maggie: a girl of the streets by stephen crane chapter i a very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of rum alley. he was throwing stones at howling urchins from devil's row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him. his infantile countenance was livid with fury. his small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths. "run, jimmie, run! dey'll get yehs," screamed a retreating rum alley child. "naw," responded jimmie with a valiant roar, "dese micks can't make me run." howls of renewed wrath went up from devil's row throats. tattered gamins on the right made a furious assault on the gravel heap. on their small, convulsed faces there shone the grins of true assassins. as they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus. the little champion of rum alley stumbled precipitately down the other side. his coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone. he had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. his wan features wore a look of a tiny, insane demon. on the ground, children from devil's row closed in on their antagonist. he crooked his left arm defensively about his head and fought with cursing fury. the little boys ran to and fro, dodging, hurling stones and swearing in barbaric trebles. from a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman. some laborers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for a moment and regarded the fight. the engineer of a passive tugboat hung lazily to a railing and watched. over on the island, a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a building and crawled slowly along the river's bank. a stone had smashed into jimmie's mouth. blood was bubbling over his chin and down upon his ragged shirt. tears made furrows on his dirt-stained cheeks. his thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak, causing his small body to reel. his roaring curses of the first part of the fight had changed to a blasphemous chatter. in the yells of the whirling mob of devil's row children there were notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery. the little boys seemed to leer gloatingly at the blood upon the other child's face. down the avenue came boastfully sauntering a lad of sixteen years, although the chronic sneer of an ideal manhood already sat upon his lips. his hat was tipped with an air of challenge over his eye. between his teeth, a cigar stump was tilted at the angle of defiance. he walked with a certain swing of the shoulders which appalled the timid. he glanced over into the vacant lot in which the little raving boys from devil's row seethed about the shrieking and tearful child from rum alley. "gee!" he murmured with interest. "a scrap. gee!" he strode over to the cursing circle, swinging his shoulders in a manner which denoted that he held victory in his fists. he approached at the back of one of the most deeply engaged of the devil's row children. "ah, what deh hell," he said, and smote the deeply-engaged one on the back of the head. the little boy fell to the ground and gave a hoarse, tremendous howl. he scrambled to his feet, and perceiving, evidently, the size of his assailant, ran quickly off, shouting alarms. the entire devil's row party followed him. they came to a stand a short distance away and yelled taunting oaths at the boy with the chronic sneer. the latter, momentarily, paid no attention to them. "what deh hell, jimmie?" he asked of the small champion. jimmie wiped his blood-wet features with his sleeve. "well, it was dis way, pete, see! i was goin' teh lick dat riley kid and dey all pitched on me." some rum alley children now came forward. the party stood for a moment exchanging vainglorious remarks with devil's row. a few stones were thrown at long distances, and words of challenge passed between small warriors. then the rum alley contingent turned slowly in the direction of their home street. they began to give, each to each, distorted versions of the fight. causes of retreat in particular cases were magnified. blows dealt in the fight were enlarged to catapultian power, and stones thrown were alleged to have hurtled with infinite accuracy. valor grew strong again, and the little boys began to swear with great spirit. "ah, we blokies kin lick deh hull damn row," said a child, swaggering. little jimmie was striving to stanch the flow of blood from his cut lips. scowling, he turned upon the speaker. "ah, where deh hell was yeh when i was doin' all deh fightin?" he demanded. "youse kids makes me tired." "ah, go ahn," replied the other argumentatively. jimmie replied with heavy contempt. "ah, youse can't fight, blue billie! i kin lick yeh wid one han'." "ah, go ahn," replied billie again. "ah," said jimmie threateningly. "ah," said the other in the same tone. they struck at each other, clinched, and rolled over on the cobble stones. "smash 'im, jimmie, kick deh damn guts out of 'im," yelled pete, the lad with the chronic sneer, in tones of delight. the small combatants pounded and kicked, scratched and tore. they began to weep and their curses struggled in their throats with sobs. the other little boys clasped their hands and wriggled their legs in excitement. they formed a bobbing circle about the pair. a tiny spectator was suddenly agitated. "cheese it, jimmie, cheese it! here comes yer fader," he yelled. the circle of little boys instantly parted. they drew away and waited in ecstatic awe for that which was about to happen. the two little boys fighting in the modes of four thousand years ago, did not hear the warning. up the avenue there plodded slowly a man with sullen eyes. he was carrying a dinner pail and smoking an apple-wood pipe. as he neared the spot where the little boys strove, he regarded them listlessly. but suddenly he roared an oath and advanced upon the rolling fighters. "here, you jim, git up, now, while i belt yer life out, you damned disorderly brat." he began to kick into the chaotic mass on the ground. the boy billie felt a heavy boot strike his head. he made a furious effort and disentangled himself from jimmie. he tottered away, damning. jimmie arose painfully from the ground and confronting his father, began to curse him. his parent kicked him. "come home, now," he cried, "an' stop yer jawin', er i'll lam the everlasting head off yehs." they departed. the man paced placidly along with the apple-wood emblem of serenity between his teeth. the boy followed a dozen feet in the rear. he swore luridly, for he felt that it was degradation for one who aimed to be some vague soldier, or a man of blood with a sort of sublime license, to be taken home by a father. chapter ii eventually they entered into a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. a wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. in all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. in the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners. a thousand odors of cooking food came forth to the street. the building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels. a small ragged girl dragged a red, bawling infant along the crowded ways. he was hanging back, baby-like, bracing his wrinkled, bare legs. the little girl cried out: "ah, tommie, come ahn. dere's jimmie and fader. don't be a-pullin' me back." she jerked the baby's arm impatiently. he fell on his face, roaring. with a second jerk she pulled him to his feet, and they went on. with the obstinacy of his order, he protested against being dragged in a chosen direction. he made heroic endeavors to keep on his legs, denounce his sister and consume a bit of orange peeling which he chewed between the times of his infantile orations. as the sullen-eyed man, followed by the blood-covered boy, drew near, the little girl burst into reproachful cries. "ah, jimmie, youse bin fightin' agin." the urchin swelled disdainfully. "ah, what deh hell, mag. see?" the little girl upbraided him, "youse allus fightin', jimmie, an' yeh knows it puts mudder out when yehs come home half dead, an' it's like we'll all get a poundin'." she began to weep. the babe threw back his head and roared at his prospects. "ah, what deh hell!" cried jimmie. "shut up er i'll smack yer mout'. see?" as his sister continued her lamentations, he suddenly swore and struck her. the little girl reeled and, recovering herself, burst into tears and quaveringly cursed him. as she slowly retreated her brother advanced dealing her cuffs. the father heard and turned about. "stop that, jim, d'yeh hear? leave yer sister alone on the street. it's like i can never beat any sense into yer damned wooden head." the urchin raised his voice in defiance to his parent and continued his attacks. the babe bawled tremendously, protesting with great violence. during his sister's hasty manoeuvres, he was dragged by the arm. finally the procession plunged into one of the gruesome doorways. they crawled up dark stairways and along cold, gloomy halls. at last the father pushed open a door and they entered a lighted room in which a large woman was rampant. she stopped in a career from a seething stove to a pan-covered table. as the father and children filed in she peered at them. "eh, what? been fightin' agin, by gawd!" she threw herself upon jimmie. the urchin tried to dart behind the others and in the scuffle the babe, tommie, was knocked down. he protested with his usual vehemence, because they had bruised his tender shins against a table leg. the mother's massive shoulders heaved with anger. grasping the urchin by the neck and shoulder she shook him until he rattled. she dragged him to an unholy sink, and, soaking a rag in water, began to scrub his lacerated face with it. jimmie screamed in pain and tried to twist his shoulders out of the clasp of the huge arms. the babe sat on the floor watching the scene, his face in contortions like that of a woman at a tragedy. the father, with a newly-ladened pipe in his mouth, crouched on a backless chair near the stove. jimmie's cries annoyed him. he turned about and bellowed at his wife: "let the damned kid alone for a minute, will yeh, mary? yer allus poundin' 'im. when i come nights i can't git no rest 'cause yer allus poundin' a kid. let up, d'yeh hear? don't be allus poundin' a kid." the woman's operations on the urchin instantly increased in violence. at last she tossed him to a corner where he limply lay cursing and weeping. the wife put her immense hands on her hips and with a chieftain-like stride approached her husband. "ho," she said, with a great grunt of contempt. "an' what in the devil are you stickin' your nose for?" the babe crawled under the table and, turning, peered out cautiously. the ragged girl retreated and the urchin in the corner drew his legs carefully beneath him. the man puffed his pipe calmly and put his great mudded boots on the back part of the stove. "go teh hell," he murmured, tranquilly. the woman screamed and shook her fists before her husband's eyes. the rough yellow of her face and neck flared suddenly crimson. she began to howl. he puffed imperturbably at his pipe for a time, but finally arose and began to look out at the window into the darkening chaos of back yards. "you've been drinkin', mary," he said. "you'd better let up on the bot', ol' woman, or you'll git done." "you're a liar. i ain't had a drop," she roared in reply. they had a lurid altercation, in which they damned each other's souls with frequence. the babe was staring out from under the table, his small face working in his excitement. the ragged girl went stealthily over to the corner where the urchin lay. "are yehs hurted much, jimmie?" she whispered timidly. "not a damn bit! see?" growled the little boy. "will i wash deh blood?" "naw!" "will i--" "when i catch dat riley kid i'll break 'is face! dat's right! see?" he turned his face to the wall as if resolved to grimly bide his time. in the quarrel between husband and wife, the woman was victor. the man grabbed his hat and rushed from the room, apparently determined upon a vengeful drunk. she followed to the door and thundered at him as he made his way down stairs. she returned and stirred up the room until her children were bobbing about like bubbles. "git outa deh way," she persistently bawled, waving feet with their dishevelled shoes near the heads of her children. she shrouded herself, puffing and snorting, in a cloud of steam at the stove, and eventually extracted a frying-pan full of potatoes that hissed. she flourished it. "come teh yer suppers, now," she cried with sudden exasperation. "hurry up, now, er i'll help yeh!" the children scrambled hastily. with prodigious clatter they arranged themselves at table. the babe sat with his feet dangling high from a precarious infant chair and gorged his small stomach. jimmie forced, with feverish rapidity, the grease-enveloped pieces between his wounded lips. maggie, with side glances of fear of interruption, ate like a small pursued tigress. the mother sat blinking at them. she delivered reproaches, swallowed potatoes and drank from a yellow-brown bottle. after a time her mood changed and she wept as she carried little tommie into another room and laid him to sleep with his fists doubled in an old quilt of faded red and green grandeur. then she came and moaned by the stove. she rocked to and fro upon a chair, shedding tears and crooning miserably to the two children about their "poor mother" and "yer fader, damn 'is soul." the little girl plodded between the table and the chair with a dish-pan on it. she tottered on her small legs beneath burdens of dishes. jimmie sat nursing his various wounds. he cast furtive glances at his mother. his practised eye perceived her gradually emerge from a muddled mist of sentiment until her brain burned in drunken heat. he sat breathless. maggie broke a plate. the mother started to her feet as if propelled. "good gawd," she howled. her eyes glittered on her child with sudden hatred. the fervent red of her face turned almost to purple. the little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake. he floundered about in darkness until he found the stairs. he stumbled, panic-stricken, to the next floor. an old woman opened a door. a light behind her threw a flare on the urchin's quivering face. "eh, gawd, child, what is it dis time? is yer fader beatin' yer mudder, or yer mudder beatin' yer fader?" chapter iii jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall. above the muffled roar of conversation, the dismal wailings of babies at night, the thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering. the old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could don, at will, an expression of great virtue. she possessed a small music-box capable of one tune, and a collection of "god bless yehs" pitched in assorted keys of fervency. each day she took a position upon the stones of fifth avenue, where she crooked her legs under her and crouched immovable and hideous, like an idol. she received daily a small sum in pennies. it was contributed, for the most part, by persons who did not make their homes in that vicinity. once, when a lady had dropped her purse on the sidewalk, the gnarled woman had grabbed it and smuggled it with great dexterity beneath her cloak. when she was arrested she had cursed the lady into a partial swoon, and with her aged limbs, twisted from rheumatism, had almost kicked the stomach out of a huge policeman whose conduct upon that occasion she referred to when she said: "the police, damn 'em." "eh, jimmie, it's cursed shame," she said. "go, now, like a dear an' buy me a can, an' if yer mudder raises 'ell all night yehs can sleep here." jimmie took a tendered tin-pail and seven pennies and departed. he passed into the side door of a saloon and went to the bar. straining up on his toes he raised the pail and pennies as high as his arms would let him. he saw two hands thrust down and take them. directly the same hands let down the filled pail and he left. in front of the gruesome doorway he met a lurching figure. it was his father, swaying about on uncertain legs. "give me deh can. see?" said the man, threateningly. "ah, come off! i got dis can fer dat ol' woman an' it 'ud be dirt teh swipe it. see?" cried jimmie. the father wrenched the pail from the urchin. he grasped it in both hands and lifted it to his mouth. he glued his lips to the under edge and tilted his head. his hairy throat swelled until it seemed to grow near his chin. there was a tremendous gulping movement and the beer was gone. the man caught his breath and laughed. he hit his son on the head with the empty pail. as it rolled clanging into the street, jimmie began to scream and kicked repeatedly at his father's shins. "look at deh dirt what yeh done me," he yelled. "deh ol' woman 'ill be raisin' hell." he retreated to the middle of the street, but the man did not pursue. he staggered toward the door. "i'll club hell outa yeh when i ketch yeh," he shouted, and disappeared. during the evening he had been standing against a bar drinking whiskies and declaring to all comers, confidentially: "my home reg'lar livin' hell! damndes' place! reg'lar hell! why do i come an' drin' whisk' here thish way? 'cause home reg'lar livin' hell!" jimmie waited a long time in the street and then crept warily up through the building. he passed with great caution the door of the gnarled woman, and finally stopped outside his home and listened. he could hear his mother moving heavily about among the furniture of the room. she was chanting in a mournful voice, occasionally interjecting bursts of volcanic wrath at the father, who, jimmie judged, had sunk down on the floor or in a corner. "why deh blazes don' chere try teh keep jim from fightin'? i'll break her jaw," she suddenly bellowed. the man mumbled with drunken indifference. "ah, wha' deh hell. w'a's odds? wha' makes kick?" "because he tears 'is clothes, yeh damn fool," cried the woman in supreme wrath. the husband seemed to become aroused. "go teh hell," he thundered fiercely in reply. there was a crash against the door and something broke into clattering fragments. jimmie partially suppressed a howl and darted down the stairway. below he paused and listened. he heard howls and curses, groans and shrieks, confusingly in chorus as if a battle were raging. with all was the crash of splintering furniture. the eyes of the urchin glared in fear that one of them would discover him. curious faces appeared in doorways, and whispered comments passed to and fro. "ol' johnson's raisin' hell agin." jimmie stood until the noises ceased and the other inhabitants of the tenement had all yawned and shut their doors. then he crawled upstairs with the caution of an invader of a panther den. sounds of labored breathing came through the broken door-panels. he pushed the door open and entered, quaking. a glow from the fire threw red hues over the bare floor, the cracked and soiled plastering, and the overturned and broken furniture. in the middle of the floor lay his mother asleep. in one corner of the room his father's limp body hung across the seat of a chair. the urchin stole forward. he began to shiver in dread of awakening his parents. his mother's great chest was heaving painfully. jimmie paused and looked down at her. her face was inflamed and swollen from drinking. her yellow brows shaded eyelids that had brown blue. her tangled hair tossed in waves over her forehead. her mouth was set in the same lines of vindictive hatred that it had, perhaps, borne during the fight. her bare, red arms were thrown out above her head in positions of exhaustion, something, mayhap, like those of a sated villain. the urchin bended over his mother. he was fearful lest she should open her eyes, and the dread within him was so strong, that he could not forbear to stare, but hung as if fascinated over the woman's grim face. suddenly her eyes opened. the urchin found himself looking straight into that expression, which, it would seem, had the power to change his blood to salt. he howled piercingly and fell backward. the woman floundered for a moment, tossed her arms about her head as if in combat, and again began to snore. jimmie crawled back in the shadows and waited. a noise in the next room had followed his cry at the discovery that his mother was awake. he grovelled in the gloom, the eyes from out his drawn face riveted upon the intervening door. he heard it creak, and then the sound of a small voice came to him. "jimmie! jimmie! are yehs dere?" it whispered. the urchin started. the thin, white face of his sister looked at him from the door-way of the other room. she crept to him across the floor. the father had not moved, but lay in the same death-like sleep. the mother writhed in uneasy slumber, her chest wheezing as if she were in the agonies of strangulation. out at the window a florid moon was peering over dark roofs, and in the distance the waters of a river glimmered pallidly. the small frame of the ragged girl was quivering. her features were haggard from weeping, and her eyes gleamed from fear. she grasped the urchin's arm in her little trembling hands and they huddled in a corner. the eyes of both were drawn, by some force, to stare at the woman's face, for they thought she need only to awake and all fiends would come from below. they crouched until the ghost-mists of dawn appeared at the window, drawing close to the panes, and looking in at the prostrate, heaving body of the mother. chapter iv the babe, tommie, died. he went away in a white, insignificant coffin, his small waxen hand clutching a flower that the girl, maggie, had stolen from an italian. she and jimmie lived. the inexperienced fibres of the boy's eyes were hardened at an early age. he became a young man of leather. he lived some red years without laboring. during that time his sneer became chronic. he studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse than he thought he had reason to believe it. he never conceived a respect for the world, because he had begun with no idols that it had smashed. he clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously in at a mission church where a man composed his sermons of "yous." while they got warm at the stove, he told his hearers just where he calculated they stood with the lord. many of the sinners were impatient over the pictured depths of their degradation. they were waiting for soup-tickets. a reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see the portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter and his hearers. "you are damned," said the preacher. and the reader of sounds might have seen the reply go forth from the ragged people: "where's our soup?" jimmie and a companion sat in a rear seat and commented upon the things that didn't concern them, with all the freedom of english gentlemen. when they grew thirsty and went out their minds confused the speaker with christ. momentarily, jimmie was sullen with thoughts of a hopeless altitude where grew fruit. his companion said that if he should ever meet god he would ask for a million dollars and a bottle of beer. jimmie's occupation for a long time was to stand on streetcorners and watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of pretty women. he menaced mankind at the intersections of streets. on the corners he was in life and of life. the world was going on and he was there to perceive it. he maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men. to him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all good coats covered faint hearts. he and his order were kings, to a certain extent, over the men of untarnished clothes, because these latter dreaded, perhaps, to be either killed or laughed at. above all things he despised obvious christians and ciphers with the chrysanthemums of aristocracy in their button-holes. he considered himself above both of these classes. he was afraid of neither the devil nor the leader of society. when he had a dollar in his pocket his satisfaction with existence was the greatest thing in the world. so, eventually, he felt obliged to work. his father died and his mother's years were divided up into periods of thirty days. he became a truck driver. he was given the charge of a painstaking pair of horses and a large rattling truck. he invaded the turmoil and tumble of the down-town streets and learned to breathe maledictory defiance at the police who occasionally used to climb up, drag him from his perch and beat him. in the lower part of the city he daily involved himself in hideous tangles. if he and his team chanced to be in the rear he preserved a demeanor of serenity, crossing his legs and bursting forth into yells when foot passengers took dangerous dives beneath the noses of his champing horses. he smoked his pipe calmly for he knew that his pay was marching on. if in the front and the key-truck of chaos, he entered terrifically into the quarrel that was raging to and fro among the drivers on their high seats, and sometimes roared oaths and violently got himself arrested. after a time his sneer grew so that it turned its glare upon all things. he became so sharp that he believed in nothing. to him the police were always actuated by malignant impulses and the rest of the world was composed, for the most part, of despicable creatures who were all trying to take advantage of him and with whom, in defense, he was obliged to quarrel on all possible occasions. he himself occupied a down-trodden position that had a private but distinct element of grandeur in its isolation. the most complete cases of aggravated idiocy were, to his mind, rampant upon the front platforms of all the street cars. at first his tongue strove with these beings, but he eventually was superior. he became immured like an african cow. in him grew a majestic contempt for those strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs. he fell into the habit, when starting on a long journey, of fixing his eye on a high and distant object, commanding his horses to begin, and then going into a sort of a trance of observation. multitudes of drivers might howl in his rear, and passengers might load him with opprobrium, he would not awaken until some blue policeman turned red and began to frenziedly tear bridles and beat the soft noses of the responsible horses. when he paused to contemplate the attitude of the police toward himself and his fellows, he believed that they were the only men in the city who had no rights. when driving about, he felt that he was held liable by the police for anything that might occur in the streets, and was the common prey of all energetic officials. in revenge, he resolved never to move out of the way of anything, until formidable circumstances, or a much larger man than himself forced him to it. foot-passengers were mere pestering flies with an insane disregard for their legs and his convenience. he could not conceive their maniacal desires to cross the streets. their madness smote him with eternal amazement. he was continually storming at them from his throne. he sat aloft and denounced their frantic leaps, plunges, dives and straddles. when they would thrust at, or parry, the noses of his champing horses, making them swing their heads and move their feet, disturbing a solid dreamy repose, he swore at the men as fools, for he himself could perceive that providence had caused it clearly to be written, that he and his team had the unalienable right to stand in the proper path of the sun chariot, and if they so minded, obstruct its mission or take a wheel off. and, perhaps, if the god-driver had an ungovernable desire to step down, put up his flame-colored fists and manfully dispute the right of way, he would have probably been immediately opposed by a scowling mortal with two sets of very hard knuckles. it is possible, perhaps, that this young man would have derided, in an axle-wide alley, the approach of a flying ferry boat. yet he achieved a respect for a fire engine. as one charged toward his truck, he would drive fearfully upon a sidewalk, threatening untold people with annihilation. when an engine would strike a mass of blocked trucks, splitting it into fragments, as a blow annihilates a cake of ice, jimmie's team could usually be observed high and safe, with whole wheels, on the sidewalk. the fearful coming of the engine could break up the most intricate muddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had been swearing for the half of an hour. a fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing that he loved with a distant dog-like devotion. they had been known to overturn street-cars. those leaping horses, striking sparks from the cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably admired. the clang of the gong pierced his breast like a noise of remembered war. when jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested. before he reached a great age, he had a fair record. he developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truck and fight with other drivers. he had been in quite a number of miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had become known to the police. once he had been arrested for assaulting a chinaman. two women in different parts of the city, and entirely unknown to each other, caused him considerable annoyance by breaking forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into wailings about marriage and support and infants. nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: "deh moon looks like hell, don't it?" chapter v the girl, maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. she grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl. none of the dirt of rum alley seemed to be in her veins. the philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and on the same floor, puzzled over it. when a child, playing and fighting with gamins in the street, dirt disguised her. attired in tatters and grime, she went unseen. there came a time, however, when the young men of the vicinity said: "dat johnson goil is a puty good looker." about this period her brother remarked to her: "mag, i'll tell yeh dis! see? yeh've edder got teh go teh hell or go teh work!" whereupon she went to work, having the feminine aversion of going to hell. by a chance, she got a position in an establishment where they made collars and cuffs. she received a stool and a machine in a room where sat twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent. she perched on the stool and treadled at her machine all day, turning out collars, the name of whose brand could be noted for its irrelevancy to anything in connection with collars. at night she returned home to her mother. jimmie grew large enough to take the vague position of head of the family. as incumbent of that office, he stumbled up-stairs late at night, as his father had done before him. he reeled about the room, swearing at his relations, or went to sleep on the floor. the mother had gradually arisen to that degree of fame that she could bandy words with her acquaintances among the police-justices. court-officials called her by her first name. when she appeared they pursued a course which had been theirs for months. they invariably grinned and cried out: "hello, mary, you here again?" her grey head wagged in many a court. she always besieged the bench with voluble excuses, explanations, apologies and prayers. her flaming face and rolling eyes were a sort of familiar sight on the island. she measured time by means of sprees, and was eternally swollen and dishevelled. one day the young man, pete, who as a lad had smitten the devil's row urchin in the back of the head and put to flight the antagonists of his friend, jimmie, strutted upon the scene. he met jimmie one day on the street, promised to take him to a boxing match in williamsburg, and called for him in the evening. maggie observed pete. he sat on a table in the johnson home and dangled his checked legs with an enticing nonchalance. his hair was curled down over his forehead in an oiled bang. his rather pugged nose seemed to revolt from contact with a bristling moustache of short, wire-like hairs. his blue double-breasted coat, edged with black braid, buttoned close to a red puff tie, and his patent-leather shoes looked like murder-fitted weapons. his mannerisms stamped him as a man who had a correct sense of his personal superiority. there was valor and contempt for circumstances in the glance of his eye. he waved his hands like a man of the world, who dismisses religion and philosophy, and says "fudge." he had certainly seen everything and with each curl of his lip, he declared that it amounted to nothing. maggie thought he must be a very elegant and graceful bartender. he was telling tales to jimmie. maggie watched him furtively, with half-closed eyes, lit with a vague interest. "hully gee! dey makes me tired," he said. "mos' e'ry day some farmer comes in an' tries teh run deh shop. see? but dey gits t'rowed right out! i jolt dem right out in deh street before dey knows where dey is! see?" "sure," said jimmie. "dere was a mug come in deh place deh odder day wid an idear he wus goin' teh own deh place! hully gee, he wus goin' teh own deh place! i see he had a still on an' i didn' wanna giv 'im no stuff, so i says: 'git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble,' i says like dat! see? 'git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble'; like dat. 'git deh hell outa here,' i says. see?" jimmie nodded understandingly. over his features played an eager desire to state the amount of his valor in a similar crisis, but the narrator proceeded. "well, deh blokie he says: 't'hell wid it! i ain' lookin' for no scrap,' he says (see?), 'but' he says, 'i'm 'spectable cit'zen an' i wanna drink an' purtydamnsoon, too.' see? 'deh hell,' i says. like dat! 'deh hell,' i says. see? 'don' make no trouble,' i says. like dat. 'don' make no trouble.' see? den deh mug he squared off an' said he was fine as silk wid his dukes (see?) an' he wanned a drink damnquick. dat's what he said. see?" "sure," repeated jimmie. pete continued. "say, i jes' jumped deh bar an' deh way i plunked dat blokie was great. see? dat's right! in deh jaw! see? hully gee, he t'rowed a spittoon true deh front windee. say, i taut i'd drop dead. but deh boss, he comes in after an' he says, 'pete, yehs done jes' right! yeh've gota keep order an' it's all right.' see? 'it's all right,' he says. dat's what he said." the two held a technical discussion. "dat bloke was a dandy," said pete, in conclusion, "but he hadn' oughta made no trouble. dat's what i says teh dem: 'don' come in here an' make no trouble,' i says, like dat. 'don' make no trouble.' see?" as jimmie and his friend exchanged tales descriptive of their prowess, maggie leaned back in the shadow. her eyes dwelt wonderingly and rather wistfully upon pete's face. the broken furniture, grimey walls, and general disorder and dirt of her home of a sudden appeared before her and began to take a potential aspect. pete's aristocratic person looked as if it might soil. she looked keenly at him, occasionally, wondering if he was feeling contempt. but pete seemed to be enveloped in reminiscence. "hully gee," said he, "dose mugs can't phase me. dey knows i kin wipe up deh street wid any t'ree of dem." when he said, "ah, what deh hell," his voice was burdened with disdain for the inevitable and contempt for anything that fate might compel him to endure. maggie perceived that here was the beau ideal of a man. her dim thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as god says, the little hills sing together in the morning. under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover. chapter vi pete took note of maggie. "say, mag, i'm stuck on yer shape. it's outa sight," he said, parenthetically, with an affable grin. as he became aware that she was listening closely, he grew still more eloquent in his descriptions of various happenings in his career. it appeared that he was invincible in fights. "why," he said, referring to a man with whom he had had a misunderstanding, "dat mug scrapped like a damn dago. dat's right. he was dead easy. see? he tau't he was a scrapper. but he foun' out diff'ent! hully gee." he walked to and fro in the small room, which seemed then to grow even smaller and unfit to hold his dignity, the attribute of a supreme warrior. that swing of the shoulders that had frozen the timid when he was but a lad had increased with his growth and education at the ratio of ten to one. it, combined with the sneer upon his mouth, told mankind that there was nothing in space which could appall him. maggie marvelled at him and surrounded him with greatness. she vaguely tried to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her. "i met a chump deh odder day way up in deh city," he said. "i was goin' teh see a frien' of mine. when i was a-crossin' deh street deh chump runned plump inteh me, an' den he turns aroun' an' says, 'yer insolen' ruffin,' he says, like dat. 'oh, gee,' i says, 'oh, gee, go teh hell and git off deh eart',' i says, like dat. see? 'go teh hell an' git off deh eart',' like dat. den deh blokie he got wild. he says i was a contempt'ble scoun'el, er somet'ing like dat, an' he says i was doom' teh everlastin' pe'dition an' all like dat. 'gee,' i says, 'gee! deh hell i am,' i says. 'deh hell i am,' like dat. an' den i slugged 'im. see?" with jimmie in his company, pete departed in a sort of a blaze of glory from the johnson home. maggie, leaning from the window, watched him as he walked down the street. here was a formidable man who disdained the strength of a world full of fists. here was one who had contempt for brass-clothed power; one whose knuckles could defiantly ring against the granite of law. he was a knight. the two men went from under the glimmering street-lamp and passed into shadows. turning, maggie contemplated the dark, dust-stained walls, and the scant and crude furniture of her home. a clock, in a splintered and battered oblong box of varnished wood, she suddenly regarded as an abomination. she noted that it ticked raspingly. the almost vanished flowers in the carpet-pattern, she conceived to be newly hideous. some faint attempts she had made with blue ribbon, to freshen the appearance of a dingy curtain, she now saw to be piteous. she wondered what pete dined on. she reflected upon the collar and cuff factory. it began to appear to her mind as a dreary place of endless grinding. pete's elegant occupation brought him, no doubt, into contact with people who had money and manners. it was probable that he had a large acquaintance of pretty girls. he must have great sums of money to spend. to her the earth was composed of hardships and insults. she felt instant admiration for a man who openly defied it. she thought that if the grim angel of death should clutch his heart, pete would shrug his shoulders and say: "oh, ev'ryt'ing goes." she anticipated that he would come again shortly. she spent some of her week's pay in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin. she made it with infinite care and hung it to the slightly-careening mantel, over the stove, in the kitchen. she studied it with painful anxiety from different points in the room. she wanted it to look well on sunday night when, perhaps, jimmie's friend would come. on sunday night, however, pete did not appear. afterward the girl looked at it with a sense of humiliation. she was now convinced that pete was superior to admiration for lambrequins. a few evenings later pete entered with fascinating innovations in his apparel. as she had seen him twice and he had different suits on each time, maggie had a dim impression that his wardrobe was prodigiously extensive. "say, mag," he said, "put on yer bes' duds friday night an' i'll take yehs teh deh show. see?" he spent a few moments in flourishing his clothes and then vanished, without having glanced at the lambrequin. over the eternal collars and cuffs in the factory maggie spent the most of three days in making imaginary sketches of pete and his daily environment. she imagined some half dozen women in love with him and thought he must lean dangerously toward an indefinite one, whom she pictured with great charms of person, but with an altogether contemptible disposition. she thought he must live in a blare of pleasure. he had friends, and people who were afraid of him. she saw the golden glitter of the place where pete was to take her. an entertainment of many hues and many melodies where she was afraid she might appear small and mouse-colored. her mother drank whiskey all friday morning. with lurid face and tossing hair she cursed and destroyed furniture all friday afternoon. when maggie came home at half-past six her mother lay asleep amidst the wreck of chairs and a table. fragments of various household utensils were scattered about the floor. she had vented some phase of drunken fury upon the lambrequin. it lay in a bedraggled heap in the corner. "hah," she snorted, sitting up suddenly, "where deh hell yeh been? why deh hell don' yeh come home earlier? been loafin' 'round deh streets. yer gettin' teh be a reg'lar devil." when pete arrived maggie, in a worn black dress, was waiting for him in the midst of a floor strewn with wreckage. the curtain at the window had been pulled by a heavy hand and hung by one tack, dangling to and fro in the draft through the cracks at the sash. the knots of blue ribbons appeared like violated flowers. the fire in the stove had gone out. the displaced lids and open doors showed heaps of sullen grey ashes. the remnants of a meal, ghastly, like dead flesh, lay in a corner. maggie's red mother, stretched on the floor, blasphemed and gave her daughter a bad name. chapter vii an orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men on an elevated stage near the centre of a great green-hued hall, played a popular waltz. the place was crowded with people grouped about little tables. a battalion of waiters slid among the throng, carrying trays of beer glasses and making change from the inexhaustible vaults of their trousers pockets. little boys, in the costumes of french chefs, paraded up and down the irregular aisles vending fancy cakes. there was a low rumble of conversation and a subdued clinking of glasses. clouds of tobacco smoke rolled and wavered high in air about the dull gilt of the chandeliers. the vast crowd had an air throughout of having just quitted labor. men with calloused hands and attired in garments that showed the wear of an endless trudge for a living, smoked their pipes contentedly and spent five, ten, or perhaps fifteen cents for beer. there was a mere sprinkling of kid-gloved men who smoked cigars purchased elsewhere. the great body of the crowd was composed of people who showed that all day they strove with their hands. quiet germans, with maybe their wives and two or three children, sat listening to the music, with the expressions of happy cows. an occasional party of sailors from a war-ship, their faces pictures of sturdy health, spent the earlier hours of the evening at the small round tables. very infrequent tipsy men, swollen with the value of their opinions, engaged their companions in earnest and confidential conversation. in the balcony, and here and there below, shone the impassive faces of women. the nationalities of the bowery beamed upon the stage from all directions. pete aggressively walked up a side aisle and took seats with maggie at a table beneath the balcony. "two beehs!" leaning back he regarded with eyes of superiority the scene before them. this attitude affected maggie strongly. a man who could regard such a sight with indifference must be accustomed to very great things. it was obvious that pete had been to this place many times before, and was very familiar with it. a knowledge of this fact made maggie feel little and new. he was extremely gracious and attentive. he displayed the consideration of a cultured gentleman who knew what was due. "say, what deh hell? bring deh lady a big glass! what deh hell use is dat pony?" "don't be fresh, now," said the waiter, with some warmth, as he departed. "ah, git off deh eart'," said pete, after the other's retreating form. maggie perceived that pete brought forth all his elegance and all his knowledge of high-class customs for her benefit. her heart warmed as she reflected upon his condescension. the orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men gave vent to a few bars of anticipatory music and a girl, in a pink dress with short skirts, galloped upon the stage. she smiled upon the throng as if in acknowledgment of a warm welcome, and began to walk to and fro, making profuse gesticulations and singing, in brazen soprano tones, a song, the words of which were inaudible. when she broke into the swift rattling measures of a chorus some half-tipsy men near the stage joined in the rollicking refrain and glasses were pounded rhythmically upon the tables. people leaned forward to watch her and to try to catch the words of the song. when she vanished there were long rollings of applause. obedient to more anticipatory bars, she reappeared amidst the half-suppressed cheering of the tipsy men. the orchestra plunged into dance music and the laces of the dancer fluttered and flew in the glare of gas jets. she divulged the fact that she was attired in some half dozen skirts. it was patent that any one of them would have proved adequate for the purpose for which skirts are intended. an occasional man bent forward, intent upon the pink stockings. maggie wondered at the splendor of the costume and lost herself in calculations of the cost of the silks and laces. the dancer's smile of stereotyped enthusiasm was turned for ten minutes upon the faces of her audience. in the finale she fell into some of those grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the dancers in the theatres up-town, giving to the bowery public the phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates. "say, pete," said maggie, leaning forward, "dis is great." "sure," said pete, with proper complacence. a ventriloquist followed the dancer. he held two fantastic dolls on his knees. he made them sing mournful ditties and say funny things about geography and ireland. "do dose little men talk?" asked maggie. "naw," said pete, "it's some damn fake. see?" two girls, on the bills as sisters, came forth and sang a duet that is heard occasionally at concerts given under church auspices. they supplemented it with a dance which of course can never be seen at concerts given under church auspices. after the duettists had retired, a woman of debatable age sang a negro melody. the chorus necessitated some grotesque waddlings supposed to be an imitation of a plantation darkey, under the influence, probably, of music and the moon. the audience was just enthusiastic enough over it to have her return and sing a sorrowful lay, whose lines told of a mother's love and a sweetheart who waited and a young man who was lost at sea under the most harrowing circumstances. from the faces of a score or so in the crowd, the self-contained look faded. many heads were bent forward with eagerness and sympathy. as the last distressing sentiment of the piece was brought forth, it was greeted by that kind of applause which rings as sincere. as a final effort, the singer rendered some verses which described a vision of britain being annihilated by america, and ireland bursting her bonds. a carefully prepared crisis was reached in the last line of the last verse, where the singer threw out her arms and cried, "the star-spangled banner." instantly a great cheer swelled from the throats of the assemblage of the masses. there was a heavy rumble of booted feet thumping the floor. eyes gleamed with sudden fire, and calloused hands waved frantically in the air. after a few moments' rest, the orchestra played crashingly, and a small fat man burst out upon the stage. he began to roar a song and stamp back and forth before the foot-lights, wildly waving a glossy silk hat and throwing leers, or smiles, broadcast. he made his face into fantastic grimaces until he looked like a pictured devil on a japanese kite. the crowd laughed gleefully. his short, fat legs were never still a moment. he shouted and roared and bobbed his shock of red wig until the audience broke out in excited applause. pete did not pay much attention to the progress of events upon the stage. he was drinking beer and watching maggie. her cheeks were blushing with excitement and her eyes were glistening. she drew deep breaths of pleasure. no thoughts of the atmosphere of the collar and cuff factory came to her. when the orchestra crashed finally, they jostled their way to the sidewalk with the crowd. pete took maggie's arm and pushed a way for her, offering to fight with a man or two. they reached maggie's home at a late hour and stood for a moment in front of the gruesome doorway. "say, mag," said pete, "give us a kiss for takin' yeh teh deh show, will yer?" maggie laughed, as if startled, and drew away from him. "naw, pete," she said, "dat wasn't in it." "ah, what deh hell?" urged pete. the girl retreated nervously. "ah, what deh hell?" repeated he. maggie darted into the hall, and up the stairs. she turned and smiled at him, then disappeared. pete walked slowly down the street. he had something of an astonished expression upon his features. he paused under a lamp-post and breathed a low breath of surprise. "gawd," he said, "i wonner if i've been played fer a duffer." chapter viii as thoughts of pete came to maggie's mind, she began to have an intense dislike for all of her dresses. "what deh hell ails yeh? what makes yeh be allus fixin' and fussin'? good gawd," her mother would frequently roar at her. she began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed women she met on the avenues. she envied elegance and soft palms. she craved those adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving them to be allies of vast importance to women. studying faces, she thought many of the women and girls she chanced to meet, smiled with serenity as though forever cherished and watched over by those they loved. the air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her. she knew she was gradually and surely shrivelling in the hot, stuffy room. the begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the passing of elevated trains. the place was filled with a whirl of noises and odors. she wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the room, mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out, with heads bended over their work, tales of imagined or real girlhood happiness, past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages. she speculated how long her youth would endure. she began to see the bloom upon her cheeks as valuable. she imagined herself, in an exasperating future, as a scrawny woman with an eternal grievance. too, she thought pete to be a very fastidious person concerning the appearance of women. she felt she would love to see somebody entangle their fingers in the oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment. he was a detestable creature. he wore white socks with low shoes. he sat all day delivering orations, in the depths of a cushioned chair. his pocketbook deprived them of the power to retort. "what een hell do you sink i pie fife dolla a week for? play? no, py damn!" maggie was anxious for a friend to whom she could talk about pete. she would have liked to discuss his admirable mannerisms with a reliable mutual friend. at home, she found her mother often drunk and always raving. it seems that the world had treated this woman very badly, and she took a deep revenge upon such portions of it as came within her reach. she broke furniture as if she were at last getting her rights. she swelled with virtuous indignation as she carried the lighter articles of household use, one by one under the shadows of the three gilt balls, where hebrews chained them with chains of interest. jimmie came when he was obliged to by circumstances over which he had no control. his well-trained legs brought him staggering home and put him to bed some nights when he would rather have gone elsewhere. swaggering pete loomed like a golden sun to maggie. he took her to a dime museum where rows of meek freaks astonished her. she contemplated their deformities with awe and thought them a sort of chosen tribe. "what een hell do you sink i pie fife dolla a week for? play? no, py damn!" maggie was anxious for a friend to whom she could talk about pete. she would have liked to discuss his admirable mannerisms with a reliable mutual friend. at home, she found her mother often drunk and always raving. it seems that the world had treated this woman very badly, and she took a deep revenge upon such portions of it as came within her reach. she broke furniture as if she were at last getting her rights. she swelled with virtuous indignation as she carried the lighter articles of household use, one by one under the shadows of the three gilt balls, where hebrews chained them with chains of interest. jimmie came when he was obliged to by circumstances over which he had no control. his well-trained legs brought him staggering home and put him to bed some nights when he would rather have gone elsewhere. swaggering pete loomed like a golden sun to maggie. he took her to a dime museum where rows of meek freaks astonished her. she contemplated their deformities with awe and thought them a sort of chosen tribe. pete, raking his brains for amusement, discovered the central park menagerie and the museum of arts. sunday afternoons would sometimes find them at these places. pete did not appear to be particularly interested in what he saw. he stood around looking heavy, while maggie giggled in glee. once at the menagerie he went into a trance of admiration before the spectacle of a very small monkey threatening to thrash a cageful because one of them had pulled his tail and he had not wheeled about quickly enough to discover who did it. ever after pete knew that monkey by sight and winked at him, trying to induce hime to fight with other and larger monkeys. at the museum, maggie said, "dis is outa sight." "oh hell," said pete, "wait 'till next summer an' i'll take yehs to a picnic." while the girl wandered in the vaulted rooms, pete occupied himself in returning stony stare for stony stare, the appalling scrutiny of the watch-dogs of the treasures. occasionally he would remark in loud tones: "dat jay has got glass eyes," and sentences of the sort. when he tired of this amusement he would go to the mummies and moralize over them. usually he submitted with silent dignity to all which he had to go through, but, at times, he was goaded into comment. "what deh hell," he demanded once. "look at all dese little jugs! hundred jugs in a row! ten rows in a case an' 'bout a t'ousand cases! what deh blazes use is dem?" evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the beautiful sentiments. the latter spent most of his time out at soak in pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing aged strangers from villains. maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow storms beneath happy-hued church windows. and a choir within singing "joy to the world." to maggie and the rest of the audience this was transcendental realism. joy always within, and they, like the actor, inevitably without. viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic pity of their imagined or real condition. the girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the magnate of the play was very accurately drawn. she echoed the maledictions that the occupants of the gallery showered on this individual when his lines compelled him to expose his extreme selfishness. shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of the drama. with untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue. unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for virtue. the loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the oppressed. they encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers. when anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned. they sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin. in the hero's erratic march from poverty in the first act, to wealth and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the enemies that he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which applauded his generous and noble sentiments and confounded the speeches of his opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp remarks. those actors who were cursed with villainy parts were confronted at every turn by the gallery. if one of them rendered lines containing the most subtile distinctions between right and wrong, the gallery was immediately aware if the actor meant wickedness, and denounced him accordingly. the last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man, his pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with tyrannical purposes, imperturbable amid suffering. maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places of the melodrama. she rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked. the theatre made her think. she wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory. chapter ix a group of urchins were intent upon the side door of a saloon. expectancy gleamed from their eyes. they were twisting their fingers in excitement. "here she comes," yelled one of them suddenly. the group of urchins burst instantly asunder and its individual fragments were spread in a wide, respectable half circle about the point of interest. the saloon door opened with a crash, and the figure of a woman appeared upon the threshold. her grey hair fell in knotted masses about her shoulders. her face was crimsoned and wet with perspiration. her eyes had a rolling glare. "not a damn cent more of me money will yehs ever get, not a damn cent. i spent me money here fer t'ree years an' now yehs tells me yeh'll sell me no more stuff! t'hell wid yeh, johnnie murckre! 'disturbance'? disturbance be damned! t'hell wid yeh, johnnie--" the door received a kick of exasperation from within and the woman lurched heavily out on the sidewalk. the gamins in the half-circle became violently agitated. they began to dance about and hoot and yell and jeer. wide dirty grins spread over each face. the woman made a furious dash at a particularly outrageous cluster of little boys. they laughed delightedly and scampered off a short distance, calling out over their shoulders to her. she stood tottering on the curb-stone and thundered at them. "yeh devil's kids," she howled, shaking red fists. the little boys whooped in glee. as she started up the street they fell in behind and marched uproariously. occasionally she wheeled about and made charges on them. they ran nimbly out of reach and taunted her. in the frame of a gruesome doorway she stood for a moment cursing them. her hair straggled, giving her crimson features a look of insanity. her great fists quivered as she shook them madly in the air. the urchins made terrific noises until she turned and disappeared. then they filed quietly in the way they had come. the woman floundered about in the lower hall of the tenement house and finally stumbled up the stairs. on an upper hall a door was opened and a collection of heads peered curiously out, watching her. with a wrathful snort the woman confronted the door, but it was slammed hastily in her face and the key was turned. she stood for a few minutes, delivering a frenzied challenge at the panels. "come out in deh hall, mary murphy, damn yeh, if yehs want a row. come ahn, yeh overgrown terrier, come ahn." she began to kick the door with her great feet. she shrilly defied the universe to appear and do battle. her cursing trebles brought heads from all doors save the one she threatened. her eyes glared in every direction. the air was full of her tossing fists. "come ahn, deh hull damn gang of yehs, come ahn," she roared at the spectators. an oath or two, cat-calls, jeers and bits of facetious advice were given in reply. missiles clattered about her feet. "what deh hell's deh matter wid yeh?" said a voice in the gathered gloom, and jimmie came forward. he carried a tin dinner-pail in his hand and under his arm a brown truckman's apron done in a bundle. "what deh hell's wrong?" he demanded. "come out, all of yehs, come out," his mother was howling. "come ahn an' i'll stamp her damn brains under me feet." "shet yer face, an' come home, yeh damned old fool," roared jimmie at her. she strided up to him and twirled her fingers in his face. her eyes were darting flames of unreasoning rage and her frame trembled with eagerness for a fight. "t'hell wid yehs! an' who deh hell are yehs? i ain't givin' a snap of me fingers fer yehs," she bawled at him. she turned her huge back in tremendous disdain and climbed the stairs to the next floor. jimmie followed, cursing blackly. at the top of the flight he seized his mother's arm and started to drag her toward the door of their room. "come home, damn yeh," he gritted between his teeth. "take yer hands off me! take yer hands off me," shrieked his mother. she raised her arm and whirled her great fist at her son's face. jimmie dodged his head and the blow struck him in the back of the neck. "damn yeh," gritted he again. he threw out his left hand and writhed his fingers about her middle arm. the mother and the son began to sway and struggle like gladiators. "whoop!" said the rum alley tenement house. the hall filled with interested spectators. "hi, ol' lady, dat was a dandy!" "t'ree to one on deh red!" "ah, stop yer damn scrappin'!" the door of the johnson home opened and maggie looked out. jimmie made a supreme cursing effort and hurled his mother into the room. he quickly followed and closed the door. the rum alley tenement swore disappointedly and retired. the mother slowly gathered herself up from the floor. her eyes glittered menacingly upon her children. "here, now," said jimmie, "we've had enough of dis. sit down, an' don' make no trouble." he grasped her arm, and twisting it, forced her into a creaking chair. "keep yer hands off me," roared his mother again. "damn yer ol' hide," yelled jimmie, madly. maggie shrieked and ran into the other room. to her there came the sound of a storm of crashes and curses. there was a great final thump and jimmie's voice cried: "dere, damn yeh, stay still." maggie opened the door now, and went warily out. "oh, jimmie." he was leaning against the wall and swearing. blood stood upon bruises on his knotty fore-arms where they had scraped against the floor or the walls in the scuffle. the mother lay screeching on the floor, the tears running down her furrowed face. maggie, standing in the middle of the room, gazed about her. the usual upheaval of the tables and chairs had taken place. crockery was strewn broadcast in fragments. the stove had been disturbed on its legs, and now leaned idiotically to one side. a pail had been upset and water spread in all directions. the door opened and pete appeared. he shrugged his shoulders. "oh, gawd," he observed. he walked over to maggie and whispered in her ear. "ah, what deh hell, mag? come ahn and we'll have a hell of a time." the mother in the corner upreared her head and shook her tangled locks. "teh hell wid him and you," she said, glowering at her daughter in the gloom. her eyes seemed to burn balefully. "yeh've gone teh deh devil, mag johnson, yehs knows yehs have gone teh deh devil. yer a disgrace teh yer people, damn yeh. an' now, git out an' go ahn wid dat doe-faced jude of yours. go teh hell wid him, damn yeh, an' a good riddance. go teh hell an' see how yeh likes it." maggie gazed long at her mother. "go teh hell now, an' see how yeh likes it. git out. i won't have sech as yehs in me house! get out, d'yeh hear! damn yeh, git out!" the girl began to tremble. at this instant pete came forward. "oh, what deh hell, mag, see," whispered he softly in her ear. "dis all blows over. see? deh ol' woman 'ill be all right in deh mornin'. come ahn out wid me! we'll have a hell of a time." the woman on the floor cursed. jimmie was intent upon his bruised fore-arms. the girl cast a glance about the room filled with a chaotic mass of debris, and at the red, writhing body of her mother. "go teh hell an' good riddance." she went. chapter x jimmie had an idea it wasn't common courtesy for a friend to come to one's home and ruin one's sister. but he was not sure how much pete knew about the rules of politeness. the following night he returned home from work at rather a late hour in the evening. in passing through the halls he came upon the gnarled and leathery old woman who possessed the music box. she was grinning in the dim light that drifted through dust-stained panes. she beckoned to him with a smudged forefinger. "ah, jimmie, what do yehs t'ink i got onto las' night. it was deh funnies' t'ing i ever saw," she cried, coming close to him and leering. she was trembling with eagerness to tell her tale. "i was by me door las' night when yer sister and her jude feller came in late, oh, very late. an' she, the dear, she was a-cryin' as if her heart would break, she was. it was deh funnies' t'ing i ever saw. an' right out here by me door she asked him did he love her, did he. an' she was a-cryin' as if her heart would break, poor t'ing. an' him, i could see by deh way what he said it dat she had been askin' orften, he says: 'oh, hell, yes,' he says, says he, 'oh, hell, yes.'" storm-clouds swept over jimmie's face, but he turned from the leathery old woman and plodded on up-stairs. "oh, hell, yes," called she after him. she laughed a laugh that was like a prophetic croak. "'oh, hell, yes,' he says, says he, 'oh, hell, yes.'" there was no one in at home. the rooms showed that attempts had been made at tidying them. parts of the wreckage of the day before had been repaired by an unskilful hand. a chair or two and the table, stood uncertainly upon legs. the floor had been newly swept. too, the blue ribbons had been restored to the curtains, and the lambrequin, with its immense sheaves of yellow wheat and red roses of equal size, had been returned, in a worn and sorry state, to its position at the mantel. maggie's jacket and hat were gone from the nail behind the door. jimmie walked to the window and began to look through the blurred glass. it occurred to him to vaguely wonder, for an instant, if some of the women of his acquaintance had brothers. suddenly, however, he began to swear. "but he was me frien'! i brought 'im here! dat's deh hell of it!" he fumed about the room, his anger gradually rising to the furious pitch. "i'll kill deh jay! dat's what i'll do! i'll kill deh jay!" he clutched his hat and sprang toward the door. but it opened and his mother's great form blocked the passage. "what deh hell's deh matter wid yeh?" exclaimed she, coming into the rooms. jimmie gave vent to a sardonic curse and then laughed heavily. "well, maggie's gone teh deh devil! dat's what! see?" "eh?" said his mother. "maggie's gone teh deh devil! are yehs deaf?" roared jimmie, impatiently. "deh hell she has," murmured the mother, astounded. jimmie grunted, and then began to stare out at the window. his mother sat down in a chair, but a moment later sprang erect and delivered a maddened whirl of oaths. her son turned to look at her as she reeled and swayed in the middle of the room, her fierce face convulsed with passion, her blotched arms raised high in imprecation. "may gawd curse her forever," she shrieked. "may she eat nothin' but stones and deh dirt in deh street. may she sleep in deh gutter an' never see deh sun shine agin. deh damn--" "here, now," said her son. "take a drop on yourself." the mother raised lamenting eyes to the ceiling. "she's deh devil's own chil', jimmie," she whispered. "ah, who would t'ink such a bad girl could grow up in our fambly, jimmie, me son. many deh hour i've spent in talk wid dat girl an' tol' her if she ever went on deh streets i'd see her damned. an' after all her bringin' up an' what i tol' her and talked wid her, she goes teh deh bad, like a duck teh water." the tears rolled down her furrowed face. her hands trembled. "an' den when dat sadie macmallister next door to us was sent teh deh devil by dat feller what worked in deh soap-factory, didn't i tell our mag dat if she--" "ah, dat's annuder story," interrupted the brother. "of course, dat sadie was nice an' all dat--but--see--it ain't dessame as if--well, maggie was diff'ent--see--she was diff'ent." he was trying to formulate a theory that he had always unconsciously held, that all sisters, excepting his own, could advisedly be ruined. he suddenly broke out again. "i'll go t'ump hell outa deh mug what did her deh harm. i'll kill 'im! he t'inks he kin scrap, but when he gits me a-chasin' 'im he'll fin' out where he's wrong, deh damned duffer. i'll wipe up deh street wid 'im." in a fury he plunged out of the doorway. as he vanished the mother raised her head and lifted both hands, entreating. "may gawd curse her forever," she cried. in the darkness of the hallway jimmie discerned a knot of women talking volubly. when he strode by they paid no attention to him. "she allus was a bold thing," he heard one of them cry in an eager voice. "dere wasn't a feller come teh deh house but she'd try teh mash 'im. my annie says deh shameless t'ing tried teh ketch her feller, her own feller, what we useter know his fader." "i could a' tol' yehs dis two years ago," said a woman, in a key of triumph. "yessir, it was over two years ago dat i says teh my ol' man, i says, 'dat johnson girl ain't straight,' i says. 'oh, hell,' he says. 'oh, hell.' 'dat's all right,' i says, 'but i know what i knows,' i says, 'an' it 'ill come out later. you wait an' see,' i says, 'you see.'" "anybody what had eyes could see dat dere was somethin' wrong wid dat girl. i didn't like her actions." on the street jimmie met a friend. "what deh hell?" asked the latter. jimmie explained. "an' i'll t'ump 'im till he can't stand." "oh, what deh hell," said the friend. "what's deh use! yeh'll git pulled in! everybody 'ill be onto it! an' ten plunks! gee!" jimmie was determined. "he t'inks he kin scrap, but he'll fin' out diff'ent." "gee," remonstrated the friend. "what deh hell?" chapter xi on a corner a glass-fronted building shed a yellow glare upon the pavements. the open mouth of a saloon called seductively to passengers to enter and annihilate sorrow or create rage. the interior of the place was papered in olive and bronze tints of imitation leather. a shining bar of counterfeit massiveness extended down the side of the room. behind it a great mahogany-appearing sideboard reached the ceiling. upon its shelves rested pyramids of shimmering glasses that were never disturbed. mirrors set in the face of the sideboard multiplied them. lemons, oranges and paper napkins, arranged with mathematical precision, sat among the glasses. many-hued decanters of liquor perched at regular intervals on the lower shelves. a nickel-plated cash register occupied a position in the exact centre of the general effect. the elementary senses of it all seemed to be opulence and geometrical accuracy. across from the bar a smaller counter held a collection of plates upon which swarmed frayed fragments of crackers, slices of boiled ham, dishevelled bits of cheese, and pickles swimming in vinegar. an odor of grasping, begrimed hands and munching mouths pervaded. pete, in a white jacket, was behind the bar bending expectantly toward a quiet stranger. "a beeh," said the man. pete drew a foam-topped glassful and set it dripping upon the bar. at this moment the light bamboo doors at the entrance swung open and crashed against the siding. jimmie and a companion entered. they swaggered unsteadily but belligerently toward the bar and looked at pete with bleared and blinking eyes. "gin," said jimmie. "gin," said the companion. pete slid a bottle and two glasses along the bar. he bended his head sideways as he assiduously polished away with a napkin at the gleaming wood. he had a look of watchfulness upon his features. jimmie and his companion kept their eyes upon the bartender and conversed loudly in tones of contempt. "he's a dindy masher, ain't he, by gawd?" laughed jimmie. "oh, hell, yes," said the companion, sneering widely. "he's great, he is. git onto deh mug on deh blokie. dat's enough to make a feller turn hand-springs in 'is sleep." the quiet stranger moved himself and his glass a trifle further away and maintained an attitude of oblivion. "gee! ain't he hot stuff!" "git onto his shape! great gawd!" "hey," cried jimmie, in tones of command. pete came along slowly, with a sullen dropping of the under lip. "well," he growled, "what's eatin' yehs?" "gin," said jimmie. "gin," said the companion. as pete confronted them with the bottle and the glasses, they laughed in his face. jimmie's companion, evidently overcome with merriment, pointed a grimy forefinger in pete's direction. "say, jimmie," demanded he, "what deh hell is dat behind deh bar?" "damned if i knows," replied jimmie. they laughed loudly. pete put down a bottle with a bang and turned a formidable face toward them. he disclosed his teeth and his shoulders heaved restlessly. "you fellers can't guy me," he said. "drink yer stuff an' git out an' don' make no trouble." instantly the laughter faded from the faces of the two men and expressions of offended dignity immediately came. "who deh hell has said anyt'ing teh you," cried they in the same breath. the quiet stranger looked at the door calculatingly. "ah, come off," said pete to the two men. "don't pick me up for no jay. drink yer rum an' git out an' don' make no trouble." "oh, deh hell," airily cried jimmie. "oh, deh hell," airily repeated his companion. "we goes when we git ready! see!" continued jimmie. "well," said pete in a threatening voice, "don' make no trouble." jimmie suddenly leaned forward with his head on one side. he snarled like a wild animal. "well, what if we does? see?" said he. dark blood flushed into pete's face, and he shot a lurid glance at jimmie. "well, den we'll see whose deh bes' man, you or me," he said. the quiet stranger moved modestly toward the door. jimmie began to swell with valor. "don' pick me up fer no tenderfoot. when yeh tackles me yeh tackles one of deh bes' men in deh city. see? i'm a scrapper, i am. ain't dat right, billie?" "sure, mike," responded his companion in tones of conviction. "oh, hell," said pete, easily. "go fall on yerself." the two men again began to laugh. "what deh hell is dat talkin'?" cried the companion. "damned if i knows," replied jimmie with exaggerated contempt. pete made a furious gesture. "git outa here now, an' don' make no trouble. see? youse fellers er lookin' fer a scrap an' it's damn likely yeh'll fin' one if yeh keeps on shootin' off yer mout's. i know yehs! see? i kin lick better men dan yehs ever saw in yer lifes. dat's right! see? don' pick me up fer no stuff er yeh might be jolted out in deh street before yeh knows where yeh is. when i comes from behind dis bar, i t'rows yehs bote inteh deh street. see?" "oh, hell," cried the two men in chorus. the glare of a panther came into pete's eyes. "dat's what i said! unnerstan'?" he came through a passage at the end of the bar and swelled down upon the two men. they stepped promptly forward and crowded close to him. they bristled like three roosters. they moved their heads pugnaciously and kept their shoulders braced. the nervous muscles about each mouth twitched with a forced smile of mockery. "well, what deh hell yer goin' teh do?" gritted jimmie. pete stepped warily back, waving his hands before him to keep the men from coming too near. "well, what deh hell yer goin' teh do?" repeated jimmie's ally. they kept close to him, taunting and leering. they strove to make him attempt the initial blow. "keep back, now! don' crowd me," ominously said pete. again they chorused in contempt. "oh, hell!" in a small, tossing group, the three men edged for positions like frigates contemplating battle. "well, why deh hell don' yeh try teh t'row us out?" cried jimmie and his ally with copious sneers. the bravery of bull-dogs sat upon the faces of the men. their clenched fists moved like eager weapons. the allied two jostled the bartender's elbows, glaring at him with feverish eyes and forcing him toward the wall. suddenly pete swore redly. the flash of action gleamed from his eyes. he threw back his arm and aimed a tremendous, lightning-like blow at jimmie's face. his foot swung a step forward and the weight of his body was behind his fist. jimmie ducked his head, bowery-like, with the quickness of a cat. the fierce, answering blows of him and his ally crushed on pete's bowed head. the quiet stranger vanished. the arms of the combatants whirled in the air like flails. the faces of the men, at first flushed to flame-colored anger, now began to fade to the pallor of warriors in the blood and heat of a battle. their lips curled back and stretched tightly over the gums in ghoul-like grins. through their white, gripped teeth struggled hoarse whisperings of oaths. their eyes glittered with murderous fire. each head was huddled between its owner's shoulders, and arms were swinging with marvelous rapidity. feet scraped to and fro with a loud scratching sound upon the sanded floor. blows left crimson blotches upon pale skin. the curses of the first quarter minute of the fight died away. the breaths of the fighters came wheezingly from their lips and the three chests were straining and heaving. pete at intervals gave vent to low, labored hisses, that sounded like a desire to kill. jimmie's ally gibbered at times like a wounded maniac. jimmie was silent, fighting with the face of a sacrificial priest. the rage of fear shone in all their eyes and their blood-colored fists swirled. at a tottering moment a blow from pete's hand struck the ally and he crashed to the floor. he wriggled instantly to his feet and grasping the quiet stranger's beer glass from the bar, hurled it at pete's head. high on the wall it burst like a bomb, shivering fragments flying in all directions. then missiles came to every man's hand. the place had heretofore appeared free of things to throw, but suddenly glass and bottles went singing through the air. they were thrown point blank at bobbing heads. the pyramid of shimmering glasses, that had never been disturbed, changed to cascades as heavy bottles were flung into them. mirrors splintered to nothing. the three frothing creatures on the floor buried themselves in a frenzy for blood. there followed in the wake of missiles and fists some unknown prayers, perhaps for death. the quiet stranger had sprawled very pyrotechnically out on the sidewalk. a laugh ran up and down the avenue for the half of a block. "dey've trowed a bloke inteh deh street." people heard the sound of breaking glass and shuffling feet within the saloon and came running. a small group, bending down to look under the bamboo doors, watching the fall of glass, and three pairs of violent legs, changed in a moment to a crowd. a policeman came charging down the sidewalk and bounced through the doors into the saloon. the crowd bended and surged in absorbing anxiety to see. jimmie caught first sight of the on-coming interruption. on his feet he had the same regard for a policeman that, when on his truck, he had for a fire engine. he howled and ran for the side door. the officer made a terrific advance, club in hand. one comprehensive sweep of the long night stick threw the ally to the floor and forced pete to a corner. with his disengaged hand he made a furious effort at jimmie's coat-tails. then he regained his balance and paused. "well, well, you are a pair of pictures. what in hell yeh been up to?" jimmie, with his face drenched in blood, escaped up a side street, pursued a short distance by some of the more law-loving, or excited individuals of the crowd. later, from a corner safely dark, he saw the policeman, the ally and the bartender emerge from the saloon. pete locked the doors and then followed up the avenue in the rear of the crowd-encompassed policeman and his charge. on first thoughts jimmie, with his heart throbbing at battle heat, started to go desperately to the rescue of his friend, but he halted. "ah, what deh hell?" he demanded of himself. chapter xii in a hall of irregular shape sat pete and maggie drinking beer. a submissive orchestra dictated to by a spectacled man with frowsy hair and a dress suit, industriously followed the bobs of his head and the waves of his baton. a ballad singer, in a dress of flaming scarlet, sang in the inevitable voice of brass. when she vanished, men seated at the tables near the front applauded loudly, pounding the polished wood with their beer glasses. she returned attired in less gown, and sang again. she received another enthusiastic encore. she reappeared in still less gown and danced. the deafening rumble of glasses and clapping of hands that followed her exit indicated an overwhelming desire to have her come on for the fourth time, but the curiosity of the audience was not gratified. maggie was pale. from her eyes had been plucked all look of self-reliance. she leaned with a dependent air toward her companion. she was timid, as if fearing his anger or displeasure. she seemed to beseech tenderness of him. pete's air of distinguished valor had grown upon him until it threatened stupendous dimensions. he was infinitely gracious to the girl. it was apparent to her that his condescension was a marvel. he could appear to strut even while sitting still and he showed that he was a lion of lordly characteristics by the air with which he spat. with maggie gazing at him wonderingly, he took pride in commanding the waiters who were, however, indifferent or deaf. "hi, you, git a russle on yehs! what deh hell yehs lookin' at? two more beehs, d'yeh hear?" he leaned back and critically regarded the person of a girl with a straw-colored wig who upon the stage was flinging her heels in somewhat awkward imitation of a well-known danseuse. at times maggie told pete long confidential tales of her former home life, dwelling upon the escapades of the other members of the family and the difficulties she had to combat in order to obtain a degree of comfort. he responded in tones of philanthropy. he pressed her arm with an air of reassuring proprietorship. "dey was damn jays," he said, denouncing the mother and brother. the sound of the music which, by the efforts of the frowsy-headed leader, drifted to her ears through the smoke-filled atmosphere, made the girl dream. she thought of her former rum alley environment and turned to regard pete's strong protecting fists. she thought of the collar and cuff manufactory and the eternal moan of the proprietor: "what een hell do you sink i pie fife dolla a week for? play? no, py damn." she contemplated pete's man-subduing eyes and noted that wealth and prosperity was indicated by his clothes. she imagined a future, rose-tinted, because of its distance from all that she previously had experienced. as to the present she perceived only vague reasons to be miserable. her life was pete's and she considered him worthy of the charge. she would be disturbed by no particular apprehensions, so long as pete adored her as he now said he did. she did not feel like a bad woman. to her knowledge she had never seen any better. at times men at other tables regarded the girl furtively. pete, aware of it, nodded at her and grinned. he felt proud. "mag, yer a bloomin' good-looker," he remarked, studying her face through the haze. the men made maggie fear, but she blushed at pete's words as it became apparent to her that she was the apple of his eye. grey-headed men, wonderfully pathetic in their dissipation, stared at her through clouds. smooth-cheeked boys, some of them with faces of stone and mouths of sin, not nearly so pathetic as the grey heads, tried to find the girl's eyes in the smoke wreaths. maggie considered she was not what they thought her. she confined her glances to pete and the stage. the orchestra played negro melodies and a versatile drummer pounded, whacked, clattered and scratched on a dozen machines to make noise. those glances of the men, shot at maggie from under half-closed lids, made her tremble. she thought them all to be worse men than pete. "come, let's go," she said. as they went out maggie perceived two women seated at a table with some men. they were painted and their cheeks had lost their roundness. as she passed them the girl, with a shrinking movement, drew back her skirts. chapter xiii jimmie did not return home for a number of days after the fight with pete in the saloon. when he did, he approached with extreme caution. he found his mother raving. maggie had not returned home. the parent continually wondered how her daughter could come to such a pass. she had never considered maggie as a pearl dropped unstained into rum alley from heaven, but she could not conceive how it was possible for her daughter to fall so low as to bring disgrace upon her family. she was terrific in denunciation of the girl's wickedness. the fact that the neighbors talked of it, maddened her. when women came in, and in the course of their conversation casually asked, "where's maggie dese days?" the mother shook her fuzzy head at them and appalled them with curses. cunning hints inviting confidence she rebuffed with violence. "an' wid all deh bringin' up she had, how could she?" moaningly she asked of her son. "wid all deh talkin' wid her i did an' deh t'ings i tol' her to remember? when a girl is bringed up deh way i bringed up maggie, how kin she go teh deh devil?" jimmie was transfixed by these questions. he could not conceive how under the circumstances his mother's daughter and his sister could have been so wicked. his mother took a drink from a squdgy bottle that sat on the table. she continued her lament. "she had a bad heart, dat girl did, jimmie. she was wicked teh deh heart an' we never knowed it." jimmie nodded, admitting the fact. "we lived in deh same house wid her an' i brought her up an' we never knowed how bad she was." jimmie nodded again. "wid a home like dis an' a mudder like me, she went teh deh bad," cried the mother, raising her eyes. one day, jimmie came home, sat down in a chair and began to wriggle about with a new and strange nervousness. at last he spoke shamefacedly. "well, look-a-here, dis t'ing queers us! see? we're queered! an' maybe it 'ud be better if i--well, i t'ink i kin look 'er up an'--maybe it 'ud be better if i fetched her home an'--" the mother started from her chair and broke forth into a storm of passionate anger. "what! let 'er come an' sleep under deh same roof wid her mudder agin! oh, yes, i will, won't i? sure? shame on yehs, jimmie johnson, for sayin' such a t'ing teh yer own mudder--teh yer own mudder! little did i t'ink when yehs was a babby playin' about me feet dat ye'd grow up teh say sech a t'ing teh yer mudder--yer own mudder. i never taut--" sobs choked her and interrupted her reproaches. "dere ain't nottin' teh raise sech hell about," said jimmie. "i on'y says it 'ud be better if we keep dis t'ing dark, see? it queers us! see?" his mother laughed a laugh that seemed to ring through the city and be echoed and re-echoed by countless other laughs. "oh, yes, i will, won't i! sure!" "well, yeh must take me fer a damn fool," said jimmie, indignant at his mother for mocking him. "i didn't say we'd make 'er inteh a little tin angel, ner nottin', but deh way it is now she can queer us! don' che see?" "aye, she'll git tired of deh life atter a while an' den she'll wanna be a-comin' home, won' she, deh beast! i'll let 'er in den, won' i?" "well, i didn' mean none of dis prod'gal bus'ness anyway," explained jimmie. "it wasn't no prod'gal dauter, yeh damn fool," said the mother. "it was prod'gal son, anyhow." "i know dat," said jimmie. for a time they sat in silence. the mother's eyes gloated on a scene her imagination could call before her. her lips were set in a vindictive smile. "aye, she'll cry, won' she, an' carry on, an' tell how pete, or some odder feller, beats 'er an' she'll say she's sorry an' all dat an' she ain't happy, she ain't, an' she wants to come home agin, she does." with grim humor, the mother imitated the possible wailing notes of the daughter's voice. "den i'll take 'er in, won't i, deh beast. she kin cry 'er two eyes out on deh stones of deh street before i'll dirty deh place wid her. she abused an' ill-treated her own mudder--her own mudder what loved her an' she'll never git anodder chance dis side of hell." jimmie thought he had a great idea of women's frailty, but he could not understand why any of his kin should be victims. "damn her," he fervidly said. again he wondered vaguely if some of the women of his acquaintance had brothers. nevertheless, his mind did not for an instant confuse himself with those brothers nor his sister with theirs. after the mother had, with great difficulty, suppressed the neighbors, she went among them and proclaimed her grief. "may gawd forgive dat girl," was her continual cry. to attentive ears she recited the whole length and breadth of her woes. "i bringed 'er up deh way a dauter oughta be bringed up an' dis is how she served me! she went teh deh devil deh first chance she got! may gawd forgive her." when arrested for drunkenness she used the story of her daughter's downfall with telling effect upon the police justices. finally one of them said to her, peering down over his spectacles: "mary, the records of this and other courts show that you are the mother of forty-two daughters who have been ruined. the case is unparalleled in the annals of this court, and this court thinks--" the mother went through life shedding large tears of sorrow. her red face was a picture of agony. of course jimmie publicly damned his sister that he might appear on a higher social plane. but, arguing with himself, stumbling about in ways that he knew not, he, once, almost came to a conclusion that his sister would have been more firmly good had she better known why. however, he felt that he could not hold such a view. he threw it hastily aside. chapter xiv in a hilarious hall there were twenty-eight tables and twenty-eight women and a crowd of smoking men. valiant noise was made on a stage at the end of the hall by an orchestra composed of men who looked as if they had just happened in. soiled waiters ran to and fro, swooping down like hawks on the unwary in the throng; clattering along the aisles with trays covered with glasses; stumbling over women's skirts and charging two prices for everything but beer, all with a swiftness that blurred the view of the cocoanut palms and dusty monstrosities painted upon the walls of the room. a bouncer, with an immense load of business upon his hands, plunged about in the crowd, dragging bashful strangers to prominent chairs, ordering waiters here and there and quarreling furiously with men who wanted to sing with the orchestra. the usual smoke cloud was present, but so dense that heads and arms seemed entangled in it. the rumble of conversation was replaced by a roar. plenteous oaths heaved through the air. the room rang with the shrill voices of women bubbling o'er with drink-laughter. the chief element in the music of the orchestra was speed. the musicians played in intent fury. a woman was singing and smiling upon the stage, but no one took notice of her. the rate at which the piano, cornet and violins were going, seemed to impart wildness to the half-drunken crowd. beer glasses were emptied at a gulp and conversation became a rapid chatter. the smoke eddied and swirled like a shadowy river hurrying toward some unseen falls. pete and maggie entered the hall and took chairs at a table near the door. the woman who was seated there made an attempt to occupy pete's attention and, failing, went away. three weeks had passed since the girl had left home. the air of spaniel-like dependence had been magnified and showed its direct effect in the peculiar off-handedness and ease of pete's ways toward her. she followed pete's eyes with hers, anticipating with smiles gracious looks from him. a woman of brilliance and audacity, accompanied by a mere boy, came into the place and took seats near them. at once pete sprang to his feet, his face beaming with glad surprise. "by gawd, there's nellie," he cried. he went over to the table and held out an eager hand to the woman. "why, hello, pete, me boy, how are you," said she, giving him her fingers. maggie took instant note of the woman. she perceived that her black dress fitted her to perfection. her linen collar and cuffs were spotless. tan gloves were stretched over her well-shaped hands. a hat of a prevailing fashion perched jauntily upon her dark hair. she wore no jewelry and was painted with no apparent paint. she looked clear-eyed through the stares of the men. "sit down, and call your lady-friend over," she said cordially to pete. at his beckoning maggie came and sat between pete and the mere boy. "i thought yeh were gone away fer good," began pete, at once. "when did yeh git back? how did dat buff'lo bus'ness turn out?" the woman shrugged her shoulders. "well, he didn't have as many stamps as he tried to make out, so i shook him, that's all." "well, i'm glad teh see yehs back in deh city," said pete, with awkward gallantry. he and the woman entered into a long conversation, exchanging reminiscences of days together. maggie sat still, unable to formulate an intelligent sentence upon the conversation and painfully aware of it. she saw pete's eyes sparkle as he gazed upon the handsome stranger. he listened smilingly to all she said. the woman was familiar with all his affairs, asked him about mutual friends, and knew the amount of his salary. she paid no attention to maggie, looking toward her once or twice and apparently seeing the wall beyond. the mere boy was sulky. in the beginning he had welcomed with acclamations the additions. "let's all have a drink! what'll you take, nell? and you, miss what's-your-name. have a drink, mr. -----, you, i mean." he had shown a sprightly desire to do the talking for the company and tell all about his family. in a loud voice he declaimed on various topics. he assumed a patronizing air toward pete. as maggie was silent, he paid no attention to her. he made a great show of lavishing wealth upon the woman of brilliance and audacity. "do keep still, freddie! you gibber like an ape, dear," said the woman to him. she turned away and devoted her attention to pete. "we'll have many a good time together again, eh?" "sure, mike," said pete, enthusiastic at once. "say," whispered she, leaning forward, "let's go over to billie's and have a heluva time." "well, it's dis way! see?" said pete. "i got dis lady frien' here." "oh, t'hell with her," argued the woman. pete appeared disturbed. "all right," said she, nodding her head at him. "all right for you! we'll see the next time you ask me to go anywheres with you." pete squirmed. "say," he said, beseechingly, "come wid me a minit an' i'll tell yer why." the woman waved her hand. "oh, that's all right, you needn't explain, you know. you wouldn't come merely because you wouldn't come, that's all there is of it." to pete's visible distress she turned to the mere boy, bringing him speedily from a terrific rage. he had been debating whether it would be the part of a man to pick a quarrel with pete, or would he be justified in striking him savagely with his beer glass without warning. but he recovered himself when the woman turned to renew her smilings. he beamed upon her with an expression that was somewhat tipsy and inexpressibly tender. "say, shake that bowery jay," requested he, in a loud whisper. "freddie, you are so droll," she replied. pete reached forward and touched the woman on the arm. "come out a minit while i tells yeh why i can't go wid yer. yer doin' me dirt, nell! i never taut ye'd do me dirt, nell. come on, will yer?" he spoke in tones of injury. "why, i don't see why i should be interested in your explanations," said the woman, with a coldness that seemed to reduce pete to a pulp. his eyes pleaded with her. "come out a minit while i tells yeh." the woman nodded slightly at maggie and the mere boy, "'scuse me." the mere boy interrupted his loving smile and turned a shrivelling glare upon pete. his boyish countenance flushed and he spoke, in a whine, to the woman: "oh, i say, nellie, this ain't a square deal, you know. you aren't goin' to leave me and go off with that duffer, are you? i should think--" "why, you dear boy, of course i'm not," cried the woman, affectionately. she bended over and whispered in his ear. he smiled again and settled in his chair as if resolved to wait patiently. as the woman walked down between the rows of tables, pete was at her shoulder talking earnestly, apparently in explanation. the woman waved her hands with studied airs of indifference. the doors swung behind them, leaving maggie and the mere boy seated at the table. maggie was dazed. she could dimly perceive that something stupendous had happened. she wondered why pete saw fit to remonstrate with the woman, pleading for forgiveness with his eyes. she thought she noted an air of submission about her leonine pete. she was astounded. the mere boy occupied himself with cock-tails and a cigar. he was tranquilly silent for half an hour. then he bestirred himself and spoke. "well," he said, sighing, "i knew this was the way it would be." there was another stillness. the mere boy seemed to be musing. "she was pulling m'leg. that's the whole amount of it," he said, suddenly. "it's a bloomin' shame the way that girl does. why, i've spent over two dollars in drinks to-night. and she goes off with that plug-ugly who looks as if he had been hit in the face with a coin-die. i call it rocky treatment for a fellah like me. here, waiter, bring me a cock-tail and make it damned strong." maggie made no reply. she was watching the doors. "it's a mean piece of business," complained the mere boy. he explained to her how amazing it was that anybody should treat him in such a manner. "but i'll get square with her, you bet. she won't get far ahead of yours truly, you know," he added, winking. "i'll tell her plainly that it was bloomin' mean business. and she won't come it over me with any of her 'now-freddie-dears.' she thinks my name is freddie, you know, but of course it ain't. i always tell these people some name like that, because if they got onto your right name they might use it sometime. understand? oh, they don't fool me much." maggie was paying no attention, being intent upon the doors. the mere boy relapsed into a period of gloom, during which he exterminated a number of cock-tails with a determined air, as if replying defiantly to fate. he occasionally broke forth into sentences composed of invectives joined together in a long string. the girl was still staring at the doors. after a time the mere boy began to see cobwebs just in front of his nose. he spurred himself into being agreeable and insisted upon her having a charlotte-russe and a glass of beer. "they's gone," he remarked, "they's gone." he looked at her through the smoke wreaths. "shay, lil' girl, we mightish well make bes' of it. you ain't such bad-lookin' girl, y'know. not half bad. can't come up to nell, though. no, can't do it! well, i should shay not! nell fine-lookin' girl! f--i--n--ine. you look damn bad longsider her, but by y'self ain't so bad. have to do anyhow. nell gone. on'y you left. not half bad, though." maggie stood up. "i'm going home," she said. the mere boy started. "eh? what? home," he cried, struck with amazement. "i beg pardon, did hear say home?" "i'm going home," she repeated. "great gawd, what hava struck," demanded the mere boy of himself, stupefied. in a semi-comatose state he conducted her on board an up-town car, ostentatiously paid her fare, leered kindly at her through the rear window and fell off the steps. chapter xv a forlorn woman went along a lighted avenue. the street was filled with people desperately bound on missions. an endless crowd darted at the elevated station stairs and the horse cars were thronged with owners of bundles. the pace of the forlorn woman was slow. she was apparently searching for some one. she loitered near the doors of saloons and watched men emerge from them. she scanned furtively the faces in the rushing stream of pedestrians. hurrying men, bent on catching some boat or train, jostled her elbows, failing to notice her, their thoughts fixed on distant dinners. the forlorn woman had a peculiar face. her smile was no smile. but when in repose her features had a shadowy look that was like a sardonic grin, as if some one had sketched with cruel forefinger indelible lines about her mouth. jimmie came strolling up the avenue. the woman encountered him with an aggrieved air. "oh, jimmie, i've been lookin' all over fer yehs--," she began. jimmie made an impatient gesture and quickened his pace. "ah, don't bodder me! good gawd!" he said, with the savageness of a man whose life is pestered. the woman followed him along the sidewalk in somewhat the manner of a suppliant. "but, jimmie," she said, "yehs told me ye'd--" jimmie turned upon her fiercely as if resolved to make a last stand for comfort and peace. "say, fer gawd's sake, hattie, don' foller me from one end of deh city teh deh odder. let up, will yehs! give me a minute's res', can't yehs? yehs makes me tired, allus taggin' me. see? ain' yehs got no sense. do yehs want people teh get onto me? go chase yerself, fer gawd's sake." the woman stepped closer and laid her fingers on his arm. "but, look-a-here--" jimmie snarled. "oh, go teh hell." he darted into the front door of a convenient saloon and a moment later came out into the shadows that surrounded the side door. on the brilliantly lighted avenue he perceived the forlorn woman dodging about like a scout. jimmie laughed with an air of relief and went away. when he arrived home he found his mother clamoring. maggie had returned. she stood shivering beneath the torrent of her mother's wrath. "well, i'm damned," said jimmie in greeting. his mother, tottering about the room, pointed a quivering forefinger. "lookut her, jimmie, lookut her. dere's yer sister, boy. dere's yer sister. lookut her! lookut her!" she screamed in scoffing laughter. the girl stood in the middle of the room. she edged about as if unable to find a place on the floor to put her feet. "ha, ha, ha," bellowed the mother. "dere she stands! ain' she purty? lookut her! ain' she sweet, deh beast? lookut her! ha, ha, lookut her!" she lurched forward and put her red and seamed hands upon her daughter's face. she bent down and peered keenly up into the eyes of the girl. "oh, she's jes' dessame as she ever was, ain' she? she's her mudder's purty darlin' yit, ain' she? lookut her, jimmie! come here, fer gawd's sake, and lookut her." the loud, tremendous sneering of the mother brought the denizens of the rum alley tenement to their doors. women came in the hallways. children scurried to and fro. "what's up? dat johnson party on anudder tear?" "naw! young mag's come home!" "deh hell yeh say?" through the open door curious eyes stared in at maggie. children ventured into the room and ogled her, as if they formed the front row at a theatre. women, without, bended toward each other and whispered, nodding their heads with airs of profound philosophy. a baby, overcome with curiosity concerning this object at which all were looking, sidled forward and touched her dress, cautiously, as if investigating a red-hot stove. its mother's voice rang out like a warning trumpet. she rushed forward and grabbed her child, casting a terrible look of indignation at the girl. maggie's mother paced to and fro, addressing the doorful of eyes, expounding like a glib showman at a museum. her voice rang through the building. "dere she stands," she cried, wheeling suddenly and pointing with dramatic finger. "dere she stands! lookut her! ain' she a dindy? an' she was so good as to come home teh her mudder, she was! ain' she a beaut'? ain' she a dindy? fer gawd's sake!" the jeering cries ended in another burst of shrill laughter. the girl seemed to awaken. "jimmie--" he drew hastily back from her. "well, now, yer a hell of a t'ing, ain' yeh?" he said, his lips curling in scorn. radiant virtue sat upon his brow and his repelling hands expressed horror of contamination. maggie turned and went. the crowd at the door fell back precipitately. a baby falling down in front of the door, wrenched a scream like a wounded animal from its mother. another woman sprang forward and picked it up, with a chivalrous air, as if rescuing a human being from an oncoming express train. as the girl passed down through the hall, she went before open doors framing more eyes strangely microscopic, and sending broad beams of inquisitive light into the darkness of her path. on the second floor she met the gnarled old woman who possessed the music box. "so," she cried, "'ere yehs are back again, are yehs? an' dey've kicked yehs out? well, come in an' stay wid me teh-night. i ain' got no moral standin'." from above came an unceasing babble of tongues, over all of which rang the mother's derisive laughter. chapter xvi pete did not consider that he had ruined maggie. if he had thought that her soul could never smile again, he would have believed the mother and brother, who were pyrotechnic over the affair, to be responsible for it. besides, in his world, souls did not insist upon being able to smile. "what deh hell?" he felt a trifle entangled. it distressed him. revelations and scenes might bring upon him the wrath of the owner of the saloon, who insisted upon respectability of an advanced type. "what deh hell do dey wanna raise such a smoke about it fer?" demanded he of himself, disgusted with the attitude of the family. he saw no necessity for anyone's losing their equilibrium merely because their sister or their daughter had stayed away from home. searching about in his mind for possible reasons for their conduct, he came upon the conclusion that maggie's motives were correct, but that the two others wished to snare him. he felt pursued. the woman of brilliance and audacity whom he had met in the hilarious hall showed a disposition to ridicule him. "a little pale thing with no spirit," she said. "did you note the expression of her eyes? there was something in them about pumpkin pie and virtue. that is a peculiar way the left corner of her mouth has of twitching, isn't it? dear, dear, my cloud-compelling pete, what are you coming to?" pete asserted at once that he never was very much interested in the girl. the woman interrupted him, laughing. "oh, it's not of the slightest consequence to me, my dear young man. you needn't draw maps for my benefit. why should i be concerned about it?" but pete continued with his explanations. if he was laughed at for his tastes in women, he felt obliged to say that they were only temporary or indifferent ones. the morning after maggie had departed from home, pete stood behind the bar. he was immaculate in white jacket and apron and his hair was plastered over his brow with infinite correctness. no customers were in the place. pete was twisting his napkined fist slowly in a beer glass, softly whistling to himself and occasionally holding the object of his attention between his eyes and a few weak beams of sunlight that had found their way over the thick screens and into the shaded room. with lingering thoughts of the woman of brilliance and audacity, the bartender raised his head and stared through the varying cracks between the swaying bamboo doors. suddenly the whistling pucker faded from his lips. he saw maggie walking slowly past. he gave a great start, fearing for the previously-mentioned eminent respectability of the place. he threw a swift, nervous glance about him, all at once feeling guilty. no one was in the room. he went hastily over to the side door. opening it and looking out, he perceived maggie standing, as if undecided, on the corner. she was searching the place with her eyes. as she turned her face toward him pete beckoned to her hurriedly, intent upon returning with speed to a position behind the bar and to the atmosphere of respectability upon which the proprietor insisted. maggie came to him, the anxious look disappearing from her face and a smile wreathing her lips. "oh, pete--," she began brightly. the bartender made a violent gesture of impatience. "oh, my gawd," cried he, vehemently. "what deh hell do yeh wanna hang aroun' here fer? do yeh wanna git me inteh trouble?" he demanded with an air of injury. astonishment swept over the girl's features. "why, pete! yehs tol' me--" pete glanced profound irritation. his countenance reddened with the anger of a man whose respectability is being threatened. "say, yehs makes me tired. see? what deh hell deh yeh wanna tag aroun' atter me fer? yeh'll git me inteh trouble wid deh ol' man an' dey'll be hell teh pay! if he sees a woman roun' here he'll go crazy an' i'll lose me job! see? yer brudder come in here an' raised hell an' deh ol' man hada put up fer it! an' now i'm done! see? i'm done." the girl's eyes stared into his face. "pete, don't yeh remem--" "oh, hell," interrupted pete, anticipating. the girl seemed to have a struggle with herself. she was apparently bewildered and could not find speech. finally she asked in a low voice: "but where kin i go?" the question exasperated pete beyond the powers of endurance. it was a direct attempt to give him some responsibility in a matter that did not concern him. in his indignation he volunteered information. "oh, go teh hell," cried he. he slammed the door furiously and returned, with an air of relief, to his respectability. maggie went away. she wandered aimlessly for several blocks. she stopped once and asked aloud a question of herself: "who?" a man who was passing near her shoulder, humorously took the questioning word as intended for him. "eh? what? who? nobody! i didn't say anything," he laughingly said, and continued his way. soon the girl discovered that if she walked with such apparent aimlessness, some men looked at her with calculating eyes. she quickened her step, frightened. as a protection, she adopted a demeanor of intentness as if going somewhere. after a time she left rattling avenues and passed between rows of houses with sternness and stolidity stamped upon their features. she hung her head for she felt their eyes grimly upon her. suddenly she came upon a stout gentleman in a silk hat and a chaste black coat, whose decorous row of buttons reached from his chin to his knees. the girl had heard of the grace of god and she decided to approach this man. his beaming, chubby face was a picture of benevolence and kind-heartedness. his eyes shone good-will. but as the girl timidly accosted him, he gave a convulsive movement and saved his respectability by a vigorous side-step. he did not risk it to save a soul. for how was he to know that there was a soul before him that needed saving? chapter xvii upon a wet evening, several months after the last chapter, two interminable rows of cars, pulled by slipping horses, jangled along a prominent side-street. a dozen cabs, with coat-enshrouded drivers, clattered to and fro. electric lights, whirring softly, shed a blurred radiance. a flower dealer, his feet tapping impatiently, his nose and his wares glistening with rain-drops, stood behind an array of roses and chrysanthemums. two or three theatres emptied a crowd upon the storm-swept pavements. men pulled their hats over their eyebrows and raised their collars to their ears. women shrugged impatient shoulders in their warm cloaks and stopped to arrange their skirts for a walk through the storm. people having been comparatively silent for two hours burst into a roar of conversation, their hearts still kindling from the glowings of the stage. the pavements became tossing seas of umbrellas. men stepped forth to hail cabs or cars, raising their fingers in varied forms of polite request or imperative demand. an endless procession wended toward elevated stations. an atmosphere of pleasure and prosperity seemed to hang over the throng, born, perhaps, of good clothes and of having just emerged from a place of forgetfulness. in the mingled light and gloom of an adjacent park, a handful of wet wanderers, in attitudes of chronic dejection, was scattered among the benches. a girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street. she threw changing glances at men who passed her, giving smiling invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern and usually seeming sedately unconscious of the men with a metropolitan seal upon their faces. crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging from the places of forgetfulness. she hurried forward through the crowd as if intent upon reaching a distant home, bending forward in her handsome cloak, daintily lifting her skirts and picking for her well-shod feet the dryer spots upon the pavements. the restless doors of saloons, clashing to and fro, disclosed animated rows of men before bars and hurrying barkeepers. a concert hall gave to the street faint sounds of swift, machine-like music, as if a group of phantom musicians were hastening. a tall young man, smoking a cigarette with a sublime air, strolled near the girl. he had on evening dress, a moustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye. seeing the girl walk on as if such a young man as he was not in existence, he looked back transfixed with interest. he stared glassily for a moment, but gave a slight convulsive start when he discerned that she was neither new, parisian, nor theatrical. he wheeled about hastily and turned his stare into the air, like a sailor with a search-light. a stout gentleman, with pompous and philanthropic whiskers, went stolidly by, the broad of his back sneering at the girl. a belated man in business clothes, and in haste to catch a car, bounced against her shoulder. "hi, there, mary, i beg your pardon! brace up, old girl." he grasped her arm to steady her, and then was away running down the middle of the street. the girl walked on out of the realm of restaurants and saloons. she passed more glittering avenues and went into darker blocks than those where the crowd travelled. a young man in light overcoat and derby hat received a glance shot keenly from the eyes of the girl. he stopped and looked at her, thrusting his hands in his pockets and making a mocking smile curl his lips. "come, now, old lady," he said, "you don't mean to tel me that you sized me up for a farmer?" a labouring man marched along; with bundles under his arms. to her remarks, he replied, "it's a fine evenin', ain't it?" she smiled squarely into the face of a boy who was hurrying by with his hands buried in his overcoat pockets, his blonde locks bobbing on his youthful temples, and a cheery smile of unconcern upon his lips. he turned his head and smiled back at her, waving his hands. "not this eve--some other eve!" a drunken man, reeling in her pathway, began to roar at her. "i ain' ga no money!" he shouted, in a dismal voice. he lurched on up the street, wailing to himself: "i ain' ga no money. ba' luck. ain' ga no more money." the girl went into gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fell across the pavements from saloons. in front of one of these places, whence came the sound of a violin vigorously scraped, the patter of feet on boards and the ring of loud laughter, there stood a man with blotched features. further on in the darkness she met a ragged being with shifting, bloodshot eyes and grimy hands. she went into the blackness of the final block. the shutters of the tall buildings were closed like grim lips. the structures seemed to have eyes that looked over them, beyond them, at other things. afar off the lights of the avenues glittered as if from an impossible distance. street-car bells jingled with a sound of merriment. at the feet of the tall buildings appeared the deathly black hue of the river. some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against timbers. the varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence. chapter xviii in a partitioned-off section of a saloon sat a man with a half dozen women, gleefully laughing, hovering about him. the man had arrived at that stage of drunkenness where affection is felt for the universe. "i'm good f'ler, girls," he said, convincingly. "i'm damn good f'ler. an'body treats me right, i allus trea's zem right! see?" the women nodded their heads approvingly. "to be sure," they cried out in hearty chorus. "you're the kind of a man we like, pete. you're outa sight! what yeh goin' to buy this time, dear?" "an't'ing yehs wants, damn it," said the man in an abandonment of good will. his countenance shone with the true spirit of benevolence. he was in the proper mode of missionaries. he would have fraternized with obscure hottentots. and above all, he was overwhelmed in tenderness for his friends, who were all illustrious. "an't'ing yehs wants, damn it," repeated he, waving his hands with beneficent recklessness. "i'm good f'ler, girls, an' if an'body treats me right i--here," called he through an open door to a waiter, "bring girls drinks, damn it. what 'ill yehs have, girls? an't'ing yehs wants, damn it!" the waiter glanced in with the disgusted look of the man who serves intoxicants for the man who takes too much of them. he nodded his head shortly at the order from each individual, and went. "damn it," said the man, "we're havin' heluva time. i like you girls! damn'd if i don't! yer right sort! see?" he spoke at length and with feeling, concerning the excellencies of his assembled friends. "don' try pull man's leg, but have a heluva time! das right! das way teh do! now, if i sawght yehs tryin' work me fer drinks, wouldn' buy damn t'ing! but yer right sort, damn it! yehs know how ter treat a f'ler, an' i stays by yehs 'til spen' las' cent! das right! i'm good f'ler an' i knows when an'body treats me right!" between the times of the arrival and departure of the waiter, the man discoursed to the women on the tender regard he felt for all living things. he laid stress upon the purity of his motives in all dealings with men in the world and spoke of the fervor of his friendship for those who were amiable. tears welled slowly from his eyes. his voice quavered when he spoke to them. once when the waiter was about to depart with an empty tray, the man drew a coin from his pocket and held it forth. "here," said he, quite magnificently, "here's quar'." the waiter kept his hands on his tray. "i don' want yer money," he said. the other put forth the coin with tearful insistence. "here, damn it," cried he, "tak't! yer damn goo' f'ler an' i wan' yehs tak't!" "come, come, now," said the waiter, with the sullen air of a man who is forced into giving advice. "put yer mon in yer pocket! yer loaded an' yehs on'y makes a damn fool of yerself." as the latter passed out of the door the man turned pathetically to the women. "he don' know i'm damn goo' f'ler," cried he, dismally. "never you mind, pete, dear," said a woman of brilliance and audacity, laying her hand with great affection upon his arm. "never you mind, old boy! we'll stay by you, dear!" "das ri'," cried the man, his face lighting up at the soothing tones of the woman's voice. "das ri', i'm damn goo' f'ler an' w'en anyone trea's me ri', i treats zem ri'! shee!" "sure!" cried the women. "and we're not goin' back on you, old man." the man turned appealing eyes to the woman of brilliance and audacity. he felt that if he could be convicted of a contemptible action he would die. "shay, nell, damn it, i allus trea's yehs shquare, didn' i? i allus been goo' f'ler wi' yehs, ain't i, nell?" "sure you have, pete," assented the woman. she delivered an oration to her companions. "yessir, that's a fact. pete's a square fellah, he is. he never goes back on a friend. he's the right kind an' we stay by him, don't we, girls?" "sure," they exclaimed. looking lovingly at him they raised their glasses and drank his health. "girlsh," said the man, beseechingly, "i allus trea's yehs ri', didn' i? i'm goo' f'ler, ain' i, girlsh?" "sure," again they chorused. "well," said he finally, "le's have nozzer drink, zen." "that's right," hailed a woman, "that's right. yer no bloomin' jay! yer spends yer money like a man. dat's right." the man pounded the table with his quivering fists. "yessir," he cried, with deep earnestness, as if someone disputed him. "i'm damn goo' f'ler, an' w'en anyone trea's me ri', i allus trea's--le's have nozzer drink." he began to beat the wood with his glass. "shay," howled he, growing suddenly impatient. as the waiter did not then come, the man swelled with wrath. "shay," howled he again. the waiter appeared at the door. "bringsh drinksh," said the man. the waiter disappeared with the orders. "zat f'ler damn fool," cried the man. "he insul' me! i'm ge'man! can' stan' be insul'! i'm goin' lickim when comes!" "no, no," cried the women, crowding about and trying to subdue him. "he's all right! he didn't mean anything! let it go! he's a good fellah!" "din' he insul' me?" asked the man earnestly. "no," said they. "of course he didn't! he's all right!" "sure he didn' insul' me?" demanded the man, with deep anxiety in his voice. "no, no! we know him! he's a good fellah. he didn't mean anything." "well, zen," said the man, resolutely, "i'm go' 'pol'gize!" when the waiter came, the man struggled to the middle of the floor. "girlsh shed you insul' me! i shay damn lie! i 'pol'gize!" "all right," said the waiter. the man sat down. he felt a sleepy but strong desire to straighten things out and have a perfect understanding with everybody. "nell, i allus trea's yeh shquare, din' i? yeh likes me, don' yehs, nell? i'm goo' f'ler?" "sure," said the woman of brilliance and audacity. "yeh knows i'm stuck on yehs, don' yehs, nell?" "sure," she repeated, carelessly. overwhelmed by a spasm of drunken adoration, he drew two or three bills from his pocket, and, with the trembling fingers of an offering priest, laid them on the table before the woman. "yehs knows, damn it, yehs kin have all got, 'cause i'm stuck on yehs, nell, damn't, i--i'm stuck on yehs, nell--buy drinksh--damn't--we're havin' heluva time--w'en anyone trea's me ri'--i--damn't, nell--we're havin' heluva--time." shortly he went to sleep with his swollen face fallen forward on his chest. the women drank and laughed, not heeding the slumbering man in the corner. finally he lurched forward and fell groaning to the floor. the women screamed in disgust and drew back their skirts. "come ahn," cried one, starting up angrily, "let's get out of here." the woman of brilliance and audacity stayed behind, taking up the bills and stuffing them into a deep, irregularly-shaped pocket. a guttural snore from the recumbent man caused her to turn and look down at him. she laughed. "what a damn fool," she said, and went. the smoke from the lamps settled heavily down in the little compartment, obscuring the way out. the smell of oil, stifling in its intensity, pervaded the air. the wine from an overturned glass dripped softly down upon the blotches on the man's neck. chapter xix in a room a woman sat at a table eating like a fat monk in a picture. a soiled, unshaven man pushed open the door and entered. "well," said he, "mag's dead." "what?" said the woman, her mouth filled with bread. "mag's dead," repeated the man. "deh hell she is," said the woman. she continued her meal. when she finished her coffee she began to weep. "i kin remember when her two feet was no bigger dan yer t'umb, and she weared worsted boots," moaned she. "well, whata dat?" said the man. "i kin remember when she weared worsted boots," she cried. the neighbors began to gather in the hall, staring in at the weeping woman as if watching the contortions of a dying dog. a dozen women entered and lamented with her. under their busy hands the rooms took on that appalling appearance of neatness and order with which death is greeted. suddenly the door opened and a woman in a black gown rushed in with outstretched arms. "ah, poor mary," she cried, and tenderly embraced the moaning one. "ah, what ter'ble affliction is dis," continued she. her vocabulary was derived from mission churches. "me poor mary, how i feel fer yehs! ah, what a ter'ble affliction is a disobed'ent chil'." her good, motherly face was wet with tears. she trembled in eagerness to express her sympathy. the mourner sat with bowed head, rocking her body heavily to and fro, and crying out in a high, strained voice that sounded like a dirge on some forlorn pipe. "i kin remember when she weared worsted boots an' her two feets was no bigger dan yer t'umb an' she weared worsted boots, miss smith," she cried, raising her streaming eyes. "ah, me poor mary," sobbed the woman in black. with low, coddling cries, she sank on her knees by the mourner's chair, and put her arms about her. the other women began to groan in different keys. "yer poor misguided chil' is gone now, mary, an' let us hope it's fer deh bes'. yeh'll fergive her now, mary, won't yehs, dear, all her disobed'ence? all her t'ankless behavior to her mudder an' all her badness? she's gone where her ter'ble sins will be judged." the woman in black raised her face and paused. the inevitable sunlight came streaming in at the windows and shed a ghastly cheerfulness upon the faded hues of the room. two or three of the spectators were sniffling, and one was loudly weeping. the mourner arose and staggered into the other room. in a moment she emerged with a pair of faded baby shoes held in the hollow of her hand. "i kin remember when she used to wear dem," cried she. the women burst anew into cries as if they had all been stabbed. the mourner turned to the soiled and unshaven man. "jimmie, boy, go git yer sister! go git yer sister an' we'll put deh boots on her feets!" "dey won't fit her now, yeh damn fool," said the man. "go git yer sister, jimmie," shrieked the woman, confronting him fiercely. the man swore sullenly. he went over to a corner and slowly began to put on his coat. he took his hat and went out, with a dragging, reluctant step. the woman in black came forward and again besought the mourner. "yeh'll fergive her, mary! yeh'll fergive yer bad, bad, chil'! her life was a curse an' her days were black an' yeh'll fergive yer bad girl? she's gone where her sins will be judged." "she's gone where her sins will be judged," cried the other women, like a choir at a funeral. "deh lord gives and deh lord takes away," said the woman in black, raising her eyes to the sunbeams. "deh lord gives and deh lord takes away," responded the others. "yeh'll fergive her, mary!" pleaded the woman in black. the mourner essayed to speak but her voice gave way. she shook her great shoulders frantically, in an agony of grief. hot tears seemed to scald her quivering face. finally her voice came and arose like a scream of pain. "oh, yes, i'll fergive her! i'll fergive her!" http://www.fadedpage.net a bed of roses · · by w. l. george author of 'engines of social progress,' · · 'france in the twentieth century,' &c. it's not work that any woman would do for pleasure, goodness knows; though to hear the pious people talk you would suppose it was a bed of roses. mrs warren's profession · by g. bernard shaw. authorised edition brentano's · new york mcmxi third edition part i chapter i 'we go.' the lascar meditatively pressed his face, brown and begrimed with coal dust, streaked here and there with sweat, against the rope which formed the rough bulwark. his dark eyes were fixed on the shore near by, between which and the ship's side the water quivered quicker and quicker in little ripples, each ripple carrying an iridescent film of grey ooze. without joy or sadness he was bidding goodbye to bombay, his city. those goodbyes are often farewells for lascars who must face the bay and the channel. but the stoker did not care. his companion lay by his side, lazily propped up on his elbow, not deigning even to take a last look at the market place, seething still with its crowded reds and blues and golds. 'dekko!' cried the first stoker pointing to the wharf where a white man in a dirty smock had just cast off the last rope, which came away swishing through the air. his companion did not raise his eyes. slowly he tilted up his pannikin and let the water flow in a thin stream into his mouth, keeping the metal away from his lips. then, careless of the land of akbar, he let himself sink on the deck and composed himself to sleep. india was no concern of his. a few yards away a woman watched them absently from the upper deck. she was conscious of them, conscious too of the slow insistent buzzing of a gadfly. her eyes slowly shifted to the shore, passed over the market place, stopped at the fort. there, in the open space, a troop was drilling, white and speckless, alertly wheeling at the word of command. her eyes were still fixed on the group as the ship imperceptibly receded from the shore, throbbing steadily as the boilers got up steam. a half-naked brown boy was racing along the wharf to gain a start and beat the vessel before she reached the military crane. the woman turned away. she was neither tall nor short: she did not attract attention overmuch but she was one of those who retain such attention as they draw. she was clad entirely in black; her face seemed to start forward intensified. her features were regular; her mouth small. her skin, darkened by the shadow of a broad brimmed hat, blushed still darker at the cheeks. the attraction was all in the eyes, large and grey, suggestive of energy without emotion. her chin was square, perhaps too thick in the jaw. she turned once more and leant against the bulwark. a yard away another woman was also standing, her eyes fixed on the shore, on a figure who waited motionless on the fast receding wharf. as the steamer kept on her course the woman craned forward, saw once more and then lost sight of the lonely figure. she was small, fair, a little insignificant, and dressed all in white drill. the steamer had by now attained half speed. the shore was streaming by. the second woman turned her back on the bulwark, looked about aimlessly, then, perceiving her neighbour, impulsively went up to her and stood close beside her. the two women did not speak, but remained watching the shoals fly past. far away a train in kolaba puffed up sharp bursts of smoke into the blue air. there was nothing to draw the attention of the beholder in that interminable shore, low-lying and muddy, splashed here and there with ragged trees. it was a desert almost, save for a village built between two swamps. here and then smoke arose, brown and peaty from a bonfire. in the evening light the sun's declining rays lit up with radiance the red speck of a heavy shawl on the tiny figure of a brown girl. little by little, as the ship entered the fairway, the shore receded almost into nothingness. the two women still watched, while india merged into shadow. it was the second hour and, as the ship slowly turned towards the west, the women watched the great cocoanut trees turn into black specks upon marla point. then, slowly, the shore sank into the dark sea until it was gone and nothing was left of india save the vaguely paler night that tells of land and the even fainter white spears of the distant light. for a moment they stood still, side by side. then the fair woman suddenly put her hand on her companion's arm. 'i'm cold,' she said, 'let's go below.' the dark girl looked at her sympathetically. 'yes,' she said, 'let's, who'd have thought we wanted to see more of the beastly country than we could help. . . . i say, what's the matter, molly?' molly was still looking towards the light; one of her feet tapped the deck nervously; she fumbled for her handkerchief. 'nothing, nothing,' she said indistinctly, 'come and unpack.' she turned away from her companion and quickly walked towards the gangway. the dark girl looked once more into the distance where even the searchlight had waned. 'vic!' cried the fair girl querulously, half way up the deck. 'all right, i'm coming,' replied the woman in black. she looked again at the pale horizon into which india had faded, at the deck before her where a little black cluster of people had formed to look their last upon the light. then she turned and followed her companion. the cabin was on the lower deck, small, stuffy in the extreme. its two grave-like bunks, its drop table, even its exiguous armchair promised no comfort. on the worn carpet the pattern had almost vanished; alone the official numerals on the edge stared forth. for half an hour the two women unpacked in silence; molly knelt by the side of her trunk delving into it, dragging out garments which she tried to find room for on the scanty pegs. her companion merely raised the lid of her trunk to ease the pressure on her clothes, and placed a small dressing-case on the drop table. once she would have spoken but, at that moment, a faint sob came from molly's kneeling form. she went up to her, put her arm about her neck and kissed her cheek. she undressed wearily, climbed into the upper berth. soon molly did likewise, after turning down the light. for a while she sighed and turned uneasily; then she became quieter, her breathing more measured, and she slept. victoria fulton lay in her berth, her eyes wide open, glued to the roof a foot or so above her face. it was very like a coffin, she thought, perhaps a suitable enough habitation for her, but at present, not in the least tempting. a salutary capacity for optimism was enabling her to review the past three years and to speculate about the future. not that either was very rosy, especially the future. the steady throb of the screw pulsated through the stuffy cabin, and blended with the silence broken only by molly's regular breathing in the lower berth. victoria could not help remembering other nights passed also in a stuffy little cabin, where the screw was throbbing as steadily, and when the silence was broken by breathing as regular, but a little heavier. three years only, and she was going home. but now she was leaving behind her the high hopes she had brought with her. she was no exception to the common rule, and memories, whether bitter or sweet, had always bridged for her the gulf between wakefulness and sleep. and what could be more natural than to recall those nights, three years ago, when every beat of that steady screw was bringing her nearer to the country where her young husband was, according to his mood, going to win the v.c., trace the treasure stolen from a begum, or become military member on the viceroy's council? poor old dicky, she thought, perhaps it was as well he did not live to see himself a major, old and embittered, with all those hopes behind him. there were no tears in her eyes when she thought of fulton. the good old days, the officers' ball at lympton when she danced with him half the night, the rutty lane where they met to sit on a bank of damp moss smelling of earth and crushed leaves, and the crumbling little church where she became fulton's wife, all that was far away. how dulled it all was too by those three years during which, in the hot moist air of the plains, she had seen him degenerate, his skin lose it's freshness, his eyelids pucker and gather pouches, his tongue grow ever more bitter as he attempted to still with whisky the drunkard's chronic thirst. she could not even shudder at the thought of all it had meant for her, at the horror of seeing him become every day more stupefied, at the savage outbursts of the later days, at the last scenes, crude and physically foul. three years had taught her brain dullness to such scenes as those. the tragedy of fulton was a common enough thing. heat, idleness, temporary affluence, all those things that do not let a man see that life is blessed only by the works that enable him to forget it, had played havoc with him. he had followed up his initial error of coming into the world at all by marrying a woman who neither cajoled or coerced him. with the best of intentions she had bored him to extinction. his interest in things became slender; he drank himself to death, and not even the ghost of his self lived to grieve by his bedside. in spite of everything it had not been a bad life in its way. victoria had been the belle, in spite of mrs major dartle and her peroxidised tresses. and there had been polo (dicky always would have three ponies and refused three hundred guineas for tagrag), and regimental dances and gymkhanas and what not. under the sleepy sun these three years had passed, not like a flash of lightning, but slowly, dreamily, in the unending routine of marches, inspections, migrations to and from the hills. the end had come quickly. one day they carried dick fulton all the way from the mess and laid him under his own verandah. the fourth day he died of cirrhosis of the liver. even mrs major dartle who formally called and lit up the darkened room with the meretricious glow of her curls hinted that it was a happy release. the station in general had no doubt as to the person for whom release had come. as victoria lay in the coffin-like berth she vainly tried to analyse her feeling for fulton. the three years had drawn over her past something like a veil behind which she could see the dim shapes of her impressions dancing like ghostly marionettes. she knew that she had loved him with the discreet passion of an englishwoman. he had burst in upon her ravished soul like the materialised dream of a schoolgirl; he had been adorably careless, adorably rakish. for a whole year all his foibles had been charms in so far as they made the god more human, nearer to her. then, one night, he had returned home so drunk as to fall prostrate on the tiles of the verandah and sleep there until next morning. she had not dared to call the ayah or the butler and, as she could not rouse or lift him, she had left him lying there under some rugs and mosquito netting. during the rest of that revolutionary night she had not slept, nor had she found the relief of tears that is given most women. hot waves of indignation flowed over her. she wanted to get up, to stamp with rage, to kick the disgraceful thing on the tiles. she held herself down, however, or perhaps the tradition of the english counties whispered to her that anything was preferable to scandal, that crises must be noiseless. when dawn came and she at last managed to arouse fulton by flooding his head with the contents of the water jug, the hot fit was gone. she felt cold, too aloof, too far away from him to hate him, too petrified to reproach him. fulton took no notice of the incident. he was still young and vigorous enough to shake off within a few hours the effects of the drink. besides he seldom mentioned things that affected their relations; in the keep of his heart he hid the resentment of a culprit against the one who has caught him in the act. he confined his conversation to daily happenings; in moments of expansion he talked of the future. they did not, however, draw nearer one another; thus the evolution of their marriage tended inevitably to draw them apart. victoria was no longer angry, but she was frightened because she had been frightened and she hated the source of her fear. fulton, thick skinned as he was, felt their estrangement keenly. he grew to hate his wife; it almost made him wish to hurt her again. so he absented himself more often, drank more, then died. his wife was free. so this was freedom. freedom, a word to conjure with, thought victoria, when one is enslaved and meaning very little when one is free. she was able to do what she liked and wished to do nothing. of course things would smooth themselves out: they always did, even though the smoothing process might be lengthy. they must do so, but how? there were friends of course, and ted, and thirty pounds of consols unless they'd gone down again, as safe investments are wont to do. she would have to do some work. rather funny, but how jolly to draw your first month's or week's salary; everybody said it was a proud moment. of course it would have to be earned, but that did not matter: everybody had to earn what they got, she supposed, and they ought to enjoy doing it. old flynn, the d.c., used to say that work was a remunerative occupation you didn't like, but then he had been twenty years in india. molly turned uneasily in her bunk and settled down again. victoria's train of thought was broken and she could not detach her attention from the very gentle snore that came from the lower berth, a snore gentle but so insidious that it seemed to dominate the steady beat of the screw. through the porthole, over which now there raced some flecks of spray, she could see nothing but the blackness of the sky, a blackness which at times turned to grey whenever the still inkier sea appeared. the cabin seemed black and empty, lit up faintly by a white skirt flung on a chair. slowly victoria sank into sleep, conscious of a half dream of england where so many unknowable things must happen. chapter ii 'no, molly, i don't think it's very nice of you,' said victoria, 'we've been out four days and i've done nothing but mope and mope; it's all very well my being a widow and all that: i'm not suggesting you and i should play hop scotch on deck with the master gunner, but for four days i've been reading a three months old _harper's_ and the memoirs of mademoiselle de i don't know what, and . . .' 'but what have i done?' cried molly. 'i'm bored,' replied victoria, with admirable detachment, 'and what's more, i don't intend to go on being bored for another fortnight; i'm going on deck to find somebody to amuse me.' 'you can't do that,' said molly, 'they're washing it.' 'very well, then, i'll go and watch and sing songs to the men.' victoria glared at her unoffending companion, her lips tightening and her jaw growing ominously squarer. 'but my dear girl,' said molly, 'i'm awfully sorry. i didn't know you cared; come and have a game of quoits with me and old cairns. there's a place behind the companion which i should say nobody ever does wash.' victoria was on the point of answering that she hated quoits as she never scored and they were generally dirty, but the prospect of returning to the ancient _harper's_ was not alluring, so she followed molly to the hatchway and climbed up to the upper deck still shining moist and white. apparently they would not have to play behind the companion. four men were leaning against the bulwarks, looking out at nothing as people do on board ship. victoria just had time to notice a very broad flannel-clad back surmounted by a thick neck, while molly went up to the last man and unceremoniously prodded him in the ribs. 'wake up, bobby,' she said, 'i'm waiting.' the men all wheeled round suddenly. the broad man stepped forward quickly and shook hands with molly. then he took a critical look at victoria. the three young men struggled for an absurd little bag which molly always dropped at the right moment. 'how do you do, mrs fulton,' said the broad man stretching out his hand. victoria took it hesitatingly. 'don't you remember me?' he said. 'my name's cairns. major cairns. you know. travancores. met you at his excellency's hop.' of course she remembered him. he was so typical. anybody could have told his profession and his rank at sight. he had a broad humorous face, tanned over freckled pink. since he left wellington he had grown a little in every direction and had become a large middle aged boy. victoria took him in at one look. a square face such as that of cairns, distinctly chubby, framing grey blue eyes, was as easily recalled as forgotten. she took in his forehead, high and likely to become higher as his hair receded; his straight aggressive nose; his little rough moustache looking like nothing so much as a ragged strip off an irish terrier's back. while victoria was wondering what to say, molly, determined to show her that she was not going to leave her out, had thrust her three henchmen forward. 'this is bobby,' she remarked. bobby was a tall young man with a round head, bright brown eyes full of cheerfulness and hot temper. 'and captain alastair . . . and mr parker.' alastair smiled. smiles were his method of expression. mr parker bowed rather low and said nothing. he had at once conceived for victoria the mixture of admiration and dislike that a man feels towards a woman who would not marry him if she knew where he had been to school. 'i hope,' said mr parker slowly, 'that your. . . .' but he broke off suddenly, realising the mourning and feeling the ground to be unsafe. 'mr parker, i've been looking for you all the morning,' interjected molly, with intuition. 'you've promised to teach me to judge my distance,' and she cleverly pushed bobby between mr parker and victoria. 'come along, and you bobby, you can pick the rings up.' 'right o,' said bobby readily. she turned towards the stern followed by the obedient bobby and mr parker. captain alastair smiled vacuously, made as if to follow the trio, realising that it was a false start, swerved back and finally covering his confusion by sliding a few yards onwards to tell mrs colonel lanning that it was blowing up for a squall. victoria had watched the little incident with amused detachment. 'who is mr parker?' she enquired. 'met him yesterday for the first time,' said cairns, 'and really i can't say i want to know. might be awkward. must be in the stores or something. looks to me like a cross between a mute and a parson. bit of a worm, anyhow.' 'oh, he didn't hurt my feelings,' remarked victoria; 'but some men never know what women have got on.' cairns looked her over approvingly. shoddy-looking mourning. durzee made of course. but, lord, what hands and eyes. 'i daresay not,' he said drily. 'i wish he'd keep away though. let's walk up.' he took a stride or two away from alastair. victoria followed him. she was rather taken with his rough simplicity, the comfort of his apparent obtuseness. so like an uncle, she thought. 'well, mrs fulton,' said cairns, 'i suppose you're glad to be here, as usual.' 'as usual?' 'yes, as usual; people are always glad to be on board. if they're going home, they're going home and if they're going out they're thinking that it's going to be full pay instead of half.' 'it hadn't struck me like that,' said victoria with a smile, 'though i suppose i am glad to go home.' 'funny,' said the major, 'i never found a country like india to make people want to come to it and to make them want to get out of it when they were there. we had a sub once. you should have heard him on the dead cities. somewhere south east of hyderabad, he said. and native jewellery, and fakirism, and all that. he's got a liver now and the last i heard of him was that he put his shoulder out at polo.' victoria looked out over the immense oily greenness of the water. far away on the skyline a twirling wreath of smoke showed that some tramp steamer was passing them unseen. the world was between them; they were crawling on one side of the ball and the tramp on the other, like flies on an orange. was that tramp, bombay bound, carrying more than a cargo of rolling stock? perhaps the mate had forgotten his b.s.a. fittings and was brooding, he too, over the dead cities, somewhere south-east of hyderabad. 'no,' repeated victoria slowly, 'it hadn't struck me like that.' cairns looked at her curiously. he had heard of fulton and knew of the manner of his death. he could not help thinking that she did not seem to show many signs of a recent bereavement, but then she was well rid of fulton. of course there were other things too. going back as the widow of an indian officer was all very well if you could afford the luxury, but if you couldn't, well it couldn't be much catch. so, being thirty eight or so, he prudently directed the conversation towards the customary subjects discussed on board a trooper: the abominable accommodation and the appalling incompetency of the government with regard to the catering. victoria listened to him placidly. his ancient tittle-tattle had been made familiar to her by three years' association with his fellows, and she had learned that she need not say much, as his one wish was naturally to revile the authorities and all their work. but one item interested her. 'after all,' he said, 'i don't see why i should talk. i've had enough of it. i'm sending in my papers as soon as i've settled a small job at perim. i'll get back to aden and shake all that beastly asiatic dust off my shoes.' 'surely,' said victoria, 'you're not going to leave the service?' her intonation implied that she was urging him not to commit suicide. some women must pass twice under the yoke. 'fed up. simply fed up with it. suppose i do waste another twenty years in india or singapore or hong kong, how much forrarder am i? they'll retire me as a colonel or courtesy general and dump me into an england which doesn't care a hang about me with the remains of malaria, no digestion and no temper. i'll then while away my time watching the busses pass by from one of the windows of the rag and give my daily opinion of the doings of simla and the national congress to men who will only listen to me so long as i stand them a whisky and soda.' 'it isn't alluring,' said victoria, 'but it may not be as bad as that. you can do marvels in india. my husband used to say that a man could hope for anything there.' cairns suppressed the obvious retort that fulton's ideals did not seem to have materialised. 'no,' he said, 'i'm not ambitious. india's steam rollered all that. when i've done with my job at perim, which won't be much more than a couple of months, i'm going home. don't know that i'll do anything in particular. farm a bit, perhaps, or have some chambers somewhere near st james' and dabble in balloons or motors. some shooting too. all that sort of thing.' 'perhaps you are right,' said victoria after a pause. 'i suppose it's as well to do what one likes. shall we join the others?' chapter iii life on a trooper is not eventful. victoria was not so deeply absorbed in her mourning or in the pallid literature borrowed from molly as not to notice it. though she was not what is termed serious, the perpetual quoits on the upper deck in company with alastair and his conversation limited by smiles, and with mr parker and his conversation limited by uneasiness palled about the second game. bobby too was a cypher. it was his fate to be known as 'bobby,' a quantity of no importance. he belonged to the modern school of squires of dames, ever ready to fetch a handkerchief, to fish when he inwardly wanted to sleep in a deck chair or to talk when he had a headache. such men have their value as tame cats and victoria did not avoid his cheery neighbourhood. but he was summed up in the small fact which she recalled with gentle amusement a long time after: she had never known his name. for her, as for the ship's company, he was 'bobby,' merely bobby. the female section too could detain none but cats and hens, as victoria put it. she had moved too long like a tiny satellite in the orbit of mrs colonel so-and-so to return to the little group which slumbered all day by the funnel dreaming aloud the petty happenings of bombay. the heavy rains at chandraga, the simply awful things that had been said about an a.d.c. and mrs bryan, and the scandalous way in which a babu had been made a judge, all this filled her with an extraordinary weariness. she felt, in the presence of these remains of her daily life, as she would when confronted for the third time with the cold leg of mutton. true there was cairns, a man right enough and jovial in spite of his cynical assumption that nothing was worth anything. he could produce passing fair aphorisms, throw doubts on the value of success and happiness. there was nothing, however, to hold on to. victoria had not found in him a teacher or a helper. he was merely destructive of thought and epicurean in taste. convinced that wine, woman and song were quite valueless things, he nevertheless knew the best rüdesheimer and had an eye for the droop of victoria's shoulders. cairns obviously liked victoria. he did not shun his fellow passengers, for he considered that the dullest people are the most interesting, yet she could not help noticing from time to time that his eyes followed her round. he was a good big man and she knew that his thick hand, a little swollen and sunburnt, would be a good thing to touch. but there was in him none of that subtle magnetism that grasps and holds. he was coarse, perhaps a little vulgar at heart. thus victoria had roamed aimlessly over the ship, visiting even the bows where, everlastingly, a lascar seemed to brood in fixed attitudes as a budh dreaming of nirvana. she often wandered in the troop-deck filled with the womankind and children of the non-coms. without disliking children she could find no attraction in these poor little faded things born to be scorched by the indian sun. the women too, mostly yellow and faded, always recalled to her, so languid and tired were they, commonplace flowers, marigolds, drooping on their stems. besides, the society of the upper deck found a replica on the troop deck, where it was occasionally a little shriller. there too, she could catch snatches which told of the heavy rains of chandraga, the goings on of lance corporal maccaskie's wife and the disgrace of giving babu clerks more than fifty rupees a month. perpetually the indian ocean shimmered by, calm as the opaque eye of a shark, breaking at times into immense rollers that swelled hardly more than a woman's breast. and the days passed on. they were nearing aden, though nothing on the mauve horizon told of the outpost where the filth of the east begins to overwhelm the ugliness of the west. victoria and cairns were leaning on the starboard bulwark. she was looking vacuously into the greying sky, conscious that cairns was watching her. she felt with extraordinary clearness that he was gazing as if spell-bound at the soft and regular rise and fall of her skin towards the coarse black openwork of her bodice. far away in the twilight was something long and black, hardly more than a line vanishing towards the north. 'araby,' said cairns. victoria looked more intently. far away, half veiled by the mists of night, unlit by the evening star, lay the coast. araby, the land of manna and milk--of black-eyed women--of horses that champ strange bits. here and there a blackened rock sprang up from the waste of sand and scrub. its utter desolation awakened a sympathetic chord. it was lonely, as she was lonely. as the night swiftly rushed into the heavens, she let her arm rest against that of cairns. then his hand closed over hers. it was warm and hard; something like a pale light of companionship struggled through the solitude of her soul. they stood cold and silent while the night swallowed up the coast and all save here and there the foam tip of a wave. the man had put his arm round her and pressed her to him. she did not resist. the soft wind playing in her hair carried a straying lock into his eyes, half blinding him and making him catch his breath, so redolent was it, not with the scent of flowers, but of life, vigorous and rich in its thousand saps. he drew her closer to him and pressed his lips on her neck. victoria did not resist. from the forepeak swathed in darkness, came the faint unearthly echoes of the stokers' song. there were no fourths; the dominant and the subdominant were absent. strangely attuned to the western ear, the sounds sometimes boomed, sometimes fell to a whisper. the chant rose like incense into the heavens, celebrating durga, protector of the motherland, lakshmi, bowered in the flower that in the water grows. cairns had drawn victoria close against him. he was stirred and shaken as never before. all conspired against him, the night, the fancied scents of araby, the unresisting woman in his arms who yielded him her lips with the passivity of weariness. they did not think as they kissed, whether laying the foundation of regret or snatching from the fleeting hour a moment of thoughtless joy. again a brass drum boomed out beyond them, softly as if touched by velvet hands. it carried the buzzing of bees, the calls of corncrakes, in every tone the rich scents of the jungle, where undergrowth rots in black water--of perfumes that burn before the gods. then the night wind arose and swept away the crooning voices. chapter iv victoria stepped out on to the platform with a heart that bounded and yet shrank. not even the first faint coming of the coastline had given her the almost physical shock that she experienced on this bare platform. waterloo station lay around her in a pall of faint yellow mist that gripped and wrenched at her throat. through the fog a thousand ungainly shapes of stairs and signals thrust themselves, some crude in their near blackness, others fainter in the distance. it might have been a dream scene but for the uproar that rose around her from the rumble of london, the voices of a great crowd. yet all this violence of life, the darkness, the surge of men and women, all this told her that she was once more in the midst of things. she found her belongings mechanically, fumblingly. she did not realise until then the bitterness that drove its iron into her soul. already, when the troopship had entered the channel she had felt a cruel pang when she realised that she must expect nothing and that nobody would greet her. she had fled from the circle near the funnel when the talk began to turn round london and waiting sisters and fathers, round the lord mayor's show, the play, the old fashioned christmas. now, as she struggled through the crowd that cried out and laughed excitedly and kissed, she knew her isolation was complete. there was nobody to meet her. the fog made her eyes smart, so they filled readily with tears. as she sat in the cab, however, and there flashed by her like beacons the lights of the stalls in the waterloo road, the black and greasy pavement sown with orange peel, she felt her heart beating furiously with the excitement of home coming. she passed the thames flowing silently, swathed in its shroud of mist. then the blackness of st james's park through which her cab crawled timidly as if it feared things that might lurk unknown in the fogbound thickets. it was still in a state of feverish dreaming that victoria entered her room at curran's private hotel, otherwise known by a humble number in seymour street. 'curran's' is much in favour among anglo-indians, as it is both central and cheap. it has everything that distinguishes the english hotel which has grown from a boarding-house into a superior establishment where you may stay at so much a day. the successful owner had bought up one after the other three contiguous houses and had connected them by means of a conservatory where there lived, among much pampas grass, small ferns in pots shrouded in pea-green paper and sickly plants to which no name could be attached as they mostly suggested stewed lettuce. it was impossible to walk in a straight line from one end of the coalition of buildings to the other without climbing and descending steps every one of which proclaimed the fact that the leases of the houses would soon fall in. from the three kitchens ascended three smells of mutton. the three halls were strewn with bicycles, gun cases in their last phase, sticks decrepit or dandified. the three hat racks, all early victorian in their lines, bore a motley cargo. dusty bowlers hustled it with heather coloured caps and top hats; one even bore a pith helmet and a clerical atrocity. queer as curran's is, it is comfortable enough. victoria looked round her room, tiny in length and breadth, high however with all the dignity that befits an odd corner left over by the victorian builder. it was distinguished by its simplicity, for the walls bore nothing whatever beyond a restrained papering of brownish roses. a small black and gold bed, a wardrobe with a white handle, a washing stand with a marble top took up all the space left by the large tin trunk which contained most of victoria's worldly goods. so this, thought victoria, is the beginning. she pulled aside the curtain. before her lay seymour street, where alone an eye of light shone faintly from the nearest lamp post. through the fog came the warning noise of a lorry picking its way. it was cold, cold, all this, and lonely like an island. her meditations were disturbed by the maid who brought her hot water. 'my name is carlotta,' said the girl complacently depositing the can upon the marble topped washstand. 'yes?' said victoria. 'you are a foreigner?' 'yes. i am italian. it is foggy,' replied the girl. victoria sighed. it was kind of the girl to make her feel at home, to smile at her with those flashing teeth so well set in her ugly little brown face. she went to the washstand and cried out in horror at her dirt and fog begrimed face, rimmed at the eyes, furrowed on the left by the course of that tear shed at waterloo. 'tell them downstairs i shan't be ready for half an hour,' she said; 'it'll take me about a week to get quite clean, i should say.' carlotta bared her white teeth again and withdrew gently as a cat, while victoria courageously drenched her face and neck. the scents of england, already conjured up by the fog and the mutton, rose at her still more vividly from the warm water which inevitably exhales the traditional perfume of hot painted can. her dinner was a small affair but delightful. it was good to eat and drink once more things to which she had been accustomed for the first twenty years of her life. her depression had vanished; she was merely hungry, and, like the healthy young animal she was, longing for a rare cut of roast beef, accompanied by the good old english potatoes boiled down to the consistency of flour and the flavour of nothing. her companions were so normal that she could not help wondering, when her first hunger was sated and she was confronted with the apple tart of her fathers, whether she was not in the unchanging old board residence in fulham where her mother had stayed with her whenever she came up to town, excited and conscious of being on the spree. two spinsters of no age discussed the fog. both were immaculate and sat rigidly in correct attitudes facing their plates. both talked quickly and continuously in soft but high tones. they passed one another the salt with the courtesy of abbés taking pinches of snuff. a young man from the midlands explained to the owner of the clerical hat that under certain circumstances his food would cost him more. near by a heavy man solemnly and steadily ate, wiping at times from his beard drops of gravy and of sauce, whilst his faded wife nibbled disconsolately tiny scraps of crust. these she daintily buttered, while her four lanky girls nudged and whispered. victoria did not stay in the conservatory after the important meal. as she passed through it, a mist of weariness gathering before her eyes, she had a vision of half a dozen men sleeping in cane chairs, or studying pink or white evening papers. the young man from the midlands had captured another victim and was once more explaining that under certain circumstances his food would cost him more. victoria seemed to have reached the limits of physical endurance. she fumbled as she divested herself of her clothes; she could not even collect enough energy to wash. all the room seemed filled with haze. her tongue clove to her palate. little tingles in her eyelids crushed them together over her pupils. she stumbled into her bed, mechanically switching off the light by her bedside. in the very act her arm lost its energy and she sank into a dreamless sleep. next morning she breakfasted with good appetite. the fog had almost entirely lifted and sunshine soft as silver was filtering through the windows into the little dining-room. its mahoganous ugliness was almost warmed into charm. the sideboard shone dully through its covering of coarse net. even the stacked cruets remembered the days when they cunningly blazed in a shop window. a pleasurable feeling of excitement ran through victoria's body, for she was going to discover london, to have adventures. as she closed the door behind her with a definite little slam she felt like a buccaneer. buccaneering in the edgware road, even when it is bathed in the morning sun, soon falls flat in november. it came upon victoria rather as a shock that her indian clothing was rather thin. as her flying visits to town had only left in her mind a very hazy picture of regent street it was quite unconsciously that she entered the emporium opposite. a frigid young lady sacrificed for her benefit an abominable vicuna coat which, she said, fitted victoria like a glove. victoria paid the twenty seven and six with an admirable feeling of recklessness and left the shop reflecting that she looked the complete charwoman. she turned into hyde park, where the gentle wind was sorrowfully driving the brown and broken leaves along the rough gravel. the thin tracery of the trees imaged itself on the road like a giant cobweb. victoria looked for a moment towards the south where the massive buildings rise, towards the east where a cathedral thrusts into the sky a tower that suspiciously recalls waterworks. she drank in the cold air with a gusto that can be understood by none save those who have learned to live in the floating moisture of the plains. she felt young and, in the sunshine, with her cheeks gaining colour as the wind whipped them, she looked in her long black coat and broad brimmed straw hat, like a quakeress in love. as she walked down towards the achilles statue the early morning panorama of london unfolded itself before her un-understanding eyes. girls hurried by with their satchels towards the typewriting rooms of the west; they stole a look at victoria's face but quickly turned away from her clothes. now and then spruce young clerks walking to the tube slackened their pace to look twice into her grey eyes; one or two looked back, not so much in the hope of an adventure, for time could not be snatched for venus herself on the way to the office, as to see whether they could carry away with them the flattery of having been noticed. in a sense that first day in london was for victoria a day of revelations. having despatched a telegram to her brother to announce her arrival she felt that the day was hers. ted had not troubled to meet her either at southampton or waterloo: it was not likely that he had followed the sightings of her ship. the next day being a saturday, however, he would probably come up from the bedfordshire school where he proffered latin to an ungrateful generation. victoria's excursions to london had been so few that she had but the faintest idea of where she was to go. knowing, however, that one cannot lose oneself in london, she walked aimlessly towards the east. it was a voyage of discovery. piccadilly, bathed in the pale sun, revealed itself as a land where luxury flows like rivers of milk. victoria, being a true woman, could not pass a shop. thus her progress was slow, so slow that when she found herself between the lions of trafalgar square she began to realise that she wanted her lunch. the problem of food is cruel for all women who desire more than a bun. they risk either inattention or over attention, and if they follow other women, they almost invariably discover the cheap and bad. victoria hesitated for a moment on the steps of an oyster shop, as nervous in the presence of her first plunge into freedom as a novice at the side door of a pawnbroker. a man passed by her into the oyster shop, smoking a pipe. she felt she would never dare to sit in a room where strange men smoked pipes. thus she stood for a moment forlorn on the pavement, until a memory of the only decent grill in town, according to bobby, passed through her mind. a policeman sent her by bus to the new gaiety, patronised by bobby and his cronies. as victoria went down the interminable underground staircase, and especially as she entered the enormous room where paper, carpets, and plate always seem new, her courage almost failed her. indeed she looked round anxiously, half hoping that the anonymous bobby might be revisiting his old haunts. but she was quite alone, and it was only by reminding herself that she must always be alone at meals now that she coerced herself into sitting down. she got through her meal with expedition. she felt frightfully small; the waiters were painfully courteous; a man laid aside his orange coloured newspaper, and embarrassed her with frequent side glances. she braced herself up however. 'i am training,' was her uppermost thought. she then wondered whether she ought to have come to the new gaiety at all. fortunately it was only at the very end of her lunch that victoria realised she was the only woman sitting alone. after this discovery her nerve failed her. she got up hurriedly, and, in her confusion, omitted to tip the waiter. at the desk the last stone was heaped on the cairn of her discomfiture when the cashier politely returned to her a quarter rupee which she had given her thinking it was a sixpence. with a sigh of satisfaction victoria resumed her walk through london. she was a little tired already but she could think of nothing to do, nowhere to go to. she did not want to return to curran's to sit in her box-like room, or to look at the two spinsters availing themselves of their holiday in town to play patience in the conservatory. all the afternoon, therefore, victoria saw the sights. covent garden repelled her by the massiveness of its food suggestion, and especially by the choking dirt of its lanes. after covent garden, savoy court yard and its announcements of intellectual plays by unknown women. then once more, drawn by its spaciousness guessed at through spring gardens, victoria walked into saint james's park. she rested awhile upon a seat, watching the waterfowl strut and plume themselves, the pelicans flounder heavily in the mud. she was tired. the sun was setting early. the magic slowly faded from london; buckingham palace lost the fictitious grace that it has when set in a blue sky. victoria shivered a little. she felt tired. she did not know where to go. she was alone. on the seat nearest to hers two lovers sat together, hand in hand. the man's face was almost hidden by his cap and by the blue puffs of his pipe; the girl's was averted towards the ground where, with the ferule of her umbrella, she lazily drew signs. there was no bitterness in this sight for victoria. her romance had come and gone so long ago that she looked quite casually at these wanderers in arcadia. she only knew that she was alone and cold. victoria got up and walked out of the park. it was darkening, and little by little the lights of london were springing into life. by dint of many questionings she managed to regain oxford street, that spinal column of london without which the stranger would be lost. then her course was easy, and it was with a peculiar feeling of luxuriousness that she resigned herself to the motor bus that jolted and shook her tired body until she reached the arch. more slowly, and with diminished optimism, she found her way up edgware road, where night was now falling. the emporium was dazzling with lights. alone the public house rivalled it and thrust its glare through the settling mist. victoria closed the door of curran's. at once she re-entered its atmosphere; into the warm air rose the three smells of three legs of mutton. chapter v 'mr wren, ma'am.' victoria turned quickly to carlotta. the girl's face was obtrusively demure. some years at curran's had not dulled in her the interest that any woman subtly feels in the meeting of the sexes. 'ask him to come in here, carlotta,' said victoria. 'we shan't be disturbed, shall we?' 'oh no! ma'am,' said carlotta, with increasing demureness. 'there is nobody, nobody. i will show the young gentleman in.' victoria walked to the looking-glass which shyly peeped out from the back of the monumental sideboard. she re-arranged her hair and hurriedly flicked some dust from the corners of her eyes. all this for edward, but she had not seen him for three years. as she turned round she was confronted by her brother who had gently stolen into the dining-room. edward's every movement was unobtrusive. he put one arm round her and kissed her cheek. 'how are you, victoria?' he said, looking her in the eyes. 'oh, i'm alright, ted. i'm so glad to see you.' she was genuinely glad; it was so good to have belongings once again. 'did you have a good passage?' asked edward. 'pretty good until we got to ushant and then it did blow. i was glad to get home.' 'i'm very glad to see you,' said edward, 'very glad.' his eyes fixed on the sideboard as if he were mesmerised by the cruets. victoria looked at him critically. three years had not made on him the smallest impression. he was at twenty-eight what he had been at twenty-five or for the matter of that at eighteen. he was a tall slim figure with narrow pointed shoulders and a slightly bowed back. his face was pale without being unhealthy. there was nothing in his countenance to arouse any particular interest, for he had those average features that commit no man either to coarseness or to intellectuality. he showed no trace of the massiveness of his sister's chin; his mouth too was looser and hung a little open. alone his eyes, richly grey, recalled his relationship. straggly fair hair fell across the left side of his forehead. he peered through silver rimmed spectacles as he nervously worried his watch chain with both hands. every movement exposed the sharpness of his knees through his worn trousers. 'ted,' said victoria, breaking in upon the silence, 'it was kind of you to come up at once.' 'of course i'd come up at once. i couldn't leave you here alone. it must be a big change after the sunshine.' 'yes,' said victoria slowly, 'it is a big change. not only the sunshine. other things, you know.' edward's hands played still more nervously with his watch chain. he had not heard much of the manner of fulton's death. victoria's serious face encouraged him to believe that she might harrow him with details, weep even. he feared any expression of feeling, not because he was hard but because it was so difficult to know what to say. he was neither hard nor soft; he was a schoolmaster and could deal readily enough with the pangs of andromeda but what should he say to a live woman, his sister too? 'i understand--i--you see, it's quite awful about dick--' he stopped, lost, groping for the proper sentiment. 'ted,' said victoria, 'don't condole with me. i don't want to be unkind--if you knew everything--but there, i'd rather not tell you; poor dicky 's dead and i suppose it's wrong, but i can't be sorry.' edward looked at her with some disapproval. the marriage had not been a success, he knew that much, but she ought not to speak like that. he felt he ought to reprove her, but the difficulty of finding words stopped him. 'have you made any plans?' he asked in his embarrassment, thus blundering into the subject he had intended to lead up to with infinite tact. 'plans?' said victoria. 'well, not exactly. of course i shall have to work; i thought you might help me perhaps.' edward looked at her again uneasily. she had sat down in an armchair by the side of the fire with her back to the light. in the penumbra her eyes came out like dark pools. a curl rippled over one of her ears. she looked so self-possessed that his embarrassment increased. 'will you have to work?' he asked. the idea of his sister working filled him with vague annoyance. 'i don't quite see how i can help it,' said victoria smiling. 'you see, i've got nothing, absolutely nothing. when i've spent the thirty pounds or so i've got, i must either earn my own living or go into the workhouse.' she spoke lightly, but she was conscious of a peculiar sinking. 'i thought you might come back with me,' said edward, '. . . and stay with me a little . . . and look round.' 'ted, it's awfully kind of you, but i'm not going to let you saddle yourself with me. i can't be your housekeeper; oh! it would never do. and don't you think i am more likely to get something to do here than down in bedfordshire?' 'i do want you to come back with me,' said edward hesitatingly. 'i don't think you ought to be alone here. and perhaps i could find you something in a family at cray or thereabouts. i could ask the vicar.' victoria shuddered. it had never struck her that employment might be difficult to find or uncongenial when one found it. the words 'vicar' and 'cray' suggested something like domestic service without its rights, gentility without its privileges. 'ted,' she said gravely, 'you're awfully good to me, but i'd rather stay here. i'm sure i could find something to do.' edward's thoughts naturally came back to his own profession. 'i'll ask the head,' he said with the first flash of animation he had shown since he entered the room. to ask the head was to go to the source of all knowledge. 'perhaps he knows a school. of course your french is pretty good, isn't it?' 'ted, ted, you do forget things,' said victoria, laughing. 'don't you remember the mater insisting on my taking german because so few girls did? why, it was the only original thing she ever did in her life, poor dear!' 'but nobody wants german, for girls that is,' replied edward miserably. 'very well then,' said victoria, 'i won't teach; that's all. i must do something else.' edward walked up and down nervously, pushing back his thin fair hair with one hand, and with the other nervously tugging at his watch chain. 'don't worry yourself, ted,' said victoria. 'something will turn up. besides there's no hurry. why, i can live two or three months on my money, can't i?' 'i suppose you can,' said edward gloomily, 'but what will you do afterwards?' 'earn some more,' said victoria. 'now ted, you haven't seen me for three years. don't let us worry. think things over when you get back to cray and write to me. you won't go back until to-morrow, will you?' 'i'm sorry,' said edward, 'but i didn't think you'd be back this week. i shall be in charge to-morrow. why don't you come down?' 'ted, ted, how can you suggest that i should spend my poor little fortune in railway fares! well, if you can't stay, you can't. but i'll tell you what you can do. i can't go on paying two and a half guineas a week here; i must get some rooms. you lived here when you taught at that school in the city, didn't you? well then, you must know all about it: we'll go house-hunting.' edward looked at her dubiously. he disliked the idea of victoria in rooms almost as much as victoria at curran's. it offended some vague notions of propriety. however her suggestion would give him time to think. perhaps she was right. 'of course, i'll be glad to help,' he said, 'i don't know much about it; i used to live in gower street.' a faint flush of reminiscent excitement rose to his cheeks. gower street, by the side of cray and lympton, had been almost adventurous. 'very well then,' said victoria, 'we shall go to gower street first. just wait till i put on my hat.' she ran upstairs, not exactly light of heart, but pleased with the idea of house-hunting. there's romance in all seeking, even if the treasure is to be found in a bloomsbury lodging-house. the ride on the top of the motor bus was exhilarating. the pale sun of november was lighting up the streets with the almost mystic whiteness of the footlights. edward said nothing, for his memories of london were stale and he did not feel secure enough to point out the church of the deaf and dumb, nor had he ever known his london well enough to be able to pronounce judgment on the shops. besides, victoria was too much absorbed in gazing at london rolling and swirling beneath her, belching out its crowds of workers and pleasure seekers from every tube and main street. at every shop the omnibus seemed surrounded by a swarm of angry bees. victoria watched them struggle with spirit still unspoiled, wondering at the determination on the faces of the men, at the bitterness painted on the sharp features of the women as they savagely thrust one another aside and, dishevelled and dusty, successively conquered their seats. all this, the constant surge of horse and mechanical conveyances, the shrill cries of the newsboys flashing pink papers like _chulos_ at an angry bull, the roar of the town, made victoria understand the city. something like fear of this strong restless people crept into her as she began to have a dim perception that she too would have to fight. she was young, however, and the feeling was not unpleasant. her nerves tingled a little as she thought of the struggle to come and the inevitable victory at the end. victoria's spirits had not subsided even when she entered gower street. its immensity, its interminable length frightened her a little. the contrast between it, so quiet, dignified and dull, and the inferno she had just left behind her impressed her with a sense of security. its houses, however, seemed so high and dirty that she wondered, looking at its thousand windows, whether human beings could be cooped up thus and yet retain their humanity. here edward was a little more in his element. with a degree of animation he pointed to the staid beauty of bedford square. he demanded admiration like a native guiding a stranger in his own town. victoria watched him curiously. he was a good fellow but it was odd to hear him raise his voice and to see him point with his stick. he had always been quiet, so she had not expected him to show as much interest as he did in his old surroundings. 'i suppose you had a good time when you were here?' she said. 'nothing special. i was too busy at the school,' he replied. 'but, of course, you know, one does things in london. it's not very lively at cray.' 'wouldn't you like to leave cray,' she said, 'and come back?' edward paused nervously. london frightened him a little and the idea of leaving cray suddenly thrust upon him froze him to the bone. it was not cray he loved, but cray meant a life passing gently away by the side of a few beloved books. though he had never realised that hedgerows flower in the spring and that trees redden to gold and copper in the autumn, the country had taken upon him so great a hold that even the thought of leaving it was pain. 'oh! no,' he said hurriedly. 'i couldn't leave cray. i couldn't live here, it's too noisy. there are my old rooms, there, the house with the torch extinguishers.' victoria looked at him again. what curious tricks does nature play and how strangely she pleases to distort her own work! then she looked at the house with the extinguishers. clearly it would be impossible, but for those aristocratic remains, to distinguish it from among half a dozen of its fellows. it was a house, that was all. it was faced in dirty brick, parted at every floor by stone work. a portico, rising over six stone steps, protected a door painted brown and bearing a brass knocker. it had windows, an area, bells. it was impossible to find in it an individual detail to remember. but edward was talking almost excitedly for him. 'see there,' he said, 'those are my old rooms,' pointing indefinitely at the frontage. 'they were quite decent, you know. wonder whether they're let. you could have them.' he looked almost sentimentally at the home of the wrens. 'why not ring and ask?' said victoria, whose resourcefulness equalled that of mr dick. edward took another loving look at the familiar window, strode up the steps, followed by victoria. there were several bells. 'curious,' he said, 'she must have let it out in floors; wakefield and grindlay, don't know them. seymour? it's mrs brumfit's house: oh! here it is.' he pressed a bell marked 'house.' victoria heard with a curious sensation of unexpectedness the sudden shrill sound of the electric bell. after an interminable interval, during which edward's hands nervously played, the door opened. a young girl stood on the threshold. she wore a red cloth blouse, a black skirt, and an unspeakably dirty apron half loose round her waist. her hair was tightly done up in curlers in expectation of sunday. 'mrs brumfit,' said edward, 'is she in?' ''oo?' said the girl. 'mrs brumfit, the landlady,' said edward. 'don't know 'er, try next 'ouse.' the girl tried to shut the door. 'you don't understand,' cried edward, stopping the door with his hand. 'i used to live here.' 'well, wot do yer want?' replied the girl. 'can't 'elp that, can i? there ain't no mrs brumfit 'ere. only them there.' she pointed at the bells. 'nobody but them and mother. she's the 'ousekeeper. if yer mean the old woman as was 'ere when they turned the 'ouse into flats, she's dead.' edward stepped back. the girl shut the door with a slam. he stood as if petrified. victoria looked at him with amusement in her eyes, listening to the echoes of the girl's voice singing more and more faintly some catchy tune as she descended into the basement. 'dead,' said edward, 'can it be possible--?' he looked like a plant torn up by the roots. he had jumped on the old ground and it had given way. 'my dear ted,' said victoria gently, 'things change, you see.' slowly they went down the steps of the house. victoria did not speak, for a strange mixture of pity and disdain was in her. she quite understood that a tie had been severed and that the death of his old landlady meant for edward that the past which he had vaguely loved had died with her. he was one of those amorphous creatures whose life is so interwoven with that of their fellows that any death throws it into disarray. she let him brood over his lost memories until they reached bedford square. 'but ted,' she broke in, 'where am i to go?' edward looked at her as if dazed. clearly he had not foreseen that mrs brumfit was not an institution. 'go?' he said, 'i don't know.' 'don't you know any other lodgings?' asked victoria. 'gower street seems full of them.' 'oh! no,' said edward quickly, 'we don't know what sort of places they are. you couldn't go there.' 'but where am i to go then?' victoria persisted. edward was silent. 'it seems to me,' his sister went on, 'that i shall have to risk it. after all, they won't murder me and they can't rob me of much.' 'please don't talk like that,' said edward stiffly. he did not like this association of ideas. 'well i must find some lodgings,' said victoria, a little irritably. 'in that case i may as well look round near curran's. i don't like this street much.' in default of an alternative, edward looked sulky. victoria felt remorseful; she knew that gower street must have become for her brother the traveller's mecca and that he was vaguely afraid of the west end. 'never mind, dear,' she went on more gently, 'don't worry about lodgings any more. do you know what you're going to do? you're going to take me to tea in some nice place and then i'll go with you to st pancras; that's the station you said you were going back by, isn't it? and you'll put me in a bus and i'll go home. now, come along, it's past five and i'm dying for some tea.' as victoria stood, an hour later, just outside the station in which expires the spirit of constantine the great, she could not help feeling relieved. as she stood there, so self-possessed, seeing so clearly the busy world, she wondered why she had been given a broken reed to lean upon. where had her brother left his virility? had it been sapped by years of self-restraint? had the formidable code of pretence, the daily affectation of dignity, the perpetual giving of good examples, reduced him to this shred of humanity, so timid, so resourceless? as she sped home in the tube into which she had been directed by a policeman, she vainly turned over the problem. fortunately victoria was young. as she laid her head on the pillow, conscious of the coming of sunday, when nothing could be done, visions of things she could do obsessed her. there were lodgings to find, nice, clean, cheap lodgings, with a dear old landlady and trees outside the window, in a pretty old-fashioned house, very very quiet and quite near all the tubes. she nursed the ideal for a time. then she thought of careers. she would read all the advertisements and pick out the nicest work. perhaps she could be a housekeeper. or a secretary. on reflection, a secretary would be better. it might be so interesting. fancy being secretary to a member of parliament. or to a famous author. she too might write. her dreams were pleasant. chapter vi a week had elapsed and victoria was beginning to feel the strain. she looked out from the window into the little street where fine rain fell gently as if it had decided to do so for ever. it was deserted, save by a cat who shivered and crouched under the archway of the mews. sometimes a horse stirred. through the open window the hot alcaline smell of the animals filtered slowly. victoria had found her lodgings. they were not quite the ideal, but she had not seen the ideal and this little den in portsea place was not without its charms. her room, for the 'rooms' had turned from the plural into the singular, was comfortable enough. it occupied the front of the second floor in a small house. it had two windows, from which, by craning out a little, the trees of connaught square could be seen standing out like black skeletons against a white house. opposite was the archway of the mews out of which came most of the traffic of the street. under it too was the mart where the landladies who have invaded the little street exchange notes on their lodgers and boast of their ailments. victoria inspected her domain. she had a very big bed, a little inclined to creak; she had a table on a pedestal split so cunningly at the base that she was always table-conscious when she sat by it; she had a mahogany wash-stand, also on the triangular pedestal loved by the pre-morrisites, enriched by a white marble top and splasher. a large armchair, smooth and rather treacherous, a small mahogany chest of drawers, every drawer of which took a minute to pull out, some chairs of no importance, completed her furniture. the carpet had been of all colours and was now of none. the tablecloth was blue serge and would have been serviceable if it had not contracted the habit of sliding off the mahogany table whenever it was touched. ugly as it was in every detail, victoria could not help thinking the room comfortable; its light paper saved it and it was not over-loaded with pictures. it had escaped with one text and the 'sailor's homecoming.' besides it was restrained in colour and solid: it was comfortable like roast beef and boiled potatoes. victoria looked at all these things, at her few scattered books, the picture of dick and of a group of school friends, at some of her boots piled in a corner. then she listened and heard nothing. once more she was struck by the emptiness, the darkness around her. she was alone. she had been alone a whole week, hardly knowing what to do. the excitement of choosing lodgings over, she had found time hang heavy on her hands. she had interminably walked in london, gazed at shop windows, read hundreds of imbecile picture postcards on bookstalls, gone continually to many places in omnibuses. she had stumbled upon south kensington and wandered in its catacombs of stone and brick. she had discovered hampstead, lost herself horribly near albany street; she had even unexpectedly landed in the city where rushing mobs had hustled and battered her. faithful to her resolve she had sedulously read the morning papers and applied for several posts as housekeeper without receiving any answers. she had realised that answering advertisements must be an art and had become quite conscious that employment was not so easy to find as she thought. nobody seemed to want secretaries, except the limited companies, about which she was not quite clear. as these mostly required the investment of a hundred pounds or more she had not followed them up. she paced up and down in her room. the afternoon was wearing. soon the man downstairs would come back and slam the door. a little later the young lady in the city would gently enter the room behind hers and, after washing in an unobtrusive manner, would discreetly leave for an hour. meanwhile nothing broke the silence, except the postman's knock coming nearer and nearer along portsea place. it fell unheeded even on her own front door, for victoria's ears were already attuned to the sound. it meant nothing. she walked up and down nervously. she looked at herself in the glass. she was pretty she thought, with her creamy skin and thick hair; her eyes too were good; what a pity her chin was so thick. that's why dicky used to call her 'towzer.' poor old dicky! shuffling footsteps rose up the stairs. then a knock. at victoria's invitation, a woman entered. it was mrs bell, the landlady. 'why, ma'am, you're sitting in the dark! let me light the lamp,' cried mrs bell, producing a large wooden box from a capacious front pocket. she lit the lamp and a yellow glow filled the room, except the corners which remained in darkness. 'here's a letter for you, ma'am,' said mrs bell holding it out. as victoria took it, mrs bell beamed on her approvingly. she liked her new lodger. she had already informed the gathering under the archway that she was a real lady. she had a leaning for real ladies, having been a parlourmaid previous to marrying a butler and eking out his income by letting rooms. 'thank you, mrs bell,' said victoria, 'it was kind of you to come up.' 'oh! ma'am, no trouble i can assure you,' said mrs bell, with a mixture of respect and patronage. she wanted to be kind to her lodger, but she found a difficulty in being kind to so real a lady. victoria saw the letter was from edward and opened it hurriedly. mrs bell hesitated, looking with her black dress, clean face and grey hair, the picture of the respectable maid. then she turned and struggled out on her worn shoes, the one blot on her neatness. victoria read the letter, bending perilously over the lamp which smoked like a funnel. the letter was quite short; it ran: 'my dear victoria,--i am sorry i could not write before now, but i wanted to have some news to give you. i am glad to say that i have been able to interest the vicar on your behalf. he informs me that if you will call at once on lady rockham, a queen's gate, south kensington, s.w., she may be in a position to find you a post in a family of standing. he tells me she is most capable and kind. he is writing to her. i shall come to london and see you soon.--yours affectionately, edward.' victoria fingered the letter lovingly. perhaps she was going to have a chance after all. it was good to have something to do. indeed it seemed almost too good to be true; she had vaguely resigned herself to unemployment. of course something would ultimately turn up, but the what and when and how thereof were dangerously dim. she hardly cared to face these ideas; indeed she dismissed them when they occurred to her with a mixture of depression and optimism. now, however, she was buoyant again. the family of standing would probably pay well and demand little. it would mean the theatres, the shops, flowers, the latest novels, no end of nice things. a little work too, of course, driving in the park with a dear dowager with the most lovely white hair. she ate an excellent and comparatively expensive dinner in an oxford street restaurant and went to bed early for the express purpose of making plans until she fell asleep. she was still buoyant in the morning. connaught square looked its best and even south kensington's stony face melted into smiles when it caught sight of her. lady rockham's was a mighty house, the very house for a family of standing. victoria walked up the four steep steps of the house where something of her fate was to be decided. she hesitated for an instant and then, being healthily inclined to take plunges, pulled the bell with a little more vigour than was in her heart. it echoed tremendously. the quietude of queen's gate stretching apparently for miles towards the south, increased the terrifying noise. victoria's anticipations were half pleasureable, half fearsome; she felt on the brink of an adventure and recalled the tremor with which she had entered the new gaiety for the first time. measured steps came nearer and nearer from the inside of the house; a shape silhouetted itself vaguely on the stained glass of the door. she mustered sufficient coolness to tell the butler that she wished to see lady rockham, who was probably expecting her. as the large and solid man preceded her along an interminable hall, she felt rather than saw the thick persian rug stretching along the crude mosaic of the floor, the red paper on the walls almost entirely hidden by exceedingly large and new pictures. over her head a ponderous iron chandelier carrying many electric lamps blotted out most of the staircase. for some minutes she waited in the dining-room into which she had been shown; for the butler was not at all certain, from a look at the visitor's mourning, that she was quite entitled to the boudoir. victoria's square chin and steady eyes saved her, however, from having to accommodate her spine to the exceeding perpendicularity of the high-backed chairs in the hall. the dining-room, ridiculous thought, reminded her of curran's. in every particular it seemed the same. there was the large table with the thick cloth of indefinite design and colour. the sideboard too was there, larger and richer perhaps, of spanish mahogany not an inch of which was left bare of garlands of flowers or archangelic faces. it carried curran's looking-glass; curran's cruets were replaced by a number of cups which proclaimed that charles rockham had once won the junior sculls, and more recently, the spring handicap of the kidderwick golf club. the walls were red as in the hall and profusely decorated with large pictures representing various generations having tea in old english gardens, decorously garbed roman ladies basking by the side of marble basins, and such like subjects. twelve chairs, all high backed and heavily groined, were ranged round the walls, with the exception of a large carving chair, standing at the head of the table, awaiting one who was clearly the head of a household. victoria was looking pensively at the large black marble clock representing the temple in which the lares and penates of south kensington usually dwell, when the door opened and a vigorous rustle entered the room. 'i am very glad to see you, mrs fulton,' remarked the owner of the rustle. 'i have just received a letter from mr meaker, the vicar of cray. a most excellent man. i am sure we can do something for you. something quite nice.' victoria looked at lady rockham with shyness and surprise. never had she seen anything so majestic. lady rockham had but lately attained her ladyhood by marrying a knight bachelor whose name was a household word in the wood-paving world. she felt at peace with the universe. her large silk clad person was redolent with content. she did not vulgarly beam. she merely was. on her capacious bosom large brooches rose and fell rhythmically. her face was round and smooth as her voice. her eyes were almost severely healthy. 'i am sure it is very kind of you,' said victoria. 'i don't know anybody in london, you see.' 'that will not matter; that will not matter at all,' said lady rockham. 'some people prefer those whose connections live in the country, yes, absolutely prefer them. why, friends come to me every day, and they are clamouring for country girls, absolutely clamouring. i do hope you are not too particular. for things are difficult in london. so very difficult.' 'yes, i know,' murmured victoria, thinking of her unanswered applications. 'but i'm not particular at all. if you can find me anything to do, lady rockham, i should be so grateful.' 'of course, of course. now let me see. a young friend of mine has just started a poultry farm in dorset. she is doing very well. oh! very well. of course you want a little capital. but such a very nice occupation for a young woman. the capital is often the difficulty. perhaps you would not be prepared to invest much?' 'no, i'm afraid i couldn't,' faltered victoria, wondering at what figure capital began. 'no, no, quite right,' purred lady rockham, 'i can see you are quite sensible. it is a little risky too. yet my young friend is doing well, very well, indeed. her sister is in johannesburg. she went out as a governess and now she is married to a mine manager. there are so few girls in the country. oh! he is quite a nice man, a little rough, i should say, but quite suitable.' victoria wondered for a moment whether her ladyship was going to suggest sending her out to johannesburg to marry a mine manager, but the presence resumed. 'no doubt you would rather stay in london. things are a little difficult here, but very pleasant, very pleasant indeed.' 'i don't mind things being difficult,' victoria broke in, mustering a little courage. 'i must earn my own living and i don't mind what i do; i'd be a nursery governess, or a housekeeper, or companion. i haven't got any degrees, i couldn't quite be a governess, but i'd try anything.' 'certainly, certainly, i'm sure we will find something very nice for you. i can't think of anybody just now but leave me your address. i'll let you know as soon as i hear of anything.' lady rockham gently crossed her hands over her waistband and benevolently smiled at her protégée. victoria wrote down her address and listened patiently to lady rockham who discoursed at length on the imperfections of the weather, the noisiness of london streets and the prowess of charles rockham on the kidderwick links. she felt conscious of having to return thanks for what she was about to receive. lady rockham's kindness persisted up to the door to which she showed victoria. she dismissed her with the parthian shot that 'they would find something for her, something quite nice.' victoria walked away; cold gusts of wind struck her, chilling her to the bone, catching and furling her skirts about her. she felt at the same time cheered and depressed. the interview had been inconclusive. however, as she walked over the serpentine bridge, under which the wind was angrily ruffling the black water, a great wave of optimism came over her; for it was late, and she remembered that in the edgware road, there was a small italian restaurant where she was about to lunch. it was well for victoria that she was an optimist and a good sleeper, for november had waned into december before anything happened to disturb the tenor of her life. for a whole fortnight she had heard nothing from lady rockham or from edward. she had written to molly but had received no answer. all day long the knocker fell with brutal emphasis upon the doors of portsea place and brought her nothing. she did not think much or hope much. she did nothing and spent little. her only companion was mrs bell, who still hovered round her mysterious lodger, so ladylike and so quiet. she passed hours sometimes at the window watching the stream of life in portsea place. the stream did not flow very swiftly; its principal eddies vanished by midday with the milkman and the butcher. the postman recurred more often but he did not count. now and then the policeman passed and spied suspiciously into the archway where the landladies no longer met. cabs trotted into it now and then to change horses. victoria watched alone. beyond mrs bell, she seemed to know nobody. the young man downstairs continued to be invisible, and contented himself with slamming the door. the young lady in the back room continued to wash discreetly and to snore gently at night. sometimes victoria ventured abroad to be bitten by the blast. sometimes she strayed over the town in the intervals of food. she had to exercise caution in this, for an aspect of the lodging house fire had only lately dawned upon her. if she did not order it at all she was met on the threshold by darkness and cold; if she ordered it for a given time she was so often late that she returned to find it dead or kept up wastefully at the rate of sixpence a scuttle. this trouble was chronic; on bitter days it seemed to dog her footsteps. she had almost grown accustomed to loneliness. alone she watched at her window or paced the streets. she had established a quasi-right to a certain seat at the italian restaurant where the waiters had ceased to speculate as to who she was. the demoralisation of unemployment was upon her. she did not cast up her accounts; she rose late, made no plans. she slept and ate, careless of the morrow. it was in the midst of this slow settling into despond that a short note from lady rockham arrived like a bombshell. it asked her to call on a mrs holt who lived in finchley road. it appeared that mrs holt was in need of a companion as her husband was often away. victoria was shaken out of her torpor. in a trice her optimism crushed out of sight the flat thoughts of aimless days. she feverishly dressed for the occasion. she debated whether she would have time to insert a new white frill into the neck of a black blouse. heedless of expenditure she spent two and eleven pence on new black gloves, and twopence on the services of a shoeblack who whistled cheerful tunes, and smiled on the coppers. victoria sallied out to certain victory. the wind was blowing balmier. a fitful gleam of sunshine lit up and reddened the pile of tangerines in a shop window. chapter vii 'i'm very sorry you can't come,' said mrs holt. 'last sunday, mr baker was so nice. i never heard anything so interesting as his sermon on the personal devil. i was quite frightened. at least i would have been if he had said all that at bethlehem. you know, when we were at rawsley we had such nice lantern lectures. i do miss them.' victoria looked up with a smile at the kindly red face. 'i'm so sorry,' she said, 'i've got such a headache. perhaps it'll pass over if i go for a little walk while you are at church.' she was not unconscious, as she said this, of the subtle flattery that the use of the word 'church' implies when used to people who dare not leave their chapel. 'do, victoria, i'm sure it will do you good,' said mrs holt, kindly. 'if the sun keeps on, we'll go to the zoo this afternoon. i do like to see the children in the monkey house.' 'i'm sure i shall be glad to go,' said victoria quietly. 'it's very kind of you to take me.' 'nonsense, my dear,' replied mrs holt, gently beaming. 'you are like the sunshine, you know. dear me! i don't know what i should have done if i hadn't found you. you can't imagine the woman who was here before you. she was the daughter of a clergyman, and i did get so tired of hearing how they lost their money. but, there, i'm worrying you when you've got a headache. i do wish you'd try dr eberman's pills. all the papers are simply full of advertisements about them. and these german doctors are so clever. oh, i shall be so late.' victoria assured her that she was sure her head would be better by dinner time. mrs holt fussed about the room for a moment, anxiously tested the possible dustiness of a bracket, pulled the curtains and picked up the sunday papers from the floor. she then collected a small canvas bag decorated with a rainbow parrot, a hymn and service book, her spectacle case, several unnecessary articles which happened to be about and left the room with the characteristic rustle which pervades the black silk dresses of well-to-do rawsley dames. victoria sat back in the large leather armchair. her head was not very bad but she felt just enough in her temples a tiny passing twinge to shirk chapel without qualms. she toyed with a broken backed copy of _charlton on book-keeping_ which lay in her lap. it was a curious fate that had landed her into charlton's epoch making work. mrs holt, that prince of good fellows, had a genius for saving pennies and had been trained in the school of a midland household, but the fortunes of her husband had left her feebly struggling in a backwash of pounds. so much had this been the case that mr holt had discovered joyfully that he had at last in his house a woman who could bring herself to passing an account for twenty pounds for stabling. little by little victoria had established her position. she was mrs holt's necessary companion and factotum. she could apparently do anything and do it well; she could even tackle such intricate tasks as checking washing or understanding bradshaw. she was always ready and always bright. she had an unerring eye for a good quality of velvet; she could time the carriage to a nicety for the albert hall concert. mrs holt felt that without this pleasant and competent young woman she would be quite lost. mr holt, too, after inspecting victoria grimly every day for an entire month, had decided that she would do and had lent her the work on book-keeping, hoping that she would be able to keep the house accounts. in three months he had not addressed her twenty times beyond wishing her good morning and good night. he had but reluctantly left rawsley and his beloved cement works to superintend his ever growing london business. he was a little suspicious of victoria's easy manners; suspicious of her intentions, too, as the northerner is wont to be. yet he grudgingly admitted that she was level headed, which was 'more than maria or his fool of a son would ever be.' victoria thought for a moment of holt, the book-keeping, the falling due of insurance premiums; then of mrs holt who had just stepped into her carriage which was slowly proceeding down the drive, crunching into the hard gravel. a gleam of sunshine fitfully lit up the polished panels of the clumsy barouche as it vanished through the gate. this then was her life. it might well have been worse. mr holt sometimes let a rough kindness appear through an exterior as hard as his own cement. mrs holt, stout, comfortable and good-tempered, quite incompetent when it came to controlling a house in the finchley road, was not of the termagant type that victoria had expected when she became a companion. her nature, peaceful as that of a mollusc, was kind and had but one outstanding feature; her passionate devotion to her son jack. victoria thought that she might well be content to pass the remainder of her days among these good folk. from the bottom of her heart mild discontent rose every now and then. it was a little dull. tuesday was like monday and probably like the tuesday after next. the glories of the town, which she had caught sight of during her wanderings, before she floated into the still waters of the finchley road, haunted her at times. the motor buses too, which perpetually carried couples to the theatre, the crowds in regent street making for the tea-shops, while the barouche trotted sedately up the hill, all this life and adventure were closed off. victoria was not unhappy. she drifted in that singular psychological region where the greatest possible pain is not suffering and where the acme of possible pleasure is not joy. she did not realise that this negative condition was almost happiness, and yet did not precisely repine. the romance of her life, born at lympton, now slept under the tamarinds. the stupefaction of the search for work, the hopes and fears of december, all that lay far away in those dark chambers of the brain into which memory cannot force a way but swoons on the threshold. yes, she was happy enough. her eyes, casting through the bay window over the evergreens, trimly stationed and dusty, strayed over the low wall. on the other side of the road stood another house, low and solid as this one, beautiful though ugly in its strength and worth. it is not the house you live in that matters, thought victoria, unconsciously committing plagiarism, but the house opposite. the house she lived in was well enough. its inhabitants were kind, the servants respectful, even the mongrel manchester terrier with the melancholy eyes of some collie ancestor did not gnaw her boots. she let her hands fall into her lap and, for a minute, sat staring into space, seeing with extraordinary lucidity those things to come which a movement dispels and swathes with the dense fog of forgetfulness. with terrible clarity she saw the life of the last three months and the life to come, as it was in the beginning ever to be. the door opened softly. before she had time to turn round two hands were clapped over her eyes. she struggled to free herself, but the hands grew more insistent and two thumbs softly touched her cheeks. 'dimple, dimple,' said a voice, while one of the thumbs gently dwelled near the corner of her mouth. victoria struggled to her feet, a little flushed, a strand of hair flying over her left ear. 'mr jack,' she said rather curtly, 'i don't like that. you know you mustn't do that. it's not fair. i really don't like it.' she was angry; her nostrils opened and shut quickly; she glared at the good looking boy before her. 'naughty temper,' he remarked, quite unruffled. 'you'll take a fit one of these days, vicky, if you don't look out.' 'very likely if you give me starts like that. not that i mind that so much, but really it's not nice of you. you know you wouldn't do that if your mother was looking.' 'course i wouldn't,' said jack, 'the old mater's such a back number, you know.' 'then,' replied victoria with much dignity, 'you ought not to do things when we're alone which you wouldn't do before her.' 'oh lord! morals again,' groaned the youth. 'you are rough on me, vicky.' 'and you mustn't call me vicky,' said victoria. 'i don't say i mind, but it isn't the thing. if anybody heard you i don't know what they'd think.' 'who cares!' said jack in his most dare devil style, putting his hand on the back of hers and stroking it softly. victoria snatched her hand away and went to the window, where she seemed absorbed in the contemplation of the evergreens. jack looked a little nonplussed. he was an attractive youth and looked about twenty. he had the fresh complexion and blue eyes of his father but differed from him by a measure of delicacy. his tall body was a little bent; his face was all pinks and whites set off by the blackness of his straight hair. he well deserved his school nickname of kathleen mavourneen. his long thin hands, which would have been aristocratic but for the slight thickness of the joints, branded him a poet. he was not happy in the cement business. jack stepped up to the window. 'sorry,' he said, as humbly as possible. victoria did not move. 'won't never do it again,' he said, pouting like a scolded child. 'it's no good,' answered victoria, 'i'm not going to make it up.' 'i shall go and drown myself in the regent canal,' said jack dolefully. 'i'd rather you went for a walk along the banks,' said victoria. 'i will if you'll come too,' answered jack. 'no, i'm not going out. i've got a headache. look here, i'll forgive you on condition that you go out now and if you'll do that perhaps you can come with your mother and me to the zoo this afternoon.' 'all right then,' grumbled the culprit, 'you're rather hard on me. always knew you didn't like me. sorry.' victoria looked out again. a minute later jack came out of the house and, pausing before the window, signed to her to lift up the sash. 'what do you want now?' asked victoria, thrusting her head out. 'it's a bargain about the zoo, isn't it?' 'yes, of course it is, silly boy. i've got several children's tickets.' jack made a wry face, but walked away with a queer little feeling of exultation. 'silly boy.' she had called him 'silly boy.' victoria watched him go with some perplexity. the young man was rather a problem. not only did his pretty face and gentle ways appeal to her in themselves, but he had told her something of his thoughts and they did not run on cement. his father had thrust him into his business as men of his type naturally force their sons into their own avocation whatever it be. victoria knew that he was not happy and was sorry for him; how could she help feeling sorry for this lonely youth who had once printed a rondeau in the _westminster gazette_. jack had taken to her at once. all that was delicate and feminine in him called out to her square chin and steady eyes. often she had seen him look hungrily at her strong hands where bone and muscle plainly showed. but, in his wistful way, jack had begun to embarrass her. he was making love to her in a sense, sometimes sportively, sometimes plaintively, and he was difficult to resist. victoria saw quite well that trouble must ensue. she would not allow the boy to fall in love with her when all she could offer was an almost motherly affection. besides, they could not marry; it would be absurd. she was puzzled as to what to do. everything tended to complicate the situation for her. she had once been to the theatre with jack and remembered with anxiety how his arm had rested against hers in the cab and how, when he leaned over towards her to speak, she had felt him slowly inhaling the scents of her hair. she had promised herself that jack should be snubbed. and now he played pranks on her. it must end in their being caught in an ambiguous attitude and then she would be blamed. she might tell mrs holt, but then what would be her position in the household? jack would sulk and mrs holt would watch them suspiciously until the situation became intolerable and she had to leave. leave! no, no, she couldn't do that. with sudden vividness victoria pictured the search for work, the silence of portsea place, the rialto-like archway, mrs bell, and the cold, the loneliness. events must take their course. like the rasp of a corncrake she heard the wheels of the barouche on the gravel. mrs holt had returned from the discourse on the personal devil. chapter viii 'thomas,' said mrs holt with some hesitation. 'yes,' said mr holt. 'what is it?' 'oh! nothing,' said mrs holt. 'just a queer idea. nothing worth talking about.' 'well, come again when it is worth talking about,' growled mr holt, relapsing into his newspaper. 'of course there's nothing in it,' remarked mrs holt pertinaciously. 'nothing in what?' her husband burst forth. 'what do you mean, maria? have you got anything to say or not? if you have, let's have it out.' 'i was only going to say that jack . . . of course i don't think that victoria sees it, but you understand he's a very young man, but i don't blame her, he's such a funny boy,' said mrs holt lucidly. 'good heavens, maria,' cried her husband, 'do you want me to smash something?' 'how you do go on,' remarked maria placidly. 'what i meant to say is that don't you think jack's rather too attentive to victoria?' mr holt dropped his paper suddenly. 'attentive?' he growled, 'haven't noticed it.' 'oh! you men never notice things,' replied mrs holt with conscious superiority. 'don't say i didn't warn you, that's all.' 'now look here, maria,' said mr holt, his blue eyes darkening visibly, 'i don't want any more of this tittle tattle. you can keep it for the next p.s.a. i can tell you that if the young cub is "attentive" to mrs fulton, well, so much the better: it'll teach him something worth knowing if he finds out that there's somebody else in the world who's worth doing something for beyond _his_ precious self.' 'very well, very well,' purred mrs holt. 'if you take it like that, i don't mind, thomas. don't say i didn't warn you if anything happens. that's all.' mr holt got up from the leather chair and left the room. there were moments when his wife roused in him the fury that filled him when once, in his young days, he had dropped steel bolts into the cement grinders to gratify a grudge against an employer. the temper that had made him rejoice over the sharp cracks speaking of smashed axles was in him still. he had got above the social stratum where husbands beat their wives, but innuendoes and semi-secrets goaded him almost to paroxysm. mrs holt heard the door slam and coolly took up her work. she was engaged in the congenial task of disfiguring a piece of morris chintz. she had decided that the little bag given her by an æsthetic friend was too flat and she was busily employed in embroidering the 'eyebright' pattern, with coloured wool in the most approved early victorian manner. 'at any rate,' she thought, 'thomas has got the idea in his head.' mrs holt had not arrived at her determination to awaken her husband's suspicions without much thought. she had begun to realise that 'something was wrong' one sunday afternoon at the zoo. she had taken jack and victoria in the barouche, putting down to a fit of filial affection the readiness of jack to join them. she had availed herself of the opportunity to drive round the circle; so as to show off her adored son to the bramleys, who were there in their electric, to the wilsons, who were worth quite fifty thousand a year, to the wellensteins too, who seemed to do so wonderfully well on the stock exchange. jack had taken it very nicely indeed. all the afternoon jack had remained with them; he had bought animal food, found a fellow to take them into the pavilion, and even driven home with them. it was when he helped his charges into the carriage that mrs holt had noticed something. he first handed his mother in and then victoria. mrs holt had seen him put his hand under victoria's forearm, which was quite ordinary, but she had also seen him hold her in so doing by the joint of her short sleeve and long glove where a strip of white skin showed and slip two fingers under the glove. this was not so ordinary and mrs holt began to think. when a rawsley dame begins to think of things such as these, her conscience invariably demands of her that she should know more. mrs holt therefore said nothing, but kept a watchful eye on the couple. she could urge nothing against victoria. her companion remained the cheerful and competent friend of the early days; she was no more amiable to jack than to his father: she talked no more to him than to the rest of the household; she did not even look at him much. but jack was always about her; his eyes followed her round the room, playing with every one of her movements. whenever she smiled his lips fluttered in response. mrs holt passed slowly through the tragic stages that a mother goes through when her son loves. she was not very anxious as to the results of the affair, for she knew jack, though she loved him. she knew that his purpose was never strong. also she trusted victoria. but, every day and inevitably, the terrible jealousy that invades a mother's soul crept further into hers. he was her son and he was wavering from an allegiance the pangs of childbirth had entitled her to. mrs holt loved her son, and, like most of those who love, would torture the being that was all in all for her. she would have crushed his thoughts if she had felt able to do so, so as to make him more malleable; she rejoiced to see him safely anchored to the cement business, where nothing could distract him; she even rejoiced over his weakness, for she enjoyed the privilege of giving him strength. she would have ground to powder his ambitions, so that he might be more fully her son, hers, hers only. the stepping in of the other woman, remote and subtle as it was, was a terrible thing. she felt it from afar as the arabian steed hears the coming simoon moaning beyond the desert. with terrible lucidity she had seen everything that passed for a month after that fatal day at the zoo, when jack touched victoria's arm. she saw his looks, stolen from his mother's face, heard the softness of his voice which was often sharp for her. like gall, his little attentions, the quick turn of his face, a flush sometimes, entered into and poisoned her soul. he was her son; and, with all the ruthless, entirely animal cruelty of the mother, she had begun to swear to herself that he should be hers and hers only, and that she would hug him in her arms, aye, hug him to death if need be, if only in her arms he died. savagely selfish as a good mother, however, mrs holt remembered that she must go slowly, collect her evidence, allow the fruit to ripen before she plucked it. thus she retained her outward kindnesses for victoria, spoke her fair, threw her even into frequent contact with her son. and every day she tortured herself with all the tiny signs that radiate from a lover's face like aerolites from the blazing tail of a comet. now her case was complete. she had seen jack lean over victoria while she was on her knees dusting some books, and let his hand dwell on hers. she had seen his face all alight, his mouth a little open, breathing in the fragrance of this woman, the intruder. and the iron had entered into the mother's heart so sharply that she had to hurry away unseen for fear she should cry out. mrs holt dropped her little work bag. she wondered whether her husband would see. would she have to worry him placidly for months as she usually had to when she wanted her own way? or would he understand and side with her? she did not know that women are intuitive, for she knew nothing either of women or men, but she felt perfectly certain that she was cleverer than thomas holt. if he would not see, then she would have to show him, even if she had to plot for her son's sake. the door opened suddenly. thomas holt entered. his face was perturbed, his jaw setting grimly between the two deep folds in his cheeks. that was the face of his bad days. 'well, thomas?' ventured his wife hesitatingly. 'you were right, maria,' answered holt after a pause. 'jack's a bigger fool than i thought him.' 'ah!' said mrs holt with meaning, her heart beating a sharp tatoo. 'i was standing on the first landing,' holt went on. 'i saw them at the door of the smoke-room. he asked her for a flower from her dress; she wouldn't give it him; he reached over and pulled one away.' 'yes?' said mrs holt, everything in her quivering. 'put his arm round her, though she pushed him off, and kissed her.' mrs holt clasped her hands together. a sharp pang had shot through her. 'what are you going to do?' she asked. 'do?' said holt. 'sack her of course. send him up to rawsley. damn the young fool.' chapter ix breakfast is so proverbially dismal, that dismalness becomes good form; humanity feels silent and liverish, so it grudges providence its due, for it cannot return thanks for the precocious blessings of the day. such was breakfast at finchley road, and victoria would not have noticed it on that particular morning had the silence not somehow been eloquent. she could feel, if not see storm clouds on the horizon. mr holt sat over his eggs and bacon, eating quickly with both hands, every now and then soiling the napkin tightly tucked into the front of his low collar. there was nothing abnormal in this, except perhaps that he kept his eyes more closely glued than usual to the table cloth; moreover, he had not unfolded the paper. therefore he had not looked up the prices of industrials. this was singular. mrs holt never said much at breakfast, in deference to her husband, but this morning her silence was somewhat ostentatious. she handed victoria her tea. victoria passed her the toast and hardly heard her 'thank you.' jack sat more abstracted than ever. he was feeling very uncomfortable. he wavered between the severe talking to he had received from victoria the previous afternoon and the sulkiness of his parents. of course he was feeling depressed, but he could not tell why. victoria's mere nod of acceptance when he offered her the salt, and his mother's curt refusal of the pepper did not contribute to make him easier in his mind. mrs holt cleared her throat: 'blowing up for rain, thomas,' she said. mr holt did not move a muscle. he helped himself to marmalade. stolid silence once more reigned over the breakfast table. jack stole a sidelong glance at victoria. her eyes were fixed upon her hands crossed before her. jack's eyes dwelled for a moment on their shapely strength, then upon the firm white nape of her bent neck. an insane desire possessed him to jump up, seize her in his arms, crush his lips into that spot where the dark tendrils of her hair began. he repressed it, and considered the grandfather's clock which had once ticked in a peasant holt's kitchen. to-day it ticked with almost horrible deliberation. jack found that he had no appetite. forebodings were at work with him. perhaps vic had told. of course not, she couldn't be such a fool. what a beastly room it was! sideboard must weigh a ton. and those red curtains! awful, simply awful. good god, why couldn't he get out of the damned place and take vic with him. couldn't do that yet of course, but couldn't stick it much longer. he'd be off to the city now. simply awful here. jack rose to his feet suddenly, so suddenly that his chair tilted and fell over. mrs holt looked up. 'i wish you wouldn't be so noisy, jack,' she said. 'sorry, mater,' said jack, going round to her and bending down to kiss her. 'i'm off.' 'you're in a fine hurry,' remarked mr holt grimly, looking up and speaking for the first time. 'left some work over,' said jack, in a curt manner, making for the door. 'hem! you've got work on the brain,' retorted his father in his most sardonic tone. jack opened the door without a word. 'one minute, jack,' said mrs holt placidly, 'you needn't go yet, your father and i have something to say to you.' jack stood rooted to the ground. his knees almost gave way beneath him. it, it, it was it. they knew. victoria's face, the profile of which he could see outlined like a plaster cast against the red wall paper did not help him. her face had set, rigid like a mask. now she knew why the previous evening had gone by in silence. she rose to her feet, a strange numb feeling creeping all over her. 'don't go, mrs fulton,' said mr holt sharply, 'this concerns you.' for some seconds the party remained silent. mr and mrs holt had not moved from the table. jack and victoria stood right and left, like prisoners at the bar. 'victoria,' said mrs holt, 'i'm very sorry to have to say it, but i'm afraid you know what i'm going to tell you. of course i don't say i blame you. it's quite natural at your age and all that.' she stopped, for a flush was rising in victoria's face, the cheekbones showing two little red patches. mr holt had clasped his hands together and kept his eyes fixed on victoria's with unnatural intensity. 'you see, victoria,' resumed mrs holt, 'it's always difficult when there's a young man in the house; of course i make allowances, but, really, you see it's so complicated and things get so annoying. you know what people are . . .' 'that'll do, maria,' snarled mr holt, jumping to his feet. 'if you don't know what you have to say, i do. look here, mrs fulton. last night i saw jack kissing you. i know perfectly well you didn't encourage him. you'd know better. however, there it is. i don't pretend i like what i've got to do, but this must be stopped. i can't have philandering going on here. you, jack, you're going back to the works at rawsley and don't let me see anything of you this side of the next three months. as for you, mrs fulton, i'm sorry, but mrs holt will have to find another companion. i know it's hard on you to ask you to leave without notice, but i propose to give you an indemnity of twenty pounds. i should like to keep you here, but you see that after what has happened it's impossible. i suppose you agree to that?' victoria stood silent for a moment, her hands tightly clenched. she knew holt's short ways, but the manner of the dismissal was brutal. everything seemed to revolve round her, she recovered herself with difficulty. 'yes,' she said at length, 'you're quite right.' jack had not moved. his hands were nervously playing with his watch chain. victoria, in the midst of her trouble, remembered edward's familiar gesture. they were alike in a way, these two tall weedy men, both irresolute and undeveloped. 'very well then,' continued holt; 'perhaps you'll make your arrangements at once. here is the cheque.' he held out a slip of blue paper. victoria looked at him for a moment dully. then revolt surged inside her. 'i don't want your indemnity,' she said coldly, 'you merely owe me a month's wages in lieu of notice.' the shadow of a smile crept into holt's face. the semi-legal, semi-commercial phrase pleased him. mrs holt rose from the table and went to victoria. 'i'm so sorry,' she said, speaking more gently than she had ever done. 'you must take it. things are so hard.' 'oh, but i say, dad . . .' broke in jack. 'that will do, do you hear me, sir?' thundered the father violently, bringing down his fist on the table. 'i'm not asking you for your opinion! you can stay and look at your work but you just keep a silent tongue in your head. d'you hear?' jack stood cowed and dumb. 'there's nothing more to say, is there?' growled mr holt, placing the cheque on the table before victoria. 'not much,' said victoria. 'i've done no wrong. oh! i'm not complaining. but i begin to understand things. your son has persecuted me. i didn't want his attentions. you turn me out. of course it's my fault, i know.' 'my dear victoria,' interposed mrs holt, 'nobody says it's your fault. we all think . . .' 'indeed? it's not my fault, but you turn me out.' mrs holt dropped her hands helplessly. 'i see it all now,' continued victoria. 'you don't blame me, but you're afraid to have me here. so long as i was a servant all was well. now i'm a woman and you're afraid of me.' she walked up and down nervously. 'now understand, i've never encouraged your son. if he had asked me to marry him i wouldn't have done it.' a look of pain passed over jack's face but aroused no pity in victoria. she felt frozen. 'oh! but there was no question of that,' cried mrs holt, plaintively. 'no doubt,' said victoria ruthlessly. 'you couldn't think of it. nobody could think of an officer's widow marrying into the rawsley works. from more than one point of view it would be impossible. very good. i'll leave in the course of the morning. as for the cheque, i'll take it. as you say, mrs holt, things are hard. i've learned that and i'm still learning.' victoria took up the blue slip. the flush on her face subsided somewhat. she picked up her handkerchief, a letter from molly and a small anthology lying on the dumb waiter. she made for the door, avoiding jack's eyes. she felt through her downcast lids the misery of his looks. a softer feeling went through her, and she regretted her outburst. as she placed her hand on the handle she turned round and faced mrs holt, a gentler look in her eyes. 'i'm sorry i was hasty,' she stammered. 'i was taken by surprise. it was . . . vulgar.' the door closed softly behind her. chapter x victoria went up to her room and locked the door behind her. she sat down on her small basket trunk and stared out of the dormer window. she was still all of a tingle; her hands, grasping the rough edges of the trunk, trembled a little. yet she felt, amid all her perturbation, the strange gladness that overcomes one who has had a shock; the contest was still upon her. 'yes,' she said aloud, 'i'm free. i'm out of it.' she hated the dullness and ugliness which the holts had brought with them from the midlands. the feeling came over her almost like a spasm. through the dormer window she could see the white frontage of the house opposite. it was repellent like mrs holt's personal devil. the feeling of exultation suddenly subsided in victoria's breast. she realised all of a sudden that she was once more adrift, that she must find something to do. it might not be easy. she would have to find lodgings. the archway in portsea place materialised crudely. she could hear the landlady from detailing the last phase of rheumatics to the slatternly maid who did for the grocer. awful, awful. perhaps she'd never find another berth. what should she do? victoria pulled herself together with a start. 'this will never do,' she said, 'there's lots of time to worry in. now i must pack.' she got up, drew the trunk into the middle of the room, opened it and took out the tray. then, methodically, as she had been taught to do by her mother, she piled her belongings on the bed. in a few minutes it was filled with the nondescript possessions of the nomad. skirts, books, boots, underclothing, an inkpot even, jostled one another in dangerous proximity. victoria surveyed the heap with some dismay; all her troubles had vanished in the horror that comes over every packer: she would never get it all in. she struggled for half an hour, putting the heavy things at the bottom, piling blouses on the tray, cunningly secreting scent bottles in shoes, stuffing handkerchiefs into odd corners. then she dropped the tray in, closed the lid and sat down upon it. the box creaked a little and gave way. victoria locked it and got up with a little sigh of satisfaction. but she suddenly saw that the cupboard door was ajar and that in it hung her best dress and a feather boa; on the floor stood the packer's plague, shoes. it was quite hopeless to try and get them in. victoria surveyed the difficulty for a moment; then she regretfully decided that she must ask mrs holt for a cardboard box, for her hat-box was already mortgaged. a nuisance. but rather no, she would ask the parlourmaid. she went to the door and was surprised to find it locked. she turned the key slowly, looking round at the cheerful little room, every article of which was stupid without being offensive. it was hard, after all, to leave all this, without knowing where to go. victoria opened the door and jumped back with a little cry. before her stood jack. he had stolen up silently and waited. his face had flushed as he saw her; in his eyes was the misery of a sorrowful dog. his mouth, always a little open, trembled with excitement. 'jack,' cried victoria, 'oh! what do you want?' 'i've come to say . . . oh! victoria . . .' jack broke down in the middle of his carefully prepared sentence. 'oh! go away,' said victoria faintly, putting her hand on her breast. 'do go away. can't you see i've had trouble enough this morning?' 'i'm sorry,' muttered jack miserably. 'i've been a fool. vic, i've come to ask you if you'll forgive me. it's all my fault. i can't bear it.' 'don't talk about it,' said victoria becoming rigid. 'that's all over. besides you'll have forgotten all about it to-morrow,' she added cruelly. jack did not answer directly, though he was stung. 'vic,' he said with hesitation, 'i can't bear to see you go, all through me. listen, there's something you said this morning. did you mean it?' 'mean what?' asked victoria uneasily. 'you said, if i'd asked you to marry me you . . . i know i didn't, but you know, vic, i wanted you the first time i saw you. oh! vic, won't you marry me now?' victoria looked at him incredulously. his hands were still trembling with excitement. his light eyes stared a little. his long thin frame was swaying. 'i'd do anything for you. you don't know what i could do. i'd work for you. i'd love you more than you've ever been loved.' jack stopped short; there was a hardness that frightened him in the set of victoria's jaw. 'you didn't say that yesterday,' she answered. 'no, i was mad. but i wanted to all along, vic. you're the only woman i ever loved. i don't ask more of you than to let me love you.' victoria looked at him more gently. his likeness to her brother grew plainer than ever. kind but hopelessly inefficient. poor boy, he meant no harm. 'i'm sorry, jack,' she said after a pause, 'i can't do it. you know you couldn't make a living . . .' 'oh, i could, i could!' cried jack clinging at the straw, 'if i had you to work for. you can't tell what it means for me.' 'perhaps you could work,' said victoria with a wan little smile, 'but i can't marry you, jack, you see. i like you very much, but i'm not in love with you. it wouldn't be fair.' jack looked at her dully. he had not dared to expect anything but defeat, yet defeat crushed him. 'there, you must go away now,' said victoria, 'i must go downstairs. let me pass please.' she squeezed between him and the wall and made for the stairs. 'no, i can't let you go,' said jack hoarsely. he seized her by the waist and bent over her. victoria looked the space of a second into his eyes where the tiny veins were becoming bloodshot. she pushed him back sharply and, wrenching herself away, ran down the stairs. he did not follow her. victoria looked up from the landing. jack was standing with bent head, one hand on the banister. 'the only thing you can do for me is to go away,' she said coldly. 'i shall come up again in five minutes with effie. i suppose you will not want us to find you outside my bedroom door.' she went downstairs. when she came up again with the maid, who carried a large brown cardboard box, jack was nowhere to be seen. a quarter of an hour later she followed the butcher's boy who was dragging her box down the stairs, dropping it with successive thuds from step to step. as she reached the hall, while she was hesitating as to whether she should go into the dining-room to say good-bye to mrs holt, the door opened and mrs holt came out. the two women looked at one another for the space of a second, like duellists about to cross swords. then mrs holt held out her hand. 'good-bye, victoria,' she said, 'i'm sorry you're going. i know you're not to blame.' 'thank you,' said victoria icily. 'i'm sorry also, but it couldn't be helped.' mrs holt heaved a large sigh. 'i suppose not,' she said. victoria withdrew her hand and went towards the door. the butcher's boy had already taken her box down, marking the whitened steps with two black lines. 'shall i call a cab, mum?' he asked. 'yes please,' said victoria dreamily. the youth went down the drive, his heels crunching into the gravel. victoria stood at the top of the steps, looking out at the shrubs, one or two of which showed pale buds, standing sharp like jewels on the black stems. mrs holt came up behind her softly. 'i hope we don't part in anger, victoria,' she said guiltily. victoria looked at her with faint amusement. true, anger is a cardinal sin. 'oh! no, not at all,' she answered. 'i quite understand.' 'don't be afraid to give me as a reference,' said mrs holt. 'thank you,' said victoria. 'i shan't forget.' 'and if ever you're in trouble, come to me.' 'you're very kind,' said victoria. mrs holt was kind, she felt. she understood her better now. much of her sternness oozed out of her. a mother defending her son knows no pity, thought victoria; perhaps it's wrong to resent it. it's nature's way of keeping the young alive. the cab came trotting up the drive and stopped. the butcher's boy was loading the trunk upon the roof. victoria turned to mrs holt and took her hand. 'good-bye,' she said, 'you've been very good to me. don't think i'm so bad as you thought me this morning. your son has just asked me to marry him.' mrs holt dropped victoria's hand; her face was distorted by a spasm. 'i refused him,' said victoria. she stepped into the cab and directed the cabman to portsea place. as they turned into the road she looked back. at the head of the steps mrs holt stood frozen and amazed. victoria almost smiled but, her eyes wandering upwards, she saw, at her dormer window, jack's head and shoulders. his blue eyes were fixed upon her with unutterable longing. a few strands of hair had blown down upon his forehead. for the space of a second they gazed into each other's eyes. then the wall blotted him out suddenly. victoria sighed softly and sank back upon the seat of the cab. at the moment she had no thought. she was at such a point as one may be who has turned the last page of the first volume of a lengthy book: the next page is blank. nothing remained even of that last look in which jack's blue eyes had pitifully retold his sorry tale. she was like a rope which has parted with many groans and wrenchings; broken and its strands scattering, its ends float lazily at the mercy of the waves, preparing to sink. she was going more certainly into the unknown than if she had walked blindfold into the darkest night. the horse trotted gently, the brakes gritting on the wheels as it picked its way down the steep. the fresh air of april drove into the cab, stinging a little and yet balmy with the freshness of latent spring. victoria sat up, clasped her hands on the doors and craned out to see. there was a little fever in her blood again; the spirit of adventure was raising its head. as fitful gleams of sunshine lit up and irradiated the puddles a passionate interest in the life around seemed to overpower her. she looked almost greedily at the spire, far down the wellington road, shining white like molten metal with almost italian brilliancy against a sky pale as shallow water. the light, the young wind, the scents of earth and buds, the men and women who walked with springy step intent on no business, all this, and even the horse who seemed to toss his head and swish his tail in sheer glee, told her that the world was singing its alleluia, for, behold, spring was born unto it in gladness, with all its trappings and its sumptuous promise. everything was beautiful; not even the dreary waste of wall which conceals lords from the vulgar, nor the thousand tombs of the churchyard where the dead jostle and grab land from one another were without their peculiar charm. it was not until the cab crossed the edgware road that victoria realised with a start that, though the world was born again, she did not share its good fortune. edgware road had dragged her down to the old level; a horrible familiarity, half pleasurable, half fearful, overwhelmed her. this street, which she had so often paced carrying a heart that grew heavier with every step, had never led her to anything but loneliness, to the cold emptiness of her room. her mood had changed. she saw nothing now but tawdry stationer's shops, meretricious jewellery and, worse still, the sickening plenty of its monster stores of clothing and food. the road had seized her and was carrying her away towards its summit, where the hill melts into the skies between the houses that grow lower as far as the eye can see. victoria closed her eyes. she was in the grip once more; the wheels of the machine were not moving yet but she could feel the vibration as it got up steam. in a little the flywheel would slowly revolve and then she would be caught and ground up. yes, ground up, cried the edgware road, like thousands of others as good as you, ground into little bits to make roadmetal of, yes, ground, ground fine. the cab stopped suddenly. victoria opened her eyes. yes, this was portsea place. she got out. it had not changed. the curtains of the house opposite were as dirty as ever. the landlady from the corner was standing just under the archway, dressed as usual in an expansive pink blouse in which her flowing contours rose and fell. she interrupted the voluble comments on the weather which she was addressing to the little faded colleague, dressed in equally faded black, to stare at the newcomer. 'there ain't no more room at bell's,' she remarked. 'she is very fortunate,' said the faded little woman. 'dear me, dear me. it's a cruel world.' 'them lidies' maids allus ketches on,' said the large woman savagely. 'tell yer wot, though, p'raps they wouldn't if they was to see bell's kitching. oh, lor'! there ain't no black-beetles. i don't think.' the little faded woman looked longingly at victoria standing on the steps. a loafer sprung from thin air as is the way of his kind and leant against the area railings, touching his cap whenever he caught victoria's eye, indicating at times the box on the roof of the cab. from the silent house came a noise that grew louder and louder as the footsteps drew nearer the door. victoria recognised the familiar shuffle. mrs bell opened the door. 'lor, mum,' she cried, 'i'm glad to see you again.' she caught sight of the trunk. 'oh, are you moving, mum?' 'yes, mrs bell,' said victoria. 'i'm moving and i want some rooms. of course i thought of you.' mrs bell's face fell. 'oh, i'm so sorry, mum. the house is full. if you'd come last week i had the first floor back.' she seemed genuinely distressed. she liked her quiet lodger and to turn away business of any kind was always depressing. victoria felt dashed. she remembered edward's consternation on discovering the change in gower street and, for the first time, sympathised. 'oh, i'm so sorry too, mrs bell. i should like to have come back to you.' 'couldn't you wait until next month, mum!' said mrs bell, reluctant to turn her away. 'the gentleman in the second floor front, he's going away to rhodesia. it's your old room, mum.' 'i'm afraid not,' said victoria with a smile. 'in fact i must find lodgings at once. never mind, if i don't like them i'll come back here. but can't you recommend somebody?' mrs bell looked right and left, then into the archway. the little faded woman had disappeared. the landlady in the billowy blouse was still surveying the scene. mrs bell froze her with a single look. 'no, mum, can't say i know of anybody, leastways not here,' she said slowly. 'it's a nice neighbourhood of course, but the houses here, they look all right, but oh, mum, you should see their kitchens! dirty ain't the word, mum. but wait a bit, mum, if you wouldn't mind that, i've got a sister who's got a very nice room. she lives in castle street, mum, near oxford circus. it's a nice neighbourhood, of course not so near the park,' added mrs bell with conscious superiority. 'i don't mind, mrs bell,' said victoria. 'i'm not fashionable.' 'oh, mum,' cried mrs bell, endeavouring to imply together the superiority of portsea place and the respectability of any street patronised by her family, 'i'm sure you'll like it. i'll give you the address.' in a few minutes victoria was speeding eastwards. now she was rooted up for good. she was leaving behind her curran's and mrs bell, slender links between her and home life, links still, however. the pageant of london rolled by her, heaving, bursting with rich life. the sunshine around her bade her be of good cheer. then the cab turned a corner and, with the suddenness of a stage effect, it carried its burden into the haunts of darkness and malodour. chapter xi '_telegraph_, mum,' said a voice. victoria started up from the big armchair with a suddenness that almost shot her out of it. it was the brother of the one in portsea place and shared its constitutional objection to being sat upon. it was part of the 'sweet' which miss briggs had divided with mrs bell when their grandmother died. 'thanks, miss briggs,' said victoria. 'by the way, i don't think that egg is quite fresh. and why does hetty put the armchair in front of the cupboard every day so that i can't open it?' 'the slut, i don't see there's anything the matter with it,' remarked miss briggs, simultaneously endorsing the complaint against hetty and defending her own marketing. 'oh, yes there is, miss briggs,' snapped victoria with a sharpness which would have been foreign to her some months before. 'don't let it happen again or i'll do my own catering.' miss briggs collapsed on the spot. the profits on the three and sixpence a week for 'tea, bread and butter and anything that's going,' formed quite a substantial portion of her budget. 'oh, i'm sorry, mum,' she said, 'it's hetty bought 'em this week. the slut, i'll talk to her.' victoria took no notice of the penitent landlady and opened the _telegraph_. she absorbed the fact that consols had gone up an eighth and that contangoes were in process of arrangement, without interest or understanding. she was thinking of something else. miss briggs coughed apologetically. victoria looked up. miss briggs reflectively tied knots in her apron string. she was a tall, lantern-jawed woman of no particular age; old looking for thirty-five perhaps or young looking for fifty. her brown hair, plentifully sprinkled with grey, broke out in wisps over each ear and at the back of the neck. her perfectly flat chest allowed big bags of coarse black serge to hang over her dirty white apron. her hands played mechanically with the strings, while her water-coloured eye fixed upon the _telegraph_. 'you shouldn't read that paper, mum,' she remarked. 'why not?' asked victoria, with a smile, 'isn't it a good one?' 'oh, yes, mum, i don't say that,' said miss briggs with the respect that she felt for the buyers of penny papers. 'there's none better. mine's the _daily mail_ of course and just a peep into _reynolds_ before the young gent on the first floor front. but you shouldn't have it. _tizer's_ your paper.' '_tizer_?' said victoria interrogatively. '_morning advertiser_, mum; that's the one for advertisements.' 'but how do you know i read the advertisements, miss briggs?' asked victoria still smiling. 'oh, mum, excuse the liberty,' said miss briggs in great trepidation. 'it's the only sheet i don't find when i comes up to do the bed. _tizer's_ the one for you, mum; i had a young lady 'ere, once. got a job at the inverness lounge, she did. married a clergyman, they say. he's divorced her now.' 'that's an encouraging story, miss briggs,' said victoria with a twinkle in her eye. 'how do you know i want to be a barmaid, though?' 'oh, one has to be what one can, mum,' said miss briggs sorrowfully. 'sure enough, it ain't all honey and it ain't all jam keeping this house. the bells, they rings all day and it's the breakfast that's bad and their ain't blankets enough, and i never 'ad a scuttle big enough to please 'em for sixpence. but you ain't doing that, mum,' she added after a pause devoted to the consideration of her wrongs. 'a young lady like you, she ought to be behind the bar.' victoria laughed aloud. 'thanks for the hint, miss briggs,' she said, 'i'll think it over. to-day however, i'm going to try my luck on the stage. what do you think of that?' 'going on tour?' cried miss briggs in a tone of tense anxiety. 'well, not yet,' said victoria soothingly. 'i'm going to see an agent.' 'oh, that's all right,' said miss briggs with ghoulish relief. 'hope yer'll get a job,' she added as confidently as a man offering a drink to a teetotaller. at that moment a fearful clattering on the stairs announced that hetty and the pail had suddenly descended to the lower landing. liquid noises followed. miss briggs rushed out. victoria jumped up and slammed her door on the chaotic scene. she returned to the _telegraph_. the last six weeks in the castle street lodging house had taught her that these were happenings quite devoid of importance. victoria spread out the _telegraph_, ignored the foreign news, the leaders and the shocking revelations as to the government's saharan policy; she dallied for a moment over 'gowns for débutantes,' for she was a true woman, and passed on to the advertisements. she was getting quite experienced as a reader and could sift the wheat from the chaff with some accuracy. she knew that she could safely ignore applications for lady helps in 'small families,' at least unless she was willing to clean boots and blacklead grates for five shillings a week and meals when an opportunity occurred; her last revelation as to the nature of a post of housekeeper to an elderly gentleman who had retired from business into the quietude of surbiton had not been edifying. the 'financial and businesses' column left her colder than she had been when she left mrs holt with nearly thirty-seven pounds. then she was a capitalist and pondered longingly over the proposals of tobacconists, fancy goods firms, and stationers, who were prepared to guarantee a fortune to any person who could muster thirty pounds. fortunately miss briggs had undeceived her. in her variegated experience, she herself had surrendered some sixty golden sovereigns to the persuasive owner of a flourishing newsagent's business. after a few weeks of vain attempts to induce the neighbourhood to indulge in the news of the day, she had been glad to sell her stock of sweets for eighteen shillings, and to take half a crown for a hundred penny novelettes. victoria turned to the 'situations vacant.' their numbers were deceptive. she had never realised before how many people live by fitting other people for work they cannot get. two thirds of the advertisements offered wonderful opportunities for sons of gentlemen in the offices of architects and engineers on payment of a premium; she also found she could become a lady gardener if she would only follow the courses in some dukery and meanwhile live on air; others would teach her shorthand, typewriting or the art of the secretary. all these she now calmly skipped. she was obviously unfitted to be the matron of an asylum for the feeble-minded. such experience had not been hers, nor had she the redoubtable record which would open the gates of an emporium. an illegible hand would exclude her from the city. 'no,' thought victoria, 'i'm an unskilled labourer; that's what i am.' she wearily skimmed the agencies; as a matter of habit noted the demand for two companions and one nursery governess and put the paper aside. there was not much hope in any of these, for one was for tiverton, the other for cardiff, which would make a personal interview a costly business; the third, discreetly cloaked by an initial, suggested by its terseness a companionship probably undue in its intimacy. the last six weeks had opened victoria's eyes to the unpleasant aspects of life, so much so that she wondered whether there were any other. she felt now that london was waiting for her outside, waiting for her to have spent her last copper, when she would come out to be eaten so that she might eat. whatever her conceit might have been six months before, victoria had lost it all. she could do nothing that was wanted and desired everything she could not get. she had tried all sources and found them dry. commercialism, philanthropy, and five per cent. philanthropy had failed her. what can you do? was their cry. and, the answer being 'nothing,' their retort had been 'no more can we.' victoria turned over in her mind her interview with the honorary secretary of the british women's imperial self help association. 'of course,' said the secretary, 'we will be glad to register you. we need some references and, as our principle is to foster the independence and self-respect of those whom we endeavour to place in positions such as may befit their social status, we are compelled to demand a fee of five shillings.' 'oh, self help, i see,' said victoria sardonically, for she was beginning to understand the world. 'yes,' replied the honorary secretary, oblivious of the sneer, for his mind was cast in the parliamentary mould, 'by adhering to our principle and by this means only can we hope to stem the tide of pauperism to which modern socialistic tendencies are--are--spurring the masses.' victoria had paid five shillings for this immortal metaphor and within a week had received an invitation to attend a meeting presided over by several countesses. the b. w. i. s. h. a., (as it was called by its intimates) had induced in victoria suspicions of societies in general. she had, however, applied also to the ladies' provider. its name left one in doubt whether it provided ladies with persons or whether it provided ladies to persons who might not be ladies. the secretary in this case, was not honorary. the inwardness of this did not appear to victoria; for she did not then know that plain secretaries are generally paid, and try to earn their salary. their interview had, however, not been such as to convert her to the value of corporate effort. the secretary in this case was a woman of forty, with a pink face, trim grey hair, spectacles, amorphous clothing, capable hands. she exhaled an atmosphere of respectability, and the faint odour of almonds which emanates from those women who eschew scent in favour of soap. she had quietly listened to victoria's history, making every now and then a shorthand note. then she had coughed gently once or twice. victoria felt as in the presence of an examiner. was she going to get a pass? 'i do not say that we cannot do anything for you, mrs fulton,' she said, 'but we have so many cases similar to yours.' victoria had bridled a little at this. 'cases' was a nasty word. 'i'm not particular,' she had answered, 'i'd be a companion any day.' 'i'm sure you'd make a pleasant one,' said the secretary graciously, 'but before we go any further, tell me how it was you left your last place. you were in the . . . in the finchley road, was it not?' the secretary's eyes travelled to a map of london where marylebone, south paddington, kensington, belgravia, and mayfair, were blocked out in blue. victoria had hesitated, then fenced. 'mrs holt will give me a good character,' she faltered. 'no doubt, no doubt,' replied the secretary, her eyes growing just a little darker behind the glasses. 'yet, you see, we are compelled by the nature of our business to make enquiries. a good reference is a very good thing, yet people are a little careless sometimes; the hearts of employers are often rather soft.' this was a little too much for victoria. 'if you want to know the truth,' she said bluntly, 'the son of the house persecuted me with his attentions, and i couldn't bear it.' the secretary made a shorthand note. then she looked at victoria's flashing eyes, heightened colour, thick piled hair. 'i am very sorry,' she began lamely. . . . what dreadful things women are, thought victoria, folding up the _telegraph_. if christ had said: let _her_ who hath never sinned. . . the woman would have been stoned. victoria got up, went to the looking-glass and inspected herself. yes, she was very pretty. she was prettier than she had ever been before. her skin was paler, her eyes larger; her thick eyebrows almost met in an exquisite gradation of short dark hairs over the bridge of the nose. she watched her breast rise and fall gently, flashing white through the black lacework of her blouse, then falling away from it, tantalising the faint sunshine that would kiss it. as she turned, another looking-glass set in the lower panels of a small cupboard told her that her feet were small and high arched. her openwork stockings were drawn so tight that the skin there also gleamed white. victoria took from the table a dirty visiting card. it bore the words 'louis carrel, musical and theatrical agent, soho place.' she had come by it in singular manner. two days before, as she left the offices of the 'compleat governess agency' after having realised that she could not qualify in either french, german, music, poker work or swedish drill, she had paused for a moment on the doorstep, surveying the dingy court where they were concealed, the dirty panes of an unlet shop opposite, the strange literature flaunting in the showcase of some publisher of esoterics. a woman had come up to her, rising like the loafers from the flagstones. she had realised her as between ages and between colours. then the woman had disappeared as suddenly as she came without having spoken, leaving in victoria's hand the little square of pasteboard. victoria looked at it meditatively. she would have shrunk from the idea of the stage a year before, when the tradition of lympton was still upon her. but times had changed; a simple philosophy was growing in her; what did anything matter? would it not be all the same in a hundred years? the discovery of this philosophy did not strike her as commonplace. there are but few who know that this is the philosophy of the world. victoria put down the card and began to dress. she removed the old black skirt and ragged lace blouse and, as she stood before the glass in her short petticoat, patting her hair and setting a comb, she reflected with satisfaction that her arms were shapely and white. she looked almost lovingly at the long thin dark hairs, fine as silk, that streaked her forearms; she kissed them gently, moved to self-adoration by the sweet scent of femininity that rose from her. she tore herself away from her self-worship and quickly began to dress. she put on a light skirt in serge, striped black and white, threading her head through it with great care for fear she should damage her fringe net. she drew on a white blouse, simple enough though cheap. as it fastened along the side she did not have to call in miss briggs; which was fortunate, as this was the time when miss briggs carried coals. victoria wriggled for a moment to settle the uncomfortable boning of the neck and, having buckled and belted the skirt over the blouse, completed her toilet with her little black and white jacket to match the skirt. a tiny black silk cravat from her neck was discarded, as she found that the fashionable ruffle, emerging from the closed coat, produced an _effet mousquetaire_. lastly she put on her hat; a lapse from the fashions perhaps, but a lovable, flat, almost crownless, dead black, save a vertical group of feathers. victoria drew her veil down, regretting the thickness of the spots, pushed it up to repair with a dab of powder the ravage of a pod on the tip of her nose. she took up her parasol and white gloves, a glow of excitement already creeping over her as she realised how cleverly she must have caught the spirit of the profession to look the actress to the life and yet remain in the note of the demure widow. soho place is neither one of the 'good' streets nor one of the 'bad.' the police do not pace it in twos and threes in broad daylight, yet they hardly like to venture into it singly by night. on one side it ends in a square; on the other it turns off into an unobtrusive side street, the reputation of which varies yard by yard according to the distance from the main roads. it is dirty, dingy; yet not without dignity, for its good georgian and victorian houses preserve some solidity and are not yet of the tenement class. they are still in the grade of office and shop which is immediately below their one-time status of dwellings for well-to-do merchants. victoria entered soho place from the square, so that she was not too ill impressed. she walked in the middle of the pavement, unconsciously influenced the foreign flavour of soho. there men and women stand all day in the street, talking, bargaining, quarrelling and making love; when a cab rattles by they move aside lazily, as a neapolitan stevedore rolls away on the wharf from the wheels of a passing cart. victoria paused for a second on the steps. no soho place was a good house enough. the ground floor was occupied by a firm of auctioneers; a gentleman describing himself as a.r.i.b.a. exercised his profession on the third floor; below his plate was nailed a visiting-card similar to the one victoria took from her reticule. she went up the staircase feeling a little braced by the respectability of the house, though she had caught sight through the area railings of an unspeakably dirty kitchen where unwashed pots flaunted greasy remains on a liquor stained deal table. the staircase itself, with its neutral and stained green distemper, was not over encouraging. victoria stopped at the first landing. she had no need to enquire as to the whereabouts of the impresario for, on a door which stood ajar, was nailed another dirty card. just as she was about to push it, it opened further to allow a girl to come out. she was very fair; her cheeks were a little flushed; a golden lock or two fell like keepsake ringlets on her low lace collar. victoria just had time to see that the blue eyes sparkled and to receive a cheerful smile. the girl muttered an apology and, smiling still, brushed past her and lightly ran down the stairs. 'a successful candidate,' thought victoria, her heart rising once more. she entered the room and found it empty. it was almost entirely bare of furniture, for little save an island of chairs in the middle and faded red cloth curtains relieved the uniform dirtiness of the wall paper which once was flowered. one wall was entirely covered by a large poster where half a dozen impossibly charming girls of the biscuit box type were executing a cancan so symmetrically as to recall an egyptian frieze. the mantlepiece was bare save for the signed photograph of some magnificent foreign-looking athlete, nude to the waist. victoria waited for a moment, watching a door which led into an inner room, then went towards it. at once the sound of a chair being pushed back and the fall of some small article on the floor told her that the occupant had heard her footsteps. the door opened suddenly. victoria looked at the apparition with some surprise. in a single glance she took in the details of his face and clothes, all of which were pleasing. the man was obviously a foreigner. his face was pale, clean shaven save for a small black moustache closely cropped at the ends; his eyes were brown; his eyebrows, as beautifully pencilled as those of a girl, emphasized the whiteness of his high forehead from which the hair receded in thick waves. his lips, red and full, were parted over his white teeth in a pleasant smile. victoria saw too that he was dressed in perfect taste, in soft grey tweed, fitting well over the collar and loose everywhere else; his linen was immaculate; in fact nothing about him would have disgraced the chandraga mess, except perhaps a gold ring with a large diamond which he wore on the little finger of his right hand. 'mr carrel?' said victoria in some trepidation. 'yes, mademoiselle,' said the man pleasantly. 'will you have the kindness to enter?' he held the door open and victoria, hesitating a little, preceded him. the inner room was almost a replica of the outer. it too was scantily furnished. on a large table heaps of dusty papers were stacked. an ash-tray overflowed over one end. in a corner stood a rickety-looking piano. the walls were profusely decorated with posters and photographs, presumably of actors and actresses, some highly renowned. victoria felt respect creeping into her soul. carrel placed a chair for her before the table and resumed his own. for the space of a second or two he looked victoria over. she was a little too conscious of his scrutiny to be quite at ease, but she was not afraid of the verdict. 'so, mademoiselle,' said the man gently, 'you wish for an engagement on the stage?' victoria had not expected such directness. 'yes, i do,' she said. 'that is, i was thinking of it since i got your card.' 'my card?' said carrel, raising his eyebrows a little. 'how did you get my card?' victoria told him briefly how the card had been thrust into her hand, how curious it was and how surprised she had been as she did not know the woman and had never seen her again. then she frankly confessed that she had no experience of the stage but wanted to earn her living and that . . . she stopped aghast at the tactical error. but carrel was looking at her fixedly, a smile playing on his lips as he pulled his tiny moustache with his jewelled hand. 'yes, certainly, i understand,' he said. 'experience is very useful, naturally. but you must begin and you know: _il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte_. now perhaps you can sing? it would be very useful.' 'yes, i can sing,' said victoria doubtfully, suppressing 'a little,' remembering her first mistake. 'ah, that is good,' said carrel smiling. 'will you sit down to the piano? i have no music; ladies always bring it but do you not know something by heart?' victoria got up, her heart beating a little and went to the piano. 'i don't know anything french,' she said. 'it does not matter,' said carrel, 'you will learn easily.' he lowered the piano stool for her. as she sat down the side of his head brushed her shoulder lightly. a faint scent of heliotrope rose from his hair. victoria dragged off her gloves nervously, felt for the pedals and with a voice that trembled a little sang two ballads which had always pleased lympton. the piano was frightfully out of tune. everything conspired to make her nervous. it was only when she struck the last note that she looked at the impresario. 'very good, very good,' cried carrel. '_magnifique._ mademoiselle, you have a beautiful voice. you will be a great success at vichy.' 'vichy?' echoed victoria, a little overwhelmed by his approval of a voice which she knew to be quite ordinary. 'yes, i have a troupe to sing and dance at vichy and in the towns, clermont ferrand, lyon, everywhere. i will engage you to sing and dance,' said carrel, his dark eyes sparkling. 'oh, i can't dance,' cried victoria despairingly. 'but i assure you, it is not difficult,' said carrel. 'we will teach you. there, i will show you the contract. as you have not had much experience my syndicate can only pay you one hundred and fifty francs a month. but we will pay the expenses and the costumes.' victoria looked doubtful for a moment. to sing, to dance, to go to france where she had never been, all this was sudden and momentous. '_voyons_,' said carrel, 'it will be quite easy. i am taking four english ladies with you and two do not understand the theatre. you will make more money if the audience like you. here is the contract.' he drew a printed sheet out of the drawer and handed it to her. it was an impressive document with a heavy headline; _troupe de théâtre anglaise_. it bore a french revenue stamp and contained half-a-dozen clauses in french which she struggled through painfully; she could only guess at their meaning. so far as she could see she was bound to sing and dance according to the programme which was to be fixed by the _directeur_, twice every day including sundays. the _syndicat_ undertook to pay the railway fares and to provide costumes. she hesitated, then crossed the rubicon. 'fill in the blanks, please,' she said unsteadily. 'i accept.' carrel took up a pen and wrote in the date and _cent cinquante francs_. 'what name will you adopt?' he asked, 'and what is your own name?' victoria hesitated. 'my name is victoria fulton,' she said. 'you may call me . . . aminta ormond.' carrel smiled once more. 'aminta ormond? i do not think you will like that. it is not english. it is like amanda. no! i have it, gladys oxford, it is excellent.' before she could protest he had begun writing. after all, what did it matter? she signed the document without a word. '_voilà_,' said carrel smoothly, locking the drawer on the contract. 'we leave from charing cross on wednesday evening. so you have two days to prepare yourself. _monsieur le directeur_ will meet you under the clock at a quarter past eight. the train leaves at nine. we will take your ticket when you arrive. please come here at four on wednesday and i will introduce you to the _directeur_.' victoria got up and mechanically shook hands. carrel opened the door for her and ceremoniously bowed her out. she walked into soho place as in a dream, every pulse in her body thrilling with unwonted adventure. she stared at a dirty window pane and wondered at the brilliance it threw back from her eyes. chapter xii victoria had forgotten her latchkey. miss briggs opened the door for her. her sallow face brightened up. 'there's a gentleman waiting, mum,' she said, 'and 'ere's a telegram.' came jest five minutes after you left. i've put him in the front room what's empty, mum. thought you'd rather see him there. been 'ere 'arf an 'our, mum.' victoria did not attempt to disentangle the hours of arrival of the gentleman and the telegram; she tore open the brown envelope excitedly. it only heralded the coming of edward who was doubtless the gentleman. 'thanks, miss briggs,' she said, 'it's my brother.' 'yes, mum, nice young gentleman. he's all right; been reading the _new age_, mum, this 'arf hour, what belongs to the lady on the third.' victoria smiled and went into the dining-room, where none dine in lodging houses save ghosts. edward was standing near the mantlepiece immersed in the paper. 'why, ted, this is nice of you,' cried victoria going up to him and taking his hand. 'i had to come up to town suddenly,' said edward, 'to get books for the head. i'm going back this afternoon but i thought i'd look you up. did you get the telegram.' 'just got it now,' said victoria, showing it, 'so you might have saved the sixpence.' 'i'm sorry,' said edward. 'i didn't know until this morning.' 'it doesn't matter. i'm so glad to see you.' there was an awkward pause. edward brushed away the hair from his forehead. his hands flew back to his watch-chain. victoria had briefly written to him to tell him why she left the holts. fearful of all that touches women, he was acutely conscious that he blamed her and yet knew her to be blameless. 'it's a beautiful day,' he said suddenly. 'isn't it?' agreed victoria, looking at him with surprise. there was another pause. 'what are you doing just now, vic?' edward breathed more freely, having taken the plunge. 'i've just got some work,' said victoria. 'i begin on wednesday.' 'oh, indeed?' said edward with increasing interest. 'have you got a post as companion?' 'well, not exactly,' said victoria. she realised that her story was not very easy to tell a man like edward. he looked at her sharply. his face flushed. his brow puckered. with both hands he grasped his watch-chain. 'i hope, victoria,' he said severely, 'that you are not adopting an occupation unworthy of a lady. i mean i know you couldn't,' he added, his severity melting into nervousness. 'i suppose nothing's unworthy,' said victoria; 'the fact is, ted, i'm afraid you won't like it much, but i'm going on the stage.' edward started and flushed like an angry boy. 'on the . . . the stage?' he gasped. 'yes,' said victoria quietly. 'i've got an engagement for six months to play at vichy and other places in france. i only get six pounds a month but they pay all the expenses. i'll have quite thirty pounds clear when i come back. what do you think of that?' 'it's . . . it's awful,' cried edward, losing all self-consciousness. 'how can you do such a thing, vic? if it were in london, it would be different. you simply can't do it.' 'can't?' asked victoria, raising her eyebrows. 'why?' 'it's not done. no really vic, you can't do it.' edward was evidently disturbed. fancy a sister of his . . . it was preposterous. 'i'm sorry, ted,' said victoria, 'but i'm going on wednesday. i've signed the agreement.' edward looked at her almost horror-struck. his spectacles had slid down to the sharp tip of his nose. 'you are doing very wrong, victoria,' he said, resuming his pedagogic gravity. 'you could have done nothing that i should have disapproved of as much. you should have looked out for something else.' 'looked out for something else?' said victoria with the suspicion of a sneer. 'look here, ted. i know you mean well, but i know what i'm doing; i haven't been in london for six months without finding out that life is hard on women like me. i'm no good because i'm too good for a poor job and not suitable for a superior one. so i've just got to do what i can.' 'why didn't you try for a post as companion?' asked edward with a half snarl. 'try indeed! anybody can see you haven't had to try, ted. i've tried everything i could think of, agencies, societies, papers, everything. i can't get a post. i must do something. i've got to take what i can get. i know it now; we women are just raw material. the world uses as much of us as it needs and throws the rest on the scrap heap. do you think i don't keep my eyes open? do you think i don't see that when you want somebody to do double work at half rates you get a woman? and she thanks god and struggles for the work that's too dirty or too hard for a man to touch.' victoria paced up and down the small room, carried away by her vehemence. edward said nothing. he was much upset and did not know what to say; he had never seen victoria like this and he was constitutionally afraid of vigour. 'i'm sorry, ted,' said victoria stopping suddenly. she laid her hand on his sleeve. 'there, don't sulk with me. let's go out to lunch and i'll go and choose your books with you after. is it a bargain?' 'i don't want to discuss the matter again,' replied edward with as much composure as he could muster. 'yes, let's go out to lunch.' the rest of the day passed without another word on the subject of victoria's downfall. she saw edward off at st pancras. after he had said good-bye to her, he suddenly leaned out of the window of the railway carriage as if to speak, then changed his mind and sank back on the seat. victoria smiled at her victory. next morning she broke the news to miss briggs. the landlady seemed amazed as well as concerned. 'you seem rather taken aback,' said victoria. 'well, mum, you see it's a funny thing the stage; young ladies all seems to think it's easy to get on. and then they don't get on. and there you are.' 'well i _am_ on,' said victoria, 'so i shall have to leave on wednesday.' 'sorry to lose you, mum,' said miss briggs, ''ope yer'll 'ave a success. in course, as you 'aven't given me notice, mum, it'll 'ave to be a week's money more.' 'oh, come miss briggs, this is too bad,' cried victoria, 'why, you've got a whole floor vacant! what would it have mattered if i had given you notice?' 'might have let it, mum. besides it's the law,' said miss briggs, placing her arms akimbo, ready for the fray. 'very well then,' said victoria coldly, 'don't let's say anything more about it.' miss briggs looked at her critically. 'no offence meant, mum,' she said timidly, 'it's a 'ard life, lodgers.' 'indeed?' said victoria without any show of interest. 'you wouldn't believe it, mum, all i've got to put up with. there's hetty now . . .' 'yes, yes, miss briggs,' said victoria impatiently, 'you've told me about hetty.' 'to be sure, mum,' replied miss briggs, humbly. 'it ain't easy to make ends meet. what with the rent and them borough council rates. there ain't no end to it, mum. i lives in the basement, mum, and that means gas all the afternoon, mum.' victoria looked at her again. this was a curious outlook. the poor troglodyte had translated the glory of the sun into cubic feet of gas. 'yes, i suppose it is hard,' she said reflectively. 'to be sure, mum,' mused miss briggs. 'sometimes you can't let at all. i've watched through the area railings, mum, many a long day in august, wondering if the legs i can see was coming 'ere. they don't mostly, mum.' 'then why do you go on?' asked victoria hardening suddenly. 'what am i to do, mum? i just gets my board and lodging out of it, mum. keeps one respectable; always been respectable, mum. that ain't so easy in london, mum. ah, when i was a young girl, might have been different, mum; you should have seen me 'air. curls like anything, mum, when i puts it in papers. 'ad a bit of a figure too, mum.' 'deary me!' victoria looked with sympathy at the hard thin face, the ragged hair. yes, she was respectable enough, poor miss briggs! women have a hard life. no wonder they too are hard. you cannot afford to be earthenware among the brass pots. 'what will you do when you can't run the house any more?' she asked more gently. 'do, mum? i dunno.' yet another philosophy. 'miss briggs,' came a man's voice from the stairs. 'coming, sir,' yelled miss briggs in the penetrating tone that calling from cellar to attic teaches. 'where are my boots?' said the voice on the stairs. 'i'll get 'em for you, sir,' cried miss briggs shuffling to the door on her worn slippers. life is a hard thing, thought victoria again. another woman for the scrap heap. fourteen hours work a day, nightmares of unlet rooms, boots to black and coals to carry, dirt, loneliness, harsh words and at the end 'i dunno.' is that to be my fate? she wondered. however her blood soon raced again; she was an actress, she was going abroad, she was going to see the world, to enslave it, to have adventures, live. it was good. all that day victoria trod on air. she no longer felt her loneliness. the sun was out and aglow, bringing in its premature exuberance joyful moisture to her temples. she, with the world, was young. in a fit of extravagance she lunched at a half crown table d'hôte in oxford street, where pink shades softly diffuse the light on shining glass and silver. the coffee was almost regal, so strong, so full of sap. the light of triumph was in her eyes, making men turn back, sometimes follow and look into her face, half appealing, half insolent. but victoria was unconscious of them, for the world was at her feet. she was the axis of the earth. it was in such a frame of mind that, the next day, she climbed the steps of soho place, careless of the view into the underground kitchen, of the two dogs who under the archway fought, growling, fouling the air with the scents of their hides, over a piece of offal. she ran up the stairs lightly. the door was still ajar. two men were sitting in the anteroom, both smoking briar pipes. the taller of the two got up. 'yes?' he said interrogatively. 'i . . . you . . . is mr carrel here?' asked victoria nervously. 'no miss,' said the man calmly, 'he's just gone to marlborough street.' 'oh,' said victoria, still nervous, 'will he be long?' 'i should say so, miss,' replied the man, 'perhaps twelve months, perhaps more.' victoria gasped. 'i don't understand,' she said, but her heart began to beat. 'don't s'pose you would, miss,' said the short man, getting up. 'fact is, miss, we're the police and we've had to take him; just about time we did, too. leaving for france to-night with a batch of girls. s'pose you're one of them?' 'i was going to-night,' said victoria faintly. 'may i have your name?' asked the tall man politely, taking out a pocket book. 'fulton,' she faltered. 'victoria fulton.' 'm'yes, that's it. 'gladys oxford,'' said the tall man turning back a page. 'well miss, you can thank your stars you're out of it.' 'but what has he done?' asked victoria with an effort. 'lord, miss, you're from the country, i can see,' said the short man amiably. 'i thought everybody knew that little game. take you over to vichy, you know. make you dance and sing. provide costumes.' he winked at his companion. 'costumes,' said victoria, 'what do you mean?' 'costumes don't mean much, miss, over there,' said the tall man. 'fact is you'd have to wear what they like and sing what they like when you pass the plate round among the customers.' something seemed to freeze in victoria. 'he said it was a theatre of varieties,' she gasped. 'quite true,' said the tall man with returning cynicism. 'a theatre right enough, but you'd have supplied the variety to the customers.' victoria clenched her hands on the handle of her parasol. then she turned to fly. the short man stopped her and demanded her address, informing her that she was to attend at marlborough street next day at eleven thirty. 'case mayn't be called before twelve,' he added. 'sorry to trouble you, miss. you won't hear any more about it unless it's a case for the sessions.' victoria ran down the steps, through the alley and into charing cross road as if something was tracking her, tracking her down. so this was the end of the dream. she had stretched her hand out to the roses, and the gods, less merciful to her than to tantalus, had filled her palm with thorns. it was horrible, horrible. she had imagination, and a memory of old prints after rowlandson which her father had treasured came back to her with almost nauseating force. she pictured the french _café chantant_ like the cave of harmony; rough boards on trestles, laden with tankards of foaming beer, muddy lights, a foulness of tobacco smoke, a raised stage with an enormous woman singing on it, her eye frightfully dilated by belladonna, her massive arms and legs gleaming behind the dirty footlights and everywhere around men smoking, with noses like snouts, bodies like swines, hairy hands--hands, ye gods! she walked quickly away from the place of revelation. she hurried through the five o'clock inferno of trafalgar square, careless of the traffic, escaping death ten times. she hurried down the spaces of whitehall, and only slackened her pace at westminster bridge. there she stopped for a moment; the sun was setting and gilded and empurpled the foreshores. the horror of the past half hour seemed to fade away as she watched the roses and mauves bloom and blend, the deep shadows of the embankments rise and fall. near by, a vagrant, every inch of him clothed in rags, the dirt of his face mimicking their colour, smoked a short clay pipe, puffing at long intervals small wreaths of smoke into the blue air. and as victoria watched them form, rise and vanish into nothingness, the sun kiss gently but pitilessly the old vagrant hunched up against the parapet, the horror seemed to melt away. the peace of the evening was expelling it, but another dread visitor was heralded in. victoria felt like lead in her heart, the return of uncertainty. once more she was an outcast. no work. once more she must ask herself what to do and find no answer. the river glittered and rose and fell, as if inviting her. victoria shuddered. it was not yet time for that. she turned back and, with downcast eyes, made for st james's park. there she sat for a moment watching a pelican flop on his island, the waterfowl race and dive. the problem of life was upon her now and where was the solution? must i tread the mill once more? thought victoria. the vision of agencies again, of secretaries courteous or rude, of waits and hopes and despairs, all rushed at her and convinced her of the uselessness of it all. she was alone, always alone, because she wanted to be free, to be happy, to live. perhaps she had been wrong after all to resist the call of the river. she shuddered once more. a couple passed her with hands interlocked, eyes gazing into eyes. no, life must hold forth to her something to make it worth while. she was cold. she got up and, with nervous determination, walked quickly towards the gate. the first thing to be done was to get quit of all the horrors of the day, to cut away the wreckage. she dared not stay at castle street. she would be tracked. she would have to give evidence. she couldn't do it. she couldn't. victoria having regained her coolness was in no wise uncertain as to her course of action. the first thing to do was for her to lose herself in london, and that so deep that none could drag her out and force her to tell her story. she must change her lodgings then. nothing could be easier, as she had already given miss briggs notice. in fact the best thing to do would be to keep up the fiction of her departure for france. chapter xiii victoria entered her room. it was in the condition that speaks of departure. her trunks were packed and corded, all save a small suitcase which still gaped, showing spaces among the sundries that the skilled packer collects in the same bundle. every drawer was open; the bed was unmade; the room was littered with newspapers and nondescript articles discarded at the last moment. victoria rang her bell and quickly finished packing the suitcase with soap, washing gloves, powder-puffs and such like. as she turned the key miss briggs opened the door. 'oh, miss briggs,' said victoria quietly, 'i find that i must go down by an earlier train; i must be at charing cross in an hour; i'm going now.' 'yes, mum,' said miss briggs without interest. 'shall i tell the greengrocer to come now, mum?' 'yes please, miss briggs; here are the seven shillings.' miss briggs accepted the money without a word. it had formed the basis of a hot argument between her and her tenant; she considered herself entitled to one week's rent in lieu of notice but victoria's new born sense of business had urged the fact that she had had two days notice; this had saved her three shillings. miss briggs laboured under a sense of injury, so she did not see victoria to the door. this was well, for victoria was able to pay the greengrocer and to get rid of him in an artistic manner by sending him to post an empty envelope addressed to an imaginary person, while she directed the cabman to paddington; this saved her awkward questions and would leave miss briggs under the impression that she had gone to charing cross. at paddington station she left her luggage in the cloak-room and went out to find lodgings. her quest was short, for she had ceased to be particular, so that within an hour she was installed in an imposing ground floor front in the most respectable house in star street. the district was not so refined as portsea place, but the house seemed clean and the quarters were certainly cheaper; eleven and six covered both them and the usual breakfast. victoria surveyed the room in a friendly manner; there was nothing attractive or repulsive in it; it was clean; the furniture was almost exactly similar to that which graced her lodgings in portsea place and in castle street. the landlady seemed a friendly body, and had already saved victoria a drain on her small store by sending her son, an out-of-work furrier's hand, to fetch the luggage in a handcart. remembering that she was a fugitive from justice she gave her name as miss ferris. victoria returned from a hurried tea, unpacked with content the trunk that should have followed her to france. she was almost exhilarated by the feeling of safety which enveloped her like comforting warmth. the day was blithe in unison. she felt quite safe, every movement of her flight having been so skilfully calculated; she was revelling therefore in her escape from danger, the deepest and truest of all joys. the next morning, however, found her in the familiar mood of wondering what was to become of her. after an extremely inferior breakfast which brought down upon the already awed mrs smith well deserved reproaches, victoria investigated the _telegraph_ columns with the usual negative results and, in the resultant acid frame of mind, went through her accounts and discovered that her possessions amounted to twelve pounds, eight shillings and four pence. this was a terrible blow; the outfit for the interview with carrel and the trip to france had dug an enormous hole in victoria's resources. 'i must hurry up and find something,' said victoria to herself. 'twelve pounds eight and fourpence--say twelve weeks--and then?' the next morning reconciled her a little to her fate. true, the paper yielded no help, but a lengthy account of carrel's preliminary examination occupied three quarters of a column in the police court report. it was apparently a complicated case, for carrel had been remanded and bail refused. the report did not yield her much information. apparently carrel was indicted for other counts than the exporting of the dancing girls to vichy, for nine women had appeared. victoria had quite a thrill of horror when she read the line in which the well schooled reporter dismissed the evidence of miss 's,' by saying that miss 's----' here gave an account of her experience in the green room of the folichon-palace in .' the baldness of the statement was appalling in its suggestiveness. she had been called, apparently, but no comment was made on her non-appearance. 'that's all over,' said victoria with decision, throwing the newspaper down. she rose from the armchair, shook herself and opened the window to let out the smell of breakfast. then she put on her hat and gloves and decided to have a walk to cheer herself up. mindful that she was in a sense a fugitive, she avoided the marble arch and made for the park through the desolate respectability of lancaster gate. she made for the south east, unconsciously guided by the hieratic shot tower of westminster. it was early; the freshness of may still bejewelled with dew drops the crisp new grass; the gravel, stained dark by moisture, hardly crunched under her feet, but gave like springy turf. forgetting her depleted exchequer victoria stepped briskly as if on business bent, looking at nothing but absorbing as through her skin the kisses of the western wind. at hyde park corner she turned into st james's park, and, passing the barracks, received with an old familiar thrill a covert smile from the handsome sentry. after all she was young, and it was good somehow to be once more smiled at by a soldier. soldiers, soldiers--stupid perhaps, but could one help liking them? victoria let her thoughts run back to dicky--poor old wasted dicky--and the colonel and his liver, and bobby, who would never be anything but bobby, and major cairns too. victoria felt a tiny pang as she thought of the major. he was hardly young or handsome but strong, reassuring. she suddenly felt his lips on her neck again as she gazed rapidly at the dark lift on the horizon of the coast of araby. he was a good fellow, the major. she would like to meet him again. she had reached westminster bridge. her thoughts fell away from the comfortable presence of major cairns. hunched up against the parapet sat the old vagrant she had seen there before, motionless, his rags lifting in the breeze, puffs of smoke coming at long intervals from his short clay pipe. victoria shuddered; it seemed as if her life were bound to a wheel which brought her back inexorably to the same spot until the time came for her to lose there energy and life itself. she turned quickly towards the embankment, and, as she rounded the curve, caught a glimpse of the old vagrant. the symbol of time had not moved. another twenty minutes of quick walking had brought her to the city. she was no longer fearful of it; indeed she almost enjoyed its surge and roar. log that she was, tossed on a stormy sea, she could not help feeling the joy of life in its buffeting. not even the dullness and eternal length of queen victoria street, which seems in the city, like gower street, indefinite and interminable, robbed her of the curious exultation which she felt whenever she entered the precincts. here at least was life and doing; ugly doing perhaps, but things worthy of the name of action. at mansion house she stopped for a moment to look at the turmoil: drays, motorbuses, cabs, cycles, entangled and threatening everywhere the little running black mites of humanity. as victoria passed the bank and walked up princes street she felt hungry, for it was nearly one o'clock. she turned up a lane and stopped before a small shop which arrested her attention by its name above the door. it was called 'the rosebud café,' every letter of its name being made up of tiny roses; all the woodwork was painted white; the door was glazed and faced with pink curtains; pink half blinds lined the two small windows, nothing appearing through them except, right and left, two tall palms. 'the rosebud' had a freshness and newness that pleased her; and, as it boldly announced luncheons and teas, she pushed the white door open and entered. the room was larger than the outside gave reason to think, for it was all in depth. it was pretty in a style suggesting a combination of watteau, dresden china, and the top of a biscuit tin. all the woodwork was white, relieved here and there by pink drapery and cunningly selected water colours of more or less the same tint. from the roof, at close intervals, hung little baskets of paper roses. the back part of the room was glazed over, which showed that it lay below the well of a tall building. symmetrically ranged were little tables, some large enough for four persons, mostly however meant for two, but victoria noticed that they were all untenanted; in fact the room was empty, save for a woman who on her hands and knees was loudly washing the upper steps of a staircase leading into a cellar, and for a tall girl who stood on a ladder at the far end of the room critically surveying a picture she had just put up. victoria hesitated for a moment. the girl on the ladder looked round and jumped down. she was dressed in severe black out of which her long white face, mantling pink at the cheeks, emerged like a flower; indeed victoria wondered whether she had been selected as an attendant because she was in harmony with the colour scheme of the shop. the girl was quite charming out of sheer insignificance; her fair hair untidily crowned her with a halo marred by flying wisps. her little pink mouth, perpetually open and pouting querulous over three white upper teeth, showed annoyance at being disturbed. 'we aren't open,' she said with much decision. it was clearly quite bad enough to have to look forward to work on the morrow without anticipating the evil. 'oh,' said victoria, 'i'm sorry, i didn't know.' 'we open on monday,' said the fair girl. 'sharp.' 'yes?' answered victoria vaguely interested as one is in things newly born. 'this is a pretty place, isn't it?' a flicker of animation. the fair girl's blue eyes opened wider. 'rather,' she said. 'i did the water colours,' she explained with pride. 'how clever of you!' exclaimed victoria. 'i couldn't draw to save my life.' 'coloured them up, i mean,' the girl apologised grudgingly. 'it was a long job, i can tell you.' victoria smiled. 'well,' she said, 'i must come back on monday and see it finished if i'm in the city.' 'oh, aren't you in the city?' asked the girl. 'west end?' 'no, not exactly west end,' said victoria. 'i'm not doing anything just now.' the fair girl gave her a glance of faint suspicion. 'oh, aye, i see,' she said slowly, thoughtfully considering the rather full lines of victoria's figure. victoria had not the slightest idea of what she saw. 'i'm looking out for a berth,' she remarked casually. 'oh, are you?' said the girl with renewed animation. 'what's your line?' 'anything,' said victoria. she looked round the pink and white shop. a feeling of weariness had suddenly come over her. the woman at the top of the steps had backed away a little, and was rhythmically swishing a wet rag on the linoleum. under her untidy hair her neck gleamed red and fleshy, touched here and there with beads of perspiration. victoria took her in as unconsciously as she would an ox patiently straining at the yoke. to and fro the woman's body rocked, like a machine wound up to work until its parts drop out worn and useless. 'ever done any waiting?' the voice of the girl almost made victoria jump. she saw herself being critically inspected. 'no, never,' she faltered. 'that's to say, i would, if i got a billet.' 'mm,' said the girl, eyeing her over. 'mm.' victoria's heart beat unreasonably. 'do you know where i can get a job?' she asked. 'well,' said the girl very deliberately, 'the fact of the matter is, that we're short here. we had a letter this morning. one of our girls left home yesterday. says she can't come. they don't know where she is.' 'yes,' said victoria, too excited to speculate as to the implied tragedy. 'if you like, you can see the manager,' said the girl. 'he's down there.' she pointed to the cellar. 'thank you so much,' said victoria, 'it's awfully kind of you.' the fair girl walked to the banisters. 'mr stein,' she cried shrilly into the darkness. there was a rumble, a sound like the upsetting of a chair, footsteps on the stairs. a head appeared on a level with the floor. 'vat is it?' growled a voice. 'new girl; wants to be taken on.' 'vell, take her on,' growled the voice. 'you are ze 'ead vaitress, gn, you are responsible.' victoria had just time to see the head, perfectly round, short-haired, white faced, cloven by a turned up black moustache, when it vanished once more. the germanic 'gn' at the end of the first sentence puzzled her. 'sulky beast,' murmured the girl. 'anyhow, that's settled. you know the wages, don't you? eight bob a week and your lunch and tea.' 'eight . . .' gasped victoria. 'but i can't live on that.' 'my, you are a green 'un,' smiled the girl. 'with a face like that you'll make twenty-five bob in tips by the time we've been on for a month.' she looked again at victoria not unkindly. 'tips,' said victoria reflectively. awful. but after all, what did it matter. 'all right,' she said, 'put me down.' the girl took her name and address. 'half-past eight sharp on monday,' she said. ''cos it's opening day. usual time half-past nine, off at four two days a week. other days seven. nine o'clock mid and end.' victoria stared a little. this was a business woman. 'sorry,' said the girl, 'must leave you. got a lot more to do to-day. my name's laura. it'll have to be lottie though. nothing like lottie to make fellows remember you.' 'remember you?' asked victoria puzzled. 'lord, yes, how you going to make your station if they don't remember you?' said lottie snappishly. 'you'll learn right enough. you let 'em call you vic. tell 'em to. you'll be all right. and get yourself a black business dress. we supply pink caps and aprons; charge you sixpence a week for washing. you get a black openwork blouse, mind you, with short sleeves. nothing like it to make your station.' 'what's a station?' asked victoria, more bewildered than ever. 'my, you _are_ a green 'un! a station's your tables. five you get. we'll cut 'em down when they begin to come in. what you've got to do is to pal up with the fellows; then they'll stick to you, see? regulars is what you want. the sort that give no trouble 'cos you know their orders right off and leave their twopence like clockwork, see? but never you mind: you'll learn.' thereupon lottie tactfully pushed victoria towards the door. victoria stepped past the cleaner, who was now washing the entrance. nothing could be seen of her save her back heaving a little in a filthy blue bodice and her hands, large, red, ribbed with flowing rivulets of black dirt and water. as her left hand swung to and fro, victoria saw upon the middle finger the golden strangle of a wedding ring deep in the red cavity of the swollen flesh. chapter xiv 'you come back with me, vic, don't you?' 'you silly,' said victoria, witheringly, 'i don't go off to-day, gertie, worse luck.' 'worse luck! i don't think,' cried gertie. 'i'll swap with you, if you like. as if yer didn't know it's settling day. why there's two and a kick in it!' 'shut it,' remarked a fat, dark girl, placidly helping herself to potatoes, 'some people make a sight too much out of settling day.' 'perhaps yer'll tell me wot yer mean, miss prodgitt,' snarled gertie, her brown eyes flashing, her cockney accent attaining a heroic pitch. 'what i say,' remarked miss prodgitt, with the patronising air that usually accompanies this enlightening answer. 'ho, indeed,' snapped gertie, 'then p'raps yer'll keep wot yer've got ter sye to yersel, _miss_ prodgitt.' the fat girl opened her mouth, then, changing her mind, turned to victoria and informed her that the weather was very cold for the time of the year. 'that'll do, gertie,' remarked lottie, 'you leave bella alone and hook it.' gertie glowered for a moment, wasted another look of scorn on her opponent and flounced out of the room into a cupboard-like dark place, whence issued sounds like the growl of an angry cat. something had obviously happened to her hat. victoria looked round aimlessly. she had no appetite; for half-past three, the barbarous lunch hour of the rosebud girls, seemed calculated to limit the food bill. by her side bella was conscientiously absorbing the potatoes that her daintier companions had left over from the irish stew. lottie was deeply engrossed in a copy of _london opinion_, left behind by a customer. victoria surveyed the room, almost absolutely bare save in the essentials of chairs and tables. it was not unsightly, excepting the fact that it was probably swept now and then but never cleaned out. upon the wall opposite was stuck a penny souvenir which proclaimed the fact that the emperor of patagonia had lunched at the guildhall. by its side hung a large looking glass co-operatively purchased by the staff. another wall was occupied by pegs on which hung sundry dust coats and feather boas, mostly smart. gertie, in the corner, was still fumbling in the place known as 'heath's' because it represented the 'hatterie.' it was a silent party enough, this; even the two other girls on duty downstairs would not have increased the animation much. victoria sat back in her chair, and, glancing at the little watch she carried on her wrist in a leather strap, saw she still had ten minutes to think. victoria watched gertie, who had come out of 'heath's' and was poising her hat before the glass. she was a neat little thing, round everywhere, trim in the figure, standing well on her toes; her brown hair and eyes, pursed up little mouth, small, sharp nose, all spoke of briskness and self-confidence. 'quarter to four, doin' a bunk,' she remarked generally over her shoulder. 'mind butty doesn't catch you,' said victoria. 'oh, he's all right,' said gertie, 'we're pals.' fat bella, chewing the cud at the table, shot a malevolent glance at her. gertie took no notice of her, tied on her veil with a snap, and collected her steel purse, parasol, and long white cotton gloves. 'bye, everybody,' she said, 'be good. bye, miss prodgitt; wish yer luck with yer perliceman, but you take my tip; all what glitters isn't coppers.' before miss prodgitt could find a retort to this ruthless exposure of her idyll, gertie had vanished down the stairs. lottie dreamily turned to the last page of _london opinion_ and vainly attempted to sound the middle of her back; she was clearly disturbed by the advertisement of a patent medicine. victoria watched her amusedly. they were not bad sorts, any of them. lottie, in her sharp way, had been a kindly guide in the early days, explained the meaning of 'checks,' shown her how to distinguish the inflexion on the word 'bill,' that tells whether a customer wants the bill of fare or the bill of costs, imparted too the wonderful mnemonics which enable a waitress to sort four simultaneous orders. gertie, the only frankly common member of the staff, barked ever but bit never. as for bella, poor soul, she represented neutrality. the thread of her life was woven; she would marry her policeman when he got his stripe, and bear him dull company to the grave. gertie would no doubt look after herself. not being likely to marry, she might keep straight and end as a manageress, probably save nothing and end in the workhouse, or go wrong and live somehow, and then die as quickly as a robin passing from the sunshine to the darkness. lottie was a greater problem; in her intelligence lay danger; she had imagination, which in girls of her class is a perilous possession. her enthusiasm might take her anywhere, but very much more likely to misery than to happiness. however, as she was visibly weak-chested, victoria took comfort in the thought that the air of the underground smoking-room would some day settle her troubles. victoria did not follow up her own line of life because as for all young things, there was no end for her--nothing but mist ahead, with a rosy tinge in it. sufficient was it that she was in receipt of a fairly regular income, not exactly overworked, neither happy nor miserable. apart from the two hours rush in the middle of the day, there was nothing to worry her. after two months she had worked up a fair connection; she could not rival the experienced lottie, nor even gertie whose forward little ways always 'caught on,' but she kept up an average of some fourteen shillings a week in tips. thus she scored over gladys and cora, whose looks and manners were unimpressive, lymphatic bella being of course outclassed by everybody. twenty-one and six a week was none too much for victoria, whose ideas of clothes were fatally upper middle class; good, and not too cheap. still, she was enough of her class to live within her income, and even add a shilling now and then to her little hoard. a door opened downstairs. 'four o'clock! come down! vic! bella! lottie! vat are you doing? gn?' bella jumped up in terror, her fat cheeks quivering like jelly. 'coming, mr stein, coming,' she cried, making for the stairs. victoria followed more slowly. lottie, secure in her privileges as head waitress, did not move until she heard the door below slam behind them. victoria lazily made for her tables. they were unoccupied save by a youth of the junior clerk type. 'small tea toasted scone, miss,' said the monarch with an approving look at victoria's eyes. as she turned to execute his order he threw himself back in the bamboo arm chair. he joined his ten finger tips, and, crossing his legs, negligently displayed a purple sock. he retained this attitude until the return of victoria. 'kyou,' she said, depositing his cup before him. she had unconsciously acquired this incomprehensible habit of waitresses. the young man availed himself of the wait for the scone to inform victoria that it was a cold day. 'we don't notice it here,' she said graciously enough. 'hot place, eh,' said the customer with a wink. victoria smiled. in the early days she would have snubbed him, but she had heard the remark before and had a stereotyped answer ready which, with a new customer, invariably earned her a reputation for wit. 'oh, the hotter the fewer.' she smiled negligently, moving away towards the counter. when she returned with the scone, the youth held out his hand for the plate, and, taking it, touched the side of hers with his finger tips. she gave him a faint smile and sat down a couple of yards away on a chair marked 'attendant.' the youth congratulated her upon the prettiness of the place. victoria helped him through his scone by agreeing with him generally. she completed her conquest by lightly touching his shoulder as she gave him his check. 'penny?' asked bella, as the youth gone, victoria slipped her fingers under the cup. 'gent,' replied victoria, displaying three coppers. bella sighed. 'you've got all the luck, don't often get a twopenny; never had a gent in my life.' 'i don't wonder you don't,' said cora from the other side of the room, 'looking as pleasant as if you were being photographed. you got to give the boys some sport.' bella sighed. 'it's all very well, cora, i'm an ugly one, that's what it is.' 'get out; i'm not a blooming daisy. try washing your hair . . .' 'it's wrong,' interposed bella ponderously. 'oh, shut it, _miss_ prodgitt, i've no patience with you.' cora walked away to the counter where gladys was brewing tea. there was a singular similarity between these two; both were short and plump; both used henna to bring their hair up to a certain hue of redness; both had complexions obviously too dark for the copper of their locks, belied as it was already by their brown eyes. indeed their resemblance frequently created trouble, for each maintained that the other ruined her trade by making her face cheap. 'can't help it if you've got a cheap face,' was the invariable answer from either. 'you go home and come back when the rhubarb's out,' usually served as a retort. the july afternoon oozed away. it was cool; now and then an effluvium of tea came to victoria, mingled with the scent of toast. now and then too the rumble of a dray or the clatter of a hansom filtered into the dullness. victoria almost slept. the inner door opened. a tall, stout, elderly man entered, throwing a savage glance round the shop. there was a little stir among the girls. bella's rigidity increased tenfold. cora and gladys suddenly stopped talking. alone victoria and lottie seemed unconcerned at the entrance of butty, for 'butty' it was. 'butty,' otherwise mr burton, the chairman of 'rosebud, ltd.,' continued to glare theatrically. he wore a blue suit of a crude tint, a check black and white waistcoat, a soft fronted brown shirt and, set in a shilling poplin tie, a large black pearl. under a grey bowler set far back on his head his forehead sloped away to his wispy greying hair. his nose was large and veined, his cheeks pendulous and touched with rosacia; his hanging underlip revealed yellow teeth. the heavy dullness of his face was somewhat relieved by his little blue eyes, piercing and sparkling like those of a snake. his face was that of a man who is looking for faults to correct. mr burton strode through the shop to the counter where cora and gladys at once assumed an air of rectitude while he examined the cash register. then, without a word, he returned towards the doorway, sweeping lottie's tables with a discontented glance, and came to a stop before one of bella's tables. 'what's this? what the devil do you mean by this?' thundered butty, pointing to a soiled plate and cup. 'oh, sir, i'm sorry, i . . .' gasped bella, 'i . . .' 'now look here, my girl,' hissed butty, savagely, 'don't you give me any of your lip. if i ever find anything on a table of yours thirty seconds after a customer's gone, it's the sack. take it from me.' he walked to the steps and descended into the smoking-room. cora and gladys went into fits of silent mirth, pointing at poor bella. lottie, unconcerned as ever, vainly tried to extract interest from the shop copy of 'what's on.' 'victoria,' came butty's voice from below. 'where's mr stein? come down.' 'he's washing, sir,' said victoria, bending over the banisters. 'oh, washing is he? first time i've caught him at it,' came the answer with vicious jocularity. 'here's a nice state of things; come down.' victoria went down the steps. 'now then, why aren't these salt cellars put away? it's your job before you come up.' 'if you please, sir, it's settling day,' said victoria quietly, 'we open this room again at six.' 'oh, yes, s'pose you're right. i don't blame you. never have to,' said butty grudgingly, then ingratiatingly. 'no, sir,' said victoria. 'no, you're not like the others,' said butty negligently coming closer to her. victoria smiled respectfully, but edged a little away. butty eyed her narrowly, his lips smiling and a little moist. then his hand suddenly shot out and seized her by the arm, high up, just under the short sleeve. 'you're a nice girl,' he said, looking into her eyes. victoria said nothing, but tried to free herself. she tried harder as she felt on her forearm the moist warmth of the ball of butty's thumb softly caressing it. 'let me go, sir,' she whispered, 'they can see you through the banisters.' 'never you mind, vic,' said butty drawing her towards him. victoria slipped from his grasp, ran to the stairs, but remembered to climb them in a natural and leisurely manner. 'cool, very cool,' said butty, approvingly, 'fine girl, fine girl.' he passed his tongue over his lips, which had suddenly gone dry. when victoria returned to her seat lottie had not moved; bella sat deep in her own despair, but, behind the counter, cora and gladys were fixing two stern pairs of eyes upon the favourite. chapter xv 'yes, sir, yes sir; i've got your order,' cried victoria to a middle aged man, whose face reddened with every minute of waiting. 'steak, sir? yes, sir, that'll be eight minutes. and sautées, yes sir. gladys, send dicky up to four. what was yours, sir? wing twopence extra. no bread? oh, sorry, sir, thought you said worcester.' victoria dashed away to the counter. this was the busy hour. in her brain a hurtle of food stuffs and condiments automatically sorted itself out. 'now then, hurry up with that chop,' she snapped, thrusting her head almost through the kitchen window. ''oo are you,' growled the cook over her shoulder. 'empress of germany? i don't think.' 'oh, shut it, maria, hand it over; now then cora, where you pushing to?' victoria edged cora back from the window, seized the chop and rushed back to her tables. the bustle increased; it was close on one o'clock, an hour when the slaves drop their oars, and for a while leave the thwarts of many groans. the rosebud had nearly filled up. almost every table was occupied by young men, most of them reading a paper propped up against a cruet, some a temple classic, its pages kept open by the weight of the plate edge. a steady hum of talk came from those who did not read, and, mingled with the clatter of knives and forks, produced that atmosphere of mongrel sound that floats into the ears like a restless wave. victoria stepped briskly between the tables, collecting orders, deftly making out bill after bill, smoothing tempers ruffled here and there by a wrongful attribution of food. 'yes sir, cutlets. no veg? cauli? yes sir.' she almost ran up and down as half-past one struck and the young men asked for coffees, small coffees, small blacks, china teas. from time to time she could breathe and linger for some seconds by a youth who audaciously played with the pencil and foil suspended from her waist. or she exchanged a pleasantry. 'now then, nevy, none of your larks.' victoria turned round sharply and caught a hand engaged in forcing a piece of sugar into her belt. nevy, otherwise neville brown, laughed and held her hand the space of a second. 'i love my love with a v . . .' he began, looking up at her, his blue eyes shining. 'chuck it or i'll tell your mother,' said victoria, smiling too. she withdrew her hand and turned away. 'oh, i say, vic, don't go, wait a bit,' cried neville, 'i want, now what did i want?' 'sure i don't know,' said victoria, 'you never said what you wanted. want me to make up your mind for you?' 'do, vic, let our minds be one,' said neville. victoria looked at him approvingly. neville brown deserved the nickname of 'beauty,' which had clung to him since he left school. brown wavy hair, features so clean cut as to appear almost effeminate, a broad pointed jaw, all combined to make him the schoolgirl's dream. set off by his fair and slightly sunburnt face, his blue eyes sparkled with mischief. 'well, then, special and cream. sixpence and serve you right.' she laughed and stepped briskly away to the counter. 'you're in luck, beauty,' said his neighbour with a sardonic air. 'oh, it's no go, james,' replied brown, 'straight as they make them.' 'don't say she's not. but if i weren't a married man, i'd go for her baldheaded.' 'guess you would, jimmy,' said beauty, laughing, 'but you'd be wasting your time. you wouldn't get anything out of her.' 'don't you be too sure,' said jimmy meaningly. he passed his hand reflectively over his shaven lips. 'well, well,' said brown, 'p'raps i'm not an apollo like you, jimmy.' jimmy smiled complacently. he was a tall slim youth, well groomed about the head, doggy about the collar and tie, neatly dressed in scotch tweed. his steady grey eyes and firm mouth, a little set and rigid, the impeccability of all about him, had stamped business upon his face as upon his clothes. 'oh, i can't queer your pitch, beauty,' he said a little grimly. 'i know you, you low dog.' beauty laughed at the epithet. 'you've got no poetry about you, you north country chaps, when a girl's as lovely as victoria--' 'as lovely as victoria,' he repeated a little louder as victoria laid the cup of coffee before him. 'i know all about that,' said victoria coolly, 'you don't come it over me like that, nevy.' 'cruel, cruel girl,' sighed neville. 'ah, if you only knew what i feel----' victoria put her hand on the tablecloth and, for a moment, looked down into neville's blue eyes. 'you oughtn't to be allowed out,' she pronounced, 'you aren't safe.' jimmy got up as if he had been sitting on a suddenly released spring. 'spoon away both of you,' he said smoothly, 'i'm going over to parsons' to buy a racquet. coming, beauty? no, thought as much. ta-ta, vic. excuse me. steak and kidney pie is tenpence, not a shilling. cheer oh! beauty.' 'he's a rum one,' said victoria, reflectively, as jimmy passed the cash desk. 'jimmy? oh, he's all right,' said neville, 'but look here vic, i want to speak to you. let's go on the bust to-night. dinner at the new gaiety and the theatre. what d'you think?' victoria looked at him for a second. 'you are a cure, nevy,' she said. 'then that's a bargain?' said brown, eagerly snapping up her non-refusal. 'meet me at strand tube station half-past seven. you're off to-night, i know.' 'oh you know, do you,' said victoria smiling. 'been pumping bella i suppose, like the rest. she's a green one, that girl.' neville looked up at her appealingly. 'never mind how i know,' he said, 'say you'll come, we'll have a ripping time.' 'well, p'raps i will and p'raps i won't,' said victoria. 'your bill, sir? yessir.' victoria went to the next table. while she wrote she exchanged chaff with the customers. one had not raised his eyes from his book; one stood waiting for his bill; the other two, creatures about to be men, raised languid eyes from their coffee cups. one negligently puffed a jet of tobacco smoke upwards towards victoria. 'rotten,' she said briefly, 'i see you didn't buy those up west.' 'that's what _you_ think, vic,' said the youth, 'fact is i got them in the burlington. have one?' 'no thanks. don't want to be run in.' 'have a match then.' the young man held up a two inch vesta. 'what price that, eh? pinched 'em from the troc' last night.' 'you are a toff, bertie,' said victoria with unction. 'i'll have it as a keepsake.' she took it and stuck it in her belt. bertie leaned over to his neighbour. 'it's a mash,' he said confidently. 'take her to kew,' said his friend, 'next stop brighton.' 'can't run to it, old cock,' said the youth. 'however we shall see.' 'vic, vic,' whispered neville. but victoria had passed him quickly and was answering mr stein. 'vat you mean by it,' he growled, 'making de gentleman vait for his ticket, gn?' 'beg your pardon, mr stein, i did nothing of the kind. the gentleman was making _me_ wait while he talked to his friend.' victoria could now lie coolly and well. stein looked at her savagely and slowly walked away along the gangway between the tables, glowering from right to left, looking managerially for possible complaints. victoria turned back from the counter. there, behind the coffee urn where cora presided, stood burton, in his blue suit, tiny beads of perspiration appearing on his forehead. his little blue eyes fixed themselves upon her like drills seeking in her being the line of least resistance where he could deliver his attack. she almost fled, as if she had seen a snake, every facet of her memory causing the touch of his hot warm hand to materialise. 'vic,' said neville's voice softly as she passed, 'is it yes?' she looked down at the handsome face. 'yes, beauty boy,' she whispered, and walked away. chapter xvi 'silly ass,' remarked victoria angrily. she threw edward's letter on the table. unconsciously she spoke the 'rosebud' language, for contact had had its effect upon her; she no longer awoke with a start to the fact that she was speaking an alien tongue, a tongue she would once have despised. edward had expressed his interest in her welfare in a letter of four pages covered with his thin writing, every letter of which was legible and sloped at the proper angle. he 'considered it exceedingly undesirable for her to adopt a profession such as that of waitress.' it was comforting to know that 'he was relieved to see that she had the common decency to change her name, and he trusted. . . .' here victoria had stopped. 'i can't bear it,' she said. 'i can't, can't, can't. twopenny little schoolmaster lecturing me, me who've got to earn every penny i get by fighting for it in the dirt, so to say.' every one of edward's features came up before her eyes, his straggling fair hair, his bloodless face, his fumbling ineffective hands. this pedagogue who had stepped from scholardom to teacherdom dared to blame or eulogise the steps she took to earn her living, to be free to live or die as she chose. it was preposterous. what did he know of life? victoria seized a pen and feverishly scribbled on a crumpled sheet of paper. 'my dear edward,--what i do's my business. i've got to live and i can't choose. and you can be sure that so long as i can keep myself i shan't come to you for help or advice. perhaps you don't know what freedom is, never having had any. but i do and i'm going to keep it even if it costs me the approval of you people who sit at home comfortably and judge people like me who want to be strong and free. but what's the good of talking about freedom to you.-- your affectionate sister, victoria'. she addressed the envelope and ran out hatless to post it at the pillar box in edgware road. as she crossed the road homewards a horse bus rumbled by. it carried an enormous advertisement of the new musical comedy _the teapot girl_. 'a fine comedy indeed,' she thought, suddenly a little weary. as she entered her room, where a small oil lamp diffused a sphere of graduated light, she was seized as by the throat by the oppression of the silent summer night. the wind had fallen; not even a whirl of dust stirred in the air. alone and far away a piano organ in a square droned and clanked italian melody. she thought of edward and of her letter. perhaps she had been too sharp. once upon a time she would not have written like that: she was getting common. victoria sat down on a little chair, her hands clasped together in her lap, her eyes looking out at the blank wall opposite. this, nine o'clock, was the fatal hour when the ghosts of her dead past paced like caged beasts up and down in her small room, and the wraith of the day's work rattled its chains. there had been earlier times when, in the first flush of independence, she had sat down to gloat over what was almost success, her liberty, her living earned by her own efforts. the rosiness of freedom then wrapped around the dinge with wreaths of fancy, wreaths that curled incessantly into harmonious shapes. but victoria had soon plumbed the depths of speculation and found that the fire of imagination needs shadowy fuel for its shadowy combustion. day by day her brain had become less lissome. then, instead of thinking for the joy of thought, she had read some fourpenny-halfpenny novel, a paper even, picked up in the tube. her mind was waking up, visualising, realising, and in its troublous surgings made for something to cling to to steady itself. but months rolled on and on, inharmonious in their sameness, unrelieved by anything from the monotony of work and sleep. certain facts meant certain things and recurred eternally with their unchanging meaning; the knock that awoke her, a knock so individual and habitual that her sleepy brain was conscious on sundays that she need not respond; the smell of food which began to assail her faintly as she entered the 'rosebud,' then grew to pungency and reek at midday, blended with tobacco, then slowly ebbed almost into nothingness: the dying day that was grateful to her eyes when she left to go home, when things looked kindly round her. when victoria realised all of a sudden her loneliness in her island in star street, something like the fear of the hunted had driven her out into the streets. she was afraid to be alone, for not even books could save her from her thoughts, those hounds in full cry. in such moods she had walked the streets quickly, looking at nothing, maintaining her pace over hills. now and then she had suddenly landed on a slum, caught sight of, all beery and bloody, through the chink of a black lane. but she shunned the flares, the wet pavement, the orange peel that squelched beneath her boots, afraid of the sight of too vigorous life. unconsciously she had sought the drug of weariness, and the cunning bred of her dipsomania told her that the living were poor companions for her soul. and, when at times a man had followed her, his eye arrested by the lines of her face lit up by a gas lamp, he had soon tired of her quick walk and turned away towards weaker vessels. but even weariness, when abused, loses its power as a sedative. the body, at once hardened and satiated, demands more every day as it craves for increasing doses of morphia, for more food, more drink, more kisses, more, ever more. thus victoria had reached her last stage when, sitting alone in her room, she once more faced the emptiness where the ghosts of her dead past paced like caged beasts and the wraith of the day's work rattled its chains. from this, now a state of mental instead of physical exhaustion, she was seldom roused; and it needed an edward come to judgment to stir her sleepy brain into quick passion. again and again the events of the day would chase round and round maddeningly with every one of their little details sharp as crystals. victoria could almost mechanically repeat some conversations, all trifling, similar, confined to half a dozen topics; she could feel, too, but casually as an odalisque, the hot wave of desire which surrounded her all day, evidenced by eyes that glittered, fastened on her hands as she served, on her face, the curve of her neck, her breast, her hips; eyes that devoured and divested her of her meretricious livery. and, worse perhaps than that big primitive surge which left her cold but unangered, the futility of others who bandied with her the daily threadbare joke, who wearied her mind with questions as to food, compelled her to sympathise with the vagaries of the weather or were arch, flirtatious and dragged out of her tired mind the necessary response. even butty and the moist warmth of him, even stein with his flaccid surly face, were better in their grossness than these vapid youths, thoughtless, incapable of thought, incapable of imagining thought, who set her down as an inferior, as a toy for games that were not even those of men. 'beauty' had been a disappointment. she had met him two or three times since their first evening out. that night neville, who was a young man of the world, had pressed his suit so delicately, preserving in so cat-like a manner his lines of retreat, that she had not been able to snub him when inclined to. he had a small private income and knew how to make the best of his good looks by means of gentle manners and smart clothes. in the insurance office where he was one of those clerks who have lately evolved from the junior stage, he was nothing in particular and earned ten pounds a month. he had furnished two rooms on the chelsea edge of kensington, belonged to an inexpensive club in st james's, had been twice to brussels and once to paris; he smoked turkish cigarettes, deeming virginia common; he subscribed to a library in connection with mudie's, and knew enough of the middle classes to exaggerate his impression of them into the smart set. perhaps he tried a little too much to be a gentleman. neville brown was strongly attracted to victoria. he had vainly tried to draw her out, and scented the lie in her carefully concocted story. he knew enough to feel that she was at heart one of those women he met 'in society,' perhaps a little better. thus she puzzled him extremely, for she was not even facile; he could hold her hand; she had not refused him kisses, but he was afraid to secure his grip on her as a man carrying a butterfly stirs not a finger for fear it should escape. victoria turned all this over lazily. her instinct told her what manner of man was neville, for he hardly concealed his desires. indeed their relations had something of the charm of a masqued ball. she saw well enough that neville was not likely to remain content with kisses, and viewed the inevitable battle with mixed feelings. she liked him; indeed, in certain moods and when his blue eyes were at their bluest, he attracted her magnetically. the reminiscent scent of turkish tobacco on her lips always drew her back towards him; and yet she was of her class, shy of love, of all that is illicit because unacknowledged. she knew very well that neville would hardly ask her to marry him and that she would refuse if he did; she knew less well what she would do if he asked her to love him. when she analysed their relation she always found that all lay on the lap of the gods. in the loneliness of night her thoughts would fasten on him more intently. he was youth and warmth and friendliness, words for the silent, a hand to touch; better still he was a figment of love itself, with all its tenderness and crudity, its heat, all the quivers of its body; he was soft scented as the mysterious giver of passionate gifts. so, when victoria lay down to try and sleep she rocked in the trough of the waves of doubt. she could not tell into what hands she would give, if she gave, her freedom, her independence of thought and deed, all that security which is dear to the sheltered class from which she came. so, far into the night she would struggle for sight, tossing from right to left and left to right, thrusting away and then recalling the brown face, the blue eyes and their promise. chapter xvii the days rolled on, and on every one, as their scroll revealed itself, victoria inscribed doings which never varied. the routine grew heavier as she found that the events of a monday were so similar to those of another monday that after a month she could not locate happenings. she no longer read newspapers. there was nothing in them for her; not even the mock tragedy of the death of an heir presumptive or the truer grimness of a shipwreck could rouse in her an emotion. she did not care for adventure: not because she thought that adventure was beneath her notice, but because it could not affect her. a revolution could have happened, but she would have served boiled cod and coffees to the groundlings, wings of chicken to the luxurious, without a thought for the upheaval, provided it did not flutter the pink curtains beyond which hummed the world. at times, for the holiday season was not over and work was rather slack, victoria had time to sit on her 'attendant' chair and to think awhile. reading nothing and seeing no one save beauty and mrs smith, she was thinking once more and thinking dangerously much. often she would watch lottie, negligently serving, returning the ball of futility with a carelessness that was almost grace, or cora talking smart slang in young lady-like tones. 'to what end?' thought victoria. 'what are we doing here, wasting our lives, i suppose, to feed these boys. for what's the good of feeding them so that they may scrawl figures in books and catch trains and perhaps one day, unless they've got too old, marry some dull girl and have more children than they can keep? we girls, we're wasted too.' so strongly did she feel this that, one day, she prospected the unexplored ground of cora's mind. 'what are you worrying about?' remarked cora, after victoria had tried to inflame her with noble discontent. 'i don't say it's all honey, this job of ours, but you can have a good time pretty well every night, can't you, let alone sundays?' 'but i don't want a good time,' said victoria, suddenly inspired. 'i want to feel i'm alive, do something.' 'do what?' said cora. 'live, see things, travel.' 'oh, we don't get a chance, of course,' said cora. 'i'll tell you how it is, vic, you want too much. if you want anything in life you've got to want nothing, then whatever you get good seems jolly good.' 'you're a pessimist, cora,' said victoria smiling. 'meaning i see the sad side? don't you believe it. every cloud has a silver lining, you know.' 'and every silver lining has a cloud,' said victoria, sadly. 'now, vic,' answered cora crossly, 'don't you go on like that. you'll only mope and mope. and what's the good of that, i'd like to know.' 'oh, i don't know,' said victoria, 'i like thinking of things. sometimes i wish i could make an end of it. don't you?' 'lord, no,' said cora, 'i make the best of it. you take my tip and don't think too much.' victoria bent down in her chair, her chin upon her open palm. cora slapped her on the back. 'cheer up,' she said, 'we'll soon be dead.' victoria had also attempted gladys, but had discovered without surprise that her association with cora had equalised their minds as well as the copper of their hair. lottie never said much when attacked on a general subject, while bella never said anything at all. since the day when victoria had attempted to draw her out on the fateful question 'what's the good of anything?' bella prodgitt had looked upon victoria as a dangerous revolutionary. at times she would follow the firebrand round the shop with frightened and admiring eyes. for her victoria was something like the brilliant relation of whom the family is proud without daring to acknowledge him. it fell to gertie's lot to enlighten victoria further on the current outlook of life. it came about in this way. one saturday afternoon victoria and bella were alone on duty upstairs, for the serving of lunch is then at a low ebb; the city makes a desperate effort to reach the edge of the world to lunch peacefully and cheaply in its homes and lodgings. lottie and gertie were taking the smoking room below. it was nearly three o'clock. at one of the larger tables sat two men, both almost through with their lunch. the elder of the two, a stout, cheery-looking man, pushed away his cup, slipped two pennies under the saucer and, taking up his bill, which victoria had made out when she gave him his coffee, went up to the cash desk. the other man, a pale-faced youth in a blue suit, sat before his half emptied cup. his hand passed nervously round his chin as he surveyed the room; his was rather the face of a ferret, with a long upper lip, watery blue eyes, and a weak chin. his forehead sloped a little and was decorated with many pimples. victoria passed him quickly, caught up the stout man, entered the cash desk and took his bill. he turned in the doorway. 'well, vic,' he said, 'when are we going to be married?' ' th of february, if it's not a leap year,' she laughed. 'too bad, too bad,' said the stout man, looking back from the open door out of which he had already passed, 'you're the third girl who's said that to me in a fortnight.' 'serve you right,' said victoria, looking into the mirror opposite, 'you're as bad as henry the . . . .' the door closed. victoria did not finish her sentence. her eyes were glued to the mirror. in it she could only see a young man with a thin face, decorated with many pimples, hurriedly gulping down the remains of his cup of coffee. but a second before then she had seen something which made her fetch a quick breath. the young man had looked round, marked that her head was turned away; he had thrown a quick glance to the right and the left, to the counter which bella had left for a moment to go into the kitchen; then his hand had shot out and, with a quick movement, he had seized the stout man's pennies and slipped them under his own saucer. the young man got up. victoria came up to him and made out his bill. he took it without a word and paid it at the desk, victoria taking his money. 'well, he didn't steal it, did he?' said gertie, when victoria told her of the incident. 'no, not exactly. unless he stole it from the first man.' ''ow could he steal it if he didn't take it?' snapped gertie. 'well, he made believe to tip me when he didn't, and he made believe that the first man was mean when it was he who was,' said victoria. 'so he stole it from the first man to give it me.' 'lord, i don't see what yer after,' said gertie. 'you ain't lost nothing. and the first fellow he ain't lost nothing either. he'd _left_ his money.' victoria struggled for a few sentences. the little cockney brain could not take in her view. gertie could only see that victoria had had twopence from somebody instead of from somebody else, so what was her trouble? 'tell yer wot,' said gertie summing up the case, 'seems ter me the fellow knew wot he was after. dodgy sort of thing to do. oughter 'ave thought of the looking-glass though.' victoria turned away from gertie's crafty little smile. there was something in the girl that she could not understand; nor could gertie understand her scruple. gertie helped her a little though to solve the problem of waste; this girl could hardly be wasted, thought victoria, for of what use could she be? she had neither the fine physique that enables a woman to bear big stupid sons, nor the intelligence which breeds a cleverer generation; she was sunk in the worship of easy pleasure, and ever bade the fleeting joy to tarry yet awhile. 'she isn't alive at all,' said victoria to lottie. 'she merely grows older.' 'well, so do we,' replied lottie in matter of fact tones. victoria was compelled to admit the truth of this, but she did not see her point clearly enough to state it. lottie, besides, did nothing to draw her out. in some ways she was victoria's oasis in the desert, for she was simple and gentle, but her status lymphaticus was permanent. she did not even dream. victoria's psychological enquiries did not tend to make her popular. the verdict of the 'rosebud' was that she was a 'rum one,' perhaps a 'deep one.' the staff were confirmed in their suspicions that she was a 'deep one' by the obvious attentions that mr burton paid her. they were not prudish, except bella, who objected to 'goings on'; to be distinguished by butty was rather disgusting, but it was flattering too. 'he could have anybody he liked, the dirty old tyke,' remarked cora. 'of course i'm not taking any,' she added in response to a black look from bella prodgitt. victoria was not 'taking any' either, but she every day found greater difficulty in repelling him. burton would stand behind the counter near the kitchen door during the lunch hour, and whenever victoria had to come up to it, he would draw closer, so close that she could see over the whites of his little eyes a fine web of blood vessels. every time she came and went her skirts brushed against his legs; on her neck sometimes she felt the rush of his bitter scented breath. one afternoon, in the change room, as she was dressing alone to leave at four, the door opened. she had taken off her blouse and turned with a little cry. burton had come in suddenly. he walked straight up to her, his eyes not fixed on hers but on her bare arms. a faintness came over her. she hardly had the strength to repel him, as without a word he threw one arm round her waist, seizing her above the elbow with his other hand. as he tried to draw her towards him she saw a few inches from her face, just the man's mouth, red and wet, like the sucker of a leech, the lips parted over the yellow teeth. 'let me go!' she hissed, throwing her head back. burton ground her against him, craning his neck to touch her lips with his. 'don't be silly,' he whispered, 'i love you. you be my little girl.' 'let me go.' victoria shook him savagely. 'none of that.' burton's eyes were glittering. the corners had pulled upwards with rage. 'let me go, i say.' burton did not answer. for a minute they wrestled. victoria thrust him back against the wall. she almost turned sick as his hand, slipping round her, flattened itself on her bare shoulder. in that moment of weakness burton won, and, bending her over, kissed her on the mouth. she struggled, but burton had gripped her behind the neck. three times he kissed her on the lips. a convulsion of disgust and she lay motionless in his embrace. there was a step on the stairs. a few seconds later burton had slipped out by the side door. 'what's up?' said gladys suspiciously. victoria had sunk upon a chair, breathless, dishevelled, her face in her hands. 'nothing . . . i . . . i feel sick,' she faltered. then she savagely wiped her mouth with her feather boa. victoria was getting a grip of things. the brute, the currish brute. the words rang in her head like a chorus. for days, the memory of the affray did not leave her. she guarded, too, against any recurrence of the scene. her hatred for burton seemed to increase the fascination of neville. she did not think of them together, but it always seemed to happen that, immediately after thrusting away the toad-like picture of the chairman, she thought of the blue-eyed boy. yet her relations with neville were ill-fated. some days after the foul incident in the change room, neville took her for one of his little 'busts.' as it was one of her late nights he called for her at a quarter past nine. they walked towards the west and, on the stroke of ten, neville escorted her into one of the enormous restaurants that the refreshment rendezvous, known to london as the ah-ah, runs as anonymously as it may. victoria was amused. the r. r. was the owner of a palace, built, if not for the classes, certainly not for the masses. its facing was of tortured portland stone, where greek columns, italian, louis xiv and tudor mouldings blended with rich byzantine gildings and pre-raphaelite frescoes. inside too, it was all plush, mainly red; gold again; palms, fountains, with goldfish and tin ducks. the restaurant was quite a fair imitation of the carlton, but a table d'hôte supper was provided for eighteen pence, including finger bowls in which floated a rose petal. neville and victoria sat at a small table made for two. she surrendered her feet to the clasp of his. around her were about two hundred couples and a hundred family parties. most of the young men were elaborately casual; they wore blue or tweed suits, a few, frock coats marred by double collars; they had a tendency to loll and to puff the insolent tobacco smoke of virginias towards the distant roof. their young ladies talked a great deal and looked about. there was much wriggling of chairs, much giggling, much pulling up of long gloves over bare arms. in a corner, all alone, a young man in well-fitting evening clothes was consuming in melancholy some chocolate and a sandwich. neville plied victoria with the major part of a half bottle of claret. 'burgundy's the thing,' he said. 'more body in it.' 'yes, it is good, isn't it? i mustn't have any more, though.' 'oh, you're all right,' said neville indulgently. 'let's have some coffee and a liqueur.' 'no, no liqueur for me.' 'well, coffee then. here, waiter.' neville struggled for some minutes. he utterly failed to gain the ear of the waiters. 'let's go, beauty,' said victoria. 'i don't want any coffee. no, really, i'd rather not. i can't sleep if i take it.' the couple walked up regent street, then along piccadilly. neville held victoria's arm. he had slipped his fingers under the long glove. she did not withdraw her arm. his touch tickled her senses to quiescence if not to satisfaction. they turned into the park. just behind the statue of achilles they stepped upon the grass and at once neville threw his arm round victoria. it was a little chilly; mist was rising from the grass. the trees stood blackly out of it, as if sawn off a few feet from the ground. neville stopped. a little smile was on his lips. 'beauty boy,' said victoria. he drew her towards him and kissed her. he kissed her on the forehead, then on the cheek, for he was a sybarite, in matters of love something of an artist, just behind the ear, then passionately on the lips. victoria closed her eyes and threw one arm round his neck. she felt exhilarated, as if gently warmed. they walked further westwards, and with every step the fog thickened. 'let's stop, beauty,' said victoria, after they had rather suddenly walked up to a thicket. 'we'll get lost in the wilderness.' 'and wilderness were paradise enow,' murmured neville in her ear. victoria did not know the hackneyed line. it sounded beautiful to her. she laughed nervously and let neville draw her down by his side on the grass. 'oh, let me go, beauty,' she whispered. 'suppose someone should come.' neville did not answer. he had clasped her to him. his lips were more insistent on hers. she felt his hand on her breast. 'oh, no, no, beauty, don't, please don't,' she said weakly. for some minutes she lay passive in his grasp. he had undone the back of her blouse. his hand, cold and dry, had slipped along her shoulder, seeking warmth. slowly his clasp grew harder; he used his weight. victoria bent under it. something like faintness came over her. 'victoria, victoria, my darling.' the voice seemed far away. she was giving way more and more. not a blade of grass shuddered under its shroud of mist. from the road came the roar of a motorbus, like a muffled drum. then she felt the damp of the grass on her back through the opening of her blouse. a second later she was sitting up. she had thrust neville away with a savage push under the chin. he seized her once more. she fought him, seeing nothing to struggle with but a silent dark shadow. 'no, beauty, no, you mustn't,' she panted. they were standing then, both of them. 'vic, darling, why not?' pleaded neville gently, still holding her hand. 'i don't know. oh, no, really i can't, beauty.' she did not know it, but generations of clean living were fighting behind her, driving back and crushing out the forces of nature. she did not know that, like most women, she was not a free being but the great-granddaughter of a woman whose forbears had taught her that illegal surrender is evil. 'i'm sorry, beauty, . . . it's my fault,' she said. 'oh, don't mention it,' said neville icily, dropping her hand. 'you're playing with me, that's all.' 'i'm not,' said victoria, tears of excitement in her eyes. 'oh, beauty, don't you understand. we women, we can't do what we like. it's so hard. we're poor, and life is so dull and we wish we were dead. and then a man comes like you and the only thing he can offer, we mustn't take it.' 'but why, why?' asked beauty. 'i don't know,' said victoria. 'we mustn't. at any rate i mustn't. my freedom is all i've got and i can't give it up to you like that. i like you, you know that, don't you, beauty?' neville did not answer. 'i do, beauty. but i can't, don't you see. if i were a rich woman it would be different. i'd owe nobody anything. but i'm poor; it'd pull me down and . . . when a woman's down, men either kick or kiss her.' neville shrugged his shoulders. 'let's go,' he said. silently, side by side, they walked out of the park. chapter xviii october was dying, its russet tints slowly merging into grey. thin mists, laden with fine specks of soot, had penetrated into the 'rosebud.' victoria, in her black business dress, under which she now had to wear a vest which rather killed the tip-drawing power of her openwork blouse, was setting her tables, quickly crossing red cloths over white, polishing the glasses, arranging knives and forks in artistic if inconvenient positions. it was ten o'clock, but business had not begun, neither mr stein nor butty having arrived. 'cold, ain't it?' remarked gertie. 'might be colder,' said bella prodgitt. victoria came towards them, carrying a trayful of cruets. ''ow's beauty?' asked gertie. victoria passed by without a word. this romance had not added to the popularity of the chairman's favourite. cora and gladys were busy dusting the counter and polishing the urns. lottie, in front of a wall glass, was putting the finishing touches to the set of her cap. the door opened to let in mr stein, strapped tight in his frock coat, his top hat set far back on his bullet head. he glared for a moment at the staff in general, then without a word took a letter addressed to him from a rack bearing several addressed to customers, and passed into the cash desk. the girls resumed their polishing more busily. quickly the night wrappings fell from the chandeliers; the rosebud baskets were teased into shape; the tables, loaded swiftly with their sets, grew more becoming. victoria, passing from table to table set on each a small vase full of chrysanthemums. 'i say, gladys, look at stein,' whispered cora to her neighbour. gladys straightened herself from under the counter and followed the direction of cora's finger. 'lord,' she said, 'what's up?' bella's attention was attracted. she too was interested in her bovine way. mr stein's attitude was certainly unusual. he held a sheet of paper in one hand, his other hand clutching at his cheek so hard as to make one of his eyes protrude. both his eyes were fixed on the sheet of paper, incredulous and horror-stricken. 'i say, vic, what's the matter with the little swine?' suddenly said lottie, who had at length noticed him. victoria looked. stein had not moved. for some seconds all the girls gazed spellbound at the frozen figure in the cashbox. the silence of tragedy was on them, a silence which arrests gesture and causes hearts to beat. 'lord, i can't stick this,' whispered cora, 'there's something wrong.' quickly diving under the counter flap she ran towards the pay box where stein still sat unmoving, as if petrified. the little group of girls watched her. bella's stertorous breathing was plainly heard. cora opened the glass door and seized stein by the arm. 'what's the matter, mr stein?' she said excitedly, 'are you feeling queer?' stein started like a somnambulist suddenly awakened and looked at her stupidly, then at the motionless girls in the shop. 'nein, nein, lassen sie doch,' he muttered. 'mr stein, mr stein,' half-screamed cora. 'oh, get out, i'm all right, but the game's up. he's gone. the game's up i tell up. the game's up.' cora looked at him round-eyed. mr stein's idioms frightened her almost more than his german. stein was babbling, speaking louder and louder. 'gone away, burton. bankrupt and got all the cash. . . . see? you get the sack. starve. so do i and my vife. . . . ach, ach, ach, ach. mein gott, mein gott, was solls. . . .' gertie watched from the counter with a heightened colour. lottie and victoria, side by side, had not moved. a curious chill had seized victoria, stiffening her wrists and knees. stein was talking quicker and quicker, with a voice that was not his. 'ach, the damned scoundrel . . . the schweinehund . . . he knew the business was going to the dogs, ach, schweinehund, schweinehund. . . .' he paused. less savage his thoughts turned to his losses. 'two hundred shares he sold me. . . . i paid a premium . . . they vas to go to four . . . ach, ach, ach. . . . i'm in the cart.' gertie sniggered gently. the idiom had swamped the tragedy. stein looked round at the sound. his face had gone leaden; his greasy plastered hair was all awry. 'vat you laughing at, gn?' he asked savagely, suddenly resuming his managerial tone. 'take it we're bust, ain't we?' said gertie, stepping forward jauntily. stein lifted, then dropped one hand. 'yes,' he said, 'bust.' 'thank you for a week's wages, mr stein,' said gertie, 'and i'll push off, if yer don't mind.' stein laughed harshly. with a theatrical movement he seized the cash drawer by the handle, drew it out and flung it on the floor. it was empty. 'oh, that's 'ow it is,' said gertie. 'you're a fine gentleman, i don't think. bloomin' lot of skunks. what price that, mate?' she screamed addressing bella, who still sat in her chair, her cheeks rising and falling like the sides of a cuttlefish. ''ere's a fine go. fellers comes along and tikes in poor girls like me and you and steals the bread outer their mouths. i'll 'ave yer run in, yer bloody foreigner.' she waved her fist in the man's face. 'for two pins,' she screamed, 'i'd smash yer fice, i'd. . . .' 'chuck it, gertie,' said lottie, suddenly taking her by the arm, 'don't you see he's got nothing to do with it?' 'oh, indeed, miss mealymouth,' sneered gertie, 'what i want is my money . . . .' 'leave him alone, gertie,' said victoria, 'you can't kick a man when he's down.' gertie looked as if she were about to explode. then the problem became too big for her. in her little cockney brain the question was insolubly revolving: 'can you kick a man when he's down. . .? can you kick. . .?' mr stein passed his hand over his forehead. he was pulling himself together. 'close de door, cora,' he commanded. 'now then, the company's bankrupt, there's nothing in the cashbox. you get the push. . . . i get the push.' his voice broke slightly. his face twitched. 'you can go. get another job.' he looked at gertie. 'put down your address. i give it to the police. you get something for wages.' he slowly turned away and sat down on a chair, his eyes fixed on the wall. there was a repressed hubbub of talking. then gertie made the first move and went up to the change room. she came back a minute or two later in her long coat and large hat, carrying a parcel which none noticed as being rather large for a comb. it contained the company's cap and apron which, thought she, she might as well save from the wreck. gertie shook hands with cora. 'see yer ter-night,' she said airily, 'same old place; 'bye miss prodgitt, 'ope "force" 'll lift you out of this.' she shook hands with victoria, a trifle coldly, kissed lottie, threw one last malevolent look at stein's back. the door closed behind her. she had passed out of the backwater into the main stream. lottie, a little self consciously, pulled down the pink blinds, in token of mourning. the 'rosebud' hung broken on its stalk. then, silently, she went up into the change room, followed by cora; a pace behind came victoria, all heavy with gloom. they dressed silently. cora, without a word, kissed them both, collected her small possessions into a reticule, then shook hands with both and kissed them again. the door closed behind her. when lottie and victoria went down into the shop, cora also had passed into the main stream. gladys had gone with her. the two girls hesitated for a moment as to whether they should speak to stein. it was almost dark, for the october light was too weak to filter through the thick pink blinds. lottie went up to the dark figure. 'cheer up,' she said kindly, 'it's a long lane that has no turning.' stein looked up uncomprehendingly, then sank his head into his hands. as lottie and victoria turned once more, the front door open behind them, all they saw was bella prodgitt, lymphatic as ever, motionless on her chair, like a watcher over the figure of the man silently mourning his last hopes. as they passed into the street the fresh air quickened by the coming cold of winter, stung their blood to action. the autumn sunlight, pale like the faded gold of hair that age has silvered, threw faint shadows on the dry white pavements where little whirlwinds of dust chased and figured like swallows on the wing. lottie and victoria walked quickly down the city streets. it was half-past eleven, a time when, the rush of the morning over, comparative emptiness awaits the coming of the midday crowds; every minute they were stopped by the blocks of drays and carriages which come in greater numbers in the road as men grow fewer on the pavements. the unaccustomed liberty of the hour did not strike them; for depression, a sense of impotence before fatality, was upon them. indeed, they did not pause until they reached on the embankment the spot where the two beautiful youths prepare to fasten on one another their grip of bronze. they sat down upon a seat and for a while remained silent. 'what are you going to do? lottie?' asked victoria. 'look out for another job, of course,' said lottie. 'in the same line?' said victoria. 'i'll try that first,' replied lottie, 'but you know i'm not particular. there's all sorts of shops. nice soft little jobs at photographers, and manicuring showrooms, i don't mind.' victoria, with the leaden weight of former days pressing on her, envied lottie's calm optimism. she seemed so capable. but so far as she herself was concerned, she did not feel sure that the 'other job' would so easily be found. indeed the memory of her desperate hunt for work wrapped itself round her, cold as a shroud. 'but what if you can't get one,' she faltered. 'oh, that'll be all right,' said lottie, airily. 'i can live with my married sister for a bit, but i'll find a job somehow. that doesn't worry me. what are you thinking of?' 'i don't know,' said victoria slowly, 'i must look out i suppose.' 'hard up?' asked lottie. 'no, not exactly,' said victoria. 'i'm not rolling in wealth, you know, but i can manage.' 'well, don't you go and get stranded or anything,' said lottie. 'it doesn't do to be proud. it's not much i can do, but anyhow you let me know if--' she paused. victoria put her hand on hers. 'you're a bit of all right, lottie,' she said softly, her feelings forming naturally into the language of her adopted class. for a few minutes the girls sat hand in hand. 'well, i'd better be going,' said lottie. 'i'm going to my married sister at highgate first. time enough to look about this afternoon.' the two girls exchanged addresses. victoria watched her friend's slim figure grow smaller and slimmer under her crown of pale hair, then almost fade away, merge into men and women and suddenly vanish at a turn, swallowed up. with a little shiver she got up and walked away quickly towards the west. she was lonely suddenly, horribly so. one by one, all the links of her worldly chain had snapped. burton, the sensual brute, was gone; stein was perhaps sitting still numb and silent in the darkened shop; gertie, flippant and sharp, had sailed forth on life's ocean, there to be tossed like a cork and like a cork to swim; now lottie was gone, cool and confident, to dangers underrated and unknown. she stood alone. as she reached westminster bridge a strange sense of familiarity overwhelmed her. a well-known figure was there and it was horribly symbolical. it was the old vagrant of bygone days, sitting propped up against the parapet, clad in his filthy rags. from his short clay pipe, at long intervals, he puffed wreaths of smoke into the blue air. chapter xix the russet of october had turned into the bleak darkness of december. the threat of winter was in the air; it hissed and sizzled in the bare branches as they bent in the cold wind, shaking quivering drops of water broadcast as if sowing the seeds of pain. victoria stopped for a moment on the threshold of the house in star street, looked up and down the road. it was black and sodden with wet; the pavement was greasy and glistening, flecked with cabbage stalks and orange peel. then she looked across at the small shop where, though it was sunday, a tailor sat cross-legged almost on a level with the street, painfully collecting with weary eyes the avaricious light. his back was bowed with habit; that and his bandy legs told of his life and revealed his being. in the street, when he had time to walk there, boys mocked his shuffling gate, thus paying popular tribute to the marks of honest toil. victoria stepped down to the pavement. a dragging sensation made her look at her right boot. the sole was parting from the upper, stitch by stitch. with something that was hardly a sigh victoria put her foot down again and slowly walked away. she turned into edgware road, followed it northwards for a while, then doubled sharply back into praed street where she lingered awhile before an old curiosity shop. she looked between two prints into the shop where, in the darkness, she could see nothing. yet she looked at nothingness for quite a long while. then, listlessly, she followed the street, turned back through a square and stopped before a tiny chapel almost at the end of star street. the deity that follows with passionless eyes the wanderer in mean streets knew from her course that this woman had no errand; without emotion the being snipped a few minutes from her earthly span. by the side of the chapel sat an aged woman smothered in rags so many and so thick that she was passing well clad. she was hunched up on a camp stool, all string and bits of firewood. a small stove carrying an iron tray told that her trade was selling roasted chestnuts; nothing moved in the group; the old woman's face was brown and cracked as her own chestnuts and there was less life in her than in the warm scent of the roasting fruits which gratefully filled victoria's nostrils. the eight weeks which now separated victoria from the old days at the 'rosebud' had driven deeper yet into her soul her unimportance. she was powerless before the world; indeed, when she thought of it at all, she no longer likened herself to a cork tossed in the storm, but to a pebble sunken and motionless in the bed of a flowing river. upon the day which followed her sudden uprooting victoria had bent her back to the task of finding work. she had known once more the despairing search through the advertisement columns of the _daily telegraph_, the skilful winnowing of chaff from wheat, sudden and then baffled hopes. her new professional sense had taken her to the shops where young women are wanted to enhance the attraction of coffee and cigarettes. but the bankruptcy of the 'rosebud' was not an isolated case. the dishonesty of burton was not its cause but its consequence; the ship was sinking under his feet when he deserted it after loading himself with such booty as he could carry. victoria had discovered grimly that the first result of a commercial crisis is the submerging of those whose labours create a commercial boom. within a week of the 'rosebud' disaster the eleven city cafés of the 'lethe, ltd.' had closed their doors. two small failures in the west end were followed by a greater crash. the 'people's restaurants, ltd.', eaten out by the thousand depots of the 'refreshment rendezvous, ltd.,' had filed a voluntary petition for liquidation; the official liquidator had at once inaugurated a policy of 'retrenchment and sound business management,' and, as a beginning, closed two hundred shops in the city and west end. he proposed to exploit the suburbs, and, after a triumphant amalgamation with the victorious 'refreshment rendezvous,' to retire from law into peaceful directorships and there collect innumerable guineas. victoria had followed the convulsion with passionate interest. for a week the restaurant slump had been the fashion. the manager of every surviving café in london had given it as his deliberate opinion that trade would be all the better for it. the financial papers published grave warnings as to the dangers of the restaurant business, to which the stock exchange promptly responded by marking up the prices of the survivors' shares. the socialist papers had eloquently pleaded for government assistance for the two thousand odd displaced girls; a cabinet minister had marred his parliamentary reputation by endeavouring to satisfy one wing of his party that the tearoom at south kensington museum was not a socialistic venture and the other wing that it was an institution leading up to state ownership of the trade. a girl discharged from the 'lethe' had earned five guineas by writing a thousand words in a hated but largely read daily paper. the interest had been kept up by the rescue of a p.r. girl who had jumped off waterloo bridge. another p.r. girl, fired by example, had been more successful in the lea. this valuable advertisement enabled the relief fund to distribute five shillings a head to many young persons who had been waitresses at some time or another; there were rumours of a knighthood for its energetic promoter. it was in the midst of this welter that victoria had found herself cast, with her newly acquired experience a drug in the market, and all the world inclined to look upon her as a kind of adventuress. her employer's failure was in a sense her failure, and she was handy to blame. for three weeks she had doggedly continued her search for work, applying first of all in the smart tea-rooms of the west, and every day she became more accustomed to being turned away. her soul hardened to rebuffs as that of a beggar who learns to bear stoically the denial of alms. after vainly trying the best victoria had tried the worst, but everywhere the story was the same. every small restaurant keeper was drawing his horns in, feverishly casting up trial balances; some of them in their panic had damaged their credit by trying to arrange with their banks for overdrafts they would never need. the slump was such that they did not believe that the public would continue to eat and drink; they retrenched employees instead of trying to carve success out of other men's disasters. victoria, her teeth set, had faced the storm. she now explored districts and streets systematically, almost house by house. and when her spirit broke at the end of the week, as her perpetual walks, the buffeting of rain and wind soiled her clothing, broke breaches into her boots, chapped her hands as glove seams gave way, the only thing that could brace her up was the shrinkage of her hoard by a sovereign. she placed the coin on the mantlepiece after counting the remainder. monday morning saw it reduced to eleven shillings and sixpence. when the crisis came she had taken in sail by exchanging into the second floor back, then fortunately vacant, thus saving three shillings in rent. the sight of her melting capital was a horror which she faced only once a week, for at other times she thrust the thought away, but it intruded every time with greater insistence. untrained still in economy she found it impossible to reduce her expenditure below a pound. after paying off the mortgage of eight and sixpence for her room and breakfast, she had to set aside three shillings for fares, for she dared not wade overmuch in the december mud. the manageress of a cafe lost in marylebone had heard her kindly, but had looked at her boots plastered with mud, then at the dirty fringes of her petticoats and said, regretfully almost, that she would not do. that day had cost victoria a pound almost wrenched out of the money drawer. but this wardrobe though an asset, was an incubus, and victoria at times often hated it, for it cost so much in omnibus fares that she paid for it every day in food stolen from her body. by the end of the seventh week victoria had reduced her hoard to four pounds. she now applied for work like an automaton, often going twice to the same shop without realising it, at other times sitting for hours on a park seat until the drizzle oozed from her hair into her neck. at the end of the seventh week she had so lost consciousness of the world that she walked all through the sunday gloom without food. then, at eight o'clock, awakening suddenly to her need, she gorged herself with suet pudding at an eating house in the edgware road, came back to star street and fell into a heavy sleep. about four she was aroused by horrible sickness which left her weak, every muscle relaxed and every nerve strained to breaking point. shapes blacker than the night floated before her eyes; every passing milk cart rattled savagely through her beating temples; twitchings at her ankles and wrists, and the hurried beat of her heart shook the whole of her body. she almost writhed on her bed, up and down, as if forcibly thrown or goaded. as the december dawn struggled through her window, diffusing over the white wall the light of the condemned cell, she could bear it no more. she got up, washed horrible bitterness from her mouth, clots from her eyes. then, swaying with weariness and all her pulses beating, she strayed into the street, unseeing, her boots unbuttoned, into the daily struggle. as the blind man unguided, or the poor on the march, she went into the east, now palely glowing over the chimney pots. she did not feel her weariness. her feet did not belong to her; she felt as if her whole body were one gigantic wound vaguely aching under the chloroform. she walked without intention, and as towards no goal. at oxford circus she stopped. her eye had unconsciously been arrested by the posters which the newsvendor was deftly glueing down on the pavement. the crude colours of the posters, red, green, yellow, shocked her sluggish mind into action. one spoke of a great reverse in nubia; another repeated the information and added a football cup draw. a third poster, blazing red, struck such a blow at victoria that, for a wild moment, her heart seemed to stop. it merely bore the words: p. r. reopens victoria read the two lines five or six times, first dully, then in a whirl of emotion. her blood seemed to go hot and tingle; the twitchings of her wrists and ankles grew insistent. with her heart pounding with excitement she asked for the paper in a choked voice, refusing the halfpenny change. backing a step or two she opened the paper. a sheet dropped into the mud. the newsvendor, grizzled and sunburnt right into the wrinkles, picked up the sheet and looked at her wonderingly. from the other side a corpulent policeman watched her with faint interest, reading her like a book. he did not need to be told that victoria was out of work; her face showed that hope had come into her life. victoria read every detail greedily. the enterprising liquidator had carried through the amalgamation of the people's restaurants and the refreshment rendezvous, and created the people's refreshment rendezvous. he had done this so quietly and suddenly that the effect was a thunderbolt. he had forestalled the decision of the court, so that agreements had been ready and signed on the saturday evening, while leave had obscurely been granted on the friday. being master of the situation the liquidator was re-opening fifty-five of the two hundred closed shops. the paper announced his boast that 'by ten o'clock on monday morning fifty-five p. r. r.'s would be flying the flag of the scone and cross buns.' the paper also hailed this pronouncement as napoleonic. victoria feverishly read the list of the rescued depots. they were mainly in oxford street and bloomsbury. indeed, one of them was in princes street. a flood of clarity seemed to come over victoria's brain. it was impossible for the p. r. or p. r. r. or whatever it had become, to have secured a staff on the sunday. no doubt they proposed to engage it on the spot and to rush the organisation into working order so as to capture at the outset the _succès de curiosité_ which every london daily was beating up in the breast of a million idle men and women. clutching the paper in her hand she ran across oxford street almost under the wheels of a motor lorry. she turned into princes street, and hurled herself against the familiar door, clutching at the handle. there was another girl leaning against the door. she was tall and slim. her fair hair went to sandiness. her black coat was dusty and stained. her large blue eyes started from her colourless face, pale lipped, hollow under the cheekbones. victoria recovered her breath and put her hair straight feverishly. a short dark girl joined the group, pressing her body close against them. then two more. then, one by one, half a dozen. victoria discovered that her boots were undone, and bent down to do them up with a hairpin. as she struggled with numb fingers her rivals pressed upon her with silent hostility. as she straightened herself, the throng suddenly thrust her away from the door. victoria recovered herself and drove against them gritting her teeth. the fair girl was ground against her; but victoria, full of her pain and bread lust, thrust her elbow twice into the girl's breast. she felt something like the rage of battle upon her and its joy as the bone entered the soft flesh like a weapon. 'now then, steady girls,' said the voice of the policeman, faint like a dream voice. 'blime, ain't they a 'ot lot!' said another dream voice, a loafer's. the crowd once more became orderly. though quite a hundred girls had now collected hardly any spoke. in every face there was tenseness, though the front ranks showed most ferocity in their eyes and the late-comers most weariness. 'where you shovin'?' asked a sulky voice. there was a mutter that might have been a curse. then silence once more; and the girls fiercely watched for their bread, looking right and left like suspicious dogs. a spruce young warehouseman slowly reviewed the girls and allowed his eyes to linger approvingly on one or two. he winked approvingly at the fair girl but she did not respond. she stood flat against the door, every inch of her body spread so as to occupy as much space as she could. then, half-past seven, a young man and a middle-aged woman shouldering through the wedged mass, the fierce rush into the shop and there the gasp behind closed doors among the other winners, hatless, their clothes torn, their bodices ripped open to the stays, one with her hair down and her neck marked here and there by bleeding scratches. then, after the turmoil of the day among the strangeness, without rest or food, to make holiday for the londoners, a night heavy as lead and a week every day more mechanical, victoria had returned to the treadmill and, within a week, knew it. . . . . the clock struck five. victoria awoke from her dream epic. she had won her battle and sailed into harbour. its waters were already as horribly still as those of a stagnant pool. the old chestnut vendor sat motionless on her seat of firewood and string. not a thought chased over her gnarled brown face. from the stove came the faint pungent smell of the charring peel. chapter xx a fortnight later victoria had returned to the city. most of the old p.r's had reopened, after passing under the yoke. a coat of paint had transformed them into p.r.r's. in fact their extinction was complete; nothing was left of them but the p. and the chairmanship of the amalgamated company, for their chairman was an earl and part of the goodwill. the p.r. had apparently been bought up at a fair rate. its shares having fallen to sixpence, most of the shareholders had lost large sums; whereas the directors and their friends, displaying the acumen that is sometimes found among directors, had quietly bought the shares up by the thousand and by putting them into the new company had realised large profits. as the failure had happened during the old year and most of the shops had been reopened in the new, it was quite clear that the catering trade was expanding. it was a startling instance of commercial progress. within a week the p.r.r. decided to start once more in the city. victoria, by her own request, was transferred to moorgate street. she did not like the neighbourhood of oxford circus; it was unfamiliar without being stimulating. she objected too to serving women. if she must serve at all she preferred serving men. she did not worship men; indeed the impression they had left on her was rather unpleasant. the subalterns at the mess were dull, mr parker a stick, bobby was bobby, burton a cur, stein a lout, beauty, well perhaps beauty was a little better and cairns worthy of a kind thought; but all the others, boys and half men with their futile talk, their slang cribbed from the music halls, their affectations, their loud ties, were nothing but the ballast on which the world has founded its permanent way. yet a mysterious sex instinct made victoria prefer even them to the young ladies who frequented princes street. it is better to be made love to insolently than to be ordered about. the moorgate p.r.r. was one of the curious crosses between the ice cream shop and the chop house where thirty bob a week snatches a sixpenny lunch. it was full of magnificent indifference. you could bang your twopence for a small coffee, or luxuriate in steak and kidney pie, boiled (_i.e._ potatoes), stewed prunes and cream, and be served with the difference of interest that the recording angel may make between no. , , and , , . you were seldom looked at, and, if looked at, forgotten. it was as blatant as the 'rosebud' had been discreet. painted pale blue, it flaunted a plate glass window full of cakes, packets of tea, pounds of chocolate, jars of sweets; some imitation chops garnished with imitation parsley, and a chafing dish full of stage eggs and bacon held out the promise of strong meats. enormous urns, polished like silver, could be seen from the outside emitting clouds of steam; under the chafing dish too came up vaporous jets. inside, the p.r.r. recalled the wilderness and the animation of a bank. to the blue and red tesselated floor were fastened many marble-topped tables squeezed so close together that when a customer rose to leave he created an eddy among his disturbed fellows. the floor was swamped with chairs which, during the lunch hour, dismally grated on the tiled floor. it was clean; for, after every burst of feeding, the appointed scavenger swept the fallen crusts, fragments of pudding, cigarette ends and banana skins into a large bin. this bin was periodically emptied and the contents sent to the east end, whether to be destroyed or to be used for philanthropic purposes is not known. the girls were trained to quick service here. victoria found no difficulty in acquiring the p.r.r. swing, for she had not to memorise the variety of dishes which the more fastidious rosebudders demanded. her mental load seldom went beyond small teas, a coffee or two, half a veal and ham pie, sandwiches and porridge. there was no considering the bill of fare. it stood on every table, immutable as a constitution and as dull. at the p.r.r., a man absorbed a maximum of stodgy food, paid his minimum of cash and vanished into an office to pour out the resultant energy for thirty bob a week. as there were no tips victoria soon learned that courtesy was wasted, so wasted none. the p.r.r. did not treat its girls badly--in this sense, that it treated them no worse than its rivals did theirs; it practised commercial morality. victoria received eight shillings a week, to which good samaritans added an average of fourteen pence, dropped anonymously into the unobtrusive box near the cash desk. at the 'rosebud' tips averaged fourteen shillings a week, but then they were given publicly. besides her wages she was given all her meals, on a scale suited to girls who waited on mr thirty bob a week. her breakfast was tea, bread and margarine; her dinner, cold pudding or pie, according to the unpopularity of the dishes among the customers, washed down once more with tea and sometimes followed by stewed fruit if the quantity that remained made it clear that some would be left over. the day ended with supper, tea, bread and cheese--a variety of cheddar which the company bought by the ton on account of its peculiar capacity for swelling and producing a very tolerable substitute for repletion. as victoria was now paid less than half her former wages she was expected to work longer hours. the p. r. r. demanded faithful service from half-past eight in the morning to nine in the evening, except on one day when freedom was earned at six. victoria was driven to generalise a little about this; it struck her as peculiar that an increase of work should synchronise with a decrease of pay, but the early steps in any education always fill the pupil with wonderment. yet she did not repine, for she remembered too well the black days of the old year when the wolf slunk round the house, coming every day nearer to her door. she had beaten him off and there still was joy in the thought of that victory. her frame of mind was quiescent, tempered still with a feeling of relief. this she shared with her companions, for every one of them had known such straits as hers and worse. they had come back to the p. r. r. filled with exceeding joy; craving bread they had been given buns. the moorgate p. r. r. was a big depot. it boasted, in addition to the ground floor, two smoking rooms, one on the first floor and one underground, as well as a ladies' dining-room on the second floor. it had a staff of twenty waitresses, six of whom were stationed in the underground smoking-room; victoria was one of these. a virile manageress dominated them and drove with splendid efficiency a concealed kitchen team of four who sweated in the midst of steam in an underground stokehole. victoria's companions were all old p. r's except betty. they all had anything between two and five years' service behind them. nelly, a big raw boned country girl, was still assertive and loud; she had good looks of the kind that last up to thirty, made up of fine coarse healthy flesh lines, tending to redden at the nostrils and at the ears; her hands were shapely still, though reddened and thickened by swabbing floors and tables. maud was a poor little thing, small boned with a flaccid covering of white flesh, inclined to quiver a little when she felt unhappy; her eyes were undecidedly green, her hair carroty in the extreme. she had a trick of drawing down the corners of her mouth which made her look pathetic. amy and jenny were both short and darkish, inclined to be thin, always a little tired, always willing, always in a state neither happy nor unhappy. both had nearly five years' experience and could look forward to another fifteen or so. they had no assertiveness, so could not aspire to a managerial position, such as might eventually fall to the share of nelly. betty was an exception. she had not acquired the p. r. r. manner and probably never would. the daughter of a small draper at horley, she had lived through a happy childhood, played in the fields, been to a little private school. her father had strained every nerve to face on the one hand the competition of the london stores extending octopus-like into the far suburbs, on the other that of the pedlars. caught between the aristocracy and the democracy of commerce he had slowly been ground down. when betty was seventeen he collapsed through worry and overwork. his wife attempted to carry on the business after his death, bravely facing the enemy, discharging assistants, keeping the books, impressing betty to dress the window, then to clean the shop. but the pressure had become too great, and on the day when the mortgagees foreclosed she died. nothing was left for betty except the clothes she stood in. some poor relatives in london induced her to join the 'lethe.' that was three years ago and now she was twenty. betty was the tall slim girl into whose breast victoria had thrust her elbow when they were fighting for bread among the crowd which surged round the door of the princes street depot. she was pretty, perhaps a little too delicately so. her sandy hair and wide open china blue eyes made one think of a doll; but the impression disappeared when one looked at her long limbs, her slightly sunken cheeks. she had a sweet disposition, so gentle that, though she was a favourite, her fellows despised her a little and were inclined to call her 'poor betty.' she was nearly always tired; when she was well she was full of simple and honest merriment. she would laugh then if a motor bus skidded or if she saw a highlander in a kilt. she had just been shifted to the moorgate street p.r.r. from the first the two girls had made friends and victoria was deeply glad to meet her again. the depth of that gladness is only known to those who have lived alone in a hostile world. 'betty,' said victoria the first morning, 'there's something i want to say. i've had it on my mind. do you remember the first time we met outside the old p.r. in princes street?' 'don't i?' said betty. 'we had a rough time, didn't we?' 'we had. and, betty, perhaps you remember . . . i hit you in the chest. i've thought of it so often . . . and you don't know how sorry i am when i think of it.' 'oh, i didn't mind,' said betty, a blush rising to her forehead, 'i understand. i was about starving, you know, i thought you were the same.' 'no, not starving exactly,' said victoria, 'mad rather, terrified, like a sheep which the dog's driving. but i beg your pardon, betty, i oughtn't to have done it.' betty put her hand gently on her companion's. 'i understand, vic,' she said, 'it's all over now; we're friends, aren't we?' victoria returned the pressure. that day established a tender link between these two. sometimes, in the slack of three o'clock, they would sit side by side for a moment, their shoulders touching. when they met between the tables, running, their foreheads beaded with sweat, they exchanged a smile. the customers at the p.r.r. were so many that victoria could hardly retain an impression of them. a few were curious though, in the sense that they were typical. one corner of the room was occupied during the lunch hour by a small group of chess players; five of the six boards were regularly captured by them. they sat there in couples, their eyes glued to the board, allowing the grease to cake slowly on their food; from time to time one would swallow a mouthful, sometimes dropping morsels on the table. these he would brush away dreamily, his thoughts far away, two or three moves ahead. round each table sat a little group of spectators who now and then shifted their plates and cups from table to table and watched the games. at times, when a game ended, a table was involved in a fierce discussion: gambits, morphy's classical games, were thrown about. on the other side of the room the young domino-players noisily played matador, fives and threes, or plain matching, would look round and mutter a gibe at the enthusiasts. others were more personal. one, a repulsive individual, greek or levantine, patronised one of betty's tables every day. he was fat, yellow and loud; over his invariably dirty hands drooped invariably dirty cuffs; on one finger he wore a large diamond ring. 'it makes me sick sometimes,' said betty to victoria, 'you know he eats with both hands and drops his food; he snuffles too, as he eats, like a pig.' another was an old man with a beautiful thin brown face and white hair. he sat at a very small table, so small that he was usually alone. every day he ordered dry toast, a glass of milk and some stewed fruit. he never read or smoked, nor did he raise his eyes from the table. an ancient bookkeeper perhaps, he lived on some principle. most of the p. r. r. types were scheduled however. they were mainly young men or boys between fifteen and twenty. all were clad in blue or dark suits, wore flannel shirts, dickeys and no cuffs. they would congregate in noisy groups, talk with furious energy, and smoke virginia cigarettes with an air of daredevilry. now and then one of these would be sitting alone, reading unexpected papers such as the _times_, borrowed from the office. spasmodically, too, one would be seen improving his mind. victoria, within six months, noticed three starts on the part of one of the boys; french, book-keeping and electrical engineering. many were older than these. there were little groups of young men rather rakishly but shabbily dressed; often they wore a flower in their buttonhole. the old men were more pathetic; their faces were expressionless; they came to eat, not to feast. victoria and betty had many conversations about the customers. every day victoria felt her faculty of wonder increase; she was vaguely conscious already that men had a tendency to revert to types, but she did not realise the influence the conditions of their lives had upon them. 'it's curious,' she once said to betty, as they left the depot together, 'they're so much alike.' 'i suppose they are,' said betty. 'i wonder why?' 'i'm not sure,' said victoria, 'but it seems to me somehow that they must be born different but that they become alike because they do the same kind of work.' 'it's rather awful, isn't it,' said betty. 'awful? well, i suppose it is. think of it, betty. there's old dry toast, for instance. i'm sure he's been doing whatever he does do for thirty or forty years.' 'and'll go on doing it till he dies,' murmured betty. 'or goes into the workhouse,' added victoria. a sudden and horrible lucidity had come over her. 'yes, betty, that's what it means. the boys are going to be like the old man; we see them every day becoming like him. first they're in the twenties and are smart and read the sporting news; then they seem to get fat and don't shave every day, because they feel it's getting late and it doesn't matter what they look like; their hair grows grey, they take up chess or german, or something equally ridiculous. they don't get a chance. they're born and as soon as they can kick they're thrust in an office to do the same thing every day. nobody cares; all their employers want them to do is to be punctual and do what they're paid thirty bob a week for. soon they don't try; they die, and the employers fill the billet.' 'how do you know all this, vic?' said betty, eyeing her fearfully. 'it seems so true.' 'oh, i just felt it suddenly, besides . . .' victoria hesitated. 'but is it right that they should get thirty bob a week all their lives while their employers are getting thousands?' asked betty, full of excitement. 'i don't know,' said victoria slowly. betty's voice had broken the charm. she could no longer see the vision. chapter xxi the days passed away horribly long. victoria was now an automaton; she no longer felt much of sorrow or of joy. her home life had been reduced to a minimum, for she could no longer afford the luxury of 'chambers in the west end' as betty put it. she had moved to finsbury; where she had found a large attic for three shillings a week, in a house which had fallen from the state of mansion for a city merchant to that of tenement dwelling. for the first time since she returned to london she had furnished her own room. she had bought out the former tenant for one pound. for this sum she had entered into possession of an iron bedstead with a straw mattress, a thick horse cloth, an iron washstand supplied with a blue basin and a white mug, an old armchair and red curtains. she had no sheets, which meant discomfort but saved washing. a chair had cost her two shillings; she needed no cupboard as there was one in the wall; in lieu of a chest of drawers she had her trunk; her few books were stacked on a shelf made out of the side of a packing case and erected by herself. she got water from the landing every morning except when the taps were frozen. there was no fireplace in the attic, but in the present state of victoria's income this did not matter much. every morning she rose at seven, washed, dressed. as time went on she ceased to dust and sweep every morning. first she postponed the work to the evening, then to the week end. on sundays she breakfasted off a stale loaf bought among the roar of farrington street the previous evening. a little later she introduced a spirit lamp for tea; it was a revolution, even though she could never muster enough energy to bring in milk. after the first flush of possession, the horrible gloom of winter had engulfed her. sometimes she sat and froze in the attic, and, in despair, went to bed after vainly trying to read shakespeare by the light of a candle: he did not interest her much. at other times the roaring streets, the flares in the brown fog, the trams hurtling through the air, their headlights blazing, had frightened her back to her home. on sundays, after luxuriating in bed until ten, she usually went to meet betty who lived in a club in soho. together they would walk in the parks, or the squares, wherever grass grew. at one o'clock betty would introduce her as a guest at her club and feast her for eightpence on roast beef and pudding, tea, and bread and butter. then they would start out once more towards the fields, sometimes towards hampstead heath, or if it rained seek refuge in a museum or a picture gallery. when they parted in the evening, victoria kissed her affectionately. betty would then hold the elder woman in her arms, hungrily almost, and softly kiss her again. the only thing that parted these two at all was the mystery which betty guessed at. she knew that victoria was not like the other girls; she felt that there was behind her friend's present condition a past of another kind, but when she tried to question victoria, she found that her friend froze up. and as she loved her this was a daily grief; she looked at victoria with a question in her eyes. but victoria would not yield to the temptation of confiding in her; she had adopted a new class and was not going back on it. besides betty there was no one in her life. none of the other girls were able to meet her on congenial ground; beauty had not got her address; and, though she had his, she was too afraid of complicating her life to write to him. she had sent her address to edward as a matter of form, but he had not written; apparently her desire for freedom had convinced him that his sister was mad. none of the men at the p.r.r. had made any decided advances to her. she could still catch every day a glitter in the eye of some youth, but her maturity discouraged the boys, and the older men were mostly too deeply sunk in their feeding and smoking to attempt gallantry. besides: victoria was no longer the cream-coloured flower of olden days; she was thinner; her hands too were becoming coarse owing to her having to swab tables and floors; much standing and the fetid air of the smoking-room were making her sallow. soon after victoria entered into possession of her 'station' she knew most of her customers, knew them, that is, as much as continual rushes from table to counter, from floor to floor, permits. the casuals, mostly young, left no impression; lacking money but craving variety these youths would patronise every day a different p.r.r., for they hoped to find in a novel arrangement of the counter, a new waitress, larger or smaller quarters, the element of variety which the bill of fare relentlessly denied them. the older men were more faithful if no more grateful. one of them was a short thin man, looking about forty, who for some hidden reason had aroused victoria's faded interest. his appearance was somewhat peculiar. his shortness, combined with his thinness and breadth, was enough to attract attention. standing hardly any more than five foot five, he had disproportionately broad shoulders, and yet they were so thin that the bones showed bowed at the back. better fed, he would have been a bulky man. his hair was dark, streaked with grey; and, as it was getting very thin and beginning to recede, he gave the impression of having a very high forehead. his eyes were grey, set rather deep under thick eyebrows drawn close together into a permanent frown. under his rather coarse and irregular nose his mouth showed closely compressed, almost lipless; a curious muscular distortion had tortured into it a faint sneer. his hands were broad, a little coarse and very hairy. victoria could not say why she was interested in this man. he had no outward graces, dressed poorly and obviously brushed his coat but seldom; his linen, too, was not often quite clean. immediately on sitting down at his usual table he would open a book, prop it up against the sugar bowl, and begin to read. his books did not tell victoria much; in two months she noted a few books she did not know, _news from nowhere_, _fabian essays_, _the odyssey_, and a book with a long title the biggest printed word of which was _niestze_ or _niesche._ victoria could never remember this word, even though her customer read the book every day for over a month. _the odyssey_ she had heard of, but that did not tell her anything. she had found out his name accidentally. one day he had brought down three books and had put two under his seat while he read the third. soon after he had left, reading still while he went up the stairs. victoria found the books under the chair. one was a _life of william morris_, the other the _vindication of the rights of women_. on the flyleaf of each was written in bold letter. 'thomas farwell.' victoria could not resist glancing at the books during her half hour for lunch. the _life of william morris_ she did not attempt, remembering her experiences at school with 'lives' of any kind: they were all dull. marie wollstonecraft's book seemed more interesting, but she seemed to have to wade through so much that she had never heard of and to have to face a style so crabbed and congested that she hardly understood it. yet, something in the book interested her, and it was regretfully that she handed the volumes back to farwell when he called for them at half-past six. he thanked her in half a dozen words and left. farwell continued regular in his attendance. he came in on the stroke of one, left at half-past one exactly, lighting his pipe as he got up. he never spoke to anyone; when victoria stood before his table he looked at her for a moment, gave his order and cast his eyes down to his book. it was about three weeks after the incident of the books that he spoke to victoria. as he took up the bill of fare he said suddenly: 'did you read the _vindication_?' 'i did glance through it,' said victoria, feeling, she did not know why, acutely uncomfortable. 'ah? interesting, isn't it? pity it's so badly written. what do you think of it?' 'well, i hardly know,' said victoria reflectively; 'i didn't have time to read much; what i read seemed true.' 'you think that a recommendation, eh?' said farwell, his lips parting slightly. 'i'd have thought you saw enough truth about life here to like lies.' 'no,' said victoria, 'i don't care for lies. the nastier a thing is, the better everybody should know it; then one day people will be ashamed.' 'oh, an optimist!' sniggered farwell. 'bless you, my child. give me fillets of plaice, small white and cut.' for several days after this farwell took no notice of victoria. he gave his order and opened his book as before. victoria made no advances. she had talked him over with betty, who had advised her to await events. 'you never know,' she had remarked, as a clinching argument. a day or two later victoria was startled by farwell's arrival at half-past six. this had never happened before. the smoking-room was almost empty, as it was too late for teas and a little too early for suppers. farwell sat down at his usual table and ordered a small tea. as victoria returned with the cup he took out a book from under two others and held it out. 'look here,' he said a little nervously. 'i don't know whether you're busy after hours, but perhaps you might like to read this.' the wrinkles in his forehead expanded and dilated a little. 'oh, thank you so much. i would like to read it,' said victoria with the ring of earnestness in her voice. she took the book; it was a battered copy of _no. john street_. 'no. ? what a queer title,' she said. 'queer? not at all,' said farwell. 'it only seems queer to you because it is natural and you're not used to that. you're a number in the p.r.r. aren't you? just like the house you live in. and you're just number so and so; so am i. when we die fate shoves up the next number and it all begins over again.' 'that doesn't sound very cheerful, does it?' said victoria. 'it isn't cheerful. it's merely a fact.' 'i suppose it is,' said victoria. 'nobody is ever missed.' farwell looked at her critically. the platitude worried him a little; it was unexpected. 'yes, exactly,' he stammered. 'anyhow, you read it and let me know what you think of it.' thereupon he took up another book and began to read. when he had gone victoria showed her prize to betty. 'you're getting on,' said betty with a smile. 'you'll be mrs farwell one of these days, i suppose.' 'don't be ridiculous, betty,' snapped victoria, 'why, i'd have to wash him.' 'you might as well wash a husband as a dish,' said betty smoothly. 'anyhow, the other girls are talking.' 'let them talk,' said victoria rather savagely, 'so long as they don't talk to me.' betty took her hand gently. 'sorry, vic dear,' she said. 'you're not angry with me, are you?' 'no, of course not, you silly,' said victoria laughing. 'there run away, or that old gent at the end'll take a fit.' farwell did not engage her in conversation for a few days, nor did she make any advances to him. she read through _no. john street_ within three evenings; it held her with a horrible fascination. her first plunge into realistic literature left her shocked as by a cold bath. in the early days, at lympton, she had subsisted mainly on charlotte young and rhoda broughton. in india, the mess having a subscription at mudie's, she had had good opportunities of reading; but, for no particular reason, except perhaps that she was newly married and busy with regimental nothings, she had ceased to read anything beyond the _sketch_ and the _sporting and dramatic_. thus she had never heard of the 'common people' except as persons born to minister to the needs of the rich. she had never felt any interest in them, for they spoke a language that was not hers. _no. john street_, coming to her a long time after the old happy days, when she herself was struggling in the mire, was a horrible revelation; it showed her herself, and herself not as 'tilda towering over fate but as nancy withering in the indiarubber works for the benefit of the ridler system. she read feverishly by the light of a candle. at times she was repelled by the vulgarity of low covey, by the grossness which seemed to revel in poverty and dirt. but when she cast her eyes round her own bare walls, looked at her sheetless bed, a shiver ran over her. 'these are my people,' she said aloud. the candle, clamouring for the snuffers, guttered, sank low, nearly went out. shivering again before the omen, she trimmed the wick. she returned the book to farwell by slipping it on the table next day. he took it without a word but returned at half past six as before. 'well?' he asked with a faint smile. 'thank you so much,' said victoria. 'it's wonderful.' 'wonderful indeed? most commonplace, don't you think?' 'oh, no,' said victoria. 'it's extraordinary, it's like . . . like light.' farwell's eyes suddenly glittered. 'ah,' he said dreamily, 'light! light in this, the outer darkness.' victoria looked at him, a question in her eyes. 'if only we could all see,' he went on. 'then, as by a touch of a magician's wand, flowers would crowd out the thistles, the thistles that the asses eat and thank their god for. it is in our hands to make this the happy valley and we make it the valley of the shadow of death.' he paused for a moment. victoria felt her pulse quicken. 'yes,' she said, 'i think i understand. it's because we don't understand that we suffer. we're not cruel, are we? we're stupid.' 'stupid?' a ferocious intonation had come into farwell's voice. 'i should say so! forty million men, women and children sweat their lives out day by day so that four million may live idly and become too heavy even to think. i could forgive them if they thought, but the world contains only two types: lazarus with poor man's gout and dives with fatty degeneration of the brain.' victoria felt nervous. passion shook the man's hands as he clutched the marble top of the table. 'mr farwell,' she faltered, 'i don't want to be stupid. i want to understand things. i want to know why we slave twelve hours a day when others do nothing and, oh, can it be altered?' farwell had started at the mention of his name. his passion had suddenly fallen. 'altered? oh, yes,' he stammered, 'that's if the race lasts long enough. 'sometimes i think, as i see men struggling to get on top of one another, like crabs in a bucket . . . like crabs in a bucket,' he repeated dreamily, visualising the simile. 'but i cannot draw men from stones,' he said smiling; 'it is not yet time for deucalion. i'll bring you another book to-morrow.' farwell rose abruptly and left victoria singularly stirred. he was a personality, she felt; something quite unusual. he was less a man than a figment, for he seemed top heavy almost. he concentrated the hearer's attention so much on his spoken thought that his body passed unperceived, receded into the distance. while victoria was changing to go, the staff room somehow seemed darker and dirtier than ever. it was seldom swept and never cleaned out. the management had thoughtfully provided nothing but pegs and wooden benches, so as to discourage lounging. victoria was rather late, so that she found herself alone with lizzie, the cashier. lizzie was red-haired, very curly, plump, pink and white. a regular little spark. she was very popular; her green eyes and full curved figure often caused a small block at the desk. 'you look tired,' she said good-naturedly. 'i suppose i am,' said victoria. 'aren't you?' 'so so. don't mind my job.' 'mm, i suppose it isn't so bad sitting at the desk.' 'no,' said lizzie, 'pays too.' 'pays?' lizzie flushed and hesitated. then the desire to boast burst its bonds. she must tell, she must. it didn't matter after all. a craving for admiration was on her. 'tell you what,' she whispered. 'i get quite two and a kick a week out of that job.' victoria's eyebrows went up. 'you know,' went on lizzie, 'the boys look at me a bit.' she simpered slightly. 'well, once one of them gave me half a bar with a bob check. he was looking at me in the eye, well! that mashed, i can tell you he looked like a boiled fish. sort of inspiration came over me.' she stopped. 'well?' asked victoria, feeling a little nervous. 'well . . . i . . . i gave him one half crown and three two bob pieces. smiled at him. he boned the money quick enough, wanted to touch my hand you see. never saw it.' victoria thought for a moment. 'then you gave him eight and six instead of nine shillings?' 'you've hit it. bless you, _he_ never knew. mashed, i can tell _you_.' 'then you did him out of sixpence?' 'right. comes off once in three. say "sorry" when i'm caught and smile and it's all right. never try it twice on the same man.' 'i call that stealing,' said victoria coldly. 'you can call it what you like,' snarled lizzie. 'everything's stealing. what's business? getting a quid for what costs you a tanner. i'm putting a bit extra on my wages.' victoria shrugged her shoulders. she might have argued with lizzie as she had once argued with gertie, but the vague truth that lurked in lizzie's economics had deprived her of argument. could theft sometimes be something else than theft? were all things theft? and above all, did the acceptance of a woman's hand as bait justify the hooking of a sixpence? as victoria left for home that night she felt restless. she could not go to bed so soon. she walked through the silent city lanes; meeting nothing, save now and then a cat on the prowl, or a policeman trying doors and flashing his bull's eye through the gratings of banks. the crossing at mansion house was still busy with the procession of omnibuses converging at the feet of the duke of wellington. drays, too heavily loaded, rumbled slowly past towards liverpool street. she turned northwards, walked quickly through the desert. at liverpool street station she stopped in the blaze of light. a few doors away stood a shouting butcher praying the passers-by to buy his pretty meat. further: a fishmonger's stall, an array of glistening black shapes on white marble, a tobacconist, a jeweller--all aglow with coruscating light. and over all, the blazing light of arc lamps, under which an unending stream of motor cabs, lorries, omnibuses passed in kaleidoscopic colours. in the full glare of a lamp post stood a woman, her feet in the gutter. she was short, stunted, dirty and thin of face and body. round her wretched frame a filthy black coat was tightly buttoned; her muddy skirt seemed almost falling from her shrunken hips. crushed on her sallow face, hiding all but a few wisps of hair, was a battered black straw hat. with one arm she carried a child, thin of face too, and golden-haired. on its upper lip a crusted sore gleamed red and brown. in her other hand she held out a tin lid, in which were five boxes of matches. victoria looked at the silent watcher and passed on. a few minutes later she remembered her and a fearful flood of insight rushed upon her. the child? then this, this creature had known love? a man had kissed those shrivelled lips. something like a thrill of disgust ran through her. that such things as these could love and mate and bear children was unspeakable; the very touch of them was loathsome, their love akin to unnatural vice. as she walked further into shoreditch the impression of horror grew on her. it was not that the lanes and little streets abutting into the high street were full of terrors when pitch dark, or more sinister still in the pale yellow light of a single gas lamp; the high street itself, filled with men and women, most of them shabby, some loudly dressed in crude colours, shouting, laughing, jostling one another off the footpath was more terrible, for its joy of life was brutal as the joy of the pugilist who feels his opponent's teeth crunch under his fist. at a corner, near a public house blazing with lights, a small crowd watched two women who were about to fight. they had not come to blows yet; their duel was purely homeric. victoria listened with greedy horror to the terrible recurrence of half a dozen words. a child squirmed through the crowd, crying, and caught one of the fighters by her skirt. 'leave go . . . i'll rive the guts out 'o yer.' with a swing of the body the woman sent the child flying into the gutter. victoria hurried from the spot. she made towards the west now, between the gin shops, the barrows under their blazing naphtha lamps. she was afraid, horribly afraid. sitting alone in her attic, her hands crossed before her, questions intruded upon her. why all this pain, this violence, by the side of life's graces? could it be that one went with the other, indissolubly? and could it be altered before it was too late, before the earth was flooded, overwhelmed with pain? she slipped into bed and drew the horsecloth over her ears. the world was best shut out. chapter xxii thomas farwell collected three volumes from his desk, two pamphlets and a banana. it was six o'clock and, the partners having left, he was his own master half an hour earlier than usual. 'you off?' said the junior from the other end of the desk. 'yes. half an hour to the good.' 'what's the good of half an hour,' said the youth superciliously. 'no good unless you think it is, like everything else,' said farwell. 'besides, i may be run over by half past six.' 'cheerful as ever,' remarked the junior, bending his head down to the petty cash balance. farwell took no notice of him. ten times a day he cursed himself for wasting words upon this troglodyte. he was a youth long as a day's starvation, with a bulbous forehead, stooping narrow shoulders and narrow lips; his shape resembled that of an old potato. he peered through his glasses with watery eyes hardly darker than his grey face. 'good night,' said farwell curtly. 'cheer, oh!' said the junior. farwell slammed the door behind him. he felt inclined to skip down the stairs, not that anything particularly pleasant had happened but because the bells of st botolph's were pealing out a chime of freedom. it was six. he had nothing to do. the best thing was to go to moorgate street and take the books to victoria. on second thoughts, no, he would wait. six o'clock might still be a busy time. farwell walked down the narrow lane from bishopsgate into st. botolph's churchyard. it was a dank and dreary evening, dark already. the wind swept over the paths in little whirlwinds. dejected sparrows sought scraps of food among the ancient graves where office boys munch buns and read of woodcarving and desperate adventure. he sat down on a seat by the side of a shape that slept, and opened one of the books, though it was too dark to read. the shape lifted an eyelid and looked at him. farwell turned over the pages listlessly. it was a history of revolutionists. for some reason he hated them to-day, all of them. jack cade was a boor, cromwell a tartuffe, bolivar a politician, mazzini a theorist. it would bore victoria. farwell brought himself up with a jerk. he was thinking of victoria too often. as he was a man who faced facts he told himself quite plainly that he did not intend to fall in love with her. he did not feel capable of love; he hated most people, but did not believe that a good hater was a good lover. 'clever, of course,' he muttered, 'but no woman is everlastingly clever. i won't risk finding her out.' the shape at his side moved. it was an old man, filthy, clad in blackened rags, with a matted beard. farwell glanced at him and turned away. 'i'd have you poisoned if i could,' he thought. then he returned to victoria. was she worth educating? and supposing she was educated, what then? she would become discontented, instead of brutalised. the latter was the happier state. or she would fall in love with him, when he would give her short shrift. what a pity. a tiny wave of sentiment flowed into farwell's soul. 'clever, clever,' he thought, 'a little house, babies, roses, a fox terrier.' 'gov'nor,' croaked a hoarse voice beside him. farwell turned quickly. the shape was alive, then, curse it. 'well, what d'you want?' 'give us a copper, gov'nor, i'm an old man, can't work. s'elp me, gawd, gov'nor, 'aven't 'ad a bite. . . .' 'that'll do, you fool,' snarled farwell, 'why the hell don't you go and get it in gaol?' 'yer don't mean that, gov'nor, do yer?' whined the old man, 'i always kep my self respectable; 'ere, look at these 'ere testimonials, gov'nor, . . .' he drew from his coat a disgusting object, a bundle of papers tied together with string. 'i don't want to see them,' said farwell. 'i wouldn't employ you if i could. why don't you go to the workhouse?' the old man almost bridled. 'why? because you're a stuck up. d'you hear? you're proud of being poor. that's about as vulgar as bragging because you're rich. if you and all the likes of you went into the house, you'd reform the system in a week. understand?' the old man's eyes were fixed on the speaker, uncomprehending. 'better still, go and throw any bit of dirt you pick up at a policeman,' continued farwell. 'see he gets it in the mouth. you get locked up. suppose a million of the likes of you do the same, what d'you think happens?' 'i dunno,' said the old man. 'well, your penal system is bust. if you offend the law you're a criminal. but what's the law? the opinion of the majority. if the majority goes against the law, then the minority becomes criminal. the world's upside down.' farwell smiled. 'the world's upside down,' he said softly, licking his lips. 'give us a copper for a bed, guv'nor,' said the old man dully. 'what's the good of a bed to you?' exploded farwell. 'why don't you have a drink?' 'i'm a teetotaller, guv'nor; always kep' myself respectable.' 'respectable! you're earning the wages of respectability, that is death,' said farwell with a wolfish laugh. 'why, man, can't you see you've been on the wrong tack? we don't want any more of you respectables. we want pirates, vampires. we want all this society of yours rotted by internal canker, so that we can build a new one. but we must rot it first. we aren't going to work on a sow's ear.' 'give us a copper, guv'nor,' moaned the old man. farwell took out sixpence and laid it on the seat. 'now then,' he said, 'you can have this if you'll swear to blow it in drink.' 'i will, s'elp me gawd,' said the old man eagerly. farwell pushed the coin towards him. 'take it, teetotaller,' he sneered, 'your respectable system of bribery has bought you for sixpence. now let me see you go into that pub.' the old man clutched the sixpence and staggered to his feet. farwell watched the swing doors of the public bar at the end of the passage close behind him. then he got up and walked away; it was about time to go to moorgate street. as he entered the smoking-room, victoria blushed. the man moved her, stimulated her. when she saw him she felt like a body meeting a soul. he sat down at his usual place. victoria brought him his tea, and laid it before him without a word. nelly, lolling in another corner, kicked the ground, looking away insolently from the elaborate wink of one of the scullions. 'here, read these,' said farwell, pushing two of the books across the table. victoria picked them up. '_looking backwards?_' she said. 'oh, i don't want to do that. it's forward i want to go.' 'a laudable sentiment,' sneered farwell, 'the theory of every sunday school in the country, and the practice of none. however, you'll find it fairly soul-filling as an unintelligent anticipation. personally i prefer the other. _demos_ is good stuff, for gissing went through the fire.' victoria quickly walked away. farwell looked surprised for a second, then saw the manageress on the stairs. 'faugh,' he muttered, 'if the world's a stage i'm playing the part of a low intriguer.' he sipped his tea meditatively. in a few minutes victoria returned. 'thank you,' she whispered. 'it's good of you. you're teaching me to live.' farwell looked at her critically. 'i don't see much good in that,' he said, 'unless you've got something to live for. one of our philosophers says you live either for experience or the race. i recommend the former to myself, and to you nothing.' 'why shouldn't i live for anything?' she asked. 'because life's too dear. and its pleasures are not white but piebald.' 'i understand,' said victoria, 'but i must live.' '_je n'en vois pas la nécessité_,' quoted farwell smiling. 'never mind what that means,' he added, 'i'm only a pessimist.' the next few weeks seemed to create in victoria a new personality. her reading was so carefully selected that every line told. farwell knew the hundred best books for a working girl; he had a large library composed mostly of battered copies squeezed out of his daily bread. victoria's was the appetite of a gorgon. in another month she had absorbed _odd women_, _an enemy of the people_, _the_ _doll's house_, _alton locke_, and a translation of _germinal_. every night she read with an intensity which made her forget that march chilled her to the bone; poring over the book, her eyes a few inches from the candle, she soaked in rebellion. when the cold nipped too close into her she would get up and wrap herself in the horsecloth and read with savage application, rushing to the core of the thought. she was no student, so she would skip a hard word. besides, in those moods, when the spirit bounds in the body like a caged bird, words are felt, not understood. betty was still hovering round her, a gentle presence. she knew what was going on and was frightened. a new victoria was rising before her, a woman very charming still, but extraordinary, incomprehensible. often victoria would snub her savagely, then take her hand as they stood together at the counter bawling for food and drink. and as victoria grew hard and strong, betty worshipped her more as she would have worshipped a strong man. yet betty was not happy. victoria lived now in a state of excitement and hunger for solitude. she took no interest in things that betty could understand. their sunday walks had been ruthlessly cut now and then, for the fury was upon victoria when eating the fruits of the tree. when they were together now victoria was preoccupied; she no longer listened to the club gossip, nor did she ask to be told once more the story of betty's early days. 'do you know you're sweated?' she said suddenly one day. betty's eyes opened round and blue. 'sweated,' she said. 'i thought only people in the east end were sweated.' 'the world's one big east end,' snapped victoria. betty shivered. farwell might have said that. 'you're sweated if you get two pounds a week,' continued victoria. 'you're sweated when you buy a loaf, sweated when you ride in a bus, sweated when they cremate you.' 'i don't understand,' said betty. 'all profits are sweated,' quoted victoria from a pamphlet. 'but people must make profits,' protested betty. 'what for?' asked victoria. 'how are people to live unless they make profits?' said betty. 'aren't our wages profits?' victoria was nonplussed for a moment and became involved. 'no, our wages are only wages; profit is the excess over our wages.' 'i don't understand,' said betty. 'never mind,' said victoria, 'i'll ask mr farwell; he'll make it clear.' betty shot a dark blue glance at her. 'vic,' she said softly, 'i think mr farwell. . . .' then she changed her mind. 'i can't, i can't,' she thought. she crushed the jealous words down and plunged. 'vic, darling,' she faltered, 'i'm afraid you're not well. no, and not happy. i've been thinking of something; why shouldn't i leave the club and come and live with you.' victoria looked at her critically for a moment. she thought of her independence, of this affection hovering round her, sweet, dangerously clinging. but betty's blue eyes were wet. 'you're too good a pal for me, betty,' she said in a low voice. 'i'd make you miserable.' 'no, no,' cried betty impulsively. 'i'd love it, vic dear, and you would go on reading and do what you like. only let me be with you.' victoria's hand tightened on her friend's arm. 'let me think, betty dear,' she said. ten days later, betty having won her point, the great move was to take place at seven o'clock. it certainly lacked solemnity. for three days preceding the great change betty had hurried away from the p.r.r. on the stroke of nine, quickly kissing victoria and saying she couldn't wait as she must pack. clearly her wardrobe could not be disposed of in a twinkling. yet, on moving day, at seven o'clock sharp (the carrier having been thoughtfully commanded to deliver at five) a tin trunk kept together by a rope, a tiny bath muzzled with a curtain, and a hat box loudly advertising somebody's tea, were dumped on the doorstep. the cart drove off leaving the two girls to make terms with a loafer. the latter compromised for fourpence, slammed their door behind him and lurched down the creaking stairs. betty threw herself into victoria's arms. those first days were sweet. betty rejoiced like a lover in possession of a long-desired mistress; stripping off her blouse and looking very pretty, showing her white neck and slim arms, she strutted about the attic with a hammer in her hand and her mouth full of nails. it took an evening to hang the curtain which had muzzled the bath; betty's art treasures, an oleograph of 'bubbles' and another of 'i'se biggest,' were cunningly hung by victoria so that she could not see them on waking up. betty was active now as a will o' the wisp. she invented little feasts, expensive sunday suppers of fried fish and chips, produced a basket of oranges at three a penny; thanks to her there was now milk with the tea. in a moment of enthusiasm victoria heard her murmur something about keeping a cat. in fact the only thing that marred her life at all was victoria's absorption in her reading. often betty would go to bed and stay awake, watching victoria at the table, her fingers ravelling her hair, reading with an intentness that frightened her. she would watch victoria and see her face grow paler, except at the cheeks where a flush would rise. a wild look would come into her eyes. sometimes she would get up suddenly and, thrusting her hair out of her eyes, walk up and down muttering things betty could not understand. one night betty woke up suddenly, and saw victoria standing in the moonlight clad only in her nightgown. words were surging from her lips. 'it's no good. . . . i can't go on. . . . i can't go on until i die or somebody marries me. . . . i won't marry: i won't do it. . . . why should i sell myself? . . . at any rate why should i sell myself cheaply?' there was a pause. betty sat up and looked at her friend's wild face. 'what's it all mean after all? i'm only being used. sucked dry like an orange. by and by they'll throw the peel away. talk of brotherhood! . . . it's war, war . . . it's climbing and fighting to get on top . . . like crabs in a bucket, like crabs. . .' 'vic,' screamed betty. victoria started like a somnambulist aroused and looked at her vaguely. 'come back to bed at once,' cried betty with inspired firmness. victoria obeyed. betty drew her down beside her under the horsecloth and threw her arms round her; victoria's body was cold as ice. suddenly she burst into tears; and betty, torn as if she saw a strong man weep, wept too. closely locked in one another's arms they sobbed themselves to sleep. chapter xxiii every day now victoria's brain grew clearer and her body weaker. a sullen spirit of revolt blended with horrible depression was upon her, but she was getting thinner, paler; dark rings were forming round her eyes. she knew pain now; perpetual weariness, twitchings in the ankles, stabs just above the knee. in horrible listlessness she dragged her weary feet over the tiled floor, responding to commands like the old cab horse which can hardly feel the whip. in this mood, growing churlish, she repulsed betty, avoided farwell and tried to seclude herself. she no longer walked holborn or the strand where life went by, but sought the mean and silent streets, where none could see her shamble or where none would care. one night, when she had left at six, she painfully crawled home and up into the attic. at half-past nine the door opened and betty came in; the room was in darkness, but something oppressed her; she went to the mantlepiece to look for the matches, her fingers trembling. for an eternity she seemed to fumble, the oppression growing; she felt that victoria was in the room, and could only hope that she was asleep. with a great effort of her will she lit the candle before turning round. then she gave a short sharp scream. victoria was lying across the bed dressed in her bodice and petticoat. she had tucked this up to her knees and taken off her stockings; her legs hung dead white over the edge. at her feet was the tin bath full of water. betty ran to the bed, choking almost, and clasped her friend round the neck. it was some seconds before she thought of wetting her face. after some minutes victoria returned to consciousness and opened her eyes; she groaned slightly as betty lifted up her legs and straightened her on the bed. it was then that betty noticed the singular appearance of victoria's legs. they were covered with a network of veins, some narrow and pale blue in colour, others darker, protruding and swollen; on the left calf one of the veins stood out like a rope. the unaccustomed sight filled her with the horror bred of a mysterious disease. she was delicate, but had never been seriously ill; this sight filled her with physical repulsion. for her the ugliness of it meant foulness. for a moment she almost hated victoria, but the sight of the tin bath full of water cut her to the heart; it told her that victoria, maddened by mysterious pain, had tried to assuage it by bathing her legs in the cold water. little by little victoria came round; she smiled at betty. 'did i faint, betty dear?' she asked. 'yes, dear. are you better now?' 'yes, i'm better; it doesn't hurt now.' betty could not repress a question. 'vic,' she said, 'what is it?' 'i don't know,' said victoria fearfully, then more cheerfully, 'i'm tired i suppose. i shall be all right to-morrow.' then betty refused to let her talk any more, and soon victoria slept by her side the sleep of exhaustion. the next morning victoria insisted upon going to the p. r. r. in spite of betty suggesting a doctor. 'can't risk losing my job,' she said laughing. 'besides it doesn't hurt at all now. look.' victoria lifted up her nightshirt. her calves were again perfectly white and smooth; the thin network of veins had sunk in again and showed blue under the skin. alone one vein on the left leg seemed dark and angry. victoria felt so well, however, that she agreed to meet farwell at a quarter-past nine. this was their second expedition, and the idea of it was a stimulant. he went with her up to finsbury pavement and stopped at a small italian restaurant. 'come in here and have some coffee,' he said, 'they have waiters here; that'll be a change.' victoria followed him in. they sat at a marble topped table, flooded with light by incandescent gas. in the glare the waiters seemed blacker, smaller and more stunted than by the light of day. their faces were pallid, with a touch of green: their hair and moustaches were almost blue black. their energy was that of automata. victoria looked at them, melting with pity. 'there's a life for you,' said farwell interpreting her look. 'sixteen hours' work a day in an atmosphere of stale food. for meals, plate scourings. for sleep and time to get to it, eight hours. for living, the rest of the day.' 'it's awful, awful,' said victoria. 'they might as well be dead.' 'they will be soon,' said farwell, 'but what does that matter? there are plenty of waiters. in the shadow of the olive groves to-night in far off calabria, at the base of the vine-clad hills, couples are walking hand in hand, with passion flashing in their eyes. brown peasant boys are clasping to their breast young girls with dark hair, white teeth, red lips, hearts that beat and quiver with ecstasy. they tell a tale of love and hope. so we shall not be short of waiters.' 'why do you sneer at everything, mr farwell?' said victoria. 'can't you see anything in life to make it worth while?' 'no, i cannot say i do. the pursuit of a living debars me from the enjoyments that make living worth while. but never mind me: i am over without having bloomed. i brought you here to talk of you, not of me.' 'of me, mr farwell?' asked victoria. 'what do you want to know?' farwell leant over the table, toyed with the sugar and helped himself to a piece. then without looking at her: 'what's the matter with you, victoria?' he asked. 'matter with me? what do you mean?' said victoria, too disturbed to notice the use of her christian name. the man scrutinised her carefully. 'you're ill,' he said. 'don't protest. you're thin; there are purple pockets under your eyes; your underlip is twisted with pain, and you limp.' victoria felt a spasm of anger. there was still in her the ghost of vanity. but she looked at farwell before answering; there was gentleness in his eyes. 'well,' she said slowly, 'if you must know, perhaps there is something wrong. pains.' 'where?' he asked. 'in the legs,' she said after a pause. 'ah, swellings?' victoria bridled a little. this man was laying bare something, tearing at a secret. 'are you a doctor, mr farwell?' she asked coldly. 'that's all right,' he said roughly, 'it doesn't need much learning to know what's the matter with a girl who stands for eleven hours a day. are the veins of your legs swollen?' 'yes,' said victoria with an effort. she was frightened; she forgot to resent this wrenching at the privacy of her body. 'ah; when do they hurt?' 'at night. they're all right in the morning.' 'you've got varicose veins, victoria. you must give up your job.' 'i can't,' whispered the girl hoarsely. 'i've got nothing else.' 'exactly. either you go on and are a cripple for life or you stop and starve. yours is a disease of occupation, purely a natural consequence of your work. perfectly normal, perfectly. it is undesirable to encourage laziness; there are girls starving to-day for lack of work, but it would never do to reduce your hours to eight. it would interfere with the p. r. r. dividends.' victoria looked at him without feeling. 'what am i to do?' she asked at length. 'go to a hospital,' said farwell. 'these institutions are run by the wealthy who pay two guineas a year ransom for a thousand pounds of profits and get in the bargain a fine sense of civic duty done. no doubt the directors of the p.r.r. contribute most generously.' 'i can't give up my job,' said victoria dully. 'perhaps they'll give you a stocking,' said farwell, 'or sell it you, letting you pay in instalments so that you be not pauperised. this is called training in responsibility, also self-help.' victoria got up. she could bear it no longer. farwell saw her home and made her promise to apply for leave to see the doctor. as the door closed behind her he stood still for some minutes on the doorstep, filling his pipe. 'well, well,' he said at length, 'the government might think of that lethal chamber--but no, that would never do, it would deplete the labour market and hamper the commercial development of the empire.' he walked away, a crackling little laugh floating behind him. the faint light of a lamp fell on his bowed head and shoulders, making him look like a titan born a dwarf. two days later victoria went to the carew. she had never before set foot in a hospital. such intercourse as she had had with doctors was figured by discreet interviews in dark studies filled with unspeakably ugly and reassuringly solid furniture. those doctors had patted her hand, said she needed a little change or may be a tonic. at the carew, fed as it is by the misery of two square miles of north east london, the revelation of pain was dazzling, apocalyptic. the sight of the benches crowded with women and children--some pale as corpses, others flushed with fever, some with faces bandaged or disfigured by sores--almost made her sick. they were packed in serried rows; the children almost all cried persistently, except here and there a baby, who looked with frightful fixity at the glazed roof. from all this chattering crowd of the condemned rose a stench of iodoform, perspiration, unwashed bodies, the acrid smell of poverty. the little red-haired scotch doctor dismissed victoria's case in less than one minute. 'varicose veins. always wear a stocking. here's your form. settle terms at the truss office. don't stand on your feet. oh, what's your occupation?' 'waitress at the p.r.r., sir.' 'ah, hum. you must give it up.' 'i can't, sir.' 'it's your risk. come again in a month.' victoria pulled up her stockings. walking in a dream she went to the truss office where a man measured her calves. she felt numb and indifferent as to the exposure of her body. the man looked enquiringly at the left calf. 'v.h. for the left,' he called over his shoulder to the clerk. at twelve o'clock she was in the p.r.r., revived by the familiar atmosphere. she even rallied one of the old chess players on a stroke of ill-luck. towards four o'clock her ankles began to twitch. chapter xxiv through all these anxious times, betty watched over victoria with the devotion that is born of love. there was in the girl a reserve of maternal sweetness equalled only by the courage she showed every day. slim and delicate as she seemed, there was in betty's thin body a strength all nervous but enduring. she did not complain, though driven eleven or twelve hours a day by the eyes of the manageress; those eyes were sharp as a goad, but she went cheerfully. in a sense betty was happy. the work did not weigh too heavily upon her; there was so much humility in her that she did not resent the roughness of her companions. nelly could snub her, trample at times on her like the cart horse she was; the manageress too could freeze her with a look, the kitchen staff disregard her humble requests for teas and procure for her the savage bullying of the customers, yet she remained placid enough. 'it's a hard life,' she once said to victoria, 'but i suppose it's got to be.' this was her philosophy. 'but don't you want to get out of it?' cried victoria the militant. 'i don't know,' said betty. 'i might marry.' 'marry,' sniffed victoria. 'you seem to think marriage is the only way out for women.' 'well, isn't it?' asked betty. 'what else is there?' and for the life of her victoria could not find another occupation for an unskilled girl. milliners, dressmakers, clerks, typists, were all frightfully underpaid and overworked; true there were women doctors, but who cared to employ them? and teachers, but they earned the wages of virtue: neglect. besides it was too late; both victoria and betty were unskilled, condemned by their sex to low pay and hard work. 'it's frightful, frightful,' cried victoria. 'the only use we are is to do the dirty work. men don't char. of course we may marry, if we can, to any of those gods if they'll share with us their thirty bob a week. talk of slaves! they're better off than we.' betty looked upon all this as rather wild, as a consequence of victoria's illness. her view was that it didn't do to complain, and that the only thing to do was to make the best of it. but she loved victoria, and it was almost a voluptous joy for her to help her friend to undress every night, to tempt her with little offerings of fruit and flowers. when they woke up, betty would draw her friend into her arms and cover her face with gentle kisses. but as victoria grew worse, stiffer, and slower, responding ever more reluctantly to the demands made upon her all day at the p. r. r., betty was conscious of horrible anxiety. sometimes her imagination would conjure up a victoria helpless, wasted, bedridden, and her heart seemed to stop. but her devotion was proof against egoism. whatever happened, victoria should not starve if she had to pay the rent and feed herself on nine shillings or so a week until she was well again and beautiful as she had been. her anxiety increasing, she mustered up courage to interview farwell, whom she hated jealously. he had ruined victoria, she thought--made her wild, discontented, rebellious against the incurable. yet he knew her, and at any rate she must talk about it to somebody. so she mustered up courage to ask him to meet at nine. 'well?' said farwell. he did not like betty much. he included her among the poor creatures, the rubble. 'oh, mr farwell, what's going to happen to victoria,' cried betty, with tears in her voice. then she put her hand against the railings of finsbury circus. she had prepared a dignified little speech, and her suffering had burst from her. the indignity of it. 'happen? the usual thing in these cases. she'll get worse; the veins will burst and she'll be crippled for life.' betty looked at him, her eyes blazing with rage. 'how dare you, how dare you?' she growled. farwell laughed. 'my dear young lady,' he said smoothly, 'it needs no doctor to tell you what is wanted. victoria must stop work, lie up, be well fed, live in the country perhaps and her spirits must be raised. to this effect i would suggest a pretty house, flowers, books, some music, say a hundred-guinea grand piano, some pretty pictures. so that she may improve in health it is desirable that she should have servants. these may gain varicose veins by waiting on her, but that is by the way.' betty was weeping now. tear after tear rolled down her cheeks. 'but all this costs money,' continued farwell, 'and, as you are aware, bread is very dear and flesh and blood very cheap. humanity finds the extraction of gold a toilsome process, whilst the production of children is a normal recreation which eclipses even the charms of alcohol. there, my child, you have the problem; and there is only one radical solution to it.' betty looked at him, intuitively guessing the horrible suggestion. 'the solution,' said farwell, 'is to complain to the doctor of insomnia, get him to prescribe laudanum and sink your capital in the purchase of half a pint. one's last investment is generally one's best.' 'oh, i can't bear it, i can't bear it,' wailed betty. 'she's so beautiful, so clever.' 'ah, yes,' said farwell in his dreamy manner, 'but then you see when a woman doesn't marry. . . .' he broke off, his eyes fixed on the grey pavement. 'the time will come, betty, when the earth will be not only our eternal bed, but the fairy land where joyful flowers will grow. ah! it will be joyful, joyful, this crop of flowers born from seas of blood.' 'but, now, now, what can we do with her?' cried betty. 'i have no other suggestion if she will not fight,' growled farwell in his old manner. 'she must sink or swim. if she sinks she's to blame, i suppose. in a world of pirates and cut-throats she will have elected to be a saint, and the martyr's crown will be hers. if suicide is not to her taste, i would recommend her to resort to what is called criminal practices. being ill, she has magnificent advantages if she wishes to start business as a begging-letter writer; burglary is not suitable for women, but there are splendid openings for confidence tricksters and shoplifting would be a fine profession if it were not overcrowded by the upper middle classes.' betty dabbed her eyes vigorously. her mouth tightened. she looked despairingly at the desolate half circle of london wall buildings and salisbury house. then she gave farwell her hand for a moment and hurriedly walked away. as she entered the attic the candle was still burning. victoria was in bed and had forgotten it; she had already fallen into stertorous sleep. next morning victoria got up and dressed silently. she did not seem any worse; and with this betty was content, though she only got short answers to her questions. all that day victoria seemed well enough. she walked springily; at times she exchanged a quick joke with a customer. she laughed even when a young man, carried away for a moment beyond the spirit of food which reigned supreme in the p.r.r., touched her hand and looked into her eyes. as the afternoon wore victoria felt creeping over her the desperate weariness of the hour. at a quarter to six she made up her checks. there was a shortfall of one and a penny. 'how do you account for it?' asked the manageress. 'sure i don't know, miss,' said victoria helplessly. 'i always give checks. somebody must have slipped out without paying.' 'possibly.' the manageress grew more tense faced than ever. her bust expanded. 'i don't care. of course you know the rule. you pay half and the desk pays half.' 'i couldn't help it, miss,' said victoria miserably. sixpence halfpenny was a serious loss. 'no more could i. i think i can tell you how it happened, though,' said the manageress with a vague smile. 'i'm an old hand. a customer of yours had a tuck out for one and a penny. you gave him a check. look at the foil and you'll see.' 'yes, miss, here it is,' said victoria anxiously. 'very well. then he went upstairs on the q.t. and had a cup of coffee. follow!' 'yes, miss.' 'one of the girls gave him a twopenny check. then he went out and handed in the twopenny check. he kept the other one in his pocket.' 'oh, miss. . . . it's stealing,' victoria gasped. 'it is. but there it is, you see.' 'but it's not my fault, miss; if you had a pay box at the top of the stairs, i don't say. . . .' 'oh, we can't do that,' said the manageress icily, 'they would cost a lot to build and extra staff and we must keep down expenses, you know. competition is very keen in this trade.' victoria felt stunned. the incident was as full of revelations as lizzie's practices at the desk. the girls cheated the customers, the customers the girls. and the p.r.r. sitting olympian on its pillar of cloud, exacted from all its dividends. the p.r.r. suddenly loomed up before victoria's eyes as a big swollen monster in whose veins ran china tea. and from its nostrils poured forth torrents of coffee-scented steam. it grew and grew, and fed men and women, every now and then extending a talon and seizing a few young girls with sore legs, a rival café or two. then it vanished. victoria was looking at one of the large plated urns. 'all right,' she said sullenly, 'i'll pay.' as it was her day off, at six o'clock victoria went up to the change room, saying good-night to betty, telling her she was going out to get some fresh air. she thought it would do her good, so rode on a bus to the green park. round her, in piccadilly, a tide of rich life seemed to rise redolent with scent, soft tobacco, moist furs, all those odours that herald and follow wealth. a savagery was upon her as she passed along the club windows, now full of young men telling tales that made their teeth shine in the night, of old men, red, pink, brown, healthy in colour and in security, reading, sleeping, eking out life. the picture was familiar; for it was the picture she had so often seen when, as a girl, she came up to town from lympton for a week to shop in oxford street and see, from the upper boxes, the three or four plays recommended by _hearth and home_. piccadilly had been her mecca. it had represented mysterious delights, restaurants, little teashops, jewellers, makers of cunning cases for everything. she had never been well-off enough to shop there, but had gazed into its windows and bought the nearest imitations in oxford street. then the clubs had been, if not familiar, at any rate friendly. she had once with her mother called at the in and out to ask for a general. he was dead now, and so was piccadilly. victoria remembered without joy: a sign of total flatness, for the mind that does not glow at the thought of the glamorous past is dulled indeed. piccadilly struck her now rather as a show and a poor one, a show of the inefficients basking, of the wretched shuffling by. and the savagery that was upon her waxed fat. without ideals of ultimate brotherhood or love she could not help thinking, half amused, of the dismay that would come over london if a bomb were suddenly to raze to the ground one of these shrines of men. the bus stopped in a block just opposite one of the clubs; and victoria, from the off-side seat, could see across the road into one of the rooms. there were in it a dozen men of all ages, most of them standing in small groups, some already in evening-dress; some lolled on enormous padded chairs reading, and, against the mantlepiece where a fire burned brightly, a youth was telling an obviously successful story to a group of oldsters. their ease, their conviviality and facile friendship stung victoria; she felt an outcast. what had she now to do with these men? they would not know her. their sphere was their father's sphere, by right of birth and wealth, not hers who had not the right of wealth. besides, perhaps some were shareholders in the p.r.r. painfully shambling down the steps, victoria got off the bus and entered the green park. she sat down on a seat under a tree just bursting into bud. for many minutes she looked at the young grass, at the windows where lights were appearing, at a man seated near by and puffing rich blue smoke from his cigar. a loafer lay face down on the grass, like a bundle. her moods altered between rage, as she looked at the two men, and misery as she realised that her lot was cast with the wretch grovelling on the cold earth. she noticed that the man with the cigar was watching her, but hardly looked at him. he was fat, that was all she knew. her eyes once more fastened on the loafer. he had not fought the world; would she? and how? now and then he turned a little in his sleep, dreaming perhaps of feasts in cockayne, perhaps of the skilly he had tasted in gaol, of love perhaps, bright-eyed, master of the gates. it was cold, for the snap of winter was in the spring air; in the pale western sky the roofs loomed black. already the dull glow of london light rose like a halo over the town. victoria did not seem to feel the wind; she was a little numb, her legs felt heavy as lead. a gust of wind carried into her face a few drops of rain. the man with the cigar got up, slowly passed her; there was something familiar in his walk. he turned so as to see her face in the light of a gas-lamp. then he took three quick steps towards her. her heart was already throbbing; she felt and yet did not know. 'victoria,' said the man in a faint, far away voice. victoria gasped, put her hand on her heart, swaying on the seat. the man sat down by her side and took her hand. 'victoria,' he said again. there was in his voice a rich quality. 'oh, major cairns, major cairns,' she burst out. and clasping his hand between hers, she laid her face upon it. he felt all her body throb; there were tears on his hands. a man of the world, he very gently lifted up her chin and raised her to a sitting posture. 'there,' he said softly, still retaining her hands, 'don't cry, dear, all is well. don't speak. i have found you.' with all the gentleness of a heavy man he softly stroked her hands. chapter xxv two days later victoria was floating in the curious ether of the unusual. it was sunday night. she was before a little table at one of those concealed restaurants in soho where blows fragrant the wind of france. she was sitting in a softly cushioned arm chair, grateful to arms and back, her feet propped up on a footstool. before her lay the little table, with its rough cloth, imperfectly clean and shining dully with brittania ware. there were flowers in a small mug of bruges pottery; there was little light save from candles discreetly veiled by pink shades. the bill of fare, rigid on its metal stem, bore the two shilling table d'hôte and the more pretentious à la carte. an immense feeling of restfulness, so complete as to be positive was upon her. she felt luxurious and at large, at one with the other couples who sat near by, smiling, with possessive hands. on the other side of the table sat major cairns. he had not altered very much except that he was stouter. his grey eyes still shone kindly from his rather gross face. victoria could not make up her mind whether she liked him or not. when she met him in the park he had seemed beautiful as an archangel; he had been gentle too as big men mostly are to women, but now she could feel him examining her critically, noting her points, speculating on the change in her, wondering whether her ravaged beauty was greater and her neck softer than when he last held her in his arms off the coast of araby. victoria had compacted for a quiet place. she could not, she felt, face the pall mall or jermyn street restaurants, their lights, wealth of silver and glass, their soft carpets, their silent waiters. the major had agreed, for he knew women well and was not over-anxious to expose to the eyes of the town victoria's paltry clothes. now he had her before him he began to regret that he had not risked it. for victoria had gained as much as she had lost in looks. her figure had shrunk, but her neck was still beautifully moulded, broad as a pillar; her colour had gone down almost to dead white; the superfluous flesh had wasted away and had left bare the splendid line of the strong chin and jaw. her eyes, however, were the magnet that held cairns fast. they were as grey as ever, but dilated and thrown into contrast with the pale skin by the purple zone which surrounded them. they stared before them with a novel boldness, a strange lucidity. 'victoria,' whispered cairns leaning forward, 'you are very beautiful.' victoria laughed and a faint flush rose into her cheeks. there was still something grateful in the admiration of this man, gross and limited as he might be, centred round his pleasures, sceptical of good and evil alike. without a word she took up a spoon and began to eat her ice. cairns watched every movement of her hand and wrist. 'don't,' said victoria after a pause. she dropped her spoon and put her hands under the table. 'don't what?' said cairns. 'look at my hands. they're . . . oh, they're not what they were. it makes me feel ashamed.' 'nonsense,' said cairns with a laugh. 'your hands are still as fine as ever and, when we've had them manicured. . . .' he stopped abruptly as if he had said too much. 'manicured?' said victoria warily, though the 'we' had given her a little shock. 'oh, they're not worth manicuring now for the sort of work i've got to do.' 'look here, victoria,' said cairns rather roughly. 'this can't go on. you're not made to be one of the drabs. you say your work is telling on you: well, you must give it up.' 'oh, i can't do that,' said victoria, 'i've got to earn my living and i'm no good for anything else.' cairns looked at her for a moment and meditatively sipped his port. 'drink the port,' he commanded, 'it'll do you good.' victoria obeyed willingly enough. there was already in her blood the glow of burgundy; but the port, mellow, exquisite, and curling round the tongue, coloured like burnt almonds, fragrant too, concealed a deeper joy. the smoke from cairns' cigar, half hiding his face, floating in wreaths between them, entered her nostrils, aromatic, narcotic. 'what are you thinking of doing now?' she asked. 'i don't know quite,' said cairns. 'you see i broke my good resolution. after my job at perim, they offered me some surveying work near ormuz; they call it surveying, but it's spying really or it would be if there were anything to spy. i took it and rather enjoyed it.' 'did you have any adventures?' asked victoria. 'nothing to speak of except expeditions into the hinterland trying to get fresh meat. the east is overrated, i assure you. a butr landed off our station once, probably intending to turn us into able-bodied slaves. there were only seven of us to their thirty but we killed ten with two volleys and they made off, parting with their anchor in their hurry.' cairns looked at victoria. the flush had not died from her cheeks. she was good to look upon. 'no,' he went on more slowly, 'i don't quite know what i shall do. i meant to retire anyhow, you know, and the sudden death of my uncle, old marmaduke cairns, settled it. i never expected to get a look in, but there was hardly anybody else to leave anything to, except his sisters whom he hated like poison, so i'm the heir. i don't yet know what i'm worth quite, but the old man always seemed to do himself pretty well.' 'i'm glad,' said victoria. she was not. the monstrous stupidity of a system which suddenly places a man in a position enabling him to live on the labour of a thousand was obvious to her. 'i'm rather at a loose end,' said cairns musing, 'you see i've had enough knocking about. but it's rather dull here, you know. i'm not a marrying man either.' victoria was disturbed. she looked at cairns and met his eyes. there was forming in them a question. as she looked at him the expression faded and he signed to the waiter to bring the coffee. as they sipped it they spoke little but inspected one another narrowly. victoria told herself that if cairns offered her marriage she would accept him. she was not sure that ideal happiness would be hers if she did; his limitations were more apparent to her than they had been when she first knew him. yet the alternative was the p.r.r. and all that must follow. cairns was turning over in his mind the question victoria had surprised. though he was by no means cautious or shy, being a bold and good liver, he felt that victoria's present position made it difficult to be sentimental. so they talked of indifferent things. but when they left the restaurant and drove towards finsbury victoria came closer to him; and, unconsciously almost, cairns took her hand, which she did not withdraw. he leant towards her. his hand grew more insistent on her arm. she was passive, though her heart beat and fear was upon her. 'victoria,' said cairns, his voice strained and metallic. she turned her face towards him. there was in it complete acquiescence. he passed one arm round her waist and drew her towards him. she could feel his chest crush her as he bent her back. his lips fastened on her neck greedily. 'victoria,' said cairns again, 'i want you. come away from all this labour and pain; let me make you happy.' she looked at him, a question in her eyes. 'as free man and woman,' he stammered. then more firmly: 'i'll make you happy. you'll want nothing. perhaps you'll even learn to like me.' victoria said nothing for a minute. the proposal did not offend her; she was too broken, too stupefied for her inherent prejudices to assert themselves. morals, belief, reputation, what figments all these things. what was this freedom of hers that she should set so high a price on it? and here was comfort, wealth, peace--oh, peace. yet she hesitated to plunge into the cold stream; she stood shivering on the edge. 'let me think,' she said. cairns pressed her closer to him. a little of the flame that warmed his body passed into hers. 'don't hurry me. please. i don't know what to say. . . .' he bent over with hungry lips. 'yes, you may kiss me.' submissive, if frightened and repelled, yet with a heart where hope fluttered, she surrendered him her lips. chapter xxvi 'i don't approve and i don't disapprove,' snarled farwell. 'i'm not my sister's keeper. i don't pretend to think it noble of you to live with a man you don't care for, but i don't say you're wrong to do it.' 'but really,' said victoria, 'if you don't think it right to do a thing, you must think it wrong.' 'not at all. i am neutral, or rather my reason supports what my principles reject. thus my principles may seem unreasonable and my reasoning devoid of principle, but i cannot help that.' victoria thought for a moment. she was about to take a great step and she longed for approval. 'mr farwell,' she said deliberately, 'i've come to the conclusion that you are right. we are crabs in a bucket and those at the bottom are no nobler than those on the top, for they would gladly be on the top. i'm going on the top.' 'sophist,' said farwell smiling. 'i don't know what that means,' victoria went on; 'i suppose you think that i'm trying to cheat myself as to what is right. possibly, but i don't profess to know what is right.' 'oh, no more do i,' interrupted farwell, 'please don't set me up as a judge. i haven't got any ethical standards for you. i don't believe there are any; the ethics of the renaissance are not those of the twentieth century, nor are those of london the same as those of constantinople. time and space work moral revolutions; and, even on stereotyped lines, nobody can say present ethics are the best. from a conventional point of view the hundred and fifty years that separate us from fielding mark an improvement, but i have still to learn that the morals of to-day compare favourably with those of sparta. you must decide that for yourself.' 'i am doing so,' said victoria quietly, 'but i don't think you quite understand a woman's position and i want you to. i find a world where the harder a woman works, the worse she is paid, where her mind is despised and her body courted. oh, i know, you haven't done that, but you don't employ women. nobody but you has ever cared a scrap about such brains as i may have; the subs courted me in my husband's regiment. . . .' she stopped abruptly, having spoken too freely. 'go on,' said farwell tactfully. 'and in london what have i found? nothing but men bent on one pursuit. they have followed me in the streets and tubes, tried to sit by me in the parks. they have tried to touch me--yes me! the dependent who could not resent it, when i served them with their food. their talk is the inane, under which they cloak desire. their words are covert appeals. i hear round me the everlasting cry: yield, yield, for that is all we want from young women.' 'true,' said farwell, 'i have never denied this.' 'and yet,' answered victoria angrily, 'you almost blame me. i tell you that i have never seen the world as i do now. men have no use for us save as mistresses, whether legal or not. perhaps they will have us as breeders or housekeepers, but the mistress is the root of it all. and if they can gain us without pledges, without risks, by promises, by force or by deceit, they will.' farwell said nothing. his eyes were full of sorrow. 'my husband drank himself to death,' pursued victoria in low tones. 'the proprietor of the rosebud tried to force me to become his toy . . . perhaps he would have thrown me on the streets if he had had time to pursue me longer and if i refused myself still . . . because he was my employer and all is fair in what they call love . . . the customers bought every day for twopence the right to stare through my openwork blouse, to touch my hand, to brush my knees with theirs. one, who seemed above them, tried to break my body into obedience by force . . . here, at the p.r.r. i am a toy still, though more of a servant . . . soon i shall be a cripple and good neither for servant nor mistress, what will you do with me?' farwell made a despairing gesture with his hand. 'i tell you,' said victoria with ferocious intensity. 'you're right, life's a fight and i'm going to win, for my eyes are clear. i have done with sentiment and sympathy. a man may command respect as a wage earner; a woman commands nothing but what she can cheat out of men's senses. she must be rich, she must be economically independent. then men will crawl where they hectored, worship that which they burned. and if i must be dependent to become independent, that is a stage i am ready for.' 'what are you going to do?' asked farwell. 'i'm going to live with this man,' said victoria in a frozen voice. 'i neither love nor hate him. i am going to exploit him, to extort from him as much of the joy of life as i can, but above all i am going to draw from him, from others too if i can, as much wealth as i can. i will store it, hive it bee-like, and when my treasure is great enough i will consume it. and the world will stand by and shout: hallelujah, a rich woman cometh into her kingdom.' farwell remained silent for a minute. 'you are right,' he said, 'if you must choose, then be strong and carve your way into freedom. i have not done this, and the world has sucked me dry. you can still be free, so do not shrink from the means. you are a woman, your body is your fortune, your only fortune, so transmute it into gold. you will succeed, you will be rich; and the swine, instead of trampling on you, will herd round the trough where you scatter pearls.' he stopped for a moment, slowly puffing at his pipe. 'women's profession,' he muttered. 'the time will come . . . but to-day. . . .' victoria looked at him, a faint figure in the night. he was the spectral prophet, a david in fear of goliath. 'yes,' she said, 'woman's profession.' together they walked away. farwell was almost soliloquising. 'if she is brave, life is easier for a woman than a man. she can play on him; but her head must be cool, her heart silent. hear this, victoria. remember yours is a trade and needs your application. to win this fight you must be well equipped. let your touch be soft as velvet, your grip as hard as steel. shrink from nothing, rise to treachery, let the worldly nadir be your zenith.' he stopped before a public house and opened the door of the bar a little. 'look in here,' he said. victoria looked. there were five men, half hidden in smoke; among them sat one woman clad in vivid colours, her face painted, her hands dirty and covered with rings. her yellow hair made a vivid patch against the brown wall. a yard away, alone at a small table, sat another woman, covered too with cheap finery, with weary eyes and a smiling mouth, her figure abandoned on a sofa, lost to the scene, her look fixed on the side door through which men slink in. 'remember,' said farwell, 'give no quarter in the struggle, for you will get none.' victoria shuddered. but the fury was upon her. 'don't be afraid,' she hissed, 'i'll spare nobody. they've already given me a taste of the whip. i know, i understand; those girls don't. i see the goal before me and therefore i will reach it.' farwell looked at her again, his eyes full of melancholy. 'go then, victoria,' he said, 'and work out your fate.' part ii chapter i victoria turned uneasily on the sofa and stretched her arms. she yawned, then sat up abruptly. sudermann's _katzensteg_ fell to the ground off her lap. she was in a tiny back room, so overcrowded by the sofa and easy-chair that she could almost touch a small rosewood bureau opposite. she looked round the room lazily, then relapsed on the sofa, hugging a cushion. she snuggled her face into it, voluptuously breathing in its compactness laden with scent and tobacco smoke. then, looking up, she reflected that she was very comfortable. victoria's boudoir was the back extension of the dining-room. shut off by the folding doors, it contained within its tiny space the comfort which is only found in small rooms. it was papered red with a flowered pattern, which she thought ugly, but which had just been imported from france and was quite the thing. the sofa and easy-chair were covered with obtrusively new red and white chintz; a little pile of cushions had fallen on the indeterminate persian pattern of the carpet. long coffee-coloured curtains, banded with chintz, shut out part of the high window, through which a little of the garden and the bare branches of a tree could be seen. victoria took all this in for the hundredth time. she had been sleeping for an hour; she felt smooth, stroked; she could have hugged all these pretty things, the little brass fender, the books, the delft inkpot on the little bureau. everything in the room was already intimate. her eyes dwelt on the clean chintzes, on the half blinds surmounted by insertion, the brass ashtrays, the massive silver cigarette box. victoria stood up, the movement changing the direction of her contemplative mood. the gothic rosewood clock told her it was a little after three. she went to the cigarette box and lit a cigarette. while slowly inhaling the smoke, she rang the bell. on her right forefinger there was a faint yellow tinge of nicotine which had reached the nail. 'i shall have to be manicured again,' she soliloquised. 'what a nuisance. better have it done to-day while i get my hair done too.' 'yes, mum.' a neat dark maid stood at the door. victoria did not answer for a second. the girl's black dress was perfectly brushed, her cap, collar, cuffs, apron, immaculate white. 'i'm going out now, mary,' said victoria. 'you'd better get my brown velvet out.' 'yes, mum,' said the maid. 'will you be back for dinner, mum?' 'no, i'm dining with the major. oh, don't get the velvet out. it's muddy out, isn't it?' 'yes, mum. it's been raining in the morning, mum.' 'ah, well, perhaps i'd better wear the grey coat and skirt. and my furs and toque.' 'the beaver, mum?' 'no, of course not, the white fox. and, oh, mary, i've lost my little bag somewhere. and tell charlotte to send me up a cup of tea at half-past three.' mary left the room silently. she seldom asked questions, and never expressed pleasure, displeasure or surprise. victoria walked up to her bedroom; the staircase was papered with a pretty blue and white pattern over a dado of white lincrusta. a few french engravings stood out in their old gold frames. victoria stopped at the first landing to look at her favourite, after lancret; it represented lovers surprised in a barn by an irate husband. the bedroom occupied the entire first floor. on taking possession of the little house she had realised that, as she would have no callers, a drawing-room would be absurd, so had suppressed the folding doors and made the two rooms into one large one. in the front, between the two windows, stood her dressing-table, now covered with small bottles, some in cut glass and full of scent, others more workmanlike, marked vaseline, glycerine, skin food, bay rum. scattered about them on the lace toilet cover, were boxes of powder, white, sepia, bluish, puffs, little sticks of cosmetics, some silver-backed brushes, some squat and short-bristled, others with long handles, with long soft bristles, one studded with short wires, another with whalebone, some clothes brushes too, buttonhooks, silver trays, a handglass with a massive silver handle. right and left, two little electric lamps and above the swinging mirror, a shaded bulb shedding a candid glow. one wall was blotted out by two inlaid mahogany wardrobes; through the open doors of one could be seen a pile of frilled linen, lace petticoats, chemises threaded with coloured ribbons. on the large arm-chair, covered with blue and white chintz, was a crumpled heap of white linen, a pair of _café au lait_ silk stockings. a light mahogany chair or two stood about the room. each had a blue and white cushion. a large wash-stand stood near the mantlepiece, laden with blue and white ware. the walls were covered with blue silky paper, dotted here and there with some colour prints. these were mostly english; their nude beauties sprawled and languished slyly among bushes, listening to the pipes of pan. victoria went into the back of the room, and, unhooking her cream silk dressing jacket, threw it on the bed. this was a vast low edifice of glittering brown wood, covered now by a blue and white silk bedspread with edges smothered in lace; from the head of the bed peeped out the tips of two lace pillows. by the side of the bed, on the little night table, stood two or three books, a reading lamp and a small silver basket full of sweets. an ivory bell-pull hung by the side of a swinging switch just between the pillows. victoria walked past the bed and looked at herself in the high looking-glass set into the wall which rose from the floor to well above her head. the mirror threw back a pleasing reflection. it showed her a woman of twenty-six, neither short nor tall, dressed in a white petticoat and mauve silk corsets. the corsets fitted well into the figure which was round and inclined to be full. her arms and neck, framed with white frillings, were uniformly cream coloured, shadowed a little darker at the elbows, near the rounded shoulders and under the jaw; all her skin had a glow, half vigorous, half delicate. but the woman's face interested victoria more. her hair was piled high and black over a broad low white forehead; the cream of the skin turned faintly into colour at the cheeks, into crimson at the lips; her eyes were large, steel grey, long lashed and thrown into relief by a faintly mauve aura. there was strength in the jaw, square, hard, fine cut; there was strength too in the steadiness of the eyes, in the slightly compressed red lips. 'yes,' said victoria to the picture, 'you mean business.' she reflected that she was fatter than she had ever been. two months of rest had worked a revolution in her. the sudden change from toil to idleness had caused a reaction. there was something almost matronly about the soft curves of her breast. but the change was to the good. she was less interesting than the day when the major sat face to face with her in soho, his pulse beating quicker and quicker as her ravished beauty stimulated him by its novelty; but she was a finer animal. indeed she realised to the full that she had never been so beautiful, that she had never been beautiful before, as men understand beauty. the past two months had been busy as well as idle, busy that is as an idle woman's time. she had felt weary now and then, like those unfortunates who are bound to the wheel of pleasure and are compelled to 'do too much.' major cairns had launched out into his first experiment in pseudo-married life with an almost boyish zest. it was he who had practically compelled her to take the little house in elm tree place. 'think of it, vic,' he had said, 'your own little den. with no prying neighbours. and your own little garden. and dogs.' he had waxed quite sentimental over it and victoria, full of the gratitude that makes a woman cling to the fireman when he has rescued her, had helped him to build a home for the idyll. within a feverish month he had produced the house as it stood. he had hardly allowed victoria any choice in the matter, for he would not let her do anything. he practically compelled her to keep to her suite at the hotel, so that she might get well. he struggled alone with the decoration, plumbing, furniture and linoleum, linen and garden. now and then he would ring up to know whether she preferred salmon pink to _fraise écrasée_ cushions, or he would come up to the hotel rent in twain by conflicting rugs. at last he had pronounced the house ready, and, after supplying it with mary and charlotte, had triumphantly installed his new queen in her palace. victoria's first revelation was one of immense joy; unquestioning, and for one moment quite disinterested. it was not until a few hours had elapsed that she regained mastery over herself. she went from room to room punching cushions, pressing her hands over the polished wood, at times feeling voluptuously on hands and knees the pile of the carpets. she almost loved cairns at the moment. it was quite honestly that she drew him down by her side on the red and white sofa and softly kissed his cheek and drove his ragged moustache into rebellion. it was quite willingly too that she felt his grasp tighten on her and that she yielded to him. her lips did not abhor his kisses. some hours later she became herself again. cairns was good to her, but good as the grazier is to the heifer from whom he hopes to breed; she was his creature, and must be well housed, well fed, well clothed, so that his eyes might feast on her, scented so that his desire for her might be whipped into action. in her moments of cold horror in the past she had realised herself as a commodity, as a beast of burden; now she realised herself as a beast of pleasure. the only thing to remember then was to coin into gold her condescension. victoria looked at herself again in the glass. yes, it was condescension. as a free woman, that is, a woman of means, she would never have surrendered to cairns the tips of her fingers. off the coast of araby she had yielded to him a little, so badly did she need human sympathy, a little warmth in the cold of the lonely night. when he appeared again as the rescuer she had flung herself into his arms with an appalling fetterless joy. she had plunged her life into his as into nirvana. now her head was cooler. indeed it had been cool for a month. she saw cairns as an average man, neither good nor evil, a son of his father and the seed thereof, bound by a strict code of honour and a lax code of morals. she saw him as a dull man with the superficial polish that even the roughest pebble acquires in the stream of life. he had found her at low water mark, stranded and gasping on the sands; he had picked her up and imprisoned her in this vivarium to which he alone had access, where he could enjoy his capture to the full. 'and the capture's business is to get as much out of the captor as possible, so as to buy its freedom back.' this was victoria's new philosophy. she had dexterously induced cairns to give her a thousand a year. she knew perfectly well that she could live on seven hundred, perhaps on six. besides, she played on his pride. cairns was after all only a big middle-aged boy; it made him swell to accompany victoria to sloane street to buy a hat, to the leicester gallery to see the latest one-man show. she was a credit to a fellow. thus she found no difficulty in making him buy her sables, gold purses, whistler etchings. they would come in handy, she reflected, 'when the big bust-up came.' for victoria was not rocking herself in the transitory, but from the very first making ready for the storm which follows on the longest stretch of fair weather. 'yes,' said victoria again to the mirror, 'you mean business.' the door opened and almost noiselessly closed. mary brought in a tray covered with a clean set of silver-backed brushes, and piled up the other ready to take away. she put a water can on the washstand and parsimoniously measured into it some attar of roses. victoria stepped out into the middle of the room and stood there braced and stiff as the maid unlaced and then tightened her stays. 'what will you wear this evening, mum?' asked mary, as victoria sat down in the low dressing chair opposite the swinging glass. 'this evening,' mused victoria. 'let me see, there's the _gris perle_.' 'no, mum, i've sent it to the cleaner's,' said mary. her fingers were deftly removing the sham curls from victoria's back hair. 'you've worn it four times, mum,' she added reproachfully. 'oh, have i? i don't think. . . . oh, that's all right, mary.' victoria reflected that she would never have a well-trained maid if she finished sentences such as this. four times! well, she must give the major his money's worth. 'you might wear your red directoire, mum,' suggested mary in the unemotional tones of one who is paid not to hear slips. 'i might. yes. perhaps it's a little loud for the carlton.' 'yes, mum,' said mary without committing herself. 'after all, i don't think it is so loud.' 'no, mum,' said mary in even tones. she deftly rolled her mistress' plaits round the crown. victoria felt vaguely annoyed. the woman's words were anonymous. 'but what _do_ you think, mary,' she asked. 'oh, i think you're quite right, mum,' said mary. victoria watched her face in the glass. not a wave of opinion rippled over it. victoria got up. she stretched out her arms for mary to slip the skirt over her head. the maid closed the lace blouse, quickly clipped the fasteners together, then closed the placket hole completely. without a word she fetched the light grey coat, slipped it on victoria's shoulders. she found the grey skin bag, while victoria put on her white fox toque. she then encased victoria's head in a grey silk veil and sprayed her with scent. victoria looked at herself in the glass. she was very lovely, she thought. 'anything else, mum,' said mary's quiet voice. 'no, mary, nothing else.' 'thank you, mum.' as victoria turned, she found the maid had disappeared, but her watchful presence was by the front door to open it for her. victoria saw her from the stairs, a short erect figure, with a pale face framed in dark hair. she stood with one hand on the latch, the other holding a cab whistle; her eyes were fixed upon the ground. as victoria passed out she looked at mary. the girl's eyes were averted still, her face without a question. upon her left hand she wore a thin gold ring with a single red stone. the ring fastened on victoria's imagination as she stepped into a hansom which was loafing near the door. it was not the custom, she knew, for a maid to wear a ring; and this alone was enough to amaze her. was it possible that mary's armour was not perfect in every point of servility? no doubt she had just put it on as it was her evening out and she would be leaving the house in another half hour. and then? would another and a stronger hand take hers, hold it, twine its fingers among her fingers. victoria wondered, for the vision of love and mary were incongruous ideas. it was almost inconceivable that with her cap and apron she doffed the mantle of her reserve; she surely could not vibrate; her heart could not beat in unison with another. yet, there was the ring, the promise of passion. victoria nursed for a moment the vision of the two spectral figures, walking in a dusky park, arms round waists, then of shapes blended on a seat, faces hidden, lip to lip. victoria threw herself back in the cab. what did it all matter after all? mary was the beast of burden which she had captured by piracy. she had been her equal once when abiding by the law; she had shared her toil and her slender meed of thanks. now she was a buccaneer, outside the social code, and as such earned the right to command. so much did victoria dominate that she thought she would refrain from the exercise of a bourgeois prerogative: the girl should wear her ring, even though custom forbade it, load herself with trinkets if she chose, for as a worker and a respecter of social laws surely she might well be treated as the sacrificial ox. the horse trotted down baker street, then through wigmore street. daylight was already waning; here and there houses were breaking into light between the shops, some of which had remembered it was christmas eve and decked themselves out in holly. at the corner near the bechstein hall the cab came to a stop behind the long line of carriages waiting for the end of a concert. victoria had time to see the old crossing sweeper, with a smile on his face and mistletoe in his battered billy-cock. the festivities would no doubt yield him his annual kind word from the world. she passed the carriages, all empty still. the cushions were rich, she could see. here and there she could see a fur coat or a book on the seat; in one of them sat an elderly maid, watching the carriage clock under the electric light, meanwhile nursing a chocolate pom who growled as victoria passed. 'slaves all of them,' thought victoria. 'a slave the good elderly maid, thankful for the crumbs that fall from the pom's table. slaves too, the fat coachman, the slim footman despite their handsome english faces, lit up by a gas lamp. the raw material of fashion.' the cab turned into the greater blaze of oxford circus, past the princes street p.r.r. there was a great show of christmas cakes there. from the cab victoria, craning out, could see a young and pretty girl behind the counter busily packing frosted biscuits. victoria felt warmed by the sight; she was not malicious, but the contrast told her of her emancipation from the thrall of eight bob a week. through regent street, all congested with traffic, little figures laden with parcels darting like frightened ants under the horse's nose, then into the immensity of whitehall, the cab stopped at the stores in victoria street. victoria had but recently joined. a store ticket and a telephone are the next best thing to respectability and the same thing as regards comfort. they go far to establish one's social position. victoria struggled through the wedged crowd. here and there boys and girls with flushed faces, who enjoyed being squashed. she could see crowds of jolly women picking from the counters things useful and things pretty; upon signal discoveries loudly proclaimed followed continual exclamations that they would not do. family parties, excited and talkative, left her unmoved. that world, that of the rich and the free, would ultimately be hers; her past, that of the worn men and women ministering behind the counter to the whims of her future world, was dead. she only had to buy a few christmas presents. there was one for betty, one for cairns, and two for the servants. in the clothing department she selected a pretty blue merino dressing-gown and a long purple sweater for betty. the measurements were much the same as hers, if a little slighter; besides such garments need not fit. she went downstairs and disposed of the major by means of a small gold cigarette case with a leather cover. no doubt he had a dozen, but what could she give a man? the stores buzzed round her like a parliament of bees. now and then people shouldered past her, a woman trod on her foot and neglected to apologise; parcels too, inconveniently carried, struck her as she passed. she felt the joy of the lost; for none looked at her, save now and then a man drowned in the sea of women. the atmosphere was stuffy, however, and time was precious as she had put off buying presents until so late. followed by a porter with her parcels she left the stores, experiencing the pleasure of credit on an overdrawn deposit order account. the man piled the goods in a cab, and in a few minutes she had transferred betty's presents to a carrier's office, with instructions to send them off at eight o'clock by a messenger who was to wait at the door until the addressee returned. this was not unnecessary foresight, for betty would not be back until nine. with the major's cigarette case in her white muff, victoria then drove to bond street, there to snatch a cup of tea. on the way she stopped the cab to buy a lace blouse for mary and an umbrella for charlotte, having forgotten them in her hurry. she decided to have tea at miss fortesque's, for miss fortesque's is one of those tearooms where ladies serve ladies, and the newest fashions come. it is the right place to be seen in at five o'clock. at the door a small boy in an eton jacket and collar solemnly salutes with a shiny topper. inside, the english character of the room is emphasized. there are no bamboo tables, no skimpy french chairs or japanese umbrellas; everything is severely plain and impeccably clean. the wood shines, the table linen is hard and glossy, the glass is hand cut and heavy, the plate quite plain and obviously dear. on the white distempered walls are colour prints after reynolds, romney, gainsborough. all conspires with the thick carpet to promote silence, even the china and glass, which seem no more to dare to rattle than if they were used in a men's club. victoria settled down in a large chintz-covered arm chair and ordered tea from a good-looking girl in a dark grey blouse and dress. visibly a hockey skirt had not long ago been more natural to her. as she returned victoria observed the slim straight lines of her undeveloped figure. she was half graceful, half gawky, like most young english girls. 'it's been very cold to-day, hasn't it?' said the girl as she set down bread and butter, then cake and jam sandwiches. 'very,' victoria looked at her narrowly. 'i suppose it doesn't matter much in here, though.' 'oh, no, we don't notice it.' the girl looked weary for a second. then she smiled at victoria and walked away to a corner where she stood listlessly. 'slave, slave.' the words rang through victoria's head. 'you talk to me when you're sick of the sight of me. you talk of things you don't care about. you smile if you feel your face shows you are tired, in the hope i'll tip you silver instead of copper.' victoria looked round the room. it was fairly full, and as fortesquean as it was british. the fortesque tradition is less fluid than the constitution of the empire. its tables shout 'we are old wood'; its cups say 'we are real porcelain'; and its customers look at one another and say 'who the devil are you?' nobody thinks of having tea there unless they have between one and three thousand a year. it is too quiet for ten thousand a year or for three pounds a week; it caters for ladies and gentlemen and freezes out everybody else, regardless of turnover. thus its congregation (for its afternoon rite is almost hieratical) invariably includes a retired colonel, a dowager with a daughter about to come out, several squiresses who came to miss fortesque's as little girls and are handing on the torch to their own. there is a sprinkling of women who have been shopping in bond street, buying things good but not showy. as the customers, or rather clients, lapse with a sigh into the comfortable armchairs they look round with the covert elegance that says, 'and who the devil are you?' victoria was in her element. she had had tea at miss fortesque's some dozen years before when up for the week from lympton; thus she felt she had the freedom of the house. she sipped her tea and dropped crumbs with unconcern. she looked at the dowager without curiosity. the dowager speculated as to the maker of her coat and skirt. victoria's eyes fixed again on the girl who was passing her with a laden tray. the effort was bringing out the beautiful lines of the slender arms, drooping shoulders, round bust. her fair hair clustered low over the creamy nape. 'slave, slave,' thought victoria again. 'what are you doing, you fool? roughening your hands, losing flesh, growing old. and there's nothing for a girl to do but serve on, serve, always serve. until you get too old. and then, scrapped. or you marry . . . anything that comes along. good luck to you, paragon, on your eight bob a week.' victoria went downstairs and got into the cab which had been waiting for her with the servants' presents. it was no longer cold, but foggy and warm. she undid her white fox stole, dropping on the seat her crocodile skin bag, whence escaped a swollen purse of gold mesh. upstairs the girl cleared away. under the butter-smeared plate which slipped through her fingers she found half-a-crown. her heart bounded with joy. chapter ii 'tom, you know how i hate _tournedos_,' said victoria petulantly. 'sorry, old girl.' cairns turned and motioned to the waiter. while he was exchanging murmurs with the man victoria observed him. cairns was not bad looking, redder and stouter than ever. he was turning into the 'jolly old major' type, short, broad, strangled in cross barred cravats and tight frock-coats. in evening dress, his face and hands emerging from his shirt and collar, he looked like an enormous dish of strawberries and cream. 'i've ordered quails for you? will that do, miss dainty?' 'yes, that's better.' she smiled at him and he smiled back. 'by jove, vic,' he whispered, 'you look fine. nothing like pink shades for the complexion.' 'i think you're very rude,' said victoria smiling. 'honest,' said cairns. 'and why not? no harm in looking your best is there? now my light's yellow. brings me down from tomato to carrot.' 'fishing again. no good, tommy old chap.' 'never mind me,' said cairns with a laugh. he paused and looked intently at victoria, then cautiously round him. they were almost in the middle of the restaurant, but it was still only half full. cairns had fixed dinner for seven, though they were only due for a music hall; he hated to hurry over his coffee. thus they were in a little island of pink light surrounded by penumbra. softly attuned, mimi's song before the gates of paris floated in from the balcony. 'vic,' said cairns gravely, 'you're lovely. i've never seen you like this before.' 'do you like my gown?' she asked coquettishly. 'your gown!' cairns said 'your gown's like a stalk, vic, and you're a big white flower bursting from it . . . a big white flower, pink flecked, scented. . . .' 'sh . . . tom, don't talk like that in here.' victoria slid her foot forward, slipped off her shoe and gently put her foot on the major's instep. his eyes blinked quickly twice. he reached out for his glass and gulped down the champagne. the waiter returned, velvet footed. every one of his gestures consecrated the quails resting on the flowered white plates, surrounded by a succulent lake of aromatic sauce. they ate silently. there was already between them the good understanding which makes speech unnecessary. victoria looked about her from time to time. the couples interested her, for they were nearly all couples. most of them comprised a man between thirty and forty, and a woman some years his junior. their behaviour was severely decorous, in fact a little languid. from a table near by a woman's voice floated lazily, 'i rather like this pub, robbie.' indeed the acceptance of the pubbishness of the place was characteristic of its frequenters. most of the men looked vaguely weary; some keenly interested bent over the silver laden tables, their eyes fixed on their women's arms. here and there a foreigner with coal black hair, a soft shirt front and a fancy white waistcoat, spiced with originality the sedateness of english gaiety. an american woman was giving herself away by a semitone, but her gown was exquisite and its _décolletage_ challenged gravitation. cairns' attitude was exasperatingly that of gallio, save as concerned victoria. his eyes did not leave her. she knew perfectly well that he was inspecting her, watching the rise and fall on her white breast of his christmas gift, a diamond cross. they both refused the mousse and victoria mischievously leant forward, her hands crossed under her chin, her arms so near cairns' face that he could see on them the fine black shading of the down. 'well, tom?' she asked. 'quite happy?' 'no,' growled cairns, 'you know what i want.' 'patience and shuffle the cards,' said victoria, 'and be thankful i'm here at all. but i musn't rot you tommy dear, after a present like that.' she slipped her fingers under the diamond cross. cairns watched the picture made by the rosy manicured finger nails, the sparkling stones, the white skin. 'a pity it doesn't match my rings,' she remarked. cairns looked at her hand. 'oh, no more it does. i thought you had a half hoop. never mind, dear. give me that sapphire ring.' 'what do you want it for?' asked victoria with a conscious smile. 'that's my business.' she slipped it off. he took it, pressing her fingers. 'i think you ought to have a half hoop,' he said conclusively. victoria leant back in her chair. her smile was triumphant. truly, men are hard masters but docile slaves. 'you'll spoil me, tom,' she said weakly. 'i don't want you to think that i'm fishing for things. i'm quite happy, you know. i'd rather you didn't give me another ring.' 'nonsense,' said cairns, 'i wouldn't give it you if i didn't like to see it on your hand.' 'i don't believe you,' she said smoothly, but the phrase rang true. some minutes later, as they passed down the stairs into the palm room, she was conscious of the eyes that followed her. those of the men were mostly a little dilated; the women seemed more cynically interested, as suits those who appraise not bodies but garments. major cairns, walking a step behind her, was still looking well, with his close cut hair and moustache, stiff white linen and erect bearing. victoria realised herself as a queen in a worthy kingdom. but the kingdom was not the one she wished to hold with all the force of her beauty. that beauty was transitory, or at least its subtler quality was. as victoria lay in the brougham with cairns's arm holding her close to him, she still remembered that the fading of her beauty might synchronise with the growth of her wealth. a memory from some book on political economy flashed through her mind: beauty was a wasting asset. cairns kissed her on the lips. an atmosphere of champagne, coffee, tobacco, enveloped her as her breath mixed with his. she coiled one arm round his neck and returned his kisses. 'vic, vic,' he murmured, 'can't you love me a little?' she put her hand behind his neck and once more kissed his lips. he must be lulled, but not into security. victoria had never realised her strength and her freedom so well as that night, as she leant back in her box. her face and breast, the major's shirt front, were the only spots of light which emerged from the darkness of the box as if pictured by a german impressionist; down below, under the mist, the damned souls revelled in the cheap seats; they swayed, a black mass speckled with hundreds of white collars, dotted with points of fire in the bowls of pipes. by the side of the men, girls in white blouses or crude colours, shrouded in the mist of tobacco smoke. now and then a ring coiled up from a cigar in the stalls, swirled in the air for a moment and then broke. just behind the footlights blazing over the blackness, a little fat man, with preposterous breeches, a coat of many colours, a yellow wisp of hair clashing with his vinous nose, sang of the bank and his manifold accounts. a faint salvo of applause ushered him out, then swelled into a tempest as the next number went up. 'tommy bung, you're in luck,' said the major, taking off victoria's wrap. she craned forward to see. a woman with masses of fair hair, bowered in blue velvet, took a long look at her from the stage box through an opera glass. the curtain went up. there was a roar of applause. tommy bung was ready for the audience and had already fallen into a tub of whitewash. the sorry object extricated itself. his red nose shone, star like. he rolled ferocious eyes at a girl. the crowd rocked with joy. without a word the great tommy bang began to dance. at once the hall followed the splendid metre. up and down, up and down, twisting, curvetting, tommy bung held his audience spellbound with rhythm. they swayed sharply with the alternations. victoria watched the major. his hands were beating time. tommy bung brought his effort to a conclusion by beating the floor, the soles of his feet, the scenery, and punctuated the final thwack with a well timed leap on the prompter's box. victoria was losing touch with things. waves of heat seemed to overwhelm her; little figures of jugglers, gymnasts, performing dogs, passed before her eyes like arabesques. then again raucous voices. the crowd was applauding hysterically. it was number fourteen, whose great name she was fated never to know. unsteadily poised on legs wide apart, number fourteen sang. uncontrollable glee radiated from him-- now kids is orl right when yer ain't got none; yer can sit at 'ome an' eat 'cher dam bun. i've just 'ad some twins; nurse says don't be coy, for they're just the picture of the lodger's boy. tinka, tinka, tinka; tinka, tinka, tink 'it 'im in the eye and made the lodger blink. tinga, tinga, tinga; tinga, tinga, teg never larfed so much since farver broke 'is leg. a roar of applause encouraged him. victoria saw cairns carried away, clapping, laughing. in the bar below she could hear continuously the thud of the levers belching beer. number fourteen was still singing, his smile wide-slit through his face-- now me paw-in-law 'e's a rum ole bloke; got a 'and as light as a ton o' coke. came 'ome late one night an' what oh did 'e see? saw me ma-in-law on the lodger's knee. tinka, tinka, tinka; tinka, tinka, tink 'it 'im in the eye an' made the lodger blink. tinga, tinga, tinga; tinga, tinga, teg, never larfed so much since farver broke 'is leg. enthusiasm was rising high. number fourteen braced himself for his great effort on the effects of beer. then, gracious and master of the crowd, he beat time with his hands while the chorus sounded from a thousand throats. victoria happened to look at cairns. his head was beating time and, from his lips issued gleefully: tinka, tinka, tinka; tinka, tinka, tink 'it 'im in the eye-- victoria scrutinised him narrowly. cairns was a phenomenon. 'never larfed so much since farver broke 'is leg,' roared cairns. 'i say, vic, he really _is_ good.' he noticed her puzzled expression. 'i say, vic, what's up? don't you like him?' victoria did not answer for a second. 'oh, yes, i--he's very funny--you see i've never been in a music hall before.' 'oh, is that it?' cairns's brow cleared. 'it's a little coarse, but so natural.' 'is that the same thing?' asked victoria. 's'pose it is. with some of us anyhow. but what's the next?' cairns had already relapsed into the programme. he hated the abstract; a public school, sandhurst and the army had armoured him magnificently against intrusive thought. they watched the next turn silently. a couple of cross-talk comedians, one a shocking creature in pegtop trousers, a shock yellow head and a battered opera hat, the other young, handsome and smart as a superior barber's assistant, gibbered incomprehensibly of songs they couldn't sing and lies they could tell. the splendid irresponsibility of the music hall was wasted on victoria. she had the mind of a schoolmistress grafted on a social sense. she saw nothing before her but the gross riot of the drunken. she saw no humour in that cockney cruelty, capable though it be of absurd generosity. she resented too cairns's boyish pleasure in it all; he revelled, she felt, as a buffalo wallows in a mud bath. he was gross, stupid, dull. it was degrading to be his instrument of pleasure. but, after all, what did it matter? he was the narrow way which would lead her to the august. though cairns was not thin-skinned he perceived a little of this. without a word he watched the cross-talk comedians, then the 'dandy girl of cornucopia,' a rainbow of stiff frills with a voice like a fretsaw. as the lights went down for the bioscope, the idea of reconciliation that springs from fat cheery hearts overwhelmed him. he put his hand out and closed it over hers. with a tremendous effort she repressed her repulsion, and in so doing won her victory. in the darkness cairns threw his arms round her. he drew her towards him, moved, the least bit hysterical. as if fearful of losing her he crushed her against his shirt front. victoria did not resist him. her eyes fixed on the blackness of the roof she submitted to the growing brutality of his kisses on her neck, her shoulders, her cheeks. pressed close against him she did not withdraw her knees from the grasp of his. 'kiss me,' whispered cairns imperiously. she cast down her eyes; she could hardly see his face in the darkness, nothing but the glitter of his eyeballs. then, unhurried and purposeful, she pressed her lips to his. the lights went up again. many of the crowd were stirring; victoria stretched out her arms in a gesture of weariness. 'let's go home, vic,' said cairns, 'you're tired.' 'oh, no, i'm not tired,' she said. 'i don't mind staying.' 'well, you're bored.' 'no, not at all, it's quite interesting,' said victoria judicially. 'come along, vic,' said cairns sharply. he got up. she looked up at him. his face was redder, more swollen than it had been half-an-hour before. his eyes followed every movement of her arms and shoulders. with a faint smile of understanding and the patience of those who play lone hands, she got up and let him put on her wrap. as she put it on she made him feel against his fingers the sweep of her arm; she rested for a moment her shoulder against his. in the cab they did not exchange a word. victoria's eyes were fixed on the leaden sky; she was this man's prey. but, after all, one man's prey or another? the prey of those who demand bitter toil from the charwoman, the female miner, the p.r.r. girl; or of those who want kisses, soft flesh, pungent scents, what did it all amount to? and, in oxford street, a sky sign in the shape of a horse-shoe advertising whisky suddenly reminded her of the half hoop, a step towards that capital which meant freedom. no, she was not the prey--at least not in the sense of the bait which finally captures the salmon. cairns had not spoken a word. victoria looked at him furtively. his hands were clenched before him; in his eyes shone an indomitable purpose. he was going to the feast and he would foot the bill. on arriving at elm tree place he walked at once into his dressing room, while victoria went into her bedroom. she knew his mood well and knew too that he would not be long. she did not fancy overmuch the scene she could conjure up. in another minute or two he would come in with the culture of a thousand years ground down, smothered beneath the lava-like flow of animalism. he would come with his hands shaking, ready to be cruel in the exaction of his rights. she hovered between repulsion and an anxiety which was almost anticipation; cairns was the known and the unknown at once. but whatever his demands they should be met and satisfied, for business is business and its justification is profits. so victoria braced herself and, with feverish activity, twisted up her hair, sprayed herself with scent, jumped into bed and turned out the light. as she did so the door opened. she was conscious for a fraction of a second of the bright quadrilateral of the open door where cairns stood framed, a broad black silhouette. chapter iii 'yes, i'm a lucky beggar,' soliloquised cairns. he gave a tug to the leads at which two pekingese spaniels were straining. 'come along, you little brutes,' he growled. the spaniels, intent upon a piece of soiled brown paper in the gutter, refused to move. 'obstinate, sir,' said a policeman respectfully. 'devilish. simply devilish. fine day, isn't it?' 'blowing up for rain, sir.' 'maybe. come along, snoo; that'll do.' cairns dragged the dogs up the road. snoo and poo, husband and wife, had suddenly fascinated him in villiers street that morning. he was on his way to offer them at victoria's shrine. instinctively he liked the smart dog, as he liked the smart woman and the american novel. snoo and poo, tiny, fat, curly, khaki-coloured, with their flat kalmuck faces, unwillingly trundled behind him. they would, thought cairns, be in keeping with the establishment. a pleasant establishment. a nice little house, in its quiet street where nothing ever seemed to pass, except every hour or so a cab. it was better than a home, for it offered all that a home offers, soft carpets, discreet servants, nice little lunches among flowers and well-cleaned plate, and beyond, something that no home contains. it was adventurous. cairns had knocked about the world a good deal and had collected sensations as finer natures collect thoughts. the women of the past met and caressed on steam-boats, in hotels at cairo, singapore and cape town, the tea gardens of kobe and the stranger mysteries of zanzibar, all this had left him weary and sighing for something like the english home. indeed he grew more sentimental as he thought of dover cliffs every time his tailor called the measurement of his girth. an extra quarter of an inch invariably coincided with a sentimental pang. cairns, however, would not yet have been capable of settling down in a hunting county with a well-connected wife, a costly farming experiment and the shilling weeklies. a transition was required; he had no gift of introspection, but his relations with victoria were expressions of this mood. thus he was happy. he never entered the little house in elm tree place without a thrill of pleasure. under the placid mask of its respectability and all that went with it, clean white steps, half curtains, bulbs in the window boxes, there flowed for him a swift hot stream. and in that stream flourished a beautiful white lily whose petals opened and smiled at will. 'i wonder whether i'm in love with her?' this was a frequent subject for cairns's meditations. victoria was so much more for him than any other woman had been that he always hesitated to answer. she charmed him sensually, but other women had done likewise; she was beautiful, but he could conceive of greater beauty. her intellect he did not consider, for he was almost unaware of it. for him she was clever, in the sense that women are clever in men's eyes when they can give a smart answer, understand bradshaw and order a possible combination at a restaurant. what impressed him was victoria's coolness, the balance of her unhurried mind. now and then he caught her reading curious books, such as _smiles's self-help_, _letters of a self-made merchant to his son_ and _thus spake zara . . . something_, by a man with a funny name; but this was all part of her character and of its novelty. he did not worry to scratch the surface of this brain; virgin soils did not interest him in the mental sense. sometimes, when he enounced a political opinion or generalised on the problems of the day as stated in the morning paper, he would find, a little uneasily, her eyes fixed on him with a strangely interested look. but her eyelids would at once be lowered and her lips would part, showing a little redder and moister, causing his heart to beat quicker, and he would forget his perplexity as he took her hand and stroked her arm with gentle insistence. cairns dragged snoo and poo up the steps of the little house still grumbling, panting and protesting that, as drawing-room dogs, they objected to exercise in any form. he had a latchkey, but always refrained from using it. he liked to ring the bell, to feel like a guest. it would have been commonplace to enter _his_ hall and hang up _his_ hat on _his_ peg. that would have been home and home only. to ask whether mrs ferris was in was more adventurous, for she might be out. and if she expected him, then it was an assignation; adventure again. the unimposing mary let him in. for a fraction of a second she looked at the major, then at the floor. 'mrs ferris in?' 'yes, sir, mrs ferris is in the boudoir.' mary's voice fell on the last necessary word like a dropgate. she had been asked a question and answered it. that was the end of it. cairns was the master of her mistress. what respect she owed was paid. cairns deposited his hat and coat in mary's hands. then, lifting snoo under one arm and poo under the other, both grumbling vigorously and kicking with their hind legs, he walked to the boudoir and pushed it open with his shoulder. victoria was sitting at the little bureau writing a letter. cairns watched her for two seconds, rejoicing in the firm white moulding of her neck, in the dark tendrils of hair clustering low, dwindling into the central line of down which tells of breeding and health. then victoria turned round sharply. 'oh,' she said, with a little gasp. 'oh, tom, the ducks!' cairns laughed and, walking up to her, dropped snoo on her lap and poo, snuffling ferociously, on the floor. victoria buried her hands in snoo's thick coat; the dog gurgled joyfully and rolled over on its side. victoria laughed, muzzling snoo with her hand. cairns watched the picture for, a moment. he was absurdly reminded of a girl in java who nursed a black marmoset against her yellow breast. and as victoria looked up at him, her chin now resting on snoo's brown head, a soft wave of scent rose towards him. he knelt down, throwing his arms round her and the dog, gathering them both into his embrace. as his lips met hers and clung to them, her perfume and the ranker scent of the dog filled his nostrils, burning aphrodisiac into his brain. victoria freed herself gently and rose to her feet, still nursing snoo, and laughingly pushed him into cairns's face. 'kiss him,' she said, 'no favours here.' cairns obeyed, then picked up poo and sat down on the couch. 'this is sweet of you, tom,' said victoria. 'they _are_ lovebirds.' 'i'm glad you like them; this is poo i'm holding, yours is snoo.' 'odd names,' said victoria. 'chinese according to the dealer,' said cairns, 'but i don't pretend to know what they mean.' 'never mind,' said victoria, 'they're lovebirds, and so are you, tom.' cairns looked at her silently, at her full erect figure and smiling eyes. he was a lucky beggar, a damned lucky beggar. 'and what is this bribe for?' she asked. 'oh, nothing. knew you'd like them, beastly tempers and as game as mice. women's dogs, you know.' 'generalising again, tom. besides i hate mice.' cairns drew her down by his side on the couch. everything in this woman interested and stimulated him. she was always fresh, always young. the touch of her hand, the smell of her hair, the feel of her skirts winding round his ankles, all that was magic; every little act of hers was a taking of possession. every time he mirrored his face in her eyes and saw the eyelids slowly veil and unveil them, something like love crept into his soul. but every passionate embrace left him weak and almost repelled. she was his property; he had paid for her; and, insistent thought, what would she have done if he had not been rich? half an hour passed away. victoria lay passive in his arms. snoo and poo, piled in a heap, were snuffling drowsily. there was a ring at the front door, then a slam. they could hear voices. they started up. 'who the deuce . . . .?' said cairns. then they heard someone in the dining-room beyond the door. there was a knock at the door of the boudoir. 'come in,' said victoria. mary entered. her placid eyes passed over the major's tie which had burst out of his waistcoat, victoria's tumbled hair. 'mr wren, mum,' she said. victoria staggered. her hands knotted themselves together convulsively. 'good god,' she whispered. 'who is it? what does he want? what name did you say?' asked cairns. victoria's excitement was infecting him. victoria did not answer. mary stood before them, her eyes downcast before the drama. she was waiting for orders. 'can't you speak?' growled cairns. 'who is it?' victoria found her voice at last. 'my brother,' she said hoarsely. cairns did not say a word. he walked once up and once down the room, stopped before the mirror to settle his tie. then turned to mary. 'tell the gentleman mrs ferris can't see him!' mary turned to go. there was a sound of footsteps in the dining-room. the button of the door turned twice as if somebody was trying to open it. the door was locked but cairns almost leaped towards it. victoria stopped him. 'no,' she said, 'let me have it out. tell mr wren i'm coming, mary.' mary turned away. the incident was fading from her mind as a stone fades away as it falls into an abyss. victoria clung to cairns and whispered in his ear. 'tom, go away, go away. come back in an hour. i beg you.' 'no, old girl, i'm going to see you through,' said cairns doggedly. 'no, no, don't.' there was fear in her voice. 'i must have it out. go away, for my sake, tom.' she pushed him gently into the hall, forced him to pick up his hat and stick and closed the door behind him. she braced herself for the effort; for a second the staircase shivered before her eyes like a road in the heat. 'now for it,' she said, 'i'm in for a row.' a pleasant little tingle was in her veins. she opened the dining-room door. it was not very light. there was a slight singing in her ears. she saw nothing before her except a man's legs clad in worn grey trousers where the knees jutted forward sharply. with an effort she raised her eyes and looked edward in the face. he was pale and thin as ever. a ragged wisp of yellow hair hung over the left side of his forehead. he peered at her through his silver-mounted glasses. his hands were twisting at his watch chain, quickly, nervously, like a mouse in a wheel. as she looked at his weak mouth his insignificance was revealed to her. was this, this creature with the vague idealistic face, the high shoulders, something to be afraid of? pooh! 'well, edward?' she said, involuntarily aggressive. wren did not answer. his hands suddenly stopped revolving. 'well, edward?' she repeated. 'so you've found me?' 'yes,' he said at length. 'i . . . . yes, i've found you.' the movement of his hands began again. 'well?' 'i know. i've found out. . . . i went to finsbury.' 'oh? i suppose you mean you tracked me from my old rooms. i suppose betty told you i . . . my new occupation.' wren jumped. 'damn,' he growled. 'damn you.' victoria smiled. edward swearing. it was too funny. what an awful thing it was to have a sense of humour. 'you seem to know all about it,' she said smoothly. 'but what do you want?' 'how dare you,' growled edward. 'a woman like you. . . . .' a hard look came into victoria's eyes. 'that will do edward, i know my own business.' 'yes, a dirty business.' a hot flush spread over the man's thin cheeks. 'you little cur.' victoria smiled; she could feel her lips baring her eye teeth. 'fool.' edward stared at her. passion was stifling his words. 'it's a lot you know about life, schoolmaster,' she sneered. 'who are you to preach at me? is it your business if i choose to sell my body instead of selling my labour?' 'you're disgraced.' his voice went down to a hoarse whisper. 'disgraced.' victoria felt a wave of heat pass over her body. 'disgraced, you fool? will anybody ever teach you what disgrace is? there's no such thing as disgrace for a woman. all women are disgraced when they're born. we're parasites, toys. that's all we are. you've got two kinds of uses for us, lords and masters! one kind is honourable labour, as you say, namely the work undertaken by what you call the lower classes; the other's a share in the nuptial couch, whether illegal or legal. yes, your holy matrimony is only another name for my profession.' 'you've no right to say that,' cried edward. 'you're trying to drag down marriage to your level. when a woman marries she gives herself because she loves; then her sacrifice is sublime.' he stopped for a second. idealism, sentimentalism, other names for ignorance of life, clashed in his self-conscious brain without producing light. 'oh, victoria,' he said, 'you don't know how awful it is for me to find you like this, my little sister . . . of course you can't love him . . . if you'd married him it would have been different.' 'ah, edward, so that's your philosophy. you say that though i don't love him, if i'd married him it would have been different. so you won't let me surrender to a man unless i can trick him or goad him into binding himself to me for life. if i don't love him i may marry him and make his life a hell and i shall be a good woman; but i mustn't live with him illegally so that he may stick to me only so long as he cares for me.' 'i didn't say that,' stammered edward. 'of course, it's wrong to marry a man you don't care for . . . but marriage is different, it sanctifies.' 'sanctifies! nothing sanctifies anything. our deeds are holy or unholy in themselves. oh, understand me well, i claim no ethical revelation; i don't care whether my deeds are holy or not. i judge nothing, not even myself. all i say is that your holy bond is a farce; if women were free--that is, trained, able and allowed to earn fair wages for fair labour--then marriage might be holy. but marriage for a woman is a monetary contract. it means that she is kept, clothed, amused; she is petted like a favourite dog, indulged like a spoiled child. in exchange she gives her body.' 'no, no.' 'yes, yes. and the difference between a married woman and me is her superior craft, her ability to secure a grip upon a man. you respect her because she is permanent, as you respect a vested interest.' the flush rose again in edward's cheeks. as he lost ground he fortified his obstinacy. 'you've sold yourself,' he said quickly, 'gone down into the gutter . . . . oh!' 'the gutter.' victoria was so full of contempt that it almost hurt her. 'of course i'm in the gutter. i always was in the gutter. i was in the gutter when i married and my husband boarded and lodged me to be his favourite. i was in the gutter when i had to kow-tow to underbred people; to be a companion is to prostitute friendship. you don't mind that, do you? i was in the gutter in the tea shops, when i decoyed men into coming to the place because they could touch me, breathe me. i'm in the gutter now, but i'm in the right one. i've found the one that's going to make me free.' edward was shaken by her passion. 'you'll never be free,' he faltered, 'you're an outcast.' 'an outcast from what?' sneered victoria. 'from society? what has society done for me? it's kicked me, it's bled me. it's made me work ten hours a day for eight bob a week. it'd have sucked me dry and offered me the workhouse, or the thames at the end. it made me almost a cripple.' edward stared. 'yes,' said victoria savagely. 'that makes you squirm, sentimentalist. look at that!' she put her foot on a chair, tucked up her skirt, tore down the stocking. purplish still, the veins stood out on the firm white flesh. edward clenched both his hands and looked away. a look of pain was in his eyes. 'yes, look at that,' raged victoria. 'that's what your society's done for me. it's chucked me into the water to teach me to swim, and it's gloated over every choke. it's fine talking about chivalry, isn't it, when you see what honest labour's done for me, isn't it? it's fine talking about purity when you see the price your society pays me for being what i am, isn't it? look at me. look at my lace, look at my diamonds, look at my house . . . and think of the other side: eight bob a week, ten hours work a day, a room with no fire, and a bed with no sheets. but i know your society now, and as i can't kill it i'll cheat it. i've served it and it's got two years of my life; but i'm going to get enough out of it to make it crawl.' she strode towards edward. 'so don't you come preaching to me,' she hissed. edward's head bent down. slowly he walked towards the door. 'yes,' she said, 'go. i've no use for you. i'm out for stronger meat.' he opened the door, then, without looking up, 'good-bye,' he said. the door closed behind him. victoria looked about her for some seconds, then sat down in the carving chair, her arms outstretched on the table. her teeth were clenched now, her jaw set; with indomitable purpose she looked out into the darkening room where she saw the battle and victory of life. chapter iv victoria had never loved adventure for its own sake. the change from drudgery to leisure was grateful as was all it brought in the shape of pretty clothes, jewels and savoury dishes; but she realised every day better that, taking it as a profession, her career was no great success. it afforded her a fair livelihood, but the wasting asset of her beauty could not be replaced; thus it behoved her to amortize its value at a rapid rate. she felt much better in health; her varicose veins had gone down a good deal, but she still preserved a dark mystery about them; after six months of intimate association, cairns did not yet know why he had never seen victoria without her stockings. being man of the world enough to know that discretion is happiness, he had never pressed the point; a younger or more sensitive man would have torn away the veil, so as to achieve total intimacy at the risk of wrecking it. he was not of these, and vaguely victoria did not thank him for a sentiment half discreet, half indifferent; such an attitude for a lover suggested disregard for essentials. as she grew stronger and healthier her brain worked more clearly, and she began to realise that even ten years of association with this man would yield no more than a pittance. and it would be difficult to hold him for ten years. victoria certainly went ably to work to preserve for cairns the feeling of novelty and adventure. it was practically in deference to her suggestions that he retained his chambers; he soon realised her wisdom and entered into the spirit of their life. he still understood very well the pleasure of being her guest. victoria found no decline in his desire; perhaps it was less fiery, but it was as coarse and as constant. certainly she was woman for him rather than merely a woman; moreover she was a habit. victoria saw this clearly enough and resolved to make the most of it. in accordance with her principles she kept her expenses down. she would not even allow herself the luxury of a maid; she found it cheaper to pay mary higher wages. when cairns was not expected her lunch was of the simplest, and charlotte discovered with amazement that her rakish mistress could check a grocer's book. victoria was not even above cheating the water board by omitting to register her garden tap. all these, however, were petty economies; they would result in a saving of perhaps three hundred a year, a beggarly sum when pitted against the uncertainties of her profession. she realised all this within three or four months of her new departure, and promptly decided that cairns must be made to yield a higher revenue. she felt that she could not very well tell him that a thousand a year was not enough; on the face of it it was ample. it was necessary therefore to launch out a little. the first step was to increase her visible supply of clothes, and this was easily done by buying the cheap and effective instead of the expensive and good. cairns knew enough about women's clothes to detect this now and then, but the changes bewildered him a little and he had some difficulty in seeing the difference between the latest thing and the cheapest. whenever she was with him she affected the manners of a spendthrift; she would call cabs to carry her a hundred yards, give a beggar a shilling, or throw a pair of gloves out of the window because they had been worn once. cairns smiled tolerantly. she might as well have her fling, he thought, and a lack of discipline was as charming in a mistress as it was deplorable in a wife. he was therefore not surprised when, one morning, he found victoria apparently nervous and worried. she owned that she was short of cash. in fact the manager of her bank had written to point out that her account was overdrawn. 'dear me,' said cairns with mock gravity, 'you've been going it, old girl! what's all this? "self," "self," why all these cheques are to "self." you'll go broke.' 'i suppose i shall,' said victoria wearily. 'i don't know how i do it, tom. i'm no good at accounts. and i hate asking you for more money . . . but what am i to do?' she crossed her hands over her knees and looked up at him with a pretty expression of appeal. cairns laughed. 'don't worry,' he said, curling a lock of her hair round a fat forefinger. 'i'll see you through.' victoria received that afternoon a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds which she paid into her account. she did not, however, inform cairns that the proceeds of the "self" cheques had been paid into a separate account which she had opened with another bank. by this means, she was always able to exhibit a gloomy pass book whenever it was required. having discovered that cairns was squeezable victoria felt more hopeful as to the future. she was his only luxury and made the most of his liking for jewellery and furs. she even hit upon the more ingenious experiment of interesting barbezan soeurs in her little speculations. the device was not novel: for a consideration of ten per cent these bustling dressmakers were ready to provide fictitious bills and even solicitor's letters couched in frigidly menacing terms. cairns laughed and paid solidly. he had apparently far more money than he needed. victoria was almost an economy; without her he would have lost a fortune at bridge, kept a yacht perhaps and certainly a motor. as it was he was quite content with his poky chambers in st james', a couple of clubs which he never thought of entering, the house in elm tree place and a stock of good cigars. cairns was happy, and victoria labouring lightly for large profits, was contented too. theirs were lazy lives, for cairns was a man who could loaf. he loafed so successfully that he did not even think of interfering with victoria's reading. she now read steadily and voraciously; she eschewed novels, fearing the influence of sentiment. 'it will be time for sentiment by and by,' she sometimes told herself. meanwhile she armoured her heart and sharpened her wits. the earlier political opinions which had formed in her mind under the pressure of toil remained unchanged but did not develop. she recognised herself as a parasite and almost gloried in it. she evolved as a system of philosophy that one's conduct in life is a matter of alternatives. nothing was good and nothing was evil; things were better than others or worse and there was an end of her morality. victoria had no patience with theories. one day, much to cairns surprise, she violently flung ingersoll's essays into the fender. 'steady on,' said cairns, 'steady on, old girl.' 'such rot,' she snarled. 'hear, hear,' said cairns, picking up the book and looking at its title. 'serve you right for reading that sort of stuff. i can't make you out, vic.' victoria looked at him with a faint smile, but refused to assign a cause for her anger. in fact she had suddenly been irritated by ingersoll's definition of morality. 'perceived obligation,' she thought. 'and i don't perceive any obligation!' she consoled herself suddenly with the thought that her amorality was a characteristic of the superman. the superman preoccupied her now and then. he was a good subject for speculation because imponderable and inexistent. the nearest approach she could think of was a cross between an efficient colonial governor and a latter-day prophet. she believed quite sincerely that the day must come when children of the light must be born, capable of ruling and of keeping the law. she saw very well too that their production did not lie with an effete aristocracy any more than with a dirty and drunken democracy; probably they would be neo-plutocrats, men full of ambition, lusting for power and yet imbued with a spirit of icy justice. her earliest tendency had been towards an idealistic socialism. burning with her own wrongs and touched by the angelic wing of sympathy, she had seen in the communisation of wealth the only means of curbing the evils it had hitherto wrought. further observation showed her however that an idealism of this kind would not lead the world speedily into a peaceful haven. she saw too well that covetousness was still lurking snakelike in the bosom of man, ready to rear its ugly head and strike at any hand. thus she was not surprised to see the chaos which reigned among socialists, their intriguing, their jealousies, their unending dissensions, their apostacies. this did not throw her back into the stereotyped philosophy of individualism; for she could not help seeing that the system of modern life was absurd, stupidly wasteful above all of time, labour and wealth. to apply nietzscheism to socialism was, however, beyond her; to reconcile the two doctrines which apparently conflict and really only overlap was a task too difficult for a brain which had lain fallow for twenty-five years. but she dimly felt that nietzscheism did not mean a glorified imperialism, but a worship of intellectual efficiency and the stringent morality of _noblesse oblige_. where victoria began to part issue with her own thoughts was when she considered the position of women. their outlook was one of unrelieved gloom; and it one day came upon her as a revelation that nietzsche and schopenhauer, following in a degree on rousseau, had forgotten women in the scheme of life. there might be supermen but there would be no superwomen: if the supermen were true to their type they would have to crush and to dominate the women. as the latter fared so hard at the hands of the pigmies of to-day, what would they do if they could not develop in time to resist the sons of anak? victoria saw that the world was entering upon a sex war. hitherto a shameful state of peace had left women in the hands of men, turning over the other cheek to the smiter. the sex war, however, held forth no hopes to her; in the dim future, sex equality might perhaps prevail; but she saw nothing to indicate that women had sown the seeds of their victory. she had no wish to enrol herself in the ranks of those who were waging an almost hopeless battle, armed with untrained intellects and unathletic bodies. she could not get away from the fact that the best woman athletes cannot compete with ordinary men, that even women with high intellectual qualifications had not ousted from commanding positions men of inferior ability. all this, she thought, was unjust; but why hope for a change? there was nothing to show that men grew much better as a sex; then why pin faith to the coming of better times? women were parasites, working only under constraint, badly and at uncongenial tasks; their right to live was based on their capacity to please. this brought her to her own situation. the future lay before her in the shape of two roads. one was the road which led to the struggle for life; ending, she felt it too well, in a crawl to death on crippled limbs. the other was the road along which grew roses, roses which she could pluck and sell to men; at the end of that was the heaven of independence. it had golden gates; it was guarded by an angel in white garments with a palm leaf in his hands and beyond lay the pleasant places where she had a right of way. and as she looked again the heaven with the golden gates turned into a bank with a commissionaire at the door. her choice being made, she did not regret it. for the time being her life was pleasant enough, and if it could be made a little more profitable it would soon be well worth living, and her freedom would be earned. meanwhile she took pleasure in small things. the little house was almost a show place, so delicate and refined were its inner and outer details. victoria saw to it that frequently changed flowers decorated the beds in the front garden; japanese trees, dwarfed and gnarled, stood right and left of the steps, scowling like tiny titans; all the blinds in the house were a mass of insertion. these blinds were a feature for her; they implied secrecy. behind the half blinds were thick curtains of decorated muslin; behind these again, heavy curtains which could be drawn at will. they were the impenetrable veil which closed off from the world and its brutalities this oasis of forbidden joys. in the house also she was ever elaborating, sybaritising her life. she had a branch telephone fixed at the head of her bed; the first time that cairns used it to tell his man to bring up his morning coat she had the peculiar sensation that her bed was in touch with the world. she could call up anybody, the archbishop of canterbury, the governor of the bank of england or the headquarters of the salvation army. her bed was the centre of the world. she fitted the doors of her bedroom and her boudoir with curious little locks which acted on the pressure of a finger for her mind was turned on delicacies and the sharp click of a bolt, the grating of a key savoured of the definite, therefore of the coarse. a twist of the knob between two fingers and the world was silently shut out. now too that she was beautiful once more she revelled in mirrors. the existing ones in her bedroom and in the boudoir were not enough; they were public, unintimate. she had a high mirror fixed in the bathroom, so that she could see herself in her freshness, covered with pearly beads like a naiad. she rejoiced in her beauty, in her renewed strength; she often stood for many minutes in the dim steamy light of the room, analysing her body, its grace and youth, with a growing consciousness of latent power. then, suddenly, the faint violet streaks of the varicose veins would intrude upon the rite and she would wrap herself up jealously in her bath robe so that not even the mirror should be a confidant of the past. chapter v week after week passed on, and now monotony drew her stifling cloak over victoria. cairns was still in a state of beatitude which made him an unexciting companion; satisfied in his egoism, it never came into his mind that victoria could tire of her life. he spent many afternoons in the back garden under a rose-covered pergola. by his side was a little table with a syphon, a decanter of whisky, and a box of cigars; he read desultorily, sometimes the latest motor novel, at other times the improving memoirs of eighteenth century noblewomen. now and then he would look approvingly at victoria in plain white drill, delightfully mischievous under a sun-bonnet, and relapse into his book. once he quoted 'a flask of wine, a book of verse. . . .' and victoria went into sudden fits of laughter when she remembered neville brown. the single hackneyed line seemed to link malekind together. cairns was already talking of going away. june was oppressively hot and he was hankering after some quiet place where he might do some sea-fishing and get some golf. he was becoming dangerously fat; and victoria, foreseeing a long and very cheap holiday, favoured the idea in every way. they could go up to scotland later too; but cairns rather hesitated about this, for he neither cared to show off victoria before the people he knew on the moors, nor to leave her for a fortnight. he was paying the penalty of capua. his plans were set back, however, by serious trouble which had taken place on his irish estate, his though still in the hands of marmaduke cairns's executors. there had been nightriding, cattle driving, some boycotting. the situation grew so tense that the executors advised cairns to sell the estate to the tenants but the latter declined the terms; matters came to a deadlock and it was quite on the cards that an application might be made under the irish land act. it was clear that in this case the terms would be bad, and cairns was called to limerick by telegram as a last chance. he left victoria, grumbling and cursing ireland and all things irish. left to herself, victoria felt rather at a loose end. the cheerful if uninteresting personality of major cairns had a way of filling the house. he had an expansive mind; it was almost chubby. for two days she rather enjoyed her freedom. the summer was gorgeous; st john's wood was bursting everywhere into flower; the trees were growing opaque in the parks. at every street corner little whirlwinds of dry grit swayed in the hot air. one afternoon victoria indulged in the luxury of a hired private carriage, and flaunted it with the best in the long line on the south side of the park. wedged for a quarter of an hour in the mass she felt a glow come over her. the horses all round her shone like polished wood, the carriage panels were lustrous, the harness was glittering, the brass burnished; all the world seemed to radiate warmth and light. gaily enough, because not jaded by repetition, she caused the carriage to do the ring, twice. she felt for a moment that she was free, that she could vie with those women whose lazy detachment she stirred for a moment into curiosity by her deep eyes, dark piled hair and the audacity of her diaphanous _crèpe de chine_. cairns was still in ireland, struggling conscientiously to pile up unearned increment; and victoria, thoroughly aimless, suddenly bethought herself of farwell. she had been remiss in what was almost a duty. surely she ought to report progress to the man who had helped to open her eyes to the realities of life. she had misapplied his teaching perhaps, or rather remoulded it, but still it was his teaching. or rather it was what a woman should know, as opposed to what thomas farwell preached; if men were to practise that, then she should revise her philosophy. at ten minutes to one she entered the moorgate street p.r.r. with a little thrill. everything breathed familiarity; it was like coming home, but better, for it is sweeter to revisit the place where one has suffered, when one has emerged, than to brood with gentle sorrow on the spot, where there once was joy. she knew every landmark, the tobacconist, the picture shop, still full of 'mother's helps' and of 'artistic' studies in the nude; there was the red-coated bootblack too, as dirty and as keenly solicitous as ever. the p.r.r. itself did not chill her. in the crude june sunlight its nickel shone gaily enough. everything was as before; the cakes had been moulded in the old moulds, and here was the old bill of fare, unchanged no doubt; even the marble-topped tables and the half cleaned cruets looked kindly upon her; but the tesselated red and blue floor aroused the hateful memory of another victoria on her hands and knees, an old sack round her waist, painfully swaying from right to left, swabbing the tiles. little rivulets of water and dirt flowed slowly across the spectre's hand. as she went down the steps into the smoking-room she crossed with the manageress, still buxom and erect; but she passed unnoticed, for this was the busy hour when the chief tried to be simultaneously on three floors. the room was not so full as it had once been. she sat down at a little table and watched the familiar scene for some minutes. she told the girl she would wait a minute, for she did not want to miss farwell. the world had gone round, but apparently the p.r.r. was the axis. there in the corner were the chess players; to-day they only ran four boards, but at one of them a fierce discussion was going on as to a variation of the queen's pawn opening. on the other side of the room were the young domino players, laughing and smoking cigarettes. the fat and yellow levantine was missing. victoria regretted him, for the apocalyptic figure was an essential part of the ugly past. but there was 'old dry toast' all alone at his little table. he had not changed; his white hair still framed thickly his beautiful old brown face. there he sat, still silent and desolate, waiting for the end. victoria felt a pang of sorrow. she was not quite hardened yet and she realised it angrily. there must be no sympathy and no quarter in her game of life. it was too late or too soon for that. victoria let her eyes stray round the room. there were the young men and boys or some of the same breed, in their dark suits, brilliant ties, talking noisily, chaffing one another, gulping down their small teas and toasted scones. a conversation between two older men was wafted in to her ears. 'awful. have you tried annelicide?' at that moment a short broad figure walked smartly down the steps. it was thomas farwell, a thin red book under his arm. he went straight through to the old table, propped his book against the cruet and began to read. victoria surveyed him critically. he was thinner than ever; his hair was more plentifully sprinkled with grey but had receded no further. he was quite near her, so she could see his unbrushed collar and his frayed cuffs. after a moment the girl came and stood before him; it was nelly, big and raw-boned as ever, handsome still like the fine beast of burden she was. she wore no apron now in proud token of her new position as head waitress. now the voices by her side were talking holidays. 'no, ramsgit's good enough for me. broadstairs and all these little places, they're so tony--' maud passed quickly before victoria. the poor little girl was as white as ever; her flaccid cheeks danced up and down as she ran. the other voice was relating at length how its owner had taken his good lady to deal. nelly had left farwell, walking more slowly than the other girls, as befitted her station. victoria felt herself pluck up a little courage, crossed the room followed by many admiring glances, and quickly sat down at farwell's table. he looked up quickly. the book dropped suddenly from the cruet. 'victoria,' he gasped. 'yes,' she said smiling. 'well . . .' his eyes ran over her close fitting tussore dress, her white kid gloves. 'is that all you've got to say to me?' she asked. 'won't you shake hands?' farwell put out his hand and held hers for a second. he was smiling now, with just a touch of wistfulness in his eyes. 'i'm very glad to see you,' he said at length. 'so am i,' said victoria. 'i hope you don't mind my coming here, but i only thought of it this morning.' 'mind,' snapped farwell. 'people who understand everything never mind anything.' victoria smiled again. the bumptious aphorism was a sign that farwell was still himself. for a minute or so they looked at one another. victoria wondered at this man; so powerful intellectually and physically; and yet content to live in his ideals on a pittance, to do dull work, to be a subordinate. truly a caged lion. farwell, on the other hand, was looking in vain for some physical ravishes to justify victoria's profession, for some gross development at least. he looked in vain. instead of the pale dark girl with large grey eyes whom he had known, he now saw a healthy and beautiful woman with a clear white skin, thick hair, red lips. 'well,' he said with a laugh, 'can i invite you to lunch with me?' 'you may,' she said. 'i'll have a small coffee and . . . a sunny side up.' farwell laughed and signed to nelly. after a minute he attracted her attention and gave the order without nelly taking any interest in farwell's guest. it might be rather extraordinary, but her supervisory duties were all-absorbent. when she returned, however, she stole a curious look at victoria while placing before her the poached egg on toast. she looked at her again, and her eyes dilated. 'law,' she said. 'vic!' 'yes, nelly, how are you?' victoria put out her gloved hand. nelly took it wonderingly. 'i'm all right,' she answered slowly. 'just been made head waitress,' she added with some unction. her eyes were roving over victoria's clothes, valuing them like an expert. 'congratulations,' said victoria. 'glad you're getting on.' 'i see _you're_ getting on,' said nelly, with a touch of sarcasm. 'so, so, things aren't too bad.' victoria looked up. the women's eyes crossed like rapiers; nelly's were full of suspicion. the conversation stopped then, for nelly was already in request in half a dozen quarters. 'she knows,' said victoria smoothly. 'of course,' said farwell. 'trust a woman to know the worst about another and to show it up. every little helps in a contest such as life.' farwell then questioned her as to her situation, but she refused him all details. 'no,' she said, 'not here. there's nelly watching us, and maud has just been told. betty's been shifted, i know, and i suppose mary and jennie are gone, but there's the manageress and some of the girls upstairs. i've nearly done. let me return the invitation. dine with me to-night. . .' she was going to say 'at home,' but changed her mind to the prudent course. . . . 'at, well, anywhere you like. whereabouts do you live, mr farwell?' 'i live in the waterloo road,' said farwell, 'an artery named after the playing fields of eton.' 'i don't know it well,' said victoria, 'but i seem to remember an italian place near waterloo station. suppose you meet me at the south end of waterloo bridge at seven?' 'it will do admirably,' said the man. 'i suppose you want to go now? well, you've put out my habits, but i'll come too.' they went out; the last victoria saw of the p.r.r. was the face of the cook through the hole in the partition, red, sweating, wrinkled by the heat and hurry of the day. they parted in the churchyard. victoria watched him walk away with his firm swing, his head erect. 'a man,' she thought, 'too clever to succeed.' being now again at a loose end and still feeling fairly hungry, she drove down to frascati's to lunch. she was a healthy young animal, and scanty fare was now a novelty. at three o'clock she decided to look up betty at her depôt in holborn; and by great good luck found that betty was free at half past five, as the holborn depôt for unknown reasons kept shorter hours than moorgate street. she whiled away the intervening time easily enough by shop-gazing and writing a long letter to cairns on the hospitable paper of the grand hotel. at half-past five she picked up betty at the door of the p. r. r. 'thank you again so very, very much for the sweater and the dressing gown,' said betty as she slipped her arm through that of her friend. 'don't be silly, betty, i like giving you things.' victoria smiled and pressed the girl's arm. 'you're not looking well, betty.' 'oh, i'm all right,' said betty wearily. victoria looked at her again. under the pretty waved sandy hair betty's forehead looked waxen; her cheeks were too red. her arm felt thinner than ever. what was one to do? betty was a weakling and must go to the wall. but there was a sweetness in her which no one could resist. 'look here, betty,' said victoria, 'i've got very little time; i've got to meet mr farwell at waterloo bridge at seven. it's beautifully fine, let's drive down to embankment gardens and talk.' betty's face clouded for a moment at the mention of farwell's name. she hated him with the ferocity of the weak; he had ruined her friend. but it was good to have her back. the cab drove down chancery lane at a spanking rate, then across the strand and through a lane. the unaccustomed pleasure and the rush of air brought all her face into pink unison with her cheeks. the two women sat side by side for a moment. this was the second time they had met since victoria had entered her new life. there had been a few letters, the last to thank victoria for her christmas present, but betty did not say much in them. her tradition of virtue had erected a barrier between them. 'well, betty,' said victoria suddenly, 'do you still think me very bad?' 'oh, vic, how can you? i never, never said that.' 'no, you thought it,' answered victoria a little cruelly. 'but never mind, perhaps you're right.' 'i never said so, never thought so,' persisted betty. 'you can't go wrong, vic, you're . . . you're different.' 'perhaps i am,' said victoria. 'perhaps there are different laws for different people. at any rate i've made my choice and must abide by it.' 'and are you happy, vic?' anxiety was in the girl's face. 'happy? oh, happy enough. he's a good sort.' 'i'm so glad. and . . . vic . . . do you think he'll marry you?' 'marry me?' said victoria laughing. 'you little goose, of course not. why should he marry me now he's got me?' this was a new idea for betty. 'but doesn't he love you very, very much?' she asked, her blue eyes growing rounder and rounder. 'i suppose he does in a way,' said victoria. 'but it doesn't matter. he's very kind to me but he won't marry me; and, honestly, i wouldn't marry him.' betty looked at her amazed and a little shocked. 'but, dear,' she faltered, 'think of what it would mean; you . . . he and you, you see . . . you're living like that . . . if he married you. . . .' 'yes, i see,' said victoria with a slight sneer, 'you mean that i should be an honest woman and all that? my dear child, you don't understand. whether he marries me or not it's all the same. so long as a woman is economically dependent on a man she's a slave, a plaything. legally or illegally joined it's exactly the same thing; the legal bond has its advantages and its disadvantages and there's an end of the matter.' betty looked away over the thames; she did not understand. the tradition was too strong. time went quickly. betty had no tale to unfold; the months had passed leaving her doing the same work for the same wage, living in the same room. before her was the horizon on which were outlined two ships; 'ten hours a day' and 'eight bob a week.' and the skyline? as they parted, victoria made betty promise to come and see her. then they kissed twice, gently and silently, and victoria watched her friend's slim figure fade out of sight as she walked away. she had the same impression as when she parted with lottie, who had gone so bravely into the dark. a wave of melancholy was upon her. poor girls, they were without hope; she at least was viewing life with her eyes open. she would wrench something out of it yet. she shook herself; it was a quarter to seven. an hour later she was sitting opposite farwell. they were getting to the end of dinner. conversation had flagged while they disposed of the earlier courses. now they were at the ice and coffee stage. the waiters grew less attentive; indeed there was nobody to observe them save the olive-skinned boy with the mournful eyes who looked at the harbour of palermo through the waterloo road door. farwell lit the cigar which victoria forced upon him, and leant back, puffing contentedly. 'well,' he said at length, 'how do you like the life?' 'it is better than the old one,' she said. 'oh, so you've come to that. you have given up the absolutes.' 'yes, i've given them up. a woman like me has to.' 'yes, i suppose you've got to,' pondered farwell. 'but apart from that, is it a success? are you attaining your end? that's the only thing that matters, you know.' 'i am, in a sense; i'm saving money. you see, he's generous.' 'excellent, excellent,' sneered farwell. 'i like to see you making out of what the bourgeois call vice that which will enable you to command bourgeois respect. by-and-by i suppose you'll have made a fortune.' 'well, no; a competency perhaps, with luck.' 'with luck, as you say. do you know, victoria, this luck business is grand! my firm goes in for mines: they went prospecting in america twenty years ago and they happened to strike copper. that was good. other men struck granite only. that was bad. but my boss is a city sheriff now. frightfully rich. there used to be four of them, but one died of copper poisoning, and another was found shot in a gulch. nobody knows how it happened, but the other two got the mines.' victoria smiled. she liked this piratical tit bit. 'yes,' she said, 'luck's the thing. and merit . . . well i suppose the surviving partners had merit.' 'anyhow, i wish you luck,' said farwell. 'but tell me more. do you find you've paid too high a price for what you've got?' 'too high a price?' 'yes. do you have any of that remorse we read about; would you like to be what you were? unattached, you know . . . eligible for young women's christian associations?' 'oh, no,' victoria laughed. 'i can't pay too high a price for what i think i'll get. i don't mean these jewels or these clothes, that's only my professional uniform. when i've served my time i shall get that for which no woman can pay too much: i shall be economically independent, free.' 'free.' farwell looked towards the ceiling through a cloudlet of smoke. 'yes, you're right. with the world as it is it's the only way. to be independent you must acquire the right to be dependent on the world's labour, to be a drone . . . and the biggest drone is queen of the hive. yet i wish it had been otherwise with you.' he looked at her regretfully. victoria toyed with a dessert knife. 'why?' she asked. 'oh, you had possibilities . . . but after all, we all have. and most of them turn out to be impossibilities. at any rate, you're not disgusted with your life, with any detail?' 'no, i don't think so. i don't say i'll go on any longer than i need, but it's bearable. but even if it were repulsive in every way i'd go on if i saw freedom ahead. if i fight at all i fight to a finish.' 'you're strong,' said farwell looking at her. 'i wish i had your strength. you've got that force which makes explorers, founders of new faiths, prophets, company promoters.' he sighed. 'let's go,' he added, 'we can talk in the warm night.' for an hour they talked, agreeing always in the end. farwell was cruelly conscious of two wasted lives: his, because his principles and his capacity for thought had no counterweight in a capacity for action; victoria's, because of her splendid gifts ignobly wasted and misused by a world which had asked her for the least of them. victoria felt a peculiar pleasure in this man's society. he was elderly, ugly, ill-clad; sometimes he was boorish, but a halo of thought surrounded him, and the least of his words seemed precious. all this devirilised him, deprived him of physical attractiveness. she could not imagine herself receiving and returning his caresses. they parted on waterloo bridge. 'good-bye,' said farwell, 'you're on the right track. the time hasn't come for us to keep the law, for we don't know what the law is. all we have is the edict of the powerful, the prejudice of the fool; the last especially, for these goaled souls have their traditions, and their convictions are prisons all.' victoria pressed his hand and turned away. she did not look back. if she had she would have seen farwell looking into the thames, his face lit up by a gas lamp, curiously speculative in expression. his emotions were not warring, but the chaos in his brain was such that he was fighting the logical case for and against an attempt to find enlightenment on the other slope of the valley. chapter vi victoria stretched herself lazily in bed. her eyes took in a picture of cairns on the mantelpiece framed between a bottle of eau-de-cologne and the carriage clock; then, little by little, she analysed details, small objects, powderpuffs, a chelsea candlestick, an open letter, the wall paper. she closed her eyes again and buried her face in the pillow. the lace edge tickled her ear pleasantly. she snuggled like a stroked cat. then she awoke again, for mary had just placed her early cup of tea on the night table. the tray seemed to come down with a crash, a spoon fell on the carpet. victoria felt daylight rolling back sleep from her brain while mary pulled up the blinds. as light flooded the room and her senses became keener she heard the blinds clash. 'you're very noisy, mary,' she said, lifting herself on one elbow. the girl came back to the bed her hands folded together. 'i'm sorry, mum . . . i . . . i've . . .' 'yes? what's the matter?' mary did not answer, but victoria could see she was disturbed. her cap was disarranged; it inclined perhaps five degrees from the vertical. there was a faint flush on her cheeks. 'what's the matter,' said victoria sharply. 'is there anything wrong?' 'no, mum. . . . yes mum. . . . they say in the paper . . . . there's been trouble in ireland, mum. . . .' 'in ireland?' victoria sat bolt upright. her heart gave a great bang and then began to go with a whirr. 'at rossbantry, mum . . . last night . . . he's shot. . . .' 'shot? who? can't you speak?' 'the major, mum.' mary unfolded her hands suddenly and drew them up and down her apron as if trying to dry them. victoria sat as if frozen, looking at her wide-eyed. then she relapsed on the pillow. everything swam for a second, then she felt mary raising her head. 'go away,' whispered victoria. 'leave me for a minute. i'm all right.' mary hesitated for a moment, then obeyed, softly closing the door. victoria lay staring at the ceiling. cairns was dead, shot. awful. a week ago his heavy frame was outlined under these very blankets. she shuddered. but why, how? it wasn't true, it couldn't be true. she sat up as if impelled by a spring, and rang the bell violently. the broken rope fell on her face in a coil. with both hands she seized her chin as if to stop a scream. 'the paper! get me the paper!' she gasped as mary came in. the girl hesitated. victoria's face frightened her. victoria looked at her straight, and she ran out of the room. in another minute she had laid the open paper before her mistress. victoria clutched at it with both hands. it was true. true. it was true. the headlines were all she could see. she tried to read the text, but the letters danced. she returned to the headlines. shocking outrage in ireland * * * * landlord shot in the next column:-- m. c. c.'s hard task her heart's action was less violent now. she understood; every second increased her lucidity. shot. cairns was shot. oh, she knew, he had carried strife with him and some tenant had had his revenge. she took up the paper and could read it now. cairns had refused to make terms, and on the morning of his death had served notices of eviction on eighteen cottagers. the same night he was sitting at a window of his bailiff's house. then two shots from the other side of the road, another from lower down. cairns was wounded twice, in the lung and throat, and died within twenty minutes. a man was under arrest. victoria put down the paper. her mind was quite clear again. poor old tom! she felt sorry but above all disturbed; every nerve in her body seemed raw. poor old tom, a good fellow! he had been kind to her; and now, there he was. dead when he was thinking of coming back to her. he would never see her again, the little house and things he loved. yes, he had been kind; he had saved her from that awful life . . . . victoria's thoughts turned into another channel. what was going to become of her. 'old girl,' she said aloud, 'you're in the cart.' she realised that she was again adrift, alone, face to face with the terrible world. cairns was gone; there was nobody to protect her against the buffeting waves. a milkman's cart rattled by; she could hear the distant rumble of the underground, a snatch carried by the wind from a german band. well, the time had come; it had to come. she could not have held cairns for ever; and now she had to prove her mettle, to show whether she had learned enough of the world, whether she had grit. the thought struck cold at her, but an intimate counsellor in her brain was already awake and crying out: 'yes, yes, go on! you can do it yet.' victoria threw down the paper and jumped out of bed. she dressed feverishly in the clothes and linen she had thrown in a heap on a chair the night before, twisting her hair up into a rough coil. just before leaving the room she remembered she had not even washed her hands. she did so hurriedly; then, seeing the cold cup of tea, drank it off at a gulp; her throat felt parched. she pushed back the untasted dish on the breakfast table. her head between her hands, she tried to think. at intervals she poured out cups of tea and drank them off quickly. snoo and poo, after vainly trying to induce her to play with them, lay in a heap in an armchair snuffling as they slept. the better she realised her position the greater grew her fears. once more she was the cork tossed in the storm; and yet, rudderless, she must navigate into the harbour of liberty. if cairns had lived and she had seen her power over him wane, she would have taken steps; she did not know what steps, but felt she surely would have done something. but cairns was dead; in twenty minutes she had passed from comparative security into the region where thorns are many and roses few. poor old tom! she felt a tiny pang; surely this concern with herself when his body still lay unburied was selfish, ugly. but, pooh! why make any bones about it? as cairns had said himself, he liked to see her beautiful, happy, well clad. his gifts to her were gifts to himself: she was merely his vicar. victoria drank some more cold tea. good or bad, cairns belonged to the past and the past has no virtues. none, at any rate, for those whose present is a wind-swept table-land. men must come and go, drink to the full of the cup and pay richly for every sip, so that she might be free, hold it no longer to their lips. there was no time to waste, for already she was some hours older; some of those hours which might have been transmuted into gold, that saving gold. she must take steps. the 'steps to be taken,' a comforting sentence, were not easy to evolve. but another comforting catch ward, 'reviewing the situation,' saved her from perplexity. she went into the little boudoir and took out her two pass books. the balance seemed agreeably fat, but she did not allow herself to be deluded; she checked off the debit side with the foils of her cheque book and found that two of the cheques had not been presented. these she deducted, but the result was not unsatisfactory; she had exactly three hundred pounds in one bank and a few shillings over fifty pounds in the other. three hundred and fifty pounds. not so bad. she had done pretty well in these nine months. of course that banker's order of cairns would be stopped. she could hardly expect the executors to allow it to stand. thus her capital was three hundred and fifty pounds. and there was jewellery too, worth a couple of hundred pounds, perhaps, and lace, and furs. the jewellery might come in handy; it could be 'gopherised.' the furniture wasn't bad either. of course she must go on with the house. it was no great responsibility, being held on a yearly agreement. victoria then looked through her accounts; they did not amount to much, for barbezan soeurs, though willing to assist in extracting money by means of bogus invoices, made it a rule to demand cash for genuine purchases. twenty pounds would cover all the small accounts. the rent was all right, as it would not be due until the end of september. the rates were all right too, being payable every half year; they could be ignored until the blue notice came, just before christmas. victoria felt considerably strengthened by this investigation. at a pinch she could live a year on the present footing, during which something must turn up. she tried to consider for a moment the various things that might turn up. none occurred to her. she settled the difficulty by going upstairs again to dress. when she rang for mary to do her hair, the girl was surprised to find her mistress perfectly cool. without a word, however, mary restored her hair to order. it was a beautiful and elegant woman, perhaps a trifle pale and open mouthed, who, some minutes later, set out to walk to regent's park. victoria sat back in her chair. peace was upon her soul. perhaps she had just passed through a crisis, perhaps she was entering upon one, but what did it matter? the warmth of july was in the clear air, the canal slowly carried past her its film of dust. no sound broke through the morning save the cries of little boys fishing for invisible fishes, and, occasionally, a raucous roar from some prisoner in the zoo. now that she had received the blow and was recovering she was conscious of a curious feeling of lightness; she felt freer than the day before. then she was a man's property, tied to him by the bond of interest; now she was able to do what she chose, know whom she chose, so long as that money lasted. ah, it would be good one day when she had enough money to be able to look the future in the face and flaunt in its forbidding countenance the fact that she was free, for ever free. victoria was no longer a dreamer; she was a woman of action. the natural sequence of her thoughts brought her up at once against the means to the triumphant end. three hundred and fifty pounds, say six hundred if she realised everything, would not yield enough to feed a superannuated governess. she would need quite eight or ten thousand pounds before she could call herself free and live her dreams. 'i'll earn it,' she said aloud, 'yes, sure enough.' a little aberdeen terrier came bounding up to her, licked her hand and ran away after his master. a friendly omen. six hundred pounds was a large sum in a way. she could aspire to a partnership in some business now. a vision arose before her; victoria ferris, milliner. the vision grew; victoria ferris and co., limited, wholesalers; then ferris' stores, for clothes and boots and cheese and phonographs, with a branch of cook's agency, a keith prowse ticket office; ferris' stores as an octopus, with its body in knightsbridge and a tentacle hovering over every draper from richmond to highgate. yes, that was all very well, but what if victoria ferris failed? 'no good,' she thought, 'i can't afford to take risks.' of course the idea of seeking employment was absurd. no more ten hours a day for eight bob a week for her. besides, no continuous references and a game leg . . . the situations crowded into and out of victoria's brain like dissolving views. she could see herself in the little house, with another man, with other men, young men, old men; and every one of them was rocked in the lap of delilah, who laughingly shore off their golden locks. 'by jove,' she said aloud, bringing her gloved fist down on her knee, 'i'll do it.' of course the old life could not begin again just now. she did not know a man in london who was worth capturing. she must go down into the market, stand against the wall as a courtesan of alexandria and nail a wreath of roses against the highest bid. the vision she saw was now no longer the octopus. she saw a street with its pavements wet and slithering, flares, barrows laden with greens; she could smell frying fish, rotting vegetables, burning naptha; a hand opened the door of a bar and, in the glare, she could see two women with vivid hair, tired eyes, smiling mouths, each one patiently waiting before a little table and an empty glass. then she saw once more the courtesan of alexandria, dim in the night, not lit up by the sun of sweet egypt, but clad in mercerised cotton and rabbit's fur, standing, watching like a shadow against a shop door in regent street. no, she had not come to that. she belonged to the upper stratum of the profession, and, knowing it, could not sink. consciousness was the thing. she was not going into this fight soft-handed or softhearted. she knew. there was high adventure in store for her yet. if she must fish it should be for trout not chub. like a wise woman, she would not love lightly, but where money is. there should be no waiting, no hesitating. that very night she would sup at the hotel vesuvius . . . all in black . . . like an ivory madonna set in ebony . . . with a tea rose in her hair as a foil to her shoulders . . . and sweeping jade earrings which would swim like butterflies in the heavy hair. ah, it would be high adventure when demetrious knelt at the feet of aphrodite with jewels in his sunburnt palm, when croesus bargained away for a smile a half of his lydian wealth. she got up, a glow in her veins as if the lust of battle was upon her. quickly she walked out of the park to conquer the town. a few yards beyond the gates newspaper placards shouted the sensation of the day; placards pink, brown, green, all telling the tale of murder, advertising for a penny the transitory joy of the fact. victoria smiled and walked on. she let herself into the house. it was on the stroke of one. she sat down at the table, pressing the bell down with her foot. 'hurry up, mary,' she said, 'i'm as hungry as a hunter.' a voice floated through the window like an echo: 'irish murder; latest details.' 'shut the window, mary,' she said sharply. chapter vii the hotel vesuvius is a singular place. it stands on the north side of piccadilly, and for the general its stuccoed front and severe sash windows breathe an air of early victorian respectability. probably it was once a ducal mansion, for it has all the necessary ugliness, solidity and size; now it is the most remarkable instance of what can be done by a proprietor who remembers that an address in piccadilly exempts him from the rules which govern bloomsbury. one enters it through a small hall all alight with white and gold paint. right and left are the saloon bar and the buffet; this enables the customer to select either without altering the character of his accommodation, while assuming superiority for a judicious choice. a broad straight staircase leads up to the big supper room on the first floor. above are a score of private dining-rooms. victoria jumped out of the cab and walked up the steps, handing the liveried commissionaire two shillings to pay the cabman. this was an inspiration calculated to set her down at once with the staff as one who knew the ropes. in the white and gold hall she halted for a moment, puzzled and rather nervous. she had never set foot in the vesuvius; she had never heard it mentioned without a smile or a wink. now, a little flushed and her heart beating, she realised that she did not know her way about. victoria need have had no fears. before she had time to take in the scene, a tall man with a perfectly groomed head and a well fitting evening dress bowed low before her. 'madame wishes no doubt to deposit her wrap,' he said in gentle tones. his teeth flashed white for a moment. 'yes,' said victoria, . . . 'yes, where is the cloak room?' 'this way, madame. if madame will permit me. . . .' he pointed towards the end of the hall and preceded her steps. an elderly woman behind the counter received victoria's wrap and handed her a brass token without looking at her. while she pulled up her gloves she looked round curiously. the cloak room was small; behind the counter the walls were covered by a mahogany rack with some hundred pigeon-holes. the fiercer light of an unshaded chandelier beat down upon the centre of the room. victoria was conscious of an extraordinary atmosphere, a blend of many scents, tobacco smoke, leather; most of the pigeon-holes were bursting with coloured wraps, many of them vivid blue or red; here and there long veils, soiled white gloves hung out of them; a purple ostrich feather hung from an immense black hat over a white and silver cingalese shawl. victoria turned sharply. the man was inspecting her coolly with an air of intentness that showed approval. 'where does madame wish to go?' he asked as they entered the hall. 'in the buffet perhaps?' he opened the door. victoria saw for a second a long counter laden with bottles, at which stood a group of men, some in evening dress, some in tweed suits; she saw a few women among them, all with smiles upon their faces. behind the counter she had time to see the barmaid, a beautiful girl with dark eyes and vivid yellow hair. 'no, not there,' she said quickly. it reminded her of the terrible little bar of which farwell had given her a glimpse. 'you are the manager, i believe . . . i want to go up into the supper room.' 'certainly, madame; will madame come this way?' the manager preceded her up to the first floor. on the landing, two men in tweeds suddenly stopped talking as she passed. a porter flung the glazed door open. a short man in evening dress looked at her, then at the manager. after a second's hesitation the two men in tweeds followed her in. the manager put his hands in his pockets, walked up to the other man and nodded towards the door. '_pas mal, hein?_' '_epatante,_' said the short man. '_du chic. et une peau!_' the manager smiled and turned to go downstairs. '_surveillez moi ça anatole,_' he said. victoria, meanwhile, had stopped for a moment on the threshold, a little dazed by the scene. though it was only half-past ten, the eighty tables of the vesuvius were almost every one occupied; the crowd looked at first like a patchwork quilt. the room was all white and gold like the hall; a soft radiance fell from the lights hidden in the cornice; two heavy chandeliers with faintly pink electric bulbs and a few pink shaded lights on the table diffused a roseate glow over the scene. victoria felt like an intruder, and her discomfiture was heightened by the gripping hot perfume. but already a waiter was by her side; she let him be her pilot. in a few seconds she found herself sitting at a small table alone, near the middle of the room. the waiter reappeared almost at once carrying on a tray a liqueur glass containing some colourless fluid. she had ordered nothing, but his adroitness relieved her. clearly the expert had divined her inexperience and had resolved to smooth her way. she lifted the glass to her lips and sipped at it. it was good stuff, rather strong. the burn on her palate seemed to brace her; she looked round the room. it was a peculiar scene; for the vesuvius is a luxurious place, and a provincial might well be excused for thinking it was the carlton or the savoy; indeed there was something more outwardly opulent about it. it suggested a place where men not only spent what they had but spent more. but for a few men in frock-coats and tweeds it would have been almost undistinguishable from the recognised resorts of fashion. victoria took stock of her surroundings; of the shining plate and glass, the heavy red carpet, the red and gold curtains, drawn but fluttering at the open windows. the guests, however, interested her more. at half the tables sat a woman and a man, at others a woman alone before a little glass. what struck her above all was the beauty of the women, the wealth they carried on their bodies. hardly one of them seemed over thirty; most of them had golden or vivid red hair, though a few tables off victoria could see a tall woman of colour with black hair stiffened by wax and pierced with massive ivory combs. they mostly wore low-necked dresses, many of them white or faintly tinted with blue or pink. she could see a dark italian-looking girl in scarlet from whose ears long coral earrings drooped to her slim cream-coloured shoulders. there was an enormously stout woman with puffy pink cheeks, strapped slightly into a white silk costume, looking like a rose at the height of its bloom. there were others too! short dark women with tight hair; minxish french faces and little shrewd dark eyes; florid dutch and belgian women with massive busts and splendid shoulders, dazzlingly white; english girls too, most of them slim with long arms and rosy elbows and faintly outlined collar bones. many of these had the aristocratic nonchalance of 'art' photographs. opposite victoria, under the other chandelier, a splendid creature, white as a lily, with flashing green eyes, copper coloured hair, had thrown herself back in her armchair and was laughing at a man's joke. her head was bent back, and as she laughed her splendid bust rose and fell and her throat filled out. an elderly man with a close clipped grey moustache, immaculate in his well-cut dress clothes, leaned towards her with a smile on his brown face. victoria turned her eyes away from the man, (a soldier, of course), and looked at the others. they, too, were a mixed collection. there were a good many youths, all clean shaven and mostly well-groomed; these talked loudly to their partners and seemed to fill the latter with merriment; now and then they stared at other women with the boldness of the shy. there were elderly men too; a few in frock coats in spite of the heat, some very stout and red, some bald and others half concealing their scalps under cunning hair arrangements. the elderly men sat mostly with two women, some with three, and lay back smiling like courted pachas. by far the greater number of the guests, however, were anything between thirty and forty; and seemed to cover every type from the smart young captain with the tanned face, bold blue eyes and a bristly moustache, to ponderous men in tweeds or blue reefer jackets who looked about them with a mixture of nervousness and bovine stolidity. from every corner came a steady stream of loud talk; continually little shrieks of laughter pierced the din and then were smothered by the rattling of the plates. the waiters flitted ghostly through the room with incredible speed, balancing high their silver trays. then victoria became conscious that most of the women round her were looking at her; for a moment she felt her personality shrivel up under their gaze. they were analysing her, speculating as to the potentialities of a new rival, stripping off her clothes too and her jewels. it was horrible, because their look was more incisive than the merely brutal glance by which a man takes stock of a woman's charms. she pulled herself together however, and forced herself to return the stares. 'after all,' she thought, 'this is the baptism of fire.' she felt strengthened, too, as she observed her rivals more closely. beautiful as most of them seemed at first sight, many of them showed signs of wear. with joyful cruelty victoria noted here and there faint wrinkles near their eyes, relaxed mouths, cheekbones on which rosacia had already set its mark. she could not see more than half a dozen whose beauty equalled hers; she threw her head up and drew back her shoulders. in the full light of the chandelier she looked down at the firm white shapeliness of her arms. 'well, how goes it?' victoria started and looked up from her contemplation. a man had sat down at her table. he seemed about thirty, fairish, with a rather ragged moustache. he wore a black morning coat and a grey tie. his hands and wrists were well kept and emerged from pale blue cuffs. there was a not unkindly smile upon his face. his tip tilted nose gave him a cheerful, rather impertinent expression. 'oh, i'm all right,' said victoria vaguely. then with an affectation of ease. 'hot, isn't it?' 'ra-_ther_,' said the man. 'had your supper?' 'no,' said victoria, 'i don't want any.' 'now, come, really that's too bad of you. thought we were going to have a nice little family party and you're off your feed.' 'i'm sorry,' said victoria smiling. 'i had dinner only two hours ago.' this man was not very attractive; there was something forced in his ease. 'well, have a drink with me,' he said. 'what's yours?' asked victoria. that was an inspiration. the plunge braced her like a cold bath. the man laughed. 'pop, of course. unless you prefer a pernot. you know "absinthe makes the . . ."' he stopped and laughed again. victoria did likewise without understanding him. she saw that the other women laughed when men did. they filled their glasses. victoria liked champagne. she watched the little bubbles rise, and drank the glass down. it was soft and warm. how strong she felt suddenly. the conversation did not flag. the man was leaning towards her across the table, talking quickly. he punctuated every joke with a high laugh. 'oh, i say, give us a chance,' floated from the next table. victoria looked. it was one of the english girls. she was propped up on one elbow on the table; her legs were crossed showing a long slim limb and slender ankle in a white open work stocking. a man in evening dress with a foreign looking dark face was caressing her bare arm. 'penny for your thoughts,' said victoria's man. 'wasn't thinking,' she said. 'i was looking.' 'looking? are you new here?' 'yes, it's the first time i've come.' 'by jove! it _must_ be an eye-opener.' he laughed. 'it is rather. it doesn't seem half bad.' 'you're right there. i'm an old stager.' a slightly complacent expression came over his face. he filled up the glasses. 'you don't spoil the collection, you know,' he added. 'you're a bit of all right.' he looked at her approvingly. 'am i?' she looked at him demurely. then, plunging once more, 'i hope you'll still think so by and by.' the man's eyes dwelled for a moment on her face and neck, his breath became audible suddenly. she felt his foot softly stroke hers. he drew his napkin across his lips. 'well,' he said with an assumption of ease, 'shall we go?' 'i don't mind,' said victoria getting up. it was with a beating heart that victoria climbed into the cab. as soon as he got in the man put his arm round her waist and drew her to him. she resisted gently but gave way as his arm grew more insistent. 'coy little puss.' his face was very near her upturned eyes. she felt it come nearer. then, suddenly, he kissed her on the lips. she wanted to struggle; she was a little frightened. the lights of piccadilly filled her with shame. they spoke very little. the man held her close to him. as the cab rattled through portland place, he seized her once more. she fought down the repulsion with which his breath inspired: it was scented with strong cigars and champagne. victoriously she coiled one arm round his neck and kissed him on the mouth. in her disgust there was a blend of triumph; not even her own feelings could resist her will. as she waited on the doorstep while he paid the cabman a great fear came upon her. she did not know this man. who was he? perhaps a thief. she suddenly remembered that women of her kind were sometimes murdered for the sake of their jewellery. as the man turned to come up the steps she pulled herself together. 'after all,' she thought, 'it's only professional risk.' they stood for a moment in the hall of the silent house. she felt awkward. the man looked at her and mistook her hesitation. 'it's all right,' he faltered. he looked about him, then, quickly whipping out a sovereign purse, he drew out two sovereigns with a click and laid them on the hall table. 'you see,' he said '. . . a girl like you. . . . three more to-morrow morning. . . . i'm square you know.' victoria smiled and, after a second's hesitation, picked up the money. 'so'm i,' she said. then she switched on the light and pointed upstairs. chapter viii victoria's new career did not develop on unkindly lines. every night she went to the vesuvius, where she soon had her appointed place full under one of the big chandeliers. she secured this spot without difficulty, for most of her rivals were too wise to affront the glare; as soon as she realised this she rather revelled in her sense of power, for she now lived in a world where the only form of power was beauty. she felt sure of her beauty now she had compared it minutely with the charms of the preferred women. she was finer, she had more breed. almost every one of those women showed a trace of coarseness: a square jaw, not moulded in big bone like hers but swathed in heavy flesh; a thick ankle or wrist; spatulate fingertips; red ears. her pride was in the courage with which she welcomed the flow of the light on her neck and shoulders; round her chandelier the tables formed practically into circles, the nearest being occupied by the very young and venturesome, a few by the oldest who desperately clung to their illusion of immortal youth; then came the undecided, those who are between ages, who wear thick veils and sit with their backs to the light; the outer fringe was made up of those who remembered. their smiles were hard and fixed. she was fortunate enough too. she never had to sit long in front of the little glass which she discovered to be kummel; the waiter always brought it unasked. sometimes they would chat for a moment, for victoria was assimilating the lazy familiarity of her surroundings. he talked about the weather, the latest tips for goodwood, the misfortune of camille de valenciennes who had gone off to carlsbad with a barber who said he was a russian prince and had left her there stranded. her experiences piled up, and, after a few weeks she found she had exhausted most of the types who frequented the vesuvius. most of them were of the gawky kind, being very young men out for the night and desperately anxious to get off on the quiet by three o'clock in the morning; of the gawky kind too were the manchester merchants paying a brief visit to town on business and who wanted a peep into the inferno; these were easily dealt with and, if properly primed with champagne, exceedingly generous. now and then victoria was confronted with a racier type which tended to become rather brutal. it was recruited largely from obviously married men whose desires, dammed and sterilised by monotonous relations, seemed suddenly to burst their bonds. in a few weeks her resources developed exceedingly. she learned the scientific look that awakes a man's interest: a droop of the eyelid followed by a slow raising of it, a dilation of the pupil, then again a demure droop and the suspicion of a smile. she learned to prime herself from the papers with the proper conversation; racing, the latest divorce news, ragging scandals, marriages of the peerage into the chorus. she learned to laugh at chestnuts and to memorise such stories as sounded fresh; a few judicious matinées put her up to date as to the latest musical comedies. on the whole it was an easy life enough. six hours in the twenty-four seemed sufficient to afford her a good livelihood, and she did not doubt that by degrees she would make herself a connection which might be turned to greater advantage; as it was she had two faithful admirers whom she could count on once a week. the life itself often struck her as horrible, foul; still she was getting inured to the inane and could listen to it with a tolerant smile; sometimes she looked dispassionately into men's fevered eyes with a little wonder and an immense satisfaction in her power and the value of her beauty. sometimes a thrill of hatred went through her and she loathed those whose toy she was; then she felt tempted to drink, to drugs, to anything that would deaden the nausea; but she would rally: the first night, when she had drunk deep of champagne after the kummel, had given her a racking headache and suggested that beauty does not thrive on mixed drinks. another painful moment had been the third day after her new departure. it seemed to force realisation upon her. tacitly the early cup of tea had been stopped. mary now never came to the door, but breakfast was laid for two in the dining-room at half past nine; the hot course stood on a chafing dish over a tiny flame; the teapot was stocked and a kettle boiled on its own stand. neither of the servants ever appeared. on the third day, however, as victoria lay in her boudoir, reading, preparatory to ringing the cook to give her orders for the day, there was a knock at the door. 'come in,' said victoria a little nervously. she was still in the mood of feeling awkward before her servants. mary came in. for a moment she tugged at her belt. there was a slight flush on her sallow face. 'well mary?' asked victoria, still nervous. 'if you please, mum, may i speak to you? i've been talking to cook, mum, and--' 'and?' 'oh, mum, i hope you won't think it's because we're giving ourselves airs but it isn't the same as it was here before, mum--' 'well?' 'well, mum, we think we'd rather go mum. there's my young man, mum, and--and--' 'and he doesn't like your being associated with a woman of my kind? very right and proper.' 'oh, mum, i don't mean that. you've always been kind to me. cook too, she says she feels it very much, mum. when the major was alive, mum, it was different. it didn't seem to matter then, mum, but now--' mary stopped. for a moment the eyes behind the glasses looked as if they were going to cry. 'don't trouble to explain, mary,' said her mistress with some asperity. 'i understand. you and cook can't afford to jeopardise your characters. from the dizzy heights of trained domesticity, experts in your own line, you are justified in looking down upon an unskilled labourer. i have no doubt that you have considered the social problem in all its aspects, that you fully realise the possibilities of a woman wage-earner and her future. by all means go where your moral sense calls you: i shall give you an excellent character and demand none in exchange. there! i don't want to hurt your feelings, mary, i spoke hastily,' she added as the maid's features contracted, 'you only do this to please your young man; that is woman's profession, and i of all people must approve of what you do. if you don't mind, both of you, you will leave on saturday. you shall have your full month and a month's board allowance. now send up cook, i want to order lunch.' she could almost have wept as she lay with her face in the cushion. her servants had delivered an ultimatum from womankind, and lack of supplies compelled her to pick up the guage of battle. mary and cook were links between her and all those women who shelter behind one man only, and from that vantage ground hurl stones at their sisters beyond the gates. the significance of it was not that their services were lost to her, but that she must now be content to associate with another class. soon, however, her will was again supreme. 'after all,' she thought, 'i have done with society. i'm a pirate; society 'll be keen enough when i've won.' within three days she had readjusted her household. she had decided to make matters easy by engaging two german girls. laura, the cook, said at once that it was all one to her who came to the house and who didn't, so long as they left her alone in the kitchen, and provided she might bring her large tabby cat. augusta the maid, a long lanky girl with strong peasant hands and carroty hair, declared herself willing to oblige the _herrschaft_ in any way; she thereupon demanded an increase on the wages scheduled for her at the registry office. she also confided to her new mistress that she had a _kerl_ in germany, and that she would do anything to earn her dowry. thus the establishment settled down again. laura cooked excellently. augusta never flinched when bringing in the tea tray. her big blue saxon eyes seemed to allow everything to pass through them leaving her mind unsoiled, so armoured was her heart by the thought of that dowry. as for snoo and poo: they chased the tabby cat all over the house most of the day, which very soon improved their figures. thus the even tenour of victoria's life continued. she was quite a popular favourite. as soon as she sat down under the chandelier half-a-dozen men were looking at her. sometimes men followed her into the vesuvius; but these she seldom encouraged, for her instinct told her that so beautiful a woman as she was should set a high price on herself, and high prices were not to be found in piccadilly. among her faithful was a bachelor of forty, whom she only knew as charlie. this, by the way, was a characteristic of her acquaintances. she never discovered their names; some in fact were so guarded that they had apparently discarded their watches before coming out, so as to conceal even their initials. none ever showed a pocketbook. charlie was dark and burned by the sun of the tropics; there was something bluff and good-natured about him, great strength too. he had sharp grey eyes and a dark moustache. he spoke extraordinarily fast, talked loosely of places he had been to: china, mozambique, south america. victoria rather liked him; he was totally dull, inclined to be coarse; but as he invariably drank far too much before and when he came to the vesuvius, he made no demands on her patience, slept like a log and went early, leaving handsome recognition behind him. there was jim too, a precise top-hatted city clerk who had forced himself on her one saturday afternoon as she crossed piccadilly circus. he seemed such a pattern of rectitude, was so perfectly trim and brushed that she allowed herself to be inveigled into a cab and driven to a small flat in bayswater. he was too prudent to visit anybody else's rooms, he said; he had his flat on a weekly tenancy. jim kept rather a hold on her. he was neither rich nor generous; in fact victoria's social sense often stabbed her for what she considered undercutting, but jim used to hover about the vesuvius five minutes before closing time, and once or twice when victoria had had no luck he succeeded like the vulture on the stricken field. most of the others were dream figures; she lost count of them. after a month she could not remember a face. she even forgot a big fellow whom she had called black beauty, who came down from somewhere in devonshire for a monthly bust; he was so much offended that she had the mortification of seeing him captured by one of the outer circle who sit beyond the lights. in the middle of august the streets she called london were deserted. steamy air, dust laden, floated over the pavements. the vesuvius was half empty, and she had to cut down her standards. just as she was contemplating moving to folkestone for a month, however, she received a letter from solicitors in the strand, bastable, bastable & sons, informing her that 're major cairns deceased,' they were realising the estate on behalf of the administrators, and that they would be obliged if she would say when it would be convenient for her to convey the furniture of elm tree place into their hands. this perturbed victoria seriously. the furniture had a value, and besides it was the plant of a flourishing business. 'pity he died suddenly,' she thought, 'he'd have done something for me. he was a good sort, poor old tom.' she dressed herself as becomingly and quietly as she could, and, after looking up the law of intestacy in whitaker, concluded that marmaduke cairns's old sisters must be the heirs. then she sallied forth to beard the solicitor in his den. the den was a magnificent suite of offices just off the strand. she was ushered into a waiting-room partitioned off from the general office by glass. it was all very frowsy and hot. there was nothing to read except the _times_ and she was uncomfortably conscious of three clerks and an office boy who frequently turned round and looked through the partition. at last she was ushered in. the solicitor was a dry-looking man of forty or so; his parchment face, deeply wrinkled right and left, his keen blue eyes and high forehead impressed her as dangerous. he motioned her to an armchair on the other side of his desk. 'well, mrs ferris,' he said, 'to what do i owe the honour of this visit?' he sat back in his armchair and bit his penholder. a smile elongated his thin lips. this was his undoing, for he looked less formidable and victoria decided on a line of action. she had come disturbed, now she was on her mettle. 'mr bastable,' she said, plunging at once into the subject, 'you ask me to surrender my furniture. i'm not going to.' 'oh?' the solicitor raised his eyebrows. 'but, my dear madame, surely you must see . . .' 'i do. but i'm not going to.' 'well,' he said, 'i hardly see . . . my duty will compel me to take steps . . .' 'of course,' said victoria smiling, 'but if you refuse to let me alone i shall go out of this office, have the furniture moved to-day and put up at auction to-morrow.' a smile came over the solicitor's face. by jove, she was a fine woman, and she had some spirit. 'besides,' she added, 'all this would cause me a great deal of annoyance. major cairns's affairs are still very interesting to the public. i shall be compelled, if you make me sell, to write a serial, say _my life with an irish martyr_ for a sunday paper.' mr bastable laughed frankly. 'you want to be nasty, i see. but you know, we can stop your sale by an application to a judge in chambers this afternoon. and as for your serial, well, major cairns is dead, he won't mind.' 'no, but his aunts will. their name is cairns. as regards the sale, perhaps you and the other lawyers can stop it. very well, either you promise or i go home and . . . perhaps there'll be a fire to-night and perhaps there won't. i'm fully insured.' 'by jove!' bastable looked at her critically. cairns had been a lucky man. 'well, mrs ferris,' he added, 'we're not used to troublesome customers like you. i don't suppose the furniture is valuable, is it?' 'oh, a couple of hundred,' said victoria dishonestly. 'm'm. do you absolutely want me to pledge myself?' 'absolutely.' 'well, mrs ferris, i can honestly promise you that you won't hear anything more about it. i . . . i don't think it would pay us.' victoria laughed. a great joy of triumph was upon her. she liked bastable rather, now she had brought him to heel. 'all right,' she said, 'it's a bargain.' then she saw that his mouth was smiling still and his eyes fixed on her face. 'there's no quarrel between us, is there?' 'no, of course not. all in the way of business, you know.' he bent across the table; she heard him breathe in her perfume. 'then,' she said slowly, getting up and pulling on her gloves, 'i'm not doing anything to-night. you know my address. seven o'clock. you may take me out to dinner.' chapter ix within a few days of her victory over mr bastable, victoria found herself in an introspective mood. the solicitor was the origin of it, though unimportant in himself as the grain of sand which falls into a machine, and for a fraction of a second causes a wheel to rasp before the grain is crunched up. she reflected, as she looked out over her garden, that she was getting very hard. she had brought this man to his knees by threats; she had vulgarly bullied him by holding exposure over his head; she had behaved like a tragedy queen. finally, with sardonic intention, she had turned the contest to good account by entangling him while he was still under the influence of her personality. all this was not what disturbed her; for after all she had only lied to bastable, bullied him, threatened him, bluffed as to her intentions: she had been perfectly businesslike. thoughtfully she opened the little door at the end of the hall and stepped out on the outer landing where the garden steps ended. snoo and poo, asleep in a heap in the august blaze, raised heavy eyelids, and, yawning and stretching, followed her down the steps. this was a joyful little garden. the greater part of it was a lawn, close cut, but disfigured in many places by snoo and poo's digging. flower beds ran along both sides and the top of the lawn, while the bottom was occupied by the pergola, now covered with massive red blooms; an acacia tree, and an elder tree, both leafy but refusing to flower, shaded the bottom of the garden, which was effectively cut off by a hedge of golden privet. it was a tidy garden, but it showed no traces of originality. victoria had ordered it to be potted with geraniums, carnations, pinks, marguerites; and was quite content to observe that somebody had put in sweet peas, clematis and larkspur. hers was not the temperament which expresses itself in a garden; there was no sense of peace in her idea of the beautiful. if she liked the garden to look pretty at all, it was doubtless owing to her heredity. victoria picked up a couple of stones and threw them towards the end of the garden. snoo and poo rushed into the privet, snuffling excitedly, while their mistress drew down a heavy rose-laden branch from the pergola and breathed the blossoms. yes, she was hard, and it was beginning to make her nervous. in the early days she had sedulously cultivated the spirit which was making a new woman out of the quiet, refined, rather shy girl she had been. there had been a time when she would have shuddered at the idea of a quarrel with a cabman about an overcharge; now, if it were possible, she felt coldly certain that she would cheat him of his rightful fare. this process she likened to the tempering of steel, and called a development of the mental muscles. she rather revelled in this development in the earlier days, because it gave her a sense of power; she benefited by it too, for she found that by cultivating this hardness she could extort more money by stooping to wheedle, by accepting snubs, by flattery and lies too. the consciousness of this power redeemed the exercise of it; she often felt herself lifted above this atmosphere of deceit by looking coldly at the deed she was about to do, recognising its nature and doing it with her eyes open. a realization of another kind, however, was upon victoria that rich august day. in a sense she was doing well. her capital had not been touched; in fact it had probably increased, and this in spite of town being empty. she had not yet found the man who would make her fortune; but she had no doubt that he would appear if she continued on her even road, selecting without passion, judging values and possibilities. for the moment she brushed aside the question of success; it was assured. but, after success, what then? say she had four or five hundred a year at thirty and retired into the country or went to america. what use would she be to herself or to anybody if she had learned exclusively to bide her time and to strike for her own advantage? life was a contest for the poor and for the rich alike; but the first had to fight to win and to use any means, fair or foul, while the latter could accept knightly rules, be magnanimous when victorious, graceful when defeated. 'yes,' said victoria, 'i must keep myself in trim. it's all very well to win and i've got to be as hard as nails to men, but . . .' she stopped abruptly. the problem had solved itself. 'hard as nails to men,' did not include women, for 'men' seldom means mankind when the talk is of rights. she did not know what her mission might be. perhaps, after she had succeeded, she would travel all over europe, perhaps settle on the english downs where the west winds blow, perhaps even be the pioneer of a great sex revolt; but whatever she did, if her triumph was not to be sterile, she would need sympathy, the capacity to love. thus she amended her articles of war: 'woman shall be spared, and i shall remember that, as a member of a sex fighting another sex, i must understand and love my sister warrior.' it was in pursuance of her new policy that, on her way to the vesuvius, victoria dawdled for a moment at the entrance of swallow street, under its portico. a few yards beyond her stood a woman whom she knew by sight as having established practically a proprietary right to her beat. she was a dark girl, good-looking enough, well set up in her close fitting white linen blouse, drawn tight to set off her swelling bust. in the dim light victoria could see that her face was rather worn, and that the ravages of time had been clumsily repaired. the girl looked at her curiously at first; then angrily, evidently disliking the appearance of what might be a dangerous rival in her own preserves. victoria walked up and down on the pavement. the girl watched her every footstep. once she made as if to speak to her. it was ghostly, for passers-by in regent street came to and fro beyond the portico like arabesques. a passing policeman gave the girl a meaning look. she tossed her head and walked away down regent street, while victoria nervously continued down swallow street to piccadilly. these two women were to meet, however. about a week later, victoria, happening to pass by at the same hour, saw the girl and stopped under the arch. in another second the girl was by her side. 'what are you following me about for?' she snarled. 'if you're a grote it's no go. you won't teach the copper anything he doesn't know.' 'oh, i'm not following you,' said victoria. 'only i saw you about and thought i'd like to talk to you.' the girl shot a dark glance at her. 'what's your game?' she asked. 'you're not one of those blasted sisters. too toffish. seen you come out of the vez', besides.' 'i'm in the profession,' said victoria coolly. 'but that doesn't mean i've got to be against the others.' 'doesn't it!' the girl's eyes glowed. 'you don't know your job. of course you've got to be against the others. we were born like that. or got like that. what's it matter?' 'matter? oh, a lot,' said victoria. 'we want friends, all of us.' 'friends. oh, lord! the likes of you and me don't have friends. women, they won't know us . . . too good. except our sort. we can't talk; we got nothing to talk of, except money and the boys. and the boys, what's the good of them? there's the sort you pick up and all you've got to do's to get what you can out of them. haven't fallen in love with one, have you?' the girl's voice broke a little, then she went on. 'then, there's the other sort, like my hugo, p'raps you've heard of him?' 'no,' she said, 'i haven't. what is he like?' 'bless you, he's a beauty.' the girl smiled; her face was full of pride. 'does he treat you well?' 'so so. sometimes.' the shadow had returned. 'not like my first. oh, it's hard you know, beginning. he left me with a baby after three months. i was in service in pembridge gardens--such a swell house! i had to keep baby. it died then, jolly good thing too! couldn't go back to service. everybody knew.' the girl burst into tears and victoria putting an arm round her drew her against her breast. 'everybody knew, everybody knew!' wailed the girl. victoria had the vision of a thousand spectral eyes, all full of knowledge, gazing at the housemaid caught by them sinning. the girl rested her head against victoria's shoulder for a moment, holding one of her hands. suddenly she raised her head again and cleared her throat. 'there,' she said, 'let me go. hugo's waiting for me at the carcassonne. never mind me. we've all got to live, he-he!' she turned into regent street and another 'he-he' floated back. victoria felt a heavy weight at her heart; poor girl, weak, the sport of one man, deceived, then a pirate made to disgorge her gains by another man; handsome, subtle, playing upon her affections and her fears. what did it matter? was she not in the same position, but freer because conscious; poor slave soul. but the time had come for victoria to make for the vesuvius. 'it must be getting late,' she thought, putting up her hand to her little gold watch-brooch. it was gone. she had it on when she left, but it could not have dropped out, for the lace showed two long rips; it had just been torn out. victoria stood frozen for a moment. so this was the result of a first attempt at love. she recovered, however. she was not going to generalise from one woman. 'besides,' she thought bitterly, 'the girl's theories are the same as mine. she merely has no reservations or hesitations. the bolder pirate, she is perhaps the better brain.' then she walked down swallow street into piccadilly, and at once a young man in loud checks was at her side. she looked up into his face, her smile full of covert promise as they went into the vesuvius together. victoria was now at home in the market place, and could exchange a quip with the frequenters. languidly she dropped her cloak into the hands of the porter and preceded the young man into the supper-room. as they sat at the little table before the liqueur, her eyes saw the garish room through a film. how deadening it all was, and how lethal the draughts sold here. an immense weariness was upon her, an immense disgust, as she smiled full-toothed on the young man in checks. he was a cheerful rattle, suggested the man who has got beyond the retail trade without reaching the professions, a house agent's clerk perhaps. 'oh, yes, i'm a merry devil, ha! ha!' he winked a pleasant grey eye. victoria noticed that his clothes were too new, his boots too new, his manners too a recent acquisition. 'don't worry. that's how you keep young, ha! ha! besides, don't have much time to mope in my trade!' 'what's that?' asked victoria vacuously. men generally lied as to their occupation, but she had noticed that when their imagination was stimulated their temper improved. 'inspector of bun-punchers, ha! ha!' 'bun-punchers?' 'yes, bun-punchers. south eastern railway, you know. got to have them dated now. new act of parliament, ha! ha!' victoria laughed, for his cockney joviality was infectious. then again the room faded and rematerialised as his voice rose and fell. 'the wife don't know i'm out on the tiles, ha! ha! she's in streatham, looking after the smalls. . . . oh, no, none of your common or garden brass fenders. . . .' victoria pulled herself together. this was what she could not bear. brutality, the obscene even, were preferable to this dreary trickling of the inane masquerading as wit. yet she smiled at him. 'you're saucy,' she said. 'you're my fancy to-night.' a shadow passed over the man's face. then again he was rattling along. 'talk of inventions? what'd you think of mine: indiarubber books to read in your bath? ha! ha! . . .' but these are only the moths that flutter round the lamp, too far off to burn their wings. they love to breathe perfume, to touch soft hands, gaze at bright eyes and golden hair; then they flutter away, and the hand that would stay their flight cannot rob them even of a few specks of golden dust. in a few minutes victoria sat philosophically before her empty glass while fascination fledgeby was by the side of a rival, being 'an awful dog,' for the benefit of his fellow clerks on the morrow. she was in the mood when it did not matter whether she was unlucky or not. there were quite two women present for every man this hot august night. at the next table sat a woman known as 'duckie,' fair, very fat and rosy; she was the vision bursting from a white dress which victoria had seen the first night. on the first night she had embodied for victoria--so large, so fat, so coarsely animal was she--the very essence of her trade; now she knew her better she found that duckie was a good sort, careless, generous, perfectly incapable of doing anybody an ill turn. she was _bonne fille_ even, so unmercenary as sometimes to accede good humouredly to the pleadings of an impecunious youth. her one failing was a fondness for 'a wet.' she was drinking her third whisky and soda; if she was invited to supper she would add to that at least half a bottle of champagne, follow that up by a couple of liqueurs and a peg just before going to bed. she carried her liquor well; she merely grew a little vague. 'hot,' remarked duckie. 'rather,' said victoria. 'i'm going soon, can't stick it.' 'good for you. i've got to stay. always harder for grandmas like me when the fifth form boy's at the seaside.' duckie laughed, without cynicism though; she had the reasoning powers of a cow. victoria laughed too. a foreign-looking girl in scarlet bent over from the next table, her long coral earrings sliding down over her collar-bones. 'tight again,' said the girl. 'as a drum, lissa, old girl!' said duckie good temperedly. 'nothing to what you'll be by and by,' added lissa with the air of a comforter. 'nothing like, old dear! have one with me, lissa? no? no offence. you, zoé, have a _tord boyaux_?' 'no thanks.' zoé was a good-looking short girl; her french nationality written in every line of her round face, plump figure, and hands. her hair was pulled away from the fat nape of her neck. she looked competent and wide awake. a housewife gone astray. lissa, dark and italian looking in her red dress and coral earrings, was more languid than the others. she was really a greek, and all the grace of the east was in every movement of her slim figure. in a moment the four women had clustered together, forgetting strife. lissa had had a 'bank of engraving' note palmed off on her by a pseudo-south american planter, and was rightly indignant. they were still talking of camille de valenciennes and of her misfortunes with the barber. boys, the latest tip for gatwick, 'what i said to him,' the furriers' sales, boys again . . . victoria listened to the conversation. it still seemed like another world and yet her world. here they were, she and the other atoms, hostile every one, and a blind centripetal force was kneading them together into a class. yet any class was better than the isolation in which she lived. why not go further, hear more? 'i say, you girls,' she said suddenly, 'you've never been to my place. come and . . . no, not dine, it won't work . . . come and lunch with me next week.' duckie smiled heavily. 'i don' min',' she said thickly. zoé looked suspicious for a moment. 'can i bring fritz?' asked lissa. 'no, we can't have fritz,' said victoria smiling. 'ladies only.' 'i'm on,' said zoé suddenly. 'i was afraid you were going to have a lot of swells in. hate those shows. never do you any good and you get so crumpled.' 'you might let me bring fritz,' said lissa querulously. 'no men,' said victoria firmly. 'wednesday at one o'clock. all square?' 'thatawright,' remarked duckie. 'shut it lissa. fritzawright. tellm its biz . . . bizness.' with some difficulty they hoisted duckie into a cab and sent her off to bloomsbury. as it drove off she popped her head out. 'carriage paid,' she spluttered, 'or c. o. d.?' zoé and lissa walked away to the circus. on her little hall table, as victoria went into her house, she found a note scrawled in pencil on some of her own notepaper. it was from betty. it said that farwell had been stricken down by a sudden illness and was sinking fast. his address followed. chapter x in a bed sitting-room at the top of an old house off the waterloo road three women were watching by the bedside of a man. one was dressed in rusty black; she was pale faced, crowned with light hair; the other, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, was middle-aged and very stout; her breast rolled like a billow in her half buttoned bodice. the third was beautiful, all in black, her sumptuous neck and shoulders bare. none of them moved for a moment. then the beautiful woman threw back her cloak and her long jade earrings tinkled. the face on the pillow turned and opened its eyes. 'victoria,' said a faint voice. 'yes . . . are you better?' victoria bent over the bed. the face was copper coloured; every bone seemed to start out. she could hardly recognise farwell's rough hewn features. 'not yet . . . soon,' said farwell. he closed his eyes once more. 'what is it, betty?' whispered victoria. 'i don't know . . . hemorrhage they say.' 'it's all up mum,' whispered the landlady in victoria's ear. 'been ill two days only. doctor said he wouldn't come again.' victoria bent over the bed once more. she could feel the eyes of the landlady probing her personality. 'can't you do something?' she asked savagely. 'nothing.' farwell opened his eyes again and faintly smiled. 'and what's the good, victoria?' victoria threw herself on her knees by the side of the bed. 'oh, you musn't!' she whispered. 'you . . . the world can't spare you!' 'oh, yes . . . it can . . . you know . . . the world is like men . . . it spends everything on luxuries . . . it can't afford necessaries.' victoria smiled and felt as if she were going to choke. the last paradox. 'are you in pain?' she asked. 'no, not just now. . . . i shall be, soon. let me speak while i can.' his voice grew firmer suddenly. 'i have asked you to come so that you may be the last thing i see; you, the fairest. i love you.' not one of the three women moved. 'i have not spoken before, because when i could speak we were slaves. now you are free and i a slave. it is too late, so it is time for me to speak. for i cannot influence you.' farwell shut his eyes. but soon his voice rose again. 'you must never influence anybody. that is my legacy to you. you cannot teach men to stand by giving them a staff. let the halt and the lame alone. the strong will win. you must be free. there is nothing worth while. . . .' a shiver passed over him, his voice became muffled. 'no, nothing at all . . . freedom only. . . .' he spoke quicker. the words could not be distinguished. now and then he groaned. 'wait,' whispered betty, 'it will be over in a minute.' for two minutes they waited. victoria's eyes fastened on a basin by the bedside, full of reddish water. then farwell's face grew lighter in tone. his voice came faint as the sound of a spinet. 'there will be better times. but before then fighting . . . the coming to the top of the leaders . . . gold will be taken from the rich . . . given to the vile . . . pictures burnt . . . chaos . . . woman rise as a tyrant . . . there will be fighting . . . the coming to the top. . ..' his voice thinned down to nothing as his wandering mind repeated his prediction. then he spoke again. 'you are a rebel . . . you will lead . . . you have understood . . . only by understanding are you saved. i asked you to come here to tell you to go on . . . earn your freedom . . . at the expense of others.' 'why at the expense of others?' asked betty, leaning over the bed. farwell was hypnotising her. his eyes wandered to her face. 'too late . . .' he said, 'you do not see . . . you are a slave . . . a woman has only one weapon . . . otherwise, a slave . . . ask . . . ask victoria.' he closed his eyes but went on speaking. 'there is not freedom for everybody . . . capitalism means freedom for a few . . . you must have freedom, like food . . . food for the soul . . . you must capture the right to respect . . . a woman may not toil . . . make money . . .' then again. 'i am going into the blackness . . . before death . . . the judge . . . death will judge me. . . .' ''e's thinking of his maker, poor genelman,' said the landlady hoarsely. victoria and betty looked at one another. agnostic or indifferent in their cooler moments, the superstition of their ancestors worked in their blood, powerfully assisted by the spectacle of this being passing step by step into an unknown. there must be life there, feeling, loving. there must be something. the voice stopped. betty had seized victoria's arm and now clutched it violently. victoria could feel through her own body the shudders that shook the girl's frame. then farwell's voice rose again, louder and louder, like the upward flicker of a dying candle. 'yes, freedom's my message, the right to live. this world into which we are evolved by a selfish act of joy, into which we are dragged unwilling with pain for our usher, it is a world which has no justification save the freedom to enjoy it as we may. i have lived a stoic, but it is a hedonist i die. unshepherded i go into a perhaps. but i regret nothing . . . all the certainties of the past are not worth the possible of the future. behind me others tread the road that leads up the hill.' he paused for breath. then again his voice arose as a cry, proclaiming his creed. 'on the top of the hill. there i see the unknown land, running with milk and honey. i see a new people; beautiful young, beautiful old. its fathers have ground the faces of the helots; they have fought and lusted, they have suffered contumely and stripes. now they know the law, the law that all may keep because they are beyond the law. they do not desire, for they have, they do not weigh, for they know. they have not feared, they have dared; they have spared no man, nor themselves. ah! now they have opened the golden gates. . . .' the man's voice broke, he coughed, a thin stream of blood trickled from the side of his mouth. victoria felt a film come over her eyes. she leant over him to staunch the flow. they saw one another then. farwell's voice went down to a whisper. 'victoria . . . victorious . . . my love . . . never more. . . .' she looked into his glazing eyes. 'beyond . . .' he whispered; then his head fell to one side and his jaw dropped. betty turned away. she was crying. the landlady wiped her hands on her apron. victoria hesitatingly took hold of farwell's wrist. he was dead. she looked at him stupidly for a moment, then drew her cloak round her shivering shoulders. the landlady too was crying now. 'oh, mum, sich a nice genelman,' she moaned. 'but 'e did go on so!' victoria smiled pitifully. what an epitaph for a sunset! she drove away with betty and, as the horse trotted through the deserted streets, hugged the girl in her arms. betty was shuddering violently, and nestled close up to her. they did not speak. everything seemed to have become loose in victoria's mind and to be floating on a black sea. the pillar of her individualism was down. her codes were in the melting pot; a man, the finest she had known, had confessed his love in his extremity, and before she could respond passed into the shadow. but farwell had left her as a legacy the love of freedom for which he died, for which she was going to live. when they arrived at elm tree place, victoria forced betty to drink some brandy, to tell her how farwell had sent her a message, asking her to send him victoria, how she had waited for her. 'oh, it was awful,' whispered betty, 'the maid said you'd be late . . . she said i mustn't wait because you might not . . .' 'not come home alone?' said victoria in a frozen voice. 'oh, i can't bear it, i can't bear it.' betty flung herself into her friend's arms, wildly weeping. victoria soothed her, made her undress. as betty grew more collected she let drop a few words. 'oh, so then you too are happy?' said victoria smiling faintly. 'you love?' a burning blush rose over betty's face. that night, as in the old finsbury days, they lay in one another's arms and victoria grappled with her sorrow. gentle, almost motherly, she watched over this young life; blushing, full of promise, preparing already to replace the dead. chapter xi the death of farwell seemed to leave victoria struggling and gasping for breath, like a shipwrecked mariner who tries to secure his footing on shifting sand while waves knock him down every time he rises to his knees. though she hardly ever saw him and though she had no precise idea that he cared for her more than does the scientist for the bacteria he observes, he had been her tower of strength. he was there, like the institutions which make up civilisation, the british constitution, the bank and the established church. now he was gone and she saw that the temple of life was empty. he was the last link. cairns's death had turned her out among the howling wolves; now farwell seemed to have carried away with him her theory of life. above all, she now knew nobody; save betty, who counted as a charming child. it was then she began to taste more cruelly the isolation of her class. in the early days, when she paced up and down fiercely in the room at portsea place, she had already realised that she was alone, but then she was not an outcast; the doors of society were, if not open, at any rate not locked against her. then the busy hum of the rosebud and the p.r.r., the back-breaking work, the hustle, the facile friendships with city beaus--all this had drawn a veil over her solitude. now she was really alone because none knew and none would know her. her beauty, her fine clothes, contributed to clear round her a circle as if she were a leper. at times she would talk to a woman in a park, but before a few sentences had passed her lips the woman would take in every detail of her, her clean gloves, her neat shoes, her lace handkerchief, her costly veil; then the woman's face would grow rigid, and with a curt 'good morning' she would rise from her seat and go. victoria found herself thrust back, like the trapper in the hands of red indians; like him she ran in a circle, clubbed back towards the centre every time she tried to escape. she was of her class, and none but her class would associate with her. women such as herself gladly talked to her, but their ideas sickened her, for life had taught them nothing but the ethics of the sex-trade. their followers too--barbers, billiard markers, shady bookmakers, unemployed potmen; who sometimes dared to foist themselves on her--filled her with yet greater fear and disgust, for they were the only class of man alternative to those on whose bounty she lived. thus she withdrew herself away from all; sometimes a craving for society would throw her into equivocal converse with augusta, whose one idea was the dowry she must take back to germany. then, tiring of her, she would snatch up snoo and poo and pace round and round her tiny lawn like a squirrel in its wheel. a chance meeting with molly emphasised her isolation, like the flash of lightning which leaves the night darker. she was standing on the steps of the sandringham tea house in bond street, looking into the side window of the photographer who runs a print shop on the ground floor. some sprawling boucher beauties in delicate gold frames fascinated her. she delighted in the semi-crude, semi-sophisticated atmosphere, the rotundity of the well-fed bodies, their ribald rosy flesh. as she was wondering whether they would not do for the stairs the door opened suddenly and a plump little woman almost rushed into her arms. the little woman apologised, giving her a quick look. then the two looked at one another again. 'victoria!' cried molly, for it was she, with her wide open blue eyes, small nose, fair frizzy hair. a thrill of joy and fear ran through victoria. she felt her personality criddle up like a scorched moth, then expand like a flower under gentle dew. she was found out; the terrible female instinct was going to detect her, then to proclaim her guilt. however, bravely enough, she braced herself up and held out her hand. 'oh, vic, why haven't you written to me for, let me see, three years, isn't it?' 'i've been away, abroad,' said victoria slowly. she seemed to float in another world. molly was talking vigorously; victoria's brain, feverishly active, was making up the story which would have to be told when molly's cheerful egotism had had its way. 'don't let's stay here on the doorstep,' she interrupted, 'let's go upstairs and have tea. you haven't had tea yet?' 'i should love to,' said molly, squeezing her arm. 'then you can tell me about yourself.' seated at a little table molly finished her simple story. she had married an army chaplain, but he had given up his work in india and was now rector of pontyberis in wales. they had two children. molly was up in town merely to break the journey, as she was going down to stay with her aunt in kent. oh, yes, she was very happy, her husband was very well. 'they're talking of making him dean of ffwr,' she added with unction. 'but that's enough about me. how have you been getting on, vic? i needn't ask how you are; one only has to look at you.' molly's eyes roved over her friend's beautiful young face, her clothes which she appraised with the skill of those poor who are learned in the fashions. 'i? oh, i'm very well,' said victoria hysterically. 'yes, but how have you been getting on? weren't you talking about having to work when you came over?' 'yes, but i've been lucky . . . a week after i got here an aunt of my mother's died of whom i never even heard before. they told me at dick's lawyers a month later, and you wouldn't believe it, there was no will and i came in for . . . well something quite comfortable.' molly put out her hand and stroked victoria's. 'i'm so glad,' she said. . . . 'oh, you don't know how hard it is to have to work for your living. i see something of it in wales. oh, if you only knew. . . .' victoria pressed her lips together, as if about to cry or laugh. 'but what did you do then? you only wrote once. you didn't tell me?' 'no, i only heard a month after, you know. oh, i had a lot to do. i travelled a lot. i've been in america a good deal. in fact my home is in . . . alabama.' she plunged for alabama, feeling sure that new york was unsafe. 'oh, how nice,' said molly ingenuously. 'you might have sent me picture postcards, you know.' skilfully enough victoria explained that she had lost molly's address. her friend blissfully accepted all she said, but a few other women less ingenuous than the clergyman's wife were casting sharp glances at her. when they parted, victoria audaciously giving her address as 'care of mrs ferris, elm tree place,' she threw herself back on the cushions of the cab and told herself that she could not again go through with the ordeal of facing her own class. she almost hungered for the morrow, when she was to entertain the class she had adopted. chapter xii the fulton household had always been short of money, for dick spent too much himself to leave anything for entertaining; thus victoria had very little experience of lunch parties. since she had left the holts she hardly remembered a bourgeois meal. the little affair on the wednesday was therefore provocative of much thought. mutton was dismissed as common, beef in any form as coarse; laura's suggestion (for laura and augusta had been called in) of a savoury sauerkraut ('mit blutwurst, frankfurter, leberwurst, etc.'), was also dismissed. both servants took a keen interest in the occasion. 'but why no gentleman come?' asked laura, who was clearly ill-disposed to do her best for her own sex. 'in the house i was . . .' began augusta . . . then she froze up under victoria's eye. her mistress still had a strain of the prig in her. then augusta suggested hors d'oeuvres, smoked salmon, anchovies, olives, radishes; laura forced forward fowl _à la milanaise_ to be preceded by baked john dory cayenne. then augusta in a moment of inspiration thought of french beans and vegetable marrow . . . stuffed with chestnuts. the three women laughed, laura clapped her hands with the sheer joy of the creative artist. when victoria came into the dining-room at half-past twelve she was almost dazzled by her own magnificence. neither the carlton nor the savoy could equal the blaze of her plate, the brilliant polish of her tablecloths. the dahlias blazed dark red in cut glass by the side of pale belated roses from the garden. on the sideboard fat peaches were heaped in a modern lowestoft bowl, and amber-coloured plums lay like portly dowagers in velvet. a few minutes before the hour zoé and lissa arrived together. they were nervous; not on account of victoria's spread, for they were of the upper stratum, but because they were in a house. accustomed to their small flats off shaftesbury avenue, where tiny kitchens jostled with bedroom and boudoir, they were frightened by the suggestion of a vast basement out of which floated the savoury aroma of the john dory baking. victoria tried to put them at their ease, took their parasols away and showed them into the boudoir. there they sat in a triangle, the hot sun blazing in upon them, stiff and starched with the formality of those who are seldom formal. 'have a manhattan cocktail?' asked the hostess. 'no thanks; very hot, isn't it?' said lissa in her most refined manner. she was looking very pretty, dark, slim and snaky in her close-fitting lemon coloured frock. 'very hot,' chimed in zoé. she was sitting unnecessarily erect. her flat french back seemed to abhor the easy chair. her tight hair, her trim hands, her well boned collar, everything breathed neatness, well laced stays, a full complement of hooks and eyes. she might have been the sedate wife of a prosperous french tradesman. 'yes, it is hot,' said victoria. then the conversation flagged. the hostess tried to draw out her guests. they were obviously anxious to behave. lissa posed for 'the sketch,' zoé remained _très correcte_. 'do you like my pictures?' asked victoria pointing to the french engravings. 'they are very pretty,' said lissa. 'i am very interested in engravings,' said zoé, looking at the rosewood clock. there was a longish pause. 'i must show you my little dogs,' cried victoria. she must do something. she went out to the landing and opened the garden door. there she met augusta carrying a trayful of finger bowls. she felt inspired to overturn it if only to break the ice. snoo and poo rushed in, but in the boudoir they also instinctively became very well-bred. 'i am very fond of dogs,' said lissa. snoo lay down on her back. 'she is very pretty,' remarked zoé. victoria punched the dogs in the ribs, rolled them over. it was no good. they would do nothing but gently wag their tails. she felt she would like to swear, when suddenly the front door was slammed, a cheerful voice rang in the hall. 'hulloa, here's duckie,' said lissa. the door opened loudly and duckie seemed to rush in as if seated on a high wind. 'here we are again!' cried the buxom presence in white. every one of her frills rattled like metal. 'late as usual. oh, vic, what angel pups!' duckie was on her knees. in a moment she had stirred up the pekingese. they forgot their manners. they barked vociferously; and zoé's starch was taken out of her by poo, who rushed under her skirts. lissa laughed and jumped up. 'here vic,' said duckie ponderously, 'give us a hand, old girl. never can jump about after gin and bitters,' she added confidentially as they helped her up. the ice was effectually broken. they filed into the dining-room in pairs, victoria and lissa being slim playing the part of men. how they gobbled up the hors d'oeuvres and how golden the john dory was; the flanks of the fish shone like an old violin. augusta flitted about quick but noisy. there was a smile on her face. 'steady on, old love,' said duckie to her as the maid inadvertently poured her claret into a tumbler. 'never you mind, gussie,' cried zoé, bursting with familiarity, 'she'll be having it in a bucket by and by.' augusta laughed. what easy going _herrschaft_! the talk was getting racier now. by the time they got to the dessert the merriment was rather supper than lunch-like. 'victoria plums,' said lissa, 'let us name them _bonne hotesse_.' the idea was triumphant. duckie insisted on drinking a toast in hock, for she never hesitated to mix her wines. victoria smiled at them indulgently. the youth of all this and the jollity, the ease of it; all that was not of her old class. 'confusion to the puritans,' she cried, and drained her glass. snoo and poo were fighting for scraps, for duckie was already getting uncertain in her aim. lissa and zoé, like nymphs teasing bacchus, were pelting her with plum stones, but she seemed quite unconscious of their pranks. they had some difficulty in getting her into the boudoir for coffee and liqueurs; once on the sofa she tried to go to sleep. her companions roused her, however; the scent of coffee, acrid and stimulating, stung their nostrils; the liqueurs shone wickedly, green and golden in their glass bottles; talk became more individual, more reminiscent. here and there a joke shot up like a rocket or stuck quivering in duckie's placid flanks. 'well vic,' said zoé, 'you are very well _installée_.' she slowly emptied of cigarette smoke her expanded cheeks and surveyed the comfortable little room. 'did you do it yourself?' asked lissa. 'it must have cost you a lot of money.' 'oh, i didn't pay.' victoria was either getting less reticent or the liqueur was playing her tricks. 'i began with a man who set me up here,' she added; 'he was . . . he died suddenly' she went on more cautiously. 'oh!' zoé's eyebrows shot up. 'that's what i call luck. but why do you not have a flat? it is cheaper.' 'yes, but more inconvenient,' said lissa. 'ah, vic. i do envy you. you don't know. we're always in trouble. we are moving every month.' 'but why?' asked victoria. 'why must you move?' 'turn you out. neighbours talk and then the landlord's conscience begins to prick him,' grumbled duckie from the sofa. 'oh, i see,' said victoria. 'but when they turn you out what do you do?' 'go somewhere else, softy,' said duckie. 'but then what good does it do?' all the women laughed. 'law, who cares?' said duckie. 'i dunno.' 'it is perfectly simple,' began zoé in her precise foreign english. 'you see the landlord he will not let flats to ladies. when the police began to watch it would cause him _des ennuis_. so he lets to a gentleman who sublets the flats, you see? when the trouble begins, he doesn't know.' 'but what about the man who sublets?' asked the novice. 'him? oh, he's gone when it begins,' said lissa. 'but they arrest the hall porter.' 'justice must have its way, i see,' said victoria. 'what you call justice,' grumbled duckie, 'i call it damned hard lines.' for some minutes victoria discussed the housing problem with the fat jolly woman. duckie was in a cheerful mood. one could hardly believe, when one looked at her puffy pink face, that she had seen fifteen years of trouble. 'landladies,' she soliloquised, 'it's worse. you take my tip vic, you steer clear of them. you pay as much for a pigsty as a man pays for a palace. if you do badly they chuck you out and stick to your traps and what can you do? you don't call a policeman. if you do well, they raise the rent, steal your clothes, charge you key money, and don't give 'em any lip if you don't want a man set at you. oh, lor!' duckie went on, and as she spoke her bluntness caused victoria to visualise scene after scene, one more horrible than another: a tall dingy house in bloomsbury with unlit staircases leading up to black landings suggestive of robbery and murder; bedrooms with blinded windows, reeking with patchouli, with carpets soiled by a myriad ignoble stains. the house duckie pictured was like a warren in every corner of which soft-handed, rosy-lipped harpies sucked men's life-blood; there was drinking in it, and a piano played light airs; below in the ground floor, through the half open door, she could see two or three foreigners, unshaven, dirty-cuffed, playing cards in silence like hunters in ambush. she shuddered. 'yes, but fritz isn't so bad,' broke in lissa. she had all this time been wrangling with zoé. 'no good,' snapped zoé, 'he's a . . . a _bouche inutile_.' her pursed-up lips tightened. fritz was swept away to limbo by her practical french philosophy. 'i like him because he is not useful' said lissa dreamily. zoé shrugged her shoulders. poor fool, this lissa. 'who is this fritz you're always talking about?' asked victoria. 'he's a . . . you know what they call them,' said duckie brutally. 'you're a liar,' screamed lissa jumping up. 'he's . . . oh, vic, you do not understand. he's the man i care for; he is so handsome, so clever, so gentle . . .' 'very gentle,' sneered zoé, 'why did you not take off your long gloves last week, _hein_? perhaps you had blue marks?' lissa looked about to cry. victoria put her hand on her arm. 'never mind them,' she said, 'tell me.' 'oh, vic, you are so good.' lissa's face twitched, then she smiled like a child bribed with a sweet. 'they do not know; they are hard. it is true, fritz does not work, but if we were married he would work and i would do nothing. what does it matter?' they all smiled at the theory, but lissa went on with heightened colour. 'oh, it is so good to forget all the others; they are so ugly, so stupid. it is infernal. and then, fritz, the man that i love for himself . . .' 'and who loves you for . . .' began zoé. 'shut up, zoé,' said duckie, her kindly heart expanding before this idealism, 'leave the kid alone. not in my line of course. you take my tip, all of you, you go on your own. don't you get let in with a landlady and don't you get let in with a man. it's _them_ you've got to let in.' 'that's what i say,' remarked zoé. 'we are successful because we take care. one must be economical. for instance, every month i can. . . .' she stopped and looked round suspiciously; with economy goes distrust, and zoé was very french. 'well, i can manage,' she concluded vaguely. 'and you need not talk, duckie,' said lissa savagely. 'you drink two quid's worth every week.' 'well, s'pose i do,' grumbled the cherub. 'think i do it for pleasure? tell you what, if i hadn't got squiffy at the beginning i'd have gone off me bloomin' chump. i was in buenos ayres, went off with a waiter to get married. he was in a restaurant, highgate way, where i was in service. i found out all about it when i got there. o lor! why, we jolly well _had_ to drink, what with those argentines who're half monkeys and the good of the house! oh, lor!' she smiled. 'those were high old times,' she said inconsequently, overwhelmed by the glamour of the past. there was silence. 'i see,' said victoria suddenly. 'i've never seen it before. if you want to get on, you've got to run on business lines. no ties, no men to bleed you. save your money. don't drink; save your looks. why, those are good rules for a bank cashier! if you trip, down you go in the mud and nobody'll pick you up. so you've got to walk warily, not look at anybody, play fair and play hard. then you can get some cash together and then you're free.' there was silence. victoria had faced the problem too squarely for two of her guests. lissa looked dreamily towards the garden, wondering where fritz was, whether she was wise in loving; duckie, conscious of her heavy legs and incipient dropsy, blushed, then paled. alone, zoé, stiff and energetic like the determined business woman she was, wore on her lips the enigmatic smile born of a nice little sum in french three per cents. 'i must be going,' said duckie hoarsely. she levered herself off the sofa. then, almost silently, the party broke up. chapter xiii life pursued its even tenour; and victoria, watching it go by, was reminded of the endless belt of a machine. the world machine went on grinding, and every breath she took was grist thrown for ever into the intolerable mill. it was october again, and already the trees in the garden were shedding fitful rains of glowing leaves. alone the elder tree stood almost unchanged, a symbol of the everlasting. now and then victoria walked round the little lawn with snoo and poo, who were too shivery to chase the fat spiders. often she stayed there for an hour, one hand against a tree trunk, looking at nothing, bathed in the mauve light of the dying year. already the scents of decay, of wetness, filled the little garden and struck cold when the sun went down. every day now victoria felt her isolation more cruelly. solitude was no longer negative; it had materialised and had become a solid inimical presence. when the sun shone and she could walk the milky way of the streets, alone but feeling with every sense the joy of living time, there was not much to fear from solitude; there were things to look at, to touch, to smell. now solitude no longer lurked round corners; at times a gust of wind carried its icy breath into her bones. she was suffering, too, a little. she felt heavy in the legs, and a vein in her left calf hurt a little in the evening if she had walked or stood much. soon, though it did not increase, the pain became her daily companion, for even when absent it haunted her. she would await a twinge for a whole day, ready and fearful, bracing herself up against a shock which often found her unprepared. at all times too the obsession seemed to follow her now. perhaps she was walking through regent's park, buoyant and feeling capable of lifting a mountain, but the thought would rush upon her, perhaps it was going to hurt. she would lie awake too, oblivious of the heavy breathing by her side, rested, all her senses asleep, and then though she felt no pain the fear of it would come upon her and she would wrestle with the thought that the blow was about to fall. sometimes she would go out into the streets, seeking variety even in a wrangle between her pekingese and some other dog. this meant that she must separate them, apologise to the owner, exchange perhaps a few words. once she achieved a conversation with an old lady, a kindly soul, the mistress of a poodle. they walked together along the canal, and the futile conversation fell like balm on victoria's ears. the freshness of a voice ignorant of double meanings was soft as dew. they were to meet again, but the old lady was a near neighbour and she must have heard something of victoria's reputation, for when they met again opposite lord's, the old lady crossed over and the poodle followed her haughtily, leaving snoo and poo disconsolate and wondering on the edge of the pavement. one morning augusta came into the boudoir about twelve, carrying a visiting card on a little tray. 'miss emma welkin,' read victoria. 'league of the rights of women. what does she want, augusta?' 'she says she wants to see mrs ferris, mum.' 'league of the rights of women? why, she must be a suffragist.' 'yes, mum. she wear a straw hat, mum,' explained augusta with a slight sniff. 'and a tweed coat and skirt, i suppose,' said victoria smiling. 'oh, yes, mum. shall i say go away?' 'm'm. no, tell her to come in.' while augusta was away victoria settled herself in the cushions. perhaps it might be interesting. the visitor was shown in. 'how do you do?' said victoria holding out her hand. 'please sit down. excuse my getting up, i'm not very well.' miss welkin looked about her, mildly surprised. it was a pretty room, but somehow she felt uncomfortable. victoria was looking at her. a capable type of femininity this; curious, though, in its thick man-like clothes, its strong boots. she was not bad looking, thirty perhaps, very erect and rather flat. her face was fresh, clean, innocent of powder; her eyes were steady behind glasses; her hair was mostly invisible, being tightly pulled back. there were firm lines about her mouth. a fighting animal. 'i hope you'll excuse this intrusion,' said the suffragist, 'but i got your name from the directory and i have come to . . . to ascertain your views about the all-important question of the vote.' there was a queer stiltedness about the little speech. miss welkin was addressing the meeting. 'oh? i'm very much interested,' said victoria. 'of course i don't know anything about it except what i read in the papers.' the grey eyes glittered. evangelic fervour radiated from them. 'that's what we want,' said the suffragist. 'it's just the people who are ready to be our friends who haven't heard our side and who get biassed. mrs ferris, i'm sure you'll come in with us and join the marylebone branch?' 'but how can i?' asked victoria. 'you see i know nothing about it all.' 'let me give you these pamphlets,' said the suffragist. victoria obediently took a leaflet on the marriage law, a pamphlet on 'the rights of women,' a few more papers too, some of which slipped to the floor. 'thank you,' she said, 'but first of all tell me, why do you want the vote?' the suffragist looked at her for a second. this might be a keen recruit when she was converted. then a flood of words burst from her. 'oh, how can any woman ask, when she sees the misery, the subjection in which we live. we say that we want the vote because it is the only means we have to attain economic freedom . . . we say to man: "put your weapon in our hands and we will show you what we can do." we want to have a voice in the affairs of the country. we want to say how the taxes we pay shall be spent, how our children shall be educated, whether our sons shall go to war. we say it's wrong that we should be disfranchised because we are women . . . it is illogical . . . we must have it.' the suffragist stopped for a second to regain breath. 'i see,' said victoria, 'but how is the vote going to help?' 'help,' echoed miss welkin. 'it will help because it will enable women to have a voice in national affairs.' 'you must think me awfully stupid,' said victoria sweetly, 'but what use will it be to us if we do get a voice in national affairs?' miss welkin ignored the interruption. 'it is wrong that we should not have a vote if we are reasonable beings; we can be teachers, doctors, chemists, factory inspectors, business managers, writers; we can sit on local authorities, and we can't cast a vote for a member of parliament. it's preposterous, it's . . .' 'yes, i understand, but what will the vote do for us? will it raise wages?' 'it must raise wages. men's wages have risen a lot since they got the vote.' 'do you think that's because they got the vote?' 'yes. well, partly. at any rate there are things above wages,' said the suffragist excitedly. 'and you know, we know that the vote is wanted especially because it is an education; by inducing women to take an interest in politics we will broaden their minds, teach them to combine and then automatically their wages will rise.' 'oh, yes.' victoria was rather struck by the argument. 'then,' she said, 'you admit men are superior to women?' 'well, yes, at any rate at present,' said the suffragist rather sulkily. 'but you must remember that men have had nearly eighty years training in political affairs. that's why we want the vote; to wake women up. oh, you have no idea what it will mean when we get it. we shall have fresh minds bearing on political problems, we shall have more adequate protection for women and children, compulsory feeding, endowment of mothers, more education, shorter hours, more sanitary inspection. we shall not be enslaved by parties; a nobler influence, the influence of pure women will breathe an atmosphere of virtue into this terrible world.' the woman's eyes were rapt now, her hands tightly clenched, her lips parted, her cheeks a little flushed. but victoria's face had hardened suddenly. 'miss welkin,' she said quietly, 'has anything struck you about this house, about me?' the suffragist looked at her uneasily. 'you ought to know whom you are talking to,' victoria went on, 'i am a . . . i am a what you would probably call . . . well, not respectable.' a dull red flush spread over miss welkin's face, from the line of her tightly pulled hair to her stiff white collar; even her ears went red. she looked away into a corner. 'you see,' said victoria, 'it's a shock, isn't it? i ought not to have let you in. it wasn't quite fair, was it?' 'oh, it isn't that, mrs ferris,' burst out the suffragist, 'i'm not thinking of myself. . . .' 'excuse me, you must. you can't help it. if you could construct a scale with the maximum of egotism at one end, and the maximum of altruism at the other and divide it, say into one hundred degrees, you would not, i think, place your noblest thinkers more than a degree or two beyond the egotistic zero. now you, a pure girl, have been entrapped into the house of a woman of no reputation, whom you would not have in your drawing-room. now, would you?' miss welkin was silent for a moment; the flush was dying away as she gazed round eyed at this beautiful woman lying in her piled cushions, talking like a mathematician. 'i haven't come here to ask you into my drawing-room,' she answered. 'i have come to ask you to throw in your labour, your time, your money, with ours in the service of our cause.' she held her head higher as the thought rose in her like wine. 'our cause,' she continued, 'is not the cause of rich women or poor women, of good women or bad; it's the cause of woman. thus, it doesn't matter who she is, so long as there is a woman who stands aloof from us there is still work to do.' victoria looked at her interestedly. her eyes were shining, her lips parted in ecstasy. 'oh, i know what you think,' the suffragist went on; 'as you say, you think i despise you because you . . . you. . . .' the flush returned slightly. . . . 'but i know that yours is not a happy life and we are bringing the light.' 'the light!' echoed victoria bitterly. 'you have no idea, i see, of how many people there are who are bringing the light to women like me. there are various religious organisations who wish to rescue us and to house us comfortably under the patronage of the police, to keep us nicely and feed us on what is suitable for the fallen; they expect us to sew ten hours a day for these privileges, but that is by the way. there are also many kindly souls who offer little jobs as charwomen to those of us who are too worn out to pursue our calling; we are offered emigration as servants in exchange for the power of commanding a household; we are offered poverty for luxury, service for domination, slavery to women instead of slavery to men. how tempting it is! and now here is the light in another form: the right to drop a bit of paper into a box every four years or so and settle thereby whether the home secretary who administers the law of my trade shall live in fear of buff prejudice or blue.' the suffragist said nothing for a second. she felt shaken by victoria's bitterness. 'women will have no party,' she said lamely, 'they will vote as women.' 'oh? i have heard somewhere that the danger of giving women the vote is that they will vote solid "as women," as you say and swamp the men. is that so?' 'no, i'm afraid not,' said the suffragist unguardedly, 'of course women will split up into political parties.' 'indeed? then where is this woman vote which is going to remould the world? it is swamped in the ordinary parties.' the suffragist was in a dilemma. 'you forget,' she answered, wriggling on the horns, 'that women can always be aroused for a noble cause. . . .' 'am i a noble cause?' asked victoria, smiling. 'so far as i can see women, even the highest of them, despise us because we do illegally what they do legally, hate us because we attract, envy us because we shine. i have often thought that if christ had said, "let her who hath never sinned . . ." the woman would have been stoned. what do you think?' the suffragist hesitated, cleared her throat. 'that will all go when we have the vote, women will be a force, a nobler force; they will realise . . . they will sympathise more . . . then they will cast their vote for women.' victoria shook her head. 'miss welkin,' she said, 'you are an idealist. now, will you ask me to your next meeting if you are satisfied as to my views, announce me for what i am and introduce me to your committee?' 'i don't see . . . i don't think,' stammered the suffragist, 'you see some of our committee. . . .' victoria laughed. 'you see. never mind. i assure you i wouldn't go. but, tell me, supposing women get the vote, most of my class will be disfranchised on the present registration law. what will you women do for us?' the suffragist thought for a minute. 'we shall raise the condition of women,' she said. 'we shall give them a new status, increase the respect of men for them, increase their respect for themselves; besides, it will raise wages and that will help. we shall . . . we shall have better means of reform too.' 'what means?' 'when women have more sympathy.' 'votes don't mean sympathy.' 'well, intelligence then. oh, mrs ferris, it's not that that matters; we're going to the root of it. we're going to make women equal to men, give them the same opportunities, the same rights. . . .' 'yes, but will the vote increase their muscles? will it make them more logical, fitter to earn their living?' 'of course it will,' said miss welkin acidly. 'then how do you explain that several millions of men earn less than thirty shillings a week, and that at times hundreds of thousands are unemployed?' 'the vote does not mean everything,' said the suffragist reluctantly. 'it will merely ensure that we rise like the men when we are fit.' 'well, miss welkin, i won't press that, but now, tell me, if women got the vote to-morrow, what would it do for my class?' 'it would raise. . . .' 'no, no, we can't wait to be raised. we've got to live, and if you "raise" us we lose our means of livelihood. how are you going to get to the root cause and lift us, not the next generation, at once out of the lower depths?' the suffragist's face contracted. 'everything takes time,' she faltered. 'just as i couldn't promise a charwoman that her hours would go down and her wages go up next day, i can't say that . . . of course your case is more difficult than any other, because . . . because. . . .' 'because,' said victoria coldly, 'i represent a social necessity. so long as your economic system is such that there is not work for the asking for every human being--work, mark you, fitted to strength and ability--so long on the other hand as there is such uncertainty as prevents men from marrying, so long as there is a leisured class who draw luxury from the labour of other men; so long will my class endure as it endured in athens, in rome, in alexandria, as it does now from st john's wood to pekin.' there was a pause. then miss welkin got up awkwardly. victoria followed suit. 'there,' she said, 'you don't mind my being frank, do you? may i subscribe this sovereign to the funds of the branch? i do believe you are right, you know, even though i'm not sure the millennium is coming.' miss welkin looked doubtfully at the coin in her palm. 'don't refuse it,' said victoria, smiling, 'after all, you know, in politics there is no tainted money.' chapter xiv victoria lay back in bed, gazing at the blue silk wall. it was ten o'clock, but still dark; not a sound disturbed dominical peace, except the rain dripping from the trees, falling finally like the strokes of time. her eyes dwelt for a moment on the colour prints where the nude beauties languished. she felt desperately tired, though she had not left the house for thirty-six hours; her weariness was as much a consequence as a cause of her consciousness of defeat. october was wearing; and soon the cruel winter would come and fix its fangs into the sole remaining joy of her life, the spectacle of life itself. she was desperately tired, full of hatred and disgust. if the face of a man rose before her she thrust it back savagely into limbo; her legs hurt. the time had come when she must realise her failure. she was not, as once in the p. r. r., in the last stage of exhaustion, hunted, tortured; she was rather the wounded bird crawling away to die in a thicket than the brute at bay. as she lay, she realised that her failure had two aspects. it was together a monetary and a physical failure. the last three months had in themselves been easy. her working hours did not begin before seven o'clock in the evening; and it was open to her, being young and beautiful, to put them off for two or three hours more; she was always free by twelve o'clock in the morning at the very latest, and then the day was hers to rest, to read and think. but she was still too much of a novice to escape the excitement inherent in the chase, the strain of making conversation, of facing the inane; nor was she able without a mental effort to bring herself to the response of the simulator. as she sat in the vesuvius or stared into the showcase of a regent street jeweller, a faint smile upon her face, her brain was awake, her faculties at high pressure. her eyes roved right and left and every nerve seemed to dance with expectation or disappointment. when she got up now, she found her body heavy, her legs sore and all her being dull like a worn stone. a little more, she felt, and the degradation of her body would spread to her sweet lucidity of mind; she would no longer see ultimate ends but would be engulfed in the present, become a bird of prey seeking hungrily pleasure or excitement. besides, and this seemed more serious still, she was not doing well. it seemed more serious because this could not be fought as could be intellectual brutalisation. an examination of her pass books showed that she was a little better off than at the time of cairns's death. she was worth, all debts paid, about three hundred and ninety pounds. her net savings were therefore at the rate of about a hundred and fifty a year; but she had been wonderfully lucky, and nothing said that age, illness or such misadventures as she classed under professional risk, might not nullify her efforts in a week. there was wear and tear of clothes too: the trousseau presented her by cairns had been good throughout but some of the linen was beginning to show signs of wear; boots and shoes wanted renewing; there were winter garments to buy and new furs. 'i shall have stone martin,' she reflected. then her mind ran complacently for a while on a picture of herself in stone martin; a pity she couldn't run to sables. she brought herself back with a jerk to her consideration of ways and means. the situation was really not brilliant. of course she was extravagant in a way. eighty-five pounds rent; thirty pounds in rates and taxes, without counting income tax which might be anything, for she dared not protest; two servants--all that was too much. it was quite impossible to run the house under five hundred a year, and clothes must run into an extra hundred. 'i could give it up,' she thought. but the idea disappeared at once. a flat would be cheaper, but it meant unending difficulties; it was not for nothing that zoé, lissa and duckie envied her. and the rose-covered pergola! besides it would mean saving a hundred a year or so; and, from her point of view, even two hundred and fifty a year was not worth saving. she was nearly twenty-eight, and could count on no more than between eight and twelve years of great attractiveness. this meant that, with the best of luck, she could not hope to amass much more than three thousand pounds. and then? weston-super-mare and thirty years in a boarding-house? she was still full of hesitation and doubt as she greeted betty at lunch. this was a great sunday treat for the gentle p. r. r. girl. when she had taken off her coat and hat, she used to settle in an arm-chair with an intimate feeling of peace and protection. this particular day betty did not settle down as usual, though the cushions looked soft and tempting and a clear fire burned in the grate. victoria watched her for a moment. how exquisite and delicate this girl looked; tall, very slim and rounded. betty had placed one hand on the mantelpiece, a small long hand rather coarsened at the finger tips, one foot on the fender. it was a little foot, arched and neat in the cheap boot. she had bought new boots for the occasion; the middle of the raised sole was still white. her face was a little flushed, her eyes darkened by the glow. 'well, betty,' said her hostess suddenly, 'when's the wedding?' 'oh, vic, i didn't say . . . how can you . . .' her face had blushed a tell-tale red. 'you didn't say,' laughed victoria, 'of course you didn't say, shy bird! but surely you don't think i don't know. you've met somebody in the city and you're frightfully in love with him. now, honest, is there anybody?' 'yes . . . there is, but . . .' 'of course there is. now, betty, tell me all about it.' 'oh, i couldn't,' said betty, gazing into the fire. 'you see it isn't quite settled yet.' 'then tell me what you're going to settle. first of all, who is it?' 'nobody you know. i met him at . . . well he followed me in finsbury circus one evening. . . .' 'oh, naughty, naughty! you're getting on, betty.' 'you mustn't think i encouraged him,' said betty with a tinge of asperity. 'i'm not that sort.' she stopped, remembering victoria's profession, then, inconsequently: 'you see, he wouldn't go away and . . . now. . . .' 'and he was rather nice, wasn't he?' 'well, rather.' a faint and very sweet smile came over betty's face. victoria felt a little strangle in her throat. she too had thought her bold partner at the regimental dance at lympton rather nice. poor old dick. 'then he got out of me about the p. r. r.,' betty went on more confidently. 'and then, would you believe it, he came to lunch every day! not that he was accustomed to lunch at places like that,' she added complacently. 'oh, a swell?' said victoria. 'no, i don't say that. he used to go to the lethes, before they shut up. he lives in the west end too, in notting hill, you know.' 'dear, dear, you're flying high, betty. but tell me, what is he like? and what does he do? and is he very handsome?' 'oh, he's awfully handsome, vic. tall you know and very, very dark; he's so gentlemanly too, looks like the young man in _first words of love_. it's a lovely picture, isn't it?' 'yes, lovely,' said victoria summarily. 'but tell me more about him.' 'he's twenty-eight. he works in the city. he's a ledger clerk at anderson and dromo's. if he gets a rise this christmas, he . . . well, he says . . .' 'he says he'll marry you.' 'yes.' betty hung her head, then raised it quickly. 'oh, vic, i can't believe it. it's too good to be true. i love him so dreadfully . . . i just can't wait for one o'clock. he didn't come on wednesday. i thought he'd forgotten me and i was going off my head. but it was all right, they'd kept him in over something.' 'poor little girl,' said victoria gently. 'it's hard isn't it, but good too.' 'good! vic, when he kisses me i feel as if i were going to faint. he's strong, you see. and when he puts his arms round me i feel like a mouse in a trap . . . but i don't want to get away: i want it to go on for ever, just like that.' she paused for a moment as if listening to the first words of love. then her mind took a practical turn. 'of course we shan't be able to live in notting hill,' she added. 'we'll have to go further out, shepherd's bush way, so as to be on the tube. and he says i shan't go to the p. r. r. any more.' 'happy girl,' said victoria. 'i'm so glad, betty; i hope . . .' she restrained a doubt. 'and as you say you can't stay to tea i think i know where you're going.' 'well, yes, i am going to meet him,' said betty laughing. 'yes . . . and you're going to look at little houses at shepherd's bush.' betty looked up dreamily. she could see a two-storeyed house in a row, with a bay window, and a front garden where, winter or summer, marigolds grew. after lunch, as the two women sat once more in the boudoir, they said very little. victoria, from time to time, flicked the ash from her cigarette. betty did not smoke, but, her hands clasped together in her lap, watched a handsome dark face in the coals. 'and how are you getting on, vic?' she asked suddenly. swamped by the impetuous tide of her own romance she had not as yet shown any interest in her friend's affairs. 'i? oh, nothing special. pretty fair.' 'but, i mean . . . you said you wanted to make a lot of money and . . .' 'yes, i'm not badly off, but i can't go on, betty. i shall never do any good like this.' betty was silent for some minutes. her ingrained modesty made any discussion of her friend's profession intolerable. vanquished in argument, grudgingly accepting the logic of victoria's actions, she could not free her mind from the thought that these actions were repulsive, that there must have been some other way. 'oh? you want to get out of it all . . . you know . . . i have never said you weren't quite right, but . . .' 'but i'm quite wrong?' 'no . . . i don't mean that . . . i don't like to say that . . . i'm not clever like you, vic, but . . .' 'we've done with all that,' said victoria coldly. 'i do want to get out of it because it's getting me no nearer to what i want. i don't quite know how to do it. i'm not very well, you know.' betty looked up quickly with concern in her face. 'have those veins been troubling you again?' 'yes, a little. i can't risk much more.' 'then what are you going to do?' victoria was silent for a moment. 'i don't know,' she said. 'i never thought of all this when the major was alive.' 'ah, there never was anybody like him,' said betty after a pause. victoria sat up suddenly. 'betty,' she cried, 'you're giving me an idea.' 'i? an idea?' 'there must be somebody like him. why shouldn't i find him?' betty said nothing. she looked her stiffest, relishing but little the fathering upon her of this expedient. 'but who?' soliloquised victoria. 'i don't know anybody. you see betty, i want lots and lots of money. otherwise it's no good. if i don't make a lot soon it will be too late.' betty still said nothing. really she couldn't be expected. . . . then her conscience smote her; she ought to show a little interest in dear, kind vic. 'yes,' she said. 'but you must know lots of people. you never told me, but you're a swell and all that. you must have known lots of rich men when you came to london.' she stopped abruptly, shocked by her own audacity. but victoria was no longer noticing her; she was following with lightning speed a new train of thought. 'betty,' she cried, 'you've done it. i've found the man.' 'have you? who is it,' exclaimed betty. she was excited, unable in her disapproval of the irregular to feel uninterested in the coming together of women and men. 'never mind. you don't know him. i'll tell you later.' an extraordinary buoyancy seemed to pervade victoria. the way out! she had found the way out! and the two little words echoed in her brain as if some mighty wave of sound was rebounding from side to side in her skull. she was excited, so excited that, as she said goodbye to betty, she forgot to fix their next meeting. she had work to do and would do it that very night. as soon as betty was gone she dressed quickly. then she changed her hat to make sure she was looking her best. she went out and, with hurried steps, made for the finchley road. there was the house with the evergreens, as well clipped as ever, and the drive with its clean gravel. she ran up the steps of the porch, then hesitated for a moment. her heart was beating now. then she rang. there was a very long pause during which she heard nothing but the pumping of her heart. then distant shuffling footsteps coming nearer. the door opened. she saw a slatternly woman . . . behind her the void of an empty house. she could not speak for emotion. 'did you want to see the house, mum,' asked the woman. she looked sour. sunday afternoon was hardly a time to view. 'the house?' 'oh . . . i thought you come from belfrey's, mum. it's to let.' the caretaker nodded towards the right and victoria, following the direction, saw the house agents' board. her excitement fell as under a cold douche. 'oh! i came to see . . . do you know where mr holt is?' 'mr holt's dead, mum. died in august, mum.' 'dead.' things seemed to go round. jack was the only son . . . then?' 'yes, mum. that's why they're letting. a fine big 'ouse, mum. died in august, mum. ah, you should have seen the funeral. they say he left half a million, mum, and there wasn't no will.' 'where is mrs holt and . . . and mr holt's son.' the caretaker eyed the visitor suspiciously. there was something rakish about this young lady which frightened her respectability. 'i can't say, mum,' she answered slowly. 'i could forward a letter, mum,' she added. 'let me come in. i want to write a note.' the caretaker hesitated for a moment, then stood aside to let her pass. 'you'll 'ave to come downstairs mum,' she said, 'sorry i'm all mixed up. i was doing a bit of washing. git away maria,' to a small child who stood at the top of the stairs. in the gaslit kitchen, surrounded by steaming linen, victoria wrote a little feverish note in pencil. the caretaker watched her every movement. she liked her better somehow. 'i'll forward it all right, mum,' she said. 'thank you mum. . . . oh, mum, i don't want you to think--' she was looking amazedly at the half sovereign in her palm. 'that's all right,' said victoria, laughing loudly. she felt she must laugh, dance, let herself go. 'just post it before twelve.' the woman saw her to the door. then she looked at the letter doubtfully. it was freshly sealed and could easily be opened. then she had a burst of loyalty, put on a battered bonnet, completed the address, stamped the envelope and, walking to the pillar box round the corner, played victoria's trump card. chapter xv 'and so, jack, you haven't forgotten me?' for a minute holt did not answer. he seemed spellbound by the woman on the sofa. there she lay at full length, lazy grace in every curve of her figure, in the lines of her limbs revealed by the thin sea-green stuff which moulded them. this new woman was a very wonderful thing. 'no,' he said at length, 'but you have changed.' 'yes?' 'you're different. you used to be simple, almost shy. i used to think you very like a big white lily. now you're like--like a big white orchid--an orchid in a vase of jade.' 'poet! artist!' laughed victoria. 'ah, jack, you'll always be the same. always thinking me good and the world beautiful.' 'i'll always think you good and beautiful too.' victoria looked at him. he had hardly changed at all. his tall thin frame had not expanded, his hands were still beautifully white and seemed as aristocratic as ever. perhaps his mouth appeared weaker, his eyes bluer, his face fairer owing to his black clothes. 'i'm glad to see you again, kathleen mavourneen,' she said at length. 'why did you wait so long?' asked holt. 'it was cruel, cruel. you know what i said--i would--' 'no, no,' interrupted victoria fearing an avowal. 'i couldn't. i've been through the mill. oh, jack, it was awful. i've been cold, hungry, ill; i've worked ten hours a day--i've swabbed floors.' a hot flush rose in holt's fair cheeks. 'horrible,' he whispered, 'but why didn't you tell me? i'd have helped, you know i would.' 'yes, i know, but it wouldn't have done. no, jack, it's no good helping women. you can help men a bit; but women, no. you only make them more dependent, weaker. if women are the poor, frivolous, ignorant things they are, it's because they've been protected or told they ought to want to be protected. besides, i'm proud. i wasn't coming back to you until i was--well i'm not exactly rich, but--' she indicated the room with a nod and holt, following it, sank deeper into wonder at the room where everything spoke of culture and comfort. 'but how--?' he stammered at last, 'how did you--? what happened then?' victoria hesitated for a moment. 'don't ask me just now, jack,' she said, 'i'll tell you later. tell me about yourself. what are you doing? and where is your mother?' holt looked at her doubtfully. he would have liked to cross-question her, but he was the second generation of a rising family and had learned that questions must not be pressed. 'mother?' he said vaguely. 'oh, she's gone back to rawsley. she never was happy here. she went back as soon as pater died; she missed the tea fights, you know, and bethlehem and all that.' 'it must have been a shock to you when your father died.' 'yes, i suppose it was. the old man and i didn't exactly hit it off but, somehow--those things make you realise--' 'yes, yes,' said victoria sympathetically. the similarity of deaths among the middle classes! every woman in the regiment had told her that 'these things make you realise' when dicky died. 'but what about you? are you still in--in cement?' 'in cement!' jack's lip curled. 'the day my father died i was out of cement. it's rather awful, you know, to think that my freedom depended on his death.' 'oh, no, life depends on death,' said victoria smoothly. 'besides, we are members of one another; and when, like you, jack, we are a minority, we suffer.' holt looked at her doubtfully. he did not quite understand her; she had hardened, he thought. 'no,' he went on, 'i've done with the business. they turned it into a limited liability company a month ago. i'm a director because the others say they must have a holt in it; but directors never do anything, you know.' 'and you are going to do like the charwoman, going to do nothing, nothing for ever?' 'no, i don't say that. i've been writing--verses you know, and some sketches.' 'writing? you must be happy now, jack. of course you'll let me see them? are they published?' 'yes. at least amershams will bring out some sonnets of mine next month.' 'and are you going to pass the rest of your life writing sonnets?' 'no, of course not. i want to travel. i'll go south this winter and get some local colour. i might write a novel.' his head was thrown back on the cushion, looking out upon the blue southern sky, the bluer waters speckled as with foam by remote white sails. 'you might give me a cigarette, jack,' said victoria. 'they're in that silver box, there.' he handed her the box and struck a match. as he held it for her his eyes fastened upon the shapely whiteness of her hands, her pink polished finger nails, the roundness of her forearm. soft feminine scents rose from her hair; he saw the dark tendrils over the nape of her neck. oh, to bury his lips in that warm white neck! his hand trembled as he lit his own cigarette and victoria marked his heightened colour. 'you'll come and see me often, jack, won't you?' 'may i? it's so good of you. i'm not going south for a couple of months.' 'yes, you can always telephone. you'll find me there under mrs ferris.' holt looked at her once more. 'i don't want you to think i'm prying. but, you wrote me saying i was to ask for mrs ferris. i did, of course, but, you . . . you're not. . . .?' 'married? no, jack. don't ask me anything else. you shall know everything soon.' she got up and stood for a moment beside his chair. his eyes were fixed on her hands. 'there,' she said, 'come along and let me shew you the house, and my pictures, and my pack of hounds.' he followed her obediently, giving its meed of praise to all her possessions. he did not care for animals; he lacked the generation of culture which leads from cement-making to a taste for dogs. the french engravings on the stairs surprised him a little. he had a strain of puritanism in him running straight from bethlehem, which even the reading of swinburne and baudelaire had not quite eradicated. a vague sense of the fitness of things made him think that somehow these were not the pictures a lady should hang; she might keep them in a portfolio. otherwise, there were the servants. . . . 'and what do you think of my bedroom?' asked victoria opening the door suddenly. holt stood nervously on the threshold. he took in its details one by one, the blue paper, the polished mahogany, the flowered chintzes, the long glass, the lace curtains; it all looked so comfortable, so luxurious as to eclipse easily the rigidly good but ugly things he had been used to from birth onwards. he looked at the dressing table too, covered with its many bottles and brushes; then he started slightly and again a hot flush rose over his cheeks. with an effort he detached his eyes from the horrid thing he saw. 'very pretty, very pretty,' he gasped. without waiting for victoria he turned and went downstairs. within the next week they met again. jack took no notice of her for four days, and then suddenly telephoned asking her to dine and to come to the theatre. she was still in bed and she felt low-spirited, full of fear that her trump would not make. she accepted with an alacrity that she regretted a minute later, but she was drowning and could not dally with the lifebelt. her preparation for the dinner was as elaborate as that which had heralded her capture of cairns, far more elaborate than any she made for the vesuvius where insolent beauty is a greater asset than beauty as such. this time she put on her mauve frock with the heavily embroidered silver shoulder straps; she wore little jewellery, merely a necklet of chased old silver and amethysts, and a ring figuring a silver chimera with tiny diamond eyes. as she surveyed herself in the long glass, the holy calm which comes over the perfectly-dressed flowed into her soul like a river of honey. she was immaculate, and from her unlined white forehead to her jewel-buckled shoes she was beautiful in every detail. subtle scent followed her like a trainbearer. the entire evening was a tribute. from the moment when holt set eyes upon her and reluctantly withdrew them to direct the cabman, until they drove back through the night, she was conscious of the wave of adulation that broke at her feet. men's eyes followed her every movement, drank in every rise and fall of her breast, strove to catch sight of her teeth, flashing white, ruby cased. her progress through the dining hall and the stalls was imperial in its command. as she saw men turn to look at her again, women even grudgingly analyse her, as homage rose round her like incense, she felt frightened; for this seemed to be her triumphant night, the zenith of her beauty and power, and perhaps its very intensity showed that it was her swan song. she felt a pain in her left leg. jack holt passed that evening at her feet. a fearful exultation was upon him. the neighbourhood of victoria was magnetic; his heart, his senses, his æsthetic sense were equally enslaved. she realised everything he had dreamed, beauty, culture, grace, gentle wit. it hurt him physically not to tell that he loved her still, that he wanted her, that she was everything. he revelled in the thought that he had found her again, that she liked him, that he would see her whenever he wanted to, perhaps join his life with hers; then fear gripped his uneven soul, fear that he was only her toy, that now she was rich she would tire of him and cast him into a world swept by the icy blasts of regret. and all through ran the horribly suggestive memory of that which he had seen on the dressing table. victoria was conscious of all this storm, though unable to interpret its squalls and its lulls. without effort she played upon him; alternately encouraging the pretty youth, bending towards him to read his programme so that he could feel her breath on his cheek, and drawing up and becoming absorbed in the play. in the darkness she felt his hand close over hers; gently but firmly she freed herself. as they drove back to st john's wood they hardly exchanged a word. victoria felt tired; for in the dark, away from the crowds, the music, the admiration of her fellows, reaction had full play. holt found he could say nothing, for every nerve in his body was tense with excitement. a hundred words were on his lips but he dared not breathe them for fear of breaking the spell. 'come in and have a whisky and soda before you go,' said victoria in a matter of fact tone as he opened the garden gate. he could not resist. a wonderful feeling of intimacy overwhelmed him as he watched her switch on the lights and bring out a decanter, a syphon and glasses. she put them on the table and motioned him towards it, placing one foot on the fender to warm herself before the glowing embers. his eyes did not leave hers. there was a surge of blood in his head. one of his hands fixed on her bare arm; with the other he drew her towards him, crushed her against his breast; she lay unresisting in his arms while he covered her lips, her neck, her shoulders, with hot kisses, some quick and passionate, others lingering, full of tenderness. then she gently repulsed him and freed herself. jack,' she said softly, 'you shouldn't have done that. you don't know . . . you don't know . . .' he drew his hand over his forehead. his brain seemed to clear a little. the maddening mystery of it all formed into a question. 'victoria, why are those two razors on your dressing table?' she looked at him a brief space. then, very quietly, with the deliberation of a surgeon, 'need you ask? do you not understand what i am?' his eyes went up towards the ceiling; his hands clenched; a queer choked sound escaped from his throat. victoria saw him suffer, wounded as an æsthete, wounded in his traditional conception of purity, prejudiced, un-understanding. for a second she hated him as one hates a howling dog on whose paw one has trodden. 'oh,' he gasped, 'oh.' victoria watched him through her downcast eyelashes. poor boy, it had to come. pandora had opened the chest. then he looked at her again with returning sanity. 'why didn't you tell me before? i can't bear it. you, whom i thought. . . . i can't bear it.' 'poor boy.' she took his hand. it was hot and dry. 'i can't bear it,' he repeated dully. 'i had to. it was the only way.' 'there is always a way. it's awful.' his voice broke. 'jack,' she said softly, 'the world's a hard place for women. it takes from them either hard labour or gratification. i've done my best. for a whole year i worked. i worked ten hours a day, i've starved almost, i've swabbed floors. . . .' he withdrew his hand with a jerk. he could bear that even less than her confession. 'then a man came,' she went on relentlessly, 'a good man who offered me ease, peace, happiness. i was poor, i was ill. what could i do? then he died and i was alone. what could i do? ah, don't believe mine is a bed of roses, jack!' he had turned away, and was looking into the dying fire. his ideals, his prejudices, all were in the melting pot. here was the woman who had been his earliest dream, degraded, irretrievably soiled. whatever happened he could not forget; not even love could break down the terrific barrier which generations of hard and honest men of rawsley had erected in his soul between straight women and the others. but she was the dream still: beautiful, all that his heart desired; such that (and he felt it like an awful taunt) he could not give her up. he looked at her, at her sorrowful face. no, he could not let her pass out of his life. he thought of disjointed things. he could see his mother's face, the black streets of rawsley; he thought of the pastor at bethlehem denouncing sin. all his standards were jarred. he had nothing to hold on to while everything seemed to slip: ideals, resolutions, dreams; nothing remained save the horrible sweetness of the mermaid's face. 'let me think,' he said hoarsely, 'let me think.' victoria said nothing. he was in hands stronger than hers. he was fighting his tradition, the blood of the covenanters, for her sake. nothing that she could say would help him; it might impede him. he had turned away; she could see nothing of his face. then he looked into her eyes. 'what was can never be again,' he said, 'what i dreamed can never be. you were my beacon and my hope. i have only found you to lose you. if i were to marry you there would always be that between us, the past.' 'then do not marry me. i do not ask you to.' her voice went down to a whisper and she put her hands on his shoulders. 'let me be another, a new dream, less golden, but sweet.' she put her face almost against his, gazing into his eyes. 'do not leave this house and i will be everything for you.' she felt a shudder run through him as if he would repel her, but she did not relax her hold or her gaze. she drew nearer to him, and inch by inch his arms went round her. for a second they swayed close locked together. as they fell into the deep arm chair her loose black hair uncoiled, and, falling, buried their faces in its shadow. chapter xvi the months which followed emerged but slowly from blankness for these two who had joined their lives together. both had a difficulty in realising, the woman that she had laid the coping stone of her career, the man that he was happy as may be an opium eater. the first days were electric, hectic. victoria felt limp, for her nerves had been worn down by the excitement and the anxiety of making sure of her conquest. the reaction left her rather depressed than glowing with success. jack was beyond scruples; he felt that he had passed the rubicon. he was false to his theories and his ideals, in revolt against his upbringing. at the outset he revelled in the thought that he was cutting himself adrift from the ugly past. it was joyful to think that the pastor in his whitewashed barn would covertly select him as a text. for the first time in his fettered life he saw that the outlaw alone is free; both he and victoria were outlaws, but she had tasted the bitterness of ostracism while he was still at the stage of welcoming it. as the weeks wore, however, victoria realised her position better and splendid peace flowed in upon her. she did not love holt; she began even to doubt whether she could love any man if she could not love him, this handsome youth with the delicate soul, grace, generosity. it was not his mental weakness that repelled her, for he was virile enough; nor was it the touch of provincialism against which his intelligence struggled. it was rather that he did not attract her. he was clever enough, well read, kind, but he lacked magnetism; he had nothing of the slumberous fire which distinguished farwell. his passion was personal, his outlook theoretical and limited; there was nothing purposeful in his ideas. he had no message for her. in no wise did he repel her, though. sometimes she would take his face between her hands, look awhile into the blue eyes where there always lurked some wistfulness, and then kiss him just once and quickly, without knowing why. 'why do you do that, vicky,' he asked once. she had not answered but had merely kissed his cheek again. she hardly knew how to tell him that she sighed because she could only consent to love him instead of offering to do so. while he was sunk in his daily growing ease she was again thinking of ultimate ends and despised herself a little for it. she had to be alone for a while before she could regain self-control, remember the terrible tyranny of man and her resolve to be free. gentle jack was a man, one of the oppressors, and as such he must be used as an instrument against his sex. the very ease with which she swayed him, with which she could foresee her victory, unnerved her a little. when she answered his hesitating question as to how much she needed to live, she had to force herself to lie, to trade on his enslavement by asking him for two thousand a year. she dared to name the figure, for whitaker told her that the only son of an intestate takes two-thirds of the estate; the book had also put her on the track of the registration of joint-stock companies. a visit to somerset house enabled her to discover that some three hundred thousand shares of holt's cement works, ltd., stood in the name of john holt; as they were quoted in the paper something above par he could hardly be worth less than fifteen thousand a year. she had expected to have to explain her needs, to have to exaggerate her rent, the cost of her clothes, but holt did not say a word beyond 'all right.' she had told him it hurt her to take money from him; and that, so as to avoid the subject, she would like him to tell his bankers to pay the monthly instalments into her account. he had agreed and then talked of their trip to the south. clearly the whole matter was repugnant to him. as neither wanted to talk about it the subject was soon almost forgotten. they left england early in december after shutting up the house. victoria did not care to leave it in charge of laura, so decided to give her a three months' holiday on full pay; augusta accompanied them. the sandy-haired german was delighted with the change in the fortunes of her mistress. she felt that holt must be very rich, and doubted not that her dowry would derive some benefit from him. snoo and poo were left in laura's charge. victoria paid a quarter's rent in advance, also the rates; insured against burglary, and left england as it settled into the winter night. the next three months were probably the most steadily happy she had ever known. they had taken a small house known as the villa mehari just outside algiers. a french cook and a taciturn kabyl completed their establishment. the villa was a curious compromise between east and west. its architect had turned out similar ones in scores at argenteuil and saint cloud, saving the minaret and the deep verandah which faced the balmy west. from the precipitous little garden where orange and lime trees bent beneath their fruit among the underbrush of aloes and cactus, they could see, far away, the estranging sea. the kabyl had slung a hammock for victoria between a gate-post and a gigantic clump of palm trees. there she passed most of her days, lazily swinging in the breeze which tumbled her black hair; while jack, lying at her feet in the crisp rough grass, looked long at her sun-warmed beauty. the days seemed to fly, for they were hardly conscious of the recurrence of life. it was sunrise, when it was good to go into the garden and see the blue green night blush softly into salmon pink, then burst suddenly into tropical radiance: then, vague occupations, a short walk over stony paths to a café where the east and west met; unexpected food; sleep in the heat of the day under the nets beyond which the crowding flies buzzed; then the waning of the day, the heat settling more leaden; sunset, the cold snapping suddenly, the night wind carrying little puffs of dust, and the muezzin, hands aloft, droning, his face towards the east, praises of his god. holt was totally happy. he felt he had reached capua, and not even a thought of his past life could disturb him. he asked for nothing now but to live without a thought, eating juicy fruit, smoking for an hour the subtle narghilé; he loved to bask in the radiance of the african sun of victoria's beauty, which seemed to expand, to enwrap him in perfume like a heavy narcotic rose. in the early days he tried to work, to attune himself to the pageant of sunlit life. his will refused to act, and he found he could not write a line; even rhymes refused to come to him. without an effort almost he resigned himself into the soft hands of the east. he even exaggerated his acceptance by clothing himself in a burnous and turban, by trying to introduce algerian food, couscous, roast kid, date jam, pomegranate jelly. at times they would go into algiers, shop in the rue bab-azoum, or search for the true east in what the french called the high town. but algiers is not the east; and they quickly returned to the villa mehari, stupefied by the roar of the trams, the cries of the water and chestnut vendors, all their senses offended by the cafés on the wharf where sailors from every land drank vodka, arrack, pale ale, among zouaves and chasseurs d'afrique. sometimes holt would go into algiers by himself and remain away all day. victoria stayed at the villa careless of flying time, desultorily reading heine or sitting in the garden where she could play with the golden and green beetles. her solitude was complete, for holt had avoided the british consul and of course knew none of the frenchmen. she watched the current of her life flow away, content to know that all the while her little fortune was increasing. england was so far as to seem in another world. christmas was gone; and the link of a ten pound note to betty, to help to furnish the house at shepherd's bush, had faded away. when she was alone, those days, she could not throw her mind back to the ugly, brutish past, so potently was the influence of the east growing upon her being. then in the cool of the evening jack would return, gay, and anxious to see her, to throw his arms round her and hold her to him again. those were the days when he brought her some precious offering, aqua-marines set in hand-wrought gold, or chaplets of strung pearls. 'jack,' she said to him one day as he lay in the grass at her feet, 'do you then love me very much?' 'very much.' he took her hand and, raising himself upon his elbow, gravely kissed it. 'why?' 'because you're all the poetry of the world. because you make me dream dreams, my aspasia.' she gently stroked his dark hair. 'and to think that you are one of the enemy, jack!' 'one of the enemy? what do you mean?' 'man is woman's enemy, jack. our relation is a war of sex.' 'it's not true.' jack flushed; the idea was repulsive. 'it is true. man dominates woman by force, by man-made law; he restricts her occupations; he limits her chances; he judges of her attire; he denies her the right to be ugly, to be old, to be coarse, to be vicious.' 'but you wouldn't--' 'i'd have everything the same, jack.' holt thought for a moment. 'yes, i suppose we do keep them down. but they're different. you see, men are men and--' 'i know the rest. but never mind, jack dear, you're not like the others. you'll never be a conqueror.' then she muzzled him with her hand, and, kissing its scented palm, he thought no more of the stern game in which they were the shuttlecocks. the spring was touching europe with its wings; and here already the summer was bursting the seed pods, the sap breaking impatiently through the branches. all the wet warmth of the brief african blooming ran riot in thickening leaf. the objective of jack's life, influenced as he was by the air, was victoria and the ever more consuming love he bore her; the minutes only counted when he was by her side, watching her every movement, inhaling, touching her. all his energies seem to have been driven into this narrow channel. he was ready to move or to remain as victoria might direct; he spoke little, he basked. thus he agreed to extending their stay for a month; he agreed to shorten it by a fortnight when victoria, suddenly realising that her life force was wasting away in this enervating atmosphere, decided to go home. victoria's progress to london was like the march of a conqueror. she stopped in paris to renew her clothes. there jack knew hours of waiting in the hired victoria while his queen was trying on frocks. he showed such a childish joy in it all that she indulged her fancy, her every whim; dresses, wraps, lace veils, furs, hats massive with ostrich feathers, aigrettes, delicate kid boots, gilt shoes, amassed in their suite. jack egged her on; he rioted too. often he would stop the victoria and rush into a shop if he saw something he liked in the window, and in a few minutes return with it, excitedly demanding praise. he did not seem to understand or care for money, to have any wants except cigarettes. he followed, and in his beautiful dog-like eyes devotion daily grew. they entered london on a bustling april day. a biting east wind carried rain drops and sunshine. as it stung her face and whipped her blood, victoria found the old fierce soul reincarnating itself in her. she opened her mouth to take in the cold english air, to bend herself for the finishing of her task. chapter xvii it was in london that the real battle began. in algiers the scented winds made hideous and unnatural all thoughts of gain. on arriving in london victoria ascertained with a thrill of pleasure that her bank had received a thousand pounds since october. after disposing of a few small debts and renewing some trifles in the house, she found herself a capitalist: she had about fifteen hundred pounds of her own. the money was lying at the bank and it only struck her then that the time had come to invest it. her interview with the manager of her branch was a delightful experience; she was almost bursting with importance, and his courteous appreciation of his increasingly wealthy client was something more than balm. it was a foretaste of the power of money. she had known poor men respected, but not poor women; now the bank manager was giving her respectful attention because she had fifteen hundred pounds. 'you might buy some industrials,' he said. 'industrials? what are they?' 'oh, all sorts of things. cotton mills, iron works, trading companies, anything.' 'cement works?' she asked with a spark of devilry. 'yes, cement works too,' said the manager without moving a muscle. 'but do you call them safe?' she asked, returning to business. 'oh, fairly. of course there are bad years and good. but the debentures are mostly all right and some of the prefs.' victoria thought for a moment. reminiscences of political economy told her that there were booms and slumps. 'has trade been good lately?' she asked suddenly. 'no, not for the last two years or so. it's picking up though. . . .' 'ah, then we're in for a cycle of good trade. i think i'll have some industrials. you might pick me out the best.' the manager seemed a little surprised at this knowledge of commercial crises but said nothing more, and made out a list of securities averaging six per cent net. 'and please buy me a hundred p. r. r. shares,' added victoria. she could have laughed at the manager's stony face because he did not see the humour of this. he merely said that he would forward the orders to a stockbroker. victoria felt that she had put her hand to the plough. she was scoring so heavily that she never now wished to turn back. holt was every day growing more dreamy, more absorbed in his thoughts. he never seemed to quicken into action except when his companion touched him. he grew more silent too; the hobbledehoy was gone. he was at his worst when he had received a letter bearing the rawsley postmark. victoria knew of these, for holt's need of her grew greater every day; he was now living at elm tree place. he hardly left the house. he got up late and passed the morning in the boudoir, smoking cigarettes, desultorily reading and nursing the pekingese which he now liked better. but on the days when he got letters from rawsley, letters so bulky that they were sometimes insufficiently stamped, he would go out early and only return at night. then, however, he returned as if he had been running, full of some nameless fear; he would strain victoria to him and hold her very close, burying his face below the bedclothes as if he were afraid. on one of those days victoria accidentally saw him come out of a small dissenting chapel near by. he did not see her, for he was walking away like a man possessed; she said nothing of this but understood him better, having an inkling that the fight against the rawsley tradition was still going on. she did not, however, allow herself to be moved by his struggle. it behoved her to hold him, for he was her last chance and the world looked rosy round her. as the spring turned into summer he became more utterly hers. 'you distil poison for me,' he said one day as they sat by the rose hung pergola. 'no, jack, don't say that, it's the elixir of life.' 'the elixir of life. perhaps, but poison too. to make me live is to make me die, victoria; we are both sickening for death and to hasten the current of life is to hasten our doom.' 'live quickly,' she whispered, bending towards him, 'did you live at all a year ago?' 'no, no.' his arms were round her and his lips insistent on hers. he frightened her a little, though. she would have to take him away. she had already confided this new trouble to betty when the latter came to see her in april, but betty, beyond suggesting cricket, had been too full of her own affairs. apparently these were not going very well. anderson & dromo's had not granted the rise, and the marriage had been postponed. meanwhile she was still at the p. r. r., and very, very happy. betty too, her baby, her other baby, frightened victoria a little. she was so rosy, so pretty now, and there was something defiant and excited about her that might presage disease. but betty had not come near her for the last two months. about the middle of june she took jack away to broadstairs. he was willing to go or stay, just as she liked. he seemed so neutral that victoria experimented upon him by presenting him with a sheaf of unpaid bills. he looked at them languidly and said he supposed they must be paid, asked her to add them up and wrote a cheque for the full amount. apparently he had forgotten all about the allowance, or did not care. broadstairs seemed to do him good. except at the week end the hotel sylvester was almost empty. the sea breeze blew stiffly from the north or the east. his colour increased and once more he began to talk. victoria encouraged him to take long walks alone along the front. she had some occupation, for two little girls who were there in charge of a swiss governess had adopted the lovely lady as their aunt. a new sweetness had come into her life, shrill voices, the clinging of little hands. sometimes these four would walk together, and holt would run with the children, tumbling in the sand in sheer merriment. 'you seem all right again, jack,' said victoria on the tenth morning. 'right! rather, by jove, it's good to live, vicky.' 'you were a bit off colour, you know.' 'i suppose i was. but now, i feel nothing can hold me. i wrote a rondeau this morning on the pier. want to see it?' 'of course, silly boy. aren't you going to be the next great poet?' she read the rondeau, scrawled in pencil on the back of a bill. it was delicate, a little colourless. 'lovely,' she said, 'of course you'll send it to the _westminster_.' 'perhaps . . . hulloa, there are the kiddies.' he ran off down the steps from the front. a minute after victoria saw him helping the elder girl to bury her little sister in the sand. victoria felt much reassured. he was normal again, the half wistful, half irresponsible boy she had once known. he slept well, laughed, and his crying need for her seemed to have abated. at the end of the fortnight victoria was debating whether she should take him home. she was in the hotel garden talking to the smaller girl, telling her a wonderful story about the fairy who lived in the telephone and said ping-pong when the line was engaged. the little girl sat upon her knee; when she laughed victoria's heart bounded. the elder girl came through the gate leading a good-looking young woman in white by the hand. 'oh, mummie, here's auntie,' cried the child, dragging her mother up to victoria. the two women looked at one another. 'they tell me you have been very kind . . .' said the woman. then she stopped abruptly. 'of course, mummie, she's not _really_ our auntie,' said the child confidentially. victoria put the small girl down. the mother looked at her again. she seemed so nice and refined . . . yet her husband said that the initials on the trunks were different . . . one had to be careful. 'come here, celia,' she said sharply. 'thank you,' she added to victoria. then taking her little girls by the hand she took them away. jack willingly left broadstairs that afternoon when victoria explained that she was tired and that something had made her low-spirited. 'right oh,' he said. 'let's go back to town. i want to see amershams and find out how those sonnets have sold.' he then left her to wire to augusta. their life in town resumed its former course, interrupted only by a month in north devon. jack's cure was complete; he was sunburnt, fatter; the joy of life shone in his blue eyes. sometimes victoria found herself growing younger by contagion, sloughing the horrible miry coat of the past. if her heart had not been atrophied she would have loved the boy whom she always treated with motherly gentleness. his need of her was so crying, so total, that he lost all his self-consciousness. he would sit unblushing by her side in the bow of a fishing smack, holding her hand and looking raptly into her grey eyes; he was indifferent to the red brown fisherman with the spanish eyes and curly black hair who smiled as the turtle doves clustered. his need of her was as mental as it was physical; his body was whipped by the salt air to seek in her arms oblivion, but his mind had become equally dependent. she was his need. thus when they came back to town the riot continued; and victoria, breasting the london tide, dragged him unresisting in her rear. she hated excitement in every form, excitement that is of the puerile kind. restaurant dining, horse shows, flower shows, the academy, tea in bond street, even the theatre and its most inane successes, were for her a weariness to the flesh. 'i've had enough,' she said to jack one day. 'i'm sick of it all. i've got congestion of the appreciative sense. one day i shall chuck it all up, go and live in the country, have big dogs and a saddle horse, dress in tweeds and read the local agricultural rag.' 'give up smoking, go to church, and play tennis with the curate, the doctor and the squire's flapper,' added holt. 'but vicky, why not go now?' 'no, oh, no, i can't do that.' she was frightened by her own suggestion. 'i must drain the cup of pleasure so as to be sure that it's all pain; then i'll retire and drain the cup of resignation . . . unless, as i sometimes think, it's empty.' jack had said nothing to this. her wildness surprised and shocked him. she was so savage and yet so sweet. victoria realised that she must hold fast to the town, for there alone could she succeed. in the peace of the country she would not have the opportunities she had now. jack was in her hands. she never hesitated to ask for money, and jack responded without a word. her account grew by leaps and bounds. the cashier began to ask whether she wanted to see the manager when she called at the bank. she could see, some way off but clearly, the beacons on the coast of hope. all through jack's moods she had suffered from the defection of betty. on her return from broadstairs she had written to her to come to elm tree place, but had received no answer. this happened again in september; and fear took hold of her, for betty had, ivy-like, twined herself very closely round victoria's heart of oak. she went to finsbury; but betty had gone, leaving no address. she went to the p.r.r. also. the place had become ghostly, for the familiar faces had gone. the manageress was nowhere to be seen; nor was nelly, probably by now a manageress herself. betty was not there, and the girl who wonderingly served the beautiful lady with a tea-cake said that no girl of that name was employed at the depot. then victoria saw herself sitting in the churchyard of her past, between the two dear ghosts of farwell and betty. the customers had changed, or their faces had receded so that she knew them no more: they still played matador and fives and threes, chess too. alone the chains remained which the ghosts had rattled. silently she went away, turning over that leaf of her life for ever. farwell was dead, and betty gone--married probably--and in shepherd's bush, not daring to allow victoria's foot to sully the threshold of 'first words of love.' her conviction that betty was false had a kind of tonic effect upon her. she was alone and herself again; she realised that the lonely being is the strong being. now, at last, she could include the last woman she had known in the category of those who threw stories. and her determination to be free grew apace. she invented a reason every day to extract money from holt. he, blindly desirous, careless of money, acceded to every fresh demand. now it was a faked bill from barbezan soeurs for two hundred pounds, now the rent in arrear, a blue rates notice, an offhand request for a fiver to pay the servants, the vet's bill or the price of a cab. holt drew and overdrew. if a suspicion ever entered his mind that he was being exploited, he dismissed it at once, telling himself that victoria was rather extravagant. for a time letters from rawsley synchronised with her fresh demands, but repetition had dulled their effects: now holt postponed reading them; after a time she saw him throw one into the fire unread. little by little they grew rarer. then they ceased. holt was eaten up by his passion, and victoria's star rose high. all conspired to favour her fortune. perhaps her acumen had helped her too, for she had seen correctly the coming boom. trade rose by leaps and bounds; every day new shops seemed to open; the stalks of the central london railway could be seen belching clouds of smoke as they ground out electric power; the letter-box at elm tree place was clogged with circulars denoting by the fury of their competition that trade was flying as on a great wind. other signs too were not wanting: the main streets of london were blocked by lorries groaning under machinery, vegetables, stone; immense queues formed at the railway stations waiting for the excursion trains; above all, rose the sound of gold as it hissed and sizzled as if molten on the pavements, flowing into the pockets of merchants, bankers and shareholders. all the women at the vesuvius indulged in new clothes. victoria's investments were seized by the current. she had not entirely followed the bank manager's advice. seeing, feeling the movement, she had realised most of her debentures and turned them into shares. one of her ventures collapsed, but the remainder appreciated to an extraordinary extent. at last, in the waning days of the year her middle-class prudence reasserted itself. she knew enough of political economy to be ready for the crash, she realised. one cold morning in november she counted up her spoils. she had nearly five thousand pounds. meanwhile, while her blood was aglow, holt sank further into the dullness of his senses. a mania was upon him. waking, his thought was victoria; and the cry for her rose everlasting from his racked body. she was all, she was everywhere; and the desire for her, for her beauty, her red lips, soaked into him like a philtre, narcotic and then fiery but ever present, intimate and exacting. he was her thing, her toy, the paltry instrument which responded to her every touch. he rejoiced in his subjection; he swam in his passion like a pilgrim in the ganges to find brief oblivion; but again the thirst was on him, ravaging, ever demanding more. more, more, ever more, in the watches of the night, when ice seizes the world to throttle it--among all, in turmoil and in peace--he tossed upon the passionate sea; with one thought, one hope. chapter xviii 'i'm glad we're going away, jack,' said victoria leaning back in the cab and looking at him critically. 'you look as if you wanted a change.' 'perhaps i do,' said jack. victoria looked at him again. he had not smiled as he spoke to her, which was unusual. he seemed thinner and more delicate than ever, with his pale face and pink cheekbones. his black hair shone as if moist; and his eyes were bigger than they had ever been, blue like silent pools and surrounded by a mauve zone. his mouth hung a little open. yet, in spite of his weariness, he held her wrist in both his hands, and she could feel his fingers searching for the opening in her glove. 'you are becoming a responsibility,' she said smiling. 'i shall have to be a mother to you.' a faint smile came over his lips. 'a mother? after all, why not? phedra. . . .' his eyes fixed on the grey morning sky as he followed his thought. the horse was trotting sharply. the winter air seemed to rush into their bodies. jack, well wrapped up as he was in a fur coat, shrank back against the warm roundness of her shoulder. in an excess of gentleness she put her free hand in his. 'dear boy,' she said softly bending over him. but there was no tenderness in jack's blue eyes, rather lambent fire. at once his grasp on her hand tightened and his lips mutely formed into a request. casting a glance right and left she kissed him quickly on the mouth. up on the roof their bags jolted and bumped one another; milk carts were rattling their empty cans as they returned from their round; far away a drum and fife band played an acid air. they were going to ventnor in pursuit of the blanketed sun; and victoria rejoiced, as they passed through piccadilly circus where moisture settled black on the fountain, to think that for three days she would see the sun radiate, not loom as a red guinea. they passed over waterloo bridge at a foot pace; the enormous morning traffic was struggling in the neck of the bottle. the pressure was increased because the road was up between it and waterloo station. on her left, over the parapet, victoria could see the immense desert of the thames swathed in thin mist, whence emerged in places masts and where massive barges loomed passive like derelicts. she wondered for a moment whether her familiar symbol, the old vagrant, still sat crouching against the parapet at westminster, watching rare puffs of smoke curling from his pipe into the cold air. the cab emerged from the crush, and to avoid it the cabman turned into the little black streets which line the wharf on the east side of the bridge, then doubled back towards waterloo through cornwall road. there they met again the stream of drays and carts; the horse went at a foot pace, and victoria gazed at the black rows of houses with the fear of a lost one. so uniformly ugly these apartment houses, with their dirty curtains, their unspeakable flowerpots in the parlour windows. here and there cards announcing that they did pinking within; further, the board of a sweep; then a good corner house, the doctor's probably, with four steps and a brass knocker and a tall slim girl on her hands and knees washing the steps. the cab came to an abrupt stop. some distance ahead a horse was down on the slippery road; shouts came from the crowd around it. victoria idly watched the girl, swinging the wet rag from right to left. poor thing. everything in her seemed to cry out against the torture of womanhood. she was a picture of dumb resignation as she knelt with her back to the road. victoria could see her long thin arms, her hands red and rigid with cold, her broken-down shoes with the punctured soles emerging from the ragged black petticoat. there was a little surge in the crowd. the girl got up, and with an air of infinite weariness stretched her arms. then she picked up the pail and bucket and turned towards the street. for the space of a second the two women looked into one another's faces. then victoria gave a muffled cry and jumped out of the cab. she seized with both hands the girl's bare arms. 'betty! betty!' she faltered. a burning blush covered the girl's face and her features twitched. she made as if to turn away from the detaining hands. 'vicky, what are you doing . . . what does this mean?' came jack's voice from the cab. 'wait a minute, jack. betty, my poor little betty. why are you here? why haven't you written to me?' 'leave me alone,' said betty hoarsely. 'i won't leave you alone. betty, tell me, what's this? are you married?' a look of pain came over the girl's face, but she said nothing. 'look here, betty, we can't talk here. leave the bucket, come with me. i'll see it's all right.' 'oh, i can't do that. oh, let me alone; it's too late.' 'i don't understand you. it's never too late. now just get into the cab and come with me.' 'i can't. i must give notice . . .' she looked about to weep. 'come along.' victoria increased the pressure on the girl's arms. jack stood up in the cab. he seemed as frightened as he was surprised. 'i say, vicky . . .' he began. 'sit down, jack, she's coming with us. you don't mind if we don't go to ventnor?' jack's eyes opened in astonishment but he made no reply. victoria pulled betty sharply down the steps. 'oh, let me get my things,' she said weakly. 'no. they'd stop you. there, get in. drive back to elm tree place, cabman.' half an hour later, lying at full length on the boudoir sofa, betty was slowly sipping some hot cocoa. there was a smile on her tear-stained face. victoria was analysing with horror the ravages that sorrow had wrought on her. she was pretty still, with her china blue eyes and her hair like pale filigree gold; but the bones seemed to start from her red wrists, so thin had she become. even the smile of exhausted content on her lips did not redeem her emaciated cheeks. 'betty, my poor betty,' said victoria, taking her hand. 'what have they done to you?' the girl looked up at the ceiling as if in a dream. 'tell me all about it,' her friend went on, 'what has happened to you since april?' 'oh, lots of things, lots of things. i've had a hard time.' 'yes, i see. but what happened actually? why did you leave the p.r.r.?' 'i had to. you see, edward . . .' the flush returned. 'yes?' 'oh, vic, i've been a bad girl and i'm so, so unhappy.' betty seized her friend's hand to raise herself and buried her face on her breast. there victoria let her sob, gently stroking the golden hair. she understood already, but betty must not be questioned yet. little by little, betty's weeping grew less violent and confidence burst from her pent up soul. 'he didn't get a rise at christmas, so he said we'd have to wait . . . i couldn't bear it . . . it wasn't his fault. i couldn't let him come down in the world, a gentleman . . . he had only thirty shillings a week.' 'yes, yes, poor little girl.' 'we never meant to do wrong . . . when baby was coming he said he'd marry me . . . i couldn't drag him down . . . i ran away.' 'betty, betty, why didn't you write to me?' the girl looked at her. she was beautiful in her reminiscence of sacrifice. 'i was ashamed . . . i didn't dare . . . i only wanted to go where they didn't know what i was. . . . i was mad. the baby came too early and it died almost at once.' 'my poor little girl.' victoria softly stroked the rough back of her hand. 'oh, i wasn't sorry . . . it was a little girl . . . they don't want any more in the world. besides i didn't care for anything; i'd lost him . . . and my job. i couldn't go back. my landlady wrote me a character to go to cornwall road.' 'and there i found you.' 'i wonder what we are going to do for you,' she went on. 'where is edward now?' 'oh, i couldn't go back; i'm ashamed. . . .' 'nonsense, you haven't done anything wrong. he shall marry you.' 'he would have,' said betty a little coldly, 'he's square.' 'yes, i know. he didn't beg you very hard, did he? however, never mind. i'm not going to let you go until i've made you happy. now i'll tuck you up with a rug, and you're going to sleep before the fire.' betty lay limp and unresisting in the ministering hands. the unwonted sensations of comfort, warmth and peace soothed her to sleepiness. besides, she felt as if she had wept every tear in her racked body. soon her features relaxed, and she sank into profound, almost deathlike slumber. victoria meanwhile told her story to jack, who sat in the dining room reading a novel and smoking cigarettes. he came out of his coma as victoria unfolded the tale of betty's upbringing, her struggle to live, then love the meteor flashing through her horizon. his cheeks flushed and his mouth quivered as victoria painted for him the picture of the girl half distraught, bearing the burden of her shame, unable to reason or to forsee, to think of anything except the saving of a gentleman from life on thirty bob a week. 'something ought to be done,' he said at length, closing his book with novel vivacity. 'yes, but what?' 'i don't know.' his eyes questioned the wall; they grew vaguer and vaguer as his excitement decreased, as a ship in docks sinks further and further on her side while the water ebbs away. 'you think of something,' he said at length, picking up his book again. 'i don't care what it costs.' victoria left him and went for a walk through the misty streets seeking a solution. there were not many. she could not keep betty with her, for she was pure though betrayed; contact with the irregular would degrade her because habit would induce her to condone that which she morally condemned. it would spoil her and would ultimately throw her into a life for which she was not fitted because gentle and unspoiled. 'no,' mused victoria as she walked, 'like most women, she cannot rule: a man must rule her. she is a reed, not an oak. all must come from man, both good and evil. what man has done man must undo.' by the time she returned to elm tree place she had made up her mind. there was no hope for betty except in marriage. she must have her own fireside; and, from what she had said, her lover was no villain. he was weak, probably; and, while he strove to determine his line of conduct, events had slipped beyond his control. perhaps, though, it was not fair to deliver betty into his hands bound and defenceless, bearing the burden of their common imprudence. she was not fit to be free, but she should not be a slave. it might be well to be the slave of the strong, but not of the weak. therefore victoria arrived at a definite solution. she would see the young man; and, if it was not altogether out of the question, he should marry betty. they should have the little house at shepherd's bush, and betty should be made a free woman with a fortune of five hundred pounds in her own right, enough to place her for ever beyond sheer want. it only struck victoria later that she need not, out of quixotic generosity, deplete her own store, for holt would gladly give whatever sum she named. 'now, betty,' she said as the girl drained the glass of claret which accompanied the piece of fowl, that composed her lunch, 'tell me your young man's name and anderson & dromo's address. i'm going to see him.' 'oh, no, no, don't do that.' the look of fear returned to the blue eyes. 'no use, betty, i've decided you're going to be happy. i shall see him to-day at six, bring him here to-morrow at half past two, as it happens to be saturday. you will be married about the thirtieth of this month.' 'oh, vic, don't make me think of it. i can't do it . . . it's no good now. perhaps he's forgotten me, and it's better for him.' 'i don't think he's forgotten you,' said victoria. 'he'll marry you this month, and you'll eat your christmas dinner at shepherd's bush. don't be shy, dear--you're not going empty handed; you're going to have a dowry of five hundred pounds.' 'vic! i can't take it; it isn't right . . . you need all you've got . . . you're so good, but i don't want him to marry me if . . . if. . . .' 'oh, don't worry, i shan't tell him about the money until he says yes. now, no thanks; you're my baby, besides it's going to be a present from mr holt. silence,' she repeated as betty opened her mouth, 'or rather give me his name and address and not another word.' 'edward smith, salisbury house, but. . . .' 'enough. now, dear, don't get up.' the events of that friday and saturday formed in later days one of the sunbathed memories in victoria's dreary life. it was all so gentle, so full of sweetness and irresolute generosity. she remembered everything, the wait in the little dark room into which she was ushered by an amazed commissionaire who professed himself willing to break regulations for her sake and hand mr smith a note, the banging of her heart as she realised her responsibility and resolved to break her word if necessary and to buy a husband for betty rather than lose him, then the quick interview, the light upon the young man's face. 'where is she,' he asked excitedly. 'oh, why did she run away? you can't think what i've been going through.' 'you should have married her,' said victoria coldly, though she was moved by his sincerity. he was handsome, this young man, with his bronzed face, dark eyes, regular features and long dark hair. 'oh, i would have at once if i'd known. but i couldn't make up my mind; only thirty bob a week. . . .' 'yes, i know,' said victoria softly, 'i used to be at the p. r. r.' 'you?' the young man looked at her incredulously. 'yes, but never mind me. it's betty i've come for. the baby is dead. i found her cleaning the steps of a house near waterloo.' 'my god,' said the young man in low tones. he clenched his hands together; one of his paper cuff protectors fell to the floor. 'will you marry her now?' 'yes . . . at once.' 'good. she's had a hard time, mr smith, and i don't say it's entirely your fault. now it's all going to be put square. i'm going to see she has some money of her own, five hundred pounds. that will help won't it?' 'oh, it's too good to be true. why are you doing all this for us? you're. . . .' 'please, please, no thanks. i'm betty's friend. let that be enough. will you come and see her to-morrow at my house? here's my card.' on the last day of november these two were married at a registry office in the presence of victoria and the registrar's clerk. a new joy had settled upon betty, whose shy prettiness was turning into beauty. victoria's heart was heavy as she looked at the couple, both so young and rapt, setting out upon the sea with a cargo of glowing dreams. it was heavy still as the cab drove off carrying them away for a brief week-end, which was all anderson and dromo would allow. she tasted a new delight in this making of happiness. holt had not attended the ceremony, for he felt too weak. his interest in the affair had been dim, for he looked upon it as one of victoria's whims. he was ceasing to judge as he ceased to appreciate, so much was his physical weakness gaining upon him; all his faculty of action was concentrated in the desire which gnawed at his very being. victoria reminded him of his promise, and, finding his cheque book for him, laid it on the table. 'five hundred pounds,' she said. 'better make it out to me. it's very good of you, jack.' 'yes, yes,' he said dully, writing the date and the words 'mrs ferris.' then he stopped. concentrating with an effort he wrote the word 'five.' 'five . . . five . . .' he murmured. then he looked up at victoria with something like vacuousness. a wild idea flashed through her brain. she must act. oh, no, dreadful. yet freedom, freedom. . . . he could not understand . . . she must do it. 'thousand,' she prompted in a low voice. 'thousand pounds,' went jack's voice as he wrote obediently. then, mechanically, reciting the formula his father had taught him. 'five, comma, , , , dash, , dash, . john holt.' victoria put her hands down on the table to take the cheque he had just torn out. all her fingers were trembling with the terrible excitement of a slave watching his fetters being struck off. as she took it up and looked at it, while the figures danced, holt's eyes grew more insistent on her other hand. slowly his fingers closed over it, raised it to his lips. with his eyes closed, breathing a little deeper, he covered her palm with lingering kisses. chapter xix the endowment of betty was soon completed. advised by the bank manager to whom she confided something of the young couple's improvident tendencies, victoria vested the money in a trust administered by an insurance company. the deed was so drafted that it could not be charged; the capital could not be touched, excepting the case of male offspring who, after their mother's death, would divide it on their respective twenty-fifth birthdays; as she distrusted her own sex and perhaps still more the stock from which the girls might spring, she bound their proportion in perpetuity; failing offspring she provided that, following on his wife's decease, mr edward smith should receive one fifth of the capital, four fifths reverting to herself. victoria revelled somewhat in the technicalities of the deed; every clause she framed was a pleasure in itself; she turned the 'hereinbefores' and the 'predecease as aforesaids' round in her mouth as if they were luscious sweets. the pleasure of it was not that of lady bountiful showering blessings and feeling the holy glow of charity penetrate her being. victoria's satisfaction was more vixenish; she, the outlaw, the outcast, had wrested from society enough money to indulge in the luxury of promoting a marriage, converting the illegal into the legal, creating respectability. the gains that society term infamous were being turned towards the support of that society; still more, failing her infamous help, betty and edward smith would not have achieved their coming together with the approval of the law, their spiritual regeneration and a house at shepherd's bush. she was now the mistress of a fortune of over ten thousand pounds, a good half of which was due to her final stratagem. the time had now come for her to retire to the house in the country when she could resume her own name, piece together for the sake of the county her career since she left india for alabama, and read the local agricultural rag. her plans were postponed, however, owing to holt's state of health, which compelled her, out of sheer humanity, to take him to a sunnier clime. she dismissed algiers as being too far; she asked holt where he would like to go to, but he merely replied 'east coast,' which in december struck her as being absurd. finally she decided to take him to folkestone, as it was very near and he would doubtless like to sit with the dogs on the leas. folkestone was bright and sunny. the sting in the glowing air brought fresh colour to victoria's cheeks, a deeper brilliancy to her grey eyes; she felt well; her back was straighter; when a lock of dark hair strayed into her mouth driven by the high wind it tasted salt on her lips. sometimes she could have leaped, shouted, for life was rushing in upon her like a tide. most days, however, she was quiet, for holt was not affected by the sea. his listlessness was now such that he hardly spoke. he would walk by her side vacuously, looking at his surroundings as if he did not see them. at times he stopped, concentrated with an effort and bought a bun from a hawker to break up for the dogs. victoria noticed that he was slipping, with ununderstanding fear. the phenomenon was beyond her. though the guests at the hotel surrounded her with an atmosphere of admiration, holt's condition began to occupy all her thoughts. he was thin now to the point of showing bone under his coat, pale and hectic, generally listless, sometimes wild-eyed. he never read, played no games, talked to nobody. indeed nothing remained of him save the half physical, half emotional power of his passion. victoria called in a doctor, but found him vague and shy; beyond cutting down holt's cigarettes he prescribed nothing. victoria resigned herself to the role of a nurse. at the beginning of january she noticed that holt was using a stick to walk. the sight filled her with dread. she watched him on the leas, walking slowly, resting the weight of his body on the staff, stopping now and then to look at the sea, or worse, at a blank wall. a terrible impression of weakness emanated from him. he was going down the hill. one morning in the middle of january, holt did not get up. when questioned he hardly answered. she dressed feverishly without his moving, and went out to find the doctor herself, for she was unconsciously afraid of the servants' eyes. when she returned with the doctor holt had not moved; his head was thrown back, his mouth a little open, his face more waxen than usual. 'oh, oh. . . .' victoria nearly screamed, when holt opened his eyes. the doctor threw back the bedclothes and examined his patient. as victoria watched him inspecting holt's mouth, the inside of his eyelids, then his finger nails, a terror came upon her at these strange rites. she went to the window and looked out over the sea; it was choppy, grey and foamy like a river in spate. she strove to concentrate on her freedom, but she could feel the figure on the bed. 'got any sal volatile?' said the doctor's voice. 'no, shall i. . . .?' 'no, no time for that, he's fainting; get me some salts, ammonia, anything.' victoria watched him forcing holt to breathe the ammonia she used to clean ribbons. holt opened his eyes, coughed, struggled; tears ran down his face as he inhaled the acrid fumes. still he did not speak. the doctor pulled him out of bed, crossed his legs, and then struck him sharply across the shin, just under the knee, with the side of his hand. holt's leg hardly moved. the doctor hesitated for a moment, then pushed him back into the bed. 'i . . . mrs. . . .?' 'holt.' 'well, mrs holt, i'm afraid your husband is in a serious condition. of course i don't say that with careful feeding, tonics, we can't get him round, but it'll be a long business, and . . . and . . . you see . . . how long have you been married?' 'over a year,' said victoria with an effort. 'ah. well mrs holt, it will be part of the cure that you leave him for six months.' victoria gasped. why? why? could it be . . .? the thought appalled her. dimly she could hear the doctor talking. 'his mother . . . if he has one . . . to-day . . . phosphate of . . .' then the doctor was gone. a telegram had somehow been sent to rawsley cement works. then the long day, food produced on the initiative of the hotel servants, the room growing darker, night. it was ten o'clock, and two women stood face to face by the bed. one was victoria, beautiful like a marble statue, with raven black hair, pale lips. the other a short stout figure with tight hair, a black bonnet, a red face stained with tears. 'you've killed him,' said the harsh voice. victoria looked up at mrs holt. 'no, no.' 'my boy, my poor boy!' mrs holt was on her knees by the side of the motionless figure. victoria began to weep, silently at first, then noisily. mrs holt started at the sound, then jumped to her feet with a cry of rage. 'stop that crying,' she commanded. 'how dare you? how dare you?' victoria went on crying, the sobs choking her. 'a murderess,' mrs holt went on. 'you took my boy away; you corrupted him, ruined him, killed him. you're a vile thing; nobody should touch you, you. . . .' victoria pulled herself together. 'it's not my fault,' she stumbled. 'i didn't know.' 'didn't know,' sneered mrs holt, 'as if a woman of your class didn't know.' 'that's enough,' snarled victoria. 'i've had enough. understand? i didn't want your son. he wanted me. that's all over. he bought me, and now you think the price too heavy. i've been heaven to him who only knew misery. he's not to be pitied, unless it be because his mistress hands him over to his mother.' 'how dare you?' cried mrs holt again, a break in her voice as she pitied her outraged motherhood. 'it's you who've killed him; you, the family, rawsley, bethlehem, your moral laws, your religion. it's you who starved him, ground him down until he lost all sense of measure, desired nothing but love and life.' 'you killed him, though,' said the mother. 'perhaps. i didn't want to. i was . . . fond of him. but how can i help it? and supposing i did? what of it? yes, what of it? who was your son but a man?' 'my son?' 'your son. a distinction, not a title. your son bears part of the responsibility of making me what i am. he came last but he might have come first, and i tell you that the worker of the eleventh hour is guilty equally with the worker of the first. your son was nothing and i nothing but pawns in the game, little figures which the society you're so proud of shifts and breaks. he bought my womanhood; he contributed to my degradation. what else but degradation did you offer me?' mrs holt was weeping now. 'i am a woman, and the world has no use for me. your society taught me nothing. or rather it taught me to dance, to speak a foreign language badly, to make myself an ornament, a pleasure to man. then it threw me down from my pedestal, knowing nothing, without a profession, a trade, a friend, or a penny. and then your society waved before my eyes the lily-white banner of purity, while it fed me and treated me like a dog. when i gave it what it wanted, for there's only one thing it wants from a woman whom nothing has been taught but that which every woman knows, then it covered me with gifts. a curse on your society. a society of men, crushing, grinding down women, sweating their labour, starving their brains, urging them on to the surrender of what makes a woman worth while. ah . . . ah. . . .' breath failed her. mrs holt was weeping silently in her hands in utter abandonment. 'i'm going,' said victoria hoarsely. she picked up a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. as she opened the door the figure moved on the bed, opened its eyes. their last lingering look was for the woman at the door. chapter xx the squire of cumberleigh was not sorry that 'the retreat' had found a tenant at last. the house belonged to him, and he might have let it many times over; but so conservative and aristocratic was his disposition that he preferred to sacrifice his rent rather than have anyone who was undesirable in the neighbourhood. yet, in the case of the lady who had now occupied the house for some three weeks, though the strictest enquiries had been made concerning her, both in cumberleigh and the surrounding district, nothing could be ascertained beyond the scanty facts that she was a widow, well-to-do and had been abroad a good deal. the squire had seen her on two separate occasions himself and could not but admit that she was far from unprepossessing; she was obviously a lady, well-bred and educated, and, if her frock and hat had been a trifle smarter than those usually seen in a country village, she had owned up to having recently been to paris to replenish her wardrobe. it was curious, when he came to reflect upon it, how little she had told him about herself, and yet, what was more curious, she had no sooner left him after the second visit than he had betaken himself to his solicitor to get him to make out the lease. she had received and signed it the following day, showing herself remarkably business-like, but not ungenerous when it came to the buying of the fixtures and to the vexed question of outdoor and indoor repairs. as the squire climbed the hill that gave upon the village from the marshes, one cold march evening, he did not regret his decision; for, standing in front of 'the retreat,' he felt bound to admit that there was something cheering and enlivening in the fact that the four front windows now flaunted red curtains and holland blinds, where they had been so dark and forbidding. in the lower one on the left, where the lamps had not yet been lighted or the blinds drawn down, in the light of the dancing fire, he could see distinctly a woman's workbox on a small inlaid table, a volume of songs on the cottage piano, and, at the back of the room, a hint of china tea cups, glistening silver and white napery. presently a trim maid came out to bolt the front door, followed by two snuffling yellow dogs who took the air for a few moments in tempestuous spirits, biting each other about the neck and ears and rushing round in giddy circles on the tiny grass plot until, in response to a call from the maid, they returned with her to the house. they were foreigners evidently, these dogs! the squire could not remember the name of the breed, but he thought he had seen one of the kind before in london. he was not quite sure he approved of foreign dogs; they were not so sporting or reliable as those of the english breeds; still, these were handsome fellows, well kept and (from the green ribbons that adorned their fluffy necks) evidently made much of. he was still looking after the dogs when he was joined by the curate coming out of the blacksmith's cottage opposite and stopping to light a match in the shelter of the high wall of 'the retreat.' 'first pipe i have had to-day,' said the newcomer as he puffed at it luxuriously. 'it's more than you can say, squire, i'll be bound.' 'twenty-first, that's more like it,' said the squire with a laugh. 'how is mrs johnson?' this in allusion to the curate's call at the smithy. 'dying. won't last the night out, i think. she is quite unconscious. still i am glad i went. johnson and his daughters seemed to like to have me there, though of course there was nothing for me to do.' 'quite so, quite so,' said the squire approvingly, for the village was so small that he took a paternal interest in all its inhabitants. 'any more news?' 'mrs golightly has had twins, and young shaw has enlisted. that's about all, i think. oh, by the by, i paid a call here to-day.' and he indicate. 'the retreat.' 'it seemed about time you know, and one mustn't neglect the new-comers.' 'of course not,' the squire assented with conviction. 'was she . . . did she in any way indicate that she was pleased to see you?' 'she was very gracious, but she seemed to take my call quite as a matter of course. a nice woman i should think, though a little reserved. however she is going to rent one seat in church if not more, and she said i might put her name down for one or two little things i am interested in at present.' 'in fact you made hay while the sun shone. well, after all, why not? she didn't tell you anything about herself i suppose, or her connections?' 'no, she never mentioned them. i understood or she implied she had been abroad a good deal and that her husband had died some years ago. still i really don't think we need worry about her; the whole thing, if i may say so, was so obviously all right, the house i mean and all its appointments. she is a quiet woman, a little shy and retiring perhaps, belongs to the old-fashioned school.' 'well she is none the worse for that,' said the squire with a grunt. 'we don't meet many of that kind nowadays. even the farmers' daughters are quite ready to set you right whenever they get a chance. this modern education is a curse, i have said so from the very beginning. still they haven't robbed us of our church schools yet, if that is any consolation. coming back to dine with me to-night, seaton?' the young man shook his head. 'very sorry, squire, it's quite impossible to-night. it is friday night, choir practice you know, and there is a lantern lecture in the mission hall. i ought to be there already, helping griffin with the slides.' 'all right, sunday evening then, at the usual time,' said the squire cordially as the curate left him, and, as he looked after him, he criticised him as a busy fellow, not likely to set the thames on fire perhaps, but essentially the right man in the right place. his own progress was a good deal slower; not that he found the hill too steep, for, in spite of his fifty years, he was still perfectly sound of wind and limb, as was shown by his athletic movements, the fresh healthy colour on his cheeks, and the clear blue of his eyes, but rather because he seemed loth to tear himself away from 'the retreat' and his new tenant. even when he had reached the little post office that crowned the summit, he did not turn off towards his own place till he had spent another five minutes contemplating the stack of chimney-pots sending out thick puffs of white smoke into the quiet evening sky, and listening attentively to the cheerful sound of a tinkling piano blended with the gentle lowing of the cattle on the marsh below. after all, he told himself, he was very glad seaton had called, for apart from his duty as a clergyman it was only a kind and neighbourly thing to do. it was a pity that there were not more of his kind in the neighbourhood, for in spite of his own preference for the country, he could imagine that a woman coming to it fresh from london at such a season might find it dull and a little depressing. he wondered if mrs menzies, of hither hall, would call if he asked her to do so. of course she would in a moment if he put it on personal grounds, but that was not the point. all he wished was to be kind and hospitable to a stranger; and mrs menzies, much as he respected and admired her, had never been known to err on the side of tolerance, nor did one meet in her drawing-room anyone whose pedigree would not bear a thorough investigation. yes, there was no doubt about it, though the laws that governed social intercourse were on the whole excellent and had to be kept, there were here, as everywhere else in life, exceptions to the rule, occasions when anyone of a kindly disposition must feel tempted to break them. and mrs menzies was certainly a little stiff: witness her behaviour in the case of captain clinton's widow and the fuss she had made because the unfortunate lady had forgotten to tell her of her relationship to the eglinton clintons and had only vouchsafed the fact that her father's people had been in trade. why, it had taken weeks if not months to clear the matter up; and it had been very awkward for everybody, the eglinton clintons included when the truth had transpired. no, on second thoughts he would not ask mrs menzies to call; he would far rather make the first venture himself than risk a snub for this lonely defenceless stranger. he turned into the gates of redland hall with a half-formed intention of doing so immediately. he dined alone as usual; it was very rare that the dining-room of redland hall extended its hospitality to anybody nowadays; for the squire, like most men over forty, had lost the habit of entertaining and did not know how to recover it. a bachelor friend spent a night with him from time to time; the curate supped with him every sunday; and his sister came for a week or two during the summer, when she invariably told him that the house was too uncomfortable to live in, and he ought to have it thoroughly done up and modernised. he invariably promised to set about it immediately, with the full intention of doing so; but his resolution began to weaken the day on which he saw her off at the station, and degenerated steadily for the remainder of the year. that night, however, for the first time for many months he made a voyage of discovery into his own drawing-room. yes, there was no doubt about it, selina was quite right in calling it draughty and uncomfortable; the gilt french furniture was shabby and tarnished, the aubusson carpet worn, the wall paper faded, the whole room desolate in its suggestion of past glory. he crossed over to the enormous grand piano, opened it and struck a yellow key gently with one finger. was he wrong, he wondered, in thinking its tone was lamentably thin and poor? a rat scampered and squeaked in the wainscoting, the windows rattled in their loose sashes; he shut the piano abruptly and left the room. it would cost a good deal to have it thoroughly done up, of course; but that was not the point. who would superintend the decorations? he did not trust his own taste and had no faith in that of any upholsterer. selina would come and help him if he asked her, though she would think it strange, for she had paid her annual visit in august, and it was now only march; besides, if she brought her delicate little girls with her at such a time the whole house would be upset in arranging for their comfort. still, selina or no, he had quite made up his mind to have the room done up and to buy a new piano immediately; it was ridiculous to harbour an instrument which was merely a nesting place for mice. he returned to the dining-room, poured himself out a stiff whiskey and soda, and dozed over his _spectator_ for the rest of the evening. yet, next morning, even in the unromantic light of day, he was surprised to find that his plan of doing up the drawing-room still held good. he had intended to ride into wetherton that day to try his new mare across country, for the gates were high in that direction and good enough to test her powers as a jumper. a glance at the glistening frost on the grass soon sufficed, however, to tell him that his scheme could not be carried out; nor was he sorry until, having spent the morning on his farms and inspected everything and everybody at his leisure, it occurred to him with a desperate sense of conviction that there was still the afternoon to be filled in somehow. about three he set off in the direction of the village, looked in at the church and had a brief colloquy with seaton regarding the new pews which were being put up, interviewed the postmaster, condoled with the blacksmith upon the death of his wife, and even ventured down as far as the marsh to see if the new carrier who had taken the place of old dick tomlinson was likely to fulfil his duties properly. about four o'clock he found himself once more opposite 'the retreat.' it was on the main road certainly, but it was only recently that he had become aware of its importance in the landscape. one could not get to the marsh or come back from it without passing it. the windows looked as trim as ever--trimmer perhaps, for short muslin curtains interspaced with embroidery seemed to have sprung up in the night. they were very decorative in their way; at the same time they quite shut out all prospect of the interior, and there was no workbox, piano, or suggestion of tea things to be seen to-day. the foreign dogs were snuffling in the garden as he passed the second time, and one of them nosed its way through the iron gate and ventured a few yards down the road, but just as the squire had made up his mind it was his duty to take it back, it returned of its own accord. he watched the trim maid come out and call them as she had done the day before, and saw them rush after her frolicking round her skirt. suddenly he crossed the road, looked up and down to make sure there was no acquaintance within sight, opened the iron gate of 'the retreat,' and passed up the gravel pathway into the porch. 'mrs fulton is at home,' said the trim maid demurely, in answer to his question. mercat press, edinburgh available by randy a. riddle. [transcriber's note: suspected printing errors in the original text have been changed. a complete list is included at the end of this e-book. instances of inconsistent hyphenation have been left in place.] hookers by _richard f. mann_ printed & bound in u. s. a. to evelyn copyright rae bourbon all rights and translations reserved published by house of bourbon philadelphia "foreword" in writing this preface, it seems that i have followed the old mexican custom of "manana," and waited until the book was finished, before writing it, then i discovered that it was a necessity. the characters in this story are real, live, and living people, and most of them are still in the fair city of juarez, plying the oldest trade in the world, and were known personally by the author, who studied them for several months in pop-eyed amazement. all of the incidents in this story actually happened, and are taken right from the bare facts of life; in fact, the author has had to tone down some of the descriptions of the parties herein mentioned. the author has not meant to be vicious in his statements of either country, but has merely stated conditions as they were found. the author. "you lousy bastard, don't you ever set foot in this room again. you sure got nerve--accusing me of holding out on you--you know damn well that guy never paid me a cent." "well, pearl, how was i to know? he came down into the street, and said that he gave you two bucks." "as long as you've been a pimp, you should fall for that stuff--screw--get out of my sight." "o. k. baby, but remember that if you ever need me, all you gotta do is just say the word. you know i'm all for you." "nuts--i've been in this burg a week, and all i done is turn two dollar tricks, and split with you, and for what? you ain't never brought me one dime, but you sure ain't missed any meals. i don't need you or any other guy from now on. i got my permit today from the chief of police of juarez, to hustle all i want on the mex side, and i'm doing it, starting tonight." one week had passed since the person of pearl jones had stepped off the west-bound texas & pacific train in el paso, with one thought in mind, and that to make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible, and without bother from the police if--possible, which is not possible, even in a border town like el paso, as pearl had already found out. in order for pearl to hustle on the mexican side of the border in the city of juarez, it was absolutely necessary that she have a written permit from the chief of police, or any official whom she happened to please in the usual way that a girl of her ilk had to please one, when there wasn't enough money in the pocket to buy the permit. consequently, pearl found out later she could have had a permit from the most lowly immigration official to the mayor himself, but in the midst of her efforts to please, the chief of police seemed to be the one who was affected quickest in her efforts to--please--. hence the permit. juarez, mexico, chief port of entry to mexico, population of forty thousand souls, mostly lost ones, separated from the united states by the rio grande river, if it may have the luck to be called a river, which at no time is deep enough to wet the crucial spot of one's anatomy, in case one has to run through it owing to lack of time to make the bridge, which has often been the case. "well, this is a night for celebration," thought pearl, as she left her hotel to walk down to the corner of stanton street, to catch the juarez car. the car was filled from door to door with old mexican women, wrapped in black shawls, which would have been black with dirt had they been originally any other color, and loaded down with topping bags filled with the bare necessities that their own immigration was kind enough to let them bring in, and anything else that they might hide under the numerous dirty underskirts they might happen to have on. the car clanged, and slowly started its noisy journey toward the stanton street bridge, at which it stopped from three to five minutes, for the mexican immigration and customs officials to go through the car and make a pretense at examining everything that was being brought into mexico, as if anything on the face of god's green earth that was brought into mexico could hurt it. "i wonder where i'll get off, now that i'm over here," thought pearl, as the car left the bridge to ramble on its way on into the heart of juarez, which is the sixteenth of september st. "i know," she thought, "i'll get off at the tivoli, where all the gambling is, and see if i have any luck there." "hello, honey," came the friendly voice of a heavy-set woman of about thirty, who five years before had been the toast of the border because of her beauty, but who now had begun to show what the excess of men, beer and hook shops, too numerous to mention, can do to a woman who had sold herself to any man with the price, and had given herself just as quickly to a man whom she thought she liked. "i saw you over here last night and wondered who you were. did you just come to town? well, my name is evelyn--the last name don't matter, but better known as bar fly ev. i'll be glad to show you the ropes around here. come on and let's get off here at the tivoli and snatch a couple of shots of whiskey, and see if there's a dollar to be made here. of course, it's a little early just yet. the best time to pick a live guy is about an hour before the bridge closes tonight, that's when they are looking for a girl to spend the night with, and they ain't too particular. that's how i manage. of course, you won't have to do that--you're too fresh looking--they'll go for you like a texas hog goes for swill." the tivoli, the official gambling house of juarez with any kind of a game you care to play, run square, but with the percentage so heavy for the house that a winning customer is a scarce thing. "say, ev, did you have to get a permit when you came to this town, before you could hustle on this side?" asked pearl. "hell, no, that's a lot of dirty gippery. the only permit i've got is the one that every woman has. of course, i know what you have had to go through, and it's a damn shame that some louse didn't tip you off. that's the way them mex's have of getting first pop at every girl that comes down here." "what'll you girls have?" asked the bartender. "whiskey for me, joe. what will you have, dearie?" "the same, and a big one," answered pearl. "say, dearie, by what name are you calling yourself?" "excuse me for not telling you before, but it's pearl--pearl jones--let's have another drink on it. "well, that's as good a name as any, at least, it's good and common," smiled evelyn, as she killed her second drink without a chaser. "you know the old saying, 'common by name, common by nature.'" "i'm damned if you ain't o. k., and we'll have another drink on that one. hey, joe, two more drinks for two ladies." "say, ev, you must have something on your mind tonight the way you are starting off. you girls have a drink on the house, will you?" "hell, yes--i'll drink on anything. you know me, joe--bar fly ev, the girl without a limit--at anything. by the way, joe, this is pearl. she's a new girl in town." "hello, sister, glad to know you. have another drink." "i'm glad to know you, and ev and i will have another drink, possibly several more," answered pearl, displaying her best smile. "say, sister, you're dern good looking. i'd like to see more of you," said joe, as he poured more whiskey, and leaned over the bar and patted pearl on the arm. "i'm o. k. you ask ev if i ain't. how about it, ev?" "i'll say you're o. k., joe, and you've spent many a dollar on me, but jees, you're seventy years old if you're a day. don't you ever get too old for this sort of thing?" "you'll have to ask somebody older than i am," answered joe. "don't let her kid you, joe," smiled pearl, "you and i will get together real soon, how's that?" "here, here, here--you two, let's don't have an exhibition on such short notice. we gotta be moving along. we got a lot of hard drinking to do tonight, as well as a few dollars to earn." "oh, ev, don't be in no hurry. you and pearl have another drink on the house." "well--i guess we better have another little one before we go, eh, pearl?" "sure, ev. i'd as soon get lit here with joe, as later. makes no difference by me." joe poured the drinks, and one for himself. "here's how," said joe, as he poured his down. "we'll be seeing you," waved ev, as they started for the door. "let's see--seeing that we're on this side of the street, we might as well go to the gold palace. it's only four or five doors down this way." the gold palace, a large cabaret, with a balcony on one side, the dance floor surrounded by tables and chairs with their real ugliness covered with dirty green covers, of none too certain age, with a band stand at the far end of the place, the bar off to the right doing a rushing business. "we might as well go in here and cop a couple of snorts of liquor, and see if there's any of the girls in yet," said ev, as she started for the bar. "hello, curley--my, you look grand tonight," ev greeted the young bartender, as they stood up to the rail. "i want you to meet one of the new girls who just came to town. curley, this is pearl." "hello, pearl--i'm always glad to meet a new girl. now, what will you have to drink?" "whiskey for me," said pearl, "what do you want, ev?" "whiskey, and lots of it, curley," answered ev. "say, for cripes sake," said pearl under her breath, "who is that kid? jees, he's cute. i've been in here several times, and every time i've seen him, i get all worked up over him." "cool thyself, sister, it will doith thee no good to workith thyself into a lather about him. the old jane who owns this joint--well, her daughter married him. that's why he is working here, and is true to the wife, maybe not because he wants to be, but because he'd better be, or else lose a certain section of his anatomy which would cause him to be of no further use to anyone--ssshhh--here he comes with the drinks, i'll tell you more later. how is your wife, curley?" smiled ev. "she's fine," answered curley, as he went to wait on other customers. "well, as i was saying--the old jane who owns this place is grace valdez--no, she ain't mex, but when she came down here about ten years ago she married one, in order to become a mex citizen, so she could run a chain of hook-shops without any bother from the mex government. grace, at one time, was the biggest madam in denver, colorado--but she's a good scout. if you're in a jam and she likes you, she can do you a lot of good; in fact, she can keep any girl out of this town that she don't like. i'll introduce you to her tonight, if she comes around. that's why i'm putting you hep--don't go on the make for the son-in-law. hey, curley, give me and pearl another whiskey." "o. k. ev, drinks coming up." "don't be funny, ev. i made five bucks off him yesterday afternoon." "oh, jees--" exclaimed evelyn, with her eyes bulging, "well, for the love of your own soul, don't let on to any of these other hookers, as they are sure to run to grace with it, and hell would break loose in a big way--but--i'm curious, is--i mean--is,--well,--how the hell is his bed manners? i'm curious to know if the wife is getting a break, considering all the fun her mother has had." "oh, ev, he's--well--" "ssshh, pipe down, here comes grace now. hello, grace, dear, how are you?" smiled evelyn sweetly, "i got a friend here who is just dying to meet you, gracie, dear." "hello, ev," answered grace, as she walked up to the two. "grace, dear, this is pearl jones. she just came to town, and i'm kinda showing her the sights tonight." "how are you, pearl," said grace, as she offered her hand to pearl. "i'm glad to know you, grace; won't you have a drink with us?" "i've just got time enough to have a drink, then i've got to get out to the red lights apartments. three of my girls got into a fight last night, and one got stabbed pretty bad." "what was the fight over--a man?" asked ev. "sure--that's always the cause of fights down there. one of the girls was caught with the other one's man," said grace, as she threw her whiskey down, "i'm glad to have met you, pearl. if i can be of any help to you any time, don't be afraid to call on me. so long, ev," and with that grace disappeared in the crowd. "say, ev, i like that old dame." "i knew you would--she's a pip--that is, as long as you don't cross her. well, let's shove off from here. there's a lot of bars over on lysol lane we ain't been into yet." juarez avenue, better known as lysol lane, extends from the sixteenth of september street to the santa fe bridge, and all traffic, pedestrian and otherwise, must go down this street and across this bridge to return to el paso, as both bridges are one way, the stanton street bridge is to enter juarez, and the santa fe bridge to leave it. this street, being a little over half a mile long, even if you were sober when you start down it, you would be drunk when you reached the bridge, as more than every other door is a famous bar, others infamous--but bars nevertheless, and as you near the bridge they are bigger and better and louder and wilder. so the girls started their trek down this street with the barrel house, then to several bars of less importance, until they reached the castle, which is known for its wonderful band, its good liquor, and its wonderful proprietor and his wife, who, when she has been drinking a little too much, does a strip dance on the floor that causes the cholos to fly for the river, to keep from burning the seats out of their pants. "hi, everybody," yelled evelyn, as she threw the swinging doors open and strode in. "i crave whiskey and lots of it. come on, pearl, the night is just beginning--everybody, this is pearl, a friend of mine i've known for years--come on, everybody, drink to her--w-h-ee-ee," screamed evelyn, throwing her arms around the nearest man, and everybody moving and milling around the bar. the band in the cabaret struck up a hot number, with everybody screaming and dancing and drinking, for the night was starting its mad, hilarious orgy, which always ended with anyone going to bed with anyone they happened to be with, regardless of who it might happen to be, sometimes even their own husbands. pearl found herself swept along by strong arms, on to the dance floor, before she had time to see his face, and when she did get a real look at him, she wasn't displeased. he was a tall fellow, about twenty-five or less, in laced boots, riding pants and leather sport jacket, and grey slouch hat. "i'm hot for you, baby; i could use you plenty," were his first words to pearl. "well, you're not hard to take." "that will be for you to decide later," he smiled with his eyes. "my car is parked just back of this place. shall we go out to it, or would you rather go elsewhere?" "your car is as good a place as any--let's go." "oke," he answered, as he put his arm around her waist and lifted her off her feet and carried her out of the crowd to the swinging door. "how much is this deal going to cost me, baby?" "just five bucks, big boy." "oke, baby," as he slipped a bill into her hand, "there's ten. if you're good for five, you ought to be a pip for that." in the dim light pearl uncrumpled the bill he had slipped into her hand. "nuts, big boy, what's the gag? this ain't no ten--this is a fifty." "i know it--see if you can make the next fifteen minutes worth it." the band played wild, hot, throbbing, beating, maddening, breath-taking, passionate music, while the crowd swayed in and out, and around. young men whispered soft, sweet words. old men whispered soft, sweet words. young and innocent ears listened and remembered. not so young and less innocent ears heard, still they did not hear. hands of young men strayed over their partner's bodies. hands of old men strayed over their partners. young and innocent figures quivered, and whispered, "darling, i love you," while less young, and less innocent said, "get your hand off my pratt." evelyn looked around all the faces that were near her, but nowhere could she see pearl. she ordered more drinks while she waited, knowing from experience that if a girl friend disappeared for a few minutes there was only one thing to do, and that was to--wait. there was no need for hurry--wasn't she drinking all she could hold, and it wasn't costing her a cent? sure, she would wait--till hell froze over--or at least till whoever was buying the drinks, stopped. "for the love of jees--where the hell you been? look at your face--my god, but you need a drink, dear," said evelyn, as pearl and her boy friend came alongside the bar. "excuse us for a minute, big boy," said pearl, as she took evelyn by the arm and started for the ladies' room. "you ain't answered my question, where--have you been?" "i just made some real money--look." she showed evelyn the fifty-dollar bill. "well, if you was out with that guy that you came in with, all i got to say is--you damn sure earned it." "ev, you said it--i ain't so sure i care to meet any more like him, at least not tonight, although i gave him my address. he wants to come up tomorrow. what do you know about him, ev?" "plenty--dearie--plenty, and if you can put up with him you can have the world with a dirty shirt on it. he is filthy with money, owns a mine back out here in the mountains--you use your own judgment, dearie." "were you ever out with him, ev?" "no, thanks, i bar horses." the crowds were beginning to work their way down to the bridge district. all the bars were full of hard-drinking men and women. the cabarets were crowded, as it was time for the floor shows to go on in these places. "come on, pearl, let's go over across the street to the lobby no. . it's a gay place, they have a good show there, and there must be some of the regular girls over there by now, and you've made enough tonight already to spend the rest of the night having a good time." "all right, i'm ready." lobby no. , one of the most popular bars in juarez, the bar in the front of the building, and the cabaret directly back of it, quite a large dance floor, with a band stand at the farthest end, and surrounded on three sides with tables, and every table filled with every specie of the human race, some drunk, some more drunk, and some blind drunk. "hello, there, ev," greeted the bartender. "how's the old girl tonight?" "i'm fine, henry--i want you to meet a girl friend of mine. this is pearl." "hi, pearl, what will you and ev have to drink?" "i think i'll have rock and rye, and a big slug of it--ev, speed up, you're holding up the parade." "whiskey, my darlings--hey, harry--you damn good-looking bastard--come over here, i got a girl friend i want you to know." "why, hello, ev--i haven't seen you in days, or i mean nights. where have you been?" greeted harry hicks, a tall blonde young man of about twenty-three, who was the master of ceremonies of the floor show. "harry, this is pearl--pearl, this is harry." evelyn poured down her whiskey without further ado. "how do you do," said harry, as he offered his hand. "i'm very glad to know you," said pearl, as she took the offered hand. "how soon does the show go on, harry?" asked evelyn as she wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. "in about three minutes, come on in and see it. i've got a good table for you near the band." "i'd love to," said pearl, as harry took her by the arm and helped her through the crowd. "hello, there, irene," evelyn greeted a girl friend, "how's tricks tonight?" "lousy," answered irene. "i ain't made but two dollars all day, but thank heavens, tomorrow is pay day at fort bliss, the soldiers are coming, tra--la--la--la--la." "see you later," called evelyn, as she shoved her way into the cabaret, and on down to the table where harry had seated pearl. "say, ev, that boy is a perfect darling--gee, he is sweet, so fresh and clean looking." "yes--yes--yes--my dear, every bat in this town has said them same words, and i been unlucky enough to be at every saying." "oh--good--there goes the show--look, ev, the way he announces, isn't he the cutest thing?" "yeah--i suppose you've made a date with him tonight to meet at the states cafe after you get back on the u. s. side, and he is to take you for a ride in his brother's car, and show you the rim road on mount franklin, and how the lights of el paso glitter down in the distance." "why, ev--how did you know?" "dearest girl, he has only told that same line to five thousand other hookers in this man's burg, and what's more, they all go for it--i don't for the life of me know what it is about him that gets all the girls going--but do they go--" "did he ever tell you that, ev?" "heaven forbid--there's only one thing that harry could make me do, and that's--puke." "oh, ev, look at the way he sings that song--why, i think he is about the sweetest thing i've seen down here." "pearl, dear, don't you let my dislikes bother you. if you like him, you go for him. you see, i been in this town for a long time, and when you have been here as long as i have, you will hate every son-of-a-bitch, and all that goes with them. don't pay any attention to my rants--hey, waiter--bring us two whiskeys, and for heaven's sake, make it pronto, i'm dead of thirst already." the show went on, to a solid success, as it did every night. it was eleven thirty, the band went wild, so did everybody else. there was only thirty minutes left to drink in, before the bridge closed for the night. everyone was making the most of it. evelyn and pearl finally worked their way back to the bar, where evelyn ordered a pint of whiskey, and killed the whole thing without taking it down from her lips. "jees, am i gonna get drunk tonight--make it another pint, henry--pronto," yelled evelyn. pearl and harry were wrapped in each other's arms, conscious of nothing around them, living for the night only. the states cafe, the rendezvous for the continuation of the gaiety after one has come on the american side, not a large place by any means, but serving good food, with no hindrance whatsoever for the noise and ribaldry of the crowd, and took no notice of the bottles of straight american whiskey that appeared as if by magic out of the ladies' bosoms, where they had been concealed while in juarez. the crowd had just begun to come in when evelyn and pearl arrived. "let's get a booth, ev, and save a seat for harry, as he ought to be here soon." "sure, grab a booth--but there is no need of saving a seat for harry, he's already here," said evelyn, as harry put his arms around pearl from behind. "oh, harry, dear, i had no idea you would be here so soon," said pearl, happily, "sit here, dear." "what's the matter with you, ev," asked harry, "haven't you a boy friend tonight?" "yeah, i've had a boy friend for the past twenty-four hours, but he's up in my room, trying to sober up enough to go home. he is a louse to his wife--but--damn--he's good to me. he paid my rent for a month, and opened me a charge account at the white house, and gives me twenty bucks a month." "don't this place have but the one waiter for all these people?" asked pearl. "just the one dear; frank is his name, and he takes his time, but he's a good scout--wait, i'll go and get you some water--gee, but you are sweet. boy--oh--boy, i'd love to cut you," said harry, as he kissed her on the ear and went for the water. "good lord, ev, did you hear what he said--he must be a sadist." "no, i think harry's irish." "but he said he would love to cut me." "well, dear, that expression has more definitions than the one you happen to know," said evelyn. "my god, look who's here--if it ain't mickey and betty--for the love of heaven, where have you two been for the past rear-end of the week?" betty and mickey came over to the table, hellos and greetings were very much in order, loud, noisy, raucous, but good natured was the dirty banter that passed to and fro among the crowd. finally they left pearl and evelyn, but not until they made pearl promise to pay them a visit, then they squeezed into a booth with four other people, but where they could still see everybody, and shout ribald songs of the border at the top of their voices. "what is the matter with mickey's face? why, ev, she looks like she had been through nine wars, and fought them all herself. i've never seen so many scars." "well, you see," explained evelyn, "mickey is the only woman in juarez, or the world, for that matter, that--if a fight starts in juarez, and she is on the u. s. side--she is sure to get into the fight before it is over. i've seen her with a bottle so deep in her skull it looked like a feather." "darling," said harry, "my brother loaned me his car, just as i told you. shall we take a little ride when you are through eating?" "i'd love to, dear--i've never been riding around el paso since i've been here, but where will we go?" "well, we could drive out the smelter road and back the mesa way, or we could go up on rim road, on the side of mount franklin, or maybe you would like to drive out to washington park--it is beautiful at night." "well, if i were you," said evelyn, "i'd go to washington park. at least, there's grass on the ground around there." "well, why isn't there grass on the ground in the other places harry mentioned, ev?" "well, you see, as far as i know--i believe the natives of el paso have had something to do with the wearing off of the grass in said places." "oh, i know," smiled pearl, "you mean cows." "yes--some cows, but mostly heifers." "how do you girls feel about a drink," asked harry. "well, why the hell didn't you say something before--good heavens, it's been a long time between drinks--bottoms up." screaming, glasses crashing, curses, tearing of clothes, yells, biting, pulling of hair, turning over of tables, running of people, came from the rear of the place. "good heavens," screamed pearl, "those women are tearing each other to pieces--why don't somebody try to separate them?" "come on, let's get going," said harry, as he took pearl by the arm and piloted her out of the place, never bothering to pay the check. "so long, kids, i'll see you tomorrow," called evelyn. "but where do you live, ev?" "san antonio apartments, on san antonio street, number twenty-seven. come up tomorrow, dear--adios." harry and pearl went out into the beautiful new car, and took a long ride toward the smelter road, to the fork where you return by the mesa road. "shall we stop and look at the moon for a while?" asked harry. "i'd love it." "then we'll stop." harry pulled the car off the road at the top of a small mesa butte, and turned off the lights. "isn't it beautiful here?" "yes, but you are more beautiful than a thousand nights," whispered harry into her ear. she turned her head, looked into his expectant eyes, and thought how handsome he was, with that tightly brushed blonde hair, bushy eyebrows, beautiful smile, backed by manly big white teeth, surrounded by red lips. "oh, harry, you are a darling," as their lips met and their young bodies quivered with the thrill of expectation to be fulfilled. el paso, city of one hundred thousand, not counting the nearby towns and villages. noon, the sun maddening with its terrific heat, asphalt in the street so soft that your foot-print is left in it on crossing, only the business that has to be done is all that is going on. people move about lifelessly, clothes sticking to them. mexicans, dressed in black, with the usual black shawl around their heads, as though it were the dead of winter, and not a bead of perspiration on them, with the only cooling place in the town being in the theatres that are ice-cooled. "my god--i'll die from this heat," said pearl to herself, as she raised up in bed, with her night-gown sticking to her. "jees, i wonder if i'll ever get used to it," she mused, as she climbed out of bed and raised the shade, and looked out on the sun-baked city. "i wonder what i'll do today to kill the time before i have to go over to juarez tonight. i know, i'll put on my things and go and wake ev up and have breakfast--then maybe she can suggest some place to go where it's cool." pearl stepped out of her nightgown, looked at herself in the mirror. she was twenty-three, but she didn't look more than twenty, her beautiful white figure, with all the curves of youth reflected back at her, gave her a happy feeling, knowing that she didn't look anything like the rest of the girls that had been down on the border long, and promising herself that she would watch out and see that she would never--never be like them. the door-knob turned slowly, then the door was thrown wide open. in walked the big boy of the night before. "oh, heavens," screamed pearl, "wait a minute till i get something on," as she fled into the bathroom. "never mind, sweetheart--i like you just as you are, that's why i came up at this hour; i thought i'd find you in bed, or just getting out of it." "oh, please hand me something to put on," came the voice from the bathroom. "hold your hand out to get it, then." pearl opened the door to put her hand out, and as she did, he slid his foot into the opening. "oh, please, don't come in--i haven't a thing on." "that's why i'm coming in," he answered, as he pushed the door open and caught her in his arms. "oh, big boy, don't you know you shouldn't do this? what will you think of me?" "baby, i love you--don't you know that?--i love you," he breathed hard, as he kissed her eyes, her neck, her shoulders, and gathered her up in his arms and walked toward the bed. "you will believe me--won't you--?" as he held her as if she were a small baby. "oh, big boy, you shouldn't act like this. what would anyone think if they should see us like this?" "what the hell do i care what anyone thinks--i want you and i want you all for myself--i'll buy you anything you want. i've got money--plenty of it. can't you understand that i'll do anything for you? when you left last night without even saying goodbye, i looked all over town for you, but i couldn't find you. you know what i mean, i don't even know your name, but i want you to marry me." tenderly he laid her down on the bed, smothering her with kisses. pearl looked into his eyes--he was sober--sober as a judge. he was a big man, a very big man, but he was like a child that had found the toy it had been looking for for a long time, and was so happy at finding it that he would never let it go again. he was fresh, clean, good looking, and had that very manly odor about him that women love, and above all, he had money, and lots of it; didn't eve say so and didn't he tell her so himself? he ran his hands over her smooth body, his head was laying on her shoulder, his big body against hers, his breath seeming to scorch her. what was the use to fight against this? she knew that sooner or later she would give in to his pleadings, the sooner the better. "yes, dear, i do love you," she whispered, as she put her arms around him, and pressed her hot mouth against his hot, moist lips--they seemed to melt into one. "pardon, madam, do you want to carry all these bundles, or wouldn't you like for us to send them over for you?" asked the clerk in the white house, the largest department store in el paso. "hell, no--i'll carry them myself," said evelyn, as she began to pick up the numerous bundles she had bought. "i beg pardon, madam, but did you want to charge those things?" "jees, my all to heaven has gone--certainly i want to charge them, i got an account here, ain't i?" "i'm sorry, madam, but we shall soon find out." "yeah--and for the love of pete, make it snappy--don't keep me in suspense." "pardon, madam," returned the clerk, laying down the receiver of the store telephone, "i'm very happy to inform you that your account is quite all right; thank you very much--call again." "thank you very much, and i'll call again damn soon. adios." evelyn returned to her apartment about three-thirty, unwrapped her packages, smiling to herself, and fondling her treasures. "well, i've bought a new outfit from top to bottom, and from the skin out. won't i floor that herd of tramps tonight--hot--ziggety--damn--now i'll bathe, throw on a load of that loud perfume, and damned if i won't be a lady, or know why." "what was that?" asked pearl, as she sat up in bed with a start. there was a rapping on the door. "who is it?" "it's me--ev," came the voice outside the door. "oh, just a minute, dear, till i unlock the door." "my god, don't you ever expect to get up today? do you know it is after four o'clock?" said evelyn, as she came into the room. "well, i did get up for a little while, but you see i went back to bed." "oh, i see," said evelyn, as she walked to the bed on tiptoe, where big boy lay sleeping like a child. "he came in at noon, and i couldn't get rid of him, or i would have come over to your place," answered pearl, in a whisper. "well, i'm glad you're able to get up." she walked over to big boy, and pulled the covers off the bed. "hey, what's the big idea?" asked big boy as he raised up in bed. "shame on you," said evelyn, mockingly, "sitting up in bed in front of a lady, and you with no sign of any drawers on. here, put these on while i ain't looking," throwing him the trunks of his two-piece set. "oke, sister; where is pearl?" "don't you hear the water running in the bathroom? well, you know darn well i ain't in there." "hey, look, sister, i'll give you a hundred bucks if you will talk for me. look--i'm nuts about that girl--there's nothing i want as much as i do her--here's the hundred--will you do it?" "will i? boy, my mouth will run from now on about you. hell's fire--i'd talk for a bull with that much dough." "you know i want to marry that broad." "well, at least that's cause for the damndest drunk i can think of--hey, pearl--get them things on--juarez calleth me in a big way--and you too; get them things on. good heavens, i'm dry as a bone. come to think of it, i ain't had a drink in nearly an hour." "my, ev, you look good today. where did you get all those new clothes?" asked pearl, as she came out of the bathroom. "the boy friend i told you about last night. he is the cause of all this dressing up, and do you notice the smell? i even put on my best perfume." "it sure smells good, all right." "it does now, but wait until i throw a few beers into me, and i'll be the only one in juarez that will smell like a cross between a violet and a swill barrel," laughed evelyn. "don't you girls think we ought to have something to eat before we start on this drinking tour?" "big boy, you think of the best things--food will do us a lot of good right now. come to think of it, i forgot to eat this morning. damned if i ain't hungry," answered evelyn. "where shall we go," asked pearl. "well--i think that the hilton coffee shoppe would be grand," suggested evelyn. "hey, look--big boy, you go on down to the cafe, and order for us, and we will be along in a few minutes--will you?" "oke, baby; what do you crave in the way of food?" "well, as for me--i'll have ham and eggs--what do you want, ev?" "the same, and lots of it." "now, look, you two--don't be all day," said big boy, as he went out the door, giving evelyn a wink. "pearl--" said evelyn, slowly, "do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" as she sat down on the bed. "why--i don't get you, ev, what do you mean?" "just this, honey--i like you--you're a good kid, but don't be foolish--now don't think i'm trying to tell you your business, but you see i've been down here for a long time and i know this border--oh, god, how well i know it." "what are you driving at, ev?" "honey, don't try to kid that guy--look here," said evelyn, showing pearl the hundred-dollar bill big boy had given her. "what's it for, ev?" "well, he's nuts about you--and he wants to marry you. of course, you know that already, and what's more, it's none of my business, but for your own good, don't try to string that guy along. he looks like a kid, that's true. he is as easy to handle as a kid, but pearl, he is a killer. i know him, and i know what he will do. so, if you want to marry him, and settle down, your nest will be feathered and in a big way, but don't try to kid him if you ain't serious--be frank about it--tell him the truth and then lay off him, or else be all for him. he gave me this money to talk for him, and to tell you what a great guy he is, and try to talk you into marrying him--i ain't telling you what to do and i ain't telling you what not to do--but don't kid him, and don't promise nothing you can't make good." "why, ev, i haven't known you for hardly twenty-four hours. i didn't even stop to think you had a serious side--you are a dear. sure, i know what you mean. now i'll tell you how i feel towards him. i don't love him, i never could. he's not my type, but when he gets around me, and puts his arms around me, and pulls me close, i can't hold out on him--he is the personification of satisfaction--oh, hell, ev, you know what i mean, don't you?" "i admit you ain't left much to my imagination, but i get you." "you see, ev, i am in love--but i know it is a hopeless love--but love, nevertheless--and it's harry hicks, the guy i went with when i left you last night in the cafe--that kid sure got under my skin." "well, he better stay from under them things." "you don't like harry, do you, ev?" "well,--i don't dislike him. i never thought of him as anything but a big kid and i always treated him as one--harry is a damn good guy as far as i know, and i don't think that he has an enemy in the world, but don't make the mistake that lots of the other girls have made with harry--he likes all the girls, and what's more, he couldn't be true to any one for five minutes, not even himself--he's like millions of other men; to him a woman is for one thing, and when he is through, he is through--so the only way to impress him is to never--never let him know that he means any more to you than the lowest cholo." "that seems to be the standard formula to make any man nuts for you." "oh--good--heavens, pearl, dear, we are forgetting big boy, and most of all to me, we are forgetting breakfast, even if it is almost dinner time," said evelyn, as they hurried to the street. "have you been waiting long?" asked pearl, as they sat down. "not long, but i had begun to be a little impatient." "did you order for us yet?" asked evelyn. "no, i thought i'd better wait, so i just had coffee, and decided to read the paper until you showed up." "any news?" asked pearl. "paper says that some old boy down below the border is sore because he ain't president, and is gathering troops back in the mountains to start a little revolution." "that ain't nothing new," said evelyn, "that's in every day's paper." "i'll bet it's something awful down here when a revolution does start," mused pearl. "awful is right--awfullest laugh in the country," answered evelyn. "have you and big boy ever been down here when one started?" "i'll say," answered evelyn, as she sipped her coffee. "i was over in juarez when the last one started." "it must be awful, all those guns." "yeah--the only kind of guns these mex wars are fought with is gonorrhea guns." "listen, honey," said big boy, "what are you doing tomorrow afternoon?" "nothing--why?" asked pearl. "well, i won't be able to see you tonight, i've some business to attend to, but tomorrow afternoon i thought you might like to go swimming some place." "oh--i would--wouldn't you, ev?" "i would not. i hate water, even for swimming, but that don't stop you two from going and having a good time." "well, i'll be seeing you, tomorrow afternoon at two o'clock, at your room, baby," as he picked up the checks and started for the door. "are you sure it's swimming he wants to meet you for?" asked evelyn, with a mouth full of eggs. "i don't know, ev--i can't figure it. i've never been in love before, and i don't know what it's like, but i think this is the real thing." "you mean with big boy?" exclaimed evelyn. "no--no--no--ev, honey, i mean harry hicks. when that kid took me in his arms last night out on that mountain, i went hook, line and sinker, and i don't know how to handle it." "i'm sorry, pearl, yet i'm happy--but there's only one thing can come from it, and that's--trouble--, but you got to expect that. you see, for every bit of fun you have in this racket, you have twice as much trouble, so my motto is--laugh, as long as you can, and take the rest of it with a grain of salt, so if you love harry--you go right ahead--let nothing stand in the way--make it grand while it lasts--then when it's over, you will have something to remember, and nothing can take that from you." "come on, ev, let's get going. it's early, but let's go on over to juarez and have a few snorts, what do you say?" "when you mention drinks, you're talking right up my alley." evelyn and pearl strolled out of the coffee shoppe, and down south el paso street, across in front of the paso del norte hotel, to wait for the juarez car. "my god, what you all doing standing here, not saying a word?" came a voice from behind them. "why, hello, mickey," said evelyn, as she turned and saw who it was. "hello, mickey," said pearl. "say, listen, you kids--got any dates for tonight?" asked mickey. "i ain't," said evelyn. "have you, pearl?" "i haven't." "well, there's three old guys, five days older than hell, throwing an all-night party in the rio bravo hotel, and they asked me and betty to get as many girls as we could. there's plenty to drink, plenty to eat--there will be lots of fellows there besides them old ones, and there's a chance to make a few dollars, and if you can't make any money--well--when they get drunk you can always go through their pockets," said mickey, in a voice that was supposed to be confidential, but still could be heard at least a block away. "what do you say, pearl?" asked evelyn. "do you think harry will be there?" "oh, heavens, be calm," as she lifted her hands in supplication. "yes," answered mickey, "he'll be there; you couldn't keep him away from them kind of parties. last one harry was on, he got so drunk he stripped stark naked and did a spanish down the hall." "i'll bet that was a sight," said evelyn. "oh, honey, that wasn't no sight at all--that big guy here they call big boy, well--he was as drunk as harry, and he got naked too, and took an umbrella and opened it, and used it for a parachute when he jumped from the second-story window." "is that the big boy we know?" asked pearl. "i don't know how well you know him," answered mickey, "but it's the one you was out in the car with last night." "why, jumping out of a second-story window like that, it's a wonder he didn't break his neck." "pearl, dear," said evelyn, "it wasn't his neck he lit on." "how did you know i was out in the car with big boy last night?" pearl asked mickey. "well--you see, i had been mixing my drinks, and i was sick, and i went outside to heave. well, i was sitting on the running board of the car on the off side, when you all got in, but i didn't sit there long." "why?" asked evelyn. "honey, riding a wild horse is tame beside trying to sit on that fender," laughed mickey. "well, i'll see you all tonight at the party, as soon as the bridge closes." she waved as she went on down the street. "don't you get sore at nothing anybody says to you--she is a good scout, pearl, and when you know her better you will like her, i'm sure." "oh--ev, why would i get sore--come, come, come--here is our car." pearl grabbed evelyn's hand and started running for the car. "my heavens," exclaimed evelyn, "this street car reminds me of some madam's parlor--there's five girls i know--hello, gang." "o. k., ev. how is the biggest liquor and beer consumer today?" asked one of the girls. "i'm fine. girls, this is pearl. she is a newcomer in our midst, and a good scout--pearl, this is the girls--find out their names for yourself. i knew what some of their names was last week, but only heaven knows what they are this week." the girls smiled and said hello to pearl, and all moved over for them to sit down. "ev, what's this i hear about a party tonight at the rio bravo hotel--have you heard about it yet?" "yeah--mickey finn, you know her, we just run into her at the corner, and she told us about it, and said for us to come. are you going?" "sure, we all are." "do you think it will be all right, ev?" asked pearl, under her breath. "i don't get you--how do you mean all right?" "well, i've never been on an all-night party in juarez--so naturally i'm curious--but what i mean is--can you get away with much over here without the mexicans landing you in jail?" "as long as there ain't no murder, or absolute destruction of property--you are pretty safe, but why bother--wait till you get in the can before you start worrying about it." juarez, with its lights twinkling in the glowing dusk--with its midnight purple mountains looking like big, futuristic pillows flanking it on three sides, the skies screaming, flaming, gold, crimson, varied colors of reds, shading into blue, darker blue, then deep blue, then to purple in the far east, with the sounds of laughing, running, playing dogs and children, sounds of a twanging guitar slightly out of tune, accompanied by a nasal but sincere mexican love song being sung to a senorita with dark eyes and broken, dirty teeth, and bosoms that would make a holstein cow's eyes bulge with envy--smells of all sorts drifted on the soft, gentle breeze, of tortillas, of beans frying with cheese, of chili sauces, of charcoal, of unwashed dirty bodies, of manure, both human and animal. a street car rattling by with its cargo of brilliantly painted cheeks, flashing smiles, syphilis-carrying, would-be, has-been, and are-to-be whores. signs advertising whiskeys, and liquors of all kinds, brilliant in color, flashed in the deepening dusk, their utter defiance at the american side of the border. the extra bartenders were coming on duty, extra waiters were appearing in respective places, rubbing their hands together like pawnbrokers, at the thought of the night's tips; at the thought of what could be taken out of the pockets of one too drunk to notice; at the thought of the tips that would be thrown at the entertainers that would roll where they could stoop and pick it up without being noticed; at the thought of drunken women's pocketbooks that can so easily be gone into in a crowded place without fear of being caught. this was saturday night, the biggest night of the week. "we are getting off here at the corner," said one of the five girls. "we are going to start with the gold palace, pearl; you and ev come along with us." evelyn started to rise. "thanks," said pearl, as she caught evelyn's arm, "we are going to ride around to the lobby no. . i've a friend around there to see on business--but we will see you at the party, if not sooner. i hope you all have some good luck tonight." "thanks, honey," called one of the girls, "i'm damned if we don't need it." "why didn't you come on and get off and get a drink? i don't think harry is there yet--it's a little early for him." "oh, ev, i just can't wait." "well, i admit you sure got it bad." "say, how do these parties usually end, and where?" "they usually end in the goddamnest fight, and just anywhere that they didn't start," answered evelyn. "do you think this one will end that way?" "i can't see why this one should be any different from any of the rest; besides, mickey finn is going to be there, and that's always the sign of a fight." hugo's lobby no. was brilliantly lighted, as ever, and much less crowded than the night before, owing to the early hour. as pearl and evelyn walked in, there were about fifteen or twenty people at the bar, and about three times as many in the cabaret having dinner. "hello, henry," called evelyn, "two whiskeys for two ladies." "coming up, ev." pearl felt two cool hands slip over her eyes, and a soft voice in her ear, that made her body quiver and caused a tight feeling in her stomach. "guess who, darling," said the voice in her ear. "hi--harry, you big louse," came from evelyn before pearl could say a word. "oh, gee, ev, you spoiled my game," said harry poutingly. "she ain't no game, harry--she's a sure thing," winked evelyn. harry took pearl in his arms, gave her a big hug, and then kissed her. "oh, harry--what will people think?" "look all around you," said evelyn, "not a soul has noticed you." "what are you having to drink, harry?" asked the bartender. "whiskey, pal," answered harry; then to pearl, "listen, honey, are you doing anything tonight? i'm going on a party, and it may be a bit rough, but would you like to come? i know you will have a good time." "i know all about the party, darling, and ev and i are both going, aren't we, ev?" "sure thing." "oh, that's great," said harry. "well, i got to be going now. i've got to get that band to playing, and start a little excitement in there, or the guests will kick. so long, honey, i'll see you at the party." "oh, henry, another whiskey for me," called evelyn. "what do you want, dear--whiskey or smelling salts?" "both," answered pearl. "do you really like him as much as that? no kidding, come clean." "honestly, cross my heart, i love him--like hell." "well, suppose you catch another dame cooing over him, and making love to him in a big way--then what?" "i'd cut enough meat off her rear end to feed the dogs for a week," said pearl, viciously. "well, i admit there are a lot of rear ends in this town that could stand a little cut off here and there, but some of them are so tough you would have to use a hack-saw to do it," tittered evelyn. "did you ever stop to think that big boy might feel the same way about you that you feel about harry? have you stopped to think of that, and have you stopped to think harry might feel about you the way you feel about big boy? now, honey, don't think i'm butting in, cause i ain't, but think about it, will you?" the rio bravo hotel, on the sixteenth of september street, is the class a hotel of the town. with the street cars running in front of it, with the railroad track on the side of it, a rip-snorting bar under it, and the numerous parties going on inside of it, it would hardly be a place one would pick out to spend a quiet evening, or get a night's sleep--so when one goes to the rio bravo, one does not go for anything less than a party--or maybe to earn two dollars, but, of course, that takes but a matter of a few minutes--in juarez, but as so many of the local population figure, why spend a dollar for a room when there are so many dark nooks and corners off the main street, and parked cars, whether your own or someone else's. the rooms in this establishment are furnished with only the bare necessities of a room--a bed, a chair, sometimes a rocker, sometimes with the rockers broken off, but still used as a chair, a rug on the floor, but never a big one, or a good one, and the bathroom, but never in the history of juarez has the hotel water heater ever been known to work, never any toilet paper, but a pile of newspapers stacked in the corner, a mirror, a cracked one, but still usable, if you are not particular--and one seldom is--when one is on a party. it was twelve-thirty, the mad rush for the international bridge was over, the gates separating the two republics were closed until six o'clock in the morning. "think we better stop and have some coffee before we go on up to the hotel, what do you think?" said evelyn, as she and pearl walked arm in arm unsteadily up the street. "if we gotta do a lot of drinking up there, it wouldn't be a bad idea," answered pearl. "here's as good a place as any." she took evelyn's arm and turned her into a little mexican cafe. they sat and sipped their coffee for a while, said nothing to each other, or to anyone else, as they were the only ones in the place except the little weezened black waiter, who could easily have been mistaken for a negro, had it not been for his straight black hair. "all through?" asked evelyn. "yeah--let's get going and see what this joint of joy is going to be like." they left the place, and walked up the street toward the rio bravo. as they were crossing the railroad tracks next to the hotel, evelyn stopped, "good lord, look coming--there's ruby, myrtle, betty, billie, lillian, virginia, annie, laura, irene, marie, and i don't know any of the others." "well, we must not be late for the party, anyhow, seeing that they are just arriving." "jees--there's probably twice that many already up there," answered evelyn. "where do they all come from?" "a party in this town does the same thing to these hookers that cheese does to rats." "let's wait a minute and let them go on in," said pearl. they waited until the girls had disappeared: "come on, dearie, we might as well go on and crash it and see what's going on." they went up the steps and into the lobby, which was rather bare, with nothing but a few leather chairs, showing considerable use, and a desk at the back near the stairs. "oh, senorita evelyn, i have not see you for so long time, i have near forget what you look like," bowed the clerk, who was possessed of a monstrous stomach. "hi--guts--we are looking for that party that's going on here tonight." "a thousand pardons, senorita, there is five parties going tonight. you will look and see which one you are invited to. i need not go up with you--you will hear these parties long before you see them. have a very good time, senorita." "come back here, you slut--do you hear me--come back here with my leg," came a voice, as evelyn and pearl neared the second floor. "you can just go to hell, you cheap, lousy bastard, having the nerve to promise me two dollars, and then when i'm ready to go, you saying you wasn't going to give me a dime--goddam you, you just try and get this leg back," said mickey finn, as she came to the head of the stairs, with an artificial leg under her arm, with the shoe and sock still on it. "what's the trouble, mickey?" asked evelyn, as she and pearl came up. "why, can you believe a guy would have the nerve to pull a trick like that on me--promising me my money, and then not giving it to me? i'm taking this leg and hock it--to hell with him--the thing that makes me sore is anyone trying to pull a lousy trick like that on me--can you believe it?" fumed mickey. "come back here with my leg, you bitch. if i get my hands on you, i'll wring your damn neck." "go to hell," screamed mickey, "you'll pay me more than two dollars to get this leg back." "pipe down, mickey," shushed evelyn, "if guts hears you, he'll raise hell right." "a thousand pardons, senoritas, but what is this trouble--and you--what are you doing with the senor's leg?" came the voice of guts from behind the trio. "you seen me come in here with this guy, didn't you, guts? he paid for the room, didn't he? well, after he had his fun he refused to pay me my two dollars, and i'm damned if i ain't taking his false leg for the bill--and come to think of it, what have you got to say about it? are you for me, or are you against me? you remember, i know of a couple of dirty deals i could tell the custom and federal authorities about--and by god, you know me, guts," frothed mickey. "ah, senorita--i am so sorry. why you did not call me before? you are my friend, and no one can say different," answered guts, as he pulled his enormous belly up, and with a scowl on his near-black face, started down the hall toward the half-opened door. "take that leg away from that slut," ordered the man, leaning against the dresser to support himself, as guts and the three girls came into the room. "why have you refuse to pay the senorita?" asked guts. "refuse to pay her--why, the damn liar--i have paid her." "you are just lying because there's some other people here. you ain't give me a red cent, and what's more, you are giving me ten dollars or i'm taking the leg. ain't i right, guts?" "si, senorita, you are right." "hand the leg over and i'll give you the ten dollars to get rid of you." "all right, i'll give it to you, but don't you try to pull nothing funny or i'll take that thing away from you again, and beat the hell out of you with it," said mickey, as she handed him the leg. "thanks," said the man, as he took the leg, and reached down the top of it and pulled out a roll of bills, "here's your ten," as he dug it out of a roll of fifties and hundreds. "i'll be damned!" said mickey, as they all left the room, "that's what i get for getting chicken-hearted, and giving it back to him. every time i get sympathetic i lose money." "cheer up, mickey--let's find the drinks," said evelyn. "well, you ain't got far to look. they are right above us on the next floor," answered mickey, as she made for the stairs. "well, nobody can't say it ain't starting off well--if we all don't end in the mex jail, it will be a miracle of fate." as they reached the third floor a sight greeted their eyes that would have made the old roman gatherings look like child's play. there were couples everywhere in the hall, some fully dressed, some partially dressed, others practically nude, all oblivious of each other, while in the room there were less clothes but many more bodies, laying around on the floor, sprawled on chairs, on the bed, on the bathroom floor, while the bathtub was piled high with ice and bottles of every description; the connecting room to the bathroom had been opened, and an old phonograph was scratching the mexican national anthem, while a couple scantily clad, both male and female, in ladies' step-ins, insisted on doing their idea of the rhumba, which consisted mostly of the male part of the team goosing the female with the third finger of the hand, while she leaped, and screamed, with elephantine grace, much to the joy of the spectators, who were beginning to undress and join the dance, midst shouts and screams of gaiety. of the three hosts that gave the party, two had passed to the realm of unconsciousness, while the third sat stark nude on the dresser, with his toupee in one hand, and a bottle of whiskey in the other, wasting no time in trying to join his friends in the happy state of unconsciousness. "looks like good pickings to me," said mickey. "everybody is undressed--it won't be no trouble to go through their pockets." "good god, the bathroom is the place we are looking for. that is where all the drinks are. come, come, my dear, let us not waste time," said evelyn, as she stepped over the sprawled bodies on the floor. "jees, this takes the prize--i been on lots of parties, but never on one like this," said pearl, as she followed evelyn, who by this time was opening a fresh, cold bottle of whiskey. "why, the hell--will they put whiskey on ice." "well, you couldn't expect anybody in this condition to know any different, could you, ev?" "you couldn't expect people who get in this condition to give a damn in the first place," said evelyn, as she took a long swig of the freshly opened bottle, "even i don't care after the first ten drinks." "quick--give me a slug of that stuff--if i ever get sober on a thing like this, and actually realize what it's all about, i'd do a nose dive out of my hotel window some morning," said pearl, as evelyn handed her the bottle. "come to think of it--i ain't seen hide nor hair of harry, and he said he would be here." "well, pearl, dear, when you see a pile of whores about ten deep, dig to the bottom of them and you will find harry--at least, that's where he usually is." "oh--jees--that's lousy whiskey--open another bottle--that tastes like tobacco juice." "there's going to be trouble here this night as sure as the world stands--" said evelyn under her breath. "i just saw juan moros pass the door--and that's a bad sign, as sure as you're born." "who is juan moros?" "he's the boy friend of negro noche, and he has been on the trail of irene, the blonde girl that came in with the crowd we saw come in just ahead of us. you know irene, the tall blonde--he is crazy about her." "well, what's that got to do with us?" asked pearl. "plenty--and in more ways than one--negro noche is the one woman in the town to be afraid of. she has been pulled in by the government officials several times for smuggling dope over the border into the united states--but they have never been able to convict her. she was arrested not long ago for smuggling chinese across, and several attempts have been made to frame her, but no one has ever been able to pin it on her, and now she has threatened to kill any woman that she catches the boy friend with, and what's more, irene is crazy about him. now, ain't that cause for trouble?" "well, i can't see what that has got to do with this party. he is here and so is irene, but that is no cause for trouble--surely she wouldn't come up here and start trouble," reasoned pearl. "which proves conclusively that you don't know negro noche." "you might add that i don't want to." "well--well, hello, henry, you devil--i thought you went home to your wife every night," said evelyn, as a bartender she knew came into the bathroom. "well," laughed henry, "she can't say nothing if i don't get through work in time, and get locked on this side of the river, can she?" "not unless you pull that gag once too often--here, have a drink," as she offered him the bottle. "well, pearl, what do you think of the party?" asked henry, as he turned to pearl, who was looking out into the other room, trying to see harry. "henry, my darling, since you inquire, i think it is the most charming affair--in fact, i've never been on a party where so little self-consciousness was present--in plain english, it is the damndest thing i've ever seen--let's drink to it," as she raised her bottle and clinked it against his. the phonograph in the adjoining room had stopped, but everyone was singing instead. everybody had joined the first couple in the rhumba, making the scene more hilarious by not having any clothes on at all. "hi, baby," said harry, as he staggered into the bathroom. "oh, harry, i'm glad you came. i was afraid you might change your mind," said pearl, happily. "where you are concerned, baby, i never change my mind--let's have a drink." "come on, henry," said evelyn, "let's leave these two in here. it's plain to be seen they don't need us." "ev, you're a damn good mind-reader," said harry. "here, take a couple more bottles with you, so you won't have to bother us." "thanks, i'll just do that little thing," as she took two extra bottles. "ah, baby--i want you so," said harry, as he pulled pearl to him and smothered her with kisses. "come on, let's undress and go in the next room and join the dance." "oh, no, harry, i've never done anything like that." "oh, baby--baby--don't you trust me? have another drink." "yes, but--" "no buts," said harry, as he began to unfasten her dress. "come on, i'll help you undress and then you have to help me." "harry--please--i don't really want to undress." "you see--you see--you don't love me, that proves it." "oh, yes i do, harry--i like you so much, but i can't see where my undressing could have anything to do with it." "that just proves it--proves it right there--you don't care a thing about me." "harry, if you were sober you wouldn't do a thing like this. i'm not sober by any means myself, but i don't want to undress." "you see--you just want to spoil my whole night." "oh, all right--if my stripping will make you happy, i might as well strip--give me that bottle. i'll have to get a little drunker to enjoy this--here goes," as she put the bottle to her mouth, taking long, big swallows. "atta girl--i knew you would be a good scout," as he tried to help her get her dress off over her head. pearl took off her dress, laid it over a chair, took off her step-ins, laid them with her dress, keeping only her shoes and stockings on. "oh, gee, baby--you sure look good to me--i'm just crazy about you." "all right--you keep your word--you undress, too." "sure, i'll undress," said harry, as he started to take off his pants, shirt, and underwear, and laid them on the chair with pearl's things, standing before her in only his shoes and socks. "let's have a couple more drinks, harry, darling--you know, i believe i'm going to enjoy this after all." "i know i am," as he put his huge arms around her cool, pink body. "well--so help me--what the hell is coming off here?" said evelyn, as she came into the bathroom, her face blank in wonderment. "oh, jees--this is great--let's have a drink," said henry, as he came in behind evelyn. "you know, ev, we might as well join the merry, mad gang--what do you say?" "i dare you, henry," answered evelyn, as she started to strip with speed. pearl, in harry's arms, leaped into the milling, singing, drinking, wrestling mob, in the semi-dark room, held tight in each others' arms, naked bodies rubbed against each other, strangers kissed passionately, lovers kissed more passionately, enemies kissed less passionately, but kissed--in their drunken orgy they had forgotten what they were enemies about--couples who had been dancing longer than the others fell on the floor, locked in each others' arms, their legs stuck grotesquely in the air above them, while their burning wet lips were pressed tightly against each others' mouths, stopping only long enough to take a drink. a shriek from the bathroom--evelyn and henry leaped into the mob, naked as the rest--"shake it up, baby," screamed evelyn, as she and henry in a tight embrace started singing and dancing with the rest; as the other couples fell to the floor newer and fresher couples joined the throng--only to fall later on the floor, to continue the party with mad, wet kisses, and--? "my snow-white darling, i have love you so veer long, i weel never love but you--i have never love no one but you--only you--my darling--my darling--" came a soft voice near pearl's ear, and as she looked closely, she saw it was the tall, handsome moros, with the blonde irene in his arms. "get your goddam foot out of my face," yelled a drunken voice. "my humble pardon, senor--i am looking for some one," answered the deep, sober voice of a mexican woman. "why the hell don't you turn on the light, then?" "that, senor, is a veer good idea," as she returned to the door and snapped on a flood of bright, red light. couples that were still on their feet, stopped dead still. couples that were on the floor, stopped whatever they were doing--all looking towards the door, where the mexican woman was standing, her hand still on the light button. not a soul moved. negro noche stood motionless--her pock-marked face covered with a heavy layer of snow white powder that is typical of all mexican women. eyes gleaming, breathing heavily, she pulled a heavy, dark-blue, -calibre automatic from under her dirty coat, as a grim smile broke the death-like mask that was her face. six shots rent the dead silence. juan and irene lay in each others' arms, just as they had a few minutes before, but they knew it not. negro noche had accomplished her purpose--her lover and her rival were to annoy her no more--the gun silent in her hand, finger still on the light button, a blue wisp of smoke rose from the end of the gun, as the blood from the two bodies rapidly spread on the cheap, worn carpet--pandemonium broke loose. pearl ran into the bathroom to get her clothes--evelyn was already there--"my god, what will we do?" asked pearl. "this ain't no time to sing frankie and johnnie--don't wait to put your clothes on--run for it," answered evelyn, as she grabbed pearl and started for the hall. women were screaming, crying--men were yelling and cursing, running up and down the hall, some too excited to realize that they had on no clothes--others just running around in circles. as evelyn and pearl came to the stairs, guts was on his way up. he started to ask evelyn and pearl what had happened, but they brushed by and on down the stairs. as they rounded the second floor, they saw mickey finn on her hands and knees looking through a key-hole. "my god, mickey," said evelyn, excitedly, "don't waste no time--get out of here quick." "what's happened--what was all them shots?" as she rose off her knees and came to them. "negro noche--shot juan and irene--don't waste a minute--we have got to get on the u. s. side somehow." they all three ran down the stairs into the lobby, and out the front door, onto the street. "down the railroad tracks towards the bridge." "we can't cross that bridge," said mickey. "i know it," answered evelyn, "but it's dark down that way, and we can put our clothes on--come on," as they ran down the tracks. they stopped in the deep darkness and put their clothes on. "now, listen to me," said evelyn, "i have a plan. we will get back over on lysol lane, and go in one of those all-night bars, and i'll telephone to tony, a taxi driver i know, where to meet us." "do you think it will work?" asked pearl. "it's got to," said mickey, as they started. "now, you two stand around the corner--i'll stagger in this dump, as though nothing had happened, and use the phone." "can't i go with you?" "no, you stay with mickey--if they see all three of us they will be sure to suspect something, and i don't crave to get mixed up in this mess--stand back there in the dark," as she put on her best drunken smile and staggered into the place. "hi, senor--can a lady use your phone?" "si, senorita--right this way," he led her over to the phone booth in the corner. "gracia, senor," as she went in and closed the door, lifted the receiver--"el paso operator, please--hello--el paso operator--give me main eight-eight--yeah--hello, all-night taxi? let me talk to tony. what--oh, that's you, tony? listen, get a load of this--this is ev, you know--yeah--take one of the plain cars you got there, and cruise along the smelter road near the southern pacific bridge, and look out for three of us. no--no--no--it's not liquor--don't ask questions over the phone--make it snappy--good-bye." she hung up the receiver, and staggered out of the booth. "adios, senor," as she went out the door and around the corner, to mickey and pearl. "i just heard the ambulance and the police wagon going up the street," said mickey. "tony is going to meet us up on the smelter road," said evelyn. "we'll go down these side streets until we get to the river, and then we'll follow the levee on around to where it is only about twenty feet wide, and about three feet deep. i know the very place. we won't have any trouble if we hurry--come on." so saying, they started for the river, down dark alleys and side streets, of which there are plenty in juarez. they stumbled on through the darkness, half running, sometimes walking. "i'm sure i hear someone following us," said pearl, as they neared the river. "your life ain't worth two cents over here in this section at this hour of the night," answered evelyn. "let's run," said mickey, as they started on down the levee. "how far is this place you know about, ev?" asked pearl, out of breath, as they slowed to a fast walk again. "about a mile or more," answered evelyn, "but it's our only chance." it seemed like ten miles to the three, as they ran stumbling through the darkness, when a flare lit up the sky ahead of them to the right. "what's that?" asked pearl. "thank heaven, it's the smelter," said mickey. "we are almost there." "here's the place i mean," said evelyn, as she pointed to a very narrow place in the river. "now, let's all take hands, and hold tight. the only thing we have to be careful of is the quicksands--they are as treacherous as hell," as they started to wade into the river. "watch your step," said evelyn. "jees--that water is cold--hold tight to my hand, pearl, and don't let go," said mickey, as she took hold of pearl, who was in the middle. "we are in the midst of a lot of quicksand here--i can't seem to find bottom any further than i am standing. let go of me, pearl, and i'll wade around a bit and see if i can find a more solid place." "oh, god--now, ev, don't do that. don't let go at all here in the water--we will all wade together." "hold tight, then, and we will wade up the side here a ways, and maybe we will find more solid bottom," as they started up the side of the stream. slowly they waded in until they were in about five feet of the bank. "i think we are going to make it all right," said evelyn, as she was almost jerked off her feet by pearl falling to her knees in the water, and mickey went out of sight. "hold on to me," gasped pearl, "i've still got hold of her--she is in a sand-hole," as she rose to her feet, pulling mickey's head above water, helping her to get solid footing again. evelyn reached back and took hold of mickey's free hand, and slowly they reached the bank and climbed out on solid ground again. "are you all right, mickey?" came from evelyn and pearl at the same time. "yeah--i'm o. k., but i'd been a goner if pearl hadn't had a good hold on me. that hole i fell in back there didn't have no bottom, at least, i didn't feel any--my god, what a night," as she stooped over and felt of her stockings to see if her money was still there. "yeah, i still got my money, but i'll have to dry it, but wet money is better than no money." "listen--what is that i hear? it sounds--there it is--somebody trying to catch another car--it's the police siren and it's coming this way as sure as you're born," said evelyn, "i'll go up near the road and see if i see anything of tony. you watch me and when you see me motion to you, come a-running, because if we are caught at this, it will be just too bad," as she started toward the road. "stoop down," said mickey, "we will keep low to the ground and go as close to the road as we can, so we won't have far to run when ev motions." bright lights came into sight, of a speeding car coming from town, as evelyn came up on the edge of the road, and as the car came near her, its brakes began to scream, as lights following it came into view, with the shrieking of the police siren. "quick, get in," said the voice of a man, as the car came to a stop. "the cops are wise." "oh, jees, where are pearl and mickey?" as she jerked the door of the car open. "here," as they came alongside of evelyn. tony shifted the gears of the car, and was moving, as the three pulled and helped each other in, the other car nearing, with the siren screaming louder and louder. tony shot into the night. "lay down on the floor, girls, and get ready for the ride of your life. if i can beat the cops to the fork of the mesa road, we have a chance--if not--we are jail-house bound for some time to come." "what the hell are we passing that's throwing all that light," asked pearl. "it's some cement company," answered evelyn, as they went into darkness again. "hey, tony, how do you think they found out about this?" asked mickey. "one of them lousy telephone operators tipped them off, that is the only way they could have found out--the dirty fluzey." "good god--i hope we get away from them all right," murmured pearl, as the car lurched and shot through the deepening dark. "are we leaving them behind yet, tony?" "not yet we ain't, not till we get off these curves, but when we get on that straight stretch of road, i'll leave 'em plenty far behind." "hey, tony," said evelyn, as she got up on her knees, with her hands on the back of the front seat, "you don't think they could have sent a car out on the mesa road, maybe to head us off, do you?" "well, that's a chance we got to take, but i don't think they would have had time even if they had thought, which they probably didn't--but i'll tell you something--we gotta leave that bunch quick when we hit that straight piece of road, if we don't they will try to shoot the rear tires off. you girls stay on the floor, in case they do shoot." "o. k., tony," said evelyn, as she got back down on the floor. "get ready, girls, we are coming to that straight part," as the car fairly felt like it was leaving the earth. "we must be doing seventy or more--at least, if anything does happen while we are going this fast, we won't have to worry about it, anyhow," said mickey, as she lay jouncing in her wet, sloppy dress, covered with sand and mud. "i hope you don't take cold, mickey. you know you got your head wet. i was lucky, that's the only thing i didn't get wet," from pearl. "well--" said evelyn, "if them guys start shooting at us, there'll be more water in the car, and it won't have come from the river." "i wonder what became of harry?" "i'll bet he ain't worrying about you," said evelyn. "i don't know--at least, i hope he won't get in jail." "jail, hell," said mickey, "he came down them steps ahead of you two, and i mean way ahead of you. them shots hadn't no more than stopped when harry come down so fast it would take two people to see him, one to see him coming and one to see him going." "what was that hit the car?" asked evelyn, as she raised up. "just a bullet bouncing off--but they will have to shoot fast now, i'm doing eighty--and what's more, i'm leaving them behind. we will be fairly safe in a minute or so, unless as you said, ev--about the other car on the mesa road, and i don't think we will have any trouble from that." "damn, i hope not--i'd hate to have to sit in jail with these wet clothes on," said mickey. "i don't care much about setting in jail wet or dry." "you two don't have to worry--tony is a good driver, and we got a good chance of getting away," reasoned evelyn. "well, suppose they start looking for us, to question us?" asked pearl. "well--" said evelyn, "here's our story--this goes for you too, tony--pearl, you stayed with me tonight in my apartment--and you, tony, you stayed with mickey, and remember, we all went to bed about twelve-thirty, and don't let them jar you loose from that story, so if we all tell the same story, and stick to it, what can they do?" "look what a break you're getting, tony," laughed mickey, "you stayed with me tonight." "i suppose you are going to tell me now that i owe you two dollars," laughed tony, "but say--what the hell happened over there--a fight?" "hell, no, i wish it had been only a fight--but it wasn't--negro noche shot her boy friend and irene." "jees, ev, are they both dead?" "yeah--they never knew what hit them." "no wonder you were so anxious to get back on this side tonight." "how soon before we reach that mesa fork, tony?" asked mickey. "in just a few minutes now--look back and see how close those lights are." "oh, hell," answered evelyn, as she looked out the back of the car. "they are damn near out of sight, tony." "good--we'll make it all right now--hold tight back there--i'm making the turn--we are nearing the fork." the screaming of rubber on the concrete, as the big car turned the corner on two wheels. "now, you girls can get on the seat and rest a bit, instead of laying on that floor, all crowded up." "another night like this and i'll swear off for good," said mickey, as she sat up on the seat. "swear off what?" asked evelyn. "well, off booze, for one thing." "you swore off once before, didn't you?" "yeah--and that very night i was arrested in el paso for vag." "how long was you off liquor?" "till i got out of jail." "how long was that?" "two hours." the car was moving at a terrific rate of speed, up grade, and down grade. "see if you see any lights coming behind us," said tony. "we won't be able to tell until you reach the top of the next grade, but i'll keep a sharp look-out," answered evelyn, as she turned half around in the seat. "just think," said pearl, "this time last night i was on this road about this time, but how different it was." "well, i've been on this road plenty of times, and no two times have been alike," answered mickey. "there's lights coming, tony, but they are a long ways back, and it may not be the police car, anyhow." "o. k., ev, but i'll just keep moving pretty fast." "listen, ev, will you come over and stay with me tonight?" asked pearl. "why?" "well, i don't want to spend the rest of the night alone--will you?" "sure." they came into the city limits, but there was no sign of trouble. tony slowed down to an ordinary speed, so as not to attract attention. "listen--" said mickey, "why don't you two come and spend the night at our place--we have a furnished house, five rooms, three bedrooms, living-room, kitchen, and all that goes with it--you know the place, ev, that little brick house me and betty rented out on myrtle avenue. what do you say?" "whatever pearl says is all o. k. with me," answered evelyn. "well, i have something to drink out there." "good," said pearl, quickly. "we'll go." "hey, tony, you know where my joint is, don't you?" "i should, by this time. i've took you there enough--when you was so lit you didn't know where it was yourself." they arrived at mickey's place in a few minutes, and it was just as mickey had described it, and very tastily furnished in pinks and blues, with a faint odor of incense in the still, cool air. "come on in, tony, and have a drink," as the girls got out of the car. "o. k." they went into the rooms, snapping on the lights, then all heading for the kitchen by instinct. pearl called evelyn aside--talking in low tones, as mickey got out the bottle of whiskey and set it on the table. "help yourself, tony, while i see what the conference is about." "what do you think?" "what do i think about what?" "about how much to pay tony for his trouble tonight," said evelyn. "well," from pearl. "if it hadn't been for him, i don't know what we would have done, and i think we should at least give him ten dollars apiece--what do you think?" "it's all right by me, and here's my ten to prove it," as she dug the wet money out of her stocking. both evelyn and pearl dug into their clothes from the neck, and produced the ten apiece. "tony," said evelyn, as she turned to where he was standing, "will thirty bucks be all right for your trouble tonight?" "ah--nuts. pay me my regular three bucks and forget about the rest. you have to work pretty hard for that money, and what's more, i got a real kick out of that run tonight." "the hell you say," from pearl. "you take this dough--what do you think we are? i admit i'm new down here, and you are a good scout, but you ain't no friend of mine if you don't take this," as she handed the money toward him. "girlie, you're a good scout, and i tell you what i'll do. if it will make you feel any better, i'll take it--but remember this--when you want anything from me, or want me to take you any place or do anything for you, and you ain't got the dough--call me, and any time you need some dough yourself--i know you girls run short lots of times--don't forget--call me. now, i'll be going," as he took his cap and started for the door. "good-bye," from all three girls. "if i hear anything, i'll give you a ring on the phone and tip you off," as he closed the door behind him. "hell's fire. give me a drink, quick," said evelyn, as she began to undress where she stood. "i've seen funny sights, but i would have loved to have been a bystander and seen us three wading across that river. it wasn't funny then, but mickey, when you come up out of that water, i almost broke down, as dark as it was down there, you was funny looking--" laughingly. "it's a damn good thing pearl had as good hold on me as she had, or i'd been a goner." "do you think there will be much of a stink about this killing? you know, irene is an american citizen, and she was shot on the mex side," said pearl. "well--" said evelyn slowly, "you can't tell just what will come of this. the real trouble will come from juan moros' people, if there is any trouble at all. his old man is a political power down in that country--" "that shows what you know about it," said mickey bitterly. "when anything happens to an american outside of the u. s., it's just too bad. when trouble starts down here the american consul is the first one to run for the bridge. our government figures that if you are out of your own country, that's your business--and it's your business to protect yourself. look at nicaragua, panama, haiti, as well as our nearby mexico. when anyone of our american citizens are knocked off, said government sends a note of apology to our consul, saying they are sorry--but that don't bring your life back. believe me, if you are an american, and you're in some other country, my advice is to keep your mouth shut, or affect an english accent." "well, surely they will do something with that woman that did the shooting," argued pearl. "but my god, ev, she killed one of her own people, and in cold blood." "yes, dear--he was a mex, all right, but when she tells the mex judge how he broke her heart, and how she found him in the arms of a milk-white gringo--it's a ten-to-one shot that the judge will weep for her broken heart, and tell her that she has done her country a favor--in shooting a cur that would so scorn his own countrywoman." "well, you said that there might be trouble from his people, that his father was a big mex politician." "well, in that case, if his father isn't tied up at the present in some revolution of his own, he may come here--or send one of his loyal men, and cut negro noche loose from some of her vital spots." "i've been on some hot parties, and i've seen a lot of things happen, but tonight takes the prize," mused pearl. "there's not much of the night left," said mickey. "let's get to bed and sleep a little of this off." "pearl, didn't i hear you say you had a date with big boy this afternoon--to go swimming?" "yeah--he asked me, and you, too, ev." "are you going?" "sure, might as well. i can't lose nothing--i'll get up around noon and go over to the room, and wait for him." "you'll probably find him at the room waiting for you, if i know anything about men, and if i don't know anything about 'em, there ain't nobody who does. where did mickey go?" "i'm in bed," came from one of the bedrooms. "you two pick out the bed you want to sleep in and go to it when you are ready. good night." "good night." "say, i'm ready to turn in now, are you, pearl?" "yeah--let's have another little drink before we go to bed." "that's my idea, too--a drink--and a big one," said evelyn. "listen, ev--when i made up my mind to come down here, i only had one thought in mind, and that was to stay a little while and make some money, and get away while i could--you know what i mean, to get--well, to get away before it got me--do you know what i mean?" "sure, kid, i know what you mean, only you're too damn nice to say it for fear of hurting my feelings. you mean to get away before you get like me--and mickey--and that gang you were with tonight." "well, i don't quite mean it like that--i mean--" "listen, honey, i know just how you feel--i only hope you can do what you want to. when i came down here, i had the same idea, but i let this damn place get me. now i couldn't leave it, no matter how hard i tried. i guess the only way i'll ever leave it is in a box." "i don't quite know what to do. i'm kind of puzzled since tonight--the party, the shooting, and all. maybe i've had a little too much to drink--or not enough--i--i--well, i ought never, never think, nobody should ever think, especially about the past--oh, well, let's have another drink." "well, if you could be bothered with big boy, you could feather your nest for good--honey, that means an awful lot these days--not having to worry about the rent, not having to put up with men that you hate the sight of, especially when you have to be nice, to make the lousy two dollars that they hand out grudgingly, and think that they are doing you a good turn--but, of course, if you can't go him--well, what's the use to try?" "i've been thinking about that myself--and i'm afraid it wouldn't work out. first, i don't care a thing about him, and he would be so jealous of me my life wouldn't be safe, if he caught me talking to anyone else, and knowing what i've been, if he ever got mad at me he would be sure to throw it up to me--and i'm afraid i couldn't stand that." "well, if i'm not mistaken, you do care for somebody else, don't you? and if my guess is right--it's harry, ain't it?" "yeah--you're right, all right, it's harry. he don't even know my name, and i don't know a thing about him, but jees, how i love that kid--ah, nuts, one would be as bad as the other; i would be so jealous of harry every time he was out of my sight for five minutes, i'd think he was with some other woman, and what's more, i'd be right--second, he is not the marrying kind, that is, he don't marry my kind--that's damn certain. ah--to hell with both of them, i'll take 'em all on that's got the price. what the hell am i mooning about? let's have another drink." "o. k., we will have another drink, but pearl, you are only fooling yourself--you may say to hell with them for now, but when you get up today, you will feel different about them. i know--i've said the same thing every night for the past five years. you can't settle it like that--if it were only possible to settle one's feelings like that it would make a lot of difference in people's lives--tomorrow you will go on thinking you can see harry every night, and how you can chisel big boy at the same time, without the other being positive of just what you are doing--honey, i know what i'm talking about. five years ago, when i came to this border, i was the toast of the town--i know i don't look it, but i was sure a looker in those days, and i had my way any time i wanted it--but i was just like you--i was going to make a pile of dough, and make a getaway while i could, and marry some good, honest, quiet guy that would never suspect me of having been what i was. yeah--i was foolish, but--i guess we are all foolish like that at times--oh, god, if i could only call back those five years, what wouldn't i give, but what's the use, i've drawn my own cards, it's up to me to play them. you say you want to get out of this--then you take the money you have, and what i've got, and you catch the first train--don't wait--don't wait for anything--most of all, don't wait for your own thoughts to catch up with you--just go and go quick, but you won't--what's the use--oh, what's the use." "you're right, ev, what's the use? but there's one thing--i'm going to do the thing i originally planned; i'm one hooker that's going to get the dough and make the getaway. i'm going to do just what you suggested--i'm going to see harry every time i can, and i'm going to get all i can off big boy--come on, let's get some sleep." "honey, i'm for you hook, line and sinker. i'll also take the bottle and put it under the pillow in case i wake up thirsty." "you know, ev, i've only known you for a little over twenty-four hours, but it seems i've known you for years, and you're a damn good scout--good night." "good night, kid," said evelyn, as she took a nip from the bottle. they went to bed, to sleep the sleep of the just, and the hours slipped by as though they were seconds, until-- "my god, what is that, a fire alarm?" asked evelyn, as she raised up in bed. pearl was still sleeping. "it's that damn phone," growled mickey, as she stumbled to it. "who the hell could be calling at this time of night--or day? hello--what do you want? what? oh, it's you, tony--what's up? oh, yeah, have they been able to trace the car, do you think? do you think they will trace you? thanks, tony, i'll see you later," as she hung up. "what's up," yelled evelyn, from the bed. "well, for one thing, there's headlines in the papers about the shooting last night, and tony said the police were down there this morning, and questioned everybody on the place, and the boss lied and said that tony hadn't left the place between twelve and six this morning. he says he don't know if they suspect him or not, and the police said there was only one woman in the car--so they must be all balled up--what do you think?" "what's all the trouble, and what time is it?" said pearl, as she raised up in bed. "it was tony called," answered evelyn. "what time is it, mickey, or is your time-piece working?" "it's one-thirty," called mickey from the kitchen. "oh, good heavens, i must get to the room, i don't even remember what time i had the date with big boy." "it don't matter what time you had the date with him--he'll wait if you are late," from evelyn, as she climbed slowly out of bed. "oh, my, i'll never be the same. i'm so stiff i can hardly stand up." "you spent all of last night getting that way," said mickey. "getting how?" "getting stiff." "i know, mickey dear, but the stiff i mean is not the kind of stiff you mean." "you better be careful, ev," said pearl. "you might catch pneumonia from being in that river." "you are wrong there--the only thing you will catch from being in that river is hydrophobia, and i think i had that when i was a virgin," laughed evelyn. "good heavens, ev," said mickey, "was you ever a virgin?" "well, there has always been a doubt in my mind about that--you see, if i ever was--it's been so long ago my memory fails to recognize the fact." "it must be grand to be a virgin," from pearl. "yeah--but think of the fun you miss," said mickey. "i sure remember the time i stopped being a virgin, and do i remember the one who put a stop to it!" "what was he like?" asked pearl. "and--what was you like?" "well, i was a big, green, corn-fed country girl, in the corn and bible belt in kansas, wasn't hard to look at (of course, that's before i had all these scars on this pan of mine)--and the guy--was the son of the rural mail carrier, who had just come out of the navy, and what he knew was plenty, and i had always read what devils sailors were with the women--i guess i was just as curious as he was ambitious. come on in the kitchen and i'll put the coffee on the stove, and finish my confession." "for god's sake, make that coffee strong--i sure need it," said evelyn, as she and pearl followed mickey in the kitchen, and sat down at the table. "oh, i forgot--i'll get the cups and saucers," as she rose from the table and went to the cupboard. "go ahead with that dirty story you started to tell us," said pearl. "one of my pet weaknesses is the true story of how, why, and where trollops like us three came from, and what caused it." "well, as i was saying, i was as green as they come, and i had already spurned, so to speak, the advances of the hired hand, which he made to me one day in the barn. we drove to church as usual on sunday, in the goddamndest rig you ever saw, a buckboard buggy with two horses. dad and mother sat in the seat, and me, being the only child, i stood up in the back and held on to the seat, and there i was, with my skirt and underskirts and drawers starched so stiff that when i sat down it sounded like somebody breaking macaroni in a cooking pot, hair done up in the latest, two big buns over each ear--when i look back at that now, i have all i can do to keep from screaming with laughter at the way i must have looked. well, i was introduced to jerry at the church, and he asked me if he could take me home in his buggy--that is, it was his old man's buggy that he had borrowed for the purpose. mother and dad thought it would be lovely if he drove me home, so they went on ahead when church was over, and left me with jerry. of course, him having been places and seen and done things, i was a pushover for him. when i look back at it, i must have been a panic. he drove off the main road, and said we should tie the horse, and go for a lovely walk under the trees. i was timid at first, as we sat on the ground under an old pine tree. he kissed me, and i wasn't so keen on it, then he took me in his arms, and it done something to me, and i came right back at him. in my ignorance i decided that i would show him that us country girls was just as up to date as any of those girls he met in foreign countries, and i stopped at nothing--well, that was the memorable time when i stopped being a virgin." "i bet that was a sight," said evelyn. "and how," from pearl. "ah, damn, that coffee would boil over--hey, ev, get the cream out of the ice-box, will you?" "i'll get it," said pearl, as she rose from the table. "you haven't told us what happened after that afternoon." "there's not a lot more to tell. jerry got an awful crush on me, so i thought--he came after me every evening or so, and took me for a drive--and a walk, as well, and three months after that first sunday afternoon i began to blow up like somebody had been using a bicycle pump on me, and then jerry decided to re-enlist--which he did do, without even saying good-bye--shortly after that my father found out all the dirt, and he literally put his foot against my dainty behind, and kicked me out, that being the proper thing to do to a wayward daughter in the bible belt, and me, i went from bad to worse, and then to kansas city--and by that time i had learned to step, and did i use to burn twelfth street up. i'd start at the old gaiety theatre, on th and wyandotte street, and on down th to mcgee street, then back on the other side of the street. sometimes i'd be a long time making the round, but i made the money. that was in the days when kansas city was good--a girl could easily make twenty bucks in a night of hard labor, besides what you could roll a guy for when he went to sleep--but eventually the police gave me the works in the form of a floater out of town, and i floated to denver. boy, oh boy, will i ever forget denver? many's the pair of heels i wore off on curtis street and many's the dollar i've earned there--and from there to many places, till i arrived here, and this will probably be my finish--but what the hell, drink your coffee." "in that case, you blame the cause of your--well--the cause of this life, on a man, then," from evelyn. "i can't say i do--i'm what i am because i wanted to be--i need men. when i went to kansas city, i could have found a job of some kind, and worked like thousands of girls do, but i didn't want to. i've never wanted to be what is called decent. i think that a life like that would be damn slow, and it's not in my nature to live like that. i love all this excitement--all this uncertainty, and most of all, i could never be true to one man, because--well, because when i see a man that arouses my interest, i could never resist the impulse to satisfy my curiosity, so--what good would i be with a husband--i'd only make the poor guy miserable, or else cause him to kill me--i know me, like no one else does." "you are right there, mickey," said pearl. "no girl ever went the wrong way unless she wanted to--she may cry and say that a man made her what she is, and that she would never have been so unless some man tricked her--but down deep in her heart she wanted to be what she is. no girl was ever really raped--unless she helped the process along a little. the girls who have been raped, and really in their hearts didn't want to be, were the only ones that have been found dead, after an awful fight. no man can really rape a girl who doesn't want to be raped just a little. i know from actual experience." "you're both right," said evelyn, as she reached for the coffee pot, for her second cup of coffee. "this coffee hits me right where i sit this morning--it sure tastes good." "well, i gotta get dressed and start for town. i gotta date with big boy, but i can't for the life of me remember what time it was for. what are you going to do tonight, ev?" "i suppose i'll do the usual thing--go over the bridge." "do you suppose there will be anything said to us about last night?" "i don't see how they can say anything--we weren't caught doing anything, and there's no proof that we were mixed up in that mess, and we weren't caught coming over the border, so--what can they say?" "yeah--i guess you're right at that--well, i'll see you later," as she started for the door. "but where?" called evelyn. "i'll tell you what--you come over to my hotel, ev, about six o'clock. how is that, and we'll go to supper--oh, by the way, mickey, what are you doing tonight--the usual thing?" "sure--the usual thing, but i'll see you over on the other side," answered mickey. "then i'll be over at your hotel at six," said evelyn. "o. k., ev, see you then--and thanks, mickey, for the hospitality. so long," as she closed the door behind her. "that girl's sure a real good scout, mickey--it's too bad that she has got to go the route." "let's have a little drink--what do you say, ev?" "quick." "say, ev, where did you meet pearl?" "on the car the other night--and right away that big boy falls head over heels for her in a big way, and wants to marry her, and she can't see him--but--she is nuts over harry hicks--ain't that something to tie your bowels in a knot?" "oh, jees, harry will do to her what he has done to all the rest that's come his way--he will get tired of her as quick as the rest, and then i suppose she will grieve, and go on the usual drunk, to forget it. i don't know what it is about that guy that makes these girls go for him like they do." "yeah--and look at the dough she could get from that big guy." "i sure wish i could get my hooks into that big boy for a couple of days, but he won't even give me a tumble," as they went on sipping their coffee. when pearl arrived at her hotel, she found big boy sitting in the lobby, with a sour expression on his face, which brightened when she came in. "hello, big boy," said pearl, "did you think i was going to stand you up?" "no--i forgot what time our date was for, so i came at noon, and they said you hadn't been in all night. where have you been?" "well--now, is that nice, to ask me where i've been, and what do you care where i've been? i'm here for our date, am i not? isn't that enough? come on up to the room, while i get dressed for wherever it is we are going?" big boy followed pearl into the elevator and to her room, without saying a word. when she closed the door, then he turned to her, face red with anger. "i know where you've been--look at that dress--i know you was one of the women who waded the river last night. i suppose you went and spent the night with the guy that helped you across." "listen, big boy, what ever gave you the notion that you had the right to question where i've been, and who i've been with? get a load of this--there is no man, woman or child that has a right to talk to me like that, see--so don't you try it." "well, what was you doing in juarez that you couldn't have come across the bridge before twelve, and why was it so necessary for you to come back over here that you would take the chance of wading the river to get here?" "i--i--well--i just didn't make the bridge, and i--well, i was afraid to stay over there all night." "you're lying like hell, and you know it. you was on that party last night at the rio bravo--" as he came over to where she was standing. "i was invited over there, but i didn't go," said pearl, timidly. "stop that lying--you was invited all right--and you went, and when that shooting happened, you thought you better beat it. who was with you?" as he moved closer, "where was evelyn?" "i don't know," lied pearl. "now, you listen to me--i don't care what you do, or where you go, see--but don't lie to me," as he took hold of her, "you are the first woman in my life i have ever asked to marry me--and get this--if i can't have you, nobody else will--i mean it." "you turn loose of me--i don't see what right you have to treat me this way, because i've been nice to you, you think i belong to you body and soul. well, you let go of me, and get out. who do you think you are?" "oh, so that's the way you want it--well--what i said goes--if i can't have you, there's no other bastard will get you," as he punched her in the eye. "oh--help--help--you lousy tramp, get out of this room," screamed pearl. "god damn you, don't think you can get away with that kind of stuff with me." "oh, pearl--pearl, please forgive me--i'll never do that again. oh, honest, kid, i let my temper get away from me--oh, please listen to me. i didn't mean it--if i didn't think so much of you i wouldn't have done it," as he took her in his arms, while she sobbed violently, and let him hold her close. "i'll call a doctor and have him fix the eye up so it won't get black," as he held her away from him, and then went to the phone. "oh, jees--" sobbed pearl. "it's too late, my eye is already swelling shut--oh, what a sight i'll be," as she threw herself on the bed, kicking her feet and crying loudly. big boy called the doctor, and was told he would be there at once, then he threw himself on the bed beside pearl, taking her in his arms, kissing her and trying to stop her from crying. "you see, you don't trust me--then you call me a liar--and then you beat me," said pearl, between sobs, as she thought, "i'll put on a real show for him, i'll make him shell out some dough for this." "oh, honey, can't you see i'm crazy about you--honestly nuts for you? if i didn't love you, i wouldn't be jealous of you, would i? i'll never do that again--will you believe me--let me get you a glass of water--please don't cry--come on, straighten up--the doctor will be here in a minute," as he held her in his arms. a rap came on the door. "come in," called big boy, as he got off the bed, "oh, hello, doc--i want you to fix this eye for miss jones--she had a little accident." the doctor walked over to the bed, stooped over pearl, and looked at her eye, already swollen shut, and turning a deep blue. "that's a peach," said the doctor, "how did you get it?" "i was coming in the door, doctor, and i dropped my key on the floor, and as i stooped over to pick it up, i hit my eye on the door-knob," lied pearl. "well, it's the first door-knob i've ever seen that left knuckle prints," laughed the doctor, as he went to work to fix the eye. "how long will it be black, doctor?" asked pearl. "oh, about a week or so, and then it will be as good as ever." "ah, gee, that's tough," said big boy awkwardly as he backed towards the door, "i'll be back in a minute," as he left the room. "will i have to wear a bandage over the eye until it gets all right?" "no, you don't have to wear a bandage at all, unless you want to, but you know a bandage covers a multitude of sins. you can say you got a piece of glass in your eye, and that way you won't have to stay in your room for a week until it gets well." "ah, gee, doc, you're a peach, thanks," as she got off the bed. "well, i'll be going now," as he gathered up his things. "next time tell your boy friend to hit you some place it won't show," as he went out the door. pearl lay on the bed--there was nothing else to do. now she couldn't very well go to juarez, with her eye bandaged up. no matter what lie she told, nobody would believe it. maybe it was just as well not to go over for a few days anyhow--let some of the trouble of the shooting die down, and that would be time enough, but she couldn't stay in the room all that time--she would go crazy. she arose from the bed, went to the phone, and called evelyn's apartment and left a message for her to call as soon as she came in. the door opened slowly, as big boy came in, loaded with candy and fruit and flowers. "my god, what all have you got there?" asked pearl, as she looked at him with the one good eye. "some little things you might like, pearl. you can have anything you want, no matter what it is. will you please forgive me?" "well, it will take a lot more than candy or flowers to make me forget a sock like that." "ah, gee, honey--you can have anything you want--just name it. let me get you a nice apartment, and some clothes, open an account for you--just anything to show you i do really love you, and i only want you to marry me--will you?" "no, i won't marry you--but i'll think about the apartment and the other stuff you mentioned." "ah, that's great--i gotta go now--i gotta meet a guy on some business about the mine--i'll be back tonight." "aw--alright, go ahead--i'll be here when you get back--you've seen to that, all right," as he came over to kiss her--"never mind kissing me--i'm still mad." "i love you--can't you understand that," as he took her in his arms. a rap came on the door. "who's there," called pearl. "it's me--ev," came the voice. "come on in." "my god--what's happened to you--your eye--what's happened?" asked evelyn, breathlessly. "well, you see, it was like this," said big boy. "never mind--never mind--i get it--she was late for the date and you socked her for it--ain't you the big bully?" said evelyn, as she walked over to pearl. "i just lost my temper, and i didn't mean to." "you said you had to go--well, go ahead--i want to talk to ev." "will you be here when i get back?" asked big boy anxiously. "yeah--she'll be here, all right, thanks to you--scram--" answered evelyn, as he went out the door. "my god, this thing hurts," said pearl, as she put her hands to her head. "what happened?" "oh, we got into an argument about last night, and he was furious, and just took a punch at me, that's all." "well, what was you saying?" "he wanted to know about last night--and i was lying and trying not to tell him anything, and he seemed to know that i was lying, so he gives me the shiner." "didn't i tell you about that guy--i told you not to try to kid him, or lie to him. he is the meanest louse that ever lived when he loses his temper, and if you go ahead and play around with him, you won't only get another black eye, but you'll get a beating, and one that you will remember. i know him, and i also know his reputation. it's like i said--that guy is a killer, and if you go on fooling with him, and he ever catches you with harry, he'll kill you as sure as you're born. i'm not saying i told you so, or any of that stuff. heavens knows i know what it is to have a black eye, and it's no fun, but remember what i'm saying--i suppose he rushed out and bought this stuff to get you to overlook the sock, eh?" "yeah--that's what he bought it for, and he also is going to get me an apartment, and some new clothes--he said i could have anything i want--" "well, you better take sparingly, because, sister, you will pay in the end. you let that guy go do all that, and you don't stay true to him, it's curtains for you--i'm telling you, because when he finds you are hot for harry, he'll go up in smoke anyhow. he and harry are the best of friends, but they are rivals as well. i'm dying for a drink--i'll bet you haven't got a drop around here, have you?" "look in the top dresser drawer--there's a full bottle that hasn't been opened." "thank heavens--that's a life saver," as she fished the bottle out of the drawer, and opening it, took a long, deep drink. "want one too, don't you? "might as well," said pearl, as she raised up and took the bottle evelyn handed her. "maybe i'm nuts, but i can't figure it out--here is a guy that wants you to marry him, and you can't see him for harry. ah, hell--give me another drink--the world's all haywire." "hell, i'm not going to stay in this room all day. i want to go out, at least for a little while. i know, ev--let's you and i go get an apartment--you come with me and help me hunt." "why go hunting apartments? if you really want to be swell, then take an apartment in the hussman hotel. they got the swellest in this town, and there's no use taking anything but the swellest, since big boy is going to pay the bill." "that's an idea--i'll do it--you are all wrong about me taking sparingly--i might as well have whole hog or none, because he won't figure that, in case there is a big showdown. if i have to pay the price, i might as well make it worth while, ain't i right?" "yeah--i guess you're right, at that, because when he does start mopping the town up with you, he won't figure what he has spent--he will just figure you have been a louse, and you will get it--and how!" "i'll change this dress and we will go," as she started to strip again. "gee, i'm sorry you won't be able to go across the border tonight. i hate to go over there alone." "don't worry, you won't be alone--i'm not the first hooker that has sported a black eye in this burg. i'm going over--to hell with what that crowd thinks. i've got a sucker on the string that's not so bad, so let's have the fun while we can. give me that bottle, darling, i need it badly." "damn if you ain't the best pal i've had in a long time, pearl." "you ain't so bad yourself, ev." they left the hotel, also a note on the door, saying they would be back shortly, as they had gone apartment hunting. they moseyed by the plaza, and over to the hussman, where they looked at apartments, which ended in pearl taking one. "this is some hot-looking joint," said evelyn, as she sat down, gorgeously putting on the ritz, "if i'm going to come up here to see you i might as well start putting on the dog right now." "come up and see me--you--you're going to move up here with me." "like hell--i'll come up and see you, but i ain't moving in here--i don't want to have to jump out of one of these windows some night when you and big boy have one of your grudge fights--i'll stay where i'm at." "come on, let's go back to the hotel, and i'll get my things packed, and start to move--will you help me?" "sure, why not?" they went back to the hotel, and found big boy waiting for them. "did you find the kind of a place you want?" he asked anxiously. "did i? did i? i went to the hussman and picked the best in the joint--is that all right?" "right," he smiled, "and the best is none too good." "i'm going to pack and move right now, ev, and you are going to help me." "no, you call the maid and let her pack your things, and send them over. here's a little present i have for you," as he handed her a small book. "oh, that's wonderful--now i'll forgive you for the black eye. look, ev, my own bank book, and already a thousand dollars to check on--ah, gee, that's swell, big boy," as she gave him a peck on the cheek for a kiss. "how would you and ev like to go to a show for the rest of the afternoon?" asked big boy. "i wouldn't mind if i can have a few more drinks before i go in," said evelyn. "i'm all fixed for that," he answered, as he took a pint out of his hip pocket. "i'll tell you, pearl, you kill a third, and you kill a third, and i'll kill the rest. how's that?" said evelyn, as she took the bottle from big boy. "why just the pint? i've a quart in the other dresser--wait, i'll get it," as she went to the dresser and took out a quart of kentucky bourbon. "why not kill both?" suggested evelyn. "did you say you wanted to see the picture, or just want to go in the theatre to sleep?" asked big boy. "well, we'll get a bigger kick out of it, if we are stiff; i know we will." "i've a better idea than that," said pearl. "let's just kill the quart, then take the pint into the theatre, and have a nip during the picture, huh, what do you say?" "it don't matter where i drink it, as long as i drink, let's get started--big boy, you drink first, then you pearl, then i'll knock the rest of it off," suggested evelyn. "oke," answered big boy, as he turned the bottle up to his mouth, while deep gurgling sounds came forth. the quart was finished, and all went to the theatre, as pearl left orders with the maid to pack her things, and have them sent to the hussman. the afternoon papers carried warnings to all americans that the long-expected rebellion in mexico had broken out in durango, and that the administration of portes gil, mexico's president, looked as though it were at an end. portes gil was at a loss--his troops could not seem to do anything--there was only one thing for him to do, and that was to recall ex-president calles, known as the iron man of mexico, to help in breaking the rebellion. juarez, with its large garrison of soldiers, was at a nervous tension, and the bar owners were twice as nervous, not knowing how long the garrison would be loyal to the federals, as all that is necessary to change their loyalty is to shoot the commanding officers, and declare they were loyal to the other side, which is so often the case when the opposing side is much larger, or when there is a little looting to be done. fort bliss, with its rows of beautiful two-story brick houses for its officers, its large brick barracks, housing its hundreds of men, and small, newly built brick bungalows for its petty officers, its tremendous stables housing its hundreds of horses, its enormous parade and drill grounds, clean as a freshly swept floor, aroused from its lethargy at the rumors of war. the men were raring to be let loose to fight, anybody or anything, as long as it promised excitement and fight. "it sure looks like a hot time in the old town soon," said evelyn, as she lay back and stretched out on the beautifully appointed divan in pearl's new apartment. "wait a minute until i change the bandage on this bum eye, and you can read the newspaper to me," said pearl, from the bathroom. "why don't you leave the bandage off when you are in the house? there's nothing you can put on it now that will take the black out of it--just leave it alone, and when you start to go out, then stick the patch over it." "that's a good idea, i'll do it," as she sat down in front of evelyn. "now, tell me more, what the paper says about war." "the american consul says in a statement in the paper that he cannot be responsible for american citizens who go over to juarez just to have a good time, and that only those who have business and have to go over are the only ones to go over--well, in my business it's necessary for me to go over--but you having a man who has money, on the string, you don't have to go over--but i can see by the expression in the one good eye of yours that you will have important business in juarez--will you not, miss jones?" said evelyn, with mock elegance. "with all this excitement brewing i should stay up here in the apartment, and act like a lady. now's the time to go over there and raise hell--with the revolution coming on, they will have forgotten about the shooting, and will be so taken up with other things, it will be as safe as ever, if you can ever call juarez safe." the telephone started ringing madly--"who the hell can that be?" asked pearl, as she went to answer it. "hello--oh, yeah--yeah, i hear you all right. you have to go right now--well, when will you be back?--oh, gee, i'm sorry--well, is there anything you want me to do?--sure, i'll be careful--will you be safe in that territory? that is where most of the fighting will be, so the paper says--oh, that's why you have to go down there--i didn't get that last crack--come again--don't mind if i go over to juarez with evelyn, and have a few drinks, do you? i can go, but you would rather i wouldn't? and have a drink whenever i want, too--no, i'm not mad--why should i be mad? but why should i go into the sisterhood just because you will be out of town for a few days? oh, it might be weeks--well, you are going of your own free will--nobody is making you go--oh, hell, yes, certainly i've enough money till you get back--yes, o. k., goodbye," as she hung up the receiver. "what did i tell you?" said evelyn. "he has to go to the mine and wants you to be the sweet and innocent one till he gets back--that guy is so jealous of you he smells bad--what are you going to do tonight?" "well, i was thinking it would be grand to go over to juarez, and before the bridge closes, bring our own gang here for a party--what do you think?" "yes, dear--harry will like your new apartment--you ain't kidding me, i'm wise--and what's more, i'm staying here myself tonight with a boy friend--that is, if i can pick up one that is young enough to come without his wheel chair." "all right--let's get started--wait till i put the patch on the bum eye." "if anybody asks you how you got the eye, what are you going to tell them?" "tell them the truth--they won't believe it anyhow." "i never thought of that before, and the way i've worried over trying to think up a grand lie to tell someone when, if you were to tell the truth it would be just as good, because they would never believe it, anyhow. that is a new idea, and i won't have to think so much now--hooray--let us drink--oh, damn it--there ain't no more whiskey." "never mind, dear, we will soon be in juarez," said pearl, as she pulled the hat down over the patch on her eye. "the way you have that hat on, you would hardly notice that eye," remarked evelyn, as she arranged her dress. "don't you worry, that herd of hawk-eyed whores will see it long before i get there. any time some woman's man socks her in the eye, it travels by mental telepathy--not that they have any mental capacity, but even the most lowly animal has instinct--therefore they would know it." "oh, sister, thou speaketh the truth--thou wilt be blessed," said evelyn, lifting her hands to heaven, "come, juarez calleth." they boarded the juarez-bound car, and as the car stopped for the customs and immigration officials of mexico to get on, more than usual boarded the car, questioning everybody as to their reason for going over the border,--the extra questioning was because of the revolution having started. "for what reason, senorita, are you going to juarez tonight?" one of the men asked pearl. "i'm going over to see a friend on business," answered pearl. "what manner of business, senorita?" "about a job he promised me." "and you, senorita evelyn, why are you going over tonight?" "well--to be damn truthful, senor, i'm going over for a drink," answered evelyn. "that is a very good reason, senorita--gratias!" the men moved slowly through the car, going through every bundle and package, regardless of size, whether it be large or small, making men stand up, and feeling them over for firearms, finally leaving the car to ramble its way on to town. "my heavens, they are particular tonight," said pearl. "they will be that way until the war is over, and what good it does, i don't know," answered evelyn. juarez, since the reports of the war, and the warning for americans to stay on their own side, there were twice as many people in the bars as there usually were at this hour of the evening. they stayed on the car until they arrived at the lobby no. , where they got off the car, with pearl holding her head down so that no one might see the black eye. "i wonder what harry will say when he sees my shiner?" "black eyes are nothing new to harry." they went into the bar--crowds were milling, singing, talking, cursing and drinking to the war. "this is going to be another wild night over here--i can see that already--come on, let's get a drink, and then you can go in and see harry." "o. k." "well, for the love of jees--what happened to you?" asked mickey, as she came up to pearl. "you needn't tell me--big boy--ain't i right?" "right--what are you drinking, mickey?" asked pearl. "whiskey--but how did it happen, and when?" "well, he is jealous of me--and he knew i was lying about last night, and so--he took a sock at me." "ah, that's lousy." "yeah--that's lousy, but she got returns at once," said evelyn. "she has already moved to the hussman, and what an apartment--and then the boy friend came in and handed her a bank book all her own, with a grand for her to check on--then he goes away tonight to the mine, and pearl is going to be true to him till he comes back--like hell." "well, that calls for celebration," said mickey, as she drank her whiskey. "it does," answered pearl. "i think we should do it tonight, after the bridge closes--what do you say?" "good--i'll be there, but i ain't telling anyone about it--you do your own telling--i might invite someone you don't want--well, i got a date to roll a guy--i'll be seeing you," as she went into the crowd. "mickey is a damn good scout," said pearl. "she's regular," answered evelyn. "oh, listen--that's harry singing--come on in and let's sit at a table and see the show--i could watch him all night." "you probably will--but he won't be singing." "now, ev, you shouldn't begrudge me a little pleasure--at least harry never gave me a black eye." "no--and from all i hear, he ain't got much of what you're crazy about, to give, either." "do you believe all you hear, ev?" "well, i can't say that i do--but i have no reason to doubt the rumor, unless you care to enlighten me on the subject." "well, darling, you use your imagination--and sign my name to it." "really." "surest thing, ev." "don't tell me i've missed something." "i think you have." "well, it's really too late now--all i can do is be sorry." "you see, ev--what i really like about harry is his--well, his way." "no--really," said evelyn, eyes wide. "that's what it is." "well, i admit i've always suspected harry." "what?" said pearl. "oh, nothing," smiled evelyn, "but that calls for another drink--waiter, whiskey, quick." "i'll have one, too--pronto." they drank the whiskey, and crowded their way into the cabaret, and back near the band stand, where they found an unoccupied table, that commanded a good view of the show. "i'll be with you in a few minutes," said harry, as he passed their table. "just a minute--ladies and gentlemen--i have some news--i've been requested by the management to read for your benefit," said harry, as he silenced the crowd, then continued reading from a yellow piece of paper in his hand: "the rebels have taken chihuahua city, and are organizing more troops for the march on juarez." the crowd was silent; not a sound or a word for several minutes, then the sounds started, with low whispers, then rose to the usual loud singing, talking, dancing, still rising higher and noisier, until the gaiety was at the point of hysteria. mexicans stole sly glances at each other, some very serious and worried, others not noticing or caring that the rebels were going to march on juarez, and others wondering which side to stick to, as the winning side is always the best, and if the rebels had taken chihuahua city, juarez would be nothing. americans who ordinarily came over the border every night to have their little drink and waste a few hours, and go home practically as sober as they came over, were drinking with the best of the lot, as they knew that if the fighting was to take place in the city, as it had done before, there would be no chance to come over and have the usual drink; therefore drink all that was possible while the drinking was good; others, who remained gentlemen, whether drunk or sober, were making asses of themselves in huge form, and there is nothing that can be so perfect an ass as an american in a country other than his own, and with a mind made up to show off; hence, hilarity in its most violent form held sway for the rest of the night, cars and drunken people so numerous on the international bridge it would be impossible for the gates to be closed before at least one o'clock, and the customs and immigration officials dared not close the bridge until those that were dragging themselves and others were across, as it was possible that the rebels would take a train, or an engine with a caboose, and in one of their moments of madness, which are many in the mexican temperament, and leave chihuahua city without the rest of the rebel army, and just cause enough for a fight, to kill some innocent bystander, which is a known fact, that in a battle in mexico there are more people killed by accident than with actual intent, as they are very bad shots, but if they ever work up enough courage to come close enough for a hand-to-hand fight, they either do it with knives, or call the whole thing off and go into the nearest bar, and have a drink. it is not an unusual thing to see the federal army and the rebel army call off the fighting for lunch and the usual noon siesta, and a general get-together, and congratulate each other on the bravery of the things they have seen done, or have heard of. knowing this, and knowing that when the fighting did start in juarez, that there would be as many bullets fall on the american side as on the mexican side, fort bliss had already stationed a troop of men at the foot of the santa fe bridge; consequently, with all the ribaldry the bridge had to be kept open until nearly two o'clock. thrill seekers and tourists who were out to see everything and experience everything, stayed in juarez that night, hoping to see some fighting and have first-hand information to tell the folks back in kansas, or ohio, just what it was like, and with the usual intelligence, which isn't above that of a stray cur, thinking it possible to witness a battle, but expecting that, owing to the fact that they were american citizens, that the mexicans would watch where they were shooting, and not a hair on them would be harmed. men whose wives in their drunken stupor wanted to stay in juarez; men with women that they had picked up, but were too drunk to walk, were thrown over their shoulders, and carried like a bag of meal to the american side of the bridge; drunken women helping women more drunk than they, with the occasional leaning over the side of the bridge to let off some of the last of the liquid cargo they had taken on at the last bar. pearl, evelyn and mickey were among the last to come across, with pearl and mickey leading evelyn, who was too drunk to make it alone. "ev, you should never get this drunk," said mickey. "who are you, sister? i'll get as drunk as i like," mumbled evelyn. "what i'd like to know is how much she drank to get this drunk. i've seen her kill a quart at a time, and never phase her, but my god, she must have got to a barrel this time," said pearl. "let go of me--i can walk alone," said evelyn, as she pulled away from them. "do you think you can, ev?" "sure," said evelyn, as she staggered to the curb, vomiting down her entire front. "there she goes; now she will feel better as soon as she gets some of that stuff out of her," said mickey. "yeah--but we better hold her, she might fall," but she was too late; evelyn was already lying in the gutter. "what a sight she will be now--come on, mickey, let's get her up to my hotel--call a taxi." mickey called a car--they got evelyn in, with much trouble, and finally arrived at the hussman. "my god, pearl, what will they think--you dragging her through the lobby looking the way she does," as they were pulling evelyn out of the car, with the help of the driver. "i don't know, but i hope they let one crack out of them--that will give me all the excuse i'll need to wreck this joint without stalling." "wait a minute, girls," said the driver. "i'll take her up like this," as he threw evelyn over his shoulder and started into the lobby. "i'll get her up there and put her to bed." "don't you think, pearl, that if you could get some hot coffee down her it might make her come out of it?" "i don't know, but i'll try it--" as she said to the bell-boy, "bring me some hot coffee up here, quick." "are you going over to the states after we get ev to bed, pearl? you know you've a date over there with harry." "have i? i've been doing some heavy drinking myself--i don't even remember it. sure, we'll go over there as soon as we give her some coffee." "let's take her into the bathroom, and strip her in there, and then put her to bed," said pearl, as she opened the door for them to enter. they took evelyn in to the bathroom, the driver holding her up while pearl and mickey stripped her, clean to the skin; then the bellboy arrived with the coffee. "wait a minute--i'll get a night-gown for her, and then we will put her in bed, and pour some of this hot stuff down her gullet. o. k., driver, bring her in." he picked her up, and bringing her into the room, laid her down, holding her head up, as he took the cup out of pearl's hand, and holding it to evelyn's lips, while the hot liquid brought moans and groans from evelyn--pearl and mickey stood by to help. "now, let's cover her up, and leave her alone to sleep--she will be all right when we get back from the cafe." pearl turned the lights out, and down they went, leaving ev behind for the first time since they had met. "jees," said pearl, "i feel lost without her--she is sure some regular scout." as they got into the car that had brought them from the bridge--"to the states, driver." when they arrived at the states cafe, the height of the hilarity for the evening had passed, for the less noisy crowd had settled down to black coffee and food, to try and kill off some of the liquor. harry was sitting in a booth all alone, near the door, eating a sandwich, as they came in. he did not notice them until pearl walked over to his table. "hello, darling," as she sat down. "ah, gee, i'm glad you came--i've been waiting a long time. i'd begun to think you were going to stand me up," smiled harry, with gladness beaming from his face. "pearl, you and harry excuse me--i'll see you later," said mickey, as she went towards the rear of the place to join a crowd of people she seemed to know. "i haven't had much chance to talk to you about last night, when that awful thing happened. evelyn and mickey rushed right out over me, and i didn't know what had become of you, harry. did you get over the river all right?" "no, i stayed on that side, at dan's hotel--they know me. you see, lots of nights when i don't make the bridge, i stay over there. it's not bad, really, but last night was a little unusual. when i couldn't find you, i had a hunch that evelyn had gotten you clear of the place, and when i heard that some women had waded the river i knew that you were safe, because that's one of evelyn's pet tricks. no matter if the bridge is open or closed, and evelyn thinks that she had better get across that border, she goes for the river, and she has always been lucky--they have never been able to catch her. boy, oh boy--what a woman," laughed harry. "oh, harry, you should see my new apartment--it's just grand." "you said you have moved tonight--but i don't think you told me where." "to the hussman." "oh, baby--putting on the ritz." "of course not--i just had a streak of luck, but you haven't even noticed my black eye." "yes, sweetheart, i had noticed it, but i didn't want to say anything--i know if it is any of my business you will tell me, and it's not polite for a man to ask personal questions of--well--of a girl he really is crazy about." "harry, you are sweet, but you see the black eye is the cause of my good luck. first, jealousy caused the black eye, then the apartment was rented to make up for it--see--that's all very simple." "well, i can realize that anyone could be jealous of you, but i can't imagine anyone being mean enough to give you a shiner like that--i'm terribly jealous of you, but i couldn't do that to you--let's get out of here--this is no place to talk--can't we go somewhere, just you and i?" "yes, my apartment--just you and i--evelyn has passed out." they arose from the booth--this once harry took time to pay before they left. they strolled leisurely up the street to the hotel, which is only a few blocks away. pearl opened the door to the apartment, and harry went in, his eyes wide in amazement at the loveliness of the place. evelyn, in the meantime, had aroused from her drunken stupor and had ordered some food, and was sitting on the divan eating it, when they came in. "i thought you two would be here sooner or later. i sure have been on a good one tonight," said evelyn, as they came in. "oh, ev--i'm glad you came out of it--how do you feel?" asked pearl, as she went over and felt of evelyn's head. "gee i'm glad you are eating something. what was the matter tonight that you passed out?" "you don't mean to tell me that you passed out tonight, ev?" said harry, as he came over and stood in front of her. "well, it's the first time in years, and i can't imagine what caused it. i don't remember much of anything." "here, harry, sit down by me and tell me what you think of my new home. don't you think it is lovely?" "yeah, its fine, but i don't get the connection of the black eye and the apartment." "it's just as well," said evelyn. "the less you get, the better off you will both be." "no kidding, pearl--what is the gag--who is the sucker?" "oh, just a guy that thinks he is crazy about me, that's all." "now, harry, i want to ask you something seriously," said evelyn. "maybe i'm wrong, maybe i'm not, but you might as well know--you will sooner or later--i been telling pearl she is nuts, now let's see what you think." "let's hear it," answered harry. "do you mind, pearl?" asked evelyn. "no, i don't mind." "well, here's the story. you know that big guy they call big boy? you and he have been more less rivals for some time, and i know you are very good friends. you know the guy pretty well--you have seen him go on a rampage and wreck a place, then pay for it. well--he's nuts for pearl, and he is the one who gave her the black eye because she lied to him about last night, then he gave her a thousand bucks, and this apartment, and anything else she wants--now, what i'm coming to--this guy wants to marry her--i know that will floor you--and he means it. pearl is taking all he can give her. don't you think that if he is crazy about her, that if he catches her two-timing him he will go on such a rampage he might kill her?" "yes, that's right, ev, that guy is a bad hombre--but why should he catch her?" "i give you credit for some sense, harry. if he gave her a black eye for lying, what will he do to her when he finds out you or some other guy is playing around his duck's nest?" "don't worry, ev. pearl's too clever for that--anytime i fall for a woman i know she is clever," laughed harry assuredly. "that may be all well and good, but i'm damned if i care to be around when the thing happens," said evelyn, as she guzzled some more coffee. "you didn't tell me what they did to negro noche about that shooting last night, and what did they do with irene's body?" asked pearl. "negro noche wasn't even arrested--the authorities said that she was protecting her home, and that if another woman was trying to steal her man, and she found them in each other's arms, she had done the right thing, so she was let free. about irene, nobody seems to know where her home is, or if she has any people. they are holding her body over in the morgue until they can find out something, and if they don't they will bury her out here in the usual pauper's grave." "oh, jees that's awful," said evelyn. "well, they won't bury her in no pauper's grave as long as i got a cent." "you are right," answered pearl, "but ev, i've more money than you have--i'll pay for the funeral, poor kid--that's usually the end of most of us--god, that's awful--i'll tell you what we will do--we'll get up early in the morning and go over to the morgue, and arrange for her to have a decent funeral." "i haven't any money," said harry. "but i'll do anything i can." "that's all right, harry--i'm glad that i have the money to do it--shall we bury her on the mex side, or shall we bring her over here?" "what's the difference? i'm sure it wouldn't make any difference to her, and then you might have to go through some red tape about bringing the body across the border," said evelyn. "well, i better be getting home," said harry, as he arose to go. "oh, no, harry--stay up here tonight, won't you?" "do you really want me to?" "oh, darling, you know i want you to." "if you two must have your fun, then listen to me--i'll stay in the other bedroom, and if anything should happen that big boy would come in any time, harry, you come and get in bed with me, then he couldn't say anything," explained evelyn. "ev, you're some little thinker--what would we do without you?" "oh, nuts," exclaimed evelyn. "i'm going to bed--good-night," as she arose and went into the bedroom. harry and pearl sat for a long time on the divan, holding each other's hands, not saying a word. this was the third night they had known each other, and events since that time had been rather swift. "i've seen lots of girls come down here, and stay around for a while, then maybe make a good marriage, then others go to the dogs, but of all the lot you are the first one that i've ever really been in love with," said harry, softly. "i love you, too, harry, and it's my first real love, but i don't quite know how you can love me when you know what i'm doing and what i am--don't that make a difference?" "it might to some people, but not to me--but you see i couldn't give you what big boy can." "you mean you can't give me the money he can?" "that's it--he can give you everything you could ever want--money, clothes, cars--or just anything you happen to want--why, look, he has already given you a thousand dollars--i doubt if i'll ever have a thousand in my whole life--i'm just a bum singer." "but just the same i love you, harry--why couldn't we do this--i've an idea--let me string this guy along and get a load of dough, and then we can beat it and start fresh some place where no one knows us--would you like that?" "well, i don't know about that--i'll have to think it over--that is a little too much to say yes to on so short a notice, and not a nice thing to do." "what's the difference? what i'm doing already is not exactly what the general run of people would call decent." "oh, that's nothing--i know women about this town that have good husbands and friends, and they step out on the side for the dough, to buy something they want, but they were respectable girls before they married, but this much i know--if i marry a girl like you, i can depend on you being on the level with me--i've seen enough of life down here to know that." "suppose we talk this over some time tomorrow or later. we should get some sleep tonight," said pearl, as she laid her head on his shoulder. harry pulled her close to him, all was quiet in the hotel, and the streets were quiet. the rest of the night was bathed in liquid silver of a belated moon, but inside each of them there raged a tornado of love, desire, passion, that was soon to be quelled by complete possession of each other, then a sweet sleep of quiet and peace, that equaled the quietness of the silent city outside. morning quietly slipped through the windows, the bright hot sun rose, dispelling the chill of the night. the city rose with all its noise and bustle, as a sleeping dog rises and shakes itself, to be about its busy routine of the day. evelyn awoke, looked around, then realized that she was at pearl's apartment, then looked next to her in bed, and was surprised that she was in bed alone. she slowly climbed out of bed, going to the window, looked out on the lovely morning, then thinking of irene, she started for the bedroom where pearl was lying in harry's arms, sleeping quietly. "hey, you two," as she shook them. "come on--come on--snap out of it--we have lots to do today," as pearl and harry opened their eyes to behold a sight which caused them to laugh loudly. evelyn standing in teddies, with her hair standing on end, eyes bloodshot from the night before. "ev, have you looked at yourself in the mirror yet?" asked pearl. "no, i haven't--i'm afraid to--i've heard people sometimes die of fright--so i'm just working up the courage to do that little thing--do you want me to order breakfast?" "breakfast--that sounds good," said harry, as he sat up in bed. "ev, you're a darling--order a big one for me--i need it--i'm starved--then we will go over the river," as she went to the bathroom. evelyn called the morgue, and found that no one seemed able to find irene's people, or to find out anything about her, so she told the undertakers to get irene ready and make all the arrangements for the funeral to be held at two o'clock that afternoon, at the mexican cemetery on the outskirts of juarez, then she spent the next half hour calling every hooker that she knew, and told them the time of the funeral, and asked them to be there, and to bring any of the other girls they could get hold of. "how many have you called, in all, ev?" asked pearl, as evelyn sat down beside her. "i'll call and have these dishes taken away." "about twenty in all, but they all know others that i don't know and they will tell them." "well, i'm going to run out home," said harry, getting ready to leave, "i'll see you at the funeral." "all right, dear," said pearl, as she kissed him goodbye. "don't you think we better go over and see if there is anything we might do? i'll get a check cashed and take enough money over to pay the expenses for the flowers, since you insist on paying all the funeral expenses--the least i can do will be to see that she has lovely flowers, poor kid." "that's right, ev, we had better go on over--i'll have to get a check cashed, too." they called a taxi and started for juarez, and as the car pulled over the bridge, and under the shed where all cars stop to be questioned by the mexican officials before entering juarez, there were soldiers everywhere. "why are you senoritas going to juarez at this time," asked one of the officials. "we are going over to attend the funeral of the american girl who was shot saturday night in the rio bravo hotel," answered pearl. "what other business have you to attend to over there?" "none." "you will pardon, senorita, but may i suggest that as soon as possible you will return to the american side--the rebels have left chihuahua city by train, and they may arrive at any time from one o'clock to six." "thanks, we will," answered pearl, as the official motioned to the driver to drive on. "i bet there will be some wild carrying on here with the rebels, when they do arrive," laughed evelyn. "i wonder if there will be much fighting?" "sure, there will be fighting, and lots of screaming and running. the way they carry on you think there is twice as much fighting as there really is." "i guess we had better try and get back before the rebels arrive. what do you think, ev?" "well, after the funeral we will come back. we won't waste any time." "come right in, senoritas," said the mexican undertaker, as he bowed low to them. "you have made the necessary arrangements that we called you about this morning?" "si, senorita." "how much is the whole bill?" asked pearl, as she fished into her bag. "four hundred pesos, senorita." "how much american?" "that will be two hundred dollars, senorita, and that is everything. i have already had the grave dug, and the time you said over the phone is the time the funeral will take place. i, senorita, have taken the privilege of calling a padre--was that right?" "that's o. k. by me, don't you think, ev?" "sure." "here's your money," as she handed him two hundred dollars. "the good god will be kind to you, senorita, for this good deed," as pearl and evelyn went out. "hell, i need a drink, don't you, ev?" "yeah--a good stiff one," as they climbed in the car. "driver, take us to the central, and come in and have a shot with us." "oke, sister," answered the driver. they turned on the sixteenth of september street, and had to stop to let troops pass, some short, some tall, but none with uniforms that fit, except the officers, who were perfectly groomed, with beautiful uniforms that would have done credit to a rear admiral of anybody's country, and as they marched past, sullen dirty faces showed no sign of expression, of joy, of madness, chagrin, nor contempt--they were like so many dirty brown masks, that hide so much thievery, murder, and cowardice underneath. "do the rebels look anything like this?" asked pearl, as they passed. "just the same--clothes may be different, but that means nothing. these men that just marched past may be on the rebel side before sundown--they are just as willing to fight for one side as the other, as long as it promises to be profitable." "i can't understand why they are always having these revolutions down here." "pearl, in our country every boy is taught that he can, by hard study and work, be the president if he wants to be, but down here every boy is taught that he must be president, even if he has to kill the former one, and they have tried to live up to their teaching, so it's just another case of some bad boy taking what he thinks is rightfully his." "i suppose they will stop the trains out of town, and march in." "oh no they won't--they will ride those trains into the heart of the town, screaming and yelling and shooting at anybody that happens to be in sight, at least that is the way they always have done, and mex's never change." "i hope the rebels don't arrive before the funeral is over--that would be awful." "i'll say it would," as the car stopped. "come on, here's where we drink--come on, driver." they all went in. "i'll have whiskey," said pearl. "so will i." "make it three whiskeys," answered the driver. "say do you girls want me to wait over here for you?" "no, we are going to stick around here until time for the funeral. you can go on back--oh, i almost forgot about paying you--here, take this," as she shoved a bill in his hand. "if i were you, girls, i wouldn't waste any more time over here than i had to, and if you say the word, i'll stay and see you through," answered the driver. "that's nice of you kid, but we will be o. k." "so long," as he went. "it's going to take more than one whiskey to get me through that funeral," said pearl. "let's buy a couple of quarts, and go on out to the cemetery and wait there," suggested evelyn. "that's the best idea of all," said pearl, "let's go." they took the two quarts, and slowly walked up the street. small groups of people, talking near doorways, gazed at them curiously as they went. most of the bars and places of business were closed, and the windows boarded up, caused by the expected battle, and knowing full well that windows would be smashed if they were not somehow protected. as two o'clock drew near, the hearse with the remains of irene, started for the cemetery, the driver looking like a cornered rat, and mad at having to go out into the open when the rebels might arrive at any time, drove slowly, but fearfully, through the streets, toward the cemetery. pearl and evelyn were sitting on a fallen headstone, drinking and discussing the injustice of life, to them in particular, and to all in general. they had just killed the first quart when the first bunch of girls, headed by mickey, came into the cemetery--some were dressed as though they were going to a party, others in street suits, but none in mourning, as mourning could only be used once in a great while, so why buy mourning for the one funeral, and be stuck with something you couldn't wear to hustle in. "my goodness," said mickey. "how long have you been waiting here?" "oh, not very long--want a drink?" asked evelyn. "yeah--we brought several pints along with us--there comes some more of the girls," as she pointed along the road to about fifteen girls, all in gay colors, coming along as if they were going to a picnic. "this is one of them things i sure don't like to go through with it," said one of the girls. "me either," answered another. "well, it's near two o'clock--it won't be long now," remarked still another. "i think that's the hearse coming now," said pearl, as she shaded her eyes with her hand, looking down the road. "we tried to get a taxi to bring us over, but not one of them would come," said one of the newly arrived girls. "well, you know there has been some talk about a revolution going to take place over here," said one of the other girls. "so i'd heard," remarked the former, in a cutting voice. "yeah--that is the hearse all right--there is someone with the driver--it must be the padre," said pearl, still watching. the hearse drew up at the entrance, slowed down, then proceeded to a far corner of the cemetery, where the freshly dug grave yawned as though waiting for its toll, while the two mexican grave-diggers lay sleeping beside the fresh pile of earth. the girls moved slowly over to where the hearse had stopped, as the driver got out and kicked the grave-diggers awake, telling them in spanish to help earn their money by helping to get the gringo's body to the grave, which they did unwillingly. the driver, the padre, and the two grave-diggers brought the box with the coffin inside it, to the side of the grave, sat it down, while the padre began saying the service in spanish and in latin. painted faces looked on, as tears began to streak their cheeks, each thinking that this might have been her; some probably wishing it was them, knowing that at least their earthly troubles would be over, no matter what would be in store for them; other's minds went back to their pasts, the others to their childhood. soon there could be heard sounds of soft weeping--the service was over, the four men slowly let the coffin into the grave, jerking the straps from under the box. the two grave-diggers began to shovel dirt into the hole. "can any of you sluts say a prayer?" asked mickey. "i ain't never prayed in my life," said one of the girls, "but i'll try it," as they all bowed their heads, as hard lumps of dirt and rock fell with a hollow sound on the box. "oh, lord, i ain't never asked you a single favor in my life," began the girl slowly, "but irene is a good scout, and if she ever comes into your place of business, don't turn her down--she always paid for her drinks, poor kid--amen." "come on, kids, let's get going from here," said evelyn, as she wiped her eyes. they all walked slowly to the gates of the cemetery--those in front waited for the rest to catch up. "let's all have a drink," suggested evelyn, as she began to open the quart she still had. they all gathered around, passing the bottle, talking in low tones, starting to repair the damage done to their make-ups by the tears. "we had better be getting back to town," remarked pearl, and they all started down the road, towards town, walking in little groups. "just think--that might have been any one of us," said mickey, "it wouldn't have mattered who was with juan moros when negro noche came in--she would have shot anyone she found with him." "yeah--you're right, mickey--it might have been any one of us. juan was a nice fellow to everyone, but noche is a bad bitch--don't let anybody fool you about that, but she won't get away with this--his people will see to that," answered evelyn. pearl, evelyn and mickey were the first to arrive on the sixteenth of september street--the rest of the girls had split into the usual groups that they usually ran in, and came straggling along behind. "let's go on down to the central, and have a few drinks and rest awhile, and let this wear off," suggested evelyn. "o. k." said mickey, as they were nearing the railroad tracks. "jees--look coming," said pearl, pointing down the tracks. in the distance a train was coming--mexicans were hanging all over the engine, and on the roofs of the box-cars, the whistle was blowing, guns were firing. "it's the rebels." "here, we better get off the street--quick, let's run in the rio bravo," said evelyn, as she grabbed pearl's hand and started for the hotel. the few people that had been standing in the street, ran for shelter. four of the federal cavalry who had no chance to be disloyal, decided to make a display of their bravery by wrecking the rebel train, by riding four abreast into the locomotive, therefore making history, for mexico, as well as being heroes themselves, but never considering that they would not be present to hear of it, they spurred their poor, bony horses on to the tracks, one in command gave the order "forward"--and down the tracks they rode, the engine meeting them at the crossing of the sixteenth of september street. men, horses, legs, arms, heads, blood, manure, and guns were scattered and strewn for blocks, the engine whistling, bell ringing, men screaming, groaning, dying, the federal troops running to meet the rebels, the engine derailed in the middle of the street, the hissing of escaping steam, rebels pouring out of box-cars, running into the fight, screaming "vive, la mexico." both sides began to run behind buildings, firing from behind, at anyone they saw, whether it be friend or enemy. "we have to make that river somehow," said evelyn. "my god--what do you think has happened to the other girls?" asked pearl. "they are probably in as bad a fix as we are," answered mickey, as a stray bullet shattered the windows of the lobby. the rebels began to drive the federals towards the river, amidst much shouting and shooting and excess bravado. "i'll tell you what we will do," said evelyn. "as the shooting moves toward the river, we will try to get out of here--i'll take my drawers off and put them on a pole like a flag of truce, and we will try and make it." "my god, what is that awful odor?" asked pearl. "that's horse manure, mixed with blood, that splattered on the side of this building when the train hit those horses," explained evelyn, as she was pulling off her underthings, putting them on the end of a yard stick she had found behind the deserted desk. "will we run for it, or how shall we try it?" asked mickey. "we'll ease out into the street, holding this flag up, then we will go up the middle of this street to the corner, and down that way to the bridge," said evelyn. "do you think they will shoot at us?" asked pearl. "possibly, but i'm willing to bet that the only ones that have been killed in the fighting are the ones there in the street, that were killed by the train." "you're right, there," said mickey, as they moved toward the door. "oh, god, what a horrible sight," said pearl as she shivered and put her hand over her eyes. "get hold of her, mickey, she never saw anything like this before. i guess it is kind of a shock to her to see all these cholos laying around here in pieces," exclaimed evelyn, as she stepped over what had once been a man, but was now only mangled flesh. "if you don't want to look, you just keep your hand over your eyes, dear, and i'll keep hold of you until we get by this," said mickey, softly, as she put her arm around pearl, and helped her along. "come on here," called evelyn. they moved past the crossing, then into the center of the street--bullets whizzed overhead while toward the river there was a hot battle raging. on the american side the banks of the river were lined with people watching the fighting, as though it were a baseball game, oblivious of the bullets that fell all around them. as the fighting came nearer the river, two huge armored cars, with french 's mounted, rolled near the international bridge, muzzles lowering menacingly, toward mexico. a scream came from down to the left of the bridge, as a mother grabbed up her little one in her arms, running toward the street. the child had been killed by a stray bullet. phones began to buzz at fort bliss, saying that the bullets from the fighting were falling thick and fast on the american side, and that one had already found its mark. five minutes passed--soon the screaming of a siren could be heard, coming toward the bridge was the large dark brown car with the american flag flying from the front, and it drew up at the foot of the bridge. general m---- stepped from the car, face red with fury. "fire a warning from one of those 's," commanded the general, as he walked toward the center of the bridge, as the voice of the roared across the border. firing on the mexican side stopped immediately, as one of the federals came running toward the gates on the bridge. "open these gates," commanded the general, and the aides ran to do his bidding. "what is it, senor?" said the federal, as he came near the general. "i want the commander of the rebels and the commander of the federals at the foot of this bridge in five minutes--be on your way." the federal ran back to the group of soldiers, they all began to talk excitedly, running in several directions. truck loads of soldiers from fort bliss were unloading, all ready for action. general m---- stood, legs spread, looking at his watch, tapping his riding boot with his stick, as the federal commander came to where he was standing. "you have sent for me, senor--i have come," as the sound of a horse galloping down the street was heard. "at your command, i have come, senor," said the rebel general, as he swaggered up to the general, looking at the federal as though he were the lowest thing on earth. "yes, i sent for you both," said general m----, "i want to tell you that if you saddle-faced bastards let another bullet fall on the american side of the river, i'll wipe the whole goddamn lot of you, and this town, off the map," as he turned, giving an order to close the gates again, as the armored cars once more came into position. the general of the rebels rode away, to his own troops, who in the lull of the fighting had moved up on the federals. the fighting began again, with renewed vigor on the side of the rebels, who had drawn their bayonets, while the federals ran for the river, wading in and making for the american side, wasting no time in doing it. evelyn, pearl and mickey were coming down the middle of lysol lane, evelyn still holding the drawers on the stick, showing she was a non-combatant, when she spied about fifty girls huddled on one side of a bar, some peeping around the corner. there were all the girls who had been to the funeral, and others, who had been to juarez on their usual business, and all together, wondering how they were going to get to the american side. "hey, gang," called evelyn, "what do you say if we all make a run for the river--once we are in the river, we will be safe." "how will we do it?" asked the girls. "here's the way," explained evelyn. "we all get in the street, and start to run--the rebels have their backs this way--they won't see us until we are almost in the river--because from what i can see they have already driven the federals into the river and are already throwing rocks at them. well, we run as quietly as possible and burst right through the rebels, and into the river--take the right side of the bridge, it's better--now, do you all understand?" the girls nodded that they did. "all right, then let's get going," as they all started down the street at a trot. they neared the river very quietly then amidst screams and yells they burst through the rebels, leaping into the river like rats from a sinking ship, grabbing at each other, helping each other through the quick-sand, and cold water, some holding on to their bottles of whiskey that they had brought along to give them courage. the few federals who had not reached the american side, turned back to help the girls, amidst laughing, screaming, cursing, and splashing of water. the american soldiers were rounding the federal troops up the way a texas cowboy rounds up cattle, herding them into one bunch, while the girls pulled themselves out of the river without the aid of anyone except themselves. when they were out of the river, they went in a body to the street where the general and his aides were. "this is a hell of a note," said evelyn. "a bunch of good american women should have to wade that damn river, and no one to even help them up the bank--you don't seem to realize that once in a while a lady needs a little help." "you had no business on that side," said the general, curtly. "you knew there was to be a battle--the papers carried the news, and all americans were warned to stay away from there," he continued. "well, just the same, it's a hell of a way to treat ladies," answered evelyn, as she sat down on the curb of the sidewalk. "senoritas--senoritas," came the voice of the rebel general, who had climbed up on the side of the bridge. "what's the matter with that guy?" said mickey, as she moved toward the foot of the bridge to hear what he had to say. "senoritas--can you hear me?" he called across the river. "wait a minute--all right, spill it," called evelyn. "senoritas--we do not fight with women--you are perfectly safe." "hell's fire--we know that now--ain't we over here?" answered evelyn. "a thousand pardons, senoritas--but we want you to come back and drink with the victorious--to be our guests for the evening." "now, you see," explained evelyn, "that's what i call a gentleman, a real fellow," as she walked over to the american general. "say old top, would you mind having them gates opened and let us go back on the other side?" "no, those gates remain closed until this trouble is settled." "o. k. brother," as she went back to the girls, who were waving at the rebels. "come on, gang, we'll go back the way we came," and they started off in the river, with much more enthusiasm than the first time. "come back here," yelled one of the american officers. "you can't cross that river." "the hell you say," called evelyn, who was already in the water, leading the procession. "at least, these guys will buy us a drink." "do you think it's safe to go over here now," pearl asked evelyn. "sure, and profitable--these guys will open every safe in the town, and all the champagne you can drink. i been through these things before," explained evelyn, as the rebels were wading out to help them. "you see," said mickey, "these guys will drink so much they will just pass out all over the place, and you can go through their pockets right and left, in perfect safety, and how i'll go through them is nobody's business." "it's all new to me, but i'm with you," answered pearl. "sure, honey, that's the way--get all you can--you can't never have too much." the rebels were throwing their hats in the air, shouting at their victory, with only one thought in their minds--to do all the looting possible, and drinking as well. they started with the nearest bar, the girls in their midst, singing, laughing, and looking forward to a hilarious time. they didn't wait to open the bottles of champagne--they broke the necks off and poured it over each other--they were wet from the river, so why not be wet with liquor. the federals of mexico were taken to fort bliss and quartered until they could be sent back to mexico--they weren't prisoners--they were more refugees than anything else. the rest of the day and night was spent in drinking, dancing, singing and general hilarity. juarez was never more gay or wild--looting was indulged in--in a big way; every safe was opened. the rebels needed gold, and american money, whether paper or silver, was gold to them--the girls getting their share of the loot. "i've stood about all of this i can," said pearl, as she tried to get up from the table. "do you want to go home, honey?" asked evelyn. "home or anywhere, but i've got to come out of this--i've been drinking too much--i'll go nuts if i don't get out of it for a while." "o. k. dear, i'll take you home," said evelyn, staggering to her feet. "do you think you can manage it all right without me?" asked mickey. "sure--i can get pearl home all right, but ain't you had enough yet?" "i've had plenty to drink, but i haven't got all the money i can use yet." "well, how much have you got?" asked evelyn. "i don't know, but i've sure been going through these lice. i've got as much as i dare put in my stockings, and i got wads in my waist, and some pinned in my step-ins." "well, we'll be seeing you,--come on, pearl--give me your arm--we'll make it some-how," as they staggered toward the door. "do you think we will have to wade that damned river again?" asked pearl. "i hope not--we'll go to the gates, and i'll try and argue those guys to let a couple of ladies through." once again the two staggered toward the international bridge. the streets were deserted, not a person was to be seen, only a small group around the foot of the bridge. day was just beginning to break over the horizon. "where are you senoritas going?" asked one of the mexicans. "home," said evelyn. "i'm veer sorry, senorita, but the americans will not let you through the gates." "well, we will see about that," as they neared the huge wire gates. "hey--you--how's to let a couple of ladies through--we want to get home." "sorry, sister, we got orders to open these gates to no one," came the answer. "well, you got a hell of a nerve--we're american citizens, and i demand that you let us through." "sorry, sister--but orders is orders." "well, you louse, do you mean to tell us you are going to make us wade that river again today?" "if you want to get to the american side, you'll have to wade it." "that's our good americans for you," said evelyn in disgust. "i'm damned if i know which is the worst, these goddamn mexicans or that lousy american scum that tries to be so damn important." "come on, ev--we've waded it before--we might as well do it again--at that the cold water may wake us up." they walked back to the mexican foot of the bridge, and over the levee, holding to each other once more as they started again through the chill waters of the rio grande. "halt--who goes there?" came the challenge from the u. s. side, as they neared the bank. "who the hell do you think?" asked evelyn, as they climbed out of the water. "say, woman--ain't you got any more sense than to come across that river that way? we will have to hold you now for investigation." "oh, yeah? brother, that's just too bad--we asked you to open those gates, and let us through, and you wouldn't do it, now if you want to really start some trouble, just try and hold us for wading across." "well, you will have to come up on the bridge, and do some tall explaining." "o. k. i'll do some explaining--you're damn tooting," as they all three started for the foot of the bridge, where the commanding officer was waiting. "these two women waded across the river, sir," explained the soldier, as they walked up. "would you mind explaining," began the officer, "what you two are doing at this hour of the morning, wading across the international border?" "oh--for christ's sake--what's the big idea?" asked evelyn. "just this--you women think you can get away with this stuff because you are women, and possibly because you think it's smart. well, you can't--you will have to be detained, and taken in front of the commanding general." "well, you get a load of this--you low-born, half-witted, self-inflated with your own importance, shave-tail bastard--you ain't detaining me or my girl friend for no investigation--see--you, or your men refused to open that gate to let two american citizens through, and we had to wade the river, and it's scum like you that has managed to get into office in this country, and run it with stuffed uniforms that wouldn't know the meaning of the word man if it was drawn in blue-print for them--you stand and tell me what you are going to do--why, goddamn you, when i get through telling the general what i think, as well as the american consul, you'll be a buck private again--you've got a gall--you impudent little runt." "just the same, i'm sorry, but the general will have to give his o. k. on your crossing." "then, by god--you'll call him on the phone right now," said evelyn. "it isn't customary to disturb the general at this hour of the morning." "that's too bad for the general, that he has to be aroused out of his beauty sleep." "i will call him, even though it is not the ordinary routine." "and how you will call him," exclaimed evelyn. "well, i'm not quite used to the ways of the border yet, but it seems to me to be rather against one to be an american down here," said pearl. "the fault ain't with america--it's with the ignorant bastards that's allowed to run it," answered evelyn, as the lieutenant was calling fort bliss. after much delay the general was finally reached. "what the hell are you calling me for at this time of the morning?" he roared over the phone. "i'm sorry, sir, but it's about two women that have just waded the river, and we have detained them, and they have insisted that we call you, or they will take it up with the american consul. i thought it best to call you." evelyn leaned her ear close to the receiver. "are they respectable women?" asked the general. "i'll answer that question," said evelyn, as she snatched the receiver from the lieutenant. "what the hell difference does it make whether we are considered respectable or not--we are american citizens, that ought to be enough." "why were you wading the river at this hour of the morning?" asked the general. "because we want to get home, and one of your lackeys refused to unlock the gates--that's why we waded the river." "would you please let me talk to the gentleman who called me, please," said the general, as he boiled. "sure," as she turned to the lieutenant. "he wants to talk to you," as she handed him the receiver with mock dignity. "get those women's addresses and names, and let them go, and don't you call me again, as he slammed the receiver up. "well, what did he tell you?" asked evelyn, with contempt. "he asked me to get your names and addresses, and let you go home." "ask hell--he told you to, you mean--well, my name is evelyn and i haven't got a last name, as far as you are concerned, and i live at the san antonio apartments," said evelyn. "my name is pearl jones, and i live at the hussman." "hussman," repeated the lieutenant. "yeah, hussman--and no smart cracks--from you, either--and don't get the idea that you can use the addresses for your own convenience when you have a day off." "i'm sorry to have caused you ladies any trouble," smiled the lieutenant. "ah, nuts to you, brother," said evelyn, as she gave him a loud, juicy raspberry. "come on, ev--let's call a taxi--i'm as near all in as i'll ever be, and live to tell it. come on up to my joint and stay, will you? i don't like to be alone." "jees, i might as well move to your place--i don't seem to ever stay at home any more," said evelyn. "here, we will call from the same phone that big lousy lieutenant just used," as she turned back. loud rapping on the door aroused pearl out of the deep sleep she had been in since she had climbed into bed that morning. "who's there?" she called, still half asleep. "mickey," came the voice outside. "just a minute, dear, i'll let you in," answered pearl, as she crawled out of bed and staggered to the door. "for the love of heaven, don't you expect to get up today?" "what time is it?" asked pearl, yawning. "it's nearly five o'clock--have you been in bed all day?" "uh-huh." "what's become of evelyn? i've been over to her apartment several times, and she hasn't been there all day." "she is here with me." "well, you two sure have been sleeping sound. i been up here three times, and had the clerk ring the room several times, but no answer." "we were nearly dead when we got here this morning. we had to wade that damn river again. how did you get across?" "they opened the gates when i went and asked them to let me through." "well, the lousy tramps--and the way they treated us this morning--they sure was nasty." "i stayed as long as i thought it was safe for me to stay, i finally got to go through the rebel general's pockets, then i decided to come home and get a little sleep. i feel fine now, and did i make the dough last night? seven hundred bucks, not so bad." "i should say not. come on and let's wake ev up. have you got anything to drink with you? i haven't got a thing up here." "yeah, i have a bottle with me. i sure know what it is getting up after having been on a good one, and not having a little drink to pick me up--it's awful," as they went into the bedroom, where evelyn was still snoring. "hey, sister, snap out of it," yelled mickey, as she shook evelyn real hard. evelyn turned over and opened her eyes. "what's the big idea?" she asked. "look," said mickey, as she held a pint of whiskey where evelyn could see it. "oh, great heavens, give me a drink quick, before i have time to start thinking," as she raised up in bed, taking the bottle from mickey. "save me a drink, ev," said pearl, as she started to the bathroom. "well, you better hurry back, you know when ev gets a bottle, she don't want to give it up until it's empty," called mickey. "did you make any money out of the revolution, mickey?" asked evelyn. "sure, did you?" "i don't know yet, i haven't been sober enough to count it, but what i've got is on the chair there," as she pointed to a chair, loaded with clothes. "i'll hand it to you and see just how much you have made," said mickey, as she handed the clothes to evelyn. "how long do you think the border will be closed, ev?" asked pearl. "well, that's hard to tell. sometimes those things last only a few days, then again they have been known to last months, but if we can't go over there, nobody else can, and i know all the apartments around here where there are likely to be parties, so the only thing to do is make the rounds of them, and chisel there, just like we did on the other side." "what about liquor?" "don't worry about that--there is more on this side than there is on the other side," said evelyn, as she began to lay out her money. "did you make anything last night, pearl?" asked mickey. "i haven't looked yet." "i've got the enormous sum of thirty-five bucks," said evelyn, as she looked disgustedly at the crumpled money on the bed cover. "well, honey, you didn't stay over there as long as i did, and you see i stayed until i got to go through the general's pockets, and he is the bird with most of the money. i had my eye on him all night," said mickey. "now that another evening is here, what are we going to do with it?" asked pearl. "i know--we'll call up some of the girls i know, and see if we can't find some place to go, or maybe we can engineer a party out at my place. if we can, we will gather the fellows that we know to get the whiskey, and make it a rip-roaring, bang-up party--what do you say?" "o. k. with me--how about you, pearl?" asked evelyn. "whatever you all say is right with me." "i've fallen for a new boy friend. i don't know what his name is, but they call him dusty, and is he good looking, and can he fight? but--he's another one of those that haven't got a dime, but still, i sure can have a swell time with him. i'll call him right now, and see if he can get the rest of the boys," enthused mickey. "i've never heard you rave over a guy before, unless he had something you wanted," said evelyn. "well--," said mickey, slowly, "i guess he's got something i want." "excuse me for living," said evelyn, as she climbed out of bed, gathering up the money that she had been counting, "i don't know what he has got, but whatever it is, he has as good as lost it right now." mickey went to the phone, calling several numbers before she finally got dusty, who from the trend of the conservation over the phone, was glad to get the other fellows for the party, much to the joy of mickey. evening came, they usually do, even in el paso, and this evening was very little different from any of the others. the party started at mickey's wild, mad, hilarious, drinking, loving, laughing, fighting and all the more thrilling to all concerned, because of its being on the american side. all who were invited, came, and brought others that weren't invited, as well as their friends also, but no one cared--it was for a good time that the party was given and everybody proceeded to make the most of the chance. twenty-four hours later the party was still going strong. the hilarity had grown in volume, instead of subsiding--the party was going too strong to stay in the bounds of the house--people were wanting to go places, and still keep the party going. "i got an idea," said pearl. "what is it, honey?" asked evelyn. "why don't we go to my place, and still keep the party going there, and after that we will go to some place else--ain't that a good idea?" "sure, it's a good idea, but i can't tell how long it will last at that hotel--they may be particular about a party like this." "well--," thought pearl, as she continued, "we can go there and when we can't keep it up there any longer, then we will go elsewhere--how's that?" "fine, let's call mickey, and tell her, and see what she says." "she is in the kitchen, we will go in there and tell her," as they shoved their way into the kitchen, where new bottles were being opened. "sweetheart," said harry, as pearl came into the kitchen, "i was just getting you another drink--here it is," as he offered her the bottle. "harry, my sweet, i've a surprise for you--we are all going to my hotel--that's what we came in here to tell mickey--are you for it, mickey?" asked pearl. "sure, darling, i'll go any place--let's gather up all the licker we have left here and get started," as she began to set all the bottles on the sink. the news spread, and soon everybody was singing in a loud voice, "we're going to the hussman--we're going to the hussman," amidst much skipping and dancing. "shall i call tony?" asked evelyn. "sure," answered pearl. "the sooner the better." "you better call several cars for this mob," said pearl. "how many of them are there?" asked evelyn, as she picked up the phone. "i don't know, but you better call about five or six cars, maybe seven--there's some people out in the yard, and it's too dark to see how many there are." "hello, tony--this is ev--well, look--we want you to send some transportation out to mickey's for the party that is moving to the hussman--you knew that there was a party going on, didn't you? well, i guess there wasn't anyone who didn't--come right on out--o. k.--good-bye," as she hung up. "they will be here right away." the cars soon began to arrive, the drivers were taken in and made to drink whether they wanted to or not, and there were none who didn't want to. seven cars were little enough--people were hanging all over the outsides of the cars, screaming and singing, some fully dressed, others partially dressed, others with only a street coat and shoes on. they arrived at the hussman--the bellboys were rushing around madly, expecting at least to earn some tips, which they did by bringing ice, and ginger ale to the room, the crowd unloaded in front of the hotel, each one trying not to look drunk and to be a lady or gentleman, until they got through the lobby to the elevator--some were helping others, others were staggering it alone. pearl and evelyn and mickey in the lead, with mickey loaded down with bottles, wrapped in a sheet like it might be soiled laundry, elevators started the mad procession of getting everyone off on the right floor, which became more noisy as the newness of the place began to wear off. pearl threw everything wide open, told everybody to make themselves at home, which they were already doing--those who had gotten thirsty on the ride were already in the kitchenette, uncorking bottles. evelyn sat at the phone, ordering more liquor; pearl and harry, locked in each other's arms, oblivious to all that was taking place. mickey eyeing one of the taxi drivers that the crowd had brought with them, and wondering how much he might have in his pockets, and proceeding to make him drunk enough to find out. the party grew--other guests who were on the same floor, who were in the mood, joined in the crowd. people were going from one room to another, soon the phone in pearl's apartment began to ring--the management asked them to be just a little more quiet, as they were annoying guests five floors away. the crowd was quiet at least three minutes, when it began all over again, in all its flamboyancy--drinking began to get heavier, some of the crowd began to pass out wherever they happened to be--that's where they lay. noon the following day. big boy approached the desk of the hussman. "is miss jones in?" "that would be rather hard to say, sir," answered the clerk, "but i'll try and find out." "what do you mean by that?" asked big boy, puzzled. "well, you see, sir--there has been a party going on on that floor, and in her apartment, since last night, and it's only been quiet for about two hours now. there were a few who left, i'll find out if miss jones is still up there," as he asked the operator to ring pearl's apartment, which she did for several minutes, but got no answer. "i'll go up and see if she is there, and what the hell's going on," as he started for the elevator. the apartment door was standing half open--two of the maids were peeking in, and commenting in low tones on what they saw, as big boy came up, they moved away. he pushed the door open, stood looking in at the sight that greeted him--of bodies laying on the floor, piled on the divan, on chairs, and on each other. he started for pearl's bedroom. pearl was laying in harry's arms on the bed, where they had both passed out hours before. evelyn was laying on the floor on one side, and mickey on the other. mickey had passed out with her hand in the taxi driver's pocket. big boy quivered with rage--he grabbed harry and pearl by the arms, and dragged them out of bed, nothing on his mind except that pearl had lied to him again. twenty minutes later the police began to arrive--screaming a partly clad woman, running through the lobby headed for the street, made the more respectable guests' eyes bulge in amazement. pearl's apartment was a total loss. big boy had completely wrecked it with harry, who had come out of his stupor long enough to put up a savage fight, all the participants of the party that could make a get-away had done so, except those that were too drunk to realize that this might mean a jail sentence. evelyn had taken pearl into the bathroom, with the help of mickey, and they were trying to revive her. "i'm afraid he's killed her, mickey," said evelyn excitedly, as she patted cool water on pearl's head, and wiped the blood off her face. "oh, jees, i hope not--let's keep working with her--maybe we can bring her around--if somebody don't stop him, he is sure to kill harry." "i wonder what that is?" asked evelyn, as the screams in the other room became louder, then died down. "oh, god, he might have killed harry. if he has, we are all sure in for it." "open that door, in the name of the law," came a voice from the outside. evelyn rose to her feet, and unlocked the door, swinging it wide open, as one of the plain clothes men stepped in. "what's the matter in here?" "that louse has damn near killed this girl,--we can't bring her to," said evelyn. "all right, we'll get her to the emergency hospital quick," as he called two of the other men to take charge of pearl. "you two girls better come with us." "where?" asked mickey. "police station, sister--you've been there before." "well, that's all right by us--we don't mind--we ain't done nothing." the lobby was in a panic, the ambulance had taken harry and pearl to the hospital, and the patrol wagon was backed up to the door, partly filled with screaming girls, and three officers had over-powered big boy, and had him in another car. "you girls get in the wagon with the rest of your sisters," said the officer who brought mickey and evelyn down. they arrived at the station, and were booked with disturbing the peace, and disorderly conduct. big boy was booked with disturbing the peace, assault and battery with intent to kill. "can we get out on bail?" asked evelyn. "sure," answered the desk sergeant. "ten bucks." "i've got mine, have you enough mickey for yourself?" "yes, i have some dough," as she fished some money out of her stocking. they rushed over to the hospital, where they were told that pearl was resting easy, and there was nothing serious but cuts and bruises, of which there were many. "ah, gee, kid, i'm sorry," said evelyn, as she came to the bed where pearl lay bandaged, "how do you feel?" "awful, honey--how is harry? they haven't told me yet. will you find out for me?" "sure, i'll find out for you. mickey you stay here until i come back." "that guy's a dirty louse to beat you up this way, but don't you worry, dear, you will be all right. i wish i had a dollar for every time i've been to the hospital for some guy finding out i went through his pockets." "oh, this is an awful mess. mickey, what did they do to you and ev?" "took us to the station, and we got out on bail--ten bucks apiece." "oh, here comes ev." "well, honey, you needn't worry," said evelyn, as she sat down on the side of the bed, "harry is only beat up, but nothing serious, just cuts and bruises and a couple of black eyes." "ev, dear, i want you to go over to the hotel, and pack all my things and take them to your place and keep them until i get out of here--will you do that for me?" "sure, honey, and anything else you want me to do." "miss jones, pardon me," said the nurse, as she came over to the bed, "there is a gentleman to see you--he didn't give any name, just said say big boy." "don't let him in here, oh, please--don't let him in here--i'm afraid of him," said pearl, nearly crying. "i'll go and talk to him," said evelyn, as she rose from the bed, "i'll tell that yellow bastard something." evelyn followed the nurse out to where big boy was sitting. "well, how did you get out so soon?" asked evelyn. "i'm out on bail--twenty-five hundred--i want to see her--i'm crazy, but i've got to see her," said big boy nervously. "i'm sorry," said the nurse, "but you can't see her," as she walked away. "why can't i see her, evelyn?" "ain't you funny? you don't think she would see you after the way you beat her up--you must be nuts." "oh--ev--i've got to see her." "well, this is one thing you won't be able to explain away, or buy away. she is through with you and you ought to know it. why make her suffer more by coming here to see her? you know she is scared to death of you?" "ah, ev--i can't live without her." "i'm afraid you will die young then--you think that because you have money, you can beat up who you please, and then give them a present and that it is all over. grow up--don't be like that--you know she is only a kid, and new to this racket, and then you pull something like that." "well, i'll tell you this much, and you can tell her for me. if i can't have her, no other son-of-a-bitch will get her. i'll kill her first--do you get me?" his mouth trembling in rage. "listen, you ain't scaring me, big boy--i know your money will get you out of this scrape, but you wouldn't pull anything like that. your money wouldn't get you out of that, and what's more, you better lay off her--i'm telling you that for myself." "ah, ev, can't you see i'm nearly crazy for having treated her like i did. do you think you can talk her into seeing me? won't you try?" "well, i'll think about it--but don't come here any more, you only scare her, and you won't get to see her. i'll see you later," as she started to go back to where pearl was. "what did he say, ev?" asked pearl, anxiously, as evelyn sat down. "oh, nothing, honey--he wanted to see you. he had calmed down and you won't have nothing more to worry about, so you just rest and get well." "i'm afraid you ladies will have to go now," said the nurse, as she came to the foot of the bed. "i'll be up later and see if i can do anything," said evelyn, as she and mickey rose to go. "come back as soon as they will let you," said pearl. "all right, honey, we'll go and move your things now, and then we will be back later. now, don't you worry, honey, you just rest--good-bye," as they left the room. "what did he have to say, ev?" as they reached the street. "well, it ain't so much what he said, but it's the way he said it. i'm afraid he might kill her if he gets hold of her again. of course, he is sorry and all that now, but the next time he gets mad at her, or catches her with somebody else, he will kill her as sure as there is a heaven. he said if he couldn't have her, no one else could, and you know him, mickey, he means business." "you're right there, ev, that guy means business. well, he can't get at her there in the hospital." "i'm not afraid of him doing anything to her there--he wants to make up with her now--it's when he gets mad at her again that i'm afraid of, but i'm pretty sure she is off him now for good." "yeah--and it's a shame. if she could only have cared for that guy, even a little bit, she would have been sitting pretty, but love is blind, so they claim, so she falls for harry, and he also gets the hell beat out of him. well, it sure was some fight." a week passed, rather uneventful--the mexican trouble was settled and the border opened again. evelyn spent as much time as possible with pearl, accompanied by mickey. harry had already left the hospital, and pearl would be out in a few days. the rest had done her good, and she gained weight in those few days. "has harry been to see you today?" asked evelyn. "sure, he was over to see me this morning. he looks as good as ever, and he is so sweet. the nurse told me i could leave here in the morning--ain't that good news?" "i'm sure glad, but what are you going to do about big boy? you don't know it, but he has damn near driven me crazy--he is wild to see you--he knows harry has been up here whenever he wants to come, and he is wild with jealousy." "well, it's up to me to stay out of his way. he knows where you live, and he can come up there any time he wants to, so i'll have to stay in a hotel so he can't come up. won't you move in with me for a while, ev?" "sure, kid, i'll move in with you for a while. i know how you feel and i'm kinda tired of that apartment, anyhow. let's move to the mccoy, what do you say? i think you'll like it." "all right, ev, you go pick out the room, so i will have some place to go to in the morning." "i'll go now, and do that before i go over on the other side of the river. good-bye, honey, i'll see you in the morning," as she rose to go. pearl left the hospital, and went to the hotel, where she found evelyn in bed. "i didn't expect you to be out so soon, or i would have been down to meet you," said evelyn, as she raised up in the bed. "i didn't know myself, but it's grand to be out again and walk around--how is juarez?" "just the same--i had a pretty good night last night. mickey picked a live guy for me, and i got a hundred and ten bucks off him--that is, mickey put her hand in his pocket and took it out and give it to me. she said i had earned the money by being with him. you know mickey, and i just couldn't refuse--money is money." "see anything of big boy?" "i was coming to that--i,--well, you will have to be awful careful, honey--that guy is on a drunk, and he is bad--he told me last night that the first time he sees you he is going to shoot you. i don't think he was kidding, either--he means business. then again he might just be bragging, because he was so drunk--but just the same, don't you think it would be best to kinda keep out of sight for a few days?" "ah, gee, ev, i wanted to go over tonight--couldn't we go some place that he wouldn't think to go, and that way we wouldn't be likely to run into him. you must know of some place over there we can go and drink and have a good time?" "sure, i know the very place, and i don't think you have ever been there. it's one of the places that grace valdez owns--you remember the old girl i introduced you to--the one who owns the gold palace. well, this is her best money-making place, so she says. it is a regular cabaret and bar, with about thirty or forty girls working there, and they have rooms upstairs--but lots of people go there--sure, we will go over there tonight--what do you say?" "that's fine--i'm just raring to go on a good one tonight--how about you?" "i could start right now, as far as i'm concerned." "i'll tell you what let's do--you get up, and let's go shopping. i need some new things, anyhow--will you come?" "sure," answered evelyn, as she climbed out of bed. they spent the day shopping, and went to a show, then began to dress for the night over the border. as they were leaving the hotel they ran into mickey. "well, it sure is good to see you out and around again pearl--we sure have missed you." "that's nice of you, mickey." "hey, look mickey," said evelyn. "we're going to the popular bar tonight--you know, the one up that side street, off the sixteenth of september street there--you know where it is, don't you?" "sure, i know where that joint is--that's a good idea--keep out of sight of the big boy, especially till that louse gets over these fits of jealousy." this was too late--big boy was standing across the street watching the three as they were talking about him, eyes almost closed, watching pearl as a snake watches a bird. as they moved down the street to catch the car for juarez, big boy followed. he boarded the car with them, but stayed in the back, with his hat well over his face. the night was beginning as they unloaded in juarez. "oh, jees----" said evelyn, "don't look, but there is big boy just getting off the rear of the car--let's disappear pronto." they ran up the block and into the darkness. "do you think he will suspect where we are going?" asked pearl. "i don't think so. he will probably figure you will make right for harry, and that's where he will go, and wait for you," reasoned mickey as they made their way on up the dimly lighted street to the popular bar. as they neared the popular sounds of a tinkling piano and drums, mixed with laughing and singing, came to them. the place was crowded with men who had not only come over for their satisfaction of liquor, but to satisfy their baser lusts as well--and this was the perfect place of satisfaction of this sort. the girls were in short dresses, heavily made up, with cheap rouge and powder--they mixed with the men, hugging and kissing whomever put their arms around them, thinking only of the two dollars that could be made upstairs. "jees, what a joint," exclaimed pearl. "you said it," answered evelyn. "yeah--but you got a chance of making some real money in this place--when these guys are hugging any broad in the place you can always get your hand in the pocket and he never knows just who to blame," said mickey as she looked the place over for a prospect. "well, we might as well get to the bar and start sipping some of that joy water, don't you think?" suggested evelyn. "let's get at it," as they shoved their way through the crowd. "this place does the best business in town--at least it looks that way," said pearl. "well, they can get rougher and noisier, and just anything goes, and this is some tough mob in here right now." "where did mickey go?" asked pearl. "heaven only knows, but she must have smelled a pocketbook--anyway, she will show up in a minute--whiskey for me--what will you have, honey?" "whiskey." the music started in the cabaret, the crowd shoved its way onto the dance floor, leaving the bar partly empty. big boy stepped through the swinging doors. "oh, god," whispered pearl, "big boy." there was no place to run, no time, nothing to do but wait as big boy drew a service automatic from his pocket, leveled it at pearl, pulled the trigger six times. evelyn had stepped in front of pearl, taking the six bullets--she sank to the floor, everything was silent--pearl dropped to her knees, lifting evelyn's head. "oh, ev, why did you do it--why did you do it?" she cried in anguish. the crowd had fought and shoved its way back into the bar. mickey knelt beside pearl. evelyn slowly opened her eyes. "don't cry, kid, its best this way--you still have a chance--mickey, promise you will--" slowly her words came, then a faint shudder, and her head fell forward. evelyn was no more. there is nothing greater than to give one's life for that of a friend. evelyn had made the great gesture. a shot was heard outside. people ran out to see what it was. pearl and mickey looked at each other. "it's the guy that done this," said a man. "one shot was all he needed to finish him, right through the heart." six weeks since evelyn had been buried. pearl had not been in juarez since that night. harry had called up several times, but she had only seen him once, and tonight the desire to see him was so great she called up mickey and made a date with her to meet on the mexican side and see harry. it wouldn't be the same without evelyn, but she still had harry and he could always be depended on--he loved her--she knew that. "hello, darling," said mickey as she put her arms around pearl. "you look a little peaked; let's have a little drink and then we will go in and see the floor show." "all right," said pearl, as she turned to the bar. they had their drinks and found a table where they could see harry and the show. pearl was happy for the first time in weeks. she loved harry dearly; with him she could start all over and face life on a different plane. he saw her and waved, and soon he come over to them. "well, it's been some time since i've seen you--how are you?" said harry as he leaned over the table. "fine, harry, and you look wonderful." "listen, darling, you will have to excuse me tonight--i won't be able to see you after the show. i've got an engagement, about some business, but i'll give you a ring in a day or so," as he left the table. pearl looked at mickey--mickey looked at her glass as she laid her hand over pearl's. "forget it, kid, he's not worth it--have another drink and let's get out of here." pearl couldn't speak. the thing she depended on had been suddenly swept away from her. she wanted to cry--she couldn't. she wanted to scream--she couldn't do that. she was too numb to even think much. harry, who she had loved, and whom she thought loved her, had given her the cold freeze-out. she drank her whiskey--it did no good--water would have had the same effect now--nothing really mattered. she and mickey wandered from bar to bar until closing time of the bridge. "do you want to come out to my place tonight, pearl, honey? you are always welcome," asked mickey. "i guess so," answered pearl, "but let's go to the state's cafe before we go home--i want a sandwich." "do you think it's best to go to the states, dear?" "sure, i'll be all right." "let's go." they arrived at the states at the height of the merriment. the last of the crowd had gathered there before going home with each other. pearl and mickey came in. as they sat down, across the aisle sat harry and a little blonde who had just come to town. he looked over to their table, smiled and waved, and went on with his talk to his partner. pearl began to laugh--not a hysterical laugh, but one filled with mirth. "who in this goddam joint has a drink," she called as she rose from the table. several men rushed to her aid with open bottles; she took a drink from them all, and so did mickey. she was gay, nothing mattered now--have as much fun as possible. ribald songs were sung by her and the best of dirty stories came to her mind. the crowd was so entertained it wouldn't leave. "do you want to invite them all out to the house?" whispered mickey. "sure," answered pearl. "listen, gang--get all your cars, and let's get going for a hell of a good time out to mickey's," as she jumped off the table into the arms of the nearest man. "pearl, can't i see you for a minute?" asked harry as he pushed his way to her. "you have a business date to keep--now, brother, you keep it. i fell for that line once, but never again--adios, senor," as she went out the door in the arms of the man for the night. end [transcriber's note: list of changes to original text: page : changed "tthe word" to "the word" page : changed "evevlyn" to "evelyn" page : changed "youv'e" to "you've" page : changed "waived ev" to "waved ev" page : changed "yesterdady afternoon" to "yesterday afternoon" page : added closing quotation mark after "a good time." page : changed "acount" to "account" page : changed "raucus" to "raucous" page : changed "cant'" to "can't" page : changed "couldnt'" to "couldn't" page : changed "adois" to "adios" page : added closing quotation mark after "a little revolution." page : changed "waived" to "waved" page : changed "or tortillas" to "of tortillas" page : changed "croner" to "corner" page : changed "rio brava" to "rio bravo" page : removed extra quotation mark: "well," what's that got to do with us?" page : added "know" to "don't negro noche." page : added closing quotation mark after "won't get in jail." page : added quotation mark: "well, suppose they start looking page : changed "fod" to "for" page : added closing parantheses after "this pan of mine)" page : moved quotation mark from "his things." to "next time" page : removed extra quotation mark after "as soon as she came in." page : changed "she went out the door" to "he went out the door" page : removed duplicate word in "he cannot cannot be responsible" page : removed extra quotation mark after "started into the lobby." page : changed "out of pearl's head" to "out of pearl's hand" page : added closing quotation mark after "it's just grand." page : changed "putting on the ritz," to "putting on the ritz." page : changed "eve" to "ev" page : added quotation mark: "negro noche wasn't even arrested--the page : changed "come n" to "come in" page : changed full stop to comma in: across the border." said evelyn. page : changed "marreid" to "married" page : changed "quitely" to "quietly" page : corrected quotation marks: "hey, you two," as she shook them. "come on--come page : changed "cemetary" to "cemetery" page : added quotation mark: sat down beside her. "i'll call page : added comma and quotation mark: this time," asked one of the officials. page : changed "they way they" to "the way they" page : removed duplicate word in "over the the phone" page : removed duplicate word in "fight for one one side" page : added comma to "come on, here's where" page : changed "lets'" to "let's" page : changed "cemetary" to "cemetery" in two places page : changed "cemetary" to "cemetery" page : added quotation mark: "we tried to get a taxi page : added quotation mark: shot anyone she found with him." page : changed "rio brava" to "rio bravo" page : changed "found it's mark." to "found its mark." page : added comma and quotation mark: those 's," commanded the general page : added quotation mark: "at your command, i have come, senor," said page : removed duplicate word in "what do you say say if" page : changed "thats" to "that's" page : changed "waiving" to "waving" page : added quotation mark: officers. "you can't cross that river." page : changed "dont'" to "don't" page : removed duplicate word in "i don't know know, but" page : added quotation mark: don't you call me again," as he page : changed "lietenant" to "lieutenant" page : added quotation mark: evelyn turned over and opened her eyes. "what's page : removed extra quotation mark after: revolution, mickey?" asked evelyn." page : changed apostrophe to quotation mark: "sure, did you?' page : added comma to "those that haven't got a dime, but" page : changed "it's being on the" to "its being on the" page : removed extra quotation mark in: "sure, darling," i'll go any place page : added quotation mark: "sure," answered pearl. page : changed "good bye" to "good-bye" page : changed "all it's flamboyancy" to "all its flamboyancy" page : changed "distrubing" to "disturbing" in two places page : changed "cant'" to "can't" page : changed "wont'" to "won't" page : changed "give to to me" to "give it to me" page : added "be" to "it would be best" page : moved quotation mark: "sure," answered evelyn, page : added quotation mark: whispered pearl, "big boy." page : added comma: that done this," said a man. page : added full stop: started for the elevator.] yama [the pit] of this edition, intended for private circulation only, and printed from type on berkeley antique laid paper, copies have been printed for america, and for great britain. also, unnumbered copies, for the press. this copy is number yama [the pit] a novel in three parts by alexandra kuprin translated from the russian by bernard guilbert guerney "all the horror is in just this, that there is no horror ..." author's dedication i know that many will find this novel immoral and indecent; nevertheless, i dedicate it with all my heart to mothers and youths--a. k. translator's dedication i dedicate the labour of translation, in all humility and sincerity, to k. andrae. b. g. g. jtable jtable jtable jtable introduction "with us, you see," kuprin makes the reporter platonov, his mouthpiece, say in yama, "they write about detectives, about lawyers, about inspectors of the revenue, about pedagogues, about attorneys, about the police, about officers, about sensual ladies, about engineers, about baritones--and really, by god, altogether well--cleverly, with finesse and talent. but, after all, all these people are rubbish, and their life is not life, but some sort of conjured up, spectral, unnecessary delirium of world culture. but there are two singular realities--ancient as humanity itself: the prostitute and the moujik. and about them we know nothing, save some tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions in literature..." tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions... let us consider some of the ways in which this monstrous reality has been approached by various writers. there is, first, the purely sentimental: prevost's manon les caut. then there is the slobberingly sentimental: dumas' dame aux camelias. a third is the necrophilically romantic: louys' aphrodite. the fertile balzac has given us no less than two: the purely romantic, in his fascinating portraits of the fair imperia; and the romantically realistic, in his splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes. reade's peg woffington may be called the literary parallel of the costume drama; defoe's moll flanders is honestly realistic; zola's nana is rabidly so. there is one singular fact that must be noted in connection with the vast majority of such depictions. punk or bona roba, lorette or drab--put her before an artist in letters, and, lo and behold ye! such is the strange allure emanating from the hussy, that the resultant portrait is either that of a martyred magdalene, or, at the very least, has all the enigmatic piquancy of a monna lisa... not a slut, but what is a hetaera; and not a hetaera, but what is well-nigh kypris herself! i know of but one depiction in all literature that possesses the splendour of implacable veracity as well as undiminished artistry; where the portrait is that of a prostitute, despite all her tirings and trappings; a depiction truly deserving to be designated a portrait: the portrait supreme of the harlot eternal--shakespeare's cleopatra. furthermore, it will be observed that such depictions, for the most part, are primarily portraits of prostitutes, and not pictures of prostitution. it is also a singular fact that war, another scourge has met with similar treatment. we have the pretty, spotless grenadiers and cuirassiers of meissonier in plenty; vereshchagin is still alone in the grim starkness of his wind-swept, snow-covered battle-fields, with black crows wheeling over the crumpled masses of gray... and, curiously enough, it is another great russian, kuprin, who is supreme--if not unique--as a painter of the universal scourge of prostitution, per se; and not as an incidental background for portraits. true, he may not have entirely escaped the strange allure, aforementioned, of the femininity he paints; for femininity--even though fallen, corrupt, abased, is still femininity, one of the miracles of life, to kuprin, the lover of life. but, even if he may be said to have used too much of the oil of sentimentality in mixing his colours for the portraits, his portraits are subordinate to the background; and there his eye is true and keen, his hand steady and unflinching, his colours and brushwork unimpeachable. whether, like his own platonov--who may be called to some extent an autobiographical figure, and many of whose experiences are kuprin's own--"came upon the brothel" and gathered his material unconsciously, "without any ulterior thoughts of writing," we do not know, nor need we rummage in his dirty linen, as he puts it. suffice it to say here--to cite but two instances--that almost anyone acquainted with russia will tell you the full name of the rich, gay, southern port city of k--; that any odessite will tell you that treppel's is merely transplanted, for fictional reasons, from his own city to k--... alexandre i. kuprin was born in ; marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of his literary activity. he attained his fame only upon the publication of his amazing, epical novel, "the duel"--which, just like "yama," is an arraignment; an arraignment of militaristic corruption. russian criticism has styled him the poet of life. if chekhov was the wunderkind of russian letters, kuprin is its enfant terrible. his range of subjects is enormous; his power of observation and his versatility extraordinary. gambrinus alone would justify his place among the literary giants of europe. some of his picaresques, "the insult," "horse-thieves," and "off the street"--the last in the form of a monologue--are sheer tours de force. "olessiya" is possessed of a weird, unearthly beauty; "the shulamite" is a prose-poem of antiquity. he deals with the life of the moujik in "back-woods" and "the swamp"; of the jews, in "the jewess" and "the coward"; of the soldiers, in "the cadets," "the interrogation," "the night watch," "delirium"; of the actors, in "how i was an actor" and "in retirement." we have circus life in "'allez!'" "in the circus," "lolly," "the clown"--the last a one-act playlet; factory life, in "moloch"; provincial life, in "small fry"; bohemian life, in "captain ribnicov" and "the river of life"--which no one but kuprin could have written. there are animal stories and flower stories; stories for children--and for neuropaths; one story is dedicated to a jockey; another to a circus clown; a third, if i remember rightly, to a race-horse... "yama" created an enormous sensation upon the publication of the first part in volume three of the "sbornik zemliya"--"the earth anthology"--in ; the second part appeared in volume fifteen, in ; the third, in volume sixteen, in . both the original parts and the last revised edition have been followed in this translation. the greater part of the stories listed above are available in translations, under various titles; the list, of course, is merely a handful from the vast bulk of the fecund kuprin's writings, nor is any group of titles exhaustive of its kind. "the star of solomon," his latest collection of stories, bears the imprint of helsingfors, . it must not be thought, despite its locale, that kuprin's "yama" is a picture of russian prostitution solely; it is intrinsically universal. all that is necessary is to change the kopecks into cents, pennies, sous or pfennings; compute the versts into miles or metres; jennka may be eugenie or jeannette; and for yama, simply read whitechapel, montmartre, or the barbary coast. that is why "yama" is a "tremendous, staggering, and truthful book--a terrific book." it has been called notorious, lurid--even oleographic. so are, perhaps, the picaresques of murillo, the pictorial satires of hogarth, the bizarreries of goya... the best introduction to "yama," however, can be given in kuprin's own words, as uttered by the reporter platonov. "they do write," he says, "... but it is all either a lie, or theatrical effects for children of tender years, or else a cunning symbolism, comprehensible only to the sages of the future. but the life itself no one as yet has touched... "but the material here is in reality tremendous, downright crushing, terrible... and not at all terrible are the loud phrases about the traffic in women's flesh, about the white slaves, about prostitution being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on, and so on... an old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! no, horrible are the everyday, accustomed trifles; these business-like, daily, commercial reckonings; this thousand-year-old science of amatory practice; this prosaic usage, determined by the ages. in these unnoticeable nothings are completely dissolved such feelings as resentment, humiliation, shame. there remains a dry profession, a contract, an agreement, a well-nigh honest petty trade, no better, no worse than, say, the trade in groceries. do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this--that there is no horror! bourgeois work days--and that is all... "more awful than all awful words, a hundredfold more awful--is some such little prosaic stroke or other as will suddenly knock you all in a heap, like a blow on the forehead..." it is in such little prosaic strokes; everyday, accustomed, characteristic trifles; minute particles of life, that kuprin excels. the detailism which crowds his pages is like the stippling of whistler; or the enumerations of the bible; or the chiselling of rodin, that endows the back of the thinker with meaning. "we all pass by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like the blind, as though not seeing them scattered about under our feet. but an artist will come, and he will look over them carefully, and he will pick them up. and suddenly he will so skillfully turn in the sun a minute particle of life, that we shall all cry out: 'oh, my god! but i myself--myself!--have seen this with my own eyes. only it simply did not enter my head to turn my close attention upon it.' but our russian artists of the word--the most conscientious and sincere artists in the whole world--for some reason have up to this time passed over prostitution and the brothel. why? really, it is difficult for me to answer that. perhaps because of squeamishness, perhaps out of pusillanimity, out of fear of being signalized as a pornographic writer; finally from the apprehension that our gossiping criticism will identify the artistic work of the writer with his personal life and will start rummaging in his dirty linen. or perhaps they can find neither the time, nor the self-denial, nor the self-possession to plunge in head first into this life and to watch it right up close, without prejudice, without sonorous phrases, without a sheepish pity, in all its monstrous simplicity and everyday activity... that material... is truly unencompassable in its significance and weightiness... the words of others do not suffice--even though they be the most exact--even observations, made with a little note-book and a bit of pencil, do not suffice. one must grow accustomed to this life, without being cunningly wise..." "i believe, that not now, not soon--after fifty years or so--but there will come a writer of genius, and precisely a russian one, who will absorb within himself all the burdens and all the abominations of this life and will cast them forth to us in the form of simple, fine, and deathlessly--caustic images. and we shall all say: 'why, now, we ourselves have seen and known all this, but we could not even suppose that this is so horrible! in this coming artist i believe with all my heart." kuprin is too sincere, too big, to have written this with himself in mind; yet no reader of the scathing, searing arraignment called "yama," will question that the great, the gigantic kuprin has shown "the burdens and abominations" of prostitution, in "simple, fine, and deathlessly-caustic images"; has shown that "all the horror is in just this--that there is no horror..." for it is as a pitiless reflection of a "singular," sinister reality that "yama" stands unsurpassed. b. g. guerney. new york city, january, . translator's note. a word must be said of kuprin's style. he is by no means a purist; his pages bristle with neologisms and foreign--or, rather, outlandish--words; nor has he any hesitancy in adapting and russianizing such words. he coins words; he is, at times, actually borrowesque, and not only does he resort to colloquialisms and slang, but to dialect, cant, and even actual argot. therein is his glory--and, perhaps, his weakness. therefore, an attempt has been made, wherever corruptions, slang, and so forth, appear in the original, to render them through the nearest english equivalents. while this has its obvious dubieties and disadvantages, any other course would have smacked of prettification--a fate which such a book as "yama" surely does not deserve. part one chapter i. a long, long time ago, long before the railroads, the stage-drivers--both government and private--used to live, from generation to generation, at the very farthest confine of a large southern city. and that is why the entire region was called the yamskaya sloboda--the stage-drivers' borough; or simply yamskaya, or yamkas--little ditches, or, shorter still, yama--the pit. in the course of time, when hauling by steam killed off transportation by horses, the mettlesome tribe of the stage-drivers little by little lost its boisterous ways and its brave customs, went over into other occupations, fell apart and scattered. but for many years--even up to this time--a shady renown has remained to yama, as of a place exceedingly gay, tipsy, brawling, and in the night-time not without danger. somehow it came about of itself, that on the ruins of those ancient, long-warmed nests, where of yore the rosy-cheeked, sprightly wives of the soldiery and the plump widows of yama, with their black eyebrows, had secretly traded in vodka and free love, there began to spring up wide-open brothels, permitted by the authorities, regulated by official supervision and subject to express, strict rules. towards the end of the nineteenth century both streets of yama--great yamskaya and little yamskaya--proved to be entirely occupied, on one side of the street as well as the other, exclusively with houses of ill-fame.[ ] of the private houses no more than five or six were left, but even they were taken up by public houses, beer halls, and general stores, catering to the needs of yama prostitution. [ ] "houses of suffrance"--i.e., houses of the necessary evil.--trans. the course of life, the manners and customs, are almost identical in all the thirty-odd establishments; the difference is only in the charges exacted for the briefly-timed love, and consequently in certain external minutiae as well: in the assortment of more or less handsome women, in the comparative smartness of the costumes, in the magnificence of the premises and the luxuriousness of the furnishings. the most chic establishment is that of treppel, the first house to the left upon entering great yamskaya. this is an old firm. its present owner bears an entirely different name, and fills the post of an elector in the city council and is even a member of the city board. the house is of two stories, green and white, built in the debauched pseudo-russian style a la ropetovsky, with little horses, carved facings, roosters, and wooden towels bordered with lace-also of wood; a carpet with a white runner on the stairs; in the front hall a stuffed bear, holding a wooden platter for visiting cards in his out-stretched paws; a parquet floor in the ballroom, heavy raspberry silk curtains and tulle on the windows, along the walls white and gold chairs and mirrors with gilt frames; there are two private cabinets with carpets, divans, and soft satin puffs; in the bedrooms blue and rose lanterns, blankets of raw silk stuff and clean pillows; the inmates are clad in low-cut ball gowns, bordered with fur, or in expensive masquerade costumes of hussars, pages, fisher lasses, school-girls; and the majority of them are germans from the baltic provinces--large, handsome women, white of body and with ample breasts. at treppel's three roubles are taken for a visit, and for the whole night, ten. three of the two-rouble establishments--sophie vassilievna's, the old kiev, and anna markovna's--are somewhat worse, somewhat poorer. the remaining houses on great yamskaya are rouble ones; they are furnished still worse. while on little yamskaya, which is frequented by soldiers, petty thieves, artisans, and drab folk in general, and where fifty kopecks or less are taken for time, things are altogether filthy and poor-the floor in the parlor is crooked, warped, and full of splinters, the windows are hung with pieces of red fustian; the bedrooms, just like stalls, are separated by thin partitions, which do not reach to the ceiling, and on the beds, on top of the shaken down hay-mattresses, are scattered torn, spotted bed-sheets and flannel blankets, dark from time, crumpled any old way, full of holes; the air is sour and full of fumes, with a mixture of alcohol vapours and the smell of human emanations; the women, dressed in rags of coloured printed calico or in sailor costumes, are for the greater part hoarse or snuffling, with noses half fallen through, with faces preserving traces of yesterday's blows and scratches and naively bepainted with the aid of a red cigarette box moistened with spit. all the year round, every evening--with the exception of the last three days of holy week and the night before annunciation, when no bird builds its nest and a shorn wench does not plait her braid--when it barely grows dark out of doors, hanging red lanterns are lit before every house, above the tented, carved street doors. it is just like a holiday out on the street--like easter. all the windows are brightly lit up, the gay music of violins and pianos floats out through the panes, cabmen drive up and drive off without cease. in all the houses the entrance doors are opened wide, and through them one may see from the street a steep staircase with a narrow corridor on top, and the white flashing of the many-facetted reflector of the lamp, and the green walls of the front hall, painted over with swiss landscapes. till the very morning hundreds and thousands of men ascend and descend these staircases. here everybody frequents: half-shattered, slavering ancients, seeking artificial excitements, and boys-military cadets and high-school lads--almost children; bearded paterfamiliases; honourable pillars of society, in golden spectacles; and newly-weds, and enamoured bridegrooms, and honourable professors with renowned names; and thieves, and murderers, and liberal lawyers; and strict guardians of morals--pedagogues, and foremost writers--the authors of fervent, impassioned articles on the equal rights of women; and catchpoles, and spies, and escaped convicts, and officers, and students, and social democrats, and hired patriots; the timid and the brazen, the sick and the well, those knowing woman for the first time, and old libertines frayed by all species of vice; clear-eyed, handsome fellows and monsters maliciously distorted by nature, deaf-mutes, blind men, men without noses, with flabby, pendulous bodies, with malodorous breath, bald, trembling, covered with parasites--pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal apes. they come freely and simply, as to a restaurant or a depot; they sit, smoke, drink, convulsively pretend to be merry; they dance, executing abominable movements of the body imitative of the act of sexual love. at times attentively and long, at times with gross haste, they choose any woman they like and know beforehand that they will never meet refusal. impatiently they pay their money in advance, and on the public bed, not yet grown cold after the body of their predecessor, aimlessly commit the very greatest and most beautiful of all universal mysteries--the mystery of the conception of new life. and the women with indifferent readiness, with uniform words, with practiced professional movements, satisfy their desires, like machines--only to receive, right after them, during the same night, with the very same words, smiles and gestures, the third, the fourth, the tenth man, not infrequently already biding his turn in the waiting room. so passes the entire night. towards daybreak yama little by little grows quiet, and the bright morning finds it depopulated, spacious, plunged into sleep, with doors shut tightly, with shutters fixed on the windows. but toward evening the women awaken and get ready for the following night. and so without end, day after day, for months and years, they live a strange, incredible life in their public harems, outcast by society, accursed by the family, victims of the social temperament, cloacas for the excess of the city's sensuality, the guardians of the honour of the family--four hundred foolish, lazy, hysterical, barren women. chapter ii. two in the afternoon. in the second-rate, two-rouble establishment of anna markovna everything is plunged in sleep. the large square parlor with mirrors in gilt frames, with a score of plush chairs placed decorously along the walls, with oleograph pictures of makovsky's feast of the russian noblemen, and bathing, with a crystal lustre in the middle, is also sleeping, and in the quiet and semi-darkness it seems unwontedly pensive, austere, strangely sad. yesterday here, as on every evening, lights burned, the most rollicking of music rang out, blue tobacco smoke swirled, men and women careered in couples, shaking their hips and throwing their legs on high. and the entire street shone on the outside with the red lanterns over the street doors and with the light from the windows, and it seethed with people and carriages until morning. now the street is empty. it is glowing triumphantly and joyously in the glare of the summer sun. but in the parlor all the window curtains are lowered, and for that reason it is dark within, cool, and as peculiarly uninviting as the interiors of empty theatres, riding academies and court buildings usually are in the middle of the day. the pianoforte glimmers dully with its black, bent, glossy side; the yellow, old, time-eaten, broken, gap-toothed keys glisten faintly. the stagnant, motionless air still retains yesterday's odour; it smells of perfumes, tobacco, the sour dampness of a large uninhabited room, the perspiration of unclean and unhealthy feminine flesh, face-powder, boracic-thymol soap, and the dust of the yellow mastic with which the parquet floor had been polished yesterday. and with a strange charm the smell of withering swamp grass is blended with these smells. to-day is trinity. in accordance with an olden custom, the chambermaids of the establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought a whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long, thick blades, that crunch underfoot, everywhere about--in the corridors, in the private cabinets, in the drawing room. they, also, had lit the lamps before all the images. the girls, by tradition, dare not do this with their hands, which have been denied during the night. and the house-porter has adorned the house-entrance, which is carved in the russian style, with two little felled birch-trees. and so with all the houses--the thin white trunks with their scant dying verdure adorn the exterior near the stoops, bannisters and doors. the entire house is quiet, empty and drowsy. the chopping of cutlets for dinner can be heard from the kitchen. liubka, one of the girls, barefooted, in her shift, with bare arms, not good-looking, freckled, but strong and fresh of body, has come out into the inner court. yesterday she had had but six guests on time, but no one had remained for the night with her, and because of that she had slept her fill--splendidly, delightfully, all alone, upon a wide bed. she had risen early, at ten o'clock, and had with pleasure helped the cook scrub the floor and the tables in the kitchen. now she is feeding the chained dog amour with the sinews and cuttings of the meat. the big, rusty hound, with long glistening hair and black muzzle, jumps up on the girl--with his front paws, stretching the chain tightly and rattling in the throat from shortness of breath, then, with back and tail undulating all over, bends his head down to the ground, wrinkles his nose, smiles, whines and sneezes from the excitement. but she, teasing him with the meat, shouts at him with pretended severity: "there, you--stupid! i'll--i'll give it to you! how dare you?" but she rejoices with all her soul over the tumult and caresses of amour and her momentary power over the dog, and because she had slept her fill, and passed the night without a man, and because of the trinity, according to dim recollections of her childhood, and because of the sparkling sunny day, which it so seldom befalls her to see. all the night guests have already gone their ways. the most business-like, quiet and workaday hour is coming on. they are drinking coffee in the room of the proprietress. the company consists of five people. the proprietress herself, in whose name the house is registered, is anna markovna. she is about sixty. she is very small of stature, but dumpy: she may be visualized by imagining, from the bottom up, three soft, gelatinous globes--large, medium and small, pressed into each other without any interstices; this--her skirt, torso and head. strange, her eyes are a faded blue, girlish, even childish, but the mouth is that of an old person, with a moist lower lip of a raspberry colour, impotently hanging down. her husband--isaiah savvich--is also small, a grayish, quiet, silent little old man. he is under his wife's thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house even at the time when anna markovna served here as housekeeper. in order to be useful in some way, he has learned, through self-instruction, to play the fiddle, and now at night plays dance tunes, as well as a funeral march for shopmen far gone on a spree and craving some maudlin tears. then, there are the two housekeepers--senior and junior. the senior is emma edwardovna. she is a tall, full woman of forty-six, with chestnut hair, and a fat goitre of three chins. her eyes are encircled with black rings of hemorrhoidal origin. the face broadens out like a pear from the forehead down to the cheeks, and is of an earthen colour; the eyes are small, black; the nose humped, the lips sternly pursed; the expression of the face calmly authoritative. it is no mystery to anyone in the house that in a year or two anna markovna will go into retirement, and sell her the establishment with all its rights and furnishings, when she will receive part in cash, and part on terms--by promissory note. because of this the girls honour her equally with the proprietress and fear her somewhat. those who fall into error she beats with her own hands, beats cruelly, coolly, and calculatingly, without changing the calm expression of her face. among the girls there is always a favourite of hers, whom she tortures with her exacting love and fantastic jealousy. and this is far harder than her beatings. the other one is called zociya. she has just struggled out of the ranks of the common girls. the girls, as yet, call her impersonally, flatteringly and familiarly, "little housekeeper." she is spare, spry, just a trifle squinting, with a rosy complexion, and hair dressed in a little curly pompadour; she adores actors--preferably stout comedians. toward emma edwardovna she is ingratiating. the fifth person, finally, is the local district inspector, kerbesh. this is an athletic man; he is kind of bald, has a red beard like a fan, vividly blue slumbrous eyes, and a thin, slightly hoarse, pleasant voice. everybody knows that he formerly served in the secret service division and was the terror of crooks, thanks to his terrible physical strength and cruelty in interrogations. he has several shady transactions on his conscience. the whole town knows that two years back he married a rich old woman of seventy, and that last year he strangled her; however, he was somehow successful in hushing up this affair. but for that matter, the remaining four have also seen a thing or two in their chequered life. but, just as the bretteurs of old felt no twinges of conscience at the recollection of their victims, even so do these people regard the dark and bloody things in their past, as the unavoidable little unpleasantness of their professions. they are drinking coffee with rich, boiled cream--the inspector with benedictine. but he, strictly speaking, is not drinking, but merely conveying the impression that he is doing it to oblige. "well, what is it to be, phoma phornich?" asks the proprietress searchingly. "this business isn't worth an empty eggshell, now... why, you have only to say a word..." kerbesh slowly draws in half a wine-glass of liqueur, works the oily, strong, pungent liquid slightly with his tongue over the roof of his mouth, swallows it, chases it down, without hurrying, with coffee, and then passes the ring finger of his left hand over his moustaches, to the right and left. "think it over for yourself, madam shoibes," he says, looking down at the table, spreading out his hands and screwing up his eyes. "think of the risk to which i'm exposed! the girl through means of deception was enticed into this... what-you-may-call-it... well, in a word, into a house of ill-fame, to express it in lofty style. now the parents are searching for her through the police. ve-ery well. she gets into one place after another, from the fifth into the tenth... finally the trail is picked up with you, and most important of all--think of it!--in my district! what can i do?" "mr. kerbesh, but she is of age," says the proprietress. "they are of age," confirms isaiah savvich. "they gave an acknowledgment, that it was of their own will..." emma edwardovna pronounces in a bass, with cool assurance: "honest to god, she's the same here as an own daughter." "but that's not what i am talking about," the inspector frowns in vexation. "just consider my position... why, this is duty. lord, there's no end of unpleasantnesses without that!" the proprietress suddenly arises, shuffles in her slippers to the door, and says, winking to the inspector with a sleepy, expressionless eye of faded blue: "mr. kerbesh, i would ask you to have a look at our alterations. we want to enlarge the place a bit." "a-ah! with pleasure..." after ten minutes both return, without looking at each other. kerbesh's hand is crunching a brand-new hundred rouble note in his pocket. the conversation about the seduced girl is not renewed. the inspector, hastily finishing his benedictine, complains of the present decline in manners. "i have a son, now, a schoolboy--paul. he comes to me, the scoundrel, and declares: 'papa, the pupils swear at me, because you are a policeman, and because you serve on yamskaya, and because you take bribes from brothels.' well, tell me, for god's sake, madam shoibes, if that isn't effrontery?" "ai, ai, ai! ... and what bribes can there be? now with me..." "i say to him: 'go, you good-for-nothing, and let the principal know, that there should be no more of this, otherwise papa will inform on all of you to the governor.' and what do you think? he comes to me and says: 'i am no longer a son to you--seek another son for yourself.' what an argument! well, i gave him enough to last till the first of the month! oho-ho! now he doesn't want to speak with me. well, i'll show him yet!" "ah, you don't have to tell us," sighs anna markovna, letting her lower, raspberry-coloured lip hang down and with a mist coming over her faded eyes. "we keep our birdie--she is in fleisher's high school--we purposely keep her in town, in a respectable family. you understand, it is awkward, after all. and all of a sudden she brings such words and expressions from the high school that i just simply turned all red." "honest to god, annochka turned all red," confirms isaiah savvich. "you'll turn red, all right!" warmly agrees the inspector. "yes, yes, yes, i understand you fully. but, my god, where are we going! where are we only going? i ask you, what are these revolutionaries and all these various students, or... what-you-may-call-'ems? ... trying to attain? and let them put the blame on none but themselves. corruption is everywhere, morality is falling, there is no respect for parents. they ought to be shot." "well, now, the day before yesterday we had a case," zociya mixes in bustlingly. "a certain guest came, a stout man..." "drop it!" emma edwardovna, who was listening to the inspector, piously nodding with her head bowed to one side, cuts her short in the jargon of the brothels. "you'd better go and see about breakfast for the young ladies." "and not a single person can be relied upon," continues the proprietress grumblingly. "not a servant but what she's a stiff, a faker. and all the girls ever think about is their lovers. just so's they may have their own pleasure. but about their duties they don't even think." there is an awkward silence. some one knocks on the door. a thin, feminine voice speaks on the other side of the door: "housekeeper, dear, take the money and be kind enough to give me the stamps. pete's gone." the inspector gets up and adjusts his sabre. "well, it's time i was going to work. best regards, anna markovna. best wishes, isaiah savvich." "perhaps you'll have one more little glass for a stirrup cup?" the nearly blind isaiah savvich thrusts himself over the table. "tha-ank you. i can't. full to the gills. honoured, i'm sure! ..." "thanks for your company. drop in some time." "always glad to be your guest, sir. au revoir!" but in the doorway he stops for a minute and says significantly: "but still, my advice to you is--you'd better pass this girl on to some place or other in good time. of course, it's your affair, but as a good friend of yours i give you warning." he goes away. when his steps are abating on the stairs and the front door bangs to behind him, emma edwardovna snorts through her nose and says contemptuously: "stool-pigeon! he wants to take money both here and there..." little by little they all crawl apart out of the room. it is dark in the house. it smells sweetly of the half-withered sedge. quiet reigns. chapter iii. until dinner, which is served at six in the evening, the time drags endlessly long and with intolerable monotony. and, in general, this daily interval is the heaviest and emptiest in the life of the house. it remotely resembles in its moods those slothful, empty hours which are lived through during the great holidays in scholastic institutes and other private institutions for females, when all the friends have dispersed, when there is much leisure and much indolence, and a radiant, agreeable tedium reigns the whole day. in only their petticoats and white shifts, with bare arms, sometimes barefooted, the women aimlessly ramble from room to room, all of them unwashed, uncombed; lazily strike the keys of the old pianoforte with the index finger, lazily lay out cards to tell their fortune, lazily exchange curses, and with a languishing irritation await the evening. liubka, after breakfast, had carried out the leavings of bread and the cuttings of ham to amour, but the dog had soon palled upon her. together with niura she had bought some barberry bon-bons and sunflower seeds, and now both are standing behind the fence separating the house from the street, gnawing the seeds, the shells of which remain on their chins and bosoms, and speculate indifferently about those who pass on the street: about the lamp-lighter, pouring kerosene into the street lamps, about the policeman with the daily registry book under his arm, about the housekeeper from somebody else's establishment, running across the road to the general store. niura is a small girl, with goggle-eyes of blue; she has white, flaxen hair and little blue veins on her temples. in her face there is something stolid and innocent, reminiscent of a white sugar lamb on a paschal cake. she is lively, bustling, curious, puts her nose into everything, agrees with everybody, is the first to know the news, and, when she speaks, she speaks so much and so rapidly that spray flies out of her mouth and bubbles effervescence on the red lips, as in children. opposite, out of the dram-shop, a servant pops out for a minute--a curly, besotted young fellow with a cast in his eye--and runs into the neighbouring public house. "prokhor ivanovich, oh prokhor ivanovich," shouts niura, "don't you want some?--i'll treat you to some sunflower seeds!" "come on in and pay us a visit," liubka chimes in. niura snorts and adds through the laughter which suffocates her: "warm your feet for a while!" but the front door opens; in it appears the formidable and stern figure of the senior housekeeper. "pfui![ ] what sort of indecency is this!" she cries commandingly. "how many times must it be repeated to you, that you must not jump out on the street during the day, and also--pfui!--only in your underwear. i can't understand how you have no conscience yourselves. decent girls, who respect themselves, must not demean themselves that way in public. it seems, thank god, that you are not in an establishment catering to soldiers, but in a respectable house. not in little yamskaya." [ ] a german exclamation of disgust or contempt, corresponding to the english fie.--trans. the girls return into the house, get into the kitchen, and for a long time sit there on tabourets, contemplating the angry cook prascoviya, swinging their legs and silently gnawing the sunflower seeds. in the room of little manka, who is also called manka the scandaliste and little white manka, a whole party has gathered. sitting on the edge of the bed, she and another girl--zoe, a tall handsome girl, with arched eyebrows, with grey, somewhat bulging eyes, with the most typical, white, kind face of the russian prostitute--are playing at cards, playing at "sixty-six." little manka's closest friend, jennie, is lying behind their backs on the bed, prone on her back, reading a tattered book, the queen's necklace, the work of monsieur dumas, and smoking. in the entire establishment she is the only lover of reading and reads intoxicatingly and without discrimination. but, contrary to expectation, the forced reading of novels of adventure has not at all made her sentimental and has not vitiated her imagination. above all, she likes in novels a long intrigue, cunningly thought out and deftly disentangled; magnificent duels, before which the viscount unties the laces of his shoes to signify that he does not intend to retreat even a step from his position,[ ] and after which the marquis, having spitted the count through, apologizes for having made an opening in his splendid new waistcoat; purses, filled to the full with gold, carelessly strewn to the left and right by the chief heroes; the love adventures and witticisms of henry iv--in a word, all this spiced heroism, in gold and lace, of the past centuries of french history. in everyday life, on the contrary, she is sober of mind, jeering, practical and cynically malicious. in her relation to the other girls of the establishment she occupies the same place that in private educational institutions is accorded to the first strong man, the man spending a second year in the same grade, the first beauty in the class--tyrannizing and adored. she is a tall, thin brunette, with beautiful hazel eyes, a small proud mouth, a little moustache on the upper lip and with a swarthy, unhealthy pink on her cheeks. [ ] probably a sly dig at gautier's captain fracasse.--trans. without letting the cigarette out of her mouth and screwing up her eyes from the smoke, all she does is to turn the pages constantly with a moistened finger. her legs are bare to the knees; the enormous balls of the feet are of the most vulgar form; below the big toes stand out pointed, ugly, irregular tumours. here also, with her legs crossed, slightly bent, with some sewing, sits tamara--a quiet, easy-going, pretty girl, slightly reddish, with that dark and shining tint of hair which is to be found on the back of a fox in winter. her real name is glycera, or lukeria, as the common folk say it. but it is already an ancient usage of the houses of ill-fame to replace the uncouth names of the matrenas, agathas, cyclitinias with sonorous, preferably exotic names. tamara had at one time been a nun, or, perhaps, merely a novice in a convent, and to this day there have been preserved on her face timidity and a pale puffiness--a modest and sly expression, which is peculiar to young nuns. she holds herself aloof in the house, does not chum with any one, does not initiate any one into her past life. but in her case there must have been many more adventures besides having been a nun: there is something mysterious, taciturn and criminal in her unhurried speech, in the evasive glance of her deep and dark-gold eyes from under the long, lowered eyelashes, in her manners, her sly smiles and intonations of a modest but wanton would-be saint. there was one occurrence when the girls, with well-nigh reverent awe, heard that tamara could talk fluently in french and german. she has within her some sort of an inner, restrained power. notwithstanding her outward meekness and complaisance, all in the establishment treat her with respect and circumspection--the proprietress, and her mates, and both housekeepers, and even the doorkeeper, that veritable sultan of the house of ill-fame, that general terror and hero. "i've covered it," says zoe and turns over the trump which had been lying under the pack, wrong side up. "i'm going with forty, going with an ace of spades--a ten-spot, mannechka, if you please. i'm through. fifty-seven, eleven, sixty-eight. how much have you?" "thirty," says manka in an offended tone, pouting her lips; "oh, it's all very well for you--you remember all the plays. deal ... well, what's after that, tamarochka?" she turns to her friend. "you talk on--i'm listening." zoe shuffles the old, black, greasy cards, allows manya to cut, then deals, having first spat upon her fingers. tamara in the meanwhile is narrating to manya in a quiet voice, without dropping her sewing. "we embroidered with gold, in flat embroidery--altar covers, palls, bishops' vestments... with little grasses, with flowers, little crosses. in winter, you'd be sitting near a casement; the panes are small, with gratings, there isn't much light, it smells of lamp oil, incense, cypress; you mustn't talk--the mother superior was strict. some one from weariness would begin droning a pre-lenten first verse of a hymn ... 'when i consider thy heavens ...' we sang fine, beautifully, and it was such a quiet life, and the smell was so fine; you could see the flaky snow out the windows--well, now, just like in a dream..." jennie puts the tattered novel down on her stomach, throws the cigarette over zoe's head, and says mockingly: "we know all about your quiet life. you chucked the infants into toilets. the evil one is always snooping around your holy places." "i call forty. i had forty-six. finished!" little manka exclaims excitedly and claps her palms. "i open with three." tamara, smiling at jennie's words, answers with a scarcely perceptible smile, which barely distends her lips, but makes little, sly, ambiguous depressions at their corners, altogether as with monna lisa in the portrait by leonardo da vinci. "lay folk say a lot of things about nuns ... well, even if there had been sin once in a while ..." "if you don't sin--you don't repent," zoe puts in seriously, and wets her finger in her mouth. "you sit and sew, the gold eddies before your eyes, while from standing in the morning at prayer your back just aches, and your legs ache. and at evening there is service again. you knock at the door of the mother superior's cell: 'through prayers of thy saints, oh lord, our father, have mercy upon us.' and the mother superior would answer from the cell, in a little bass-like 'a-men.'" jennie looks at her intently for some time, shakes her head and says with great significance: "you're a queer girl, tamara. here i'm looking at you and wondering. well, now, i can understand how these fools, on the manner of sonka, play at love. that's what they're fools for. but you, it seems, have been roasted on all sorts of embers, have been washed in all sorts of lye, and yet you allow yourself foolishness of that sort. what are you embroidering that shirt for?" tamara, without haste, with a pin refastens the fabric more conveniently on her knee, smooths the seam down with the thimble, and speaks, without raising the narrowed eyes, her head bent just a trifle to one side: "one's got to be doing something. it's wearisome just so. i don't play at cards, and i don't like them." jennie continues to shake her head. "no, you're a queer girl, really you are. you always have more from the guests than all of us get. you fool, instead of saving money, what do you spend it on? you buy perfumes at seven roubles the bottle. who needs it? and now you have bought fifteen roubles' worth of silk. isn't this for your senka, now?" "of course, for sennechka." "what a treasure you've found, to be sure! a miserable thief. he rides up to this establishment like some general. how is it he doesn't beat you yet? the thieves--they like that. and he plucks you, have no fear?" "more than i want to, i won't give," meekly answers tamara and bites the thread in two. "now that is just what i wonder at. with your mind, your beauty, i would put such rings-around-a-rosie about a guest like that, that he'd take me and set me up. i'd have horses of my own, and diamonds." "everyone to his tastes, jennechka. you too, now, are a very pretty and darling girl, and your character is so independent and brave, and yet you and i have gotten stuck in anna markovna's." jennie flares up and answers with unsimulated bitterness: "yes! why not! all things come your way! ...you have all the very best guests. you do what you want with them, but with me it's always either old men or suckling babies. i have no luck. the ones are snotty, the others have yellow around the mouth. more than anything else, now, i dislike the little boys. he comes, the little varmint; he's cowardly, he hurries, he trembles, but having done the business, he doesn't know what to do with his eyes for shame. he's all squirming from disgust. i just feel like giving him one in the snout. before giving you the rouble, he holds it in his pocket in his fist, and that rouble's all hot, even sweaty. the milksop! his mother gives him a ten kopeck piece for a french roll with sausage, but he's economized out of that for a wench. i had one little cadet in the last few days. so just on purpose, to spite him, i say: 'here, my dearie, here's a little caramel for you on your way; when you're going back to your corps, you'll suck on it.' so at first he got offended, but afterwards took it. later i looked from the stoop, on purpose; just as soon as he walked out, he looked around, and right away into his mouth with the caramel. the little swine!" "but with old men it's still worse," says little manka in a tender voice, and slyly looks at zoe. "what do you think, zoinka?" zoe, who had already finished playing, and was just about to yawn, now cannot in any way give rein to her yawns. she does not know whether she wants to be angry or to laugh. she has a steady visitor, some little old man in a high station, with perverted erotic habits. the entire establishment makes fun of his visits to her. zoe at last succeeds in yawning. "to the devil's dam with all of you," she says, with her voice hoarse after the yawn; "may he be damned, the old anathema!" "but still, the worst of all," jennie continues to discourse, "worse than your director, zoinka, worse than my cadet, the worst of all--are your lovers. what can there be joyous in this: he comes drunk, poses, makes sport of you, wants to pretend there's something in him--only nothing comes of it all. wha-at a lad-die, to be sure! the scummiest of the scum, dirty, beaten-up, stinking, his whole body in scars, there's only one glory about him: the silk shirt which tamarka will embroider for him. he curses one's mother, the son of a bitch, always aching for a fight. ugh! no!" she suddenly exclaimed in a merry provoking voice, "the one i love truly and surely, for ever and ever, is my mannechka, manka the white, little manka, my manka-scandalistochka." and unexpectedly, having embraced manya by the shoulders and bosom, she drew her toward herself, threw her down on the bed, and began to kiss deeply and vigorously her hair, eyes, lips. manka with difficulty tore herself away from her, with dishevelled, bright, fine, downy hair, all rosy from the resistance, and with eyes downcast and moist from shame and laughter. "leave off, jennechka, leave off. well, now, what are you doing? let me go!" little manya is the meekest and quietest girl in the entire establishment. she is kind, yielding, can never refuse anybody's request, and involuntarily everybody treats her with great gentleness. she blushes over every trifle, and at such time becomes especially attractive, as only very tender blondes with a sensitive skin can be attractive. but it is sufficient for her to drink three or four glasses of liqueur benedictine, of which she is very fond, for her to become unrecognizable and to create brawls, such, that there is always required the intervention of the housekeepers, the porter, at times even the police. it is nothing for her to hit a guest in the face or to throw in his face a glass filled with wine, to overturn the lamp, to curse out the proprietress, jennie treats her with some strange, tender patronage and rough adoration. "ladies, to dinner! to dinner, ladies!" calls zociya the housekeeper, running along the corridor. on the run she opens the door into manya's room and drops hurriedly: "to dinner, to dinner, ladies!" they go again to the kitchen, all still in their underwear, all unwashed, in slippers and barefoot. a tasty vegetable soup of pork rinds and tomatoes, cutlets, and pastry-cream rolls are served. but no one has any appetite, thanks to the sedentary life and irregular sleep, and also because the majority of the girls, just like school-girls on a holiday, had already managed during the day to send to the store for halvah, nuts, rakkat loukoum (turkish delight), dill-pickles and molasses candy, and had through this spoiled their appetites. only nina alone--a small, pug-nosed, snuffling country girl, seduced only two months ago by a travelling salesman, and (also by him) sold into a brothel--eats for four. the inordinate, provident appetite of a woman of the common people has not yet disappeared in her. jennie, who has only picked fastidiously at her cutlet and eaten half her cream roll, speaks to her in a tone of hypocritical solicitude: "really, pheclusha, you might just as well eat my cutlet, too. eat, my dear, eat; don't be bashful--you ought to be gaining in health. but do you know what i'll tell you, ladies?" she turns to her mates, "why, our pheclusha has a tape-worm, and when a person has a tape-worm, he always eats for two: half for himself, half for the worm." nina sniffs angrily and answers in a bass which comes as a surprise from one of her stature, and through her nose: "there are no tape-worms in me. it's you that has the tape-worms, that's why you are so skinny." and she imperturbably continues to eat, and after dinner feels herself sleepy, like a boa constrictor, eructs loudly, drinks water, hiccups, and, by stealth, if no one sees her, makes the sign of the cross over her mouth, through an old habit. but already the ringing voice of zociya can be heard through the corridors and rooms: "get dressed, ladies, get dressed. there's no use in sitting around...to work..." after a few minutes in all the rooms of the establishment there are smells of singed hair, boric-thymol soap, cheap eau-de-cologne. the girls are dressing for the evening. chapter iv. the late twilight came on, and after it the warm, dark night, but for long, until very midnight, did the deep crimson glow of the sky still smoulder. simeon, the porter of the establishment, has lit all the lamps along the walls of the drawing room, and the lustre, as well as the red lantern over the stoop. simeon was a spare, stocky, taciturn and harsh man, with straight, broad shoulders, dark-haired, pock-marked, with little bald spots on his eye-brows and moustaches from small-pox, and with black, dull, insolent eyes. by day he was free and slept, while at night he sat without absenting himself in the front hall under the reflector, in order to help the guests with their coats and to be ready in case of any disorder. the pianist came--a tall, elegant young man, with white eyebrows and eyelashes, and a cataract in his right eye. the while there were no guests, he and isaiah savvich quietly rehearsed pas d'espagne, at that time coming into fashion. for every dance ordered by the guests, they received thirty kopecks for an easy dance, and a half rouble for a quadrille. but one-half of this price was taken out by the proprietress, anna markovna; the other, however, the musicians divided evenly. in this manner the pianist received only a quarter of the general earnings, which, of course, was unjust, since isaiah savvich played as one self-taught and was distinguished for having no more ear for music than a piece of wood. the pianist was constantly compelled to drag him on to new tunes, to correct and cover his mistakes with loud chords. the girls said of their pianist to the guests, with a certain pride, that he had been in the conservatory and always ranked as the first pupil, but since he is a jew, and in addition to that his eyes had begun to trouble him, he had not succeeded in completing the course. they all treated him carefully and considerately, with some sort of solicitous, somewhat mawkish, commiseration, which chimes so well with the inner, backstage customs of houses of ill-fame, where underneath the outer coarseness and the flaunting of obscene words dwells the same sweetish, hysterical sentimentality as in female boarding schools, and, so they say, in penal institutions. in the house of anna markovna everybody was already dressed and ready for the reception of the guests, and languishing from inaction and expectation. despite the fact that the majority of the women experienced toward men--with the exception of their lovers--a complete, even somewhat squeamish, indifference, before every evening dim hopes came to life and stirred within their souls; it was unknown who would choose them, whether something unusual, funny and alluring might not happen, whether a guest would not astonish with his generosity, whether there would not be some miracle which would overturn the whole life...in these presentiments and hopes was something akin to those emotions which the accustomed gamester experiences when counting his ready money before starting out for his club. besides that, despite their asexuality, they still had not lost the chiefest instinctive aspiration of women--to please. and, in truth, altogether curious personages came into the house at times and ludicrous, motley events arose. the police would appear suddenly together with disguised detectives and arrest some seemingly respectable, irreproachable gentlemen and lead them off, pushing them along with blows in the neck. at times brawls would spring up between the drunken, trouble-making company and the porters of all the establishments, who had gathered on the run for the relief of a fellow porter--a brawl, during which the window-panes and the decks of grand-pianos were broken, when the legs of the plush chairs were wrenched out for weapons, blood ran over the parquet floor of the drawing room and the steps of the stairs, and people with pierced sides and broken heads fell down into the dirt near the street entrance, to the feral, avid delight of jennka, who, with burning eyes, with happy laughter, went into the thickest of the melee, slapped herself on the hips, swore and sicked them on, while her mates were squealing from fear and hiding under the beds. there were occurrences when there would arrive, with a pack of parasites, some member of a workingmen's association or a cashier, long since far gone in an embezzlement of many thousands through gambling at cards and hideous orgies, and now, in a drunken, senseless delirium, tossing the last money after the other, before suicide or the prisoner's box. then the doors and windows of the house would be tightly closed, and for two days and nights at a stretch a russian orgy would go on--nightmarish, tedious, savage, with screams and tears, with revilement over the body of woman; paradisaical nights were gotten up, during which naked, drunken, bow-legged, hairy, pot-bellied men, and women with flabby, yellow, pendulous thin bodies hideously grimaced to the music; they drank and guzzled like swine, on the beds and on the floor, amidst the stifling atmosphere, permeated with spirits, befouled with human respiration and the exhalations of unclean skins. occasionally, there would appear a circus athlete, creating in the low-ceiled quarters a strangely cumbersome impression, somewhat like that of a horse led into a room; a chinaman in a blue blouse, white stockings, and with a queue; a negro from a cabaret, in a tuxedo coat and checked pantaloons, with a flower in his button-hole, and with starched linen, which, to the amazement of the girls, not only did not soil from the black skin, but appeared still more dazzlingly white. these rare people fomented the satiated imagination of the prostitutes, excited their exhausted sensuality and professional curiosity, and all of them, almost enamoured, would walk in their steps, jealous and bickering with one another. there was one incident when simeon had let into the room an elderly man, dressed like a bourgeois. there was nothing exceptional about him; he had a stern, thin face, with bony, evil-looking cheek-bones, protruding like tumours, a low forehead, a beard like a wedge, bushy eyebrows, one eye perceptibly higher than the other. having entered, he raised his fingers, folded for the sign of the cross, to his forehead, but having searched the corners with his eyes and finding no image, he did not in the least grow confused, put down his hand, and at once with a business-like air walked up to the fattest girl in the establishment--kitty. "let's go!" he commanded curtly, and with determination nodded his head in the direction of the door. during the entire period of her absence the omniscious simeon, with a mysterious, and even somewhat proud air, managed to inform niura, at that time his mistress, while she, in a whisper, with horror in her rounded eyes, told her mates, in secret, that the name of the bourgeois was dyadchenko, and that last fall he had volunteered, owing to the absence of the hangman, to carry out the execution of eleven rioters, and with his own hands had hung them in two mornings. and--monstrous as it may be--at that hour there was not in the establishment a single girl who did not feel envy toward the fat kitty, and did not experience a painful, keen, vertiginous curiosity. when dyadchenko was going away half an hour later--with his sedate and stern air, all the women speechlessly, with their mouths gaping, escorted him to the street door and afterwards watched him from the windows as he walked along the street. then they rushed into the room of the dressing kitty and overwhelmed her with interrogations. they looked with a new feeling, almost with astonishment, at her bare, red, thick arms, at the bed, still crumpled, at the old, greasy, paper rouble, which kitty showed them, having taken it out of her stocking. kitty could tell them nothing. "a man like any man, like all men," she said with a calm incomprehension; but when she found out who her visitor had been, she suddenly burst into tears, without herself knowing why. this man, the outcast of outcasts, fallen as low as the fancy of man can picture, this voluntary headsman, had treated her without rudeness, but with such absence of even a hint at endearment, with such disdain and wooden indifference, as no human being is treated; not even a dog or a horse, and not even an umbrella, overcoat or hat, but like some dirty, unclean object, for which a momentary, unavoidable need arises, but which, at the passing of its needfulness, becomes foreign, useless, and disgusting. the entire horror of this thought the fat kate could not embrace with her brain of a fattened turkey hen, and because of that cried--as it seemed even to her--without cause and reason. there were also other happenings, which stirred up the turbid, foul life of these poor, sick, silly, unfortunate women. there were cases of savage, unbridled jealousy with pistol shots and poisoning; occasionally, very rarely, a tender, flaming and pure love would blossom out upon this dung; occasionally the women even abandoned an establishment with the help of the loved man, but almost always came back. two or three times it happened that a woman from a brothel would suddenly prove pregnant--and this always seemed, on the face of it, laughable and disgraceful, but touching in the profundity of the event. and no matter what may have happened, every evening brought with it such an irritating, strained, spicy expectation of adventures that every other life, after that in a house of ill-fame, would have seemed flat and humdrum to these lazy women of no will power. chapter v. the windows are opened wide to the fragrant darkness of the evening, and the tulle curtains stir faintly back and forth from the imperceptible movement of the air. it smells of dewy grass from the consumptive little garden in front of the house, and just the least wee bit of lilac and the withering birch leaves of the little trees placed near the entrance because of the trinity. liuba, in a blue velvet blouse with low cut bosom, and niura, dressed as a "baby," in a pink, wide sacque to the knees, with her bright hair loose and with little curls on her forehead, are lying embraced on the window-sill, and are singing in a low voice a song about the hospital, which song is the rage of the day and exceedingly well known among prostitutes. niura, through her nose, leads in a high voice. liuba seconds her with a stifled alto: "monday now is come again, they're supposed to get me out; doctor krasov won't let me out ..." in all the houses the windows are brightly lit, while hanging lanterns are burning before the entrances. to both girls the interior in the establishment of sophia vasilievna, which is directly opposite, is distinctly visible--the shining yellow parquet, draperies of a dark cherry colour on the doors, caught up with cords, the end of a black grand-piano, a pier glass in a gilt frame, and the figures of women in gorgeous dresses, now flashing at the windows, now disappearing, and their reflections in the mirrors. the carved stoop of treppel, to the right, is brightly illuminated by a bluish electric light in a big frosted globe. the evening is calm and warm. somewhere far, far away, beyond the line of the railroads, beyond some black roofs and the thin black trunks of trees, down low over the dark earth in which the eye does not see but rather senses the mighty green tone of spring, reddens with a scarlet gold the narrow, long streak of the sunset glow, which has pierced the dove-coloured mist. and in this indistinct, distant light, in the caressing air, in the scents of the oncoming night, was some secret, sweet, conscious mournfulness, which usually is so gentle in the evenings between spring and summer. the indistinct noise of the city floated in, the dolorous, snuffling air of an accordeon, the mooing of cows could be heard; somebody's soles were scraping dryly and a ferruled cane rapped resoundingly on the flags of the pavement; lazily and irregularly the wheels of a cabman's victoria, rolling at a pace through yama, would rumble by, and all these sounds mingled with a beauty and softness in the pensive drowsiness of the evening. and the whistles of the locomotives on the line of the railroad, which was marked out in the darkness with green and red lights, sounded with a quiet, singing caution. "now the nurse is co-oming in, bringing sugar and a roll, bringing sugar and a roll, deals them equally to all." "prokhor ivanich!" niura suddenly calls after the curly waiter from the dram-shop, who, a light black silhouette, is running across the road. "oh, prokhor ivanich!" "oh, bother you!" the other snarls hoarsely. "what now?" "a friend of yours sent you his regards. i saw him today." "what sort of friend?" "such a little good-looker! an attractive little brunet ...no, but you'd better ask--where did i see him?" "well, where?" prokhor ivanovich comes to a stop for a minute. "and here's where: nailed over there, on the fifth shelf with old hats, where we keep all dead cats." "scat! you darn fool!" niura laughs shrilly over all yama, and throws herself down on the sill, kicking her legs in high black stockings. afterward, having ceased laughing, she all of a sudden makes round astonished eyes and says in a whisper: "but do you know, girlie--why, he cut a woman's throat the year before last--that same prokhor. honest to god!" "is that so? did she die?" "no, she didn't. she got by," says niura, as though with regret. "but just the same she lay for two months in the alexandrovskaya hospital. the doctors said, that if it were only this teen-weeny bit higher--then it would have been all over. bye-bye!" "well, what did he do that to her for?" "how should i know? maybe she hid money from him or wasn't true to him. he was her lover--her pimp." "well, and what did he get for it?" "why, nothing. there was no evidence of any kind. there had been a free-for-all mix-up. about a hundred people were fighting. she also told the police that she had no suspicions of any sort. but prokhor himself boasted afterwards: 'i,' says he, 'didn't do for dunka that time, but i'll finish her off another time. she,' says he, 'won't get by my hands. i'm going to give her the works.'" a shiver runs all the way down liuba's back. "they're desperate fellows, these pimps!" she pronounces quietly, with horror in her voice. "something terrible! i, you know, played at love with our simeon for a whole year. such a herod, the skunk! i didn't have a whole spot on me. i always went about in black and blue marks. and it wasn't for any reason at all, but just simply so--he'd go in the morning into a room with me, lock himself in, and start in to torture me. he'd wrench my arms, pinch my breasts, grab my throat and begin to strangle me. or else he'd be kissing, kissing, and then he'd bite the lips so that the blood would just spurt out ... i'd start crying--but that's all he was looking for. then he'd just pounce an me like a beast--simply shivering all over. and he'd take all my money away--well, now, to the very last little copper. there wasn't anything to buy ten cigarettes with. he's stingy, this here simeon, that's what, always into the bank-book with it, always putting it away into the bank-book... says when he gets a thousand roubles together--he'll go into a monastery." "go on!" "honest to god. you look into his little room: the twenty-four hours round, day and night, the little holy lamp burns before the images. he's very strong for god ... only i think that he's that way because there's heavy sins upon him. he's a murderer." "what are you saying?" "oh, let's drop talking about him, liubochka. well, let's go on further: "i'll go to the drug store, buy me some poison, and i will poison then meself." niura starts off in a very high, thin voice. jennie walks back and forth in the room, with arms akimbo, swaying as she walks, and looking at herself in all the mirrors. she has on a short orange satin dress, with straight deep pleats in the skirt, which vacillates evenly to the left and right from the movement of her hips. little manka, a passionate lover of card games, ready to play from morning to morning, without stopping, is playing away at "sixty-six" with pasha, during which both women, for convenience in dealing, have left an empty chair between them, while they gather their tricks into their skirts, spread out between their knees. manka has on a brown, very modest dress, with black apron and pleated black bib; this dress is very becoming to her dainty, fair little head and small stature; it makes her younger and gives her the appearance of a high-school undergraduate. her partner pasha is a very queer and unhappy girl. she should have been, long ago, not in a house of ill-fame, but in a psychiatric ward, because of an excruciating nervous malady, which compels her to give herself up, frenziedly, with an unwholesome avidity, to any man whatsoever who may choose her, even the most repulsive. her mates make sport of her and despise her somewhat for this vice, just as though for some treason to their corporate enmity toward men. niura, with very great versimilitude, mimics her sighs, groans, outcries and passionate words, from which she can never refrain in the moments of ecstasy and which are to be heard in the neighbouring rooms through two or three partitions. there is a rumour afloat about pasha, that she got into a brothel not at all through necessity or temptation or deception, but had gone into it her own self, voluntarily, following her horrible, insatiable instinct. but the proprietress of the house and both the housekeepers indulge pasha in every way and encourage her insane weakness, because, thanks to it, pasha is in constant demand and earns four, five times as much as any one of the remaining girls--earns so much, that on busy gala days she is not brought out to the more drab guests at all, or else refused them under the pretext of pasha's illness, because the steady, paying guests are offended if they are told that the girl they know is busy with another. and of such steady guests pasha has a multitude; many are with perfect sincerity, even though bestially, in love with her, and even not so long ago two, almost at the same time, offered to set her up: a georgian--a clerk in a store of cakhetine wines, and some railroad agent, a very proud and very poor nobleman, with shirt cuffs the colour of a cabbage rose, and with an eye which had been replaced by a black circle on an elastic. pasha, passive in everything save her impersonal sensuality, would go with anybody who might call her, but the administration of the house vigilantly guards its interests in her. a near insanity already flits over her lovely face, in her half-closed eyes, always smiling with some heady, blissful, meek, bashful and unseemly smile, in her languorous, softened, moist lips, which she is constantly licking; in her short, quiet laugh--the laugh of an idiot. yet at the same time she--this veritable victim of the social temperament--in everyday life is very good-natured, yielding, entirely uncovetous and is very much ashamed of her inordinate passion. toward her mates she is tender, likes very much to kiss and embrace them and sleep in the same bed with them, but still everybody has a little aversion for her, it would seem. "mannechka, sweetie, dearie," says pasha lightly touching manya's hand with emotion, "tell my fortune, my precious little child." "we-ell," manya pouts her lips just like a child, "let's play a little more." "mannechka, my little beauty, you little good-looker, my precious, my own, my dear..." manya gives in and lays out the pack on her knees. a suit of hearts comes out, a small monetary interest and a meeting in the suit of spades with a large company in the king of clubs. pasha claps her hands joyously: "ah, it's my levanchik! well, yes, he promised to come to-day. of course, it's levanchik." "that's your georgian!" "yes, yes, my little georgian. oh, how nice he is. i'd just love never to let him go away from me. do you know what he told me the last time? 'if you'll go on living in a sporting house, then i'll make both you dead, and make me dead.' and he flashed his eyes at me so!" jennie, who had stopped near, listens to her words and asks haughtily: "who was it said that?" "why, my little georgian, levan. 'both for you death and for me death.'" "fool! he isn't any little georgian at all, but simply a common armenian. you're a crazy fool." "oh no, he isn't--he's a georgian. and it is quite strange on your part..." "i'm telling you--a common armenian. i can tell better. fool!" "what are you cursing for, jennie? i didn't start cursing you first off, did i?" "you just try and be the first to start cursing! fool! isn't it all the same to you what he is? are you in love with him, or what?" "well, i am in love with him!" "well, and you're a fool. and the one with the badge in his cap, the lame one--are you in love with him too?" "well, what of it? i respect him very much. he is very respectable." "and with nicky the book-keeper? and with the contractor? and with antoshka-kartoshka?[ ] and with the fat actor? oo-ooh, you shameless creature!" jennie suddenly cries out. "i can't look at you without disgust. you're a bitch! in your place, if i was such a miserable thing, i'd rather lay hands on myself, strangle myself with a cord from my corset. you vermin!" [ ] tony the potato.--trans. pasha silently lowers her eyelashes over her tear-filled eyes. manya tries to defend her. "really, what are you carrying on like that for, jennechka? what are you down on her like that for..." "eh, all of you are fine!" jennie sharply cuts her short. "no self-respect of any sort! some scum comes along, buys you like a piece of meat, hires you like a cabby, at a fixed rate, for love for an hour, but you go all to pieces: 'ah, my little lover! ah, what unearthly passion!' ugh!" she spat in disgust. she wrathfully turns her back upon them and continues to promenade on a diagonal through the room, swinging her hips and blinking at herself in every mirror. during this time isaac davidovich, the piano player, is still struggling with the refractory violinist. "not that way, not that way, isaiah savvich. you throw the fiddle away for one little minute. listen a little to me. here is the tune." he plays with one finger and hums in that horrible goatish voice that all musical directors--for which calling he had been at one time preparing--possess. "ess-tam, ess-tam, ess-tiam-tiam. well, now, repeat after me the first part, first time off..... well..... ein, zwei..." their rehearsal is being attentively watched by the grey-eyed, round-faced, arch-browed zoe, mercilessly bedaubed with cheap rouges and whiteners, leaning with her elbows on the pianoforte, and the slight vera, with drink-ravaged face, in the costume of a jockey--in a round little cap with straight brim, in a little silk jacket, striped blue and white, in tightly stretched trunks and in little patent leather boots with yellow facings. and really, vera does resemble a jockey, with her narrow face, in which the exceedingly sparkling blue eyes, under a smart bob coming down on the forehead, are set too near the humped, nervous, very handsome nose. when, at last, after long efforts the musicians agree, the somewhat small verka walks up to the large zoe, in that mincing, tethered walk, the hind part sticking out, and elbows spread as though for flight, with which only women in male costume can walk, and makes a comical masculine bow to her, spreading her arms wide and lowering them. and, with great enjoyment, they begin careering over the room. the nimble niura, always the first to announce all the news, suddenly jumps down from the window sill, and calls out, spluttering from the excitement and hurry: "a swell carriage...has driven up...to treppel ...with electricity... oi, goils...may i die on the spot...there's electricity on the shafts." all the girls, save the proud jennie, thrust themselves out of the windows. a driver with a fine carriage is indeed standing near the treppel entrance. his brand-new, dashing victoria glistens with new lacquer; at the ends of the shafts two tiny electric lights burn with a yellow light; the tall white horse, with a bare pink spot on the septum of its nose, shakes its handsome head, shifts its feet on the same spot, and pricks up its thin ears; the bearded, stout driver himself sits on the coach-box like a carven image, his arms stretched out straight along his knees. "oh, for a ride!" squeals niura. "oh, uncle! oh you swell coachman!" she cries out, hanging over the window sill. "give a poor little girlie a ride... give us a ride for love." but the swell coachman laughs, makes a scarcely noticeable movement with his fingers, and immediately the white horse, as though it had been waiting just for that, starts from its place at a goodly trot, handsomely turns around and with measured speed floats away into the darkness together with the victoria and the broad back of the coachman. "pfui! what indecency!" the indignant voice of emma edwardovna sounds in the room. "well, where did you see that respectable girls should allow themselves to climb out of the windows and holler all over the street. o, scandal! and it's all niura, and it's always this horrible niura!" she is majestic in her black dress, with her yellow flabby face, with the dark pouches under her eyes, with the three pendulous, quivering chins. the girls, like boarding school misses, staidly seat themselves on the chairs along the walls, except jennie, who continues to contemplate herself in all the mirrors. two more cabbies drive up opposite, to the house of sophia vasilievna. yama is beginning to liven up. at last one more victoria rattles along the paved road and its noise is cut short abruptly at the entrance to anna markovna's. the porter simeon helps someone take off his things in the front hall. jennie looks in there, holding on with both hands to the door jambs, but immediately turns back, and as she walks shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head negatively. "don't know him, someone who's an entire stranger," she says in a low voice. "he has never been in our place. some daddy or other, fat, in gold eye-glasses and a uniform." emma edwardovna commands in a voice which sounds like a summoning cavalry trumpet: "ladies, into the drawing room! into the drawing room, ladies!" one after the other, with haughty gaits, into the drawing room enter: tamara, with bare white arms and bared neck, wound with a string of artificial pearls; fat kitty with her fleshy, quadrangular face and low forehead--she, too, is in decollete, but her skin is red and in goose-pimples; nina, the very newest one, pug-nosed and clumsy, in a dress the colour of a green parrot; another manka--big manka, or manka the crocodile, as they call her, and--the last--sonka the rudder, a jewess, with an ugly dark face and an extraordinarily large nose, precisely for which she has received her nickname, but with such magnificent large eyes, at the same time meek and sad, burning and humid, as, among the women of all the terrestrial globe, are to be found only among the jewesses. chapter vi. the elderly guest in the uniform of the department of charity walked in with slow, undecided steps, at each step bending his body a little forward and rubbing his palms with a circular motion, as though washing them. since all the women were pompously silent, as though not noticing him, he traversed the drawing room and let himself down on a chair alongside of liuba, who, in accordance with etiquette, only gathered up her skirt a little, preserving the abstracted and independent air of a girl from a respectable house. "how do you do, miss?" he said. "how do you do?" answered liuba abruptly. "how are you getting along?" "thanks--thank you. treat me to a smoke." "pardon me--i don't smoke." "so that's how. a man--and he doesn't smoke, just like that. well, then, treat me to some lafitte with lemonade. i am terribly fond of lafitte with lemonade." he let that pass in silence. "ooh, what a stingy daddy! where do you work, now? are you one of the government clerks?" "no, i'm a teacher. i teach the german language." "but i have seen you somewhere, daddy. your physiognomy is familiar to me. where have i met you before?" "well, now, i don't know, really. unless it was on the street." "it might have been on the street, likely as not... you ought to treat me to an orange, at least. may i ask for an orange?" he again grew quiet, looking about him. his face began to glisten and the pimples on his forehead became red. he was mentally appraising all the women, choosing a likely one for himself, and was at the same time embarrassed by his silence. there was nothing at all to talk about; besides that the indifferent importunity of liuba irritated him. fat katie pleased him with her large, bovine body, but she must be--he decided in his mind--very frigid in love, like all stout women, and in addition to that not handsome of face. vera also excited him, with her appearance of a little boy, and her firm thighs, closely enveloped by the white tights; and little white manya, looking so like an innocent school-girl; and jennie with her energetic, swarthy, handsome face. for one minute he was all ready to stop at jennie, but only started in his chair and did not venture--by her easy, inaccessible and negligent air, and because she in all sincerity did not pay him the least attention, he surmised that she was the most spoilt of all the girls in the establishment, accustomed to having the visitors spend more money on her than on the others. but the pedagogue was a calculating man, burthened with a large family and an exhausted wife, destroyed by his masculine demands and suffering from a multiplicity of female ills. teaching in a female high school and in an institute, he lived constantly in a sort of secret sensual delirium, and only his german training, stinginess and cowardice helped him to hold his constantly aroused desires in check. but two or three times a year, with incredible privations, he would cut five or ten roubles out of his beggarly budget, denying himself in his beloved evening mug of beer and contriving to save on the street cars, which necessitated his making enormous distances on foot through the town. this money he set aside for women and spent it slowly, with gusto, trying to prolong and cheapen down the enjoyment as much as possible. and for his money he wanted a very great deal, almost the impossible; his german sentimental soul dimly thirsted after innocence, timidity, poesy, in the flaxen image of gretchen; but as a man he dreamt, desired, and demanded that his caresses should bring a woman into rapture and palpitation and into a sweet exhaustion. however, all the men strove for the very same thing--even the most wretched, monstrous, misshapen and impotent of them--and ancient experience had long ago taught the women to imitate with voice and movements the most flaming passion, retaining in the most tempestuous minutes the fullest sang froid. "you might at least order the musicians to play a polka. let the girls dance a little," asked liuba grumblingly. that suited him. under cover of the music, amid the jostling of the dances, it was far more convenient to get up courage, arise, and lead one of the girls out of the drawing room, than to do it amid the general silence and the finical immobility. "and how much does that cost?" he asked cautiously. "a quadrille is half a rouble; but ordinary dances are thirty kopecks. is it all right then?" "well, of course...if you please...i don't begrudge it," he agreed, pretending to be generous... "whom do you speak to?" "why, over there--to the musicians." "why not? ... i'll do it with pleasure...mister musician, something in the light dances, if you please," he said, laying down his silver on the pianoforte. "what will you order?" asked isaiah savvich, putting the money away in his pocket. "waltz, polka, polka-mazourka?" "well...something sort of..." "a waltz, a waltz!" vera, a great lover of dancing, shouted from her place. "no, a polka! ... a waltz! ... a vengerka! ... a waltz!" demanded others. "let them play a polka," decided liuba in a capricious tone. "isaiah savvich, play a little polka, please. this is my husband, and he is ordering fox me," she added, embracing the pedagogue by the neck. "isn't that true, daddy?" but he freed himself from under her arm, drawing his head in like a turtle, and she without the least offence went to dance with niura. three other couples were also whirling about. in the dances all the girls tried to hold the waist as straight as possible, and the head as immobile as possible, with a complete unconcern in their faces, which constituted one of the conditions of the good taste of the establishment. under cover of the slight noise the teacher walked up to little manka. "let's go?" he said, offering her his bent arm. "let's go," answered she, laughing. she brought him into her room, gotten up with all the coquettishness of a bedroom in a brothel of the medium sort, with a bureau, covered with a knit scarf, and upon it a mirror, a bouquet of paper flowers, a few empty bonbonierres, a powder box, a faded photograph of a young man with white eyebrows and eyelashes and a haughtily astonished face, as well as several visiting cards. above the bed, which is covered with a pink pique blanket, along the wall, is nailed up a rug with a representation of a turkish sultan luxuriating in his harem, a narghili in his mouth; on the walls, several more photographs of dashing men of the waiter and actor type; a pink lantern hangs down from the ceiling by chains; there are also a round table under a carpet cover, three vienna chairs, and an enameled bowl with a pitcher of the same sort in the corner on a tabouret, behind the bed. "darling, treat me to lafitte with lemonade," in accordance with established usage asked little manka, unbuttoning her corsage. "afterwards," austerely answered the pedagogue. "it will all depend upon yourself. and then--what sort of lafitte can you have here? some muddy brew or other?" "we have good lafitte," contradicted the girl touchily. "two roubles a bottle. but if you are so stingy, then buy me beer at least. all right?" "well, beer is all right..." "and for me lemonade and oranges. yes?" "a bottle of lemonade, yes; but oranges, no. later, maybe, i will treat you to champagne even. it will all depend on you. if you'll exert yourself." "then, daddy, i'll ask for four bottles of beer and two bottles of lemonade? yes? and for me just a little cake of chocolate. all right? yes?" "two bottles of beer, a bottle of lemonade, and nothing more. i don't like when i'm bargained with. if need be, i'll order myself." "and may i invite a friend of mine?" "no, let it be without any friends, if you please." manka leaned out of the door into the corridor and called out resoundingly: "housekeeper, dear! two bottles of beer and a bottle of lemonade for me." simeon came with a tray and began with an accustomed rapidity to uncork the bottles. following him came zociya, the housekeeper. "there, now, how well you've made yourself at home here. here's to your lawful marriage!" she congratulated them. "daddy, treat the little housekeeper with beer," begged manka. "drink, housekeeper dear." "well, in that case here's to your health, mister. somehow, your face seems kind of familiar to me?" the german drank his beer, sucking and licking his moustache, and impatiently waited for the housekeeper to go away. but she, having put down her glass and thanked him, said: "let me get the money coming from you, mister. as much as is coming for the beer and the time. that's both better for you and more convenient for us." the demand for the money went against the grain of the teacher, because it completely destroyed the sentimental part of his intentions. he became angry: "what sort of boorishness is this, anyway! it doesn't look as if i were preparing to run away from here. and besides, can't you discriminate between people at all? you can see that a man of respectability, in a uniform, has come to you, and not some tramp. what sort of importunity is this!" the housekeeper gave in a little. "now, don't get offended, mister. of course, you'll pay the young lady yourself for the visit. i don't think you will do her any wrong, she's a fine girl among us. but i must trouble you to pay for the beer and lemonade. i, too, have to give an account to the proprietress. two bottles at fifty is a rouble and the lemonade thirty--a rouble thirty." "good lord, a bottle of beer fifty kopecks!" the german waxed indignant. "why, i will get it in any beer-shop for twelve kopecks." "well, then, go to a beer-shop if it's cheaper there," zociya became offended. "but if you've come to a respectable establishment, the regular price is half a rouble. we don't take anything extra. there, that's better. twenty kopecks change coming to you?" "yes, change, without fail," firmly emphasized the german teacher. "and i would request of you that nobody else should enter." "no, no, no, what are you saying," zociya began to bustle near the door. "dispose yourself as you please, to your heart's content. a pleasant appetite to you." manka locked the door on a hook after her and sat down on the german's knee, embracing him with her bare arm. "are you here long?" he asked, sipping his beer. he felt dimly that that imitation of love which must immediately take place demanded some sort of psychic propinquity, a more intimate acquaintance, and on that account, despite his impatience, began the usual conversation, which is carried on by almost all men--when alone with prostitutes, and which compels the latter to lie almost mechanically, to lie without mortification, enthusiasm or malice, according to a single, very ancient stencil. "not long, only the third month." "and how old are you?" "sixteen," fibbed little manka, taking five years off her age. "o, such a young one!" the german wondered, and began, bending down and grunting, to take off his boots. "then how did you get here?" "well, a certain officer deprived me of my innocence there...near his birthplace. and it's terrible how strict my mamma is. if she was to find out, she'd strangle me with her own hands. well, so then i ran away from home and got in here..." "and did you love that same officer, the one who was the first one, now?" "if i hadn't loved him, i wouldn't have gone to him. he promised to marry me, the scoundrel, but then managed to get what he was after, and abandoned me." "well, and were you ashamed the first time?" "of course, you'd be ashamed...how do you like it, daddy, with light or without light? i'll turn, down the lantern a little. all right?" "well, and aren't you bored here? what do they call you?" "manya. to be sure i'm bored. what sort of a life is ours!" the german kissed her hard on her lips and again asked: "and do you love the men? are there men who please you? who afford you pleasure?" "how shouldn't there be?" manka started laughing. "i love the ones like you especially, such nice little fatties." "you love them? eh? why do you love them?" "oh, i love them just so. you're nice, too." the german meditated for a few seconds, pensively sipping away at his beer. then he said that which every man tells a prostitute in these moments preceding the casual possession of her body: "do you know, marichen, you also please me very much. i would willingly take you and set you up." "you're married," the girl objected, touching his ring. "yes, but, you understand, i don't live with my wife; she isn't well, she can't fulfill her conjugal duties." "the poor thing! if she were to find out where you go, daddy, she would cry for sure." "let's drop that. so, you know, mary, i am always looking out for such a girl as you for myself, so modest and pretty. i am a man of means, i would find a flat with board for you, with fuel and light. and forty roubles a month pin money. would you go?" "why not go--i'd go." he kissed her violently, but a secret apprehension glided swiftly through his cowardly heart. "but are you healthy?" he asked in an inimical, quavering voice. "why, yes, i am healthy. there's a doctor's inspection every saturday in our place." after five minutes she went away from him, as she walked putting away in her stocking the earned money, on which, as on the first handsel, she had first spat, after a superstitious custom. there had been no further speech either about maintenance or natural liking. the german was left unsatisfied with the frigidity of manka and ordered the housekeeper to be summoned to him. "housekeeper dear, my husband demands your presence!" said manya, coming into the drawing room and fixing her hair before a mirror. zociya went away, then returned afterwards and called pasha out into the corridor. later she came back into the drawing room, but alone. "how is it, manka, that you haven't pleased your cavalier?" she asked with laughter. "he complains about you: 'this,' he says, 'is no woman, but some log of wood, a piece of ice.' i sent him pashka." "eh, what a disgusting man!" manka puckered up her face and spat aside. "butts in with his conversations. asks: 'do you feel when i kiss you? do you feel a pleasant excitement?' an old hound. 'i'll take you,' he says, 'and set you up!'" "they all say that," remarked zoe indifferently. but jennie, who since morning has been in an evil mood, suddenly flared up. "oh, the sneak, the big, miserable sneak that he is!" she exclaimed, turning red and energetically putting her hands to her sides. "why, i would take him, the old, dirty little beast, by the ear, then lead him up to the mirror and show him his disgusting snout. what? good-looking, aren't you? and how much better you'll be when the spit will be running out of your mouth, and you'll cross your eyes, and begin to choke and rattle in the throat, and to snort right in the face of the woman. and for your damned rouble you want me to go all to pieces before you like a pancake, and that from your nasty love my eyes should pop out onto my forehead? why, hit him in the snout, the skunk, in the snout! until there's blood!" "o, jennie! stop it now! pfui!" the susceptible emma edwardovna, made indignant by her tone, stopped her. "i won't stop!" she cut her short abruptly. but she grew quiet by herself and wrathfully walked away with distending nostrils and with fire in the darkened, handsome eyes. chapter vii. little by little the drawing room was filling. there came roly-poly, long known to all yama--a tall, thin, red-nosed, gray old man, in the uniform of a forest ranger, in high boots, with a wooden yard-stick always sticking out of his side-pocket. he passed whole days and evenings as a habitue of the billiard parlor in the tavern, always half-tipsy, shedding his little jokes, jingles and little sayings, acting familiarly with the porters, with the housekeepers and the girls. in the houses everybody from the proprietress to the chamber-maids--treated him with a bit of derision--careless, a trifle contemptuous, but without malice. at times he was even not without use: he could transmit notes from the girls to their lovers, and run over to the market or to the drug-store. not infrequently, thanks to his loosely hung tongue and long extinguished self respect, he would worm himself into a gathering of strangers and increase their expenditures, nor did he carry elsewhere the money gotten as "loans" on such occasions, but spent it right here for women--unless, indeed, he left himself some change for cigarettes. and, out of habit, he was good-naturedly tolerated. "and here's roly-poly arrived," announced niura, when he, having already managed to shake hands amicably with simeon the porter, stopped in the doorway of the drawing room, lanky, in a uniform cap knocked at a brave slant over one side of his head. "well, now, roly-poly, fire away!" "i have the honour to present myself," roly-poly immediately commenced to grimace, putting his hand up to his brim in military fashion, "a right honourable privy frequenter of the local agreeable establishments, prince bottlekin, count liquorkin, baron whoatinkevich-giddapkovski--mister beethoven! mister chopin!" he greeted the musicians. "play me something from the opera the brave and charming general anisimov, or, a hubbub in the coolidor. my regards to the little political economist zociya.[ ] a-ha! then you kiss only at easter? we shall write that down. ooh-you, my tomalachka, my pitty-itty tootsicums!" [ ] an untranslatable pun on economochka, a diminutive for "housekeeper."--trans. and so with jests and with pinches he went the round of all the girls and at last sat down alongside of the fat katie, who put her fat leg upon his, leant with her elbow upon her knee, while upon the palm she laid her chin, and began to watch indifferently and closely the surveyor rolling a cigarette for himself. "and how is it that you don't ever get tired of it, roly-poly? you're forever rolling a coffin nail." roly-poly at once commenced to move his eye-brows and the skin of his scalp and began to speak in verse: "dear cigarette, my secret mate, how can i help loving thee? not through mere whim, prompted by fate, all have started smoking thee." "why, roly-poly, but you are going to croak soon," said kitty indifferently. "and a very simple matter, that." "roly-poly, say something still funnier, in verse," begged verka. and at once, obediently, having placed himself in a funny pose, he began to declaim: "many stars are in the bright sky, but to count them there's no way. yes, the wind whispers there can be, but there really is no way. blossoming now are burdocks, now sing out the birds called cocks." playing the tom-fool in this manner, roly-poly would sit whole evenings and nights through in the drawing rooms of the establishments. and through some strange psychic fellow feeling the girls counted him almost as one of their own; occasionally rendered him little temporary services and even bought him beer and vodka at their expense. some time after roly-poly a large company of hairdressers, who were that day free from work, tumbled in. they were noisy, gay, but even here, in a brothel, did not cease their petty reckonings and conversations about closed and open theatrical benefits, about the bosses, about the wives of the bosses. all these were people corrupt to a sufficient degree, liars, with great hopes for the future--such as, for example, entering the service of some countess as a kept lover. they wanted to utilize to the widest possible extent their rather hard-earned money, and on that account decided to make a review of absolutely all the houses of yama; only treppel's they could not resolve to enter, as that was too swell for them. but at anna markovna's they at once ordered a quadrille and danced it, especially the fifth figure, where the gents execute a solo, perfectly, like real parisians, even putting their thumbs in the arm holes of their vests. but they did not want to remain with the girls; instead, they promised to come later, when they had wound up the complete review of the brothels. and there also came and went government clerks of some sort; crisp young people in patent leather boots; several students; several officers, who were horribly afraid of losing their dignity in the eyes of the proprietress and the guests of the brothel. little by little in the drawing room was created such a noisy, fumy setting that no one there any longer felt ill at ease. there came a steady visitor, the lover of sonka the rudder, who came almost every day and sat whole hours through near his beloved, gazed upon her with languishing oriental eyes, sighed, grew faint and created scenes for her because she lives in a brothel, because she sins against the sabbath, because she eats meat not prepared in the orthodox hebrew manner, and because she has strayed from the family and the great hebrew church. as a usual thing--and this happened often--zociya the housekeeper would walk up to him under cover of the hubbub and would say, twisting her lips: "well, what are you sitting there for mister? warming your behind? you might go and pass the time with the young lady." both of them, the jew and the jewess, were by birth from homel, and must have been created by god himself for a tender, passionate, mutual love; but many circumstances--as, for example, the pogrom which took place in their town, impoverishment, a complete confusion, fright--had for a time parted them. however, love was so great that the junior drug clerk neiman, with great difficulty, efforts, and humiliations, contrived to find for himself the place of a junior in one of the local pharmacies, and had searched out the girl he loved. he was a real, orthodox hebrew, almost fanatical. he knew that sonka had been sold by her very mother to one of the buyers-up of live merchandise, knew many humiliating, hideous particulars of how she had been resold from hand to hand, and his pious, fastidious, truly hebraic soul writhed and shuddered at these thoughts, but nevertheless love was above all. and every evening he would appear in the drawing room of anna markovna. if he was successful, at an enormous deprivation, in cutting out of his beggarly income some chance rouble, he would take sonka into her room, but this was not at all a joy either for him or for her: after a momentary happiness--the physical possession of each other--they cried, reproached each other, quarreled with characteristic hebraic, theatrical gestures, and always after these visits sonka the rudder would return into the drawing room with swollen, reddened eyelids. but most frequently of all he had no money, and would sit whole evenings through near his mistress, patiently and jealously awaiting her when sonka through chance was taken by some guest. and when she would return and sit down beside him, he would, without being perceived, overwhelm her with reproaches, trying not to turn the general attention upon himself and without turning his head in her direction. and in her splendid, humid, hebraic eyes during these conversations there was always a martyr-like but meek expression. there arrived a large company of germans, employed in an optical shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical store of kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the yamas--both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the bald spots: nicky the book-keeper and mishka the singer--so were they both called in the houses. they also were met very cordially, just like karl karlovich of the optical shop and volodka of the fish store--with raptures, cries and kisses, flattering to their self-esteem. the spry niurka would jump out into the foyer, and, having informed herself as to who had come, would report excitedly, after her wont: "jennka, your husband has come!" or: "little manka, your lover has come!" and mishka the singer, who was no singer at all, but the owner of a drug warehouse, at once, upon entering, sang out in a vibrating, quavering, goatish voice: "they fe-e-e-l the tru-u-u-u-uth! come thou daw-aw-aw-aw-ning..." which he perpetrated at every visit of his to anna markovna. almost incessantly they played the quadrille, waltz, polka, and danced. there also arrived senka--the lover of tamara--but, contrary to his wont, he did not put on airs, did not go in for "ruination," did not order a funeral march from isaiah savvich, and did not treat the girls to chocolate ... for some reason he was gloomy, limped on his right leg, and sought to attract as little attention as possible--probably his professional affairs were at this time in a bad way. with a single motion of his head, while walking, he called tamara out of the drawing room and vanished with her into her room. and there also arrived egmont-lavretzki the actor, clean-shaven, tall, resembling a court flunky with his vulgar and insolently contemptuous face. the clerks from the gastronomical store danced with all the ardour of youth and with all the decorum recommended by herman hoppe, the self-instructor of good manners. in this regard the girls also responded to their intentions. both with these and with the others it was accounted especially decorous and well-bred to dance as rigidly as possible, keeping the arms hanging down, while the heads were raised high and inclined to one side with a certain proud, and, at the same time, tired and enervated air. in the intermissions, between the figures of the dance, it was necessary to fan one's self with a handkerchief, with a bored and negligent air ... in a word, they all made believe that they belonged to the choicest society, and that if they do dance, they only do it out of condescension, as a little comradely turn. but still they danced so ardently that the perspiration rolled down in streams from the clerks of kereshkovsky. two or three rows had already happened in different houses. some man, all in blood, whose face in the pale light of the moon's crescent seemed black from the blood, was running around in the street, cursing, and, without paying the least attention to his wounds, was searching for his cap which had been lost in the brawl. on little yamskaya some government scribes had had a fight with a ship's company. the tired pianists and musicians played as in a delirium, in a doze, through mechanical habit. this was towards the waning of the night. altogether unexpectedly, seven students, a sub-professor, and a local reporter walked into the establishment of anna markovna. chapter viii. they had all, except the reporter, passed the whole day together, from the very morning, celebrating may day with some young women of their acquaintance. they had rowed in boats on the dnieper, had cooked field porridge on the other side of the river, in the thick, bitter-smelling underbrush; had bathed--men and women by turns--in the rapid, warm water; had drunk home-made spiced brandy, sung sonorous songs of little russia, and had returned to town only late in the evening, when the dark, broad, running river so eerily and merrily plashed against the sides of their boats, playing with the reflections of the stars, the silvery shimmering paths of the electric lamps, and the bowing lights of the can-buoys. and when they had stepped out on the shore, the palms of each burned from the oars, the muscles of the arms and legs ached pleasantly, and suffusing the whole body was a blissful, healthy fatigue. then they had escorted the young women to their homes and at the garden-gates and entrances had taken leave of them long and cordially, with laughter and with such swinging hand-shakes as if they were working the lever of a pump. the whole day had passed in gaiety and noise, even a trifle clamorously, and just the least wee bit tiresomely, but with youth-like continence; without intoxication, and, which happens especially rarely, without the least shadow of mutual affronts, or jealousy, or unvoiced mortifications. of course, such a benign mood had been helped by the sun, the fresh river breeze, the sweet exhalations of the grasses and the water, the joyous sensation of the strength and alertness of one's body while bathing and rowing, and the restraining influence of the clever, kind, pure and handsome girls from families they were acquainted with. but, almost without the knowledge of their consciousness, their sensuousness--not imagination, but the simple, healthy, instinctive sensuousness of young playful males--kindled from chance encounters of their hands with feminine hands and from comradely obliging embraces, when the occasion arose to help the young ladies enter a boat or jump out on shore; from the tender odour of maiden apparel, warmed by the sun; from the feminine cries of coquettish fright on the river; from the sight of feminine figures, negligently half-reclining with a naive immodesty on the green grass around the samovar--from all these innocent liberties, which are so usual and unavoidable on picnics, country outings and river excursions, when within man, in the infinite depth of his soul, secretly awakens from the care-free contact with earth, grasses, water and sun, the beast-ancient, splendid, free, but disfigured and intimidated of men. and for that reason, at two o'clock in the night, when the sparrows, a cozy students' restaurant, had barely closed, and all the eight, excited by alcohol and the plentiful food, had come out of the smoky, fumy underground place into the street, into the sweet, disquieting darkness of the night, with its beckoning fires in the sky and on the earth, with its warm, heady air, from which the nostrils dilate avidly, with its aromas, gliding from unseen gardens and flower-beds,--the head of each one of them was aflame and the heart quietly and languishingly yearning from vague desires. it was joyous and arrogant to sense after the rest the new, fresh strength in all the sinews, the deep breathing of the lungs, the red, resilient blood in the veins, the supple obedience of all the members. and--without words, without thoughts, without consciousness--one was drawn on this night to be running without raiment in the somnolent forest, to be sniffing hurriedly the tracks of some one's feet on the dewy grass, with a loud call to be summoning a female unto one's self. but to separate was now very difficult. the whole day, passed together, had shaken them into an accustomed, tenacious herd. it seemed that if even one were to go away from the company, a certain attained equilibrium would be disturbed and could not be restored afterwards. and so they dallied and stamped upon the sidewalk, near the exit of the tavern's underground vault, interfering with the progress of the infrequent passers-by. they discussed hypocritically where else they might go to wind up the night. it proved to be too far to the tivoli garden, and in addition to that one also had to pay for admission tickets, and the prices in the buffet were outrageous, and the program had ended long ago. volodya pavlov proposed going to him--he had a dozen of beer and a little cognac home. but it seemed a bore to all of them to go in the middle of the night to a family apartment, to enter on tiptoes up the stairs and to talk in whispers all the time. "tell you what, brethren ... let's better ride to the girlies, that will be nearer the mark," said peremptorily lichonin, an old student, a tall, stooping, morose and bearded fellow. by convictions he was an anarchist--theoretic, but by avocation a passionate gambler at billiards, races and cards--a gambler with a very broad, fatalistic sweep. only the day before he had won a thousand roubles at macao in the merchants' club, and this money was still burning a hole in his pockets. "and why not? right-o!" somebody sustained him. "let's go, comrades?" "is it worth while? why, this is an all night affair ..." spoke another with a false prudence and an insincere fatigue. and a third said through a feigned yawn: "let's better go home, gentlemen ... a-a-a ... go bye-bye ... that's enough for to-day." "you won't work any wonders when you're asleep," lichonin remarked sneeringly. "herr professor, are you coming?" but the sub-professor yarchenko was obstinate and seemed really angered, although, perhaps, he himself did not know what was lurking within him, in some dark cranny of his soul. "leave me in peace, lichonin. as i see it, gentlemen, this is downright and plain swinishness--that which you are about to do. we have passed the time so wonderfully, amiably and simply, it seems,--but no, you needs must, like drunken cattle, clamber into a cesspool. i won't go." "still, if my memory does not play me false," said lichonin, with calm causticity, "i recollect that no further back than past autumn we with a certain future mommsen were pouring in some place or other a jug of ice into a pianoforte, delineating a bouratian god, dancing the belly-dance, and all that sort of thing?" lichonin spoke the truth. in his student days, and later, being retained at the university, yarchenko had led the most wanton and crack-brained life. in all the taverns, cabarets, and other places of amusement his small, fat, roundish little figure, his rosy cheeks, puffed out like those of a painted cupid, and the shining, humid kindly eyes were well known, his hurried, spluttering speech and shrill laughter remembered. his comrades could never fathom where he found the time to employ in study, but nevertheless he went through all examinations and prescribed work with distinction and from the first course the professors had him in view. now yarchenko was beginning little by little to quit his former comrades and bottle companions. he had just established the indispensable connections with the professorial circle; the reading of lectures in roman history for the coming year had been offered him, and not infrequently in conversation he would use the expression current among the sub-professors: "we, the learned ones!" the student familiarity, the compulsory companionship, the obligatory participation in all meetings, protests and demonstrations, were becoming disadvantageous to him, embarrassing, and even simply tedious. but he knew the value of popularity among the younger element, and for that reason could not decide to sever relations abruptly with his former circle. lichonin's words, however, provoked him. "oh, my god, what does it matter what we did when we were youngsters? we stole sugar, soiled our panties, tore the wings off beetles," yarchenko began to speak, growing heated, and spluttering. "but there is a limit and a mean to all this. i, gentlemen, do not presume, of course, to give you counsels and to teach you, but one must be consistent. we are all agreed that prostitution is one of the greatest calamities of humanity, and are also agreed, that in this evil not the women are guilty, but we, men, because the demand gives birth to the offer. and therefore if, having drunk a glass of wine too much, i still, notwithstanding my convictions, go to the prostitutes, i am committing a triple vileness: before the unfortunate, foolish woman, whom i subject to the most degrading form of slavery for my filthy rouble; before humanity, because, hiring a public woman for an hour or two for my abominable lust, i through this justify and uphold prostitution; and finally, this is a vileness before one's own conscience and mind. and before logic." "phew-ew!" lichonin let out a long-drawn whistle and chanted in a thin, dismal voice, nodding in time with his head hanging down to one side: "the philosopher is off on our usual stuff: 'a rope--is a common cord.'" "of course, there's nothing easier than to play the tom-fool," responded yarchenko. "but in my opinion there is not in the sorrowful life of russia a more mournful phenomenon than this lackadaisicalness and vitiation of thought. to-day we will say to ourselves: eh! it's all the same, whether i go to a brothel or whether i do not go, from this one time things will get neither worse nor better. and after five years we will be saying: undoubtedly a bribe is a horribly nasty bit of business, but you know--children ... the family ... and just the same way after ten years we, having remained fortuitous russian liberals, will be sighing about personal freedom and bowing low before worthless scoundrels, whom we despise, and will be cooling our heels in their ante-rooms. 'because, don't you know,' we will say, tittering, 'when you live with wolves, you must howl like a wolf.' by god, it wasn't in vain that some minister called the russian students future head-clerks!" "or professors," lichonin put in. "but most important of all," continued yarchenko, letting this pointed remark pass by, "most important of all is this, that i have seen all of you to-day on the river and afterwards there ... on the other shore ... with these charming, fine girls. how attentive, well-bred, obliging you all were--but scarcely have you taken leave of them, when you are drawn to public women. let each one of you imagine for a moment, that we all had been visiting his sisters and straight from them had driven to yama ... what? is such a supposition pleasant?" "yes, but there must exist some valves for the passions of society," pompously remarked boris sobashnikov, a tall, somewhat supercilious and affected young man, upon whom the short, white summer uniform jacket, which scarcely covered his fat posteriors, the modish trousers, of a military cut, the pince-nez on a broad, black ribbon, and a cap after a prussian model, all bestowed the air of a coxcomb. "surely, it isn't more respectable to enjoy the caresses of your chambermaid, or to carry on an intrigue on the side with another man's wife? what am i to do if woman is indispensable to me!" "eh, very indispensable indeed!" said yarchenko with vexation and feebly made a despondent gesture. but here a student who was called ramses in the friendly coterie intervened. this was a yellowish-swarthy, hump-nosed man of small stature; his clean-shaven face seemed triangular, thanks to a broad forehead, beginning to get bald, with two wedge-like bald spots at the temples, fallen-in cheeks and a sharp chin. he led a mode of life sufficiently queer for a student. while his colleagues employed themselves by turns with politics, love, the theatre, and a little in study, ramses had withdrawn entirely into the study of all conceivable suits and claims, into the chicane subtleties of property, hereditary, land and other business law-suits, into the memorizing and logical analysis of quashed decisions. perfectly of his own will, without in the least needing the money, he served for a year as a clerk at a notary's for another as a secretary to a justice of the peace, while all of the past year, being in the last term, he had conducted in a local newspaper the reports of the city council and had borne the modest duty of an assistant to a secretary in the management of a syndicate of sugar manufacturers. and when this same syndicate commenced the well-known suit against one of its members, colonel baskakov, who had put up the surplus sugar for sale contrary to agreement, ramses from the very beginning guessed beforehand and very subtly engineered, precisely that decision which the senate subsequently handed down in this suit. despite his comparative youth, rather well-known jurists gave heed to his opinions--true, a little loftily. none of those who knew ramses closely doubted that he would make a brilliant career, and even ramses himself did not conceal his confidence in that toward thirty-five he would knock together a million, exclusively through his practice as a civil lawyer. his comrades not infrequently elected him chairman of meetings and head of the class, but this honour ramses invariably declined, excusing himself with lack of time. but still he did not avoid participation in his comrades' trials by arbitration, and his arguments--always incontrovertibly logical--were possessed of an amazing virtue in ending the trials with peace, to the mutual satisfaction of the litigating parties. he, as well as yarchenko, knew well the value of popularity among the studying youths, and even if he did look upon people with a certain contempt, from above, still he never, by as much as a single movement of his thin, clever, energetical lips, showed this. "well, gavrila petrovich, no one is necessarily dragging you into committing a fall from grace," said ramses in a conciliatory manner, "what is all this pathos and melancholy for, when the matter as it stands is altogether simple? a company of young russian gentlemen wishes to pass the remnant of the night modestly and amicably, to make merry, to sing a little, and to take internally several gallons of wine and beer. but everything is closed now, except these very same houses. ergo! ..." "consequently, we will go merry-making to women who are for sale? to prostitutes? into a brothel?" yarchenko interrupted him, mockingly and inimically. "and even so? a certain philosopher, whom it was desired to humiliate, was given a seat at dinner near the musicians. but he, sitting down, said: 'here is a sure means of making the last place the first.' and finally i repeat: if your conscience does not allow you, as you express yourself, to buy a woman, then you can go there and come away, preserving your innocence in all its blossoming inviolability." "you overdo it, ramses," objected yarchenko with displeasure. "you remind me of those bourgeois, who, while it is still dark, have gathered to gape at an execution and who say: we have nothing to do with this, we are against capital punishment, this is all the prosecuting attorney's and the executioner's doing." "superbly said and partly true, gavrila petrovich. but to us, precisely, this comparison may not even apply. one cannot, you see, treat some malignant disease while absent, without seeing the sufferer in person. and yet all of us, who are now standing here in the street and interfering with the passers-by, will be obliged at some time in our work to run up against the terrible problem of prostitution, and what a prostitution at that--the russian! lichonin, i, borya sobashnikov and pavlov as jurists, petrovsky and tolpygin as medicos. true, veltman has a distinct specialty--mathematics. but then, he will be a pedagogue, a guide of youth, and, deuce take it, even a father! and if you are going to scare with a bugaboo, it is best to look upon it one's self first. and finally, you yourself, gavrila petrovich--expert of dead languages and future luminary of grave digging--is the comparison, then, of the contemporary brothels, say, with some pompeian lupanaria, or the institution of sacred prostitution in thebes and nineveh, not important and instructive to you? ..." "bravo, ramses, magnificent!" roared lichonin. "and what's there to talk so much about, fellows? take the professor under the gills and put him in a cab!" the students, laughing and jostling, surrounded yarchenko, seized him under the arms, caught him around the waist. all of them were equally drawn to the women, but none, save lichonin, had enough courage to take the initiative upon himself. but now all this complicated, unpleasant and hypocritical business was happily resolved into a simple, easy joke upon the older comrade. yarchenko resisted, and was angry, and laughing, trying to break away. but at this moment a tall, black-moustached policeman, who had long been eyeing them keenly and inimically, walked up to the uproarious students. "i'd ask you stewdent gents not to congregate. it's not allowed! keep on going!" they moved on in a throng. yarchenka was beginning to soften little by little. "gentlemen, i am ready to go with you, if you like ... do not think, however, that the sophistries of the egyptian pharaoh ramses have convinced me ... no, i simply would be sorry to break up the party ... but i make one stipulation: we will drink a little there, gab a little, laugh a little, and so forth ... but let there be nothing more, no filth of any kind ... it is shameful and painful to think that we, the flower and glory--of the russian intelligentzia, will go all to pieces and let our mouths water at the sight of the first skirt that comes our way." "i swear it!" said lichonin, putting up his hand. "i can vouch for myself," said ramses. "and i! and i! by god, gentlemen, let's pledge our words ... yarchenko is right," others took up. they seated themselves in twos and threes in the cabs--the drivers of which had been long since following them in a file, grinning and cursing each other--and rode off. lichonin, for the sake of assurance, sat down beside the sub-professor, having embraced him around the waist and seated him on his knees and those of his neighbour, the little tolpygin, a rosy, pleasant-faced boy on whose face, despite his twenty-three years, the childish white down--soft and light--still showed. "the station is at doroshenko's!" called out lichonin after the cabbies driving off. "the stop is at doroshenko's," he repeated, turning around. they all stopped at doroshenko's restaurant, entered the general room, and crowded about the bar. all were satiated and no one wanted either to drink or to have a bite. but in the soul of each one still remained a dark trace of the consciousness that right now they were getting ready to commit something needlessly shameful, getting ready to take part in some convulsive, artificial, and not at all a merry merriment. and in each one was the yearning to bring himself through intoxication to that misty and rainbow condition when nothing makes any difference, and when the head does not know what the arms and legs are doing, and what the tongue is babbling. and, probably, not the students alone, but all the casual and constant visitors of yama experienced in greater or lesser degree the friction of this inner psychic heart-sore, because doroshenko did business only late in the evening and night, and no one lingered long in his place but only turned in in passing, half-way on the journey. while the students were drinking cognac, beer and vodka, ramses was constantly and intently looking into the farthest corner of the restaurant hall, where two men were sitting--a tattered, gray, big old man, and, opposite him, his back to the bar, with his elbows spread out upon the table and his chin resting on the fists folded upon each other, some hunched up, stout, closely-propped gentleman in a gray suit. the old man was picking upon a dulcimer lying before him and quietly singing, in a hoarse but pleasing voice: "oh my valley, my little valley, bro-o-o-o-o-oad land of plenty." "excuse me, but that is a co-worker of ours," said ramses, and went to greet the gentleman in the gray suit. after a minute he led him up to the bar and introduced him to his comrades. "gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you my companion in arms in the newspaper game, sergei ivanovich platonov. the laziest and most talented of newspaper workers." they all introduced themselves, indistinctly muttering out their names. "and therefore, let's have a drink," said uchonin, while yarchenko asked with the refined amiability which never forsook him: "pardon me, pardon me, but i am acquainted with you a little, even though not personally. weren't you in the university when professor priklonsky defended the doctor's dissertation?" "it was i," answered the reporter. "ah, that's very nice," smiled yarchenko charmingly, and for some reason once more pressed platonov's hand vigorously. "i read your report afterwards: very exactly, circumstantially and skillfully put together ... won't you favor me? ... to your health!" "then allow me, too," said platonov. "onuphriy zakharich, pour out for us again ... one ... two, three, four ... nine glasses of cognac..." "oh no, you can't do that ... you are our guest, colleague," remonstrated lichonin. "well, now, what sort of colleague am i to you?" good-naturedly laughed the reporter. "i was only in the first class and then only for half a year--as an unmatriculated student. here you are, onuphriy zakharich. gentlemen, i beg you..." the upshot of it was that after half an hour lichonin and yarchenko did not under any consideration want to part with the reporter and dragged him with them to yama. however, he did not resist. "if i am not a burden to you, i would be very glad," he said simply. "all the more since i have easy money to-day. the dnieper word has paid me an honorarium, and this is just as much of a miracle as winning two hundred thousand on a check from a theatre coat room. pardon me, i'll be right back..." he walked up to the old man with whom he had been sitting before, shoved some money into his hand, and gently took leave of him. "where i'm going, grandpa, there you mustn't go--to-morrow we will meet in the same place as to-day. good-bye!" they all walked out of the restaurant. at the door borya sobashnikov, always a little finical and unnecessarily supercilious, stopped lichonin and called him to one side. "i'm surprised at you, lichonin," he said squeamishly. "we have gathered together in our own close company, yet you must needs drag in some vagabond. the devil knows who he is!" "quit that, borya," answered lichonin amicably. "he's a warm-hearted fellow." chapter ix. "well now, gentlemen, this isn't fit for pigs," yarchenko was saying, grumblingly, at the entrance of anna markovna's establishment. "if we finally have gone, we might at least have chosen a decent place, and not some wretched hole. really, gentlemen, let's better go to treppel's alongside; there it's clean and light, at any rate." "if you please, if you please, signior," insisted lichonin, opening the door before the sub-professor with courtly urbanity, bowing and spreading his arms before him. "if you please." "but this is an abomination ... at treppel's the women are better-looking, at least." ramses, walking behind, burst into dry laughter. "so, so, gavrila petrovich. let us continue in the same spirit. let us condemn the hungry, petty thief who has stolen a five-kopeck loaf out of a tray, but if the director of a bank has squandered somebody else's million on race horses and cigars, let us mitigate his lot." "pardon me, but i do not understand this comparison," answered yarchenko with restraint. "however, it's all the same to me; let's go." "and all the more so," said lichonin, letting the subprofessor pass ahead; "all the more so, since this house guards within it so many historical traditions. comrades! decades of student generations gaze upon us from the heights of the coat-hooks, and, besides that, through the power of the usual right, children and students pay half here, as in a panopticon. isn't that so, citizen simeon?" simeon did not like to have people come in large parties--this always smacked of scandal in the not distant future; moreover, he despised students in general for their speech, but little comprehensible to him, for their propensity towards frivolous jokes, for their godlessness, and chiefly because they were in constant revolt against officialdom and order. it was not in vain that on the day when on the bessarabian square the cossacks, meat-sellers, flour dealers and fish mongers were massacring the students, simeon having scarce found it out had jumped into a fine carriage passing by, and, standing just like a chief of police in the victoria, tore off to the scene of the fray in order to take part in it. he esteemed people who were sedate, stout and elderly, who came singly, in secret, peeped in cautiously from the ante-room into the drawing room, fearing to meet with acquaintances, and very soon and with great haste went away, tipping him generously. such he always styled "your excellency." and so, while taking the light grey overcoat off yarchenko, he sombrely and with much significance snarled back in answer to lichonin's banter: "i am no citizen here, but the bouncer." "upon which i have the honour to congratulate you," answered lichonin with a polite bow. there were many people in the drawing room. the clerks, having danced their fill, were sitting, red and wet, near their ladies, rapidly fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs; they smelt strongly of old goats' wool. mishka the singer and his friend the book-keeper, both bald, with soft, downy hairs around the denuded skulls, both with turbid, nacreous, intoxicated eyes, were sitting opposite each other, leaning with their elbows on a little marble table, and were constantly trying to start singing in unison with such quavering and galloping voices as though some one was very, very often striking them in the cervical vertebrae: "they fe-e-e-l the tru-u-u-u-uth!" while emma edwardovna and zociya with all their might were exhorting them not to behave indecently. roly-poly was peacefully slumbering on a chair, his head hanging down, having laid one long leg over the other and grasped the sharp knee with his clasped hands. the girls at once recognized some of the students and ran to meet them. "tamarochka, your husband has come--volodenka. and my husband too!--mishka!" cried niura piercingly, hanging herself on the neck of the lanky, big-nosed, solemn petrovsky. "hello, mishenka. why haven't you come for so long? i grew weary of waiting for you." yarchenko with a feeling of awkwardness was looking about him on all sides. "we'd like to have in some way ... don't you know ... a little private room," he said with delicacy to emma edwardovna who had approached. "and give us some sort of red wine, please ... and then, some coffee as well ... you know yourself." yarchenko always instilled confidence in servants and maitres d'hotel, with his dashing clothes and polite but seigniorial ways. emma edwardovna started nodding her head willingly, just like an old, fat circus horse. "it can be done ... it can be done ... pass this way, gentlemen, into the parlor. it can be done, it can be done ... what liqueur? we have only benedictine ... benedictine, then? it can be done, it can be done ... and will you allow the young ladies to come in?" "well, if that is so indispensable?" yarchenko spread out his hands with a sigh. and at once the girls one after the other straggled into the parlor with its gray plush furniture and blue lantern. they entered, extended to every one in turn their unbending palms, unused to hand-clasps, gave their names abruptly in a low voice--manya, katie, liuba ... they sat down on somebody's knees, embraced him around the neck, and, as usual, began to importune: "little student, you're such a little good-looker. may i ask for oranzes?" "volodenka, buy me some candy! all right?" "and me chocolate!" "fatty," vera, dressed as a jockey, wheedled the sub-professor, clambering up on his knees, "i have a friend, only she's sick and can't come out into the drawing room. i'll carry her some apples and chocolate. will you let me?" "well, now, those are all just stories about a friend! but above all, don't be thrusting your tenderness at me. sit as smart children sit, right here alongside, on the arm chair, just so. and fold your little hands." "ah, but what if i can't!" writhed vera in coquetry, rolling her eyes up under her upper lids ... "when you are so nice." but lichonin, in answer to this professional beggary, only nodded his head gravely and good-naturedly, just like emma edwardovna, and repeated over and over again, mimicking her german accent: "itt can pe done, itt can pe done, itt can pe done..." "then i will tell the waiter, honey, to carry my friend some sweets and apples?" pestered vera. such importunity entered the round of their tacit duties. there even existed among the girls some captious, childish, strange rivalry as to the ability to "ease a guest of his money"--strange enough because they did not derive any profit out of this, unless, indeed, a certain affection from the housekeeper or a word of approbation from the proprietress. but in their petty, monotonous, habitually frivolous life there was, in general, a great deal of semi-puerile, semi-hysterical play. simeon brought a coffee pot, cups, a squatty bottle of benedictine, fruits and bon-bons in glass vases, and gaily and easily began making the corks of the beer and wine pop. "but why don't you drink?" yarchenko turned to the reporter platonov. "allow me ... i do not mistake? sergei ivanovich, i believe?" "right." "allow me to offer you a cup of coffee, sergei ivanovich. it's refreshing. or perhaps, let's drink this same dubious lafitte?" "no, you really must allow me to refuse. i have a drink of my own ... simeon, give me..." "cognac!" cried out niura hurriedly. "and with a pear!" little white manka caught up just as fast. "i heard you, sergei ivanich--right away," unhurriedly but respectfully responded simeon, and, bending down and letting out a grunt, resoundingly drew the cork out of the neck of the bottle. "it's the first time i hear of cognac being served in yama," uttered lichonin with amazement. "no matter how much i asked, they always refused me." "perhaps sergei ivanich knows some sort of magic word," jested ramses. "or is held here in an especially honoured state?" boris sobashnikov put in pointedly, with emphasis. the reporter listlessly, without turning his head, looked askance at sobashnikov, at the lower row of buttons on his short, foppish, white summer uniform jacket, and answered with a drawl: "there is nothing honourable in that i can drink like a horse and never get drunk; but then, i also do not quarrel with anyone or pick upon anybody. evidently, these good sides of my character are sufficiently known here, and because of that confidence is shown me." "good for you, old fellow!" joyously exclaimed lichonin, who was delighted by a certain peculiar, indolent negligence--of few words, yet at the same time self-confident--in the reporter. "will you share the cognac with me also?" "very, very gladly," affably answered platonov and suddenly looked at lichonin with a radiant, almost child-like smile, which beautified his plain face with the prominent cheek-bones. "you, too, appealed to me from the first. and even when i saw you there, at doroshenko's, i at once thought that you are not at all as rough as you seem." "well, now, we have exchanged pleasantries," laughed lichonin. "but it's amazing that we haven't met once just here. evidently, you come to anna markovna's quite frequently?" "even too much so." "sergei ivanich is our most important guest!" naively shrieked niura. "sergei ivanich is a sort of brother among us!" "fool!" tamara stopped her. "that seems strange to me," continued lichonin. "i, too, am a habitue. in any case, one can only envy everybody's cordiality toward you." "the local chieftain!" said boris sobashnikov, curling his lips downward, but said it so low that platanov, if he chose to, could pretend that he had not heard anything distinctly. this reporter had for long aroused in boris some blind and prickling irritation. that he was not one of his own herd really meant nothing. but boris, like many students (and also officers, junkers, and high-school boys) had grown accustomed to the fact that the outside "civilian" people, who accidentally fell into a company of students on a spree, should hold themselves somewhat subordinately and with servility in it, flatter the studying youths, be struck with its daring, laugh at its jokes, admire its self-admiration, recall their own student years with a sigh of suppressed envy. but in platonov there not only was none of this customary wagging of the tail before youth, but, on the contrary, there was to be felt a certain abstracted, calm and polite indifference. besides that, sobashnikov was angered--and angered with a petty, jealous vexation--by that simple and yet anticipatory attention which was shown to the reporter by everybody in the establishment, beginning with the porter and ending with the fleshy, taciturn katie. this attention was shown in the way he was listened to, in that triumphal carefulness with which tamara filled his glass, and in the way little white manka pared a pear for him solicitously, and in the delight of zoe, who had caught the case skillfully thrown to her across the table by the reporter, when she had vainly asked for a cigarette from her two neighbors, who were lost in conversation; and in the way none of the girls begged either chocolate or fruits from him, in the lively gratitude for his little services and his treating. "pimp!" sobashkinov had almost decided mentally with malice, but did not believe it even himself--the reporter was altogether too homely and too carelessly dressed, and moreover he bore himself with great dignity. platonov again made believe that he had not heard the insolent remark made by the student. he only nervously crumpled a napkin in his fingers and lightly threw it aside from him. and again his eyelids quivered in the direction of boris sobashnikov. "yes, true, i am one of the family here," he continued calmly, moving his glass in slow circles on the table. "just think, i dined in this very house, day after day, for exactly four months." "no? seriously?" yarchenko wondered and laughed. "in all seriousness. the table here isn't at all bad, by the way. the food is filling and savory, although exceedingly greasy." "but how did you ever..." "why, just because i was tutoring for high school a daughter of anna markovna, the lady of this hospitable house. well, i stipulated that part of my monthly pay should be deducted for my dinners." "what a strange fancy!" said yarchenko. "and did you do this of your own will? or ... pardon me, i am afraid of seeming indiscreet to you ... perhaps at that time ... extreme necessity? ..." "not at all. anna markovna soaked me three times as much as it would have cost in a student's dining room. i simply wanted to live here a while on a somewhat nearer, closer footing, to enter intimately into this little world, so to speak." "a-ah! it seems i am beginning to understand!" beamed yarchenko. "our new friend--pardon me for the little familiarity--is, apparently, gathering material from life? and, perhaps, in a few years we will have the pleasure of reading ..." "a t-r-ragedy out of a brothel!" boris sobashnikov put in loudly, like an actor. while the reporter had been answering yarchenko, tamara quietly got up from her place, walked around the table, and, bending down over sobashnikov, spoke in a whisper in his ear: "dearie, sweetie, you'd better not touch this gentleman. honest to god, it will be better for you, even." "wass that?" the student looked at her superciliously, fixing his pince-nez with two spread fingers. "is he your lover? your pimp?" "i swear by anything you want that not once in his life has he stayed with any one of us. but, i repeat, don't pick on him." "why, yes! why, of course!" retorted sobashnikov, grimacing scornfully. "he has such a splendid defense as the entire brothel. and it's a sure thing that all the bouncers on yamskaya are his near friends and cronies." "no, not that," retorted tamara in a kind whisper. "only he'll take you by the collar and throw you out of the window, like a puppy. i've already seen such an aerial flight. god forbid its happening to anyone. it's disgraceful, and bad for the health." "get out of here, you filth!" yelled sobashnikov, swinging his elbow at her. "i'm going, dearie," meekly answered tamara, and walked away from him with her light step. everybody for an instant turned toward the student. "behave yourself, barberry!" lichonin threatened him with his finger. "well, well, go on," he begged the reporter; "all that you're saying is so interesting." "no, i'm not gathering anything," continued the reporter calmly and seriously. "but the material here is in reality tremendous, downright crushing, terrible ... and not at all terrible are the loud phrases about the traffic in women's flesh, about the white slaves, about prostitution being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on, and so on ... an old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! no, horrible are the everyday, accustomed trifles, these business-like, daily, commercial reckonings, this thousand year old science of amatory practice, this prosaic usage, determined by the ages. in these unnoticeable nothings are completely dissolved such feelings as resentment, humiliation, shame. there remains a dry profession, a contract, an agreement, a well-nigh honest petty trade, no better, no worse than, say, the trade in groceries. do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this, that there is no horror! bourgeois work days--and that is all. and also an after taste of an exclusive educational institution, with its naivete, harshness, sentimentality and imitativeness." "that's right," confirmed lichonin, while the reporter continued, gazing pensively into his glass: "we read in the papers, in leading articles, various wailings of anxious souls. and the women-physicians are also endeavouring in this matter, and endeavouring disgustingly enough. 'oh, dear, regulation! oh, dear, abolition! oh, dear, live merchandise! a condition of slavery! the mesdames, these greedy haeterae! these heinous degenerates of humanity, sucking the blood of prostitutes!' ... but with clamour you will scare no one and will affect no one. you know, there's a little saying: much cry, little wool. more awful than all awful words--a hundredfold more awful--is some such little prosaic stroke or other as will suddenly knock you all in a heap, like a blow on the forehead. take even simeon, the porter here. it would seem, according to you, there is no sinking lower--a bouncer in a brothel, a brute, almost certainly a murderer, he plucks the prostitutes, gives them "black eyes," to use a local expression--that is, just simply beats them. but, do you know on what grounds he and i came together and became friendly? on the magnificent details of the divine service of the prelate, on the canon of the honest andrew, pastor of crete, on the works of the most beatific father, john the damascene. he is religious--unusually so! i used to lead him on, and he would sing to me with tears in his eyes: 'come ye brethren, and we will give the last kiss to him who has gone to his rest...' from the ritual of the burial of laymen. no, just think: it is only in the russian soul alone that such contradictions may dwell together!" "yes. a fellow like that will pray, and pray, then cut a throat, and then wash his hands and put a candle before an image," said ramses. "just so. i know of nothing more uncanny than this fusion of fully sincere devoutness with an innate leaning toward crime. shall i confess to you? i, when i talk all alone to simeon--and we talk with each other long and leisurely, for hours--i experience at moments a genuine terror. a superstitious terror! just as though, for instance, i am standing in the dusk upon a shaking little board, bending over some dark, malodorous well, and just barely distinguish how there, at the bottom, reptiles are stirring. and yet, he is devout in a real way, and i am sure will some time join the monks and will be a great faster and sayer of prayers, and the devil knows how, in what monstrous fashion, a real religious ecstasy will entwine in his soul with blasphemy, with scoffing at sacred things, with some repulsive passion or other, with sadism or something else of that nature!" "however, you do not spare the object of your observations," said yarchenko, and carefully indicated the girls with his eyes. "eh, it's all the same. our relations are cool now." "how so?" asked volodya pavlov, who had caught the end of the conversation. "just so ... it isn't even worth the telling..." smiled the reporter evasively. "a trifle ... let's have your glass here, mr. yarchenko." but the precipitate niura, who could never keep her tongue behind her teeth, suddenly shot oat in rapid patter: "it's because sergei ivanich gave him one in the snout ... on account of ninka. a certain old man came to ninka ... and stayed for the night ... and ninka had the flowers ... and the old man was torturing her all the time ... so ninka started crying and ran away."[ ] [ ] the russian expression is "the red flag."--trans. "drop it, niura; it's boring," said platonov with a wry face. "can it!" (leave off) ordered tamara severely, in the jargon of houses of prostitution. but it was impossible to stop niura, who had gotten a running start. "but ninka says: 'i,' she says, 'won't stay with him for anything, though you cut me all to pieces ... he,' she says, 'has made me all wet with his spit.' well, the old man complained to the porter, to be sure, and the porter starts in to beat up ninka, to be sure. and sergei ivanich at this time was writing for me a letter home, to the province, and when he heard that ninka was hollering..." "zoe, shut her mouth!" said platonov. "he just jumped up at once and ... app! ..." and niura's torrent instantly broke off, stopped up by zoe's palm. everybody burst out laughing, only boris sobashnikov muttered under cover of the noise with a contemptuous look: "oh, chevalier sans peur et sans reproche!" he was already pretty far gone in drink, stood leaning against the wall, in a provoking pose, and was nervously chewing a cigarette. "which ninka is this?" asked yarchenko with curiosity. "is she here?" "no, she isn't here. such a small, pug-nosed little girl. naive and very angry." the reporter suddenly and sincerely burst into laughter. "excuse me ... it's just so ... over my thoughts," explained he through laughter. "i recalled this old man very vividly just now, as he was running along the corridor in fright, having grabbed his outer clothing and shoes ... such a respectable ancient, with the appearance of an apostle, i even know where he serves. why, all of you know him. but the funniest of all was when he, at last, felt himself out of danger in the drawing room. you understand--he is sitting on a chair, putting on his pantaloons, can't put his foot where it ought to go, by any means, and bawls all over the house: 'it's an outrage! this is an abominable dive! i'll show you up! ... to-morrow i'll give you twenty-four hours to clear out! ... do you know, this combination of pitiful helplessness with the threatening cries was so killing that even the gloomy simeon started laughing ... well, now, apropos of simeon ... i say, that life dumfounds, with its wondrous muddle and farrago, makes one stand aghast. you can utter a thousand sonorous words against souteneurs, but just such a simeon you will never think up. so diverse and motley is life! or else take anna markovna, the proprietress of this place. this blood-sucker, hyena, vixen and so on ... is the tenderest mother imaginable. she has one daughter--bertha, she is now in the fifth grade of high school. if you could only see how much careful attention, how much tender care anna markovna expends that her daughter may not somehow, accidentally, find out about her profession. and everything is for birdie, everything is for the sake of birdie. and she herself dare not even converse before her, is afraid of her lexicon of a bawd and an erstwhile prostitute, looks into her eyes, holds herself servilely, like an old servant, like a foolish, doting nurse, like an old, faithful, mange-eaten poodle. it is long since time for her to retire to rest, because she has money, and because her occupation is both arduous and troublesome, and because her years are already venerable. but no and no; one more extra thousand is needed, and then more and more--everything for birdie. and so birdie has horses, birdie has an english governess, birdie is every year taken abroad, birdie has diamonds worth forty thousand--the devil knows whose they are, these diamonds? and it isn't that i am merely convinced, but i know well, that for the happiness of this same birdie, nay, not even for her happiness, but, let us suppose that birdie gets a hangnail on her little finger--well then, in order that this hangnail might pass away--imagine for a second the possibility of such a state of things!--anna markovna, without the quiver of an eyelash, will sell into corruption our sisters and daughters, will infect all of us and our sons with syphilis. what? a monster, you will say? but i will say that she is moved by the same grand, unreasoning, blind, egoistical love for which we call our mothers sainted women." "go easy around the curves!" remarked boris sobashnikov through his teeth. "pardon me: i was not comparing people, but merely generalizing on the first source of emotion. i might have brought out as an example the self-denying love of animal-mothers as well. but i see that i have started on a tedious matter. better let's drop it." "no, you finish," protested lichonin. "i feel that you have a massive thought." "and a very simple one. the other day a professor asked me if i am not observing the life here with some literary aims. and all i wanted to say was, that i can see, but precisely can not observe. here i have given you simeon and the bawd for example. i do not know myself why, but i feel that in them lurks some terrible, insuperable actuality of life, but either to tell it, or to show it, i can not. here is necessary the great ability to take some picayune trifle, an insignificant, paltry little stroke, and then will result a dreadful truth, from which the reader, aghast, will forget that his mouth is agape. people seek the terrible in words, in cries, in gestures. well, now, for example, i am reading a description of some pogrom or of a slaughter in jail, or of a riot being put down. of course, the policemen are described, these servants of arbitrariness, these lifeguards of contemporaneousness, striding up to their knees in blood, or how else do they write in such cases? of course, it is revolting and it hurts, and is disgusting, but all this is felt by the mind, and not the heart. but here i am walking along lebyazhia street, and see that a crowd has collected, a girl of five years in the centre--she has lagged behind the mother and has strayed, or it may be that the mother had abandoned her. and before the girl, squatting down on his heels, is a roundsman. he is interrogating her, how she is called, and where is she from, and how do they call papa, and how do they call mamma. he has broken out into sweat, the poor fellow, from the effort, the cap is at the back of his neck, the whiskered face is such a kindly and woeful and helpless one, while the voice is gentle, so gentle. at last, what do you think? as the girl has become all excited, and has already grown hoarse from tears, and is shy of everybody--he, this same 'roundsman on the beat,' stretches out two of his black, calloused fingers, the index and the little, and begins to imitate a nanny goat for the girl and reciting an appropriate nursery rhyme! ... and so, when i looked upon this charming scene and thought that half an hour later at the station house this same patrolman will be beating with his feet the face and chest of a man whom he had not till that time seen once, and whose crime he is entirely ignorant of--then--you understand!--i began to feel inexpressibly eerie and sad. not with the mind, but the heart. such a devilish muddle is this life. shall we drink some cognac, lichonin?" "what do you say to calling each other thou?" suddenly proposed lichonin. "all right. only, really, without any of this business of kissing, now. here's to your health, old man ... or here is another instance ... i read a certain french classic, describing the thoughts and sensations of a man condemned to capital punishment. he describes it all sonorously, powerfully, brilliantly, but i read and ... well, there is no impression of any sort; neither emotion nor indignation--just ennui. but then, within the last few days i come across a brief newspaper notice of a murderer's execution somewhere in france. the procureur, who was present at the last toilet of the criminal, sees that he is putting on his shoes on his bare feet, and--the blockhead!--reminds him: 'what about the socks?' but the other gives him a look and says, sort of thoughtfully: 'is it worth while?' do you understand, these two remarks, so very short, struck me like a blow on the skull! at once all the horror and all the stupidity of unnatural death were revealed to me ... or here is something else about death ... a certain friend of mine died, a captain in the infantry--a drunkard, a vagabond, and the finest soul in the world. for some reason we called him the electrical captain. i was in the vicinity, and it fell to me to dress him for the last parade. i took his uniform and began to attach the epaulettes to it. there's a cord, you know, that's drawn through the shank of the epaulette buttons, and after that the two ends of this cord are shoved through two little holes under the collar, and on the inside--the lining--are tied together. well, i go through all this business, and tie the cord with a slipknot, and, you know, the loop won't come out, nohow--either it's too loosely tied, or else one end's too short. i am fussing over this nonsense, and suddenly into my head comes the most astonishingly simple thought, that it's far simpler and quicker to tie it in a knot--for after all, it's all the same, no one is going to untie it. and immediately i felt death with all my being. until that time i had seen the captain's eyes, grown glassy, had felt his cold forehead, and still somehow had not sensed death to the full, but i thought of the knot--and i was all transpierced, and the simple and sad realization of the irrevocable, inevitable perishing of all our words, deeds, and sensations, of the perishing of all the apparent world, seemed to bow me down to the earth ... and i could bring forward a hundred such small but staggering trifles ... even, say, about what people experienced in the war ... but i want to lead my thought up to one thing. we all pass by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like the blind, as though not seeing them scattered about under our feet. but an artist will come, and he will look over them carefully, and he will pick them up. and suddenly he will so skillfully turn in the sun a minute bit of life that we shall all cry out: 'oh, my god! but i myself--myself--have seen this with my own eyes. only it simply did not enter my head to turn my close attention upon it.' but our russian artists of the word--the most conscientious and sincere artists in the whole world--for some reason have up to this time passed over prostitution and the brothel. why? really, it is difficult for me to answer that. perhaps because of squeamishness, perhaps because of pusillanimity, out of fear of being signalized as a pornographic writer; finally, from the apprehension that our gossiping criticism will identify the artistic work of the writer with his personal life and will start rummaging in his dirty linen. or perhaps they can find neither the time, nor the self-denial, nor the self-possession to plunge in head first into this life and to watch it right up close, without prejudice, without sonorous phrases, without a sheepish pity, in all its monstrous simplicity and every-day activity. oh, what a tremendous, staggering and truthful book would result!" "but they do write!" unwillingly remarked ramses. "they do write," wearily repeated platonov in the same tone as he. "but it is all either a lie, or theatrical effects for children of tender years, or else a cunning symbolism, comprehensible only to the sages of the future. but the life itself no one as yet has touched. one big writer--a man with a crystal-pure soul and a remarkable talent for delineation--once approached this theme,[ ] and then all that could catch the eye of an outsider was reflected in his soul, as in a wondrous mirror. but he could not decide to lie to and to frighten people. he only looked upon the coarse hair of the porter, like that of a dog, and reflected: 'but, surely, even he had a mother.' he passed with his wise, exact gaze over the faces of the prostitutes and impressed them on his mind. but that which he did not know he did not dare to write. it is remarkable, that this same writer, enchanting with his honesty and truthfulness, has looked at the moujik as well, more than once. but he sensed that both the tongue and the turn of mind, as well as the soul of the people, were for him dark and incomprehensible ... and he, with an amazing tact, modestly went around the soul of the people, but refracted all his fund of splendid observation through the eyes of townsfolk. i have brought this up purposely. with us, you see, they write about detectives, about lawyers, about inspectors of the revenue, about pedagogues, about attorneys, about the police, about officers, about sensual ladies, about engineers, about baritones--and really, by god, altogether well--cleverly, with finesse and talent. but, after all, all these people, are rubbish, and their life is not life but some sort of conjured up, spectral, unnecessary delirium of world culture. but there are two singular realities--ancient as humanity itself: the prostitute and the moujik. and about them we know nothing save some tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions in literature. i ask you: what has russian literature extracted out of all the nightmare of prostitution? sonechka marmeladova alone.[ ] what has it given us about the moujik save odious, false, nationalistic pastorals? one, altogether but one, but then, in truth, the greatest work in all the world--a staggering tragedy, the truthfulness of which takes the breath away and makes the hair stand on end. you know what i am speaking of ..." [ ] the reference here is most probably to chekhov.--trans. [ ] the heroine of dostoievsky's "crime and punishment."--trans. "'the little claw is sunk in...'"[ ] quietly prompted lichonin. [ ] "the little claw is sunk in, the whole bird is bound to perish"--a folk proverb used by tolstoi as a sub-title to his "the power of darkness."--trans. "yes," answered the reporter, and looked kindly at the student with gratefulness. "but as regards sonechka--why, this is an abstract type," remarked yarchenko with assurance. "a psychological scheme, so to speak..." platonov, who up to now had been speaking as though unwillingly, at a slow rate, suddenly grew heated: "a hundred times have i heard this opinion, a hundred times! and it is entirely an untruth. underneath the coarse and obscene profession, underneath the foulest oaths--about one's mother--underneath the drunken, hideous exterior--sonechka marmeladova still lives! the fate of the russian prostitute--oh, what a tragic, piteous, bloody, ludicrous and stupid path it is! here everything has been juxtaposed: the russian god, russian breadth and unconcern, russian despair in a fall, russian lack of culture, russian naivete, russian patience, russian shamelessness. why, all of them, whom you take into bedrooms,--look upon them, look upon them well,--why, they are all children; why, each of them is but eleven years old. fate has thrust them upon prostitution and since then they live in some sort of a strange, fairy-like, toy existence, without developing, without being enriched by experience, naive, trusting, capricious, not knowing what they will say and do half an hour later--altogether like children. this radiant and ludicrous childishness i have seen in the very oldest wenches, fallen as low as low can be, broken-winded and crippled like a cabby's nags. and never does this impotent pity, this useless commiseration toward human suffering die within them ... for example..." platonov looked over all the persons sitting with a slow gaze, and suddenly, waving his hand despondently, said in a tired voice: "however ... the devil take it all! to-day i have spoken enough for ten years ... and all of it to no purpose." "but really, sergei ivanich, why shouldn't you try to describe all this yourself?" asked yarchenko. "your attention is so vitally concentrated on this question." "i did try!" answered platonov with a cheerless smile. "but nothing came of it. i started writing and at once became entangled in various 'whats,' 'which's,' 'was's.' the epithets prove flat. the words grow cold on the page. it's all a cud of some sort. do you know, terekhov was here once, while passing through ... you know ... the well-known one ... i came to him and started in telling him lots and lots about the life here, which i do not tell you for fear of boring you. i begged him to utilize my material. he heard me out with great attention, and this is what he said, literally: 'don't get offended, platonov, if i tell you that there's almost not a single person of those i have met during my life, who wouldn't thrust themes for novels and stories upon me, or teach me as to what ought to be written up. that material which you have just communicated to me is truly unencompassable in its significance and weightiness. but what shall i do with it? in order to write a colossal book such as the one you have in mind, the words of others do not suffice--even though they be the most exact--even observations, made with a little note-book and a bit of pencil, do not suffice. one must grow accustomed to this life, without being cunningly wise, without any ulterior thoughts of writing. then a terrific book will result.' "his words discouraged me and at the same time gave me wings. since that time i believe, that now, not soon--after fifty years or so--but there will come a writer of genius, and precisely a russian one, who will absorb within himself all the burdens and all the abominations of this life and will cast them forth to us in the form of simple, fine, and deathlessly-caustic images. and we shall all say: 'why, now, we, ourselves, have seen and known all this, but we could not even suppose that this is so horrible!' in this coming artist i believe with all my heart." "amen!" said lichonin seriously. "let us drink to him." "but, honest to god," suddenly declared little manka, "if some one would only write the truth about the way we live here, miserable w--that we are..." there was a knock at the door, and at once jennie entered in her resplendent orange dress. chapter x. she greeted all the men without embarrassment, with the independent bearing of the first personage in the house, and sat down near sergei ivanich, behind his chair. she had just gotten free from that same german in the uniform of the benevolent organization, who early in the evening had made little white manka his choice, but had afterwards changed her, at the recommendation of the housekeeper, for pasha. but the provoking and self-assured beauty of jennie must have smitten deeply his lecherous heart, for, having prowled some three hours through certain beer emporiums and restaurants, and having there gathered courage, he had again returned into the house of anna markovna, had waited until her time-guest--karl karlovich, from the optical store--had gone away from jennie, and had taken her into a room. to the silent question in tamara's eyes jennie made a wry face of disgust, shivered with her back and nodded her head affirmatively. "he's gone... brrr! ..." platonov was looking at jennie with extraordinary attentiveness. he distinguished her from the rest of the girls and almost respected her for her abrupt, refractory, and impudently mocking character. and now, turning around occasionally, by her flaming, splendid eyes, by the vividly and unevenly glowing unhealthy red of her cheeks, by the much bitten parched lips, he felt that her great, long ripening rancour was heavily surging within the girl and suffocating her. and it was then that he thought (and subsequently often recalled this) that he had never yet seen jennie so radiantly beautiful as on this night. he also noticed, that all the men present in the private cabinet, with the exception of lichonin, were looking at her--some frankly, others by stealth and as though in passing--with curiosity and furtive desire. the beauty of this woman, together with the thought of her altogether easy accessibility, at any minute, agitated their imagination. "there's something working upon you, jennie," said platonov quietly. caressingly, she just barely drew her fingers over his arm. "don't pay any attention. just so ... our womanish affairs ... it won't be interesting to you." but immediately, turning to tamara, she passionately and rapidly began saying something in an agreed jargon, which presented a wild mixture out of the hebrew, tzigani and roumanian tongues and the cant words of thieves and horse-thieves. "don't try to put anything over on the fly guy, the fly guy is next," tamara cut her short and with a smile indicated the reporter with her eyes. platonov had, in fact, understood. jennie was telling with indignation that during this day and night, thanks to the influx of a cheap public, the unhappy pashka had been taken into a room more than ten times--and all by different men. only just now she had had a hysterical fit, ending in a faint. and now, scarcely having brought pashka back to consciousness and braced her up on valerian drops in a glass of spirits, emma edwardovna had again sent her into the drawing room. jennie had attempted to take the part of her comrade, but the house-keeper had cursed the intercessor out and had threatened her with punishment. "what is it all about?" asked yarchenko in perplexity, raising high his eyebrows. "don't trouble yourself ... nothing out of the way..." answered jennie in a still agitated voice. "just so ... our little family trifles ... sergei ivanich, may i have some of your wine?" she poured out half a glass for herself and drank the cognac off at a draught, distending her thin nostrils wide. platonov got up in silence and went toward the door. "it's not worth while, sergei ivanich. drop it..." jennie stopped him. "oh no, why not?" objected the reporter. "i shall do a very simple and innocent thing, take pasha here, and if need be--pay for her, even. let her lie down here for a while on the divan and rest, even though a little ... niura, run for a pillow quick!" scarcely had the door shut behind his broad, ungainly figure in its gray clothes, when boris sobashnikov at once commenced speaking with a contemptuous bitterness: "gentlemen, what the devil for have we dragged into our company this peach off the street? we must needs tie up with all sorts of riff-raff? the devil knows what he is--perhaps he's even a dinny? who can vouch for him? and you're always like that, lichonin." "it isn't lichonin but i who introduced him to everybody,"' said ramses. "i know him for a fully respectable person and a good companion." "eh! nonsense! a good companion to drink at some one else's expense. why, don't you see for yourselves that this is the most ordinary type of habitue attached to a brothel, and, most probably, he is simply the pimp here, to whom a percentage is paid for the entertainment into which he entices the visitors." "leave off, borya. it's foolish," remarked yarchenko reproachfully. but borya could not leave off. he had an unfortunate peculiarity--intoxication acted neither upon his legs nor his tongue, but put him in a morose, touchy frame of mind and egged him on into quarrels. and platonov had already for a long time irritated him with his negligently sincere, assured and serious bearing, so little suitable to the private cabinet of a brothel. but the seeming indifference with which the reporter let pass the malicious remarks which he interposed into the conversation angered sobashnikov still more. "and then, the tone in which he permits himself to speak in our company!" sobashnikov continued to seethe. "a certain aplomb, condescension, a professorial tone ... the scurvy penny-a-liner! the free-lunch grafter!" jennie, who had all the time been looking intently at the student, gaily and maliciously flashing with her sparkling dark eyes, suddenly began to clap her hands. "that's the way! bravo, little student! bravo, bravo, bravo! ... that's the way, give it to him good! ... really, what sort of a disgrace is this! when he'll come, now, i'll repeat everything to him." "i--if you please! a--as much as you like!" sobashnikov drawled out like an actor, making superciliously squeamish creases about his mouth. "i shall repeat the very same things myself." "there's a fine fellow, now,--i love you for that!" exclaimed jennie joyously and maliciously, striking her fist on the table. "you can tell an owl at once by its flight, a good man by his snot!" little white manya and tamara looked at jennie with wonder, but, noting the evil little lights leaping in her eyes and her nervously quivering nostrils, they both understood and smiled. little white manya, laughing, shook her head reproachfully. jennie always had such a face when her turbulent soul sensed that a scandal was nearing which she herself had brought on. "don't get your back up, borinka," said lichonin. "here all are equal." niura came with a pillow and laid it down on the divan. "and what's that for?" sobashnikov yelled at her. "git! take it away at once. this isn't a lodging house." "now, leave her be, honey. what's that to you?" retorted jennie in a sweet voice and hid the pillow behind tamara's back. "wait, sweetie, i'd better sit with you for a while." she walked around the table, forced boris to sit on a chair, and herself got up on his knees. twining his neck with her arm, she pressed her lips to his mouth, so long and so vigorously that the student caught his breath. right up close to his eyes he saw the eyes of the woman--strangely large, dark, luminous, indistinct and unmoving. for a quarter of a second or so, for an instant, it seemed to him that in these unliving eyes was impressed an expression of keen, mad hate; and the chill of terror, some vague premonition of an ominous, inevitable calamity flashed through the student's brain. with difficulty tearing the supple arms of jennie away from him, and pushing her away, he said, laughing, having turned red and breathing hard: "there's a temperament for you! oh, you messalina paphnutievna! ... they call you jennka, i think? you're a good-looking little rascal." platonov returned with pasha. pasha was pitiful and revolting to look at. her face was pale, with, a bluish cast as though the blood had run off; the glazed, half-closed eyes were smiling with a faint, idiotic smile; the parted lips seemed to resemble two frayed, red, wet rags, and she walked with a sort of timid, uncertain step, just as though with one foot she were making a large step, and with the other a small one. she walked with docility up to the divan and with docility laid her head down on the pillow, without ceasing to smile faintly and insanely. even at a distance it was apparent that she was cold. "pardon me, gentlemen, i am going to undress," said lichonin, and taking his coat off he threw it over the shoulders of the prostitute. "tamara, give her chocolate and wine." boris sobashnikov again stood up picturesquely in the corner, in a leaning position, one leg in front of the other and his head held high. suddenly he spoke amid the general silence, addressing platonov directly, in a most foppish tone: "eh ... listen ... what's your name? ... this, then, must be your mistress? eh?" and with the tip of his boot he pointed in the direction of the recumbent pasha. "wha-at?" asked platonov in a drawl, knitting his eyebrows. "or else you are her lover--it's all one ... what do they call this duty here? well, now, these same people for whom the women embroider shirts and with whom they divide their honest earnings? ... eh? ..." platonov looked at him with a heavy, intent gaze through his narrowed lids. "listen," he said quietly, in a hoarse voice, slowly and ponderously separating his words. "this isn't the first time that you're trying to pick a quarrel with me. but, in the first place, i see that despite your sober appearance you are exceedingly and badly drunk; and, in the second place, i spare you for the sake of your comrades. however, i warn you, that if you think of talking that way to me again, take your eyeglasses off." "what's this stuff?" exclaimed boris, raising his shoulders high and snorting through his nose. "what eyeglasses? why eyeglasses?" but mechanically, with two extended fingers, he fixed the bow of the pince-nez on the bridge of his nose. "because i'm going to hit you, and the pieces may get in your eye," said the reporter unconcernedly. despite the unexpectedness of such a turn of the quarrel, nobody started laughing. only little white manka oh'd in astonishment and clapped her hands. jennie, with avid impatience, shifted her eyes from one to the other. "well, now! i'll give you change back myself so's you won't like it!" roughly, altogether boyishly, cried out sobashnikov. "only it's not worth while mussing one's hands with every ..." he wanted to add a new invective, but decided not to, "with every ... and besides, comrades, i do not intend to stay here any longer. i am too well brought up to be hail-fellow-well-met with such persons." he rapidly and haughtily walked to the door. it was necessary for him to pass almost right up against platonov, who, out of the corner of his eye, animal-like, was watching his every movement. for a moment in the mind of the student flashed a desire to strike platonov unexpectedly, from the side, and jump away--the comrades would surely part them and not allow a fight. but immediately, almost without looking at the reporter, with some sort of deep, unconscious instinct, he saw and sensed those broad hands, lying quietly on the table, that obdurately bowed head with its broad forehead, and all the ungainly, alert, powerful body of his foe, so neligently hunched up and spread out on the chair, but ready at any second for a quick and terrific blow. and sobashnikov walked out into the corridor, loudly banging the door after him. "good riddance to bad rubbish," said jennie after him in a mocking patter. "tamarochka, pour me out some more cognac." but the lanky student petrovsky got up from his place and considered it necessary to defend sobashnikov. "just as you wish, gentlemen; this is a matter of your personal view, but out of principle i go together with boris. let him be not right and so on, we can express censure to him in our own intimate company, but when an insult has been rendered our comrade--i can't remain here. i am going away." "oh, my god!" and lichonin nervously and vexedly scratched his temple. "boris behaved himself all the time in the highest degree vulgarly, rudely and foolishly. what sort of corporate honour do you think this is? a collective walk-out from editorial offices, from political meetings, from brothels. we aren't officers to screen the foolishness of each comrade." "all the same, just as you wish, but i am going away out of a sense of solidarity!" said petrovsky importantly and walked out. "may the earth be as down upon you!" jennie sent after him. but how tortuous and dark the ways of the human soul! both of them--sobashnikov as well as petrovsky--acted in their indignation rather sincerely, but the first only half so, while the second only a quarter in all. sobashnikov, despite his intoxication and wrath, still had knocking at the door of his mind the alluring thought that now it would be more convenient and easier before his comrades to call out jennka on the quiet and to be alone with her. while petrovsky, with exactly the same aim, went after sobashnikov in order to make a loan of three roubles from him. in the general drawing room they made things up between them, and after ten minutes zociya, the housekeeper, shoved in her little, squinting, pink, cunning face through the half-open door of the private room. "jennechka," she called, "go, they have brought your linen, go count it. and you, niura, the actor begs to come for just a minute, to drink some champagne. he's with henrietta and big manya." the precipitate and incongruous quarrel of platonov and sobashnikov long served as a subject of conversation. the reporter, in cases like this, always felt shame, uneasiness, regret and the torments of conscience. and despite the fact that all those who remained were on his side, he was speaking with weariness in his voice: "by god, gentlemen! i'll go away, best of all. why should i disrupt your circle? we were both at fault. i'll go away. don't bother about the bill. i've already paid simeon, when i was going after pasha." lichonin suddenly rumpled up his hair and stood up "oh, no, the devil take it! i'll go and drag him here. upon my word of honour, they're both fine fellows--boris as well as vaska. but they're young yet, and bark at their own tails. i'm going after them, and i warrant that boris will apologize." he went away, but came back after five minutes. "they repose," said he, sombrely, and made a hopeless gesture with his hand. "both of them." chapter xi. at this moment simeon walked into the cabinet with a tray upon which stood two goblets of a bubbling golden wine and lay a large visiting card. "may i ask which of you here might be mister gavrila petrovich yarchenko?" he said, looking over all those sitting. "i," responded yarchenko. "if youse please. the actor gent sent this." yarchenko took the visiting card and read aloud: eumenii poluectovich egmont--lavretzki dramatic artist of metropolitan theatres "it's remarkable," said volodya pavlov, "that all the russian garricks bear such queer names, on the style of chrysantov, thetisov, mamontov and epimhakov." "and besides that, the best known of them must needs either speak thickly, or lisp, or stammer," added the reporter. "yes, but most remarkable of all is the fact that i do not at all have the honour of knowing this artist of the metropolitan theatres. however, there's something else written on the reverse of this card. judging by the handwriting, it was written by a man greatly drunk and little lettered. "'i dreenk'--not drink, but dreenk," explained yarchenko. "'i dreenk to the health of the luminary of russian science, gavrila petrovich yarchenko, whom i saw by chance when i was passing by through the collidor. would like to clink glasses together personally. if you do not remember, recollect the national theatre, poverty is no disgrace, and the humble artist who played african.' yes, that's right," said yarchenko. "once, somehow, they saddled me with the arrangement of this benefit performance in the national theatre. also, there dimly glimmers some clean-shaven haughty visage, but ... what shall it be, gentlemen?" lichonin answered good-naturedly: "why, drag him here. perhaps he's funny." "and you?" the sub-professor turned to platonov. "it's all the same to me. i know him slightly. at first he'll shout: 'kellner, champagne!' then burst into tears about his wife, who is an angel, then deliver a patriotic speech and finally raise a row over the bill, but none too loudly. all in all he's entertaining." "let him come," said volodya, from behind the shoulder of katie, who was sitting on his knees, swinging her legs. "and you, veltman?" "what?" the student came to with a start. he was sitting on the divan with his back to his companions, near the reclining pasha, bending over her, and already for a long time, with the friendliest appearance of sympathy, had been stroking her, now on the shoulder, now on the hair at the nape of the neck, while she was smiling at him with her shyly shameless and senselessly passionate smile through half-closed and trembling eyelashes. "what? what's it all about? oh yes,--is it all right to let the actor in? i've nothing against it. please do ..." yarchenko sent an invitation through simeon, and the actor came and immediately commenced the usual actor's play. in the door he paused, in his long frock coat, shining with its silk lapels, with a glistening opera hat, which he held with his arm in the middle of his chest, like an actor portraying in the theatre an elderly worldly lion or a bank director. and approximately these persons he was inwardly picturing to himself. "may i be permitted, gentlemen, to intrude into your intimate company?" he asked in an unctuous, kindly voice, with a half-bow done somewhat to one side. they asked him in, and he began to introduce himself. shaking hands, he stuck out his elbow forward and raised it so high that the hand proved to be far lower. now it was no longer a bank director, but such a clever, splendid fellow, a sportsman and a rake of the golden youths. but his face--with rumpled, wild eyebrows and with denuded lids without lashes--was the vulgar, harsh and low face of a typical alcoholic, libertine, and pettily cruel man. together with him came two of his ladies: henrietta the eldest girl in years in the establishment of anna markovna, experienced, who had seen everything and had grown accustomed to everything, like an old horse on the tether of a threshing machine, the possessor of a thick bass, but still a handsome woman; and big manka, or manka the crocodile. henrietta since still the preceding night had not parted from the actor, who had taken her from the house to a hotel. having seated himself alongside of yarchenko, he straight off began to play a new role--he became something on the order of an old good soul of a landed proprietor, who had at one time been at a university himself, and now can not look upon the students without a quiet, fatherly emotion. "believe me, gentlemen, that one's soul rests from all these worldly squabbles in the midst of youth," he was saying, imparting to his depraved and harsh face an actor-like, exaggerated and improbable expression of being moved. "this faith in a high ideal, these honest impulses! ... what can be loftier and purer than our russian students as a body? ... kellner! chompa-a-agne!" he yelled deafeningly all of a sudden, and dealt a heavy blow on the table with his fist. lichonin and yarchenka did not wish to remain in debt to him. a spree began. god knows in what manner mishka the singer and nicky the book-keeper soon found themselves in the cabinet, and at once began singing in their galloping voices: "they fe-e-e-el the tru-u-u-uth, come thou daw-aw-aw-awning quicker ..." there also appeared roly-poly, who had awakened. letting his head drop touchingly to one side and having made little narrowed, lachrymose, sweet eyes in his wrinkled old face of a don quixote, he was speaking in a persuasively begging tone: "gentlemen students ... you ought to treat a little old man. i love education, by god! ... allow me!" lichonin was glad to see everybody, but yarchenko in the beginning--until the champagne had mounted to his head--only raised high his small, short eyebrows with a timorous, wondering and naive air. it suddenly became crowded, smoky, noisy and close in the cabinet. simeon, with rattling, closed the blinds with bolts on the outside. the women, just having gotten done with a visit or in the interim between dances, walked into the room, sat on somebody's knees, smoked, sang disjointedly, drank wine, kissed and again went away, and again came. the clerks of kereshkovsky, offended because the damsels bestowed more attention upon the cabinet than the drawing room, did start a row and tried to enter into a provoking explanation with the students, but simeon in a moment quelled them with two or three authoritative words, thrown out as though in passing. niura came back from her room and a little later petrovsky followed her. petrovsky with an extremely serious air declared that he had been walking on the street all this time, thinking over the incident which had taken place and in the end had come to the conclusion that comrade boris was in reality not in the right, but that there also was a circumstance in extenuation of his fault--intoxication. also, jennie came later, but alone--sobashnikov had fallen asleep in her room. the actor proved to have no end of talents. he very faithfully imitated the buzzing of a fly which an intoxicated man is catching on a window-pane, and the sounds of a saw; drolly performed, standing with his face in the corner, the conversation of a nervous lady over the telephone; imitated the singing of a phonograph record, and in the end, with exceeding likeness to life, showed a little persian lad with a little trained monkey. holding on with his hand to an imaginary small chain and at the same time baring his teeth, squatting like a monkey, winking his eyelids often, and scratching now his posteriors, now the hair on his head, he sang through his nose, in a monotonous and sad voice, distorting the words: "the i-young cissack to the war has went, the i-young ladee underneath the fence lies spraw-aw-ling. aina, aina, ai-na-na-na, ai-na na-na-na." in conclusion he took little white manka in his arms, wrapped her up in the skirts of his frock and, stretching out his hand and making a tearful face, began to nod his head, bent to one side, as is done by little swarthy, dirty, oriental lads who roam over all russia in long, old, soldiers' overcoats, with bared chest of a bronze colour, holding a coughing, moth-eaten little monkey in their bosom. "and who may you be?" severely asked fat kate, who knew and loved this joke. "me serbian, lady-y-y," piteously moaned the actor through his nose. "give me somethin', lady-y-y." "and what do they call your little monkey?" "matreshka-a-a ... him 'ungry-y-y, lady ... him want eat..." "and have you got a passport?" "we serbia-a-an. gimme something lady-y-y..." the actor proved not superfluous on the whole. he created at once a great deal of noise and raised the spirits of the company, which were beginning to be depressing. and every minute he cried out in a stentorian voice: "kellner! chompa-a-agne!"--although simeon, who was accustomed to his manner paid very little attention to these cries. there began a truly russian hubbub, noisy and senseless. the rosy, flaxen-haired, pleasing tolpygin was playing la seguidille from carmen on the piano, while roly-poly was dancing a kamarinsky peasant dance to its tune. his narrow shoulders hunched up, twisted all to one side, the fingers of his hanging hands widely spread, he intricately hopped on one spot from one long, thin leg to the other, then suddenly letting out a piercing grunt, would throw himself upward and shout out in time to his wild dance: "ugh! dance on, matthew, don't spare your boots, you! ..." "eh, for one stunt like that a quartern of brandy isn't enough!" he would add, shaking his long, graying hair. "they fee-ee-eel! the tru-u-u-uth!" roared the two friends, raising with difficulty their underlids, grown heavy, beneath dull, bleary eyes. the actor commenced to tell obscene anecdotes, pouring them out as from a bag, and the women squealed from delight, bent in two from laughter and threw themselves against the backs of their chairs. veltman, who had long been whispering with pasha, inconspicuously, in the hubbub, slipped out of the cabinet, while a few minutes after him pasha also went away, smiling with her quiet, insane and bashful smile. but all of the remaining students as well, save lichonin, one after the other, some on the quiet, some under one pretext or another, vanished from the cabinet and did not return for long periods. volodya pavlov experienced a desire to look at the dancing; tolpygin's head began to ache badly, and he asked tamara to lead him somewhere where he might wash up; petrovski, having "touched" lichonin for three roubles on the quiet, went out into the corridor and only from there despatched the housekeeper zociya for little white manka. even the prudent and fastidious ramses could not cope with that spicy feeling which to-day's strange, vivid and unwholesome beauty of jennie excited in him. it proved that he had some important, undeferrable business this morning; it was necessary to go home and snatch a bit of sleep if only for a couple of hours. but, having told good-bye to his companions, he, before going out of the cabinet, rapidly and with deep significance pointed the door out to jennie with his eyes. she understood, slowly, scarcely perceptibly, lowered her eyelashes as a sign of consent, and, when she again raised them, platonov, who almost without looking had seen this silent dialogue, was struck by that expression of malice and menace in her eyes which she sped the back of the departing ramses. having waited for five minutes she got up, said "excuse me, i'll be right back," and went out, swinging her short orange skirt. "well, now? is it your turn, lichonin?" asked the reporter banteringly. "no, brother, you're mistaken!" said lichonin and clacked his tongue. "and i'm not doing it out of conviction or on principle, either ... no! i, as an anarchist, proclaim the gospel that the worse things are, the better ... but, fortunately, i am a gambler and spend all my temperament on gaming; on that account simple squeamishness speaks louder within me than this same unearthly feeling. but it's amazing our thoughts coincided. i just wanted to ask you about the same thing." "i--no. sometimes, if i become very much tired out, i sleep here over night. i take from isaiah savvich the key to his little room and sleep on the divan. but all the girls here are already used to the fact that i am a being of the third sex." "and really ... never? ..." "never." "well, what's right is right!" exclaimed nhira. "sergei ivanich is like a holy hermit." "previously, some five years ago, i experienced this also," continued platonov. "but, do you know, it's really too tedious and disgusting. something on the nature of these flies which the actor gentleman just represented. they're stuck together on the window sill, and then in some sort of fool wonder scratch their backs with their little hind legs and fly apart forever. and to play at love here? ... well, for that i'm no hero out of their sort of novel. i'm not handsome, am shy with women, uneasy, and polite. while here they thirst for savage passions, bloody jealousy, tears, poisonings, beatings, sacrifices,--in a word, hysterical romanticism. and it's easy to understand why. the heart of woman always wants love, while they are told of love every day with various sour, drooling words. involuntarily one wants pepper in one's love. one no longer wants words of passion, but tragically-passionate deeds. and for that reason thieves, murderers, souteners and other riff-raff will always be their lovers." "and most important of all," added platonov, "that would at once spoil for me all the friendly relations which have been so well built up." "enough of joking!" incredulously retorted lichonin. "then what compels you to pass days and nights here? were you a writer--it would be a different matter. it's easy to find an explanation; well, you're gathering types or something ... observing life ... after the manner of that german professor who lived for three years with monkeys, in order to study closely their language and manners. but you yourself said that you don't indulge in writing?" "it isn't that i don't indulge, but i simply don't know how--i can't." "we'll write that down. now let's suppose another thing--that you come here as an apostle of a better, honest life, in the nature of a, now, saviour of perishing souls. you know, as in the dawn of christianity certain holy fathers instead of standing on a column for thirty years or living in a cave in the woods, went to the market places, into houses of mirth, to the harlots and scaramuchios. but you aren't inclined that way." "i'm not." "then why, the devil take it, do you hang around here? i can see very well that a great deal here is revolting and oppressive and painful to your own self. for example, this fool quarrel with boris or this flunky who beats a woman, and--, in general, the constant contemplation of every kind of filth, lust, bestiality, vulgarity, drunkenness. well, now, since you say so--i believe that you don't give yourself up to lechery. but then, still more incomprehensible to me is your modus vivendi, to express myself in the style of leading articles." the reporter did not answer at once: "you see," he began speaking slowly, with pauses, as though for the first time lending ear to his thoughts and weighing them. "you see, i'm attracted and interested in this life by its ... how shall i express it? ... its fearful, stark truth. do you understand, it's as though all the conventional coverings were ripped off it. there is no falsehood, no hypocrisy, no sanctimoniousness, there are no compromises of any sort, neither with public opinion, nor with the importunate authority of our forefathers, nor with one's own conscience. no illusions of any kind, nor any kind of embellishments! here she is--'i! a public woman, a common vessel, a cloaca for the drainage of the city's surplus lust. come to me any one who wills--thou shalt meet no denial, therein is my service. but for a second of this sensuality in haste--thou shalt pay in money, revulsion, disease and ignominy.' and that is all. there is not a single phase of human life where the basic main truth should shine with such a monstrous, hideous, stark clearness, without any shade of human prevarication or self-whitewashing." "oh, i don't know! these women lie like the very devil. you just go and talk with her a bit about her first fall. she'll spin you such a yarn!" "well, don't you ask then. what business is that of yours? but even if they do lie, they lie altogether like children. but then, you know yourself that children are the foremost, the most charming fibsters, and at the same time the sincerest people on earth. and it's remarkable, that both they and the others--that is, both prostitutes and children--lie only to us--men--and grown-ups. among themselves they don't lie--they only inspiredly improvise. but they lie to us because we ourselves demand this of them, because we clamber into their souls, altogether foreign to us, with our stupid tactics and questionings, because they regard us in secret as great fools and senseless dissemblers. but if you like, i shall right now count off on my fingers all the occasions when a prostitute is sure to lie, and you yourself will be convinced that man incites her to lying." "well, well, we shall see." "first: she paints herself mercilessly, at times even in detriment to herself. why? because every pimply military cadet, who is so distressed by his sexual maturity that he grows stupid in the spring, like a wood-cock on a drumming-log; or some sorry petty government clerk or other from the department of the parish, the husband of a pregnant woman and the father of nine infants--why, they both come here not at all with the prudent and simple purpose of leaving here the surplus of their passion. he, the good for nothing, has come to enjoy himself; he needs beauty, d'you see--aesthete that he is! but all these girls, these daughters of the simple, unpretentious, great russian people--how do they regard aesthetics? 'what's sweet, that's tasty; what's red, that's handsome.' and so, there you are, receive, if you please, a beauty of antimony, white lead and rouge. "that's one. secondly, his desire for beauty isn't enough for this resplendent cavalier--no, he must in addition be served with a similitude of love, so that from his caresses there should kindle in the woman this same 'fa-hire of in-sane pahass-ssion!' which is sung about in idiotical ballads. ah! then that is what you want? there y'are! and the woman lies to him with countenance, voice, sighs, moans, movements of the body. and even he himself in the depths of his soul knows about this professional deception, but--go along with you!--still deceives himself: 'ah, what a handsome man i am! ah, how the women love me! ah, into what an ecstasy i bring them ...' you know, there are cases when a man with the most desperate brazenness, in the most unlikely manner, is flattered to his face, and he himself sees and knows it very plainly, but--the devil take it!--despite everything a delightful feeling of some sort lubricates his soul. and so here. query: whose is the initiative in the lie? "and here's a third point for you, lichonin. you prompted it yourself. they lie most of all when they are asked: 'how did you come to such a life?' but what right have you to ask her about that, may the devil take you! for she does not push her way into your intimate life? she doesn't interest herself with your first, 'holy' love or the virtue of your sisters and your bride. aha! you pay money? splendid! the bawd and the bouncer, and the police, and medicine, and the city government, watch over your interests. polite and seemly conduct on the part of the prostitute hired by you for love is guaranteed you, and your personality is immune ... even though in the most direct sense, in the sense of a slap in the face, which you, of course, deserve through your aimless, and perhaps tormenting interrogations. but you desire truth as well for your money? well, that you are never to discount and to control. they will tell you just such a conventionalized history as you--yourself a man of conventionality and a vulgarian--will digest easiest of all. because by itself life is either exceedingly humdrum and tedious to you, or else as exceedingly improbable as only life can be improbable. and so you have the eternal mediocre history about an officer, about a shop clerk, about a baby and a superannuated father, who there, in the provinces, bewails his strayed daughter and implores her to return home. but mark you, lichonin, all that i'm saying doesn't apply to you; in you, upon my word of honour, i sense a sincere and great soul ... let's drink to your health?" they drank. "shall i speak on?" continued platonov undecidedly. "are you bored?" "no, no, i beg of you, speak on." "they also lie, and lie especially innocently, to those who preen themselves before them on political hobby horses. here they agree with anything you want. i shall tell her to-day: away with the modern bourgeois order! let us destroy with bombs and daggers the capitalists, landed proprietors, and the bureaucracy! she'll warmly agree with me. but to-morrow the hanger-on nozdrunov will yell that it's necessary to string up all the socialists, to beat up all the students and massacre all the sheenies, who partake of communion in christian blood. and she'll gleefully agree with him as well. but if in addition to that you'll also inflame her imagination, make her fall in love with yourself, then she'll go with you everywhere you may wish--on a pogrom, on a barricade, on a theft, on a murder. but then, children also are yielding. and they, by god, are children, my dear lichonin... "at fourteen years she was seduced, and at sixteen she became a patent prostitute, with a yellow ticket and a venereal disease. and here is all her life, surrounded and fenced off from the universe with a sort of a bizarre, impenetrable and dead wall. turn your attention to her everyday vocabulary--thirty or forty words, no more--altogether as with a baby or a savage: to eat, to drink, to sleep, man, bed, the madam, rouble, lover, doctor, hospital, linen, policeman--and that's all. and so her mental development, her experience, her interests, remain on an infantile plane until her very death, exactly as in the case of a gray and naive lady teacher who has not crossed over the threshold of a female institute since she was ten, as in the case of a nun given as a child into a convent. in a word, picture to yourself a tree of a genuinely great species, but raised in a glass bell, in a jar from jam. and precisely to this childish phase of their existence do i attribute their compulsory lying--so innocent, purposeless and habitual ... but then, how fearful, stark, unadorned with anything the frank truth in this business-like dickering about the price of a night; in these ten men in an evening; in these printed rules, issued by the city fathers, about the use of a solution of boric acid and about maintaining one's self in cleanliness; in the weekly doctors' inspections; in the nasty diseases, which are looked upon as lightly and facetiously, just as simply and without suffering, as a cold would be; in the deep revulsion of these women to men--so deep, that they all, without conception, compensate for it in the lesbian manner and do not even in the least conceal it. all their incongruous life is here, on the palm of my hand, with all its cynicism, monstrous and coarse injustice; but there is in it none of that falsehood and that hypocrisy before people and before one's self, which enmesh all humanity from top to bottom. consider, my dear lichonin, how much nagging, drawn out, disgusting deception, how much hate, there is in any marital cohabitation in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. how much blind, merciless cruelty--precisely not animal, but human, reasoned, far-sighted, calculated cruelty--there is in the sacred maternal instinct--and behold, with what tender colours this instinct is adorned! then what about all these unnecessary, tom-fool professions, invented by cultured man for the safeguarding of my nest, my bit of meat, my woman, my child, these different overseers, controllers, inspectors, judges, attorneys, jailers, advocates, chiefs, bureaucrats, generals, soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of titles more. they all subserve human greed, cowardice, viciousness, servility, legitimised sensuality, laziness-beggarliness!--yes, that is the real word!--human beggarliness. but what magnificent words we have! the altar of the fatherland, christian compassion for our neighbor, progress, sacred duty, sacred property, holy love. ugh! i do not believe in a single fine word now, and i am nauseated to infinity with these petty liars, these cowards and gluttons! beggar women! ... man is born for great joy, for ceaseless creation, in which he is god; for a broad, free love, unhindered by anything,--love for everything: for a tree, for the sky, for man, for a dog, for the dear, benign, beautiful earth,--oh, especially for the earth with its beatific motherhood, with its mornings and nights, with its magnificent everyday miracles. but man has lied himself out so, has become such an importunate beggar, and has sunk so low! ... ah, lichonin, but i am weary!" "i, as an anarchist, partly understand you," said lichonin thoughtfully. it was as though he heard and yet did not hear the reporter. some thought was with difficulty, for the first time, being born in his mind. "but one thing i can not comprehend. if humanity has become so malodorous to you, then how do you stand--and for so long, too,--all this,--" lichonin took in the whole table with a circular motion of his hand,--"the basest thing that mankind could invent?" "well, i don't even know myself," said platonov with artlessness. "you see, i am a vagabond, and am passionately in love with life. i have been a turner, a compositor; i have sown and sold tobacco--the cheap silver makhorka kind--have sailed as a stoker on the azov sea, have been a fisherman on the black--on the dubinin fisheries; i have loaded watermelons and bricks on the dnieper, have ridden with a circus, have been an actor--i can't even recall everything. and never did need drive me. no, only an immeasurable thirst for life and an insupportable curiosity. by god, i would like for a few days to become a horse, a plant, or a fish, or to be a woman and experience childbirth; i would like to live with the inner life, and to look upon the universe with the eyes of every human being i meet. and so i wander care-free over towns and hamlets, bound by nothing; know and love tens of trades and joyously float wherever it suits fate to set my sail... and so it was that i came upon the brothel, and the more i look at it, the more there grows within me alarm, incomprehension, and very great anger. but even this will soon be at an end. when things get well into autumn--away again! i'll get into a rail-rolling mill. i've a certain friend, he'll manage it ... wait, wait, lichonin ... listen to the actor ... that's the third act." egmont-lavretzki, who until this had been very successfully imitating now a shoat which is being put into a bag, now the altercation of a cat with a dog, was beginning little by little to wilt and droop. upon him was already advancing the stage of self-revelation, next in order, in the paroxysm of which he several times attempted to kiss yarchenko's hand. his lids had become red; around the shaven, prickly lips had deepened the tearful wrinkles that gave him an appearance of weeping; and it could be heard by his voice that his nose and throat were already overflowing with tears. "i serve in a farce!" he was saying, smiting himself on the breast with his fist. "i disport myself in striped trunks for the sport of the sated mob! i have put out my torch, have hid my talent in the earth, like the slothful servant! but fo-ormerly!" he began to bray tragically, "fo-ormerly-y-y! ask in novocherkassk, ask in tvier, in ustejne, in zvenigorodok, in krijopole.[ ] what a zhadov and belugin i was! how i played max! what a figure i created of veltishchev--that was my crowning ro-ole ... nadin-perekopski was beginning with me at sumbekov's! with nikiphorov-pavlenko did i serve. who made the name for legunov-pochainin? i! but no-ow ..." [ ] all provincial towns.--trans. he sniveled, and sought to kiss the sub-professor. "yes! despise me, brand me, ye honest folk. i play the tom-fool. i drink ... i have sold and spilt the sacred ointment! i sit in a dive with vendable merchandise. while my wife ... she is a saint, and pure, my little dove! ... oh, if she knew, if she only knew! she works hard, she runs a modiste's shop; her fingers--the fingers of an angel--are pricked with the needle, but i! oh, sainted woman! and i--the scoundrel!--whom do i exchange thee for! oh, horror!" the actor seized his hair. "professor, let me, i'll kiss your scholarly hand. you alone understand me. let us go, i'll introduce you, you'll see what an angel this is! ... she awaits me, she does not sleep nights, she folds the tiny hands of my little ones and together with them whispers: 'lord, save and preserve papa.'" "you're lying about it all, you ham!" said the drunken little white manka suddenly, looking with hatred upon egmont-lavretzki. "she isn't whispering anything, but most peacefully sleeping with a man in your bed." "be still, you w--!" vociferated the actor beside himself; and seizing a bottle by the neck raised it high over his head. "hold me, or else i'll brain this carrion. don't you dare besmirch with your foul tongue..." "my tongue isn't foul--i take communion," impudently replied the woman. "but you, you fool, wear horns. you go traipsing around with prostitutes yourself, and yet want your wife not to play you false. and look where the dummy's found a place to slaver, till he looks like he had reins in his mouth. and what did you mix the children in for, you miserable papa you! don't you roll your eyes and gnash your teeth at me. you won't frighten me! w--yourself!" it required many efforts and much eloquence on the part of yarchenko in order to quiet the actor and little white manka, who always after benedictine ached for a row. the actor in the end burst into copious and unbecoming tears and blew his nose, like an old man; he grew weak, and henrietta led him away to her room. fatigue had already overcome everybody. the students, one after another, returned from the bedrooms; and separately from them, with an indifferent air, came their chance mistresses. and truly, both these and the others resembled flies, males and females, just flown apart on the window pane. they yawned, stretched, and for a long time an involuntary expression of wearisomeness and aversion did not leave their faces, pale from sleeplessness, unwholesomely glossy. and when they, before going their ways, said good-bye to each other, in their eyes twinkled some kind of an inimical feeling, just as with the participants of one and the same filthy and unnecessary crime. "where are you going right now?" lichonin asked the reporter in a low voice. "well, really, i don't know myself. i did want to spend the night in the cabinet of isaiah savvich, but it's a pity to lose such a splendid morning. i'm thinking of taking a bath, and then i'll get on a steamer and ride to the lipsky monastery to a certain tippling black friar i know. but why?" "i would ask you to remain a little while and sit the others out. i must have a very important word or two with you." "it's a go." yarchenko was the last to go. he averred a headache and fatigue. but scarcely had he gone out of the house when the reporter seized lichonin by the hand and quickly dragged him into the glass vestibule of the entrance. "look!" he said, pointing to the street. and through the orange glass of the little coloured window lichonin saw the sub-professor, who was ringing at treppel's. after a minute the door opened and yarchenko disappeared through it. "how did you find out?" asked lichonin with astonishment. "a mere trifle! i saw his face, and saw his hands smoothing verka's tights. the others were less restrained. but this fellow is bashful." "well, now, let's go," said lichonin. "i won't detain you long." chapter xii. of the girls only two remained in the cabinet-jennie, who had come in her night blouse, and liuba, who had long been sleeping under cover of the conversation, curled up into a ball in the large plush armchair. the fresh, freckled face of liuba had taken on a meek, almost childlike, expression, while the lips, just as they had smiled in sleep, had preserved the light imprint of a radiant, peaceful and tender smile. it was blue and biting in the cabinet from the dense tobacco smoke; guttered, warty little streams had congealed on the candles in the candelabras; the table, flooded with coffee and wine, scattered all over with orange peels, seemed hideous. jennie was sitting on the divan, her knees clasped around with her arms. and again was platonov struck by the sombre fire in her deep eyes, that seemed fallen in underneath the dark eyebrows, formidably contracted downward, toward the bridge of the nose. "i'll put out the candles," said lichonin. the morning half-light, watery and drowsy, filled the room through the slits of the blinds. the extinguished wicks of the candles smoked with faint streams. the tobacco smoke swirled in blue, layered shrouds, but a ray of sunlight that had cut its way through the heart-shaped hollow in a window shutter, transpierced the cabinet obliquely with a joyous, golden sword of dust, and in liquid, hot gold splashed upon the paper on the wall. "that's better," said lichonin, sitting down. "the conversation will be short, but ... the devil knows ... how to approach it." he looked at jennie in abstraction. "shall i go away, then?" said she indifferently. "no, you sit a while," the reporter answered for lichonin. "she won't be in the way," he turned to the student and slightly smiled. "for the conversation will be about prostitution? isn't that so?" "well, yes... sort of..." "very well, then. you listen to her carefully. her opinions happen to be of an unusually cynical nature, but at times of exceeding weight." lichonin vigorously rubbed and kneaded his face with his palms, then intertwined his fingers and nervously cracked them twice. it was apparent that he was agitated and was himself constrained about that which he was getting ready to say. "oh, but isn't it all the same!" he suddenly exclaimed angrily. "you were to-day speaking about these women ... i listened... true, you haven't told me anything new. but-strangely-i, for some reason, as though for the first time in my loose life, have looked upon this question with open eyes... i ask you, what is prostitution in the end? what is it? the extravagant delirium of large cities, or an eternal historical phenomenon? will it cease some time? or will it die only with the death of all mankind? who will answer me that?" platonov was looking at him intently, narrowing his eyes slightly, through habit. he wanted to know what main thought was inflicting such sincere torture on lichonin. "when it will cease, none will tell you. perhaps when the magnificent utopias of the socialists and anarchists will materialize, when the world will become everyone's and no one's, when love will be absolutely free and subject only to its own unlimited desires, while mankind will fuse into one happy family, wherein will perish the distinction between mine and thine, and there will come a paradise upon earth, and man will again become naked, glorified and without sin. perhaps it may be then..." "but now? now?" asks lichonin with growing agitation. "shall i look on, with my little hands folded? 'it's none of my affair?' tolerate it as an unavoidable evil? put up with it, and wash my hands of it? shall i pronounce a benediction upon it?" "this evil is not unavoidable, but insuperable. but isn't it all the same to you?" asked platonov with cold wonder. "for you're an anarchist, aren't you?" "what the devil kind of an anarchist am i! well, yes, i am an anarchist, because my reason, when i think of life, always leads me logically to the anarchistic beginning. and i myself think in theory: let men beat, deceive, and fleece men, like flocks of sheep--let them!--violence will breed rancour sooner or later. let them violate the child, let them trample creative thought under foot, let there be slavery, let there be prostitution, let them thieve, mock, spill blood...let them! the worse, the better, the nearer the end. there is a great law, i think, the same for inanimate objects as well as for all the tremendous and many-millioned human life: the power of effort is equal to the power of resistance. the worse, the better. let evil and vindictiveness accumulate in mankind, let them grow and ripen like a monstrous abscess--an abscess the size of the whole terrestrial sphere. for it will burst some time! and let there be terror and insufferable pain. let the pus deluge all the universe. but mankind will either choke in it and perish, or, having gone through the illness, will be regenerated to a new, beautiful life." lichonin avidly drank off a cup of cold black coffee and continued vehemently: "yes. just so do i and many others theorize, sitting in our rooms, over tea with white bread and cooked sausage, when the value of each separate human life is so-so, an infinitesimally small numeral in a mathematical formula. but let me see a child abused, and the red blood will rush to my head from rage. and when i look and look upon the labour of a moujik or a labourer, i am thrown into hysterics for shame at my algebraic calculations. there is--the devil take it!--there is something incongruous, altogether illogical, but which at this time is stronger than human reason. take to-day, now ... why do i feel at this minute as though i had robbed a sleeping man or deceived a three-year-old child, or hit a bound person? and why does it seem to me to-day that i myself am guilty of the evil of prostitution--guilty in my silence, my indifference, my indirect permission? what am i to do, platonov!" exclaimed the student with grief in his voice. platonov kept silent, squinting at him with his little narrow eyes. but jennie unexpectedly said in a caustic tone: "well, you do as one englishwoman did ... a certain red-haired clodhopper came to us here. she must have been important, because she came with a whole retinue ... all some sort of officials ... but before her had come the assistant of the commissioner, with the precinct inspector kerbesh. and the assistant directly forewarned us, just like that: 'if you stiffs, and so on and so on, will let out even one little rude word, or something, then i won't leave one stone upon another of your establishment, while i'll flog all the wenches soundly in the station-house and make 'em rot in jail!' well, at last this galoot came. she gibbered and she gibbered something in a foreign language, all the time pointed to heaven with her hand, and then distributed a five-kopeck testament to every one of us and rode away. now you ought to do the same, dearie." platonov burst into loud laughter. but seeing the naive and sad face of lichonin, who did not seem to understand, nor even suspect mockery, he restrained his laughter and said seriously: "you won't accomplish anything, lichonin. while there will be property, there will also be poverty. while marriage exists, prostitution also will not die. do you know who will always sustain and nourish prostitution? it is the so-called decent people, the noble paterfamiliases, the irreproachable husbands, the loving brothers. they will always find a seemly motive to legitimize, normalize and put a wrapper all around paid libertinage, because they know very well that otherwise it would rush in a torrent into their bedrooms and nurseries. prostitution is for them a deflection of the sensuousness of others from their personal, lawful alcove. and even the respectable paterfamilias himself is not averse to indulge in a love debauch in secret. and really, it is palling to have always the one and the same thing the wife, the chambermaid, and the lady on the side. man, as a matter of fact, is a poly--and exceedingly so--a polygamous animal. and to his rooster-like amatory instincts it will always be sweet to unfold in such a magnificent nursery garden, a la treppel's or anna markovna's. oh, of course, a well-balanced spouse or the happy father of six grown-up daughters will always be clamouring about the horror of prostitution. he will even arrange with the help of a lottery and an amateur entertainment a society for the saving of fallen women, or an asylum in the name of st. magdalene. but the existence of prostitution he will bless and sustain." "magdalene asylums!" with quiet laughter, full of an ancient hatred the ache of which had not yet healed, repeated jennie. "yes, i know that all these false measures undertaken are stuff and a total mockery," cut in lichonin. "but let me be ridiculous and stupid, yet i do not wish to remain a commiserating spectator, who sits on a warm ledge, gazes upon a conflagration, and is saying all the time: 'oh, my, but it's burning ... by god, it is burning! perhaps there are even people burning!'--but for his part merely laments and slaps his thighs." "well, now," said platonov harshly, "would you take a child's syringe and go to put out the fire with it?" "no!" heatedly exclaimed lichonin ... "perhaps--who knows?--perhaps i'll succeed in saving at least one living soul? it was just this that i wanted to ask you about, platonov, and you must help me ... only, i implore you, without jeers, without cooling off ..." "you want to take a girl out of here? to save her?" asked platonov, looking at him attentively. he now understood the drift of this entire conversation. "yes ... i don't know ... i'll try ..." answered lichonin uncertainly. "she'll come back," said platonov. "she will," jennie repeated with conviction. lichonin walked up to her, took her by the hands and began to speak in a trembling whisper: "jennechka ... perhaps you ... eh? for i don't call you as a mistress ... but a friend ... it's all a trifle, half a year of rest ... and then we'll master some trade or other ... we'll read..." jennie snatched her hands out of his with vexation. "oh, into a bog with you!" she almost shouted. "i know you! want me to darn socks for you? cook on a kerosene stove? pass nights without sleeping on account of you when you'll be chitter-chattering with your short-haired friends? but when you get to be a doctor or a lawyer, or a government clerk, then it's me will get a knee in the back: 'out on the street with you, now, you public hide, you've ruined my young life. i want to marry a decent girl, pure, and innocent! ..." "i meant it as a brother ... i meant it without that ..." mumbled lichonin in confusion. "i know that kind of brothers. until the first night ... leave off and don't talk nonsense to me! it makes me tired to listen to it!" "wait, lichonin!" began the reporter seriously. "why, you will pile a load beyond your strength upon yourself as well. i've known idealists, among the populists, who married peasant girls out of principle. this is just the way they thought--nature, black-loam, untapped forces. ... but this black-loam after a year turned into the fattest of women, who lies the whole day in bed and chews cookies, or studs her fingers with penny rings, spreads them out and admires them. or else sits in the kitchen, drinks sweet liquor with the coachman and carries on a natural romance with him. look out, here it will be worse!" all three became silent. lichonin was pale and was wiping his moist forehead with a handkerchief. "no, the devil take it!" he cried out suddenly with obstinacy. "i don't believe you! i don't want to believe! liuba" he called loudly the girl who had fallen asleep. "liubochka!" the girl awoke, passed her palm over her lips, first to one side, then the other, yawned, and smiled, in a funny, child-like manner. "i wasn't sleeping, i heard everything," she said. "i only dozed off for a teeny-weeny bit." "liuba, do you want to go away from here with me?" asked lichonin and took her by the hand. "but entirely, forever, to go away so's never to return either to a brothel or the street?" liuba questioningly, with perplexity, looked at jennie, as though seeking from her an explanation of this jest. "that's enough for you," she said slyly. "you're still studying yourself. where do you come in, then, to take a girl and set her up?" "not to set you up, liuba ... i simply want to help you ... for it isn't very sweet for you in a brothel, is it now!" "naturally, it isn't all sugar! if i was as proud as jennechka, or so enticing like pasha ... but i won't get used to things here for anything ..." "well, then, let's go, let's go! ..." entreated lichonin. "surely, you know some manual work--well, now, sewing something, embroidering, cutting?" "i don't know anything!" answered liuba bashfully and started laughing and turned red, covering her mouth with the elbow of her free arm. "what's asked of us in the village, that i know, but anything more i don't know. i can cook a little ... i lived at the priest's--cooked for him." "that's splendid! that's excellent!" lichonin grew joyous. "i will assist you, you'll open a dining room ... a cheap dining room, you understand ... i'll advertise it for you ... the students will come! that's magnificent! ..." "that's enough of making fun of me!" retorted liuba, a bit offended, and again looked askance and questioningly at jennie. "he's not joking," answered jennie with a voice which quavered strangely. "he's in earnest, seriously." "here's my word of honour that i'm serious! honest to god, now!" the student caught her up with warmth and for some reason even made the sign of the cross in the direction of the empty corner. "and really," said jennie, "take liubka. that's not the same thing as taking me. i'm like an old dragoon's nag, and used to it. you can't make me over, neither with hay nor a stick. but liubka is a simple girl and a kind one. and she hasn't grown used to our life yet. what are you popping your eyes out at me for, you ninny? answer when you're asked. well? do you want to or don't you want to?" "and why not? if they ain't laughing, but for real ... and you, jennechka, what would you advise me ..." "oh, you're such wood!" jennie grew angry. "what's better according to you--to rot on straw with a nose fallen through? to croak under the fence like a dog? or to turn honest? fool! you ought to kiss his hands; but no, you're getting particular." the naive liuba did, in fact, extend her lips toward lichonin's hand, and this movement made everybody laugh, and touched them just the least trifle. "and that's very good! it's like magic!" bustled the overjoyed lichonin. "go and notify the proprietress at once that you're going away from here forever. and take the most necessary things; it isn't as it used to be; now a girl can go away from a brothel whenever she wants to." "no, it can't be done that way," jennie stopped him; "she can go away, that's so, but you'll have no end of unpleasantness and hullabaloo. here's what you do, student. you won't regret ten roubles?" "of course, of course ... if you please." "let liuba tell the housekeeper that you're taking her to your rooms for to-day. that's the fixed rate--ten roubles. and afterwards, well, even to-morrow--come after the ticket and things. that's nothing; we'll work this thing roundly. and after that you must go to the police with her ticket and declare, that liubka so-and-so has hired herself to you as chambermaid, and that you desire to exchange her blank for a real passport. well, liubka, lively! take the money and march. and, look out, be as quick as possible with the housekeeper, or else she, the bitch, will read it in your eyes. and also don't forget," she cried, now after liuba, "wipe the rouge off your puss, now. or else the drivers will be pointing their fingers at you." after half an hour liuba and lichonin were getting on a cab at the entrance. jennie and the reporter were standing on the sidewalk. "you're committing a great folly, lichonin," platonov was saying listlessly, "but i honour and respect the fine impulse within you. here's the thought--and here's the deed. you're a brave and a splendid fellow." "here's to your commencement!" laughed jennie. "look out, don't forget to send for me to the christening." "you won't see it, no matter how long you wait for it!" laughed lichonin, waving his cap about. they rode off. the reporter looked at jennie, and with astonishment saw tears in her softened eyes. "god grant it, god grant it," she was whispering. "what has been the matter with you to-day, jennie?" he asked kindly. "what? are you oppressed? can't i do anything?" she turned her back to him and leaned over the bent balustrade of the stoop. "how shall i write to you, if need be?" she asked in a stifled voice. "why, it's simple. editorial rooms of echoes. so-and-so. they'll pass it on to me pretty fast." "i ... i ... i ..." jennie just began, but suddenly burst into loud, passionate sobs and covered her face with her hands, "i'll write you ..." and without taking her hands away from her face, her shoulders quivering, she ran up the stoop and disappeared in the house, loudly banging the door after her. part two chapter i. even to this day, after a lapse of ten years, the erstwhile inhabitants of the yamkas recall that year, abounding in unhappy, foul, bloody events, which began with a series of trifling, small affrays, but terminated in the administration's, one fine day, taking and destroying completely the ancient, long-warmed nest of legalized prostitution, which nest it had itself created--scattering its remains over the hospitals, jails and streets of the big city. even to this day a few of the former proprietresses who have remained alive and have reached the limit of decrepitude, and quondam housekeepers, fat and hoarse, like pug-dogs grown old, recall this common destruction with sorrow, horror, and stolid perplexity. just like potatoes out of a sack, brawls, robberies, diseases, murders and suicides began to pour down, and, it seemed, no one was to blame for this. all these misfortunes just simply began to be more frequent of their own accord, to pile one upon the other, to expand and grow; just as a small lump of snow, pushed by the feet of urchins, becomes constantly bigger and bigger by itself from the thawing snow sticking to it, grows bigger than the stature of a man, and, finally, with one last, small effort is precipitated into a ravine and rolls down as an enormous avalanche. the old proprietresses and housekeepers, of course, had never heard of fatality; but inwardly, with the soul, they sensed its mysterious presence in the inevitable calamities of that terrible year. and, truly, everywhere in life where people are bound by common interests, blood relationship, or the benefits of a profession into close, individualized groups--there inevitably can be observed this mysterious law of sudden accumulation, of a piling up, of events; their epidemicity, their strange succession and connectedness, their incomprehensible lingering. this occurs, as popular wisdom has long ago noted, in isolated families, where disease or death suddenly falls upon the near ones in an inevitable, enigmatic order. "misfortune does not come alone." "misfortune without waits--open wide the gates." this is to be noticed also in monasteries, banks, governmental departments, regiments, places of learning and other public institutions, where for a long time, almost for decades, life flows evenly, like a marshy river; and, suddenly, and after some altogether insignificant incident or other, there begin transfers, changes in positions, expulsions from service, losses, sicknesses. the members of society, just as though they had conspired, die, go insane, are caught thieving, shoot or hang themselves; vacancy after vacancy is freed; promotions follow promotions, new elements flow in, and, behold, after two years there is not a one of the previous people on the spot; everything is new, if only the institution has not fallen into pieces completely, has not crept apart. and is it not the same astounding destiny which overtakes enormous social, universal organizations--cities, empires, nations, countries, and, who knows, perhaps whole planetary worlds? something resembling this incomprehensible fatality swept over the yamaskya borough as well, bringing it to a rapid and scandalous destruction. now in place of the boisterous yamkas is left a peaceful, humdrum outskirt, in which live truck-farmers, cat's-meat men, tartars, swineherds and butchers from the near-by slaughterhouses. at the petition of these worthy people even the designation of yamaskya borough itself, as disgracing the inhabitants with its past, has been named over into golubovka, in honour of the merchant golubov, owner of a shop dealing in groceries and delicacies, and warden of the local church. the first subterranean shocks of this catastrophe began in the heat of summer, at the time of the annual summer fair, which this year was unbelievably brilliant. many circumstances contributed to its extraordinary success, multitudes, and the stupendousness of the deals concluded during it: the building in the vicinity of three new sugar refineries, and the unusually abundant crop of wheat, and, in particular, of sugar beets; the commencement of work in the laying of an electric trolley and of canalization; the building of a new road to the distance of versts; but mainly, the fever of building which seized the whole town, all the banks and financial institutions, and all the houseowners. factories for making brick sprang up on the outskirts of the town like mushrooms. a grandiose agricultural exposition opened. two new steamer lines came into being, and they, together with the previously established ones, frenziedly competed with each other, transporting freight and pilgrims. in competition they reached such a state, that they lowered their passenger rates for the third class from seventy-five kopecks to five, three, two, and even one kopeck. in the end, ready to fall from exhaustion in the unequal struggle, one of the steamship companies offered a free passage to all the third-class passengers. then its competitor at once added to the free passage half a loaf of white bread as well. but the biggest and most significant enterprise of this city was the engineering of the extensive river port, which had attracted to it hundreds of thousands of labourers and which cost god knows what money. it must also be added, that the city was at this time celebrating the millennial anniversary of its famous abbey, the most honoured and the richest among all the monasteries of russia. from all the ends of russia, out of siberia, from the shores of the frozen ocean, from the extreme south--the black and caspian seas--countless pilgrims had gathered for the worship of the local sanctities: the abbey's saints, reposing deep underground in calcareous caverns. suffice it to say, that the monastery gave shelter, and food of a sort, to forty thousand people daily; while those for whom there was not enough room lay, at night, side by side, like logs, in the extensive yards and lanes of the abbey. this was a summer out of some fairy-tale. the population of the city increased well-nigh fourfold through every sort of newly-come people. stone-masons, carpenters, painters, engineers, technicians, foreigners, agriculturists, brokers, shady business men, river navigators, unoccupied knaves, tourists, thieves, card sharpers--they all overflowed the city, and not in a single hotel, the most dirty and dubious one, was there a vacant room. insane prices were paid for quarters. the stock exchange gambled on a grand scale, as never before or since that summer. money in millions simply flowed from hands to hands, and thence to a third pair. in one hour colossal riches were created, but then many former firms burst, and yesterday's men of wealth turned into beggars. the commonest of labourers bathed and warmed themselves in this golden flood. stevedores, draymen, street porters, roustabouts, hod carriers and ditch diggers still remember to this day what money they earned by the day during this mad summer. any tramp received no less than four of five roubles a day at the unloading of barges laden with watermelons. and all this noisy, foreign band, locoed by the easy money, intoxicated with the sensual beauty of the ancient, seductive city, enchanted by the delightful warmth of the southern nights, made drunk by the insidious fragrance of the white acacias--these hundreds of thousands of insatiable, dissolute beasts in the image of men, with all their massed will clamoured: "give us woman!" in a single month new amusement enterprises--chic tivolis, chateaux des fleures, olympias, alcazars, etc., with a chorus and an operetta; many restaurants and beerhouses, with little summer gardens, and common little taverns--sprang up by the score in the city, in the vicinity of the building port. on every crossing new "violet-wine" houses were opened every day--little booths of boards, in each of which, under the pretext of selling bread-cider, old wenches trafficked in themselves by twos and threes, right alongside behind a partition of deal, and to many mothers and fathers is this summer painful and memorable through the degrading diseases of their sons--schoolboys and military cadets. for the casual arrivals servants were demanded, and thousands of peasant girls started out from the surrounding villages toward the city. it was inevitable that the demand on prostitution should become unusually high. and so, from warsaw, from lodz, from odessa, from moscow, and even from st. petersburg, even from abroad, flocked together an innumerable multitude of foreign women; cocottes of russian fabrication, the most ordinary prostitutes of the rank and file, and chic frenchwomen and viennese. imperiously told the corrupting influence of the hundreds of millions of easy money. it was as though this cascade of gold had lashed down upon, had set to whirling and deluged within it, the whole city. the number of thefts and murders increased with astounding rapidity. the police, collected in augmented proportions, lost its head and was swept off its feet. but it must also be said that, having gorged itself with plentiful bribes, it resembled a sated python, willy-nilly drowsy and listless. people were killed for anything and nothing, just so. it happened that men would walk up to a person in broad daylight somewhere on an unfrequented street and ask: "what's your name?" "fedorov." "aha, federov? then take this!" and they would slit his belly with a knife. they nicknamed these blades just that in the city--"rippers"; and there were among them names of which the city news seemed actually proud: the two brothers polishchuk (mitka and dundas), volodka the greek, fedor miller, captain dmitriev, sivocho, dobrovolski, shpachek, and many others. both day and night on the main streets of the frenzied city stood, moved, and yelled the mob, as though at a fire. it would be almost impossible to describe what went on in the yamkas then. despite the fact that the madams had increased the staff of their patients to more than double and increased their prices trebly, their poor demented girls could not catch up in satisfying the demands of the drunken, crazed public, which threw money around like chips. it happened that in the drawing room, filled to overflowing with people, each girl would be awaited for by some seven, eight, at times even ten, men. it was, truly, some kind of a mad, intoxicated, convulsive time! and from that very time began all the misfortunes of the yamkas, which brought them to ruin. and together with the yamkas perished also the house, familiar to us, of the stout, old, pale-eyed anna markovna. chapter ii. the passenger train sped merrily from the south to the north, traversing golden fields of wheat and beautiful groves of oak, careering with rumbling upon iron bridges over bright rivers, leaving behind it whirling clouds of smoke. in the coupe of the second class, even with open windows, there was a fearful stuffiness, and it was hot. the smell of sulphurous smoke irritated the throat. the rocking and the heat had completely tired out the passengers, save one, a merry, energetic, mobile hebrew, splendidly dressed, accommodating, sociable and talkative. he was travelling with a young woman, and it was at once apparent, especially through her, that they were newly-weds; so often did her face flare up with an unexpected colour at every tenderness of her husband, even the least. and when she raised her eyelashes to look upon him, her eyes would shine like stars, and grow humid. and her face was as beautiful as only the faces of young hebrew maidens in love can be beautiful--all tenderly rosy, with rosy lips, rounded out in beautiful innocence, and with eyes so black that their pupils could not be distinguished from the irises. unabashed by the presence of three strange people, he showered his caresses upon his companion every minute, and, it must be said, sufficiently coarse ones. with the unceremoniousness of an owner, with that especial egoism of one in love, who, it would seem, is saying to the whole universe: "see, how happy we are--this makes you happy also, isn't that so?"--he would now pass his hand over her leg, which resiliently and in relief stood out beneath her dress, now pinch her on the cheek, now tickle her neck with his stiff, black, turned-up moustache ... but, even though he did sparkle with delight, there was still something rapacious, wary, uneasy to be glimpsed in his frequently winking eyes, in the twitching of the upper lip, and in the harsh outline of his shaved, square chin, jutting out, with a scarcely noticeable dent in the middle. opposite this infatuated couple were placed three passengers--a retired general, a spare, neat little old man, with pomade on his hair, with curls combed forward to the temples; a stout land-owner, who had taken off his starched collar, but was still gasping from the heat and mopping his face every minute with a wet handkerchief; and a young infantry officer. the endless talkativeness of simon yakovlevich (the young man had already managed to inform his neighbours that he was called simon yakovlevich horizon) tired and irritated the passengers a trifle, just like the buzzing of a fly, that on a sultry summer day rhythmically beats against a window pane of a closed, stuffy room. but still, he knew how to raise their spirits: he showed tricks of magic; told hebrew anecdotes, full of a fine humour of their own. when his wife would go out on the platform to refresh herself, he would tell such things that the general would melt into a beatific smile, the land-owner would neigh, rocking his black-loam stomach, while the sub-lieutenant, a smooth-faced boy, only a year out of school, scarcely controlling his laughter and curiosity, would turn away to one side, that his neighbours might not see him turning red. his wife tended horizon with a touching, naive attention; she wiped his face with a handkerchief, waved upon him with a fan, adjusted his cravat every minute. and his face at these times became laughably supercilious and stupidly self-conceited. "but allow me to ask," asked the spare little general, coughing politely, "allow me to ask, my dear sir, what occupation might you pursue?" "ah, my god!" with a charming frankness retorted simon yakovlevich. "well, what can a poor jew do in our time? it's a bit of a travelling salesman and a commission broker by me. at the present time i'm far from business. you--he! he! he!--understand yourselves, gentlemen. a honeymoon--don't turn red, sarochka--it don't repeat itself three times in a year. but afterwards i'll have to travel and work a great deal. here we'll come with sarochka to town, will pay the visits to her relatives, and then again on the road. on my first trip i'm thinking of taking my wife. you know, sort of a wedding journey. i'm a representative from sidris and two english firms. wouldn't you like to have a look? here are the samples with me ..." he very rapidly took out of a small, elegant case of yellow leather a few long cardboard folding books, and with the dexterity of a tailor began to unfold them, holding one end, from which their folds fell downward with a light crackling. "look, what splendid samples: they don't give in to foreign ones at all. please notice. here, for instance, is russian and here english tricot, or here, cangan and cheviot. compare, feel it, and you'll be convinced that the russian samples almost don't give in to the foreign. why, that speaks of progress, of the growth of culture. so it's absolutely for nothing that europe counts us russians such barbarians. "and so we'll pay our family visits, will look at the fair, pay a visit to the chateau des fleurs, enjoy ourselves a little, stroll a bit, and then to the volga down to tzaritzin, to the black sea, and then again home to our native odessa." "that's a fine journey," said the sub-lieutenant modestly. "i should say it's fine," agreed simon yakovlevich; "but there are no roses without thorns. the work of a travelling salesman is exceedingly difficult and requires many kinds of knowledge, and not so much the knowledge of business as the knowledge of--how shall i say it?--the knowledge of the human soul. another man may not even want to give an order, but you must work like an elephant to convince him, and argue until he feels the clearness and justice of your words. because i take only absolutely clean lines exclusively, of which there can be no doubts. a fake or a bad line i will not take, although they should offer me millions for it. ask wherever you like, in any store which deals in cloths or suspenders gloire--i'm also a representative from this firm--or buttons helios--you just ask who simon yakovlevich horizon is, and everyone will answer you: 'simon yakovlevich is not a man, but gold; this is a disinterested man, as honest as a diamond.'" and horizon was already unpacking long boxes with patented suspenders, and was showing the glistening leaves of cardboard, covered with regular rows of vari-coloured buttons. "there happen great unpleasantnesses, when the place has been worked out, when a lot of travelling salesmen have appeared before you. here you can't do anything; they absolutely won't listen to you, only wave their arms. but that's only for others. i am horizon! i can talk him over, the same like a camel from a menagerie. but it happens still more unpleasant, when two competitors in one and the same line come together in the same town. and it happens even worse when it's some chimney sweep and can't do business himself and spoils business for you too. here you go to all sorts of tricks: let him drink till he's drunk or let him go off somewhere on a false track. not an easy trade! besides that, i have one more line--that's false eyes and teeth. but it ain't a profitable line. i want to drop it. and besides i'm thinking of leaving all this business. i understand, it's all right for a young man, in the bloom of his powers, to flutter around like a moth, but once you have a wife, and may be a whole family even ..." he playfully patted the woman on the knee, from which she became scarlet and looked uncommonly better. "for the lord has blessed us jews with fecundity for all our misfortunes ... then you want to have some business of your own, you want, you understand, to become settled in one place, so's there should be a shack of your own, and your own furniture, and your own bedroom, and kitchen ... isn't that so, your excellency?" "yes ... yes ... eh--eh ... yes, of course, of course," condescendingly responded the general. "and so i took with sarochka a little dowry. what do i mean, a little dowry? such money that rothschild would not even want to look at it are in my hands a whole capital already. but it must be said that there are some savings by me, too. the firms i know will give me credit. if god grant it, we shall still eat a piece of bread and a little butter--and on the sabbaths the tasty gefilteh fisch." "that's fine fish: pike the way the sheenies make it!" said the gasping land-owner. "we shall open up for ourselves the firm of 'horizon and son.' isn't that true, sarochka--'and son?' and you, i hope, will honour me with your esteemed orders? when you see the sign, 'horizon and son,' then straight off recollect that you once rode in a car together with a young man, who had grown as foolish as hell from love and from happiness." "ab-solutely!" said the land-owner. and simon yakovlevich at once turned to him: "but i also work by commission broking. to sell an estate, to buy an estate, to arrange a second mortgage--you won't find a better specialist than me, and such a cheap one at that. i can be of service to you, should the need arise," and he extended his visiting card to the land-owner with a bow, and, by the way, handed a card each to his two neighbours as well. the land-owner dived into a side pocket and also dragged out a card. "joseph ivanovich vengjenovski," simon yakovlevich read out loud. "very, very pleased! and so, should you need me ..." "why not? it's possible ..." said the land-owner meditatively. "why, yes: perhaps, indeed, a favourable chance has brought us together! why, i'm just journeying to k----about the sale of a certain forest country house. suppose you do that, then,--drop in to see me. i always stop at the grand hotel. perhaps we may be able to strike up a deal." "oh, i'm already almost sure, my dearest joseph ivanovich!" exclaimed the rejoicing horizon, and slightly, with the very tips of his fingers, patted vengjenovski's kneecap carefully. "you just rest assured; if horizon has undertaken anything, then you'll be thanking him like your own father, no more, no less." half an hour later simon yakovlevich and the smooth-faced sub-lieutenant were standing on the platform of the car and smoking. "do you often visit k----, mister sub-lieutenant?" asked horizon. "only for the first time--just imagine! our regiment is stationed at chernobob. i was born in moscow, myself." "ai, ai, ai! how'd you come to get into such a faraway place?" "well, it just fell out so. there was no other vacancy when i was let out." "but then--chernobob is a hole! the worst little town in all podolia." "that's true, but it just fell out so." "that means, then, that the young officer gent is going to k----to divert himself a little?" "yes. i'm thinking of stopping there for two or three days. i'm travelling to moscow, really. i have received a two months' leave, but it would be interesting to look over the city on the way. it's very beautiful, they say." "oh, what are you trying to tell me? a remarkable city! well, absolutely a european city. if you only knew, what streets, electricity, trolleys, theatres! and if you only knew what cabarets! you'll lick your own fingers. positively, positively, i advise you, young man, to pay a visit to the chateau des fleurs, to the tivoli, and also to ride out to the island. that's something special. what women, wha-a-at women!" the lieutenant turned red, took his eyes away, and asked in a voice that quavered: "yes, i've happened to hear that. is it possible that they're really so handsome?" "oi! strike me god! believe me, there are no handsome women there at all." "but--how's that?" "why, this way: there are only raving beauties there. you understand--what a happy blending of bloods! polish, little russian, and hebrew. how i envy you, young man, that you're free and alone. in my time i sure would have shown myself! and what's most remarkable of all, they're unusually passionate women! well, just like fire! and do you know something else?" he asked in a whisper of great significance. "what?" asked the sub-lieutenant in a fright. "it's remarkable, that nowheres, neither in paris, nor in london--believe me, this was told me by people who had seen the whole wide world--never, nowhere, will you meet with such exquisite ways of making love as in this town. that's something especial, as us little jews say. they think up such things that no imagination can picture to itself. it's enough to drive you crazy!" "but is that possible?" quietly spoke the sub-lieutenant, whose breath had been cut off. "well, strike me god! but permit me, young man, by the way! you understand yourself. i was single, and of course, every man is liable to sin ... it's different now, of course. i've had myself written in with the invalids. but from the former days a remarkable collection has remained to me. just wait, i'll show it to you right away. only, please, be as careful as possible in looking at it." horizon with trepidation looked around to the right and left and extracted from his pocket a long, narrow little box of morocco, in the style of those in which playing cards are usually kept, and extended it to the sub-lieutenant. "here you are, have a look. only, i beg of you, be very careful." the sub-lieutenant applied himself to picking out, one after the other, the cards of plain and coloured photography, in which in all possible aspects was depicted in the most beastly ways, in the most impossible positions, the external side of love which at times makes man immeasurably lower and viler than a baboon. horizon would look over his shoulder, nudge him with his elbow, and whisper: "tell me, ain't that swell, now? why, this is genuine parisian and viennese chic!" the sub-lieutenant looked through the whole collection from the beginning to the end. when he was giving back the little box, his hand was shaking, his temples and forehead were moist, his eyes had dimmed, and over his cheeks had mantled a blush, mottled like marble. "but do you know what?" horizon exclaimed gaily, all of a sudden. "it's all the same to me--the indian sign has been put upon me. i, as they used to say in the olden times, have burned my ships ... i have burned all that i used to adore before. for a long time already i've been looking for an opportunity to pass these cards on to some one. i ain't especially chasing after a price. you wish to acquire them, mister officer?" "well, now ... i,--that is ... why not? ... let's ..." "that's fine! on account of such a pleasant acquaintanceship, i'll take fifty kopecks apiece. what, is that expensive? well, what's the difference, god be with you! i see you're a travelling man, i don't want to rob you; let it go at thirty, then. what? that ain't cheap either? well, shake hands on it! twenty-five kopecks apiece. oi! what an intractable fellow you are! at twenty! you'll thank me yourself later! and then, do you know what else? when i come to k--, i always stop at the hotel hermitage. you can very easily find me there either very early in the morning, or about eight o'clock in the evening. i know an awful lot of the finest little ladies. so i'll introduce you. and, you understand, not for money. oh, no. it's just simply nice and gay for them to pass the time with a young, healthy, handsome man of your sort. there's absolutely no money of any kind necessary. and for that matter--they themselves will willingly pay for wine, for a bottle of champagne! so remember then; the hermitage, horizon. and if it isn't that, remember it anyway! maybe i can be of use to you. and the cards are such a thing, such a thing, that it will never lay on the shelf by you. those who like that sort of thing give three roubles for each specimen. but these, of course, are rich people, little old men. and then, you know"--horizon bent over to the officer's very ear, winked one eye, and pronounced in a sly whisper--"you know, many ladies adore these cards. why, you're a young man, and handsome; how many romances you will have yet!" having received the money and counted it over painstakingly, horizon had the brazenness to extend his hand in addition, and to shake the hand of the sub-lieutenant, who did not dare to lift up his eyes to him; and, having left him on the platform, went back into the passageway of the car, as though nothing had happened. this was an unusually communicative man. on the way to his coupe he came to a stop before a beautiful little girl of three years, with whom he had for some time been flirting at a distance and making all sorts of funny grimaces at. he squatted down on his heels before her, began to imitate a nanny goat for her, and questioned her in a lisping voice: "may i athk where the young lady ith going? oi, oi, oi! thuch a big girl! travelling alone, without mamma? bought a ticket all by herthelf and travelth alone! ai! what a howwid girl! and where ith the girl'th mamma?" at this moment a tall, handsome, self-assured woman appeared from the coupe and said calmly: "get away from the child. what a despicable thing to annoy strange children!" horizon jumped up on his feet and began to bustle: "madam! i could not restrain myself ... such a wonderful, such a magnificent and swell child! a regular cupid! you must understand, madam, i am a father myself--i have children of my own ... i could not restrain myself from delight! ..." but the lady turned her back upon him, took the girl by the hand and went with her into the coupe, leaving horizon shuffling his feet and muttering his compliments and apologies. several times during the twenty-four hours horizon would go into the third class, of two cars, separated from each other by almost the entire train. in one care were sitting three handsome women, in the society of a black-bearded, taciturn, morose man. horizon and he would exchange strange phrases in some special jargon. the women looked at him uneasily, as though wishing, yet not daring, to ask him about something. only once, toward noon, did one of them allow herself to utter: "then that's the truth? that which you said about the place? ... you understand--i'm somewhat uneasy at heart!" "ah, what do you mean, margarita ivanovna? if i said it, then it's right, just like by the national bank. listen, lazer," he turned to him of the beard. "there will be a station right away. buy the girls all sorts of sandwiches, whichever they may desire. the train stops here for twenty-five minutes." "i'd like to have bouillon," hesitatingly uttered a little blonde, with hair like ripened rye, and with eyes like corn-flowers. "my dear bella, anything you please! at the station i'll go and see that they bring you bouillon with meat and even stuffed dumplings. don't you trouble yourself, lazer, i'll do all that myself." in another car he had a whole nursery garden of women, twelve or fifteen people, under the leadership of an old, stout woman, with enormous, awesome, black eyebrows. she spoke in a bass, while her fat chins, breasts, and stomachs swayed under a broad morning dress in time to the shaking of the car, just like apple jelly. neither the old woman nor the young women left the least doubts as to their profession. the women were lolling on the benches, smoking, playing cards--at "sixty-six,"--drinking beer. frequently the male public of the car provoked them, and they swore back in unceremonious language, in hoarse voices. the young people treated them with wine and cigarettes. horizon was here altogether unrecognizable; he was majestically negligent and condescendingly jocose. on the other hand, cringing ingratiation sounded in every word addressed to him by his female clients. but he, having looked over all of them--this strange mixture of roumanians, jewesses, poles and russians--and having assured himself that all was in order, gave orders about the sandwiches and majestically withdrew. at these moments he very much resembled a drover, who is transporting by railroad cattle for slaughter, and at a station drops in to look it over and to feed it. after that he would return to his coupe and again begin to toy with his wife, and hebrew anecdotes just poured from his mouth. at the long stops he would go out to the buffet only to see about his lady clients. but he himself said to his neighbours: "you know, it's all the same to me if it's treif or kosher. i don't recognize any difference. but what can i do with my stomach! the devil knows what stuff they'll feed you sometimes at these stations. you'll pay some three or four roubles, and then you'll spend a hundred roubles on the doctors curing yourself. but maybe you, now, sarochka"--he would turn to his wife--"maybe you'll get off at the station to eat something? or shall i send it up to you here?" sarochka, happy over his attention, would turn red, beam upon him with grateful eyes, and refuse. "you're very kind, senya, only i don't want to. i'm full." then horizon would reach out of a travelling hamper a chicken, boiled meat, cucumbers, and a bottle of palestine wine; have a snack, without hurrying, with appetite; regale his wife, who ate very genteelly, sticking out the little fingers of her magnificent white hands; then painstakingly wrap up the remnants in paper and, without hurrying, lay them away accurately in the hamper. in the distance, far ahead of the locomotive, the cupolas and belfries were already beginning to sparkle with fires of gold. through the coupe passed the conductor and made some imperceptible sign to horizon. he immediately followed the conductor out to the platform. "the inspector will pass through right away," said the conductor, "so you'll please be so kind as to stand for a while here on the platform of the third class with your spouse." "nu, nu, nu!" concurred horizon. "and the money as agreed, if you please." "how much is coming to you, then?" "well, just as we agreed; half the extra charge, two roubles eighty kopecks." "what?" horizon suddenly boiled over. "two roubles eighty kopecks? you think you got it a crazy one in me, what? here's a rouble for you and thank god for that!" "pardon me, sir. this is even absurd--didn't you and i agree?" "agree, agree! ... here's a half more, and not a thing besides. what impudence! i'll tell the inspector yet that you carry people without tickets. don't you think it, brother--you ain't found one of that sort here!" the conductor's eyes suddenly widened, became blood-shot. "o-oh! you sheeny!" he began to roar. "i ought to take a skunk like you and under the train with you!" but horizon at once flew at him like a cock. "what? under the train? but do you know what's done for words like that? a threat by action! here, i'll go right away and will yell 'help!' and will turn the signal handle," and he seized the door-knob with such an air of resolution that the conductor just made a gesture of despair with his hand and spat. "may you choke with my money, you mangy sheeny!" horizon called his wife out of the coupe: "sarochka! let's go out on the platform for a look; one can see better there. well, it's so beautiful--just like on a picture!" sarah obediently went after him, holding up with an unskilled hand the new dress, in all probability put on for the first time, bending out and as though afraid of touching the door or the wall. in the distance, in the rosy gala haze of the evening glow, shone the golden cupolas and crosses. high up on the hill the white, graceful churches seemed to float in this flowery, magic mirage. curly woods and coppices had run down from above and had pushed on over the very ravine. and the sheer, white precipice which bathed its foot in the blue river, was all furrowed over with occasional young woods, just like green little veins and warts. beautiful as in a fairy tale, the ancient town appeared as though it were itself coming to meet the train. when the train stopped, horizon ordered three porters to carry the things into the first class, and told his wife to follow him. but he himself lingered at the exit in order to let through both his parties. to the old woman looking after the dozen women he threw briefly in passing: "so remember, madam berman! hotel america, ivanukovskaya, twenty-two!" while to the black-bearded man he said: "don't forget, lazer, to feed the girls at dinner and to bring them somewhere to a movie show. about eleven o'clock at night wait for me. i'll come for a talk. but if some one will be calling for me extra, then you know my address--the hermitage. ring me up. but if i'm not there for some reason, then run into reiman's cafe, or opposite, into the hebrew dining room. i'll be eating gefilteh fisch there. well, a lucky journey!" chapter iii. all the stories of horizon about his commercial travelling were simply brazen and glib lying. all the samples of drapers' goods, suspenders gloire and buttons helios, the artificial teeth and insertible eyes, served only as a shield, screening his real activity--to wit, the traffic in the body of woman. true, at one time, some ten years ago, he had travelled over russia as the representative for the dubious wines of some unknown firm; and this activity had imparted to his tongue that free-and-easy unconstraint for which, in general, travelling salesmen are distinguished. this former activity had, as well, brought him up against his real profession. in some way, while going to rostov-on-the-don, he had contrived to make a very young sempstress fall in love with him. this girl had not as yet succeeded in getting on the official lists of the police, but upon love and her body she looked without any lofty prejudices. horizon, at that time altogether a green youth, amorous and light-minded, dragged the sempstress after him on his wanderings, full of adventures and unexpected things. after half a year she palled upon him dreadfully. she, just like a heavy burden, like a millstone, hung around the neck of this man of energy, motion and aggressiveness. in addition to that, there were the eternal scenes of jealousy, mistrust, the constant control and tears ... the inevitable consequences of long living together ... then he began little by little to beat his mate. at the first time she was amazed, but from the second time quieted down, became tractable. it is known, that "women of love" never know a mean in love relations. they are either hysterical liars, deceivers, dissemblers, with a coolly-perverted mind and a sinuous dark soul; or else unboundedly self-denying, blindly devoted, foolish, naive animals, who know no bounds either in concessions or loss of self-esteem. the sempstress belonged to the second category, and horizon was soon successful, without great effort, in persuading her to go out on the street to traffic in herself. and from that very evening, when his mistress submitted to him and brought home the first five roubles earned, horizon experienced an unbounded loathing toward her. it is remarkable, that no matter how many women horizon met after this--and several hundred of them had passed through his hands--this feeling of loathing and masculine contempt toward them would never forsake him. he derided the poor woman in every way, and tortured her morally, seeking out the most painful spots. she would only keep silent, sigh, weep, and getting down on her knees before him, kiss his hands. and this wordless submission irritated horizon still more. he drove her away from him. she would not go away. he would push her out into the street; but she, after an hour or two, would come back shivering from cold, in a soaked hat, in the turned-up brims of which the rain-water splashed as in waterspouts. finally, some shady friend gave simon yakovlevich the harsh and crafty counsel which laid a mark on all the rest of his life activity--to sell his mistress into a brothel. to tell the truth, in going into this enterprise, horizon almost disbelieved at soul in its success. but contrary to his expectation, the business could not have adjusted itself better. the proprietress of an establishment (this was in kharkov) willingly met his proposition half-way. she had known long and well simon yakovlevich, who played amusingly on the piano, danced splendidly, and set the whole drawing room laughing with his pranks; but chiefly, could, with unusually unabashed dexterity, make any carousing party "shell out the coin." it only remained to convince the mate of his life, and this proved the most difficult of all. she did not want to detach herself from her beloved for anything; threatened suicide, swore that she would burn his eyes out with sulphuric acid, promised to go and complain to the chief of police--and she really did know a few dirty little transactions of simon yakovlevich's that smacked of capital punishment. thereupon horizon changed his tactics. he suddenly became a tender, attentive friend, an indefatigable lover. then suddenly he fell into black melancholy. the uneasy questionings of the woman he let pass in silence; at first let drop a word as though by chance; hinted in passing at some mistake of his life; and then began to lie desperately and with inspiration. he said that the police were watching him; that he could not get by the jail, and, perhaps, even hard labour and the gallows; that it was necessary for him to disappear abroad for several months. but mainly, what he persisted in especially strongly, was some tremendous fantastic business, in which he stood to make several hundred thousands of roubles. the sempstress believed and became alarmed with that disinterested, womanly, almost holy alarm, in which, with every woman, there is so much of something maternal. it was not at all difficult now to convince her that for horizon to travel together with her presented a great danger for him; and that it would be better for her to remain here and to bide the time until the affairs of her lover would adjust themselves fortuitously. after that to talk her into hiding, as in the most trustworthy retreat, in a brothel, where she would be in full safety from the police and the detectives, was a mere nothing. one morning horizon ordered her to dress a little better, curl her hair, powder herself, put a little rouge on her cheeks, and carried her off to a den, to his acquaintance. the girl made a favourable impression there, and that same day her passport was changed by the police to a so-called yellow ticket. having parted with her, after long embraces and tears, horizon went into the room of the proprietress and received his payment, fifty roubles (although he had asked for two hundred). but he did not grieve especially over the low price; the main thing was, that he had found his calling at last, all by himself, and had laid the cornerstone of his future welfare. of course, the woman sold by him just remained forever so in the tenacious hands of the brothel. horizon forgot her so thoroughly that after only a year he could not even recall her face. but who knows ... perhaps he merely pretended? now he was one of the chief speculators in the body of woman in all the south of russia. he had transactions with constantinople and with argentine; he transported, in whole parties, girls from the brothels of odessa into kiev; those from kiev he brought over into kharkov; and those from kharkov into odessa. he it was also who stuck away over second rate capital cities, and those districts which were somewhat richer, the goods which had been rejected or had grown too noticeable in the big cities. he had struck up an enormous clientele, and in the number of his consumers horizon could have counted not a few people with a prominent social position: lieutenant governors, colonels of the gendarmerie, eminent advocates, well-known doctors, rich land-owners, carousing merchants. all the shady world--the proprietresses of brothels, cocottes solitaires, go-betweens, madams of houses of assignation, souteneurs, touring actresses and chorus girls--was as familiar to him as the starry sky to an astronomer. his amazing memory, which permitted him prudently to avoid notebooks, held in mind thousands of names, family names, nicknames, addresses, characteristics. he knew to perfection the tastes of all his highly placed consumers: some of them liked unusually odd depravity, others paid mad sums for innocent girls, for others still it was necessary to seek out girls below age. he had to satisfy both the sadistic and the masochistic inclinations of his clients, and at times to cater to altogether unnatural sexual perversions, although it must be said that the last he undertook only in rare instances which promised a large, undoubted profit. two or three times he had to sit in jail, but these sessions went to his benefit; he not only did not lose his rapacious high-handedness and springy energy in his transactions, but with every year became more daring, inventive, and enterprising. with the years to his brazen impetuousness was joined a tremendous worldly business wisdom. fifteen times, during this period, he had managed to marry and every time had contrived to take a decent dowry. having possessed himself of his wife's money, he, one fine day, would suddenly vanish without a trace, and, if there was a possibility, he would sell his wife profitably into a secret house of depravity or into a chic public establishment. it would happen that the parents of the deluded victim would search for him through the police. but while inquiries would be carried on everywhere about him as shperling, he would already be travelling from town to town under the name of rosenblum. during the time of his activity, in despite of an enviable memory, he had changed so many names that he had not only forgotten what year he had been nathanielson, and during what bakalyar, but even his own name was beginning to seem to him one of his pseudonyms. it was remarkable, that he did not find in his profession anything criminal or reprehensible. he regarded it just as though he were trading in herrings, lime, flour, beef or lumber. in his own fashion he was pious. if time permitted, he would with assiduity visit the synagogue of fridays. the day of atonement, passover, and the feast of the tabernacles were invariably and reverently observed by him everywhere wherever fate might have cast him. his mother, a little old woman, and a hunch-backed sister, were left to him in odessa, and he undeviatingly sent them now large, now small sums of money, not regularly but pretty frequently, from all towns from kursk to odessa and from warsaw to samara. considerable savings of money had already accumulated to him in the credit lyonnaise, and he gradually increased them, never touching the interest. but to greed or avarice he was almost a stranger. he was attracted to the business rather by its tang, risk and a professional self-conceit. to the women he was perfectly indifferent, although he understood and could value them, and in this respect resembled a good chef, who together with a fine understanding of the business, suffers from a chronic absence of appetite. to induce, to entice a woman, to compel her to do all that he wanted, did not require any efforts on his part; they came of themselves to his call and became in his hands passive, obedient and yielding. in his treatment of them a certain firm, unshakable, self-assured aplomb had been worked out, to which they submitted just as a refractory horse submits instinctively to the voice, glance, stroking of an experienced horseman. he drank very moderately, and without company never drank. toward eating he was altogether indifferent. but, of course, as with every man, he had a little weakness of his own: he was inordinately fond of dress and spent no little money on his toilet. modish collars of all possible fashions, cravats, diamond cuff links, watch charms, the underwear of a dandy, and chic footwear constituted his main distractions. from the depot he went straight to the hermitage. the hotel porters, in blue blouses and uniform caps, carried his things into the vestibule. following them, he too entered, arm in arm with his wife; both smartly attired, imposing, but he just simply magnificent, in his wide, bell-shaped english overcoat, in a new broad-brimmed panama, holding negligently in his hand a small cane with a silver handle in the form of a naked woman. "you ain't supposed to be here without a permit for your residence," said an enormous, stout doorkeeper, looking down upon him from above and preserving on his face a sleepy and immovably-frigid expression. "ach, zachar! again 'you ain't supposed to!'" merrily exclaimed horizon, and patted the giant on his shoulder. "what does it mean, 'you ain't supposed to'? every time you shove this same 'you ain't supposed to' at me. i must be here for three days in all. soon as i conclude the rent agreement with count ipatiev, right away i go away. god be with you! live even all by yourself in all your rooms. but you just give a look, zachar, what a toy i brought you from odessa! you'll be just tickled with it!" with a careful, deft, accustomed movement he thrust a gold piece into the doorkeeper's hand, who was already holding it behind his back, ready and folded in the form of a little boat. the first thing that horizon did upon installing himself in the large, spacious room with an alcove, was to put out into the corridor at the door of the room six pairs of magnificent shoes, saying to the bell-hop who ran up in answer to the bell: "immediately all should be cleaned! so it should shine like a mirror! they call you timothy, i think? then you should know me--if you work by me it will never go for nothing. so it should shine like a mirror!" chapter iv. horizon lived at the hotel hermitage for not more than three days and nights, and during this time he managed to see some three hundred people. his arrival seemed to enliven the big, gay port city. to him came the keepers of employment offices for servants, the proprietresses of cheap hotels, and old, experienced go-betweens, grown gray in the trade in women. not so much out of an interest in booty as out of professional pride, horizon tried, at all costs, to bargain for as much profit as possible, to buy a woman as cheaply as possible. of course, to receive ten, fifteen roubles more was not the reason for him, but the mere thought that competitor yampolsky would receive at the sale more than he brought him into a frenzy. after his arrival, the next day, he set off to mezer the photographer, taking with him the straw-like girl bella, and had pictures taken in various poses together with her; at which for every negative he received three roubles, while he gave the woman a rouble. after that he rode off to barsukova. this was a woman, or, speaking more correctly, a retired wench, whose like can be found only in the south of russia; neither a pole nor a little russian; already sufficiently old and rich in order to allow herself the luxury of maintaining a husband (and together with him a cabaret), a handsome and kindly little pole. horizon and barsukova met like old friends. they had, it seemed, no fear, no shame, no conscience when they conversed with each other. "madam barsukova! i can offer you something special! three women: one a large brunette, very modest; another a little one, a blonde, but who, you understand, is ready for everything; the third is a woman of mystery, who merely smiles and doesn't say anything, but promises much and is a beauty!" madam barsukova was gazing at him with mistrust, shaking her head. "mister horizon! what are you trying to fill my head with? do you want to do the same with me that you did last time?" "by god, i should live so, how i want to deceive you! but that's not the main thing. i'm also offering you a perfectly educated woman. do with her what you like. in all probability you'll find a connoisseur." barsukova smiled artfully and asked: "again a wife?" "no. but she's of the nobility." "then that means unpleasantnesses with the police again?" "ach! my god! i don't take big money from you; all the three for a lousy thousand roubles." "well, let's talk frankly; five hundred. i don't want to buy a cat in a bag." "it seems, madam barsukova, that it isn't the first time you and i have done business together, i won't deceive you and will bring her here right away. only i beg you not to forget that you're my aunt, and please work in that direction. i won't be more than three days here in the city." madam barsukova, with all her breasts, bellies and chins, began to sway merrily. "we won't dicker over trifles. all the more so since you don't deceive me, nor i you. there's a great demand for women now. what would you say, mister horizon, if i offered you some red wine?" "thank you, madam barsukova, with pleasure." "let's talk a while like old friends. tell me, how much do you make a year?" "ach, madam, what shall i say? twelve, twenty thousand, approximately. but think what tremendous expenses there are in constantly travelling." "do you put away a little?" "well, that's trifles; some two or three thousand a year." "i thought ten, twenty ..." horizon grew wary. he sensed that he was beginning to be drawn out and asked insidiously: "but why does this interest you?" anna michailovna pressed the button of an electric bell and ordered the dressy maid to bring coffee with steamed cream and a bottle of chambertaine. she knew the tastes of horizon. then she asked: "do you know mr. shepsherovich?" horizon simply pounced upon her. "my god! who don't know shepsherovich! this is a god, this is a genius!" and, having become animated, forgetting that he was being dragged into a trap, he began speaking exaltedly: "just imagine what shepsherovich did last year! he carried to argentine thirty women from kovno, vilno, zhitomir. each one of them he sold at a thousand roubles--a total, madam--count it--of thirty thousand! do you think shepsherovich calmed down with this? for this money, in order to repay his expenses on the steamer, he bought several negresses and stuck them about in moscow, petersburg, kiev, odessa, and kharkov. but, you know, madam, this isn't a man, but an eagle. there's a man who can do business!" barsukova caressingly laid her hand on his knee. she had been waiting for this moment and said to him amicably: "and so i propose to you, mr.----however, i don't know how you are called now..." "horizon, let's say..." "so i propose to you, mr. horizon--could you find some innocent girls among yours? there's an enormous demand for them now. i'm playing an open hand with you. we won't stop at money. now it's in fashion. notice, horizon, your lady clients will be returned to you in exactly the same state in which they were. this, you understand, is a little depravity, which i can in no way make out..." horizon cast down his eyes, rubbed his head, and said: "you see, i've a wife ... you've almost guessed it." "so. but why almost?" "i'm ashamed to confess, that she--how shall i say it ... she is my bride ..." barsukova gaily burst into laughter. "you know, horizon, i couldn't at all expect that you're such a nasty villain! let's have your wife, it's all the same. but is it possible that you've really refrained?" "a thousand?" asked horizon seriously. "ah! what trifles; a thousand let's say. but tell me, will i be able to manage her?" "nonsense!" said horizon self-assuredly. "let's again suppose that you're my aunt, and i leave my wife with you. just imagine, madam barsukova, that this woman is in love with me like a cat. and if you'll tell her, that for my good she must do so and so and thus and thus--then there won't be no arguments!" apparently, there was nothing more for them to talk over. madam barsukova brought out a promissory note, whereon she with difficulty wrote her name, her father's name, and her last name. the promissory note, of course, was fantastic; but there is a tie, a welding, an honour among thieves. in such deals people do not deceive. death threatens otherwise. it is all the same, whether in prison, or on the street, or in a brothel. right after that, just like an apparition out of a trapdoor, appeared the friend of her heart, the master of the cabaret, a young little pole, with moustaches twirled high. they drank some wine, talked a bit about the fair, about the exposition, complained a little about bad business. after that horizon telephoned to his room in the hotel, and called out his wife. he introduced her to his aunt and his aunt's second cousin, and said that mysterious political reasons were calling him out of town. he tenderly kissed sarah, shed a tear, and rode away. chapter v. with the arrival of horizon (however, god knows how he was called: gogolevich, gidalevich, okunev, rosmitalsky), in a word, with the arrival of this man everything changed on yamskaya street. enormous shufflings commenced. from treppel girls were transferred to anna markovna, from anna markovna into a rouble establishment, and from the rouble establishment into a half-rouble one. there were no promotions: only demotions. at each change of place horizon earned from five to a hundred roubles. verily, he was possessed of an energy equal, approximately, to the waterfall of imatra! sitting in the daytime at anna markovna's, he was saying, squinting from the smoke of the cigarette, and swinging one leg crossed over the other: "the question is ... what do you need this same sonka for? it's no place for her in a decent establishment. if we'll float her down the stream, then you'll make a hundred roubles for yourself, i twenty-five for myself. tell me frankly, she isn't in demand, is she, now?" "ah, mr. shatzky! you can always talk a person over! but just imagine, i'm sorry for her. such a nice girl ..." horizon pondered for a moment. he was seeking an appropriate citation and suddenly let out: "'give the falling a shove!'[ ] and i'm convinced, madam shaibes, that there's no demand of any sort for her." [ ] horizon is quoting a nietzscheism of gorky's.--trans. isaiah savvich, a little, sickly, touchy old man, but in moments of need very determined, supported horizon: "and that's very simple. there is really no demand of any sort for her. think it over for yourself, annechka; her outfit costs fifty roubles, mr. shatzky will receive twenty-five roubles, fifty roubles will be left for you and me. and, glory be to god, we have done with her! at least, she won't be compromising our establishment." in such a way sonka the rudder, avoiding a rouble establishment, was transferred into a half-rouble one, where all kinds of riff-raff made sport of the girls at their own sweet will, whole nights through. there tremendous health and great nervous force were requisite. sonka once began shivering from terror, in the night, when thekla, a mountain of a woman of some two hundred pounds, jumped out into the yard to fulfill a need of nature, and cried out to the housekeeper who was passing by her: "housekeeper, dear! listen--the thirty-sixth man! ... don't forget!" fortunately, sonka was not disturbed much; even in this establishment she was too homely. no one paid any attention to her splendid eyes, and they took her only in those instances when there was no other at hand. the pharmacist sought her out and came every evening to her. but cowardice, or a special hebrew fastidiousness, or, perhaps, even physical aversion, would not permit him to take the girl and carry her away with him from the house. he would sit whole nights through near her, and, as of yore, patiently waited until she would return from a chance guest; created scenes of jealousy for her and yet loved her still, and, sticking in the daytime behind the counter in his drug store and rolling some stinking pills or other, ceaselessly thought of her and yearned. chapter vi. immediately at the entrance to a suburban cabaret an artificial flower bed shone with vari-colored lights, with electric bulbs instead of flowers; and just such another fiery alley of wide, half-round arches, narrowing toward the end, led away from it into the depths of the garden. further on was a broad, small square, strewn with yellow sand; to the left an open stage, a theatre, and a shooting gallery; straight ahead a stand for the military band (in the form of a seashell) and little booths with flowers and beer; to the right the long terrace of the restaurant. electric globes from their high masts illuminated the small square with a pale, dead-white brightness. against their frosted glass, with wire nets stretched over them, beat clouds of night moths, whose shadows--confused and large--hovered below, on the ground. hungry women, too lightly, dressily, and fancifully attired, preserving on their faces an expression of care-free merriment or haughty, offended unapproachability, strolled back and forth in pairs, with a walk already tired and dragging. all the tables in the restaurant were taken--and over them floated the continuous noise of knives upon plates and a motley babel, galloping in waves. it smelt of rich and pungent kitchen fumes. in the middle of the restaurant, upon a stand, roumanians in red frocks were playing; all swarthy, white-toothed, with the faces of whiskered, pomaded apes, with their hair licked down. the director of the orchestra, bending forward and affectedly swaying, was playing upon a violin and making unseemly sweet eyes at the public--the eyes of a man-prostitute. and everything together--this abundance of tiresome electric lights, the exaggeratedly bright toilettes of the ladies, the odours of modish, spicy perfumes, this ringing music, with willful slowings up of the tempo, with voluptuous swoonings in the transitions, with the tempestuous passages screwed up--everything fitted the one to the other, forming a general picture of insane and stupid luxury, a setting for an imitation of a gay, unseemly carouse. above, around the entire hall, ran open galleries, upon which, as upon little balconies, opened the doors of the private cabinets. in one of these cabinets four were sitting--two ladies and two men; an artiste known to all russia, the cantatrice rovinskaya, a large, handsome woman, with long, green, egyptian eyes, and a long, red, sensuous mouth, the lips of which were rapaciously drooping at the corners; the baroness tefting, little, exquisite, pale--she was everywhere seen with the artiste; the famous lawyer ryazanov; and volodya chaplinsky, a rich young man of the world, a composer-dilettante, the author of several darling little ballads and many witticisms upon the topics of the day, which circulated all over town. the walls of the cabinet were red, with a gold design. on the table, among the lighted candelabra, two white, tarred necks of bottles stuck up out of an electroplated vase, which had sweated from the cold, and the light in a tenuous gold played in the shallow goblets of wine. outside, near the doors, a waiter was on duty, leaning against the wall; while the stout, tall, important maitre d'hotel, on whose right little finger, always sticking out, sparkled a huge diamond, would frequently stop at these doors, and attentively listen with one ear to what was going on in the cabinet. the baroness, with a bored, pale face, was listlessly gazing through a lorgnette down at the droning, chewing, swarming crowd. among the red, white, blue and straw-coloured feminine dresses the uniform figures of the men resembled large, squat, black beetles. rovinskaya negligently, yet at the same time intently as well, was looking down upon the stand and the spectators, and her face expressed fatigue, ennui, and perhaps also that satiation with all spectacles, which are such matters of course to celebrities. the splendid, long, slender fingers of her left hand were lying upon the crimson velvet of the box-seat. emeralds of a rare beauty hung upon them so negligently that it seemed as though they would fall off at any second, and suddenly she began laughing. "look" she said; "what a funny figure, or, to put it more correctly, what a funny profession! there, there, that one who's playing on a 'syrinx of seven reeds.'" everyone looked in the direction of her hand. and really, the picture was funny enough. behind the roumanian orchestra was sitting a stout, whiskered man, probably the father, and perhaps even the grandfather, of a numerous family, and with all his might was whistling into seven little pipes glued together. as it was difficult for him, probably, to move this instrument between his lips, he therefore, with an unusual rapidity, turned his head now to the left, now to the right. "an amazing occupation," said rovinskaya. "well now, chaplinsky, you try to toss your head about like that." volodya chaplinsky, secretly and hopelessly in love with the artiste, immediately began obediently and zealously to do this, but after half a minute desisted. "it's impossible," he said, "either long training, or, perhaps, hereditary abilities, are necessary for this." the baroness during this time was tearing away the petals of her rose and throwing them into a goblet; then, with difficulty suppressing a yawn, she said, making just the least bit of a wry face: "but, my god, how drearily they divert themselves in our k--! look: no laughter, no singing, no dances. just like some herd that's been driven here, in order to be gay on purpose!" ryazanov listlessly took his goblet, sipped it a little, and answered apathetically in his enchanting voice: "well, and is it any gayer in your paris, or nice? why, it must be confessed--mirth, youth and laughter have vanished forever out of human life, and it is scarcely possible that they will ever return. one must regard people with more patience, it seems to me. who knows, perhaps for all those sitting here, below, the present evening is a rest, a holiday?" "the speech for the defense," put in chaplinsky in his calm manner. but rovinskaya quickly turned around to the men, and her long emerald eyes narrowed. and this with her served as a sign of wrath, from which even crowned personages committed follies at times. however, she immediately restrained herself and continued languidly: "i don't understand what you are talking about. i don't understand even what we came here for. for there are no longer any spectacles in the world. now i, for instance, have seen bull-fights in seville, madrid and marseilles--an exhibition which does not evoke anything save loathing. i have also seen boxing and wrestling nastiness and brutality. i also happened to participate in a tiger hunt, at which i sat under a baldachin on the back of a big, wise white elephant ... in a word, you all know this well yourselves. and out of all my great, chequered, noisy life, from which i have grown old ..." "oh, what are you saying, ellena victorovna!" said chaplinsky with a tender reproach. "abandon compliments, volodya! i know myself that i'm still young and beautiful of body, but, really, it seems to me at times that i am ninety. so worn out has my soul become. i continue. i say, that during all my life only three strong impressions have sunk into my soul. the first, while still a girl, when i saw a cat stealing upon a cock-sparrow, and i with horror and with interest watched its movements and the vigilant gaze of the bird. up to this time i don't know myself which i sympathized with more: the skill of the cat or the slipperiness of the sparrow. the cock-sparrow proved the quicker. in a moment he flew up on a tree and began from there to pour down upon the cat such sparrow swearing that i would have turned red for shame if i had understood even one word. while the cat, as though it had been wronged, stuck up its tail like a chimney and tried to pretend to itself that nothing out of the way had taken place. another time i had to sing in an opera a duet with a certain great artist ..." "with whom?" asked the baroness quickly. "isn't it all the same? of what need names? and so, when he and i were singing, i felt all of me in the sway of genius. how wonderfully, into what a marvelous harmony, did our voices blend! ah! it is impossible to describe this impression. probably, it happens but once in a lifetime. according to the role, i had to weep, and i wept with sincere, genuine tears. and when, after the curtain, he walked up to me and patted my hair with his big warm hand and with his enchanting, radiant smile said, 'splendid! for the first time in my life have i sung so' ... and so i--and i am a very proud being--i kissed his hand. and the tears were still standing in my eyes ..." "and the third?" asked the baroness, and her eyes lit up with the evil sparks of jealousy. "ah, the third," answered the artiste sadly, "the third is as simple as simple can be. during the last season i lived at nice, and so i saw carmen on the open stage at frejus with the anticipation of cecile ketten, who is now," the artiste earnestly made the sign of the cross, "dead--i don't really know, fortunately or unfortunately for herself?" suddenly, in a moment, her magnificent eyes filled with tears and began to shine with a magic green light, such as the evening star gives forth, on warm summer twilights. she turned her face around to the stage, and for some time her long, nervous fingers convulsively squeezed the upholstery of the barrier of the box. but when she again turned around to her friends, her eyes were already dry, and the enigmatic, vicious and wilful lips were resplendent with an unconstrained smile. then ryazanov asked her politely, in a tender but purposely calm tone: "but then, ellena victorovna, your tremendous fame, admirers, the roar of the mob ... finally, that delight which you afford to your spectators. is it possible that even this does not titillate your nerves?" "no, ryazanov," she answered in a tired voice. "you know no less than myself what this is worth. a brazen interviewer, who needs passes for his friends, and, by the way, twenty-five roubles in an envelope. high school boys and girls, students and young ladies attending courses, who beg you for autographed photographs. some old blockhead with a general's rank, who hums loudly with me during my aria. the eternal whisper behind you, when you pass by: 'there she is, that same famous one!' anonymous letters, the brazenness of back-stage habitues ... why, you can't enumerate everything! but surely, you yourself are often beset by female psychopathics of the court-room?" "yes," said ryazanov decisively. "that's all there is to it. but add to that the most terrible thing, that every time i have come to feel a genuine inspiration, i tormentingly feel on the spot the consciousness that i'm pretending and grimacing before people ... and the fear of the success of your rival? and the eternal dread of losing your voice, of straining it or catching a cold? the eternal tormenting bother of throat bandages? no, really, it is heavy to bear renown on one's shoulders." "but the artistic fame?" retorted the lawyer. "the might of genius! this, verily, is a true moral might, which is above the might of any king on earth!" "yes, yes, of course you're right, my dear. but fame, celebrity, are sweet only at a distance, when you only dream about them. but when you have attained them you feel only their thorns. but then, with what anguish you feel every dram of their decrease. and i have forgotten to say something else. why, we artists undergo a sentence at hard labour. in the morning, exercises; in the daytime, rehearsals; and then there's scarcely time for dinner and you're due for the performance. an hour or so for reading or such diversion as you and i are having now, may be snatched only by a miracle. and even so... the diversion is altogether of the mediocre..." she negligently and wearily made a slight gesture with the fingers of the hand lying on the barrier. volodya chaplinsky, agitated by this conversation, suddenly asked: "yes, but tell me, ellena victorovna, what would you want to distract your imagination and ennui?" she looked at him with her enigmatic eyes and answered quietly, even a trifle shyly, it seemed: "formerly, people lived more gaily and did not know prejudices of any sort. well, it seems to me that then i would have been in my place and would have lived with a full life. o, ancient rome!" no one understood her, save ryazanov, who, without looking at her, slowly pronounced in his velvety voice, like that of an actor, the classical, universally familiar, latin phrase: "ave, caesar, morituri te salutant!" "precisely! i love you very much, ryazanov, because you are a clever child. you will always catch a thought in its flight; although, i must say, that this isn't an especially high property of the mind. and really, two beings come together, the friends of yesterday, who had conversed with each other and eaten at the same table, and this day one of them must perish. you understand depart from life forever. but they have neither malice nor fear. there is the most real, magnificent spectacle, which i can only picture to myself!" "how much cruelty there is in you," said the baroness meditatively. "well, nothing can be done about it now! my ancestors were cavaliers and robbers. however, shan't we go away now?" they all went out of the garden. volodya chaplinsky ordered his automobile called. ellena victorovna was leaning upon his arm. and suddenly she asked: "tell me, volodya, where do you usually go when you take leave of so-called decent women?" volodya hemmed and hawed. however, he knew positively that he could not lie to rovinskaya. "m-m-m ... i'm afraid of offending your hearing. to the tzigani, for instance ... to night cabarets ..." "and somewhere else? worse?" "really, you put me in an awkward position. from the time that i've become so madly in love with you ..." "leave out the romancing!" "well, how shall i say it?" murmured volodya, feeling that he was turning red, not only in the face, but with his body, his back. "well, of course, to the women. now, of course, this does not occur with me personally ..." rovinskaya maliciously pressed chaplinsky's elbow to her side. "to a brothel?" volodya did not answer anything. then she said: "and so, you'll carry us at once over there in the automobile and acquaint us with this existence, which is foreign to me. but remember, that i rely upon your protection." the remaining two agreed to this, unwillingly, in all probability; but there was no possibility of opposing ellena victorovna. she always did everything that she wanted to. and then they had all heard and knew that in petersburg carousing worldly ladies, and even girls, permit themselves, out of a modish snobbism, pranks far worse than the one which rovinskaya had proposed. chapter vii. on the way to yamskaya street rovinskaya said to chaplinsky: "you'll bring me at first into the most luxurious place, then into a medium one, and then into the filthiest." "my dear ellena victorovna," warmly retorted chaplinsky, "i'm ready to do everything for you. it is without false boasting when i say that i would give my life away at your order, ruin my career and position at a mere sign of yours ... but i dare not bring you to these houses. russian manners are coarse, and often simply inhuman manners. i'm afraid that you will be insulted by some pungent, unseemly word, or that a chance visitor will play some senseless prank before you ..." "ah, my god," impatiently interrupted rovinskaya; "when i was singing in london, there were many at that time paying court to me, and i did not hesitate to go and see the filthiest dens of whitechapel in a choice company. i will say, that i was treated there very carefully and anticipatingly. i will also say, that there were with me at that time two english aristocrats; lords, both sportsmen, both people unusually strong physically and morally, who, of course, would never have allowed a woman to be offended. however, perhaps you, volodya, are of the race of cowards?" chaplinsky flared up: "oh, no, no, ellena victorovna. i forewarned you only out of love for you. but if you command, then i'm ready to go where you will. not only on this dubious undertaking, but even very death itself." by this time they had already driven up to the most luxurious establishment in the yamkas--treppel's. ryazanov the lawyer said, smiling with his usual ironic smile: "and so, the inspection of the menagerie begins." they were led into a cabinet with crimson wall paper, and on the wall paper was repeated, in the "empire" style, a golden design in the form of small laurel wreaths. and at once rovinskaya recognized, with the keen memory of an artiste, that exactly the same paper had also been in that cabinet in which they had just been sitting. four german women from the baltic provinces came out. all of them stout, full-breasted, blonde, powdered, very important and respectful. the conversation did not catch on at first. the girls sat immovable, like carvings of stone, in order to pretend with all their might that they were respectable ladies. even the champagne, which ryazanov called for, did not improve the mood. rovinskaya was the first to come to the aid of the party. turning to the stoutest, fairest german of all, who resembled a loaf, she asked politely in german: "tell me, where were you born? germany, in all probability?" "no, gnadige frau, i am from riga." "what compels you to serve here, then? not poverty, i hope?" "of course not, gnadige frau. but, you understand, my bridegroom, hans, works as a kellner in a restaurant-automat, and we are too poor to be married now. i bring my savings to a bank, and he does the same. when we have saved the ten thousand roubles we need, we will open our own beer-hall, and, if god will bless us, then we shall allow ourselves the luxury of having children. two children. a boy and a girl." "but, listen to me, mein fraulein!" rovinskaya was amazed. "you are young, handsome, know two languages ..." "three, madam," proudly put in the german. "i know esthonian as well. i finished the municipal school and three classes of high school." "well, then, you see, you see ..." rovinskaya became heated. "with such an education you could always find a place with everything found, and about thirty roubles. well, in the capacity of a housekeeper, bonne, senior clerk in a good store, a cashier, let's say ... and if your future bridegroom ... fritz ..." "hans, madam ..." "if hans proved to be an industrious and thrifty man, then it would not be at all hard for you to get up on your feet altogether, after three or four years. what do you think?" "ah, madam, you are a little mistaken. you have overlooked that, in the very best of positions, i, even denying myself in everything, will not be able to put aside more than fifteen, twenty roubles a month; whereas here, with a prudent economy, i gain up to a hundred roubles and at once carry them away with a book into the savings bank. and besides that, just imagine, gnadige frau, what a humiliating position to be the servant in a house! always to depend on the caprice or the disposition of the spirits of the masters! and the master always pesters you with foolishness. pfui! .. and the mistress is jealous, picks, and scolds." "no ... i don't understand ..." meditatively drawled rovinskaya, without looking the german in the eyes, but casting hers on the floor. "i've heard a great deal of your life here, in these ... what do you call them? .. these houses. they say it is something horrible. that you're forced to love the most repulsive, old and hideous men, that you are plucked and exploited in the most cruel manner ..." "oh, never, madam ... each one of us has an account book, wherein is written accurately the income and expense. during last month i earned a little more than five hundred roubles. as always, two-thirds went to the proprietress for board, quarters, fuel, light, linen ... there remains to me more than a hundred and fifty, it is not so? fifty i spent on costumes and all sorts of trifles. a hundred i save. what exploitation is it, then, madam, i ask you? and if i do not like a man at all--true, there are some who are exceedingly nasty--i can always say i am sick, and instead of me will go one of the newest girls ..." "but then ... pardon me, i do not know your name ..." "elsa." "they say, that you're treated very roughly ... beaten at times ... compelled to do that which you don't want to and which is repulsive to you?" "never, madam!" dropped elsa haughtily. "we all live here as a friendly family of our own. we are all natives of the same land or relatives, and god grant that many should live so in their own families as we live here. true, on yamskaya street there happen various scandals and fights and misunderstandings. but that's there ... in these ... in the rouble establishments. the russian girls drink a lot and always have one lover. and they do not think at all of their future." "you are prudent, elsa," said rovinskaya in an oppressed tone. "all this is well. but, what of the chance disease? infection? why, that is death? and how can you guess?" "and again--no, madam. i won't let a man into my bed before i make a detailed medical inspection of him ... i am guaranteed, at the least, against seventy-five per cent." "the devil!" suddenly exclaimed rovinskaya with heat and hit the table with her fist. "but, then, what of your albert ..." "hans," the german corrected her meekly. "pardon me ... your hans surely does not rejoice greatly over the fact that you are living here, and that you betray him every day?" elsa looked at her with sincere, lively amazement. "but gnadige frau ... i have never yet betrayed him! it is other lost wenches, especially russian, who have lovers for themselves, on whom they spend their hard-earned money. but that i should ever let myself go as far as that? pfui!" "a greater fall i have not imagined!" said rovinskaya loudly and with aversion, getting up. "pay gentlemen, and let's go on from here." when they had gone out into the street, volodya took her arm and said in an imploring voice: "for god's sake, isn't one experiment enough for you?" "oh, what vulgarity! what vulgarity!" "that's why i'm saying, let's drop this experiment." "no, in any case i am going through with it to the finish. show me something simpler, more of the medium." volodya chaplinsky, who was all the time in a torment over ellena victorovna, offered the most likely thing--to drop into the establishment of anna markovna, which was only ten steps away. but it was just here that strong impressions awaited them. simeon did not want to let them in, and only several gold pieces, which ryazanov gave him, softened him. they took up a cabinet, almost the same as at treppel's, only somewhat shabbier and more faded. at the command of emma edwardovna, the girls were herded into the cabinet. but it was the same as letting a goat into a truck-garden or mixing soda and acid. the main mistake, however, was that they let jennka in there as well--wrathful, irritated, with impudent fires in her eyes. the modest, quiet tamara was the last to walk in, with her shy and depraved smile of a monna lisa. in the end, almost the entire personnel of the establishment gathered in the cabinet. rovinskaya no longer risked asking "how did you come to this life?" but it must be said, that the inmates of the house met her with an outward hospitality. ellena victorovna asked them to sing their usual canonical songs, and they willingly sang: monday now is come again, they're supposed to get me out; doctor krassov won't let me out, well, the devil take him then. and further: poor little, poor little, poor little me, the public house is closed, my head's aching me... the love of a loafer is spice, is spice; but the prostitute is as cold as ice. ha-ha-ha! they came together matched as well as might be, she is a prostitute, a pickpocket he. ha-ha-ha! now morning has come, he is planning a theft; while she lies in her bed and laughs like she's daft. ha-ha-ha! comes morning, the laddie is led to the pen; but for the prostitute his pals await then. ha-ha-ha! ... [ ] while there can be but little doubt that these four stanzas are an actual transcript from life, heinrich heine's "ein weib" is such a striking parallel that it may be reproduced here as a matter of interest. the translation is by mr. louis untermeyer.--trans. a woman they loved each other beyond belief-- she was a strumpet, he was a thief; whenever she thought of his tricks, thereafter she'd throw herself on the bed with laughter. the day was spent with a reckless zest; at night she lay upon his breast. so when they took him, a while thereafter she watched at the window--with laughter. he sent word pleading "oh come to me, i need you, need you bitterly, yes, here and in the hereafter." her little head shook with laughter. at six in the morning they swung him high; at seven the turf on his grave was dry; at eight, however, she quaffed her red wine and sang with laughter! and still further a convict song: i'm a ruined laddie, ruined for alway; while year after year the days go away. and also: don't you cry, my mary, you'll belong to me; when i've served the army i will marry thee. but here suddenly, to the general amazement, the stout kitty, usually taciturn, burst into laughter. she was a native of odessa. "let me sing one song, too. it's sung by thieves and badger queens in the drink shops on our moldavanka and peresip." and in a horrible bass, in a rusty and unyielding voice, she began to sing, making the most incongruous gestures, but, evidently, imitating some cabaret cantatrice of the third calibre that she had sometime seen: "ah, i'll go to dukovka, sit down at the table, now i throw my hat off, toss it under table. then i athk my dearie, 'what will you drink, sweet?' but all the answer that she makes: 'my head aches fit to split.' 'i ain't a-athking you what your ache may be, but i am a-athking you what your drink may be: will it be beer, or for wine shall i call, or for violet wine, or nothing else at all?'" and all would have turned out well, if suddenly little white manka, in only her chemise and in white lace drawers, had not burst into the cabinet. some merchant, who the night before had arranged a paradisaical night, was carousing with her, and the ill-fated benedictine, which always acted upon the girl with the rapidity of dynamite, had brought her into the usual quarrelsome condition. she was no longer "little manka" and "little white manka," but she was "manka the scandaliste." having run into the cabinet, she suddenly, from unexpectedness, fell down on the floor, and, lying on her back, burst into such sincere laughter that all the rest burst out laughing as well. yes. but this laughter was not prolonged ... manka suddenly sat up on the floor and began to shout: "hurrah! new wenches have joined our place!" this was altogether an unexpected thing. the baroness did a still greater tactlessness. she said: "i am a patroness of a convent for fallen girls, and therefore, as a part of my duty, i must gather information about you." but here jennka instantly flared up: "get out of here right away, you old fool! you rag! you floor mop! ... your magdalene asylums--they're worse than a prison. your secretaries use us, like dogs carrion. your fathers, husbands, and brothers come to us, and we infect them with all sorts of diseases ... purposely ... and they in their turn infect you. your female superintendents live with the drivers, janitors and policemen, while we are put in a cell if we happen to laugh or joke a little among ourselves. and so, if you've come here as to a theatre, then you must hear the truth out, straight to your face." but tamara calmly stopped her: "stop, jennie, i will tell them myself ... can it be that you really think, baroness, that we are worse than the so-called respectable women? a man comes to me, pays me two roubles for a visit or five roubles for a night, and i don't in the least conceal this, from any one in the world ... but tell me, baroness, do you possibly know even one married lady with a family who isn't in secret giving herself up either for the sake of passion to a young man, or for the sake of money to an old one? i know very well that fifty percent of you are kept by lovers, while the remaining fifty, of those who are older, keep young lads. i also know that many--ah, how many!--of you cohabit with your fathers, brothers, and even sons, but these secrets you hide in some sort of a hidden casket. and that's all the difference between us. we are fallen, but we don't lie and don't pretend, but you all fall, and lie to boot. think it over for yourself; now--in whose favour is this difference?" "bravo, tamarochka, that's the way to serve them!" shouted manka, without getting up from the floor; dishevelled, fair, curly, resembling at this moment a thirteen-year-old girl. "now, now!" urged jennka as well, flashing with her flaming eyes. "why not, jennechka? i'll go further than that. out of us scarcely, scarcely one in a thousand has committed abortion. but all of you several times over. what? or isn't that the truth? and those of you who've done this, did it not out of desperation or cruel poverty, but you simply were afraid of spoiling your figure and beauty--that's your sole capital! or else you've been seeking only beastly carnal pleasure, while pregnancy and feeding interfered with your giving yourself up to it!" rovinskaya became confused and uttered in a quick whisper: "faites attention, baronne, que dans sa position cette demoiselle est instruite."[ ] [ ] "pay attention, baroness, the girl is rather educated for one of her position." "figurez-vous, que moi, j'ai aussi remarque cet etrange visage. comme si je l'ai deja vu ... est-ce en reve? ... en demi-delire? ou dans sa petite enfance?"[ ] [ ] "just imagine, i, too, have remarked this strange face. but where have i seen it ... was it in a dream? ... in semi-delirium? or in her early infancy?" "ne vous donnez pas la peine de chercher dans vos souvenirs, baronne," tamara suddenly interposed insolently. "je puis de suite vous venir aide. rappelez-vous seulement kharkoff, et la chambre d'hotel de koniakine, l'entrepreneur solovieitschik, et le tenor di grazzia ... a ce moment vous n'etiez pas encore m-me la baronne de ... [ ] however, let's drop the french tongue ... you were a common chorus girl and served together with me." [ ] "don't trouble to strain your memory, baroness. i will come to your aid at once. just recall kharkov, a room in koniakine's hotel, the theatrical manager, solovieitschik, and a certain lyrical tenor ... at that time you were not yet baroness de ..." "mais, dites-moi, au nom de dieu, comment vous trouvez vous ici, mademoiselle marguerite."[ ] [ ] "but tell me, in god's name, how you have come to be here, mademoiselle marguerite?" "oh, they ask us about that every day. i just up and came to be here ..." and with an inimitable cynicism she asked: "i trust you will pay for the time which we have passed with you?" "no, may the devil take you!" suddenly shouted out little white manka, quickly getting up from the rug. and suddenly, pulling two gold pieces out of her stocking, she flung them upon the table. "there, you! .. i'm giving you that for a cab. go away right now, otherwise i'll break up all the mirrors and bottles here..." rovinskaya got up and said with sincere, warm tears in her eyes: "of course, we'll go away, and the lesson of mlle. marguerite will prove of benefit to us. your time will be paid for--take care of it, volodya. still, you sang so much for us, that you must allow me to sing for you as well." rovinskaya went up to the piano, took a few chords, and suddenly began to sing the splendid ballad of dargomyzhsky: "we parted then with pride-- neither with sighs nor words proffered i thee reproach of jealousy ... we went apart for aye, yet only if with thee i might but chance to meet! .. ah, that with thee i might but chance to meet! "i weep not nor complain-- to fate i bend my knee... i know not, if you loved, so greatly wronging me? yet only if with thee i might but chance to meet! ... ah, that with thee i might but chance to meet!" this tender and passionate ballad, executed by a great artiste, suddenly reminded all these women of their first love; of their first fall; of a late leave-taking at a dawn in the spring, in the chill of the morning, when the grass is gray from the dew, while the red sky paints the tips of the birches a rosy colour; of last embraces, so closely entwined, and of the unerring heart's mournful whispers: "no, this will not be repeated, this will not be repeated!" and the lips were then cold and dry, while the damp mist of the morning lay upon the hair. silence seized tamara; silence seized manka the scandaliste; and suddenly jennka, the most untamable of all the girls, ran up to the artiste, fell down on her knees, and began to sob at her feet. and rovinskaya, touched herself, put her arms around her head and said: "my sister, let me kiss you!" jennka whispered something into her ear. "why, that's a silly trifle," said rovinskaya. "a few months of treatment and it will all go away." "no, no, no ... i want to make all of them diseased. let them all rot and croak." "ah, my dear," said rovinskaya, "i would not do that in your place." and now jennka, the proud jennka began kissing the knees and hands of the artiste and was saying: "then why have people wronged me so? ... why have they wronged me so? why? why? why?" such is the might of genius! the only might which takes into its beautiful hands not the abject reason, but the warm soul of man! the self-respecting jennka was hiding her face in rovinskaya's dress; little white manka was sitting meekly on a chair, her face covered with a handkerchief; tamara, with elbow propped on her knee and head bowed on the palm of her hand, was intently looking down, while simeon the porter, who had been looking in against any emergency, only opened his eyes wide in amazement. rovinskaya was quietly whispering into jennka's very ear: "never despair. sometimes things fall out so badly that there's nothing for it but to hang one's self--but, just look, to-morrow life has changed abruptly. my dear, my sister, i am now a world celebrity. but if you only knew what seas of humiliation and vileness i have had to wade through! be well, then, my dear, and believe in your star." she bent down to jennka and kissed her on the forehead. and never afterwards could volodya chaplinsky, who had been watching this scene with a painful tension, forget those warm and beautiful rays, which at this moment kindled in the green, long, egyptian eyes of the artiste. the party departed gloomily, but ryazanov lingered behind for a minute. he walked up to jennka, respectfully and gently kissed her hand, and said: "if possible, forgive our prank ... this, of course, will not be repeated. but if you ever have need of me, i am always at your service. here is my visiting card. don't stick it out on your bureau; but remember, that from this evening on i am your friend." and, having kissed jennka's hand once more, he was the last to go down the stairs. chapter viii. on thursday, since very morning, a ceaseless, fine drizzle had begun to fall, and so the leaves of the chestnuts, acacias, and poplars had at once turned green. and, suddenly, it became somehow dreamily quiet and protractedly tedious. pensive and monotonous. during this all the girls had gathered, as usual, in jennka's room. but something strange was going on within her. she did not utter witticisms, did not laugh, did not read, as always, her usual yellow-back novel which was now lying aimlessly either on her breast or stomach; but was vicious, wrapped up in sadness, and in her eyes blazed a yellow fire that spoke of hatred. in vain did little white manka, manka the scandaliste, who adored her, try to turn her attention to herself--jennka seemed not to notice her, and the conversation did not at all get on. it was depressing. but it may have been that the august drizzle, which had steadily set in for several weeks running, reacted upon all of them. tamara sat down on jennka's bed, gently embraced her, and, having put her mouth near her very ear, said in a whisper: "what's the matter, jennechka? i've seen for a long time that something strange is going on in you. and manka feels that too. just see, how she's wasted without your caressing. tell me. perhaps i'll be able to help you in some way?" jennka closed her eyes and shook her head in negation. tamara moved away from her a little, but continued to stroke her shoulder gently. "it's your affair, jennechka. i daren't butt into your soul. i only asked because you're the only being who..." jennka with decision suddenly jumped out of bed, seized tamara by the hand and said abruptly and commandingly: "all right! let's get out of here for a minute. i'll tell you everything. girls, wait for us a little while." in the light corridor jennka laid her hands on the shoulders of her mate and with a distorted, suddenly blanched face, said: "well, then, listen here: some one has infected me with syphilis." "oh, my poor darling. long?" "long. do you remember, when the students were here? the same ones who started a row with platonov? i found out about it for the first time then. i found out in the daytime." "do you know," quietly remarked tamara, "i almost guessed about this, and particularly then, when you went down on your knees before the singer and talked quietly about something with her. but still, my dear jennechka, you must attend to yourself." jennka wrathfully stamped her foot and tore in half the batiste handkerchief which she had been nervously crumpling in her hands. "no! not for anything! i won't infect any one of you. you may have noticed yourself, that during the last weeks i don't dine at the common table, and that i wash and wipe the dishes myself. that's why i'm trying to break manka away from me, whom, you know, i love sincerely, in the real way. but these two-legged skunks i infect purposely, infect every evening, ten, fifteen of them. let them rot, let them carry the syphilis on to their wives, mistresses, mothers--yes, yes, their mothers also, and their fathers, and their governesses, and even their grand-grandmothers. let them all perish, the honest skunks!" tamara carefully and tenderly stroked jennka's head. "can it be that you'll go the limit, jennechka?" "yes. and without any mercy. all of you, however, don't have to be afraid of me. i choose the man myself. the stupidest, the handsomest, the richest and the most important, but not to one of you will i let them go afterward. oh! i make believe i'm so passionate before them, that you'd burst out laughing if you saw. i bite them, i scratch, i cry and shiver like an insane woman. they believe it, the pack of fools." "it's your affair, it's your affair, jennechka," meditatively uttered tamara, looking down. "perhaps you're right, at that. who knows? but tell me, how did you get away from the doctor?" jennka suddenly turned away from her, pressed her face against the angle of the window frame and suddenly burst into bitter, searing tears--the tears of wrath and vengefulness--and at the same time she spoke, gasping and quivering: "because ... because ... because god has sent me especial luck: i am sick there where, in all probability, no doctor can see. and ours, besides that, is old and stupid..." and suddenly, with some unusual effort of the will jennka stopped her tears just as unexpectedly as she had started crying. "come to me, tamarochka," she said. "of course, you won't chatter too much?" "of course not." and they returned into jennka's room, both of them calm and restrained. simeon walked into the room. he, contrary to his usual brazenness, always bore himself with a shade of respect toward jennka. simeon said: "well, now, jennechka, their excellency has come to vanda. allow her to go away for ten minutes." vanda, a blue-eyed, light blonde, with a large red mouth, with the typical face of a lithuanian, looked imploringly at jennka. if jennka had said "no" she would have remained in the room, but jennka did not say anything and even shut her eyes deliberately. vanda obediently went out of the room. this general came accurately twice a month, every two weeks (just as to zoe, another girl, came daily another honoured guest, nicknamed the director in the house). jennka suddenly threw the old, tattered book behind her. her brown eyes flared up with a real golden fire. "you're wrong in despising this general," said she. "i've known worse ethiopians. i had a certain guest once--a real blockhead. he couldn't make love to me otherwise than ... otherwise than ... well, let's say it plainly: he pricked me with pins in the breast ... while in vilno a polish catholic priest used to come to me. he would dress me all in white, compel me to powder myself, lay me down on the bed. he'd light three candles near me. and then, when i seemed to him altogether like a dead woman, he'd throw himself upon me." little white manka suddenly exclaimed: "it's the truth you're telling, jennka! i had a certain old bugger, too. he made me pretend all the time that i was an innocent girl, so's i'd cry and scream. but, jennechka, though you're the smartest one of us, yet i'll bet you won't guess who he was ..." "the warden of a prison?" "a fire chief." suddenly katie burst into laughter in her bass: "well, now, i had a certain teacher. he taught some kind of arithmetic, i disremember which. he always made me believe, that i was the man, and he the woman, and that i should do it to him ... by force ... and what a fool! just imagine, girls, he'd yell all the time: 'i'm your woman! i'm all yours! take me! take me!'" "loony!" said the blue-eyed, spry verka in a positive and unexpectedly contralto voice: "loony." "no, why?" suddenly retorted the kindly and modest tamara. "not crazy at all, but simply, like all men, a libertine. at home it's tiresome for him, while here for his money he can receive whatever pleasure he desires. that's plain, it seems?" jennka, who had been silent up to now, suddenly, with one quick movement sat up in bed. "you're all fools!" she cried. "why do you forgive them all this? before i used to be foolish myself, too, but now i compel them to walk before me on all fours, compel them to kiss my soles, and they do this with delight ... you all know, girlies, that i don't love money, but i pluck the men in whatever way i can. they, the nasty beasts, present me with the portraits of their wives, brides, mothers, daughters ... however, you've seen, i think, the photographs in our water-closet? but now, just think of it, my children ... a woman loves only once, but for always, while a man loves like a he-greyhound... that he's unfaithful is nothing; but he never has even the commonest feeling of gratitude left either for the old, or the new, mistress. i've heard it said, that now there are many clean boys among the young people. i believe this, though i haven't seen, haven't met them, myself. but all those i have seen are all vagabonds, nasty brutes and skunks. not so long ago i read some novel of our miserable life. it's almost the same thing as i'm telling you now." vanda came back. she slowly, carefully, sat down on the edge of jennka's bed; there, where the shadow of the lamp fell. out of that deep, though deformed psychical delicacy, which is peculiar to people sentenced to death, prisoners at hard labour, and prostitutes, none had the courage to ask her how she had passed this hour and a half. suddenly she threw upon the table twenty-five roubles and said: "bring me white wine and a watermelon." and, burying her face in her arms, which had sunk on the table, she began to sob inaudibly. and again no one took the liberty of putting any question to her. only jennka grew pale from wrath and bit her lower lip so that a row of white spots was left upon it. "yes," she said; "here, now, i understand tamara. you hear, tamara, i apologize before you. i've often laughed over your being in love with your thief senka. but here, now, i'll say that of all the men the most decent is a thief or a murderer. he doesn't hide the fact that he loves a girlie, and, if need be, will commit a crime for her--a theft or a murder. but these--the rest of them! all lying, falsehood, petty cunning, depravity on the sly. the nasty beast has three families, a wife and five children. a governess and two children abroad. the eldest daughter from the first marriage, and a child by her. and this everybody, everybody in town knows, save his little children. and even they, perhaps, guess it and whisper among themselves. and, just imagine, he's a respected person, honoured by the whole world ... my children, it seems we've never had occasion to enter into confidences with each other, and yet i'll tell you, that i when i was ten and a half, was sold by my own mother in the city of zhitomir to doctor tarabukin. i kissed his hands, implored him to spare me, i cried out to him: 'i'm little!' but he'd answer me: 'that's nothing, that's nothing: you'll grow up.' well, of course, there was pain, aversion, nastiness ... and he afterwards spread it around as a current anecdote. the desperate cry of my soul." "well, as long as we do speak, let's speak to the end," suddenly and calmly said zoe, and smiled negligently and sadly. "i was deprived of innocence by a teacher in the ministerial school, ivan petrovich sus. he simply called me over to his rooms, and his wife at that time had gone to market for a suckling pig--it was christmas. treated me with candies, and then said it was going to be one of two things: either i must obey him in everything, or he'd at once expel me out of school for bad conduct. but then you know yourselves, girls, how we feared the teachers. here they aren't terrible to us, because we do with them whatever we want--but at that time! for then he seemed to us greater than czar and god." "and me a stewdent. he was teaching the master's boys in our place. there, where i was a servant ..." "no, but i ..." exclaimed niura, but, turning around unexpectedly, remained as she was with her mouth open. looking in the direction of her gaze, jennka had to wring her hands. in the doorway stood liubka, grown thin, with dark rings under her eyes, and, just like a somnambulist, was searching with her hand for the door-knob, as a point of support. "liubka, you fool, what's the matter with you?" yelled jennka loudly. "what is it?" "well, of course, what: he took and chased me out." no one said a word. jennka hid her eyes with her hands and started breathing hard, and it could be seen how under the skin of her cheeks the taut muscles of the jaws were working. "jennechka, all my hope is only in you," said liubka with a deep expression of weary helplessness. "everybody respects you so. talk it over, dearie, with anna markovna or with simeon ... let them take me back." jennka straightened up on the bed, fixed liubka with her dry, burning, yet seemingly weeping eyes, and asked brokenly: "have you eaten anything to-day?" "no. neither yesterday, nor to-day. nothing." "listen, jennechka," asked vanda quietly, "suppose i give her some white wine? and verka meanwhile will run to the kitchen for meat? what?" "do as you know best. of course, that's all right. and give a look, girlies, why, she's all wet. oh, what a booby! well! lively! undress yourself! little white manka, or you, tamarochka, give her dry drawers, warm stockings and slippers. well, now," she turned to liubka, "tell us, you idiot, all that happened to you!" chapter ix. on that early morning when lichonin so suddenly, and, perhaps, unexpectedly even to himself, had carried off liubka from the gay establishment of anna markovna it was the height of summer. the trees still remained green, but in the scent of the air, the leaves, and the grass there was already to be felt, as though from afar, the tender, melancholy, and at the same time bewitching scent of the nearing autumn. with wonder the student gazed at the trees, so clean, innocent and quiet, as though god, imperceptibly to men, had planted them about here at night; and the trees themselves were looking around with wonder upon the calm blue water, that still seemed slumbering in the pools and ditches and under the wooden bridge thrown across the shallow river; upon the lofty, as though newly washed sky, which had just awakened, and, in the glow of dawn, half asleep, was smiling with a rosy, lazy, happy smile in greeting to the kindling sun. the heart of the student expanded and quivered; both from the beauty of the beatific morning, and from the joy of existence, and from the sweet air, refreshing his lungs after the night, passed without sleep, in a crowded and smoke-filled compartment. but the beauty and loftiness of his own action moved him still more. yes, he had acted like a man, like a real man, in the highest sense of that word! even now he is not repenting of what he had done. it's all right for them (to whom this "them" applied, lichonin did not properly understand even himself), it's all right for them to talk about the horrors of prostitution; to talk, sitting at tea, with rolls and sausage, in the presence of pure and cultured girls. but had any one of his colleagues taken some actual step toward liberating a woman from perdition? eh, now? and then there is also--the sort that will come to this same sonechka marmeladova, will tell her all sorts of taradiddles, describe all kinds of horrors to her, butt into her soul, until he brings her to tears; and right off will start in crying himself and begin to console her, embrace her, pat her on the head, kiss her at first on the cheek, then on the lips; well, and everybody knows what happens next! faugh! but with him, with lichonin, the word and the deed were never at odds. he clasped liubka around the waist, and looked at her with kindly, almost loving, eyes; although, the very same minute, he himself thought that he was regarding her as a father or a brother. sleep was fearfully besetting liubka; her eyes would close, and she with an effort would open them wide, so as not to fall asleep again; while on her lips lay the same naive, childish, tired smile, which lichonin had noticed still there, in the cabinet. and out of one corner of her mouth ran a thin trickle of saliva. "liubka, my dear! my darling, much-suffering woman! behold how fine it is all around! lord! here it's five years that i haven't seen the sunrise. now play at cards, now drinking, now i had to hurry to the university. behold, my dearest, over there the dawn has burst into bloom. the sun is near! this is your dawn, liubochka! this is your new life beginning. you will fearlessly lean upon my strong arm. i shall lead you out upon the road of honest toil, on the way to a brave combat with life, face to face with it!" liubka eyed him askance. "there, the fumes are still playing in his head," she thought kindly. "but that's nothing--he's kind and a good sort. only a trifle homely." and, having smiled with a half-sleepy smile, she said in a tone of capricious reproach: "ye--es! you'll fool me, never fear. all of you men are like that. you just gain yours at first, to get your pleasure, and then--no attention whatsoever!" "i? oh? that i should do this!" lichonin exclaimed warmly and even smote himself on the chest with his free hand. "then you know me very badly! i'm too honest a man to be deceiving a defenseless girl. no! i'll exert all my powers and all my soul to educate your mind, to widen your outlook, to compel your poor heart, which has suffered so, to forget all the wounds and wrongs which life has inflicted upon it. i will be a father and a brother to you! i shall safeguard your every step! and if you will come to love somebody with a truly pure, holy love, then i shall bless that day and hour when i had snatched you out of this dantean hell!" during the continuation of this flaming tirade the old cabby with great significance, although silently, began laughing, and from this inaudible laughter his back shook. old cabbies hear very many things, because to the cabby, sitting in front, everything is readily audible, which is not at all suspected by the conversing fares; and many things do the old cabbies know of that which takes place among people. who knows, perhaps he had heard more than once even more disordered, more lofty speeches? it seemed to liubka for some reason that lichonin had grown angry at her, or that he was growing jealous beforehand of some imaginary rival. he was declaiming with entirely too much noise and agitation. she became perfectly awake, turned her face to lichonin with wide open, uncomprehending, and at the same time submissive eyes, and slightly touched his right hand, lying on her waist, with her fingers. "don't get angry, my sweetie. i'll never exchange you for another. here's my word of honour, honest to god! my word of honour, that i never will! don't you think i feel you're wanting to take care of me? do you think i don't understand? why, you're such an attractive, nice little young fellow. there, now, if you were an old man and homely..." "ah! you haven't got the right idea!" shouted lichonin, and again in high-flown style began to tell her about the equal rights of women, about the sacredness of toil, about human justice, about freedom, about the struggle against reigning evil. of all his words liubka understood exactly not a one. she still felt herself guilty of something and somehow shrank all up, grew sad, bowed her head and became quiet. a little more and she, in all probability, would have burst out crying in the middle of the street; but fortunately, they by this time had driven up to the house where lichonin was staying. "well, here we are at home," said the student. "stop, driver!" and when he had paid him, he could not refrain from declaiming with pathos, his hand extended theatrically straight before him: "and into my house, calm and fearless, as its full mistress walk thou in!" and again the unfathomable, prophetic smile wrinkled the aged brown face of the cabby. chapter x. the room in which lichonin lived was situated on the fifth story and a half. and a half, because there are such five, six, and seven-story profitable houses, packed to overflowing and cheap, on top of which are erected still other sorry bug-breeders of roof iron, something in the nature of mansards; or more exactly, bird-houses, in which it is fearfully cold in winter, while in the summer time it is just as torrid as in the tropics. liubka with difficulty clambered upward. it seemed to her that now, now, two steps more, and she would drop straight down on the steps and fall into a sleep from which nothing would be able to wake her. but lichonin was saying all the time: "my dear! i can see you are tired. but that's nothing. lean upon me. we are going upwards all the time! always higher and higher! is this not a symbol of all human aspirations? my comrade, my sister, lean upon my arm!" here it became still worse for poor liubka. as it was, she could barely go up alone, but here she also had to drag in tow lichonin, who had grown extremely heavy. and his weight would not really have mattered; his wordiness, however, was beginning to irritate her little by little. so irritates at times the ceaseless, wearisome crying, like a toothache, of an infant at breast; the piercing whimpering of a canary; or someone whistling without pause and out of tune in an adjoining room. finally, they reached lichonin's room. there was no key in the door. and, as a rule, it was never even locked with a key. lichonin pushed the door and they entered. it was dark in the room, because the window curtains were lowered. it smelt of mice, kerosene, yesterday's vegetable soup, long-.used bed linen, stale tobacco smoke. in the half-dusk some one who could not be seen was snoring deafeningly and with variations. lichonin raised the shade. there were the usual furnishings of a poor student: a sagging, unmade bed with a crumpled blanket; a lame table, and on it a candlestick without a candle; several books on the floor and on the table; cigarette stubs everywhere; and opposite the bed, along the other wall, an old, old divan, upon which at the present moment was sleeping and snoring, with mouth wide open, some young man with black hair and moustache. the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned and through its opening could be seen the chest and black hair, the like of which for thickness and curliness could be found only on persian lambs. "nijeradze! hey, nijeradze, get up!" cried lichonin and prodded the sleeper in the ribs. "prince!" "m-m-m..." "may your race be even accursed in the person of your ancestors and descendants! may they even be exiled from the heights of the beauteous caucasus! may they even never behold the blessed georgia! get up, you skunk! get up you aravian dromedary! kintoshka! ..." but suddenly, unexpectedly for lichonin, liubka intervened. she took him by the arm and said timidly: "darling, why torture him? maybe he wants to sleep, maybe he's tired? let him sleep a bit. i'd better go home. will you give me a half for a cabby? to-morrow you'll come to me again. isn't that so, sweetie?" lichonin was abashed. so strange did the intervention of this silent, apparently sleepy girl, appear to him. of course, he did not grasp that she was actuated by an instinctive, unconscious pity for a man who had not had enough sleep; or, perhaps, a professional regard for the sleep of other people. but the astonishment was only momentary. for some reason he became offended. he raised the hand of the recumbent man, which hung down to the floor, with the extinguished cigarette still remaining between its fingers, and, shaking it hard, he said in a serious, almost severe voice: "listen, now, nijeradze, i'm asking you seriously. understand, now, may the devil take you that i'm not alone, but with a woman. swine!" it was as though a miracle had happened: the lying man suddenly jumped up, as though some spring of unusual force had instantaneously unwound under him. he sat down on the divan, rapidly rubbed with his palms his eyes, forehead, temples; saw the woman, became confused at once, and muttered, hastily buttoning his blouse: "is that you, lichonin? and here i was waiting and waiting for you and fell asleep. request the unknown comrade to turn away for just a minute." he hastily pulled on his gray, everyday student's coat, and rumpled up with all the fingers of both his hands his luxuriant black curls. liubka, with the coquetry natural to all women, no matter in what years or situation they find themselves, walked up to the sliver of a mirror hanging on the wall, to fix her hair-dress. nijeradze askance, questioningly, only with the movement of his eyes, indicated her to lichonin. "never mind. don't pay any attention," answered the other aloud. "but let's get out of here, however. i'll tell you everything right away. excuse me, liubochka, it's only for a minute. i'll come back at once, fix you up, and then evaporate, like smoke." "but don't trouble yourself," replied liubka: "it'll be all right for me here, right on this divan. and you fix yourself up on the bed." "no, that's no longer like a model, my angel! i have a colleague here. and so i'll go to him to sleep. i'll return in just a minute." both students went out into the corridor. "what meaneth this dream?" asked nijeradze, opening wide his oriental, somewhat sheepish eyes. "whence this beauteous child, this comrade in a petticoat?" lichonin shook his head with great significance and made a wry face. now, when the ride, the fresh air, the morning, and the business-like, everyday, accustomed setting had entirely sobered him, he was beginning to experience within his soul an indistinct feeling of a certain awkwardness, needlessness of this sudden action; and at the same time something in the nature of an unconscious irritation both against himself and the woman he had carried off. he already had a presentiment of the onerousness of living together, of a multiplicity of cares, unpleasantnesses and expenses; of the equivocal smiles or even simply the unceremonious questionings of comrades; finally, of the serious hindrance during the time of government examinations. but, having scarcely begun speaking with nijeradze, he at once became ashamed of his pusillanimity, and having started off listlessly, towards the end he again began to prance on his heroic steed. "do you see, prince," he said, in his confusion twisting a button of his comrade's coat and without looking in his eyes, "you've made a mistake. this isn't a comrade in a petticoat, but ... simply, i was just now with my colleagues ... that is, i wasn't, but just dropped in for a minute with my friends into the yamkas, to anna markovna ..." "with whom?" asked nijeradze, becoming animated. "well, isn't it all the same to you, prince? there was tolpygin, ramses, a certain sub-professor--yarchenko--borya sobashnikov, and others ... i don't recall. we had been boat-riding the whole evening, then dived into a publican's, and only after that, like swine, started for the yamkas. i, you know, am a very abstemious man. i only sat and soaked up cognac, like a sponge, with a certain reporter i know. well, all the others fell from grace however. and so, toward morning, for some reason or other, i went all to pieces. i got so sad and full of pity from looking at these unhappy women. i also thought, now, of how our sisters enjoy our regard, love, protection; how our mothers are surrounded with reverent adoration. just let some one say one rude word to them, shove them, offend them; we are ready to chew his throat off! isn't that the truth?" "m-m? ..." drawled out the georgian, half questioningly, half expectantly, and squinted his eyes to one side. "well, then i thought: why, now, any blackguard, any whippersnapper, any shattered ancient can take any one of these women to himself for a minute or for a night, as a momentary whim; and indifferently, one superfluous time more--the thousand and first--profane and defile in her that which is the most precious in a human being--love... do you understand--revile, trample it underfoot, pay for the visit and walk away in peace, his hands in his pockets, whistling. but the most horrible of all is that all this has come to be a habit with them; it's all one to her, and it's all one to him. the feelings have dulled, the soul has dimmed. that's so, isn't it? and yet, in every one of them perishes both a splendid sister and a sainted mother. eh? isn't that the truth?" "n-na? ...." mumbled nijeradze and again shifted his eyes to one side. "and so i thought: wherefore words and superfluous exclamations! to the devil with hypocritical speeches during conventions. to the devil with abolition, regulation (suddenly, involuntarily, the recent words of the reporter came to his mind), magdalene asylums and all these distributions of holy books in the establishments! here, i'll up and act as a really honest man, snatch a girl out of this slough, implant her in real firm soil, calm her, encourage her, treat her kindly." "h-hm!" grunted nijeradze with a grin. "eh, prince! you always have salacious things on your mind. for you understand that i'm not talking about a woman, but about a human being; not about flesh, but about a soul." "all right, all right, me soul, go on!" "futhermore, as i thought, so did i act. i took her to-day from anna markovna's and brought her for the present to me. and later--whatever god may grant. i'll teach her in the beginning to read, and write; then open up for her a little cook-shop, or a grocery store, let's say. i think that the comrades won't refuse to help me. the human heart, prince, my brother--every heart--is in need of cordiality, of warmth. and lo and behold! in a year, in two, i will return to society a good, industrious, worthy member, with a virgin soul, open to all sorts of great possibilities... for she has given only her body, while her soul is pure and innocent." "tse, tse, tse," the prince smacked his tongue. "what does this mean, you tifflissian he-mule?" "and will you buy her a sewing machine?" "why a sewing machine, in particular? i don't understand." "it's always that way in the novels, me soul. just as soon as the hero has saved the poor, but lost, creature, he at once sets up a sewing machine for her." "stop talking nonsense," lichonin waved him away angrily with his hand. "clown!" the georgian suddenly grew heated, his black eyes began to sparkle, and immediately caucasian intonations could be heard in his voice. "no, not nonsense, me soul. it's one of two things here, and it'll all end in one and the same result. either you'll get together with her and after five months chuck her out on the street; and she'll return to the brothel or take to walking the street. that's a fact! or else you won't get together with her, but will begin to load her up with manual or mental labours and will try to develop her ignorant, dark mind; and she from tedium will run away from you, and will again find herself either walking the street, or in a brothel. that's a fact, too! however, there is still a third combination. you'll be vexing yourself about her like a brother, like the knight lancelot, but she, secretly from you, will fall in love with another. me soul, believe me, that wooman, when she is a wooman, is always--a wooman. and the other will play a bit with her body, and after three months chuck her out into the street or into a brothel." lichonin sighed deeply. somewhere deep--not in his mind, but in the hidden, almost unseizable secret recesses of his consciousness--something resembling the thought that nijeradze was right flashed through him. but he quickly gained control of himself, shook his head, and, stretching out his hand to the prince, uttered triumphantly: "i promise you, that after half a year you'll take your words back, and as a mark of apology, you erivanian billy goat, you armavirian egg-plant, you'll stand me to a dozen of cakhetine wine." "va! that's a go!" the prince struck lichonin's hand with his palm with all his might. "with pleasure. but if it comes out as i say--then you do it." "then i do it. however, au revoir, prince. whom are you lodging with?" "right here, in this corridor, at soloviev's. but you, of course, like a mediaeval knight, will lay a two-edged sword between yourself and the beauteous rosamond? yes?" "nonsense! i did want to pass the night at soloviev's myself. but now i'll go and wander about the streets a bit and turn in into somebody's; to zaitzevich or strump. farewell, prince!" "wait, wait!" nijeradze called him, when he had gone a few steps. "i have forgotten to tell you the main thing: partzan has tripped up!" "so that's how?" wondered lichonin, and at once yawned long, deeply and with enjoyment. "yes. but there's nothing dreadful; only the possession of some illegal brochures and stuff. he won't have to sit for more than a year." "that's nothing; he's a husky lad, he can stand it." "he's husky, all right" confirmed the prince. "farewell!" "au revoir, knight grunwaldus!" "au revoir, you carbidinian stallion." chapter xi. lichonin was left alone. in the half-dark corridor it smelt of kerosene fumes from the guttering little tin lamp, and of the odour of stagnant bad tobacco. the daylight dully penetrated only near the top, from two small glass frames, let in the roof at both ends of the corridor. lichonin found himself in that simultaneously weakened and elevated mood which is so familiar to every man who has happened to be thoroughly sleepless for a long time. it was as though he had gone out of the limitations of everyday human life, and this life had become to him distant and of indifference; but at the same time his thoughts and emotions obtained a certain peaceful clarity and apathetic distinctness, and there was a tedious and languishing allurement in this crystal nirvanah. he stood near his room, leaning against the wall, and seemed to see, feel, and hear how near him and below him were sleeping several score of people; sleeping with the last, fast morning sleep, with open mouths, with measured deep breathing, with a wilted pallor on their faces, glistening from sleep; and through his head flashed the thought, remote yet familiar since childhood, of how horrible sleeping people are--far more horrible than dead people. then he remembered about liubka. his subterranean, submerged, mysterious "i" rapidly, rapidly whispered that he ought to drop into the room, and see if the girl were all right, as well as make certain dispositions about tea in the morning; but he made believe to himself that he was not at all even thinking of this, and walked out into the street. he walked, looking closely at everything that met his eyes, with an idle and exact curiosity new to him; and every feature was drawn for him in relief to such a degree that it seemed to him as though he were feeling it with his fingers... there a peasant woman passed by. over her shoulder is a yoke staff, while at each end of the yoke is a large pail of milk; her face is not young, with a net of fine wrinkles on the temples and with two deep furrows from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth; but her cheeks are rosy, and, probably, hard to the touch, while her hazel eyes radiate a sprightly peasant smile. from the movement of the heavy yoke and from the smooth walk her hips sway rhythmically now to the left, now to the right, and in their wave-like movements there is a coarse, sensual beauty. "a mischievous dame, and she's lived through a checkered life," reflected lichonin. and suddenly, unexpectedly to himself, he had a feeling for, and irresistibly desired, this woman, altogether unknown to him, homely and not young; in all probability dirty and vulgar, but still resembling, as it seemed to him, a large antonovka[ ] apple which had fallen to the ground-somewhat bored by a worm, and which had lain just a wee bit too long, but which has still preserved its bright colour and its fragrant, winey aroma. [ ] somewhat like a spitzbergen, but a trifle rounder.--trans. getting ahead of her, an empty, black, funereal catafalque whirled by; with two horses in harness, and two tied behind to the little rear columns. the torch-bearers and grave-diggers, already drunk since morning, with red, brutish faces, with rusty opera hats on their heads, were sitting in a disorderly heap on their uniform liveries, on the reticular horse-blankets, on the mourning lanterns; and with rusty, hoarse voices were roaring out some incoherent song. "they must be hurrying to a funeral procession; or, perhaps, have even finished it already," reflected lichonin; "merry fellows!" on the boulevard he came to a stop and sat down on a small wooden bench, painted green. two rows of mighty centenarian chestnuts went away into the distance, merging together somewhere afar into one straight green arrow. the prickly large nuts were already hanging on the trees. lichonin suddenly recalled that at the very beginning of the spring he had been sitting on this very boulevard, and at this very same spot. then it had been a calm, gentle evening of smoky purple, soundlessly falling into slumber, just like a smiling, tired maiden. then the stalwart chestnuts, with their foliage--broad at the bottom and narrow toward the top--had been strewn all over with clusters of blossoms, growing with bright, rosy, thin cones straight to the sky; just as though some one by mistake had taken and fastened upon all the chestnuts, as upon lustres, pink christmas-tree candles. and suddenly, with extraordinary poignancy--every man sooner or later passes through this zone of inner emotion--lichonin felt, that here are the nuts ripening already, while then there had been little pink blossoming candles, and that there would be many more springs and many blossoms, but the one which had passed no one and nothing had the power to bring back. sadly gazing into the depths of the retreating dense alley, he suddenly noticed that sentimental tears were making his eyes smart. he got up and went on farther, looking closely at everything that he met with an incessant, sharpened, and at the same time calm attention, just as though he were looking at the god-created world for the first time. a gang of stone masons went past him on the pavement, and all of them were reflected in his inner vision with an exaggerated vividness and brilliance of colour, just as though on the frosted glass of a camera obscura. the foreman, with a red beard, matted to one side, and with blue austere eyes; and a tremendous young fellow, whose left eye was swollen, and who had a spot of a dark-blue colour spreading from the forehead to the cheekbone and from the nose to the temple; and a young boy with a naive, country face, with a gaping mouth like a fledgling's, weak, moist; and an old man who, having come late, was running after the gang at a funny, goat-like trot; and their clothes, soiled with lime, their aprons and their chisels--all this flickered before him in an inanimate file--a colourful, motley, but dead cinematographic film. he had to cut across the new kishenevsky market. suddenly the savoury, greasy odour of something roasted compelled him to distend his nostrils. lichonin recalled that he had not eaten anything since noon yesterday, and at once felt hunger. he turned to the right, into the centre of the market. in the days of his starvings--and he had had to experience them more than once--he would come here to the market, and for the pitiful coppers, gotten with difficulty, would buy himself bread and fried sausage. this was in winter, oftenest of all. the huckstress, wrapped up in a multiplicity of clothes, usually sat upon a pot of coals for warmth; while before her, on the iron dripping-pan, hissed and crackled the thick, home-made sausage, cut into pieces a quarter of a yard in length, plentifully seasoned with garlic. a piece of sausage usually cost ten kopecks, the bread two kopecks. there were very many folk at market to-day. even at a distance, edging his way to the familiar, loved stall, lichonin heard the sounds of music. having made his way through the crowd, which in a solid ring surrounded one of the stalls, he saw a naive and endearing sight, which may be seen only in the blessed south of russia. ten or fifteen huckstresses, during ordinary times gossips of evil tongue and addicted to unrestrainable swearing, inexhaustible in its verbal diversity, but now, evidently, flattering and tender cronies, had started celebrating even since last evening; had caroused the whole night through and now had carried their noisy merrymaking out to the market. the hired musicians--two fiddles, a first and a second, and a tambourine--were strumming a monotonous but a lively, bold, daring and cunning tune. some of the wives were clinking glasses and kissing each other, pouring vodka over one another; others poured it out into glasses and over the tables; others still, clapping their palms in time with the music, oh'd, squealed, and danced, squatting in one place. and in the middle of the ring, upon the cobbles of the pavement, a stout woman of about forty-five, but still handsome, with red, fleshy lips, with humid, intoxicated, seemingly unctuous eyes, merrily sparkling from under the high bows of black, regular, little russian eyebrows, was whirling around and stamping out a tattoo on one spot. all the beauty and all the art of her dance consisted in that she would now bow her little head and look out provokingly from under her eyebrows, then suddenly toss it back and let her eyelashes down and spread her hands out at her sides; and also in that in measure with the dance her enormous breasts swayed and quivered under her red calico waist. during the dance she was singing, now shuffling her heels, now the toes, of her goat-skin shoes: "the fiddle's playing on the street, you can hear its bass so sweet; my mother has me locked up neat, my waitin' dearie i can't meet." that was the very country-wife whom lichonin knew; the self-same who not only had had him for a client during hard times, but had even extended him credit. she suddenly recognized lichonin, darted to him, embraced him, squeezed him to her bosom and kissed him straight on his lips with her moist, warm, thick lips. then she spread her arms out wide, smote one palm against the other, intertwined her fingers, and sweetly, as only podolian wives can do it, began to coo: "my little master, my little silver gold trove, my lovie! you forgive a drunken wife like me, now. well, what of it? i've gone op a spree!" she then darted at him in an attempt to kiss his hand. "but then, i know you ain't proud, like other gentry. well, give me your hand, dearie-dear; why, i want to kiss your little hand! no, no, no! i athk, i athk you! ..." "well, now, that's nonsense, aunt glycera!" linchonin interrupted her, unexpectedly becoming animated. "let's best kiss just so, now. your lips are just too sweet!" "ah, my little sweetheart! my little bright sun, my little apple of paradise, you," glycera waxed tender, "give me your lips, then! give me your little lips to buss, then! ..." she pressed him warmly to her gigantean bosom and again slavered over him with her moist, warm, hottentot lips. after that, she seized him by his sleeve, brought him out into the middle of the ring, and began to walk around him with a stately, mincing step, having bent her waist coquettishly and vociferating: "oh, each to his taste, i want paraska more, for i've a divel in my pants her skirt holds somethin' for!" and then suddenly she passed on, sustained by the musicians, to a most rollicking, little russian, thumping gopak dance: "oh, chook, that is too much, you have soiled your apron too much. well, prisko, don't you fret, wipe it off, then, if you're wet! tralala, tralala ... sleeps, khima, and won't stir that a kossack sleeps with her, you feel all, khima--why deceive? just to yourself you make believe. tai, tai, tralalai..."' lichonin, completely grown merry, suddenly began jumping like a goat about her, just like a satellite around a whirling planet--long-legged, long-armed, stooping and altogether incongruous. his entrance was greeted by a general but pretty friendly neighing. he was made to sit down at the table, was helped to vodka and sausage. he, for his part, sent a tramp he knew after beer, and, glass in hand, delivered three absurd speeches: one about the self-determination of ukraine; another about the goodness of little russian sausage, in connection with the beauty and domesticity of the women of little russia; and the third, for some reason, about trade and industry in the south of russia. sitting alongside of lukeriya, he was all the time trying to embrace her around the waist, and she did not oppose this. but even his long arms could not encompass her amazing waist. however, she clasped his hand powerfully under the table, until it hurt, with her enormous, soft hand, as hot as fire. at this moment among the huckstresses, who up to now had been tenderly kissing, certain old, unsettled quarrels and grievances flickered up. two of the wives, bending toward each other just like roosters ready to enter battle, their arms akimbo, were pouring upon each other the most choice, out-of-the-way oaths: "fool, stiff, daughter of a dog!" one was yelling. "youse ain't fit to kiss me right here." and, turning her back around to her foe, she loudly slapped herself below the spine. "right here! here!" while the other, infuriated, squealed in answer: "you lie, you slut, for i am fit, i am fit!" lichonin utilized the minute. as though he had just recalled something, he hurriedly jumped up from the bench and called out: "wait for me, aunty luckeriya, i'll come in three minutes!" and dived through the living ring of spectators. "master! master!" his neighbour cried after him: "come back the quickest you can, now! i've one little word to say to you." having turned the corner, he for some time racked his head trying to recall what it was that he absolutely had to do, now, this very minute. and again, in the very depths of his soul, he knew just what he had to do, but he procrastinated confessing this to his own self. it was already a clear, bright day, about nine or ten o'clock. janitors were watering the streets with rubber hose. flower girls were sitting on the squares and near the gates of the boulevards, with roses, stock-gillyflowers and narcissi. the radiant, gay, rich southern town was beginning to get animated. over the pavement jolted an iron cage filled with dogs of every possible colour, breed, and age. on the coach box were sitting two dog-catchers, or, as they deferentially style themselves, "the king's dog-catchers"--i. e., hunters of stray dogs--returning home with this morning's catch. "she must be awake by now," lichonin's secret thought finally took form; "but if she isn't yet awake, then i'll quietly lie down on the divan and sleep a little." in the corridor the dying kerosene lamp emitted a dim light and smoked as before, and the watery, murky half-light penetrated into the narrow, long box. the door of the room had remained unlocked, after all. lichonin opened it without a sound and entered. the faint, blue half-light poured in through the interstices between the blinds and the windows. lichonin stopped in the middle of the room and with an intensified avidity heard the quiet, sleeping breathing of liubka. his lips became so hot and dry that he had to lick them incessantly. his knees began to tremble. "ask if she needs anything," suddenly darted through his head. like a drunkard, breathing hard, with mouth open, staggering on his shaking legs, he walked up to the bed. liubka was sleeping on her back, with one bare arm stretched out along the body, and the other on her breast. lichonin bent nearer, to her very face. she was breathing evenly and deeply. this breathing of her young, healthy body was, despite sleep, pure and almost aromatic. he cautiously ran his fingers over her bare arm and stroked her breast a little below the clavicle. "what am i doing?" his reason suddenly cried out within him in terror; but some one else answered for lichonin: "but i'm not doing anything. i only want to ask if she's sleeping comfortably, and whether she doesn't want some tea." but liubka suddenly awoke, opened her eyes, blinked them for a moment and opened them again. she gave a long, long stretch, and with a kindly, not yet fully reasoning smile, encircled lichonin's neck with her warm, strong arm. "sweetie! darling!" caressingly uttered the woman in a crooning voice, somewhat hoarse from sleep. "why, i was waiting for you and waiting, and even became angry. and after that i fell asleep and all night long saw you in my sleep. come to me, my baby, my lil' precious!" she drew him to her, breast against breast. lichonin almost did not resist; he was all atremble, as from a chill, and meaninglessly repeating in a galloping whisper with chattering teeth: "no, now, liuba, don't ... really, don't do that, liuba ... ah, let's drop this, liuba ... don't torture me. i won't vouch for myself ... let me alone, now, liuba, for god's sake! ..." "my-y little silly!" she exclaimed in a laughing, joyous voice. "come to me, my joy!"--and, overcoming the last, altogether insignificant opposition, she pressed his mouth to hers and kissed him hard and warmly--kissed him sincerely, perhaps for the first and last time in her life. "oh, you scoundrel! what am i doing?" declaimed some honest, prudent, and false body in lichonin. "well, now? are you eased up a bit?" asked liubka kindly, kissing lichonin's lips for the last time. "oh, you, my little student! ..." chapter xii. with pain at soul, with malice and repulsion toward himself and liubka, and, it would seem, toward all the world, lichonin without undressing flung himself upon the wooden, lopsided, sagging divan and even gnashed his teeth from the smarting shame. sleep would not come to him, while his thoughts revolved around this fool action--as he himself called the carrying off of liubka,--in which an atrocious vaudeville had been so disgustingly intertwined with a deep drama. "it's all one," he stubbornly repeated to himself. "once i have given my promise, i'll see the business through to the end. and, of course, that which has occurred just now will never, never be repeated! my god, who hasn't fallen, giving in to a momentary laxity of the nerves? some philosopher or other has expressed a deep, remarkable truth, when he affirmed that the value of the human soul may be known by the depth of its fall and the height of its flight. but still, the devil take the whole of this idiotical day and that equivocal reasoner--the reporter platonov, and his own--lichonin's--absurd outburst of chivalry! just as though, in reality, this had not taken place in real life, but in chernishevski's novel, what's to be done? and how, devil take it, with what eyes will i look upon her tomorrow?" his head was on fire; his eyelids were smarting, his lips dry. he was nervously smoking a cigarette and frequently got up from the divan to take the decanter of water off the table, and avidly, straight from its mouth, drink several big draughts. then, by some accidental effort of the will, he succeeded in tearing his thoughts away from the past night, and at once a heavy sleep, without any visions and images, enveloped him as though in black cotton. he awoke long past noon, at two or three o'clock; at first could not come to himself for a long while; smacked his lips and looked around the room with glazed, heavy eyes. all that had happened during the night seemed to have flown out of his memory. but when he saw liubka, who was quietly and motionlessly sitting on the bed, with head lowered and hands crossed on her knees, he began to groan and grunt from vexation and confusion. now he recalled everything. and at that minute he experienced in his own person how heavy it is to see in the morning, with one's own eyes, the results of folly committed the night before. "are you awake, sweetie?" asked liubka kindly. she got up from the bed, walked up to the divan, sat down at lichonin's feet, and cautiously patted his blanket-covered leg. "why, i woke up long ago and was sitting all the while; i was afraid to wake you up. you were sleeping so very soundly!" she stretched toward him and kissed him on the cheek. lichonin made a wry face and gently pushed her away from him. "wait, liubochka! wait; that's not necessary. do you understand--absolutely, never necessary. that which took place yesterday--well, that's an accident. my weakness, let's say. even more, a momentary baseness, perhaps. but, by god, believe me, i didn't at all want to make a mistress out of you. i want to see you my friend, my sister, my comrade ... well, that's nothing, then; everything will adjust itself, grow customary. only one mustn't fall in spirit. and in the meanwhile, my dear, go to the window and look out of it a bit; i just want to put myself in order." liubka slightly pouted her lips and walked off to the window, turning her back on lichonin. all these words about friendship, brotherhood and comradeship she could not understand with her brain of a hen and her simple peasant soul. that a student--after all, not just anybody, but an educated man, who could learn to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a judge--had taken her for maintenance flattered her imagination far more ... and here, now, it turned out that he had just fulfilled his caprice, had gotten what he wanted, and was now trying to back out. they are all like that, the men! lichonin hastily got up, splashed a few handfuls of water in his face, and dried himself with an old napkin. then he raised the blinds and threw open both window shutters. the golden sunlight, the azure sky, the rumble of the city, the foliage of the thick linden trees and the chestnuts, the bells of the horse trams, the dry smell of the hot, dusty street--all this at once burst into the tiny garret room. lichonin walked up to liubka and amicably patted her on the shoulder. "never mind, my joy ... what's done can't be undone, but it's a lesson for the future. you haven't yet asked tea for yourself, liubochka?" "no, i was waiting for you all the while. besides, i didn't know who to ask. and you're all right, too. why, i heard you, after you went off with your friend, come back and stand a while near the door. but you never even said good-bye to me. is that right?" "the first family quarrel," thought lichonin, but thought it without malice, in jest. the wash-up, the beauty of the gold and blue southern sky, and the naive, partly submissive, partly displeased face of liubka, as well as the consciousness that after all he was a man, and that he and not she had to answer for the porridge he had cooked--all this together braced up his nerves and compelled him to take himself in hand. he opened the door and roared into the darkness of the stinking corridor: "al-lexa-andra! a samova-ar! two lo-oaves, bu-utter, and sausage! and a small bottle of vo-odka!" the patter of slippers was heard in the corridor, and an aged voice, even from afar, began to speak thickly: "what are you bawling for? what are you bawling for, eh? ho, ho, ho! like a stallion in a stall. you ain't little, to look at you; you're grown up already, yet you carry on like a street boy! well, what do you want?" into the room walked a little old woman, with red-lidded eyes, like little narrow cracks, and with a face amazingly like parchment, upon which a long, sharp nose stuck downward, morosely and ominously. this was alexandra, the servant of old of the student bird-houses; the friend and creditor of all the students; a woman of sixty-five, argumentative, and a grumbler. lichonin repeated his order to her and gave her a rouble note. but the old woman would not go away; shuffled in one place, snorted, chewed with her lips and looked inimically at the girl sitting--with her back to the light. "what's the matter with you now, alexandra, that you seem ossified?" asked lichonin, laughing. "or are you lost in admiration? well, then, know: this is my cousin, my first cousin, that is--liubov..."[ ] he was confused for only a second, but immediately fired away: "liubov vasilievna, but for me--simply liubochka. i've known her when she was only that high," he showed a quarter of a yard off the table. "and i pulled her ears and slapped her for her caprices over the place where the legs grow from. and then ... i caught all sorts of bugs for her ... but, however ... however, you go on, go on, you egyptian mummy, you fragment of former ages! let one leg be here and the other there!" [ ] love.--trans. but the old woman lingered. stamping all around herself, she barely, barely turned to the door and kept a keen, spiteful, sidelong glance on liubka. and at the same time she muttered with her sunken mouth: "first cousin! we know these first cousins! there's lots of them walking around kashtanovaya street. there, these he-dogs can never get enough!" "well, you old barque! lively and don't growl!" lichonin shouted after her. "or else, like your friend, the student triassov, i'll take and lock you up in the dressing room for twenty-four hours!" alexandra went away, and for a long time her aged, flapping steps and indistinct muttering could be heard in the corridor. she was inclined, in her austere, grumbling kindliness, to forgive a great deal to the studying youths, whom she had served for nigh unto forty years. she forgave drunkenness, card playing, scandals, loud singing, debts; but, alas! she was a virgin, and there was only one thing her continent soul could not abide--libertinage. chapter xiii. "and that's splendid ... and fine and charming," lichonin was saying, bustling about the lame table and without need shifting the tea things from one place to another. "for a long time, like an old crocodile, i haven't drunk tea as it should be drunk, in a christian manner, in a domestic setting. sit down, liuba, sit down, my dear, right here on the divan, and keep house. vodka, in all probability, you don't drink of a morning, but i, with your permission, will drink some ... this braces up the nerves right off. make mine a little stronger, please, with a piece of lemon. ah, what can taste better than a glass of hot tea, poured out by charming feminine hands?" liubka listened to his chatter, a trifle too noisy to seem fully natural; and her smile, in the beginning mistrusting, wary, was softening and brightening. but she did not get on with the tea especially well. at home, in the backwoods village, where this beverage was still held a rarity, the dainty luxury of well-to-do families, to be brewed only for honored guests and on great holidays--there over the pouring of the tea officiated the eldest man of the family. later, when liubka served with "all found" in the little provincial capital city, in the beginning at a priest's, and later with an insurance agent (who had been the first to put her on the road of prostitution)--she was usually left some strained, tepid tea, which had already been drunk off, with a bit of gnawn sugar, by the mistress herself--the thin, jaundiced, malicious wife of the priest; or the wife of the agent, a fat, old, wrinkled, malignant, greasy, jealous and stingy common woman. therefore, the simple business of preparing the tea was now as difficult for her as it is difficult for all of us in childhood to distinguish the left hand from the right, or to tie a rope in a small noose. the bustling lichonin only hindered her and threw her into confusion. "my dear, the art of brewing tea is a great art. it ought to be studied at moscow. at first a dry teapot is slightly warmed up. then the tea is put into it and is quickly scalded with boiling water. the first liquid must at once be poured off into the slop-bowl--the tea thus becomes purer and more aromatic; and by the way, it's also known that chinamen are pagans and prepare their herb very filthily. after that the tea-pot must be filled anew, up to a quarter of its volume; left on the tray, covered over with a towel and kept so for three and a half minutes. afterwards pour in more boiling water almost up to the top, cover it again, let it stay just a bit, and you have ready, my dear, a divine beverage; fragrant, refreshing, and strengthening." the homely, but pleasant-looking face of liubka, all spotted from freckles, like a cuckoo's egg, lengthened and paled a little. "well, for god's sake, don't you be angry at me ... you're called vassil vassilich, isn't that so? don't get angry, darling vassil vassilich. really, now, i'll learn fast, i'm quick. and why do you say you and you[ ] to me all the time? it seems that we aren't strangers now?" [ ] in contradistinction to "thou," as used to familiars and inferiors in russia.--trans. she looked at him kindly. and truly, she had this morning, for the first time in all her brief but distorted life, given her body to a man--even though without enjoyment but more out of gratitude and pity, yet voluntarily--not for money, not under compulsion, not under threat of dismissal and scandal. and her feminine heart, always unwithering, always drawn to love, like a sunflower to the sun, was at this moment pure and inclined to tenderness. but lichonin suddenly felt a prickling, shameful awkwardness and something inimical toward this woman, yesterday unknown to him, now--his chance mistress. "the charms of the family hearth have begun," he thought involuntarily; still, he got up from his chair, walked up to liubka, and having taken her by the hand, drew her to him and patted her on the head. "my dear, my darling sister," he said touchingly and falsely; "that which has happened to-day must never more be repeated. in everything only i alone am guilty, and, if you desire, i am ready to beg forgiveness of you on my knees. understand--oh, understand, that all this came about against my will, somehow elementally, suddenly, unexpectedly. and i myself didn't think that it would be like that! you understand, for a very long time ... i have not known woman intimately ... a repulsive, unbridled beast awoke within me ... and ... but, lord, is my fault so great, then? holy people, anchorites, recluses, ascetics, stylites, hermits in deserts, are no match for me in fortitude of spirit--yet even they fell in the struggle with the temptation of the diabolical flesh. but then, i swear by whatever you wish, that this won't be repeated any more ... isn't that so?" liubka was stubbornly trying to pull his hand away from hers. her lips had become a little stuck out and the lowered lids began to wink frequently. "ye-es," she drawled, like a child that stubbornly refuses to "make up." "well, i can see that i don't please you. well, then, you'd best tell me so straight and give me a little for a cab, and some more, now; as much as you want ... the money for the night is paid anyway, and i only have to ride up to ... there." lichonin seized his hair, flung himself about the room and began to declaim: "ah, not that, not that, not that! just understand me, liuba! to go on with that which happened in the morning--that's ... that's swinishness, bestiality, and unworthy of a man who respects himself. love! love--this is a full blending of minds, thoughts, souls, interests, and not of the bodies alone. love is a tremendous, great emotion, mighty as the universe, and not the sprawling in bed. there's no such love between us, liubochka. if it'll come, it will be wonderful happiness both for you and for me. but in the meantime--i'm your friend, your faithful comrade, on the path of life. and that's enough, and that will do ... and though i'm no stranger to human frailties, still, i count myself an honest man." liubka seemed to wilt. "he thinks i want him to marry me. and i absolutely don't need that," she thought sadly. "it's possible to live just so. there are others, now, living on maintenance. and, they say, far better than if they had twirled around an altar. what's so bad about that? peaceful, quiet, genteel ... i'd darn socks for him, wash floors, cook ... the plainer dishes. of course, he'll be in line to get married to a rich girl some time. well, now, to be sure, he wouldn't throw me out in the street just so, mother-naked. although he's a little simpleton, and chatters a lot, still it's easy to tell he's a decent man. he'll provide for me with something, somehow. and, perhaps, he'll get to like me, will get used to me? i'm a simple girl, modest, and would never consent to be false to him. for, they say, things do fall out that way ... only i mustn't let him see anything. but that he'll come again into my bed, and will come this very night--that's as sure as god is holy." and lichonin also fell into thought, grew quiet and sad; he was already feeling the weight of a great deed which he had undertaken beyond his powers. that was why he was even glad when some one knocked on the door, and to his answer, "come in!", two students entered: soloviev, and nijeradze, who had slept that night at his place. soloviev, well-grown and already obese, with a broad, ruddy volga face and a light, scandent little beard, belonged to those kindly, merry and simple fellows, of which there are sufficiently many in any university. he divided his leisure--and of leisure he had twenty-four hours in the day--between the beer-shop and rambling over the boulevards; among billiards, whist, the theatre, reading of newspapers and novels, and the spectacles of circus wrestling; while the short intervals in between he used for eating, sleeping, the home repair of his wardrobe, with the aid of thread, cardboard, pins and ink; and for succinct, most realistic love with the chance woman from the kitchen, the anteroom or the street. like all the youths of his circle, he deemed himself a revolutionary, although he was oppressed by political disputes, dissensions, and mutual reproaches; and not being able to stand the reading of revolutionary brochures and journals, was almost a complete ignoramus in the work for that reason he had not attained even the very least party initiation; although at times there were given him instructions of a sort, not at all of a safe nature, the meaning of which was not made clear to him. and not in vain was his steadfast faithfulness relied upon; he carried out everything rapidly, exactly,--with a courageous faith in the universal importance of the work; with a care-free smile and with a broad contempt of possible destruction. he concealed outlawed comrades, guarded forbidden literature and printing types, transmitted passports and money. he had a great deal of physical strength, black-loam amiability and elemental simple-heartedness. not infrequently he would receive from home, somewheres in the depth of the simbirskaya or ufimskaya province, sums of money sufficiently large for a student; but in two days he scattered and dispersed it everywhere, with the carelessness of a french grandee of the seventeenth century, while he himself remained during winter in only his everyday coat, with boots restored by his own devices. beside all these naive, touching, laughable, lofty and shiftless qualities of the old russian student, passing--and god knows if for the better?--into the realm of historical memories, he possessed still another amazing ability--to invent money and arrange for credit in little restaurants and cook-shops. all the employees of pawnshops and loan offices, secret and manifest usurers, and old-clo'-men were on terms of the closest friendship with him. but if for certain reasons he could not resort to them, then even here soloviev remained at the height of his resourcefulness. at the head of a knot of impoverished friends, and weighed down with his usual business responsibility, he would at times be illumined by an inner inspiration; make at a distance, across the street, a mysterious sign to a tartar passing with his bundle behind his shoulders, and for a few seconds would disappear with him into the nearest gates. he would quickly return without his everyday coat, only in his blouse with the skirts outside, belted with a thin cord; or, in winter, without his overcoat, in the thinnest of small suits; or instead of the new, just purchased uniform cap--in a tiny jockey cap, holding by a miracle on the crown of his head. everybody loved him: comrades, servants, women, children. and all were familiar with him. he enjoyed especial good-will from his bosom cronies, the tartars, who, apparently, deemed him a little innocent. they would sometimes, in the summer, bring as a present the strong, intoxicating koumyss in big quartern bottles, while at bairam they would invite him to eat a suckling colt with them. no matter how improbable it may seem, still, soloviev at critical moments gave away for safe-keeping certain books and brochures to the tartars. he would say at this with the most simple and significant air: "that which i am giving you is a great book. it telleth, that allah akbar, and that mahomet is his prophet, that there is much evil and poverty on earth, and that men must be merciful and just to each other." he also had two other abilities: he read aloud very well; and played at chess amazingly, like a master, like a downright genius, defeating first-class players in jest. his attack was always impetuous and rigorous; his defense wise and cautious, preferably in an oblique direction; his concessions to his opponent full of refined, far-sighted calculation and murderous craftiness. with this, he made moves as though under the influence of some inner instinct, or inspiration; not pondering for more than four or five seconds and resolutely despising the respected traditions. he was not willingly played with; his manner of play was held barbarous, but still they played, sometimes for large sums of money; which, invariably winning, soloviev readily laid down upon the altar of his comrades' needs. but he steadfastly declined from participation in competitions, which could have created for him the position of a star in the world of chess: "there is in my nature neither love for this nonsense, nor respect," he would say. "i simply possess some sort of a mechanical ability of the mind, some sort of a psychic deformity. well, now, just as there are lefties. and for that reason i've no professional self-respect, nor pride at victory, nor spleen at losing." such was the generously built student soloviev. and nijeradze filled the post of his closest comrade; which did not hinder them both, however, from jeering at each other, disputing, and swearing, from morning till night. god knows, wherewithal and how the georgian prince existed. he said of himself, that he possessed the ability of a camel, of nourishing himself for the future, for several weeks ahead; and then eating nothing for a month. from home, from his blessed georgia, he received very little; and then, for the most part, in victuals. at christmas, at easter, or on his birthday (in august) he was sent--and inevitably through arriving fellow-countrymen--whole cargoes of hampers with mutton, grapes, goat-flesh, sausages, dried hawthorn berries, rakhat loukoum, egg-plants, and very tasty cookies; as well as leathern bottles of excellent home-made wine, strong and aromatic, but giving off just the least bit of sheep-skin. then the prince would summon together to one of his comrades (he never had quarters of his own) all his near friends and fellow-countrymen; and arranged such a magnificent festival--toi in caucasian--that at it were extirpated to the last shreds the gifts of fertile georgia. georgian songs were sung, the first place, of course, being given to mravol-djamiem and every guest is sent down to us from heaven by god, no matter of what country he be; the lezginka was danced without tiring, with table knives brandished wildly in the air; and the tulumbash (or, perhaps, he is called tomada?) spoke his improvisations; for the greater part nijeradze himself spoke. he was a great hand at talking and could, when he warmed up, pronounce about three hundred words a minute. his style was distinguished for mettle, pomp, and imagery; and his caucasian accent with characteristic lisping and throaty sounds, resembling now the hawking of a woodcock, now the clucking of an eagle, not only did not hinder his discourse, but somehow even strangely adorned it. and no matter of what he spoke, he always led up the monologue to the most beautiful, most fertile, the very foremost, most chivalrous, and at the same time the most injured country--georgia. and invariably he cited lines from the panther's skin of the georgian poet rustavelli; with assurances, that this poem was a thousand times above all of shakespeare, multiplied by homer. even though he was hot-headed, he was not spiteful; and in his demeanour femininely soft, gentle, engaging, without losing his native pride ... one thing only did his comrades dislike in him--some exaggerated, exotic love of women. he was unshakably, unto sacredness or folly, convinced that he was irresistibly splendid of person; that all men envied him, all women were in love with him, while husbands were jealous ... this self-conceited, obtrusive dangling after women did not forsake him for a minute, probably not even in his sleep. walking along the street he would every minute nudge lichonin, soloviev or some other companion with his elbow, and would say, smacking his lips and jerking his head backward at a woman who had passed by: "tse, tse, tse... vai-vai! a ree-markable wooman! what a look she gave me. if i wish it, she'll be mine! ..." this funny shortcoming about him was known; this trait of his was ridiculed good-naturedly and unceremoniously, but willingly forgiven for the sake of that independent comradely obligingness and faithfulness to his word, given to a man (oaths to women did not count), of which he was so naturally possessed. however, it must be said that he did in reality enjoy great success with women. sempstresses, modistes, chorus girls, girls in candy stores, and telephone girls melted from the intense gaze of his heavy, soft, and languishing dark-blue eyes. "un-to this house and all those righteously, peacefully and without sin inhabiting it ..." soloviev started in to vociferate like an arch-deacon and suddenly missed fire. "father-prelates," he began to murmur in astonishment, trying to continue the unsuccessful jest. "why, but this is ... this is ... ah, the devil ... this is sonya, no, my mistake, nadya ... well, yes! liubka from anna markovna's ..." liubka blushed hotly, to the verge of tears, and covered her face with her palms. lichonin noticed this, understood, sensed the thoroughly agitated soul of the girl, and came to her aid. he sternly, almost rudely, stopped soloviev. "perfectly correct, soloviev. as in a directory. liubka from the yamkas. formerly a prostitute. even more, still yesterday a prostitute. but from to-day--my friend, my sister. and so let everyone, who respects me to any extent, regard her. otherwise..." the ponderous soloviev hurriedly, sincerely, and powerfully embraced and rumpled lichonin. "well, dear fellow, well, that's enough ... i committed a stupidity in the flurry. it won't be repeated any more. hail, my pale-faced sister." he extended his hand with a broad sweep across the table to liubka, and squeezed her listless, small and short fingers with gnawed, tiny nails. "it's fine--your coming into our modest wigwam. this will refresh us and implant in our midst quiet and decent customs. alexandra! be-er!" he began to call loudly. "we've grown wild, coarse; have become mired in foul speech, drunkenness, laziness and other vices. and all because we were deprived of the salutary, pacifying influence of feminine society. once again i press your hand. your charming, little hand. beer!" "coming," the displeased voice of alexandra could be heard on the other side of the door. "i'm coming. what you yelling for? how much do you want?" soloviev went out into the corridor to explain. lichonin smiled after him gratefully; while the georgian on his way slapped him benignly on the back, between his shoulder blades. both understood and appreciated the belated, somewhat coarse delicacy of soloviev. "now," said soloviev, coming back into the room and sitting down cautiously upon an ancient chair, "now let's come to the order of the day. can i be of service to you in any way? if you'll give me half an hour's time, i'll run down to the coffee house for a minute and lick the guts out of the very best chess player there. in a word--i'm at your disposal!" "what a funny fellow you are!" said liubka, ill at ease and laughing. she did not understand the jocose and unusual style of speech of the student, but something drew her simple heart to him. "well, that's not at all necessary," lichonin put in. "i am as yet beastly rich. i think we'll all go together to some little tavern somewhere. i must have your advice about some things. after all, you're the people closest to me; and of course not as stupid and inexperienced as you seem at first glance. after that, i'll go and try to arrange about her ... about liuba's passport. you wait for me. that won't take long ... in a word, you understand what this whole business consists of, and won't be lavish of any superfluous jokes. i,"--his voice quivered sentimentally and falsely--"i desire that you take upon yourselves a part of my care. is that a go?" "va! it's a go!" exclaimed the prince (it sounded like "idiot," when he said it[ ]), and for some reason looked significantly at liubka and twirled his moustache. lichonin gave him a sidelong look. as for soloviev, he said simple-heartedly: [ ] the russian phrase is "eedet!"--trans. "that's the way. you've begun something big and splendid, lichonin. the prince told me about it during the night. well, what of it, that's what youth is for--to commit sacred follies. give me the bottle, alexandra, i'll open it myself, or else you'll rupture yourself and burst a vein. to a new life, liubochka, pardon me ... liubov ... liubov ..." "nikonovna. but call me just as it comes ... liuba." "well, yes, liuba. prince, allahverdi!" "yakshi-ol," answered nijeradze and clinked his glass of beer with him. "and i'll also say, that i rejoice over you, friend lichonin," continued soloviev, setting down his glass and licking his moustache. "rejoice, and bow before you. it's precisely you, only, who are capable of such a genuinely russian heroism, expressed simply, modestly, without superfluous words." "drop it ... well, where's the heroism?" lichonin made a wry face. "that's true, too," confirmed nijeradze. "you're reproaching me all the time that i chatter a lot, but see what nonsense you're spouting yourself." "that makes no difference!" retorted soloviev. "it may be even grandiloquent, but still that makes no difference! as an elder of our garret commune, i declare liuba an honourable member with full rights!" he got up, made a sweeping gesture with his hand, and uttered with pathos: "and into our house, free and fearless, its charming mistress walk thou in!" lichonin recalled vividly, that to-day at dawn he had spoken the very same phrase, like an actor; and even blinked his eyes from shame. "that's enough of tom-foolery. let's go, gentlemen. dress yourself, liuba." chapter xiv. it was not far to the sparrows restaurant; some two hundred steps. on the way liuba, unnoticed, took lichonin by the sleeve and pulled him toward her. in this wise they lagged a few steps behind soloviev and nijeradze, who were walking ahead. "then you mean it seriously, my darling vassil vassilich?" she asked, looking up at him with her kindly, dark eyes. "you're not playing a joke on me?" "what jokes can there be here, liubochka! i'd be the lowest of men if i permitted myself such jokes. i repeat, that to you i am more than a friend, brother, comrade. and let's not talk about it any more. and that which happened to-day toward morning, that, you may be sure, won't be repeated. and i'll rent a separate room for you this very day." liubka sighed. not that she was offended by the chaste resolution of lichonin, in which, to tell the truth, she believed but badly; but somehow her dark, narrow mind could not even theoretically picture any other attitude of a man toward a woman than the sensual. besides that, she experienced the ancient discontent of a preferred or rejected female; a feeling strongly intrenched in the house of anna markovna, in the form of boastful rivalry, but now dulled; yet still angry and sincere. and for some reason she believed lichonin but illy, unconsciously seizing much of the assumed, not altogether sincere, in his words. soloviev, now--although he did speak incomprehensively, like the rest of the majority of the students known to her, when they joked among themselves or with the young ladies in the general room (by themselves, in the room, all the men without an exception--all as one--said and did one and the same thing)--she would rather believe soloviev, far more readily and willingly. a certain simplicity shone in his merry, sparkling gray eyes, placed widely apart. at the sparrows lichonin was esteemed for his sedateness, kind disposition, and accuracy in money matters. because of that he was at once assigned a little private room--an honour of which but very few students could boast. the gas burned all day in this room, because light penetrated only through the narrow bottom of a window, cut short by the ceiling. only the boots, shoes, umbrellas and canes of the people walking by on the sidewalk could be seen through this window. they had to let still another student, simanovsky (whom they ran against near the coat room), join the party. "what does he mean, by leading me around as though for a show?" thought liubka: "it looks like he's showing off before them." and, snatching a free moment, she whispered to lichonin, who had bent over her: "but why are there so many people, dearie? for i'm so bashful. i can't hold my own in company." "that's nothing, that's nothing, my dear liubochka," lichonin whispered rapidly, tarrying at the door of the cabinet. "that's nothing, my sister; these are all fine people, good comrades. they'll help you, help us both. don't mind their having fun at times and their silly lying. but their hearts are of gold." "but it's so very awkward for me; i'm ashamed. all of them already know where you took me from." "well, that's nothing, that's nothing! why, let 'em know!" warmly contradicted lichonin. "why be embarrassed with your past, why try to pass it by in silence? in a year you'll look bravely and directly in the eyes of every man and you'll say: 'he who has never fallen, has never gotten up.' come on, come on, liubochka!" while the inelaborate appetizers were being served, and each one was ordering the meal, everybody, save simanovsky, felt ill at ease and somehow constrained. and simanovsky himself was partly the reason for this; he was a clean-shaven man, with pince-nez and long hair, with head proudly thrown back and with a contemptuous expression on the tight lips, drooping at the corners. he had no intimate, hearty friends among his comrades; but his opinions and judgments had a considerable authoritativeness among them. it is doubtful whether any one of them could explain to himself whence this influence came; whether from his self-assured appearance, his ability to seize and express in general words the dismembered and indistinct things which are dimly sought and desired by the majority, or because he always saved his conclusions for the most appropriate moment. among any society there are many of this sort of people: some of them act upon their circle through sophistries; others through adamant, unalterable stead-fastness of convictions; a third group with a loud mouth; a fourth, through a malicious sneer; a fifth, simply by silence, which compels the supposition of profound thought behind it; a sixth, through a chattering, outward erudition; others still through a slashing sneer at everything that is said ... many with the terrible russian word yerunda: "fiddlesticks!"--"fiddlesticks!" they say contemptuously in reply to the warm, sincere, probably truthful but clumsily put word. "but why fiddlesticks?" "because it's twaddle, nonsense," answer they, shrugging their shoulders; and it is as though they did for a man by hitting him with a stone over the head. there are many more sorts of such people, bearing the bell at the head of the meek, the shy, the nobly modest, and often even the big minds; and to their number did simanovsky belong. however, toward the middle of the dinner everybody's tongue became loosened--except liubka's, who kept silent, answered "yes" and "no", and left her food practically untouched. lichonin, soloviev, and nijeradze talked most of all. the first, in a decisive and business-like manner, trying to hide under the solicitous words something real, inward, prickling and inconvenient. soloviev, with a puerile delight, with the most sweeping of gestures, hitting the table with his fist. nijeradze, with a slight doubtfulness and with unfinished phrases, as though he knew that which must be said, but concealed it. the queer fate of the girl, however, had seemingly engrossed, interested them all; and each one, in expressing his opinion, for some reason inevitably turned to simanovsky. but he kept his counsel for the most part, and looked at each one from under the glasses of his pince-nez, raising his head high to do so. "so, so, so," he said at last, drumming with his fingers upon the table. "what lichonin has done is splendid and brave. and that the prince and soloviev are going to meet him half-way is also very good. i, for my part, am ready to co-operate with your beginnings with whatever lies in my power. but will it not be better, if we lead our friend along the path of her natural inclinations and abilities, so to speak? tell me, my dear," he turned to liubka, "what do you know, what can you do? well, now, some kind of work, or something. sewing, knitting, embroidering or something." "i don't know anything," said liubka in a whisper, letting her eyes drop low, all red, squeezing her fingers under the table. "i don't understand anything of this.'' "and really, now," interposed lichonin; "why, we haven't begun the business from the right end. by talking about her in her presence we merely place her in an awkward position. just see--even her tongue doesn't move from confusion. let's go, liubka, i'll escort you home for just a little while, and return in ten minutes. and in the meanwhile we'll think over ways and means here, without you. all right?" "as for me, i don't mind," almost inaudibly answered liubka. "i'll do just as you like, vassil vassilich. only i wouldn't like to go home." "why so?" "it's awkward for me there alone. i'd best wait for you on the boulevard, at the very entrance, on a bench." "ah, yes!" lichonin recollected: "it's alexandra who has inspired her with such a terror. my, but i'll make it hot for this old lizard! well, let's go, liubochka." she timidly, in some sidelong way, put out her hand to each one, folding it like a little spade; and walked out under the escort of lichonin. after several minutes he returned and sat down at his place. he felt that something had been said about him during his absence, and he ran his eyes uneasily over his comrades. then, putting his hands on the table, he began: "gentlemen, i know that you're all good, close friends," he gave a quick and sidelong look at simanovsky, "and responsive people. i heartily beg of you to come to my aid. the deed was done by me in a hurry--this i must confess--but done through a sincere, pure inclination of the heart." "and that's the main thing," put in soloviev. "it's absolutely all one to me what acquaintances and strangers will begin saying about me; but from my intention to save--pardon the fool word, which slipped out--to encourage, to sustain this girl, i will not decline. of course, i'm able to rent an inexpensive, small room for her; to give her something for board at first; but what's to be done further--that's what presents difficulties to me. the matter, of course, isn't one of money, which i'd always find for her; but, then, to compel her to eat, drink, and with all that to do nothing--that would mean to condemn her to idleness, indifference, apathy; and you know what the end will be then. therefore, we must think of some occupation for her. and that's the very matter which we must exert our brains about. make an effort, gentlemen; advise something." "we must know what she's fitted for," said simanovsky. "for she must have been doing something before getting into the house." lichonin, with an air of hopelessness, spread out his hands. "almost nothing. she can sew just the least bit, just like any country lass. why, she wasn't fifteen when some government clerk led her astray. she can sweep up a room, wash a little, and, if you will, cook cabbage soup and porridge. nothing more, it seems." "rather little," said simanovsky, and clacked his tongue. "and in addition to that, she's illiterate as well." "but that's not at all important!" warmly defended soloviev. "if we had to do with a well-educated girl, or, worse still, with a half-educated one, then only nonsense would result out of all that we're preparing to do, a mere soap-bubble; while here before us is maiden ground, untouched virgin soil." "he-ee!" nijeradze started neighing equivocally. soloviev, now no longer joking, but with real wrath, pounced upon him: "listen, prince! every holy thought, every good deed, can be made disgusting, obscene. there's nothing clever or worthy in that. if you regard that which we're preparing to do so like a stallion, then there's the door and god be with you. go away from us!" "yes, but you yourself just now in the room ..." retorted the prince in confusion. "yes, i too," soloviev at once softened and cooled down. "i popped out with a stupidity and i regret it. but now i willingly admit that lichonin is a fine fellow and a splendid man; and i'm ready to do everything, for my part. and i repeat, that knowledge of reading and writing is a secondary matter. it is easy to attain it in play. for such an untouched mind to learn reading, writing, counting, and especially without school, of one's free will, is like biting a nut in two. and as far as a manual trade is concerned, through which it would be possible to live and earn one's keep, then there are hundreds of trades, which can be easily mastered in two weeks." "for instance?" asked the prince. "well, for instance ... for instance ... well, now, for instance, making artificial flowers. yes, and still better, to get a place as a flower clerk. a charming business, clean and nice." "taste is necessary," simanovsky dropped carelessly. "there are no inborn tastes, as well as abilities. otherwise talents would be born only in refined, highly educated society; while artists would be born only to artists, and singers to singers; but we don't see this. however, i won't argue. well, if not a flower girl, then something else. i, for instance, saw not long ago in a store show window a miss sitting, and some sort of a little machine with foot-power before her." "v-va! again a little machine!" said the prince, smiling and looking at lichonin. "stop it, nijeradze," answered lichonin, quietly but sternly. "you ought to be ashamed." "blockhead!" soloviev threw at him, and continued. "so, then, the machine moves back and forth, while upon it, on a square frame, is stretched a thin canvas, and really, i don't know how it's contrived, i didn't grasp it; only the miss guides some metallic thingamajig over the screen, and there comes out a fine drawing in vari-coloured silks. just imagine, a lake, all grown over with pond-lilies with their white corollas and yellow stamens, and great green leaves all around. and on the water two white swans are floating toward each other, and in the background is a dark park with an alley; and all this shows finely, distinctly, as on a picture from life. and i became so interested that i went in on purpose to find out how much it costs. it proved to be just the least bit dearer than an ordinary sewing machine, and it's sold on terms. and any one who can sew a little on a common machine can learn this art in an hour. and there's a great number of charming original designs. and the main thing is that such work is very readily taken for fire-screens, albums, lamp-shades, curtains and other rubbish, and the pay is decent." "after all, that's a sort of a trade, too," agreed lichonin, and stroked his beard in meditation. "but, to confess, here's what i wanted to do. i wanted to open up for her ... to open up a little cook-shop or dining room, the very tiniest to start with, of course, but one in which all the food is cheap, clean and tasty. for it's absolutely all the same to many students where they dine and what they eat. there are almost never enough places to go round in the students' dining room. and so we may succeed, perhaps, in pulling in all our acquaintances and friends, somehow." "that's true," said the prince, "but impractical as well; we'll begin to board on credit. and you know what accurate payers we are. a practical man, a knave, is needed for such an undertaking; and if a woman, then one with a pike's teeth; and even then a man must absolutely stick right at her back. really, it's not for lichonin to stand at the counter and to watch that somebody shouldn't suddenly wine and dine and slip away." lichonin looked straight at him, insolently, but only set his jaws and let it pass in silence. simanovsky began in his measured, incontrovertible tone, toying with the glasses of his pince-nez: "your intention is splendid, gentlemen, beyond dispute. but have you turned your attention to a certain shady aspect, so to speak? for to open a dining room, to start some business--all this in the beginning demands money, assistance--somebody else's back, so to speak. the money is not grudged--that is true, i agree with lichonin; but then, does not such a beginning of an industrious life, when every step is provided for--does it not lead to inevitable laxity and negligence, and, in the very end, to an indifferent disdain for business? even a child does not learn to walk until it has flopped down some fifty times. no; if you really want to help this poor girl, you must give her a chance of getting on her feet at once, like a toiling being, and not like a drone. true, there is a great temptation here--the burden of labour, temporary need; but then, if she will surmount this, she will surmount the rest as well." "what, then, according to you, is she to become--a dish-washer?" asked soloviev with unbelief. "well, yes," calmly retorted simanovsky. "a dish-washer, a laundress, a cook. all toil elevates a human being." lichonin shook his head. "words of gold. wisdom itself speaks with your lips, simanovsky. dish-washer, cook, maid, housekeeper ... but, in the first place, it's doubtful if she's capable for that; in the second place, she has already been a maid and has tasted all the sweets of masters' bawlings out, and masters' pinches behind doors, in the corridor. tell me, is it possible you don't know that ninety per cent, of prostitution is recruited from the number of female servants? and, therefore, poor liuba, at the very first injustice, at the first rebuff, will the more easily and readily go just there where i have gotten her out of; if not even worse, because for her that's customary and not so frightful; and, perhaps, it will even seem desirable after the masters' treatment. and besides that, is it worth while for me--that is, i want to say--is it worth while for all of us, to go to so much trouble, to try so hard and put ourselves out so, if, after having saved a being from one slavery, we only plunge her into another?" "right," confirmed soloviev. "just as you wish," drawled simanovsky with a disdainful air. "but as far as i'm concerned," said the prince, "i'm ready, as a friend and a curious man, to be present at this experiment and to participate in it. but even this morning i warned you, that there have been such experiments before and that they have always ended in ignominious failure, at least those of which we know personally; while those of which we know only by hearsay are dubious as regards authenticity. but you have begun the business--and go on with it. we are your helpers." lichonin struck the table with his palm. "no!" he exclaimed stubbornly. "simanovsky is partly right concerning the great danger of a person's being led in leading strings. but i don't see any other way out. in the beginning i'll help her with room and board... find some easy work, buy the necessary accessories for her. let be what may! and let us do everything in order to educate her mind a little; and that her heart and soul are beautiful, of that i am sure. i've no grounds for the faith, but i am sure, i almost know. nijeradze! don't clown!" he cried abruptly, growing pale, "i've restrained myself several times already at your fool pranks. i have until now held you as a man of conscience and feeling. one more inappropriate witticism, and i'll change my opinion of you; and know, that it's forever." "well, now, i didn't mean anything... really, i... why go all up in the air, me soul? you don't like that i'm a gay fellow, well, i'll be quiet. give me your hand, lichonin, let's drink!" "well, all right, get away from me. here's to your health! only don't behave like a little boy, you ossetean ram. well, then, i continue, gentlemen. if we find anything which might satisfy the just opinion of simanovsky about the dignity of independent toil, unsustained by anything, then i shall stick to my system: to teach liuba whatever is possible, to take her to the theatre, to expositions, to popular lectures, to museums; to read aloud to her, give her the possibility of hearing music--comprehensible music, of course. it's understood, i alone won't be able to manage all this. i expect help from you; and after that, whatever god may will." "oh, well," said simanovsky, "the work is new, not threadbare; and how can we know the unknowable--perhaps you, lichonin, will become the spiritual father of a good being. i, too, offer my services." "and i! and i!" the other two seconded; and right there, without getting up from the table, the four students worked out a very broad and very wondrous program of education and enlightenment for liubka. soloviev took upon himself to teach the girl grammar and writing. in order not to tire her with tedious lessons, and as a reward for successes, he would read aloud for her artistic fiction, russian and foreign, easy of comprehension. lichonin left for himself the teaching of arithmetic, geography and history. while the prince said simple-heartedly, without his usual facetiousness this time: "i, my children, don't know anything; while that which i do know, i know very badly. but i'll read to her the remarkable production of the great georgian poet rustavelli, and translate it line by line. i confess to you, that i'm not much of a pedagogue: i tried to be a tutor, but they politely chased me out after only the second lesson. still, no one can teach better playing on a guitar, mandolin, and the bagpipes!" nijeradze was speaking with perfect seriousness, and for that reason lichonin with soloviev good-naturedly started laughing; but with entire unexpectedness, to the general amazement of all, simanovsky sustained him. "the prince speaks common sense. to have the mastery of an instrument elevates the aesthetic sense, in any case; and is even a help in life. and i, for my part, gentlemen ... i propose to read with the young person the capital of marx, and the history of human culture. and to take up chemistry and physics with her, besides." if it were not for the customary authority of simanovsky and the importance with which he spoke, the remaining three would have burst into laughter in his face. they only stared at him, with eyes popping out. "well, yes," continued simanovsky imperturbably, "i'll show her a whole series of chemical and physical experiments, which it is possible to carry on at home; which are always amusing and beneficial to the mind; and which eradicate prejudices. incidentally, i'll explain something of the structure of the world, of the properties of matter. and as far as karl marx is concerned, just remember, that great books are equally accessible to the understanding both of a scholar and an unlettered peasant, if only comprehensibly presented. and every great thought is simple." lichonin found liubka at the place agreed upon, on a bench of the boulevard. she went home with him very unwillingly. just as lichonin had supposed, meeting the grumbling alexandra was a fearful thing to her, who had long since grown unused to every-day actuality; harsh, and plentiful with all sorts of unpleasantnesses. and besides that, the fact that lichonin did not want to conceal her past acted oppressively upon her. but she, who had long ago lost her will in the establishment of anna markovna, deprived of her personality, ready to follow after the call of every stranger, did not tell him a word and walked after him. the crafty alexandra had already managed during this time to run to the superintendent of the houses and to complain to him, that, now, lichonin had come with some miss, had passed the night with her in the room; but who she is, that alexandra don't know; that lichonin says she is his first cousin, like; but did not present a passport. it was necessary to explain things at great length, diffusedly and tiresomely, to the superintendent, a coarse and insolent man, who bore himself to all the tenants in the house as toward a conquered city; and feared only the students slightly, because they gave him a severe rebuff at times. lichonin propitiated him only when he rented on the spot another room, several rooms away from his, for liubka; under the very slope of the roof, so that it represented on the inside a sharply cut-off, low, four-sided pyramid, with one little window. "but still, mr. lichonin, just you present the passport to-morrow without fail," said the superintendent insistently at parting. "since you're a respectable man, hard-working, and you and i are long acquainted, also you pay punctually, i am willing to do it only for you. you know yourself what hard times these are. if some one tells on me, they'll not only fire me, but they can put me out of town as well. they're strict now." in the evening lichonin strolled with liubka through prince park, listened to the music playing in the aristocratic club, and returned home early. he escorted liubka to the door of her room and at once took leave of her; kissing her, however, tenderly on the brow, like a father. but after ten minutes, when he was already lying in bed undressed and reading the statutes of state, liubka, having scratched on his door like a cat, suddenly entered his room. "darling, sweetie! excuse me for troubling you. haven't you a needle and thread? but don't get angry at me; i'll go away at once." "liuba! i beg of you to go away not at once, but this second. finally, i demand it!" "my dearie, my pretty," liubka began to intone laughably and piteously, "well, what are you yelling at me for all the time?" and, in a moment, having blown upon the candle, she nestled up to him in the darkness, laughing and crying. "no, liuba, this must not be. it's impossible to go on like this," lichonin was saying ten minutes later, standing at the door, wrapped up in his blanket, like a spanish hidalgo in a cape. "to-morrow at the latest i'll rent a room for you in another house. and, in general, don't let this occur! god be with you, and good night! still, you must give me your word of honour that our relations will be merely friendly." "i give it, dearie, i give it, i give it, i give it!" she began to prattle, smiling; and quickly smacked him first on the lips and then on his hand. the last action was altogether instinctive; and, perhaps, unexpected even to liubka herself. never yet in her life had she kissed any man's hand, save a priest's. perhaps she wanted to express through this her gratitude to lichonin, and a prostration before him as before a higher being. chapter xv. among russian intelligents, as has already been noted by many, there is a decent quantity of wonderful people; true children of the russian land and culture, who would be able heroically, without the quivering of a single muscle, to look straight in the face of death; who are capable for the sake of an idea of bearing unconceivable privations and sufferings, equal to torture; but then, these people are lost before the haughtiness of a doorman; shrink from the yelling of a laundress; while into a police station they enter in an insufferable and timid distress. and precisely such a one was lichonin. on the following day (yesterday it had been impossible on account of a holiday and the lateness), having gotten up very early and recollecting that to-day he had to take care of liubka's passport, he felt just as bad as when in former times, as a high-school boy, he went to an examination, knowing that he would surely fall through. his head ached, while his arms and legs somehow seemed another's; in addition, a drizzling and seemingly dirty rain had been falling on the street since morning. "always, now, when there's some unpleasantness in store, there is inevitably a rain falling," reflected lichonin, dressing slowly. it was not especially far from his street to the yamskaya, not more than two-thirds of a mile. in general, he was not infrequently in those parts, but he had never had occasion to go there in the daytime; and on the way it seemed to him all the time that every one he met, every cabby and policeman, was looking at him with curiosity, with reproach, or with disdain, as though surmising the destination of his journey. as always on a nasty and muggy morning, all the faces that met his eyes seemed pale, ugly, with monstrously underlined defects. scores of times he imagined all that he would say in the beginning at the house; and later at the station house; and every time the outcome was different. angry at himself for this premature rehearsal, he would at times stop himself: "ah! you mustn't think, you mustn't presuppose what you're going to say. it always turns out far better when it's done right off..." and then again imaginary dialogues would run through his head: "you have no right to hold this girl against her wish." "yes, but let her herself give notice about going away." "i act at her instruction." "all right; but how can you prove this?" and again he would mentally cut himself short. the city common began, on which cows were browsing; a board sidewalk along a fence; shaky little bridges over little brooklets and ditches. then he turned into the yamskaya. in the house of anna markovna all the windows were closed with shutters, with openings, in the form of hearts, cut out in the middle. and all of the remaining houses on the deserted street, desolated as though after a pestilence, were closed as well. with a contracting heart lichonin pulled the bell-handle. a maid, barefooted, with skirt caught up, with a wet rag in her hand, with face striped from dirt, answered the bell--she had just been washing the floor. "i'd like to see jennka," timidly requested lichonin. "well, now, the young lady is busy with a guest. they haven't waked up yet." "well, tamara then." the maid looked at him mistrustfully. "miss tamara--i don't know... i think she's busy too. but what you want--to pay a visit, or what?" "ah, isn't it all the same! a visit, let's say." "i don't know. i'll go and look. wait a while." she went away, leaving lichonin in the half-dark drawing room. the blue pillars of dust, coming from the openings in the shutters, pierced the heavy obscurity in all directions. like hideous spots stood out of the gray murkiness the bepainted furniture and the sweetish oleographs on the walls. it smelt of yesterday's tobacco, of dampness, sourness; and of something else peculiar, indeterminate, uninhabited, of which places that are lived in only temporarily always smell in the morning--such as empty theatres, dance-halls, auditoriums. far off in the city a droshky rumbled intermittently. the wall-clock monotonously ticked behind the wall. in a strange agitation lichonin walked back and forth through the drawing room and rubbed and kneaded his trembling hands, and for some reason was stooping and felt cold. "i shouldn't have started all this false comedy," he thought with irritation. "it goes without saying that i've now become the by-word of the entire university. the devil nudged me! and even during the day yesterday it wasn't too late, when she was saying that she was ready to go back. all i had to do was to give her for a cabby and a little pin money, and she'd have gone, and all would have been fine; and i would be independent now, free, and wouldn't be undergoing this tormenting and ignominious state of spirits. but it's too late to retreat now. to-morrow it'll be still later, and the day after to-morrow--still more. having pulled off one fool stunt, it must be immediately put a stop to; but on the other hand, if you don't do that in time, it draws two others after it, and they--twenty new ones. or, perhaps, it's not too late now? why, she's silly, undeveloped, and, probably, a hysteric, like the rest of them. she's an animal, fit only for stuffing herself and for the bed. oh! the devil!" lichonin forcefully squeezed his cheeks and his forehead between his hands and shut his eyes. "and if i had but held out against the common, coarse, physical temptation! there, you see for yourself, this has happened twice already; and then it'll go on and on ..." but side by side with these ran other thoughts, opposed to them: "but then, i'm a man. i am master of my word. for that which urged me on to this deed was splendid, noble, lofty. i remember very well that rapture which seized me when my thought transpired into action! that was a pure, tremendous feeling. or was it simply an extravagance of the mind, whipped up by alcohol; the consequence of a sleepless night, smoking, and long, abstract conversations?" and immediately liubka would appear before him, appear at a distance, as though out of the misty depths of time; awkward, timid, with her homely and endearing face, which had at once come to seem of infinitely close kinship; long, long familiar, and at the same time unpleasant--unjustly, without cause. "can it be that i'm a coward and a rag?" cried lichonin inwardly and wrung his hands. "what am i afraid of, before whom am i embarrassed? have i not always prided myself upon being sole master of my life? let's suppose, even, that the phantasy, the extravagance, of making a psychological experiment upon a human soul--a rare experiment, unsuccessful in ninety-nine percent--has entered my head. is it possible that i must render anybody an account in this, or fear anybody's opinion? lichonin! look down upon mankind from above!" jennie walked into the room, dishevelled, sleepy, in a night jacket on top of a white underskirt. "a-a!" she yawned, extending her hand to lichonin. "how d'you do, my dear student! how does your liubochka feel herself in the new place? call me in as a guest some time. or are you spending your honeymoon on the quiet? without any outside witnesses?" "drop the silly stuff, jennechka. i came about the passport." "so-o. about the passport," jennka went into thought. "that is, there's no passport here, but you must take a blank from the housekeeper. you understand, our usual prostitute's blank; and then they'll exchange it for you for a real book at the station house. only you see, my dear, i will be but ill help to you in this business. they are as like as not to beat me up if i come near a housekeeper or a porter. but here's what you do. you'd best send the maid for the housekeeper; tell her to say that a certain guest, now, a steady one, has come on business; that it's very urgent to see her personally. but you must excuse me--i'm going to back out, and don't you be angry, please. you know yourself--charity begins at home. but why should you hang around by yourself in this here darkness? you'd better go into the cabinet. if you want to, i'll send you beer there. or, perhaps you want coffee? or else," and her eyes sparkled slyly, "or else a girlie, perhaps? tamara is busy, but may be niura or verka will do?" "stop it, jennie! i came about a serious and important matter, but you ..." "well, well, i won't, i won't! i said it just so. i see that you observe faithfulness. that's very noble on your part. let's go, then." she led him into the cabinet, and, opening the inner bolt of the shutter, threw it wide open. the daylight softly and sadly splashed against the red and gold walls, over the candelabra, over the soft red velveteen furniture. "right here it began," reflected lichonin with sad regret. "i am going," said jennka. "don't you knuckle down too much before her, and simeon too. abuse them for all you're worth. it's daytime now, and they won't dare do anything to you. if anything happens, tell them straight that, now, you're going to the governor immediately and are going to tell on them. tell 'em, that they'll be closed up and put out of town in twenty-four hours. bawl 'em out and they get like silk. well, now, i wish you success." she went away. after ten minutes had passed, into the cabinet floated emma edwardovna, the housekeeper, in a blue satin pegnoir; corpulent, with an important face, broadening from the forehead down to the cheeks, just like a monstrous squash; with all her massive chins and breasts; with small, keen eyes, without eyelashes; with thin, malicious, compressed lips. lichonin, arising, pressed the puffy hand extended to him, studded with rings, and suddenly thought with aversion: "the devil take it! if this vermin had a soul, if it were possible to read this soul--then how many direct and indirect murders are lurking hidden within it!" it must be said, that in starting out for the yamkas, lichonin, besides money, had fetched a revolver along with him; and on the road, while walking, he had frequently shoved his hand into his pocket and had there felt the chill contact of the metal. he expected affront, violence, and was prepared to meet them in a suitable manner. but, to his amazement, all that he had presupposed and had feared proved a timorous, fantastic fiction. the business was far more simple, more wearisome and more prosaic, and at the same time more unpleasant. "ja, mein herr," said the housekeeper indifferently and somewhat loftily, settling into a low chair and lighting a cigarette. "you pay for one night and instead of that took already the girl for one more night and one more day. also, you owe twenty-five more roubles yet. when we let off a girlie for a night we take ten roubles, and for the twenty-four hours twenty-five roubles. that's a tax, like. don't you want a smoke, young man?" she stretched out her case, and lichonin, without himself knowing why, took a cigarette. "i wanted to talk with you about something else entirely." "o! don't trouble yourself to speak: i understand everything very well. probably the young man wants to take these girl, those liubka, altogether to himself to set her up, or in order to--how do you russians call it?--in order to safe her? yes, yes, yes, that happens. twenty-two years i live in a brothel, and i know, that this happens with very foolish young peoples. but only i assure you, that from this will come nothing out." "whether it will come out or whether it won't come out--that is already my affair," answered lichonin dully, looking down at his fingers, trembling on his knees. "o, of course, it's your affair, my young student," and the flabby cheeks and majestic chins of emma edwardovna began to jump from inaudible laughter. "from my soul i wish for you love and friendship; but only trouble yourself to tell this nasty creature, this liubka, that she shouldn't dare to show even her nose here, when you throw her out into the street like a little doggie. let her croak from hunger under a fence, or go into a half-rouble establishment for the soldiers!" "believe me, she won't return. i ask you merely to give me her certificate, without delay." "the certificate? ach, if you please! even this very minute. only i will first trouble you to pay for everything that she took here on credit. have a look, here is her account book. i took it along with me on purpose. i knew already with what our conversation would end." she took out of the slit of her pegnoir--showing lichonin for just a minute her fat, full-fleshed, yellow, enormous breast--a little book in a black cover, with the heading: account of miss irene voschhenkova in the house of ill-fame, maintained by anna markovna shaibes, on yam-skaya street, no. so-and-so, and extended it to him across the table. lichonin turned over the first page and read through four or five paragraphs of the printed rules. there dryly and briefly it was stated that the account book consists of two copies, of which one is kept by the proprietress while the other remains with the prostitute; that all income and expense were entered into both books; that by agreement the prostitute receives board, quarters, heat, light, bed linen, baths and so forth, and for this pays out to the proprietress in no case more than two-thirds of her earnings; while out of the remaining money she is bound to dress neatly and decently, having no less than two dresses for going out. further, mention was made of the fact that payment was made with the help of stamps, which the proprietress gives out to the prostitute upon receipt of money from her; while the account is drawn up at the end of every month. and, finally, that the prostitute can at any time leave the house of prostitution, even if there does remain a debt of hers, which, however, she binds herself to cancel on the basis of general civil laws. lichonin prodded the last point with his finger, and, having turned the face of the book to the housekeeper, said triumphantly: "aha! there, you see: she has the right to leave the house at any time. consequently, she can at any time quit your abominable dive of violence, baseness, and depravity, in which you ..." lichonin began rattling off, but the housekeeper calmly cut him short: "o! i have no doubt of this. let her go away. let her only pay the money." "what about promissory notes? she can give promissory notes." "pst! promissory notes! in the first place, she's illiterate; while in the second, what are her promissory notes worth? a spit and no more. let her find a surety who would be worthy of trust, and then i have nothing against it." "but, then, there's nothing said in the rules about sureties." "there's many a thing not said! in the rules it also does not say that it's permitted to carry a girlie out of the house, without giving warning to the owners." "but in any case you'll have to give me her blank." "i will never do such a foolishness! come here with some respectable person and with the police; and let the police certify that this friend of yours is a man of means; and let this man stand surety for you; and let, besides that, the police certify that you are not taking the girl in order to trade in her, or to sell her over to another stablishment--then as you please! hand and foot!" "the devil!" exclaimed lichonin. "but if that surety will be i, i myself! if i'll sign your promissory notes right away ..." "young man! i don't know what you are taught in your different universities, but is it possible that you reckon me such a positive fool? god grant, that you have, besides those which are on you, still some other pants! god grant, that you should even the day after have for dinner the remnants of sausages from the sausage shop, and yet you say--a promissory note! what are you bothering my head for?" lichonin grew completely angry. he drew his wallet out of his pocket and slapped it down on the table. "in that case i pay in cash and immediately!" "ach, that's a business of another kind," sweetly, but still with mistrust, the housekeeper intoned. "i will trouble you to turn the page, and see what the bill of your beloved is." "keep still, you carrion!" "i'm still, you fool," calmly responded the housekeeper. on the small ruled pages on the left side was designated the income, on the right were the expenses. "received in stamps, th of april," read lichonin, " roubles; th-- roubles; th-- roubles; th--sick; th--sick; th-- roubles; st-- roubles." "my god!" with loathing, with horror, reflected lichonin. "twelve men in one night!" at the end of the month stood: "total roubles." "lord! why, this is some sort of delirium! one hundred and sixty-five visits," thought lichonin, having mechanically calculated it, and still continued turning the pages. then he went over to the columns on the right. "made, a red dress of silk with lace roubles dressmaker eldokimova. dressing sack of lace roubles dressmaker eldokimova. silk stockings pair roubles," &c., &c. "given for cab-fare, given for candy, perfumes bought," &c., &c. "total roubles." after that from the roubles were deducted roubles--the share of the proprietress for board and lodging. the figure of roubles resulted. the end of the monthly account declared: "total after the payment to the dressmaker and for other articles, of roubles, a debt of ninety-five ( ) roubles remains for irene voschhenkova and with the four hundred and eighteen roubles remaining from last year--five hundred and thirteen ( ) roubles." lichonin's spirits fell. he did try, at first, to be indignant at the expensiveness of the materials supplied; but the housekeeper retorted with sang froid that that did not concern her at all; that the establishment demanded only that the girl dress decently, as becomes a girl from a decent, genteel house; while it did not concern itself with the rest. the establishment merely extended her credit in paying her expenses. "but this is a vixen, a spider in human shape--this dressmaker of yours!" yelled lichonin beside himself. "why, she's in a conspiracy with you, cupping glass that you are, you abominable tortoise! scuttlefish! where's your conscience?" the more agitated he grew, the more calm and jeering emma edwardovna became. "again i repeat: that is not my business. and you, young man, don't express yourself like that, because i will call the porter, and he will throw you out of the door." lichonin was compelled to bargain with the cruel woman long, brutally, till he grew hoarse, before she agreed, in the end, to take two hundred and fifty roubles in cash, and two hundred roubles in promissory notes. and even that only when lichonin with his half-yearly certificate proved to her that he was finishing this year and would become a lawyer. the housekeeper went after the ticket, while lichonin took to pacing the cabinet back and forth. he had already looked over all the pictures on the walls: leda with the swan, and the bathing on the shore of the sea, and the odalisque in a harem, and the satyr, bearing a naked nymph in his arms; but suddenly a small printed placard, framed and behind glass, half covered by a portiere, attracted his attention. it was the first time that it had come across lichonin's eyes, and the student with amazement and aversion read these lines, expressed in the dead, official language of police stations. there with shameful, businesslike coldness, were mentioned all possible measures and precautions against infections; the intimacies of feminine toilet; the weekly medical inspections and all the adaptations for them. lichonin also read that no establishment was to be situated nearer than a hundred steps from churches, places of learning, and court buildings; that only persons of the female sex may maintain houses of prostitution; that only her relatives, and even then of the female sex exclusively, and none older than seven years, may live with the proprietress; and that the proprietors and the owners of the house, as well as the girls, must in their relations among themselves and the guests as well, observe politeness, quiet, civility and decency, by no means allowing themselves drunkenness, swearing and brawls. and also that the prostitute must not allow herself the caresses of love when in an intoxicated condition or with an intoxicated man; and in addition to that, during the time of certain functions. here also the prostitutes were most strictly forbidden to commit abortions. "what a serious and moral view of things!" reflected lichonin with a malicious sneer. finally the business with emma edwarodvna was concluded. having taken the money and written out a receipt, she stretched it out to lichonin together with the blank, while he stretched out the money to her; at which, during the time of the operation, they both looked at each other's eyes and hands intently and warily. it was apparent that they both felt no especially great mutual trust. lichonin put the documents away in his wallet and was preparing to depart. the housekeeper escorted him to the very stoop, and when the student was already standing in the street, she, remaining on the steps, leaned out and called after him: "student! hey! student!" he stopped and turned around. "what now?" "and here's another thing. now i must tell you, that your liubka is trash, a thief, and sick with syphilis! none of our good guests wanted to take her; and anyway, if you had not taken her, then we would have thrown her out to-morrow! i will also tell you, that she had to do with the porter, with policemen, with janitors, and with petty thieves. congratulations on your lawful marriage!" "oo-ooh! vermin!" lichonin roared back at her. "you green blockhead!" called out the housekeeper and banged the door. lichonin went to the station house in a cab. on the way he recalled that he had not had time to look at the blank properly, at this renowned "yellow ticket," of which he had heard so much. this was an ordinary small white sheet, no larger than a postal envelope. on one side, in the proper column, were written out the name, father's name, and family name of liubka, and her profession--"prostitute"; and on the other side, concise extracts from the paragraphs of that placard which he had just read through--infamous, hypocritical rules about behaviour and external and internal cleanliness. "every visitor." he read, "has the right to demand from the prostitute the written certificate of the doctor who has inspected her the last time." and again sentimental pity overcame the heart of lichonin. "poor women!" he reflected with grief. "what only don't they do with you, how don't they abuse you, until you grow accustomed to everything, just like blind horses on a treadmill!" in the station house he was received by the district inspector, kerbesh. he had spent the night on duty, had not slept his fill, and was angry. his luxurious, fan-shaped red beard was crumpled. the right half of the ruddy face was still crimsonly glowing from lying long on the uncomfortable oilcloth pillow. but the amazing, vividly blue eyes, cold and luminous, looked clear and hard, like blue porcelain. having ended interrogating, recording, and cursing out with obscenities the throng of ragamuffins, taken in during the night for sobering up and now being sent out over their own districts, he threw himself against the back of the divan, put his hands behind his neck, and stretched with all his enormous, heroic body so hard that all his ligaments and joints cracked. he looked at lichonin just as at a thing, and asked: "and what will you have, mr. student?" lichonin stated his business briefly. "and so i want," he concluded, "to take her to me ... how is this supposed to be done with you? ... in the capacity of a servant, or, if you want, a relative, in a word ... how is it done? ..." "well, in the capacity of a kept mistress or a wife, let's say," indifferently retorted kerbesh and twirled in his hands a silver cigar case with monograms and little figures. "i can do absolutely nothing for you ... at least right now. if you desire to marry her, present a suitable permit from your university authorities. but if you're taking her on maintenance--then just think, where's the logic in that? you're taking a girl out of a house of depravity, in order to live with her in depraved cohabitation." "a servant, finally," lichonin put in. "and even a servant. i'd trouble you to present an affidavit from your landlord--for, i hope, you're not a houseowner? very well, then, an affidavit from your landlord, as to your being in a position to keep a servant; and besides that, all the documents, testifying that you're that very person you give yourself out to be; an affidavit, for instance, from your district and from the university, and all that sort of thing. for you, i hope, are registered? or, perhaps, you are now, eh? ... of the illegal ones? "no, i am registered!" retorted lichonin, beginning to lose patience. "and that's splendid. but the young lady, about whom you're troubling yourself?" "no, she's not registered as yet. but i have her blank in my possession, which, i hope, you'll exchange for a real passport for me, and then i'll register her at once." kerbesh spread his arms out wide, then again began toying with the cigar case. "can't do anything for you, mr. student, just nothing at all, until you present all the papers required. as far as the girl's concerned, why, she, as one not having the right of residence, will be sent to the police without delay, and there detained; unless she personally desires to go there, where you've taken her from. i've the honour of wishing you good day." lichonin abruptly pulled his hat over his eyes and went toward the door. but suddenly an ingenious thought flashed through his head, from which, however, he himself became disgusted. and feeling nausea in the pit of his stomach, with clammy, cold hands, experiencing a sickening pinching in his toes, he again walked up to the table and said as though carelessly, but with a catch in his voice: "pardon me, inspector. i've forgotten the most important thing; a certain mutual acquaintance of ours has instructed me to transmit to you a small debt of his." "hm! an acquaintance?" asked kerbesh, opening wide his magnificent azure eyes. "and who may he be?" "bar ... barbarisov." "ah, barbarisov? so, so, so, i recollect, i recollect!" "so then, won't you please accept these ten roubles?" kerbesh shook his head, but did not take the bit of paper. "well, but this barbarisov of yours--that is, ours--is a swine. it isn't ten roubles he owes me at all, but a quarter of a century. what a scoundrel! twenty-five roubles and some small change besides. well, the small change, of course, i won't count up to him. god be with him! this, you see, is a billiard debt. i must say that he's a blackguard, plays crookedly ... and so, young man, dig up fifteen more." "well, but you are a knave, mr. inspector!" said lichonin, getting out the money. "oh, mercy!" by now altogether good-naturedly retorted kerbesh. "a wife, children ... you know yourself what our salary is ... receive the little passport, young man. sign your receipt. best wishes." a queer thing! the consciousness that the passport was, finally, in his pocket, for some reason suddenly calmed and again braced up and elevated lichonin's nerves. "oh, well!" he thought, walking quickly along the street, "the very beginning has been laid down, the most difficult part has been done. hold fast, now, lichonin, and don't fall in spirit! what you've done is splendid and lofty. let me be even a victim of this deed--it's all one! it's a shame, having done a good deed, to expect rewards for it right away. i'm not a little circus dog, and not a trained camel, and not the first pupil of a young ladies' genteel institute. only it was useless for me to let loose yesterday before these bearers of enlightenment. it all turned out to be silly, tactless, and, in any case, premature. but everything in life is reparable. a person will sustain the heaviest, most disgraceful things; but, time passes, and they are recalled as trifles ..." to his amazement, liubka was not especially struck, and did not at all become overjoyed when he triumphantly showed her the passport. she was only glad to see lichonin again. perhaps, this primitive, naive soul had already contrived to cleave to its protector? she did throw herself upon his neck, but he stopped her, and quietly, almost in her ear, asked her: "liubka, tell me ... don't be afraid to tell the truth, no matter what it may be ... they told me just now, there in the house, that you're sick with a certain disease ... you know, that which is called the evil sickness. if you believe in me even to some extent, tell me, my darling, tell me, is that so or not?" she turned red, covered her face with her hands, fell down on the divan and burst into tears. "my dearie! vassil vassilich! vasinka! honest to god! honest to god, now, there never was anything of the kind! i always was so careful! i was awfully afraid of this. i love you so! i would have told you without fail." she caught his hands, pressed them to her wet face and continued to assure him with the absurd and touching sincerity of an unjustly accused child. and he at once believed her in his soul. "i believe you, my child," he said quietly, stroking her hair. "don't excite yourself, don't cry. only let us not again give in to our weakness. well, it has happened--let it have happened; but let us not repeat it any more.' "as you wish," prattled the girl, kissing now his hands, now the cloth of his coat. "if i displease you so, then, of course, let it be as you wish." however, this evening also the temptation was again repeated, and kept on repeating until the falls from grace ceased to arouse a burning shame in lichonin, and turned into a habit, swallowing and extinguishing remorse. chapter xvi. justice must be rendered to lichonin; he did everything to create for liubka a quiet and secure existence. since he knew that they would have to leave their mansard anyway--this bird house, rearing above the whole city--leave it not so much on account of its inconvenience and lack of space as on account of the old woman alexandra, who with every day became more ferocious, captious and scolding--he resolved to rent a little bit of a flat, consisting of two rooms and a kitchen, on the borschhagovka, at the edge of the town. he came upon an inexpensive one, for nine roubles a month, without fuel. true, lichonin had to run very far from there to his pupils, but he relied firmly upon his endurance and health, and would often say: "my legs are my own. i don't have to be sparing of them." and, truly, he was a great master at walking. once, for the sake of a joke, having put a pedometer in his vest pocket, he towards evening counted up twenty versts; which, taking into consideration the unusual length of his legs, equalled some twenty-five versts.[ ] and he did have to run about quite a bit, because the fuss about liubka's passport and the acquisition of household furnishings of a sort had eaten up all his accidental winnings at cards. he did try to take up playing again, on a small scale at first, but was soon convinced that his star at cards had now entered upon a run of fatal ill luck. [ ] a verst is equal to two-thirds of a mile.--trans. by now, of course, the real character of his relations with liubka was a mystery to none of his comrades; but he still continued in their presence to act out the comedy of friendly and brotherly relations with the girl. for some reason he could not, or did not want to, realize that it would have been far wiser and more advantageous for him not to lie, not to be false, and not to pretend. or, perhaps, although he did know this, he still could not change the established tone. as for the intimate relations, he inevitably played a secondary, passive role. the initiative, in the form of tenderness, caressing, always had to come from liubka (she had remained liubka, after all, and lichonin had somehow entirely forgotten that he himself had read her real name--irene--in the passport). she, who had so recently given her body up impassively--or, on the contrary, with an imitation of burning passion--to tens of people in a day, to hundreds in a month, had become attached to lichonin with all her feminine being, loving and jealous; had grown attached to him with body, feeling, thoughts. the prince was funny and entertaining to her, and the expansive soloviev interestingly amusing; toward the crushing authoritativeness of simanovsky she felt a supernatural terror; but lichonin was for her at the same time a sovereign, and a divinity; and, which is the most horrible of all, her property and bodily joy. it has long ago been observed, that a man who has lived his fill, has been worn out, gnawed and chewed by the jaws of amatory passions, will never again love with a strong and only love, simultaneously self-denying, pure, and passionate. but for a woman there are neither laws nor limitations in this respect. this observation was especially confirmed in liubka. she was ready to crawl before lichonin with delight, to serve him as a slave; but, at the same time, desired that he belong to her more than a table, than a little dog, than a night blouse. and he always proved wanting, always failing before the onslaught of this sudden love, which from a modest little stream had so rapidly turned into a river and had over-flowed its banks. and not infrequently he thought to himself, with bitterness and a sneer: "every evening i play the role of the beauteous joseph; still, he at least managed to tear himself away, leaving his underwear in the hands of the ardent lady; but when will i at last get free of my yoke?" and a secret enmity for liubka was already gnawing him. all the more and more frequently various crafty plans of liberation came into his head. and some of them were to such an extent dishonest, that, after a few hours, or the next day, lichonin squirmed inwardly from shame, recalling them. "i am falling, morally and mentally!" he would at times think with horror. "it's not in vain that i read somewhere, or heard from some one, that the connection of a cultured man with a woman of little intellect will never elevate her to the level of the man, but, on the contrary, will bow him down and sink him to the mental and moral outlook of the woman." and after two weeks she ceased to excite his imagination entirely. he gave in, as to violence, to the long-continued caresses, entreaties, and often even to pity. yet at the same time liubka, who had rested and felt living, real soil under her, began to improve in looks with unusual rapidity, just as a flower bud, that but yesterday was almost dying, suddenly unfolds after a plentiful and warm rain. the freckles ran off her soft face, and the uncomprehending, troubled expression, like that of a young jackdaw, had disappeared from the dark eyes, and they had grown brighter and had begun to sparkle. the body grew stronger and filled out; the lips grew red. but lichonin, seeing liubka every day, did not notice this and did not believe those compliments which were showered upon her by his friends. "fool jokes," he reflected, frowning. "the boys are spoofing." as the lady of the house, liubka proved to be less than mediocre. true, she could cook fat stews, so thick that the spoon stood upright in them; prepare enormous, unwieldy, formless cutlets; and under the guidance of lichonin familiarized herself pretty rapidly with the great art of brewing tea (at seventy-five kopecks a pound); but further than that she did not go, probably because for each art and for each being there are extreme limitations of their own, which cannot in any way be surmounted. but then, she loved to wash floors very much; and carried out this occupation so often and with such zeal, that dampness soon set in in the flat and multipedes appeared. tempted once by a newspaper advertisement, lichonin procured a stocking knitting machine for her, on terms. the art, the mastery of this instrument--promising, to judge by the advertisement, three roubles of clear profit a day--proved to be so uncomplicated that lichonin, soloviev, and nijeradze easily mastered it in a few hours; while lichonin even contrived to knit a whole stocking of uncommon durability, and of such dimensions that it would have proven big even for the feet of minin and pozharsky, whose statues are in moscow, on krasnaya square. only liubka alone could not master this trade. at every mistake or tangle she was forced to turn to the co-operation of the men. but then, she learned pretty rapidly to make artificial flowers and, despite the opinion of simanovsky, made them very exquisitely, and with great taste; so that after a month the hat specialty stores began to buy her work. and, what is most amazing, she had taken only two lessons in all from a specialist, while the rest she learned through a self-instructor, guiding herself only by the drawings supplemental to it. she did not contrive to make more than a rouble's worth of flowers in a week; but this money was her pride, and for the very first half-rouble that she made she bought lichonin a mouthpiece for smoking. several years later lichonin confessed to himself at soul, with regret and with a quiet melancholy, that this period of time was the most quiet, peaceful and comfortable one of all his life in the university and as a lawyer. this unwieldy, clumsy, perhaps even stupid liubka, possessed some instinctive domesticity, some imperceptible ability of creating a bright and easy quietude around her. it was precisely she who attained the fact that lichonin's quarters very soon became a charming, quiet centre; where all the comrades of lichonin, who, as well as the majority of the students of that time, were forced to sustain a bitter struggle with the harsh conditions of life, felt somehow at ease, as though in a family; and rested at soul after heavy tribulations, need, and starvation. lichonin recalled with grateful sadness her friendly complaisance, her modest and attentive silence, on those evenings around the samovar, when so much had been spoken, argued and dreamt. in learning, things went with great difficulty. all these self-styled cultivators, collectively and separately, spoke of the fact that the education of the human mind, and the upbringing of the human soul must flow out of individual motives; but in reality they stuffed liubka with just that which seemed to them the most necessary and indispensable, and tried to overcome together with her those scientific obstacles, which, without any loss, might have been left aside. thus, for example, lichonin did not want, under any conditions, to become reconciled, in teaching her arithmetic, to her queer, barbarous, savage, or, more correctly, childish, primitive method of counting. she counted exclusively in ones, twos, threes and fives. thus, for example, twelve to her was two times two threes; nineteen--three fives and two twos; and, it must be said, that through her system she with the rapidity of a counting board operated almost up to a hundred. to go further she dared not; and besides she had no practical need of this. in vain did lichonin try to transfer her to a digital system. nothing came of this, save that he flew into a rage, yelled at liubka; while she would look at him in silence, with astonished, widely open and guilty eyes, the lashes of which stuck into long black arrows from tears. also, through a capricious turn of her mind, she began to master addition and multiplication with comparative ease, but subtraction and division were for her an impenetrable wall. but then, she could, with amazing speed and wit, solve all possible jocose oral head-breaking riddles, and even remembered very many of them herself from the thousand year old usage of the village. toward geography she was perfectly dull. true, she could orientate herself as to the four cardinal points on the street, in the garden, and in the room; hundreds of times better than lichonin--the ancient peasant instinct in her asserted itself--but she stubbornly denied the sphericity of the earth and did not recognize the horizon; and when she was told that the terrestrial globe moves in space, she only snorted from laughter. geographical maps to her were always an incomprehensible daubing in several colours; but separate figures she memorized exactly and quickly. "where's italy?" lichonin would ask her. "here it is, a boot," liubka would say and triumphantly jabbed the apennine peninsula. "sweden and norway?" "this dog, which is jumping off a roof." "the baltic sea?" "a widow standing on her knees." "the black sea?" "a shoe." "spain?" "a fatty in a cap" ... &c. with history matters went no better; lichonin did not take into consideration the fact that she, with her childlike soul thirsting for fiction, would have easily become familiarized with historic events through various funny and heroically touching anecdotes; but he, accustomed to pulling through examinations and tutoring high-school boys of the fourth or fifth grade, starved her on names and dates. besides that, he was very impatient, unrestrained, irascible; grew fatigued soon, and a secret--usually concealed but constantly growing--hatred for the girl who had so suddenly and incongruously warped all his life, more and more frequently and unjustly broke forth during the time of these lessons. a far greater success as a pedagogue enjoyed nijeradze. his guitar and mandolin always hung in the dining room, secured to the nails with ribbons. the guitar, with its soft, warm sounds, drew liubka more than the irritating, metallic bleating of the mandolin. when nijeradze would come to them as a guest (three or four times a week, in the evening), she herself would take the guitar down from the wall, painstakingly wipe it off with a handkerchief, and hand it over to him. he, having fussed for some time with the tuning, would clear his throat, put one leg over the other, negligently throw himself against the back of the chair, and begin in a throaty little tenor, a trifle hoarse, but pleasant and true: "the trea-cha-rous sa-ound av akissing resahounds through the quiet night air; tuh all fla-ming hearts it is pleasing, and given tuh each lovin' pair. for a single mohoment of mee-ting ..." and at this he would pretend to swoon away from his own singing, shut his eyes, toss his head in the passionate passages or during the pauses, tearing his right hand away from the strings; would suddenly turn to stone, and for a second would pierce liubka's eyes with his languorous, humid, sheepish eyes. he knew an endless multitude of ballads, catches, and old-fashioned, jocose little pieces. most of all pleased liubka the universally familiar armenian couplets about karapet: "karapet has a buffet, on the buffet's a confet, on the confet's a portret-- that's the self-same karapet." [ ] anglice, "confet" is a bon-bon; "portret," a portrait.--trans. of these couplets (in the caucasus they are called kinto-uri--the song of the peddlers) the prince knew an infinite many, but the absurd refrain was always one and the same: "bravo, bravo, katenka, katerin petrovna, don't you kiss me on the cheek--a, kiss the backs of my head." these couplets nijeradze always sang in a diminished voice, preserving on his face an expression of serious astonishment about karapet; while liubka laughed until it hurt, until tears came, until she had nervous spasms. once, carried away, she could not restrain herself and began to chime in with him, and their singing proved to be very harmonious. little by little, when she had by degrees completely ceased to be embarrassed before the prince, they sang together more and more frequently. liubka proved to have a very soft and low contralto, even though thin, on which her past life with its colds, drinking, and professional excesses had left absolutely no traces. and mainly--which was already a curious gift of god--she possessed an instinctive, inherent ability very exactly, beautifully, and always originally, to carry on the second voice. there came a time toward the end of their acquaintance, when liubka did not beg the prince, but the prince liubka, to sing some one of the beloved songs of the people, of which she knew a multitude. and so, putting her elbow on the table, and propping up her head with her palm, like a peasant woman, she would start off to the cautious, painstaking, quiet accompaniment: "oh, the nights have grown tiresome to me, and wearisome; to be parted from my dearie, from my mate! oh, haven't i myself, woman-like, done a foolish thing-- have stirred up the wrath of my own darling: when i did call him a bitter drunkard! ..." "bitter drunkard!" the prince would repeat the last words together with her, and would forlornly toss his curly head, inclined to one side; and they both tried to end the song so that the scarcely seizable quivering of the guitar strings and the voice might by degrees grow quiet, and that it might not be possible to note when the sound ended and the silence came. but then, in the matter of the panther's skin, the work of the famous georgian poet rustavelli, prince nijeradze fell down completely. the beauty of the poem, of course, consisted in the way it sounded in the native tongue; but scarcely would he begin to read in sing-song his throaty, sibilant, hawking phrases, when liubka would at first shake for a long time from irresistible laughter; then, finally, burst into laughter, filling the whole room with explosive, prolonged peals. then nijeradze in wrath would slam shut the little tome of the adored writer, and swear at liubka, calling her a mule and a camel. however, they soon made up. there were times when fits of goatish, mischievous merriment would come upon nijeradze. he would pretend that he wanted to embrace liubka, would roll exaggeratedly passionate eyes at her, and would utter with a theatrically languishing whisper: "me soul! the best rosa in the garden of allah! honey and milk are upon thy lips, and thy breath is better than the aroma of kabob. give me to drink the bliss of nirvanah from the goblet of thy lips, o thou, my best tifflissian she-goat!" but she would laugh, get angry, strike his hands, and threaten to complain to lichonin. "v-va!" the prince would spread out his hands. "what is lichonin? lichonin is my friend, my brother, and bosom crony. but then, does he know what loffe is? is it possible that you northern people understand loffe? it's we, georgians, who are created for loffe. look, liubka! i'll show you right away what loffe is!" he would clench his fists, bend his body forward, and would start rolling his eyes so ferociously, gnash his teeth and roar with a lion's voice so, that a childish terror would encompass liubka, despite the fact that she knew this to be a joke, and she would dash off running into another room. it must be said, however, that for this lad, in general unrestrained in the matter of light, chance romances, existed special firm moral prohibitions, sucked in with the milk of his mother georgian; the sacred adates concerning the wife of a friend. and then, probably he understood--and it must be said that these oriental men, despite their seeming naiveness--and, perhaps, even owing to it--possess, when they wish to, a fine psychic intuition--he understood, that having made liubka his mistress for even one minute, he would be forever deprived of this charming, quiet, domestic evening comfort, to which he had grown so used. for he, who was on terms of thou-ing with almost the whole university, nevertheless felt himself so lonely in a strange city and in a country still strange to him! these studies afforded the most pleasure of all to soloviev. this big, strong, and negligent man somehow involuntarily, imperceptibly even to himself, began to submit to that hidden, unseizable, exquisite witchery of femininity; which not infrequently lurks under the coarsest covering, in the harshest, most gnarled environment. the pupil dominated, the teacher obeyed. through the qualities of a primitive, but on the other hand a fresh, deep, and original soul, liubka was inclined not to obey the method of another, but to seek out her own peculiar, strange processes. thus, for example, she--like many children, however,--learned writing before reading. not she herself, meek and yielding by nature, but some peculiar quality of her mind, obstinately refused in reading to harness a vowel alongside of a consonant, or vice versa; in writing, however, she would manage this. for penmanship along slanted rulings she, despite the general wont of beginners, felt a great inclination; she wrote bending low over the paper; blew on the paper from exertion, as though blowing off imaginary dust; licked her lips and stuck out with the tongue, from the inside, now one cheek, now the other. soloviev did not thwart her, and followed after, along those ways which her instinct laid down. and it must be said, that during this month and a half he had managed to become attached with all his huge, broad, mighty soul to this chance, weak, transitory being. this was the circumspect, droll, magnanimous, somewhat wondering love, and the careful concern, of a kind elephant for a frail, helpless, yellow-downed chick. the reading was a delectation for both of them, and here again the choice of works was directed by the taste of liubka, while soloviev only followed its current and its sinuosities. thus, for example, liubka did not overcome don quixote, tired, and, finally, turning away from him, with pleasure heard robinson crusoe through, and wept with especial copiousness over the scene of his meeting with his relatives. she liked dickens, and very easily grasped his radiant humour; but the features of english manners were foreign to her and incomprehensible. they also read chekhov more than once, and liubka very freely, without difficulty, penetrated the beauty of his design, his smile and his sadness. stories for children moved her, touched her to such a degree that it was laughable and joyous to look at her. once soloviev read to her chekhov's story, the fit, in which, as it is known, a student for the first time finds himself in a brothel; and afterwards, on the next day, writhes about, as in a fit, in the spasms of a keen psychic suffering and the consciousness of common guilt. soloviev himself did not expect that tremendous impression which this narrative would make upon her. she cried, swore, wrung her hands, and exclaimed all the while: "lord! where does he take all that stuff from, and so skillfully! why, it's every bit just the way it is with us!" once he brought with him a book entitled the history of manon lescaut and the chevalier de grieux, the work of abbe prevost. it must be said that soloviev himself was reading this remarkable book for the first time. but still, liubka appraised it far more deeply and finely. the absence of a plot, the naiveness of the telling, the surplus of sentimentality, the olden fashion of the style--all this taken together cooled soloviev; whereas liubka received the joyous, sad, touching and flippant details of this quaint immortal novel not only through her ears, but as though with her eyes and with all her naively open heart. "'our intention of espousal was forgotten at st. denis,'" soloviev was reading, bending his tousled, golden-haired head, illuminated by the shade of the lamp, low over the book; "'we transgressed against the laws of the church and, without thinking of it, became espoused.'" "what are they at? of their own will, that is? without a priest? just so?" asked liubka in uneasiness, tearing herself away from her artificial flowers. "of course. and what of it? free love, and that's all there is to it. like you and lichonin, now." "oh, me! that's an entirely different matter. you know yourself where he took me from. but she's an innocent and genteel young lady. that's a low-down thing for him to do. and, believe me, soloviev, he's sure to leave her later. ah, the poor girl. well, well, well, read on." but already after several pages all the sympathies and commiserations of liubka went over to the side of the deceived chevalier. "'however, the visits and departures by thefts of m. de b. threw me into confusion. i also recollected the little purchases of manon, which exceeded our means. all this smacked of the generosity of a new lover. "but no, no," i repeated, "it is impossible that manon should deceive me! she is aware, that i live only for her, she is exceedingly well aware that i adore her."'" "ah, the little fool, the little fool!" exclaimed liubka. "why, can't you see right off that she's being kept by this rich man. ah, trash that she is!" and the further the novel unfolded, the more passionate and lively an interest did liubka take in it. she had nothing against manon's fleecing her subsequent patrons with the help of her lover and her brother, while de grieux occupied himself with sharping at the club; but her every new betrayal brought liubka into a rage, while the sufferings of the gallant chevalier evoked her tears. once she asked: "soloviev, dearie, who was he--this author?" "he was a certain french priest." "he wasn't a russian?" "no, a frenchman, i'm telling you. see, he's got everything so--the towns are french and the people have french names." "then he was a priest, you say? where did he know all this from, then?" "well, he knew it, that's all. because he was an ordinary man of the world, a nobleman, and only became a monk afterwards. he had seen a lot in his life. then he again left the monks. but, however, here's everything about him written in detail in front of this book." he read the biography of abbe prevost to her. liubka heard it through attentively, shaking her head with great significance; asked over again about that which she did not understand in certain places, and when he had finished she thoughtfully drawled out: "then that's what he is! he's written it up awfully good. only why is she so low down? for he loves her so, with all his life; but she's playing him false all the time." "well, liubochka, what can you do? for she loved him too. only she's a vain hussy, and frivolous. all she wants is only rags, and her own horses, and diamonds." liubka flared up and hit one fist against the other. "i'd rub her into powder, the low-down creature? so that's called her having loved, too! if you love a man, then all that comes from him must be dear to you. he goes to prison, and you go with him to prison. he's become a thief, well, you help him. he's a beggar, but still you go with him. what is there out of the way, that there's only a crust of black bread, so long as there's love? she's low down, and she's low down, that's what! but i, in his place, would leave her; or, instead of crying, give her such a drubbing that she'd walk around in bruises for a whole month, the varmint!" the end of the novel she could not manage to hear to the finish for a long time, and always broke out into sincere warm tears, so that it was necessary to interrupt the reading; and the last chapter they overcame only in four doses. the calamities and misadventures of the lovers in prison, the compulsory despatch of manon to america and the self-denial of de grieux in voluntarily following her, so possessed the imagination of liubka and shook her soul, that she even forgot to make her remarks. listening to the story of the quiet, beautiful death of manon in the midst of the desert plain, she, without stirring, with hands clasped on her breast, looked at the light; and the tears ran and ran out of her staring eyes and fell, like a shower, on the table. but when the chevalier de grieux, who had lain two days near the corpse of his dear manon, finally began to dig a grave with the stump of his sword--liubka burst into sobbing so that soloviev became scared and dashed after water. but even having calmed down a little, she still sobbed for a long time with her trembling, swollen lips and babbled: "ah! their life was so miserable! what a bitter lot that was! and is it possible that it's always like that, darling soloviev; that just as soon as a man and a woman fall in love with each other, in just the way they did, then god is sure to punish them? dearie, but why is that? why?" chapter xvii. but if the georgian and the kind-souled soloviev served as a palliating beginning against the sharp thorns of great worldly wisdom, in the curious education of the mind and soul of liubka; and if liubka forgave the pedantism of lichonin for the sake of a first sincere and limitless love for him, and forgave just as willingly as she would have forgiven curses, beatings, or a heavy crime--the lessons of simanovsky, on the other hand, were a downright torture and a constant, prolonged burden for her. for it must be said that he, as though in spite, was far more accurate and exact in his lessons than any pedagogue working out his weekly stipulated tutorings. with the incontrovertibility of his opinions, the assurance of his tone and the didacticism of his presentation he took away the will of poor liubka and paralyzed her soul; in the same way that he sometimes, during university gatherings or at mass meetings, influenced the timid and bashful minds of newcomers. he was an orator at meetings; he was a prominent member in the organization of students' mess halls; he took part in the recording, lithographing and publication of lectures; he was chosen the head of the course; and, finally, took a very great interest in the students' treasury. he was of that number of people who, after they leave the student auditoriums, become the leaders of parties, the unrestrained arbiters of pure and self-denying conscience; serve out their political stage somewhere in chukhlon, directing the keen attention of all russia to their heroically woeful situation; and after that, beautifully leaning on their past, make a career for themselves, thanks to a solid advocacy, a deputation, or else a marriage joined with a goodly piece of black loam land and provincial activity. unnoticeably to themselves and altogether unnoticeably, of course, to the casual glance, they cautiously right themselves; or, more correctly, fade until they grow a belly unto themselves, and acquire podagra and diseases of the liver. then they grumble at the whole world; say that they were not understood, that their time was the time of sacred ideals. while in the family they are despots and not infrequently give money out at usury. the path of the education of liubka's mind and soul was plain to him, as was plain and incontrovertible everything that he conceived; he wanted at the start to interest liubka in chemistry and physics. "the virginally feminine mind," he pondered, "will be astounded, then i shall gain possession of her attention, and from trifles, from hocus-pocus, i shall pass on to that which will lead her to the centre of universal knowledge, where there is no superstition, no prejudices; where there is only a broad field for the testing of nature." it must be said that he was inconsistent in his lessons. he dragged in all that came to his hand for the astonishment of liubka. once he brought along for her a large self-made serpent--a long cardboard hose, filled with gunpowder, bent in the form of a harmonica, and tied tightly across with a cord. he lit it, and the serpent for a long time with crackling jumped over the dining room and the bedroom, filling the place with smoke and stench. liubka was scarcely amazed and said that this was simply fireworks, that she had already seen this, and that you couldn't astonish her with that. she asked, however, permission to open the window. then he brought a large phial, tinfoil, rosin and a cat's tail, and in this manner contrived a leyden jar. the discharge, although weak, was produced, however. "oh, the unclean one take you, satan!" liubka began to cry out, having felt the dry fillip in her little finger. then, out of heated peroxide of manganese, mixed with sand, with the help of a druggist's vial, the gutta-percha end of a syringe, a basin filled with water, and a jam jar--oxygen was derived. the red-hot cork, coal and phosphorus burnt in the jar so blindingly that it pained the eyes. liubka clapped her palms and squealed out in delight: "mister professor, more! please, more, more! ..." but when, having united the oxygen with the hydrogen brought in an empty champagne bottle, and having wrapped up the bottle for precaution in a towel, simanovsky ordered liubka to direct its neck toward a burning candle, and when the explosion broke out, as though four cannons had been fired off at once--an explosion through which the plastering fell down from the ceiling--then liubka grew timorous, and, only getting to rights with difficulty, pronounced with trembling lips, but with dignity: "you must excuse me now, but since i have a flat of my own, and i'm not at all a wench any longer, but a decent woman, i'd ask you therefore not to misbehave in my place. i thought you, like a smart and educated man, would do everything nice and genteel, but you busy yourself with silly things. they can even put one in jail for that." subsequently, much, much later, she told how she had a student friend, who made dynamite before her. it must have been, after all, that simanovsky, this enigmatic man, so influential in his youthful society, where he had to deal with theory for the most part, and so incoherent when a practical experiment with a living soul had come into his hands--was just simply stupid, but could skillfully conceal this sole sincere quality of his. having suffered failure in applied sciences, he at once passed on to metaphysics. once he very self-assuredly, and in a tone such that after it no refutation was possible, announced to liubka that there is no god, and that he would undertake to prove this during five minutes. whereupon liubka jumped up from her place, and told him firmly that she, even though a quondam prostitute, still believed in god and would not allow him to be offended in her presence; and if he would continue such nonsense, then she would complain to vassil vassilich. "i will also tell him," she added in a weeping voice, "that you, instead of teaching me, only rattle off all kinds of stuff and all that sort of nastiness, while you yourself hold your hand on my knees. and that's even not at all genteel." and for the first time during all their acquaintanceship she, who had formerly been so timorous and constrained, sharply moved away from her teacher. however, having suffered a few failures, simanovsky still obstinately continued to act upon the mind and imagination of liubka. he tried to explain to her the theory of the origin of species, beginning with an amoeba and ending with napoleon. liubka listened to him attentively, and during this there was an imploring expression in her eyes: "when will you stop at last?" she yawned into a handkerchief and then guiltily explained: "excuse me, that's from my nerves." marx also had no success goods, supplementary value, the manufacturer and the worker, which had become algebraic formulas, were for liubka merely empty sounds, vibrating the air; and she, very sincere at soul, always jumped up with joy from her place, when hearing that, apparently, the vegetable soup had boiled up, or the samovar was getting ready to boil over. it cannot be said that simanovsky did not have success with women. his aplomb and his weighty, decisive tone always acted upon simple souls, especially upon fresh, naive, trusting souls. out of protracted ties he always got out very easily; either he was dedicated to a tremendously responsible call, before which domestic love relations were nothing; or he pretended to be a superman, to whom all is permitted (o, thou, nietszche, so long ago and so disgracefully misconstrued for high-school boys!). the passive, almost imperceptible, but firmly evasive resistance of liubka irritated and excited him. what particularly incensed him was the fact that she, who had formerly been so accessible to all, ready to yield her love in one day to several people in succession, to each one for two roubles, was now all of a sudden playing at some pure and disinterested inamoration! "nonsense," he thought. "this can't be. she's making believe, and, probably, i don't strike the right tone with her." and with every day he became more exacting, captious, and stern. hardly consciously, more probably through habit, he relied on his usual influence, intimidating the thought and subduing the will, which rarely betrayed him. once liubka complained about him to lichonin: "he's too strict with me, now, vassil vassilievich; and i don't understand anything he says, and i don't want to take lessons with him any more." somehow or other, lichonin lamely quieted her down; but still he had an explanation with simanovsky. the other answered him with sang froid: "just as you wish, my dear fellow; if my method displeases you or liubka, then i'm even ready to resign. my problem consists only of bringing in a genuine element of discipline into her education. if she does not understand anything, then i compel her to learn it by heart, aloud. with time this will cease. that is unavoidable. recall, lichonin, how difficult the transition from arithmetic to algebra was for us, when we were compelled to replace common numerals with letters, and did not know why this was done. or why did they teach us grammar, instead of simply advising us to write tales and verses?" and on the very next day, bending down low under the hanging shade of the lamp over liubka's body, and sniffing all over her breast and under her arm pits, he was saying to her: "draw a triangle... well, yes, this way and this way. on top i write 'love.' write simply the letter l, and below m and w. that will be: the love of man and woman." with the air of an oracle, unshakable and austere, he spoke all sorts of erotic balderdash and almost unexpectedly concluded: "and so look, liuba. the desire to love--it's the same as the desire to eat, to drink, and to breathe the air." he would squeeze her thigh hard, considerably above the knee; and she again, becoming confused and not wishing to offend him, would try almost imperceptibly to move her leg away gradually. "tell me, would it be offensive, now, for your sister, mother, or for your husband, that you by chance had not dined at home, but had gone into a restaurant or a cook-shop, and had there satisfied your hunger? and so with love. no more, no less. a physiological enjoyment. perhaps more powerful, more keen, than all others, but that's all. thus, for example, now: i want you as a woman. while you ..." "oh, drop it, mister," liubka cut him short with vexation. "well, what are you harping on one and the same thing for all the time? change your act. you've been told: no and no. don't you think i see what you're trying to get at? but only i'll never agree to unfaithfulness, seeing as how vasilli vasillievich is my benefactor, and i adore him with all my soul... and you're even pretty disgusting to me with your nonsense." once he caused liubka a great and scandalous hurt, and all because of his theoretical first principles. as at the university they were already for a long time talking about lichonin's having saved a girl from such and such a house; and that now he is taken up with her moral regeneration; that rumour, naturally, also reached the studying girls, who frequented the student circles. and so, none other than simanovsky once brought to liubka two female medicos, one historian, and one beginning poetess, who, by the way, was already writing critical essays as well. he introduced them in the most serious and fool-like manner. "here," he said, stretching out his hand, now in the direction of the guests, now of liubka, "here, comrades, get acquainted. you, liuba, will find in them real friends, who will help you on your radiant path; while you--comrades, liza, nadya, sasha and rachel--you will regard as elder sisters a being who has just struggled out of that horrible darkness into which the social structure places the modern woman." he spoke not exactly so, perhaps; but in any case, approximately in that manner. liubka turned red, extended her hand, with all the fingers clumsily folded together, to the young ladies in coloured blouses and in leather belts; regaled them with tea and jam; promptly helped them with lights for cigarettes; but, despite all invitations, did not want to sit down for anything. she would say: "yes-ss, n-no, as you wish." and when one of the young ladies dropped a handkerchief on the floor, she hurriedly made a dash to pick it up. one of the maidens, red, stout, and with a bass voice, whose face, all in all, consisted of only a pair of red cheeks, out of which mirth-provokingly peeped out a hint at an upturned nose, and with a pair of little black eyes, like tiny raisins, sparkling out of their depths, was inspecting liubka from head to feet, as though through an imaginary lorgnette; directing over her a glance which said nothing, but was contemptuous. "why, i haven't been getting anybody away from her," thought liubka guiltily. but another was so tactless, that she--perhaps for the first time for her, but the hundredth for liubka--began a conversation about: how had she happened upon the path of prostitution? this was a bustling young lady, pale, very pretty, ethereal; all in little light curls, with the air of a spoiled kitten and even a little pink cat's bow on her neck. "but tell me, who was this scoundrel, now ... who was the first to ... well, you understand? ..." in the mind of liubka quickly flashed the images of her former mates, jennka and tamara, so proud, so brave and resourceful--oh, far brainier than these maidens--and she, almost unexpectedly for herself, suddenly said sharply: "there was a lot of them. i've already forgotten. kolka, mitka, volodka, serejka, jorjik, troshka, petka, and also kuzka and guska with a party. but why are you interested?" "why... no... that is, i ask as a person who fully sympathizes with you." "but have you a lover?" "pardon me, i don't understand what you're saying. people, it's time we were going." "that is, what don't you understand? have you ever slept with a man?" "comrade simanovsky, i had not presupposed that you would bring us to such a person. thank you. it was exceedingly charming of you!" it was difficult for liubka to surmount the first step. she was of those natures which endure long, but tear loose rapidly; and she, usually so timorous, was unrecognizable at this moment. "but i know!" she was screaming in wrath. "i know, that you're the very same as i! but you have a papa, a mamma; you're provided for, and if you have to, then you'll even commit abortion--many do so. but if you were in my place, when there's nothing to stuff your mouth with, and a girlie doesn't understand anything yet, because she can't read or write; while all around the men are shoving like he-dogs--then you'd be in a sporting house too. it's a shame to put on airs before a poor girl--that's what!" simanovsky, who had gotten into trouble, said a few general consolatory words in a judicious bass, such as the noble fathers used in olden comedies, and led his ladies off. but he was fated to play one more very shameful, distressing, and final role in the free life of liubka. she had already complained to lichonin for a long time that the presence of simanovsky was oppressive to her; but lichonin paid no attention to womanish trifles: the vacuous, fictitious, wordy hypnosis of this man of commands was strong within him. there are influences, to get rid of which is difficult, almost impossible. on the other hand, he was already for a long time feeling the burden of co-habitation with liubka. frequently he thought to himself: "she is spoiling my life; i am growing common, foolish; i have become dissolved in fool benevolence; it will end up in my marrying her, entering the excise or the assay office, or getting in among pedagogues; i'll be taking bribes, will gossip, and become an abominable provincial morel. and where are my dreams of the power of thought, the beauty of life, of love and deeds for all humanity?" he would say, at times even aloud, and pull his hair. and for that reason, instead of attentively going into liubka's complaints, he would lose his temper, yell, stamp his feet, and the patient, meek liubka would grow quiet and retire into the kitchen, to have a good cry there. now more and more frequently, after family quarrels, in the minutes of reconciliation he would say to liubka: "my dear liuba, you and i do not suit each other, comprehend that. look: here are a hundred roubles for you, ride home. your relatives will receive you as their own. live there a while, look around you. i will come for you after half a year; you'll have become rested, and, of course, all that's filthy, nasty, that has been grafted upon you by the city, will go away, will die off. and you'll begin a new life independently, without any assistance, alone and proud!" but then, can anything be done with a woman who has come to love for the first, and, of course, as it seems to her, for the last time? can she be convinced of the necessity for parting? does logic exist for her? always reverent before the firmness of the words and decisions of simanovsky, lichonin, however, surmised and by instinct understood his real relation to liubka; and in his desire to free himself, to shake off a chance load beyond his strength, he would catch himself in a nasty little thought: "she pleases simanovsky; and as for her, isn't it all the same if it's he or i or a third? guess i'll make a clean breast of it, explain things to him and yield liubka up to him like a comrade. but then, the fool won't go. will raise a rumpus." "or just to come upon the two of them together, somehow," he would ponder further, "in some decisive pose... to raise a noise, make a row... a noble gesture... a little money and... a getaway." he now frequently, for several days, would not return home; and afterwards, having come, would undergo torturesome hours of feminine interrogations, scenes, tears, even hysterical fits. liubka would at times watch him in secret, when he went out of the house; would stop opposite the entrance that he went into, and for hours would await his return in order to reproach him and to cry in the street. not being able to read, she intercepted his letters and, not daring to turn to the aid of the prince or soloviev, would save them up in her little cupboard together with sugar, tea, lemon and all sorts of other trash. she had even reached the stage when, in minutes of anger, she threatened him with sulphuric acid. "may the devil take her," lichonin would ponder during the minutes of his crafty plans. "it's all one, let there even be nothing between them. but i'll take and make a fearful scene for him, and her." and he would declaim to himself: "ah, so! ... i have warmed you in my bosom, and what do i see now? you are paying me with black ingratitude. ... and you, my best comrade, you have attempted my sole happiness! ... o, no, no, remain together; i go hence with tears in my eyes. i see, that i am one too many! i do not wish to oppose your love, etc., etc." and precisely these dreams, these hidden plans, such momentary, chance, and, at bottom, vile ones--of those to which people later do not confess to themselves--were suddenly fulfilled. it was the turn of soloviev's lesson. to his great happiness, liubka had at last read through almost without faltering: "a good plough has mikhey, and a good one has sisoi as well... a swallow... a swing ... the children love god..." and as a reward for this soloviev read aloud to her of the merchant kalashnikov and of kiribeievich, life-guardsman of czar ivan the fourth. liubka from delight bounced in her armchair, clapped her hands. the beauty of this monumental, heroic work had her in its grasp. but she did not have a chance to express her impressions in full. soloviev was hurrying to a business appointment. and immediately, coming to meet soloviev, having barely exchanged greetings with him in the doorway, came simanovsky. liubka's face sadly lengthened and her lips pouted. for this pedantic teacher and coarse male had become very repugnant to her of late. this time he began a lecture on the theme that for man there exist no laws, no rights, no duties, no honour, no vileness; and that man is a quantity self-sufficient, independent of anyone and anything. "it's possible to be a god, possible to be an intestinal worm, a tape worm--it's all the same." he already wanted to pass on to the theory of amatory emotions; but, it is to be regretted, he hurried a trifle from impatience: he embraced liubka, drew her to him and began to squeeze her roughly. "she'll become intoxicated from caressing. she'll give in!" thought the calculating simanovsky. he sought to touch her mouth with his lips for a kiss, but she screamed and snorted spit at him. all the assumed delicacy had left her. "get out, you mangy devil, fool, swine, dirt! i'll smash your snout for you! ..." all the lexicon of the establishment had come back to her; but simanovsky, having lost his pince-nez, his face distorted, was looking at her with blurred eyes and jabbering whatever came into his head: "my dear ... it's all the same ... a second of enjoyment! ... you and i will blend in enjoyment! ... no one will find out! ... be mine! ..." it was just at this very minute that lichonin walked into the room. of course, at soul he did not admit to himself that this minute he would commit a vileness; but only somehow from the side, at a distance, reflected that his face was pale, and that his immediate words would be tragic and of great significance. "yes!" he said dully, like an actor in the fourth act of a drama; and, letting his hands drop impotently, began to shake his chin, which had fallen upon his breast. "i expected everything, only not this. you i excuse, liuba--you are a cave being; but you, simanovsky ... i esteemed you ... however, i still esteem you a decent man. but i know, that passion is at times stronger than the arguments of reason. right here are fifty roubles--i am leaving them for liuba; you, of course, will return them to me later, i have no doubt of that. arrange her destiny ... you are a wise, kind, honest man, while i am ... ("a skunk!" somebody's distinct voice flashed through his head.) i am going away, because i will not be able to bear this torture any more. be happy." he snatched out of his pocket and with effect threw his wallet on the table; then seized his hair and ran out of the room. still, this was the best way out for him. and the scene had been played out precisely as he had dreamt of it. part three chapter i. all this liubka told at length and disjointedly, sobbing on jennka's shoulder. of course, in her personal elucidation this tragi-comical history proved altogether unlike what it had been in reality. lichonin, according to her words, had taken her to him only to entice, to tempt her; to have as much use as possible out of her foolishness, and then to abandon her. but she, the fool, had in truth fallen in love--with him, and since she was very jealous about him and all these tousled girls in leather belts, he had done a low-down thing: had sent up his comrade on purpose, had framed it up with him, and the other had begun to hug liubka, and vasska came in, saw it, and kicked up a great row, and chased liubka out into the street. of course, in her version there were two almost equal parts of truth and untruth; but so, at least, all this had appeared to her. she also told with great details how, having found herself without masculine support or without anybody's powerful extraneous influence, she had hired a room in a rather bad little hotel, on a retired street; how even from the first day the boots, a tough bird, a hard-boiled egg, had attempted to trade in her, without even having and vasska came in, saw it, and kicked up a great row, the hotel to a private room, but even there had been overtaken by an experienced old woman go-between, with whose like the houses inhabited by poverty swarm. therefore, even with quiet living, there was in the face, in the conversation, and in the entire manner of liubka something peculiar, specific to the casual eye; perhaps even entirely imperceptible, but for the business scent as plain and as irrefutable as the day. but the chance, brief, sincere love had given her the strength to oppose the inevitability of a second fall. in her heroic courage she even went so far as putting in a few notices in the newspapers, that she was seeking a place with "all found." however, she had no recommendation of any sort. in addition, she had to do exclusively with women when it came to the hiring; and they also, with some sort of an inner, infallible instinct, surmised in her their ancient foe--the seductress of their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons. there was neither sense nor use in going home. her native vassilkovsky district is distant only fifteen versts from the state capital; and the rumour that she had entered that sort of an establishment had long since penetrated, by means of her fellow-villagers, into the village. this was written of in letters, and transmitted verbally, by those village neighbours who had seen her both on the street and at anna markovna's place itself--porters and bell-hops of hotels, waiters at small restaurants, cabbies, small contractors. she knew what odour this fame would give off if she were to return to her native haunts. it were better to hang one's self than to endure this. she was as uneconomical and impractical in money matters as a five-year-old child, and in a short while was left without a kopeck; while to go back to the brothel was fearful and shameful. but the temptations of street prostitution turned up of themselves, and at every step begged to be seized. in the evenings, on the main street, old hardened street prostitutes at once unerringly guessed her former profession. ever and anon one of them, having come alongside of her, would begin in a sweet, ingratiating voice: "how is it, young lady, that you're walking alone? let's be mates. let's walk together. that's always more convenient. whenever men want to pass the time pleasantly with girls, they always love to start a party of four." and right here the experienced, tried recruiting agent, at first casually, but after that warmly, with all her heart, would begin to praise up all the conveniences of living at your own landlady's--the tasty food, full freedom of going out, the possibility of always concealing from the landlady of your rooms the surplus over the agreed pay. here also much of the malicious and the offensive was said, by the way, against the women of the private houses, who were called "government hides," "government stuff," "genteel maidens" and "institutes." liubka knew the value of these sneers, because the dwellers in brothels also bear themselves with the greatest contempt toward street prostitutes, calling them "bimmies" and "venereals." to be sure, in the very end that happened which had to happen. seeing in perspective a whole series of hungry days, and in the very depth of them the dark horror of an unknown future, liubka consented to a very civil invitation of some respectable little old man; important, grayish, well-dressed and correct. for this ignominy liubka received a rouble, but did not dare to protest: the previous life in the house had entirely eaten away her personal initiative, mobility and energy. later, several times running, he even did not pay her anything at all. one young man, easy of manner and handsome, in a cap with a flattened brim, put on at a brave slant over one ear, in a silk blouse, girdled by a cord with tassels, also led her with him into a hotel, asked for wine and a snack; for a long time lied to liubka about his being an earl's son on the wrong side of the blanket, and that he was the first billiardist in the whole city; that all the wenches like him and that he would make a swell jane out of liubka as well. then he went out of the room for just one minute, as though on business of his own, and vanished forever. the stern, cross-eyed porter beat her with contentment, long, in silence, with a business-like air; breathing hard and covering up liubka's mouth with his hand. but in the end, having become convinced, probably, that the fault was not hers, but the guest's, he took her purse, in which was a rouble with some small change, away from her; and took as security her rather cheap little hat and small outer jacket. another man of forty-five years, not at all badly dressed, having tortured the girl for some two hours, paid for the room and gave her kopecks; but when she started to complain, he with a ferocious face put an enormous red-haired fist up to her very nose, the first thing, and said decisively: "you just snivel a bit more to me... i'll snivel you... i'll yell for the police, now, and say that you robbed me when i was sleeping. want me to? is it long since you've been in a station house?" and went away. and of such cases there were many. on that day, when her landlords--a boatman and his wife--had refused to let her have a room and just simply threw her things out into the yard; and when she had wandered the night through on the streets, without sleep, under the rain, hiding from the policemen--only then, with aversion and shame, did she resolve to turn to lichonin's aid. but lichonin was no longer in town pusillanimously, he had gone away the very same day when the unjustly wronged and disgraced liubka had run away from the flat. and it was in the morning that there came into her head the desperate thought of returning into the brothel and begging forgiveness there. "jennechka, you're so clever, so brave, so kind; beg emma edwardovna for me--the little housekeeper will listen to you," she implored jennka and kissed her bare shoulders and wetted them with tears. "she won't listen to anybody," gloomily answered jennka. "and you did have to tie up with a fool and a low-down fellow like that." "jennechka, but you yourself advised me to," timidly retorted liubka. "i advised you? ... i didn't advise you anything. what are you lying on me for, just as though i was dead... well, all right then--let's go." emma edwardovna had already known for a long while about the return of liubka; and had even seen her at that moment when she had passed through the yard of the house, looking all around her. at soul she was not at all against taking liubka back. it must be said, that she had even let her go only because she had been tempted by the money, one-half of which she had appropriated for herself. and in addition to that, she had reckoned that with the present seasonal influx of new prostitutes she would have a large choice; in which, however, she had made a mistake, because the season had terminated abruptly. but in any case, she had firmly resolved to take liubka. only it was necessary, for the preservation and rounding out of prestige, to give her a scare befittingly. "wha-at?" she began to yell at liubka, scarcely having heard her out, babbling in confusion. "you want to be taken on again? ... you wallowed the devil knows with whom in the streets, under the fences; and now, you scum, you're again shoving your way into a respectable, decent establishment! ... pfui, you russian swine! out! ..." liubka was catching her hands, aiming to kiss them, but the housekeeper roughly snatched them away. then, suddenly paling, with a distorted face, biting her trembling, twisted lower lip, emma calculatingly and with good aim struck liubka on her cheek, with all her might; from which the other went down on her knees, but got up right away, gasping for breath and stammering from the sobs. "darlingest, don't beat me... oh my dear, don't beat me..." and again fell down, this time flat upon the floor. and this systematic, malignant slaughter, in cold blood, continued for some two minutes. jennka, who had at first been looking on with her customary malicious, disdainful air, suddenly could not stand it; she began to squeal savagely, threw herself upon the housekeeper, clutched her by the hair, tore off her chignon and began to vociferate in a real hysterical fit: "fool! ... murderer! ... low-down go-between! ... thief! ..." all the three women vociferated together, and at once enraged wails resounded through all the corridors and rooms of the establishment. this was that general fit of grand hysterics, which takes possession of those confined in prisons, or that elemental insanity (raptus), which envelops unexpectedly and epidemically an entire lunatic asylum, from which even experienced psychiatrists grow pale. only after the lapse of an hour was order restored by simeon and two comrades by profession who had come to his aid. all the thirteen girls got it hot; but jennka, who had gone into a real frenzy, more than the others. the beaten-up liubka kept on crawling before the housekeeper until she was taken back. she knew that jennka's outbreak would sooner or later be reflected upon her in a cruel repayment. jennka sat on her bed until the very night, her legs crossed turkish fashion; refused dinner, and chased out all her mates who went in to her. her eye was bruised, and she assiduously applied a five-kopeck copper to it. from underneath the torn shirt a long, transversal scratch reddened on the neck, just like a mark from a rope. that was where simeon had torn off her skin in the struggle. she sat thus, alone, with eyes that glowed in the dark like a wild beast's, with distended nostrils, with spasmodically moving cheek-bones, and whispered wrathfully: "just you wait... watch out, you damned things--i'll show you... you'll see yet... ooh-ooh, you man-eaters..." but when the lights had been lit, and the junior housekeeper, zociya, knocked on her door with the words: "miss, get dressed! ... into the drawing room!" she rapidly washed herself, dressed, put some powder on the bruise, smeared the scratch over with creme de simon and pink powder, and went out into the drawing room, pitiful but proud; beaten-up, but her eyes flaming with an unbearable wrathfulness and a beauty not human. many people, who have happened to see suicides a few hours before their horrible death, say that in their visages in those fateful hours before death they have noticed some enigmatic, mysterious, incomprehensible allurement. and all who saw jennka on this night, and on the next day for a few hours, for long, intently and in wonder, kept their gaze upon her. and strangest of all (this was one of the sombre wiles of fate) was the fact that the indirect culprit of her death, the last grain of sand which draws down the pan of the scales, appeared none other than the dear, most kind, military cadet kolya gladishev. chapter ii. kolya gladishev was a fine, merry, bashful young lad, with a large head; pink-cheeked, with a funny little white, bent line, as though from milk, upon his upper lip, under the light down of the moustache, sprouting through for the first time; with gray, naive eyes, placed far apart; and so closely cropped, that from underneath his flaxen little bristles the skin glistened through, just as with a thoroughbred yorkshire suckling pig. it was precisely he with whom jennka during the past winter had played either at maternal relations, or at dolls; and thrust upon him a little apple or a couple of bon-bons on his way, when he would be going away from the house of ill repute, squirming from shame. this time, when he came, there could at once be felt in him, after long living in camps, that rapid change in age, which so often imperceptibly and rapidly transforms a boy into a youth. he had already finished the cadet academy and with pride counted himself a junker; although he still walked around in a cadet's uniform, with aversion. he had grown taller, had become better formed and more adroit; the camp life had done him good. he spoke in a bass, and during these months to his most great pride the nipples of his breast had hardened; the most important--he already knew about this--and undeniable sign of virile maturity. now, in the meanwhile, until the eyes-front severities of a military school, he had a period of alluring freedom. already he was permitted to smoke at home, in the presence of grown-ups; and even his father had himself presented him with a leather cigar case with his monogram, and also, in the elevation of family joy, had assigned him fifteen roubles monthly salary. and it was just here--at anna markovna's--that he had come to know woman for the first time--the very same jennka. the fall of innocent souls in houses of ill-fame, or with street solitaries, is fulfilled far more frequently than it is usually thought. when not green youths only, but even honourable men of fifty, almost grandfathers, are interrogated about this ticklish matter, they will tell you, sure enough, the ancient stencilled lie of how they had been seduced by a chambermaid or a governess. but this is one of those lingering, queer lies, going back into the depth of past decades, which are almost never noticed by a single one of the professional observers, and in any case are not described by any one. if each one of us will try, to put it pompously, to put his hand on his heart, then every one will catch himself in the fact, that having once in childhood said some sort of boastful or touching fiction, which had success, and having repeated it for that reason two and five and ten times more--he afterwards cannot get rid of it all his life, and repeats with entire firmness by now a history which had never been; a firmness such that in the very end he believes the story. with time kolya also narrated to his comrades how his aunt once removed, a young woman of the world had seduced him. it must be said, however, that the intimate proximity to this lady--a large, dark-eyed, white faced, sweetly fragrant southern woman--did really exist; but existed only in kolya's imagination, in those sad, tragic and timid minutes of solitary sexual enjoyments, through which pass if not a hundred percent of all men, then ninety-nine, in any case. having experienced mechanical sexual excitements very early, approximately since nine or nine years and a half, kolya did not at all have the least understanding of the significance of that end of being in love or of courtship, which is so horrible on the face of it, if it be looked at impartially, or if it be explained scientifically. unfortunately, there was at that time near him not a one of the present progressive and learned ladies who, having turned away the neck of the classic stork, and torn up by the roots the cabbage underneath which children are found, recommend that the great mystery of love and generation be explained to children in lectures, through comparisons and assimilations, mercilessly and in a well-nigh graphic manner. it must be said, that at that remote time of which we are speaking, the private institutions--male pensions and institutes, as well as academies for cadets--represented some sort of hot-house nurseries. the care of the mind and morality they tried to entrust as much as possible to educators who were bureaucrats-formalists; and in addition impatient, captious, capricious in their sympathies and hysterical, just like old maid lady teachers. now it is otherwise. but at that time the boys were left to themselves. barely snatched away, speaking figuratively, from the maternal breast; from the care of devoted nurses; from morning and evening caresses, quiet and sweet; even though they were ashamed of every manifestation of tenderness as "womanishness," they were still irresistibly and sweetly drawn to kisses, contacts, conversations whispered in the ear. of course, attentive, solicitous treatment, bathing, exercises in the open air--precisely not gymnastics, but voluntary exercises, each to his own taste--could have always put off the coming of this climacteric period or soften and make it understandable. i repeat--then there was nothing of this. the longing for family endearment, the endearment of mother, sister, nurse, so roughly and unexpectedly cut short, turned into deformed forms of courting (every whit like the "crushes" in a female institute) of good-looking boys, of "fairies"; they loved to whisper in corners and, walking arm in arm, or embracing in dark corridors, to tell in each other's ears improbable histories of adventures with women. this was partly both childhood's need of the fairy-tale element and partly awakening sensuality as well. not infrequently some fifteen-year-old chubby, for whom it was just the proper time to be playing at popular tennis or to be greedily putting away buckwheat porridge with milk, would be telling, having read up, of course, on certain cheap novels, of how every saturday, now, when it is leave, he goes to a certain, handsome widow millionairess; and of how she is passionately enamored of him; and how near their couch always stand fruits and precious wine; and how furiously and passionately she makes love to him. here, by the bye, came along the inevitable run of prolonged reading, like hard drinking, which, of course, every boy and girl has undergone. no matter how strict in this respect the class surveillance may be, the striplings did read, are reading, and will read just that which is not permitted them. here is a special passion, chic, the allurement of the forbidden. already in the third class went from hand to hand the manuscript transcripts of barkov; of a spurious pushkin; the youthful sins of lermontov and others: "the first night," "the cherry," "lucas," "the festival at peterhof," "the she uhlan, grief through wisdom," "the priest," &c. but no matter how strange, fictitious or paradoxical this may seem, still, even these compositions, and drawings, and obscene photographic cards, did not arouse a delightful curiosity. they were looked upon as a prank, a lark, and the allurement of contraband risk. in the cadets' library were chaste excerpts from pushkin and lermontov; all of ostrovsky, who only made you laugh; and almost all of turgenev, who was the very one that played a chief and cruel role in kolya's life. as it is known, love with the late great turgenev is always surrounded with a tantalizing veil; some sort of crepe, unseizable, forbidden, but tempting: his maidens have forebodings of love and are agitated at its approach, and are ashamed beyond all measure, and tremble, and turn red. married women or widows travel this tortuous path somewhat differently: they struggle for a long time with their duty, or with respectability, or with the opinion of the world; and, in the end--oh!--fall with tears; or--oh!--begin to brave it; or, which is still more frequent, the implacable fate cuts short her or his life at the most--oh!--necessary moment, when it only lacks a light puff of wind for the ripened fruit to fall. and yet all of his personages still thirst after this shameful love; weep radiantly and laugh joyously from it; and it shuts out all the world for them. but since boys think entirely differently than we grown-ups, and since everything that is forbidden, everything not said fully, or said in secret, has in their eyes an enormous, not only twofold but threefold interest--it is therefore natural that out of reading they drew the hazy thought that the grown-ups were concealing something from them. and it must be mentioned--had not kolya (like the majority of those of his age) seen the chambermaid phrociya--so rosy-cheeked, always merry, with legs of the hardness of steel (at times he, in the heat of playing, had slapped her on the back), had he not seen her once, when kolya had by accident walked quickly into papa's cabinet, scurry out of there with all her might, covering her face with her apron; and had he not seen that during this time papa's face was red, with a dark blue, seemingly lengthened nose? and kolya had reflected: "papa looks like a turkey." had not kolya--partly through the fondness for pranks and the mischievousness natural to all boys, partly through tedium--accidentally discovered in an unlocked drawer of papa's writing table an enormous collection of cards, whereon was represented just that which shop clerks call the crowning of love, and worldly nincompoops--the unearthly passion? and had he not seen, that every time before the visit of the sweet-scented and bestarched paul edwardovich, some ninny with some embassy, with whom mamma, in imitation of the fashionable st. petersburg promenades to the strelka, used to ride to the dnieper to contemplate the sun setting on the other side of the river, in the chernigovskaya district--had he not seen how mamma's bosom went, and how her cheeks glowed under the powder; had he not detected at these moments many new and strange things; had he not heard her voice, an altogether unknown voice, like an actor's; nervously breaking off, mercilessly malicious to those of the family and the servants, and suddenly soft, like velvet, like a green meadow under the sun, when paul edwardovich would arrive? ah, if we people who have been made wise by experience would know how much, and even too much, the urchins and little girls surrounding us know, of whom we usually say: "well, why mind volodya (or petie, or katie)? ... why, they are little. they don't understand anything! ..." so also not in vain passed for gladishev the history of his elder brother, who had just come out of a military school into one of the conspicuous grenadier regiments; and, being on leave until such time when it would be possible for him to spread his wings, lived in two separate rooms with his family. at that time niusha, a chambermaid, was in their service; at times they jestingly called her signorita anita--a seductive black-haired girl, who, if she were to change costumes, could in appearance be taken for a dramatic actress, or a princess of the royal blood, or a political worker. kolya's mother manifestly countenanced the fact that kolya's brother, half in jest, half in earnest, was allured by this girl. of course, she had only the sole, holy, maternal calculation: if it were destined, after all, for her borenka to fall, then let him give his purity, his innocence, his first physical inclination, not to a prostitute, not to a street-walker, not to a seeker of adventures, but to a pure girl. of course, only a disinterested, unreasoning, truly-maternal feeling guided her. kolya at that time was living through the epoch of llanos, pampases, apaches, track-finders, and a chief by the name of "black panther"; and, of course, attentively kept track of the romance of his brother, and made his own syllogisms; at times only too correct, at times fantastic. after six months, from behind a door, he was the witness--or more correctly the auditor--of an outrageous scene. the wife of the general, always so respectable and restrained, was yelling in her boudoir at signorita anita, and cursing in the words of a cab-driver: the signorita was in the fifth month of pregnancy. if she had not cried, then, probably, they would simply have given her smart-money, and she would have gone away in peace; but she was in love with the young master, did not demand anything, and for that reason they drove her away with the aid of the police. in the fifth or sixth class many of kolya's comrades had already tasted of the tree of knowledge of evil. at that time it was considered in their corpus an especial, boastful masculine chic to call all secret things by their own names. arkasha shkar contracted a disease, not dangerous, but still venereal; and he became for three whole months the object of worship of all the seniors--at that time there were no squads yet. and many of them visited brothels; and, really, about their sprees they spoke far more handsomely and broadly than the hussars of the time of denis davidov.[ ] these debauches were esteemed by them the last word in valour and maturity. [ ] a russian ban vivant, wit and poet ( - ), the overwhelming majority of whose lyrics deals with military exploits and debauches.--trans. and so it happened once, that they did not exactly persuade gladishev to go to anna markovna, but rather he himself had begged to go, so weakly had he resisted temptation. this evening he always recalled with horror, with aversion; and dimly, just like some heavy dream. with difficulty he recalled, how in the cab, to get up courage, he had drunk rum, revoltingly smelling of real bedbugs; how qualmish this beastly drink made him feel; how he had walked into the big hall, where the lights of the lustres and the candelabra on the walls were turning round in fiery wheels; where the women moved as fantastic pink, blue, violet splotches, and the whiteness of their necks, bosoms and arms flashed with a blinding, spicy, victorious splendour. some one of the comrades whispered something in the ear of one of these fantastic figures. she ran up to kolya and said: "listen, you good-looking little cadet, your comrades are saying, now, that you're still innocent ... let's go ... i'll teach you everything." the phrase was said in a kindly manner; but this phrase the walls of anna markovna's establishment had already heard several thousand times. further, that took place which it was so difficult and painful to recall, that in the middle of his recollections kolya grew tired, and with an effort of the will turned back the imagination to something else. he only remembered dimly the revolving and spreading circles from the light of the lamp; persistent kisses; disconcerting contacts--then a sudden sharp pain, from which one wanted both to die in enjoyment and to cry out in terror; and then with wonder he saw his pale shaking hands, which could not, somehow, button his clothes. of course, all men have experienced this primordial tristia post coitus; but this great moral pain, very serious in its significance and depth, passes very rapidly, remaining, however, with the majority for a long time--sometimes for all life--in the form of wearisomeness and awkwardness after certain moments. in a short while kolya became accustomed to it; grew bolder, became familiarized with woman, and rejoiced very much over the fact that when he came into the establishment, all the girls, and verka before all, would call out: "jennechka, your lover has come!" it was pleasant, in relating this to his comrades, to be plucking at an imaginary moustache. chapter iii. it was still early--about nine--of a rainy august evening. the illuminated drawing room in the house of anna markovna was almost empty. only near the very doors a young telegraph clerk was sitting, his legs shyly and awkwardly squeezed under his chair, and was trying to start with the thick-fleshed katie that worldly, unconstrained conversation which is laid down as the proper thing in polite society at quadrille, during the intermissions between the figures of the dance. and, also, the long-legged, aged roly-poly wandered over the room, sitting down now next one girl, now another, and entertaining them all with his fluent chatter. when kolya gladishev walked into the front hall, the first to recognize him was the round-eyed verka, dressed in her usual jockey costume. she began to twirl round and round, to clap her palms, and called out: "jennka, jennka, come quicker, your little lover has come to you ... the little cadet ... and what a handsome little fellow!" but jennka was not in the drawing room at this time; a stout head-conductor had already managed to get hold of her. this elderly, sedate, and majestic man was a very convenient guest, because he never lingered in the house for more than twenty minutes, fearing to let his train go by; and, even so, glanced at his watch all the while. during this time he regularly drank down four bottles of beer, and, going away, infallibly gave the girl half a rouble for candy and simeon twenty kopecks for drink-money. kolya gladishev was not alone, but with a comrade of the same school, petrov, who was stepping over the threshold of a brothel for the first time, having given in to the tempting persuasions of gladishev. probably, during these minutes, he found himself in the same wild, absurd, feverish state which kolya himself had gone through a year and a half ago, when his legs had shook, his mouth had grown dry, and the lights of the lamps had danced before him in revolving wheels. simeon took their great-coats from them and hid them separately, on the side, that the shoulder straps and the buttons might not be seen. it must be said, that this stern man, who did not approve of students because of their free-and-easy facetiousness and incomprehensible style in conversation, also did not like when just such boys in uniform appeared in the establishment. "well, what's the good of it?" he would at times say sombrely to his colleagues by profession. "what if a whippersnapper like that comes, and runs right up nose to nose against his superiors? smash, and they've closed up the establishment! there, like lupendikha's three years back. of course, it's nothing that they closed it up--she transferred it in another name right off; and when they sentenced her to sit in jail for a year and a half, why, it came to a pre-etty penny for her. she had to shell out four hundred for kerbesh alone ... and then it also happens: a little pig of that kind will cook up some sort of disease for himself and start in whining: 'oh, papa! oh, mamma! i am dying!' 'tell me, you skunk, where you got it?' 'there and there ...' well, and so they haul you over the coals again; judge me, thou unrighteous judge!" "pass on, pass on," said he to the cadets sternly. the cadets entered, blinking from the bright light. petrov, who had been drinking to get up courage, swayed and was pale. they sat down beneath the picture of the feast of the russian noblemen, and immediately two of the young ladies--verka and tamara--joined them on both sides. "treat me to a smoke, you beautiful little brunet!" verka turned to petrov; and as though by accident put against his leg her strong, warm thigh, closely drawn over with white tights. "what an agreeable little fellow you are!" "but where's jennie?" gladishev asked of tamara. "is she busy with anybody?" tamara looked him in the eyes intently--looked so fixedly, that the boy even began to feel uncomfortable, and turned away. "no. why should she be busy? only the whole day to-day her head ached; she was walking through the corridor, and at that time the housekeeper opened the door quickly and accidentally struck her in the forehead--and so her head started in to ache. the poor thing, she's lying the whole day with a cold pack. but why? or can't you hold out? wait a while, she'll come out in five minutes. you'll remain very much satisfied with her." verka pestered petrov: "sweetie, dearie, what a tootsie-wootsicums you are! i adore such pale brunets; they are jealous and very fiery in love." and suddenly she started singing in a low voice: "he's kind of brown, my light, my own, won't sell me out, and won't deceive. he suffers madly, pants and coat gladly all for a woman he will give." "how do they call you, ducky dear?" "george," answered petrov in a hoarse, cadet's bass. "jorjik jorochka! ah, how very nice!" she suddenly drew near to his ear and whispered with a cunning face: "jorochka, come to me." petrov was abashed and forlornly let out in a bass: "i don't know ... it all depends on what the comrade says, now..." verka burst into loud laughter: "there's a case for you! say, what an infant it is! such as you, jorochka, in a little village would long since have been married; but he says: 'it all depends on the comrade!' you ought to ask a nurse or a wet nurse yet! tamara, my angel, just imagine: i'm calling him to go sleeping, but he says: 'it all depends on the comrade.' what about you, mister friend, are you his bringer up?" "don't be pestering, you devil!" clumsily, altogether like a cadet before a quarrel, grumbled out petrov in a bass. the lanky, ricketty roly-poly, grown still grayer, walked up to the cadets, and, inclining his long, narrow head to one side, and having made a touching grimace, began to patter: "messieurs cadets, highly educated young people; the flower, so to speak, of the intelligentzia; future masters of ordnance, will you not lend to a little old man, an aborigine of these herbiferous regions, one good old cigarette? i be poor. omnia mea mecum porto. but i do adore the weed." and, having received a cigarette, suddenly, without delay, he got into a free-and-easy, unconstrained pose; put forward the bent right leg, put his hand to his side, and began to sing in a wizened falsetto: "it used to be that i gave dinners, in rivers flowed the champagne wine; but now i have not even bread crusts, nor for a split, oh brother mine. it used to be--in the saratov the doorman rushed, and was so fine; but now all drive me in the neck, give for a split, oh brother mine." "gentlemen!" suddenly exclaimed roly-poly with pathos, cutting short his singing and smiting himself on the chest. "here i behold you, and know that you are the future generals skobelev and gurko; but i, too, in a certain respect, am a military hound. in my time, when i was studying for a forest ranger, all our department of woods and forests was military; and for that reason, knocking at the diamond-studded, golden doors of your hearts, i beg of you--donate toward the raising for an ensign of taxation of a wee measure of spiritus vini, which same is taken of the monks also." "roly!" cried the stout kitty from the other end, "show the young officers the lightning; or else, look you, you're taking the money only for nothing, you good-for-nothing camel." "right away!" merrily responded roly-poly. "most illustrious benefactors, turn your attention this way. living pictures. thunder storm on a summer day in june. the work of the unrecognized dramaturgist who concealed himself under the pseudonym of roly-poly. the first picture. "'it was a splendid day in june. the scorching rays of the sun illumined the blossoming meadows and environs ...'" roly-poly's don quixotic phiz spread into a wrinkled, sweetish smile; and the eyes narrowed into half-circles. "'... but now in the distance the first clouds have appeared upon the horizon. they grew, piled upon each other like crags, covering little by little the blue vault of the sky." by degrees the smile was coming off roly-poly's face, and it grew more and more serious and austere. "'at last the clouds have overcast the sun ... an ominous darkness has fallen ...'" roly-poly made his physiognomy altogether ferocious. "'the first drops of the rain fell ...'" roly-poly began to drum his fingers on the back of a chair. "'... in the distance flashed the first lightning ... '" roly-poly's eye winked quickly, and the left corner of his mouth gave a twitch. "'... whereupon the rain began to pour down in torrents, and there came a sudden, blinding flash of lightning...'" and with unusual artistry and rapidity roly-poly, with a successive movement of his eyebrows, eyes, nose, the upper and the lower lip, portrayed a lightning zig-zag. "'... a jarring thunder clap burst out--trrroo-oo. an oak that had stood through the ages fell down to earth, as though it were a frail reed ...'" and roly-poly with an ease and daring not to be expected from one of his years, bending neither the knees nor the back, only drawing down his head, instantaneously fell down; straight, like a statue, with his back to the floor, but at once deftly sprang up on his feet. "'but now the thunder storm is gradually abating. the lightning flashes less and less often. the thunder sounds duller, just like a satiated beast--oooooo-oooooo ... the clouds scurry away. the first rays of the blessed sun have peeped out ...'" roly-poly made a wry smile. "'... and now, the luminary of day has at last begun to shine anew over the bathed earth ...'" and the silliest of beatific smiles spread anew over the senile face of roly-poly. the cadets gave him a twenty-kopeck piece each. he laid them on his palm, made a pass in the air with the other hand, said: ein, zwei, drei, snapped two of his fingers, and the coins vanished. "tamarochka, this isn't honest," he said reproachfully. "aren't you ashamed to take the last money from a poor retired almost-head-officer? why have you hidden them here?" and, having snapped his fingers again, he drew the coins out of tamara's ear. "i shall return at once, don't be bored without me," he reassured the young people; "but if you can't wait for me, then i won't have any special pretensions about it. i have the honour! ..." "roly-poly!" little white manka cried after him, "won't you buy me candy for fifteen kopecks... turkish delight, fifteen kopecks' worth. there, grab!" roly-poly neatly caught in its flight the thrown fifteen-kopeck piece; made a comical curtsey and, pulling down the uniform cap with the green edging at a slant over his eyes, vanished. the tall, old henrietta walked up to the cadets, also asked for a smoke and, having yawned, said: "if only you young people would dance a bit--for as it is the young ladies sit and sit, just croaking from weariness." "if you please, if you please!" agreed kolya. "play a waltz and something else of the sort." the musicians began to play. the girls started to whirl around with one another, ceremoniously as usual, with stiffened backs and with eyes modestly cast down. kolya gladishev, who was very fond of dancing, could not hold out and invited tamara; he knew even from the previous winter that she danced more lightly and skillfully than the rest. while he was twirling in the waltz, the stout head-conductor, skillfully making his way between the couples, slipped away unperceived through the drawing room. kolya did not have a chance to notice him. no matter how verka pressed petrov, she could not, in any way, drag him off his place. the recent light intoxication had by now gone entirely out of his head; and more and more horrible, and unrealizable, and monstrous did that for which he had come here seem to him. he might have gone away, saying that not a one here pleased him; have put the blame on a headache, or something; but he knew that gladishev would not let him go; and mainly--it seemed unbearably hard to get up from his place and to walk a few steps by himself. and, besides that, he felt that he had not the strength to start talking of this with kolya. they finished dancing. tamara and gladishev again sat down side by side. "well, really, how is it that jennechka isn't coming by now?" asked kolya impatiently. tamara quickly gave verka a look with a question, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, in her eyes. verka quickly lowered her eyelashes. this signified: yes, he is gone. "i'll go right away and call her," said tamara. "but what are you so stuck on your jennka for," said henrietta. "you might take me." "all right, another time," answered kolya and nervously began to smoke. jennka was not even beginning to dress yet. she was sitting before the mirror and powdering her face. "what is it, tamarochka?" she asked. "your little cadet has come to you. he's waiting." "ah, that's the little baby of last year... well, the devil with him!" "and that's right, too. but how healthy and handsome the lad has grown, and how tall... it's a delight, that's all! so if you don't want to, i'll go myself." tamara saw in the mirror how jennka contracted her eyebrows. "no, you wait a while, tamara, don't. i'll see. send him here to me. say that i'm not well, that my head aches." "i have already told him, anyway, that zociya had opened the door unsuccessfully and hit you on the head; and that you're lying down with a cold pack. but the only thing is, is it worth while, jennechka?" "whether it's worth while or not, that's not your business, tamara," answered jennka rudely. tamara asked cautiously: "is it possible, then, that you aren't at all, at all sorry?" "but for me you aren't sorry?" and she passed her hand over the red stripe that slashed her throat. "and for yourself you aren't sorry? and not sorry for this liubka, miserable as she is? and not sorry for pashka? you're huckleberry jelly, and not a human being!" tamara smiled craftily and haughtily: "no, when it comes to a real matter, i'm not jelly. perhaps you'll see this soon, jennechka. only let's better not quarrel--as it is it isn't any too sweet to live. all right, i'll go at once and send him to you." when she had gone away, jennka lowered the light in the little hanging blue lantern, put on her night blouse, and lay down. a minute later gladishev walked in; and after him tamara, dragging petrov by the hand, who resisted and kept his head down. and in the rear was thrust in the pink, sharp, foxy little phiz of the cross-eyed housekeeper zociya. "and that's fine, now," the housekeeper commenced to bustle. "it's just sweet to look at; two handsome gents and two swell dames. a regular bouquet. what shall i treat you with, young people? will you order beer or wine?" gladishev had a great deal of money in his pocket, as much as he never had before during all his brief life--all of twenty-five roubles; and he wanted to go on a splurge. beer he drank only out of bravado, but could not bear its bitter taste, and wondered himself how others could ever drink it. and for that reason, squeamishly, like an old rake, sticking out his lower lip, he said mistrustfully: "but then, you surely must have some awful stuff?" "what do you mean, what do you mean, good-looking! the very best gentlemen approve of it. of the sweet, there are cagore, church wine, teneriffe; while of the french there's lafitte. you can get port wine also. the girls just simply adore lafitte with lemonade." "and what are the prices?" "no dearer than money. as is the rule in all good establishments--a bottle of lafitte five roubles, four bottles of lemonade at a half each, that's two roubles, and only seven in all..." "that'll do you, zociya," jennka stopped her indifferently, "it's a shame to take advantage of boys. even five is enough. you can see these are decent people, and not just anybody..." but gladishev turned red, and with a negligent air threw a ten rouble note on the table. "oh, what's the use of talking about it. all right, bring it." "whilst i'm at it, i'll take the money for the visit as well. what about you, young people--are you on time or for the night? you know the rates yourself: on time, at two roubles; for the night, at five." "all right, all right. on time," interrupted jennka, flaring up. "trust us in that, at least." the wine was brought. tamara through importunity got pastry, besides. jennka asked for permission to call in little white manka. jennka herself did not drink, did not get up from the bed, and all the time muffled herself up in a gray shawl of orenburg[ ] manufacture, although it was hot in the room. she looked fixedly, without tearing her eyes away, at the handsome, sunburned face of gladishev, which had become so manly. [ ] orenburg has as high a reputation for woolens as sheffield has for steel.--trans. "what's the matter with you, dearie?" asked gladishev, sitting down on her bed and stroking her hand. "nothing special... head aches a little... i hit myself." "well, don't you pay any attention." "well, here i've seen you, and already i feel better. how is it you haven't been here for so long?" "i couldn't snatch away the time, nohow-camping. you know yourself... we had to put away twenty-five versts a day. the whole day drilling and drilling: field, formation, garrison. with a full pack. used to get so fagged out from morning to night that towards evening you couldn't feel your legs under you... we were at the manoeuvres also... it isn't sweet..." "oh, you poor little things!" little white manka suddenly clasped her hands. "and what do they torture you for, angels that you are? if i was to have a brother like you, or a son--my heart would just simply bleed. here's to your health, little cadet!" they clinked glasses. jennka was just as attentively scrutinizing gladishev. "and you, jennechka?" he asked, extending a glass. "i don't want to," she answered listlessly, "but, however, ladies, you've drunk some wine, chatted a bit--don't wear the welcome off the mat." "perhaps you'll stay with me the whole night?" she asked gladishev, when the others had gone away. "don't you be afraid, dearie; if you won't have enough money, i'll pay the difference for you. you see, how good-looking you are, that a wench does not grudge even money for you?" she began laughing. gladishev turned around to her; even his unobserving ear was struck by jennka's strange tone--neither sad, nor kindly, nor yet mocking. "no, sweetie, i'd be very glad to; i'd like to remain myself, but i can't possibly; i promised to be home toward ten o'clock." "that's nothing, dear, they'll wait; you're altogether a grown-up man now. is it possible that you have to listen to anybody? ... but, however, as you wish. shall i put out the light entirely, perhaps; or is it all right the way it is? which do you want--the outside or near the wall?" "it's immaterial to me," he answered in a quavering voice; and, having embraced with his arm the hot, dry body of jennka, he stretched with his lips toward her face. she slightly repulsed him. "wait, bear a while, sweetheart--we have time enough to kiss our fill yet. just lie still for one little minute... so, now... quiet, peaceful... don't stir..." these words, passionate and imperious, acted like hypnosis upon gladishev. he submitted to her and lay down on his back, putting his hands underneath his head. she raised herself a little, leant upon her elbow, and placing her head upon the bent hand, silently, in the faint half-light, was looking his body over--so white, strong, muscular; with a high and broad pectoral cavity; with well-made ribs; with a narrow pelvis; and with mighty, bulging thighs. the dark tan of the face and the upper half of the neck was divided by a sharp line from the whiteness of the shoulders and breast. gladishev blinked for a second. it seemed to him that he was feeling upon himself, upon his face, upon his entire body, this intensely fixed gaze, which seemed to touch his face and tickle it, like the cobwebby contact of a comb, which you first rub against a cloth--the sensation of a thin, imponderous, living matter. he opened his eyes and saw altogether near him the large, dark, uncanny eyes of the woman, who seemed to him now an entire stranger. "what are you looking at, jennie?" he asked quietly. "what are you thinking of?" "my dear little boy! ...they call you kolya: isn't that so?" "yes." "don't be angry at me, carry out a certain caprice of mine, please: shut your eyes again... no, even tighter, tighter... i want to turn up the light and have a good look at you. there now, so... if you only knew how beautiful you are now... right now... this second. later you will become coarse, and you will begin giving off a goatish smell; but now you give off an odour of fur and milk... and a little of some wild flower. but shut them--shut your eyes!" she added light, returned to her place, and sat down in her favourite pose--turkish fashion. both kept silent. in the distance, several rooms away, a broken-down grand piano was tinkling; somebody's vibrating laughter floated in; while from the other side--a little song, and rapid, merry talking. the words could not be heard. a cabby was rumbling by somewhere through the distant street... "and now i will infect him right away, just like all the others," pondered jennka, gliding with a deep gaze over his well-made legs, his handsome torso of a future athlete, and over his arms, thrown back, upon which, above the bend of the elbow, the muscles tautened--bulging, firm. "why, then, am i so sorry for him? or is it because he is such a good-looking little fellow? no. i am long since a stranger to such feelings. or is it because he is a boy? why, only a little over a year ago i shoved apples in his pocket, when he was going away from me at night. why have i not told him then that which, i can, and dare, tell him now? or would he not have believed me, anyway? would have grown angry? would have gone to another? for sooner or later this turn awaits every man... and that he bought me for money--can that be forgiven? or did he act just as all of them do--blindly? ..." "kolya!" she said quietly, "open your eyes." he obeyed, opened his eyes, turned to her; entwined her neck with his arm, drew her a little to him, and wanted to kiss her in the opening of her chemise--on the breast. she again tenderly but commandingly repulsed him. "no, wait a while, wait a while--hear me out... one little minute more. tell me, boy, why do you come here to us--to the women?" kolya quietly and hoarsely began laughing. "how silly you are! well, what do they all come for? am i not also a man? for, it seems, i'm at that age when in every man ripens... well, a certain need... for woman. for i'm not going to occupy myself with all sorts of nastiness!" "need? only need? that means, just as for that chamber which stands under my bed?" "no, why so?" retorted kolya, with a kindly laugh. "i liked you very much... from the very first time... if you will, i'm even... a little in love with you... at least, i never stayed with any of the others." "well, all right! but then, the first time, could it possibly have been need?" "no, perhaps, it wasn't need even; but somehow, vaguely, i wanted woman... my friends talked me into it... many had already gone here before me... so then, i too..." "but, now, weren't you ashamed the first time?" kolya became confused; all this interrogation was to him unpleasant, oppressive. he felt, that this was not the empty, idle bed talk, so well known to him, out of his small experience; but something else, of more import. "let's say... not that i was ashamed... well, but still i felt kind of awkward. i drank that time to get up courage." jennie again lay down on her side; leaned upon her elbow, and again looked at him from time to time, near at hand and intently. "but tell me, sweetie," she asked, in a barely audible voice, so that the cadet with difficulty made out her words, "tell me one thing more; but the fact of your paying money, these filthy two roubles--do you understand?--paying them for love, so that i might caress, kiss you, give all my body to you--didn't you feel ashamed to pay for that? never?" "oh, my god! what strange questions you put to me to-day! but then they all pay money! not i, then some one else would have paid--isn't it all the same to you?" "and have you been in love with any one, kolya? confess! well, now, if not in real earnest, then just so... at soul... have you done any courting? brought little flowers of some sort... strolled arm-in-arm with her under the moon? wasn't that so?" "well, yes," said koiya in a sedate bass. "what follies don't happen in one's youth! it's a matter anyone can understand..." "some sort of a little first cousin? an educated young lady? a boarding school miss? a high school girl? ... there has been, hasn't there?" "well, yes, of course--everybody has them." "why, you wouldn't have touched her, would you? ... you'd have spared her? well, if she had only said to you: take me, but only give me two roubles--what would you have said to her?" "i don't understand you, jennka!" gladishev suddenly grew angry. "what are you putting on airs for! what sort of comedy are you trying to put over! honest to god, i'll dress myself at once and go away." "wait a while, wait a while, kolya! one more, one more, the last, the very, very last question." "oh, you!" growled kolya displeased. "and could you never imagine... well, imagine it right now, even for a second... that your family has suddenly grown poor, become ruined. you'd have to earn your bread by copying papers; or, now, let's say, through carpenter or blacksmith work; and your sister was to go wrong, like all of us... yes, yes, yours, your own sister... if some blockhead seduced her and she was to go travelling... from hand to hand... what would you say then?" "bosh! ... that can't be..." kolya cut her short curtly. "but, however, that's enough--i'm going away!" "go away, do me that favour! i've ten roubles lying there, near the mirror, in a little box from chocolates--take them for yourself. i don't need them, anyway. buy with them a tortoise powder box with a gold setting for your mamma; and if you have a little sister, buy her a good doll. say: in memory from a certain wench that died. go on, little boy!" kolya, with a frown, angry, with one shove of a well-knit body jumped off the bed, almost without touching it. now he was standing on the little mat near the bed, naked, well-formed, splendid in all the magnificence of his blooming, youthful body. "kolya!" jennka called him quietly, insistently and caressingly. "kolechka!" he turned around to her call, and drew in the air in a short, jerky gust, as though he had gasped: he had never yet in his life met anywhere, even in pictures, such a beautiful expression of tenderness, sorrow, and womanly silent reproach, as the one he was just now beholding in the eyes of jennka, filled with tears. he sat down on the edge of the bed, and impulsively embraced her around the bared, swarthy arms. "let's not quarrel, then, jennechka," he said tenderly. and she twined herself around him, placed her arms on his neck, while her head she pressed against his breast. they kept silent so for several seconds. "kolya," jennie suddenly asked dully, "but were you never afraid of becoming infected?" kolya shivered. some chill, loathsome horror stirred and glided through within his soul. he did not answer at once. "of course, that would be horrible... horrible... god save me! but then i go only to you alone, only to you! you'd surely have told me? ..." "yes, i'd have told you," she uttered meditatively. and at once rapidly, consciously, as though having weighed the significance of her words: "yes, of course, of course, i would have told you! but haven't you ever heard what sort of a thing is that disease called syphilis?" "of course, i've heard... the nose falls through..." "no, kolya, not only the nose! the person becomes all diseased: his bones, sinews, brains grow diseased... some doctors say such nonsense as that it's possible to be cured of this disease. bosh! you'll never cure yourself! a person rots ten, twenty, thirty years. every second paralysis can strike him down, so that the right side of the face, the right arm, the right leg die--it isn't a human being that's living, but some sort of a little half. half-man-half-corpse. the majority of them go out of their minds. and each understands... every person... each one so infected understands, that if he eats, drinks, kisses, simply even breathes--he can't be sure that he won't immediately infect some one of those around him, the very nearest--sister, wife, son... to all syphilitics the children are born monsters, abortions, goitrous, consumptives, idiots. there, kolya, is what this disease means. and now," jennka suddenly straightened up quickly, seized kolya fast by his bare shoulders, turned his face to her, so that he was almost blinded by the flashing of her sorrowful, sombre, extraordinary eyes, "and now, kolya, i will tell you that for more than a month i am sick with this filth. and that's just why i haven't allowed you to kiss me..." "you're joking! ... you're teasing me on purpose, jennie!" muttered gladishev, wrathful, frightened, and out of his wits. "joking? ...come here!" she abruptly compelled him to get up on his feet, lit a match and said: "now look closely at what i'm going to show you..." she opened her mouth wide and placed the light so that it would illumine her larynx. kolya looked and staggered back. "do you see these white spots? this is syphilis, kolya! do you understand?--syphilis in the most fearful, the most serious stage. now dress yourself and thank god." he, silently and without looking around at jennka, began to dress hurriedly, missing his clothes when he tried to put his legs through. his hands were shaking, and his under jaw jumped so that the lower teeth knocked against the upper; while jennka was speaking with bowed head: "listen, kolya, it's your good fortune that you've run across an honest woman; another wouldn't have spared you. do you hear that? we, whom you deprive of innocence and then drive out of your home, while later you pay us two roubles a visit, we always--do you understand?"--she suddenly raised her head--"we always hate you and never have any pity for you!" the half-clad kolya suddenly dropped his dressing, sat down on the bed near jennka and, covering his face with his palms, burst into tears; sincerely, altogether like a child... "lord, lord," he whispered, "why this is the truth! ... what a vile thing this really is! ... we, also, we had this happen: we had a chambermaid, niusha...a chambermaid... they also called her signorita anita...a pretty little girl...and my brother lived with her...my elder brother...an officer...and when he went away, she proved pregnant and mother drove her out...well, yes--drove her out...threw her out of the house, like a floor mop...where is she now? and father...father...he also with a cham...chambermaid." and the half-naked jennka, this jennka, the atheist, swearer, and brawler, suddenly got up from the bed, stood before the cadet, and slowly, almost solemnly, made the sign of the cross over him. "and may god preserve you my boy!" she said with an expression of deep tenderness and gratitude. and at once she ran to the door, opened it and called out: "housekeeper!" "tell you what, housekeeper dear," jennka directed, "go and find out, please, which one of them is free--tamara or little white manka. and the one that's free send here." kolya growled out something in the back, but jennka purposely did not listen to him. "and please make it as quick as possible, housekeeper dear, won't you be so kind?" "right away, right away, miss." "why, why do you do this, jennie?" asked gladishev with anguish. "well, what's that for? ...is it possible that you want to tell about it? ..." "wait awhile, that's not your business...wait a while, i won't do anything unpleasant for you." after a minute little white manka came in her brown, smooth, deliberately modest dress of a high school girl. "what did you call me for, jennie? or have you quarreled?" "no, we haven't quarreled, mannechka, but my head aches very much," answered jennka calmly, "and for that reason my little friend finds me very cold. be a friend, mannechka, stay with him, take my place!" "that's enough, jennie, stop it, darling!" in a tone of sincere suffering retorted kolya. "i understand everything, everything, it's not necessary now ... don't be finishing me off, then! ..." "i don't understand anything of what's happened," the frivolous manka spread out her hands. "maybe you'll treat a poor little girl to something?" "well, go on, go on!" jennka sent her away gently. "i'll come right away. we just played a joke." already dressed, they stood for long in the open door between the bedroom and the corridor; and without words sadly looked at each other. and kolya did not understand, but sensed, that at this moment in his soul was taking place one of those tremendous crises which tell imperiously upon the entire life. then he pressed jennie's hand hard and said: "forgive! ... will you forgive me, jennie? will you forgive? ..." "yes, my boy! ... yes, my fine one! ... yes...yes..." she tenderly, softly, like a mother, stroked his closely cropped harsh head and gave him, a slight shove into the corridor. "where are you bound now?" she sent after him, half opening her door. "i'll take my comrade right away, and then home." "as you know best! ... god bless you, dearie!" "forgive me! ... forgive me! ..." once more repeated kolya, stretching out his hands to her. "i've already told you, my splendid boy...and you forgive me too...for we won't see each other anymore!" and she, having closed the door, was left alone. in the corridor gladishev hesitated, because he did not know how to find the room to which petrov had retired with tamara. but the housekeeper zociya helped him, running past him very quickly, and with a very anxious, alarmed air. "oh, i haven't time to bother with you now!" she snarled back at gladishev's question. "third door to the left." kolya walked up to the door indicated and knocked. some sort of bustle and whispering sounded in the room. he knocked once more. "kerkovius, open! this is me--soliterov." among the cadets, setting out on expeditions of this sort, it was always agreed upon to call each other by fictitious names. it was not so much a conspiracy or a shift against the vigilance of those in authority, or fear of compromising one's self before a chance acquaintance of the family, but rather a play, of its own kind, at mysteriousness and disguise--a play tracing its beginning from those times when the young people were borne away by gustave aimard, mayne reid, and the detective lecocq. "you can't come in!" the voice of tamara came from behind the door. "you can't come in. we are busy." but the bass voice of petrov immediately cut her short: "nonsense! she's lying. come in. it's all right." kolya opened the door. petrov was sitting on a chair dressed, but all red, morose, with lips pouting like a child's, with downcast eyes. "well, what a friend you've brought--i must say!" tamara began speaking sneeringly and wrathfully. "i thought he was a man in earnest, but this is only some sort of a little girl! he's sorry to lose his innocence, if you please. what a treasure you've found, to be sure! but take back, take back your two roubles!" she suddenly began yelling at petrov and tossed two coins on the table. "you'll give them away to some poor chambermaid or other! or else save them for gloves for yourself, you marmot!" "but what are you cursing for?" grumbled petrov, without raising his eyes. "i'm not cursing you, am i? then why do you curse first? i have a full right to act as i want to. but i have passed some time with you, and so take them. but to be forced, i don't want to. and on your part, gladishev--that is, soliterov--this isn't at all nice. i thought she was a nice girl, but she's trying to kiss all the time, and does god knows what..." tamara, despite her wrath, burst into laughter. "oh, you little stupid, little stupid! well, don't be angry--i'll take your money. only watch: this very evening you'll be sorry, you'll be crying. well, don't be angry, don't be angry, angel, let's make up. put your hand out to me, as i'm doing to you." "let's go, kerkovius," said gladishev. "au revoir, tamara!" tamara let the money down into her stocking, through the habit of all prostitutes, and went to show the boys the way. even at the time that they were passing through the corridor gladishev was struck by the strange, silent, tense bustle in the drawing room; the trampling of feet and some muffled, low-voiced, rapid conversations. near that place where they had just been sitting below the picture, all the inmates of anna markovna's house and several outsiders had gathered. they were standing in a close knot, bending down. kolya walked up with curiosity, and, wedging his way through a little, looked in between the heads: on the floor, sideways, somehow unnaturally drawn up, was lying roly-poly. his face was blue, almost black. he did not move, and was lying strangely small, shrunken, with legs bent. one arm was squeezed in under his breast, while the other was flung back. "what's the matter with him?" asked gladishev in a fright. niurka answered him, starting to speak in a rapid, jerky whisper: "roly-poly just came here...gave manka the candy, and then started in to put armenian riddles to us...'of a blue colour, hangs in the parlor and whistles'...we couldn't guess nohow, but he says: 'a herring'...suddenly he started laughing, had a coughing spell, and began falling sideways; and then--bang on the ground and don't move...they sent for the police...lord, there's doings for you! ... i'm horribly afraid of corpseses!" "wait!" gladishev stopped her. "it's necessary to feel his forehead; he may be alive yet..." he did try to thrust himself forward, but simeon's fingers, just like iron pincers, seized him above the elbows and dragged him back. "there's nothing, there's nothing to be inspecting," sternly ordered simeon, "go on, now, young gents, out of here! this is no place for you: the police will come, will summon you as witnesses--then it's scat! to the devil's dam! for you out of the military high school! better go while you're good and healthy!" he escorted them to the entrance hall, shoved the great-coats into their hands and added still more sternly: "well, now--go at a run...lively! so's there won't be even a whiff of you left. and if you come another time, then i won't let youse in at all. you are wise guys, you are! you gave the old hound money for whiskey--so now he's gone and croaked." "well, don't you get too smart, now!" gladishev flew at him, all ruffled up. "what d'you mean, don't get smart? ..." simeon suddenly began to yell infuriatedly, and his black eyes without lashes and brows became so terrible that the cadets shrank back. "i'll soak you one on the snout so hard you'll forget how to say papa and mamma! git, this second! or else i'll bust you in the neck!" the boys went down the steps. at this time two men were going up, in cloth caps on the sides of their heads; one in a blue, the other in a red blouse, with the skirts outside, under the unbuttoned, wide open jackets--evidently, simeon's comrades in the profession. "what?" one of them called out gaily from below, addressing simeon, "is it bye-bye for roly-poly?" "yes, it must be the finish," answered simeon. "we've got to throw him out into the street in the meantime, fellows, or else the spirits will start haunting. the devil with him, let 'em think that he drank himself full and croaked on the road." "but you didn't ... well, now? ... you didn't do for him?" "well, now, there's foolish talk! if there'd only been some reason. he was a harmless fellow. altogether like a little lamb. it must be just that his turn came." "and didn't he find a place where to die! couldn't he have thought up something worse?" said the one who was in the red shirt. "right you are, there!" seconded the other. "lived to grin and died in sin. well, let's go, mate, what?" the cadets ran with all their might. now, in the darkness, the figure of roly-poly drawn up on the floor, with his blue face, appeared before them in all the horror that the dead possess for early youth; and especially if recalled at night, in the dark. chapter iv. a fine rain, like dust, obstinate and tedious, had been drizzling since morning. platonov was working in the port at the unloading of watermelons. at the mill, where he had since the very summer proposed to establish himself, luck had turned against him; after a week he had already quarreled, and almost had a fight, with the foreman, who was extremely brutal with the workers. about a month sergei ivanovich had struggled along somehow from hand to mouth, somewheres in the back-yards of temnikovskaya street, dragging into the editorial rooms of the echoes, from time to time, notes of street accidents or little humorous scenes from the court rooms of the justices of the peace. but the hard newspaper game had long ago grown distasteful to him. he was always drawn to adventures, to physical labour in the fresh air, to life completely devoid of even the least hint at comfort; to care-free vagabondage, in which a man, having cast from him all possible external conditions, does not know himself what is going to be with him on the morrow. and for that reason, when from the lower stretches of the dnieper the first barges with watermelons started coming in, he willingly entered a gang of labourers, in which he was known even from last year, and loved for his merry nature, for his comradely spirit, and for his masterly ability of keeping count. this labour was carried on with good team work and with skill. four parties, each of five men, worked on each barge. number one would reach for a watermelon and pass it on to the second, who was standing on the side of the barge. the second cast it to the third, standing already on the wharf; the third threw it over to the fourth; while the fourth handed it up to the fifth, who stood on a horse cart and laid the watermelons away--now dark-green, now white, now striped--into even glistening rows. this work is clean, lively, and progresses rapidly. when a good party is gotten up, it is a pleasure to see how the watermelons fly from hand to hand, are caught with a circus-like quickness and success, and anew, and anew, without a break, fly, in order to fill up the dray. it is only difficult for the novices, that have not as yet gained the skill, have not caught on to that especial sense of the tempo. and it is not as difficult to catch a watermelon as to be able to throw it. platonov remembered well his first experiences of last year. what swearing--virulent, mocking, coarse--poured down upon him when for the third or fourth time he had been gaping and had slowed up the passing: two watermelons, not thrown in time, had smashed against the pavement with a succulent crunch, while the completely lost platonov dropped the one which he was holding in his hands as well. the first time they treated him gently; on the second day, however, for every mistake they began to deduct from him five kopecks per watermelon out of the common share. the following time when this happened, they threatened to throw him out of the party at once, without any reckoning. platonov even now still remembered how a sudden fury seized him: "ah, so? the devil take you!" he had thought. "and yet you want me to be chary of your watermelons? so then, here you are, here you are! ..." this flare-up helped him as though instantaneously. he carelessly caught the watermelons, just as carelessly threw them over, and to his amazement suddenly felt that precisely just now he had gotten into the real swing of the work with all his muscles, sight, and breathing; and understood, that the most important thing was not to think at all of the watermelons representing some value, and that then everything went well. when he, finally, had fully mastered this art, it served him for a long time as a pleasant and entertaining athletic game of its own kind. but that, too, passed away. he reached, in, the end, the stage where he felt himself a will-less, mechanical wheel in a general machine consisting of five men and an endless chain of flying watermelons. now he was number two. bending downward rhythmically, he, without looking, received with both hands the cold, springy, heavy watermelon; swung it to the right; and, also almost without looking, or looking only out of the corner of his eye, tossed it downward, and immediately once again bent down for the next watermelon. and his ear seized at this time how smack-smack ...smack-smack...the caught watermelons slapped in the hands; and immediately bent downwards and again threw, letting the air out of himself noisily--ghe...ghe... the present work was very profitable; their gang, consisting of forty men, had taken on the work, thanks to the great rush, not by the day but by the amount of work done, by the waggon load. zavorotny, the head--an enormous, mighty poltavian--had succeeded with extreme deftness in getting around the owner; a young man, and, to boot, in all probability not very experienced as yet. the owner, it is true, came to his senses later and wanted to change the stipulations; but experienced melon growers dissuaded him from it in time: "drop it. they'll kill you," they told him simply and firmly. and so, through this very stroke of good luck every member of the gang was now earning up to four roubles a day. they all worked with unusual ardour, even with some sort of vehemence; and if it had been possible to measure with some apparatus the labour of each one of them, then, in all probability, the number of units of energy created would have equalled the work of a large voronezhian train horse. however, zavorotny was not satisfied even with this--he hurried and hurried his lads on all the time. professional ambition was speaking within him; he wanted to bring the daily earnings of every member of the gang up to five roubles per snout. and gaily, with unusual ease, twinkled from the harbour to the waggon, twirling and flashing, the wet green and white watermelons; and their succulent plashing resounded against accustomed palms. but now a long blast sounded on the dredging machine in the port. a second, a third, responded to it on the river; a few more on shore; and for a long time they roared together in a mighty chorus of different voices. "ba-a-a-st-a-a!" hoarsely and thickly, exactly like a locomotive blast, zavorotny started roaring. and now the last smack-smack--and the work stopped instantaneously. platonov with enjoyment straightened out his back and bent it backward, and spread out his swollen arms. with pleasure he thought of having already gotten over that first pain in all the muscles, which tells so during the first days, when one is just getting back into the work after disuse. while up to this day, awaking in the mornings in his lair on temnikovskaya--also to the sound of a factory blast agreed upon--he would during the first minutes experience such fearful pains in his neck, back, in his arms and legs, that it seemed to him as if only a miracle would be able to compel him to get up and make a few steps. "go-o-o and e-at," zavorotny began to clamour again. the stevedores went down to the water; got down on their knees or laid down flat on the gangplank or on the rafts; and, scooping up the water in handfuls, washed their wet, heated faces and arms. right here, too, on the shore, to one side, where a little grass had been left yet, they disposed themselves for dinner: placed in a circle ten of the most ripe watermelons, black bread, and twenty dried porgies. gavriushka the bullet was already running with a half-gallon bottle to the pot-house and was singing as he went the soldiers' signal for dinner: "drag spoon and mess-kit out, if there's no bread, eat without." a bare-footed urchin, dirty and so ragged that there was more of his bare body than clothes upon him, ran up to the gang. "which one of you here is platonov?" he asked, quickly running over them with his thievish eyes. "i'm platonov, and by what name do they tease you?" "around the corner here, behind the church, some sort of a young lady is waiting for you...here's a note for you." the whole gang neighed deeply. "what d'you open up your mouths for, you pack of fools!" said platonov calmly. "give me the note here." this was a letter from jennka, written in a round, naive, rolling, childish handwriting, and not very well spelt. "sergei ivanich. forgive me that i disturbe you. i must talk over a very, very important matter with you. i would not be troubling you if it was trifles. for only minutes in all. jennka, whom you know, from anna markovna's." platonov got up. "i'm going away for a little while," he said to zavorotny. "when you begin, i'll be in my place." "now you've found somethin' to do," lazily and contemptuously said the head of the gang. "there's the night for that business...go ahead, go ahead, who's holding you. but only if you won't be here when we begin work, then this day don't count. i'll take any tramp. and as many watermelons as he busts--that's out of your share, too...i didn't think it of you, platonov--that you're such a he-dog..." jennka was waiting for him in the tiny little square, sheltered between a church and the wharf, and consisting of ten sorry poplars. she had on a gray, one-piece street dress; a simple, round, straw hat with a small black ribbon. "and yet, even though she has dressed herself simply," reflected platonov, looking at her from a distance with his habitually puckered eyes, "and yet, every man will walk past, give a look, and inevitably look back three or four times; he'll feel the especial tone at once." "howdy do, jennka! very glad to see you," he said cordially, squeezing the girl's hand. "there, now, i didn't expect it!" jennka was reserved, sad, and apparently troubled over something. platonov at once understood and sensed this. "you excuse me, jennechka, i must have dinner right away," said he, "so, perhaps, you'll go together with me and tell me what's the matter, while i'll manage to eat at the same time. there's a modest little inn not far from here. at this time there are no people there at all, and there's even a tiny little stall, a sort of a private room; that will be just the thing for you and me. let's go! perhaps you'll also have a bite of something." "no. i won't eat," answered jennka hoarsely, "and i won't detain you for long...a few minutes. i have to talk things over, have some advice--but i haven't anybody." "very well...let's go then! in whatever way i can, i'm always at your service, in everything. i love you very much, jennka!" she looked at him sadly and gratefully. "i know this, serge ivanovich; that's why i've come." "you need money, perhaps? just say so. i haven't got much with me, myself; but the gang will trust me with an advance." "no, thanks...it isn't that at all. i'll tell everything at once, there, where we're going now." in the dim, low-ceiled little inn, the customary haunt of petty thieves, where business was carried on only in the evening, until very far into the night, platonov took the little half-dark cubby hole. "give me boiled meat, cucumbers, a large glass of vodka, and bread," he ordered the waiter. the waiter--a young fellow with a dirty face; pugnosed; as dirty and greasy in all his person as though he had just been pulled out of a cesspool, wiped his lips and asked hoarsely: "how many kopecks' bread?" "as much as it comes to." then he started laughing: "bring as much as possible--we'll reckon it up later... and some bread cider!" "well, jennie, say what your trouble is...i can already see by your face that there's trouble, or something distasteful in general...go ahead and tell it!" jennka for a long time plucked her handkerchief and looked at the tips of her slippers, as though, gathering her strength. timorousness had taken possession of her--the necessary and important words would not come into her mind, for anything. platonov came to her aid: "don't be embarrassed, my dear jennie, tell all there is! for you know that i'm like one of the family, and will never give you away. and perhaps i may really give you some worth-while advice. well, dive off with a splash into the water--begin!" "that's just it, i don't know how to begin," said jennka irresolutely. "here's what, sergei ivanovich, i'm a sick woman...understand?--sick in a bad way...with the most nasty disease...do you know which?" "go on!" said platonov, nodding his head. "and i've been that way for a long time...more than a month...a month and a half, maybe...yes, more than a month, because i found out about this on the trinity..." platonov quickly rubbed his forehead with his hand. "wait a while, i've recalled it...this was that day i was there together with the students...isn't that so?" "that's right, sergei ivanovich, that's so..." "ah, jennka," said platonov reproachfully and with regret. "for do you know, that after this two of the students got sick...wasn't it from you?" jennka wrathfully and disdainfully flashed her eyes. "perhaps even from me...how should i know? there were a lot of them...i remember there was this one, now, who was even trying to pick a fight with you all the time ...a tall sort of fellow, fair-haired, in pince-nez..." "yes, yes...that's sobashnikov. they passed the news to me...that's he...that one was nothing--a little coxcomb! but then the other--him i'm sorry for. although i've known him long, somehow i never made the right inquiries about his name...i only remember that he comes from some city or other--poliyansk...zvenigorodsk... his comrades called him ramses...when the physicians--he turned to several physicians--when they told him irrevocably that he had the lues, he went home and shot himself...and in the note that he wrote there were amazing things, something like this: i supposed all the meaning of life to be in the triumph of mind, beauty and good; with this disease i am not a man, but junk, rottenness, carrion; a candidate for a progressive paralytic. my human dignity cannot reconcile itself to this. but guilty in all that has happened, and therefore in my death as well, am i alone; for that i, obeying a momentary bestial inclination, took a woman without love, for money. for that reason have i earned the punishment which i myself lay upon me..." "i am sorry for him..." added platonov quietly. jennka dilated her nostrils. "but i, now, not the very least bit." "that's wrong...you go away now, young fellow. when i'll need you i'll call out," said platonov to the serving-man "absolutely wrong, jennechka! this was an unusually big and forceful man. such come only one to the hundreds of thousands. i don't respect suicides. most frequent of all, these are little boys, who shoot and hang themselves over trifles, like a child that has not been given a piece of candy, and hits itself against the wall to spite those around it. but before his death i reverently and with sorrow bow my head. he was a wise, generous, kindly man, attentive to all; and, as you see, too strict to himself." "but to me this is absolutely all one," obstinately contradicted jennka, "wise or foolish, honest or dishonest, old or young--i have come to hate them all. because--look upon me--what am i? some sort of universal spittoon, cesspool, privy. think of it, platonov; why, thousands, thousands of people have taken me, clutched me; grunted, snorted over me; and all those who were, and all those who might yet have been on my bed--oh, how i hate them all! if i only could, i would sentence them to torture by fire and iron! ... i would order..." "you are malicious and proud, jennie," said platonov quietly. "i was neither malicious nor proud...it's only now. i wasn't ten yet when my own mother sold me; and since that time i've been travelling from hand to hand... if only some one had seen a human being in me! no! ... i am vermin, refuse, worse than a beggar, worse than a thief, worse than a murderer! ... even a hangman...we have even such coming to the establishment--and even he would have treated me loftily, with loathing: i am nothing; i am a public wench! do you understand, sergei ivanovich, what a horrible word this is? pub-lic! ... this means nobody's: not papa's, not mamma's, not russian, not riyazan, but simply--public! and not once did it enter anybody's head to walk up to me and think: why, now, this is a human being too; she has a heart and a brain; she thinks of something, feels something; for she's not made out of wood, and isn't stuffed with straw, small hay, or excelsior! and yet, only i feel this. i, perhaps, am the only one out of all of them who feels the horror of her position; this black, stinking, filthy pit. but then, all the girls with whom i have met, and with whom i am living right now--understand, platonov, understand me!--why, they don't realize anything... talking, walking pieces of meat! and this is even worse than my malice! ..." "you are right!" said platonov quietly. "and this is one of those questions where you'll always run up against a wall. no one will help you..." "no one, no one! ..." passionately exclaimed jennka. "do you remember--this was while you were there: a student carried away our liubka..." "why, certainly, i remember well! ... well, and what then?" "and this is what, that yesterday she came back tattered, wet...crying...left her, the skunk! ... played a while at kindliness, and then away with her! 'you,' he says, 'are a sister.' 'i,' he says, 'will save you, make a human being of you...'" "is that possible?" "just so! ... one man i did see, kindly, indulgent, without the designs of a he-dog--that's you. but then, you're altogether different. you're somehow queer. you're always wandering somewhere, seeking something...you forgive me, sergei ivanovich, you're some sort of a little innocent! ... and that's just why i've come to you, to you alone! ..." "speak on, jennechka..." "and so, when i found out that i was sick, i almost went out of my mind from wrath; i choked from wrath ...i thought: and here's the end; therefore, there's no more use in pitying, there's nothing to grieve about, nothing to expect...the lid! ... but for all that i have borne--can it be that there's no paying back for it? can it be that there's no justice in the world? can it be that i can't even feast myself with revenge?--for that i have never known love; that of family life i know only by hearsay; that, like a disgustin', nasty little dog, they call me near, pat me and then with a boot over the head--get out!--that they made me over, from a human being, equal to all of them, no more foolish than all those i've met; made me over into a floor mop, some sort of a sewer pipe for their filthy pleasures? ...ugh! ... is it possible that for all of this i must take even such a disease with gratitude as well? ... or am i a slave? ... a dumb object? ... a pack horse? ... and so, platonov, it was just then that i resolved to infect them all: young, old, poor, rich, handsome, hideous--all, all, all! ..." platonov, who had already long since put his plate away from him, was looking at her with astonishment, and even more--almost with horror. he, who had seen in life much of the painful, the filthy, at times even of the bloody--he grew frightened with an animal fright before this intensity of enormous, unvented hatred. coming to himself, he said: "one great writer tells of such a case. the prussians conquered the french and lorded it over them in every possible way: shot the men, violated the women, pillaged the houses, burned down the fields...and so one handsome woman--a frenchwoman, very handsome,--having become infected, began out of spite to infect all the germans who happened to fall into her embraces. she made ill whole hundreds, perhaps even thousands...and when she was dying in a hospital, she recalled this with joy and with pride...[ ] but then, those were enemies, trampling upon her fatherland and slaughtering her brothers...but you, you, jennechka! ..." [ ] this story is lit. no. , by guy de maupassant.--trans. "but i--all, just all! tell me, sergei ivanovich, only tell me on your conscience: if you were to find in the street a child, whom some one had dishonoured, had abused...well, let's say, had stuck its eyes out, cut its ears off--and then you were to find out that this man is at this minute walking past you, and that only god alone, if only he exists, is looking at you this minute from heaven--what would you do?" "don't know," answered platonov, dully and downcast; but he paled, and his fingers underneath the table convulsively clenched into fists, "perhaps i would kill him..." "not 'perhaps,' but certainly! i know you, i sense you. well, and now think: every one of us has been abused so, when we were children! ... children! ..." passionately moaned out jennka and covered her eyes for a moment with her palm. "why, it comes to me, you also spoke of this at one time, in our place--wasn't it on that same evening before the trinity? ... yes, children--foolish, trusting, blind, greedy, frivolous...and we cannot tear ourselves out of our harness...where are we to go? what are we to do? ... and please, don't you think it, sergei ivanovich--that the spite within me is strong only against those who wronged just me, me personally...no, against all our guests in general; all these cavaliers, from little to big...well, and so i have resolved to avenge myself and my sisters. is that good or no? ..." "jehnechka, really i don't know...i can't...i dare not say anything...i don't understand." "but even that's not the main thing...for the main thing is this: i infected them, and did not feel anything--no pity, no remorse, no guilt before god or my fatherland. within me was only joy, as in a hungry wolf that has managed to get at blood...but yesterday something happened which even i can't understand. a cadet came to me, altogether a little bit of a lad, silly, with yellow around his mouth...he used to come to me from still last winter...and then suddenly i had pity on him... not because he was very handsome and very young; and not because he had always been very polite--even tender, if you will...no, both the one and the other had come to me, but i did not spare them: with enjoyment i marked them off, just like cattle, with a red-hot brand ...but this one i suddenly pitied...i myself don't understand--why? i can't make it out. it seemed to me, that it would be all the same as stealing money from a little simpleton, a little idiot; or hitting a blind man, or cutting a sleeper's throat...if he only were some dried-up marasmus or a nasty little brute, or a lecherous old fellow, i would not have stopped. but he was healthy, robust, with chest and arms like a statue's...and i could not... i gave him his money back, showed him my disease; in a word, i acted like a fool among fools. he went away from me...burst into tears...and now since last evening i haven't slept. i walk around as in a fog...therefore--i'm thinking right now--therefore, that which, i meditated; my dream to infect them all; to infect their fathers, mothers, sisters, brides--even all the world--therefore, all this was folly, an empty fantasy, since i have stopped? ... once again, i don't understand anything ...sergei ivanovich, you are so wise, you have seen so much of life--help me, then, to find myself now!..." "i don't know, jennechka!" quietly pronounced platonov. "not that i fear telling you, or advising you, but i know absolutely nothing. this is above my reason... above conscience..." jennie crossed her fingers and nervously cracked them. "and i, too, don't know...therefore, that which i thought--is not the truth. therefore, there is but one thing left me...this thought came into my head this morning..." "don't, don't do it, jennechka! ... jennie! ..." platonov quickly interrupted her. "there's one thing: to hang myself..." "no, no, jennie, only not that! ... if there were other circumstances, unsurmountable, i would, believe me, tell you boldly: well, it's no use, jennie; it's time to close up shop... but what you need isn't that at all... if you wish, i can suggest one way out to you, no less malicious and merciless; but which, perhaps, will satiate your wrath a hundredfold..." "what's that?" asked jennie, wearily, as though suddenly wilted after her flare-up. "well, this is it ... you're still young, and i'll tell you the truth, you are very handsome; that is, you can be, if you only want to, unusually stunning ... that's even more than beauty. but you've never yet known the bounds and the power of your appearance; and, mainly, you don't know to what a degree such natures as yours are bewitching, and how mightily they enchain men to them, and make out of them more than slaves and brutes ... you are proud, you are brave, you are independent, you are a clever woman. i know--you have read a great deal, let's presuppose even trashy books, but still you have read, you have an entirely different speech from the others. with a successful turn of life, you can cure yourself, you can get out of these 'yamkas,' these 'little ditches,' into freedom. you have only to stir a finger, in order to see at your feet hundreds of men; submissive, ready for your sake for vileness, for theft, for embezzlement ... lord it over them with tight reins, with a cruel whip in your hands! ... ruin them, make them go out of their minds, as long as your desire and energy hold out! ... look, my dear jennie, who manages life now if not women! yesterday's chambermaid, laundress, chorus girl goes through estates worth millions, the way a country-woman of tver cracks sunflower seeds. a woman scarcely able to sign her name, at times affects the destiny of an entire kingdom through a man. hereditary princes marry the street-walkers, the kept mistresses of yesterday... jennechka, there is the scope for your unbridled vengeance; while i will admire you from a distance... for you--you are made of this stuff--you are a bird of prey, a spoliator... perhaps not with such a broad sweep--but you will cast them down under your feet." "no," faintly smiled jennka. "i thought of this before ... but something of the utmost importance has burned out within me. there are no forces within me, there is no will within me, no desires ... i am somehow all empty inside, rotted ... well, now, you know, there's a mushroom like that--white, round,--you squeeze it, and snuff pours out of it. and the same way with me. this life has eaten out everything within me save malice. and i am flabby, and my malice is flabby ... i'll see some little boy again, will have pity on him, will be punishing myself again ... no, it's better ... better so! ..." she became silent. and platonov did not know what to say. it became oppressive and awkward for both. finally, jennka got up, and, without looking at platonov, extended her cold, feeble hand to him. "good-bye, sergei ivanovich! excuse me, that i took up your time ... oh, well, i can see myself that you'd help me, if you only could ... but, evidently, there's nothing to be done here ... good-bye!" "only don't do anything foolish, jennechka! i implore you! ..." "oh, that's all right!" said she and made a tired gesture with her hand. having come out of the square, they parted; but, having gone a few steps, jennka suddenly called after him: "sergei ivanovich, oh sergei ivanovich! ..." he stopped, turned around, walked back to her. "roly-poly croaked last evening in our drawing room. he jumped and he jumped, and then suddenly plumped down ... oh, well, it's an easy death at least! and also i forgot to ask you, sergei ivanovich ... this is the last, now ... is there a god or no?" platonov knit his eyebrows. "what answer can i make? i don't know. i think that there is, but not such as we imagine him. he is more wise, more just..." "and future life? there, after death? is there, now, as they tell us, a paradise or hell? is that the truth? or is there just nothing at all? a barren void? a sleep without a dream? a dark basement?" platonov kept silent, trying not to look at jennka. he felt oppressed and frightened. "i don't know," said he, finally, with an effort. "i don't want to lie to you." jennka sighed, and smiled with a pitiful, twisted smile. "well, thanks, my dear. and thanks for even that much ... i wish you happiness. with all my soul. well, good-bye..." she turned away from him and began slowly, with a wavering walk, to climb up the hill. platonov returned to work just in the nick of time. the gathering of tramps, scratching, yawning, working out their accustomed dislocations, were getting into their places. zavorotny, at a distance, with his keen eyes caught sight of platonov and began to yell over the whole port: "you did manage to get here in time, you round-shouldered devil ... but i was already wanting to take you by the tail and chase you out of the gang ... well, get in your place! ..." "well, but i did get a he-dog in you, serejka! ..." he added, in a kindly manner. "if only it was night; but no,--look you, he starts in playing ring-around-a-rosie in broad daylight..." chapter v. saturday was the customary day of the doctor's inspection, for which they prepared very carefully and with quaking in all the houses; as, however, even society ladies prepare themselves, when getting ready for a visit to a physician-specialist; they diligently made their intimate toilet and inevitably put on clean underthings, even as dressy as possible. the windows toward the street were closed with shutters, while at one of those windows, which gave out upon the yard, was put a table with a hard bolster to put under the back. all the girls were agitated ... "and what if there's a disease, which i haven't noticed myself? ... and then the despatch to a hospital; disgrace; the tedium of hospital life; bad food; the hard course of treatment..." only big manka--or otherwise manka the crocodile--zoe, and henrietta--all thirty years old, and, therefore, in the reckoning of yama, already old prostitutes, who had seen everything, had grown inured to everything, grown indifferent to their trade, like white, fat circus horses--remained imperturbably calm. manka the crocodile even often said of herself: "i have gone through fire and water and pipes of brass ... nothing will stick to me any more." jennka, since morning, was meek and pensive. she presented to little white manka a golden bracelet; a medallion upon a thin little chain with her photograph; and a silver neck crucifix. tamara she moved through entreaty into taking two rings for remembrance: one of silver, in three hoops, that could be moved apart, with a heart in the middle, and under it two hands that clasped one another when all the three parts of the ring were joined; while the other was of thin gold wire with an almandine. "as for my underwear, tamarochka--you give it to annushka, the chambermaid. let her wash it out well and wear it in good health, in memory of me." the two of them were sitting in tamara's room. jennka had in the very morning sent after cognac; and now slowly, as though lazily, was imbibing wine-glass after wine-glass, eating lemon and a piece of sugar after drinking. tamara was observing this for the first time and wondered, because jennka had always disliked wine, and drank very rarely; and then only at the constraint of guests. "what are you giving stuff away so to-day?" asked tamara. "just as though you'd gotten ready to die, or to go into a convent?" "yes, and i will go away," answered jennka listlessly. "i am weary, tamarochka! ..." "well, which one of us has a good time?" "well, no! ... it isn't so much that i'm weary; but somehow everything--everything is all the same ... i look at you, at the table, at the bottle; at my hands and feet; and i'm thinking, that all this is alike and everything is to no purpose ... there's no sense in anything ... just like on some old, old picture. look there--there's a soldier walking on the street, but it's all one to me, as though they had wound up a doll, and it's moving ... and that he's wet under the ram, is also all one to me ... and that he'll die, and i'll die, and you, tamara, will die--in this also i see nothing frightful, nothing amazing... so simple and wearisome is everything to me..." jennka was silent for a while; drank one more wine-glass; sucked the sugar, and, still looking out at the street, suddenly asked: "tell me, please, tamara, i've never asked you about it--from where did you get in here, into the house? you don't at all resemble all of us; you know everything; for everything that turns up you have a good, clever remark ... even french, now--how well you spoke it that time! but none of us knows anything at all about you ... who are you?" "darling jennechka, really, it's not worth while ... a life like any life ... i went to boarding school; was a governess; sang in a choir; then kept a shooting gallery in a summer garden; and then got mixed up with a certain charlatan and taught myself to shoot with a winchester ... i traveled with circuses--i represented an american amazon. i used to shoot splendidly ... then i found myself in a monastery. there i passed two years ... i've been through a lot ... can't recall everything ... i used to steal..." "you've lived through a great deal ... checkered-like." "but then, my years are not a few. well, what do you think--how many?" "twenty-two, twenty-four? ..." "no, my angel! it just struck thirty-two a week ago. i, if you like, am older than all of you here in anna markovna's. only i didn't wonder at anything, didn't take anything near to heart. as you see, i never drink ... i occupy myself very carefully with the care of my body; and the main thing, the very main thing--i don't allow myself ever to be carried away with men..." "well, but what about your senka? ..." "senka--that's a horse of another colour; the heart of woman is foolish, inconsistent ... can it possibly live without love? and even so, i don't love him, but just so ... a self-deception ... but, however, i shall be in very great need of senka soon." jennka suddenly grew animated and looked at her friend with curiosity. "but how did you come to get stuck right here, in this hole? so clever, handsome, sociable..." "i'd have to take a long time in telling it ... and then i'm too lazy ... i got in here out of love; i got mixed up with a certain young man and went into a revolution with him. for we always act so, we women: where the dearie is looking, there we also look; what the dearie sees, that we also see ... i didn't believe at soul in his work, but i went. a flattering man he was; smart, a good talker, a good looker ... only he proved to be a skunk and a traitor afterwards. he played at revolution; while he himself gave his comrades away to the gendarmes. a stool-pigeon, he was. when they had killed and shown him up, then all the foolishness left me. however, it was necessary to conceal myself ... i changed my passport. then they advised me, that the easiest thing of all was to screen myself with a yellow ticket ... and then the fun began! ... and even here i'm on a sort of pasture ground; when the time comes, the successful moment arrives--i'll go away!" "where?" asked jennie with impatience. "the world is large ... and i love life! ... there, now, i was the same way in the convent: i lived on and i lived on; sang antiphonies and dulias, until i had rested up, and had finally grown weary of it; and then all at once--hop! and into a cabaret ... wasn't that some jump? the same way out of here ... i'll get into a theatre, into a circus, into a corps de ballet ... but do you know, jennechka, i'm drawn to the thieving trade the most, after all ... daring, dangerous, hard, and somehow intoxicating ... it's drawing me! ... don't you mind that i'm so respectable and modest, and can appear an educated young lady. i'm entirely, entirely different." her eyes suddenly blazed up, vividly and gaily. "there's a devil dwells in me!" "it's all very well for you," pensively and with weariness pronounced jennie. "you at least desire something, but my soul is some sort of carrion ... i'm twenty-five years old, now; but my soul is like that of an old woman, shrivelled up, smelling of the earth ... and if i had only lived sensibly! ... ugh! ... there was only some sort of slush." "drop it, jennka; you're talking foolishly. you're smart, you're original; you have that special power before which men crawl and creep so willingly. you go away from here, too. not with me, of course--i'm always single--but go away all by your own self." jennka shook her head and quietly, without tears, hid her face in her palms. "no," she responded dully, after a long silence, "no, this won't work out with me: fate has chewed me all up! ... i'm not a human being any more, but some sort of dirty cud ... eh!" she suddenly made a gesture of despair. 'let's better drink some cognac, jennechka,'" she addressed herself, "'and let's suck the lemon a little! ...' brr ... what nasty stuff! ... and where does annushka always get such abominable stuff? if you smear a dog's wool with it, it will fall off ... and always, the low-down thing, she'll take an extra half. once i somehow ask her--'what are you hoarding money for?' 'well, i,' she says, 'am saving it up for a wedding. what sort,' she says, 'of joy will it be for my husband, that i'll offer him up my innocence alone! i must earn a few hundreds in addition.' she's happy! ... i have here, tamara, a little money in the little box under the mirror; you pass it on to her, please..." "and what are you about, you fool; do you want to die, or what?" sharply, with reproach, said tamara. "no, i'm saying it just so, if anything happens ... take it, now, take the money! maybe they'll take me off to the hospital ... and how do you know what's going to take place there? i left myself some small change, if anything happens ... and supposing that i wanted to do something to myself in downright earnest, tamarochka--is it possible that you'd interfere with me?" tamara looked at her fixedly, deeply, and calmly. jennie's eyes were sad, and as though vacant. the living fire had become extinguished in them, and they seemed turbid, just as though faded, with whites like moonstone. "no," tamara said at last, quietly but firmly. "if it was on account of love, i'd interfere; if it was on account of money, i'd talk you out of it: but there are cases where one must not interfere. i wouldn't help, of course; but i also wouldn't seize you and interfere with you." at this moment the quick-limbed housekeeper zociya whirled through the corridor with an outcry: "ladies, get dressed! the doctor has arrived ... ladies, get dressed! ... lively, ladies! ..." "well, go on, tamara, go on," said jennka tenderly, getting up. "i'll run into my room for just a minute--i haven't changed my dress yet, although, to tell the truth, this also is all one. when they'll be calling out for me, and i don't come in time, call out, run in after me." and, going out of tamara's room, she embraced her by the shoulder, as though by chance, and stroked it tenderly. doctor klimenko--the official city doctor--was preparing in the parlor everything indispensable for an inspection--vaseline, a solution of sublimate, and other things--and was placing them on a separate little table. here also were arranged for him the white blanks of the girls, replacing their passports, as well as a general alphabetical list. the girls, dressed only in their chemises, stockings, and slippers, were standing and sitting at a distance. nearer the table was standing the proprietress herself--anna markovna--while a little behind her were emma edwardovna and zociya. the doctor--aged, disheartened, slovenly; a man indifferent to everything--put the pince-nez crookedly upon his nose, looked at the list, and called out: "alexandra budzinskaya! ..." the frowning, little, pug-nosed nina stepped out. preserving on her face an angry expression, and breathing heavily from shame, from the consciousness of her own awkwardness, and from the exertions, she clumsily climbed up on the table. the doctor, squinting through his pince-nez and dropping it every minute, carried out the inspection. "go ahead! ... you're sound." and on the reverse side of the blank he marked off: "twenty-eighth of august. sound" and put down a curly-cue. and when he had not even finished writing called out: "voshchenkova, irene! ..." now it was the turn of liubka. she, during the past month and a half of comparative freedom, had had time to grow unaccustomed to the inspections of every week; and when the doctor turned up the chemise over her breast, she suddenly turned as red as only very bashful women can--even with her back and breast. after her was the turn of zoe; then of little white manka; after that of tamara and niurka--the last, the doctor found, had gonorrhoea, and ordered her to be sent off to a hospital. the doctor carried out the inspection with amazing rapidity. it was now nearly twenty years that every week, on saturdays, he had to inspect in such a manner several hundred girls; and he had worked out that habitual technical dexterity and rapidity, a calm carelessness of movements, which is; frequently to be found in circus artists, in card sharpers, in furniture movers and packers, and in other professionals. and he carried out his manipulations with the same calmness with which a drover or a veterinary inspects several hundred head of cattle in a day. did he ever think that before him were living people; or that he appeared as the last and most important link of that fearful chain which is called legalized prostitution? no! and even if he did experience this, then it must have been in the very beginning of his career. now before him were only naked abdomens, naked backs, and opened mouths. not one exemplar of all this faceless herd of every saturday would he have recognized subsequently on the street. the main thing was the necessity of finishing as soon as possible the inspection in one establishment, in order to pass on to another, to a third, a ninth, a twentieth... "susannah raitzina!" the doctor finally called out. no one walked up to the table. all the inmates of the house began to exchange glances and to whisper. "jennka ... where's jennka? ..." but she was not among the girls. then tamara, just released by the doctor, moved a little forward and said: "she isn't here. she hasn't had a chance to get herself ready yet. excuse me, mr. doctor, i'll go right away and call her." she ran into the corridor and did not return for a long time. after her went, at first emma edwardovna, then zociya, several girls, and even anna markovna herself. "pfui! what indecency is this! ..." the majestic emma edwardovna was saying in the corridor, making an indignant face. "and eternally this jennka! ... always this jennka! ... it seems my patience has already burst ..." but jennka was nowhere--neither in her room, nor in tamara's. they looked into other chambers, in all the out-of-the-way corners ... but she did not prove to be even there. "we must look in the water-closet ... perhaps she's there?" surmised zoe. but this institution was locked from the inside with a bolt. emma edwardovna knocked on the door with her fist. "jennie, do come out at last! what foolishness is this?" and, raising her voice, she cried out impatiently and threateningly: "do you hear, you swine? ... come out this minute--the doctor's waiting!" but there was no answer of any sort. all exchanged glances with fear in their eyes, with one and the same thought in mind. emma edwardovna shook the door by the brass knob, but the door did not yield. "go after simeon!" anna markovna directed. simeon was called ... he came, sleepy and morose, as was his wont. by the distracted faces of the girls and the housekeepers, he already saw that some misunderstanding or other had occurred, in which his professional cruelty and strength were required. when they explained to him what the matter was, he silently took the door-knob with both hands, braced himself against the wall, and gave a yank. the knob remained in his hands; and he himself, staggering backward, almost fell to the floor on his back. "a-a, hell!" he began to growl in a stifled voice. "give me a table knife." through the crack of the door he felt the inner bolt with the table knife; whittled away with the blade the edges of the crack, and widened it so that he could at last push the end of the knife through it, and began gradually to scrape back the bolt. only the grating of metal against metal could be heard. finally simeon threw the door wide open. jennka was hanging in the middle of the water-closet on a tape from her corset, fastened to the lamphook. her body, already motionless after an unprolonged agony, was slowly swinging in the air, and describing scarcely perceptible turns to the right and left around its vertical axis. her face was bluishly-purple, and the tip of the tongue was thrust out between clenched and bared teeth. the lamp which had been taken off was also here, sprawling on the floor. some one began to squeal hysterically, and all the girls, like a stampeded herd, crowding and jostling each other in the narrow corridor, vociferating and choking with hysterical sobbings, started in to run. the doctor came upon hearing the outcries... came, precisely, and not ran. seeing what the matter was, he did not become amazed or excited; during his practice as an official city doctor, he had had his fill of seeing such things, so that he had already grown benumbed and hardened to human sufferings, wounds and death. he ordered simeon to lift the corpse of jennka a bit upward, and himself getting up on the seat, cut through the tape. proforma, he ordered jennka's body to be borne away into the room that had been hers, and tried with the help of the same simeon to produce artificial respiration; but after five minutes gave it up as a bad job, fixed the pince-nez, which had become crooked, on his nose, and said: "call the police in to make a protocol." again kerbesh came, again whispered for a long time with the proprietress in her little bit of a cabinet, and again crunched in his pocket a new hundred-rouble bill. the protocol was made in five minutes; and jennka, just as half-naked as she had hung herself, was carted away in a hired wagon into an anatomical theatre, wrapped up in and covered with two straw mats. emma edwardovna was the first to find the note that jennka had left on her night table. on a sheet, torn out of the income-expense book, compulsory for every prostitute, in pencil, in a naive, rounded, childish handwriting--by which, however, it could be judged that the hands of the suicide had not trembled during the last minutes--was written: "i beg that no one be blamed for my death. i am dying because i have become infected, and also because all people are scoundrels and it is very disgusting to live. how to divide my things--tamara knows about that. i told her in detail." emma edwardovna turned around upon tamara, who was right on the spot among a number of other girls, and with eyes filled with a cold, green hatred, hissed out: "then you knew, you low-down thing, what she was preparing to do? ... you knew, you vermin? ... you knew and didn't tell? ..." she already had swung back, in order, as was her wont, to hit tamara cruelly and calculatingly; but suddenly stopped just as she was, with gaping mouth and with eyes wide open. it was just as though she was seeing, for the first time, tamara, who was looking at her with a firm, wrathful, unbearable gaze, and slowly, slowly was raising from below, and at last brought up to the level of the housekeeper's face, a small object, glistening with white metal. chapter vi. that very same day, at evening, a very important event took place in the house of anna markovna: the whole institution--with land and house, with live and inanimate stock--passed into the hands of emma edwardovna. they had been speaking of this, on and off, for a long time in the establishment; but when the rumours so unexpectedly, immediately right after the death of jennka, turned into realities, the misses could not for a long time come to themselves for amazement and fear. they knew well, having experienced the sway of the german upon themselves, her cruel, implacable pedantism; her greed, arrogance, and, finally, her perverted, exacting, repulsive love, now for one, now for another favorite. besides that, it was no mystery to any one, that out of the fifteen thousand which emma edwardovna had to pay the former proprietress for the firm and for the property, one third belonged to kerbesh, who had, for a long time already, been carrying on half-friendly, half-business relations with the fat housekeeper. from the union of two such people, shameless, pitiless, and covetous, the girls could expect all sorts of disasters for themselves. anna markovna had to let the house go so cheaply not simply because kerbesh, even if he had not known about certain shady little transactions to her credit, could still at any time he liked trip her up and eat her up without leaving anything. of pretexts and cavils for this even a hundred could be found every day; and certain ones of them not merely threatened the shutting down of the house alone, but, if you like, even with the court. but, dissembling, oh-ing and sighing, bewailing her poverty, her maladies and orphanhood, anna markovna at soul was glad of even such a settlement. and then it must be said: she was already for a long time feeling the approach of senile infirmity, together with all sorts of ailments and the thirst for complete, benevolent rest, undisturbed by anything. all, of which she had not even dared dream in her early youth, when she herself had yet been a prostitute of the rank and file--all had now come to her of itself, one in addition to the other: peaceful old age, a house--a brimming cup on one of the quiet, cozy streets, almost in the centre of the city,--the adored daughter birdie, who--if not to-day then tomorrow--must marry a respected man, an engineer, a house-owner, and member of the city-council; provided for as she was with a respectable dowry and magnificent valuables ... now it was possible peacefully, without hurrying, with gusto, to dine and sup on sweet things, for which anna markovna had always nourished a great weakness; to drink after dinner good, home-made, strong cherry-brandy; and of evenings to play a bit at "preference," for kopeck stakes, with esteemed elderly ladies of her acquaintance, who, even although they never as much as let it appear that they knew the real trade of the little old woman, did in reality know it very well; and not only did not condemn her business but even bore themselves with respect toward those enormous percentages which she earned upon her capital. and these charming friends, the joy and consolation of an untroubled old age, were: one--the keeper of a loan office; another--the proprietress of a lively hotel near the railroad; the third--the owner of a jewelry shop, not large, but all the go and well known among the big thieves, &c. and about them, in her turn, anna markovna knew and could tell several shady and not especially flattering anecdotes; but in their society it was not customary to talk of the sources of the family well-being--only cleverness, daring, success, and decent manners were esteemed. but, even besides that, anna markovna, sufficiently limited in mind and not especially developed, had some sort of an amazing inner intuition, which during all her life permitted her instinctively but irreproachably to avoid unpleasantnesses, and to find prudent paths in time. and so now, after the sudden death of roly-poly, and the suicide of jennka which followed the next day, she, with her unconsciously--penetrating soul foreguessed that fate--which had been favouring her house of ill-fame, sending her good fortunes, turning away all under-water shoals--was now getting ready to turn its back upon her. and she was the first to retreat. they say, that not long before a fire in a house, or before the wreck of a ship, the wise, nervous rats in droves make their way into another place. and anna markovna was directed by the same rat-like, animal, prophetic intuition. and she was right: immediately right after the death of jennka some fearful curse seemed to hang over the house, formerly anna markovna shaibes', but now emma edwardovna titzner's: deaths, misfortunes, scandals just simply descended upon it ceaselessly, becoming constantly more frequent, on the manner of bloody events in shakespeare's tragedies; as, however, was the case at all the remaining houses of the yamas as well. and one of the first to die, a week after the liquidation of the business, was anna markovna herself. however, this frequently happens with people put out of their accustomed rut of thirty years: so die war heroes, who have gone into retirement--people of insuperable health and iron will; so quickly go off the stage former stock brokers, who have happily gone away to rest, but have been deprived of the burning allurement of risk and hazard; so, too, age rapidly, droop, and grow decrepit, the great artists who leave the stage ... her death was the death of the just. once at a game of cards she felt herself unwell; begged them to wait a while for her; said that she would lie down for just a minute; lay down in the bedroom on a bed; sighed deeply, and passed on into another world--with a calm face, with a peaceful, senile smile upon her lips. isaiah savvich--her faithful comrade on the path of life, a trifle downtrodden, who had always played a secondary, subordinate role--survived her only a month. birdie was left sole heiress. she very successfully turned the cozy house into money, as well as the land somewheres at the edge of the town; married, as it had been presupposed, very happily; and up to this time is convinced that her father carried on a great commercial business in the export of wheat through odessa and novorossiysk into asia minor. on the evening of the day when jennie's corpse had been carried away to an anatomical theatre; at an hour when not even a chance guest appears on yamskaya street, all the girls, at the insistence of emma edwardovna, assembled in the drawing room. not one of them dared murmur against the fact that on this distressing day, when they had not yet recovered from the impression of jennka's horrible death, they would be compelled to dress up, as usual, in wildly festive finery, and to go into the brightly illuminated drawing room, in order to dance, sing, and to entice lecherous men with their denuded bodies. and at last into the drawing room walked emma edwardovna herself. she was more majestic than she had ever been--clad in a black silk gown, from which, just like battlements, her enormous breasts jutted out, upon which descended two fat chins; in black silk mittens; with an enormous gold chain wound thrice around her neck, and terminating in a ponderous medallion hanging upon the very abdomen. "ladies! ..." she began impressively, "i must ... stand up!" she suddenly called out commandingly. "when i speak, you must hear me out standing." they all exchanged glances with perplexity: such an order was a novelty in the establishment. however, the girls got up one after another, irresolutely, with eyes and mouths gasping. "sie sollen ... you must from this day show me that respect which you are bound to show to your mistress," importantly and weightily began emma edwardovna. "beginning from to-day, the establishment in a legal manner has passed from our good and respected anna markovna to me, emma edwardovna titzner. i hope that we will not quarrel, and that you will behave yourselves like sensible, obedient, and well-brought-up girls. i will be to you like in place of your own mother, but only remember, that i will not stand for laziness, or drunkenness, or notions of any sort; or any kind of disorder. the kind madam shaibes, it must be said, held you in too loose reins. o--o, i will be far more strict. discipline uber alles ... before everything. it's a great pity, that the russian people are lazy, dirty and stoopid, do not understand this rule; but don't you trouble yourself, i will teach you this for your own good. i say 'for your own good,' because my main thought is to kill the competition of treppel. i want that my client should be a man of substance, and not some charlatan and ragamuffin, some kind of student, now, or ham actor. i want that my ladies should be the most beautiful, best brought-up, the healthiest and gayest in the whole city. i won't spare any money in order to set up swell furnishings; and you will have rooms with silk furniture and with genuine, beautiful rugs. your guests will no longer be demanding beer, but only genteel bordeaux and burgundy wines and champagne. remember, that a rich, substantial, elderly man never likes your common, ordinary, coarse love. he requires cayenne pepper; he requires not a trade, but an art, and you will soon acquire this. at treppel's they take three roubles for a visit and ten roubles for a night ... i will establish it so, that you will receive five roubles for a visit and twenty-five for a night. they will present you with gold and diamonds. i will contrive it so, that you won't have to pass on into establishments of a lower sort, und so weiter ... right down to the soldiers' filthy den. no! deposits will be put away and saved with me for each one of you every month; and will be put away in your name in a banker's office, where there will increase interest upon them, and interest upon interest. and then, if a girl feels herself tired, or wants to marry a respectable man, there will always be at her disposal not a large, but a sure capital. so is it done in the best establishments in riga, and everywhere abroad. let no one say about me, that emma edwardovna is a spider, a vixen, a cupping glass. but for disobedience, for laziness, for notions, for lovers on the side, i will punish cruelly and, like nasty weeds, will throw out--on the street, or still worse. now i have said all that i had to. nina, come near me. and all the rest of you come up in turn." ninka irresolutely walked right up to emma edwardovna--and even staggered back in amazement: emma edwardovna was extending her right hand to her, with the fingers lowered downward, and slowly nearing it to ninka's lips. "kiss it! ..." impressively and firmly pronounced emma edwardovna, narrowing her eyes and with head thrown back, in the magnificent pose of a princess ascending her throne. ninka was so bewildered that her right arm gave a jerk in order to make the sign of the cross; but she corrected herself, loudly smacked the extended hand, and stepped aside. following her zoe, henrietta, vanda and others stepped up also. tamara alone continued to stand near the wall with her back to the mirror; that mirror into which jennka so loved to gaze, in gone-by times, admiring herself as she walked back and forth through the drawing room. emma edwardovna let the imperious, obstinate gaze of a boa-constrictor rest upon her; but the hypnosis did not work. tamara bore this gaze without turning away, without flinching; but without any expression on her face. then the new proprietress put down her hand, produced on her face something resembling a smile, and said hoarsely: "and with you, tamara, i must have a little talk separately, eye to eye. let's go!" "i hear you, emma edwardovna!" calmly answered tamara. emma edwardovna came to the little bit of a cabinet, where formerly anna markovna loved to drink coffee with clotted cream; sat down on the divan and pointed out a place opposite her to tamara. for some time the women kept silent; searchingly, mistrustfully eyeing each other. "you acted rightly, tamara," said emma edwardovna finally. "you did wisely in not stepping up, on the manner of those sheep, to kiss my hand. but just the same, i would not have let you come to that. i wanted right there, in the presence of all, when you walked up to me, to press your hand and to offer you the place of first housekeeper--you understand?--my chief assistant--and on terms very advantageous to you..." "i thank you ..." "no, wait a while, don't interrupt me. i will have my say to the end, and then you will express your pros and cons. but will you explain to me, please, when yesterday you were aiming at me out of a revolver, what did you want? can it possibly be, to kill me?" "on the contrary, emma edwardovna," retorted tamara respectfully, "on the contrary; it seemed to me that you wanted to strike me." "pjui! what do you mean, tamarochka! ... have you paid no attention to the fact that during all the time of our acquaintance i never permitted myself, not only to hit you, but even to address you with a rude word? ... what do you mean, what do you mean? ... i don't confuse you with this poor russian trash ... glory be to god, i am an experienced person and one who knows people well. i can very well see that you are a genuinely cultured young lady; far more educated, for example, than i myself. you are refined, elegant, smart. i am convinced of the fact that you even know music not at all badly. finally, if i were to confess, i was a little ... how shall i put it to you? ... i always was a little in love with you. and now you wanted to shoot me! me, a person who could be a very good friend to you! well, what will you say to that?" "well ... nothing at all, emma edwardovna," retorted tamara in the meekest and most plausible tone. "everything was very simple. even before that i found the revolver under jennka's pillow and brought it, in order to give it over to you. i did not want to interfere, when you were reading the letter; but then you turned around to me--i stretched the revolver out to you and wanted to say: 'see, emma edwardovna, what i found'--for, don't you see, it surprised me awfully how the late jennie, having a revolver at her disposal, preferred such a horrible death as hanging? and that's all." the bushy, frightful eyebrows of emma edwardovna rose upward; the eyes widened joyously; and a real, uncounterfeited smile spread over her cheeks of a behemoth. she quickly extended both hands to tamara. "and is this all? o, mein kind? and i thought ... god knows what i imagined! give me your hands, tamara, your little charming white hands, and allow me to press them auf mein herz, upon my heart, and to kiss you." the kiss was so long, that tamara with great difficulty and with aversion barely freed herself from the embraces of emma edwardovna. "well, and now to business. and so, here are my terms: you will be housekeeper, i give you fifteen percent, out of the clear gain. mind you, tamara, fifteen percent. and, besides that, a small salary--thirty, forty, well, if you like, fifty roubles a month. splendid terms--isn't that the truth? i am deeply convinced, that none other than just you will help me to raise the house to a real height, and make it the swellest not only in our city, but in all the south of russia as well. you have taste, and an understanding of things! ... besides that, you will always be able to entertain, and to stir up the most exacting, the most unyielding guests. in rare instances, when a very rich and distinguished gentleman--in russian they call it one "sun-fish," while with us, ein freier,[ ]--when he becomes infatuated with you--for you are so handsome, tamarochka," (the proprietress looked at her with misty, humid eyes), "then i do not at all forbid you to pass the time with him gaily; only to bear down always upon the fact that you have no right, owing to your duty, your position, und so weiter, und so weiter ... aber sagen sie bitte, do you easily make yourself understood in german?" [ ] in english, a "toff"; in american, a "swell."--trans. "die deutsche sprache beherrsche ich in geringerem grade als die franzosische; indes kann ich stets in einer salon-plauderei mitmachen."[ ] [ ] "my mastery of the german language is a trifle worse than that of the french, but i can always keep up my end in parlor small talk." "o, wunderbar! sie haben eine entzuckende rigaer aussprache, die beste alter deutschen aussprachen. und also--fahren wir in unserer sprache fort. sie klingt viel susser meinem ohr, die muttersprache. schon?"[ ] [ ] o, splendid! ... you have a bewitching riga enunciation, the most correct of all the german ones. and so, let us continue in my tongue. that is far sweeter to my ear--my mother tongue. all right?" "schon."[ ] [ ] "all right." "zuletzt werden sie nachgeben, dem anschein nach ungern, unwillkurlich, van der laune des augenblicks hingerissen--und, was die hauptsache ist, lautlos, heimlich vor mir. sie verstehen? dafur zahlen narren ein schweres geld. ubrigens brauche ich sie wohl nicht zu lernen."[ ] [ ] "in the very end you will give in, as though unwillingly, as though against your will, as though from infatuation, a momentary caprice, and--which is the main thing--as though on the sly from me. you understand? for this the fools pay enormous money. however, it seems i will not have to teach you." "ja, gnadige frau. sie sprechen gar kluge dinge. doch das ist schon keine plauderei mehr, sondern eine ernste unterhaltung. yes, my dear madam. you say very wise things. but this is no longer small talk; it is, rather, serious conversation ... and for that reason it is more convenient for me, if you will revert to the russian language ... i am ready to obey you." "furthermore! ... i was just now talking about a lover. i dare not forbid you this pleasure, but let us be prudent: let him not appear here, or appear as rarely as possible. i will give you days for going out, when you will be perfectly free. but it's best if you would get along without him entirely. it will serve your benefit too. this is only a drag and a yoke. i am telling you this from my own personal experience. wait a while; after three or four years we will expand this business so, that you will have substantial money already, and then i vill take you into the business as a partner with full rights. after ten years you will still be young and handsome, and then take and buy men as much as you want to. by that time romantic follies will go out of your head entirely, and it will not be you who will be chosen already, but you who will be choosing with sense and with feeling, as a connoisseur picks out precious stones. do you agree with me?" tamara cast down her eyes, and smiled just the least trifle. "you speak golden truths, emma edwardovna. i will drop mine, but not at once. for that i will need some two weeks. i will try not to have him appear here. i accept your proposition." "and that's splendid!" said emma edwardovna, get ting up. "now let us conclude our agreement with one good, sweet kiss." and she again embraced and took to kissing tamara hard; who, with her downcast eyes and naive, tender face, seemed now altogether a little girl. but, having freed herself, finally, from the proprietress, she asked in russian: "you see, emma edwardovna, that i agree in everything with you, but for that i beg you to fulfill one request of mine. it will not cost you anything. namely, i hope that you will allow me and the other girls to escort the late jennie to the cemetery." emma edwardovna made a wry face. "oh, if you want to, my darling tamara, i have nothing against your whim. only what for? this will not help the dead person and will not make her alive. only sentimentalism alone will come out of it ... but very well! only, however, you know yourself that in accordance with your law suicides are not buried, or--i don't know with certainty--it seems they throw them into some dirty hole beyond the cemetery." "no, do allow me to do as i want to myself. let it be my whim, but concede it to me, my darling, dear, bewitching emma edwardovna! but then, i promise you that this will be my last whim. after this i will be like a wise and obedient soldier at the disposal of a talented general." "is' gut!" emma edwardovna gave in with a sigh. "i can not deny you in anything, my child. let me press your hand. let us toil and labour together for the common good." and, having opened the door, she called out across the drawing room into the entrance-hall: "simeon!" and when simeon appeared in the room, she ordered him weightily and triumphantly: "bring us a bottle of champagne here, but the real thing--rederer demi sec, and as cool as possible. step lively!" she ordered the porter, who was gaping at her with popping eyes. "we will drink with you, tamara, to the new business, to our brilliant and beautiful future." they say that dead people bring luck. if there is any foundation at all in this superstition, then on this saturday it could not have told plainer: the influx of visitors was out of the ordinary, even for a saturday night. true, the girls, passing through the corridor or past the room that had been jennka's increased their steps; timorously glanced at it sidelong, out of the corner of the eye; while others even crossed themselves. but late in the night the fear of death somehow subsided, grew bearable. all the rooms were occupied, while in the drawing room a new violinist was trilling without cease--a free-and-easy, clean-shaven young man, whom the pianist with the cataract had searched out somewhere and brought with him. the appointment of tamara as housekeeper was received with cold perplexity, with taciturn dryness. but, having bided her time, tamara managed to whisper to little white manka: "listen, manya! you tell them all that they shouldn't pay any attention to the fact that i've been chosen housekeeper. it's got to be so. but let them do as they wish, only don't let them trip me up. i am as before--their friend and intercessor ... and further on we'll see." chapter vii. on the next day, on sunday, tamara had a multitude of cares. she had become possessed by a firm and undeviating thought to bury her friend despite all circumstances, in the way that nearest friends are buried--in a christian manner, with all the sad solemnity of the burial of secular persons. she belonged to the number of those strange persons who underneath an external indolent calmness, careless taciturnity, egotistical withdrawal into one's self, conceal within them unusual energy; always as though slumbering with half an eye, guarding itself from unnecessary expenditure; but ready in one moment to become animated and to rush forward without reckoning the obstacles. at twelve o'clock she descended in a cab into the old town; rode through it into a little narrow street giving out upon a square where fairs were held; and stopped near a rather dirty tea-room, having ordered the cabby to wait. in the room she made inquiries of a boy, red-haired, with a badger hair-cut and the parting slicked down with butter, if senka the depot had not come here? the serving lad, who, judging by his refined and gallant readiness, had already known tamara for a long time, answered that "nohow, ma'am; they--semen ignatich--had not been in yet, and probably would not be here soon seein' as how yesterday they had the pleasure of going on a spree at the transvaal, and had played at billiards until six in the morning; and that now they, in all probabilities, are at home, in the half way house rooms, and if the young lady will give the word, then it's possible to hop over to them this here minute." tamara asked for paper and pencil, and wrote a few words right on the spot. then she gave the note to the waiter, together with a half-rouble piece for a tip, and rode away. the following visit was to the artiste rovinskaya, living, as tamara had known even before, in the city's most aristocratic hotel--europe--where she occupied several rooms in a consecutive suite. to obtain an interview with the singer was not very easy: the doorman below said that it looked as if ellena victorovna was not at home; while her own personal maid, who came out in answer to tamara's knocking, declared that madam had a headache, and that she was not receiving any one. again tamara was compelled to write on a piece of paper: "i come to you from her who once, in a house which is not spoken of loudly, cried, standing before you on her knees, after you had sung the ballad of dargomyzhsky. your kind treatment of her was so splendid. do you remember? do not fear--she has no need of any one's help now: yesterday she died. but you can do one very important deed in her memory, which will be almost no trouble to you at all. while i--am that very person who permitted herself to say a few bitter truths to the baroness t--, who was then with you; for which truths i am remorseful and apologize even now." "hand this over!" she ordered the chambermaid. she returned after two minutes. "the madam requests you. they apologize very much that they will receive you not fully dressed." she escorted tamara, opened a door before her and quietly shut it. the great artiste was lying upon an enormous ottoman, covered with a beautiful tekin rug and a multitude of little silk pillows, and soft cylindrical bolsters of tapestry. her feet were wrapped up in silvery, soft fur. her fingers, as usual, were adorned by a multiplicity of rings with emeralds, attracting the eyes by their deep and tender green. the artiste was having one of her evil, black days to-day. yesterday morning some misunderstandings with the management had arisen; while in the evening the public had received her not as triumphantly as she would have desired, or, perhaps, this had simply appeared so to her; while to-day in the newspaper the fool of a reviewer, who understood just as much of art as a cow does of astronomy, had praised up her rival, titanova, in a big article. and so ellena victorovna had persuaded herself that her head was aching; that there was a nervous tic in her temples; and that her heart, time and again, seemed suddenly to fall through somewheres. "how do you do, my dear!" she said, a trifle nasally, in a weak, wan voice, with pauses, as heroines on the stage speak when dying from love and from consumption. "sit down here ... i am glad to see you ... only don't be angry--i am almost dying from migraine, and from my miserable heart. pardon my speaking with difficulty. i think i sang too much and tired my voice ..." rovinskaya, of course, had recalled both the mad escapade of that evening; and the striking, unforgettable face of tamara; but now, in a bad mood, in the wearisome, prosaic light of an autumn day, this adventure appeared to her as unnecessary bravado; something artificial, imagined, and poignantly shameful. but she was equally sincere on that strange, night-marish evening when she, through the might of talent, had prostrated the proud jennka at her feet, as well as now, when she recalled it with fatigue, indolence, and artistic disdain. she, as well as many distinguished artists, was always playing a role; was always not her own self, and always regarded her words, movements, actions, as though looking at herself from a distance with the eyes and feelings of the spectators. she languidly raised from the pillow her narrow, slender, beautiful hand, and applied it to her forehead; and the mysterious, deep emeralds stirred as though alive and began to flash with a warm, deep sparkle. "i just read in your note that this poor ... pardon me, her name has vanished out of my head..." "jennie." "yes, yes, thank you! i recall it now. she died? but from what?" "she hanged herself ... yesterday morning, during the doctor's inspection..." the eyes of the artiste, so listless, seemingly faded, suddenly opened, and, as through a miracle, grew animated and became shining and green, just like her emeralds; and in them were reflected curiosity, fear and aversion. "oh, my god! such a dear, so original, handsome, so fiery ... oh, the poor, poor soul! ... and the reason for this was? ..." "you know ... the disease. she told you." "yes, yes ... i remember, i remember ... but to hang one's self! ... what horror! ... why, i advised her to treat herself then. medicine works miracles now. i myself know several people who absolutely ... well, absolutely cured themselves. everybody in society knows this and receives them ... ah, the poor little thing, the poor little thing! ..." "and so i've come to you, ellena victorovna. i wouldn't have dared to disturb you, but i seem to be in a forest, and have no one to turn to. you were so kind then, so touchingly attentive, so tender to us ... i need only your advice and, perhaps, a little of your influence, your protection..." "oh, please, my dear! ... all i can do, i will ... oh, my poor head! and then this horrible news. tell me, in what way can i be of assistance to you?" "to confess, i don't know even myself yet," answered tamara. "you see, they carried her away to an anatomical theatre ... but until they had made the protocol, until they made the journey--then the time for receiving had gone by also--in general i think that they have not had a chance to dissect her yet ... i'd like, if it's only possible, that she should not be touched. to-day is sunday; perhaps they'll postpone it until to-morrow, and in the meanwhile something may be done for her..." "i can't tell you, dear ... wait! ... haven't i some friend among the professors, in the medical world? ... i will look later in my memo-books. perhaps we will succeed in doing something." "besides that," continued tamara, "i want to bury her ... at my expense ... i was attached to her with all my heart during her life." "i will help you with pleasure in this, materially..." "no, no! ... a thousand thanks! ... i'll do everything myself. i would not hesitate to have recourse to your kind heart, but this ... --you will understand me-- ... this is something in the nature of a vow, that a person gives to one's self and to the memory of a friend. the main difficulty is in how we may manage to bury her with christian rites. she was, it seems, an unbeliever, or believed altogether poorly. and it's only by chance that i, also, will cross my forehead. but i don't want them to bury her just like a dog, somewhere beyond the enclosure of the cemetery; in silence, without words, without singing ... i don't know, will they permit burying her properly--with choristers, with priests? for that reason i'm asking you to assist me with your advice. or, perhaps, you will direct me somewhere? ..." now the artiste had little by little become interested and was already beginning to forget about her fatigue, and migraine, and the consumptive heroine dying in the fourth act. she was already picturing the role of an intercessor, the beautiful figure of genius merciful to a fallen woman. this was original, extravagant, and at the same time so theatrically touching! rovinskaya, like many of her confreres, did not let one day pass by--and, if it were possible, she would not have let pass even one hour--without standing out from the crowd, without compelling people to talk about her: to-day she would participate in a pseudo-patriotic manifestation, while to-morrow she would read from a platform, for the benefit of revolutionaries exiled to siberia, inciting verses, full of fire and vengeance. she loved to sell flowers at carnivals, in riding academies; and to sell champagne at large balls. she would think up her little bon mots beforehand, which on the morrow would be caught up by the whole town. she desired that everywhere and always the crowd should look only at her, repeat her name, love her egyptian, green eyes, her rapacious and sensuous mouth; her emeralds on the slender and nervous hands. "i can't grasp it all properly at once," said she after a silence. "but if a person wants anything hard, he will attain it, and i want to fulfill your wish with all my soul. stay, stay! ... i think a glorious thought is coming into my head ... for then, on that evening, if i mistake not, there was with us, beside the baroness and me..." "i don't know them ... one of them walked out of the cabinet later than all of you. he kissed jennie's hand and said, that if she should ever need him, he was always at her service; and gave her his card, but asked her not to show it to any strangers. but later all this passed off somehow and was forgotten. in some way i never found the time to ask jennie who this man was; while yesterday i searched for the card but couldn't find it..." "allow me, allow me! ... i have recalled it!" the artiste suddenly became animated. "aha!" exclaimed she, rapidly getting off the ottoman. "it was ryazanov... yes, yes, yes... the advocate ernst andreievich ryazanov. we will arrange everything right away. that's a splendid thought!" she turned to the little table upon which the telephone apparatus was standing, and rang: "central-- - please ... thank you ... hello! ... ask ernst andreievich to the telephone ... the artiste rovinskaya ... thank you ... hello! ... is this you, ernst andreievich? very well, very well, but now it isn't a matter of little hands. are you free? ... drop the nonsense! ... the matter is serious. couldn't you come up to me for a quarter of an hour? ...no, no ... yes ... only as a kind and a clever man. you slander yourself ... well, that's splendid, really ... well, i am not especially well-dressed, but i have a justification--a fearful headache. no, a lady, a girl ... you will see for yourself, come as soon as possible ... thanks! au revior! ..." "he will come right away," said rovinskaya, hanging up the receiver. "he is a charming and awfully clever man. everything is possible to him, even the almost impossible to man ... but in the meantime ... pardon me--your name?" tamara was abashed, but then smiled at herself: "oh, it isn't worth your disturbing yourself, ellena victorovna! mon nomme de guerre is tamara but just so--anastasia nikolaevna. it's all the same--call me even tamara ... i am more used to it..." "tamara! ... that is so beautiful! ... so now, mile. tamara, perhaps you will not refuse to breakfast with me? perhaps ryazanov will also do so with us..." "i have no time, forgive me." "that's a great pity! ... i hope, some other time ... but, perhaps you smoke," and she moved toward her a gold case, adorned with an enormous letter e out of the same emeralds she adored. ryazanov came very soon. tamara, who had not examined him properly on that evening, was struck by his appearance. tall of stature, almost of an athletic build, with a broad brow, like beethoven's, tangled with artistically negligent black, grizzled hair; with the large fleshy mouth of the passionate orator; with clear, expressive, clever, mocking eyes--he had such an appearance as catches one's eyes among thousands--the appearance of a vanquisher of souls and a conqueror of hearts; deeply ambitious, not yet oversated with life; still fiery in love and never retreating before a beautiful indiscretion ... "if fate had not broken me up so," reflected tamara, watching his movements with enjoyment, "then here's a man to whom i'd throw my life; jestingly, with delight, with a smile, as a plucked rose is thrown to the beloved..." ryazanov kissed rovinskaya's hand, then with unconstrained simplicity exchanged greetings with tamara and said: "we are acquainted even from that mad evening, when you dumbfounded all of us with your knowledge of the french language, and when you spoke. that which you said was, between us, paradoxical; but then, how it was said! ... to this day i remember the tone of your voice, so warm, expressive ... and so, ellena victorovna," he turned to rovinskaya again, sitting down on a small, low chair without a back, "in what can i be of use to you? i am at your disposal." rovinskaya, with a languid air, again applied the tips of her fingers to her temples. "ah, really, i am so upset, my dear ryazanov," said she, intentionally extinguishing the sparkle of her magnificent eyes, "and then, my miserable head ... may i trouble you to pass me the pyramidon what-not from that table ... let mile. tamara tell you everything ... i can not, i am not able to ... this is so horrible! ..." tamara briefly, lucidly, narrated to ryazanov all the sad history of jennka's death; recalled also about the card left with jennie; and also how the deceased had reverently preserved this card; and--in passing--about his promise to help in case of need. "of course, of course!" exclaimed ryanzanov, when she had finished; and at once began pacing the room back and forth with big steps, ruffling and tossing back his picturesque hair through habit. "you are performing a magnificent, sincere, comradely action! that is good! ... that is very good! ... i am yours ... you say--a permit for the funeral ... hm ... god grant me memory!..." he rubbed his forehead with his palm. "hm ... hm ... if i'm not mistaken--monocanon, rule one hundred seventy ... one hundred seventy ... eight ... pardon me, i think i remember it by heart ... pardon me! ... yes, so! 'if a man slayeth himself, he shall not be chanted over, nor shall a mass be said for him, unless he were greatly astonied, that is, to wit, out of his mind'... hm ... see st. timothy alexandrine ... and so, my dear miss, the first thing ... you say, that she was taken down from the noose by your doctor--i.e., the official city doctor ... his name? ..." "klimenko." "it seems i've met him somewheres ... all right ... who is the district inspector in your precinct station?" "kerbesh." "aha, i know ... such a strong, virile fellow, with a red beard in a fan ... yes?" "yes, that is he." "i know him very well! there, now, is somebody that a sentence to hard labour is hankering after ... some ten times he fell into my hands; and always, the skunk, gave me the slip somehow. slippery, just like an eel-pout ... we will have to slip him a little present. well, now! and then the anatomical theatre ... when do you want to bury her?" "really, i don't know ... i would like to do it as soon as possible ... if possible, to-day." "hm ... to-day ... i don't vouch for it--we will hardly manage it ... but here is my memorandum book. well, take even this page, where are my friends under the letter t--just write the very same way: tamara, and your address. in two hours i will give you an answer. does that suit you? but i repeat again, that probably you will have to postpone the burial till to-morrow ... then--pardon my unceremoniousness--is money needed, perhaps?" "no, thank you!" refused tamara. "i have money. thanks for your interest! ... it's time for me to be going. i thank you with all my heart, ellen victorovna! ..." "then expect it in two hours," repeated ryazanov, escorting her to the door. tamara did not at once ride away to the house. she turned into a little coffee-house on catholicheskaya street on the way. there senka the depot was waiting for her--a gay fellow with the appearance of a handsome tzigan; not black--but blue-haired; black-eyed, with yellow whites; resolute and daring in his work; the pride of local thieves--a great celebrity in their world, the first leader of experience, and a constant, all-night gamester. he stretched out his hand to her, without getting up. but in the way in which he so carefully, with a certain force, seated her in her place could be seen a broad, good-natured endearment. "how do you do, tamarochka! haven't seen you in a long time--i grew weary ... do you want coffee?" "no! business first ... to-morrow we bury jennka ... she hanged herself..." "yes, i read it in a newspaper," carelessly drawled out senka through his teeth. "what's the odds? ..." "get fifty roubles for me at once." "tamarochka, my sweetheart--i haven't a kopeck! ..." "i'm telling you--get them!" ordered tamara, imperiously, but without getting angry. "oh, my lord! ... yours, now, i didn't touch, like i promised; but then, it's sunday ... the savings banks are closed..." "let them! ... hock the savings book! in general, it's up to you!" "why do you need this, my dearie?" "isn't it all the same to you, you fool? ... for the funeral." "oh! well, all right then!" sighed senka. "then i'd best bring it to you myself in the evening ... right, tamarochka? ... it's so very hard for me to stand it without you! oh, my dearie, how i'd kiss and kiss you; i wouldn't let you close your eyes! ... shan't i come? ..." "no, no! ... you do as i ask you, senechka ... give in to me. but you mustn't come--i'm housekeeper now." "well, what d'you know about that! ..." drawled out the astonished senka and even whistled. "yes. and don't you come to me in the meantime. but afterwards, afterwards, sweetheart, whatever you desire ... there will be an end to everything soon!" "oh, if you wouldn't make me suffer so! wind things up as soon as you can!" "and i will wind 'em up! wait one little week more, dearie! did you get the powders?" "the powders are a trifle!" discontentedly answered senka. "and it isn't powders at all, but pills." "and you're sure when you say that they'll dissolve at once in water?" "sure, i saw it myself." "but he won't die? listen, senya: he won't die? is that right?..." "nothing will happen to him ... he'll only snooze for a while ... oh, tamara!" exclaimed he in a passionate whisper; and even suddenly stretched himself hard from an unbearable emotion, so that his joints cracked. "finish it, for god's sake, as soon as possible! ... let's do the trick and--bye-bye! wherever you want to go to, sweet-heart! i am all at your will: if you want to, we start off for odessa; if you want to--abroad. finish it up as soon as possible! ..." "soon, soon..." "you just wink at me, and i'm all ready ... with powders, with instruments, with passports ... and then--choo-choo! the machine is off! tamarochka! my angel! ... my precious, my sparkler! ..." and he, always restrained, having forgotten that he could be seen by strangers, already wanted to embrace and hug tamara to himself. "now, now!" ... rapidly and deftly, like a cat, tamara jumped off the chair. "afterwards ... afterwards, senechka, afterwards, little dearie! ... i'll be all yours--there won't be any denial, nor forbiddance. i'll myself make you weary of me ... good-bye, my little silly!" and with a quick movement of her hand having rumpled up his black curls, she hastily went out of the coffee-house. chapter viii. on the next day, on monday, toward ten o'clock in the morning, almost all the inmates of the house--formerly madam shaibes', but now emma edwardovna titzner's--rode off in cabs to the centre of the city, to the anatomical theatre--all, except the far-sighted, much-experienced henrietta; the cowardly and insensible ninka; and the feeble-minded pashka, who for two days now had not gotten up from her bed, kept silent, and to questions directed at her answered by a beatific, idiotical smile and with some sort of inarticulate animal lowing. if she were not given to eat, she would not even ask; but if food were brought, she would eat with greediness, right with her hands. she became so slovenly and forgetful, that it was necessary to remind her of certain necessary functions in order to avoid unpleasantness. emma edwardovna did not send out pashka to her steady guests, who asked for pashka every day. even before, she had had such periods of a detriment of consciousness; however, they had not lasted long, and emma edwardovna in any case determined to tide it over: pashka was a veritable treasure for the establishment, and its truly horrible victim. the anatomical theatre represented a long, one-storied, dark-gray building, with white frames around the windows and doors. there was in its very exterior something low, pressed down, receding into the ground, almost weird. the girls one after the other stopped near the gates and timidly passed through the yard into the chapel; nestled down at the other end of the yard, in a corner, painted over in the same dark gray colour, with white frame-work. the door was locked. it was necessary to go after the watchman. tamara with difficulty sought out a bald, ancient old man, grown over as though with bog moss by entangled gray bristles; with little rheumy eyes and an enormous, reddish, dark-blue granulous nose, on the manner of a cookie. he unlocked the enormous hanging lock, pushed away the bolt and opened the rusty, singing door. the cold, damp air together with the mixed smell of the dampness of stones, frankincense, and dead flesh breathed upon the girls. they fell back, huddling closely into a timorous flock. tamara alone went after the watchman without wavering. it was almost dark in the chapel. the autumn light penetrated scantily through the little, narrow prison-like window, barred with an iron grating. two or three images without chasubles, dark and without visages, hung upon the walls. several common board coffins were standing right on the floor, upon wooden carrying shafts. one in the middle was empty, and the taken-off lid was lying alongside. "what sort is yours, now?" asked the watchman hoarsely and took some snuff. "do you know her face or not?" "i know her." "well, then, look! i'll show them all to you. maybe this one? ..." and he took the lid off one of the coffins, not yet fastened down with nails. a wrinkled old woman, dressed any old way in her tatters, with a swollen blue face, was lying there. her left eye was closed; while the right was staring and gazing immovably and frightfully, having already lost its sparkle and resembling mica that had lain for a long time. "not this one, you say? well, look ... here's more for you!" said the watchman; and one after the other, opening the lids, exhibited the decedents--all, probably, the poorest of the poor: picked up on the streets, intoxicated, crushed, maimed and mutilated, beginning to decompose. certain ones had already begun to show on their hands and faces bluish-green spots, resembling mould--signs of putrefaction. one man, without a nose, with an upper hare-lip cloven in two, had worms, like little white dots, swarming upon his sore-eaten face. a woman who had died from hydropsy, reared like a whole mountain from her board couch, bulging out the lid. all of them had been hastily sewn up after autopsy, repaired, and washed by the moss-covered watchman and his mates. what affair was it of theirs if, at times, the brain got into the stomach; while the skull was stuffed with the liver and rudely joined with the help of sticking plaster to the head? the watchmen had grown used to everything during their night-marish, unlikely, drunken life; and, by the bye, almost never did their voiceless clients prove to have either relatives or acquaintances... a heavy odour of carrion--thick, cloying, and so viscid that to tamara it seemed as though it was covering all the living pores of her body just like glue--stood in the chapel. "listen, watchman," asked tamara, "what's this crackling under my feet all the time?" "crack-ling?" the watchman questioned her over again, and scratched himself, "why, lice, it must be," he said indifferently. "it's fierce how these beasties do multiply on the corpseses! ... but who you lookin' for--man or woman?" "a woman," answered tamara. "and that means that all these ain't yours?" "no, they're all strangers." "there, now! ... that means i have to go to the morgue. when did they bring her, now?" "on saturday, grandpa," and tamara at this got out her purse. "saturday, in the daytime. there's something for tobacco for you, my dear sir!" "that's the way! saturday, you say in the daytime? and what did she have on?" "well, almost nothing; a little night blouse, an underskirt ... both the one and the other white." "so-o! that must be number two hundred and seventeen ... how is she called, now? ..." "susannah raitzina." "i'll go and see--maybe she's there. well, now, mam'selles," he turned to the young ladies, who were dully huddling in the doorway, obstructing the light. "which of you are the braver? if your friend came the day before yesterday, then that means that she's now lying in the manner that the lord god has created all mankind--that is, without anything ... well, who of you will be the bolder? which two of you will come? she's got to be dressed..." "well, now, you go, manka," tamara ordered her mate, who, grown chill and pale from horror and aversion, was staring at the dead with widely open, limpid eyes. "don't be afraid, you fool--i'll go with you! who's to go, if not you? "well, am i ... well, am i? ..." babbled little white manka with barely moving lips. "let's go. it's all the same to me..." the morgue was right here, behind the chapel--a low, already entirely dark basement, into which one had to descend by six steps. the watchman ran off somewhere, and returned with a candle-end and a tattered book. when he had lit the candle, the girls saw a score of corpses that were lying directly on the stone floor in regular rows--extended, yellow, with faces distorted by pre-mortal convulsions, with skulls split open, with clots of blood on their faces, with grinning teeth. "right away ... right away..." the watchman was saying, guiding his finger over the headings. "the day before yesterday ... that means, on saturday ... on saturday ... what did you say her name was, now?" "raitzina, susannah," answered tamara. "rai-tzina susannah ..." said the watchman, just as though he were singing, "raitzina, susannah. just as i said. two hundred seventeen." bending over the dead and illuminating them with the guttered and dripping candle-end, he passed from one to another. finally he stopped before a corpse, upon whose foot was written in ink, in large black figures: . "here's the very same one! let me, i'll carry her out into the little corridor and run after her stuff ... wait a while! ..." grunting, but still with an ease amazing in one of his age, he lifted up the corpse of jennka by the feet, and threw it upon his back with the head down, as though it were a carcass of meat, or a bag of potatoes. it was a trifle lighter in the corridor; and, when the watchman had lowered his horrible burden to the floor, tamara for a moment covered her face with her hands, while manka turned away and began to cry. "if you need anything, say so," the watchman was instructing them. "if you want to dress the deceased as is fitting, then we can get everything that's required--cloth of gold, a little wreath, a little image, a shroud, gauze--we keep everything ... you can buy a thing or two in, clothing ... slippers, too, now..." tamara gave him money and went out into the air, letting manka go in front of her. after some time two wreaths were brought; one from tamara, of asters and georginas with an inscription in black letters upon a white ribbon: "to jennie from a friend;" the other was from ryazanov, all of red flowers; upon its red ribbon stood in gold characters: "through suffering shall we be purified." he also sent a short little note, expressing commiseration and apologizing for not being able to come, as he was occupied with an undeferrable business meeting. then came the singers who had been invited by tamara--fifteen men from the very best choir in the city. the precentor, in a gray overcoat and a gray hat, all gray, somehow, as though covered with dust, but with long, straight moustaches, like a military person's, recognized verka; opened his eyes wide in astonishment, smiled slightly and winked at her. two or three times a month, and sometimes even oftener, he visited yamskaya street with ecclesiastical academicians of his acquaintance, just the same precentors as he, and some psalmists; and having usually made a full review of all the establishments, always wound up with the house of anna markovna, where he invariably chose verka. he was a merry and sprightly man; danced in a lively manner, in a frenzy; and executed such figures during the dances that all those present just melted from laughter. following the singers came the two-horsed catafalque, that tamara had hired; black, with white plumes, and seven torch-bearers along with it. they also brought a white, glazed brocade coffin; and a pedestal for it, stretched over with black calico. without hurrying, with habitually deft movements, they put away the deceased into the coffin; covered her face with gauze; curtained off the corpse with cloth of gold, and lit the candles--one at the head and two at the feet. now, in the yellow, trembling light of the candles, the face of jennka became more clearly visible. the lividness had almost gone off it, remaining only here and there on the temples, on the nose, and between the eyes, in party-coloured, uneven, serpentine spots. between the parted dark lips slightly glimmered the whiteness of the teeth, and the tip of the bitten tongue was still visible. out of the open collar of the neck, which had taken on the colour of old parchment, showed two stripes: one dark--the mark of the rope; another red--the sign of the scratch, inflicted by simeon during the encounter--just like two fearful necklaces. tamara approached and with a safety pin pinned together the lace on the collar, at the very chin. the clergy came: a little gray priest in gold spectacles, in a skull-cap; a lanky, tall, thin-haired deacon with a sickly, strangely dark and yellow face, as though of terra-cotta; and a sprightly, long-skirted psalmist, animatedly exchanging on his way some gay, mysterious signs with his friends among the singers. tamara walked up to the priest: "father," she asked, "how will you perform the funeral service; all together or each one separate?" "we perform the funeral service for all of them conjointly," answered the priest, kissing the stole, and extricating his beard and hair out of its slits. "usually, that is. but by special request, and by special agreement, it's also possible to do it separately. what death did the deceased undergo?" "she's a suicide, father." "hm ... a suicide? ... but do you know, young person, that by the canons of the church there isn't supposed to be any funeral service ... there ought not to be any? of course, there are exceptions--by special intercession..." "right here, father, i have certificates from the police and from the doctor ... she wasn't in her right mind ... in a fit of insanity..." tamara extended to the priest two papers, sent her the evening before by ryazanov, and on top of them three bank-notes of ten roubles each. "i would beg of you, father, to do everything fitting--christian like. she was a splendid being, and suffered a very great deal. and won't you be so kind--go along with her to the cemetery, and there hold one more little mass..." "it's all right for me to go along with her to the cemetery, but in the cemetery itself i have no right to hold service--there is a clergy of their own ... and also here's how, young person; in view of the fact that i'll have to return once more after the rest, won't you, now ... add another little ten-spot." and having taken the money from tamara's hand, the priest blessed the thurible, which had been brought up by the psalmist, and began to walk around the body of the deceased with thurification. then, having stopped at her head, he in a meek, wontedly sad voice, uttered: "blessed is our god. as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end!" the psalmist began pattering: holy god, most holy trinity and our father poured out like peas. quietly, as though confiding some deep, sad, occult mystery, the singers began in a rapid, sweet recitative: "with thy blessed saints in glory everlasting, the soul of this thy servant save, set at rest; preserving her in the blessed life, as thou hast loving kindness for man." the psalmist distributed the candles; and they with warm, soft, living little flames, one after the other, were lit in the heavy, murky air, tenderly and transparently illuminating the faces of the women. harmoniously the mournful melody flowed forth, and like the sighs of aggrieved angels sounded the great words: "rest, oh god, this thy servant and establish her in heaven, wherein the faces of the just and the saints of the lord shine like unto lights; set at rest this thy servant who hath fallen asleep, contemning all her trespasses." tamara was listening intently to the long familiar, but now long unheard words, and was smiling bitterly. the passionate, mad words of jennka came back to her, full of such inescapable despair and unbelief ... would the all-merciful, all-gracious lord forgive or would he not forgive her foul, fumy, embittered, unclean life? all-knowing--can it be that thou wouldst repulse her--the pitiful rebel, the involuntary libertine; a child that had uttered blasphemies against thy radiant, holy name? thou--benevolence, thou--our consolation! a dull, restrained wailing, suddenly passing into a scream, resounded in the chapel. "oh, jennechka!" this was little white manka, standing on her knees and stuffing her mouth with her handkerchief, beating about in tears. and the remaining mates, following her, also got down upon their knees; and the chapel was filled with sighs, stifled lamentations and sobbings ... "thou alone art deathless, who hast created and made man; out of the dust of the earth were we made, and unto the same dust shall we return; as thou hast ordained me, creating me and saying unto me, dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return." tamara was standing motionless and with an austere face that seemed turned to stone. the light of the candle in thin gold spirals shone in her bronze-chestnut hair; while she could not tear her eyes away from the lines of jennka's moist, yellow forehead and the tip of her nose, which were visible to tamara from her place. "dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return ..." she was mentally repeating the words of the canticles. "could it be that that would be all; only earth alone and nothing more? and which is better: nothing, or even anything at all--even the most execrable--but merely to be existing?" and the choir, as though affirming her thoughts, as though taking away from her the last consolation, was uttering forlornly: "and all mankind may go..." they sang eternal memory through, blew out the candles, and the little blue streams spread in the air, blue from frankincense. the priest read through the farewell prayer; and afterwards, in the general silence, scooped up some sand with the little shovel handed to him by the psalmist, and cast it cross-wise upon the corpse, on top of the gauze. and at this he was uttering great words, filled with the austere, sad inevitability of a mysterious universal law: "the world is the lord's, and its fulfillment the universe, and all that dwelleth therein." the girls escorted their dead mate to the very cemetery. the road thither intersected the very entrance to yamskaya street. it would have been possible to turn to the left through it, and that would have been almost half as short; but dead people were not usually carried through yamskaya. nevertheless, out of almost all the doors their inmates poured out towards the cross roads, in whatever they had on: in slippers upon bare feet, in night gowns, with kerchiefs upon their heads; they crossed themselves, sighed, wiped their eyes with their handkerchiefs and the edges of their jackets. the weather cleared up ... the cold sun shone brightly from a cold sky of radiant blue enamel; the last grass showed its green, the withered leaves on the trees glowed, showing their pink and gold ... and in the crystal clear, cold air solemnly, and mournfully reverberated the sonorous sounds: "holy god, holy almighty, holy everliving, have mercy upon us!" and with what flaming thirst for life, not to be satiated by aught; with what longing for the momentary--transient like unto a dream--joy and beauty of being; with what horror before the eternal silence of death, sounded the ancient refrain of john damascene! then a brief requiem at the grave, the dull thud of the earth against the lid of the coffin ... a small fresh hillock ... "and here's the end!" said tamara to her comrades, when they were left alone. "oh, well, girls--an hour earlier, an hour later! ... i'm sorry for jennka! ... horribly sorry! ... we won't ever find such another. and yet, my children, it's far better for her in her pit than for us in ours ... well, let's cross ourselves for the last time--and home! ..." and when they all were already nearing their house, tamara suddenly uttered pensively the strange, ominous words: "and we won't be long together without her: soon we will be scattered, by the wind far and wide. life is good! ... look: there's the sun, the blue sky ... how pure the air is ... cobwebs are floating--it's indian summer ... how good it is in this world! ... only we alone--we wenches--are wayside rubbish." the girls started off on their journey. but suddenly from somewhere on the side, from behind a monument, a tall sturdy student detached himself. he caught up with liubka and softly touched her sleeve. she turned around and beheld soloviev. her face instantaneously turned pale, her eyes opened wide and her lips began to tremble. "go away!" she said quietly, with infinite hatred. "liuba ... liubochka ..." soloviev began to mumble. "i searched ... searched for you ... i ... honest to god, i'm not like that one ... like lichonin ... i'm in earnest ... even right now, even to-day. "go away!" still more quietly pronounced liubka. "i'm serious ... i'm serious ... i'm not trifling, i want to marry..." "oh, you creature!" suddenly squealed out liubka, and quickly, hard, peasant-like, hit soloviev on the cheek with her palm. soloviev stood a little while, slightly swaying. his eyes were like those of a martyr ... the mouth half-open, with mournful creases at the sides. "go away! go away! i can't bear to look at all of you!" liubka was screaming with rage. "hangmen, swine!" soloviev unexpectedly covered his face with his palms and went back, without knowing his way, with uncertain steps, like one drunk. chapter ix. and in reality, the words of tamara proved to be prophetic: since the funeral of jennie not more than two weeks had passed, but during this brief space of time so many events burst over the house of emma edwardovna as do not befall sometimes even in half a decade. on the very next day they had to send off to a charitable institution--into a lunatic asylum--the unfortunate pashka, who had fallen completely into feeble-mindedness. the doctors said that there was no hope of her ever improving. and in reality, as they had placed her in the hospital on the floor, upon a straw mattress, so did she remain upon it without getting up from it to her very death; submerging more and more into the black, bottomless abyss of quiet feeble-mindedness; but she died only half a year later, from bed-sores and infection of the blood. the next turn was tamara's. for about half a month she fulfilled the duties of a housekeeper, was all the time unusually active, energetic; and somehow unwontedly wound up with that inner something of her own, which was so strongly fomenting within her. on a certain evening she vanished, and did not return at all to the establishment... the matter of fact was, that in the city she had carried on a protracted romance with a certain notary--an elderly man, sufficiently rich, but exceedingly niggardly. their acquaintance had been scraped up yet a year back, when they had been by chance travelling together on the same steamer to a suburban monastery, and had begun a conversation. the clever, handsome tamara; her enigmatic, depraved smile; her entertaining conversation; her modest manner of deporting herself, had captivated the notary. she had even then marked down for herself this elderly man with picturesque gray hair, with seigniorial manners; an erstwhile jurisconsult and a man of good family. she did not tell him about her profession--it pleased her rather to mystify him. she only hazily, in a few words, hinted at the fact that she was a married lady of the middle class; that she was unfortunate in domestic life, since her husband was a gambler and a despot; and that even by fate she was denied such a consolation as children. at parting she refused to pass an evening with the notary, and did not want to meet him; but then she allowed him to write to her--general delivery, under a fictitious name. a correspondence commenced between them, in which the notary flaunted his style and the ardency of his feelings, worthy of the heroes of paul bourget. she maintained the same withdrawn, mysterious tone. then, being touched by the entreaties of the notary for a meeting, she made an appointment in prince park; was charming, witty, and languishing; but refused to go with him anywhere. so she tortured her adorer and skillfully inflamed within him the last passion, which at times is stronger and more dangerous than first love. finally, this summer, when the family of the notary had gone abroad, she decided to visit his rooms; and here for the first time gave herself up to him with tears, with twinges of her conscience, and at the same time with such ardour and tenderness, that the poor secretary lost his head completely--was plunged entirely into that senile love, which no longer knows either reason or retrospect; which compels a man to lose the last thing--the fear of appearing ridiculous. tamara was very sparing of her meetings. this inflamed her impatient friend still more. she consented to receiving from him bouquets of flowers, a modest breakfast in a suburban restaurant; but indignantly refused all expensive presents, and bore herself so skillfully and subtly, that the notary never got up the courage to offer her money. when he once stammered out something about a separate apartment and other conveniences, she looked him in the eyes so intently, haughtily, and sternly, that he, like a boy, turned red in his picturesque gray hairs, and kissed her hands, babbling incoherent apologies. so did tamara play with him, and feel the ground more and more under her. she already knew now on what days the notary kept in his fireproof iron safe especially large sums. however, she did not hurry, fearing to spoil the business through clumsiness or prematurity. and so right now this long expected day arrived; a great contractors' fair had just ended, and all the notaries' offices were transacting deals for enormous suras every day. tamara knew that the notary usually carried off the money to the bank on saturdays, in order to be perfectly free on sunday. and for that reason on friday the notary received the following letter: "my dear, my adored king solomon! thy shoilamite, thy girl of the vineyard, greets thee with burning kisses ... dear, to-day is a holiday for me, and i am infinitely happy. to-day i am free, as well as you. he has gone away to homel for twenty-four hours on business matters, and i want to pass all the evening and all the night in your place. ah, my beloved! all my life i am ready to pass on my knees before thee. i do not want to go anywhere. the suburban road-houses and cabarets have bored me long ago. i want you, only you ... you ... you alone. await me, then, in the evening, my joy, about ten-eleven-o'clock! prepare a great quantity of cold white wine, a canteloupe, and sugared chestnuts. i am burning, i am dying from desire! it seems to me, i will tire you out! i can not wait! my head is spinning around, my face burning, and my hands as cold as ice. i embrace you. thy valentina." that very same evening, about eleven o'clock, she artfully, through conversation, led the notary into showing her his fireproof safe; playing upon his odd, pecuniary vanity. rapidly gliding with her glance over the shelves and the movable boxes, tamara turned away with a skillfully executed yawn and said: "fie, what a bore!" and, having embraced the notary's neck, she whispered with her lips at his very ears, burning him with her hot breath: "lock up this nastiness, my treasure! let's go! .... let's go! ..." and she was the first to go out into the dining room. "come here, now, volodya!" she cried out from there. "come quicker! i want wine and after that love, love, love without end! ... no! drink it all, to the very bottom! just as we will drain our love to the very bottom today!" the notary clinked glasses with her and at one gulp drank off his glass. then he drew in his lips and remarked: "strange ... the wine seems to be sort of bitter to-day." "yes!" agreed tamara and looked attentively at her lover. "this wine is always the least bit bitter. for such is the nature of rhine wines..." "but to-day it's especially strong," said the notary. "no, thanks, my dear--i don't want any more!" after five minutes he fell asleep, sitting in his chair; his head thrown back against its back, and his lower jaw hanging down. tamara waited for some time and started to awaken him. he was without motion. then she took the lit candle, and, having placed it on the window sill giving out upon the street, went out into the entrance hall and began to listen, until she heard light steps on the stairs. almost without a sound she opened the door and let in senka, dressed like a real gentleman, with a brand new leather hand-bag in his hands. "ready?" asked the thief in a whisper. "he's sleeping," answered tamara, just as quietly. "look and here are the keys." they passed together into the study with the fireproof safe. having looked over the lock with the aid of a flashlight, senka swore in a low voice: "the devil take him, the old animal! ... i just knew that it would be a lock with a combination. here you've got to know the letters ... it's got to be melted with electricity, and the devil knows how much time it'll take." "it's not necessary," retorted tamara hurriedly. "i know the word ... pick it out: m-o-r-t-g-a-g-. without the e." after ten minutes they descended the steps together; went in purposely broken lines through several streets, hiring a cab to the depot only in the old city; and rode out of the city with irreproachable passports of citizens and landed proprietors--the stavnitzkys, man and wife. for a long time nothing was heard of them until, a year later, senka was caught in moscow in a large theft, and gave tamara away during the interrogation. they were both tried and sentenced to imprisonment. following tamara came the turn of the naive, trusting, and amorous verka. for a long time already she had been in love with a semi-military man, who called himself a civic clerk in the military department. his name was dilectorsky. in their relations verka was the adoring party; while he, like an important idol, condescendingly received the worship and the proffered gifts. even from the end of summer verka noticed that her beloved was becoming more and more cold and negligent; and, talking with her, was dwelling in thought somewhere far, far away. she tortured herself, was jealous, questioned him, but always received in answer some indeterminate phrases, some ominous hints at a near misfortune, at a premature grave ... in the beginning of september he finally confessed to her, that he had embezzled official money, big money, something around three thousand; and that after five days he would be checked up, and that he, dilectorsky, was threatened with disgrace, the court, and finally, hard labour ... here the civic clerk of the military department burst into sobs, clasping his head, and exclaimed: "my poor mother! ... what will become of her? she will not be able to sustain this degradation ... no! death is a thousand times better than these hellish tortures of a being guilty of naught." although he was expressing himself, as always, in the style of the dime novels (in which way he had mainly enticed the trusting verka), still, the theatrical thought of suicide, once arisen, no longer forsook him. somehow one day he was promenading for a long time with verka in prince park. already greatly devastated by autumn, this wonderful ancient park glistened and played with the magnificent tones of the foliage, blossoming out into colours: crimson, purple, lemon, orange and the deep cherry colour of old, settled wine; and it seemed that the cold air was diffusing sweet odours, like precious wine. and yet, a fine impress, a tender aroma of death, was wafted from the bushes, from the grass, from the trees. dilectorsky waxed tender; gave his feelings a free rein, was moved over himself, and began to weep. verka wept a bit with him, too. "to-day i will kill myself!" said dilectorsky finally. "all is over! ..." "my own, don't! ... my precious, don't! ..." "it's impossible," answered dilectorsky sombrely. "the cursed money! ... which is dearer--honour or life?!" "my dear..." "don't speak, don't speak, annetta!" (he, for some reason, preferred to the common name of verka the aristocratic annetta, thought up by himself.) "don't speak. this is decided!" "oh, if only i could help you!" exclaimed verka woefully. "why, i'd give my life away ... every drop of blood! ..." "what is life?" dilectorsky shook his head with an actor's despondence. "farewell, annetta! ... farewell! ..." the girl desperately began to shake her head: "i don't want it! ... i don't want it! ... i don't want it! ... take me! ... i'll go with you too! ..." late in the evening dilectorsky took a room in an expensive hotel. he knew, that within a few hours, perhaps minutes, he and verka would be corpses; and for that reason, although he had in his pocket only eleven kopecks, all in all, he gave orders sweepingly, like a habitual, downright prodigal; he ordered sturgeon stew, double snipes, and fruits; and, in addition to all this, coffee, liqueurs and two bottles of frosted champagne. and he was in reality convinced that he would shoot himself; but thought of it somehow affectedly, as though admiring, a trifle from the side, his tragic role; and enjoying beforehand the despair of his relatives and the amazement of his fellow clerks. while verka, when she had suddenly said that she would commit suicide with her beloved, had been immediately strengthened in this thought. and there was nothing fearful to verka in this impending death. "well, now, is it better to croak just so, under a fence? but here it's together with your dearie! at least a sweet death! ..." and she frantically kissed her clerk, laughed, and with dishevelled, curly hair, with sparkling eyes, was prettier than she had ever been. the final triumphal moment arrived at last. "you and i have both enjoyed ourselves, annetta ... we have drained the cup to the bottom and now, to use an expression of pushkin's, must shatter the goblet!" said dilectorsky. "you do not repent, oh, my dear? ..." "no, no! ..." "are you ready?" "yes!" whispered she and smiled. "then turn away to the wall and shut your eyes!" "no, no, my dearest, i don't want it so! ... i don't want it! come to me! there, so! nearer, nearer.. give me your eyes, i will be gazing into them. give me your lips--i will be kissing you, while you... i am not afraid! ... be braver! ... kiss me harder! ..." he killed her; and when he looked upon the horrible deed of his hands, he then suddenly felt a loathsome, abominable, abject fear. the half-naked body of verka was still quivering on the bed. the legs of dilectorsky gave in from horror; but the reason of a hypocrite, coward and blackguard kept vigil: he did still have spirit sufficient to stretch away at his side the skin over his ribs, and to shoot through it. and when he was falling, frantically crying out from pain, from fright, and from the thunder of the shot, the last convulsion was running through the body of verka. while two weeks after the death of verka, the naive, sportful, meek, brawling little white manka perished as well. during one of the general, clamourous brawls, usual in the yamkas, in an enormous affray, some one killed her, hitting her with a heavy empty bottle over the head. and the murderer remained undiscovered to the last. so rapidly did events take place in the yamkas, in the house of emma edwardovna; and well nigh not a one of its inmates escaped a bloody, foul or disgraceful doom. the final, most grandiose, and at the same time most bloody calamity was the devastation committed on the yamkas by soldiers. two dragoons had been short-changed in a rouble establishment, beaten up, and thrown out at night into the street. tom to pieces, in blood, they returned to the barracks, where their comrades, having begun in the morning, were still finishing up their regimental holiday. and so, not half an hour passed, when a hundred soldiers burst into the yamkas and began to wreck house after house. they were joined by an innumerable mob that gathered on the run--men of the golden squad[ ], ragamuffins, tramps, crooks, souteneurs. the panes were broken in all the houses, and the grand pianos smashed to smithereens. the feather beds were ripped open and the down thrown out into the street; and yet for a long while after--for some two days--the countless bits of down flew and whirled over the yamkas, like flakes of snow. the wenches, bare-headed, perfectly naked, were driven out into the street. three porters were beaten to death. the rabble shattered, befouled, and rent into pieces all the silk and plush furniture of treppel. they also smashed up all the neighbouring taverns and drink-shops, while they were at it. [ ] zolotorotzi--a subtle euphemism for cleaners of cesspools and carters of the wealth contained therein.--trans. the drunken, bloody, hideous slaughter continued for some three hours; until the arrayed military authorities, together with the fire company, finally succeeded in repulsing and scattering the infuriated mob. two half-rouble establishments were set on fire, but the fire was soon put out. however, on the next day the tumult again flared up; this time already over the whole city and its environs. altogether unexpectedly it took on the character of a jewish pogrom, which lasted for three days, with all its horrors and miseries. and a week after followed the order of the governor-general about the immediate shutting down of houses of prostitution, on the yamkas as well as other streets of the city. the proprietresses were given only a week's time for the settlement of matters in connection with their property. annihilated, crushed, plundered; having lost all the glamour of their former grandeur; ludicrous and pitiful, the aged, faded proprietresses and fat-faced, hoarse housekeepers were hastily packing up their things. and a month after only the name reminded one of merry yamskaya street; of the riotous, scandalous, horrible yamkas. however, even the name of the street was soon replaced by another, more respectable one, in order to efface even the memory of the former unpardonable times. and all these henriettas-horses, fat kitties, lelkas-polecats and other women--always naive and foolish, often touching and amusing, in the majority of cases deceived and perverted children,--spread through the big city, were dissolved within it. out of them was born a new stratum of society--a stratum of the strolling, street prostitutes--solitaries. and about their life, just as pitiful and incongruous, but tinged by other interests and customs, the author of this novel--which he still dedicates to youths and mothers--will some time tell. the end susan lenox: her fall and rise by david graham phillips volume i with a portrait of the author d. appleton and company new york london david graham phillips a tribute even now i cannot realize that he is dead, and often in the city streets--on fifth avenue in particular--i find myself glancing ahead for a glimpse of the tall, boyish, familiar figure--experience once again a flash of the old happy expectancy. i have lived in many lands, and have known men. i never knew a finer man than graham phillips. his were the clearest, bluest, most honest eyes i ever saw--eyes that scorned untruth--eyes that penetrated all sham. in repose his handsome features were a trifle stern--and the magic of his smile was the more wonderful--such a sunny, youthful, engaging smile. his mere presence in a room was exhilarating. it seemed to freshen the very air with a keen sweetness almost pungent. he was tall, spare, leisurely, iron-strong; yet figure, features and bearing were delightfully boyish. men liked him, women liked him when he liked them. he was the most honest man i ever knew, clean in mind, clean-cut in body, a little over-serious perhaps, except when among intimates; a little prone to hoist the burdens of the world on his young shoulders. his was a knightly mind; a paladin character. but he could unbend, and the memory of such hours with him--hours that can never be again--hurts more keenly than the memory of calmer and more sober moments. we agreed in many matters, he and i; in many we differed. to me it was a greater honor to differ in opinion with such a man than to find an entire synod of my own mind. because--and of course this is the opinion of one man and worth no more than that--i have always thought that graham phillips was head and shoulders above us all in his profession. he was to have been really great. he is--by his last book, "susan lenox." not that, when he sometimes discussed the writing of it with me, i was in sympathy with it. i was not. we always were truthful to each other. but when a giant molds a lump of clay into tremendous masses, lesser men become confused by the huge contours, the vast distances, the terrific spaces, the majestic scope of the ensemble. so i. but he went on about his business. i do not know what the public may think of "susan lenox." i scarcely know what i think. it is a terrible book--terrible and true and beautiful. under the depths there are unspeakable things that writhe. his plumb-line touches them and they squirm. he bends his head from the clouds to do it. is it worth doing? i don't know. but this i do know--that within the range of all fiction of all lands and of all times no character has so overwhelmed me as the character of susan lenox. she is as real as life and as unreal. she is life. hers was the concentrated nobility of heaven and hell. and the divinity of the one and the tragedy of the other. for she had known both--this girl--the most pathetic, the most human, the most honest character ever drawn by an american writer. in the presence of his last work, so overwhelming, so stupendous, we lesser men are left at a loss. its magnitude demands the perspective that time only can lend it. its dignity and austerity and its pitiless truth impose upon us that honest and intelligent silence which even the quickest minds concede is necessary before an honest verdict. truth was his goddess; he wrought honestly and only for her. he is dead, but he is to have his day in court. and whatever the verdict, if it be a true one, were he living he would rest content. robert w. chambers. before the curtain a few years ago, as to the most important and most interesting subject in the world, the relations of the sexes, an author had to choose between silence and telling those distorted truths beside which plain lying seems almost white and quite harmless. and as no author could afford to be silent on the subject that underlies all subjects, our literature, in so far as it attempted to deal with the most vital phases of human nature, was beneath contempt. the authors who knew they were lying sank almost as low as the nasty-nice purveyors of fake idealism and candied pruriency who fancied they were writing the truth. now it almost seems that the day of lying conscious and unconscious is about run. "and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." there are three ways of dealing with the sex relations of men and women--two wrong and one right. for lack of more accurate names the two wrong ways may be called respectively the anglo-saxon and the continental. both are in essence processes of spicing up and coloring up perfectly innocuous facts of nature to make them poisonously attractive to perverted palates. the wishy-washy literature and the wishy-washy morality on which it is based are not one stage more--or less--rotten than the libertine literature and the libertine morality on which it is based. so far as degrading effect is concerned, the "pure, sweet" story or play, false to nature, false to true morality, propagandist of indecent emotions disguised as idealism, need yield nothing to the so-called "strong" story. both pander to different forms of the same diseased craving for the unnatural. both produce moral atrophy. the one tends to encourage the shallow and unthinking in ignorance of life and so causes them to suffer the merciless penalties of ignorance. the other tends to miseducate the shallow and unthinking, to give them a ruinously false notion of the delights of vice. the anglo-saxon "morality" is like a nude figure salaciously draped; the continental "strength" is like a nude figure salaciously distorted. the anglo-saxon article reeks the stench of disinfectants; the continental reeks the stench of degenerate perfume. the continental shouts "hypocrisy!" at the anglo-saxon; the anglo-saxon shouts "filthiness!" at the continental. both are right; they are twin sisters of the same horrid mother. and an author of either allegiance has to have many a redeeming grace of style, of character drawing, of philosophy, to gain him tolerance in a clean mind. there is the third and right way of dealing with the sex relations of men and women. that is the way of simple candor and naturalness. treat the sex question as you would any other question. don't treat it reverently; don't treat it rakishly. treat it naturally. don't insult your intelligence and lower your moral tone by thinking about either the decency or the indecency of matters that are familiar, undeniable, and unchangeable facts of life. don't look on woman as mere female, but as human being. remember that she has a mind and a heart as well as a body. in a sentence, don't join in the prurient clamor of "purity" hypocrites and "strong" libertines that exaggerates and distorts the most commonplace, if the most important feature of life. let us try to be as sensible about sex as we are trying to be about all the other phenomena of the universe in this more enlightened day. nothing so sweetens a sin or so delights a sinner as getting big-eyed about it and him. those of us who are naughty aren't nearly so naughty as we like to think; nor are those of us who are nice nearly so nice. our virtues and our failings are--perhaps to an unsuspected degree--the result of the circumstances in which we are placed. the way to improve individuals is to improve these circumstances; and the way to start at improving the circumstances is by looking honestly and fearlessly at things as they are. we must know our world and ourselves before we can know what should be kept and what changed. and the beginning of this wisdom is in seeing sex relations rationally. until that fundamental matter is brought under the sway of good common sense, improvement in other directions will be slow indeed. let us stop lying--to others--to ourselves. d.g.p. july, . susan lenox chapter i "the child's dead," said nora, the nurse. it was the upstairs sitting-room in one of the pretentious houses of sutherland, oldest and most charming of the towns on the indiana bank of the ohio. the two big windows were open; their limp and listless draperies showed that there was not the least motion in the stifling humid air of the july afternoon. at the center of the room stood an oblong table; over it were neatly spread several thicknesses of white cotton cloth; naked upon them lay the body of a newborn girl baby. at one side of the table nearer the window stood nora. hers were the hard features and corrugated skin popularly regarded as the result of a life of toil, but in fact the result of a life of defiance to the laws of health. as additional penalties for that same self-indulgence she had an enormous bust and hips, thin face and arms, hollow, sinew-striped neck. the young man, blond and smooth faced, at the other side of the table and facing the light, was doctor stevens, a recently graduated pupil of the famous schulze of saint christopher who as much as any other one man is responsible for the rejection of hocus-pocus and the injection of common sense into american medicine. for upwards of an hour young stevens, coat off and shirt sleeves rolled to his shoulders, had been toiling with the lifeless form on the table. he had tried everything his training, his reading and his experience suggested--all the more or less familiar devices similar to those indicated for cases of drowning. nora had watched him, at first with interest and hope, then with interest alone, finally with swiftly deepening disapproval, as her compressed lips and angry eyes plainly revealed. it seemed to her his effort was degenerating into sacrilege, into defiance of an obvious decree of the almighty. however, she had not ventured to speak until the young man, with a muttered ejaculation suspiciously like an imprecation, straightened his stocky figure and began to mop the sweat from his face, hands and bared arms. when she saw that her verdict had not been heard, she repeated it more emphatically. "the child's dead," said she, "as i told you from the set-out." she made the sign of the cross on her forehead and bosom, while her fat, dry lips moved in a "hail, mary." the young man did not rouse from his reverie. he continued to gaze with a baffled expression at the tiny form, so like a whimsical caricature of humanity. he showed that he had heard the woman's remark by saying, to himself rather than to her, "dead? what's that? merely another name for ignorance." but the current of his thought did not swerve. it held to the one course: what would his master, the dauntless, the infinitely resourceful schulze, do if he were confronted by this intolerable obstacle of a perfect machine refusing to do its duty and pump vital force through an eagerly waiting body? "he'd _make_ it go, i'd bet my life," the young man muttered. "i'm ashamed of myself." as if the reproach were just the spur his courage and his intelligence had needed, his face suddenly glowed with the upshooting fire of an inspiration. he thrust the big white handkerchief into his hip pocket, laid one large strong hand upon the small, beautifully arched chest of the baby. nora, roused by his expression even more than by his gesture, gave an exclamation of horror. "don't touch it again," she cried, between entreaty and command. "you've done all you can--and more." stevens was not listening. "such a fine baby, too," he said, hesitating--the old woman mistakenly fancied it was her words that made him pause. "i feel no good at all," he went on, as if reasoning with himself, "no good at all, losing both the mother and the child." "_she_ didn't want to live," replied nora. her glances stole somewhat fearfully toward the door of the adjoining room--the bedroom where the mother lay dead. "there wasn't nothing but disgrace ahead for both of them. everybody'll be glad." "such a fine baby," muttered the abstracted young doctor. "love-children always is," said nora. she was looking sadly and tenderly down at the tiny, symmetrical form--symmetrical to her and the doctor's expert eyes. "such a deep chest," she sighed. "such pretty hands and feet. a real love-child." there she glanced nervously at the doctor; it was meet and proper and pious to speak well of the dead, but she felt she might be going rather far for a "good woman." "i'll try it," cried the young man in a resolute tone. "it can't do any harm, and----" without finishing his sentence he laid hold of the body by the ankles, swung it clear of the table. as nora saw it dangling head downwards like a dressed suckling pig on a butcher's hook she vented a scream and darted round the table to stop by main force this revolting desecration of the dead. stevens called out sternly: "mind your business, nora! push the table against the wall and get out of the way. i want all the room there is." "oh, doctor--for the blessed jesus' sake----" "push back that table!" nora shrank before his fierce eyes. she thought his exertions, his disappointment and the heat had combined to topple him over into insanity. she retreated toward the farther of the open windows. with a curse at her stupidity stevens kicked over the table, used his foot vigorously in thrusting it to the wall. "now!" exclaimed he, taking his stand in the center of the room and gauging the distance of ceiling, floor and walls. nora, her back against the window frame, her fingers sunk in her big loose bosom, stared petrified. stevens, like an athlete swinging an indian club, whirled the body round and round his head, at the full length of his powerful arms. more and more rapidly he swung it, until his breath came and went in gasps and the sweat was trickling in streams down his face and neck. round and round between ceiling and floor whirled the naked body of the baby--round and round for minutes that seemed hours to the horrified nurse--round and round with all the strength and speed the young man could put forth--round and round until the room was a blur before his throbbing eyes, until his expression became fully as demoniac as nora had been fancying it. just as she was recovering from her paralysis of horror and was about to fly shrieking from the room she was halted by a sound that made her draw in air until her bosom swelled as if it would burst its gingham prison. she craned eagerly toward stevens. he was whirling the body more furiously than ever. "was that you?" asked nora hoarsely. "or was it----" she paused, listened. the sound came again--the sound of a drowning person fighting for breath. "it's--it's----" muttered nora. "what is it, doctor?" "life!" panted stevens, triumph in his glistening, streaming face. "life!" he continued to whirl the little form, but not so rapidly or so vigorously. and now the sound was louder, or, rather, less faint, less uncertain--was a cry--was the cry of a living thing. "she's alive--alive!" shrieked the woman, and in time with his movements she swayed to and fro from side to side, laughing, weeping, wringing her hands, patting her bosom, her cheeks. she stretched out her arms. "my prayers are answered!" she cried. "don't kill her, you brute! give her to me. you shan't treat a baby that way." the unheeding doctor kept on whirling until the cry was continuous, a low but lusty wail of angry protest. then he stopped, caught the baby up in both arms, burst out laughing. "you little minx!" he said--or, rather, gasped--a tenderness quite maternal in his eyes. "but i got you! nora, the table." nora righted the table, spread and smoothed the cloths, extended her scrawny eager arms for the baby. stevens with a jerk of the head motioned her aside, laid the baby on the table. he felt for the pulse at its wrist, bent to listen at the heart. quite useless. that strong, rising howl of helpless fury was proof enough. her majesty the baby was mad through and through--therefore alive through and through. "grand heart action!" said the young man. he stood aloof, hands on his hips, head at a proud angle. "you never saw a healthier specimen. it'll be many a year, bar accidents, before she's that near death again." but it was nora's turn not to hear. she was soothing and swaddling the outraged baby. "there--there!" she crooned. "nora'll take care of you. the bad man shan't come near my little precious--no, the wicked man shan't touch her again." the bedroom door opened. at the slight noise superstitious nora paled, shriveled within her green and white checked gingham. she slowly turned her head as if on this day of miracles she expected yet another--the resurrection of the resurrected baby's mother, "poor miss lorella." but lorella lenox was forever tranquil in the sleep that engulfed her and the sorrows in which she had been entangled by an impetuous, trusting heart. the apparition in the doorway was commonplace--the mistress of the house, lorella's elder and married sister fanny--neither fair nor dark, neither tall nor short, neither thin nor fat, neither pretty nor homely, neither stupid nor bright, neither neat nor dowdy--one of that multitude of excellent, unobtrusive human beings who make the restful stretches in a world of agitations--and who respond to the impetus of circumstance as unresistingly as cloud to wind. as the wail of the child smote upon fanny's ears she lifted her head, startled, and cried out sharply, "what's that?" "we've saved the baby, mrs. warham," replied the young doctor, beaming on her through his glasses. "oh!" said mrs. warham. and she abruptly seated herself on the big chintz-covered sofa beside the door. "and it's a lovely child," pleaded nora. her woman's instinct guided her straight to the secret of the conflict raging behind mrs. warham's unhappy face. "the finest girl in the world," cried stevens, well-meaning but tactless. "girl!" exclaimed fanny, starting up from the sofa. "is it a _girl_?" nora nodded. the young man looked downcast; he was realizing the practical side of his victory for science--the consequences to the girl child, to all the relatives. "a girl!" moaned fanny, sinking to the sofa again. "god have mercy on us!" louder and angrier rose the wail. fanny, after a brief struggle with herself, hurried to the table, looked down at the tiny helplessness. her face softened. she had been a mother four times. only one had lived--her fair little two-year-old ruth--and she would never have any more children. the tears glistened in her eyes. "what ails you, nora mulvey?" she demanded. "why aren't you 'tending to this poor little creature?" nora sprang into action, but she wrapped the baby herself. the doctor in deep embarrassment withdrew to the farther window. she fussed over the baby lingeringly, but finally resigned it to the nurse. "take it into the bathroom," she said, "where everything's ready to feed it--though i never dreamed----" as nora was about to depart, she detained her. "let me look at it again." the nurse understood that fanny warham was searching for evidence of the mysterious but suspected paternity whose secret lorella, with true lenox obstinacy, had guarded to the end. the two women scanned the features. a man would at a glance have abandoned hope of discovering anything from a chart so vague and confused as that wrinkled, twisted, swollen face of the newborn. not so a woman. said nora: "she seems to me to favor the lenoxes. but i think--i _kind_ o' think--i see a _trace_ of--of----" there she halted, waiting for encouragement. "of galt?" suggested fanny, in an undertone. "of galt," assented nora, her tone equally discreet. "that nose is galt-like and the set of the ears--and a kind of something to the neck and shoulders." "maybe so," said fanny doubtfully. she shook her head drearily, sighed. "what's the use? lorella's gone. and this morning general galt came down to see my husband with a letter he'd got from jimmie. jimmie denies it. perhaps so. again, perhaps the general wrote him to write that, and threatened him if he didn't. but what's the use? we'll never know." and they never did. when young stevens was leaving, george warham waylaid him at the front gate, separated from the spacious old creeper-clad house by long lawns and an avenue of elms. "i hear the child's going to live," said he anxiously. "i've never seen anything more alive," replied stevens. warham stared gloomily at the ground. he was evidently ashamed of his feelings, yet convinced that they were human and natural. a moment's silence between the men, then stevens put his hand on the gate latch. "did--did--my wife----" began warham. "did she say what she calculated to do?" "not a word, george." after a silence. "you know how fond she is of babies." "yes, i know," replied warham. "fanny is a true woman if ever there was one." with a certain defiance, "and lorella--she was a sweet, womanly girl!" "as sweet and good as she was pretty," replied stevens heartily. "the way she kept her mouth shut about that hound, whoever he is!" warham's roman face grew savage, revealed in startling apparition a stubborn cruelty of which there was not a trace upon the surface. "if i ever catch the ---- ---- i'll fill him full of holes." "he'd be lynched--_whoever_ he is," said stevens. "that's right!" cried warham. "this is the north, but it's near enough to kentucky to know what to do with a wretch of that sort." his face became calmer. "that poor little baby! he'll have a hard row to hoe." stevens flushed a guilty red. "it's--it's--a girl," he stammered. warham stared. "a _girl_!" he cried. then his face reddened and in a furious tone he burst out: "now don't that beat the devil for luck!. . . a girl! good lord--a girl!" "nobody in this town'll blame her," consoled stevens. "you know better than that, bob! a girl! why, it's downright wicked. . . i wonder what fanny allows to do?" he showed what fear was in his mind by wheeling savagely on stevens with a stormy, "we can't keep her--we simply can't!" "what's to become of her?" protested stevens gently. warham made a wild vague gesture with both arms. "damn if i know! i've got to look out for my own daughter. i won't have it. damn it, i won't have it!" stevens lifted the gate latch. "well---- "good-by, george. i'll look in again this evening." and knowing the moral ideas of the town, all he could muster by way of encouragement was a half-hearted "don't borrow trouble." but warham did not hear. he was moving up the tanbark walk toward the house, muttering to himself. when fanny, unable longer to conceal lorella's plight, had told him, pity and affection for his sweet sister-in-law who had made her home with them for five years had triumphed over his principles. he had himself arranged for fanny to hide lorella in new york until she could safely return. but just as the sisters were about to set out, lorella, low in body and in mind, fell ill. then george--and fanny, too--had striven with her to give them the name of her betrayer, that he might be compelled to do her justice. lorella refused. "i told him," she said, "and he--i never want to see him again." they pleaded the disgrace to them, but she replied that he would not marry her even if she would marry him; and she held to her refusal with the firmness for which the lenoxes were famous. they suspected jimmie galt, because he had been about the most attentive of the young men until two or three months before, and because he had abruptly departed for europe to study architecture. lorella denied that it was he. "if you kill him," she said to warham, "you kill an innocent man." warham was so exasperated by her obstinacy that he was at first for taking her at her offer and letting her go away. but fanny would not hear of it, and he acquiesced. now--"this child must be sent away off somewhere, and never be heard of again," he said to himself. "if it'd been a boy, perhaps it might have got along. but a girl---- "there's nothing can be done to make things right for a girl that's got no father and no name." the subject did not come up between him and his wife until about a week after lorella's funeral. but he was thinking of nothing else. at his big grocery store--wholesale and retail--he sat morosely in his office, brooding over the disgrace and the danger of deeper disgrace--for he saw what a hold the baby already had upon his wife. he was ashamed to appear in the streets; he knew what was going on behind the sympathetic faces, heard the whisperings as if they had been trumpetings. and he was as much afraid of his own soft heart as of his wife's. but for the sake of his daughter he must be firm and just. one morning, as he was leaving the house after breakfast, he turned back and said abruptly: "fan, don't you think you'd better send the baby away and get it over with?" "no," said his wife unhesitatingly--and he knew his worst suspicion was correct. "i've made up my mind to keep her." "it isn't fair to ruth." "send it away--where?" "anywhere. get it adopted in chicago--cincinnati--louisville." "lorella's baby?" "when she and ruth grow up--what then?" "people ain't so low as some think." "'the sins of the parents are visited on the children unto----'" "i don't care," interrupted fanny. "i love her. i'm going to keep her. wait here a minute." when she came back she had the baby in her arms. "just look," she said softly. george frowned, tried not to look, but was soon drawn and held by the sweet, fresh, blooming face, so smooth, so winning, so innocent. "and think how she was sent back to life--from beyond the grave. it must have been for some purpose." warham groaned, "oh, lord, i don't know _what_ to do! but--it ain't fair to our ruth." "i don't see it that way. . . . kiss her, george." warham kissed one of the soft cheeks, swelling like a ripening apple. the baby opened wide a pair of wonderful dark eyes, threw up its chubby arms and laughed--such a laugh!. . . there was no more talk of sending her away. chapter ii not quite seventeen years later, on a fine june morning, ruth warham issued hastily from the house and started down the long tanbark walk from the front veranda to the street gate. she was now nineteen--nearer twenty--and a very pretty young woman, indeed. she had grown up one of those small slender blondes, exquisite and doll-like, who cannot help seeming fresh and sweet, whatever the truth about them, without or within. this morning she had on a new summer dress of a blue that matched her eyes and harmonized with her coloring. she was looking her best, and she had the satisfying, confidence-giving sense that it was so. like most of the unattached girls of small towns, she was always dreaming of the handsome stranger who would fall in love--the thrilling, love-story kind of love at first sight. the weather plays a conspicuous part in the romancings of youth; she felt that this was precisely the kind of day fate would be most likely to select for the meeting. just before dressing she had been reading about the wonderful _him_--in robert chambers' latest story--and she had spent full fifteen minutes of blissful reverie over the accompanying fisher illustration. now she was issuing hopefully forth, as hopefully as if adventure were the rule and order of life in sutherland, instead of a desperate monotony made the harder to bear by the glory of its scenery. she had got only far enough from the house to be visible to the second-story windows when a young voice called: "ruthie! aren't you going to wait for me?" ruth halted; an expression anything but harmonious with the pretty blue costume stormed across her face. "i won't have her along!" she muttered. "i simply won't!" she turned slowly and, as she turned, effaced every trace of temper with a dexterity which might have given an onlooker a poorer opinion of her character than perhaps the facts as to human nature justify. the countenance she presently revealed to those upper windows was sunny and sweet. no one was visible; but the horizontal slats in one of the only closed pair of shutters and a vague suggestion of movement rather than form behind them gave the impression that a woman, not far enough dressed to risk being seen from the street, was hidden there. evidently ruth knew, for it was toward this window that she directed her gaze and the remark: "can't wait, dear. i'm in a great hurry. mamma wants the silk right away and i've got to match it." "but i'll be only a minute," pleaded the voice--a much more interesting, more musical voice than ruth's rather shrill and thin high soprano. "no--i'll meet you up at papa's store." "all right." ruth resumed her journey. she smiled to herself. "that means," said she, half aloud, "i'll steer clear of the store this morning." but as she was leaving the gate into the wide, shady, sleepy street, who should come driving past in a village cart but lottie wright! and lottie reined her pony in to the sidewalk and in the shade of a symmetrical walnut tree proceeded to invite ruth to a dance--a long story, as lottie had to tell all about it, the decorations, the favors, the food, who would be there, what she was going to wear, and so on and on. ruth was intensely interested but kept remembering something that caused her to glance uneasily from time to time up the tanbark walk under the arching boughs toward the house. even if she had not been interested, she would hardly have ventured to break off; lottie wright was the only daughter of the richest man in sutherland and, therefore, social arbiter to the younger set. lottie stopped abruptly, said: "well, i really must get on. and there's your cousin coming down the walk. i know you've been waiting for her." ruth tried to keep in countenance, but a blush of shame and a frown of irritation came in spite of her. "i'm sorry i can't ask susie, too," pursued lottie, in a voice of hypocritical regret. "but there are to be exactly eighteen couples--and i couldn't." "of course not," said ruth heartily. "susan'll understand." "i wouldn't for the world do anything to hurt her feelings," continued lottie with the self-complacent righteousness of a deacon telling the congregation how good "grace" has made him. her prominent commonplace brown eyes were gazing up the walk, an expression distressingly like envious anger in them. she had a thick, pudgy face, an oily skin, an outcropping of dull red pimples on the chin. many women can indulge their passion for sweets at meals and sweets between meals without serious injury--to complexion; lottie wright, unluckily, couldn't. "i feel sorry for susie," she went on, in the ludicrous patronizing tone that needs no describing to anyone acquainted with any fashionable set anywhere from china to peru. "and i think the way you all treat her is simply beautiful. but, then, everybody feels sorry for her and tries to be kind. she knows--about herself, i mean--doesn't she, ruthie?" "i guess so," replied ruth, almost hanging her head in her mortification. "she's very good and sweet." "indeed, she is," said lottie. "and father says she's far and away the prettiest girl in town." with this parting shot, which struck precisely where she had aimed, lottie gathered up the reins and drove on, calling out a friendly "hello, susie dearie," to susan lenox, who, on her purposely lagging way from the house, had nearly reached the gate. "what a nasty thing lottie wright is!" exclaimed ruth to her cousin. "she has a mean tongue," admitted susan, tall and slim and straight, with glorious dark hair and a skin healthily pallid and as smooth as clear. "but she's got a good heart. she gives a lot away to poor people." "because she likes to patronize and be kowtowed to," retorted ruth. "she's mean, i tell you." then, with a vicious gleam in the blue eyes that hinted a deeper and less presentable motive for the telling, she added: "why, she's not going to ask you to her party." susan was obviously unmoved. "she has the right to ask whom she pleases. and"--she laughed--"if i were giving a party i'd not want to ask her--though i might do it for fear she'd feel left out." "don't you feel--left out?" susan shook her head. "i seem not to care much about going to parties lately. the boys don't like to dance with me, and i get tired of sitting the dances out." this touched ruth's impulsively generous heart and woman's easy tears filled her eyes; her cousin's remark was so pathetic, the more pathetic because its pathos was absolutely unconscious. ruth shot a pitying glance at susan, but the instant she saw the loveliness of the features upon which that expression of unconsciousness lay like innocence upon a bed of roses, the pity vanished from her eyes to be replaced by a disfiguring envy as hateful as an evil emotion can be at nineteen. susan still lacked nearly a month of seventeen, but she seemed older than ruth because her mind and her body had developed beyond her years--or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say beyond the average of growth at seventeen. also, her personality was stronger, far more definite. ruth tried to believe herself the cleverer and the more beautiful, at times with a certain success. but as she happened to be a shrewd young person--an inheritance from the warhams--she was haunted by misgivings--and worse. those whose vanity never suffers from these torments will, of course, condemn her; but whoever has known the pain of having to concede superiority to someone with whom she or he--is constantly contrasted will not be altogether without sympathy for ruth in her struggles, often vain struggles, against the mortal sin of jealousy. the truth is, susan was beyond question the beauty of sutherland. her eyes, very dark at birth, had changed to a soft, dreamy violet-gray. hair and coloring, lashes and eyebrows remained dark; thus her eyes and the intense red of her lips had that vicinage of contrast which is necessary to distinction. to look at her was to be at once fascinated by those violet-gray eyes--by their color, by their clearness, by their regard of calm, grave inquiry, by their mystery not untouched by a certain sadness. she had a thick abundance of wavy hair, not so long as ruth's golden braids, but growing beautifully instead of thinly about her low brow, about her delicately modeled ears, and at the back of her exquisite neck. her slim nose departed enough from the classic line to prevent the suggestion of monotony that is in all purely classic faces. her nostrils had the sensitiveness that more than any other outward sign indicates the imaginative temperament. her chin and throat--to look at them was to know where her lover would choose to kiss her first. when she smiled her large even teeth were dazzling. and the smile itself was exceedingly sweet and winning, with the violet-gray eyes casting over it that seriousness verging on sadness which is the natural outlook of a highly intelligent nature. for while stupid vain people are suspicious and easily offended, only the intelligent are truly sensitive--keenly susceptible to all sensations. the dull ear is suspicious; the acute ear is sensitive. the intense red of her lips, at times so vivid that it seemed artificial, and their sinuous, sensitive curve indicated a temperament that was frankly proclaimed in her figure--sensuous, graceful, slender--the figure of girlhood in its perfection and of perfect womanhood, too--like those tropical flowers that look innocent and young and fresh, yet stir in the beholder passionate longings and visions. her walk was worthy of face and figure--free and firm and graceful, the small head carried proudly without haughtiness. this physical beauty had as an aureole to illuminate it and to set it off a manner that was wholly devoid of mannerisms--of those that men and women think out and exhibit to give added charm to themselves--tricks of cuteness, as lisp and baby stare; tricks of dignity, as grave brow and body always carried rigidly erect; tricks of sweetness and kindliness, as the ever ready smile and the warm handclasp. susan, the interested in the world about her, susan, the self-unconscious, had none of these tricks. she was at all times her own self. beauty is anything but rare, likewise intelligence. but this quality of naturalness is the greatest of all qualities. it made susan lenox unique. it was not strange--nor inexcusable that the girls and their parents had begun to pity susan as soon as this beauty developed and this personality had begun to exhale its delicious perfume. it was but natural that they should start the whole town to "being kind to the poor thing." and it was equally the matter of course that they should have achieved their object--should have impressed the conventional masculine mind of the town with such a sense of the "poor thing's" social isolation and "impossibility" that the boys ceased to be her eagerly admiring friends, were afraid to be alone with her, to ask her to dance. women are conventional as a business; but with men conventionality is a groveling superstition. the youths of sutherland longed for, sighed for the alluring, sweet, bright susan; but they dared not, with all the women saying "poor thing! what a pity a nice man can't afford to have anything to do with her!" it was an interesting typical example of the profound snobbishness of the male character. rarely, after susan was sixteen, did any of the boys venture to ask her to dance and so give himself the joy of encircling that lovely form of hers; yet from babyhood her fascination for the male sex, regardless of age or temperament, had been uncanny--"naturally, she being a love-child," said the old women. and from fourteen on, it grew steadily. it would be difficult for one who has not lived in a small town to understand exactly the kind of isolation to which sutherland consigned the girl without her realizing it, without their fully realizing it themselves. everyone was friendly with her. a stranger would not have noticed any difference in the treatment of her and of her cousin ruth. yet not one of the young men would have thought of marrying her, would have regarded her as his equal or the equal of his sisters. she went to all the general entertainments. she was invited to all the houses when failure to invite her would have seemed pointed--but only then. she did not think much about herself; she was fond of study--fonder of reading--fondest, perhaps, of making dresses and hats, especially for ruth, whom she thought much prettier than herself. thus, she was only vaguely, subconsciously conscious of there being something peculiar and mysterious in her lot. this isolation, rather than her dominant quality of self-effacing consideration for others, was the chief cause of the extraordinary innocence of her mind. no servant, no girl, no audacious boy ever ventured to raise with her any question remotely touching on sex. all those questions seemed to puritan sutherland in any circumstances highly indelicate; in relation to susan they seemed worse than indelicate, dreadful though the thought was that there could be anything worse than indelicacy. at fifteen she remained as unaware of even the existence of the mysteries of sex as she had been at birth. nothing definite enough to arouse her curiosity had ever been said in her hearing; and such references to those matters as she found in her reading passed her by, as any matter of which he has not the beginnings of knowledge will fail to arrest the attention of any reader. it was generally assumed that she knew all about her origin, that someone had, some time or other, told her. even her aunt fanny thought so, thought she was hiding the knowledge deep in her heart, explained in that way her content with the solitude of books and sewing. susan was the worst possible influence in ruth's life. our character is ourself, is born with us, clings to us as the flesh to our bones, persists unchanged until we die. but upon the circumstances that surround us depends what part of our character shall show itself. ruth was born with perhaps something more than the normal tendency to be envious and petty. but these qualities might never have shown themselves conspicuously had there been no susan for her to envy. the very qualities that made susan lovable reacted upon the pretty, pert blond cousin to make her the more unlovable. again and again, when she and susan were about to start out together, and susan would appear in beauty and grace of person and dress, ruth would excuse herself, would fly to her room to lock herself in and weep and rage and hate. and at the high school, when susan scored in a recitation or in some dramatic entertainment, ruth would sit with bitten lip and surging bosom, pale with jealousy. susan's isolation, the way the boys avoided having with her the friendly relations that spring up naturally among young people these gave ruth a partial revenge. but susan, seemingly unconscious, rising sweetly and serenely above all pettiness-- ruth's hatred deepened, though she hid it from everyone, almost from herself. and she depended more and more utterly upon susan to select her clothes for her, to dress her, to make her look well; for susan had taste and ruth had not. on that bright june morning as the cousins went up main street together, susan gave herself over to the delight of sun and air and of the flowering gardens before the attractive houses they were passing; ruth, with the day quite dark for her, all its joys gone, was fighting against a hatred of her cousin so vicious that it made her afraid. "i'll have no chance at all," her angry heart was saying, "so long as susie's around, keeping everybody reminded of the family shame." and that was a truth she could not downface, mean and ungenerous though thinking it might be. the worst of all was that susan, in a simple white dress and an almost untrimmed white straw hat with a graceful curve to its brim and set at the right angle upon that wavy dark hair, was making the beauty of her short blond cousin dim and somehow common. at the corner of maple street ruth's self-control reached its limit. she halted, took the sample of silk from her glove. there was not a hint of her feelings in her countenance, for shame and the desire to seem to be better than she was were fast making her an adept in hypocrisy. "you go ahead and match it for mamma," said she. "i've got to run in and see bessie andrews." "but i promised uncle george i'd come and help him with the monthly bills," objected susan. "you can do both. it'll take you only a minute. if mother had known you were going uptown, she'd never have trusted _me_." and ruth had tucked the sample in susan's belt and was hurrying out maple street. there was nothing for susan to do but go on alone. two squares, and she was passing the show place of sutherland, the home of the wrights. she paused to regale herself with a glance into the grove of magnificent elms with lawns and bright gardens beyond--for the wright place filled the entire square between broad and myrtle streets and from main to monroe. she was starting on when she saw among the trees a young man in striped flannels. at the same instant he saw her. "hel-_lo_, susie!" he cried. "i was thinking about you." susan halted. "when did you get back, sam?" she asked. "i heard you were going to stay on in the east all summer." after they had shaken hands across the hedge that came almost to their shoulders, susan began to move on. sam kept pace with her on his side of the carefully trimmed boxwood barrier. "i'm going back east in about two weeks," said he. "it's awfully dull here after yale. i just blew in--haven't seen lottie or father yet. coming to lottie's party?" "no," said susan. "why not?" susan laughed merrily. "the best reason in the world. lottie has only invited just so many couples." "i'll see about that," cried sam. "you'll be asked all right, all right." "no," said susan. she was one of those whose way of saying no gives its full meaning and intent. "i'll not be asked, thank you--and i'll not go if i am." by this time they were at the gate. he opened it, came out into the street. he was a tallish, athletic youth, dark, and pleasing enough of feature to be called handsome. he was dressed with a great deal of style of the efflorescent kind called sophomoric. he was a sophomore at yale. but that was not so largely responsible for his self-complacent expression as the deference he had got from babyhood through being heir apparent to the wright fortune. he had a sophisticated way of inspecting susan's charms of figure no less than charms of face that might have made a disagreeable impression upon an experienced onlooker. there is a time for feeling without knowing why one feels; and that period ought not to have been passed for young wright for many a year. "my, but you're looking fine, susie!" exclaimed he. "i haven't seen anyone that could hold a candle to you even in the east." susan laughed and blushed with pleasure. "go on," said she with raillery. "i love it." "come in and sit under the trees and i'll fill all the time you'll give me." this reminded her. "i must hurry uptown," she said. "good-by." "hold on!" cried he. "what have you got to do?" he happened to glance down the street. "isn't that ruth coming?" "so it is," said susan. "i guess bessie andrews wasn't at home." sam waved at ruth and called, "hello! glad to see you." ruth was all sweetness and smiles. she and her mother--quite privately and with nothing openly said on either side--had canvassed sam as a "possibility." there had been keen disappointment at the news that he was not coming home for the long vacation. "how are you, sam?" said she, as they shook hands. "my, susie, _doesn't_ he look new york?" sam tried to conceal that he was swelling with pride. "oh, this is nothing," said he deprecatingly. ruth's heart was a-flutter. the fisher picture of the chambers love-maker, thought she, might almost be a photograph of sam. she was glad she had obeyed the mysterious impulse to make a toilette of unusual elegance that morning. how get rid of susan? "_i_'ll take the sample, susie," said she. "then you won't have to keep father waiting." susie gave up the sample. her face was no longer so bright and interested. "oh, drop it," cried sam. "come in--both of you. i'll telephone for joe andrews and we'll take a drive--or anything you like." he was looking at susan. "can't do it," replied susan. "i promised uncle george." "oh, bother!" urged sam. "telephone him. it'll be all right--won't it, ruth?" "you don't know susie," said ruth, with a queer, strained laugh. "she'd rather die than break a promise." "i must go," susan now said. "good-by." "come on, ruth," cried sam. "let's walk uptown with her." "and you can help match the silk," said ruth. "not for me," replied young wright. then to susan, "what've _you_ got to do? maybe it's something i could help at." "no. it's for uncle george and me." "well, i'll go as far as the store. then--we'll see." they were now in the business part of main street, were at wilson's dry goods store. "you might find it here," suggested the innocent susan to her cousin. ruth colored, veiled her eyes to hide their flash. "i've got to go to the store first--to get some money," she hastily improvised. sam had been walking between the two girls. he now changed to the outside and, so, put himself next susan alone, put susan between him and ruth. the maneuver seemed to be a mere politeness, but ruth knew better. what fate had intended as her lucky day was being changed into unlucky by this cousin of hers. ruth walked sullenly along, hot tears in her eyes and a choke in her throat, as she listened to sam's flatterings of her cousin, and to susan's laughing, delighted replies. she tried to gather herself together, to think up something funny or at least interesting with which to break into the _tête-à-tête_ and draw sam to herself. she could think nothing but envious, hateful thoughts. at the doors of warham and company, wholesale and retail grocers, the three halted. "i guess i'll go to vandermark's," said ruth. "i really don't need money. come on, sam." "no--i'm going back home. i ought to see lottie and father. my, but it's dull in this town!" "well, so long," said susan. she nodded, sparkling of hair and skin and eyes, and went into the store. sam and ruth watched her as she walked down the broad aisle between the counters. from the store came a mingling of odors of fruit, of spices, of freshly ground coffee. "susan's an awful pretty girl, isn't she?" declared sam with rude enthusiasm. "indeed she is," replied ruth as heartily--and with an honest if discouraged effort to feel enthusiastic. "what a figure! and she has such a good walk. most women walk horribly." "come on to vandermark's with me and i'll stroll back with you," offered ruth. sam was still gazing into the store where, far to the rear, susan could be seen; the graceful head, the gently swelling bust, the soft lines of the white dress, the pretty ankles revealed by the short skirt--there was, indeed, a profile worth a man's looking at on a fine june day. ruth's eyes were upon sam, handsome, dressed in the eastern fashion, an ideal lover. "come on, sam," urged ruth. "no, thanks," he replied absently. "i'll go back. good luck!" and not glancing at her, he lifted his straw hat with its band of yale blue and set out. ruth moved slowly and disconsolately in the opposite direction. she was ashamed of her thoughts; but shame never yet withheld anybody from being human in thought. as she turned to enter vandermark's she glanced down the street. there was sam, returned and going into her father's store. she hesitated, could devise no plan of action, hurried into the dry goods store. sinclair, the head salesman and the beau of sutherland, was an especial friend of hers. the tall, slender, hungry-looking young man, devoured with ambition for speedy wealth, had no mind to neglect so easy an aid to that ambition as nature gave him in making him a lady-charmer. he had resolved to marry either lottie wright or ruth warham--ruth preferred, because, while lottie would have many times more money, her skin made her a stiff dose for a young man brought up to the american tradition that the face is the woman. but that morning sinclair exerted his charms in vain. ruth was in a hurry, was distinctly rude, cut short what in other circumstances would have been a prolonged and delightful flirtation by tossing the sample on the counter and asking him to do the matching for her and to send the silk right away. which said, she fairly bolted from the store. she arrived barely in time. young wright was issuing from warham and company. he smiled friendly enough, but ruth knew where his thoughts were. "get what you wanted?" inquired he, and went on to explain: "i came back to find out if you and susie were to be at home this evening. thought i'd call." ruth paled with angry dismay. she was going to a party at the sinclairs'--one to which susan was not invited. "aren't you going to sinclairs'?" said she. "i was. but i thought i'd rather call. perhaps i'll go there later." he was coming to call on susan! all the way down main street to the wright place ruth fought against her mood of angry and depressed silence, tried to make the best of her chance to impress sam. but sam was absent and humiliatingly near to curt. he halted at his father's gate. she halted also, searched the grounds with anxious eyes for sign of lottie that would give her the excuse for entering. "so long," said sam. "do come to sinclairs' early. you always did dance so well." "oh, dancing bores me," said the blasé sophomore. "but i'll be round before the shindy's over. i've got to take lot home." he lifted the hat again with what both he and ruth regarded as a gesture of most elegant carelessness. ruth strolled reluctantly on, feeling as if her toilet had been splashed or crushed. as she entered the front door her mother, in a wrapper and curl papers, appeared at the head of the stairs. "why!" cried she. "where's the silk? it's for your dress tonight, you know." "it'll be along," was ruth's answer, her tone dreary, her lip quivering. "i met sam wright." "oh!" exclaimed her mother. "he's back, is he?" ruth did not reply. she came on up the stairs, went into the sitting-room--the room where doctor stevens seventeen years before had torn the baby susan from the very claws of death. she flung herself down, buried her head in her arms upon that same table. she burst into a storm of tears. "why, dearie dear," cried her mother, "whatever is the matter?" "it's wicked and hateful," sobbed the girl, "but---- oh, mamma, i _hate_ susan! she was along, and sam hardly noticed me, and he's coming here this evening to call." "but you'll be at sinclairs'!" exclaimed mrs. warham. "not susan," sobbed ruth. "he wants to see only her." the members of the second presbyterian church, of which fanny warham was about the most exemplary and assiduous female member, would hardly have recognized the face encircled by that triple row of curl-papered locks, shinily plastered with quince-seed liquor. she was at woman's second critical age, and the strange emotions working in her mind--of whose disorder no one had an inkling--were upon the surface now. she ventured this freedom of facial expression because her daughter's face was hid. she did not speak. she laid a tender defending hand for an instant upon her daughter's shoulder--like the caress of love and encouragement the lioness gives her cub as she is about to give battle for it. then she left the room. she did not know what to do, but she knew she must and would do something. chapter iii the telephone was downstairs, in the rear end of the hall which divided the lower floor into two equal parts. but hardly had mrs. warham given the sinclairs' number to the exchange girl when ruth called from the head of the stairs: "what're you doing there, mamma?" "i'll tell mrs. sinclair you're sick and can't come. then i'll send susan in your place." "don't!" cried ruth, in an agitated, angry voice. "ring off--quick!" "now, ruth, let me----" "ring off!" ordered ruth. "you mustn't do that. you'll have the whole town talking about how i'm throwing myself at sam's head--and that i'm jealous of susan." mrs. warham said, "never mind" into the telephone sender and hung up the receiver. she was frightened, but not convinced. hers was a slow, old-fashioned mind, and to it the scheme it had worked out seemed a model of skillful duplicity. but ruth, of the younger and subtler generation, realized instantly how transparent the thing was. mrs. warham was abashed but not angered by her daughter's curt contempt. "it's the only way i can think of," said she. "and i still don't see----" "of course you don't," cut in ruth, ruffled by the perilously narrow escape from being the laughing stock of the town. "people aren't as big fools as they used to be, mamma. they don't believe nowadays everything that's told them. there isn't anybody that doesn't know i'm never sick. no--we'll have to----" she reflected a moment, pausing halfway down the stairs, while her mother watched her swollen and tear-stained face. "we might send susan away for the evening," suggested the mother. "yes," assented the daughter. "papa could take her with him for a drive to north sutherland--to see the provosts. then sam'd come straight on to the sinclairs'." "i'll call up your father." "no!" cried ruth, stamping her foot. "call up mr. provost, and tell him papa's coming. then you can talk with papa when he gets home to dinner." "but maybe----" "if that doesn't work out we can do something else this afternoon." the mother and the daughter avoided each other's eyes. both felt mean and small, guilty toward susan; but neither was for that reason disposed to draw back. as mrs. warham was trying the new dress on her daughter, she said: "anyhow, sam'd be wasting time on susan. he'd hang round her for no good. she'd simply get talked about. the poor child can't be lively or smile but what people begin to wonder if she's going the way of--of lorella." "that's so," agreed ruth, and both felt better. "was aunt lorella _very_ pretty, mamma?" "lovely!" replied fanny, and her eyes grew tender, for she had adored lorella. "you never saw such a complexion--like susan's, only snow-white." nervously and hastily, "most as fine as yours, ruthie." ruth gazed complacently into the mirror. "i'm glad i'm fair, and not big," said she. "yes, indeed! i like the womanly woman. and so do men." "don't you think we ought to send susan away to visit somewhere?" asked ruth at the next opportunity for talk the fitting gave. "it's getting more and more--pointed--the way people act. and she's so sweet and good, i'd hate to have her feelings hurt." in a burst of generosity, "she's the most considerate human being i ever knew. she'd give up anything rather than see someone else put out. she's too much that way." "we can't be too much that way," said mrs. warham in mechanical christian reproof. "oh, i know," retorted ruth, "that's all very well for church and sundays. but i guess if you want to get along you've got to look out for number one. . . . yes, she ought to visit somewhere." "i've been trying to think," said her mother. "she couldn't go any place but your uncle zeke's. but it's so lonesome out there i haven't the heart to send her. besides, she wouldn't know what to make of it." "what'd father say?" "that's another thing." mrs. warham had latterly grown jealous--not without reason--of her husband's partiality for susan. ruth sighed. "oh, dear!" cried she. "i don't know what to do. how's she ever going to get married!" "if she'd only been a boy!" said mrs. warham, on her knees, taking the unevenness out of the front of the skirt. "a girl has to suffer for her mother's sins." ruth made no reply. she smiled to herself--the comment of the younger generation upon the older. sin it might have been; but, worse than that, it was a stupidity--to let a man make a fool of her. lorella must have been a poor weak-minded creature. by dinner time ruth had completely soothed and smoothed her vanity. sam had been caught by susan simply because he had seen susan before he saw her. all that would be necessary was a good chance at him, and he would never look at susan again. he had been in the east, where the admired type was her own--refined, ladylike, the woman of the dainty appearance and manners and tastes. a brief undisturbed exposure to her charms and susan would seem coarse and countrified to him. there was no denying that susan had style, but it was fully effective only when applied to a sunny fairy-like beauty such as hers. but at midday, when susan came in with warham, ruth's jealousy opened all her inward-bleeding wounds again. susan's merry eyes, her laughing mouth, her funny way of saying even commonplace things--how could quiet, unobtrusive, ladylike charms such as ruth's have a chance if susan were about? she waited, silent and anxious, while her mother was having the talk with her father in the sitting-room. warham, mere man, was amused by his wife's scheming. "don't put yourself out, fanny," said he. "if the boy wants ruth and she wants him, why, well and good. but you'll only make a mess interfering. let the young people alone." "i'm surprised, george warham," cried fanny, "that you can show so little sense and heart." "to hear you talk, i'd think marriage was a business, like groceries." mrs. warham thought it was, in a sense. but she would never have dared say so aloud, even to her husband--or, rather, especially to her husband. in matters of men and women he was thoroughly innocent, with the simplicity of the old-time man of the small town and the country; he fancied that, while in grocery matters and the like the world was full of guile, in matters of the heart it was idyllic, arcadian, with never a thought of duplicity, except among a few obviously wicked and designing people. "i guess we both want to see ruth married well," was all she could venture. "i'd rather the girls stayed with us," declared warham. "i'd hate to give them up." "of course," hastily agreed fanny. "still--it's the regular order of nature." "oh, ruth'll marry--only too soon," said warham. "and marry well. i'm not so sure, though, that marrying any of old wright's breed would be marrying what ought to be called well. money isn't everything--not by a long sight--though, of course, it's comfortable." "i never heard anything against sam," protested mrs. warham. "you've heard what i've heard--that he's wild and loose. but then you women like that in a man." "we've got to put up with it, you mean," cried fanny, indignant. "women like it," persisted warham. "and i guess sam's only sowing the usual wild oats, getting ready to settle. no, mother, you let ruth alone. if she wants him, she'll get him--she or susan." mrs. warham compressed her lips and lowered her eyes. ruth or susan--as if it didn't matter which! "susan isn't _ours_," she could not refrain from saying. "indeed, she is!" retorted george warmly. "why, she couldn't be more our own----" "yes, certainly," interrupted fanny. she moved toward the door. she saw that without revealing her entire scheme--hers and ruth's--she could make no headway with george. and if she did reveal it he would sternly veto it. so she gave up that direction. she went upstairs; george took his hat from the front hall rack and pushed open the screen door. as he appeared on the veranda susan was picking dead leaves from one of the hanging baskets; ruth, seated in the hammock, hands in lap, her whole attitude intensely still, was watching her with narrowed eyes. "what's this i hear," cried warham, laughing, "about you two girls setting your caps for sam wright?" and his good-humored brown eyes glanced at ruth, passed on to susan's wealth of wavy dark hair and long, rounded form, and lingered there. ruth lowered her eyes and compressed her lips, a trick she had borrowed from her mother along with the peculiarities of her mother's disposition that it fitted. susan flung a laughing glance over her shoulder at her uncle. "not ruth," said she. "only me. i saw him first, so he's mine. he's coming to see me this evening." "so i hear. well, the moon's full and your aunt and i'll not interrupt--at least not till ten o'clock. no callers on a child like you after ten." "oh, i don't think i'll be able to hold him that long." "don't you fret, brownie. but i mustn't make you vain. coming along to the store?" "no. tomorrow," said susan. "i can finish in the morning. i'm going to wear my white dress with embroidery, and it's got to be pressed--and that means i must do it myself." "poor sam! and i suppose, when he calls, you'll come down as if you'd put on any old thing and didn't care whether he came or not. and you'll have primped for an hour--and he, too--shaving and combing and trying different ties." susan sparkled at the idea of a young man, and _such_ a young man, taking trouble for her. ruth, pale, kept her eyes down and her lips compressed. she was picturing the gallant appearance the young sophomore from yale, away off in the gorgeous fashionable east, would make as he came in at that gate yonder and up the walk and seated himself on the veranda--with susan! evidently her mother had failed; susan was not to be taken away. when warham departed down the walk ruth rose; she could not bear being alone with her triumphant rival--triumphant because unconscious. she knew that to get sam to herself all she would have to do would be to hint to susan, the generous, what she wanted. but pride forbade that. as her hand was on the knob of the screen door, susan said: "why don't you like sam?" "oh, i think he's stuck-up. he's been spoiled in the east." "why, i don't see any sign of it." "you were too flattered by his talking to you," said ruth, with a sweet-sour little laugh--an asp of a sneer hid in a basket of flowers. susan felt the sting; but, seeing only the flowers, did not dream whence it had come. "it _was_ nice, wasn't it?" said she, gayly. "maybe you're right about him, but i can't help liking him. you must admit he's handsome." "he has a bad look in his eyes," replied ruth. such rage against susan was swelling within her that it seemed to her she would faint if she did not release at least part of it. "you want to look out for him, susie," said she, calmly and evenly. "you don't want to take what he says seriously." "of course not," said susan, quite honestly, though she, no more than the next human being, could avoid taking seriously whatever was pleasantly flattering. "he'd never think of marrying you." ruth trembled before and after delivering this venomous shaft. "marrying!" cried susan, again quite honestly. "why, i'm only seventeen." ruth drew a breath of relief. the shaft had glanced off the armor of innocence without making the faintest dent. she rushed into the house. she did not dare trust herself with her cousin. what might the demon within her tempt her to say next? "come up, ruth!" called her mother. "the dress is ready for the last try-on. i think it's going to hang beautifully." ruth dragged herself up the stairs, lagged into the sitting-room, gazed at the dress with a scowl. "what did father say?" she asked. "it's no use trying to do anything with your father." ruth flung herself in a corner of the sofa. "the only thing i can think of," said her mother, humbly and timidly, "is phone the sinclairs as i originally set out to do." "and have the whole town laughing at me. . . . oh, what do i care, anyhow!" "arthur sinclair's taller and a sight handsomer. right in the face, sam's as plain as dick's hatband. his looks is all clothes and polish--and mighty poor polish, i think. arthur's got rise in him, too, while sam--well, i don't know what'd become of him if old wright lost his money." but arthur, a mere promise, seemed poor indeed beside sam, the actually arrived. to marry sam would be to step at once into grandeur; to marry arthur would mean years of struggle. besides, arthur was heavy, at least seemed heavy to light ruth, while sam was her ideal of gay elegance. "i _detest_ arthur sinclair," she now announced. "you can get sam if you want him," said her mother confidently. "one evening with a mere child like susie isn't going to amount to much." ruth winced. "do you suppose i don't know that?" cried she. "what makes me so mad is his impudence--coming here to see her when he wouldn't marry her or take her any place. it's insulting to us all." "oh, i don't think it's as bad as all that, ruthie," soothed her mother, too simple-minded to accept immediately this clever subtlety of self-deception. "you know this town--how people talk. why, his sister----" and she related their conversation at the gate that morning. "you ought to have sat on her hard, ruth," said mrs. warham, with dangerously sparkling eyes. "no matter what we may think privately, it gives people a low opinion of us to----" "don't i know that!" shrilled ruth. she began to weep. "i'm ashamed of myself." "but we must try the dress on." mrs. warham spread the skirt, using herself as form. "isn't it too lovely!" ruth dried her eyes as she gazed. the dress was indeed lovely. but her pleasure in it was shadowed by the remembrance that most of the loveliness was due to susan's suggestions. still, she tried it on, and felt better. she would linger until sam came, would exhibit herself to him; and surely he would not tarry long with susan. this project improved the situation greatly. she began her toilet for the evening at once, though it was only three o'clock. susan finished her pressing and started to dress at five--because she knew ruth would be appealing to her to come in and help put the finishing touches to the toilet for the party. and, sure enough, at half-past five, before she had nearly finished, ruth, with a sneaking humility, begged her to come "for half a minute--if you don't mind--and have got time." susan did ruth's hair over, made her change to another color of stockings and slippers, put the dress on her, did nearly an hour's refitting and redraping. both were late for supper; and after supper susan had to make certain final amendments to the wonderful toilet, and then get herself ready. so it was ruth alone who went down when sam wright came. "my, but you do look all to the good, ruth!" cried sam. and his eyes no less than his tone showed that he meant it. he hadn't realized what a soft white neck the blond cousin had, or how perfectly her shoulders rounded into her slim arms. as ruth moved to depart, he said: "don't be in such a rush. wait till susie finishes her primping and comes down." "she had to help me," said ruth, with a righteousness she could justly plume herself upon. "that's why she's late. no, i must get along." she was wise enough to resist the temptation to improve upon an already splendid impression. "come as soon as you can." "i'll be there in a few minutes," sam assured her convincingly. "save some dances for me." ruth went away happy. at the gate she glanced furtively back. sam was looking after her. she marched down the street with light step. "i must wear low-necked dresses more in the evenings," she said to herself. "it's foolish for a girl to hide a good neck." sam, at the edge of the veranda, regretting his promise to call on susan, was roused by her voice: "did you ever see anything as lovely as ruth?" sam's regret vanished the instant he looked at her, and the greedy expression came into his sensual, confident young face. "she's a corker," said he. "but i'm content to be where i am." susan's dress was not cut out in the neck, was simply of the collarless kind girls of her age wear. it revealed the smooth, voluptuous yet slender column of her throat. and her arms, bare to just above the elbows, were exquisite. but susan's fascination did not lie in any or in all of her charms, but in that subtlety of magnetism which account for all the sensational phenomena of the relations of men and women. she was a clever girl--clever beyond her years, perhaps--though in this day seventeen is not far from fully developed womanhood. but even had she been silly, men would have been glad to linger on and on under the spell of the sex call which nature had subtly woven into the texture of her voice, into the glance of her eyes, into the delicate emanations of her skin. they talked of all manner of things--games and college east and west--the wonders of new york--the weather, finally. sam was every moment of the time puzzling how to bring up the one subject that interested both above all others, that interested him to the exclusion of all others. he was an ardent student of the game of man and woman, had made considerable progress at it--remarkable progress, in view of his bare twenty years. he had devised as many "openings" as an expert chess player. none seemed to fit this difficult case how to make love to a girl of his own class whom his conventional, socially ambitious nature forbade him to consider marrying. as he observed her in the moonlight, he said to himself: "i've got to look out or i'll make a damn fool of myself with her." for his heady passion was fast getting the better of those prudent instincts he had inherited from a father who almost breathed by calculation. while he was still struggling for an "opening," susan eager to help him but not knowing how, there came from the far interior of the house three distant raps. "gracious!" exclaimed susan. "that's uncle george. it must be ten o'clock." with frank regret, "i'm so sorry. i thought it was early." "yes, it did seem as if i'd just come," said sam. her shy innocence was contagious. he felt an awkward country lout. "well, i suppose i must go." "but you'll come again--sometime?" she asked wistfully. it was her first real beau--the first that had interested her--and what a dream lover of a beau he looked, standing before her in that wonderful light! "come? rather!" exclaimed he in a tone of enthusiasm that could not but flatter her into a sort of intoxication. "i'd have hard work staying away. but ruth--she'll always be here." "oh, she goes out a lot--and i don't." "will you telephone me--next time she's to be out?" "yes," agreed she with a hesitation that was explained when she added: "but don't think you've got to come. . . . oh, i must go in!" "good night--susie." sam held out his hand. she took it with a queer reluctance. she felt nervous, afraid, as if there were something uncanny lurking somewhere in those moonlight shadows. she gently tried to draw her hand away, but he would not let her. she made a faint struggle, then yielded. it was so wonderful, the sense of the touch of his hand. "susie!" he said hoarsely. and she knew he felt as she did. before she realized it his arms were round her, and his lips had met hers. "you drive me crazy," he whispered. both were trembling; she had become quite cold--her cheeks, her hand, her body even. "you mustn't," she murmured, drawing gently away. "you set me crazy," he repeated. "do you--love me--a little?" "oh, i must go!" she pleaded. tears were glistening in her long dark lashes. the sight of them maddened him. "do you--susie?" he pleaded. "i'm--i'm--very young," she stammered. "yes--yes--i know," he assented eagerly. "but not too young to love, susie? no. because you do--don't you?" the moonlit world seemed a fairyland. "yes," she said softly. "i guess so. i must go. i must." and moved beyond her power to control herself, she broke from his detaining hand and fled into the house. she darted up to her room, paused in the middle of the floor, her hands clasped over her wildly beating heart. when she could move she threw open the shutters and went out on the balcony. she leaned against the window frame and gazed up at the stars, instinctively seeking the companionship of the infinite. curiously enough, she thought little about sam. she was awed and wonderstruck before the strange mysterious event within her, the opening up, the flowering of her soul. these vast emotions, where did they come from? what were they? why did she long to burst into laughter, to burst into tears? why did she do neither, but simply stand motionless, with the stars blazing and reeling in the sky and her heart beating like mad and her blood surging and ebbing? was this--love? yes--it must be love. oh, how wonderful love was--and how sad--and how happy beyond all laughter--and how sweet! she felt an enormous tenderness for everybody and for everything, for all the world--an overwhelming sense of beauty and goodness. her lips were moving. she was amazed to find she was repeating the one prayer she knew, the one aunt fanny had taught her in babyhood. why should she find herself praying? love--love love! she was a woman and she loved! so this was what it meant to be a woman; it meant to love! she was roused by the sound of ruth saying good night to someone at the gate, invisible because of the intervening foliage. why, it must be dreadfully late. the dipper had moved away round to the south, and the heat of the day was all gone, and the air was full of the cool, scented breath of leaves and flowers and grass. ruth's lights shone out upon the balcony. susan turned to slip into her own room. but ruth heard, called out peevishly: "who's there?" "only me," cried susan. she longed to go in and embrace ruth, and kiss her. she would have liked to ask ruth to let her sleep with her, but she felt ruth wouldn't understand. "what are you doing out there?" demanded ruth. "it's 'way after one." "oh--dear--i must go to bed," cried susan. ruth's voice somehow seemed to be knocking and tumbling her new dream-world. "what time did sam wright leave here?" asked ruth. she was standing in her window now. susan saw that her face looked tired and worn, almost homely. "at ten," she replied. "uncle george knocked on the banister." "are you sure it was ten?" said ruth sharply. "i guess so. yes--it was ten. why?" "oh--nothing." "was he at sinclairs'?" "he came as it was over. he and lottie brought me home." ruth was eyeing her cousin evilly. "how did you two get on?" susan flushed from head to foot. "oh--so-so," she answered, in an uncertain voice. "i don't know why he didn't come to sinclairs'," snapped ruth. susan flushed again--a delicious warmth from head to foot. she knew why. so he, too, had been dreaming alone. love! love! "what are you smiling at?" cried ruth crossly. "was i smiling?. . . do you want me to help you undress?" "no," was the curt answer. "good night." "please let me unhook it, at least," urged susan, following ruth into her room. ruth submitted. "did you have a good time?" asked susan. "of course," snapped ruth. "what made you think i didn't?" "don't be a silly, dear. i didn't think so." "i had an awful time--awful!" ruth began to sob, turned fiercely on susan. "leave me alone!" she cried. "i hate to have you touch me." the dress was, of course, entirely unfastened in the back. "you had a quarrel with arthur?" asked susan with sympathy. "but you know he can't keep away from you. tomorrow----" "be careful, susan, how you let sam wright hang around you," cried ruth, with blazing eyes and trembling lips. "you be careful--that's all i've got to say." "why, what do you mean?" asked susan wonderingly. "be careful! he'd never think for a minute of marrying you." the words meant nothing to susan; but the tone stabbed into her heart. "why not?" she said. ruth looked at her cousin, hung her head in shame. "go--go!" she begged. "please go. i'm a bad girl--bad--_bad_! go!" and, crying hysterically, she pushed amazed susan through the connecting door, closed and bolted it. chapter iv when fanny warham was young her mother--compelled by her father--roused--"routed out"--the children at half-past six on week days and at seven on sundays for prayers and breakfast, no matter what time they had gone to bed the night before. the horror of this made such an impression upon her that she never permitted ruth and susan to be awakened; always they slept until they had "had their sleep out." regularity was no doubt an excellent thing for health and for moral discipline; but the best rule could be carried to foolish extremes. until the last year mrs. warham had made her two girls live a life of the strictest simplicity and regularity, with the result that they were the most amazingly, soundly, healthy girls in sutherland. and the regimen still held, except when they had company in the evening or went out--and mrs. warham saw to it that there was not too much of that sort of thing. in all her life thus far susan had never slept less than ten hours, rarely less than twelve. it lacked less than a minute of ten o'clock the morning after sam's call when susan's eyes opened upon her simple, pale-gray bedroom, neat and fresh. she looked sleepily at the little clock on the night stand. "mercy me!" she cried. and her bare feet were on the floor and she was stretching her lithe young body, weak from the relaxation of her profound sleep. she heard someone stirring in ruth's room; instantly ruth's remark, "he'd never think for a minute of marrying you," popped into her head. it still meant nothing to her. she could not have explained why it came back or why she fell to puzzling over it as if it held some mysterious meaning. perhaps the reason was that from early childhood there had been accumulating in some dusky chamber of her mind stray happenings and remarks, all baring upon the unsuspected secret of her birth and the unsuspected strangeness of her position in the world where everyone else was definitely placed and ticketed. she was wondering about ruth's queer hysterical outburst, evidently the result of a quarrel with arthur sinclair. "i guess ruth cares more for him than she lets on," thought she. this love that had come to her so suddenly and miraculously made her alert for signs of love elsewhere. she went to the bolted connecting door; she could not remember when it had ever been bolted before, and she felt forlorn and shut out. "ruth!" she called. "is that you?" a brief silence, then a faint "yes." "may i come in?" "you'd better take your bath and get downstairs." this reminded her that she was hungry. she gathered her underclothes together, and with the bundle in her arms darted across the hall into the bathroom. the cold water acted as champagne promises to act but doesn't. she felt giddy with health and happiness. and the bright sun was flooding the bathroom, and the odors from the big bed of hyacinths in the side lawn scented the warm breeze from the open window. when she dashed back to her room she was singing, and her singing voice was as charming as her speaking voice promised. a few minutes and her hair had gone up in careless grace and she was clad in a fresh dress of tan linen, full in the blouse. this, with her tan stockings and tan slippers and the radiant youth of her face, gave her a look of utter cleanness and freshness that was exceedingly good to see. "i'm ready," she called. there was no answer; doubtless ruth had already descended. she rushed downstairs and into the dining-room. no one was at the little table set in one of the windows in readiness for the late breakfasters. molly came, bringing cocoa, a cereal, hot biscuit and crab-apple preserves, all attractively arranged on a large tray. "i didn't bring much, miss susie," she apologized. "it's so late, and i don't want you to spoil your dinner. we're going to have the grandest chicken that ever came out of an egg." susan surveyed the tray with delighted eyes. "that's plenty," she said, "if you don't talk too much about the chicken. where's ruth?" "she ain't coming down. she's got a headache. it was that salad for supper over to sinclairs' last night. salad ain't fit for a dog to eat, nohow--that's _my_ opinion. and at night--it's sure to bust your face out or give you the headache or both." susan ate with her usual enthusiasm, thinking the while of sam and wondering how she could contrive to see him. she remembered her promise to her uncle. she had not eaten nearly so much as she wanted. but up she sprang and in fifteen minutes was on her way to the store. she had seen neither ruth nor her aunt. "_he_'ll be waiting for me to pass," she thought. and she was not disappointed. there he stood, at the footpath gate into his father's place. he had arrayed himself in a blue and white flannel suit, white hat and shoes; a big expensive-looking cigarette adorned his lips. the martins, the delevans, the castles and the bowens, neighbors across the way, were watching him admiringly through the meshes of lace window curtains. she expected that he would come forward eagerly. instead, he continued to lean indolently on the gate, as if unaware of her approach. and when she was close at hand, his bow and smile were, so it seemed to her, almost coldly polite. into her eyes came a confused, hurt expression. "susie--sweetheart," he said, the voice in as astonishing contrast as the words to his air of friendly indifference. "they're watching us from the windows all around here." "oh--yes," assented she, as if she understood. but she didn't. in sutherland the young people were not so mindful of gossip, which it was impossible to escape, anyhow. still--off there in the east, no doubt, they had more refined ways; without a doubt, whatever sam did was the correct thing. "do you still care as you did last night?" he asked. the effect of his words upon her was so obvious that he glanced nervously round. it was delightful to be able to evoke a love like this; but he did wish others weren't looking. "i'm going to uncle's store," she said. "i'm late." "i'll walk part of the way with you," he volunteered, and they started on. "that--that kiss," he stammered. "i can feel it yet." she blushed deeply, happily. her beauty made him tingle. "so can i," she said. they walked in silence several squares. "when will i see you again?" he asked. "tonight?" "yes--do come down. but--ruth'll be there. i believe artie sinclair's coming." "oh, that counter-jumper?" she looked at him in surprise. "he's an awfully nice fellow," said she. "about the nicest in town." "of course," replied sam elaborately. "i beg your pardon. they think differently about those things in the east." "what thing?" "no matter." sam, whose secret dream was to marry some fashionable eastern woman and cut a dash in fifth avenue life, had no intention of explaining what was what to one who would not understand, would not approve, and would be made auspicious of him. "i suppose ruth and sinclair'll pair off and give us a chance." "you'll come?" "right after din--supper, i mean. in the east we have dinner in the evening." "isn't that queer!" exclaimed susan. but she was thinking of the joys in store for her at the close of the day. "i must go back now," said sam. far up the street he saw his sister's pony cart coming. "you might as well walk to the store." it seemed to her that they both had ever so much to say to each other, and had said nothing. "no. i can't go any further. good-by--that is, till tonight." he was red and stammering. as they shook hands emotion made them speechless. he stumbled awkwardly as he turned to leave, became still more hotly self-conscious when he saw the grin on the faces of the group of loungers at a packing case near the curb. susan did not see the loafers, did not see anything distinctly. her feet sought the uneven brick sidewalk uncertainly, and the blood was pouring into her cheeks, was steaming in her brain, making a red mist before her eyes. she was glad he had left her. the joy of being with him was so keen that it was pain. now she could breathe freely and could dream--dream--dream. she made blunder after blunder in working over the accounts with her uncle, and he began to tease her. "you sure are in love, brownie," declared he. her painful but happy blush delighted him. "tell me all about it?" she shook her head, bending it low to hide her color. "no?. . . sometime?" she nodded. she was glancing shyly and merrily at him now. "well, some hold that first love's best. maybe so. but it seems to me any time's good enough. still--the first time's mighty fine eh?" he sighed. "my, but it's good to be young!" and he patted her thick wavy hair. it did not leak out until supper that sam was coming. warham said to susan, "while ruth's looking out for artie, you and i'll have a game or so of chess, brownie." susan colored violently. "what?" laughed warham. "are _you_ going to have a beau too?" susan felt two pairs of feminine eyes pounce--hostile eyes, savagely curious. she paled with fright as queer, as unprecedented, as those hostile glances. it seemed to her that she had done or was about to do something criminal. she could not speak. an awful silence, then her aunt--she no longer seemed her loving aunt--asked in an ominous voice: "is someone coming to see you, susan?" "sam wright"--stammered susan--"i saw him this morning--he was at their gate--and he said--i think he's coming." a dead silence--warham silent because he was eating, but the two others not for that reason. susan felt horribly guilty, and for no reason. "i'd have spoken of it before," she said, "but there didn't seem to be any chance." she had the instinct of fine shy nature to veil the soul; she found it hard to speak of anything as sacred as this love of hers and whatever related to it. "i can't allow this, susie," said her aunt, with lips tightly drawn against the teeth. "you are too young." "oh, come now, mother," cried warham, good-humoredly. "that's foolishness. let the young folks have a good time. you didn't think you were too young at susie's age." "you don't understand, george," said fanny after she had given him a private frown. susie's gaze was on the tablecloth. "i can't permit sam to come here to see susie." ruth's eyes were down also. about her lips was a twitching that meant a struggle to hide a pleased smile. "i've no objection to susie's having boys of her own age come to see her," continued mrs. warham in the same precise, restrained manner. "but sam is too old." "now, mother----" mrs. warham met his eyes steadily. "i must protect my sister's child, george," she said. at last she had found what she felt was a just reason for keeping sam away from susan, so her tone was honest and strong. warham lowered his gaze. he understood. "oh--as you think best, fan; i didn't mean to interfere," said he awkwardly. he turned on susan with his affection in his eyes. "well, brownie, it looks like chess with your old uncle, doesn't it?" susan's bosom was swelling, her lip trembling. "i--i----" she began. she choked back the sobs, faltered out: "i don't think i could, uncle," and rushed from the room. there was an uncomfortable pause. then warham said, "i must say, fan, i think--if you had to do it--you might have spared the girl's feelings." mrs. warham felt miserable about it also. "susie took me by surprise," she apologized. then, defiantly, "and what else can i do? you know he doesn't come for any good." warham stared in amazement. "now, what does _that_ mean?" he demanded. "you know very well what it means," retorted his wife. her tone made him understand. he reddened, and with too blustering anger brought his fist down on the table. "susan's our daughter. she's ruth's sister." ruth pushed back her chair and stood up. her expression made her look much older than she was. "i wish you could induce the rest of the town to think that, papa," said she. "it'd make my position less painful." and she, too, left the room. "what's she talking about?" asked warham. "it's true, george," replied fanny with trembling lip. "it's all my fault--insisting on keeping her. i might have known!" "i think you and ruth must be crazy. i've seen no sign." "have you seen any of the boys calling on susan since she shot up from a child to a girl? haven't you noticed she isn't invited any more except when it can't be avoided?" warham's face was fiery with rage. he looked helplessly, furiously about. but he said nothing. to fight public sentiment would be like trying to thrust back with one's fists an oncreeping fog. finally he cried, "it's too outrageous to talk about." "if i only knew what to do!" moaned fanny. a long silence, while warham was grasping the fullness of the meaning, the frightful meaning, in these revelations so astounding to him. at last he said: "does _she_ realize?" "i guess so . . . i don't know . . . i don't believe she does. she's the most innocent child that ever grew up." "if i had a chance, i'd sell out and move away." "where?" said his wife. "where would people accept--her?" warham became suddenly angry again. "i don't believe it!" he cried, his look and tone contradicting his words. "you've been making a mountain out of a molehill." and he strode from the room, flung on his hat and went for a walk. as mrs. warham came from the dining-room a few minutes later, ruth appeared in the side veranda doorway. "i think i'll telephone arthur to come tomorrow evening instead," said she. "he'd not like it, with sam here too." "that would be better," assented her mother. "yes, i'd telephone him if i were you." thus it came about that susan, descending the stairs to the library to get a book, heard ruth say into the telephone in her sweetest voice, "yes--tomorrow evening, arthur. some others are coming--the wrights. you'd have to talk to lottie . . . i don't blame you. . . . tomorrow evening, then. so sorry. good-by." the girl on the stairway stopped short, shrank against the wall. a moment, and she hastily reascended, entered her room, closed the door. love had awakened the woman; and the woman was not so unsuspecting, so easily deceived as the child had been. she understood what her cousin and her aunt were about; they were trying to take her lover from her! she understood her aunt's looks and tones, her cousin's temper and hysteria. she sat down upon the floor and cried with a breaking heart. the injustice of it! the meanness of it! the wickedness of a world where even her sweet cousin, even her loving aunt were wicked! she sat there on the floor a long time, abandoned to the misery of a first shattered illusion, a misery the more cruel because never before had either cousin or aunt said or done anything to cause her real pain. the sound of voices coming through the open window from below made her start up and go out on the balcony. she leaned over the rail. she could not see the veranda for the masses of creeper, but the voices were now quite plain in the stillness. ruth's voice gay and incessant. presently a man's voice _his_--and laughing! then his voice speaking--then the two voices mingled--both talking at once, so eager were they! her lover--and ruth was stealing him from her! oh, the baseness, the treachery! and her aunt was helping!. . . sore of heart, utterly forlorn, she sat in the balcony hammock, aching with love and jealousy. every now and then she ran in and looked at the clock. he was staying on and on, though he must have learned she was not coming down. she heard her uncle and aunt come up to bed. now the piano in the parlor was going. first it was ruth singing one of her pretty love songs in that clear small voice of hers. then sam played and sang--how his voice thrilled her! again it was ruthie singing--"sweet dream faces"--susan began to sob afresh. she could see ruth at the piano, how beautiful she looked--and that song--it would be impossible for him not to be impressed. she felt the jealousy of despair. . . . ten o'clock--half-past--eleven o'clock! she heard them at the edge of the veranda--so, at last he was going. she was able to hear their words now: "you'll be up for the tennis in the morning?" he was saying. "at ten," replied ruth. "of course susie's asked, too," he said--and his voice sounded careless, not at all earnest. "certainly," was her cousin's reply. "but i'm not sure she can come." it was all the girl at the balcony rail could do to refrain from crying out a protest. but sam was saying to ruth: "well--good night. haven't had so much fun in a long time. may i come again?" "if you don't, i'll think you were bored." "bored!" he laughed. "that's too ridiculous. see you in the morning. good night. . . . give my love to susie, and tell her i was sorry not to see her." susan was all in a glow as her cousin answered, "i'll tell her." doubtless sam didn't note it, but susan heard the constraint, the hypocrisy in that sweet voice. she watched him stroll down to the gate under the arch of boughs dimly lit by the moon. she stretched her arms passionately toward him. then she went in to go to bed. but at the sound of ruth humming gayly in the next room, she realized that she could not sleep with her heart full of evil thoughts. she must have it out with her cousin. she knocked on the still bolted door. "what is it?" asked ruth coldly. "let me in," answered susan. "i've got to see you." "go to bed, susie. it's late." "you must let me in." the bolt shot back. "all right. and please unhook my dress--there's a dear." susan opened the door, stood on the threshold, all her dark passion in her face. "ruth!" she cried. ruth had turned her back, in readiness for the service the need of which had alone caused her to unbolt the door. at that swift, fierce ejaculation she started, wheeled round. at sight of that wild anger she paled. "why, susie!" she gasped. "i've found you out!" raged susan. "you're trying to steal him from me--you and aunt fanny. it isn't fair! i'll not stand it!" "what _are_ you talking about?" cried ruth. "you must have lost your senses." "i'll not stand it," susan repeated, advancing threateningly "he loves me and i love him." ruth laughed. "you foolish girl! why, he cares nothing about you. the idea of your having your head turned by a little politeness!" "he loves me he told me so. and i love him. i told him so. he's mine! you shan't take him from me!" "he told you he loved you?" ruth's eyes were gleaming and her voice was shrill with hate. "he told you _that_?" "yes--he did!" "i don't believe you." "we love each other," cried the dark girl. "he came to see _me_. you've got arthur sinclair. you shan't take him away!" the two girls, shaking with fury, were facing each other, were looking into each other's eyes. "if sam wright told you he loved you," said ruth, with the icy deliberateness of a cold-hearted anger, "he was trying to--to make a fool of you. you ought to be ashamed of yourself. _we_'re trying to save you." "he and i are engaged!" declared susan. "you shan't take him--and you can't! he _loves_ me!" "engaged!" jeered ruth. "engaged!" she laughed, pretending not to believe, yet believing. she was beside herself with jealous anger. "yes--we'll save you from yourself. you're like your mother. you'd disgrace us--as she did." "don't you dare talk that way, ruth warham. it's false--_false_! my mother is dead--and you're a wicked girl." "it's time you knew the truth," said ruth softly. her eyes were half shut now and sparkling devilishly. "you haven't got any name. you haven't got any father. and no man of any position would marry you. as for sam----" she laughed contemptuously. "do you suppose sam wright would marry a girl without a name?" susan had shrunk against the door jamb. she understood only dimly, but things understood dimly are worse than things that are clear. "me?" she muttered. "me? oh, ruth, you don't mean that." "it's true," said ruth, calmly. "and the sooner you realize it the less likely you are to go the way your mother did." susan stood as if petrified. "if sam wright comes hanging round you any more, you'll know how to treat him," ruth went on. "you'll appreciate that he hasn't any respect for you--that he thinks you're someone to be trifled with. and if he talked engagement, it was only a pretense. do you understand?" the girl leaning in the doorway gazed into vacancy. after a while she answered dully, "i guess so." ruth began to fuss with the things on her bureau. susan went into her room, sat on the edge of the bed. a few minutes, and ruth, somewhat cooled down and not a little frightened, entered. she looked uneasily at the motionless figure. finally she said, "susie!" no answer. more sharply, "susie!" "yes," said susan, without moving. "you understand that i told you for your own good? and you'll not say anything to mother or father? they feel terribly about it, and don't want it ever mentioned. you won't let on that you know?" "i'll not tell," said susan. "you know we're fond of you--and want to do everything for you?" no answer. "it wasn't true--what you said about sam's making love to you?" "that's all over. i don't want to talk about it." "you're not angry with me, susie? i admit i was angry, but it was best for you to know--wasn't it?" "yes," said susan. "you're not angry with me?" "no." ruth, still more uneasy, turned back into her own room because there was nothing else to do. she did not shut the door between. when she was in her nightgown she glanced in at her cousin. the girl was sitting on the edge of the bed in the same position. "it's after midnight," said ruth. "you'd better get undressed." susan moved a little. "i will," she said. ruth went to bed and soon fell asleep. after an hour or so she awakened. light was streaming through the open connecting door. she ran to it, looked in. susan's clothes were in a heap beside the bed. susan herself, with the pillows propping her, was staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. it was impossible for ruth to realize any part of the effect upon her cousin of a thing she herself had known for years and had taken always as a matter of course; she simply felt mildly sorry for unfortunate susan. "susie, dear," she said gently, "do you want me to turn out the light?" "yes," said susan. ruth switched off the light and went back to bed, better content. she felt that now susan would stop her staring and would go to sleep. sam's call had been very satisfactory. ruth felt she had shown off to the best advantage, felt that he admired her, would come to see _her_ next time. and now that she had so arranged it that susan would avoid him, everything would turn out as she wished. "i'll use arthur to make him jealous after a while--and then--i'll have things my own way." as she fell asleep she was selecting the rooms sam and she would occupy in the big wright mansion--"when we're not in the east or in europe." chapter v ruth had forgotten to close her shutters, so toward seven o'clock the light which had been beating against her eyelids for three hours succeeded in lifting them. she stretched herself and yawned noisily. susan appeared in the connecting doorway. "are you awake?" she said softly. "what time is it?" asked ruth, too lazy to turn over and look at her clock. "ten to seven." "do close my shutters for me. i'll sleep an hour or two." she hazily made out the figure in the doorway. "you're dressed, aren't you?" she inquired sleepily. "yes," replied susan. "i've been waiting for you to wake." something in the tone made ruth forget about sleep and rub her fingers over her eyes to clear them for a view of her cousin. susan seemed about as usual--perhaps a little serious, but then she had the habit of strange moods of seriousness. "what did you want?" said ruth. susan came into the room, sat at the foot of the bed--there was room, as the bed was long and ruth short. "i want you to tell me what my mother did." "did?" echoed ruth feebly. "did, to disgrace you and--me." "oh, i couldn't explain--not in a few words. i'm so sleepy. don't bother about it, susan." and she thrust her head deeper into the pillow. "close the shutters." "then i'll have to ask aunt fanny--or uncle george or everybody--till i find out." "but you mustn't do that," protested ruth, flinging herself from left to right impatiently. "what is it you want to know?" "about my mother--and what she did. and why i have no father--why i'm not like you--and the other girls." "oh--it's nothing. i can't explain. don't bother about it. it's no use. it can't be helped. and it doesn't really matter." "i've been thinking," said susan. "i understand a great many things i didn't know i'd noticed--ever since i was a baby. but what i don't understand----" she drew a long breath, a cautious breath, as if there were danger of awakening a pain. "what i don't understand is--why. and--you must tell me all about it. . . . was my mother bad?" "not exactly bad," ruth answered uncertainly. "but she did one thing that was wicked--at least that a woman never can be forgiven for, if it's found out." "did she--did she take something that didn't belong to her?" "no--nothing like that. no, she was, they say, as nice and sweet as she could be--except---- she wasn't married to your father." susan sat in a brown study. "i can't understand," she said at last. "why--she _must_ have been married, or--or--there wouldn't have been me." ruth smiled uneasily. "not at all. don't you really understand?" susan shook her head. "he--he betrayed her--and left her--and then everybody knew because you came." susan's violet-gray eyes rested a grave, inquiring glance upon her cousin's face. "but if he betrayed her---- what does 'betray' mean? doesn't it mean he promised to marry her and didn't?" "something like that," said ruth. "yes--something like that." "then _he_ was the disgrace," said the dark cousin, after reflecting. "no--you're not telling me, ruth. _what_ did my mother do?" "she had you without being married." again susan sat in silence, trying to puzzle it out. ruth lifted herself, put the pillows behind her back. "you don't understand--anything--do you? well, i'll try to explain--though i don't know much about it." and hesitatingly, choosing words she thought fitted to those innocent ears, hunting about for expressions she thought comprehensible to that innocent mind, ruth explained the relations of the sexes--an inaccurate, often absurd, explanation, for she herself knew only what she had picked up from other girls--the fantastic hodgepodge of pruriency, physiology and sheer nonsense which under our system of education distorts and either alarms or inflames the imaginations of girls and boys where the clean, simple truth would at least enlighten them. susan listened with increasing amazement. "well, do you understand?" ruth ended. "how we come into the world--and what marriage means?" "i don't believe it," declared susan. "it's--awful!" and she shivered with disgust. "i tell you it's true," insisted ruth. "i thought it was awful when i first heard--when lottie wright took me out in their orchard, where nobody could listen, and told me what their cook had told her. but i've got kind of used to it." "but it--it's so, then; my mother did marry my father," said susan. "no. she let him betray her. and when a woman lets a man betray her without being married by the preacher or somebody, why, she's ruined forever." "but doesn't marriage mean where two people promise to love each other and then betray each other?" "if they're married, it isn't betraying," explained ruth. "if they're not, it is betraying." susan reflected, nodded slowly. "i guess i understand. but don't you see it was my father who was the disgrace? he was the one that promised to marry and didn't." "how foolish you are!" cried ruth. "i never knew you to be stupid." "but isn't it so?" persisted susan. "yes--in a way," her cousin admitted. "only--the woman must keep herself pure until the ceremony has been performed." "but if he said so to her, wasn't that saying so to god just as much as if the preacher had been there?" "no, it wasn't," said ruth with irritation. "and it's wicked to think such things. all i know is, god says a woman must be married before she--before she has any children. and your mother wasn't." susan shook her head. "i guess you don't understand any better than i do--really." "no, i don't," confessed ruth. "but i'd like to see any man more than kiss me or put his arm round me without our having been married." "but," urged susan, "if he kissed you, wouldn't that be like marriage?" "some say so," admitted ruth. "but i'm not so strict. a little kissing and that often leads a man to propose." susan reflected again. "it all sounds low and sneaking to me," was her final verdict. "i don't want to have anything to do with it. but i'm sure my mother was a good woman. it wasn't her fault if she was lied to, when she loved and believed. and anybody who blames her is low and bad. i'm glad i haven't got any father, if fathers have to be made to promise before everybody or else they'll not keep their word." "well, i'll not argue about it," said ruth. "i'm telling you the way things are. the woman has to take _all_ the blame." susan lifted her head haughtily. "i'd be glad to be blamed by anybody who was wicked enough to be that unjust. i'd not have anything to do with such people." "then you'd live alone." "no, i shouldn't. there are lots of people who are good and----" "that's wicked, susan," interrupted ruth. "all good people think as i tell you they do." "do aunt fanny and uncle george blame my mother?" "of course. how could they help it, when she----" ruth was checked by the gathering lightnings in those violet-gray eyes. "but," pursued susan, after a pause, "even if they were wicked enough to blame my mother, they couldn't blame me." "of course not," declared ruth warmly. "hasn't everybody always been sweet and kind to you?" "but last night you said----" ruth hid her face. "i'm ashamed of what i said last night," she murmured. "i've got, oh, such a _nasty_ disposition, susie." "but what you said--wasn't it so?" ruth turned away her head. susan drew a long sigh, so quietly that ruth could not have heard. "you understand," ruth said gently, "everybody feels sorry for you and----" susan frowned stormily, "they'd better feel sorry for themselves." "oh, susie, dear," cried ruth, impulsively catching her hand, "we all love you, and mother and father and i--we'll stand up for you through everything----" "don't you _dare_ feel sorry for me!" susan cried, wrenching her hand away. ruth's eyes filled with tears. "you can't blame us because everybody---- you know, god says, 'the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children----'" "i'm done with everybody," cried susan, rising and lifting her proud head, "i'm done with god." ruth gave a low scream and shuddered. susan looked round defiantly, as if she expected a bolt from the blue to come hurtling through the open window. but the sky remained serene, and the quiet, scented breeze continued to play with the lace curtains, and the birds on the balcony did not suspend their chattering courtship. this lack of immediate effect from her declaration of war upon man and god was encouraging. the last of the crushed, cowed feeling ruth had inspired the night before disappeared. with a soul haughtily plumed and looking defiance from the violet-gray eyes, susan left her cousin and betook herself down to breakfast. in common with most children, she had always dreamed of a mysterious fate for herself, different from the commonplace routine around her. ruth's revelations, far from daunting her, far from making her feel like cringing before the world in gratitude for its tolerance of her bar sinister, seemed a fascinatingly tragic confirmation of her romantic longings and beliefs. no doubt it was the difference from the common lot that had attracted sam to her; and this difference would make their love wholly unlike the commonplace sutherland wooing and wedding. yes, hers had been a mysterious fate, and would continue to be. nora, an old woman now, had often related in her presence how doctor stevens had brought her to life when she lay apparently, indeed really, dead upon the upstairs sitting-room table--doctor stevens and nora's own prayers. an extraordinary birth, in defiance of the laws of god and man; an extraordinary resurrection, in defiance of the laws of nature--yes, hers would be a life superbly different from the common. and when she and sam married, how gracious and forgiving she would be to all those bad-hearted people; how she would shame them for their evil thoughts against her mother and herself! the susan lenox who sat alone at the little table in the dining-room window, eating bread and butter and honey in the comb, was apparently the same susan lenox who had taken three meals a day in that room all those years--was, indeed, actually the same, for character is not an overnight creation. yet it was an amazingly different susan lenox, too. the first crisis had come; she had been put to the test; and she had not collapsed in weakness but had stood erect in strength. after breakfast she went down main street and at crooked creek avenue took the turning for the cemetery. she sought the warham plot, on the western slope near the quiet brook. there was a clump of cedars at each corner of the plot; near the largest of them were three little graves--the three dead children of george and fanny. in the shadow of the clump and nearest the brook was a fourth grave apart and, to the girl, now thrillingly mysterious: lorella lenox born may , died july , twenty years old! susan's tears scalded her eyes. only a little older than her cousin ruth was now--ruth who often seemed to her, and to everybody, younger than herself. "and she was good--i know she was good!" thought susan. "_he_ was bad, and the people who took his part against her were bad. but _she_ was good!" she started as sam's voice, gay and light, sounded directly behind her. "what are you doing in a graveyard?" cried he. "how did you find me?" she asked, paling and flushing and paling again. "i've been following you ever since you left home." he might have added that he did not try to overtake her until they were where people would be least likely to see. "whose graves are those?" he went on, cutting across a plot and stepping on several graves to join her. she was gazing at her mothers simple headstone. his glance followed hers, he read. "oh--beg pardon," he said confusedly. "i didn't see." she turned her serious gaze from the headstone to his face, which her young imagination transfigured. "you know--about her?" she asked. "i--i--i've heard," he confessed. "but--susie, it doesn't amount to anything. it happened a long time ago--and everybody's forgotten--and----" his stammering falsehoods died away before her steady look. "how did you find out?" "someone just told me," replied she. "and they said you'd never respect or marry a girl who had no father. no--don't deny--please! i didn't believe it--not after what we had said to each other." sam, red and shifting uneasily, could not even keep his downcast eyes upon the same spot of ground. "you see," she went on, sweet and grave, "they don't understand what love means--do they?" "i guess not," muttered he, completely unnerved. why, how seriously the girl had taken him and his words--such a few words and not at all definite! no, he decided, it was the kiss. he had heard of girls so innocent that they thought a kiss meant the same as being married. he got himself together as well as he could and looked at her. "but, susie," he said, "you're too young for anything definite--and i'm not halfway through college." "i understand," said she. "but you need not be afraid i'll change." she was so sweet, so magnetic, so compelling that in spite of the frowns of prudence he seized her hand. at her touch he flung prudence to the winds. "i love you," he cried; and putting his arm around her, he tried to kiss her. she gently but strongly repulsed him. "why not, dear?" he pleaded. "you love me--don't you?" "yes," she replied, her honest eyes shining upon his. "but we must wait until we're married. i don't care so much for the others, but i'd not want uncle george to feel i had disgraced him." "why, there's no harm in a kiss," pleaded he. "kissing you is--different," she replied. "it's--it's--marriage." he understood her innocence that frankly assumed marriage where a sophisticated girl would, in the guilt of designing thoughts, have shrunk in shame from however vaguely suggesting such a thing. he realized to the full his peril. "i'm a damn fool," he said to himself, "to hang about her. but somehow i can't help it--i can't!" and the truth was, he loved her as much as a boy of his age is capable of loving, and he would have gone on and married her but for the snobbishness smeared on him by the provincialism of the small town and burned in by the toadyism of his fashionable college set. as he looked at her he saw beauty beyond any he had ever seen elsewhere and a sweetness and honesty that made him ashamed before her. "no, i couldn't harm her," he told himself. "i'm not such a dog as that. but there's no harm in loving her and kissing her and making her as happy as it's right to be." "don't be mean, susan," he begged, tears in his eyes. "if you love me, you'll let me kiss you." and she yielded, and the shock of the kiss set both to trembling. it appealed to his vanity, it heightened his own agitations to see how pale she had grown and how her rounded bosom rose and fell in the wild tumult of her emotions. "oh, i can't do without seeing you," she cried. "and aunt fanny has forbidden me." "i thought so!" exclaimed he. "i did what i could last night to throw them off the track. if ruth had only known what i was thinking about all the time. where were you?" "upstairs--on the balcony." "i felt it," he declared. "and when she sang love songs i could hardly keep from rushing up to you. susie, we _must_ see each other." "i can come here, almost any day." "but people'd soon find out--and they'd say all sorts of things. and your uncle and aunt would hear." there was no disputing anything so obvious. "couldn't you come down tonight, after the others are in bed and the house is quiet?" he suggested. she hesitated before the deception, though she felt that her family had forfeited the right to control her. but love, being the supreme necessity, conquered. "for a few minutes," she conceded. she had been absorbed; but his eyes, kept alert by his conventional soul, had seen several people at a distance observing without seeming to do so. "we must separate," he now said. "you see, susie, we mustn't be gossiped about. you know how determined they are to keep us apart." "yes--yes," she eagerly agreed. "will you go first, or shall i?" "you go--the way you came. i'll jump the brook down where it's narrow and cut across and into our place by the back way. what time tonight?" "arthur's coming," reflected susie aloud. "ruth'll not let him stay late. she'll be sleepy and will go straight to bed. about half past ten. if i'm not on the front veranda--no, the side veranda--by eleven, you'll know something has prevented." "but you'll surely come?" "i'll come." and it both thrilled and alarmed him to see how much in earnest she was. but he looked love into her loving eyes and went away, too intoxicated to care whither this adventure was leading him. at dinner she felt she was no longer a part of this family. were they not all pitying and looking down on her in their hearts? she was like a deformed person who has always imagined the consideration he has had was natural and equal, and suddenly discovers that it is pity for his deformity. she now acutely felt her aunt's, her cousin's, dislike; and her uncle's gentleness was not less galling. in her softly rounded youthful face there was revealed definitely for the first time an underlying expression of strength, of what is often confused with its feeble counterfeit, obstinacy--that power to resist circumstances which makes the unusual and the firm character. the young mobility of her features suggested the easy swaying of the baby sapling in the gentlest breeze. singularly at variance with it was this expression of tenacity. such an expression in the face of the young infallibly forecasts an agitated and agitating life. it seemed amazingly out of place in susan because theretofore she had never been put to the test in any but unnoted trifles and so had given the impression that she was as docile as she was fearful of giving annoyance or pain and indifferent to having her own way. those who have this temperament of strength encased in gentleness are invariably misunderstood. when they assert themselves, though they are in the particular instance wholly right, they are regarded as wholly and outrageously wrong. life deals hardly with them, punishes them for the mistaken notion of themselves they have through forbearance and gentleness of heart permitted an unobservant world to form. susan spent the afternoon on the balcony before her window, reading and sewing--or, rather, dreaming over first a book, then a dress. when she entered the dining-room at supper time the others were already seated. she saw instantly that something had occurred--something ominous for her. mrs. warham gave her a penetrating, severe look and lowered her eyes; ruth was gazing sullenly at her plate. warham's glance was stern and reproachful. she took her place opposite ruth, and the meal was eaten in silence. ruth left the table first. next mrs. warham rose and saying, "susan, when you've finished, i wish to see you in the sitting-room upstairs," swept in solemn dignity from the room. susan rose at once to follow. as she was passing her uncle he put out his hand and detained her. "i hope it was only a foolish girl's piece of nonsense," said he with an attempt at his wonted kindliness. "and i know it won't occur again. but when your aunt says things you won't like to hear, remember that you brought this on yourself and that she loves you as we all do and is thinking only of your good." "what is it, uncle george?" cried susan, amazed. "what have i done?" warham looked sternly grieved. "brownie," he reproached, "you mustn't deceive. go to your aunt." she found her aunt seated stiffly in the living-room, her hands folded upon her stomach. so gradual had been the crucial middle-life change in fanny that no one had noted it. this evening susan, become morbidly acute, suddenly realized the contrast between the severe, uncertain-tempered aunt of today and the amiable, altogether and always gentle aunt of two years before. "what is it, aunt?" she said, feeling as if she were before a stranger and an enemy. "the whole town is talking about your disgraceful doings this morning," ruth's mother replied in a hard voice. the color leaped in susan's cheeks. "yesterday i forbade you to see sam wright again. and already you disobey." "i did not say i would not see him again," replied susan. "i thought you were an honest, obedient girl," cried fanny, the high shrill notes in her voice rasping upon the sensitive, the now morbidly sensitive, susan. "instead--you slip away from the house and meet a young man--and permit him to take _liberties_ with you." susan braced herself. "i did not go to the cemetery to meet him," she replied; and that new or, rather, newly revived tenacity was strong in her eyes, in the set of her sweet mouth. "he saw me on the way and followed. i did let him kiss me--once. but i had the right to." "you have disgraced yourself--and us all." "we are going to be married." "i don't want to hear such foolish talk!" cried mrs. warham violently. "if you had any sense, you'd know better." "he and i do not feel as you do about my mother," said the girl with quiet dignity. mrs. warham shivered before this fling. "who told you?" she demanded. "it doesn't matter; i know." "well, miss, since you know, then i can tell you that your uncle and i realize you're going the way your mother went. and the whole town thinks you've gone already. they're all saying, 'i told you so! i told you so! like her mother!'" mrs. warham was weeping hysterical tears of fury. "the whole town! and it'll reflect on my ruth. oh, you miserable girl! whatever possessed me to take pity on you!" susan's hands clutched until the nails sunk into the palms. she shut her teeth together, turned to fly. "wait!" commanded mrs. warham. "wait, i tell you!" susan halted in the doorway, but did not turn. "your uncle and i have talked it over." "oh!" cried susan. mrs. warham's eyes glistened. "yes, he has wakened up at last. there's one thing he isn't soft about----" "you've turned him against me!" cried the girl despairingly. "you mean _you_ have turned him against you," retorted her aunt. "anyhow, you can't wheedle him this time. he's as bent as i am. and you must promise us that you won't see sam again." a pause. then susan said, "i can't." "then we'll send you away to your uncle zeke's. it's quiet out there and you'll have a chance to think things over. and i reckon he'll watch you. he's never forgiven your mother. now, will you promise?" "no," said susan calmly. "you have wicked thoughts about my mother, and you are being wicked to me--you and ruth. oh, i understand!" "don't you dare stand there and lie that way!" raved mrs. warham. "i'll give you tonight to think about it. if you don't promise, you leave this house. your uncle has been weak where you were concerned, but this caper of yours has brought him to his senses. we'll not have you a loose character--and your cousin's life spoiled by it. first thing we know, no respectable man'll marry her, either." from between the girl's shut teeth issued a cry. she darted across the hall, locked herself in her room. chapter vi sam did not wait until arthur sinclair left, but, all ardor and impatience, stole in at the warhams' front gate at ten o'clock. he dropped to the grass behind a clump of lilacs, and to calm his nerves and to make the time pass more quickly, smoked a cigarette, keeping its lighted end carefully hidden in the hollow of his hand. he was not twenty feet away, was seeing and hearing, when arthur kissed ruth good night. he laughed to himself. "how disappointed she looked last night when she saw i wasn't going to do that!" what a charmer susie must be when the thought of her made the idea of kissing as pretty a girl as ruth uninteresting, almost distasteful! sinclair departed; the lights in parlor and hall went out; presently light appeared through the chinks in some of the second-story shutters. then followed three-quarters of an hour of increasing tension. the tension would have been even greater had he seen the young lady going leisurely about her preparations for bed. for ruth was of the orderly, precise women who are created to foster the virtue of patience in those about them. it took her nearly as long to dress for bed as for a party. she did her hair up in curl papers with the utmost care; she washed and rinsed and greased her face and neck and gave them a thorough massage. she shook out and carefully hung or folded or put to air each separate garment. she examined her silk stockings for holes, found one, darned it with a neatness rivaling that of a _stoppeur_. she removed from her dressing table and put away in drawers everything that was out of place. she closed each drawer tightly, closed and locked the closets, looked under the bed, turned off the lights over the dressing table. she completed her toilet with a slow washing of her teeth, a long spraying of her throat, and a deliberate, thoroughgoing dripping of boracic acid into each eye to keep and improve its clearness and brilliancy. she sat on the bed, reflected on what she had done, to assure herself that nothing had been omitted. after a slow look around she drew off her bedroom slippers, set them carefully side by side near the head of the bed. she folded her nightgown neatly about her legs, thrust them down into the bed. again she looked slowly, searchingly, about the room to make absolutely sure she had forgotten nothing, had put everything in perfect order. once in bed, she hated to get out; yet if she should recall any omission, however slight, she would be unable to sleep until she had corrected it. finally, sure as fallible humanity can be, she turned out the last light, lay down--went instantly to sleep. it was hardly a quarter of an hour after the vanishing of that last ray when sam, standing now with heart beating fast and a lump of expectancy, perhaps of trepidation, too, in his throat, saw a figure issue from the front door and move round to the side veranda. he made a detour on the lawn, so as to keep out of view both from house and street, came up to the veranda, called to her softly. "can you get over the rail?" asked she in the same low tone. "let's go back to the summer house," urged he. "no. come up here," she insisted. "be careful. the windows above are open." he climbed the rail noiselessly and made an impetuous move for her hand. she drew back. "no, sam dear," she said. "i know it's foolish. but i've an instinct against it--and we mustn't." she spoke so gently that he persisted and pleaded. it was some time before he realized how much firmness there was under her gentleness. she was so afraid of making him cross; yet he also saw that she would withstand at any cost. he placed himself beside her on the wicker lounge, sitting close, his cheek almost against hers, that they might hear each other without speaking above a whisper. after one of those silences which are the peculiar delight of lovers, she drew a long breath and said: "i've got to go away, sam. i shan't see you again for a long time." "they heard about this morning? they're sending you away?" "no--i'm going. they feel that i'm a disgrace and a drag. so i can't stay." "but--you've _got_ to stay!" protested sam. in wild alarm he suspected she was preparing to make him elope with her--and he did not know to what length of folly his infatuation might whirl him. "you've no place to go," he urged. "i'll find a place," said she. "you mustn't--you mustn't, susie! why, you're only seventeen--and have no experience." "i'll _get_ experience," said she. "nothing could be so bad as staying here. can't you see that?" he could not. like so many of the children of the rich, he had no trace of over-nice sense of self-respect, having been lying and toadying all his life to a father who used the power of his wealth at home no less, rather more, than abroad. but he vaguely realized what delicacy of feeling lay behind her statement of her position; and he did not dare express his real opinion. he returned to the main point. "you've simply got to put up with it for the present, susie," he insisted. "but, then, of course, you're not serious." "yes. i am going." "you'll think it over, and see i'm right, dear." "i'm going tonight." "tonight!" he cried. "sh-h!" sam looked apprehensively around. both breathed softly and listened with straining ears. his exclamation had not been loud, but the silence was profound. "i guess nobody heard," he finally whispered. "you mustn't go, susie." he caught her hand and held it. "i love you, and i forbid it." "i _must_ go, dear," answered she. "i've decided to take the midnight boat for cincinnati." in the half darkness he gazed in stupefaction at her--this girl of only seventeen calmly resolving upon and planning an adventure so daring, so impossible. as he had been born and bred in that western country where the very children have more independence than the carefully tamed grown people of the east, he ought to have been prepared for almost anything. but his father had undermined his courage and independence; also his year in the east had given him somewhat different ideas of women. susan's announcement seemed incredible. he was gathering himself for pouring out a fresh protest when it flashed through his mind--why not? she would go to cincinnati. he could follow in a few days or a week--and then-- well, at least they would be free and could have many happy days together. "why, how could you get to cincinnati?" he said. "you haven't any money." "i've a twenty-dollar gold piece uncle gave me as a keepsake. and i've got seventeen dollars in other money, and several dollars in change," explained she. "i've got two hundred and forty-three dollars and fifty cents in the bank, but i can't get that--not now. they'll send it to me when i find a place and am settled and let them know." "you can't do it, susie! you can't and you mustn't." "if you knew what they said to me! oh, i _couldn't_ stay, sam. i've got some of my clothes--a little bundle behind the front door. as soon as i'm settled i'll let you know." a silence, then he, hesitatingly, "don't you--do you--hadn't i better go with you?" she thrilled at this generosity, this new proof of love. but she said: "no, i wouldn't let you do that. they'd blame you. and i want them to know it's all my own doing." "you're right, susie," said the young man, relieved and emphatic. "if i went with you, it'd only get both of us into deeper trouble." again silence, with sam feeling a kind of awe as he studied the resolute, mysterious profile of the girl, which he could now see clearly. at last he said: "and after you get there, susie--what will you do?" "find a boarding house, and then look for a place." "what kind of a place?" "in a store--or making dresses--or any kind of sewing. or i could do housework." the sex impulse is prolific of generous impulses. he, sitting so close to her and breathing in through his skin the emanations of her young magnetism, was moved to the depths by the picture her words conjured. this beautiful girl, a mere child, born and bred in the lady class, wandering away penniless and alone, to be a prey to the world's buffetings which, severe enough in reality, seem savage beyond endurance to the children of wealth. as he pictured it his heart impulsively expanded. it was at his lips to offer to marry her. but his real self--and one's real self is vastly different from one's impulses--his real self forbade the words passage. not even the sex impulse, intoxicating him as it then was, could dethrone snobbish calculation. he was young; so while he did not speak, he felt ashamed of himself for not speaking. he felt that she must be expecting him to speak, that she had the right to expect it. he drew a little away from her, and kept silent. "the time will soon pass," said she absently. "the time? then you intend to come back?" "i mean the time until you're through college and we can be together." she spoke as one speaks of a dream as to which one has never a doubt but that it will come true. it was so preposterous, this idea that he would marry her, especially after she had been a servant or god knows what for several years--it was so absurd that he burst into a sweat of nervous terror. and he hastily drew further away. she felt the change, for she was of those who are born sensitive. but she was far too young and inexperienced to have learned to interpret aright the subtle warning of the nerves. "you are displeased with me?" she asked timidly. "no--oh, no, susie," he stammered. "i--i was thinking. do put off going for a day or two. there's no need of hurrying." but she felt that by disobeying her aunt and coming down to see him she had forfeited the right to shelter under that roof. "i can't go back," said she. "there's a reason." she would not tell him the reason; it would make him feel as if he were to blame. "when i get a place in cincinnati," she went on, "i'll write to you." "not here," he objected. "that wouldn't do at all. no, send me a line to the gibson house in cincinnati, giving me your address." "the gibson house," she repeated. "i'll not forget that name. gibson house." "send it as soon as you get a place. i may be in cincinnati soon. but this is all nonsense. you're not going. you'd be afraid." she laughed softly. "you don't know me. now that i've got to go, i'm glad." and he realized that she was not talking to give herself courage, that her words were literally true. this made him admire her, and fear her, too. there must be something wild and unwomanly in her nature. "i guess she inherits it from her mother--and perhaps her father, whoever he was." probably she was simply doing a little early what she'd have been sure to do sooner or later, no matter what had happened. on the whole, it was just as well that she was going. "i can take her on east in the fall. as soon as she has a little knowledge of the world she'll not expect me to marry her. she can get something to do. i'll help her." and now he felt in conceit with himself again--felt that he was going to be a good, generous friend to her. "perhaps you'll be better off--once you get started," said he. "i don't see how i could be worse off. what is there here for _me_?" he wondered at the good sense of this from a mere child. it was most unlikely that any man of the class she had been brought up in would marry her; and how could she endure marriage with a man of the class in which she might possibly find a husband? as for reputation-- she, an illegitimate child, never could have a reputation, at least not so long as she had her looks. after supper, to kill time, he had dropped in at willett's drug store, where the young fellows loafed and gossiped in the evenings; all the time he was there the conversation had been made up of sly digs and hints about graveyard trysts, each thrust causing the kind of laughter that is the wake of the prurient and the obscene. yes, she was right. there could be "nothing in it" for her in sutherland. he was filled with pity for her. "poor child! what a shame!" there must be something wrong with a world that permitted such iniquities. the clock struck twelve. "you must go," she said. "sometimes the boat comes as early as half-past." and she stood up. as he faced her the generous impulse surged again. he caught her in his arms, she not resisting. he kissed her again and again, murmuring disconnected words of endearment and fighting back the offer to marry her. "i mustn't! i mustn't!" he said to himself. "what'd become of us?" if his passions had been as virgin, as inexperienced, as hers, no power could have held him from going with her and marrying her. but experience had taught him the abysmal difference between before and after; and he found strength to be sensible, even in the height of his passionate longing for her. she clasped her arms about his neck. "oh, my dear love!" she murmured. "i'd do anything for you. i feel that you love me as i love you." "yes--yes." and he pressed his lips to hers. an instant and she drew away, shaking and panting. he tried to clasp her again, but she would not have it. "i can't stand it!" he murmured. "i must go with you--i must!" "no!" she replied. "it wouldn't do unless we were really married." wistfully, "and we can't be that yet--can we? there isn't any way?" his passion cooled instantly. "there isn't any way," he said regretfully. "i'd not dare tell my father." "yes, we must wait till you're of age, and have your education, and are free. then----" she drew a long breath, looked at him with a brave smile. the large moon was shining upon them. "we'll think of that, and not let ourselves be unhappy--won't we?" "yes," he said. "but i must go." "i forgot for the minute. good-by, dearest." she put up her lips. he kissed her, but without passion now. "you might go with me as far as the wharf," she suggested. "no--someone might see--and that would ruin everything. i'd like to--i'd----" "it wouldn't do," she interrupted. "i wouldn't let you come." with sudden agitation she kissed him--he felt that her lips were cold. he pressed her hands--they, too, were cold. "good-by, my darling," he murmured, vaulted lightly over the rail and disappeared in the deep shadows of the shrubbery. when he was clear of the grounds he paused to light a cigarette. his hand was shaking so that the match almost dropped from his fingers. "i've been making a damn fool of myself," he said half aloud. "a double damn fool! i've got to stop that talk about marrying, somehow--or keep away from her. but i can't keep away. i _must_ have her! why in the devil can't she realize that a man in my position couldn't marry her? if it wasn't for this marrying talk, i'd make her happy. i've simply got to stop this marrying talk. it gets worse and worse." her calmness deceived her into thinking herself perfectly sane and sober, perfectly aware of what she was about. she had left her hat and her bundle behind the door. she put on the hat in the darkness of the hall with steady fingers, took up the well-filled shawl strap and went forth, closing the door behind her. in the morning they would find the door unlocked but that would not cause much talk, as sutherland people were all rather careless about locking up. they would not knock at the door of her room until noon, perhaps. then they would find on the pincushion the letter she had written to her uncle, saying good-by and explaining that she had decided to remove forever the taint of her mother and herself from their house and their lives--a somewhat theatrical letter, modeled upon ouida, whom she thought the greatest writer that had ever lived, victor hugo and two or three poets perhaps excepted. her bundle was not light, but she hardly felt it as she moved swiftly through the deserted, moonlit streets toward the river. the wharf boat for the cincinnati and louisville mail steamers was anchored at the foot of pine street. on the levee before it were piled the boxes, bags, cases, crates, barrels to be loaded upon the "up boat." she was descending the gentle slope toward this mass of freight when her blood tingled at a deep, hoarse, mournful whistle from far away; she knew it was the up boat, rounding the bend and sighting the town. the sound echoed musically back and forth between the kentucky and the indiana bluffs, died lingeringly away. again the whistle boomed, again the dark forest-clad steeps sent the echoes to and fro across the broad silver river. and now she could see the steamer, at the bend--a dark mass picked out with brilliant dots of light; the big funnels, the two thick pennants of black smoke. and she could hear the faint pleasant stroke of the paddles of the big side wheels upon the water. at the wharf boat there had not been a sign of life. but with the dying away of the second whistle lights--the lights of lanterns--appeared on the levee close to the water's edge and on the wharf boat itself. and, behind her, the doors of the sutherland hotel opened and its office lit up, in preparation for any chance arrivals. she turned abruptly out of the beaten path down the gravel levee, made for the lower and darker end of the wharf boat. there would be sutherland people going up the river. but they would be more than prompt; everyone came early to boats and trains to begin the sweet draught of the excitement of journeying. so she would wait in the darkness and go aboard when the steamer was about to draw in its planks. at the upper end of the wharf boat there was the broad gangway to the levee for passengers and freight; at the lower and dark and deserted end a narrow beam extended from boat to shore, to hold the boat steady. susan, balancing herself with her bundle, went up to the beam, sat down upon a low stanchion in the darkness where she could see the river. louder and louder grew the regular musical beat of engine and paddle. the searchlight on the forward deck of the _general lytle_, after peering uncertainly, suspiciously, at the entire levee, and at the river, and at the kentucky shore, abruptly focused upon the wharf boat. the _general lytle_ now seemed a blaze of lights--from lower deck, from saloon deck, from pilot house deck, and forward and astern. a hundred interesting sounds came from her--tinkling of bells, calls from deck to deck, whistling, creaking of pulleys, lowing of cattle, grunting of swine, plaint of agitated sheep, the resigned cluckings of many chickens. along the rail of the middle or saloon deck were seated a few passengers who had not yet gone to bed. on the lower deck was a swarm of black roustabouts, their sooty animal faces, their uncannily contrasting white teeth and eyeballs, their strange and varied rags lit up by the torches blazing where a gangplank lay ready for running out. and high and clear in the lovely june night sailed the moon, spreading a faint benign light upon hills and shores and glistening river, upon the graceful, stately mail steamer, now advancing majestically upon the wharf boat. susan watched all, saw all, with quick beating heart and quivering interest. it was the first time that her life had been visited by the fascinating sense of event, real event. the tall, proud, impetuous child-woman, standing in the semi-darkness beside her bundle, was about to cast her stake upon the table in a bold game with destiny. her eyes shone with the wonderful expression that is seen only when courage gazes into the bright face of danger. the steamer touched the edge of the wharf-boat with gentle care; the wharf-boat swayed and groaned. even as the gangplanks were pushing out, the ragged, fantastic roustabouts, with wild, savage, hilarious cries, ran and jumped and scrambled to the wharf-boat like a band of escaping lunatics and darted down its shore planks to pounce upon the piles of freight. the mate, at the steamer edge to superintend the loading, and the wharf master on the levee beside the freight released each a hoarse torrent of profanity to spur on the yelling, laughing roustabouts, more brute than man. torches flared; cow and sheep, pig and chicken, uttered each its own cry of dissatisfaction or dismay; the mate and wharf master cursed because it was the custom to curse; the roustabouts rushed ashore empty-handed, came filing back, stooping under their burdens. it was a scene of animation, of excitement, savage, grotesque, fascinating. susan, trembling a little, so tense were her nerves, waited until the last struggling roustabouts were staggering on the boat, until the deep whistle sounded, warning of approaching departure. then she took up her bundle and put herself in the line of roustabouts, between a half-naked negro, black as coal and bearing a small barrel of beer, and a half-naked mulatto bearing a bundle of loud-smelling untanned skins. "get out of the way, lady!" yelled the mate, eagerly seizing upon a new text for his denunciations. "get out of the way, you black hellions! let the lady pass! look out, lady! you damned sons of hell, what're you about! i'll rip out your bowels----" susan fled across the deck and darted up the stairs to the saloon. the steamer was all white without except the black metal work. within--that is, in the long saloon out of which the cabins opened to right and left and in which the meals were served at extension tables--there was the palatial splendor of white and gilt. at the forward end near the main entrance was the office. susan, peering in from the darkness of the deck, saw that the way was clear. the sutherland passengers had been accommodated. she entered, put her bundle down, faced the clerk behind the desk. "why, howdy, miss lenox," said he genially, beginning to twist his narrow, carefully attended blond mustache. "any of the folks with you?" she remembered his face but not his name. she remembered him as one of the "river characters" regarded as outcast by the christian respectability of sutherland. but she who could not but be polite to everybody smiled pleasantly, though she did not like his expression as he looked at her. "no, i'm alone," said she. "oh--your friends are going to meet you at the wharf in the morning," said he, content with his own explanation. "just sign here, please." and, as she wrote, he went on: "i've got one room left. ain't that lucky? it's a nice one, too. you'll be very comfortable. everybody at home well? i ain't been in sutherland for nigh ten years. every week or so i think i will, and then somehow i don't. here's your key--number right-hand side, well down toward the far end, yonder. two dollars, please. thank you--exactly right. hope you sleep well." "thank you," said susan. she turned away with the key which was thrust through one end of a stick about a foot long, to make it too bulky for absent-minded passengers to pocket. she took up her bundle, walked down the long saloon with its gilt decorations, its crystal chandeliers, its double array of small doors, each numbered. the clerk looked after her, admiration of the fine curve of her shoulders, back, and hips written plain upon his insignificant features. and it was a free admiration he would not have dared show had she not been a daughter of illegitimacy--a girl whose mother's "looseness" raised pleasing if scandalous suggestions and even possibilities in the mind of every man with a carnal eye. and not unnaturally. to think of her was to think of the circumstances surrounding her coming into the world; and to think of those circumstances was to think of immorality. susan, all unconscious of that polluted and impudent gaze, was soon standing before the narrow door numbered , as she barely made out, for the lamps in the saloon chandeliers were turned low. she unlocked it, entered the small clean stateroom and deposited her bundle on the floor. with just a glance at her quarters she hurried to the opposite door--the one giving upon the promenade. she opened it, stepped out, crossed the deserted deck and stood at the rail. the _general lytle_ was drawing slowly away from the wharf-boat. as that part of the promenade happened to be sheltered from the steamer's lights, she was seeing the panorama of sutherland--its long stretch of shaded waterfront, its cupolas and steeples, the wide leafy streets leading straight from the river by a gentle slope to the base of the dark towering bluffs behind the town--all sleeping in peace and beauty in the soft light of the moon. that farthest cupola to the left--it was the number two engine house, and the third place from it was her uncle's house. slowly the steamer, now in mid-stream, drew away from the town. one by one the familiar landmarks--the packing house, the soap factory, the geiss brewery, the tall chimney of the pumping station, the shorn top of reservoir hill--slipped ghostlily away to the southwest. the sobs choked up into her throat and the tears rained from her eyes. they all pitied and looked down on her there; still, it had been home the only home she ever had known or ever would know. and until these last few frightful days, how happy she had been there! for the first time she felt desolate, weak, afraid. but not daunted. it is strange to see in strong human character the strength and the weakness, two flat contradictions, existing side by side and making weak what seems so strong and making strong what seems so weak. however, human character is a tangle of inconsistencies, as disorderly and inchoate as the tangible and visible parts of nature. susan felt weak, but not the kind of weakness that skulks. and there lay the difference, the abysmal difference, between courage and cowardice. courage has full as much fear as cowardice, often more; but it has a something else that cowardice has not. it trembles and shivers but goes forward. wiping her eyes she went back to her own cabin. she had neglected closing its other door, the one from the saloon. the clerk was standing smirking in the doorway. "you must be going away for quite some time," said he. and he fixed upon her as greedy and impudent eyes as ever looked from a common face. it was his battle glance. guileful women, bent on trimming him for anything from a piece of plated jewelry to a saucer of ice cream, had led him to believe that before it walls of virtue tottered and fell like jericho's before the trumpets of joshua. "it makes me a little homesick to see the old town disappear," hastily explained susan, recovering herself. the instant anyone was watching, her emotions always hid. "wouldn't you like to sit out on deck a while?" pursued the clerk, bringing up a winning smile to reinforce the fetching stare. the idea was attractive, for she did not feel like sleep. it would be fine to sit out in the open, watch the moon and the stars, the mysterious banks gliding swiftly by, and new vistas always widening out ahead. but not with this puny, sandy little "river character," not with anybody that night. "no," replied she. "i think i'll go to bed." she had hesitated--and that was enough to give him encouragement. "now, do come," he urged. "you don't know how nice it is. and they say i'm mighty good company." "no, thanks." susan nodded a pleasant dismissal. the clerk lingered. "can't i help you in some way? wouldn't you like me to get you something?" "no--nothing." "going to visit in cincinnati? i know the town from a to izzard. it's a lot of fun over the rhine. i've had mighty good times there--the kind a pretty, lively girl like you would take to." "when do we get to cincinnati?" "about eight--maybe half-past seven. depends on the landings we have to make, and the freight." "then i'll not have much time for sleep," said susan. "good night." and no more realizing the coldness of her manner than the reason for his hanging about, she faced him, hand on the door to close it. "you ain't a bit friendly," wheedled he. "i'm sorry you think so. good night--and thank you." and he could not but withdraw his form from the door. she closed it and forgot him. and she did not dream she had passed through one of those perilous adventures incident to a female traveling alone--adventures that even in the telling frighten ladies whose nervousness for their safety seems to increase in direct proportion to the degree of tranquillity their charms create in the male bosom. she decided it would be unwise regularly to undress; the boat might catch fire or blow up or something. she took off skirt, hat and ties, loosened her waist, and lay upon the lower of the two plain, hard little berths. the throb of the engines, the beat of the huge paddles, made the whole boat tremble and shiver. faintly up from below came the sound of quarrels over crap-shooting, of banjos and singing--from the roustabouts amusing themselves between landings. she thought she would not be able to sleep in these novel and exciting surroundings. she had hardly composed herself before she lost consciousness, to sleep on and on dreamlessly, without motion. chapter vii she was awakened by a crash so uproarious that she sat bolt upright before she had her eyes open. her head struck stunningly against the bottom of the upper berth. this further confused her thoughts. she leaped from the bed, caught up her slippers, reached for her opened-up bundle. the crash was still billowing through the boat; she now recognized it as a great gong sounding for breakfast. she sat down on the bed and rubbed her head and laughed merrily. "i _am_ a greenhorn!" she said. "another minute and i'd have had the whole boat laughing at me." she felt rested and hungry--ravenously hungry. she tucked in her blouse, washed as well as she could in the tiny bowl on the little washstand. then before the cloudy watermarked mirror she arranged her scarcely mussed hair. a charming vision of fresh young loveliness, strong, erect, healthy, bright of eye and of cheek, she made as, after a furtive look up and down the saloon, she stepped from her door a very few minutes after the crash of that gong. with much scuffling and bustling the passengers, most of them country people, were hurrying into places at the tables which now had their extension leaves and were covered with coarse white tablecloths and with dishes of nicked stoneware, white, indeed, but shabbily so. but susan's young eyes were not critical. to her it all seemed fine, with the rich flavor of adventure. a more experienced traveler might have been filled with gloomy foreboding by the quality of the odor from the cooking. she found it delightful and sympathized with the unrestrained eagerness of the homely country faces about her, with the children beating their spoons on their empty plates. the colored waiters presently began to stream in, each wearing a soiled white jacket, each bearing aloft a huge tray on which were stacked filled dishes and steaming cups. colored people have a keen instinct for class. one of the waiters happened to note her, advanced bowing and smiling with that good-humored, unservile courtesy which is the peculiar possession of the americanized colored race. he flourished her into a chair with a "good morning, miss. it's going to be a fine day." and as soon as she was seated he began to form round her plate a large inclosing arc of side dishes--fried fish, fried steak, fried egg, fried potatoes, wheat cakes, canned peaches, a cup of coffee. he drew toward her a can of syrup, a pitcher of cream, and a bowl of granulated sugar. "anything else?" said he, with a show of teeth white and sound. "no--nothing. thank you so much." her smile stimulated him to further courtesies. "some likes the yeggs biled. shall i change 'em?" "no. i like them this way." she was so hungry that the idea of taking away a certainty on the chance of getting something out of sight and not yet cooked did not attract her. "perhaps--a little better piece of steak?" "no--this looks fine." her enthusiasm was not mere politeness. "i clean forgot your hot biscuits." and away he darted. when he came back with a heaping plate of hot biscuits, sally lunn and cornbread, she was eating as heartily as any of her neighbors. it seemed to her that never had she tasted such grand food as this served in the white and gold saloon with strangeness and interest all about her and the delightful sense of motion--motion into the fascinating golden unknown. the men at the table were eating with their knives; each had one protecting forearm and hand cast round his arc of small dishes as if to ward off probable attempt at seizure. and they swallowed as if the boat were afire. the women ate more daintily, as became members of the finer sex on public exhibition. they were wearing fingerless net gloves, and their little fingers stood straight out in that gesture which every truly elegant woman deems necessary if the food is to be daintily and artistically conveyed to her lips. the children mussed and gormed themselves, their dishes, the tablecloth. susan loved it all. her eyes sparkled. she ate everything, and regretted that lack of capacity made it impossible for her to yield to the entreaties of her waiter that she "have a little more." she rose, went into the nearest passageway between saloon and promenade, stealthily took a ten-cent piece from her pocketbook. she called her waiter and gave it to him. she was blushing deeply, frightened lest this the first tip she had ever given or seen given be misunderstood and refused. "i'm so much obliged," she said. "you were very nice." the waiter bowed like a prince, always with his simple, friendly smile; the tip disappeared under his apron. "nobody could help being nice to you, lady." she thanked him again and went to the promenade. it seemed to her that they had almost arrived. along shore stretched a continuous line of houses--pretty houses with gardens. there were electric cars. nearer the river lay several parallel lines of railway track along which train after train was speeding, some of them short trains of ordinary day coaches, others long trains made up in part of coaches grander and more beautiful than any she had ever seen. she knew they must be the parlor and dining and sleeping cars she had read about. and now they were in the midst of a fleet of steamers and barges, and far ahead loomed the first of cincinnati's big suspension bridges, pictures of which she had many a time gazed at in wonder. there was a mingling of strange loud noises--whistles, engines, on the water, on shore; there was a multitude of what seemed to her feverish activities--she who had not been out of quiet sutherland since she was a baby too young to note things. the river, the shores, grew more and more crowded. susan's eyes darted from one new object to another; and eagerly though she looked she felt she was missing more than she saw. "why, susan lenox!" exclaimed a voice almost in her ear. she closed her teeth upon a cry; suddenly she was back from wonderland to herself. she turned to face dumpy, dressy mrs. waterbury and her husband with the glossy kinky ringlets and the long wavy mustache. "how do you do?" she stammered. "we didn't know you were aboard," said mrs. waterbury, a silly, duck-legged woman looking proudly uncomfortable in her bead-trimmed black silk. "yes--i'm--i'm here," confessed susan. "going to the city to visit?" "yes," said susan. she hesitated, then repeated, "yes." "what elegant breakfasts they do serve on these boats! i suppose your friends'll meet you. but mort and i'll look after you till they come." "oh, it isn't necessary," protested susan. the steamer was passing under the bridge. there were cities on both shores--huge masses of dingy brick, streets filled with motion of every kind--always motion, incessant motion, and change. "we're about there, aren't we?" she asked. "the wharf's up beyond the second bridge--the covington bridge," explained waterbury with the air of the old experienced globe-trotter. "there's a third one, further up, but you can't see it for the smoke." and he went on and on, volubly airing his intimate knowledge of the great city which he visited once a year for two or three days to buy goods. he ended with a scornful, "my, but cincinnati's a dirty place!" dirty it might be, but susan loved it, dirt and all. the smoke, the grime somehow seemed part of it, one of its charms, one of the things that made it different from, and superior to, monotonous country and country town. she edged away from the waterburys, hid in her stateroom watching the panorama through the curtained glass of her promenade deck door. she was completely carried away. the city! so, this was the city! and her dreams of travel, of new sights, new faces, were beginning to come true. she forgot herself, forgot what she had left behind, forgot what she was to face. all her power of thought and feeling was used up in absorbing these unfolding wonders. and when the june sun suddenly pierced the heavy clouds of fog and smoke, she clasped her hands and gasped, "lovely! oh, how lovely!" and now the steamer was at the huge wharf-boat, in shape like the one at sutherland, but in comparative size like the real noah's ark beside a toy ark. and from the whole tremendous scene rose an enormous clamor, the stentorian voice of the city. that voice is discordant and terrifying to many. to susan, on that day, it was the most splendid burst of music. "awake--awake!" it cried. "awake, and _live!_" she opened her door that she might hear it better--rattle and rumble and roar, shriek of whistle, clang of bell. and the people!--thousands on thousands hurrying hither and yon, like bees in a hive. "awake awake, and live!" the noises from the saloon reminded her that the journey was ended, that she must leave the boat. and she did not know where to go--she and her bundle. she waited until she saw the waterburys, along with the other passengers, moving up the levee. then she issued forth--by the promenade deck door so that she would not pass the office. but at the head of the companionway, in the forward part of the deck, there the clerk stood, looking even pettier and more offensive by daylight. she thought to slip by him. but he stopped stroking his mustache and called out to her, "haven't your friends come?" she frowned, angry in her nervousness. "i shall get on very well," she said curtly. then she repented, smiled politely, added, "thank you." "i'll put you in a carriage," he offered, hastening down the stairs to join her. she did not know what to say or do. she walked silently beside him, he carrying her bundle. they crossed the wharf-boat. a line of dilapidated looking carriages was drawn up near the end of the gangplank. the sight of them, the remembrance of what she had heard of the expensiveness of city carriages, nerved her to desperation. "give me my things, please," she said. "i think i'll walk." "where do you want to go?" the question took her breath away. with a quickness that amazed her, her lips uttered, "the gibson house." "oh! that's a right smart piece. but you can take a car. i'll walk with you to the car. there's a line a couple of squares up that goes almost by the door. you know it isn't far from fourth street." she was now in a flutter of terror. she went stumbling along beside him, not hearing a word of his voluble and flirtatious talk. they were in the midst of the mad rush and confusion. the noises, no longer mingled but individual, smote savagely upon her ears, startling her, making her look dazedly round as if expecting death to swoop upon her. at the corner of fourth street the clerk halted. he was clear out of humor with her, so dumb, so unappreciative. "there'll be a car along soon," said he sourly. "you needn't wait," said she timidly. "thank you again." "you can't miss it. good-by." and he lifted his hat--"tipped" it, rather--for he would not have wasted a full lift upon such a female. she gave a gasp of relief when he departed; then a gasp of terror--for upon the opposite corner stood the waterburys. the globe-trotter and his wife were so dazed by the city that they did not see her, though in their helpless glancing round they looked straight at her. she hastily ran into a drug store on the corner. a young man in shirt sleeves held up by pink garters, and with oily black hair carefully parted and plastered, put down a pestle and mortar and came forward. he had kind brown eyes, but there was something wrong with the lower part of his face. susan did not dare look to see what it was, lest he should think her unfeeling. he was behind the counter. susan saw the soda fountain. as if by inspiration, she said, "some chocolate soda, please." "ice cream?" asked the young man in a peculiar voice, like that of one who has a harelip. "please," said susan. and then she saw the sign, "ice cream, ten cents," and wished she hadn't. the young man mixed the soda, put in a liberal helping of ice cream, set it before her with a spoon in it, rested the knuckles of his brown hairy hands on the counter and said: "it _is_ hot." "yes, indeed," assented susan. "i wonder where i could leave my bundle for a while. i'm a stranger and i want to look for a boarding house." "you might leave it here with me," said the young man. "that's about our biggest line of trade--that and postage stamps and telephone--_and_ the directory. "he laughed heartily. susan did not see why; she did not like the sound, either, for the young man's deformity of lower jaw deformed his laughter as well as his speech. however, she smiled politely and ate and drank her soda slowly. "i'll be glad to take care of your bundle," the young man said presently. "ever been here before?" "no," said susan. "that is, not since i was about four years old." "i was four," said the young man, "when a horse stepped on my mouth in the street." "my, how dreadful!" exclaimed susan. "you can see some of the scar yet," the young man assured her, and he pointed to his curiously sunken mouth. "the doctors said it was the most remarkable case of the kind on record," continued he proudly. "that was what led me into the medical line. you don't seem to have your boarding house picked." "i was going to look in the papers." "that's dangerous--especially for a young lady. some of them boarding houses--well, they're no better'n they ought to be." "i don't suppose you know of any?" "my aunt keeps one. and she's got a vacancy, it being summer." "i'm afraid it'd be too expensive for me," said susan, to feel her way. the young man was much flattered. but he said, "oh, it ain't so toppy. i think you could make a deal with her for five per." susan looked inquiring. "five a week--room and board." "i might stand that," said susan reflectively. then, deciding for complete confidence, "i'm looking for work, too." "what line?" "oh, i never tried anything. i thought maybe dressmaking or millinery." "mighty poor season for jobs. the times are bad, anyhow." he was looking at her with kindly curiosity. "if i was you, i'd go back home--and wait." susan shrank within herself. "i can't do that," she said. the young man thought awhile, then said: "if you should go to my aunt's, you can say mr. ellison sent you. no, that ain't me. it's the boss. you see, a respectable boarding house asks for references." susan colored deeply and her gaze slowly sank. "i didn't know that," she murmured. "don't be afraid. aunt kate ain't so particular--leastways, not in summer when things is slow. and i know you're quiet." by the time the soda was finished, the young man--who said his name was robert wylie--had written on the back of ellison's business card in a spencerian hand: "mrs. kate wylie, west sixth street." he explained that susan was to walk up two squares and take the car going west; the conductor would let her off at the right place. "you'd better leave your things here," said mr. wylie, holding up the card so that they could admire his penmanship together. "you may not hit it off with aunt kate. don't think you've got to stay there just because of me." "i'm sure i'll like it," susan declared confidently. her spirits were high; she felt that she was in a strong run of luck. wylie lifted her package over the counter and went to the door with her to point out the direction. "this is fourth. the next up is fifth. the next wide one is sixth--and you can read it on the lamp-post, too." "isn't that convenient!" exclaimed susan. "what a lovely city this is!" "there's worse," said mr. wylie, not to seem vain of his native town. they shook hands most friendly and she set out in the direction he had indicated. she was much upset by the many vehicles and the confusion, but she did her best to seem at ease and at home. she watched a girl walking ahead of her--a shopgirl who seemed well-dressed and stylish, especially about the hat and hair. susan tried to walk like her. "i suppose i look and act greener than i really am," thought she. "but i'll keep my eyes open and catch on." and in this, as in all her thoughts and actions since leaving, she showed confidence not because she was conceited, but because she had not the remotest notion what she was actually attempting. how many of us get credit for courage as we walk unconcerned through perils, or essay and conquer great obstacles, when in truth we are not courageous but simply unaware! as a rule knowledge is power or, rather, a source of power, but there are times when ignorance is a power and knowledge a weakness. if susan had known, she might perhaps have stayed at home and submitted and, with crushed spirit, might have sunk under the sense of shame and degradation. but she did not know; so columbus before his sailors or caesar at the rubicon among his soldiers did not seem more tranquil than she really was. wylie, who suspected in the direction of the truth, wondered at her. "she's game, she is," he muttered again and again that morning. "what a nerve for a kid--and a lady, too!" she found the right corner and the right car without further adventure; and the conductor assured her that he would set her down before the very door of the address on the card. it was an open car with few passengers. she took the middle of the long seat nearest the rear platform and looked about her like one in a happy dream. on and on and yet on they went. with every square they passed more people, so it seemed to her, than there were in all sutherland. and what huge stores! and what wonderful displays of things to wear! where would the people be found to buy such quantities, and where would they get the money to pay? how many restaurants and saloons! why, everybody must be eating and drinking all the time. and at each corner she looked up and down the cross streets, and there were more and ever more magnificent buildings, throngs upon throngs of people. was there no end to it? this was sixth street, still sixth street, as she saw at the corner lamp-posts. then there must be five more such streets between this and the river; and she could see, up the cross streets, that the city was even vaster in the direction of the hills. and there were all these cross streets! it was stupefying--overwhelming--incredible. she began to be nervous, they were going so far. she glanced anxiously at the conductor. he was watching her interestedly, understood her glance, answered it with a reassuring nod. he called out: "i'm looking out for you, miss. i've got you on my mind. don't you fret." she gave him a bright smile of relief. they were passing through a double row of what seemed to her stately residences, and there were few people on the sidewalks. the air, too, was clearer, though the walls were grimy and also the grass in the occasional tiny front yards. but the curtains at the windows looked clean and fresh, and so did the better class of people among those on the sidewalk. it delighted her to see so many well-dressed women, wearing their clothes with an air which she told herself she must acquire. she was startled by the conductor's calling out: "now, miss!" she rose as he rang the bell and was ready to get off when the car stopped, for she was eager to cause him as little trouble as possible. "the house is right straight before you," said the conductor. "the number's in the transom." she thanked him, descended, was on the sidewalk before mrs. wylie's. she looked at the house and her heart sank. she thought of the small sum in her purse; it was most unlikely that such a house as this would harbor her. for here was a grand stone stairway ascending to a deep stone portico, and within it great doors, bigger than those of the wright mansion, the palace of sutherland. however, she recalled the humble appearance and mode of speech of her friend the drug clerk and plucked up the courage to ascend and to ring. a slattern, colored maid opened the door. at the first glance within, at the first whiff of the interior air, susan felt more at ease. for she was seeing what even her bedazzled eyes recognized as cheap dowdiness, and the smell that assailed her nostrils was that of a house badly and poorly kept--the smell of cheap food and bad butter cooking, of cats, of undusted rooms, of various unrecognizable kinds of staleness. she stood in the center of the big dingy parlor, gazing round at the grimed chromos until mrs. wylie entered--a thin middle-aged woman with small brown eyes set wide apart, a perpetual frown, and a chin so long and so projected that she was almost jimber-jawed. while susan explained stammeringly what she had come for, mrs. wylie eyed her with increasing disfavor. when susan had finished, she unlocked her lips for the first time to say: "the room's took." "oh!" cried susan in dismay. the telephone rang in the back parlor. mrs. wylie excused herself to answer. after a few words she closed the doors between. she was gone fully five minutes; to susan it seemed an hour. she came back, saying: "i've been talking to my nephew. he called up. well, i reckon you can have the room. it ain't my custom to take in ladies as young as you. but you seem to be all right. your parents allowed you to come?" "i haven't any," replied susan. "i'm here to find a place and support myself." mrs. wylie continued to eye her dubiously. "well, i have no wish to pry into your affairs. 'mind your own business,' that's my rule." she spoke with defiance, as if the contrary were being asserted by some invisible person who might appear and gain hearing and belief. she went on: "if mr. ellison wants it, why i suppose it's all right. but you can't stay out later'n ten o'clock." "i shan't go out at all of nights," said susan eagerly. "you _look_ quiet," said mrs. wylie, with the air of adding that appearances were rarely other than deceptive. "oh, i _am_ quiet," declared susan. it puzzled her, this recurrence of the suggestion of noisiness. "i can't allow much company--none in your room." "there won't be any company." she blushed deeply. "that is, a--a young man from our town--he may call once. but he'll be off for the east right away." mrs. wylie reflected on this, susan the while standing uneasily, dreading lest decision would be against her. finally mrs. wylie said: "robert says you want the five-dollar room. i'll show it to you." they ascended two flights through increasing shabbiness. on the third floor at the rear was a room--a mere continuation of the narrow hall, partitioned off. it contained a small folding bed, a small table, a tiny bureau, a washstand hardly as large as that in the cabin on the boat, a row of hooks with a curtain of flowered chintz before them, a kitchen chair, a chromo of "awake and asleep," a torn and dirty rag carpet. the odor of the room, stale, damp, verging on moldy, seemed the fitting exhalation from such an assemblage of forbidding objects. "it's a nice, comfortable room," said mrs. wylie aggressively. "i couldn't afford to give it and two meals for five dollars except till the first of september. after that it's eight." "i'll be glad to stay, if you'll let me," said susan. mrs. wylie's suspicion, so plain in those repellent eyes, took all the courage out of her. the great adventure seemed rapidly to be losing its charms. she could not think of herself as content or anything but sad and depressed in such surroundings as these. how much better it would be if she could live out in the open, out where it was attractive! "i suppose you've got some baggage," said mrs. wylie, as if she rather expected to hear that she had not. "i left it at the drug store," explained susan. "your trunk?" susan started nervously at that explosive exclamation. "i--i haven't got a trunk--only a few things in a shawl strap." "well, i never!" mrs. wylie tossed her head, clucked her tongue disgustedly against the roof of her mouth. "but i suppose if mr. ellison says so, why you can stay." "thank you," said susan humbly. even if it would not have been basest ingratitude to betray her friend, mr. wylie, still she would not have had the courage to confess the truth about mr. ellison and so get herself ordered into the street. "i--i think i'll go for my things." "the custom is to pay in advance," said mrs. wylie sharply. "oh, yes--of course," stammered susan. she seated herself on the wooden chair and opened out her purse. she found the five among her few bills, extended it with trembling fingers toward mrs. wylie. at the same time she lifted her eyes. the woman's expression as she bored into the pocketbook terrified her. never before had she seen the savage greediness that is bred in the city among the people who fight against fearful odds to maintain their respectability and to save themselves from the ever threatened drop to the despised working class. "thank you," said mrs. wylie, taking the bill as if she were conferring a favor upon susan. "i make everybody pay promptly. the first of the week or out they go! i used to be easy and i came near going down." "oh, i shouldn't stay a minute if i couldn't pay," said the girl. "i'm going to look for something right away." "well, i don't want to discourage you, but there's a great many out of work. still, i suppose you'll be able to wheedle some man into giving you a job. but i warn you i'm very particular about morals. if i see any signs----" mrs. wylie did not finish her sentence. any words would have been weaker than her look. susan colored and trembled. not at the poisonous hint as to how money could be got to keep on paying for that room, for the hint passed wide of susan. she was agitated by the thought: if mrs. wylie should learn that she was not respectable! if mrs. wylie should learn that she was nameless--was born in disgrace so deep that, no matter how good she might be, she would yet be classed with the wicked. "i'm down like a thousand of brick on any woman that is at all loose with the men," continued the landlady. "i never could understand how any woman could so far forget herself." and the woman whom the men had all her life been helping to their uttermost not to "forget herself" looked sharp suspicion and envy at susan, the lovely. why are women of the mrs. wylie sort so swift to suspect? can it be that in some secret chamber of their never assailed hearts there lurks a longing--a feeling as to what they would do if they had the chance? mrs. wylie continued, "i hope you have strict christian principles?" "i was brought up presbyterian," said susan anxiously. she was far from sure that in cincinnati and by its mrs. wylies presbyterian would be regarded as christian. "there's your kind of a church a few squares from here," was all mrs. wylie deigned to reply. susan suspected a sneer at presbyterianism in her accent. "that'll be nice," she murmured. she was eager to escape. "i'll go for my things." "you can walk down and take the fourth street car," suggested her landlady. "then you can watch out and not miss the store. the conductors are very impudent and forgetful." susan escaped from the house as speedily as her flying feet would take her down the two flights. in the street once more, her spirits rose. she went south to fourth street, decided to walk instead of taking a car. she now found herself in much more impressive surroundings than before, and realized that sixth street was really one of the minor streets. the further uptown she went, the more excited she became. after the district of stately mansions with wonderful carriages driving up and away and women dressed like those in the illustrated story papers, came splendid shops and hotels, finer than susan had believed there were anywhere in the world. and most of the people--the crowds on crowds of people!--looked prosperous and cheerful and so delightfully citified! she wondered why so many of the men stared at her. she assumed it must be something rural in her appearance though that ought to have set the women to staring, too. but she thought little about this, so absorbed was she in seeing all the new things. she walked slowly, pausing to inspect the shop windows--the gorgeous dresses and hats and jewelry, the thousand costly things scattered in careless profusion. and the crowds! how secure she felt among these multitudes of strangers, not one of them knowing or suspecting her secret of shame! she no longer had the sense of being outcast, branded. when she had gone so far that it seemed to her she certainly must have missed the drug store, carefully though she had inspected each corner as she went, she decided that she must stop someone of this hurrying throng and inquire the way. while she was still screwing her courage to this boldness, she espied the sign and hastened joyfully across the street. she and wylie welcomed each other like old friends. he was delighted when he learned that she had taken the room. "you won't mind aunt kate after a while," said he. "she's sour and nosey, but she's honest and respectable--and that's the main thing just now with you. and i think you'll get a job all right. aunt kate's got a lady friend that's head saleslady at shillito's. she'll know of something." wylie was so kind and so hopeful that susan felt already settled. as soon as customers came in, she took her parcel and went, wylie saying, "i'll drop round after supper and see how things are getting on." she took the sixth street car back, and felt like an old resident. she was critical of sixth street now, and of the women she had been admiring there less than two hours before--critical of their manners and of their dress. the exterior of the boarding house no longer awed her. she was getting a point of view--as she proudly realized. by the time sam came--and surely that wouldn't be many days--she would be quite transformed. she mounted the steps and was about to ring when mrs. wylie herself, with stormy brow and snapping eyes, opened the door. "go into the parlor," she jerked out from between her unpleasant-looking receding teeth. susan gave her a glance of frightened wonder and obeyed. chapter viii at the threshold her bundles dropped to the floor and all color fled from her face. before her stood her uncle george and sam wright and his father. the two elderly men were glowering at her; sam, white as his shirt and limp, was hanging his head. "so, miss!--you've got back, eh?" cried her uncle in a tone she would not have believed could come from him. as quickly as fear had seized her she now shook it off. "yes, uncle," she said calmly, meeting his angry eyes without flinching. and back came that expression of resolution--of stubbornness we call it when it is the flag of opposition to _our_ will. "what'd have become of you," demanded her uncle, "if i hadn't found out early this morning, and got after sam here and choked the truth out of him?" susan gazed at sam; but he was such a pitiful figure, so mean and frightened, that she glanced quickly back to her uncle. she said: "but he didn't know where i was." "don't lie to me," cried warham. "it won't do you any good, any more than his lying kept us from finding you. we came on the train and saw the waterburys in the street and they'd seen you go into the drug store. we'd have caught you there if we'd been a few minutes sooner, but we drove, and got here in time. now, tell me, susan"--and his voice was cruelly harsh--"all about what's been going on between you and sam." she gazed fearlessly and was silent. "speak up!" commanded sam's father. "yes--and no lies," said her uncle. "i don't know what you mean," susan at last answered--truthfully enough, yet to gain time, too. "you can't play that game any longer," cried warham. "you did make a fool of me, but my eyes are open. your aunt's right about you." "oh, uncle george!" said the girl, a sob in her voice. but he gazed pitilessly--gazed at the woman he was now abhorring as the treacherous, fallen, unsexed daughter of fallen lorella. "speak out. crying won't help you. what have you and this fellow been up to? you disgrace!" susan shrank and shivered, but answered steadfastly, "that's between him and me, uncle." warham gave a snort of fury, turned to the elder wright. "you see, wright," cried he. "it's as my wife and i told you. your boy's lying. we'll send the landlady out for a preacher and marry them." "hold on, george," objected wright soothingly. "i agreed to that only if there'd been something wrong. i'm not satisfied yet." he turned to susan, said in his gruff, blunt way: "susan, have you been loose with my boy here?" "loose?" said susan wonderingly. sam roused himself. "tell them it isn't so, susan," he pleaded, and his voice was little better than a whine of terror. "your uncle's going to kill me and my father'll kick me out." susan's heart grew sick as she looked at him--looked furtively, for she was ashamed to see him so abject. "if you mean did i let him kiss me," she said to mr. wright, "why, i did. we kissed several times. but we had the right to. we were engaged." sam turned on his father in an agony of terror. "that isn't true!" he cried. "i swear it isn't, father. we aren't engaged. i only made love to her a little, as a fellow does to lots of girls." susan looked at him with wide, horrified eyes. "sam!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "sam!" sam's eyes dropped, but he managed to turn his face in her direction. the situation was too serious for him; he did not dare to indulge in such vanities as manhood or manly appearance. "that's the truth, susan," he said sullenly. "_you_ talked a lot about marrying but _i_ never thought of such a thing." "but--you said--you loved me." "i didn't mean anything by it." there fell a silence that was interrupted by mr. wright. "you see there's nothing in it, warham. i'll take my boy and go." "not by a damn sight!" cried warham. "he's got to marry her. susan, did sam promise to marry you?" "when he got through college," replied susan. "i thought so! and he persuaded you to run away." "no," said susan. "he----" "i say yes," stormed her uncle. "don't lie!" "warham! warham!" remonstrated mr. wright. "don't browbeat the girl." "he begged me not to go," said susan. "you lying fool!" shouted her uncle. then to wright, "if he did ask her to stay it was because he was afraid it would all come out--just as it has." "i never promised to marry her!" whined sam. "honest to god, father, i never did. honest to god, mr. warham! you know that's so, susan. it was you that did all the marrying talk." "yes," she said slowly. "yes, i believe it was." she looked dazedly at the three men. "i supposed he meant marriage because--" her voice faltered, but she steadied it and went on--"because we loved each other." "i knew it!" cried her uncle. "you hear, wright? she admits he betrayed her." susan remembered the horrible part of her cousin's sex revelations. "oh, no!" she cried. "i wouldn't have let him do that--even if he had wanted to. no--not even if we'd been married." "you see, warham!" cried mr. wright, in triumph. "i see a liar!" was warham's furious answer. "she's trying to defend him and make out a case for herself." "i am telling the truth," said susan. warham gazed unbelievingly at her, speechless with fury. mr. wright took his silk hat from the corner of the piano. "i'm satisfied they're innocent," said he. "so i'll take my boy and go." "not if i know it!" retorted warham. "he's got to marry her." "but the girl says she's pure, says he never spoke of marriage, says he begged her not to run away. be reasonable, warham." "for a good christian," sneered he at wright, "you're mighty easily convinced by a flimsy lie. in your heart you know the boy has wronged her and that she's shielding him, just as----" there warham checked himself; it would be anything but timely to remind wright of the character of the girl's mother. "i'll admit," said mr. wright smoothly, "that i wasn't overanxious for my boy's marriage with a girl whose mother was--unfortunate. but if your charge had been true, warham, i'd have made the boy do her justice, she being only seventeen. come, sam." sam slunk toward the door. warham stared fiercely at the elder wright. "and you call yourself a christian!" he sneered. at the door--sam had already disappeared--mr. wright paused to say, "i'm going to give sam a discipline he'll remember. the girl's only been foolish. don't be harsh with her." "you damned hypocrite!" shouted warham. "i might have known what to expect from a man who cut the wages of his hands to pay his church subscription." but wright was far too crafty to be drawn. he went on pushing sam before him. as the outer door closed behind them mrs. wylie appeared. "i want you both to get out of my house as quick as you can," she snapped. "my boarders'll be coming to dinner in a few minutes." warham took his straw hat from the floor beside the chair behind him. "i've nothing to do with this girl here. good day, madam." and he strode out of the house, slamming the door behind him. mrs. wylie looked at susan with storming face and bosom. susan did not see. she was gazing into space, her face blanched. "clear out!" cried mrs. wylie. and she ran to the outer door and opened it. "how dare you come into a respectable house!" she wished to be so wildly angry that she would forget the five dollars which she, as a professing christian in full church standing, would have to pay back if she remembered. "clear out this minute!" she cried shrilly. "if you don't, i'll throw your bundle into the street and you after it." susan took up the bundle mechanically, slowly went out on the stoop. the door closed with a slam behind her. she descended the steps, walked a few yards up the street, paused at the edge of the curb and looked dazedly about. her uncle stood beside her. "now where are you going?" he said roughly. susan shook her head. "i suppose," he went on, "i've got to look after you. you shan't disgrace my daughter any further." susan simply looked at him, her eyes unseeing, her brain swept clean of thought by the cyclone that had destroyed all her dreams and hopes. she was not horrified by his accusations; such things had little meaning for one practically in complete ignorance of sex relations. besides, the miserable fiasco of her romantic love left her with a feeling of abasement, of degradation little different from that which overwhelms a woman who believes her virtue is her all and finds herself betrayed and abandoned. she now felt indeed the outcast, looked down upon by all the world. "if you hadn't lied," he fumed on, "you'd have been his wife and a respectable woman." the girl shivered. "instead, you're a disgrace. everybody in sutherland'll know you've gone the way your mother went." "go away," said the girl piteously. "let me alone." "alone? what will become of you?" he addressed the question to himself, not to her. "it doesn't matter," was her reply in a dreary tone. "i've been betrayed, as my mother was. it doesn't matter what----" "i knew it!" cried warham, with no notion of what the girl meant by the word "betrayed." "why didn't you confess the truth while he was here and his father was ready to marry him to you? i knew you'd been loose with him, as your aunt fanny said." "but i wasn't," said susan. "i wouldn't do such a thing." "there you go, lying again!" "it doesn't matter," said she. "all i want is for you to go away." "you do?" sneered he. "and then what? i've got to think of ruthie." he snatched the bundle from her hand. "come on! i must do all i can to keep the disgrace to my family down. as for you, you don't deserve anything but the gutter, where you'd sink if i left you. your aunt's right. you're rotten. you were born rotten. you're your mother's own brat." "yes, i am," she cried. "and i'm proud of it!" she turned from him, was walking rapidly away. "come with me!" ordered warham, following and seizing her by the arm. "no," said susan, wrenching herself free. "then i'll call a policeman and have you locked up." uncle and niece stood regarding each other, hatred and contempt in his gaze, hatred and fear in hers. "you're a child in law--though, god knows, you're anything but a child in fact. come along with me. you've got to. i'm going to see that you're put out of harm's way." "you wouldn't take me back to sutherland!" she cried. he laughed savagely. "i guess not! you'll not show your face there again--though i've no doubt you'd be brazen enough to brass it out. no--you can't pollute my home again." "i can't go back to sutherland!" "you shan't, i say. you ran off because you had disgraced yourself." "no!" cried susan. "no!" "don't lie to me! don't speak to me. i'll see what i can do to hide this mess. come along!" susan looked helplessly round the street, saw nothing, not even eager, curious faces pressed against many a window pane, saw only a desolate waste. then she walked along beside her uncle, both of them silent, he carrying her bundle, she tightly clutching her little purse. perhaps the most amazing, the most stunning, of all the blows fate had thus suddenly showered upon her was this transformation of her uncle from gentleness to ferocity. but many a far older and far wiser woman than seventeen-year-old susan has failed to understand how it is with the man who does not regard woman as a fellow human being. to such she is either an object of adoration, a quintessence of purity and innocence, or less than the dust, sheer filth. warham's anger was no gust. he was simply the average man of small intelligence, great vanity, and abject snobbishness or terror of public opinion. there could be but one reason for the flight of lorella's daughter--rottenness. the only point to consider now was how to save the imperiled family standing, how to protect his own daughter, whom his good nature and his wife's weakness had thus endangered. the one thing that could have appeased his hatred of susan would have been her marriage to sam wright. then he would have--not, indeed, forgiven or reinstated her--but tolerated her. it is the dominance of such ideas as his that makes for woman the slavery she discovers beneath her queenly sway if she happens to do something deeply displeasing to her masculine subject and adorer. they went to the central station. the o. and m. express which connected with the train on the branch line to sutherland would not leave until a quarter past two. it was only a few minutes past one. warham led the way into the station restaurant; with a curt nod he indicated a seat at one of the small tables, and dropped into the opposite seat. he ordered beefsteak and fried potatoes, coffee and apple pie. "sit still!" he said to her roughly and rose to go out to buy a paper. the girl sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes upon them. she looked utterly, pitifully tired. a moment and he came back to resume his seat and read the paper. when the waiter flopped down the steak and the dish of greasily fried potatoes before his plate, he stuffed the paper in his pocket, cut a slice of the steak and put it on the plate. the waiter noisily exchanged it for the empty plate before susan. warham cut two slices of the steak for himself, took a liberal helping of the potatoes, pushed the dish toward her. "do you want the coffee now, or with the pie?" asked the waiter. "now," said warham. "coffee for the young lady, too?" warham scowled at her. "coffee?" he demanded. she did not answer; she did not hear. "yes, she wants coffee," said warham. "hustle it!" "yes, sir." and the waiter bustled away with a great deal of motion that created a deceptive impression of speed. warham was helping himself to steak again when the coffee came a suspicious-looking liquid diffusing an odor of staleness reheated again and again, an under odor of metal pot not too frequently scoured. warham glanced at susan's plate. she had not disturbed the knife and fork on either side of it. "eat!" he commanded. and when she gave no sign of having heard, he repeatedly sharply, "eat, i tell you." she started, nervously took up the knife and fork, cut a morsel off the slice of steak. when she lifted it to her lips, she suddenly put it back in the plate. "i can't," she said. "you've got to," ordered he. "i won't have you acting this way." "i can't," she repeated monotonously. "i feel sick." nature had luckily so made her that it was impossible for her to swallow when her nerves were upset or when she was tired; thus, she would not have the physical woes that aggravate and prolong mental disturbance if food is taken at times when it instantly turns to poison. he repeated his order in a still more savage tone. she put her elbows on the table, rested her head wearily upon her hands, shook her head. he desisted. when he had eaten all of the steak, except the fat and the gristly tail, and nearly all the potatoes, the waiter took the used dishes away and brought two generous slices of apple pie and set down one before each. with the pie went a cube of american cream or "rat-trap" cheese. warham ate his own pie and cheese; then, as she had not touched hers, he reached for it and ate it also. now he was watching the clock and, between liftings of laden fork to his mouth, verifying the clock's opinion of the hour by his own watch. he called for the bill, paid it, gave the waiter five cents--a concession to the tipping custom of the effete city which, judging by the waiter's expression, might as well not have been made. still, warham had not made it with an idea of promoting good feeling between himself and the waiter, but simply to show that he knew the city and its ways. he took up the shawl strap, said, "come on" in the voice which he deemed worthy of the fallen creature he must, through christian duty and worldly prudence, for the time associate with. she rose and followed him to the ticket office. he had the return half of his own ticket. when she heard him ask for a ticket to north sutherland she shivered. she knew that her destination was his brother zeke's farm. from cincinnati to north vernon, where they were to change cars, he sat beside her without speech. at north vernon, where they had to occupy a bench outside the squat and squalid station for nearly two hours, he sat beside her without speech. and without a single word on either side they journeyed in the poking, no-sooner-well-started-than-stopping accommodation train southbound. several sutherland people were aboard. he nodded surlily to those who spoke to him. he read an indianapolis paper which he had bought at north vernon. all the way she gazed unseeingly out over the fair june landscape of rolling or hilly fields ripening in the sun. at north sutherland he bade her follow him to a dilapidated barn a few yards from the railway tracks, where was displayed a homemade sign--"v. goslin. livery and sale stable." there was dickering and a final compromise on four dollars where the proprietor had demanded five and warham had declared two fifty liberal. a surrey was hitched with two horses. warham opened the awkward door to the rear seat and ordered susan to jump in. she obeyed; he put the bundle on the floor beside her. he sat with the driver--the proprietor himself. the horses set off at a round pace over the smooth turnpike. it was evening, and a beautiful coolness issued from the woods on either side. they skimmed over the long level stretches; they climbed hills, they raced down into valleys. warham and the ragged, rawboned old proprietor kept up a kind of conversation--about crops and politics, about the ownership, value, and fertility of the farms they were passing. susan sat quiet, motionless most of the time. the last daylight faded; the stars came out; the road wound in and out, up and down, amid cool dark silence and mysterious fascinating shadows. the moon appeared above the tree tops straight ahead--a big moon, with a lower arc of the rim clipped off. the turnpike ended; they were making equally rapid progress over the dirt road which was in perfect condition as there had been no rain for several days. the beat of the flying hoofs was soft now; the two men's voices, fell into a lower key; the moon marked out the line of the road clearly, made strange spectral minglings of light and darkness in the woods, glorified the open fields and gave the occasional groups of farm buildings an ancient beauty and dignity. the girl slept. at nine o'clock the twenty-mile drive ended in a long, slow climb up a road so washed out, so full of holes and bowlders, that it was no road at all but simply a weather-beaten hillside. a mile of this, with the liveryman's curses--"dod rot it" and "gosh dang it" and similar modifications of profanity for christian use and for the presence of "the sex"--ringing out at every step. susan soon awakened, rather because the surrey was pitching so wildly than because of goslin's denunciations. a brief level stretch and they stopped for warham to open the outer gate into his brother zeke's big farm. a quarter of a mile through wheat to the tops of the wheels and they reached the second gate. a descent into a valley, a crossing of a creek, an ascent of a steep hill, and they were at the third gate--between pasture and barnyard. now they came into view of the house, set upon a slope where a spring bubbled out. the house was white and a white picket fence cut off its lawn from the barnyard. a dog with a deep voice began to bark. they drove up to the front gate and stopped. the dog barked in a frenzy of rage, and they heard his straining and jerking at his chain. a clump of cedars brooded to the right of the house; their trunks were whitewashed up to the lowest branches. the house had a high stoop with wooden steps. as warham descended and hallooed, there came a fierce tugging at the front door from the inside. but the front door was not in the habit of being opened, and stoutly resisted. the assault grew more strenuous; the door gave way and a tall thin farmer appeared. "hello, zeke," called george. he opened the surrey door. "get down," he said to the girl, at the same time taking her bundle. he set it on the horse block beside the gate, took out his pocketbook and paid over the four dollars. "good-by, vic," said he pleasantly. "that's a good team you've got." "not so coarse," said vic. "good-by, mr. warham." and off he drove. zeke warham had now descended the steps and was opening the front gate, which was evidently as unaccustomed to use as the front door. "howdy, george," said he. "ain't that susie you've got with you?" like george, zeke had had an elementary education. but he had married an ignorant woman, and had lived so long among his farm hands and tenants that he used their mode of speech. "yes, it's susie," said george, shaking hands with his brother. "howdy, susie," said zeke, shaking hands with her. "i see you've got your things with you. come to stay awhile?" george interrupted. "susan, go up on the porch and take your bundle." the girl took up the shawl strap and went to the front door. she leaned upon the railing of the stoop and watched the two men standing at the gate. george was talking to his brother in a low tone. occasionally the brother uttered an ejaculation. she could not hear; their heads were so turned that she could not see their faces. the moon made it almost as bright as day. from the pasture woods came a low, sweet chorus of night life--frogs and insects and occasionally a night bird. from the orchard to the left and the clover fields beyond came a wonderful scented breeze. she heard a step in the hall; her aunt sallie appeared--a comfortable, voluble woman, a hard worker and a harder eater and showing it in thin hair and wrinkled face. "why, susie lenox, ain't that you?" she exclaimed. "yes, aunt," said susan. her aunt kissed her, diffusing that earthy odor which is the basis of the smell of country persons. at various hours of the day this odor would be modified with the smell of cow stables, of chickens, of cooking, according to immediate occupation. but whatever other smell there was, the earthy smell persisted. and it was the smell of the house, too. "who's at the gate with your uncle zeke?" inquired sallie. "ain't it george?" "yes," said susan. "why don't he come in?" she raised her voice. "george, ain't you coming in?" "howdy, sallie," called george. "you take the girl in. zeke and i'll be along." "some business, i reckon," said her aunt to susan. "come on. have you had supper?" "no," said susan. she was hungry now. the splendid health of the girl that had calmed her torment of soul into a dull ache was clamoring for food--food to enable her body to carry her strong and enduring through whatever might befall. "i'll set something out for you," said sallie. "come right in. you might leave your bundle here by the parlor door. we'll put you in the upstairs room." they passed the front stairway, went back through the hall, through the big low-ceilinged living-room with its vast fireplace now covered for the warm season by a screen of flowered wallpaper. they were in the plain old dining-room with its smaller fireplace and its big old-fashioned cupboards built into the wall on either side of the projecting chimney-piece. "there ain't much," resumed sallie. "but i reckon you kin make out." on the gayly patterned table cover she set an array of substantial plates and glasses. from various cupboards in dining-room and adjoining kitchen she assembled a glass pitcher of sweet milk, a glass pitcher of buttermilk, a plate of cold cornbread, a platter of cold fried chicken, a dish of golden butter, a pan of cold fried potatoes, a jar of preserved crab apples and another of peach butter. susan watched with hungry eyes. she was thinking of nothing but food now. her aunt looked at her and smiled. "my, but you're shootin' up!" she exclaimed, admiring the girl's tall, straight figure. "and you don't seem to get stringy and bony like so many, but keep nice and round. do set down." "i--i think i'll wait until uncle george comes." "nothing of the kind!" she pushed a wooden chair before one of the two plates she had laid. "i see you've still got that lovely skin. and how tasty you dress! now, do set!" susan seated herself. "pitch right in, child," urged sallie. "how's yer aunt and her ruth?" "they're--they're well, thank you." "do eat!" "no," said susan. "i'll wait for uncle." "never mind your manners. i know you're starved." then seeing that the girl would not eat, she said, "well, i'll go fetch him." but susan stopped her. "please please don't," she entreated. sallie stared to oppose; then, arrested by the intense, appealing expression in those violet-gray eyes, so beautifully shaded by dark lashes and brows, she kept silent, bustled aimlessly about, boiling with suddenly aroused curiosity. it was nearly half an hour by the big square wooden clock on the chimney-piece when susan heard the steps of her two uncles. her hunger fled; the deathly sickness surged up again. she trembled, grew ghastly in the yellow lamplight. her hands clutched each other in her lap. "why, susie!" cried her aunt. "whatever is the matter of you!" the girl lifted her eyes to her aunt's face the eyes of a wounded, suffering, horribly suffering animal. she rose, rushed out of the door into the yard, flung herself down on the grass. but still she could not get the relief of tears. after a while she sat up and listened. she heard faintly the voices of her uncle and his relatives. presently her aunt came out to her. she hid her face in her arm and waited for the new harshness to strike. "get up and come in, susie." the voice was kind, was pitying--not with the pity that galls, but with the pity of one who understands and feels and is also human, the pity that soothes. at least to this woman she was not outcast. the girl flung herself down again and sobbed--poured out upon the bosom of our mother earth all the torrents of tears that had been damming up within her. and sallie knelt beside her and patted her now and then, with a "that's right. cry it out, sweetie." when tears and sobs subsided sallie lifted her up, walked to the house with her arm round her. "do you feel better?" "some," admitted susan. "the men folks have went. so we kin be comfortable. after you've et, you'll feel still better." george warham had made a notable inroad upon the food and drink. but there was an abundance left. susan began with a hesitating sipping at a glass of milk and nibbling at one of the generous cubes of old-fashioned cornbread. soon she was busy. it delighted sallie to see her eat. she pressed the preserves, the chicken, the cornbread upon her. "i haven't eaten since early this morning," apologized the girl. "that means a big hole to fill," observed sallie. "try this buttermilk." but susan could hold no more. "i reckon you're pretty well tired out," observed sallie. "i'll help you straighten up," said susan, rising. "no. let me take you up to bed--while the men's still outside." susan did not insist. they returned through the empty sitting-room and along the hall. aunt sallie took the bundle, and they ascended to the spare bedroom. sallie showed her into the front room--a damp, earthy odor; a wallpaper with countless reproductions of two little brown girls in a brown swing under a brown tree; a lofty bed, white and tomb-like; some preposterous artificial flowers under glass on chimney-piece and table; three bright chromos on the walls; "god bless our home" in pink, blue and yellow worsted over the door. "i'll run down and put the things away," said her aunt. "then i'll come back." susan put her bundle on the sofa, opened it, found nightgown and toilet articles on top. she looked uncertainly about, rapidly undressed, got into the nightgown. "i'll turn down the bed and lie on it until auntie comes," she said to herself. the bed was delightfully cool; the shuck mattress made soft crackling sounds under her and gave out a soothing odor of the fields. hardly had her head touched the pillow when she fell sound asleep. in a few minutes her aunt came hurrying in, stopped short at sight of that lovely childlike face with the lamplight full upon it. one of susan's tapering arms was flung round her dark wavy hair. sallie warham smiled gently. "bless the baby" she said half aloud. then her smile faded and a look of sadness and pity came. "poor child!" she murmured. "the warham men's hard. but then all the men's hard. poor child." and gently she kissed the girl's flushed cheek. "and she never had no mother, nor nothing." she sighed, gradually lowered the flame of the little old glass lamp, blew it out, and went noiselessly from the room, closing the door behind her. chapter ix susan sat up in bed suddenly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. it was broad day, and the birds were making a mighty clamor. she gazed round, astonished that it was not her own room. then she remembered. but it was as a child remembers; for when we have the sense of perfect physical well-being we cannot but see our misfortunes with the child's sense of unreality--and susan had not only health but youth, was still in the child stage of the period between childhood and womanhood. she lay down again, with the feeling that so long as she could stay in that comfortable bed, with the world shut out, just so long would all be well with her. soon, however, the restlessness of all nature under the stimulus and heat of that brilliant day communicated itself to her vigorous young body. for repose and inaction are as foreign to healthy life as death itself, of which they are the symptoms; and if ever there was an intense and vivid life, susan had it. she got up and dressed, and leaned from the window, watching the two-horse reaper in the wheat fields across the hollow of the pasture, and listening to its faint musical whirr. the cows which had just been milked were moving sedately through the gate into the pasture, where the bull, under a tree, was placidly awaiting them. a boy, in huge straw hat and a blue cotton shirt and linsey woolsey trousers rolled high upon his brown bare legs, was escorting the herd. her aunt in fresh, blue, checked calico came in. "wouldn't you like some breakfast?" said she. and susan read in her manner that the men were out of the way. "no, i don't feel hungry," susan replied. she thought this was true; but when she was at the table she ate almost as heartily as she had the night before. as susan ate she gazed out into the back yard of the house, where chickens of all sizes, colors and ages were peering and picking about. through the fence of the kitchen garden she saw lew, the farm hand, digging potatoes. there were ripening beans on tall poles, and in the farther part the forming heads of cabbages, the sprouting melon vines, the beautiful fresh green of the just springing garden corn. the window through which she was looking was framed in morning glories and hollyhocks, and over by the garden gate were on the one side a clump of elders, on the other the hardy graceful stalks of gaudily spreading sunflowers. bees flew in and out, and one lighted upon the dish of honey in the comb that went so well with the hot biscuit. she rose and wandered out among the chickens, to pick up little fluffy youngsters one after another, and caress them, to look in the henhouse itself, where several hens were sitting with the pensive expression that accompanies the laying of eggs. she thought of those other hens, less conventional, who ran away to lay in secret places in the weeds, to accumulate a store against the time when the setting instinct should possess them. she thought of those cannier, less docile hens and laughed. she opened a gate into the barnyard, intending to go to the barn for a look at the horses, taking in the duck pond and perhaps the pigs on the way. her uncle george's voice arrested her. "susan," he cried. "come here." she turned and looked wistfully at him. the same harsh, unforgiving countenance--mean with anger and petty thoughts. as she moved hesitatingly toward him he said, "you are not to go out of the yard." and he reëntered the house. what a mysterious cruel world! could it be the same world she had lived in so happily all the years until a few days ago--the same she had always found "god's beautiful world," full of gentleness and kindness? and why had it changed? what was this sin that after a long sleep in her mother's grave had risen to poison everyone against her? and why had it risen? it was all beyond her. she strolled wretchedly within bounds, with a foreboding of impending evil. she watched lew in the garden; she got her aunt to let her help with the churning--drive the dasher monotonously up and down until the butter came; then she helped work the butter, helped gather the vegetables for dinner, did everything and anything to keep herself from thinking. toward eleven o'clock her uncle zeke appeared in the dining-room, called his wife from the kitchen. susan felt that at last something was to happen. after a long time her aunt returned; there were all the evidences of weeping in her face. "you'd better go to your room and straighten it up," she said without looking at the girl. "the thing has aired long enough, i reckon. . . . and you'd better stay up there till i call you." susan had finished the room, was about to unpack the heavy-laden shawl strap and shake the wrinkles out of the skirts, folded away for two days now. she heard the sound of a horse's hoofs, went to the window. a young man whom she recognized as one of her uncle zeke's tenants was hitching to the horse block a well-set-up young mare drawing a species of broad-seated breaking sulky. he had a handsome common face, a wavy black mustache. she remembered that his name was ferguson--jeb ferguson, and that he was working on shares what was known as "the creek-bottom farm," which began about a mile and a half away, straight down the pasture hollow. he glanced up at the window, raised his black slouch hat, and nodded with the self-conscious, self-assured grin of the desired of women. she tried to return this salute with a pleasant smile. he entered the gate and she heard his boots upon the front steps. now away across the hollow another figure appeared--a man on horseback coming through the wheat fields. he was riding toward the farther gate of the pasture at a leisurely dignified pace. she had only made out that he had abundant whiskers when the sound of a step upon the stairs caused her to turn. as that step came nearer her heart beat more and more wildly. her wide eyes fixed upon the open door of the room. it was her uncle george. "sit down," he said as he reached the threshold. "i want to talk to you." she seated herself, with hands folded in her lap. her head was aching from the beat of the blood in her temples. "zeke and i have talked it over," said warham. "and we've decided that the only thing to do with you is to get you settled. so in a few minutes now you're going to be married." her lack of expression showed that she did not understand. in fact, she could only feel--feel the cruel, contemptuous anger of that voice which all her days before had caressed her. "we've picked out a good husband for you," warham continued. "it's jeb ferguson." susan quivered. "i--i don't want to," she said. "it ain't a question of what you want," retorted warham roughly. he was twenty-four hours and a night's sleep away from his first fierce outblazing of fury--away from the influence of his wife and his daughter. if it had not been for his brother zeke, narrow and cold, the event might have been different. but zeke was there to keep his "sense of duty" strong. and that he might nerve himself and hide and put down any tendency to be a "soft-hearted fool"--a tendency that threatened to grow as he looked at the girl--the child--he assumed the roughest manner he could muster. "it ain't a question of what you want," he repeated. "it's a question of what's got to be done, to save my family and you, too--from disgrace. we ain't going to have any more bastards in this family." the word meant nothing to the girl. but the sound of it, as her uncle pronounced it, made her feel as though the blood were drying up in her veins. "we ain't going to take any chances," pursued warham, less roughly; for now that he had looked the situation full and frankly in the face, he had no nerve to brace himself. the necessity of what he was prepared to do and to make her do was too obvious. "ferguson's here, and zeke saw the preacher we sent for riding in from the main road. so i've come to tell you. if you'd like to fix up a little, why your aunt sallie'll be here in a minute. you want to pray god to make you a good wife. and you ought to be thankful you have sensible relations to step in and save you from yourself." susan tried to speak; her voice died in her throat. she made another effort. "i don't want to," she said. "then what do you want to do--tell me that!" exclaimed her uncle, rough again. for her manner was very moving, the more so because there was none of the usual appeal to pity and to mercy. she was silent. "there isn't anything else for you to do." "i want to--to stay here." "do you think zeke'd harbor you--when you're about certain to up and disgrace us as your mother did?" "i haven't done anything wrong," said the girl dully. "don't you dare lie about that!" "i've seen ruth do the same with artie sinclair--and all the girls with different boys." "you miserable girl!" cried her uncle. "i never heard it was so dreadful to let a boy kiss you." "don't pretend to be innocent. you know the difference between that and what you did!" susan realized that when she had kissed sam she had really loved him. perhaps that was the fatal difference. and her mother--the sin there had been that she really loved while the man hadn't. yes, it must be so. ruth's explanation of these mysteries had been different; but then ruth had also admitted that she knew little about the matter--and susan most doubted the part that ruth had assured her was certainly true. "i didn't know," said susan to her uncle. "nobody ever told me. i thought we were engaged." "a good woman don't need to be told," retorted warham. "but i'm not going to argue with you. you've got to marry." "i couldn't do that," said the girl. "no, i couldn't." "you'll either take him or you go back to sutherland and i'll have you locked up in the jail till you can be sent to the house of correction. you can take your choice." susan sat looking at her slim brown hands and interlacing her long fingers. the jail! the house of correction was dreadful enough, for though she had never seen it she had heard what it was for, what kind of boys and girls lived there. but the jail--she had seen the jail, back behind the courthouse, with its air of mystery and of horror. not hell itself seemed such a frightful thing as that jail. "well--which do you choose?" said her uncle in a sharp voice. the girl shivered. "i don't care what happens to me," she said, and her voice was dull and sullen and hard. "and it doesn't much matter," sneered warham. every time he looked at her his anger flamed again at the outrage to his love, his trust, his honor, and the impending danger of more illegitimacy. "marrying jeb will give you a chance to reform and be a good woman. he understands--so you needn't be afraid of what he'll find out." "i don't care what happens to me," the girl repeated in the same monotonous voice. warham rose. "i'll send your aunt sallie," said he. "and when i call, she'll bring you down." the girl's silence, her non-resistance the awful expression of her still features--made him uneasy. he went to the window instead of to the door. he glanced furtively at her; but he might have glanced openly as there wasn't the least danger of meeting her eyes. "you're marrying about as well as you could have hoped to, anyhow--better, probably," he observed, in an argumentative, defensive tone. "zeke says jeb's about the likeliest young fellow he knows--a likelier fellow than either zeke or i was at his age. i've given him two thousand dollars in cash. that ought to start you off well." and he went out without venturing another look at her. her youth and helplessness, her stony misery, were again making it harder for him to hold himself to what he and the fanatic zeke had decided to be his duty as a christian, as a father, as a guardian. besides, he did not dare face his wife and his daughter until the whole business was settled respectably and finally. his sister-in-law was waiting in the next room. as soon as his descent cleared the way she hurried in. from the threshold she glanced at the girl; what she saw sent her hurrying out to recompose herself. but the instant she again saw that expression of mute and dazed despair the tears fought for release. the effort to suppress outward signs of pity made her plain fat face grotesque. she could not speak. with a corner of her apron she wiped imaginary dust from the glass bells that protected the artificial flowers. the poor child! and all for no fault of hers--and because she had been born out of wedlock. but then, the old woman reflected, was it not one of the most familiar of god's mysterious ways that people were punished most severely of all for the things that weren't their fault--for being born in shame, or in bad or low families, or sickly, or for being stupid or ugly or ignorant? she envied zeke--his unwavering belief in religion. she believed, but her tender heart was always leading her into doubts. she at last got some sort of control over her voice. "it'll turn out for the best," she said, with her back to susan. "it don't make much difference nohow who a woman marries, so long as he's steady and a good provider. jeb seems to be a nice feller. he's better looking than your uncle george was before he went to town and married a lenox and got sleeked up. and jeb ain't near so close as some. that's a lot in a husband." and in a kind of hysteria, bred of fear of silence just then, she rattled on, telling how this man lay awake o' nights thinking how to skin a flea for its hide and tallow, how that one had said only a fool would pay over a quarter for a new hat for his wife---- "will it be long?" asked the girl. "i'll go down and see," said mrs. warham, glad of a real excuse for leaving the room. she began to cry as soon as she was in the hall. two sparrows lit upon the window sill near susan and screamed and pecked at each other in a mock fight. she watched them; but her shiver at the faint sound of her aunt's returning step far away down the stairs showed where her attention was. when zeke's wife entered she was standing and said: "is it time?" "come on, honey. now don't be afraid." susan advanced with a firm step, preceded her aunt down the stairs. the black slouch hat and the straw of dignified cut were side by side on the shiny hall table. the parlor door was open; the rarely used showroom gave forth an earthy, moldy odor like that of a disturbed grave. its shutters, for the first time in perhaps a year, were open; the mud daubers that had built in the crevices between shutters and sills, fancying they would never be disturbed, were buzzing crossly about their ruined homes. the four men were seated, each with his legs crossed, and each wearing the funereal expression befitting a solemn occasion. susan did not lift her eyes. the profusely whiskered man seated on the haircloth sofa smoothed his black alpaca coat, reset the black tie deep hid by his beard, rose and advanced with a clerical smile whose real kindliness took somewhat from its offensive unction. "this is the young lady, is it?" said he, reaching for susan's rising but listless hand. "she is indeed a _young_ lady!" the two warham men stood, shifting uneasily from leg to leg and rubbing their faces from time to time. sallie warham was standing also, her big unhealthy face twitching fantastically. jeb alone was seated--chair tilted back, hands in trousers pockets, a bucolic grin of embarrassment giving an expression of pain to his common features. a strained silence, then zeke warham said: "i reckon we might as well go ahead." the preacher took a small black-bound book from the inside pocket of his limp and dusty coat, cleared his throat, turned over the pages. that rustling, the creaking of his collar on his overstarched shirt band, and the buzzing of the mud daubers round the windows were the only sounds. the preacher found the place, cleared his throat again. "mr. ferguson----" jeb, tall, spare, sallow, rose awkwardly. "--you and miss lenox will take your places here----" and he indicated a position before him. susan was already in place; jeb shuffled up to stand at her left. sallie warham hid her face in her apron. the preacher cleared his throat vigorously, began--"dearly beloved"--and so on and on. when he put the questions to susan and jeb he told them what answer was expected, and they obeyed him, jeb muttering, susan with a mere, movement of the lips. when he had finished--a matter of less than three minutes--he shook hands warmly first with susan, then with jeb. "live in the fear of the lord," he said. "that's all that's necessary." sallie put down her apron. her face was haggard and gray. she kissed susan tenderly, then led her from the room. they went upstairs to the bedroom. "do you want to stay to dinner?" she asked in the hoarse undertone of funeral occasions. "or would you rather go right away?" "i'd rather go," said the girl. "you set down and make yourself comfortable. i'll hook up your shawl strap." susan sat by the window, her hands in her lap. the hand with the new circlet of gold on it was uppermost. sallie busied herself with the bundle; abruptly she threw her apron over her face, knelt by the bed and sobbed and uttered inarticulate moans. the girl made no sound, did not move, looked unseeingly at her inert hands. a few moments and sallie set to work again. she soon had the bundle ready, brought susan's hat, put it on. "it's so hot, i reckon you'll carry your jacket. i ain't seen as pretty a blue dress as this--yet it's plain-like, too." she went to the top of the stairs. "she wants to go, jeb," she called loudly. "you'd better get the sulky ready." the answer from below was the heavy thump of jeb's boots on the oilcloth covering of the hall floor. susan, from the window, dully watched the young farmer unhitch the mare and lead her up in front of the gate. "come on, honey," said aunt sallie, taking up the bundle. the girl--she seemed a child now--followed her. on the front stoop were george and his brother and the preacher. the men made room for them to pass. sallie opened the gate; susan went out. "you'll have to hold the bundle," said sallie. susan mounted to the seat, took the bundle on her knees. jeb, who had the lines, left the mare's head and got up beside his bride. "good day, all," he said, nodding at the men on the stoop. "good day, mrs. warham." "come and see us real soon," said sallie. her fat chin was quivering; her tired-looking, washed-out eyes gazed mournfully at the girl who was acting and looking as if she were walking in her sleep. "good day, all," repeated jeb, and again he made the clucking sound. "good-by and god bless you," said the preacher. his nostrils were luxuriously sniffing the air which bore to them odors of cookery. the mare set out. susan's gaze rested immovably upon the heavy bundle in her lap. as the road was in wretched repair, jeb's whole attention was upon his driving. at the gate between barnyard and pasture he said, "you hold the lines while i get down." susan's fingers closed mechanically upon the strips of leather. jeb led the mare through the gate, closed it, resumed his seat. this time the mare went on without exacting the clucking sound. they were following the rocky road along the wester hillside of the pasture hollow. as they slowly made their way among the deep ruts and bowlders, from frequent moistenings of the lips and throats, noises, and twitchings of body and hands, it was evident that the young farmer was getting ready for conversation. the struggle at last broke surface with, "zeke warham don't waste no time road patchin'--does he?" susan did not answer. jeb studied her out of the corner of his eye, the first time a fairly good bit of roadway permitted. he could make nothing of her face except that it was about the prettiest he had ever seen. plainly she was not eager to get acquainted; still, acquainted they must get. so he tried again: "my sister keziah--she keeps house for me--she'll be mighty surprised when i turn up with a wife. i didn't let on to her what i was about, nary a word." he laughed and looked expectantly at the girl. her expression was unchanged. jeb again devoted himself to his driving. "no, i didn't let on," he presently resumed. "fact is, i wan't sure myself till i seed you at the winder." he smiled flirtatiously at her. "then i decided to go ahead. i dunno, but i somehow kinder allow you and me'll hit it off purty well--don't you?" susan tried to speak. she found that she could not--that she had nothing to say. "you're the kind of a girl i always had my mind set on," pursued jeb, who was an expert love-maker. "i like a smooth skin and pouty lips that looks as if they wanted to be kissed." he took the reins in one hand, put his arm round her, clumsily found her lips with his. she shrank slightly, then submitted. but jeb somehow felt no inclination to kiss her again. after a moment he let his arm drop away from her waist and took the reins in both hands with an elaborate pretense that the bad road compelled it. a long silence, then he tried again: "it's cool and nice under these here trees, ain't it?" "yes," she said. "i ain't saw you out here for several years now. how long has it been?" "three summers ago." "you must 'a' growed some. i don't seem to recollect you. you like the country?" "yes." "sho! you're just sayin' that. you want to live in town. well, so do i. and as soon as i get things settled a little i'm goin' to take what i've got and the two thousand from your uncle george and open up a livery stable in town." susan's strange eyes turned upon him. "in sutherland?" she asked breathlessly. "right in sutherland," replied he complacently. "i think i'll buy jake antle's place in jefferson street." susan was blanched and trembling. "oh, no," she cried. "you mustn't do that!" jeb laughed. "you see if i don't. and we'll live in style, and you can keep a gal and stay dolled up all the time. oh, i know how to treat you." "i want to stay in the country," cried susan. "i hate sutherland." "now, don't you be afraid," soothed jeb. "when people see you've got a husband and money they'll not be down on you no more. they'll forget all about your maw--and they won't know nothin' about the other thing. you treat me right and i'll treat you right. i'm not one to rake up the past. there ain't arry bit of meanness about me!" "but you'll let me stay here in the country?" pleaded susan. her imagination was torturing her with pictures of herself in sutherland and the people craning and whispering and mocking. "you go where i go," replied jeb. "a woman's place is with her man. and i'll knock anybody down that looks cockeyed at you." "oh!" murmured susan, sinking back against the support. "don't you fret, susie," ordered jeb, confident and patronizing. "you do what i say and everything'll be all right. that's the way to get along with me and get nice clothes--do what i say. with them that crosses me i'm mighty ugly. but you ain't a-goin' to cross me. . . . now, about the house. i reckon i'd better send keziah off right away. you kin cook?" "a--a little," said susan. jeb looked relieved. "then she'd be in the way. two women about always fights--and keziah's got the ferguson temper. she's afraid of me, but now and then she fergits and has a tantrum." jeb looked at her with a smile and a frown. "perk up a little," he more than half ordered. "i don't want keziah jeerin' at me." susan made a pitiful effort to smile. he eyed it sourly, grunted, gave the mare a cut with the whip that caused her to leap forward in a gallop. "whoa!" he yelled. "whoa--damn you!" and he sawed cruelly at her mouth until she quieted down. a turning and they were before a shallow story-and-a-half frame house which squatted like an old roadside beggar behind a weather-beaten picket fence. the sagging shingle roof sloped abruptly; there were four little windows downstairs and two smaller upstairs. the door was in the center of the house; a weedy path led from its crooked step, between two patches of weedy grass, to the gate in the fence. "whoa!" shouted jeb, with the double purpose of stopping the mare and informing the house of his arrival. then to susan: "you git down and i'll drive round to the barn yonder." he nodded toward a dilapidated clapboard structure, small and mean, set between a dirty lopsided straw heap and a manure heap. "go right in and make yourself at home. tell keziah who you air. i'll be along, soon as i unhitch and feed the mare." susan was staring stupidly at the house--at her new home. "git down," he said sharply. "you don't act as if your hearin' or your manners was much to brag on." he felt awkward and embarrassed with this delicately bred, lovely child-woman in the, to him, wonderfully fine and fashionable dress. to hide his nervousness and to brave it out, he took the only way he knew, the only way shy people usually know--the way of gruffness. it was not a ferocious gruffness for a man of his kind; but it seemed so to her who had been used to gentleness only, until these last few days. his grammar, his untrained voice, his rough clothes, the odor of stale sweat and farm labor he exhaled, made him horrible to her--though she only vaguely knew why she felt so wretched and why her body shrank from him. she stepped down from the sulky, almost falling in her dizziness and blindness. jeb touched the mare with the whip and she was alone before the house--a sweet forlorn figure, childish, utterly out of place in those surroundings. on the threshold, in faded and patched calico, stood a tall gaunt woman with a family likeness to jeb. she had thin shiny black hair, a hard brown skin, high cheekbones and snapping black eyes. when her thin lips parted she showed on the left side of the mouth three large and glittering gold teeth that in the contrast made their gray, not too clean neighbors seem white. "howdy!" she called in a tone of hostility. susan tried in vain to respond. she stood gazing. "what d'ye want?" "he he told me to go in," faltered susan. she had no sense of reality. it was a dream--only a dream--and she would awaken in her own clean pretty pale-gray bedroom with ruth gayly calling her to come down to breakfast. "who are you?" demanded keziah--for at a glance it was the sister. "i'm--i'm susan lenox." "oh--zeke warham's niece. come right in." and keziah looked as if she were about to bite and claw. susan pushed open the latchless gate, went up the short path to the doorstep. "i think i'll wait till he comes," she said. "no. come in and sit down, miss lenox." and keziah drew a rush-bottomed rocking chair toward the doorway. susan was looking at the interior. the lower floor of the house was divided into three small rooms. this central room was obviously the parlor--the calico-covered sofa, the center table, the two dingy chromos, and a battered cottage organ made that certain. on the floor was a rag carpet; on the walls, torn and dirty paper, with huge weather stains marking where water had leaked from the roof down the supporting beams. keziah scowled at susan's frank expression of repulsion for the surroundings. susan seated herself on the edge of the chair, put her bundle beside her. "i allow you'll stay to dinner," said keziah. "yes," replied susan. "then i'll go put on some more to cook." "oh, no--please don't--i couldn't eat anything--really, i couldn't." the girl spoke hysterically. just then jeb came round the house and appeared in the doorway. he grinned and winked at susan, looked at his sister. "well, keziah," said he, "what d'ye think of her?" "she says she's going to stay to dinner," observed keziah, trying to maintain the veneer of manners she had put on for company. the young man laughed loudly. "that's a good one--that is!" he cried, nodding and winking at susan. "so you ain't tole her? well, keziah, i've been and gone and got married. and there _she_ is." "shut up--you fool!" said keziah. and she looked apologetically at their guest. but the expression of susan's face made her catch her breath. "for the lord's sake!" she ejaculated. "she ain't married _you!_" "why not?" demanded jeb. "ain't this a free country? ain't i as good as anybody?" keziah blew out her breath in a great gust and seated herself on the tattered calico cover of the sofa. susan grew deathly white. her hands trembled. then she sat quiet upon the edge of the old rush-bottomed chair. there was a terrible silence, broken by jeb's saying loudly and fiercely, "keziah, you go get the dinner. then you pack your duds and clear out for uncle bob's." keziah stared at the bride, rose and went to the rear door. "i'm goin' now," she answered. "the dinner's ready except for putting on the table." through the flimsy partitions they heard her mounting the uncarpeted stairs, hustling about upon an uncarpeted floor above, and presently descending. "i'll hoof it," she said, reappearing in the doorway. "i'll send for my things this afternoon." jeb, not caring to provoke the "ferguson temper," said nothing. "as for this here marryin'," continued keziah, "i never allowed you'd fall so low as to take a baby, and a bastard at that." she whirled away. jeb flung his hat on the table, flung himself on the sofa. "well--that's settled," said he. "you kin get the dinner. it's all in there." and he jerked his head toward the door in the partition to the left. susan got up, moved toward the indicated door. jeb laughed. "don't you think you might take off your hat and stay awhile?" said he. she removed her hat, put it on top of the bundle which she left on the floor beside the rocking chair. she went into the kitchen dining-room. it was a squalid room, its ceiling and walls smoke-stained from the cracked and never polished stove in the corner. the air was foul with the strong old onions stewing on the stove. in a skillet slices of pork were frying. on the back of the stove stood a pan of mashed potatoes and a tin coffeepot. on the stained flowered cloth which covered the table in the middle of the room had been laid coarse, cracked dishes and discolored steel knives and forks with black wooden handles. susan, half fainting, dropped into a chair by one of the open windows. a multitude of fat flies from the stable were running and crawling everywhere, were buzzing about her head. she was aroused by jeb's voice: "why, what the--the damnation! you've fell asleep!" she started up. "in a minute!" she muttered, nervously. and somehow, with jeb's eyes on her from the doorway, she got the evil-smelling messes from the stove into table dishes from the shelves and then on the table, where the flies descended upon them in troops of scores and hundreds. jeb, in his shirt sleeves now, sat down and fell to. she sat opposite him, her hands in her lap. he used his knife in preference to his fork, leaping the blade high, packing the food firmly upon it with fork or fingers, then thrusting it into his mouth. he ate voraciously, smacking his lips, breathing hard, now and then eructing with frank energy and satisfaction. "my stummick's gassy right smart this year," he observed after a huge gulp of coffee. "some says the heavy rains last spring put gas into everything, but i dunno. maybe it's keziah's cooking. i hope you'll do better. why, you ain't eatin' nothin'!" "i'm not hungry," said susan. then, as he frowned suspiciously, "i had a late breakfast." he laughed. "and the marrying, too," he suggested with a flirtatious nod and wink. "women's always upset by them kind of things." when he had filled himself he pushed his chair back. "i'll set with you while you wash up," said he. "but you'd better take off them sunday duds. you'll find some calikers that belonged to maw in a box under the bed in our room." he laughed and winked at her. "that's the one on t'other side of the settin'-room. yes--that's our'n!" and he winked again. the girl, ghastly white, her great eyes staring like a sleepwalker's, rose and stood resting one hand on the back of the chair to steady her. jeb drew a cigar from his waistcoat pocket and lighted it. "usually," said he, "i take a pipe or a chaw. but this bein' a weddin' day----" he laughed and winked again, rose, took her in his arms and kissed her. she made a feeble gesture of thrusting him away. her head reeled, her stomach turned. she got away as soon as he would release her, crossed the sitting-room and entered the tiny dingy bedroom. the windows were down and the bed had not yet been made. the odor was nauseating--the staleness left by a not too clean sleeper who abhors fresh air. susan saw the box under the bed, knelt to draw it out. but instead she buried her face in her hands, burst into wild sobs. "oh, god," she prayed, "stop punishing me. i didn't mean to do wrong--and i'm sure my mother didn't, either. stop, for thy son's sake, amen." now surely she would wake. god must answer that prayer. she dared not take her palms from her eyes. suddenly she felt herself caught from behind. she gave a wild scream and sprang up. jeb was looking at her with eyes that filled her with a fear more awful than the fear of death. "don't!" she cried. "don't!" "never mind, hon," said he in a voice that was terrible just because it was soft. "it's only your husband. my, but you're purty!" and he seized her. she fought. he crushed her. he kissed her with great slobbering smacks and gnawed at the flesh of her neck with teeth that craved to bite. "oh, mr. ferguson, for pity's sake!" she wailed. then she opened her mouth wide as one gasping for breath where there is no air; and pushing at him with all her strength she vented a series of maniac shrieks. chapter x late that afternoon jeb returned to the house after several hours of uneasy, aimless pottering about at barn and woodshed. he stumped and stamped around the kitchen, then in the sitting-room, finally he mustered the courage to look into the bedroom, from which he had slunk like a criminal three hours before. there she lay, apparently in the same position. her waxen color and her absolute stillness added fear to his sense of guilt--a guilt against which he protested, because he felt he had simply done what god and man expected of him. he stood in the low doorway for some time, stood there peering and craning until his fear grew so great that he could no longer put off ending or confirming it. "sleepin'?" said he in a hoarse undertone. she did not reply; she did not move. he could not see that she was breathing. "it'll soon be time to git supper," he went on--not because he was thinking of supper but because he was desperately clutching for something that must draw a reply from her--if she could reply. "want me to clean up the dinner and put the supper things on?" she made a feeble effort to rise, sank back again. he drew an audible sigh of relief; at least she was not what her color had suggested. in fact, she was morbidly conscious. the instant she had heard him at the outer door she had begun to shiver and shake, and not until he moved toward the bedroom door did she become quiet. then a calm had come into her nerves and her flesh--the calm that descends upon the brave when the peril actually faces. as he stood there her eyes were closed, but the smell of him--beneath the earthy odor of his clothing the odor of the bodies of those who eat strong, coarse food--stole into her nostrils, into her nerves. her whole body sickened and shrank--for to her now that odor meant marriage--and she would not have believed hell contained or heaven permitted such a thing as was marriage. she understood now why the bible always talked of man as a vile creature born in sin. jeb was stealthily watching her ghastly face, her limp body. "feelin' sickish?" he asked. a slight movement of the head in assent. "i kin ride over to beecamp and fetch doc christie." another and negative shake of the head, more determined. the pale lips murmured, "no--no, thank you." she was not hating him. he existed for her only as a symbol, in this hideous dream called life, that was coiled like a snake about her and was befouling her and stinging her to death. "don't you bother 'bout supper," said he with gruff, shamefaced generosity. "i'll look out for myself, this onct." he withdrew to the kitchen, where she heard him clattering dishes and pans. daylight waned to twilight, twilight to dusk, to darkness. she did not think; she did not feel, except an occasional dull pang from some bodily bruise. her soul, her mind, were absolutely numb. suddenly a radiance beat upon her eyes. all in an instant, before the lifting of her eyelids, soul and body became exquisitely acute; for she thought it was he come again, with a lamp. she looked; it was the moon whose beams struck full in at the uncurtained window and bathed her face in their mild brightness. she closed her eyes again and presently fell asleep--the utter relaxed sleep of a child that is worn out with pain, when nature turns gentle nurse and sets about healing and soothing as only nature can. when she awoke it was with a scream. no, she was not dreaming; there was an odor in the room--his odor, with that of a saloon added to it. after cooking and eating supper he had taken the jug from its concealment behind the woodbox and had proceeded to cheer his drooped spirits. the more he drank the better content he was with himself, with his conduct, and the clearer became his conviction that the girl was simply playing woman's familiar game of dainty modesty. a proper game it was too; only a man must not pay attention to it unless he wished his woman to despise him. when this conviction reached the point of action he put away the jug, washed the glass, ate a liberal mouthful of the left-over stewed onions, as he would not for worlds have his bride catch him tippling. he put out the lamp and went to the bedroom, chuckling to himself like a man about to play a particularly clever and extremely good-humored practical joke. his preparations for the night were, as always, extremely simple merely a flinging off of his outer clothes and, in summer, his socks. from time to time he cast an admiring amorous glance at the lovely childlike face in the full moonlight. as he was about to stretch himself on the bed beside her he happened to note that she was dressed as when she came. that stylish, sundayish dress was already too much mussed and wrinkled. he leaned over to wake her with a kiss. it was then that she started up with a scream. "oh--oh--my god!" she exclaimed, passing her hand over her brow and staring at him with crazed, anguished eyes. "it's jest me," said he. "thought you'd want to git ready fur bed, like as not." "no, thank you, no," she stammered, drawing away toward the inner side of the bed. "please i want to be as i am." "now, don't put on, sweetness," he wheedled. "you know you're married and 'ave got to git used to it." he laid his hand on her arm. she had intended to obey, since that was the law of god and man and since in all the world there was no other place for her, nameless and outcast. but at his touch she clenched her teeth, cried: "no--mr. ferguson--please--_please_ let me be." "now, hon," he pleaded, seizing her with strong gentleness. "there ain't no call to be skittish. we're married, you know." she wrenched herself free. he seized her again. "what's the use of puttin' on? i know all about you. you little no-name," he cursed, when her teeth sank into his hand. for an instant, at that reminder of her degradation, her indelible shame that made her of the low and the vile, she collapsed in weakness. then with new and fierce strength she fought again. when she had exhausted herself utterly she relaxed, fell to sobbing and moaning, feebly trying to shelter her face from his gluttonous and odorous kisses. and upon the scene the moon shone in all that beauty which from time immemorial has filled the hearts of lovers with ecstasy and of devotees with prayer. they lay quietly side by side; he fell into a profound sleep. he was full upon his back, his broad chest heaving in the gray cotton undershirt, his mouth wide open with its upper fringe of hair in disarray and agitated by his breath. soon he began to snore, a deafening clamor that set some loose object in the dark part of the room to vibrating with a tapping sound. susan stealthily raised herself upon her elbow, looked at him. there was neither horror nor fear in her haggard face but only eagerness to be sure he would not awaken. she, inch by inch, more softly than a cat, climbed over the low footboard, was standing on the floor. one silent step at a time, with eyes never from his face so clear in the moonlight, she made her way toward the door. the snoring stopped--and her heart stopped with it. he gasped, gurgled, gave a snort, and sat up. "what--which----" he ejaculated. then he saw her near the door. "hello--whar ye goin'?" "i thought i'd undress," she lied, calmly and smoothly. "oh--that's right." and he lay down. she stood in the darkness, making now and then a faint sound suggestive of undressing. the snoring began again--soft, then deep, then the steady, uproarious intake with the fierce whistling exhalation. she went into the sitting-room, felt round in the darkness, swift and noiseless. on the sofa she found her bundle, tore it open. by feeling alone she snatched her sailor hat, a few handkerchiefs, two stockings, a collar her fingers chanced upon and a toothbrush. she darted to the front door, was outside, was gliding down the path, out through the gate into the road. to the left would be the way she had come. she ran to the right, with never a backward glance--ran with all the speed in her lithe young body, ran with all the energy of her fear and horror and resolve to die rather than be taken. for a few hundred yards the road lay between open fields. but after that it entered a wood. and in that dimness she felt the first beginnings of a sense of freedom. half a mile and open fields again, with a small house on the right, a road southeastward on the left. that would be away from her uncle zeke's and also away from sutherland, which lay twenty miles to the southwest. when she would be followed jeb would not think of this direction until he had exhausted the other two. she walked, she ran, she rested; she walked and ran and walked again. the moon ascended to the zenith, crossed the levels of the upper sky, went down in the west; a long bar of dusky gray outlined a cloud low upon the horizon in the northeast. she was on the verge of collapse. her skin, the inside of her mouth, were hot and dry. she had to walk along at snail's pace or her heart would begin to beat as if it were about to burst and the blood would choke up into the veins of her throat to suffocate her. a terrible pain came in her side--came and went--came and stayed. she had passed turning after turning, to the right, to the left--crossroads leading away in all directions. she had kept to the main road because she did not wish to lose time, perhaps return upon her path, in the confusion of the darkness. now she began to look about her at the country. it was still the hills as round zeke warham's--the hills of southeastern indiana. but they were steeper and higher, for she was moving toward the river. there was less open ground, more and denser undergrowth and forest. she felt that she was in a wilderness, was safe. night still lay too thick upon the landscape for her to distinguish anything but outlines. she sat down on the ruined and crumbling panel of a zigzag fence to rest and to wait for light. she listened; a profound hush. she was alone, all alone. how far had she come? she could not guess; but she knew that she had done well. she would have been amazed if she had known how well. all the years of her life, thanks to mrs. warham's good sense about health, she had been steadily adding to the vitality and strength that were hers by inheritance. thus, the response to this first demand upon them had been almost inevitable. it augured well for the future, if the future should draw her into hardships. she knew she had gone far and in what was left of the night and with what was left of her strength she would put such a distance between her and them that they would never believe she had got so far, even should they seek in this direction. she was supporting her head upon her hands, her elbows upon her knees. her eyes closed, her head nodded; she fought against the impulse, but she slept. when she straightened up with a start it was broad day. the birds must have finished their morning song, for there was only happy, comfortable chirping in the branches above her. she rose stiffly. her legs, her whole body, ached; and her feet were burning and blistered. but she struck out resolutely. after she had gone halfway down a long steep hill, she had to turn back because she had left her only possessions. it was a weary climb, and her heart quaked with terror. but no one appeared, and at last she was once more at the ruins of the fence panel. there lay her sailor hat, the handkerchiefs, wrapped round the toothbrush, the collar--and two stockings, one black, the other brown. and where was her purse? not there, certainly. she glanced round in swift alarm. no one. yet she had been absolutely sure she had taken her purse from the sitting-room table when she came upon it, feeling about in the dark. she had forgotten it; she was without a cent! but she had no time to waste in self-reproaches or forebodings. though the stockings would be of no use to her, she took them along because to leave them was to leave a trail. she hastened down the hill. at the bottom ran a deep creek--without a bridge. the road was now a mere cowpath which only the stoutest vehicles or a horseman would adventure. to her left ran an even wilder trail, following the downward course of the creek. she turned out of the road, entered the trail. she came to a place where the bowlders over which the creek foamed and splashed as it hurried southeastward were big and numerous enough to make a crossing. she took it, went slowly on down the other bank. there was no sign of human intrusion. steeply on either side rose a hill, strewn with huge bowlders, many of them large as large houses. the sun filtered through the foliage to make a bright pattern upon the carpet of last year's leaves. the birds twittered and chirped; the creek hummed its drowsy, soothing melody. she was wretchedly weary, and oh, so hungry! a little further, and two of the great bowlders, tumbled down from the steeps, had cut off part of the creek, had formed a pool which their seamed and pitted and fern-adorned walls hid from all observation except that of the birds and the squirrels in the boughs. at once she thought how refreshed she would be if she could bathe in those cool waters. she looked round, stepped in between the bowlders. she peered out; she listened. she was safe; she drew back into her little inclosure. there was a small dry shelf of rock. she hurried off her clothes, stood a moment in the delicious warmth of the sunshine, stepped into the pool. she would have liked to splash about; but she dared make no sound that could be heard above the noise of the water. luckily the creek was just there rather loud, as it was expressing its extreme annoyance over the stolid impudence of the interrupting bowlders. while she was waiting for the sun to dry her she looked at her underclothes. she simply could not put them on as they were. she knelt at the edge of the shelf and rinsed them out as well as she could. then she spread them on the thick tufts of overhanging fern where the hot sun would get full swing at them. the brown stocking of the two mismates she had brought along almost matched the pair she was wearing. as there was a hole in the toe of one of them, she discarded it, and so had one fresh stocking. she dried her feet thoroughly with the stocking she was discarding. then she put her corsets and her dress directly upon her body. she could not afford to wait until the underclothes dried; she would carry them until she found for herself a more remote and better hiding place where she could await nightfall. she stuffed the stocking with the hole deep into a cleft in the rock and laid a small stone upon it so that it was concealed. here where there were no traces, no reminders of the human race which had cast her out and pursued her with torture of body and soul, here in the wilderness her spirits were going up, and her young eyes were looking hopefully round and forward. the up-piling horrors of those two days and their hideous climax seemed a dream which the sun had scattered. hopefully! that blessed inexperience and sheer imagination of youth enabling it to hope in a large, vague way when to hope for any definite and real thing would be impossible. she cleaned her tan low shoes with branches of fern and grass, put them on. it is impossible to account for the peculiarities of physical vanity. probably no one was ever born who had not physical vanity of some kind; susan's was her feet and ankles. not her eyes, nor her hair, nor her contour, nor her skin, nor her figure, though any or all of these might well have been her pleasure. of them she never thought in the way of pride or vanity. but of her feet and ankles she was both proud and vain--in a reserved, wholly unobtrusive way, be it said, so quietly that she had passed unsuspected. there was reason for this shy, secret self-satisfaction, so amusing in one otherwise self-unconscious. her feet were beautifully formed and the curves of her instep and ankle were beautiful. she gave more attention now to the look of her shoes and of her stockings than to all the rest of this difficult woodland toilet. she then put on the sailor hat, fastened the collar to her garter, slipped the handkerchiefs into the legs of her stockings. carrying her underclothes, ready to roll them into a ball should she meet anyone, she resumed her journey into that rocky wilderness. she was sore, she had pains that were the memories of the worst horrors of her hideous dream, but up in her strong, healthy body, up through her strong young soul, surged joy of freedom and joy of hope. compared with what her lot had been until such a few brief days before, this lot of friendless wanderer in the wilderness was dark indeed. but she was comparing it with the monstrous dream from which it was the awakening. she was almost happy--and madly hungry. an enormous bowlder, high above her and firmly fixed in the spine of the hill, invited as a place where she could see without being seen, could hide securely until darkness came again. she climbed to the base of it, found that she might reach the top by stepping from ledge to ledge with the aid of the trees growing so close around it that some of their boughs seemed rooted in its weather-dented cliffs. she dragged herself upward the fifty or sixty feet, glad of the difficulties because they would make any pursuer feel certain she had not gone that way. after perhaps an hour she came upon a flat surface where soil had formed, where grass and wild flowers and several little trees gave shade and a place to sleep. and from her eyrie she commanded a vast sweep of country--hills and valleys, fields, creeks, here and there lonely farmhouses, and far away to the east the glint of the river! to the river! that was her destination. and somehow it would be kind, would take her where she would never, never dream those frightful dreams again! she went to the side of the bowlder opposite that which she had climbed. she drew back hastily, ready to cry with vexation. it was not nearly so high or so steep; and on the slope of the hill a short distance away was set a little farmhouse, with smoke curling up from its rough stone chimney. she dropped to all fours in the tall grass and moved cautiously toward the edge. flat upon her breast, she worked her way to the edge and looked down. a faintly lined path led from the house through a gate in a zigzag fence and up to the base of her fortress. the rock had so crumbled on that side that a sort of path extended clear up to the top. but her alarm quieted somewhat when she noted how the path was grass-grown. as nearly as she could judge it was about five o'clock. so that smoke meant breakfast! her eyes fixed hungrily upon the thin column of violet vapor mounting straight into the still morning air. when smoke rose in that fashion, she remembered, it was sure sign of clear weather. and then the thought came, "what if it had been raining!" she simply could not have got away. as she interestedly watched the little house and its yard she saw hurrying through the burdock and dog fennel toward the base of her rock a determined looking hen. susan laughed silently, it was so obvious that the hen was on a pressing and secret business errand. but almost immediately her attention was distracted to observing the movements of a human being she could obscurely make out through one of the windows just back of the chimney. soon she saw that it was a woman, cleaning up a kitchen after breakfast--the early breakfast of the farmhouse in summer. what had they had for breakfast? she sniffed the air. "i think i can smell ham and cornbread," she said aloud, and laughed, partly at the absurdity of her fancy, chiefly at the idea of such attractive food. she aggravated her hunger by letting her imagination loose upon the glorious possibilities. a stealthy fluttering brought her glance back to the point where the hen had disappeared. the hen reappeared, hastened down the path and through the weeds, and rejoined the flock in the yard with an air which seemed to say, "no, indeed, i've been right here all the time." "now, what was she up to?" wondered susan, and the answer came to her. eggs! a nest hidden somewhere near or in the base of the rock! could she get down to that nest without being seen from the house or from any other part of the region below? she drew back from the edge, crawled through the grass to the place where the path, if path it could be called, reached the top. she was delighted to find that it made the ascent through a wide cleft and not along the outside. she let herself down cautiously as the footway was crumbling and rotten and slippery with grass. at the lower end of the cleft she peered out. trees and bushes--plenty of them, a thick shield between her and the valleys. she moved slowly downward; a misstep might send her through the boughs to the hillside forty feet below. she had gone up and down several times before her hunger-sharpened eyes caught the gleam of white through the ferns growing thickly out of the moist mossy cracks which everywhere seamed the wall. she pushed the ferns aside. there was the nest, the length of her forearm into the dim seclusion of a deep hole. she felt round, found the egg that was warm. and as she drew it out she laughed softly and said half aloud: "breakfast is ready!" no, not quite ready. hooking one arm round the bough of a tree that shot up from the hillside to the height of the rock and beyond, she pressed her foot firmly against the protecting root of an ancient vine of poison ivy. thus ensconced, she had free hands; and she proceeded to remove the thin shell of the egg piece by piece. she had difficulty in restraining herself until the end. at last she put the whole egg into her mouth. and never had she tasted anything so good. but one egg was only an appetizer. she reached in again. she did not wish to despoil the meritorious hen unnecessarily, so she held the egg up in her inclosing fingers and looked through it, as she had often seen the cook do at home. she was not sure, but the inside seemed muddy. she laid it to one side, tried another. it was clear and she ate it as she had eaten the first. she laid aside the third, the fourth, and the fifth. the sixth seemed all right--but was not. fortunately she had not been certain enough to feel justified in putting the whole egg into her mouth before tasting it. the taste, however, was enough to make her reflect that perhaps on the whole two eggs were sufficient for breakfast, especially as there would be at least dinner and supper before she could go further. as she did not wish to risk another descent, she continued to sort out the eggs. she found four that were, or seemed to be, all right. the thirteen that looked doubtful or worse when tested by the light she restored with the greatest care. it was an interesting illustration of the rare quality of consideration which at that period of her life dominated her character. she put the four eggs in the bosom of her blouse and climbed up to her eyrie. all at once she felt the delicious languor of body and mind which is nature's forewarning that she is about to put us to sleep, whether we will or no. she lost all anxiety about safety, looked hastily around for a bed. she found just the place in a corner of the little tableland where the grass grew tall and thick. she took from her bosom the four eggs--her dinner and supper--and put them between the roots of a tree with a cover of broad leaves over them to keep them cool. she pulled grass to make a pillow, took off her collar and laid herself down to sleep. and that day's sun did not shine upon a prettier sight than this soundly and sweetly sleeping girl, with her oval face suffused by a gentle flush, with her rounded young shoulders just moving the bosom of her gray silk blouse, with her slim, graceful legs curled up to the edge of her carefully smoothed blue serge skirt. you would have said never a care, much less a sorrow, had shadowed her dawning life. and that is what it means to be young--and free from the curse of self-pity, and ignorant of life's saddest truth, that future and past are not two contrasts; one is surely bright and the other is sober, but they are parts of a continuous fabric woven of the same threads and into the same patterns from beginning to end. when she awoke, beautifully rested, her eyes clear and soft, the shadows which had been long toward the southwest were long, though not so long, toward the southeast. she sat up and smiled; it was so fine to be free! and her woes had not in the least shaken that serene optimism which is youth's most delightful if most dangerous possession. she crawled through the grass to the edge of the rock and looked out through the screening leaves of the dense undergrowth. there was no smoke from the chimney of the house. the woman, in a blue calico, was sitting on the back doorstep knitting. farther away, in fields here and there, a few men--not a dozen in all--were at work. from a barnyard at the far edge of the western horizon came the faint sound of a steam thresher, and she thought she could see the men at work around it, but this might have been illusion. it was a serene and lovely panorama of summer and country. last of all her eyes sought the glimpse of distant river. she ate two of her four eggs, put on the underclothes which were now thoroughly sun-dried, shook out and rebraided her hair. then she cast about for some way to pass the time. she explored the whole top of the rock, but that did not use up more than fifteen minutes, as it was so small that every part was visible from every other part. however, she found a great many wild flowers and gathered a huge bouquet of the audacious colors of nature's gardens, so common yet so effective. she did a little botanizing--anything to occupy her mind and keep it from the ugly visions and fears. but all too soon she had exhausted the resources of her hiding place. she looked down into the valley to the north--the valley through which she had come. she might go down there and roam; it would be something to do, and her young impatience of restraint was making her so restless that she felt she could not endure the confines of that little rock. it had seemed huge; a brief experience of freedom, a few hours between her and the night's horrors and terrors, and it had shrunk to a tiny prison cell. surely she would run no risk in journeying through that trackless wilderness; she need not be idle, she could hasten her destiny by following the creek in its lonely wanderings, which must sooner or later bring it to the river. the river! she was about to get the two remaining eggs and abandon her stronghold when it occurred to her that she would do well to take a last look all around. she went back to the side of the rock facing the house. the woman had suspended knitting and was gazing intently across the hollow to the west, where the road from the north entered the landscape. susan turned her eyes in that direction. two horsemen at a gallop were moving southward. the girl was well screened, but instinctively she drew still further back behind the bushes--but not so far that the two on horseback, riding so eagerly, were out of her view. the road dipped into the hollow. the galloping horsemen disappeared with it. susan shifted her gaze to the point on the brow of the hill where the road reappeared. she was quivering in every nerve. when they came into view again she would know. the place she was watching swam before her eyes. suddenly the two, still at a gallop, rose upon the crest of the hill. jeb and her uncle zeke! her vision cleared, her nerve steadied. they did not draw rein until they were at the road gate of the little house. the woman rose, put down her knitting in the seat of her stiff, rush-bottomed rocker, advanced to the fence. the air was still, but susan could not hear a sound, though she craned forward and strained her ears to the uttermost. she shrank as if she had been struck when the three began to gaze up at the rock--to gaze, it seemed to her, at the very spot where she was standing. was her screen less thick than she thought? had they seen--if not her, perhaps part of her dress? wildly her heart beat as jeb dismounted from his horse the mare behind which she had made her wedding journey--and stood in the gateway, talking with the woman and looking toward the top of the rock. zeke warham turned his horse and began to ride slowly away. he got as far as the brow of the hill, with jeb still in the gateway, hesitating. then susan heard: "hold on, mr. warham. i reckon you're right." warham halted his horse, jeb remounted and joined him. as the woman returned toward the back doorstep, the two men rode at a walk down into the hollow. when they reappeared it was on the road by which they had come. and the girl knew the pursuit in that direction--the right direction--was over. trembling and with a fluttering in her breast like the flapping of a bird's wings, she sank to the ground. presently she burst into a passion of tears. without knowing why, she tore off the wedding ring which until then she had forgotten, and flung it out among the treetops. a few minutes, and she dried her eyes and stood up. the two horsemen were leaving the landscape at the point at which they had entered it. the girl would not have known, would have been frightened by, her own face had she seen it as she watched them go out of her sight--out of her life. she did not understand herself, for she was at that age when one is no more conscious of the forces locked up within his unexplored and untested character than the dynamite cartridge is of its secrets of power and terror. chapter xi she felt free to go now. she walked toward the place where she had left the eggs. it was on the side of the rock overlooking the creek. as she knelt to remove the leaves, she heard from far below a man's voice singing. she leaned forward and glanced down at the creek. in a moment appeared a young man with a fishing rod and a bag slung over his shoulder. his gray and white striped flannel trousers were rolled to his knees. his fair skin and the fair hair waving about his forehead were exposed by the flapping-brimmed straw hat set upon the back of his head. his voice, a strong and manly tenor, was sending up those steeps a song she had never heard before--a song in italian. she had not seen what he looked like when she remembered herself and hastily fell back from view. she dropped to the grass and crawled out toward the ledge. when she showed her face it so happened that he was looking straight at her. "hello!" he shouted. "that you, nell?" susan drew back, her blood in a tumult. from below, after a brief silence, came a burst of laughter. she waited a long time, then through a shield of bunches of grass looked again. the young man was gone. she wished that he had resumed his song, for she thought she had never heard one so beautiful. because she did not feel safe in descending until he was well out of the way, and because she was so comfortable lying there in the afternoon sunshine watching the birds and listening to them, she continued on there, glancing now and then at where the creek entered and where it left her range of vision, to make sure that no one else should come and catch her. suddenly sounded a voice from somewhere behind her: "hey, nell! i'm coming!" she sprang to her feet, faced about; and crusoe was not more agitated when he saw the print of the naked foot on his island's strand. the straw hat with the flapping brim was just lifting above the edge of the rock at the opposite side, where the path was. she could not escape; the shelf offered no hiding place. now the young man was stepping to the level, panting loudly. "gee, what a climb for a hot day!" he cried. "where are you?" with that he was looking at susan, less than twenty yards away and drawn up defiantly. he stared, took off his hat. he had close-cropped wavy hair and eyes as gray as susan's own, but it was a blue-gray instead of violet. his skin was fair, too, and his expression intelligent and sympathetic. in spite of his hat, and his blue cotton shirt, and trousers rolled high on bare sunburned legs, there was nothing of the yokel about him. "i beg your pardon," he exclaimed half humorously. "i thought it was my cousin nell." "no," said susan, disarmed by his courtesy and by the frank engaging manner of it. "i didn't mean to intrude." he showed white teeth in a broad smile. "i see from your face that this is your private domain." "oh, no--not at all," stammered susan. "yes, i insist," replied he. "will you let me stay and rest a minute? i ran round the rock and climbed pretty fast." "yes--do," said susan. the young man sat on the grass near where he had appeared, and crossed his long legs. the girl, much embarrassed, looked uneasily about. "perhaps you'd sit, too?" suggested he, after eyeing her in a friendly way that could not cause offense and somehow did not cause any great uneasiness. susan hesitated, went to the shadow of a little tree not far from him. he was fanning his flushed face with his hat. the collar of his shirt was open; below, where the tan ended abruptly, his skin was beautifully white. now that she had been discovered, it was as well to be pleasant, she reasoned. "it's a fine day," she observed with a grown-up gravity that much amused him. "not for fishing," said he. "i caught nothing. you are a stranger in these parts?" susan colored and a look of terror flitted into her eyes. "yes," she admitted. "i'm--i'm passing through." the young man had all he could do to conceal his amusement. susan flushed deeply again, not because she saw his expression, for she was not looking at him, but because her remark seemed to her absurd and likely to rouse suspicion. "i suppose you came up here to see the view," said the man. he glanced round. "it _is_ pretty good. you're not visiting down brooksburg way, by any chance?" "no," replied susan, rather composedly and determined to change the subject. "what was that song i heard you singing?" "oh--you heard, did you?" laughed he. "it's the duke's song from 'rigoletto.'" "that's an opera, isn't it--like 'trovatore'?" "yes--an italian opera. same author." "it's a beautiful song." it was evident that she longed to ask him to sing it. she felt at ease with him; he was so unaffected and simple, was one of those people who seem to be at home wherever they are. "do you sing?" he inquired. "not really," replied she. "neither do i. so if you'll sing to me, i'll sing to you." susan looked round in alarm. "oh, dear, no--please don't," she cried. "why not?" he asked curiously. "there isn't a soul about." "i know--but--really, you mustn't." "very well," said he, seeing that her nervousness was not at all from being asked to sing. they sat quietly, she gazing off at the horizon, he fanning himself and studying her lovely young face. he was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five and a close observer would have suspected him of an unusual amount of experience, even for a good-looking, expansive youth of that age. he broke the long silence. "i'm a newspaper man from cincinnati. i'm on the _commercial_ there. my name's roderick spenser. my father's clayton spenser, down at brooksburg"--he pointed to the southeast--"beyond that hill there, on the river. i'm here on my vacation." and he halted, looking at her expectantly. it seemed to her that there was in courtesy no escape without a return biographical sketch. she hung her head, twisted her tapering fingers in her lap, and looked childishly embarrassed and unhappy. another long silence; again he broke it. "you'll pardon my saying so, but--you're very young, aren't you?" "not so--so _terribly_ young. i'm almost seventeen," replied she, glancing this way and that, as if thinking of flight. "you look like a child, yet you don't," he went on, and his frank, honest voice calmed her. "you've had some painful experience, i'd say." she nodded, her eyes down. a pause, then he: "honest, now--aren't you--running away?" she lifted her eyes to his piteously. "please don't ask me," she said. "i shouldn't think of it," replied he, with a gentleness in his persistence that made her feel still more like trusting him, "if it wasn't that---- "well, this world isn't the easiest sort of a place. lots of rough stretches in the road. i've struck several and i've always been glad when somebody has given me a lift. and i want to pass it on--if you'll let me. it's something we owe each other--don't you think?" the words were fine enough; but it was the voice in which he said them that went to her heart. she covered her face with her hands and released her pent emotions. he took a package of tobacco and a sheaf of papers from his trousers pocket, rolled and lighted a cigarette. after a while she dried her eyes, looked at him shamefacedly. but he was all understanding and sympathy. "now you feel better, don't you?" "much," said she. and she laughed. "i guess i'm more upset than i let myself realize." "sorry you left home?" "i haven't any home," answered she simply. "and i wouldn't go back alive to the place i came from." there was a quality in the energy she put into her words that made him thoughtful. he counseled with the end of his cigarette. finally he inquired: "where are you bound for?" "i don't know exactly," confessed she, as if it were a small matter. he shook his head. "i see you haven't the faintest notion what you're up against." "oh, i'll get along. i'm strong, and i can learn." he looked at her critically and rather sadly. "yes--you are strong," said he. "but i wonder if you're strong enough." "i never was sick in my life." "i don't mean that. . . . i'm not sure i know just what i do mean." "is it very hard to get to chicago?" inquired she. "it's easier to get to cincinnati." she shook her head positively. "it wouldn't do for me to go there." "oh, you come from cincinnati?" "no--but i--i've been there." "oh, they caught you and brought you back?" she nodded. this young man must be very smart to understand so quickly. "how much money have you got?" he asked abruptly. but his fear that she would think him impertinent came of an underestimate of her innocence. "i haven't got any," replied she. "i forgot my purse. it had thirty dollars in it." at once he recognized the absolute child; only utter inexperience of the world could speak of so small a sum so respectfully. "i don't understand at all," said he. "how long have you been here?" "all day. i got here early this morning." "and you haven't had anything to eat!" "oh, yes! i found some eggs. i've got two left." two eggs--and no money and no friends--and a woman. yet she was facing the future hopefully! he smiled, with tears in his eyes. "you mustn't tell anybody you saw me," she went on. "no matter what they say, don't think you ought to tell on me." he looked at her, she at him. when he had satisfied himself he smiled most reassuringly. "i'll not," was his answer, and now she _knew_ she could trust him. she drew a breath of relief, and went on as if talking with an old friend. "i've got to get a long ways from here. as soon as it's dark i'm going." "where?" "toward the river." and her eyes lit. "the river? what's there?" "i don't know," said she triumphantly. but he understood. he had the spirit of adventure himself--one could see it at a glance--the spirit that instinctively shuns yesterday and all its works and wings eagerly into tomorrow, unknown, different, new--therefore better. but this girl, this child-woman--or was she rather woman-child?--penniless, with nothing but two eggs between her and starvation, alone, without plans, without experience-- what would become of her?. . . "aren't you--afraid?" he asked. "of what?" she inquired calmly. it was the mere unconscious audacity of ignorance, yet he saw in her now--not fancied he saw, but saw--a certain strength of soul, both courage and tenacity. no, she might suffer, sink--but she would die fighting, and she would not be afraid. and he admired and envied her. "oh, i'll get along somehow," she assured him in the same self-reliant tone. suddenly she felt it would no longer give her the horrors to speak of what she had been through. "i'm not very old," said she, and hers was the face of a woman now. "but i've learned a great deal." "you are sure you are not making a mistake in--in--running away?" "i couldn't do anything else," replied she. "i'm all alone in the world. there's no one--except---- "i hadn't done anything, and they said i had disgraced them--and they----" her voice faltered, her eyes sank, the color flooded into her face. "they gave me to a man--and he--i had hardly seen him before--he----" she tried but could not pronounce the dreadful word. "married, you mean?" said the young man gently. the girl shuddered. "yes," she answered. "and i ran away." so strange, so startling, so moving was the expression of her face that he could not speak for a moment. a chill crept over him as he watched her wide eyes gazing into vacancy. what vision of horror was she seeing, he wondered. to rouse her he spoke the first words he could assemble: "when was this?" the vision seemed slowly to fade and she looked at him in astonishment. "why, it was last night!" she said, as if dazed by the discovery. "only last night!" "last night! then you haven't got far." "no. but i must. i will. and i'm not afraid of anything except of being taken back." "but you don't realize what may be--probably is--waiting for you--at the river--and beyond." "nothing could be so bad," said she. the words were nothing, but the tone and the expression that accompanied them somehow convinced him beyond a doubt. "you'll let me help you?" she debated. "you might bring me something to eat--mightn't you? the eggs'll do for supper. but there's tomorrow. i don't want to be seen till i get a long ways off." he rose at once. "yes, i'll bring you something to eat." he took a knockabout watch from the breast pocket of his shirt. "it's now four o'clock. i've got three miles to walk. i'll ride back and hitch the horse down the creek--a little ways down, so it won't attract attention to your place up here. i'll be back in about an hour and a half. . . . maybe i'll think of something that'll help. can i bring you anything else? "no. that is--i'd like a little piece of soap." "and a towel?" he suggested. "i could take care of a towel," agreed she. "i'll send it back to you when i get settled." "good heavens!" he laughed at her simplicity. "what an honest child you are!" he put out his hand, and she took it with charming friendliness. "good-by. i'll hurry." "i'm so glad you caught me," said she. then, apologetically, "i don't want to be any trouble. i hate to be troublesome. i've never let anybody wait on me." "i don't know when i've had as much pleasure as this is giving me." and he made a bow that hid its seriousness behind a smile of good-humored raillery. she watched him descend with a sinking heart. the rock--the world--her life, seemed empty now. he had reminded her that there were human beings with good hearts. but--perhaps if he knew, his kindness would turn also. . . . no, she decided not. men like him, women like aunt sallie--they did not believe those dreadful, wicked ideas that people said god had ordained. still--if he knew about her birth--branded outcast--he might change. she must not really hope for anything much until she was far, far away in a wholly new world where there would be a wholly new sort of people, of a kind she had never met. but she was sure they would welcome her, and give her a chance. she returned to the tree against which she had been sitting, for there she could look at the place his big frame had pressed down in the tall grass, and could see him in it, and could recall his friendly eyes and voice, and could keep herself assured she had not been dreaming. he was a citified man, like sam--but how different! a man with a heart like his would never marry a woman--no, never! he couldn't be a brute like that. still, perhaps nice men married because it was supposed to be the right thing to do, and was the only way to have children without people thinking you a disgrace and slighting the children--and then marrying made brutes of them. no wonder her uncles could treat her so. they were men who had married. afar off she heard the manly voice singing the song from "rigoletto." she sprang up and listened, with eyes softly shining and head a little on one side. the song ended; her heart beat fast. it was not many minutes before she, watching at the end of the path, saw him appear at the bottom of the huge cleft. and the look in his eyes, the merry smile about his expressive mouth, delighted her. "i'm so glad to see you!" she cried. over his shoulder was flung his fishing bag, and it bulged. "don't be scared by the size of my pack," he called up, as he climbed. "we're going to have supper together--if you'll let me stay. then you can take as much or as little as you like of what's left." arrived at the top, he halted for a long breath. they stood facing each other. "my, what a tall girl you are for your age!" said he admiringly. she laughed up at him. "i'll be as tall as you when i get my growth." she was so lovely that he could scarcely refrain from telling her so. it seemed to him, however, it would be taking an unfair advantage to say that sort of thing when she was in a way at his mercy. "where shall we spread the table?" said he. "i'm hungry as the horseleech's daughter. and you--why, you must be starved. i'm afraid i didn't bring what you like. but i did the best i could. i raided the pantry, took everything that was portable." he had set down the bag and had loosened its strings. first he took out a tablecloth. she laughed. "gracious! how stylish we shall be!" "i didn't bring napkins. we can use the corners of the cloth." he had two knives, two forks, and a big spoon rolled up in the cloth, and a saltcellar. "now, here's my triumph!" he cried, drawing from the bag a pair of roasted chickens. next came a jar of quince jelly; next, a paper bag with cold potatoes and cold string beans in it. then he fished out a huge square of cornbread and a loaf of salt-rising bread, a pound of butter-- "what will your folks say?" exclaimed she, in dismay. he laughed. "they always have thought i was crazy, ever since i went to college and then to the city instead of farming." and out of the bag came a big glass jar of milk. "i forgot to bring a glass!" he apologized. then he suspended unpacking to open the jar. "why, you must be half-dead with thirst, up here all day with not a drop of water." and he held out the jar to her. "drink hearty!" he cried. the milk was rich and cold; she drank nearly a fourth of it before she could wrest the jar away from her lips. "my, but that was good!" she remarked. he had enjoyed watching her drink. "surely you haven't got anything else in that bag?" "not much," replied he. "here's a towel, wrapped round the soap. and here are three cakes of chocolate. you could live four or five days on them, if you were put to it. so whatever else you leave, don't leave them. and--oh, yes, here's a calico slip and a sunbonnet, and a paper of pins. and that's all." "what are they for?" "i thought you might put them on--the slip over your dress--and you wouldn't look quite so--so out of place--if anybody should see you." "what a fine idea!" cried susan, shaking out the slip delightedly. he was spreading the supper on the tablecloth. he carved one of the chickens, opened the jelly, placed the bread and vegetables and butter. "now!" he cried. "let's get busy." and he set her an example she was not slow to follow. the sun had slipped down behind the hills of the northwest horizon. the birds were tuning for their evening song. a breeze sprang up and coquetted with the strays of her wavy dark hair. and they sat cross-legged on the grass on opposite sides of the tablecloth and joked and laughed and ate, and ate and laughed and joked until the stars began to appear in the vast paling opal of the sky. they had chosen the center of the grassy platform for their banquet; thus, from where they sat only the tops of trees and the sky were to be seen. and after they had finished she leaned on her elbow and listened while he, smoking his cigarette, told her of his life as a newspaper man in cincinnati. the twilight faded into dusk, the dusk into a scarlet darkness. "when the moon comes up we'll start," said he. "you can ride behind me on the horse part of the way, anyhow." the shadow of the parting, the ending of this happiness, fell upon her. how lonely it would be when he was gone! "i haven't told you my name," she said. "i've told you mine roderick spenser--with an _s_, not a _c_." "i remember," said she. "i'll never forget. . . . mine's susan lenox." "what was it--before----" he halted. "before what?" his silence set her to thinking. "oh!" she exclaimed, in a tone that made him curse his stupidity in reminding her. "my name's susan lenox--and always will be. it was my mother's name." she hesitated, decided for frankness at any cost, for his kindness forbade her to deceive him in any way. proudly, "my mother never let any man marry her. they say she was disgraced, but i understand now. _she_ wouldn't stoop to let any man marry her." spenser puzzled over this, but could make nothing of it. he felt that he ought not to inquire further. he saw her anxious eyes, her expression of one keyed up and waiting for a verdict. "i'd have only to look at you to know your mother was a fine woman," said he. then, to escape from the neighborhood of the dangerous riddle, "now, about your--your going," he began. "i've been thinking what to do." "you'll help me?" said she, to dispel her last doubt--a very faint doubt, for his words and his way of uttering them had dispelled her real anxiety. "help you?" cried he heartily. "all i can. i've got a scheme to propose to you. you say you can't take the mail boat?" "they know me. i--i'm from sutherland." "you trust me--don't you?" "indeed i do." "now listen to me--as if i were your brother. will you?" "yes." "i'm going to take you to cincinnati with me. i'm going to put you in my boarding house as my sister. and i'm going to get you a position. then--you can start in for yourself." "but that'll be a great lot of trouble, won't it?" "not any more than friends of mine took for me when i was starting out." then, as she continued silent, "what are you thinking? i can't see your face in this starlight." "i was thinking how good you are," she said simply. he laughed uneasily. "i'm not often accused of that," he replied. "i'm like most people--a mixture of good and bad--and not very strong either way. i'm afraid i'm mostly impulse that winks out. but--the question is, how to get you to cincinnati. it's simply impossible for me to go tonight. i can't take you home for the night. i don't trust my people. they'd not think i was good--or you, either. and while usually they'd be right--both ways--this is an exception." this idea of an exception seemed to amuse him. he went on, "i don't dare leave you at any farmhouse in the neighborhood. if i did, you could be traced." "no--no," she cried, alarmed at the very suggestion. "i mustn't be seen by anybody." "we'll go straight to the river, and i'll get a boat and row you across to kentucky--over to carrollton. there's a little hotel. i can leave you----" "no--not carrollton," she interrupted. "my uncle sells goods there, and they know him. and if anything is in the sutherland papers about me, why, they'd know." "not with you in that slip and sunbonnet. i'll make up a story--about our wagon breaking down and that i've got to walk back into the hills to get another before we can go on. and--it's the only plan that's at all possible." obviously he was right; but she would not consent. by adroit questioning he found that her objection was dislike of being so much trouble to him. "that's too ridiculous," cried he. "why, i wouldn't have missed this adventure for anything in the world." his manner was convincing enough, but she did not give in until moonrise came without her having thought of any other plan. he was to be bob peters, she his sister kate, and they were to hail from a farm in the kentucky hills back of milton. they practiced the dialect of the region and found that they could talk it well enough to pass the test of a few sentences they packed the fishing bag; she wrapped the two eggs in paper and put them in the empty milk bottle. they descended by the path--a slow journey in the darkness of that side of the rock, as there were many dangers, including the danger of making a noise that might be heard by some restless person at the house. after half an hour they were safely at the base of the rock; they skirted it, went down to the creek, found the horse tied where he had left it. with her seated sideways behind him and holding on by an arm half round his waist, they made a merry but not very speedy advance toward the river, keeping as nearly due south as the breaks in the hills permitted. after a while he asked: "do you ever think of the stage?" "i've never seen a real stage play," said she. "but i want to--and i will, the first chance i get." "i meant, did you ever think of going on the stage?" "no." so daring a flight would have been impossible for a baby imagination in the cage of the respectable-family-in-a-small-town. "it's one of my dreams to write plays," he went on. "wouldn't it be queer if some day i wrote plays for you to act in?" when one's fancy is as free as was susan's then, it takes any direction chance may suggest. susan's fancy instantly winged along this fascinating route. "i've given recitations at school, and in the plays we used to have they let me take the best parts--that is--until--until a year or so ago." he noted the hesitation, had an instinct against asking why there had come a time when she no longer got good parts. "i'm sure you could learn to act," declared he. "and you'll be sure of it, too, after you've seen the people who do it." "oh, i don't believe i could," said she, in rebuke to her own mounting self-confidence. then, suddenly remembering her birth-brand of shame and overwhelmed by it, "no, i can't hope to be to be anything much. they wouldn't have--_me_." "i know how you feel," replied he, all unaware of the real reason for this deep humility. "when i first struck town i felt that way. it seemed to me i couldn't hope ever to line up with the clever people they had there. but i soon saw there was nothing in that idea. the fact is, everywhere in the world there's a lot more things to do than people who can do them. most of those who get to the top--where did they start? where we're starting." she was immensely flattered by that "we" and grateful for it. but she held to her original opinion. "there wouldn't be a chance for me," said she. "they wouldn't have me." "oh, i understand," said he and he fancied he did. he laughed gayly at the idea that in the theater anyone would care who she was--what kind of past she had had--or present either, for that matter. said he, "you needn't worry. on the stage they don't ask any questions--any questions except 'can you act? can you get it over? can you get the hand?'" then this stage, it was the world she had dreamed of--the world where there lived a wholly new kind of people--people who could make room for her. she thrilled, and her heart beat wildly. in a strangely quiet, intense voice, she said: "i want to try. i'm sure i'll get along there. i'll work--oh, so hard. i'll do _anything!_" "that's the talk," cried he. "you've got the stuff in you." she said little the rest of the journey. her mind was busy with the idea he had by merest accident given her. if he could have looked in upon her thoughts, he would have been amazed and not a little alarmed by the ferment he had set up. where they reached the river the bank was mud and thick willows, the haunt of incredible armies of mosquitoes. "it's a mystery to me," cried he, "why these fiends live in lonely places far away from blood, when they're so mad about it." after some searching he found a clear stretch of sandy gravel where she would be not too uncomfortable while he was gone for a boat. he left the horse with her and walked upstream in the direction of brooksburg. as he had warned her that he might be gone a long time, he knew she would not be alarmed for him--and she had already proved that timidity about herself was not in her nature. but he was alarmed for her--this girl alone in that lonely darkness--with light enough to make her visible to any prowler. about an hour after he left her he returned in a rowboat he had borrowed at the water mill. he hitched the horse in the deep shadow of the break in the bank. she got into the boat, put on the slip and the sunbonnet, put her sailor hat in the bag. they pushed off and he began the long hard row across and upstream. the moon was high now and was still near enough to its full glory to pour a flood of beautiful light upon the broad river--the lovely ohio at its loveliest part. "won't you sing?" he asked. and without hesitation she began one of the simple familiar love songs that were all the music to which the sutherland girls had access. she sang softly, in a deep sweet voice, sweeter even than her speaking voice. she had the sunbonnet in her lap; the moon shone full upon her face. and it seemed to him that he was in a dream; there was nowhere a suggestion of reality--not of its prose, not even of its poetry. only in the land no waking eye has seen could such a thing be. the low sweet voice sang of love, the oars clicked rhythmically in the locks and clove the water with musical splash; the river, between its steep hills, shone in the moonlight, with a breeze like a friendly spirit moving upon its surface. he urged her, and she sang another song, and another. she sighed when she saw the red lantern on the carrollton wharf; and he, turning his head and seeing, echoed her sigh. "the first chance, you must sing me that song," she said. "from 'rigoletto'? i will. but--it tells how fickle women are--'like a feather in the wind.'. . . they aren't all like that, though--don't you think so?" "sometimes i think everybody's like a feather in the wind," replied she. "about love--and everything." he laughed. "except those people who are where there isn't any wind." chapter xii for some time spenser had been rowing well in toward the kentucky shore, to avoid the swift current of the kentucky river which rushes into the ohio at carrollton. a few yards below its mouth, in the quiet stretch of backwater along shore, lay the wharf-boat, little more than a landing stage. the hotel was but a hundred feet away, at the top of the steep levee. it was midnight, so everyone in the village had long been asleep. after several minutes of thunderous hammering roderick succeeded in drawing to the door a barefooted man with a candle in his huge, knotted hand--a man of great stature, amazingly lean and long of leg, with a monstrous head thatched and fronted with coarse, yellow-brown hair. he had on a dirty cotton shirt and dirty cotton trousers--a night dress that served equally well for the day. his feet were flat and thick and were hideous with corns and bunions. susan had early been made a critical observer of feet by the unusual symmetry of her own. she had seen few feet that were fit to be seen; but never, she thought, had she seen an exhibition so repellent. "what t'hell----" he began. then, discovering susan, he growled, "beg pardon, miss." roderick explained--that is, told the prearranged story. the man pointed to a grimy register on the office desk, and roderick set down the fishing bag and wrote in a cramped, scrawly hand, "kate peters, milton, ky." the man looked at it through his screen of hair and beard, said, "come on, ma'am." "just a minute," said roderick, and he drew "kate" aside and said to her in a low tone: "i'll be back sometime tomorrow, and then we'll start at once. but--to provide against everything--don't be alarmed if i don't come. you'll know i couldn't help it. and wait." susan nodded, looking at him with trustful, grateful eyes. "and," he went on hurriedly, "i'll leave this with you, to take care of. it's yours as much as mine." she saw that it was a pocketbook, instinctively put her hands behind her. "don't be silly," he said, with good-humored impatience. "you'll probably not need it. if you do, you'll need it bad. and you'll pay me back when you get your place." he caught one of her hands and put the pocketbook in it. as his argument was unanswerable, she did not resist further. she uttered not a word of thanks, but simply looked at him, her eyes swimming and about her mouth a quiver that meant a great deal in her. impulsively and with flaming cheek he kissed her on the cheek. "so long, sis," he said loudly, and strode into the night. susan did not flush; she paled. she gazed after him with some such expression as a man lost in a cave might have as he watches the flickering out of his only light. "this way, ma'am," said the hotel man sourly, taking up the fishing bag. she started, followed him up the noisy stairs to a plain, neat country bedroom. "the price of this here's one fifty a day," said he. "we've got 'em as low as a dollar." "i'll take a dollar one, please," said susan. the man hesitated. "well," he finally snarled, "business is slack jes' now. seein' as you're a lady, you kin have this here un fur a dollar." "oh, thank you--but if the price is more----" "the other rooms ain't fit fur a lady," said the hotel man. then he grinned a very human humorous grin that straightway made him much less repulsive. "anyhow, them two durn boys of mine an' their cousins is asleep in 'em. i'd as lief rout out a nest of hornets. i'll leave you the candle." as soon as he had gone susan put out the light, ran to the window. she saw the rowboat and spenser, a black spot far out on the river, almost gone from view to the southwest. hastily she lighted the candle again, stood at the window and waved a white cover she snatched from the table. she thought she saw one of the oars go up and flourish, but she could not be sure. she watched until the boat vanished in the darkness at the bend. she found the soap in the bag and took a slow but thorough bath in the washbowl. then she unbraided her hair, combed it out as well as she could with her fingers, rubbed it thoroughly with a towel and braided it again. she put on the calico slip as a nightdress, knelt down to say her prayers. but instead of prayers there came flooding into her mind memories of where she had been last night, of the horrors, of the agonies of body and soul. she rose from her knees, put out the light, stood again at the window. in after years she always looked back upon that hour as the one that definitely marked the end of girlhood, of the thoughts and beliefs which go with the sheltered life, and the beginning of womanhood, of self-reliance and of the hardiness--so near akin to hardness--the hardiness that must come into the character before a man or a woman is fit to give and take in the combat of life. the bed was coarse, but white and clean. she fell asleep instantly and did not awaken until, after the vague, gradually louder sound of hammering on the door, she heard a female voice warning her that breakfast was "put nigh over an' done." she got up, partly drew on one stocking, then without taking it off tumbled over against the pillow and was asleep. when she came to herself again, the lay of the shadows told her it must be after twelve o'clock. she dressed, packed her serge suit in the bag with the sailor hat, smoothed out the pink calico slip and put it on. for more than a year she had worn her hair in a braid doubled upon itself and tied with a bow at the back of her neck. she decided that if she would part it, plait it in two braids and bring them round her head, she would look older. she tried this and was much pleased with the result. she thought the new style not only more grown-up, but also more becoming. the pink slip, too, seemed to her a success. it came almost to her ankles and its strings enabled her to make it look something like a dress. carrying the pink sunbonnet, down she went in search of something to eat. the hall was full of smoke and its air seemed greasy with the odor of frying. she found that dinner was about to be served. a girl in blue calico skirt and food-smeared, sweat-discolored blue jersey ushered her to one of the tables in the dining-room. "there's a gentleman comin'," said she. "i'll set him down with you. he won't bite, i don't reckon, and there ain't no use mussin' up two tables." there was no protesting against two such arguments; so susan presently had opposite her a fattish man with long oily hair and a face like that of a fallen and dissipated preacher. she recognized him at once as one of those wanderers who visit small towns with cheap shows or selling patent medicines and doing juggling tricks on the street corners in the flare of a gasoline lamp. she eyed him furtively until he caught her at it--he being about the same business himself. thereafter she kept her eyes steadily upon the tablecloth, patched and worn thin with much washing. soon the plate of each was encircled by the familiar arc of side dishes containing assorted and not very appetizing messes--fried steak, watery peas, stringy beans, soggy turnips, lumpy mashed potatoes, a perilous-looking chicken stew, cornbread with streaks of baking soda in it. but neither of the diners was critical, and the dinner was eaten with an enthusiasm which the best rarely inspires. with the prunes and dried-apple pie, the stranger expanded. "warm day, miss," he ventured. "yes, it is a little warm," said susan. she ventured a direct look at him. above the pleasant, kindly eyes there was a brow so unusually well shaped that it arrested even her young and untrained attention. whatever the man's character or station, there could be no question as to his intelligence. "the flies are very bothersome," continued he. "but nothing like australia. there the flies have to be picked off, and they're big, and they bite--take a piece right out of you. the natives used to laugh at us when we were in the ring and would try to brush, em away." the stranger had the pleasant, easy manner of one who through custom of all kinds of people and all varieties of fortune, has learned to be patient and good-humored--to take the day and the hour as the seasoned gambler takes the cards that are dealt him. susan said nothing; but she had listened politely. the man went on amusing himself with his own conversation. "i was in the show business then. clown was my line, but i was rotten at it--simply rotten. i'm still in the show business--different line, though. i've got a show of my own. if you're going to be in town perhaps you'll come to see us tonight. our boat's anchored down next to the wharf. you can see it from the windows. come, and bring your folks." "thank you," said susan--she had for gotten her role and its accent. "but i'm afraid we'll not be here." there was an expression in the stranger's face--a puzzled, curious expression, not impertinent, rather covert--an expression that made her uneasy. it warned her that this man saw she was not what she seemed to be, that he was trying to peer into her secret. his brown eyes were kind enough, but alarmingly keen. with only half her pie eaten, she excused herself and hastened to her room. at the threshold she remembered the pocketbook spenser had given her. she had left it by the fishing bag on the table. there was the bag but not the pocketbook. "i must have put it in the bag," she said aloud, and the sound and the tone of her voice frightened her. she searched the bag, then the room which had not yet been straightened up. she shook out the bed covers, looked in all the drawers, under the bed, went over the contents of the bag again. the pocketbook was gone--stolen. she sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap, and stared at the place where she had last seen the pocketbook--_his_ pocketbook, which he had asked her to take care of. how could she face him! what would he think of her, so untrustworthy! what a return for his kindness! she felt weak--so weak that she lay down. the food she had taken turned to poison and her head ached fiercely. what could she do? to speak to the proprietor would be to cause a great commotion, to attract attention to herself--and how would that help to bring back the stolen pocketbook, taken perhaps by the proprietor himself? she recalled that as she hurried through the office from the dining-room he had a queer shifting expression, gave her a wheedling, cringing good morning not at all in keeping with the character he had shown the night before. the slovenly girl came to do the room; susan sent her away, sat by the window gazing out over the river and downstream. he would soon be here; the thought made her long to fly and hide. he had been all generosity; and this was her way of appreciating it! they sent for her to come down to supper. she refused, saying she was not feeling well. she searched the room, the bag, again and again. she would rest a few minutes, then up she would spring and tear everything out. then back to the window to sit and stare at the river over which the evening shadows were beginning to gather. once, as she was sitting there, she happened to see the gaudily painted and decorated show boat. a man--the stranger of the dinner table--was standing on the forward end, smoking a cigar. she saw that he was observing her, realized he could have seen her stirring feverishly about her room. a woman came out of the cabin and joined him. as soon as his attention was distracted she closed her shutters. and there she sat alone, with the hours dragging their wretched minutes slowly away. that was one of those nights upon which anyone who has had them--and who has not?--looks back with wonder at how they ever lived, how they ever came to an end. she slept a little toward dawn--for youth and health will not let the most despairing heart suffer in sleeplessness. her headache went, but the misery of soul which had been a maddening pain settled down into a throbbing ache. she feared he would come; she feared he would not come. the servants tried to persuade her to take breakfast. she could not have swallowed food; she would not have dared take food for which she could not pay. what would they do with her if he did not come? she searched the room again, hoping against hope, a hundred times fancying she felt the purse under some other things, each time suffering sickening disappointment. toward noon the servant came knocking. "a letter for you, ma'am." susan rushed to the door, seized the letter, tore it open, read: when i got back to the horse and started to mount, he kicked me and broke my leg. you can go on south to the l. and n. and take a train to cincinnati. when you find a boarding house send your address to me at the office. i'll come in a few weeks. i'd write more but i can't. don't worry. everything'll come out right. you are brave and sensible, and i _back you to win_. with the unsigned letter crumpled in her hands she sat at the window with scarcely a motion until noon. she then went down to the show boat. several people--men and women--were on the forward end, quarreling. she looked only at her acquaintance. his face was swollen and his eyes bloodshot, but he still wore the air of easy and patient good-humor. she said, standing on the shore, "could i speak to you a minute?" "certainly, ma'am," replies he, lifting his dingy straw hat with gaudy, stained band. he came down the broad plank to the shore. "why, what's the matter?" this in a sympathetic tone. "will you lend me two dollars and take me along to work it out?" she asked. he eyed her keenly. "for the hotel bill?" he inquired, the cigar tucked away in the corner of his mouth. she nodded. "he didn't show up?" "he broke his leg." "oh!" the tone was politely sympathetic, but incredulous. he eyed her critically, thoughtfully. "can you sing?" he finally asked. "a little." his hands were deep in the pockets of his baggy light trousers. he drew one of them out with a two-dollar bill in it. "go and pay him and bring your things. we're about to push off." "thank you," said the girl in the same stolid way. she returned to the hotel, brought the bag down from her room, stood at the office desk. the servant came. "mr. gumpus has jes' stepped out," said she. "here is the money for my room." and susan laid the two-dollar bill on the register. "ain't you goin' to wait fur yer--yer brother?" "he's not coming," replied the girl. "so--i'll go. good-by." "good-by. it's awful, bein' took sick away from home." "thank you," said susan. "good-by." the girl's homely, ignorant face twisted in a grin. but susan did not see, would have been indifferent had she seen. since she accepted the war earth and heaven had declared against her, she had ceased from the little thought she had once given to what was thought of her by those of whom she thought not at all. she went down to the show boat. the plank had been taken in. her acquaintance was waiting for her, helped her to the deck, jumped aboard himself, and was instantly busy helping to guide the boat out into mid-stream. susan looked back at the hotel. mr. gumpus was in the doorway, amusement in every line of his ugly face. beside him stood the slovenly servant. she was crying--the more human second thought of a heart not altogether corrupted by the sordid hardness of her lot. how can faith in the human race falter when one considers how much heart it has in spite of all it suffers in the struggle upward through the dense fogs of ignorance upward, toward the truth, toward the light of which it never ceases to dream and to hope? susan stood in the same place, with her bag beside her, until her acquaintance came. "now," said he, comfortably, as he lighted a fresh cigar, "we'll float pleasantly along. i guess you and i had better get acquainted. what is your name?" susan flushed. "kate peters is the name i gave at the hotel. that'll do, won't it?" "never in the world!" replied he. "you must have a good catchy name. say--er--er----" he rolled his cigar slowly, looking thoughtfully toward the willows thick and green along the indiana shore. "say--well, say--lorna--lorna--lorna sackville! that's a winner. lorna sackville!--a stroke of genius! don't you think so?" "yes," said susan. "it doesn't matter." "but it does," remonstrated he. "you are an artist, now, and an artist's name should always arouse pleasing and romantic anticipations. it's like the odor that heralds the dish. you must remember, my dear, that you have stepped out of the world of dull reality into the world of ideals, of dreams." the sound of two harsh voices, one male, the other female, came from within the cabin--oaths, reproaches. her acquaintance laughed. "that's one on me--eh? still, what i say is true--or at least ought to be. by the way, this is the burlingham floating palace of thespians, floating temple to the histrionic art. i am burlingham--robert burlingham." he smiled, extended his hand. "glad to meet you, miss lorna sackville--don't forget!" she could not but reflect a smile so genuine, so good-humored. "we'll go in and meet the others--your fellow stars--for this is an all-star aggregation." over the broad entrance to the cabin was a chintz curtain strung upon a wire. burlingham drew this aside. susan was looking into a room about thirty feet long, about twelve feet wide, and a scant six feet high. across it with an aisle between were narrow wooden benches with backs. at the opposite end was a stage, with the curtain up and a portable stove occupying the center. at the stove a woman in a chemise and underskirt, with slippers on her bare feet, was toiling over several pots and pans with fork and spoon. at the edge of the stage, with legs swinging, sat another woman, in a blue sailor suit neither fresh nor notably clean but somehow coquettish. two men in flannel shirts were seated, one on each of the front benches, with their backs to her. as burlingham went down the aisle ahead of her, he called out: "ladies and gentlemen, i wish to present the latest valuable addition to our company--miss lorna sackville, the renowned ballad singer." the two men turned lazily and stared at susan, each with an arm hanging over the back of the bench. burlingham looked at the woman bent over the stove--a fat, middle-aged woman with thin, taffy-yellow hair done sleekly over a big rat in front and made into a huge coil behind with the aid of one or more false braids. she had a fat face, a broad expanse of unpleasant-looking, elderly bosom, big, shapeless white arms. her contour was almost gone. her teeth were a curious mixture of natural, gold, and porcelain. "miss anstruther--miss sackville," called burlingham. "miss sackville, miss violet anstruther." miss anstruther and susan exchanged bows--susan's timid and frightened, miss anstruther's accompanied by a hostile stare and a hardening of the fat, decaying face. "miss connemora--miss sackville." burlingham was looking at the younger woman--she who sat on the edge of the little stage. she, too, was a blond, but her hair had taken to the chemical somewhat less reluctantly than had miss anstruther's, with the result that miss connemora's looked golden. her face--of the baby type must have been softly pretty at one time--not so very distant. now lines were coming and the hard look that is inevitable with dyed hair. also her once fine teeth were rapidly going off, as half a dozen gold fillings in front proclaimed. at susan's appealing look and smile miss connemora nodded not unfriendly. "good god, bob," said she to burlingham with a laugh, "are you going to get the bunch of us pinched for child-stealing?" burlingham started to laugh, suddenly checked himself, looked uneasily and keenly at susan. "oh, it's all right," he said with a wave of the hand. but his tone belied his words. he puffed twice at his cigar, then introduced the men--elbert eshwell and gregory tempest--two of the kind clearly if inelegantly placed by the phrase, "greasy hamfats." mr. eshwell's black-dyed hair was smoothly brushed down from a central part, mr. tempest's iron-gray hair was greasily wild--a disarray of romantic ringlets. eshwell was inclined to fat; tempest was gaunt and had the hollow, burning eye that bespeaks the sentimental ass. "now, miss sackville," said burlingham, "we'll go on the forward deck and canvass the situation. what for dinner, vi?" "same old rot," retorted miss anstruther, wiping the sweat from her face and shoulders with a towel that served also as a dishcloth. "pork and beans--potatoes--peach pie." "cheer up," said burlingham. "after tomorrow we'll do better." "that's been the cry ever since we started," snapped violet. "for god's sake, shut up, vi," groaned eshwell. "you're always kicking." the cabin was not quite the full width of the broad house boat. along the outside, between each wall and the edge, there was room for one person to pass from forward deck to rear. from the cabin roof, over the rear deck, into the water extended a big rudder oar. when susan, following burlingham, reached the rear deck, she saw the man at this oar--a fat, amiable-looking rascal, in linsey woolsey and a blue checked shirt open over his chest and revealing a mat of curly gray hair. burlingham hailed him as pat--his only known name. but susan had only a glance for him and no ear at all for the chaffing between him and the actor-manager. she was gazing at the indiana shore, at a tiny village snuggled among trees and ripened fields close to the water's edge. she knew it was brooksburg. she remembered the long covered bridge which they had crossed--spenser and she, on the horse. to the north of the town, on a knoll, stood a large red brick house trimmed with white veranda and balconies--far and away the most pretentious house in the landscape. before the door was a horse and buggy. she could make out that there were several people on the front veranda, one of them a man in black--the doctor, no doubt. sobs choked up into her throat. she turned quickly away that burlingham might not see. and under her breath she said, "good-by, dear. forgive me--forgive me." chapter xiii woman's worktable, a rocking chair and another with a swayback that made it fairly comfortable for lounging gave the rear deck the air of an outdoor sitting-room, which indeed it was. burlingham, after a comprehensive glance at the panorama of summer and fruitfulness through which they were drifting, sprawled himself in the swayback chair, indicating to susan that she was to face him in the rocker. "sit down, my dear," said he. "and tell me you are at least eighteen and are not running away from home. you heard what miss connemora said." "i'm not running away from home," replied susan, blushing violently because she was evading as to the more important fact. "i don't know anything about you, and i don't want to know," pursued burlingham, alarmed by the evidences of a dangerous tendency to candor. "i've no desire to have my own past dug into, and turn about's fair play. you came to me to get an engagement. i took you. understand?" susan nodded. "you said you could sing--that is, a little." "a very little," said the girl. "enough, no doubt. that has been our weak point--lack of a ballad singer. know any ballads?--not fancy ones. nothing fancy! we cater to the plain people, and the plain people only like the best--that is, the simplest--the things that reach for the heartstrings with ten strong fingers. you don't happen to know 'i stood on the bridge at midnight'?" "no--ruth sings that," replied susan, and colored violently. burlingham ignored the slip. "'blue alsatian mountains'?" "yes. but that's very old." "exactly. nothing is of any use to the stage until it's very old. audiences at theaters don't want to _hear_ anything they don't already know by heart. they've come to _see_, not to hear. so it annoys them to have to try to hear. do you understand that?" "no," confessed susan. "i'm sorry. but i'll think about it, and try to understand it." she thought she was showing her inability to do what was expected of her in paying back the two dollars. "don't bother," said burlingham. "pat!" "yes, boss," said the man at the oar, without looking or removing his pipe. "get your fiddle." pat tied the oar fast and went forward along the roof of the cabin. while he was gone burlingham explained, "a frightful souse, pat--almost equal to eshwell and far the superior of tempest or vi--that is, of tempest. but he's steady enough for our purposes, as a rule. he's the pilot, the orchestra, the man-of-all-work, the bill distributor. oh, he's a wonder. graduate of trinity college, dublin--yeggman--panhandler--barrel-house bum--genius, nearly. has drunk as much booze as there is water in this river----" pat was back beside the handle of the oar, with a violin. burlingham suggested to susan that she'd better stand while she sang, "and if you've any tendency to stage fright, remember it's your bread and butter to get through well. you'll not bother about your audience." susan found this thought a potent strengthener--then and afterward. with surprisingly little embarrassment she stood before her good-natured, sympathetic employer, and while pat scraped out an accompaniment sang the pathetic story of the "maiden young and fair" and the "stranger in the spring" who "lingered near the fountains just to hear the maiden sing," and how he departed after winning her love, and how "she will never see the stranger where the fountains fall again--adé, adé, adé." her voice was deliciously young and had the pathetic quality that is never absent from anything which has enduring charm for us. tears were in burlingham's voice--tears for the fate of the maiden, tears of response to the haunting pathos of susan's sweet contralto, tears of joy at the acquisition of such a "number" for his program. as her voice died away he beat his plump hands together enthusiastically. "she'll do--eh, pat? she'll set the hay-tossers crazy!" susan's heart was beating fast from nervousness. she sat down. burlingham sprang up and put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her. he laughed at her shrinking. "don't mind, my dear," he cried. "it's one of our ways. now, what others do you know?" she tried to recall, and with his assistance finally did discover that she possessed a repertoire of "good old stale ones," consisting of "coming thro' the rye," "suwanee river," "annie laurie" and "kathleen mavourneen." she knew many other songs, but either pat could not play them or burlingham declared them "above the head of reub the rotter." "those five are quite enough," said burlingham. "two regulars, two encores, with a third in case of emergency. after dinner miss anstruther and i'll fit you out with a costume. you'll make a hit at sutherland tonight." "sutherland!" exclaimed susan, suddenly pale. "i can't sing there--really, i can't." burlingham made a significant gesture toward pat at the oar above them, and winked at her. "you'll not have stage fright, my dear. you'll pull through." susan understood that nothing more was to be said before pat. soon burlingham told him to tie the oar again and retire to the cabin. "i'll stand watch," said he. "i want to talk business with miss sackville." when pat had gone, burlingham gave her a sympathetic look. "no confidences, mind you, my dear," he warned. "all i want to know is that it isn't stage fright that's keeping you off the program at sutherland." "no," replied the girl. "it isn't stage fright. i'm--i'm sorry i can't begin right away to earn the money to pay you back. but--i can't." "not even in a velvet and spangle costume--low neck, short sleeves, with blond wig and paint and powder? you'll not know yourself, my dear--really." "i couldn't," said susan. "i'd not be able to open my lips." "very well. that's settled." it was evident that burlingham was deeply disappointed. "we were going to try to make a killing at sutherland." he sighed. "however, let that pass. if you can't, you can't." "i'm afraid you're angry with me," cried she. "i--angry!" he laughed. "i've not been angry in ten years. i'm such a _damn_, damn fool that with all the knocks life's given me i haven't learned much. but at least i've learned not to get angry. no, i understand, my dear--and will save you for the next town below." he leaned forward and gave her hands a fatherly pat as they lay in her lap. "don't give it a second thought," he said. "we've got the whole length of the river before us." susan showed her gratitude in her face better far than she could have expressed it in words. the two sat silent. when she saw his eyes upon her with that look of smiling wonder in them, she said, "you mustn't think i've done anything dreadful. i haven't--really, i haven't." he laughed heartily. "and if you had, you'd not need to hang your head in this company, my dear. we're all people who have _lived_--and life isn't exactly a class meeting with the elders taking turns at praying and the organ wheezing out gospel hymns. no, we've all been up against it most of our lives--which means we've done the best we could oftener than we've had the chance to do what we ought." he gave her one of his keen looks, nodded: "i like you. . . . what do they tell oftenest when they're talking about how you were as a baby?" susan did not puzzle over the queerness of this abrupt question. she fell to searching her memory diligently for an answer. "i'm not sure, but i think they speak oftenest of how i never used to like anybody to take my hand and help me along, even when i was barely able to walk. they say i always insisted on trudging along by myself." burlingham nodded, slapped his knee. "i can believe it," he cried. "i always ask everybody that question to see whether i've sited 'em up right. i rather think i hit you off to a t--as you faced me at dinner yesterday in the hotel. speaking of dinner--let's go sit in on the one i smell." they returned to the cabin where, to make a table, a board had been swung between the backs of the second and third benches from the front on the left side of the aisle. thus the three men sat on the front bench with their legs thrust through between seat and back, while the three women sat in dignity and comfort on the fourth bench. susan thought the dinner by no means justified miss anstruther's pessimism. it was good in itself, and the better for being in this happy-go-lucky way, in this happy-go-lucky company. once they got started, all the grouchiness disappeared. susan, young and optimistic and determined to be pleased, soon became accustomed to the looks of her new companions--that matter of mere exterior about which we shallow surface-skimmers make such a mighty fuss, though in the test situations of life, great and small, it amounts to precious little. they were all human beings, and the girl was unspoiled, did not think of them as failures, half-wolves, of no social position, of no standing in the respectable world. she still had much of the natural democracy of children, and she admired these new friends who knew so much more than she did, who had lived, had suffered, had come away from horrible battles covered with wounds, the scars of which they would bear into the grave--battles they had lost; yet they had not given up, but had lived on, smiling, courageous, kind of heart. it was their kind hearts that most impressed her--their kind taking in of her whom those she loved had cast out--her, the unknown stranger, helpless and ignorant. and what spenser had told her about the stage and its people made her almost believe that they would not cast her out, though they knew the dreadful truth about her birth. tempest told a story that was "broad." while the others laughed, susan gazed at him with a puzzled expression. she wished to be polite, to please, to enjoy. but what that story meant she could not fathom. miss anstruther jeered at her. "look at the innocent," she cried. "shut up, vi," retorted miss connemora. "it's no use for us to try to be anything but what we are. still, let the baby alone." "yes--let her alone," said burlingham. "it'll soak in soon enough," miss connemora went on. "no use rubbing it in." "what?" said susan, thinking to show her desire to be friendly, to be one of them. "dirt," said burlingham dryly. "and don't ask any more questions." when the three women had cleared away the dinner and had stowed the dishes in one of the many cubbyholes along the sides of the cabin, the three men got ready for a nap. susan was delighted to see them drop to the tops of the backs of the seats three berths which fitted snugly into the walls when not in use. she saw now that there were five others of the same kind, and that there was a contrivance of wires and curtains by which each berth could be shut off to itself. she had a thrilling sense of being in a kind of swiss family robinson storybook come to life. she unpacked her bag, contributed the food in it to the common store, spread out her serge suit which miss anstruther offered to press and insisted on pressing, though susan protested she could do it herself quite well. "you'll want to put it on for the arrival at sutherland," said mabel connemora. "no," replied susan nervously. "not till tomorrow." she saw the curious look in all their eyes at sight of that dress, so different from the calico she was wearing. mabel took her out on the forward deck where there was an awning and a good breeze. they sat there, mabel talking, susan gazing rapt at land and water and at the actress, and listening as to a fairy story--for the actress had lived through many and strange experiences in the ten years since she left her father's roof in columbia, south carolina. susan listened and absorbed as a dry sponge dropped into a pail of water. at her leisure she would think it all out, would understand, would learn. "now, tell _me_ about _your_self," said mabel when she had exhausted all the reminiscences she could recall at the moment--all that were fit for a "baby's" ears. "i will, some time," said susan, who was ready for the question. "but i can't--not yet." "it seems to me you're very innocent," said mabel, "even for a well-brought-up girl. _i_ was well brought up, too. i wish to god my mother had told me a few things. but no--not a thing." "what do you mean?" inquired susan. that set the actress to probing the girl's innocence--what she knew and what she did not. it had been many a day since miss connemora had had so much pleasure. "well!" she finally said. "i never would have believed it--though i know these things are so. now i'm going to teach you. innocence may be a good thing for respectable women who are going to marry and settle down with a good husband to look after them. but it won't do at all--not at all, my dear!--for a woman who works--who has to meet men in their own world and on their own terms. it's hard enough to get along, if you know. if you don't--when you're knocked down, you stay knocked down." "yes--i want to learn," said susan eagerly. "i want to know--_everything!_" "you're not going back?" mabel pointed toward the shore, to a home on a hillside, with a woman sewing on the front steps and children racing about the yard. "back to that sort of thing?" "no," replied susan. "i've got nothing to go back to." "nonsense!" "nothing," repeated susan in the same simple, final way. "i'm an outcast." the ready tears sprang to mabel's dissipated but still bright eyes. susan's unconscious pathos was so touching. "then i'll educate you. now don't get horrified or scandalized at me. when you feel that way, remember that mabel connemora didn't make the world, but god. at least, so they say--though personally i feel as if the devil had charge of things, and the only god was in us poor human creatures fighting to be decent. i tell you, men and women ain't bad--not so damn bad--excuse me; they will slip out. no, it's the things that happen to them or what they're afraid'll happen--it's those things that compel them to be bad--and get them in the way of being bad--hard to each other, and to hate and to lie and to do all sorts of things." the show boat drifted placidly down with the current of the broad ohio. now it moved toward the left bank and now toward the right, as the current was deflected by the bends--the beautiful curves that divided the river into a series of lovely, lake-like reaches, each with its emerald oval of hills and rolling valleys where harvests were ripening. and in the shadow of the awning susan heard from those pretty, coarse lips, in language softened indeed but still far from refined, about all there is to know concerning the causes and consequences of the eternal struggle that rages round sex. to make her tale vivid, mabel illustrated it by the story of her own life from girlhood to the present hour. and she omitted no detail necessary to enforce the lesson in life. a few days before susan would not have believed, would not have understood. now she both believed and understood. and nothing that mabel told her--not the worst of the possibilities in the world in which she was adventuring--burned deep enough to penetrate beyond the wound she had already received and to give her a fresh sensation of pain and horror. "you don't seem to be horrified," said mabel. susan shook her head. "no," she said. "i feel--somehow i feel better." mabel eyed her curiously--had a sense of a mystery of suffering which she dared not try to explore. she said: "better? that's queer. you don't take it at all as i thought you would." said susan: "i had about made up my mind it was all bad. i see that maybe it isn't." "oh, the world isn't such a bad place--in lots of ways. you'll get a heap of fun out of it if you don't take things or yourself seriously. i wish to god i'd had somebody to tell me, instead of having to spell it out, a letter at a time. i've got just two pieces of advice to give you." and she stopped speaking and gazed away toward the shore with a look that seemed to be piercing the hills. "please do," urged susan, when mabel's long mood of abstraction tried her patience. "oh--yes--two pieces of advice. the first is, don't drink. there's nothing to it--and it'll play hell--excuse me--it'll spoil your looks and your health and give you a woozy head when you most need a steady one. don't drink--that's the first advice." "i won't," said susan. "oh, yes, you will. but remember my advice all the same. the second is, don't sell your body to get a living, unless you've got to." "i couldn't do that," said the girl. mabel laughed queerly. "oh, yes, you could--and will. but remember my advice. don't sell your body because it seems to be the easy way to make a living. i know most women get their living that way." "oh--no--no, indeed!" protested susan. "what a child you are!" laughed mabel. "what's marriage but that?. . . believe your aunt betsy, it's the poorest way to make a living that ever was invented--marriage or the other thing. sometimes you'll be tempted to. you're pretty, and you'll find yourself up against it with no way out. you'll have to give in for a time, no doubt. the men run things in this world, and they'll compel it--one way or another. but fight back to your feet again. if i'd taken my own advice, my name would be on every dead wall in new york in letters two feet high. instead----" she laughed, without much bitterness. "and why? all because i never learned to stand alone. i've even supported men--to have something to lean on! how's that for a poor fool?" there violet anstruther called her. she rose. "you won't take my advice," she said by way of conclusion. "nobody'll take advice. nobody can. we ain't made that way. but don't forget what i've said. and when you've wobbled way off maybe it'll give you something to steer back by." susan sat on there, deep in the deepest of those brown studies that had been characteristic of her from early childhood. often--perhaps most often--abstraction means only mental fogginess. but susan happened to be of those who can concentrate--can think things out. and that afternoon, oblivious of the beauty around her, even unconscious of where she was, she studied the world of reality--that world whose existence, even the part of it lying within ourselves, we all try to ignore or to evade or to deny, and get soundly punished for our folly. taking advantage of the floods of light mabel connemora had let in upon her--full light where there had been a dimness that was equal to darkness--she drew from the closets of memory and examined all the incidents of her life--all that were typical or for other reasons important. one who comes for the first time into new surroundings sees more, learns more about them in a brief period than has been seen and known by those who have lived there always. after a few hours of recalling and reconstructing susan lenox understood sutherland probably better than she would have understood it had she lived a long eventless life there. and is not every sutherland the world in miniature? she also understood her own position--why the world of respectability had cast her out as soon as she emerged from childhood--why she could not have hoped for the lot to which other girls looked forward--why she belonged with the outcasts, in a world apart--and must live her life there. she felt that she could not hope to be respected, loved, married. she must work out her destiny along other lines. she understood it all, more clearly than would have been expected of her. and it is important to note that she faced her future without repining or self-pity, without either joy or despondency. she would go on; she would do as best she could. and nothing that might befall could equal what she had suffered in the throes of the casting out. burlingham roused her from her long reverie. he evidently had come straight from his nap--stocking feet, shirt open at the collar, trousers sagging and face shiny with the sweat that accumulates during sleep on a hot day. "round that bend ahead of us is sutherland," said he, pointing forward. up she started in alarm. "now, don't get fractious," cried he cheerfully. "we'll not touch shore for an hour, at least. and nobody's allowed aboard. you can keep to the cabin. i'll see that you're not bothered." "and--this evening?" "you can keep to the dressing-room until the show's over and the people've gone ashore. and tomorrow morning, bright and early, we'll be off. i promised pat a day for a drunk at sutherland. he'll have to postpone it. i'll give him three at jeffersonville, instead." susan put on her sunbonnet as soon as the show boat rounded the bend above town. thus she felt safe in staying on deck and watching the town drift by. she did not begin to think of going into the cabin until pat was working the boat in toward the landing a square above the old familiar wharf-boat. "what day is this?" she asked eshwell. "saturday." only saturday! and last monday--less than five days ago--she had left this town for her cincinnati adventure. she felt as if months, years, had passed. the town seemed strange to her, and she recalled the landmarks as if she were revisiting in age the scenes of youth. how small the town seemed, after cincinnati! and how squat! then---- she saw the cupola of the schoolhouse. its rooms, the playgrounds flashed before her mind's eye--the teachers she had liked--those she had feared--the face of her uncle, so kind and loving--that same face, with hate and contempt in it---- she hurried into the cabin, tears blinding her eyes, her throat choked with sobs. the burlingham floating palace of thespians tied up against the float of bill phibbs's boathouse--a privilege for which burlingham had to pay two dollars. pat went ashore with a sack of handbills to litter through the town. burlingham followed, to visit the offices of the two evening newspapers and by "handing them out a line of smooth talk"--the one art whereof he was master--to get free advertising. also there were groceries to buy and odds and ends of elastic, fancy crêpe, paper muslin and the like for repairing the shabby costumes. the others remained on board, eshwell and tempest to guard the boat against the swarms of boys darting and swooping and chattering like a huge flock of impudent english sparrows. an additional--and the chief--reason for burlingham's keeping the two actors close was that eshwell was a drunkard and tempest a gambler. neither could be trusted where there was the least temptation. each despised the other's vice and despised the other for being slave to it. burlingham could trust eshwell to watch tempest, could trust tempest to watch eshwell. susan helped mabel with the small and early supper--cold chicken and ham, fried potatoes and coffee. afterward all dressed in the cabin. some of the curtains for dividing off the berths were drawn, out of respect to susan not yet broken to the ways of a mode of life which made privacy and personal modesty impossible--and when any human custom becomes impossible, it does not take human beings long to discover that it is also foolish and useless. the women had to provide for a change of costumes. as the dressing-room behind the stage was only a narrow space between the back drop and the forward wall of the cabin, dressing in it was impossible, so mabel and vi put on a costume of tights, and over it a dress. susan was invited to remain and help. the making-up of the faces interested her; she was amazed by the transformation of mabel into youthful loveliness, with a dairy maid's bloom in place of her pallid pastiness. on the other hand, make-up seemed to bring out the horrors of miss anstruther's big, fat, yet hollow face, and to create other and worse horrors--as if in covering her face it somehow uncovered her soul. when the two women stripped and got into their tights, susan with polite modesty turned away. however, catching sight of miss anstruther in the mirror that had been hung up under one of the side lamps, she was so fascinated that she gazed furtively at her by that indirect way. violet happened to see, laughed. "look at the baby's shocked face, mabel," she cried. but she was mistaken. it was sheer horror that held susan's gaze upon violet's incredible hips and thighs, violently obtruded by the close-reefed corset. mabel had a slender figure, the waist too short and the legs too nearly of the same girth from hip to ankle, but for all that, attractive. susan had never before seen a woman in tights without any sort of skirt. "you would show up well in those things," violet said to her, "that is, for a thin woman. the men don't care much for thinness." "not the clodhoppers and roustabouts that come to see us," retorted mabel. "the more a woman looks like a cow or a sow, the better they like it. they don't believe it's female unless it looks like what they're used to in the barnyard and the cattle pen." miss anstruther was not in the least offended. she paraded, jauntily switching her great hips and laughing. "jealous!" she teased. "you poor little broomstick." burlingham was in a white flannel suit that looked well enough in those dim lights. the make-up gave him an air of rakish youth. eshwell had got himself into an ordinary sack suit. tempest was in the tattered and dirty finery of a seventeenth-century courtier. the paint and black made eshwell's face fat and comic; it gave tempest distinction, made his hollow blazing eyes brilliant and large. all traces of habitation were effaced from the "auditorium"; the lamps were lighted, a ticket box was set up on the rear deck and an iron bar was thrown half across the rear entrance to the cabin, that only one person at a time might be able to pass. the curtain was let down--a gaudy smear of a garden scene in a french palace in the eighteenth century. pat, the orchestra, put on a dress coat and vest and a "dickey"; the coat had white celluloid cuffs pinned in the sleeves at the wrists. as it was still fully an hour and a half from dark, susan hid on the stage; when it should be time for the curtain to go up she would retreat to the dressing-room. through a peephole in the curtain she admired the auditorium; and it did look surprisingly well by lamplight, with the smutches and faded spots on its bright paint softened or concealed. "how many will it hold?" she asked mabel, who was walking up and down, carrying her long train. "a hundred and twenty comfortably," replied miss connemora. "a hundred and fifty crowded. it has held as high as thirty dollars, but we'll be lucky if we get fifteen tonight." susan glanced round at her. she was smoking a cigarette, handling it like a man. susan's expression was so curious that mabel laughed. susan, distressed, cried: "i'm sorry if--if i was impolite." "oh, you couldn't be impolite," said mabel. "you've got that to learn, too--and mighty important it is. we all smoke. why not? we got out of cigarettes, but bob bought a stock this afternoon." susan turned to the peephole. pat, ready to take tickets, was "barking" vigorously in the direction of shore, addressing a crowd which susan of course could not see. whenever he paused for breath, burlingham leaned from the box and took it up, pouring out a stream of eulogies of his show in that easy, lightly cynical voice of his. and the audience straggled in--young fellows and their girls, roughs from along the river front, farmers in town for a day's sport. susan did not see a single familiar face, and she had supposed she knew, by sight at least, everyone in sutherland. from fear lest she should see someone she knew, her mind changed to longing. at last she was rewarded. down the aisle swaggered redney king, son of the washerwoman, a big hulking bully who used to tease her by pulling her hair during recess and by kicking at her shins when they happened to be next each other in the class standing in long line against the wall of the schoolroom for recitation. from her security she smiled at redney as representative of all she loved in the old town. and now the four members of the company on the stage and in the dressing-room lost their ease and contemptuous indifference. they had been talking sneeringly about "yokels" and "jays" and "slum bums." they dropped all that, as there spread over them the mysterious spell of the crowd. as individuals the provincials in those seats were ridiculous; as a mass they were an audience, an object of fear and awe. mabel was almost in tears; violet talked rapidly, with excited gestures and nervous adjustments of various parts of her toilet. the two men paced about, eshwell trembling, tempest with sheer fright in his rolling eyes. they wet their dry lips with dry tongues. each again and again asked the other anxiously how he was looking and paced away without waiting for the answer. the suspense and nervous terror took hold of susan; she stood in the corner of the dressing-room, pressing herself close against the wall, her fingers tightly interlocked and hot and cold tremors chasing up and down her body. burlingham left the box and combined pat's duties with his own--a small matter, as the audience was seated and a guard at the door was necessary only to keep the loafers on shore from rushing in free. pat advanced to the little space reserved before the stage, sat down and fell to tuning his violin with all the noise he could make, to create the illusion of a full orchestra. miss anstruther appeared in one of the forward side doors of the auditorium, very dignified in her black satin (paper muslin) dress, with many and sparkling hair and neck ornaments and rings that seemed alight. she bowed to the audience, pulled a little old cottage organ from under the stage and seated herself at it. after the overture, a pause. susan, peeping through a hole in the drop, saw the curtain go up, drew a long breath of terror as the audience was revealed beyond the row of footlights, beyond the big, befrizzled blond head of violet and the drink-seared face of pat. from the rear of the auditorium came burlingham's smooth-flowing, faintly amused voice, announcing the beginning of the performance "a delightful feast throughout, ladies and gentlemen, amusing yet elevating, ever moral yet with none of the depressing sadness of puritanism. for, ladies and gentlemen, while we are pious, we are not puritan. the first number is a monologue, 'the mad prince,' by that eminent artist, gregory tempest. he has delivered it before vast audiences amid thunders of applause." susan thrilled as tempest strode forth--tempest transformed by the footlights and by her young imagination into a true king most wonderfully and romantically bereft of reason by the woes that had assailed him in horrid phalanxes. if anyone had pointed out to her that tempest's awful voice was simply cheap ranting, or that her own woes had been as terrible as any that had ever visited a king, or that when people go mad it is never from grief but from insides unromantically addled by foolish eating and drinking--if anyone had attempted then and there to educate the girl, how angry it would have made her, how she would have hated that well-meaning person for spoiling her illusion! the spell of the stage seized her with tempest's first line, first elegant despairing gesture. it held her through burlingham and anstruther's "sketch" of a matrimonial quarrel, through connemora and eshwell's "delicious symphonic romanticism" of a lovers' quarrel and making up, through tempest's recitation of "lasca," dying to shield her cowboy lover from the hoofs of the stampeded herd. how the tears did stream from susan's eyes, as tempest wailed out those last lines: but i wonder why i do not care for the things that are like the things that were? can it be that half my heart lies buried there, in texas down by the rio grande? she saw the little grave in the desert and the vast blue sky and the buzzard sailing lazily to and fro, and it seemed to her that tempest himself had inspired such a love, had lost a sweetheart in just that way. no wonder he looked gaunt and hollow-eyed and sallow. the last part of the performance was holy land and comic pictures thrown from the rear on a sheet substituted for the drop. as burlingham had to work the magic lantern from the dressing-room (while tempest, in a kind of monk's robe, used his voice and elocutionary powers in describing the pictures, now lugubriously and now in "lighter vein"), susan was forced to retreat to the forward deck and missed that part of the show. but she watched burlingham shifting the slides and altering the forms of the lenses, and was in another way as much thrilled and spellbound as by the acting. nor did the spell vanish when, with the audience gone, they all sat down to a late supper, and made coarse jests and mocked at their own doings and at the people who had applauded. susan did not hear. she felt proud that she was permitted in so distinguished a company. every disagreeable impression vanished. how could she have thought these geniuses common and cheap! how had she dared apply to them the standards of the people, the dull, commonplace people, among whom she had been brought up! if she could only qualify for membership in this galaxy! the thought made her feel like a worm aspiring to be a star. tempest, whom she had liked least, now filled her with admiration. she saw the tragedy of his life plain and sad upon his features. she could not look at him without her heart's contracting in an ache. it was not long before mr. tempest, who believed himself a lady-killer, noted the ingenuous look in the young girl's face, and began to pose. and it was hardly three bites of a ham sandwich thereafter when mabel connemora noted tempest's shootings of his cuffs and rumplings of his oily ringlets and rollings of his hollow eyes. and at the sight miss mabel's bright eyes became bad and her tongue shot satire at him. but susan did not observe this. after supper they went straightway to bed. burlingham drew the curtains round the berth let down for susan. the others indulged in no such prudery on so hot a night. they put out the lamps and got ready for bed and into it by the dim light trickling in through the big rear doorway and the two small side doorways forward. to help on the circulation of air pat raised the stage curtain and drop, and opened the little door forward. each sleeper had a small netting suspended over him from the ceiling; without that netting the dense swarms of savage mosquitoes would have made sleep impossible. as it was, the loud singing of these baffled thousands kept susan awake. after a while, to calm her brain, excited by the evenings thronging impressions and by the new--or, rather, reviewed--ambitions born of them, susan rose and went softly out on deck, in her nightgown of calico slip. because of the breeze the mosquitoes did not trouble her there, and she stood a long time watching the town's few faint lights--watching the stars, the thronging stars of the milky way--dreaming--dreaming--dreaming. yesterday had almost faded from her, for youth lives only in tomorrow--youth in tomorrow, age in yesterday, and none of us in today which is all we really have. and she, with her wonderful health of body meaning youth as long as it lasted, she would certainly be young until she was very old--would keep her youth--her dreams--her living always in tomorrow. she was dreaming of her first real tomorrow, now. she would work hard at this wonderful profession--_her_ profession!--would be humble and attentive; and surely the day must come when she too would feel upon her heart the intoxicating beat of those magic waves of applause! susan, more excited than ever, slipped softly into the cabin and stole into her curtained berth. like the soughing of the storm above the whimper of the tortured leaves the stentorian snorings of two of the sleepers resounded above the noise of the mosquitoes. she had hardly extended herself in her close little bed when she heard a stealthy step, saw one of her curtains drawn aside. "who is it?" she whispered, unsuspiciously, for she could see only a vague form darkening the space between the parted curtains. the answer came in a hoarse undertone: "ye dainty little darling!" she sat up, struck out madly, screamed at the top of her lungs. the curtains fell back into place, the snoring stopped. susan, all in a sweat and a shiver, lay quiet. hoarse whispering; then in burlingham's voice stern and gruff--"get back to your bed and let her alone, you rolling-eyed----" the sentence ended with as foul a spatter of filth as man can fling at man. silence again, and after a few minutes the two snores resumed their bass accompaniment to the falsetto of the mosquito chorus. susan got a little troubled sleep, was wide awake when violet came saying, "if you want to bathe, i'll bring you a bucket of water and you can put up your berth and do it behind your curtains." susan thanked her and got a most refreshing bath. when she looked out the men were on deck, violet was getting breakfast, and connemora was combing her short, thinning, yellow hair before a mirror hung up near one of the forward doors. in the mirror connemora saw her, smiled and nodded. "you can fix your hair here," said she. "i'm about done. you can use my brush." and when susan was busy at the mirror, mabel lounged on a seat near by smoking a before-breakfast cigarette. "i wish to god i had your hair," said she. "i never did have such a wonderful crop of grass on the knoll, and the way it up and drops out in bunches every now and then sets me crazy. it won't be long before i'll be down to vi's three hairs and a half. you haven't seen her without her wigs? well, don't, if you happen to be feeling a bit off. how burlingham can--" there she stopped, blew out a volume of smoke, grinned half amusedly, half in sympathy with the innocence she was protecting--or, rather, was initiating by cautious degrees. "who was it raised the row last night?" she inquired. "i don't know," said susan, her face hid by the mass of wavy hair she was brushing forward from roots to ends. "you don't? i guess you've got a kind of idea, though." no answer from the girl. "well, it doesn't matter. it isn't your fault." mabel smoked reflectively. "i'm not jealous of _him_--a woman never is. it's the idea of another woman's getting away with her property, whether she wants it or not--_that's_ what sets her mad-spot to humming. no, i don't give a--a cigarette butt--for that greasy bum actor. but i've always got to have somebody." she laughed. "the idea of his thinking _you'd_ have _him_! what peacocks men are!" susan understood. the fact of this sort of thing was no longer a mystery to her. but the why of the fact--that seemed more amazing than ever. now that she had discovered that her notion of love being incorporeal was as fanciful as santa claus, she could not conceive why it should be at all. as she was bringing round the braids for the new coiffure she had adopted she said to mabel: "you--love him?" "i?" mabel laughed immoderately. "you can have him, if you want him." susan shuddered. "oh, no," she said. "i suppose he's very nice--and really he's quite a wonderful actor. but i--i don't care for men." mabel laughed again--curt, bitter. "wait," she said. susan shook her head, with youth's positiveness. "what's caring got to do with it?" pursued mabel, ignoring the headshake. "i've been about quite a bit, and i've yet to see anybody that really cared for anybody else. we care for ourselves. but a man needs a woman, and a woman needs a man. they call it loving. they might as well call eating loving. ask burly." chapter xiv at breakfast tempest was precisely as usual, and so were the others. nor was there effort or any sort of pretense in this. we understand only that to which we are accustomed; the man of peace is amazed by the veteran's nonchalance in presence of danger and horror, of wound and death. to these river wanderers, veterans in the unconventional life, where the unusual is the usual, the unexpected the expected, whatever might happen was the matter of course, to be dealt with and dismissed. susan naturally took her cue from them. when tempest said something to her in the course of the careless conversation round the breakfast table, she answered--and had no sense of constraint. thus, an incident that in other surroundings would have been in some way harmful through receiving the exaggeration of undue emphasis, caused less stir than the five huge and fiery mosquito bites eshwell had got in the night. and susan unconsciously absorbed one of those lessons in the science and art of living that have decisive weight in shaping our destinies. for intelligent living is in large part learning to ignore the unprofitable that one may concentrate upon the profitable. burlingham announced that they would cast off and float down to bethlehem. there was a chorus of protests. "why, we ought to stay here a week!" cried miss anstruther. "we certainly caught on last night." "didn't we take in seventeen dollars?" demanded eshwell. "we can't do better than that anywhere." "who's managing this show?" asked burlingham in his suave but effective way. "i think i know what i'm about." he met their grumblings with the utmost good-humor and remained inflexible. susan listened with eyes down and burning cheeks. she knew burlingham was "leaving the best cow unmilked," as connemora put it, because he wished to protect her. she told him so when they were alone on the forward deck a little later, as the boat was floating round the bend below sutherland. "yes," he admitted. "i've great hopes from your ballads. i want to get you on." he looked round casually, saw that no one was looking, drew a peculiarly folded copy of the _sutherland courier_ from his pocket. "besides"--said he, holding out the paper--"read that." susan read: george warham, esq., requests us to announce that he has increased the reward for information as to the whereabouts of mrs. susan ferguson, his young niece, nee susan lenox, to one thousand dollars. there are grave fears that the estimable and lovely young lady, who disappeared from her husband's farm the night of her marriage, has, doubtless in a moment of insanity, ended her life. we hope not. susan lifted her gaze from this paragraph, after she had read it until the words ran together in a blur. she found burlingham looking at her. said he: "as i told you before, i don't want to know anything. but when i read that, it occurred to me, if some of the others saw it they might think it was you--and might do a dirty trick." he sighed, with a cynical little smile. "i was tempted, myself. a thousand is quite a bunch. you don't know--not yet--how a chance to make some money--any old way--compels a man--or a woman--when money's as scarce and as useful as it is in this world. as you get along, you'll notice, my dear, that the people who get moral goose flesh at the shady doings of others are always people who haven't ever really been up against it. i don't know why i didn't----" he shrugged his shoulders. "now, my dear, you're in on the secret of why i haven't got up in the world." he smiled cheerfully. "but i may yet. the game's far from over." she realized that he had indeed made an enormous sacrifice for her; for, though very ignorant about money, a thousand dollars seemed a fortune. she had no words; she looked away toward the emerald shore, and her eyes filled and her lip quivered. how much goodness there was in the world--how much generosity and affection! "i'm not sure," he went on, "that you oughtn't to go back. but it's your own business. i've a kind of feeling you know what you're about." "no matter what happens to me," said she, "i'll never regret what i've done. i'd kill myself before i'd spend another day with the man they made me marry." "well--i'm not fond of dying," observed burlingham, in the light, jovial tone that would most quickly soothe her agitation, "but i think i'd take my chances with the worms rather than with the dry rot of a backwoods farm. you may not get your meals so regular out in the world, but you certainly do live. yes--that backwoods life, for anybody with a spark of spunk, is simply being dead and knowing it." he tore the _courier_ into six pieces, flung them over the side. "none of the others saw the paper," said he. "so--miss lorna sackville is perfectly safe." he patted her on the shoulder. "and she owes me a thousand and two dollars." "i'll pay--if you'll be patient," said the girl, taking his jest gravely. "it's a good gamble," said he. then he laughed. "i guess that had something to do with my virtue. there's always a practical reason--always." but the girl was not hearing his philosophies. once more she was overwhelmed and stupefied by the events that had dashed in, upon, and over her like swift succeeding billows that give the swimmer no pause for breath or for clearing the eyes. "no--you're not dreaming," said burlingham, laughing at her expression. "at least, no more than we all are. sometimes i suspect the whole damn shooting-match is nothing but a dream. well, it's a pretty good one eh?" and she agreed with him, as she thought how smoothly and agreeably they were drifting into the unknown, full of the most fascinating possibilities. how attractive this life was, how much at home she felt among these people, and if anyone should tell him about her birth or about how she had been degraded by ferguson, it wouldn't in the least affect their feeling toward her, she was sure. "when do--do you--try me?" she asked. "tomorrow night, at bethlehem--a bum little town for us. we'll stay there a couple of days. i want you to get used to appearing." he nodded at her encouragingly. "you've got stuff in you, real stuff. don't you doubt it. get self-confidence--conceit, if you please. nobody arrives anywhere without it. you want to feel that you can do what you want to do. a fool's conceit is that he's it already. a sensible man's conceit is that he can be it, if he'll only work hard and in the right way. see?" "i--i think i do," said the girl. "i'm not sure." burlingham smoked his cigar in silence. when he spoke, it was with eyes carefully averted. "there's another subject the spirit moves me to talk to you about. that's the one miss connemora opened up with you yesterday." as susan moved uneasily, "now, don't get scared. i'm not letting the woman business bother me much nowadays. all i think of is how to get on my feet again. i want to have a theater on broadway before the old black-flagger overtakes my craft and makes me walk the plank and jump out into the big guess. so you needn't think i'm going to worry you. i'm not." "oh, i didn't think----" "you ought to have, though," interrupted he. "a man like me is a rare exception. i'm a rare exception to my ordinary self, to be quite honest. it'll be best for you always to assume that every man you run across is looking for just one thing. you know what?" susan, the flush gone from her cheeks, nodded. "i suppose connemora has put you wise. but there are some things even she don't know about that subject. now, i want you to listen to your grandfather. remember what he says. and think it over until you understand it." "i will," said susan. "in the life you've come out of, virtue in a woman's everything. she's got to be virtuous, or at least to have the reputation of it--or she's nothing. you understand that?" "yes," said susan. "i understand that--now." "very well. now in the life you're going into, virtue in a woman is nothing--no more than it is in a man anywhere. the woman who makes a career becomes like the man who makes a career. how is it with a man? some are virtuous, others are not. but no man lets virtue bother him and nobody bothers about his virtue. that's the way it is with a woman who cuts loose from the conventional life of society and home and all that. she is virtuous or not, as she happens to incline. her real interest in herself, her real value, lies in another direction. if it doesn't, if she continues to be agitated about her virtue as if it were all there is to her--then the sooner she hikes back to respectability, to the conventional routine, why the better for her. she'll never make a career, any more than she could drive an automobile through a crowded street and at the same time keep a big picture hat on straight. do you follow me?" "i'm not sure," said the girl. "i'll have to think about it." "that's right. don't misunderstand. i'm not talking for or against virtue. i'm simply talking practical life, and all i mean is that you won't get on there by your virtue, and you won't get on by your lack of virtue. now for my advice." susan's look of unconscious admiration and attention was the subtlest flattery. its frank, ingenuous showing of her implicit trust in him so impressed him with his responsibility that he hesitated before he said: "never forget this, and don't stop thinking about it until you understand it: make men _as_ men incidental in your life, precisely as men who amount to anything make women _as_ women incidental." her first sensation was obviously disappointing. she had expected something far more impressive. said she: "i don't care anything about men." "be sensible! how are you to know now what you care about and what you don't?" was burlingham's laughing rebuke. "and in the line you've taken--the stage--with your emotions always being stirred up, with your thoughts always hovering round the relations of men and women--for that's the only subject of plays and music, and with opportunity thrusting at you as it never thrusts at conventional people you'll probably soon find you care a great deal about men. but don't ever let your emotions hinder or hurt or destroy you. use them to help you. i guess i'm shooting pretty far over that young head of yours, ain't i?" "not so very far," said the girl. "anyhow, i'll remember." "if you live big enough and long enough, you'll go through three stages. the first is the one you're in now. they've always taught you without realizing it, and so you think that only the strong can afford to do right. you think doing right makes the ordinary person, like yourself, easy prey for those who do wrong. you think that good people--if they're really good--have to wait until they get to heaven before they get a chance." "isn't that so?" "no. but you'll not realize it until you pass into the second stage. there, you'll think you see that only the strong can afford to do wrong. you'll think that everyone, except the strong, gets it in the neck if he or she does anything out of the way. you'll think you're being punished for your sins, and that, if you had behaved yourself, you'd have got on much better. that's the stage that's coming; and what you go through with there--how you come out of the fight--will decide your fate--show whether or not you've got the real stuff in you. do you understand?" susan shook her head. "i thought not. you haven't lived long enough yet. well, i'll finish, anyhow." "i'll remember," said susan. "i'll think about it until i do understand." "i hope so. the weather and the scenery make me feel like philosophizing. finally, if you come through the second stage all right, you'll enter the third stage. there, you'll see that you were right at first when you thought only the strong could afford to do right. and you'll see that you were right in the second stage when you thought only the strong could afford to do wrong. for you'll have learned that only the strong can afford to act at all, and that they can do right or wrong as they please _because they are strong_." "then you don't believe in right, at all!" exclaimed the girl, much depressed, but whether for the right or for her friend she could not have told. "now, who said that?" demanded he, amused. "what _did_ i say? why--if you want to do right, be strong or you'll be crushed; and if you want to do wrong, take care again to be strong--or you'll be crushed. my moral is, be strong! in this world the good weaklings and the bad weaklings had better lie low, hide in the tall grass. the strong inherit the earth." they were silent a long time, she thinking, he observing her with sad tenderness. at last he said: "you are a nice sweet girl--well brought up. but that means badly brought up for the life you've got to lead--the life you've got to learn to lead." "i'm beginning to see that," said the girl. her gravity made him feel like laughing, and brought the tears to his eyes. the laughter he suppressed. "you're going to fight your way up to what's called the triumphant class--the people on top--they have all the success, all the money, all the good times. well, the things you've been taught--at church--in the sunday school--in the nice storybooks you've read--those things are all for the triumphant class, or for people working meekly along in 'the station to which god has appointed them' and handing over their earnings to their betters. but those nice moral things you believe in--they don't apply to people like you--fighting their way up from the meek working class to the triumphant class. you won't believe me now--won't understand thoroughly. but soon you'll see. once you've climbed up among the successful people you can afford to indulge--in moderation--in practicing the good old moralities. any dirty work you may need done you can hire done and pretend not to know about it. but while you're climbing, no golden rule and no turning of the cheek. tooth and claw then--not sheathed but naked--not by proxy but in your own person." "but you're not like that," said the girl. "the more fool i," repeated he. she was surprised that she understood so much of what he had said--childlike wonder at her wise old heart, made wise almost in a night--a wedding night. when burlingham lapsed into silence, laughing at himself for having talked so far over the "kiddie's" head, she sat puzzling out what he had said. the world seemed horribly vast and forbidding, and the sky, so blue and bright, seemed far, far away. she sighed profoundly. "i am so weak," she murmured. "i am so ignorant." burlingham nodded and winked. "yes, but you'll grow," said be. "i back you to win." the color poured into her cheeks, and she burst into tears. burlingham thought he understood; for once his shrewdness went far astray. excusably, since he could not know that he had used the same phrase that had closed spenser's letter to her. late in the afternoon, when the heat had abated somewhat and they were floating pleasantly along with the washing gently a-flutter from lines on the roof of the auditorium, burlingham put eshwell at the rudder and with pat and the violin rehearsed her. "the main thing, the only thing to worry about," explained he, "is beginning right." she was standing in the center of the stage, he on the floor of the auditorium beside the seated orchestra. "that means," he went on, "you've simply got to learn to come in right. we'll practice that for a while." she went to the wings--where there was barely space for her to conceal herself by squeezing tightly against the wall. at the signal from him she walked out. as she had the utmost confidence in his kindness, and as she was always too deeply interested in what she and others were doing to be uncomfortably self-conscious, she was not embarrassed, and thought she made the crossing and took her stand very well. he nodded approvingly. "but," said he, "there's a difference between a stage walk and walking anywhere else--or standing. nothing is natural on the stage. if it were it would look unnatural, because the stage itself is artificial and whatever is there must be in harmony with it. so everything must be done unnaturally in such a way that it _seems_ natural. just as a picture boat looks natural though it's painted on a flat surface. now i'll illustrate." he gave her his hand to help her jump down; then he climbed to the stage. he went to the wings and walked out. as he came he called her attention to how he poised his body, how he advanced so that there would be from the auditorium no unsightly view of crossing legs, how he arranged hands, arms, shoulders, legs, head, feet for an attitude of complete rest. he repeated his illustration again and again, susan watching and listening with open-eyed wonder and admiration. she had never dreamed that so simple a matter could be so complex. when he got her up beside him and went through it with her, she soon became as used to the new motions as a beginner at the piano to stretching an octave. but it was only after more than an hour's practice that she moved him to say: "that'll do for a beginning. now, we'll sing." she tried "suwanee river" first and went through it fairly well, singing to him as he stood back at the rear door. he was enthusiastic--cunning burlingham, who knew so well how to get the best out of everyone! "mighty good--eh, pat? yes, mighty good. you've got something better than a great voice, my dear. you've got magnetism. the same thing that made me engage you the minute you asked me is going to make you--well, go a long ways--a _long_ ways. now, we'll try 'the last rose of summer.'" she sang even better. and this improvement continued through the other four songs of her repertoire. his confidence in her was contagious; it was so evident that he really did believe in her. and pat, too, wagged his head in a way that made her feel good about herself. then burlingham called in the others whom he had sent to the forward deck. before them the girl went all to pieces. she made her entrance badly, she sang worse. and the worse she sang, the worse she felt and the worse her next attempt was. at last, with nerves unstrung, she broke down and sobbed. burlingham climbed up to pat her on the shoulder. "that's the best sign yet," said he. "it shows you've got temperament. yes--you've got the stuff in you." he quieted her, interested her in the purely mechanical part of what she was doing. "don't think of who you're doing it before, or of how you're doing it, but only of getting through each step and each note. if your head's full of that, you'll have no room for fright." and she was ready to try again. when she finished the last notes of "suwanee river," there was an outburst of hearty applause. and the sound that pleased her most was tempest's rich rhetorical "bravo!" as a man she abhorred him; but she respected the artist. and in unconsciously drawing this distinction she gave proof of yet another quality that was to count heavily in the coming days. artist he was not. but she thought him an artist. a girl or boy without the intelligence that can develop into flower and fruit would have seen and felt only tempest, the odious personality. burlingham did not let her off until she was ready to drop with exhaustion. and after supper, when they were floating slowly on, well out of the channel where they might be run down by some passing steamer with a flint-hearted captain or pilot, she had to go at it again. she went to bed early, and she slept without a motion or a break until the odor of the cooking breakfast awakened her. when she came out, her face was bright for the first time. she was smiling, laughing, chatting, was delighted with everything and everybody. even the thought of roderick spenser laid up with a broken leg recurred less often and less vividly. it seemed to her that the leg must be about well. the imagination of healthy youth is reluctant to admit ideas of gloom in any circumstances. in circumstances of excitement and adventure, such as susan's at that time, it flatly refuses to admit them. they were at anchor before a little town sprawled upon the fields between hills and river edge. a few loafers were chewing tobacco and inspecting the show boat from the shady side of a pile of lumber. pat had already gone forth with the bundle of handbills; he was not only waking up the town, but touring the country in horse and buggy, was agitating the farmers--for the show boat was to stay at least two nights at bethlehem. "and we ought to do pretty well," said burlingham. "the wheat's about all threshed, and there's a kind of lull. the hayseeds aren't so dead tired at night. a couple of weeks ago we couldn't have got half a house by paying for it." as the afternoon wore away and the sun disappeared behind the hills to the southwest, susan's spirits oozed. burlingham and the others--deliberately--paid no attention to her, acted as if no great, universe-stirring event were impending. immediately after supper burlingham said: "now, vi, get busy and put her into her harness. make her a work of art." never was there a finer display of unselfishness than in their eagerness to help her succeed, in their intense nervous anxiety lest she should not make a hit. the bad in human nature, as mabel connemora had said, is indeed almost entirely if not entirely the result of the compulsion of circumstances; the good is the natural outcropping of normal instincts, and resumes control whenever circumstances permit. these wandering players had suffered too much not to have the keenest and gentlest sympathy. susan looked on tempest as a wicked man; yet she could not but be touched by his almost hysterical excitement over her debut, when the near approach of the hour made it impossible for his emotional temperament longer to hide its agitation. every one of them gave or loaned her a talisman--tempest, a bit of rabbit's foot; anstruther, a ring that had twice saved her from drowning (at least, it had been on her finger each time); connemora, a hunchback's tooth on a faded velvet string; pat, a penny which happened to be of the date of her birth year (the presence of the penny was regarded by all as a most encouraging sign); eshwell loaned her a miniature silver bug he wore on his watch chain; burlingham's contribution was a large buckeye----"ever since i've had that, i've never been without at least the price of a meal in my pocket." they had got together for her a kind of evening dress, a pale blue chiffon-like drapery that left her lovely arms and shoulders bare and clung softly to the lines of her figure. they did her hair up in a graceful sweep from the brow and a simple coil behind. she looked like a woman, yet like a child dressed as a woman, too, for there was as always that exuberant vitality which made each of the hairs of her head seem individual, electric. the rouge gave her color, enhanced into splendor the brilliance of her violet-gray eyes--eyes so intensely colored and so admirably framed that they were noted by the least observant. when anstruther had put the last touches to her toilet and paraded her to the others, there was a chorus of enthusiasm. the men no less than the women viewed her with the professional eye. "didn't i tell you all?" cried burlingham, as they looked her up and down like a group of connoisseurs inspecting a statue. "wasn't i right?" "'it is the dawn, and juliet is the east,'" orated tempest in rich, romantic tones. "a damn shame to waste her on these yaps," said eshwell. connemora embraced her with tearful eyes. "and as sweet as you are lovely, you dear!" she cried. "you simply can't help winning." the two women thought her greatest charms were her form and her feet and ankles. the men insisted that her charm of charms was her eyes. and certainly, much could be said for that view. susan's violet-gray eyes, growing grayer when she was thoughtful, growing deeper and clearer and softer shining violet when her emotions were touched--susan's eyes were undoubtedly unusual even in a race in which homely eyes are the exception. when it was her turn and she emerged into the glare of the footlights, she came to a full stop and an awful wave of weakness leaped up through legs and body to blind her eyes and crash upon her brain. she shook her head, lifted it high like a swimmer shaking off a wave. her gaze leaped in terror across the blackness of the auditorium with its thick-strewn round white disks of human faces, sought the eyes of burlingham standing in full view in the center of the rear doorway--where he had told her to look for him. she heard pat playing the last of the opening chords; burlingham lifted his hand like a leader's baton. and naturally and sweetly the notes, the words of the old darkey song of longing for home began to float out through the stillness. she did not take her gaze from burlingham. she sang her best, sang to please him, to show him how she appreciated what he had done for her. and when she finished and bowed, the outburst of applause unnerved her, sent her dizzy and almost staggering into the wings. "splendid! splendid!" cried mabel, and anstruther embraced her, and tempest and eshwell kissed her hands. they all joined in pushing her out again for the encore--"blue alsatian mountains." she did not sing quite so steadily, but got through in good form, the tremolo of nervousness in her voice adding to the wailing pathos of the song's refrain: adé, adé, adé, such dreams must pass away, but the blue alsatian mountains seem to watch and wait alway. the crowd clapped, stamped, whistled, shouted; but burlingham defied it. "the lady will sing again later," he cried. "the next number on the regular program is," etc., etc. the crowd yelled; burlingham stood firm, and up went the curtain on eshwell and connemora's sketch. it got no applause. nor did any other numbers on the program. the contrast between the others and the beauty of the girl, her delicate sweetness, her vital youth, her freshness of the early morning flower, was inevitable. the crowd could think only of her. the quality of magnetism aside, she had sung neither very well nor very badly. but had she sung badly, still her beauty would have won her the same triumph. when she came on for her second number with a cloud-like azure chiffon flung carelessly over her dark hair as a scarf, spanish fashion, she received a stirring welcome. it frightened her, so that pat had to begin four times before her voice faintly took up the tune. again burlingham's encouraging, confident gaze, flung across the gap between them like a strong rescuing hand, strengthened her to her task. this time he let the crowd have two encores--and the show was over; for the astute manager, seeing how the girl had caught on, had moved her second number to the end. burlingham lingered in the entrance to the auditorium to feast himself on the comments of the crowd as it passed out. when he went back he had to search for the girl, found her all in a heap in a chair at the outer edge of the forward deck. she was sobbing piteously. "well, for god's sake!" cried he. "is _this_ the way you take it!" she lifted her head. "did i do very badly?" she asked. "you swept 'em off their big hulking feet," replied he. "when you didn't come, i thought i'd disappointed you." "i'll bet my hand there never was such a hit made in a river show boat--and they've graduated some of the swells of the profession. we'll play here a week to crowded houses--matinées every day, too. and this is a two-night stand usually. i must find some more songs." he slapped his thigh. "the very thing!" he cried. "we'll ring in some hymns. 'rock of ages,' say--and 'jesus, lover of my soul'--and you can get 'em off in a churchy kind of costume something like a surplice. that'll knock 'em stiff. and anstruther can dope out the accompaniments on that wheezer. what d'you think?" "whatever you want," said the girl. "oh, i am so glad!" "i don't see how you got through so well," said he. "i didn't dare fail," replied susan. "if i had, i couldn't have faced you." and by the light of the waning moon he saw the passionate gratitude of her sensitive young face. "oh--i've done nothing," said he, wiping the tears from his eyes--for he had his full share of the impulsive, sentimental temperament of his profession. "pure selfishness." susan gazed at him with eyes of the pure deep violet of strongest feeling. "_i_ know what you did," she said in a low voice. "and--i'd die for you." burlingham had to use his handkerchief in dealing with his eyes now. "this business has given me hysterics," said he with a queer attempt at a laugh. then, after a moment, "god bless you, little girl. you wait here a moment. i'll see how supper's getting on." he wished to go ahead of her, for he had a shrewd suspicion as to the state of mind of the rest of the company. and he was right. there they sat in the litter of peanut hulls, popcorn, and fruit skins which the audience had left. on every countenance was jealous gloom. "what's wrong?" inquired burlingham in his cheerful derisive way. "you are a nice bunch, you are!" they shifted uneasily. mabel snapped out, "where's the infant prodigy? is she so stuck on herself already that she won't associate with us?" "you grown-up babies," mocked burlingham. "i found her out there crying in darkness because she thought she'd failed. now you go bring her in, conny. as for the rest of you, i'm disgusted. here we've hit on something that'll land us in easy street, and you're all filled up with poison." they were ashamed of themselves. burlingham had brought back to them vividly the girl's simplicity and sweetness that had won their hearts, even the hearts of the women in whom jealousy of her young beauty would have been more than excusable. anstruther began to get out the supper dishes and mabel slipped away toward the forward deck. "when the child comes in," pursued burlingham, "i want to see you people looking and acting human." "we are a lot of damn fools," admitted eshwell. "that's why we're bum actors instead of doing well at some respectable business." and his jealousy went the way of violet's and mabel's. pat began to remember that he had shared in the triumph--where would she have been without his violin work? but tempest remained somber. in his case better nature was having a particularly hard time of it. his vanity had got savage wounds from the hoots and the "oh, bite it off, hamfat," which had greeted his impressive lecture on the magic lantern pictures. he eyed burlingham glumly. he exonerated the girl, but not burlingham. he was convinced that the manager, in a spirit of mean revenge, had put up a job on him. it simply could not be in the ordinary course that any audience, without some sly trickery of prompting from an old expert of theatrical "double-crossing," would be impatient for a mere chit of an amateur when it might listen to his rich, mellow eloquence. susan came shyly--and at the first glance into her face her associates despised themselves for their pettiness. it is impossible for envy and jealousy and hatred to stand before the light of such a nature as susan's. away from her these very human friends of hers might hate her--but in her presence they could not resist the charm of her sincerity. everyone's spirits went up with the supper. it was pat who said to burlingham, "bob, we're going to let the pullet in on the profits equally, aren't we?" "sure," replied burlingham. "anybody kicking?" the others protested enthusiastically except tempest, who shot a glance of fiery scorn at burlingham over a fork laden with potato salad. "then--you're elected, miss sackville," said burlingham. susan's puzzled eyes demanded an explanation. "just this," said he. "we divide equally at the end of the trip all we've raked in, after the rent of the boat and expenses are taken off. you get your equal share exactly as if you started with us." "but that wouldn't be fair," protested the girl. "i must pay what i owe you first." "she means two dollars she borrowed of me at carrollton," explained burlingham. and they all laughed uproariously. "i'll only take what's fair," said the girl. "i vote we give it all to her," rolled out tempest in tragedy's tone for classic satire. before mabel could hurl at him the probably coarse retort she instantly got her lips ready to make, burlingham's cool, peace-compelling tones broke in: "miss sackville's right. she must get only what's fair. she shares equally from tonight on--less two dollars." susan nodded delightedly. she did not know--and the others did not at the excited moment recall--that the company was to date eleven dollars less well off than when it started from the headwaters of the ohio in early june. but burlingham knew, and that was the cause of the quiet grin to which he treated himself. chapter xv burlingham had lived too long, too actively, and too intelligently to have left any of his large, original stock of the optimism that had so often shipwrecked his career in spite of his talents and his energy. out of the bitterness of experience he used to say, "a young optimist is a young fool. an old optimist is an old ass. a fool may learn, an ass can't." and again, "an optimist steams through the fog, taking it for granted everything's all right. a pessimist steams ahead too, but he gets ready for trouble." however, he was wise enough to keep his private misgivings and reservations from his associates; the leaders of the human race always talk optimism and think pessimism. he had told the company that susan was sure to make a go; and after she had made a go, he announced the beginning of a season of triumph. but he was surprised when his prediction came true and they had to turn people away from the next afternoon's performance. he began to believe they really could stay a week, and hired a man to fill the streets of new washington and other inland villages and towns of the county with a handbill headlining susan. the news of the lovely young ballad singer in the show boat at bethlehem spread, as interesting news ever does, and down came the people to see and hear, and to go away exclaiming. bethlehem, the sleepy, showed that it could wake when there was anything worth waking for. burlingham put on the hymns in the middle of the week, and even the clergy sent their families. every morning susan, either with mabel or with burlingham, or with both, took a long walk into the country. it was burlingham, by the way, who taught her the necessity of regular and methodical long walks for the preservation of her health. when she returned there was always a crowd lounging about the landing waiting to gape at her and whisper. it was intoxicating to her, this delicious draught of the heady wine of fame; and burlingham was not unprepared for the evidences that she thought pretty well of herself, felt that she had arrived. he laughed to himself indulgently. "let the kiddie enjoy herself," thought he. "she needs the self-confidence now to give her a good foundation to stand on. then when she finds out what a false alarm this jay excitement was, she'll not be swept clean away into despair." the chief element in her happiness, he of course knew nothing about. until this success--which she, having no basis for comparison, could not but exaggerate--she had been crushed and abused more deeply than she had dared admit to herself by her birth which made all the world scorn her and by the series of calamities climaxing in that afternoon and night of horror at ferguson's. this success--it seemed to her to give her the right to have been born, the right to live on and hold up her head without effort after ferguson. "i'll show them all, before i get through," she said to herself over and over again. "they'll be proud of me. ruth will be boasting to everyone that i'm her cousin. and sam wright--he'll wonder that he ever dared touch such a famous, great woman." she only half believed this herself, for she had much common sense and small self-confidence. but pretending that she believed it all gave her the most delicious pleasure. burlingham took such frank joy in her innocent vanity--so far as he understood it and so far as she exhibited it--that the others were good-humored about it too--all the others except tempest, whom conceit and defeat had long since soured through and through. a tithe of susan's success would have made him unbearable, for like most human beings he had a vanity that was atlantosaurian on starvation rations and would have filled the whole earth if it had been fed a few crumbs. small wonder that we are ever eagerly on the alert for signs of vanity in others; we are seeking the curious comfort there is in the feeling that others have our own weakness to a more ridiculous degree. tempest twitched to jeer openly at susan, whose exhibition was really timid and modest and not merely excusable but justifiable. but he dared go no further than holding haughtily aloof and casting vaguely into the air ever and anon a tragic sneer. susan would not have understood if she had seen, and did not see. she was treading the heights, her eyes upon the sky. she held grave consultation with burlingham, with violet, with mabel, about improving her part. she took it all very, very seriously--and burlingham was glad of that. "yes, she does take herself seriously," he admitted to anstruther. "but that won't do any harm as she's so young, and as she takes her work seriously, too. the trouble about taking oneself seriously is it stops growth. she hasn't got that form of it." "not yet," said violet. "she'll wake from her little dream, poor child, long before the fatal stage." and he heaved a sigh for his own lost illusions--those illusions that had cost him so dear. burlingham had intended to make at least one stop before jeffersonville, the first large town on the way down. but susan's capacities as a house-filler decided him for pushing straight for it. "we'll go where there's a big population to be drawn on," said he. but he did not say that in the back of his head there was forming a plan to take a small theater at jeffersonville if the girl made a hit there. eshwell, to whom he was talking, looked glum. "she's going pretty good with these greenies," observed he. "but i've my doubts whether city people'll care for anything so milk-like." burlingham had his doubts, too; but he retorted warmly: "don't you believe it, eshie. city's an outside. underneath, there's still the simple, honest, grassy-green heart of the country." eshwell laughed. "so you've stopped jeering at jays. you've forgotten what a lot of tightwads and petty swindlers they are. well, i don't blame you. now that they're giving down to us so freely, i feel better about them myself. it's a pity we can't lower the rest of the program to the level of their intellectuals." burlingham was not tactless enough to disturb eshwell's consoling notion that while susan was appreciated by these ignorant country-jakes, the rest of the company were too subtle and refined in their art. "that's a good idea," replied he. "i'll try to get together some simple slop. perhaps a melodrama, a good hot one, would go--eh?" after ten days the receipts began to drop. on the fifteenth day there was only a handful at the matinée, and in the evening half the benches were empty. "about milked dry," said burlingham at the late supper. "we'll move on in the morning." this pleased everyone. susan saw visions of bigger triumphs; the others felt that they were going where dramatic talent, not to say genius, would be at least not entirely unappreciated. so the company was at its liveliest next morning as the mosquito-infested willows of the bethlehem shore slowly dropped away. they had made an unusually early start, for the river would be more and more crowded as they neared the three close-set cities--louisville, jeffersonville, and new albany, and the helpless little show boat must give the steamers no excuse for not seeing her. all day--a long, dreamy, summer day--they drifted lazily downstream, and, except tempest, all grew gayer and more gay. burlingham had announced that there were three hundred and seventy-eight dollars in the japanned tin box he kept shut up in his bag. at dusk a tug, for three dollars, nosed them into a wharf which adjoined the thickly populated labor quarter of jeffersonville. susan was awakened by a scream. even as she opened her eyes a dark cloud, a dull suffocating terrifying pain, descended upon her. when she again became conscious, she was lying upon a mass of canvas on the levee with three strange men bending over her. she sat up, instinctively caught together the front of the nightdress she had bought in bethlehem the second day there. then she looked wildly from face to face. "you're all right, ma'am," said one of the men. "not a scratch--only stunned." "what was it?" said the girl. "where are they?" as she spoke, she saw burlingham in his nightshirt propped against a big blue oil barrel. he was staring stupidly at the ground. and now she noted the others scattered about the levee, each with a group around him or her. "what was it?" she repeated. "a tug butted its tow of barges into you," said someone. "crushed your boat like an eggshell." burlingham staggered to his feet, stared round, saw her. "thank god!" he cried. "anyone drowned? anyone hurt?" "all saved--no bones broken," someone responded. "and the boat?" "gone down. nothing left of her but splinters. the barges were full of coal and building stone." "the box!" suddenly shouted burlingham. "the box!" "what kind of a box?" asked a boy with lean, dirty, and much scratched bare legs. "a little black tin box like they keep money in?" "that's it. where is it?" "it's all right," said the boy. "one of your people, a black actor-looking fellow----" "tempest," interjected burlingham. "go on." "he dressed on the wharf and he had the box." "where is he?" "he said he was going for a doctor. last i seed of him he was up to the corner yonder. he was movin' fast." burlingham gave a kind of groan. susan read in his face his fear, his suspicion--the suspicion he was ashamed of himself for having. she noted vaguely that he talked with the policeman aside for a few minutes, after which the policeman went up the levee. burlingham rejoined his companions and took command. the first thing was to get dressed as well as might be from such of the trunks as had been knocked out of the cabin by the barge and had been picked up. they were all dazed. even burlingham could not realize just what had occurred. they called to one another more or less humorous remarks while they were dressing behind piles of boxes, crates, barrels and sacks in the wharf-boat. and they laughed gayly when they assembled. susan made the best appearance, for her blue serge suit had been taken out dry when she herself was lifted from the sinking wreck; the nightgown served as a blouse. mabel's trunk had been saved. violet could wear none of her things, as they were many sizes too small, so she appeared in a property skirt of black paper muslin, a black velvet property basque, a pair of shoes belonging to tempest. burlingham and eshwell made a fairly respectable showing in clothing from tempest's trunk. their own trunks had gone down. "why, where's tempest?" asked eshwell. "he'll be back in a few minutes," replied burlingham. "in fact, he ought to be back now." his glance happened to meet susan's; he hastily shifted his eyes. "where's the box?" asked violet. "tempest's taking care of it," was the manager's answer. "tempest!" exclaimed mabel. her shrewd, dissipated eyes contracted with suspicion. "anybody got any money?" inquired eshwell, as he fished in his pockets. no one had a cent. eshwell searched tempest's trunk, found a two-dollar bill and a one wrapped round a silver dollar and wadded in among some ragged underclothes. susan heard burlingham mutter "wonder how he happened to overlook that!" but no one else heard. "well, we might have breakfast," suggested mabel. they went out on the water deck of the wharf-boat, looked down at the splinters of the wreck lying in the deep yellow river. "come on," said burlingham, and he led the way up the levee. there was no attempt at jauntiness; they all realized now. "how about tempest?" said eshwell, stopping short halfway up. "tempest--hell!" retorted mabel. "come on." "what do you mean?" cried violet, whose left eye was almost closed by a bruise. "we'll not see him again. come on." "bob!" shrieked violet at burlingham. "do you hear that?" "yes," said he. "keep calm, and come on." "aren't you going to _do_ anything?" she screamed, seizing him by the coat tail. "you must, damn it--you must!" "i got the policeman to telephone headquarters," said burlingham. "what else can be done? come on." and a moment later the bedraggled and dejected company filed into a cheap levee restaurant. "bring some coffee," burlingham said to the waiter. then to the others, "does anybody want anything else?" no one spoke. "coffee's all," he said to the waiter. it came, and they drank it in silence, each one's brain busy with the disaster from the standpoint of his own resulting ruin. susan glanced furtively at each face in turn. she could not think of her own fate, there was such despair in the faces of these others. mabel looked like an old woman. as for violet, every feature of her homeliness, her coarseness, her dissipated premature old age stood forth in all its horror. susan's heart contracted and her flesh crept as she glanced quickly away. but she still saw, and it was many a week before she ceased to see whenever violet's name came into her mind. burlingham, too, looked old and broken. eshwell and pat, neither of whom had ever had the smallest taste of success, were stolid, like cornered curs taking their beating and waiting in silence for the blows to stop. "here, eshie," said the manager, "take care of the three dollars." and he handed him the bills. "i'll pay for the coffee and keep the change. i'm going down to the owners of that tug and see what i can do." when he had paid they followed him out. at the curbstone he said, "keep together somewhere round the wharf-boat. so long." he lifted the battered hat he was wearing, smiled at susan. "cheer up, miss sackville. we'll down 'em yet!" and away he went--a strange figure, his burly frame squeezed into a dingy old frock suit from among tempest's costumes. a dreary two hours, the last half-hour in a drizzling rain from which the narrow eaves of the now closed and locked wharf-boat sheltered them only a little. "there he comes!" cried susan; and sure enough, burlingham separated from the crowd streaming along the street at the top of the levee, and began to descend the slope toward them. they concentrated on his face, hoping to get some indication of what to expect; but he never permitted his face to betray his mind. he strode up the plank and joined them. "tempest come?" he asked. "tempest!" cried mabel. "haven't i told you he's jumped? don't you suppose _i_ know him?" "and you brought him into the company," raged violet. "burlingham didn't want to take him. he looked the fool and jackass he is. why didn't you warn us he was a rotten thief, too?" "wasn't it for shoplifting you served six months in joliet?" retorted mabel. "you lie--you streetwalker!" screamed violet. "ladies! ladies!" said eshwell. "that's what _i_ say," observed pat. "i'm no lady," replied mabel. "i'm an actress." "an actress--he-he!" jeered violet. "an actress!" "shut up, all of you," commanded burlingham. "i've got some money. i settled for cash." "how much?" cried mabel and violet in the same breath, their quarrel not merely finished but forgotten. "three hundred dollars." "for the boat and all?" demanded eshwell. "why, bob----" "they think it was for boat and all," interrupted burlingham with his cynical smile. "they set out to bully and cheat me. they knew i couldn't get justice. so i let 'em believe i owned the boat--and i've got fifty apiece for us." "sixty," said violet. "fifty. there are six of us." "you don't count in this little jonah here, do you?" cried violet, scowling evilly at susan. "no--no--don't count me in," begged susan. "i didn't lose anything." mabel pinched her arm. "you're right, mr. burlingham," said she. "miss sackville ought to share. we're all in the same box." "miss sackville will share," said burlingham. "there's going to be no skunking about this, as long as i'm in charge." eshwell and pat sided with violet. while the rain streamed, the five, with susan a horrified onlooker, fought on and on about the division of the money. their voices grew louder. they hurled the most frightful epithets at one another. violet seized mabel by the hair, and the men interfered, all but coming to blows themselves in the mêlée. the wharfmaster rushed from his office, drove them off to the levee. they continued to yell and curse, even burlingham losing control of himself and releasing all there was of the tough and the blackguard in his nature. two policemen came, calmed them with threat of arrest. at last burlingham took from his pocket one at a time three small rolls of bills. he flung one at each of the three who were opposing his division. "take that, you dirty curs," he said. "and be glad i'm giving you anything at all. most managers wouldn't have come back. come on, miss sackville. come on, mabel." and the two followed him up the levee, leaving the others counting their shares. at the street corner they went into a general store where burlingham bought two ninety-eight-cent umbrellas. he gave mabel one, held the other over susan and himself as they walked along. "well, ladies," said he, "we begin life again. a clean slate, a fresh start--as if nothing had ever happened." susan looked at him to try to give him a grateful and sympathetic smile. she was surprised to see that, so far as she could judge, he had really meant the words he had spoken. "yes, i mean it," said he. "always look at life as it is--as a game. with every deal, whether you win or lose, your stake grows--for your stake's your wits, and you add to 'em by learning something with each deal. what are you going to do, mabel?" "get some clothes. the water wrecked mine and this rain has finished my hat." "we'll go together," said burlingham. they took a car for louisville, descended before a department store. burlingham had to fit himself from the skin out; mabel had underclothes, needed a hat, a dress, summer shoes. susan needed underclothes, shoes, a hat, for she was bareheaded. they arranged to meet at the first entrance down the side street; burlingham gave susan and mabel each their fifty dollars and went his way. when they met again in an hour and a half, they burst into smiles of delight. burlingham had transformed himself into a jaunty, fashionable young middle-aged man, with an air of success achieved and prosperity assured. he had put the fine finishing touch to his transformation by getting a haircut and a shave. mabel looked like a showy chorus girl, in a striped blue and white linen suit, a big beflowered hat, and a fluffy blouse of white chiffon. susan had resisted mabel's entreaties, had got a plain, sensible linen blouse of a kind that on a pinch might be washed out and worn without ironing. her new hat was a simple blue sailor with a dark blue band that matched her dress. "i spent thirty-six dollars," said burlingham. "i only spent twenty-two," declared mabel. "and this child here only parted with seven of her dollars. i had no idea she was so thrifty." "and now--what?" said burlingham. "i'm going round to see a friend of mine," replied mabel. "she's on the stage, too. there's sure to be something doing at the summer places. maybe i can ring miss sackville in. there ought to be a good living in those eyes of hers and those feet and ankles. i'm sure i can put her next to something." "then you can give her your address," said burlingham. "why, she's going with me," cried mabel. "you don't suppose i'd leave the child adrift?" "no, she's going with me to a boarding house i'll find for her," said burlingham. into mabel's face flashed the expression of the suspicion such a statement would at once arouse in a mind trained as hers had been. burlingham's look drove the expression out of her face, and suspicion at least into the background. "she's not going with your friend," said burlingham, a hint of sternness in his voice. "that's best--isn't it?" miss connemora's eyes dropped. "yes, i guess it is," replied she. "well--i turn down this way." "we'll keep on and go out chestnut street," said burlingham. "you can write to her--or to me--care of the general delivery." "that's best. you may hear from tempest. you can write me there, too." mabel was constrained and embarrassed. "good-by, miss sackville." susan embraced and kissed her. mabel began to weep. "oh, it's all so sudden--and frightful," she said. "do try to be good, lorna. you can trust bob." she looked earnestly, appealingly, at him. "yes, i'm sure you can. and--he's right about me. good-by." she hurried away, not before susan had seen the tears falling from her kind, fast-fading eyes. susan stood looking after her. and for the first time the truth about the catastrophe came to her. she turned to burlingham. "how brave you are!" she cried. "oh, what'd be the use in dropping down and howling like a dog?" replied he. "that wouldn't bring the boat back. it wouldn't get me a job." "and you shared equally, when you lost the most of all." they were walking on. "the boat was mine, too," said he in a dry reflective tone. "i told 'em it wasn't when we started out because i wanted to get a good share for rent and so on, without any kicking from anybody." the loss did not appeal to her; it was the lie he had told. she felt her confidence shaking. "you didn't mean to--to----" she faltered, stopped. "to cheat them?" suggested he. "yes, i did. so--to sort of balance things up i divided equally all i got from the tug people. what're you looking so unhappy about?" "i wish you hadn't told me," she said miserably. "i don't see why you did." "because i don't want you making me into a saint. i'm like the rest you see about in pants, cheating and lying, with or without pretending to themselves that they're honest. don't trust anybody, my dear. the sooner you get over the habit, the sooner you'll cease to tempt people to be hypocrites. all the serious trouble i've ever got into has come through trusting or being trusted." he looked gravely at her, burst out laughing at her perplexed, alarmed expression. "oh, lord, it isn't as bad as all that," said he. "the rain's stopped. let's have breakfast. then--a new deal--with everything to gain and nothing to lose. it's a great advantage to be in a position where you've got nothing to lose!" chapter xvi burlingham found for her a comfortable room in a flat in west chestnut street--a respectable middle-class neighborhood with three churches in full view and the spires of two others visible over the housetops. her landlady was mrs. redding, a simple-hearted, deaf old widow with bright kind eyes beaming guilelessness through steel-framed spectacles. mrs. redding had only recently been reduced to the necessity of letting a room. she stated her moderate price--seven dollars a week for room and board--as if she expected to be arrested for attempted extortion. "i give good meals," she hastened to add. "i do the cooking myself--and buy the best. i'm no hand for canned stuff. as for that there cold storage, it's no better'n slow poison, and not so terrible slow at that. anything your daughter wants i'll give her." "she's not my daughter," said burlingham, and it was his turn to be red and flustered. "i'm simply looking after her, as she's alone in the world. i'm going to live somewhere else. but i'll come here for meals, if you're willing, ma'am." "i--i'd have to make that extry, i'm afraid," pleaded mrs. redding. "rather!" exclaimed burlingham. "i eat like a pair of percherons." "how much did you calculate to pay?" inquired the widow. her one effort at price fixing, though entirely successful, had exhausted her courage. burlingham was clear out of his class in those idyllic days of protector of innocence. he proceeded to be more than honest. "oh, say five a week." "gracious! that's too much," protested she. "i hate to charge a body for food, somehow. it don't seem to be accordin' to what god tells us. but i don't see no way out." "i'll come for five not a cent less," insisted burlingham. "i want to feel free to eat as much as i like." and it was so arranged. away he went to look up his acquaintances, while susan sat listening to the widow and trying to convince her that she and mr. burlingham didn't want and couldn't possibly eat all the things she suggested as suitable for a nice supper. susan had been learning rapidly since she joined the theatrical profession. she saw why this fine old woman was getting poorer steadily, was arranging to spend her last years in an almshouse. what a queer world it was! what a strange way for a good god to order things! the better you were, the worse off you were. no doubt it was burlingham's lifelong goodness of heart as shown in his generosity to her, that had kept him down. it was the same way with her dead mother--she had been loving and trusting, had given generously without thought of self, with generous confidence in the man she loved--and had paid with reputation and life. she compelled burlingham to take what was left of her fifty dollars. "you wouldn't like to make me feel mean," was the argument she used. "i must put in what i've got--the same as you do. now, isn't that fair?" and as he was dead broke and had been unable to borrow, he did not oppose vigorously. she assumed that after a day or two spent in getting his bearings he would take her with him as he went looking. when she suggested it, he promptly vetoed it. "that isn't the way business is done in the profession," said he. "the star--you're the star--keeps in the background, and her manager--that's me does the hustling." she had every reason for believing this; but as the days passed with no results, sitting about waiting began to get upon her nerves. mrs. redding had the remnant of her dead husband's library, and he had been a man of broad taste in literature. but susan, ardent reader though she was, could not often lose herself in books now. she was too impatient for realities, too anxious about them. burlingham remained equable, neither hopeful nor gloomy; he made her feel that he was strong, and it gave her strength. thus she was not depressed when on the last day of their week he said: "i think we'd better push on to cincinnati tomorrow. there's nothing here, and we've got to get placed before our cash gives out. in cincinnati there are a dozen places to one in this snide town." the idea of going to cincinnati gave her a qualm of fear; but it passed away when she considered how she had dropped out of the world. "they think i'm dead," she reflected. "anyhow, i'd never be looked for among the kind of people i'm in with now." the past with which she had broken seemed so far away and so dim to her that she could not but feel it must seem so to those who knew her in her former life. she had such a sense of her own insignificance, now that she knew something of the vastness and business of the world, that she was without a suspicion of the huge scandal and excitement her disappearance had caused in sutherland. to cincinnati they went next day by the l. and n. and took two tiny rooms in the dingy old walnut street house, at a special rate--five dollars a week for the two, as a concession to the profession. "we'll eat in cheap restaurants and spread our capital out," said burlingham. "i want you to get placed _right_, not just placed." he bought a box of blacking and a brush, instructed her in the subtle art of making a front--an art whereof he was past master, as susan had long since learned. "never let yourself look poor or act poor, until you simply have to throw up the sponge," said he. "the world judges by appearances. put your first money and your last into clothes. and never--never--tell a hard-luck story. always seem to be doing well and comfortably looking out for a chance to do better. the whole world runs from seedy people and whimperers." "am i--that way?" she asked nervously. "not a bit," declared he. "the day you came up to me in carrollton i knew you were playing in the hardest kind of hard luck because of what i had happened to see and hear--and guess. but you weren't looking for pity--and that was what i liked. and it made me feel you had the stuff in you. i'd not waste breath teaching a whiner or a cheap skate. you couldn't be cheap if you tried. the reason i talk to you about these things is so you'll learn to put the artistic touches by instinct into what you do." "you've taken too much trouble for me," said the girl. "don't you believe it, my dear," laughed he. "if i can do with you what i hope--i've an instinct that if i win out for you, i'll come into my own at last." "you've taught me a lot," said she. "i wonder," replied he. "that is, i wonder how much you've learned. perhaps enough to keep you--not to keep from being knocked down by fate, but to get on your feet afterward. i hope so--i hope so." they dropped coffee, bought milk by the bottle, he smuggling it to their rooms disguised as a roll of newspapers. they carried in rolls also, and cut down their restaurant meals to supper which they got for twenty-five cents apiece at a bakery restaurant in seventh street. there is a way of resorting to these little economies--a snobbish, self-despairing way--that makes them sordid and makes the person indulging in them sink lower and lower. but burlingham could not have taken that way. he was the adventurer born, was a hardy seasoned campaigner who had never looked on life in the snob's way, had never felt the impulse to apologize for his defeats or to grow haughty over his successes. susan was an apt pupil; and for the career that lay before her his instructions were invaluable. he was teaching her how to keep the craft afloat and shipshape through the worst weather that can sweep the sea of life. "how do you make yourself look always neat and clean?" he asked. she confessed: "i wash out my things at night and hang them on the inside of the shutters to dry. they're ready to wear again in the morning." "getting on!" cried he, full of admiration. "they simply can't down us, and they might as well give up trying." "but i don't look neat," sighed she. "i can't iron." "no--that's the devil of it," laughed he. he pulled aside his waistcoat and she saw he was wearing a dickey. "and my cuffs are pinned in," he said. "i have to be careful about raising and lowering my arms." "can't i wash out some things for you?" she said, then hurried on to put it more strongly. "yes, give them to me when we get back to the hotel." "it does help a man to feel he's clean underneath. and we've got nothing to waste on laundries." "i wish i hadn't spent that fifteen cents to have my heels straightened and new steels put in them." she had sat in a cobbler's while this repair to the part of her person she was most insistent upon had been effected. he laughed. "a good investment, that," said he. "i've been noticing how you always look nice about the feet. keep it up. the surest sign of a sloven and a failure, of a moral, mental, and physical no-good is down-at-the-heel. always keep your heels straight, lorna." and never had he given her a piece of advice more to her liking. she thought she knew now why she had always been so particular about her boots and shoes, her slippers and her stockings. he had given her a new confidence in herself--in a strength within her somewhere beneath the weakness she was always seeing and feeling. not until she thought it out afterward did she realize what they were passing through, what frightful days of failure he was enduring. he acted like the steady-nerved gambler at life that he was. he was not one of those more or less weak losers who have to make desperate efforts to conceal a fainting heart. his heart was not fainting. he simply played calmly on, feeling that the next throw was as likely to be for as against him. she kept close to her room, walking about there--she had never been much of a sitter--thinking, practicing the new songs he had got for her--character songs in which he trained her as well as he could without music or costume or any of the accessories. he also had an idea for a church scene, with her in a choir boy's costume, singing the most moving of the simple religious songs to organ music. she from time to time urged him to take her on the rounds with him. but he stood firm, giving always the same reason of the custom in the profession. gradually, perhaps by some form of that curious process of infiltration that goes on between two minds long in intimate contact, the conviction came to her that the reason he alleged was not his real reason; but as she had absolute confidence in him she felt that there was some good reason or he would not keep her in the background--and that his silence about it must be respected. so she tried to hide from him how weary and heartsick inaction was making her, how hard it was for her to stay alone so many hours each day. as he watched her closely, it soon dawned on him that something was wrong, and after a day or so he worked out the explanation. he found a remedy--the reading room of the public library where she could make herself almost content the whole day long. he began to have a haggard look, and she saw he was sick, was keeping up his strength with whisky. "it's only this infernal summer cold i caught in the smashup," he explained. "i can't shake it, but neither can it get me down. i'd not dare fall sick. what'd become of _us_?" she knew that "us" meant only herself. her mind had been aging rapidly in those long periods of unbroken reflection. to develop a human being, leave him or her alone most of the time; it is too much company, too little time to digest and assimilate, that keep us thoughtless and unformed until life is half over. she astonished him by suddenly announcing one evening: "i am a drag on you. i'm going to take a place in a store." he affected an indignation so artistic that it ought to have been convincing. "i'm ashamed of you!" he cried. "i see you're losing your nerve." this was ingenious, but it did not succeed. "you can't deceive me any longer," was her steady answer. "tell me honest--couldn't you have got something to do long ago, if it hadn't been for trying to do something for me?" "sure," replied he, too canny to deny the obvious. "but what has that to do with it? if i'd had a living offer, i'd have taken it. but at my age a man doesn't dare take certain kinds of places. it'd settle him for life. and i'm playing for a really big stake and i'll win. when i get what i want for you, we'll make as much money a month as i could make a year. trust me, my dear." it was plausible; and her "loss of nerve" was visibly aggravating his condition--the twitching of hands and face, the terrifying brightness of his eyes, of the color in the deep hollows under his cheek bones. but she felt that she must persist. "how much money have we got?" she asked. "oh--a great deal enough." "you must play square with me," said she. "i'm not a baby, but a woman--and your partner." "don't worry me, child. we'll talk about it tomorrow." "how much? you've no right to hide things from me. you--hurt me." "eleven dollars and eighty cents--when this bill for supper's paid and the waitress tipped." "i'll try for a place in a store," said she. "don't talk that way or think that way," cried he angrily. "there's where so many people fail in life. they don't stick to their game. i wish to god i'd had sense enough to break straight for chicago or new york. but it's too late now. what i lack is nerve--nerve to do the big, bold things my brains show me i ought." his distress was so obvious that she let the subject drop. that night she lay awake as she had fallen into the habit of doing. but instead of purposeless, rambling thoughts, she was trying definitely to plan a search for work. toward three in the morning she heard him tossing and muttering--for the wall between their rooms was merely plastered laths covered with paper. she tried his door; it was locked. she knocked, got no answer but incoherent ravings. she roused the office, and the night porter forced the door. burlingham's gas was lighted; he was sitting up in bed--a haggard, disheveled, insane man, raving on and on--names of men and women she had never heard--oaths, disjointed sentences. "brain fever, i reckon," said the porter. "i'll call a doctor." in a few minutes susan was gladdened by the sight of a young man wearing the familiar pointed beard and bearing the familiar black bag. he made a careful examination, asked her many questions, finally said: "your father has typhoid, i fear. he must be taken to a hospital." "but we have very little money," said susan. "i understand," replied the doctor, marveling at the calmness of one so young. "the hospital i mean is free. i'll send for an ambulance." while they were waiting beside burlingham, whom the doctor had drugged into unconsciousness with a hypodermic, susan said: "can i go to the hospital and take care of him?" "no," replied the doctor. "you can only call and inquire how he is, until he's well enough to see you." "and how long will that be?" "i can't say." he hadn't the courage to tell her it would be three weeks at least, perhaps six or seven. he got leave of the ambulance surgeon for susan to ride to the hospital, and he went along himself. as the ambulance sped through the dimly lighted streets with clanging bell and heavy pounding of the horse's hoofs on the granite pavement, susan knelt beside burlingham, holding one of his hot hands. she was remembering how she had said that she would die for him--and here it was he that was dying for her. and her heart was heavy with a load of guilt, the heaviest she was ever to feel in her life. she could not know how misfortune is really the lot of human beings; it seemed to her that a special curse attended her, striking down all who befriended her. they dashed up to great open doors of the hospital. burlingham was lifted, was carried swiftly into the receiving room. susan with tearless eyes bent over, embraced him lingeringly, kissed his fiery brow, his wasted cheeks. one of the surgeons in white duck touched her on the arm. "we can't delay," he said. "no indeed," she replied, instantly drawing back. she watched the stretcher on wheels go noiselessly down the corridor toward the elevator and when it was gone she still continued to look. "you can come at any hour to inquire," said the young doctor who had accompanied her. "now we'll go into the office and have the slip made out." they entered a small room, divided unequally by a barrier desk; behind it stood a lean, coffee-sallowed young man with a scrawny neck displayed to the uttermost by a standing collar scarcely taller than the band of a shirt. he directed at susan one of those obtrusively shrewd glances which shallow people practice and affect to create the impression that they have a genius for character reading. he drew a pad of blank forms toward him, wiped a pen on the mat into which his mouse-colored hair was roached above his right temple. "well, miss, what's the patient's name?" "robert burlingham." "age?" "i don't know." "about what?" "i--i don't know. i guess he isn't very young. but i don't know." "put down forty, sim," said the doctor. "very well, doctor hamilton." then to susan: "color white, i suppose. nativity?" susan recalled that she had heard him speak of liverpool as his birthplace. "english," said she. "profession?" "actor." "residence?" "he hasn't any. it was sunk at jeffersonville. we stop at the walnut street house." "walnut street house. was he married or single?" "single." then she recalled some of the disconnected ravings. "i--i--don't know." "single," said the clerk. "no, i guess i'll put it widower. next friend or relative?" "i am." "daughter. first name?" "i am not his daughter." "oh, niece. full name, please." "i am no relation--just his--his friend." sim the clerk looked up sharply. hamilton reddened, glowered at him. "i understand," said sim, leering at her. and in a tone that reeked insinuation which quite escaped her, he went on, "we'll put your name down. what is it?" "lorna sackville." "you don't look english--not at all the english style of beauty, eh--doctor?" "that's all, miss sackville," said hamilton, with a scowl at the clerk. susan and he went out into twelfth street. hamilton from time to time stole a glance of sympathy and inquiry into the sad young face, as he and she walked eastward together. "he's a strong man and sure to pull through," said the doctor. "are you alone at the hotel?" "i've nobody but him in the world," replied she. "i was about to venture to advise that you go to a boarding house," pursued the young man. "thank you. i'll see." "there's one opposite the hospital--a reasonable place." "i've got to go to work," said the girl, to herself rather than to him. "oh, you have a position." susan did not reply, and he assumed that she had. "if you don't mind, i'd like to call and see--mr. burlingham. the physicians at the hospital are perfectly competent, as good as there are in the city. but i'm not very busy, and i'd be glad to go." "we haven't any money," said the girl. "and i don't know when we shall have. i don't want to deceive you." "i understand perfectly," said the young man, looking at her with interested but respectful eyes. "i'm poor, myself, and have just started." "will they treat him well, when he's got no money?" "as well as if he paid." "and you will go and see that everything's all right?" "it'll be a pleasure." under a gas lamp he took out a card and gave it to her. she thanked him and put it in the bosom of her blouse where lay all the money they had--the eleven dollars and eighty cents. they walked to the hotel, as cars were few at that hour. he did all the talking--assurances that her "father" could not fail to get well, that typhoid wasn't anything like the serious disease it used to be, and that he probably had a light form of it. the girl listened, but her heart could not grow less heavy. as he was leaving her at the hotel door, he hesitated, then asked if she wouldn't let him call and take her to the hospital the next morning, or, rather, later that same morning. she accepted, she hoped that, if he were with her, she gratefully; would be admitted to see burlingham and could assure herself that he was well taken care of. the night porter tried to detain her for a little chat. "well," said he, "it's a good hospital--for you folks with money. of course, for us poor people it's different. you couldn't hire _me_ to go there." susan turned upon him. "why not?" she asked. "oh, if a man's poor, or can't pay for nice quarters, they treat him any old way. yes, they're good doctors and all that. but they're like everybody else. they don't give a darn for poor people. but your uncle'll be all right there." for the first time in her life susan did not close her eyes in sleep. the young doctor was so moved by her worn appearance that he impulsively said: "have you some troubles you've said nothing about? please don't hesitate to tell me." "oh, you needn't worry about me," replied she. "i simply didn't sleep--that's all. do they treat charity patients badly at the hospital?" "certainly not," declared he earnestly. "of course, a charity patient can't have a room to himself. but that's no disadvantage." "how much is a room?" "the cheapest are ten dollars a week. that includes private attendance--a little better nursing than the public patients get--perhaps. but, really--miss sackville----" "he must have a room," said susan. "you are sure you can afford it? the difference isn't----" "he must have a room." she held out a ten-dollar bill--ten dollars of the eleven dollars and eighty cents. "this'll pay for the first week. you fix it, won't you?" young doctor hamilton hesitatingly took the money. "you are quite, quite sure, miss sackville?--quite sure you can afford this extravagance--for it is an extravagance." "he must have the best we can afford," evaded she. she waited in the office while hamilton went up. when he came down after perhaps half an hour, he had an air of cheerfulness. "everything going nicely," said he. susan's violet-gray eyes gazed straight into his brown eyes; and the brown eyes dropped. "you are not telling me the truth," said she. "i'm not denying he's a very sick man," protested hamilton. "is he----" she could not pronounce the word. "nothing like that--believe me, nothing. he has the chances all with him." and susan tried to believe. "he will have a room?" "he has a room. that's why i was so long. and i'm glad he has--for, to be perfectly honest, the attendance--not the treatment, but the attendance--is much better for private patients." susan was looking at the floor. presently she drew a long breath, rose. "well, i must be going," said she. and she went to the street, he accompanying her. "if you're going back to the hotel," said he, "i'm walking that way." "no, i've got to go this way," replied she, looking up elm street. he saw she wished to be alone, and left her with the promise to see burlingham again that afternoon and let her know at the hotel how he was getting on. he went east, she north. at the first corner she stopped, glanced back to make sure he was not following. from her bosom she drew four business cards. she had taken the papers from the pockets of burlingham's clothes and from the drawer of the table in his room, to put them all together for safety; she had found these cards, the addresses of theatrical agents. as she looked at them, she remembered burlingham's having said that blynn--maurice blynn, at vine and ninth streets--might give them something at one of the "over the rhine" music halls, as a last resort. she noted the address, put away the cards and walked on, looking about for a policeman. soon she came to a bridge over a muddy stream--a little river, she thought at first, then remembered that it must be the canal--the rhine, as it was called, because the city's huge german population lived beyond it, keeping up the customs and even the language of the fatherland. she stood on the bridge, watching the repulsive waters from which arose the stench of sewage; watching canal boats dragged drearily by mules with harness-worn hides; followed with her melancholy eyes the course of the canal under bridge after bridge, through a lane of dirty, noisy factories pouring out from lofty chimneys immense clouds of black smoke. it ought to have been a bright summer day, but the sun shone palely through the dense clouds; a sticky, sooty moisture saturated the air, formed a skin of oily black ooze over everything exposed to it. a policeman, a big german, with stupid honest face, brutal yet kindly, came lounging along. "i beg your pardon," said susan, "but would you mind telling me where--" she had forgotten the address, fumbled in her bosom for the cards, showed him blynn's card--"how i can get to this?" the policeman nodded as he read the address. "keep on this way, lady"--he pointed his baton south--"until you've passed four streets. at the fifth street turn east. go one--two--three--four--five streets east. understand?" "yes, thank you," said the girl with the politeness of deep gratitude. "you'll be at vine. you'll see the name on the street lamp. blynn's on the southwest corner. think you can find it?" "i'm sure i can." "i'm going that way," continued the policeman. "but you'd better walk ahead. if you walked with me, they'd think you was pinched--and we'd have a crowd after us." and he laughed with much shaking of his fat, tightly belted body. susan contrived to force a smile, though the suggestion of such a disgraceful scene made her shudder. "thank you so much. i'm sure i'll find it." and she hastened on, eager to put distance between herself and that awkward company. "don't mention it, lady," the policeman called after her, tapping his baton on the rim of his helmet, as a mark of elegant courtesy. she was not at ease until, looking back, she no longer saw the bluecoat for the intervening crowds. after several slight mistakes in the way, she descried ahead of her a large sign painted on the wall of a three-story brick building: maurice blynn, theatrical agent all kinds of talent placed and supplied after some investigation she discovered back of the saloon which occupied the street floor a grimy and uneven wooden staircase leading to the upper stories. at the first floor she came face to face with a door on the glass of which was painted the same announcement she had read from the wall. she knocked timidly, then louder. a shrill voice came from the interior: "the door's open. come in." she turned the knob and entered a small, low-ceilinged room whose general grime was streaked here and there with smears of soot. it contained a small wooden table at which sprawled a freckled and undernourished office boy, and a wooden bench where fretted a woman obviously of "the profession." she was dressed in masses of dirty white furbelows. on her head reared a big hat, above an incredible quantity of yellow hair; on the hat were badly put together plumes of badly curled ostrich feathers. beneath her skirt was visible one of her feet; it was large and fat, was thrust into a tiny slipper with high heel ending under the arch of the foot. the face of the actress was young and pertly pretty, but worn, overpainted, overpowdered and underwashed. she eyed susan insolently. "want to see the boss?" said the boy. "if you please," murmured susan. "business?" "i'm looking for a--for a place." the boy examined her carefully. "appointment?" "no, sir," replied the girl. "well--he'll see you, anyhow," said the boy, rising. the mass of plumes and yellow bangs and furbelows on the bench became violently agitated. "i'm first," cried the actress. "oh, you sit tight, mame," jeered the boy. he opened a solid door behind him. through the crack susan saw busily writing at a table desk a bald, fat man with a pasty skin and a veined and bulbous nose. "lady to see you," said the boy in a tone loud enough for both susan and the actress to hear. "who? what name?" snapped the man, not ceasing or looking up. "she's young, and a queen," said the boy. "shall i show her in?" "yep." the actress started up. "mr. blynn----" she began in a loud, threatening, elocutionary voice. "'lo, mame," said blynn, still busy. "no time to see you. nothing doing. so long." "but, mr. blynn----" "bite it off, mame," ordered the boy. "walk in, miss." susan, deeply colored from sympathy with the humiliated actress and from nervousness in those forbidding and ominous surroundings, entered the private office. the boy closed the door behind her. the pen scratched on. presently the man said: "well, my dear, what's your name?" with the last word, the face lifted and susan saw a seamed and pitted skin, small pale blue eyes showing the white, or rather the bloodshot yellow all round the iris, a heavy mouth and jaw, thick lips; the lower lip protruded and was decorated with a blue-black spot like a blood boil, as if to indicate where the incessant cigar usually rested. at first glance into susan's sweet, young face the small eyes sparkled and danced, traveled on to the curves of her form. "do sit down, my dear," said he in a grotesquely wheedling voice. she took the chair close to him as it was the only one in the little room. "what can i do for you? my, how fresh and pretty you are!" "mr. burlingham----" began susan. "oh--you're the girl bob was talking about." he smiled and nodded at her. "no wonder he kept you out of sight." he inventoried her charms again with his sensual, confident glance. "bob certainly has got good taste." "he's in the hospital," said susan desperately. "so i've come to get a place if you can find me one." "hospital? i'm sorry to hear that." and mr. blynn's tones had that accent of deep sympathy which get a man or woman without further evidence credit for being "kind-hearted whatever else he is." "yes, he's very ill--with typhoid," said the girl. "i must do something right away to help him." "that's fine--fine," said mr. blynn in the same effective tone. "i see you're as sweet as you are pretty. yes--that's fine--fine!" and the moisture was in the little eyes. "well, i think i can do something for you. i _must_ do something for you. had much experience?--professional, i mean." mr. blynn laughed at his, to susan, mysterious joke. susan smiled faintly in polite response. he rubbed his hands and smacked his lips, the small eyes dancing. the moisture had vanished. "oh, yes, i can place you, if you can do anything at all," he went on. "i'd 'a' done it long ago, if bob had let me see you. but he was too foxy. he ought to be ashamed of himself, standing in the way of your getting on, just out of jealousy. sing or dance--or both?" "i can sing a little, i think," said susan. "now, that's modest. ever worn tights?" susan shook her head, a piteous look in her violet-gray eyes. "oh, you'll soon get used to that. and mighty well you'll look in 'em, i'll bet, eh? where did bob get you? and when?" before she could answer, he went on, "let's see, i've got a date for this evening, but i'll put it off. and she's a peach, too. so you see what a hit you've made with me. we'll have a nice little dinner at the hotel du rhine and talk things over." "couldn't i go to work right away?" asked the girl. "sure. i'll have you put on at schaumer's tomorrow night----" he looked shrewdly, laughingly, at her, with contracted eyelids. "_if_ everything goes well. before i do anything for you, i have to see what you can do for me." and he nodded and smacked his lips. "oh, we'll have a lovely little dinner!" he looked expectantly at her. "you certainly are a queen! what a dainty little hand!" he reached out one of his hands--puffy as if it had been poisoned, very white, with stubby fingers. susan reluctantly yielded her hand to his close, mushy embrace. "no rings. that's a shame, petty----" he was talking as if to a baby.--"that'll have to be fixed--yes, it will, my little sweetie. my, how nice and fresh you are!" and his great nostrils, repulsively hairy within, deeply pitted without, sniffed as if over an odorous flower. susan drew her hand away. "what will they give me?" she asked. "how greedy it is!" he wheedled. "well, you'll get plenty--plenty." "how much?" said the girl. "is it a salary?" "of course, there's the regular salary. but that won't amount to much. you know how those things are." "how much?" "oh, say a dollar a night--until you make a hit." "six dollars a week." "seven. this is a sunday town. sunday's the big day. you'll have wednesday, saturday and sunday matinées, but they don't pay for them." "seven dollars a week." and the hospital wanted ten. "couldn't i get--about fifteen--or fourteen? i think i could do on fourteen." "rather! i was talking only of the salary. you'll make a good many times fifteen--if you play your cards right. it's true schaumer draws only a beer crowd. but as soon as the word flies round that _you_'re there, the boys with the boodle'll flock in. oh, you'll wear the sparklers all right, pet." rather slowly it was penetrating to susan what mr. blynn had in mind. "i'd--i'd rather take a regular salary," said she. "i must have ten a week for him. i can live any old way." "oh, come off!" cried mr. blynn with a wink. "what's your game? anyhow, don't play it on me. you understand that you can't get something for nothing. it's all very well to love your friend and be true to him. but he can't expect--he'll not ask you to queer yourself. that sort of thing don't go in the profession. . . . come now, i'm willing to set you on your feet, give you a good start, if you'll play fair with me--show appreciation. will you or won't you?" "you mean----" began susan, and paused there, looking at him with grave questioning eyes. his own eyes shifted. "yes, i mean that. i'm a business man, not a sentimentalist. i don't want love. i've got no time for it. but when it comes to giving a girl of the right sort a square deal and a good time, why you'll find i'm as good as there is going." he reached for her hands again, his empty, flabby chin bags quivering. "i want to help bob, and i want to help you." she rose slowly, pushing her chair back. she understood now why burlingham had kept her in the background, why his quest had been vain, why it had fretted him into mortal illness. "i--couldn't do that," she said. "i'm sorry, but i couldn't." he looked at her in a puzzled way. "you belong to bob, don't you?" "no." "you mean you're straight--a good girl?" "yes." he was half inclined to believe her, so impressive was her quiet natural way, in favorable contrast to the noisy protests of women posing as virtuous. "well--if that's so--why you'd better drop out of the profession--and get away from bob burlingham." "can't i have a place without--what you said?" "not as pretty a girl as you. and if they ain't pretty the public don't want 'em." susan went to the door leading into the office. "no--the other door," said blynn hastily. he did not wish the office boy to read his defeat in susan's countenance. he got up himself, opened the door into the hall. susan passed out. "think it over," said he, eyes and mouth full of longing. "come round in a day or two, and we'll have another talk." "thank you," said susan. she felt no anger against him. she felt about him as she had about jeb ferguson. it was not his fault; it was simply the way life was lived--part of the general misery and horror of the established order--like marriage and the rest of it. "i'll treat you white," urged blynn, tenderly. "i've got a soft heart--that's why i'll never get rich. any of the others'd ask more and give less." she looked at him with an expression that haunted him for several hours. "thank you. good-by," she said, and went down the narrow, rickety stairs--and out into the confused maze of streets full of strangers. chapter xvii at the hotel again; she went to burlingham's room, gathered his belongings--his suit, his well-worn, twice-tapped shoes, his one extra suit of underclothes, a soiled shirt, two dickeys and cuffs, his whisk broom, toothbrush, a box of blacking, the blacking brush. she made the package as compact as she could--it was still a formidable bundle both for size and weight--and carried it into her room. then she rolled into a small parcel her own possessions--two blouses, an undervest, a pair of stockings, a nightgown--reminder of bethlehem and her brief sip at the cup of success--a few toilet articles. with the two bundles she descended to the office. "i came to say," she said calmly to the clerk, "that we have no money to pay what we owe. mr. burlingham is at the hospital--very sick with typhoid. here is a dollar and eighty cents. you can have that, but i'd like to keep it, as it's all we've got." the clerk called the manager, and to him susan repeated. she used almost the same words; she spoke in the same calm, monotonous way. when she finished, the manager, a small, brisk man with a large brisk beard, said: "no. keep the money. i'd like to ask you to stay on. but we run this place for a class of people who haven't much at best and keep wobbling back and forth across the line. if i broke my rule----" he made a furious gesture, looked at the girl angrily--holding her responsible for his being in a position where he must do violence to every decent instinct--"my god, miss, i've got a wife and children to look after. if i ran my hotel on sympathy, what'd become of them?" "i wouldn't take anything i couldn't pay for," said susan. "as soon as i earn some money----" "don't worry about that," interrupted the manager. he saw now that he was dealing with one who would in no circumstances become troublesome; he went on in an easier tone: "you can stay till the house fills up." "could you give me a place to wait on table and clean up rooms--or help cook?" "no, i don't need anybody. the town's full of people out of work. you can't ask me to turn away----" "please--i didn't know," cried the girl. "anyhow, i couldn't give but twelve a month and board," continued the manager. "and the work--for a lady like you----" a lady! she dropped her gaze in confusion. if he knew about her birth! "i'll do anything. i'm not a lady," said she. "but i've got to have at least ten a week in cash." "no such place here." the manager was glad to find the fault of uppish ideas in this girl who was making it hard for him to be business-like. "no such place anywhere for a beginner." "i must have it," said the girl. "i don't want to discourage you, but----" he was speaking less curtly, for her expression made him suspect why she was bent upon that particular amount. "i hope you'll succeed. only--don't be depressed if you're disappointed." she smiled gravely at him; he bowed, avoiding her eyes. she took up her bundles and went out into walnut street. he moved a few steps in obedience to an impulse to follow her, to give her counsel and warning, to offer to help her about the larger bundle. but he checked himself with the frown of his own not too prosperous affairs. it was the hottest part of the day, and her way lay along unshaded streets. as she had eaten nothing since the night before, she felt faint. her face was ghastly when she entered the office of the hospital and left burlingham's parcel. the clerk at the desk told her that burlingham was in the same condition--"and there'll be probably no change one way or the other for several days." she returned to the street, wandered aimlessly about. she knew she ought to eat something, but the idea of food revolted her. she was fighting the temptation to go to the _commercial_ office, roderick spenser's office. she had not a suspicion that his kindness might have been impulse, long since repented of, perhaps repented of as soon as he was away from her. she felt that if she went to him he would help her. "but i mustn't do it," she said to herself. "not after what i did." no, she must not see him until she could pay him back. also, and deeper, there was a feeling that there was a curse upon her; had not everyone who befriended her come to grief? she must not draw anyone else into trouble, must not tangle others in the meshes of her misfortunes. she did not reason this out, of course; but the feeling was not the less strong because the reasons for it were vague in her mind. and there was nothing vague about the resolve to which she finally came--that she would fight her battle herself. her unheeding wanderings led her after an hour or so to a big department store. crowds of shoppers, mussy, hot, and cross, were pushing rudely in and out of the doors. she entered, approached a well-dressed, bareheaded old gentleman, whom she rightly placed as floorwalker, inquired of him: "where do they ask for work?" she had been attracted to him because his was the one face within view not suggesting temper or at least bad humor. it was more than pleasant, it was benign. he inclined toward susan with an air that invited confidence and application for balm for a wounded spirit. the instant the nature of her inquiry penetrated through his pose to the man himself, there was a swift change to lofty disdain--the familiar attitude of workers toward fellow-workers of what they regard as a lower class. evidently he resented her having beguiled him by the false air of young lady into wasting upon her, mere servility like himself, a display reserved exclusively for patrons. it was susan's first experience of this snobbishness; it at once humbled her into the dust. she had been put in her place, and that place was not among people worthy of civil treatment. a girl of his own class would have flashed at him, probably would have "jawed" him. susan meekly submitted; she was once more reminded that she was an outcast, one for whom the respectable world had no place. he made some sort of reply to her question, in the tone the usher of a fashionable church would use to a stranger obviously not in the same set as the habitués. she heard the tone, but not the words; she turned away to seek the street again. she wandered on--through the labyrinth of streets, through the crowds on crowds of strangers. ten dollars a week! she knew little about wages, but enough to realize the hopelessness of her quest. ten dollars a week--and her own keep beside. the faces of the crowds pushing past her and jostling her made her heartsick. so much sickness, and harassment, and discontent--so much unhappiness! surely all these sad hearts ought to be kind to each other. yet they were not; each soul went selfishly alone, thinking only of its own burden. she walked on and on, thinking, in this disconnected way characteristic of a good intelligence that has not yet developed order and sequence, a theory of life and a purpose. it had always been her habit to walk about rather than to sit, whether indoors or out. she could think better when in motion physically. when she was so tired that she began to feel weak, she saw a shaded square, with benches under the trees. she entered, sat down to rest. she might apply to the young doctor. but, no. he was poor--and what chance was there of her ever making the money to pay back? no, she could not take alms; than alms there was no lower way of getting money. she might return to mr. blynn and accept his offer. the man in all his physical horror rose before her. no, she could not do that. at least, not yet. she could entertain the idea as a possibility now. she remembered her wedding--the afternoon, the night. yes, blynn's offer involved nothing so horrible as that--and she had lived through that. it would be cowardice, treachery, to shrink from anything that should prove necessary in doing the square thing by the man who had done so much for her. she had said she would die for burlingham; she owed even that to him, if her death would help him. had she then meant nothing but mere lying words of pretended gratitude? but blynn was always there; something else might turn up, and her dollar and eighty cents would last another day or so, and the ten dollars were not due for six days. no, she would not go to blynn; she would wait, would take his advice--"think it over." a man was walking up and down the shaded alley, passing and repassing the bench where she sat. she observed him, saw that he was watching her. he was a young man--a very young man--of middle height, strongly built. he had crisp, short dark hair, a darkish skin, amiable blue-gray eyes, pleasing features. she decided that he was of good family, was home from some college on vacation. he was wearing a silk shirt, striped flannel trousers, a thin serge coat of an attractive shade of blue. she liked his looks, liked the way he dressed. it pleased her that such a man should be interested in her; he had a frank and friendly air, and her sad young heart was horribly lonely. she pretended not to notice him; but after a while he walked up to her, lifting his straw hat. "good afternoon," said he. when he showed his strong sharp teeth in an amiable smile, she thought of sam wright--only this man was not weak and mean looking, like her last and truest memory picture of sam--indeed, the only one she had not lost. "good afternoon," replied she politely. for in spite of burlingham's explanations and cautionings she was still the small-town girl, unsuspicious toward courtesy from strange men. also, she longed for someone to talk with. it had been weeks since she had talked with anyone nearer than burlingham to her own age and breeding. "won't you have lunch with me?" he asked. "i hate to eat alone." she, faint from hunger, simply could not help obvious hesitation before saying, "i don't think i care for any." "you haven't had yours--have you?" "no." "may i sit down?" she moved along the bench to indicate that he might, without definitely committing herself. he sat, took off his hat. he had a clean, fresh look about the neck that pleased her. she was weary of seeing grimy, sweaty people, and of smelling them. also, except the young doctor, since roderick spenser left her at carrolltown she had talked with no one of her own age and class--the class in which she had been brought up, the class that, after making her one of itself, had cast her out forever with its mark of shame upon her. its mark of shame--burning and stinging again as she sat beside this young man! "you're sad about something?" suggested he, himself nearly as embarrassed as she. "my friend's ill. he's got typhoid." "that is bad. but he'll get all right. they always cure typhoid, nowadays--if it's taken in time and the nursing's good. everything depends on the nursing. i had it a couple of years ago, and pulled through easily." susan brightened. he spoke so confidently that the appeal to her young credulity toward good news and the hopeful, cheerful thing was irresistible. "oh, yes--he'll be over it soon," the young man went on, "especially if he's in a hospital where they've got the facilities for taking care of sick people. where is he?" "in the hospital--up that way." she moved her head vaguely in the direction of the northwest. "oh, yes. it's a good one--for the pay patients. i suppose for the poor devils that can't pay"--he glanced with careless sympathy at the dozen or so tramps on benches nearby--"it's like all the rest of 'em--like the whole world, for that matter. it must be awful not to have money enough to get on with, i mean. i'm talking about men." he smiled cheerfully. "with a woman--if she's pretty--it's different, of course." the girl was so agitated that she did not notice the sly, if shy, hint in the remark and its accompanying glance. said she: "but it's a good hospital if you pay?" "none better. maybe it's good straight through. i've only heard the servants' talk--and servants are such liars. still--i'd not want to trust myself to a hospital unless i could pay. i guess the common people have good reason for their horror of free wards. nothing free is ever good." the girl's face suddenly and startlingly grew almost hard, so fierce was the resolve that formed within her. the money must be got--_must!_--and would. she would try every way she could think of between now and to-morrow; then--if she failed she would go to blynn. the young man was saying: "you're a stranger in town?" "i was with a theatrical company on a show boat. it sank." his embarrassment vanished. she saw, but she did not understand that it was because he thought he had "placed" her--and that her place was where he had hoped. "you _are_ up against it!" said he. "come have some lunch. you'll feel better." the good sense of this was unanswerable. susan hesitated no longer, wondered why she had hesitated at first. "well--i guess i will." and she rose with a frank, childlike alacrity that amused him immensely. "you don't look it, but you've been about some--haven't you?" "rather," replied she. "i somehow thought you knew a thing or two." they walked west to race street. they were about the same height. her costume might have been fresher, might have suggested to an expert eye the passed-on clothes of a richer relative; but her carriage and the fine look of skin and hair and features made the defects of dress unimportant. she seemed of his class--of the class comfortable, well educated, and well-bred. if she had been more experienced, she would have seen that he was satisfied with her appearance despite the curious looking little package, and would have been flattered. as it was, her interest was absorbed in things apart from herself. he talked about the town--the amusements, the good times to be had at the over-the-rhine beer halls, at the hilltop gardens, at the dances in the pavilion out at the zoo. he drew a lively and charming picture, one that appealed to her healthy youth, to her unsatisfied curiosity, to her passionate desire to live the gay, free city life of which the small town reads and dreams. "you and i can go round together, can't we? i haven't got much, but i'll not try to take your time for nothing, of course. that wouldn't be square. i'm sure you'll have no cause to complain. what do you say?" "maybe," replied the girl, all at once absent-minded. her brain was wildly busy with some ideas started there by his significant words, by his flirtatious glances at her, by his way of touching her whenever he could make opportunity. evidently there was an alternative to blynn. "you like a good time, don't you?" said he. "rather!" exclaimed she, the violet eyes suddenly very violet indeed and sparkling. her spirits had suddenly soared. she was acting like one of her age. with that blessed happy hopefulness of healthy youth, she had put aside her sorrows--not because she was frivolous but for the best of all reasons, because she was young and superbly vital. said she: "i'm crazy about dancing--and music." "i only needed to look at your feet--and ankles--to know that," ventured he the "ankles" being especially audacious. she was pleased, and in youth's foolish way tried to hide her pleasure by saying, "my feet aren't exactly small." "i should say not!" protested he with energy. "little feet would look like the mischief on a girl as tall as you are. yes, we can have a lot of fun." they went into a large restaurant with fly fans speeding. susan thought it very grand--and it was the grandest restaurant she had ever been in. they sat down--in a delightfully cool place by a window looking out on a little plot of green with a colladium, a fountain, some oleanders in full and fragrant bloom; the young man ordered, with an ease that fascinated her, an elaborate lunch--soup, a chicken, with salad, ice cream, and fresh peaches. susan had a menu in her hand and as he ordered she noted the prices. she was dazzled by his extravagance--dazzled and frightened--and, in a curious, vague, unnerving way, fascinated. money--the thing she must have for burlingham in whose case "everything depended on the nursing." in the brief time this boy and she had been together, he, without making an effort to impress, had given her the feeling that he was of the best city class, that he knew the world--the high world. thus, she felt that she must be careful not to show her "greenness." she would have liked to protest against his extravagance, but she ventured only the timid remonstrance, "oh, i'm not a bit hungry." she thought she was speaking the truth, for the ideas whirling so fast that they were dim quite took away the sense of hunger. but when the food came she discovered that she was, on the contrary, ravenous--and she ate with rising spirits, with a feeling of content and hope. he had urged her to drink wine or beer, but she refused to take anything but a glass of milk; and he ended by taking milk himself. he was looking more and more boldly and ardently into her eyes, and she received his glances smilingly. she felt thoroughly at ease and at home, as if she were back once more among her own sort of people--with some element of disagreeable constraint left out. since she was an outcast, she need not bother about the small restraints the girls felt compelled to put upon themselves in the company of boys. nobody respected a "bastard," as they called her when they spoke frankly. so with nothing to lose she could at least get what pleasure there was in freedom. she liked it, having this handsome, well-dressed young man making love to her in this grand restaurant where things were so good to eat and so excitingly expensive. he would not regard her as fit to associate with his respectable mother and sisters. in the casts of respectability, her place was with jeb ferguson! she was better off, clear of the whole unjust and horrible business of respectable life, clear of it and free, frankly in the outcast class. she had not realized--and she did not realize--that association with the players of the show boat had made any especial change in her; in fact, it had loosened to the sloughing point the whole skin of her conventional training--that surface skin which seems part of the very essence of our being until something happens to force us to shed it. crises, catastrophes, may scratch that skin, or cut clear through it; but only the gentle, steady, everywhere-acting prying-loose of day and night association can change it from a skin to a loose envelope ready to be shed at any moment. "what are you going to do?" asked the young man, when the acquaintance had become a friendship--which was before the peaches and ice cream were served. "i don't know," said the girl, with the secretive instinct of self-reliance hiding the unhappiness his abrupt question set to throbbing again. "honestly, i've never met anyone that was so congenial. but maybe you don't feel that way?" "then again maybe i do," rejoined she, forcing a merry smile. his face flushed with embarrassment, but his eyes grew more ardent as he said: "what were you looking for, when i saw you in garfield place?" "was that garfield place?" she asked, in evasion. "yes." and he insisted, "what were you looking for?" "what were _you_ looking for?" "for a pretty girl." they both laughed. "and i've found her. i'm suited if you are. . . . don't look so serious. you haven't answered my question." "i'm looking for work." he smiled as if it were a joke. "you mean for a place on the stage. that isn't work. _you_ couldn't work. i can see that at a glance." "why not?" "oh, you haven't been brought up to that kind of life. you'd hate it in every way. and they don't pay women anything for work. my father employs a lot of them. most of his girls live at home. that keeps the wages down, and the others have to piece out with"--he smiled--"one thing and another." susan sat gazing straight before her. "i've not had much experience," she finally said, thoughtfully. "i guess i don't know what i'm about." the young man leaned toward her, his face flushing with earnestness. "you don't know how pretty you are. i wish my father wasn't so close with me. i'd not let you ever speak of work again--even on the stage. what good times we could have!" "i must be going," said she, rising. her whole body was alternately hot and cold. in her brain, less vague now, were the ideas mabel connemora had opened up for her. "oh, bother!" exclaimed he. "sit down a minute. you misunderstood me. i don't mean i'm flat broke." susan hastily reseated herself, showing her confusion. "i wasn't thinking of that." "then--what were you thinking of?" "i don't know," she replied--truthfully, for she could not have put into words anything definite about the struggle raging in her like a battle in a fog. "i often don't exactly know what i'm thinking about. i somehow can't--can't fit it together--yet." "do you suppose," he went on, as if she had not spoken, "do you suppose i don't understand? i know you can't afford to let me take your time for nothing. . . . don't you like me a little?" she looked at him with grave friendliness. "yes." then, seized with a terror which her habitual manner of calm concealed from him, she rose again. "why shouldn't it be me as well as another?. . . at least sit down till i pay the bill." she seated herself, stared at her plate. "now what are you thinking about?" he asked. "i don't know exactly. nothing much." the waiter brought the bill. the young man merely glanced at the total, drew a small roll of money from his trousers pocket, put a five-dollar note on the tray with the bill. susan's eyes opened wide when the waiter returned with only two quarters and a dime. she glanced furtively at the young man, to see if he, too, was not disconcerted. he waved the tray carelessly aside; the waiter said "thank you," in a matter-of-course way, dropped the sixty cents into his pocket. the waiter's tip was by itself almost as much as she had ever seen paid out for a meal for two persons. "now, where shall we go?" asked the young man. susan did not lift her eyes. he leaned toward her, took her hand. "you're different from the sort a fellow usually finds," said he. "and i'm--i'm crazy about you. let's go," said he. susan took her bundle, followed him. she glanced up the street and down. she had an impulse to say she must go away alone; it was not strong enough to frame a sentence, much less express her thought. she was seeing queer, vivid, apparently disconnected visions--burlingham, sick unto death, on the stretcher in the hospital reception room--blynn of the hideous face and loose, repulsive body--the contemptuous old gentleman in the shop--odds and ends of the things mabel connemora had told her--the roll of bills the young man had taken from his pocket when he paid--jeb ferguson in the climax of the horrors of that wedding day and night. they went to garfield place, turned west, paused after a block or so at a little frame house set somewhat back from the street. the young man, who had been as silent as she--but nervous instead of preoccupied--opened the gate in the picket fence. "this is a first-class quiet place," said he, embarrassed but trying to appear at ease. susan hesitated. she must somehow nerve herself to speak of money, to say to him that she needed ten dollars--that she must have it. if she did not speak--if she got nothing for mr. burlingham--or almost nothing--and probably men didn't give women much--if she were going with him--to endure again the horrors and the degradation she had suffered from mr. ferguson--if it should be in vain! this nice young man didn't suggest mr. ferguson in any way. but there was such a mystery about men--they had a way of changing so--sam wright--uncle george even mr. ferguson hadn't seemed capable of torturing a helpless girl for no reason at all---- "we can't stand here," the young man was saying. she tried to speak about the ten dollars. she simply could not force out the words. with brain in a whirl, with blood beating suffocatingly into her throat and lungs, but giving no outward sign of agitation, she entered the gate. there was a low, old-fashioned porch along the side of the house, with an awning curiously placed at the end toward the street. when they ascended the steps under the awning, they were screened from the street. the young man pulled a knob. a bell within tinkled faintly; susan started, shivered. but the young man, looking straight at the door, did not see. a colored girl with a pleasant, welcoming face opened, stood aside for them to enter. he went straight up the stairs directly ahead, and susan followed. at the threshold the trembling girl looked round in terror. she expected to see a place like that foul, close little farm bedroom--for it seemed to her that at such times men must seek some dreadful place--vile, dim, fitting. she was in a small, attractively furnished room, with a bow window looking upon the yard and the street. the furniture reminded her of her own room at her uncle's in sutherland, except that the brass bed was far finer. he closed the door and locked it. as he advanced toward her he said: "_what_ are you seeing? please don't look like that." persuasively, "you weren't thinking of me--were you?" "no--oh, no," replied she, passing her hand over her eyes to try to drive away the vision of ferguson. "you look as if you expected to be murdered. do you want to go?" she forced herself to seem calm. "what a coward i am!" she said to herself. "if i could only die for him, instead of this. but i can't. and i _must_ get money for him." to the young man she said: "no. i--i--want to stay." late in the afternoon, when they were once more in the street, he said. "i'd ask you to go to dinner with me, but i haven't enough money." she stopped short. an awful look came into her face. "don't be alarmed," cried he, hurried and nervous, and blushing furiously. "i put the--the present for you in that funny little bundle of yours, under one of the folds of the nightgown or whatever it is you've got wrapped on the outside. i didn't like to hand it to you. i've a feeling somehow that you're not regularly--that kind." "was it--ten dollars?" she said, and for all he could see she was absolutely calm. "yes," replied he, with a look of relief followed by a smile of amused tenderness. "i can't make you out," he went on. "you're a queer one. you've had a look in your eyes all afternoon--well, if i hadn't been sure you were experienced, you'd almost have frightened me away." "yes, i've had experience. the--the worst," said the girl. "you--you attract me awfully; you've got--well, everything that's nice about a woman--and at the same time, there's something in your eyes---- are you very fond of your friend?" "he's all i've got in the world." "i suppose it's his being sick that makes you look and act so queer?" "i don't know what's the matter with me," she said slowly. "i--don't know." "i want to see you again--soon. what's your address?" "i haven't any. i've got to look for a place to live." "well, you can give me the place you did live. i'll write you there, lorna. you didn't ask me my name when i asked you yours. you've hardly said anything. are you always quiet like this?" "no--not always. at least, i haven't been." "no. you weren't, part of the time this afternoon--at the restaurant. tell me, what are you thinking about all the time? you're very secretive. why don't you tell me? don't you know i like you?" "i don't know," said the girl in a slow dazed way. "i--don't--know." "i wouldn't take your time for nothing," he went on, after a pause. "my father doesn't give me much money, but i think i'll have some more day after tomorrow. can i see you then?" "i don't know." he laughed. "you said that before. day after tomorrow afternoon--in the same place. no matter if it's raining. i'll be there first--at three. will you come?" "if i can." she made a movement to go. but still he detained her. he colored high again, in the struggle between the impulses of his generous youth and the fear of being absurd with a girl he had picked up in the street. he looked at her searchingly, wistfully. "i know it's your life, but--i hate to think of it," he went on. "you're far too nice. i don't see how you happened to be in--in this line. still, what else is there for a girl, when she's up against it? i've often thought of those things--and i don't feel about them as most people do. . . . i'm curious about you. you'll pardon me, won't you? i'm afraid i'll fall in love with you, if i see you often. you won't fail to come day after tomorrow?" "if i can." "don't you want to see me again?" she did not speak or lift her eyes. "you like me, don't you?" still no answer. "you don't want to be questioned?" "no," said the girl. "where are you going now?" "to the hospital." "may i walk up there with you? i live in clifton. i can go home that way." "i'd rather you didn't." "then--good-by--till day after tomorrow at three." he put out his hand; he had to reach for hers and take it. "you're not--not angry with me?" "no." his eyes lingered tenderly upon her. "you are _so_ sweet! you don't know how i want to kiss you. are you sorry to go--sorry to leave me--just a little?. . . i forgot. you don't like to be questioned. well, good-by, dear." "good-by," she said; and still without lifting her gaze from the ground she turned away, walked slowly westward. she had not reached the next street to the north when she suddenly felt that if she did not sit she would drop. she lifted her eyes for an instant to glance furtively round. she saw a house with stone steps leading up to the front doors; there was a "for rent" sign in one of the close-shuttered parlor windows. she seated herself, supported the upper part of her weary body by resting her elbows on her knees. her bundle had rolled to the sidewalk at her feet. a passing man picked it up, handed it to her, with a polite bow. she looked at him vaguely, took the bundle as if she were not sure it was hers. "heat been too much for you, miss?" asked the man. she shook her head. he lingered, talking volubly--about the weather--then about how cool it was on the hilltops. "we might go up to the bellevue," he finally suggested, "if you've nothing better to do." "no, thank you," she said. "i'll go anywhere you like. i've got a little money that i don't care to keep." she shook her head. "i don't mean anything bad," he hastened to suggest--because that would bring up the subject in discussable form. "i can't go with you," said the girl drearily. "don't bother me, please." "oh--excuse me." and the man went on. susan turned the bundle over in her lap, thrust her fingers slowly and deliberately into the fold of the soiled blouse which was on the outside. she drew out the money. a ten and two fives. enough to keep his room at the hospital for two weeks. no, for she must live, herself. enough to give him a room one week longer and to enable her to live two weeks at least. . . . and day after tomorrow--more. perhaps, soon--enough to see him through the typhoid. she put the money in her bosom, rose and went on toward the hospital. she no longer felt weary, and the sensation of a wound that might ache if she were not so numb passed away. a clerk she had not seen before was at the barrier desk. "i came to ask how mr. burlingham is," said she. the clerk yawned, drew a large book toward him. "burlingham--b--bu--bur----" he said half to himself, turning over the leaves. "yes--here he is." he looked at her. "you his daughter?" "no, i'm a friend." "oh--then--he died at five o'clock--an hour ago." he looked up--saw her eyes--only her eyes. they were a deep violet now, large, shining with tragic softness--like the eyes of an angel that has lost its birthright through no fault of its own. he turned hastily away, awed, terrified, ashamed of himself. chapter xviii the next thing she knew, she felt herself seized strongly by the arm. she gazed round in a dazed way. she was in the street--how she got there she had no idea. the grip on her arm--it was the young doctor, hamilton. "i called you twice," explained he, "but you didn't hear." "he is dead," said she. hamilton had a clear view of her face now. there was not a trace of the child left. he saw her eyes--quiet, lonely, violet stars. "you must go and rest quietly," he said with gentleness. "you are worn out." susan took from her bosom the twenty dollars, handed it to him. "it belongs to him," said she. "give it to them, to bury him." and she started on. "where are you going?" asked the young man. susan stopped, looked vaguely at him. "good-by," she said. "you've been very kind." "you've found a boarding place?" "oh, i'm all right." "you want to see him?" "no. then he'll always be alive to me." "you had better keep this money. the city will take care of the funeral." "it belong to him. i couldn't keep it for myself. i must be going." "shan't i see you again?" "i'll not trouble you." "let me walk with you as far as your place." "i'm not feeling--just right. if you don't mind--please--i'd rather be alone." "i don't mean to intrude, but----" "i'm all right," said the girl. "don't worry about me." "but you are too young----" "i've been married. . . . thank you, but--good-by." he could think of no further excuse for detaining her. her manner disquieted him, yet it seemed composed and natural. probably she had run away from a good home, was now sobered and chastened, was eager to separate herself from the mess she had got into and return to her own sort of people. it struck him as heartless that she should go away in this fashion; but on second thought, he could not associate heartlessness with her. also, he saw how there might be something in what she had said about not wishing to have to think of her friend as dead. he stood watching her straight narrow young figure until it was lost to view in the crowd of people going home from work. susan went down elm street to garfield place, seated herself on one of the benches. she was within sight of the unobtrusive little house with the awnings; but she did not realize it. she had no sense of her surroundings, of the passing of time, felt no grief, no sensation of any kind. she simply sat, her little bundle in her lap, her hands folded upon it. a man in uniform paused before her. "closing-up time," he said, sharply but in the impartial official way. "i'm going to lock the gates." she looked at him. in a softer, apologetic tone, he said, "i've got to lock the gates. that's the law, miss." she did not clearly understand, but rose and went out into race street. she walked slowly along, not knowing or caring where. she walked--walked--walked. sometimes her way lay through crowded streets, again through streets deserted. now she was stumbling over the uneven sidewalks of a poor quarter; again it was the smooth flagstones of the shopping or wholesale districts. several times she saw the river with its multitude of boats great and small; several times she crossed the canal. twice she turned back because the street was mounting the hills behind the city--the hills with the cars swiftly ascending and descending the inclined planes, and at the crests gayly lighted pavilions where crowds were drinking and dancing. occasionally some man spoke to her, but desisted as she walked straight on, apparently not hearing. she rested from time to time, on a stoop or on a barrel or box left out by some shopkeeper, or leaning upon the rail of a canal bridge. she was walking with a purpose--to try to scatter the dense fog that had rolled in and enveloped her mind, and then to try to think. she sat, or rather dropped, down from sheer fatigue, in that cool hour which precedes the dawn. it happened to be the steps of a church. she fell into a doze, was startled back to consciousness by the deep boom of the bell in the steeple; it made the stone vibrate under her. one--two--three--four! toward the east there shone a flush of light, not yet strong enough to dim the stars. the sky above her was clear. the pall of smoke rolled away. the air felt clean and fresh, even had in it a reminiscence of the green fields whence it had come. she began to revive, like a sleeper shaking off drowsiness and the spell of a bad dream and looking forward to the new day. the fog that had swathed and stupefied her brain seemed to have lifted. at her heart there was numbness and a dull throbbing, an ache; but her mind was clear and her body felt intensely, hopelessly alive and ready, clamorously ready, for food. a movement across the narrow street attracted her attention. a cellar door was rising--thrust upward by the shoulders of a man. it fell full open with a resounding crash, the man revealed by the light from beneath--a white blouse, a white cap. toward her wafted the delicious odor of baking bread. she rose, hesitated only an instant, crossed the street directly toward the baker who had come up to the surface for cool air. "i am hungry," said she to him. "can't you let me have something to eat?" the man--he had a large, smooth, florid face eyed her in amused astonishment. "where'd you jump from?" he demanded. "i was resting on the church steps over there. the smell came to me and--i couldn't stand it. i can pay." "oh, that's all right," said the man, with a strong german accent. "come down." and he descended the steps, she following. it was a large and lofty cellar, paved with cement; floor, ceilings, walls, were whitened with flour. there were long clean tables for rolling the dough; big wooden bowls; farther back, the ovens and several bakers at work adding to the huge piles of loaves the huge baskets of rolls. susan's eyes glistened; her white teeth showed in a delightful smile of hunger about to be satisfied. "do you want bread or rolls?" asked the german. then without waiting for her to answer, "i guess some of the 'sweet rolls,' we call 'em, would about suit a lady." "yes--the sweet rolls," said the girl. the baker fumbled about behind a lot of empty baskets, found a sewing basket, filled it with small rolls--some crescent in shape, some like lady fingers, some oval, some almost like biscuit, all with pulverized sugar powdered on them thick as a frosting. he set the little basket upon an empty kneading table. "wait yet a minute," he commanded, and bustled up a flight of stairs. he reappeared with a bottle of milk and a piece of fresh butter. he put these beside the basket of rolls, drew a stool up before them. "how's that?" asked he, his hands on his hips, his head on one side, and his big jolly face beaming upon her. "pretty good, don't it!" susan was laughing with pleasure. he pointed to the place well down in the bottle of milk where the cream ended. "that's the way it should be always--not so!" said he. she nodded. then he shook the bottle to remix the separated cream and milk. "so!" he cried. then--"_ach, dummer esel!_" he muttered, striking his brow a resounding thwack with the flat of his hand. "a knife!" and he hastened to repair that omission. susan sat at the table, took one of the fresh rolls, spread butter upon it. the day will never come for her when she cannot distinctly remember the first bite of the little sweet buttered roll, eaten in that air perfumed with the aroma of baking bread. the milk was as fine as it promised to be she drank it from the bottle. the german watched her a while, then beckoned to his fellow workmen. they stood round, reveling in the joyful sight of this pretty hungry girl eating so happily and so heartily. "the pie," whispered one workman to another. they brought a small freshly baked peach pie, light and crisp and brown. susan's beautiful eyes danced. "but," she said to her first friend among the bakers, "i'm afraid i can't afford it." at this there was a loud chorus of laughter. "eat it," said her friend. and when she had finished her rolls and butter, she did eat it. "i never tasted a pie like that," declared she. "and i like pies and can make them too." once more they laughed, as if she had said the wittiest thing in the world. as the last mouthful of the pie was disappearing, her friend said, "another!" "goodness, no!" cried the girl. "i couldn't eat a bite more." "but it's an apple pie." and he brought it, holding it on his big florid fat hand and turning it round to show her its full beauty. she sighed regretfully. "i simply can't," she said. "how much is what i've had?" her friend frowned. "vot you take me for--hey?" demanded he, with a terrible frown--so terrible he felt it to be that, fearing he had frightened her, he burst out laughing, to reassure. "oh, but i must pay," she pleaded. "i didn't come begging." "not a cent!" said her friend firmly. "i'm the boss. i won't take it." she insisted until she saw she was hurting his feelings. then she tried to thank him; but he would not listen to that, either. "good-by--good-by," he said gruffly. "i must get to work once." but she understood, and went with a light heart up into the world again. he stood waist deep in the cellar, she hesitated upon the sidewalk. "good-by," she said, with swimming eyes. "you don't know how good you've been to me." "all right. luck!" he waved his hand, half turned his back on her and looked intently up the street, his eyes blinking. she went down the street, turned the first corner, dropped on a doorstep and sobbed and cried, out of the fullness of her heart. when she rose to go on again, she felt stronger and gentler than she had felt since her troubles began with the quarrel over sam wright. a little further on she came upon a florist's shop in front of which a wagon was unloading the supply of flowers for the day's trade. she paused to look at the roses and carnations, the lilies and dahlias, the violets and verbenas and geraniums. the fast brightening air was scented with delicate odors. she was attracted to a small geranium with many buds and two full-blown crimson flowers. "how much for that?" she asked a young man who seemed to be in charge. he eyed her shrewdly. "well, i reckon about fifteen cents," replied he. she took from her bosom the dollar bill wrapped round the eighty cents, gave him what he had asked. "no, you needn't tie it up," said she, as he moved to take it into the store. she went back to the bakeshop. the cellar door was open, but no one was in sight. stooping down, she called: "mr. baker! mr. baker!" the big smooth face appeared below. she set the plant down on the top step. "for you," she said, and hurried away. on a passing street car she saw the sign "eden park." she had heard of it--of its beauties, of the wonderful museum there. she took the next car of the same line. a few minutes, and it was being drawn up the inclined plane toward the lofty hilltops. she had thought the air pure below. she was suddenly lifted through a dense vapor--the cloud that always lies over the lower part of the city. a moment, and she was above the cloud, was being carried through the wide, clean tree-lined avenue of a beautiful suburb. on either side, lawns and gardens and charming houses, a hush brooding over them. behind these walls, in comfortable beds, amid the surroundings that come to mind with the word "home," lay many girls such as she--happy, secure, sheltered. girls like herself. a wave of homesickness swept over her, daunting her for a little while. but she fought it down, watched what was going on around her. "i mustn't look back--i mustn't! nothing there for me." at the main gateway of the park she descended. there indeed was the, to her, vast building containing the treasures of art; but she had not come for that. she struck into the first by-path, sought out a grassy slope thickly studded with bushes, and laid herself down. she spread her skirts carefully so as not to muss them. she put her bundle under her head. when she awoke the moon was shining upon her face--shining from a starry sky! she sat up, looked round in wonder. yes--it was night again--very still, very beautiful, and warm, with the air fragrant and soft. she felt intensely awake, entirely rested--and full of hope. it was as if during that long dreamless sleep her whole being had been renewed and magically borne away from the lands of shadow and pain where it had been wandering, to a land of bright promise. oh, youth, youth, that bears so lightly the burden of the past, that faces so confidently the mystery of the future! she listened--heard a faint sound that moved her to investigate. peering through the dense bushes, she discovered on the grass in the shadow of the next clump, a ragged, dirty man and woman, both sound asleep and snoring gently. she watched them spellbound. the man's face was deeply shaded by his battered straw hat. but she could see the woman's face plainly--the thin, white hair, the sunken eyes and mouth, the skeleton look of old features over which the dry skin of age is tightly drawn. she gazed until the man, moving in his sleep, kicked out furiously and uttered a curse. she drew back, crawled away until she had put several clumps of bushes between her and the pair. then she sped down and up the slopes and did not stop until she was where she could see, far below, the friendly lights of the city blinking at her through the smoky mist. she had forgotten her bundle! she did not know how to find the place where she had left it; and, had she known, she would not have dared return. this loss, however, troubled her little. not in vain had she dwelt with the philosopher burlingham. she seated herself on a bench and made herself comfortable. but she no longer needed sleep. she was awake--wide awake--in every atom of her vigorous young body. the minutes dragged. she was impatient for the dawn to give the signal for the future to roll up its curtain. she would have gone down into the city to walk about but she was now afraid the police would take her in--and that probably would mean going to a reformatory, for she could not give a satisfactory account of herself. true, her older way of wearing her hair and some slight but telling changes in her dress had made her look less the child. but she could not hope to pass for a woman full grown. the moon set; the starlight was after a long, long time succeeded by the dawn of waking birds, and of waking city, too--for up from below rose an ever louder roar like a rising storm. in her restless rovings, she came upon a fountain; she joined the birds making a toilet in its basin, and patterned after them--washed her face and hands, dried them on a handkerchief she by great good luck had put into her stocking, smoothed her hair, her dress. and still the sense of unreality persisted, cast its friendly spell over this child-woman suddenly caught up from the quietest of quiet lives and whirled into a dizzy vortex of strange events without parallel, or similitude even, in anything she had ever known. if anyone had suddenly asked her who she was and she had tried to recall, she would have felt as if trying to remember a dream. sutherland--a faint, faint dream, and the show boat also. spenser--a romantic dream--or a first installment of a love-story read in some stray magazine. burlingham--the theatrical agent--the young man of the previous afternoon--the news of the death that left her quite alone--all a dream, a tumbled, jumbled dream, all passed with the night and the awakening. in her youth and perfect health, refreshed by the long sleep, gladdened by the bright new day, she was as irresponsible as the merry birds chattering and flinging the water about at the opposite side of the fountain's basin. she was now glad she had lost her bundle. without it her hands were free both hands free to take whatever might offer next. and she was eager to see what that would be, and hopeful about it--no--more than hopeful, confident. burlingham, aided by those highly favorable surroundings of the show boat, and of the vagabond life thereafter, had developed in her that gambler's spirit which had enabled him to play year after year of losing hands with unabating courage--the spirit that animates all the brave souls whose deeds awe the docile, conventional, craven masses of mankind. leisurely as a truant she tramped back toward the city, pausing to observe anything that chanced to catch her eye. at the moment of her discovery of the difference between her and most girls there had begun a cleavage between her and the social system. and now she felt as if she were of one race and the rest of the world of another and hostile race. she did not realize it, but she had taken the first great step along the path that leads to distinction or destruction. for the world either obeys or tramples into dust those who, in whatever way, have a lot apart from the common. she was free from the bonds of convention--free to soar or to sink. her way toward the city lay along a slowly descending street that had been, not so very long before, a country road. block after block there were grassy fields intersected by streets, as if city had attempted a conquest of country and had abandoned it. again the vacant lots were disfigured with the ruins of a shanty or by dreary dump heaps. for long stretches the way was built up only on one side. the houses were for the most part tenement with small and unprosperous shops or saloons on the ground floor. toward the foot of the hill, where the line of tenements was continuous on either side, she saw a sign "restaurant" projecting over the sidewalk. when she reached it, she paused and looked in. a narrow window and a narrow open door gave a full view of the tiny room with its two rows of plain tables. near the window was a small counter with a case containing cakes and pies and rolls. with back to the window sat a pretty towheaded girl of about her own age, reading. susan, close to the window, saw that the book was owen meredith's "lucile," one of her own favorites. she could even read the words: the ways they are many and wide, and seldom are two ways the same. she entered. the girl glanced up, with eyes slowly changing from far-away dreaminess to present and practical--pleasant blue eyes with lashes and brows of the same color as the thick, neatly done yellowish hair. "could i get a glass of milk and a roll?" asked susan, a modest demand, indeed, on behalf of a growing girl's appetite twenty-four hours unsatisfied. the blonde girl smiled, showing a clean mouth with excellent teeth. "we sell the milk for five cents, the rolls three for a nickel." "then i'll take milk and three rolls," said susan. "may i sit at a table? i'll not spoil it." "sure. sit down. that's what the tables are for." and the girl closed the book, putting a chromo card in it to mark her place, and stirred about to serve the customer. susan took the table nearest the door, took the seat facing the light. the girl set before her a plate, a knife and fork, a little form of butter, a tall glass of milk, and three small rolls in a large saucer. "you're up and out early?" she said to susan. on one of those inexplicable impulses of frankness susan replied: "i've been sleeping in the park." the girl had made the remark merely to be polite and was turning away. as susan's reply penetrated to her inattentive mind she looked sharply at her, eyes opening wonderingly. "did you get lost? are you a stranger in town? why didn't you ask someone to take you in?" the girl reflected, realized. "that's so," said she. "i never thought of it before. . . . yes, that is so! it must be dreadful not to have any place to go." she gazed at susan with admiring eyes. "weren't you afraid--up in the park?" "no," replied susan. "i hadn't anything anybody'd want to steal." "but some man might have----" the girl left it to susan's imagination to finish the sentence. "i hadn't anything to steal," repeated susan, with a kind of cynical melancholy remotely suggestive of mabel connemora. the restaurant girl retired behind the counter to reflect, while susan began upon her meager breakfast with the deliberation of one who must coax a little to go a great ways. presently the girl said: "where are you going to sleep tonight?" "oh, that's a long ways off," replied the apt pupil of the happy-go-lucky houseboat show. "i'll find a place, i guess." the girl looked thoughtfully toward the street. "i was wondering," she said after a while, "what i'd do if i was to find myself out in the street, with no money and nowhere to go. . . . are you looking for something to do?" "do you know of anything?" asked susan interested at once. "nothing worth while. there's a box factory down on the next square. but only a girl that lives at home can work there. pa says the day's coming when women'll be like men--work at everything and get the same wages. but it isn't so now. a girl's got to get married." such a strange expression came over susan's face that the waitress looked apologetic and hastened to explain herself: "i don't much mind the idea of getting married," said she. "only--i'm afraid i can never get the kind of a man i'd want. the boys round here leave school before the girls, so the girls are better educated. and then they feel above the boys of their own class--except those boys that're beginning to get up in the world--and those kind of boys want some girl who's above them and can help them up. it's dreadful to be above the people you know and not good enough for the people you'd like to know." susan was not impressed; she could not understand why the waitress spoke with so much feeling. "well," said she, pausing before beginning on the last roll, "i don't care so long as i find something to do." "there's another thing," complained the waitress. "if you work in a store, you can't get wages enough to live on; and you learn things, and want to live better and better all the time. it makes you miserable. and you can't marry the men who work at nice refined labor because they don't make enough to marry on. and if you work in a factory or as a servant, why all but the commonest kind of men look down on you. you may get wages enough to live on, but you can't marry or get up in the world." "you're very ambitious, aren't you?" "indeed i am. i don't want to be in the working class." she was leaning over the counter now, and her blond face was expressing deep discontent and scorn. "i _hate_ working people. all of them who have any sense look down on themselves and wish they could get something respectable to do." "oh, you don't mean that," protested susan. "any kind of work's respectable if it's honest." "_you_ can say that," retorted the girl. "_you_ don't belong in our class. you were brought up different. you are a _lady_." susan shrank and grew crimson. the other girl did not see. she went on crossly: "upper-class people always talk about how fine it is to be an honest workingman. but that's all rot. let 'em try it a while. and pa says it'll never be straightened out till everybody has to work." "what--what does your father do?" "he was a cabinetmaker. then one of the other men tipped over a big chest and his right hand was crushed--smashed to pieces, so he wasn't able to work any more. but he's mighty smart in his brains. it's the kind you can't make any money out of. he has read most everything. the trouble with pa was he had too much heart. he wasn't mean enough to try and get ahead of the other workmen, and rise to be a boss over them, and grind them down to make money for the proprietor. so he stayed on at the bench--he was a first-class cabinetmaker. the better a man is as a workman, and the nicer he is as a man, the harder it is for him to get up. pa was too good at his trade--and too soft-hearted. won't you have another glass of milk?" "no--thank you," said susan. she was still hungry, but it alarmed her to think of taking more than ten cents from her hoard. "are you going to ask for work at the box factory?" "i'm afraid they wouldn't take me. i don't know how to make boxes." "oh, that's nothing," assured the restaurant girl. "it's the easiest kind of work. but then an educated person can pick up most any trade in a few days, well enough to get along. they'll make you a paster, at first." "how much does that pay?" "he'll offer you two fifty a week, but you must make him give you three. that's right for beginners. then, if you stay on and work hard, you'll be raised to four after six months. the highest pay's five." "three dollars," said susan. "how much can i rent a room for?" the restaurant girl looked at her pityingly. "oh, you can't afford a room. you'll have to club in with three other girls and take a room together, and cook your meals yourselves, turn about." susan tried not to show how gloomy this prospect seemed. "i'll try," said she. she paid the ten cents; her new acquaintance went with her to the door, pointed out the huge bare wooden building displaying in great letters "j. c. matson, paper boxes." "you apply at the office," said the waitress. "there'll be a fat black-complected man in his shirt with his suspenders let down off his shoulders. he'll be fresh with you. he used to be a working man himself, so he hasn't any respect for working people. but he doesn't mean any harm. he isn't like a good many; he lets his girls alone." susan had not got far when the waitress came running after her. "won't you come back and let me know how you made out?" she asked, a little embarrassed. "i hope you don't think i'm fresh." "i'll be glad to come," susan assured her. and their eyes met in a friendly glance. "if you don't find a place to go, why not come in with me? i've got only a very little bit of a room, but it's as big and a lot cleaner than any you'll find with the factory girls." "but i haven't any money," said susan regretfully. "and i couldn't take anything without paying." "you could pay two dollars and a half a week and eat in with us. we couldn't afford to give you much for that, but it'd be better than what you'd get the other way." "but you can't afford to do that." the restaurant girl's mind was aroused, was working fast and well. "you can help in the restaurant of evenings," she promptly replied. "i'll tell ma you're so pretty you'll draw trade. and i'll explain that you used to go to school with me--and have lost your father and mother. my name's etta brashear." "mine's--lorna sackville," said susan, blushing. "i'll come after a while, and we'll talk about what to do. i may not get a place." "oh, you'll get it. he has hard work finding girls. factories usually pay more than stores, because the work's more looked down on--though lord knows it's hard to think how anything could be more looked down on than a saleslady." "i don't see why you bother about those things. what do they matter?" "why, everybody bothers about them. but you don't understand. you were born a lady, and you'll always feel you've got social standing, and people'll feel that way too." "but i wasn't," said susan earnestly. "indeed, i wasn't. i was born--a--a nobody. i can't tell you, but i'm just nobody. i haven't even got a name." etta, as romantic as the next young girl, was only the more fascinated by the now thrillingly mysterious stranger--so pretty, so sweet, with such beautiful manners and strangely outcast no doubt from some family of "high folks." "you'll be sure to come? you won't disappoint me?" susan kissed etta. etta embraced susan, her cheeks flushed, her eyes brilliant. "'i've taken an awful fancy to you," she said. "i haven't ever had an intimate lady friend. i don't care for the girls round here. they're so fresh and common. ma brought me up refined; she's not like the ordinary working-class woman." it hurt susan deeply--why, she could not have quite explained--to hear etta talk in this fashion. and in spite of herself her tone was less friendly as she said, "i'll come when i find out." chapter xix in the office of the factory susan found the man etta described. he was seated, or, rather, was sprawled before an open and overflowing rolltop desk, his collar and cuffs off, and his coat and waistcoat also. his feet--broad, thick feet with knots at the great toe joints bulging his shoes--were hoisted upon the leaf of the desk. susan's charms of person and manners so wrought upon him that, during the exchange of preliminary questions and answers, he slowly took down first one foot then the other, and readjusted his once muscular but now loose and pudgy body into a less loaferish posture. he was as unconscious as she of the cause and meaning of these movements. had he awakened to what he was doing he would probably have been angered against himself and against her; and the direction of susan lenox's life would certainly have been changed. those who fancy the human animal is in the custody of some conscious and predetermining destiny think with their vanity rather than with their intelligence. a careful look at any day or even hour of any life reveals the inevitable influence of sheer accidents, most of them trivial. and these accidents, often the most trivial, most powerfully determine not only the direction but also the degree and kind of force--what characteristics shall develop and what shall dwindle. "you seem to have a nut on you," said the box manufacturer at the end of the examination. "i'll start you at three." susan, thus suddenly "placed" in the world and ticketed with a real value, was so profoundly excited that she could not even make a stammering attempt at expressing gratitude. "do your work well," continued matson, "and you'll have a good steady job with me till you get some nice young fellow to support you. stand the boys off. don't let 'em touch you till you're engaged--and not much then till the preacher's said the word." "thank you," said susan, trying to look grave. she was fascinated by his curious habit of scratching himself as he talked--head, ribs, arm, legs, the backs of his red hairy hands. "stand 'em off," pursued the box-maker, scratching his ribs and nodding his huge head vigorously. "that's the way my wife got me. it's pull dick pull devil with the gals and the boys. and the gal that's stiff with the men gets a home, while her that ain't goes to the streets. i always gives my gals a word of good advice. and many a one i've saved. there's mighty few preachers does as much good as me. when can you go to work?" susan reflected. with heightened color and a slight stammer she said, "i've got something to do this afternoon, if you'll let me. can i come in the morning?" "seven sharp. we take off a cent a minute up to a quarter of an hour. if you're later than that, you get docked for the day. and no excuses. i didn't climb to the top from spittoon cleaner in a saloon fifteen years ago by being an easy mark for my hands." "i'll come at seven in the morning," said susan. "do you live far?" "i'm going to live just up the street." "that's right. it adds ten cents a day to your wages--the ten you'll save in carfare. sixty cents a week!" and matson beamed and scratched as if he felt he had done a generous act. "who are you livin' with? respectable, i hope." "with miss brashear--i think." "oh, yes--tom brashear's gal. they're nice people. tom's an honest fellow--used to make good money till he had his hard luck. him and me used to work together. but he never could seem to learn that it ain't workin' for yourself but makin' others work for you that climbs a man up. i never was much as a worker. i was always thinkin' out ways of makin' people work for me. and here i am at the top. and where's tom? well--run along now--what's your name?" "lorna sackville." "lorny." he burst into a loud guffaw. "lord, what a name! sounds like a theayter. seven sharp, lorny. so long." susan nodded with laughing eyes, thanked him and departed. she glanced up the street, saw etta standing in the door of the restaurant. etta did not move from her own doorway, though she was showing every sign of anxiety and impatience. "i can't leave even for a minute so near the dinner hour," she explained when susan came, "or i'd, a' been outside the factory. and ma's got to stick to the kitchen. i see you got a job. how much?" "three," replied susan. "he must have offered it to you," said etta, laughing. "i thought about it after you were gone and i knew you'd take whatever he said first. oh, i've been so scared something'd happen. i do want you as my lady friend. was he fresh?" "not a bit. he was--very nice." "well, he ought to be nice--as pa says, getting richer and richer, and driving the girls he robs to marry men they hate or to pick up a living in the gutter." susan felt that she owed her benefactor a strong protest. "maybe i'm foolish," said she, "but i'm awful glad he's got that place and can give me work." etta was neither convinced nor abashed. "you don't understand things in our class," replied she. "pa says it was the kind of grateful thinking and talking you've just done that's made him poor in his old age. he says you've either got to whip or be whipped, rob or be robbed--and that the really good honest people are the fools who take the losing side. but he says, too, he'd rather be a fool and a failure than stoop to stamping on his fellow-beings and robbing them. and i guess he's right"--there etta laughed--"though i'll admit i'd hate to be tempted with a chance to get up by stepping on somebody." she sighed. "and sometimes i can't help wishing pa had done some tramping and stamping. why not? that's all most people are fit for--to be tramped and stamped on. now, don't look so shocked. you don't understand. wait till you've been at work a while." susan changed the subject. "i'm going to work at seven in the morning. . . . i might as well have gone today. i had a kind of an engagement i thought i was going to keep, but i've about decided i won't." etta watched with awe and delight the mysterious look in susan's suddenly flushed face and abstracted eyes. after a time she ventured to interrupt with: "you'll try living with us?" "if you're quite sure--did you talk to your mother?" "mother'll be crazy about you. she wants anything that'll make me more contented. oh, i do get so lonesome!" mrs. brashear, a spare woman, much bent by monotonous work--which, however, had not bent her courage or her cheerfulness--made susan feel at home immediately in the little flat. the tenement was of rather a superior class. but to susan it seemed full of noisome smells, and she was offended by the halls littered with evidences of the uncleanness of the tenants. she did not then realize that the apparent superior cleanness and neatness of the better-off classes was really in large part only affected, that their secluded back doors and back ways gave them opportunity to hide their uncivilized habits from the world that saw only the front. however, once inside the brashear flat, she had an instant rise of spirits. "isn't this nice?" exclaimed she as etta showed her, at a glance from the sitting-room, the five small but scrupulously clean rooms. "i'll like it here!" etta reddened, glanced at her for signs of mockery, saw that she was in earnest. "i'm afraid it's better to look at than to live in," she began, then decided against saying anything discouraging. "it seems cramped to us," said she, "after the house we had till a couple of years ago. i guess we'll make out, somehow." the family paid twenty dollars a month for the flat. the restaurant earned twelve to fifteen a week; and the son, ashbel, stocky, powerful and stupid, had a steady job as porter at ten a week. he gave his mother seven, as he had a room to himself and an enormous appetite. he talked of getting married; if he did marry, the family finances would be in disorder. but his girl had high ideas, being the daughter of a grocer who fancied himself still an independent merchant though he was in fact the even more poorly paid selling agent of the various food products trusts. she had fixed twenty a week as the least on which she would marry; his prospects of any such raise were--luckily for his family--extremely remote; for he had nothing but physical strength to sell, and the price of physical strength alone was going down, under immigrant competition, not only in actual wages like any other form of wage labor, but also in nominal wages. altogether, the brashears were in excellent shape for a tenement family, were better off than upwards of ninety per cent of the families of prosperous and typical cincinnati. while it was true that old tom brashear drank, it was also true that he carefully limited himself to two dollars a week. while it was true that he could not work at his trade and apparently did little but sit round and talk--usually high above his audience--nevertheless he was the actual head of the family and its chief bread-winner. it was his savings that were invested in the restaurant; he bought the supplies and was shrewd and intelligent about that vitally important department of the business--the department whose mismanagement in domestic economy is, next to drink, the main cause of failure and pauperism, of sickness, of premature disability, of those profound discouragements that lead to despair. also, old brashear had the sagacity and the nagging habit that are necessary to keeping people and things up to the mark. he had ideas--practical ideas as well as ideals--far above his station. but for him the housekeeping would have been in the familiar tenement fashion of slovenliness and filth, and the family would have been neat only on sundays, and only on the surface then. because he had the habit of speaking of himself as useless, as done for, as a drag, as one lingering on when he ought to be dead, his family and all the neighborhood thought of him in that way. although intelligence, indeed, virtue of every kind, is expected of tenement house people--and is needed by them beyond any other condition of humanity--they are unfortunately merely human, are tainted of all human weaknesses. they lack, for instance, discrimination. so, it never occurred to them that tom brashear was the sole reason why the brashears lived better than any of the other families and yielded less to the ferocious and incessant downward pressure. but for one thing the brashears would have been going up in the world. that thing was old tom's honesty. the restaurant gave good food and honest measure. therefore, the margin of profit was narrow--too narrow. he knew what was the matter. he mocked at himself for being "such a weak fool" when everybody else with the opportunity and the intelligence was getting on by yielding to the compulsion of the iron rule of dishonesty in business. but he remained honest--therefore, remained in the working class, instead of rising among its exploiters. "if i didn't drink, i'd kill myself," said old tom to susan, when he came to know her well and to feel that from her he could get not the mere blind admiration the family gave him but understanding and sympathy. "whenever anybody in the working class has any imagination," he explained, "he either kicks his way out of it into capitalist or into criminal--or else he takes to drink. i ain't mean enough to be either a capitalist or a criminal. so, i've got to drink." susan only too soon began to appreciate from her own experience what he meant. in the first few days the novelty pleased her, made her think she was going to be contented. the new friends and acquaintances, different from any she had known, the new sights, the new way of living--all this interested her, even when it shocked one or many of her senses and sensibilities. but the novelty of folding and pasting boxes, of the queer new kind of girls who worked with her, hardly survived into the second week. she saw that she was among a people where the highest known standard--the mode of life regarded by them as the acme of elegance and bliss--the best they could conceive was far, far below what she had been brought up to believe the scantest necessities of respectable and civilized living. she saw this life from the inside now--as the comfortable classes never permit themselves to see it if they can avoid. she saw that to be a contented working girl, to look forward to the prospect of being a workingman's wife, a tenement housekeeper and mother, a woman must have been born to it--and born with little brains--must have been educated for it, and for nothing else. etta was bitterly discontented; yet after all it was a vague endurable discontent. she had simply heard of and dreamed of and from afar off--chiefly through novels and poems and the theater--had glimpsed a life that was broader, that had comfort and luxury, people with refined habits and manners. susan had not merely heard of such a life; she had lived it--it, and no other. always of the thoughtful temperament, she had been rapidly developed first by burlingham and now by tom brashear--had been taught not only how to think but also how to gather the things to think about. with a few exceptions the girls at the factory were woefully unclean about their persons. susan did not blame them; she only wondered at etta the more, and grew to admire her--and the father who held the whole family up to the mark. for, in spite of the difficulties of getting clean, without bathtub, without any but the crudest and cheapest appliances for cleanliness, without any leisure time, etta kept herself in perfect order. the show boat and the quarters at the hotel had been trying to susan. but they had seemed an adventure, a temporary, passing phase, a sort of somewhat prolonged camping-out lark. now, she was settled down, to live, apparently for the rest of her life, with none of the comforts, with few of the decencies. what etta and her people, using all their imagination, would have pictured as the pinnacle of luxury would have been for susan a small and imperfect part of what she had been bred to regard as "living decently." she suspected that but for etta's example she would be yielding, at least in the matter of cleanliness, when the struggle against dirt was so unequal, was thankless. discouragement became her frequent mood; she wondered if the time would not come when it would be her fixed habit, as it was with all but a handful of those about her. sometimes she and etta walked in the quarter at the top of the hill where lived the families of prosperous merchants--establishments a little larger, a little more pretentious than her uncle george's in sutherland, but on the whole much like it--the houses of the solid middle class which fancies itself grandly luxurious where it is in fact merely comfortable in a crude unimaginative way. susan was one of those who are born with the instinct and mental bent for luxurious comfort; also, she had the accompanying peculiar talent for assimilating ideas about food and dress and surroundings from books and magazines, from the study of well-dressed people in the street, from glances into luxurious interiors through windows or open doors as she passed by. she saw with even quicker and more intelligently critical eyes the new thing, the good idea, the improvement on what she already knew. etta's excitement over these commonplace rich people amused her. she herself, on the wings of her daring young fancy, could soar into a realm of luxury, of beauty and exquisite comfort, that made these self-complacent mansions seem very ordinary indeed. it was no drag upon her fancy, but the reverse, that she was sharing a narrow bed and a narrow room in a humble and tiny tenement flat. on one of these walks etta confided to her the only romance of her life therefore the real cause of her deep discontent. it was a young man from one of these houses--a flirtation lasting about a year. she assured susan it was altogether innocent. susan--perhaps chiefly because etta protested so insistently about her unsullied purity--had her doubts. "then," said etta, "when i saw that he didn't care anything about me except in one way--i didn't see him any more. i--i've been sorry ever since." susan did not offer the hoped-for sympathy. she was silent. "did you ever have anything like that happen to you?" inquired etta. "yes," said susan. "something like that." "and what did you do?" "i didn't want to see him any more." "why?" "i don't know--exactly. "and you like him?" "i think i would have liked him." "you're sorry you stopped?" "sometimes," replied she, hesitatingly. she was beginning to be afraid that she would soon be sorry all the time. every day the war within burst forth afresh. she reproached herself for her growing hatred of her life. ought she not to be grateful that she had so much--that she was not one of a squalid quartette in a foul, vermin-infested back bedroom--infested instead of only occasionally visited--that she was not a streetwalker, diseased, prowling in all weathers, the prey of the coarse humors of contemptuous and usually drunken beasts; that she was not living where everyone about her would, by pity or out of spitefulness, tear open the wounds of that hideous brand which had been put upon her at birth? above all, she ought to be thankful that she was not jeb ferguson's wife. but her efforts to make herself resigned and contented, to kill her doubts as to the goodness of "goodness," were not successful. she had tom brashear's "ungrateful" nature--the nature that will not let a man or a woman stay in the class of hewers of wood and drawers of water but drives him or her out of it--and up or down. "you're one of those that things happen to," the old cabinetmaker said to her on a september evening, as they sat on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. the tenements had discharged their swarms into the hot street, and there was that lively panorama of dirt and disease and depravity which is fascinating--to unaccustomed eyes. "yes," said tom, "things'll happen to you." "what--for instance?" she asked. "god only knows. you'll up and do something some day. you're settin' here just to grow wings. some day--swish!--and off you'll soar. it's a pity you was born female. still--there's a lot of females that gets up. come to think of it, i guess sex don't matter. it's havin' the soul--and mighty few of either sex has it." "oh, i'm like everybody else," said the girl with an impatient sigh. "i dream, but--it doesn't come to anything." "no, you ain't like everybody else," retorted he, with a positive shake of his finely shaped head, thatched superbly with white hair. "you ain't afraid, for instance. that's the principal sign of a great soul, i guess." "oh, but i _am_ afraid," cried susan. "i've only lately found out what a coward i am." "you think you are," said the cabinetmaker. "there's them that's afraid to do, and don't do. then there's them that's afraid to do, but goes ahead and does anyhow. that's you. i don't know where you came from--oh, i heard etta's accountin' for you to her ma, but that's neither here nor there. i don't know where you come from, and i don't know where you're going. but--you ain't afraid--and you have imagination--and those two signs means something doing." susan shook her head dejectedly; it had been a cruelly hard day at the factory and the odors from the girls working on either side of her had all but overwhelmed her. old tom nodded with stronger emphasis. "you're too young, yet," he said. "and not licked into shape. but wait a while. you'll get there." susan hoped so, but doubted it. there was no time to work at these large problems of destiny when the daily grind was so compelling, so wearing, when the problems of bare food, clothing and shelter took all there was in her. for example, there was the matter of clothes. she had come with only what she was wearing. she gave the brashears every saturday two dollars and a half of her three and was ashamed of herself for taking so much for so little, when she learned about the cost of living and how different was the food the brashears had from that of any other family in those quarters! as soon as she had saved four dollars from her wages--it took nearly two months--she bought the necessary materials and made herself two plain outer skirts, three blouses and three pairs of drawers. chemises and corset covers she could not afford. she bought a pair of shoes for a dollar, two pairs of stockings for thirty cents, a corset for eighty cents, an umbrella for half a dollar, two underwaists for a quarter. she bought an untrimmed hat for thirty-five cents and trimmed it with the cleaned ribbon from her summer sailor and a left over bit of skirt material. she also made herself a jacket that had to serve as wrap too--and the materials for this took the surplus of her wages for another month. the cold weather had come, and she had to walk fast when she was in the open air not to be chilled to the bone. her aunt fanny had been one of those women, not too common in america, who understand and practice genuine economy in the household--not the shabby stinginess that passes for economy but the laying out of money to the best advantage that comes only when one knows values. this training stood susan in good stead now. it saved her from disaster--from disintegration. she and etta did some washing every night, hanging the things on the fire escape to dry. in this way she was able to be clean; but in appearance she looked as poor as she was. she found a cobbler who kept her shoes in fair order for a few cents; but nothing was right about them soon--except that they were not down at the heel. she could recall how she had often wondered why the poor girls at sutherland showed so little taste, looked so dowdy. she wondered at her own stupidity, at the narrowness of an education, such as hers had been, an education that left her ignorant of the conditions of life as it was lived by all but a lucky few of her fellow beings. how few the lucky! what an amazing world--what a strange creation the human race! how was it possible that the lucky few, among whom she had been born and bred, should know so little, really nothing, about the lot of the vast mass of their fellows, living all around them, close up against them? "if i had only known!" she thought. and then she reflected that, if she had known, pleasure would have been impossible. she could see her bureau drawers, her closets at home. she had thought herself not any too well off. now, how luxurious, how stuffed with shameful, wasteful unnecessaries those drawers and closets seemed! and merely to keep herself in underclothes that were at least not in tatters she had to spend every cent over and above her board. if she had had to pay carfare ten cents a day, sixty cents a week!--as did many of the girls who lived at home, she would have been ruined. she understood now why every girl without a family back of her, and without good prospect of marriage, was revolving the idea of becoming a streetwalker--not as a hope, but as a fear. as she learned to observe more closely, she found good reasons for suspecting that from time to time the girls who became too hard pressed relieved the tension by taking to the streets on saturday and sunday nights. she read in the _commercial_ one noon--mr. matson sometimes left his paper where she could glance through it--she read an article on working girls, how they were seduced to lives of shame--by love of _finery_! then she read that those who did not fall were restrained by religion and innate purity. there she laughed--bitterly. fear of disease, fear of maternity, yes. but where was this religion? who but the dullest fools in the throes of that bare and tortured life ever thought of god? as for the purity--what about the obscene talk that made her shudder because of its sheer filthy stupidity?--what about the frank shamelessness of the efforts to lure their "steadies" into speedy matrimony by using every charm of caress and of person to inflame passion without satisfying it? she had thought she knew about the relations of the sexes when she came to live and work in that tenement quarter. soon her knowledge had seemed ignorance beside the knowledge of the very babies. it was a sad, sad puzzle. if one ought to be good--chaste and clean in mind and body--then, why was there the most tremendous pressure on all but a few to make them as foul as the surroundings in which they were compelled to live? if it was wiser to be good, then why were most people imprisoned in a life from which they could escape only by being bad? what was this thing comfortable people had set up as good, anyhow--and what was bad? she found no answer. how could god condemn anyone for anything they did in the torments of the hell that life revealed itself to her as being, after a few weeks of its moral, mental and physical horrors? etta's father was right; those who realized what life really was and what it might be, those who were sensitive took to drink or went to pieces some other way, if they were gentle, and if they were cruel, committed any brutality, any crime to try to escape. in former days susan thought well of charity, as she had been taught. old tom brashear gave her a different point of view. one day he insulted and drove from the tenement some pious charitable people who had come down from the fashionable hilltop to be good and gracious to their "less fashionable fellow-beings." after they had gone he explained his harshness to susan: "that's the only way you can make them slicked-up brutes feel," said he, "they're so thick in the hide and satisfied with themselves. what do they come here for! to do good! yes--to themselves. to make themselves feel how generous and sweet they was. well, they'd better go home and read their russia-leather covered bibles. they'd find out that when god wanted to really do something for man, he didn't have himself created a king, or a plutocrat, or a fat, slimy church deacon in a fashionable church. no, he had himself born a bastard in a manger." susan shivered, for the truth thus put sounded like sacrilege. then a glow--a glow of pride and of hope--swept through her. "if you ever get up into another class," went on old tom, "don't come hangin' round the common people you'll be livin' off of and helpin' to grind down; stick to your own class. that's the only place anybody can do any good--any real helpin' and lovin', man to man, and woman to woman. if you want to help anybody that's down, pull him up into your class first. stick to your class. you'll find plenty to do there." "what, for instance?" asked susan. she understood a little of what he had in mind, but was still puzzled. "them stall-fed fakers i just threw out," the old man went on. "they come here, actin' as if this was the middle ages and the lord of the castle was doin' a fine thing when he went down among the low peasants who'd been made by god to work for the lords. but this ain't the middle ages. what's the truth about it?" "i don't know," confessed susan. "why, the big lower class is poor because the little upper class takes away from 'em and eats up all they toil and slave to make. oh, it ain't the upper class's fault. they do it because they're ignorant more'n because they're bad, just as what goes on down here is ignorance more'n badness. but they do it, all the same. and they're ignorant and need to be told. supposin' you saw a big girl out yonder in the street beatin' her baby sister. what would you do? would you go and hold out little pieces of candy to the baby and say how sorry you was for her? or would you first grab hold of that big sister and throw her away from beatin' of the baby?" "i see," said susan. "that's it exactly," exclaimed the old man, in triumph. "and i say to them pious charity fakers, 'git the hell out of here where you can't do no good. git back to yer own class that makes all this misery, makes it faster'n all the religion and charity in the world could help it. git back to yer own class and work with them, and teach them and make them stop robbin' and beatin' the baby.'" "yes," said the girl, "you are right. i see it now. but, mr. brashear, they meant well." "the hell they did," retorted the old man. "if they'd, a' had love in their hearts, they'd have seen the truth. love's one of the greatest teachers in the world. if they'd, a' meant well, they'd, a' been goin' round teachin' and preachin' and prayin' at their friends and fathers and brothers, the plutocrats. they'd never 'a' come down here, pretendin' they was doin' good, killin' one bedbug out of ten million and offerin' one pair of good pants where a hundred thousand pairs is needed. they'd better go read about themselves in their bible--what jesus says. he knew 'em. _he_ belonged to _us_--and _they_ crucified him." the horrors of that by no means lowest tenement region, its horrors for a girl bred as susan had been! horrors moral, horrors mental, horrors physical--above all, the physical horrors; for, worse to her than the dull wits and the lack of education, worse than vile speech and gesture, was the hopeless battle against dirt, against the vermin that could crawl everywhere--and did. she envied the ignorant and the insensible their lack of consciousness of their own plight--like the disemboweled horse that eats tranquilly on. at first she had thought her unhappiness came from her having been used to better things, that if she had been born to this life she would have been content, gay at times. soon she learned that laughter does not always mean mirth; that the ignorant do not lack the power to suffer simply because they lack the power to appreciate; that the diseases, the bent bodies, the harrowed faces, the drunkenness, quarreling, fighting, were safer guides to the real conditions of these people than their occasional guffaws and fits of horseplay. a woman from the hilltop came in a carriage to see about a servant. on her way through the hall she cried out: "gracious! why don't these lazy creatures clean up, when soap costs so little and water nothing at all!" susan heard, was moved to face her fiercely, but restrained herself. of what use? how could the woman understand, if she heard, "but, you fool, where are we to get the time to clean up?--and where the courage?--and would soap enough to clean up and keep clean cost so little, when every penny means a drop of blood?" "if they only couldn't drink so much!" said susan to tom. "what, then?" retorted he. "why, pretty soon wages'd be cut faster than they was when street carfares went down from ten cents to five. whenever the workin' people arrange to live cheaper and to try to save something, down goes wages. no, they might as well drink. it helps 'em bear it and winds 'em up sooner. i tell you, it ain't the workin' people's fault--it's the bosses, now. it's the system--the system. a new form of slavery, this here wage system--and it's got to go--like the slaveholder that looked so copper-riveted and bible-backed in its day." that idea of "the system" was beyond susan. but not what her eyes saw, and her ears heard, and her nose smelled, and her sense of touch shrank from. no ambition and no reason for ambition. no real knowledge, and no chance to get any--neither the leisure nor the money nor the teachers. no hope, and no reason for hope. no god--and no reason for a god. ideas beyond her years, beyond her comprehension, were stirring in her brain, were making her grave and thoughtful. she was accumulating a store of knowledge about life; she was groping for the clew to its mystery, for the missing fact or facts which would enable her to solve the puzzle, to see what its lessons were for her. sometimes her heavy heart told her that the mystery was plain and the lesson easy--hopelessness. for of all the sadness about her, of all the tragedies so sordid and unromantic, the most tragic was the hopelessness. it would be impossible to conceive people worse off; it would be impossible to conceive _these_ people better off. they were such a multitude that only they could save themselves--and they had no intelligence to appreciate, no desire to impel. if their miseries--miseries to which they had fallen heir at birth--had made them what they were, it was also true that they were what they were--hopeless, down to the babies playing in the filth. an unscalable cliff; at the top, in pleasant lands, lived the comfortable classes; at the bottom lived the masses--and while many came whirling down from the top, how few found their way up! on a saturday night ashbel came home with the news that his wages had been cut to seven dollars. and the restaurant had been paying steadily less as the hard times grew harder and the cost of unadulterated and wholesome food mounted higher and higher. as the family sat silent and stupefied, old tom looked up from his paper, fixed his keen, mocking eyes on susan. "i see, here," said he, "that _we_ are so rich that they want to raise the president's salary so as he can entertain _decently_--and to build palaces at foreign courts so as our representatives'll live worthy of _us_!" chapter xx on monday at the lunch hour--or, rather, half-hour--susan ventured in to see the boss. matson had too recently sprung from the working class and was too ignorant of everything outside his business to have made radical changes in his habits. he smoked five-cent cigars instead of "twofurs"; he ate larger quantities of food, did not stint himself in beer or in treating his friends in the evenings down at wielert's beer garden. also he wore a somewhat better quality of clothing; but he looked precisely what he was. like all the working class above the pauper line, he made a sunday toilet, the chief features of which were the weekly bath and the weekly clean white shirt. thus, it being only monday morning, he was looking notably clean when susan entered--and was morally wound up to a higher key than he would be as the week wore on. at sight of her his feet on the leaf of the desk wavered, then became inert; it would not do to put on manners with any of the "hands." thanks to the bath, he was not exuding his usual odor that comes from bolting much strong, cheap food. "well, lorny--what's the kick?" inquired he with his amiable grin. his rise in the world never for an instant ceased to be a source of delight to him; it--and a perfect digestion--kept him in a good humor all the time. "i want to know," stammered susan, "if you can't give me a little more money." he laughed, eyeing her approvingly. her clothing was that of the working girl; but in her face was the look never found in those born to the modern form of slavery-wage servitude. if he had been "cultured" he might have compared her to an enslaved princess, though in fact that expression of her courageous violet-gray eyes and sensitive mouth could never have been in the face of princess bred to the enslaving routine of the most conventional of conventional lives; it could come only from sheer erectness of spirit, the exclusive birthright of the sons and daughters of democracy. "more money!" he chuckled. "you _have_ got a nerve!--when factories are shutting down everywhere and working people are tramping the streets in droves." "i do about one-fourth more than the best hands you've got," replied susan, made audacious by necessity. "and i'll agree to throw in my lunch time." "let me see, how much do you get?" "three dollars." "and you aren't living at home. you must have a hard time. not much over for diamonds, eh? you want to hustle round and get married, lorny. looks don't last long when a gal works. but you're holdin' out better'n them that gads and dances all night." "i help at the restaurant in the evening to piece out my board. i'm pretty tired when i get a chance to go to bed." "i'll bet!. . . so, you want more money. i've been watchin' you. i watch all my gals--i have to, to keep weedin' out the fast ones. i won't have no bad examples in _my_ place! as soon as i ketch a gal livin' beyond her wages i give her the bounce." susan lowered her eyes and her cheeks burned--not because matson was frankly discussing the frivolous subject of sex. another girl might have affected the air of distressed modesty, but it would have been affectation, pure and simple, as in those regions all were used to hearing the frankest, vilest things--and we do not blush at what we are used to hearing. still, the tenement female sex is as full of affectation as is the sex elsewhere. but, susan, the curiously self-unconscious, was incapable of affectation. her indignation arose from her sense of the hideous injustice of matson's discharging girls for doing what his meager wages all but compelled. "yes, i've been watching you," he went on, "with a kind of a sort of a notion of makin' you a forelady. that'd mean six dollars a week. but you ain't fit. you've got the brains--plenty of 'em. but you wouldn't be of no use to me as forelady." "why not?" asked susan. six dollars a week! affluence! wealth! matson took his feet down, relit his cigar and swung himself into an oracular attitude. "i'll show you. what's manufacturin'? right down at the bottom, i mean." he looked hard at the girl. she looked receptively at him. "why, it's gettin' work out of the hands. new ideas is nothin'. you can steal 'em the minute the other fellow uses 'em. no, it's all in gettin' work out of the hands." susan's expression suggested one who sees light and wishes to see more of it. he proceeded: "you work for me--for instance, now, if every day you make stuff there's a profit of five dollars on, i get five dollars out of you. if i can push you to make stuff there's a profit of six dollars on, i get six dollars--a dollar more. clear extra gain, isn't it? now multiply a dollar by the number of hands, and you'll see what it amounts to." "i see," said susan, nodding thoughtfully. "well! how did i get up? because as a foreman i knew how to work the hands. i knew how to get those extra dollars. and how do i keep up? because i hire forepeople that get work out of the hands." susan understood. but her expression was a comment that was not missed by the shrewd matson. "now, listen to me, lorny. i want to give you a plain straight talk because i'd like to see you climb. ever since you've been here i've been laughin' to myself over the way your forelady--she's a fox, she is!--makes you the pacemaker for the other girls. she squeezes at least twenty-five cents a day over what she used to out of each hand in your room because you're above the rest of them dirty, shiftless muttonheads." susan flushed at this fling at her fellow-workers. "dirty, shiftless muttonheads," repeated matson. "ain't i right? ain't they dirty? ain't they shiftless--so no-account that if they wasn't watched every minute they'd lay down--and let me and the factory that supports 'em go to rack and ruin? and ain't they muttonheads? do you ever find any of 'em saying or doing a sensible thing?" susan could not deny. she could think of excuses--perfect excuses. but the facts were about as he brutally put it. "oh, i know 'em. i've dealt with 'em all my life," pursued the box manufacturer. "now, lorny, you ought to be a forelady. you've got to toughen up and stop bein' so polite and helpful and all that. you'll _never_ get on if you don't toughen up. business is business. be as sentimental as you like away from business, and after you've clum to the top. but not _in_ business or while you're kickin' and scratchin' and clawin' your way up." susan shook her head slowly. she felt painfully young and inexperienced and unfit for the ferocious struggle called life. she felt deathly sick. "of course it's a hard world," said matson with a wave of his cigar. "but did i make it?" "no," admitted susan, as his eyes demanded a reply. "sure not," said he. "and how's anybody to get up in it? is there any other way but by kickin' and stampin', eh?" "none that i see," conceded susan reluctantly. "none that is," declared he. "them that says there's other ways either lies or don't know nothin' about the practical game. well, then!" matson puffed triumphantly at the cigar. "such bein' the case--and as long as the crowd down below's got to be kicked in the face by them that's on the way up, why shouldn't i do the kickin'--which is goin' to be done anyhow--instead of gettin' kicked? ain't that sense?" "yes," admitted susan. she sighed. "yes," she repeated. "well--toughen up. meanwhile, i'll raise you, to spur the others on. i'll give you four a week." and he cut short her thanks with an "oh, don't mention it. i'm only doin' what's square--what helps me as well as you. i want to encourage you. you don't belong down among them cattle. toughen up, lorny. a girl with a bank account gets the pick of the beaux." and he nodded a dismissal. matson, and his hands, bosses and workers, brutal, brutalizing each other more and more as they acted and reacted upon each other. where would it end? she was in dire need of underclothes. her undershirts were full of holes from the rubbing of her cheap, rough corset; her drawers and stockings were patched in several places--in fact, she could not have worn the stockings had not her skirt now been well below her shoetops. also, her shoes, in spite of the money she had spent upon them, were about to burst round the edges of the soles. but she would not longer accept from the brashears what she regarded as charity. "you more than pay your share, what with the work you do," protested mrs. brashear. "i'll not refuse the extra dollar because i've simply got to take it. but i don't want to pertend." the restaurant receipts began to fall with the increasing hardness of the times among the working people. soon it was down to practically no profit at all--that is, nothing toward the rent. tom brashear was forced to abandon his policy of honesty, to do as all the other purveyors were doing--to buy cheap stuff and to cheapen it still further. he broke abruptly with his tradition and his past. it aged him horribly all in a few weeks--but, at least, ruin was put off. mrs. brashear had to draw twenty of the sixty-three dollars which were in the savings bank against sickness. funerals would be taken care of by the burial insurance; each member of the family, including susan, had a policy. but sickness had to have its special fund; and it was frequently drawn upon, as the brashears knew no more than their neighbors about hygiene, and were constantly catching the colds of foolish exposure or indigestion and letting them develop into fevers, bad attacks of rheumatism, stomach trouble, backache all regarded by them as by their neighbors as a necessary part of the routine of life. those tenement people had no more notion of self-restraint than had the "better classes" whose self-indulgences maintain the vast army of doctors and druggists. the only thing that saved susan from all but an occasional cold or sore throat from wet feet was eating little through being unable to accustom herself to the fare that was the best the brashears could now afford--cheap food in cheap lard, coarse and poisonous sugar, vilely adulterated coffee, doctored meat and vegetables--the food which the poor in their ignorance buy--and for which they in their helplessness pay actually higher prices than do intelligent well-to-do people for the better qualities. and not only were the times hard, but the winter also. snow--sleet--rain--thaw--slush--noisome, disease-laden vapor--and, of course, sickness everywhere--with occasional relief in death, relief for the one who died, relief for the living freed from just so much of the burden. the sickness on every hand appalled susan. surely, she said to old brashear, the like had never been before; on the contrary, said he, the amount of illness and death was, if anything, less than usual because the hard times gave people less for eating and drinking. these ghastly creatures crawling toward the hospital or borne out on stretchers to the ambulance--these yet ghastlier creatures tottering feebly homeward, discharged as cured--these corpses of men, of women, of boys and girls, of babies--oh, how many corpses of babies!--these corpses borne away for burial, usually to the public burying ground--all these stricken ones in the battle ever waging, with curses, with hoarse loud laughter, with shrieks and moans, with dull, drawn faces and jaws set--all these stricken ones were but the ordinary losses of the battle! "and in the churches," said old tom brashear, "they preach the goodness and mercy of god. and in the papers they talk about how rich and prosperous we are." "i don't care to live! it is too horrible," cried the girl. "oh, you mustn't take things so to heart," counseled he. "us that live this life can't afford to take it to heart. leave that to them who come down here from the good houses and look on us for a minute and enjoy themselves with a little weepin' and sighin' as if it was in the theater." "it seems worse every, day," she said. "i try to fool myself, because i've got to stay and----" "oh, no, you haven't," interrupted he. susan looked at him with a startled expression. it seemed to her that the old man had seen into her secret heart where was daily raging the struggle against taking the only way out open to a girl in her circumstances. it seemed to her he was hinting that she ought to take that way. if any such idea was in his mind, he did not dare put it into words. he simply repeated: "you won't stay. you'll pull out." "how?" she asked. "somehow. when the way opens you'll see it, and take it." there had long since sprung up between these two a sympathy, a mutual understanding beyond any necessity of expression in words or looks. she had never had this feeling for anyone, not even for burlingham. this feeling for each other had been like that of a father and daughter who love each other without either understanding the other very well or feeling the need of a sympathetic understanding. there was a strong resemblance between burlingham and old tom. both belonged to the familiar philosopher type. but, unlike the actor-manager, the old cabinetmaker had lived his philosophy, and a very gentle and tolerant philosophy it was. after she had looked her request for light upon what way she was to take, they sat silent, neither looking at the other, yet each seeing the other with the eye of the mind. she said: "i may not dare take it." "you won't have no choice," replied he. "you'll have to take it. and you'll get away from here. and you mustn't ever come back--or look back. forget all this misery. rememberin' won't do us no good. it'd only weaken you." "i shan't ever forget," cried the girl. "you must," said the old man firmly. he added, "and you will. you'll have too much else to think about--too much that has to be attended to." as the first of the year approached and the small shopkeepers of the tenements, like the big ones elsewhere, were casting up the year's balances and learning how far toward or beyond the verge of ruin the hard times had brought them, the sound of the fire engines--and of the ambulances--became a familiar part of the daily and nightly noises of the district. desperate shopkeepers, careless of their neighbors' lives and property in fiercely striving for themselves and their families--workingmen out of a job and deep in debt--landlords with too heavy interest falling due--all these were trying to save themselves or to lengthen the time the fact of ruin could be kept secret by setting fire to their shops or their flats. the brashears had been burned out twice in their wandering tenement house life; so old tom was sleeping little; was constantly prowling about the halls of all the tenements in that row and into the cellars. he told susan the open secret of the meaning of most of these fires. and after he had cursed the fire fiends, he apologized for them. "it's the curse of the system," explained he. "it's all the curse of the system. these here storekeepers and the farmers the same way--they think they're independent, but really they're nothin' but fooled slaves of the big blood suckers for the upper class. but these here little storekeepers, they're tryin' to escape. how does a man escape? why, by gettin' some hands together to work for him so that he can take it out of their wages. when you get together enough to hire help--that's when you pass out of slavery into the master class--master of slaves." susan nodded understandingly. "now, how can these little storekeepers like me get together enough to begin to hire slaves? by a hundred tricks, every one of them wicked and mean. by skimpin' and slavin' themselves and their families, by sellin' short weight, by sellin' rotten food, by sellin' poison, by burnin' to get the insurance. and, at last, if they don't die or get caught and jailed, they get together the money to branch out and hire help, and begin to get prosperous out of the blood of their help. these here arson fellows--they're on the first rung of the ladder of success. you heard about that beautiful ladder in sunday school, didn't you?" "yes," said susan, "that and a great many other lies about god and man." susan had all along had great difficulty in getting sleep because of the incessant and discordant noises of the district. the unhappy people added to their own misery by disturbing each other's rest--and no small part of the bad health everywhere prevailing was due to this inability of anybody to get proper sleep because somebody was always singing or quarreling, shouting or stamping about. but susan, being young and as yet untroubled by the indigestion that openly or secretly preyed upon everyone else, did at last grow somewhat used to noise, did contrive to get five or six hours of broken sleep. with the epidemic of fires she was once more restless and wakeful. every day came news of fire somewhere in the tenement districts of the city, with one or more, perhaps a dozen, roasted to death, or horribly burned. a few weeks, however, and even that peril became so familiar that she slept like the rest. there were too many actualities of discomfort, of misery, to harass her all day long every time her mind wandered from her work. one night she was awakened by a scream. she leaped from bed to find the room filling with smoke and the street bright as day, but with a flickering evil light. etta was screaming, ashbel was bawling and roaring like a tortured bull. susan, completely dazed by the uproar, seized etta and dragged her into the hall. there were mr. and mrs. brashear, he in his nightdress of drawers and undershirt, she in the short flannel petticoat and sacque in which she always slept. ashbel burst out of his room, kicking the door down instead of turning the knob. "lorny," cried old tom, "you take mother and etta to the escape." and he rushed at his powerful, stupid son and began to strike him in the face with his one good fist, shrieking, "shut up, you damn fool! shut up!" dragging etta and pushing mrs. brashear, susan moved toward the end of the hall where the fire escape passed their windows. all the way down, the landings were littered with bedding, pots, pans, drying clothes, fire wood, boxes, all manner of rubbish, the overflow of the crowded little flats. over these obstructions and down the ladders were falling and stumbling men, women, children, babies, in all degrees of nudity--for many of the big families that slept in one room with windows tight shut so that the stove heat would not escape and be wasted when fuel was so dear, slept stark naked. susan contrived to get etta and the old woman to the street; not far behind them came tom and ashbel, the son's face bleeding from the blows his father had struck to quiet him. it was a penetrating cold night, with an icy drizzle falling. the street was filled with engines, hose, all manner of ruined household effects, firemen shouting, the tenement people huddling this way and that, barefooted, nearly or quite naked, silent, stupefied. nobody had saved anything worth while. the entire block was ablaze, was burning as if it had been saturated with coal oil. "the owner's done this," said old tom. "i heard he was in trouble. but though he's a church member and what they call a philanthropist, i hardly thought he'd stoop to hirin' this done. if anybody's caught, it'll be some fellow that don't know who he did it for." about a hundred families were homeless in the street. half a dozen patrol wagons and five ambulances were taking the people away to shelter, women and babies first. it was an hour--an hour of standing in the street, with bare feet on the ice, under the ankle-deep slush--before old tom and his wife got their turn to be taken. then susan and etta and ashbel, escorted by a policeman, set out for the station house. as they walked along, someone called out to the policeman: "anybody killed at the fire, officer?" "six jumped and was smashed," replied the policeman. "i seen three dead babies. but they won't know for several days how many it'll total." and all her life long, whenever susan lenox heard the clang of a fire engine, there arose before her the memory picture of that fire, in all the horror of detail. a fire bell to her meant wretched families flung into the night, shrieks of mangled and dying, moans of babies with life oozing from their blue lips, columns of smoke ascending through icy, soaking air, and a vast glare of wicked light with flame demons leaping for joy in the measureless woe over which they were presiding. as the little party was passing the fire lines, ashbel's foot slipped on a freezing ooze of blood and slush, and he fell sprawling upon a human body battered and trampled until it was like an overturned basket of butcher's odds and ends. the station house was eleven long squares away. but before they started for it they were already at the lowest depth of physical wretchedness which human nerves can register; thus, they arrived simply a little more numb. the big room, heated by a huge, red-hot stove to the point where the sweat starts, was crowded with abject and pitiful human specimens. even susan, the most sensitive person there, gazed about with stolid eyes. the nakedness of unsightly bodies, gross with fat or wasted to emaciation, the dirtiness of limbs and torsos long, long unwashed, the foul steam from it all and from the water-soaked rags, the groans of some, the silent, staring misery of others, and, most horrible of all, the laughter of those who yielded like animals to the momentary sense of physical well-being as the heat thawed them out--these sights and sounds together made up a truly infernal picture. and, like all the tragedies of abject poverty, it was wholly devoid of that dignity which is necessary to excite the deep pity of respect, was sordid and squalid, moved the sensitive to turn away in loathing rather than to advance with brotherly sympathy and love. ashbel, his animal instinct roused by the sight of the stove, thrust the throng aside rudely as he pushed straight for the radiating center. etta and susan followed in his wake. the fierce heat soon roused them to the sense of their plight. ashbel began to curse, etta to weep. susan's mind was staring, without hope but also without despair, at the walls of the trap in which they were all caught--was seeking the spot where they could begin to burrow through and escape. beds and covers were gathered in by the police from everywhere in that district, were ranged upon the floor of the four rooms. the men were put in the cells downstairs; the women and the children got the cots. susan and etta lay upon the same mattress, a horse blanket over them. etta slept; susan, wide awake, lived in brain and nerves the heart-breaking scenes through which she had passed numb and stolid. about six o'clock a breakfast of coffee, milk and bread was served. it was evident that the police did not know what to do with these outcasts who had nothing and no place to go--for practically all were out of work when the blow came. ashbel demanded shoes, pants and a coat. "i've got to get to my job," shouted he, "or else i'll lose it. then where in the hell'd we be!" his blustering angered the sergeant, who finally told him if he did not quiet down he would be locked in a cell. susan interrupted, explained the situation, got ashbel the necessary clothes and freed etta and herself of his worse than useless presence. at susan's suggestion such other men as had jobs were also fitted out after a fashion and sent away. "you can take the addresses of their families if you send them anywhere during the day, and these men can come back here and find out where they've gone----" this was the plan she proposed to the captain, and he adopted it. as soon as the morning papers were about the city, aid of every kind began to pour in, with the result that before noon many of the families were better established than they had been before the fire. susan and etta got some clothing, enough to keep them warm on their way through the streets to the hospital to which brashear and his wife had been taken. mrs. brashear had died in the ambulance--of heart disease, the doctors said, but susan felt it was really of the sense that to go on living was impossible. and fond of her though she was, she could not but be relieved that there was one less factor in the unsolvable problem. "she's better, off" she said to etta in the effort to console. but etta needed no consolation. "ever so much better off," she promptly assented. "mother hasn't cared about living since we had to give up our little home and become tenement house people. and she was right." as to brashear, they learned that he was ill; but they did not learn until evening that he was dying of pneumonia. the two girls and ashbel were admitted to the ward where he lay--one of a long line of sufferers in bare, clean little beds. screens were drawn round his bed because he was dying. he had been suffering torments from the savage assaults of the pneumonia; but the pain had passed away now, so he said, though the dreadful sound of his breathing made susan's heart flutter and her whole body quiver. "do you want a preacher or a priest?" asked the nurse. "neither," replied the old man in gasps and whispers. "if there is a god he'll never let anybody from this hell of a world into his presence. they might tell him the truth about himself." "oh, father, father!" pleaded etta, and ashbel burst into a fit of hysterical and terrified crying. the old man turned his dying eyes on susan. he rested a few minutes, fixing her gaze upon his with a hypnotic stare. then he began again: "you've got somethin' more'n a turnip on your shoulders. listen to me. there was a man named jesus once"--gasp--gasp--"you've heard about him, but you don't know about him"--gasp--gasp--"i'll tell you--listen. he was a low fellow--a workin' man--same trade as mine--born without a father--born in a horse trough--in a stable"--gasp--gasp-- susan leaned forward. "born without a father," she murmured, her eyes suddenly bright. "that's him. listen"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"he was a big feller--big brain--big heart--the biggest man that ever lived"--gasp--gasp--gasp--gas--"and he looked at this here hell of a world from the outside, he being an outcast and a low-down common workingman. and he _saw_--he did---- "yes, he saw!"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"and he said all men were brothers--and that they'd find it out some day. he saw that this world was put together for the strong and the cruel--that they could win out--and make the rest of us work for 'em for what they chose to give--like they work a poor ignorant horse for his feed and stall in a dirty stable----"gasp--gasp--gasp-- "for the strong and the cruel," said susan. "and this feller jesus--he set round the saloons and such places--publicans, they called 'em"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"and he says to all the poor ignorant slaves and such cattle, he says, 'you're all brothers. love one another'"--gasp--gasp--gasp--" 'love one another,' he says, 'and learn to help each other and stand up for each other,' he says, 'and hate war and fightin' and money grabbin'----'"gasp--gasp--gasp--"'peace on earth,' he says, 'know the truth, and the truth shall make you free'--and he saw there'd be a time"--the old man raised himself on one elbow--"yes, by god--there _will_ be!--a time when men'll learn not to be beasts and'll be men--_men_, little gal!" "men," echoed susan, her eyes shining, her bosom heaving. "it ain't sense and it ain't right that everything should be for the few--for them with brains--and that the rest--the millions--should be tramped down just because they ain't so cruel or so 'cute'--they and their children tramped down in the dirt. and that feller jesus saw it." "yes--yes," cried susan. "he saw it." "i'll tell you what he was," said old tom in a hoarse whisper. "he wasn't no god. he was bigger'n that--bigger'n that, little gal! he was the first _man_ that ever lived. he said, 'give the weak a chance so as they kin git strong.' he says----" the dying man fell back exhausted. his eyes rolled wildly, closed; his mouth twitched, fell wide open; there came from his throat a sound susan had never heard before, but she knew what it was, what it meant. etta and ashbel were overwhelmed afresh by the disgrace of having their parents buried in potter's field--for the insurance money went for debts. they did not understand when susan said, "i think your father'd have liked to feel that he was going to be buried there--because then he'll be with--with his friend. you know, _he_ was buried in potter's field." however, their grief was shortlived; there is no time in the lives of working people for such luxuries as grief--no more time than there is at sea when all are toiling to keep afloat the storm-racked sinking ship and one sailor is swept overboard. in comfortable lives a bereavement is a contrast; in the lives of the wretched it is but one more in the assailing army of woes. etta took a job at the box factory at three dollars a week; she and susan and ashbel moved into two small rooms in a flat in a tenement opposite the factory--a cheaper and therefore lower house than the one that had burned. they bought on the installment plan nine dollars' worth of furniture--the scant minimum of necessities. they calculated that, by careful saving, they could pay off the debt in a year or so--unless one or the other fell ill or lost work. "that means," said etta, eyeing their flimsy and all but downright worthless purchases, "that means we'll still be paying when this furniture'll be gone to pieces and fit only for kindling." "it's the best we can do," replied susan. "maybe one of us'll get a better job." "_you_ could, i'm sure, if you had the clothes," said etta. "but not in those rags." "if i had the clothes? where?" "at shillito's or one of the other department stores. they'd give us both places in one of the men's departments. they like pretty girls for those places--if they're not giddy and don't waste time flirting but use flirtation to sell goods. but what's the sense in talking about it? you haven't got the clothes. a saleslady's got to be counter-dressed. she can look as bad as she pleases round the skirt and the feet. but from the waist up she has to look natty, if she wants wages." susan had seen these girls; she understood now why they looked as if they were the put together upper and lower halves of two different persons. she recalled that, even though they went into other business, they still retained the habit, wore toilets that were counterbuilt. she revolved the problem of getting one of these toilets and of securing a store job. but she soon saw it was hopeless, for the time. every cent the three had was needed to keep from starving and freezing. also--though she did not realize it--her young enthusiasm was steadily being sapped by the life she was leading. it may have been this rather than natural gentleness--or perhaps it was as much the one as the other--that kept susan from taking matson's advice and hardening herself into a forelady. the ruddy glow under her skin had given place to, the roundness of her form had gone, and its pallor; beauty remained only because she had a figure which not even emaciation could have deprived of lines of alluring grace. but she was no longer quite so straight, and her hair, which it was a sheer impossibility to care for, was losing its soft vitality. she was still pretty, but not the beauty she had been when she was ejected from the class in which she was bred. however, she gave the change in herself little thought; it was the rapid decline of etta's prettiness and freshness that worried her most. not many weeks after the fire and the deeper plunge, she began to be annoyed by ashbel. in his clumsy, clownish way he was making advances to her. several times he tried to kiss her. once, when etta was out, he opened the door of the room where she was taking a bath in a washtub she had borrowed of the janitress, leered in at her and very reluctantly obeyed her sharp order to close the door. she had long known that he was in reality very different from the silent restrained person fear of his father made him seem to be. but she thought even the reality was far above the rest of the young men growing up among those degrading influences. the intrusion into her room was on a sunday; on the following sunday he came back as soon as etta went out. "look here, lorny," said he, with blustering tone and gesture, "i want to have a plain talk with you. i'm sick and tired of this. there's got to be a change." "sick of what?" asked susan. "of the way you stand me off." he plumped himself sullenly down on the edge of hers and etta's bed. "i can't afford to get married. i've got to stick by you two." "it strikes me, ashbel, we all need each other. who'd marry you on seven a week?" she laughed good-humoredly. "anyhow, _you_ wouldn't support a wife. it takes the hardest kind of work to get your share of the expenses out of you. you always try to beat us down to letting you off with two fifty a week." "that's about all etta pays." "it's about all she gets. and _i_ pay three fifty--and she and i do all the work--and give you two meals and a lunch to take with you--and you've got a room alone--and your mending done. i guess you know when you're well off." "but i ain't well off," he cried. "i'm a grown-up man--and i've got to have a woman." susan had become used to tenement conditions. she said, practically, "well--there's your left over four dollars a week." "huh!" retorted he. "think i'm goin' to run any risks? i'm no fool. i take care of my health." "well--don't bother me with your troubles--at least, troubles of that sort." "yes, but i will!" shouted he, in one of those sudden furies that seize upon the stupid ignorant. "you needn't act so nifty with me. i'm as good as you are. i'm willing to marry you." "no, thanks," said susan. "i'm not free to marry--even if i would." "oh--you ain't?" for an instant his curiosity, as she thus laid a hand upon the curtain over her past, distracted his uncertain attention. but her expression, reserved, cold, maddeningly reminding him of a class distinction of which he was as sensitively conscious as she was unconscious--her expression brought him back with a jerk. "then you'll have to live with me, anyhow. i can't stand it, and i'm not goin' to. if you want me to stay on here, and help out, you've got to treat me right. other fellows that do as i'm doing get treated right. and i've got to be, too--or i'll clear out." and he squirmed, and waggled his head and slapped and rubbed his heavy, powerful legs. "why, ashbel," said susan, patting him on the shoulder. "you and i are like brother and sister. you might as well talk this way to etta." he gave her a brazen look, uttered a laugh that was like the flinging out of a bucket of filth. "why not? other fellows that have to support the family and can't afford to marry gets took care of." susan shrank away. but ashbel did not notice it. "it ain't a question of etta," he went on. "there's you--and i don't need to look nowhere else." susan had long since lost power to be shocked by any revelation of the doings of people lashed out of all civilized feelings by the incessant brutal whips of poverty and driven back to the state of nature. she had never happened to hear definitely of this habit--even custom--of incestuous relations; now that she heard, she instantly accepted it as something of which she had really known for some time. at any rate, she had no sense of shock. she felt no horror, no deep disgust, simply the distaste into which her original sense of horror had been thinned down by constant contact with poverty's conditions--just as filth no longer made her shudder, so long as it did not touch her own person. "you'd better go and chase yourself round the square a few times," said she, turning away and taking up some mending. "you see, there ain't no way out of it," pursued he, with an insinuating grin. susan gave him a steady, straight look. "don't ever speak of it again," said she quietly. "you ought to be ashamed--and you will be when you think it over." he laughed loudly. "i've thought it over. i mean what i say. if you don't do the square thing by me, you drive me out." he came hulking up to her, tried to catch her in his big powerful arms. she put the table between him and her. he kicked it aside and came on. she saw that her move had given him a false impression--a notion that she was afraid of him, was coquetting with him. she opened the door leading into the front part of the flat where the quinlan family lived. "if you don't behave yourself, i'll call mr. quinlan," said she, not the least bluster or fear or nervousness in her tone. "what'd be the use? he'd only laugh. why, the same thing's going on in their family." "still, he'd lynch you if i told him what _you_ were trying to do." even ashbel saw this familiar truth of human nature. the fact that quinlan was guilty himself, far from staying him from meting out savage justice to another, would make him the more relentless and eager. "all right," said he. "then you want me to git out?" "i want you to behave yourself and stay on. go take a walk, ashbel." and ashbel went. but his expression was not reassuring; susan feared he had no intention of accepting his defeat. however, she reasoned that numbskull though he was, he yet had wit enough to realize how greatly to his disadvantage any change he could make would be. she did not speak of the matter to etta, who was therefore taken completely by surprise when ashbel, after a silent supper that evening, burst out with his grievance: "i'm going to pack up," said he. "i've found a place where i'll be treated right." he looked haughtily at susan. "and the daughter's a good looker, too. she's got some weight on her. she ain't like a washed out string." etta understood at once. "what a low-down thing you are!" she cried. "just like the rest of these filthy tenement house animals. i thought _you_ had some pride." "oh, shut up!" bawled ashbel. "you're not such a much. what're we, anyhow, to put on airs? we're as common as dirt--yes, and that sniffy lady friend of yours, too. where'd she come from, anyhow? some dung pile, i'll bet." he went into his room, reappeared with his few belongings done into a bundle. "so long," said he, stalking toward the hall door. etta burst into tears, caught him by the arm. "you ain't goin', are you, ashy?" cried she. "bet your life. let me loose." and he shook her off. "i'm not goin' to be saddled with two women that ain't got no gratitude." "my god, lorna!" wailed etta. "talk to him. make him stay." susan shook her head, went to the window and gazed into the snowy dreary prospect of tenement house yards. ashbel, who had been hesitating through hope, vented a jeering laugh. "ain't she the insultin'est, airiest lady!" sneered he. "well, so long." "but, ashy, you haven't paid for last week yet," pleaded etta, clinging to his arm. "you kin have my share of the furniture for that." "the furniture! oh, my god!" shrieked etta, releasing him to throw out her arms in despair. "how'll we pay for the furniture if you go?" "ask your high and mighty lady friend," said her brother. and he opened the door, passed into the hall, slammed it behind him. susan waited a moment for etta to speak, then turned to see what she was doing. she had dropped into one of the flimsy chairs, was staring into vacancy. "we'll have to give up these rooms right away," said susan. etta roused herself, looked at her friend. and susan saw what etta had not the courage to express--that she blamed her for not having "made the best of it" and kept ashbel. and susan was by no means sure that the reproach in etta's eyes and heart were not justified. "i couldn't do it, etta," she said with a faint suggestion of apology. "men are that way," said etta sullenly. "oh, i don't blame him," protested susan. "i understand. but--i can't do it, etta--i simply can't!" "no," said etta. "you couldn't. i could, but you couldn't. i'm not as far down as ashbel. i'm betwixt and between; so i can understand you both." "you go and make up with him and let me look after myself. i'll get along." etta shook her head. "no," said she without any show of sentiment, but like one stating an unalterable fact. "i've got to stay on with you. i can't live without you. i don't want to go down. i want to go up." "up!" susan smiled bitterly. silence fell between them, and susan planned for the new conditions. she did not speak until etta said, "what ever will we do?" "we've got to give up the furniture. thank goodness, we've paid only two-fifty on it." "yes, _it's_ got to go," said etta. "and we've got to pay mrs. quinlan the six we owe her and get out tonight. we'll go up to the top floor--up to mrs. cassatt. she takes sleepers. then--we'll see." an hour later they had moved; for mrs. quinlan was able to find two lodgers to take the rooms at once. they were established with mrs. cassatt, had a foul and foul-smelling bed and one-half of her back room; the other half barely contained two even dirtier and more malodorous cots, in one of which slept mrs. cassatt's sixteen-year-old daughter kate, in the other her fourteen-year-old son dan. for these new quarters and the right to cook their food on the cassatt stove the girls agreed to pay three dollars and a half a week--which left them three dollars and a half a week for food and clothing--and for recreation and for the exercise of the virtue of thrift which the comfortable so assiduously urge upon the poor. chapter xxi each girl now had with her at all times everything she possessed in the world--a toothbrush, a cake of castile soap, the little money left out of the week's wages, these three items in the pocket of her one skirt, a cheap dark blue cloth much wrinkled and patched; a twenty-five cent felt hat, susan's adorned with a blue ribbon, etta's with a bunch of faded roses; a blue cotton blouse patched under the arms with stuff of a different shade; an old misshapen corset that cost forty-nine cents in a bargain sale; a suit of gray shoddy-and-wool underwear; a pair of fifteen-cent stockings, susan's brown, etta's black; a pair of worn and torn ties, scuffed and down at the heel, bought for a dollar and nine cents; a dirt-stained dark blue jacket, susan's lacking one button, etta's lacking three and having a patch under the right arm. yet they often laughed and joked with each other, with their fellow-workers. you might have said their hearts were light; for so eager are we to believe our fellow-beings comfortable, a smile of poverty's face convinces us straightway that it is as happy as we, if not happier. there would have been to their mirth a little more than mere surface and youthful ability to find some jest in the most crushing tragedy if only they could have kept themselves clean. the lack of sufficient food was a severe trial, for both had voracious appetites; etta was tormented by visions of quantity, susan by visions of quality as well as of quantity. but only at meal times, or when they had to omit a meal entirely, were they keenly distressed by the food question. the cold was a still severer trial; but it was warm in the factory and it was warm in mrs. cassatt's flat, whose windows were never opened from closing in of winter until spring came round. the inability to keep clean was the trial of trials. from her beginning at the box factory the physical uncleanness of the other girls had made susan suffer keenly. and her suffering can be understood only by a clean person who has been through the same ordeal. she knew that her fellow-workers were not to blame. she even envied them the ignorance and the insensibility that enabled them to bear what, she was convinced, could never be changed. she wondered sometimes at the strength and grip of the religious belief among the girls--even, or, rather, especially, among those who had strayed from virtue into the path their priests and preachers and rabbis told them was the most sinful of all strayings. but she also saw many signs that religion was fast losing its hold. one day a lutheran girl, emma schmeltz, said during a monday morning lunch talk: "well, anyhow, i believe it's all a probation, and everything'll be made right hereafter. _i_ believe my religion, i do. yes, we'll be rewarded in the hereafter." becky--rebecca lichtenspiel--laughed, as did most of the girls. said becky: "and there ain't no hereafter. did you ever see a corpse? ain't they the dead ones! don't talk to me about no hereafter." everybody laughed. but this was a monday morning conversation, high above the average of the girls' talk in intelligence and liveliness. their minds had been stimulated by the sunday rest from the dreary and degenerating drudgery of "honest toil." it was the physical contacts that most preyed upon susan. she was too gentle, too considerate to show her feelings; in her determined and successful effort to conceal them she at times went to the opposite extreme and not only endured but even courted contacts that were little short of loathsome. tongue could not tell what she suffered through the persistent affectionateness of letty southard, a sweet and pretty young girl of wretchedly poor family who developed an enormous liking for her. letty, dirty and clad in noisome undergarments beneath soiled rags and patches, was always hugging and kissing her--and not to have submitted would have been to stab poor letty to the heart and humiliate all the other girls. so no one, not even etta, suspected what she was going through. from her coming to the factory in the morning, to hang her hat and jacket in the only possible place, along with the soiled and smelling and often vermin-infected wraps of the others--from early morning until she left at night she was forced into contacts to which custom never in the least blunted her. however, so long as she had a home with the brashears there was the nightly respite. but now-- there was little water, and only a cracked and filthy basin to wash in. there was no chance to do laundry work; for their underclothes must be used as night clothes also. to wash their hair was impossible. "does my hair smell as bad as yours?" said etta. "you needn't think yours is clean because it doesn't show the dirt like mine." "does my hair smell as bad as the rest of the girls'?" said susan. "not quite," was etta's consoling reply. by making desperate efforts they contrived partially to wash their bodies once a week, not without interruptions of privacy--to which, however, they soon grew accustomed. in spite of efforts which were literally heroic, they could not always keep free from parasites; for the whole tenement and all persons and things in it were infected--and how could it be otherwise where no one had time or money or any effective means whatsoever to combat nature's inflexible determination to breed wherever there is a breeding spot? the last traces of civilization were slipping from the two girls; they were sinking to a state of nature. even personal pride, powerful in susan and strong in etta through susan's example, was deserting them. they no longer minded dan's sleeping in their room. they saw him, his father, the other members of the family in all stages of nudity and at the most private acts; and they were seen by the cassatts in the same way. to avoid this was impossible, as impossible as to avoid the parasites swarming in the bed, in the woodwork, in cracks of ceiling, walls, floor. the cassatts were an example of how much the people who live in the sheltered and more or less sunny nooks owe to their shelter and how little to their own boasted superiority of mind and soul. they had been a high class artisan family until a few months before. the hard times struck them a series of quick, savage blows, such as are commonplace enough under our social system, intricate because a crude jumble of makeshifts, and easily disordered because intricate. they were swept without a breathing pause down to the bottom. those who have always been accustomed to prosperity have no reserve of experience or courage to enable them to recuperate from sudden and extreme adversity. in an amazingly short time the cassatts had become demoralized--a familiar illustration of how civilization is merely a wafer-thin veneer over most human beings as yet. over how many is it more? they fought after a fashion; they fought valiantly. but how would it have been possible not steadily to yield ground against such a pitiless, powerful foe as poverty? the man had taken to drink, to blunt outraged self-respect and to numb his despair before the spectacle of his family's downfall. mrs. cassatt was as poor a manager as the average woman in whatever walk of life, thanks to the habit of educating woman in the most slipshod fashion, if at all, in any other part of the business but sex-trickery. thus she was helpless before the tenement conditions. she gave up, went soddenly about in rags with an incredibly greasy and usually dangling tail of hair. "why don't you tie up that tail, ma?" said the son dan, who had ideas about neatness. "what's the use?" said mrs. cassatt. "what's the use of _anything_?" "ma don't want to look stylish and stuck up," said the daughter. mrs. cassatt's haunting terror was lest someone who had known them in the days of their prosperity with a decently furnished little house of their own should run into one of the family now. kate, the sixteen-year-old had a place as saleslady in a big shop in fifth, street; her six dollars a week was the family's entire steady income. she had formerly possessed a good deal of finery for a girl in her position, though really not much more than the daughter of the average prosperous artisan or small shopkeeper expects, and is expected, to have. being at the shop where finery was all the talk and sight and thought from opening until closing had developed in her a greedy taste for luxury. she pilfered from the stocks of goods within her reach and exchanged her stealings for the stealings of girls who happened to be able to get things more to her liking or need. but now that the family savings--bank account was exhausted, all these pilferings had to go at once to the pawnshop. kate grew more and more ill-tempered as the family sank. formerly she had been noted for her amiability, for her vanity easily pleased with a careless compliment from no matter whom--a jocose, half-drunken ash man, half-jeering, half-admiring from his cart seat quite as satisfactory as anybody. but poverty was bringing out in her all those meanest and most selfish and most brutish instincts--those primal instincts of human nature that civilization has slowly been subjecting to the process of atrophy which has lost us such other primal attributes as, for example, prehensile toes and a covering of hair. "well, i for one don't have to stay in this slop barrel," kate was always saying. "some fine morning i'll turn up missing--and you'll see me in my own turnout." she was torturing her mother and father with the dread that she would leave the family in the lurch and enter a house of prostitution. she recounted with the utmost detail how the madam of a house in longworth street came from time to time to her counter in the perfumery and soap department--and urged her to "stop making a fool of yourself and come get good money for your looks before you lose 'em drudging behind a counter." the idea grew less abhorrent, took on allurement as the degradation of tenement life ate out respect for conventional restraints--for modesty, for virtue, for cleanness of speech, and the rest. more and more boldly kate was announcing that she wasn't going to be a fool much longer. dan, the fourteen-year-old boy, had attracted the attention of what cassatt called "a fancy lady" who lived two floors below them. she made sometimes as much as nine or ten dollars a week and slept all day or lounged comfortably about in showy, tawdry stuff that in those surroundings seemed elegant luxury. she was caught by the boy's young beauty and strength, and was rapidly training him in every vice and was fitting him to become a professional seducer and "lover." said mrs. cassatt in one of her noisy wailing appeals to dan: "you better keep away from that there soiled dove. they tell me she's a thief--has done time--has robbed drunken men in dark hallways." dan laughed impudently. "she's a cute one. what diff does it make how she gets the goods as long as she gets it?" mrs. cassatt confided to everybody that she was afraid the woman would make a thief of her boy--and there was no disputing the justice of her forebodings. foul smells and sights everywhere, and foul language; no privacy, no possibility of modesty where all must do all in the same room: vermin, parasites, bad food vilely cooked--in the midst of these and a multitude of similar ills how was it possible to maintain a human standard, even if one had by chance acquired a knowledge of what constituted a human standard? the cassatts were sinking into the slime in which their neighbors were already wallowing. but there was this difference. for the cassatts it was a descent; for many of their neighbors it was an ascent--for the immigrants notably, who had been worse off in their european homes; in this land not yet completely in the grip of the capitalist or wage system they were now getting the first notions of decency and development, the first views and hope of rising in the world. the cassatts, though they had always lived too near the slime to be nauseated by it, still found it disagreeable and in spots disgusting. their neighbors-- one of the chief reasons why these people were rising so slowly where they were rising at all was that the slime seemed to them natural, and to try to get clean of it seemed rather a foolish, finicky waste of time and effort. people who have come up--by accident, or by their own force, or by the force of some at once shrewd and brutal member of the family--have to be far and long from the slums before they lose the sense that in conforming to the decencies of life they are making absurd effeminate concessions. when they go to buy a toothbrush they blush and stammer. "look at lorna and etta," mrs. cassatt was always saying to kate. "well, i see 'em," kate would reply. "and i don't see much." "ain't you ashamed of yourself!" cried the mother. "them two lives straight and decent. and you're better off than they are." "don't preach to me, ma," sneered kate. "when i get ready i'll--stop making a damn fool of myself." but the example of the two girls was not without its effect. they, struggling on in chastity against appalling odds, became the models, not only to mrs. cassatt, but all the mothers of that row held up to their daughters. the mothers--all of them by observation, not a few by experience--knew what the "fancy lady's" life really meant. and they strove mightily to keep their daughters from it. not through religion or moral feeling, though many pretended--perhaps fancied--that this was their reason; but through the plainest kind of practical sense--the kind that in the broad determines the actions of human beings of whatever class, however lofty the idealistic pretenses may be. these mothers knew that the profession of the pariah meant a short life and a wretched one, meant disease, lower and ever lower wages, the scale swiftly descending, meant all the miseries of respectability plus a heavy burden of miseries of its own. there were many other girls besides susan and etta holding up their heads--girls with prospects of matrimony, girls with fairly good wages, girls with fathers and brothers at work and able to provide a home. but susan and etta were peculiarly valuable as examples because they were making the fight alone and unaided. thus, they were watched closely. in those neighborhoods everyone knows everyone's else business down to how the last cent is got and spent. if either girl had appeared in a new pair of shoes, a new hat, a new garment of any kind, at once the report would have sped that the wearer had taken a turn in the streets. and the scandal would have been justified; for where could either have respectably got the money for the smallest and cheapest addition to her toilet? matson, too, proudly pointed them out as giving the lie to the talk about working girls not getting living wages, to the muttering against him and his fellow employers as practically procurers for the pavement and the dive, for the charity hospital's most dreadful wards, for the morgue's most piteous boxes and slabs. as their strength declined, as their miseries ate in and in, the two girls ceased talking together; they used to chatter much of the time like two birds on a leafy, sunny bough. now they walked, ate their scanty, repulsive meals, dressed, worked, all in silence. when their eyes met both glanced guiltily away, each fearing the other would discover the thought she was revolving--the thought of the streets. they slept badly--etta sometimes, susan every night. for a long time after she came to the tenements she had not slept well, despite her youth and the dull toil that wore her out each day. but after many months she had grown somewhat used to the noisiness--to fretting babies, to wailing children, the mixed ale parties, the quarrelings of the ill and the drunk, the incessant restlessness wherever people are huddled so close together that repose is impossible. and she had gradually acquired the habit of sleeping well--that is, well for the tenement region where no one ever gets the rest without which health is impossible. now sleeplessness came again--hours on hours of listening to the hateful and maddening discords of densely crowded humanity, hours on hours of thinking--thinking--in the hopeless circles like those of a caged animal, treading with soft swift step round and round, nose to the iron wall, eyes gleaming with despairing pain. one saturday evening after a supper of scorched cornmeal which had been none too fresh when they got it at the swindling grocer's on the street floor, etta put on the tattered, patched old skirt at which she had been toiling. "i can't make it fit to wear," said she. "it's too far gone; i think"--her eyelids fluttered--"i'll go see some of the girls." susan, who was darning--seated on the one chair--yes, it had once been a chair--did not look up or speak. etta put on her hat--slowly. then, with a stealthy glance at susan, she moved slidingly toward the door. as she reached it susan's hands dropped to her lap; so tense were etta's nerves that the gesture made her startle. "etta!" said susan in an appealing voice. etta's hand dropped from the knob. "well--what is it, lorna?" she asked in a low, nervous tone. "look at me, dear." etta tried to obey, could not. "don't do it--yet," said susan. "wait--a few more days." "wait for what?" "i don't know. but--wait." "you get four, i get only three--and there's no chance of a raise. i work slower instead of faster. i'm going to be discharged soon. i'm in rags underneath. . . . i've got to go before i get sick--and won't have anything to--to sell." susan did not reply. she stared at the remains of a cheap stocking in her lap. yes, there was no doubt about it, etta's health was going. etta was strong, but she had no such store of strength to draw upon as had accumulated for susan during the seventeen years of simple, regular life in healthful surroundings. a little while and etta would be ill--would, perhaps--probably--almost certainly--die-- dan cassatt came in at the other door, sat on the edge of his bed and changed his trousers for what he was pleased to imagine a less disreputable pair. midway the boy stopped and eyed susan's bare leg and foot, a grin of pleasure and amusement on his precociously and viciously mature face. "my, but you keep clean," he cried. "and you've got a mighty pretty foot. minnie's is ugly as hell." minnie was the "fancy lady" on the floor below--"my skirt," he called her. susan evidently did not hear his compliment. dan completed his "sporting toilet" with a sleeking down of his long greasy hair, took himself away to his girl. susan was watching a bug crawl down the wall toward their bed with its stained and malodorous covers of rag. etta was still standing by the door motionless. she sighed, once more put her hand on the knob. susan's voice came again. "you've never been out, have you?" "no," replied etta. susan began to put on her stocking. "i'll go," said she. "i'll go--instead." "no!" cried etta, sobbing. "it don't matter about me. i'm bound to be sucked under. you've got a chance to pull through." "not a ghost of a chance," answered susan. "i'll go. you've never been." "i know, but----" "you've never been," continued susan, fastening her shoe with its ragged string. "you've never been. well--i have." "you!" exclaimed etta, horrified though unbelieving. "oh, no, you haven't." "yes," said susan. "and worse." "and worse?" repeated etta. "is that what the look i sometimes see in your eyes--when you don't know anyone's seeing--is that what it means?" "i suppose so. i'll go. you stay here." "and you--out there!" "it doesn't mean much to me." etta looked at her with eyes as devoted as a dog's. "then we'll go together," she said. susan, pinning on her weather-stained hat, reflected. "very well," she said finally. "there's nothing lower than this." they said no more; they went out into the clear, cold winter night, out under the brilliant stars. several handsome theater buses were passing on their way from the fashionable suburb to the theater. etta looked at them, at the splendid horses, at the men in top hats and fur coats--clean looking, fine looking, amiable looking men--at the beautiful fur wraps of the delicate women--what complexions!--what lovely hair!--what jewels! etta, her heart bursting, her throat choking, glanced at susan to see whether she too was observing. but susan's eyes were on the tenement they had just left. "what are you looking at--so queer?" asked etta. "i was thinking that we'll not come back here." etta started. "not come back _home!_" susan gave a strange short laugh. "home!. . . no, we'll not come back home. there's no use doing things halfway. we've made the plunge. we'll go--the limit." etta shivered. she admired the courage, but it terrified her. "there's something--something--awful about you, lorna," she said. "you've changed till you're like a different person from what you were when you came to the restaurant. sometimes--that look in your eyes--well, it takes my breath away." "it takes _my_ breath away, too. come on." at the foot of the hill they took the shortest route for vine street, the highway of the city's night life. though they were so young and walked briskly, their impoverished blood was not vigorous enough to produce a reaction against the sharp wind of the zero night which nosed through their few thin garments and bit into their bodies as if they were naked. they came to a vast department store. each of its great show-windows, flooded with light, was a fascinating display of clothing for women upon wax models--costly jackets and cloaks of wonderful furs, white, brown, gray, rich and glossy black; underclothes fine and soft, with ribbons and flounces and laces; silk stockings and graceful shoes and slippers; dresses for street, for ball, for afternoon, dresses with form, with lines, dresses elegantly plain, dresses richly embroidered. despite the cold the two girls lingered, going from window to window, their freezing faces pinched and purple, their eyes gazing hungrily. "now that we've tried 'em all on," said susan with a short and bitter laugh, "let's dress in our dirty rags again and go." "oh, i couldn't imagine myself in any of those things--could you?" cried etta. "yes," answered susan. "and better." "you were brought up to have those things, i know." susan shook her head. "but i'm going to have them." "when?" said etta, scenting romance. "soon?" "as soon as i learn," was susan's absent, unsatisfactory reply. etta had gone back to her own misery and the contrasts to it. "i get mad through and through," she cried, "when i think how all those things go to some women--women that never did work and never could. and they get them because they happen to belong to rich fathers and husbands or whoever protects them. it isn't fair! it makes me crazy!" susan gave a disdainful shrug. "what's the use of that kind of talk!" said she. "no use at all. the thing is, _we_ haven't got what we want, and we've got to _get_ it--and so we've got to _learn_ how." "i can't think of anything but the cold," said etta. "my god, how cold i am! there isn't anything i wouldn't do to get warm. there isn't anything anybody wouldn't do to get warm, if they were as cold as this. it's all very well for warm people to talk----" "oh, i'm sick of all the lying and faking, anyhow. do you believe in hell, lorna?" "not in a hot one," said susan. soon they struck into vine street, bright as day almost, and lined with beer halls, concert gardens, restaurants. through the glass fronts crowds of men and women were visible--contented faces, well-fed bodies, food on the tables or inviting-looking drink. along the sidewalk poured an eager throng, all the conspicuous faces in it notable for the expectancy of pleasure in the eyes. "isn't this different!" exclaimed etta. "my god, how cold i am--and how warm everybody else is but us!" the sights, the sounds of laughter, of gay music, acted upon her like an intoxicant. she tossed her head in a reckless gesture. "i don't care what becomes of me," said she. "i'm ready for anything except dirt and starvation." nevertheless, they hurried down vine street, avoiding the glances of the men and behaving as if they were two working girls in a rush to get home. as they walked, susan, to delude herself into believing that she was not hesitating, with fainting courage talked incessantly to etta--told her the things mabel connemora had explained to her--about how a woman could, and must, take care of her health, if she were not to be swept under like the great mass of the ignorant, careless women of the pariah class. susan was astonished that she remembered all the actress had told her--remembered it easily, as if she had often thought of it, had used the knowledge habitually. they arrived at fountain square, tired from the long walk. they were both relieved and depressed that nothing had happened. "we might go round the fountain and then back," suggested susan. they made the tour less rapidly but still keeping their heads and their glances timidly down. they were numb with the cold now. to the sharp agony had succeeded an ache like the steady grinding pain of rheumatism. etta broke the silence with, "maybe we ought to go into a house." "a house! oh--you mean a--a sporting house." at that time professional prostitution had not become widespread among the working class; stationary or falling wages, advancing cost of food and developing demand for comfort and luxury had as yet only begun to produce their inevitable results. thus, prostitution as an industry was in the main segregated in certain streets and certain houses and the prostitutes were a distinct class. "you haven't been?" inquired etta. "no," said susan. "dan cassatt and kate told me about those places," etta went on. "kate says they're fine and the girls make fifty and sometimes a hundred dollars a week, and have everything--servants to wait on them, good food, bathrooms, lovely clothes, and can drive out. but i--i think i'd stay in the house." "i want to be my own boss," said susan. "there's another side than what kate says," continued etta as consecutively as her chattering teeth would permit. "she heard from a madam that wants her to come. but dan heard from minnie--she used to be in one--and she says the girls are slaves, that they're treated like dogs and have to take anything. she says it's something dreadful the way men act--even the gentlemen. she says the madam fixes things so that every girl always owes her money and don't own a stitch to her back, and so couldn't leave if she wanted to." "that sounds more like the truth," said susan. "but we may _have_ to go," pleaded etta. "it's awful cold--and if we went, at least we'd have a warm place. if we wanted to leave, why, we couldn't be any worse off for clothes than we are." susan had no answer for this argument. they went several squares up vine street in silence. then etta burst out again: "i'm frozen through and through, lorna, and i'm dead tired--and hungry. the wind's cutting the flesh off my bones. what in the hell does it matter what becomes of us? let's get warm, for god's sake. let's go to a house. they're in longworth street--the best ones." and she came to a halt, forcing susan to halt also. it happened to be the corner of eighth street. susan saw the iron fence, the leafless trees of garfield place. "let's go down this way," said she. "i had luck here once." "luck!" said etta, her curiosity triumphant over all. susan's answer was a strange laugh. ahead of them, a woman warmly and showily dressed was sauntering along. "that's one of them," said etta. "let's see how _she_ does it. we've got to learn quick. i can't stand this cold much longer." the two girls, their rags fluttering about their miserable bodies, kept a few feet behind the woman, watched her with hollow eyes of envy and fear. tears of anguish from the cold were streaming down their cheeks. soon a man alone--a youngish man with a lurching step--came along. they heard the woman say, "hello, dear. don't be in a hurry." he tried to lurch past her, but she seized him by the lapel of his overcoat. "lemme go," said he. "you're old enough to be a grandmother, you old hag." susan and etta halted and, watching so interestedly that they forgot themselves, heard her laugh at his insult, heard her say wheedlingly, "come along, dearie, i'll treat you right. you're the kind of a lively, joky fellow i like." "go to hell, gran'ma," said the man, roughly shaking her off and lurching on toward the two girls. he stopped before them, eyed them by the light of the big electric lamp, grinned good-naturedly. "what've we got here?" said he. "this looks better." the woman rushed toward the girls, pouring out a stream of vileness. "you git out of here!" she shrilled. "you chippies git off my beat. i'll have you pinched--i will!" "shut up!" cried the drunken man, lifting his fist. "i'll have _you_ pinched. let these ladies alone, they're friends of mine. do you want me to call the cop?" the woman glanced toward the corner where a policeman was standing, twirling his club. she turned away, cursing horribly. the man laughed. "dirty old hag--isn't she?" said he. "don't look so scared, birdies." he caught them each by an arm, stared woozily at etta. "you're a good little looker, you are. come along with me. there's three in it." "i--i can't leave my lady friend," etta succeeded in chattering. "please really i can't." "your lady friend?" he turned his drunken head in susan's direction, squinted at her. he was rather good-looking. "oh--she means _you_. fact is, i'm so soused i thought i was seein' double. why, _you're_ a peach. i'll take you." and he released his hold on etta to seize her. "come right along, my lovey-dovey dear." susan drew away; she was looking at him with terror and repulsion. the icy blast swept down the street, sawed into her flesh savagely. "i'll give _you_ five," said the drunken man. "come along." he grabbed her arm, waved his other hand at etta. "so long, blondie. 'nother time. good luck." susan heard etta's gasp of horror. she wrenched herself free again. "i guess i'd better go with him," said she to etta. etta began to sob. "oh, lorna!" she moaned. "it's awful." "you go into the restaurant on the corner and get something to eat, and wait for me. we can afford to spend the money. and you'll be warm there." "here! here!" cried the tipsy man. "what're you two whispering about? come along, skinny. no offense. i like 'em slim." and he made coarse and pointed remarks about the sluggishness of fat women, laughing loudly at his own wit. the two girls did not hear. the wind straight from the arctic was plying its hideous lash upon their defenseless bodies. "come on, lovey!" cried the man. "let's go in out of the cold." "oh, lorna! you can't go with a drunken man! i'll--i'll take him. i can stand it better'n you. you can go when there's a gentleman----" "you don't know," said susan. "didn't i tell you i'd been through the worst?" "are you coming?" broke in the man, shaking his head to scatter the clouds over his sight. the cold was lashing susan's body; and she was seeing the tenement she had left--the vermin crawling, the filth everywhere, the meal bugs in the rotting corn meal--and jeb ferguson. "wait in the restaurant," said she to etta. "didn't i tell you i'm a nobody. this is what's expected of me." the wind clawed and tore at her quivering flesh. "it's cold, etta. go get warm. good-by." she yielded to the tipsy man's tugging at her arm. etta stood as if paralyzed, watching the two move slowly westward. but cold soon triumphed over horror. she retraced her steps toward vine street. at the corner stood an elderly man with an iron-gray beard. she merely glanced at him in passing, and so was startled when he said in a low voice: "go back the way you came. i'll join you." she glanced at him again, saw a gleam in his eyes that assured her she had not imagined the request. trembling and all at once hot, she kept on across the street. but instead of going into the restaurant she walked past it and east through dark eighth street. a few yards, and she heard a quiet step behind her. a few yards more, and the lights of vine street threw a man's shadow upon the sidewalk beside her. from sheer fright she halted. the man faced her--a man old enough to be her father, a most respectable, clean looking man with a certain churchly though hardly clerical air about him. "good evening, miss," said he. "good evening," she faltered. "i'm a stranger--in town to buy goods and have a little fun," stammered he with a grotesque attempt to be easy and familiar. "i thought maybe you could help me." a little fun! etta's lips opened, but no words came. the cold was digging its needle-knives into flesh, into bone, into nerve. through the man's thick beard and mustache came the gleam of large teeth, the twisting of thick raw lips. a little fun! "would it," continued the man, nervously, "would it be very dear?" "i--i don't know," faltered etta. "i could afford--say--" he looked at her dress--"say--two dollars." "i--i" and again etta could get no further. "the room'd be a dollar," pleaded the man. "that'd make it three." "i--i--can't," burst out etta, hysterical. "oh, please let me alone. i--i'm a good girl, but i do need money. but i--i can't. oh, for god's sake--i'm so cold--so cold!" the man was much embarrassed. "oh, i'm sorry," he said feelingly. "that's right--keep your virtue. go home to your parents." he was at ease now; his voice was greasy and his words sleek with the unction of an elder. "i thought you were a soiled dove. i'm glad you spoke out--glad for my sake as well as your own. i've got a daughter about your age. go home, my dear, and stay a good girl. i know it's hard sometimes; but never give up your purity--never!" and he lifted his square-topped hard hat and turned away. suddenly etta felt again the fury of the winter night and icy wind. as that wind flapped her thin skirt and tortured her flesh, she cried, "wait--please. i was just--just fooling." the man had halted, but he was looking at her uncertainly. etta put her hand on his arm and smiled pertly up at him--smiled as she had seen other street girls smile in the days when she despised them. "i'll go--if you'll give me three." "i--i don't think i care to go now. you sort of put me out of the humor." "well--two, then." she gave a reckless laugh. "god, how cold it is! anybody'd go to hell to get warm a night like this." "you are a very pretty girl," said the man. he was warmly dressed; his was not the thin blood of poverty. he could not have appreciated what she was feeling. "you're sure you want to go? you're sure it's your--your business?" "yes. i'm strange in this part of town. do you know a place?" an hour later etta went into the appointed restaurant. her eyes searched anxiously for susan, but did not find her. she inquired at the counter. no one had asked there for a young lady. this both relieved her and increased her nervousness; susan had not come and gone--but would she come? etta was so hungry that she could hold out no longer. she sat at a table near the door and took up the large sheet on which was printed the bill of fare. she was almost alone in the place, as it was between dinner and supper. she read the bill thoroughly, then ordered black bean soup, a sirloin steak and german fried potatoes. this, she had calculated, would cost altogether a dollar; undoubtedly an extravagance, but everything at that restaurant seemed dear in comparison with the prices to which she had been used, and she felt horribly empty. she ordered the soup, to stay her while the steak was broiling. as soon as the waiter set down bread and butter she began upon it greedily. as the soup came, in walked susan--calm and self-possessed, etta saw at first glance. "i've been so frightened. you'll have a plate of soup?" asked etta, trying to look and speak in unconcerned fashion. "no, thank you," replied susan, seating herself opposite. "there's a steak coming--a good-sized one, the waiter said it'd be." "very well." susan spoke indifferently. "aren't you hungry?" "i don't know. i'll see." susan was gazing straight ahead. her eyes were distinctly gray--gray and as hard as susan lenox's eyes could be. "what're you thinking about?" "i don't know," she laughed queerly. "was--it--dreadful?" a pause, then: "nothing is going to be dreadful to me any more. it's all in the game, as mr. burlingham used to say." "burlingham--who's he?" it was etta's first faint clew toward that mysterious past of susan's into which she longed to peer. "oh--a man i knew. he's dead." a long pause, etta watching susan's unreadable face. at last she said: "you don't seem a bit excited." susan came back to the present. "don't i? your soup's getting cold." etta ate several spoonfuls, then said with an embarrassed attempt at a laugh, "i--i went, too." susan slowly turned upon etta her gaze--the gaze of eyes softening, becoming violet. etta's eyes dropped and the color flooded into her fair skin. "he was an old man--forty or maybe fifty," she explained nervously. "he gave me two dollars. i nearly didn't get him. i lost my nerve and told him i was good and was only starting because i needed money." "never whine," said susan. "it's no use. take what comes, and wait for a winning hand." etta looked at her in a puzzled way. "how queer you talk! not a bit like yourself. you sound so much older. . . . and your eyes--they don't look natural at all." indeed they looked supernatural. the last trace of gray was gone. they were of the purest, deepest violet, luminous, mysterious, with that awe-inspiring expression of utter aloneness. but as etta spoke the expression changed. the gray came back and with it a glance of irony. said she: "oh--nonsense! i'm all right." "i didn't mind nearly as much as i thought i would. yes, i'll get used to it." "you mustn't," said susan. "but i've got to." "we've got to do it, but we haven't got to get used to it," replied susan. etta was still puzzling at this when the dinner now came--a fine, thick broiled steak, the best steak susan had ever seen, and the best food etta had ever seen. they had happened upon one of those famous cincinnati chop houses where in plain surroundings the highest quality of plain food is served. "you _are_ hungry, aren't you, lorna?" said etta. "yes--i'm hungry," declared susan. "cut it--quick." "draught beer or bottled?" asked the waiter. "bring us draught beer," said etta. "i haven't tasted beer since our restaurant burned." "i never tasted it," said susan. "but i'll try it tonight." etta cut two thick slices from the steak, put them on susan's plate with some of the beautifully browned fried potatoes. "gracious, they have good things to eat here!" she exclaimed. then she cut two thick slices for herself, and filled her mouth. her eyes glistened, the color came into her pale cheeks. "isn't it _grand_!" she cried, when there was room for words to pass out. "grand," agreed susan, a marvelous change of expression in her face also. the beer came. etta drank a quarter of the tall glass at once. susan tasted, rather liked the fresh bitter-sweet odor and flavor. "is it--very intoxicating?" she inquired. "if you drink enough," said etta. "but not one glass." susan took quite a drink. "i feel a lot less tired already," declared she. "me too," said etta. "my, what a meal! i never had anything like this in my life. when i think what we've been through! lorna, will it _last_?" "we mustn't think about that," said susan. "tell me what happened to you." "nothing. he gave me the money, that was all." "then we've got seven dollars--seven dollars and twenty cents, with what we brought away from home with us." "seven dollars--and twenty cents," repeated susan thoughtfully. then a queer smile played around the corners of her mouth. "seven dollars--that's a week's wages for both of us at matson's." "but i'd go back to honest work tomorrow--if i could find a good job," etta said eagerly--too eagerly. "wouldn't you, lorna?" "i don't know," replied susan. she had the inability to make pretenses, either to others or to herself, which characterizes stupid people and also the large, simple natures. "oh, you can't mean that!" protested etta. instead of replying susan began to talk of what to do next. "we must find a place to sleep, and we must buy a few things to make a better appearance." "i don't dare spend anything yet," said etta. "i've got only my two dollars. not that when this meal's paid for." "we're going to share even," said susan. "as long as either has anything, it belongs to both." the tears welled from etta's eyes. "you are too good, lorna! you mustn't be. it isn't the way to get on. anyhow, i can't accept anything from you. you wouldn't take anything from me." "we've got to help each other up," insisted susan. "we share even--and let's not talk any more about it. now, what shall we get? how much ought we to lay out?" the waiter here interrupted. "beg pardon, young ladies," said he. "over yonder, at the table four down, there's a couple of gents that'd like to join you. i seen one of 'em flash quite a roll, and they acts too like easy spenders." as susan was facing that way, she examined them. they were young men, rather blond, with smooth faces, good-natured eyes and mouths; they were well dressed--one, the handsomer, notably so. susan merely glanced; both men at once smiled at her with an unimpertinent audacity that probably came out of the champagne bottle in a silver bucket of ice on their table. "shall i tell 'em to come over?" said the waiter. "yes," replied susan. she was calm, but etta twitched with nervousness, saying, "i wish i'd had your experience. i wish we didn't look so dreadful--me especially. _i_'m not pretty enough to stand out against these awful clothes." the two men were pushing eagerly toward them, the taller and less handsome slightly in advance. he said, his eyes upon susan, "we were lonesome, and you looked a little that way too. we're much obliged." he glanced at the waiter. "another bottle of the same." "i don't want anything to drink," said susan. "nor i," chimed in etta. "no, thank you." the young man waved the waiter away with, "get it for my friend and me, then." he smiled agreeably at susan. "you won't mind my friend and me drinking?" "oh, no." "and maybe you'll change your mind," said the shorter man to etta. "you see, if we all drink, we'll get acquainted faster. don't you like champagne?" "i never tasted it," etta confessed. "neither did i," admitted susan. "you're sure to like it," said the taller man to susan--his friend presently addressed him as john. "nothing equal to it for making friends. i like it for itself, and i like it for the friends it has made me." champagne was not one of the commonplaces of that modest chop house. so the waiter opened the bottle with much ceremony. susan and etta startled when the cork popped ceilingward in the way that in such places is still regarded as fashionable. they watched with interested eyes the pouring of the beautiful pale amber liquid, were fascinated when they saw how the bubbles surged upward incessantly, imprisoned joys thronging to escape. and after the first glass, the four began to have the kindliest feelings for each other. sorrow and shame, poverty and foreboding, took wings unto themselves and flew away. the girls felt deliciously warm and contented, and thought the young men charming--a splendid change from the coarse, badly dressed youths of the tenement, with their ignorant speech and rough, misshapen hands. they were ashamed of their own hands, were painfully self-conscious whenever lifting the glass to the lips brought them into view. etta's hands in fact were not so badly spoiled as might have been expected, considering her long years of rough work; the nails were in fairly good condition and the skin was rougher to the touch than to the sight. susan's hands had not really been spoiled as yet. she had been proud of them and had taken care of them; still, they were not the hands of a lady, but of a working girl. the young men had gentlemen's hands--strong, evidently exercised only at sports, not at degrading and deforming toil. the shorter and handsomer youth, who answered to the name of fatty, for obvious but not too obvious reasons, addressed himself to etta. john--who, it came out, was a chicagoan, visiting fatty--fell to susan. the champagne made him voluble; he was soon telling all about himself--a senior at ann arbor, as was fatty also; he intended to be a lawyer; he was fond of a good, time was fond of the girls--liked girls who were gay rather than respectable ones--"because with the prim girls you have to quit just as the fun ought really to begin." after two glasses susan, warned by a slight dizziness, stopped drinking; etta followed her example. but the boys kept on, ordered a second bottle. "this is the fourth we've had tonight," said fatty proudly when it came. "don't it make you dizzy?" asked etta. "not a bit," fatty assured her. but she noticed that his tongue now swung trippingly loose. "you haven't been at--at this--long, have you?" inquired john of susan. "not long," replied she. etta, somewhat giddied, overheard and put in, "we began tonight. we got tired of starving and freezing." john looked deepest sympathy into susan's calm violet-gray eyes. "i don't blame you," said he. "a woman does have a--a hades of a time!" "we were going out to buy some clothes when you came," proceeded etta. "we're in an awful state." "i wondered how two girls with faces like yours," said john, "came to be dressed so--so differently. that was what first attracted us." then, as etta and fatty were absorbed in each other, he went on to susan: "and your eyes--i mustn't forget them. you certainly have got a beautiful face. and your mouth--so sweet and sad--but, what a lovely, _lovely_ smile!" at this susan smiled still more broadly with pleasure. "i'm glad you're pleased," said she. "why, if you were dressed up---- "you're not a working girl by birth, are you?" "i wish i had been," said susan. "oh, i think a girl's got as good a right as a man to have a good time," lied john. "don't say things you don't believe," said susan. "it isn't necessary." "i can hand that back to you. you weren't frank, yourself, when you said you wished you'd been born in the class of your friend--and of my friend fatty, too." susan's laugh was confession. the champagne was dancing in her blood. she said with a reckless toss of the head: "i was born nothing. so i'm free to become anything i please--anything except respectable." here fatty broke in. "i'll tell you what let's do. let's all go shopping. we can help you girls select your things." susan laughed. "we're going to buy about three dollars' worth. there won't be any selecting. we'll simply take the cheapest." "then--let's go shopping," said john, "and you two girls can help fatty and me select clothes for you." "that's the talk!" cried fatty. and he summoned the waiter. "the bill," said he in the manner of a man who likes to enjoy the servility of servants. "we hadn't paid for our supper," said susan. "how much was it, etta?" "a dollar twenty-five." "we're going to pay for that," said fatty. "what d'ye take us for?" "oh, no. we must pay it," said susan. "don't be foolish. of course i'll pay." "no," said susan quietly, ignoring etta's wink. and from her bosom she took a crumpled five-dollar bill. "i should say you _were_ new," laughed john. "you don't even know where to carry your money yet." and they all laughed, susan and etta because they felt gay and assumed the joke whatever it was must be a good one. then john laid his hand over hers and said, "put your money away." susan looked straight at him. "i can't allow it," she said. "i'm not that poor--yet." john colored. "i beg your pardon," he said. and when the bill came he compelled fatty to let her pay a dollar and a quarter of it out of her crumpled five. the two girls were fascinated by the large roll of bills--fives, tens, twenties--which fatty took from his trousers pocket. they stared open-eyed when he laid a twenty on the waiter's plate along with susan's five. and it frightened them when he, after handing susan her change, had left only a two-dollar bill, four silver quarters and a dime. he gave the silver to the waiter. "was that for a tip?" asked susan. "yes," said fatty. "i always give about ten per cent of the bill unless it runs over ten dollars. in that case--a quarter a person as a rule. of course, if the bill was very large, i'd give more." he was showing his amusement at her inquisitiveness. "i wanted to know," explained she. "i'm very ignorant, and i've got to learn." "that's right," said john, admiringly--with a touch of condescension. "don't be afraid to confess ignorance." "i'm not," replied susan. "i used to be afraid of not being respectable and that was all. now, i haven't any fear at all." "you are a queer one!" exclaimed john. "you oughtn't to be in this life." "where then?" asked she. "i don't know," he confessed. "neither do i." her expression suddenly was absent, with a quaint, slight smile hovering about her lips. she looked at him merrily. "you see, it's got to be something that isn't respectable." "what _do_ you mean?" demanded he. her answer was a laugh. fatty declared it too cold to chase about afoot--"anyhow, it's late--nearly eleven, and unless we're quick all the stores'll be closed." the waiter called them a carriage; its driver promised to take them to a shop that didn't close till midnight on saturdays. said fatty, as they drove away: "well, i suppose, etta, you'll say you've never been in a carriage before." "oh, yes, i have," cried etta. "twice--at funerals." this made everyone laugh--this and the champagne and the air which no longer seemed cruel to the girls but stimulating, a grateful change from the close warmth of the room. as the boys were smoking cigarettes, they had the windows down. the faces of both girls were flushed and lively, and their cheeks seemed already to have filled out. the four made so much noise that the crowds on the sidewalk were looking at them--looking smilingly, delighted by the sight of such gayety. susan was even gayer than etta. she sang, she took a puff at john's cigarette; then laughed loudly when he seized and kissed her, laughed again as she kissed him; and she and john fell into each other's arms and laughed uproariously as they saw fatty and etta embracing. the driver kept his promise; eleven o'clock found them bursting into sternberg's, over the rhine--a famous department store for germans of all classes. they had an hour, and they made good use of it. etta was for yielding to fatty's generous urgings and buying right and left. but susan would not have it. she told the men what she and etta would take--a simple complete outfit, and no more. etta wanted furs and finery. susan kept her to plain, serviceable things. only once did she yield. when etta and fatty begged to be allowed a big showy hat, susan yielded--but gave john leave to buy her only the simplest of simple hats. "you needn't tell _me_ any yarns about your birth and breeding," said he in a low tone so that etta should not hear. but that subject did not interest susan. "let's forget it," said she, almost curtly. "i've cut out the past--and the future. today's enough for me." "and for me, too," protested he. "i hope you're having as good fun as i am." "this is the first time i've really laughed in nearly a year," said she. "you don't know what it means to be poor and hungry and cold--worst of all, cold." "you unhappy child," said john tenderly. but susan was laughing again, and making jokes about a wonderful german party dress all covered with beads and lace and ruffles and embroidery. when they reached the shoe department, susan asked john to take fatty away. he understood that she was ashamed of their patched and holed stockings, and hastened to obey. they were making these their last purchases when the big bell rang for the closing. "i'm glad these poor tired shopgirls and clerks are set free," said john. it was one of those well-meaning but worthless commonplaces of word-kindness that get for their utterance perhaps exaggerated credit for "good heart." susan, conscience-stricken, halted. "and i never once thought of them!" she exclaimed. "it just shows." "shows what?" "oh, nothing. come on. i must forget that, for i can't be happy again till i do. i understand now why the comfortable people can be happy. they keep from knowing or they make themselves forget." "why not?" said john. "what's the use in being miserable about things that can't be helped?" "no use at all," replied the girl. she laughed. "i've forgotten." the carriage was so filled with their bundles that they had some difficulty in making room for themselves--finally accomplished it by each girl sitting on her young man's lap. they drove to a quietly placed, scrupulously clean little hotel overlooking lincoln park. "we're going to take rooms here and dress," explained fatty. "then we'll wander out and have some supper." by this time susan and etta had lost all sense of strangeness. the spirit of adventure was rampant in them as in a dreaming child. and the life they had been living--what they had seen and heard and grown accustomed to--made it easy for them to strike out at once and briskly in the new road, so different from the dreary and cruel path along which they had been plodding. they stood laughing and joking in the parlor while the boys registered; then the four went up to two small but comfortable and fascinatingly clean rooms with a large bathroom between. "fatty and i will go down to the bar while you two dress," said john. "not on your life!" exclaimed fatty. "we'll have the bar brought up to us." but john, fortified by susan's look of gratitude for his tactfulness, whispered to his friend--what susan could easily guess. and fatty said, "oh, i never thought of it. yes, we'll give 'em a chance. don't be long, girls." "thank you," said susan to john. "that's all right. take your time." susan locked the hall door behind the two men. she rushed to the bathroom, turned on the hot water. "oh, etta!" she cried, tears in her eyes, a hysterical sob in her throat. "a bathtub again!" etta too was enthusiastic; but she had not that intense hysterical joy which susan felt--a joy that can be appreciated only by a person who, clean by instinct and by lifelong habit, has been shut out from thorough cleanliness for long months of dirt and foul odors and cold. it was no easy matter to become clean again after all those months. but there was plenty of soap and brushes and towels, and at last the thing was accomplished. then they tore open the bundles and arrayed themselves in the fresh new underclothes, in the simple attractive costumes of jacket, blouse and skirt. susan had returned to her class, and had brought etta with her. "what shall we do with these?" asked etta, pointing disdainfully with the toe of her new boot to the scatter of the garments they had cast off. susan looked down at it in horror. she could not believe that _she_ had been wearing such stuff--that it was the clothing of all her associates of the past six months--was the kind of attire in which most of her fellow-beings went about the beautiful earth, she shuddered. "isn't life dreadful?" she cried. and she kicked together the tattered, patched, stained trash, kicked it on to a large piece of heavy wrapping paper she had spread out upon the floor. thus, without touching her discarded self, she got it wrapped up and bound with a strong string. she rang for the maid, gave her a quarter and pointed to the bundle. "please take that and throw it away," she said. when the maid was gone etta said: "i'm mighty glad to have it out of the room." "out of the room?" cried susan. "out of my heart. out of my life." they put on their hats, admired themselves in the mirror, and descended--susan remembering halfway that they had left the lights on and going back to turn them off. the door boy summoned the two young men to the parlor. they entered and exclaimed in real amazement. for they were facing two extremely pretty young women, one dark, the other fair. the two faces were wreathed in pleased and grateful smiles. "don't we look nice?" demanded etta. "nice!" cried fatty. "we sure did draw a pair of first prizes--didn't we, johnny?" john did not reply. he was gazing at susan. etta had young beauty but it was of the commonplace kind. in susan's face and carriage there was far more than beauty. "where _did_ you come from?" said john to her in an undertone. "and _where_ are you going?" "out to supper, i hope," laughed she. "your eyes change--don't they? i thought they were violet. now i see they're gray--gray as can be." chapter xxii at lunch, well toward the middle of the following afternoon, fatty--his proper name was august gulick--said: "john and i don't start for ann arbor until a week from today. that means seven clear days. a lot can be done in that time, with a little intelligent hustling. what do you say, girls? do you stick to us?" "as long as you'll let us," said etta, who was delighting gulick with her frank and wondering and grateful appreciation of his munificence. never before had his own private opinion of himself received such a flatteringly sweeping indorsement--from anyone who happened to impress him as worth while. in the last phrase lies the explanation of her success through a policy that is always dangerous and usually a failure. so it was settled that with the quiet little hotel as headquarters the four would spend a week in exploring cincinnati as a pleasure ground. gulick knew the town thoroughly. his father was a brewer whose name was on many a huge beer wagon drawn about those streets by showy clydesdales. also he had plenty of money; and, while redmond--for his friend was the son of redmond, well known as a lawyer-politician in chicago--had nothing like so much as gulick, still he had enough to make a passable pretense at keeping up his end. for etta and susan the city had meant shabby to filthy tenements, toil and weariness and sorrow. there was opened to their ravished young eyes "the city"--what reveals itself to the pleasure-seeker with pocket well filled--what we usually think of when we pronounce its name, forgetting what its reality is for all but a favored few of those within its borders. it was a week of music and of laughter--music especially--music whenever they ate or drank, music to dance by, music in the beer gardens where they spent the early evenings, music at the road houses where they arrived in sleighs after the dances to have supper--unless you choose to call it breakfast. you would have said that susan had slipped out of the tenement life as she had out of its garments, that she had retained not a trace of it even in memory. but--in those days began her habit of never passing a beggar without giving something. within three or four days this life brought a truly amazing transformation in the two girls. you would not have recognized in them the pale and wan and ragged outcasts of only the saturday night before. "aren't you happy?" said etta to susan, in one of the few moments they were alone. "but i don't need to ask. i didn't know you could be so gay." "i had forgotten how to laugh," replied susan. "i suppose i ought to be ashamed," pursued etta. "why?" inquired susan. "oh, you know why. you know how people'd talk if they knew." "what people?" said susan. "anyone who's willing to give you anything?" "no," admitted etta. "but----" there she halted. susan went on: "i don't propose to be bothered by the other kind. they wouldn't do anything for me if they could except sneer and condemn." "still, you know it isn't right, what we're doing." "i know it isn't cold--or hunger--or rags and dirt--and bugs," replied susan. those few words were enough to conjure even to etta's duller fancy the whole picture to its last detail of loathsome squalor. into etta's face came a dazed expression. "was that really _us_, lorna?" "no," said susan with a certain fierceness. "it was a dream. but we must take care not to have that dream again." "i'd forgotten how cold i was," said etta; "hadn't you?" "no," said susan, "i hadn't forgotten anything." "yes, i suppose it was all worse for you than for me. _you_ used to be a lady." "don't talk nonsense," said susan. "i don't regret what i'm doing," etta now declared. "it was gus that made me think about it." she looked somewhat sheepish as she went on to explain. "i had a little too much to drink last night. and when gus and i were alone, i cried--for no reason except the drink. he asked me why and i had to say something, and it popped into my head to say i was ashamed of the life i was leading. as things turned out, i'm glad i said it. he was awfully impressed." "of course," said susan. "you never saw anything like it," continued etta with an expression suggesting a feeling that she ought to be ashamed but could not help being amused. "he acted differently right away. why don't you try it on john?" "what for?" "oh, it'll make him--make him have more--more respect for you." "perhaps," said susan indifferently. "don't you want john to--to respect you?" "i've been too busy having a good time to think much about him--or about anything. i'm tired of thinking. i want to rest. last night was the first time in my life i danced as much as i wanted to." "don't you like john?" "certainly." "he does know a lot, doesn't he? he's like you. he reads and and thinks--and---- he's away ahead of fatty except---- you don't mind my having the man with the most money?" "not in the least," laughed susan. "money's another thing i'm glad to rest from thinking about." "but this'll last only a few days longer. and--if you managed john redmond right, lorna----" "now--you must not try to make me think." "lorna--are you _really_ happy?" "can't you see i am?" "yes--when we're all together. but when--when you're alone with him----" susan's expression stopped her. it was a laughing expression; and yet-- said susan: "i am happy, dear--very happy. i eat and drink and sleep--and i am, oh, so glad to be alive." "_isn't_ it good to be alive!--if you've got plenty," exclaimed etta. "i never knew before. _this_ is the dream, lorna--and i think i'll kill myself if i have to wake." on saturday afternoon the four were in one of the rooms discussing where the farewell dinner should be held and what they would eat and drink. etta called susan into the other room and shut the door between. "fatty wants me to go along with him and live in detroit," said she, blurting it out as if confessing a crime. "isn't that splendid!" cried susan, kissing her. "i thought he would. he fell in love with you at first sight." "that's what he says. but, lorna--i--i don't know _what_ to do!" "_do_? why, go. what else is there? go, of course." "oh, no, lorna," protested etta. "i couldn't leave you. i couldn't get along without you." "but you must go. don't you love him?" etta began to weep. "that's the worst of it. i do love him so! and i think he loves me--and might marry me and make me a good woman again. . . . you mustn't ever tell john or anybody about that--that dreadful man i went with--will you, dear?" "what do you take me for?" said susan. "i've told fatty i was a good girl until i met him. you haven't told john about yourself?" susan shook her head. "i suppose not. you're so secretive. you really think i ought to go?" "i know it." etta was offended by susan's positive, practical tone. "i don't believe you care." "yes, i care," said susan. "but you're right to follow the man you love. besides, there's nothing so good in sight here." "what'll _you_ do? oh, i can't go, lorna!" "now, etta," said susan calmly, "don't talk nonsense. i'll get along all right." "you come to detroit. you could find a job there, and we could live together." "would fatty like that?" etta flushed and glanced away. young gulick had soon decided that susan was the stronger--therefore, the less "womanly"--of the two girls, and must be the evil influence over her whom he had appeared just in time to save. when he said this to etta, she protested--not very vigorously, because she wished him to think her really almost innocent. she wasn't _quite_ easy in her mind as to whether she had been loyal to lorna. but, being normally human, she soon _almost_ convinced herself that but for lorna she never would have made the awful venture. anyhow, since it would help her with gulick and wouldn't do lorna the least mite of harm, why not let him think he was right? said susan: "hasn't he been talking to you about getting away from--from all this?" "but i don't care," cried etta, moved to an outburst of frankness by her sense of security in susan's loyalty and generosity. "he doesn't understand. men are fools about women. he thinks he likes in me what i haven't got at all. as a matter of fact if i had been what he made me tell him i was, why we'd never have met--or got acquainted in the way that makes us so fond of each other. and i owe it all to you, lorna. i don't care what he says, lorna--or does. i want you." "can't go," said susan, not conscious--yet not unaware, either--of the curious mixture of heart and art in etta's outburst of apparent eagerness to risk everything for love of her. "can't possibly go. i've made other plans. the thing for you is to be straight--get some kind of a job in detroit--make fatty marry you--quick!" "he would, but his father'd throw him out." "not if you were an honest working girl." "but----" etta was silent and reflective for a moment. "men are so queer," she finally said. "if i'd been an honest working girl he'd never have noticed me. it's because i am what i am that i've been able to get acquainted with him and fascinate him. and he feels it's a sporty thing to do--to marry a fast girl. if i was to settle down to work, be a regular working girl--why, i'm afraid he--he'd stop loving me. then, too, he likes to believe he's rescuing me from a life of shame. i've watched him close. i understand him." "no doubt," said susan drily. "oh, i know you think i'm deceitful. but a woman's got to be, with a man. and i care a lot about him--aside from the fact that he can make me comfortable and--and protect me from--from the streets. if you cared for a man-- no, i guess you wouldn't. you oughtn't to be so--so _honest_, lorna. it'll always do you up." susan laughed, shrugged her shoulders. "i am what i am," said she. "i can't be any different. if i tried, i'd only fail worse." "you don't love john--do you?" "i like him." "then you wouldn't have to do _much_ pretending," urged etta. "and what does a little pretending amount to?" "that's what i say to myself," replied susan thoughtfully. "it isn't nearly as bad as--as what we started out to do." susan laughed at etta's little hypocrisy for her respectability's comfort. "as what we did--and are doing," corrected she. burlingham had taught her that it only makes things worse and more difficult to lie to oneself about them. "john's crazy about you. but he hasn't money enough to ask you to come along. and----" etta hesitated, eyed susan doubtfully. "you're _sure_ you don't love him?" "no. i couldn't love him any more than--than i could hate him." susan's strange look drifted across her features. "it's very queer, how i feel toward men. but--i don't love him and i shan't pretend. i want to, but somehow--i can't." etta felt that she could give herself the pleasure of unburdening herself of a secret. "then i may as well tell you, he's engaged to a girl he thinks he ought to marry." "i suspected so." "and you don't mind?" inquired etta, unable to read susan's queer expression. "except for him--and her--a little," replied susan. "i guess that's why i haven't liked him better--haven't trusted him at all." "aren't men dreadful! and he is so nice in many ways. . . . lorna----" etta was weeping again. "i can't go--i can't. i mustn't leave you." "don't be absurd. you've simply got to do it." "and i do love him," said etta, calmed again by susan's calmness. "and if he married me--oh, how grateful i'd be!" "i should say!" exclaimed susan. she kissed etta and petted her. "and he'll have a mighty good wife." "do you think i can marry him?" "if you love him--and don't worry about catching him." etta shook her head in rejection of this piece of idealistic advice. "but a girl's got to be shrewd. you ought to be more so, lorna." "that depends on what a girl wants," said susan, absently. "upon what she wants," she repeated. "what do _you_ want?" inquired etta curiously. "i don't know," susan answered slowly. "i wish i knew what was going on in your head!" exclaimed etta. "so do i," said susan, smiling. "do you really mind my going? really--honestly?" there wasn't a flaw in susan's look or tone. "if you tried to stay with me, i'd run away from you." "and if i do get him, i can help you. once he's mine----" etta rounded out her sentence with an expression of countenance which it was well her adoring rescuer did not see. not that it lacked womanliness; "womanly" is the word that most exactly describes it--and always will exactly describe such expressions--and the thoughts behind--so long as men compel women to be just women, under penalty of refusing them support if they are not so. redmond came in, and etta left him alone with susan. "well, has etta told you?" he asked. "yes," replied the girl. she looked at him--simply a look, but the violet-gray eyes had an unusual seeming of seeing into minds and hearts, an expression that was perhaps the more disquieting because it was sympathetic rather than critical. his glance shifted. he was a notably handsome young fellow--too young for any display of character in his face, or for any development of it beyond the amiable, free and easy lover of a jolly good time that is the type repeated over and over again among the youth of the comfortable classes that send their sons to college. "are you going with her?" he asked. "no," said susan. redmond's face fell. "i hoped you liked me a little better than that," said he. "it isn't a question of you." "but it's a question of _you_ with me," he cried. "i'm in love with you, lorna. i'm--i'm tempted to say all sorts of crazy things that i think but haven't the courage to act on." he kneeled down beside her, put his arms round her waist. "i'm crazy about you, lorna. . . . tell me---- were you---- had you been--before we met?" "yes," said susan. "why don't you deny it?" he exclaimed. "why don't you fool me, as etta fooled gus?" "etta's story is different from mine," said susan. "she's had no experience at all, compared to me." "i don't believe it," declared he. "i know she's been stuffing fatty, has made him think that you led her away. but i can soon knock those silly ideas out of his silly head----" "it's the truth," interrupted susan, calmly. "no matter. you could be a good woman." impulsively, "if you'll settle down and be a good woman, i'll marry you." susan smiled gently. "and ruin your prospects?" "i don't care for prospects beside you. you _are_ a good woman--inside. the better i know you the less like a fast woman you are. won't you go to work, lorna, and wait for me?" her smile had a little mockery in it now--perhaps to hide from him how deeply she was moved. "no matter what else i did, i'd not wait for you, johnny. you'd never come. you're not a johnny-on-the-spot." "you think i'm weak--don't you?" he said. then, as she did not answer, "well, i am. but i love you, all the same." for the first time he felt that he had touched her heart. the tears sprang to her eyes, which were not at all gray now but all violet, as was their wont when she was deeply moved. she laid her hands on his shoulders. "oh, it's so good to be loved!" she murmured. he put his arms around her, and for the moment she rested there, content--yes, content, as many a woman who needed love less and craved it less has been content just with being loved, when to make herself content she has had to ignore and forget the personality of the man who was doing the loving--and the kind of love it was. said he: "don't you love me a little enough to be a good woman and wait till i set up in the law?" she let herself play with the idea, to prolong this novel feeling of content. she asked, "how long will that be?" "i'll be admitted in two years. i'll soon have a practice. my father's got influence." susan looked at him sadly, slowly shook her head. "two years--and then several years more. and i working in a factory--or behind a counter--from dawn till after dark--poor, hungry--half-naked--wearing my heart out--wearing my body away----" she drew away from him, laughed. "i was fooling, john--about marrying. i liked to hear you say those things. i couldn't marry you if i would. i'm married already." "_you_!" she nodded. "tell me about it--won't you?" she looked at him in astonishment, so amazing seemed the idea that she could tell anyone that experience. it would be like voluntarily showing a hideous, repulsive scar or wound, for sometimes it was scar, and sometimes open wound, and always the thing that made whatever befell her endurable by comparison. she did not answer his appeal for her confidence but went on, "anyhow, nothing could induce me to go to work again. you don't realize what work means--the only sort of work i can get to do. it's--it's selling both body and soul. i prefer----" he kissed her to stop her from finishing her sentence. "don't--please," he pleaded. "you don't understand. in this life you'll soon grow hard and coarse and lose your beauty and your health--and become a moral and physical wreck." she reflected, the grave expression in her eyes--the expression that gave whoever saw it the feeling of dread as before impending tragedy. "yes--i suppose so," she said. "but---- any sooner than as a working girl living in a dirty hole in a tenement? no--not so soon. and in this life i've got a chance if i'm careful of my health and--and don't let things touch _me_. in that other--there's no chance--none!" "what chance have you got in this life?" "i don't know exactly. i'm very ignorant yet. at worst, it's simply that i've got no chance in either life--and this life is more comfortable." "comfortable! with men you don't like--frightful men----" "were you ever cold?" asked susan. but it made no impression upon him who had no conception of the cold that knows not how it is ever to get warm again. he rushed on: "lorna, my god!" he caught hold of her and strained her to his breast. "you are lovely and sweet! it's frightful--you in this life." her expression made the sobs choke up into his throat. she said quietly: "not worse than dirt and vermin and freezing cold and long, long, dull--oh, _so_ dull hours of working among human beings that don't ever wash--because they can't." she pushed him gently away. "you don't understand. you haven't been through it. comfortable people talk like fools about those things. . . . do you remember my hands that first evening?" he reddened and his eyes shifted. "i'm absurdly sensitive about a woman's hands," he muttered. she laughed at him. "oh, i saw--how you couldn't bear to look at them--how they made you shiver. well, the hands were nothing--_nothing_!--beside what you didn't see." "lorna, do you love someone else?" his eyes demanded an honest answer, and it seemed to her his feeling for her deserved it. but she could not put the answer into words. she lowered her gaze. "then why----" he began impetuously. but there he halted, for he knew she would not lift the veil over herself, over her past. "i'm very, very fond of you," she said with depressing friendliness. then with a sweet laugh, "you ought to be glad i'm not able to take you at your word. and you will be glad soon." she sighed. "what a good time we've had!" "if i only had a decent allowance, like fatty!" he groaned. "no use talking about that. it's best for us to separate best for us both. you've been good to me--you'll never know how good. and i can't play you a mean trick. i wish i could be selfish enough to do it, but i can't." "you don't love me. that's the reason." "maybe it is. yes, i guess that's why i've got the courage to be square with you. anyhow, john, you can't afford to care for me. and if i cared for you, and put off the parting--why it'd only put off what i've got to go through with before----" she did not finish; her eyes became dreamy. "before what?" he asked. "i don't know," she said, returning with a sigh. "something i see--yet don't see in the darkness, ahead of me." "i can't make you out," cried he. her expression moved him to the same awe she inspired in etta--a feeling that gave both of them the sense of having known her better, of having been more intimate with her when they first met her than they ever had been since or ever would be again. when redmond embraced and kissed her for the last time, he was in another and less sympathetic mood, was busy with his own wounds to vanity and perhaps to heart. he thought her heartless--good and sweet and friendly, but without sentiment. she refused to help him make a scene; she refused to say she would write to him, and asked him not to write to her. "you know we'll probably see each other soon." "not till the long vacation--not till nearly july." "only three months." "oh, if you look at it that way!" said he, piqued and sullen. girls had always been more than kind, more than eager, when he had shown interest. etta, leaving on a later train, was even more depressed about susan's heart. she wept hysterically, wished susan to do the same; but susan stood out firmly against a scene, and would not have it that etta was shamefully deserting her, as etta tearfully accused herself. "you're going to be happy," she said. "and i'm not so selfish as to be wretched about it. and don't you worry a minute on my account. i'm better off in every way than i've ever been. i'll get on all right." "i know you gave up john to help me with august. i know you mean to break off everything. oh, lorna, you mustn't--you mustn't." "don't talk nonsense," was susan's unsatisfactory reply. when it came down to the last embrace and the last kiss, etta did feel through susan's lips and close encircling arms a something that dried up her hysterical tears and filled her heart with an awful aching. it did not last long. no matter how wildly shallow waters are stirred, they soon calm and murmur placidly on again. the three who had left her would have been amazed could they have seen her a few minutes after etta's train rolled out of the union station. the difference between strong natures and weak is not that the strong are free from cowardice and faint-heartedness, from doubt and foreboding, from love and affection, but that they do not stay down when they are crushed down, stagger up and on. susan hurried to the room they had helped her find the day before--a room in a house where no questions were asked or answered. she locked herself in and gave way to the agonies of her loneliness. and when her grief had exhausted her, she lay upon the bed staring at the wall with eyes that looked as though her soul had emptied itself through them of all that makes life endurable, even of hope. for the first time in her life she thought of suicide--not suicide the vague possibility, not suicide the remote way of escape, but suicide the close and intimate friend, the healer of all woes, the solace of all griefs--suicide, the speedy, accurate solver of the worst problem destiny can put to man. she saw her pocketbook on the floor where she had dropped it. "i'll wait till my money's gone," thought she. then she remembered etta--how gentle and loving she was, how utterly she gave herself--for susan was still far from the profound knowledge of character that enables us to disregard outward signs in measuring actualities. "if i really weren't harder than etta," her thoughts ran on reproachfully, "i'd not wait until the money went. i'd kill myself now, and have it over with." the truth was that if the position of the two girls had been reversed and susan had loved gulick as intensely as etta professed and believed she loved him, still susan would have given him up rather than have left etta alone. and she would have done it without any sense of sacrifice. and it must be admitted that, whether or not there are those who deserve credit for doing right, certainly those who do right simply because they cannot do otherwise--the only trustworthy people--deserve no credit for it. she counted her money--twenty-three dollars in bills, and some change. redmond had given her fifty dollars each time they had gone shopping, and had made her keep the balance--his indirect way of adjusting the financial side. twenty-three dollars meant perhaps two weeks' living. well, she would live those two weeks decently and comfortably and then--bid life adieu unless something turned up--for back to the streets she would not go. with etta gone, with not a friend anywhere on earth, life was not worth the price she had paid for etta and herself to the drunken man. her streak of good fortune in meeting redmond had given her no illusions; from mabel connemora, from what she herself had heard and seen--and experienced--she knew the street woman's life, and she could not live that life for herself alone. she could talk about it to redmond tranquilly. she could think about it in the abstract, could see how other women did it, and how those who had intelligence might well survive and lift themselves up in it. but do it she could not. so she resolved upon suicide, firmly believing in her own resolve. and she was not one to deceive herself or to shrink from anything whatsoever. except the insane, only the young make these resolves and act upon them; for the young have not yet learned to value life, have not yet fallen under life's sinister spell that makes human beings cling more firmly and more cravenly to it as they grow older. the young must have something--some hope, however fanatic and false--to live for. they will not tarry just to live. and in that hour susan had lost hope. she took off her street dress and opened her trunk to get a wrapper and bedroom slippers. as she lifted the lid, she saw an envelope addressed "lorna"; she remembered that redmond had locked and strapped the trunk. she tore the end from the envelope, looked in. some folded bills; nothing more. she sat on the floor and counted two twenties, five tens, two fives--a hundred dollars! she looked dazedly at the money--gave a cry of delight--sprang to her feet, with a change like the startling shift from night to day in the tropics. "i can pay!" she cried. "i can pay!" bubbling over with smiles and with little laughs, gay as even champagne and the release from the vile prison of the slums had made her, she with eager hands took from the trunk her best clothes--the jacket and skirt of dark gray check she had bought for thirty dollars at shillito's and had had altered to her figure and her taste; the blouse of good quality linen with rather a fancy collar; the gray leather belt with a big oxidized silver buckle; her only pair of silk stockings; the pair of high-heeled patent leather shoes--the large black hat with a gray feather curling attractively round and over its brim. the hat had cost only fourteen dollars because she had put it together herself; if she had bought it made, she would have paid not less than thirty dollars. all these things she carefully unpacked and carefully laid out. then she thoroughly brushed her hair and did it up in a graceful pompadour that would go well with the hat. she washed away the traces of her outburst of grief, went over her finger nails, now almost recovered from the disasters incident to the life of manual labor. she went on to complete her toilet, all with the same attention to detail--a sure indication, in one so young, of a desire to please some specific person. when she had the hat set at the satisfactory angle and the veil wound upon it and draped over her fresh young face coquettishly, she took from her slender store of gloves a fresh gray pair and, as she put them on, stood before the glass examining herself. there was now not a trace of the tenement working girl of a week and a day before. here was beauty in bloom, fresh and alluring from head to narrow, well-booted feet. more than a hint of a fine color sense--that vital quality, if fashion, the conventional, is to be refined and individualized into style, the rare--more than a hint of color sense showed in the harmony of the pearl gray in the big feather, the pearl gray in the collar of the blouse, and the pearl white of her skin. susan had indeed returned to her own class. she had left it, a small-town girl with more than a suggestion of the child in eyes and mouth; she had returned to it, a young woman of the city, with that look in her face which only experience can give--experience that has resulted in growth. she locked all her possessions away in her trunk--all but her money; that she put in her stockings--seventy-five dollars well down in the right leg, the rest of the bills well down in the left leg; the two dollars or so in change was all she intrusted to the pocketbook she carried. she cast a coquettish glance down at her charmingly arrayed feet--a harmless glance of coquetry that will be condemned by those whose physical vanity happens to center elsewhere. after this glance she dropped her skirts--and was ready. by this time dusk had fallen, and it was nearly six o'clock. as she came out of the house she glanced toward the west--the instinctive gesture of people who live in rainy climates. her face brightened; she saw an omen in the long broad streak of reddened evening sky. chapter xxiii she went down to fourth street, along it to race, to the _commercial_ building. at the entrance to the corridor at the far side of which were elevator and stairway, she paused and considered. she turned into the business office. "is mr. roderick spenser here?" she asked of a heavily built, gray-bearded man in the respectable black of the old-fashioned financial employee, showing the sobriety and stolidity of his character in his dress. "he works upstairs," replied the old man, beaming approvingly upon the pretty, stylish young woman. "is he there now?" "i'll telephone." he went into the rear office, presently returned with the news that mr. spenser had that moment left, was probably on his way down in the elevator. "and you'll catch him if you go to the office entrance right away." susan, the inexperienced in the city ways of men with women, did not appreciate what a tribute to her charms and to her character, as revealed in the honest, grave eyes, was the old man's unhesitating assumption that spenser would wish to see her. she lost no time in retracing her steps. as she reached the office entrance she saw at the other end of the long hall two young men coming out of the elevator. after the habit of youth, she had rehearsed speech and manner for this meeting; but at sight of him she was straightway trembling so that she feared she would be unable to speak at all. the entrance light was dim, but as he glanced at her in passing he saw her looking at him and his hand moved toward his hat. his face had not changed--the same frank, careless expression, the same sympathetic, understanding look out of the eyes. but he was the city man in dress now--notably the city man. "mr. spenser," said she shyly. he halted; his companion went on. he lifted his hat, looked inquiringly at her--the look of the enthusiast and connoisseur on the subject of pretty women, when he finds a new specimen worthy of his attention. "don't you know me?" his expression of puzzled and flirtatious politeness gradually cleared away. the lighting up of his eyes, the smile round his mouth delighted her; and she grew radiant when he exclaimed eagerly, "why, it's the little girl of the rock again! how you've grown--in a year--less than a year!" "yes, i suppose i have," said she, thinking of it for the first time. then, to show him at once what a good excuse she had for intruding again, she hastened to add, "i've come to pay you that money you loaned me." he burst out laughing, drew her into the corridor where the light was brighter. "and you've gone back to your husband," he said--she noted the quick, sharp change in his voice. "why do you think that?" she said. the way his eyes lingered upon the charming details toilet that indicated anything but poverty might of a have given her a simple explanation. he offered another. "i can't explain. it's your different expression--a kind of experienced look." the color flamed and flared in susan's face. "you are--happy?" he asked. "i've not seen--him," evaded she. "ever since i left carrollton i've been wandering about." "wandering about?" he repeated absently, his eyes busy with her appearance. "and now," she went on, nervous and hurried, "i'm here in town--for a while." "then i may come to see you?" "i'd be glad. i'm alone in a furnished room i've taken--out near lincoln park." "alone! you don't mean you're still wandering?" "still wandering." he laughed. "well, it certainly is doing you no harm. the reverse." an embarrassed pause, then he said with returning politeness: "maybe you'll dine with me this evening?" she beamed. "i've been hoping you'd ask me." "it won't be as good as the one on the rock." "there never will be another dinner like that," declared she. "your leg is well?" her question took him by surprise. in his interest and wonder as to the new mystery of this mysterious young person he had not recalled the excuses he made for dropping out of the entanglement in which his impulses had put him. the color poured into his face. "ages ago," he replied, hurriedly. "i'd have forgotten it, if it hadn't been for you. i've never been able to get you out of my head." and as a matter of truth she had finally dislodged his cousin nell--without lingering long or vividly herself. young mr. spenser was too busy and too self-absorbed a man to bother long about any one flower in a world that was one vast field abloom with open-petaled flowers. "nor i you," said she, as pleased as he had expected, and showing it with a candor that made her look almost the child he had last seen. "you see, i owed you that money, and i wanted to pay it." "oh--_that_ was all!" exclaimed he, half jokingly. "wait here a minute." and he went to the door, looked up and down the street, then darted across it and disappeared into the st. nicholas hotel. he was not gone more than half a minute. "i had to see bayne and tell him," he explained when he was with her again. "i was to have dined with him and some others--over in the café. instead, you and i will dine upstairs. you won't mind my not being dressed?" it seemed to her he was dressed well enough for any occasion. "i'd rather you had on the flannel trousers rolled up to your knees," said she. "but i can imagine them." "what a dinner that was!" cried he. "and the ride afterward," with an effort at ease that escaped her bedazzled eyes. "why didn't you ever write?" he expected her to say that she did not know his address, and was ready with protests and excuses. but she replied: "i didn't have the money to pay what i owed you." they were crossing fourth street and ascending the steps to the hotel. "then, too--afterward--when i got to know a little more about life i----oh, no matter. really, the money was the only reason." but he had stopped short. in a tone so correctly sincere that a suspicious person might perhaps have doubted the sincerity of the man using it, he said: "what was in your mind? what did you think? what did you--suspect me of? for i see in that honest, telltale face of yours that it was a suspicion." "i didn't blame you," protested the girl, "even if it was so. i thought maybe you got to thinking it over--and--didn't want to be bothered with anyone so troublesome as i had made myself." "how _could_ you suspect _me_ of such a thing?" "oh, i really didn't," declared she, with all the earnestness of a generous nature, for she read into his heightened color and averted eyes the feelings she herself would have had before an unjust suspicion. "it was merely an idea. and i didn't blame you--not in the least. it would have been the sensible----" next thing, this child-woman, this mysterious mind of mixed precocity and innocence, would be showing that she had guessed a cousin nell. "you are far too modest," interrupted he with a flirtatious smile. "you didn't realize how strong an impression you made. no, i really broke my leg. don't you suppose i knew the twenty-five in the pocketbook wouldn't carry you far?" he saw--and naturally misunderstood--her sudden change of expression as he spoke of the amount. he went on apologetically, "i intended to bring more when i came. i was afraid to put money in the note for fear it'd never be delivered, if i did. and didn't i tell you to write--and didn't i give you my address here? would i have done that, if i hadn't meant to stand by you?" susan was convinced, was shamed by these smooth, plausible assertions and explanations. "your father's house--it's a big brick, with stone trimmings, standing all alone outside the little town--isn't it?" spenser was again coloring deeply. "yes," admitted he uneasily. but susan didn't notice. "i saw the doctor--and your family--on the veranda," she said. he was now so nervous that she could not but observe it. "they gave out that it was only a sprain," said he, "because i told them i didn't want it known. i didn't want the people at the office to know i was going to be laid up so long. i was afraid i'd lose my job." "i didn't hear anything about it," said she. "i only saw as i was going by on a boat." he looked disconcerted--but not to her eyes. "well--it's far in the past now," said he. "let's forget--all but the fun." "yes--all but the fun." then very sweetly, "but i'll never forget what i owe you. not the money--not that, hardly at all--but what you did for me. it made me able to go on." "don't speak of it," cried he, flushed and shamefaced. "i didn't do half what i ought." like most human beings he was aware of his more obvious--if less dangerous--faults and weaknesses. he liked to be called generous, but always had qualms when so called because he knew he was in fact of the familiar type classed as generous only because human beings are so artless in their judgments as to human nature that they cannot see that quick impulses quickly die. the only deep truth is that there are no generous natures but just natures--and they are rarely classed as generous because their slowly formed resolves have the air of prudence and calculation. in the hotel she went to the dressing-room, took twenty-five dollars from the money in her stocking. as soon as they were seated in the restaurant she handed it to him. "but this makes it you who are having me to dinner--and more," he protested. "if you knew what a weight it's been on me, you'd not talk that way," said she. her tone compelled him to accept her view of the matter. he laughed and put the money in his waistcoat pocket, saying: "then i'll still owe you a dinner." during the past week she had been absorbing as only a young woman with a good mind and a determination to learn the business of living can absorb. the lessons before her had been the life that is lived in cities by those who have money to spend and experience in spending it; she had learned out of all proportion to opportunity. at a glance she realized that she was now in a place far superior to the bohemian resorts which had seemed to her inexperience the best possible. from earliest childhood she had shown the delicate sense of good taste and of luxury that always goes with a practical imagination--practical as distinguished from the idealistic kind of imagination that is vague, erratic, and fond of the dreams which neither could nor should come true. and the reading she had done--the novels, the memoirs, the books of travel, the fashion and home magazines--had made deep and distinct impressions upon her, had prepared her--as they have prepared thousands of americans in secluded towns and rural regions where luxury and even comfort are very crude indeed--for the possible rise of fortune that is the universal american dream and hope. she felt these new surroundings exquisitely--the subdued coloring, the softened lights, the thick carpets, the quiet elegance and comfort of the furniture. she noted the good manners of the well-trained waiter; she listened admiringly and memorizingly as spenser ordered the dinner--a dinner of french good taste--small but fine oysters, a thick soup, a guinea hen _en casserole_, a fruit salad, fresh strawberry ice cream, dry champagne. she saw that spenser knew what he was about, and she was delighted with him and proud to be with him and glad that he had tastes like her own--that is, tastes such as she proposed to learn to have. of the men she had known or known about he seemed to her far and away the best. it isn't necessary to explain into what an attitude of mind and heart this feeling of his high superiority immediately put her--certainly not for the enlightenment of any woman. "what are you thinking?" he asked--the question that was so often thrust at her because, when she thought intensely, there was a curiosity-compelling expression in her eyes. "oh--about all this," replied she. "i like this sort of thing so much. i never had it in my life, yet now that i see it i feel as if i were part of it, as if it must belong to me." her eyes met his sympathetic gaze. "you understand, don't you?" he nodded. "and i was wondering"--she laughed, as if she expected even him to laugh at her--"i was wondering how long it would be before i should possess it. do you think i'm crazy?" he shook his head. "i've got that same feeling," said he. "i'm poor--don't dare do this often--have all i can manage in keeping myself decently. yet i have a conviction that i shall--shall win. don't think i'm dreaming of being rich--not at all. i--i don't care much about that if i did go into business. but i want all my surroundings to be right." her eyes gleamed. "and you'll get it. and so shall i. i know it sounds improbable and absurd for me to say that about myself. but--i know it." "i believe you," said he. "you've got the look in your face--in your eyes. . . . i've never seen anyone improve as you have in this less than a year." she smiled as she thought in what surroundings she had apparently spent practically all that time. "if you could have seen me!" she said. "yes, i was learning and i know it. i led a sort of double life. i----" she hesitated, gave up trying to explain. she had not the words and phrases, the clear-cut ideas, to express that inner life led by people who have real imagination. with most human beings their immediate visible surroundings determine their life; with the imaginative few their horizon is always the whole wide world. she sighed, "but i'm ignorant. i don't know how or where to take hold." "i can't help you there, yet," said he. "when we know each other better, then i'll know. not that you need me to tell you. you'll find out for yourself. one always does." she glanced round the attractive room again, then looked at him with narrowed eyelids. "only a few hours ago i was thinking of suicide. how absurd it seems now!--i'll never do that again. at least, i've learned how to profit by a lesson. mr. burlingham taught me that." "who's he?" "that's a long story. i don't feel like telling about it now." but the mere suggestion had opened certain doors in her memory and crowds of sad and bitter thoughts came trooping in. "are you in some sort of trouble?" said he, instantly leaning toward her across the table and all aglow with the impulsive sympathy that kindles in impressionable natures as quickly as fire in dry grass. such natures are as perfect conductors of emotion as platinum is of heat--instantly absorbing it, instantly throwing it off, to return to their normal and metallic chill--and capacity for receptiveness. "anything you can tell me about?" "oh, no--nothing especial," replied she. "just loneliness and a feeling of--of discouragement." strongly, "just a mood. i'm never really discouraged. something always turns up." "please tell me what happened after i left you at that wretched hotel." "i can't," she said. "at least, not now." "there is----" he looked sympathetically at her, as if to assure her that he would understand, no matter what she might confess. "there is--someone?" "no. i'm all alone. i'm--free." it was not in the least degree an instinct for deception that made her then convey an impression of there having been no one. she was simply obeying her innate reticence that was part of her unusual self-unconsciousness. "and you're not worried about--about money matters?" he asked. "you see, i'm enough older and more experienced to give me excuse for asking. besides, unless a woman has money, she doesn't find it easy to get on." "i've enough for the present," she assured him, and the stimulus of the champagne made her look--and feel--much more self-confident than she really was. "more than i've ever had before. so i'm not worried. when anyone has been through what i have they aren't so scared about the future." he looked the admiration he felt--and there was not a little of the enthusiasm of the champagne both in the look and in the admiration--"i see you've already learned to play the game without losing your nerve." "i begin to hope so," said she. "yes--you've got the signs of success in your face. curious about those signs. once you learn to know them, you never miss in sizing up people." the dinner had come. both were hungry, and it was as good a dinner as the discussion about it between spenser and the waiter had forecast. as they ate the well-cooked, well-served food and drank the delicately flavored champagne, mellow as the gorgeous autumn its color suggested, there diffused through them an extraordinary feeling of quiet intense happiness--happiness of mind and body. her face took on a new and finer beauty; into his face came a tenderness that was most becoming to its rather rugged features. and he had not talked with her long before he discovered that he was facing not a child, not a child-woman, but a woman grown, one who could understand and appreciate the things men and women of experience say and do. "i've always been expecting to hear from you every day since we separated," he said--and he was honestly believing it now. "i've had a feeling that you hadn't forgotten me. it didn't seem possible i could feel so strongly unless there was real sympathy between us." "i came as soon as i could." he reflected in silence a moment, then in a tone that made her heart leap and her blood tingle, he said: "you say you're free?" "free as air. only--i couldn't fly far." he hesitated on an instinct of prudence, then ventured. "far as new york?" "what is the railroad fare?" "oh, about twenty-five dollars--with sleeper." "yes--i can fly that far." "do you mean to say you've no ties of any kind?" "none. not one." her eyes opened wide and her nostrils dilated. "free!" "you love it--don't you?" "don't you?" "above everything!" he exclaimed. "only the free _live_." she lifted her head higher in a graceful, attractive gesture of confidence and happiness. "well--i am ready to live." "i'm afraid you don't realize," he said hesitatingly. "people wouldn't understand. you've your reputation to think of, you know." she looked straight at him. "no--not even that. i'm even free from reputation." then, as his face saddened and his eyes glistened with sympathy, "you needn't pity me. see where it's brought me." "you're a strong swimmer--aren't you?" he said tenderly. "but then there isn't any safe and easy crossing to the isles of freedom. it's no wonder most people don't get further than gazing and longing." "probably i shouldn't," confessed susan, "if i hadn't been thrown into the water. it was a case of swim or drown." "but most who try are drowned--nearly all the women." "oh, i guess there are more survive than is generally supposed. so much lying is done about that sort of thing." "what a shrewd young lady it is! at any rate, you have reached the islands." "but i'm not queen of them yet," she reminded him. "i'm only a poor, naked, out-of-breath castaway lying on the beach." he laughed appreciatively. very clever, this extremely pretty young woman. "yes--you'll win. you'll be queen." he lifted his champagne glass and watched the little bubbles pushing gayly and swiftly upward. "so--you've cast over your reputation." "i told you i had reached the beach naked." a reckless light in her eyes now. "fact is, i had none to start with. anybody has a reason for starting--or for being started. that was mine, i guess." "i've often thought about that matter of reputation--in a man or a woman--if they're trying to make the bold, strong swim. to care about one's reputation means fear of what the world says. it's important to care about one's character--for without character no one ever got anywhere worth getting to. but it's very, very dangerous to be afraid for one's reputation. and--i hate to admit it, because i'm hopelessly conventional at bottom, but it's true--reputation--fear of what the world says--has sunk more swimmers, has wrecked more characters than it ever helped. so--the strongest and best swimmers swim naked." susan was looking thoughtfully at him over the rim of her glass. she took a sip of the champagne, said: "if i hadn't been quite naked, i'd have sunk--i'd have been at the bottom--with the fishes----" "don't!" he cried. "thank god, you did whatever you've done--yes, i mean that--whatever you've done, since it enabled you to swim on." he added, "and i know it wasn't anything bad--anything unwomanly." "i did the best i could--nothing i'm ashamed of--or proud of either. just--what i had to do." "but you ought to be proud that you arrived." "no--only glad," said she. "so--so _frightfully_ glad!" in any event, their friendship was bound to flourish; aided by that dinner and that wine it sprang up into an intimacy, a feeling of mutual trust and of sympathy at every point. like all women she admired strength in a man above everything else. she delighted in the thick obstinate growth of his fair hair, in the breadth of the line of his eyebrows, in the aggressive thrust of his large nose and long jawbone. she saw in the way his mouth closed evidence of a will against which opposition would dash about as dangerously as an egg against a stone wall. there was no question of his having those birthmarks of success about which he talked. she saw them--saw nothing of the less obtrusive--but not less important--marks of weakness which might have enabled an expert in the reading of faces to reach some rather depressing conclusion as to the nature and the degree of that success. finally, he burst out with, "yes, i've made up my mind. i'll do it! i'm going to new york. i've been fooling away the last five years here learning a lot, but still idling--drinking--amusing myself in all kinds of ways. and about a month ago--one night, as i was rolling home toward dawn--through a driving sleet storm--do you remember a line in 'paradise lost'" "i never read it," interrupted susan. "well--it's where the devils have been kicked out of heaven and are lying in agony flat on the burning lake--and satan rises up--and marches haughtily out among them--and calls out, 'awake! arise! or forever more be damned!' that's what has happened to me several times in my life. when i was a boy, idling about the farm and wasting myself, that voice came to me--'awake! arise! or forever more be damned!' and i got a move on me, and insisted on going to college. again--at college--i became a dawdler--poker--drink--dances--all the rest of it. and suddenly that voice roared in my ears, made me jump like a rabbit when a gun goes off. and last month it came again. i went to work--finished a play i've been pottering over for three years. but somehow i couldn't find the--the--whatever i needed--to make me break away. well--_you've_ given me that. i'll resign from the _commercial_ and with all i've got in the world--three hundred dollars and a trunk full of good clothes, i'll break into broadway." susan had listened with bright eyes and quickened breath, as intoxicated and as convinced as was he by his eloquence. "isn't that splendid!" she exclaimed in a low voice. "and you?" he said meaningly. "i?" she replied, fearing she was misunderstanding. "will you go?" "do you want me?" she asked, low and breathlessly. with a reluctance which suggested--but not to her--that his generosity was winning a hard-fought battle with his vanity, he replied: "i need you. i doubt if i'd dare, without you to back me up." "i've got a trunk full of fairly good clothes and about a hundred dollars. but i haven't got any play--or any art--or any trade even. of course, i'll go." then she hastily added, "i'll not be a drag on you. i pay my own way." "but you mustn't be suspicious in your independence," he warned her. "you mustn't forget that i'm older than you and more experienced and that it's far easier for a man to get money than for a woman." "to get it without lowering himself?" "ah!" he exclaimed, looking strangely at her. "you mean, without bowing to some boss? without selling his soul? i had no idea you were so much of a woman when i met you that day." "i wasn't--then," replied she. "and i didn't know where i'd got till we began to talk this evening." "and you're very young!" "oh, but i've been going to a school where they make you learn fast." "indeed i do need you." he touched his glass to hers. "on to broadway!" he cried. "broadway!" echoed she, radiant. "together--eh?" she nodded. but as she drank the toast a tear splashed into her glass. she was remembering how some mysterious instinct had restrained her from going with john redmond, though it seemed the only sane thing to do. what if she had disobeyed that instinct! and then--through her mind in swift ghostly march--past trailed the persons and events of the days just gone--just gone, yet seeming as far away as a former life in another world. redmond and gulick--etta--yes, etta, too--all past and gone--forever gone---- "what are you thinking about?" she shook her head and the spectral procession vanished into the glooms of memory's vistas. "thinking?--of yesterday. i don't understand myself--how i shake off and forget what's past. nothing seems real to me but the future." "not even the present?" said he with a smile. "not even the present," she answered with grave candor. "nothing seems to touch me--the real me. it's like--like looking out of the window of the train at the landscape running by. i'm a traveler passing through. i wonder if it'll always be that way. i wonder if i'll ever arrive where i'll feel that i belong." "i think so--and soon." but she did not respond to his confident smile. "i--i hope so," she said with sad, wistful sweetness. "then again--aren't there some people who don't belong anywhere--aren't allowed to settle down and be happy, but have to keep going--on and on--until----" "until they pass out into the dark," he finished for her. "yes." he looked at her in a wondering uneasy way. "you do suggest that kind," said he. "but," smilingly, to hide his earnestness, "i'll try to detain you." "please do," she said. "i don't want to go on--alone." he dropped into silence, puzzled and in a way awed by the mystery enveloping her--a mystery of aloofness and stoniness, of complete separation from the contact of the world--the mystery that incloses all whose real life is lived deep within themselves. chapter xxiv like days later, on the eastern express, they were not so confident as they had been over the st. nicholas champagne. as confident about the remoter future, it was that annoying little stretch near at hand which gave them secret uneasiness. there had been nothing but dreaming and sentimentalizing in those four days--and that disquietingly suggested the soldier who with an impressive flourish highly resolves to give battle, then sheathes his sword and goes away to a revel. also, like all idlers, they had spent money--far more money than total net cash resources of less than five hundred dollars warranted. "we've spent an awful lot of money," said susan. she was quick to see the faint frown, the warning that she was on dangerous ground. said he: "do you regret?" "no, indeed--no!" cried she, eager to have that cloud vanish, but honest too. she no more than he regretted a single moment of the dreaming and love-making, a single penny of the eighty and odd dollars that had enabled them fittingly to embower their romance, to twine myrtle in their hair and to provide cupid's torch-bowls with fragrant incense. still--with the battle not begun, there gaped that deep, wide hollow in the war chest. spenser's newspaper connection got them passes over one of the cheaper lines to new york--and he tried to console himself by setting this down as a saving of forty dollars against the eighty dollars of the debit item. but he couldn't altogether forget that they would have traveled on passes, anyhow. he was not regretting that he had indulged in the extravagance of a stateroom--but he couldn't deny that it was an extravagance. however, he had only to look at her to feel that he had done altogether well in providing for her the best, and to believe that he could face with courage any fate so long as he had her at his side. "yes, i can face anything with you," he said. "what i feel for you is the real thing. the real thing, at last." she had no disposition to inquire curiously into this. her reply was a flash of a smile that was like a flash of glorious light upon the crest of a wave surging straight from her happy heart. they were opposite each other at breakfast in the restaurant car. he delighted in her frank delight in the novelty of travel--swift and luxurious travel. he had never been east before, himself, but he had had experience of sleepers and diners; she had not, and every moment she was getting some new sensation. she especially enjoyed this sitting at breakfast with the express train rushing smoothly along through the mountains--the first mountains either had seen. at times they were so intensely happy that they laughed with tears in their eyes and touched hands across the table to get from physical contact the reassurances of reality. "how good to eat everything is!" she exclaimed. "you'll think me very greedy, i'm afraid. but if you'd eaten the stuff i have since we dined on the rock!" they were always going back to the rock, and neither wearied of recalling and reminding each other of the smallest details. it seemed to them that everything, even the least happening, at that sacred spot must be remembered, must be recorded indelibly in the book of their romance. "i'm glad we were happy together in such circumstances," she went on. "it was a test--wasn't it, rod?" "if two people don't love each other enough to be happy anywhere, they could be happy nowhere," declared he. "so, we'll not mind being very, very careful about spending money in new york," she ventured--for she was again bringing up the subject she had been privately revolving ever since they had formed the partnership. in her wanderings with burlingham, in her sojourn in the tenements, she had learned a great deal about the care and spending of money--had developed that instinct for forehandedness which nature has implanted in all normal women along with the maternal instinct--and as a necessary supplement to it. this instinct is more or less futile in most women because they are more or less ignorant of the realities as to wise and foolish expenditure. but it is found in the most extravagant women no less than in the most absurdly and meanly stingy. "of course, we must be careful," assented rod. "but i can't let you be uncomfortable." "now, dear," she remonstrated, "you mustn't treat me that way. i'm better fitted for hardship than you. i'd mind it less." he laughed; she looked so fine and delicate, with her transparent skin and her curves of figure, he felt that anything so nearly perfect could not but easily be spoiled. and there he showed how little he appreciated her iron strength, her almost exhaustless endurance. he fancied he was the stronger because he could have crushed her in his muscular arms. but exposures, privations, dissipations that would have done for a muscularly stronger man than he would have left no trace upon her after a few days of rest and sleep. "it's the truth," she insisted. "i could prove it, but i shan't. i don't want to remember vividly. rod, we _must_ live cheaply in new york until you sell a play and i have a place in some company." "yes," he conceded. "but, susie, not too cheap. a cheap way of living makes a cheap man--gives a man a cheap outlook on life. besides, don't forget--if the worst comes to the worst, i can always get a job on a newspaper." she would not have let him see how uneasy this remark made her. however, she could not permit it to pass without notice. said she a little nervously: "but you've made up your mind to devote yourself to plays--to stand or fall by that." he remembered how he had thrilled her and himself with brave talk about the necessity of concentrating, of selecting a goal and moving relentlessly for it, letting nothing halt him or turn him aside. for his years rod spenser was as wise in the philosophy of success as burlingham or tom brashear. but he had done that brave and wise talking before he loved her as he now did--before he realized how love can be in itself an achievement and a possession so great that other ambitions dwarf beside it. true, away back in his facile, fickle mind, behind the region where self-excuse and somebody-else-always-to-blame reigned supreme, a something--the something that had set the marks of success so strongly upon his face--was whispering to him the real reason for his now revolving a new york newspaper job. real reasons as distinguished from alleged reasons and imagined reasons, from the reasons self-deception invents and vanity gives out--real reasons are always interesting and worth noting. what was rod's? not his love for her; nothing so superior, so superhuman as that. no, it was weak and wobbly misgivings as to his own ability to get on independently, the misgivings that menace every man who has never worked for himself but has always drawn pay--the misgivings that paralyze most men and keep them wage or salary slaves all their lives. rod was no better pleased at this sly, unwelcome revelation of his real self to himself than the next human being is in similar circumstances. the whispering was hastily suppressed; love for her, desire that she should be comfortable--those must be the real reasons. but he must be careful lest she, the sensitive, should begin to brood over a fear that she was already weakening him and would become a drag upon him--the fear that, he knew, would take shape in his own mind if things began to go badly. "you may be sure, dearest," he said, "i'll do nothing that won't help me on." he tapped his forehead with his finger. "this is a machine for making plays. everything that's put into it will be grist for it." she was impressed but not convinced. he had made his point about concentration too clear to her intelligence. she persisted: "but you said if you took a place on a newspaper it would make you fight less hard." "i say a lot of things," he interrupted laughingly. "don't be frightened about me. what i'm most afraid of is that you'll desert me. _that_ would be a real knock-out blow." he said this smilingly; but she could not bear jokes on that one subject. "what do you mean, rod?" "now, don't look so funereal, susie. i simply meant that i hate to think of your going on the stage--or at anything else. i want you to help _me_. selfish, isn't it? but, dear heart, if i could feel that the plays were _ours_, that we were both concentrated on the one career--darling. to love each other, to work together--not separately but together--don't you understand?" her expression showed that she understood, but was not at all in sympathy. "i've got to earn my living, rod," she objected. "i shan't care anything about what i'll be doing. i'll do it simply to keep from being a burden to you----" "a burden, susie! you! why, you're my wings that enable me to fly. it's selfish, but i want all of you. don't you think, dear, that if it were possible, it would be better for you to make us a home and hold the fort while i go out to give battle to managers--and bind up my wounds when i come back--and send me out the next day well again? don't you think we ought to concentrate?" the picture appealed to her. all she wanted in life now was his success. "but," she objected, "it's useless to talk of that until we get on our feet--perfectly useless." "it's true," he admitted with a sigh. "and until we do, we must be economical." "what a persistent lady it is," laughed he. "i wish i were like that." in the evening's gathering dusk the train steamed into jersey city; and spenser and susan lenox, with the adventurer's mingling hope and dread, confidence and doubt, courage and fear, followed the crowd down the long platform under the vast train shed, went through the huge thronged waiting-room and aboard the giant ferryboat which filled both with astonishment because of its size and luxuriousness. "i am a jay!" said she. "i can hardly keep my mouth from dropping open." "you haven't any the advantage of me," he assured her. "are you trembling all over?" "yes," she admitted. "and my heart's like lead. i suppose there are thousands on thousands like us, from all over the country--who come here every day--feeling as we do." "let's go out on the front deck--where we can see it." they went out on the upper front deck and, leaning against the forward gates, with their traveling bags at their feet, they stood dumb before the most astounding and most splendid scene in the civilized world. it was not quite dark yet; the air was almost july hot, as one of those prematurely warm days new york so often has in march. the sky, a soft and delicate blue shading into opal and crimson behind them, displayed a bright crescent moon as it arched over the fairyland in the dusk before them. straight ahead, across the broad, swift, sparkling river--the broadest water susan had ever seen--rose the mighty, the majestic city. it rose direct from the water. endless stretches of ethereal-looking structure, reaching higher and higher, in masses like mountain ranges, in peaks, in towers and domes. and millions of lights, like fairy lamps, like resplendent jewels, gave the city a glory beyond that of the stars thronging the heavens on a clear summer night. they looked toward the north; on and on, to the far horizon's edge stretched the broad river and the lovely city that seemed the newborn offspring of the waves; on and on, the myriad lights, in masses, in festoons, in great gleaming globes of fire from towers rising higher than susan's and rod's native hills. they looked to the south. there, too, rose city, mile after mile, and then beyond it the expanse of the bay; and everywhere the lights, the beautiful, soft, starlike lights, shedding a radiance as of heaven itself over the whole scene. majesty and strength and beauty. "i love it!" murmured the girl. "already i love it." "i never dreamed it was like this," said roderick, in an awed tone. "the city of the stars," said she, in the caressing tone in which a lover speaks the name of the beloved. they moved closer together and clasped hands and gazed as if they feared the whole thing--river and magic city and their own selves--would fade away and vanish forever. susan clutched rod in terror as she saw the vision suddenly begin to move, to advance toward her, like apparitions in a dream before they vanish. then she exclaimed, "why, we are moving!" the big ferryboat, swift, steady as land, noiseless, had got under way. upon them from the direction of the distant and hidden sea blew a cool, fresh breeze. never before had either smelled that perfume, strong and keen and clean, which comes straight from the unbreathed air of the ocean to bathe new york, to put life and hope and health into its people. rod and susan turned their faces southward toward this breeze, drank in great draughts of it. they saw a colossal statue, vivid as life in the dusk, in the hand at the end of the high-flung arm a torch which sent a blaze of light streaming out over land and water. "that must be liberty," said roderick. susan slipped her arm through his. she was quivering with excitement and joy. "rod--rod!" she murmured. "it's the isles of freedom. kiss me." and he bent and kissed her, and his cheek felt the tears upon hers. he reached for her hand, with an instinct to strengthen her. but when he had it within his its firm and vital grasp sent a thrill of strength through him. a few minutes, and they paused at the exit from the ferry house. they almost shrank back, so dazed and helpless did they feel before the staggering billows of noise that swept savagely down upon them--roar and crash, shriek and snort; the air was shuddering with it, the ground quaking. the beauty had vanished--the beauty that was not the city but a glamour to lure them into the city's grasp; now that city stood revealed as a monster about to seize and devour them. "god!" he shouted in her ear. "isn't this _frightful!_" she was recovering more quickly than he. the faces she saw reassured her. they were human faces; and while they were eager and restless, as if the souls behind them sought that which never could be found, they were sane and kind faces, too. where others of her own race lived, and lived without fear, she, too, could hope to survive. and already she, who had loved this mighty offspring of the sea and the sky at first glance, saw and felt another magic--the magic of the peopled solitude. in this vast, this endless solitude she and he would be free. they could do as they pleased, live as they pleased, without thought of the opinion of others. here she could forget the bestial horrors of marriage; here she would fear no scornful pointing at her birth-brand of shame. she and rod could be poor without shame; they could make their fight in the grateful darkness of obscurity. "scared?" he asked. "not a bit," was her prompt answer. "i love it more than ever." "well, it frightens me a little. i feel helpless--lost in the noise and the crowd. how can i do anything here!" "others have. others do." "yes--yes! that's so. we must take hold!" and he selected a cabman from the shouting swarm. "we want to go, with two trunks, to the hotel st. denis," said he. "all right, sir! gimme the checks, please." spenser was about to hand them over when susan said in an undertone, "you haven't asked the price." spenser hastened to repair this important omission. "ten dollars," replied the cabman as if ten dollars were some such trifle as ten cents. spenser laughed at the first experience of the famous new york habit of talking in a faint careless way of large sums of money--other people's money. "you did save us a swat," he said to susan, and beckoned another man. the upshot of a long and arduous discussion, noisy and profane, was that they got the carriage for six dollars--a price which the policeman who had been drawn into the discussion vouched for as reasonable. spenser knew it was too high, knew the policeman would get a dollar or so of the profit, but he was weary of the wrangle; and he would not listen to susan's suggestion that they have the trunks sent by the express company and themselves go in a street car for ten cents. at the hotel they got a large comfortable room and a bath for four dollars a day. spenser insisted it was cheap; susan showed her alarm--less than an hour in new york and ten dollars gone, not to speak of she did not know how much change. for roderick had been scattering tips with what is for some mysterious reason called "a princely hand," though princes know too well the value of money and have too many extravagant tastes ever to go far in sheer throwing away. they had dinner in the restaurant of the hotel and set out to explore the land they purposed to subdue and to possess. they walked up broadway to fourteenth, missed their way in the dazzle and glare of south union square, discovered the wandering highway again after some searching. after the long, rather quiet stretch between union square and thirty-fourth street they found themselves at the very heart of the city's night life. they gazed in wonder upon the elevated road with its trains thundering by high above them. they crossed greeley square and stood entranced before the spectacle--a street bright as day with electric signs of every color, shape and size; sidewalks jammed with people, most of them dressed with as much pretense to fashion as the few best in cincinnati; one theater after another, and at forty-second street theaters in every direction. surely--surely--there would be small difficulty in placing his play when there were so many theaters, all eager for plays. they debated going to the theater, decided against it, as they were tired from the journey and the excitement of crowding new sensations. "i've never been to a real theater in my life," said susan. "i want to be fresh the first time i go." "yes," cried rod. "that's right. tomorrow night. that _will_ be an experience!" and they read the illuminated signs, inspected the show windows, and slowly strolled back toward the hotel. as they were recrossing union square, spenser said, "have you noticed how many street girls there are? we must have passed a thousand. isn't it frightful?" "yes," said susan. rod made a gesture of disgust, and said with feeling, "how low a woman must have sunk before she could take to that life!" "yes," said susan. "so low that there couldn't possibly be left any shred of feeling or decency anywhere in her." susan did not reply. "it's not a question of morals, but of sensibility," pursued he. "some day i'm going to write a play or a story about it. a woman with anything to her, who had to choose between that life and death, wouldn't hesitate an instant. she couldn't. a streetwalker!" and again he made that gesture of disgust. "before you write," said susan, in a queer, quiet voice, "you'll find out all about it. maybe some of these girls--most of them--all of them--are still human beings. it's not fair to judge people unless you know. and it's so easy to say that someone else ought to die rather than do this or that." "you can't imagine yourself doing such a thing," urged he. susan hesitated, then--"yes," she said. her tone irritated him. "oh, nonsense! you don't know what you're talking about." "yes," said susan. "susie!" he exclaimed, looking reprovingly at her. she met his eyes without flinching. "yes," she said. "i have." he stopped short and his expression set her bosom to heaving. but her gaze was steady upon his. "why did you tell me!" he cried. "oh, it isn't so--it can't be. you don't mean exactly that." "yes, i do," said she. "don't tell me! i don't want to know." and he strode on, she keeping beside him. "i can't let you believe me different from what i am," replied she. "not you. i supposed you guessed." "now i'll always think of it--whenever i look at you. . . . i simply can't believe it. . . . you spoke of it as if you weren't ashamed." "i'm not ashamed," she said. "not before you. there isn't anything i've done that i wouldn't be willing to have you know. i'd have told you, except that i didn't want to recall it. you know that nobody can live without getting dirty. the thing is to want to be clean--and to try to get clean afterward--isn't it?" "yes," he admitted, as if he had not been hearing. "i wish you hadn't told me. i'll always see it and feel it when i look at you." "i want you to," said she. "i couldn't love you as i do if i hadn't gone through a great deal." "but it must have left its stains upon you," said he. again he stopped short in the street, faced her at the curb, with the crowd hurrying by and jostling them. "tell me about it!" he commanded. she shook her head. "i couldn't." to have told would have been like tearing open closed and healed wounds. also it would have seemed whining--and she had utter contempt for whining. "i'll answer any question, but i can't just go on and tell." "you deliberately went and did--that?" "yes." "haven't you any excuse, any defense?" she might have told him about burlingham dying and the need of money to save him. she might have told him about etta--her health going--her mind made up to take to the streets, with no one to look after her. she might have made it all a moving and a true tale--of self-sacrifice for the two people who had done most for her. but it was not in her simple honest nature to try to shift blame. so all she said was: "no, rod." "and you didn't want to kill yourself first?" "no. i wanted to live. i was dirty--and i wanted to be clean. i was hungry--and i wanted food. i was cold--that was the worst. i was cold, and i wanted to get warm. and--i had been married--but i couldn't tell even you about that--except--after a woman's been through what i went through then, nothing in life has any real terror or horror for her." he looked at her long. "i don't understand," he finally said. "come on. let's go back to the hotel." she walked beside him, making no attempt to break his gloomy silence. they went up to their room and she sat on the lounge by the window. he lit a cigarette and half sat, half lay, upon the bed. after a long time he said with a bitter laugh, "and i was so sure you were a good woman!" "i don't feel bad," she ventured timidly. "am i?" "do you mean to tell me," he cried, sitting up, "that you don't think anything of those things?" "life can be so hard and cruel, can make one do so many----" "but don't you realize that what you've done is the very worst thing a woman can do?" "no," said she. "i don't. . . . i'm sorry you didn't understand. i thought you did--not the details, but in a general sort of way. i didn't mean to deceive you. that would have seemed to me much worse than anything i did." "i might have known! i might have known!" he cried--rather theatrically, though sincerely withal--for mr. spenser was a diligent worker with the tools of the play-making trade. "i learned who you were as soon as i got home the night i left you in carrolton. they had been telephoning about you to the village. so i knew about you." "about my mother?" asked she. "is that what you mean?" "oh, you need not look so ashamed," said he, graciously, pityingly. "i am not ashamed," said she. but she did not tell him that her look came from an awful fear that he was about to make her ashamed of him. "no, i suppose you aren't," he went on, incensed by this further evidence of her lack of a good woman's instincts. "i really ought not to blame you. you were born wrong--born with the moral sense left out." "yes, i suppose so," said she, wearily. "if only you had lied to me--told me the one lie!" cried he. "then you wouldn't have destroyed my illusion. you wouldn't have killed my love." she grew deathly white; that was all. "i don't mean that i don't love you still," he hurried on. "but not in the same way. that's killed forever." "are there different ways of loving?" she asked. "how can i give you the love of respect and trust--now?" "don't you trust me--any more?" "i couldn't. i simply couldn't. it was hard enough before on account of your birth. but now---- trust a woman who had been a--a--i can't speak the word. trust you? you don't understand a man." "no, i don't." she looked round drearily. everything in ruins. alone again. outcast. nowhere to go but the streets--the life that seemed the only one for such as she. "i don't understand people at all. . . . do you want me to go?" she had risen as she asked this. he was beside her instantly. "go!" he cried. "why i couldn't get along without you." "then you love me as i love you," said she, putting her arms round him. "and that's all i want. i don't want what you call respect. i couldn't ever have hoped to get that, being born as i was--could i? anyhow, it doesn't seem to me to amount to much. i can't help it, rod--that's the way i feel. so just love me--do with me whatever you will, so long as it makes you happy. and i don't need to be trusted. i couldn't think of anybody but you." he felt sure of her again, reascended to the peak of the moral mountain. "you understand, we can never get married. we can never have any children." "i don't mind. i didn't expect that. we can _love_--can't we?" he took her face between his hands. "what an exquisite face it is," he said, "soft and smooth! and what clear, honest eyes! where is _it?_ where _is_ it? it _must_ be there!" "what, rod?" "the--the dirt." she did not wince, but there came into her young face a deeper pathos--and a wan, deprecating, pleading smile. she said: "maybe love has washed it away--if it was there. it never seemed to touch me--any more than the dirt when i had to clean up my room." "you mustn't talk that way. why you are perfectly calm! you don't cry or feel repentant. you don't seem to care." "it's so--so past--and dead. i feel as if it were another person. and it was, rod!" he shook his head, frowning. "let's not talk about it," he said harshly. "if only i could stop thinking about it!" she effaced herself as far as she could, living in the same room with him. she avoided the least show of the tenderness she felt, of the longing to have her wounds soothed. she lay awake the whole night, suffering, now and then timidly and softly caressing him when she was sure that he slept. in the morning she pretended to be asleep, let him call her twice before she showed that she was awake. a furtive glance at him confirmed the impression his voice had given. behind her pale, unrevealing face there was the agonized throb of an aching heart, but she had the confidence of her honest, utter love; he would surely soften, would surely forgive. as for herself--she had, through loving and feeling that she was loved, almost lost the sense of the unreality of past and present that made her feel quite detached and apart from the life she was leading, from the events in which she was taking part, from the persons most intimately associated with her. now that sense of isolation, of the mere spectator or the traveler gazing from the windows of the hurrying train--that sense returned. but she fought against the feeling it gave her. that evening they went to the theater--to see modjeska in "magda." susan had never been in a real theater. the only approach to a playhouse in sutherland was masonic hall. it had a sort of stage at one end where from time to time wandering players gave poor performances of poor plays or a minstrel show or a low vaudeville. but none of the best people of sutherland went--at least, none of the women. the notion was strong in sutherland that the theater was of the devil--not so strong as in the days before they began to tolerate amateur theatricals, but still vigorous enough to give susan now, as she sat in the big, brilliant auditorium, a pleasing sense that she, an outcast, was at last comfortably at home. usually the first sight of anything one has dreamed about is pitifully disappointing. neither nature nor life can build so splendidly as a vivid fancy. but susan, in some sort prepared for the shortcomings of the stage, was not disappointed. from rise to fall of curtain she was so fascinated, so absolutely absorbed, that she quite forgot her surroundings, even rod. and between the acts she could not talk for thinking. rod, deceived by her silence, was chagrined. he had been looking forward to a great happiness for himself in seeing her happy, and much profit from the study of the viewpoint of an absolutely fresh mind. it wasn't until they were leaving the theater that he got an inkling of the true state of affairs with her. "let's go to supper," said he. "if you don't mind," replied she, "i'd rather go home. i'm very tired." "you were sound asleep this morning. so you must have slept well," said he sarcastically. "it's the play," said she. "_why_ didn't you like it?" he asked, irritated. she looked at him in wonder. "like what? the play?" she drew a long breath. "i feel as if it had almost killed me." he understood when they were in their room and she could hardly undress before falling into a sleep so relaxed, so profound, that it made him a little uneasy. it seemed to him the exhaustion of a child worn out with the excitement of a spectacle. and her failure to go into ecstasies the next day led him further into the same error. "modjeska is very good as _magda_," said he, carelessly, as one talking without expecting to be understood. "but they say there's an italian woman--duse--who is the real thing." modjeska--duse--susan seemed indeed not to understand. "i hated her father," she said. "he didn't deserve to have such a wonderful daughter." spenser had begun to laugh with her first sentence. at the second he frowned, said bitterly: "i might have known! you get it all wrong. i suppose you sympathize with _magda_?" "i worshiped her," said susan, her voice low and tremulous with the intensity of her feeling. roderick laughed bitterly. "naturally," he said. "you can't understand." an obvious case, thought he. she was indeed one of those instances of absolute lack of moral sense. just as some people have the misfortune to be born without arms or without legs, so others are doomed to live bereft of a moral sense. a sweet disposition, a beautiful body, but no soul; not a stained soul, but no soul at all. and his whole mental attitude toward her changed; or, rather, it was changed by the iron compulsion of his prejudice. the only change in his physical attitude--that is, in his treatment of her--was in the direction of bolder passion. of complete casting aside of all the restraint a conventional respecter of conventional womanhood feels toward a woman whom he respects. so, naturally, susan, eager to love and to be loved, and easily confusing the not easily distinguished spiritual and physical, was reassured. once in a while a look or a phrase from him gave her vague uneasiness; but on the whole she felt that, in addition to clear conscience from straightforwardness, she had a further reason for being glad chance had forced upon her the alternative of telling him or lying. she did not inquire into the realities beneath the surface of their life--neither into what he thought of her, nor into what she thought of him--thought in the bottom of her heart. she continued to fight against, to ignore, her feeling of aloneness, her feeling of impending departure. she was aided in this by her anxiety about their finances. in his efforts to place his play he was spending what were for them large sums of money--treating this man and that to dinners, to suppers--inviting men to lunch with him at expensive broadway restaurants. she assumed that all this was necessary; he said so, and he must know. he was equally open-handed when they were alone, insisting on ordering the more expensive dishes, on having suppers they really did not need and drink which she knew she would be better off without--and, she suspected, he also. it simply was not in him, she saw, to be careful about money. she liked it, as a trait, for to her as to all the young and the unthinking carelessness about money seems a sure, perhaps the surest, sign of generosity--when in fact the two qualities are in no way related. character is not a collection of ignorant impulses but a solidly woven fabric of deliberate purposes. carelessness about anything most often indicates a tendency to carelessness about everything. she admired his openhanded way of scattering; she wouldn't have admired it in herself, would have thought it dishonest and selfish. but rod was different. _he_ had the "artistic temperament," while she was a commonplace nobody, who ought to be--and was--grateful to him for allowing her to stay on and for making such use of her as he saw fit. still, even as she admired, she saw danger, grave danger, a disturbingly short distance ahead. he described to her the difficulties he was having in getting to managers, in having his play read, and the absurdity of the reasons given for turning it down. he made light of all these; the next manager would see, would give him a big advance, would put the play on--and then, easy street! but experience had already killed what little optimism there was in her temperament--and there had not been much, because george warham was a successful man in his line, and successful men do not create or permit optimistic atmosphere even in their houses. nor had she forgotten burlingham's lectures on the subject with illustrations from his own spoiled career; she understood it all now--and everything else he had given her to store up in her memory that retained everything. with that philippic against optimism in mind, she felt what spenser was rushing toward. she made such inquiries about work for herself as her inexperience and limited opportunities permitted. she asked, she begged him, to let her try to get a place. he angrily ordered her to put any such notion out of her head. after a time she nerved herself again to speak. then he frankly showed her why he was refusing. "no," said he peremptorily, "i couldn't trust you in those temptations. you must stay where i can guard you." a woman who had deliberately taken to the streets--why, she thought nothing of virtue; she would be having lovers with the utmost indifference; and while she was not a liar yet--"at least, i think not"--how long would that last? with virtue gone, virtue the foundation of woman's character--the rest could no more stand than a house set on sand. "as long as you want me to love you, you've got to stay with me," he declared. "if you persist, i'll know you're simply looking for a chance to go back to your old ways." and though she continued to think and cautiously to inquire about work she said no more to him. she spent not a penny, discouraged him from throwing money away--as much as she could without irritating him--and waited for the cataclysm. waited not in gloom and tears but as normal healthy youth awaits any adversity not definitely scheduled for an hour close at hand. it would be far indeed from the truth to picture susan as ever for long a melancholy figure to the eye or even wholly melancholy within. her intelligence and her too sympathetic heart were together a strong force for sadness in her life, as they cannot but be in any life. in this world, to understand and to sympathize is to be saddened. but there was in her a force stronger than either or both. she had superb health. it made her beautiful, strong body happy; and that physical happiness brought her up quickly out of any depths--made her gay in spite of herself, caused her to enjoy even when she felt that it was "almost like hard-heartedness to be happy." she loved the sun and in this city where the sun shone almost all the days, sparkling gloriously upon the tiny salt particles filling the air and making it delicious to breathe and upon the skin--in this city of the sun as she called it, she was gay even when she was heavy-hearted. thus, she was no repellent, aggravating companion to rod as she awaited the cataclysm. it came in the third week. he spent the entire day away from her, toward midnight he returned, flushed with liquor. she had gone to bed. "get up and dress," said he with an irritability toward her which she had no difficulty in seeing was really directed at himself. "i'm hungry--and thirsty. we're going out for some supper." "come kiss me first," said she, stretching out her arms. several times this device had shifted his purpose from spending money on the needless and expensive suppers. he laughed. "not a kiss. we're going to have one final blow-out. i start to work tomorrow. i've taken a place on the _herald_--on space, guaranty of twenty-five a week, good chance to average fifty or sixty." he said this hurriedly, carelessly, gayly--guiltily. she showed then and there what a surpassing wise young woman she was, for she did not exclaim or remind him of his high resolve to do or die as a playwright. "i'll be ready in a minute," was all she said. she dressed swiftly, he lounging on the sofa and watching her. he loved to watch her dress, she did it so gracefully, and the motions brought out latent charms of her supple figure. "you're not so sure-fingered tonight as usual," said he. "i never saw you make so many blunders--and you've got one stocking on wrong side out." she smiled into the glass at him. "the skirt'll cover that. i guess i was sleepy." "never saw your eyes more wide-awake. what're you thinking about?" "about supper," declared she. "i'm hungry. i didn't feel like eating alone." "i can't be here always," said he crossly--and she knew he was suspecting what she really must be thinking. "i wasn't complaining," replied she sweetly. "you know i understand about business." "yes, i know," said he, with his air of generosity that always made her feel grateful. "i always feel perfectly free about you." "i should say!" laughed she. "you know i don't care what happens so long as you succeed." since their talk in broadway that first evening in new york she had instinctively never said "we." when they were at the table at rector's and he had taken a few more drinks, he became voluble and plausible on the subject of the trifling importance of his setback as a playwright. it was the worst possible time of year; the managers were stocked up; his play would have to be rewritten to suit some particular star; a place on a newspaper, especially such an influential paper as the _herald_, would be of use to him in interesting managers. she listened and looked convinced, and strove to convince herself that she believed. but there was no gray in her eyes, only the deepest hue of violets. next day they took a suite of two rooms and a bath in a pretentious old house in west forty-fourth street near long acre square. she insisted that she preferred another much sunnier and quieter suite with no bath but only a stationary washstand; it was to be had for ten dollars a week. but he laughed at her as too economical in her ideas, and decided for the eighteen-dollar rooms. also he went with her to buy clothes, made her spend nearly a hundred dollars where she would have spent less than twenty-five. "i prefer to make most of my things," declared she. "and i've all the time in the world." he would not have it. in her leisure time she must read and amuse herself and keep herself up to the mark, especially physically. "i'm proud of your looks," said he. "they belong to me, don't they? well, take care of my property, miss." she looked at him vaguely--a look of distance, of parting, of pain. then she flung herself into his arms with a hysterical cry--and shut her eyes tight against the beckoning figure calling her away. "no! no!" she murmured. "i belong here--_here!_" "what are you saying?" he asked. "nothing--nothing," she replied. chapter xxv at the hotel they had been mr. and mrs. spenser. when they moved, he tried to devise some way round this; but it was necessary that they have his address at the office, and mrs. pershall with the glistening old-fashioned false teeth who kept the furnished-room house was not one in whose withered bosom it would be wise to raise a suspicion as to respectability. only in a strenuously respectable house would he live; in the other sort, what might not untrustworthy susan be up to? so mr. and mrs. spenser they remained, and the truth was suspected by only a few of their acquaintances, was known by two or three of his intimates whom he told in those bursts of confidence to which voluble, careless men are given--and for which they in resolute self-excuse unjustly blame strong drink. one of his favorite remarks to her--sometimes made laughingly, again ironically, again angrily, again insultingly, was in this strain: "your face is demure enough. but you look too damned attractive about those beautiful feet of yours to be respectable at heart--and trustable." that matter of her untrustworthiness had become a fixed idea with him. the more he concentrated upon her physical loveliness, the more he revolved the dangers, the possibilities of unfaithfulness; for a physical infatuation is always jealous. his work on the _herald_ made close guarding out of the question. the best he could do was to pop in unexpectedly upon her from time to time, to rummage through her belongings, to check up her statements as to her goings and comings by questioning the servants and, most important of all, each day to put her through searching and skillfully planned cross-examination. she had to tell him everything she did--every little thing--and he calculated the time, to make sure she had not found half an hour or so in which to deceive him. if she had sewed, he must look at the sewing; if she had read, he must know how many pages and must hear a summary of what those pages contained. as she would not and could not deceive him in any matter, however small, she was compelled to give over a plan quietly to look for work and to fit herself for some occupation that would pay a living wage--if there were such for a beginning woman worker. at first he was covert in this detective work, being ashamed of his own suspicions. but as he drank, as he associated again with the same sort of people who had wasted his time in cincinnati, he rapidly became franker and more inquisitorial. and she dreaded to see the look she knew would come into his eyes, the cruel tightening of his mouth, if in her confusion and eagerness she should happen not instantly to satisfy the doubt behind each question. he tormented her; he tormented himself. she suffered from humiliation; but she suffered more because she saw how his suspicions were torturing him. and in her humility and helplessness and inexperience, she felt no sense of right to resist, no impulse to resist. and she forced herself to look on his spasms of jealousy as the occasional storms which occur even in the best climates. she reminded herself that she was secure of his love, secure in his love; and in her sad mood she reproached herself for not being content when at bottom everything was all right. after what she had been through, to be sad because the man she loved loved her too well! it was absurd, ungrateful. he pried into every nook and corner of her being with that ingenious and tireless persistence human beings reserve for searches for what they do not wish to find. at last he contrived to find, or to imagine he had found, something that justified his labors and vindicated his disbelief in her. they were walking in fifth avenue one afternoon, at the hour when there is the greatest press of equipages whose expensively and showily dressed occupants are industriously engaged in the occupation of imagining they are doing something when in fact they are doing nothing. what a world! what a grotesque confusing of motion and progress! what fantastic delusions that one is busy when one is merely occupied! they were between forty-sixth street and forty-seventh, on the west side, when a small victoria drew up at the curb and a woman descended and crossed the sidewalk before them to look at the display in a milliner's window. susan gave her the swift, seeing glance which one woman always gives another--the glance of competitors at each other's offerings. instead of glancing away, susan stopped short and gazed. forgetting rod, she herself went up to the millinery display that she might have a fuller view of the woman who had fascinated her. "what's the matter?" cried spenser. "come on. you don't want any of those hats." but susan insisted that she must see, made him linger until the woman returned to her carriage and drove away. she said to rod: "did you see her?" "yes. rather pretty--nothing to scream about." "but her _style!_" cried susan. "oh, she was nicely dressed--in a quiet way. you'll see thousands a lot more exciting after you've been about in this town a while." "i've seen scores of beautifully dressed women here--and in cincinnati, too," replied susan. "but that woman--she was _perfect_. and that's a thing i've never seen before." "i'm glad you have such quiet tastes--quiet and inexpensive." "inexpensive!" exclaimed susan. "i don't dare think how much that woman's clothes cost. you only glanced at her, rod, you didn't _look_. if you had, you'd have seen. everything she wore was just right." susan's eyes were brilliant. "oh, it was wonderful! the colors--the fit--the style--the making--every big and little thing. she was a work of art, rod! that's the first woman i've seen in my life that i through and through envied." rod's look was interested now. "you like that sort of thing a lot?" he inquired with affected carelessness. "every woman does," replied she, unsuspicious. "but i care--well, not for merely fine clothes. but for the--the kind that show what sort of person is in them." she sighed. "i wonder if i'll ever learn--and have money enough to carry out. it'll take so much--so much!" she laughed. "i've got terribly extravagant ideas. but don't be alarmed--i keep them chained up." he was eying her unpleasantly. suddenly she became confused. he thought it was because she was seeing and understanding his look and was frightened at his having caught her at last. in fact, it was because it all at once struck her that what she had innocently and carelessly said sounded like a hint or a reproach to him. he sneered: "so you're crazy about finery--eh?" "oh, rod!" she cried. "you know i didn't mean it that way. i long for and dream about a whole lot of beautiful things, but nothing else in the world's in the same class with--with what we've got." "you needn't try to excuse yourself," said he in a tone that silenced her. she wished she had not seen the woman who had thus put a cloud over their afternoon's happiness. but long after she had forgotten his queerness about what she said, she continued to remember that "perfect" woman--to see every detail of her exquisite toilet, so rare in a world where expensive-looking finery is regarded as the chief factor in the art of dress. how much she would have to learn before she could hope to dress like that!--learn not merely about dress but about the whole artistic side of life. for that woman had happened to cross susan's vision at just the right moment--in development and in mood--to reveal to her clearly a world into which she had never penetrated--a world of which she had vaguely dreamed as she read novels of life in the lands beyond the seas, the life of palaces and pictures and statuary, of opera and theater, of equipages and servants and food and clothing of rare quality. she had rather thought such a life did not exist outside of novels and dreams. what she had seen of new york--the profuse, the gigantic but also the undiscriminating--had tended to strengthen the suspicion. but this woman proved her mistaken. our great forward strides are made unconsciously, are the results of apparently trivial, often unnoted impulses. susan, like all our race, had always had vague secret dreams of ambition--so vague thus far that she never thought of them as impelling purposes in her life. her first long forward stride toward changing these dreams from the vague to the definite was when rod, before her on the horse on the way to brooksburg, talked over his shoulder to her of the stage and made her feel that it was the life for her, the only life open to her where a woman could hope to be judged as human being instead of as mere instrument of sex. her second long forward movement toward sharply defined ambition dated from the sight of the woman of the milliner's window--the woman who epitomized to susan the whole art side of life that always gives its highest expression in some personal achievement--the perfect toilet, the perfect painting or sculpture, the perfect novel or play. but rod saw in her enthusiasm only evidence of a concealed longing for the money to indulge extravagant whims. with his narrowing interest in women--narrowed now almost to sex--his contempt for them as to their minds and their hearts was so far advancing that he hardly took the trouble to veil it with remnants of courtesy. if susan had clearly understood--even if she had let herself understand what her increasing knowledge might have enabled her to understand--she would have hated him in spite of the hold gratitude and habit had given him upon her loyal nature--and despite the fact that she had, as far as she could see, no alternative to living with him but the tenements or the streets. one day in midsummer she chanced to go into the hotel astor to buy a magazine. as she had not been there before she made a wrong turning and was forced to cross one of the restaurants. in a far corner, half hidden by a group of palms, she saw rod at a small table with a strikingly pretty woman whose expression and dress and manner most energetically proclaimed the actress. the woman was leaning toward him, was touching his hand and looking into his eyes with that show of enthusiasm which raises doubts of sincerity in an experienced man and sets him to keeping an eye or a hand--or both--upon his money. real emotion, even a professional expert at display of emotion, is rarely so adept at exhibiting itself. it may have been jealousy that guided her to this swift judgment upon the character of the emotion correctly and charmingly expressing itself. if so, jealousy was for once a trustworthy guide. she turned swiftly and escaped unseen. the idea of trapping him, of confronting him, never occurred to her. she felt ashamed and self-reproachful that she had seen. instead of the anger that fires a vain woman, whether she cares about a man or not, there came a profound humiliation. she had in some way fallen short; she had not given him all he needed; it must be that she hadn't it to give, since she had given him all she had. he must not know--he must not! for if he knew he might dislike her, might leave her--and she dared not think what life would be without him, her only source of companionship and affection, her only means of support. she was puzzled that her discovery, not of his treachery--he had so broken her spirit with his suspicions and his insulting questions that she did not regard herself as of the rank and dignity that has the right to exact fidelity--but of his no longer caring enough to be content with her alone, had not stunned her with amazement. she did not realize how completely the instinct that he was estranged from her had prepared her for the thing that always accompanies estrangement. between the perfect accord, that is, the never realized ideal for a man and a woman living together, and the intolerable discord that means complete repulse there is a vast range of states of feeling imperceptibly shading into each other. most couples constantly move along this range, now toward the one extreme, now toward the other. as human kings are not given to self-analysis, and usually wander into grotesque error whenever they attempt it, no couple knows precisely where it is upon the range, until something crucial happens to compel them to know. susan and rod had begun as all couples begin--with an imaginary ideal accord based upon their ignorance of each other and their misunderstanding of what qualities they thought they understood in each other. the delusion of accord vanished that first evening in new york. what remained? what came in the place? they knew no more about that than does the next couple. they were simply "living along." a crisis, drawing them close together or flinging them forever apart or forcing them to live together, he frankly as keeper and she frankly as kept, might come any day, any hour. again it might never come. after a few weeks the matter that had been out of her mind accidentally and indirectly came to the surface in a chance remark. she said: "sometimes i half believe a man could be untrue to a woman, even though he loved her." she did not appreciate the bearings of her remark until it was spoken. with a sensation of terror lest the dreaded crisis might be about to burst, she felt his quick, nervous glance. she breathed freely again when she felt his reassurance and relief as she successfully withstood. "certainly," he said with elaborate carelessness. "men are a rotten, promiscuous lot. that's why it's necessary for a woman to be good and straight." all this time his cross-examination had grown in severity. evidently he was fearing that she might be having a recurrence of the moral disease which was fatal in womankind, though only mild indiscretion in a man, if not positively a virtue, an evidence of possessing a normal masculine nature. her mind began curiously--sadly--to revolve the occasional presents--of money, of books, of things to wear--which he gave, always quite unexpectedly. at first unconsciously, but soon consciously, she began to associate these gifts, given always in an embarrassed, shamefaced way, with certain small but significant indications of his having strayed. and it was not long before she understood; she was receiving his expiations for his indiscretions. like an honest man and a loyal--masculinely loyal--lover he was squaring accounts. she never read the books she owed to these twinges; it was thus that she got her aversion to thackeray--one of his "expiations" was a set of thackeray. the things to wear she contrived never to use. the conscience money she either spent upon him or put back into his pocket a little at a time, sure that he, the most careless of men about money, would never detect her. his work forced him to keep irregular hours; thus she could pretend to herself that his absences were certainly because of office duty. still, whenever he was gone overnight, she became unhappy--not the crying kind of unhappiness; to that she was little given--but the kind that lies awake and aches and with morbid vivid fancy paints the scenes suspicion suggests, and stares at them not in anger but in despair. she was always urging herself to content herself with what she was getting. she recalled and lived again the things she had forgotten while roderick was wholly hers--the penalties of the birth brand of shame--her wedding night--the miseries of the last period of her wanderings with burlingham--her tenement days--the dirt, the nakedness, the brutal degradation, the vermin, the savage cold. and the instant he returned, no matter how low-spirited she had been, she was at once gay, often deliriously gay--until soon his awakened suspicion as to what she had been up to in his absence quieted her. there was little forcing or pretense in this gayety; it bubbled and sparkled from the strong swift current of her healthy passionate young life which, suspended in the icy clutch of fear when he was away from her, flowed as freely as the brooks in spring as soon as she realized that she still had him. did she really love him? she believed she did. was she right? love is of many degrees--and kinds. and strange and confused beyond untangling is the mixture of motives and ideas in the mind of any human being as to any other being with whom his or her relations are many sided. anyone who had not been roughly seized by destiny and forced to fight desperately weaponless might have found it difficult to understand how this intelligent, high-spirited girl could be so reasonable--coarsely practical, many people would have said. a brave soul--truly brave with the unconscious courage that lives heroically without any taint of heroics--such a soul learns to accept the facts of life, to make the best of things, to be grateful for whatever sunshine may be and not to shriek and gesticulate at storm. suffering had given this sapling of a girl the strong fiber that enables a tree to push majestically up toward the open sky. because she did not cry out was no sign that she was not hurt; and because she did not wither and die of her wounds was only proof of her strength of soul. the weak wail and the weak succumb; the strong persist--and a world of wailers and weaklings calls them hard, insensible, coarse. spenser was fond of exhibiting to his men friends--to some of them--this treasure to which he always returned the more enamoured for his vagary and its opportunity of comparison. women he would not permit. in general, he held that all women, the respectable no less than the other kind, put mischief in each other's heads and egged each other on to carry out the mischief already there in embryo. in particular, he would have felt that he was committing a gross breach of the proprieties, not to say the decencies, had he introduced a woman of susan's origin, history and present status to the wives and sisters of his friends; and, for reasons which it was not necessary even to pretend to conceal from her, he forbade her having anything to do with the kinds of woman who would not have minded, had they known all about her. thus, her only acquaintances, her only associates, were certain carefully selected men. he asked to dinner or to the theater or to supper at jack's or rector's only such men as he could trust. and trustworthy meant physically unattractive. having small and dwindling belief in the mentality of women, and no belief whatever in mentality as a force in the relations of the sexes, he was satisfied to have about her any man, however clever, provided he was absolutely devoid of physical charm. the friend who came oftenest was drumley, an editorial writer who had been his chum at college and had got him the place on the _herald_. drumley he would have trusted alone with her on a desert island; for several reasons, all of his personal convenience, it pleased him that susan liked drumley and was glad of his company, no matter how often he came or how long he stayed. drumley was an emaciated kentucky giant with grotesquely sloping shoulders which not all the ingenious padding of his tailor could appreciably mitigate. his spare legs were bowed in the calves. his skin looked rough and tough, like sandpaper and emery board. the thought of touching his face gave one the same sensation as a too deeply cut nail. his neck was thin and long, and he wore a low collar--through that interesting passion of the vain for seeing a defect in themselves as a charm and calling attention to it. the lower part of his sallow face suggested weakness--the weakness so often seen in the faces of professional men, and explaining why they chose passive instead of active careers. his forehead was really fine, but the development of the rest of the cranium above the protuberant little ears was not altogether satisfying to a claim of mental powers. drumley was a good sort--not so much through positive virtue as through the timidity which too often accounts for goodness, that is, for the meek conformity which passes as goodness. he was an insatiable reader, had incredible stores of knowledge; and as he had a large vocabulary and a ready speech he could dole out of those reservoirs an agreeable treacle of commonplace philosophy or comment--thus he had an ideal equipment for editorial writing. he was absolutely without physical magnetism. the most he could ever expect from any woman was respect; and that woman would have had to be foolish enough not to realize that there is as abysmal a difference between knowledge and mentality as there is between reputation and character. susan liked him because he knew so much. she had developed still further her innate passion for educating herself. she now wanted to know all about everything. he told her what to read, set her in the way to discovering and acquiring the art of reading--an art he was himself capable of acquiring only in its rudiments--an art the existence of which is entirely unsuspected by most persons who regard themselves and are regarded as readers. he knew the histories and biographies that are most amusing and least shallow and mendacious. he instructed her in the great playwrights and novelists and poets, and gave--as his own--the reasons for their greatness assigned by the world's foremost critical writers. he showed her what scientific books to read--those that do not bore and do not hide the simple fascinating facts about the universe under pretentious, college-professor phraseology. he was a pedant, but his pedantry was disguised, therefore mitigated by his having associated with men of the world instead of with the pale and pompous capons of the student's closet. his favorite topic was beauty and ugliness--and his abhorrence for anyone who was not good to look at. as he talked this subject, his hearers were nervous and embarrassed. he was a drastic cure for physical vanity. if this man could so far deceive himself that he thought himself handsome, who in all the world could be sure he or she was not the victim of the same incredible delusion? it was this hallucination of physical beauty that caused rod to regard him as the safest of the safe. for it made him pitiful and ridiculous. at first he came only with spenser. afterward, spenser used to send him to dine with susan and to spend the evenings with her when he himself had to be--or wished to be elsewhere. when she was with drumley he knew she was not "up to any of her old tricks." drumley fell in love with her; but, as in his experience the female sex was coldly chaste, he never developed even the slight hope necessary to start in a man's mind the idea of treachery to his friend about a woman. whenever drumley heard that a woman other than the brazenly out and out disreputables was "loose" or was inclined that way, he indignantly denied it as a libel upon the empedestaled sex. if proofs beyond dispute were furnished, he raved against the man with all the venom of the unsuccessful hating the successful for their success. he had been sought of women, of course, for he had a comfortable and secure position and money put by. but the serious women who had set snares for him for the sake of a home had not attracted him; as for the better looking and livelier women who had come a-courting with alimony in view, they had unwisely chosen the method of approach that caused him to set them down as nothing but professional loose characters. thus his high ideal of feminine beauty and his lofty notion of his own deserts, on the one hand, and his reverence for womanly propriety, on the other hand, had kept his charms and his income unshared. toward the end of spenser's first year on the _herald_--it was early summer--he fell into a melancholy so profound and so prolonged that susan became alarmed. she was used to his having those fits of the blues that are a part of the nervous, morbidly sensitive nature and in the unhealthfulness of an irregular and dissipated life recur at brief intervals. he spent more and more time with her, became as ardent as in their first days together, with an added desperation of passionate clinging that touched her to the depths. she had early learned to ignore his moods, to avoid sympathy which aggravates, and to meet his blues with a vigorous counterirritant of liveliness. after watching the course of this acute attack for more than a month, she decided that at the first opportunity she would try to find out from drumley what the cause was. perhaps she could cure him if she were not working in the dark. one june evening drumley came to take her to dinner at the casino in central park. she hesitated. she still liked drumley's mind; but latterly he had fallen into the way of gazing furtively, with a repulsive tremulousness of his loose eyelids, at her form and at her ankles--especially at her ankles--especially at her ankles. this furtive debauch gave her a shivery sense of intrusion. she distinctly liked the candid, even the not too coarse, glances of the usual man. but not this shy peeping. however, as there were books she particularly wished to talk about with him, she accepted. it was an excursion of which she was fond. they strolled along seventh avenue to the park, entered and followed the lovely walk, quiet and green and odorous, to the mall. they sauntered in the fading light up the broad mall, with its roof of boughs of majestic trees, with its pale blue vistas of well-kept lawns. at the steps leading to the casino they paused to delight in the profusely blooming wistaria and to gaze away northward into and over what seemed an endless forest with towers and cupolas of castle and fortress and cathedral rising serene and graceful here and there above the sea of green. there was the sound of tinkling fountains, the musical chink-chink of harness chains of elegant equipages; on the mall hundreds of children were playing furiously, to enjoy to the uttermost the last few moments before being snatched away to bed--and the birds were in the same hysterical state as they got ready for their evening song. the air was saturated with the fresh odors of spring and early summer flowers. susan, walking beside the homely drumley, was a charming and stylish figure of girlish womanhood. the year and three months in new york had wrought the same transformations in her that are so noticeable whenever an intelligent and observant woman with taste for the luxuries is dipped in the magic of city life. she had grown, was now perhaps a shade above the medium height for women, looked even taller because of the slenderness of her arms, of her neck, of the lines of her figure. there was a deeper melancholy in her violet-gray eyes. experience had increased the allure of her wide, beautifully curved mouth. they took a table under the trees, with beds of blooming flowers on either hand. drumley ordered the sort of dinner she liked, and a bottle of champagne and a bottle of fine burgundy to make his favorite drink--champagne and burgundy, half and half. he was running to poetry that evening--keats and swinburne. finally, after some hesitation, he produced a poem by dowson--"i ran across it today. it's the only thing of his worth while, i believe--and it's so fine that swinburne must have been sore when he read it because he hadn't thought to write it himself. its moral tone is not high, but it's so beautiful, mrs. susan, that i'll venture to show it to you. it comes nearer to expressing what men mean by the man sort of constancy than anything i ever read. listen to this: "i cried for madder music and for stronger wine, but when the feast is finished, and the lamps expire, then falls thy shadow, cynara!--the night is thine; and i am desolate and sick of an old passion, yea, hungry for the lips of my desire; i have been faithful to thee, cynara, in my fashion." susan took the paper, read the four stanzas several times, handed it back to him without a word. "don't you think it fine?" asked he, a little uneasily--he was always uneasy with a woman when the conversation touched the relations of the sexes--uneasy lest he might say or might have said something to send a shiver through her delicate modesty. "fine," susan echoed absently. "and true. . . . i suppose it is the best a woman can expect--to be the one he returns to. and--isn't that enough?" "you are very different from any woman i ever met," said drumley. "very different from what you were last fall--wonderfully different. but you were different then, too." "i'd have been a strange sort of person if it weren't so. i've led a different life. i've learned--because i've had to learn." "you've been through a great deal--suffered a great deal for one of your age?" susan shrugged her shoulders slightly. she had her impulses to confide, but she had yet to meet the person who seriously tempted her to yield to them. not even rod; no, least of all rod. "you are--happy?" "happy--and more. i'm content." the reply was the truth, as she saw the truth. perhaps it was also the absolute truth; for when a woman has the best she has ever actually possessed, and when she knows there is nowhere else on earth for her, she is likely to be content. their destiny of subordination has made philosophers of women. drumley seemed to be debating how to disclose something he had in mind. but after several glances at the sweet, delicate face of the girl, he gave it over. in the subdued light from the shaded candles on their table, she looked more child-like than he had ever seen. perhaps her big pale-blue hat and graceful pale-blue summer dress had something to do with it, also. "how old are you?" he asked abruptly. "nearly nineteen." "i feel like saying, 'so much!'--and also 'so little!' how long have you been married?" "why all these questions?" demanded she, smiling. he colored with embarrassment. "i didn't mean to be impertinent," said he. "it isn't impertinence--is it?--to ask a woman how long she's been married." but she did not go on to tell him; instead, she pretended to have her attention distracted by a very old man and a very young girl behaving in most lover-like fashion, the girl outdoing the man in enthusiastic determination to convince. she was elegantly and badly dressed in new clothes--and she seemed as new to that kind of clothes as those particular clothes were new to her. after dinner they walked down through the park by the way they had come; it did not look like the same scene now, with the moonlight upon it, with soft shadows everywhere and in every shadow a pair of lovers. they had nearly reached the entrance when drumley said: "let's sit on this bench here. i want to have a serious talk with you." susan seated herself and waited. he lit a cigar with the deliberation of one who is striving to gain time. the bench happened to be one of those that are divided by iron arms into individual seats. he sat with a compartment between them. the moonbeams struck across his profile as he turned it toward her; they shone full upon her face. he looked, hastily glanced away. with a gruffness as if the evening mist had got into his throat he said: "let's take another bench." "why?" objected she. "i like this beautiful light." he rose. "please let me have my way." and he led her to a bench across which a tree threw a deep shadow; as they sat there, neither could see the other's face except in dimmest outline. after a brief silence he began: "you love rod--don't you?" she laughed happily. "above everything on earth?" "or in heaven." "you'd do anything to have him succeed?" "no one could prevent his succeeding. he's got it in him. it's bound to come out." "so i'd have said--until a year ago--that is, about a year ago." as her face turned quickly toward him, he turned profile to her. "what do you mean?" said she, quickly, almost imperiously. "yes--i mean _you_," replied he. "you mean you think i'm hindering him?" when drumley's voice finally came, it was funereally solemn. "you are dragging him down. you are killing his ambition." "you don't understand," she protested with painful expression. "if you did, you wouldn't say that." "you mean because he is not true to you?" "isn't he?" said she, loyally trying to pretend surprise. "if that's so, you've no right to tell me--you, his friend. if it isn't, you----" "in either case i'd be beneath contempt--unless i knew that you knew already. oh, i've known a long time that you knew--ever since the night you looked away when he absent-mindedly pulled a woman's veil and gloves out of his pocket. i've watched you since then, and i know." "you are a very dear friend, mr. drumley," said she. "but you must not talk of him to me." "i must," he replied. and he hastened to make the self-fooled hypocrite's familiar move to the safety of duty's skirts. "it would be a crime to keep silent." she rose. "i can't listen. it may be your duty to speak. it's my duty to refuse to hear." "he is overwhelmed with debt. he is about to lose his position. it is all because he is degraded--because he feels he is entangled in an intrigue with a woman he is ashamed to love--a woman he has struggled in vain to put out of his heart." susan, suddenly weak, had seated herself again. from his first words she had been prey to an internal struggle--her heart fighting against understanding things about her relations with rod, about his feeling toward her, which she had long been contriving to hide from herself. when drumley began she knew that the end of self-deception was at hand--if she let him speak. but the instant he had spoken, the struggle ended. if he had tried to stop she would have compelled him to go on. "that woman is you," he continued in the same solemn measured way. "rod will not marry you. he cannot leave you. and you are dragging him down. you are young. you don't know that passionate love is a man's worst enemy. it satisfies his ambition--why struggle when one already has attained the climax of desire? it saps his strength, takes from him the energy without which achievement is impossible. passion dies poisoned of its own sweets. but passionate love kills--at least, it kills the man. if you did not love him, i'd not be talking to you now. but you do love him. so i say, you are killing him. . . . don't think he has told me----" "i know he didn't," she interrupted curtly. "he does not whine." she hadn't a doubt of the truth of her loyal defense. and drumley could not have raised a doubt, even if she had been seeing the expression of his face. his long practice of the modern editorial art of clearness and brevity and compact statement had enabled him to put into those few sentences more than another might have been unable to express in hours of explanation and appeal. and the ideas were not new to her. rod had often talked them in a general way and she had thought much about them. until now she had never seen how they applied to rod and herself. but she was seeing and feeling it now so acutely that if she had tried to speak or to move she could not have done so. after a long pause, drumley said: "do you comprehend what i mean?" she was silent--so it was certain that she comprehended. "but you don't believe?. . . he began to borrow money almost immediately on his arrival here last summer. he has been borrowing ever since--from everybody and anybody. he owes now, as nearly as i can find out, upwards of three thousand dollars." susan made a slight but sharp movement. "you don't believe me?" "yes. go on." "he has it in him, i'm confident, to write plays--strong plays. does he ever write except ephemeral space stuff for the paper?" "no." "and he never will so long as he has you to go home to. he lives beyond his means because he will have you in comfortable surroundings and dressed to stimulate his passion. if he would marry you, it might be a little better--though still he would never amount to anything as long as his love lasted--the kind of love you inspire. but he will never marry you. i learned that from what i know of his ideas and from what i've observed as to your relations--not from anything he ever said about you." if susan had been of the suspicious temperament, or if she had been a few years older, the manner of this second protest might have set her to thinking how unlike drumley, the inexpert in matters of love and passion, it was to analyze thus and to form such judgments. and thence she might have gone on to consider that drumley's speeches sounded strangely like paraphrases of spenser's eloquent outbursts when he "got going." but she had not a suspicion. besides, her whole being was concentrated upon the idea drumley was trying to put into words. she asked: "why are you telling me?" "because i love him," replied drumley with feeling. "we're about the same age, but he's been like my son ever since we struck up a friendship in the first term of freshman year." "is that your only reason?" "on my honor." and so firmly did he believe it, he bore her scrutiny as she peered into his face through the dimness. she drew back. "yes," she said in a low voice, half to herself. "yes, i believe it is." there was silence for a long time, then she asked quietly: "what do you think i ought to do?" "leave him--if you love him," replied drumley. "what else can you do?. . . stay on and complete his ruin?" "and if i go--what?" "oh, you can do any one of many things. you can----" "i mean--what about him?" "he will be like a crazy man for a while. he'll make that a fresh excuse for keeping on as he's going now. then he'll brace up, and i'll be watching over him, and i'll put him to work in the right direction. he can't be saved, he can't even be kept afloat as long as you are with him, or within reach. with you gone out of his life--his strength will return, his self-respect can be roused. i've seen the same thing in other cases again and again. i could tell you any number of stories of----" "he does not care for me?" "in _one_ way, a great deal. but you're like drink, like a drug to him. it is strange that a woman such as you, devoted, single-hearted, utterly loving, should be an influence for bad. but it's true of wives also. the best wives are often the worst. the philosophers are right. a man needs tranquillity at home." "i understand," said she. "i understand--perfectly." and her voice was unemotional, as always when she was so deeply moved that she dared not release anything lest all should be released. she was like a seated statue. the moon had moved so that it shone upon her face. he was astonished by its placid calm. he had expected her to rave and weep, to protest and plead--before denouncing him and bidding him mind his own business. instead, she was making it clear that after all she did not care about roderick; probably she was wondering what would become of her, now that her love was ruined. well, wasn't it natural? wasn't it altogether to her credit--wasn't it additional proof that she was a fine pure woman? how could she have continued deeply to care for a man scandalously untrue, and drunk much of the time? certainly, it was in no way her fault that rod made her the object and the victim of the only kind of so-called love of which he was capable. no doubt one reason he was untrue to her was that she was too pure for his debauched fancy. thus reasoned drumley with that mingling of truth and error characteristic of those who speculate about matters of which they have small and unfixed experience. "about yourself," he proceeded. "i have a choice of professions for you--one with a company on the road--on the southern circuit--with good prospects of advancement. i know, from what i have seen of you, and from talks we have had, that you would do well on the stage. but the life might offend your sensibilities. i should hesitate to recommend it to a delicate, fine-fibered woman like you. the other position is a clerkship in a business office in philadelphia--with an increase as soon as you learn stenography and typewriting. it is respectable. it is sheltered. it doesn't offer anything brilliant. but except the stage and literature, nothing brilliant offers for a woman. literature is out of the question, i think--certainly for the present. the stage isn't really a place for a woman of lady-like instincts. so i should recommend the office position." she remained silent. "while my main purpose in talking to you," he continued, "was to try to save him, i can honestly say that it was hardly less my intention to save you. but for that, i'd not have had the courage to speak. he is on the way down. he's dragging you with him. what future have you with him? you would go on down and down, as low as he should sink and lower. you've completely merged yourself in him--which might do very well if you were his wife and a good influence in his life or a mere negation like most wives. but in the circumstances it means ruin to you. don't you see that?" "what did you say?" "i was talking about you--your future your----" "oh, i shall do well enough." she rose. "i must be going." her short, indifferent dismissal of what was his real object in speaking--though he did not permit himself to know it--cut him to the quick. he felt a sickening and to him inexplicable sense of defeat and disgrace. because he must talk to distract his mind from himself, he began afresh by saying: "you'll think it over?" "i am thinking it over. . . . i wonder that----" with the fingers of one hand she smoothed her glove on the fingers of the other--"i wonder that i didn't think of it long ago. i ought to have thought of it. i ought to have seen." "i can't tell you how i hate to have been the----" "please don't say any more," she requested in a tone that made it impossible for a man so timid as he to disobey. neither spoke until they were in fifty-ninth street; then he, unable to stand the strain of a silent walk of fifteen blocks, suggested that they take the car down. she assented. in the car the stronger light enabled him to see that she was pale in a way quite different from her usual clear, healthy pallor, that there was an unfamiliar look about her mouth and her eyes--a look of strain, of repression, of resolve. these signs and the contrast of her mute motionlessness with her usual vivacity of speech and expression and gesture made him uneasy. "i'd advise," said he, "that you reflect on it all carefully and consult with me before you do anything--if you think you ought to do anything." she made no reply. at the door of the house he had to reach for her hand, and her answer to his good night was a vague absent echo of the word. "i've only done what i saw was my duty," said he, appealingly. "yes, i suppose so. i must go in." "and you'll talk with me before you----" the door had closed behind her; she had not known he was speaking. when spenser came, about two hours later, and turned on the light in their bedroom, she was in the bed, apparently asleep. he stood staring with theatric self-consciousness at himself in the glass for several minutes, then sat down before the bureau and pulled out the third drawer--where he kept collars, ties, handkerchiefs, gloves and a pistol concealed under the handkerchiefs. with the awful solemnity of the youth who takes himself--and the theater--seriously he lifted the pistol, eyed it critically, turning it this way and that as if interested in the reflections of light from the bright cylinder and barrel at different angles. he laid it noiselessly back, covered it over with the handkerchiefs, sat with his fingers resting on the edge of the drawer. presently he moved uneasily, as a man--on the stage or in its amusing imitation called civilized life among the self-conscious classes--moves when he feels that someone is behind him in a "crucial moment." he slowly turned round. she had shifted her position so that her face was now toward him. but her eyes were closed and her face was tranquil. still, he hoped she had seen the little episode of the pistol, which he thought fine and impressive. with his arm on the back of the chair and supporting that resolute-looking chin of his, he stared at her face from under his thick eyebrows, so thick that although they were almost as fair as his hair they seemed dark. after a while her eyelids fluttered and lifted to disclose eyes that startled him, so intense, so sleepless were they. "kiss me," she said, in her usual sweet, tender way--a little shyness, much of passion's sparkle and allure. "kiss me." "i've often thought," said he, "what would i do if i should go smash, reach the end of my string? would i kill you before taking myself off? or would that be cowardly?" she had not a doubt that he meant this melodramatic twaddle. it did not seem twaddle or melodramatic to her--or, for that matter, to him. she clasped him more closely. "what's the matter, dear?" she asked, her head on his breast. "oh, i've had a row at the _herald_, and have quit. but i'll get another place tomorrow." "of course. i wish you'd fix up that play the way drumley suggested." "maybe i shall. we'll see." "anything else wrong?" "only the same old trouble. i love you too much. too damn much," he added in a tone not intended for her ears. "weak fool--that's what i am. weak fool. i've got _you_, anyhow. haven't i?" "yes," she said. "i'd do anything for you--anything." "as long as i keep my eyes on you," said he, half mockingly. "i'm weak, but you're weaker. aren't you?" "i guess so. i don't know." and she drew a long breath, nestled into his arms, and upon his breast, with her perfumed hair drowsing his senses. he soon slept; when he awoke, toward noon, he did not disturb her. he shaved and bathed and dressed, and was about to go out when she called him. "oh, i thought you were asleep," said he. "i can't wait for you to get breakfast. i must get a move on." "still blue?" "no, indeed." but his face was not convincing. "so long, pet." "aren't you going to kiss me good-by?" he laughed tenderly, yet in bitter self-mockery too. "and waste an hour or so? not much. what a siren you are!" she put her hand over her face quickly. "now, perhaps i can risk one kiss." he bent over her; his lips touched her hair. she stretched out her hand, laid it against his cheek. "dearest," she murmured. "i must go." "just a minute. no, don't look at me. turn your face so that i can see your profile--so!" she had turned his head with a hand that gently caressed as it pushed. "i like that view best. yes, you are strong and brave. you will succeed! no--i'll not keep you a minute." she kissed his hand, rested her head for an instant on his lap as he sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly flung herself to the far side of the bed, with her face toward the wall. "go to sleep again, lazy!" cried he. "i'll try to be home about dinner-time. see that you behave today! good lord, how hard it is to leave you! having you makes nothing else seem worth while. good-by!" and he was off. she started to a sitting posture, listened to the faint sound of his descending footsteps. she darted to the window, leaned out, watched him until he rounded the corner into broadway. then she dropped down with elbows on the window sill and hands pressing her cheeks; she stared unseeingly at the opposite house, at a gilt cage with a canary hopping and chirping within. and once more she thought all the thoughts that had filled her mind in the sleepless hours of that night and morning. her eyes shifted in color from pure gray to pure violet--back and forth, as emotion or thought dominated her mind. she made herself coffee in the french machine, heated the milk she brought every day from the dairy, drank her _café au lait_ slowly, reading the newspaper advertisements for "help wanted--female"--a habit she had formed when she first came to new york and had never altogether dropped. when she finished her coffee she took the scissors and cut out several of the demands for help. she bathed and dressed. she moved through the routine of life--precisely as we all do, whatever may be in our minds and hearts. she went out, crossed long acre and entered the shop of a dealer in women's cast-off clothes. she reappeared in the street presently with a fat, sloppy looking woman in black. she took her to the rooms, offered for sale her entire wardrobe except the dress she had on and one other, the simply trimmed sailor upon her head, the ties on her feet and one pair of boots and a few small articles. after long haggling the woman made a final price--ninety-five dollars for things, most of them almost new, which had cost upwards of seven hundred. susan accepted the offer; she knew she could do no better. the woman departed, returned with a porter and several huge sweets of wrapping paper. the two made three bundles of the purchases; the money was paid over; they and susan's wardrobe departed. next, susan packed in the traveling bag she had brought from cincinnati the between seasons dress of brown serge she had withheld, and some such collection of bare necessities as she had taken with her when she left george warham's. into the bag she put the pistol from under spenser's handkerchiefs in the third bureau drawer. when all was ready, she sent for the maid to straighten the rooms. while the maid was at work, she wrote this note: dearest--mr. drumley will tell you why i have gone. you will find some money under your handkerchiefs in the bureau. when you are on your feet again, i may come--if you want me. it won't be any use for you to look for me. i ought to have gone before, but i was selfish and blind. good-by, dear love--i wasn't so bad as you always suspected. i was true to you, and for the sake of what you have been to me and done for me i couldn't be so ungrateful as not to go. don't worry about me. i shall get on. and so will you. it's best for us both. good-by, dear heart--i was true to you. good-by. she sealed this note, addressed it, fastened it over the mantel in the sitting-room where they always put notes for each other. and after she had looked in each drawer and in the closet at all his clothing, and had kissed the pillow on which his head had lain, she took her bag and went. she had left for him the ninety-five dollars and also eleven dollars of the money she had in her purse. she took with her two five-dollar bills and a dollar and forty cents in change. the violet waned in her eyes, and in its stead came the gray of thought and action. ********the end of volume i******* susan lenox: her fall and rise by david graham phillips volume ii with a portrait of the author d. appleton and company new york london chapter i susan's impulse was toward the stage. it had become a definite ambition with her, the stronger because spenser's jealousy and suspicion had forced her to keep it a secret, to pretend to herself that she had no thought but going on indefinitely as his obedient and devoted mistress. the hardiest and best growths are the growths inward--where they have sun and air from without. she had been at the theater several times every week, and had studied the performances at a point of view very different from that of the audience. it was there to be amused; she was there to learn. spenser and such of his friends as he would let meet her talked plays and acting most of the time. he had forbidden her to have women friends. "men don't demoralize women; women demoralize each other," was one of his axioms. but such women as she had a bowing acquaintance with were all on the stage--in comic operas or musical farces. she was much alone; that meant many hours every day which could not but be spent by a mind like hers in reading and in thinking. only those who have observed the difference aloneness makes in mental development, where there is a good mind, can appreciate how rapidly, how broadly, susan expanded. she read plays more than any other kind of literature. she did not read them casually but was always thinking how they would act. she was soon making in imagination stage scenes out of dramatic chapters in novels as she read. more and more clearly the characters of play and novel took shape and substance before the eyes of her fancy. but the stage was clearly out of the question. while the idea of a stage career had been dominant, she had thought in other directions, also. every sunday, indeed almost every day, she found in the newspapers articles on the subject of work for women. "why do you waste time on that stuff?" said drumley, when he discovered her taste for it. "oh, a woman never can tell what may happen," replied she. "she'll never learn anything from those fool articles," answered he. "you ought to hear the people who get them up laughing about them. i see now why they are printed. it's good for circulation, catches the women--even women like you." however, she persisted in reading. but never did she find an article that contained a really practical suggestion--that is, one applying to the case of a woman who had to live on what she made at the start, who was without experience and without a family to help her. all around her had been women who were making their way; but few indeed of them--even of those regarded as successful--were getting along without outside aid of some kind. so when she read or thought or inquired about work for women, she was sometimes amused and oftener made unhappy by the truth as to the conditions, that when a common worker rises it is almost always by the helping hand of a man, and rarely indeed a generous hand--a painful and shameful truth which a society resolved at any cost to think well of itself fiercely conceals from itself and hypocritically lies about. she felt now that there was hope in only one direction--hope of occupation that would enable her to live in physical, moral and mental decency. she must find some employment where she could as decently as might be realize upon her physical assets. the stage would be best--but the stage was impossible, at least for the time. later on she would try for it; there was in her mind not a doubt of that, for unsuspected of any who knew her there lay, beneath her sweet and gentle exterior, beneath her appearance of having been created especially for love and laughter and sympathy, tenacity of purpose and daring of ambition that were--rarely--hinted at the surface in her moments of abstraction. however, just now the stage was impossible. spenser would find her immediately. she must go into another part of town, must work at something that touched his life at no point. she had often been told that her figure would be one of her chief assets as a player. and ready-made clothes fitted her with very slight alterations--showing that she had a model figure. the advertisements she had cut out were for cloak models. within an hour after she left forty-fourth street, she found at jeffries and jonas, in broadway a few doors below houston, a vacancy that had not yet been filled--though as a rule all the help needed was got from the throng of applicants waiting when the store opened. "come up to my office," said jeffries, who happened to be near the door as she entered. "we'll see how you shape up. we want something extra--something dainty and catchy." he was a short thick man, with flat feet, a flat face and an almost bald head. in his flat nostrils, in the hollows of his great forward bent ears and on the lobes were bunches of coarse, stiff gray hairs. his eyebrows bristled; his small, sly brown eyes twinkled with good nature and with sensuality. his skin had the pallor that suggests kidney trouble. his words issued from his thick mouth as if he were tasting each beforehand--and liked the flavor. he led susan into his private office, closed the door, took a tape measure from his desk. "now, my dear," said he, eyeing her form gluttonously, "we'll size you up--eh? you're exactly the build i like." and under the pretense of taking her measurements, he fumbled and felt, pinched and stroked every part of her person, laughing and chuckling the while. "my, but you are sweet! and so firm! what flesh! solid--solid! mighty healthy! you are a good girl--eh?" "i am a married woman." "but you've got no ring." "i've never worn a ring." "well--well! i believe that is one of the new wrinkles, but i don't approve. i'm an old-fashioned family man. let me see again. now, don't mind a poor old man like me, my dear. i've got a wife--the best woman in the world, and i've never been untrue to her. a look over the fence occasionally--but not an inch out of the pasture. don't stiffen yourself like that. i can't judge, when you do. not too much hips--neither sides nor back. fine! fine! and the thigh slender--yes--quite lovely, my dear. thick thighs spoil the hang of garments. yes--yes--a splendid figure. i'll bet the bosom is a corker--fine skin and nice ladylike size. you can have the place." "what does it pay?" she asked. "ten dollars, to start with. splendid wages. _i_ started on two fifty. but i forgot--you don't know the business?" "no--nothing about it," was her innocent, honest answer. "ah--well, then--nine dollars--eh?" susan hesitated. "you can make quite a neat little bunch on the outside--_you_ can. we cater only to the best trade, and the buyers who come to us are big easy spenders. but i'm supposed to know nothing about that. you'll find out from the other girls." he chuckled. "oh, it's a nice soft life except for a few weeks along at this part of the year--and again in winter. well--ten dollars, then." susan accepted. it was more than she had expected to get; it was less than she could hope to live on in new york in anything approaching the manner a person of any refinement or tastes or customs of comfort regards as merely decent. she must descend again to the tenements, must resume the fight against that physical degradation which sooner or later imposes--upon those _descending_ to it--a degradation of mind and heart deeper, more saturating, more putrefying than any that ever originated from within. not so long as her figure lasted was she the worse off for not knowing a trade. jeffries was telling the truth; she would be getting splendid wages, not merely for a beginner but for any woman of the working class. except in rare occasional instances wages and salaries for women were kept down below the standard of decency by woman's peculiar position--by such conditions as that most women took up work as a temporary makeshift or to piece out a family's earnings, and that almost any woman could supplement--and so many did supplement--their earnings at labor with as large or larger earnings in the stealthy shameful way. where was there a trade that would bring a girl ten dollars a week at the start? even if she were a semi-professional, a stenographer and typewriter, it would take expertness and long service to lift her up to such wages. thanks to her figure--to its chancing to please old jeffries' taste--she was better off than all but a few working women, than all but a few workingmen. she was of the labor aristocracy; and if she had been one of a family of workers she would have been counted an enviable favorite of fortune. unfortunately, she was alone unfortunately for herself, not at all from the standpoint of the tenement class she was now joining. among them she would be a person who could afford the luxuries of life as life reveals itself to the tenements. "tomorrow morning at seven o'clock," said jeffries. "you have lost your husband?" "yes." "i saw you'd had great grief. no insurance, i judge? well--you will find another--maybe a rich one. no--you'll not have to sleep alone long, my dear." and he patted her on the shoulder, gave her a parting fumble of shoulders and arms. she was able to muster a grateful smile; for she felt a rare kindness of heart under the familiar animalism to which good-looking, well-formed women who go about much unescorted soon grow accustomed. also, experience had taught her that, as things go with girls of the working class, his treatment was courteous, considerate, chivalrous almost. with men in absolute control of all kinds of work, with women stimulating the sex appetite by openly or covertly using their charms as female to assist them in the cruel struggle for existence--what was to be expected? her way to the elevator took her along aisles lined with tables, hidden under masses of cloaks, jackets, dresses and materials for making them. they exuded the odors of the factory--faint yet pungent odors that brought up before her visions of huge, badly ventilated rooms, where women aged or ageing swiftly were toiling hour after hour monotonously--spending half of each day in buying the right to eat and sleep unhealthily. the odors--or, rather, the visions they evoked--made her sick at heart. for the moment she came from under the spell of her peculiar trait--her power to do without whimper or vain gesture of revolt the inevitable thing, whatever it was. she paused to steady herself, half leaning against a lofty up-piling of winter cloaks. a girl, young at first glance, not nearly so young thereafter, suddenly appeared before her--a girl whose hair had the sheen of burnished brass and whose soft smooth skin was of that frog-belly whiteness which suggests an inheritance of some bleaching and blistering disease. she had small regular features, eyes that at once suggested looseness, good-natured yet mercenary too. she was dressed in the sleek tight-fitting trying-on robe of the professional model, and her figure was superb in its firm luxuriousness. "sick?" asked the girl with real kindliness. "no--only dizzy for the moment." "i suppose you've had a hard day." "it might have been easier," susan replied, attempting a smile. "it's no fun, looking for a job. but you've caught on?" "yes. he took me." "i made a bet with myself that he would when i saw you go in." the girl laughed agreeably. "he picked you for gideon." "what department is that?" the girl laughed again, with a cynical squinting of the eyes. "oh, gideon's our biggest customer. he buys for the largest house in chicago." "i'm looking for a place to live," said susan. "some place in this part of town." "how much do you want to spend?" "i'm to have ten a week. so i can't afford more than twelve or fourteen a month for rent, can i?" "if you happen to have to live on the ten," was the reply with a sly, merry smile. "it's all i've got." again the girl laughed, the good-humored mercenary eyes twinkling rakishly. "well--you can't get much for fourteen a month." "i don't care, so long as it's clean." "gee, you're reasonable, ain't you?" cried the girl. "clean! i pay fourteen a week, and all kinds of things come through the cracks from the other apartments. you must be a stranger to little old new york--bugtown, a lady friend of mine calls it. alone?" "yes." "um--" the girl shook her head dubiously. "rents are mighty steep in new york, and going up all the time. you see, the rich people that own the lands and houses here need a lot of money in their business. you've got either to take a room or part of one in with some tenement family, respectable but noisy and dirty and not at all refined, or else you've got to live in a house where everything goes. you want to live respectable, i judge?" "yes." "that's the way with me. do what you please, _i_ say, but for _god's sake_, don't make yourself _common!_ you'll want to be free to have your gentlemen friends come--and at the same time a room you'll not be ashamed for 'em to see on account of dirt and smells and common people around." "i shan't want to see anyone in my room." the young woman winced, then went on with hasty enthusiasm. "i knew you were refined the minute i looked at you. i think you might get a room in the house of a lady friend of mine--mrs. tucker, up in clinton place near university place--an elegant neighborhood--that is, the north side of the street. the south side's kind o' low, on account of dagoes having moved in there. they live like vermin--but then all tenement people do." "they've got to," said susan. "yes, that's a fact. ain't it awful? i'll write down the name and address of my lady friend. i'm miss mary hinkle." "my name is lorna sackville," said susan, in response to the expectant look of miss hinkle. "my, what a swell name! you've been sick, haven't you?" "no, i'm never sick." "me too. my mother taught me to stop eating as soon as i felt bad, and not to eat again till i was all right." "i do that, too," said susan. "is it good for the health?" "it starves the doctors. you've never worked before?" "oh, yes--i've worked in a factory." miss hinkle looked disappointed. then she gave susan a side glance of incredulity. "i'd never, a' thought it. but i can see you weren't brought up to that. i'll write the address." and she went back through the showroom, presently to reappear with a card which she gave susan. "you'll find mrs. tucker a perfect lady--too much a lady to get on. i tell her she'll go to ruin--and she will." susan thanked miss hinkle and departed. a few minutes' walk brought her to the old, high-stooped, brown-stone where mrs. tucker lived. the dents, scratches and old paint scales on the door, the dust-streaked windows, the slovenly hang of the imitation lace window curtains proclaimed the cheap middle-class lodging or boarding house of the humblest grade. respectable undoubtedly; for the fitfully prosperous offenders against laws and morals insist upon better accommodations. susan's heart sank. she saw that once more she was clinging at the edge of the precipice. and what hope was there that she would get back to firm ground? certainly not by "honest labor." back to the tenement! "yes, i'm on the way back," she said to herself. however, she pulled the loose bell-knob and was admitted to a dingy, dusty hallway by a maid so redolent of stale perspiration that it was noticeable even in the hall's strong saturation of smells of cheap cookery. the parlor furniture was rapidly going to pieces; the chromos and prints hung crazily awry; dust lay thick upon the center table, upon the chimney-piece, upon the picture frames, upon the carving in the rickety old chairs. only by standing did susan avoid service as a dust rag. it was typical of the profound discouragement that blights or blasts all but a small area of our modern civilization--a discouragement due in part to ignorance--but not at all to the cause usually assigned--to "natural shiftlessness." it is chiefly due to an unconscious instinctive feeling of the hopelessness of the average lot. while susan explained to mrs. tucker how she had come and what she could afford, she examined her with results far from disagreeable. one glance into that homely wrinkled face was enough to convince anyone of her goodness of heart--and to susan in those days of aloneness, of uncertainty, of the feeling of hopelessness, goodness of heart seemed the supreme charm. such a woman as a landlady, and a landlady in new york, was pathetically absurd. even to still rather simple-minded susan she seemed an invitation to the swindler, to the sponger with the hard-luck story, to the sinking who clutch about desperately and drag down with them everyone who permits them to get a hold. "i've only got one room," said mrs. tucker. "that's not any too nice. i did rather calculate to get five a week for it, but you are the kind i like to have in the house. so if you want it i'll let it to you for fourteen a month. and i do hope you'll pay as steady as you can. there's so many in such hard lines that i have a tough time with my rent. i've got to pay my rent, you know." "i'll go as soon as i can't pay," replied susan. the landlady's apologetic tone made her sick at heart, as a sensitive human being must ever feel in the presence of a fellow-being doomed to disaster. "thank you," said mrs. tucker gratefully. "i do wish----" she checked herself. "no, i don't mean that. they do the best they can--and i'll botch along somehow. i look at the bright side of things." the incurable optimism of the smile accompanying these words moved susan, abnormally bruised and tender of heart that morning, almost to tears. a woman with her own way to make, and always looking at the bright side! "how long have you had this house?" "only five months. my husband died a year ago. i had to give up our little business six months after his death. such a nice little stationery store, but i couldn't seem to refuse credit or to collect bills. then i came here. this looks like losing, too. but i'm sure i'll come out all right. the lord will provide, as the good book says. i don't have no trouble keeping the house full. only they don't seem to pay. you want to see your room?" she and susan ascended three flights to the top story--to a closet of a room at the back. the walls were newly and brightly papered. the sloping roof of the house made one wall a ceiling also, and in this two small windows were set. the furniture was a tiny bed, white and clean as to its linen, a table, two chairs, a small washstand with a little bowl and a less pitcher, a soap dish and a mug. along one wall ran a row of hooks. on the floor was an old and incredibly dirty carpet, mitigated by a strip of clean matting which ran from the door, between washstand and bed, to one of the windows. susan glanced round--a glance was enough to enable her to see all--all that was there, all that the things there implied. back to the tenement life! she shuddered. "it ain't much," said mrs. tucker. "but usually rooms like these rents for five a week." the sun had heated the roof scorching hot; the air of this room, immediately underneath, was like that of a cellar where a furnace is in full blast. but susan knew she was indeed in luck. "it's clean and nice here," said she to mrs. tucker, "and i'm much obliged to you for being so reasonable with me." and to clinch the bargain she then and there paid half a month's rent. "i'll give you the rest when my week at the store's up." "no hurry," said mrs. tucker who was handling the money and looking at it with glistening grateful eyes. "us poor folks oughtn't to be hard on each other--though, lord knows, if we was, i reckon we'd not be quite so poor. it's them that has the streak of hard in 'em what gets on. but the bible teaches us that's what to expect in a world of sin. i suppose you want to go now and have your trunk sent?" "this is all i've got," said susan, indicating her bag on the table. into mrs. tucker's face came a look of terror that made susan realize in an instant how hard-pressed she must be. it was the kind of look that comes into the eyes of the deer brought down by the dogs when it sees the hunter coming up. "but i've a good place," susan hastened to say. "i get ten a week. and as i told you before, when i can't pay i'll go right away." "i've lost so much in bad debts," explained the landlady humbly. "i don't seem to see which way to turn." then she brightened. "it'll all come out for the best. i work hard and i try to do right by everybody." "i'm sure it will," said susan believingly. often her confidence in the moral ideals trained into her from childhood had been sorely tried. but never had she permitted herself more than a hasty, ashamed doubt that the only way to get on was to work and to practice the golden rule. everyone who was prosperous attributed his prosperity to the steadfast following of that way; as for those who were not prosperous, they were either lazy or bad-hearted, or would have been even worse off had they been less faithful to the creed that was best policy as well as best for peace of mind and heart. in trying to be as inexpensive to spenser as she could contrive, and also because of her passion for improving herself, susan had explored far into the almost unknown art of living, on its shamefully neglected material side. she had cultivated the habit of spending much time about her purchases of every kind--had spent time intelligently in saving money intelligently. she had gone from shop to shop, comparing values and prices. she had studied quality in food and in clothing, and thus she had discovered what enormous sums are wasted through ignorance--wasted by poor even more lavishly than by rich or well-to-do, because the shops where the poor dealt had absolutely no check on their rapacity through the occasional canny customer. she had learned the fundamental truth of the material art of living; only when a good thing happens to be cheap is a cheap thing good. spenser, cross-examining her as to how she passed the days, found out about this education she was acquiring. it amused him. "a waste of time!" he used to say. "pay what they ask, and don't bother your head with such petty matters." he might have suspected and accused her of being stingy had not her generosity been about the most obvious and incessant trait of her character. she was now reduced to an income below what life can be decently maintained upon--the life of a city-dweller with normal tastes for cleanliness and healthfulness. she proceeded without delay to put her invaluable education into use. she must fill her mind with the present and with the future. she must not glance back. she must ignore her wounds--their aches, their clamorous throbs. she took off her clothes, as soon as mrs. tucker left her alone, brushed them and hung them up, put on the thin wrapper she had brought in her bag. the fierce heat of the little packing-case of a room became less unendurable; also, she was saving the clothes from useless wear. she sat down at the table and with pencil and paper planned her budget. of the ten dollars a week, three dollars and thirty cents must be subtracted for rent--for shelter. this left six dollars and seventy cents for the other two necessaries, food and clothing--there must be no incidental expenses since there was no money to meet them. she could not afford to provide for carfare on stormy days; a rain coat, overshoes and umbrella, more expensive at the outset, were incomparably cheaper in the long run. her washing and ironing she would of course do for herself in the evenings and on sundays. of the two items which the six dollars and seventy cents must cover, food came first in importance. how little could she live on? that stifling hot room! she was as wet as if she had come undried from a bath. she had thought she could never feel anything but love for the sun of her city of the sun. but this undreamed-of heat--like the cruel caresses of a too impetuous lover-- how little could she live on? dividing her total of six dollars and seventy cents by seven, she found that she had ninety-five cents a day. she would soon have to buy clothes, however scrupulous care she might take of those she possessed. it was modest indeed to estimate fifteen dollars for clothes before october. that meant she must save fifteen dollars in the remaining three weeks of june, in july, august and september--in one hundred and ten days. she must save about fifteen cents a day. and out of that she must buy soap and tooth powder, outer and under clothes, perhaps a hat and a pair of shoes. thus she could spend for food not more than eighty cents a day, as much less as was consistent with buying the best quality--for she had learned by bitter experience the ravages poor quality food makes in health and looks, had learned why girls of the working class go to pieces swiftly after eighteen. she must fight to keep health--sick she did not dare be. she must fight to keep looks--her figure was her income. eighty cents a day. the outlook was not so gloomy. a cup of cocoa in the morning--made at home of the best cocoa, the kind that did not overheat the blood and disorder the skin--it would cost her less than ten cents. she would carry lunch with her to the store. in the evening she would cook a chop or something of that kind on the gas stove she would buy. some days she would be able to save twenty or even twenty-five cents toward clothing and the like. whatever else happened, she was resolved never again to sink to dirt and rags. never again!--never! she had passed through that experience once without loss of self-respect only because it was by way of education. to go through it again would be yielding ground in the fight--the fight for a destiny worth while which some latent but mighty instinct within her never permitted her to forget. she sat at the table, with the shutters closed against the fiery light of the summer afternoon sun. that hideous unacceptable heat! with eyelids drooped--deep and dark were the circles round them--she listened to the roar of the city, a savage sound like the clamor of a multitude of famished wild beasts. a city like the city of destruction in "pilgrim's progress"--a city where of all the millions, but a few thousands were moving toward or keeping in the sunlight of civilization. the rest, the swarms of the cheap boarding houses, cheap lodging houses, tenements--these myriads were squirming in darkness and squalor, ignorant and never to be less ignorant, ill fed and never to be better fed, clothed in pitiful absurd rags or shoddy vulgar attempts at finery, and never to be better clothed. she would not be of those! she would struggle on, would sink only to mount. she would work; she would try to do as nearly right as she could. and in the end she must triumph. she would get at least a good part of what her soul craved, of what her mind craved, of what her heart craved. the heat of this tenement room! the heat to which poverty was exposed naked and bound! would not anyone be justified in doing anything--yes, _anything_--to escape from this fiend? chapter ii ellen, the maid, slept across the hall from susan, in a closet so dirty that no one could have risked in it any article of clothing with the least pretension to cleanness. it was no better, no worse than the lodgings of more than two hundred thousand new yorkers. its one narrow opening, beside the door, gave upon a shaft whose odors were so foul that she kept the window closed, preferring heat like the inside of a steaming pan to the only available "outside air." this in a civilized city where hundreds of dogs with jeweled collars slept in luxurious rooms on downiest beds and had servants to wait upon them! the morning after susan's coming, ellen woke her, as they had arranged, at a quarter before five. the night before, susan had brought up from the basement a large bucket of water; for she had made up her mind, to take a bath every day, at least until the cold weather set in and rendered such a luxury impossible. with this water and what she had in her little pitcher, susan contrived to freshen herself up. she had bought a gas stove and some indispensable utensils for three dollars and seventeen cents in a fourteenth street store, a pound of cocoa for seventy cents and ten cents' worth of rolls--three rolls, well baked, of first quality flour and with about as good butter and other things put into the dough as one can expect in bread not made at home. these purchases had reduced her cash to forty-three cents--and she ought to buy without delay a clock with an alarm attachment. and pay day--saturday--was two days away. she made a cup of cocoa, drank it slowly, eating one of the rolls--all in the same methodical way like a machine that continues to revolve after the power has been shut off. it was then, even more than during her first evening alone, even more than when she from time to time startled out of troubled sleep--it was then, as she forced down her lonely breakfast, that she most missed rod. when she had finished, she completed her toilet. the final glance at herself in the little mirror was depressing. she looked fresh for her new surroundings and for her new class. but in comparison with what she usually looked, already there was a distinct, an ominous falling off. "i'm glad rod never saw me looking like this," she said aloud drearily. taking a roll for lunch, she issued forth at half-past six. the hour and three-quarters she had allowed for dressing and breakfasting had been none too much. in the coolness and comparative quiet she went down university place and across washington square under the old trees, all alive with song and breeze and flashes of early morning light. she was soon in broadway's deep canyon, was drifting absently along in the stream of cross, mussy-looking workers pushing southward. her heart ached, her brain throbbed. it was horrible, this loneliness; and every one of the wounds where she had severed the ties with spenser was bleeding. she was astonished to find herself before the building whose upper floors were occupied by jeffries and jonas. how had she got there? where had she crossed broadway? "good morning, miss sackville." it was miss hinkle, just arriving. her eyes were heavy, and there were the criss-cross lines under them that tell a story to the expert in the different effects of different kinds of dissipation. miss hinkle was showing her age--and she was "no spring chicken." susan returned her greeting, gazing at her with the dazed eyes and puzzled smile of an awakening sleeper. "i'll show you the ropes," said miss hinkle, as they climbed the two flights of stairs. "you'll find the job dead easy. they're mighty nice people to work for, mr. jeffries especially. not easy fruit, of course, but nice for people that have got on. you didn't sleep well?" "yes--i think so." "i didn't have a chance to drop round last night. i was out with one of the buyers. how do you like mrs. tucker?" "she's very good, isn't she?" "she'll never get along. she works hard, too--but not for herself. in this world you have to look out for number one. i had a swell dinner last night. lobster--i love lobster--and elegant champagne--up to murray's--such a refined place--all fountains and mirrors--really quite artistic. and my gentleman friend was so nice and respectful. you know, we have to go out with the buyers when they ask us. it helps the house sell goods. and we have to be careful not to offend them." miss hinkle's tone in the last remark was so significant that susan looked at her--and, looking, understood. "sometimes," pursued miss hinkle, eyes carefully averted, "sometimes a new girl goes out with an important customer and he gets fresh and she kicks and complains to mr. jeffries--or mr. jonas--or mr. ratney, the head man. they always sympathize with her--but--well, i've noticed that somehow she soon loses her job." "what do you do when--when a customer annoys you?" "i!" miss hinkle laughed with some embarrassment. "oh, i do the best i can." a swift glance of the cynical, laughing, "fast" eyes at susan and away. "the best i can--for the house--and for myself. . . . i talk to you because i know you're a lady and because i don't want to see you thrown down. a woman that's living quietly at home--like a lady--she can be squeamish. but out in the world a woman can't afford to be--no, nor a man, neither. you don't find this set down in the books, and they don't preach it in the churches--leastways they didn't when i used to go to church. but it's true, all the same." they were a few minutes early; so miss hinkle continued the conversation while they waited for the opening of the room where susan would be outfitted for her work. "i called you miss sackville," said she, "but you've been married--haven't you?" "yes." "i can always tell--or at least i can see whether a woman's had experience or not. well, i've never been regularly married, and i don't expect to, unless something pretty good offers. think i'd marry one of these rotten little clerks?" miss hinkle answered her own question with a scornful sniff. "they can hardly make a living for themselves. and a man who amounts to anything, he wants a refined lady to help him on up, not a working girl. of course, there're exceptions. but as a rule a girl in our position either has to stay single or marry beneath her--marry some mechanic or such like. well, i ain't so lazy, or so crazy about being supported, that i'd sink to be cook and slop-carrier--and worse--for a carpenter or a bricklayer. going out with the buyers--the gentlemanly ones--has spoiled my taste. i can't stand a coarse man--coarse dress and hands and manners. can you?" susan turned hastily away, so that her face was hidden from miss hinkle. "i'll bet you wasn't married to a coarse man." "i'd rather not talk about myself," said susan with an effort. "it's not pleasant." her manner of checking miss hinkle's friendly curiosity did not give offense; it excited the experienced working woman's sympathy. she went on: "well, i feel sorry for any woman that has to work. of course most women do--and at worse than anything in the stores and factories. as between being a drudge to some dirty common laborer like most women are, and working in a factory even, give me the factory. yes, give me a job as a pot slinger even, low as that is. oh, i _hate_ working people! i love refinement. up to murray's last night i sat there, eating my lobster and drinking my wine, and i pretended i was a lady--and, my, how happy i was!" the stockroom now opened. susan, with the help of miss hinkle and the stock keeper, dressed in one of the tight-fitting satin slips that revealed every curve and line of her form, made every motion however slight, every breath she drew, a gesture of sensuousness. as she looked at herself in a long glass in one of the show-parlors, her face did not reflect the admiration frankly displayed upon the faces of the two other women. that satin slip seemed to have a moral quality, an immoral character. it made her feel naked--no, as if she were naked and being peeped at through a crack or keyhole. "you'll soon get used to it," miss hinkle assured her. "and you'll learn to show off the dresses and cloaks to the best advantage." she laughed her insinuating little laugh again, amused, cynical, reckless. "you know, the buyers are men. gee, what awful jay things we work off on them, sometimes! they can't see the dress for the figure. and you've got such a refined figure, miss sackville--the kind i'd be crazy about if i was a man. but i must say----" here she eyed herself in the glass complacently--"most men prefer a figure like mine. don't they, miss simmons?" the stock keeper shook her fat shoulders in a gesture of indifferent disdain. "they take whatever's handiest--that's _my_ experience." about half-past nine the first customer appeared--mr. gideon, it happened to be. he was making the rounds of the big wholesale houses in search of stock for the huge chicago department store that paid him fifteen thousand a year and expenses. he had been contemptuous of the offerings of jeffries and jonas for the winter season, had praised with enthusiasm the models of their principal rival, icklemeier, schwartz and company. they were undecided whether he was really thinking of deserting them or was feeling for lower prices. mr. jeffries bustled into the room where susan stood waiting; his flat face quivered with excitement. "gid's come!" he said in a hoarse whisper. "everybody get busy. we'll try miss sackville on him." and he himself assisted while they tricked out susan in an afternoon costume of pale gray, putting on her head a big pale gray hat with harmonizing feathers. the model was offered in all colors and also in a modified form that permitted its use for either afternoon or evening. susan had received her instructions, so when she was dressed, she was ready to sweep into gideon's presence with languid majesty. jeffries' eyes glistened as he noted her walk. "she looks as if she really was a lady!" exclaimed he. "i wish i could make my daughters move around on their trotters like that." gideon was enthroned in an easy chair, smoking a cigar. he was a spare man of perhaps forty-five, with no intention of abandoning the pretensions to youth for many a year. in dress he was as spick and span as a tailor at the trade's annual convention. but he had evidently been "going some" for several days; the sour, worn, haggard face rising above his elegantly fitting collar suggested a moth-eaten jaguar that has been for weeks on short rations or none. "what's the matter?" he snapped, as the door began to open. "i don't like to be kept waiting." in swept susan; and jeffries, rubbing his thick hands, said fawningly, "but i think, mr. gideon, you'll say it was worth waiting for." gideon's angry, arrogant eyes softened at first glimpse of susan. "um!" he grunted, some such sound as the jaguar aforesaid would make when the first chunk of food hurtled through the bars and landed on his paws. he sat with cigar poised between his long white fingers while susan walked up and down before him, displaying the dress at all angles, jeffries expatiating upon it the while. "don't talk so damn much, jeff!" he commanded with the insolence of a customer containing possibilities of large profit. "i judge for myself. i'm not a damn fool." "i should say not," cried jeffries, laughing the merchant's laugh for a customer's pleasantry. "but i can't help talking about it, gid, it's so lovely!" jeffries' shrewd eyes leaped for joy when gideon got up from his chair and, under pretense of examining the garment, investigated susan's figure. as his gentle, insinuating hands traveled over her, his eyes sought hers. "excuse me," said jeffries. "i'll see that they get the other things ready." and out he went, winking at mary hinkle to follow him--an unnecessary gesture as she was already on her way to the door. gideon understood as well as did they why they left. "i don't think i've seen you before, my dear," said he to susan. "i came only this morning," replied she. "i like to know everybody i deal with. we must get better acquainted. you've got the best figure in the business--the very best." "thank you," said susan with a grave, distant smile. "got a date for dinner tonight?" inquired he; and, assuming that everything would yield precedence to him, he did not wait for a reply, but went on, "tell me your address. i'll send a cab for you at seven o'clock." "thank you," said susan, "but i can't go." gideon smiled. "oh, don't be shy. of course you'll go. ask jeffries. he'll tell you it's all right." "there are reasons why i'd rather not be seen in the restaurants." "that's even better. i'll come in the cab myself and we'll go to a quiet place." his eyes smiled insinuatingly at her. now that she looked at him more carefully he was unusually attractive for a man of his type--had strength and intelligence in his features, had a suggestion of mastery, of one used to obedience, in his voice. his teeth were even and sound, his lips firm yet not too thin. "come," said he persuasively. "i'll not eat you up--" with a gay and gracious smile--"at least i'll try not to." susan remembered what miss hinkle had told her. she saw that she must either accept the invitation or give up her position. she said: "very well," and gave him her address. back came jeffries and miss hinkle carrying the first of the wraps. gideon waved them away. "you've shown 'em to me before," said he. "i don't want to see 'em again. give me the evening gowns." susan withdrew, soon to appear in a dress that left her arms and neck bare. gideon could not get enough of this. jeffries kept her walking up and down until she was ready to drop with weariness of the monotony, of the distasteful play of gideon's fiery glance upon her arms and shoulders and throat. gideon tried to draw her into conversation, but she would--indeed could--go no further than direct answers to his direct questions. "never mind," said he to her in an undertone. "i'll cheer you up this evening. i think i know how to order a dinner." her instant conquest of the difficult and valuable gideon so elated jeffries that he piled the work on her. he used her with every important buyer who came that day. the temperature was up in the high nineties, the hot moist air stood stagnant as a barnyard pool; the winter models were cruelly hot and heavy. all day long, with a pause of half an hour to eat her roll and drink a glass of water, susan walked up and down the show parlors weighted with dresses and cloaks, furs for arctic weather. the other girls, even those doing almost nothing, were all but prostrated. it was little short of intolerable, this struggle to gain the "honest, self-respecting living by honest work" that there was so much talk about. toward five o'clock her nerves abruptly and completely gave way, and she fainted--for the first time in her life. at once the whole establishment was in an uproar. jeffries cursed himself loudly for his shortsightedness, for his overestimating her young strength. "she'll look like hell this evening," he wailed, wringing his hands like a distracted peasant woman. "maybe she won't be able to go out at all." she soon came round. they brought her whiskey, and afterward tea and sandwiches. and with the power of quick recuperation that is the most fascinating miracle of healthy youth, she not only showed no sign of her breakdown but looked much better. and she felt better. we shall some day understand why it is that if a severe physical blow follows upon a mental blow, recovery from the physical blow is always accompanied by a relief of the mental strain. susan came out of her fit of faintness and exhaustion with a different point of view--as if time had been long at work softening her, grief. spenser seemed part of the present no longer, but of the past--a past far more remote than yesterday. mary hinkle sat with her as she drank the tea. "did you make a date with gid?" inquired she. her tone let susan know that the question had been prompted by jeffries. "he asked me to dine with him, and i said i would." "have you got a nice dress--dinner dress, i mean?" "the linen one i'm wearing is all. my other dress is for cooler weather." "then i'll give you one out of stock--i mean i'll borrow one for you. this dinner's a house affair, you know--to get gid's order. it'll be worth thousands to them." "there wouldn't be anything to fit me on such short notice," said susan, casting about for an excuse for not wearing borrowed finery. "why, you've got a model figure. i'll pick you out a white dress--and a black and white hat. i know 'em all, and i know one that'll make you look simply lovely." susan did not protest. she was profoundly indifferent to what happened to her. life seemed a show in which she had no part, and at which she sat a listless spectator. a few minutes, and in puffed jeffries, solicitous as a fussy old bird with a new family. "you're a lot better, ain't you?" cried he, before he had looked at her. "oh, yes, you'll be all right. and you'll have a lovely time with mr. gideon. he's a perfect gentleman--knows how to treat a lady. . . . the minute i laid eyes on you i said to myself, said i, 'jeffries, she's a mascot.' and you are, my dear. you'll get us the order. but you mustn't talk business with him, you understand?" "yes," said susan, wearily. "he's a gentleman, you know, and it don't do to mix business and social pleasures. you string him along quiet and ladylike and elegant, as if there wasn't any such things as cloaks or dresses in the world. he'll understand all right. . . . if you land the order, my dear, i'll see that you get a nice present. a nice dress--the one we're going to lend you--if he gives us a slice. the dress and twenty-five in cash, if he gives us all. how's that?" "thank you," said susan. "i'll do my best." "you'll land it. you'll land it. i feel as if we had it with his o. k. on it." susan shivered. "don't--don't count on me too much," she said hesitatingly. "i'm not in very good spirits, i'm sorry to say." "a little pressed for money?" jeffries hesitated, made an effort, blurted out what was for him, the business man, a giddy generosity. "on your way out, stop at the cashier's. he'll give you this week's pay in advance." jeffries hesitated, decided against dangerous liberality. "not ten, you understand, but say six. you see, you won't have been with us a full week." and he hurried away, frightened by his prodigality, by these hysterical impulses that were rushing him far from the course of sound business sense. "as jones says, i'm a generous old fool," he muttered. "my soft heart'll ruin me yet." jeffries sent mary hinkle home with susan to carry the dress and hat, to help her make a toilet and to "start her off right." in the hour before they left the store there was offered a typical illustration of why and how "business" is able to suspend the normal moral sense and to substitute for it a highly ingenious counterfeit of supreme moral obligation to it. the hysterical jeffries had infected the entire personnel with his excitement, with the sense that a great battle was impending and that the cause of the house, which was the cause of everyone who drew pay from it, had been intrusted to the young recruit with the fascinating figure and the sweet, sad face. and susan's sensitive nature was soon vibrating in response to this feeling. it terrified her that she, the inexperienced, had such grave responsibility. it made her heart heavy to think of probable failure, when the house had been so good to her, had taken her in, had given her unusual wages, had made it possible for her to get a start in life, had intrusted to her its cause, its chance to retrieve a bad season and to protect its employees instead of discharging a lot of them. "have you got long white gloves?" asked mary hinkle, as they walked up broadway, she carrying the dress and susan the hat box. "only a few pairs of short ones." "you must have long white gloves--and a pair of white stockings." "i can't afford them." "oh, jeffries told me to ask you--and to go to work and buy them if you hadn't." they stopped at wanamaker's. susan was about to pay, when mary stopped her. "if you pay," said she, "maybe you'll get your money back from the house, and maybe you won't. if i pay, they'll not make a kick on giving it back to me." the dress mary had selected was a simple white batiste, cut out at the neck prettily, and with the elbow sleeves that were then the fashion. "your arms and throat are lovely," said mary. "and your hands are mighty nice, too--that's why i'm sure you've never been a real working girl--leastways, not for a long time. when you get to the restaurant and draw off your gloves in a slow, careless, ladylike kind of way, and put your elbows on the table--my, how he will take on!" mary looked at her with an intense but not at all malignant envy. "if you don't land high, it'll be because you're a fool. and you ain't that." "i'm afraid i am," replied susan. "yes, i guess i'm what's called a fool--what probably is a fool." "you want to look out then," warned miss hinkle. "you want to go to work and get over that. beauty don't count, unless a girl's got shrewdness. the streets are full of beauties sellin' out for a bare living. they thought they couldn't help winning, and they got left, and the plain girls who had to hustle and manage have passed them. go to del's or rector's or the waldorf or the madrid or any of those high-toned places, and see the women with the swell clothes and jewelry! the married ones, and the other kind, both. are they raving tearing beauties? not often. . . . the trouble with me is i've been too good-hearted and too soft about being flattered. i was too good looking, and a small easy living came too easy. you--i'd say you were--that you had brains but were shy about using them. what's the good of having them? might as well be a boob. then, too, you've got to go to work and look out about being too refined. the refined, nice ones goes the lowest--if they get pushed--and this is a pushing world. you'll get pushed just as far as you'll let 'em. take it from me. i've been down the line." susan's low spirits sank lower. these disagreeable truths--for observation and experience made her fear they were truths--filled her with despondency. what was the matter with life? as between the morality she had been taught and the practical morality of this world upon which she had been cast, which was the right? how "take hold"? how avert the impending disaster? what of the "good" should--_must_--she throw away? what should--_must_--she cling to? mary hinkle was shocked by the poor little room. "this is no place for a lady!" cried she. "but it won't last long--not after tonight, if you play your cards halfway right." "i'm very well satisfied," said susan. "if i can only keep this!" she felt no interest in the toilet until the dress and hat were unpacked and laid out upon the bed. at sight of them her eyes became a keen and lively gray--never violet for that kind of emotion--and there surged up the love of finery that dwells in every normal woman--and in every normal man--that is put there by a heredity dating back through the ages to the very beginning of conscious life--and does not leave them until life gives up the battle and prepares to vacate before death. ellen, the maid, passing the door, saw and entered to add her ecstatic exclamations to the excitement. down she ran to bring mrs. tucker, who no sooner beheld the glory displayed upon the humble bed than she too was in a turmoil. susan dressed with the aid of three maids as interested and eager as ever robed a queen for coronation. ellen brought hot water and a larger bowl. mrs. tucker wished to lend a highly scented toilet soap she used when she put on gala attire; but susan insisted upon her own plain soap. they all helped her bathe; they helped her select the best underclothes from her small store. susan would put on her own stockings; but ellen got one foot into one of the slippers and mrs. tucker looked after the other foot. "ain't they lovely?" said ellen to mrs. tucker, as they knelt together at their task. "i never see such feet. not a lump on 'em, but like feet in a picture." "it takes a mighty good leg to look good in a white stocking," observed mary. "but yours is so nice and long and slim that they'd stand most anything." mrs. tucker and ellen stood by with no interference save suggestion and comment, while mary, who at one time worked for a hairdresser, did susan's thick dark hair. susan would permit no elaborations, much to miss hinkle's regret. but the three agreed that she was right when the simple sweep of the vital blue-black hair was finished in a loose and graceful knot at the back, and susan's small, healthily pallid face looked its loveliest, with the violet-gray eyes soft and sweet and serious. mrs. tucker brought the hat from the bed, and susan put it on--a large black straw of a most becoming shape with two pure white plumes curling round the crown and a third, not so long, rising gracefully from the big buckle where the three plumes met. and now came the putting on of the dress. with as much care as if they were handling a rare and fragile vase, mary and mrs. tucker held the dress for susan to step into it. ellen kept her petticoat in place while the other two escorted the dress up susan's form. then the three worked together at hooking and smoothing. susan washed her hands again, refused to let mrs. tucker run and bring powder, produced from a drawer some prepared chalk and with it safeguarded her nose against shine; she tucked the powder rag into her stocking. last of all the gloves went on and a small handkerchief was thrust into the palm of the left glove. "how do i look?" asked susan. "lovely"--"fine"--"just grand," exclaimed the three maids. "i feel awfully dressed up," said she. "and it's so hot!" "you must go right downstairs where it's cool and you won't get wilted," cried mrs. tucker. "hold your skirts close on the way. the steps and walls ain't none too clean." in the bathroom downstairs there was a long mirror built into the wall, a relic of the old house's long departed youth of grandeur. as the tenant--mr. jessop--was out, mrs. tucker led the way into it. there susan had the first satisfactory look at herself. she knew she was a pretty woman; she would have been weak-minded had she not known it. but she was amazed at herself. a touch here and there, a sinuous shifting of the body within the garments, and the suggestion of "dressed up" vanished before the reflected eyes of her agitated assistants, who did not know what had happened but only saw the results. she hardly knew the tall beautiful woman of fashion gazing at her from the mirror. could it be that this was her hair?--these eyes hers--and the mouth and nose and the skin? was this long slender figure her very own? what an astounding difference clothes did make! never before had susan worn anything nearly so fine. "this is the way i ought to look all the time," thought she. "and this is the way i _will_ look!" only better--much better. already her true eye was seeing the defects, the chances for improvement--how the hat could be re-bent and re-trimmed to adapt it to her features, how the dress could be altered to make it more tasteful, more effective in subtly attracting attention to her figure. "how much do you suppose the dress cost, miss hinkle?" asked ellen--the question mrs. tucker had been dying to put but had refrained from putting lest it should sound unrefined. "it costs ninety wholesale," said miss hinkle. "that'd mean a hundred and twenty-five--a hundred and fifty, maybe if you was to try to buy it in a department store. and the hat--well, lichtenstein'd ask fifty or sixty for it and never turn a hair." "gosh--ee?" exclaimed ellen. "did you ever hear the like?" "i'm not surprised," said mrs. tucker, who in fact was flabbergasted. "well--it's worth the money to them that can afford to buy it. the good lord put everything on earth to be used, i reckon. and miss sackville is the build for things like that. now it'd be foolish on me, with a stomach and sitter that won't let no skirt hang fit to look at." the bell rang. the excitement died from susan's face, leaving it pale and cold. a wave of nausea swept through her. ellen peeped out, mrs. tucker and miss hinkle listening with anxious faces. "it's him!" whispered ellen, "and there's a taxi, too." it was decided that ellen should go to the door, that as she opened it susan should come carelessly from the back room and advance along the hall. and this program was carried out with the result that as gideon said, "is miss sackville here?" miss sackville appeared before his widening, wondering, admiring eyes. he was dressed in the extreme of fashion and costliness in good taste; while it would have been impossible for him to look distinguished, he did look what he was--a prosperous business man with prospects. he came perfumed and rustling. but he felt completely outclassed--until he reminded himself that for all her brave show of fashionable lady she was only a model while he was a fifteen-thousand-a-year man on the way to a partnership. "don't you think we might dine on the veranda at sherry's?" suggested he. "it'd be cool there." at sight of him she had nerved herself, had keyed herself up toward recklessness. she was in for it. she would put it through. no futile cowardly shrinking and whimpering! why not try to get whatever pleasure there was a chance for? but--sherry's--was it safe? yes, almost any of the fifth avenue places--except the waldorf, possibly--was safe enough. the circuit of spenser and his friends lay in the more bohemian broadway district. he had taken her to sherry's only once, to see as part of a new york education the sunday night crowd of fashionable people. "if you like," said she. gideon beamed. he would be able to show off his prize! as they drove away susan glanced at the front parlor windows, saw the curtains agitated, felt the three friendly, excited faces palpitating. she leaned from the cab window, waved her hand, smiled. the three faces instantly appeared and immediately hid again lest gideon should see. but gideon was too busy planning conversation. he knew miss sackville was "as common as the rest of 'em--and an old hand at the business, no doubt." but he simply could not abruptly break through the barrier; he must squirm through gradually. "that's a swell outfit you've got on," he began. "yes," replied susan with her usual candor. "miss hinkle borrowed it out of the stock for me to wear." gideon was confused. he knew how she had got the hat and dress, but he expected her to make a pretense. he couldn't understand her not doing it. such candor--any kind of candor--wasn't in the game of men and women as women had played it in his experience. the women--all sorts of women--lied and faked at their business just as men did in the business of buying and selling goods. and her voice--and her way of speaking--they made him feel more than ever out of his class. he must get something to drink as soon as it could be served; that would put him at his ease. yes--a drink--that would set him up again. and a drink for her--that would bring her down from this queer new kind of high horse. "i guess she must be a top notcher--the real thing, come down in the world--and not out of the near silks. but she'll be all right after a drink. one drink of liquor makes the whole world kin." that last thought reminded him of his own cleverness and he attacked the situation afresh. but the conversation as they drove up the avenue was on the whole constrained and intermittent--chiefly about the weather. susan was observing--and feeling--and enjoying. up bubbled her young spirits perpetually renewed by her healthy, vital youth of body. she was seeing her beloved city of the sun again. as they turned out of the avenue for sherry's main entrance susan realized that she was in forty-fourth street. the street where she and spenser had lived!--had lived only yesterday. no--not yesterday--impossible! her eyes closed and she leaned back in the cab. gideon was waiting to help her alight. he saw that something was wrong; it stood out obviously in her ghastly face. he feared the carriage men round the entrance would "catch on" to the fact that he was escorting a girl so unused to swell surroundings that she was ready to faint with fright. "don't be foolish," he said sharply. susan revived herself, descended, and with head bent low and trembling body entered the restaurant. in the agitation of getting a table and settling at it gideon forgot for the moment her sickly pallor. he began to order at once, not consulting her--for he prided himself on his knowledge of cookery and assumed that she knew nothing about it. "have a cocktail?" asked he. "yes, of course you will. you need it bad and you need it quick." she said she preferred sherry. she had intended to drink nothing, but she must have aid in conquering her faintness and overwhelming depression. gideon took a dry martini; ordered a second for himself when the first came, and had them both down before she finished her sherry. "i've ordered champagne," said he. "i suppose you like sweet champagne. most ladies do, but i can't stand seeing it served even." "no--i like it very dry," said susan. gideon glinted his eyes gayly at her, showed his white jaguar teeth. "so you're acquainted with fizz, are you?" he was feeling his absurd notion of inequality in her favor dissipate as the fumes of the cocktails rose straight and strong from his empty stomach to his brain. "do you know, i've a sort of feeling that we're going to like each other a lot. i think we make a handsome couple--eh--what's your first name?" "lorna." "lorna, then. my name's ed, but everybody calls me gid." as soon as the melon was served, he ordered the champagne opened. "to our better acquaintance," said he, lifting his glass toward her. "thank you," said she, in a suffocated voice, touching her glass to her lips. he was too polite to speak, even in banter, of what he thought was the real cause of her politeness and silence. but he must end this state of overwhelmedness at grand surroundings. said he: "you're kind o' shy, aren't you, lorna? or is that your game?" "i don't know. you've had a very interesting life, haven't you? won't you tell me about it?" "oh--just ordinary," replied he, with a proper show of modesty. and straightway, as susan had hoped, he launched into a minute account of himself--the familiar story of the energetic, aggressive man twisting and kicking his way up from two or three dollars a week. susan seemed interested, but her mind refused to occupy itself with a narrative so commonplace. after rod and his friends this boastful business man was dull and tedious. whenever he laughed at an account of his superior craft--how he had bluffed this man, how he had euchered that one--she smiled. and so in one more case the common masculine delusion that women listen to them on the subject of themselves, with interest and admiration as profound as their own, was not impaired. "but," he wound up, "i've stayed plain ed gideon. i never have let prosperity swell _my_ head. and anyone that knows me'll tell you i'm a regular fool for generosity with those that come at me right. . . . i've always been a favorite with the ladies." as he was pausing for comment from her, she said, "i can believe it." the word "generosity" kept echoing in her mind. generosity--generosity. how much talk there was about it! everyone was forever praising himself for his generosity, was reciting acts of the most obvious selfishness in proof. was there any such thing in the whole world as real generosity? "they like a generous man," pursued gid. "i'm tight in business--i can see a dollar as far as the next man and chase it as hard and grab it as tight. but when it comes to the ladies, why, i'm open-handed. if they treat me right, i treat them right." then, fearing that he had tactlessly raised a doubt of his invincibility, he hastily added, "but they always do treat me right." while he had been talking on and on, susan had been appealing to the champagne to help her quiet her aching heart. she resolutely set her thoughts to wandering among the couples at the other tables in that subdued softening light--the beautifully dressed women listening to their male companions with close attention--were they too being bored by such trash by way of talk? were they too simply listening because it is the man who pays, because it is the man who must be conciliated and put in a good humor with himself, if dinners and dresses and jewels are to be bought? that tenement attic--that hot moist workroom--poverty--privation--"honest work's" dread rewards---- "now, what kind of a man would you say i was?" gideon was inquiring. "how do you mean?" replied susan, with the dexterity at vagueness that habitually self-veiling people acquire as an instinct. "why, as a man. how do i compare with the other men you've known?" and he "shot" his cuffs with a gesture of careless elegance that his cuff links might assist in the picture of the "swell dresser" he felt he was posing. "oh--you--you're--very different." "i _am_ different," swelled gideon. "you see, it's this way----" and he was off again into another eulogy of himself; it carried them through the dinner and two quarts of champagne. he was much annoyed that she did not take advantage of the pointed opportunity he gave her to note the total of the bill; he was even uncertain whether she had noted that he gave the waiter a dollar. he rustled and snapped it before laying it upon the tray, but her eyes looked vague. "well," said he, after a comfortable pull at an expensive-looking cigar, "sixteen seventy-five is quite a lively little peel-off for a dinner for only two. but it was worth it, don't you think?" "it was a splendid dinner," said susan truthfully. gideon beamed in intoxicated good humor. "i knew you'd like it. nothing pleases me better than to take a nice girl who isn't as well off as i am out and blow her off to a crackerjack dinner. now, you may have thought a dollar was too much to tip the waiter?" "a dollar is--a dollar, isn't it?" said susan. gideon laughed. "i used to think so. and most men wouldn't give that much to a waiter. but i feel sorry for poor devils who don't happen to be as lucky or as brainy as i am. what do you say to a turn in the park? we'll take a hansom, and kind of jog along. and we'll stop at the casino and at gabe's for a drink." "i have to get up so early," began susan. "oh, that's all right." he slowly winked at her. "you'll not have to bump the bumps for being late tomorrow--if you treat _me_ right." he carried his liquor easily. only in his eyes and in his ever more slippery smile that would slide about his face did he show that he had been drinking. he helped her into a hansom with a flourish and, overruling her protests, bade the driver go to the casino. once under way she was glad; her hot skin and her weary heart were grateful for the air blowing down the avenue from the park's expanse of green. when gideon attempted to put his arm around her, she moved close into the corner and went on talking so calmly about calm subjects that he did not insist. but when he had tossed down a drink of whiskey at the casino and they resumed the drive along the moonlit, shady roads, he tried again. "please," said she, "don't spoil a delightful evening." "now look here, my dear--haven't i treated you right?" "indeed you have, mr. gideon." "oh, don't be so damned formal. forget the difference between our positions. tomorrow i'm going to place a big order with your house, if you treat me right. i'm dead stuck on you--and that's a god's fact. you've taken me clean off my feet. i'm thinking of doing a lot for you." susan was silent. "what do you say to throwing up your job and coming to chicago with me? how much do you get?" "ten." "why, _you_ can't live on that." "i've lived on less--much less." "do you like it?" "naturally not." "you want to get on--don't you?" "i must." "you're down in the heart about something. love?" susan was silent. "cut love out. cut it out, my dear. that ain't the way to get on. love's a good consolation prize, if you ain't going to get anywhere, and know you ain't. and it's a good first prize after you've arrived and can afford the luxuries of life. but for a man--or a woman--that's pushing up, it's sheer ruination! cut it out!" "i am cutting it out," said susan. "but that takes time." "not if you've got sense. the way to cut anything out is--cut it out!--a quick slash--just cut. if you make a dozen little slashes, each of them hurts as much as the one big slash--and the dozen hurt twelve times as much--bleed twelve times as much--put off the cure a lot more than twelve times as long." he had susan's attention for the first time. "do you know why women don't get on?" "tell me," said she. "that's what i want to hear." "because they don't play the game under the rules. now, what does a man do? why, he stakes everything he's got--does whatever's necessary, don't stop at _nothing_ to help him get there. how is it with women? some try to be virtuous--when their bodies are their best assets. god! i wish i'd 'a' had your looks and your advantages as a woman to help me. i'd be a millionaire this minute, with a house facing this park and a yacht and all the rest of it. a woman that's squeamish about her virtue can't hope to win--unless she's in a position to make a good marriage. as for the loose ones, they are as big fools as the virtuous ones. the virtuous ones lock away their best asset; the loose ones throw it away. neither one _use_ it. do you follow me?" "i think so." susan was listening with a mind made abnormally acute by the champagne she had freely drunk. the coarse bluntness and directness of the man did not offend her. it made what he said the more effective, producing a rude arresting effect upon her nerves. it made the man himself seem more of a person. susan was beginning to have a kind of respect for him, to change her first opinion that he was merely a vulgar, pushing commonplace. "never thought of that before?" "yes--i've thought of it. but----" she paused. "but--what?" "oh, nothing." "never mind. some womanish heart nonsense, i suppose. do you see the application of what i've said to you and me?" "go on." she was leaning forward, her elbows on the closed doors of the hansom, her eyes gazing dreamily into the moonlit dimness of the cool woods through which they were driving. "you don't want to stick at ten per?" "no." "it'll be less in a little while. models don't last. the work's too hard." "i can see that." "and anyhow it means tenement house." "yes. tenement house." "well--what then? what's your plan?" "i haven't any." "haven't a plan--yet want to get on! is that good sense? did ever anybody get anywhere without a plan?" "i'm willing to work. i'm going to work. i _am_ working." "work, of course. nobody can keep alive without working. you might as well say you're going to breathe and eat--work don't amount to anything, for getting on. it's the kind of work--working in a certain direction--working with a plan." "i've got a plan. but i can't begin at it just yet." "will it take money?" "some." "have you got it?" "no," replied susan. "i'll have to get it." "as an honest working girl?" said he with good-humored irony. susan laughed. "it does sound ridiculous, doesn't it?" said she. "here's another thing that maybe you haven't counted in. looking as you do, do you suppose men that run things'll let you get past without paying toll? not on your life, my dear. if you was ugly, you might after several years get twenty or twenty-five by working hard--unless you lost your figure first. but the men won't let a good looker rise that way. do you follow me?" "yes." "i'm not talking theory. i'm talking life. take you and me for example. i can help you--help you a lot. in fact i can put you on your feet. and i'm willing. if you was a man and i liked you and wanted to help you, i'd make you help me, too. i'd make you do a lot of things for me--maybe some of 'em not so very nice--maybe some of 'em downright dirty. and you'd do 'em, as all young fellows, struggling up, have to. but you're a woman. so i'm willing to make easier terms. but i can't help you with you not showing any appreciation. that wouldn't be good business--would it?--to get no return but, 'oh, thank you so much, mr. gideon. so sweet of you. i'll remember you in my prayers.' would that be sensible?" "no," said susan. "well, then! if i do you a good turn, you've got to do me a good turn--not one that i don't want done, but one i do want done. ain't i right? do you follow me?" "i follow you." some vague accent in susan's voice made him feel dissatisfied with her response. "i hope you do," he said sharply. "what i'm saying is dresses on your back and dollars in your pocket--and getting on in the world--if you work it right." "getting on in the world," said susan, pensively. "i suppose that's a sneer." "oh, no. i was only thinking." "about love being all a woman needs to make her happy, i suppose?" "no. love is--well, it isn't happiness." "because you let it run you, instead of you running it. eh?" "perhaps." "sure! now, let me tell you, lorna dear. comfort and luxury, money in bank, property, a good solid position--_that's_ the foundation. build on _that_ and you'll build solid. build on love and sentiment and you're building upside down. you're putting the gingerbread where the rock ought to be. follow me?" "i see what you mean." he tried to find her hand. "what do you say?" "i'll think of it." "well, think quick, my dear. opportunity doesn't wait round in anybody's outside office . . . maybe you don't trust me--don't think i'll deliver the goods?" "no. i think you're honest." "you're right i am. i do what i say i'll do. that's why i've got on. that's why i'll keep on getting on. let's drive to a hotel." she turned her head and looked at him for the first time since he began his discourse on making one's way in the world. her look was calm, inquiring--would have been chilling to a man of sensibility--that is, of sensibility toward an unconquered woman. "i want to give your people that order, and i want to help you." "i want them to get the order. i don't care about the rest," she replied dully. "put it any way you like." again he tried to embrace her. she resisted firmly. "wait," said she. "let me think." they drove the rest of the way to the upper end of the park in silence. he ordered the driver to turn. he said to her; "well, do you get the sack or does the house get the order?" she was silent. "shall i drive you home or shall we stop at gabe's for a drink?" "could i have champagne?" said she. "anything you like if you choose right." "i haven't any choice," said she. he laughed, put his arm around her, kissed her unresponsive but unresisting lips. "you're right, you haven't," said he. "it's a fine sign that you have the sense to see it. oh, you'll get on. you don't let trifles stand in your way." chapter iii at the lunch hour the next day mary hinkle knocked at the garret in clinton place. getting no answer, she opened the door. at the table close to the window was susan in a nightgown, her hair in disorder as if she had begun to arrange it and had stopped halfway. her eyes turned listlessly in mary's direction--dull eyes, gray, heavily circled. "you didn't answer, miss sackville. so i thought i'd come in and leave a note," explained mary. her glance was avoiding susan's. "come for the dress and hat?" said susan. "there they are." and she indicated the undisturbed bed whereon hat and dress were carelessly flung. "my, but it's hot in this room!" exclaimed mary. "you must move up to my place. there's a room and bath vacant--only seven per." susan seemed not to hear. she was looking dully at her hands upon the table before her. "mr. jeffries sent me to ask you how you were. he was worried because you didn't come." with a change of voice, "mr. gideon telephoned down the order a while ago. mr. jeffries says you are to keep the dress and hat." "no," said susan. "take them away with you." "aren't you coming down this afternoon?" "no," replied susan. "i've quit." "quit?" cried miss hinkle. her expression gradually shifted from astonishment to pleased understanding. "oh, i see! you've got something better." "no. but i'll find something." mary studied the situation, using susan's expressionless face as a guide. after a time she seemed to get from it a clew. with the air of friendly experience bent on aiding helpless inexperience she pushed aside the dress and made room for herself on the bed. "don't be a fool, miss sackville," said she. "if you don't like that sort of thing--you know what i mean--why, you can live six months--maybe a year--on the reputation of what you've done and their hope that you'll weaken down and do it again. that'll give you time to look round and find something else. for pity's sake, don't turn yourself loose without a job. you got your place so easy that you think you can get one any old time. there's where you're wrong. believe me, you played in luck--and luck don't come round often. i know what i'm talking about. so i say, don't be a fool!" "i am a fool," said susan. "well--get over it. and don't waste any time about it, either." "i can't go back," said susan stolidly. "i can't face them." "face who?" cried mary. "business is business. everybody understands that. all the people down there are crazy about you now. you got the house a hundred-thousand-dollar order. you don't _suppose_ anybody in business bothers about how an order's got--do you?" "it's the way _i_ feel--not the way _they_ feel." "as for the women down there--of course, there's some that pretend they won't do that sort of thing. look at 'em--at their faces and figures--and you'll see why they don't. of course a girl keeps straight when there's nothing in not being straight--leastways, unless she's a fool. she knows that if the best she can do is marry a fellow of her own class, why she'd only get left if she played any tricks with them cheap skates that have to get married or go without because they're too poor to pay for anything--and by marrying can get that and a cook and a washwoman and mender besides--and maybe, too, somebody who can go out and work if they're laid up sick. but if a girl sees a chance to get on----don't be a fool, miss sackville." susan listened with a smile that barely disturbed the stolid calm of her features. "i'm not going back," she said. mary hinkle was silenced by the quiet finality of her voice. studying that delicate face, she felt, behind its pallid impassiveness, behind the refusal to return, a reason she could not comprehend. she dimly realized that she would respect it if she could understand it; for she suspected it had its origin somewhere in susan's "refined ladylike nature." she knew that once in a while among the women she was acquainted with there did happen one who preferred death in any form of misery to leading a lax life--and indisputable facts had convinced her that not always were these women "just stupid ignorant fools." she herself possessed no such refinement of nerves or of whatever it was. she had been brought up in a loose family and in a loose neighborhood. she was in the habit of making all sorts of pretenses, because that was the custom, while being candid about such matters was regarded as bad form. she was not fooled by these pretenses in other girls, though they often did fool each other. in susan, she instinctively felt, it was not pretense. it was something or other else--it was a dangerous reality. she liked susan; in her intelligence and physical charm were the possibilities of getting far up in the world; it seemed a pity that she was thus handicapped. still, perhaps susan would stumble upon some worth while man who, attempting to possess her without marriage and failing, would pay the heavy price. there was always that chance--a small chance, smaller even than finding by loose living a worth while man who would marry you because you happened exactly to suit him--to give him enough only to make him feel that he wanted more. still, susan was unusually attractive, and luck sometimes did come a poor person's way--sometimes. "i'm overdue back," said mary. "you want me to tell 'em that?" "yes." "you'll have hard work finding a job at anything like as much as ten per. i've got two trades, and i couldn't at either one." "i don't expect to find it." "then what are you going to do?" "take what i can get--until i've been made hard enough--or strong enough--or whatever it is--to stop being a fool." this indication of latent good sense relieved miss hinkle. "i'll tell 'em you may be down tomorrow. think it over for another day." susan shook her head. "they'll have to get somebody else." and, as miss hinkle reached the threshold, "wait till i do the dress up. you'll take it for me?" "why send the things back?" urged mary. "they belong to you. god knows you earned 'em." susan, standing now, looked down at the finery. "so i did. i'll keep them," said she. "they'd pawn for something." "with your looks they'd wear for a heap more. but keep 'em, anyhow. and i'll not tell jeffries you've quit. it'll do no harm to hold your job open a day or so." "as you like," said susan, to end the discussion. "but i have quit." "no matter. after you've had something to eat, you'll feel different." and miss hinkle nodded brightly and departed. susan resumed her seat at the bare wobbly little table, resumed her listless attitude. she did not move until ellen came in, holding out a note and saying, "a boy from your store brung this--here." "thank you," said susan, taking the note. in it she found a twenty-dollar bill and a five. on the sheet of paper round it was scrawled: take the day off. here's your commission. we'll raise your pay in a few weeks, l. l. j. so mary hinkle had told them either that she was quitting or that she was thinking of quitting, and they wished her to stay, had used the means they believed she could not resist. in a dreary way this amused her. as if she cared whether or not life was kept in this worthless body of hers, in her tired heart, in her disgusted mind! then she dropped back into listlessness. when she was aroused again it was by gideon, completely filling the small doorway. "hello, my dear!" cried he cheerfully. "mind my smoking?" susan slowly turned her head toward him, surveyed him with an expression but one removed from the blank look she would have had if there had been no one before her. "i'm feeling fine today," pursued gideon, advancing a step and so bringing himself about halfway to the table. "had a couple of pick-me-ups and a fat breakfast. how are you?" "i'm always well." "thought you seemed a little seedy." his shrewd sensual eyes were exploring the openings in her nightdress. "you'll be mighty glad to get out of this hole. gosh! it's hot. don't see how you stand it. i'm a law abiding citizen but i must say i'd turn criminal before i'd put up with this." in the underworld from which gideon had sprung--the underworld where welters the overwhelming mass of the human race--there are three main types. there are the hopeless and spiritless--the mass--who welter passively on, breeding and dying. there are the spirited who also possess both shrewdness and calculation; they push upward by hook and by crook, always mindful of the futility of the struggle of the petty criminal of the slums against the police and the law; they arrive and found the aristocracies of the future. the third is the criminal class. it is also made up of the spirited--but the spirited who, having little shrewdness and no calculation--that is, no ability to foresee and measure consequences--wage clumsy war upon society and pay the penalty of their fatuity in lives of wretchedness even more wretched than the common lot. gideon belonged to the second class--the class that pushes upward without getting into jail; he was a fair representative of this type, neither its best nor its worst, but about midway of its range between arrogant, all-dominating plutocrat and shystering merchant or lawyer or politician who barely escapes the criminal class. "you don't ask me to sit down, dearie," he went on facetiously. "but i'm not so mad that i won't do it." he took the seat miss hinkle had cleared on the bed. his glance wandered disgustedly from object to object in the crowded yet bare attic. he caught a whiff of the odor from across the hall--from the fresh-air shaft--and hastily gave several puffs at his cigar to saturate his surroundings with its perfume. susan acted as if she were alone in the room. she had not even drawn together her nightgown. "i phoned your store about you," resumed gideon. "they said you hadn't showed up--wouldn't till tomorrow. so i came round here and your landlady sent me up. i want to take you for a drive this afternoon. we can dine up to claremont or farther, if you like." "no, thanks," said susan. "i can't go." "upty-tupty!" cried gideon. "what's the lady so sour about?" "i'm not sour." "then why won't you go?" "i can't." "but we'll have a chance to talk over what i'm going to do for you." "you've kept your word," said susan. "that was only part. besides, i'd have given your house the order, anyhow." susan's eyes suddenly lighted up. "you would?" she cried. "well--a part of it. not so much, of course. but i never let pleasure interfere with business. nobody that does ever gets very far." her expression made him hasten to explain--without being conscious why. "i said--_part_ of the order, my dear. they owe to you about half of what they'll make off me. . . . what's that money on the table? your commission?" "yes." "twenty-five? um!" gideon laughed. "well, i suppose it's as generous as i'd be, in the same circumstances. encourage your employees, but don't swell-head 'em--that's the good rule. i've seen many a promising young chap ruined by a raise of pay. . . . now, about you and me." gideon took a roll of bills from his trousers pocket, counted off five twenties, tossed them on the table. "there!" one of the bills in falling touched susan's hand. she jerked the hand away as if the bill had been afire. she took all five of them, folded them, held them out to him. "the house has paid me," said she. "that's honest," said he, nodding approvingly. "i like it. but in your case it don't apply." these two, thus facing a practical situation, revealed an important, overlooked truth about human morals. humanity divides broadly into three classes: the arrived; those who will never arrive and will never try; those in a state of flux, attempting and either failing or succeeding. the arrived and the inert together preach and to a certain extent practice an idealistic system of morality that interferes with them in no way. it does not interfere with the arrived because they have no need to infringe it, except for amusement; it does not interfere with the inert, but rather helps them to bear their lot by giving them a cheering notion that their insignificance is due to their goodness. this idealistic system receives the homage of lip service from the third and struggling section of mankind, but no more, for in practice it would hamper them at every turn in their efforts to fight their way up. susan was, at that stage of her career, a candidate for membership in the struggling class. her heart was set firmly against the unwritten, unspoken, even unwhispered code of practical morality which dominates the struggling class. but life had at least taught her the folly of intolerance. so when gideon talked in terms of that practical morality, she listened without offense; and she talked to him in terms of it because to talk the idealistic morality in which she had been bred and before which she bowed the knee in sincere belief would have been simply to excite his laughter at her innocence and his contempt for her folly. "i feel that i've been paid," said she. "i did it for the house--because i owed it to them." "only for the house?" said he with insinuating tenderness. he took and pressed the fingers extended with the money in them. "only for the house," she repeated, a hard note in her voice. and her fingers slipped away, leaving the money in his hand. "at least, i suppose it must have been for the house," she added, reflectively, talking to herself aloud. "why did i do it? i don't know. i don't know. they say one always has a reason for what one does. but i often can't find any reason for things i do--that, for instance. i simply did it because it seemed to me not to matter much what _i_ did with myself, and they wanted the order so badly." then she happened to become conscious of his presence and to see a look of uneasiness, self-complacence, as if he were thinking that he quite understood this puzzle. she disconcerted him with what vain men call a cruel snub. "but whatever the reason, it certainly couldn't have been you," said she. "now, look here, lorna," protested gideon, the beginnings of anger in his tone. "that's not the way to talk if you want to get on." she eyed him with an expression which would have raised a suspicion that he was repulsive in a man less self-confident, less indifferent to what the human beings he used for pleasure or profit thought of him. "to say nothing of what i can do for you, there's the matter of future orders. i order twice a year--in big lots always." "i've quit down there." "oh! somebody else has given you something good--eh? _that's_ why you're cocky." "no." "then why've you quit?" "i wish you could tell me. i don't understand. but--i've done it." gideon puzzled with this a moment, decided that it was beyond him and unimportant, anyhow. he blew out a cloud of smoke, stretched his legs and took up the main subject. "i was about to say, i've got a place for you. i'd like to take you to chicago, but there's a mrs. g.--as dear, sweet, good a soul as ever lived--just what a man wants at home with the children and to make things respectable. i wouldn't grieve her for worlds. but i can't live without a little fun--and mrs. g. is a bit slow for me. . . . still, it's no use talking about having you out there. she ought to be able to understand that an active man needs two women. one for the quiet side of his nature, the other for the lively side. sometimes i think she--like a lot of wives--wouldn't object if it wasn't that she was afraid the other lady would get me away altogether and she'd be left stranded." "naturally," said susan. "not at all!" cried he. "don't you get any such notion in that lovely little head of yours, my dear. you women don't understand honor--a man's sense of honor." "naturally," repeated susan. he gave a glance of short disapproval. her voice was not to his liking. "let's drop mrs. g. out of this," said he. "as i was saying, i've arranged for you to take a place here--easy work--something to occupy you--and i'll foot the bills over and above----" he stopped short or, rather, was stopped by the peculiar smile susan had turned upon him. before it he slowly reddened, and his eyes reluctantly shifted. he had roused her from listlessness, from indifference. the poisons in her blood were burned up by the fresh, swiftly flowing currents set in motion by his words, by the helpfulness of his expression, of his presence. she became again the intensely healthy, therefore intensely alive, therefore energetic and undaunted susan lenox, who, when still a child, had not hesitated to fly from home, from everyone she knew, into an unknown world. "what are you smiling at me that way for?" demanded he in a tone of extreme irritation. "so you look on me as your mistress?" and never in all her life had her eyes been so gray--the gray of cruelest irony. "now what's the use discussing those things? you know the world. you're a sensible woman." susan made closer and more secure the large loose coil of her hair, rose and leaned against the table. "you don't understand. you couldn't. i'm not one of those respectable women, like your mrs. g., who belong to men. and i'm not one of the other kind who also throw in their souls with their bodies for good measure. do _you_ think you had _me?_" she laughed with maddening gentle mockery, went on: "i don't hate you. i don't despise you even. you mean well. but the sight of you makes me sick. it makes me feel as i do when i think of a dirty tenement i used to have to live in, and of the things that i used to have to let crawl over me. so i want to forget you as soon as i can--and that will be soon after you get out of my sight." her blazing eyes startled him. her voice, not lifted above its usual quiet tones, enraged him. "you--you!" he cried. "you must be crazy, to talk to _me_ like that!" she nodded. "yes--crazy," said she with the same quiet intensity. "for i know what kind of a beast you are--a clean, good-natured beast, but still a beast. and how could you understand?" he had got upon his feet. he looked as if he were going to strike her. she made a slight gesture toward the door. he felt at a hopeless disadvantage with her--with this woman who did not raise her voice, did not need to raise it to express the uttermost of any passion. his jagged teeth gleamed through his mustache; his shrewd little eyes snapped like an angry rat's. he fumbled about through the steam of his insane rage for adequate insults--in vain. he rushed from the room and bolted downstairs. within an hour susan was out, looking for work. there could be no turning back now. until she went with gideon it had been as if her dead were still unburied and in the house. now---- never again could she even indulge in dreams of going to rod. that part of her life was finished with all the finality of the closed grave. grief--yes. but the same sort of grief as when a loved one, after a long and painful illness, finds relief in death. her love for rod had been stricken of a mortal illness the night of their arrival in new york. after lingering for a year between life and death, after a long death agony, it had expired. the end came--these matters of the exact moment of inevitable events are unimportant but have a certain melancholy interest--the end came when she made choice where there was no choice, in the cab with gideon. for better or for worse she was free. she was ready to begin her career. chapter iv after a few days, when she was viewing her situation in a calmer, more normal mood with the practical feminine eye, she regretted that she had refused gideon's money. she was proud of that within herself which had impelled and compelled her to refuse it; but she wished she had it. taking it, she felt, would have added nothing to her humiliation in her own sight; and for what he thought of her, one way or the other, she cared not a pin. it is one of the familiar curiosities of human inconsistency which is at bottom so completely consistent, that she did not regret having refused his far more valuable offer to aid her. she did not regret even during those few next days of disheartening search for work. we often read how purpose can be so powerful that it compels. no doubt if susan's purpose had been to get temporary relief--or, perhaps, had it been to get permanent relief by weaving a sex spell--she would in that desperate mood have been able to compel. unfortunately she was not seeking to be a pauper or a parasite; she was trying to find steady employment at living wages--that is, at wages above the market value for female and for most male--labor. and that sort of purpose cannot compel. our civilization overflows with charity--which is simply willingness to hand back to labor as generous gracious alms a small part of the loot from the just wages of labor. but of real help--just wages for honest labor--there is little, for real help would disarrange the system, would abolish the upper classes. she had some faint hopes in the direction of millinery and dressmaking, the things for which she felt she had distinct talent. she was soon disabused. there was nothing for her, and could be nothing until after several years of doubtful apprenticeship in the trades to which any female person seeking employment to piece out an income instinctively turned first and offered herself at the employer's own price. day after day, from the first moment of the industrial day until its end, she hunted--wearily, yet unweariedly--with resolve living on after the death of hope. she answered advertisements; despite the obviously sensible warnings of the working girls she talked with she even consulted and took lists from the religious and charitable organizations, patronized by those whose enthusiasm about honest work had never been cooled by doing or trying to do any of it, and managed by those who, beginning as workers, had made all haste to escape from it into positions where they could live by talking about it and lying about it--saying the things comfortable people subscribe to philanthropies to hear. there was work, plenty of it. but not at decent wages, and not leading to wages that could be earned without viciously wronging those under her in an executive position. but even in those cases the prospect of promotion was vague and remote, with illness and failing strength and poor food, worse clothing and lodgings, as certainties straightway. at some places she was refused with the first glance at her. no good-looking girls wanted; even though they behaved themselves and attracted customers, the customers lost sight of matters of merchandise in the all-absorbing matter of sex. in offices a good-looking girl upset discipline, caused the place to degenerate into a deer-haunt in the mating season. no place did she find offering more than four dollars a week, except where the dress requirements made the nominally higher wages even less. everywhere women's wages were based upon the assumption that women either lived at home or made the principal part of their incomes by prostitution, disguised or frank. in fact, all wages even the wages of men except in a few trades--were too small for an independent support. there had to be a family--and the whole family had to work--and even then the joint income was not enough for decency. she had no family or friends to help her--at least, no friends except those as poor as herself, and she could not commit the crime of adding to their miseries. she had less than ten dollars left. she must get to work at once--and what she earned must supply her with all. a note came from jeffries--a curt request that she call--curt to disguise the eagerness to have her back. she tore it up. she did not even debate the matter. it was one of her significant qualities that she never had the inclination, apparently lacked the power, to turn back once she had turned away. mary hinkle came, urged her. susan listened in silence, merely shook her head for answer, changed the subject. in the entrance to the lofts of a tall broadway building she saw a placard: "experienced hands at fancy ready-to-wear hat trimming wanted." she climbed three steep flights and was in a large, low-ceilinged room where perhaps seventy-five girls were at work. she paused in the doorway long enough to observe the kind of work--a purely mechanical process of stitching a few trimmings in exactly the same way upon a cheap hat frame. then she went to an open window in a glass partition and asked employment of a young jew with an incredibly long nose thrusting from the midst of a pimply face which seemed merely its too small base. "experienced?" asked the young man. "i can do what those girls are doing." with intelligent eyes he glanced at her face, then let his glance rove contemptuously over the room full of workers. "i should hope so," said he. "forty cents a dozen. want to try it?" "when may i go to work?" "right away. write your name here." susan signed her name to what she saw at a glance was some sort of contract. she knew it contained nothing to her advantage, much to her disadvantage. but she did not care. she had to have work--something, anything that would stop the waste of her slender capital. and within fifteen minutes she was seated in the midst of the sweating, almost nauseatingly odorous women of all ages, was toiling away at the simple task of making an ugly hat frame still more ugly by the addition of a bit of tawdry cotton ribbon, a buckle, and a bunch of absurdly artificial flowers. she was soon able to calculate roughly what she could make in six days. she thought she could do two dozen of the hats a day; and twelve dozen hats at forty cents the dozen would mean four dollars and eighty cents a week! four dollars and eighty cents! less than she had planned to set aside for food alone, out of her ten dollars as a model. next her on the right sat a middle-aged woman, grossly fat, repulsively shapeless, piteously homely--one of those luckless human beings who are foredoomed from the outset never to know any of the great joys of life the joys that come through our power to attract our fellow-beings. as this woman stitched away, squinting through the steel-framed spectacles set upon her snub nose, susan saw that she had not even good health to mitigate her lot, for her color was pasty and on her dirty skin lay blotches of dull red. except a very young girl here and there all the women had poor or bad skins. and susan was not made disdainful by the odor which is far worse than that of any lower animal, however dirty, because the human animal must wear clothing. she had lived in wretchedness in a tenement; she knew that this odor was an inevitable part of tenement life when one has neither the time nor the means to be clean. poor food, foul air, broken sleep--bad health, disease, unsightly faces, repulsive bodies! no wonder the common people looked almost like another race in contrast with their brothers and sisters of the comfortable classes. another race! the race into which she would soon be reborn under the black magic of poverty! as she glanced and reflected on what she saw, viewed it in the light of her experience, her fingers slackened, and she could speed them up only in spurts. "if i stay here," thought she, "in a few weeks i shall be like these others. no matter how hard i may fight, i'll be dragged down." as impossible to escape the common lot as for a swimmer alone in mid-ocean to keep up indefinitely whether long or brief, the struggle could have but, the one end--to be sunk in, merged in, the ocean. it took no great amount of vanity for her to realize that she was in every way the superior of all those around her--in every way except one. what did she lack? why was it that with her superior intelligence, her superior skill both of mind and of body, she could be thus dragged down and held far below her natural level? why could she not lift herself up among the sort of people with whom she belonged--or even make a beginning toward lifting herself up? why could she not take hold? what did she lack? what must she acquire--or what get rid of? at lunch time she walked with the ugly woman up and down the first side street above the building in which the factory was located. she ate a roll she bought from a pushcart man, the woman munched an apple with her few remnants of teeth. "most of the girls is always kicking," said the woman. "but i'm mighty satisfied. i get enough to eat and to wear, and i've got a bed to sleep in--and what else is there in life for anybody, rich or poor?" "there's something to be said for that," replied susan, marveling to find in this piteous creature the only case of thorough content she had ever seen. "i make my four to five per," continued the woman. "and i've got only myself. thank god, i was never fool enough to marry. it's marrying that drags us poor people down and makes us miserable. some says to me, 'ain't you lonesome?' and i says to them, says i, 'why, i'm used to being alone. i don't want anything else.' if they was all like me, they'd not be fightin' and drinkin' and makin' bad worse. the bosses always likes to give me work. they say i'm a model worker, and i'm proud to say they're right. i'm mighty grateful to the bosses that provide for the like of us. what'd we do without 'em? that's what _i_'d like to know." she had pitied this woman because she could never hope to experience any of the great joys of life. what a waste of pity, she now thought. she had overlooked the joy of joys--delusions. this woman was secure for life against unhappiness. a few days, and susan was herself regarded as a model worker. she turned out hats so rapidly that the forewoman, urged on by mr. himberg, the proprietor, began to nag at the other girls. and presently a notice of general reduction to thirty-five cents a dozen was posted. there had been a union; it had won a strike two years before--and then had been broken up by shrewd employing of detectives who had got themselves elected officers. with the union out of the way, there was no check upon the bosses in their natural and lawful effort to get that profit which is the most high god of our civilization. a few of the youngest and most spirited girls--those from families containing several workers--indignantly quit. a few others murmured, but stayed on. the mass dumbly accepted the extra twist in the screw of the mighty press that was slowly squeezing them to death. neither to them nor to susan herself did it happen to occur that she was the cause of the general increase of hardship and misery. however, to have blamed her would have been as foolish and as unjust as to blame any other individual. the system ordained it all. oppression and oppressed were both equally its helpless instruments. no wonder all the vast beneficent discoveries of science that ought to have made the whole human race healthy, long-lived and prosperous, are barely able to save the race from swift decay and destruction under the ravages of this modern system of labor worse than slavery--for under slavery the slave, being property whose loss could not be made good without expense, was protected in life and in health. susan soon discovered that she had miscalculated her earning power. she had been deceived by her swiftness in the first days, before the monotony of her task had begun to wear her down. her first week's earnings were only four dollars and thirty cents. this in her freshness, and in the busiest season when wages were at the highest point. in the room next hers--the same, perhaps a little dingier--lived a man. like herself he had no trade--that is, none protected by a powerful union and by the still more powerful--in fact, the only powerful shield--requirements of health and strength and a certain grade of intelligence that together act rigidly to exclude most men and so to keep wages from dropping to the neighborhood of the line of pauperism. he was the most industrious and, in his small way, the most resourceful of men. he was insurance agent, toilet soap agent, piano tuner, giver of piano lessons, seller of pianos and of music on commission. he worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day. he made nominally about twelve to fifteen a week. actually--because of the poverty of his customers and his too sympathetic nature he made five to six a week--the most any working person could hope for unless in one of the few favored trades. barely enough to keep body and soul together. and why should capital that needs so much for fine houses and wines and servants and automobiles and culture and charity and the other luxuries--why should capital pay more when so many were competing for the privilege of being allowed to work? she gave up her room at mrs. tucker's--after she had spent several evenings walking the streets and observing and thinking about the miseries of the fast women of the only class she could hope to enter. "a woman," she decided, "can't even earn a decent living that way unless she has the money to make the right sort of a start. 'to him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.' gideon was my chance and i threw it away." still, she did not regret. of all the horrors the most repellent seemed to her to be dependence upon some one man who could take it away at his whim. she disregarded the advice of the other girls and made the rounds of the religious and charitable homes for working girls. she believed she could endure perhaps better than could girls with more false pride, with more awe of snobbish conventionalities--at least she could try to endure--the superciliousness, the patronizing airs, the petty restraints and oppressions, the nauseating smugness, the constant prying and peeping, the hypocritical lectures, the heavy doses of smug morality. she felt that she could bear with almost any annoyances and humiliations to be in clean surroundings and to get food that was at least not so rotten that the eye could see it and the nose smell it. but she found all the homes full, with long waiting lists, filled for the most part, so the working girls said, with professional objects of charity. thus she had no opportunity to judge for herself whether there was any truth in the prejudice of the girls against these few and feeble attempts to mitigate the miseries of a vast and ever vaster multitude of girls. adding together all the accommodations offered by all the homes of every description, there was a total that might possibly have provided for the homeless girls of a dozen factories or sweatshops--and the number of homeless girls was more than a quarter of a million, was increasing at the rate of more than a hundred a day. charity is so trifling a force that it can, and should be, disregarded. it serves no _good_ useful service. it enables comfortable people to delude themselves that all that can be done is being done to mitigate the misfortunes which the poor bring upon themselves. it obscures the truth that modern civilization has been perverted into a huge manufacturing of decrepitude and disease, of poverty and prostitution. the reason we talk so much and listen so eagerly when our magnificent benevolences are the subject is that we do not wish to be disturbed--and that we dearly love the tickling sensation in our vanity of generosity. susan was compelled to the common lot--the lot that will be the common lot as long as there are people to be made, by taking advantage of human necessities, to force men and women and children to degrade themselves into machines as wage-slaves. at two dollars a week, double what her income justified--she rented a room in a tenement flat in bleecker street. it was a closet of a room whose thin, dirt-adorned walls were no protection against sound or vermin, not giving even privacy from prying eyes. she might have done a little better had she been willing to share room and bed with one or more girls, but not enough better to compensate for what that would have meant. the young jew with the nose so impossible that it elevated his countenance from commonplace ugliness to weird distinction had taken a friendly fancy to her. he was julius bam, nephew of the proprietor. in her third week he offered her the forewoman's place. "you've got a few brains in your head," said he. "miss tuohy's a boob. take the job and you'll push up. we'll start you at five per." susan thanked him but declined. "what's the use of my taking a job i couldn't keep more than a day or two?" explained she. "i haven't it in me to boss people." "then you've got to get it, or you're done for," said he. "nobody ever gets anywhere until he's making others work for him." it was the advice she had got from matson, the paper box manufacturer in cincinnati. it was the lesson she found in all prosperity on every hand. make others work for you--and the harder you made them work the more prosperous you were--provided, of course, you kept all or nearly all the profits of their harder toil. obvious common sense. but how could she goad these unfortunates, force their clumsy fingers to move faster, make their long and weary day longer and wearier--with nothing for them as the result but duller brain, clumsier fingers, more wretched bodies? she realized why those above lost all patience with them, treated them with contempt. only as one of them could any intelligent, energetic human being have any sympathy for them, stupid and incompetent from birth, made ever more and more stupid and incapable by the degrading lives they led. she could scarcely conceal her repulsion for their dirty bodies, their stained and rotting clothing saturated with stale sweat, their coarse flesh reeking coarse food smells. she could not listen to their conversation, so vulgar, so inane. yet she felt herself--for the time--one of them, and her heart bled for them. and while she knew that only their dullness of wit and ignorance kept them from climbing up and stamping and trampling full as savagely and cruelly as did those on top, still the fact remained that they were not stamping and trampling. as she was turning in some work, miss tuohy said abruptly: "you don't belong here. you ought to go back." susan started, and her heart beat wildly. she was going to lose her job! the forelady saw, and instantly understood. "i don't mean that," she said. "you can stay as long as you like--as long as your health lasts. but isn't there somebody somewhere--_anybody_--you can go to and ask them to help you out of this?" "no--there's no one," said she. "that can't be true," insisted the forelady. "everybody has somebody--or can get somebody--that is, anyone who looks like you. i wouldn't suggest such a thing to a fool. but _you_ could keep your head. there isn't any other way, and you might as well make up your mind to it." to confide is one of the all but universal longings--perhaps needs--of human nature. susan's honest, sympathetic eyes, her look and her habit of reticence, were always attracting confidences from such unexpected sources as hard, forbidding miss tuohy. susan was not much surprised when miss tuohy went on to say: "i was spoiled when i was still a kid--by getting to know well a man who was above my class. i had tastes that way, and he appealed to them. after him i couldn't marry the sort of man that wanted me. then my looks went--like a flash--it often happens that way with us irish girls. but i can get on. i know how to deal with these people--and _you_ never could learn. you'd treat 'em like ladies and they'd treat you as easy fruit. yes, i get along all right, and i'm happy--away from here." susan's sympathetic glance of inquiry gave the necessary encouragement. "it's a baby," miss tuohy explained--and susan knew it was for the baby's sake that this good heart had hardened itself to the dirty work of forelady. her eyes shifted as she said, "a child of my sister's--dead in ireland. how i do love that baby----" they were interrupted and it so happened that the confidence was never resumed and finished. but miss tuohy had made her point with susan--had set her to thinking less indefinitely. "i _must_ take hold!" susan kept saying to herself. the phrase was always echoing in her brain. but how?--_how?_ and to that question she could find no answer. every morning she bought a one-cent paper whose big circulation was in large part due to its want ads--its daily section of closely printed columns of advertisements of help wanted and situations wanted. susan read the columns diligently. at first they acted upon her like an intoxicant, filling her not merely with hope but with confident belief that soon she would be in a situation where the pay was good and the work agreeable, or at least not disagreeable. but after a few weeks she ceased from reading. why? because she answered the advertisements, scores of them, more than a hundred, before she saw through the trick and gave up. she found that throughout new york all the attractive or even tolerable places were filled by girls helped by their families or in other ways, girls working at less than living wages because they did not have to rely upon their wages for their support. and those help wanted advertisements were simply appeals for more girls of that sort--for cheaper girls; or they were inserted by employment agencies, masquerading in the newspaper as employers and lying in wait to swindle working girls by getting a fee in exchange for a false promise of good work at high wages; or they were the nets flung out by crafty employers who speeded and starved their slaves, and wished to recruit fresh relays to replace those that had quit in exhaustion or in despair. "why do you always read the want ads?" she said to lany ricardo, who spent all her spare time at those advertisements in two papers she bought and one she borrowed every day. "did you ever get anything good, or hear of anybody that did?" "oh, my, no," replied lany with a laugh. "i read for the same reason that all the rest do. it's a kind of dope. you read and then you dream about the places--how grand they are and how well off you'll be. but nobody'd be fool enough to answer one of 'em unless she was out of a job and had to get another and didn't care how rotten it was. no, it's just dope--like buyin' policy numbers or lottery tickets. you know you won't git a prize, but you have a lot of fun dreaming about it." as susan walked up and down at the lunch hour, she talked with workers, both men and women, in all sorts of employment. some were doing a little better than she; others--the most--were worse off chiefly because her education, her developed intelligence, enabled her to ward off savage blows--such as illness from rotten food--against which their ignorance made them defenseless. whenever she heard a story of someone's getting on, how grotesquely different it was from the stories she used to get out of the sunday school library and dream over! these almost actualities of getting on had nothing in them about honesty and virtue. according to them it was always some sort of meanness or trickery; and the particular meanness or tricks were, in these practical schools of success in session at each lunch hour, related in detail as lessons in how to get on. if the success under discussion was a woman's, it was always how her boss or employer had "got stuck on her" and had given her an easier job with good pay so that she could wear clothes more agreeable to his eyes and to his touch. now and then it was a wonderful dazzling success--some girl had got her rich employer so "dead crazy" about her that he had taken her away from work altogether and had set her up in a flat with a servant and a "swell trap"; there was even talk of marriage. was it true? were the sunday school books through and through lies--ridiculous, misleading lies, wicked lies--wicked because they hid the shameful truth that ought to be proclaimed from the housetops? susan was not sure. perhaps envy twisted somewhat these tales of rare occasional successes told by the workers to each other. but certain it was that, wherever she had the opportunity to see for herself, success came only by hardness of heart, by tricks and cheats. certain it was also that the general belief among the workers was that success could be got in those ways only--and this belief made the falsehood, if it was a falsehood, or the partial truth, if it was a twisted truth, full as poisonous as if it had been true throughout. also, if the thing were not true, how came it that everyone in practical life believed it to be so--how came it that everyone who talked in praise of honesty and virtue looked, as he talked, as if he were canting and half expected to be laughed at? all about her as badly off as she, or worse off. yet none so unhappy as she--not even the worse off. in fact, the worse off as the better off were not so deeply wretched. because they had never in all their lives known the decencies of life clean lodgings, clean clothing, food fit to eat, leisure and the means of enjoying leisure. and susan had known all these things. when she realized why her companions in misery, so feeble in self-restraint, were able to endure patiently and for the most part even cheerfully, how careful she was never to say or to suggest anything that might put ideas of what life might be, of what it was for the comfortable few, into the minds of these girls who never had known and could only be made wretched by knowing! how fortunate for them, she thought, that they had gone to schools where they met only their own kind! how fortunate that the devouring monster of industry had snatched them away from school before their minds had been awakened to the realities of life! how fortunate that their imaginations were too dull and too heavy to be touched by the sights of luxury they saw in the streets or by what they read in the newspapers and in the cheap novels! to them, as she soon realized, their world seemed the only world, and the world that lived in comfort seemed a vague unreality, as must seem whatever does not come into our own experience. one lunch hour an apostle of discontent preaching some kind of politics or other held forth on the corner above the shop. susan paused to listen. she had heard only a few words when she was incensed to the depths of her heart against him. he ought to be stopped by the police, this scoundrel trying to make these people unhappy by awakening them to the misery and degradation of their lot! he looked like an honest, earnest man. no doubt he fancied that he was in some way doing good. these people who were always trying to do the poor good--they ought all to be suppressed! if someone could tell them how to cease to be poor, that would indeed be good. but such a thing would be impossible. in sutherland, where the best off hadn't so painfully much more than the worst off, and where everybody but the idle and the drunken, and even they most of the time, had enough to eat, and a decent place to sleep, and some kind of sunday clothes--in sutherland the poverty was less than in cincinnati, infinitely less than in this vast and incredibly rich new york where in certain districts wealth, enormous wealth, was piled up and up. so evidently the presence of riches did not help poverty but seemed to increase it. no, the disease was miserable, thought susan. for most of the human race, disease and bad food and vile beds in dingy holes and days of fierce, poorly paid toil--that was the law of this hell of a world. and to escape from that hideous tyranny, you must be hard, you must trample, you must rob, you must cease to be human. the apostle of discontent insisted that the law could be changed, that the tyranny could be abolished. she listened, but he did not convince her. he sounded vague and dreamy--as fantastically false in his new way as she had found the sunday school books to be. she passed on. she continued to pay out a cent each day for the newspaper. she no longer bothered with the want ads. pipe dreaming did not attract her; she was too fiercely bent upon escape, actual escape, to waste time in dreaming of ways of escape that she never could realize. she read the paper because, if she could not live in the world but was battered down in its dark and foul and crowded cellar, she at least wished to know what was going on up in the light and air. she found every day news of great doings, of wonderful rises, of rich rewards for industry and thrift, of abounding prosperity and of opportunity fairly forcing itself into acceptance. but all this applied only to the few so strangely and so luckily chosen, while the mass was rejected. for that mass, from earliest childhood until death, there was only toil in squalor--squalid food, squalid clothing, squalid shelter. and when she read one day--in an obscure paragraph in her newspaper--that the income of the average american family was less than twelve dollars a week--less than two dollars and a half a week for each individual--she realized that what she was seeing and living was not new york and cincinnati, but was the common lot, country wide, no doubt world wide. "_must_ take hold!" her mind cried incessantly to her shrinking heart. "somehow--anyhow--take hold!--must--must--_must!_" those tenement houses! those tenement streets! everywhere wandering through the crowds the lonely old women--holding up to the girls the mirror of time and saying: "look at my misery! look at my disease-blasted body. look at my toil-bent form and toil-wrecked hands. look at my masses of wrinkles, at my rags, at my leaky and rotten shoes. think of my aloneness--not a friend--feared and cast off by my relatives because they are afraid they will have to give me food and lodgings. look at me--think of my life--and know that i am _you_ as you will be a few years from now whether you work as a slave to the machine or as a slave to the passions of one or of many men. i am _you_. not one in a hundred thousand escape my fate except by death." "somehow--anyhow--i must take hold," cried susan to her swooning heart. when her capital had dwindled to three dollars mrs. tucker appeared. her face was so beaming bright that susan, despite her being clad in garments on which a pawnshop would advance nothing, fancied she had come with good news. "now that i'm rid of that there house," said she, "i'll begin to perk up. i ain't got nothing left to worry me. i'm ready for whatever blessings the dear master'll provide. my pastor tells me i'm the finest example of christian fortitude he ever saw. but"--and mrs. tucker spoke with genuine modesty--"i tell him i don't deserve no credit for leaning on the lord. if i can trust him in death, why not in life?" "you've got a place? the church has----" "bless you, no," cried mrs. tucker. "would i burden 'em with myself, when there's so many that has to be looked after? no, i go direct to the lord." "what are you going to do? what place have you got?" "none as yet. but he'll provide something--something better'n i deserve." susan had to turn away, to hide her pity--and her disappointment. not only was she not to be helped, but also she must help another. "you might get a job at the hat factory," said she. mrs. tucker was delighted. "i knew it!" she cried. "don't you see how he looks after me?" susan persuaded miss tuohy to take mrs. tucker on. she could truthfully recommend the old woman as a hard worker. they moved into a room in a tenement in south fifth avenue. susan read in the paper about a model tenement and went to try for what was described as real luxury in comfort and cleanliness. she found that sort of tenements filled with middle-class families on their way down in the world and making their last stand against rising rents and rising prices. the model tenement rents were far, far beyond her ability to pay. she might as well think of moving to the waldorf. she and mrs. tucker had to be content with a dark room on the fifth floor, opening on a damp air shaft whose odor was so foul that in comparison the clinton place shaft was as the pure breath of the open sky. for this shelter--more than one-half the free and proud citizens of prosperous america dwelling in cities occupy its like, or worse they paid three dollars a week--a dollar and a half apiece. they washed their underclothing at night, slept while it was drying. and susan, who could not bring herself to imitate the other girls and wear a blouse of dark color that was not to be washed, rose at four to do the necessary ironing. they did their own cooking. it was no longer possible for susan to buy quality and content herself with small quantity. however small the quantity of food she could get along on, it must be of poor quality--for good quality was beyond her means. it maddened her to see the better class of working girls. their fairly good clothing, their evidences of some comfort at home, seemed to mock at her as a poor fool who was being beaten down because she had not wit enough to get on. she knew these girls were either supporting themselves in part by prostitution or were held up by their families, by the pooling of the earnings of several persons. left to themselves, to their own earnings at work, they would be no better off than she, or at best so little better off that the difference was unimportant. if to live decently in new york took an income of fifteen dollars a week, what did it matter whether one got five or ten or twelve? any wages below fifteen meant a steady downward drag--meant exposure to the dirt and poison of poverty tenements--meant the steady decline of the power of resistance, the steady oozing away of self-respect, of the courage and hope that give the power to rise. to have less than the fifteen dollars absolutely necessary for decent surroundings, decent clothing, decent food--that meant one was drowning. what matter whether the death of the soul was quick, or slow, whether the waters of destruction were twenty feet deep or twenty thousand? mrs. reardon, the servant woman on the top floor, was evicted and susan and mrs. tucker took her in. she protested that she could sleep on the floor, that she had done so a large part of her life--that she preferred it to most beds. but susan made her up a kind of bed in the corner. they would not let her pay anything. she had rheumatism horribly, some kind of lung trouble, and the almost universal and repulsive catarrh that preys upon working people. her hair had dwindled to a meager wisp. this she wound into a hard little knot and fastened with an imitation tortoise-shell comb, huge, high, and broken, set with large pieces of glass cut like diamonds. her teeth were all gone and her cheeks almost met in her mouth. one day, when mrs. tucker and mrs. reardon were exchanging eulogies upon the goodness of god to them, susan shocked them by harshly ordering them to be silent. "if god hears you," she said, "he'll think you're mocking him. anyhow, i can't stand any more of it. hereafter do your talking of that kind when i'm not here." another day mrs. reardon told about her sister. the sister had worked in a factory where some sort of poison that had a rotting effect on the human body was used in the manufacture. like a series of others the sister caught the disease. but instead of rotting out a spot, a few fingers, or part of the face, it had eaten away the whole of her lower jaw so that she had to prepare her food for swallowing by first pressing it with her fingers against her upper teeth. used as susan was to hearing horrors in this region where disease and accident preyed upon every family, she fled from the room and walked shuddering about the streets--the streets with their incessant march past of blighted and blasted, of maimed and crippled and worm-eaten. until that day susan had been about as unobservant of the obvious things as is the rest of the race. on that day she for the first time noticed the crowd in the street, with mind alert to signs of the ravages of accident and disease. hardly a sound body, hardly one that was not piteously and hideously marked. when she returned--and she did not stay out long--mrs. tucker was alone. said she: "mrs. reardon says the rotten jaw was sent on her sister as a punishment for marrying a protestant, she being a catholic. how ignorant some people is! of course, the good lord sent the judgment on her for being a catholic at all." "mrs. tucker," said susan, "did you ever hear of nero?" "he burned up rome--and he burned up the christian martyrs," said mrs. tucker. "i had a good schooling. besides, sermons is highly educating." "well," said susan, "if i had a choice of living under nero or of living under that god you and mrs. reardon talk about, i'd take nero and be thankful and happy." mrs. tucker would have fled if she could have afforded it. as it was all she ventured was a sigh and lips moving in prayer. on a friday in late october, at the lunch hour, susan was walking up and down the sunny side of broadway. it was the first distinctly cool day of the autumn; there had been a heavy downpour of rain all morning, but the new york sun that is ever struggling to shine and is successful on all but an occasional day was tearing up and scattering the clouds with the aid of a sharp north wind blowing down the deep canyon. she was wearing her summer dress still--old and dingy but clean. that look of neatness about the feet--that charm of a well-shaped foot and a well-turned ankle properly set off--had disappeared--with her the surest sign of the extreme of desperate poverty. her shoes were much scuffed, were even slightly down at the heel; her sailor hat would have looked only the worse had it had a fresh ribbon on its crown. this first hint of winter had stung her fast numbing faculties into unusual activity. she was remembering the misery of the cold in cincinnati--the misery that had driven her into prostitution as a drunken driver's lash makes the frenzied horse rush he cares not where in his desire to escape. this wind of broadway--this first warning of winter--it was hissing in her ears: "take hold! winter is coming! take hold!" summer and winter--fiery heat and brutal cold. like the devils in the poem, the poor--the masses, all but a few of the human race--were hurried from fire to ice, to vary their torment and to make it always exquisite. to shelter herself for a moment she paused at a spot that happened to be protected to the south by a projecting sidewalk sign. she was facing, with only a tantalizing sheet of glass between, a display of winter underclothes on wax figures. to show them off more effectively the sides and the back of the window were mirrors. susan's gaze traveled past the figures to a person she saw standing at full length before her. "who is that pale, stooped girl?" she thought. "how dreary and sad she looks! how hard she is fighting to make her clothes look decent, when they aren't! she must be something like me--only much worse off." and then she realized that she was gazing at her own image, was pitying her own self. the room she and mrs. tucker and the old scrubwoman occupied was so dark, even with its one little gas jet lighted, that she was able to get only a faint look at herself in the little cracked and water-marked mirror over its filthy washstand--filthy because the dirt was so ground in that only floods of water and bars of soap could have cleaned down to its original surface. she was having a clear look at herself for the first time in three months. she shrank in horror, yet gazed on fascinated. why, her physical charm had gone gone, leaving hardly a trace! those dull, hollow eyes--that thin and almost ghastly face--the emaciated form--the once attractive hair now looking poor and stringy because it could not be washed properly--above all, the sad, bitter expression about the mouth. those pale lips! her lips had been from childhood one of her conspicuous and most tempting beauties; and as the sex side of her nature had developed they had bloomed into wonderful freshness and vividness of form and color. now---- those pale, pale lips! they seemed to form a sort of climax of tragedy to the melancholy of her face. she gazed on and on. she noted every detail. how she had fallen! indeed, a fallen woman! these others had been born to the conditions that were destroying her; they were no worse off, in many cases better off. but she, born to comfort and custom of intelligent educated associations and associates---- a fallen woman! honest work! even if it were true that this honest work was a sort of probation through which one rose to better things--even if this were true, could it be denied that only a few at best could rise, that the most--including all the sensitive, and most of the children--must wallow on, must perish? oh, the lies, the lies about honest work! rosa mohr, a girl of her own age who worked in the same room, joined her. "admiring yourself?" she said laughing. "well, i don't blame you. you _are_ pretty." susan at first thought rosa was mocking her. but the tone and expression were sincere. "it won't last long," rosa went on. "i wasn't so bad myself when i quit the high school and took a job because father lost his business and his health. he got in the way of one of those trusts. so of course they handed it to him good and hard. but he wasn't a squealer. he always said they'd done only what he'd been doing himself if he'd had the chance. i always think of what papa used to say when i hear people carrying on about how wicked this or that somebody else is." "are you going to stay on--at this life?" asked susan, still looking at her own image. "i guess so. what else is there? . . . i've got a steady. we'll get married as soon as he has a raise to twelve per. but i'll not be any better off. my beau's too stupid ever to make much. if you see me ten years from now i'll probably be a fat, sloppy old thing, warming a window sill or slouching about in dirty rags." "isn't there any way to--to escape?" "it does look as though there ought to be--doesn't it? but i've thought and thought, and _i_ can't see it--and i'm pretty near straight jew. they say things are better than they used to be, and i guess they are. but not enough better to help me any. perhaps my children--_if_ i'm fool enough to have any--perhaps they'll get a chance. . . . but i wouldn't gamble on it." susan was still looking at her rags--at her pale lips--was avoiding meeting her own eyes. "why not try the streets?" "nothing in it," said rosa, practically. "i did try it for a while and quit. lots of the girls do, and only the fools stay at it. once in a while there's a girl who's lucky and gets a lover that's kind to her or a husband that can make good. but that's luck. for one that wins out, a thousand lose." "luck?" said susan. rosa laughed. "you're right. it's something else besides luck. the trouble is a girl loses her head--falls in love--supports a man--takes to drink--don't look out for her health--wastes her money. still--where's the girl with head enough to get on where there's so many temptations?" "but there's no chance at all, keeping straight, you say." "the other thing's worse. the street girls--of our class, i mean--don't average as much as we do. and it's an awful business in winter. and they spend so much time in station houses and over on the island. and, gosh! how the men do treat them! you haven't any idea. you wouldn't believe the horrible things the girls have to do to earn their money--a quarter or half a dollar--and maybe the men don't pay them even that. a girl tries to get her money in advance, but often she doesn't. and as they have to dress better than we do, and live where they can clean up a little, they 'most starve. oh, that life's hell." susan had turned away from her image, was looking at rosa. "as for the fast houses----" rosa shuddered--"i was in one for a week. i ran away--it was the only way i could escape. i'd never tell any human being what i went through in that house. . . . never!" she watched susan's fine sympathetic face, and in a burst of confidence said: "one night the landlady sent me up with seventeen men. and she kept the seventeen dollars i made, and took away from me half a dollar one drunken longshoreman gave me as a present. she said i owed it for board and clothes. in those houses, high and low, the girls always owes the madam. they haven't a stitch of their own to their backs." the two girls stood facing each other, each looking past the other into the wind-swept canyon of broadway--the majestic vista of lofty buildings, symbols of wealth and luxury so abundant that it flaunted itself, overflowed in gaudy extravagance. finally susan said: "do you ever think of killing yourself?" "i thought i would," replied the other girl. "but i guess i wouldn't have. everybody knows there's no hope, yet they keep on hopin'. and i've got pretty good health yet, and once in a while i have some fun. you ought to go to dances--and drink. you wouldn't be blue _all_ the time, then." "if it wasn't for the sun," said susan. "the sun?" inquired rosa. "where i came from," explained susan, "it rained a great deal, and the sky was covered so much of the time. but here in new york there is so much sun. i love the sun. i get desperate--then out comes the sun, and i say to myself, 'well, i guess i can go on a while longer, with the sun to help me.'" "i hadn't thought of it," said rosa, "but the sun is a help." that indefatigable new york sun! it was like susan's own courage. it fought the clouds whenever clouds dared to appear and contest its right to shine upon the city of the sun, and hardly a day was so stormy that for a moment at least the sun did not burst through for a look at its beloved. for weeks susan had eaten almost nothing. during her previous sojourn in the slums--the slums of cincinnati, though they were not classed as slums--the food had seemed revolting. but she was less discriminating then. the only food she could afford now--the food that is the best obtainable for a majority of the inhabitants of any city--was simply impossible for her. she ate only when she could endure no longer. this starvation no doubt saved her from illness; but at the same time it drained her strength. her vitality had been going down, a little each day--lower and lower. the poverty which had infuriated her at first was now acting upon her like a soothing poison. the reason she had not risen to revolt was this slow and subtle poison that explains the inertia of the tenement poor from babyhood. to be spirited one must have health or a nervous system diseased in some of the ways that cause constant irritation. the disease called poverty is not an irritant, but an anesthetic. if susan had been born to that life, her naturally vivacious temperament would have made her gay in unconscious wretchedness; as it was, she knew her own misery and suffered from it keenly--at times hideously--yet was rapidly losing the power to revolt. perhaps it was the wind--yes, it must have been the wind with its threat of winter--that roused her sluggish blood, that whipped thought into action. anything--anything would be right, if it promised escape. right--wrong! hypocritical words for comfortable people! that friday night, after her supper of half-cooked corn meal and tea, she went instantly to work at washing out clothes. mrs. tucker spent the evening gossiping with the janitress, came in about midnight. as usual she was full to the brim with news of misery--of jobs lost, abandoned wives, of abused children, of poisoning from rotten "fresh" food or from "embalmed" stuff in cans, of sickness and yet more sickness, of maiming accidents, of death--news that is the commonplace of tenement life. she loved to tell these tales with all the harrowing particulars and to find in each some evidence of the goodness of god to herself. often susan could let her run on and on without listening. but not that night. she resisted the impulse to bid her be silent, left the room and stood at the hall window. when she returned mrs. tucker was in bed, was snoring in a tranquillity that was the reverse of contagious. with her habitual cheerfulness she had adapted herself to her changed condition without fretting. she had become as ragged and as dirty as her neighbors; she so wrought upon susan's sensibilities, blunted though they were, that the girl would have been unable to sleep in the same bed if she had not always been tired to exhaustion when she lay down. but for that matter only exhaustion could have kept her asleep in that vermin-infested hole. even the fiercest swarms of the insects that flew or ran or crawled and bit, even the filthy mice squeaking as they played upon the covers or ran over the faces of the sleepers, did not often rouse her. while mrs. tucker snored, susan worked on, getting every piece of at all fit clothing in her meager wardrobe into the best possible condition. she did not once glance at the face of the noisy sleeper--a face homely enough in mrs. tucker's waking hours, hideous now with the mouth open and a few scattered rotten teeth exposed, and the dark yellow-blue of the unhealthy gums and tongue. at dawn mrs. tucker awoke with a snort and a start. she rubbed her eyes with her dirty and twisted and wrinkled fingers--the nails were worn and broken, turned up as if warped at the edges, blackened with dirt and bruisings. "why, are you up already?" she said to susan. "i've not been to bed," replied the girl. the woman stretched herself, sat up, thrust her thick, stockinged legs over the side of the bed. she slept in all her clothing but her skirt, waist, and shoes. she kneeled down upon the bare, sprung, and slanting floor, said a prayer, arose with a beaming face. "it's nice and warm in the room. how i do dread the winter, the cold weather--though no doubt we'll make out all right! everything always does turn out well for me. the lord takes care of me. i must make me a cup of tea." "i've made it," said susan. the tea was frightful stuff--not tea at all, but cheap adulterants colored poisonously. everything they got was of the same quality; yet the prices they paid for the tiny quantities they were able to buy at any one time were at a rate that would have bought the finest quality at the most expensive grocery in new york. "wonder why mrs. reardon don't come?" said mrs. tucker. mrs. reardon had as her only work a one night job at scrubbing. "she ought to have come an hour ago." "her rheumatism was bad when she started," said susan. "i guess she worked slow." when mrs. tucker had finished her second cup she put on her shoes, overskirt and waist, made a few passes at her hair. she was ready to go to work. susan looked at her, murmured: "an honest, god-fearing working woman!" "huh?" said mrs. tucker. "nothing," replied susan who would not have permitted her to hear. it would be cruel to put such ideas before one doomed beyond hope. susan was utterly tired, but even the strong craving for a stimulant could not draw that tea past her lips. she ate a piece of dry bread, washed her face, neck, and hands. it was time to start for the factory. that day--saturday--was a half-holiday. susan drew her week's earnings--four dollars and ten cents--and came home. mrs. tucker, who had drawn--"thanks to the lord"--three dollars and a quarter, was with her. the janitress halted them as they passed and told them that mrs. reardon was dead. she looked like another scrubwoman, living down the street, who was known always to carry a sum of money in her dress pocket, the banks being untrustworthy. mrs. reardon, passing along in the dusk of the early morning, had been hit on the head with a blackjack. the one blow had killed her. violence, tragedy of all kinds, were too commonplace in that neighborhood to cause more than a slight ripple. an old scrubwoman would have had to die in some peculiarly awful way to receive the flattery of agitating an agitated street. mrs. reardon had died what was really almost a natural death. so the faint disturbance of the terrors of life had long since disappeared. the body was at the morgue, of course. "we'll go up, right away," said mrs. tucker. "i've something to do that can't be put, off," replied susan. "i don't like for anyone as young as you to be so hard," reproached mrs. tucker. "is it hard," said susan, "to see that death isn't nearly so terrible as life? she's safe and at peace. i've got to _live_." mrs. tucker, eager for an emotional and religious opportunity, hastened away. susan went at her wardrobe ironing, darning, fixing buttonholes, hooks and eyes. she drew a bucket of water from the tap in the hall and proceeded to wash her hair with soap; she rinsed it, dried it as well as she could with their one small, thin towel, left it hanging free for the air to finish the job. it had rained all the night before--the second heavy rain in two months. but at dawn the rain had ceased, and the clouds had fled before the sun that rules almost undisputed nine months of the year and wars valiantly to rule the other three months--not altogether in vain. a few golden strays found their way into that cavelike room and had been helping her wonderfully. she bathed herself and scrubbed herself from head to foot. she manicured her nails, got her hands and feet into fairly good condition. she put on her best underclothes, her one remaining pair of undarned stockings, the pair of ties she had been saving against an emergency. and once more she had the charm upon which she most prided herself--the charm of an attractive look about the feet and ankles. she then took up the dark-blue hat frame--one of a lot of "seconds"--she had bought for thirty-five cents at a bargain sale, trimmed it with a broad dark-blue ribbon for which she had paid sixty cents. she was well pleased--and justly so--with the result. the trimmed hat might well have cost ten or fifteen dollars--for the largest part of the price of a woman's hat is usually the taste of the arrangement of the trimming. by this time her hair was dry. she did it up with a care she had not had time to give it in many a week. she put on the dark-blue serge skirt of the between seasons dress she had brought with her from forty-fourth street; she had not worn it at all. with the feeble aid of the mirror that distorted her image into grotesqueness, she put on her hat with the care that important detail of a woman's toilet always deserves. she completed her toilet with her one good and unworn blouse--plain white, the yoke gracefully pointed--and with a blue neck piece she had been saving. she made a bundle of all her clothing that was fit for anything--including the unworn batiste dress jeffries and jonas had given her. and into it she put the pistol she had brought away from forty-fourth street. she made a separate bundle of the jeffries and jonas hat with its valuable plumes. with the two bundles she descended and went to a pawnshop in houston street, to which she had made several visits. a dirty-looking man with a short beard fluffy and thick like a yellow hen's tail lurked behind the counter in the dark little shop. she put her bundles on the counter, opened them. "how much can i get for these things?" she asked. the man examined every piece minutely. "there's really nothing here but the summer dress and the hat," said he. "and they're out of style. i can't give you more than four dollars for the lot--and one for the pistol which is good but old style now. five dollars. how'll you have it?" susan folded the things and tied up the bundles. "sorry to have troubled you," she said, taking one in either hand. "how much did you expect to get, lady?" asked the pawnbroker. "twenty-five dollars." he laughed, turned toward the back of the shop. as she reached the door he called from his desk at which he seemed about to seat himself, "i might squeeze you out ten dollars." "the plumes on the hat will sell for thirty dollars," said susan. "you know as well as i do that ostrich feathers have gone up." the man slowly advanced. "i hate to see a customer go away unsatisfied," said he. "i'll give you twenty dollars." "not a cent less than twenty-five. at the next place i'll ask thirty--and get it." "i never can stand out against a lady. give me the stuff." susan put it on the counter again. said she: "i don't blame you for trying to do me. you're right to try to buy your way out of hell." the pawnbroker reflected, could not understand this subtlety, went behind his counter. he produced a key from his pocket, unlocked a drawer underneath and took out a large tin box. with another key from another pocket he unlocked this, threw back the lid revealing a disorder of papers. from the depths he fished a paper bag. this contained a roll of bills. he gave susan a twenty and a five, both covered with dirt so thickly that she could scarcely make out the denominations. "you'll have to give me cleaner money than this," said she. "you are a fine lady," grumbled he. but he found cleaner bills. she turned to her room. at sight of her mrs. tucker burst out laughing with delight. "my, but you do look like old times!" cried she. "how neat and tasty you are! i suppose it's no need to ask if you're going to church?" "no," said susan. "i've got nothing to give, and i don't beg." "well, i ain't going there myself, lately--somehow. they got so they weren't very cordial--or maybe it was me thinking that way because i wasn't dressed up like. still i do wish you was more religious. but you'll come to it, for you're naturally a good girl. and when you do, the lord'll give you a more contented heart. not that you complain. i never knew anybody, especially a young person, that took things so quiet. . . . it can't be you're going to a dance?" "no," said susan. "i'm going to leave--go back uptown." mrs. tucker plumped down upon the bed. "leave for good?" she gasped. "i've got nelly lemayer to take my place here, if you want her," said susan. "here is my share of the rent for next week and half a dollar for the extra gas i've burned last night and today." "and mrs. reardon gone, too!" sobbed mrs. tucker, suddenly remembering the old scrubwoman whom both had forgotten. "and up to that there morgue they wouldn't let me see her except where the light was so poor that i couldn't rightly swear it was her. how brutal everybody is to the poor! if they didn't have the lord, what would become of them! and you leaving me all alone!" the sobs rose into hysteria. susan stood impassive. she had seen again and again how faint the breeze that would throw those shallow waters into commotion and how soon they were tranquil again. it was by observing mrs. tucker that she first learned an important unrecognized truth about human nature that amiable, easily sympathetic and habitually good-humored people are invariably hard of heart. in this parting she had no sense of loss, none of the melancholy that often oppresses us when we separate from someone to whom we are indifferent yet feel bound by the tie of misfortunes borne together. mrs. tucker, fallen into the habits of their surroundings, was for her simply part of them. and she was glad she was leaving them--forever, she hoped. _christian_, fleeing the city of destruction, had no sterner mandate to flight than her instinct was suddenly urging upon her. when mrs. tucker saw that her tears were not appreciated, she decided that they were unnecessary. she dried her eyes and said: "anyhow, i reckon mrs. reardon's taking-off was a mercy." "she's better dead," said susan. she had abhorred the old woman, even as she pitied and sheltered her. she had a way of fawning and cringing and flattering--no doubt in well meaning attempt to show gratitude--but it was unendurable to susan. and now that she was dead and gone, there was no call for further pretenses. "you ain't going right away?" said mrs. tucker. "yes," said susan. "you ought to stay to supper." supper! that revolting food! "no, i must go right away," replied susan. "well, you'll come to see me. and maybe you'll be back with us. you might go farther and do worse. on my way from the morgue i dropped in to see a lady friend on the east side. i guess the good lord has abandoned the east side, there being nothing there but catholics and jews, and no true religion. it's dreadful the way things is over there--the girls are taking to the streets in droves. my lady friend was telling me that some of the mothers is sending their little girls out streetwalking, and some's even taking out them that's too young to be trusted to go alone. and no money in it, at that. and food and clothing prices going up and up. meat and vegetables two and three times what they was a few years ago. and rents!" mrs. tucker threw up her hands. "i must be going," said susan. "good-by." she put out her hand, but mrs. tucker insisted on kissing her. she crossed washington square, beautiful in the soft evening light, and went up fifth avenue. she felt that she was breathing the air of a different world as she walked along the broad clean sidewalk with the handsome old houses on either side, with carriages and automobiles speeding past, with clean, happy-faced, well dressed human beings in sight everywhere. it was like coming out of the dank darkness of dismal swamp into smiling fields with a pure, star-spangled sky above. she was free--free! it might be for but a moment; still it was freedom, infinitely sweet because of past slavery and because of the fear of slavery closing in again. she had abandoned the old toilet articles. she had only the clothes she was wearing, the thirty-one dollars divided between her stockings, and the two-dollar bill stuffed into the palm of her left glove. she had walked but a few hundred feet. she had advanced into a region no more prosperous to the eye than that she had been working in every day. yet she had changed her world--because she had changed her point of view. the strata that form society lie in roughly parallel lines one above the other. the flow of all forms of the currents of life is horizontally along these strata, never vertically from one stratum to another. these strata, lying apparently in contact, one upon another, are in fact abysmally separated. there is not--and in the nature of things never can be any genuine human sympathy between any two strata. we _sympathize_ in our own stratum, or class; toward other strata--other classes--our attitude is necessarily a looking up or a looking down. susan, a bit of flotsam, ascending, descending, ascending across the social layers--belonging nowhere having attachments, not sympathies, a real settled lot nowhere--susan was once more upward bound. at the corner of fourteenth street there was a shop with large mirrors in the show windows. she paused to examine herself. she found she had no reason to be disturbed about her appearance. her dress and hat looked well; her hair was satisfactory; the sharp air had brought some life to the pallor of her cheeks, and the release from the slums had restored some of the light to her eyes. "why did i stay there so long?" she demanded of herself. then, "how have i suddenly got the courage to leave?" she had no answer to either question. nor did she care for an answer. she was not even especially interested in what was about to happen to her. the moment she found herself above twenty-third street and in the old familiar surroundings, she felt an irresistible longing to hear about rod spenser. she was like one who has been on a far journey, leaving behind him everything that has been life to him; he dismisses it all because he must, until he finds himself again in his own country, in his old surroundings. she went into the hoffman house and at the public telephone got the _herald_ office. "is mr. drumley there?" "no," was the reply. "he's gone to europe." "did mr. spenser go with him?" "mr. spenser isn't here--hasn't been for a long time. he's abroad too. who is this?" "thank you," said susan, hanging up the receiver. she drew a deep breath of relief. she left the hotel by the women's entrance in broadway. it was six o'clock. the sky was clear--a typical new york sky with air that intoxicated blowing from it--air of the sea--air of the depths of heaven. a crescent moon glittered above the diana on the garden tower. it was saturday night and broadway was thronged--with men eager to spend in pleasure part of the week's wages or salary they had just drawn; with women sparkling-eyed and odorous of perfumes and eager to help the men. the air was sharp--was the ocean air of new york at its delicious best. and the slim, slightly stooped girl with the earnest violet-gray eyes and the sad bitter mouth from whose lips the once brilliant color had now fled was ready for whatever might come. she paused at the corner, and gazed up brilliantly lighted broadway. "now!" she said half aloud and, like an expert swimmer adventuring the rapids, she advanced into the swift-moving crowd of the highway of new york's gayety. chapter v at the corner of twenty-sixth street a man put himself squarely across her path. she was attracted by the twinkle in his good-natured eyes. he was a youngish man, had the stoutness of indulgence in a fondness for eating and drinking--but the stoutness was still well within the bounds of decency. his clothing bore out the suggestion of his self-assured way of stopping her--the suggestion of a confidence-giving prosperity. "you look as if you needed a drink, too," said he. "how about it, lady with the lovely feet?" for the first time in her life she was feeling on an equality with man. she gave him the same candidly measuring glance that man gives man. she saw good-nature, audacity without impudence--at least not the common sort of impudence. she smiled merrily, glad of the chance to show her delight that she was once more back in civilization after the long sojourn in the prison workshops where it is manufactured. she said: "a drink? thank you--yes." "that's a superior quality of smile you've got there," said he. "that, and those nice slim feet of yours ought to win for you anywhere. let's go to the martin." "down university place?" the stout young man pointed his slender cane across the street. "you must have been away." "yes," said the girl. "i've been--dead." "i'd like to try that myself--if i could be sure of coming to life in little old new york." and he looked round with laughing eyes as if the lights, the crowds, the champagne-like air intoxicated him. at the first break in the thunderous torrent of traffic they crossed broadway and went in at the twenty-sixth street entrance. the restaurant, to the left, was empty. its little tables were ready, however, for the throng of diners soon to come. susan had difficulty in restraining herself. she was almost delirious with delight. she was agitated almost to tears by the freshness, the sparkle in the glow of the red-shaded candles, in the colors and odors of the flowers decorating every table. while she had been down there all this had been up here--waiting for her! why had she stayed down there? but then, why had she gone? what folly, what madness! to suffer such horrors for no reason--beyond some vague, clinging remnant of a superstition--or had it been just plain insanity? "yes, i've been crazy--out of my head. the break with--rod--upset my mind." her companion took her into the café to the right. he seated her on one of the leather benches not far from the door, seated himself in a chair opposite; there was a narrow marble-topped table between them. on susan's right sat a too conspicuously dressed but somehow important looking actress; on her left, a shopkeeper's fat wife. opposite each woman sat the sort of man one would expect to find with her. the face of the actress's man interested her. it was a long pale face, the mouth weary, in the eyes a strange hot fire of intense enthusiasm. he was young--and old--and neither. evidently he had lived every minute of every year of his perhaps forty years. he was wearing a quiet suit of blue and his necktie was of a darker shade of the same color. his clothes were draped upon his good figure with a certain fascinating distinction. he was smoking an unusually long and thick cigarette. the slender strong white hand he raised and lowered was the hand of an artist. he might be a bad man, a very bad man--his face had an expression of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. but however bad he might be, susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind of badness, without vulgarity. he might have reached the stage at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes--and he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and manner. the woman with him evidently wished to convince him that she loved him, to convince those about her that they were lovers; the man evidently knew exactly what she had in mind--for he was polite, attentive, indifferent, and--susan suspected--secretly amused. susan's escort leaned toward her and said in a low tone, "the two at the next table--the woman's mary rigsdall, the actress, and the man's brent, the fellow who writes plays." then in a less cautious tone, "what are you drinking?" "what are _you_ drinking?" asked susan, still covertly watching brent. "you are going to dine with me?" "i've no engagement." "then let's have martinis--and i'll go get a table and order dinner while the waiter's bringing them." when susan was alone, she gazed round the crowded café, at the scores of interesting faces--thrillingly interesting to her after her long sojourn among countenances merely expressing crude elemental appetites if anything at all beyond toil, anxiety, privation, and bad health. these were the faces of the triumphant class--of those who had wealth or were getting it, fame or were striving for it, of those born to or acquiring position of some sort among the few thousands who lord it over the millions. these were the people among whom she belonged. why was she having such a savage struggle to attain it? then, all in an instant the truth she had been so long groping for in vain flung itself at her. none of these women, none of the women of the prosperous classes would be there but for the assistance and protection of the men. she marveled at her stupidity in not having seen the obvious thing clearly long ago. the successful women won their success by disposing of their persons to advantage--by getting the favor of some man of ability. therefore, she, a woman, must adopt that same policy if she was to have a chance at the things worth while in life. she must make the best bargain--or series of bargains--she could. and as her necessities were pressing she must lose no time. she understood now the instinct that had forced her to fly from south fifth avenue, that had overruled her hesitation and had compelled her to accept the good-natured, prosperous man's invitation. . . . there was no other way open to her. she must not evade that fact; she must accept it. other ways there might be--for other women. but not for her, the outcast without friends or family, the woman alone, with no one to lean upon or to give her anything except in exchange for what she had to offer that was marketable. she must make the bargain she could, not waste time in the folly of awaiting a bargain to her liking. since she was living in the world and wished to continue to live there, she must accept the world's terms. to be sad or angry either one because the world did not offer her as attractive terms as it apparently offered many other women--the happy and respected wives and mothers of the prosperous classes, for instance--to rail against that was silly and stupid, was unworthy of her intelligence. she would do as best she could, and move along, keeping her eyes open; and perhaps some day a chance for much better terms might offer--for the best--for such terms as that famous actress there had got. she looked at mary rigsdall. an expression in her interesting face--the latent rather than the surface expression--set susan to wondering whether, if she knew rigsdall's _whole_ story--or any woman's whole story--she might not see that the world was not bargaining so hardly with her, after all. or any man's whole story. there her eyes shifted to rigsdall's companion, the famous playwright of whom she had so often heard rod and his friends talk. she was startled to find that his gaze was upon her--an all-seeing look that penetrated to the very core of her being. he either did not note or cared nothing about her color of embarrassment. he regarded her steadily until, so she felt, he had seen precisely what she was, had become intimately acquainted with her. then he looked away. it chagrined her that his eyes did not again turn in her direction; she felt that he had catalogued her as not worth while. she listened to the conversation of the two. the woman did the talking, and her subject was herself--her ability as an actress, her conception of some part she either was about to play or was hoping to play. susan, too young to have acquired more than the rudiments of the difficult art of character study, even had she had especial talent for it--which she had not--susan decided that the famous rigsdall was as shallow and vain as rod had said all stage people were. the waiter brought the cocktails and her stout young companion came back, beaming at the thought of the dinner he had painstakingly ordered. as he reached the table he jerked his head in self-approval. "it'll be a good one," said he. "saturday night dinner--and after--means a lot to me. i work hard all week. saturday nights i cut loose. sundays i sleep and get ready to scramble again on monday for the dollars." he seated himself, leaned toward her with elevated glass. "what name?" inquired he. "susan." "that's a good old-fashioned name. makes me see the hollyhocks, and the hens scratching for worms. mine's howland. billy howland. i came from maryland . . . and i'm mighty glad i did. i wouldn't be from anywhere else for worlds, and i wouldn't be there for worlds. where do you hail from?" "the west," said susan. "well, the men in your particular corner out yonder must be a pretty poor lot to have let you leave. i spotted you for mine the minute i saw you--susan. i hope you're not as quiet as your name. another cocktail?" "thanks." "like to drink?" "i'm going to do more of it hereafter." "been laying low for a while--eh?" "very low," said susan. her eyes were sparkling now; the cocktail had begun to stir her long languid blood. "live with your family?" "i haven't any. i'm free." "on the stage?" "i'm thinking of going on." "and meanwhile?" "meanwhile--whatever comes." billy howland's face was radiant. "i had a date tonight and the lady threw me down. one of those drummer's wives that take in washing to add to the family income while hubby's flirting round the country. this hubby came home unexpectedly. i'm glad he did." he beamed with such whole-souled good-nature that susan laughed. "thanks. same to you," said she. "hope you're going to do a lot of that laughing," said he. "it's the best i've heard--such a quiet, gay sound. i sure do have the best luck. until five years ago there was nothing doing for billy--hall bedroom--wheeling stogies--one shirt and two pairs of cuffs a week--not enough to buy a lady an ice-cream soda. all at once--bang! the hoodoo busted, and everything that arrived was for william c. howland. better get aboard." "here i am." "hold on tight. i pay no attention to the speed laws, and round the corners on two wheels. do you like good things to eat?" "i haven't eaten for six months." "you must have been out home. ah!--there's the man to tell us dinner's ready." they finished the second cocktail. susan was pleased to note that brent was again looking at her; and she thought--though she suspected it might be the cocktail--that there was a question in his look--a question about her which he had been unable to answer to his satisfaction. when she and howland were at one of the small tables against the wall in the restaurant, she said to him: "you know mr. brent?" "the play man? lord, no. i'm a plain business dub. he wouldn't bother with me. you like that sort of man?" "i want to get on the stage, if i can," was susan's diplomatic reply. "well--let's have dinner first. i've ordered champagne, but if you prefer something else----" "champagne is what i want. i hope it's very dry." howland's eyes gazed tenderly at her. "i do like a woman who knows the difference between champagne and carbonated sirup. i think you and i've got a lot of tastes in common. i like eating--so do you. i like drinking--so do you. i like a good time--so do you. you're a little bit thin for my taste, but you'll fatten up. i wonder what makes your lips so pale." "i'd hate to remind myself by telling you," said susan. the restaurant was filling. most of the men and women were in evening dress. each arriving woman brought with her a new exhibition of extravagance in costume, diffused a new variety of powerful perfume. the orchestra in the balcony was playing waltzes and the liveliest hungarian music and the most sensuous strains from italy and france and spain. and before her was food!--food again!--not horrible stuff unfit for beasts, worse than was fed to beasts, but human food--good things, well cooked and well served. to have seen her, to have seen the expression of her eyes, without knowing her history and without having lived as she had lived, would have been to think her a glutton. her spirits giddied toward the ecstatic. she began to talk--commenting on the people about her--the one subject she could venture with her companion. as she talked and drank, he ate and drank, stuffing and gorging himself, but with a frankness of gluttony that delighted her. she found she could not eat much, but she liked to see eating; she who had so long been seeing only poverty, bolting wretched food and drinking the vilest kinds of whiskey and beer, of alleged coffee and tea--she reveled in howland's exhibition. she must learn to live altogether in her senses, never to think except about an appetite. where could she find a better teacher? . . . they drank two quarts of champagne, and with the coffee she took _crême de menthe_ and he brandy. and as the sensuous temperament that springs from intense vitality reasserted itself, the opportunity before her lost all its repellent features, became the bright, vivid countenance of lusty youth, irradiating the joy of living. "i hear there's a lively ball up at terrace garden," said he. "want to go?" "that'll be fine!" cried she. she saw it would have taken nearly all the money she possessed to have paid that bill. about four weeks' wages for one dinner! thousands of families living for two weeks on what she and he had consumed in two hours! she reached for her half empty champagne glass, emptied it. she must forget all those things! "i've played the fool once. i've learned my lesson. surely i'll never do it again." as she drank, her eyes chanced upon the clock. half-past ten. mrs. tucker had probably just fallen asleep. and mrs. reardon was going out to scrub--going out limping and groaning with rheumatism. no, mrs. reardon was lying up at the morgue dead, her one chance to live lost forever. dead! yet better off than mrs. tucker lying alive. susan could see her--the seamed and broken and dirty old remnant of a face--could see the vermin--and the mice could hear the snoring--the angry grunt and turning over as the insects---- "i want another drink--right away," she cried. "sure!" said howland. "i need one more, too." they drove in a taxi to terrace garden, he holding her in his arms and kissing her with an intoxicated man's enthusiasm. "you certainly are sweet," said he. "the wine on your breath is like flowers. gosh, but i'm glad that husband came home! like me a little?" "i'm so happy, i feel like standing up and screaming," declared she. "good idea," cried he. whereupon he released a war whoop and they both went off into a fit of hysterical laughter. when it subsided he said, "i sized you up as a live wire the minute i saw you. but you're even better than i thought. what are you in such a good humor about?" "you couldn't understand if i told you," replied she. "you'd have to go and live where i've been living--live there as long as i have." "convent?" "worse. worse than a jail." the ball proved as lively as they hoped. a select company from the tenderloin was attending, and the regulars were all of the gayest crowd among the sons and daughters of artisans and small merchants up and down the east side. not a few of the women were extremely pretty. all, or almost all, were young, and those who on inspection proved to be older than eighteen or twenty were acting younger than the youngest. everyone had been drinking freely, and continued to drink. the orchestra played continuously. the air was giddy with laughter and song. couples hugged and kissed in corners, and finally openly on the dancing floor. for a while susan and howland danced together. but soon they made friends with the crowd and danced with whoever was nearest. toward three in the morning it flashed upon her that she had not even seen him for many a dance. she looked round--searched for him--got a blond-bearded man in evening dress to assist her. "the last seen of your stout friend," this man finally reported, "he was driving away in a cab with a large lady from broadway. he was asleep, but i guess she wasn't." a sober thought winked into her whirling brain--he had warned her to hold on tight, and she had lost her head--and her opportunity. a bad start--a foolishly bad start. but out winked the glimpse of sobriety and susan laughed. "that's the last i'll ever see of _him_," said she. this seemed to give blond-beard no regrets. said he: "let's you and i have a little supper. i'd call it breakfast, only then we couldn't have champagne." and they had supper--six at the table, all uproarious, susan with difficulty restrained from a skirt dance on the table up and down among the dishes and bottles. it was nearly five o'clock when she and blond-beard helped each other toward a cab. "what's your address?" said he. "the same as yours," replied she drowsily. late that afternoon she established herself in a room with a bath in west twenty-ninth street not far from broadway. the exterior of the house was dingy and down-at-the-heel. but the interior was new and scrupulously clean. several other young women lived there alone also, none quite so well installed as susan, who had the only private bath and was paying twelve dollars a week. the landlady, frizzled and peroxide, explained--without adding anything to what she already knew--that she could have "privileges," but cautioned her against noise. "i can't stand for it," said she. "first offense--out you go. this house is for ladies, and only gentlemen that know how to conduct themselves as a gentleman should with a lady are allowed to come here." susan paid a week in advance, reducing to thirty-one dollars her capital which blond-beard had increased to forty-three. the young lady who lived at the other end of the hall smiled at her, when both happened to glance from their open doors at the same time. susan invited her to call and she immediately advanced along the hall in the blue silk kimono she was wearing over her nightgown. "my name's ida driscoll," said she, showing a double row of charming white teeth--her chief positive claim to beauty. she was short, was plump about the shoulders but slender in the hips. her reddish brown hair was neatly done over a big rat, and was so spread that its thinness was hidden well enough to deceive masculine eyes. nor would a man have observed that one of her white round shoulders was full two inches higher than the other. her skin was good, her features small and irregular, her eyes shrewd but kindly. "my name's"--susan hesitated--"lorna sackville." "i guess lorna and ida'll be enough for us to bother to remember," laughed miss driscoll. "the rest's liable to change. you've just come, haven't you?" "about an hour ago. i've got only a toothbrush, a comb, a washrag and a cake of soap. i bought them on my way here." "baggage lost--eh?" said ida, amused. "no," admitted susan. "i'm beginning an entire new deal." "i'll lend you a nightgown. i'm too short for my other things to fit you." "oh, i can get along. what's good for a headache? i'm nearly crazy with it." "wine?" "yes." "wait a minute." ida, with bedroom slippers clattering, hurried back to her room, returned with a bottle of bromo seltzer and in the bathroom fixed susan a dose. "you'll feel all right in half an hour or so. gee, but you're swell--with your own bathroom." susan shrugged her shoulders and laughed. ida shook her head gravely. "you ought to save your money. i do." "later--perhaps. just now--i _must_ have a fling." ida seemed to understand. she went on to say: "i was in millinery. but in this town there's nothing in anything unless you have capital or a backer. i got tired of working for five per, with ten or fifteen as the top notch. so i quit, kissed my folks up in harlem good-by and came down to look about. as soon as i've saved enough i'm going to start a business. that'll be about a couple of years--maybe sooner, if i find an angel." "i'm thinking of the stage." "cut it out!" cried ida. "it's on the bum. there's more money and less worry in straight sporting--if you keep respectable. of course, there's nothing in out and out sporting." "oh, i haven't decided on anything. my head is better." "sure! if the dose i gave you don't knock it you can get one at the drug store two blocks up sixth avenue that'll do the trick. got a dinner date?" "no. i haven't anything on hand." "i think you and i might work together," said ida. "you're thin and tallish. i'm short and fattish. we'd catch 'em coming and going." "that sounds good," said susan. "you're new to--to the business?" "in a way--yes." "i thought so. we all soon get a kind of a professional look. you haven't got it. still, so many dead respectable women imitate nowadays, and paint and use loud perfumes, that sporting women aren't nearly so noticeable. seems to me the men's tastes even for what they want at home are getting louder and louder all the time. they hate anything that looks slow. and in our business it's harder and harder to please them--except the yaps from the little towns and the college boys. a woman has to be up to snuff if she gets on. if she looks what she is, men won't have her--nor if she is what she looks." susan had not lived where every form of viciousness is openly discussed and practiced, without having learned the things necessary to a full understanding of ida's technical phrases and references. the liveliness that had come with the departure of the headache vanished. to change the subject she invited ida to dine with her. "what's the use of your spending money in a restaurant?" objected ida. "you eat with me in my room. i always cook myself something when i ain't asked out by some one of my gentleman friends. i can cook you a chop and warm up a can of french peas and some dandy tea biscuits i bought yesterday." susan accepted the invitation, promising that when she was established she would reciprocate. as it was about six, they arranged to have the dinner at seven, susan to dress in the meantime. the headache had now gone, even to that last heaviness which seems to be an ominous threat of a return. when she was alone, she threw off her clothes, filled the big bathtub with water as hot as she could stand it. into this she gently lowered herself until she was able to relax and recline without discomfort. then she stood up and with the soap and washrag gave herself the most thorough scrubbing of her life. time after time she soaped and rubbed and scrubbed, and dipped herself in the hot water. when she felt that she had restored her body to some where near her ideal of cleanness, she let the water run out and refilled the tub with even hotter water. in this she lay luxuriously, reveling in the magnificent sensations of warmth and utter cleanliness. her eyes closed; a delicious languor stole over her and through her, soothing every nerve. she slept. she was awakened by ida, who had entered after knocking and calling at the outer door in vain. susan slowly opened her eyes, gazed at ida with a soft dreamy smile. "you don't know what this means. it seems to me i was never quite so comfortable or so happy in my life." "it's a shame to disturb you," said ida. "but dinner's ready. don't stop to dress first. i'll bring you a kimono." susan turned on the cold water, and the bath rapidly changed from warm to icy. when she had indulged in the sense of cold as delightful in its way as the sense of warmth, she rubbed her glowing skin with a rough towel until she was rose-red from head to foot. then she put on stockings, shoes and the pink kimono ida had brought, and ran along the hall to dinner. as she entered ida's room, ida exclaimed, "how sweet and pretty you do look! you sure ought to make a hit!" "i feel like a human being for the first time in--it seems years--ages--to me." "you've got a swell color--except your lips. have they always been pale like that?" "no." "i thought not. it don't seem to fit in with your style. you ought to touch 'em up. you look too serious and innocent, anyhow. they make a rouge now that'll stick through everything--eating, drinking--anything." susan regarded herself critically in the glass. "i'll see," she said. the odor of the cooking chops thrilled susan like music. she drew a chair up to the table, sat in happy-go-lucky fashion, and attacked the chop, the hot biscuit, and the peas, with an enthusiasm that inspired ida to imitation. "you know how to cook a chop," she said to ida. "and anybody who can cook a chop right can cook. cooking's like playing the piano. if you can do the simple things perfectly, you're ready to do anything." "wait till i have a flat of my own," said ida. "i'll show you what eating means. and i'll have it, too, before very long. maybe we'll live together. i was to a fortune teller's yesterday. that's the only way i waste money. i go to fortune tellers nearly every day. but then all the girls do. you get your money's worth in excitement and hope, whether there's anything in it or not. well, the fortune teller she said i was to meet a dark, slender person who was to change the whole course of my life--that all my troubles would roll away--and that if any more came, they'd roll away, too. my, but she did give me a swell fortune, and only fifty cents! i'll take you to her." ida made black coffee and the two girls, profoundly contented, drank it and talked with that buoyant cheerfulness which bubbles up in youth on the slightest pretext. in this case the pretext was anything but slight, for both girls had health as well as youth, had that freedom from harassing responsibility which is the chief charm of every form of unconventional life. and susan was still in the first flush of the joy of escape from the noisome prison whose poisons had been corroding her, soul and body. no, poison is not a just comparison; what poison in civilization parallels, or even approaches, in squalor, in vileness of food and air, in wretchedness of shelter and clothing, the tenement life that is really the typical life of the city? from time to time susan, suffused with the happiness that is too deep for laughter, too deep for tears even, gazed round like a dreamer at those cheerful comfortable surroundings and drew a long breath--stealthily, as if she feared she would awaken and be again in south fifth avenue, of rags and filth, of hideous toil without hope. "you'd better save your money to put in the millinery business with me," ida advised. "i can show you how to make a lot. sometimes i clear as high as a hundred a week, and i don't often fall below seventy-five. so many girls go about this business in a no account way, instead of being regular and business-like." susan strove to hide the feelings aroused by this practical statement of what lay before her. those feelings filled her with misgiving. was the lesson still unlearned? obviously ida was right; there must be plan, calculation, a definite line laid out and held to, or there could not but be failure and disaster. and yet--susan's flesh quivered and shrank away. she struggled against it, but she could not conquer it. experience had apparently been in vain; her character had remained unchanged. . . . she must compel herself. she must do what she had to do; she must not ruin everything by imitating the people of the tenements with their fatal habit of living from day to day only, and taking no thought for the morrow except fatuously to hope and dream that all would be well. while she was fighting with herself, ida had been talking on--the same subject. when susan heard again, ida was saying: "now, take me, for instance. i don't smoke or drink. there's nothing in either one--especially drink. of course sometimes a girl's got to drink. a man watches her too close for her to dodge out. but usually you can make him think you're as full as he is, when you really are cold sober." "do the men always drink when they--come with--with--us?" asked susan. "most always. they come because they want to turn themselves loose. that's why a girl's got to be careful not to make a man feel nervous or shy. a respectable woman's game is to be modest and innocent. with us, the opposite. they're both games; one's just as good as the other." "i don't think i could get along at all--at this," confessed susan with an effort, "unless i drank too much--so that i was reckless and didn't care what happened." ida looked directly into her eyes; susan's glance fell and a flush mounted. after a pause ida went on: "a girl does feel that way at first. a girl that marries as most of them do--because the old ones are pushing her out of the nest and she's got no place else to go--she feels the same way till she hardens to it. of course, you've got to get broke into any business." "go on," said susan eagerly. "you are so sensible. you must teach me." "common sense is a thing you don't often hear--especially about getting on in the world. but, as i was saying--one of my gentlemen friends is a lawyer--such a nice fellow--so liberal. gives me a present of twenty or twenty-five extra, you understand--every time he makes a killing downtown. he asked me once how i felt when i started in; and when i told him, he said, 'that's exactly the way i felt the first time i won a case for a client i knew was a dirty rascal and in the wrong. but now--i take that sort of thing as easy as you do.' he says the thing is to get on, no matter how, and that one way's as good as another. and he's mighty right. you soon learn that in little old new york, where you've got to have the money or you get the laugh and the foot--the swift, hard kick. clean up after you've arrived, he says--and don't try to keep clean while you're working--and don't stop for baths and things while you're at the job." susan was listening with every faculty she possessed. "he says he talks the other sort of thing--the dope--the fake stuff--just as the rest of the hustlers do. he says it's necessary in order to keep the people fooled--that if they got wise to the real way to succeed, then there'd be nobody to rob and get rich off of. oh, he's got it right. he's a smart one." the sad, bitter expression was strong in susan's face. after a pause, ida went on: "if a girl's an ignorant fool or squeamish, she don't get up in this business any more than in any other. but if she keeps a cool head, and don't take lovers unless they pay their way, and don't drink, why she can keep her self-respect and not have to take to the streets." susan lifted her head eagerly. "don't have to take to the streets?" she echoed. "certainly not," declared ida. "i very seldom let a man pick me up after dark--unless he looks mighty good. i go out in the daytime. i pretend i'm an actress out of a job for the time being, or a forelady in a big shop who's taking a day or so off, or a respectable girl living with her parents. i put a lot of money into clothes--quiet, ladylike clothes. mighty good investment. if you ain't got clothes in new york you can't do any kind of business. i go where a nice class of men hangs out, and i never act bold, but just flirt timidly, as so many respectable girls or semi-respectables do. but when a girl plays that game, she has to be careful not to make a man think he ain't expected to pay. the town's choked full of men on the lookout for what they call love--which means, for something cheap or, better still, free. men are just crazy about themselves. nothing easier than to fool 'em--and nothing's harder than to make 'em think you ain't stuck on 'em. i tell you, a girl in our life has a chance to learn men. they turn themselves inside out to us." susan, silent, her thoughts flowing like a mill race, helped ida with the dishes. then they dressed and went together for a walk. it being sunday evening, the streets were quiet. they sauntered up fifth avenue as far as fifty-ninth street and back. ida's calm and sensible demeanor gave susan much needed courage every time a man spoke to them. none of these men happened to be up to ida's standard, which was high. "no use wasting time on snide people," explained she. "we don't want drinks and a gush of loose talk, and i saw at a glance that was all those chappies were good for." they returned home at half-past nine without adventure. toward midnight one of ida's regulars called and susan was free to go to bed. she slept hardly at all. ever before her mind hovered a nameless, shapeless horror. and when she slept she dreamed of her wedding night, woke herself screaming, "please, mr. ferguson--please!" ida had three chief sources of revenue. the best was five men--her "regular gentleman friends"--who called by appointment from time to time. these paid her ten dollars apiece, and occasionally gave her presents of money or jewelry--nothing that amounted to much. from them she averaged about thirty-five dollars a week. her second source was a mrs. thurston who kept in west fifty-sixth street near ninth avenue a furnished-room house of the sort that is on the official--and also the "revenue"--lists of the police and the anti-vice societies. this lady had a list of girls and married women upon whom she could call. gentlemen using her house for rendezvous were sometimes disappointed by the ladies with whom they were intriguing. again a gentleman grew a little weary of his perhaps too respectable or too sincerely loving ladylove and appealed to mrs. thurston. she kept her list of availables most select and passed them off as women of good position willing to supplement a small income, or to punish stingy husbands or fathers and at the same time get the money they needed for dress and bridge, for matinées and lunches. mrs. thurston insisted--and ida was inclined to believe--that there were genuine cases of this kind on the list. "it's mighty hard for women with expensive tastes and small means to keep straight in new york," said she to susan. "it costs so much to live, and there are so many ways to spend money. and they always have rich lady friends who set an extravagant pace. they've got to dress--and to kind of keep up their end. so--" ida laughed, went on: "besides the city women are getting so they like a little sporty novelty as much as their brothers and husbands and fathers do. oh, i'm not ashamed of my business any more. we're as good as the others, and we're not hypocrites. as my lawyer friend says, everybody's got to make a _good_ living, and good livings can't be made on the ways that used to be called on the level--they're called damfool ways now." ida's third source of income was to her the most attractive because it had such a large gambling element in it. this was her flirtations as a respectable woman in search of lively amusement and having to take care not to be caught. there are women of all kinds who delight in deceiving men because it gives them a sweet stealthy sense of superiority to the condescending sex. in women of the ida class this pleasure becomes as much a passion as it is in the respectable woman whom her husband tries to enslave. with susan, another woman and one in need of education, ida was simple and scrupulously truthful. but it would have been impossible for a man to get truth as to anything from her. she amused herself inventing plausible romantic stories about herself that she might enjoy the gullibility of the boastfully superior and patronizing male. she was devoid of sentiment, even of passion. yet at times she affected both in the most extreme fashion. and afterward, with peals of laughter, she would describe to susan how the man had acted, what an ass she had made of him. "men despise us," she said. "but it's nothing to the way i despise them. the best of them are rotten beasts when they show themselves as they are. and they haven't any mercy on us. it's too ridiculous. men despise a man who is virtuous and a woman who isn't. what rot!" she deceived the "regulars" without taking the trouble to remember her deceptions. they caught her lying so often that she knew they thought her untruthful through and through. but this only gave her an opportunity for additional pleasure--the pleasure of inventing lies that they would believe in spite of their distrust of her. "anyhow," said she, "haven't you noticed the liars everybody's on to are always believed and truthful people are doubted?" upon the men with whom she flirted, she practiced the highly colored romances it would have been useless to try upon the regulars. her greatest triumph at this game was a hard luck story she had told so effectively that the man had given her two hundred dollars. most of her romances turned about her own ruin. as a matter of fact, she had told susan the exact truth when she said she had taken up her mode of life deliberately; she had grown weary and impatient of the increasing poverty of a family which, like so many of the artisan and small merchant and professional classes in this day of concentrating wealth and spreading tastes for comfort and luxury, was on its way down from comfort toward or through the tenements. she was a type of the recruits that are swelling the prostitute class in ever larger numbers and are driving the prostitutes of the tenement class toward starvation--where they once dominated the profession even to its highest ranks, even to the fashionable _cocotes_ who prey upon the second generation of the rich. but ida never told her lovers her plain and commonplace tale of yielding to the irresistible pressure of economic forces. she had made men weep at her recital of her wrongs. it had even brought her offers of marriage--none, however, worth accepting. "i'd be a boob to marry a man with less than fifteen or twenty thousand a year, wouldn't i?" said she. "why, two of the married men who come to see me regularly give me more than they give their wives for pin money. and in a few years i'll be having my own respectable business, with ten thousand income--maybe more--and as well thought of as the next woman." ida's dream was a house in the country, a fine flat in town, a husband in some "refined" profession and children at high-class schools. "and i'll get there, don't you doubt it!" exclaimed she. "others have--of course, you don't know about them--they've looked out for that. yes, lots of others have--but--well, just you watch your sister ida." and susan felt that she would indeed arrive. already she had seen that there was no difficulty such as she had once imagined about recrossing the line to respectability. the only real problem in that matter was how to get together enough to make the crossing worth while--for what was there in respectability without money, in a day when respectability had ceased to mean anything but money? ida wished to take her to mrs. thurston and get her a favored place on the list. susan thanked her, but said, "not yet--not quite yet." ida suggested that they go out together as two young married women whose husbands had gone on the road. susan put her off from day to day. ida finally offered to introduce her to one of the regulars: "he's a nice fellow--knows how to treat a lady in a gentlemanly way. not a bit coarse or familiar." susan would not permit this generosity. and all this time her funds were sinking. she had paid a second week's rent, had bought cooking apparatus, some food supplies, some necessary clothing. she was down to a five-dollar bill and a little change. "look here, lorna," said ida, between remonstrance and exasperation, "when _are_ you going to start in?" susan looked fixedly at her, said with a slow smile, "when i can't hold out another minute." ida tossed her head angrily. "you've got brains--more than i have," she cried. "you've got every advantage for catching rich men--even a rich husband. you're educated. you speak and act and look refined. why you could pretend to be a howling fashionable swell. you've got all the points. but what have you got 'em for? not to use that's certain." "you can't be as disgusted with me as i am." "if you're going to do a thing, why, _do_ it!" "that's what i tell myself. but--i can't make a move." ida gave a gesture of despair. "i don't see what's to become of you. and you could do _so_ well! . . . let me phone mr. sterling. i told him about you. he's anxious to meet you. he's fond of books--like you. you'd like him. he'd give up a lot to you, because you're classier than i am." susan threw her arms round ida and kissed her. "don't bother about me," she said. "i've got to act in my own foolish, stupid way. i'm like a child going to school. i've got to learn a certain amount before i'm ready to do whatever it is i'm going to do. and until i learn it, i can't do much of anything. i thought i had learned in the last few months. i see i haven't." "do listen to sense, lorna," pleaded ida. "if you wait till the last minute, you'll get left. the time to get the money's when you have money. and i've a feeling that you're not particularly flush." "i'll do the best i can. and i can't move till i'm ready." meanwhile she continued to search for work--work that would enable her to live _decently_, wages less degrading than the wages of shame. in a newspaper she read an advertisement of a theatrical agency. advertisements of all kinds read well; those of theatrical agencies read--like the fairy tales that they were. however, she found in this particular offering of dazzling careers and salaries a peculiar phrasing that decided her to break the rule she had made after having investigated scores of this sort of offers. rod was abroad; anyhow, enough time had elapsed. one of the most impressive features of the effect of new york--meaning by "new york" only that small but significant portion of the four millions that thinks--at least, after a fashion, and acts, instead of being mere passive tools of whatever happens to turn up--the most familiar notable effect of this new york is the speedy distinction in the newcomer of those illusions and delusions about life and about human nature, about good and evil, that are for so many people the most precious and the only endurable and beautiful thing in the world. new york, destroyer of delusions and cherished hypocrisies and pretenses, therefore makes the broadly intelligent of its citizens hardy, makes the others hard--and between the hardy and hard, between sense and cynicism, yawns a gulf like that between absalom and dives. susan, a new yorker now, had got the habit--in thought, at least--of seeing things with somewhat less distortion from the actual. she no longer exaggerated the importance of the rod-susan episode. she saw that in new york, where life is crowded with events, everything in one's life, except death, becomes incident, becomes episode, where in regions offering less to think about each rare happening took on an aspect of vast importance. the rod-susan love adventure, she now saw, was not what it would have seemed--therefore, would have been--in sutherland, but was mere episode of a new york life, giving its light and shade to a certain small part of the long, variedly patterned fabric of her life, and of his, not determining the whole. she saw that it was simply like a bend in the river, giving a new turn to current and course but not changing the river itself, and soon left far behind and succeeded by other bends giving each its equal or greater turn to the stream. rod had passed from her life, and she from his life. thus she was free to begin her real career--the stage--if she could. she went to the suite of offices tenanted by mr. josiah ransome. she was ushered in to ransome himself, instead of halting with underlings. she owed this favor to advantages which her lack of vanity and of self-consciousness prevented her from surmising. ransome--smooth, curly, comfortable looking--received her with a delicate blending of the paternal and the gallant. after he had inspected her exterior with flattering attentiveness and had investigated her qualifications with a thoroughness that was convincing of sincerity he said: "most satisfactory! i can make you an exceptional assurance. if you register with me, i can guarantee you not less than twenty-five a week." susan hesitated long and asked many questions before she finally--with reluctance paid the five dollars. she felt ashamed of her distrust, but might perhaps have persisted in it had not mr. ransome said: "i don't blame you for hesitating, my dear young lady. and if i could i'd put you on my list without payment. but you can see how unbusiness-like that would be. i am a substantial, old-established concern. you--no doubt you are perfectly reliable. but i have been fooled so many times. i must not let myself forget that after all i know nothing about you." as soon as susan had paid he gave her a list of vaudeville and musical comedy houses where girls were wanted. "you can't fail to suit one of them," said he. "if not, come back here and get your money." after two weary days of canvassing she went back to ransome. he was just leaving. but he smiled genially, opened his desk and seated himself. "at your service," said he. "what luck?" "none," replied susan. "i couldn't live on the wages they offered at the musical comedy places, even if i could get placed." "and the vaudeville people?" "when i said i could only sing and not dance, they looked discouraged. when i said i had no costumes they turned me down." "excellent!" cried ransome. "you mustn't be so easily beaten. you must take dancing lessons--perhaps a few singing lessons, too. and you must get some costumes." "but that means several hundred dollars." "three or four hundred," said ransome airily. "a matter of a few weeks." "but i haven't anything like that," said susan. "i haven't so much as----" "i comprehend perfectly," interrupted ransome. she interested him, this unusual looking girl, with her attractive mingling of youth and experience. her charm that tempted people to give her at once the frankest confidences, moved him to go out of his way to help her. "you haven't the money," he went on. "you must have it. so--i promised to place you, and i will. i don't usually go so far in assisting my clients. it's not often necessary--and where it's necessary it's usually imprudent. however--i'll give you the address of a flat where there is a lady--a trustworthy, square sort, despite her--her profession. she will put you in the way of getting on a sound financial basis." ransome spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, like a man stating a simple business proposition. susan understood. she rose. her expression was neither shock nor indignation; but it was none the less a negative. "it's the regular thing, my dear," urged ransome. "to make a start, to get in right, you can't afford to be squeamish. the way i suggest is the simplest and most direct of several that all involve the same thing. and the surest. you look steady-headed--self-reliant. you look sensible----" susan smiled rather forlornly. "but i'm not," said she. "not yet." ransome regarded her with a sympathy which she felt was genuine. "i'm sorry, my dear. i've done the best i can for you. you may think it a very poor best--and it is. but"--he shrugged his shoulders--"i didn't make this world and its conditions for living. i may say also that i'm not the responsible party--the party in charge. however----" to her amazement he held out a five-dollar bill. "here's your fee back." he laughed at her expression. "oh, i'm not a robber," said he. "i only wish i could serve you. i didn't think you were so--" his eyes twinkled--"so unreasonable, let us say. among those who don't know anything about life there's an impression that my sort of people are in the business of dragging women down. perhaps one of us occasionally does as bad--about a millionth part as bad--as the average employer of labor who skims his profits from the lifeblood of his employees. but as a rule we folks merely take those that are falling and help them to light easy--or even to get up again." susan felt ashamed to take her money. but he pressed it on her. "you'll need it," said he. "i know how it is with a girl alone and trying to get a start. perhaps later on you'll be more in the mood where i can help you." "perhaps," said susan. "but i hope not. it'll take uncommon luck to pull you through--and i hope you'll have it." "thank you," said susan. he took her hand, pressed it friendlily--and she felt that he was a man with real good in him, more good than many who would have shrunk from him in horror. she was waiting for a thrust from fate. but fate, disappointing as usual, would not thrust. it seemed bent on the malicious pleasure of compelling her to degrade herself deliberately and with calculation, like a woman marrying for support a man who refuses to permit her to decorate with any artificial floral concealments of faked-up sentiment the sordid truth as to what she is about. she searched within herself in vain for the scruple or sentiment or timidity or whatever it was that held her back from the course that was plainly inevitable. she had got down to the naked fundamentals of decency and indecency that are deep hidden by, and for most of us under, hypocrisies of conventionality. she had found out that a decent woman was one who respected her body and her soul, that an indecent woman was one who did not, and that marriage rites or the absence of them, the absence of financial or equivalent consideration, or its presence, or its extent or its form, were all irrelevant non-essentials. yet--she hesitated, knowing the while that she was risking a greater degradation, and a stupid and fatal folly to boot, by shrinking from the best course open to her--unless it were better to take a dose of poison and end it all. she probably would have done that had she not been so utterly healthy, therefore overflowing with passionate love of life. except in fiction suicide and health do not go together, however superhumanly sensitive the sore beset hero or heroine. susan was sensitive enough; whenever she did things incompatible with our false and hypocritical and unscientific notions of sensitiveness, allowances should be made for her because of her superb and dauntless health. if her physical condition had been morbid, her conduct might have been, would have been, very different. she was still hesitating when saturday night came round again--swiftly despite long disheartening days, and wakeful awful nights. in the morning her rent would be due. she had a dollar and forty-five cents. after dinner alone a pretense at dinner--she wandered the streets of the old tenderloin until midnight. an icy rain was falling. rains such as this--any rains except showers--were rare in the city of the sun. that rain by itself was enough to make her downhearted. she walked with head down and umbrella close to her shoulders. no one spoke to her. she returned dripping; she had all but ruined her one dress. she went to bed, but not to sleep. about nine--early for that house she rose, drank a cup of coffee and ate part of a roll. her little stove and such other things as could not be taken along she rolled into a bundle, marked it, "for ida." on a scrap of paper she wrote this note: don't think i'm ungrateful, please. i'm going without saying good-by because i'm afraid if i saw you, you'd be generous enough to put up for me, and i'd be weak enough to accept. and if i did that, i'd never be able to get strong or even to hold my head up. so--good-by. i'll learn sooner or later--learn how to live. i hope it won't be too long--and that the teacher won't be too hard on me. yes, i'll learn, and i'll buy fine hats at your grand millinery store yet. don't forget me altogether. she tucked this note into the bundle and laid it against the door behind which ida and one of her regulars were sleeping peacefully. the odor of ida's powerful perfume came through the cracks in the door; susan drew it eagerly into her nostrils, sobbed softly, turned away, it was one of the perfumes classed as immoral; to susan it was the aroma of a friendship as noble, as disinterested, as generous, as human sympathy had ever breathed upon human woe. with her few personal possessions in a package she descended the stairs unnoticed, went out into the rain. at the corner of sixth avenue she paused, looked up and down the street. it was almost deserted. now and then a streetwalker, roused early by a lover with perhaps a family waiting for him, hurried by, looking piteous in the daylight which showed up false and dyed hair, the layers of paint, the sad tawdriness of battered finery from the cheapest bargain troughs. susan went slowly up sixth avenue. two blocks, and she saw a girl enter the side door of a saloon across the way. she crossed the street, pushed in at the same door, went on to a small sitting-room with blinds drawn, with round tables, on every table a match stand. it was one of those places where streetwalkers rest their weary legs between strolls, and sit for company on rainy or snowy nights, and take shy men for sociability-breeding drinks and for the preliminary bargaining. the air of the room was strong with stale liquor and tobacco, the lingering aroma of the night's vanished revels. in the far corner sat the girl she had followed; a glass of raw whiskey and another of water stood on the table before her. susan seated herself near the door and when the swollen-faced, surly bartender came, ordered whiskey. she poured herself a drink--filled the glass to the brim. she drank it in two gulps, set the empty glass down. she shivered like an animal as it is hit in the head with a poleax. the mechanism of life staggered, hesitated, went on with a sudden leaping acceleration of pace. susan tapped her glass against the matchstand. the bartender came. "another," said she. the man stared at her. "the--hell!" he ejaculated. "you must be afraid o' catchin' cold. or maybe you're looking for the menagerie?" susan laughed and so did the girl in the corner. "won't you have a drink with me?" asked susan. "that's very kind of you," replied the girl, in the manner of one eager to show that she, too, is a perfect lady in every respect, used to the ways of the best society. she moved to a chair at susan's table. she and susan inventoried each other. susan saw a mere child--hardly eighteen--possibly not seventeen--but much worn by drink and irregular living--evidently one of those who rush into the fast woman's life with the idea that it is a career of gayety--and do not find out their error until looks and health are gone. susan drank her second drink in three gulps, several minutes apart. the girl was explaining in a thin, common voice, childish yet cracked, that she had come there seeking a certain lady friend because she had an extra man and needed a side partner. "suppose you come with me," she suggested. "it's good money, i think. want to get next?" "when i've had another drink," said susan. her eyes were gorgeously brilliant. she had felt almost as reckless several times before; but never had she felt this devil-may-care eagerness to see what the turn of the next card would bring. "you'll take one?" "sure. i feel like the devil. been bumming round all night. my lady friend that i had with me--a regular lady friend--she was suddenly took ill. appendicitis complicated with d.t.'s the ambulance guy said. the boys are waiting for me to come back, so's we can go on. they've got some swell rooms in a hotel up in forty-second street. let's get a move on." the bartender served the third drink and susan paid for them, the other girl insisting on paying for the one she was having when susan came. susan's head was whirling. her spirits were spiraling up and up. her pale lips were wreathed in a reckless smile. she felt courageous for adventure--any adventure. her capital had now sunk to three quarters and a five-cent piece. they issued forth, talking without saying anything, laughing without knowing or caring why. life was a joke--a coarse, broad joke--but amusing if one drank enough to blunt any refinement of sensibility. and what was sensibility but a kind of snobbishness? and what more absurd than snobbishness in an outcast? "that's good whiskey they had, back there," said susan. "good? yes--if you don't care what you say." "if you don't want to care what you say or do," explained susan. "oh, all booze is good for that," said the girl. chapter vi they went through to broadway and there stood waiting for a car, each under her own umbrella. "holy gee!" cried susan's new acquaintance. "ain't this rain a soaker?" it was coming in sheets, bent and torn and driven horizontally by the wind. the umbrella, sheltering the head somewhat, gave a wholly false impression of protection. both girls were soon sopping wet. but they were more than cheerful about it; the whiskey made them indifferent to external ills as they warmed themselves by its bright fire. at that time a famous and much envied, admired and respected "captain of industry," having looted the street-car systems, was preparing to loot them over again by the familiar trickery of the receivership and the reorganization. the masses of the people were too ignorant to know what was going on; the classes were too busy, each man of each of them, about his own personal schemes for graft of one kind and another. thus, the street-car service was a joke and a disgrace. however, after four or five minutes a north-bound car appeared. "but it won't stop," cried susan. "it's jammed." "that's why it will stop," replied her new acquaintance. "you don't suppose a new york conductor'd miss a chance to put his passengers more on the bum than ever?" she was right, at least as to the main point; and the conductor with much free handling of their waists and shoulders added them to the dripping, straining press of passengers, enduring the discomforts the captain of industry put upon them with more patience than cattle would have exhibited in like circumstances. all the way up broadway the new acquaintance enlivened herself and susan and the men they were squeezed in among by her loud gay sallies which her young prettiness made seem witty. and certainly she did have an amazing and amusing acquaintance with the slang at the moment current. the worn look had vanished, her rounded girlhood freshness had returned. as for susan, you would hardly have recognized her as the same person who had issued from the house in twenty-ninth street less than an hour before. indeed, it was not the same person. drink nervifies every character; here it transformed, suppressing the characteristics that seemed, perhaps were, essential in her normal state, and causing to bloom in sudden audacity of color and form the passions and gayeties at other times subdued by her intelligence and her sensitiveness. her brilliant glance moved about the car full as boldly as her companion's. but there was this difference: her companion gazed straight into the eyes of the men; susan's glance shot past above or just below their eyes. as they left the car at forty-second street the other girl gave her short skirt a dexterous upward flirt that exhibited her legs almost to the hips. susan saw that they were well shaped legs, surprisingly plump from the calves upward, considering the slightness of her figure above the waist. "i always do that when i leave a car," said the girl. "sometimes it starts something on the trail. you forgot your package--back in the saloon!" "then i didn't forget much," laughed susan. it appealed to her, the idea of entering the new life empty-handed. the hotel was one that must have been of the first class in its day--not a distant day, for the expansion of new york in craving for showy luxury has been as sudden as the miraculous upward thrust of a steel skyscraper. it had now sunk to relying upon the trade of those who came in off broadway for a few minutes. it was dingy and dirty; the walls and plastering were peeling; the servants were slovenly and fresh. the girl nodded to the evil-looking man behind the desk, who said: "hello, miss maud. just in time. the boys were sending out for some others." "they've got a nerve!" laughed maud. and she led susan down a rather long corridor to a door with the letter b upon it. maud explained: "this is the swellest suite in the house parlor, bedroom, bath." she flung open the door, disclosing a sitting-room in disorder with two young men partly dressed, seated at a small table on which were bottles, siphons, matches, remains of sandwiches, boxes of cigarettes--a chaotic jumble of implements to dissipation giving forth a powerful, stale odor. maud burst into a stream of picturesque profanity which set the two men to laughing. susan had paused on the threshold. the shock of this scene had for the moment arrested the triumphant march of the alcohol through blood and nerve and brain. "oh, bite it off!" cried the darker of the two men to maud, "and have a drink. ain't you ashamed to speak so free before your innocent young lady friend?" he grinned at susan. "what sunday school do you hail from?" inquired he. the other young man was also looking at susan; and it was an arresting and somewhat compelling gaze. she saw that he was tall and well set up. as he was dressed only in trousers and a pale blue silk undershirt, the strength of his shoulders, back and arms was in full evidence. his figure was like that of the wonderful young prize-fighters she had admired at moving picture shows to which drumley had taken her. he had a singularly handsome face, blond yet remotely suggesting italian. he smiled at susan and she thought she had never seen teeth more beautiful--pearl-white, regular, even. his eyes were large and sensuous; smiling though they were, susan was ill at ease--for in them there shone the same untamed, uncontrolled ferocity that one sees in the eyes of a wild beast. his youth, his good looks, his charm made the sinister savagery hinted in the smile the more disconcerting. he poured whiskey from a bottle into each of the two tall glasses, filled them up with seltzer, extended one toward susan. "shut the door, queenie," he said to her in a pleasant tone that subtly mingled mockery and admiration. "and let's drink to love." "didn't i do well for you, freddie?" cried maud. "she's my long-sought affinity," declared freddie with the same attractive mingling of jest and flattery. susan closed the door, accepted the glass, laughed into his eyes. the whiskey was once more asserting its power. she took about half the drink before she set the glass down. the young man said, "your name's queenie, mine's freddie." he came to her, holding her gaze fast by the piercing look from his handsome eyes. he put his arms round her and kissed her full upon the pale, laughing lips. his eyes were still smiling in pleasant mockery; yet his kiss burned and stung, and the grip of his arm round her shoulders made her vaguely afraid. her smile died away. the grave, searching, wondering expression reappeared in the violet-gray eyes for a moment. "you're all right," said he. "except those pale lips. you're going to be my girl. that means, if you ever try to get away from me unless i let you go--i'll kill you--or worse." and he laughed as if he had made the best joke in the world. but she saw in his eyes a sparkle that seemed to her to have something of the malignance of the angry serpent's. she hastily finished her drink. maud was jerking off her clothes, crying, "i want to get out of these nasty wet rags." the steam heat was full on; the sitting-room, the whole suite, was intensely warm. maud hung her skirt over the back of a chair close to the radiator, took off her shoes and stockings and put them to dry also. in her chemise she curled herself on a chair, lit a cigarette and poured a drink. her feet were not bad, but neither were they notably good; she tucked them out of sight. she looked at susan. "get off those wet things," urged she, "or you'll take your death." "in a minute," said susan, but not convincingly. freddie forced another drink and a cigarette upon her. as a girl at home in sutherland, she had several times--she and ruth--smoked cigarettes in secrecy, to try the new london and new york fashion, announced in the newspapers and the novels. so the cigarette did not make her uncomfortable. "look at the way she's holding it?" cried maud, and she and the men burst out laughing. susan laughed also and, freddie helping, practiced a less inexpert manner. jim, the dark young man with the sullen heavy countenance, rang for more sandwiches and another bottle of whiskey. susan continued to drink but ate nothing. "have a sandwich," said freddie. "i'm not hungry." "well, they say that to eat and drink means to die of paresis, while to only drink means dying of delirium tremens. i guess you're right. i'd prefer the d.t.'s. it's quicker and livelier." jim sang a ribald song with some amusing comedy business. maud told several stories whose only claim to point lay in their frankness about things not usually spoken. "don't you tell any more, maudie," advised freddie. "why is it that a woman never takes up a story until every man on earth has heard it at least twice?" the sandwiches disappeared, the second bottle of whiskey ran low. maud told story after story of how she had played this man and that for a sucker--was as full of such tales and as joyous and self-pleased over them as an honest salesman telling his delighted, respectable, pew-holding employer how he has "stuck" this customer and that for a "fancy" price. presently maud again noticed that susan was in her wet clothes and cried out about it. susan pretended to start to undress. freddie and jim suddenly seized her. she struggled, half laughing; the whiskey was sending into her brain dizzying clouds. she struggled more fiercely. but it was in vain. "gee, you _have_ got a prize, freddie!" exclaimed jim at last, angry. "a regular tartar!" "a damn handsome one," retorted freddie. "she's even got feet." susan, amid the laughter of the others, darted for the bedroom. cowering in a corner, trying to cover herself, she ordered freddie to leave her. he laughed, seized her in his iron grip. she struck at him, bit him in the shoulder. he gave a cry of pain and drove a savage blow into her cheek. then he buried his fingers in her throat and the gleam of his eyes made her soul quail. "don't kill me!" she cried, in the clutch of cowardice for the first time. it was not death that she feared but the phantom of things worse than death that can be conjured to the imagination by the fury of a personality which is utterly reckless and utterly cruel. "don't kill me!" she shrieked. "what the hell are you doing?" shouted jim from the other room. "shut that door," replied freddie. "i'm going to attend to my lady friend." as the door slammed, he dragged susan by the throat and one arm to the bed, flung her down. "i saw you were a high stepper the minute i looked at you," said he, in a pleasant, cooing voice that sent the chills up and down her spine. "i knew you'd have to be broke. well, the sooner it's done, the sooner we'll get along nicely." his blue eyes were laughing into hers. with the utmost deliberation he gripped her throat with one hand and with the other began to slap her, each blow at his full strength. her attempts to scream were only gasps. quickly the agony of his brutality drove her into unconsciousness. long after she had ceased to feel pain, she continued to feel the impact of those blows, and dully heard her own deep groans. when she came to her senses, she was lying sprawled upon the far side of the bed. her head was aching wildly; her body was stiff and sore; her face felt as if it were swollen to many times its normal size. in misery she dragged herself up and stood on the floor. she went to the bureau and stared at herself in the glass. her face was indeed swollen, but not to actual disfigurement. under her left eye there was a small cut from which the blood had oozed to smear and dry upon her left cheek. upon her throat were faint bluish finger marks. the damage was not nearly so great as her throbbing nerves reported--the damage to her body. but--her soul--it was a crushed, trampled, degraded thing, lying prone and bleeding to death. "shall i kill myself?" she thought. and the answer came in a fierce protest and refusal from every nerve of her intensely vital youth. she looked straight into her own eyes--without horror, without shame, without fear. "you are as low as the lowest," she said to her image--not to herself but to her image; for herself seemed spectator merely of that body and soul aching and bleeding and degraded. it was the beginning of self-consciousness with her--a curious kind of self-consciousness--her real self, aloof and far removed, observing calmly, critically, impersonally the adventures of her body and the rest of her surface self. she turned round to look again at the man who had outraged them. his eyes were open and he was gazing dreamily at her, as smiling and innocent as a child. when their eyes met, his smile broadened until he was showing his beautiful teeth. "you _are_ a beauty!" said he. "go into the other room and get me a cigarette." she continued to look fixedly at him. without change of expression he said gently, "do you want another lesson in manners?" she went to the door, opened it, entered the sitting-room. the other two had pulled open a folding bed and were lying in it, jim's head on maud's bosom, her arms round his neck. both were asleep. his black beard had grown out enough to give his face a dirty and devilish expression. maud looked far more youthful and much prettier than when she was awake. susan put a cigarette between her lips, lit it, carried a box of cigarettes and a stand of matches in to freddie. "light one for me," said he. she obeyed, held it to his lips. "kiss me, first." her pale lips compressed. "kiss me," he repeated, far down in his eyes the vicious gleam of that boundlessly ferocious cruelty which is mothered not by rage but by pleasure. she kissed him on the cheek. "on the lips," he commanded. their lips met, and it was to her as if a hot flame, terrible yet thrilling, swept round and embraced her whole body. "do you love me?" he asked tenderly. she was silent. "you love me?" he asked commandingly. "you can call it that if you like." "i knew you would. i understand women. the way to make a woman love is to make her afraid." she gazed at him. "i am not afraid," she said. he laughed. "oh, yes. that's why you do what i say--and always will." "no," replied she. "i don't do it because i am afraid, but because i want to live." "i should think! . . . you'll be all right in a day or so," said he, after inspecting her bruises. "now, i'll explain to you what good friends we're going to be." he propped himself in an attitude of lazy grace, puffed at his cigarette in silence for a moment, as if arranging what he had to say. at last he began: "i haven't any regular business. i wasn't born to work. only damn fools work--and the clever man waits till they've got something, then he takes it away from 'em. you don't want to work, either." "i haven't been able to make a living at it," said the girl. she was sitting cross-legged, a cover draped around her. "you're too pretty and too clever. besides, as you say, you couldn't make a living at it--not what's a living for a woman brought up as you've been. no, you can't work. so we're going to be partners." "no," said susan. "i'm going to dress now and go away." freddie laughed. "don't be a fool. didn't i say we were to be partners? . . . you want to keep on at the sporting business, don't you?" hers was the silence of assent. "well--a woman--especially a young one like you--is no good unless she has someone--some man--behind her. married or single, respectable or lively, working or sporting--n. g. without a man. a woman alone doesn't amount to any more than a rich man's son." there had been nothing in susan's experience to enable her to dispute this. "now, i'm going to stand behind you. i'll see that you don't get pinched, and get you out if you do. i'll see that you get the best the city's got if you're sick--and so on. i've got a pull with the organization. i'm one of finnegan's lieutenants. some day--when i'm older and have served my apprenticeship--i'll pull off something good. meanwhile--i manage to live. i always have managed it--and i never did a stroke of real work since i was a kid--and never shall. god was mighty good to me when he put a few brains in this nut of mine." he settled his head comfortably in the pillow and smiled at his own thoughts. in spite of herself susan had been not only interested but attracted. it is impossible for any human being to contemplate mystery in any form without being fascinated. and here was the profoundest mystery she had ever seen. he talked well, and his mode of talking was that of education, of refinement even. an extraordinary man, certainly--and in what a strange way! "yes," said he presently, looking at her with his gentle, friendly smile. "we'll be partners. i'll protect you and we'll divide what you make." what a strange creature! had he--this kindly handsome youth--done that frightful thing? no--no. it was another instance of the unreality of the outward life. _he_ had not done it, any more than she--her real self--had suffered it. her reply to his restatement of the partnership was: "no, thank you. i want nothing to do with it." "you're dead slow," said he, with mild and patient persuasion. "how would you get along at your business in this town if you didn't have a backer? why, you'd be taking turns at the island and the gutter within six months. you'd be giving all your money to some rotten cop or fly cop who couldn't protect you, at that. or you'd work the street for some cheap cadet who'd beat you up oftener than he'd beat up the men who welched on you." "i'll look out for myself," persisted she. "bless the baby!" exclaimed he, immensely amused. "how lucky that you found me! i'm going to take care of you in spite of yourself. not for nothing, of course. you wouldn't value me if you got me for nothing. i'm going to help you, and you're going to help me. you need me, and i need you. why do you suppose i took the trouble to tame you? what _you_ want doesn't go. it's what _i_ want." he let her reflect on this a while. then he went on: "you don't understand about fellows like jim and me--though jim's a small potato beside me, as you'll soon find out. suppose you didn't obey orders--just as i do what finnegan tells me--just as finnegan does what the big shout down below says? suppose you didn't obey--what then?" "i don't know," confessed susan. "well, it's time you learned. we'll say, you act stubborn. you dress and say good-by to me and start out. do you think i'm wicked enough to let you make a fool of yourself? well, i'm not. you won't get outside the door before your good angel here will get busy. i'll be telephoning to a fly cop of this district. and what'll he do? why, about the time you are halfway down the block, he'll pinch you. he'll take you to the station house. and in police court tomorrow the judge'll give you a week on the island for being a streetwalker." susan shivered. she instinctively glanced toward the window. the rain was still falling, changing the city of the sun into a city of desolation. it looked as though it would never see the sun again--and her life looked that way, also. freddie was smiling pleasantly. he went on: "you do your little stretch on the island. when your time's up i send you word where to report to me. we'll say you don't come. the minute you set foot on the streets again alone, back to the island you go. . . . now, do you understand, queenie?" and he laughed and pulled her over and kissed her and smoothed her hair. "you're a very superior article--you are," he murmured. "i'm stuck on you." susan did not resist. she did not care what happened to her. the more intelligent a trapped animal is, the less resistance it offers, once it realizes. helpless--absolutely helpless. no money--no friends. no escape but death. the sun was shining. outside lay the vast world; across the street on a flagpole fluttered the banner of freedom. freedom! was there any such thing anywhere? perhaps if one had plenty of money--or powerful friends. but not for her, any more than for the masses whose fate of squalid and stupid slavery she was trying to escape. not for her; so long as she was helpless she would simply move from one land of slavery to another. helpless! to struggle would not be courageous, but merely absurd. "if you don't believe me, ask maud," said freddie. "i don't want you to get into trouble. as i told you, i'm stuck on you." with his cigarette gracefully loose between those almost too beautifully formed lips of his and with one of his strong smooth white arms about his head, he looked at her, an expression of content with himself, of admiration for her in his handsome eyes. "you don't realize your good luck. but you will when you find how many girls are crazy to get on the good side of me. this is a great old town, and nobody amounts to anything in it unless he's got a pull or is next to somebody else that has." susan's slow reflective nod showed that this statement explained, or seemed to explain, certain mysteries of life that had been puzzling her. "you've got a lot in you," continued he. "that's my opinion, and i'm a fair judge of yearlings. you're liable to land somewhere some day when you've struck your gait. . . . if i had the mon i'd be tempted to set you up in a flat and keep you all to myself. but i can't afford it. it takes a lot of cash to keep me going. . . . you'll do well. you won't have to bother with any but classy gents. i'll see that the cops put you wise when there's anyone round throwing his money away. and i can help you, myself. i've got quite a line of friends among the rich chappies from fifth avenue. and i always let my girls get the benefit of it." my girls! susan's mind, recovering now from its daze, seized upon this phrase. and soon she had fathomed how these two young men came to be so luxuriously dressed, so well supplied with money. she had heard of this system under which the girls in the streets were exploited as thoroughly as the girls in the houses. in all the earth was there anyone who was suffered to do for himself or herself without there being a powerful idle someone else to take away all the proceeds but a bare living? helpless! helpless! "how many girls have you?" she asked. "jealous already!" and he laughed and blew a cloud of smoke into her face. she took the quarters he directed--a plain clean room two flights up at seven dollars a week, in a furnished room house on west forty-third street near eighth avenue. she was but a few blocks from where she and rod had lived. new york--to a degree unrivaled among the cities of the world--illustrates in the isolated lives of its never isolated inhabitants how little relationship there is between space and actualities of distance. wherever on earth there are as many as two human beings, one may see an instance of the truth. that an infinity of spiritual solitude can stretch uncrossable even between two locked in each other's loving arms! but new york's solitudes, its separations, extend to the surface things. susan had no sense of the apparent nearness of her former abode. her life again lay in the same streets; but there again came the sense of strangeness which only one who has lived in new york could appreciate. the streets were the same; but to her they seemed as the streets of another city, because she was now seeing in them none of the things she used to see, was seeing instead kinds of people, aspects of human beings, modes of feeling and acting and existing of which she used to have not the faintest knowledge. there were as many worlds as kinds of people. thus, though we all talk to each other as if about the same world, each of us is thinking of his own kind of world, the only one he sees. and that is why there can never be sympathy and understanding among the children of men until there is some approach to resemblance in their various lots; for the lot determines the man. the house was filled with women of her own kind. they were allowed all privileges. there was neither bath nor stationary washstand, but the landlady supplied tin tubs on request. "oh, mr. palmer's recommendation," said she; "i'll give you two days to pay. my terms are in advance. but mr. palmer's a dear friend of mine." she was a short woman with a monstrous bust and almost no hips. her thin hair was dyed and frizzled, and her voice sounded as if it found its way out of her fat lips after a long struggle to pass through the fat of her throat and chest. her second chin lay upon her bosom in a soft swollen bag that seemed to be suspended from her ears. her eyes were hard and evil, of a brownish gray. she affected suavity and elaborate politeness; but if the least thing disturbed her, she became red and coarse of voice and vile of language. the vile language and the nature of her business and her private life aside, she would have compared favorably with anyone in the class of those who deal--as merchants, as landlords, as boarding-house keepers--with the desperately different classes of uncertain income. she was reputed rich. they said she stayed on in business to avoid lonesomeness and to keep in touch with all that was going on in the life that had been hers from girlhood. "and she's a mixer," said maud to susan. in response to susan's look of inquiry, she went on to explain, "a mixer's a white woman that keeps a colored man." maud laughed at susan's expression of horror. "you are a greenie," she mocked. "why, it's all the rage. nearly all the girls do--from the headliners that are kept by the young fifth avenue millionaires down to nine out of ten of the girls of our set that you see in broadway. no, i'm not lying. it's the truth. _i_ don't do it--at least, not yet. i may get round to it." after the talk with maud about the realities of life as it is lived by several hundred thousand of the inhabitants of manhattan island susan had not the least disposition to test by defiance the truth of freddie palmer's plain statement as to his powers and her duties. he had told her to go to work that very sunday evening, and jim had ordered maud to call for her and to initiate her. and at half-past seven maud came. at once she inspected susan's swollen face. "might be a bit worse," she said. "with a veil on, no one'd notice it." "but i haven't a veil," said susan. "i've got mine with me--pinned to my garter. i haven't been home since this afternoon." and maud produced it. "but i can't wear a veil at night," objected susan. "why not?" said maud. "lots of the girls do. a veil's a dandy hider. besides, even where a girl's got nothing to hide and has a face that's all to the good, still it's not a bad idea to wear a veil. men like what they can't see. one of the ugliest girls i know makes a lot of money--all with her veil. she fixes up her figure something grand. then she puts on that veil--one of the kind you think you can see a face through but you really can't. and she never lifts it till the 'come on' has given up his cash. then----" maud laughed. "gee, but she has had some hot run-ins after she hoists her curtain!" "why don't you wear a veil all the time?" asked susan. maud tossed her head. "what do you take me for? i've got too good an opinion of my looks for that." susan put on the veil. it was not of the kind that is a disguise. still, diaphanous though it seemed, it concealed astonishingly the swelling in susan's face. obviously, then, it must at least haze the features, would do something toward blurring the marks that go to make identity. "i shall always wear a veil," said susan. "oh, i don't know," deprecated maud. "i think you're quite pretty--though a little too proper and serious looking to suit some tastes." susan had removed veil and hat, was letting down her hair. "what are you doing that for?" cried maud impatiently. "we're late now and----" "i don't like the way my hair's done," cried susan. "why, it was all right--real swell--good as a hairdresser could have done." but susan went on at her task. ever since she came east she had worn it in a braid looped at the back of her head. she proceeded to change this radically. with maud forgetting to be impatient in admiration of her swift fingers she made a coiffure much more elaborate--wide waves out from her temples and a big round loose knot behind. she was well content with the result--especially when she got the veil on again and it was assisting in the change. "what do you think?" she said to maud when she was ready. "my, but you look different!" exclaimed maud. "a lot dressier--and sportier. more--more broadway." "that's it--broadway," said susan. she had always avoided looking like broadway. now, she would take the opposite tack. not loud toilets--for they would defeat her purpose. not loud but--just common. "but," added maud, "you do look swell about the feet. where _do_ you get your shoes? no, i guess it's the feet." as they sallied forth maud said, "first, i'll show you our hotel." and they went to a raines law hotel in forty-second street near eighth avenue. "the proprietor's a heeler of finnegan's. i guess freddie comes in for some rake-off. he gives us twenty-five cents of every dollar the man spends," explained she. "and if the man opens wine we get two dollars on every bottle. the best way is to stay behind when the man goes and collect right away. that avoids rows--though they'd hardly dare cheat you, being as you're on freddie's staff. freddie's got a big pull. he's way up at the top. i wish to god i had him instead of jim. freddie's giving up fast. they say he's got some things a lot better'n this now, and that he's likely to quit this and turn respectable. you ought to treat me mighty white, seeing what i done for you. i've put you in right--and that's everything in this here life." susan looked all round--looked along the streets stretching away with their morning suggestion of freedom to fly, freedom to escape--helpless! "can't i get a drink?" asked she. there was a strained look in her eyes, a significant nervousness of the lips and hands. "i must have a drink." "of course. max has been on a vacation, but i hear he's back. when i introduce you, he'll probably set 'em up. but i wouldn't drink if i were you till i went off duty." "i must have a drink," replied susan. "it'll get you down. it got me down. i used to have a fine sucker--gave me a hundred a week and paid my flat rent. but i had nothing else to do, so i took to drinking, and i got so reckless that i let him catch me with my lover that time. but i had to have somebody to spend the money on. anyhow, it's no fun having a john." "a john?" said susan. "what's that?" "you are an innocent----!" laughed maud. "a john's a sucker--a fellow that keeps a girl. well, it'd be no fun to have a john unless you fooled him--would it?" they now entered the side door of the hotel and ascended the stairs. a dyspeptic looking man with a red nose that stood out the more strongly for the sallowness of his skin and the smallness of his sunken brown eyes had his hands spread upon the office desk and was leaning on his stiff arms. "hello, max," said maud in a fresh, condescending way. "how's business?" "slow. always slack on sundays. how goes it with you, maudie?" "so--so. i manage to pick up a living in spite of the damn chippies. i don't see why the hell they don't go into the business regular and make something out of it, instead of loving free. i'm down on a girl that's neither the one thing nor the other. this is my lady friend, miss queenie." she turned laughingly to susan. "i never asked your last name." "brown." "my, what a strange name!" cried maud. then, as the proprietor laughed with the heartiness of tradesman at good customer's jest, she said, "going to set 'em up, max?" he pressed a button and rang a bell loudly. the responding waiter departed with orders for a whiskey and two lithias. maud explained to susan: "max used to be a prize-fighter. he was middleweight champion." "i've been a lot of things in my days," said max with pride. "so i've heard," joked maud. "they say they've got your picture at headquarters." "that's neither here nor there," said max surlily. "don't get too flip." susan drank her whiskey as soon as it came, and the glow rushed to her ghastly face. said max with great politeness: "you're having a little neuralgia, ain't you? i see your face is swhole some." "yes," said susan. "neuralgia." maud laughed hilariously. susan herself had ceased to brood over the incident. in conventional lives, visited but rarely by perilous storms, by disaster, such an event would be what is called concise. but in life as it is lived by the masses of the people--life in which awful disease, death, maiming, eviction, fire, violent event of any and every kind, is part of the daily routine in that life of the masses there is no time for lingering upon the weathered storm or for bothering about and repairing its ravages. those who live the comparatively languid, the sheltered life should not use their own standards of what is delicate and refined, what is conspicuous and strong, when they judge their fellow beings as differently situated. nevertheless, they do--with the result that we find the puny mud lark criticizing the eagle battling with the hurricane. when susan and maud were in the street again, susan declared that she must have another drink. "i can't offer to pay for one for you," said she to maud. "i've almost no money. and i must spend what i've got for whiskey before i--can--can--start in." maud began to laugh, looked at susan, and was almost crying instead. "i can lend you a fiver," she said. "life's hell--ain't it? my father used to have a good business--tobacco. the trust took it away from him--and then he drank--and mother, she drank, too. and one day he beat her so she died--and he ran away. oh, it's all awful! but i've stopped caring. i'm stuck on jim--and another little fellow he don't know about. for god's sake don't tell him or he'd have me pinched for doing business free. i get full every night and raise old nick. sometimes i hate jim. i've tried to kill him twice when i was loaded. but a girl's got to have a backer with a pull. and jim lets me keep a bigger share of what i make than some fellows. freddie's pretty good too, they say--except when he's losing on the races or gets stuck on some actress that's too classy to be shanghaied--like you was--and that makes him cough up." maud went on to disclose that jim usually let her have all she made above thirty dollars a week, and in hard weeks had sometimes let her beg off with fifteen. said she: "i can generally count on about fifteen or twenty for myself. us girls that has backers make a lot more money than the girls that hasn't. they're always getting pinched too--though they're careful never to speak first to a man. _we_ can go right up and brace men with the cops looking on. a cop that'd touch us would get broke--unless we got too gay or robbed somebody with a pull. but none of our class of girls do any robbing. there's nothing in it. you get caught sooner or later, and then you're down and out." while susan was having two more drinks maud talked about freddie. she seemed to know little about him, though he was evidently one of the conspicuous figures. he had started in the lower east side--had been leader of one of those gangs that infest tenement districts--the young men who refuse to submit to the common lot of stupid and badly paid toil and try to fight their way out by the quick methods of violence instead of the slower but surer methods of robbing the poor through a store of some kind. these gangs were thieves, blackmailers, kidnapers of young girls for houses of prostitution, repeaters. most of them graduated into habitual jailbirds, a few--the cleverest--became saloon-keepers and politicians and high-class professional gamblers and race track men. freddie, maud explained, was not much over twenty-five, yet was already well up toward the place where successful gang leaders crossed over into the respectable class--that is, grafted in "big figures." he was a great reader, said maud, and had taken courses at some college. "they say he and his gang used to kill somebody nearly every night. then he got a lot of money out of one of his jobs--some say it was a bank robbery and some say they killed a miner who was drunk with a big roll on him. anyhow, freddie got next to finnegan--he's worth several millions that he made out of policy shops and poolrooms, and contracts and such political things. so he's in right--and he's got the brains. he's a good one for working out schemes for making people work hard and bring him their money. and everybody's afraid of him because he won't stop at nothing and is too slick to get caught." maud broke off abruptly and rose, warned by the glazed look in susan's eyes. susan was so far gone that she had difficulty in not staggering and did not dare speak lest her uncertain tongue should betray her. maud walked her up and down the block several times to give the fresh air a chance, then led her up to a man who had looked at them in passing and had paused to look back. "want to go have a good time, sweetheart?" said maud to the man. he was well dressed, middle-aged, with a full beard and spectacles, looked as if he might be a banker, or perhaps a professor in some college. "how much?" asked he. "five for a little while. come along, sporty. take me or my lady friend." "how much for both of you?" "ten. we don't cut rates. take us both, dearie. i know a hotel where it'd be all right." "no. i guess i'll take your lady friend." he had been peering at susan through his glasses. "and if she treats me well, i'll take her again. you're sure you're all right? i'm a married man." "we've both been home visiting for a month, and walking the chalk. my, but ma's strict! we got back tonight," said maud glibly. "go ahead, queenie. i'll be chasing up and down here, waiting." in a lower tone: "get through with him quick. strike him for five more after you get the first five. he's a blob." when susan came slinking through the office of the hotel in the wake of the man two hours later, maud sprang from the little parlor. "how much did you get?" she asked in an undertone. susan looked nervously at the back of the man who was descending the stairway to the street. "he said he'd pay me next time," she said. "i didn't know what to do. he was polite and----" maud seized her by the arm. "come along!" she cried. as she passed the desk she said to the clerk, "a dirty bilker! tryin' to kiss his way out!" "give him hell," said the clerk. maud, still gripping susan, overtook the man at the sidewalk. "what do you mean by not paying my lady friend?" she shouted. "get out!" said the man in a low tone, with an uneasy glance round. "if you annoy me i'll call the police." "if you don't cough up mighty damn quick," cried maud so loudly that several passers-by stopped, "i'll do the calling myself, you bum, and have you pinched for insulting two respectable working girls." and she planted herself squarely before him. susan drew back into the shadow of the wall. up stepped max, who happened to be standing outside his place. "what's the row about?" he demanded. "these women are trying to blackmail me," said the man, sidling away. maud seized him by the arm. "will you cough up or shall i scream?" she cried. "stand out of the way, girls," said max savagely, "and let me take a crack at the----." the man dived into his pocket, produced a bill, thrust it toward susan. maud saw that it was a five. "that's only five," she cried. "where's the other five?" "five was the bargain," whined the man. "do you want me to push in your blinkers, you damned old bilk, you?" cried max, seizing him violently by the arm. the man visited his pocket again, found another five, extended the two. maud seized them. "now, clear out!" said max. "i hate to let you go without a swift kick in the pants." maud pressed the money on susan and thanked max. said max, "don't forget to tell freddie what i done for his girl." "she'll tell him, all right," maud assured him. as the girls went east through forty-second street, susan said, "i'm afraid that man'll lay for us." "lay for us," laughed maud. "he'll run like a cat afire if he ever sights us again." "i feel queer and faint," said susan. "i must have a drink." "well--i'll go with you. but i've got to get busy. i want a couple of days off this week for my little fellow, so i must hustle. you let that dirty dog keep you too long. half an hour's plenty enough. always make 'em cough up in advance, then hustle 'em through. and don't listen to their guff about wanting to see you again if you treat 'em right. there's nothing in it." they went into a restaurant bar near broadway. susan took two drinks of whiskey raw in rapid succession; maud took one drink--a green mint with ice. "while you was fooling away time with that thief," said she, "i had two men--got five from one, three from the other. the five-dollar man took a three-dollar room--that was seventy-five for me. the three-dollar man wouldn't stand for more than a dollar room--so i got only a quarter there. but he set 'em up to two rounds of drinks--a quarter more for me. so i cleared nine twenty-five. and you'd 'a' got only your twenty-five cents commission on the room if it hadn't been for me. you forgot to collect your commission. well, you can get it next time. only i wouldn't _ask_ for it, max was so nice in helping out. he'll give you the quarter." when susan had taken her second stiff drink, her eyes were sparkling and she was laughing recklessly. "i want a cigarette," she said. "you feel bully, don't you?" "i'm ready for anything," declared she giddily. "i don't give a damn. i'm over the line. i--_don't_--give--a--damn!" "i used to hate the men i went up with," said maud, "but now i hardly look at their faces. you'll soon be that way. then you'll only drink for fun. drink--and dope--they are about the only fun we have--them and caring about some fellow." "how many girls has freddie got?" "search me. not many that he'd speak to himself. jim's his wardman--does his collecting for him. freddie's above most of the men in this business. the others are about like jim--tough straight through, but freddie's a kind of a pullman. the other men-even jim--hate him for being such a snare and being able to hide it that he's in such a low business. they'd have done him up long ago, if they could. but he's to wise for them. that's why they have to do what he says. i tell you, you're in right, for sure. you'll have freddie eating out of your hand, if you play a cool hand." susan ordered another drink and a package of egyptian cigarettes. "they don't allow ladies to smoke in here," said maud. "we'll go to the washroom." and in the washroom they took a few hasty puffs before sallying forth again. usually sunday night was dull, all the men having spent their spare money the night before, and it being a bad night for married men to make excuses for getting away from home. maud explained that, except "out-of-towners," the married men were the chief support of their profession--"and most of the cornhuskers are married men, too." but susan had the novice's luck. when she and maud met maud's "little gentleman friend" harry tucker at midnight and went to considine's for supper, susan had taken in "presents" and commissions twenty-nine dollars and a half. maud had not done so badly, herself; her net receipts were twenty-two fifty. she would not let susan pay any part of the supper bill, but gave harry the necessary money. "here's a five," said she, pressing the bill into his hand, "and keep the change." and she looked at him with loving eyes of longing. he was a pretty, common-looking fellow, a mere boy, who clerked in a haberdashery in the neighborhood. as he got only six dollars a week and had to give five to his mother who sewed, he could not afford to spend money on maud, and she neither expected nor wished it. when she picked him up, he like most of his fellow-clerks had no decent clothing but the suit he had to have to "make a front" at the store. maud had outfitted him from the skin with the cheap but showy stuff exhibited for just such purposes in the broadway windows. she explained confidentially to susan: "it makes me sort of feel that i own him. then, too, in love there oughtn't to be any money. if he paid, i'd be as cold to him as i am to the rest. the only reason i like jim at all is i like a good beating once in a while. it's exciting. jim--he treats me like the dirt under his feet. and that's what we are--dirt under the men's feet. every woman knows it, when it comes to a showdown between her and a man. as my pop used to say, the world was made for men, not for women. still, our graft ain't so bum, at that--if we work it right." freddie called on susan about noon the next day. she was still in bed. he was dressed in the extreme of fashion, was wearing a chinchilla-lined coat. he looked the idle, sportively inclined son of some rich man in the fifth avenue district. he was having an affair with a much admired young actress--was engaged in it rather as a matter of vanity and for the fashionable half-world associations into which it introduced him rather than from any present interest in the lady. he stood watching susan with a peculiar expression--one he might perhaps have found it hard to define himself. he bent over her and carelessly brushed her ear with his lips. "how did your royal highness make out?" inquired he. "the money's in the top bureau drawer," replied she, the covers up to her eyes and her eyes closed. he went to the bureau, opened the drawer, with his gloved hands counted the money. as he counted his eyes had a look in them that was strangely like jealous rage. he kept his back toward her for some time after he had crossed to look at the money. when he spoke it was to say: "not bad. and when you get dressed up a bit and lose your stage fright, you'll do a smashing business. i'll not take my share of this. i had a good run with the cards last night. anyhow, you've got to pay your rent and buy some clothes. i've got to invest something in my new property. it's badly run down. you'll get busy again tonight, of course. never lay off, lady, unless the weather's bad. you'll find you won't average more than twenty good business days a month in summer and fall, and only about ten in winter and spring, when it's cold and often lots of bad weather in the afternoons and evenings. that means hustle." no sign from susan. he sat on the bed and pulled the covers away from her face. "what are you so grouchy about, pet?" he inquired, chucking her under the chin. "nothing." "too much booze, i'll bet. well, sleep your grouch off. i've got a date with finnegan. the election's coming on, and i have to work--lining up the vote and getting the repeaters ready. it all means good money for me. look out about the booze, lady. it'll float you into trouble--trouble with me, i mean." and he patted her bare shoulders, laughed gently, went to the door. he paused there, struggled with an impulse to turn--departed. chapter vii but she did not "look out about the booze." each morning she awoke in a state of depression so horrible that she wondered why she could not bring herself to plan suicide. why was it? her marriage? yes--and she paid it its customary tribute of a shudder. yes, her marriage had made all things thereafter possible. but what else? lack of courage? lack of self-respect? was it not always assumed that a woman in her position, if she had a grain of decent instinct, would rush eagerly upon death? was she so much worse than others? or was what everybody said about these things--everybody who had experience--was it false, like nearly everything else she had been taught? she did not understand; she only knew that hope was as strong within her as health itself--and that she did not want to die--and that at present she was helpless. one evening the man she was with--a good-looking and unusually interesting young chap--suddenly said: "what a heart action you have got! let me listen to that again." "is it all wrong?" asked susan, as he pressed his ear against her chest. "you ask that as if you rather hoped it was." "i do--and i don't." "well," said he, after listening for a third time, "you'll never die of heart trouble. i never heard a heart with such a grand action--like a big, powerful pump, built to last forever. you're never ill, are you?" "not thus far." "and you'll have a hard time making yourself ill. health? why, your health must be perfect. let me see." and he proceeded to thump and press upon her chest with an expertness that proclaimed the student of medicine. he was all interest and enthusiasm, took a pencil and, spreading a sheet upon her chest over her heart, drew its outlines. "there!" he cried. "what is it?" asked susan. "i don't understand." the young man drew a second and much smaller heart within the outline of hers. "this," he explained, "is about the size of an ordinary heart. you can see for yourself that yours is fully one-fourth bigger than the normal." "what of it?" said susan. "why, health and strength--and vitality--courage--hope--all one-fourth above the ordinary allowance. yes, more than a fourth. i envy you. you ought to live long, stay young until you're very old--and get pretty much anything you please. you don't belong to this life. some accident, i guess. every once in a while i run across a case something like yours. you'll go back where you belong. this is a dip, not a drop." "you sound like a fortune-teller." she was smiling mockingly. but in truth she had never in all her life heard words that thrilled her so, that heartened her so. "i am. a scientific fortune-teller. and what that kind says comes true, barring accidents. as you're not ignorant and careless this life of yours isn't physiologically bad. on the contrary, you're out in the open air much of the time and get the splendid exercise of walking--a much more healthful life, in the essential ways, than respectable women lead. they're always stuffing, and rumping it. they never move if they can help. no, nothing can stop you but death--unless you're far less intelligent than you look. oh, yes--death and one other thing." "drink." and he looked shrewdly at her. but drink she must. and each day, as soon as she dressed and was out in the street, she began to drink, and kept it up until she had driven off the depression and had got herself into the mood of recklessness in which she found a certain sardonic pleasure in outraging her own sensibilities. there is a stage in a drinking career when the man or the woman becomes depraved and ugly as soon as the liquor takes effect. but she was far from this advanced stage. her disposition was, if anything, more sweet and generous when she was under the influence of liquor. the whiskey--she almost always drank whiskey--seemed to act directly and only upon the nerves that ached and throbbed when she was sober, the nerves that made the life she was leading seem loathsome beyond the power of habit to accustom. with these nerves stupefied, her natural gayety asserted itself, and a fondness for quiet and subtle mockery--her indulgence in it did not make her popular with vain men sufficiently acute to catch her meaning. by observation and practice she was soon able to measure the exact amount of liquor that was necessary to produce the proper state of intoxication at the hour for going "on duty." that gayety of hers was of the surface only. behind it her real self remained indifferent or somber or sardonic, according to her mood of the day. and she had the sense of being in the grasp of a hideous, fascinating nightmare, of being dragged through some dreadful probation from which she would presently emerge to ascend to the position she would have earned by her desperate fortitude. the past--unreal. the present--a waking dream. but the future--ah, the future! he has not candidly explored far beneath the surface of things who does not know the strange allure, charm even, that many loathsome things possess. and drink is peculiarly fitted to bring out this perverse quality--drink that blurs all the conventionalities, even those built up into moral ideas by centuries and ages of unbroken custom. the human animal, for all its pretenses of inflexibility, is almost infinitely adaptable--that is why it has risen in several million years of evolution from about the humblest rank in the mammalian family to overlordship of the universe. still, it is doubtful if, without drink to help her, a girl of susan's intelligence and temperament would have been apt to endure. she would probably have chosen the alternative--death. hundreds, perhaps thousands, of girls, at least her equals in sensibility, are caught in the same calamity every year, tens of thousands, ever more and more as our civilization transforms under the pressure of industrialism, are caught in the similar calamities of soul-destroying toil. and only the few survive who have perfect health and abounding vitality. susan's iron strength enabled her to live; but it was drink that enabled her to endure. beyond question one of the greatest blessings that could now be conferred upon the race would be to cure it of the drink evil. but at the same time, if drink were taken away before the causes of drink were removed, there would be an appalling increase in suicide--in insanity, in the general total of human misery. for while drink retards the growth of intelligent effort to end the stupidities in the social system, does it not also help men and women to bear the consequences of those stupidities? our crude and undeveloped new civilization, strapping men and women and children to the machines and squeezing all the energy out of them, all the capacity for vital life, casts them aside as soon as they are useless but long before they are dead. how unutterably wretched they would be without drink to give them illusions! susan grew fond of cigarettes, fond of whiskey; to the rest she after a few weeks became numb--no new or strange phenomenon in a world where people with a cancer or other hideous running sore or some gross and frightful deformity of fat or excrescence are seen laughing, joining freely and comfortably in the company of the unafflicted. in her affliction susan at least saw only those affected like herself--and that helped not a little, helped the whiskey to confuse and distort her outlook upon life. the old cartesian formula--"i think, therefore i am"--would come nearer to expressing a truth, were it reversed--"i am, therefore i think." our characters are compressed, and our thoughts bent by our environment. and most of us are unconscious of our slavery because our environment remains unchanged from birth until death, and so seems the whole universe to us. in spite of her life, in spite of all she did to disguise herself, there persisted in her face--even when she was dazed or giddied or stupefied with drink--the expression of the woman on the right side of the line. whether it was something in her character, whether it was not rather due to superiority of breeding and intelligence, would be difficult to say. however, there was the _different_ look that irritated many of the other girls, interfered with her business and made her feel a hypocrite. she heard so much about the paleness of her lips that she decided to end that comment by using paint--the durable kind ida had recommended. when her lips flamed carmine, a strange and striking effect resulted. the sad sweet pensiveness of her eyes--the pallor of her clear skin--then, that splash of bright red, artificial, bold, defiant--the contrast of the combination seemed somehow to tell the story of her life her past no less than her present. and when her beauty began to come back--for, hard though her life was, it was a life of good food, of plenty of sleep, of much open air; so it put no such strain upon her as had the life of the factory and the tenement--when her beauty came back, the effect of that contrast of scarlet splash against the sad purity of pallid cheeks and violet-gray eyes became a mark of individuality, of distinction. it was not long before susan would have as soon thought of issuing forth with her body uncovered as with her lips unrouged. she turned away from men who sought her a second time. she was difficult to find, she went on "duty" only enough days each week to earn a low average of what was expected from the girls by their protectors. yet she got many unexpected presents--and so had money to lend to the other girls, who soon learned how "easy" she was. maud, sometimes at her own prompting, sometimes prompted by jim, who was prompted by freddie--warned her every few days that she was skating on the thinnest of ice. but she went her way. not until she accompanied a girl to an opium joint to discover whether dope had the merits claimed for it as a deadener of pain and a producer of happiness--not until then did freddie come in person. "i hear," said he and she wondered whether he had heard from max or from loose-tongued maud--"that you come into the hotel so drunk that men sometimes leave you right away again--go without paying you." "i must drink," said susan. "you must _stop_ drink," retorted he, amiable in his terrible way. "if you don't, i'll have you pinched and sent up. that'll bring you to your senses." "i must drink," said susan. "then i must have you pinched," said he with his mocking laugh. "don't be a fool," he went on. "you can make money enough to soon buy the right sort of clothes so that i can afford to be seen with you. i'd like to take you out once in a while and give you a swell time. but what'd we look like together--with you in those cheap things out of bargain troughs? not that you don't look well--for you do. but the rest of you isn't up to your feet and to the look in your face. the whole thing's got to be right before a lady can sit opposite _me_ in murray's or rector's." "all i ask is to be let alone," said susan. "that isn't playing square--and you've got to play square. what i want is to set you up in a nice parlor trade--chaps from the college and the swell clubs and hotels. but i can't do anything for you as long as you drink this way. you'll have to stay on the streets." "that's where i want to stay." "well, there's something to be said for the streets," freddie admitted. "if a woman don't intend to make sporting her life business, she don't want to get up among the swells of the profession, where she'd become known and find it hard to sidestep. still, even in the street you ought to make a hundred, easy--and not go with any man that doesn't suit you." "any man that doesn't suit me," said susan. and, after a pause, she said it again: "any man that doesn't suit me." the young man, with his shrewdness of the street-graduate and his sensitiveness of the italian, gave her an understanding glance. "you look as if you couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry. i'd try to laugh if i was you." she had laughed as he spoke. freddie nodded approval. "that sounded good to me. you're getting broken in. don't take yourself so seriously. after all, what are you doing? why, learning to live like a man." she found this new point of view interesting--and true, too. like a man--like all men, except possibly a few--not enough exceptions to change the rule. like a man; getting herself hardened up to the point where she could take part in the cruel struggle on equal terms with the men. it wasn't their difference of body any more than it was their difference of dress that handicapped women; it was the idea behind skirt and sex--and she was getting rid of that. . . . the theory was admirable; but it helped her not at all in practice. she continued to keep to the darkness, to wait in the deep doorways, so far as she could in her "business hours," and to repulse advances in the day time or in public places--and to drink. she did not go again to the opium joint, and she resisted the nightly offers of girls and their "gentlemen friends" to try cocaine in its various forms. "dope," she saw, was the medicine of despair. and she was far from despair. had she not youth? had she not health and intelligence and good looks? some day she would have finished her apprenticeship. then--the career! freddie let her alone for nearly a month, though she was earning less than fifty dollars a week--which meant only thirty for him. he had never "collected" from her directly, but always through jim; and she had now learned enough of the methods of the system of which she was one of the thousands of slaves to appreciate that she was treated by jim with unique consideration. not only by the surly and brutal jim, but also by the police who oppressed in petty ways wherever they dared because they hated freddie's system which took away from them a part of the graft they regarded as rightfully theirs. yes, rightfully theirs. and anyone disposed to be critical of police morality--or of freddie palmer morality--in this matter of graft would do well to pause and consider the source of his own income before he waxes too eloquent and too virtuous. graft is one of those general words that mean everything and nothing. what is graft and what is honest income? just where shall we draw the line between rightful exploitation of our fellow-beings through their necessities and their ignorance of their helplessness, and wrongful exploitation? do attempts to draw that line resolve down to making virtuous whatever i may appropriate and vicious whatever is appropriated in ways other than mine? and if so are not the police and the palmers entitled to their day in the moral court no less than the tariff-baron and market-cornerer, the herder and driver of wage slaves, the retail artists in cold storage filth, short weight and shoddy goods? however, "we must draw the line somewhere" or there will be no such thing as morality under our social system. so why not draw it at anything the other fellow does to make money. in adopting this simple rule, we not only preserve the moralities from destruction but also establish our own virtue and the other fellow's villainy. truly, never is the human race so delightfully, so unconsciously, amusing as when it discusses right and wrong. when she saw freddie again, he was far from sober. he showed it by his way of beginning. said he: "i've got to hand you a line of rough talk, queenie. i took on this jag for your especial benefit," said he. "i'm a fool about you and you take advantage of it. that's bad for both of us. . . . you're drinking as much as ever?" "more," replied she. "it takes more and more." "how can you expect to get on?" cried he, exasperated. "as i told you, i couldn't make a cent if i didn't drink." freddie stared moodily at her, then at the floor--they were in her room. finally he said: "you get the best class of men. i put my swell friends on to where you go slipping by, up and down in the shadow--and it's all they can do to find you. the best class of men--men all the swell respectable girls in town are crazy to hook up with--those of 'em that ain't married already. if you're good enough for those chaps they ought to be good enough for you. yet some of 'em complain to me that they get thrown down--and others kick because you were too full--and, damn it, you act so queer that you scare 'em away. what am i to do about it?" she was silent. "i want you to promise me you'll take a brace." no answer. "you won't promise?" "no--because i don't intend to. i'm doing the best i can." "you think i'm a good thing. you think i'll take anything off you, because i'm stuck on you--and appreciate that you ain't on the same level with the rest of these heifers. well--i'll not let any woman con me. i never have. i never will. and i'll make you realize that you're not square with me. i'll let you get a taste of life as it is when a girl hasn't got a friend with a pull." "as you please," said susan indifferently. "i don't in the least care what happens to me." "we'll see about that," cried he, enraged. "i'll give you a week to brace up in." the look he shot at her by way of finish to his sentence was menacing enough. but she was not disturbed; these signs of anger tended to confirm her in her sense of security from him. for it was wholly unlike the freddie palmer the rest of the world knew, to act in this irresolute and stormy way. she knew that palmer, in his fashion, cared for her--better still, liked her--liked to talk with her, liked to show--and to develop--the aspiring side of his interesting, unusual nature for her benefit. a week passed, during which she did not see him. but she heard that he was losing on both the cards and the horses and was drinking wildly. a week--ten days--then---- one night, as she came out of a saloon a block or so down seventh avenue from forty-second, a fly cop seized her by the arm. "come along," said he roughly. "you're drinking and soliciting. i've got to clear the streets of some of these tarts. it's got so decent people can't move without falling over 'em." susan had not lived in the tenement districts where the ignorance and the helplessness and the lack of a voice that can make itself heard among the ruling classes make the sway of the police absolute and therefore tyrannical--she had not lived there without getting something of that dread and horror of the police which to people of the upper classes seems childish or evidence of secret criminal hankerings. and this nervousness had latterly been increased to terror by what she had learned from her fellow-outcasts--the hideous tales of oppression, of robbery, of bodily and moral degradation. but all this terror had been purely fanciful, as any emotion not of experience proves to be when experience evokes the reality. at that touch, at the sound of those rough words--at that _reality_ of the terror she had imagined from the days when she went to work at matson's and to live with the brashears, she straightway lost consciousness. when her senses returned she was in a cell, lying on a wooden bench. there must have been some sort of wild struggle; for her clothes were muddy, her hat was crushed into shapelessness, her veil was so torn that she had difficulty in arranging it to act as any sort of concealment. though she had no mirror at which to discover the consolation, she need have had no fear of being recognized, so distorted were all her features by the frightful paroxysms of grief that swept and ravaged her body that night. she fainted again when they led her out to put her in the wagon. she fainted a third time when she heard her name--"queenie brown"--bellowed out by the court officer. they shook her into consciousness, led her to the court-room. she was conscious of a stifling heat, of a curious crowd staring at her with eyes which seemed to bore red hot holes into her flesh. as she stood before the judge, with head limp upon her bosom, she heard in her ear a rough voice bawling, "you're discharged. the judge says don't come here again." and she was pushed through an iron gate. she walked unsteadily up the aisle, between two masses of those burning-eyed human monsters. she felt the cold outside air like a vast drench of icy water flung upon her. if it had been raining, she might have gone toward the river. but than that day new york had never been more radiantly the city of the sun. how she got home she never knew, but late in the afternoon she realized that she was in her own room. hour after hour she lay upon the bed, body and mind inert. helpless--no escape--no courage to live--yet no wish to die. how much longer would it last? surely the waking from this dream must come soon. about noon the next day freddie came. "i let you off easy," said he, sitting on the bed upon which she was lying dressed as when she came in the day before. "have you been drinking again?" "no," she muttered. "well--don't. next time, a week on the island. . . . did you hear?" "yes." "don't turn me against you. i'd hate to have to make an awful example of you." "i must drink," she repeated in the same stolid way. he abruptly but without shock lifted her to a sitting position. his arm held her body up; her head was thrown back and her face was looking calmly at him. she realized that he had been drinking--drinking hard. her eyes met his terrible eyes without flinching. he kissed her full upon the lips. with her open palm she struck him across the cheek, bringing the red fierily to its smooth fair surface. the devil leaped into his eyes, the devil of cruelty and lust. he smiled softly and wickedly. "i see you've forgotten the lesson i gave you three months ago. you've got to be taught to be afraid all over again." "i _am_ not afraid," said she. "i _was_ not afraid. you can't make me afraid." "we'll see," murmured he. and his fingers began to caress her round smooth throat. "if you ever strike me again," she said quietly, "i'll kill you." his eyes flinched for an instant--long enough to let her know his innermost secret. "i want you--i want _you_--damn you," he said, between his clinched teeth. "you're the first one i couldn't get. there's something in you i can't get!" "that's _me_," she replied. "you hate me, don't you?" "no." "then you love me?" "no. i care nothing about you." he let her drop back to the bed, went to the window, stood looking out moodily. after a while he said without turning: "my mother kept a book shop--on the lower east side. she brought me up at home. at home!" and he laughed sardonically. "she hated me because i looked like my father." silence, then he spoke again: "you've never been to my flat. i've got a swell place. i want to cut out this part of the game. i can get along without it. you're going to move in with me, and stop this street business. i make good money. you can have everything you want." "i prefer to keep on as i am." "what's the difference? aren't you mine whenever i want you?" "i prefer to be free." "_free!_ why, you're not free. can't i send you to the island any time i feel like it--just as i can the other girls?" "yes--you can do that. but i'm free, all the same." "no more than the other girls." "yes." "what do you mean?" "unless you understand, i couldn't make you see it," she said. she was sitting on the edge of the bed, doing up her hair, which had partly fallen down. "i think you do understand." "what in the hell do you want, anyhow?" he demanded. "if i knew--do you suppose i'd be here?" he watched her with baffled, longing eyes. "what is it," he muttered, "that's so damn peculiar about you?" it was the question every shrewd observant person who saw her put to himself in one way or another; and there was excellent reason why this should have been. life has a certain set of molds--lawyer, financier, gambler, preacher, fashionable woman, prostitute, domestic woman, laborer, clerk, and so on through a not extensive list of familiar types with which we all soon become acquainted. and to one or another of these patterns life fits each of us as we grow up. not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is arrested because it has lit upon a personality that cannot be immediately located, measured, accounted for. the reason for this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality. we obey the law of nature--and nature so abhors variety that, whenever a variation from a type happens, she tries to kill it, and, that failing, reproduces it a myriad times to make it a type. when an original man or woman appears and all the strenuous effort to suppress him or her fails, straightway spring up a thousand imitators and copiers, and the individuality is lost in the school, the fashion, the craze. we have not the courage to be ourselves, even where there is anything in us that might be developed into something distinctive enough to win us the rank of real identity. individuality--distinction--where it does exist, almost never shows until experience brings it out--just as up to a certain stage the embryo of any animal is like that of every other animal, though there is latent in it the most positive assertion of race and sex, of family, type, and so on. susan had from childhood possessed certain qualities of physical beauty, of spiritedness, of facility in mind and body--the not uncommon characteristic of the child that is the flower of passionate love. but now there was beginning to show in her a radical difference from the rest of the crowd pouring through the streets of the city. it made the quicker observers in the passing throng turn the head for a second and wondering glance. most of them assumed they had been stirred by her superiority of face and figure. but striking faces and figures of the various comely types are frequent in the streets of new york and of several other american cities. the truth was that they were interested by her expression--an elusive expression telling of a soul that was being moved to its depths by experience which usually finds and molds mere passive material. this expression was as evident in her mouth as in her eyes, in her profile as in her full face. and as she sat there on the edge of the bed twisting up her thick dark hair, it was this expression that disconcerted freddie palmer, for the first time in all his contemptuous dealings with the female sex. in his eyes was a ferocious desire to seize her and again try to conquer and to possess. she had become almost unconscious of his presence. he startled her by suddenly crying, "oh, you go to hell!" and flinging from the room, crashing the door shut behind him. maud had grown tired of the haberdasher's clerk and his presumptions upon her frank fondness which he wholly misunderstood. she had dropped him for a rough looking waiter-singer in a basement drinking place. he was beating her and taking all the money she had for herself, and was spending it on another woman, much older than maud and homely--and maud knew, and complained of him bitterly to everyone but himself. she was no longer hanging round susan persistently, having been discouraged by the failure of her attempts at intimacy with a girl who spent nearly all her spare time at reading or at plays and concerts. maud was now chumming with a woman who preyed upon the patrons of a big broadway hotel--she picked them up near the entrance, robbed them, and when they asked the hotel detectives to help them get back their stolen money, the detectives, who divided with her, frightened them off by saying she was a mulatto and would compel them to make a public appearance against her in open court. this woman, older and harder than most of the girls, though of quiet and refined appearance and manner, was rapidly dragging maud down. also, maud's looks were going because she ate irregularly all kinds of trash, and late every night ate herself full to bursting and drank herself drunk to stupefaction. susan's first horror of the men she met--men of all classes--was rapidly modified into an inconsistent, therefore characteristically human, mingling of horror and tolerance. nobody, nothing, was either good or bad, but all veered like weathercocks in the shifting wind. she decided that people were steadily good only where their lot happened to be cast in a place in which the good wind held steadily, and that those who were usually bad simply had the misfortune to have to live where the prevailing winds were bad. for instance, there was the handsome, well educated, well mannered young prize-fighter, ned ballou, who was estelle's "friend." ballou, big and gentle and as incapable of bad humor as of constancy or of honesty about money matters, fought under the name of joe geary and was known as upper cut joe because usually, in the third round, never later than the fifth, he gave the knockout to his opponent by a cruelly swift and savage uppercut. he had educated himself marvelously well. but he had been brought up among thieves and had by some curious freak never learned to know what a moral sense was, which is one--and a not unattractive--step deeper down than those who know what a moral sense is but never use it. at supper in gaffney's he related to susan and estelle how he had won his greatest victory--the victory of terry the cyclone, that had lifted him up into the class of secure money-makers. he told how he always tried to "rattle" his opponent by talking to him, by pouring out in an undertone a stream of gibes, jeers, insults. the afternoon of the fight terry's first-born had died, but the money for the funeral expenses and to save the wife from the horrors and dangers of the free wards had to be earned. joe geary knew that he must win this fight or drop into the working or the criminal class. terry was a "hard one"; so circumstances compelled, those desperate measures which great men, from financiers and generals down to prize-fighters, do not shrink from else they would not be great, but small. as soon as he was facing terry in the ring--joe so he related with pride in his cleverness--began to "guy"--"well, you irish fake--so the kid's dead--eh? who was its pa, say?--the dirty little bastard--or does the wife know which one it was----" and so on. and terry, insane with grief and fury, fought wild--and joe became a champion. as she listened susan grew cold with horror and with hate. estelle said: "tell the rest of it, joe." "oh, that was nothing," replied he. when he strolled away to talk with some friends estelle told "the rest" that was "nothing." the championship secure, joe had paid all terry's bills, had supported terry and his wife for a year, had relapsed into old habits and "pulled off a job" of safe-cracking because, the prize-fighting happening to pay poorly, he would have had a default on the payments for a month or so. he was caught, did a year on the island before his "pull" could get him out. and all the time he was in the "pen" he so arranged it with his friends that the invalid terry and his invalid wife did not suffer. and all this he had done not because he had a sense of owing terry, but because he was of the "set" in which it is the custom to help anybody who happens to need it, and aid begun becomes an obligation to "see it through." it was an extreme case of the moral chaos about her--the chaos she had begun to discover when she caught her aunt and ruth conspiring to take sam away from her. what a world! if only these shifting, usually evil winds of circumstance could be made to blow good! a few evenings after the arrest maud came for susan, persuaded her to go out. they dined at about the only good restaurant where unescorted women were served after nightfall. afterward they went "on duty." it was fine overhead and the air was cold and bracing--one of those marvelous new york winter nights which have the tonic of both sea and mountains and an exhilaration, in addition, from the intense bright-burning life of the mighty city. for more than a week there had been a steady downpour of snow, sleet and finally rain. thus, the women of the streets had been doing almost no business. there was not much money in sitting in drinking halls and the back rooms of saloons and picking up occasional men; the best trade was the men who would not venture to show themselves in such frankly disreputable places, but picked out women in the crowded streets and followed them to quiet dark places to make the arrangements--men stimulated by good dinners, or, later on, in the evening, those who left parties of elegant respectability after theater or opera. on this first night of business weather in nearly two weeks the streets were crowded with women and girls. they were desperately hard up and they made open dashes for every man they could get at. all classes were made equally bold--the shop and factory and office and theater girls with wages too small for what they regarded as a decent living; the women with young children to support and educate; the protected professional regulars; the miserable creatures who had to get along as best they could without protection, and were prey to every blackmailing officer of an anti-vice society and to every policeman and fly-cop not above levying upon women who were "too low to be allowed to live, anyhow." out from all kinds of shelters swarmed the women who were demonstrating how prostitution flourishes and tends to spread to every class of society whenever education develops tastes beyond the earning power of their possessors. and with clothes and food to buy, rent to pay, dependents to support, these women, so many days hampered in the one way that was open to them to get money, made the most piteous appeals to the men. not tearful appeals, not appeals to sympathy or even to charity, but to passion. they sought in every way to excite. they exhibited their carefully gotten-up legs; they made indecent gestures; they said the vilest things; they offered the vilest inducements; they lowered their prices down and down. and such men as did not order them off with disdain, listened with laughter, made jokes at which the wretched creatures laughed as gayly as if they were not mad with anxiety and were not hating these men who were holding on to that which they must have to live. "too many out tonight," said maud as they walked their beat--forty-second between broadway and eighth avenue. "i knew it would be this way. let's go in here and get warm." they went into the back room of a saloon where perhaps half a dozen women were already seated, some of them gray with the cold against which their thin showy garments were no protection. susan and maud sat at a table in a corner; maud broke her rule and drank whiskey with susan. after they had taken perhaps half a dozen drinks, maud grew really confidential. she always, even in her soberest moments, seemed to be telling everything she knew; but susan had learned that there were in her many deep secrets, some of which not even liquor could unlock. "i'm going to tell you something," she now said to susan. "you must promise not to give me away." "don't tell me," replied susan. she was used to being flattered--or victimized, according to the point of view--with confidences. she assumed maud was about to confess some secret about her own self, as she had the almost universal habit of never thinking of anyone else. "don't tell me," said she. "i'm tired of being used to air awful secrets. it makes me feel like a tenement wash line." "this is about you," said maud. "if it's ever found out that i put you wise, jim'll have me killed. yes--killed." susan, reckless by this time, laughed. "oh, trash!" she said. "no trash at all," insisted maud. "when you know this town through and through you'll know that murder's something that can be arranged as easy as buying a drink. what risk is there in making one of _us_ 'disappear'? none in the world. i always feel that jim'll have me killed some day--unless i go crazy sometime and kill him. he's stuck on me--or, at least, he's jealous of me--and if he ever found out i had a lover--somebody--anybody that didn't pay--why, it'd be all up with me. little maud would go on the grill." she ordered and slowly drank another whiskey before she recalled what she had set out to confide. by way of a fresh start she said, "what do you think of freddie?" "i don't know," replied susan. and it was the truth. her instinctive belief in a modified kind of fatalism made her judgments of people--even of those who caused her to suffer--singularly free from personal bitterness. freddie, a mere instrument of destiny, had his good side, his human side, she knew. at his worst he was no worse than the others, and aside from his queer magnetism, there was a certain force in him that compelled her admiration; at least he was not one of the petty instruments of destiny. he had in him the same quality she felt gestating within herself. "i don't know what to think," she repeated. maud had been reflecting while susan was casting about, as she had many a time before, for her real opinion of her master who was in turn the slave of finnegan, who was in his turn the slave of somebody higher up, she didn't exactly know who--or why--or the why of any of it--or the why of the grotesque savage purposeless doings of destiny in general. maud now burst out: "i don't care. i'm going to put you wise if i die for it." "don't," said susan. "i don't want to know." "but i've _got_ to tell you. do you know what freddie's going to do?" susan smiled disdainfully. "i don't care. you mustn't tell me--when you've been drinking this way----" "finnegan's police judge is a man named bennett. as soon as bennett comes back to jefferson market police court, freddie's going to have you sent up for three months." susan's glass was on the way to her lips. she set it down again. the drunken old wreck of an entertainer at the piano in the corner was bellowing out his favorite song--"i am the king of the vikings." susan began to hum the air. "it's gospel," cried maud, thinking susan did not believe her. "he's a queer one, is freddie. they're all afraid of him. you'd think he was a coward, the way he bullies women and that. but somehow he ain't--not a bit. he'll be a big man in the organization some day, they all say. he never lets up till he gets square. and he thinks you're not square--after all he's done for you." "perhaps not--as he looks at it," said susan. "and jim says he's crazy in love with you, and that he wants to put you where other men can't see you and where maybe he can get over caring about you. that's the real reason. he's a queer devil. but then all men are though none quite like freddie." "so i'm to go to the island for three months," said susan reflectively. "you don't seem to care. it's plain you never was there. . . . and you've got to go. there's no way out of it--unless you skip to another city. and if you did you never could come back here. freddie'd see that you got yours as soon as you landed." susan sat looking at her glass. maud watched her in astonishment. "you're as queer as freddie," said she at length. "i never feel as if i was acquainted with you--not really. i never had a lady friend like that before. you don't seem to be a bit excited about what freddie's going to do. are you in love with him?" susan lifted strange, smiling eyes to maud's curious gaze. "i--in _love_--with a _man_," she said slowly. and then she laughed. "don't laugh that way," cried maud. "it gives me the creeps. what are you going to do?" "what can i do?" "nothing." "then if there's nothing to do, i'll no nothing." "go to the island for three months?" susan shrugged her shoulders. "i haven't gone yet." she rose. "it's too stuffy and smelly in here," said she. "let's move out." "no. i'll wait. i promised to meet a gentleman friend here. you'll not tell that i tipped you off?" "you'd not have told me if you hadn't known i wouldn't." "that's so. but--why don't you make it up with freddie?" "i couldn't do that." "he's dead in love. i'm sure you could." again susan's eyes became strange. "i'm sure i couldn't. good night." she got as far as the door, came back. "thank you for telling me." "oh, that's all right," murmured the girl. she was embarrassed by susan's manner. she was frightened by susan's eyes. "you ain't going to----" there she halted. "what?" "to jump off? kill yourself?" "hardly," said susan. "i've got a lot to do before i die." she went directly home. palmer was lying on the bed, a cigarette between his lips, a newspaper under his feet to prevent his boots from spoiling the spread--one of the many small indications of the prudence, thrift and calculation that underlay the almost insane recklessness of his surface character, and that would save him from living as the fool lives and dying as the fool dies. "i thought you wouldn't slop round in these streets long," said he, as she paused upon the threshold. "so i waited." she went to the bureau, unlocked the top drawer, took the ten-dollar bill she had under some undershirts there, put it in her right stocking where there were already a five and a two. she locked the drawer, tossed the key into an open box of hairpins. she moved toward the door. "where are you going?" asked he, still staring at the ceiling. "out. i've made almost nothing this week." "sit down. i want to talk to you." she hesitated, seated herself on a chair near the bed. he frowned at her. "you've been drinking?" "yes." "i've been drinking myself, but i've got a nose like a hunting dog. what do you do it for?" "what's the use of explaining? you'd not understand." "perhaps i would. i'm one-fourth italian--and they understand everything. . . . you're fond of reading, aren't you?" "it passes the time." "while i was waiting for you i glanced at your new books--emerson--dickens--zola." he was looking toward the row of paper backs that filled almost the whole length of the mantel. "i must read them. i always like your books. you spend nearly as much time reading as i do--and you don't need it, for you've got a good education. what do you read for? to amuse yourself?" "no." "to get away from yourself?" "no." "then why?" persisted he. "to find out about myself." he thought a moment, turned his face toward her. "you _are_ clever!" he said admiringly. "what's your game?" "my game?" "what are you aiming for? you've got too much sense not to be aiming for something." she looked at him; the expression that marked her as a person peculiar and apart was glowing in her eyes like a bed of red-hot coals covered with ashes. "what?" he repeated. "to get strong," replied she. "women are born weak and bred weaker. i've got to get over being a woman. for there isn't any place in this world for a woman except under the shelter of some man. and i don't want that." the underlying strength of her features abruptly came into view. "and i won't have it," she added. he laughed. "but the men'll never let _you_ be anything but a woman." "we'll see," said she, smiling. the strong look had vanished into the soft contour of her beautiful youth. "personally, i like you better when you've been drinking," he went on. "you're sad when you're sober. as you drink you liven up." "when i get over being sad if i'm sober, when i learn to take things as they come, just like a man--a strong man, then i'll be----" she stopped. "be what?" "ready." "ready for what?" "how do i know?" he swung himself to a sitting position. "meanwhile, you're coming to live with me. i've been fighting against it, but i give up. i need you. you're the one i've been looking for. pack your traps. i'll call a cab and we'll go over to my flat. then we'll go to rector's and celebrate." she shook her head. "i'm sorry, but i can't." "why not?" "i told you. there's something in me that won't let me." he rose, walked to her very deliberately. he took one of her hands from her lap, drew her to her feet, put his hands strongly on her shoulders. "you belong to me," he said, his lips smiling charmingly, but the devil in the gleam of his eyes and in the glistening of his beautiful, cruel teeth. "pack up." "you know that i won't." he slowly crushed her in his arms, slowly pressed his lips upon hers. a low scream issued from her lips and she seized him by the throat with both hands, one hand over the other, and thrust him backward. he reeled, fell upon his back on the bed; she fell with him, clung to him--like a bull dog--not as if she would not, but as if she could not, let go. he clutched at her fingers; failing to dislodge them, he tried to thrust his thumbs into her eyes. but she seized his right thumb between her teeth and bit into it until they almost met. and at the same time her knees ground into his abdomen. he choked, gurgled, grew dark red, then gray, then a faint blackish blue, lay limp under her. but she did not relax until the blue of his face had deepened to black and his eyes began to bulge from their sockets. at those signs that he was beyond doubt unconscious, she cautiously relaxed her fingers. she unclenched her teeth; his arm, which had been held up by the thumb she was biting, dropped heavily. she stood over him, her eyes blazing insanely at him. she snatched out her hatpin, flung his coat and waistcoat from over his chest, felt for his heart. with the murderous eight inches of that slender steel poniard poised for the drive, she began to sob, flung the weapon away, took his face between her hands and kissed him. "you fiend! you fiend!" she sobbed. she changed to her plainest dress. leaving the blood-stained blouse on the bed beside him where she had flung it down after tearing it off, she turned out the light, darted down stairs and into the street. at times square she took the subway for the bowery. to change one's world, one need not travel far in new york; the ocean is not so wide as is the gap between the tenderloin and the lower east side. chapter viii she had thought of escape daily, hourly almost, for nearly five months. she had advanced not an inch toward it; but she never for an instant lost hope. she believed in her destiny, felt with all the strength of her health and vitality that she had not yet found her place in the world, that she would find it, and that it would be high. now--she was compelled to escape, and this with only seventeen dollars and in the little time that would elapse before palmer returned to consciousness and started in pursuit, bent upon cruel and complete revenge. she changed to an express train at the grand central subway station, left the express on impulse at fourteenth street, took a local to astor place, there ascended to the street. she was far indeed from the tenderloin, in a region not visited by the people she knew. as for freddie, he never went below fourteenth street, hated the lower east side, avoided anyone from that region of his early days, now shrouded in a mystery that would not be dispelled with his consent. freddie would not think of searching for her there; and soon he would believe she was dead--drowned, and at the bottom of river or bay. as she stepped from the exit of the underground, she saw in the square before her, under the sunset cox statue, a salvation army corps holding a meeting. she heard a cry from the center of the crowd: "the wages of sin is death!" she drifted into the fringe of the crowd and glanced at the little group of exhorters and musicians. the woman who was preaching had taken the life of the streets as her text. well fed and well clad and certain of a clean room to sleep in--certain of a good living, she was painting the moral horrors of the street life. "the wages of sin is death!" she shouted. she caught susan's eye, saw the cynical-bitter smile round her lips. for susan had the feeling that, unsuspected by the upper classes, animates the masses as to clergy and charity workers of all kinds--much the same feeling one would have toward the robber's messenger who came bringing from his master as a loving gift some worthless trifle from the stolen goods. not from clergy, not from charity worker, not from the life of the poor as they take what is given them with hypocritical cringe and tear of thanks, will the upper classes get the truth as to what is thought of them by the masses in this day of awakening intelligence and slow heaving of crusts so long firm that they have come to be regarded as bed-rock of social foundation. cried the woman, in response to susan's satirical look: "you mock at that, my lovely young sister. your lips are painted, and they sneer. but you know i'm right--yes, you show in your eyes that you know it in your aching heart! the wages of sin is _death!_ isn't that so, sister?" susan shook her head. "speak the truth, sister! god is watching you. the wages of sin is _death!_" "the wages of weakness is death," retorted susan. "but--the wages of sin--well, it's sometimes a house in fifth avenue." and then she shrank away before the approving laughter of the little crowd and hurried across into eighth street. in the deep shadow of the front of cooper union she paused, as the meaning of her own impulsive words came to her. the wages of sin! and what was sin, the supreme sin, but weakness? it was exactly as burlingham had explained. he had said that, whether for good or for evil, really to live one must be strong. strong! what a good teacher he had been--one of the rare kind that not only said things interestingly but also said them so that you never forgot. how badly she had learned! she strolled on through eighth street, across third avenue and into second avenue. it was ten o'clock. the effects of the liquor she had drunk had worn away. in so much wandering she had acquired the habit of closing up an episode of life as a traveler puts behind him the railway journey at its end. she was less than half an hour from her life in the tenderloin; it was as completely in her past as it would ever be. the cards had once more been shuffled; a new deal was on. a new deal. what? to fly to another city--that meant another palmer, or the miseries of the unprotected woman of the streets, or slavery to the madman of what the french with cruel irony call a _maison de joie_. to return to work---- what was open to her, educated as the comfortable classes educate their women? work meant the tenements. she loathed the fast life, but not as she loathed vermin-infected tenements. to toil all day at a monotonous task, the same task every day and all day long! to sleep at night with tucker and the vermin! to her notion the sights and sounds and smells and personal contacts of the tenements were no less vicious; were--for her at least--far more degrading than anything in the tenderloin and its like. and there she got money to buy whiskey that whirled her almost endurably, sometimes even gayly, over the worst things--money to buy hours, whole days of respite that could be spent in books, in dreams and plannings, in the freedom of a clean and comfortable room, or at the theater or concert. there were degrees in horror; she was paying a hateful price, but not so hateful as she had paid when she worked. the wages of shame were not so hard earned as the wages of toil, were larger, brought her many of the things she craved. the wages of toil brought her nothing but the right to bare existence in filth and depravity and darkness. also, she felt that if she were tied down to some dull and exhausting employment, she would be settled and done for. in a few years she would be an old woman, with less wages or flung out diseased or maimed--to live on and on like hundreds of wretched old creatures adrift everywhere in the tenement streets. no, work had nothing to offer her except "respectability." and what a mocking was "respectability," in rags and filth! besides, what had _she_, the outcast born, to do with this respectability? no--not work--never again. so long as she was roving about, there was hope and chance somehow to break through into the triumphant class that ruled the world, that did the things worth while--wore the good clothes, lived in the good houses, ate the good food, basked in the sunshine of art. either she would soar above respectability, or she would remain beneath it. respectability might be an excellent thing; surely there must be some merit in a thing about which there was so much talk, after which there was so much hankering, and to which there was such desperate clinging. but as a sole possession, as a sole ambition, it seemed thin and poor and even pitiful. she had emancipated herself from its tyranny; she would not resume the yoke. among so many lacks of the good things of life its good would not be missed. perhaps, when she had got a few other of the good things she might try to add it to them--or might find herself able to get comfortably along without it, as had george eliot and aspasia, george sand and duse and bernhardt and so many of the world's company of self-elected women members of the triumphant class. a new deal! and a new deal meant at least even chance for good luck. as she drifted down the west side of second avenue, her thoughts so absorbed her that she was oblivious of the slushy sidewalk, even of the crossings where one had to pick one's way as through a shallow creek with stepping stones here and there. there were many women alone, as in every other avenue and every frequented cross street throughout the city--women made eager to desperation by the long stretch of impossible weather. every passing man was hailed, sometimes boldly, sometimes softly. again and again that grotesque phrase "let's go have a good time" fell upon the ears. after several blocks, when her absent-mindedness had got her legs wet to the knees in the shallow shiny slush, she was roused by the sound of music--an orchestra playing and playing well a lively hungarian dance. she was standing before the winter garden from which the sounds came. as she opened the door she was greeted by a rush of warm air pleasantly scented with fresh tobacco smoke, the odors of spiced drinks and of food, pastry predominating. some of the tables were covered ready for those who would wish to eat; but many of them were for the drinkers. the large, low-ceilinged room was comfortably filled. there were but a few women and they seemed to be wives or sweethearts. susan was about to retreat when a waiter--one of those austrians whose heads end abruptly an inch or so above the eyebrows and whose chins soon shade off into neck--advanced smilingly with a polite, "we serve ladies without escorts." she chose a table that had several other vacant tables round it. on the recommendation of the waiter she ordered a "burning devil"; he assured her she would find it delicious and the very thing for a cold slushy night. at the far end of the room on a low platform sat the orchestra. a man in an evening suit many sizes too large for him sang in a strong, not disagreeable tenor a german song that drew loud applause at the end of each stanza. the "burning devil" came--an almost black mixture in a large heavy glass. the waiter touched a match to it, and it was at once wreathed in pale flickering flames that hovered like butterflies, now rising as if to float away, now lightly descending to flit over the surface of the liquid or to dance along the edge of the glass. "what shall i do with it?" said susan. "wait till it goes out," said the waiter. "then drink, as you would anything else." and he was off to attend to the wants of a group of card players a few feet away. susan touched her finger to the glass, when the flame suddenly vanished. she found it was not too hot to drink, touched her lips to it. the taste, sweetish, suggestive of coffee and of brandy and of burnt sugar, was agreeable. she slowly sipped it, delighting in the sensation of warmth, of comfort, of well being that speedily diffused through her. the waiter came to receive her thanks for his advice. she said to him: "do you have women sing, too?" "oh, yes--when we can find a good-looker with a voice. our customers know music." "i wonder if i could get a trial?" the waiter was interested at once. "perhaps. you sing?" "i have sung on the stage." "i'll ask the boss." he went to the counter near the door where stood a short thick-set jew of the east european snub-nosed type in earnest conversation with a seated blonde woman. she showed that skill at clinging to youth which among the lower middle and lower classes pretty clearly indicates at least some experience at the fast life. for only in the upper and upper middle class does a respectable woman venture thus to advertise so suspicious a guest within as a desire to be agreeable in the sight of men. susan watched the waiter as he spoke to the proprietor, saw the proprietor's impatient shake of the head, sent out a wave of gratitude from her heart when her waiter friend persisted, compelled the proprietor to look toward her. she affected an air of unconsciousness; in fact, she was posing as if before a camera. her heart leaped when out of the corner of her eye she saw the proprietor coming with the waiter. the two paused at her table, and the proprietor said in a sharp, impatient voice: "well, lady--what is it?" "i want a trial as a singer." the proprietor was scanning her features and her figure which was well displayed by the tight-fitting jacket. the result seemed satisfactory, for in a voice oily with the softening influence of feminine charm upon male, he said: "you've had experience?" "yes--a lot of it. but i haven't sung in about two years." "sing german?" "only ballads in english. but i can learn anything." "english'll do--_if_ you can _sing_. what costume do you wear?" and the proprietor seated himself and motioned the waiter away. "i have no costume. as i told you, i've not been singing lately." "we've got one that might fit--a short blue silk skirt--low neck and blue stockings. slippers too, but they might be tight--i forget the number." "i did wear threes. but i've done a great deal of walking. i wear a five now." susan thrust out a foot and ankle, for she knew that despite the overshoe they were good to look at. the proprietor nodded approvingly and there was the note of personal interest in his voice as he said: "they can try your voice tomorrow morning. come at ten o'clock." "if you decide to try me, what pay will i get?" the proprietor smiled slyly. "oh, we don't pay anything to the singers. that man who sang--he gets his board here. he works in a factory as a bookkeeper in the daytime. lots of theatrical and musical people come here. if a man or a girl can do any stunt worth while, there's a chance." "i'd have to have something more than board," said susan. the proprietor frowned down at his stubby fingers whose black and cracked nails were drumming on the table. "well--i might give you a bed. there's a place i could put one in my daughter's room. she sings and dances over at louis blanc's garden in third avenue. yes, i could put you there. but--no privileges, you understand." "certainly. . . . i'll decide tomorrow. maybe you'll not want me." "oh, yes--if you can sing at all. your looks'd please my customers." seeing the dubious expression in susan's face, he went on, "when i say 'no privilege' i mean only about the room. of course, it's none of my business what you do outside. lots of well fixed gents comes here. my girls have all had good luck. i've been open two years, and in that time one of my singers got an elegant delicatessen owner to keep her." "really," said susan, in the tone that was plainly expected of her. "yes--an _elegant_ gentleman. i'd not be surprised if he married her. and another married an electrician that cops out forty a week. you'll find it a splendid chance to make nice friends--good spenders. and i'm a practical man." "i suppose there isn't any work i could do in the daytime?" "not here." "perhaps----" "not nowhere, so far as i know. that is, work you'd care to do. the factories and stores is hard on a woman, and she don't get much. and besides they ain't very classy to my notion. of course, if a woman ain't got looks or sense or any tone to her, if she's satisfied to live in a bum tenement and marry some dub that can't make nothing, why, that's different. but you look like a woman that had been used to something and wanted to get somewhere. i wouldn't have let _my_ daughter go into no such low, foolish life." she had intended to ask about a place to stop for the night. she now decided that the suggestion that she was homeless might possibly impair her chances. after some further conversation--the proprietor repeating what he had already said, and repeating it in about the same language--she paid the waiter fifteen cents for the drink and a tip of five cents out of the change she had in her purse, and departed. it had clouded over, and a misty, dismal rain was trickling through the saturated air to add to the messiness of the churn of cold slush. susan went on down second avenue. on a corner near its lower end she saw a raines law hotel with awnings, indicating that it was not merely a blind to give a saloon a hotel license but was actually open for business. she went into the "family" entrance of the saloon, was alone in a small clean sitting-room with a sliding window between it and the bar. a tough but not unpleasant young face appeared at the window. it was the bartender. "evening, cutie," said he. "what'll you have?" "some rye whiskey," replied susan. "may i smoke a cigarette here?" "sure, go as far as you like. ten-cent whiskey--or fifteen?" "fifteen--unless it's out of the same bottle as the ten." "call it ten--seeing as you are a lady. i've got a soft heart for you ladies. i've got a wife in the business, myself." when he came in at the door with the drink, a young man followed him--a good-looking, darkish youth, well dressed in a ready made suit of the best sort. at second glance susan saw that he was at least partly of jewish blood, enough to elevate his face above the rather dull type which predominates among clerks and merchants of the christian races. he had small, shifty eyes, an attractive smile, a manner of assurance bordering on insolence. he dropped into a chair at susan's table with a, "you don't mind having a drink on me." as susan had no money to spare, she acquiesced. she said to the bartender, "i want to get a room here--a plain room. how much?" "maybe this gent'll help you out," said the bartender with a grin and a wink. "he's got money to burn--and burns it." the bartender withdrew. the young man struck a match and held it for her to light the cigarette she took from her purse. then he lit one himself. "next time try one of mine," said he. "i get 'em of a fellow that makes for the swellest uptown houses. but i get 'em ten cents a package instead of forty. i haven't seen you down here before. what a good skin you've got! it's been a long time since i've seen a skin as fine as that, except on a baby now and then. and that shape of yours is all right, too. i suppose it's the real goods?" with that he leaned across the table and put his hand upon her bosom. she drew back indifferently. "you don't give anything for nothing--eh?" laughed he. "been in the business long?" "it seems long." "it ain't what it used to be. the competition's getting to be something fierce. looks as if all the respectable girls and most of the married women were coming out to look for a little extra money. well--why not?" susan shrugged her shoulders. "why not?" echoed she carelessly. she did not look forward with pleasure to being alone. the man was clean and well dressed, and had an unusual amount of personal charm that softened his impertinence of manner. evidently he has the habit of success with women. she much preferred him sitting with her to her own depressing society. so she accepted his invitation. she took one of his cigarettes, and it was as good as he had said. he rattled on, mingling frank coarse compliments with talk about "the business" from a standpoint so practical that she began to suspect he was somehow in it himself. he clearly belonged to those more intelligent children of the upper class tenement people, the children who are too bright and too well educated to become working men and working women like their parents; they refuse to do any kind of manual labor, as it could never in the most favorable circumstances pay well enough to give them the higher comforts they crave, the expensive comforts which every merchant is insistently and temptingly thrusting at a public for the most part too poor to buy; so these cleverer children of the working class develop into shyster lawyers, politicians, sports, prostitutes, unless chance throws into their way some respectable means of getting money. vaguely she wondered--without caring to question or guess what particular form of activity this young man had taken in avoiding monotonous work at small pay. after her second drink came she found that she did not want it. she felt tired and sleepy and wished to get her wet stockings off and to dry her skirt which, for all her careful holding up, had not escaped the fate of whatever was exposed to that abominable night. "i'm going along with you," said the young man as she rose. "here's to our better acquaintance." "thanks, but i want to be alone," replied she affably. and, not to seem unappreciative of his courtesy, she took a small drink from her glass. it tasted very queer. she glanced suspiciously at the young man. her legs grew suddenly and strangely heavy. her heart began to beat violently, and a black fog seemed to be closing in upon her eyes. through it she saw the youth grinning sardonically. and instantly she knew. "what a fool i am!" she thought. she had been trapped by another form of the slave system. this man was a recruiting sergeant for houses of prostitution--was one of the "cadets." they search the tenement districts for good-looking girls and young women. they hang about the street corners, flirting. they attend the balls where go the young people of the lower middle class and upper lower class. they learn to make love seductively; they understand how to tempt a girl's longing for finery, for an easier life, her dream of a husband above her class in looks and in earning power. and for each recruit "broken in" and hardened to the point of willingness to go into a sporting house, they get from the proprietor ten to twenty-five dollars according to her youth and beauty. susan knew all about the system, had heard stories of it from the lips of girls who had been embarked through it--embarked a little sooner than they would have embarked under the lash of want, or of that other and almost equally compelling brute, desire for the comforts and luxuries that mean decent living. susan knew; yet here she was, because of an unguarded moment, and because of a sense of security through experience--here she was, succumbing to knockout drops as easily as the most innocent child lured away from its mother's door to get a saucer of ice cream! she tried to rise, to scream, though she knew any such effort was futile. with a gasp and a sigh her head fell forward and she was unconscious. she awakened in a small, rather dingy room. she was lying on her back with only stockings on. beyond the foot of the bed was a little bureau at which a man, back full to her, stood in trousers and shirt sleeves tying his necktie. she saw that he was a rough looking man, coarsely dressed--an artisan or small shop-keeper. used as she was to the profound indifference of men of all classes and degrees of education and intelligence to what the woman thought--used as she was to this sensual selfishness which men at least in part conceal from their respectable wives, susan felt a horror of this man who had not minded her unconsciousness. her head was aching so fiercely that she had not the courage to move. presently the man turned toward her a kindly, bearded face. but she was used to the man of general good character who with little shame and no hesitation became beast before her, the free woman. "hello, pretty!" cried he, genially. "slept off your jag, have you?" he was putting on his coat and waistcoat. he took from the waistcoat pocket a dollar bill. "you're a peach," said he. "i'll come again, next time my old lady goes off guard." he made the bill into a pellet, dropped it on her breast. "a little present for you. put it in your stocking and don't let the madam grab it." with a groan susan lifted herself to a sitting position, drew the spread about her--a gesture of instinct rather than of conscious modesty. "they drugged me and brought me here," said she. "i want you to help me get out." "good lord!" cried the man, instantly all a-quiver with nervousness. "i'm a married man. i don't want to get mixed up in this." and out of the room he bolted, closing the door behind him. susan smiled at herself satirically. after all her experience, to make this silly appeal--she who knew men! "i must be getting feeble-minded," thought she. then---- her clothes! with a glance she swept the little room. no closet! her own clothes gone! on the chair beside the bed a fast-house parlor dress of pink cotton silk, and a kind of abbreviated chemise. the stockings on her legs were not her own, but were of pink cotton, silk finished. a pair of pink satin slippers stood on the floor beside the two galvanized iron wash basins. the door opened and a burly man, dressed in cheap ready-made clothes but with an air of authority and prosperity, was smiling at her. "the madam told me to walk right in and make myself at home," said he. "yes, you're up to her account of you. only she said you were dead drunk and would probably be asleep. now, honey, you treat me right and i'll treat you right." "get out of here!" cried susan. "i'm going to leave this house. they drugged me and brought me here." "oh, come now. i've got nothing to do with your quarrels with the landlady. cut those fairy tales out. you treat me right and----" a few minutes later in came the madam. susan, exhausted, sick, lay inert in the middle of the bed. she fixed her gaze upon the eyes looking through the hideous mask of paint and powder partially concealing the madam's face. "well, are you going to be a good girl now?" said the madam. "i want to sleep," said susan. "all right, my dear." she saw and snatched the five-dollar bill from the pillow. "it'll go toward paying your board and for the parlor dress. god, but you was drunk when they brought you up from the bar!" "when was that?" asked susan. "about midnight. it's nearly four now. we've shut the house for the night. you're in a first-rate house, my dear, and if you behave yourself, you'll make money--a lot more than you ever could at a dive like zeist's. if you don't behave well, we'll teach you how. this building belongs to one of the big men in politics, and he looks after my interests--and he ought to, considering the rent i pay--five hundred a month--for the three upper floors. the bar's let separate. would you like a nice drink?" "no," said susan. trapped! hopelessly trapped! and she would never escape until, diseased, her looks gone, ruined in body and soul, she was cast out into the hospital and the gutter. "as i was saying," ventured the madam, "you might as well settle down quietly." "i'm very well satisfied," said susan. "i suppose you'll give me a square deal on what i make." she laughed quietly as if secretly amused at something. "in fact, i know you will," she added in a tone of amused confidence. "as soon as you've paid up your twenty-five a week for room and board and the fifty for the parlor dress----" susan interrupted her with a laugh. "oh, come off," said she. "i'll not stand for that. i'll go back to jim finnegan." the old woman's eyes pounced for her face instantly. "do you know finnegan?" "i'm his girl," said susan carelessly. she stretched herself and yawned. "i got mad at him and started out for some fun. he's a regular damn fool about me. but i'm sick of him. anything but a jealous man! and spied on everywhere i go. how much can i make here?" "ain't you from zeist's?" demanded the madam. her voice was quivering with fright. she did not dare believe the girl; she did not dare disbelieve her. "zeist's? what's that?" said susan indifferently. "the joint two blocks down. hasn't joe bishop had you in there for a couple of months?" susan yawned. "lord, how my head does ache! who's joe bishop? i'm dead to the world. i must have had an awful jag!" she turned on her side, drew the spread over her. "i want to sleep. so long!" "didn't you run away from home with joe bishop?" demanded the madam shrilly. "and didn't he put you to work for zeist?" "who's joe bishop? where's zeist's?" susan said, cross and yawning. "i've been with jim about a year. he took me off the street. i was broke in five years ago." the madam gave a kind of howl. "and that joe bishop got twenty-five off me!" she screamed. "and you're finnegan's girl, and he'll make trouble for me." "he's got a nasty streak in him," said susan, drowsily. "he put me on the island once for a little side trip i made." she laughed, yawned. "but he sent and got me out in two days--and gave me a present of a hundred. it's funny how a man'll make a fool of himself about a woman. put out the light." "no, i won't put out the light," shrieked the madam. "you can't work here. i'm going to telephone jim finnegan to come and get you." susan started up angrily, as if she were half-crazed by drink. "if you do, you old hag," she cried, "i'll tell him you doped me and set these men on me. i'll tell him about joe bishop. and jim'll send the whole bunch of you to the pen. i'll not go back to him till i get good and ready. and that means, i won't go back at all, no matter what he offers me." she began to cry in a maudlin way. "i hate him. i'm tired of living as if i was back in the convent." the madam stood, heaving to and fro and blowing like a chained elephant. "i don't know what to do," she whined. "i wish joe bishop was in hell." "i'm going to get out of here," shrieked susan, raving and blazing again and waving her arms. "you don't know a good thing when you get it. what kind of a bum joint is this, anyway? where's my clothes? they must be dry by this time." "yes--yes--they're dry, my dear," whined the madam. "i'll bring 'em to you." and out she waddled, returning in a moment with her arms full of the clothing. she found susan in the bed and nestling comfortably into the pillows. "here are your clothes," she cried. "no--i want to sleep," was susan's answer in a cross, drowsy tone. "i think i'll stay. you won't telephone jim. but when he finds me, i'll tell him to go to the devil." "for god's sake!" wailed the madam. "i can't let you work here. you don't want to ruin me, do you?" susan sat up, rubbed her eyes, yawned, brushed her hair back, put a sly, smiling look into her face. "how much'll you give me to go?" she asked. "where's the fifteen that was in my stocking?" "i've got it for you," said the madam. "how much did i make tonight?" "there was three at five apiece." three!--not only the two, but a third while she lay in a dead stupor. susan shivered. "your share's four dollars," continued the madam. "is that all!" cried susan, jeering. "a bum joint! oh, there's my five the man gave me as a present." "yes--yes," quavered the madam. "and another man gave me a dollar." she looked round. "where the devil is it?" she found it in a fold of the spread. "then you owe me twenty altogether, counting the money i had on me." she yawned. "i don't want to go!" she protested, pausing halfway in taking off the second pink stocking. then she laughed. "lord, what hell jim will raise if he finds i spent the night working in this house. why is it that, as soon as men begin to care for a woman, they get prim about her?" "do get dressed, dear," wheedled the madam. "i don't see why i should go at this time of night," objected susan pettishly. "what'll you give me if i go?" the madam uttered a groan. "you say you paid joe bishop twenty-five----" "i'll kill him!" shrieked the madam. "he's ruined me--ruined me!" "oh, he's all right," said susan cheerfully. "i like him. he's a pretty little fellow. i'll not give him away to jim." "joe was dead stuck on you," cried the madam eagerly. "i might 'a' knowed he hadn't seen you before. i had to pay him the twenty-five right away, to get him out of the house and let me put you to work. he wanted to stay on." susan shivered, laughed to hide it. "well, i'll go for twenty-five." "twenty-five!" shrieked the madam. "you'll get it back from joe." "maybe i won't. he's a dog--a dirty dog." "i think i told joe about jim," said susan reflectively. "i was awful gabby downstairs. yes--i told him." and her lowered eyes gleamed with satisfaction when the madam cried out: "you did! and after that he brought you here! he's got it in for me. but i'll ruin him! i'll tear him up!" susan dressed with the utmost deliberation, the madam urging her to make haste. after some argument, susan yielded to the madam's pleadings and contented herself with the twenty dollars. the madam herself escorted susan down to the outside door and slathered her with sweetness and politeness. the rain had stopped again. susan went up second avenue slowly. two blocks from the dive from which she had escaped, she sank down on a stoop and fainted. chapter ix the dash of cold rain drops upon her face and the chill of moisture soaking through her clothing revived her. throughout the whole range of life, whenever we resist we suffer. as susan dragged her aching, cold wet body up from that stoop, it seemed to her that each time she resisted the penalty grew heavier. could she have been more wretched had she remained in that dive? from her first rebellion that drove her out of her uncle's house had she ever bettered herself by resisting? she had gone from bad to worse, from worse to worst. worst? "this _must_ be the worst!" she thought. "surely there can be no lower depth than where i am now." and then she shuddered and her soul reeled. had she not thought this at each shelf of the precipice down which she had been falling? "has it a bottom? is there no bottom?" wet through, tired through, she put up her umbrella and forced herself feebly along. "where am i going? why do i not kill myself? what is it that drives me on and on?" there came no direct answer to that last question. but up from those deep vast reservoirs of vitality that seemed sufficient whatever the drain upon them--up from those reservoirs welled strength and that unfaltering will to live which breathes upon the corpse of hope and quickens it. and she had a sense of an invisible being, a power that had her in charge, a destiny, walking beside her, holding up her drooping strength, compelling her toward some goal hidden in the fog and the storm. at eighth street she turned west; at third avenue she paused, waiting for chance to direct her. was it not like the maliciousness of fate that in the city whose rarely interrupted reign of joyous sunshine made her call it the city of the sun her critical turn of chance should have fallen in foul weather? evidently fate was resolved on a thorough test of her endurance. in the open square, near the peter cooper statue, stood a huge all-night lunch wagon. she moved toward it, for she suddenly felt hungry. it was drawn to the curb; a short flight of ladder steps led to an interior attractive to sight and smell. she halted at the foot of the steps and looked in. the only occupant was the man in charge. in a white coat he was leaning upon the counter, reading a newspaper which lay flat upon it. his bent head was extensively and roughly thatched with black hair so thick that to draw a comb through it would have been all but impossible. as susan let down her umbrella and began to ascend, he lifted his head and gave her a full view of a humorous young face, bushy of eyebrows and mustache and darkly stained by his beard, close shaven though it was. he looked like a spaniard or an italian, but he was a black irishman, one of the west coasters who recall in their eyes and coloring the wrecking of the armada. "good morning, lady," said he. "breakfast or supper?" "both," replied susan. "i'm starved." the air was gratefully warm in the little restaurant on wheels. the dominant odor was of hot coffee; but that aroma was carried to a still higher delight by a suggestion of pastry. "the best thing i've got," said the restaurant man, "is hot corn beef hash. it's so good i hate to let any of it go. you can have griddle cakes, too--and coffee, of course." "very well," said susan. she was ascending upon a wave of reaction from the events of the night. her headache had gone. the rain beating upon the roof seemed musical to her now, in this warm shelter with its certainty of the food she craved. the young man was busy at the shiny, compact stove; the odors of the good things she was presently to have grew stronger and stronger, stimulating her hunger, bringing joy to her heart and a smile to her eyes. she wondered at herself. after what she had passed through, how could she feel thus happy--yes, positively happy? it seemed to her this was an indication of a lack in her somewhere--of seriousness, of sensibility, of she knew not what. she ought to be ashamed of that lack. but she was not ashamed. she was shedding her troubles like a child--or like a philosopher. "do you like hash?" inquired the restaurant man over his shoulder. "just as you're making it," said she. "dry but not too dry. brown but not too brown." "you don't think you'd like a poached egg on top of it?" "exactly what i want!" "it isn't everybody that can poach an egg," said the restaurant man. "and it isn't every egg that can be poached. now, my eggs are the real thing. and i can poach 'em so you'd think they was done with one of them poaching machines. i don't have 'em with the yellow on a slab of white. i do it so that the white's all round the yellow, like in the shell. and i keep 'em tender, too. did you say one egg or a pair?" "two," said susan. the dishes were thick, but clean and whole. the hash--"dry but not too dry, brown but not too brown"--was artistically arranged on its platter, and the two eggs that adorned its top were precisely as he had promised. the coffee, boiled with the milk, was real coffee, too. when the restaurant man had set these things before her, as she sat expectant on a stool, he viewed his handiwork with admiring eyes. "delmonico couldn't beat it," said he. "no, nor oscar, neither. that'll take the tired look out of your face, lady, and bring the beauty back." susan ate slowly, listening to the music of the beating rain. it was like an oasis, a restful halt between two stretches of desert journey; she wished to make it as long as possible. only those who live exposed to life's buffetings ever learn to enjoy to the full the great little pleasures of life--the halcyon pauses in the storms--the few bright rays through the break in the clouds, the joy of food after hunger, of a bath after days of privation, of a jest or a smiling face or a kind word or deed after darkness and bitterness and contempt. she saw the restaurant man's eyes on her, a curious expression in them. "what's the matter?" she inquired. "i was thinking," said he, "how miserable you must have been to be so happy now." "oh, i guess none of us has any too easy a time," said she. "but it's mighty hard on women. i used to think different, before i had bad luck and got down to tending this lunch wagon. but now i understand about a lot of things. it's all very well for comfortable people to talk about what a man or a woman ought to do and oughtn't to do. but let 'em be slammed up against it. they'd sing a different song--wouldn't they?" "quite different," said susan. the man waved a griddle spoon. "i tell you, we do what we've got to do. yes--the thieves and--and--all of us. some's used for foundations and some for roofing and some for inside fancy work and some for outside wall. and some's used for the rubbish heap. but all's used. they do what they've got to do. i was a great hand at worrying what i was going to be used for. but i don't bother about it any more." he began to pour the griddle cake dough. "i think i'll get there, though," said he doggedly, as if he expected to be derided for vanity. "you will," said susan. "i'm twenty-nine. but i've been being got ready for something. they don't chip away at a stone as they have at me without intending to make some use of it." "no, indeed," said the girl, hope and faith welling up in her own heart. "and what's more, i've stood the chipping. i ain't become rubbish; i'm still a good stone. that's promising, ain't it?" "it's a sure sign," declared susan. sure for herself, no less than for him. the restaurant man took from under the counter several well-worn schoolbooks. he held them up, looked at susan and winked. "good business--eh?" she laughed and nodded. he put the books back under the counter, finished the cakes and served them. as he gave her more butter he said: "it ain't the best butter--not by a long shot. but it's good--as good as you get on the average farm--or better. did you ever eat the best butter?" "i don't know. i've had some that was very good." "eighty cents a pound?" "mercy, no," exclaimed susan. "awful price, isn't it? but worth the money--yes, sir! some time when you've got a little change to spare, go get half a pound at one of the swell groceries or dairies. and the best milk, too. twelve cents a quart. wait till i get money. i'll show 'em how to live. i was born in a tenement. never had nothing. rags to wear, and food one notch above a garbage barrel." "i know," said susan. "but even as a boy i wanted the high-class things. it's wanting the best that makes a man push his way up." another customer came--a keeper of a butcher shop, on his way to market. susan finished the cakes, paid the forty cents and prepared to depart. "i'm looking for a hotel," said she to the restaurant man, "one where they'll take me in at this time, but one that's safe not a dive." "right across the square there's a salvation army shelter--very good--clean. i don't know of any other place for a lady." "there's a hotel on the next corner," put in the butcher, suspending the violent smacking and sipping which attended his taking rolls and coffee. "it ain't neither the one thing nor the other. it's clean and cheap, and they'll let you behave if you want to." "that's all i ask," said the girl. "thank you." and she departed, after an exchange of friendly glances with the restaurant man. "i feel lots better," said she. "it was a good breakfast," replied he. "that was only part. good luck!" "same to you, lady. call again. try my chops." at the corner the butcher had indicated susan found the usual raines law hotel, adjunct to a saloon and open to all comers, however "transient." but she took the butcher's word for it, engaged a dollar-and-a-half room from the half-asleep clerk, was shown to it by a colored bellboy who did not bother to wake up. it was a nice little room with barely space enough for a bed, a bureau, a stationary washstand, a chair and a small radiator. as she undressed by the light of a sad gray dawn, she examined her dress to see how far it needed repair and how far it might be repaired. she had worn away from forty-third street her cheapest dress because it happened to be of an inconspicuous blue. it was one of those suits that look fairly well at a glance on the wax figure in the department store window, that lose their bloom as quickly as a country bride, and at the fourth or fifth wearing begin to make frank and sweeping confession of the cheapness of every bit of the material and labor that went into them. these suits are typical of all that poverty compels upon the poor, all that they in their ignorance and inexperience of values accept without complaint, fancying they are getting money's worth and never dreaming they are more extravagant than the most prodigal of the rich. however, as their poverty gives them no choice, their ignorance saves them from futilities of angry discontent. susan had bought this dress because she had to have another dress and could not afford to spend more than twelve dollars, and it had been marked down from twenty-five. she had worn it in fair weather and had contrived to keep it looking pretty well. but this rain had finished it quite. thereafter, until she could get another dress, she must expect to be classed as poor and seedy--therefore, on the way toward deeper poverty--therefore, an object of pity and of prey. if she went into a shop, she would be treated insultingly by the shopgirls, despising her as a poor creature like themselves. if a man approached her, he would calculate upon getting her very cheap because a girl in such a costume could not have been in the habit of receiving any great sum. and if she went with him, he would treat her with far less consideration than if she had been about the same business in smarter attire. she spread the dress on bureau and chair, smoothing it, wiping the mud stains from it. she washed out her stockings at the stationary stand, got them as dry as her remarkably strong hands could wring them, hung them on a rung of the chair near the hot little radiator. she cleaned her boots and overshoes with an old newspaper she found in a drawer, and wet at the washstand. she took her hat to pieces and made it over into something that looked almost fresh enough to be new. then, ready for bed, she got the office of the hotel on the telephone and left a call for half-past nine o'clock--three hours and a half away. when she was throwing up the window, she glanced into the street. the rain had once more ceased. through the gray dimness the men and women, boys and girls, on the way to the factories and shops for the day's work, were streaming past in funereal procession. some of the young ones were lively. but the mass was sullen and dreary. bodies wrecked or rapidly wrecking by ignorance of hygiene, by the foul air and foul food of the tenements, by the monotonous toil of factory and shop--mindless toil--toil that took away mind and put in its place a distaste for all improvement--toil of the factories that distorted the body and enveloped the soul in sodden stupidity--toil of the shops that meant breathing bad air all day long, meant stooped shoulders and varicose veins in the legs and the arches of the insteps broken down, meant dull eyes, bad skin, female complaints, meant the breeding of desires for the luxury the shops display, the breeding of envy and servility toward those able to buy these luxuries. susan lingered, fascinated by this exhibit of the price to the many of civilization for the few. work? never! not any more than she would. "work" in a dive! work--either branch of it, factory and shop or dive meant the sale of all the body and all the soul; her profession--at least as she practiced it--meant that perhaps she could buy with part of body and part of soul the privilege of keeping the rest of both for her own self. if she had stayed on at work from the beginning in cincinnati, where would she be now? living in some stinking tenement hole, with hope dead. and how would she be looking? as dull of eye as the rest, as pasty and mottled of skin, as ready for any chance disease. work? never! never! "not at anything that'd degrade me more than this life. yes--more." and she lifted her head defiantly. to her hunger life was thus far offering only a plate of rotten apples; it was difficult to choose among them--but there was choice. she was awakened by the telephone bell; and it kept on ringing until she got up and spoke to the office through the sender. never had she so craved sleep; and her mental and physical contentment of three hours and a half before had been succeeded by headache, a general soreness, a horrible attack of the blues. she grew somewhat better, however, as she washed first in hot water, then in cold at the stationary stand which was quite as efficient if not so luxurious as a bathtub. she dressed in a rush, but not so hurriedly that she failed to make the best toilet the circumstances permitted. her hair went up unusually well; the dress did not look so badly as she had feared it would. "as it's a nasty day," she reflected, "it won't do me so much damage. my hat and my boots will make them give me the benefit of the doubt and think i'm saving my good clothes." she passed through the office at five minutes to ten. when she reached lange's winter garden, its clock said ten minutes past ten, but she knew it must be fast. only one of the four musicians had arrived--the man who played the drums, cymbals, triangle and xylophone--a fat, discouraged old man who knew how easily he could be replaced. neither lange nor his wife had come; her original friend, the austrian waiter, was wiping off tables and cleaning match stands. he welcomed her with a smile of delight that showed how few teeth remained in the front of his mouth and how deeply yellow they were. but susan saw only his eyes--and the kind heart that looked through them. "maybe you haven't had breakfast already?" he suggested. "i'm not hungry, thank you." "perhaps some coffee--yes?" susan thought the coffee would make her feel better. so he brought it--vienna fashion--an open china pot full of strong, deliciously aromatic black coffee, a jug of milk with whipped white of egg on top, a basket of small sweet rolls powdered with sugar and caraway seed. she ate one of the rolls, drank the coffee. before she had finished, the waiter stood beaming before her and said: "a cigarette--yes?" "oh, no," replied susan, a little sadly. "but yes," urged he. "it isn't against the rules. the boss's wife smokes. many ladies who come here do--real ladies. it is the custom in europe. why not?" and he produced a box of cigarettes and put it on the table. susan lit one of them and once more with supreme physical content came a cheerfulness that put color and sprightliness into the flowers of hope. and the sun had won its battle with the storm; the storm was in retreat. sunshine was streaming in at the windows, into her heart. the waiter paused in his work now and then to enjoy himself in contemplating the charming picture she made. she was thinking of what the wagon restaurant man had said. yes, life had been chipping away at her; but she had remained good stone, had not become rubbish. about half-past ten lange came down from his flat which was overhead. he inspected her by daylight and finding that his electric light impressions were not delusion was highly pleased with her. he refused to allow her to pay for the coffee. "johann!" he called, and the leader of the orchestra approached and made a respectful bow to his employer. he had a solemn pompous air and the usual pompadour. he and susan plunged into the music question, found that the only song they both knew was tosti's "good bye." "that'll do to try," said lange. "begin!" and after a little tuning and voice testing, susan sang the "good bye" with full orchestra accompaniment. it was not good; it was not even pretty good; but it was not bad. "you'll do all right," said lange. "you can stay. now, you and johann fix up some songs and get ready for tonight." and he turned away to buy supplies for restaurant and bar. johann, deeply sentimental by nature, was much pleased with susan's contralto. "you do not know how to sing," said he. "you sing in your throat and you've got all the faults of parlor singers. but the voice is there--and much expressiveness--much temperament. also, you have intelligence--and that will make a very little voice go a great way." before proceeding any further with the rehearsal, he took susan up to a shop where sheet music was sold and they selected three simple songs: "gipsy queen," "star of my life" and "love in dreams." they were to try "gipsy queen" that night, with "good bye" and, if the applause should compel, "suwanee river." when they were back at the restaurant susan seated herself in a quiet corner and proceeded to learn the words of the song and to get some notion of the tune. she had lunch with mr. and mrs. lange and katy, whose hair was very golden indeed and whose voice and manner proclaimed the bowery and its vaudeville stage. she began by being grand with susan, but had far too good a heart and far too sensible a nature to keep up long. it takes more vanity, more solemn stupidity and more leisure than plain people have time for, to maintain the force of fake dignity. before lunch was over it was katy and lorna; and katy was distressed that her duties at the theater made it impossible for her to stay and help lorna with the song. at the afternoon rehearsal susan distinguished herself. to permit business in the restaurant and the rehearsal at the same time, there was a curtain to divide the big room into two unequal parts. when susan sang her song through for the first time complete, the men smoking and drinking on the other side of the curtain burst into applause. johann shook hands with susan, shook hands again, kissed her hand, patted her shoulder. but in the evening things did not go so well. susan, badly frightened, got away from the orchestra, lagged when it speeded to catch up with her. she made a pretty and engaging figure in the costume, low in the neck and ending at the knees. her face and shoulders, her arms and legs, the lines of her slender, rounded body made a success. but they barely saved her from being laughed at. when she finished, there was no applause so no necessity for an encore. she ran upstairs, and, with nerves all a-quiver, hid herself in the little room she and katy were to share. until she failed she did not realize how much she had staked upon this venture. but now she knew; and it seemed to her that her only future was the streets. again her chance had come; again she had thrown it away. if there were anything in her--anything but mere vain hopes--that could not have occurred. in her plight anyone with a spark of the divinity that achieves success would have scored. "i belong in the streets," said she. before dinner she had gone out and had bought a ninety-five cent night-dress and some toilet articles. these she now bundled together again. she changed to her street dress; she stole down the stairs. she was out at the side door, she was flying through the side street toward the bowery. "hi!" shouted someone behind her. "where you going?" and overtaking her came her staunch friend albert, the waiter. feeling that she must need sympathy and encouragement, he had slipped away from his duties to go up to her. he had reached the hall in time to see what she was about and had darted bareheaded after her. "where you going?" he repeated, excitedly. a crowd began to gather. "oh, good-by," she cried. "i'm getting out before i'm told to go--that's all. i made a failure. thank you, albert." she put out her hand; she was still moving and looking in the direction of the bowery. "now you mustn't be foolish,", said he, holding on tightly to her hand. "the boss says it's all right. tomorrow you do better." "i'd never dare try again." "tomorrow makes everything all right. you mustn't act like a baby. the first time katy tried, they yelled her off the stage. now she gets eleven a week. come back right away with me. the boss'd be mad if you won't. you ain't acting right, miss lorna. i didn't think you was such a fool." he had her attention now. unmindful of the little crowd they had gathered, they stood there discussing until to save albert from pneumonia she returned with him. he saw her started up the stairs, then ventured to take his eye off her long enough to put his head into the winter garden and send a waiter for lange. he stood guard until lange came and was on his way to her. the next evening, a saturday, before a crowded house she sang well, as well as she had ever sung in her life--sang well enough to give her beauty of face and figure, her sweetness, her charm the opportunity to win a success. she had to come back and sing "suwanee river." she had to come for a second encore; and, flushed with her victory over her timidity, she sang tosti's sad cry of everlasting farewell with all the tenderness there was in her. that song exactly fitted her passionate, melancholy voice; its words harmonized with the deep sadness that was her real self, that is the real self of every sensitive soul this world has ever tried with its exquisite torments for flesh and spirit. the tears that cannot be shed were in her voice, in her face, as she stood there, with her violet-gray eyes straining into vacancy. but the men and the women shed tears; and when she moved, breaking the spell of silence, they not only applauded, they cheered. the news quickly spread that at lange's there was a girl singer worth hearing and still more worth looking at. and lange had his opportunity to arrive. but several things stood in his way, things a man of far more intelligence would have found it hard to overcome. like nearly all saloon-keepers, he was serf to a brewery; and the particular brewery whose beer his mortgage compelled him to push did not make a beer that could be pushed. people complained that it had a disagreeably bitter aftertaste. in the second place, mrs. lange was a born sitter. she had married to rest--and she was resting. she was always piled upon a chair. thus, she was not an aid but a hindrance, an encourager of the help in laziness and slovenliness. again, the cooking was distinctly bad; the only really good thing the house served was coffee, and that was good only in the mornings. finally, lange was a saver by nature and not a spreader. he could hold tightly to any money he closed his stubby fingers upon; he did not know how to plant money and make it grow, but only how to hoard. thus it came to pass that, after the first spurt, the business fell back to about where it had been before susan came. albert, the austrian waiter, explained to susan why it was that her popularity did the house apparently so little good--explained with truth where she suspected kind-hearted plotting, that she had arrested its latterly swift-downward slide. she was glad to hear what he had to say, as it was most pleasant to her vanity; but she could not get over the depression of the central fact--she was not making the sort of business to justify asking lange for more than board and lodging; she was not in the way of making the money that was each day more necessary, as her little store dwindled. the question of getting money to live on is usually dismissed in a princely way by writers about human life. it is in reality, except with the few rich, the ever-present question--as ever-present as the necessity of breathing--and it is not, like breathing, a matter settled automatically. it dominates thought; it determines action. to leave it out of account ever, in writing a human history, is to misrepresent and distort as utterly as would a portrait painter who neglected to give his subject eyes, or a head, even. with the overwhelming mass of us, money is at all times all our lives long the paramount question--for to be without it is destruction worse than death, and we are almost all perilously near to being without it. thus, airily to pass judgment upon men and women as to their doings in getting money for necessaries, for what the compulsion of custom and habit has made necessaries to them--airily to judge them for their doings in such dire straits is like sitting calmly on shore and criticizing the conduct of passengers and sailors in a storm-beset sinking ship. it is one of the favorite pastimes of the comfortable classes; it makes an excellent impression as to one's virtue upon one's audience; it gives us a pleasing sense of superior delicacy and humor. but it is none the less mean and ridiculous. instead of condemnation, the world needs to bestir itself to remove the stupid and cruel creatures that make evil conduct necessary; for can anyone, not a prig, say that the small part of the human race that does well does so because it is naturally better than the large part that does ill? spring was slow in opening. susan's one dress was in a deplorable state. the lining hung in rags. the never good material was stretched out of shape, was frayed and worn gray in spots, was beyond being made up as presentable by the most careful pressing and cleaning. she had been forced to buy a hat, shoes, underclothes. she had only three dollars and a few cents left, and she simply did not dare lay it all out in dress materials. yet, less than all would not be enough; all would not be enough. lange had from time to time more than hinted at the opportunities she was having as a public singer in his hall. but susan, for all her experience, had remained one of those upon whom such opportunities must be thrust if they are to be accepted. so long as she had food and shelter, she could not make advances; she could not even go so far as passive acquiescence. she knew she was again violating the fundamental canon of success; whatever one's business, do it thoroughly if at all. but she could not overcome her temperament which had at this feeble and false opportunity at once resented itself. she knew perfectly that therein was the whole cause of her failure to make the success she ought to have made when she came up from the tenements, and again when she fell into the clutches of freddie palmer. but it is one thing to know; it is another thing to do. susan ignored the attempts of the men; she pretended not to understand lange when they set him on to intercede with her for them. she saw that she was once more drifting to disaster--and that she had not long to drift. she was exasperated against herself; she was disgusted with herself. but she drifted on. growing seedier looking every day, she waited, defying the plain teachings of experience. she even thought seriously of going to work. but the situation in that direction remained unchanged. she was seeing things, the reasons for things, more clearly now, as experience developed her mind. she felt that to get on in respectability she ought to have been either more or less educated. if she had been used from birth to conditions but a step removed from savagery, she might have been content with what offered, might even have felt that she was rising. or if she had been bred to a good trade, and educated only to the point where her small earnings could have satisfied her desires, then she might have got along in respectability. but she had been bred a "lady"; a chinese woman whose feet have been bound from babyhood until her fifteenth or sixteenth year--how long it would be, after her feet were freed, before she could learn to walk at all!--and would she ever be able to learn to walk well? what is luxury for one is squalor for another; what is elevation for one degrades another. in respectability she could not earn what was barest necessity for her--what she was now getting at lange's--decent shelter, passable food. ejected from her own class that shelters its women and brings them up in unfitness for the unsheltered life, she was dropping as all such women must and do drop--was going down, down, down--striking on this ledge and that, and rebounding to resume her ever downward course. she saw her own plight only too vividly. those whose outward and inward lives are wide apart get a strong sense of dual personality. it was thus with susan. there were times when she could not believe in the reality of her external life. she often glanced through the columns on columns, pages on pages of "want ads" in the papers--not with the idea of answering them, for she had served her apprenticeship at that, but simply to force herself to realize vividly just how matters stood with her. those columns and pages of closely printed offerings of work! dreary tasks, all of them--tasks devoid of interest, of personal sense of usefulness, tasks simply to keep degrading soul in degenerating body, tasks performed in filthy factories, in foul-smelling workrooms and shops, in unhealthful surroundings. and this, throughout civilization, was the "honest work" so praised--by all who don't do it, but live pleasantly by making others do it. wasn't there something in the ideas of etta's father, old tom brashear? couldn't sensible, really loving people devise some way of making most tasks less repulsive, of lessening the burdens of those tasks that couldn't be anything but repulsive? was this stupid system, so cruel, so crushing, and producing at the top such absurd results as flashy, insolent autos and silly palaces and overfed, overdressed women, and dogs in jeweled collars, and babies of wealth brought up by low menials--was this system really the best? "if they'd stop canting about 'honest work' they might begin to get somewhere." in the effort to prevent her downward drop from beginning again she searched all the occupations open to her. she could not find one that would not have meant only the most visionary prospect of some slight remote advancement, and the certain and speedy destruction of what she now realized was her chief asset and hope--her personal appearance. and she resolved that she would not even endanger it ever again. the largest part of the little capital she took away from forty-third street had gone to a dentist who put in several fillings of her back teeth. she had learned to value every charm--hair, teeth, eyes, skin, figure, hands. she watched over them all, because she felt that when her day finally came--and come it would, she never allowed long to doubt--she must be ready to enter fully into her own. her day! the day when fate should change the life her outward self would be compelled to live, would bring it into harmony with the life of inward self--the self she could control. katy had struck up a friendship at once profitable and sentimental with her stage manager. she often stayed out all night. on one of these nights susan, alone in the tiny room and asleep, was roused by feeling hands upon her. she started up half awake and screamed. "sh!" came in lange's voice. "it's me." susan had latterly observed sly attempts on his part to make advances without his wife and daughter's suspecting; but she had thought her way of quietly ignoring was effective. "you must go," she whispered. "mrs. lange must have heard." "i had to come," said he hoarsely, a mere voice in the darkness. "i can't hold out no longer without you, lorna." "go--go," urged susan. but it was too late. in the doorway, candle in hand, appeared mrs. lange. despite her efforts at "dressiness" she was in her best hour homely and nearly shapeless. in night dress and released from corsets she was hideous and monstrous. "i thought so!" she shrieked. "i thought so!" "i heard a burglar, mother," whined lange, an abject and guilty figure. "shut your mouth, you loafer!" shrieked mrs. lange. and she turned to susan. "you gutter hussy, get on your clothes and clear out!" "but--mrs. lange----" began susan. "clear out!" she shouted, opening the outer hall. "dress mighty damn quick and clear out!" "mother, you'll wake the people upstairs," pleaded lange--and susan had never before realized how afraid of his wife the little man was. "for god's sake, listen to sense." "after i've thrown you--into the streets," cried his wife, beside herself with jealous fury. "get dressed, i tell you!" she shouted at susan. and the girl hurried into her clothes, making no further attempt to speak. she knew that to plead and to explain would be useless; even if mrs. lange believed, still she would drive from the house the temptation to her husband. lange, in a quaking, cowardly whine, begged his wife to be sensible and believe his burglar story. but with each half-dozen words he uttered, she interrupted to hurl obscene epithets at him or at susan. the tenants of the upstairs flats came down. she told her wrongs to a dozen half-clad men, women and children; they took her side at once, and with the women leading showered vile insults upon susan. the uproar was rising, rising. lange cowered in a corner, crying bitterly like a whipped child. susan, only partly dressed, caught up her hat and rushed into the hall. several women struck at her as she passed. she stumbled on the stairs, almost fell headlong. with the most frightful words in tenement house vocabulary pursuing her she fled into the street, and did not pause until she was within a few yards of the bowery. there she sat down on a doorstep and, half-crazed by the horror of her sudden downfall, laced her shoes and buttoned her blouse and put on her hat with fumbling, shaking fingers. it had all happened so quickly that she would have thought she was dreaming but for the cold night air and the dingy waste of the bowery with the streetwalkers and drunken bums strolling along under the elevated tracks. she had trifled with the opportunity too long. it had flown in disgust, dislodging her as it took flight. if she would be over nice and critical, would hesitate to take the only upward path fate saw fit to offer, then--let her seek the bottom! susan peered down, and shuddered. she went into the saloon at the corner, into the little back room. she poured down drink after drink of the frightful poison sold as whiskey with the permission of a government owned by every interest that can make big money out of a race of free men and so can afford to pay big bribes. it is characteristic of this poison of the saloon of the tenement quarter that it produces in anyone who drinks it a species of quick insanity, of immediate degeneration--a desire to commit crime, to do degraded acts. within an hour of susan's being thrown into the streets, no one would have recognized her. she had been drinking, had been treating the two faded but young and decently dressed streetwalkers who sat at another table. the three, fired and maddened by the poison, were amusing themselves and two young men as recklessly intoxicated as they. susan, in an attitude she had seen often enough but had never dreamed of taking, was laughing wildly at a coarse song, was standing up, skirts caught high and body swaying in drunken rhythm as she led the chorus. when the barkeeper announced closing time, one of the young men said to her: "which way?" "to hell," laughed she. "i've been thrown out everywhere else. want to go along?" "i'll never desert a perfect lady," replied he. chapter x she was like one who has fallen bleeding and broken into a cave; who after a time gathers himself together and crawls toward a faint and far distant gleam of light; who suddenly sees the light no more and at the same instant lurches forward and down into a deeper chasm. occasionally sheer exhaustion of nerves made it impossible for her to drink herself again into apathy before the effects of the last doses of the poison had worn off. in these intervals of partial awakening--she never permitted them to lengthen out, as such sensation as she had was of one falling--falling--through empty space--with whirling brain and strange sounds in the ears and strange distorted sights or hallucinations before the eyes--falling down--down--whither?--to how great a depth?--or was there no bottom, but simply presently a plunging on down into the black of death's bottomless oblivion? drink--always drink. yet in every other way she took care of her health--a strange mingling of prudence and subtle hope with recklessness and frank despair. all her refinement, baffled in the moral ways, concentrated upon the physical. she would be neat and well dressed; she would not let herself be seized of the diseases on the pariah in those regions--the diseases through dirt and ignorance and indifference. in the regions she now frequented recklessness was the keynote. there was the hilarity of the doomed; there was the cynical or stolid indifference to heat or cold, to rain or shine, to rags, to filth, to jail, to ejection for nonpayment of rent, to insult of word or blow. the fire engines--the ambulance--the patrol wagon--the city dead wagon--these were all ever passing and repassing through those swarming streets. it was the vastest, the most populous tenement area of the city. its inhabitants represented the common lot--for it is the common lot of the overwhelming mass of mankind to live near to nakedness, to shelterlessness, to starvation, without ever being quite naked or quite roofless or quite starved. the masses are eager for the necessities; the classes are eager for the comforts and luxuries. the masses are ignorant; the classes are intelligent--or, at least, shrewd. the unconscious and inevitable exploitation of the masses by the classes automatically and of necessity stops just short of the catastrophe point--for the masses must have enough to give them the strength to work and reproduce. to go down through the social system as had susan from her original place well up among the classes is like descending from the beautiful dining room of the palace where the meat is served in taste and refinement upon costly dishes by well mannered servants to attractively dressed people--descending along the various stages of the preparation of the meat, at each stage less of refinement and more of coarseness, until one at last arrives at the slaughter pen. the shambles, stinking and reeking blood and filth! the shambles, with hideous groan or shriek, or more hideous silent look of agony! the shambles of society where the beauty and grace and charm of civilization are created out of noisome sweat and savage toil, out of the health and strength of men and women and children, out of their ground up bodies, out of their ground up souls. susan knew those regions well. she had no theories about them, no resentment against the fortunate classes, no notion that any other or better system might be possible, any other or better life for the masses. she simply accepted life as she found it, lived it as best she could. throughout the masses of mankind life is sustained by illusions--illusions of a better lot tomorrow, illusions of a heaven beyond a grave, where the nightmare, life in the body, will end and the reality, life in the spirit, will begin. she could not join the throngs moving toward church and synagogue to indulge in their dream that the present was a dream from which death would be a joyful awakening. she alternately pitied and envied them. she had her own dream that this dream, the present, would end in a joyful awakening to success and freedom and light and beauty. she admitted to herself that the dream was probably an illusion, like that of the pious throngs. but she was as unreasonably tenacious of her dream as they were of theirs. she dreamed it because she was a human being--and to be human means to hope, and to hope means to dream of a brighter future here or hereafter, or both here and hereafter. the earth is peopled with dreamers; she was but one of them. the last thought of despair as the black earth closes is a hope, perhaps the most colossal of hope's delusions, that there will be escape in the grave. there is the time when we hope and know it and believe in it. there is the time when we hope and know it but have ceased to believe in it. there is the time when we hope, believing that we have altogether ceased to hope. that time had come for susan. she seemed to think about the present. she moved about like a sleepwalker. what women did she know--what men? she only dimly remembered from day to day--from hour to hour. blurred faces passed before her, blurred voices sounded in her ears, blurred personalities touched hers. it was like the jostling of a huge crowd in night streets. a vague sense of buffetings--of rude contacts--of momentary sensations of pain, of shame, of disgust, all blunted and soon forgotten. in estimating suffering, physical or mental, to fail to take into account a more important factor--the merciful paralysis or partial paralysis of any center of sensibility--that is insistently assaulted. she no longer had headaches or nausea after drinking deeply. and where formerly it had taken many stiff doses of liquor to get her into the state of recklessness or of indifference, she was now able to put herself into the mood in which life was endurable with two or three drinks, often with only one. the most marked change was that never by any chance did she become gay; the sky over her life was steadily gray--gray or black, to gray again--never lighter. how far she had fallen! but swift descent or gradual, she had adapted herself--had, in fact, learned by much experience of disaster to mitigate the calamities, to have something to keep a certain deep-lying self of selfs intact--unaffected by what she had been forced to undergo. it seemed to her that if she could get the chance--or could cure herself of the blindness which was always preventing her from seeing and seizing the chance that doubtless offered again and again--she could shed the surface her mode of life had formed over her and would find underneath a new real surface, stronger, sightly, better able to bear--like the skin that forms beneath the healing wound. in these tenements, as in all tenements of all degrees, she and the others of her class were fiercely resented by the heads of families where there was any hope left to impel a striving upward. she had the best furnished room in the tenement. she was the best dressed woman--a marked and instantly recognizable figure because of her neat and finer clothes. her profession kept alive and active the instincts for care of the person that either did not exist or were momentary and feeble in the respectable women. the slovenliness, the scurrilousness of even the wives and daughters of the well-to-do and the rich of that region would not have been tolerated in any but the lowest strata of her profession, hardly even in those sought by men of the laboring class. also, the deep horror of disease, which her intelligence never for an instant permitted to relax its hold, made her particular and careful when in other circumstances drink might have reduced her to squalor. she spent all her leisure time--for she no longer read--in the care of her person. she was watched with frightened, yet longing and curious, eyes by all the girls who were at work. the mothers hated her; many of them spat upon the ground after she had passed. it was a heart-breaking struggle, that of these mothers to save their daughters, not from prostitution, not from living with men outside marriage, not from moral danger, but from the practical danger, the danger of bringing into the world children with no father to help feed and clothe them. in the opinion of these people--an opinion often frankly expressed, rarely concealed with any but the thinnest hypocrisy--the life of prostitution was not so bad. did the life of virtue offer any attractive alternative? whether a woman was "bad" or "good," she must live in travail and die in squalor to be buried in or near the potter's field. but if the girl still living at home were not "good," that would mean a baby to be taken care of, would mean the girl herself not a contributor to the family support but a double burden. and if she went into prostitution, would her family get the benefit? no. the mothers made little effort to save their sons; they concentrated on the daughters. it was pitiful to see how in their ignorance they were unaware of the strongest forces working against them. the talk of all this motley humanity--of "good" no less than "bad" women, of steady workingmen, of political heelers, thieves and bums and runners for dives--was frankly, often hideously, obscene. the jammed together way of living made modesty impossible, or scantest decency--made the pictures of it among the aspiring few, usually for the benefit of religion or charitable visitors, a pitiful, grotesque hypocrisy. indeed, the prostitute class was the highest in this respect. the streetwalkers, those who prospered, had better masters, learned something about the pleasures and charms of privacy, also had more leisure in which to think, in however crude a way, about the refinements of life, and more money with which to practice those refinements. the boys from the earliest age were on terms of licentious freedom with the girls. the favorite children's games, often played in the open street with the elders looking on and laughing, were sex games. the very babies used foul language--that is, used the language they learned both at home and in the street. it was primitive man; susan was at the foundation of the world. to speak of the conditions there as a product of civilization is to show ignorance of the history of our race, is to fancy that we are civilized today, when in fact we are--historically--in a turbulent and painful period of transition from a better yesterday toward a tomorrow in which life will be worth living as it never has been before in all the ages of duration. in this today of movement toward civilization which began with the discovery of iron and will end when we shall have discovered how to use for the benefit of all the main forces of nature--in this today of agitation incident to journeying, we are in some respects better off, in other respects worse off, than the race was ten or fifteen thousand years ago. we have lost much of the freedom that was ours before the rise of governments and ruling classes; we have gained much--not so much as the ignorant and the unthinking and the uneducated imagine, but still much. in the end we which means the masses of us--will gain infinitely. but gain or loss has not been in so-called morality. there is not a virtue that has not existed from time ages before record. not a vice which is shallowly called "effete" or the "product of over-civilization," but originated before man was man. to speak of the conditions in which susan lenox now lived as savagery is to misuse the word. every transitional stage is accompanied by a disintegration. savagery was a settled state in which every man and every woman had his or her fixed position, settled duties and rights. with the downfall of savagery with the beginning of the journey toward that hope of tomorrow, civilization, everything in the relations of men with men and men with women, became unsettled. such social systems as the world has known since have all been makeshift and temporary--like our social systems of today, like the moral and extinct codes rising and sinking in power over a vast multitude of emigrants moving from a distant abandoned home toward a distant promised land and forced to live as best they can in the interval. in the historic day's journey of perhaps fifteen thousand years our present time is but a brief second. in that second there has come a breaking up of the makeshift organization which long served the working multitudes fairly well. the result is an anarchy in which the strong oppress the weak, in which the masses are being crushed by the burdens imposed upon them by the classes. and in that particular part of the human race en route into which fate had flung susan lenox conditions not of savagery but of primitive chaos were prevailing. a large part of the population lived off the unhappy workers by prostitution, by thieving, by petty swindling, by politics, by the various devices in coarse, crude and small imitation of the devices employed by the ruling classes. and these petty parasites imitated the big parasites in their ways of spending their dubiously got gains. to have a "good time" was the ideal here as in idle fifth avenue; and the notions of a "good time" in vogue in the two opposite quarters differed in degree rather than in kind. nothing to think about but the appetites and their vices. nothing to hope for but the next carouse. susan had brought down with her from above one desire unknown to her associates and neighbors--the desire to forget. if she could only forget! if the poison would not wear off at times! she could not quite forget. and to be unable to forget is to remember--and to remember is to long--and to long is to hope. several times she heard of freddie palmer. twice she chanced upon his name in the newspaper--an incidental reference to him in connection with local politics. the other times were when men talking together in the drinking places frequented by both sexes spoke of him as a minor power in the organization. each time she got a sense of her remoteness, of her security. once she passed in grand street a detective she had often seen with him in considine's at broadway and forty-second. the "bull" looked sharply at her. her heart stood still. but he went on without recognizing her. the sharp glance had been simply that official expression of see-all and know-all which is mere formality, part of the official livery, otherwise meaningless. however, it is not to that detective's discredit that he failed to recognize her. she had adapted herself to her changed surroundings. because she was of a different and higher class, and because she picked and chose her company, even when drink had beclouded her senses and instinct alone remained on drowsy guard, she prospered despite her indifference. for that region had its aristocracy of rich merchants, tenement-owners, politicians whose sons, close imitators of the uptown aristocracies in manners and dress, spent money freely in the amusements that attract nearly all young men everywhere. susan made almost as much as she could have made in the more renowned quarters of the town. and presently she was able to move into a tenement which, except for two workingmen's families of a better class, was given over entirely to fast women. it was much better kept, much cleaner, much better furnished than the tenements for workers chiefly; they could not afford decencies, much less luxuries. all that sort of thing was, for the neighborhood, concentrated in the saloons, the dance halls, the fast houses and the fast flats. her walks in grand street and the bowery, repelling and capricious though she was with her alternating moods of cold moroseness and sardonic and mocking gayety, were bringing her in a good sum of money for that region. sometimes as much as twenty dollars a week, rarely less than twelve or fifteen. and despite her drinking and her freehandedness with her fellow-professionals less fortunate and with the street beggars and for tenement charities, she had in her stockings a capital of thirty-one dollars. she avoided the tough places, the hang-outs of the gangs. she rarely went alone into the streets at night--and the afternoons were, luckily, best for business as well as for safety. she made no friends and therefore no enemies. without meaning to do so and without realizing that she did so, she held herself aloof without haughtiness through sense of loneliness, not at all through sense of superiority. had it not been for her scarlet lips, a far more marked sign in that region than anywhere uptown, she would have passed in the street for a more or less respectable woman--not thoroughly respectable; she was too well dressed, too intelligently cared for to seem the good working girl. on one of the few nights when she lingered in the little back room of the saloon a few doors away at the corner, as she entered the dark passageway of the tenement, strong fingers closed upon her throat and she was borne to the floor. she knew at once that she was in the clutch of one of those terrors of tenement fast women, the lobbygows--men who live by lying in wait in the darkness to seize and rob the lonely, friendless fast woman. she struggled--and she was anything but weak. but not a sound could escape from her tight-pressed throat. soon she became unconscious. one of the workingmen, returning drunk from the meeting of the union, in the corner saloon, stumbled over her, gave her a kick in his anger. this roused her; she uttered a faint cry. "thought it was a man," mumbled he, dragging her to a sitting position. he struck a match. "oh--it's you! don't make any noise. if my old woman came out, she'd kill us both." "never mind me," said susan. "i was only stunned." "oh, i thought it was the booze. they say you hit it something fierce." "no--a lobbygow." and she felt for her stockings. they were torn away from her garters. her bosom also was bare, for the lobbygow had searched there, also. "how much did he get?" "about thirty-five." "the hell he did! want me to call a cop?" "no," replied susan, who was on her feet again. "what's the use?" "those damn cops!" cursed the workingman. "they'd probably pinch you--or both of us. ten to one the lobbygows divide with them." "i didn't mean that," said susan. the police were most friendly and most kind to her. she was understanding the ways of the world better now, and appreciated that the police themselves were part of the same vast system of tyranny and robbery that was compelling her. the police made her pay because they dared not refuse to be collectors. they bound whom the mysterious invisible power compelled them to bind; they loosed whom that same power bade them loose. she had no quarrel with the police, who protected her from far worse oppressions and oppressors than that to which they subjected her. and if they tolerated lobbygows and divided with them, it was because the overshadowing power ordained it so. "needn't be afraid i'll blow to the cop," said the drunken artisan. "you can damn the cops all you please to me. they make new york worse than russia." "i guess they do the best they can--like everybody else," said the girl wearily. "i'll help you upstairs." "no, thank you," said she. not that she did not need help; but she wished no disagreeable scene with the workingman's wife who might open the door as they passed his family's flat. she went upstairs, the man waiting below until she should be safe--and out of the way. she staggered into her room, tottered to the bed, fell upon it. a girl named clara, who lived across the hall, was sitting in a rocking-chair in a nightgown, reading a bertha clay novel and smoking a cigarette. she glanced up, was arrested by the strange look in susan's eyes. "hello--been hitting the pipe, i see," said she. "down in gussie's room?" "no. a lobbygow," said susan. "did he get much?" "about thirty-five." "the ----!" cried clara. "i'll bet it was gussie's fellow. i've suspected him. him and her stay in, hitting the pipe all the time. that costs money, and she hasn't been out for i don't know how long. let's go down there and raise hell." "what's the use?" said susan. "you ought to 'a' put it in the savings bank. that's what i do--when i have anything. then, when i'm robbed, they only get what i've just made. last time, they didn't get nothing--but me." and she laughed. her teeth were good in front, but out on one side and beginning to be discolored on the other. "how long had you been saving?" "nearly six months." "gee! _isn't_ that hell!" presently she laughed. "six months' work and only thirty-five to show for it. guess you're about as poor at hiving it up as i am. i give it to that loafer i live with. you give it away to anybody that wants a stake. well--what's the diff? it all goes." "give me a cigarette," said susan, sitting up and inspecting the bruises on her bosom and legs. "and get that bottle of whiskey from under the soiled clothes in the bottom of the washstand." "it _is_ something to celebrate, isn't it?" said clara. "my fellow's gone to his club tonight, so i didn't go out. i never do any more, unless he's there to hang round and see that i ain't done up. you'll have to get a fellow. you'll have to come to it, as i'm always telling you. they're expensive, but they're company--anybody you can count on for shining up, even if it is for what they can get out of you, is better than not having nobody nowhere. and they keep off bums and lobbygows and scare the bilkers into coughing up." "not for me," replied susan. the greater the catastrophe, the longer the time before it is fully realized. susan's loss of the money that represented so much of savage if momentary horror, and so much of unconscious hope this calamity did not overwhelm her for several days. then she yielded for the first time to the lure of opium. she had listened longingly to the descriptions of the delights as girls and men told; for practically all of them smoked--or took cocaine. but to clara's or gussie's invitations to join the happy band of dreamers, she had always replied, "not yet. i'm saving that." now, however, she felt that the time had come. hope in this world she had none. before the black adventure, why not try the world of blissful unreality to which it gave entrance? why leave life until she had exhausted all it put within her reach? she went to gussie's room at midnight and flung herself down in a wrapper upon a couch opposite a sallow, delicate young man. his great dark eyes were gazing unseeingly at her, were perhaps using her as an outline sketch from which his imagination could picture a beauty of loveliness beyond human. gussie taught her how to prepare the little ball of opium, how to put it on the pipe and draw in its fumes. her system was so well prepared for it by the poisons she had drunk that she had satisfactory results from the outset. and she entered upon the happiest period of her life thus far. all the hideousness of her profession disappeared under the gorgeous draperies of the imagination. opium's magic transformed the vile, the obscene, into the lofty, the romantic, the exalted. the world she had been accustomed to regard as real ceased to be even the blur the poisonous liquors had made of it, became a vague, distant thing seen in a dream. her opium world became the vivid reality. the life she had been leading had made her extremely thin, had hardened and dulled her eyes, had given her that sad, shuddering expression of the face upon which have beaten a thousand mercenary and lustful kisses. the opium soon changed all this. her skin, always tending toward pallor, became of the dead amber-white of old ivory. her thinness took on an ethereal transparency that gave charm even to her slight stoop. her face became dreamy, exalted, rapt; and her violet-gray eyes looked from it like the vents of poetical fires burning without ceasing upon an altar to the god of dreams. never had she been so beautiful; never had she been so happy--not with the coarser happiness of dancing eye and laughing lip, but with the ecstasy of soul that is like the shimmers of a tranquil sea quivering rhythmically under the caresses of moonlight. in her descent she had now reached that long narrow shelf along which she would walk so long as health and looks should last--unless some accident should topple her off on the one side into suicide or on the other side into the criminal prostitute class. and such accidents were likely to happen. still there was a fair chance of her keeping her balance until loss of looks and loss of health--the end of the shelf--should drop her abruptly to the very bottom. she could guess what was there. every day she saw about the streets, most wretched and most forlorn of its wretched and forlorn things, the solitary old women, bent and twisted, wrapped in rotting rags, picking papers and tobacco from the gutters and burrowing in garbage barrels, seeking somehow to get the drink or the dope that changed hell into heaven for them. despite liquor and opium and the degradations of the street-woman's life she walked that narrow ledge with curious steadiness. she was unconscious of the cause. indeed, self-consciousness had never been one of her traits. the cause is interesting. in our egotism, in our shame of what we ignorantly regard as the lowliness of our origin we are always seeking alleged lofty spiritual explanations of our doings, and overlook the actual, quite simple real reason. one of the strongest factors in susan's holding herself together in face of overwhelming odds, was the nearly seventeen years of early training her aunt fanny warham had given her in orderly and systematic ways--a place for everything and everything in its place; a time for everything and everything at its time, neatness, scrupulous cleanliness, no neglecting of any of the small, yet large, matters that conserve the body. susan had not been so apt a pupil of fanny warham's as was ruth, because susan had not ruth's nature of the old-maidish, cut-and-dried conventional. but during the whole fundamentally formative period of her life susan lenox had been trained to order and system, and they had become part of her being, beyond the power of drink and opium and prostitution to disintegrate them until the general break-up should come. in all her wanderings every man or woman or girl she had met who was not rapidly breaking up, but was offering more or less resistance to the assaults of bad habits, was one who like herself had acquired in childhood strong good habits to oppose the bad habits and to fight them with. an enemy must be met with his own weapons or stronger. the strongest weapons that can be given a human animal for combating the destructive forces of the struggle for existence are not good sentiments or good principles or even pious or moral practices--for, bad habits can make short work of all these--but are good habits in the practical, material matters of life. they operate automatically, they apply to all the multitude of small, every day; semi-unconscious actions of the daily routine. they preserve the _morale_. and not morality but morals is the warp of character--the part which, once destroyed or even frayed, cannot be restored. susan, unconsciously and tenaciously practicing her early training in order and system whenever she could and wherever she could, had an enormous advantage over the mass of the girls, both respectable and fast. and while their evidence was always toward "going to pieces" her tendency was always to repair and to put off the break-up. one june evening she was looking through the better class of dance halls and drinking resorts for clara, to get her to go up to gussie's for a smoke. she opened a door she had never happened to enter before--a dingy door with the glass frosted. just inside there was a fetid little bar; view of the rest of the room was cut off by a screen from behind which came the sound of a tuneless old piano. she knew clara would not be in such a den, but out of curiosity she glanced round the screen. she was seeing a low-ceilinged room, the walls almost dripping with the dirt of many and many a hard year. in a corner was the piano, battered, about to fall to pieces, its ancient and horrid voice cracked by the liquor which had been poured into it by facetious drunkards. at the keyboard sat an old hunchback, broken-jawed, dressed in slimy rags, his one eye instantly fixed upon her with a lecherous expression that made her shiver as it compelled her to imagine the embrace he was evidently imagining. his filthy fingers were pounding out a waltz. about the floor were tottering in the measure of the waltz a score of dreadful old women. they were in calico. they had each a little biscuit knot of white hair firmly upon the crown of the head. from their bleached, seamed old faces gleamed the longings or the torments of all the passions they could no longer either inspire or satisfy. they were one time prostitutes, one time young, perhaps pretty women, now descending to death--still prostitutes in heart and mind but compelled to live as scrub women, cleaners of all manner of loathsome messes in dives after the drunkards had passed on. they were now enjoying the reward of their toil, the pleasures of which they dreamed and to which they looked forward as they dragged their stiff old knees along the floors in the wake of the brush and the cloth. they were drinking biting poisons from tin cups--for those hands quivering with palsy could not be trusted with glass-dancing with drunken, disease-swollen or twisted legs--venting from ghastly toothless mouths strange cries of merriment that sounded like shrieks of damned souls at the licking of quenchless flames. susan stood rooted to the threshold of that frightful scene--that vision of the future toward which she was hurrying. a few years--a very few years--and, unless she should have passed through the morgue, here she would be, abandoning her body to abominations beyond belief at the hands of degenerate oriental sailors to get a few pennies for the privileges of this dance hall. and she would laugh, as did these, would enjoy as did these, would revel in the filth her senses had been trained to find sweet. "no! no!" she protested. "i'd kill myself first!" and then she cowered again, as the thought came that she probably would not, any more than these had killed themselves. the descent would be gradual--no matter how swift, still gradual. only the insane put an end to life. yes--she would come here some day. she leaned against the wall, her throat contracting in a fit of nausea. she grew cold all over; her teeth chattered. she tried in vain to tear her gaze from the spectacle; some invisible power seemed to be holding her head in a vise, thrusting her struggling eyelids violently open. there were several men, dead drunk, asleep in old wooden chairs against the wall. one of these men was so near her that she could have touched him. his clothing was such an assortment of rags slimy and greasy as one sometimes sees upon the top of a filled garbage barrel to add its horrors of odor of long unwashed humanity to the stenches from vegetable decay. his wreck of a hard hat had fallen from his head as it dropped forward in drunken sleep. something in the shape of the head made her concentrate upon this man. she gave a sharp cry, stretched out her hand, touched the man's shoulder. "rod!" she cried. "rod!" the head slowly lifted, and the bleary, blowsy wreck of roderick spenser's handsome face was turned stupidly toward her. into his gray eyes slowly came a gleam of recognition. then she saw the red of shame burst into his hollow cheeks, and the head quickly drooped. she shook him. "rod! it's _you!_" "get the hell out," he mumbled. "i want to sleep." "you know me," she said. "i see the color in your face. oh, rod--you needn't be ashamed before _me_." she felt him quiver under her fingers pressing upon his shoulder. but he pretended to snore. "rod," she pleaded, "i want you to come along with me. i can't do you any harm now." the hunchback had stopped playing. the old women were crowding round spenser and her, were peering at them, with eyes eager and ears a-cock for romance--for nowhere on this earth do the stars shine so sweetly as down between the precipices of shame to the black floor of the slum's abyss. spenser, stooped and shaking, rose abruptly, thrust susan aside with a sweep of the arm that made her reel, bolted into the street. she recovered her balance and amid hoarse croakings of "that's right, honey! don't give him up!" followed the shambling, swaying figure. he was too utterly drunk to go far; soon down he sank, a heap of rags and filth, against a stoop. she bent over him, saw he was beyond rousing, straightened and looked about her. two honest looking young jews stopped. "won't you help me get him home?" she said to them. "sure!" replied they in chorus. and, with no outward sign of the disgust they must have felt at the contact, they lifted up the sot, in such fantastic contrast to susan's clean and even stylish appearance, and bore him along, trying to make him seem less the helpless whiskey-soaked dead weight. they dragged him up the two flights of stairs and, as she pushed back the door, deposited him on the floor. she assured them they could do nothing more, thanked them, and they departed. clara appeared in her doorway. "god almighty, lorna!" she cried. "_what_ have you got there? how'd it get in?" "you've been advising me to take a fellow," said susan. "well--here he is." clara looked at her as if she thought her crazed by drink or dope. "i'll call the janitor and have him thrown out." "no, he's my lover," said susan. "will you help me clean him up?" clara, looking at spenser's face now, saw those signs which not the hardest of the world's hard uses can cut or tear away. "oh!" she said, in a tone of sympathy. "he _is_ down, isn't he? but he'll pull round all right." she went into her room to take off her street clothes and to get herself into garments as suitable as she possessed for one of those noisome tasks that are done a dozen times a day by the bath nurses in the receiving department of a charity hospital. when she returned, susan too was in her chemise and ready to begin the search for the man, if man there was left deep buried in that muck. while susan took off the stinking and rotten rags, and flung them into the hall, clara went to the bathroom they and mollie shared, and filled the tub with water as hot as her hand could bear. with her foot susan pushed the rags along the hall floor and into the garbage closet. then she and clara lifted the emaciated, dirt-streaked, filth-smeared body, carried it to the bathroom, let it down into the water. there were at hand plenty of those strong, specially prepared soaps and other disinfectants constantly used by the women of their kind who still cling to cleanliness and health. with these they attacked him, not as if he were a human being, but as if he were some inanimate object that must be scoured before it could be used. again and again they let out the water, black, full of dead and dying vermin; again and again they rinsed him, attacked him afresh. their task grew less and less repulsive as the man gradually appeared, a young man with a soft skin, a well-formed body, unusually good hands and feet, a distinguished face despite its savage wounds from dissipation, hardly the less handsome for the now fair and crisp beard which gave it a look of more years than spenser had lived. if spenser recovered consciousness--and it seems hardly possible that he did not--he was careful to conceal the fact. he remained limp, inert, apparently in a stupor. they gave him one final scrubbing, one final rinsing, one final thorough inspection. "now, he's all right," declared clara. "what shall we do with him?" "put him to bed," said susan. they had already dried him off in the empty tub. they now rubbed him down with a rough towel, lifted him, susan taking the shoulders, clara the legs, and put him in susan's bed. clara ran to her room, brought one of the two nightshirts she kept for her fellow. when they had him in this and with a sheet over him, they cleaned and straightened the bathroom, then lit cigarettes and sat down to rest and to admire the work of their hands. "who is he?" asked clara. "a man i used to know," said susan. like all the girls in that life with a real story to tell, she never told about her past self. never tell? they never even remember if drink and drugs will do their duty. "i don't blame you for loving him," said clara. "somehow, the lower a man sinks the more a woman loves him. it's the other way with men. but then men don't know what love is. and a woman don't really know till she's been through the mill." "i don't love him," said susan. "same thing," replied the practical clara, with a wave of the bare arm at the end of which smoked the cigarette. "what're you going to do with him?" "i don't know," confessed susan. she was not a little uneasy at the thought of his awakening. would he despise her more than ever now--fly from her back to his filth? would he let her try to help him? and she looked at the face which had been, in that other life so long, long ago, dearer to her than any face her eyes had ever rested upon; a sob started deep down within her, found its slow and painful way upward, shaking her whole body and coming from between her clenched teeth in a groan. she forgot all she had suffered from rod--forgot the truth about him which she had slowly puzzled out after she left him and as experience enabled her to understand actions she had not understood at the time. she forgot it all. that past--that far, dear, dead past! again she was a simple, innocent girl upon the high rock, eating that wonderful dinner. again the evening light faded, stars and moon came out, and she felt the first sweet stirring of love for him. she could hear his voice, the light, clear, entrancing melody of the duke's song-- la donna è mobile qua penna al vento-- she burst into tears--tears that drenched her soul as the rain drenches the blasted desert and makes the things that could live in beauty stir deep in its bosom. and clara, sobbing in sympathy, kissed her and stole away, softly closing the door. "if a man die, shall he live again?" asked the old arabian philosopher. if a woman die, shall she live again?. . . shall not that which dies in weakness live again in strength?. . . looking at him, as he lay there sleeping so quietly, her being surged with the heaving of high longings and hopes. if _they_ could only live again! here they were, together, at the lowest depth, at the rock bottom of life. if they could build on that rock, build upon the very foundation of the world, then would they indeed build in strength! then, nothing could destroy--nothing!. . . if they could live again! if they could build! she had something to live for--something to fight for. into her eyes came a new light; into her soul came peace and strength. something to live for--someone to redeem. chapter xi she fell asleep, her head resting upon her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair. she awoke with a shiver; she opened her eyes to find him gazing at her. the eyes of both shifted instantly. "wouldn't you like some whiskey?" she asked. "thanks," replied he, and his unchanged voice reminded her vividly of his old self, obscured by the beard and by the dissipated look. she took the bottle from its concealment in the locked washstand drawer, poured him out a large drink. when she came back where he could see the whiskey in the glass, his eyes glistened and he raised himself first on his elbow, then to a sitting position. his shaking hand reached out eagerly and his expectant lips quivered. he gulped the whiskey down. "thank you," he said, gazing longingly at the bottle as he held the empty glass toward her. "more?" "i _would_ like a little more," said he gratefully. again she poured him a large drink, and again he gulped it down. "that's strong stuff," said he. "but then they sell strong stuff in this part of town. the other kind tastes weak to me now." he dropped back against the pillows. she poured herself a drink. halfway to her lips the glass halted. "i've got to stop that," thought she, "if i'm going to do anything for him or for myself." and she poured the whiskey back and put the bottle away. the whole incident took less than five seconds. it did not occur that she was essaying and achieving the heroic, that she had in that instant revealed her right to her dream of a career high above the common lot. "don't _you_ drink?" said he. "i've decided to cut it out," replied she carelessly. "there's nothing in it." "i couldn't live without it--and wouldn't." "it _is_ a comfort when one's on the way down," said she. "but i'm going to try the other direction--for a change." she held a box of cigarettes toward him. he took one, then she; she held the lighted match for him, lit her own cigarette, let the flame of the match burn on, she absently watching it. "look out! you'll burn yourself!" cried he. she started, threw the match into the slop jar. "how do you feel?" inquired she. "like the devil," he answered. "but then i haven't known what it was to feel any other way for several months except when i couldn't feel at all." a long silence, both smoking, he thinking, she furtively watching him. "you haven't changed so much," he finally said. "at least, not on the outside." "more on the outside than on the inside," said she. "the inside doesn't change much. there i'm almost as i was that day on the big rock. and i guess you are, too--aren't you?" "the devil i am! i've grown hard and bitter." "that's all outside," declared she. "that's the shell--like the scab that stays over the sore spot till it heals." "sore spot? i'm nothing but sore spots. i've been treated like a dog." and he proceeded to talk about the only subject that interested him--himself. he spoke in a defensive way, as if replying to something she had said or thought. "i've not got down in the world without damn good excuse. i wrote several plays, and they were tried out of town. but we never could get into new york. i think brent was jealous of me, and his influence kept me from a hearing. i know it sounds conceited, but i'm sure i'm right." "brent?" said she, in a queer voice. "oh, i think you must be mistaken. he doesn't look like a man who could do petty mean things. no, i'm sure he's not petty." "do you know him?" cried spenser, in an irritated tone. "no. but--someone pointed him out to me once--a long time ago--one night in the martin. and then--you'll remember--there used to be a great deal of talk about him when we lived in forty-third street. you admired him tremendously." "well, he's responsible," said spenser, sullenly. "the men on top are always trampling down those who are trying to climb up. he had it in for me. one of my friends who thought he was a decent chap gave him my best play to read. he returned it with some phrases about its showing talent--one of those phrases that don't mean a damn thing. and a few weeks ago--" spenser raised himself excitedly--"the thieving hound produced a play that was a clean steal from mine. i'd be laughed at if i protested or sued. but i _know_, curse him!" he fell back shaking so violently that his cigarette dropped to the sheet. susan picked it up, handed it to him. he eyed her with angry suspicion. "you don't believe me, do you?" he demanded. "i don't know anything about it," replied she. "anyhow, what does it matter? the man i met on that show boat--the mr. burlingham i've often talked about--he used to say that the dog that stopped to lick his scratches never caught up with the prey." he flung himself angrily in the bed. "you never did have any heart--any sympathy. but who has? even drumley went back on me--let 'em put a roast of my last play in the _herald_--a telegraphed roast from new haven--said it was a dead failure. and who wrote it? why, some newspaper correspondent in the pay of the _syndicate_--and that means brent. and of course it was a dead failure. so--i gave up--and here i am. . . . this your room?" "yes." "where's this nightshirt come from?" "it belongs to the friend of the girl across the hall." he laughed sneeringly. "the hell it does!" mocked he. "i understand perfectly. i want my clothes." "no one is coming," said susan. "there's no one to come." he was looking round the comfortable little room that was the talk of the whole tenement and was stirring wives and fast women alike to "do a little fixing up." said he: "a nice little nest you've made for him. you always were good at that." "i've made it for myself," said she. "i never bring men here." "i want my clothes," cried he. "i haven't sunk that low, you----!" the word he used did not greatly disturb susan. the shell she had formed over herself could ward off brutal contacts of languages no less than of the other kinds. it did, however, shock her a little to hear rod spenser use a word so crude. "give me my clothes," he ordered, waving his fists in a fierce, feeble gesture. "they were torn all to pieces. i threw them away. i'll get you some more in the morning." he dropped back again, a scowl upon his face. "i've got no money--not a damn cent. i did half a day's work on the docks and made enough to quiet me last night." he raised himself. "i can work again. give me my clothes!" "they're gone," said susan. "they were completely used up." this brought back apparently anything but dim memory of what his plight had been. "how'd i happen to get so clean?" "clara and i washed you off a little. you had fallen down." he lay silent a few minutes, then said in a hesitating, ashamed tone, "my troubles have made me a boor. i beg your pardon. you've been tremendously kind to me." "oh, it wasn't much. don't you feel sleepy?" "not a bit." he dragged himself from the bed. "but _you_ do. i must go." she laughed in the friendliest way. "you can't. you haven't any clothes." he passed his hand over his face and coughed violently, she holding his head and supporting his emaciated shoulders. after several minutes of coughing and gagging, gasping and groaning and spitting, he was relieved by the spasm and lay down again. when he got his breath, he said--with rest between words--"i'd ask you to send for the ambulance, but if the doctors catch me, they'll lock me away. i've got consumption. oh, i'll soon be out of it." susan sat silent. she did not dare look at him lest he should see the pity and horror in her eyes. "they'll find a cure for it," pursued he. "but not till the day after i'm gone. that is the way my luck runs. still, i don't see why i should care to stay--and i don't! have you any more of that whiskey?" susan brought out the bottle again, gave him the last of the whiskey--a large drink. he sat up, sipping it to make it last. he noted the long row of books on the shelf fastened along the wall beside the bed, the books and magazines on the table. said he: "as fond of reading as ever, i see?" "fonder," said she. "it takes me out of myself." "i suppose you read the sort of stuff you really like, now--not the things you used to read to make old drumley think you were cultured and intellectual." "no--the same sort," replied she, unruffled by his contemptuous, unjust fling. "trash bores me." "come to think of it, i guess you did have pretty good taste in books." but he was interested in himself, like all invalids; and, like them, he fancied his own intense interest could not but be shared by everyone. he talked on and on of himself, after the manner of failures--told of his wrongs, of how friends had betrayed him, of the jealousies and enmities his talents had provoked. susan was used to these hard-luck stories, was used to analyzing them. with the aid of what she had worked out as to his character after she left him, she had no difficulty in seeing that he was deceiving himself, was excusing himself. but after all she had lived through, after all she had discovered about human frailty, especially in herself, she was not able to criticize, much less condemn, anybody. her doubts merely set her to wondering whether he might not also be self-deceived as to his disease. "why do you think you've got consumption?" asked she. "i was examined at the free dispensary up in second avenue the other day. i've suspected what was the matter for several months. they told me i was right." "but the doctors are always making mistakes. i'd not give up if i were you." "do you suppose i would if i had anything to live for?" "i was thinking about that a while ago--while you were asleep." "oh, i'm all in. that's a cinch." "so am i," said she. "and as we've nothing to lose and no hope, why, trying to do something won't make us any worse off. . . . we've both struck the bottom. we can't go any lower." she leaned forward and, with her earnest eyes fixed upon him, said, "rod--why not try--together?" he closed his eyes. "i'm afraid i can't be of much use to you," she went on. "but you can help me. and helping me will make you help yourself. i can't get up alone. i've tried. no doubt it's my fault. i guess i'm one of those women that aren't hard enough or self-confident enough to do what's necessary unless i've got some man to make me do it. perhaps i'd get the--the strength or whatever it is, when i was much older. but by that time in my case--i guess it'd be too late. won't you help me, rod?" he turned his head away, without opening his eyes. "you've helped me many times--beginning with the first day we met." "don't," he said. "i went back on you. i did sprain my ankle, but i could have come." "that wasn't anything," replied she. "you had already done a thousand times more than you needed to do." his hand wandered along the cover in her direction. she touched it. their hands clasped. "i lied about where i got the money yesterday. i didn't work. i begged. three of us--from the saloon they call the owl's chute--two yale men--one of them had been a judge--and i. we've been begging for a week. we were going out on the road in a few days--to rob. then--i saw you--in that old women's dance hall--the venusberg, they call it." "you've come down here for me, rod. you'll take me back? you'll save me from the venusberg?" "i couldn't save anybody. susie, at bottom i'm n. g. i always was--and i knew it. weak--vain. but you! if you hadn't been a woman--and such a sweet, considerate one you'd have never got down here." "such a fool," corrected susan. "but, once i get up, i'll not be so again. i'll fight under the rules, instead of acting in the silly way they teach us as children." "don't say those hard things, susie!" "aren't they true?" "yes, but i can't bear to hear them from a woman. . . . i told you that you hadn't changed. but after i'd looked at you a while i saw that you have. you've got a terrible look in your eyes--wonderful and terrible. you had something of that look as a child--the first time i saw you." "the day after my marriage," said the girl, tearing her face away. "it was there then," he went on. "but now--it's--it's heartbreaking, susie when your face is in repose." "i've gone through a fire that has burned up every bit of me that can burn," said she. "i've been wondering if what's left isn't strong enough to do something with. i believe so--if you'll help me." "help you? i--help anybody? don't mock me, susie." "i don't know about anybody else," said she sweetly and gently, "but i do know about me." "no use--too late. i've lost my nerve." he began to sob. "it's because i'm unstrung," explained he. "don't think i'm a poor contemptible fool of a whiner. . . . yes, i _am_ a whiner! susie, i ought to have been the woman and you the man. weak--weak--weak!" she turned the gas low, bent over him, kissed his brow, caressed him. "let's do the best we can," she murmured. he put his arm round her. "i wonder if there _is_ any hope," he said. "no--there couldn't be." "let's not hope," pleaded she. "let's just do the best we can." "what--for instance?" "you know the theater people. you might write a little play--a sketch--and you and i could act it in one of the ten-cent houses." "that's not a bad idea!" exclaimed he. "a little comedy--about fifteen or twenty minutes." and he cast about for a plot, found the beginnings of one the ancient but ever acceptable commonplace of a jealous quarrel between two lovers--"i'll lay the scene in fifth avenue--there's nothing low life likes so much as high life." he sketched, she suggested. they planned until broad day, then fell asleep, she half sitting up, his head pillowed upon her lap. she was awakened by a sense of a parching and suffocating heat. she started up with the idea of fire in her drowsy mind. but a glance at him revealed the real cause. his face was fiery red, and from his lips came rambling sentences, muttered, whispered, that indicated the delirium of a high fever. she had first seen it when she and the night porter broke into burlingham's room in the walnut street house, in cincinnati. she had seen it many a time since; for, while she herself had never been ill, she had been surrounded by illness all the time, and the commonest form of it was one of these fevers, outraged nature's frenzied rise against the ever denser swarms of enemies from without which the slums sent to attack her. susan ran across the hall and roused clara, who would watch while she went for a doctor. "you'd better get einstein in grand street," clara advised. "why not sacci?" asked susan. "our doctor doesn't know anything but the one thing--and he doesn't like to take other kinds of cases. no, get einstein. . . . you know, he's like all of them--he won't come unless you pay in advance." "how much?" asked susan. "three dollars. i'll lend you if----" "no--i've got it." she had eleven dollars and sixty cents in the world. einstein pronounced it a case of typhoid. "you must get him to the hospital at once." susan and clara looked at each other in terror. to them, as to the masses everywhere, the hospital meant almost certain death; for they assumed--and they had heard again and again accusations which warranted it--that the public hospital doctors and nurses treated their patients with neglect always, with downright inhumanity often. not a day passed without their hearing some story of hospital outrage upon poverty, without their seeing someone--usually some child--who was paying a heavy penalty for having been in the charity wards. einstein understood their expression. "nonsense!" said he gruffly. "you girls look too sensible to believe those silly lies." susan looked at him steadily. his eyes shifted. "of course, the pay service _is_ better," said he in a strikingly different tone. "how much would it be at a pay hospital?" asked susan. "twenty-five a week including my services," said doctor einstein. "but you can't afford that." "will he get the best treatment for that?" "the very best. as good as if he were rockefeller or the big chap uptown." "in advance, i suppose?" "would we ever get our money out of people if we didn't get it in advance? we've got to live just the same as any other class." "i understand," said the girl. "i don't blame you. i don't blame anybody for anything." she said to clara, "can you lend me twenty?" "sure. come in and get it." when she and susan were in the hall beyond einstein's hearing, she went on: "i've got the twenty and you're welcome to it. but--lorna hadn't you better----" "in the same sort of a case, what'd _you_ do?" interrupted susan. clara laughed. "oh--of course." and she gave susan a roll of much soiled bills--a five, the rest ones and twos. "i can get the ambulance to take him free," said einstein. "that'll save you five for a carriage." she accepted this offer. and when the ambulance went, with spenser burning and raving in the tightly wrapped blankets, susan followed in a street car to see with her own eyes that he was properly installed. it was arranged that she could visit him at any hour and stay as long as she liked. she returned to the tenement, to find the sentiment of the entire neighborhood changed toward her. not loss of money, not loss of work, not dispossession nor fire nor death is the supreme calamity among the poor, but sickness. it is their most frequent visitor--sickness in all its many frightful forms--rheumatism and consumption, cancer and typhoid and the rest of the monsters. yet never do the poor grow accustomed or hardened. and at the sight of the ambulance the neighborhood had been instantly stirred. when the reason for its coming got about, susan became the object of universal sympathy and respect. she was not sending her friend to be neglected and killed at a charity hospital; she was paying twenty-five a week that he might have a chance for life--twenty-five dollars a week! the neighbors felt that her high purpose justified any means she might be compelled to employ in getting the money. women who had scowled and spat as she walked by, spoke friendlily to her and wiped their eyes with their filthy skirts, and prayed in church and synagogue that she might prosper until her man was well and the old debt paid. clara went from group to group, relating the whole story, and the tears flowed at each recital. money they had none to give; but what they had they gave with that generosity which suddenly transfigures rags and filth and makes foul and distorted bodies lift in the full dignity of membership in the human family. everywhere in those streets were seen the ravages of disease--rheumatism and rickets and goiter, wen and tumors and cancer, children with only one arm or one leg, twisted spines, sunken chests, distorted hips, scrofulous eyes and necks, all the sad markings of poverty's supreme misery, the ferocious penalties of ignorance, stupidity and want. but susan's burden of sorrow was not on this account overlooked. rafferty, who kept the saloon at the corner and was chief lieutenant to o'frayne, the district leader, sent for her and handed her a twenty. "that may help some," said he. susan hesitated--gave it back. "thank you," said she, "and perhaps later i'll have to get it from you. but i don't want to get into debt. i already owe twenty." "this ain't debt," explained rafferty. "take it and forget it." "i couldn't do that," said the girl. "but maybe you'll lend it to me, if i need it in a week or so?" "sure," said the puzzled saloon man--liquor store man, he preferred to be called, or politician. "any amount you want." as she went away he looked after her, saying to his barkeeper: "what do you think of that, terry? i offered her a twenty and she sidestepped." terry's brother had got drunk a few days before, had killed a woman and was on his way to the chair. terry scowled at the boss and said: "she's got a right to, ain't she? don't she earn her money honest, without harmin' anybody but herself? there ain't many that can say that--not any that runs factories and stores and holds their noses up as if they smelt their own sins, damn 'em!" "she's a nice girl," said rafferty, sauntering away. he was a broad, tolerant and good-humored man; he made allowances for an employee whose brother was in for murder. susan had little time to spend at the hospital. she must now earn fifty dollars a week--nearly double the amount she had been averaging. she must pay the twenty-five dollars for spenser, the ten dollars for her lodgings. then there was the seven dollars which must be handed to the police captain's "wardman" in the darkness of some entry every thursday night. she had been paying the patrolman three dollars a week to keep him in a good humor, and two dollars to the janitor's wife; she might risk cutting out these items for the time, as both janitor's wife and policeman were sympathetic. but on the closest figuring, fifty a week would barely meet her absolute necessities--would give her but seven a week for food and other expenses and nothing toward repaying clara. fifty dollars a week! she might have a better chance to make it could she go back to the broadway-fifth avenue district. but however vague other impressions from the life about her might have been, there had been branded into her a deep and terrible fear of the police an omnipotence as cruel as destiny itself--indeed, the visible form of that sinister god at present. once in the pariah class, once with a "police record," and a man or woman would have to scale the steeps of respectability up to a far loftier height than susan ever dreamed of again reaching, before that malign and relentless power would abandon its tyranny. she did not dare risk adventuring a part of town where she had no "pull" and where, even should she by chance escape arrest, freddie palmer would hear of her; would certainly revenge himself by having her arrested and made an example of. in the grand street district she must stay, and she must "stop the nonsense" and "play the game"--must be business-like. she went to see the "wardman," o'ryan, who under the guise of being a plain clothes man or detective, collected and turned in to the captain, who took his "bit" and passed up the rest, all the money levied upon saloons, dives, procuresses, dealers in unlawful goods of any kind from opium and cocaine to girls for "hock shops." o'ryan was a huge brute of a man, his great hard face bearing the scars of battles against pistol, knife, bludgeon and fist. he was a sour and savage brute, hated and feared by everyone for his tyrannies over the helpless poor and the helpless outcast class. he had primitive masculine notions as to feminine virtue, intact despite the latter day general disposition to concede toleration and even a certain respectability to prostitutes. but by some chance which she and the other girls did not understand he treated susan with the utmost consideration, made the gangs appreciate that if they annoyed her or tried to drag her into the net of tribute in which they had enmeshed most of the girls worth while, he would regard it as a personal defiance to himself. susan waited in the back room of the saloon nearest o'ryan's lodgings and sent a boy to ask him to come. the boy came back with the astonishing message that she was to come to o'ryan's flat. susan was so doubtful that she paused to ask the janitress about it. "it's all right," said the janitress. "since his wife died three years ago him and his baby lives alone. there's his old mother but she's gone out. he's always at home when he ain't on duty. he takes care of the baby himself, though it howls all the time something awful." susan ascended, found the big policeman in his shirt sleeves, trying to soothe the most hideous monstrosity she had ever seen--a misshapen, hairy animal looking like a monkey, like a rat, like half a dozen repulsive animals, and not at all like a human being. the thing was clawing and growling and grinding its teeth. at sight of susan it fixed malevolent eyes on her and began to snap its teeth at her. "don't mind him," said o'ryan. "he's only acting up queer." susan sat not daring to look at the thing lest she should show her aversion, and not knowing how to state her business when the thing was so clamorous, so fiendishly uproarious. after a time o'ryan succeeded in quieting it. he seemed to think some explanation was necessary. he began abruptly, his gaze tenderly on the awful creature, his child, lying quiet now in his arms: "my wife--she died some time ago--died when the baby here was born." "you spend a good deal of time with it," said susan. "all i can spare from my job. i'm afraid to trust him to anybody, he being kind of different. then, too, i _like_ to take care of him. you see, it's all i've got to remember _her_ by. i'm kind o' tryin' to do what _she'd_ want did." his lips quivered. he looked at his monstrous child. "yes, i _like_ settin' here, thinkin'--and takin' care of him." this brute of a slave driver, this cruel tyrant over the poor and the helpless--yet, thus tender and gentle--thus capable of the enormous sacrifice of a great, pure love! "_you've_ got a way of lookin' out of the eyes that's like her," he went on--and susan had the secret of his strange forbearance toward her. "i suppose you've come about being let off on the assessment?" already he knew the whole story of rod and the hospital. "yes--that's why i'm bothering you," said she. "you needn't pay but five-fifty. i can only let you off a dollar and a half--my bit and the captain's. we pass the rest on up--and we don't dare let you off." "oh, i can make the money," susan said hastily. "thank you, mr. o'ryan, but i don't want to get anyone into trouble." "we've got the right to knock off one dollar and a half," said o'ryan. "but if we let you off the other, the word would get up to--to wherever the graft goes--and they'd send down along the line, to have merry hell raised with us. the whole thing's done systematic, and they won't take no excuses, won't allow no breaks in the system nowhere. you can see for yourself--it'd go to smash if they did." "somebody must get a lot of money," said susan. "oh, it's dribbled out--and as you go higher up, i don't suppose them that gets it knows where it comes from. the whole world's nothing but graft, anyhow. sorry i can't let you off." the thing in his lap had recovered strength for a fresh fit of malevolence. it was tearing at its hairy, hideous face with its claws and was howling and shrieking, the big father gently trying to soothe it--for _her_ sake. susan got away quickly. she halted in the deserted hall and gave way to a spasm of dry sobbing--an overflow of all the emotions that had been accumulating within her. in this world of noxious and repulsive weeds, what sudden startling upshooting of what beautiful flowers! flowers where you would expect to find the most noisome weeds of all, and vilest weeds where you would expect to find flowers. what a world! however--the fifty a week must be got--and she must be business-like. most of the girls who took to the streets came direct from the tenements of new york, of the foreign cities or of the factory towns of new england. and the world over, tenement house life is an excellent school for the life of the streets. it prevents modesty from developing; it familiarizes the eye, the ear, the nerves, to all that is brutal; it takes away from a girl every feeling that might act as a restraining influence except fear--fear of maternity, of disease, of prison. thus, practically all the other girls had the advantage over susan. soon after they definitely abandoned respectability and appeared in the streets frankly members of the profession, they became bold and rapacious. they had an instinctive feeling that their business was as reputable as any other, more reputable than many held in high repute, that it would be most reputable if it paid better and were less uncertain. they respected themselves for all things, talk to the contrary in the search for the sympathy and pity most human beings crave. they despised the men as utterly as the men despised them. they bargained as shamelessly as the men. even those who did not steal still felt that stealing was justifiable; for, in the streets the sex impulse shows stripped of all disguise, shows as a brutal male appetite, and the female feels that her yielding to it entitles her to all she can compel and cozen and crib. susan had been unfitted for her profession--as for all active, unsheltered life--by her early training. the point of view given us in our childhood remains our point of view as to all the essentials of life to the end. reason, experience, the influence of contact with many phases of the world, may change us seemingly, but the under-instinct remains unchanged. thus, susan had never lost, and never would lose her original repugnance; not even drink had ever given her the courage to approach men or to bargain with them. her shame was a false shame, like most of the shame in the world--a lack of courage, not a lack of desire--and, however we may pretend, there can be no virtue in abstinence merely through cowardice. still, if there be merit in shrinking, even when the cruelest necessities were goading, that merit was hers in full measure. as a matter of reason and sense, she admitted that the girls who respected themselves and practiced their profession like merchants of other kinds were right, were doing what she ought to do. anyhow, it was absurd to practice a profession half-heartedly. to play your game, whatever it might be, for all there was in it--that was the obvious first principle of success. yet--she remained laggard and squeamish. what she had been unable to do for herself, to save herself from squalor, from hunger, from cold, she was now able to do for the sake of another--to help the man who had enabled her to escape from that marriage, more hideous than anything she had endured since, or ever could be called upon to endure--to save him from certain neglect and probable death in the "charity" hospital. not by merely tolerating the not too impossible men who joined her without sign from her, and not by merely accepting what they gave, could fifty dollars a week be made. she must dress herself in franker avowal of her profession, must look as expensive as her limited stock of clothing, supplemented by her own taste, would permit. she must flirt, must bargain, must ask for presents, must make herself agreeable, must resort to the crude female arts--which, however, are subtle enough to convince the self-enchanted male even in face of the discouraging fact of the mercenary arrangement. she must crush down her repugnance, must be active, not simply passive--must get the extra dollars by stimulating male appetites, instead of simply permitting them to satisfy themselves. she must seem rather the eager mistress than the reluctant and impatient wife. and she did abruptly change her manner. there was in her, as her life had shown, a power of endurance, an ability to sacrifice herself in order to do the thing that seemed necessary, and to do it without shuffling or whining. whatever else her career had done for her, it undoubtedly had strengthened this part of her nature. and now the result of her training showed. with her superior intelligence for the first time free to make the best of her opportunities, she abruptly became equal to the most consummate of her sisters in that long line of her sister-panders to male appetites which extends from the bought wife or mistress or fiancee of the rich grandee down all the social ranks to the wife or street girl cozening for a tipsy day-laborer's earnings on a saturday night and the work girl teasing her "steady company" toward matrimony on the park bench or in the dark entry of the tenement. she was able to pay clara back in less than ten days. in spenser's second week at the hospital she had him moved to better quarters and better attendance at thirty dollars a week. although she had never got rid of her most unprofessional habit of choosing and rejecting, there had been times when need forced her into straits where her lot seemed to her almost as low as that of the slave-like wives of the tenements, made her almost think she would be nearly as well off were she the wife, companion, butt, servant and general vent to some one dull and distasteful provider of a poor living. but now she no longer felt either degraded or heart sick and heart weary. and when he passed the worst crisis her spirits began to return. and when roderick should be well, and the sketch written--and an engagement got--ah, then! life indeed--life, at last! was it this hope that gave her the strength to fight down and conquer the craving for opium? or was it the necessity of keeping her wits and of saving every cent? or was it because the opium habit, like the drink habit, like every other habit, is a matter of a temperament far more than it is a matter of an appetite--and that she had the appetite but not the temperament? no doubt this had its part in the quick and complete victory. at any rate, fight and conquer she did. the strongest interest always wins. she had an interest stronger than love of opium--an interest that substituted itself for opium and for drink and supplanted them. life indeed--life, at last! in his third week rod began to round toward health. einstein observed from the nurse's charts that susan's visits were having an unfavorably exciting effect. he showed her the readings of temperature and pulse, and forbade her to stay longer than five minutes at each of her two daily visits. also, she must not bring up any topic beyond the sickroom itself. one day spenser greeted her with, "i'll feel better, now that i've got this off my mind." he held out to her a letter. "take that to george fitzalan. he's an old friend of mine--one i've done a lot for and never asked any favors of. he may be able to give you something fairly good, right away." susan glanced penetratingly at him, saw he had been brooding over the source of the money that was being spent upon him. "very well," said she, "i'll go as soon as i can." "go this afternoon," said he with an invalid's fretfulness. "and when you come this evening you can tell me how you got on." "very well. this afternoon. but you know, rod, there's not a ghost of a chance." "i tell you fitzalan's my friend. he's got some gratitude. he'll _do_ something." "i don't want you to get into a mood where you'll be awfully depressed if i should fail." "but you'll not fail." it was evident that spenser, untaught by experience and flattered into exaggerating his importance by the solicitude and deference of doctors and nurses to a paying invalid, had restored to favor his ancient enemy--optimism, the certain destroyer of any man who does not shake it off. she went away, depressed and worried. when she should come back with the only possible news, what would be the effect upon him--and he still in a critical stage? as the afternoon must be given to business, she decided to go straight uptown, hoping to catch fitzalan before he went out to lunch. and twenty minutes after making this decision she was sitting in the anteroom of a suite of theatrical offices in the empire theater building. the girl in attendance had, as usual, all the airs little people assume when they are in close, if menial, relations with a person who, being important to them, therefore fills their whole small horizon. she deigned to take in susan's name and the letter. susan seated herself at the long table and with the seeming of calmness that always veiled her in her hours of greatest agitation, turned over the pages of the theatrical journals and magazines spread about in quantity. after perhaps ten silent and uninterrupted minutes a man hurried in from the outside hall, strode toward the frosted glass door marked "private." with his hand reaching for the knob he halted, made an impatient gesture, plumped himself down at the long table--at its distant opposite end. with a sweep of the arm he cleared a space wherein he proceeded to spread papers from his pocket and to scribble upon them furiously. when susan happened to glance at him, his head was bent so low and his straw hat was tilted so far forward that she could not see his face. she observed that he was dressed attractively in an extremely light summer suit of homespun; his hands were large and strong and ruddy--the hands of an artist, in good health. her glance returned to the magazine. after a few minutes she looked up. she was startled to find that the man was giving her a curious, searching inspection--and that he was brent, the playwright--the same fascinating face, keen, cynical, amused--the same seeing eyes, that, in the cafe martin long ago, had made her feel as if she were being read to her most secret thought. she dropped her glance. his voice made her start. "it's been a long time since i've seen you," he was saying. she looked up, not believing it possible he was addressing her. but his gaze was upon her. thus, she had not been mistaken in thinking she had seen recognition in his eyes. "yes," she said, with a faint smile. "a longer time for you than for me," said he. "a good deal has happened to me," she admitted. "are you on the stage?" "no. not yet." the girl entered by way of the private door. "miss lenox--this way, please." she saw brent, became instantly all smiles and bows. "oh--mr. fitzalan doesn't know you're here, mr. brent," she cried. then, to susan, "wait a minute." she was about to reënter the private office when brent stopped her with, "let miss lenox go in first. i don't wish to see mr. fitzalan yet." and he stood up, took off his hat, bowed gravely to susan, said, "i'm glad to have seen you again." susan, with some color forced into her old-ivory skin by nervousness and amazement, went into the presence of fitzalan. as the now obsequious girl closed the door behind her, she found herself facing a youngish man with a remnant of hair that was little more than fuzz on the top of his head. his features were sharp, aggressive, rather hard. he might have sat for the typical successful american young man of forty--so much younger in new york than is forty elsewhere in the united states--and so much older. he looked at susan with a pleasant sympathetic smile. "so," said he, "you're taking care of poor spenser, are you? tell him i'll try to run down to see him. i wish i could do something for him--something worth while, i mean. but--his request---- "really, i've nothing of the kind. i couldn't possibly place you--at least, not at present--perhaps, later on----" "i understand," interrupted susan. "he's very ill. it would help him greatly if you would write him a few lines, saying you'll give me a place at the first vacancy, but that it may not be soon. i'll not trouble you again. i want the letter simply to carry him over the crisis." fitzalan hesitated, rubbed his fuzzy crown with his jeweled hand. "tell him that," he said, finally. "i'm rather careful about writing letters. . . . yes, say to him what you suggested, as if it was from me." "the letter will make all the difference between his believing and not believing," urged susan. "he has great admiration and liking for you--thinks you would do anything for him." fitzalan frowned; she saw that her insistence had roused--or, rather, had strengthened--suspicion. "really--you must excuse me. what i've heard about him the past year has not---- "but, no matter, i can't do it. you'll let me know how he's getting on? good day." and he gave her that polite yet positive nod of dismissal which is a necessary part of the equipment of men of affairs, constantly beset as they are and ever engaged in the battle to save their chief asset, time, from being wasted. susan looked at him--a straight glance from gray eyes, a slight smile hovering about her scarlet lips. he reddened, fussed with the papers before him on the desk from which he had not risen. she opened the door, closed it behind her. brent was seated with his back full to her and was busy with his scribbling. she passed him, went on to the outer door. she was waiting for his voice; she knew it would come. "miss lenox!" as she turned he was advancing. his figure, tall and slim and straight, had the ease of movement which proclaims the man who has been everywhere and so is at home anywhere. he held out a card. "i wish to see you on business. you can come at three this afternoon?" "yes," said susan. "thanks," said he, bowing and returning to the table. she went on into the hall, the card between her fingers. at the elevator, she stood staring at the name--robert brent--as if it were an inscription in a forgotten language. she was so absorbed, so dazed that she did not ring the bell. the car happened to stop at that floor; she entered as if it were dark. and, in the street, she wandered many blocks down broadway before she realized where she was. she left the elevated and walked eastward through grand street. she was filled with a new and profound dissatisfaction. she felt like one awakening from a hypnotic trance. the surroundings, inanimate and animate, that had become endurable through custom abruptly resumed their original aspect of squalor and ugliness of repulsion and tragedy. a stranger--the ordinary, unobservant, feebly imaginative person, going along those streets would have seen nothing but tawdriness and poverty. susan, experienced, imaginative, saw _all_--saw what another would have seen only after it was pointed out, and even then but dimly. and that day her vision was no longer staled and deadened by familiarity, but with vision fresh and with nerves acute. the men--the women--and, saddest, most tragic of all, the children! when she entered her room her reawakened sensitiveness, the keener for its long repose, for the enormous unconscious absorption of impressions of the life about her--this morbid sensitiveness of the soul a-clash with its environment reached its climax. as she threw open the door, she shrank back before the odor--the powerful, sensual, sweet odor of chypre so effective in covering the bad smells that came up from other flats and from the noisome back yards. the room itself was neat and clean and plain, with not a few evidences of her personal taste--in the blending of colors, in the selection of framed photographs on the walls. the one she especially liked was the largest--a nude woman lying at full length, her head supported by her arm, her face gazing straight out of the picture, upon it a baffling expression--of sadness, of cynicism, of amusement perhaps, of experience, yet of innocence. it hung upon the wall opposite the door. when she saw this picture in the department store, she felt at once a sympathy between that woman and herself, felt she was for the first time seeing another soul like her own, one that would have understood her strange sense of innocence in the midst of her own defiled and depraved self--a core of unsullied nature. everyone else in the world would have mocked at this notion of a something within--a true self to which all that seemed to be her own self was as external as her clothing; this woman of the photograph would understand. so, there she hung--susan's one prized possession. the question of dressing for this interview with brent was most important. susan gave it much thought before she began to dress, changed her mind again and again in the course of dressing. through all her vicissitudes she had never lost her interest in the art of dress or her skill at it--and despite the unfavorable surroundings she had steadily improved; any woman anywhere would instantly have recognized her as one of those few favored and envied women who know how to get together a toilet. she finally chose the simplest of the half dozen summer dresses she had made for herself--a plain white lawn, with a short skirt. it gave her an appearance of extreme youth, despite her height and the slight stoop in her shoulders--a mere drooping that harmonized touchingly with the young yet weary expression of her face. to go with the dress she had a large hat of black rough straw with a very little white trimming on it. with this large black hat bewitchingly set upon her gracefully-done dark wavy hair, her sad, dreamy eyes, her pallid skin, her sweet-bitter mouth with its rouged lips seemed to her to show at their best. she felt that nothing was quite so effective for her skin as a white dress. in other colors--though she did not realize--the woman of bought kisses showed more distinctly--never brazenly as in most of the girls, but still unmistakably. in white she took on a glamour of melancholy--and the human countenance is capable of no expression so universally appealing as the look of melancholy that suggests the sadness underlying all life, the pain that pays for pleasure, the pain that pays and gets no pleasure, the sorrow of the passing of all things, the faint foreshadow of the doom awaiting us all. she washed the rouge from her lips, studied the effect in the glass. "no," she said aloud, "without it i feel like a hypocrite--and i don't look half so well." and she put the rouge on again--the scarlet dash drawn startlingly across her strange, pallid face. chapter xii at three that afternoon she stood in the vestibule of brent's small house in park avenue overlooking the oblong of green between east thirty-seventh street and east thirty-eighth. a most reputable looking englishman in evening dress opened the door; from her reading and her theater-going she knew that this was a butler. he bowed her in. the entire lower floor was given to an entrance hall, done in plain black walnut, almost lofty of ceiling, and with a grand stairway leading to the upper part of the house. there was a huge fireplace to the right; a mirror filled the entire back wall; a broad low seat ran all round the room. in one corner, an enormous urn of dark pottery; in another corner, a suit of armor, the helmet, the breastplate and the gauntlets set with gold of ancient lackluster. the butler left her there and ascended the polished but dead-finished stairway noiselessly. susan had never before been in so grand a room. the best private house she had ever seen was wright's in sutherland; and while everybody else in sutherland thought it magnificent, she had felt that there was something wrong, what she had not known. the grandiose new york hotels and restaurants were more showy and more pretentious far than this interior of brent's. but her unerring instinct of those born with good taste knew at first view of them that they were simply costly; there were beautiful things in them, fine carvings and paintings and tapestries, but personality was lacking. and without personality there can be no unity; without unity there can be no harmony--and without harmony, no beauty. looking round her now, she had her first deep draught of esthetic delight in interior decoration. she loved this quiet dignity, this large simplicity--nothing that obtruded, nothing that jarred, everything on the same scale of dark coloring and large size. she admired the way the mirror, without pretense of being anything but a mirror, enhanced the spaciousness of the room and doubled the pleasure it gave by offering another and different view of it. last of all susan caught sight of herself--a slim, slightly stooped figure, its white dress and its big black hat with white trimmings making it stand out strongly against the rather somber background. in a curiously impersonal way her own sad, wistful face interested her. a human being's face is a summary of his career. no man can realize at a thought what he is, can epitomize in just proportion what has been made of him by experience of the multitude of moments of which life is composed. but in some moods and in some lights we do get such an all-comprehending view of ourselves in looking at our own faces. as she had instinctively felt, there was a world of meaning in the contrast between her pensive brow above melancholy eyes and the blood-red line of her rouged lips. the butler descended. "mr. brent is in his library, on the fourth floor," said he. "will you kindly step this way, ma'am?" instead of indicating the stairway, he went to the panel next the chimney piece. she saw that it was a hidden door admitting to an elevator. she entered; the door closed; the elevator ascended rapidly. when it came to a stop the door opened and she was facing brent. "thank you for coming," said he, with almost formal courtesy. for all her sudden shyness, she cast a quick but seeing look round. it was an overcast day; the soft floods of liquid light--the beautiful light of her beloved city of the sun--poured into the big room through an enormous window of clear glass which formed the entire north wall. round the other walls from floor almost to lofty ceiling were books in solid rows; not books with ornamental bindings, but books for use, books that had been and were being used. by way of furniture there were an immense lounge, wide and long and deep, facing the left chimney piece, an immense table desk facing the north light, three great chairs with tall backs, one behind the table, one near the end of the table, the third in the corner farthest from the window; a grand piano, open, with music upon its rack, and a long carved seat at its keyboard. the huge window had a broad sill upon which was built a generous window garden fresh and lively with bright flowers. the woodwork, the ceiling, the furniture were of mahogany. the master of this splendid simplicity was dressed in a blue house suit of some summer material like linen. he was smoking a cigarette, and offered her one from the great carved wood box filled with them on the table desk. "thanks," said she. and when she had lighted it and was seated facing him as he sat at his desk, she felt almost at her ease. after all, while his gaze was penetrating, it was also understanding; we do not mind being unmasked if the unmasker at once hails us as brother. brent's eyes seemed to say to her, "human!--like me." she smoked and let her gaze wander from her books to window garden, from window garden to piano. "you play?" said he. "a very little. enough for accompaniments to simple songs." "you sing?" "simple songs. i've had but a few lessons from a small-town teacher." "let me hear." she went to the piano, laid her cigarette in a tray ready beside the music rack. she gave him the "gipsy queen," which she liked because it expressed her own passion of revolt against restraints of every conventional kind and her love for the open air and open sky. he somehow took away all feeling of embarrassment; she felt so strongly that he understood and was big enough not to have it anywhere in him to laugh at anything sincere. when she finished she resumed her cigarette and returned to the chair near his. "it's as i thought," said he. "your voice can be trained--to speak, i mean. i don't know as to its singing value. . . . have you good health?" "i never have even colds. yes, i'm strong." "you'll need it." "i have needed it," said she. into her face came the sad, bitter expression with its curious relief of a faint cynical smile. he leaned back in his chair and looked at her through a cloud of smoke. she saw that his eyes were not gray, as she had thought, but brown, a hazel brown with points of light sparkling in the irises and taking away all the suggestion of weakness and sentimentality that makes pure brown eyes unsatisfactory in a man. he said slowly: "when i saw you--in the martin--you were on the way down. you went, i see." she nodded. "i'm still there." "you like it? you wish to stay?" she shook her head smilingly. "no, but i can stay if it's necessary. i've discovered that i've got the health and the nerves for anything." "that's a great discovery. . . . well, you'll soon be on your way up. . . . do you wish to know why i spoke to you this morning?--why i remembered you?" "why?" "because of the expression of your eyes--when your face is in repose." she felt no shyness--and no sense of necessity of responding to a compliment, for his tone forbade any thought of flattery. she lowered her gaze to conceal the thoughts his words brought--the memories of the things that had caused her eyes to look as rod and now brent said. "such an expression," the playwright went on, "must mean character. i am sick and tired of the vanity of these actresses who can act just enough never to be able to learn to act well. i'm going to try an experiment with you. i've tried it several times but--no matter. i'm not discouraged. i never give up. . . . can you stand being alone?" "i spend most of my time alone. i prefer it." "i thought so. yes--you'll do. only the few who can stand being alone ever get anywhere. everything worth while is done alone. the big battle--it isn't fought in the field, but by the man sitting alone in his tent, working it all out. the bridge--the tunnel through the great mountains--the railway--the huge business enterprise--all done by the man alone, thinking, plotting to the last detail. it's the same way with the novel, the picture, the statue, the play--writing it, acting it--all done by someone alone, shut in with his imagination and his tools. i saw that you were one of the lonely ones. all you need is a chance. you'd surely get it, sooner or later. perhaps i can bring it a little sooner. . . . how much do you need to live on?" "i must have fifty dollars a week--if i go on at--as i am now. if you wish to take all my time--then, forty." he smiled in a puzzled way. "the police," she explained. "i need ten----" "certainly--certainly," cried he. "i understand--perfectly. how stupid of me! i'll want all your time. so it's to be forty dollars a week. when can you begin?" susan reflected. "i can't go into anything that'll mean a long time," she said. "i'm waiting for a man--a friend of mine to get well. then we're going to do something together." brent made an impatient gesture. "an actor? well, i suppose i can get him something to do. but i don't want you to be under the influence of any of these absurd creatures who think they know what acting is--when they merely know how to dress themselves in different suits of clothes, and strut themselves about the stage. they'd rather die than give up their own feeble, foolish little identities. i'll see that your actor friend is taken care of, but you must keep away from him--for the time at least." "he's all i've got. he's an old friend." "you--care for him?" "i used to. and lately i found him again--after we had been separated a long time. we're going to help each other up." "oh--he's down and out oh? why?" "drink--and hard luck." "not hard luck. that helps a man. it has helped you. it has made you what you are." "what am i?" asked susan. brent smiled mysteriously. "that's what we're going to find out," said he. "there's no human being who has ever had a future unless he or she had a past--and the severer the past the more splendid the future." susan was attending with all her senses. this man was putting into words her own inarticulate instincts. "a past," he went on in his sharp, dogmatic way, "either breaks or makes. you go into the crucible a mere ore, a possibility. you come out slag or steel." he was standing now, looking down at her with quizzical eyes. "you're about due to leave the pot," said he. "and i've hopes that you're steel. if not----" he shrugged his shoulders--"you'll have had forty a week for your time, and i'll have gained useful experience." susan gazed at him as if she doubted her eyes and ears. "what do you want me to do?" she presently inquired. "learn the art of acting--which consists of two parts. first, you must learn to act--thousands of the profession do that. second, you must learn not to act--and so far i know there aren't a dozen in the whole world who've got that far along. i've written a play i think well of. i want to have it done properly--it, and several other plays i intend to write. i'm going to give you a chance to become famous--better still, great." susan looked at him incredulously. "do you know who i am?" she asked at last. "certainly." her eyes lowered, the faintest tinge of red changed the amber-white pallor of her cheeks, her bosom rose and fell quickly. "i don't mean," he went on, "that i know any of the details of your experience. i only know the results as they are written in your face. the details are unimportant. when i say i know who you are, i mean i know that you are a woman who has suffered, whose heart has been broken by suffering, but not her spirit. of where you came from or how you've lived, i know nothing. and it's none of my business--no more than it's the public's business where _i_ came from and how i've learned to write plays." well, whether he was guessing any part of the truth or all of it, certainly what she had said about the police and now this sweeping statement of his attitude toward her freed her of the necessity of disclosing herself. she eagerly tried to dismiss the thoughts that had been making her most uneasy. she said: "you think i can learn to act?" "that, of course," replied he. "any intelligent person can learn to act--and also most persons who have no more intelligence in their heads than they have in their feet. i'll guarantee you some sort of career. what i'm interested to find out is whether you can learn _not_ to act. i believe you can. but----" he laughed in self-mockery. "i've made several absurd mistakes in that direction. . . . you have led a life in which most women become the cheapest sort of liars--worse liars even than is the usual respectable person, because they haven't the restraint of fearing loss of reputation. why is it you have not become a liar?" susan laughed. "i'm sure i don't know. perhaps because lying is such a tax on the memory. may i have another cigarette?" he held the match for her. "you don't paint--except your lips," he went on, "though you have no color. and you don't wear cheap finery. and while you use a strong scent, it's not one of the cheap and nasty kind--it's sensual without being slimy. and you don't use the kind of words one always hears in your circle." susan looked immensely relieved. "then you _do_ know who i am!" she cried. "you didn't suppose i thought you fresh from a fashionable boarding school, did you? i'd hardly look there for an actress who could act. you've got experience--experience--experience--written all over your face--sadly, satirically, scornfully, gayly, bitterly. and what i want is experience--not merely having been through things, but having been through them understandingly. you'll help me in my experiment?" he looked astonished, then irritated, when the girl, instead of accepting eagerly, drew back in her chair and seemed to be debating. his irritation showed still more plainly when she finally said: "that depends on him. and he--he thinks you don't like him." "what's his name?" said brent in his abrupt, intense fashion. "what's his name?" "spenser--roderick spenser." brent looked vague. "he used to be on the _herald_. he writes plays." "oh--yes. i remember. he's a weak fool." susan abruptly straightened, an ominous look in eyes and brow. brent made an impatient gesture. "beg pardon. why be sensitive about him? obviously because you know i'm right. i said fool, not ass. he's clever, but ridiculously vain. i don't dislike him. i don't care anything about him--or about anybody else in the world. no man does who amounts to anything. with a career it's as jesus said--leave father and mother, husband and wife--land, ox everything--and follow it." "what for?" said susan. "to save your soul! to be a somebody; to be strong. to be able to give to anybody and everybody--whatever they need. to be happy." "are you happy?" "no," he admitted. "but i'm growing in that direction. . . . don't waste yourself on stevens--i beg pardon, spenser. you're bigger than that. he's a small man with large dreams--a hopeless misfit. small dreams for small men; large dreams for--" he laughed--"you and me--our sort." susan echoed his laugh, but faint-heartedly. "i've watched your name in the papers," she said, sincerely unconscious of flattery. "i've seen you grow more and more famous. but--if there had been anything in me, would i have gone down and down?" "how old are you?" "about twenty-one." "only twenty-one and that look in your face! magnificent! i don't believe i'm to be disappointed this time. you ask why you've gone down! you haven't. you've gone _through_." "down," she insisted, sadly. "nonsense! the soot'll rub off the steel." she lifted her head eagerly. her own secret thought put into words. "you can't make steel without soot and dirt. you can't make anything without dirt. that's why the nice, prim, silly world's full of cabinets exhibiting little chips of raw material polished up neatly in one or two spots. that's why there are so few men and women--and those few have had to make themselves, or are made by accident. you're an accident, i suppose. the women who amount to anything usually are. the last actress i tried to do anything with might have become a somebody if it hadn't been for one thing: she had a hankering for respectability--a yearning to be a society person--to be thought well of by society people. it did for her." "i'll not sink on that rock," said susan cheerfully. "no secret longing for social position?" "none. even if i would, i couldn't." "that's one heavy handicap out of the way. but i'll not let myself begin to hope until i find out whether you've got incurable and unteachable vanity. if you have--then, no hope. if you haven't--there's a fighting chance." "you forget my compact," susan reminded him. "oh--the lover--spenser." brent reflected, strolled to the big window, his hands deep in his pockets. susan took advantage of his back to give way to her own feelings of utter amazement and incredulity. she certainly was not dreaming. and the man gazing out at the window was certainly flesh and blood--a great man, if voluble and eccentric. perhaps to act and speak as one pleased was one of the signs of greatness, one of its perquisites. was he amusing himself with her? was he perchance taken with her physically and employing these extraordinary methods as ways of approach? she had seen many peculiarities of sex-approach in men--some grotesque, many terrible, all beyond comprehension. was this another such? he wheeled suddenly, surprised her eyes upon him. he burst out laughing, and she felt that he had read her thoughts. however, he merely said: "have you anything to suggest--about spenser?" "i can't even tell him of your offer now. he's very ill--and sensitive about you." "about me? how ridiculous! i'm always coming across men i don't know who are full of venom toward me. i suppose he thinks i crowded him. no matter. you're sure you're not fancying yourself in love with him?" "no, i am not in love with him. he has changed--and so have i." he smiled at her. "especially in the last hour?" he suggested. "i had changed before that. i had been changing right along. but i didn't realize it fully until you talked with me--no, until after you gave me your card this morning." "you saw a chance--a hope--eh?" she nodded. "and at once became all nerves and courage. . . . as to spenser--i'll have some play carpenter sent to collaborate with him and set him up in the play business. you know it's a business as well as an art. and the chromos sell better than the oil paintings--except the finest ones. it's my chromos that have earned me the means and the leisure to try oils." "he'd never consent. he's very proud." "vain, you mean. pride will consent to anything as a means to an end. it's vanity that's squeamish and haughty. he needn't know." "but i couldn't discuss any change with him until he's much better." "i'll send the play carpenter to him--get fitzalan to send one of his carpenters." brent smiled. "you don't think _he_'ll hang back because of the compact, do you?" susan flushed painfully. "no," she admitted in a low voice. brent was still smiling at her, and the smile was cynical. but his tone soothed where his words would have wounded, as he went on: "a man of his sort--an average, 'there-are-two-kinds-of-women, good-and-bad' sort of man--has but one use for a woman of your sort." "i know that," said susan. "do you mind it?" "not much. i'd not mind it at all if i felt that i was somebody." brent put his hand on her shoulder. "you'll do, miss lenox," he said with quiet heartiness. "you may not be so big a somebody as you and i would like. but you'll count as one, all right." she looked at him with intense appeal in her eyes. "why?" she said earnestly. "_why_ do you do this?" he smiled gravely down at her--as gravely as brent could smile--with the quizzical suggestion never absent from his handsome face, so full of life and intelligence. "i've been observing your uneasiness," said he. "now listen. it would be impossible for you to judge me, to understand me. you are young and as yet small. i am forty, and have lived twenty-five of my forty years intensely. so, don't fall into the error of shallow people and size me up by your own foolish little standards. do you see what i mean?" susan's candid face revealed her guilt. "yes," said she, rather humbly. "i see you do understand," said he. "and that's a good sign. most people, hearing what i said, would have disregarded it as merely my vanity, would have gone on with their silly judging, would have set me down as a conceited ass who by some accident had got a reputation. but to proceed--i have not chosen you on impulse. long and patient study has made me able to judge character by the face, as a horse dealer can judge horses by looking at them. i don't need to read every line of a book to know whether it's wise or foolish, worth while or not. i don't need to know a human being for years or for hours or for minutes even, before i can measure certain things. i measured you. it's like astronomy. an astronomer wants to get the orbit of a star. he takes its position twice--and from the two observations he can calculate the orbit to the inch. i've got three observations of your orbit. enough--and to spare." "i shan't misunderstand again," said susan. "one thing more," insisted brent. "in our relations, we are to be not man and woman, but master and pupil. i shan't waste your time with any--other matters." it was susan's turn to laugh. "that's your polite way of warning me not to waste any of your time with--other matters." "precisely," conceded he. "a man in my position--a man in any sort of position, for that matter--is much annoyed by women trying to use their sex with him. i wished to make it clear at the outset that----" "that i could gain nothing by neglecting the trade of actress for the trade of woman," interrupted susan. "i understand perfectly." he put out his hand. "i see that at least we'll get on together. i'll have fitzalan send the carpenter to your friend at once." "today!" exclaimed susan, in surprise and delight. "why not?" he arranged paper and pen. "sit here and write spenser's address, and your own. your salary begins with today. i'll have my secretary mail you a check. and as soon as i can see you again, i'll send you a telegram. meanwhile--" he rummaged among a lot of paper bound plays on the table "here's 'cavalleria rusticana.' read it with a view to yourself as either _santuzzao_ or _lola_. study her first entrance--what you would do with it. don't be frightened. i expect nothing from you--nothing whatever. i'm glad you know nothing about acting. you'll have the less to unlearn." they had been moving towards the elevator. he shook hands again and, after adjusting the mechanism for the descent, closed the door. as it was closing she saw in his expression that his mind had already dismissed her for some one of the many other matters that crowded his life. chapter xiii the susan lenox who left delancey street at half past two that afternoon to call upon robert brent was not the susan lenox who returned to delancey street at half-past five. a man is wandering, lost in a cave, is groping this way and that in absolute darkness, with flagging hope and fainting strength--has reached the point where he wonders at his own folly in keeping on moving--is persuading himself that the sensible thing would be to lie down and give up. he sees a gleam of light. is it a reality? is it an illusion--one more of the illusions that have lured him on and on? he does not know; but instantly a fire sweeps through him, warming his dying strength into vigor. so it was with susan. the pariah class--the real pariah class--does not consist of merely the women formally put beyond the pale for violations of conventional morality and the men with the brand of thief or gambler upon them. our social, our industrial system has made it far vaster. it includes almost the whole population--all those who sell body or brain or soul in an uncertain market for uncertain hire, to gain the day's food and clothing, the night's shelter. this vast mass floats hither and yon on the tides and currents of destiny. now it halts, resting sluggishly in a dead calm; again it moves, sometimes slowly, sometimes under the lash of tempest. but it is ever the same vast inertia, with no particle of it possessing an aim beyond keeping afloat and alive. susan had been an atom, a spray of weed, in this sargasso sea. if you observe a huge, unwieldy crowd so closely packed that nothing can be done with it and it can do nothing with itself, you will note three different types. there are the entirely inert--and they make up most of the crowd. they do not resist; they helplessly move this way and that as the chance waves of motion prompt. of this type is the overwhelming majority of the human race. here and there in the mass you will see examples of a second type. these are individuals who are restive and resentful under the sense of helplessness and impotence. they struggle now gently, now furiously. they thrust backward or forward or to one side. they thresh about. but nothing comes of their efforts beyond a brief agitation, soon dying away in ripples. the inertia of the mass and their own lack of purpose conquer them. occasionally one of these grows so angry and so violent that the surrounding inertia quickens into purpose--the purpose of making an end of this agitation which is serving only to increase the general discomfort. and the agitator is trampled down, disappears, perhaps silently, perhaps with groan or shriek. continue to look at this crowd, so pitiful, so terrible, such a melancholy waste of incalculable power--continue to observe and you may chance upon an example of the third type. you are likely at first to confuse the third type with the second, for they seem to be much alike. here and there, of the resentful strugglers, will be one whose resentment is intelligent. he struggles, but it is not aimless struggle. he has seen or suspected in a definite direction a point where he would be more or less free, perhaps entirely free. he realizes how he is hemmed in, realizes how difficult, how dangerous, will be his endeavor to get to that point. and he proceeds to try to minimize or overcome the difficulties, the dangers. he struggles now gently, now earnestly, now violently--but always toward his fixed objective. he is driven back, to one side, is almost overwhelmed. he causes commotions that threaten to engulf him, and must pause or retreat until they have calmed. you may have to watch him long before you discover that, where other strugglers have been aimless, he aims and resolves. and little by little he gains, makes progress toward his goal--and once in a long while one such reaches that goal. it is triumph, success. susan, young, inexperienced, dazed; now too despondent, now too hopeful; now too gentle and again too infuriated--susan had been alternating between inertia and purposeless struggle. brent had given her the thing she lacked--had given her a definite, concrete, tangible purpose. he had shown her the place where, if she should arrive, she might be free of that hideous slavery of the miserable mass; and he had inspired her with the hope that she could reach it. and that was the susan lenox who came back to the little room in delancey street at half-past five. curiously, while she was thinking much about brent, she was thinking even more about burlingham--about their long talks on the show boat and in their wanderings in louisville and cincinnati. his philosophy, his teachings--the wisdom he had, but was unable to apply--began to come back to her. it was not strange that she should remember it, for she had admired him intensely and had listened to his every word, and she was then at the time when the memory takes its clearest and strongest impressions. the strangeness lay in the suddenness with which burlingham, so long dead, suddenly came to life, changed from a sad and tender memory to a vivid possibility, advising her, helping her, urging her on. clara, dressed to go to dinner with her lover, was waiting to arrange about their meeting to make together the usual rounds in the evening. "i've got an hour before i'm due at the hospital," said susan. "let's go down to kelly's for a drink." while they were going and as they sat in the clean little back room of kelly's well ordered and select corner saloon, clara gave her all the news she had gathered in an afternoon of visits among their acquaintances--how, because of a neighborhood complaint, there was to be a fake raid on gussie's opium joint at midnight; that mazie had caught a frightful fever; and that nettie was dying in governeur of the stab in the stomach her lover had given her at a ball three nights before; that the police had raised the tariff for sporting houses, and would collect seventy-five and a hundred a month protection money where the charge had been twenty-five and fifty--the plea was that the reformers, just elected and hoping for one term only, were compelling a larger fund from vice than the old steady year-in-and-year-out ruling crowd. "and they may raise _us_ to fifteen a week," said clara, "though i doubt it. they'll not cut off their nose to spite their face. if they raised the rate for the streets they'd drive two-thirds of the girls back to the factories and sweat shops. you're not listening, lorna. what's up?" "nothing." "your fellow's not had a relapse?" "no--nothing." "need some money? i can lend you ten. i did have twenty, but i gave sallie and that little jew girl who's her side partner ten for the bail bondsman. they got pinched last night for not paying up to the police. they've gone crazy about that prize fighter--at least, he thinks he is--that joe o'mara, and they're giving him every cent they make. it's funny about sallie. she's a catholic and goes to mass regular. and she keeps straight on sunday--no money'll tempt her--i've seen it tried. do you want the ten?" "no. i've got plenty." "we must look in at that jolly rovers' ball tonight. there'll be a lot of fellows with money there. "we can sure pull off something pretty good. anyhow, we'll have fun. but you don't care for the dances. well, they are a waste of time. and because the men pay for a few bum drinks and dance with a girl, they don't want to give up anything more. how's she to live, i want to know?" "would you like to get out of this, clara?" interrupted susan, coming out of her absent-mindedness. "would i! but what's the use of talking?" "but i mean, would you _really?_" "oh--if there was something better. but is there? i don't see how i'd be as well off, respectable. as i said to the rescue woman, what is there in it for a 'reclaimed' girl, as they call it? when they ask a man to reform they can offer him something--and he can go on up and up. but not for girls. nothing doing but charity and pity and the second table and the back door. i can make more money at this and have a better time, as long as my looks last. and i've turned down already a couple of chances to marry--men that wouldn't have looked at me if i'd been in a store or a factory or living out. i may marry." "don't do that," said susan. "marriage makes brutes of men, and slaves of women." "you speak as if you knew." "i do," said susan, in a tone that forbade question. "i ain't exactly stuck on the idea myself," pursued clara. "and if i don't, why when my looks are gone, where am i worse off than i'd be at the same age as a working girl? if i have to get a job then, i can get it--and i'll not be broken down like the respectable women at thirty--those that work or those that slop round boozing and neglecting their children while their husbands work. of course, there's chances against you in this business. but so there is in every business. suppose i worked in a factory and lost a leg in the machinery, like that girl of mantell, the bricklayer's? suppose i get an awful disease--to hear some people talk you'd think there wasn't any chances of death or horrible diseases at respectable work. why, how could anybody be worse off than if they got lung trouble and boils as big as your fist like those girls over in the tobacco factory?" "you needn't tell me about work," said susan. "the streets are full of wrecks from work--and the hospitals--and the graveyard over on the island. you can always go to that slavery. but i mean a respectable life, with everything better." "has one of those swell women from uptown been after you?" "no. this isn't a pious pipe dream." "you sound like it. one of them swell silk smarties got at me when i was in the hospital with the fever. she was a bird--she was. she handed me a line of grand talk, and i, being sort of weak with sickness, took it in. well, when she got right down to business, what did she want me to do? be a dressmaker or a lady's maid. me work twelve, fourteen, god knows how many hours--be too tired to have any fun--travel round with dead ones--be a doormat for a lot of cheap people that are tryin' to make out they ain't human like the rest of us. _me!_ and when i said, 'no, thank you,' what do you think?" "did she offer to get you a good home in the country?" said susan. "that was it. the _country!_ the nerve of her! but i called her bluff, all right, all right. i says to her, 'are you going to the country to live?' and she reared at _me_ daring to question _her_, and said she wasn't. 'you'd find it dead slow, wouldn't you?' says i. and she kind o' laughed and looked almost human. 'then,' says i, 'no more am i going to the country. i'll take my chances in little old new york,' i says." "i should think so!" exclaimed susan. "i'd like to be respectable, if i could afford it. but there's nothing in that game for poor girls unless they haven't got no looks to sell and have to sell the rest of themselves for some factory boss to get rich off of while they get poorer and weaker every day. and when they say 'god' to me, i say, 'who's he? he must be somebody that lives up on fifth avenue. we ain't seen him down our way.'" "i mean, go on the stage," resumed susan. "i wouldn't mind, if i could get in right. everything in this world depends on getting in right. i was born four flights up in a tenement, and i've been in wrong ever since." "i was in wrong from the beginning, too," said susan, thoughtfully. "in wrong--that's it exactly." clara's eyes again became eager with the hope of a peep into the mystery of susan's origin. but susan went on, "yes, i've always been in wrong. always." "oh, no," declared clara. "you've got education--and manners--and ladylike instincts. i'm at home here. i was never so well off in my life. i'm, you might say, on my way up in the world. most of us girls are--like the fellow that ain't got nothing to eat or no place to sleep and gets into jail--he's better off, ain't he? but you--you don't belong here at all." "i belong anywhere--and everywhere--and nowhere," said susan. "yes, i belong here. i've got a chance uptown. if it pans out, i'll let you in." clara looked at her wistfully. clara had a wicked temper when she was in liquor, and had the ordinary human proneness to lying, to mischievous gossip, and to utter laziness. the life she led, compelling cleanliness and neatness and a certain amount of thrift under penalty of instant ruin, had done her much good in saving her from going to pieces and becoming the ordinary sloven and drag on the energies of some man. "lorna," she now said, "i do believe you like me a little." "more than that," susan assured her. "you've saved me from being hard-hearted. i must go to the hospital. so long!" "how about this evening?" asked clara. "i'm staying in. i've got something to do." "well--i may be home early--unless i go to the ball." susan was refused admittance at the hospital. spenser, they said, had received a caller, had taxed his strength enough for the day. nor would it be worth while to return in the morning. the same caller was coming again. spenser had said she was to come in the afternoon. she received this cheerfully, yet not without a certain sense of hurt--which, however, did not last long. when she was admitted to spenser the following afternoon, she faced him guiltily--for the thoughts brent had set to bubbling and boiling in her. and her guilt showed in the tone of her greeting, in the reluctance and forced intensity of her kiss and embrace. she had compressed into the five most receptive years of a human being's life an experience that was, for one of her intelligence and education, equal to many times five years of ordinary life. and this experience had developed her instinct for concealing her deep feelings into a fixed habit. but it had not made her a liar--had not robbed her of her fundamental courage and self-respect which made her shrink in disdain from deceiving anyone who seemed to her to have the right to frankness. spenser, she felt as always, had that right--this, though he had not been frank with her; still, that was a matter for his own conscience and did not affect her conscience as to what was courageous and honorable toward him. so, had he been observing, he must have seen that something was wrong. but he was far too excited about his own affairs to note her. "my luck's turned!" cried he, after kissing her with enthusiasm. "fitzalan has sent jack sperry to me, and we're to collaborate on a play. i told you fitz was the real thing." susan turned hastily away to hide her telltale face. "who's sperry?" asked she, to gain time for self-control. "oh, he's a play-smith--and a bear at it. he has knocked together half a dozen successes. he'll supply the trade experience that i lack, and fitzalan will be sure to put on our piece." "you're a lot better--aren't you?" "better? i'm almost well." he certainly had made a sudden stride toward health. by way of doing something progressive he had had a shave, and that had restored the look of youth to his face--or, rather, had uncovered it. a strong, handsome face it was--much handsomer than brent's--and with the subtle, moral weakness of optimistic vanity well concealed. yes, much handsomer than brent's, which wasn't really handsome at all--yet was superbly handsomer, also--the handsomeness that comes from being through and through a somebody. she saw again why she had cared for rod so deeply; but she also saw why she could not care again, at least not in that same absorbed, self-effacing way. physical attraction--yes. and a certain remnant of the feeling of comradeship, too. but never again utter belief, worshipful admiration--or any other degree of belief or admiration beyond the mild and critical. she herself had grown. also, brent's penetrating and just analysis of spenser had put clearly before her precisely what he was--precisely what she herself had been vaguely thinking of him. as he talked on and on of sperry's visit and the new projects, she listened, looking at his character in the light brent had turned upon it--brent who had in a few brief moments turned such floods of light upon so many things she had been seeing dimly or not at all. moderate prosperity and moderate adversity bring out the best there is in a man; the extreme of either brings out his worst. the actual man is the best there is in him, and not the worst, but it is one of the tragedies of life that those who have once seen his worst ever afterward have sense of it chiefly, and cannot return to the feeling they had for him when his worst was undreamed of. "i'm not in love with brent," thought susan. "but having known him, i can't ever any more care for rod. he seems small beside brent--and he _is_ small." spenser in his optimistic dreaming aloud had reached a point where it was necessary to assign susan a role in his dazzling career. "you'll not have to go on the stage," said he. "i'll look out for you. by next week sperry and i will have got together a scenario for the play and when sperry reads it to fitzalan we'll get an advance of at least five hundred. so you and i will take a nice room and bath uptown--as a starter--and we'll be happy again--happier than before." "no, i'm going to support myself," said susan promptly. "trash!" cried spenser, smiling tenderly at her. "do you suppose i'd allow you to mix up in stage life? you've forgotten how jealous i am of you. you don't know what i've suffered since i've been here sick, brooding over what you're doing, to----" she laid her fingers on his lips. "what's the use of fretting about anything that has to be?" said she, smilingly. "i'm going to support myself. you may as well make up your mind to it." "plenty of time to argue that out," said he, and his tone forecast his verdict on the arguing. and he changed the subject by saying, "i see you still cling to your fad of looking fascinating about the feet. that was one of the reasons i never could trust you. a girl with as charming feet and ankles as you have, and so much pride in getting them up well, simply cannot be trustworthy." he laughed. "no, you were made to be taken care of, my dear." she did not press the matter. she had taken her stand; that was enough for the present. after an hour with him, she went home to get herself something to eat on her gas stove. spenser's confidence in the future did not move her even to the extent of laying out half a dollar on a restaurant dinner. women have the habit of believing in the optimistic outpourings of egotistical men, and often hasten men along the road to ruin by proclaiming this belief and acting upon it. but not intelligent women of experience; that sort of woman, by checking optimistic husbands, fathers, sons, lovers, has even put off ruin--sometimes until death has had the chance to save the optimist from the inevitable consequence of his folly. when she finished her chop and vegetable, instead of lighting a cigarette and lingering over a cup of black coffee she quickly straightened up and began upon the play brent had given her. she had read it several times the night before, and again and again during the day. but not until now did she feel sufficiently calmed down from her agitations of thought and emotion to attack the play understandingly. thanks to defective education the most enlightened of us go through life much like a dim-sighted man who has no spectacles. almost the whole of the wonderful panorama of the universe is unseen by us, or, if seen, is but partially understood or absurdly misunderstood. when it comes to the subtler things, the things of science and art, rarely indeed is there anyone who has the necessary training to get more than the crudest, most imperfect pleasure from them. what little training we have is so limping that it spoils the charm of mystery with which savage ignorance invests the universe from blade of grass to star, and does not put in place of that broken charm the profounder and loftier joy of understanding. to take for illustration the most widely diffused of all the higher arts and sciences, reading: how many so-called "educated" people can read understandingly even a novel, the form of literature designed to make the least demand upon the mind? people say they have read, but, when questioned, they show that they have got merely a glimmering of the real action, the faintest hint of style and characterization, have perhaps noted some stray epigram which they quote with evidently faulty grasp of its meaning. when the thing read is a play, almost no one can get from it a coherent notion of what it is about. most of us have nothing that can justly be called imagination; our early training at home and at school killed in the shoot that finest plant of the mind's garden. so there is no ability to fill in the picture which the dramatic author draws in outline. susan had not seen "cavalleria rusticana" either as play or as opera. but when she and spenser were together in forty-fourth street, she had read plays and had dreamed over them; the talk had been almost altogether of plays--of writing plays, of constructing scenes, of productions, of acting, of all the many aspects of the theater. spenser read scenes to her, got her to help him with criticism, and she was present when he went over his work with drumley, riggs, townsend and the others. thus, reading a play was no untried art to her. she read "cavalleria" through slowly, taking about an hour to it. she saw now why brent had given it to her as the primer lesson--the simple, elemental story of a peasant girl's ruin under promise of marriage; of her lover's wearying of one who had only crude physical charm; of his being attracted by a young married woman, gay as well as pretty, offering the security in intrigue that an unmarried woman could not offer. such a play is at once the easiest and the hardest to act--the easiest because every audience understands it perfectly and supplies unconsciously almost any defect in the acting; the hardest because any actor with the education necessary to acting well finds it next to impossible to divest himself or herself of the sophistications of education and get back to the elemental animal. _santuzza_ or _lola_? susan debated. _santuzza_ was the big and easy part; _lola_, the smaller part, was of the kind that is usually neglected. but susan saw possibilities in the character of the woman who won _turiddu_ away--the triumphant woman. the two women represented the two kinds of love--the love that is serious, the love that is light. and experience had taught her why it is that human nature soon tires of intensity, turns to frivolity. she felt that, if she could act, she would try to show that not _turiddu's_ fickleness nor his contempt of the woman who had yielded, but _santuzza's_ sad intensity and _lola's_ butterfly gayety had cost _santuzza_ her lover and her lover his life. so, it was not _santuzza's_ but _lola's_ first entrance that she studied. in the next morning's mail, under cover addressed "miss susan lenox, care of miss lorna sackville," as she had written it for brent, came the promised check for forty dollars. it was signed john p. garvey, secretary, and was inclosed with a note bearing the same signature: dear madam: herewith i send you a check for forty dollars for the first week's salary under your arrangement with mr. brent. no receipt is necessary. until further notice a check for the same amount will be mailed you each thursday. unless you receive notice to the contrary, please call as before, at three o'clock next wednesday. it made her nervous to think of those five days before she should see brent. he had assured her he would expect nothing from her; but she felt she must be able to show him that she had not been wasting her time--his time, the time for which he was paying nearly six dollars a day. she must work every waking hour, except the two hours each day at the hospital. she recalled what brent had said about the advantage of being contented alone--and how everything worth doing must be done in solitude. she had never thought about her own feelings as to company and solitude, as it was not her habit to think about herself. but now she realized how solitary she had been, and how it had bred in her habits of thinking and reading--and how valuable these habits would be to her in her work. there was rod, for example. he hated being alone, must have someone around even when he was writing; and he had no taste for order or system. she understood why it was so hard for him to stick at anything, to put anything through to the finish. with her fondness for being alone, with her passion for reading and thinking about what she read, surely she ought soon to begin to accomplish something--if there was any ability in her. she found rod in higher spirits. several ideas for his play had come to him; he already saw it acted, successful, drawing crowded houses, bringing him in anywhere from five hundred to a thousand a week. she was not troubled hunting for things to talk about with him--she, who could think of but one thing and that a secret from him. he talked his play, a steady stream with not a seeing glance at her or a question about her. she watched the little clock at the side of the bed. at the end of an hour to the minute, she interrupted him in the middle of a sentence. "i must go now," said she, rising. "sit down," he cried. "you can stay all day. the doctor says it will do me good to have you to talk with. and sperry isn't coming until tomorrow." "i can't do it," said she. "i must go." he misunderstood her avoiding glance. "now, susie--sit down there," commanded he. "we've got plenty of money. you--you needn't bother about it any more." "we're not settled yet," said she. "until we are, i'd not dare take the risk." she was subtly adroit by chance, not by design. "risk!" exclaimed he angrily. "there's no risk. i've as good as got the advance money. sit down." she hesitated. "don't be angry," pleaded she in a voice that faltered. "but i must go." into his eyes came the gleam of distrust and jealousy. "look at me," he ordered. with some difficulty she forced her eyes to meet his. "have you got a lover?" "no." "then where do you get the money we're living on?" he counted on her being too humiliated to answer in words. instead of the hanging head and burning cheeks he saw clear, steady eyes, heard a calm, gentle and dignified voice say: "in the streets." his eyes dropped and a look of abject shame made his face pitiable. "good heavens," he muttered. "how low we are!" "we've been doing the best we could," said she simply. "isn't there any decency anywhere in you?" he flashed out, eagerly seizing the chance to forget his own shame in contemplating her greater degradation. she looked out of the window. there was something terrible in the calmness of her profile. she finally said in an even, pensive voice: "you have been intimate with a great many women, rod. but you have never got acquainted with a single one." he laughed good-humoredly. "oh, yes, i have. i've learned that 'every woman is at heart a rake,' as mr. jingle pope says." she looked at him again, her face now curiously lighted by her slow faint smile. "perhaps they showed you only what they thought you'd be able to appreciate," she suggested. he took this as evidence of her being jealous of him. "tell me, susan, did you leave me--in forty-fourth street--because you thought or heard i wasn't true to you?" "what did drumley tell you?" "i asked him, as you said in your note. he told me he knew no reason." so drumley had decided it was best rod should not know why she left. well, perhaps--probably--drumley was right. but there was no reason why he shouldn't know the truth now. "i left," said she, "because i saw we were bad for each other." this amused him. she saw that he did not believe. it wounded her, but she smiled carelessly. her smile encouraged him to say: "i couldn't quite make up my mind whether the reason was jealousy or because you had the soul of a shameless woman. you see, i know human nature, and i know that a woman who once crosses the line never crosses back. i'll always have to watch you, my dear. but somehow i like it. i guess you have--you and i have--a rotten streak in us. we were brought up too strictly. that always makes one either too firm or too loose. i used to think i liked good women. but i don't. they bore me. that shows i'm rotten." "or that your idea of what's good is--is mistaken." "you don't pretend that _you_ haven't done wrong?" cried rod. "i might have done worse," replied she. "i might have wronged others. no, rod, i can't honestly say i've ever felt wicked." "why, what brought you here?" she reflected a moment, then smiled. "two things brought me down," said she. "in the first place, i wasn't raised right. i was raised as a lady instead of as a human being. so i didn't know how to meet the conditions of life. in the second place--" her smile returned, broadened--"i was too--too what's called 'good.'" "pity about you!" mocked he. "being what's called good is all very well if you're independent or if you've got a husband or a father to do life's dirty work for you--or, perhaps, if you happen to be in some profession like preaching or teaching--though i don't believe the so-called 'goodness' would let you get very far even as a preacher. in most lines, to practice what we're taught as children would be to go to the bottom like a stone. you know this is a hard world, rod. it's full of men and women fighting desperately for food and clothes and a roof to cover them--fighting each other. and to get on you've got to have the courage and the indifference to your fellow beings that'll enable you to do it." "there's a lot of truth in that," admitted spenser. "if i'd not been such a 'good fellow,' as they call it--a fellow everybody liked--if i'd been like brent, for instance--brent, who never would have any friends, who never would do anything for anybody but himself, who hadn't a thought except for his career--why, i'd be where he is." it was at the tip of susan's tongue to say, "yes--strong--able to help others--able to do things worth while." but she did not speak. rod went on: "i'm not going to be a fool any longer. i'm going to be too busy to have friends or to help people or to do anything but push my own interests." susan, indifferent to being thus wholly misunderstood, was again moving toward the door. "i'll be back this evening, as usual," said she. spenser's face became hard and lowering: "you're going to stay here now, or you're not coming back," said he. "you can take your choice. do you want me to know you've got the soul of a streetwalker?" she stood at the foot of the bed, gazing at the wall above his head. "i must earn our expenses until we're safe," said she, once more telling a literal truth that was yet a complete deception. "why do you fret me?" exclaimed he. "do you want me to be sick again?" "suppose you didn't get the advance right away," urged she. "i tell you i shall get it! and i won't have you--do as you are doing. if you go, you go for keeps." she seated herself. "do you want me to read or take dictation?" his face expressed the satisfaction small people find in small successes at asserting authority. "don't be angry," said he. "i'm acting for your good. i'm saving you from yourself." "i'm not angry," replied she, her strange eyes resting upon him. he shifted uncomfortably. "now what does that look mean?" he demanded with an uneasy laugh. she smiled, shrugged her shoulders. sperry--small and thin, a weather-beaten, wooden face suggesting mr. punch, sly keen eyes, theater in every tone and gesture sperry pushed the scenario hastily to completion and was so successful with fitzalan that on sunday afternoon he brought two hundred and fifty dollars, spenser's half of the advance money. "didn't i tell you!" said spenser to susan, in triumph. "we'll move at once. go pack your traps and put them in a carriage, and by the time you're back here sperry and the nurses will have me ready." it was about three when susan got to her room. clara heard her come in and soon appeared, bare feet in mules, hair hanging every which way. despite the softening effect of the white nightdress and of the framing of abundant hair, her face was hard and coarse. she had been drunk on liquor and on opium the night before, and the effects were wearing off. as she was only twenty years old, the hard coarse look would withdraw before youth in a few hours; it was there only temporarily as a foreshadowing of what clara would look like in five years or so. "hello, lorna," said she. "gee, what a bun my fellow and i had on last night! did you hear us scrapping when we came in about five o'clock?" "no," replied susan. "i was up late and had a lot to do, and was kept at the hospital all day. i guess i must have fallen asleep." "he gave me an awful beating," pursued clara. "but i got one good crack at him with a bottle." she laughed. "i don't think he'll be doing much flirting till his cheek heals up. he looks a sight!" she opened her nightdress and showed susan a deep blue-black mark on her left breast. "i wonder if i'll get cancer from that?" said she. "it'd be just my rotten luck. i've heard of several cases of it lately, and my father kicked my mother there, and she got cancer. lord, how she did suffer!" susan shivered, turned her eyes away. her blood surged with joy that she had once more climbed up out of this deep, dark wallow where the masses of her fellow beings weltered in darkness and drunkenness and disease--was up among the favored ones who, while they could not entirely escape the great ills of life, at least had the intelligence and the means to mitigate them. how fortunate that few of these unhappy ones had the imagination to realize their own wretchedness! "i don't care what becomes of me," clara was saying. "what is there in it for me? i can have a good time only as long as my looks last--and that's true of every woman, ain't it? what's a woman but a body? ain't i right?" "that's why i'm going to stop being a woman as soon as ever i can," said susan. "why, you're packing up!" cried clara. "yes. my friend's well enough to be moved. we're going to live uptown." "right away?" "this afternoon." clara dropped into a chair and began to weep. "i'll miss you something fierce!" sobbed she. "you're the only friend in the world i give a damn for, or that gives a damn for me. i wish to god i was like you. you don't need anybody." "oh, yes, i do, dear," cried susan. "but, i mean, you don't lean on anybody. i don't mean you're hard-hearted--for you ain't. you've pulled me and a dozen other girls out of the hole lots of times. but you're independent. can't you take me along? i can drop that bum across the hall. i don't give a hoot for him. but a girl's got to make believe she cares for somebody or she'd blow her brains out." "i can't take you along, but i'm going to come for you as soon as i'm on my feet," said susan. "i've got to get up myself first. i've learned at least that much." "oh, you'll forget all about _me_." "no," said susan. and clara knew that she would not. moaned clara, "i'm not fit to go. i'm only a common streetwalker. you belong up there. you're going back to your own. but i belong here. i wish to god i was like most of the people down here, and didn't have any sense. no wonder you used to drink so! i'm getting that way, too. the only people that don't hit the booze hard down here are the muttonheads who don't know nothing and can't learn nothing. . . . i used to be contented. but somehow, being with you so much has made me dissatisfied." "that means you're on your way up," said susan, busy with her packing. "it would, if i had sense enough. oh, it's torment to have sense enough to see, and not sense enough to do!" "i'll come for you soon," said susan. "you're going up with me." clara watched her for some time in silence. "you're sure you're going to win?" said she, at last. "sure," replied susan. "oh, you can't be as sure as that." "yes, but i can," laughed she. "i'm done with foolishness. i've made up my mind to get up in the world--_with_ my self-respect if possible; if not, then without it. i'm going to have everything--money, comfort, luxury, pleasure. everything!" and she dropped a folded skirt emphatically upon the pile she had been making, and gave a short, sharp nod. "i was taught a lot of things when i was little--things about being sweet and unselfish and all that. they'd be fine, if the world was heaven. but it isn't." "not exactly," said clara. "maybe they're fine, if you want to get to heaven," continued susan. "but i'm not trying to get to heaven. i'm trying to live on earth. i don't like the game, and i don't like its rules. but--it's the only game, and i can't change the rules. so i'm going to follow them--at least, until i get what i want." "do you mean to say you've got any respect for yourself?" said clara. "_i_ haven't. and i don't see how any girl in our line can have." "i thought i hadn't," was susan's reply, "until i talked with--with someone i met the other day. if you slipped and fell in the mud--or were thrown into it--you wouldn't say, 'i'm dirty through and through. i can never get clean again'--would you?" "but that's different," objected clara. "not a bit," declared susan. "if you look around this world, you'll see that everybody who ever moved about at all has slipped and fallen in the mud--or has been pushed in." "mostly pushed in." "mostly pushed in," assented susan. "and those that have good sense get up as soon as they can, and wash as much of the mud off as'll come off--maybe all--and go on. the fools--they worry about the mud. but not i--not any more!. . . and not you, my dear--when i get you uptown." clara was now looking on susan's departure as a dawn of good luck for herself. she took a headache powder, telephoned for a carriage, and helped carry down the two big packages that contained all susan's possessions worth moving. and they kissed each other good-by with smiling faces. susan did not give clara, the loose-tongued, her new address; nor did clara, conscious of her own weakness, ask for it. "don't put yourself out about me," cried clara in farewell. "get a good tight grip yourself, first." "that's advice i need," answered susan. "good-by. soon--_soon!_" the carriage had to move slowly through those narrow tenement streets, so thronged were they with the people swarmed from hot little rooms into the open to try to get a little air that did not threaten to burn and choke as it entered the lungs. susan's nostrils were filled with the stenches of animal and vegetable decay--stenches descending in heavy clouds from the open windows of the flats and from the fire escapes crowded with all manner of rubbish; stenches from the rotting, brimful garbage cans; stenches from the groceries and butcher shops and bakeries where the poorest qualities of food were exposed to the contamination of swarms of disgusting fat flies, of mangy, vermin-harassed children and cats and dogs; stenches from the never washed human bodies, clad in filthy garments and drawn out of shape by disease and toil. sore eyes, scrofula, withered arm or leg, sagged shoulder, hip out of joint--there, crawling along the sidewalk, was the boy whose legs had been cut off by the street car; and the stumps were horribly ulcered. and there at the basement window drooled and cackled the fat idiot girl whose mother sacrificed everything always to dress her freshly in pink. what a world!--where a few people such a very few!--lived in health and comfort and cleanliness--and the millions lived in disease and squalor, ignorant, untouched of civilization save to wear its cast-off clothes and to eat its castaway food and to live in its dark noisome cellars!--and to toil unceasingly to make for others the good things of which they had none themselves! it made her heartsick--the sadder because nothing could be done about it. stay and help? as well stay to put out a conflagration barehanded and alone. as the carriage reached wider second avenue, the horses broke into a trot. susan drew a long breath of the purer air--then shuddered as she saw the corner where the dive into which the cadet had lured her flaunted its telltale awnings. lower still her spirits sank when she was passing, a few blocks further on, the music hall. there, too, she had had a chance, had let hope blaze high. and she was going forward--into--the region where she had been a slave to freddie palmer--no, to the system of which he was a slave no less than she---- "i _must_ be strong! i _must!_" susan said to herself, and there was desperation in the gleam of her eyes, in the set of her chin. "this time i will fight! and i feel at last that i can." but her spirits soared no more that day. chapter xiv sperry had chosen for "mr. and mrs. spenser" the second floor rear of a house on the south side of west forty-fifth street a few doors off sixth avenue. it was furnished as a sitting-room--elegant in red plush, with oil paintings on the walls, a fringed red silk-plush dado fastened to the mantelpiece with bright brass-headed tacks, elaborate imitation lace throws on the sofa and chairs, and an imposing piece that might have been a cabinet organ or a pianola or a roll-top desk but was in fact a comfortable folding bed. there was a marble stationary washstand behind the hand-embroidered screen in the corner, near one of the two windows. through a deep clothes closet was a small but satisfactory bathroom. "and it's warm in winter," said mrs. norris, the landlady, to susan. "don't you hate a cold bathroom?" susan declared that she did. "there's only one thing i hate worse," said mrs. norris, "and that's cold coffee." she had one of those large faces which look bald because the frame of hair does not begin until unusually far back. at fifty, when her hair would be thin, mrs. norris would be homely; but at thirty she was handsome in a bold, strong way. her hair was always carefully done, her good figure beautifully corseted. it was said she was not married to mr. norris--because new york likes to believe that people are living together without being married, because mr. norris came and went irregularly, and because mrs. norris was so particular about her toilet--and everyone knows that when a woman has the man with whom she's satisfied securely fastened, she shows her content or her virtuous indifference to other men--or her laziness--by neglecting her hair and her hips and dressing in any old thing any which way. whatever the truth as to mrs. norris's domestic life, she carried herself strictly and insisted upon keeping her house as respectable as can reasonably be expected in a large city. that is, everyone in it was quiet, was of steady and sedate habit, was backed by references. not until sperry had thoroughly qualified as a responsible person did mrs. norris accept his assurances as to the spensers and consent to receive them. downtown the apartment houses that admit persons of loose character are usually more expensive because that class of tenants have more and expect more than ordinary working people. uptown the custom is the reverse; to get into a respectable house you must pay more. the spensers had to pay fourteen a week for their quarters--and they were getting a real bargain, mrs. norris having a weakness for literature and art where they were respectable and paid regularly. "what's left of the two hundred and fifty will not last long," said spenser to susan, when they were established and alone. "but we'll have another five hundred as soon as the play's done, and that'll be in less than a month. we're to begin tomorrow. in less than two months the play'll be on and the royalties will be coming in. i wonder how much i owe the doctor and the hospital." "that's settled," said susan. he glanced at her with a frown. "how much was it? you had no right to pay!" "you couldn't have got either doctor or room without payment in advance." she spoke tranquilly, with a quiet assurance of manner that was new in her, the nervous and sensitive about causing displeasure in others. she added, "don't be cross, rod. you know it's only pretense." "don't you believe anybody has any decency?" demanded he. "it depends on what you mean by decency," replied she. "but why talk of the past? let's forget it." "i would that i could!" exclaimed he. she laughed at his heroics. "put that in your play," said she. "but this isn't the melodrama of the stage. it's the farce comedy of life." "how you have changed! has all the sweetness, all the womanliness, gone out of your character?" she showed how little she was impressed. "i've learned to take terrible things--really terrible things--without making a fuss--or feeling like making a fuss. you can't expect me to get excited over mere staginess. they're fond of fake emotions up in this part of town. but down where i've been so long the real horrors come too thick and fast for there to be any time to fake." he continued to frown, presently came out of a deep study to say, "susie, i see i've got to have a serious talk with you." "wait till you're well, my dear," said she. "i'm afraid i'll not be very sympathetic with your seriousness." "no--today. i'm not an invalid. and our relations worry me, whenever i think of them." he observed her as she sat with hands loosely clasped in her lap; there was an inscrutable look upon her delicate face, upon the clear-cut features so attractively framed by her thick dark hair, brown in some lights, black in others. "well?" said she. "to begin, i want you to stop rouging your lips. it's the only sign of--of what you were. i'd a little rather you didn't smoke. but as respectable women smoke nowadays, why i don't seriously object. and when you get more clothes, get quieter ones. not that you dress loudly or in bad taste----" "thank you," murmured susan. "what did you say?" "i didn't mean to interrupt. go on." "i admire the way you dress, but it makes me jealous. i want you to have nice clothes for the house. i like things that show your neck and suggest your form. but i don't want you attracting men's eyes and their loose thoughts, in the street. . . . and i don't want you to look so damnably alluring about the feet. that's your best trick--and your worst. why are you smiling--in that fashion?" "you talk to me as if i were your wife." he gazed at her with an expression that was as affectionate as it was generous--and it was most generous. "well, you may be some day--if you keep straight. and i think you will." the artificial red of her lips greatly helped to make her sweetly smiling face the perfection of gentle irony. "and you?" said she. "you know perfectly well it's different about a man." "i know nothing of the sort," replied she. "among certain kinds of people that is the rule. but i'm not of those kinds. i'm trying to make my way in the world, exactly like a man. so i've got to be free from the rules that may be all very well for ladies. a woman can't fight with her hands tied, any more than a man can--and you know what happens to the men who allow themselves to be tied; they're poor downtrodden creatures working hard at small pay for the men who fight with their hands free." "i've taken you out of the unprotected woman class, my dear," he reminded her. "you're mine, now, and you're going back where you belong." "back to the cage it's taken me so long to learn to do without?" she shook her head. "no, rod--i couldn't possibly do it--not if i wanted to. . . . you've got several false ideas about me. you'll have to get rid of them, if we're to get along." "for instance?" "in the first place, don't delude yourself with the notion that i'd marry you. i don't know whether the man i was forced to marry is dead or whether he's got a divorce. i don't care. no matter how free i was i shouldn't marry you." he smiled complacently. she noted it without irritation. truly, small indeed is the heat of any kind that can be got from the warmed-up ashes of a burnt-out passion. she went easily on: "you have nothing to offer me--neither love nor money. and a woman--unless she's a poor excuse--insists on one or the other. you and i fancied we loved each other for a while. we don't fool ourselves in that way now. at least i don't, though i believe you do imagine i'm in love with you." "you wouldn't be here if you weren't." "put that out of your head, rod. it'll only breed trouble. i don't like to say these things to you, but you compel me to. i learned long ago how foolish it is to put off unpleasant things that will have to be faced in the end. the longer they're put off the worse the final reckoning is. most of my troubles have come through my being too weak or good-natured--or whatever it was--to act as my good sense told me. i'm not going to make that mistake any more. and i'm going to start the new deal with absolute frankness with you. i am not in love with you." "i know you better than you know yourself," said he. "for a little while after i found you again i did have a return of the old feeling--or something like it. but it soon passed. i couldn't love you. i know you too well." he struggled hard with his temper, as his vanity lashed at it. she saw, struggled with her old sensitiveness about inflicting even necessary pain upon others, went on: "i simply like you, rod--and that's all. we're well acquainted. you're physically attractive to me--not wildly so, but enough--more than any other man--probably more than most husbands are to their wives--or most wives to their husbands. so as long as you treat me well and don't wander off to other women, i'm more than willing to stay on here." "really!" said he, in an intensely sarcastic tone. "really!" "now--keep your temper," she warned. "didn't i keep mine when you were handing me that impertinent talk about how i should dress and the rest of it? no--let me finish. in the second place and in conclusion, my dear rod, i'm not going to live off you. i'll pay my half of the room. i'll pay for my own clothes--and rouge for my lips. i'll buy and cook what we eat in the room; you'll pay when we go to a restaurant. i believe that's all." "are you quite sure?" inquired he with much satire. "yes, i think so. except--if you don't like my terms, i'm ready to leave at once." "and go back to the streets, i suppose?" jeered he. "if it were necessary--yes. so long as i've got my youth and my health, i'll do precisely as i please. i've no craving for respectability--not the slightest. i--i----" she tried to speak of her birth, that secret shame of which she was ashamed. she had been thinking that brent's big fine way of looking at things had cured her of this bitterness. she found that it had not--as yet. so she went on, "i'd prefer your friendship to your ill will--much prefer it, as you're the only person i can look to for what a man can do for a woman, and as i like you. but if i have to take tyranny along with the friendship--" she looked at him quietly and her tones were almost tender, almost appealing--"then, it's good-by, rod." she had silenced him, for he saw in her eyes, much more gray than violet though the suggestion of violet was there, that she meant precisely what she said. he was astonished, almost dazed by the change in her. this woman grown was not the susie who had left him. no--and yet---- she had left him, hadn't she? that showed a character completely hidden from him, perhaps the character he was now seeing. he asked--and there was no sarcasm and a great deal of uneasiness in his tone: "how do you expect to make a living?" "i've got a place at forty dollars a week." "forty dollars a week! you!" he scowled savagely at her. "there's only one thing anyone would pay you forty a week for." "that's what i'd have said," rejoined she. "but it seems not to be true. my luck may not last, but while it lasts, i'll have forty a week." "i don't believe you," said he, with the angry bluntness of jealousy. "then you want me to go?" inquired she, with a certain melancholy but without any weakness. he ignored her question. he demanded: "who's giving it to you?" "brent." spenser leaned from the bed toward her in his excitement. "_robert_ brent?" he cried. "yes. i'm to have a part in one of his plays." spenser laughed harshly. "what rot! you're his mistress." "it wouldn't be strange for you to think i'd accept that position for so little, but you must know a man of his sort wouldn't have so cheap a mistress." "it's simply absurd." "he is to train me himself." "you never told me you knew him." "i don't." "who got you the job?" "he saw me in fitzalan's office the day you sent me there. he asked me to call, and when i went he made me the offer." "absolute rot. what reason did he give?" "he said i looked as if i had the temperament he was in search of." "you must take me for a fool." "why should i lie to you?" "god knows. why do women lie to men all the time? for the pleasure of fooling them." "oh, no. to get money, rod--the best reason in the world, it being rather hard for a woman to make money by working for it." "the man's in love with you!" "i wish he were," said susan, laughing. "i'd not be here, my dear--you may be sure of that. and i'd not content myself with forty a week. oh, you don't know what tastes i've got! wait till i turn myself loose." "well--you can--in a few months," said spenser. even as he had been protesting his disbelief in her story, his manner toward her had been growing more respectful--a change that at once hurt and amused her with its cynical suggestions, and also pleased her, giving her a confidence-breeding sense of a new value in herself. rod went on, with a kind of shamefaced mingling of jest and earnest: "you stick by me, susie, old girl, and the time'll come when i'll be able to give you more than brent." "i hope so," said susan. he eyed her sharply. "i feel like a fool believing such a fairy story as you've been telling me. yet i do." "that's good," laughed she. "now i can stay. if you hadn't believed me, i'd have had to go. and i don't want to do that--not yet." his eyes flinched. "not yet? what does that mean?" "it means i'm content to stay, at present. who can answer for tomorrow?" her eyes lit up mockingly. "for instance--you. today you think you're going to be true to me don't you? yet tomorrow--or as soon as you get strength and street clothes, i may catch you in some restaurant telling some girl she's the one you've been getting ready for." he laughed, but not heartily. sperry came, and susan went to buy at a department store a complete outfit for rod, who still had only nightshirts. as she had often bought for him in the old days, she felt she would have no difficulty in fitting him nearly enough, with her accurate eye supplementing the measurements she had taken. when she got back home two hours and a half later, bringing her purchases in a cab, sperry had gone and rod was asleep. she sat in the bathroom, with the gas lighted, and worked at "cavalleria" until she heard him calling. he had awakened in high good-humor. "that was an awful raking you gave me before sperry came," began he. "but it did me good. a man gets so in the habit of ordering women about that it becomes second nature to him. you've made it clear to me that i've even less control over you than you have over me. so, dear, i'm going to be humble and try to give satisfaction, as servants say." "you'd better," laughed susan. "at least, until you get on your feet again." "you say we don't love each other," rod went on, a becoming brightness in his strong face. "well--maybe so. but--we suit each other--don't we?" "that's why i want to stay," said susan, sitting on the bed and laying her hand caressingly upon his. "i could stand it to go, for i've been trained to stand anything--everything. but i'd hate it." he put his arm round her, drew her against his breast. "aren't you happy here?" he murmured. "happier than any place else in the world," replied she softly. after a while she got a small dinner for their two selves on the gas stove she had brought with her and had set up in the bathroom. as they ate, she cross-legged on the bed opposite him, they beamed contentedly at each other. "do you remember the dinner we had at the st. nicholas in cincinnati?" asked she. "it wasn't as good as this," declared he. "not nearly so well cooked. you could make a fortune as a cook. but then you do everything well." "even to rouging my lips?" "oh, forget it!" laughed he. "i'm an ass. there's a wonderful fascination in the contrast between the dash of scarlet and the pallor of that clear, lovely skin of yours." her eyes danced. "you are getting well!" she exclaimed. "i'm sorry i bought you clothes. i'll be uneasy every time you're out." "you can trust me. i see i've got to hustle to keep my job with you. well, thank god, your friend brent's old enough to be your father." "is he?" cried susan. "do you know, i never thought of his age." "yes, he's forty at least--more. are you sure he isn't after _you_, susie?" "he warned me that if i annoyed him in that way he'd discharge me." "do you like him?" "i--don't--know" was susan's slow, reflective answer. "i'm--afraid of him--a little." both became silent. finally rod said, with an impatient shake of the head, "let's not think of him." "let's try on your new clothes," cried susan. and when the dishes were cleared away they had a grand time trying on the things she had bought. it was amazing how near she had come to fitting him. "you ought to feel flattered," said she. "only a labor of love could have turned out so well." he turned abruptly from admiring his new suit in the glass and caught her in his arms. "you do love me--you do!" he cried. "no woman would have done all you've done for me, if she didn't." for answer, susan kissed him passionately; and as her body trembled with the sudden upheaval of emotions long dormant or indulged only in debased, hateful ways, she burst into tears. she knew, even in that moment of passion, that she did not love him; but not love itself can move the heart more deeply than gratitude and her bruised heart was so grateful for his words and tones and gestures of affection! wednesday afternoon, on the way to brent's house, she glanced up at the clock in the corner tower of the grand central station. it lacked five minutes of three. she walked slowly, timed herself so accurately that, as the butler opened the door, a cathedral chime hidden somewhere in the upper interior boomed the hour musically. the man took her direct to the elevator, and when it stopped at the top floor, brent himself opened the door, as before. he was dismissing a short fat man whom susan placed as a manager, and a tall, slim, and most fashionably dressed woman with a beautiful insincere face--anyone would have at once declared her an actress, probably a star. the woman gave susan a searching, feminine look which changed swiftly to superciliousness. both the man and the woman were loath to go, evidently had not finished what they had come to say. but brent, in his abrupt but courteous way, said: "tomorrow at four, then. as you see, my next appointment has begun." and he had them in the elevator with the door closed. he turned upon susan the gaze that seemed to take in everything. "you are in better spirits, i see," said he. "i'm sorry to have interrupted," said she. "i could have waited." "but _i_ couldn't," replied he. "some day you'll discover that your time is valuable, and that to waste it is far sillier than if you were to walk along throwing your money into the gutter. time ought to be used like money--spent generously but intelligently." he talked rapidly on, with his manner as full of unexpressed and inexpressible intensity as the voice of the violin, with his frank egotism that had no suggestion of vanity or conceit. "because i systematize my time, i'm never in a hurry, never at a loss for time to give to whatever i wish. i didn't refuse to keep you waiting for your sake but for my own. now the next hour belongs to you and me--and we'll forget about time--as, if we were dining in a restaurant, we'd not think of the bill till it was presented. what did you do with the play?" susan could only look at him helplessly. he laughed, handed her a cigarette, rose to light a match for her. "settle yourself comfortably," said he, "and say what's in your head." with hands deep in the trousers of his house suit, he paced up and down the long room, the cigarette loose between his lips. whenever she saw his front face she was reassured; but whenever she saw his profile, her nerves trembled--for in the profile there was an expression of almost ferocious resolution, of tragic sadness, of the sternness that spares not. the full face was kind, if keen; was sympathetic--was the man as nature had made him. the profile was the great man--the man his career had made. and susan knew that the profile was master. "which part did you like _santuzza_ or _lola_?" "_lola_," replied she. he paused, looked at her quickly. why?" "oh, i don't sympathize with the woman--or the man--who's deserted. i pity, but i can't help seeing it's her or his own fault. _lola_ explains why. wouldn't you rather laugh than cry? _santuzza_ may have been attractive in the moments of passion, but how she must have bored _turiddu_ the rest of the time! she was so intense, so serious--so vain and selfish." "vain and selfish? that's interesting." he walked up and down several times, then turned on her abruptly. "well--go on," he said. "i'm waiting to hear why she was vain and selfish." "isn't it vain for a woman to think a man ought to be crazy about her all the time because he once has been? isn't it selfish for her to want him to be true to her because it gives _her_ pleasure, even though she knows it doesn't give _him_ pleasure?" "men and women are all vain and selfish in love," said he. "but the women are meaner than the men," replied she, "because they're more ignorant and narrow-minded." he was regarding her with an expression that made her uneasy. "but that isn't in the play--none of it," said he. "well, it ought to be," replied she. "_santuzza_ is the old-fashioned conventional heroine. i used to like them--until i had lived a little, myself. she isn't true to life. but in _lola_----" "yes--what about _lola_?" he demanded. "oh, she wasn't a heroine, either. she was just human--taking happiness when it offered. and her gayety--and her capriciousness. a man will always break away from a solemn, intense woman to get that sort of sunshine." "yes--yes--go on," said brent. "and her sour, serious, solemn husband explains why wives are untrue to their husbands. at least, it seems so to me." he was walking up and down again. every trace of indolence, of relaxation, was gone from his gait and from his features. his mind was evidently working like an engine at full speed. suddenly he halted. "you've given me a big idea," said he. "i'll throw away the play i was working on. i'll do your play." susan laughed--pleased, yet a little afraid he was kinder than she deserved. "what i said was only common sense--what my experience has taught me." "that's all that genius is, my dear," replied he. "as soon as we're born, our eyes are operated on so that we shall never see anything as it is. the geniuses are those who either escape the operation or are reëndowed with true sight by experience." he nodded approvingly at her. "you're going to be a person--or, rather, you're going to show you're a person. but that comes later. you thought of _lola_ as your part?" "i tried to. but i don't know anything about acting except what i've seen and the talk i've heard." "as i said the other day, that means you've little to learn. now--as to _lola's_ entrance." "oh, i thought of a lot of things to do--to show that she, too, loved _turiddu_ and that she had as much right to love--and to be loved--as _santuzza_ had. _santuzza_ had had her chance, and had failed." brent was highly amused. "you seem to forget that _lola_ was a married woman--and that if _santuzza_ didn't get a husband she'd be the mother of a fatherless child." never had he seen in her face such a charm of sweet melancholy as at that moment. "i suppose the way i was born and the life i've led make me think less of those things than most people do," replied she. "i was talking about natural hearts--what people think inside--the way they act when they have courage." "when they have courage," brent repeated reflectively. "but who has courage?" "a great many people are compelled to have it," said she. "i never had it until i got enough money to be independent." "i never had it," said susan, "until i had no money." he leaned against the big table, folded his arms on his chest, looked at her with eyes that made her feel absolutely at ease with him. said he: "you have known what it was to have no money--none?" susan nodded. "and no friends--no place to sleep--worse off than _robinson crusoe_ when the waves threw him on the island. i had to--to suck my own blood to keep alive." "you smile as you say that," said he. "if i hadn't learned to smile over such things," she answered, "i'd have been dead long ago." he seated himself opposite her. he asked: "why didn't you kill yourself?" "i was afraid." "of the hereafter?" "oh no. of missing the coming true of my dreams about life." "love?" "that--and more. just love wouldn't satisfy me. i want to see the world--to know the world--and to be somebody. i want to try _everything_." she laughed gayly--a sudden fascinating vanishing of the melancholy of eyes and mouth, a sudden flashing out of young beauty. "i've been down about as deep as one can go. i want to explore in the other direction." "yes--yes," said brent, absently. "you must see it all." he remained for some time in a profound reverie, she as unconscious of the passing of time as he for if he had his thoughts, she had his face to study. try as she would, she could not associate the idea of age with him--any age. he seemed simply a grown man. and the more closely she studied him the greater her awe became. he knew so much; he understood so well. she could not imagine him swept away by any of the petty emotions--the vanities, the jealousies, the small rages, the small passions and loves that made up the petty days of the small creatures who inhabit the world and call it theirs. could he fall in love? had he been in love? yes--he must have been in love many times--for many women must have taken trouble to please a man so well worth while, and he must have passed from one woman to another as his whims or his tastes changed. could he ever care about her--as a woman? did he think her worn out as a physical woman? or would he realize that body is nothing by itself; that unless the soul enters it, it is cold and meaningless and worthless--like the electric bulb when the filament is dark and the beautiful, hot, brilliant and intensely living current is not in it? could she love him? could she ever feel equal and at ease, through and through, with a man so superior? "you'd better study the part of _lola_--learn the lines," said he, when he had finished his reflecting. "then--this day week at the same hour--we will begin. we will work all afternoon--we will dine together--go to some theater where i can illustrate what i mean. beginning with next wednesday that will be the program every day until further notice." "until you see whether you can do anything with me or not?" "just so. you are living with spenser?" "yes." susan could have wished his tone less matter-of-fact. "how is he getting on?" "he and sperry are doing a play for fitzalan." "really? that's good. he has talent. if he'll learn of sperry and talk less and work more, and steadily, he'll make a lot of money. you are not tied to him in any way?" "no--not now that he's prospering. except, of course, that i'm fond of him." he shrugged his shoulders. "oh, everybody must have somebody. you've not seen this house. i'll show it to you, as we've still fifteen minutes." a luxurious house it was--filled with things curious and, some of them, beautiful--things gathered in excursions through europe, susan assumed. the only absolutely simple room was his bedroom, big and bare and so arranged that he could sleep practically out of doors. she saw servants--two men besides the butler, several women. but the house was a bachelor's house, with not a trace of feminine influence. and evidently he cared nothing about it but lived entirely in that wonderful world which so awed susan--the world he had created within himself, the world of which she had alluring glimpses through his eyes, through his tones and gestures even. small people strive to make, and do make, impression of themselves by laboring to show what they know and think. but the person of the larger kind makes no such effort. in everything brent said and did and wore, in all his movements, gestures, expressions, there was the unmistakable hallmark of the man worth while. the social life has banished simplicity from even the most savage tribe. indeed, savages, filled with superstitions, their every movement the result of some notion of proper ceremonial, are the most complex of all the human kind. the effort toward simplicity is not a movement back to nature, for there savage and lower animal are completely enslaved by custom and instinct; it is a movement upward toward the freedom of thought and action of which our best intelligence has given us a conception and for which it has given us a longing. never had susan met so simple a man; and never had she seen one so far from all the silly ostentations of rudeness, of unattractive dress, of eccentric or coarse speech wherewith the cheap sort of man strives to proclaim himself individual and free. with her instinct for recognizing the best at first sight, susan at once understood. and she was like one who has been stumbling about searching for the right road, and has it suddenly shown to him. she fairly darted along this right road. she was immediately busy, noting the mistakes in her own ideas of manners and dress, of good and bad taste. she realized how much she had to learn. but this did not discourage her. for she realized at the same time that she could learn--and his obvious belief in her as a possibility was most encouraging. when he bade her good-by at the front door and it closed behind her, she was all at once so tired that it seemed to her she would then and there sink down through sheer fatigue and fall asleep. for no physical exercise so quickly and utterly exhausts as real brain exercise--thinking, studying, learning with all the concentrated intensity of a thoroughbred in the last quarter of the mile race. chapter xv spenser had time and thought for his play only. he no longer tormented himself with jealousy of the abilities and income and fame of brent and the other successful writers for the stage; was not he about to equal them, probably to surpass them? as a rule, none of the mean emotions is able to thrive--unless it has the noxious vapors from disappointment and failure to feed upon. spenser, in spirits and in hope again, was content with himself. jealousy of brent about susan had been born of dissatisfaction with himself as a failure and envy of brent as a success; it died with that dissatisfaction and that envy. his vanity assured him that while there might be possibly--ways in which he was not without rivals, certainly where women were concerned he simply could not be equaled; the woman he wanted he could have--and he could hold her as long as he wished. the idea that susan would give a sentimental thought to a man "old enough to be her father"--brent was forty-one--was too preposterous to present itself to his mind. she loved the handsome, fascinating, youthful roderick spenser; she would soon be crazy about him. rarely does it occur to a man to wonder what a woman is thinking. during courtship very young men attribute intellect and qualities of mystery and awe to the woman they love. but after men get an insight into the mind of woman and discover how trivial are the matters that of necessity usually engage it, they become skeptical about feminine mentality; they would as soon think of speculating on what profundities fill the brain of the kitten playing with a ball as of seeking a solution of the mystery behind a woman's fits of abstraction. however, there was in susan's face, especially in her eyes, an expression so unusual, so arresting that spenser, self-centered and convinced of woman's intellectual deficiency though he was, did sometimes inquire what she was thinking about. he asked this question at breakfast the morning after that second visit to brent. "was i thinking?" she countered. "you certainly were not listening. you haven't a notion what i was talking about." "about your play." "of course. you know i talk nothing else," laughed he. "i must bore you horribly." "no, indeed," protested she. "no, i suppose not. you're not bored because you don't listen." he was cheerful about it. he talked merely to arrange his thoughts, not because he expected susan to understand matters far above one whom nature had fashioned and experience had trained to minister satisfyingly to the physical and sentimental needs of man. he assumed that she was as worshipful before his intellect as in the old days. he would have been even more amazed than enraged had he known that she regarded his play as mediocre claptrap, false to life, fit only for the unthinking, sloppily sentimental crowd that could not see the truth about even their own lives, their own thoughts and actions. "there you go again!" cried he, a few minutes later. "what _are_ you thinking about? i forgot to ask how you got on with brent. poor chap--he's had several failures in the past year. he must be horribly cut up. they say he's written out. what does he think he's trying to get at with you?" "acting, as i told you," replied susan. she felt ashamed for him, making this pitiable exhibition of patronizing a great man. "sperry tells me he has had that twist in his brain for a long time--that he has tried out a dozen girls or more--drops them after a few weeks or months. he has a regular system about it--runs away abroad, stops the pay after a month or so." "well, the forty a week's clear gain while it lasts," said susan. she tried to speak lightly. but she felt hurt and uncomfortable. there had crept into her mind one of those disagreeable ideas that skurry into some dusky corner to hide, and reappear from time to time making every fit of the blues so much the sadder and aggravating despondency toward despair. "oh, i didn't mean to suggest that _you_ wouldn't succeed," spenser hastened to apologize with more or less real kindliness. "sperry says brent has some good ideas about acting. so, you'll learn something--maybe enough to enable me to put you in a good position--if brent gets tired and if you still want to be independent, as you call it." "i hope so," said susan absently. spenser was no more absorbed in his career than she in hers; only, she realized how useless it would be to try to talk it to him--that he would not give her so much as ears in an attitude of polite attention. if he could have looked into her head that morning and seen what thoughts were distracting her from hearing about the great play, he would have been more amused and disgusted than ever with feminine frivolity of mind and incapacity in serious matters. for, it so happened that at the moment susan was concentrating on a new dress. he would have laughed in the face of anyone saying to him that this new dress was for susan in the pursuit of her scheme of life quite as weighty a matter, quite as worthy of the most careful attention, as was his play for him. yet that would have been the literal truth. primarily man's appeal is to the ear, woman's to the eye--the reason, by the way, why the theater--preeminently the place to _see_--tends to be dominated by woman. susan had made up her mind not only that she would rapidly improve herself in every way, but also how she would go about the improving. she saw that, for a woman at least, dress is as much the prime essential as an arresting show window for a dealer in articles that display well. she knew she was far from the goal of which she dreamed--the position where she would no longer be a woman primarily but a personage. dress would not merely increase her physical attractiveness; it would achieve the far more important end of gaining her a large measure of consideration. she felt that brent, even brent, dealer in actualities and not to be fooled by pretenses, would in spite of himself change his opinion of her if she went to him dressed less like a middle class working girl, more like the woman of the upper classes. at best, using all the advantages she had, she felt there was small enough chance of her holding his interest; for she could not make herself believe that he was not deceiving himself about her. however, to strengthen herself in every way with him was obviously the wisest effort she could make. so, she must have a new dress for the next meeting, one which would make him better pleased to take her out to dinner. true, if she came in rags, he would not be disturbed--for he had nothing of the snob in him. but at the same time, if she came dressed like a woman of his own class, he would be impressed. "he's a man, if he is a genius," reasoned she. vital though the matter was, she calculated that she did not dare spend more than twenty-five dollars on this toilet. she must put by some of her forty a week; brent might give her up at any time, and she must not be in the position of having to choose immediately between submitting to the slavery of the kept woman as spenser's dependent and submitting to the costly and dangerous and repulsive freedom of the woman of the streets. thus, to lay out twenty-five dollars on a single costume was a wild extravagance. she thought it over from every point of view; she decided that she must take the risk. late in the afternoon she walked for an hour in fifth avenue. after some hesitation she ventured into the waiting- and dressing-rooms of several fashionable hotels. she was in search of ideas for the dress, which must be in the prevailing fashion. she had far too good sense and good taste to attempt to be wholly original in dress; she knew that the woman who understands her business does not try to create a fashion but uses the changing and capricious fashion as the means to express a constant and consistent style of her own. she appreciated her limitations in such matters--how far she as yet was from the knowledge necessary to forming a permanent and self-expressive style. she was prepared to be most cautious in giving play to an individual taste so imperfectly educated as hers had necessarily been. she felt that she had the natural instinct for the best and could recognize it on sight--an instinct without which no one can go a step forward in any of the arts. she had long since learned to discriminate among the vast masses of offering, most of them tasteless or commonplace, to select the rare and few things that have merit. thus, she had always stood out in the tawdrily or drearily or fussily dressed throngs, had been a pleasure to the eyes even of those who did not know why they were pleased. on that momentous day, she finally saw a woman dressed in admirable taste who was wearing a costume simple enough for her to venture to think of copying the main points. she walked several blocks a few yards behind this woman, then hurried ahead of her, turned and walked toward her to inspect the front of the dress. she repeated this several times between the st. regis and sherry's. the woman soon realized, as women always do, what the girl in the shirtwaist and short skirt was about. but she happened to be a good-natured person, and smiled pleasantly at susan, and got in return a smile she probably did not soon forget. the next morning susan went shopping. she had it in mind to get the materials for a costume of a certain delicate shade of violet. a dress of that shade, and a big hat trimmed in tulle to match or to harmonize, with a bunch of silk violets fastened in the tulle in a certain way. susan knew she had good looks, knew what was becoming to her darkly and softly fringed violet eyes, pallid skin, to her rather tall figure, slender, not voluptuous yet suggesting voluptuousness. she could see herself in that violet costume. but when she began to look at materials she hesitated. the violet would be beautiful; but it was not a wise investment for a girl with few clothes, with but one best dress. she did not give it up definitely, however, until she came upon a sixteen-yard remnant of soft gray china crêpe. gray was a really serviceable color for the best dress of a girl of small means. and this remnant, certainly enough for a dress, could be had for ten dollars, where violet china crêpe of the shade she wanted would cost her a dollar a yard. she took the remnant. she went to the millinery department and bought a large hat frame. it was of a good shape and she saw how it could be bent to suit her face. she paid fifty cents for this, and two dollars and seventy cents for four yards of gray tulle. she found that silk flowers were beyond her means; so she took a bunch of presentable looking violets of the cheaper kind at two dollars and a half. she happened to pass a counter whereon were displayed bargains in big buckles and similar odds and ends of steel and enamel. she fairly pounced upon a handsome gray buckle with violet enamel, which cost but eighty-nine cents. for a pair of gray suede ties she paid two dollars; for a pair of gray silk stockings, ninety cents. these matters, with some gray silk net for the collar, gray silk for a belt, linings and the like, made her total bill twenty-three dollars and sixty-seven cents. she returned home content and studied "cavalleria" until her purchases arrived. spenser was out now, was working all day and in the evenings at sperry's office high up in the times building. so, susan had freedom for her dressmaking operations. to get them off her mind that she might work uninterruptedly at learning _lola's_ part in "cavalleria," she toiled all saturday, far into sunday morning, was astir before spenser waked, finished the dress soon after breakfast and the hat by the middle of the afternoon. when spenser returned from sperry's office to take her to dinner, she was arrayed. for the first time he saw her in fashionable attire and it was really fashionable, for despite all her disadvantages she, who had real and rare capacity for learning, had educated herself well in the chief business of woman the man-catcher in her years in new york. he stood rooted to the threshold. it would have justified a vanity less vigorous than susan or any other normal human being possessed, to excite such a look as was in his eyes. he drew a long breath by way of breaking the spell over speech. "you are _beautiful!_" he exclaimed. and his eyes traveled from the bewitching hat, set upon her head coquettishly yet without audacity, to the soft crêpe dress, its round collar showing her perfect throat, its graceful lines subtly revealing her alluring figure, to the feet that men always admired, whatever else of beauty or charm they might fail to realize. "how you have grown!" he ejaculated. then, "how did you do it?" "by all but breaking myself." "it's worth whatever it cost. if i had a dress suit, we'd go to sherry's or the waldorf. i'm willing to go, without the dress suit." "no. i've got everything ready for dinner at home." "then, why on earth did you dress? to give me a treat?" "oh, i hate to go out in a dress i've never worn. and a woman has to wear a hat a good many times before she knows how." "what a lot of fuss you women do make about clothes." "you seem to like it, all the same." "of course. but it's a trifle." "it has got many women a good provider for life. and not paying attention to dress or not knowing how has made most of the old maids. are those things trifles?" spenser laughed and shifted his ground without any sense of having been pressed to do so. "men are fools where women are concerned." "or women are wise where men are concerned." "i guess they do know their business--some of them," he confessed. "still, it's a silly business, you must admit." "nothing is silly that's successful," said susan. "depends on what you mean by success," argued he. "success is getting what you want." "provided one wants what's worth while," said he. "and what's worth while?" rejoined she. "why, whatever one happens to want." to avoid any possible mischance to the _grande toilette_ he served the dinner and did the dangerous part of the clearing up. they went to the theater, rod enjoying even more than she the very considerable admiration she got. when she was putting the dress away carefully that night, rod inquired when he was to be treated again. "oh--i don't know," replied she. "not soon." she was too wise to tell him that the dress would not be worn again until brent was to see it. the hat she took out of the closet from time to time and experimented with it, reshaping the brim, studying the different effects of different angles. it delighted spenser to catch her at this "foolishness"; he felt so superior, and with his incurable delusion of the shallow that dress is an end, not merely a means, he felt more confident than ever of being able to hold her when he should have the money to buy her what her frivolous and feminine nature evidently craved beyond all else in the world. but---- when he bought a ready-to-wear evening suit, he made more stir about it than had susan about her costume--this, when dress to him was altogether an end in itself and not a shrewd and useful means. he spent more time in admiring himself in it before the mirror, and looked at it, and at himself in it, with far more admiration and no criticism at all. susan noted this--and after the manner of women who are wise or indifferent--or both--she made no comment. at the studio floor of brent's house the door of the elevator was opened for susan by a small young man with a notably large head, bald and bulging. his big smooth face had the expression of extreme amiability that usually goes with weakness and timidity. "i am mr. brent's secretary, mr. garvey," he explained. and susan--made as accurate as quick in her judgments of character by the opportunities and the necessities of her experience--saw that she had before her one of those nice feeble folk who either get the shelter of some strong personality as a bird hides from the storm in the thick branches of a great tree or are tossed and torn and ruined by life and exist miserably until rescued by death. she knew the type well; it had been the dominant type in her surroundings ever since she left sutherland. indeed, is it not the dominant type in the whole ill-equipped, sore-tried human race? and does it not usually fail of recognition because so many of us who are in fact weak, look--and feel--strong because we are sheltered by inherited money or by powerful friends or relatives or by chance lodgment in a nook unvisited of the high winds of life in the open? susan liked garvey at once; they exchanged smiles and were friends. she glanced round the room. at the huge open window brent, his back to her, was talking earnestly to a big hatchet-faced man with a black beard. even as susan glanced brent closed the interview; with an emphatic gesture of fist into palm he exclaimed, "and that's final. good-by." the two men came toward her, both bowed, the hatchet-faced man entered the elevator and was gone. brent extended his hand with a smile. "you evidently didn't come to work today," said he with a careless, fleeting glance at the _grande toilette_. "but we are prepared against such tricks. garvey, take her down to the rear dressing-room and have the maid lay her out a simple costume." to susan, "be as quick as you can." and he seated himself at his desk and was reading and signing letters. susan, crestfallen, followed garvey down the stairway. she had confidently expected that he would show some appreciation of her toilette. she knew she had never in her life looked so well. in the long glass in the dressing-room, while garvey was gone to send the maid, she inspected herself again. yes--never anything like so well. and brent had noted her appearance only to condemn it. she was always telling herself that she wished him to regard her as a working woman, a pupil in stagecraft. but now that she had proof that he did so regard her, she was depressed, resentful. however, this did not last long. while she was changing to linen skirt and shirtwaist, she began to laugh at herself. how absurd she had been, thinking to impress this man who had known so many beautiful women, who must have been satiated long ago with beauty--she thinking to create a sensation in such a man, with a simple little costume of her own crude devising. she reappeared in the studio, laughter in her eyes and upon her lips. brent apparently did not glance at her; yet he said, "what's amusing you?" she confessed all, on one of her frequent impulses to candor--those impulses characteristic both of weak natures unable to exercise self-restraint and of strong natures, indifferent to petty criticism and misunderstanding, and absent from vain mediocrity, which always has itself--that is, appearances--on its mind. she described in amusing detail how she had planned and got together the costume how foolish his reception of it had made her feel. "i've no doubt you guessed what was in my head," concluded she. "you see everything." "i did notice that you were looking unusually well, and that you felt considerably set up over it," said he. "but why not? vanity's an excellent thing. like everything else it's got to be used, not misused. it can help us to learn instead of preventing." "i had an excuse for dressing up," she reminded him. "you said we were to dine together. i thought you wouldn't want there to be too much contrast between us. next time i'll be more sensible." "dress as you like for the present," said he. "you can always change here. later on dress will be one of the main things, of course. but not now. have you learned the part?" and they began. she saw at the far end of the room a platform about the height of a stage. he explained that garvey, with the book of the play, would take the other parts in _lola's_ scenes, and sent them both to the stage. "don't be nervous," garvey said to her in an undertone. "he doesn't expect anything of you. this is simply to get started." but she could not suppress the trembling in her legs and arms, the hysterical contractions of her throat. however, she did contrive to go through the part--garvey prompting. she knew she was ridiculous; she could not carry out a single one of the ideas of "business" which had come to her as she studied; she was awkward, inarticulate, panic-stricken. "rotten!" exclaimed brent, when she had finished. "couldn't be worse therefore, couldn't be better." she dropped to a chair and sobbed hysterically. "that's right--cry it out," said brent. "leave us alone, garvey." brent walked up and down smoking until she lifted her head and glanced at him with a pathetic smile. "take a cigarette," he suggested. "we'll talk it over. now, we've got something to talk about." she found relief from her embarrassment in the cigarette. "you can laugh at me now," she said. "i shan't mind. in fact, i didn't mind, though i thought i did. if i had, i'd not have let you see me cry." "don't think i'm discouraged," said brent. "the reverse. you showed that you have nerve a very different matter from impudence. impudence fails when it's most needed. nerve makes one hang on, regardless. in such a panic as yours was, the average girl would have funked absolutely. you stuck it out. now, you and i will try _lola's_ first entrance. no, don't throw away your cigarette. _lola_ might well come in smoking a cigarette." she did better. what burlingham had once thoroughly drilled into her now stood her in good stead, and brent's sympathy and enthusiasm gave her the stimulating sense that he and she were working together. they spent the afternoon on the one thing--_lola_ coming on, singing her gay song, her halt at sight of _santuzza_ and _turiddu_, her look at _santuzza_, at _turiddu_, her greeting for each. they tried it twenty different ways. they discussed what would have been in the minds of all three. they built up "business" for _lola_, and for the two others to increase the significance of _lola's_ actions. "as i've already told you," said he, "anyone with a voice and a movable body can learn to act. there's no question about your becoming a good actress. but it'll be some time before i can tell whether you can be what i hope--an actress who shows no sign that she's acting." susan showed the alarm she felt. "i'm afraid you'll find at the end that you've been wasting your time," said she. "put it straight out of your head," replied he. "i never waste time. to live is to learn. already you've given me a new play--don't forget that. in a month i'll have it ready for us to use. besides, in teaching you i teach myself. hungry?" "no--that is, yes. i hadn't thought of it, but i'm starved." "this sort of thing gives one an appetite like a field hand." he accompanied her to the door of the rear dressing-room on the floor below. "go down to the reception room when you're ready," said he, as he left her to go on to his own suite to change his clothes. "i'll be there." the maid came immediately, drew a bath for her, afterward helped her to dress. it was susan's first experience with a maid, her first realization how much time and trouble one saves oneself if free from the routine, menial things. and then and there a maid was set down upon her secret list of the luxurious comforts to which she would treat herself--_when?_ the craving for luxury is always a part, usually a powerful part, of an ambitious temperament. ambition is simply a variously manifested and variously directed impulse toward improvement--a discomfort so keen that it compels effort to change to a position less uncomfortable. there had never been a time when luxury had not attracted her. at the slightest opportunity she had always pushed out for luxuries--for better food, better clothing, more agreeable surroundings. even in her worst hours of discouragement she had not really relaxed in the struggle against rags and dirt. and when moral horror had been blunted by custom and drink, physical horror had remained acute. for, human nature being a development upward through the physical to the spiritual, when a process of degeneration sets in, the topmost layers, the spiritual, wear away first--then those in which the spiritual is a larger ingredient than the material--then those in which the material is the larger--and last of all those that are purely material. as life educated her, as her intelligence and her knowledge grew, her appreciation of luxury had grown apace and her desire for it. with most human beings, the imagination is a heavy bird of feeble wing; it flies low, seeing only the things of the earth. when they describe heaven, it has houses of marble and streets of gold. their pretense to sight of higher things is either sheer pretense or sight at second hand. susan was of the few whose fancy can soar. she saw the earthy things; she saw the things of the upper regions also. and she saw the lower region from the altitudes of the higher--and in their perspective. as she and brent stood together on the sidewalk before his house, about to enter his big limousine, his smile told her that he had read her thought--her desire for such an automobile as her very own. "i can't help it," said she. "it's my nature to want these things." "and to want them intelligently," said he. "everybody wants, but only the few want intelligently--and they get. the three worst things in the world are sickness, poverty and obscurity. your splendid health safeguards you against sickness. your looks and your brains can carry you far away from the other two. your one danger is of yielding to the temptation to become the wife or the mistress of some rich man. the prospect of several years of heart-breaking hard work isn't wildly attractive at twenty-two." "you don't know me," said susan--but the boast was uttered under her breath. the auto rushed up to delmonico's entrance, came to a halt abruptly yet gently. the attentiveness of the personnel, the staring and whispering of the people in the palm room showed how well known brent was. there were several women--handsome women of what is called the new york type, though it certainly does not represent the average new york woman, who is poorly dressed in flimsy ready-made clothes and has the mottled skin that indicates bad food and too little sleep. these handsome women were dressed beautifully as well as expensively, in models got in--not from--paris. one of them smiled sweetly at brent, who responded, so susan thought, rather formally. she felt dowdy in her home-made dress. all her pride in it vanished; she saw only its defects. and the gracefully careless manner of these women--the manners of those who feel sure of themselves--made her feel "green" and out of place. she was disgusted with the folly that had caused her to thrill with pleasure when his order to his chauffeur at his door told her she was actually to be taken to one of the restaurants in which she had wished to exhibit herself with him. she heartily wished she had insisted on going where she would have been as well dressed and as much at home as anyone there. she lifted her eyes, to distract her mind from these depressing sensations. brent was looking at her with that amused, mocking yet sympathetic expression which was most characteristic of him. she blushed furiously. he laughed. "no, i'm not ashamed of your homemade dress," said he. "i don't care what is thought of me by people who don't give me any money. and, anyhow, you are easily the most unusual looking and the most tastefully dressed woman here. the rest of these women are doomed for life to commonplace obscurity. you---- "we'll see your name in letters of fire on the broadway temples of fame." "i know you're half laughing at me," said susan. "but i feel a little better." "then i'm accomplishing my object. let's not think about ourselves. that makes life narrow. let's keep the thoughts on our work--on the big splendid dreams that come to us and invite us to labor and to dare." and as they lingered over the satisfactory dinner he had ordered, they talked of acting--of the different roles of "cavalleria" as types of fundamental instincts and actions--of how best to express those meanings--how to fill out the skeletons of the dramatist into personalities actual and vivid. susan forgot where she was, forgot to be reserved with him. in her and rod's happiest days she had never been free from the constraint of his and her own sense of his great superiority. with brent, such trifles of the petty personal disappeared. and she talked more naturally than she had since a girl at her uncle's at sutherland. she was amazed by the fountain that had suddenly gushed forth in her mind at the conjuring of brent's sympathy. she did not recognize herself in this person so open to ideas, so eager to learn, so clear in the expression of her thoughts. not since the burlingham days had she spent so long a time with a man in absolute unconsciousness of sex. they were interrupted by the intrusion of a fashionable young man with the expression of assurance which comes from the possession of wealth and the knowledge that money will buy practically everything and everybody. brent received him so coldly that, after a smooth sentence or two, he took himself off stammering and in confusion. "i suppose," said brent when he was gone, "that young ass hoped i would introduce him to you and invite him to sit. but you'll be tempted often enough in the next few years by rich men without my helping to put temptation in your way," "i've never been troubled thus far," laughed susan. "but you will, now. you have developed to the point where everyone will soon be seeing what it took expert eyes to see heretofore." "if i am tempted," said susan, "do you think i'll be able to resist?" "i don't know," confessed brent. "you have a strong sense of honesty, and that'll keep you at work with me for a while. then---- "if you have it in you to be great, you'll go on. if you're merely the ordinary woman, a little more intelligent, you'll probably--sell out. all the advice i have to offer is, don't sell cheap. as you're not hampered by respectability or by inexperience, you needn't." he reflected a moment, then added, "and if you ever do decide that you don't care to go on with a career, tell me frankly. i may be able to help you in the other direction." "thank you," said susan, her strange eyes fixed upon him. "why do you put so much gratitude in your tone and in your eyes?" asked he. "i didn't put it there," she answered. "it--just came. and i was grateful because--well, i'm human, you know, and it was good to feel--that--that----" "go on," said he, as she hesitated. "i'm afraid you'll misunderstand." "what does it matter, if i do?" "well--you've acted toward me as if i were a mere machine that you were experimenting with." "and so you are." "i understand that. but when you offered to help me, if i happened to want to do something different from what you want me to do, it made me feel that you thought of me as a human being, too." the expression of his unseeing eyes puzzled her. she became much embarrassed when he said, "are you dissatisfied with spenser? do you want to change lovers? are you revolving me as a possibility?" "i haven't forgotten what you said," she protested. "but a few words from me wouldn't change you from a woman into a sexless ambition." an expression of wistful sadness crept into the violet-gray eyes, in contrast to the bravely smiling lips. she was thinking of her birth that had condemned her to that farmer ferguson, full as much as of the life of the streets, when she said: "i know that a man like you wouldn't care for a woman of my sort." "if i were you," said he gently, "i'd not say those things about myself. saying them encourages you to think them. and thinking them gives you a false point of view. you must learn to appreciate that you're not a sheltered woman, with reputation for virtue as your one asset, the thing that'll enable you to get some man to undertake your support. you are dealing with the world as a man deals with it. you must demand and insist that the world deal with you on that basis." there came a wonderful look of courage and hope into the eyes of lorella's daughter. "and the world will," he went on. "at least, the only part of it that's important to you--or really important in any way. the matter of your virtue or lack of it is of no more importance than is my virtue or lack of it." "do you _really_ believe that way?" asked susan, earnestly. "it doesn't in the least matter whether i do or not," laughed he. "don't bother about what i think--what anyone thinks--of you. the point here, as always, is that you believe it, yourself. there's no reason why a woman who is making a career should not be virtuous. she will probably not get far if she isn't more or less so. dissipation doesn't help man or woman, especially the ruinous dissipation of license in passion. on the other hand, no woman can ever hope to make a career who persists in narrowing and cheapening herself with the notion that her virtue is her all. she'll not amount to much as a worker in the fields of action." susan reflected, sighed. "it's very, very hard to get rid of one's sex." "it's impossible," declared he. "don't try. but don't let it worry you, either." "everyone can't be as strong as you are--so absorbed in a career that they care for nothing else." this amused him. with forearms on the edge of the table he turned his cigarette slowly round between his fingers, watching the smoke curl up from it. she observed that there was more than a light sprinkle of gray in his thick, carefully brushed hair. she was filled with curiosity as to the thoughts just then in that marvelous brain of his; nor did it lessen her curiosity to know that never would those thoughts be revealed to her. what women had he loved? what women had loved him? what follies had he committed? from how many sources he must have gathered his knowledge of human nature of--woman nature! and no doubt he was still gathering. what woman was it now? when he lifted his glance from the cigarette, it was to call the waiter and get the bill. "i've a supper engagement," he said, "and it's nearly eleven o'clock." "eleven o'clock!" she exclaimed. "times does fly--doesn't it?--when a man and a woman, each an unexplored mystery to the other, are dining alone and talking about themselves." "it was my fault," said susan. his quizzical eyes looked into hers--uncomfortably far. she flushed. "you make me feel guiltier than i am," she protested, under cover of laughing glance and tone of raillery. "guilty? of what?" "you think i've been trying to--to 'encourage' you," replied she frankly. "and why shouldn't you, if you feel so inclined?" laughed he. "that doesn't compel me to be--encouraged." "honestly i haven't," said she, the contents of seriousness still in the gay wrapper of raillery. "at least not any more than----" "you know, a woman feels bound to 'encourage' a man who piques her by seeming--difficult." "naturally, you'd not have objected to baptizing the new hat and dress with my heart's blood." she could not have helped laughing with him. "unfortunately for you--or rather for the new toilette--my poor heart was bled dry long, long ago. i'm a busy man, too--busy and a little tired." "i deserve it all," said she. "i've brought it on myself. and i'm not a bit sorry i started the subject. i've found out you're quite human--and that'll help me to work better." they separated with the smiling faces of those who have added an evening altogether pleasant to memory's store of the past's happy hours--that roomy storehouse which is all too empty even where the life has been what is counted happy. he insisted on sending her home in his auto, himself taking a taxi to the players' where the supper was given. the moment she was alone for the short ride home, her gayety evaporated like a delicious but unstable perfume. why? perhaps it was the sight of the girls on the stroll. had she really been one of them?--and only a few days ago? impossible! not she not the real self . . . and perhaps she would be back there with them before long. no--never, never, in any circumstances!. . . she had said, "never!" the first time she escaped from the tenements, yet she had gone back. . . were any of those girls strolling along--were, again, any of them freddie palmer's? at the thought she shivered and quailed. she had not thought of him, except casually, in many months. what if he should see her, should still feel vengeful--he who never forgot or forgave--who would dare anything! and she would be defenseless against him. . . . she remembered what she had last read about him in the newspaper. he had risen in the world, was no longer in the criminal class apparently, had moved to the class of semi-criminal wholly respectable contractor-politician. no, he had long since forgotten her, vindictive italian though he was. the auto set her down at home. her tremors about freddie departed; but the depression remained. she felt physically as if she had been sitting all evening in a stuffy room with a dull company after a heavy, badly selected dinner. she fell easy prey to one of those fits of the blues to which all imaginative young people are at least occasional victims, and by which those cursed and hampered with the optimistic temperament are haunted and harassed and all but or quite undone. she had a sense of failure, of having made a bad impression. she feared he, recalling and reinspecting what she had said, would get the idea that she was not in earnest, was merely looking for a lover--for a chance to lead a life of luxurious irresponsibility. would it not be natural for him, who knew women well, to assume from her mistakenly candid remarks, that she was like the rest of the women, both the respectable and the free? why should he believe in her, when she did not altogether believe in herself but suspected herself of a secret hankering after something more immediate, more easy and more secure than the stage career? the longer she thought of it the clearer it seemed to her to be that she had once more fallen victim to too much hope, too much optimism, too much and too ready belief in her fellow-beings--she who had suffered so much from these follies, and had tried so hard to school herself against them. she fought this mood of depression--fought alone, for spenser did not notice and she would not annoy him. she slept little that night; she felt that she could not hope for peace until she had seen brent again. chapter xvi toward half-past ten the next day, a few minutes after rod left for the theater, she was in the bathroom cleaning the coffee machine. there came a knock at the door of the sitting-room bedroom. into such disorder had her mood of depression worried her nerves that she dropped the coffee machine into the washbowl and jumped as if she were seeing a ghost. several dire calamities took vague shape in her mind, then the image of freddie palmer, smiling sweetly, cruelly. she wavered only a moment, went to the door, and after a brief hesitation that still further depressed her about herself she opened it. the maid--a good-natured sloven who had become devoted to susan because she gave her liberal fees and made her no extra work--was standing there, in an attitude of suppressed excitement. susan laughed, for this maid was a born agitator, a person who is always trying to find a thrill or to put a thrill into the most trivial event. "what is it now, annie?" susan asked. "mr. spenser--he's gone, hasn't he?" "yes--a quarter of an hour ago." annie drew a breath of deep relief. "i was sure he had went," said she, producing from under her apron a note. "i saw it was in a gentleman's writing, so i didn't come up with it till he was out of the way, though the boy brought it a little after nine." "oh, bother!" exclaimed susan, taking the note. "well, mrs. spenser, i've had my lesson," replied annie, apologetic but firm. "when i first came to new york, green as the grass that grows along the edge of the spring, what does i do but go to work and take up a note to a lady when her husband was there! next thing i knew he went to work and hauled her round the floor by the hair and skinned out--yes, beat it for good. and my madam says to me, 'annie, you're fired. never give a note to a lady when her gent is by or to a gent when his lady's by. that's the first rule of life in gay new york.' and you can bet i never have since--nor never will." susan had glanced at the address on the note, had recognized the handwriting of brent's secretary. her heart had straightway sunk as if the foreboding of calamity had been realized. as she stood there uncertainly, annie seized the opportunity to run on and on. susan now said absently, "thank you. very well," and closed the door. it was a minute or so before she tore open the envelope with an impatient gesture and read: dear mrs. spenser: mr. brent requests me to ask you not to come until further notice. it may be sometime before he will be free to resume. yours truly, john c. garvey. it was a fair specimen of garvey's official style, with which she had become acquainted--the style of the secretary who has learned by experience not to use frills or flourishes but to convey his message in the fewest and clearest words. had it been a skillfully worded insult susan, in this mood of depression and distorted mental vision, could not have received it differently. she dropped to a chair at the table and stared at the five lines of neat handwriting until her eyes became circled and her face almost haggard. precisely as rod had described! after a long, long time she crumpled the paper and let it fall into the waste-basket. then she walked up and down the room--presently drifted into the bathroom and resumed cleaning the coffee machine. every few moments she would pause in the task--and in her dressing afterwards--would be seized by the fear, the horror of again being thrust into that hideous underworld. what was between her and it, to save her from being flung back into its degradation? two men on neither of whom she could rely. brent might drop her at any time--perhaps had already dropped her. as for rod--vain, capricious, faithless, certain to become an unendurable tyrant if he got her in his power--rod was even less of a necessity than brent. what a dangerous situation was hers! how slender her chances of escape from another catastrophe. she leaned against wall or table and was shaken by violent fits of shuddering. she felt herself slipping--slipping. it was all she could do to refrain from crying out. in those moments, no trace of the self-possessed susan the world always saw. her fancy went mad and ran wild. she quivered under the actuality of coarse contacts--mrs. tucker in bed with her--the men who had bought her body for an hour--the vermin of the tenements--the brutal hands of policemen. then with an exclamation of impatience or of anger she would shake herself together and go resolutely on--only again to relapse. "because i so suddenly cut off the liquor and the opium," she said. it was the obvious and the complete explanation. but her heart was like lead, and her sky like ink. this note, the day after having tried her out as a possibility for the stage and as a woman. she stared down at the crumpled note in the wast-basket. that note--it was herself. he had crumpled her up and thrown her into the waste-basket, where she no doubt belonged. it was nearly noon before she, dressed with unconscious care, stood in the street doorway looking about uncertainly as if she did not know which way to turn. she finally moved in the direction of the theater where rod's play was rehearsing. she had gone to none of the rehearsals because rod had requested it. "i want you to see it as a total surprise the first night," explained he. "that'll give you more pleasure, and also it will make your criticism more valuable to us." and she had acquiesced, not displeased to have all her time for her own affairs. but now she, dazed, stunned almost, convinced that it was all over for her with brent, instinctively turned to rod to get human help--not to ask for it, but in the hope that somehow he would divine and would say or do something that would make the way ahead a little less forbidding--something that would hearten her for the few first steps, anyhow. she turned back several times--now, because she feared rod wouldn't like her coming; again because her experience--enlightened good sense--told her that rod would--could--not help her, that her sole reliance was herself. but in the end, driven by one of those spasms of terror lest the underworld should be about to engulf her again, she stood at the stage door. as she was about to negotiate the surly looking man on guard within, sperry came rushing down the long dark passageway. he was brushing past her when he saw who it was. "too late!" he cried. "rehearsal's over." "i didn't come to the rehearsal," explained susan. "i thought perhaps rod would be going to lunch." "so he is. go straight back. you'll find him on the stage. i'll join you if you'll wait a minute or so." and sperry hurried on into the street. susan advanced along the passageway cautiously as it was but one remove from pitch dark. perhaps fifty feet, and she came to a cross passage. as she hesitated, a door at the far end of it opened and she caught a glimpse of a dressing-room and, in the space made by the partly opened door, a woman half-dressed--an attractive glimpse. the woman--who seemed young--was not looking down the passage, but into the room. she was laughing in the way a woman laughs only when it is for a man, for _the_ man--and was saying, "now, rod, you must go, and give me a chance to finish dressing." a man's arm--rod's arm--reached across the opening in the doorway. a hand--susan recognized rod's well-shaped hand--was laid strongly yet tenderly upon the pretty bare arm of the struggling, laughing young woman--and the door closed--and the passage was soot-dark again. all this a matter of less than five seconds. susan, ashamed at having caught him, frightened lest she should be found where she had no business to be, fled back along the main passage and jerked open the street door. she ran squarely into sperry. "i--i beg your pardon," stammered he. "i was in such a rush--i ought to have been thinking where i was going. did i hurt you?" this last most anxiously. "i'm so sorry----" "it's nothing--nothing," laughed susan. "you are the one that's hurt." and in fact she had knocked sperry breathless. "you don't look anything like so strong," gasped he. "oh, my appearance is deceptive--in a lot of ways." for instance, he could have got from her face just then no hint of the agony of fear torturing her--fear of the drop into the underworld. "find rod?" asked he. "he wasn't on the stage. so--i came out again." "wait here," said sperry. "i'll hunt him up." "oh, no--please don't. i stopped on impulse. i'll not bother him." she smiled mischievously. "i might be interrupting." sperry promptly reddened. she had no difficulty in reading what was in his mind--that her remark had reminded him of rod's "affair," and he was cursing himself for having been so stupid as to forget it for the moment and put his partner in danger of detection. "i--i guess he's gone," stammered sperry. "lord, but that was a knock you gave me! better come to lunch with me." susan hesitated, a wistful, forlorn look in her eyes. "do you really want me?" asked she. "come right along," said sperry in a tone that left no doubt of his sincerity. "we'll go to the knickerbocker and have something good to eat." "oh, no--a quieter place," urged susan. sperry laughed. "you mean less expensive. there's one of the great big differences between you and the make-believe ladies one bumps into in this part of town. _you_ don't like to be troublesome or expensive. but we'll go to the knickerbocker. i feel 'way down today, and i intended to treat myself. you don't look any too gay-hearted yourself." "i'll admit i don't like the way the cards are running," said susan. "but--they'll run better--sooner or later." "sure!" cried sperry. "you needn't worry about the play. that's all right. how i envy women!" "why?" "oh--you have rod between you and the fight. while i--i've got to look out for myself." "so have i," said susan. "so has everyone, for that matter." "believe me, mrs. spenser," cried sperry, earnestly, "you can count on rod. no matter what----" "please!" protested susan. "i count on nobody. i learned long ago not to lean." "well, leaning isn't exactly a safe position," sperry admitted. "there never was a perfectly reliable crutch. tell me your troubles." susan smilingly shook her head. "that'd be leaning. . . . no, thank you. i've got to think it out for myself. i believed i had arranged for a career for myself. it seems to have gone to pieces that's all. something else will turn up--after lunch." "not a doubt in the world," replied he confidently. "meanwhile--there's rod." susan's laugh of raillery made him blush guiltily. "yes," said she, "there's rod." she laughed again, merrily. "there's rod--but where is there?" "you're the only woman in the world he has any real liking for," said sperry, earnest and sincere. "don't you ever doubt that, mrs. spenser." when they were seated in the café and he had ordered, he excused himself and susan saw him make his way to a table where sat fitzalan and another man who looked as if he too had to do with the stage. it was apparent that fitzalan was excited about something; his lips, his arms, his head were in incessant motion. susan noted that he had picked up many of brent's mannerisms; she had got the habit of noting this imitativeness in men--and in women, too--from having seen in the old days how rod took on the tricks of speech, manner, expression, thought even, of whatever man he happened at the time to be admiring. may it not have been this trait of rod's that gave her the clue to his character, when she was thinking him over, after the separation? sperry was gone nearly ten minutes. he came, full of apologies. "fitz held on to me while he roasted brent. you've heard of brent, of course?" "yes," said susan. "fitz has been seeing him off. and he says it's----" susan glanced quickly at him. "off?" she said. "to europe." susan had paused in removing her left glove. rod's description of brent's way of sidestepping--rod's description to the last detail. her hands fluttered uncertainly--fluttering fingers like a flock of birds flushed and confused by the bang of the gun. "and fitz says----" "for europe," said susan. she was drawing her fingers slowly one by one from the fingers of her glove. "yes. he sailed, it seems, on impulse barely time to climb aboard. fitz always lays everything to a woman. he says brent has been mixed up for a year or so with---- oh, it doesn't matter. i oughtn't to repeat those things. i don't believe 'em--on principle. every man--or woman--who amounts to anything has scandal talked about him or her all the time. good lord! if robert brent bothered with half the affairs that are credited to him, he'd have no time or strength--not to speak of brains--to do plays." "i guess even the busiest man manages to fit a woman in somehow," observed susan. "a woman or so." sperry laughed. "i guess yes," said he. "but as to brent, most of the scandal about him is due to a fad of his--hunting for an undeveloped female genius who----" "i've heard of that," interrupted susan. "the service is dreadfully slow here. how long is it since you ordered?" "twenty minutes--and here comes our waiter." and then, being one of those who must finish whatever they have begun, he went on. "well, it's true brent does pick up and drop a good many ladies of one kind and another. and naturally, every one of them is good-looking and clever or he'd not start in. but--you may laugh at me if you like--i think he's strictly business with all of them. he'd have got into trouble if he hadn't been. and fitz admits this one woman--she's a society woman--is the only one there's any real basis for talk about in connection with brent." susan had several times lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips and had every time lowered it untasted. "and brent's mighty decent to those he tries and has to give up. i know of one woman he carried on his pay roll for nearly two years----" "let's drop mr. brent," cried susan. "tell me about--about the play." "rod must be giving you an overdose of that." "i've not seen much of him lately. how was the rehearsal?" "fair--fair." and sperry forgot brent and talked on and on about the play, not checking himself until the coffee was served. he had not observed that susan was eating nothing. neither had he observed that she was not listening; but there was excuse for this oversight, as she had set her expression at absorbed attention before withdrawing within herself to think--and to suffer. she came to the surface again when sperry, complaining of the way the leading lady was doing her part, said: "no wonder brent drops one after another. women aren't worth much as workers. their real mind's always occupied with the search for a man to support 'em." "not always," cried susan, quivering with sudden pain. "oh, no, mr. sperry--not always." "yes--there are exceptions," said sperry, not noting how he had wounded her. "but--well, i never happened to run across one." "can you blame them?" mocked susan. she was ashamed that she had been stung into crying out. "to be honest--no," said sperry. "i suspect i'd throw up the sponge and sell out if i had anything a lady with cash wanted to buy. i only _suspect_ myself. but i _know_ most men would. no, i don't blame the ladies. why not have a nice easy time? only one short life--and then--the worms." she was struggling with the re-aroused insane terror of a fall back to the depths whence she had once more just come--and she felt that, if she fell again, it would mean the very end of hope. it must have been instinct or accident, for it certainly was not any prompting from her calm expression, that moved him to say: "now, tell me _your_ troubles. i've told you mine. . . . you surely must have some?" susan forced a successful smile of raillery. "none to speak of," evaded she. when she reached home there was a telegram--from brent: compelled to sail suddenly. shall be back in a few weeks. don't mind this annoying interruption. r. b. a very few minutes after she read these words, she was at work on the play. but--a very few minutes thereafter she was sitting with the play in her lap, eyes gazing into the black and menacing future. the misgivings of the night before had been fed and fattened into despairing certainties by the events of the day. the sun was shining, never more brightly; but it was not the light of her city of the sun. she stayed in all afternoon and all evening. during those hours before she put out the light and shut herself away in the dark a score of susans, every one different from every other, had been seen upon the little theater of that lodging house parlor-bedroom. there had been a hopeful susan, a sad but resolved susan, a strong susan, a weak susan; there had been susans who could not have shed a tear; there had been susans who shed many tears--some of them susans all bitterness, others susans all humility and self-reproach. any spectator would have been puzzled by this shifting of personality. susan herself was completely confused. she sought for her real self among this multitude so contradictory. each successive one seemed the reality; yet none persisted. when we look in at our own souls, it is like looking into a many-sided room lined with mirrors. we see reflections--re-reflections--views at all angles--but we cannot distinguish the soul itself among all these counterfeits, all real yet all false because partial. "what shall i do? what can i do? what will i do?"--that was her last cry as the day ended. and it was her first cry as her weary brain awakened for the new day. at the end of the week came the regular check with a note from garvey--less machine-like, more human. he apologized for not having called, said one thing and another had prevented, and now illness of a near relative compelled him to leave town for a few days, but as soon as he came back he would immediately call. it seemed to susan that there could be but one reason why he should call--the reason that would make a timid, soft-hearted man such as he put off a personal interview as long as he could find excuses. she flushed hot with rage and shame as she reflected on her position. garvey pitying her! she straightway sat down and wrote: dear mr. garvey: do not send me any more checks until mr. brent comes back and i have seen him. i am in doubt whether i shall be able to go on with the work he and i had arranged. she signed this "susan lenox" and dispatched it. at once she felt better in spite of the fact that she had, with characteristic and fatal folly, her good sense warned her, cut herself off from all the income in sight or in prospect. she had debated sending back the check, but had decided that if she did she might give the impression of pique or anger. no, she would give him every chance to withdraw from a bargain with which he was not content; and he would get the idea that it was she who was ending the arrangement, would therefore feel no sense of responsibility for her. she would save her pride; she would spare his feelings. she was taking counsel of burlingham these days--was recalling the lesson he had taught her, was getting his aid in deciding her course. burlingham protested vehemently against this sending back of the check; but she let her pride, her aversion to being an object of pity, overrule him. a few days more, and she was so desperate, so harassed that she altogether lost confidence in her own judgment. while outwardly she seemed to be the same as always with rod, she had a feeling of utter alienation. still, there was no one else to whom she could turn. should she put the facts before him and ask his opinion? her intelligence said no; her heart said perhaps. while she was hesitating, he decided for her. one morning at breakfast he stopped talking about himself long enough to ask carelessly: "about you and brent--he's gone away. what are you doing?" "nothing," said she. "going to take that business up again, when he comes back?" "i don't know." "i wouldn't count on it, if i were you. . . . you're so sensitive that i've hesitated to say anything. but i think that chap was looking for trouble, and when he found you were already engaged, why, he made up his mind to drop it." "do you think so?" said susan indifferently. "more coffee?" "yes--a little. if my play's as good as your coffee---- that's enough, thanks. . . . do you still draw your--your----" his tone as he cast about for a fit word made her flush scarlet. "no--i stopped it until we begin work again." he did not conceal his thorough satisfaction. "that's right!" he cried. "the only cloud on our happiness is gone. you know, a man doesn't like that sort of thing." "i know," said susan drily. and she understood why that very night he for the first time asked her to supper after the rehearsal with sperry and constance francklyn, the leading lady, with whom he was having one of those affairs which as he declared to sperry were "absolutely necessary to a man of genius to keep him freshened up--to keep the fire burning brightly." he had carefully coached miss francklyn to play the part of unsuspected "understudy"--susan saw that before they had been seated in jack's ten minutes. and she also saw that he was himself resolved to conduct himself "like a gentleman." but after he had taken two or three highballs, susan was forced to engage deeply in conversation with the exasperated and alarmed sperry to avoid seeing how madly rod and constance were flirting. she, however, did contrive to see nothing--at least, the other three were convinced that she had not seen. when they were back in their rooms, rod--whether through pretense or through sidetracked amorousness or from simple intoxication--became more demonstrative than he had been for a long time. "no, there's nobody like you," he declared. "even if i wandered i'd always come back to you." "really?" said susan with careless irony. "that's good. no, i can unhook my blouse." "i do believe you're growing cold." "i don't feel like being messed with tonight." "oh, very well," said he sulkily. then, forgetting his ill humor after a few minutes of watching her graceful movements and gestures as she took off her dress and made her beautiful hair ready for the night, he burst out in a very different tone: "you don't know how glad i am that you're dependent on me again. you'll not be difficult any more." a moment's silence, then susan, with a queer little laugh, "men don't in the least mind--do they?" "mind what?" "being loved for money." there was a world of sarcasm in her accent on that word loved. "oh, nonsense. you don't understand yourself," declared he with large confidence. "women never grow up. they're like babies--and babies, you know, love the person that feeds them." "and dogs--and cats--and birds--and all the lower orders." she took a book and sat in a wrapper under the light. "come to bed--please, dear," pleaded he. "no, i'll read a while." and she held the book before her until he was asleep. then she sat a long time, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her gaze fixed upon his face--the face of the man who was her master now. she must please him, must accept what treatment he saw fit to give, must rein in her ambitions to suit the uncertain gait and staying power of his ability to achieve. she could not leave him; he could leave her when he might feel so inclined. her master--capricious, tyrannical, a drunkard. her sole reliance--and the first condition of his protection was that she should not try to do for herself. a dependent, condemned to become even more dependent. chapter xvii she now spent a large part of every day in wandering, like a derelict, drifting aimlessly this way or that, up into the park or along fifth avenue. she gazed intently into shop windows, apparently inspecting carefully all the articles on display; but she passed on, unconscious of having seen anything. if she sat at home with a book she rarely turned a page, though her gaze was fastened upon the print as if she were absorbingly interested. what was she feeling? the coarse contacts of street life and tenement life--the choice between monstrous defilements from human beings and monstrous defilements from filth and vermin. what was she seeing? the old women of the slums--the forlorn, aloof figures of shattered health and looks--creeping along the gutters, dancing in the barrel houses, sleeping on the floor in some vile hole in the wall--sleeping the sleep from which one awakes bitten by mice and bugs, and swarming with lice. she had entire confidence in brent's judgment. brent must have discovered that she was without talent for the stage--for if he had thought she had the least talent, would he not in his kindness have arranged or offered some sort of place in some theater or other? since she had no stage talent--then--what should she do? what _could_ she do? and so her mind wandered as aimlessly as her wandering steps. and never before had the sweet melancholy of her eyes been so moving. but, though she did not realize it, there was a highly significant difference between this mood of profound discouragement and all the other similar moods that had accompanied and accelerated her downward plunges. every time theretofore, she had been cowed by the crushing mandate of destiny--had made no struggle against it beyond the futile threshings about of aimless youth. this time she lost neither strength nor courage. she was no longer a child; she was no longer mere human flotsam and jetsam. she did not know which way to turn; but she did know, with all the certainty of a dauntless will, that she would turn some way--and that it would not be a way leading back to the marshes and caves of the underworld. she wandered--she wandered aimlessly; but not for an instant did she cease to keep watch for the right direction--the direction that would be the best available in the circumstances. she did not know or greatly care which way it led, so long as it did not lead back whence she had come. in all her excursions she had--not consciously but by instinct--kept away from her old beat. indeed, except in the company of spenser or sperry she had never ventured into the neighborhood of long acre. but one day she was deflected by chance at the forty-second street corner of fifth avenue and drifted westward, pausing at each book stall to stare at the titles of the bargain offerings in literature. as she stood at one of these stalls near sixth avenue, she became conscious that two men were pressing against her, one on either side. she moved back and started on her way. one of the men was standing before her. she lifted her eyes, was looking into the cruel smiling eyes of a man with a big black mustache and the jaws of a prizefighter. his smile broadened. "i thought it was you, queenie," said he. "delighted to see you." she recognized him as a fly cop who had been one of freddie palmer's handy men. she fell back a step and the other man--she knew him instantly as also a policeman--lined up beside him of the black mustache. both men were laughing. "we've been on the lookout for you a long time, queenie," said the other. "there's a friend of yours that wants to see you mighty bad." susan glanced from one to the other, her face pale but calm, in contrast to her heart where was all the fear and horror of the police which long and savage experience had bred. she turned away without speaking and started toward sixth avenue. "now, what d'ye think of that?" said black mustache to his "side kick." "i thought she was too much of a lady to cut an old friend. guess we'd better run her in, pete." "that's right," assented pete. "then we can keep her safe till f. p. can get the hooks on her." black mustache laughed, laid his hand on her arm. "you'll come along quietly," said he. "you don't want to make a scene. you always was a perfect lady." she drew her arm away. "i am a married woman--living with my husband." black mustache laughed. "think of that, pete! and she soliciting us. that'll be good news for your loving husband. come along, queenie. your record's against you. everybody'll know you've dropped back to your old ways." "i am going to my husband," said she quietly. "you had better not annoy me." pete looked uneasy, but black mustache's sinister face became more resolute. "if you wanted to live respectable, why did you solicit us two? come along--or do you want me and pete to take you by the arms?" "very well," said she. "i'll go." she knew the police, knew that palmer's lieutenant would act as he said--and she also knew what her "record" would do toward carrying through the plot. she walked in the direction of the station house, the two plain clothes men dropping a few feet behind and rejoining her only when they reached the steps between the two green lamps. in this way they avoided collecting a crowd at their heels. as she advanced to the desk, the sergeant yawning over the blotter glanced up. "bless my soul!" cried he, all interest at once. "if it ain't f. p.'s queenie!" "and up to her old tricks, sergeant," said black mustache. "she solicited me and pete." susan was looking the sergeant straight in the eyes. "i am a married woman," said she. "i live with my husband. i was looking at some books in forty-second street when these two came up and arrested me." the sergeant quailed, glanced at pete who was guiltily hanging his head--glanced at black mustache. there he got the support he was seeking. "what's your husband's name?" demanded black mustache roughly. "what's your address?" and rod's play coming on the next night but one! she shrank, collected herself. "i am not going to drag him into this, if i can help it," said she. "i give you a chance to keep yourselves out of trouble." she was gazing calmly at the sergeant again. "you know these men are not telling the truth. you know they've brought me here because of freddie palmer. my husband knows all about my past. he will stand by me. but i wish to spare him." the sergeant's uncertain manner alarmed black mustache. "she's putting up a good, bluff" scoffed he. "the truth is she ain't got no husband. she'd not have solicited us if she was living decent." "you hear what the officer says," said the sergeant, taking the tone of great kindness. "you'll have to give your name and address--and i'll leave it to the judge to decide between you and the officers." he took up his pen. "what's your name?" susan, weak and trembling, was clutching the iron rail before the desk--the rail worn smooth by the nervous hands of ten thousand of the social system's sick or crippled victims. "come--what's your name?" jeered black mustache. susan did not answer. "put her down queenie brown," cried he, triumphantly. the sergeant wrote. then he said: "age?" no answer from susan. black mustache answered for her: "about twenty-two now." "she don't look it," said the sergeant, almost at ease once more. "but brunettes stands the racket better'n blondes. native parents?" no answer. "native. you don't look irish or dutch or dago--though you might have a dash of the spinnitch or the frog-eaters. ever arrested before?" no answer from the girl, standing rigid at the bar. black mustache said: "at least oncet, to my knowledge. i run her in myself." "oh, she's got a record?" exclaimed the sergeant, now wholly at ease. "why the hell didn't you say so?" "i thought you remembered. you took her pedigree." "i do recollect now," said the sergeant. "take my advice, queenie, and drop that bluff about the officers lying. swallow your medicine--plead guilty--and you'll get off with a fine. if you lie about the police, the judge'll soak it to you. it happens to be a good judge--a friend of freddie's." then to the policemen: "take her along to court, boys, and get back here as soon as you can." "i want her locked up," objected black mustache. "i want f. p. to see her. i've got to hunt for him." "can't do it," said the sergeant. "if she makes a yell about police oppression, our holding on to her would look bad. no, put her through." susan now straightened herself and spoke. "i shan't make any complaint," said she. "anything rather than court. i can't stand that. keep me here." "not on your life!" cried the sergeant. "that's a trick. she'd have a good case against us." "f. p.'ll raise the devil if----" began black mustache. "then hunt him up right away. to court she's got to go. i don't want to get broke." the two men fell afoul each other with curse and abuse. they were in no way embarrassed by the presence of susan. her "record" made her of no account either as a woman or as a witness. soon each was so well pleased with the verbal wounds he had dealt the other that their anger evaporated. the upshot of the hideous controversy was that black mustache said: "you take her to court, pete. i'll hunt up f. p. keep her till the last." in after days she could recall starting for the street car with the officer, pete; then memory was a blank until she was sitting in a stuffy room with a prison odor--the anteroom to the court. she and pete were alone. he was walking nervously up and down pulling his little fair mustache. it must have been that she had retained throughout the impassive features which, however stormy it was within, gave her an air of strength and calm. otherwise pete would not presently have halted before her to say in a low, agitated voice: "if you can make trouble for us, don't do it. i've got a wife, and three babies--one come only last week--and my old mother paralyzed. you know how it is with us fellows--that we've got to do what them higher up says or be broke." susan made no reply. "and f. p.--he's right up next the big fellows nowadays. what he says goes. you can see for yourself how much chance against him there'd be for a common low-down cop." she was still silent, not through anger as he imagined but because she had no sense of the reality of what was happening. the officer, who had lost his nerve, looked at her a moment, in his animal eyes a humble pleading look; then he gave a groan and turned away. "oh, hell!" he muttered. again her memory ceased to record until--the door swung open; she shivered, thinking it was the summons to court. instead, there stood freddie palmer. the instant she looked into his face she became as calm and strong as her impassive expression had been falsely making her seem. behind him was black mustache, his face ghastly, sullen, cowed. palmer made a jerky motion of head and arm. pete went; and the door closed and she was alone with him. "i've seen the judge and you're free," said freddie. she stood and began to adjust her hat and veil. "i'll have those filthy curs kicked off the force." she was looking tranquilly at him. "you don't believe me? you think i ordered it done?" she shrugged her shoulders. "no matter," she said. "it's undone now. i'm much obliged. it's more than i expected." "you don't believe me--and i don't blame you. you think i'm making some sort of grandstand play." "you haven't changed--at least not much." "i'll admit, when you left i was wild and did tell 'em to take you in as soon as they found you. but that was a long time ago. and i never meant them to disturb a woman who was living respectably with her husband. there may have been--yes, there was a time when i'd have done that--and worse. but not any more. you say i haven't changed. well, you're wrong. in some ways i have. i'm climbing up, as i always told you i would--and as a man gets up he sees things differently. at least, he acts differently. i don't do _that_ kind of dirty work, any more." "i'm glad to hear it," murmured susan for lack of anything else to say. he was as handsome as ever, she saw--had the same charm of manner--a charm owing not a little of its potency to the impression he made of the man who would dare as far as any man, and then go on to dare a step farther--the step from which all but the rare, utterly unafraid man shrinks. his look at her could not but appeal to her vanity as woman, and to her woman's craving for being loved; at the same time it agitated her with specters of the days of her slavery to him. he said: "_you_'ve changed--a lot. and all to the good. the only sign is rouge on your lips and that isn't really a sign nowadays. but then you never did look the professional--and you weren't." his eyes were appealingly tender as he gazed at her sweet, pensive face, with its violet-gray eyes full of mystery and sorrow and longing. and the clear pallor of her skin, and the slender yet voluptuous lines of her form suggested a pale, beautiful rose, most delicate of flowers yet about the hardiest. "so--you've married and settled down?" "no," replied susan. "neither the one nor the other." "why, you told----" "i'm supposed to be a married woman." "why didn't you give your name and address at the police station?" said he. "they'd have let you go at once." "yes, i know," replied she. "but the newspapers would probably have published it. so--i couldn't. as it is i've been worrying for fear i'd be recognized, and the man would get a write-up." "that was square," said he. "yes, it'd have been a dirty trick to drag him in." it was the matter-of-course to both of them that she should have protected her "friend." she had simply obeyed about the most stringent and least often violated article in the moral code of the world of outcasts. if freddie's worst enemy in that world had murdered him, freddie would have used his last breath in shielding him from the common foe, the law. "if you're not married to him, you're free," said freddie with a sudden new kind of interest in her. "i told you i should always be free." they remained facing each other a moment. when she moved to go, he said: "i see you've still got your taste in dress--only more so." she smiled faintly, glanced at his clothing. he was dressed with real fashion. he looked fifth avenue at its best, and his expression bore out the appearance of the well-bred man of fortune. "i can return the compliment," said she. "and you too have improved." at a glance all the old fear of him had gone beyond the possibility of return. for she instantly realized that, like all those who give up war upon society and come in and surrender, he was enormously agitated about his new status, was impressed by the conventionalities to a degree that made him almost weak and mildly absurd. he was saying: "i don't think of anything else but improving--in every way. and the higher i get the higher i want to go. . . . that was a dreadful thing i did to you. i wasn't to blame. it was part of the system. a man's got to do at every stage whatever's necessary. but i don't expect you to appreciate that. i know you'll never forgive me." "i'm used to men doing dreadful things." "_you_ don't do them." "oh, i was brought up badly--badly for the game, i mean. but i'm doing better, and i shall do still better. i can't abolish the system. i can't stand out against it--and live. so, i'm yielding--in my own foolish fashion." "you don't lay up against me the--the--you know what i mean?" the question surprised her, so far as it aroused any emotion. she answered indifferently: "i don't lay anything up against anybody. what's the use? i guess we all do the best we can--the best the system'll let us." and she was speaking the exact truth. she did not reason out the causes of a state of mind so alien to the experiences of the comfortable classes that they could not understand it, would therefore see in it hardness of heart. in fact, the heart has nothing to do with this attitude in those who are exposed to the full force of the cruel buffetings of the storms that incessantly sweep the wild and wintry sea of active life. they lose the sense of the personal. where they yield to anger and revenge upon the instrument the blow fate has used it to inflict, the resentment is momentary. the mood of personal vengeance is characteristic of stupid people leading uneventful lives--of comfortable classes, of remote rural districts. she again moved to go, this time putting out her hand with a smile. he said, with an awkwardness most significant in one so supple of mind and manner: "i want to talk to you. i've got something to propose--something that'll interest you. will you give me--say, about an hour?" she debated, then smiled. "you will have me arrested if i refuse?" he flushed scarlet. "you're giving me what's coming to me," said he. "the reason--one reason--i've got on so well is that i've never been a liar." "no--you never were that." "you, too. it's always a sign of bravery, and bravery's the one thing i respect. yes, what i said i'd do always i did. that's the only way to get on in politics--and the crookeder the politics the more careful a man has to be about acting on the level. i can borrow a hundred thousand dollars without signing a paper--and that's more than the crooks in wall street can do--the biggest and best of them. so, when i told you how things were with me about you, i was on the level." "i know it," said susan. "where shall we go? i can't ask you to come home with me." "we might go to tea somewhere----" susan laughed outright. tea! freddie palmer proposing tea! what a changed hooligan--how ridiculously changed! the other freddie palmer--the real one--the fascinating repelling mixture of all the barbaric virtues and vices must still be there. but how carefully hidden--and what strong provocation would be needed to bring that savage to the surface again. the italian in him, that was carrying him so far so cleverly, enabled him instantly to understand her amusement. he echoed her laugh. said he: "you've no idea the kind of people i'm traveling with--not political swells, but the real thing. what do you say to the brevoort?" she hesitated. "you needn't be worried about being seen with me, no matter how high you're flying," he hastened to say. "i always did keep myself in good condition for the rise. nothing's known about me or ever will be." the girl was smiling at him again. "i wasn't thinking of those things," said she. "i've never been to the brevoort." "it's quiet and respectable." susan's eyes twinkled. "i'm glad it's respectable," said she. "are you quite sure _you_ can afford to be seen with _me?_ it's true they don't make the fuss about right and wrong side of the line that they did a few years ago. they've gotten a metropolitan morality. still--i'm not respectable and never shall be." "don't be too hasty about that," protested he, gravely. "but wait till you hear my proposition." as they walked through west ninth street she noted that there was more of a physical change in him than she had seen at first glance. he was less athletic, heavier of form and his face was fuller. "you don't keep in as good training as you used," said she. "it's those infernal automobiles," cried he. "they're death to figure--to health, for that matter. but i've got the habit, and i don't suppose i'll ever break myself of it. i've taken on twenty pounds in the past year, and i've got myself so upset that the doctor has ordered me abroad to take a cure. then there's champagne. i can't let that alone, either, though i know it's plain poison." and when they were in the restaurant of the brevoort he insisted on ordering champagne--and left her for a moment to telephone for his automobile. it amused her to see a man so masterful thus pettily enslaved. she laughed at him, and he again denounced himself as a weak fool. "money and luxury are too much for me. they are for everybody. i'm not as strong willed as i used to be," he said. "and it makes me uneasy. that's another reason for my proposition." "well--let's hear it," said she. "i happen to be in a position where i'm fond of hearing propositions--even if i have no intention of accepting." she was watching him narrowly. the freddie palmer he was showing to her was a surprising but perfectly logical development of a side of his character with which she had been familiar in the old days; she was watching for that other side--the sinister and cruel side. "but first," he went on, "i must tell you a little about myself. i think i told you once about my mother and father?" "i remember," said susan. "well, honestly, do you wonder that i was what i used to be?" "no," she answered. "i wonder that you are what you _seem_ to be." "what i come pretty near being," cried he. "the part that's more or less put on today is going to be the real thing tomorrow. that's the way it is with life--you put on a thing, and gradually learn to wear it. and--i want you to help me." there fell silence between them, he gazing at his glass of champagne, turning it round and round between his long white fingers and watching the bubbles throng riotously up from the bottom. "yes," he said thoughtfully, "i want you to help me. i've been waiting for you. i knew you'd turn up again." he laughed. "i've been true to you in a way--a man's way. i've hunted the town for women who suggested you--a poor sort of makeshift--but--i had to do something." "what were you going to tell me?" her tone was business-like. he did not resent it, but straightway acquiesced. "i'll plunge right in. i've been, as you know, a bad one--bad all my life. i was born bad. you know about my mother and father. one of my sisters died in a disreputable resort. the other--well, the last i heard of her, she was doing time in an english pen. i've got a brother--he's a degenerate. well!--not to linger over rotten smells, i was the only one of the family that had brains. i soon saw that everybody who gets on in the world is bad--which simply means doing disturbing things of one kind and another. and i saw that the ordinary crooks let their badness run their brains, while the get-on kind of people let their brains run their badness. you can be rotten--and sink lower and lower every day. or you can gratify your natural taste for rottenness and at the same time get up in the world. i made up my mind to do the rotten things that get a man money and power." "respectability," said susan. "respectability exactly. so i set out to improve my brains. i went to night school and read and studied. and i didn't stay a private in the gang of toughs. i had the brains to be leader, but the leader's got to be a fighter too. i took up boxing and made good in the ring. i got to be leader. then i pushed my way up where i thought out the dirty work for the others to do, and i stayed under cover and made 'em bring the big share of the profits to me. and they did it because i had the brains to think out jobs that paid well and that could be pulled off without getting pinched--at least, not always getting pinched." palmer sipped his champagne, looked at her to see if she was appreciative. "i thought you'd understand," said he. "i needn't go into details. you remember about the women?" "yes, i remember," said susan. "that was one step in the ladder up?" "it got me the money to make my first play for respectability. i couldn't have got it any other way. i had extravagant tastes--and the leader has to be always giving up to help this fellow and that out of the hole. and i never did have luck with the cards and the horses." "why did you want to be respectable?" she asked. "because that's the best graft," explained he. "it means the most money, and the most influence. the coyotes that raid the sheep fold don't get the big share--though they may get a good deal. no, it's the shepherds and the owners that pull off the most. i've been leader of coyotes. i'm graduating into shepherd and proprietor." "i see," said susan. "you make it beautifully clear." he bowed and smiled. "thank you, kindly. then, i'll go on. i'm deep in the contracting business now. i've got a pot of money put away. i've cut out the cards--except a little gentlemen's game now and then, to help me on with the right kind of people. horses, the same way. i've got my political pull copper-riveted. it's as good with the republicans as with democrats, and as good with the reform crowd as with either. my next move is to cut loose from the gang. i've put a lot of lieutenants between me and them, instead of dealing with them direct. i'm putting in several more fellows i'm not ashamed to be seen with in delmonico's." "what's become of jim?" asked susan. "dead--a kike shot him all to pieces in a joint in seventh avenue about a month ago. as i was saying, how do these big multi-millionaires do the trick? they don't tell somebody to go steal what they happen to want. they tell somebody they want it, and that somebody else tells somebody else to get it, and that somebody else passes the word along until it reaches the poor devils who must steal it or lose their jobs. i studied it all out, and i've framed up my game the same way. nowadays, every dollar that comes to me has been thoroughly cleaned long before it drops into my pocket. but you're wondering where _you_ come in." "women are only interested in what's coming to them," said susan. "sensible men are the same way. the men who aren't--they work for wages and salaries. if you're going to live off of other people, as women and the rich do, you've got to stand steady, day and night, for number one. and now, here's where _you_ come in. you've no objection to being respectable?" "i've no objection to not being disreputable." "that's the right way to put it," he promptly agreed. "respectable, you know, doesn't mean anything but appearances. people who are really respectable, who let it strike in, instead of keeping it on the outside where it belongs--they soon get poor and drop down and out." palmer's revelation of himself and of a philosophy which life as it had revealed itself to her was incessantly urging her to adopt so grappled her attention that she altogether forgot herself. a man on his way to the scaffold who suddenly sees and feels a cataclysm rocking the world about him forgets his own plight. unconsciously he was epitomizing, unconsciously she was learning, the whole story of the progress of the race upward from beast toward intellect--the brutal and bloody building of the highway from the caves of darkness toward the peaks of light. the source from which springs, and ever has sprung, the cruelty of man toward man is the struggle of the ambition of the few who see and insist upon better conditions, with the inertia and incompetence of the many who have little sight and less imagination. ambition must use the inert mass--must persuade it, if possible, must compel it by trick or force if persuasion fails. but palmer and susan lenox were, naturally, not seeing the thing in the broad but only as it applied to themselves. "i've read a whole lot of history and biography," freddie went on, "and i've thought about what i read and about what's going on around me. i tell you the world's full of cant. the people who get there don't act on what is always preached. the preaching isn't all lies--at least, i think not. but it doesn't fit the facts a man or a woman has got to meet." "i realized that long ago," said susan. "there's a saying that you can't touch pitch without being defiled. well--you can't build without touching pitch--at least not in a world where money's king and where those with brains have to live off of those without brains by making 'em work and showing 'em what to work at. it's a hell of a world, but _i_ didn't get it up." "and we've got to live in it," said she, "and get out of it the things we want and need." "that's the talk!" cried palmer. "i see you're 'on.' now--to make a long story short--you and i can get what we want. we can help each other. you were better born than i am--you've had a better training in manners and dress and all the classy sort of things. i've got the money--and brains enough to learn with--and i can help you in various ways. so--i propose that we go up together." "we've got--pasts," said susan. "who hasn't that amounts to anything? mighty few. no one that's made his own pile, i'll bet you. i'm in a position to do favors for people--the people we'd need. and i'll get in a position to do more and more. as long as they can make something out of us--or hope to--do you suppose they'll nose into our pasts and root things up that'd injure them as much as us?" "it would be an interesting game, wouldn't it?" said susan. she was reflectively observing the handsome, earnest face before her--an incarnation of intelligent ambition, a freddie palmer who was somehow divesting himself of himself--was growing up--away from the rotten soil that had nourished him--up into the air--was growing strongly--yes, splendidly! "and we've got everything to gain and nothing to lose," pursued he. "we'd not be adventurers, you see. adventurers are people who haven't any money and are looking round to try to steal it. we'd have money. so, we'd be building solid, right on the rock." the handsome young man--the strongest, the most intelligent, the most purposeful she had ever met, except possibly brent--looked at her with an admiring tenderness that moved her, the forlorn derelict adrift on the vast, lonely, treacherous sea. "the reason i've waited for you to invite you in on this scheme is that i tried you out and i found that you belong to the mighty few people who do what they say they'll do, good bargain or bad. it'd never occur to you to shuffle out of trying to keep your word." "it hasn't--so far," said susan. "well--that's the only sort of thing worth talking about as morality. believe me, for i've been through the whole game from chimney pots to cellar floor." "there's another thing, too," said the girl. "what's that?" "not to injure anyone else." palmer shook his head positively. "it's believing that and acting on it that has kept you down in spite of your brains and looks." "that i shall never do," said the girl. "it may be weakness--i guess it is weakness. but--i draw the line there." "but i'm not proposing that you injure anyone--or proposing to do it myself. as i said, i've got up where i can afford to be good and kind and all that. and i'm willing to jump you up over the stretch of the climb that can't be crossed without being--well, anything but good and kind." she was reflecting. "you'll never get over that stretch by yourself. it'll always turn you back." "just what do you propose?" she asked. it gave her pleasure to see the keen delight her question, with its implication of hope, aroused in him. said he: "that we go to europe together and stay over there several years--as long as you like as long as it's necessary. stay till our pasts have disappeared--work ourselves in with the right sort of people. you say you're not married?" "not to the man i'm with." "to somebody else?" "i don't know. i was." "well--that'll be looked into and straightened out. and then we'll quietly marry." susan laughed. "you're too fast," said she. "i'll admit i'm interested. i've been looking for a road--one that doesn't lead toward where we've come from. and this is the first road that has offered. but i haven't agreed to go in with you yet--haven't even begun to think it over. and if i did agree--which i probably won't--why, still i'd not be willing to marry. that's a serious matter. i'd want to be very, very sure i was satisfied." palmer nodded, with a return of the look of admiration. "i understand. you don't promise until you intend to stick, and once you've promised all hell couldn't change you." "another thing--very unfortunate, too. it looks to me as if i'd be dependent on you for money." freddie's eyes wavered. "oh, we'd never quarrel about that," said he with an attempt at careless confidence. "no," replied she quietly. "for the best of reasons. i'd not consider going into any arrangement where i'd be dependent on a man for money. i've had my experience. i've learned my lesson. if i lived with you several years in the sort of style you've suggested--no, not several years but a few months--you'd have me absolutely at your mercy. you'd thought of that, hadn't you?" his smile was confession. "i'd develop tastes for luxuries and they'd become necessities." susan shook her head. "no--that would be foolish--very foolish." he was watching her so keenly that his expression was covert suspicion. "what do you suggest?" he asked. "not what you suspect," replied she, amused. "i'm not making a play for a gift of a fortune. i haven't anything to suggest." there was a long silence, he turning his glass slowly and from time to time taking a little of the champagne thoughtfully. she observed him with a quizzical expression. it was apparent to her that he was debating whether he would be making a fool of himself if he offered her an independence outright. finally she said: "don't worry, freddie. i'd not take it, even if you screwed yourself up to the point of offering it." he glanced up quickly and guiltily. "why not?" he said. "you'd be practically my wife. i can trust you. you've had experience, so you can't blame me for hesitating. money puts the devil in anybody who gets it--man or woman. but i'll trust you----" he laughed--"since i've got to." "no. the most i'd take would be a salary. i'd be a sort of companion." "anything you like," cried he. this last suspicion born of a life of intimate dealings with his fellow-beings took flight. "it'd have to be a big salary because you'd have to dress and act the part. what do you say? is it a go?" "oh, i can't decide now." "when?" she reflected. "i can tell you in a week." he hesitated, said, "all right--a week." she rose to go. "i've warned you the chances are against my accepting." "that's because you haven't looked the ground over," replied he, rising. then, after a nervous moment, "is the--is the----" he stopped short. "go on," said she. "we must be frank with each other." "if the idea of living with me is--is disagreeable----" and again he stopped, greatly embarrassed--an amazing indication of the state of mind of such a man as he--of the depth of his infatuation, of his respect, of his new-sprung awe of conventionality. "i hadn't given it a thought," replied she. "women are not especially sensitive about that sort of thing." "they're supposed to be. and i rather thought you were." she laughed mockingly. "no more than other women," said she. "look how they marry for a home--or money--or social position--and such men! and look how they live with men year after year, hating them. men never could do that." "don't you believe it," replied he. "they can, and they do. the kept man--in and out of marriage--is quite a feature of life in our chaste little village." susan looked amused. "well--why not?" said she. "everybody's simply got to have money nowadays." "and working for it is slow and mighty uncertain." her face clouded. she was seeing the sad wretched past from filthy tenement to foul workshop. she said: "where shall i send you word?" "i've an apartment at sherry's now." "then--a week from today." she put out her hand. he took it, and she marveled as she felt a tremor in that steady hand of his. but his voice was resolutely careless as he said, "so long. don't forget how much i want or need you. and if you do forget that, think of the advantages--seeing the world with plenty of money--and all the rest of it. where'll you get such another chance? you'll not be fool enough to refuse." she smiled, said as she went, "you may remember i used to be something of a fool." "but that was some time ago. you've learned a lot since then--surely." "we'll see. i've become--i think--a good deal of a--of a new yorker." "that means frank about doing what the rest of the world does under a stack of lies. it's a lovely world, isn't it?" "if i had made it," laughed susan, "i'd not own up to the fact." she laughed; but she was seeing the old women of the slums--was seeing them as one sees in the magic mirror the vision of one's future self. and on the way home she said to herself, "it was a good thing that i was arrested today. it reminded me. it warned me. but for it, i might have gone on to make a fool of myself." and she recalled how it had been one of burlingham's favorite maxims that everything is for the best, for those who know how to use it. chapter xviii she wrote garvey asking an appointment. the reply should have come the next day or the next day but one at the farthest; for garvey had been trained by brent to the supreme courtesy of promptness. it did not come until the fourth day; before she opened it susan knew about what she would read--the stupidly obvious attempt to put off facing her--the cowardice of a kind-hearted, weak fellow. she really had her answer--was left without a doubt for hope to perch upon. but she wrote again, insisting so sharply that he came the following day. his large, tell-tale face was a restatement of what she had read in his delay and between the lines of his note. he was effusively friendly with a sort of mortuary suggestion, like one bearing condolences, that tickled her sense of humor, far though her heart was from mirth. "something has happened," began she, "that makes it necessary for me to know when mr. brent is coming back." "really, mrs. spencer----" "miss lenox," she corrected. "yes--miss lenox, i beg your pardon. but really--in my position--i know nothing of mr. brent's plans--and if i did, i'd not be at liberty to speak of them. i have written him what you wrote me about the check--and--and--that is all." "mr. garvey, is he ever--has he----" susan, desperate, burst out with more than she intended to say: "i care nothing about it, one way or the other. if mr. brent is politely hinting that i won't do, i've a right to know it. i have a chance at something else. can't you tell me?" "i don't know anything about it--honestly i don't, miss lenox," cried he, swearing profusely. "you put an accent on the 'know,'" said susan. "you suspect that i'm right, don't you?" "i've no ground for suspecting--that is--no, i haven't. he said nothing to me--nothing. but he never does. he's very peculiar and uncertain . . . and i don't understand him at all." "isn't this his usual way with the failures--his way of letting them down easily?" susan's manner was certainly light and cheerful, an assurance that he need have no fear of hysterics or despair or any sort of scene trying to a soft heart. but garvey could take but the one view of the favor or disfavor of the god of his universe. he looked at her like a dog that is getting a whipping from a friend. "now, miss lenox, you've no right to put me in this painful----" "that's true," said susan, done since she had got what she sought. "i shan't say another word. when mr. brent comes back, will you tell him i sent for you to ask you to thank him for me--and say to him that i found something else for which i hope i'm better suited?" "i'm so glad," said garvey, hysterically. "i'm delighted. and i'm sure he will be, too. for i'm sure he liked you, personally--and i must say i was surprised when he went. but i must not say that sort of thing. indeed, i know nothing, miss lenox--i assure you----" "and please tell him," interrupted susan, "that i'd have written him myself, only i don't want to bother him." "oh, no--no, indeed. not that, miss lenox. i'm so sorry. but i'm only the secretary. i can't say anything." it was some time before susan could get rid of him, though he was eager to be gone. he hung in the doorway, ejaculating disconnectedly, dropping and picking up his hat, perspiring profusely, shaking hands again and again, and so exciting her pity for his misery of the good-hearted weak that she was for the moment forgetful of her own plight. long before he went, he had greatly increased her already strong belief in brent's generosity of character--for, thought she, he'd have got another secretary if he hadn't been too kind to turn adrift so helpless and foolish a creature. well--he should have no trouble in getting rid of her. she was seeing little of spenser and they were saying almost nothing to each other. when he came at night, always very late, she was in bed and pretended sleep. when he awoke, she got breakfast in silence; they read the newspapers as they ate. and he could not spare the time to come to dinner. as the decisive moment drew near, his fears dried up his confident volubility. he changed his mind and insisted on her coming to the theater for the final rehearsals. but "shattered lives" was not the sort of play she cared for, and she was wearied by the profane and tedious wranglings of the stage director and the authors, by the stupidity of the actors who had to be told every little intonation and gesture again and again. the agitation, the labor seemed grotesquely out of proportion to the triviality of the matter at issue. at the first night she sat in a box from which spenser, in a high fever and twitching with nervousness, watched the play, gliding out just before the lights were turned up for the intermission. the play went better than she had expected, and the enthusiasm of the audience convinced her that it was a success before the fall of the curtain on the second act. with the applause that greeted the chief climax--the end of the third act--spenser, sperry and fitzalan were convinced. all three responded to curtain calls. susan had never seen spenser so handsome, and she admired the calmness and the cleverness of his brief speech of thanks. that line of footlights between them gave her a new point of view on him, made her realize how being so close to his weaknesses had obscured for her his strong qualities--for, unfortunately, while a man's public life is determined wholly by his strong qualities, his intimate life depends wholly on his weaknesses. she was as fond of him as she had ever been; but it was impossible for her to feel any thrill approaching love. why? she looked at his fine face and manly figure; she recalled how many good qualities he had. why had she ceased to love him? she thought perhaps some mystery of physical lack of sympathy was in part responsible; then there was the fact that she could not trust him. with many women, trust is not necessary to love; on the contrary, distrust inflames love. it happened not to be so with susan lenox. "i do not love him. i can never love him again. and when he uses his power over me, i shall begin to dislike him." the lost illusion! the dead love! if she could call it back to life! but no--there it lay, coffined, the gray of death upon its features. her heart ached. after the play fitzalan took the authors and the leading lady, constance francklyn, and miss lenox to supper in a private room at rector's. this was miss francklyn's first trial in a leading part. she had small ability as an actress, having never risen beyond the primer stage of mere posing and declamation in which so many players are halted by their vanity--the universal human vanity that is content with small triumphs, or with purely imaginary triumphs. but she had a notable figure of the lank, serpentine kind and a bad, sensual face that harmonized with it. especially in artificial light she had an uncanny allure of the elemental, the wild animal in the jungle. with every disposition and effort to use her physical charms to further herself she would not have been still struggling at twenty-eight, had she had so much as a thimbleful of intelligence. "several times," said sperry to susan as they crossed long acre together on the way to rector's, "yes, at least half a dozen times to my knowledge, constance had had success right in her hands. and every time she has gone crazy about some cheap actor or sport and has thrown it away." "but she'll get on now," said susan. "perhaps," was sperry's doubting reply. "of course, she's got no brains. but it doesn't take brains to act--that is, to act well enough for cheap machine-made plays like this. and nowadays playwrights have learned that it's useless to try to get actors who can act. they try to write parts that are actor-proof." "you don't like your play?" said susan. "like it? i love it. isn't it going to bring me in a pot of money? but as a play"--sperry laughed. "i know spenser thinks it's great, but--there's only one of us who can write plays, and that's brent. it takes a clever man to write a clever play. but it takes a genius to write a clever play that'll draw the damn fools who buy theater seats. and robert brent now and then does the trick. how are you getting on with your ambition for a career?" susan glanced nervously at him. the question, coming upon the heels of talk about brent, filled her with alarm lest rod had broken his promise and had betrayed her confidence. but sperry's expression showed that she was probably mistaken. "my ambition?" said she. "oh--i've given it up." "the thought of work was too much for you--eh?" susan shrugged her shoulders. a sardonic grin flitted over sperry's punch-like face. "the more i see of women, the less i think of 'em," said he. "but i suppose the men'd be lazy and worthless too, if nature had given 'em anything that'd sell or rent. . . . somehow i'm disappointed in _you_, though." that ended the conversation until they were sitting down at the table. then sperry said: "are you offended by my frankness a while ago?" "no," replied susan. "the contrary. some day your saying that may help me." "it's quite true, there's something about you--a look--a manner--it makes one feel you could do things if you tried." "i'm afraid that 'something' is a fraud," said she. no doubt it was that something that had misled brent--that had always deceived her about herself. no, she must not think herself a self-deceived dreamer. even if it was so, still she must not think it. she must say to herself over and over again "brent or no brent, i shall get on--i shall get on" until she had silenced the last disheartening doubt. miss francklyn, with fitzalan on her left and spenser on her right, was seated opposite susan. about the time the third bottle was being emptied the attempts of spenser and constance to conceal from her their doings became absurd. long before the supper was over there had been thrust at her all manner of proofs that spenser was again untrue, that he was whirling madly in one of those cyclonic infatuations which soon wore him out and left him to return contritely to her. sperry admired susan's manners as displayed in her unruffled serenity--an admiration which she did not in the least deserve. she was in fact as deeply interested as she seemed in his discussion of plays and acting, illustrated by brent's latest production. by the time the party broke up, susan had in spite of herself collected a formidable array of incriminating evidence, including the stealing of one of constance's jeweled show garters by spenser under cover of the tablecloth and a swift kiss in the hall when constance went out for a moment and spenser presently suspended his drunken praises of himself as a dramatist, and appointed himself a committee to see what had become of her. at the door of the restaurant, spenser said: "susan, you and miss francklyn take a taxicab. she'll drop you at our place on her way home. fitz and sperry and i want one more drink." "not for me," said sperry savagely, with a scowl at constance. but fitzalan, whose arm susan had seen rod press, remained silent. "come on, my dear," cried miss francklyn, smiling sweet insolent treachery into susan's face. susan smiled sweetly back at her. as she was leaving the taxicab in forty-fifth street, she said: "send rod home by noon, won't you? and don't tell him i know." miss francklyn, who had been drinking greedily, began to cry. susan laughed. "don't be a silly," she urged. "if i'm not upset, why should you be? and how could i blame you two for getting crazy about each other? i wouldn't spoil it for worlds. i want to help it on." "don't you love him--really?" cried constance, face and voice full of the most thrilling theatricalism. "i'm very fond of him," replied susan. "we're old, old friends. but as to love--i'm where you'll be a few months from now." miss francklyn dried her eyes. "isn't it the devil!" she exclaimed. "why _can't_ it last?" "why, indeed," said susan. "good night--and don't forget to send him by twelve o'clock." and she hurried up the steps without waiting for a reply. she felt that the time for action had again come--that critical moment which she had so often in the past seen come and had let pass unheeded. he was in love with another woman; he was prosperous, assured of a good income for a long time, though he wrote no more successes. no need to consider him. for herself, then--what? clearly, there could be no future for her with rod. clearly, she must go. must go--must take the only road that offered. up before her--as in every mood of deep depression--rose the vision of the old women of the slums--the solitary, bent, broken forms, clad in rags, feet wrapped in rags--shuffling along in the gutters, peering and poking among filth, among garbage, to get together stuff to sell for the price of a drink. the old women of the tenements, the old women of the gutters, the old women drunk and dancing as the lecherous-eyed hunchback played the piano. she must not this time wait and hesitate and hope; this time she must take the road that offered--and since it must be taken she must advance along it as if of all possible roads it was the only one she would have freely chosen. yet after she had written and sent off the note to palmer, a deep sadness enveloped her--a grief, not for rod, but for the association, the intimacy, their life together, its sorrows and storms perhaps more than the pleasures and the joys. when she left him before, she had gone sustained by the feeling that she was doing it for him, was doing a duty. now, she was going merely to save herself, to further herself. life, life in that great and hard school of practical living, new york, had given her the necessary hardiness to go, aided by rod's unfaithfulness and growing uncongeniality. but not while she lived could she ever learn to be hard. she would do what she must--she was no longer a fool. but she could not help sighing and crying a little as she did it. it was not many minutes after noon when spenser came. he looked so sheepish and uncomfortable that susan thought constance had told him. but his opening sentence of apology was: "i took too many nightcaps and fitz had to lug me home with him." "really?" said susan. "how disappointed constance must have been!" spenser was not a good liar. his face twisted and twitched so that susan laughed outright. "why, you look like a caught married man," cried she. "you forget we're both free." "whatever put that crazy notion in your head--about miss francklyn?" demanded he. "when you take me or anyone for that big a fool, rod, you only show how foolish you yourself are," said she with the utmost good humor. "the best way to find out how much sense a person has is to see what kind of lies he thinks'll deceive another person." "now--don't get jealous, susie," soothed he. "you know how a man is." the tone was correctly contrite, but susan felt underneath the confidence that he would be forgiven--the confidence of the egotist giddied by a triumph. said she: "don't you think mine's a strange way of acting jealous?" "but you're a strange woman." susan looked at him thoughtfully. "yes, i suppose i am," said she. "and you'll think me stranger when i tell you what i'm going to do." he started up in a panic. and the fear in his eyes pleased her, at the same time that it made her wince. she nodded slowly. "yes, rod--i'm leaving." "i'll drop constance," cried he. "i'll have her put out of the company." "no--go on with her till you've got enough--or she has." "i've got enough, this minute," declared he with convincing energy and passion. "you must know, dearest, that to me constance--all the women i've ever seen--aren't worth your little finger. you're all that they are, and a whole lot more besides." he seized her in his arms. "you wouldn't leave me--you couldn't! you understand how men are--how they get these fits of craziness about a pair of eyes or a figure or some trick of voice or manner. but that doesn't affect the man's heart. i love you, susan. i adore you." she did not let him see how sincerely he had touched her. her eyes were of their deepest violet, but he had never learned that sign. she smiled mockingly; the fingers that caressed his hair were trembling. "we've tided each other over, rod. the play's a success. you're all right again--and so am i. now's the time to part." "is it brent, susie?" "i quit him last week." "there's no one else. you're going because of constance!" she did not deny. "you're free and so am i," said she practically. "i'm going. so--let's part sensibly. don't make a silly scene." she knew how to deal with him--how to control him through his vanity. he drew away from her, chilled and sullen. "if you can live through it, i guess i can," said he. "you're making a damn fool of yourself--leaving a man that's fond of you--and leaving when he's successful." "i always was a fool, you know," said she. she had decided against explaining to him and so opening up endless and vain argument. it was enough that she saw it was impossible to build upon or with him, saw the necessity of trying elsewhere--unless she would risk--no, invite--finding herself after a few months, or years, back among the drift, back in the underworld. he gazed at her as she stood smiling gently at him--smiling to help her hide the ache at her heart, the terror before the vision of the old women of the tenement gutters, earning the wages, not of sin, not of vice, not of stupidity, but of indecision, of over-hopefulness--of weakness. here was the kind of smile that hurts worse than tears, that takes the place of tears and sobs and moans. but he who had never understood her did not understand her now. her smile infuriated his vanity. "you can _laugh!_" he sneered. "well--go to the filth where you belong! you were born for it." and he flung out of the room, went noisily down the stairs. she heard the front door's distant slam; it seemed to drop her into a chair. she sat there all crouched together until the clock on the mantel struck two. this roused her hastily to gather into her trunk such of her belongings as she had not already packed. she sent for a cab. the man of all work carried down the trunk and put it on the box. dressed in a simple blue costume as if for traveling, she entered the cab and gave the order to drive to the grand central station. at the corner she changed the order and was presently entering the beaux arts restaurant where she had asked freddie to meet her. he was there, smoking calmly and waiting. at sight of her he rose. "you'll have lunch?" said he. "no, thanks." "a small bottle of champagne?" "yes--i'm rather tired." he ordered the champagne. "and," said he, "it'll be the real thing--which mighty few new yorkers get even at the best places." when it came he sent the waiter away and filled the glasses himself. he touched the brim of his glass to the bottom of hers. "to the new deal," said he. she smiled and nodded, and emptied the glass. suddenly it came to her why she felt so differently toward him. she saw the subtle, yet radical change that always transforms a man of force of character when his position in the world notably changes. this man before her, so slightly different in physical characteristics from the man she had fled, was wholly different in expression. "when shall we sail?" asked he. "tomorrow?" "first--there's the question of money," said she. he was much amused. "still worrying about your independence." "no," replied she. "i've been thinking it out, and i don't feel any anxiety about that. i've changed my scheme of life. i'm going to be sensible and practice what life has taught me. it seems there's only one way for a woman to get up. through some man." freddie nodded. "by marriage or otherwise, but always through a man." "so i've discovered," continued she. "so, i'm going to play the game. and i think i can win now. with the aid of what i'll learn and with the chances i'll have, i can keep my feeling of independence. you see, if you and i don't get on well together, i'll be able to look out for myself. something'll turn up." "or--_somebody_--eh?" "or somebody." "that's candid." "don't you want me to be candid? but even if you don't, i've got to be." "yes--truth--especially disagreeable truth--is your long suit," said he. "not that i'm kicking. i'm glad you went straight at the money question. we can settle it and never think of it again. and neither of us will be plotting to take advantage of the other, or fretting for fear the other is plotting. sometimes i think nearly all the trouble in this world comes through failure to have a clear understanding about money matters." susan nodded. said she thoughtfully, "i guess that's why i came--one of the main reasons. you are wonderfully sensible and decent about money." "and the other chap isn't?" "oh, yes--and no. he likes to make a woman feel dependent. he thinks--but that doesn't matter. he's all right." "now--for our understanding with each other," said palmer. "you can have whatever you want. the other day you said you wanted some sort of a salary. but if you've changed----" "no--that's what i want." "so much a year?" "so much a week," replied she. "i want to feel, and i want you to feel, that we can call it off at any time on seven days' notice." "but that isn't what i want," said he--and she, watching him closely if furtively, saw the strong lines deepen round his mouth. she hesitated. she was seeing the old woman's dance hall, was hearing the piano as the hunchback played and the old horrors reeled about, making their palsy rhythmic. she was seeing this, yet she dared. "then you don't want me," said she, so quietly that he could not have suspected her agitation. never had her habit of concealing her emotion been so useful to her. he sat frowning at his glass--debating. finally he said: "i explained the other day what i was aiming for. such an arrangement as you suggest wouldn't help. you see that?" "it's all i can do--at present," replied she firmly. and she was now ready to stand or fall by that decision. she had always accepted the other previous terms--or whatever terms fate offered. result--each time, disaster. she must make no more fatal blunders. this time, her own terms or not at all. he was silent a long time. she knew she had convinced him that her terms were final. so, his delay could only mean that he was debating whether to accept or to go his way and leave her to go hers. at last he laughed and said: "you've become a true new yorker. you know how to drive a hard bargain." he looked at her admiringly. "you certainly have got courage. i happen to know a lot about your affairs. i've ways of finding out things. and i know you'd not be here if you hadn't broken with the other fellow first. so, if i turned your proposition down you'd be up against it--wouldn't you?" "yes," said she. "but--i won't in any circumstances tie myself. i must be free." "you're right," said he. "and i'll risk your sticking. i'm a good gambler." "if i were bound, but didn't want to stay, would i be of much use?" "of no use. you can quit on seven minutes' notice, instead of seven days." "and you, also," said she. laughingly they shook hands. she began to like him in a new and more promising way. here was a man, who at least was cast in a big mold. nothing small and cheap about him--and brent had made small cheap men forever intolerable to her. yes, here was a man of the big sort; and a big man couldn't possibly be a bad man. no matter how many bad things he might do, he would still be himself, at least, a scorner of the pettiness and sneakiness and cowardice inseparable from villainy. "and now," said he, "let's settle the last detail. how much a week? how would five hundred strike you?" "that's more than twelve times the largest salary i ever got. it's many times as much as i made in the----" "no matter," he hastily interposed. "it's the least you can hold down the job on. you've got to spend money--for clothes and so on." "two hundred is the most i can take," said she. "it's the outside limit." he insisted, but she remained firm. "i will not accustom myself to much more than i see any prospect of getting elsewhere," explained she. "perhaps later on i'll ask for an increase--later on, when i see how things are going and what my prospects elsewhere would be. but i must begin modestly." "well, let it go at two hundred for the present. i'll deposit a year's salary in a bank, and you can draw against it. is that satisfactory? you don't want me to hand you two hundred dollars every saturday, do you?" "no. that would get on my nerves," said she. "now--it's all settled. when shall we sail?" "there's a girl i've got to look up before i go." "maud? you needn't bother about her. she's married to a piker from up the state--a shoe manufacturer. she's got a baby, and is fat enough to make two or three like what she used to be." "no, not maud. one you don't know." "i hoped we could sail tomorrow. why not take a taxi and go after her now?" "it may be a long search." "she's a----?" he did not need to finish his sentence in order to make himself understood. susan nodded. "oh, let her----" "i promised," interrupted she. "then--of course." freddie drew from his trousers pocket a huge roll of bills. susan smiled at this proof that he still retained the universal habit of gamblers, politicians and similar loose characters of large income, precariously derived. he counted off three hundreds and four fifties and held them out to her. "let me in on it," said he. susan took the money without hesitation. she was used to these careless generosities of the men of that class--generosities passing with them and with the unthinking for evidences of goodness of heart, when in fact no generosity has any significance whatever beyond selfish vanity unless it is a sacrifice of necessities--real necessities. "i don't think i'll need money," said she. "but i may." "you've got a trunk and a bag on the cab outside," he went on. "i've told them at sherry's that i'm to be married." susan flushed. she hastily lowered her eyes. but she need not have feared lest he should suspect the cause of the blush . . . a strange, absurd resentment of the idea that she could be married to freddie palmer. live with him--yes. but marry--now that it was thus squarely presented to her, she found it unthinkable. she did not pause to analyze this feeling, indeed could not have analyzed it, had she tried. it was, however, a most interesting illustration of how she had been educated at last to look upon questions of sex as a man looks on them. she was like the man who openly takes a mistress whom he in no circumstances would elevate to the position of wife. "so," he proceeded, "you might as well move in at sherry's." "no," objected she. "let's not begin the new deal until we sail." the wisdom of this was obvious. "then we'll take your things over to the manhattan hotel," said he. "and we'll start the search from there." but after registering at the manhattan as susan lenox, she started out alone. she would not let him look in upon any part of her life which she could keep veiled. chapter xix she left the taxicab at the corner of grand street and the bowery, and plunged into her former haunts afoot. once again she had it forced upon her how meaningless in the life history are the words "time" and "space." she was now hardly any distance, as measurements go, from her present world, and she had lived here only a yesterday or so ago. yet what an infinity yawned between! at the delancey street apartment house there was already a new janitress, and the kinds of shops on the ground floor had changed. only after two hours of going up and down stairs, of knocking at doors, of questioning and cross-questioning, did she discover that clara had moved to allen street, to the tenement in which susan herself had for a few weeks lived--those vague, besotted weeks of despair. when we go out into the streets with bereavement in mind, we see nothing but people dressed in mourning. and a similar thing occurs, whatever the emotion that oppresses us. it would not have been strange if susan, on the way to allen street afoot, had seen only women of the streets, for they swarm in every great thoroughfare of our industrial cities. they used to come out only at night. but with the passing of the feeling against them that existed when they were a rare, unfamiliar, mysteriously terrible minor feature of life, they issue forth boldly by day, like all the other classes, making a living as best they can. but on that day susan felt as if she were seeing only the broken down and cast-out creatures of the class--the old women, old in body rather than in years, picking in the gutters, fumbling in the garbage barrels, poking and peering everywhere for odds and ends that might pile up into the price of a glass of the poison sold in the barrel houses. the old women--the hideous, lonely old women--and the diseased, crippled children, worse off than the cats and the dogs, for cat and dog were not compelled to wear filth-soaked rags. prosperous, civilized new york! a group of these children were playing some rough game, in imitation of their elders, that was causing several to howl with pain. she heard a woman, being shown about by a settlement worker or some such person, say: "really, not at all badly dressed--for street games. i must confess i don't see signs of the misery they talk so much about." a wave of fury passed through susan. she felt like striking the woman full in her vain, supercilious, patronizing face--striking her and saying: "you smug liar! what if you had to wear such clothes on that fat, overfed body of yours! you'd realize then how filthy they are!" she gazed in horror at the allen street house. was it possible that _she_ had lived there? in the filthy doorway sat a child eating a dill pickle--a scrawny, ragged little girl with much of her hair eaten out by the mange. she recalled this little girl as the formerly pretty and lively youngster, the daughter of the janitress. she went past the child without disturbing her, knocked at the janitress' door. it presently opened, disclosing in a small and foul room four prematurely old women, all in the family way, two with babies in arms. one of these was the janitress. though she was not a jewess, she was wearing one of the wigs assumed by orthodox jewish women when they marry. she stared at susan with not a sign of recognition. "i am looking for miss clara," said susan. the janitress debated, shifted her baby from one arm to the other, glanced inquiringly at the other women. they shook their heads; she looked at susan and shook her head. "there ain't a clara," said she. "perhaps she's took another name?" "perhaps," conceded susan. and she described clara and the various dresses she had had. at the account of one with flounces on the skirts and lace puffs in the sleeves, the youngest of the women showed a gleam of intelligence. "you mean the girl with the cancer of the breast," said she. susan remembered. she could not articulate; she nodded. "oh, yes," said the janitress. "she had the third floor back, and was always kicking because mrs. pfister kept a guinea pig for her rheumatism and the smell came through." "has she gone?" asked susan. "couple of weeks." "where?" the janitress shrugged her shoulders. the other women shrugged their shoulders. said the janitress: "her feller stopped coming. the cancer got awful bad. i've saw a good many--they're quite plentiful down this way. i never see a worse'n hers. she didn't have no money. up to the hospital they tried a new cure on her that made her gallopin' worse. the day before i was going to have to go to work and put her out--she left." "can't you give me any idea?" urged susan. "she didn't take her things," said the janitress meaningly. "not a stitch." "the--the river?" the janitress shrugged her shoulders. "she always said she would, and i guess----" again the fat, stooped shoulders lifted and lowered. "she was most crazy with pain." there was a moment's silence, then susan murmured, "thank you," and went back to the hall. the house was exhaling a frightful stench--the odor of cheap kerosene, of things that passed there for food, of animals human and lower, of death and decay. on her way out she dropped a dollar into the lap of the little girl with the mange. a parrot was shrieking from an upper window. on the topmost fire escape was a row of geraniums blooming sturdily. her taxicab had moved up the street, pushed out of place by a hearse--a white hearse, with polished mountings, the horses caparisoned in white netting, and tossing white plumes. a baby's funeral--this mockery of a ride in state after a brief life of squalor. it was summer, and the babies were dying like lambs in the shambles. in winter the grown people were slaughtered; in summer the children. across the street, a few doors up, the city dead wagon was taking away another body--in a plain pine box--to the potter's field where find their way for the final rest one in every ten of the people of the rich and splendid city of new york. susan hurried into her cab. "drive fast," she said. when she came back to sense of her surroundings she was flying up wide and airy fifth avenue with gorgeous sunshine bathing its palaces, with wealth and fashion and ease all about her. her dear city of the sun! but it hurt her now, was hateful to look upon. she closed her eyes; her life in the slums, her life when she was sharing the lot that is really the lot of the human race as a race, passed before her--its sights and sounds and odors, its hideous heat, its still more hideous cold, its contacts and associations, its dirt and disease and degradation. and through the roar of the city there came to her a sound, faint yet intense--like the still, small voice the prophet heard--but not the voice of god, rather the voice of the multitude of aching hearts, aching in hopeless poverty--hearts of men, of women, of children---- the children! the multitudes of children with hearts that no sooner begin to beat than they begin to ache. she opened her eyes to shut out these sights and that sound of heartache. she gazed round, drew a long breath of relief. she had almost been afraid to look round lest she should find that her escape had been only a dream. and now the road she had chosen--or, rather, the only road she could take--the road with freddie palmer--seemed attractive, even dazzling. what she could not like, she would ignore--and how easily she, after her experience, could do that! what she could not ignore she would tolerate would compel herself to like. poor clara!--happy clara!--better off in the dregs of the river than she had ever been in the dregs of new york. she shuddered. then, as so often, the sense of the grotesque thrust in, as out of place as jester in cap and bells at a bier--and she smiled sardonically. "why," thought she, "in being squeamish about freddie i'm showing that i'm more respectable than the respectable women. there's hardly one of them that doesn't swallow worse doses with less excuse or no excuse at all--and without so much as a wry face." chapter xx in the ten days on the atlantic and the mediterranean mr. and mrs. palmer, as the passenger list declared them, planned the early stages of their campaign. they must keep to themselves, must make no acquaintances, no social entanglements of any kind, until they had effected the exterior transformation which was to be the first stride--and a very long one, they felt--toward the conquest of the world that commands all the other worlds. several men aboard knew palmer slightly--knew him vaguely as a big politician and contractor. they had a hazy notion that he was reputed to have been a thug and a grafter. but new yorkers have few prejudices except against guilelessness and failure. they are well aware that the wisest of the wise hebrew race was never more sagacious than when he observed that "he who hasteth to be rich shall not be innocent." they are too well used to unsavory pasts to bother much about that kind of odor; and where in the civilized world--or in that which is not civilized--is there an odor from reputation--or character--whose edge is not taken off by the strong, sweet, hypnotic perfume of money? also, palmer's appearance gave the lie direct to any scandal about him. it could not be--it simply could not be--that a man of such splendid physical build, a man with a countenance so handsome, had ever been a low, wicked fellow! does not the devil always at once exhibit his hoofs, horns, tail and malevolent smile, that all men may know who and what he is? a frank, manly young leader of men--that was the writing on his countenance. and his italian blood put into his good looks an ancient and aristocratic delicacy that made it incredible that he was of low origin. he spoke good english, he dressed quietly; he did not eat with his knife; he did not retire behind a napkin to pick his teeth, but attended to them openly, if necessity compelled--and splendid teeth they were, set in a wide, clean mouth, notably attractive for a man's. no, freddie palmer's past would not give him any trouble whatever; in a few years it would be forgotten, would be romanced about as the heroic struggles of a typical american rising from poverty. "thank god," said freddie, "i had sense enough not to get a jail smell on me!" susan colored painfully--and palmer, the sensitive, colored also. but he had the tact that does not try to repair a blunder by making a worse one; he pretended not to see susan's crimson flush. _her_ past would not be an easy matter--if it should ever rise to face her publicly. therefore it must not rise till freddie and she were within the walls of the world they purposed to enter by stealth, and had got themselves well intrenched. then she would be susan lenox of sutherland, indiana, who had come to new york to study for the stage and, after many trials from all of which she had emerged with unspotted virtue, whatever vicious calumny might in envy say, had captured the heart and the name of the handsome, rich young contractor. there would be nasty rumors, dreadful stories, perhaps. but in these loose and cynical days, with the women more and more audacious and independent, with the universal craving for luxury beyond the reach of laboriously earned incomes, with marriage decaying in city life among the better classes--in these easy-going days, who was not suspected, hinted about, attacked? and the very atrociousness of the stories would prevent their being believed. one glance at susan would be enough to make doubters laugh at their doubts. the familiar types of fast women of all degrees come from the poorest kinds of farms and from the tenements. in america, practically not until the panics and collapses of recent years which have tumbled another and better section of the middle class into the abyss of the underworld--not until then did there appear in the city streets and houses of ill repute any considerable number of girls from good early surroundings. before that time, the clamor for luxury--the luxury that civilization makes as much a necessity as food--had been satisfied more or less by the incomes of the middle class; and any girl of that class, with physical charm and shrewdness enough to gain a living as outcast woman, was either supported at home or got a husband able to give her at least enough of what her tastes craved to keep her in the ranks of the reputable. thus susan's beauty of refinement, her speech and manner of the lady, made absurd any suggestion that she could ever have been a fallen woman. the crimson splash of her rouged lips did not suggest the _cocotte_, but the lady with a dash of gayety in her temperament. this, because of the sweet, sensitive seriousness of her small, pallid face with its earnest violet-gray eyes and its frame of abundant dark hair, simply and gracefully arranged. she was of the advance guard of a type which the swift downfall of the middle class, the increasing intelligence and restlessness and love of luxury among women, and the decay of formal religion with its exactions of chastity as woman's one diamond-fine jewel, are now making familiar in every city. the demand for the luxurious comfort which the educated regard as merely decent existence is far outstripping the demand for, and the education of, women in lucrative occupations other than prostitution. luckily susan had not been arrested under her own name; there existed no court record which could be brought forward as proof by some nosing newspaper. susan herself marveled that there was not more trace of her underworld experience in her face and in her mind. she could not account for it. yet the matter was simple enough to one viewing it from the outside. it is what we think, what we feel about ourselves, that makes up our expression of body and soul. and never in her lowest hour had her soul struck its flag and surrendered to the idea that she was a fallen creature. she had a temperament that estimated her acts not as right and wrong but as necessity. men, all the rest of the world, might regard her as nothing but sex symbol; she regarded herself as an intelligence. and the filth slipped from her and could not soak in to change the texture of her being. she had no more the feeling or air of the _cocotte_ than has the married woman who lives with her husband for a living. her expression, her way of looking at her fellow beings and of meeting their looks, was that of the woman of the world who is for whatever reason above that slavery to opinion, that fear of being thought bold or forward which causes women of the usual run to be sensitive about staring or being stared at. sometimes--in _cocottes_, in stage women, in fashionable women--this expression is self-conscious, or supercilious. it was not so with susan, for she had little self-consciousness and no snobbishness at all. it merely gave the charm of worldly experience and expertness to a beauty which, without it, might have been too melancholy. susan, become by sheer compulsion philosopher about the vagaries of fat, did not fret over possible future dangers. she dismissed them and put all her intelligence and energy to the business in hand--to learning and to helping palmer learn the ways of that world which includes all worlds. toward the end of the voyage she said to him: "about my salary--or allowance--or whatever it is---- i've been thinking things over. i've made up my mind to save some money. my only chance is that salary. have you any objection to my saving it--as much of it as i can?" he laughed. "tuck away anything and everything you can lay your hands on," said he. "i'm not one of those fools who try to hold women by being close and small with them. i'd not want you about if you were of the sort that could be held that way." "no--i'll put by only from my salary," said she. "i admit i've no right to do that. but i've become sensible enough to realize that i mustn't ever risk being out again with no money. it has got on my mind so that i'd not be able to think of much else for worrying--unless i had at least a little." "do you want me to make you independent?" "no," replied she. "whatever you gave me i'd have to give back if we separated." "_that_ isn't the way to get on, my dear," said he. "it's the best i can do--as yet," replied she. "and it's quite an advance on what i was. yes, i _am_ learning--slowly." "save all your salary, then," said freddie. "when you buy anything charge it, and i'll attend to the bill." her expression told him that he had never made a shrewder move in his life. he knew he had made himself secure against losing her; for he knew what a force gratitude was in her character. her mind was now free--free for the educational business in hand. she appreciated that he had less to learn than she. civilization, the science and art of living, of extracting all possible good from the few swift years of life, has been--since the downfall of woman from hardship, ten or fifteen thousand years ago--the creation of the man almost entirely. until recently among the higher races such small development of the intelligence of woman as her seclusion and servitude permitted was sporadic and exotic. nothing intelligent was expected of her--and it is only under the compulsion of peremptory demand that any human being ever is roused from the natural sluggishness. but civilization, created _by_ man, was created _for_ woman. woman has to learn how to be the civilized being which man has ordained that she shall be--how to use for man's comfort and pleasure the ingenuities and the graces he has invented. it is easy for a man to pick up the habits, tastes, manners and dress of male citizens of the world, if he has as keen eyes and as discriminating taste as had palmer, clever descendant of the supple italian. but to become a female citizen of the world is not so easy. for susan to learn to be an example of the highest civilization, from her inmost thoughts to the outermost penumbra of her surroundings--that would be for her a labor of love, but still a labor. as her vanity was of the kind that centers on the advantages she actually had, instead of being the more familiar kind that centers upon non-existent charms of mind and person, her task was possible of accomplishment--for those who are sincerely willing to learn, who sincerely know wherein they lack, can learn, can be taught. as she had given these matters of civilization intelligent thought she knew where to begin--at the humble, material foundation, despised and neglected by those who talk most loudly about civilization, art, culture, and so on. they aspire to the clouds and the stars at once--and arrive nowhere except in talk and pretense and flaunting of ill-fitting borrowed plumage. they flap their gaudy artificial wings; there is motion, but no ascent. susan wished to build--and build solidly. she began with the so-called trifles. when they had been at naples a week palmer said: "don't you think we'd better push on to paris?" "i can't go before saturday," replied she. "i've got several fittings yet." "it's pretty dull here for me--with you spending so much time in the shops. i suppose the women's shops are good"--hesitatingly--"but i've heard those in paris are better." "the shops here are rotten. italian women have no taste in dress. and the paris shops are the best in the world." "then let's clear out," cried he. "i'm bored to death. but i didn't like to say anything, you seemed so busy." "i am busy. and--can you stand it three days more?" "but you'll only have to throw away the stuff you buy here. why buy so much?" "i'm not buying much. two ready-to-wear paris dresses--models they call them--and two hats." palmer looked alarmed. "why, at that rate," protested he, "it'll take you all winter to get together your winter clothes, and no time left to wear 'em." "you don't understand," said she. "if you want to be treated right in a shop--be shown the best things--have your orders attended to, you've got to come looking as if you knew what the best is. i'm getting ready to make a good first impression on the dressmakers and milliners in paris." "oh, you'll have the money, and that'll make 'em step round." "don't you believe it," replied she. "all the money in the world won't get you _fashionable_ clothes at the most fashionable place. it'll only get you _costly_ clothes." "maybe that's so for women's things. it isn't for men's." "i'm not sure of that. when we get to paris, we'll see. but certainly it's true for women. if i went to the places in the rue de la paix dressed as i am now, it'd take several years to convince them that i knew what i wanted and wouldn't be satisfied with anything but the latest and best. so i'm having these miserable dressmakers fit those dresses on me until they're absolutely perfect. it's wearing me out, but i'll be glad i did it." palmer had profound respect for her as a woman who knew what she was about. so he settled himself patiently and passed the time investigating the famous neapolitan political machine with the aid of an interpreter guide whom he hired by the day. he was enthusiastic over the dresses and the hats when susan at last had them at the hotel and showed herself to him in them. they certainly did work an amazing change in her. they were the first real paris models she had ever worn. "maybe it's because i never thought much about women's clothes before," said freddie, "but those things seem to be the best ever. how they do show up your complexion and your figure! and i hadn't any idea your hair was as grand as all that. i'm a little afraid of you. we've got to get acquainted all over again. these clothes of mine look pretty poor, don't they? yet i paid all kinds of money for 'em at the best place in fifth avenue." he examined her from all points of view, going round and round her, getting her to walk up and down to give him the full effect of her slender yet voluptuous figure in that beautifully fitted coat and skirt. he felt that his dreams were beginning to come true. "we'll do the trick!" cried he. "don't you think about money when you're buying clothes. it's a joy to give up for clothes for you. you make 'em look like something." "wait till i've shopped a few weeks in paris," said susan. "let's start tonight," cried he. "i'll telegraph to the ritz for rooms." when she began to dress in her old clothes for the journey, he protested. "throw all these things away," he urged. "wear one of the new dresses and hats." "but they're not exactly suitable for traveling." "people'll think you lost your baggage. i don't want ever to see you again looking any way except as you ought to look." "no, i must take care of those clothes," said she firmly. "it'll be weeks before i can get anything in paris, and i must keep up a good front." he continued to argue with her until it occurred to him that as his own clothes were not what they should be, he and she would look much better matched if she dressed as she wished. he had not been so much in jest as he thought when he said to her that they would have to get acquainted all over again. those new clothes of hers brought out startlingly--so clearly that even his vanity was made uneasy--the subtle yet profound difference of class between them. he had always felt this difference, and in the old days it had given him many a savage impulse to degrade her, to put her beneath him as a punishment for his feeling that she was above him. now he had his ambition too close at heart to wish to rob her of her chief distinction; he was disturbed about it, though, and looked forward to paris with uneasiness. "you must help me get my things," said he. "i'd be glad to," said she. "and you must be frank with me, and tell me where i fall short of the best of the women we see." he laughed. the idea that he could help her seemed fantastic. he could not understand it--how this girl who had been brought up in a jay town away out west, who had never had what might be called a real chance to get in the know in new york, could so quickly pass him who had been born and bred in new york, had spent the last ten years in cultivating style and all the other luxurious tastes. he did not like to linger on this puzzle; the more he worked at it, the farther away from him susan seemed to get. yet the puzzle would not let him drop it. they came in at the gare de lyon in the middle of a beautiful october afternoon. usually, from late september or earlier until may or later, paris has about the vilest climate that curses a civilized city. it is one of the bitterest ironies of fate that a people so passionately fond of the sun, of the outdoors, should be doomed for two-thirds of the year to live under leaden, icily leaking skies with rarely a ray of real sunshine. and nothing so well illustrates the exuberant vitality, the dauntless spirit of the french people, as the way they have built in preparation for the enjoyment of every bit of the light and warmth of any chance ray of sunshine. that year it so fell that the winter rains did not close in until late, and paris reveled in a long autumn of almost new york perfection. susan and palmer drove to the ritz through paris, the lovely, the gay. "this is the real thing--isn't it?" said he, thrilled into speech by that spectacle so inspiring to all who have the joy of life in their veins--the place de l'opéra late on a bright afternoon. "it's the first thing i've ever seen that was equal to what i had dreamed about it," replied she. they had chosen the ritz as their campaign headquarters because they had learned that it was the most fashionable hotel in paris--which meant in the world. there were hotels more grand, the interpreter-guide at naples had said; there were hotels more exclusive. there were even hotels more comfortable. "but for fashion," said he, "it is the summit. there you see the most beautiful ladies, most beautifully dressed. there you see the elegant world at tea and at dinner." at first glance they were somewhat disappointed in the quiet, unostentatious general rooms. the suite assigned them--at a hundred and twenty francs a day--was comfortable, was the most comfortable assemblage of rooms either had ever seen. but there was nothing imposing. this impression did not last long, however. they had been misled by their american passion for looks. they soon discovered that the guide at naples had told the literal truth. they went down for tea in the garden, which was filled as the day was summer warm. neither spoke as they sat under a striped awning umbrella, she with tea untasted before her, he with a glass of whiskey and soda he did not lift from the little table. their eyes and their thoughts were too busy for speech; one cannot talk when one is thinking. about them were people of the world of which neither had before had any but a distant glimpse. they heard english, american, french, italian. they saw men and women with that air which no one can define yet everyone knows on sight--the assurance without impertinence, the politeness without formality, the simplicity that is more complex than the most elaborate ornamentation of dress or speech or manner. susan and freddie lingered until the departure of the last couple--a plainly dressed man whose clothes on inspection revealed marvels of fineness and harmonious color; a quietly dressed woman whose costume from tip of plume to tip of suede slipper was a revelation of how fine a fine art the toilet can be made. "well--we're right in it, for sure," said freddie, dropping to a sofa in their suite and lighting a cigarette. "yes," said susan, with a sigh. "in it--but not of it." "i almost lost my nerve as i sat there. and for the life of me i can't tell why." "those people know how," replied susan. "well--what they've learned we can learn." "sure," said he energetically. "it's going to take a lot of practice--a lot of time. but i'm game." his expression, its suggestion of helplessness and appeal, was a clear confession of a feeling that she was his superior. "we're both of us ignorant," she hastened to say. "but when we get our bearings--in a day or two--we'll be all right." "let's have dinner up here in the sitting-room. i haven't got the nerve to face that gang again today" "nonsense!" laughed she. "we mustn't give way to our feelings--not for a minute. there'll be a lot of people as badly off as we are. i saw some this afternoon--and from the way the waiters treated them, i know they had money or something. put on your evening suit, and you'll be all right. i'm the one that hasn't anything to wear. but i've got to go and study the styles. i must begin to learn what to wear and now to wear it. we've come to the right place, freddie. cheer up!" he felt better when he was in evening clothes which made him handsome indeed, bringing out all his refinement of feature and coloring. he was almost cheerful when susan came into the sitting-room in the pale gray of her two new toilettes. it might be, as she insisted, that she was not dressed properly for fashionable dining; but there would be no more delicate, no more lady-like loveliness. he quite recovered his nerve when they faced the company that had terrified him in prospect. he saw many commonplace looking people, not a few who were downright dowdy. and presently he had the satisfaction of realizing that not only susan but he also was getting admiring attention. he no longer floundered panic-stricken; his feet touched bottom and he felt foolish about his sensations of a few minutes before. after all, the world over, dining in a restaurant is nothing but dining in a restaurant. the waiter and the head waiter spoke english, were gracefully, tactfully, polite; and as he ordered he found his self-confidence returning with the surging rush of a turned tide on a low shore. the food was wonderful, and the champagne, "english taste," was the best he had ever drunk. halfway through dinner both he and susan were in the happiest frame of mind. the other people were drinking too, were emerging from caste into humanness. women gazed languorously and longingly at the handsome young american; men sent stealthy or open smiles of adoration at susan whenever freddie's eyes were safely averted. but susan was more careful than a woman of the world to which she aspired would have been; she ignored the glances and without difficulty assumed the air of wife. "i don't believe we'll have any trouble getting acquainted with these people," said freddie. "we don't want to, yet," replied she. "oh, i feel we'll soon be ready for them," said he. "yes--that," said she. "but that amounts to nothing. this isn't to be merely a matter of clothes and acquaintances--at least, not with me." "what then?" inquired he. "oh--we'll see as we get our bearings." she could not have put into words the plans she was forming--plans for educating and in every way developing him and herself. she was not sure at what she was aiming, but only of the direction. she had no idea how far she could go herself--or how far he would consent to go. the wise course was just to work along from day to day--keeping the direction. "all right. i'll do as you say. you've got this game sized up better than i." is there any other people that works as hard as do the parisians? other peoples work with their bodies; but the parisians, all classes and masses too, press both mind and body into service. other peoples, if they think at all, think how to avoid work; the parisians think incessantly, always, how to provide themselves with more to do. other peoples drink to stupefy themselves lest peradventure in a leisure moment they might be seized of a thought; parisians drink to stimulate themselves, to try to think more rapidly, to attract ideas that might not enter and engage a sober and therefore somewhat sluggish brain. other peoples meet a new idea as if it were a mortal foe; the parisians as if it were a long-lost friend. other peoples are agitated chiefly, each man or woman, about themselves; the parisians are full of their work, their surroundings, bother little about themselves except as means to what they regard as the end and aim of life--to make the world each moment as different as possible from what it was the moment before, to transform the crass and sordid universe of things with the magic of ideas. being intelligent, they prefer good to evil; but they have god's own horror of that which is neither good nor evil, and spew it out of their mouths. at the moment of the arrival of susan and palmer the world that labors at amusing itself was pausing in paris on its way from the pleasures of sea and mountains to the pleasures of the riviera and egypt. and as the weather held fine, day after day the streets, the cafés, the restaurants, offered the young adventurers an incessant dazzling panorama of all they had come abroad to seek. a week passed before susan permitted herself to enter any of the shops where she intended to buy dresses, hats and the other and lesser paraphernalia of the woman of fashion. "i mustn't go until i've seen," said she. "i'd yield to the temptation to buy and would regret it." and freddie, seeing her point, restrained his impatience for making radical changes in himself and in her. the fourth day of their stay at paris he realized that he would buy, and would wish to buy, none of the things that had tempted him the first and second days. secure in the obscurity of the crowd of strangers, he was losing his extreme nervousness about himself. that sort of emotion is most characteristic of americans and gets them the reputation for profound snobbishness. in fact, it is not snobbishness at all. in no country on earth is ignorance in such universal disrepute as in america. the american, eager to learn, eager to be abreast of the foremost, is terrified into embarrassment and awe when he finds himself in surroundings where are things that he feels he ought to know about--while a stupid fellow, in such circumstances, is calmly content with himself, wholly unaware of his own deficiencies. susan let full two weeks pass before she, with much hesitation, gave her first order toward the outfit on which palmer insisted upon her spending not less than five thousand dollars. palmer had been going to the shops with her. she warned him it would make prices higher if she appeared with a prosperous looking man; but he wanted occupation and everything concerning her fascinated him now. his ignorance of the details of feminine dress was giving place rapidly to a knowledge which he thought profound--and it was profound, for a man. she would not permit him to go with her to order, however, or to fittings. all she would tell him in advance about this first dress was that it was for evening wear and that its color was green. "but not a greeny green," said she. "i understand. a green something like the tint in your skin at the nape of your neck." "perhaps," admitted she. "yes." "we'll go to the opera the evening it comes home. i'll have my new evening outfit from charvet's by that time." it was about ten days after this conversation that she told him she had had a final fitting, had ordered the dress sent home. he was instantly all excitement and rushed away to engage a good box for the opera. with her assistance he had got evening clothes that sent through his whole being a glow of self-confidence--for he knew that in those clothes, he looked what he was striving to be. they were to dine at seven. he dressed early and went into their sitting-room. he was afraid he would spoil his pleasure of complete surprise by catching a glimpse of the _grande toilette_ before it was finished. at a quarter past seven susan put her head into the sitting-room--only her head. at sight of his anxious face, his tense manner, she burst out laughing. it seemed, and was, grotesque that one so imperturbable of surface should be so upset. "can you stand the strain another quarter of an hour?" said she. "don't hurry," he urged. "take all the time you want. do the thing up right." he rose and came toward her with one hand behind him. "you said the dress was green, didn't you?" "yes." "well--here's something you may be able to fit in somewhere." and he brought the concealed hand into view and held a jewel box toward her. she reached a bare arm through the crack in the door and took it. the box, the arm, the head disappeared. presently there was a low cry of delight that thrilled him. the face reappeared. "oh--freddie!" she exclaimed, radiant. "you must have spent a fortune on them." "no. twelve thousand--that's all. it was a bargain. go on dressing. we'll talk about it afterward." and he gently pushed her head back--getting a kiss in the palm of his hand--and drew the door to. ten minutes later the door opened part way again. "brace yourself," she called laughingly. "i'm coming." a breathless pause and the door swung wide. he stared with eyes amazed and bewitched. there is no more describing the effects of a harmonious combination of exquisite dress and exquisite woman than there is reproducing in words the magic and the thrill of sunrise or sunset, of moonlight's fanciful amorous play, or of starry sky. as the girl stood there, her eyes starlike with excitement, her lips crimson and sensuous against the clear old-ivory pallor of her small face in its frame of glorious dark hair, it seemed to him that her soul, more beautiful counterpart of herself, had come from its dwelling place within and was hovering about her body like an aureole. round her lovely throat was the string of emeralds. her shoulders were bare and also her bosom, over nearly half its soft, girlish swell. and draped in light and clinging grace about her slender, sensuous form was the most wonderful garment he had ever seen. the great french designers of dresses and hats and materials have a genius for taking an idea--a pure poetical abstraction--and materializing it, making it visible and tangible without destroying its spirituality. this dress of susan's did not suggest matter any more than the bar of music suggests the rosined string that has given birth to it. she was carrying the train and a pair of long gloves in one hand. the skirt, thus drawn back, revealed her slim, narrow foot, a slender slipper of pale green satin, a charming instep with a rosiness shimmering through the gossamer web of pale green silk, the outline of a long, slender leg whose perfection was guaranteed by the beauty of her bare arm. his expression changed slowly from bedazzlement to the nearest approach to the old slumbrous, smiling wickedness she had seen since they started. and her sensitive instinct understood; it was the menace of an insane jealousy, sprung from fear--fear of losing her. the look vanished, and once again he was freddie palmer the delighted, the generous and almost romantically considerate, because everything was going as he wished. "no wonder i went crazy about you," he said. "then you're not disappointed?" he came to her, unclasped the emeralds, stood off and viewed her again. "no--you mustn't wear them," said he. "oh!" she cried, protesting. "they're the best of all." "not tonight," said he. "they look cheap. they spoil the effect of your neck and shoulders. another time, when you're not quite so wonderful, but not tonight." as she could not see herself as he saw her, she pleaded for the jewels. she loved jewels and these were the first she had ever had, except two modest little birthday rings she had left in sutherland. but he led her to the long mirror and convinced her that he was right. when they descended to the dining-room, they caused a stir. it does not take much to make fashionable people stare; but it does take something to make a whole room full of them quiet so far toward silence that the discreet and refined handling of dishes in a restaurant like the ritz sounds like a vulgar clatter. susan and palmer congratulated themselves that they had been at the hotel long enough to become acclimated and so could act as if they were unconscious of the sensation they were creating. when they finished dinner, they found all the little tables in the long corridor between the restaurant and the entrance taken by people lingering over coffee to get another and closer view. and the men who looked at her sweet dreaming violet-gray eyes said she was innocent; those who looked at her crimson lips said she was gay; those who saw both eyes and lips said she was innocent--as yet. a few very dim-sighted, and very wise, retained their reason sufficiently to say that nothing could be told about a woman from her looks--especially an american woman. she put on the magnificent cloak, white silk, ermine lined, which he had seen at paquin's and had insisted on buying. and they were off for the opera in the aristocratic looking auto he was taking by the week. she had a second triumph at the opera--was the center that drew all glasses the instant the lights went up for the intermission. there were a few minutes when her head was quite turned, when it seemed to her that she had arrived very near to the highest goal of human ambition--said goal being the one achieved and so self-complacently occupied by these luxurious, fashionable people who were paying her the tribute of interest and admiration. were not these people at the top of the heap? was she not among them, of them, by right of excellence in the things that made them, distinguished them? ambition, drunk and heavy with luxury, flies sluggishly and low. and her ambition was--for the moment--in danger of that fate. during the last intermission the door of their box opened. at once palmer sprang up and advanced with beaming face and extended hand to welcome the caller. "hello, brent, i _am_ glad to see you! i want to introduce you to mrs. palmer"--that name pronounced with the unconscious pride of the possessor of _the_ jewel. brent bowed. susan forced a smile. "we," palmer hastened on, "are on a sort of postponed honeymoon. i didn't announce the marriage--didn't want to have my friends out of pocket for presents. besides, they'd have sent us stuff fit only to furnish out a saloon or a hotel--and we'd have had to use it or hurt their feelings. my wife's a western girl--from indiana. she came on to study for the stage. but"--he laughed delightedly--"i persuaded her to change her mind." "you are from the west?" said brent in the formal tone one uses in addressing a new acquaintance. "so am i. but that's more years ago than you could count. i live in new york--when i don't live here or in the riviera." the moment had passed when susan could, without creating an impossible scene, admit and compel brent to admit that they knew each other. what did it matter? was it not best to ignore the past? probably brent had done this deliberately, assuming that she was beginning a new life with a clean slate. "been here long?" said brent to palmer. as he and palmer talked, she contrasted the two men. palmer was much the younger, much the handsomer. yet in the comparison brent had the advantage. he looked as if he amounted to a great deal, as if he had lived and had understood life as the other man could not. the physical difference between them was somewhat the difference between look of lion and look of tiger. brent looked strong; palmer, dangerous. she could not imagine either man failing of a purpose he had set his heart upon. she could not imagine brent reaching for it in any but an open, direct, daring way. she knew that the descendant of the supple italians, the graduate of the street schools of stealth and fraud, would not care to have anything unless he got it by skill at subtlety. she noted their dress. brent was wearing his clothes in that elegantly careless way which it was one of freddie's dreams--one of the vain ones--to attain. brent's voice was much more virile, was almost harsh, and in pronouncing some words made the nerves tingle with a sensation of mingled irritation and pleasure. freddie's voice was manly enough, but soft and dangerous, suggestive of hidden danger. she compared the two men, as she knew them. she wondered how they would seem to a complete stranger. palmer, she thought, would be able to attract almost any woman he might want; it seemed to her that a woman brent wanted would feel rather helpless before the onset he would make. it irritated her, this untimely intrusion of brent who had the curious quality of making all other men seem less in the comparison. not that he assumed anything, or forced comparisons; on the contrary, no man could have insisted less upon himself. not that he compelled or caused the transfer of all interest to himself. simply that, with him there, she felt less hopeful of palmer, less confident of his ability to become what he seemed--and go beyond it. there are occasional men who have this same quality that susan was just then feeling in brent--men whom women never love yet who make it impossible for them to begin to love or to continue to love the other men within their range. she was not glad to see him. she did not conceal it. yet she knew that he would linger--and that she would not oppose. she would have liked to say to him: "you lost belief in me and dropped me. i have begun to make a life for myself. let me alone. do not upset me--do not force me to see what i must not see if i am to be happy. go away, and give me a chance." but we do not say these frank, childlike things except in moments of closest intimacy--and certainly there was no suggestion of intimacy, no invitation to it, but the reverse, in the man facing her at the front of the box. "then you are to be in paris some time?" said brent, addressing her. "i think so," said susan. "sure," cried palmer. "this is the town the world revolves round. i felt like singing 'home, sweet home' as we drove from the station." "i like it better than any place on earth," said brent. "better even than new york. i've never been quite able to forgive new york for some of the things it made me suffer before it gave me what i wanted." "i, too," said freddie. "my wife can't understand that. she doesn't know the side of life we know. i'm going to smoke a cigarette. i'll leave you here, old man, to entertain her." when he disappeared, susan looked out over the house with an expression of apparent abstraction. brent--she was conscious--studied her with those seeing eyes--hazel eyes with not a bit of the sentimentality and weakness of brown in them. "you and palmer know no one here?" "not a soul." "i'll be glad to introduce some of my acquaintances to you--french people of the artistic set. they speak english. and you'll soon be learning french." "i intend to learn as soon as i've finished my fall shopping." "you are not coming back to america?" "not for a long time." "then you will find my friends useful." she turned her eyes upon his. "you are very kind," said she. "but i'd rather--we'd rather--not meet anyone just yet." his eyes met hers calmly. it was impossible to tell whether he understood or not. after a few seconds he glanced out over the house. "that is a beautiful dress," said he. "you have real taste, if you'll permit me to say so. i was one of those who were struck dumb with admiration at the ritz tonight." "it's the first grand dress i ever possessed," said she. "you love dresses--and jewels--and luxury?" "as a starving man loves food." "then you are happy?" "perfectly so--for the first time in my life." "it is a kind of ecstasy--isn't it? i remember how it was with me. i had always been poor--i worked my way through prep school and college. and i wanted _all_ the luxuries. the more i had to endure--the worse food and clothing and lodgings--the madder i became about them, until i couldn't think of anything but getting the money to buy them. when i got it, i gorged myself. . . . it's a pity the starving man can't keep on loving food--keep on being always starving and always having his hunger satisfied." "ah, but he can." he smiled mysteriously. "you think so, now. wait till you are gorged." she laughed. "you don't know! i could never get enough--never!" his smile became even more mysterious. as he looked away, his profile presented itself to her view--an outline of sheer strength, of tragic sadness--the profile of those who have dreamed and dared and suffered. but the smile, saying no to her confident assertion, still lingered. "never!" she repeated. she must compel that smile to take away its disquieting negation, its relentless prophecy of the end of her happiness. she must convince him that he had come back in vain, that he could not disturb her. "you don't suggest to me the woman who can be content with just people and just things. you will always insist on luxury. but you will demand more." he looked at her again. "and you will get it," he added, in a tone that sent a wave through her nerves. her glance fell. palmer came in, bringing an odor of cologne and of fresh cigarette fumes. brent rose. palmer laid a detaining hand on his shoulder. "do stay on, brent, and go to supper with us." "i was about to ask you to supper with me. have you been to the abbaye?" "no. we haven't got round to that yet. is it lively?" "and the food's the best in paris. you'll come?" brent was looking at susan. palmer, not yet educated in the smaller--and important--refinements of politeness, did not wait for her reply or think that she should be consulted. "certainly," said he. "on condition that you dine with us tomorrow night." "very well," agreed brent. and he excused himself to take leave of his friends. "just tell your chauffeur to go to the abbaye--he'll know," he said as he bowed over susan's hand. "i'll be waiting. i wish to be there ahead and make sure of a table." as the door of the box closed upon him freddie burst out with that enthusiasm we feel for one who is in a position to render us good service and is showing a disposition to do so. "i've known him for years," said he, "and he's the real thing. he used to spend a lot of time in a saloon i used to keep in allen street." "allen street?" ejaculated susan, shivering. "i was twenty-two then. he used to want to study types, as he called it. and i gathered in types for him--though really my place was for the swell crooks and their ladies. how long ago that seems--and how far away!" "another life," said susan. "that's a fact. this is my second time on earth. _our_ second time. i tell you it's fighting for a foothold that makes men and women the wretches they are. nowadays, i couldn't hurt a fly--could you? but then you never were cruel. that's why you stayed down so long." susan smiled into the darkness of the auditorium--the curtain was up, and they were talking in undertones. she said, as she smiled: "i'll never go down and stay down for that reason again." her tone arrested his attention; but he could make nothing of it or of her expression, though her face was clear enough in the reflection from the footlights. "anyhow, brent and i are old pals," continued he, "though we haven't seen so much of each other since he made a hit with the plays. he always used to predict i'd get to the top and be respectable. now that it's come true, he'll help me. he'll introduce us, if we work it right." "but we don't want that yet," protested susan. "you're ready and so am i," declared palmer in the tone she knew had the full strength of his will back of it. faint angry hissing from the stalls silenced them, but as soon as they were in the auto susan resumed. "i have told mr. brent we don't want to meet his friends yet." "now what the hell did you do that for?" demanded freddie. it was the first time she had crossed him; it was the first time he had been reminiscent of the freddie she used to know. "because," said she evenly, "i will not meet people under false pretenses." "what rot!" "i will not do it," replied she in the same quiet way. he assumed that she meant only one of the false pretenses--the one that seemed the least to her. he said: "then we'll draw up and sign a marriage contract and date it a couple of years ago, before the new marriage law was passed to save rich men's drunken sons from common law wives." "i am already married," said susan. "to a farmer out in indiana." freddie laughed. "well, i'll be damned! you! you!" he looked at her ermine-lined cloak and laughed again. "an indiana farmer!" then he suddenly sobered. "come to think of it," said he, "that's the first thing you ever told me about your past." "or anybody else," said susan. her body was quivering, for we remember the past events with the sensations they made upon us at the time. she could smell that little room in the farmhouse. allen street and all the rest of her life in the underworld had for her something of the vagueness of dreams--not only now but also while she was living that life. but not ferguson, not the night when her innocent soul was ravished as a wolf rips up and munches a bleating lamb. no vagueness of dreams about that, but a reality to make her shudder and reel whenever she thought of it--a reality vivider now that she was a woman grown in experiences and understanding. "he's probably dead--or divorced you long ago." "i do not know." "i can find out--without stirring things up. what was his name?" "ferguson." "what was his first name?" she tried to recall. "i think--it was jim. yes, it was jim." she fancied she could hear the voice of that ferocious sister snapping out that name in the miserable little coop of a general room in that hot, foul, farm cottage. "where did he live?" "his farm was at the edge of zeke warham's place--not far from beecamp, in jefferson county." she lapsed into silence, seemed to be watching the gay night streets of the montmartre district--the cafés, the music halls, the sidewalk shows, the throngs of people every man and woman of them with his or her own individual variation upon the fascinating, covertly terrible face of the paris mob. "what are you thinking about?" he asked, when a remark brought no answer. "the past," said she. "and the future." "well--we'll find out in a few days that your farmer's got no claim on you--and we'll attend to that marriage contract and everything'll be all right." "do you want to marry me?" she asked, turning on him suddenly. "we're as good as married already," replied he. "your tone sounds as if _you_ didn't want to marry _me_." and he laughed at the absurdity of such an idea. "i don't know whether i do or not," said she slowly. he laid a gentle strong hand on her knee. gentle though it was, she felt its strength through the thickness of her cloak. "when the time comes," said he in the soft voice with the menace hidden in it, "you'll know whether you do or don't. you'll know you _do_--queenie." the auto was at the curb before the abbaye. and on the steps, in furs and a top hat, stood the tall, experienced looking, cynical looking playwright. susan's eyes met his, he lifted his hat, formal, polite. "i'll bet he's got the best table in the place," said palmer, before opening the door, "and i'll bet it cost him a bunch." chapter xxi brent had an apartment in the rue de rivoli, near the hotel meurice and high enough to command the whole tuileries garden. from his balcony he could see to the east the ancient courts of the louvre, to the south the varied, harmonious façades of the quay d'orsay with the domes and spires of the left bank behind, to the west the obélisque, the long broad reaches of the champs elysées with the arc de triomphe at the boundary of the horizon. on that balcony, with the tides of traffic far below, one had a sense of being at the heart of the world, past, present, and to come. brent liked to feel at home wherever he was; it enabled him to go tranquilly to work within a few minutes after his arrival, no matter how far he had journeyed or how long he had been away. so he regarded it as an economy, an essential to good work, to keep up the house in new york, a villa in petite afrique, with the mediterranean washing its garden wall, this apartment at paris; and a telegram a week in advance would reserve him the same quarters in the quietest part of hotels at luzerne, at st. moritz and at biarritz. susan admired, as he explained his scheme of life to her and palmer when they visited his apartment. always profound tranquillity in the midst of intense activity. he could shut his door and he as in a desert; he could open it, and the most interesting of the sensations created by the actions and reactions of the whole human race were straightway beating upon his senses. as she listened, she looked about, her eyes taking in impressions to be studied at leisure. these quarters of his in paris were fundamentally different from those in new york, were the expression of a different side of his personality. it was plain that he loved them, that they came nearer to expressing his real--that is, his inmost--self. "though i work harder in paris than in new york," he explained, "i have more leisure because it is all one kind of work--writing--at which i'm never interrupted. so i have time to make surroundings for myself. no one has time for surroundings in new york." she observed that of the scores of pictures on the walls, tables, shelves of the three rooms they were shown, every one was a face--faces of all nationalities, all ages, all conditions--faces happy and faces tragic, faces homely, faces beautiful, faces irradiating the fascination of those abnormal developments of character, good and bad, which give the composite countenance of the human race its distinction, as the characteristics themselves give it intensities of light and shade. she saw angels, beautiful and ugly, devils beautiful and ugly. when she began to notice this peculiarity of those rooms, she was simply interested. what an amazing collection! how much time and thought it must have taken! how he must have searched--and what an instinct he had for finding the unusual, the significant! as she sat there and then strolled about and then sat again, her interest rose into a feverish excitement. it was as if the ghosts of all these personalities, not one of them commonplace, were moving through the rooms, were pressing upon her. she understood why brent had them there--that they were as necessary to him as cadavers and skeletons and physiological charts to an anatomist. but they oppressed, suffocated her; she went out on the balcony and watched the effects of the light from the setting sun upon and around the enormously magnified arc. "you don't like my rooms," said brent. "they fascinate me," replied she. "but i'd have to get used to these friends of yours. you made their acquaintance one or a few at a time. it's very upsetting, being introduced to all at once." she felt brent's gaze upon her--that unfathomable look which made her uneasy, yet was somehow satisfying, too. he said, after a while, "palmer is to give me his photograph. will you give me yours?" he was smiling. "both of you belong in my gallery." "of course she will," said palmer, coming out on the balcony and standing beside her. "i want her to have some taken right away--in the evening dress she wore to the opera last week. and she must have her portrait painted." "when we are settled," said susan. "i've no time for anything now but shopping." they had come to inspect the apartment above brent's, and had decided to take it; susan saw possibilities of making it over into the sort of environment of which she had dreamed. in novels the descriptions of interiors, which weary most readers, interested her more than story or characters. in her days of abject poverty she used these word paintings to construct for herself a room, suites of rooms, a whole house, to replace, when her physical eyes closed and her eyes of fancy opened wide, the squalid and nauseous cell to which poverty condemned her. in the streets she would sometimes pause before a shop window display of interior furnishings; a beautiful table or chair, a design in wall or floor covering had caught her eyes, had set her to dreaming--dreaming on and on--she in dingy skirt and leaky shoes. now--the chance to realize her dreams had come. palmer had got acquainted with some high-class sports, american, french and english, at an american bar in the rue volney. he was spending his afternoons and some of his evenings with them--in the evenings winning large sums from them at cards at which he was now as lucky as at everything else. palmer, pleased by brent's manner toward susan--formal politeness, indifference to sex--was glad to have him go about with her. also palmer was one of those men who not merely imagine they read human nature but actually can read it. he _knew_ he could trust susan. and it had been his habit--as it is the habit of all successful men--to trust human beings, each one up to his capacity for resisting temptation to treachery. "brent doesn't care for women--as women," said he. "he never did. don't you think he's queer?" "he's different," replied susan. "he doesn't care much for people--to have them as intimates. i understand why. love and friendship bore one--or fail one--and are unsatisfactory--and disturbing. but if one centers one's life about things--books, pictures, art, a career--why, one is never bored or betrayed. he has solved the secret of happiness, i think." "do you think a woman could fall in love with him?" he asked, with an air of the accidental and casual. "if you mean, could i fall in love with him," said she, "i should say no. i think it would either amuse or annoy him to find that a woman cared about him." "amuse him most of all," said palmer. "he knows the ladies--that they love us men for what we can give them." "did you ever hear of anyone, man or woman, who cared about a person who couldn't give them anything?" freddie's laugh was admission that he thought her right. "the way to get on in politics," observed he, "is to show men that it's to their best interest to support you. and that's the way to get on in everything else--including love." susan knew that this was the truth about life, as it appeared to her also. but she could not divest herself of the human aversion to hearing the cold, practical truth. she wanted sugar coating on the pill, even though she knew the sugar made the medicine much less effective, often neutralized it altogether. thus palmer's brutally frank cynicism got upon her nerves, whereas brent's equally frank cynicism attracted her because it was not brutal. both men saw that life was a coarse practical joke. palmer put the stress on the coarseness, brent upon the humor. brent recommended and introduced to her a friend of his, a young french jew named gourdain, an architect on the way up to celebrity. "you will like his ideas and he will like yours," said brent. she had acquiesced in his insistent friendship for palmer and her, but she had not lowered by an inch the barrier of her reserve toward him. his speech and actions at all times, whether palmer was there or not; suggested that he respected the barrier, regarded it as even higher and thicker than it was. nevertheless she felt that he really regarded the barrier as non-existent. she said: "but i've never told you my ideas." "i can guess what they are. your surroundings will simply be an extension of your dress." she would not have let him see--she would not have admitted to herself--how profoundly the subtle compliment pleased her. because a man's or a woman's intimate personal taste is good it by no means follows that he or she will build or decorate or furnish a house well. in matters of taste, the greater does not necessarily include the less, nor does the less imply the greater. perhaps susan would have shown she did not deserve brent's compliment, would have failed ignominiously in that first essay of hers, had she not found a gourdain, sympathetic, able to put into the concrete the rather vague ideas she had evolved in her dreaming. an architect is like a milliner or a dressmaker. he supplies the model, product of his own individual taste. the person who employs him must remold that form into an expression of his own personality--for people who deliberately live in surroundings that are not part of themselves are on the same low level with those who utter only borrowed ideas. that is the object and the aim of civilization--to encourage and to compel each individual to be frankly himself--herself. that is the profound meaning of freedom. the world owes more to bad morals and to bad taste that are spontaneous than to all the docile conformity to the standards of morals and of taste, however good. truth--which simply means an increase of harmony, a decrease of discord, between the internal man and his environment--truth is a product, usually a byproduct, of a ferment of action. gourdain--chiefly, no doubt, because susan's beauty of face and figure and dress fascinated him--was more eager to bring out her individuality than to show off his own talents. he took endless pains with her, taught her the technical knowledge and vocabulary that would enable her to express herself, then carried out her ideas religiously. "you are right, _mon ami_," said he to brent. "she is an orchid, and of a rare species. she has a glorious imagination, like a bird of paradise balancing itself into an azure sky, with every plume raining color and brilliancy." "somewhat exaggerated," was susan's pleased, laughing comment when brent told her. "somewhat," said brent. "but my friend gourdain is stark mad about women's dressing well. that lilac dress you had on yesterday did for him. he _was_ your servant; he _is_ your slave." abruptly--for no apparent cause, as was often the case--susan had that sickening sense of the unreality of her luxurious present, of being about to awaken in vine street with etta--or in the filthy bed with old mrs. tucker. absently she glanced down at her foot, holding it out as if for inspection. she saw brent's look of amusement at her seeming vanity. "i was looking to see if my shoes were leaky," she explained. a subtle change came over his face. he understood instantly. "have you ever been--cold?" she asked, looking at him strangely. "one cold february--cold and damp--i had no underclothes--and no overcoat." "and dirty beds--filthy rooms--filthy people?" "a ten-cent lodging house with a tramp for bedfellow." they were looking at each other, with the perfect understanding and sympathy that can come only to two people of the same fiber who have braved the same storms. each glanced hastily away. her enthusiasm for doing the apartment was due full as much to the fact that it gave her definitely directed occupation as to its congeniality. that early training of hers from aunt fanny warham had made it forever impossible for her in any circumstances to become the typical luxuriously sheltered woman, whether legally or illegally kept--the lie-abed woman, the woman who dresses only to go out and show off, the woman who wastes her life in petty, piffling trifles--without purpose, without order or system, without morals or personal self-respect. she had never lost the systematic instinct--the instinct to use time instead of wasting it--that fanny warham had implanted in her during the years that determine character. not for a moment, even without distinctly definite aim, was she in danger of the creeping paralysis that is epidemic among the rich, enfeebling and slowing down mental and physical activity. she had a regular life; she read, she walked in the bois; she made the best of each day. and when this definite thing to accomplish offered, she did not have to learn how to work before she could begin the work itself. all this was nothing new to gourdain. he was born and bred in a country where intelligent discipline is the rule and the lack of it the rare exception--among all classes--even among the women of the well-to-do classes. the finished apartment was a disappointment to palmer. its effects were too quiet, too restrained. within certain small limits, those of the man of unusual intelligence but no marked originality, he had excellent taste--or, perhaps, excellent ability to recognize good taste. but in the large he yearned for the grandiose. he loved the gaudy with which the rich surround themselves because good taste forbids them to talk of their wealth and such surroundings do the talking for them and do it more effectively. he would have preferred even a vulgar glitter to the unobtrusiveness of those rooms. but he knew that susan was right, and he was a very human arrant coward about admitting that he had bad taste. "this is beautiful--exquisite," said he, with feigned enthusiasm. "i'm afraid, though, it'll be above their heads." "what do you mean?" inquired susan. palmer felt her restrained irritation, hastened to explain. "i mean the people who'll come here. they can't appreciate it. you have to look twice to appreciate this--and people, the best of 'em, look only once and a mighty blind look it is." but susan was not deceived. "you must tell me what changes you want," said she. her momentary irritation had vanished. since freddie was paying, freddie must have what suited him. "oh, i've got nothing to suggest. now that i've been studying it out, i couldn't allow you to make any changes. it does grow on one, doesn't it, brent?" "it will be the talk of paris," replied brent. the playwright's tone settled the matter for palmer. he was content. said he: "thank god she hasn't put in any of those dirty old tapestry rags--and the banged up, broken furniture and the patched crockery." at the same time she had produced an effect of long tenancy. there was nothing that glittered, nothing with the offensive sheen of the brand new. there was in that delicately toned atmosphere one suggestion which gave the same impression as the artificial crimson of her lips in contrast with the pallor of her skin and the sweet thoughtful melancholy of her eyes. this suggestion came from an all-pervading odor of a heavy, languorously sweet, sensuous perfume--the same that susan herself used. she had it made at a perfumer's in the faubourg st. honoré by mixing in a certain proportion several of the heaviest and most clinging of the familiar perfumes. "you don't like my perfume?" she said to brent one day. he was in the library, was inspecting her _selections_ of books. instead of answering her question, he said: "how did you find out so much about books? how did you find time to read so many?" "one always finds time for what one likes." "not always," said he. "i had a hard stretch once--just after i struck new york. i was a waiter for two months. working people don't find time for reading--and such things." "that was one reason why i gave up work," said she. "that--and the dirt--and the poor wages--and the hopelessness--and a few other reasons," said he. "why don't you like the perfume i use?" "why do you say that?" "you made a queer face as you came into the drawing-room." "do _you_ like it?" "what a queer question!" she said. "no other man would have asked it." "the obvious," said he, shrugging his shoulders. "i couldn't help knowing you didn't like it." "then why should i use it?" his glance drifted slowly away from hers. he lit a cigarette with much attention to detail. "why should i use perfume i don't like?" persisted she. "what's the use of going into that?" said he. "but i do like it--in a way," she went on after a pause. "it is--it seems to me the odor of myself." "yes--it is," he admitted. she laughed. "yet you made a wry face." "i did." "at the odor?" "at the odor." "do you think i ought to change to another perfume?" "you know i do not. it's the odor of your soul. it is different at different times--sometimes inspiringly sweet as the incense of heaven, as my metaphoric friend gourdain would say--sometimes as deadly sweet as the odors of the drugs men take to drag them to hell--sometimes repulsively sweet, making one heart sick for pure, clean smell-less air yet without the courage to seek it. your perfume is many things, but always--always strong and tenacious and individual." a flush had overspread the pallor of her skin; her long dark lashes hid her eyes. "you have never been in love," he went on. "so you told me once before." it was the first time either had referred to their new york acquaintance. "you did not believe me then. but you do now?" "for me there is no such thing as love," replied she. "i understand affection--i have felt it. i understand passion. it is a strong force in my life--perhaps the strongest." "no," said he, quiet but positive. "perhaps not," replied she carelessly, and went on, with her more than manlike candor, and in her manner of saying the most startling things in the calmest way: "i understand what is called love--feebleness looking up to strength or strength pitying feebleness. i understand because i've felt both those things. but love--two equal people united perfectly, merged into a third person who is neither yet is both--that i have not felt. i've dreamed it. i've imagined it--in some moments of passion. but"--she laughed and shrugged her shoulders and waved the hand with the cigarette between its fingers--"i have not felt it and i shall not feel it. i remain i." she paused, considered, added, "and i prefer that." "you are strong," said he, absent and reflective. "yes, you are strong." "i don't know," replied she. "sometimes i think so. again----" she shook her head doubtfully. "you would be dead if you were not. as strong in soul as in body." "probably," admitted she. "anyhow, i am sure i shall always be--alone. i shall visit--i shall linger on my threshold and talk. perhaps i shall wander in perfumed gardens and dream of comradeship. but i shall return _chez moi_." he rose--sighed--laughed--at her and at himself. "don't delay too long," said he. "delay?" "your career." "my career? why, i am in the full swing of it. i'm at work in the only profession i'm fit for." "the profession of woman?" "yes--the profession of female." he winced--and at this sign, if she did not ask herself what pleased her, she did not ask herself why. he said sharply, "i don't like that." "but _you_ have only to _hear_ it. think of poor me who have to _live_ it." "have to? no," said he. "surely you're not suggesting that i drop back into the laboring classes! no, thank you. if you knew, you'd not say anything so stupid." "i do know, and i was not suggesting that. under this capitalistic system the whole working class is degraded. they call what they do 'work,' but that word ought to be reserved for what a man does when he exercises mind and body usefully. what the working class is condemned to by capitalism is not work but toil." "the toil of a slave," said susan. "it's shallow twaddle or sheer want to talk about the dignity and beauty of labor under this system," he went on. "it is ugly and degrading. the fools or hypocrites who talk that way ought to be forced to join the gangs of slaves at their tasks in factory and mine and shop, in the fields and the streets. and even the easier and better paid tasks, even what the capitalists themselves do--those things aren't dignified and beautiful. capitalism divides all men except those of one class--the class to which i luckily belong--divides all other men into three unlovely classes--slave owners, slave drivers and slaves. but you're not interested in those questions." "in wage slavery? no. i wish to forget about it. any alternative to being a wage slave or a slave driver--or a slave owner. any alternative." "you don't appreciate your own good fortune," said he. "most human beings--all but a very few--have to be in the slave classes, in one way or another. they have to submit to the repulsive drudgery, with no advancement except to slave driver. as for women--if they have to work, what can they do but sell themselves into slavery to the machines, to the capitalists? but you--you needn't do that. nature endowed you with talent--unusual talent, i believe. how lucky you are! how superior to the great mass of your fellow beings who must slave or starve, because they have no talent!" "talent?--i?" said susan. "for what, pray?" "for the stage." she looked amused. "you evidently don't think me vain--or you'd not venture that jest." "for the stage," he repeated. "thanks," said she drily, "but i'll not appeal from your verdict." "my verdict? what do you mean?" "i prefer to talk of something else," said she coldly, offended by his unaccountable disregard of her feelings. "this is bewildering," said he. and his manner certainly fitted the words. "that i should have understood? perhaps i shouldn't--at least, not so quickly--if i hadn't heard how often you have been disappointed, and how hard it has been for you to get rid of some of those you tried and found wanting." "believe me--i was not disappointed in you." he spoke earnestly, apparently with sincerity. "the contrary. your throwing it all up was one of the shocks of my life." she laughed mockingly--to hide her sensitiveness. "one of the shocks of my life," he repeated. she was looking at him curiously--wondering why he was thus uncandid. "it puzzled me," he went on. "i've been lingering on here, trying to solve the puzzle. and the more i've seen of you the less i understand. why did you do it? how could _you_ do it?" he was walking up and down the room in a characteristic pose--hands clasped behind his back as if to keep them quiet, body erect, head powerfully thrust forward. he halted abruptly and wheeled to face her. "do you mean to tell me you didn't get tired of work and drop it for--" he waved his arm to indicate her luxurious surroundings--"for this?" no sign of her agitation showed at the surface. but she felt she was not concealing herself from him. he resumed his march, presently to halt and wheel again upon her. but before he could speak, she stopped him. "i don't wish to hear any more," said she, the strange look in her eyes. it was all she could do to hide the wild burst of emotion that had followed her discovery. then she had not been without a chance for a real career! she might have been free, might have belonged to herself---- "it is not too late," cried he. "that's why i'm here." "it is too late," she said. "it is not too late," repeated he, harshly, in his way that swept aside opposition. "i shall get you back." triumphantly, "the puzzle is solved!" she faced him with a look of defiant negation. "that ocean i crossed--it's as narrow as the east river into which i thought of throwing myself many a time--it's as narrow as the east river beside the ocean between what i am and what i was. and i'll never go back. never!" she repeated the "never" quietly, under her breath. his eyes looked as if they, without missing an essential detail, had swept the whole of that to which she would never go back. he said: "go back? no, indeed. who's asking you to go back? not i. i'm not _asking_ you to go anywhere. i'm simply saying that you will--_must_--go forward. if you were in love, perhaps not. but you aren't in love. i know from experience how men and women care for each other--how they form these relationships. they find each other convenient and comfortable. but they care only for themselves. especially young people. one must live quite a while to discover that thinking about oneself is living in a stuffy little cage with only a little light, through slats in the top that give no view. . . . it's an unnatural life for you. it can't last. you--centering upon yourself--upon comfort and convenience. absurd!" "i have chosen," said she. "no--you can't do it," he went on, as if she had not spoken. "_you_ can't spend your life at dresses and millinery, at chattering about art, at thinking about eating and drinking--at being passively amused--at attending to your hair and skin and figure. you may think so, but in reality you are getting ready for _me_ . . . for your career. you are simply educating yourself. i shall have you back." she held the cigarette to her lips, inhaled the smoke deeply, exhaled it slowly. "i will tell you why," he went on, as if he were answering a protest. "every one of us has an individuality of some sort. and in spite of everything and anything, except death or hopeless disease, that individuality will insist upon expressing itself." "mine is expressing itself," said she with a light smile--the smile of a light woman. "you can't rest in this present life of yours. your individuality is too strong. it will have its way--and for all your mocking smiling, you know i am right. i understand how you were tempted into it----" she opened her lips--changed her mind and stopped her lips with her cigarette. "i don't blame you--and it was just as well. this life has taught you--will teach you--will advance you in your career. . . . tell me, what gave you the idea that i was disappointed?" she tossed her cigarette into the big ash tray. "as i told you, it is too late." she rose and looked at him with a strange, sweet smile. "i've got any quantity of faults," said she. "but there's one i haven't got. i don't whine." "you don't whine," assented he, "and you don't lie--and you don't shirk. men and women have been canonized for less. i understand that for some reason you can't talk about----" "then why do you continue to press me?" said she, a little coldly. he accepted the rebuke with a bow. "nevertheless," said he, with raillery to carry off his persistence, "i shall get you. if not sooner, then when the specter of an obscure--perhaps poor--old age begins to agitate the rich hangings of youth's banquet hall." "that'll be a good many years yet," mocked she. and from her lovely young face flashed the radiant defiance of her perfect youth and health. "years that pass quickly," retorted he, unmoved. she was still radiant, still smiling, but once more she was seeing the hideous old women of the tenements. into her nostrils stole the stench of the foul den in which she had slept with mrs. tucker and mrs. reardon--and she was hearing the hunchback of the dive playing for the drunken dancing old cronies, with their tin cups of whiskey. no danger of that now? how little she was saving of her salary from palmer! she could not "work" men--she simply could not. she would never put by enough to be independent and every day her tastes for luxury had firmer hold upon her. no danger? as much danger as ever--a danger postponed but certain to threaten some day--and then, a fall from a greater height--a certain fall. she was hearing the battered, shattered piano of the dive. "for pity's sake mrs. palmer!" cried brent, in a low voice. she started. the beautiful room, the environment of luxury and taste and comfort came back. gourdain interrupted and then palmer. the four went to the cafe anglais for dinner. brent announced that he was going to the riviera soon to join a party of friends. "i wish you would visit me later," said he, with a glance that included them all and rested, as courtesy required, upon susan. "there's room in my villa--barely room." "we've not really settled here," said susan. "and we've taken up french seriously." "the weather's frightful," said palmer, with a meaning glance at her. "i think we ought to go." but her expression showed that she had no intention of going, no sympathy with palmer's desire to use this excellent, easy ladder of brent's offering to make the ascent into secure respectability. "next winter, then," said brent, who was observing her. "or--in the early spring, perhaps." "oh, we may change our minds and come," palmer suggested eagerly. "i'm going to try to persuade my wife." "come if you can," said brent cordially. "i'll have no one stopping with me." when they were alone, palmer sent his valet away and fussed about impatiently until susan's maid had unhooked her dress and had got her ready for bed. as the maid began the long process of giving her hair a thorough brushing, he said, "please let her go, susan. i want to tell you something." "she does not know a word of english." "but these french are so clever that they understand perfectly with their eyes." susan sent the maid to bed and sat in a dressing gown brushing her hair. it was long enough to reach to the middle of her back and to cover her bosom. it was very thick and wavy. now that the scarlet was washed from her lips for the night, her eyes shone soft and clear with no relief for their almost tragic melancholy. he was looking at her in profile. her expression was stern as well as sad--the soul of a woman who has suffered and has been made strong, if not hard. "i got a letter from my lawyers today," he began. "it was about that marriage. i'll read." at the word "marriage," she halted the regular stroke of the brush. her eyes gazed into the mirror of the dressing table through her reflection deep into her life, deep into the vistas of memory. as he unfolded the letter, she leaned back in the low chair, let her hands drop to her lap. "'as the inclosed documents show,'" he read, "'we have learned and have legally verified that jeb--not james--ferguson divorced his wife susan lenox about a year after their marriage, on the ground of desertion; and two years later he fell through the floor of an old bridge near brooksburg and was killed.'" the old bridge--she was feeling its loose flooring sag and shift under the cautious hoofs of the horse. she was seeing rod spenser on the horse, behind him a girl, hardly more than a child--under the starry sky exchanging confidences--talking of their futures. "so, you see, you are free," said palmer. "i went round to an american lawyer's office this afternoon, and borrowed an old legal form book. and i've copied out this form----" she was hardly conscious of his laying papers on the table before her. "it's valid, as i've fixed things. the lawyer gave me some paper. it has a watermark five years old. i've dated back two years--quite enough. so when we've signed, the marriage never could be contested--not even by ourselves." he took the papers from the table, laid them in her lap. she started. "what were you saying?" she asked. "what's this?" "what were you thinking about?" said he. "i wasn't thinking," she answered, with her slow sweet smile of self-concealment. "i was feeling--living--the past. i was watching the procession." he nodded understandingly. "that's a kind of time-wasting that can easily be overdone." "easily," she agreed. "still, there's the lesson. i have to remind myself of it often--always, when there's anything that has to be decided." "i've written out two of the forms," said he. "we sign both. you keep one, i the other. why not sign now?" she read the form--the agreement to take each other as lawful husband and wife and to regard the contract as in all respects binding and legal. "do you understand it?" laughed he nervously, for her manner was disquieting. "perfectly." "you stared at the paper as if it were a puzzle." "it is," said she. "come into the library and we'll sign and have it over with." she laid the papers on the dressing table, took up her brush, drew it slowly over her hair several times. "wake up," cried he, good humoredly. "come on into the library." and he went to the threshold. she continued brushing her hair. "i can't sign," said she. there was the complete absence of emotion that caused her to be misunderstood always by those who did not know her peculiarities. no one could have suspected the vision of the old women of the dive before her eyes, the sound of the hunchback's piano in her ears, the smell of foul liquors and foul bodies and foul breaths in her nostrils. yet she repeated: "no--i can't sign." he returned to his chair, seated himself, a slight cloud on his brow, a wicked smile on his lips. "now what the devil!" said he gently, a jeer in his quiet voice. "what's all this about?" "i can't marry you," said she. "i wish to live on as we are." "but if we do that we can't get up where we want to go." "i don't wish to know anyone but interesting men of the sort that does things--and women of my own sort. those people have no interest in conventionalities." "that's not the crowd we set out to conquer," said he. "you seem to have forgotten." "it's you who have forgotten," replied she. "yes--yes--i know," he hastened to say. "i wasn't accusing you of breaking your agreement. you've lived up to it--and more. but, susan, the people you care about don't especially interest me. brent--yes. he's a man of the world as well as one of the artistic chaps. but the others--they're beyond me. i admit it's all fine, and i'm glad you go in for it. but the only crowd that's congenial to me is the crowd that we've got to be married to get in with." she saw his point--saw it more clearly than did he. to him the world of fashion and luxurious amusement seemed the only world worth while. he accepted the scheme of things as he found it, had the conventional ambitions--to make in succession the familiar goals of the conventional human success--power, wealth, social position. it was impossible for him to get any other idea of a successful life, of ambitions worthy a man's labor. it was evidence of the excellence of his mind that he was able to tolerate the idea of the possibility of there being another mode of success worth while. "i'm helping you in your ambitions--in doing what you think is worth while," said he. "don't you think you owe it to me to help me in mine?" he saw the slight change of expression that told him how deeply he had touched her. "if i don't go in for the high society game," he went on, "i'll have nothing to do. i'll be adrift--gambling, drinking, yawning about and going to pieces. a man's got to have something to work for--and he can't work unless it seems to him worth doing." she was staring into the mirror, her elbows on the table, her chin upon her interlaced fingers. it would be difficult to say how much of his gentleness to her was due to her physical charm for him, and how much to his respect for her mind and her character. he himself would have said that his weakness was altogether the result of the spell her physical charm cast over him. but it is probable that the other element was the stronger. "you'll not be selfish, susan?" urged he. "you'll give me a square deal." "yes--i see that it does look selfish," said she. "a little while ago i'd not have been able to see any deeper than the looks of it. freddie, there are some things no one has a right to ask of another, and no one has a right to grant." the ugliness of his character was becoming less easy to control. this girl whom he had picked up, practically out of the gutter, and had heaped generosities upon, was trying his patience too far. but he said, rather amiably: "certainly i'm not asking any such thing of you in asking you to become a respectable married woman, the wife of a rich man." "yes--you are, freddie," replied she gently. "if i married you, i'd be signing an agreement to lead your life, to give up my own--an agreement to become a sort of woman i've no desire to be and no interest in being; to give up trying to become the only sort of woman i think is worth while. when we were discussing my coming with you, you made this same proposal in another form. i refused it then. and i refuse it now. it's harder to refuse now, but i'm stronger." "stronger, thanks to the money you've got from me--the money and the rest of it," sneered he. "haven't i earned all i've got?" said she, so calmly that he did not realize how the charge of ingratitude, unjust though it was, had struck into her. "you have changed!" said he. "you're getting as hard as the rest of us. so it's all a matter of money, of give and take--is it? none of the generosity and sentiment you used to be full of? you've simply been using me." "it can be put that way," replied she. "and no doubt you honestly see it that way. but i've got to see my own interest and my own right, freddie. i've learned at last that i mustn't trust to anyone else to look after them for me." "are you riding for a fall--queenie?" at "queenie" she smiled faintly. "i'm riding the way i always have," answered she. "it has carried me down. but--it has brought me up again." she looked at him with eyes that appealed, without yielding. "and i'll ride that way to the end--up or down," said she. "i can't help it." "then you want to break with me?" he asked--and he began to look dangerous. "no," replied she. "i want to go on as we are. . . . i'll not be interfering in your social ambitions, in any way. over here it'll help you to have a mistress who--" she saw her image in the glass, threw him an arch glance--"who isn't altogether unattractive won't it? and if you found you could go higher by marrying some woman of the grand world--why, you'd be free to do it." he had a way of looking at her that gave her--and himself--the sense of a delirious embrace. he looked at her so, now. he said: "you take advantage of my being crazy about you--_damn_ you!" "heaven knows," laughed she, "i need every advantage i can find." he touched her--the lightest kind of touch. it carried the sense of embrace in his look still more giddily upward. "queenie!" he said softly. she smiled at him through half closed eyes that with a gentle and shy frankness confessed the secret of his attraction for her. there was, however, more of strength than of passion in her face as a whole. said she: "we're getting on well--as we are aren't we? i can meet the most amusing and interesting people--my sort of people. you can go with the people and to the places you like and you'll not be bound. if you should take a notion to marry some woman with a big position--you'd not have to regret being tied to--queenie." "but--i want you--i want you," said he. "i've got to have you." "as long as you like," said she. "but on terms i can accept--always on terms i can accept. never on any others--never! i can't help it. i can yield everything but that." where she was concerned he was the primitive man only. the higher his passion rose, the stronger became his desire for absolute possession. when she spoke of terms--of the limitations upon his possession of her--she transformed his passion into fury. he eyed her wickedly, abruptly demanded: "when did you decide to make this kick-up?" "i don't know. simply--when you asked me to sign, i found i couldn't." "you don't expect _me_ to believe that." "it's the truth." she resumed brushing her hair. "look at me!" she turned her face toward him, met his gaze. "have you fallen in love with that young jew?" "gourdain? no." "have you a crazy notion that your looks'll get you a better husband? a big fortune or a title?" "i haven't thought about a husband. haven't i told you i wish to be free?" "but that doesn't mean anything." "it might," said she absently. "how?" "i don't know. if one is always free--one is ready for--whatever comes. anyhow, i must be free--no matter what it costs." "i see you're bent on dropping back into the dirt i picked you out of." "even that," she said. "i must be free." "haven't you any desire to be respectable--decent?" "i guess not," confessed she. "what is there in that direction for me?" "a woman doesn't stay young and good-looking long." "no." she smiled faintly. "but does she get old and ugly any slower for being married?" he rose and stood over her, looked smiling danger down at her. she leaned back in her chair to meet his eyes without constraint. "you're trying to play me a trick," said he. "but you're not going to get away with the goods. i'm astonished that you are so rotten ungrateful." "because i'm not for sale?" "queenie balking at selling herself," he jeered. "and what's the least you ever did sell for?" "a half-dollar, i think. no--two drinks of whiskey one cold night. but what i sold was no more myself than--than the coat i'd pawned and drunk up before i did it." the plain calm way in which she said this made it so terrible that he winced and turned away. "we have seen hell--haven't we?" he muttered. he turned toward her with genuine passion of feeling. "susan," he cried, "don't be a fool. let's push our luck, now that things are coming our way. we need each other--we want to stay together--don't we?" "_i_ want to stay. i'm happy." "then--let's put the record straight." "let's keep it straight," replied she earnestly. "don't ask me to go where i don't belong. for i can't, freddie--honestly, i can't." a pause. then, "you will!" said he, not in blustering fury, but in that cool and smiling malevolence which had made him the terror of his associates from his boyhood days among the petty thieves and pickpockets of grand street. he laid his hand gently on her shoulder. "you hear me. i say you will." she looked straight at him. "not if you kill me," she said. she rose to face him at his own height. "i've bought my freedom with my body and with my heart and with my soul. it's all i've got. i shall keep it." he measured her strength with an expert eye. he knew that he was beaten. he laughed lightly and went into his dressing-room. chapter xxii they met the next morning with no sign in the manner of either that there had been a drawn battle, that there was an armed truce. she knew that he, like herself, was thinking of nothing else. but until he had devised some way of certainly conquering her he would wait, and watch, and pretend that he was satisfied with matters as they were. the longer she reflected the less uneasy she became--as to immediate danger. in paris the methods of violence he might have been tempted to try in new york were out of the question. what remained? he must realize that threats to expose her would be futile; also, he must feel vulnerable, himself, to that kind of attack--a feeling that would act as a restraint, even though he might appreciate that she was the sort of person who could not in any circumstances resort to it. he had not upon her a single one of the holds a husband has upon a wife. true, he could break with her. but she must appreciate how easy it would now be for her in this capital of the idle rich to find some other man glad to "protect" a woman so expert at gratifying man's vanity of being known as the proprietor of a beautiful and fashionable woman. she had discovered how, in the aristocracy of european wealth, an admired mistress was as much a necessary part of the grandeur of great nobles, great financiers, great manufacturers, or merchants, as wife, as heir, as palace, as equipage, as chef, as train of secretaries and courtiers. she knew how deeply it would cut, to find himself without his show piece that made him the envied of men and the desired of women. also, she knew that she had an even stronger hold upon him--that she appealed to him as no other woman ever had, that she had become for him a tenacious habit. she was not afraid that he would break with her. but she could not feel secure; in former days she had seen too far into the mazes of that italian mind of his, she knew too well how patient, how relentless, how unforgetting he was. she would have taken murder into account as more than a possibility but for his intense and intelligent selfishness; he would not risk his life or his liberty; he would not deprive himself of his keenest pleasure. he was resourceful; but in the circumstances what resources were there for him to draw upon? when he began to press upon her more money than ever, and to buy her costly jewelry, she felt still further reassured. evidently he had been unable to think out any practicable scheme; evidently he was, for the time, taking the course of appeal to her generous instincts, of making her more and more dependent upon his liberality. well--was he not right? love might fail; passion might wane; conscience, aiding self-interest with its usual servility, might overcome the instincts of gratitude. but what power could overcome the loyalty resting upon money interest? no power but that of a longer purse than his. as she was not in the mood to make pretenses about herself to herself, she smiled at this cynical self-measuring. "but i shan't despise myself for being so material," said she to herself, "until i find a _genuine_ case of a woman, respectable or otherwise, who has known poverty and escaped from it, and has then voluntarily given up wealth to go back to it. i should not stay on with him if he were distasteful to me. and that's more than most women can honestly say. perhaps even i should not stay on if it were not for a silly, weak feeling of obligation--but i can't be sure of that." she had seen too much of men and women preening upon noble disinterested motives when in fact their real motives were the most calculatingly selfish; she preferred doing herself less than justice rather than more. she had fifty-five thousand francs on deposit at munroe's--all her very own. she had almost two hundred thousand francs' worth of jewels, which she would be justified in keeping--at least, she hoped she would think so--should there come a break with freddie. yet in spite of this substantial prosperity--or was it because of this prosperity?--she abruptly began again to be haunted by the old visions, by warnings of the dangers that beset any human being who has not that paying trade or profession which makes him or her independent--gives him or her the only unassailable independence. the end with freddie might be far away. but end, she saw, there would be the day when he would somehow get her in his power and so would drive her to leave him. for she could not again become a slave. extreme youth, utter inexperience, no knowledge of real freedom--these had enabled her to endure in former days. but she was wholly different now. she could not sink back. steadily she was growing less and less able to take orders from anyone. this full-grown passion for freedom, this intolerance of the least restraint--how dangerous, if she should find herself in a position where she would have to put up with the caprices of some man or drop down and down! what real, secure support had she? none. her building was without solid foundations. her struggle with freddie was a revelation and a warning. there were days when, driving about in her luxurious car, she could do nothing but search among the crowds in the streets for the lonely old women in rags, picking and peering along the refuse of the cafés--weazened, warped figures swathed in rags, creeping along, mumbling to themselves, lips folded in and in over toothless gums. one day brent saw again the look she often could not keep from her face when that vision of the dance hall in the slums was horrifying her. he said impulsively: "what is it? tell me--what is it, susan?" it was the first and the last time he ever called her by her only personal name. he flushed deeply. to cover his confusion--and her own--she said in her most frivolous way: "i was thinking that if i am ever rich i shall have more pairs of shoes and stockings and take care of more orphans than anyone else in the world." "a purpose! at last a purpose!" laughed he. "now you will go to work." through gourdain she got a french teacher--and her first woman friend. the young widow he recommended, a madame clélie délière, was the most attractive woman she had ever known. she had all the best french characteristics--a good heart, a lively mind, was imaginative yet sensible, had good taste in all things. like most of the attractive french women, she was not beautiful, but had that which is of far greater importance--charm. she knew not a word of english, and it was perhaps susan's chief incentive toward working hard at french that she could not really be friends with this fascinating person until she learned to speak her language. palmer--partly by nature, partly through early experience in the polyglot tenement district of new york--had more aptitude for language than had susan. but he had been lazy about acquiring french in a city where english is spoken almost universally. with the coming of young madame délière to live in the apartment, he became interested. it was not a month after her coming when you might have seen at one of the fashionable gay restaurants any evening a party of four--gourdain was the fourth--talking french almost volubly. palmer's accent was better than susan's. she could not--and felt she never could--get the accent of the trans-alleghany region out of her voice--and so long as that remained she would not speak good french. "but don't let that trouble you," said clélie. "your voice is your greatest charm. it is so honest and so human. of the americans i have met, i have liked only those with that same tone in their voices." "but _i_ haven't that accent," said freddie with raillery. madame clélie laughed. "no--and i do not like you," retorted she. "no one ever did. you do not wish to be liked. you wish to be feared." her lively brown eyes sparkled and the big white teeth in her generous mouth glistened. "you wish to be feared--and you _are_ feared, monsieur freddie." "it takes a clever woman to know how to flatter with the truth," said he. "everybody always has been afraid of me--and is--except, of course, my wife." he was always talking of "my wife" now. the subject so completely possessed his mind that he aired it unconsciously. when she was not around he boasted of "my wife's" skill in the art of dress, of "my wife's" taste, of "my wife's" shrewdness in getting her money's worth. when she was there, he was using the favorite phrase "my wife" this--"my wife" that--"my wife" the other--until it so got on her nerves that she began to wait for it and to wince whenever it came--never a wait of many minutes. at first she thought he was doing this deliberately either to annoy her or in pursuance of some secret deep design. but she soon saw that he was not aware of his inability to keep off the subject or of his obsession for that phrase representing the thing he was intensely wishing and willing--"chiefly," she thought, "because it is something he cannot have." she was amazed at his display of such a weakness. it gave her the chance to learn an important truth about human nature--that self-indulgence soon destroys the strongest nature--and she was witness to how rapidly an inflexible will disintegrates if incessantly applied to an impossibility. when a strong arrogant man, unbalanced by long and successful self-indulgence, hurls himself at an obstruction, either the obstruction yields or the man is destroyed. one morning early in february, as she was descending from her auto in front of the apartment house, she saw brent in the doorway. never had he looked so young or so well. his color was fine, his face had become almost boyish; upon his skin and in his eyes was that gloss of perfect health which until these latter days of scientific hygiene was rarely seen after twenty-five in a woman or after thirty in a man. she gathered in all, to the smallest detail--such as the color of his shirt--with a single quick glance. she knew that he had seen her before she saw him--that he had been observing her. her happiest friendliest smile made her small face bewitching as she advanced with outstretched hand. "when did you come?" she asked. "about an hour ago." "from the riviera?" "no, indeed. from st. moritz--and skating and skiing and tobogganing. i rather hoped i looked it. doing those things in that air--it's being born again." "i felt well till i saw you," said she. "now i feel dingy and half sick." he laughed, his glance sweeping her from hat to boots. certainly his eyes could not have found a more entrancing sight. she was wearing a beautiful dress of golden brown cloth, sable hat, short coat and muff, brown suede boots laced high upon her long slender calves. and when she had descended from the perfect little limousine made to order for her, he had seen a ravishing flutter of lingerie of pale violet silk. the sharp air had brought no color to her cheeks to interfere with the abrupt and fascinating contrast of their pallor with the long crimson bow of her mouth. but her skin seemed transparent and had the clearness of health itself. everything about her, every least detail, was of parisian perfection. "probably there are not in the world," said he, "so many as a dozen women so well put together as you are. no, not half a dozen. few women carry the art of dress to the point of genius." "i see they had only frumps at st. moritz this season," laughed she. but he would not be turned aside. "most of the well dressed women stop short with being simply frivolous in spending so much time at less than perfection--like the army of poets who write pretty good verse, or the swarm of singers who sing pretty well. i've heard of you many times this winter. you are the talk of paris." she laughed with frank delight. it was indeed a pleasure to discover that her pains had not been in vain. "it is always the outsider who comes to the great city to show it its own resources," he went on. "i knew you were going to do this. still happy?" "oh, yes." but he had taken her by surprise. a faint shadow flitted across her face. "not so happy, i see." "you see too much. won't you lunch with us? we'll have it in about half an hour." he accepted promptly and they went up together. his glance traveled round the drawing-room; and she knew he had noted all the changes she had made on better acquaintance with her surroundings and wider knowledge of interior furnishing. she saw that he approved, and it increased her good humor. "are you hurrying through paris on your way to somewhere else?" she asked. "no, i stop here--i think--until i sail for america." "and that will be soon?" "perhaps not until july. i have no plans. i've finished a play a woman suggested to me some time ago. and i'm waiting." a gleam of understanding came into her eyes. there was controlled interest in her voice as she inquired: "when is it to be produced?" "when the woman who suggested it is ready to act in it." "do i by any chance know her?" "you used to know her. you will know her again." she shook her head slowly, a pensive smile hovering about her eyes and lips. "no--not again. i have changed." "we do not change," said he. "we move, but we do not change. you are the same character you were when you came into the world. and what you were then, that you will be when the curtain falls on the climax of your last act. your circumstances will change--and your clothes--and your face, hair, figure--but not _you_." "do you believe that?" "i _know_ it." she nodded slowly, the violet-gray eyes pensive. "birds in the strong wind--that's what we are. driven this way or that--or quite beaten down. but the wind doesn't change sparrow to eagle--or eagle to gull--does it?" she had removed her coat and was seated on an oval lounge gazing into the open fire. he was standing before it, looking taller and stronger than ever, in a gray lounging suit. a cigarette depended loosely from the corner of his mouth. he said abruptly: "how are you getting on with your acting?" she glanced in surprise. "gourdain," brent explained. "he had to talk to somebody about how wonderful you are. so he took to writing me--two huge letters a week--all about you." "i'm fond of him. and he's fond of clélie. she's my----" "i know all," he interrupted. "the tie between them is their fondness for you. tell me about the acting." "oh--clélie and i have been going to the theater every few days--to help me with french. she is mad about acting, and there's nothing i like better." "also, _you_ simply have to have occupation." she nodded. "i wasn't brought up to fit me for an idler. when i was a child i was taught to keep busy--not at nothing, but at something. freddie's a lot better at it than i." "naturally," said brent. "you had a home, with order and a system--an old-fashioned american home. he--well, he hadn't." "clélie and i go at our make-believe acting quite seriously. we have to--if we're to fool ourselves that it's an occupation." "why this anxiety to prove to me that you're not really serious?" susan laughed mockingly for answer, and went on: "you should see us do the two wives in 'l'enigme'--or mother and daughter in that diary scene in 'l'autre danger'!" "i must. . . . when are you going to resume your career?" she rose, strolled toward an open door at one end of the salon, closed it--strolled toward the door into the hall, glanced out, returned without having closed it. she then said: "could i study here in paris?" triumph gleamed in his eyes. "yes. boudrin--a splendid teacher--speaks english. he--and i--can teach you." "tell me what i'd have to do." "we would coach you for a small part in some play that's to be produced here." "in french?" "i'll have an american girl written into a farce. enough to get you used to the stage--to give you practice in what he'll teach you--the trade side of the art." "and then?" "and then we shall spend the summer learning your part in my play. two or three weeks of company rehearsals in new york in september. in october--your name out over the long acre theater in letters of fire." "could that be done?" "even if you had little talent, less intelligence, and no experience. properly taught, the trade part of every art is easy. teachers make it hard partly because they're dull, chiefly because there'd be small money for them if they taught quickly, and only the essentials. no, journeyman acting's no harder to learn than bricklaying or carpentering. and in america--everywhere in the world but a few theaters in paris and vienna--there is nothing seen but journeyman acting. the art is in its infancy as an art. it even has not yet been emancipated from the swaddling clothes of declamation. yes, you can do well by the autumn. and if you develop what i think you have in you, you can leap with one bound into fame. in america or england, mind you--because there the acting is all poor to 'pretty good'." "you are sure it could be done? no--i don't mean that. i mean, is there really a chance--any chance--for me to make my own living? a real living?" "i guarantee," said brent. she changed from seriousness to a mocking kind of gayety--that is, to a seriousness so profound that she would not show it. and she said: "you see i simply must banish my old women--and that hunchback and his piano. they get on my nerves." he smiled humorously at her. but behind the smile his gaze--grave, sympathetic--pierced into her soul, seeking the meaning he knew she would never put into words. at the sound of voices in the hall she said: "we'll talk of this again." at lunch that day she, for the first time in many a week, listened without irritation while freddie poured forth his unending praise of "my wife." as brent knew them intimately, freddie felt free to expatiate upon all the details of domestic economy that chanced to be his theme, with the exquisite lunch as a text. he told brent how susan had made a study of that branch of the art of living; how she had explored the unrivaled parisian markets and groceries and shops that dealt in specialties; how she had developed their breakfasts, dinners, and lunches to works of art. it is impossible for anyone, however stupid, to stop long in paris without beginning to idealize the material side of life--for the french, who build solidly, first idealize food, clothing, and shelter, before going on to take up the higher side of life--as a sane man builds his foundation before his first story, and so on, putting the observation tower on last of all, instead of making an ass of himself trying to hang his tower to the stars. our idealization goes forward haltingly and hypocritically because we try to build from the stars down, instead of from the ground up. the place to seek the ideal is in the homely, the commonplace, and the necessary. an ideal that does not spring deep-rooted from the soil of practical life may be a topic for a sermon or a novel or for idle conversation among silly and pretentious people. but what use has it in a world that must _live_, and must be taught to live? freddie was unaware that he was describing a further development of susan--a course she was taking in the university of experience--she who had passed through its common school, its high school, its college. to him her clever housekeeping offered simply another instance of her cleverness in general. his discourse was in bad taste. but its bad taste was tolerable because he was interesting--food, like sex, being one of those universal subjects that command and hold the attention of all mankind. he rose to no mean height of eloquence in describing their dinner of the evening before--the game soup that brought to him visions of a hunting excursion he had once made into the wilds of canada; the way the _barbue_ was cooked and served; the incredible duck--and the salad! clélie interrupted to describe that salad as like a breath of summer air from fields and limpid brooks. he declared that the cheese--which susan had found in a shop in the marche st. honoré--was more wonderful than the most wonderful _petit suisse_. "and the coffee!" he exclaimed. "but you'll see in a few minutes. we have _coffee_ here." "_quelle histoire!_" exclaimed brent, when freddie had concluded. and he looked at susan with the ironic, quizzical gleam in his eyes. she colored. "i am learning to live," said she. "that's what we're on earth for--isn't it?" "to learn to live--and then, to live," replied he. she laughed. "ah, that comes a little later." "not much later," rejoined he, "or there's no time left for it." it was freddie who, after lunch, urged susan and clélie to "show brent what you can do at acting." "yes--by all means," said brent with enthusiasm. and they gave--in one end of the salon which was well suited for it--the scene between mother and daughter over the stolen diary, in "l'autre danger." brent said little when they finished, so little that palmer was visibly annoyed. but susan, who was acquainted with his modes of expression, felt a deep glow of satisfaction. she had no delusions about her attempts; she understood perfectly that they were simply crude attempts. she knew she had done well--for her--and she knew he appreciated her improvement. "that would have gone fine--with costumes and scenery--eh?" demanded freddie of brent. "yes," said brent absently. "yes--that is--yes." freddie was dissatisfied with this lack of enthusiasm. he went on insistently: "i think she ought to go on the stage--she and madame clélie, too." "yes," said brent, between inquiry and reflection. "what do _you_ think?" "i don't think she ought," replied brent. "i think she _must_." he turned to susan. "would you like it?" susan hesitated. freddie said--rather lamely, "of course she would. for my part, i wish she would." "then i will," said susan quietly. palmer looked astounded. he had not dreamed she would assent. he knew her tones--knew that the particular tone meant finality. "you're joking," cried he, with an uneasy laugh. "why, you wouldn't stand the work for a week. it's hard work--isn't it, brent?" "about the hardest," said brent. "and she's got practically everything still to learn." "shall we try, clélie?" said susan. young madame délière was pale with eagerness. "ah--but that would be worth while!" cried she. "then it's settled," said susan. to brent: "we'll make the arrangements at once--today." freddie was looking at her with a dazed expression. his glance presently drifted from her face to the fire, to rest there thoughtfully as he smoked his cigar. he took no part in the conversation that followed. presently he left the room without excusing himself. when clélie seated herself at the piano to wander vaguely from one piece of music to another, brent joined susan at the fire and said in english: "palmer is furious." "i saw," said she. "i am afraid. for--i know him." she looked calmly at him. "but i am not." "then you do not know him." the strangest smile flitted across her face. after a pause brent said: "are you married to him?" again the calm steady look. then: "that is none of your business." "i thought you were not," said brent, as if she had answered his question with a clear negative. he added, "you know i'd not have asked if it had been 'none of my business.'" "what do you mean?" "if you had been his wife, i could not have gone on. i've all the reverence for a home of the man who has never had one. i'd not take part in a home-breaking. but--since you are free----" "i shall never be anything else but free. it's because i wish to make sure of my freedom that i'm going into this." palmer appeared in the doorway. that night the four and gourdain dined together, went to the theater and afterward to supper at the cafe de paris. gourdain and young madame délière formed an interesting, unusually attractive exhibit of the parasitism that is as inevitable to the rich as fleas to a dog. gourdain was a superior man, clélie a superior woman. there was nothing of the sycophant, or even of the courtier, about either. yet they already had in their faces that subtle indication of the dependent that is found in all professional people who habitually work for and associate with the rich only. they had no sense of dependence; they were not dependents, for they gave more than value received. yet so corrupting is the atmosphere about rich people that gourdain, who had other rich clients, no less than clélie who got her whole living from palmer, was at a glance in the flea class and not in the dog class. brent looked for signs of the same thing in susan's face. the signs should have been there; but they were not. "not yet," thought he. "and never will be now." palmer's abstraction and constraint were in sharp contrast to the gayety of the others. susan drank almost nothing. her spirits were soaring so high that she did not dare stimulate them with champagne. the cafe de paris is one of the places where the respectable go to watch _les autres_ and to catch a real gayety by contagion of a gayety that is mechanical and altogether as unreal as play-acting. there is something fantastic about the official temples of venus; the pleasure-makers are so serious under their masks and the pleasure-getters so quaintly dazzled and deluded. that is, venus's temples are like those of so many other religions in reverence among men--disbelief and solemn humbuggery at the altar; belief that would rather die than be undeceived, in the pews. palmer scarcely took his eyes from susan's face. it amused and pleased her to see how uneasy this made brent--and how her own laughter and jests aggravated his uneasiness to the point where he was almost showing it. she glanced round that brilliant room filled with men and women, each of them carrying underneath the placidity of stiff evening shirt or the scantiness of audacious evening gown the most fascinating emotions and secrets--love and hate and jealousy, cold and monstrous habits and desires, ruin impending or stealthily advancing, fortune giddying to a gorgeous climax, disease and shame and fear--yet only signs of love and laughter and lightness of heart visible. and she wondered whether at any other table there was gathered so curious an assemblage of pasts and presents and futures as at the one over which freddie palmer was presiding somberly. . . . then her thoughts took another turn. she fell to noting how each man was accompanied by a woman--a gorgeously dressed woman, a woman revealing, proclaiming, in every line, in every movement, that she was thus elaborately and beautifully toiletted to please man, to appeal to his senses, to gain his gracious approval. it was the world in miniature; it was an illustration of the position of woman--of her own position. favorite; pet. not the equal of man, but an appetizer, a dessert. she glanced at herself in the glass, mocked her own radiant beauty of face and form and dress. not really a full human being; merely a decoration. no more; and no worse off than most of the women everywhere, the favorites licensed or unlicensed of law and religion. but just as badly off, and just as insecure. free! no rest, no full breath until freedom had been won! at any cost, by straight way or devious--free! "let's go home," said she abruptly. "i've had enough of this." she was in a dressing gown, all ready for bed and reading, when palmer came into her sitting-room. she was smoking, her gaze upon her book. her thick dark hair was braided close to her small head. there was delicate lace on her nightgown, showing above the wadded satin collar of the dressing gown. he dropped heavily into a chair. "if anyone had told me a year ago that a skirt could make a damn fool of me," said he bitterly, "i'd have laughed in his face. yet--here i am! how nicely i did drop into your trap today--about the acting!" "trap?" "oh, i admit i built and baited and set it, myself--ass that i was! but it was your trap--yours and brent's, all the same. . . . a skirt--and not a clean one, at that." she lowered the book to her lap, took the cigarette from between her lips, looked at him. "why not be reasonable, freddie?" said she calmly. language had long since lost its power to impress her. "why irritate yourself and annoy me simply because i won't let you tyrannize over me? you know you can't treat me as if i were your property. i'm not your wife, and i don't have to be your mistress." "getting ready to break with me eh?" "if i wished to go, i'd tell you--and go." "you'd give me the shake, would you?--without the slightest regard for all i've done for you!" she refused to argue that again. "i hope i've outgrown doing weak gentle things through cowardice and pretending it's through goodness of heart." "you've gotten hard--like stone." "like you--somewhat." and after a moment she added, "anything that's strong is hard--isn't it? can a man or a woman get anywhere without being able to be what you call 'hard' and what i call 'strong'?" "where do _you_ want to get?" demanded he. she disregarded his question, to finish saying what was in her mind--what she was saying rather to give herself a clear look at her own thoughts and purposes than to enlighten him about them. "i'm not a sheltered woman," pursued she. "i've got no one to save me from the consequences of doing nice, sweet, womanly things." "you've got me," said he angrily. "but why lean if i'm strong enough to stand alone? why weaken myself just to gratify your mania for owning and bossing? but let me finish what i was saying. i never got any quarter because i was a woman. no woman does, as a matter of fact; and in the end, the more she uses her sex to help her shirk, the worse her punishment is. but in my case---- "i was brought up to play the weak female, to use my sex as my shield. and that was taken from me and--i needn't tell _you_ how i was taught to give and take like a man--no, not like a man--for no man ever has to endure what a woman goes through if she is thrown on the world. still, i'm not whining. now that it's all over i'm the better for what i've been through. i've learned to use all a man's weapons and in addition i've got a woman's." "as long as your looks last," sneered he. "that will be longer than yours," said she pleasantly, "if you keep on with the automobiles and the champagne. and when my looks are gone, my woman's weapons. . . "why, i'll still have the man's weapons left--shan't i?--knowledge, and the ability to use it." his expression of impotent fury mingled with compelled admiration and respect made his face about as unpleasant to look at as she had ever seen it. but she liked to look. his confession of her strength made her feel stronger. the sense of strength was a new sensation with her--new and delicious. nor could the feeling that she was being somewhat cruel restrain her from enjoying it. "i have never asked quarter," she went on. "i never shall. if fate gets me down, as it has many a time, why i'll he able to take my medicine without weeping or whining. i've never asked pity. i've never asked charity. that's why i'm here, freddie--in this apartment, instead of in a filthy tenement attic--and in these clothes instead of in rags--and with you respecting me, instead of kicking me toward the gutter. isn't that so?" he was silent. "isn't it so?" she insisted. "yes," he admitted. and his handsome eyes looked the love so near to hate that fills a strong man for a strong woman when they clash and he cannot conquer. "no wonder i'm a fool about you," he muttered. "i don't purpose that any man or woman shall use me," she went on, "in exchange for merely a few flatteries. i insist that if they use me, they must let me use them. i shan't be mean about it, but i shan't be altogether a fool, either. and what is a woman but a fool when she lets men use her for nothing but being called sweet and loving and womanly? unless that's the best she can do, poor thing!" "you needn't sneer at respectable women." "i don't," replied she. "i've no sneers for anybody. i've discovered a great truth, freddie the deep-down equality of all human beings--all of them birds in the same wind and battling with it each as best he can. as for myself--with money, with a career that interests me, with position that'll give me any acquaintances and friends that are congenial, i don't care what is said of me." as her plan unfolded itself fully to his understanding, which needed only a hint to enable it to grasp all, he forgot his rage for a moment in his interest and admiration. said he: "you've used me. now you're going to use brent--eh? well--what will you give _him_ in exchange?" "he wants someone to act certain parts in certain plays." "is that _all_ he wants?" "he hasn't asked anything else." "and if he did?" "don't be absurd. you know brent." "he's not in love with you," assented palmer. "he doesn't want you that way. there's some woman somewhere, i've heard--and he doesn't care about anybody but her." he was speaking in a careless, casual way, watching her out of the corner of his eye. and she, taken off guard, betrayed in her features the secret that was a secret even from herself. he sprang up with a bound, sprang at her, caught her up out of her chair, the fingers of one hand clasping her throat. "i thought so!" he hissed. "you love him--damn you! you love him! you'd better look out, both of you!" there came a knock at the door between her bedroom and that of madame clélie. palmer released her, stood panting, with furious eyes on the door from which the sound had come. susan called, "it's all right, clélie, for the present." then she said to palmer, "i told clélie to knock if she ever heard voices in this room--or any sound she didn't understand." she reseated herself, began to massage her throat where his fingers had clutched it. "it's fortunate my skin doesn't mar easily," she went on. "what were you saying?" "i know the truth now. you love brent. that's the milk in the cocoanut." she reflected on this, apparently with perfect tranquillity, apparently with no memory of his furious threat against her and against brent. she said: "perhaps i was simply piqued because there's another woman." "you are jealous." "i guess i was--a little." "you admit that you love him, you----" he checked himself on the first hissing breath of the foul epithet. she said tranquilly: "jealousy doesn't mean love. we're jealous in all sorts of ways--and of all sorts of things." "well--_he_ cares nothing about _you_." "nothing." "and never will. he'd despise a woman who had been----" "don't hesitate. say it. i'm used to hearing it, freddie--and to being it. and not 'had been' but 'is.' i still am, you know." "you're not!" he cried. "and never were--and never could be--for some unknown reason, god knows why." she shrugged her shoulders, lit another cigarette. he went on: "you can't get it out of your head that because he's interested in you he's more or less stuck on you. that's the way with women. the truth is, he wants you merely to act in his plays." "and i want that, too." "you think i'm going to stand quietly by and let this thing go on--do you?" she showed not the faintest sign of nervousness at this repetition, more carefully veiled, of his threat against her--and against brent. she chose the only hopeful course; she went at him boldly and directly. said she with amused carelessness: "why not? he doesn't want me. even if i love him, i'm not giving him anything you want." "how do you know what i want?" cried he, confused by this unexpected way of meeting his attack. "you think i'm simply a brute--with no fine instincts or feelings----" she interrupted him with a laugh. "don't be absurd, freddie," said she. "you know perfectly well you and i don't call out the finer feelings in each other. if either of us wanted that sort of thing, we'd have to look elsewhere." "you mean brent--eh?" she laughed with convincing derision. "what nonsense!" she put her arms round his neck, and her lips close to his. the violet-gray eyes were half closed, the perfume of the smooth amber-white skin, of the thick, wavy, dark hair, was in his nostrils. and in a languorous murmur she soothed his subjection to a deep sleep with, "as long as you give me what i want from you, and i give you what you want from me why should we wrangle?" and with a smile he acquiesced. she felt that she had ended the frightful danger--to brent rather than to herself--that suddenly threatened from those wicked eyes of palmer's. but it might easily come again. she did not dare relax her efforts, for in the succeeding days she saw that he was like one annoyed by a constant pricking from a pin hidden in the clothing and searched for in vain. he was no longer jealous of brent. but while he didn't know what was troubling him, he did know that he was uncomfortable. chapter xxiii in but one important respect was brent's original plan modified. instead of getting her stage experience in france, susan joined a london company making one of those dreary, weary, cheap and trashy tours of the smaller cities of the provinces with half a dozen plays by jones, pinero, and shaw. clélie stayed in london, toiling at the language, determined to be ready to take the small part of french maid in brent's play in the fall. brent and palmer accompanied susan; and every day for several hours brent and the stage manager--his real name was thomas boil and his professional name was herbert streathern--coached the patient but most unhappy susan line by line, word by word, gesture by gesture, in the little parts she was playing. palmer traveled with them, making a pretense of interest that ill concealed his boredom and irritation. this for three weeks; then he began to make trips to london to amuse himself with the sports, amateur and professional, with whom he easily made friends--some of them men in a position to be useful to him socially later on. he had not spoken of those social ambitions of his since susan refused to go that way with him--but she knew he had them in mind as strongly as ever. he was the sort of man who must have an objective, and what other objective could there be for him who cared for and believed in the conventional ambitions and triumphs only--the successes that made the respectable world gape and grovel and envy? "you'll not stick at this long," he said to susan. "i'm frightfully depressed," she admitted. "it's tiresome--and hard--and so hideously uncomfortable! and i've lost all sense of art or profession. acting seems to be nothing but a trade, and a poor, cheap one at that." he was not surprised, but was much encouraged by this candid account of her state of mind. said he: "it's my private opinion that only your obstinacy keeps you from giving it up straight off. surely you must see it's nonsense. drop it and come along--and be comfortable and happy. why be obstinate? there's nothing in it." "perhaps it _is_ obstinacy," said she. "i like to think it's something else." "drop it. you want to. you know you do." "i want to, but i can't," replied she. he recognized the tone, the expression of the eyes, the sudden showing of strength through the soft, young contour. and he desisted. never again could there be comfort, much less happiness, until she had tried out her reawakened ambition. she had given up all that had been occupying her since she left america with freddie; she had abandoned herself to a life of toil. certainly nothing could have been more tedious, more tormenting to sensitive nerves, than the schooling through which brent was putting her. its childishness revolted her and angered her. experience had long since lowered very considerably the point at which her naturally sweet disposition ceased to be sweet--a process through which every good-tempered person must pass unless he or she is to be crushed and cast aside as a failure. there were days, many of them, when it took all her good sense, all her fundamental faith in brent, to restrain her from an outbreak. streathern regarded brent as a crank, and had to call into service all his humility as a poor englishman toward a rich man to keep from showing his contempt. and brent seemed to be--indeed was--testing her forbearance to the uttermost. he offered not the slightest explanation of his method. he simply ordered her blindly to pursue the course he marked out. she was sorely tempted to ask, to demand, explanations. but there stood out a quality in brent that made her resolve ooze away, as soon as she faced him. of one thing she was confident. any lingering suspicions freddie might have had of brent's interest in her as a woman, or even of her being interested in him as a man, must have been killed beyond resurrection. freddie showed that he would have hated brent, would have burst out against him, for the unhuman, inhuman way he was treating her, had it not been that brent was so admirably serving his design to have her finally and forever disgusted and done with the stage. finally there came a performance in which the audience--the gallery part of it--"booed" her--not the play, not the other players, but her and no other. brent came along, apparently by accident, as she made her exit. he halted before her and scanned her countenance with those all-seeing eyes of his. said he: "you heard them?" "of course," replied she. "that was for you," said he and he said it with an absence of sympathy that made it brutal. "for only me," said she--frivolously. "you seem not to mind." "certainly i mind. i'm not made of wood or stone." "don't you think you'd better give it up?" she looked at him with a steely light from the violet eyes, a light that had never been there before. "give up?" said she. "not even if you give me up. this thing has got to be put through." he simply nodded. "all right," he said. "it will be." "that booing--it almost struck me dead. when it didn't, i for the first time felt sure i was going to win." he nodded again, gave her one of his quick expressive, fleeting glances that somehow made her forget and forgive everything and feel fresh and eager to start in again. he said: "when the booing began and you didn't break down and run off the stage, i knew that what i hoped and believed about you was true." streathern joined them. his large, soft eyes were full of sympathetic tears. he was so moved that he braved brent. he said to susan: "it wasn't your fault, miss lenox. you were doing exactly as mr. brent ordered, when the booing broke out." "exactly," said brent. streathern regarded him with a certain nervousness and veiled pity. streathern had been brought into contact with many great men. he had found them, each and every one, with this same streak of wild folly, this habit of doing things that were to him obviously useless and ridiculous. it was a profound mystery to him why such men succeeded while he himself who never did such things remained in obscurity. the only explanation was the abysmal stupidity, ignorance, and folly of the masses of mankind. what a harbor of refuge that reflection has ever been for mediocrity's shattered and sinking vanity! yet the one indisputable fact about the great geniuses of long ago is that in their own country and age "the common people heard them gladly." streathern could not now close his mouth upon one last appeal on behalf of the clever and lovely and so amiable victim of brent's mania. "i say, mr. brent," pleaded he, "don't you think--really now, if you'll permit a chap not without experience to say so--don't you think that by drilling her so much and so--so _beastly_ minutely--you're making her wooden--machine-like?" "i hope so," said brent, in a tone that sent streathern scurrying away to a place where he could express himself unseen and unheard. in her fifth week she began to improve. she felt at home on the stage; she felt at home in her part, whatever it happened to be. she was giving what could really be called a performance. streathern, when he was sure brent could not hear, congratulated her. "it's wonderfully plucky of you, my dear," said he, "quite amazingly plucky--to get yourself together and go straight ahead, in spite of what your american friend has been doing to you." "in spite of it." cried susan. "why, don't you see that it's because of what he's been doing? i felt it, all the time. i see it now." "oh, really--do you think so?" said streathern. his tone made it a polite and extremely discreet way of telling her he thought she had become as mad as brent. she did not try to explain to him why she was improving. in that week she advanced by long strides, and brent was radiant. "now we'll teach you scales," said he. "we'll teach you the mechanics of expressing every variety of emotion. then we'll be ready to study a strong part." she had known in the broad from the outset what brent was trying to accomplish--that he was giving her the trade side of the art, was giving it to her quickly and systematically. but she did not appreciate how profoundly right he was until she was "learning scales." then she understood why most so called "professional" performances are amateurish, haphazard, without any precision. she was learning to posture, and to utter every emotion so accurately that any spectator would recognize it at once. "and in time your voice and your body," said brent, "will become as much your servants as are paderewski's ten fingers. he doesn't rely upon any such rot as inspiration. nor does any master of any art. a mind can be inspired but not a body. it must be taught. you must first have a perfect instrument. then, if you are a genius, your genius, having a perfect instrument to work with, will produce perfect results. to ignore or to neglect the mechanics of an art is to hamper or to kill inspiration. geniuses--a few--and they not the greatest--have been too lazy to train their instruments. but anyone who is merely talented dares not take the risk. and you--we'd better assume--are merely talented." streathern, who had a deserved reputation as a coach, was disgusted with brent's degradation of an art. as openly as he dared, he warned susan against the danger of becoming a mere machine--a puppet, responding stiffly to the pulling of strings. but susan had got over her momentary irritation against brent, her doubt of his judgment in her particular case. she ignored streathern's advice that she should be natural, that she should let her own temperament dictate variations on his cut and dried formulae for expression. she continued to do as she was bid. "if you are _not_ a natural born actress," said brent, "at least you will be a good one--so good that most critics will call you great. and if you _are_ a natural born genius at acting, you will soon put color in the cheeks of these dolls i'm giving you--and ease into their bodies--and nerves and muscles and blood in place of the strings." in the seventh week he abruptly took her out of the company and up to london to have each day an hour of singing, an hour of dancing, and an hour of fencing. "you'll ruin her health," protested freddie. "you're making her work like a ditch digger." brent replied, "if she hasn't the health, she's got to abandon the career. if she has health, this training will give it steadiness and solidity. if there's a weakness anywhere, it'll show itself and can be remedied." and he piled the work on her, dictated her hours of sleep, her hours for rest and for walking, her diet--and little he gave her to eat. when he had her thoroughly broken to his regimen, he announced that business compelled his going immediately to america. "i shall be back in a month," said he. "i think i'll run over with you," said palmer. "do you mind, susan?" "clélie and i shall get on very well," she replied. she would be glad to have both out of the way that she might give her whole mind to the only thing that now interested her. for the first time she was experiencing the highest joy that comes to mortals, the only joy that endures and grows and defies all the calamities of circumstances--the joy of work congenial and developing. "yes--come along," said brent to palmer. "here you'll be tempting her to break the rules." he added, "not that you would succeed. she understands what it all means, now--and nothing could stop her. that's why i feel free to leave her." "yes, i understand," said susan. she was gazing away into space; at sight of her expression freddie turned hastily away. on a saturday morning susan and clélie, after waiting on the platform at euston station until the long, crowded train for liverpool and the _lusitania_ disappeared, went back to the lodgings in half moon street with a sudden sense of the vastness of london, of its loneliness and dreariness, of its awkward inhospitality to the stranger under its pall of foggy smoke. susan was thinking of brent's last words: she had said, "i'll try to deserve all the pains you've taken, mr. brent." "yes, i have done a lot for you," he had replied. "i've put you beyond the reach of any of the calamities of life--beyond the need of any of its consolations. don't forget that if the steamer goes down with all on board." and then she had looked at him--and as freddie's back was half turned, she hoped he had not seen--in fact, she was sure he had not, or she would not have dared. and brent--had returned her look with his usual quizzical smile; but she had learned how to see through that mask. then--she had submitted to freddie's energetic embrace--had given her hand to brent--"good-by," she had said; and "good luck," he. beyond the reach of _any_ of the calamities? beyond the need of _any_ of the consolations? yes--it was almost literally true. she felt the big interest--the career--growing up within her, and expanding, and already overstepping all other interests and emotions. brent had left her and clélie more to do than could be done; thus they had no time to bother either about the absent or about themselves. looking back in after years on the days that freddie was away, susan could recall that from time to time she would find her mind wandering, as if groping in the darkness of its own cellars or closets for a lost thought, a missing link in some chain of thought. this even awakened her several times in the night--made her leap from sleep into acute and painful consciousness as if she had recalled and instantly forgotten some startling and terrible thing. and when freddie unexpectedly came--having taken passage on the _lusitania_ for the return voyage, after only six nights and five days in new york--she was astonished by her delight at seeing him, and by the kind of delight it was. for it rather seemed a sort of relief, as from a heavy burden of anxiety. "why didn't you wait and come with brent?" asked she. "couldn't stand it," replied he. "i've grown clear away from new york--at least from the only new york i know. i don't like the boys any more. they bore me. they--offend me. and i know if i stayed on a few days they'd begin to suspect. no, it isn't europe. it's--you. you're responsible for the change in me." he was speaking entirely of the internal change, which indeed was great. for while he was still fond of all kinds of sporting, it was not in his former crude way; he had even become something of a connoisseur of pictures and was cultivating a respect for the purity of the english language that made him wince at susan's and brent's slang. but when he spoke thus frankly and feelingly of the change in him, susan looked at him--and, not having seen him in two weeks and three days, she really saw him for the first time in many a month. she could not think of the internal change he spoke of for noting the external change. he had grown at least fifty pounds heavier than he had been when they came abroad. in one way this was an improvement; it gave him a dignity, an air of consequence in place of the boyish good looks of the days before the automobile and before the effects of high living began to show. but it made of him a different man in susan's eyes--a man who now seemed almost a stranger to her. "yes, you _have_ changed," replied she absently. and she went and examined herself in a mirror. "you, too," said freddie. "you don't look older--as i do. but--there's a--a--i can't describe it." susan could not see it. "i'm just the same," she insisted. palmer laughed. "you can't judge about yourself. but all this excitement--and studying--and thinking--and god knows what---- you're not at all the woman i came abroad with." the subject seemed to be making both uncomfortable; they dropped it. women are bred to attach enormous importance to their physical selves--so much so that many women have no other sense of self-respect, and regard themselves as possessing the entirety of virtue if they have chastity or can pretend to have it. the life susan had led upsets all this and forces a woman either utterly to despise herself, even as she is despised of men, or to discard the sex measure of feminine self-respect as ridiculously inadequate, and to seek some other measure. susan had sought this other measure, and had found it. she was, therefore, not a little surprised to find--after freddie had been back three or four days--that he was arousing in her the same sensations which a strange man intimately about would have aroused in her in the long past girlhood of innocence. it was not physical repulsion; it was not a sense of immorality. it was a kind of shyness, a feeling of violated modesty. she felt herself blushing if he came into the room when she was dressing. as soon as she awakened in the morning she sprang from bed beside him and hastened into her dressing-room and closed the door, resisting an impulse to lock it. apparently the feeling of physical modesty which she had thought dead, killed to the last root, was not dead, was once more stirring toward life. "what are you blushing about?" asked he, when she, passing through the bedroom, came suddenly upon him, very scantily dressed. she laughed confusedly and beat a hurried retreat. she began to revolve the idea of separate bedrooms; she resolved that when they moved again she would arrange it on some pretext--and she was looking about for a new place on the plea that their quarters in half moon street were too cramped. all this close upon his return, for it was before the end of the first week that she, taking a shower bath one morning, saw the door of the bathroom opening to admit him, and cried out sharply: "close that door!" "it's i," freddie called, to make himself heard above the noise of the water. "shut off that water and listen." she shut off the water, but instead of listening, she said, nervous but determined: "please close the door. i'll be out directly." "listen, i tell you," he cried, and she now noticed that his voice was curiously, arrestingly, shrill. "brent--has been hurt--badly hurt." she was dripping wet. she thrust her arms into her bathrobe, flung wide the partly open door. he was standing there, a newspaper in his trembling hand. "this is a dispatch from new york--dated yesterday," he began. "listen," and he read: "during an attempt to rob the house of mr. robert brent, the distinguished playwright, early this morning, mr. brent was set upon and stabbed in a dozen places, his butler, james fourget, was wounded, perhaps mortally, and his secretary, mr. j. c. garvey, was knocked insensible. the thieves made their escape. the police have several clues. mr. brent is hovering between life and death, with the chances against him." susan, leaning with all her weight against the door jamb, saw palmer's white face going away from her, heard his agitated voice less and less distinctly--fell to the floor with a crash and knew no more. when she came to, she was lying in the bed; about it or near it were palmer, her maid, his valet, clélie, several strangers. her glance turned to freddie's face and she looked into his eyes amid a profound silence. she saw in those eyes only intense anxiety and intense affection. he said: "what is it, dear? you are all right. only a fainting spell." "was that true?" she asked. "yes, but he'll pull through. the surgeons save everybody nowadays. i've cabled his secretary, garvey, and to my lawyers. we'll have an answer soon. i've sent out for all the papers." "she must not be agitated," interposed a medical looking man with stupid brown eyes and a thin brown beard sparsely veiling his gaunt and pasty face. "nonsense!" said palmer, curtly. "my wife is not an invalid. our closest friend has been almost killed. to keep the news from her would be to make her sick." susan closed her eyes. "thank you," she murmured. "send them all away--except clélie. . . . leave me alone with clélie." pushing the others before him, freddie moved toward the door into the hall. at the threshold he paused to say: "shall i bring the papers when they come?" she hesitated. "no," she answered without opening her eyes. "send them in. i want to read them, myself." she lay quiet, clélie stroking her brow. from time to time a shudder passed over her. when, in answer to a knock, clélie took in the bundle of newspapers, she sat up in bed and read the meager dispatches. the long accounts were made long by the addition of facts about brent's life. the short accounts added nothing to what she already knew. when she had read all, she sank back among the pillows and closed her eyes. a long, long silence in the room. then a soft knock at the door. clélie left the bedside to answer it, returned to say: "mr. freddie wishes to come in with a telegram." susan started up wildly. her eyes were wide and staring--a look of horror. "no--no!" she cried. then she compressed her lips, passed her hand slowly over her brow. "yes--tell him to come in." her gaze was upon the door until it opened, leaped to his face, to his eyes, the instant he appeared. he was smiling--hopefully, but not gayly. "garvey says"--and he read from a slip of paper in his hand--" 'none of the wounds necessarily mortal. doctors refuse to commit themselves, but i believe he has a good chance.'" he extended the cablegram that she might read for herself, and said, "he'll win, my dear. he has luck, and lucky people always win in big things." her gaze did not leave his face. one would have said that she had not heard, that she was still seeking what she had admitted him to learn. he sat down where clélie had been, and said: "there's only one thing for us to do, and that is to go over at once." she closed her eyes. a baffled, puzzled expression was upon her deathly pale face. "we can sail on the _mauretania_ saturday," continued he. "i've telephoned and there are good rooms." she turned her face away. "don't you feel equal to going?" "as you say, we must." "the trip can't do you any harm." his forced composure abruptly vanished and he cried out hysterically: "good god! it's incredible." then he got himself in hand again, and went on: "no wonder it bowled you out. i had my anxiety about you to break the shock. but you---- how do you feel now?" "i'm going to dress." "i'll send you in some brandy." he bent and kissed her. a shudder convulsed her--a shudder visible even through the covers. but he seemed not to note it, and went on: "i didn't realize how fond i was of brent until i saw that thing in the paper. i almost fainted, myself. i gave clélie a horrible scare." "i thought you were having an attack," said clélie. "my husband looked exactly as you did when he died that way." susan's strange eyes were gazing intently at him--the searching, baffled, persistently seeking look. she closed them as he turned from the bed. when she and clélie were alone and she was dressing, she said: "freddie gave you a scare?" "i was at breakfast," replied clélie, "was pouring my coffee. he came into the room in his bathrobe--took up the papers from the table opened to the foreign news as he always does. i happened to be looking at him"--clélie flushed--"he is very handsome in that robe--and all at once he dropped the paper--grew white--staggered and fell into a chair. exactly like my husband." susan, seated at her dressing-table, was staring absently out of the window. she shook her head impatiently, drew a long breath, went on with her toilet. chapter xxiv a few minutes before the dinner hour she came into the drawing room. palmer and madame délière were already there, near the fire which the unseasonable but by no means unusual coolness of the london summer evening made extremely comfortable--and, for americans, necessary. palmer stood with his back to the blaze, moodily smoking a cigarette. that evening his now almost huge form looked more degenerated than usual by the fat of high living and much automobiling. his fleshy face, handsome still and of a refined type, bore the traces of anxious sorrow. clélie, sitting at the corner of the fireplace and absently turning the leaves of an illustrated french magazine, had in her own way an air as funereal as freddie's. as susan entered, they glanced at her. palmer uttered and half suppressed an ejaculation of amazement. susan was dressed as for opera or ball--one of her best evening dresses, the greatest care in arranging her hair and the details of her toilette. never had she been more beautiful. her mode of life since she came abroad with palmer, the thoughts that had been filling her brain and giving direction to her life since she accepted brent as her guide and brent's plans as her career, had combined to give her air of distinction the touch of the extraordinary--the touch that characterizes the comparatively few human beings who live the life above and apart from that of the common run--the life illuminated by imagination. at a glance one sees that they are not of the eaters, drinkers, sleepers, and seekers after the shallow easy pleasures money provides ready-made. they shine by their own light; the rest of mankind shines either by light reflected from them or not at all. looking at her that evening as she came into the comfortable, old-fashioned english room, with its somewhat heavy but undeniably dignified furniture and draperies, the least observant could not have said that she was in gala attire because she was in gala mood. beneath the calm of her surface expression lay something widely different. her face, slim and therefore almost beyond the reach of the attacks of time and worry, was of the type to which a haggard expression is becoming. her eyes, large and dreamy, seemed to be seeing visions of unutterable sadness, and the scarlet streak of her mouth seemed to emphasize their pathos. she looked young, very young; yet there was also upon her features the stamp of experience, the experience of suffering. she did not notice the two by the fire, but went to the piano at the far end of the room and stood gazing out into the lovely twilight of the garden. freddie, who saw only the costume, said in an undertone to clélie, "what sort of freak is this?" said madame délière: "an uncle of mine lost his wife. they were young and he loved her to distraction. between her death and the funeral he scandalized everybody by talking incessantly of the most trivial details--the cards, the mourning, the flowers, his own clothes. but the night of the funeral he killed himself." palmer winced as if clélie had struck him. then an expression of terror, of fear, came into his eyes. "you don't think she'd do that?" he muttered hoarsely. "certainly not," replied the young frenchwoman. "i was simply trying to explain her. she dressed because she was unconscious of what she was doing. real sorrow doesn't think about appearances." then with quick tact she added: "why should she kill herself? monsieur brent is getting well. also, while she's a devoted friend of his, she doesn't love him, but you." "i'm all upset," said palmer, in confused apology. he gazed fixedly at susan--a straight, slim figure with the carriage and the poise of head that indicate self-confidence and pride. as he gazed madame clélie watched him with fascinated eyes. it was both thrilling and terrifying to see such love as he was revealing--a love more dangerous than hate. palmer noted that he was observed, abruptly turned to face the fire. a servant opened the doors into the dining-room, madame délière rose. "come, susan," said she. susan looked at her with unseeing eyes. "dinner is served." "i do not care for dinner," said susan, seating herself at the piano. "oh, but you----" "let her alone," said freddie, curtly. "you and i will go in." susan, alone, dropped listless hands into her lap. how long she sat there motionless and with mind a blank she did not know. she was aroused by a sound in the hall--in the direction of the outer door of their apartment. she started up, instantly all alive and alert, and glided swiftly in the direction of the sound. a servant met her at the threshold. he had a cablegram on a tray. "for mr. palmer," said he. but she, not hearing, took the envelope and tore it open. at a sweep her eyes took in the unevenly typewritten words: brent died at half past two this afternoon. garvey. she gazed wonderingly at the servant, reread the cablegram. the servant said: "shall i take it to mr. palmer, ma'am?" "no. that is all, thanks," replied she. and she walked slowly across the room to the fire. she shivered, adjusted one of the shoulder straps of her low-cut pale green dress. she read the cablegram a third time, laid it gently, thoughtfully, upon the mantel. "brent died at half past two this afternoon." died. yes, there was no mistaking the meaning of those words. she knew that the message was true. but she did not feel it. she was seeing brent as he had been when they said good-by. and it would take something more than a mere message to make her feel that the brent so vividly alive, so redolent of life, of activity, of energy, of plans and projects, the brent of health and strength, had ceased to be. "brent died at half past two this afternoon." except in the great crises we all act with a certain theatricalism, do the thing books and plays and the example of others have taught us to do. but in the great crises we do as we feel. susan knew that brent was dead. if he had meant less to her, she would have shrieked or fainted or burst into wild sobs. but not when he was her whole future. she _knew_ he was dead, but she did not _believe_ it. so she stood staring at the flames, and wondering why, when she knew such a frightful thing, she should remain calm. when she had heard that he was injured, she had felt, now she did not feel at all. her body, her brain, went serenely on in their routine. the part of her that was her very self--had it died, and not brent? she turned her back to the fire, gazed toward the opposite wall. in a mirror there she saw the reflection of palmer, at table in the adjoining room. a servant was holding a dish at his left and he was helping himself. she observed his every motion, observed his fattened body, his round and large face, the forming roll of fat at the back of his neck. all at once she grew cold--cold as she had not been since the night she and etta brashear walked the streets of cincinnati. the ache of this cold, like the cold of death, was an agony. she shook from head to foot. she turned toward the mantel again, looked at the cablegram. but she did not take it in her hands. she could see--in the air, before her eyes--in clear, sharp lettering--"brent died at half past two this afternoon. garvey." the sensation of cold faded into a sensation of approaching numbness. she went into the hall--to her own rooms. in the dressing-room her maid, clemence, was putting away the afternoon things she had taken off. she stood at the dressing table, unclasping the string of pearls. she said to clemence tranquilly: "please pack in the small trunk with the broad stripes three of my plainest street dresses--some underclothes--the things for a journey--only necessaries. some very warm things, please, clemence, i've suffered from cold, and i can't bear the idea of it. and please telephone to the--to the cecil for a room and bath. when you have finished i shall pay you what i owe and a month's wages extra. i cannot afford to keep you any longer." "but, madame"--clemence fluttered in agitation--"madame promised to take me to america." "telephone for the rooms for miss susan lenox," said susan. she was rapidly taking off her dress. "if i took you to america i should have to let you go as soon as we landed." "but, madame--" clemence advanced to assist her. "please pack the trunk," said susan. "i am leaving here at once." "i prefer to go to america, even if madame----" "very well. i'll take you. but you understand?" "perfectly, madame----" a sound of hurrying footsteps and palmer was at the threshold. his eyes were wild, his face distorted. his hair, usually carefully arranged over the rapidly growing bald spot above his brow, was disarranged in a manner that would have been ludicrous but for the terrible expression of his face. "go!" he said harshly to the maid; and he stood fretting the knob until she hastened out and gave him the chance to close the door. susan, calm and apparently unconscious of his presence, went on with her rapid change of costume. he lit a cigarette with fingers trembling, dropped heavily into a chair near the door. she, seated on the floor, was putting on boots. when she had finished one and was beginning on the other he said stolidly: "you think i did it"--not a question but an assertion. "i know it," replied she. she was so seated that he was seeing her in profile. "yes--i did," he went on. he settled himself more deeply in the chair, crossed his leg. "and i am glad that i did." she kept on at lacing the boot. there was nothing in her expression to indicate emotion, or even that she heard. "i did it," continued he, "because i had the right. he invited it. he knew me--knew what to expect. i suppose he decided that you were worth taking the risk. it's strange what fools men--all men--we men--are about women. . . . yes, he knew it. he didn't blame me." she stopped lacing the boot, turned so that she could look at him. "do you remember his talking about me one day?" he went on, meeting her gaze naturally. "he said i was a survival of the middle ages--had a medieval italian mind--said i would do anything to gain my end--and would have a clear conscience about it. do you remember?" "yes." "but you don't see why i had the right to kill him?" a shiver passed over her. she turned away again, began again to lace the boot--but now her fingers were uncertain. "i'll explain," pursued he. "you and i were getting along fine. he had had his chance with you and had lost it. well, he comes over here--looks us up--puts himself between you and me--proceeds to take you away from me. not in a square manly way but under the pretense of giving you a career. he made you restless--dissatisfied. he got you away from me. isn't that so?" she was sitting motionless now. palmer went on in the same harsh, jerky way: "now, nobody in the world--not even you--knew me better than brent did. he knew what to expect--if i caught on to what was doing. and i guess he knew i would be pretty sure to catch on." "he never said a word to me that you couldn't have heard," said susan. "of course not," retorted palmer. "that isn't the question. it don't matter whether he wanted you for himself or for his plays. the point is that he took you away from me--he, my friend--and did it by stealth. you can't deny that." "he offered me a chance for a career--that was all," said she. "he never asked for my love--or showed any interest in it. i gave him that." he laughed--his old-time, gentle, sweet, wicked laugh. he said: "well--it'd have been better for him if you hadn't. all it did for him was to cost him his life." up she sprang. "don't say that!" she cried passionately--so passionately that her whole body shook. "do you suppose i don't know it? i know that i killed him. but i don't feel that he's dead. if i did, i'd not be able to live. but i can't! i can't! for me he is as much alive as ever." "try to think that--if it pleases you," sneered palmer. "the fact remains that it was _you_ who killed him." again she shivered. "yes," she said, "i killed him." "and that's why i hate you," palmer went on, calm and deliberate--except his eyes; they were terrible. "a few minutes ago--when i was exulting that he would probably die--just then i found that opened cable on the mantel. do you know what it did to me? it made me hate you. when i read it----" freddie puffed at his cigarette in silence. she dropped weakly to the chair at the dressing table. "curse it!" he burst out. "i loved him. yes, i was crazy about him--and am still. i'm glad i killed him. i'd do it again. i had to do it. he owed me his life. but that doesn't make me forgive _you_." a long silence. her fingers wandered among the articles spread upon the dressing table. he said: "you're getting ready to leave?" "i'm going to a hotel at once." "well, you needn't. i'm leaving. you're done with me. but i'm done with you." he rose, bent upon her his wicked glance, sneering and cruel. "you never want to see me again. no more do i ever want to see you again. i wish to god i never had seen you. you cost me the only friend i ever had that i cared about. and what's a woman beside a friend--a _man_ friend? you've made a fool of me, as a woman always does of a man--always, by god! if she loves him, she destroys him. if she doesn't love him, he destroys himself." susan covered her face with her bare arms and sank down at the dressing table. "for pity's sake," she cried brokenly, "spare me--spare me!" he seized her roughly by the shoulder. "just flesh!" he said. "beautiful flesh--but just female. and look what a fool you've made of me--and the best man in the world dead--over yonder! spare you? oh, you'll pull through all right. you'll pull through everything and anything--and come out stronger and better looking and better off. spare you! hell! i'd have killed you instead of him if i'd known i was going to hate you after i'd done the other thing. i'd do it yet--you dirty skirt!" he jerked her unresisting form to its feet, gazed at her like an insane fiend. with a sob he seized her in his arms, crushed her against his breast, sunk his fingers deep into her hair, kissed it, grinding his teeth as he kissed. "i hate you, damn you--and i love you!" he flung her back into the chair--out of his life. "you'll never see me again!" and he fled from the room--from the house. chapter xxv the big ship issued from the mersey into ugly waters--into the weather that at all seasons haunts and curses the coasts of northern europe. from saturday until wednesday susan and madame délière had true atlantic seas and skies; and the ship leaped and shivered and crashed along like a brave cavalryman in the rear of a rout--fighting and flying, flying and fighting. four days of hours whose every waking second lagged to record itself in a distinct pang of physical wretchedness; four days in which all emotions not physical were suspended, in which even the will to live, most tenacious of primal instincts in a sane human being, yielded somewhat to the general lassitude and disgust. yet for susan lenox four most fortunate days; for in them she underwent a mental change that enabled her to emerge delivered of the strain that threatened at every moment to cause a snap. on the fifth day her mind, crutched by her resuming body, took up again its normal routine. she began to dress herself, to eat, to exercise--the mechanical things first, as always--then to think. the grief that had numbed her seemed to have been left behind in england where it had suddenly struck her down--england far away and vague across those immense and infuriated waters, like the gulf of death between two incarnations. no doubt that grief was awaiting her at the other shores; no doubt there she would feel that brent was gone. but she would be better able to bear the discovery. the body can be accustomed to the deadliest poisons, so that they become harmless--even useful--even a necessary aid to life. in the same way the mind can grow accustomed to the cruelest calamities, tolerate them, use them to attain a strength and power the hot-housed soul never gets. when a human being is abruptly plunged into an unnatural unconsciousness by mental or physical catastrophes, the greatest care is taken that the awakening to normal life again be slow, gradual, without shock. otherwise the return would mean death or insanity or lifelong affliction with radical weakness. it may be that this sea voyage with its four days of agitations that lowered susan's physical life to a harmony of wretchedness with her mental plight, and the succeeding days of gradual calming and restoration, acted upon her to save her from disaster. there will be those readers of her story who, judging her, perhaps, by themselves--as revealed in their judgments, rather than in their professions--will think it was quite unnecessary to awaken her gradually; they will declare her a hard-hearted person, caring deeply about no one but herself, or one of those curiosities of human nature that are interested only in things, not at all in persons, even in themselves. there may also be those who will see in her a soft and gentle heart for which her intelligence finally taught her to construct a shield--more or less effective--against buffetings which would have destroyed or, worse still, maimed her. these will feel that the sea voyage, the sea change, suspending the normal human life, the life on land, tided her over a crisis that otherwise must have been disastrous. however this may be--and who dares claim the definite knowledge of the mazes of human character and motive to be positive about the matter?--however it may be, on thursday afternoon they steamed along a tranquil and glistening sea into the splendor and majesty of new york harbor. and susan was again her calm, sweet self, as the violet-gray eyes gazing pensively from the small, strongly-featured face plainly showed. herself again, with the wound--deepest if not cruelest of her many wounds--covered and with its poison under control. she was ready again to begin to live--ready to fulfill our only certain mission on this earth, for we are not here to succumb and to die, but to adapt ourselves and live. and those who laud the succumbers and the diers--yea, even the blessed martyrs of sundry and divers fleeting issues usually delusions--may be paying ill-deserved tribute to vanity, obstinacy, lack of useful common sense, passion for futile and untimely agitation--or sheer cowardice. truth--and what is truth but right living?--truth needs no martyrs; and the world needs not martyrs, not corpses rotting in unmarked or monumented graves, but intelligent men and women, healthy in body and mind, capable of leading the human race as fast as it is able to go in the direction of the best truth to which it is able at that time to aspire. as the ship cleared quarantine susan stood on the main deck well forward, with madame clélie beside her. and up within her, defying all rebuke, surged the hope that cannot die in strong souls living in healthy bodies. she had a momentary sense of shame, born of the feeling that it is basest, most heartless selfishness to live, to respond to the caress of keen air upon healthy skin, of glorious light upon healthy eyes, when there are others shut out and shut away from these joys forever. then she said to herself, "but no one need apologize for being alive and for hoping. i must try to justify him for all he did for me." a few miles of beautiful water highway between circling shores of green, and afar off through the mist madame clélie's fascinated eyes beheld a city of enchantment. it appeared and disappeared, reappeared only to disappear again, as its veil of azure mist was blown into thick or thin folds by the light breeze. one moment the frenchwoman would think there was nothing ahead but more and ever more of the bay glittering in the summer sunlight. the next moment she would see again that city--or was it a mirage of a city?--towers, mighty walls, domes rising mass above mass, summit above summit, into the very heavens from the water's edge where there was a fringe of green. surely the vision must be real; yet how could tiny man out of earth and upon earth rear in such enchantment of line and color those enormous masses, those peak-like piercings of the sky? "is that--_it?_" she asked in an awed undertone. susan nodded. she, too, was gazing spellbound. her beloved city of the sun. "but it is beautiful--beautiful beyond belief. and i have always heard that new york was ugly." "it is beautiful--and ugly--both beyond belief!" replied susan. "no wonder you love it!" "yes--i love it. i have loved it from the first moment i saw it. i've never stopped loving it--not even----" she did not finish her sentence but gazed dreamily at the city appearing and disappearing in its veils of thin, luminous mist. her thoughts traveled again the journey of her life in new york. when she spoke again, it was to say: "yes--when i first saw it--that spring evening--i called it my city of the stars, then, for i didn't know that it belonged to the sun-- yes, that spring evening i was happier than i ever had been--or ever shall be again." "but you will be happy again dear," said clélie, tenderly pressing her arm. a faint sad smile--sad but still a smile--made susan's beautiful face lovely. "yes, i shall be happy--not in those ways--but happy, for i shall be busy. . . . no, i don't take the tragic view of life--not at all. and as i've known misery, i don't try to hold to it." "leave that," said clélie, "to those who have known only the comfortable make-believe miseries that rustle in crêpe and shed tears--whenever there's anyone by to see." "like the beggars who begin to whine and exhibit their aggravated sores as soon as a possible giver comes into view," said susan. "i've learned to accept what comes, and to try to make the best of it, whatever it is. . . . i say i've learned. but have i? does one ever change? i guess i was born that sort of philosopher." she recalled how she put the warhams out of her life as soon as she discovered what they really meant to her and she to them--how she had put jeb ferguson out of her life--how she had conquered the grief and desolation of the loss of burlingham--how she had survived etta's going away without her--the inner meaning of her episodes with rod--with freddie palmer---- and now this last supreme test--with her soul rising up and gathering itself together and lifting its head in strength---- "yes, i was born to make the best of things," she repeated. "then you were born lucky," sighed clélie, who was of those who must lean if they would not fall and lie where they fell. susan gave a curious little laugh--with no mirth, with a great deal of mockery. "do you know, i never thought so before, but i believe you're right," said she. again she laughed in that queer way. "if you knew my life you'd think i was joking. but i'm not. the fact that i've survived and am what i am proves i was born lucky." her tone changed, her expression became unreadable. "if it's lucky to be born able to live. and if that isn't luck, what is?" she thought how brent said she was born lucky because she had the talent that enables one to rise above the sordidness of that capitalism he so often denounced--the sordidness of the lot of its slaves, the sordidness of the lot of its masters. brent! if it were he leaning beside her--if he and she were coming up the bay toward the city of the sun! a billow of heartsick desolation surged over her. alone--always alone. and still alone. and always to be alone. garvey came aboard when the gangway was run out. he was in black wherever black could be displayed. but the grief shadowing his large, simple countenance had the stamp of the genuine. and it was genuine, of the most approved enervating kind. he had done nothing but grieve since his master's death--had left unattended all the matters the man he loved and grieved for would have wished put in order. is it out of charity for the weakness of human nature and that we may think as well as possible of it--is that why we admire and praise most enthusiastically the kind of love and the kind of friendship and the kind of grief that manifest themselves in obstreperous feeling and wordiness, with no strength left for any attempt to _do?_ as garvey greeted them the tears filled clélie's eyes and she turned away. but susan gazed at him steadily; in her eyes there were no tears, but a look that made garvey choke back sobs and bend his head to hide his expression. what he saw--or felt--behind her calmness filled him with awe, with a kind of terror. but he did not recognize what he saw as grief; it did not resemble any grief he had felt or had heard about. "he made a will just before he died," he said to susan. "he left everything to you." then she had not been mistaken. he had loved her, even as she loved him. she turned and walked quickly from them. she hastened into her cabin, closed the door and flung herself across the bed. and for the first time she gave way. in that storm her soul was like a little land bird in the clutch of a sea hurricane. she did not understand herself. she still had no sense that he was dead; yet had his dead body been lying there in her arms she could not have been more shaken by paroxysms of grief, without tears or sobs--grief that vents itself in shrieks and peals of horrible laughter-like screams--she smothered them in the pillows in which she buried her face. clélie came, opened the door, glanced in, closed it. an hour passed--an hour and a half. then susan appeared on deck--amber-white pallor, calm, beautiful, the fashionable woman in traveling dress. "i never before saw you with your lips not rouged!" exclaimed clélie. "you will never see them rouged again," said susan. "but it makes you look older." "not so old as i am," replied she. and she busied herself about the details of the landing and the customs, waving aside garvey and his eager urgings that she sit quietly and leave everything to him. in the carriage, on the way to the hotel, she roused herself from her apparently tranquil reverie and broke the strained silence by saying: "how much shall i have?" the question was merely the protruding end of a train of thought years long and pursued all that time with scarcely an interruption. it seemed abrupt; to garvey it sounded brutal. off his guard, he showed in flooding color and staring eye how profoundly it shocked him. susan saw, but she did not explain; she was not keeping accounts in emotion with the world. she waited patiently. after a long pause he said in a tone that contained as much of rebuke as so mild a dependent dared express: "he left about thirty thousand a year, miss lenox." the exultant light that leaped to susan's eye horrified him. it even disturbed clélie, though she better understood susan's nature and was not nearly so reverent as garvey of the hypocrisies of conventionality. but susan had long since lost the last trace of awe of the opinion of others. she was not seeking to convey an impression of grief. grief was too real to her. she would as soon have burst out with voluble confession of the secret of her love for brent. she saw what garvey was thinking; but she was not concerned. she continued to be herself--natural and simple. and there was no reason why she should conceal as a thing to be ashamed of the fact that brent had accomplished the purpose he intended, had filled her with honest exultation--not with delight merely, not with triumph, but with that stronger and deeper joy which the unhoped for pardon brings to the condemned man. she must live on. the thought of suicide, of any form of giving up--the thought that instantly possesses the weak and the diseased--could not find lodgment in that young, healthy body and mind of hers. she must live on; and suddenly she discovered that she could live _free!_ not after years of doubtful struggles, of reverses, of success so hardly won that she was left exhausted. but now--at once--_free!_ the heavy shackles had been stricken off at a blow. she was free--forever free! free, forever free, from the wolves of poverty and shame, of want and rags and filth, the wolves that had been pursuing her with swift, hideous padded stride, the wolves that more than once had dragged her down and torn and trampled her, and lapped her blood. free to enter of her own right the world worth living in, the world from which all but a few are shut out, the world which only a few of those privileged to enter know how to enjoy. free to live the life worth while the life of leisure to work, instead of slaving to make leisure and luxury and comfort for others. free to achieve something beside food, clothing, and shelter. free to live as _she_ pleased, instead of for the pleasure of a master or masters. free--free--free! the ecstasy of it surged up in her, for the moment possessing her and submerging even thought of how she had been freed. she who had never acquired the habit of hypocrisy frankly exulted in countenance exultant beyond laughter. she could conceal her feelings, could refrain from expressing. but if she expressed at all, it must be her true self--what she honestly felt. garvey hung his head in shame. he would not have believed susan could be so unfeeling. he would not let his eyes see the painful sight. he would try to forget, would deny to himself that he had seen. for to his shallow, conventional nature susan's expression could only mean delight in wealth, in the opportunity that now offered to idle and to luxuriate in the dead man's money, to realize the crude dreamings of those lesser minds whose initial impulses toward growth have been stifled by the routine our social system imposes upon all but the few with the strength to persist individual. free! she tried to summon the haunting vision of the old women with the tin cups of whisky reeling and staggering in time to the hunchback's playing. she could remember every detail, but these memories would not assemble even into a vivid picture and the picture would have been far enough from the horror of actuality in the vision she formerly could not banish. as a menace, as a prophecy, the old women and the hunchback and the strumming piano had gone forever. free--secure, independent--free! after a long silence garvey ventured stammeringly: "he said to me--he asked me to request--he didn't make it a condition--just a wish--a hope, miss lenox--that if you could, and felt it strongly enough----" "wished what?" said susan, with a sharp impatience that showed how her nerves were unstrung. "that you'd go on--go on with the plays--with the acting." the violet eyes expressed wonder. "go on?" she inquired, "go on?" then in a tone that made clélie sob and garvey's eyes fill she said: "what else is there to live for, now?" "i'm--i'm glad for his sake," stammered garvey. he was disconcerted by her smile. she made no other answer--aloud. for _his_ sake! for her own sake, rather. what other life had she but the life _he_ had given her? "and he knew i would," she said to herself. "he said that merely to let me know he left me entirely free. how like him, to do that!" at the hotel she shut herself in; she saw no one, not even clélie, for nearly a week. then--she went to work--and worked like a reincarnation of brent. she inquired for sperry, found that he and rod had separated as they no longer needed each other; she went into a sort of partnership with sperry for the production of brent's plays--he, an excellent coach as well as stage director, helping her to finish her formal education for the stage. she played with success half a dozen of the already produced brent plays. at the beginning of her second season she appeared in what has become her most famous part--_roxy_ in brent's last play, "the scandal." with the opening night her career of triumph began. even the critics--therefore, not unnaturally, suspicious of an actress who was so beautiful, so beautifully dressed, so well supported, and so well outfitted with actor-proof plays even the critics conceded her ability. she was worthy of the great character brent had created--the wayward, many-sided, ever gay _roxy grandon_. when, at the first night of "the scandal," the audience lingered, cheering brent's picture thrown upon a drop, cheering susan, calling her out again and again, refusing to leave the theater until it was announced that she could answer no more calls, as she had gone home--when she was thus finally and firmly established in her own right--she said to sperry: "will you see to it that every sketch of me that appears tomorrow says that i am the natural daughter of lorella lenox?" sperry's punch-like face reddened. "i've been ashamed of that fact," she went on. "it has made me ashamed to be alive in the bottom of my heart." "absurd," said sperry. "exactly," replied susan. "absurd. even stronger than my shame about it has been my shame that i could be so small as to feel ashamed of it. now--tonight" she was still in her dressing-room. as she paused they heard the faint faraway thunders of the applause of the lingering audience--"listen!" she cried. "i am ashamed no longer. sperry, _ich bin ein ich!_" "i should say," laughed he. "all you have to say is 'susan lenox' and you answer all questions." "at last i'm proud of it," she went on. "i've justified myself. i've justified my mother. i am proud of her, and she would be proud of me. so see that it's done, sperry." "sure," said he. "you're right." he took her hand and kissed it. she laughed, patted him on the shoulder, kissed him on both cheeks in friendly, sisterly fashion. he had just gone when a card was brought to her--"dr. robert stevens"--with "sutherland, indiana," penciled underneath. instantly she remembered, and had him brought to her--the man who had rescued her from death at her birth. he proved to be a quiet, elderly gentleman, subdued and aged beyond his fifty-five years by the monotonous life of the drowsy old town. he approached with a manner of embarrassed respect and deference, stammering old-fashioned compliments. but susan was the simple, unaffected girl again, so natural that he soon felt as much at ease as with one of his patients in sutherland. she took him away in her car to her apartment for supper with her and clélie, who was in the company, and sperry. she kept him hour after hour, questioning him about everyone and everything in the old town, drawing him out, insisting upon more and more details. the morning papers were brought and they read the accounts of play and author and players. for once there was not a dissent; all the critics agreed that it was a great performance of a great play. and susan made sperry read aloud the finest and the longest of the accounts of brent himself--his life, his death, his work, his lasting fame now peculiarly assured because in susan lenox there had been found a competent interpreter of his genius. after the reading there fell silence. susan, her pallid face and her luminous, inquiring violet eyes inscrutable, sat gazing into vacancy. at last doctor stevens moved uneasily and rose to go. susan roused herself, accompanied him to the adjoining room. said the old doctor. "i've told you about everybody. but you've told me nothing about the most interesting sutherlander of all--yourself." susan looked at him. and he saw the wound hidden from all the world--the wound she hid from herself as much of the time as she could. he, the doctor, the professional confessor, had seen such wounds often; in all the world there is hardly a heart without one. he said: "since sorrow is the common lot, i wonder that men can be so selfish or so unthinking as not to help each other in every way to its consolations. poor creatures that we are--wandering in the dark, fighting desperately, not knowing friend from foe!" "but i am glad that you saved me," said she. "you have the consolations--success--fame--honor." "there is no consolation," replied she in her grave sweet way. "i had the best. i--lost him. i shall spend my life in flying from myself." after a pause she went on: "i shall never speak to anyone as i have spoken to you. you will understand all. i had the best--the man who could have given me all a woman seeks from a man--love, companionship, sympathy, the shelter of strong arms. i had that. i have lost it. so----" a long pause. then she added: "usually life is almost tasteless to me. again--for an hour or two it is a little less so--until i remember what i have lost. then--the taste is very bitter--very bitter." and she turned away. she is a famous actress, reputed great. some day she will be indeed great--when she has the stage experience and the years. except for clélie, she is alone. not that there have been no friendships in her life. there have even been passions. with men and women of her vigor and vitality, passion is inevitable. but those she admits find that she has little to give, and they go away, she making no effort to detain them; or she finds that she has nothing to give, and sends them away as gently as may be. she has the reputation of caring for nothing but her art--and for the great establishment for orphans up the hudson, into which about all her earnings go. the establishment is named for brent and is dedicated to her mother. is she happy? i do not know. i do not think she knows. probably she is--as long as she can avoid pausing to think whether she is or not. what better happiness can intelligent mortal have, or hope for? certainly she is triumphant, is lifted high above the storms that tortured her girlhood and early youth, the sordid woes that make life an unrelieved tragedy of calamity threatened and calamity realized for the masses of mankind. the last time i saw her---- it was a few evenings ago, and she was crossing the sidewalk before her house toward the big limousine that was to take her to the theater. she is still young; she looked even younger than she is. her dress had the same exquisite quality that made her the talk of paris in the days of her sojourn there. but it is not her dress that most interests me, nor the luxury and perfection of all her surroundings. it is not even her beauty--that is, the whole of her beauty. everything and every being that is individual in appearance has some one quality, trait, characteristic, which stands out above all the rest to make a climax of interest and charm. with the rose it is its perfume; with the bird, perhaps the scarlet or snowy feathers upon its breast. among human beings who have the rare divine dower of clear individuality the crown and cap of distinction differs. in her--for me, at least--the consummate fascination is not in her eyes, though i am moved by the soft glory of their light, nor in the lovely oval contour of her sweet, healthily pallid face. no, it is in her mouth--sensitive, strong yet gentle, suggestive of all the passion and suffering and striving that have built up her life. her mouth--the curve of it--i think it is, that sends from time to time the mysterious thrill through her audiences. and i imagine those who know her best look always first at those strangely pale lips, curved in a way that suggests bitterness melting into sympathy, sadness changing into mirth--a way that seems to say: "i have suffered--but, see! i have stood fast!" can a life teach any deeper lesson, give any higher inspiration? as i was saying, the last time i saw her she was about to enter her automobile. i halted and watched the graceful movements with which she took her seat and gathered the robes about her. and then i noted her profile, by the light of the big lamps guarding her door. you know that profile? you have seen its same expression in every profile of successful man or woman who ever lived. yes, she may be happy--doubtless is more happy than unhappy. but--i do not envy her--or any other of the sons and daughters of men who is blessed--and cursed--with imagination. and freddie--and rod--and etta--and the people of sutherland--and all the rest who passed through her life and out? what does it matter? some went up, some down--not without reason, but, alas! not for reason of desert. for the judgments of fate are, for the most part, not unlike blows from a lunatic striking out in the dark; if they land where they should, it is rarely and by sheer chance. ruth's parents are dead; she is married to sam wright. he lost his father's money in wheat speculation in chicago--in one of the most successful of the plutocracy's constantly recurring raids upon the hoardings of the middle class. they live in a little house in one of the back streets of sutherland and he is head clerk in arthur sinclair's store--a position he owes to the fact that sinclair is his rich brother-in-law. ruth has children and she is happier in them than she realizes or than her discontented face and voice suggest. etta is fat and contented, the mother of many, and fond of her fat, fussy august, the rich brewer. john redmond--a congressman, a possession of the beef trust, i believe--but not so highly prized a possession as was his abler father. freddie? i saw him a year ago at the races at auteuil. he is huge and loose and coarse, is in the way soon to die of bright's disease, i suspect. there was a woman with him--very pretty, very _chic_. i saw no other woman similarly placed whose eyes held so assiduously, and without ever a wandering flutter, to the face of the man who was paying. but freddie never noticed her. he chewed savagely at his cigar, looking about the while for things to grumble at or to curse. rod? he is still writing indifferent plays with varying success. he long since wearied of constance francklyn, but she clings to him and, as she is a steady moneymaker, he tolerates her. brent? he is statelily ensconced up at woodlawn. susan has never been to his grave--there. his grave in her heart--she avoids that too, when she can. but there are times--there always will be times---- if you doubt it, look at her profile. yes, she has learned to live. but--she has paid the price. the second mrs. tanqueray * * * * * _the plays of arthur w. pinero_ with introductory notes by malcolm c. salaman paper cover, s. d.; cloth, s. d. each _the times_ _the profligate_ _the cabinet minister_ _the hobby-horse_ _lady bountiful_ _the magistrate_ _dandy dick_ _sweet lavender_ _the schoolmistress_ _the weaker sex_ _the amazons_ _the second mrs. tanqueray_ _the notorious mrs. ebbsmith_ _the benefit of the doubt_ _the princess and the butterfly_ _trelawny of the "wells"_ _the pinero birthday book_ selected and arranged by myra hamilton with a portrait. mo, cloth, s. d. _london: william heinemann_ * * * * * the second mrs. tanqueray a play in four acts by arthur w. pinero london: william heinemann mcm first impression, second impression, third impression, copyright, all rights reserved entered at stationers' hall entered at the library of congress washington, u.s.a. all applications respecting amateur performances of this play must be made to mr. pinero's agents, samuel french, limited, strand, london, w.c. this play was produced at the st. james's theatre on saturday, may , . _the persons of the play_ aubrey tanqueray. paula. ellean. cayley drummle. mrs. cortelyon. captain hugh ardale. gordon jayne, m.d. frank misquith, q.c., m.p. sir george orreyed, bart. lady orreyed. morse. _the present day._ _the scene of the first act is laid at_ mr. tanqueray's _rooms, no. x, the albany, in the month of november; the occurrences of the succeeding acts take place at his house, "highercoombe," near willowmere, surrey, during the early part of the following year._ the second mrs. tanqueray the first act aubrey tanqueray's _chambers in the albany--a richly and tastefully decorated room, elegantly and luxuriously furnished: on the right a large pair of doors opening into another room, on the left at the further end of the room a small door leading to a bedchamber. a circular table is laid for a dinner for four persons which has now reached the stage of dessert and coffee. everything in the apartment suggests wealth and refinement. the fire is burning brightly._ aubrey tanqueray, misquith, _and_ jayne _are seated at the dinner-table._ aubrey _is forty-two, handsome, winning in manner, his speech and bearing retaining some of the qualities of young-manhood._ misquith _is about forty-seven, genial and portly._ jayne _is a year or two_ misquith's _senior; soft-speaking and precise--in appearance a type of the prosperous town physician._ morse, aubrey's _servant, places a little cabinet of cigars and the spirit-lamp on the table beside_ aubrey, _and goes out._ misquith. aubrey, it is a pleasant yet dreadful fact to contemplate, but it's nearly fifteen years since i first dined with you. you lodged in piccadilly in those days, over a hat-shop. jayne, i met you at that dinner, and cayley drummle. jayne. yes, yes. what a pity it is that cayley isn't here to-night. aubrey. confound the old gossip! his empty chair has been staring us in the face all through dinner. i ought to have told morse to take it away. misquith. odd, his sending no excuse. aubrey. i'll walk round to his lodgings later on and ask after him. misquith. i'll go with you. jayne. so will i. aubrey. [_opening the cigar-cabinet._] doctor, it's useless to tempt you, i know. frank--[misquith _and_ aubrey _smoke._] i particularly wished cayley drummle to be one of us to-night. you two fellows and cayley are my closest, my best friends---- misquith. my dear aubrey! jayne. i rejoice to hear you say so. aubrey. and i wanted to see the three of you round this table. you can't guess the reason. misquith. you desired to give us a most excellent dinner. jayne. obviously. aubrey. [_hesitatingly._] well--i--[_glancing at the clock_]--cayley won't turn up now. jayne. h'm, hardly. aubrey. then you two shall hear it. doctor, frank, this is the last time we are to meet in these rooms. jayne. the last time? misquith. you're going to leave the albany? aubrey. yes. you've heard me speak of a house i built in the country years ago, haven't you? misquith. in surrey. aubrey. well, when my wife died i cleared out of that house and let it. i think of trying the place again. misquith. but you'll go raving mad if ever you find yourself down there alone. aubrey. ah, but i sha'n't be alone, and that's what i wanted to tell you. i'm going to be married. jayne. going to be married? misquith. married? aubrey. yes--to-morrow. jayne. to-morrow? misquith. you take my breath away! my dear fellow, i--i--of course, i congratulate you. jayne. and--and so do i--heartily. aubrey. thanks--thanks. [_there is a moment or two of embarrassment._ misquith. er--ah--this is an excellent cigar. jayne. ah--um--your coffee is remarkable. aubrey. look here; i daresay you two old friends think this treatment very strange, very unkind. so i want you to understand me. you know a marriage often cools friendships. what's the usual course of things? a man's engagement is given out, he is congratulated, complimented upon his choice; the church is filled with troops of friends, and he goes away happily to a chorus of good wishes. he comes back, sets up house in town or country, and thinks to resume the old associations, the old companionships. my dear frank, my dear good doctor, it's very seldom that it can be done. generally, a worm has begun to eat its way into those hearty, unreserved, pre-nuptial friendships; a damnable constraint sets in and acts like a wasting disease; and so, believe me, in nine cases out of ten a man's marriage severs for him more close ties than it forms. misquith. well, my dear aubrey, i earnestly hope---- aubrey. i know what you're going to say, frank. i hope so, too. in the meantime let's face dangers. i've reminded you of the _usual_ course of things, but my marriage isn't even the conventional sort of marriage likely to satisfy society. now, cayley's a bachelor, but you two men have wives. by-the-bye, my love to mrs. misquith and to mrs. jayne when you get home--don't forget that. well, your wives may not--like--the lady i'm going to marry. jayne. aubrey, forgive me for suggesting that the lady you are going to marry may not like our wives--mine at least; i beg your pardon, frank. aubrey. quite so; then i must go the way my wife goes. misquith. come, come, pray don't let us anticipate that either side will be called upon to make such a sacrifice. aubrey. yes, yes, let us anticipate it. and let us make up our minds to have no slow bleeding-to-death of our friendship. we'll end a pleasant chapter here to-night, and after to-night start afresh. when my wife and i settle down at willowmere it's possible that we shall all come together. but if this isn't to be, for heaven's sake let us recognise that it is simply because it can't be, and not wear hypocritical faces and suffer and be wretched. doctor, frank--[_holding out his hands, one to_ misquith, _the other to_ jayne]--good luck to all of us! misquith. but--but--do i understand we are to ask nothing? not even the lady's name, aubrey? aubrey. the lady, my dear frank, belongs to the next chapter, and in that her name is mrs. aubrey tanqueray. jayne. [_raising his coffee-cup._] then, in an old-fashioned way, i propose a toast. aubrey, frank, i give you "the next chapter!" [_they drink the toast, saying, "the next chapter!"_ aubrey. doctor, find a comfortable chair; frank, you too. as we're going to turn out by-and-by, let me scribble a couple of notes now while i think of them. misquith _and_ jayne. certainly--yes, yes. aubrey. it might slip my memory when i get back. [aubrey _sits at a writing-table at the other end of the room, and writes._ jayne. [_to_ misquith, _in a whisper._] frank---- [misquith _quietly leaves his chair and sits nearer to jayne._] what is all this? simply a morbid crank of aubrey's with regard to ante-nuptial acquaintances? misquith. h'm! did you notice _one_ expression he used? jayne. let me think---- misquith. "my marriage is not even the conventional sort of marriage likely to satisfy society." jayne. bless me, yes! what does that suggest? misquith. that he has a particular rather than a general reason for anticipating estrangement from his friends, i'm afraid. jayne. a horrible _mésalliance_! a dairymaid who has given him a glass of milk during a day's hunting, or a little anæmic shopgirl! frank, i'm utterly wretched! misquith. my dear jayne, speaking in absolute confidence, i have never been more profoundly depressed in my life. morse _enters._ morse. [_announcing_] mr. drummle. [cayley drummle _enters briskly. he is a neat little man of about five-and-forty, in manner bright, airy, debonair, but with an undercurrent of seriousness._ [morse _retires._ drummle. i'm in disgrace; nobody realises that more thoroughly than i do. where's my host? aubrey. [_who has risen._] cayley. drummle. [_shaking hands with him._] don't speak to me till i have tendered my explanation. a harsh word from anybody would unman me. [misquith _and_ jayne _shake hands with_ drummle. aubrey. have you dined? drummle. no--unless you call a bit of fish, a cutlet, and a pancake dining. aubrey. cayley, this is disgraceful. jayne. fish, a cutlet, and a pancake will require a great deal of explanation. misquith. especially the pancake. my dear friend, your case looks miserably weak. drummle. hear me! hear me! jayne. now then! misquith. come! aubrey. well! drummle. it so happens that to-night i was exceptionally early in dressing for dinner. misquith. for which dinner--the fish and cutlet? drummle. for _this_ dinner, of course--really, frank! at a quarter to eight, in fact, i found myself trimming my nails, with ten minutes to spare. just then enter my man with a note--would i hasten, as fast as cab could carry me, to old lady orreyed in bruton street?--"sad trouble." now, recollect, please, i had ten minutes on my hands, old lady orreyed was a very dear friend of my mother's, and was in some distress. aubrey. cayley, come to the fish and cutlet? misquith _and_ jayne. yes, yes, and the pancake! drummle. upon my word! well, the scene in bruton street beggars description; the women servants looked scared, the men drunk; and there was poor old lady orreyed on the floor of her boudoir like queen bess among her pillows. aubrey. what's the matter? drummle. [_to everybody._] you know george orreyed? misquith. yes. jayne. i've met him. drummle. well, he's a thing of the past. aubrey. not dead! drummle. certainly, in the worst sense. he's married mabel hervey. misquith. what! drummle. it's true--this morning. the poor mother showed me his letter--a dozen curt words, and some of those ill-spelt. misquith. [_walking up to the fireplace._] i'm very sorry. jayne. pardon my ignorance--who _was_ mabel hervey? drummle. you don't----? oh, of course not. miss hervey--lady orreyed, as she now is--was a lady who would have been, perhaps has been, described in the reports of the police or the divorce court as an actress. had she belonged to a lower stratum of our advanced civilisation she would, in the event of judicial inquiry, have defined her calling with equal justification as that of a dressmaker. to do her justice, she is a type of a class which is immortal. physically, by the strange caprice of creation, curiously beautiful; mentally, she lacks even the strength of deliberate viciousness. paint her portrait, it would symbolise a creature perfectly patrician; lance a vein of her superbly-modelled arm, you would get the poorest _vin ordinaire_! her affections, emotions, impulses, her very existence--a burlesque! flaxen, five-and-twenty, and feebly frolicsome; anybody's, in less gentle society i should say everybody's, property! that, doctor, was miss hervey who is the new lady orreyed. dost thou like the picture? misquith. very good, cayley! bravo! aubrey. [_laying his hand on_ drummle's _shoulder._] you'd scarcely believe it, jayne, but none of us really know anything about this lady, our gay young friend here, i suspect, least of all. drummle. aubrey, i applaud your chivalry. aubrey. and perhaps you'll let me finish a couple of letters which frank and jayne have given me leave to write. [_returning to the writing-table._] ring for what you want, like a good fellow! [aubrey _resumes his writing._ misquith. [_to_ drummle.] still, the fish and cutlet remain unexplained. drummle. oh, the poor old woman was so weak that i insisted upon her taking some food, and felt there was nothing for it but to sit down opposite her. the fool! the blackguard! misquith. poor orreyed! well, he's gone under for a time. drummle. for a time! my dear frank, i tell you he has absolutely ceased to be. [aubrey, _who has been writing busily, turns his head towards the speakers and listens. his lips are set, and there is a frown upon his face._] for all practical purposes you may regard him as the late george orreyed. to-morrow the very characteristics of his speech, as we remember them, will have become obsolete. jayne. but surely, in the course of years, he and his wife will outlive---- drummle. no, no, doctor, don't try to upset one of my settled beliefs. you may dive into many waters, but there is _one_ social dead sea----! jayne. perhaps you're right. drummle. right! good god! i wish you could prove me otherwise! why, for years i've been sitting, and watching and waiting. misquith. you're in form to-night, cayley. may we ask where you've been in the habit of squandering your useful leisure? drummle. where? on the shore of that same sea. misquith. and, pray, what have you been waiting for? drummle. for some of my best friends _to come up_. [aubrey _utters a half-stifled exclamation of impatience; then he hurriedly gathers up his papers from the writing-table. the three men turn to him._] eh? aubrey. oh, i--i'll finish my letters in the other room if you'll excuse me for five minutes. tell cayley the news. [_he goes out._ drummle. [_hurrying to the door._] my dear fellow, my jabbering has disturbed you! i'll never talk again as long as i live! misquith. close the door, cayley. [drummle _shuts the door._ jayne. cayley---- drummle. [_advancing to the dinner table._] a smoke, a smoke, or i perish! [_selects a cigar from the little cabinet._ jayne. cayley, marriages are in the air. drummle. are they? discover the bacillus, doctor, and destroy it. jayne. i mean, among our friends. drummle. oh, nugent warrinder's engagement to lady alice tring. i've heard of that. they're not to be married till the spring. jayne. another marriage that concerns us a little takes place to-morrow. drummle. whose marriage? jayne. aubrey's. drummle. aub----! [_looking towards_ misquith.] is it a joke? misquith. no. drummle. [_looking from_ misquith _to_ jayne.] to whom? misquith. he doesn't tell us. jayne. we three were asked here to-night to receive the announcement. aubrey has some theory that marriage is likely to alienate a man from his friends, and it seems to me he has taken the precaution to wish us good-bye. misquith. no, no. jayne. practically, surely. drummle. [_thoughtfully._] marriage in general, does he mean, or this marriage? jayne. that's the point. frank says---- misquith. no, no, no; i feared it suggested---- jayne. well, well. [_to_ drummle.] what do you think of it? drummle. [_after a slight pause._] is there a light there? [_lighting his cigar._] he--wraps the lady--in mystery--you say? misquith. most modestly. drummle. aubrey's--not--a very--young man. jayne. forty-three. drummle. ah! _l'age critique!_ misquith. a dangerous age--yes, yes. drummle. when you two fellows go home, do you mind leaving me behind here? misquith. not at all. jayne. by all means. drummle. all right. [_anxiously._] deuce take it, the man's second marriage mustn't be another mistake! [_with his head bent he walks up to the fireplace._ jayne. you knew him in his short married life, cayley. terribly unsatisfactory, wasn't it? drummle. well---- [_looking at the door._] i quite closed that door? misquith. yes. [_settles himself on the sofa_; jayne _is seated in an armchair._ drummle. [_smoking, with his back to the fire._] he married a miss herriott; that was in the year eighteen--confound dates--twenty years ago. she was a lovely creature--by jove, she was; by religion a roman catholic. she was one of your cold sort, you know--all marble arms and black velvet. i remember her with painful distinctness as the only woman who ever made me nervous. misquith. ha, ha! drummle. he loved her--to distraction, as they say. jupiter, how fervently that poor devil courted her! but i don't believe she allowed him even to squeeze her fingers. she _was_ an iceberg! as for kissing, the mere contact would have given him chapped lips. however, he married her and took her away, the latter greatly to my relief. jayne. abroad, you mean? drummle. eh? yes. i imagine he gratified her by renting a villa in lapland, but i don't know. after a while they returned, and then i saw how wofully aubrey had miscalculated results. jayne. miscalculated----? drummle. he had reckoned, poor wretch, that in the early days of marriage she would thaw. but she didn't. i used to picture him closing his doors and making up the fire in the hope of seeing her features relax. bless her, the thaw never set in! i believe she kept a thermometer in her stays and always registered ten degrees below zero. however, in time a child came--a daughter. jayne. didn't that----? drummle. not a bit of it; it made matters worse. frightened at her failure to stir up in him some sympathetic religious belief, she determined upon strong measures with regard to the child. he opposed her for a miserable year or so, but she wore him down, and the insensible little brat was placed in a convent, first in france, then in ireland. not long afterwards the mother died, strangely enough, of fever, the only warmth, i believe, that ever came to that woman's body. misquith. don't, cayley! jayne. the child is living, we know. drummle. yes, if you choose to call it living. miss tanqueray--a young woman of nineteen now--is in the loretto convent at armagh. she professes to have found her true vocation in a religious life, and within a month or two will take final vows. misquith. he ought to have removed his daughter from the convent when the mother died. drummle. yes, yes, but absolutely at the end there was reconciliation between husband and wife, and she won his promise that the child should complete her conventual education. he reaped his reward. when he attempted to gain his girl's confidence and affection he was too late; he found he was dealing with the spirit of the mother. you remember his visit to ireland last month? jayne. yes. drummle. that was to wish his girl good-bye. misquith. poor fellow? drummle. he sent for me when he came back. i think he must have had a lingering hope that the girl would relent--would come to life, as it were--at the last moment, for, for an hour or so, in this room, he was terribly shaken. i'm sure he'd clung to that hope from the persistent way in which he kept breaking off in his talk to repeat one dismal word, as if he couldn't realise his position without dinning this damned word into his head. jayne. what word was that? drummle. alone--alone. aubrey _enters._ aubrey. a thousand apologies! drummle. [_gaily._] we are talking about you, my dear aubrey. [_during the telling of the story,_ misquith _has risen and gone to the fire, and_ drummle _has thrown himself full-length on the sofa._ aubrey _now joins_ misquith _and_ jayne. aubrey. well, cayley, are you surprised? drummle. surp----! i haven't been surprised for twenty years. aubrey. and you're not angry with me? drummle. angry! [_rising._] because you considerately withhold the name of a lady with whom it is now the object of my life to become acquainted? my dear fellow, you pique my curiosity, you give zest to my existence! and as for a wedding, who on earth wants to attend that familiar and probably draughty function? ugh! my cigar's out. aubrey. let's talk about something else. misquith. [_looking at his watch._] not to-night, aubrey. aubrey. my dear frank! misquith. i go up to scotland to-morrow, and there are some little matters---- jayne. i am off too. aubrey. no, no. jayne. i must: i have to give a look to a case in clifford street on my way home. aubrey. [_going to the door._] well! [misquith _and_ jayne _exchange looks with_ drummle. _opening the door and calling._] morse, hats and coats! i shall write to you all next week from genoa or florence. now, doctor, frank, remember, my love to mrs. misquith and to mrs. jayne! morse _enters with hats and coats._ misquith _and_ jayne. yes, yes--yes, yes. aubrey. and your young people! [_as_ misquith _and_ jayne _put on their coats there is the clatter of careless talk._ jayne. cayley, i meet you at dinner on sunday. drummle. at the stratfields'. that's very pleasant. misquith. [_putting on his coat with_ aubrey's _aid._] ah-h! aubrey. what's wrong? misquith. a twinge. why didn't i go to aix in august? jayne. [_shaking hands with_ drummle.] good-night, cayley. drummle. good-night, my dear doctor! misquith. [_shaking hands with_ drummle.] cayley, are you in town for long? drummle. dear friend, i'm nowhere for long. good-night. misquith. good-night. [aubrey, jayne, _and_ misquith _go out, followed by_ morse; _the hum of talk is continued outside._ aubrey. a cigar, frank? misquith. no, thank you. aubrey. going to walk, doctor? jayne. if frank will. misquith. by all means. aubrey. it's a cold night. [_the door is closed._ drummle _remains standing with his coat on his arm and his hat in his hand._ drummle. [_to himself, thoughtfully._] now then! what the devil----! [aubrey _returns._ aubrey. [_eyeing_ drummle _a little awkwardly._] well, cayley? drummle. well, aubrey? [aubrey _walks up to the fire and stands looking into it._ aubrey. you're not going, old chap? drummle. [_sitting._] no. aubrey. [_after a slight pause, with a forced laugh._] hah! cayley, i never thought i should feel--shy--with you. drummle. why do you? aubrey. never mind. drummle. now, i can quite understand a man wishing to be married in the dark, as it were. aubrey. you can? drummle. in your place i should very likely adopt the same course. aubrey. you think so? drummle. and if i intended marrying a lady not prominently in society, as i presume you do--as i presume you do---- aubrey. well? drummle. as i presume you do, i'm not sure that _i_ should tender her for preliminary dissection at afternoon tea-tables. aubrey. no? drummle. in fact, there is probably only one person--were i in your position to-night--with whom i should care to chat the matter over. aubrey. who's that? drummle. yourself, of course. [_going to_ aubrey _and standing beside him._] of course, yourself, old friend. aubrey. [_after a pause._] i must seem a brute to you, cayley. but there are some acts which are hard to explain, hard to defend---- drummle. to defend----? aubrey. some acts which one must trust to time to put right. [drummle _watches him for a moment, then takes up his hat and coat._ drummle. well, i'll be moving. aubrey. cayley! confound you and your old friendship! do you think i forget it? put your coat down! why did you stay behind here? cayley, the lady i am going to marry is the lady--who is known as--mrs. jarman. [_there is a pause._ drummle. [_in a low voice_] mrs. jarman! are you serious? [_he walks up to the fireplace, where he leans upon the mantelpiece uttering something like a groan._ aubrey. as you've got this out of me i give you leave to say all you care to say. come, we'll be plain with each other. you know mrs. jarman? drummle. i first met her at--what does it matter? aubrey. yes, yes, everything! come! drummle. i met her at homburg, two--three seasons ago. aubrey. not as mrs. jarman? drummle. no. aubrey. she was then----? drummle. mrs. dartry. aubrey. yes. she has also seen you in london, she says. drummle. certainly. aubrey. in aldford street. go on. drummle. please! aubrey. i insist. drummle. [_with a slight shrug of the shoulders._] some time last year i was asked by a man to sup at his house, one night after the theatre. aubrey. mr. selwyn ethurst--a bachelor. drummle. yes. aubrey. you were surprised therefore to find mr. ethurst aided in his cursed hospitality by a lady. drummle. i was unprepared. aubrey. the lady you had known as mrs. dartry? [drummle _inclines his head silently._] there is something of a yachting cruise in the mediterranean too, is there not? drummle. i joined peter jarman's yacht at marseilles, in the spring, a month before he died. aubrey. mrs. jarman was on board? drummle. she was a kind hostess. aubrey. and an old acquaintance? drummle. yes. aubrey. you have told your story. drummle. with your assistance. aubrey. i have put you to the pain of telling it to show you that this is not the case of a blind man entrapped by an artful woman. let me add that mrs. jarman has no legal right to that name, that she is simply miss ray--miss paula ray. drummle. [_after a pause._] i should like to express my regret, aubrey, for the way in which i spoke of george orreyed's marriage. aubrey. you mean you compare lady orreyed with miss ray? [drummle _is silent._] oh, of course! to you, cayley, all women who have been roughly treated, and who dare to survive by borrowing a little of our philosophy, are alike. you see in the crowd of the ill-used only one pattern; you can't detect the shades of goodness, intelligence, even nobility there. well, how should you? the crowd is dimly lighted! and, besides, yours is the way of the world. drummle. my dear aubrey, i _live_ in the world. aubrey. the name we give our little parish of st. james's. drummle. [_laying a hand on_ aubrey's _shoulder._] and you are quite prepared, my friend, to forfeit the esteem of your little parish? aubrey. i avoid mortification by shifting from one parish to another. i give up pall mall for the surrey hills; leave off varnishing my boots and double the thickness of the soles. drummle. and your skin--do you double the thickness of that also? aubrey. i know you think me a fool, cayley--you needn't infer that i'm a coward into the bargain. no! i know what i'm doing, and i do it deliberately, defiantly. i'm alone; i injure no living soul by the step i'm going to take; and so you can't urge the one argument which might restrain me. of course, i don't expect you to think compassionately, fairly even, of the woman whom i--whom i am drawn to---- drummle. my dear aubrey, i assure you i consider mrs.--miss jarman--mrs. ray--miss ray--delightful. but i confess there is a form of chivalry which i gravely distrust, especially in a man of--our age. aubrey. thanks. i've heard you say that from forty till fifty a man is at heart either a stoic or a satyr. drummle. [_protestingly._] ah! now---- aubrey. i am neither. i have a temperate, honourable affection for mrs. jarman. she has never met a man who has treated her well--i intend to treat her well. that's all. and in a few years, cayley, if you've not quite forsaken me, i'll prove to you that it's possible to rear a life of happiness, of good repute, on a--miserable foundation. drummle. [_offering his hand._] do prove it! aubrey. [_taking his hand._] we have spoken too freely of--of mrs. jarman. i was excited--angry. please forget it! drummle. my dear aubrey, when we next meet i shall remember nothing but my respect for the lady who bears your name. morse _enters, closing the door behind him carefully._ aubrey. what is it? morse. [_hesitatingly._] may i speak to you, sir? [_in an undertone._] mrs. jarman, sir. aubrey. [_softly to_ morse.] mrs. jarman! do you mean she is at the lodge in her carriage? morse. no, sir--here. [aubrey _looks towards_ drummle, _perplexed._] there's a nice fire in your--in that room, sir. [_glancing in the direction of the door leading to the bedroom._] aubrey. [_between his teeth, angrily._] very well. [morse _retires._ drummle. [_looking at his watch._] a quarter to eleven--horrible! [_taking up his hat and coat._] must get to bed--up late every night this week. [aubrey _assists_ drummle _with his coat._] thank you. well, good-night, aubrey. i feel i've been dooced serious, quite out of keeping with myself; pray overlook it. aubrey. [_kindly._] ah, cayley! drummle. [_putting on a neck-handkerchief._] and remember that, after all, i'm merely a spectator in life; nothing more than a man at a play, in fact; only, like the old-fashioned playgoer, i love to see certain characters happy and comfortable at the finish. you understand? aubrey. i think i do. drummle. then, for as long as you can, old friend, will you--keep a stall for me? aubrey. yes, cayley. drummle. [_gaily._] ah, ha! good-night! [_bustling to the door._] don't bother! i'll let myself out! good-night! god bless yer! [_he goes out_; aubrey _follows him._ morse _enters by the other door, carrying some unopened letters which after a little consideration he places on the mantelpiece against the clock._ aubrey _returns._ aubrey. yes? morse. you hadn't seen your letters that came by the nine o'clock post, sir; i've put 'em where they'll catch your eye by-and-by. aubrey. thank you. morse. [_hesitatingly._] gunter's cook and waiter have gone, sir. would you prefer me to go to bed? aubrey. [_frowning._] certainly not. morse. very well, sir. [_he goes out._ aubrey. [_opening the upper door_] paula! paula! paula _enters and throws her arms round his neck. she is a young woman of about twenty-seven: beautiful, fresh, innocent-looking. she is in superb evening dress._ paula. dearest! aubrey. why have you come here? paula. angry? aubrey. yes--no. but it's eleven o'clock. paula. [_laughing._] i know. aubrey. what on earth will morse think? paula. do you trouble yourself about what servants _think_? aubrey. of course. paula. goose! they're only machines made to wait upon people--and to give evidence in the divorce court. [_looking round._] oh, indeed! a snug little dinner! aubrey. three men. paula. [_suspiciously._] men? aubrey. men. paula. [_penitently._] ah! [_sitting at the table._] i'm so hungry. aubrey. let me get you some game pie, or some---- paula. no, no, hungry for this. what beautiful fruit! i love fruit when it's expensive. [_he clears a space on the table, places a plate before her, and helps her to fruit._] i haven't dined, aubrey dear. aubrey. my poor girl! why? paula. in the first place, i forgot to order any dinner, and my cook, who has always loathed me, thought he'd pay me out before he departed. aubrey. the beast! paula. that's precisely what i---- aubrey. no, paula! paula. what i told my maid to call him. what next will you think of me? aubrey. forgive me. you must be starved. paula. [_eating fruit._] _i_ didn't care. as there was nothing to eat, i sat in my best frock, with my toes on the dining-room fender, and dreamt, oh, such a lovely dinner-party. aubrey. dear lonely little woman! paula. it was perfect. i saw you at the end of a very long table, opposite me, and we exchanged sly glances now and again over the flowers. we were host and hostess, aubrey, and had been married about five years. aubrey. [_kissing her hand._] five years. paula. and on each side of us was the nicest set imaginable--you know, dearest, the sort of men and women that can't be imitated. aubrey. yes, yes. eat some more fruit. paula. but i haven't told you the best part of my dream. aubrey. tell me. paula. well, although we had been married only such a few years, i seemed to know by the look on their faces that none of our guests had ever heard anything--anything--anything peculiar about the fascinating hostess. aubrey. that's just how it will be, paula. the world moves so quickly. that's just how it will be. paula. [_with a little grimace._] i wonder! [_glancing at the fire._] ugh! do throw another log on. aubrey. [_mending the fire._] there. but you mustn't be here long. paula. hospitable wretch! i've something important to tell you. no, stay where you are. [_turning from him, her face averted._] look here, that was my dream, aubrey; but the fire went out while i was dozing, and i woke up with a regular fit of the shivers. and the result of it all was that i ran upstairs and scribbled you a letter. aubrey. dear baby! paula. remain where you are. [_taking a letter from her pocket._] this is it. i've given you an account of myself, furnished you with a list of my adventures since i--you know. [_weighing the letter in her hand._] i wonder if it would go for a penny. most of it you're acquainted with; _i've_ told you a good deal, haven't i? aubrey. oh, paula! paula. what i haven't told you i daresay you've heard from others. but in case they've omitted anything--the dears--it's all here. aubrey. in heaven's name, why must you talk like this to-night? paula. it may save discussion by-and-by, don't you think? [_holding out the letter._] there you are. aubrey. no, dear, no. paula. take it. [_he takes the letter._] read it through after i've gone, and then--read it again, and turn the matter over in your mind finally. and if, even at the very last moment, you feel you--oughtn't to go to church with me, send a messenger to pont street, any time before eleven to-morrow, telling me that you're afraid, and i--i'll take the blow. aubrey. why, what--what do you think i am? paula. that's it. it's because i know you're such a dear good fellow that i want to save you the chance of ever feeling sorry you married me. i really love you so much, aubrey, that to save you that i'd rather you treated me as--as the others have done. aubrey. [_turning from her with a cry._] oh! paula. [_after a slight pause._] i suppose i've shocked you. i can't help it if i have. [_she sits, with assumed languor and indifference. he turns to her, advances, and kneels by her._ aubrey. my dearest, you don't understand me. i--i can't bear to hear you always talking about--what's done with. i tell you i'll never remember it; paula, can't you dismiss it? try. darling, if we promise each other to forget, to forget, we're bound to be happy. after all, it's a mechanical matter; the moment a wretched thought enters your head, you quickly think of something bright--it depends on one's will. shall i burn this, dear? [_referring to the letter he holds in his hand._] let me, let me! paula. [_with a shrug of the shoulders._] i don't suppose there's much that's new to you in it--just as you like. [_he goes to the fire and burns the letter._ aubrey. there's an end of it. [_returning to her._] what's the matter? paula. [_rising, coldly._] oh, nothing! i'll go and put my cloak on. aubrey. [_detaining her._] what _is_ the matter? paula. well, i think you might have said, "you're very generous, paula," or at least, "thank you, dear," when i offered to set you free. aubrey. [_catching her in his arms._] ah! paula. ah! ah! ha, ha! it's all very well, but you don't know what it cost me to make such an offer. i do so want to be married. aubrey. but you never imagined----? paula. perhaps not. and yet i _did_ think of what i'd do at the end of our acquaintance if you had preferred to behave like the rest. [_taking a flower from her bodice._ aubrey. hush! paula. oh, i forgot! aubrey. what would you have done when we parted? paula. why, killed myself. aubrey. paula, dear! paula. it's true. [_putting the flower in his buttonhole._] do you know i feel certain i should make away with myself if anything serious happened to me. aubrey. anything serious! what, has nothing ever been serious to you, paula? paula. not lately; not since a long while ago. i made up my mind then to have done with taking things seriously. if i hadn't, i---- however, we won't talk about that. aubrey. but now, now, life will be different to you, won't it--quite different? eh, dear? paula. oh yes, now. only, aubrey, mind you keep me always happy. aubrey. i will try to. paula. i know i couldn't swallow a second big dose of misery. i know that if ever i felt wretched again--truly wretched--i should take a leaf out of connie tirlemont's book. you remember? they found her---- [_with a look of horror._] aubrey. for god's sake, don't let your thoughts run on such things! paula. [_laughing._] ha, ha, how scared you look! there, think of the time! dearest, what will my coachman say! my cloak! [_she runs off, gaily, by the upper door._ aubrey _looks after her for a moment, then he walks up to the fire and stands warming his feet at the bars. as he does so he raises his head and observes the letters upon the mantelpiece. he takes one down quickly._ aubrey. ah! ellean! [_opening the letter and reading._] "my dear father,--a great change has come over me. i believe my mother in heaven has spoken to me, and counselled me to turn to you in your loneliness. at any rate, your words have reached my heart, and i no longer feel fitted for this solemn life. i am ready to take my place by you. dear father, will you receive me?--ellean." paula _re-enters, dressed in a handsome cloak. he stares at her as if he hardly realised her presence._ paula. what are you staring at? don't you admire my cloak? aubrey. yes. paula. couldn't you wait till i'd gone before reading your letters? aubrey. [_putting the letter away._] i beg your pardon. paula. take me downstairs to the carriage. [_slipping her arm through his._] how i tease you! to-morrow! i'm so happy! [_they go out._ the second act _a morning-room in_ aubrey tanqueray's _house, "highercoombe," near willowmere, surrey--a bright and prettily furnished apartment of irregular shape, with double doors opening into a small hall at the back, another door on the left, and a large recessed window through which is obtained a view of extensive grounds. everything about the room is charming and graceful. the fire is burning in the grate, and a small table is tastefully laid for breakfast. it is a morning in early spring, and the sun is streaming in through the window._ aubrey _and_ paula _are seated at breakfast, and_ aubrey _is silently reading his letters. two servants, a man and a woman, hand dishes and then retire. after a little while_ aubrey _puts his letters aside and looks across to the window._ aubrey. sunshine! spring! paula. [_glancing at the clock._] exactly six minutes. aubrey. six minutes? paula. six minutes, aubrey dear, since you made your last remark. aubrey. i beg your pardon; i was reading my letters. have you seen ellean this morning? paula. [_coldly._] your last observation but one was about ellean. aubrey. dearest, what shall i talk about? paula. ellean breakfasted two hours ago, morgan tells me, and then went out walking with her dog. aubrey. she wraps up warmly, i hope; this sunshine is deceptive. paula. i ran about the lawn last night, after dinner, in satin shoes. were you anxious about me? aubrey. certainly. paula. [_melting._] really? aubrey. you make me wretchedly anxious; you delight in doing incautious things. you are incurable. paula. ah, what a beast i am! [_going to him and kissing him, then glancing at the letters by his side._] a letter from cayley? aubrey. he is staying very near here, with mrs.---- very near here. paula. with the lady whose chimneys we have the honour of contemplating from our windows? aubrey. with mrs. cortelyon--yes. paula. mrs. cortelyon! the woman who might have set the example of calling on me when we first threw out roots in this deadly-lively soil! deuce take mrs. cortelyon! aubrey. hush! my dear girl! paula. [_returning to her seat._] oh, i know she's an old acquaintance of yours--and of the first mrs. tanqueray. and she joins the rest of 'em in slapping the second mrs. tanqueray in the face. however, i have my revenge--she's six-and-forty, and i wish nothing worse to happen to any woman. aubrey. well, she's going to town, cayley says here, and his visit's at an end. he's coming over this morning to call on you. shall we ask him to transfer himself to us? do say yes. paula. yes. aubrey. [_gladly._] ah, ha! old cayley! paula. [_coldly._] he'll amuse _you_. aubrey. and you too. paula. because you find a companion, shall i be boisterously hilarious? aubrey. come, come! he talks london, and you know you like that. paula. london! london or heaven! which is farther from me! aubrey. paula! paula. oh! oh, i am so bored, aubrey! aubrey. [_gathering up his letters and going to her, leaning over her shoulder._] baby, what can i do for you? paula. i suppose, nothing. you have done all you can for me. aubrey. what do you mean? paula. you have married me. [_he walks away from her thoughtfully, to the writing-table. as he places his letters on the table he sees an addressed letter, stamped for the post, lying on the blotting-book; he picks it up._ aubrey. [_in an altered tone._] you've been writing this morning before breakfast? paula. [_looking at him quickly, then away again._] er--that letter. aubrey. [_with the letter in his hand._] to lady orreyed. why? paula. why not? mabel's an old friend of mine. aubrey. are you--corresponding? paula. i heard from her yesterday. they've just returned from the riviera. she seems happy. aubrey. [_sarcastically._] that's good news. paula. why are you always so cutting about mabel? she's a kind-hearted girl. every thing's altered; she even thinks of letting her hair go back to brown. she's lady orreyed. she's married to george. what's the matter with her? aubrey. [_turning away._] oh! paula. you drive me mad sometimes with the tone you take about things! great goodness, if you come to that, george orreyed's wife isn't a bit worse than yours! [_he faces her suddenly._] i suppose i needn't have made that observation. aubrey. no, there was scarcely a necessity. [_he throws the letter on to the table, and takes up the newspaper._ paula. i am very sorry. aubrey. all right, dear. paula. [_trifling with the letter._] i--i'd better tell you what i've written. i meant to do so, of course. i--i've asked the orreyeds to come and stay with us. [_he looks at her and lets the paper fall to the ground in a helpless way._] george was a great friend of cayley's; i'm sure _he_ would be delighted to meet them here. aubrey. [_laughing mirthlessly._] ha, ha, ha! they say orreyed has taken to tippling at dinner. heavens above! paula. oh! i've no patience with you! you'll kill me with this life! [_she selects some flowers from a vase on the table, cuts and arranges them, and fastens them in her bodice._] what is my existence, sunday to saturday? in the morning, a drive down to the village, with the groom, to give my orders to the tradespeople. at lunch, you and ellean. in the afternoon, a novel, the newspapers; if fine, another drive--_if_ fine! tea--you and ellean. then two hours of dusk; then dinner--you and ellean. then a game of bésique, you and i, while ellean reads a religious book in a dull corner. then a yawn from me, another from you, a sigh from ellean; three figures suddenly rise--"good-night, good-night, good-night!" [_imitating a kiss._] "god bless you!" ah! aubrey. yes, yes, paula--yes, dearest--that's what it is _now_. but, by-and-by, if people begin to come round us---- paula. hah! that's where we've made the mistake, my friend aubrey! [_pointing to the window._] do you believe these people will _ever_ come round us? your former crony, mrs. cortelyon? or the grim old vicar, or that wife of his whose huge nose is positively indecent? or the ullathornes, or the gollans, or lady william petres? i know better! and when the young ones gradually take the place of the old, there will still remain the sacred tradition that the dreadful person who lives at the top of the hill is never, under any circumstances, to be called upon! and so we shall go on here, year in and year out, until the sap is run out of our lives, and we're stale and dry and withered from sheer, solitary respectability. upon my word, i wonder we didn't see that we should have been far happier if we'd gone in for the devil-may-care, _café_-living sort of life in town! after all, _i_ have a set and you might have joined it. it's true i did want, dearly, dearly, to be a married woman, but where's the pride in being a married woman among married women who are--married! if---- [_seeing that_ aubrey's _head has sunk into his hands._] aubrey! my dear boy! you're not--crying? [_he looks up, with a flushed face._ ellean _enters, dressed very simply for walking. she is a low voiced, grave girl of about nineteen, with a face somewhat resembling a madonna. towards_ paula _her manner is cold and distant._ aubrey. [_in an undertone._] ellean! ellean. good-morning, papa. good-morning, paula. [paula _puts her arms round_ ellean _and kisses her._ ellean _makes little response._ paula. good-morning. [_brightly._] we've been breakfasting this side of the house, to get the sun. [_she sits at the piano and rattles at a gay melody. seeing that_ paula's _back is turned to them,_ ellean _goes to_ aubrey _and kisses him; he returns the kiss almost furtively. as they separate, the servants re-enter, and proceed to carry out the breakfast-table._ aubrey. [_to_ ellean.] i guess where you've been: there's some gorse clinging to your frock. ellean. [_removing a sprig of gorse from her skirt._] rover and i walked nearly as far as black moor. the poor fellow has a thorn in his pad; i am going upstairs for my tweezers. aubrey. ellean! [_she returns to him._] paula is a little depressed--out of sorts. she complains that she has no companion. ellean. i am with paula nearly all the day, papa. aubrey. ah, but you're such a little mouse. paula likes cheerful people about her. ellean. i'm afraid i am naturally rather silent; and it's so difficult to seem to be what one is not. aubrey. i don't wish that, ellean. ellean. i will offer to go down to the village with paula this morning--shall i? aubrey. [_touching her hand gently._] thank you--do. ellean. when i've looked after rover, i'll come back to her. [_she goes out;_ paula _ceases playing, and turns on the music-stool looking at_ aubrey. paula. well, have you and ellean had your little confidence? aubrey. confidence? paula. do you think i couldn't feel it, like a pain between my shoulders? aubrey. ellean is coming back in a few minutes to be with you. [_bending over her._] paula, paula dear, is this how you keep your promise? paula. oh! [_rising impatiently and crossing swiftly to the settee, where she sits, moving restlessly._] i _can't_ keep my promise; i _am_ jealous; it won't be smothered. i see you looking at her, watching her; your voice drops when you speak to her. i know how fond you are of that girl, aubrey. aubrey. what would you have? i've no other home for her. she is my daughter. paula. she is your saint. saint ellean! aubrey. you have often told me how good and sweet you think her. paula. good!--yes! do you imagine _that_ makes me less jealous? [_going to him and clinging to his arm._] aubrey, there are two sorts of affection--the love for a woman you respect, and the love for a woman you--love. she gets the first from you: i never can. aubrey. hush, hush! you don't realise what you say. paula. if ellean cared for me only a little, it would be different. i shouldn't be jealous then. why doesn't she care for me? aubrey. she--she--she will, in time. paula. you can't say that without stuttering. aubrey. her disposition seems a little unresponsive; she resembles her mother in many ways; i can see it every day. paula. she's marble. it's a shame. there's not the slightest excuse; for all she knows, i'm as much a saint as she--only married. dearest, help me to win her over! aubrey. help you? paula. you can. teach her that it is her duty to love me; she hangs on to every word you speak. i'm sure, aubrey, that the love of a nice woman who believed me to be like herself would do me a world of good. you'd get the benefit of it as well as i. it would soothe me; it would make me less horribly restless; it would take this--this--mischievous feeling from me. [_coaxingly._] aubrey! aubrey. have patience; everything will come right. paula. yes, if you help me. aubrey. in the meantime you will tear up your letter to lady orreyed, won't you? paula. [_kissing his hand._] of course i will--anything! aubrey. ah, thank you, dearest! [_laughing._] why, good gracious!--ha, ha!--just imagine "saint ellean" and that woman side by side! paula. [_going back with a cry._] ah! aubrey. what? paula. [_passionately._] it's ellean you're considering, not me? it's all ellean with you! ellean! ellean! ellean _re-enters._ ellean. did you call me, paula? [_clenching his hands,_ aubrey _turns away and goes out._] is papa angry? paula. i drive him distracted sometimes. there, i confess it! ellean. do you? oh, why do you? paula. because i--because i'm jealous. ellean. jealous? paula. yes--of you. [ellean _is silent._] well, what do you think of that? ellean. i knew it; i've seen it. it hurts me dreadfully. what do you wish me to do? go away? paula. leave us! [_beckoning her with a motion of the head._] look here! [ellean _goes to_ paula _slowly and unresponsively._] you could cure me of my jealousy very easily. why don't you--like me? ellean. what do you mean by--like you? i don't understand. paula. love me. ellean. love is not a feeling that is under one's control. i shall alter as time goes on, perhaps. i didn't begin to love my father deeply till a few months ago, and then i obeyed my mother. paula. ah, yes, you dream things, don't you--see them in your sleep? you fancy your mother speaks to you? ellean. when you have lost your mother it is a comfort to believe that she is dead only to this life, that she still watches over her child. i do believe that of my mother. paula. well, and so you haven't been bidden to love _me_? ellean. [_after a pause, almost inaudibly._] no. paula. dreams are only a hash-up of one's day-thoughts, i suppose you know. think intently of anything, and it's bound to come back to you at night. i don't cultivate dreams myself. ellean. ah, i knew you would only sneer! paula. i'm not sneering; i'm speaking the truth. i say that if you cared for me in the daytime i should soon make friends with those nightmares of yours. ellean, why don't you try to look on me as your second mother? of course there are not many years between us, but i'm ever so much older than you--in experience. i shall have no children of my own, i know that; it would be a real comfort to me if you would make me feel we belonged to each other. won't you? perhaps you think i'm odd--not nice. well, the fact is i've two sides to my nature, and i've let the one almost smother the other. a few years ago i went through some trouble, and since then i haven't shed a tear. i believe if you put your arms round me just once i should run upstairs and have a good cry. there, i've talked to you as i've never talked to a woman in my life. ellean, you seem to fear me. don't! kiss me! [_with a cry, almost of despair,_ ellean _turns from_ paula _and sinks on to the settee, covering her face with her hands._ paula. [_indignantly._] oh! why is it! how dare you treat me like this? what do you mean by it? what do you mean? _a_ servant _enters._ servant. mr. drummle, ma'am. cayley drummle, _in riding dress, enters briskly._ _the_ servant _retires._ paula. [_recovering herself._] well, cayley! drummle. [_shaking hands with her cordially._] how are you? [_shaking hands with_ ellean, _who rises._] i saw you in the distance an hour ago, in the gorse near stapleton's. ellean. i didn't see you, mr. drummle. drummle. my dear ellean, it is my experience that no charming young lady of nineteen ever does see a man of forty-five. [_laughing._] ha, ha! ellean. [_going to the door._] paula, papa wishes me to drive down to the village with you this morning. do you care to take me? paula. [_coldly._] oh, by all means. pray tell watts to balance the cart for three. [ellean _goes out._ drummle. how's aubrey? paula. very well--when ellean's about the house. drummle. and you? i needn't ask. paula. [_walking away to the window._] oh, a dog's life, my dear cayley, mine. drummle. eh? paula. doesn't that define a happy marriage? i'm sleek, well-kept, well-fed, never without a bone to gnaw and fresh straw to lie upon. [_gazing out of the window._] oh, dear me! drummle. h'm! well, i heartily congratulate you on your kennel. the view from the terrace here is superb. paula. yes, i can see london. drummle. london! not quite so far, surely? paula. _i_ can. also the mediterranean, on a fine day. i wonder what algiers looks like this morning from the sea! [_impulsively._] oh, cayley, do you remember those jolly times on board peter jarman's yacht when we lay off----? [_stopping suddenly, seeing_ drummle _staring at her._] good gracious! what are we talking about! aubrey _enters._ aubrey. [_to drummle._] dear old chap! has paula asked you? paula. not yet. aubrey. we want you to come to us, now that you're leaving mrs. cortelyon--at once, to-day. stay a month, as long as you please--eh, paula? paula. as long as you can possibly endure it--do, cayley. drummle. [_looking at aubrey._] delighted. [_to paula._] charming of you to have me. paula. my dear man, you're a blessing. i must telegraph to london for more fish! a strange appetite to cater for! something to do, to do, to do! [_she goes out in a mood of almost childish delight._ drummle. [_eyeing aubrey._] well? aubrey. [_with a wearied, anxious look._] well, cayley? drummle. how are you getting on? aubrey. my position doesn't grow less difficult. i told you, when i met you last week, of this feverish, jealous attachment of paula's for ellean? drummle. yes. i hardly know why, but i came to the conclusion that you don't consider it an altogether fortunate attachment. aubrey. ellean doesn't respond to it. drummle. these are early days. ellean will warm towards your wife by-and-by. aubrey. ah, but there's the question, cayley! drummle. what question? aubrey. the question which positively distracts me. ellean is so different from--most women; i don't believe a purer creature exists out of heaven. and i--i ask myself, am i doing right in exposing her to the influence of poor paula's light, careless nature? drummle. my dear aubrey! aubrey. that shocks you! so it does me. i assure you i long to urge my girl to break down the reserve which keeps her apart from paula, but somehow i can't do it--well, i don't do it. how can i make you understand? but when you come to us you'll understand quickly enough. cayley, there's hardly a subject you can broach on which poor paula hasn't some strange, out-of-the-way thought to give utterance to; some curious, warped notion. they are not mere worldly thoughts--unless, good god! they belong to the little hellish world which our blackguardism has created: no, her ideas have too little calculation in them to be called worldly. but it makes it the more dreadful that such thoughts should be ready, spontaneous; that expressing them has become a perfectly natural process; that her words, acts even, have almost lost their proper significance for her, and seem beyond her control. ah, and the pain of listening to it all from the woman one loves, the woman one hoped to make happy and contented, who is really and truly a good woman, as it were, maimed! well, this is my burden, and i shouldn't speak to you of it but for my anxiety about ellean. ellean! what is to be her future? it is in my hands; what am i to do? cayley, when i remember how ellean comes to me, from another world i always think, when i realise the charge that's laid on me, i find myself wishing, in a sort of terror, that my child were safe under the ground! drummle. my dear aubrey, aren't you making a mistake? aubrey. very likely. what is it? drummle. a mistake, not in regarding your ellean as an angel, but in believing that, under any circumstances, it would be possible for her to go through life without getting her white robe--shall we say, a little dusty at the hem? don't take me for a cynic. i am sure there are many women upon earth who are almost divinely innocent; but being on earth, they must send their robes to the laundry occasionally. ah, and it's right that they should have to do so, for what can they learn from the checking of their little washing-bills but lessons of charity? now i see but two courses open to you for the disposal of your angel. aubrey. yes? drummle. you must either restrict her to a paradise which is, like every earthly paradise, necessarily somewhat imperfect, or treat her as an ordinary flesh-and-blood young woman, and give her the advantages of that society to which she properly belongs. aubrey. advantages? drummle. my dear aubrey, of all forms of innocence mere ignorance is the least admirable. take my advice, let her walk and talk and suffer and be healed with the great crowd. do it, and hope that she'll some day meet a good, honest fellow who'll make her life complete, happy, secure. now you see what i'm driving at. aubrey. a sanguine programme, my dear cayley! oh, i'm not pooh-poohing it. putting sentiment aside, of course i know that a fortunate marriage for ellean would be the best--perhaps the only--solution of my difficulty. but you forget the danger of the course you suggest. drummle. danger? aubrey. if ellean goes among men and women, how can she escape from learning, sooner or later, the history of--poor paula's--old life? drummle. h'm! you remember the episode of the jeweller's son in the arabian nights? of course you don't. well, if your daughter lives, she _can't_ escape--what you're afraid of. [aubrey _gives a half stifled exclamation of pain._] and when she does hear the story, surely it would be better that she should have some knowledge of the world to help her to understand it. aubrey. to understand! drummle. to understand, to--to philosophise. aubrey. to philosophise? drummle. philosophy is toleration, and it is only one step from toleration to forgiveness. aubrey. you're right, cayley; i believe you always are. yes, yes. but, even if i had the courage to attempt to solve the problem of ellean's future in this way, i--i'm helpless. drummle. how? aubrey. what means have i now of placing my daughter in the world i've left? drummle. oh, some friend--some woman friend. aubrey. i have none; they're gone. drummle. you're wrong there; i know one---- aubrey. [_listening._] that's paula's cart. let's discuss this again. drummle. [_going up to the window and looking out._] it isn't the dog-cart. [_turning to_ aubrey.] i hope you'll forgive me, old chap. aubrey. what for? drummle. whose wheels do you think have been cutting ruts in your immaculate drive? _a_ servant _enters._ servant. [_to_ aubrey.] mrs. cortelyon, sir. aubrey. mrs. cortelyon! [_after a short pause._] very well. [_the_ servant _withdraws._] what on earth is the meaning of this? drummle. ahem! while i've been our old friend's guest, aubrey, we have very naturally talked a good deal about you and yours. aubrey. indeed, have you? drummle. yes, and alice cortelyon has arrived at the conclusion that it would have been far kinder had she called on mrs. tanqueray long ago. she's going abroad for easter before settling down in london for the season, and i believe she has come over this morning to ask for ellean's companionship. aubrey. oh, i see! [_frowning._] quite a friendly little conspiracy, my dear cayley! drummle. conspiracy! not at all, i assure you. [_laughing._] ha, ha! ellean _enters from the hall with_ mrs. cortelyon,_a handsome, good humoured, spirited woman of about forty-five._ ellean. papa---- mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ aubrey, _shaking hands with him heartily._] well, aubrey, how are you? i've just been telling this great girl of yours that i knew her when she was a sad-faced, pale baby. how is mrs. tanqueray? i have been a bad neighbour, and i'm here to beg forgiveness. is she indoors? aubrey. she's upstairs putting on a hat, i believe. mrs. cortelyon. [_sitting comfortably._] ah! [_she looks round:_ drummle _and_ ellean _are talking together in the hall._] we used to be very frank with each other, aubrey. i suppose the old footing is no longer possible, eh? aubrey. if so, i'm not entirely to blame, mrs. cortelyon. mrs. cortelyon. mrs. cortelyon? h'm! no, i admit it. but you must make some little allowance for me, _mr. tanqueray_. your first wife and i, as girls, were like two cherries on one stalk, and then i was the confidential friend of your married life. that post, perhaps, wasn't altogether a sinecure. and now--well, when a woman gets to my age i suppose she's a stupid, prejudiced, conventional creature. however, i've got over it and--[_giving him her hand_]--i hope you'll be enormously happy and let me be a friend once more. aubrey. thank you, alice. mrs. cortelyon. that's right. i feel more cheerful than i've done for weeks. but i suppose it would serve me right if the second mrs. tanqueray showed me the door. do you think she will? aubrey. [_listening._] here is my wife. [mrs. cortelyon _rises, and_ paula _enters, dressed for driving; she stops abruptly on seeing_ mrs. cortelyon.] paula dear, mrs. cortelyon has called to see you. [paula _starts, looks at_ mrs. cortelyon _irresolutely, then after a slight pause barely touches_ mrs. cortelyon's _extended hand._ paula. [_whose manner now alternates between deliberate insolence and assumed sweetness._] mrs.----? what name, aubrey? aubrey. mrs. cortelyon. paula. cortelyon? oh, yes. cortelyon. mrs. cortelyon. [_carefully guarding herself throughout against any expression of resentment._] aubrey ought to have told you that alice cortelyon and he are very old friends. paula. oh, very likely he has mentioned the circumstance. i have quite a wretched memory. mrs. cortelyon. you know we are neighbours, mrs. tanqueray. paula. neighbours? are we really? won't you sit down? [_they both sit._] neighbours! that's most interesting! mrs. cortelyon. very near neighbours. you can see my roof from your windows. paula. i fancy i _have_ observed a roof. but you have been away from home; you have only just returned. mrs. cortelyon. i? what makes you think that? paula. why, because it is two months since we came to highercoombe, and i don't remember your having called. mrs. cortelyon. your memory is now terribly accurate. no, i've not been away from home, and it is to explain my neglect that i am here, rather unceremoniously, this morning. paula. oh, to explain--quite so. [_with mock solicitude._] ah, you've been very ill; i ought to have seen that before. mrs. cortelyon. ill! paula. you look dreadfully pulled down. we poor women show illness so plainly in our faces, don't we? aubrey. [_anxiously._] paula dear, mrs. cortelyon is the picture of health. mrs. cortelyon. [_with some asperity._] i have never _felt_ better in my life. paula. [_looking round innocently._] have i said anything awkward? aubrey, tell mrs. cortelyon how stupid and thoughtless i always am! mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ drummle _who is now standing close to her._] really, cayley----! [_he soothes her with a nod and smile and a motion of his finger to his lip._] mrs. tanqueray, i am afraid my explanation will not be quite so satisfactory as either of those you have just helped me to. you may have heard--but, if you have heard, you have doubtless forgotten--that twenty years ago, when your husband first lived here, i was a constant visitor at highercoombe. paula. twenty years ago--fancy. i was a naughty little child then. mrs. cortelyon. possibly. well, at that time, and till the end of her life, my affections were centred upon the lady of this house. paula. were they? that was very sweet of you. [ellean _approaches_ mrs. cortelyon, _listening intently to her._ mrs. cortelyon. i will say no more on that score, but i must add this: when, two months ago, you came here, i realised, perhaps for the first time, that i was a middle-aged woman, and that it had become impossible for me to accept without some effort a breaking-in upon many tender associations. there, mrs. tanqueray, that is my confession. will you try to understand it and pardon me? paula. [_watching_ ellean,--_sneeringly._] ellean dear, you appear to be very interested in mrs. cortelyon's reminiscences; i don't think i can do better than make you my mouthpiece--there is such sympathy between us. what do you say--can we bring ourselves to forgive mrs. cortelyon for neglecting us for two weary months? mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ ellean, _pleasantly._] well, ellean? [_with a little cry of tenderness_ ellean _impulsively sits beside_ mrs. cortelyon _and takes her hand._] my dear child! paula. [_in an undertone to_ aubrey.] ellean isn't so very slow in taking to mrs. cortelyon! mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ paula _and_ aubrey.] come, this encourages me to broach my scheme. mrs. tanqueray, it strikes me that you two good people are just now excellent company for each other, while ellean would perhaps be glad of a little peep into the world you are anxious to avoid. now, i'm going to paris to-morrow for a week or two before settling down in chester square, so--don't gasp, both of you!--if this girl is willing, and you have made no other arrangements for her, will you let her come with me to paris, and afterwards remain with me in town during the season? [ellean _utters an exclamation of surprise._ paula _is silent._] what do you say? aubrey. paula--paula dear. [_hesitatingly._] my dear mrs. cortelyon, this is wonderfully kind of you; i am really at a loss to--eh, cayley? drummle. [_watching_ paula _apprehensively._] kind! now i must say i don't think so! i begged alice to take _me_ to paris, and she declined. i am thrown over for ellean! ha! ha! mrs. cortelyon. [_laughing._] what nonsense you talk, cayley! [_the laughter dies out._ paula _remains quite still._ aubrey. paula dear. paula. [_slowly collecting herself._] one moment. i--i don't quite---- [_to_ mrs. cortelyon.] you propose that ellean leaves highercoombe almost at once and remains with you some months? mrs. cortelyon. it would be a mercy to me. you can afford to be generous to a desolate old widow. come, mrs. tanqueray, won't you spare her? paula. won't _i_ spare her. [_suspiciously._] have you mentioned your plan to aubrey--before i came in? mrs. cortelyon. no, i had no opportunity. paula. nor to ellean? mrs. cortelyon. oh, no. paula. [_looking about her, in suppressed excitement._] this hasn't been discussed at all, behind my back? mrs. cortelyon. my dear mrs. tanqueray! paula. ellean, let us hear your voice in the matter! ellean. i should like to go with mrs. cortelyon-- paula. ah! ellean. that is, if--if---- paula. if--if what? ellean. _[looking towards_ aubrey, _appealingly._] papa! paula. [_in a hard voice._] oh, of course--i forgot. [_to_ aubrey.] my dear aubrey, it rests with you, naturally, whether i am--to lose--ellean. aubrey. lose ellean! [_advancing to_ paula.] there is no question of losing ellean. you would see ellean in town constantly when she returned from paris; isn't that so, mrs. cortelyon? mrs. cortelyon. certainly. paula. [_laughing softly._] oh, i didn't know i should be allowed that privilege. mrs. cortelyon. privilege, my dear mrs. tanqueray! paula. ha, ha! that makes all the difference, doesn't it? aubrey. [_with assumed gaiety._] all the difference? i should think so! [_to_ ellean, _laying his hand upon her head, tenderly._] and you are quite certain you wish to see what the world is like on the other side of black moor? ellean. if you are willing, papa, i am quite certain. aubrey. [_looking at_ paula _irresolutely, then speaking with an effort._] then i--i am willing. paula. [_rising and striking the table lightly with her clenched hand._] that decides it! [_there is a general movement. excitedly to_ mrs. cortelyon, _who advances towards her._] when do you want her? mrs. cortelyon. we go to town this afternoon at five o'clock, and sleep to-night at bayliss's. there is barely time for her to make her preparations. paula. i will undertake that she is ready. mrs. cortelyon. i've a great deal to scramble through at home too, as you may guess. good-bye! paula. [_turning away._] mrs. cortelyon is going. [paula _stands looking out of the window, with her back to those in the room._ mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ drummle.] cayley---- drummle. [_to her._] eh? mrs. cortelyon. i've gone through it, for the sake of aubrey and his child, but i--i feel a hundred. is that a mad-woman? drummle. of course; all jealous women are mad. [_he goes out with_ aubrey. mrs. cortelyon. [_hesitatingly, to_ paula.] good-bye, mrs. tanqueray. [paula _inclines her head with the slightest possible movement, then resumes her former position._ ellean _comes from the hall and takes_ mrs. cortelyon _out of the room. after a brief silence,_ paula _turns with a fierce cry, and hurriedly takes off her coat and hat, and tosses them upon the settee._ paula. oh! oh! oh! [_she drops into the chair as_ aubrey _returns; he stands looking at her._] who's that? aubrey. i. you have altered your mind about going out? paula. yes. please to ring the bell. aubrey. [_touching the bell._] you are angry about mrs. cortelyon and ellean. let me try to explain my reasons---- paula. be careful what you say to me just now! i have never felt like this--except once--in my life. be careful what you say to me! _a_ servant _enters._ paula. [_rising._] is watts at the door with the cart? servant. yes, ma'am. paula. tell him to drive down to the post-office directly, with this. [_picking up the letter which has been lying upon the table._ aubrey. with that? paula. yes. my letter to lady orreyed. [_giving the letter to the_ servant, _who goes out._ aubrey. surely you don't wish me to countermand any order of yours to a servant? call the man back--take the letter from him! paula. i have not the slightest intention of doing so. aubrey. i must, then. [_going to the door. she snatches up her hat and coat and follows him._] what are you going to do? paula. if you stop that letter, walk out of the house. [_he hesitates, then leaves the door._ aubrey. i am right in believing that to be the letter inviting george orreyed and his wife to stay here, am i not? paula. oh yes--quite right. aubrey. let it go; i'll write to him by-and-by. paula. [_facing him._] you dare! aubrey. hush, paula! paula. insult me again and, upon my word, i'll go straight out of the house! aubrey. insult you? paula. insult me! what else is it? my god! what else is it? what do you mean by taking ellean from me? aubrey. listen----! paula. listen to _me_! and how do you take her? you pack her off in the care of a woman who has deliberately held aloof from me, who's thrown mud at me! yet this cortelyon creature has only to put foot here once to be entrusted with the charge of the girl you know i dearly want to keep near me! aubrey. paula dear! hear me----! paula. ah! of course, of course! i can't be so useful to your daughter as such people as this; and so i'm to be given the go-by for any town friend of yours who turns up and chooses to patronise us! hah! very well, at any rate, as you take ellean from me you justify my looking for companions where i can most readily find 'em. aubrey. you wish me to fully appreciate your reason for sending that letter to lady orreyed? paula. precisely--i do. aubrey. and could you, after all, go back to associates of that order? it's not possible! paula. [_mockingly._] what, not after the refining influence of these intensely respectable surroundings? [_going to the door._] we'll see! aubrey. paula! paula. [_violently._] we'll see! [_she goes out. he stands still looking after her._ the third act _the drawing-room at "highercoombe." facing the spectator are two large french windows, sheltered by a verandah, leading into the garden; on the right is a door opening into a small hall. the fireplace, with a large mirror above it, is on the left-hand side of the room, and higher up in the same wall are double doors recessed. the room is richly furnished, and everything betokens taste and luxury. the windows are open, and there is moonlight in the garden._ lady orreyed, _a pretty, affected doll of a woman with a mincing voice and flaxen hair, is sitting on the ottoman, her head resting against the drum, and her eyes closed._ paula, _looking pale, worn, and thoroughly unhappy, is sitting at a table. both are in sumptuous dinner-gowns._ lady orreyed. [_opening her eyes._] well, i never! i dropped off! [_feeling her hair._] just fancy! where are the men? paula. [_icily._] outside, smoking. _a_ servant _enters with coffee, which he hands to_ lady orreyed. sir george orreyed _comes in by the window. he is a man of about thirty-five, with a low forehead, a receding chin, a vacuous expression, and an ominous redness about the nose._ lady orreyed. [_taking coffee._] here's dodo. sir george. i say, the flies under the verandah make you swear. [_the_ servant _hands coffee to_ paula, _who declines it, then to_ sir george, _who takes a cup._] hi! wait a bit! [_he looks at the tray searchingly, then puts back his cup._] never mind. [_quietly to_ lady orreyed.] i say, they're dooced sparin' with their liqueur, ain't they? [_the_ servant _goes out at window._ paula. [_to_ sir george.] won't you take coffee, george? sir george. no, thanks. it's gettin' near time for a whisky and potass. [_approaching_ paula, _regarding_ lady orreyed _admiringly._] i say, birdie looks rippin' to-night, don't she? paula. your wife? sir george. yaas--birdie. paula. rippin'? sir george. yaas. paula. quite--quite rippin'. [_he moves round to the settee._ paula _watches him with distaste, then rises and walks away._ sir george _falls asleep on the settee._ lady orreyed. paula love, i fancied you and aubrey were a little more friendly at dinner. you haven't made it up, have you? paula. we? oh, no. we speak before others, that's all. lady orreyed. and how long do you intend to carry on this game, dear? paula. [_turning away impatiently._] i really can't tell you. lady orreyed. sit down, old girl; don't be so fidgety. [paula _sits on the upper seat of the ottoman with her back to_ lady orreyed.] of course, it's my duty, as an old friend, to give you a good talking-to--[paula _glares at her suddenly and fiercely._]--but really i've found one gets so many smacks in the face through interfering in matrimonial squabbles that i've determined to drop it. paula. i think you're wise. lady orreyed. however, i must say that i do wish you'd look at marriage in a more solemn light--just as i do, in fact. it is such a beautiful thing--marriage, and if people in our position don't respect it, and set a good example by living happily with their husbands, what can you expect from the middle classes? when did this sad state of affairs between you and aubrey actually begin? paula. actually, a fortnight and three days ago; i haven't calculated the minutes. lady orreyed. a day or two before dodo and i turned up--arrived. paula. yes. one always remembers one thing by another; we left off speaking to each other the morning i wrote asking you to visit us. lady orreyed. lucky for you i was able to pop down, wasn't it, dear? paula. [_glaring at her again._] most fortunate. lady orreyed. a serious split with your husband without a pal on the premises--i should say, without a friend in the house--would be most unpleasant. paula. [_turning to her abruptly._] this place must be horribly doleful for you and george just now. at least you ought to consider him before me. why don't you leave me to my difficulties? lady orreyed. oh, we're quite comfortable, dear, thank you--both of us. george and me are so wrapped up in each other, it doesn't matter where we are. i don't want to crow over you, old girl, but i've got a perfect husband. [sir george _is now fast asleep, his head thrown back and his mouth open, looking hideous._ paula. [_glancing at_ sir george.] so you've given me to understand. lady orreyed. not that we don't have our little differences. why, we fell out only this very morning. you remember the diamond and ruby tiara charley prestwick gave poor dear connie tirlemont years ago, don't you? paula. no, i do not. lady orreyed. no? well, it's in the market. benjamin of piccadilly has got it in his shop-window, and i've set my heart on it. paula. you consider it quite necessary? lady orreyed. yes, because what i say to dodo is this--a lady of my station must smother herself with hair ornaments. it's different with you, love--people don't look for so much blaze from you, but i've got rank to keep up; haven't i? paula. yes. lady orreyed. well, that was the cause of the little set-to between i and dodo this morning. he broke two chairs, he was in such a rage. i forgot, they're your chairs; do you mind? paula. no. lady orreyed. you know, poor dodo can't lose his temper without smashing something; if it isn't a chair, it's a mirror; if it isn't that, it's china--a bit of dresden for choice. dear old pet! he loves a bit of dresden when he's furious. he doesn't really throw things _at_ me, dear; he simply lifts them up and drops them, like a gentleman. i expect our room upstairs will look rather wrecky before i get that tiara. paula. excuse the suggestion, perhaps your husband can't afford it. lady orreyed. oh, how dreadfully changed you are, paula! dodo can always mortgage something, or borrow of his ma. what _is_ coming to you! paula. ah! [_she sits at the piano and touches the keys._ lady orreyed. oh, yes, do play! that's the one thing i envy you for. paula. what shall i play? lady orreyed. what was that heavenly piece you gave us last night, dear? paula. a bit of schubert. would you like to hear it again? lady orreyed. you don't know any comic songs, do you? paula. i'm afraid not. lady orreyed. i leave it to you, then. [paula _plays._ aubrey _and_ cayley drummle _appear outside the window; they look into the room._ aubrey. [_to_ drummle. ] you can see her face in that mirror. poor girl, how ill and wretched she looks. drummle. when are the orreyeds going? aubrey. heaven knows! [_entering the room._ drummle. but _you're_ entertaining them; what's it to do with heaven? [_following_ aubrey. aubrey. do you know, cayley, that even the orreyeds serve a useful purpose? my wife actually speaks to me before our guests--think of that! i've come to rejoice at the presence of the orreyeds! drummle. i daresay; we're taught that beetles are sent for a benign end. aubrey. cayley, talk to paula again to-night. drummle. certainly, if i get the chance. aubrey. let's contrive it. george is asleep; perhaps i can get that doll out of the way. [_as they advance into the room,_ paula _abruptly ceases playing and finds interest in a volume of music._ sir george _is now nodding and snoring apoplectically._] lady orreyed, whenever you feel inclined for a game of billiards i'm at your service. lady orreyed. [_jumping up._] charmed, i'm sure! i really thought you'd forgotten poor little me. oh, look at dodo! aubrey. no, no, don't wake him; he's tired. lady orreyed. i must, he looks so plain. [_rousing_ sir george.] dodo! dodo! sir george. [_stupidly._] 'ullo! lady orreyed. dodo, dear, you were snoring. sir george. oh, i say, you could 'a told me that by-and-by. aubrey. you want a cigar, george; come into the billiard-room. [_giving his arm to_ lady orreyed.] cayley, bring paula. [aubrey _and_ lady orreyed _go out._ sir george. [_rising._] hey, what! billiard-room! [_looking at his watch._] how goes the----? phew! 'ullo, 'ullo! whisky and potass! [_he goes rapidly after_ aubrey _and_ lady orreyed. paula _resumes playing._ paula. [_after a pause._] don't moon about after me, cayley; follow the others. drummle. thanks, by-and-by. [_sitting._] that's pretty. paula. [_after another pause, still playing._] i wish you wouldn't stare so. drummle. was i staring? i'm sorry. [_she plays a little longer, then stops suddenly, rises, and goes to the window, where she stands looking out._ drummle _moves from the ottoman to the settee._] a lovely night. paula. [_startled._] oh! [_without turning to him._] why do you hop about like a monkey? drummle. hot rooms play the deuce with the nerves. now, it would have done you good to have walked in the garden with us after dinner and made merry. why didn't you? paula. you know why. drummle. ah, you're thinking of the--difference between you and aubrey? paula. yes, i _am_ thinking of it. drummle. well, so am i. how long----? paula. getting on for three weeks. drummle. bless me, it must be! and this would have been such a night to have healed it! moonlight, the stars, the scent of flowers; and yet enough darkness to enable a kind woman to rest her hand for an instant on the arm of a good fellow who loves her. ah, ha! it's a wonderful power, dear mrs. aubrey, the power of an offended woman! only realise it! just that one touch--the mere tips of her fingers--and, for herself and another, she changes the colour of the whole world! paula. [_turning to him, calmly._] cayley, my dear man, you talk exactly like a very romantic old lady. [_she leaves the window and sits playing with the knick-knacks on the table._ drummle. [_to himself._] h'm, that hasn't done it! well--ha, ha!--i accept the suggestion. an old woman, eh? paula. oh, i didn't intend---- drummle. but why not? i've every qualification--well, almost. and i confess it would have given this withered bosom a throb of grandmotherly satisfaction if i could have seen you and aubrey at peace before i take my leave to-morrow. paula. to-morrow, cayley! drummle. i must. paula. oh, this house is becoming unendurable. drummle. you're very kind. but you've got the orreyeds. paula. [_fiercely._] the orreyeds! i--i hate the orreyeds! i lie awake at night, hating them! drummle. pardon me, i've understood that their visit is, in some degree, owing to--hem!--your suggestion. paula. heavens! that doesn't make me like them better. somehow or another, i--i've outgrown these people. this woman--i used to think her "jolly!"--sickens me. i can't breathe when she's near me: the whiff of her handkerchief turns me faint! and she patronises me by the hour, until i--i feel my nails growing longer with every word she speaks! drummle. my dear lady, why on earth don't you say all this to aubrey? paula. oh, i've been such an utter fool, cayley! drummle. [_soothingly._] well, well, mention it to aubrey! paula. no, no, you don't understand. what do you think i've done? drummle. done! what, _since_ you invited the orreyeds? paula. yes; i must tell you---- drummle. perhaps you'd better not. paula. look here. i've intercepted some letters from mrs. cortelyon and ellean to--him. [_producing three unopened letters from the bodice of her dress._] there are the accursed things! from paris--two from the cortelyon woman, the other from ellean! drummle. but why--why? paula. i don't know. yes, i do! i saw letters coming from ellean to her father; not a line to me--not a line. and one morning it happened i was downstairs before he was, and i spied this one lying with his heap on the breakfast-table, and i slipped it into my pocket--out of malice, cayley, pure devilry! and a day or two afterwards i met elwes the postman at the lodge, and took the letters from him, and found these others amongst 'em. i felt simply fiendish when i saw them--fiendish! [_returning the letters to her bodice._] and now i carry them about with me, and they're scorching me like a mustard plaster! drummle. oh, this accounts for aubrey not hearing from paris lately! paula. that's an ingenious conclusion to arrive at! of course it does! [_with an hysterical laugh._] ha, ha! drummle. well, well! [_laughing._] ha, ha, ha! paula. [_turning upon him._] i suppose it _is_ amusing! drummle. i beg pardon. paula. heaven knows i've little enough to brag about! i'm a bad lot, but not in mean tricks of this sort. in all my life this is the most caddish thing i've done. how am i to get rid of these letters--that's what i want to know? how am i to get rid of them? drummle. if i were you i should take aubrey aside and put them into his hands as soon as possible. paula. what! and tell him to his face that i----! no, thank you. i suppose _you_ wouldn't like to---- drummle. no, no; i won't touch 'em! paula. and you call yourself my friend? drummle. [_good-humouredly._] no, i don't! paula. perhaps i'll tie them together and give them to his man in the morning. drummle. that won't avoid an explanation. paula. [_recklessly._] oh, then he must miss them---- drummle. and trace them. paula. [_throwing herself upon the ottoman._] i don't care! drummle. i know you don't; but let me send him to you now, may i? paula. now! what do you think a woman's made of? i couldn't stand it, cayley. i haven't slept for nights; and last night there was thunder, too! i believe i've got the horrors. drummle. [_taking the little hand-mirror from the table._] you'll sleep well enough when you deliver those letters. come, come, mrs. aubrey--a good night's rest! [_holding the mirror before her face._] it's quite time. [_she looks at herself for a moment, then snatches the mirror from him._ paula. you brute, cayley, to show me that! drummle. then--may i? be guided by a fr--a poor old woman! may i? paula. you'll kill me, amongst you! drummle. what do you say? paula. [_after a pause._] very well. [_he nods his head and goes out rapidly. she looks after him for a moment, and calls "cayley! cayley!" then she again produces the letters, deliberately, one by one, fingering them with aversion. suddenly she starts, turning her head towards the door._] ah! aubrey _enters quickly._ aubrey. paula! paula. [_handing him the letters, her face averted._] there! [_he examines the letters, puzzled, and looks at her inquiringly._] they are many days old. i stole them, i suppose to make you anxious and unhappy. [_he looks at the letters again, then lays them aside on the table._ aubrey. [_gently._] paula, dear, it doesn't matter. paula. [_after a short pause._] why--why do you take it like this? aubrey. what did you expect? paula. oh, but i suppose silent reproaches are really the severest. and then, naturally, you are itching to open your letters. [_she crosses the room as if to go._ aubrey. paula! [_she pauses._] surely, surely it's all over now? paula. all over! [_mockingly._.] has my step-daughter returned then? when did she arrive? i haven't heard of it! aubrey. you can be very cruel. paula. that word's always on a man's lips; he uses it if his soup's cold. [_with another movement as if to go._] need we---- aubrey. i know i've wounded you, paula. but isn't there any way out of this? paula. when does ellean return? to-morrow? next week? aubrey. [_wearily._] oh! why should we grudge ellean the little pleasure she is likely to find in paris and in london. paula. i grudge her nothing, if that's a hit at me. but with that woman----! aubrey. it must be that woman or another. you know that at present we are unable to give ellean the opportunity of--of---- paula. of mixing with respectable people. aubrey. the opportunity of gaining friends, experience, ordinary knowledge of the world. if you are interested in ellean, can't you see how useful mrs. cortelyon's good offices are? paula. may i put one question? at the end of the london season, when mrs. cortelyon has done with ellean, is it quite understood that the girl comes back to us? [aubrey _is silent._] is it? is it? aubrey. let us wait till the end of the season---- paula. oh! i knew it. you're only fooling me; you put me off with any trash. i believe you've sent ellean away, not for the reasons you give, but because you don't consider me a decent companion for her, because you're afraid she might get a little of her innocence rubbed off in my company? come, isn't that the truth? be honest! isn't that it? aubrey. yes. [_there is a moment's silence on both sides._ paula. [_with uplifted hands as if to strike him._] oh! aubrey. [_taking her by the wrists._] sit down. sit down. [_he puts her into a chair; she shakes herself free with a cry._] now listen to me. fond as you are, paula, of harking back to your past, there's one chapter of it you always let alone. i've never asked you to speak of it; you've never offered to speak of it. i mean the chapter that relates to the time when you were--like ellean. [_she attempts to rise; he restrains her._] no, no. paula. i don't choose to talk about that time. i won't satisfy your curiosity. aubrey. my dear paula, i have no curiosity--i know what you were at ellean's age. i'll tell you. you hadn't a thought that wasn't a wholesome one, you hadn't an impulse that didn't tend towards good, you never harboured a notion you couldn't have gossiped about to a parcel of children. [_she makes another effort to rise: he lays his hand lightly on her shoulder._] and this was a very few years back--there are days now when you look like a schoolgirl--but think of the difference between the two paulas. you'll have to think hard, because after a cruel life one's perceptions grow a thick skin. but, for god's sake, do think till you get these two images clearly in your mind, and then ask yourself what sort of a friend such a woman as you are to-day would have been for the girl of seven or eight years ago. paula. [_rising._] how dare you? i could be almost as good a friend to ellean as her own mother would have been had she lived. i know what you mean. how dare you? aubrey. you say that; very likely you believe it. but you're blind, paula; you're blind. you! every belief that a young, pure-minded girl holds sacred--that you once held sacred--you now make a target for a jest, a sneer, a paltry cynicism. i tell you, you're not mistress any longer of your thoughts or your tongue. why, how often, sitting between you and ellean, have i seen her cheeks turn scarlet as you've rattled off some tale that belongs by right to the club or the smoking-room! have you noticed the blush? if you have, has the cause of it ever struck you? and this is the girl you say you love, i admit that you _do_ love, whose love you expect in return! oh, paula, i make the best, the only, excuse for you when i tell you you're blind! paula. ellean--ellean blushes easily. aubrey. you blushed as easily a few years ago. paula. [_after a short pause._] well! have you finished your sermon? aubrey. [_with a gesture of despair._] oh, paula! [_going up to the window and standing with his back to the room._ paula. [_to herself._] a few--years ago! [_she walks slowly towards the door, then suddenly drops upon the ottoman in a paroxysm of weeping._] o god! a few years ago! aubrey. [_going to her._] paula! paula. [_sobbing._] oh, don't touch me! aubrey. paula! paula. oh, go away from me! [_he goes back a few steps, and after a little while she becomes calmer and rises unsteadily; then in an altered tone._] look here----! [_he advances a step; she checks him with a quick gesture._] look here! get rid of these people--mabel and her husband--as soon as possible! i--i've done with them! aubrey. [_in a whisper._] paula! paula. and then--then--when the time comes for ellean to leave mrs. cortelyon, give me--give me another chance! [_he advances again, but she shrinks away._] no, no! [_she goes out by the door on the right. he sinks on to the settee, covering his eyes with his hands. there is a brief silence, then a_ servant _enters._] servant. mrs. cortelyon, sir, with miss ellean. [aubrey _rises to meet_ mrs. cortelyon, _who enters, followed by_ ellean, _both being in travelling dresses. the_ servant _withdraws._ mrs. cortelyon. [_shaking hands with_ aubrey.] oh, my dear aubrey! aubrey. mrs. cortelyon! [_kissing_ ellean.] ellean dear! ellean. papa, is all well at home? mrs. cortelyon. we're shockingly anxious. aubrey. yes, yes, all's well. this is quite unexpected. [_to_ mrs. cortelyon.] you've found paris insufferably hot? mrs. cortelyon. insufferably hot! paris is pleasant enough. we've had no letter from you! aubrey. i wrote to ellean a week ago. mrs. cortelyon. without alluding to the subject i had written to you upon. aubrey. [_thinking._] ah, of course---- mrs. cortelyon. and since then we've both written and you've been absolutely silent. oh, it's too bad! aubrey. [_picking up the letters from the table._] it isn't altogether my fault. here are the letters---- ellean. papa! mrs. cortelyon. they're unopened. aubrey. an accident delayed their reaching me till this evening. i'm afraid this has upset you very much. mrs. cortelyon. upset me! ellean. [_in an undertone to_ mrs. cortelyon.] never mind. not now, dear--not to-night. aubrey. eh? mrs. cortelyon. [_to_ ellean _aloud._] child, run away and take your things off. she doesn't look as if she'd journeyed from paris to-day. aubrey. i've never seen her with such a colour. [_taking_ ellean's _hands._ ellean. [_to_ aubrey, _in a faint voice._] papa, mrs. cortelyon has been so very, very kind to me, but i--i have come home. [_she goes out._ aubrey. come home! [_to_ mrs. cortelyon.] ellean returns to us, then? mrs. cortelyon. that's the very point i put to you in my letters, and you oblige me to travel from paris to willowmere on a warm day to settle it. i think perhaps it's right that ellean should be with you just now, although i---- my dear friend, circumstances are a little altered. aubrey. alice, you're in some trouble. mrs. cortelyon. well--yes, i _am_ in trouble. you remember pretty little mrs. brereton who was once caroline ardale? aubrey. quite well. mrs. cortelyon. she's a widow now, poor thing. she has the _entresol_ of the house where we've been lodging in the avenue de friedland. caroline's a dear chum of mine; she formed a great liking for ellean. aubrey. i'm very glad. mrs. cortelyon. yes, it's nice for her to meet her mother's friends. er--that young hugh ardale the papers were full of some time ago--he's caroline brereton's brother, you know. aubrey. no, i didn't know. what did he do? i forget. mrs. cortelyon. checked one of those horrid mutinies at some far-away station in india, marched down with a handful of his men and a few faithful natives, and held the place until he was relieved. they gave him his company and a v.c. for it. aubrey. and he's mrs. brereton's brother? mrs. cortelyon. yes. he's with his sister--_was_, rather--in paris. he's home--invalided. good gracious, aubrey, why don't you help me out? can't you guess what has occurred? aubrey. alice! mrs. cortelyon. young ardale--ellean! aubrey. an attachment? mrs. cortelyon. yes, aubrey. [_after a little pause._] well, i suppose i've got myself into sad disgrace. but really i didn't foresee anything of this kind. a serious, reserved child like ellean, and a boyish, high-spirited soldier--it never struck me as being likely. [aubrey _paces to and fro thoughtfully._] i did all i could directly captain ardale spoke--wrote to you at once. why on earth don't you receive your letters promptly, and when you do get them why can't you open them? i endured the anxiety till last night, and then made up my mind--home! of course, it has worried me terribly. my head's bursting. are there any salts about? [aubrey _fetches a bottle from the cabinet and hands it to her._] we've had one of those hateful smooth crossings that won't let you be properly indisposed. aubrey. my dear alice, i assure you i've no thought of blaming you. mrs. cortelyon. that statement always precedes a quarrel. aubrey. i don't know whether this is the worst or the best luck. how will my wife regard it? is captain ardale a good fellow? mrs. cortelyon. my dear aubrey, you'd better read up the accounts of his wonderful heroism. face to face with death for a whole week; always with a smile and a cheering word for the poor helpless souls depending on him! of course, it's that that has stirred the depths of your child's nature. i've watched her while we've been dragging the story out of him, and if angels look different from ellean at that moment, i don't desire to meet any, that's all! aubrey. if you were in my position----? but you can't judge. mrs. cortelyon. why, if i had a marriageable daughter of my own and captain ardale proposed for her, naturally i should cry my eyes out all night--but i should thank heaven in the morning. aubrey. you believe so thoroughly in him? mrs. cortelyon. do you think i should have only a headache at this minute if i didn't! look here, you've got to see me down the lane; that's the least you can do, my friend. come into my house for a moment and shake hands with hugh. aubrey. what, is he here? mrs. cortelyon. he came through with us, to present himself formally to-morrow. where are my gloves? [aubrey _fetches them from the ottoman._] make my apologies to mrs. tanqueray, please. she's well, i hope? [_going towards the door._] i can't feel sorry she hasn't seen me in this condition. ellean _enters._ ellean. [_to_ mrs. cortelyon.] i've been waiting to wish you good-night. i was afraid i'd missed you. mrs. cortelyon. good-night, ellean. ellean. [_in a low voice, embracing_ mrs. cortelyon.] i can't thank you. dear mrs. cortelyon! mrs. cortelyon. [_her arms round_ ellean, _in a whisper to_ aubrey.] speak a word to her. [mrs. cortelyon _goes out._ aubrey. [_to_ ellean.] ellean, i'm going to see mrs. cortelyon home. tell paula where i am; explain, dear. [_going to the door_ ellean. [_her head drooping._] yes. [_quickly._] father! you are angry with me--disappointed? aubrey. angry?--no. ellean. disappointed? aubrey. [_smiling and going to her and taking her hand._] if so, it's only because you've shaken my belief in my discernment. i thought you took after your poor mother a little, ellean; but there's a look on your face to-night, dear, that i never saw on hers--never, never. ellean. [_leaning her head on his shoulder._] perhaps i ought not to have gone away? aubrey. hush! you're quite happy? ellean. yes. aubrey. that's right. then, as you are quite happy there is something i particularly want you to do for me ellean. ellean. what is that? aubrey. be very gentle with paula. will you? ellean. you think i have been unkind. aubrey. [_kissing her upon the forehead._] be very gentle with paula. [_he goes out and she stands looking after him, then, as she turns thoughtfully from the door, a rose is thrown through the window and falls at her feet. she picks up the flower wonderingly and goes to the window._ ellean. [_starting back._] hugh! hugh ardale, _a handsome young man of about seven-and-twenty, with a boyish face and manner, appears outside the window._ hugh. nelly! nelly dear! ellean. what's the matter? hugh. hush! nothing. it's only fun. [_laughing._] ha, ha, ha! i've found out that mrs. cortelyon's meadow runs up to your father's plantation; i've come through a gap in the hedge. ellean. why, hugh? hugh. i'm miserable at the warren; it's so different from the avenue de friedland. don't look like that! upon my word i meant just to peep at your home and go back, but i saw figures moving about here, and came nearer, hoping to get a glimpse of you. was that your father? [_entering the room._ ellean. yes. hugh. isn't this fun! a rabbit ran across my foot while i was hiding behind that old yew. ellean. you must go away; it's not right for you to be here like this. hugh. but it's only fun, i tell you. you take everything so seriously. do wish me good-night. ellean. we have said good-night. hugh. in the hall at the warren before mrs. cortelyon and a man-servant. oh, it's so different from the avenue de friedland! ellean. [_giving him her hand hastily._] good-night, hugh. hugh. is that all? we might be the merest acquaintances. [_he momentarily embraces her, but she releases herself._ ellean. it's when you're like this that you make me feel utterly miserable. [_throwing the rose from her angrily._] oh! hugh. i've offended you now, i suppose? ellean. yes. hugh. forgive me, nelly. come into the garden for five minutes; we'll stroll down to the plantation. ellean. no, no. hugh. for two minutes--to tell me you forgive me. ellean. i forgive you. hugh. evidently. i sha'n't sleep a wink to-night after this. what a fool i am! come down to the plantation. make it up with me. ellean. there is somebody coming into this room. do you wish to be seen here? hugh. i shall wait for you behind that yew-tree. you must speak to me. nelly! [_he disappears._ paula _enters._ paula. ellean! ellean. you--you are very surprised to see me, paula, of course. paula. why are you here? why aren't you with--your friend? ellean. i've come home--if you'll have me. we left paris this morning; mrs. cortelyon brought me back. she was here a minute or two ago; papa has just gone with her to the warren. he asked me to tell you. paula. there are some people staying with us that i'd rather you didn't meet. it was hardly worth your while to return for a few hours. ellean. a few hours? paula. well, when do you go to london? ellean. i don't think i go to london, after all. paula. [_eagerly._] you--you've quarrelled with her? ellean. no, no, no, not that; but--paula! [_in an altered tone._] paula. paula. [_startled._] eh? [ellean _goes deliberately to_ paula _and kisses her._] ellean! ellean. kiss me. paula. what--what's come to you? ellean. i want to behave differently to you in the future. is it too late? paula. too--late! [_impulsively kissing_ ellean _and crying._] no--no--no! no--no! ellean. paula, don't cry. paula. [_wiping her eyes_] i'm a little shaky; i haven't been sleeping. it's all right,--talk to me. ellean. there is something i want to tell you---- paula. is there--is there? [_they sit together on the ottoman,_ paula _taking_ ellean's _hand._ ellean. paula, in our house in the avenue de friedland, on the floor below us, there was a mrs. brereton. she used to be a friend of my mother's. mrs. cortelyon and i spent a great deal of our time with her. paula. [_suspiciously._] oh! [_letting_ ellean's _hand fall._] is this lady going to take you up in place of mrs. cortelyon? ellean. no, no. her brother is staying with her--_was_ staying with her. her brother---- [_breaking off in confusion._ paula. well? ellean. [_almost inaudibly._] paula---- [_she rises and walks away,_ paula _following her._ paula. ellean! [_taking hold of her._] you're not in love! [ellean _looks at_ paula _appealingly._ paula. oh! _you_ in love! you! oh, this is why you've come home! of course, you can make friends with me now! you'll leave us for good soon, i suppose; so it doesn't much matter being civil to me for a little while! ellean. oh, paula! paula. why, how you have deceived us--all of us! we've taken you for a cold-blooded little saint. the fools you've made of us! saint ellean! saint ellean! ellean. ah, i might have known you'd only mock me! paula. [_her tone changing._] eh? ellean. i--i can't talk to you. [_sitting on the settee._] you do nothing else but mock and sneer, nothing else. paula. ellean dear! ellean! i didn't mean it. i'm so horribly jealous, it's a sort of curse on me. [_kneeling beside_ ellean _and embracing her._] my tongue runs away with me. i'm going to alter, i swear i am. i've made some good resolutions, and, as god's above me, i'll keep them! if you are in love, if you do ever marry, that's no reason why we shouldn't be fond of each other. come, you've kissed me of your own accord--you can't take it back. now we're friends again, aren't we? ellean dear! i want to know everything, everything. ellean dear, ellean! ellean. paula, hugh has done something that makes me very angry. he came with us from paris to-day, to see papa. he is staying with mrs. cortelyon and--i ought to tell you---- paula. yes, yes. what? ellean. he has found his way by the warren meadow through the plantation up to this house. he is waiting to bid me good-night. [_glancing towards the garden._] he is--out there. paula. oh! ellean. what shall i do? paula. bring him in to see me! will you? ellean. no, no. paula. but i'm dying to know him. oh, yes, you must. i shall meet him before aubrey does. [_excitedly running her hands over her hair._] i'm so glad. [ellean _goes out by the window._] the mirror--mirror. what a fright i must look! [_not finding the hand-glass on the table, she jumps on to the settee, and surveys herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece, then sits quietly down and waits._] ellean! just fancy! ellean! _after a pause_ ellean _enters by the window with_ hugh. ellean. paula, this is captain ardale--mrs. tanqueray. [paula _risen and turns, and she and_ hugh _stand staring blankly at each other for a moment or two; then_ paula _advances and gives him her hand._ paula. [_in a strange voice, but calmly._] how do you do? hugh. how do you do? paula. [_to_ ellean.] mr. ardale and i have met in london, ellean. er--captain ardale, now? hugh. yes. ellean. in london? paula. they say the world's very small, don't they? hugh. yes. paula. ellean, dear, i want to have a little talk about you to mr. ardale--captain ardale--alone. [_putting her arms round_ ellean, _and leading her to the door._] come back in a little while. [ellean _nods to_ paula _with a smile and goes out, while_ paula _stands watching her at the open door._] in a little while--in a little---- [_closing the door and then taking a seat facing_ hugh.] be quick! mr. tanqueray has only gone down to the warren with mrs. cortelyon. what is to be done? hugh. [_blankly._] done? paula. done--done. something must be done. hugh. i understood that mr. tanqueray had married a mrs.--mrs.---- paula. jarman? hugh. yes. paula. i'd been going by that name. you didn't follow my doings after we separated. hugh. no. paula. [_sneeringly._] no. hugh. i went out to india. paula. what's to be done? hugh. damn this chance! paula. oh, my god! hugh. your husband doesn't know, does he? paula. that you and i----? hugh. yes. paula. no. he knows about others. hugh. not about me. how long were we----? paula. i don't remember, exactly. hugh. do you--do you think it matters? paula. his--his daughter. [_with a muttered exclamation he turns away and sits with his head in his hands._] what's to be done? hugh. i wish i could think. paula. oh! oh! what happened to that flat of ours in ethelbert street? hugh. i let it. paula. all that pretty furniture? hugh. sold it. paula. i came across the key of the escritoire the other day in an old purse! [_suddenly realising the horror and hopelessness of her position, and starting to her feet with an hysterical cry of rage._] what am i maundering about? hugh. for god's sake, be quiet! do let me think. paula. this will send me mad! [_suddenly turning and standing over him._] you--you beast, to crop up in my life again like this! hugh. i always treated you fairly. paula. [_weakly._] oh! i beg your pardon--i know you did--i---- [_she sinks on to the settee, crying hysterically._ hugh. hush! paula. she kissed me to-night! i'd won her over! i've had such a fight to make her love me! and now--just as she's beginning to love me, to bring this on her! hugh. hush, hush! don't break down! paula. [_sobbing._] you don't know! i--i haven't been getting on well in my marriage. it's been my fault. the life i used to lead spoilt me completely. but i'd made up my mind to turn over a new life from to-night. from to-night! hugh. paula---- paula. don't you call me that! hugh. mrs. tanqueray, there is no cause for you to despair in this way. it's all right, i tell you--it shall be all right. paula. [_shivering._] what are we to do? hugh. hold our tongues. paula. eh? [_staring vacantly._ hugh. the chances are a hundred to one against any one ever turning up who knew us when we were together. besides, no one would be such a brute as to split on us. if anybody did do such a thing we should have to lie! what are we upsetting ourselves like this for, when we've simply got to hold our tongues? paula. you're as mad as i am! hugh. can you think of a better plan? paula. there's only one plan possible--let's come to our senses!--mr. tanqueray must be told. hugh. your husband! what, and i lose ellean! i lose ellean! paula. you've got to lose her. hugh. i won't lose her! i can't lose her! paula. didn't i read of your doing any number of brave things in india? why, you seem to be an awful coward! hugh. that's another sort of pluck altogether; i haven't this sort of pluck. paula. oh, i don't ask _you_ to tell mr. tanqueray. that's my job. hugh. [_standing over her._] you--you--you'd better! you----! paula. [_rising._] don't bully me! i intend to. hugh. [_taking hold of her; she wrenches herself free._] look here, paula! i never treated you badly--you've owned it. why should you want to pay me out like this? you don't know how i love ellean! paula. yes, that's just what i _do_ know. hugh. i say you don't! she's as good as my own mother. i've been downright honest with her too. i told her, in paris, that i'd been a bit wild at one time, and, after a damned wretched day, she promised to forgive me because of what i'd done since in india. she's behaved like an angel to me! surely i oughtn't to lose her, after all, just because i've been like other fellows! no; i haven't been half as rackety as a hundred men we could think of. paula, don't pay me out for nothing; be fair to me, there's a good girl--be fair to me! paula. oh, i'm not considering you at all! i advise you not to stay here any longer; mr. tanqueray is sure to be back soon. hugh. [_taking up his hat._] what's the understanding between us then? what have we arranged to do? paula. i don't know what you're going to do; i've got to tell mr. tanqueray. hugh. by god, you shall do nothing of the sort! [_approaching her fiercely._ paula. you shocking coward! hugh. if you dare! [_going up to the window._] mind! if you dare! paula. [_following him._] why, what would you do? hugh. [_after a short pause, sullenly._] nothing. i'd shoot myself--that's nothing. good-night. paula. good-night. [_he disappears. she walks unsteadily to the ottoman, and sits; and as she does so her hand falls upon the little silver mirror, which she takes up, staring at her own reflection._ the fourth act _the drawing room at "highercoombe," the same evening._ paula _is still seated on the ottoman, looking vacantly before her, with the little mirror in her hand._ lady orreyed _enters._ lady orreyed. there you are! you never came into the billiard-room. isn't it maddening--cayley drummle gives me sixty out of a hundred and beats me. i must be out of form, because i know i play remarkably well for a lady. only last month---- [paula _rises._] whatever is the matter with you, old girl? paula. why? lady orreyed. [_staring._] it's the light, i suppose. [paula _replaces the mirror on the table._] by aubrey's bolting from the billiard-table in that fashion i thought perhaps---- paula. yes; it's all right. lady orreyed. you've patched it up? [paula _nods._] oh, i am jolly glad----! i mean---- paula. yes, i know what you mean. thanks, mabel. lady orreyed. [_kissing_ paula.] now take my advice; for the future---- paula. mabel, if i've been disagreeable to you while you've been staying here, i--i beg your pardon. [_walking away and sitting down._ lady orreyed. you disagreeable, my dear? i haven't noticed it. dodo and me both consider you make a first-class hostess, but then you've had such practice, haven't you? [_dropping on to the ottoman and gaping._] oh, talk about being sleepy----! paula. why don't you----! lady orreyed. why, dear, i must hang about for dodo. you may as well know it; he's in one of his moods. paula. [_under her breath._] oh----! lady orreyed. now, it's not his fault; it was deadly dull for him while we were playing billiards. cayley drummle did ask him to mark, but i stopped that; it's so easy to make a gentleman look like a billiard-marker. this is just how it always is; if poor old dodo has nothing to do, he loses count, as you may say. paula. hark! sir george orreyed _enters, walking slowly and deliberately; he looks pale and watery-eyed._ sir george. [_with mournful indistinctness._] i'm 'fraid we've lef' you a grea' deal to yourself to-night, mrs. tanqueray. attra'tions of billiards. i apol'gise. i say, where's ol' aubrey? paula. my husband has been obliged to go out to a neighbour's house. sir george. i want his advice on a rather pressing matter connected with my family--my family. [_sitting._] to-morrow will do just as well. lady orreyed. [_to_ paula.] this is the mood i hate so--drivelling about his precious family. sir george. the fact is, mrs. tanqueray, i am not easy in my min' 'bout the way i am treatin' my poor ol' mother. lady orreyed. [_to_ paula.] do you hear that? that's _his_ mother, but _my_ mother he won't so much as look at! sir george. i shall write to bruton street firs' thing in the morning. lady orreyed. [_to_ paula.] mamma has stuck to me through everything--well, you know! sir george. i'll get ol' aubrey to figure out a letter. i'll drop line to uncle fitz too--dooced shame of the ol' feller to chuck me over in this manner. [_wiping his eyes._] all my family have chucked me over. lady orreyed. [_rising._] dodo! sir george. jus' because i've married beneath me, to be chucked over! aunt lydia, the general, hooky whitgrave, lady sugnall--my own dear sister!--all turn their backs on me. it's more than i can stan'! lady orreyed. [_approaching him with dignity._] sir george, wish mrs. tanqueray good-night at once and come upstairs. do you hear me? sir george. [_rising angrily._] wha'---- lady orreyed. be quiet! sir george. you presoom to order me about! lady orreyed. you're making an exhibition of yourself! sir george. look 'ere----! lady orreyed. come along, i tell you! [_he hesitates, utters a few inarticulate sounds, then snatches up a fragile ornament from the table, and is about to dash it on to the ground._ lady orreyed _retreats, and_ paula _goes to him._ paula. george! [_he replaces the ornament._ sir george. [_shaking_ paula's _hand._] good ni', mrs. tanqueray. lady orreyed. [_to_ paula.] good-night, darling. wish aubrey good-night for me. now, dodo? [_she goes out._ sir george. [_to_ paula.] i say, are you goin' to sit up for ol' aubrey? paula. yes. sir george. shall i keep you comp'ny? paula. no, thank you, george. sir george. sure? paula. yes, sure. sir george. [_shaking hands._] good-night again. paula. good-night. [_she turns away. he goes out, steadying himself carefully. drummle appears outside the window, smoking._ drummle. [_looking into the room, and seeing_ paula.] my last cigar. where's aubrey? paula. gone down to the warren, to see mrs. cortelyon home. drummle. [_entering the room._] eh? did you say mrs. cortelyon? paula. yes. she has brought ellean back. drummle. bless my soul! why? paula. i--i'm too tired to tell you, cayley. if you stroll along the lane you'll meet aubrey. get the news from him. drummle. [_going up to the window._] yes, yes. [_returning to_ paula.] i don't want to bother you, only--the anxious old woman, you know. are you and aubrey----? paula. good friends again? drummle. [_nodding._] um. paula. [_giving him her hand._] quite, cayley, quite. drummle. [_retaining her hand._] that's capital. as i'm off so early to-morrow morning, let me say now--thank you for your hospitality. [_he bends over her hand gallantly, then goes out by the window._ paula. [_to herself._] "are you and aubrey----?" "good friends again?" "yes." "quite, cayley, quite." [_there is a brief pause, then_ aubrey _enters hurriedly, wearing a light overcoat and carrying a cap._ aubrey. paula dear! have you seen ellean? paula. i found her here when i came down. aubrey. she--she's told you? paula. yes, aubrey. aubrey. it's extraordinary, isn't it! not that somebody should fall in love with ellean or that ellean herself should fall in love. all that's natural enough and was bound to happen, i suppose, sooner or later. but this young fellow! you know his history? paula. his history? aubrey. you remember the papers were full of his name a few months ago? paula. oh, yes. aubrey. the man's as brave as a lion, there's no doubt about that; and, at the same time, he's like a big good-natured schoolboy, mrs. cortelyon says. have you ever pictured the kind of man ellean would marry some day? paula. i can't say that i have. aubrey. a grave, sedate fellow i've thought about--hah! she has fallen in love with the way in which ardale practically laid down his life to save those poor people shut up in the residency. [_taking off his coat._] well, i suppose if a man can do that sort of thing, one ought to be content. and yet---- [_throwing his coat on the settee._] i should have met him to-night, but he'd gone out. paula dear, tell me how you look upon this business. paula. yes, i will--i must. to begin with, i--i've seen mr. ardale. aubrey. captain ardale? paula. captain ardale. aubrey. seen him? paula. while you were away he came up here, through our grounds, to try to get a word with ellean. i made her fetch him in and present him to me. aubrey. [_frowning._] doesn't captain ardale know there's a lodge and a front door to this place? never mind! what is your impression of him? paula. aubrey, do you recollect my bringing you a letter--a letter giving you an account of myself--to the albany late one night--the night before we got married? aubrey. a letter? paula. you burnt it; don't you know? aubrey. yes; i know. paula. his name was in that letter. aubrey. [_going back from her slowly, and staring at her._] i don't understand. paula. well--ardale and i once kept house together. [_he remains silent, not moving._] why don't you strike me? hit me in the face--i'd rather you did! hurt me! hurt me! aubrey. [_after a pause._] what did you--and this man--say to each other--just now? paula. i--hardly--know. aubrey. think! paula. the end of it all was that i--i told him i must inform you of--what had happened ... he didn't want me to do that ... i declared that i would ... he dared me to. [_breaking down._] let me alone!--oh! aubrey. where was my daughter while this went on? paula. i--i had sent her out of the room ... that is all right. aubrey. yes, yes--yes, yes. [_he turns his head towards the door._ paula. who's that? _a_ servant _enters with a letter._ servant. the coachman has just run up with this from the warren, sir. [aubrey _takes the letter._] it's for mrs. tanqueray, sir; there's no answer. [_the_ servant _withdraws._ aubrey _goes to_ paula _and drops the letter into her lap; she opens it with uncertain hands._ paula. [_reading it to herself._] it's from--him. he's going away--or gone--i think. [_rising in a weak way._] what does it say? i never could make out his writing. [_she gives the letter to_ aubrey _and stands near him, looking at the letter over his shoulder as he reads._ aubrey. [_reading._] "i shall be in paris by to-morrow evening. shall wait there, at meurice's, for a week, ready to receive any communication you or your husband may address to me. please invent some explanation to ellean. mrs. tanqueray, for god's sake, do what you can for me." [paula _and_ aubrey _speak in low voices, both still looking at the letter._ paula. has he left the warren, i wonder, already? aubrey. that doesn't matter. paula. no, but i can picture him going quietly off. very likely he's walking on to bridgeford or cottering to-night, to get the first train in the morning. a pleasant stroll for him. aubrey. we'll reckon he's gone, that's enough. paula. that isn't to be answered in any way? aubrey. silence will answer that. paula. he'll soon recover his spirits, i know. aubrey. you know. [_offering her the letter._] you don't want this, i suppose? paula. no. aubrey. it's done with--done with. [_he tears the letter into small pieces. she has dropped the envelope; she searches for it, finds it, and gives it to him._ paula. here! aubrey. [_looking at the remnants of the letter._] this is no good; i must burn it. paula. burn it in your room. aubrey. yes. paula. put it in your pocket for now. aubrey. yes. [_he does so._ ellean _enters and they both turn, guiltily, and stare at her._ ellean. [_after a short silence, wonderingly._] papa---- aubrey. what do you want, ellean? ellean. i heard from willis that you had come in; i only want to wish you good-night. [paula _steals away, without looking back._] what's the matter? ah! of course, paula has told you about captain ardale? aubrey. well? ellean. have you and he met? aubrey. no. ellean. you are angry with him; so was i. but to-morrow when he calls and expresses his regret--to-morrow---- aubrey. ellean--ellean! ellean. yes, papa? aubrey. i--i can't let you see this man again. [_he walks away from her in a paroxysm of distress, then, after a moment or two, he returns to her and takes her to his arms._] ellean! my child! ellean. [_releasing herself._] what has happened, papa? what is it? aubrey. [_thinking out his words deliberately._] something has occurred, something has come to my knowledge, in relation to captain ardale, which puts any further acquaintanceship between you two out of the question. ellean. any further acquaintanceship ... out of the question? aubrey. yes. [_advancing to her quickly, but she shrinks from him._ ellean. no, no--i am quite well. [_after a short pause._] it's not an hour ago since mrs. cortelyon left you and me together here; you had nothing to urge against captain ardale then. aubrey. no. ellean. you don't know each other; you haven't even seen him this evening. father! aubrey. i have told you he and i have not met. ellean. mrs. cortelyon couldn't have spoken against him to you just now. no, no, no; she's too good a friend to both of us. aren't you going to give me some explanation? you can't take this position towards me--towards captain ardale--without affording me the fullest explanation. aubrey. ellean, there are circumstances connected with captain ardale's career which you had better remain ignorant of. it must be sufficient for you that i consider these circumstances render him unfit to be your husband. ellean. father! aubrey. you must trust me, ellean; you must try to understand the depth of my love for you and the--the agony it gives me to hurt you. you must trust me. ellean. i will, father; but you must trust me a little too. circumstances connected with captain ardale's career? aubrey. yes. ellean. when he presents himself here to-morrow of course you will see him and let him defend himself? aubrey. captain ardale will not be here to-morrow. ellean. not! you have stopped his coming here? aubrey. indirectly--yes. ellean. but just now he was talking to me at that window! nothing had taken place then! and since then nothing can have----! oh! why--you have heard something against him from paula. aubrey. from--paula! ellean. she knows him. aubrey. she has told you so? ellean. when i introduced captain ardale to her she said she had met him in london. of course! it is paula who has done this! aubrey. [_in a hard voice._] i--i hope you--you'll refrain from rushing at conclusions. there's nothing to be gained by trying to avoid the main point, which is that you must drive captain ardale out of your thoughts. understand that! you're able to obtain comfort from your religion, aren't you? i'm glad to think that's so. i talk to you in a harsh way, ellean, but i feel your pain almost as acutely as you do. [_going to the door._] i--i can't say anything more to you to-night. ellean. father! [_he pauses at the door._] father, i'm obliged to ask you this; there's no help for it--i've no mother to go to. does what you have heard about captain ardale concern the time when he led a wild, a dissolute life in london? aubrey. [_returning to her slowly and staring at her._] explain yourself! ellean. he has been quite honest with me. one day--in paris--he confessed to me--what a man's life is--what his life had been. aubrey. [_under his breath._] oh! ellean. he offered to go away, not to approach me again. aubrey. and you--you accepted his view of what a man's life is! ellean. as far as _i_ could forgive him, i forgave him. aubrey. [_with a groan._] why, when was it you left us? it hasn't taken you long to get your robe "just a little dusty at the hem!" ellean. what do you mean? aubrey. hah! a few weeks ago my one great desire was to keep you ignorant of evil. ellean. father, it is impossible to be ignorant of evil. instinct, common instinct, teaches us what is good and bad. surely i am none the worse for knowing what is wicked and detesting it! aubrey. detesting it! why, you love this fellow! ellean. ah, you don't understand! i have simply judged captain ardale as we all pray to be judged. i have lived in imagination through that one week in india when he deliberately offered his life back to god to save those wretched, desperate people. in his whole career i see now nothing but that one week; those few hours bring him nearer the saints, i believe, than fifty uneventful years of mere blamelessness would have done! and so, father, if paula has reported anything to captain ardale's discredit---- aubrey. paula----! ellean. it must be paula; it can't be anybody else. aubrey. you--you'll please keep paula out of the question. finally, ellean, understand me--i have made up my mind. [_again going to the door._ ellean. but wait--listen! i have made up my mind also. aubrey. ah! i recognise your mother in you now! ellean. you need not speak against my mother because you are angry with me! aubrey. i--i hardly know what i'm saying to you. in the morning--in the morning---- [_he goes out. she remains standing, and turns her head to listen. then, after a moment's hesitation she goes softly to the window, and looks out under the verandah._ ellean. [_in a whisper._] paula! paula! [paula _appears outside the window and steps into the room; her face is white and drawn, her hair is a little disordered._ paula. [_huskily._] well? ellean. have you been under the verandah all the while--listening? paula. n--no. ellean. you _have_ overheard us--i see you have. and it _is_ you who have been speaking to my father against captain ardale. isn't it? paula, why don't you own it or deny it? paula. oh, i--i don't mind owning it; why should i? ellean. ah! you seem to have been very very eager to tell your tale. paula. no, i wasn't eager, ellean. i'd have given something not to have had to do it. i wasn't eager. ellean. not! oh, i think you might safely have spared us all for a little while. paula. but, ellean, you forget i--i am your step-mother. it was my--my duty--to tell your father what i--what i knew---- ellean. what you knew! why, after all, what can you know! you can only speak from gossip, report, hearsay! how is it possible that you----! [_she stops abruptly. the two women stand staring at each other for a moment; then_ ellean _backs away from_ paula _slowly._] paula! paula. what--what's the matter? ellean. you--you knew captain ardale in london! paula. why--what do you mean? ellean. oh! [_she makes for the door, but_ paula _catches her by the wrist._ paula. you shall tell me what you mean! ellean. ah! [_suddenly looking fixedly in_ paula's _face._] you know what i mean. paula. you accuse me! ellean. it's in your face! paula. [_hoarsely._] you--you think i'm--that sort of creature, do you? ellean. let me go! paula. answer me! you've always hated me! [_shaking her._] out with it! ellean. you hurt me! paula. you've always hated me! you shall answer me! ellean. well, then, i have always--always---- paula. what? ellean. i have always known what you were! paula. ah! who--who told you? ellean. nobody but yourself. from the first moment i saw you i knew you were altogether unlike the good women i'd left; directly i saw you i knew what my father had done. you've wondered why i've turned from you! there--that's the reason! oh, but this is a horrible way for the truth to come home to every one! oh! paula. it's a lie! it's all a lie! [_forcing_ ellean _down upon her knees._] you shall beg my pardon for it. [_ellean utters a loud shriek of terror._] ellean, i'm a good woman! i swear i am! i've always been a good woman! you dare to say i've ever been anything else! it's a lie! [_throwing her off violently._ aubrey _re-enters._ aubrey. paula! [paula _staggers back as_ aubrey _advances. raising_ ellean.] what's this? what's this? ellean. [_faintly._] nothing. it--it's my fault. father, i--i don't wish to see captain ardale again. [_she goes out,_ aubrey _slowly following her to the door._ paula. aubrey, she--she guesses. aubrey. guesses? paula. about me--and ardale. aubrey. about you--and ardale? paula. she says she suspected my character from the beginning ... that's why she's always kept me at a distance ... and now she sees through---- [_she falters; he helps her to the ottoman, where she sits._ aubrey. [_bending over her._] paula, you must have said something--admitted something---- paula. i don't think so. it--it's in my face. aubrey. what? paula. she tells me so. she's right! i'm tainted through and through; anybody can see it, anybody can find it out. you said much the same to me to-night. aubrey. if she has got this idea into her head we must drive it out, that's all. we must take steps to---- what shall we do? we had better--better----what--what? [_sitting and staring before him._ paula. ellean! so meek, so demure! you've often said she reminded you of her mother. yes, i know now what your first marriage was like. aubrey. we must drive this idea out of her head. we'll do something. what shall we do? paula. she's a regular woman too. she could forgive _him_ easily enough--but _me_! that's just a woman! aubrey. what _can_ we do? paula. why, nothing! she'd have no difficulty in following up her suspicions. suspicions! you should have seen how she looked at me! [_he buries his head in his hands. there is silence for a time, then she rises slowly, and goes and sits beside him._] aubrey! aubrey. yes. paula. i'm very sorry. [_without meeting her eyes, he lays his hand on her arm for a moment._ aubrey. well, we must look things straight in the face. [_glancing round._] at any rate, we've done with this. paula. i suppose so. [_after a brief pause._] of course, she and i can't live under the same roof any more. you know she kissed me to-night, of her own accord. aubrey. i asked her to alter towards you. paula. that was it, then. aubrey. i--i'm sorry i sent her away. paula. it was my fault; i made it necessary. aubrey. perhaps now she'll propose to return to the convent,--well, she must. paula. would you like to keep her with you and--and leave me? aubrey. paula----! paula. you needn't be afraid i'd go back to--what i was. i couldn't. aubrey. sssh, for god's sake! we--you and i--we'll get out of this place ... what a fool i was to come here again! paula. you lived here with your first wife! aubrey. we'll get out of this place and go abroad again, and begin afresh. paula. begin afresh? aubrey. there's no reason why the future shouldn't be happy for us--no reason that i can see---- paula. aubrey! aubrey. yes? paula. you'll never forget this, you know. aubrey. this? paula. to-night, and everything that's led up to it. our coming here, ellean, our quarrels--cat and dog!--mrs. cortelyon, the orreyeds, this man! what an everlasting nightmare for you! aubrey. oh, we can forget it, if we choose. paula. that was always your cry. how _can_ one do it! aubrey. well make our calculations solely for the future, talk about the future, think about the future. paula. i believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate. aubrey. that's an awful belief. paula. to-night proves it. you must see now that, do what we will, go where we will, you'll be continually reminded of--what i was. i see it. aubrey. you're frightened to-night; meeting this man has frightened you. but that sort of thing isn't likely to recur. the world isn't quite so small as all that. paula. isn't it! the only great distances it contains are those we carry within ourselves--the distances that separate husbands and wives, for instance. and so it'll be with us. you'll do your best--oh, i know that--you're a good fellow. but circumstances will be too strong for you in the end, mark my words. aubrey. paula----! paula. of course i'm pretty now--i'm pretty still--and a pretty woman, whatever else she may be, is always--well, endurable. but even now i notice that the lines of my face are getting deeper; so are the hollows about my eyes. yes, my face is covered with little shadows that usen't to be there. oh, i know i'm "going off." i hate paint and dye and those messes, but, by-and-by, i shall drift the way of the others; i sha'n't he able to help myself. and then, some day--perhaps very suddenly, under a queer, fantastic light at night or in the glare of the morning--that horrid, irresistible truth that physical repulsion forces on men and women will come to you, and you'll sicken at me. aubrey. i----! paula. you'll see me then, at last, with other people's eyes; you'll see me just as your daughter does now, as all wholesome folks see women like me. and i shall have no weapon to fight with--not one serviceable little bit of prettiness left me to defend myself with! a worn-out creature--broken up, very likely, some time before i ought to be--my hair bright, my eyes dull, my body too thin or too stout, my cheeks raddled and ruddled--a ghost, a wreck, a caricature, a candle that gutters, call such an end what you like! oh, aubrey, what shall i be able to say to you then? and this is the future you talk about! i know it--i know it! [_he is still sitting staring forward; she rocks herself to and fro as if in pain._] oh, aubrey! oh! oh! aubrey. paula----! [_trying to comfort her._ paula. oh, and i wanted so much to sleep to-night! [_laying her head upon his shoulder. from the distance, in the garden, there comes the sound of_ drummle's _voice; he is singing as he approaches the house._] that's cayley, coming back from the warren. [_starting up._] he doesn't know, evidently. i--i won't see him! [_she goes out quickly._ drummle's _voice comes nearer._ aubrey _rouses himself and snatches up a book from the table, making a pretence of reading. after a moment or two,_ drummle _appears at the window and looks in._ drummle. aha! my dear chap! aubrey. cayley? drummle. [_coming into the room._] i went down to the warren after you? aubrey. yes? drummle. missed you. well? i've been gossiping with mrs. cortelyon. confound you, i've heard the news! aubrey. what have you heard? drummle. what have i heard! why--ellean and young ardale! [_looking at_ aubrey _keenly._] my dear aubrey! alice is under the impression that you are inclined to look on the affair favourably. aubrey. [_rising and advancing to_ drummle.] you've not--met--captain ardale? drummle. no. why do you ask? by-the-bye, i don't know that i need tell you--but it's rather strange. he's not at the warren to-night. aubrey. no? drummle. he left the house half-an-hour ago, to stroll about the lanes; just now a note came from him, a scribble in pencil, simply telling alice that she would receive a letter from him to-morrow. what's the matter? there's nothing very wrong, is there! my dear chap, pray forgive me if i'm asking too much. aubrey. cayley, you--you urged me to send her away! drummle. ellean! yes, yes. but--but--by all accounts this is quite an eligible young fellow. alice has been giving me the history---- aubrey. curse him! [_hurling his book to the floor._] curse him! yes, i do curse him--him and his class! perhaps i curse myself too in doing it. he has only led "a man's life"--just as i, how many of us, have done! the misery he has brought on me and mine it's likely enough we, in our time, have helped to bring on others by this leading "a man's life"! but i do curse him for all that. my god, _i've_ nothing more to fear--i've paid _my_ fine! and so i can curse him in safety. curse him! curse him! drummle. in heaven's name, tell me what's happened? aubrey. [_gripping_ drummle's _arm._] paula! paula! drummle. what? aubrey. they met to-night here. they--they--they're not strangers to each other. drummle. aubrey! aubrey. curse him! my poor, wretched wife! my poor, wretched wife! [_the door opens and_ ellean _appears. the two men turn to her. there is a moment's silence._ ellean. father ... father...! aubrey. ellean? ellean. i--i want you. [_he goes to her._] father ... go to paula! [_he looks into her face, startled._] quickly--quickly! [_he passes her to go out, she seizes his arm, with a cry._] no, no; don't go! [_he shakes her off and goes._ ellean _staggers back towards_ drummle. drummle. [_to_ ellean.] what do you mean? what do you mean? ellean. i--i went to her room--to tell her i was sorry for something i had said to her. and i _was_ sorry--i _was_ sorry. i heard the fall. i--i've seen her. it's horrible. drummle. she--she has----! ellean. killed--herself? yes--yes. so everybody will say. but i know--i helped to kill her. if i had only been merciful! [_she faints upon the ottoman. he pauses for a moment irresolutely--then he goes to the door, opens it, and stands looking out._ _printed by_ ballantyne, hanson, & co. _london and edinburgh_ * * * * * transcriber's note: spelling has been preserved as in the original, but several cases of missing punctuation have been corrected. the pretty lady a novel by arnold bennett "_virtue has never yet been adequately represented by any who have had any claim to be considered virtuous. it is the sub-vicious who best understand virtue. let the virtuous people stick to describing vice--which they can do well enough_." samuel butler contents chapter . the promenade . the power . the flat . confidence . ostend . the albany . for the empire . boots . the club . the mission . the telegram . rendezvous . in committee . queen . evening out . the virgin . sunday afternoon . the mystic . the visit . mascot . the leave-train . getting on with the war . the call . the soldier . the ring . the return . the clyde . salome . the streets . the child's arm . "romance" . mrs. braiding . the roof . in the boudoir . queen dead . collapse . the invisible powers . the victory . idyll . the window . the envoy chapter i the promenade the piece was a west end success so brilliant that even if you belonged to the intellectual despisers of the british theatre you could not hold up your head in the world unless you had seen it; even for such as you it was undeniably a success of curiosity at least. the stage scene flamed extravagantly with crude orange and viridian light, a rectangle of bedazzling illumination; on the boards, in the midst of great width, with great depth behind them and arching height above, tiny squeaking figures ogled the primeval passion in gesture and innuendo. from the arc of the upper circle convergent beams of light pierced through gloom and broke violently on this group of the half-clad lovely and the swathed grotesque. the group did not quail. in fullest publicity it was licensed to say that which in private could not be said where men and women meet, and that which could not be printed. it gave a voice to the silent appeal of pictures and posters and illustrated weeklies all over the town; it disturbed the silence of the most secret groves in the vast, undiscovered hearts of men and women young and old. the half-clad lovely were protected from the satyrs in the audience by an impalpable screen made of light and of ascending music in which strings, brass, and concussion exemplified the naïve sensuality of lyrical niggers. the guffaw which, occasionally leaping sharply out of the dim, mysterious auditorium, surged round the silhouetted conductor and drove like a cyclone between the barriers of plush and gilt and fat cupids on to the stage--this huge guffaw seemed to indicate what might have happened if the magic protection of the impalpable screen had not been there. behind the audience came the restless promenade, where was the reality which the stage reflected. there it was, multitudinous, obtainable, seizable, dumbly imploring to be carried off. the stage, very daring, yet dared no more than hint at the existence of the bright and joyous reality. but there it was, under the same roof. christine entered with madame larivaudière. between shoulders and broad hats, as through a telescope, she glimpsed in the far distance the illusive, glowing oblong of the stage; then the silhouetted conductor and the tops of instruments; then the dark, curved concentric rows of spectators. lastly she took in the promenade, in which she stood. she surveyed the promenade with a professional eye. it instantly shocked her, not as it might have shocked one ignorant of human nature and history, but by reason of its frigidity, its constraint, its solemnity, its pretence. in one glance she embraced all the figures, moving or stationary, against the hedge of shoulders in front and against the mirrors behind--all of them: the programme girls, the cigarette girls, the chocolate girls, the cloak-room girls, the waiters, the overseers, as well as the vivid courtesans and their clientèle in black, tweed, or khaki. with scarcely an exception they all had the same strange look, the same absence of gesture. they were northern, blond, self-contained, terribly impassive. christine impulsively exclaimed--and the faint cry was dragged out of her, out of the bottom of her heart, by what she saw: "my god! how mournful it is!" lise larivaudière, a stout and benevolent bruxelloise, agreed with uncomprehending indulgence. the two chatted together for a few moments, each ceremoniously addressing the other as "madame," "madame," and then they parted, insinuating themselves separately into the slow, confused traffic of the promenade. chapter the power christine knew piccadilly, leicester square, regent street, a bit of oxford street, the green park, hyde park, victoria station, charing cross. beyond these, london, measureless as the future and the past, surrounded her with the unknown. but she had not been afraid, because of her conviction that men were much the same everywhere, and that she had power over them. she did not exercise this power consciously; she had merely to exist and it exercised itself. for her this power was the mystical central fact of the universe. now, however, as she stood in the promenade, it seemed to her that something uncanny had happened to the universe. surely it had shifted from its pivot! her basic conviction trembled. men were not the same everywhere, and her power over them was a delusion. englishmen were incomprehensible; they were not human; they were apart. the memory of the hundreds of englishmen who had yielded to her power in paris (for she had specialised in travelling englishmen) could not re-establish her conviction as to the sameness of men. the presence of her professed rivals of various nationalities in the promenade could not restore it either. the promenade in its cold, prim languor was the very negation of desire. she was afraid. she foresaw ruin for herself in this london, inclement, misty and inscrutable. and then she noticed a man looking at her, and she was herself again and the universe was itself again. she had a sensation of warmth and heavenly reassurance, just as though she had drunk an anisette or a crême de menthe. her features took on an innocent expression; the characteristic puckering of the brows denoted not discontent, but a gentle concern for the whole world and also virginal curiosity. the man passed her. she did not stir. presently he emerged afresh out of the moving knots of promenaders and discreetly approached her. she did not smile, but her eyes lighted with a faint amiable benevolence--scarcely perceptible, doubtful, deniable even, but enough. the man stopped. she at once gave a frank, kind smile, which changed all her face. he raised his hat an inch or so. she liked men to raise their hats. clearly he was a gentleman of means, though in morning dress. his cigar had a very fine aroma. she classed him in half a second and was happy. he spoke to her in french, with a slight, unmistakable english accent, but very good, easy, conversational french--french french. she responded almost ecstatically: "ah, you speak french!" she was too excited to play the usual comedy, so flattering to most englishmen, of pretending that she thought from his speech that he was a frenchman. the french so well spoken from a man's mouth in london most marvellously enheartened her and encouraged her in the perilous enterprise of her career. she was candidly grateful to him for speaking french. he said after a moment: "you have not at all a fatigued air, but would it not be preferable to sit down?" a man of the world! he could phrase his politeness. ah! there were none like an englishman of the world. frenchmen, delightfully courteous up to a point, were unsatisfactory past that point. frenchmen of the south were detestable, and she hated them. "you have not been in london long?" said the man, leading her away to the lounge. she observed then that, despite his national phlegm, he was in a state of rather intense excitation. luck! enormous luck! and also an augury for the future! she was professing in london for the first time in her life; she had not been in the promenade for five minutes; and lo! the ideal admirer. for he was not young. what a fine omen for her profound mysticism and superstitiousness! chapter the flat her flat was in cork street. as soon as they entered it the man remarked on its warmth and its cosiness, so agreeable after the november streets. christine only smiled. it was a long, narrow flat--a small sitting-room with a piano and a sideboard, opening into a larger bedroom shaped like a thick l. the short top of the l, not cut off from the rest of the room, was installed as a _cabinet de toilette_, but it had a divan. from the divan, behind which was a heavily curtained window, you could see right through the flat to the curtained window of the sitting-room. all the lights were softened by paper shades of a peculiar hot tint between indian red and carmine, giving a rich, romantic effect to the gleaming pale enamelled furniture, and to the voluptuous engravings after sir frederick leighton, and the sweet, sentimental engravings after marcus stone, and to the assorted knicknacks. the flat had homogeneity, for everything in it, except the stove, had been bought at one shop in tottenham court road by a landlord who knew his business. the stove, which was large, stood in the bedroom fireplace, and thence radiated celestial comfort and security throughout the home; the stove was the divinity of the home and christine the priestess; she had herself bought the stove, and she understood its personality--it was one of your finite gods. "will you take something?" she asked, the hostess. whisky and a siphon and glasses were on the sideboard. "oh no, thanks!" "not even a cigarette?" holding out the box and looking up at him, she appealed with a long, anxious glance that he should honour her cigarettes. "thank you!" he said. "i should like a cigarette very much." she lit a match for him. "but you--do you not smoke?" "yes. sometimes." "try one of mine--for a change." he produced a long, thin gold cigarette-case, stuffed with cigarettes. she lit a cigarette from his. "oh!" she cried after a few violent puffs. "i like enormously your cigarettes. where are they to be found?" "look!" said he. "i will put these few in your box." and he poured twenty cigarettes into an empty compartment of the box, which was divided into two. "not all!" she protested. "yes." "but i say no!" she insisted with a gesture suddenly firm, and put a single cigarette back into his case and shut the case with a snap, and herself returned it to his pocket. "one ought never to be without a cigarette." he said: "you understand life.... how nice it is here!" he looked about and then sighed. "but why do you sigh?" "sigh of content! i was just thinking this place would be something else if an english girl had it. it is curious, lamentable, that english girls understand nothing--certainly not love." "as for that, i've always heard so." "they understand nothing. not even warmth. one is cold in their rooms." "as for that--i mean warmth--one may say that i understand it; i do." "you understand more than warmth. what is your name?" "christine." she was the accidental daughter of a daughter of joy. the mother, as frequently happens in these cases, dreamed of perfect respectability for her child and kept christine in the country far away in paris, meaning to provide a good dowry in due course. at forty-two she had not got the dowry together, nor even begun to get it together, and she was ill. feckless, dilatory and extravagant, she saw as in a vision her own shortcomings and how they might involve disaster for christine. christine, she perceived, was a girl imperfectly educated--for in the affair of christine's education the mother had not aimed high enough--indolent, but economical, affectionate, and with a very great deal of temperament. actuated by deep maternal solicitude, she brought her daughter back to paris, and had her inducted into the profession under the most decent auspices. at nineteen christine's second education was complete. most of it the mother had left to others, from a sense of propriety. but she herself had instructed christine concerning the five great plagues of the profession. and also she had adjured her never to drink alcohol save professionally, never to invest in anything save bonds of the city of paris, never to seek celebrity, which according to the mother meant ultimate ruin, never to mix intimately with other women. she had expounded the great theory that generosity towards men in small things is always repaid by generosity in big things--and if it is not the loss is so slight! and she taught her the fundamental differences between nationalities. with a russian you had to eat, drink and listen. with a german you had to flatter, and yet adroitly insert, "do not imagine that i am here for the fun of the thing." with an italian you must begin with finance. with a frenchman you must discuss finance before it is too late. with an englishman you must talk, for he will not, but in no circumstances touch finance until he has mentioned it. in each case there was a risk, but the risk should be faced. the course of instruction finished, christine's mother had died with a clear conscience and a mind consoled. said christine, conversational, putting the question that lips seemed then to articulate of themselves in obedience to its imperious demand for utterance: "how long do you think the war will last?" the man answered with serenity: "the war has not begun yet." "how english you are! but all the same, i ask myself whether you would say that if you had seen belgium. i came here from ostend last month." the man gazed at her with new vivacious interest. "so it is like that that you are here!" "but do not let us talk about it," she added quickly with a mournful smile. "no, no!" he agreed.... "i see you have a piano. i expect you are fond of music." "ah!" she exclaimed in a fresh, relieved tone. "am i fond of it! i adore it, quite simply. do play for me. play a boston--a two-step." "i can't," he said. "but you play. i am sure of it." "and you?" he parried. she made a sad negative sign. "well, i'll play something out of _the rosenkavalier_." "ah! but you are a _musician_!" she amiably scrutinised him. "and yet--no." smiling, he, too, made a sad negative sign. "the waltz out of _the rosenkavalier_, eh?" "oh, yes! a waltz. i prefer waltzes to anything." as soon as he had played a few bars she passed demurely out of the sitting-room, through the main part of the bedroom into the _cabinet de toilette_. she moved about in the _cabinet de toilette_ thinking that the waltz out of _the rosenkavalier_ was divinely exciting. the delicate sound of her movements and the plash of water came to him across the bedroom. as he played he threw a glance at her now and then; he could see well enough, but not very well because the smoke of the shortening cigarette was in his eyes. she returned at length into the sitting-room, carrying a small silk bag about five inches by three. the waltz finished. "but you'll take cold!" he murmured. "no. at home i never take cold. besides--" smiling at him as he swung round on the music-stool, she undid the bag, and drew from it some folded stuff which she slowly shook out, rather in the manner of a conjurer, until it was revealed as a full-sized kimono. she laughed. "is it not marvellous?" "it is." "that is what i wear. in the way of chiffons it is the only fantasy i have bought up to the present in london. of course, clothes--i have been forced to buy clothes. it matches exquisitely the stockings, eh?" she slid her arms into the sleeves of the transparency. she was a pretty and highly developed girl of twenty-six, short, still lissom, but with the fear of corpulence in her heart. she had beautiful hair and beautiful eyes, and she had that pucker of the forehead denoting, according to circumstances, either some kindly, grave preoccupation or a benevolent perplexity about something or other. she went near him and clasped hands round his neck, and whispered: "your waltz was adorable. you are an artist." and with her shoulders she seemed to sketch the movements of dancing. chapter confidence after putting on his thick overcoat and one glove he had suddenly darted to the dressing-table for his watch, which he was forgetting. christine's face showed sympathetic satisfaction that he had remembered in time, simultaneously implying that even if he had not remembered, the watch would have been perfectly safe till he called for it. the hour was five minutes to midnight. he was just going. christine had dropped a little batch of black and red treasury notes on to the dressing-table with an indifferent if not perhaps an impatient air, as though she held these financial sequels to be a stain on the ideal, a tedious necessary, a nuisance, or simply negligible. she kissed him goodbye, and felt agreeably fragile and soft within the embrace of his huge, rough overcoat. and she breathed winningly, delicately, apologetically into his ear: "thou wilt give something to the servant?" her soft eyes seemed to say, "it is not for myself that i am asking, is it?" he made an easy philanthropic gesture to indicate that the servant would have no reason to regret his passage. he opened the door into the little hall, where the fat italian maid was yawning in an atmosphere comparatively cold, and then, in a change of purpose, he shut the door again. "you do not know how i knew you could not have been in london very long," he said confidentially. "no." "because i saw you in paris one night in july--at the marigny theatre." "not at the marigny." "yes. the marigny." "it is true. i recall it. i wore white and a yellow stole." "yes. you stood on the seat at the back of the promenade to see a contortionist girl better, and then you jumped down. i thought you were delicious--quite delicious." "thou flatterest me. thou sayest that to flatter me." "no, no. i assure you i went to the marigny every night for five nights afterwards in order to find you." "but the marigny is not my regular music-hall. olympia is my regular music-hall." "i went to olympia and all the other halls, too, each night." "ah, yes! then i must have left paris. but why, my poor friend, why didst thou not speak to me at the marigny? i was alone." "i don't know. i hesitated. i suppose i was afraid." "thou!" "so to-night i was terribly content to meet you. when i saw that it was really you i could not believe my eyes." she understood now his agitation on first accosting her in the promenade. the affair very pleasantly grew more serious for her. she liked him. he had nice eyes. he was fairly tall and broadly built, but not a bit stout. neither dark nor blond. not handsome, and yet ... beneath a certain superficial freedom, he was reserved. he had beautiful manners. he was refined, and he was refined in love; and yet he knew something. she very highly esteemed refinement in a man. she had never met a refined woman, and was convinced that few such existed. of course he was rich. she could be quite sure, from his way of handling money, that he was accustomed to handling money. she would swear he was a bachelor merely on the evidence of his eyes.... yes, the affair had lovely possibilities. afraid to speak to her, and then ran round paris after her for five nights! had he, then, had the lightning-stroke from her? it appeared so. and why not? she was not like other girls, and this she had always known. she did precisely the same things as other girls did. true. but somehow, subtly, inexplicably, when she did them they were not the same things. the proof: he, so refined and distinguished himself, had felt the difference. she became very tender. "to think," she murmured, "that only on that one night in all my life did i go to the marigny! and you saw me!" the coincidence frightened her--she might have missed this nice, dependable, admiring creature for ever. but the coincidence also delighted her, strengthening her superstition. the hand of destiny was obviously in this affair. was it not astounding that on one night of all nights he should have been at the marigny? was it not still more astounding that on one night of all nights he should have been in the promenade in leicester square?... the affair was ordained since before the beginning of time. therefore it was serious. "ah, my friend!" she said. "if only you had spoken to me that night at the marigny, you might have saved me from troubles frightful--fantastic." "how?" he had confided in her--and at the right moment. with her human lore she could not have respected a man who had begun by admitting to a strange and unproved woman that for five days and nights he had gone mad about her. to do so would have been folly on his part. but having withheld his wild secret, he had charmingly showed, by the gesture of opening and then shutting the door, that at last it was too strong for his control. such candour deserved candour in return. despite his age, he looked just then attractively, sympathetically boyish. he was a benevolent creature. the responsive kindliness of his enquiring "how?" was beyond question genuine. once more, in the warm and dark-glowing comfort of her home, the contrast between the masculine, thick rough overcoat and the feminine, diaphanous, useless kimono appealed to her soul. it seemed to justify, even to call for, confidence from her to him. the italian woman behind the door coughed impatiently and was not heard. chapter ostend in july she had gone to ostend with an american. a gentleman, but mad. one of those men with a fixed idea that everything would always be all right and that nothing really and permanently uncomfortable could possibly happen. a very fair man, with red hair, and radiating wrinkles all round his eyes--phenomenon due to his humorous outlook on the world. he laughed at her because she travelled with all her bonds of the city of paris on her person. he had met her one night, and the next morning suggested the ostend excursion. too sudden, too capricious, of course; but she had always desired to see the cosmopolitanism of ostend. trouville she did not like, as you had sand with every meal if you lived near the front. hotel astoria at ostend. complete flat in the hotel. very chic. the red-haired one, the _rouquin_, had broad ideas, very broad ideas, of what was due to a woman. in fact, one might say that he carried generosity in details to excess. but naturally with americans it was necessary to be surprised at nothing. the _rouquin_ said steadily that war would not break out. he said so until the day on which it broke out. he then became a turk. yes, a turk. he assumed rights over her, the rights of protection, but very strange rights. he would not let her try to return to paris. he said the germans might get to paris, but to ostend, never--because of the english! difficult to believe, but he had locked her up in the complete flat. the ostend season had collapsed--pluff--like that. the hotel staff vanished almost entirely. one or two old fat belgian women on the bedroom floors--that seemed to be all. the _rouquin_ was exquisitely polite, but very firm. in fine, he was a master. it was astonishing what he did. they were the sole remaining guests in the astoria. and they remained because he refused to permit the management to turn him out. weeks passed. yes, weeks. english forces came to ostend. marvellous. among nations there was none like the english. she did not see them herself. she was ill. the _rouquin_ had told her that she was ill when she was not ill, but lo! the next day she was ill--oh, a long time. the _rouquin_ told her the news--battle of the marne and all species of glorious deeds. an old fat belgian told her a different kind of news. the stories of the fall of liége, namur, brussels, antwerp. the massacres at aerschot, at louvain. terrible stories that travelled from mouth to mouth among women. there was always rape and blood and filth mingled. stories of a frightful fascination ... unrepeatable! ah! the _rouquin_ had informed her one day that the belgian government had come to ostend. proof enough, according to him, that ostend could not be captured by the germans! after that he had said nothing about the belgian government for many days. and then one day he had informed her casually that the belgian government was about to leave ostend by steamer. but days earlier the old fat woman had told her that the german staff had ordered seventy-five rooms at the hôtel des postes at ghent. seventy-five rooms. and that in the space of a few hours ghent had become a city of the dead.... thousands of refugees in ostend. thousands of escaped virgins. thousands of wounded soldiers. often, the sound of guns all day and all night. and in the daytime occasionally, a sharp sound, very loud; that meant that a german aeroplane was over the town--killing ... plenty to kill. ostend was always full, behind the digue, and yet people were always leaving--by steamer. steamers taken by assault. at first there had been formalities, permits, passports. but when one steamer had been taken by assault--no more formalities! in trying to board the steamers people were drowned. they fell into the water and nobody troubled--so said the old woman. christine was better; desired to rise. the _rouquin_ said no, not yet. he would believe naught. and now he believed one thing, and it filled his mind--that german submarines sank all refugee ships in the north sea. proof of the folly of leaving ostend. yet immediately afterwards he came and told her to get up. that is to say, she had been up for several days, but not outside. he told her to come away, come away. she had only summer clothes, and it was mid-october. what a climate, ostend in october! the old woman said that thousands of parcels of clothes for refugees had been sent by generous england. she got a parcel; she had means of getting it. she opened it with pride in the bedroom of the flat. it contained eight corsets and a ball-dress. a droll race, all the same, the english. had they no imagination? but, no doubt, society women were the same everywhere. it was notorious that in france.... christine went forth in her summer clothes. the _rouquin_ had got an old horse-carriage. he gave her much american money--or, rather, cheques--which, true enough, she had since cashed with no difficulty in london. they had to leave the carriage. the station square was full of guns and women and children and bundles. yes, together with a few men. she spent the whole night in the station square with the _rouquin_, in her summer clothes and his overcoat. at six o'clock in the evening it was already dark. a night interminable. babies crying. one heard that at the other end of the square a baby had been born. she, christine, sat next to a young mother with a baby. both mother and baby had the right arm bandaged. they had both been shot through the arm with the same bullet. it was near aerschot. the young woman also told her.... no, she could not relate that to an englishman. happily it did not rain. but the wind and the cold! in the morning the _rouquin_ put her on to a fishing-vessel. she had nothing but her bonds of the city of paris and her american cheques. the crush was frightful. the captain of the fishing-vessel, however, comprehended what discipline was. he made much money. the _rouquin_ would not come. he said he was an american citizen and had all his papers. for the rest, the captain would not let him come, though doubtless the captain could have been bribed. as they left the harbour, with other trawlers, they could see the quays all covered with the disappointed, waiting. somebody in the boat said that the germans had that morning reached--she forgot the name of the place, but it was the next village to ostend on the bruges road. thus christine parted from the _rouquin_. mad! always wrong, even about the german submarines. but _chic_. truly _chic_. what a voyage! what adventures with the charitable people in england! people who resembled nothing else on earth! people who did not understand what life was.... no understanding of that which it is--life! in fine ...! however, she should stay in england. it was the only country in which one could have confidence. she was trying to sell the furniture of her flat in paris. complications! under the emergency law she was not obliged to pay her rent to the landlord; but if she removed her furniture then she would have to pay the rent. what did it matter, though? besides, she might not be able to sell her furniture after all. remarkably few women in paris at that moment were in a financial state to buy furniture. ah no! "but i have not told you the tenth part!" said christine. "terrible! terrible!" murmured the man. all the heavy sorrow of the world lay on her puckered brow, and floated in her dark glistening eyes. then she smiled, sadly but with courage. "i will come to see you again," said the man comfortingly. "are you here in the afternoons?" "every afternoon, naturally." "well, i will come--not to-morrow--the day after to-morrow." already, long before, interrupting the buttoning of his collar, she had whispered softly, persuasively, clingingly, in the classic manner: "thou art content, _chéri_? thou wilt return?" and he had said: "that goes without saying." but not with quite the same conviction as he now used in speaking definitely of the afternoon of the day after to-morrow. the fact was, he was moved; she too. she had been right not to tell the story earlier, and equally right to tell it before he departed. some men, most men, hated to hear any tale of real misfortune, at any moment, from a woman, because, of course, it diverted their thoughts. in thus departing at once the man showed characteristic tact. her recital left nothing to be said. they kissed again, rather like comrades. christine was still the vessel of the heavy sorrow of the world, but in the kiss and in their glances was an implication that the effective, triumphant antidote to sorrow might be found in a mutual trust. he opened the door. the italian woman, yawning and with her hand open, was tenaciously waiting. alone, carefully refolding the kimono in its original creases, christine wondered what the man's name was. she felt that the mysterious future might soon disclose a germ of happiness. chapter the albany g.j. hoape--he was usually addressed as "g.j." by his friends, and always referred to as "g.j." by both friends and acquaintances--woke up finally in the bedroom of his flat with the thought: "to-day i shall see her." he inhabited one of the three flats at the extreme northern end of the albany, piccadilly, w.i. the flat was strangely planned. its shape as a whole was that of a cube. imagine the cube to be divided perpendicularly into two very unequal parts. the larger part, occupying nearly two-thirds of the entire cubic space, was the drawing-room, a noble chamber, large and lofty. the smaller part was cut horizontally into two storeys. the lower storey comprised a very small hall, a fair bathroom, the tiniest staircase in london, and g.j.'s very small bedroom. the upper storey comprised a very small dining-room, the kitchen, and servants' quarters. the door between the bedroom and the drawing room, left open in the night for ventilation, had been softly closed as usual during g.j.'s final sleep, and the bedroom was in absolute darkness save for a faint grey gleam over the valance of the window curtains. g.j. could think. he wondered whether he was in love. he hoped he was in love, and the fact that the woman who attracted him was a courtesan did not disturb him in the least. he was nearing fifty years of age. he had casually known hundreds of courtesans in sundry capitals, a few of them very agreeable; also a number of women calling themselves, sometimes correctly, actresses, all of whom, for various reasons which need not be given, had proved very unsatisfactory. but he had never loved--unless it might be, mildly, concepcion, and concepcion was now a war bride. he wanted to love. he had never felt about any woman, not even about concepcion, as he felt about the woman seen for a few minutes at the marigny theatre and then for five successive nights vainly searched for in all the chief music-halls of paris. (a nice name, christine! it suited her.) he had given her up--never expected to catch sight of her again; but she had remained a steadfast memory, sad and charming. the encounter in the promenade in leicester square was such a piece of heavenly and incredible luck that it had, at the moment, positively made him giddy. the first visit to christine's flat had beatified and stimulated him. would the second? anyhow, she was the most alluring woman--and yet apparently of dependable character!--he had ever met. no other consideration counted with him. there was a soft knock; the door was pushed, and wavy reflections of the drawing-room fire played on the corner of the bedroom ceiling. mrs. braiding came in. g.j. had known it was she by the caressing quality of the knock. mrs. braiding was his cook and the wife of his "man". it was not her place to come in, but occasionally, because something had happened to braiding, she did come in. she drew the curtains apart, and the day of vigo street, pale, dirty, morose, feebly and perfunctorily took possession of the bedroom. mrs. braiding, having drawn the curtains, returned to the door and from the doorway said: "breakfast is practically ready, sir." g.j. perceived that this was one of her brave, resigned mornings. since august she had borne the entire weight of the war on her back, and sometimes the burden would overpower her, but never quite. g.j. switched on the light, arose from his bed, assumed his dressing-gown, and, gazing with accustomed pleasure round the bedroom, saw that it was perfect. he had furnished his flat in the regency style of the first decade of the nineteenth century, as matured by george smith, "upholder extraordinary to his royal highness the prince of wales". the pavilion at brighton had given the original idea to g.j., who saw in it the solution of the problem of combining the somewhat massive dignity suitable to a bachelor of middling age with the bright, unconquerable colours which the eternal twilight of london demands. his dome bed was yellow as to its upper works, with crimson valances above and yellow valances below. the yellow-lined crimson curtains (of course never closed) had green cords and tassels, and the counterpane was yellow. this bed was a modest sample of the careful and uncompromising reconstitution of a period which he had everywhere carried out in his abode. the drawing-room, with its moulded ceiling and huge recessed window, had presented an admirable field for connoisseurship. here the clash of rich primary colours, the perpendiculars which began with bronze girls' heads and ended with bronze girls' feet or animals' claws, the vast flat surfaces of furniture, the stiff curves of wood and a drapery, the morbid rage for solidity which would employ a candelabrum weighing five hundredweight to hold a single wax candle, produced a real and imposing effect of style; it was a style debased, a style which was shedding the last graces of french empire in order soon to appeal to a victoria determined to be utterly english and good; but it was a style. and g.j. had scamped no detail. even the pictures were hung with thick tasselled cords of the regency. the drawing-room was a triumph. do not conceive that g.j. had lost his head about furniture and that his notion of paradise was an endless series of second-hand shops. he had an admirable balance; and he held that a man might make a faultless interior for himself and yet not necessarily lose his balance. he resented being called a specialist in furniture. he regarded himself as an amateur of life, and, if a specialist in anything, as a specialist in friendships. yet he was a solitary man (liking solitude without knowing that he liked it), and in the midst of the perfections which he had created he sometimes gloomily thought: "what in the name of god am i doing on this earth?" he went into the drawing-room, and there, by the fire and in front of a formidable blue chair whose arms developed into the grinning heads of bronze lions, stood the lacquered table consecrated to his breakfast tray; and his breakfast tray, with newspaper and correspondence, had been magically placed thereon as though by invisible hands. and on one arm of the easy-chair lay the rug which, because a dressing-gown does not button all the way down, he put over his knees while breakfasting in winter. yes, he admitted with pleasure that he was "well served". before eating he opened the piano--a modern instrument concealed in an ingeniously confected regency case--and played with taste a bach prelude and fugue. his was not the standardised and habituated kind of musical culture which takes a bach prelude and fugue every morning before breakfast with or without a glass of lithia water or fizzy saline. he did, however, customarily begin the day at the piano, and on this particular morning he happened to play a bach prelude and fugue. and as he played he congratulated himself on not having gone to seek christine in the promenade on the previous night, as impatience had tempted him to do. such a procedure would have been an error in worldliness and bad from every point of view. he had wisely rejected the temptation. in the deep blue arm-chair, with the rug over his knees and one hand on a lion's head, he glanced first at the opened _times_, because of the war. among the few letters was one with the heading of the reveille motor horn company ltd. g.j. like his father, had been a solicitor. when he was twenty-five his father, a widower, had died and left him a respectable fortune and a very good practice. he sold half the practice to an incoming partner, and four years later he sold the other half of the practice to the same man. at thirty he was free, and this result had been attained through his frank negative answer to the question, "the law bores me--is there any reason why i should let it continue to bore me?" there was no reason. instead of the law he took up life. of business preoccupations naught remained but his investments. he possessed a gift for investing money. he had helped the man who had first put the reveille motor horn on the market. he had had a mighty holding of shares in the reveille syndicate limited, which had so successfully promoted the reveille motor horn company limited. and in the latter, too, he held many shares. the reveille motor horn company had prospered and had gone into the manufacture of speedometers, illuminating outfits, and all manner of motor-car accessories. on the outbreak of war g.j. had given himself up for lost. "this is the end," he had said, as a member of the sore-shaken investing public. he had felt sick under the region of the heart. in particular he had feared for his reveille shares. no one would want to buy expensive motor horns in the midst of the greatest war that the world, etc., etc. still the reveille company, after sustaining the shock, had somehow continued to do a pretty good business. it had patriotically offered its plant and services to the war office, and had been repulsed with contumely and ignominy. the war office had most caustically intimated to the reveille company that it had no use and never under any conceivable circumstances could have any use whatever for the reveille company, and that the reveille company was a forward and tedious jackanapes, unworthy even of an articulate rebuff. now the autograph letter with the reveille note-heading was written by the managing director (who represented g.j.'s interests on the board), and it stated that the war office had been to the reveille company, and implored it to enlarge itself, and given it vast orders at grand prices for all sorts of things that it had never made before. the profits of would be doubled, if not trebled--perhaps quadrupled. g.j. was relieved, uplifted; and he sniggered at his terrible forebodings of august and september. ruin? he was actually going to make money out of the greatest war that the world, etc. etc. and why not? somebody had to make money, and somebody had to pay for the war in income tax. for the first time the incubus of the war seemed lighter upon g.j. and also he need feel no slightest concern about the financial aspect of any possible developments of the christine adventure. he had a very clear and undeniable sensation of positive happiness. chapter for the empire mrs. braiding came into the drawing-room, and he wondered, paternally, why she was so fidgety and why her tranquillising mate had not appeared. to the careless observer she was a cheerful woman, but the temple of her brightness was reared over a dark and frightful crypt in which the demons of doubt, anxiety, and despair year after year dragged at their chains, intimidating hope. slender, small, and neat, she passed her life in bravely fronting the shapes of disaster with an earnest, vivacious, upturned face. she was thirty-five, and her aspect recalled the pretty, respected lady's-maid which she had been before braiding got her and knocked some nonsense out of her and turned her into a wife. g.j., still paternally, but firmly, took her up at once. "i say, mrs. braiding, what about this dish-cover?" he lifted the article, of which the copper was beginning to show through the sheffield plating. "yes sir. it does look rather impoverished, doesn't it?" "but i told braiding to use the new toast-dish i bought last week but one." "did you, sir? i was very happy about the new one as soon as i saw it, but braiding never gave me your instructions in regard to it." she glanced at the cabinet in which the new toast-dish reposed with other antique metal-work. "braiding's been rather upset this last few days, sir." "what about?" "this recruiting, sir. of course, you are aware he's decided on it." "i'm not aware of anything of the sort," said g.j. rather roughly, perhaps to hide his sudden emotion, perhaps to express his irritation at mrs. braiding's strange habit of pretending that the most startling pieces of news were matters of common knowledge. "well, sir, of course you were out most of yesterday, and you dined at the club. braiding attended at a recruiting office yesterday, sir. he stood three hours in the crowd outside because there was no room inside, and then he stood over two hours in a passage inside before his turn came, and nothing to eat all day, or drink either. and when his turn came and they asked him his age, he said 'thirty-six,' and the person was very angry and said he hadn't any time to waste, and braiding had better go outside again and consider whether he hadn't made a mistake about his age. so braiding went outside and considered that his age was only thirty-three after all, but he couldn't get in again, not by any means, so he just came back here and i gave him a good tea, and he needed it, sir." "but he saw me last night, and he never said anything!" "yes, sir," mrs. braiding admitted with pain. "i asked him if he had told you, and he said he hadn't and that i must." "where is he now?" "he went off early, sir, so as to get a good place. i shouldn't be a bit surprised if he's in the army by this time. i know it's not the right way of going about things, and braiding's only excuse is it's for the empire. when it's a question of the empire, sir...." at that instant the white man's burden was mrs. braiding's, and the glance of her serious face showed what the crushing strain of it was. "i think he might have told me." "well, sir. i'm very sorry. very sorry.... but you know what braiding is." g.j. felt that that was just what he did not know, or at any rate had not hitherto known. he was hurt by braiding's conduct. he had always treated braiding as a friend. they had daily discussed the progress of the war. on the previous night braiding, in all the customary sedateness of black coat and faintly striped trousers, had behaved just as usual! it was astounding. g.j. began to incline towards the views of certain of his friends about the utter incomprehensibility of the servile classes--views which he had often annoyed them by traversing. yes; it was astounding. all this martial imperialism seething in the depths of braiding, and g.j. never suspecting the ferment! exceedingly difficult to conceive braiding as a soldier! he was the albany valet, and albany valets were albany valets and naught else. mrs. braiding continued: "it's very inconsiderate to you, sir. that's a point that is appreciated by both braiding and i. but let us fervently hope it won't be for long, sir. the consensus of opinion seems to be we shall be in berlin in the spring. and in the meantime, i think"--she smiled an appeal--"i can manage for you by myself, if you'll be so good as to let me." "oh! it's not that," said g.j. carelessly. "i expect you can manage all right." "oh!" cried she. "i know how you feel about it, sir, and i'm very sorry. and at best it's bound to be highly inconvenient for a gentleman like yourself, sir. i said to braiding, 'you're taking advantage of mr. hoape's good nature,' that's what i said to braiding, and he couldn't deny it. however, sir, if you'll be so good as to let me try what i can do by myself--" "i tell you that'll be all right," he stopped her. braiding, his mainstay, was irrevocably gone. he realised that, and it was a severe blow. he must accept it. as for mrs. braiding managing, she would manage in a kind of way, but the risks to regency furniture and china would be grave. she did not understand regency furniture and china as braiding did; no woman could. braiding had been as much a "find" as the dome bed or the unique bookcase which bore the names of "homer" and "virgil" in bronze characters on its outer wings. also, g.j. had a hundred little ways about neckties and about trouser-stretching which he, g.j., would have to teach mrs. braiding. still the war ... when she was gone he stood up and brushed the crumbs from his dressing-gown, and emitted a short, harsh laugh. he was laughing at himself. regency furniture and china! neckties! trouser-stretching! in the next room was a youngish woman whose minstrel boy to the war had gone--gone, though he might be only in the next street! and had she said a word about her feelings as a wife? not a word! but dozens of words about the inconvenience to the god-like employer! she had apologised to him because braiding had departed to save the empire without first asking his permission. it was not merely astounding--it flabbergasted. he had always felt that there was something fundamentally wrong in the social fabric, and he had long had a preoccupation to the effect that it was his business, his, to take a share in finding out what was wrong and in discovering and applying a cure. this preoccupation had worried him, scarcely perceptibly, like the delicate oncoming of neuralgia. there must be something wrong when a member of one class would behave to a member of another class as mrs. braiding behaved to him--without protest from him. "mrs. braiding!" he called out. "yes, sir." she almost ran back into the drawing-room. "when shall you be seeing your husband?" at least he would remind her that she had a husband. "i haven't an idea, sir." "well, when you do, tell him that i want to speak to him; and you can tell him i shall pay you half his wages in addition to your own." her gratitude filled him with secret fury. he said to himself: "futile--these grand gestures about wages." chapter boots in the very small hall g.j. gazed at himself in the mirror that was nearly as large as the bathroom door, to which it was attached, and which it ingeniously masked. although mrs. braiding was present, holding his ebony stick, he carefully examined his face and appearance without the slightest self-consciousness. nor did mrs. braiding's demeanour indicate that in her opinion g.j. was behaving in a manner eccentric or incorrect. he was dressed in mourning. honestly he did not believe that he looked anywhere near fifty. his face was worn by the friction of the world, especially under the eyes, but his eyes were youthful, and his hair and moustache and short, fine beard scarcely tinged with grey. his features showed benevolence, with a certain firmness, and they had the refinement which comes of half a century's instinctive avoidance of excess. still, he was beginning to feel his age. he moved more slowly; he sat down, instead of standing up, at the dressing-table. and he was beginning also to take a pride in mentioning these changes and in the fact that he would be fifty on his next birthday. and when talking to men under thirty, or even under forty, he would say in a tone mingling condescension and envy: "but, of course, you're young." he departed, remarking that he should not be in for lunch and might not be in for dinner, and he walked down the covered way to the albany courtyard, and was approved by the albany porters as a resident handsomely conforming to the traditional high standard set by the albany for its residents. he crossed piccadilly, and as he did so he saw a couple of jolly fine girls, handsome, stylish, independent of carriage, swinging freely along and intimately talking with that mien of experience and broad-mindedness which some girls manage to wear in the streets. one of them in particular appealed to him. he thought how different they were from christine. he had dreamt of just such girls as they were, and yet now christine filled the whole of his mind. "you can't foresee," he thought. he dipped down into the extraordinary rectangle of st. james's, where he was utterly at home. a strange architecture, parsimoniously plain on the outside, indeed carrying the oriental scorn for merely external effect to a point only reachable by a race at once hypocritical and madly proud. the shabby plainness of wren's church well typified all the parochial parsimony. the despairing architect had been so pinched by his employers in the matter of ornament that on the whole of the northern facade there was only one of his favourite cherub's heads! what a parish! it was a parish of flat brick walls and brass door-knobs and brass plates. and the first commandment was to polish every brass door-knob and every brass plate every morning. what happened in the way of disfigurement by polishing paste to the surrounding brick or wood had no importance. the conventions of the parish had no eye save for brass door-knobs and brass plates, which were maintained daily in effulgence by a vast early-rising population. recruiting offices, casualty lists, the rumour of peril and of glory, could do nothing to diminish the high urgency of the polishing of those brass door-knobs and those brass plates. the shops and offices seemed to show that the wants of customers were few and simple. grouse moors, fisheries, yachts, valuations, hosiery, neckties, motor-cars, insurance, assurance, antique china, antique pictures, boots, riding-whips, and, above all, eastern cigarettes! the master-passion was evidently eastern cigarettes. the few provision shops were marmoreal and majestic, catering as they did chiefly for the multifarious palatial male clubs which dominated the parish and protected and justified the innumerable "bachelor" suites that hung forth signs in every street. the parish, in effect, was first an immense monastery, where the monks, determined to do themselves extremely well in dignified peace, had made a prodigious and not entirely unsuccessful effort to keep out the excitable sex. and, second, it was an excusable conspiracy on the part of intensely respectable tradesmen and stewards to force the non-bargaining sex to pay the highest possible price for the privilege of doing the correct thing. g.j. passed through the cardiac region of st. james's, the square itself, where knights, baronets, barons, brewers, viscounts, marquesses, hereditary marshals and chief butlers, dukes, bishops, banks, librarians and government departments gaze throughout the four seasons at the statue of a dutchman; and then he found himself at his bootmaker's. now, his bootmaker was one of the three first bootmakers in the west end, bearing a name famous from peru to hong kong. an untidy interior, full of old boots and the hides of various animals! a dirty girl was writing in a dirty tome, and a young man was knotting together two pieces of string in order to tie up a parcel. such was the "note" of the "house". the girl smiled, the young man bowed. in an instant the manager appeared, and g.j. was invested with the attributes of god. he informed the manager with pain, and the manager heard with deep pain, that the left boot of the new pair he then wore was not quite comfortable in the toes. the manager simply could not understand it, just as he simply could not have understood a failure in the working of the law of gravity. and if god had not told him he would not have believed it. he knelt and felt. he would send for the boots. he would make the boots comfortable or he would make a new pair. expense was nothing. trouble was nothing. incidentally he remarked with a sigh that the enormous demand for military boots was rendering it more and more difficult for him to give to old patrons that prompt and plenary attention which he would desire to give. however, god in any case should not suffer. he noticed that the boots were not quite well polished, and he ventured to charge god with hints for god's personal attendant. then he went swiftly across to a speaking-tube and snapped: "polisher!" a trap-door opened in the floor of the shop and a horrible, pallid, weak, cringing man came up out of the earth of st. james's, and knelt before god far more submissively than even the manager had knelt. he had brushes and blacking, and he blacked and he brushed and breathed alternately, undoing continually with his breath or his filthy hand what he had done with his brush. he never looked up, never spoke. when he had made the boots like mirrors he gathered together his implements and vanished, silent and dutifully bent, through the trap-door back into the earth of st. james's. and because the trap-door had not shut properly the manager stamped on it and stamped down the pale man definitely into the darkness underneath. and then g.j. was wafted out of the shop with smiles and bows. chapter the club the vast "morning-room" of the monumental club (pre-eminent among clubs for its architecture) was on the whole tonically chilly. but as one of the high windows stood open, and there were two fires fluttering beneath the lovely marble mantelpieces, between the fires and the window every gradation of temperature could be experienced by the curious. on each wall book-shelves rose to the carved and gilded ceiling. the furlongs of shelves were fitted with majestic volumes containing all the statutes, all the parliamentary debates, and all the reports of royal commissions ever printed to narcotise the conscience of a nation. these calf-bound works were not, in fact, read; but the magnificent pretence of their usefulness was completed by carpeted mahogany ladders which leaned here and there against the shelfing, in accord with the theory that some studious member some day might yearn and aspire to some upper shelf. on reading-stands and on huge mahogany tables were disposed the countless newspapers of great britain and ireland, europe and america, and also the files of such newspapers. the apparatus of information was complete. g.j. entered the splendid apartment like a discoverer. it was empty. not a member; not a servant! it waited, content to be inhabited, equally content with its own solitude. this apartment had made an adjunct even of the war; the function of the war in this apartment was to render it more impressive, to increase, if possible, its importance, for nowhere else could the war be studied so minutely day by day. a strange thing! g.j.'s sense of duty to himself had been quickened by the defection of his valet. he felt that he had been failing to comprehend in detail the cause and the evolution of the war, and that even his general ideas as to it were inexcusably vague; and he had determined to go every morning to the club, at whatever inconvenience, for the especial purpose of studying and getting the true hang of the supreme topic. as he sat down he was aware of the solemnity of the great room, last fastness of the old strict decorum in the club. you might not smoke in it until after p.m. two other members came in immediately, one after the other. the first, a little, very old and very natty man, began to read _the times_ at a stand. the second, old too, but of larger and firmer build, with a long, clean-shaven upper lip, such as is only developed at the bar, on the bench, and in provincial circles of noncomformity, took an easy-chair and another copy of _the times_. a few moments elapsed, and then the little old man glanced round, and, assuming surprise that he had not noticed g.j. earlier, nodded to him with a very bright and benevolent smile. g.j. said: "well, sir francis, what's your opinion of this ypres business. seems pretty complicated, doesn't it?" sir francis answered in a tone whose mild and bland benevolence matched his smile: "i dare say the complications escape me. i see the affair quite simply. we are holding on, but we cannot continue to hold on. the germans have more men, far more guns, and infinitely more ammunition. they certainly have not less genius for war. what can be the result? i am told by respectable people that the germans lost the war at the marne. i don't appreciate it. i am told that the germans don't realise the marne. i think they realise the marne at least as well as we realise tannenberg." the slightly trembling, slightly mincing voice of sir francis denoted such detachment, such politeness, such kindliness, that the opinion it emitted seemed to impose itself on g.j. with extraordinary authority. there was a brief pause, and sir francis ejaculated: "what's your view, bob?" the other old man now consisted of a newspaper, two seamy hands and a pair of grey legs. his grim voice came from behind the newspaper, which did not move: "we've no adequate means of judging." "true," said sir francis. "now, another thing i'm told is that the war office was perfectly ready for the war on the scale agreed upon for ourselves with france and russia. i don't appreciate that either. no war office can be said to be perfectly ready for any war until it has organised its relations with the public which it serves. my belief is that the war office had never thought for one moment about the military importance of public opinion and the press. at any rate, it has most carefully left nothing undone to alienate both the public and the press. my son-in-law has the misfortune to own seven newspapers, and the tales he tells about the antics of the press bureau--" sir francis smiled the rest of the sentence. "let me see, they offered the press bureau to you, didn't they, bob?" _the times_ fell, disclosing bob, whose long upper lip grew longer. "they did," he said. "i made a few inquiries, and found it was nothing but a shuttlecock of the departments. i should have had no real power, but unlimited quantities of responsibility. so i respectfully refused." sir francis remarked: "your hearing's much better, bob." "it is," answered bob. "the fact is, i got hold of a marvellous feller at birmingham." he laughed sardonically. "i hope to go down to history as the first judge that ever voluntarily retired because of deafness. and now, thanks to this feller at birmingham, i can hear better than seventy-five per cent of the bench. the lord chancellor gave me a hint i might care to return, and so save a pension to the nation. i told him i'd begin to think about that when he'd persuaded the board of works to ventilate my old court." he laughed again. "and now i see the press bureau is enunciating the principle that it won't permit criticism that might in any way weaken the confidence of the people in the administration of affairs." bob opened his mouth wide and kept it open. sir francis, with no diminution of the mild and bland benevolence of his detachment, said: "the voice is the press bureau's voice, but the hands are the hands of the war office. can we reasonably hope to win, or not to lose, with such a mentality at the head? i cannot admit that the war office has changed in the slightest degree in a hundred years. from time to time a brainy civilian walks in, like cardwell or haldane, and saves it from becoming patently ridiculous. but it never really alters. when i was war secretary in a transient government it was precisely the same as it had been in the reign of the duke of cambridge, and to-day it is still precisely the same. i am told that haldane succeeded in teaching our generals the value of staff work as distinguished from dashing cavalry charges. i don't appreciate that. the staffs are still wide open to men with social influence and still closed to men without social influence. my grandson is full of great modern notions about tactics. he may have talent for all i know. he got a staff appointment--because he came to me and i spoke ten words to an old friend of mine with oak leaves in the club next door but one. no questions asked. i mean no serious questions. it was done to oblige me--the very existence of the empire being at stake, according to all accounts. so that i venture to doubt whether we're going to hold ypres, or anything else." bob, unimpressed by the speech, burst out: "you've got the perspective wrong. obviously the centre of gravity is no longer in the west--it's in the east. in the west, roughly, equilibrium has been established. hence poland is the decisive field, and the measure of the russian success or failure is the measure of the allied success or failure." sir francis inquired with gentle joy: "then we're all right? the russians have admittedly recovered from tannenberg. if there is any truth in a map they are doing excellently. they're more brilliant than potsdam, and they can put two men into the field to the germans' one--two and a half in fact." bob fiercely rumbled: "i don't think we're all right. this habit of thinking in men is dangerous. what are men without munitions? and without a clean administration? nothing but a rabble. it is notorious that the russians are running short of munitions and that the administration from top to bottom consists of outrageous rascals. moreover i see to-day a report that the germans have won a big victory at kutno. i've been expecting that. that's the beginning--mark me!" "yes," sir francis cheerfully agreed. "yes. we're spending one million a day, and now income tax is doubled! the country cannot stand it indefinitely, and since our only hope lies in our being able to stand it indefinitely, there is no hope--at any rate for unbiased minds. facts are facts, i fear." bob cried impatiently: "unbiased be damned! i don't want to be unbiased. i won't be. i had enough of being unbiased when i was on the bench, and i don't care what any of you unbiased people say--i believe we shall win." g.j. suddenly saw a boy in the old man, and suddenly he too became boyish, remembering what he had said to christine about the war not having begun yet; and with fervour he concurred: "so do i." he rose, moved--relieved after a tension which he had not noticed until it was broken. it was time for him to go. the two old men were recalled to the fact of his presence. bob raised the newspaper again. sir francis asked: "are you going to the--er--affair in the city?" "yes," said g.j. with careful unconcern. "i had thought of going. my granddaughter worried me till i consented to take her. i got two tickets; but no sooner had i arrayed myself this morning than she rang me up to say that her baby was teething and she couldn't leave it. in view of this important creature's indisposition i sent the tickets back to the dean and changed my clothes. great-grandfathers have to be philosophers. i say, hoape, they tell me you play uncommonly good auction bridge." "i play," said g.j. modestly. "but no better than i ought." "you might care to make a fourth this afternoon, in the card-room." "i should have been delighted to, but i've got one of these war-committees at six o'clock." again he spoke with careful unconcern, masking a considerable self-satisfaction. chapter the mission the great dim place was full, but crowding had not been permitted. with a few exceptions in the outlying parts, everybody had a seat. g.j. was favourably placed for seeing the whole length of the interior. accustomed to the restaurants of fashionable hotels, auction-rooms, theatrical first-nights, the haunts of sport, clubs, and courts of justice, he soon perceived, from the numerous samples which he himself was able to identify, that all the london worlds were fully represented in the multitude--the official world, the political, the clerical, the legal, the municipal, the military, the artistic, the literary, the dilettante, the financial, the sporting, and the world whose sole object in life apparently is to be observed and recorded at all gatherings to which admittance is gained by privilege and influence alone. there were in particular women the names and countenances and family history of whom were familiar to hundreds of thousands of illustrated-newspaper readers, even in the most distant counties, and who never missed what was called a "function," whether "brilliant," "exclusive," or merely scandalous. at murder trials, at the sales of art collections, at the birth of musical comedies, at boxing matches, at historic debates, at receptions in honour of the renowned, at luscious divorce cases, they were surely present, and the entire press surely noted that they were present. and if executions had been public, they would in the same religious spirit have attended executions, rousing their maids at milkmen's hours in order that they might assume the right cunning frock to fit the occasion. and they were here. and no one could divine why or how, or to what eternal end. g.j. hated them, and he hated the solemn self-satisfaction that brooded over the haughty faces of the throng. he hated himself for having accepted a ticket from the friend in the war office who was now sitting next to him. and yet he was pleased, too. a disturbed conscience could not defeat the instinct which bound him to the whole fashionable and powerful assemblage. for ever afterwards, to his dying hour, he could say--casually, modestly, as a matter of course, but he could still say--that he had been there. the lord mayor and sheriffs, tradesmen glittering like oriental potentates, passed slowly across his field of vision. he thought with contempt of the city, living ghoulish on the buried past, and obstinately and humanly refusing to make a pile of its putrefying interests, set fire to it, and perish thereon. the music began. it was the dead march in _saul_. the long-rolling drums suddenly rent the soul, and destroyed every base and petty thought that was there. clergy, headed by a bishop, were walking down the cathedral. at the huge doors, nearly lost in the heavy twilight of november noon, they stopped, turned and came back. the coffin swayed into view, covered with the sacred symbolic bunting, and borne on the shoulders of eight sergeants of the old regiments of the dead man. then followed the pall-bearers--five field-marshals, five full generals, and two admirals; aged men, and some of them had reached the highest dignity without giving a single gesture that had impressed itself on the national mind; nonentities, apotheosised by seniority; and some showed traces of the bitter rain that was falling in the fog outside. then the primate. then the king, who had supervened from nowhere, the magic production of chamberlains and comptrollers. the procession, headed by the clergy, moved slowly, amid the vistas ending in the dull burning of stained glass, through the congregation in mourning and in khaki, through the lines of yellow-glowing candelabra, towards the crowd of scarlet under the dome; the summit of the dome was hidden in soft mist. the music became insupportable in its sublimity. g.j. was afraid, and he did not immediately know why he was afraid. the procession came nearer. it was upon him.... he knew why he was afraid, and he averted sharply his gaze from the coffin. he was afraid for his composure. if he had continued to watch the coffin he would have burst into loud sobs. only by an extraordinary effort did he master himself. many other people lowered their faces in self-defence. the searchers after new and violent sensations were having the time of their lives. the dead march with its intolerable genius had ceased. the coffin, guarded by flickering candles, lay on the lofty catafalque; the eight sergeants were pretending that their strength had not been in the least degree taxed. princes, the illustrious, the champions of allied might, dark indians, adventurers, even germans, surrounded the catafalque in the gloom. g.j. sympathised with the man in the coffin, the simple little man whose non-political mission had in spite of him grown political. he regretted horribly that once he, g.j., who protested that he belonged to no party, had said of the dead man: "roberts! well-meaning of course, but senile!" ... yet a trifle! what did it matter? and how he loathed to think that the name of the dead man was now befouled by the calculating and impure praise of schemers. another trifle! as the service proceeded g.j. was overwhelmed and lost in the grandeur and terror of existence. there he sat, grizzled, dignified, with the great world, looking as though he belonged to the great world; and he felt like a boy, like a child, like a helpless infant before the enormities of destiny. he wanted help, because of his futility. he could do nothing, or so little. it was as if he had been training himself for twenty years in order to be futile at a crisis requiring crude action. and he could not undo twenty years. the war loomed about him, co-extensive with existence itself. he thought of the sergeant who, as recounted that morning in the papers, had led a victorious storming party, been decorated--and died of wounds. and similar deeds were being done at that moment. and the simple little man in the coffin was being tilted downwards from the catafalque into the grave close by. g.j. wanted surcease, were it but for an hour. he longed acutely, unbearably, to be for an hour with christine in her warm, stuffy, exciting, languorous, enervating room hermetically sealed against the war. then he remembered the tones of her voice as she had told her belgian adventures.... was it love? was it tenderness? was it sensuality? the difference was indiscernible; it had no importance. against the stark background of infinite existence all human beings were alike and all their passions were alike. the gaunt, ruthless autocrat of the war office and the frail crowned descendant of kings fronted each other across the open grave, and the coffin sank between them and was gone. from the choir there came the chanted and soothing words: _steals on the ear the distant triumph-song_. g.j. just caught them clear among much that was incomprehensible. an intense patriotism filled him. he could do nothing; but he could keep his head, keep his balance, practise magnanimity, uphold the truth amid prejudice and superstition, and be kind. such at that moment seemed to be his mission.... he looked round, and pitied, instead of hating, the searchers after sensations. a being called the garter king of arms stepped forward and in a loud voice recited the earthly titles and honours of the simple little dead man; and, although few qualities are commoner than physical courage, the whole catalogue seemed ridiculous and tawdry until the being came to the two words, "victoria cross". the being, having lived his glorious moments, withdrew. the funeral march of chopin tramped with its excruciating dragging tread across the ruins of the soul. and finally the cathedral was startled by the sudden trumpets of the last post, and the ceremony ended. "come and have lunch with me," said the young red-hatted officer next to g.j. "i haven't got to be back till two-thirty, and i want to talk music for a change. do you know i'm putting in ninety hours a week at the w.o.?" "can't," g.j. replied, with an affectation of jauntiness. "i'm engaged for lunch. sorry." "who you lunching with?" "mrs. smith." the staff officer exclaimed aghast: "conception?" "yes. why, dear heart?" "my dear chap. you don't know. carlos smith's been killed. _she_ doesn't know yet. i only heard by chance. news came through just as i left. nobody knows except a chap or two in casualties. they won't be sending out to-day's wires until two or three o'clock." g.j., terrified and at a loss, murmured: "what am i to do, then?" "you know her extremely well, don't you? you ought to go and prepare her." "but how can i prepare her?" "i don't know. how do people prepare people?... poor thing!" g.j. fought against the incredible fact of death. "but he only went out six days ago! they haven't been married three weeks." the central hardness of the other disclosed itself as he said: "what's that got to do with it? what does it matter if he went out six days ago or six weeks ago? he's killed." "well--" "of course you must go. indicate a rumour. tell her it's probably false, but you thought you owed it to her to warn her. only for god's sake don't mention me. we're not supposed to say anything, you know." g.j. seemed to see his mission, and it challenged him. chapter the telegram as soon as g.j. had been let into the abode by concepcion's venerable parlour-maid, the voice of concepcion came down to him from above: "g.j., who is your oldest and dearest friend?" he replied, marvellously schooling his voice to a similar tone of cheerful abruptness: "difficult to say, off-hand." "not at all. it's your beard." that was her greeting to him. he knew she was recalling an old declined suggestion of hers that he should part with his beard. the parlour-maid practised an admirable deafness, faithfully to confirm concepcion, who always presumed deafness in all servants. g.j. looked up the narrow well of the staircase. he could vaguely see concepcion on high, leaning over the banisters; he thought she was rather fluffilly dressed, for her. concepcion inhabited an upper part in a street largely devoted to the sale of grand pianos. her front door was immediately at the top of a long, straight, narrow stairway; so that whoever opened the door stood one step higher than the person desiring entrance. within the abode, which was fairly spacious, more and more stairs went up and up. "my motto is," she would say, "'one room, one staircase.'" the life of the abode was on the busy stairs. she called it also her alpine club. she had made upper-parts in that street popular among the select, and had therefore caused rents to rise. in the drawing-room she had hung a horrible enlarged photographic portrait of herself, with a chocolate-coloured mount, the whole framed in german gilt, and under it she had inscribed, "presented to miss concepcion iquist by the grateful landlords of the neighbourhood as a slight token of esteem and regard." she was the only daughter of iquist's brother, who had had a business and a palace at lima. at the age of eighteen, her last surviving parent being dead, she had come to london and started to keep house for the bachelor iquist, who at that very moment, owing to a fortunate change in the ministry, had humorously entered the cabinet. these two had immediately become "the most talked-of pair in london," london in this phrase signifying the few thousand people who do talk about the doings of other people unknown to them and being neither kings, princes, statesmen, artistes, artists, jockeys, nor poisoners. the iquists had led the semi-intelligent, conscious-of-its-audience set which had ousted the old, quite unintelligent stately-homes-of-england set from the first place in the curiosity of the everlasting public. concepcion had wit. it was stated that she furnished her uncle with the finest of his _mots_. when iquist died, of course poor concepcion had retired to the upper part, whence, though her position was naturally weakened, she still took a hand in leading the set. g.j. had grown friendly and appreciative of her, for the simple reason that she had singled him out and always tried to please him, even when taking liberties with him. he liked her because she was different from her set. she had a masculine mind, whereas many even of the males of her set had a feminine mind. she was exceedingly well educated; she had ideas on everything; and she never failed in catching an allusion. she would criticise her set very honestly; her attitude to it and to herself seemed to be that of an impartial and yet indulgent philosopher; withal she could be intensely loyal to fools and worse who were friends. as for the public, she was apparently convinced of the sincerity of her scorn for it, while admitting that she enjoyed publicity, which had become indispensable to her as a drug may become indispensable. moreover, there was her wit and her candid, queer respect for g.j. yes, he had greatly admired her for her qualities. he did not, however, greatly admire her physique. she was tall, with a head scarcely large enough for her body. she had a nice snub nose which in another woman might have been irresistible. she possessed very little physical charm, and showed very little taste in her neat, prim frocks. not merely had she a masculine mind, but she was somewhat hard, a self-confessed egoist. she swore like the set, using about one "damn" or one "bloody" to every four cigarettes, of which she smoked, perhaps, fifty a day--including some in taxis. she discussed the sexual vagaries of her friends and her enemies with a freedom and an apparent learning which were remarkable in a virgin. in the end she had married carlos smith, and, characteristically, had received him into her own home instead of going to his; as a fact, he had none, having been a parent's close-kept darling. london had only just recovered from the excitations of the wedding. g.j. had regarded the marriage with benevolence, perhaps with relief. "anybody else coming to lunch?" he discreetly inquired of his familiar, the parlour-maid. she breathed a negative. he had guessed it. concepcion had meant to be alone with him. having married for love, and her husband being rapt away by the war, she intended to resume her old, honest, quasi-sentimental relations with g.j. a reliable and experienced bachelor is always useful to a young grass-widow, and, moreover, the attendant hopeless adorer nourishes her hungry egotism as nobody else can. g.j. thought these thoughts, clearly and callously, in the same moment as, mounting the next flight of stairs, he absolutely trembled with sympathetic anguish for concepcion. his errand was an impossible one; he feared, or rather he hoped, that the very look on his face might betray the dreadful news to that undeceivable intuition which women were supposed to possess. he hesitated on the stairs; he recoiled from the top step--(she had coquettishly withdrawn herself into the room)--he hadn't the slightest idea how to begin. yes, the errand was an impossible one, and yet such errands had to be performed by somebody, were daily being performed by somebodies. then he had the idea of telephoning privily to fetch her cousin sara. he would open by remarking casually to concepcion: "i say, can i use your telephone a minute?" he found a strange concepcion in the drawing-room. this was his first sight of mrs. carlos smith since the wedding. she wore a dress such as he had never seen on her: a tea-gown--and for lunch! it could be called neither neat nor prim, but it was voluptuous. her complexion had bloomed; the curves of her face were softer, her gestures more abandoned, her gaze full of a bold and yet shamed self-consciousness, her dark hair looser. he stood close to her; he stood within the aura of her recently aroused temperament, and felt it. he thought, could not help thinking: "perhaps she bears within her the legacy of new life." he could not help thinking of her name. he took her hot hand. she said nothing, but just looked at him. he then said jauntily: "i say, can i use your telephone a minute?" fortunately, the telephone was in the bedroom. he went farther upstairs and shut himself in the bedroom, and saw naught but the telephone surrounded by the mysterious influences of inanimate things in the gay, crowded room. "is that you, mrs. trevise? it's g.j. speaking. g.j.... hoape. yes. listen. i'm at concepcion's for lunch, and i want you to come over as quickly as you can. i've got very bad news indeed--the worst possible. carlos has been killed at the front. what? yes, awful, isn't it? she doesn't know. i have the job of telling her." now that the words had been spoken in concepcion's abode the reality of carlos smith's death seemed more horribly convincing than before. and g.j., speaker of the words, felt almost as guilty as though he himself were responsible for the death. when he had rung off he stood motionless in the room until the opening of the door startled him. concepcion appeared. "if you've done corrupting my innocent telephone ..." she said, "lunch is cooling." he felt a murderer. at the lunch-table she might have been a genuine south american. nobody could be less like christine than she was; and yet in those instants she incomprehensibly reminded him of christine. then she started to talk in her old manner of a professional and renowned talker. g.j. listened attentively. they ate. it was astounding that he could eat. and it was rather surprising that she did not cry out: "g.j. what the devil's the matter with you to-day?" but she went on talking evenly, and she made him recount his doings. he related the conversation at the club, and especially what bob, the retired judge, had said about equilibrium on the western front. she did not want to hear anything as to the funeral. "we'll have champagne," she said suddenly to the parlour-maid, who was about to offer some red wine. and while the parlour-maid was out of the room she said to g.j., "there isn't a country in europe where champagne is not a symbol, and we must conform." "a symbol of what?" "ah! the unusual." "and what is there unusual to-day?" he almost asked, but did not ask. it would, of course, have been utterly monstrous to put such a question, knowing what he knew. he thought: i'm not a bit nearer telling her than i was when i came. after the parlour-maid had poured out the champagne concepcion picked up her glass and absently glanced through it and said: "you know, g.j., i shouldn't be in the least surprised to hear that carly was killed out there. i shouldn't, really." in amazement g.j. ceased to eat. "you needn't look at me like that," she said. "i'm quite serious. one may as well face the risks. _he_ does. of course they're all heroes. there are millions of heroes. but i do honestly believe that my carly would be braver than anyone. by the way, did i ever tell you he was considered the best shot in cheshire?" "no. but i knew," answered g.j. feebly. he would have expected her to be a little condescending towards carlos, to whom in brains she was infinitely superior. but no! carlos had mastered her, and she was grateful to him for mastering her. he had taught her in three weeks more than she had learnt on two continents in thirty years. she talked of him precisely as any wee wifie might have talked of the soldier-spouse. and she called him "carly"! neither of them had touched the champagne. g.j. decided that he would postpone any attempt to tell her until her cousin arrived; her cousin might arrive at any moment now. while the parlour-maid presented potatoes concepcion deliberately ignored her and said dryly to g.j.: "i can't eat any more. i think i ought to run along to debenham and freebody's at once. you might come too, and be sure to bring your good taste with you." he was alarmed by her tone. "debenham and freebody's! what for?" "to order mourning, of course. to have it ready, you know. a precaution, you know." she laughed. he saw that she was becoming hysterical: the special liability of the war-bride for whom the curtain has been lifted and falls exasperatingly, enragingly, too soon. "you think i'm a bit hysterical?" she questioned, half menacingly, and stood up. "i think you'd better sit down, to begin with," he said firmly. the parlour-maid, blushing slightly, left the room. "oh, all right!" concepcion agreed carelessly, and sat down. "but you may as well read that." she drew a telegram from the low neck of her gown and carefully unfolded it and placed it in front of him. it was a war office telegram announcing that carlos had been killed. "it came ten minutes before you," she said. "why didn't you tell me at once?" he murmured, frightfully shocked. he was actually reproaching her! she stood up again. she lived; her breast rose and fell. her gown had the same voluptuousness. her temperament was still emanating the same aura. she was the same new concepcion, strange and yet profoundly known to him. but ineffable tragedy had marked her down, and the sight of her parched the throat. she said: "couldn't. besides, i had to see if i could stand it. because i've got to stand it, g.j.... and, moreover, in our set it's a sacred duty to be original." she snatched the telegram, tore it in two, and pushed the pieces back into her gown. "'poor wounded name!'" she murmured, "'my bosom as a bed shall lodge thee.'" the next moment she fell to the floor, at full length on her back. g.j. sprang to her, kneeling on her rich, outspread gown, and tried to lift her. "no, no!" she protested faintly, dreamily, with a feeble frown on her pale forehead. "let me lie. equilibrium has been established on the western front." this was her greatest _mot_. chapter rendezvous when the italian woman, having recognised him with a discreet smile, introduced g.j. into the drawing-room of the cork street flat, he saw christine lying on the sofa by the fire. she too was in a tea-gown. she said: "do not be vexed. i have my migraine--am good for nothing. but i gave the order that thou shouldst be admitted." she lifted her arms, and the long sleeves fell away. g.j. bent down and kissed her. she joined her hands on the nape of his neck, and with this leverage raised her whole body for an instant, like a child, smiling; then dropped back with a fatigued sigh, also like a child. he found satisfaction in the fact that she was laid aside. it was providential. it set him right with himself. for, to put the thing crudely, he had left the tragic concepcion to come to christine, a woman picked up in a promenade. true, sara trevise had agreed with him that he could accomplish no good by staying at concepcion's; concepcion had withdrawn from the vision of men. true, it could make no difference to concepcion whether he retired to his flat for the rest of the day and saw no one, or whether, having changed his ceremonious clothes there, he went out again on his own affairs. true, he had promised christine to see her that afternoon, and a promise was a promise, and christine was a woman who had behaved well to him, and it would have been impossible for him to send her an excuse, since he did not know her surname. these apparently excellent arguments were specious and worthless. he would, anyhow, have gone to christine. the call was imperious within him, and took no heed of grief, nor propriety, nor the secret decencies of sympathy. the primitive man in him would have gone to christine. he sat down with a profound and exquisite relief. the entrance to the house was nearly opposite the entrance to a prim but fashionable and expensive hotel. to ring (and ring the right bell) and wait at christine's door almost under the eyes of the hotel was an ordeal.... the fat and untidy italian had opened the door, and shut it again--quick! he was in another world, saved, safe! on the dark staircase the image of concepcion with her temperament roused and condemned to everlasting hunger, the unconquerable concepcion blasted in an instant of destiny--this image faded. she would re-marry.... she ought to re-marry.... and now he was in christine's warm room, and christine, temporary invalid, reclined before his eyes. the lights were turned on, the blinds drawn, the stove replenished, the fire replenished. he was enclosed with christine in a little world with no law and no conventions except its own, and no shames nor pretences. he was, as it were, in the east. and the immanence of a third person, the italian, accepting naturally and completely the code of the little world, only added to the charm. the italian was like a slave, from whom it is necessary to hide nothing and never to blush. a stuffy little world with a perceptible odour! ordinarily he had the common insular appetite for ventilation, but now stuffiness appealed to him; he scented it almost voluptuously. the ugliness of the wallpaper, of the furniture, of everything in the room was naught. christine's profession was naught. who could positively say that her profession was on her face, in her gestures, in her talk? admirable as was his knowledge of french, it was not enough to enable him to criticise her speech. her gestures were delightful. her face--her face was soft; her puckered brow was touching in its ingenuousness. she had a kind and a trustful eye; it was a lewd eye, indicative of her incomparable endowment; but had he not encountered the lewd eye in the very arcana of the respectability of the world outside? on the sofa, open and leaves downward, lay a book with a glistening coloured cover, entitled _fantomas_. it was the seventh volume of an interminable romance which for years had had a tremendous vogue among the concierges, the workgirls, the clerks, and the _cocottes_ of paris. an unreadable affair, not even indecent, which nevertheless had enchanted a whole generation. to be able to enjoy it was an absolute demonstration of lack of taste; but did not some of his best friends enjoy books no better? and could he not any day in any drawing-room see martyred books dropped open and leaves downwards in a manner to raise the gorge of a person of any bookish sensibility? "thou wilt play for me?" she suggested. "but the headache?" "it will do me good. i adore music, such music as thou playest." he was flattered. the draped piano was close to him. stretching out his hand he took a little pile of music from the top of it. "but you play, then!" he exclaimed, pleased. "no, no! i tap--only. and very little." he glanced through the pieces of music. they were all, without exception, waltzes, by the once popular waltz-kings of paris and vienna, including several by the king of kings, berger. he seated himself at the piano and opened the first waltz that came. "oh! i adore the waltzes of berger," she murmured. "there is only he. you don't think so?" he said he had never heard any of this music. then he played every piece for her. he tried to see what it was in this music that so pleased the simple; and he saw it, or he thought he saw it. he abandoned himself to the music, yielding to it, accepting its ideals, interpreting it as though it moved him, until in the end it did produce in him a sort of factitious emotion. after all, it was no worse than much of the music he was forced to hear in very refined circles. she said, ravished: "you decipher music like an angel." and hummed a fragment of the waltz from _the rosenkavalier_ which he had played for her two evenings earlier. he glanced round sharply. had she, then, real taste? "it is like that, isn't it?" she questioned, and hummed it again, flattered by the look on his face. while, at her invitation, he repeated the waltz on the piano, whose strings might have been made of zinc, he heard a ring at the outer door and then the muffled sound of a colloquy between a male voice and the voice of the italian. "of course," he admitted philosophically, "she has other clients already." such a woman was bound to have other clients. he felt no jealousy, nor even discomfort, from the fact that she lent herself to any male with sufficient money and a respectable appearance. the colloquy expired. "ring, please," she requested, after thanking him. he hoped that she was not going to interrogate the italian in his presence. surely she would be incapable of such clumsiness! still, women without imagination--and the majority of women were without imagination--did do the most astounding things. there was no immediate answer to the bell; but in a few minutes the italian entered with a tea-tray. christine sat up. "i will pour the tea," said she, and to the italian: "marthe, where is the evening paper?" and when marthe returned with a newspaper damp from the press, christine said: "to monsieur...." not a word of curiosity as to the unknown visitor! g.j. was amply confirmed in his original opinion of christine. she was one in a hundred. to provide the evening paper.... it was nothing, but it was enormous. "sit by my side," she said. she made just a little space for him on the sofa--barely enough so that he had to squeeze in. the afternoon tea was correct, save for the extraordinary thickness of the bread-and-butter. but g.j. said to himself that the french did not understand bread-and-butter, and the italians still less. to compensate for the defects of the bread-and-butter there was a box of fine chocolates. "i perfect my english," she said. tea was finished; they were smoking, the _evening news_ spread between them over the tea-things. she articulated with a strong french accent the words of some of the headings. "mistair carlos smith keeled at the front," she read out. "who is it, that woman there? she must be celebrated." there was a portrait of the illustrious concepcion, together with some sympathetic remarks about her, remarks conceived very differently from the usual semi-ironic, semi-worshipping journalistic references to the stars of concepcion's set. g.j. answered vaguely. "i do not like too much these society women. they are worse than us, and they cost you more. ah! if the truth were known--" christine spoke with a queer, restrained, surprising bitterness. then she added, softly relenting: "however, it is sad for her.... who was he, this monsieur?" g.j. replied that he was nobody in particular, so far as his knowledge went. "ah! one of those who are husbands of their wives!" said christine acidly. the disturbing intuition of women! a little later he said that he must depart. "but why? i feel better." "i have a committee." "a committee?" "it is a work of charity--for the french wounded." "ah! in that case.... but, beloved!" "yes?" she lowered her voice. "how dost thou call thyself?" "gilbert." "thou knowest--i have a fancy for thee." her tone was delicious, its sincerity absolutely convincing. "too amiable." "no, no. it is true. say! return. return after thy committee. take me out to dinner--some gentle little restaurant, discreet. there must be many of them in a city like london. it is a city so romantic. oh! the little corners of london!" "but--of course. i should be enchanted--" "well, then." he was standing. she raised her smiling, seductive face. she was young--younger than concepcion; less battered by the world's contacts than concepcion. she had the inexpressible virtue and power of youth. he was nearing fifty. and she, perhaps half his age, had confessed his charm. "and say! my gilbert. bring me a few flowers. i have not been able to go out to-day. something very simple. i detest that one should squander money on flowers for me." "seven-thirty, then!" said he. "and you will be ready?" "i shall be very exact. thou wilt tell me all that concerns thy committee. that interests me. the english are extraordinary." chapter in committee within the hotel the glowing gold hall, whose lincrusta walton panels dated it, was nearly empty. of the hundred small round tables only one was occupied; a bald head and a large green hat were almost meeting over the top of this table, but there was nothing on it except an ashtray. a waiter wandered about amid the thick plushy silence and the stagnant pools of electric light, meditating upon the curse which had befallen the world of hotels. the red lips beneath the green hat discernibly moved, but no faintest murmur therefrom reached the entrance. the hot, still place seemed to be enchanted. the sight of the hotel flower-stall recessed on the left reminded g.j. of christine's desire. forty thousand skilled women had been put out of work in england because luxury was scared by the sudden vista of war, but the black-garbed girl, entrenched in her mahogany bower, was still earning some sort of a livelihood. in a moment, wakened out of her terrible boredom into an alert smile, she had sold to g.j. a bunch of expensive chrysanthemums whose yellow petals were like long curly locks. thoughtless, he had meant to have the flowers delivered at once to christine's flat. it would not do; it would be indiscreet. and somehow, in the absence of braiding, it would be equally indiscreet to have them delivered at his own flat. "i shall be leaving the hotel in about an hour; i'll take them away myself then," he said, and inquired for the headquarters of the lechford french hospitals committee. "committee?" repeated the girl vaguely. "i expect the onyx hall's what you want." she pointed up a corridor, and gave change. g.j. discovered the onyx hall, which had its own entrance from the street, and which in other days had been a café lounge. the precious pavement was now half hidden by wooden trestles, wooden cubicles, and cheap chairs. temporary flexes brought down electric light from a stained glass dome to illuminate card-indexes and pigeon-holes and piles of letters. notices in french and flemish were suspended from the ornate onyx pilasters. old countrywomen and children in rough foreign clothes, smart officers in strange uniforms, privates in shabby blue, gentlemen in morning coats and spats, and untidy englishwomen with eyes romantic, hard, or wistful, were mixed together in the onyx hall, where there was no enchantment and little order, save that good french seemed to be regularly spoken on one side of the trestles and regularly assassinated on the other. g.j., mystified, caught the grey eye of a youngish woman with a tired and fretful expression. "and you?" she inquired perfunctorily. he demanded, with hesitation: "is this the lechford committee?" "the what committee?" "the lechford committee headquarters." he thought she might be rather an attractive little thing at, say, an evening party. she gave him a sardonic look and answered, not rudely, but with large tolerance: "can't you read?" by means of gesture scarcely perceptible she directed his attention to an immense linen sign stretched across the back of the big room, and he saw that he was in the ant-heap of some belgian committee. "so sorry to have troubled you!" he apologised. "i suppose you don't happen to know where the lechford committee sits?" "never heard of it," said she with cheerful disdain. then she smiled and he smiled. "you know, the hotel simply hums with committees, but this is the biggest by a long way. they can't let their rooms, so it costs them nothing to lend them for patriotic purposes." he liked the chit. presently, with a page-boy, he was ascending in a lift through storey after storey of silent carpeted desert. light alternated with darkness, winking like a succession of days and nights as seen by a god. the infant showed him into a private parlour furnished and decorated in almost precisely the same taste as christine's sitting-room, where a number of men and women sat close together at a long deal table, whose pale, classic simplicity clashed with the rest of the apartment. a thin, dark, middle-aged man of austere visage bowed to him from the head of the table. somebody else indicated a chair, which, with a hideous, noisy scraping over the bare floor, he modestly insinuated between two occupied chairs. a third person offered a typewritten sheet containing the agenda of the meeting. a blonde girl was reading in earnest, timid tones the minutes of the previous meeting. the affair had just begun. as soon as the minutes had been passed the austere chairman turned and said evenly: "i am sure i am expressing the feelings of the committee in welcoming among us mr. hoape, who has so kindly consented to join us and give us the benefit of his help and advice in our labours." sympathetic murmurs converged upon g.j. from the four sides of the table, and g.j. nervously murmured a few incomprehensible words, feeling both foolish and pleased. he had never sat on a committee; and as his war-conscience troubled him more and more daily, he was extremely anxious to start work which might placate it. indeed, he had seized upon the request to join the committee as a swimmer in difficulties clasps the gunwale of a dinghy. a man who kept his gaze steadily on the table cleared his throat and said: "the matter is not in order, mr. chairman, but i am sure i am expressing the feelings of the committee in proposing a vote of condolence to yourself on the terrible loss which you have sustained in the death of your son at the front." "i beg to second that," said a lady quickly. "our chairman has given his only son--" tears came into her eyes; she seemed to appeal for help. there were "hear, hears," and more sympathetic murmurs. the proposer, with his gaze still steadily fixed on the table, said: "i beg to put the resolution to the meeting." "yes," said the chairman with calm self-control in the course of his acknowledgment. "and if i had ten sons i would willingly give them all--for the cause." and his firm, hard glance appeared to challenge any member of the committee to assert that this profession of parental and patriotic generosity of heart was not utterly sincere. however, nobody had the air of doubting that if the chairman had had ten sons, or as many sons as solomon, he would have sacrificed them all with the most admirable and eager heroism. the agenda was opened. g.j. had little but newspaper knowledge of the enterprises of the committee, and it would not have been proper to waste the time of so numerous a company in enlightening him. the common-sense custom evidently was that new members should "pick up the threads as they went along." g.j. honestly tried to do so. but he was preoccupied with the personalities of the committee. he soon saw that the whole body was effectively divided into two classes--the chairmen of the various sub-committees, and the rest. few members were interested in any particular subject. those who were not interested either stared at the walls or at the agenda paper, or laboriously drew intricate and meaningless designs on the agenda paper, or folded up the agenda paper into fantastic shapes until, when someone in authority brought out the formula, "i think the view of the committee will be--" a resolution was put and the issue settled by the mechanical raising of hands on the fulcrum of the elbow. and at each raising of hands everybody felt that something positive had indeed been accomplished. the new member was a little discouraged. he had the illusion that the two hospitals run in france for french soldiers by the lechford committee were an illusion, that they did not really exist, that the committee was discussing an abstraction. nevertheless, each problem as it was presented--the drains (postponed), the repairs to the motor-ambulances, the ordering of a new x-ray apparatus, the dilatoriness of a french minister in dealing with correspondence, the cost per day per patient, the relations with the french civil authorities and the french military authorities, the appointment of a new matron who could keep the peace with the senior doctor, and the great principle involved in deducting five francs fifty centimes for excess luggage from a nurse's account for travelling expenses--each problem helped to demonstrate that the hospitals did exist and that men and women were toiling therein, and that french soldiers in grave need were being magnificently cared for and even saved from death. and it was plain, too, that none of these excellent things could have come to pass or could continue to occur if the committee did not regularly sit round the table and at short intervals perform the rite of raising hands.... g.j.'s attention wandered. he could not keep his mind off the thought that he should soon be seeing christine again. sitting at the table with a mien of intelligent interest, he had a waking dream of christine. he saw her just as she was--ingenuous, and ignorant if you like--except that she was pure. her purity, though, had not cooled her temperament, and thus she combined in herself the characteristics of at least two different women, both of whom were necessary to his happiness. and she was his wife, and they lived in a roomy house in hyde park gardens, and the war was over. and she adored him and he was passionately fond of her. and she was always having children; she enjoyed having children; she demanded children; she had a child every year and there was never any trouble. and he never admired her more poignantly than at the periods just before his children were born, when she had the vast, exquisitely swelling figure of the french renaissance virgin in marble that stood on a console in his drawing-room at the albany.... such was g.j.'s dream as he assisted in the control of the lechford hospitals. emerging from it he looked along the table. quite half the members were dreaming too, and he wondered what thoughts were moving secretly within them. but the chairman was not dreaming. he never loosed his grasp of the matter in hand. nor did the earnest young blonde by the chairman's side who took down in stenography the decisions of the committee. chapter queen then lady queenie paulle entered rather hurriedly, filling the room with a distinguished scent. all the men rose in haste, and there was a frightful scraping of chair-legs on the floor. lady queenie cheerfully apologised for being late, and, begging no one to disturb himself, took a modest place between the chairman and the secretary and a little behind them. lady queenie obviously had what is called "race". the renown of her family went back far, far beyond its special victorian vogue, which had transformed an earldom into a marquisate and which, incidentally, was responsible for the new family christian name that queenie herself bore. she was young, tall, slim and pale, and dressed with the utmost smartness in black--her half-brother having gloriously lost his life in september. she nodded to the secretary, who blushed with pleasure, and she nodded to several members, including g.j. being accustomed to publicity and to seeing herself nearly every week in either _the tatler_ or _the sketch_, she was perfectly at ease in the room, and the fact that nearly the whole company turned to her as plants to the sun did not in the least disturb her. the attention which she received was her due, for she had few rivals as a war-worker. she was connected with the queen's work for women fund, queen mary's needlework guild, the three arts fund, the women's emergency corps, and many minor organisations. she had joined a women's suffrage society because such societies were being utilised by the government. she had had ten lessons in first aid in ten days, had donned the red cross, and gone to france with two motor-cars and a staff and a french maid in order to help in the great national work of nursing wounded heroes; and she might still have been in france had not an unsympathetic and audacious colonel of the r.a.m.c. insisted on her being shipped back to england. she had done practically everything that a patriotic girl could do for the war, except, perhaps, join a voluntary aid detachment and wash dishes and scrub floors for fifteen hours a day and thirteen and a half days a fortnight. it was from her mother that she had inherited the passion for public service. the marchioness of lechford had been the cause of more philanthropic work in others than any woman in the whole history of philanthropy. lady lechford had said, "let there be lechford hospitals in france," and lo! there were lechford hospitals in france. when troublesome complications arose lady lechford had, with true self-effacement, surrendered the establishments to a thoroughly competent committee, and while retaining a seat on the committee for herself and another for queenie, had curved tirelessly away to the inauguration of fresh and more exciting schemes. "mamma was very sorry she couldn't come this afternoon," said lady queenie, addressing the chairman. the formula of those with authority in deciding now became: "i don't know exactly what lady lechford's view is, but i venture to think--" then suddenly the demeanour of every member of the committee was quickened, everybody listened intently to everything that was said; a couple of members would speak together; pattern-designing and the manufacture of paper ships, chains, and flowers ceased; it was as though a tonic had been mysteriously administered to each individual in the enervating room. the cause of the change was a recommendation from the hospitals management sub-committee that it be an instruction to the new matron of the smaller hospital to forbid any nurse and any doctor to go out alone together in the evening. scandal was insinuated; nothing really wrong, but a bad impression produced upon the civilians of the tiny town, who could not be expected to understand the holy innocence which underlies the superficial license of anglo-saxon manners. the personal characters and strange idiosyncrasies of every doctor and every nurse were discussed; broad principles of conduct were enunciated, together with the advantages and disadvantages of those opposite poles, discipline and freedom. the argument continually expanded, branching forth like the timber of a great oak-tree from the trunk, and the minds of the committee ran about the tree like monkeys. the interest was endless. a quiet delegate who had just returned from a visit to the tiny town completely blasted one part of the argument by asserting that the hospital bore a blameless reputation among the citizens; but new arguments were instantly constructed by the adherents of the idea of discipline. the committee had plainly split into two even parties. g.j. began to resent the harshness of the disciplinarians. "i think we should remember," he said in his modest voice, "i think we should remember that we are dealing with adult men and women." the libertarians at once took him for their own. the disciplinarians gave him to understand with their eyes that it might have been better if he, as a new member attending his first meeting, had kept silence. the discussion was inflamed. one or two people glanced surreptitiously at their watches. the hour had long passed six thirty. g.j. grew anxious about his rendezvous with christine. he had enjoined exactitude upon christine. but the main body of the excited and happy committee had no thought of the flight of time. the amusements of the tiny town came up for review. as a fact, there was only one amusement, the cinema. the whole town went to the cinema. cinemas were always darkened; human nature was human nature.... g.j. had an extraordinarily realistic vision of the hospital staff slaving through its long and heavy day and its everlasting week and preparing in sections to amuse itself on certain evenings, and thinking with pleasant anticipation of the ecstasies of the cinema, and pathetically unsuspicious that its fate was being decided by a council of omnipotent deities in the heaven of a london hotel. "mamma has never mentioned the subject to me," said lady queenie in response to a question, looking at her rich muff. "this is a question of principle," said somebody sharply, implying that at last individual consciences were involved and that the opinions of the marchioness of lechford had ceased to weigh. "i'm afraid it's getting late," said the impassive chairman. "we must come to some decision." in the voting lady queenie, after hesitation, raised her hand with the disciplinarians. by one vote the libertarians were defeated, and the dalliance of the hospital staff in leisure hours received a severe check. "she _would_--of course!" breathed a sharp-nosed little woman in the chair next but one to g.j., gazing inimically at the lax mouth and cynical eyes of lady queenie, who for four years had been the subject of universal whispering, and some shouting, and one or two ferocious battles in london. chair-legs scraped. people rose here and there to go as they rise in a music hall after the scottish comedian has retired, bowing, from his final encore. they protested urgent appointments elsewhere. the chairman remarked that other important decisions yet remained to be taken; but his voice had no insistence because he had already settled the decisions in his own mind. g.j. seized the occasion to depart. "mr. hoape," the chairman detained him a moment. "the committee hope you will allow yourself to be nominated to the accounts sub-committee. we understand that you are by way of being an expert. the sub-committee meets on wednesday mornings at eleven--doesn't it, sir charles?" "half-past," said sir charles. "oh! half-past." g.j., somewhat surprised to learn of his expertise in accountancy, consented to the suggestion, which renewed his resolution, impaired somewhat by the experience of the meeting, to be of service in the world. "you will receive the notice, of course," said the chairman. down below, just as g.j. was getting away with christine's chrysanthemums in their tissue paper, lady queenie darted out of the lift opposite. it was she who, at concepcion's instigation, had had him put in the committee. "i say, queen," he said with a casual air--on account of the flowers, "who's been telling 'em i know about accounts?" "i did." "why?" "why?" she said maliciously. "don't you keep an account of every penny you spend?" (it was true.) here was a fair example of her sardonic and unscrupulous humour--a humour not of words but of acts. g.j. simply tossed his head, aware of the futility of expostulation. she went on in a different tone: "you were the first to see connie?" "yes," he said sadly. "she has lain in my arms all afternoon," lady queenie burst out, her voice liquid. "and now i'm going straight back to her." she looked at him with the strangest triumphant expression. then her large, equivocal blue eyes fell from his face to the flowers, and their expression simultaneously altered to disdainful amusement full of mischievous implications. she ran off without another word. the glazed entrance doors revolved, and he saw her nip into an electric brougham, which, before he had time to button his overcoat, vanished like an apparition in the rainy mist. chapter evening out he found christine exactly as he had left her, in the same tea-gown and the same posture, and on the same sofa. but a small table had been put by the sofa; and on this table was a penny bottle of ink in a saucer, and a pen. she was studying some kind of official form. the pucker between the eyes was very marked. "already!" she exclaimed, as if amazed. "but there is not a clock that goes, and i had not the least idea of the hour. besides, i was splitting my head to fill up this form." such was her notion of being exact! he had abandoned an important meeting of a committee which was doing untold mercies to her compatriots in order to keep his appointment with her; and she, whose professional business it was that evening to charm him and harmonise with him, had merely flouted the appointment. nevertheless, her gestures and smile as she rose and came towards him were so utterly exquisite that immediately he also flouted the appointment. what, after all, could it matter whether they dined at eight, nine, or even ten o'clock? "thou wilt pardon me, monster?" she murmured, kissing him. no woman had ever put her chin up to his as she did, nor with a glance expressed so unreserved a surrender to his masculinity. she went on, twining languishingly round him: "i do not know whether i ought to go out. i am yet far from--it is perhaps imprudent." "absurd!" he protested--he could not bear the thought of her not dining with him. he knew too well the desolation of a solitary dinner. "absurd! we go in a taxi. the restaurant is warm. we return in a taxi." "to please thee, then." "what is that form?" "it is for the telephone. thou understandest how it is necessary that i have the telephone--me! but i comprehend nothing of this form." she passed him the form. she had written her name in the space allotted. "christine dubois." a fair calligraphy! but what a name! the french equivalent of "smith". nothing could be less distinguished. suddenly it occurred to him that concepcion's name also was smith. "i will fill it up for you. it is quite simple." "it is possible that it is simple when one is english. but english--that is as if to say chinese. everything contrary. here is a pen." "no. i have my fountain-pen." he hated a cheap pen, and still more a penny bottle of ink, but somehow this particular penny bottle of ink seemed touching in its simple ugliness. she was eminently teachable. he would teach her his own attitude towards penny bottles of ink.... of course she would need the telephone--that could not be denied. as christine was signing the form marthe entered with the chrysanthemums, which he had handed over to her; she had arranged them in a horrible blue glass vase cheaply gilded; and while marthe was putting the vase on the small table there was a ring at the outer door. marthe hurried off. christine said, kissing him again tenderly: "thou art a squanderer! fine for me to tell thee not to buy costly flowers! thou has spent at least ten shillings for these. with ten shillings--" "no, no!" he interrupted her. "five." it was a fib. he had paid half a guinea for the few flowers, but he could not confess it. they could hear a powerful voice indistinctly booming at the top of the stairs. "two callers on one afternoon!" g.j. reflected. and yet she had told him she went out for the first time only the day before yesterday! he scarcely liked it, but his reason rescued him from the puerility of a grievance against her on this account. "and why not? she is bound to be a marked success." marthe returned to the drawing-room and shut the door. "madame--" she began, slightly agitated. "speak, then!" christine urged, catching her agitation. "it is the police!" g.j. had a shock. he knew many of the policemen who lurked in the dark doorways of piccadilly at night, had little friendly talks with them, held them for excellent fellows. but a policeman invading the flat of a courtesan, and himself in the flat, seemed a different being from the honest stalwarts who threw the beams of lanterns on the key-holes of jewellers' shops. christine steeled herself to meet the crisis with self-reliance. she pointedly did not appeal to the male. "well, what is it that he wants?" "he talks of the chimney. it appears this morning there was a chimney on fire. but since we burn only anthracite and gas--he knows madame's name." there was a pause. christine asked sharply and mysteriously: "how much do you think?" "if madame gave five pounds--having regard to the _chic_ of the quarter." christine rushed into the bedroom and came back with a five-pound note. "here! chuck that at him--politely. tell him we are very sorry." "yes, madame." "but he'll never take it. you can't treat the london police like that!" g.j. could not help expostulating as soon as marthe had gone. he feared some trouble. "my poor friend!" christine replied patronisingly. "thou art not up in these things. marthe knows her affair--a woman very experienced in london. he will take it, thy policeman. and if i do not deceive myself no more chimneys will burn for about a year.... ah! the police do not wipe their noses with broken bottles!" (she meant that the police knew their way about.) "i no more than they, i do not wipe my nose with broken bottles." she was moved, indignant, stoutly defensive. g.j. grew self-conscious. moreover, her slang disturbed him. it was the first slang he had heard her use, and in using it her voice had roughened. but he remembered that concepcion also used slang--and advanced slang--upon occasion. the booming ceased; a door closed. marthe returned once more. "well?" "he is gone. he was very nice, madame. i told him about madame--that madame was very discreet." marthe finished in a murmur. "so much the better. now, help me to dress. quick, quick! monsieur will be impatient." g.j. was ashamed of the innocence he had displayed, and ashamed, too, of the whole metropolitan police force, admirable though it was in stopping traffic for a perambulator to cross the road. five pounds! these ladies were bled. five pounds wanted earning.... it was a good sign, though, that she had not so far asked him to contribute. and he felt sure that she would not. "come in, then, poltroon!" she cooed softly and encouragingly from the bedroom, where marthe was busy with her. the door between the bedroom and the drawing-room was open. g.j., humming, obeyed the invitation and sat down on the bed between two heaps of clothes. christine was very gay; she was like a child. she had apparently quite forgotten her migraine and also the incident of the policeman. she snatched the cigarette from g.j.'s mouth, took a puff, and put it back again. then she sat in front of the large mirror and did her hair while marthe buttoned her boots. her corset fitted beautifully, and as she raised her arms above her head under the shaded lamp g.j. could study the marvellous articulation of the arms at the bare shoulders. the close atmosphere was drenched with femininity. the two women, one so stylish and the other by contrast piquantly a heavy slattern, hid nothing whatever from him, bestowing on him with perfect tranquillity the right to be there and to watch at his ease every mysterious transaction.... the most convincing proof that christine was authentically young! and g.j. had the illusion again that he was in the orient, and it was extraordinarily agreeable. the recollection of the scene of the lechford committee amused him like a pantomime witnessed afar off through a gauze curtain. it had no more reality than that. but he thought better of the committee now. he perceived the wonderful goodness of it and of its work. it really was running those real hospitals; it had a real interest in them. he meant to do his very best in the accounts department. after all, he had been a lawyer and knew the routine of an office and the minutest phenomena of a ledger. he was eager to begin. "how findest thou me?" she stood for inspection. she was ready, except the gloves. the angle of her hat, the provocation of her veil--these things would have quickened the pulse of a patagonian. perfume pervaded the room. he gave the classic response that nothing could render trite: "_tu es exquise_." she raised her veil just above her mouth.... in the drawing-room she hesitated, and then settled down on the piano-stool like a bird alighting and played a few bars from the _rosenkavalier_ waltz. he was thunderstruck, for she had got not only the air but some of the accompaniment right. "go on! go on!" he urged her, marvelling. she turned, smiling, and shook her head. "that is all that i can recall to myself." the obvious sincerity of his appreciation delighted her. "she is really musical!" he thought, and was convinced that while looking for a bit of coloured glass he had picked up an emerald. marthe produced his overcoat, and when he was ready for the street christine gazed at him and said: "for the true _chic_, there are only englishmen!" in the taxi she proved to him by delicate effronteries the genuineness of her confessed "fancy" for him. and she poured out slang. he began to be afraid, for this excursion was an experiment such as he had never tried before in london; in paris, of course, the code was otherwise. but as soon as the commissionaire of the restaurant at victoria approached the door of the taxi her manner changed. she walked up the long interior with the demureness of a stockbroker's young wife out for the evening from putney hill. he thought, relieved, "she is the embodiment of common sense." at the end of the vista of white tables the restaurant opened out to the left. in a far corner they were comfortably secure from observation. they sat down. a waiter beamed his flatteries upon them. g.j. was serenely aware of his own skilled faculty for ordering a dinner. he looked over the menu card at christine. nobody could possibly tell that she was a professed enemy of society. "these french women are astounding!" he thought. he intensely admired her. he was mad about her. his bliss was extreme. he could not keep it within bounds meet for the great world-catastrophe. he was happy as for quite ten years he had never hoped to be. yes, he grieved for concepcion; but somehow grief could not mingle with nor impair the happiness he felt. and was not concepcion lying in the affectionate arms of queenie paulle? christine, glancing about her contentedly, reverted to one of her leading ideas: "truly, it is very romantic, thy london!" chapter the virgin christine went into the oratory of st. philip at brompton on a sunday morning in the following january, dipped her finger into one of the italian basins at the entrance, and signed herself with the holy water. she was dressed in black; she had the face of a pretty martyr; her brow was crumpled by the world's sorrow; she looked and actually was at the moment intensely religious. she had months earlier chosen the brompton oratory for her devotions, partly because of the name of philip, which had been murmured in accents of affection by her dying mother, and partly because it lay on a direct, comprehensible bus-route from piccadilly. you got into the motor-bus opposite the end of the burlington arcade, and in about six minutes it dropped you in front of the oratory; and you could not possibly lose yourself in the topographical intricacies of the unknown city. christine never took a taxi except when on business. the interior was gloomy with the winter forenoon; the broad renaissance arches showed themselves only faintly above; on every side there were little archipelagos of light made by groups of candles in front of great pale images. the church was comparatively empty, and most of the people present were kneeling in the chapels; for christine had purposely come, as she always did, at the slack hour between the seventh and last of the early morning low masses and the high mass at eleven. she went up the right aisle and stopped before the miraculous infant jesus of prague, a charming and naive little figure about eighteen inches high in a stiff embroidered cloak and a huge symbol upon his curly head. she had put herself under the protection of the miraculous infant jesus of prague. she liked him; he was a change from the virgin; and he stood in the darkest corner of the whole interior, behind the black statue of st. peter with protruding toe, and within the deep shadow made by the organ-loft overhead. also he had a motto in french: "plus vous m'honorerez plus je vous favoriserai." christine hesitated, and then left the miraculous infant jesus of prague without even a transient genuflexion. she was afraid to devote herself to him that morning. of course she had been brought up strictly in the roman catholic faith. and in her own esteem she was still an honest catholic. for years she had not confessed and therefore had not communicated. for years she had had a desire to cast herself down at a confessional-box, but she had not done so because of one of the questions in the _petit paroissien_ which she used: "avez-vous péché, par pensée, parole, ou action, contre la pureté ou la modestie?" and because also of the preliminary injunction: "maintenant essayez de vous rappeler vos péchés, _et combien de fois vous les avez commis_." she could not bring herself to do that. once she had confessed a great deal to a priest at sens, but he had treated her too lightly; his lightness with her had indeed been shameful. since then she had never confessed. further, she knew herself to be in a state of mortal sin by reason of her frequent wilful neglect of the holy offices; and occasionally, at the most inconvenient moments, the conviction that if she died she was damned would triumph over her complacency. but on the whole she had hopes for the future; though she had sinned, her sin was mysteriously not like other people's sin of exactly the same kind. and finally there was the virgin mary, the sweet and dependable goddess. she had been neglecting the very clement virgin mary in favour of the miraculous infant jesus of prague. a whim, a thoughtless caprice, which she had paid for! the virgin mary had withdrawn her defending shield. at least that was the interpretation which christine was bound to put upon the terrible incident of the previous night in the promenade. she had quite innocently been involved in a drunken row in the lounge. two military officers, one of whom, unnoticed by christine, was intoxicated, and two women--madame larivaudière and christine! the belgian had been growing more and more jealous of christine.... the row had flamed up in the tenth of a second like an explosion. the two officers--then the two women. the bright silvery sound of glass shattered on marble! high voices, deep voices! half the promenade had rushed vulgarly into the lounge, panting with a gross appetite to witness a vulgar scene. and as the belgian was jealous of the french girl, so were the english girls horribly jealous of all the foreign girls, and scornful too. nothing but the overwhelming desire of the management to maintain the perfect respectability of its promenade had prevented a rough-and-tumble between the officers. as for madame larivaudière, she had been ejected and told never to return. christine had fled to the cloak-room, where she had remained for half an hour, and thence had vanished away, solitary, by the side entrance. it was precisely such an episode as christine's mother would have deprecated in horror, and as christine herself intensely loathed. and she could never assuage the moral wound of it by confiding the affair to gilbert. she was mad about gilbert; she thrilled to be his slave; she had what seemed an immeasurable confidence in him; and yet never, never could she mention another individual man to him, much less tell him of the public shame that had fallen upon her in the exercise of her profession. why had fate been thus hard on her? the answer was surely to be found in the displeasure of the virgin. and so she did not dare to stay with the miraculous infant jesus of prague, nor even to murmur the prayer beginning: "adorable jésus, divin modèle de la perfection ..." she glanced round the great church, considering what were to her the major and minor gods and goddesses on their ornate thrones: st. antony, st. joseph, st. sebastian, st. philip, the sacred heart, st. cecilia, st. peter, st. wilfrid, st. mary magdelene (ah! not at that altar could she be seen!), st. patrick, st. veronica, st. francis, st. john baptist, st. teresa, our lady, our lady of good counsel. no! there was only one goddess possible for her--our lady of vii dolours. she crossed the wide nave to the severe black and white marble chapel of the vii dolours. the aspect of the shrine suited her. on one side she read the english words: "of your charity pray for the soul of flora duchess of norfolk who put up this altar to the mother of sorrows that they who mourn may be comforted." and the very words were romantic to her, and she thought of flora duchess of norfolk as a figure inexpressibly more romantic than the illustrious female figures of french history. the virgin of the vii dolours was enigmatically gazing at her, waiting no doubt to be placated. the virgin was painted, gigantic, in oil on canvas, but on her breast stood out a heart made in three dimensions of real silver and pierced by the swords of the seven dolours, three to the left and four to the right; and in front was a tiny gold figure of jesus crucified on a gold cross. christine cast herself down and prayed to the painted image and the hammered heart. she prayed to the goddess whom the middle ages had perfected and who in the minds of the simple and the savage has survived the renaissance and still triumphantly flourishes; the queen of heaven, the tyrant of heaven, the woman in heaven; who was so venerated that even her sweat is exhibited as a relic; who was softer than christ as christ was softer than the father; who in becoming a goddess had increased her humanity; who put living roses for a sign into the mouths of fornicators when they died, if only they had been faithful to her; who told the amorous sacristan to kiss her face and not her feet; who questioned lovers about their mistresses: "is she as pretty as i?"; who fell like a pestilence on the nuptial chambers of young men who, professing love for her, had taken another bride; who enjoyed being amused; who admitted a weakness for artists, tumblers, soldiers and the common herd; who had visibly led both opponents on every battlefield for centuries; who impersonated absent disreputable nuns and did their work for them until they returned, repentant, to be forgiven by her; who acted always on her instinct and never on her reason; who cared nothing for legal principles; who openly used her feminine influence with the trinity; who filled heaven with riff-raff; and who had never on any pretext driven a soul out of heaven. christine made peace with this jealous and divine creature. she felt unmistakably that she was forgiven for her infidelity due to the infant in the darkness beyond the opposite aisle. the face of the lady of vii dolours miraculously smiled at her; the silver heart miraculously shed its tarnish and glittered beneficent lightnings. doubtless she knew somewhere in her mind that no physical change had occurred in the picture or the heart; but her mind was a complex, and like nearly all minds could disbelieve and believe simultaneously. just as high mass was beginning she rose and in grave solace left the oratory; she would not endanger her new peace with the virgin mary by any devotion to other gods. she was solemn but happy. the conductor who took her penny in the motor-bus never suspected that on the pane before her, where some agency had caused to be printed in colour the words "seek ye the _lord_" she saw, in addition to the amazing oddness of the anglo-saxon race, a dangerous incitement to unfaith. she kept her thoughts passionately on the virgin; and by the time the bus had reached hyde park corner she was utterly sure that the horrible adventure of the promenade was purged of its evil potentialities. in the house in cork street she took out her latch-key, placidly opened the door, and entered, smiling at the solitude. marthe, who also had a soul in need of succour, would, in the ordinary course, have gone forth to a smaller church and a late mass. but on this particular morning fat marthe, in déshabille, came running to her from the little kitchen. "oh! madame!... there is someone! he is drunk." her voice was outraged. she pointed fearfully to the bedroom. christine, courageous, walked straight in. an officer in khaki was lying on the bed; his muddy, spurred boots had soiled the white lace coverlet. he was asleep and snoring. she looked at him, and, recognising her acquaintance of the previous night, wondered what the very clement virgin could be about. chapter sunday afternoon "what is madame going to do?" whispered marthe, still alarmed and shocked, when they had both stepped back out of the bedroom; and she added: "he has never been here before." marthe was a woman of immense experience but little brains, and when phenomena passed beyond her experience she became rather like a foolish, raw girl. she had often dealt with drunken men; she had often--especially in her younger days--satisfactorily explained a situation to visitors who happened to call when her mistress for the time being was out. but only on the very rarest occasions had she known a client commit the awful solecism of calling before lunch; and that a newcomer, even intoxicated, should commit this solecism staggered her and left her trembling. "what am i going to do? nothing!" answered christine. "let him sleep." christine, too, was dismayed. but marthe's weakness gave her strength, and she would not show her fright. moreover, christine had some force of character, though it did not often show itself as sudden firmness. she condescended to marthe. she also condescended to the officer, because he was unconscious, because he had put himself in a false position, because sooner or later he would look extremely silly. she regarded the officer's intrusion as tiresome, but she did not gravely resent it. after all, he was drunk; and before the row in the promenade he had asked her for her card, saying that he was engaged that night but would like to know where she lived. of course she had protested--as what woman in her place would not?--against the theory that he was engaged that night, and she had been in a fair way to convince him that he was not really engaged that night--except morally to her, since he had accosted her--when the quarrel had supervened and it had dawned on her that he had been in the taciturn and cautious stage of acute inebriety. he had, it now seemed, probably been drinking through the night. there were men, as she knew, who simply had to have bouts, whose only method to peace was to drown the demon within them. she would never knowingly touch a drunken man, or even a partially intoxicated man, if she could help it. she was not a bit like the polite young lady above, who seemed to specialise in noisy tipplers. her way with the top-heavy was to leave them to recover in tranquillity. no other way was safe. nevertheless, in the present instance she did venture again into the bedroom. the plight of the lace coverlet troubled her and practically drove her into the bedroom. she got a little towel, gently lifted the sleeper's left foot, and tied the towel round his boot; then she did the same to his other foot. the man did not stir; but if, later, he should stir, neither his boots nor his spurs could do further harm to the lace coverlet. his cane and gloves were on the floor; she picked them up. his overcoat, apparently of excellent quality, was still on his back; and the cap had not quite departed from his head. christine had learned enough about english military signs and symbols to enable her to perceive that he belonged to the artillery. "but how will madame change her dress?" marthe demanded in the sitting-room. madame always changed her dress immediately on returning from church, for that which is suitable for mass may not be proper to other ends. "i shall not change," said christine. "it is well, madame." christine was not deterred from changing by the fact that the bedroom was occupied. she retained her church dress because she foresaw the great advantage she would derive from it in the encounter which must ultimately occur with the visitor. she would not even take her hat off. the two women lunched, mainly on macaroni, with some cheese and an apple. christine had coffee. ah, she must always have her coffee. as for a cigarette, she never smoked when alone, because she did not really care for smoking. marthe, however, enjoyed smoking, and christine gave her a cigarette, which she lighted while clearing the table. one was mistress, the other servant, but the two women were constantly meeting on the plane of equality. neither of them could avoid it, or consistently tried to avoid it. although marthe did not eat with christine, if a meal was in progress she generally came into the sitting-room with her mouth more or less full of food. their repasts were trifles, passovers, unceremonious and irregular peckings, begun and finished in a few moments. and if marthe was always untidy in her person, christine, up till three in the afternoon, was also untidy. they went about the flat in a wonderful state of unkempt and insecure slovenliness. and sometimes marthe might be lolling in the sitting-room over the illustrations in _la vie parisienne_, which was part of the apparatus of the flat, while christine was in the tiny kitchen washing gloves as she alone could wash them. the flat lapsed into at any rate a superficial calm. marthe, seeing that fate had deprived her of the usual consolations of religion, determined to reward herself by remaining a perfect slattern for the rest of the day. she would not change at all. she would not wash up either the breakfast things or the lunch things. leaving a small ring of gas alight in the gas stove, she sat down all dirty on a hard chair in front of it and fell into a luxurious catalepsy. in the sitting-room christine sat upright on the sofa and read lusciously a french translation of _east lynne_. she was in no hurry for the man to waken; her sense of time was very imperfect; she was never pricked by the thought that life is short and that many urgent things demand to be done before the grave opens. nor was she apprehensive of unpleasant complications. the man was in the flat, but it was her flat; her law ran in the flat; and the door was fast against invasion. still, the gentle snore of the man, rising and falling, dominated the flat, and the fact of his presence preoccupied the one woman in the kitchen and the other in the sitting-room.... christine noticed that the thickness of the pages read had imperceptibly increased to three-quarters of an inch, while the thickness of the unread pages had diminished to a quarter of an inch. and she also noticed, on the open page, another phenomenon. it was the failing of the day--the faintest shadow on the page. with incredible transience another of those brief interruptions of darkness which in london in winter are called days was ending. she rose and went to the discreetly-curtained window, and, conscious of the extreme propriety of her appearance, boldly pulled aside the curtain and looked across, through naked glass, at the hotel nearly opposite. there was not a sound, not a movement, in cork street. cork street, the flat, the hotel, the city, the universe, lay entranced and stupefied beneath the grey vapours of the sabbath. the sensation to christine was melancholy, but it was exquisitely melancholy. the solid hotel dissolved, and in its place christine saw the interesting, pathetic phantom of her own existence. a stern, serious existence, full of disappointments, and not free from dangerous episodes, an existence which entailed much solitude and loss of liberty; but the verdict upon it was that in the main it might easily have been more unsatisfactory than it was. with her indolence and her unappeasable temperament what other vocation indeed, save that of marriage, could she have taken up? and her temperament would have rendered any marriage an impossible prison for her. she was a modest success--her mother had always counselled her against ambition--but she was a success. her magic power was at its height. she continued to save money and had become a fairly regular frequenter of the west end branch of the crédit lyonnais. (incidentally she had come to an arrangement with her paris landlord.) but, more important than money, she was saving her health, and especially her complexion--the source of money. her complexion could still survive the minutest examination. she achieved this supreme end by plenty of sleep and by keeping to the minimum of alcohol. of course she had to drink professionally; clients insisted; some of them were exhilarated by the spectacle of a girl tipsy; but she was very ingenious in avoiding alcohol. when invited to supper she would respond with an air of restrained eagerness: "oh, yes, with pleasure!" and then carelessly add: "unless you would prefer to come quietly home with me. my maid is an excellent cook and one is very comfortable _chez-moi_." and often the prospect thus sketched would piquantly allure a client. nevertheless at intervals she could savour a fashionable restaurant as well as any harum-scarum minx there. her secret fear was still obesity. she was capable of imagining herself at fat as marthe--and ruined; for, though a few peculiar amateurs appreciated solidity, the great majority of men did not. however, she was not getting stouter. she had a secret sincere respect for certain of her own qualities; and if women of the world condemned certain other qualities in her, well, she despised women of the world--selfish idlers who did nothing, who contributed nothing, to the sum of life, whereas she was a useful and indispensable member of society, despite her admitted indolence. in this summary way she comforted herself in her loss of caste. without gilbert, of course, her existence would have been fatally dull, and she might have been driven to terrible remedies against ennui and emptiness. the depth and violence of her feeling for gilbert were indescribable--at any rate by her. she turned again from the darkening window to the sofa and sat down and tried to recall the figures of the dozens of men who had sat there, and she could recall at most six or eight, and gilbert alone was real. what a paragon!... her scorn for girls who succumbed to _souteneurs_ was measureless; as a fact she had met few who did.... she would have liked to beautify her flat for gilbert, but in the first place she did not wish to spend money on it, in the second place she was too indolent to buckle to the enterprise, and in the third place if she beautified it she would be doing so not for gilbert, but for the monotonous procession of her clients. her flat was a public resort, and so she would do nothing to it. besides, she did not care a fig about the look of furniture; the feel of furniture alone interested her; she wanted softness and warmth and no more. she moved across to the piano, remembering that she had not practised that day, and that she had promised gilbert to practise every day. he was teaching her. at the beginning she had dreamt of acquiring brilliance such as his on the piano, but she had soon seen the futility of the dream and had moderated her hopes accordingly. even with terrific efforts she could not make her hands do the things that his did quite easily at the first attempt. she had, for example, abandoned the _rosenkavalier_ waltz, having never succeeded in struggling through more than about ten bars of it, and those the simplest. but her french dances she had notably improved in. she knew some of them by heart and could patter them off with a very tasteful vivacity. instead of practising, she now played gently through a slow waltz from memory. if the snoring man was wakened, so much the worse--or so much the better! she went on playing, and evening continued to fall, until she could scarcely see the notes. then she heard movements in the bedroom, a sigh, a bump, some english words that she did not comprehend. she still, by force of resolution, went on playing, to protect herself, to give herself countenance. at length she saw a dim male figure against the pale oblong of the doorway between the two rooms, and behind the figure a point of glowing red in the stove. "i say--what time is it?" she recognised the heavy, resonant, vibrating voice. she had stopped playing because she was making so many mistakes. "late--late!" she murmured timidly. the next moment the figure was kneeling at her feet, and her left hand had been seized in a hot hand and kissed--respectfully. "forgive me, you beautiful creature!" begged the deep, imploring voice. "i know i don't deserve it. but forgive me! i worship women, honestly." assuredly she had not expected this development. she thought: "is he not sober yet?" but the query had no conviction in it. she wanted to believe that he was sober. at any rate he had removed the absurd towels from his boots. chapter the mystic "say you forgive me!" the officer insisted. "but there is nothing--" "say you forgive me!" she had counted on a scene of triumph with him when he woke up, anticipating that he was bound to cut a ridiculous appearance. he knelt dimly there without a sign of self-consciousness or false shame. she forgave him. "great baby!" her hand was kissed again and loosed. she detected a faint, sad smile on his face. "ah!" he rose, towering above her. "i know i'm a drunken sot," he said. "it was only because i knew i was drunk that i didn't want to come with you last night. and i called this morning to apologise. i did really. i'd no other thought in my poor old head. i wanted you to understand why i tried to hit that chap. the other woman had spoken to me earlier, and i suppose she was jealous, seeing me with you. she said something to him about you, and he laughed, and i had to hit him for laughing. i couldn't hit her. if i'd caught him an upper cut with my left he'd have gone down, and he wouldn't have got up by himself--_i_ warrant you--" "what did she say?" christine interrupted, not comprehending the technical idiom and not interested in it. "i dunno; but he laughed--anyhow he smiled." christine turned on the light, and then went quickly to the window to draw the curtains. "take off your overcoat," she commanded him kindly. he obeyed, blinking. she sat down on the sofa and, raising her arms, drew the pins from her hat and put it on the table. she motioned him to sit down too, and left him a narrow space between herself and the arm of the sofa, so that they were very close together. then, with puckered brow, she examined him. "i'd better tell you," he said. "it does me good to confess to you, you beautiful thing. i had a bottle of whisky upstairs in my room at the grosvenor. night before last, when i arrived there, i couldn't get to sleep in the bed. hadn't been used to a bed for so long, you know. i had to turn out and roll myself up in a blanket on the floor. and last night i spent drinking by myself. yes, by myself. somehow, i don't mind telling _you_. this morning i must have been worse than i thought i was--" he stopped and put his hand on her shoulder. "there are tears in your eyes, little thing. let me kiss your eyes.... no! i'll respect you. i worship you. you're the nicest little woman i ever saw, and i'm a brute. but let me kiss your eyes." she held her face seriously, even frowning somewhat. and he kissed her eyes gently, one after the other, and she smelt his contaminated breath. he was a spare man, with a rather thin, ingenuous, mysterious, romantic, appealing face. it was true that her eyes had moistened. she was touched by his look and his tone as he told her that he had been obliged to lie on the floor of his bedroom in order to sleep. there seemed to be an infinite pathos in that trifle. he was one of the fighters. he had fought. he was come from the horrors of the battle. a man of power. he had killed. and he was probably ten or a dozen years her senior. nevertheless, she felt herself to be older than he was, wiser, more experienced. she almost wanted to nurse him. and for her he was, too, the protected of the very clement virgin. inquiries from marthe showed that he must have entered the flat at the moment when she was kneeling at the altar and when the lady of vii dolours had miraculously granted to her pardon and peace. he was part of the miracle. she had a duty to him, and her duty was to brighten his destiny, to give him joy, not to let him go without a charming memory of her soft womanly acquiescences. at the same time her temperament was aroused by his personality; and she did not forget she had a living to earn; but still her chief concern was his satisfaction, not her own, and her overmastering sentiment one of dutiful, nay religious, surrender. french gratitude of the english fighter, and a mystic, fearful allegiance to the very clement virgin--these things inspired her. "ah!" he sighed. "my throat's like leather." and seeing that she did not follow, he added: "thirsty." he stretched his arms. she went to the sideboard and half filled a tumbler with soda water from the siphon. "drink!" she said, as if to a child. "just a dash! the tiniest dash!" he pleaded in his rich voice, with a glance at the whisky. "you don't know how it'll pull me together. you don't know how i need it." but she did know, and she humoured him, shaking her head disapprovingly. he drank and smacked his lips. "ah!" he breathed voluptuously, and then said in changed, playful accents: "your french accent is exquisite. it makes english sound quite beautiful. and you're the daintiest little thing." "daintiest? what is that? i have much to learn in english. but it is something nice--daintiest; it is a compliment." she somehow understood then that, despite appearances, he was not really a devotee of her sex, that he was really a solitary, that he would never die of love, and that her _rôle_ was a minor _rôle_ in his existence. and she accepted the fact with humility, with enthusiasm, with ardour, quite ready to please and to be forgotten. in playing the slave to him she had the fierce french illusion of killing germans. suddenly she noticed that he was wearing two wrist-watches, one close to the other, on his left arm, and she remarked on the strange fact. the officer's face changed. "have you got a wrist-watch?" he demanded. "no." silently he unfastened one of the watches and then said: "hold out your beautiful arm." she did so. he fastened the watch on her arm. she was surprised to see that it was a lady's watch. the black strap was deeply scratched. she privately reconstructed the history of the watch, and decided that it must be a gift returned after a quarrel--and perhaps the scratches on the strap had something to do with the quarrel. "i beg you to accept it," he said. "i particularly wish you to accept it." "it's really a lovely watch," she exclaimed. "how kind you are!" she rewarded him with a warm kiss. "i have always wanted a wrist-watch. and now they are so _chic_. in fact, one must have one." moving her arm about, she admired the watch at different angles. "it isn't going. and what's more, it won't go," he said. "ah!" she politely murmured. "no! but do you know why i give you that watch?" "why?" "because it is a mascot." "true?" "absolutely a mascot. it belonged to a friend of mine who is dead." "ah! a lady--" "no! not a lady. a man. he gave it me a few minutes before he died--and he was wearing it--and he told me to take it off his arm as soon as he was dead. i did so." christine was somewhat alarmed. "but if he was wearing it when he died, how can it be a mascot?" "that was what made it a mascot. believe me, i know about these things. i wouldn't deceive you, and i wouldn't tell you it was a mascot unless i was quite certain." he spoke with a quiet, initiated authority that reassured her entirely and gave her the most perfect confidence. "and why was your friend wearing a lady's watch?" "i cannot tell you." "you do not know?" "i do not know. but i know that watch is a mascot." "was it at the front--all this?" the man nodded. "he was wounded, killed, your friend?" "no, no, not wounded! he was in my battery. we were galloping some guns to a new position. he came off his horse--the horse was shot under him--he himself fell in front of a gun. of course, the drivers dared not stop, and there was no room to swerve. hence they had to drive right over him ... later, i came back to him. they had got him as far as the advanced dressing-station. he died in less than an hour...." solemnity fell between christine and her client. she said softly: "but if it is a mascot--do you not need it, you, at the front? it is wrong for me to take it." "i have my own mascot. nothing can touch me--except my great enemy, and he is not german." with an austere gesture he indicated the glass. his deep voice was sad, but very firm. christine felt that she was in the presence of an adept of mysticism. the virgin had sent this man to her, and the man had given her the watch. clearly the heavenly power had her in its holy charge. "ah, yes!" said the man in a new tone, as if realising the solemnity and its inappropriateness, and trying to dissipate it. "ah, yes! once we had the day of our lives together, he and i. we got a day off to go and see a new trench mortar, and we did have a time." "trench mortar--what is that?" he explained. "but tell me how it works," she insisted, not because she had the slightest genuine interest in the technical details of war--for she had not--but because she desired to help him to change the mood of the scene. "well, it's not so easy, you know. it was a four and a half pound shell, filled with gun-cotton slabs and shrapnel bullets packed in sawdust. the charge was black powder in a paper bag, and you stuck it at the bottom end of the pipe and put a bit of fuse into the touch-hole--but, of course, you must take care it penetrates the charge. the shell-fuse has a pinner with a detonator with the right length of fuse shoved into it; you wrap some clay round the end of the fuse to stop the flash of the charge from detonating the shell. well, then you load the shell--" she comprehended simply nothing, and the man, professionally absorbed, seemed to have no perception that she was comprehending nothing. she scarcely even listened. her face was set in a courteous, formal smile; but all the time she was thinking that the man, in spite of his qualities, must be lacking in character to give a watch away to a woman to whom he had not been talking for ten minutes. his lack of character was shown also in his unshamed confession concerning his real enemy. some men would bare their souls to a _cocotte_ in a fashion that was flattering neither to themselves nor to the _cocotte_, and christine never really respected such men. she did not really respect this man, but respected, and stood in awe of, his mysticism; and, further, her instinct to satisfy him, to make a spoiled boy of him, was not in the least weakened. then, just as the man was in the middle of his description of the functioning of the trench mortar, the telephone-bell rang, and christine excused herself. the telephone was in the bedroom, not by the bedside--for such a situation had its inconveniences--but in the farthest corner, between the window and the washstand. as she went to the telephone she was preoccupied by one of the major worries of her vocation, the worry of keeping clients out of each other's sight. she wondered who could be telephoning to her on sunday evening. not gilbert, for gilbert never telephoned on sunday except in the morning. she insisted, of course, on his telephoning to her daily, or almost daily. she did this to several of her more reliable friends, for there was no surer way of convincing them of the genuineness of her regard for them than to vituperate them when they failed to keep her informed of their health, their spirits, and their doings. in the case of gilbert, however, her insistence had entirely ceased to be a professional device; she adored him violently. the telephoner was gilbert. he made an amazing suggestion; he asked her to come across to his flat, where she had never been and where he had never asked her to go. it had been tacitly and quite amiably understood between them that he was not one who invited young ladies to his own apartments. christine cautiously answered that she was not sure whether she could come. "are you alone?" he asked pleasantly. "yes, quite." "well, i will come and fetch you." she decided exactly what she would do. "no, no. i will come. i will come now. i shall be enchanted." purposely she spoke without conviction, maintaining a mysterious reserve. she returned to the sitting-room and the other man. fortunately the conversation on the telephone had been in french. "see!" she said, speaking and feeling as though they were intimates. "i have a lady friend who is ill. i am called to see her. i shall not be long. i swear to you i shall not be long. wait. will you wait?" "yes," he replied, gazing at her. "put yourself at your ease." she was relieved to find that she could so easily reconcile her desire to please gilbert with her pleasurable duty towards the protégé of the very clement virgin. chapter the visit in the doorway of his flat christine kissed g.j. vehemently, but with a certain preoccupation; she was looking about her, very curious. the way in which she raised her veil and raised her face, mysteriously glanced at him, puckered her kind brow--these things thrilled him. she said: "you are quite alone, of course." she said it nicely, even benevolently; nevertheless he seemed to hear her saying: "you are quite alone, or, of course, you wouldn't have let me come." "i suppose it's through here," she murmured; and without waiting for an invitation she passed direct into the lighted drawing-room and stood there, observant. he followed her. they were both nervous in the midst of the interior which he was showing her for the first time, and which she was silently estimating. for him she made an exquisite figure in the drawing-room. she was so correct in her church-dress, so modest, prim and demure. and her appearance clashed excitingly with his absolute knowledge of her secret temperament. he had often hesitated in his judgment of her. was she good enough or was she not? but now he thought more highly of her than ever. she was ideal, divine, the realisation of a dream. and he felt extraordinarily pleased with himself because, after much cautious indecision, he had invited her to visit him. by heaven, she was young physically, and yet she knew everything! her miraculous youthfulness rejuvenated him. as a fact he was essentially younger than he had been for years. not only she, but his war work, had re-vitalised him. he had developed into a considerable personage on the lechford committee; he was chairman of a sub-committee; he bore responsibilities and had worries. and for a climax the committee had sent him out to france to report on the accountancy of the hospitals; he had received a special passport; he had had glimpses of the immense and growing military organisation behind the front; he had chatted in his fluent and idiomatic french with authorities military and civil; he had been ceremoniously complimented on behalf of his committee and country by high officials of the service de santé. a wondrous experience, from which he had returned to england with a greatly increased self-respect and a sharper apprehension of the significance of the war. life in london was proceeding much as usual. if on the one hand the treasury had startlingly put an embargo upon capital issues, on the other hand the king had resumed his patronage of the theatre, and the town talked of a new lady teazle, and a british dye-industry had been inaugurated. but behind the thin gauze of social phenomena g.j. now more and more realistically perceived and conceived the dark shape of the war as a vast moving entity. he kept concurrently in his mind, each in its place, the most diverse factors and events: not merely the flemish and the french battles, but the hoped-for intervention of roumania, the defeat of the austrians by servia, the menace of a new austrian attack on servia, the rise in prices, the russian move north of the vistula, the raid on yarmouth, the divulgence of the german axioms about frightfulness, the rumour of a definite german submarine policy, the terrible storm that had disorganised the entire english railway-system, and the dim distant italian earthquake whose death-roll of thousands had produced no emotion whatever on a globe monopolised by one sole interest. and to-night he had had private early telephonic information of a naval victory in the north sea in which big german cruisers had been chased to their ignominious lairs and one sunk. christine could not possibly know of this grand affair, for the sunday night extras were not yet on the streets; he had it ready for her, eagerly waiting to pour it into her delicious lap along with the inexhaustible treasures of his heart. at that moment he envisaged the victory as a shining jewel specially created in order to give her a throb of joy. "it seems they picked up a lot of survivors from the _blucher_," he finished his narration, rather proudly. she retorted, quietly but terribly scornful: "_zut_! you english are so naive. why save them? why not let them drown? do they not deserve to drown? look what they have done, those boches! and you save them! why did the german ships run away? they had set a trap--that sees itself--in addition to being cowards. you save them, and you think you have made a fine gesture; but you are nothing but simpletons." she shrugged her shoulders in inarticulate disdain. christine's attitude towards the war was uncomplicated by any subtleties. disregarding all but the utmost spectacular military events, she devoted her whole soul to hatred of the germans--and all the germans. she believed them to be damnably cleverer than any other people on earth, and especially than the english. she believed them to be capable of all villainies whatsoever. she believed every charge brought against them, never troubling about evidence. she would have imprisoned on bread and water all germans and all persons with german names in england. she was really shocked by the transparent idiocy of britons who opposed the retirement of prince louis of battenberg from the navy. for weeks she had remained happily in the delusion that prince louis had been shot in the tower, and when the awakening came she had instantly decided that the sinister influence of lord haldane and naught else must have saved prince louis from a just retribution. she had a vision of england as overrun with innumerable german spies who moved freely at inexpressible speed about the country in high-powered grey automobiles with dazzling headlights, while the marvellously stupid and blind british police touched their hats to them. g.j. smiled at her in silence, aware by experience of the futility of argument. he knew quite a lot of women who had almost precisely christine's attitude towards the war, and quite a lot of men too. but he could have wished the charming creature to be as desirable for her intelligence as for her physical and her strange spiritual charm: he could have wished her not to be providing yet another specimen of the phenomena of woman repeating herself so monotonously in the various worlds of london. the simpleton of fifty made in his soul an effort to be superior, and failed. "what is it that binds me to her?" he reflected, imagining himself to be on the edge of a divine mystery, and never expecting that he and christine were the huge contrivances of certain active spermatozoa for producing other active spermatozoa. christine did not wonder what bound her to g.j. she knew, though she had never heard such a word as spermatozoa. she had a violent passion for him; it would, she feared, be eternal, whereas his passion for her could not last more than a few years. she knew what the passions of men were--so she said to herself superiorly. her passion for him was in her smile as she smiled back at his silent smile; but in her smile there was also a convinced apostleship--for she alone was the repository of the truth concerning germans, which truth she preached to an unheeding world. and there was something else in her baffling smile, namely, a quiet, good-natured, resigned resentment against the richness of his home. he had treated her always with generosity, and at any rate with rather more than fairness; he had not attempted to conceal that he was a man of means; she had nothing to reproach him with financially. and yet she did reproach him--for having been too modest. she had a pretty sure instinct for the price of things, and she knew that this albany interior must have been very costly; further, it displayed what she deemed to be the taste of an exclusive aristocrat. she saw that she had been undervaluing her gilbert. the proprietor of this flat would be entitled to seek relations of higher standing than herself in the ranks of _cocotterie_; he would be justified in spending far more money on a girl than he had spent on her. he was indeed something of a fraud with his exaggerated english horror of parade. and he lived by himself, save for servants; he was utterly free; and yet for two months he had kept her out of these splendours, prevented her from basking in the glow of these chandeliers and lounging on these extraordinary sofas and beholding herself in these terrific mirrors. even now he was ashamed to let his servants see her. was it altogether nice of him? her verdict on him had not the slightest importance--even for herself. in kissing other men she generally kissed him--to cheat her appetite. she was at his mercy, whatever he was. he was useful to her and kind to her; he might be the fount of very important future advantages; but he was more than that, he was indispensable to her. she walked exploringly into the little glittering bedroom. beneath the fantastic dome of the bed the sheets were turned down and a suit of pyjamas laid out. on a chinese tray on a lacquered table by the bed was a spirit-lamp and kettle, and a box of matches in an embroidered case with one match sticking out ready to be seized and struck. she gazed, and left the bedroom, saying nothing, and wandered elsewhere. the stairs were so infinitesimal and dear and delicious that they drew from her a sharp exclamation of delight. she ran up them like a child. g.j. turned switches. in the little glittering dining-room a little cold repast was laid for two on an inlaid table covered with a sheet of glass. christine gazed, saying nothing, and wandered again to the drawing-room floor, while g.j. hovered attendant. she went to the vast regency desk, idly fingering papers, and laid hold of a document. it was his report on the accountacy of the lechford hospitals in france. she scrutinised it carefully, murmuring sentences from it aloud in her french accent. at length she dropped it; she did not put it down, she dropped it, and murmured: "all that--what good does it do to wounded men?... true, i comprehend nothing of it--i!" then she sat to the piano, whose gorgeous and fantastic case might well have intimidated even a professional musician. "dare i?" she took off her gloves. as she began to play her best waltz she looked round at g.j. and said: "i adore thy staircase." and that was all she did say about the flat. still, her demeanour, mystifying as it might be, was benign, benevolent, with a remarkable appearance of genuine humility. g.j., while she played, discreetly picked up the telephone and got the marlborough club. he spoke low, so as not to disturb the waltz, which christine in her nervousness was stumbling over. "i want to speak to mr. montague ryper. yes, yes; he is in the club. i spoke to him about an hour ago, and he is waiting for me to ring him up.... that you, monty? well, dear heart, i find i shan't be able to come to-night after all. i should like to awfully, but i've got these things i absolutely must finish.... you understand.... no, no.... is she, by jove? by-bye, old thing." when christine had pettishly banged the last chord of the coda, he came close to her and said, with an appreciative smile, in english: "charming, my little girl." she shook her head, gazing at the front of the piano. he murmured--it was almost a whisper: "take your things off." she looked round and up at him, and the light diffused from a thousand lustres fell on her mysterious and absorbed face. "my little rabbit, i cannot stay with thee to-night." the words, though he did not by any means take them as final, seriously shocked him. for five days he had known that mrs. braiding, subject to his convenience, was going down to bramshott to see the defender of the empire. for four days he had hesitated whether or not he should tell her that she might stay away for the night. in the end he had told her to stay away; he had insisted that she should stay; he had protested that he was quite ready to look after himself for a night and a morning. she had gone, unwillingly, having first arranged a meal which he said he was to share with a friend--naturally, for mrs. braiding, a male friend. she had wanted him to dine at the club, but he had explained to mrs. braiding that he would be busy upon hospital work, and that another member of the committee would be coming to help him--the friend, of course. even when he had contrived this elaborate and perfect plot he had still hesitated about the bold step of inviting christine to the flat. the plan was extremely attractive, but it held dangers. well, he had invited her. if she had not been at home, or if she had been unwilling to come, he would not have felt desolated; he would have accepted the fact as perhaps providential. but she was at home; she was willing; she had come. she was with him; she had put him into an ecstasy of satisfaction and anticipation. one evening alone with her in his own beautiful flat! what a frame for her and for love! and now she said that she would not stay. it was incredible; it could not be permitted. "but why not? we are happy together. i have just refused a dinner because of--this. didn't you hear me on the 'phone?" "thou wast wrong," she smiled. "i am not worth a dinner. it is essential that i should return home. i am tired--tired. it is sunday night, and i have sworn to myself that i will pass this evening at home--alone." exasperating, maddening creature! he thought: "i fancied i knew her, and i don't know her. i'm only just beginning to know her." he stared steadily at her soft, serious, worried, enchanting face, and tried to see through it into the arcana of her queer little brain. he could not. the sweet face foiled him. "then why come?" "because i wished to be nice to thee, to prove to thee how nice i am." she seized her gloves. he saw that she meant to go. his demeanour changed. he was aware of his power over her, and he would use it. she was being subtle; but he could be subtle too, far subtler than christine. true, he had not penetrated her face. nevertheless his instinct, and his male gift of ratiocination, informed him that beneath her gentle politeness she was vexed, hurt, because he had got rid of mrs. braiding before receiving her. she had her feelings, and despite her softness she could resent. still, her feelings must not be over-indulged; they must not be permitted to make a fool of her. he said, rather teasingly, but firmly: "i know why she refuses to stay." she cried, plaintive: "it is not that i have another rendezvous. no! but naturally thou thinkest it is that." he shook his head. "not at all. the little silly wants to go back home because she finds there is no servant here. she is insulted in her pride. i noticed it in her first words when she came in. and yet she ought to know--" christine gave a loud laugh that really disconcerted him. "au revoir, my old one. embrace me." she dropped the veil. "no!" he could play a game of pretence longer than she could. she moved with dignity towards the door, but never would she depart like that. he knew that when it came to the point she was at the mercy of her passion for him. she had confessed the tyranny of her passion, as such victims foolishly will. moreover he had perceived it for himself. he followed her to the door. at the door she would relent. and, sure enough, at the door she leapt at him and clasped his neck with fierceness and fiercely kissed him through her veil, and exclaimed bitterly: "ah! thou dost not love me, but i love thee!" but the next instant she had managed to open the door and she was gone. he sprang out to the landing. she was running down the stone stairs. "christine!" she did not stop. g.j. might be marvellously subtle; but he could not be subtle enough to divine that on that night christine happened to be the devotee of the most clement virgin, and that her demeanour throughout the visit had been contrived, half unconsciously, to enable her to perform a deed of superb self-denial and renunciation in the service of the dread goddess. he ate most miserably alone, facing an empty chair; the desolate solitude of the evening was terrible; he lacked the force to go seeking succour in clubs. chapter mascot a single light burned in christine's bedroom. it stood low on the pedestal by the wide bed and was heavily shaded, so that only one half of the bed, christine's half, was exempt from the general gloom of the chamber. the officer had thus ordained things. the white, plump arm of christine was imprisoned under his neck. he had ordered that too. he was asleep. christine watched him. on her return from the albany she had found him apparently just as she had left him, except that he was much less talkative. indeed, though unswervingly polite--even punctilious with her--he had grown quite taciturn and very obstinate and finicking in self-assertion. there was no detail as to which he did not formulate a definite wish. yet not until by chance her eye fell on the whisky decanter did she perceive that in her absence he had been copiously drinking again. he was not, however, drunk. remorseful at her defection, she constituted herself his slave; she covered him with acquiescences; she drank his tippler's breath. and he was not particularly responsive. he had all his own ideas. he ought, for example, to have been hungry, but his idea was that he was not hungry; therefore he had refused her dishes. she knew him better now. save on one subject, discussed in the afternoon, he was a dull, narrow, direct man, especially in love. he had no fancy, no humour, no resilience. possibly he worshipped women, as he had said, perhaps devoutly; but his worship of the individual girl tended more to ritualism than to ecstasy. the parisian devotee was thrown away on him, and she felt it. but not with bitterness. on the contrary, she liked him to be as he was; she liked to be herself unappreciated, neglected, bored. she thought of the delights which she had renounced in the rich and voluptuous drawing-room of the albany; she gazed under the reddish illumination at the tedious eternal market-place on which she exposed her wares, and which in tottenham court road went by the name of bedstead; and she gathered nausea and painful longing to her breast as the virgin gathered the swords of the dolours at the oratory, and was mystically happy in the ennui of serving the miraculous envoy of the virgin. and when marthe, uneasy, stole into the sitting-room, christine, the door being ajar, most faintly transmitted to her a command in french to tranquillise herself and go away. and outside a boy broke the vast lull of the sunday night with a shattering cry of victory in the north sea. possibly it was this cry that roused the officer out of his doze. he sat up, looked unseeing at christine's bright smile and at the black gauze that revealed the reality of her youth, and then reached for his tunic which hung at the foot of the bed. "you asked about my mascot," he said, drawing from a pocket a small envelope of semi-transparent oilskin. "here it is. now that is a mascot!" he had wakened under the spell of his original theme, of his sole genuine subject. he spoke with assurance, as one inspired. his eyes, as they masterfully encountered christine's eyes, had a strange, violent, religious expression. christine's eyes yielded to his, and her smile vanished in seriousness. he undid the envelope and displayed an oval piece of red cloth with a picture of christ, his bleeding heart surrounded by flames and thorns and a great cross in the background. "that," said the officer, "will bring anybody safe home again." christine was too awed even to touch the red cloth. the vision of the dishevelled, inspired man in khaki shirt, collar and tie, holding the magic saviour in his thin, veined, aristocratic hand, powerfully impressed her, and she neither moved nor spoke. "have you seen the 'touchwood' mascot?" he asked. she signified a negative, and then nervously fingered her gauze. "no? it's a well-known mascot. sort of tiny imp sort of thing, with a huge head, glittering eyes, a khaki cap of _oak_, and crossed legs in gold and silver. i hear that tens of thousands of them are sold. but there is nothing like my mascot." "where have you got it?" christine asked in her queer but improving english. "where did i get it? just after mons, on the road, in a house." "have you been in the retreat?" "i was." "and the angels? have you seen them?" he paused, and then said with solemnity: "was it an angel i saw?... i was lying doggo by myself in a hole, and bullets whizzing over me all the time. it was nearly dark, and a figure in white came and stood by the hole; he stood quite still and the german bullets went on just the same. suddenly i saw he was wounded in the hand; it was bleeding. i said to him: 'you're hit in the hand.' 'no,' he said--he had a most beautiful voice--'that is an old wound. it has reopened lately. i have another wound in the other hand.' and he showed me the other hand, and that was bleeding too. then the firing ceased, and he pointed, and although i'd eaten nothing at all that day and was dead-beat, i got up and ran the way he pointed, and in five minutes i ran into what remained of my unit." the officer's sonorous tones ceased; he shut his lips tightly, as though clinching the testimony, and the life of the bedroom was suspended in absolute silence. "that's what _i_ saw.... and with the lack of food my brain was absolutely clear." christine, on her back, trembled. the officer replaced his mascot. then he said, waving the little bag: "of course, there are fellows who don't need mascots. fellows that if their name isn't written on a bullet or a piece of shrapnel it won't reach them any more than a letter not addressed to you would reach you. now my colonel, for instance--it was he who told me how good my mascot was--well, he can stop shells, turn 'em back. yes. he's just got the d.s.o. and he said to me, 'edgar,' he said, 'i don't deserve it. i got it by inspiration.' and so he did.... what time's that?" the gilded swiss clock in the drawing-room was striking its tiny gong. "nine o'clock." the officer looked dully at his wrist-watch which, not having been wound on the previous night, had inconsiderately stopped. "then i can't catch my train at victoria." he spoke in a changed voice, lifeless, and sank back on the bed. "train? what train?" "nothing. only the leave train. my leave is up to-night. to-morrow i ought to have been back in the trenches." "but you have told me nothing of it! if you had told me--but not one word, my dear." "when one is with a woman--!" he seemed gloomily and hopelessly to reproach her. chapter the leave-train "what o'clock--your train?" "nine-thirty." "but you can catch it. you must catch it." he shook his head. "it's fate," he muttered, bitterly resigned. "what is written is written." christine sprang to the floor, shuffled off the black gauze in almost a single movement, and seized some of her clothes. "quick! you shall catch your train. the clock is wrong--the clock is too soon." she implored him with positive desperation. she shook him and dragged him, energised in an instant by the overwhelming idea that for him to miss his train would be fatal to him--and to her also. she could and did believe in the efficacy of mascots against bullets and shrapnel and bayonets. but the traditions of a country of conscripts were ingrained in her childhood and youth, and she had not the slightest faith in the efficacy of no matter what mascot to protect from the consequences of indiscipline. and already during her short career in london she had had good reason to learn the sacredness of the leave-train. fantastic tales she had heard of capital executions for what seemed trifling laxities--tales whispered half proudly by the army in the rooms of horrified courtesans--tales in which the remote and ruthless imagined figure of the grand provost-marshal rivalled that of god himself. and, moreover, if this man fell into misfortune through her, she would eternally lose the grace of the most clement virgin who had confided him to her and who was capable of terrible revenges. she secretly called on the virgin. nay, she became the virgin. she found a miraculous strength, and furiously pulled the poor sot out of bed. the fibres of his character had been soaked away, and she mystically replaced them with her own. intimidated and, as it were, mesmerised, he began to dress. she rushed as she was to the door. "marthe! marthe!" "madame?" replied the fat woman in alarm. "run for a taxi." "but, madame, it is raining terribly." "_je m'en fous_! run for a taxi." turning back into the room she repeated; "the clock is too soon." but she knew that it was not. nearly nude, she put on a hat. "what are you doing?" he asked. "do not worry. i come with you." she took a skirt and a jersey and then threw a cloak over everything. he was very slow; he could find nothing; he could button nothing. she helped him. but when he began to finger his leggings with the endless laces and the innumerable eyelets she snatched them from him. "those--in the taxi," she said. "but there is no taxi." "there will be a taxi. i have sent the maid." at the last moment, as she was hurrying him on to the staircase, she grasped her handbag. they stumbled one after the other down the dark stairs. he had now caught the infection of her tremendous anxiety. she opened the front door. the glistening street was absolutely empty; the rain pelted on the pavements and the roadway, each drop falling like a missile and raising a separate splash, so that it seemed as if the flood on the earth was leaping up to meet the flood from the sky. "come!" she said with hysterical impatience. "we cannot wait. there will be a taxi in piccadilly, i know." simultaneously a taxi swerved round the corner of burlington street. marthe stood on the step next to the driver. as the taxi halted she jumped down. her drenched white apron was over her head and she was wet to the skin. in the taxi, while the officer struck matches, christine knelt and fastened his leggings; he could not have performed the nice operation for himself. and all the time she was doing something else--she was pushing forward the whole taxi, till her muscles ached with the effort. then she sat back on the seat, smoothed her hair under the hat, unclasped the bag, and patted her features delicately with the powder-puff. neither knew the exact time, and in vain they tried to discern the faces of clocks that flew past them in the heavy rain. christine sighed and said: "these tempests. this rain. they say it is because of the big cannons--which break the clouds." the officer, who had the air of being in a dream, suddenly bent towards her and replied with a most strange solemnity: "it is to wash away the blood!" she had not thought of that. of course it was! she sighed again. as they neared victoria the officer said: "my kit-bag! it's at the hotel. shall i have time to pay my bill and get it? the grosvenor's next to the station, you know." she answered unhesitatingly: "you will go direct to the train. i will try the hotel." "drive round to the grosvenor entrance like hell," he instructed the driver when the taxi stopped in the station yard. in the hotel she would never have got the bag, owing to her difficulties in explaining the situation in english to a haughty reception-clerk, had not a french-swiss waiter been standing by. she flung imploring french sentences at the waiter like a stream from a hydrant. the bill was produced in less than half a minute. she put down money of her own to pay for it, for she had refused to wait at the station while the officer fished in the obscurities of his purse. the bag, into which a menial had crammed a kit probably scattered about the bedroom, arrived unfastened. once more at the station, she gave the cabman all the change which she had received at the hotel counter. by a miracle she made a porter understand what was needed and how urgently it was needed. he said the train was just going, and ran. she ran after him. the ticket-collector at the platform gate allowed the porter to pass, but raised an implacable arm to prevent her from following. she had no platform ticket, and she could not possibly be travelling by the train. then she descried her officer standing at an open carriage door in conversation with another officer and tapping his leggings with his cane. how aristocratic and disdainful and self-absorbed the pair looked! they existed in a world utterly different from hers. they were the triumphant and negligent males. she endeavoured to direct the porter with her pointing hand, and then, hysterical again, she screamed out the one identifying word she knew: "edgar!" it was lost in the resounding echoes of the immense vault. edgar certainly did not hear it. but he caught the great black initials, "e.w." on the kit-bag as the porter staggered along, and stopped the aimless man, and the kit-bag was thrown into the apartment. doors were now banging. christine saw edgar take out his purse and fumble at it. but edgar's companion pushed edgar into the train and himself gave a tip which caused the porter to salute extravagantly. the porter, at any rate, had been rewarded. christine began to cry, not from chagrin, but with relief. women on the platform waved absurd little white handkerchiefs. heads and khaki shoulders stuck out of the carriage windows of the shut train. a small green flag waved; arms waved like semaphores. the train ought to have been gliding away, but something delayed it, and it was held as if spellbound under the high, dim semicircle of black glass, amid the noises of steam, the hissing of electric globes, the horrible rattle of luggage trucks, the patter of feet, and the vast, murmuring gloom. christine saw edgar leaning from a window and gazing anxiously about. the little handkerchiefs were still courageously waving, and she, too, waved a little wisp. but he did not see her; he was not looking in the right place for her. she thought: why did he not stay near the gate for me? but she thought again: because he feared to miss the train. it was necessary that he should be close to his compartment. he knows he is not quite sober. she wondered whether he had any relatives, or any relations with another woman. he seemed to be as solitary as she was. on the same side of the platform-gate as herself a very tall, slim, dandy of an officer was bending over a smartly-dressed girl, smiling at her and whispering. suddenly the girl turned from him with a disdainful toss of the head and said in a loud, clear cockney voice: "you can't tell the tale to me, young man. this is my second time on earth." christine heard the words, but was completely puzzled. the train moved, at first almost imperceptibly. the handkerchiefs showed extreme agitation. then a raucous song floated from the train: "john brown's baby's got a pimple on his--_shoooo_-- john brown's baby's got a pimple on his--_shoooo_-- john brown's baby's got a pimple on his--_shoooo_-- and we all went marching home. glory, glory, alleluia! glory, glory ..." the rails showed empty where the train had been, and the sound of the song faded and died. some of the women were crying. christine felt that she was in a land of which she understood nothing but the tears. she also felt very cold in the legs. chapter getting on with the war the floors of the reynolds galleries were covered with some hundreds of very well-dressed and very expensively-dressed women and some scores of men. the walls were covered with a loan collection of oil-paintings, water-colour drawings, and etchings--english and french, but chiefly english. a very large proportion of the pictures were portraits of women done by a select group of very expensive painters in the highest vogue. these portraits were the main attraction of the elegant crowd, which included many of the sitters; as for the latter, they failed to hide under an unconvincing mask of indifference their curiosity as to their own effectiveness in a frame. the portraits for the most part had every quality save that of sincerity. they were transcendantly adroit and they reeked of talent. they were luxurious, refined, sensual, titillating, exquisite, tender, compact, of striking poses and subtle new tones. and while the heads were well finished and instantly recognisable as likenesses, the impressionism of the hands and of the provocative draperies showed that the artists had fully realised the necessity of being modern. the mischief and the damnation were that the sitters liked them because they produced in the sitters the illusion that the sitters were really what the sitters wanted to be, and what indeed nearly every woman in the galleries wanted to be; and the ideal of the sitters was a low ideal. the portraits flattered; but only a few guessed that they flattered ignobly; scarcely any even of the artists guessed that. the portraits were a success; the exhibition was a success; and all the people at the private view justly felt that they were part of and contributing to the success. and though seemingly the aim of everybody was to prove to everybody else that no war, not the greatest war, could disturb the appearances of social life in london, yet many were properly serious and proud in their seriousness. it was the autumn of . british troops were triumphantly on the road to kut, and british forces were approaching decisive victory in gallipoli. the russians had turned on their pursuers. the french had initiated in champagne an offensive so dramatic that it was regarded as the beginning of the end. and the british on their left, in the taking of loos and hill , had achieved what might have been regarded as the greatest success on the western front, had it not been for the rumour, current among the informed personages at the reynolds galleries, that recent bulletins had been reticent to the point of deception and that, in fact, hill had ceased to be ours a week earlier. further, zeppelins had raided london and killed and wounded numerous londoners, and all present in the reynolds galleries were aware, from positive statements in the newspapers, that whereas german morale was crumbling, all londoners, including themselves, had behaved with the most marvellous stoic calm in the ordeal of the zeppelins. the assembly had a further and particular reason for serious pride. it was getting on with the war, and in a most novel way. private views are customarily views gratis. but the entry to this private view cost a guinea, and there was absolutely no free list. the guineas were going to the support of the lechford hospitals in france. the happy idea was g.j.'s own, and lady queenie paulle and her mother had taken the right influential measures to ensure its grandiose execution. a queen had visited the private view for half an hour. thus all the very well-dressed and very expensively-dressed women, and all the men who admired and desired them as they moved, in voluptuous perfection, amid dazzling pictures with the soft illumination of screened skylights above and the reflections in polished parquet below--all of both sexes were comfortably conscious of virtue in the undoubted fact that they were helping to support two renowned hospitals where at that very moment dissevered legs and arms were being thrown into buckets. in a little room at the end of the galleries was a small but choice collection of the etchings of félicien rops: a collection for connoisseurs, as the critics were to point out in the newspapers the next morning. for rops, though he had an undeniable partiality for subjects in which ugly and prurient women displayed themselves in nothing but the inessentials of costume, was a classic before whom it was necessary to bow the head in homage. g.j. was in this room in company with a young and handsome staff officer, lieutenant molder, home on convalescent leave from suvla bay. mr. molder had left oxford in order to join the army; he had behaved admirably, and well earned the red shoulder-ornaments which pure accident had given him. he was a youth of artistic and literary tastes, with genuine ambitions quite other than military, and after a year of horrible existence in which he had hungered for the arts more than for anything, he was solacing and renewing himself in the contemplation of all the masterpieces that london could show. he greatly esteemed g.j.'s connoisseurship, and g.j. had taken him in hand. at the close of a conscientious and highly critical round of the galleries they had at length reached the rops room, and they were discussing every aspect of rops except his lubricity, when lady queenie paulle approached them from behind. molder was the first to notice her and turn. he blushed. "well, queen," said g.j., who had already had several conversations with her in the galleries that day and on the previous days of preparation. she replied: "well, i hope you're satisfied with the results of your beautiful idea." the young woman, slim and pale, had long since gone out of mourning. she was most brilliantly attired, and no detail lacked to the perfection of her modish outfit. indeed, just as she was, she would have made a marvellous mannequin, except for the fact that mannequins are not usually allowed to perfume themselves in business hours. her thin, rather high voice, which somehow matched her complexion and carriage, had its customary tone of amiable insolence, and her tired, drooping eyes their equivocal glance, as she faced the bearded and grave middle-aged bachelor and the handsome, muscular boy; even the boy was older than queen, yet she seemed to condescend to them as if she were an immortal from everlasting to everlasting and could teach both of them all sorts of useful things about life. nobody could have guessed from that serene demeanour that her self-satisfaction was marred by any untoward detail whatever. yet it was. all her frocks were designed to conceal a serious defect which seriously disturbed her: she was low-breasted. g.j. said bluntly: "may i present mr. molder?--lady queenie paulle." and he said to himself, secretly annoyed: "dash the infernal chit. that's what she's come for. now she's got it." she gave the slightest, dubious nod to molder, who, having faced fighting turks with an equanimity equal to queenie's own, was yet considerably flurried by the presence and the gaze of this legendary girl. queenie, enjoying his agitation, but affecting to ignore him, began to talk quickly in the vein of exclusive gossip; she mentioned in a few seconds the topics of the imminent entry of bulgaria into the war, the maturing salonika expedition, the confidential terrible utterances of k. on recruiting, and, of course, the misfortune (due to causes which queenie had at her finger-ends) round about loos. then in regard to the last she suddenly added, quite unjustifiably implying that the two phenomena were connected: "you know, mother's hospitals are frightfully full just now.... but, of course, you do know. that's why i'm so specially glad to-day's such a success." thus in a moment, and with no more than ten phrases, she had conveyed the suggestion that while mere soldiers, ageing men-about-town, and the ingenuous mass of the public might and did foolishly imagine the war to be a simple affair, she herself, by reason of her intelligence and her private sources of knowledge, had a full, unique apprehension of its extremely complex and various formidableness. g.j. resented the familiar attitude, and he resented queenie's very appearance and the appearance of the entire opulent scene. in his head at that precise instant were not only the statistics of mortality and major operations at the lechford hospitals, but also the astounding desolating tales of the handsome boy about folly, ignorance, stupidity and martyrdoms at suvla. he said, with the peculiar polite restraint that in him masked emotion and acrimony: "yes, i'm glad it's a success. but the machinery of it is perhaps just slightly out of proportion to the results. if people had given to the hospitals what they have spent on clothes to come here and what they've paid painters so that they could see themselves on the walls, we should have made twenty times as much as we have made--a hundred times as much. why, good god! queen, the whole afternoon's takings wouldn't buy what you're wearing now, to say nothing of the five hundred other women here." his eye rested on the badge of her half-brother's regiment which she had had reproduced in diamonds. at this juncture he heard himself addressed in a hearty, heavy voice as "g.j., old soul." an officer with the solitary crown on his sleeve, bald, stoutish, but probably not more than forty-five, touched him--much gentler than he spoke--on the shoulder. "craive, my son! you back! well, it's startling to see you at a picture-show, anyhow." the major, saluting lady queenie as a distant acquaintance, retorted: "morally, you owe me a guinea, my dear g.j. i called at the flat, and the young woman there told me you'd surely be here." while they were talking g.j. could hear queenie paulle and molder: "where are you back from?" "suvla, lady queenie." "you must be oozing with interest and actuality. tell g.j. to bring you to tea one day, quite, quite soon, will you? _i_'ll tell him." and molder murmured something fatuously conventional. g.j. showed decorously that he had caught his own name. whereupon lady queenie, instead of naming a day for tea, addressed him almost bitterly: "g.j., what's come over you? what in the name of pan do you suppose all you males are fighting each other for?" she paused effectively. "good god! if i began to dress like a housemaid the germans would be in london in a month. our job as women is quite delicate enough without you making it worse by any damned sentimental superficiality.... i want you to bring mr. molder to tea _to-morrow_, and if you can't come he must come alone...." with a last strange look at molder she retired into the glitter of the crowded larger room. "she been driving any fresh men to suicide lately?" major craive demanded acidly under his breath. g.j. raised his eyebrows. then: "that's not _you_, frankie!" said the major with a start of recognition towards the staff lieutenant. "yes, sir," said molder. they shook hands. at the previous christmas they had lain out together on the cliffs of the east coast in wild weather, waiting to repel a phantom army of thirty thousand germans. "it was the red hat put me off," the major explained. "not my fault, sir," molder smiled. "devilish glad to see you, my boy." g.j. murmured to molder: "you don't want to go and have tea with her, do you?" and molder answered, with the somewhat fatuous, self-conscious grin that no amount of intelligence can keep out of the face of a good-looking fellow who knows that he has made an impression: "well, i don't know--" g.j. raised his eyebrows again, but with indulgence, and winked at craive. the major shut his lips tight, then stood with his mouth open for a second or two in the attitude of a man suddenly receiving the onset of a great and original idea. "she's right, hang it all!" he exclaimed. "she's right! of course she is! why, what's all this"--he waved an arm at the whole scene--"what's all this but sex? look at 'em! and look at their portraits! you aren't going to tell me! what's the good of pretending? hang it all, when my own aunt comes down to breakfast in a low-cut blouse that would have given her fits even in the evening ten years ago!... and jolly fine too. i'm all for it. the more of it the merrier--that's what i say. and don't any of you high-brows go trying to alter it. if you do i retire, and you can defend your own bally front." "craive," said g.j. affectionately, "until you and queen came along molder and i really thought we were at a picture exhibition, and we still think so, don't we, molder?" the lieutenant nodded. "now, as you're here, just let me show you one or two things." "oh!" breathed the major, "have pity. it's not any canvas woman that i want--by jove!" he caught sight of an invention of félicien rops, a pig on the end of a string, leading, or being driven by, a woman who wore nothing but stockings, boots and a hat. "what do you call that?" "my dear fellow, that's one of the most famous etchings in the world." "is it?" the major said. "well, i'm not surprised. there's more in this business than i imagined." he set himself to examine all the exhibits by rops, and when he had finished he turned to g.j. "listen here, g.j. we're going to make a night of it. i've decided on that." "sorry, dear heart," said g.j. "i'm engaged with molder to-night. we shall have some private chamber-music at my rooms--just for ourselves. you ought to come. much better for your health." "what time will the din be over?" "about eleven." "now i say again--listen here. let's talk business. i'll come to your chamber-music. i've been before, and survived, and i'll come again. but afterwards you'll come with me to the guinea-fowl." "but, my dear chap, i can't throw molder out into vigo street at eleven o'clock," g.j. protested, startled by the blunt mention of the notorious night-club in the young man's presence. "naturally you can't. he'll come along with us. frankie and i have nearly fallen into the north sea or german ocean together, haven't we, frankie? it'll be my show. and i'll turn up with the stuff--one, two or three pretty ladies according as your worship wishes." g.j. was now more than startled; he was shocked; he felt his cheeks reddening. it was the presence of molder that confused him. never had he talked to molder on any subjects but the arts, and if they had once or twice lighted on the topic of women it was only in connection with the arts. he was really interested in and admired molder's unusual aesthetic intelligence, and he had done what he could to foster it, and he immensely appreciated molder's youthful esteem for himself. moreover, he was easily old enough to be molder's father. it seemed to him that though two generations might properly mingle in anything else, they ought not to mingle in licence. craive's crudity was extraordinary. "see here!" craive went on, serious and determined. "you know the sort of thing i've come from. i got four days unexpected. i had to run down to my uncle's. the old things would have died if i hadn't. to-morrow i go back. this is my last night. i haven't had a scratch up to now. but my turn's coming, you bet. next week i may be in heaven or hell or anywhere, or blind for life or without my legs or any damn thing you please. but i'm going to have to-night, and you're going to join in." g.j. saw the look of simple, half-worshipful appeal that sometimes came into craive's rather ingenuous face. he well knew that look, and it always touched him. he remembered certain descriptive letters which he had received from craive at the front,--they corresponded faithfully. he could not have explained the intimacy of his relations with craive. they had begun at a club, over cards. the two had little in common--craive was a stockbroker when world-wars did not happen to be in progress--but g.j. greatly liked him because, with all his crudity, he was such a decent, natural fellow, so kind-hearted, so fresh and unassuming. and craive on his part had developed an admiration for g.j. which g.j. was quite at a loss to account for. the one clue to the origin of the mysterious attachment between them had been a naive phrase which he had once overheard craive utter to a mutual acquaintance: "old g.j.'s so subtle, isn't he?" g.j. said to himself, reconsidering the proposal: "and why on earth not?" and then aloud, soothingly, to craive: "all right! all right!" the major brightened and said to molder: "you'll come, of course?" "oh, rather!" answered molder, quite simply. and g.j., again to himself, said: "i am a simpleton." the major's pleading, and the spectacle of the two officers with their precarious hold on life, humiliated g.j. as well as touched him. and, if only in order to avoid the momentary humiliation, he would have been well content to be able to roll back his existence and to have had a military training and to be with them in the sacred and proud uniform. "now listen here!" said the major. "about the aforesaid pretty ladies--" there they stood together in the corner, hiding several of rops's eccentricities, ostensibly discussing art, charity, world-politics, the strategy of war, the casualty lists. chapter the call christine found the night at the guinea-fowl rather dull. the supper-room, garish and tawdry in its decorations, was functioning as usual. the round tables and the square tables, the tables large and the tables small, were well occupied with mixed parties and couples. each table had its own yellow illumination, and the upper portion of the room, with a certain empty space in the centre of it, was bafflingly shadowed. between two high, straight falling curtains could be seen a section of the ball-room, very bright against the curtains, with the figures of dancers whose bodies seemed to be glued to each other, pale to black or pale to khaki, passing slowly and rhythmically across. the rag-time music, over a sort of ground-bass of syncopated tom-tom, surged through the curtains like a tide of the sea of aphrodite, and bathed everyone at the supper-tables in a mysterious aphrodisiacal fluid. the waiters alone were insensible to its influence. they moved to and fro with the impassivity and disdain of eunuchs separated for ever from the world's temptations. loud laughs or shrill little shrieks exploded at intervals from the sinister melancholy of the interior. on christine's left, at a round table in a corner, sat g.j.; on her right, the handsome boy molder. on molder's right, miss aida altown spread her amplitude, and on g.j.'s left was a young girl known to the company as alice. major craive, the host, the splendid quality of whose hospitality was proved by the flowers, the fruit, the bottles, the cigar-boxes and the cigarette-boxes on the table, sat between alice and aida altown. the three women on principle despised and scorned each other with false warm smiles and sudden outbursts of compliment. christine knew that the other two detested her as being "one of those french girls" who, under the protection of free trade, came to london and, by their lack of scruple and decency, took the bread out of the mouths of the nice, modest, respectable, english girls. she on her side disdained both of them, not merely because they were courtesans (which somehow christine considered she really was not), but also for their characteristic insipidity, lackadaisicalness and ignorance of the technique of the profession. they expected to be paid for doing nothing. aida altown she knew by sight as belonging to a great rival promenade. aida had reached the purgatory of obesity which christine always feared. despite the largeness of her mass, she was a very beautiful woman in the english manner, blonde, soft, idle, without a trace of temperament, and incomparably dull and stupid. but she was ageing; she had been favourably known in the west end continuously (save for a brief escapade in new york) for perhaps a quarter of a century. she was at the period when such as she realise with flaccid alarm that they have no future, and when they are ready to risk grave imprudences for youths who feel flattered by their extreme maturity. christine gazed calmly at her, supercilious and secure in the immense advantage of at least fifteen years to the good. and if she shrugged her shoulders at aida for being too old, christine did the same at alice for being too young. alice was truly a girl--probably not more than seventeen. her pert, pretty, infantile face was an outrage against the code. she was a mere amateur, with everything to learn, absurdly presuming upon the very quality which would vanish first. and she was a fool. she obviously had no sense, not even the beginnings of sense. she was wearing an impudently expensive frock which must have cost quite five times as much as christine's own, though the latter in the opinion of the wearer was by far the more authentically _chic_. and she talked proudly at large about her losses on the turf and of the swindles practised upon her. christine admitted that the girl could make plenty of money, and would continue to make money for a long, long time, bar accidents, but her final conclusion about alice was: "she will end on straw." the supper was over. the conversation had never been vivacious, and now it was half-drowned in champagne. the girls had wanted to hear about the war, but the major, who had arrived in a rather dogmatic mood, put an absolute ban on shop. alice had then kept the talk, such as it was, upon her favourite topic--revues. she was an encyclopaedia of knowledge concerning revues past, present, and to come. she had once indeed figured for a few grand weeks in a revue chorus, thereby acquiring unique status in her world. the topic palled upon both aida and christine. and christine had said to herself: "they are aware of nothing, those two," for aida and alice had proved to be equally and utterly ignorant of the superlative social event of the afternoon, the private view at the reynolds galleries--at which indeed christine had not assisted, but of which she had learnt all the intimate details from g.j. what, christine demanded, _could_ be done with such a pair of ninnies? she might have been excused for abandoning all attempt to behave as a woman of the world should at a supper party. nevertheless, she continued good-naturedly and conscientiously in the performance of her duty to charm, to divert, and to enliven. after all, the ladies were there to captivate the males, and if aida and alice dishonestly flouted obligations, christine would not. she would, at any rate, show them how to behave. she especially attended to g.j., who having drunk little, was taciturn and preoccupied in his amiabilities. she divined that something was the matter, but she could not divine that his thoughts were saddened by the recollection at the guinea-fowl of the lovely music which he had heard earlier in his drawing-room and by the memory of the major's letters and of what the major had said at the reynolds galleries about the past and the possibilities of the future. the major was very benevolently intoxicated, and at short intervals he raised his glass to g.j., who did not once fail to respond with an affectionate smile which christine had never before seen on g.j.'s face. suddenly alice, who had been lounging semi-somnolent with an extinct cigarette in her jewelled fingers, sat up and said in the uncertain voice of an inexperienced girl who has ceased to count the number of glasses emptied: "shall i recite? i've been trained, you know." and, not waiting for an answer, she stood and recited, with a surprisingly correct and sure pronunciation of difficult words to show that she had, in fact, received some training: helen, thy beauty is to me like those nicean barks of yore, that gently o'er a perfumed sea the weary, wayworn wanderer bore to his own native shore. on desperate seas long wont to roam, thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, thy naiad airs have brought me home to the glory that was greece, to the grandeur that was rome. lo! in your brilliant window niche, how statue-like i see thee stand, the agate lamp within thy hand! ah, psyche from the regions which are holy land! the uncomprehended marvellous poem, having startled the whole room, ceased, and the rag-time resumed its sway. a drunken "bravo!" came from one table, a cheer from another. young alice nodded an acknowledgment and sank loosely into her chair, exhausted by her last effort against the spell of champagne and liqueurs. and the naive, big major, bewitched by the child, subsided into soft contact with her, and they almost tearfully embraced. a waiter sedately replaced a glass which alice's drooping, negligent hand had over-turned, and wiped the cloth. g.j. was silent. the whole table was silent. "_est-ce de la grande poésie_?" asked christine of g.j., who did not reply. christine, though she condemned alice as now disgusting, had been taken aback and, in spite of herself, much impressed by the surprising display of elocution. "_oui_," said molder, in his clipped, self-conscious oxford french. two couples from other tables were dancing in the middle of the room. molder demanded, leaning towards her: "i say, do you dance?" "but certainly," said christine. "i learnt at the convent." and she spoke of her convent education, a triumphant subject with her, though she had actually spent less than a year in the convent. after a few moments they both rose, and christine, bending over g.j., whispered lovingly in his ear: "dear, thou wilt not be jealous if i dance one turn with thy young friend?" she was addressing the wrong person. already throughout the supper aida, ignoring the fact that the whole structure of civilised society is based on the rule that at a meal a man must talk first to the lady on his right and then to the lady on his left and so on infinitely, had secretly taken exception to the periodic intercourse--and particularly the intercourse in french--between christine and molder, who was officially "hers". that these two should go off and dance together was the supreme insult to her. by ill-chance she had not sufficient physical command of herself. christine felt that molder would have danced better two hours earlier; but still he danced beautifully. their bodies fitted like two parts of a jigsaw puzzle that have discovered each other. she realised that g.j. was middle-aged, and regret tinctured the ecstasy of the dance. then suddenly she heard a loud, imploring cry in her ear: "christine!" she looked round, pale, still dancing, but only by inertia. nobody was near her. the four people at the major's table gave no sign of agitation or even of interest. the major still had alice more or less in his arms. "what was that?" she asked wildly. "what was what?" said molder, at a loss to understand her extraordinary demeanour. and she heard the cry again, and then again: "christine! christine!" she recognised the voice. it was the voice of the officer whom she had taken to victoria station one sunday night months and months ago. "excuse me!" she said, slipping from molder's hold, and she hurried out of the room to the ladies' cloak-room, got her wraps, and ran past the watchful guardian, through the dark, dubious portico of the club into the street. the thing was done in a moment, and why she did it she could not tell. she knew simply that she must do it, and that she was under the dominion of those unseen powers in whom she had always believed. she forgot the guinea-fowl as completely as though it had been a pre-natal phenomenon with her. chapter the soldier but outside she lost faith. half a dozen motor-cars were slumbering in a row near the door of the guinea-fowl, and they all stirred monstrously yet scarcely perceptibly at the sight of the woman's figure, solitary, fragile and pale in the darkness. they seemed for an instant to lust for her; and then, recognising that she was not their prey, to sink back into the torpor of their inexhaustible patience. the sight of them was prejudicial to the dominion of the unseen powers. christine admitted to herself that she had drunk a lot, that she was demented, that her only proper course was to return dutifully to the supper-party. she wondered what, if she did not so return, she could possibly say to justify herself to g.j. nevertheless she went on down the street, hurrying, automatic, and reached the main thoroughfare. it was dark with the new protective darkness. the central hooded lamps showed like poor candles, making a series of rings of feeble illumination on the vast invisible floor of the road. nobody was afoot; not a soul. the last of the motor-buses that went about killing and maiming people in the new protective darkness had long since reached its yard. the seductive dim violet bulbs were all extinguished on the entrances of the theatres, and, save for a thread of light at some lofty window here and there, the curving facades of the street were as undecipherable as the heavens above or as the asphalte beneath. then christine's ear detected a faint roar. it grew louder; it became terrific; and a long succession of huge loaded army waggons with peering head-lamps thundered past at full speed, one close behind the next, shaking the very avenue. the slightest misjudgment by the leading waggon in the confusion of light and darkness--and the whole convoy would have pitched itself together in a mass of iron, flesh, blood and ordnance; but the convoy went ruthlessly and safely forward till its final red tail-lamp swung round a corner and vanished. the avenue ceased to shake. the thunder died away, and there was silence again. whence and why the convoy came, and at whose dread omnipotent command? whither it was bound? what it carried? no answer in the darkness to these enigmas!... and christine was afraid of england. she remembered people in ostend saying that england would never go to war. she, too, had said it, bitterly. and now she was in the midst of the unmeasured city which had darkened itself for war, and she was afraid of an unloosed might.... what madness was she doing? she did not even know the man's name. she knew only that he was "edgar w." she would have liked to be his _marraine_, according to the french custom, but he had never written to her. he was still in her debt for the hotel bill and the taxi fare. he had not even kissed her at the station. she tried to fancy that she heard his voice calling "christine" with frantic supplication in her ears, but she could not. she turned into another side street, and saw a lighted doorway. two soldiers were standing in the veiled radiance. she could just read the lower half of the painted notice: "all service men welcome. beds. meals. writing and reading rooms. always open." she passed on. one of the soldiers, a non-commissioned officer of mature years, solemnly winked at her, without moving an unnecessary muscle. she looked modestly down. twenty yards further on she described near a lamp-post a tall soldier whose somewhat bent body seemed to be clustered over with pots, pans, tins, bags, valises, satchels and weapons, like the figure of some military father christmas on his surreptitious rounds. she knew that he must be a poor benighted fellow just back from the trenches. he was staring up at the place where the street-sign ought to have been. he glanced at her, and said, in a fatigued, gloomy, aristocratic voice: "pardon me, madam. is this denman street? i want to find the denman hostel." christine looked into his face. a sacred dew suffused her from head to foot. she trembled with an intimidated joy. she felt the mystic influences of all the unseen powers. she knew herself with holy dread to be the chosen of the very clement virgin, and the channel of a miraculous intervention. it was the most marvellous, sweetest thing that had ever happened. it was humanly incredible, but it had happened. "is it you?" she murmured in a soft, breaking voice. the man stooped and examined her face. she said, while he gazed at her: "edgar!... see--the wrist watch," and held up her arm, from which the wide sleeve of her mantle slipped away. and the man said: "is it you?" she said: "come with me. i will look after you." the man answered glumly: "i have no money--at least not enough for you. and i owe you a lot of money already. you are an angel. i'm ashamed." "what do you mean?" christine protested. "do you forget that you gave me a five-pound note? it was more than enough to pay the hotel.... as for the rest, let us not speak of it. come with me." "did i?" muttered the man. she could feel the very clement virgin smiling approval of her fib; it was exactly such a fib as the virgin herself would have told in a quandary of charity. and when a taxi came round the corner, she knew that the virgin disguised as a taxi-driver was steering it, and she hailed it with a firm and yet loving gesture. the taxi stopped. she opened the door, and in her sombre mantle and bright trailing frock and glinting, pale shoes she got in, and the military father christmas with much difficulty and jingling and clinking insinuated himself after her into the vehicle, and banged to the door. and at the same moment one of the soldiers from the hostel ran up: "here, mate!... what do you want to take his money from him for, you damned w----?" but the taxi drove off. christine had not understood. and had she understood, she would not have cared. she had a divine mission; she was in bliss. "you did not seem surprised to meet me," she said, taking edgar's rough hand. "no." "had you called out my name--'christine'?" "no." "you are sure?" "yes." "perhaps you were thinking of me? i was thinking of you." "perhaps. i don't know. but i'm never surprised." "you must be very tired?" "yes." "but why are you like that? all these things? you are not an officer now." "no. i had to resign my commission--just after i saw you." he paused, and added drily: "whisky." his deep rich voice filled the taxi with the resigned philosophy of fatalism. "and then?" "of course i joined up again at once," he said casually. "i soon got out to the front. now i'm on leave. that's mere luck." she burst into tears. she was so touched by his curt story, and by the grotesquerie of his appearance in the faint light from the exterior lamp which lit the dial of the taximeter, that she lost control of herself. and the man gave a sob, or possibly it was only a gulp to hide a sob. and she leaned against him in her thin garments. and he clinked and jingled, and his breath smelt of beer. chapter the ring the flat was in darkness, except for the little lamp by the bedside. the soldier lay asleep in his flannel shirt in the wide bed, and christine lay awake next him. his clothes were heaped on a chair. his eighty pounds' weight of kit were deposited in a corner of the drawing-room. on the table in the drawing-room were the remains of a meal. christine was thinking, carelessly and without apprehension, of what she should say to g.j. she would tell him that she had suddenly felt unwell. no! that would be silly. she would tell him that he really had not the right to ask her to meet such women as aida and alice. had he no respect for her? or she would tell him that aida had obviously meant to attack her, and that the dance with lieutenant molder was simply a device to enable her to get away quietly and avoid all scandal in a resort where scandal was intensely deprecated. she could tell him fifty things, and he would have to accept whatever she chose to tell him. she was mystically happy in the incomparable marvel of the miracle, and in her care of the dull, unresponding man. her heart yearned thankfully, devotedly, passionately to the virgin of the vii dolours. in the profound nocturnal silence broken only by the man's slow, regular breathing, she heard a sudden ring. it was the front-door bell ringing in the kitchen. the bell rang again and again obstinately. g.j.'s party was over, then, and he had arrived to make inquiries. she smiled, and did not move. after a few moments she could hear marthe stirring. she sprang up, and then, cunningly considerate, slipped from under the bed-clothes as noiselessly and as smoothly as a snake, so that the man should not be disturbed. the two women met in the little hall, christine in the immodesty of a lacy and diaphanous garment, and marthe in a coarse cotton nightgown covered with a shawl. the bell rang once more, loudly, close to their ears. "are you mad?" christine whispered with fierceness. "go back to bed. let him ring." chapter the return it was afternoon in april, . g.j. rang the right bell at the entrance of the london home of the lechfords. lechford house, designed about by an englishman of genius who in this rare instance had found a patron with the wit to let him alone, was one of the finest examples of domestic architecture in the west end. inspired by the formidable palaces of rome and florence, the artist had conceived a building in the style of the italian renaissance, but modified, softened, chastened, civilised, to express the bland and yet haughty sobriety of the english climate and the english peerage. people without an eye for the perfect would have correctly described it as a large plain house in grey stone, of three storeys, with a width of four windows on either side of its black front door, a jutting cornice, and rather elaborate chimneys. it was, however, a masterpiece for the connoisseur, and foreign architects sometimes came with cards of admission to pry into it professionally. the blinds of its principal windows were down--not because of the war; they were often down, for at least four other houses disputed with lechford house the honour of sheltering the marquis and his wife and their sole surviving child. above the roof a wire platform for the catching of bombs had given the mansion a somewhat ridiculous appearance, but otherwise lechford house managed to look as though it had never heard of the european war. one half of the black entrance swung open, and a middle-aged gentleman dressed like lord lechford's stockbroker, but who was in reality his butler, said in answer to g.j.'s enquiry: "lady queenie is not at home, sir." "but it is five o'clock," protested g.j., suddenly sick of queen's impudent unreliability. "and i have an appointment with her at five." the butler's face relaxed ever so little from its occupational inhumanity of a suet pudding; the spirit of compassion seemed to inform it for an instant. "her ladyship went out about a quarter of an hour ago, sir." "when d'you think she'll be back?" the suet pudding was restored. "that i could not say, sir." "damn the girl!" said g.j. to himself; and aloud: "please tell her ladyship that i've called." "mr. hoape, is it not, sir?" "it is." by the force of his raisin eyes the butler held g.j. as he turned to descend the steps. "there's nobody at home, sir, except mrs. carlos smith. mrs. carlos smith is in lady queenie's apartments." "mrs. carlos smith!" exclaimed g.j., who had not seen concepcion for some seventeen months; nor heard from her for nearly as long, nor heard of her since the previous year. "yes, sir." "ask her if she can see me, will you?" said g.j. impetuously, after a slight pause. he stepped on to the tessellated pavement of the outer hall. on the raised tessellated pavement of the inner hall stood two meditative youngish footmen, possibly musing upon the problems of the intensification of the military service act which were then exciting journalists and statesmen. beyond was the renowned staircase, which, rising with insubstantial grace, lost itself in silvery altitude like the way to heaven. presently g.j. was mounting the staircase and passing statues by canova and thorwaldsen, and portraits of which the heads had been painted by lawrence and the hands and draperies by lawrence's hireling, and huger canvasses on which the heads and breasts had been painted by rubens and everything else by rubens's regiment of hirelings. the guiding footman preceded him through a great chamber which he recognised as the drawing-room in its winding sheet, and then up a small and insignificant staircase; and g.j. was on ground strange to him, for never till then had he been higher than the first-floor in lechford house. lady queenie's apartments did violence to g.j.'s sensibilities as an upholder of traditionalism in all the arts, of the theory that every sound movement in any art must derive from its predecessor. some months earlier he had met for a few minutes the creative leader of the newest development in internal decoration, and he vividly remembered a saying of the grey-haired, slouch-hatted man: "at the present day the only people in the world with really vital perceptions about decoration are african niggers, and the only inspiring productions are the coloured cotton stuffs designed for the african native market." the remark had amused and stimulated him, but he had never troubled to go in search of examples of the inspiring influence of african taste on london domesticity. he now saw perhaps the supreme instance lodged in lechford house, like a new and truculent state within a great empire. lady queenie had imposed terms on her family, and under threats of rupture, of separation, of scandal, lady queenie's exotic nest had come into existence in the very fortress of unchangeable british convention. the phenomenon was a war phenomenon due to the war, begotten by the war; for lady queenie had said that if she was to do war-work without disaster to her sanity she must have the right environment. thus the putting together of lady queenie's nest had proceeded concurrently with the building of national projectile factories and of square miles of offices for the girl clerks of ministries and departments of government. the footman left g.j. alone in a room designated the boudoir. g.j. resented the boudoir, because it was like nothing that he had ever witnessed. the walls were irregularly covered with rhombuses, rhomboids, lozenges, diamonds, triangles, and parallelograms; the carpet was treated likewise, and also the upholstery and the cushions. the colourings of the scene in their excessive brightness, crudity and variety surpassed g.j.'s conception of the possible. he had learned the value of colour before queen was born, and in the albany had translated principle into practice. but the hues of the boudoir made the gaudiest effects of regency furniture appear sombre. the place resembled a gigantic and glittering kaleidoscope deranged and arrested. g.j.'s glance ran round the room like a hunted animal seeking escape, and found no escape. he was as disturbed as he might have been disturbed by drinking a liqueur on the top of a cocktail. nevertheless he had to admit that some of the contrasts of pure colour were rather beautiful, even impressive; and he hated to admit it. he was aware of a terrible apprehension that he would never be the same man again, and that henceforth his own abode would be eternally stricken for him with the curse of insipidity. regaining somewhat his nerve, he looked for pictures. there were no pictures. but every piece of furniture was painted with primitive sketches of human figures, or of flowers, or of vessels, or of animals. on the front of the mantelpiece were perversely but brilliantly depicted, with a high degree of finish, two nude, crouching women who gazed longingly at each other across the impassable semicircular abyss of the fireplace; and just above their heads, on a scroll, ran these words: "the ways of god are strange." he heard movements and a slight cough in the next room, the door leading to which was ajar. concepcion's cough; he thought he recognised it. five minutes ago he had had no notion of seeing her; now he was about to see her. and he felt excited and troubled, as much by the sudden violence of life as by the mere prospect of the meeting. after her husband's death concepcion had soon withdrawn from london. a large engineering firm on the clyde, one of the heads of which happened to be constitutionally a pioneer, was establishing a canteen for its workmen, and concepcion, the tentacles of whose influence would stretch to any length, had decided that she ought to take up canteen work, and in particular the canteen work of just that firm. but first of all, to strengthen her prestige and acquire new prestige, she had gone to the united states, with a powerful introduction to sears, roebuck and company of chicago, in order to study industrial canteenism in its most advanced and intricate manifestations. portraits of concepcion in splendid furs on the deck of the steamer in the act of preparing to study industrial canteenism in its most advanced and intricate manifestations had appeared in the illustrated weeklies. the luxurious trip had cost several hundreds of pounds, but it was war expenditure, and, moreover, concepcion had come into considerable sums of money through her deceased husband. her return to britain had never been published. advertisements of concepcion ceased. only a few friends knew that she was in the most active retirement on the clyde. g.j. had written to her twice but had obtained no replies. one fact he knew, that she had not had a child. lady queenie had not mentioned her; it was understood that the inseparables had quarrelled in the heroic manner and separated for ever. she entered the boudoir slowly. g.j. grew self-conscious, as it were because she was still the martyr of destiny and he was not. she wore a lavender-tinted gown of queen's; he knew it was queen's because he had seen precisely such a gown on queen, and there could not possibly be another gown precisely like that very challenging gown. it suited queen, but it did not suit concepcion. she looked older; she was thirty-two, and might have been taken for thirty-five. she was very pale, with immense fatigued eyes; but her ridiculous nose had preserved all its originality. and she had the same slightly masculine air--perhaps somewhat intensified--with an added dignity. and g.j. thought: "she is as mysterious and unfathomable as i am myself." and he was impressed and perturbed. with a faint, sardonic smile, glancing at him as a physical equal from her unusual height (she was as tall as lady queenie), she said abruptly and casually: "am i changed?" "no," he replied as abruptly and casually, clasping almost inimically her ringed hand--she was wearing queenie's rings. "but you're tired. the journey, i suppose." "it's not that. we sat up till five o'clock this morning, talking." "who?" "queen and i." "what did you do that for?" "well, you see, we'd had the devil's own row--" she stopped, leaving his imagination to complete the picture of the meeting and the night talk. he smiled awkwardly--tried to be paternal, and failed. "what about?" "she never wanted me to leave london. i came back last night with only a handbag just as she was going out to dinner. she didn't go out to dinner. queen is a white woman. nobody knows how white queen is. i didn't know myself until last night." there was a pause. g.j. said: "i had an appointment here with the white woman, on business." "yes, i know," said concepcion negligently. "she'll be home soon." something infinitesimally malicious in the voice and gaze sent the singular idea shooting through his mind that queen had gone out on purpose so that concepcion might have him alone for a while. and he was wary of both of them, as he might have been of two pagan goddesses whom he, a poor defiant mortal, suspected of having laid an eye on him for their own ends. "_you've_ changed, anyhow," said concepcion. "older?" "no. harder." he was startled, not displeased. "how--harder?" "more sure of yourself," said concepcion, with a trace of the old harsh egotism in her tone. "it appears you're a perfect tyrant on the lechford committee now you're vice-chairman, and all the more footling members dread the days when you're in the chair. it appears also that you've really overthrown two chairmen, and yet won't take the situation yourself." he was still more startled, but now positively flattered by the world's estimate of his activities and individuality. he saw himself in a new light. "this what you were talking about until five a.m.?" the butler entered. "shall i serve tea, madam?" concepcion looked at the man scornfully: "yes." one of the minor stalwarts entered and arranged a table, and the other followed with a glittering, steaming tray in his hands, while the butler hovered like a winged hippopotamus over the operation. concepcion half sat down by the table, and then, altering her mind, dropped on to a vast chaise-longue, as wide as a bed, and covered with as many cushions as would have stocked a cushion shop, which occupied the principal place in front of the hearth. the hem of her rich gown just touched the floor. g.j. could see that she was wearing the transparent deep-purple stockings that queen wore with the transparent lavender gown. her right shoulder rose high from the mass of the body, and her head was sunk between two cushions. her voice came smothered from the cushions: "damn it! g.j. don't look at me like that." he was standing near the mantelpiece. "why?" he exclaimed. "what's the matter, con?" there was no answer. he lit a cigarette. the ebullient kettle kept lifting its lid in growing impatience. but concepcion seemed to have forgotten the tea. g.j. had a thought, distinct like a bubble on a sea of thoughts, that if the tea was already made, as no doubt it was, it would soon be stewed. concepcion said: "the matter is that i'm a ruined woman, and queen can't understand." and in the bewildering voluptuous brightness and luxury of the room g.j. had the sensation of being a poor, baffled ghost groping in the night of existence. concepcion's left arm slipped over the edge of the day-bed and hung limp and pale, the curved fingers touching the carpet. chapter the clyde she was sitting up on the chaise-longue and had poured out the tea--he had pushed the tea-table towards the chaise-longue--and she was talking in an ordinary tone just as though she had not immodestly bared her spirit to him and as though she knew not that he realised she had done so. she was talking at length, as one who in the past had been well accustomed to giving monologues and to holding drawing-rooms in subjection while she chattered, and to making drawing-rooms feel glad that they had consented to subjection. she was saying: "you've no idea what the valley of the clyde is now. you can't have. it's filled with girls, and they come into it every morning by train to huge stations specially built for them, and they make the most ghastly things for killing other girls' lovers all day, and they go back by train at night. only some of them work all night. i had to leave my own works to organise the canteen of a new filling factory. five thousand girls in that factory. it's frightfully dangerous. they have to wear special clothing. they have to take off every stitch from their bodies in one room, and run in their innocence and nothing else to another room where the special clothing is. that's the only way to prevent the whole place being blown up one beautiful day. but five thousand of them! you can't imagine it. you'd like to, g.j., but you can't. however, i didn't stay there very long. i wanted to go back to my own place. i was adored at my own place. of course the men adored me. they used to fight about me sometimes. terrific men. nothing ever made me happier than that, or so happy. but the girls were more interesting. two thousand of them there. you'd never guess it, because they were hidden in thickets of machinery. but see them rush out endlessly to the canteen for tea! all sorts. lots of devils and cats. some lovely creatures, heavenly creatures, as fine as a queen. they adored me too. they didn't at first, some of them. but they soon tumbled to it that i was the modern woman, and that they'd never seen me before, and it was a great discovery. absurdly easy to raise yourself to be the idol of a crowd that fancies itself canny! incredibly easy! i used to take their part against the works-manager as often as i could; he was a fiend; he hated me; but then i was a fiend, too, and i hated him more. i used often to come on at six in the morning, when they did, and 'sign on'. it isn't really signing on now at all; there's a clock dial and a whole machine for catching you out. they loved to see me doing that. and i worked the lathes sometimes, just for a bit, just to show that i wasn't ashamed to work. etc.... all that sentimental twaddle. it pleased them. and if any really vigorous-minded girl had dared to say it was sentimental twaddle, there would have been a crucifixion or something of the sort in the cloak-rooms. the mob's always the same. but what pleased them far more than anything was me knowing them by their christian names. not all, of course; still, hundreds of them. marvellous feats of memorising i did! i used to go about muttering under my breath: 'winnie, wart on left hand, winnie, wart on left hand, wart on left hand, winnie.' you see? and i've sworn at them--not often; it wouldn't do, naturally. but there was scarcely a woman there that i couldn't simply blast in two seconds if i felt like it. on the other hand, i assure you i could be very tender. i was surprised how tender i could be, now and then, in my little office. they'd tell me anything--sounds sentimental, but they would--and some of them had no more notion that there's such a thing on earth as propriety than a monkey has. i thought i knew everything before i went to the clyde valley. well, i didn't." concepcion looked at g.j. "you know you're very innocent, g.j., compared to me." "i should hope so!" said g.j., impenetrably. "what do you think of it all?" she demanded in a fresh tone, leaning a little towards him. he replied: "i'm impressed." he was, in fact, very profoundly impressed; but he had to illustrate the hardness in himself which she had revealed to him. (he wondered whether the members of the lechford committee really did credit him with having dethroned a couple of chairmen. the idea was new to his modesty. perhaps he had been underestimating his own weight on the committee. no doubt he had.) all constraint was now dissipated between concepcion and himself. they were behaving to each other as though their intimacy had never been interrupted for a single week. she amazed him, sitting there in the purple stockings and the affronting gown, and he admired. her material achievement alone was prodigious. he pictured her as she rose in the winter dark and in the summer dawn to go to the works and wrestle with so much incalculable human nature and so many complex questions of organisation, day after day, week after week, month after month, for nearly eighteen months. she had kept it up; that was the point. she had shown what she was made of, and what she was made of was unquestionably marvellous. he would have liked to know about various things to which she had made no reference. did she live in a frowsy lodging-house near the great works? what kind of food did she get? what did she do with her evenings and her sundays? was she bored? was she miserable or exultant? had she acquaintances, external interests; or did she immerse herself completely, inclusively, in the huge, smoking, whirring, foul, perilous hell which she had described? the contemplation of the horror of the hell gave him--and her, too, he thought--a curious feeling which was not unpleasurable. it had savour. he would not, however, inquire from her concerning details. he preferred, on reflection, to keep the details mysterious, as mysterious as her individuality and as the impression of her worn eyes. the setting of mystery in his mind suited her. he said: "but of course your relations with those girls were artificial, after all." "no, they weren't. i tell you the girls were perfectly open; there wasn't the slightest artificiality." "yes, but were you open, to them? did you ever tell them anything about yourself, for instance?" "oh, no!" "did they ever ask you to?" "no! they wouldn't have thought of doing so." "that's what i call artificiality. by the way, how have you been ruined? who ruined you? was it the hated works-manager?" there had been no change in his tone; he spoke with the utmost detachment. "i was coming to that," answered concepcion, apparently with a detachment equal to his. "last week but one in one of the shops there was a girl standing in front of a machine, with her back to it. about twenty-two--you must see her in your mind--about twenty-two, nice chestnut hair. cap over it, of course--that's the rule. khaki overalls and trousers. rather high-heeled patent-leather boots--they fancy themselves, thank god!--and a bit of lace showing out of the khaki at the neck. red cheeks; she was fairly new to the works. do you see her? she meant to be one of the devils. earning two pounds a week nearly, and eagerly spending it all. fully awake to all the possibilities of her body. i was in the shop. i said something to her, and she didn't hear at first--the noise of some of the shops is shattering. i went close to her and repeated it. she laughed out of mere vivacity, and threw back her head as people do when they laugh. the machine behind her must have caught some hair that wasn't under her cap. all her hair was dragged from under the cap, and in no time all her hair was torn out and the whole of her scalp ripped clean off. in a second or two i got her on to a trolley--i did it--and threw an overall over her and ran her to the dressing-station, close to the main office entrance. there was a car there. one of the directors was just driving off. i stopped him. it wasn't a case for our dressing-station. in three minutes i had her at the hospital--three minutes. the car was soaked in blood. but she didn't lose consciousness, that child didn't. she's dead now. she's buried. her body that she meant to use so profusely for her own delights is squeezed up in the little black box in the dark and the silence, down below where the spring can't get at it.... i had no sleep for two nights. on the second day a doctor at the hospital said that i must take at least three months' holiday. he said i'd had a nervous breakdown. i didn't know i had, and i don't know now. i said i wouldn't take any holiday, and that nothing would induce me to." "why, con?" "because i'd sworn, absolutely sworn to myself, to stick that job till the war was over. you understand, i'd sworn it. well, they wouldn't let me on to the works. and yesterday one of the directors brought me up to town himself. he was very kind, in his clyde way. now you understand what i mean when i say i'm ruined. i'm ruined with myself, you see. i didn't stick it. i couldn't. but there were twenty or thirty girls who saw the accident. they're sticking it." "yes," he said in a voice soft and moved, "i understand." and while he spoke thus aloud, though his emotion was genuine, and his desire to comfort and sustain her genuine, and his admiration for her genuine, he thought to himself: "how theatrically she told it! every effect was studied, nearly every word. well, she can't help it. but does she imagine i can't see that all the casualness was deliberately part of the effect?" she lit a cigarette and leaned her half-draped elbows on the tea-table, and curved her ringed fingers, which had withstood time and fatigue much better than her face; and then she reclined again on the chaise-longue, on her back, and sent up smoke perpendicularly, and through the smoke seemed to be trying to decipher the enigmas of the ceiling. g.j. rose and stood over her in silence. at last she went on: "the work those girls do is excruciating, hellish, and they don't realise it. that's the worst of it. they'll never be the same again. they're ruining their health, and, what's more important, their looks. you can see them changing under your eyes. ours was the best factory on the clyde, and the conditions were unspeakable, in spite of canteens, and rest-rooms, and libraries, and sanitation, and all this damned 'welfare'. fancy a girl chained up for twelve hours every day to a thundering, whizzing, iron machine that never gets tired. the machine's just as fresh at six o'clock at night as it was at six o'clock in the morning, and just as anxious to maim her if she doesn't look out for herself--more anxious. the whole thing's still going on; they're at it now, this very minute. you're interested in a factory, aren't you, g.j.?" "yes," he answered gently, but looked with seemingly callous firmness down at her. "the reveille company, or some such name." "yes." "making tons of money, i hear." "yes." "you're a profiteer, g.j." "i'm not. long since i decided i must give away all my extra profits." "ever go and look at your factory?" "no." "any nice young girls working there?" "i don't know." "if there are, are they decently treated?" "don't know that, either." "why don't you go and see?" "it's no business of mine." "yes, it is. aren't you making yourself glorious as a philanthropist out of the thing?" "i tell you it's no business of mine," he insisted evenly. "i couldn't do anything if i went. i've no status." "rotten system." "possibly. but systems can't be altered like that. systems alter themselves, and they aren't in a hurry about it. this system isn't new, though it's new to you." "you people in london don't know what work is." "and what about your clyde strikes?" g.j. retorted. "well, all that's settled now," said concepcion rather uneasily, like a champion who foresees a fight but lacks confidence. "yes, but--" g.j. suddenly altered his tone to the persuasive: "you must know all about those strikes. what was the real cause? we don't understand them here." "if you really want to know--nerves," she said earnestly and triumphantly. "nerves?" "overwork. no rest. no change. everlasting punishment. the one incomprehensible thing to me is that the whole of glasgow didn't go on strike and stay out for ever." "there's just as much overwork in london as there is on the clyde." "there's a lot more talking--parliament, cabinet, committees. you should hear what they say about it in glasgow." "con," he said kindly, "you don't suspect it, but you're childish. it's the job of one part of london to talk. if that part of london didn't talk your tribes on the clyde couldn't work, because they wouldn't know what to do, nor how to do it. talking has to come before working, and let me tell you it's more difficult, and it's more killing, because it's more responsible. excuse this common sense made easy for beginners, but you brought it on yourself." she frowned. "and what do you do? do you talk or work?" she smiled. "i'll tell you this!" said he, smiling candidly and benevolently. "it took me a dickens of a time really to _put_ myself into anything that meant steady effort. i'd lost the habit. natural enough, and i'm not going into sackcloth about it. however, i'm improving. i'm going to take on the secretaryship of the lechford committee. some of 'em mayn't want me, but they'll have to have me. and when they've got me they'll have to look out. all of them, including queen and her mother." "will it take the whole of your time?" "yes. i'm doing three days a week now." "i suppose you think you've beaten me." "con, i do ask you not to be a child." "but i am a child. why don't you humour me? you know i've had a nervous breakdown. you used to humour me." he shook his head. "humouring you won't do _your_ nervous breakdown any good. it might some women's--but not yours." "you shall humour me!" she cried. "i haven't told you half my ruin. do you know i meant to love carly all my life. i felt sure i should. well, i can't! it's gone, all that feeling--already! in less than two years! and now i'm only sorry for him and sorry for myself. isn't it horrible? isn't it horrible?" "try not to think," he murmured. she sat up impetuously. "don't talk such damned nonsense! 'try not to think'! why, my frightful unhappiness is the one thing that keeps me alive." "yes," g.j. yielded. "it was nonsense." she sank back. he saw moisture in her eyes and felt it in his own. chapter salome lady queenie arrived in haste, as though relentless time had pursued her up the stairs. "why, you're in the dark here!" she exclaimed impatiently, and impatiently switched on several lights. "sorry i'm late, g.j.," she said perfunctorily, without taking any trouble to put conviction into her voice. "how have you two been getting on?" she looked at concepcion and g.j. in a peculiar way, inquisitorial and implicatory. then, towards the door: "come in, come in, dialin." a young soldier with the stripe of a lance-corporal entered, slightly nervous and slightly defiant. "and you, miss i-forget-your-name." a young woman entered; she had very red lips and very high heels, and was both more nervous and more defiant than the young soldier. "this is mr. dialin, you know, con, second ballet-master at the ottoman. i met him by sheer marvellous chance. he's only got ten minutes; he hasn't really got that; but he's going to see me do my salome dance." lady queenie made no attempt to introduce miss i-forget-your-name, who of her own accord took a chair with a curious, dashed effrontery. it appeared that she was attached to mr. dialin. lady queenie cast off rapidly gloves, hat and coat, and then, having rushed to the bell and rung it fiercely several times, came back to the chaise-longue and gazed at it and at the surrounding floor. "would you mind, con?" concepcion rose. lady queenie, rushing off again, pushed several more switches, and from a thick cluster of bulbs in front of a large mirror at the end of the room there fell dazzling sheets of light. a footman presented himself. "push the day-bed right away towards the window," she commanded. the footman inclined and obeyed, and the lance-corporal superiorly helped him. then the footman was told to energise the gramophone, which in its specially designed case stood in a corner. the footman seemed to be on intimate terms with the gramophone. meanwhile lady queenie, with a safety-pin, was fastening the back hem of her short skirt to the front between the knees. still bending, she took her shoes off. her scent impregnated the room. "you see, it will be barefoot," she explained to mr. dialin. the walls of london were already billed with an early announcement of the marvels of the pageant of terpsichore, which was to occur at the albert hall, under the superintendence of the greatest modern english painters, in aid of a fund for soldiers disabled by deafness. the performers were all ladies of the upper world, ladies bearing names for the most part as familiar as the names of streets--and not a stage-star among them. amateurism was to be absolutely untainted by professionalism in the prodigious affair; therefore the prices of tickets ruled high, and queens had conferred their patronage. lady queenie removed several bracelets and a necklace, and, seizing a plate, deposited it on the carpet. "that piece of bread-and-butter," she said, "is the head of my beloved john." the clever footman started the gramophone, and lady queenie began to dance. the lance-corporal walked round her, surveying her at all angles, watching her like a tiger, imitating movements, suggesting movements, sketching emotions with his arm, raising himself at intervals on the toes of his thick boots. after a few moments concepcion glanced at g.j., conveying to him a passionate, adoring admiration of queen's talent. g.j., startled by her brightened eyes so suddenly full of temperament, nodded to please her. but the fact was that he saw naught to admire in the beautiful and brazen amateur's performance. he wondered that she could not have discovered something more original than to follow the footsteps of maud allan in a scene which years ago had become stale. he wondered that, at any rate, concepcion should not perceive the poor, pretentious quality of the girlish exhibition. and as he looked at the mincing dialin he pictured the lance-corporal helping to serve a gun. and as he looked at the youthful, lithe queenie posturing in the shower-bath of rays amid the blazing chromatic fantasy of the room, and his nostrils twitched to her pungent perfume, he pictured the reverberating shell-factory on the clyde where girls had their scalps torn off by unappeasable machinery, and the filling-factory where five thousand girls stripped themselves naked in order to lessen the danger of being blown to bits.... after a climax of capering queen fell full length on her stomach upon the carpet, her soft chin accurately adjusted to the edge of the plate. the music ceased. the gramophone gnashed on the disc until the footman lifted its fang. miss i-forget-your-name raised both her feet from the floor, stuck her legs out in a straight, slanting line, and condescendingly clapped. then, seeing that queen was worrying the piece of bread-and-butter with her teeth, she exclaimed in agitation: "ow my!" mr. dialin assisted the breathless queen to rise, and they went off into a corner and he talked to her in low tones. soon he looked at his wrist-watch and caught the summoning eye of miss i-forget-your-name. "but it's pretty all right, isn't it?" said queen. "oh, yes! oh, yes!" he soothed her with an expert's casualness. "naturally, you want to work it up. you fell beautifully. now you go and see crevelli--he's the man." "i shall get him to come here. what's his address?" "i don't know. he's just moved. but you'll see it in the april number of _the dancing times_." as the footman was about to escort mr. dialin and his urgent lady downstairs queen ordered: "bring me up a whisky-and-soda." "it's splendid, queen," said concepcion enthusiastically when the two were alone with g.j. "i'm so glad you think so, darling. how are you, darling?" she kissed the older woman affectionately, fondly, on the lips, and then gave g.j. a challenging glance. "oh!" she exclaimed, and called out very loud: "robin! i want you at once." the secretarial miss robinson, carrying a note-book, appeared like magic from the inner room. "get me the april number of _the dancing news_." "_times_," g.j. corrected. "well, _times_. it's all the same. and write to mr. opson and say that we really must have proper dressing-room accommodation. it's most important." "yes, your ladyship. your ladyship has the sub-committee as to entrance arrangements for the public at half-past six." "i shan't go. telephone to them. i've got quite enough to do without that. i'm utterly exhausted. don't forget about _the dancing times_ and to write to mr. opson." "yes, your ladyship." "g.j.," said queen after robin had gone, "you are a pig if you don't go on that sub-committee as to entrance arrangements. you know what the albert hall is. they'll make a horrible mess of it, and it's just the sort of thing you can do better than anybody." "yes. but a pig i am," answered g.j. firmly. then he added: "i'll tell you how you might have avoided all these complications." "how?" "by having no pageant and simply going round collecting subscriptions. nobody would have refused you. and there'd have been no expenses to come off the total." lady queenie put her lips together. "has he been behaving in this style to you, con?" "a little--now and then," said concepcion. later, when the chaise-longue and queen's shoes had been replaced, and the tea-things and the head of john the baptist taken away, and all the lights extinguished save one over the mantelpiece, and lady queenie had nearly finished the whisky-and-soda, and nothing remained of the rehearsal except the safety-pin between lady queenie's knees, g.j. was still waiting for her to bethink herself of the hospitals subject upon which he had called by special request and appointment to see her. he took oath not to mention it first. shortly afterwards, stiff in his resolution, he departed. in three minutes he was in the smoking-room of his club, warming himself at a fine, old, huge, wasteful grate, in which burned such a coal fire as could not have been seen in france, italy, germany, austria, russia, nor anywhere on the continent of europe. the war had as yet changed nothing in the impregnable club, unless it was that ordinary matches had recently been substituted for the giant matches on which the club had hitherto prided itself. the hour lay neglected midway between tea and dinner, and there were only two other members in the vast room--solitaries, each before his own grand fire. g.j. took up _the times_, which his duties had prevented him from reading at large in the morning. he wandered with a sense of ease among its multifarious pages, and, in full leisure, brought his information up to date concerning the state of the war and of the country. air-raids by zeppelins were frequent, and some authorities talked magniloquently about the "defence of london." hundreds of people had paid immense sums for pictures and objects of art at the red cross sale at christie's, one of the most successful social events of the year. the house of commons was inquisitive about mesopotamia as a whole, and one british army was still trying to relieve another british army besieged in kut. german submarine successes were obviously disquieting. the supply of beer was reduced. there were to be forty principal aristocratic dancers in the pageant of terpsichore. the chancellor of the exchequer had budgeted for five hundred millions, and was very proud. the best people were at once proud and scared of the new income tax at s. in the £. they expressed the fear that such a tax would kill income or send it to america. the theatrical profession was quite sure that the amusements tax would involve utter ruin for the theatrical profession, and the match trade was quite sure that the match tax would put an end to matches, and some unnamed modest individuals had apparently decided that the travel tax must and forthwith would be dropped. the story of the evacuation of gallipoli had grown old and tedious. cranks were still vainly trying to prove to the blunt john bullishness of the prime minister that the daylight saving bill was not a piece of mere freak legislation. the whole of the west end and all the inhabitants of country houses in britain had discovered a new deity in australia and spent all their spare time and lungs in asserting that all other deities were false and futile; his earthly name was hughes. jan smuts was fighting in the primeval forests of east africa. the germans were discussing their war aims; and on the verdun front they had reached mort homme in the usual way, that was, according to the london press, by sacrificing more men than any place could possibly be worth; still, they had reached mort homme. and though our losses and the french losses were everywhere--one might assert, so to speak--negligible, nevertheless the steadfast band of thinkers and fact-facers who held a monopoly of true patriotism were extremely anxious to extend the military service act, so as to rope into the army every fit male in the island except themselves. the pages of _the times_ grew semi-transparent, and g.j. descried concepcion moving mysteriously in a mist behind them. only then did he begin effectively to realise her experiences and her achievement and her ordeal on the distant, romantic clyde. he said to himself: "i could never have stood what she has stood." she was a terrific woman; but because she was such a mixture of the mad-heroic and the silly-foolish, he rather condescended to her. she lacked what he was sure he possessed, and what he prized beyond everything--poise. and had she truly had a nervous breakdown, or was that fancy? did she truly despair of herself as a ruined woman, doubly ruined, or was she acting a part, as much in order to impress herself as in order to impress others? he thought the country and particularly its press, was somewhat like concepcion as a complex. he condescended to queenie also, not bitterly, but with sardonic pity. there she was, unalterable by any war, instinctively and ruthlessly working out her soul and her destiny. the country was somewhat like queenie too. but, of course, comparison between queenie and concepcion was absurd. he had had to defend himself to concepcion. and had he not defended himself? true, he had begun perhaps too slowly to work for the war; however, he had begun. what else could he have done beyond what he had done? become a special constable? grotesque. he simply could not see himself as a special constable, and if the country could not employ him more usefully than in standing on guard over an electricity works or a railway bridge in the middle of the night, the country deserved to lose his services. become a volunteer? even more grotesque. was he, a man turned fifty, to dress up and fall flat on the ground at the word of some fantastic jackanapes, or stare into vacancy while some inspecting general examined his person as though it were a tailor's mannikin? he had tried several times to get into a government department which would utilise his brains, but without success. and the club hummed with the unimaginable stories related by disappointed and dignified middle-aged men whose too eager patriotism had been rendered ridiculous by the vicious foolery of government departments. no! he had some work to do and he was doing it. people were looking to him for decision, for sagacity, for initiative; he supplied these things. his work might grow even beyond his expectations; but if it did not he should not worry. he felt that, unfatigued, he could and would contribute to the mass of the national resolution in the latter and more racking half of the war. morally, he was profiting by the war. nay, more, in a deep sense he was enjoying it. the immensity of it, the terror of it, the idiocy of it, the splendour of it, its unique grandeur as an illustration of human nature, thrilled the spectator in him. he had little fear for the result. the nations had measured themselves; the factors of the equation were known. britain conceivably might not win, but she could never lose. and he did not accept the singular theory that unless she won this war another war would necessarily follow. he had, in spite of all, a pretty good opinion of mankind, and would not exaggerate its capacity for lunatic madness. the worst was over when paris was definitely saved. suffering would sink and die like a fire. privations were paid for day by day in the cash of fortitude. taxes would always be met. a whole generation, including himself, would rapidly vanish and the next would stand in its place. and at worst, the path of evolution was unchangeably appointed. a harsh, callous philosophy. perhaps. what impressed him, and possibly intimidated him beyond anything else whatever, was the onset of the next generation. he thought of queenie, of mr. dialin, of miss i-forget-your-name, of lieutenant molder. how unconsciously sure of themselves and arrogant in their years! how strong! how unapprehensive! (and yet he had just been taking credit for his own freedom from apprehensiveness!) they were young--and he was so no longer. pooh! (a brave "pooh"!) he was wiser than they. he had acquired the supreme and subtly enjoyable faculty, which they had yet painfully to acquire, of nice, sure, discriminating, all-weighing judgment ... concepcion had divested herself of youth. and christine, since he knew her, had never had any youthfulness save the physical. there were only these two. said a voice behind him: "you dining here to-night?" "i am." "shall we crack a bottle together?" (it was astonishing and deplorable how clichés survived in the best clubs!) "by all means." the voice spoke lower: "that bollinger's all gone at last." "you were fearing the worst the last time i saw you," said g.j. "auction afterwards?" the voice suggested. "afraid i can't," said g.j. after a moment's hesitation. "i shall have to leave early." chapter the streets after dinner g.j. walked a little eastwards from the club, and, entering leicester square from the south, crossed it, and then turned westwards again on the left side of the road leading to piccadilly circus. it was about the time when christine usually went from her flat to her promenade. without admitting a definite resolve to see christine that evening he had said to himself that he would rather like to see her, or that he wouldn't mind seeing her, and that he might, if the mood took him, call at cork street and catch her before she left. having advanced thus far in the sketch of his intentions, he had decided that it would be a pity not to take precautions to encounter her in the street, assuming that she had already started but had not reached the theatre. the chance of meeting her on her way was exceedingly small; nevertheless he would not miss it. hence his roundabout route; and hence his selection of the chaste as against the unchaste pavement of coventry street. he knew very little of christine's professional arrangements, but he did know, from occasional remarks of hers, that owing to the need for economy and the difficulty of finding taxis she now always walked to the promenade on dry nights, and that from a motive of self-respect she always took the south side of piccadilly and the south side of coventry street in order to avoid the risk of ever being mistaken for something which she was not. it was a dry night, but very cloudy. points of faint illumination, mysteriously travelling across the heavens and revealing the otherwise invisible cushioned surface of the clouds, alone showed that searchlights were at their work of watching over the heedless town. entertainments had drawn in the people from the streets; motor-buses were half empty; implacable parcels-vans, with thin, exhausted boys scarcely descried on their rear perches, forced the more fragile traffic to yield place to them. footfarers were few, except on the north side of coventry street, where officers, soldiers, civilians, police and courtesans marched eternally to and fro, peering at one another in the thick gloom that, except in the immediate region of a lamp, put all girls, the young and the ageing, the pretty and the ugly, the good-natured and the grasping, on a sinister enticing equality. and they were all, men and women and vehicles, phantoms flitting and murmuring and hooting in the darkness. and the violet glow-worms that hung in front of theatres and cinemas seemed to mark the entrances to unimaginable fastnesses, and the side streets seemed to lead to the precipitous edges of the universe where nothing was. g.j. recognised christine just beyond the knot of loiterers at the piccadilly tube. the improbable had happened. she was walking at what was for her a rather quick pace, purposeful and preoccupied. for an instant the recognition was not mutual; he liked the uninviting stare that she gave him as he stopped. "it is thou?" she exclaimed, and her dimly-seen face softened suddenly into a delighted, adoring smile. he was moved by the passion which she still had for him. he felt vaguely and yet acutely an undischarged obligation in regard to her. it was the first time he had met her in such circumstances. a constraint fell between them. in five minutes she would have been in her promenade engaged upon her highly technical business, displaying her attractions while appearing to protect herself within a virginal timidity (for this was her natural method). in any case, even had he not set forth on purpose to find her, he could scarcely have accompanied her to the doors of the theatre and there left her to the night's routine. they both hesitated, and then, without a word, he turned aside and she followed close, acquiescent by training and by instinct. knowing his sure instinct for what was proper, she knew at once that hazard had saved her from the night's routine, and she was full of quiet triumph. he, of course, though absolutely loyal to her, had for dignity's sake to practise the duplicity of pretending to make up his mind what he should do. they went through the tube station and were soon in one of the withdrawn streets between coventry street and pall mall east. the episode had somehow the air of an adventure. he looked at her; the hat was possibly rather large, but, in truth, she was the image of refinement, delicacy, virtue, virtuous surrender. he thought it was marvellous that there should exist such a woman as she. and he thought how marvellous was the protective vastness of the town, beneath whose shield he was free--free to live different lives simultaneously, to make his own laws, to maintain indefinitely exciting and delicious secrecies. not half a mile off were concepcion and queen, and his amour was as safe from them as if he had hidden it in the depths of some hareemed asiatic city. christine said politely: "but i detain thee?" "as for that," he replied, "what does that matter, after all?" "thou knowest," she said in a new tone, "i am all that is most worried. in this london they are never willing to leave you in peace." "what is it, my poor child?" he asked benevolently. "they talk of closing the promenade," she answered. "never!" he murmured easily, reassuringly. he remembered the night years earlier when, as a protest against some restrictive action of a county council, the theatre of varieties whose promenade rivalled throughout the whole world even the promenade of the folies-bergère, shut its doors and darkened its blazing facade, and the entire west end seemed to go into a kind of shocked mourning. but the next night the theatre had reopened as usual and the promenade had been packed. close the promenades! absurd! not the full bench of archbishops and bishops could close the promenades! the thing was inconceivable, especially in war-time, when human nature was so human. "but it is quite serious!" she cried. "everyone speaks of it.... what idiots! what frightful lack of imagination! and how unjust! what do they suppose we are going to do, we other women? do they intend to put respectable women like me on to the pavement? it is a fantastic idea! fantastic!... and the night-clubs closing too!" "there is always the other place." "the ottoman? do not speak to me of the ottoman. moreover, that also will be suppressed. they are all mad." she gave a great sigh. "oh! what a fool i was to leave paris! after all, in paris, they know what it is, life! however, i weary thee. let us say no more about it." she controlled her agitation. the subject was excessively delicate, and that she should have expressed herself so violently on it showed the powerful reality of the emotion it had aroused in her. unquestionably the decency of her livelihood was at stake. she had convinced him of the peril. but what could he say? he could not say, "do not despair. you are indispensable; therefore you will not be dispensed with. these crises have often arisen before, and they always end in the same manner. and are there not the big hotels, the chic cinemas, certain restaurants? not to mention the clientèle which you must have made for yourself?" such remarks were impossible. but not more impossible than the very basis of his relations with her. he was aware again of the weight of an undischarged obligation to her. his behaviour towards her had always been perfection, and yet was she not his creditor? he had a conscience, and it was illogical and extremely inconvenient. at that moment a young man flew along the silent, shadowed street, and as he passed them shouted somewhat hysterically the one word: "zepps!" christine clutched his arm. they stood still. "do not be frightened," said g.j. with perfect tranquillity. "but i hear guns," she protested. he, too, heard the distant sounds of guns, and it occurred to him that the sounds had begun earlier, while they were talking. "i expect it's only anti-aircraft practice," he replied. "i seem to remember seeing a warning in the paper about there being practice one of these nights." christine, increasing the pressure on his arm and apparently trying to drag him away, complained: "they ought to give warning of raids. that is elementary. this country is so bizarre." "oh!" said g.j., full of wisdom and standing his ground. "that would never do. warnings would make panics, and they wouldn't help in the least. we are just as safe here as anywhere. even supposing there is an air-raid, the chance of any particular spot being hit must be several million to one against. and i don't think for a moment there is an air-raid." "why?" "well, i don't," g.j. answered with calm superiority. the fact was that he did not know why he thought there was not an air-raid. to assume that there was not an air-raid, in the absence of proof positive of the existence of an air-raid, was with him constitutional: a state of mind precisely as illogical, biased and credulous as the alarmist mood which he disdained in others. also he was lacking in candour, for after a few seconds the suspicion crept into his mind that there might indeed be an air-raid--and he would not utter it. "in any case," said christine, "they always give warning in paris." he thought: "i'd better get this woman home," and said aloud: "come along." "but is it safe?" she asked anxiously. he saw that she was the primeval woman, exactly like concepcion and queen. first she wanted to run, and then when he was ready to run she asked: "is it safe?" and he felt very indulgent and comfortably masculine. he admitted that it would be absurd to expect the conduct of a frightened christine to be governed by the operations of reason. he was not annoyed, because personally he simply did not care a whit whether they moved or not. while they were hesitating a group of people came round the corner. these people were talking loudly, and as they approached g.j. discerned that one of them was pointing to the sky. "there she is! there she is!" shouted an eager voice. seeing more human society in g.j. and christine, the group stopped near them. g.j. gazed in the indicated direction, and lo! there was a point of light in the sky. and then guns suddenly began to sound much nearer. "what did i tell you?" said another voice. "i told you they'd cleared the corner at the bottom of st. james's street for a gun. now they've got her going. good for us they're shooting southwards." christine was shaking on g.j.'s arm. "it's all right! it's all right!" he murmured compassionately, and she tightened her clutch on him in thanks. he looked hard at the point of light, which might have been anything. the changing forms of thin clouds continually baffled the vision. "by god!" shouted the first voice. "she's hit. see her stagger? she's hit. she'll blaze up in a moment. one down last week. another this. look at her now. she's afire." the group gave a weak cheer. then the clouds cleared for an instant and revealed a crescent. g.j. said: "that's the moon, you idiots. it's not a zeppelin." even as he spoke he wondered, and regretted, that he should be calling them idiots. they were complete strangers to him. the group vanished, crestfallen, round another corner. g.j. laughed to christine. then the noise of guns was multiplied. that he was with christine in the midst of an authentic air-raid could no longer be doubted. he was conscious of the wine he had drunk at the club. he had the sensation of human beings, men like himself, who ate and drank and laced their boots, being actually at that moment up there in the sky with intent to kill him and christine. it was a marvellous sensation, terrible but exquisite. and he had the sensation of other human beings beyond the sea, giving deliberate orders in german for murder, murdering for their lives; and they, too, were like himself, and ate and drank and either laced their boots or had them laced daily. and the staggering apprehension of the miraculous lunacy of war swept through his soul. chapter the child's arm "you see," he said to christine, "it was not a zeppelin.... we shall be quite safe here." but in that last phrase he had now confessed to her the existence of an air-raid. he knew that he was not behaving with the maximum of sagacity. there were, for example, hotels with subterranean grill-rooms close by, and there were similar refuges where danger would be less than in the street, though the street was narrow and might be compared to a trench. and yet he had said, "we shall be quite safe here." in others he would have condemned such an attitude. now, however, he realised that he was very like others. an inactive fatalism had seized him. he was too proud, too idle, too negligent, too curious, to do the wise thing. he and christine were in the air-raid, and in it they should remain. he had just the senseless, monkeyish curiosity of the staring crowd so lyrically praised by the london press. he was afraid, but his curiosity and inertia were stronger than his fear. then came a most tremendous explosion--the loudest sound, the most formidable physical phenomenon that g.j. had ever experienced in his life. the earth under their feet trembled. christine gave a squeal and seemed to subside to the ground, but he pulled her up again, not in calm self-possession, but by the sheer automatism of instinct. a spasm of horrible fright shot through him. he thought, in awe and stupefaction: "a bomb!" he thought about death and maiming and blood. the relations between him and those everyday males aloft in the sky seemed to be appallingly close. after the explosion perfect silence--no screams, no noise of crumbling--perfect silence, and yet the explosion seemed still to dominate the air! ears ached and sang. something must be done. all theories of safety had been smashed to atoms in the explosion. g.j. dragged christine along the street, he knew not why. the street was unharmed. not the slightest trace in it, so far as g.j. could tell in the gloom, of destruction! but where the explosion had been, whether east, west, south or north, he could not guess. except for the disturbance in his ears the explosion might have been a hallucination. suddenly he saw at the end of the street a wide thoroughfare, and he could not be sure what thoroughfare it was. two motor-buses passed the end of the street at mad speed; then two taxis; then a number of people, men and women, running hard. useless and silly to risk the perils of that wide thoroughfare! he turned back with christine. he got her to run. in the thick gloom he looked for an open door or a porch, but there was none. the houses were like the houses of the dead. he made more than one right angle turn. christine gave a sign that she could go no farther. he ceased trying to drag her. he was recovering himself. once more he heard the guns--childishly feeble after the explosion of the bomb. after all, one spot was as safe as another. the outline of a building seemed familiar. it was an abandoned chapel; he knew he was in st. martin's street. he was about to pull christine into the shelter of the front of the chapel, when something happened for which he could not find a name. true, it was an explosion. but the previous event had been an explosion, and this one was a thousandfold more intimidating. the earth swayed up and down. the sound alone of the immeasurable cataclysm annihilated the universe. the sound and the concussion transcended what had been conceivable. both the sound and the concussion seemed to last for a long time. then, like an afterthought, succeeded the awful noise of falling masses and the innumerable crystal tinkling of shattered glass. this noise ceased and began again.... g.j. was now in a strange condition of mild wonder. there was silence in the dark solitude of st. martin's street. then the sound of guns supervened once more, but they were distant guns. g.j. discovered that he was not holding christine, and also that, instead of being in the middle of the street, he was leaning against the door of a house. he called faintly, "christine!" no reply. "in a moment," he said to himself, "i must go out and look for her. but i am not quite ready yet." he had a slight pain in his side; it was naught; it was naught, especially in comparison with the strange conviction of weakness and confusion. he thought: "we've not won this war yet," and he had qualms. one poor lamp burned in the street. he started to walk slowly and uncertainly towards it. near by he saw a hat on the ground. it was his own. he put it on. suddenly the street lamp went out. he walked on, and stepped ankle-deep into broken glass. then the road was clear again. he halted. not a sign of christine! he decided that she must have run away, and that she would run blindly and, finding herself either in leicester square or lower regent street, would by instinct run home. at any rate, she could not be blown to atoms, for they were together at the instant of the explosion. she must exist, and she must have had the power of motion. he remembered that he had had a stick; he had it no longer. he turned back and, taking from his pocket the electric torch which had lately come into fashion, he examined the road for his stick. the sole object of interest which the torch revealed was a child's severed arm, with a fragment of brown frock on it and a tinsel ring on one of the fingers of the dirty little hand. the blood from the other end had stained the ground. g.j. abruptly switched off the torch. nausea overcame him, and then a feeling of the most intense pity and anger overcame the nausea. (a month elapsed before he could mention his discovery of the child's arm to anyone at all.) the arm lay there as if it had been thrown there. whence had it come? no doubt it had come from over the housetops.... he smelt gas, and then he felt cold water in his boots. water was advancing in a flood along the street. "broken mains, of course," he said to himself, and was rather pleased with the promptness of his explanation. at the elbow of st. martin's street, where a new dim vista opened up, he saw policemen, then firemen; then he heard the beat of a fire-engine, upon whose brass glinted the reflection of flames that were flickering in a gap between two buildings. a huge pile of debris encumbered the middle of the road. the vista was closed by a barricade, beyond which was a pressing crowd. "stand clear there!" said a policeman to him roughly. "there's a wall going to fall there any minute." he walked off, hurrying with relief from the half-lit scene of busy, dim silhouettes. he could scarcely understand it; and he was incapable of replying to the policeman. he wanted to be alone and to ponder himself back into perfect composure. at the elbow again he halted afresh. and as he stood figures in couples, bearing stretchers, strode past him. the stretchers were covered with cloths that hung down. not the faintest sound came from beneath the cloths. after a time he went on. the other exit of st. martin's street was being barricaded as he reached it. a large crowd had assembled, and there was a sound of talking like steady rain. he pushed grimly through the crowd. he was set apart from the idle crowd. he would tell the crowd nothing. in a minute he was going westwards on the left side of coventry street again. the other side was as populous with saunterers as ever. the violet glow-worms still burned in front of the theatres and cinemas. motor-buses swept by; taxis swept by; parcels vans swept by, hooting. a newsman was selling papers at the corner. was he in a dream now? or had he been in a dream in st. martin's street? the vast capacity of the capital for digesting experience seemed to endanger his reason. save for the fragments of eager conversation everywhere overheard, there was not a sign of disturbance of the town's habitual life. and he was within four hundred yards of the child's arm and of the spot where the procession of stretcher-bearers had passed. one thought gradually gained ascendancy in his mind: "i am saved!" it became exultant: "i might have been blown to bits, but i am saved!" despite the world's anguish and the besetting imminence of danger, life and the city which he inhabited had never seemed so enchanting, so lovely, as they did then. he hurried towards cork street, hopeful. chapter "romance" at two periods of the day marthe, with great effort and for professional purposes, achieved some degree of personal tidiness. the first period began at about four o'clock in the afternoon. by six o'clock or six-thirty she had slipped back into the sloven. the second period began at about ten o'clock at night. it was more brilliant while it lasted, but owing to the accentuation of marthe's characteristics by fatigue it seldom lasted more than an hour. when marthe opened the door to g.j. she was at her proudest, intensely conscious of being clean and neat, and unwilling to stand any nonsense from anybody. of course she was polite to g.j. as the chief friend of the establishment and a giver of good tips, but she deprecated calls by gentlemen in the evening, for unless they were made by appointment the risk of complications at once arose. the mention of an air-raid rendered her definitely inimical. formerly marthe had been more than average nervous in air-raids, but she had grown used to them and now defied them. as she kept all windows closed on principle she heard less of raids than some people. g.j. did not explain the circumstances. he simply asked if madame had returned. no, madame had not returned. true, marthe had not been unaware of guns and things, but there was no need to worry; madame must have arrived at the theatre long before the guns started. marthe really could not be bothered with these unnecessary apprehensions. she had her duties to attend to like other folks, and they were heavy, and she washed her hands of air-raids; she accepted no responsibility for them; for her, within the flat, they did not exist, and the whole german war-machine was thereby foiled. g.j. was on the point of a full explanation, but he checked himself. a recital of the circumstances would not immediately help, and it might hinder. concealing his astonishment at the excesses of which unimaginative stolidity is capable, even in an italian, he turned down the stairs again. he stopped in the middle of the stairs, because he did not know what he was going to do, and he seemed to lack force for decisions. no harm could have happened to christine; she had run off, that was certain. and yet--had he not often heard of the impish tricks of explosions? of one person being taken and another left? was it not possible that christine had been blown to the other end of the street, and was now lying there?... no! either she was on her way home, or, automatically, she had scurried to the theatre, which was close to st. martin's street, and been too fearful to venture forth again. perhaps she was looking somewhere for _him_. yet she might be dead. in any case, what could he do? ring up the police? it was too soon. he decided that he would wait in cork street for half an hour. this plan appealed to him for the mere reason that it was negative. as he opened the front door he saw a taxi standing outside. the taxi-man had taken one of the lamps from its bracket, and was looking into the interior of the cab, which was ornate with toy-curtains and artificial flowers to indicate to the world that he was an owner-driver and understood life. hearing the noise of the door, he turned his head--he was wearing a bowler hat and a smart white muffler--and said to g.j., with self-respecting respect for a gentleman: "this is no. , isn't it, sir?" "yes." the taxi-man jerked his head to draw g.j.'s attention to the interior of the vehicle. christine was half on the seat and half on the floor, unconscious, with shut eyes. instantly g.j. was conscious of making a complete recovery from all the effects, physical and moral, of the air-raid. "just help me to get her out, will you?" he said in a casual tone, "and i'll carry her upstairs. where did you pick the lady up?" "strand, sir, nearly opposite romano's." "the dickens you did!" "shock from air-raid, i suppose, sir." "probably." "she did seem a little upset when she hailed me, or i shouldn't have taken her. i was off home, and i only took her to oblige." the taxi-man ran quickly round to the other side of the cab and entered it by the off-door, behind christine. together the men lifted her up. "i can manage her," said g.j. calmly. "excuse me, sir, you'll have to get hold lower down, so as her waist'll be nearly as high as your shoulder. my brother's a fireman." "right," said g.j. "by the way, what's the fare?" holding christine across his shoulder with the right arm, he unbuttoned his overcoat with his left hand and took out change from his trouser pocket for the driver. "you might pull the door to after me," he said, in response to the driver's expression of thanks. "certainly, sir." the door banged. he was alone with christine on the long, dark, inclement stairs. he felt the contours of her body through her clothes. she was limp, helpless. she was a featherweight. she was nothing at all; inexpressibly girlish, pathetic, dear. never had g.j. felt as he felt then. he mounted the stairs rather quickly, with firm, disdaining steps, and, despite his being a little out of breath, he had a tremendous triumph over the stolidity of marthe when she answered his ring. marthe screamed, and in the scream readjusted her views concerning air-raids. "it's queer this swoon lasting such a long time!" he reflected, when christine had been deposited on the sofa in the sitting-room, and the common remedies and tricks tried without result, and marthe had gone into the kitchen to make hot water hotter. he had established absolute empire over marthe. he had insisted on marthe not being silly; and yet, though he had already been silly himself in his absurd speculations as to the possibility of christine's death, he was now in danger of being silly again. did ordinary swoons ever continue as this one was continuing? would christine ever come out of it? he stood with his back to the fireplace, and her head and shoulders were right under him, so that he looked almost perpendicularly down upon them. her face was as pale as ivory; every drop of blood seemed to have left it; the same with her neck and bosom; her limbs had dropped anyhow, in disarray; a fur jacket was untidily cast over her black muslin dress. but her waved hair, fresh from the weekly visit of the professional coiffeur, remained in the most perfect order. g.j. looked round the room. it was getting very shabby. its pale enamelled shabbiness and the tawdry ugliness of nearly every object in it had never repelled and saddened him as they did then. the sole agreeable item was a large photograph of the mistress in a rich silver frame which he had given her. she would not let him buy knicknacks or draperies for her drawing-room; she preferred other presents. and now that she lay in the room, but with no power to animate it, he knew what the room really looked like; it looked like a dentist's waiting-room, except that no dentist would expose copies of _la vie parisienne_ to the view of clients. it had no more individuality than a dentist's waiting-room. indeed it was a dentist's waiting-room. he remembered that he had had similar ideas about the room at the beginning of his acquaintance with christine; but he had partially forgotten them, and moreover, they had not by any means been so clear and desolating as in that moment. he looked from the photograph to her face. the face was like the photograph, but in the swoon its wistfulness became unbearable. and it was so young. what was she? twenty-seven? she could not be twenty-eight. no age! a girl! and talk about experience! she had had scarcely any experience, save one kind of experience. the monotony and narrowness of her life was terrifying to him. he had fifty interests, but she had only one. all her days were alike. she had no change and no holiday; no past and no future; no family; no intimate friends--unless marthe was an intimate friend; no horizons, no prospects. she witnessed life in london through the distorting, mystifying veil of a foreign language imperfectly understood. she was the most solitary girl in london, or she would have been were there not a hundred thousand or so others in nearly the same case.... stay! once she had delicately allowed him to divine that she had been to bournemouth with a gentleman for a week-end. he could recall nothing else. nightly, or almost nightly, she listened to the same insufferably tedious jokes in the same insufferably tedious revue. but the authorities were soon going to deprive her of the opportunity of doing that. and then she would cease to receive even the education that revues can furnish, and in her mind no images would survive but images connected with the material arts of love. for, after all, what had they truly in common, he and she, but a periodical transient excitation? when next he looked at her, her eyes were wide open and a flush was coming, as imperceptibly as the dawn, into her cheeks. he took her hands again and rubbed them. marthe returned, and christine drank. she gazed, in weak silence, first at marthe and then at g.j. after a few moments no one spoke. marthe took off christine's boots, and rubbed her stockinged feet, and then kissed them violently. "madame should go to bed." "i am better." marthe left the room, seeming resentful. "what has passed?" christine murmured, without smiling. "a faint in the taxi, my poor child. that was all," said g.j. calmly. "but how is it that i find myself here?" "i carried thee upstairs in my arms." "thou?" "why not?" he spoke lightly, with careful negligence. "it appears that thou wast in the strand." "was i? i lost thee. something tore thee from me. i ran. i ran till i could not run. i was sure that never more should i see thee alive. oh! my gilbert, what terrible moments! what a catastrophe! never shall i forget those moments!" g.j. said, with bland supremacy: "but it is necessary that thou shouldst forget them. master thyself. thou knowst now what it is--an air-raid. it was an ordinary air-raid. there have been many like it. there will be many more. for once we were in the middle of a raid--by chance. but we are safe--that is enough." "but the deaths?" he shook his head. "but there must have been many deaths!" "i do not know. there will have been deaths. there usually are." he shrugged his shoulders. christine sat up and gave a little screech. "ah!" she burst out, her features suddenly transformed by enraged protest. "why wilt thou act thy cold man?" he was amazed at the sudden nervous strength she showed. "but, my little one--" she cried: "why wilt thou act thy cold man? i shall become mad in this sacred england. i shall become totally mad. you are all the same, all, all, men and women. you are marvels--let it be so!--but you are not human. do you then wish to be taken for telegraph-poles? always you are pretending something. pretending that you have no sentiments. and you are soaked in sentimentality. but no! you will not show it! you will not applaud your soldiers in the streets. you will not salute your flag. you will not salute even a corpse. you have only one phrase: 'it is nothing'. if you win a battle, 'it is nothing' if you lose one, 'it is nothing'. if you are nearly killed in an air-raid, 'it is nothing'. and if you were killed outright and could yet speak, you would say, with your eternal sneer, 'it is nothing'. you other men, you make love with the air of turning on a tap. as for your women, god knows--! but i have a horror of englishwomen. prudes but wantons. can i not guess? always hypocrites. always holding themselves in. my god, that pinched smile! and your women of the world especially. have they a natural gesture? yet does not everyone know that they are rotten with vice and perversity? and your actresses!... and they talk of us! ah, well! for me, i can say that i earn my living honestly, every son of it. for all that i receive, i give. and they would throw me on to the pavement to starve, me whose function in society--" she collapsed in sobs, and with averted face held out her arms in appeal. g.j., at once admiring and stricken with compassion, bent and clasped her neck, and kissed her, and kept his mouth on hers. her tears dropped freely on his cheeks. her sobs shook both of them. gradually the sobs decreased in violence and frequency. in an infant's broken voice she murmured into his mouth: "my wolf! is it true--that thou didst carry me here in thy arms? i am so proud." he was not in the slightest degree irritated or grieved by her tirade. but the childlike changeableness and facility of her emotions touched him. he savoured her youth, and himself felt curiously young. it was the fact that within the last year he had grown younger. he thought of great intellectuals, artists, men of action, princes, kings--historical figures--in whom courtesans had inspired immortal passion. he thought of the illustrious courtesans who had made themselves heroic in legend, women whose loves were countless and often venal, and yet whose renown had come down to posterity as gloriously as that of supreme poets. he thought of lifelong passionate attachments, which to the world were inexplicable, and which the world never tired of leniently discussing. he overheard people saying: "yes. picked her up somewhere, in a promenade. she worships him, and he adores her. don't know where he hides her. you see them about together sometimes--at concerts, for instance. mysterious-looking creature she is. plays the part very well, too. strange affair. but, of course, there's no accounting for these things." the role attracted him. and there could be no doubt that she did worship him utterly. he did not analyse his feeling for her--perhaps could not. she satisfied something in him that was profound. she never offended his sensibilities, nor wearied him. her manners were excellent, her gestures full of grace and modesty, her temperament extreme. a unique combination! and if the tie between them was not real and secure, why should he have yearned for her company that night after the scenes with concepcion and queen. those women challenged him, discomposed him, fretted him, fought him, left his nerves raw. she soothed. why should he not, in the french phrase, "put her among her own furniture?" in a proper artistic environment, an environment created by himself, of taste and moderate luxury, she would be exquisite. she would blossom. and she would blossom for him alone. she would live for his footstep on her threshold; and when he was not there she would dream amid cushions like a cat. in the right environment she would become another being, that was to say, the same being, but orchidised. and when he was old, when he was sixty-five, she would still be young, still be under forty and seductive. and the publishing of his last will and testament, under which she inherited all, would render her famous throughout all the west end, and the word "romance" would spring to every lip. he searched in his mind for the location of suitable flats. "is it true that thou didst carry me in thine arms?" repeated christine. he murmured into her mouth: "is it true? can she doubt? the proof, then." and he picked her up as though she had been a doll, and carried her into the bedroom. as she lay on the bed, she raised her arm and looked at the broken wrist-watch and sighed. "my mascot. it is not a _blague_, my mascot." shortly afterwards she began to cry again, at first gently; then sobs supervened. "she must sleep," he said firmly. she shook her head. "i cannot. i have been too upset. it is impossible that i should sleep." "she must." "go and buy me a drug." "if i go and buy her a drug, will she undress and get into bed while i am away?" she nodded. calling marthe, and taking the latch-key of the street-door, he went to his chemist's in dover street and bought some potassium bromide and sal volatile. when he came back marthe whispered to him: "she sleeps. she has told me everything as i undressed her. the poor child!" chapter mrs. braiding g.j. went home at once, partly so that christine should not be disturbed, partly because he desired solitude in order to examine and compose his mind. mrs. braiding had left an agreeable modest fire--fit for cold april--in the drawing-room. he had just sat down in front of it and was tranquillising himself in the familiar harmonious beauty of the apartment (which, however, did seem rather insipid after the decorative excesses of queen's room), when he heard footsteps on the little stairway from the upper floor. mrs. braiding entered the drawing-room. this was a mrs. braiding very different from the mrs. braiding of , a shameless creature of more rounded contours than of old, and not quite so spick and span as of old. she was carrying in her arms that which before the war she could not have conceived herself as carrying. the being was invisible in wraps, but it was there; and she seemed to have no shame for it, seemed indeed to be proud of it and defiant about it. braiding's military career had been full of surprises. he had expected within a few months of joining the colours to be dashing gloriously and homicidally at panic-stricken germans across the plains of flanders, to be, in fact, saving the empire at the muzzle of rifle and the point of bayonet. in truth, he found that for interminable, innumerable weeks his job was to save the empire by cleaning harness on the east coast of england--for under advice he had transferred to the artillery. later, when his true qualifications were discovered, he had to save the empire by polishing the buttons and serving the morning tea and buying the cigarettes of a major who in had been a lawyer by profession and a soldier only for fun. the major talked too much, and to the wrong people. he became lyric concerning the talents of braiding to a dandiacal divisional general at colchester, and soon, by the actuating of mysterious forces and the filling up of many army forms, braiding was removed to colchester, and had to save the empire by valeting the divisonal general. foiled in one direction, braiding advanced in another. by tradition, when a valet marries a lady's maid, the effect on the birth-rate is naught. and it is certain that but for the war braiding would not have permitted himself to act as he did. the empire, however, needed citizens. the first rumour that braiding had done what in him lay to meet the need spread through the kitchens of the albany like a new gospel, incredible and stupefying--but which imposed itself. the albany was never the same again. all the kitchens were agreed that mr. hoape would soon be stranded. the spectacle of mrs. braiding as she slipped out of a morning past the porter's lodge mesmerised beholders. at last, when things had reached the limit, mrs. braiding slipped out and did not come back. meanwhile a much younger sister of hers had been introduced into the flat. but when mrs. braiding went the virgin went also. the flat was more or less closed, and mr. hoape had slept at his club for weeks. at length the flat was reopened, but whereas three had left it, four returned. that a bachelor of mr. hoape's fastidiousness should tolerate in his home a woman with a tiny baby was remarkable; it was as astounding perhaps as any phenomenon of the war, and a sublime proof that mr. hoape realised that the empire was fighting for its life. it arose from the fact that both g.j. and braiding were men of considerable sagacity. braiding had issued an order, after seeing g.j., that his wife should not leave g.j.'s service. and mrs. braiding, too, had her sense of duty. she was very proud of g.j.'s war-work, and would have thought it disloyal to leave him in the lurch, and so possibly prejudice the war-work--especially as she was convinced that he would never get anybody else comparable to herself. at first she had been a little apologetic and diffident about her offspring. but soon the man-child had established an important position in the flat, and though he was generally invisible, his individuality pervaded the whole place. g.j. had easily got accustomed to the new inhabitant. he tolerated and then liked the babe. he had never nursed it--for such an act would have been excessive--but he had once stuck his finger in its mouth, and he had given it a perambulator that folded up. he did venture secretly to hope that braiding would not imagine it to be his duty to provide further for the needs of the empire. that mrs. braiding had grown rather shameless in motherhood was shown by her quite casual demeanour as she now came into the drawing-room with the baby, for this was the first time she had ever come into the drawing-room with the baby, knowing her august master to be there. "mrs. braiding," said g.j. "that child ought to be asleep." "he is asleep, sir," said the woman, glancing into the mysteries of the immortal package, "but maria hasn't been able to get back yet because of the raid, and i didn't want to leave him upstairs alone with the cat. he slept all through the raid." "it seems some of you have made the cellar quite comfortable." "oh, yes, sir. particularly now with the oilstove and the carpet. perhaps one night you'll come down, sir." "i may have to. i shouldn't have been much surprised to find some damage here to-night. they've been very close, you know.... near leicester square." he could not be troubled to say more than that. "have they really, sir? it's just like them," said mrs. braiding. and she then continued in exactly the same tone: "lady queenie paulle has just been telephoning from lechford house, sir." she still--despite her marvellous experiences--impishly loved to make extraordinary announcements as if they were nothing at all. and she felt an uplifted satisfaction in having talked to lady queenie paulle herself on the telephone. "what does _she_ want?" g.j. asked impatiently, and not at all in a voice proper for the mention of a lady queenie to a mrs. braiding. he was annoyed; he resented any disturbance of the repose which he so acutely needed. mrs. braiding showed that she was a little shocked. the old harassed look of bearing up against complex anxieties came into her face. "her ladyship wished to speak to you, sir, on a matter of importance. i didn't know _where_ you were, sir." that last phrase was always used by mrs. braiding when she wished to imply that she could guess where g.j. had been. he did not suppose that she was acquainted with the circumstances of his amour, but he had a suspicion amounting to conviction that she had conjectured it, as men of science from certain derangements in their calculations will conjecture the existence of a star that no telescope has revealed. "well, better leave lady queenie alone for to-night." "i promised her ladyship that i would ring her up again in any case in a quarter of an hour. that was approximately ten minutes ago." he could not say: "be hanged to your promises!" reluctantly he went to the telephone himself, and learnt from lady queenie, who always knew everything, that the raiders were expected to return in about half an hour, and that she and concepcion desired his presence at lechford house. he replied coldly that he was too tired to come, and was indeed practically in bed. "but you must come. don't you understand we want you?" said lady queenie autocratically, adding: "and don't forget that business about the hospitals. we didn't attend to it this afternoon, you know." he said to himself: "and whose fault was that?" and went off angrily, wondering what mysterious power of convention it was that compelled him to respond to the whim of a girl whom he scarcely even respected. chapter the roof the main door of lechford house was ajar, and at the sound of g.j.'s footsteps on the marble of the porch it opened. robin, the secretary, stood at the threshold. evidently she had been set to wait for him. "the men-servants are all in the cellars," said she perkily. g.j. retorted with sardonic bitterness: "and quite right, too. i'm glad someone's got some sense left." yet he did not really admire the men-servants for being in the cellars. somehow it seemed mean of them not to be ready to take any risks, however unnecessary. robin, hiding her surprise and confusion in a nervous snigger, banged the heavy door, and led him through the halls and up the staircases. as she went forward she turned on electric lamps here and there in advance, turning them off by the alternative switches after she had passed them, so that in the vast, shadowed, echoing interior the two appeared to be preceded by light and pursued by a tide of darkness. she was mincingly feminine, and very conscious of the fact that g.j. was a fine gentleman. in the afternoon, and again to-night--at first, he had taken her for a mere girl; but as she halted under a lamp to hold a door for him at the entrance to the upper stairs, he perceived that it must have been a long time since she was a girl. often had he warned himself that the fashion of short skirts and revealed stockings gave a deceiving youthfulness to the middle-aged, and yet nearly every day he had to learn the lesson afresh. he was just expecting to be shown into the boudoir when robin stopped at a very small door. "her ladyship and mrs. carlos smith are out on the roof. this is the ladder," she said, and illuminated the ladder. g.j. had no choice but to mount. luckily he had kept his hat. he put it on. as he climbed he felt a slight recurrence of the pain in his side which he had noticed in st. martin's street. the roof was a very strange, tempestuous place, and insecure. he had an impression similar to that of being at sea, for the wind, which he had scarcely observed in the street, made melancholy noises in the new protective wire-netting that stretched over his head. this bomb-catching contrivance, fastened on thick iron stanchions, formed a sort of second roof, and was a very solid and elaborate affair which must have cost much money. the upstreaming light from the ladder-shaft was suddenly extinguished. he could see nobody, and the loneliness was uncomfortable. somehow, when robin had announced that the ladies were on the roof he had imagined the roof as a large, flat expanse. it was nothing of the kind. so far as he could distinguish in the deep gloom it had leaden pathways, but on either hand it sloped sharply up or sharply down. he might have fallen sheer into a chasm, or stumbled against the leaden side of a slant. he descried a lofty construction of carved masonry with an iron ladder clamped into it, far transcending the net. not immediately did he comprehend that it was merely one of the famous lechford chimney-stacks looming gigantic in the night. he walked cautiously onward and came to a precipice and drew back, startled, and took another pathway at right angles to the first one. presently the protective netting stopped, and he was exposed to heaven; he had reached the roof of the servants' quarters towards the back of the house. he stood still and gazed, accustoming himself to the night. the moon was concealed, but there were patches of dim stars. he could make out, across the empty green park, the huge silhouette of buckingham palace, and beyond that the tower of westminster cathedral. to his left he could see part of a courtyard or small square, with a fore-shortened black figure, no doubt a policeman, carrying a flash-lamp. the tree-lined mall seemed to be utterly deserted. but piccadilly showed a line of faint stationary lights and still fainter moving lights. a mild hum and the sounds of motor-horns and cab-whistles came from piccadilly, where people were abroad in ignorance that the raid was not really over. all the heavens were continually restless with long, shifting rays from the anti-aircraft stations, but the rays served only to prove the power of darkness. then he heard quick, smooth footsteps. two figures, one behind the other, approached him, almost running, eagerly, girlishly, with little cries. the first was queen, who wore a white skirt and a very close-fitting black jersey. concepcion also wore a white skirt and a very close-fitting black jersey, but with a long mantle hung loosely from the shoulders. both were bareheaded. "isn't it splendid, g.j.?" queen burst out enthusiastically. again g.j. had the sensation of being at sea--perhaps on the deck of a yacht. he felt that rain ought to have been beating on the face of the excited and careless girl. before answering, he turned up the collar of his overcoat. then he said: "won't you catch a chill?" "i'm never cold," said queen. it was true. "i shall always come up here for raids in future." "you seem to be enjoying it." "i love it. i love it. i only thought of it to-night. it's the next best thing to being a man and being at the front. it _is_ being at the front." her face was little more than a pale, featureless oval to him in the gloom, but he could divine from the vibrations of her voice that she was as ecstatic as a young maid at her first dance. "and what about that business interview that you've just asked for on the 'phone?" g.j. acidly demanded. "oh, we'll come to that later. we wanted a man here--not to save us, only to save us from ourselves--and you were the best we could think of, wasn't he, con? but you've not heard about my next bazaar, g.j., have you?" "i thought it was a pageant." "i mean after that. a bazaar. i don't know yet what it will be for, but i've got lots of the most topping ideas for it. for instance, i'm going to have a first-aid station." "what for? air-raid casualties?" queen scorned his obtuseness, pouring out a cataract of swift sentences. "no. first-aid to lovely complexions. help for distressed beauties. i shall get roger fry to design the station and the costumes of my attendants. it will be marvellous, and i tell you there'll always be a queue waiting for admittance. i shall have all the latest dodges in the sublime and fatal art of make-up, and if any of the bond street gang refuse to help me i'll damn well ruin them. but they won't refuse because they know what i'll do. gontran is coming in with his new steaming process for waving. con, you must try that. it's a miracle. waving's no good for my style of coiffure, but it would suit you. you always wouldn't wave, but you've got to now, my seraph. the electric heater works in sections. no danger. no inconvenience to the poor old scalp. the waves will last for six months or more. it has to be seen to be believed, and even then you can't believe it. its only fault is that it's too natural to be natural. but who wants to be natural? this modern craze for naturalness seems to me to be rather unwholesome, not to say perverted. what?" she seized g.j.'s arm convulsively. concepcion had said nothing. g.j. sought her eyes in the darkness, but did not find them. "so much for the bazaar!" he said. queen suddenly cried aloud: "what is it, robin? has captain brickly telephoned?" "yes, my lady," came a voice faintly across the gloom from the region of the ladder-shaft. "they're coming! they'll be here directly!" exclaimed queen, loosing g.j. and clapping her hands. g.j. thought of robin affixed to the telephone, and some scarlet-shouldered officer at the war office quitting duty for the telephone, in order to keep the capricious girl informed of military movements simply because she had taken the trouble to be her father's daughter, and in so doing had acquired the right to treat the imperial machine as one of her nursery toys. and he became unreasonably annoyed. "i suppose you were cowering in your club during the first act?" she said, with vivacity. "yes," g.j. briefly answered. once more he was aware of a strong instinctive disinclination to relate what had happened to him. he was too proud to explain, and perhaps too tired. "you ought to have been up here. they dropped two bombs close to the national gallery; pity they couldn't have destroyed a landseer or two while they were so near! there were either seven or eight killed and eighteen wounded, so far as is known. but there were probably more. there was quite a fire, too, but that was soon got under. we saw it all except the explosion of the bombs. we weren't looking in the right place--no luck! however, we saw the zepp. what a shame the moon's disappeared again! listen! listen!... can't you hear the engines?" g.j. shrugged his shoulders. nothing could be heard above the faint hum of piccadilly. the wind seemed to have diminished to a chill, fitful zephyr. concepcion had sat down on a coping. "look!" she exclaimed in a startled whisper, and sprang erect. to the south, down among the trees, a red light flashed and was gone. the faint, irregular hum of piccadilly persisted for a couple of seconds, and then was drowned in the loud report, which seemed to linger and wander in the great open spaces. g.j.'s flesh crept. he comprehended the mad ecstasy of queen, and because he comprehended it his anger against her increased. "can you see the zepp?" murmured queen, as it were ferociously. "it must be within range, or they wouldn't have fired. look along the lines of the searchlights. one of them, at any rate, must have got on to it. we saw it before. can't you see it? i can hear the engines, i think." another flash was followed by another resounding report. more guns spoke in the distance. then a glare arose on the southern horizon. "incendiary bomb!" muttered queen. she stood stock-still, with her mouth open, entranced. the zeppelin or the zeppelins remained invisible and inaudible. yet they must be aloft there, somewhere amid the criss-cross of the unresting searchlights. g.j. waited, powerfully impressed, incapable of any direct action, gazing blankly now at the women and now at the huge undecipherable heaven and earth, and receiving the chill zephyr on his face. the nearmost gun had ceased to fire. occasionally there was perfect silence--for no faintest hum came from piccadilly, and nothing seemed to move there. the further guns recommenced, and then the group heard a new sound, rather like the sound of a worn-out taxi accelerating before changing gear. it grew gradually louder. it grew very loud. it seemed to be ripping the envelope of the air. it seemed as if it would last for ever--till it finished with a gigantic and intimidating _plop_ quite near the front of lechford house. queen said: "shrapnel--and a big lump!" g.j. could see the quick heave of her bosom imprisoned in the black. she was breathing through her nostrils. "come downstairs into the house," he said sharply--more than sharply, brutally. "where in the name of god is the sense of stopping up here? are you both mad?" queen laughed lightly. "oh, g.j.! how funny you are! i'm really surprised you haven't left london for good before now. by rights you ought to belong to the hook-it brigade. do you know what they do? they take a ticket to any station north or west, and when they get out of the train they run to the nearest house and interview the tenant. has he any accommodation to let? will he take them in as boarders? will he take them as paying guests? will he let the house furnished? will he let it unfurnished? will he allow them to camp out in the stables? will he sell the blooming house? so there isn't a house to be had on the north western nearer than leighton buzzard." "are you going? because i am," said g.j. concepcion murmured: "don't go." "i shall go--and so will you, both of you." "g.j.," queen mocked him, "you're in a funk." "i've got courage enough to go, anyhow," said he. "and that's more than you have." "you're losing your temper." as a fact he was. he grabbed at queen, but she easily escaped him. he saw the whiteness of her skirt in the distance of the roof, dimly rising. she was climbing the ladder up the side of the chimney. she stood on the top of the chimney, and laughed again. a gun sounded. g.j. said no more. using his flash-lamp he found his way to the ladder-shaft and descended. he was in the warm and sheltered interior of the house; he was in another and a saner world. robin was at the foot of the ladder; she blinked under his lamp. "i've had enough of that," he said, and followed her to the illuminated boudoir, where after a certain hesitation she left him. alone in the boudoir he felt himself to be a very shamed and futile person, and he was still extremely angry. the next moment concepcion entered the boudoir. "ah!" he murmured, curiously appeased. "you're quite right," said concepcion simply. he said: "can you give me any reason, con, why we should make a present of ourselves to the hun?" concepcion repeated: "you're quite right." "is she coming?" concepcion made a negative sign. "she doesn't know what fear is, queen doesn't." "she doesn't know what sense is. she ought to be whipped, and if i got hold of her i'd whip her." "she'd like nothing better," said concepcion. g.j. removed his overcoat and sat down. chapter in the boudoir "we aren't so desperately safe even here," said g.j., firmly pursuing the moral triumph which concepcion's very surprising and comforting descent from the roof had given him. "don't go to extremes," she answered. "no, i won't." he thought of the valetry in the cellars, and the impossible humiliation of joining them; and added: "i merely state." then, after a moment of silence: "by the way, was it only _her_ idea that i should come along, or did the command come from both of you?" the suspicion of some dark, feminine conspiracy revisited him. "it was queen's idea." "oh! well, i don't quite understand the psychology of it." "surely that's plain." "it isn't in the least plain." concepcion loosed and dropped her cloak, and, not even glancing at g.j., went to the fire and teased it with the poker. bending down, with one hand on the graphic and didactic mantelpiece, and staring into the fire, she said: "queen's in love with you, of course." the words were a genuine shock to his sarcastic and rather embittered and bullying mood. was he to believe them? the vibrant, uttering voice was convincing enough. was he to show the conventional incredulity proper to such an occasion? or was he to be natural, brutally natural? he was drawn first to one course and then to the other, and finally spoke at random, by instinct: "what have i been doing to deserve this?" concepcion replied, still looking into the fire: "as far as i can gather it must be your masterful ways at the hospital committee that have impressed her, and especially your unheard-of tyrannical methods with her august mother." "i see.... thanks!" it had not occurred to him that he had treated the marchioness tyrannically; he treated her like anybody else; he now perceived that this was to treat her tyrannically. his imagination leapt forward as he gazed round the weird and exciting room which queen had brought into existence for the illustration of herself, and as he pictured the slim, pale figure outside clinging in the night to the vast chimney, and as he listened to the faint intermittent thud of far-off guns. he had a spasm of delicious temptation. he was tempted by queen's connections and her prospective wealth. if anybody was to possess millions after the war, queen would one day possess millions. her family and her innumerable powerful relatives would be compelled to accept him without the slightest reserve, for queen issued edicts; and through all those big people he would acquire immense prestige and influence, which he could use greatly. ambition flared up in him--ambition to impress himself on his era. and he reflected with satisfaction on the strangeness of the fact that such an opportunity should have come to him, the son of a lawyer, solely by virtue of his own individuality. he thought of christine, and poor little christine was shrunk to nothing at all; she was scarcely even an object of compassion; she was a prostitute. but far more than by queen's connections and prospective wealth he was tempted by her youth and beauty; he saw her beautiful and girlish, and he was sexually tempted. most of all he was tempted by the desire to master her. he saw again the foolish, elegant, brilliant thing on the chimney pretending to defy him and mock at him. and he heard himself commanding sharply: "come down. come down and acknowledge your ruler. come down and be whipped." (for had he not been told that she would like nothing better?) and he heard the west end of london and all the country-houses saying, "she obeys _him_ like a slave." he conceived a new and dazzling environment for himself; and it was undeniable that he needed something of the kind, for he was growing lonely; before the war he had lived intensely in his younger friends, but the war had taken nearly all of them away from him, many of them for ever. then he said in a voice almost resentfully satiric, and wondered why such a tone should come from his lips: "another of her caprices, no doubt." "what do you mean--another of her caprices?" said concepcion, straightening herself and leaning against the mantelpiece. he had noticed, only a moment earlier, on the mantelpiece, a large photograph of the handsome molder, with some writing under it. "well, what about that, for example?" he pointed. concepcion glanced at him for the first time, and her eyes followed the direction of his finger. "that! i don't know anything about it." "do you mean to say that while you were gossiping till five o'clock this morning, you two, she didn't mention it?" "she didn't." g.j. went right on, murmuring: "wants to do something unusual. wants to astonish the town." "no! no!" "then you seriously tell me she's fallen in love with me, con?" "i haven't the slightest doubt of it." "did she say so?" there was a sound outside the door. they both started like plotters in danger, and tried to look as if they had been discussing the weather or the war. but no interruption occurred. "well, she did. i know i shall be thought mischievous. if she had the faintest notion i'd breathed the least hint to you, she'd quarrel with me eternally--of course. i couldn't bear another quarrel. if it had been anybody else but you i wouldn't have said a word. but you're different from anybody else. and i couldn't help it. you don't know what queen is. queen's a white woman." "so you said this afternoon." "and so she is. she has the most curious and interesting brain, and she's as straight as a man." "i've never noticed it." "but i know. i know. and she's an exquisite companion." "and so on and so on. and i expect the scheme is that i am to make love to her and be worried out of my life, and then propose to her and she'll accept me." the word "scheme" brought up again his suspicion of a conspiracy. evidently there was no conspiracy, but there was a plot--of one.... a nervous breakdown? was concepcion merely under an illusion that she had had a nervous breakdown, or had she in truth had one, and was this singular interview a result of it? concepcion continued with surprising calm magnanimity: "i know her mind is strange, but it's lovely. no one but me has ever seen into it. she's following her instinct, unconsciously--as we all do, you know. and her instinct's right, in spite of everything. her instinct's telling her just now that she needs a master. and that's exactly what she does need. we must remember she's very young--" "yes," g.j. interrupted, bursting out with a kind of savagery that he could not explain. "yes. she's young, and she finds even my age spicy. there'd be something quite amusingly piquant for her in marrying a man nearly thirty years her senior." concepcion advanced towards him. there she stood in front of him, quite close to his chair, gazing down at him in her tight black jersey and short white skirt; she was wearing black stockings now. her serious face was perfectly unruffled. and in her worn face was all her experience; all the nights and days on the clyde were in her face; the scalping of the young glasgow girl was in her face, and the failure to endure either in work or in love. there was complete silence within and without--not the echo of an echo of a gun. g.j. felt as though he were at bay. she said: "people like you and queen don't want to bother about age. neither of you has any age. and i'm not imploring you to have her. i'm only telling you that she's there for you if you want her. but doesn't she attract you? isn't she positively irresistible?" she added with poignancy: "i know if i were a man i should find her irresistible." "just so." a look of sacrifice came into concepcion's eyes as she finished: "i'd do anything, anything, to make queen happy." "yes, you would," retorted g.j. icily, carried away by a ruthless and inexorable impulse. "you'd do anything to make her happy even for three months. yes, to make her happy for three weeks you'd be ready to ruin my whole life. i know you and queen." and the mild image of christine formed in his mind, soothingly, infinitely desirable. what balm, after the nerve-racking contact of these incalculable creatures! concepcion retired with a gesture of the arm and sat down by the fire. "you're terrible, g.j.," she said wistfully. "queen wouldn't be thrown away on you, but you'd be thrown away on her. i admit it. i didn't think you had it in you. i never saw a man develop as you have. marriage isn't for you. you ought to roam in the primeval forest, and take and kill." "not a bit," said g.j., appeased once more. "not a bit.... but the new relations of the sexes aren't in my line." "_new_? my poor boy, are you so ingenuous after all? there's nothing very new in the relations of the sexes that i know of. they're much what they were in the garden of eden." "what do you know of the garden of eden?" "i get my information from milton," she replied cheerfully, as though much relieved. "have you read _paradise lost_, then, con?" "i read it all through in my lodgings. and it's really rather good. in fact, the remarks of raphael to adam in the eighth book--i think it is--are still just about the last word on the relations of the sexes: "oft-times nothing profits more than self-esteem, grounded on just and right well-managed; of that skill the more thou know'st, the more she will acknowledge thee her head _and to realities yield all her shows_." g.j., marvelling, exclaimed with sudden enthusiasm: "by jove! you're an astounding woman, con. you do me good!" there was a fresh noise beyond the door, and the door opened and robin rushed in, blanched and hysterical, and with her seemed to rush in terror. "oh! madame!" she cried. "as there was no more firing i went on to the roof, and her ladyship--" she covered her face and sobbed. g.j. jumped up. "go and see," said concepcion in a blank voice, not moving. "i can't.... it's the message straight from potsdam that's arrived." chapter queen dead g.j. emerged from the crowded and malodorous coroner's court with a deep sense of the rigour and the thoroughness of british justice, and especially of its stolidity. there had been four inquests, all upon the bodies of air-raid victims: a road-man, his wife, an orphan baby--all belonging to the thick central mass of the proletariat, for a west end slum had received a bomb full in the face--and lady queenie paulle. the policemen were stolid; the reporters were stolid; the proletariat was stolid; the majority of the witnesses were stolid, and in particular the representatives of various philanthropic agencies who gave the most minute evidence about the habits and circumstances of the slum; and the jurymen were very stolid, and never more so than when, with stubby fingers holding ancient pens, they had to sign quantities of blue forms under the strict guidance of a bareheaded policeman. the world of queenie's acquaintances made a strange, vivid contrast to this grey, grim, blockish world; and the two worlds regarded each other with the wonder and the suspicious resentment of foreigners. queen's world came expecting to behave as at a cause célèbre of, for example, divorce. its representatives were quite ready to tolerate unpleasing contacts and long stretches of tedium in return for some glimpse of the squalid and the privilege of being able to say that they had been present at the inquest. but most of them had arrived rather late, and they had reckoned without the coroner, and comparatively few obtained even admittance. the coroner had arrived on the stroke of the hour, in a silk hat and frock coat, with a black bag, and had sat down at his desk and begun to rule the proceedings with an absolutism that no high court judge would have attempted. he was autocrat in a small, close, sordid room; but he was autocrat. he had already shown his quality in some indirect collisions with the marquis of lechford. the marquis felt that he could not stomach the exposure of his daughter's corpse in a common mortuary with other corpses of he knew not whom. long experience of the marquisate had taught him to believe that everything could be arranged. he found, however, that this matter could not be arranged. there was no appeal from the ukase of the coroner. then he wished to be excused from giving evidence, since his evidence could have no direct bearing on the death. but he was informed by a mere clerk, who had knowledge of the coroner's ways, that if he did not attend the inquest would probably be adjourned for his attendance. the fact was, the coroner had appreciated as well as anybody that heaven and the war had sent him a cause célèbre of the first-class. he saw himself the supreme being of a unique assize. he saw his remarks reproduced verbatim in the papers, for, though localities might not be mentioned, there was no censor's ban upon the _obiter dicta_ of coroners. his idiosyncrasy was that he hid all his enjoyment in his own breast. even had he had the use of a bench, instead of a mere chair, he would never have allowed titled ladies in mirific black hats to share it with him. he was an icy radical, sincere, competent, conscientious and vain. he would be no respecter of persons, but he was a disrespecter of persons above a certain social rank. he said, "open that window." and that window was opened, regardless of the identity of the person who might be sitting under it. he said: "this court is unhealthily full. admit no more." and no more could be admitted, though the entire peerage waited without. the marquis had considered that the inquest on his daughter might be taken first. the other three cases were taken first, and, even taken concurrently, they occupied an immense period of time. all the bodies were, of course, "viewed" together, and the absence of the jury seemed to the marquis interminable; he thought the despicable tradesmen were gloating unduly over the damaged face of his daughter. the coroner had been marvellously courteous to the procession of humble witnesses. he could not have been more courteous to the exalted; and he was not. in the sight of the coroner all men were equal. g.j. encountered him first. "i did my best to persuade her ladyship to come down," said g.j. very formally. "i am quite sure you did," said the coroner with the dryest politeness. "and you failed." the policeman had related events from the moment when g.j. had fetched him in from the street. the policeman could remember everything, what everybody had said, the positions of all objects, the characteristics and extent of the wire-netting, the exact posture of the deceased girl, the exact minute of his visit. he and the coroner played to each other like well-rehearsed actors. mrs. carlos smith's ordeal was very brief, and the coroner dismissed her with an expression of sympathy that seemed to issue from his mouth like carved granite. with the doctor alone the coroner had become human; the coroner also was a doctor. the doctor had talked about a relatively slight extravasation of blood, and said that death had been instantaneous. said the coroner: "the body was found on the wire-netting; it had fallen from the chimney. in your opinion, was the fall a contributory cause of death?" the doctor said, no. "in your opinion death was due to an extremely small piece of shrapnel which struck the deceased's head slightly above the left ear, entering the brain?" the doctor said, yes. the marquis of lechford had to answer questions as to his parental relations with his daughter. how long had he been away in the country? how long had the deceased been living in lechford house practically alone? how old was his daughter? had he given any order to the effect that nobody was to be on the roof of his house during an air-raid? had he given any orders at all as to conduct during an air-raid? the coroner sympathised deeply with his lordship's position, and felt sure that his lordship understood that; but his lordship would also understand that the policy of heads of households in regard to air-raids had more than a domestic interest--it had, one might say, a national interest; and the force of prominent example was one of the forces upon which the government counted, and had the right to count, for help in the regulation of public conduct in these great crises of the most gigantic war that the world had ever seen. "now, as to the wire-netting," had said the coroner, leaving the subject of the force of example. he had a perfect plan of the wire-netting in his mind. he understood that the chimney-stack rose higher than the wire-netting, and that the wire-netting went round the chimney-stack at a distance of a foot or more, leaving room so that a person might climb up the perpendicular ladder. if a person fell from the top of the chimney-stack it was a chance whether that person fell on the wire-netting, or through the space between the wire-netting and the chimney on to the roof itself. the jury doubtless understood. (the jury, however, at that instant had been engaged in examining the bit of shrapnel which had been extracted from the brain of the only daughter of a marquis.) the coroner understood that the wire-netting did not extend over the whole of the house. "it extends over all the main part of the house," his lordship had replied. "but not over the back part of the house?" his lordship agreed. "the servants' quarters, probably?" his lordship nodded. the coroner had said: "the wire-netting does not extend over the servants' quarters," in a very even voice. a faint hiss in court had been extinguished by the sharp glare of the coroner's eyes. his lordship, a thin, antique figure, in a long cloak that none but himself would have ventured to wear, had stepped down, helpless. there had been much signing of depositions. the coroner had spoken of the hague convention, mentioning one article by its number. the jury as to the first three cases--in which the victims had been killed by bombs--had returned a verdict of wilful murder against the kaiser. the coroner, suppressing the applause, had agreed heartily with the verdict. he told the jury that the fourth case was different, and the jury returned a verdict of death from shrapnel. they gave their sympathy to all the relatives, and added a rider about the inadvisability of running unnecessary risks, and the coroner, once more agreeing heartily, had thereon made an effective little speech to a hushed, assenting audience. there were several motor-cars outside. g.j. signalled across the street to the taxi-man who telephoned every morning to him for orders. he had never owned a motor-car, and, because he had no ambition to drive himself, had never felt the desire to own one. the taxi-man experienced some delay in starting his engine. g.j. lit a cigarette. concepcion came out, alone. he had expected her to be with the marquis, with whom she had arrived. she was dressed in mourning. only on that day, and once before--on the day of her husband's funeral--had he seen her in mourning. she looked now like the widow she was. nevertheless, he had not quite accustomed himself to the sight of her in mourning. "i wonder whether i can get a taxi?" she asked. "you can have mine," said he. "where do you want to go?" she named a disconcerting address near shepherd's market. at that moment a pressman with a camera came boldly up and snapped her. the man had the brazen demeanour of a racecourse tout. but concepcion seemed not to mind at all, and g.j. remembered that she was deeply inured to publicity. her portrait had already appeared in the picture papers along with that of queen, but the papers had deemed it necessary to remind a forgetful public that mrs. carlos smith was the same lady as the super-celebrated concepcion iquist. the taxi-man hesitated for an instant on hearing the address, but only for an instant. he had earned the esteem and regular patronage of g.j. by a curious hazard. one night g.j. had hailed him, and the man had said in a flash, without waiting for the fare to speak, "the albany, isn't it, sir? i drove you home about two months ago." thenceforward he had been for g.j. the perfect taxi-man. in the taxi concepcion said not a word, and g.j. did not disturb her. beneath his superficial melancholy he was sustained by the mere joy of being alive. the common phenomena of the streets were beautiful to him. concepcion's calm and grieved vitality seemed mysteriously exquisite. he had had similar sensations while walking along coventry street after his escape from the explosion of the bomb. fatigue and annoyance and sorrow had extinguished them for a time, but now that the episode of queen's tragedy was closed they were born anew. queen, the pathetic victim of the indiscipline of her own impulses, was gone. but he had escaped. he lived. and life was an affair miraculous and lovely. "i think i've been here before," said he, when they got out of the taxi in a short, untidy, indeterminate street that was a cul-de-sac. the prospect ended in a garage, near which two women chauffeurs were discussing a topic that interested them. a hurdy-gurdy was playing close by, and a few ragged children stared at the hurdy-gurdy, on the end of which a baby was cradled. the fact that the street was midway between curzon street and piccadilly, and almost within sight of the monumental new mansion of an american duchess, explained the existence of the building in front of which the taxi had stopped. the entrance to the flats was mean and soiled. it repelled, but concepcion unapologetically led g.j. up a flight of four stone steps and round a curve into a little corridor. she halted at a door on the ground floor. "yes," said g.j. with admirable calm, "i do believe you've got the very flat i once looked at with a friend of mine. if i remember it didn't fill the bill because the tenant wouldn't sub-let it unfurnished. when did you get hold of this?" "yesterday afternoon," concepcion answered. "quick work. but these feats can be accomplished. i've only taken it for a month. hotels seem to be all full. i couldn't open my own place at a moment's notice, and i didn't mean to stay on at lechford house, even if they'd asked me to." g.j.'s notion of the vastness and safety of london had received a shock. he was now a very busy man, and would quite sincerely have told anybody who questioned him on the point that he hadn't a moment to call his own. nevertheless, on the previous morning he had spent a considerable time in searching for a nest in which to hide his christine and create romance; and he had come to this very flat. more, there had been two flats to let in the block. he had declined them--the better one because of the furniture, the worse because it was impossibly small, and both because of the propinquity of the garage. but supposing that he had taken one and concepcion the other! he recoiled at the thought.... concepcion's new home, if not impossibly small, was small, and the immensity and abundance of the furniture made it seem smaller than it actually was. each little room had the air of having been furnished out of a huge and expensive second-hand emporium. no single style prevailed. there were big carved and inlaid antique cabinets and chests, big hanging crystal candelabra, and big pictures (some of them apparently family portraits, the rest eighteenth-century flower-pieces) in big gilt frames, with a multiplicity of occasional tables and bric-à-brac. gilt predominated. the ornate cornices were gilded. human beings had to move about like dwarfs on the tiny free spaces of carpet between frowning cabinetry. the taste and the aim of the author of this home defied deduction. in the first room a charwoman was cleaning. concepcion greeted her like a sister. in the next room, whose window gave on to a blank wall, tea was laid for one in front of a gas-fire. concepcion reached down a cup and saucer from a glazed cupboard and put a match to the spirit-lamp under the kettle. "let me see, the bedroom's up here, isn't it?" said g.j., pointing along a passage that was like a tunnel. concepcion, yielding to his curiosity, turned on lights everywhere and preceded him. the passage, hung with massive canvases, had scarcely more than width enough for g.j.'s shoulders. the tiny bedroom was muslined in every conceivable manner. it had a colossal bed, surpassing even christine's. a muslined maid was bending over some drapery-shop boxes on the floor and removing garments therefrom. concepcion greeted her like a sister. "don't let me disturb you, emily," she said, and to g.j., "emily was poor queenie's maid, and she has come to me for a little while." g.j. amicably nodded. tears came suddenly into the maid's eyes. g.j. looked away and saw the bathroom, which, also well muslined, was completely open to the bedroom. "whose _is_ this marvellous home?" he added when they had gone back to the drawing-room. "i think the original tenant is the wife of somebody who's interned." "how simple the explanation is!" said g.j. "but i should never have guessed it." they started the tea in a strange silence. after a minute or two g.j. said: "i mustn't stay long." "neither must i." concepcion smiled. "got to go out?" "yes." there was another silence. then concepcion said: "i'm going to sarah churcher's. and as i know she has her pageant committee at five-thirty, i'd better not arrive later than five, had i?" "what is there between you and lady churcher?" "well, i'm going to offer to take queen's place on the organising committee." "con!" he exclaimed impulsively, "you aren't?" in an instant the atmosphere of the little airless, electric-lit, gas-fumed apartment was charged with a fluid that no physical chemistry could have traced. concepcion said mildly: "i am. i owe it to queen's memory to take her place if i can. of course i'm no dancer, but in other things i expect i can make myself useful." g.j. replied with equal mildness: "you aren't going to mix yourself up with that crowd again--after all you've been through! the pageant business isn't good enough for you, con, and you know it. you know it's odious." she murmured: "i feel it's my duty. i feel i owe it to queen. it's a sort of religion with me, i expect. each person has his own religion, and i doubt if one's more dogmatic than another." he was grieved; he had a sense almost of outrage. he hated to picture concepcion subduing herself to the horrible environment of the pageant enterprise. but he said nothing more. the silence resumed. they might have conversed, with care, about the inquest, or about the funeral, which was to take place at the castle, in cheshire. silence, however, suited them best. "also i thought you needed repose," said g.j. when concepcion broke the melancholy enchantment by rising to look for cigarettes. "i must be allowed to work," she answered after a pause, putting a cigarette between her teeth. "i must have something to do--unless, of course, you want me to go to the bad altogether." it was a remarkable saying, but it seemed to admit that he was legitimately entitled to his critical interest in her. "if i'd known that," he said, suddenly inspired, "i should have asked you to take on something for _me_." he waited; she made no response, and he continued: "i'm secretary of my small affair since yesterday. the paid secretary, a nice enough little thing, has just run off to the women's auxiliary corps in france and left me utterly in the lurch. just like domestic servants, these earnest girl-clerks are, when it comes to the point! no imagination. wanted to wear khaki, and no doubt thought she was doing a splendid thing. never occurred to her the mess i should be in. i'd have asked you to step into the breach. you'd have been frightfully useful." "but i'm no girl-clerk," concepcion gently and carelessly protested. "well, she wasn't either. i shouldn't have wanted you to be a typist. we have a typist. as a matter of fact, her job needed a bit more brains than she'd got. however--" another silence. g.j. rose to depart. concepcion did not stir. she said softly: "i don't think anybody realises what queen's death is to me. not even you." on her face was the look of sacrifice which g.j. had seen there as they talked together in queen's boudoir during the raid. he thought, amazed: "and they'd only had about twenty-four hours together, and part of that must have been spent in making up their quarrel!" then aloud: "i quite agree. people can't realise what they haven't had to go through. i've understood that ever since i read in the paper the day before yesterday that 'two bombs fell close together and one immediately after the other' in a certain quarter of the west end. that was all the paper said about those two bombs." "why! what do you mean?" "and i understood it when poor old queen gave me some similar information on the roof." "what _do_ you mean?" "i was between those two bombs when they fell. one of 'em blew me against a house. i've been to look at the place since. and i'm dashed if i myself could realise then what i'd been through." she gave a little cry. her face pleased him. "and you weren't hurt?" "i had a pain in my side, but it's gone," he said laconically. "and you never said anything to us! why not?" "well--there were so many other things...." "g.j., you're astounding!" "no, i'm not. i'm just myself." "and hasn't it upset your nerves?" "not as far as i can judge. of course one never knows, but i think not. what do you think?" she offered no response. at length she spoke with queer emotion: "you remember that night i said it was a message direct from potsdam? well, naturally it wasn't. but do you know the thought that tortures me? supposing the shrapnel that killed queen was out of a shell made at my place in glasgow!... it might have been.... supposing it was!" "con," he said firmly, "i simply won't listen to that kind of talk. there's no excuse for it. shall i tell you what, more than anything else, has made me respect you since queen was killed? ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have managed to remind me, quite illogically and quite inexcusably, that i was saying hard things about poor old queen at the very moment when she was lying dead on the roof. you didn't. you knew i was very sorry about queen, but you knew that my feelings as to her death had nothing whatever to do with what i happened to be saying when she was killed. you knew the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. for god's sake, don't start wondering where the shell was made." she looked up at him, saying nothing, and he savoured the intelligence of her weary, fine, alert, comprehending face. he did not pretend to himself to be able to fathom the enigmas of that long glance. he had again the feeling of the splendour of what it was to be alive, to have survived. just as he was leaving she said casually: "very well. i'll do what you want." "what i want?" "i won't go to sarah churcher's." "you mean you'll come as assistant secretary?" she nodded. "only i don't need to be paid." and he, too, fell into a casual tone: "that's excellent." thus, by this nonchalance, they conspired to hide from themselves the seriousness of that which had passed between them. the grotesque, pretentious little apartment was mysteriously humanised; it was no longer the reception-room of a furnished flat by chance hired for a month; they had lived in it. she finished, eagerly smiling: "i can practise my religion just as much with you as with sarah churcher, can't i? queen was on your committee, too. yes, i shan't be deserting her." the remark disquieted his triumph. that aspect of the matter had not occurred to him. chapter collapse late of that same afternoon g.j., in the absence of the chairman, presided as honorary secretary over a meeting of the executive committee of the lechford hospitals. in the course of the war the committee had changed its habitation more than once. the hotel which had at first given it a home had long ago been commandeered by the government for a new government department, and its hundreds of chambers were now full of the clicking of typewriters and the dictation of officially phrased correspondence, and the conferences which precede decisions, and the untamed footsteps of messenger-flappers, and the making of tea, and chatter about cinemas, blouses and headaches. afterwards the committee had been the guest of a bank and of a trust company, and had for a period even paid rent to a common landlord. but its object was always to escape the formality of rent-paying, and it was now lodged in an untenanted mansion belonging to a viscount in a great belgravian square. its sign was spread high across the facade; its posters were in the windows; and on the door was a notice such as in nobody had ever expected to see in that quadrangle of guarded sacred castles: "turn the handle and walk in." the mansion, though much later in date, was built precisely on the lines of a typical bloomsbury boarding-house. it had the same basement, the same general disposition of rooms, the same abundance of stairs and paucity of baths, the same chilly draughts and primeval devices for heating, and the same superb disregard for the convenience of servants. the patrons of domestic architecture had permitted architects to learn nothing in seventy years except that chimney-flues must be constructed so that they could be cleaned without exposing sooty infants to the danger of suffocation or incineration. the committee sat on the first floor in the back drawing-room, whose furniture consisted of a deal table, windsor chairs, a row of hat-pegs, a wooden box containing coal, half a poker, two unshaded lights; the walls, from which all the paper had been torn off, were decorated with lists of sub-committees, posters, and rows of figures scrawled here and there in pencil. the room was divided from the main drawing-room by the usual folding-doors. the smaller apartment had been chosen in the winter because it was somewhat easier to keep warm than the other one. in the main drawing-room the honorary secretary camped himself at a desk near the fireplace. when the clock struck, g.j., one of whose monastic weaknesses was a ritualistic regard for punctuality, was in his place at the head of the table, and the table well filled with members, for the honorary secretary's harmless foible was known and admitted. the table and the chairs, the scraping of the chair-legs on the bare floor, the agenda papers and the ornamentation thereof by absent-minded pens, were the same as in the committee's youth. but the personnel of the committee had greatly changed, and it was enlarged--as its scope had been enlarged. the two lechford hospitals behind the french lines were now only a part of the committee's responsibilities. it had a special hospital in paris, two convalescent homes in england, and an important medical unit somewhere in italy. finance was becoming its chief anxiety, for the reason that, though soldiers had not abandoned in disgust the practice of being wounded, philanthropists were unquestionably showing signs of fatigue. it had collected money by postal appeals, by advertisements, by selling flags, by competing with drapers' shops, by intimidation, by ruse and guile, and by all the other recognised methods. of late it had depended largely upon the very wealthy, and, to a less extent, upon g.j., who having gradually constituted the committee his hobby, had contributed some thousands of pounds from his share of the magic profits of the reveille company. everybody was aware of the immense importance of g.j.'s help. g.j. never showed it in his demeanour, but the others continually showed it in theirs. he had acquired authority. he had also acquired the sure manner of one accustomed to preside. "before we begin on the agenda," he said--and as he spoke a late member crept apologetically in and tiptoed to the heavily charged hat-pegs--"i would like to mention about miss trewas. some of you know that through an admirable but somewhat disordered sense of patriotism she has left us at a moment's notice. i am glad to say that my friend mrs. carlos smith, who, i may tell you, has had a very considerable experience of organisation, has very kindly agreed, subject of course to the approval of the committee, to step temporarily into the breach. she will be an honorary worker, like all of us here, and i am sure that the committee will feel as grateful to her as i do." as there had been smiles at the turn of his phrase about miss trewas, so now there were fervent, almost emotional, "hear-hears." "mrs. smith, will you please read the minutes of the last meeting." concepcion was sitting at his left hand. he kept thinking, "i'm one of those who get things done." two hours ago, and the idea of enlisting her had not even occurred to him, and already he had taken her out of her burrow, brought her to the offices, coached her in the preliminaries of her allotted task, and introduced several important members of the committee to her! it was an achievement. never had the minutes been listened to with such attention as they obtained that day. concepcion was apparently not in the least nervous, and she read very well--far better than the deserter miss trewas, who could not open her mouth without bridling. concepcion held the room. those who had not seen before the celebrated concepcion iquist now saw her and sated their eyes upon her. she had been less a woman than a legend. the romance of south america enveloped her, and the romance of her famous and notorious uncle, of her triumph over the west end, her startling marriage and swift widowing, her journey to america and her complete disappearance, her attachment to lady queenie, and now her dramatic reappearance. and the sharp condiment to all this was the general knowledge of the bachelor g.j.'s long intimacy with her, and of their having both been at lechford house on the night of the raid, and both been at the inquest on the body of lady queenie paulle on that very day. but nobody could have guessed from their placid and self-possessed demeanour that either of them had just emerged from a series of ordeals. they won a deep and full respect. still, some people ventured to have their own ideas; and an ingenuous few were surprised to find that the legend was only a woman after all, and a rather worn woman, not indeed very recognisable from her innumerable portraits. nevertheless the respect for the pair was even increased when g.j. broached the first item on the agenda--a resolution of respectful sympathy with the marquis and marchioness of lechford in their bereavement, of profound appreciation of the services of lady queenie on the committee, and of an intention to send by the chairman to the funeral a wreath to be subscribed for by the members. g.j. proposed the resolution himself, and it was seconded by a lady and supported by a gentleman whose speeches gave no hint that lady queenie had again and again by her caprices nearly driven the entire committee into a lunatic asylum and had caused several individual resignations. g.j. put the resolution without a tremor; it was impressively carried; and concepcion wrote down the terms of it quite calmly in her secretarial notes. the performance of the pair was marvellous, and worthy of the english race. then arrived sir stephen bradern. sir stephen was chairman of the french hospitals management sub-committee. g.j. said: "sir stephen, you are just too late for the resolution as to lady queenie paulle." "i deeply apologise, mr. chairman," replied the aged but active sir stephen, nervously stroking his rather long beard. "i hope, however, that i may be allowed to associate myself very closely with the resolution." after a suitable pause and general silence he went on: "i've been detained by that nurse smaith that my sub-committee's been having trouble with. you'll find, when you come to them, that she's on my sub-committee's minutes. i've just had an interview with her, and she says she wants to see the executive. i don't know what you think, mr. chairman--" he stopped. g.j. smiled. "i should have her brought in," said the lady who had previously spoken. "if i might suggest," she added. a boy scout, who seemed to have long ago grown out of his uniform, entered with a note for somebody. he was told to bring in nurse smaith. she proved to be a rather short and rather podgy woman, with a reddish, not rosy, complexion, and red hair. the ugly red-bordered cape of the british red cross did not suit her better than it suited any other wearer. she was in full, strict, starched uniform, and prominently wore medals on her plenteous breast. she looked as though, if she had a sister, that sister might be employed in a large draper's shop at brixton or islington. in saying "gid ahfternoon" she revealed the purity of a cockney accent undefiled by continental experiences. she sat down in a manner sternly defensive. she was nervous and abashed, but evidently dangerous. she belonged to the type which is courageous in spite of fear. she had resolved to interview the committee, and though the ordeal frightened her, she desperately and triumphantly welcomed it. "now, nurse smaith," said g.j. diplomatically. "we are always very glad to see our nurses, even when our time is limited. will you kindly tell the committee as briefly as possible just what your claim is?" and the nurse replied, with medals shaking: "i'm claiming, as i've said before, two weeks' salary in loo of notice, and my fare home from france; twenty-five francs salary and ninety-five francs expenses. and i sy nothing of excess luggage." "but you didn't _come_ home." "i have come home, though." one of those members whose destiny it is always to put a committee in the wrong remarked: "but surely, nurse, you left our employ nearly a year ago. why didn't you claim before?" "i've been at you for two months at least, and i was ill for six months in turin; they had to put me off the train there," said nurse smaith, getting self-confidence. "as i understand," said g.j. "you left us in order to join a serbian unit of another society, and you only returned to england in february." "i didn't leave you, sir. that is, i mean, i left you, but i was told to go." "who told you to go?" "matron." sir stephen benevolently put in: "but the matron had always informed us that it was you who said you wouldn't stay another minute. we have it in the correspondence." "that's what _she_ says. but i say different. and i can prove it." said g.j.: "there must be some misunderstanding. we have every confidence in the matron, and she's still with us." "then i'm sorry for you." he turned warily to another aspect of the subject. "do i gather that you went straight from paris to serbia?" "yes. the unit was passing through, and i joined it." "but how did you obtain your passport? you had no certificate from us?" nurse smaith tossed her perilous red hair. "oh! no difficulty about that. i am not _without_ friends, as you may say." some of the committee looked up suspiciously, aware that the matron had in her report hinted at mysterious relations between nurse smaith and certain authorities. "the doctor in charge of the serbian unit was only too glad to have me. of course, if you're going to believe everything matron says--" her tone was becoming coarser, but the committee could neither turn her out nor cure her natural coarseness, nor indicate to her that she was not using the demeanour of committee-rooms. she was firmly lodged among them, and she went from bad to worse. "of course, if you're going to swallow everything matron says--! it isn't as if i was the only one." "may i ask if you are at present employed?" "i don't _quite_ see what that's got to do with it," said nurse smaith, still gaining ground. "certainly not. nothing. nothing at all. i was only hoping that these visits here are not inconvenient to you." "well, as it seems so important, i _my_ sy i'm going out to salonika next week, and that's why i want this business settled." she stopped, and as the committee remained diffidently and apprehensively silent, she went on: "it isn't as if i was the only one. why! when we were in the retreat of the serbian army owver the mahntains i came across by chance, if you call it chance, another nurse that knew all about _her_--been under her in bristol for a year." a young member, pricking up, asked: "were you in the serbian retreat, nurse?" "if i hadn't been i shouldn't be here now," said nurse smaith, entirely recovered from her stage-fright and entirely pleased to be there then. "i lost all i had at ypek. all i took was my medals, and them i did take. there were fifty of us, british, french and russians. we had nearly three weeks in the mahntains. we slept rough all together in one room, when there was a room, and when there wasn't we slept in stables. we had nothing but black bread, and that froze in the haversacks, and if we took our boots off we had to thaw them the next morning before we could put them on. if we hadn't had three saucepans we should have died. when we went dahn the hills two of us had to hold every horse by his head and tail to keep them from falling. however, nearly all the horses died, and then we took the packs off them and tried to drag the packs along by hand; but we soon stopped that. all the bridle-paths were littered with dead horses and oxen. and when we came up with the serbian army we saw soldiers just drop down and die in the snow. i read in the paper there were no children in the retreat, but i saw lots of children, strapped to their mother's backs. yes; and they fell down together and froze to death. then we got to scutari, and glad i was." she glanced round defiantly, but not otherwise moved, at the committee, the hitherto invisible gods of hospitals and medical units. the nipping wind of reality had blown into the back drawing-room. the committee was daunted. but some of its members, less daunted than the rest, had the presence of mind to wonder why it seemed strange and strangely chilling that a rather coarse, stout woman with a cockney accent and little social refinement should have passed through, and emerged so successfully from, the unimaginable retreat. if nurse smaith had been beautiful and slim and of elegant manners they could not have controlled their chivalrous enthusiasm. "very interesting," said someone. glancing at g.j., nurse smaith proceeded: "you sy i didn't come home. but the money for my journey was due to me. that's what i sy. twenty-five francs for two weeks' wages and ninety-five francs journey money." "as regards the journey money," observed sir stephen blandly, "we've never paid so much, if my recollection serves me. and of course we have to remember that we're dealing with public funds." nurse smaith sprang up, looking fixedly at concepcion. concepcion had thrown herself back in her chair, and her face was so drawn that it was no more the same face. "even if it is public funds," concepcion shrieked, "can't you give ninety-five francs in memory of those three saucepans?" then she relapsed on to the table, her head in her hands, and sobbed violently, very violently. the sobs rose and fell in the scale, and the whole body quaked. g.j. jumped to his feet. half the shocked and alarmed committee was on its feet. nurse smaith had run round to concepcion and had seized her with a persuasive, soothing gesture. concepcion quite submissively allowed herself to be led out of the room by nurse smaith and sir stephen. her sobs weakened, and when the door was closed could no longer be heard. a lady member had followed the three. the committee was positively staggered by the unprecedented affair. g.j., very pale, said: "mrs. smith is in competent hands. we can't do anything. i think we had better sit down." he was obeyed. a second doctor on the committee remarked with a curious slight smile: "i said to myself when i first saw her this afternoon that mrs. smith had some of the symptoms of a nervous breakdown." "yes," g.j. concurred. "i very much regret that i allowed mrs. smith to come. but she was determined to work, and she seemed perfectly calm and collected. i very much regret it." then, to hide his constraint, he pulled towards him the sheet of paper on which concepcion had been making notes, and, remembering that a list of members present had always to be kept, he began to write down names. he was extremely angry with himself. he had tried concepcion too high. he ought to have known that all women were the same. he had behaved like an impulsive fool. he had been ridiculous before the committee. what should have been a triumph was a disaster. the committee would bind their two names together. and at the conclusion of the meeting news of the affairs would radiate from the committee's offices in every direction throughout london. and he had been unfair to concepcion. their relations would be endlessly complicated by the episode. he foresaw trying scenes, in which she would make all the excuses, between her and himself. "perhaps it would be simpler if we decided to admit nurse smaith's claim," said a timid voice from the other end of the table. g.j. murmured coldly, gazing at the agenda paper and yet dominating his committee: "the question will come up on the minutes of the hospitals management sub-committee. we had better deal with it then. the next business on the agenda is the letter from the paris service de santé." he was thinking: "how is she now? ought i to go out and see?" and the majority of the committee was vaguely thinking, not without a certain pleasurable malice: "these society women! they're all queer!" chapter the invisible powers several times already the rumour had spread in the promenade that the promenade would be closed on a certain date, and the promenade had not been closed. but to-night it was stated that the promenade would be closed at the end of the week, and everybody concerned knew that the prophecy would come true. no official notice was issued, no person who repeated the tale could give a reliable authority for it; nevertheless, for some mysterious reason it convinced. the rival promenade had already passed away. the high invisible powers who ruled the world of pleasure were moving at the behest of powers still higher than themselves; and the cloak-room attendants, in their frivolous tiny aprons, shared murmuringly behind plush portières in the woe of the ladies with large hats. the revue being a failure, the auditorium was more than half empty. in the promenade to each man there were at least five pretty ladies, and the ladies looked gloomily across many rows of vacant seats at the bright proscenium where jocularities of an exacerbating tedium were being enacted. not that the jocularities were inane beyond the usual, but failure made them seem so. none had the slightest idea why the revue had failed; for precisely similar revues, concocted according to the same recipe and full of the same jocularities executed by the same players at the same salaries, had crowded the theatre for many months together. it was an incomprehensible universe. christine suddenly shrugged her shoulders and walked out. what use in staying to the end? it was long after ten o'clock, and an exquisite faint light lingering in the sky still revealed the features of the people in the streets. the man who had devoted half a life to the ingenious project of lengthening the summer days by altering clocks was in his disappointed grave; but victory had come to him there, for statesmen had at last proved the possibility of that which they had always maintained to be impossible, and the wisdom of that which they had always maintained to be idiotic. the voluptuous divine melancholy of evening june descended upon the city from the sky, and even sounds were beautifully sad. the happy progress of the war could not exorcise this soft, omnipotent melancholy. yet the progress of the war was nearly all that could be desired. verdun was held, and if fort vaux had been lost there had been compensation in the fact that the enemy, through the gesture of the crown prince in allowing the captured commander of the fort to retain his sword, had done something to rehabilitate themselves in the esteem of mankind. lord kitchener was drowned, but the discovery had been announced that he was not indispensable; indeed, there were those who said that it was better thus. the easter rebellion was well in hand; order was understood to reign in an ireland hidden behind the black veil of the censorship. the mighty naval battle of jutland had quickly transformed itself from a defeat into a brilliant triumph. the disturbing prices of food were about to be reduced by means of a committee. in america the republican forces were preparing to eject president wilson in favour of another hughes who could be counted upon to realise the world-destiny of the united states. an economic conference was assembling in paris with the object of cutting germany off from the rest of the human race after the war. and in eleven days the russians had made prisoners of a hundred and fifty thousand austrians, and brusiloff had just said: "this is only the beginning." lastly the close prospect of the resistless allied western offensive which would deracinate prussian militarism was uplifting men's minds. christine walked nonchalantly and uninvitingly through the streets, quite unresponsive to the exhilaration of events. "marthe!" she called, when she had let herself into the flat. contrary to orders, the little hall was in darkness. there was no answer. she lit the hall and passed into the kitchen, lighting it also. there, in the terrible and incurable squalor of marthe's own kitchen, marthe's apron was thrown untidily across the back of the solitary windsor chair. she knew then that marthe had gone out, and in truth, although very annoyed, she was not altogether surprised. marthe had a mysterious love affair. it was astonishing, in view of the intensely aphrodisiacal atmosphere in which she lived, that marthe did not continually have love affairs. but the day of love had seemed for marthe to be over, and christine found great difficulty in getting her ever to leave the flat, save on necessary household errands. on the other hand it was astonishing that any man should be attracted by the fat slattern. the moth now fluttering round her was an italian waiter, as to whom christine had learnt that he was being unjustly hunted by the italian military authorities. hence the mystery necessarily attaching to the love affair. being french, christine despised him. he called marthe by her right name of "marta," and christine had more than once heard the pair gabbling in the kitchen in italian. just as though she had been a conventional _bourgeoise_ christine now accused marthe of ingratitude because the woman was subordinating christine's convenience to the supreme exigencies of fate. a man's freedom might be in the balance, marthe's future might be in the balance; but supposing that christine had come home with a gallant--and no _femme de chambre_ to do service! she walked about the flat, shut the windows, drew the blinds, removed her hat, removed her gloves, stretched them, put her things away; she gazed at the two principal rooms, at the soiled numbers of _la vie parisienne_ and the cracked bric-à-brac in the drawing-room, at the rent in the lace bedcover, and the foul mess of toilet apparatus in the bedroom. the forlorn emptiness of the place appalled her. she had been quite fairly successful in her london career. hundreds of men had caressed her and paid her with compliments and sweets and money. she had been really admired. the flat had had gay hours. unmistakable aristocrats had yielded to her. and she had escaped the five scourges of her profession.... it was all over. the chapter was closed. she saw nothing in front of her but decline and ruin. she had escaped the five scourges of her profession, but part of the price of this immunity was that through keeping herself to herself she had not a friend. despite her profession, and because of the prudence with which she exercised it, she was a solitary, a recluse. yes, of course she had gilbert. she could count upon gilbert to a certain extent, to a considerable extent; but he would not be eternal, and his fancy for her would not be eternal. once, before easter, she had had the idea that he meant to suggest to her an exclusive liaison. foolish! nothing, less than nothing, had come of it. he would not be such an imbecile as to suggest such a thing to her. miracles did not happen, at any rate not that kind of miracle. in the midst of her desolation an old persistent dream revisited her: the dream of a small country cottage in france, with a dog, a faithful servant, respectability, good name, works of charity, her own praying-stool in the village church. she moved to the wardrobe and unlocked one of the drawers beneath the wide doors. and rummaging under the linen and under the photographs under the linen she drew forth a package and spread its contents on the table in the drawing-room. her securities, her bonds of the city of paris, ever increasing! gilbert had tried to induce her to accept more attractive investments. but she would not. never! these were her consols, part of her religion. bonds of the city of paris had fallen in value, but not in her dogmatic esteem. the passionate little miser that was in her surveyed them with pleasure, even with assurance; but they were still far too few to stand for the realisation of her dream. and she might have to sell some of them soon in order to live. she replaced them carefully in the drawer with dejection unabated. when she glanced at the table again she saw an envelope. inexplicably she had not noticed it before. she seized it in hope--and recognised in the address the curious hand of her landlord. it contained a week's notice to quit. the tenancy of the flat was weekly. this was the last blow. all the invisible powers of london were conspiring together to shatter the profession. what in the name of the holy virgin had come over the astounding, incomprehensible city? then there was a ring at the bell. marthe? no, marthe would never ring; she had a key and she would creep in. a lover? a rich, spendthrift, kind lover? hope flickered anew in her desolated heart. it was the other pretty lady--a newcomer--who lived in the house: a rather stylish woman of about thirty-five, unusually fair, with regular features and a very dignified carriage, indeed not unimposing. they had met once, at the foot of the stairs. christine was not sure of her name. she proclaimed herself to be russian, but christine doubted the assertion. her french had no trace of a foreign accent; and in view of the achieve-merits of the russian army ladies were finding it advantageous to be of russian blood. still she had a fine cosmopolitan air to which christine could not pretend. they engaged each other in glances. "i hope i do not disturb you, madame." "not at all, madame. i am obliged to open the door myself because my servant is out." "i thought i heard you come in, and so--" "no," interrupted christine, determined not to admit the defeat of having returned from the promenade alone. "i have not been out. probably it was my servant you heard." "ah!... without doubt." "will you give yourself the trouble to enter, madame?" "ah!" exclaimed the russian, in the sitting-room. "you will excuse me, madame, but what a beautiful photograph!" "you are too amiable, madame. a friend had it done for me." they sat down. "you are deliciously installed here," said the russian perfunctorily, looking round. "now, madame, i have been here only three weeks. and to-night i receive a notice to quit. shall i be indiscreet if i ask if you have received a similar notice?" "this very evening," said christine, in secret still more disconcerted by this further proof of a general plot against human nature. she was about to add: "i found it here on my return home," but, remembering her fib, managed to stop in time. "well, madame, i know little of london. without doubt you know london to the bottom. is it serious, this notice?" "i think so." "quite serious?" christine said: "you see, there is a crisis. it is the war that in london has led to the discovery that men have desires. of course, it will pass, but--" "oh, of course.... but it is grotesque, this crisis." "it is perfectly grotesque," christine agreed. "you do not by hazard know where one can find flats to let? i hear speak of bloomsbury and of long acre. but it seems to me that those quarters--" "i am in london since now more than eighteen months," said christine. "and as for all those things i know little. i have lived here in this flat all the time, and i go out so rarely--" the russian put in with eagerness: "oh, i also! i go out, so to speak, not at all." "i thought i had seen you once in the promenade at the--" "yes, it is true," interrupted the russian quickly. "i went from curiosity, for distraction. you see, since the war i have lived in dublin. i had there a friend, very highly placed in the administration. he married. one lived terrible hours during the revolt. i decided to come to london, especially as--however, i do not wish to fatigue you with all that." christine said nothing. the irish rebellion did not interest her. she was in no mood for talking about the irish rebellion. she had convinced herself that all sinn feiners were in german pay, and naught else mattered. never, she thought, had the british government carried ingenuousness further than in this affair! given a free hand, christine with her strong, direct common sense would have settled the irish question in forty-eight hours. the russian, after a little pause, continued: "i merely wished to ask you whether the notice to quit was serious--not a trick for raising the rent." christine shook her head to the last clause. "and then, if the notice was quite serious, whether you knew of any flats--not too dear.... not that i mind a good rent if one receives the value of it, and is left tranquil." the conversation might at this point have taken a more useful turn if christine had not felt bound to hold herself up against the other's high tone of indifference to expenditure. the russian, in demanding "tranquillity," had admitted that she regularly practised the profession--or, as english girls strangely called it, "the business"--and christine could have followed her lead into the region of gossiping and intimate realism where detailed confidences are enlighteningly exchanged; but the tone about money was a challenge. "i should have been enchanted to be of service to you," said christine. "but i know nothing. i go out less and less. as for this notice, i smile at it. i have a friend upon whom i can count for everything. i have only to tell him, and he will put me among my own furniture at once. he has indeed already suggested it. so that, _je m'en fiche_." "i also!" said the russian. "my new friend--he is a colonel, sent from dublin to london--has insisted upon putting me among my own furniture. but i have refused so far--because one likes to know more of a gentleman--does not one?--before ..." "truly!" murmured christine. "and there is always paris," said the russian. "but i thought you were from petrograd." "yes. but i know paris well. ah! there is only paris! paris is a second home to me." "can one get a passport easily for paris?... i mean, supposing the air-raids grew too dangerous again." "why not, madame? if one has one's papers. to get a passport from paris to london, that would be another thing, i admit.... i see that you play," the russian added, rising, with a gesture towards the piano. "i have heard you play. you play with true taste. i know, for when a girl i played much." "you flatter me." "not at all. i think your friend plays too." "ah!" said christine. "he!... it is an artist, that one." they turned over the music, exchanged views about waltzes, became enthusiastic, laughed, and parted amid manifestations of good breeding and goodwill. as soon as christine was alone, she sat down and wept. she could not longer contain her distress. paris gleamed before her. but no! it was a false gleam. she could not make a new start in paris during the war. the adventure would be too perilous; the adventure might end in a licensed house. and yet in london--what was there in london but, ultimately, the pavement? and the pavement meant complications with the police, with prowlers, with other women; it meant all the scourges of the profession, including probably alcoholism. it meant prostitution, to which she had never sunk! she wished she had been killed outright in the air-raid. she had an idea of going to the oratory the next morning, and perhaps choosing a new virgin and soliciting favour of the image thereof. she sobbed, and, sobbing, suddenly jumped up and ran to the telephone. and even as she gave gilbert's number, she broke it in the middle with a sob. after all, there was gilbert. chapter the victory "get back into bed," said g.j., having silently opened the window in the sitting-room. he spoke with courteous persuasion, but his peculiar intense politeness and restraint somewhat dismayed christine. by experience she knew that they were a sure symptom of annoyance. she often, though not on this occasion, wished that he would yield to anger and make a scene; but he never did, and she would hate him for not doing so. the fact was that under the agreement which ruled their relations, she had no right to telephone to him, save in grave and instant emergency, and even then it was her duty to say first, when she got the communication: "mr. pringle wants to speak to mr. hoape." she had omitted, in her disquiet, to fulfil this formality. recognising his voice, she had begun passionately, without preliminary: "oh! beloved, thou canst not imagine what has happened to me--" etc. still he had come. he had cut her short, but he had left whatever he was doing and had, amazingly, walked over at once. and in the meantime she had hurriedly undressed and put on a new peignoir and slipped into bed. of course she had had to open the door herself. she obeyed his command like an intelligent little mouse, and he sat down on the edge of the bed. he might inspire foreboding, alarm, even terror. but he was in the flat. he was the saviour, man, in the flat. and his coming was in the nature of a miracle. he might have been out; he might have been entertaining; he might have been engaged; he might well have said that he could not come until the next day. never before had she made such a request, and he had acceded to it immediately! her mood was one of frightened triumph. he was being most damnably himself; his demeanour was as faultless as his dress. she could not even complain that he had forgotten to kiss her. he said nothing about her transgression of the rule as to telephoning. he was waiting, with his exasperating sense of justice and self-control, until she had acquainted him with her case. instead of referring coldly and disapprovingly to the matter of the telephone, he said in a judicious, amicable voice: "i doubt whether your coiffeur is all that he ought to be. i see you had your hair waved to-day." "yes, why?" "you should tell the fellow to give you the new method of hair-waving, steaming with electric heaters--or else go where you can get it." "new method?" repeated christine the tory doubtfully. and then with sudden sexual suspicion: "who told you about it?" "oh! i heard of it months ago," he said carelessly. "besides, it's in the papers, in the advertisements. it lasts longer--much longer--and it's more artistic." she felt sure that he had been discussing hair-waving with some woman. she thought of all her grievances against him. the lechford house episode rankled in her mind. he had given her the details, but she said to herself that he had given her the details only because he had foreseen that she would hear about the case from others or read about it in the newspapers. she had not been able to stomach that he should be at lechford house alone late at night with two women of the class she hated and feared--and the very night of her dreadful experience with him in the bomb-explosion! no explanations could make that seem proper or fair. naturally she had never disclosed her feelings. further, the frequenting of such a house as lechford house was more proof of his social importance, and incidentally of his riches. the spectacle of his flat showed her long ago that previously she had been underestimating his situation in the world. the revelations as to lechford house had seemed to show her that she was still underestimating it. she resented his modesty. she was inclined to attribute his modesty to a desire to pay her as little as he reasonably could. however, she could not in sincerity do so. he treated her handsomely, considering her pretensions, but considering his position--he had no pretensions--not handsomely. she had had an irrational idea that, having permitted her to see the splendour of his flat, he ought to have increased her emoluments--that, indeed, she should be paid not according to her original environment, but according to his. she also resented that he had never again asked her to his flat. her behaviour on that sole visit had apparently decided him not to invite her any more. she resented his perfectly hidden resentment. what disturbed her more than anything else was a notion in her mind, possibly a wrong notion, that she cared for him less madly than of old. she had always said to herself, and more than once sadly to him, that his fancy for her would not and could not last; but that hers for him should decline puzzled her and added to her grievances against him. she looked at him from the little nest made by her head between two pillows. did she in truth care for him less madly than of old? she wondered. she had only one gauge, the physical. she began to talk despairingly about marthe, whom, of course, she had had to mention at the door. he said quietly: "but it's not because of marthe's caprices that i'm asked to come down to-night, i suppose?" she told him about the closing of the promenade in a tone of absolute, resigned certainty that admitted of no facile pooh-poohings or reassurances. and then, glancing sidelong at the night-table, where the lamp burned, she extended her half-bared arm and picked up the landlord's notice and gave it to him to read. watching him read it she inwardly trembled, as though she had started on some perilous enterprise the end of which might be black desperation, as though she had cast off from the shore and was afloat amid the waves of a vast, swollen river--waves that often hid the distant further bank. she felt somehow that she was playing for all or nothing. and though she had had immense experience of men, though it was her special business to handle men, she felt herself to be unskilled and incompetent. the common ruses, feints, devices, guiles, chicaneries were familiar to her; she could employ them as well as any and better than most; they succeeded marvellously and absurdly--in the common embarrassments and emergencies, because they had not to stand the test of time. their purpose was temporary, and when the purpose had been accomplished it did not matter whether they were unmasked or not, for the adversary-victim--who, in any event, was better treated than he deserved!--either had gone for ever, or would soon forget, or was too proud to murmur, or philosophically accepted a certain amount of wile as part of the price of ecstasy. but this embarrassment and this emergency were not common. they were a supreme crisis. "the other lady has had notice too," she said, and went on: "it's the same everywhere in this quarter. i know not if it is the same in other districts, but quite probably it is.... it is the end." she saw by the lifting of his eyebrows that he was impressed, that he secretly admitted the justifiability of her summons to him. and instantly she took a reasonable, wise, calm tone. "it is a little serious, is it not? i do not frighten myself, but it is serious. above all, i do not wish to trouble thee. i know all thy anxieties, and i am a woman who understands. but except thee i have not a friend, as i have often told thee. in my heart there is a place only for one. i have a horror of all those women. they weary me. i am not like them, as thou well knowest. thus my existence is solitary. i have no relations. not one. see! go into no matter what interior, and there are photographs. but here--not one. yes, one. my own. i am forced to regard my own portrait. what would i not give to be able to put on my chimney-piece thy portrait! but i cannot. do not deceive thyself. i am not complaining. i comprehend perfectly. it is impossible that a woman like me should have thy photograph on her chimney-piece." she smiled, smoothing for a moment the pucker out of her brow. "and lately i see thee so little. thou comest less frequently. and when thou comest, well--one embraces--a little music--and then _pouf_! thou art gone. is it not so?" he said: "but thou knowest the reason, i am terribly busy. i have all the preoccupations in the world. my committee--it is not all smooth, my committee. everything and everybody depends on me. and in the committee i have enemies too. the fact is, i have become a beast of burden. i dream about it. and there are others in worse case. we shall soon be in the third year of the war. we must not forget that." "my little rabbit," she replied very calmly and reasonably and caressingly. "do not imagine to thyself that i blame thee. i do not blame thee. i comprehend too well all that thou dost, all that thou art worth. in every way thou art stronger than me. i am ten times nothing. i know it. i have no grievance against thee. thou hast always given me what thou couldst, and i on my part have never demanded too much. say, have i been excessive? at this hour i make no claim on thee. i have done all that to me was possible to make thee happy. in my soul i have always been faithful to thee. i do not praise myself for that. i did not choose it. these things are not chosen. they come to pass--that is all. and it arrived that i was bound to go mad about thee, and to remain so. what wouldst thou? speak not of the war. is it not because of the war that i am in exile, and that i am ruined? i have always worked honestly for my living. and there is not on earth an officer who has encountered me who can say that i have not been particularly nice to him--because he was an officer. thou wilt excuse me if i speak of such matters. i know i am wrong. it is contrary to my habit. but what wouldst thou? i also have done what i could for the war. but it is my ruin. oh, my gilbert! tell me what i must do. i ask nothing from thee but advice. it was for that that i dared to telephone thee." g.j. answered casually: "i see nothing to worry about. it will be necessary to take another flat. that is all." "but i--i know nothing of london. one tells me that it is in future impossible for women who live alone--like me--to find a flat--that is to say, respectable." "absurd! i will find a flat. i know precisely where there is a flat." "but will they let it to me?" "they will let it to _me_, i suppose," said he, still casually. a pause ensued. she said, in a voice trembling: "thou art not going to say to me that thou wilt put me among my own furniture?" "the flat is furnished. but it is the same thing." "do not let such a hope shine before me--me who saw before me only the pavement. thou art not serious." "i never was more serious. for whom dost thou take me, little-foolish one?" she cried: "oh, you english! you are _chic_. you make love as you go to war. like _that_!... one word--it is decided! and there is nothing more to say! ah! you english!" she had almost screamed, shuddering under the shock of his decision, for which she had impossibly hoped, but whose reality overwhelmed her. he sat there in front of her, elegant, impeccably dressed, distinguished, aristocratic, rich, in the full wisdom of his years, and in the strength of his dominating will, and in the righteousness of his heart. one could absolutely trust such as him to do the right thing, and to do it generously, and to do it all the time. and she, _she_ had won him. he had recognised her qualities. she had denied any claim upon him, but by his decision he had admitted a claim--a claim that no money could satisfy. after all, for eighteen months she had been more to him than any other woman. he had talked freely to her. he had concealed naught from her. he had spoken to her of his discouragements and his weaknesses. he had had no shame before her. by her acquiescences, her skill, her warmth, her adaptability, her intense womanliness, she had created between them a bond stronger than anything that could keep them apart. the bond existed. it could not during the whole future be broken save by a disloyalty. a disloyalty, she divined, would irrevocably destroy it. but she had no fear on that score, for she knew her own nature. his decision did more than fill her with a dizzy sense of relief, a mad, intolerable happiness--it re-established her self-respect. no ordinary woman, handicapped as she was, could have captured this fastidious and shy paragon ... and the notion that her passion for him had dwindled was utterly ridiculous, like the notion that he would tire of her. she was saved. she burst into wild tears. "ah! pardon me!" she sobbed. "i am quite calm, really. but since the air-raid, thou knowest, i have not been quite the same ... thou! thou art different. nothing could disturb thy calm. ah! if thou wert a general at the front! what sang-froid! what presence of mind! but i--" he bent towards her, and she suddenly sprang up and seized him round the neck, and ate his lips, and while she strangled and consumed him she kept muttering to him: "hope not that i shall thank thee. i cannot. i cannot! the words with which i could thank thee do not exist. but i am thine, thine! all of me is thine. humiliate me! demand of me impossible things! i am thy slave, thy creature! ah! let me kiss thy beautiful grey hairs. i love thy hair. and thy ears ..." the thought of her insatiable temperament flashed through her as she held him, and of his northern sobriety, and of the profound, unchangeable difference between these two. she would discipline her temperament; she would subjugate it. women were capable of miracles--and women alone. and she was capable of miracles. a strange, muffled noise came to them across the darkness of the sitting-room, and g.j. raised his head slightly to listen. "repose! repose thyself in the arms of thy little mother," she breathed softly. "it is nothing. it is but the wind blowing the blind against the curtains." and later, when she had distilled the magic of the hour and was tranquillised, she said: "and where is it, this flat?" chapter idyll christine said to marie, otherwise la mère gaston, the new servant in the new flat, who was holding in her hand a telegram addressed to "hoape, albany": "give it to me. i will put it in front of the clock on the mantelpiece." and she lodged it among the gilt cupids that supported the clock on the fringed mantelpiece in the drawing-room. she did so with a little gesture of childlike glee expressing her satisfaction in the flat as a whole. the flat was dark; she did not object, loving artificial light. the rooms were all very small; she loved cosiness. there was a garage close by, which might have disturbed her nights; but it did not. the bathroom was open to the bedroom; no arrangement could be better. g.j. in enumerating the disadvantages of the flat had said also that it was too much and too heavily furnished. not at all. she adored the cumbrous and rich furniture; she did not want in her flat the empty spaces of a ball-room; she wanted to feel that she was within an interior--inside something. she gloried in the flat. she preferred it even to her memory of g.j.'s flat in the albany. its golden ornateness flattered her. the glittering cornices, and the big carved frames of the pictures of impossible flowers and of ladies and gentlemen in historic coiffures and costumes, appeared marvellous to her. she had never seen, and certainly had never hoped to inhabit, anything like it. but then gilbert was always better than his word. he had been quite frank, telling her that he knew of the existence of the flat simply because it had been occupied for a brief time by the mrs. carlos smith of whom she had heard and read, and who had had to leave it on account of health. (she did not remind him that once at the beginning of the war when she had noticed the name and portrait of mrs. carlos smith in the paper, he, sitting by her side, had concealed from her that he knew mrs. carlos smith. judiciously, she had never made the slightest reference to that episode.) though she detested the unknown mrs. carlos smith, she admired and envied her for a great illustrious personage, and was secretly very proud of succeeding mrs. carlos smith in the tenancy. and when gilbert told her that he had had his eye on the flat for her before mrs. carlos smith took it, and had hesitated on account of its drawbacks, she was even more proud. and reassured also. for this detail was a proof that gilbert had really had the intention to put her "among her own furniture" long before the night of the supreme appeal to him.... only he was always so cautious. and gilbert was the discoverer of la mère gaston, too, and as frank about her as about the flat. la mère gaston was the widow of a french soldier, domiciled in london previous to the war, who had died of wounds in one of the lechford hospitals; and it was through the lechford committee that gilbert had come across her. a few weeks earlier than the beginning of the formal liaison mrs. braiding had fallen ill for a space, and madame gaston had been summoned as charwoman to aid mrs. braiding's young sister in the albany flat. with excellent judgment gilbert had chosen her to succeed marthe, whom he himself had reproachfully dismissed from cork street. he was amazingly clever, was gilbert, for he had so arranged things that christine had been able to cut off her cork street career as with a knife. she had departed from cork street with two trunks and a few cardboard boxes--her stove was abandoned to the landlord--and vanished into london and left no trace. except gilbert, nobody who knew her in cork street was aware of her new address, and nobody who knew her in mayfair knew that she had come from cork street. her ancient acquaintances in cork street would ring the bell there in vain. madame gaston was a neat, plump woman of perhaps forty, not looking her years. she had a comprehending eye. after three words from gilbert she had mastered the situation, and as she perfectly realised where her interest lay she could be relied upon for discretion. in all delicate matters only her eye talked. she was a protestant, and went to the french church in soho square, which she called the "temple". christine and she had had but one sunday together--and christine had gone with her to the temple! the fact was that christine had decided to be a protestant. she needed a religion, and catholicism had an inconvenience--confession. she had regularised her position, so much so that by comparison with the past she was now perfectly respectable. yet if she had been candid in the confessional the priest would still have convicted her of mortal sin; which would have been very unfair; and she could not, in view of her respectability, have remained a catholic without confessing, however infrequently. madame gaston, as soon as she was sure of her convert, referred to catholicism as "idolatry". "put your apron on, marie," said christine. "monsieur will be here directly." "ah, yes, madame!" "have you opened the kitchen-window to take away the smell of cooking?" "yes, madame." "am i all right, marie?" madame gaston surveyed her mistress, who turned round. "yes, madame. i think that monsieur will much like that _négligée_." she departed to don the apron. between these two it was continually "monsieur," "monsieur". he was seldom there, but he was always there, always being consulted, placated, invoked, revered, propitiated, magnified. he was the giver of all good, and there was no other allah, and he had two prophets. christine sang, she twittered, she pirouetted, out of sheer youthful joy. she had forgotten care and forgotten promiscuity; good fortune had washed her pure. she looked at herself in the massive bevelled mirror, and saw that she was fresh and young and lithe and graceful. and she felt triumphant. gilbert had expressed the fear that she might get lonely and bored. he had even said that occasionally he might bring along a man, and that perhaps the man would have a very nice woman friend. she had not very heartily responded. she was markedly sympathetic towards englishmen, but towards english women--no! and especially she did not want to know any english women in the same situation as herself. lonely? impossible! bored? impossible! she had an establishment. she had a civil list. her days passed like an arabian dream. she never had an unfilled moment, and when each day was over she always remembered little things which she had meant to do and had not found time to do. she was a superb sleeper, and arose at noon. three o'clock usually struck before her day had fairly begun--unless, of course, she happened to be very busy, in which case she would be ready for contact with the world at the lunch-hour. her main occupation was to charm, allure, and gratify a man; for that she lived. her distractions were music, the reading of novels, _le journal_, and _les grandes modes_. and for the war she knitted. in her new situation it was essential that she should do something for the war. therefore she knitted, being a good knitter, and her knitting generally lay about. she popped into the dining-room to see if the table was well set for dinner. it was, but in order to show that marie did not know everything, she rearranged somewhat the flowers in the central bowl. then she returned to the drawing-room, and sat down at the piano and waited. the instant of arrival approached. gilbert's punctuality was absolute, always had been; sometimes it alarmed her. she could not have to wait more than a minute or two, according to the inexactitude of her clock.... the bell rang, and simultaneously she began to play a five-finger exercise. often in the old life she had executed upon him this innocent subterfuge, to make him think she practised the piano to a greater extent than she actually did, that indeed she was always practising. it never occurred to her that he was not deceived. hear marie fly to the front door! see christine's face, see her body, as in her pale, bright gown she peeps round the half-open door of the drawing-room! she lives, then. her eyes sparkle for the giver of all good, for the adored, and her brow is puckered for him, and the jewels on her hand burn for him, and every pleat of her garments visible and invisible is pleated for him. she is a child. she has snatched up a chocolate, and put it between her teeth, and so she offers the half of it to him, smiling, silent. she is a child, but she is also a woman intensely skilled in her art.... "monster!" she said. "come this way." and she led him down the tunnel to the bedroom. there, in a corner of the bathroom, stood an antique closed toilet-stand, such as was used by men in the days before splashing and sousing were invented. she had removed it from the drawing-room. "open it," she commanded. he obeyed. its little compartments, which had been empty, were filled with a man's toilet instruments--brushes, file, scissors, shaving-soap (his own brand), a safety-razor, &c. the set was complete. she had known exactly the requirements. "it is a little present from thy woman," she said. "in future thou wilt have no excuse--sit down. marie!" "madame?" "take off the boots of monsieur." marie knelt. christine found the new slippers. "and now this!" she said, after he had washed and used the new brushes, producing a black house-jacket with velvet collar and cuffs. "how tired thou must be after thy day!" she murmured, patting him with tiny pats. "thou knowest, my little one," she said, pointing to the gas-stove in the bedroom fireplace. "for the other rooms a gas-stove--i am indifferent. but the bedroom is something else. the bedroom is sacred. i could not tolerate a gas-stove in the bedroom. a coal fire is necessary to me. you do not think so?" "yes," he said. "you are quite right. it shall be seen to." "can i give the order? thou permittest me to give the order?" "certainly." in the drawing-room she cushioned him well in the best easy-chair, and, sitting down on a pouf near him, began to knit like an industrious wife who understands the seriousness of war. nothing escaped the attention of that man. he espied the telegram. "what's that?" "ah!" she cried, springing up and giving it to him. "stupid that i am! i forgot." he looked at the address. "how did this come here?" he asked mildly. "marie brought it--from the albany." "oh!" he opened the telegram and read it, having dropped the envelope into the silk-lined, gilded waste-paper basket by the fender. "it is nothing serious?" she questioned. "no. business." he might have shown it to her--he had shown her telegrams before--but he stuck it into his pocket. then, without a word to christine, he rang the bell, and marie appeared. "marie! the telegram--why did you bring it here?" "monsieur, it was like this. i went to monsieur's flat to fetch two aprons that i had left there. the telegram was on the console in the ante-chamber. knowing that monsieur was to come direct here, i brought it." "does mrs. braiding know you brought it?" "ah! as for mrs. braiding, monsieur--" marie stopped, disclaiming any responsibility for mrs. braiding, of whom she was somewhat jealous. "i thought to do well." "i am sure of it. but surely you can see you have been indiscreet. don't do it again." "no, monsieur. i ask pardon of monsieur." immediately afterwards he said to christine in a gay, careless tone: "and this gas-stove here? is it all right? have we tried it? let us try it." "the weather is warm, dearest." "but just to try it. i always like to satisfy myself--in time." "fusser!" she exclaimed, and ignited the stove. he gazed at it absently, then picked up a cigarette and, taking the telegram from his pocket, folded it into a spill and with it lit the cigarette. "yes," he said meditatively. "it seems not a bad stove." and he held the spill till it had burnt to his finger-ends. then he extinguished the stove. she said to herself: "he has burned the telegram on purpose. but how cleverly he did it! ah! that man! there is none but him!" she was disquieted about the telegram. she feared it. her superstitiousness was awakened. she thought of her apostasy from catholicism to protestantism. she thought of a holy virgin angered. and throughout the evening and throughout the night, amid her smiles and teasings and coaxings and caresses and ecstasies and all her accomplished, voluptuous girlishness, the image of a resentful holy virgin flitted before her. why should he burn a business telegram? also, was he not at intervals a little absent-minded? chapter the window g.j. sat on the oilcloth-covered seat of the large overhanging open bay-window. below him was the river, tributary of the severn; in front the old bridge, with an ancient street rising beyond, and above that the silhouette of the roofs of wrikton surmounted by the spire of its vast church. to the left was the weir, and the cliffs were there also, and the last tints of the sunset. somebody came into the coffee-room. g.j. looked round, hoping that it might, after all, be concepcion. but it was concepcion's maid, emily, an imitative young woman who seemed to have caught from her former employer the quality of strange, sinister provocativeness. she paused a moment before speaking. her thin figure was somewhat indistinct in the twilight. "mrs. smith wishes me to say that she will certainly be well enough to take you to the station in the morning, sir," said she in her specious tones. "but she hopes you will be able to stay till the afternoon train." "i shan't." he shook his head. "very well, sir." and after another moment's pause emily, apparently with a challenging reluctance, receded through the shadows of the room and vanished. g.j. was extremely depressed and somewhat indignant. he gazed down bitterly at the water, following with his eye the incredibly long branches of the tree that from the height of the buttresses drooped perpendicularly into the water. he had had an astounding week-end; and for having responded to concepcion's telegram, for having taken the telegram seriously, he had deserved what he got. thus he argued. she had met him on the hot saturday afternoon in a ford car. she did not look ill. she looked as if she had fairly recovered from her acute neurasthenia. she was smartly and carelessly dressed in a summer sporting costume, and had made a strong contrast to every other human being on the platform of the small provincial station. the car drove not to the famous principal hotel, but to a small hotel just beyond the bridge. she had given him tea in the coffee-room and taken him out again, on foot, showing him the town--the half-timbered houses, the immense castle, the market-hall, the spacious flat-fronted residences, the multiplicity of solicitors, banks and surveyors, the bursting provision shops with imposing fractions of animals and expensive pies, and the drapers with ladies' blouses at s. d. then she had conducted him to an organ recital in the vast church where, amid faint gas-jets and beadles and stalls and stained glass and holiness and centuries of history and the high respectability of the town, she had whispered sibilantly, and other people had whispered, in the long intervals of the organ. she had removed him from the church before the collection for the red cross, and when they had eaten a sort of dinner she had borne him away to the russian dancers in the moot hall. she said she had seen the russian dancers once already, and that they were richly worth to him a six-hours' train journey. the posters of the russian dancers were rather daring and seductive. the russian dancers themselves were the most desolating stage spectacle that g.j. had ever witnessed. the troupe consisted of intensely english girls of various ages, and girl-children. the costumes had obviously been fabricated by the artistes. the artistes could neither dance, pose, group, make an entrance, make an exit, nor even smile. the ballets, obviously fabricated by the same persons as the costumes, had no plot, no beginning and no end. crude amateurishness was the characteristic of these honest and hard-working professionals, who somehow contrived to be neither men nor women--and assuredly not epicene--but who travelled from country town to country town in a glamour of posters, exciting the towns, in spite of a perfect lack of sex, because they were the fabled russian dancers. the moot hall was crammed with adults and their cackling offspring, who heartily applauded the show, which indeed was billed as a "return visit" due to "terrific success" on a previous occasion. "is it not too marvellous," concepcion had said. he had admitted that it was. but the boredom had been excruciating. in the street they had bought an evening paper of which he had never before heard the name, to learn news of the war. the war, however, seemed very far off; it had grown unreal. "we'll talk to-morrow," concepcion had said, and gone abruptly to bed! still, he had slept well in the soft climate, to the everlasting murmur of the weir. then the sunday. she was indisposed, could not come down to breakfast, but hoped to come down to lunch, could not come down to lunch, but hoped to come down to tea, could not come down to tea--and so on to nightfall. the sunday had been like a thousand years to him. he had learnt the town, and the suburbs of it; the grass-grown streets, the main thoroughfares, and the slums; by the afternoon he was recognising familiar faces in the town. he had twice made the classic round--along the cliffs, over the new bridge (which was an antique), up the hill to the castle, through the market-place, down the high street to the old bridge. he had explored the brain of the landlord, who could not grapple with a time-table, and who spent most of the time during closed hours in patiently bolting the front door which g.j. was continually opening. he had talked to the old customer who, whenever the house was open, sat at a table in the garden over a mug of cider. he had played through all the musical comedies, dance albums and pianoforte albums that littered the piano. he had read the same sunday papers that he read in the albany. and he had learnt the life-history of the sole servant, a very young agreeable woman with a wedding-ring and a baby, which baby she carried about with her when serving at table. her husband was in france. she said that as soon as she had received his permission to do so she should leave, as she really could not get through all the work of the hotel and mind and feed a baby. she said also that she played the piano herself. and she regretted that baby and pressure of work had deprived her of a sight of the russian dancers, because she had heard so much about them, and was sure they were beautiful. this detail touched g.j.'s heart to a mysterious and sweet and almost intolerable melancholy. he had not made the acquaintance of fellow-guests--for there were none, save concepcion and emily. and in the evening as in the morning the weir placidly murmured, and the river slipped smoothly between the huge jutting buttresses of the old bridge; and the thought of the perpetuity of the river, in whose mirror the venerable town was a mushroom, obsessed him, mastered him, and made him as old as the river. he was wonder-struck and sorrow-struck by life, and by his own life, and by the incomprehensible and angering fantasy of concepcion. his week-end took on the appearance of the monstrous. then the door opened again, and concepcion entered in a white gown, the antithesis of her sporting costume of the day before. she approached through the thickening shadows of the room, and the vague whiteness of her gown reminded him of the whiteness of the form climbing the chimney-ladder on the roof of lechford house in the raid. knowing her, he ought to have known that, having made him believe that she would not come down, she would certainly come down. he restrained himself, showed no untoward emotion, and said in a calm, genial voice: "oh! i'm so glad you were well enough to come down." she sat opposite to him in the window-seat, rather sideways, so that her skirt was pulled close round her left thigh and flowed free over the right. he could see her still plainly in the dusk. "i've never yet apologised to you for my style of behaviour at the committee of yours," she began abruptly in a soft, kind, reasonable voice. "i know i let you down horribly. yes, yes! i did. and i ought to apologise to you for to-day too. but i don't think i'll apologise to you for bringing you to wrikton and this place. they're not real, you know. they're an illusion. there is no such place as wrikton and this river and this window. there couldn't be, could there? queen and i motored over here once from paulle--it's not so very far--and we agreed that it didn't really exist. i never forgot it; i was determined to come here again some time, and that's why i chose this very spot when half harley street stood up and told me i must go away somewhere after my cure and be by myself, far from the pernicious influence of friends. i think i gave you a very fair idea of the town yesterday. but i didn't show you the funniest thing in it--the inside of a solicitor's office. you remember the large grey stone house in mill street--the grass street, you know--with 'simpover and simpover' on the brass plate, and the strip of green felt nailed all round the front door to keep the wind out in winter. well, it's all in the same key inside. and i don't know which is the funniest, the russian dancers, or the green felt round the front door, or mr. simpover, or the other mr. simpover. i'm sure neither of those men is real, though they both somehow have children. you remember the yellow cards that you see in so many of the windows: 'a man has gone from this house to fight for king and country!'--the elder mr. simpover thinks it would be rather boastful to put the card in the window, so he keeps it on the mantelpiece in his private office. it's for his son. and yet i assure you the father isn't real. he is like the town, he simply couldn't be real." "what have _you_ been up to in the private office?" g.j. asked lightly. "making my will." "what for?" "isn't it the proper thing to do? i've left everything to you." "you haven't, con!" he protested. there was absolutely no tranquillity about this woman. with her, the disconcerting unexpected happened every five minutes. "did you suppose i was going to send any of my possessions back to my tropical relatives in south america? i've left everything to you to do what you like with. squander it if you like, but i expect you'll give it to war charities. anyhow, i thought it would be safest in your hands." he retorted in a tone quietly and sardonically challenging: "but i was under the impression you were cured." "of my neurasthenia?" "yes." "i believe i am. i gained thirteen pounds in the nursing home, and slept like a greengrocer. in fact, the weir-mitchell treatment, with modern improvements of course, enjoyed a marvellous triumph in my case. but that's not the point. g.j., i know you think i behaved very childishly yesterday, and that i deserved to be ill to-day for what i did yesterday. and i admit you're a saint for not saying so. but i wasn't really childish, and i haven't really been ill to-day. i've only been in a devil of a dilemma. i wanted to tell you something. i telegraphed for you so that i could tell you. but as soon as i saw you i was afraid to tell you. not afraid, but i couldn't make up my mind whether i ought to tell you or not. i've lain in bed all day trying to decide the point. to-night i decided i oughtn't, and then all of a sudden, just now, i became an automaton and put on some things, and here i am telling you." she paused. g.j. kept silence. then she continued, in a voice in which persuasiveness was added to calm, engaging reasonableness: "now you must get rid of all your conventional ideas, g.j. because you're rather conventional. you must be completely straight--i mean intellectually--otherwise i can't treat you as an intellectual equal, and i want to. you must be a realist--if any man can be." she spoke almost with tenderness. he felt mysteriously shy, and with a brusque movement of the head shifted his glance from her to the river. "well?" he questioned, his gaze fixed on the water that continually slipped in large, swirling, glinting sheets under the bridge. "i'm going to kill myself." at first the words made no impression on him. he replied: "you were right when you said this place was an illusion. it is." and then he began to be afraid. did she mean it? she was capable of anything. and he was involved in her, inescapably. yes, he was afraid. nevertheless, as she kept silence he went on--with bravado: "and how do you intend to do it?" "that will be my affair. but i venture to say that my way of doing it will make wrikton historic," she said, curiously gentle. "trust you!" he exclaimed, suddenly looking at her. "con, why _will_ you always be so theatrical?" she changed her posture for an easier one, half reclining. her face and demeanour seemed to have the benign masculinity of a man's. "i'm sorry," she answered. "i oughtn't to have said that. at any rate, to you. i ought to have had more respect for your feelings." he said: "you aren't cured. that's evident. all this is physical." "of course it's physical, g.j.," she agreed, with an intonation of astonishment that he should be guilty of an utterance so obvious and banal. "did you ever know anything that wasn't? did you ever even conceive anything that wasn't? if you can show me how to conceive spirit except in terms of matter, i'd like to listen to you." "it's against nature--to kill yourself." "oh!" she murmured. "i'm quite used to that charge. you aren't by any means the first to accuse me of being against nature. but can you tell me where nature ends? that's another thing i'd like to know.... my dear friend, you're being conventional, and you aren't being realistic. you must know perfectly well in your heart that there's no reason why i shouldn't kill myself if i want to. you aren't going to talk to me about the ten commandments, i suppose, are you? there's a risk, of course, on the other side--shore--but perhaps it's worth taking. you aren't in a position to say it isn't worth taking. and at worst the other shore must be marvellous. it may possibly be terrible, if you arrive too soon and without being asked, but it must be marvellous.... naturally, i believe in immortality. if i didn't, the thing wouldn't be worth doing. oh! i should hate to be extinguished. but to change one existence for another, if the fancy takes you--that seems to me the greatest proof of real independence that anybody can give. it's tremendous. you're playing chess with fate and fate's winning, and you knock up the chess-board and fate has to begin all over again! can't you see how tremendous it is--and how tempting it is? the temptation is terrific." "i can see all that," said g.j. he was surprised by a sudden sense of esteem for the mighty volition hidden behind those calm, worn, gracious features. but concepcion's body was younger than her face. he perceived, as it were for the first time, that concepcion was immeasurably younger than himself; and yet she had passed far beyond him in experience. "but what's the origin of all this? what do you want to do it for? what's happened?" "then you believe i mean to do it?" "yes," he replied sincerely, and as naturally as he could. "that's the tone i like to hear," said she, smiling. "i felt sure i could count on you not to indulge in too much nonsense. well, i'm going to try the next avatar just to remind fate of my existence. i think fate's forgotten me, and i can stand anything but that. i've lost carly, and i've lost queen.... oh, g.j.! isn't it awful to think that when i offered you queen she'd already gone, and it was only her dead body i was offering you? ... and i've lost my love. and i've failed, and i shall never be any more good here. i swore i would see a certain thing through, and i haven't seen it through, and i can't! but i've told you all this before.... what's left? even my unhappiness is leaving me. unless i kill myself i shall cease to exist. don't you understand? yes, you do." after a marked pause she added: "and i may overtake queen." "there's one thing i don't understand," he said, "as we're being frank with each other. why do you tell me? has it occurred to you that you're really making me a party to this scheme of yours?" he spoke with a perfectly benevolent detachment deriving from hers. and as he spoke he thought of a man whom he had once known and who had committed suicide, and of all that he had read about suicides and what he had thought of them. suicides had been incomprehensible to him, and either despicable or pitiable. and he said to himself: "here is one of them! (or is it an illusion?) but she has made all my notions of suicide seem ridiculous." she answered his spoken question with vivacity: "why do i tell you? i don't know. that's the point i've been arguing to myself all night and all day. _i'm_ not telling you. something _in_ me is forcing me to tell you. perhaps it's much more important that you should comprehend me than that you should be spared the passing worry that i'm causing you by showing you the inside of my head. you're the only friend i have left. i knew you before i knew carly. i practically committed suicide from my particular world at the beginning of the war. i was going back to my particular world--you remember, g.j., in that little furnished flat--i was going back to it, but you wouldn't let me. it was you who definitely cut me off from my past. i might have been gadding about safely with sarah churcher and her lot at this very hour, but you would have it otherwise, and so i finished up with neurasthenia. you commanded and i obeyed." "well," he said, ignoring all her utterance except the last words, "obey me again." "what do you want me to do?" she demanded wistfully and yet defiantly. her features were tending to disappear in the tide of night, but she happened to sit up and lean forward and bring them a little closer to him. "you've no right to stop me from doing what i want to do. what right have you to stop me? besides, you can't stop me. nothing can stop me. it is settled. everything is arranged." he, too, sat up and leaned forward. in a voice rendered soft by the realisation of the fact that he had indeed known her before carlos smith knew her and had imagined himself once to be in love with her, and of the harshness of her destiny and the fading of her glory, he said simply and yet, in spite of himself, insinuatingly: "no! i don't claim any right to stop you. i understand better, perhaps, than you think. but let me come down again next week-end. do let me," he insisted, still more softly. even while he was speaking he expected her to say, "you're only suggesting that in order to gain time." but she said: "how can you be sure it wouldn't be my inquest and funeral i should be 'letting' you come down to?" he replied: "i could trust you." a delicate night-gust charged with the scent of some plant came in at the open window and deranged ever so slightly a glistening lock on her forehead. g.j., peering at her, saw the masculinity melt from her face. he saw the mysterious resurrection of the girl in her, and felt in himself the sudden exciting outflow from her of that temperamental fluid whose springs had been dried up since the day when she learnt of her widowhood. she flushed. he looked away into the dark water, as though he had profanely witnessed that which ought not to be witnessed. earlier in the interview she had inspired him with shyness. he was now stirred, agitated, thrilled--overwhelmed by the effect on her of his own words and his own voice. he was afraid of his power, as a prophet might be afraid of his power. he had worked a miracle--a miracle infinitely more convincing than anything that had led up to it. the miracle had brought back the reign of reality. "very well," she quivered. and there was a movement and she was gone. he glanced quickly behind him, but the room lay black.... a transient pallor on the blackness, and the door banged. he sat a long time, solemn, gazing at the serrated silhouette of the town against a sky that obstinately held the wraith of daylight, and listening to the everlasting murmur of the invisible weir. not a sound came from the town, not the least sound. when at length he stumbled out, he saw the figure of the landlord smoking the pipe of philosophy, and waiting with a landlord's fatalism for the last guest to go to bed. and they talked of the weather. chapter the envoy the next night g.j., having been hailed by an acquaintance, was talking at the top of the steps beneath the portal of a club in piccadilly. it was after ten by the clocks, and nearly, but not quite, dark. a warm, rather heavy, evening shower had ceased. this was the beginning of the great macintosh epoch, by-product of the war, when the paucity of the means of vehicular locomotion had rendered macintoshes permissible, even for women with pretensions to smartness; and at intervals stylish girls on their way home from unaccustomed overtime, passed the doors in transparent macintoshes of pink, yellow or green, as scornful as military officers of the effeminate umbrella, whose use was being confined to clubmen and old dowdies. the acquaintance sought advice from g.j. about the shutting up of households for belgian refugees. g.j. answered absently, not concealing that he was in a hurry. he had, in fact, been held up within three minutes of the scene of his secret idyll, and was anxious to arrive there. he had promised himself this surprise visit to christine as some sort of recompense and narcotic for the immense disturbance of spirit which he had suffered at wrikton. that morning concepcion had been invisible, but at his early breakfast he had received a note from her, a brief but masterly composition, if ever so slightly theatrical. he was conscious of tenderness for concepcion, of sympathy with her, of a desire to help to restore her to that which by misfortune she had lost. but the first of these sentiments he resolutely put aside. he was determined to change his mood towards her for the sake of his own tranquillity; and he had convinced himself that his wise, calm, common sense was capable of saving her from any tragic and fatal folly. he had her in the hollow of his hand; but if she was expecting too much from him she would be gradually disappointed. he must have peace; he could not allow a bomb to be thrown into his habits; he was a bachelor of over fifty whose habits had the value of inestimable jewels and whose perfect independence was the most precious thing in the world. at his age he could not marry a volcano, a revolution, a new radio-active element exhibiting properties which were an enigma to social science. concepcion would turn his existence into an endless drama of which she alone, with her deep-rooted, devilish talent for the sensational, would always choose the setting, as she had chosen the window and the weir. no; he must not mistake affectionate sympathy for tenderness, nor tolerate the sexual exploitation of his pity. as he listened and talked to the acquaintance his inner mind shifted with relief to the vision of christine, contented and simple and compliant in her nest--christine, at once restful and exciting, christine, the exquisite symbol of acquiescence and response. what a contrast to concepcion! it had been a bold and sudden stroke to lift christine to another plane, but a stroke well justified and entirely successful, fulfilling his dream. at this moment he noticed a figure pass the doorway in whose shadow he was, and he exclaimed within himself incredulously: "that is christine!" in the shortest possible delay he said "good-night" to his acquaintance, and jumped down the steps and followed eastwards the figure. he followed warily, for already the strange and distressing idea had occurred to him that he must not overtake her--if she it was. it was she. he caught sight of her again in the thick obscurity by the prison-wall of devonshire house. he recognised the peculiar brim of the new hat and the new "military" umbrella held on the wrist by a thong. what was she doing abroad? she could not be going to a theatre. she had not a friend in london. he was her london. and la mère gaston was not with her. theoretically, of course, she was free. he had laid down no law. but it had been clearly understood between them that she should never emerge at night alone. she herself had promulgated the rule, for she had a sense of propriety and a strong sense of reality. she had belonged to the class which respectable, broadminded women, when they bantered g.j., always called "the pretty ladies," and as a postulant for respectability she had for her own satisfaction to mind her p's and q's. she could not afford not to keep herself above suspicion. she had been a courtesan. did she look like one? as an individual figure in repose, no! none could have said that she did. he had long since learnt that to decide always correctly by appearance, and apart from environment and gesture, whether an unknown woman was or was not a wanton, presented a task beyond the powers of even the completest experience. but christine was walking in piccadilly at night, and he soon perceived that she was discreetly showing the demeanour of a courtesan at her profession--she who had hated and feared the pavement! he knew too well the signs--the waverings, the turns of the head, the variations in speed, the scarcely perceptible hesitations, the unmistakable air of wandering with no definite objective. near dover street he hastened through the thin, reflecting mire, amid beams of light and illuminated numbers that advanced upon him in both directions thundering or purring, and crossed piccadilly, and hurried ahead of her, to watch her in safety from the other side of the thoroughfare. he could hardly see her; she was only a moving shadow; but still he could see her; and in the long stretch of gloom beneath the facade of the royal academy he saw the shadow pause in front of a military figure, which by a flank movement avoided the shadow and went resolutely forward. he lost her in front of the piccadilly hotel, and found her again at the corner of air street. she swerved into air street and crossed regent street; he was following. in denman street, close to shaftesbury avenue, she stood still in front of another military figure--a common soldier as it proved--who also rebuffed her. the thing was flagrant. he halted, and deliberately let her go from his sight. she vanished into the dark crowds of the avenue. in horrible humiliation, in atrocious disgust, he said to himself: "never will i set eyes on her again! never! never!" why was she doing it? not for money. she could only be doing it from the nostalgia of adventurous debauch. she was the slave of her temperament, as the drunkard is the slave of his thirst. he had told her that he would be out of town for the week end, on committee business. he had distinctly told her that she must on no account expect him on the monday night. and her temperament had roused itself from the obscene groves of her subconsciousness like a tiger and come up and driven her forth. how easy for her to escape from la mère gaston if she chose! and yet--would she dare, even at the bidding of the tiger, to introduce a stranger into the flat? unnecessary, he reflected. there were a hundred accommodating dubious interiors between shaftesbury avenue and leicester square. he understood; he neither accused nor pardoned; but he was utterly revolted, and wounded not merely in his soul but in the most sensitive part of his soul--his pride. he called himself by the worst epithet of opprobrium: simpleton! the bold and sudden stroke had now become the fatuous caprice of a damned fool. had he, at his age, been capable of overlooking the elementary axiom: once a wrong 'un, always a wrong 'un? had he believed in reclamation? he laughed out his disgust ... no! he did not blame her. to blame her would have been ridiculous. she was only what she was, and not worth blame. she was nothing at all. how right, how cursedly right, were the respectable dames in the accent of amused indifference which they employed for their precious phrase, "the pretty ladies"! well, he would treat her generously--but through his lawyer. and in the desolation, the dismay, the disillusion, the nausea which ravaged him he was unwillingly conscious of fragments of thoughts that flickered like transient flames far below in the deep mines of his being.... "you are an astounding woman, con." ... "do you want me to go to the bad altogether?" ... in offering him queen had not concepcion made the supreme double sacrifice of attempting to bring together, at the price of her own separation from both of them, the two beings to whom she was most profoundly attached? it was a marvellous deed.... worry, volcanoes, revolutions--was he afraid of them?... were they not the very essence of life?... a figure of nobility!... sitting there now by the window over the river, listening to the weir.... "i shall never be any more good." ... but she never had a gesture that was not superb.... was he really encrusted in habits? really like men whom he knew and despised at his club?... she loved him.... and what rich, flattering love was her love compared to--!... she was young.... tenderness.... such were the flames of dim promise that nickered immeasurably beneath the dark devastation of his mind. he ignored them, but he could not ignore them. he extinguished them, but they were continually relighted.... a wedding?... what sort of a wedding?... poor carlos, pathetically buried under the ruthless happiness of others! what a shame!... poor carlos! (nice enough little cocotte, nothing else! but, of course, incurable!... he remembered all her crimes now. how she had been late in dressing for their first dinner. her inexplicable vanishing from the supper-party, never explained, but easily explicable now, perhaps. and so on and so on.... simpleton! ass!) he had walked heedless of direction. he was near lechford house. many of its windows were lit. the great front doors were open. a commissionaire stood on guard in front of them. to the railings was affixed a newly-painted notice: "no person will be allowed to enter these premises without a pass. to this rule there is no exception." lechford house had been "taken over" in its entirety by a government department that believed in the virtue of mystery and of long hours. he looked up at the higher windows. he could not distinguish the chimney amid the newly-revealed stars. he thought of queen, the white woman. evidently he had never understood queen, for if concepcion admired her she was worth admiration. concepcion never made a mistake in assessing fundamental character. the complete silent absorption of lechford house into the war-machine rather dismayed him. he had seen not a word as to the affair in the newspapers--and lechford house was one of the final strongholds of privilege! he strolled on into the quietness of the park--of which one of the gate-keepers said to him that it would be shutting in a few minutes. he was in solitude, and surrounded by london. he stood still, and the vast sea of war seemed to be closing over him. the war was growing, or the sense of its measureless scope was growing. it had sprung, not out of this crime or that, but out of the secret invisible roots of humanity, and it was widening to the limits of evolution itself. it transcended judgment. it defied conclusions and rendered equally impossible both hope and despair. his pride in his country was intensified as months passed; his faith in his country was not lessened. and yet, wherein was the efficacy of grim words about british tenacity? the great new somme offensive was not succeeding in the north. was victory possible? was victory deserved? in his daily labour he was brought into contact with too many instances of official selfishness, folly, ignorance, stupidity, and sloth, french as well as british, not to marvel at times that the conflict had not come to an ignominious end long ago through simple lack of imagination. he knew that he himself had often failed in devotion, in rectitude, in sheer grit. the supreme lesson of the war was its revelation of what human nature actually was. and the solace of the lesson, the hope for triumph, lay in the fact that human nature must be substantially the same throughout the world. if we were humanly imperfect, so at least was the enemy. perhaps the frame of society was about to collapse. perhaps queen, deliberately courting destruction, and being destroyed, was the symbol of society. what matter? perhaps civilisation, by its nobility and its elements of reason, and by the favour of destiny, would be saved from disaster after frightful danger, and concepcion was its symbol.... all he knew was that he had a heavy day's work before him on the morrow, and in relief from pain and insoluble problems he turned to face that work, thankful; thankful that (owing originally to queen!) he had discovered in the war a task which suited his powers, which was genuinely useful, and which would only finish with the war; thankful for the prospect of meeting concepcion at the week-end and exploring with her the marvellous provocative potentialities that now drew them together; thankful, too, that he had a balanced and sagacious mind, and could judge justly. (yes, he was already forgetting his bitter condemnation of himself as a simpleton!) how in his human self-sufficiency could he be expected to know that he had judged the negligible christine unjustly? was he divine that he could see in the figure of the wanton who peered at soldiers in the street a self-convinced mystic envoy of the most clement virgin, an envoy passionately repentant after apostasy, bound at all costs to respond to an imagined voice long unheard, and seeking--though in vain this second time--the protégé of the virgin so that she might once more succour and assuage his affliction? the life and amours of the beautiful, gay and dashing kate percival the belle of the delaware written by herself voluptuous, exciting, amorous and delighting london - paris volume one chapter i childhood i am about to do a bold thing. i am about to give to the world the particulars of a life fraught with incident and adventure. i am about to lift the veil from the most voluptuous scenes. i shall disguise nothing, conceal nothing, but shall relate everything that has happened to me just as it occurred. i am what is called a woman of pleasure, and have drained its cup to the very dregs. i have the most extraordinary scenes to depict, but although i shall place everything before the reader in the most explicit language, i shall be careful not to wound his or her sense of decency by the use of coarse words, feeling satisfied there is more charm in a story decently told than in the bold unblushing use of term which ought never to sully a woman's lips. i was born in a small village in the state of pennsylvania, situated on the banks of the delaware, and about thirty miles from philadelphia. my father's house was most romantically situated within a few yards of the river. it was supported as it were, at the back by a high hill, which, in summer was covered with green trees and bushes. on each side of the dwelling was a wood so dense and thick that a stranger un-acquainted with the paths through it could not enter. in front of the house, the river on sunshiny days gleamed and glistened in the rays of the sun, and the white sails passing and repassing formed quite a picturesque scene. at night, however, especially in the winter time, the scene was different. then the wind would howl and moan through the leafless trees and the river would beat against the rocks in a most mournful cadence. to this day i can remember the effect it had on my youthful mind, and whenever i hear the wind whistling at night, it always recalls, to my memory my birth place. my father was a stern, austere man, usually very silent and reserved. i only remembered seeing him excited once or twice. my mother had died in my infancy--(i was but fifteen months at the time) and my father's sister became his housekeeper. i had but one brother a year older than myself. how well i remember him, a fine noble-hearted boy full of love and affection. we were neglected by our father and aunt, and left to get through our childhood's days as best we could. we would wander together hand in hand by the river side or in the woods, and often cry ourselves to sleep in each other's arms at our father's want of affection for us. we enjoyed none of the gayeties, none of the sports of youth. the chill of our home appeared to follow us wherever we went, and no matter how brightly the sun shone, it could not dissipate the chill around our hearts. i never remember seeing my father even smile. a continual gloom hung over him, and he usually kept himself locked in his room except at meal times. this life continued until i was ten years of age, when one day my father informed me that the next day i was to go to philadelphia to a boarding school. at first i was glad to hear it, for any change from the dull monotony of that solitary house must be an agreeable one to me. i ran to the garden to tell my brother; but the moment i mentioned it, harry threw himself sobbing in my arms. "will you leave me, kate!" he exclaimed, "what will i do when you are gone, i shall be so lonely--so very lonely without you?" "but harry, darling," i returned, "i shall be back again in a few months, and then i shall have so much to tell you, and we shall have such nice walks together." i succeeded in calming him, especially as our father informed him before the day was over that he too was to go to a boarding school in the city of baltimore. that evening we took our last ramble together before we left home. it was the month of june, and all nature was decked in her gayest apparel. it was a beautiful moon-light night, and the hair [sic] was fragrant with the odor of june roses, of which there were a large number in the garden. we wandered by the side of the river and watched the moon rays playing on the surface of the water, while a gentle breeze murmured softly through the pine trees. on that evening we settled our future life. it was arranged between us that when harry grew up to be a man i should go and keep his house. we dwelt a long time on the pleasures of such life. at last it was time for us to return to the house, we embraced each other tenderly and separated. the next morning i left very early, and in a few hours reached my destination and was enrolled among the pupils of b.... seminary, i shall not dwell long on my school days, although i might devote much of space to them. i was not a popular girl in the school--i was too cold, too reserved, and some of the girls said too proud. i took no pleasure in girlish sports, but my chief amusement was reading. i would retire to a corner of the school room and while the other girls were at play--i would be plunged in the mysteries of mrs. radcliffs novels, or some other work of the same character. frequently the principal insisted on my shutting up my book and going out to play, but i would creep back when she had left the schoolroom, and resume my favorite occupation. i remained at school seven years, and during that time i never once visited home, for my father made a special agreement that i was to spend my vacation at school. it is strange that, considering the prominent part i had played in the court of venus, that up to the age of seventeen, not a single thought concerning the relation of the sexes ever entered my head. i had up to that age never experienced the slightest longing or desire and looked on all men with the utmost indifference. and yet i knew that i was called beautiful and was the envy of all my school fellows. i have not yet given a description of myself to the reader and it is nothing but right that i should do so. at the age of seventeen my charms were well developed, and although they had not attained the ripe fullness which a few years later was the admiration and delight of all my adorers, still i possessed all the insignia of womanhood. in stature i was above the medium height, my hair was a dark auburn and hung in massive bands on a white neck. my eyes were a deep blue and possessed a languishing voluptuous expression; they were fringed with long silky eyelashes and arched with brows so finely pencilled that i have often been accused of using art to give them their graceful appearance. my features were classically regular, my skin of dazzling whiteness, my shoulders were gracefully rounded and my bust faultless in its contours. my more secret charms i shall describe at some future time when i shall have to expose them to the reader's gaze. i have said that up to the age of seventeen i had never experienced the slightest sexual desire. the spark of voluptuousness which has ever since burnt so fiercely in my breast was destined to be lighted up by one of my own sex. yes, dear laura, it was you who first taught me the delights and joys of love; it was you who first kindled that flame of desire that has caused me to experience twelve years of delirious bliss; it was to your gentle teaching, sweet friend, that i owe my initiation in all the mysteries of the court of venus; it was your soft hand that pointed out to me that path of pleasure--and all the delight shown on the wayside. the incident happened in this manner: about three months before i left school we were told one morning that a new music and french teacher would take her abode in b-- seminary the next day. we were all extremely anxious to see her, and at the expected hour she made her appearance. her name was laura castleton, and her father lived in st. mary's county, maryland. she was a brunette, about twenty years of age, and one of the most beautiful girls i ever saw. she was nearly as tall as myself, but considerably stouter, and her body was molded in a most exquisite manner. although her eyes were very black and her hair like the raven's plume, her skin was as white as alabaster. her teeth were as regular as if they had been cut of a solid piece of ivory, and her hands and feet were fairylike in their proportions. i was the eldest girl in the school and laura immediately made me her companion. she was exceedingly intelligent, well educated, and well read. i was soon attracted to her and we became inseparable. we would pass all our spare time reading to each other or in conversation on literary subjects. i agreed to love her with my whole heart, and was never happy outside of her company. "laura," i said to her one day when we were walking on the playground with our arms around each other's waist, "why can't we sleep together?" "would you like it, kate?" she asked, bending her black eyes upon my face with a peculiar gloom in them which sent the blood rushing to my cheeks--but why and wherefore i did not know. "indeed i would, laura. it would be so nice to lie in your arms all night." "well, darling, i will ask mrs. b--. i have no doubt that she will give her consent." the lovely girl drew me towards her and gave me a warmer kiss than she had ever before bestowed upon me. the contact of her easy lips to mine sent an indefinable thrill through my body which i had never experienced before. in the evening she informed me that she had spoken to mrs. b--and that the latter had consented that we should sleep together. i was overjoyed at this news and longed for night to come so that i might recline in my darling's arms. at last the hour of bedtime arrived and i followed laura to her chamber. she put the lamp on the dressing table and, kissing me affectionately, bade me undress myself quickly. we began our toilette for the night. i was undressed first, and having put on my nightgown, i sat down on the side of the bed and watched laura disrobing herself. after she had removed her dress and her petticoats, i could not help being struck with her resplendent charms. her chemise had fallen off her shoulder, beautifully rounded, and two globes of alabaster reposing on a field of snow. she appeared to be entirely unaware that i was watching her, for she sat down on a chair exactly in front of me, and crossing one leg over the other, she began to remove her garters and stockings. this attitude raised her chemise in front, and allowed me to have a full view of her magnificently formed limbs. i even caught sight of her voluptuous thighs. laura caught my eye. "what are you gazing at so earnestly?" she asked. "i am gazing at your beauties, laura." "one would think that you were my lover," returned laura laughingly. "so i am, dear--for you know i love you." "you little witch you, you know well enough what i mean. but if you want to admire beauty, why not look in the glass, for i am not nearly as beautiful as you are, dear kate." "what nonsense, laura," i replied, "but come, let us get into bed." so saying, i jumped between the sheets and was followed almost immediately by laura, who first, however, placed the lamp on a chair by the bedside. she clasped me in her arms and pressed me to her breast, while she kissed my lips, cheek and eyes passionately. the warmth of her embraces and her glowing limbs entwined in mine caused a strange sensation to steal through me. my cheeks burned and i returned her kisses with an ardor that equalled her own. "how delightful it is to be in your arms, dear laura," i exclaimed. "do you really like it?" she replied, pressing me still closer to her. at the same time our nightdresses became disarranged, and i felt her naked thighs pressing against mine. laura kissed me again with even greater warmth than before, and while she was thus engaged she slipped one of her soft hands in the opening of my night-chemise, and i felt it descend on one of my breasts. when i felt this, a trembling seized my limbs and i pressed her convulsively to my heart. "what a voluptuous girl you are, kate," she said, molding my breasts and titillating my nipples. "you set me on fire." "i never felt so happy in my life, laura. i could live and die in your arms." i now carried my hand to her globes of alabaster and pressed and molded them, imitating her in all her actions. nay, more, i turned down the bedclothes and, unbuttoning her nightdress in front, i exposed those charming, snowy hillocks to my delighted gaze. the light of the lamp shone directly upon them, and i was never tired of admiring the whiteness, firmness and splendid development of those glowing semiglobes. i buried my face between them and pressed a thousand kisses on the soft velvet surface. "why kate, you are a perfect volcano," said laura, trembling under my embraces, "and i have been laboring under the delusion that you were an icicle." "i was an icicle, darling, but now i have been melted by your charms." "what a happy man your husband will be," said laura. "happy-why?" "to enfold such a glorious creature as you in his embrace. if you take so much delight with one of your own sex, what will you do when clasped in a man's arms?" "you are jesting, laura. do you suppose for a moment that i will ever allow a man to kiss and embrace me as you do?" "certainly, my love--he will do a great deal more than i do." "more? what can you mean?" "is it possible, kate, that you do not know?" "i really do not know. do tell me, there's a dear girl." "i can scarcely believe it possible that you are seventeen years of age--a perfectly developed woman, and that you know nothing of the mysteries of love. are you not aware, darling, that you possess a jewel about you that a man would give half his lifetime to ravish?" "you speak in riddles, laura. where is this jewel?" "lie perfectly quiet, and i will show you where it is." my cheeks burned and i was all aglow, for i had pretended to be more ignorant than i really was. laura fastened her lips on my breast and placed her hand on one of my thighs. she then slowly carried it up the marble column and at last invaded the very sanctuary of love itself. when i felt her fingers roaming in the mossy covering of that hallowed spot, every moment growing more bold and enterprising, i could not help uttering a faint scream--it was the last cry of expiring modesty, and i grew as hardy and lascivious as my beautiful companion. i stretched my thighs open to their widest extent, the better to second the examination laura was making of my person. the lovely girl appeared to be strangely affected while she was manipulating my secret charms. her eyes shot fire, her bosom heaved, and she began to wiggle her bottom. for some time she played with the hair which thickly covered my mount of venus--twisting it around her fingers, she then gently divided the folding lips and endeavored to penetrate the interior of the mystical grotto--but she could not effect an entrance but was obliged to satisfy herself with titillating the inside of the lips. suddenly flows of pleasure shot through my entire body--for her finger had come in contact with the peeping sentinel that guarded the abode of bliss, an article which until that moment i did not know i possessed. she rubbed it gently, giving me the most exquisite pleasure. if the last remnant of prudery had not taken flight before, this last act would have routed it completely. with a single jerk i threw off the bedclothes, and thus we both lay naked from the waist down. "how magnificently you are formed, dear kate," said laura, examining all my hidden charms with the aid of the lamp. "what glorious thighs, what a delicious bijou, what a thick forest of hair, and what a splendidly developed clitoris. now, sweet girl, i will make you taste the most delicious sensation you have ever experienced in your life. let me do with you as i will." "do what you like with me, darling. i resign myself entirely in your hands." laura now commenced to gently rub my clitoris with her finger, while she kissed my breasts and lips passionately. i soon began again to experience the delicious sensation i have spoken of before; rivers of pleasure permeated through my system. my breasts bounded up and down--my buttocks were set in motion from the effect of her caressing finger, my thighs were stretched widely apart, and my whole body was under the exquisite influence of her scientific manipulations. at last the acme came, a convulsive shivering seized me, i gave two or three convulsive heaves with my buttocks, and in an agony of delight i poured down my first tribute to the god of love. for a quarter of an hour i lay in a complete state of annihilation, and was only recalled from it by the kisses of laura. "darling kate," she exclaimed, "you must give me relief or i shall die--the sight of your enjoyment has lighted up such a fire within me that i shall burn up if you do not quench it." "i will do my best, dear laura, to assuage your desires. you have made me experience such unheard-of delight that i should indeed be wanting in gratitude if i were not to attempt to make you some return." i rose up and, kneeling across her, began to examine at my ease her lovely mons veneris. it was a glorious object, covered over with a mass of black silky hair, through the midst of which i could discern the plump lips folding close together. i placed my finger between them and felt her clitoris swelling beneath it until it actually peeped its little red head from its soft place of concealment. i now advanced one finger and found that it entered her coral sheath with the utmost ease; at the same time it was tightly grasped by the sensitive folds of her vagina. i began to move it in and out, while i kissed her white belly and thighs. "stop, darling," said laura, rising up and going to a drawer, "i will contrive something better to bring on the dissolving period. you are rather a novice as yet in the art of procuring enjoyment." she took from the drawer a dildo, which she fastened securely around my waist, and making me lie on my back, she leaned over me and guided it into her sensitive quiver. she then commenced to move herself rapidly upon it. it was a delicious sight to me; i could see the instrument entering in and out of her luscious grotto while her features expressed the most entrancing enjoyment and her broad white bottom and breasts shivered with pleasure. her motions did not continue long, however. in a few minutes she succumbed and the elixir of love poured down her white thighs. the voluptuous sight before me and the rubbing of the dildo on my clitoris caused me to emit again at the same moment that she did, and we both sank exhausted on the bed. i shall not detain the reader with all the exquisite enjoyments i experienced for the next three months in my lessons with the beautiful laura: suffice it to say that we exhausted every method that two young girls of ardent imagination could propose. at last the time approached for us to separate, and with tears and embraces we bade each other adieu. i returned home and it was several years before i saw the sweet companion of my school days again. chapter ii the mysteries of a convent when i returned home i found my father as gloomy and austere as ever. he welcomed me with a cold kiss and asked me a few questions as to the progress i had made in my studies. my replies did not appear to satisfy him and i had not been home a week before he declared his intention to send me to school again. i was by no means sorry to hear of this resolve, for my brother was finishing his education in new york, and the house was insufferably dull. i was at once dispatched to mount de sales, a convent near baltimore. the inmates of the convent consisted of pupils and nuns--the latter acting as instructresses to the former, assisted by two or three priests. i had been in the convent a year when we received a new pupil named margaret maitland, the daughter of a distinguished lawyer, residing in baltimore. margaret was a beautiful girl about my own age. she was rather tall, her eyes and hair were black, while her skin was of a whiteness ravishing to behold. she was exceedingly religious and spent a great portion of her time in prayer, fasting and vigils. i noticed that she confessed to a father clark very frequently and always appeared very happy and contented when she left the confessional. i felt satisfied that there was something going on which partook more of the flesh than the spirit, and i determined to watch. father clark's apartment was situated at the eastern extremity of the convent. it contained a large closet, and one day i concealed myself in it at the time i knew his penitent would visit him. i had been there but a few minutes before the priest entered. he was about forty years of age, stoutly built and rather handsome. he did not wait long before margaret made her appearance. she looked positively beautiful. her eyes sparkled, her cheeks were flushed, and her bosom rose and fell, showing that she was laboring under some excitement. to my extreme surprise, the moment she entered the room she ran up to father clark, and throwing her white arms round his neck kissed him passionately on the lips. he returned her embraces and drew her on his knee. this sight was entirely novel to me, and my cheeks burned while my eyes almost started from their sockets watching what would be their next proceeding. i had not long to wait, for i saw the priest's officious fingers unbutton margaret's dress in front and deliberately pull it off her ivory shoulders, thus exposing two globes of snow, round, firm, exquisitely formed, and surmounted by two strawberry nipples, which stood out stiff. he pressed and kissed her breasts, absolutely burying his manly face between the soft cushions. he was, however, soon not satisfied with this, but canting her slightly up in his lap, he put his hand up her clothes, and invaded the most secret recesses of her body. this action raised her petticoats in such a manner that it exposed, to my gaze, one of her ivory thighs, which was large, well developed and beautifully rounded. i could see that he was moving his hand rapidly while margaret seemed on the point of dying with delight. after amusing himself a short time in this manner, he suddenly desisted and, slipping her off his lap, placed her on her hands and knees on the floor. he then went to a cupboard and took from it a bunch of rods. margaret remained in the position which he had placed her without making the slightest movement. father clark now walked up to her and, raising her petticoats, threw them over her head, thus exposing, in a moment, all her hidden charms to my excited eyes. it was a delicious sight, sufficient to have seduced the most rigid anchorite. i could see margaret's white buttocks, admirably formed, her two beautiful thighs, and exquisitely formed legs; all was naked from her waist down. situated at the lower portion of her white bottom, between her lovely thighs, i could discern the pouting lips of her bijou, with a line of coral marking the spot where they met. father clark raised the rod and brought it down gently on her broad, white buttocks--their hue was immediately changed to a blushing red, while margaret twisted and turned under the flagellation, every movement revealing more of her exquisite mon veneris. while the priest plied the rod, he appeared to be experiencing the most delicious sensations. margaret's bottom was soon as red as a cherry, but she did not appear to mind the flogging which she was receiving the least bit. when the priest had continued this exercise a few minutes, he threw down the rod, and kneeling on the ground behind her, he unbuttoned his pantaloons, and out leaped his staff of love, stiff, firm and with its ruby head uncovered. he nestled it for a moment between her buttocks, and then gently driving the vermilion lips of her coral sheath with his fingers, he brought his instrument to bear on the luscious opening, and seizing her by the hips, in another moment he was plunged to the very hilt in her beautiful body. when margaret felt that the conjunction was complete she uttered a faint exclamation of joy and wiggled her buttocks from side to side as if to prevent her prisoner from escaping her. the priest now began to move himself in and out of her--and as he did so, i could distinctly see his staff appear and disappear in its warm nest. every time he withdrew, her vagina clasped his instrument so tightly that he drew out the interior lips, and each time that he plunged it into her palpitating body, they were carried in with it. you can imagine my sensations, dear reader, when i saw all this. i instinctively raised my clothes and carried my hand to my own moss-covered retreat, and forcing a finger between the lips, i found it tightly grasped by my vagina, and i imitated all their motions, thrusting it in and out, my eyes being all the time fixed on the amorous couple. the priest was evidently in the seventh heaven of enjoyment, his hands wandered from one beauty to another as if at a loss to know which to take possession of. at one moment it would be her snowy globes which still remained uncovered; at another it would be her white belly, and then again it was the top of her mount of venus. suddenly his motions grew quicker, his staff entered in and out of the coral retreat so rapidly that i could no longer detect the motion. the crisis came, and with a smothered exclamation of joy they both discharged. at the same moment the exciting scene i had witnessed drew from me my tribute to the god of sexual desire. i cultivated margaret's friendship after this, and when i was intimate enough with her i told her all i had seen. she blushed at first, but when she saw that i could be discreet, she confessed the whole truth to me. i found her an able instructress, and was soon even more perfectly _au fait_ in all the mysteries of love, except the actual experience of sexual intercourse with the other sex. she made me a witness of many scenes between herself and father clark, and i soon found they were both perfectly adept in the art of procuring sexual enjoyment. one day i discovered further evidence of the great morality pervading in mount de sales. the lady abbess was a handsome, fine-looking woman of about forty years of age. she was very strict with all the boarders of the convent, except with two sisters named emily and fannie dawson. these two girls were her pets and were always with her. they were both beautiful girls, with flashing dark eyes and beautiful complexions. on the day i refer to, margaret maitland came to me and whispered in my ear that if i would come with her she would show me a pretty sight. i followed and she led me to the lady abbess's room and told me to peep through the keyhole. i did so and saw a very strange scene which i will endeavor to describe to you. seated on a low chair near a large sofa was father price. his pantaloons were down and the lower portion of his body all uncovered; his instrument of love stood stiff and erect. seated sideways towards him on the sofa i have just referred to, was the lady abbess. her dress was off her shoulders, revealing her well-developed bust. the lower portion of her body was entirely naked; one of her feet rested on an ottoman, the other on the ground; by this means one of her thighs was elevated. father price had one finger in her lustful slit, while she had grasped his staff in her hand. he was slowly pushing his finger in and out of her warm nest, and every now and then kissing her broad white buttocks which were entirely at his command. but this was not all; emily and fannie dawson were also there, acting their parts. emily stood on the sofa with her petticoats raised above her naval, thus revealing her delicious thighs, her white belly and the moss-covered domain of venus. she was exquisitely made. the lady abbess was titillating her clitoris with her unoccupied hand, while emily's excited face, the tip of her tongue slightly protruding from her coral lips and the heaves of her alabaster buttocks rising to meet the abbess's deflowering finger, sufficiently showed the intense delights she was enjoying. fannie was at the other end of the sofa. she had her back turned towards father price; she knelt on the sofa with one knee, while the other leg rested on the ground; her skirts were thrown over her head, and her head was buried in the sofa, thus elevating her white bottom in the air. between her ivory thighs we could see the panting lips of her luscious bijou. she was rubbing the top of her slit with one finger, and by the quivering of her buttocks, i guessed she was enjoying herself to her heart's content. margaret and i watched all their proceedings. their motion soon grew fast and furious, and we were both so excited by what we saw that we instinctively raised each other's petticoats and imitated their actions on each other. i forced a finger in margaret's lovely grotto, and at the same time felt her finger caressing my clitoris. i opened my thighs to the widest possible extent to admit her manipulation more readily and she did the same. it was a delicious sensation, feeling her delicate finger force its way into my warm vagina. we kept time with the actors in the next room, and at the very moment that i saw the sperm go from father price's instrument to the broad, white buttocks of the abbess, both margaret and myself emitted, and the abbess and the two sisters were not a moment behind. we then ran to our dormitories for fear of being discovered. a few weeks after this occurrence my father took me away from the convent and i returned home. here my time passed monotonously enough, and i wished myself back to mount de sales a hundred times. but an event happened which more than reconciled me to my change of life. this was nothing less than a visit from harry duval, a cousin who resided in baltimore. harry was a fine, handsome young fellow, about twenty-two years of age. the moment i saw him, i felt irresistibly attracted towards him. but i disguised my admiration with all the hypocrisy common to young girls. one day we were out walking together in the beautiful grounds surrounding my father's house. the weather was deliciously warm and the birds filled the air with their melodies. i was clad very lightly, wearing a low-necked dress with a light scarf thrown over my shoulders. we wandered for some distance, conversing on everyday topics, when my cousin proposed that we should rest ourselves on the grass under the shade of a fine, large elm tree; i consented and we sat down. harry took my hand in his and kissed it. i blushed at this familiarity but did not withdraw it from his grasp. by degrees he grew more enterprising, and drawing me towards him, imprinted a kiss on my lips. i now made an effort to withdraw myself from his grasp but he held me tightly. "dear kate," said he, "i love you with all my heart and soul." "oh harry," i replied, "you have said that to hundreds of others." "pray, darling--it is you alone that possesses my heart. i swear i love none but you." so saying, he imprinted fresh kisses on my lips in spite of the resistance i made. to tell the truth, my resistance was getting weaker and weaker, for i felt a delicious feeling run through my body such as i had never experienced before. he grew bolder and almost devoured me with kisses. in our struggle the light scarf which i wore on my shoulders became displaced and my neck and the upper portion of my bust were bare. the sight of my white shoulders appeared to electrify harry, for he immediately brought his lips to bear upon them, and caressed and patted them with his hand. he did not stop here, however. my dress was rather loose in front and he had the audacity to invade the secrets of my bosom. the pressure he made caused some of the buttons to give away behind and my frock fell completely off my shoulders, revealing to his gaze my two "orbs of snow," as he called them. he immediately took possession of them and molded and pressed them with his hands, at the same time gently titillating the strawberry nipples which, under his lascivious touches, stood out stiff. i was now completely on fire and no longer opposed him. to tell the truth, i was as anxious as he to experience the acme of love. harry kissed and caressed my bubbies for some minutes, and while thus engaged, one of his hands was furtively raising my petticoats. at last i felt one of his hands on my naked thigh--a shiver of desire ran through my frame. he cautiously ascended the snowy columns, and in a moment or two i felt an impudent finger in the outskirts of the domain of venus. i instinctively lifted up my thighs in order to facilitate his curious researches, and soon experienced the most delicious sensations, for his finger had already divided the lips which formed the entrance of my moss-covered retreat. he gently pushed it forward until it was clasped tightly by the warm sides of my vagina. while he was acting in this manner he kissed me repeatedly on the lips and breast, only pausing to suck the rosy nipples which surmounted the two semiglobes. although he addressed every term of endearment to me, i was too much excited to make any reply. for in a few moments he continued his delicious play, titillating the interior of my mons veneris, while he caressed my clitoris with his thumb, sending a lava of delight through my frame. in spite of all my endeavors not to appear too lascivious, i could not help moving my buttocks in response to his soul inspiring touches--i felt the crisis approaching. at that moment i saw him tear open the front of his pantaloons and out jumped his member, as stiff as an iron bar. with his unoccupied hand he seized mine and bore it down on the menacing object. i seized it in my grasp and began to imitate his motions. this was more than harry could bear, for i had scarcely made half a dozen movements when my cousin, frantically seizing me around the waist, stretched my length on the green sward. in one moment he was between my thighs, which i am willing to confess were opened wide enough to receive him, and in another moment his instrument had penetrated the lips of my most secret charms, and was imbedded to the very hilt in my body. oh god! the ecstasy i felt when the conjunction was complete i can never describe. he reposed for a moment or two in this condition and then began to gently heave his buttocks. i responded with a corresponding motion and no tongue can tell the delights i enjoyed as his delicious staff rushed in and out of the sheath destined by nature to receive it. "oh, harry," i exclaimed, "this is too much--i am suffocating with pleasure--darling, dar-dar--" the crisis came; a flood of rapture escaped from me while i felt his copious discharge lubricate the very mouth of my womb. i absolutely fainted with pleasure. when i recovered my senses i found that harry was drying me with his pocket handkerchief. this done, he stooped and imprinted a kiss on the sheath of his joys, and then assisted me to rise. we then returned to the house fully satisfied with our delightful experiences. "darling kate," said he, as we reached the door, "leave the door of your bed chamber open tonight." i pressed his hand as a sign of affirmation and we separated. you can easily imagine, dear reader, how anxiously i waited for night. my bedroom was far removed from any other occupied part of the house, and i had no fear that we should be interrupted. at last the hour for retiring came, and i took up my candle and went to my chamber. i did not undress myself, but sat on the beside anxiously awaiting my cousin's coming. i had been there about a quarter of an hour when i heard his footsteps, and in another moment he was by my side. he rushed to me, kissed my lips and then, with trembling fingers, bared my breasts, which he covered with kisses. he then absolutely tore off my clothes, not even sparing my chemise, and i stood before him as naked as i was born. in a few seconds he was in the same situation and i saw for the second time in my life his splendid member, so stiff and firm that its ruby head nearly reached his navel. all my modesty disappeared as if by magic, and i removed my hands which i had instinctively placed over my center of attraction and, rushing towards him, seized his burning rod in my grasp. i capped and uncapped the fiery head and played with the purse containing the two witnesses to virility. my cousin's eyes shot fire and he began to move his buttocks in reply to my touches. he placed his hands on my bottom and pressed me close to him, and i could feel his staff of love pressing against my white belly. in another moment he had thrown me on my back on the bed, and then set about examining the charms of my person at his ease. his first proceeding was to open my thighs to the widest extent, thus exposing to his gaze and touches the whole of love's domain. he played with the hair covering the hillock of venus; he divided the lips with his finger and, seeking my clitoris, almost sent me crazy with pleasure by gently rubbing it. he then turned me over on my belly and patted the cheeks of my buttocks, which he swore were whiter than driven snow. he titillated both my clitoris and bottom at the same time, but noticing by my convulsive movements that i was on the eve of spending, he suddenly desisted. restoring me to my former position on my back, and throwing himself on top of me, he inserted his staff of love into the pouting lips of my moss-covered slit. no sooner had i felt the delicious morsel pierce me to the quick than i passed one of my arms round his neck and pressed him convulsively to my bosom. i then clasped his loins with my thighs and legs and strained myself so closely to him that the very hair of our genitals intermingled. a large mirror hung beside the bed and i could see our forms reflected in it. i could see his instrument imbedded to the very hilt in my mons veneris, the tips of which clasped it tightly. he now commenced to work his plump buttocks up and down. i replied by a corresponding motion and we kept time admirably together. the thrilling rapture, the delicious sensations of that ecstatic period is out of my power to describe. when i felt his hot pego rushing in and out of my sensitive vagina, i squirmed and wriggled under his fierce thrusts, and i thought my breath would leave my body. at last the dissolving period approached. i could tell it was coming on by his more rapid thrusts, by his half-drawn sighs, by his interrupted breathing, and more especially, by a peculiar suction which my vagina exercised on his rod. i spurred his bottom with my heels, i pressed him to me, i bit him in the agony of my delight, and just as i was discharging, i passed my hand underneath his thigh and tickled his testicles. "i am coming, darling kate," he exclaimed. "oh god, i come, i co-!" "i too, harry," i exclaimed, "there, there! there!" he made two more vigorous thrusts to which i responded with such vigor that it made his testicles butt against my bottom, and the next moment we were both dissolved in bliss. he then withdrew from me and lay down by my side. a delightful conversation followed in which he told me how much he loved me and how faithful he would always be to me. while we were thus conversing i had hold of his instrument while he was playing with my center of love. in a short time i felt his staff swelling beneath my grasp, and it was soon in a state of princely erection again. we again resumed the rites of venus. this time he stretched himself all his length on his back and drew me on top of him. he clasped me around the waist, while i myself guided his dart into my bower, which was burning to receive it. he then insisted that i should pump up his spermatic treasures myself while he would remain perfectly passive. i was quite agreeable, and began an up-and-down motion. my vagina fitted his pego like a glove, and i had not played horsewoman a dozen times before i felt his boiling sperm inundate my womb, while i also poured down my share of love's elixer in such profusion that it wetted both thighs and belly. i shall not detain the reader by detailing how many times we sacrificed ourselves to the shrine of venus that night, nor shall i depict all the postures and modes we persued, as i have many similar scenes to depict; suffice it to say that when we got up the next morning we were both thoroughly exhausted, and pale and feeble from our unwonted exertions. for six weeks i enjoyed sexual delights in every possible form--not a day passing without at least one experience of my cousin's capabilities. at the end of that time he was compelled to return home. he left me with the most ardent protestations of love and devotion, and took an oath that he would marry none but me. i had such a confidence in him that i firmly believed his word. chapter iii a new scene after harry's departure, my father's house grew more and more distasteful to me, and i resolved to make an effort to leave it. one day i went to him and expressed a wish to take a situation as governess--he made but slight objections, and at last gave his consent. i immediately sent an advertisement to the philadelphia papers and received several answers; amongst them was one from a mr. herbert clarence who lived in the village of chester. he offered me such advantageous terms that i at once accepted them, and the next day started for my new home. riverside lodge, as mr. clarence's residence was called, was situated on the banks of the schuylkill, and was fitted up with all the elegance wealth could command. the grounds were handsomely laid out, the gardens cultivated to the extreme of art, and in short, it bore more resemblance to the residences we meet on the other side of the water which are occupied by the proud aristocracy of england than the mansion of a simple american gentleman. nature too had done an immense deal to enhance the beauties of the dwelling. the scenery around was pastoral and beautiful--what it wanted in grandeur it more than made up with the picturesque view to be seen from all sides of the house. the lodge was situated on a rising hillock and fronted the river, from which it was not more than a hundred yards distant. to the north of the house was a thick wood, containing trees of many years growth. in this sylvan retreat mr. clarence had fitted up rustic chairs and seats, and in the heat of the summer it afforded a delightful shelter from the sun's rays. on both the other sides of the dwelling was a handsome sloping lawn, also covered with fine trees. i was met at the door of the house by the owner, a fine handsome man of about thirty-five years of age. he introduced me to his wife, a confined invalid who never left her chamber. i then saw my pupils, two little girls, the eldest not more than six years of age. i found mr. clarence to be a perfect gentleman, courteous, polite and agreeable. i soon felt quite at home with him. mrs. clarence never interfered with me, and days passed without my even seeing her. i pitied poor mr. clarence having such a sick wife, for it was easy to be seen that he was a man of a very amorous temperament, and it was also certain that his wife could afford him no satisfaction in this respect. i was naturally thrown much into mr. clarence's society and noticed that he daily grew more tender to me. when shaking hands with me he would press my hand and retain it in his, and when i wore a low-necked dress i observed that his eyes were fixed on my white shoulders, and that when he caught a glimpse of my bosom his face would flush and a decided protuberance would manifest itself in his pantaloons. things went on in this way for two months. then one day mr. clarence asked me if i would like to go out riding with him. i had always been fond of equestrian exercises and consented very willingly. the horses were brought round to the door and i mounted a handsome bay pony, while my companion rode a large gray horse which appeared but half broken. mr. clarence assisted me to mount and in doing so i exposed a considerable portion of my limbs, my petticoats getting entangled in the saddle. when he saw my leg above the knee, for i wore no drawers, a crimson flush suffused his face--but it was not one of shame but desire. he recovered himself, however, almost immediately, and off we started. we had ridden about six or seven miles when mr. clarence's horse suddenly took fright and galloped off with him. at the turn of the road, from some cause or other, the rider was thrown off and deposited on the green sward. fortunately he was not injured--his horse, however, galloped away towards riverside lodge. "a pretty situation, miss percival," said clarence as he rose to his feet. "here am i, six miles from home, and nothing left for me but to tramp it on foot." "nay, mr. clarence, that must not be. if you do not mind, you can ride behind me. the pony can bear us both very well, and we can proceed slowly." "i am afraid to discommode you, miss percival." "not at all--our ancestors, you know, used to ride pillion." "i accept your kind offer," he returned, and springing on the pony's back took his place behind me. he passed one arm around my waist for the purpose of holding himself securely in his position. we then slowly started in the direction of the lodge. we had not advanced a mile, however, before i felt something pressing stiffly against my bottom. my previous experience made me know what it was and you may easily believe, dear reader, that i began to feel a strange sensation running through me. whether my companion detected my sensations or not, i cannot say, but certain it is that the arm that encircled my waist was raised until his hand rested on my bosom, outside my riding habit; however, i made no attempt to remove it, and encouraged, doubtless, by my seeming tacit consent to his enterprises, he furtively inserted two of his fingers in the opening in front of my dress and i felt them on my naked breast. the contact of my bubbies appeared to electrify him, for i felt his staff of love beating against my buttocks, still more plainly than before. "mr. clarence," said i, "this is wrong--remember you have a wife." "my darling girl," he replied, "i cannot help it. i am deeply enamored with you. my wife is sick and unable to receive my embraces. dearest kate, be kind to me. i swear i will not injure you." what could an amorous, love-sick girl reply? i was too fond of sexual pleasures to refuse them when time and opportunity offered. t made no reply whatever. my silence evidently encouraged him, for he now unbuttoned the front of my habit and placed his hand on my naked breasts, molding them and titillating the strawberry nipples. with his other hand he managed to raise my petticoats from behind, and i felt myself sitting bare-bottomed on his lap. this was not all, for between my fleshy thighs was his instrument, which he had managed to disengage from his pantaloons. he now raised me up slightly and in another moment his hand invaded my mossy crevice. no sooner did his fingers come in contact with the hair surrounding the domain of venus than all reserve left him and, inclining me slightly forward, he directed his instrument and in a moment forced it into my moist and burning passage, and drove it home with a sudden plunge. "oh god! mr. clarence! how delicious!" i exclaimed when i felt the hair surmounting his pubes tickling my bottom, and i wiggled myself from side to side on his splendid staff. the pony now began to canter and the motion he made was sufficient to cause his lance to move in and out of me. during this exciting proceeding, clarence was titillating my clitoris in front, and turning my head around he kissed my lips in the most passionate manner. the pony really seemed to have some idea of what was being transacted on his back, for he set off in a gallop which soon brought a climax to our pleasure, for we both discharged simultaneously. he then withdrew his weapon and we proceeded quietly home, indulging, however, in most delicious conversation on the way. when we reached riverside lodge we dismounted and entered the drawing room. it was unoccupied. "darling girl," said herbert, "i must enjoy you once more--we shall not be interrupted." "i am yours, dear herbert, do with me as you please," i replied. he led me to a sofa and laid me on my back, and then threw my clothes up above my navel. he paused awhile to gaze on my hidden charm, and ran his hands over the various objects that met his gaze. "what magnificent limbs! what splendid thighs!" he exclaimed, "and what a graceful, rounded and polished belly, and then what a delicious mons veneris! what a profusion of curly hair adorns this lovely spot!" he was not content with the unveiled charms of the lower portion of my body, but he must needs release my large and plump breasts--and these afforded him a new theme on which to expatiate. he did not moralize long, but unbuttoning his pantaloons he released his stiff lance and, bringing it to bear between my widely stretched thighs, i soon felt it forcing its way into my sensitive vagina. i raised my buttocks to meet his thrusts and experienced the most delicious sensation. his motions grew quicker and the end approached. i wiggled my bottom from side to side. i gave utterance to my rapture in words, sighs and exclamations of pleasure and received his whole discharge at the same moment that i myself emitted. when he had finished he leaned over and kissed my breasts and assisted me to rise. we heard steps approaching the room and i hastily retired to my chamber. my time after the adventure with mr. clarence passed very agreeably. my amorous desires were fully satisfied and i enjoyed a repetition of the scenes i had passed through with my cousin. i found herbert very ardent and very ingenious in his mode of performing the sexual act--i shall have to refer to some of his experiments by and by. one day i was informed that mr. clarence's sister-in-law was coming to spend a few weeks at riverside lodge. herbert gave me the information with manifest pleasure painted on his face and i felt sure her coming pleased him; for my own part, i cannot say that i was especially delighted, for i was afraid her presence would interfere with our enjoyments. on the appointed day, a carriage drove up to the entrance and amy denmead, mrs. clarence's sister, alighted. the moment i saw her, truth compels me to state that she was one of the most beautiful women i had ever beheld. she was about twenty years of age, above the medium height and her form was molded in the most exquisite manner. her face was really lovely, her features faultless, her complexion fair as parian marble and yet the hue of health was on her cheeks--the white and red contrasting in admirable manner. her hair was a dark glossy brown and hung in natural ringlets on her snowy neck and shoulders. her bosom was full, voluptuous and beautifully rounded. her hands and feet were small, almost to a fault, her carriage was full of grace and when she smiled she allowed to be seen a row of pearly teeth which, if they had been cut out of a solid piece of ivory, could not have been more regular. when i was introduced to her she received me with a good deal of warmth in her manner and observed that she was certain we would be good friends. during the evening she asked me if i had any objections to her sleeping with me, as she was too timid to sleep alone. i replied that i should be very happy for her to share my bed. we retired early as she was tired from her journey. she undressed very quickly and was soon between the sheets. i quickly followed her example. the moment i lay by her side she clasped me in her arms and pressed a warm kiss on my lips. i returned it, for i began to feel attracted by this delicious creature, and the warm contact of her beautiful semiglobes to mine sent a thrill through me. but we made no further progress that night, confining ourselves to conversation only. she asked me a great many questions concerning herbert clarence, as to "how i liked him," "how he behaved towards me," and a hundred other interrogatories. at last we went to sleep. when i awoke the next morning i found miss denmead already risen. i got up, dressed myself and went down to seek her. i searched the house and found she was not there, and then came to the conclusion that she must have gone into the garden for a stroll. i followed and directed my steps to a summer-house situated at the bottom of the lawn. the pathway that led to it was of grass so that the sound of footsteps could not be heard. when i approached the arbor i heard the rustling of a dress inside, and instead of opening the door i peeped through the keyhole. great god! i saw a sight which sent the blood boiling through my veins. herbert clarence was reclining on his back on a divan which he had drawn into the middle of the floor. his pantaloons were slipped down to his heels, leaving the whole of the lower portion of his body uncovered. straddling him, with one foot resting on the ground and with the other on the divan was the beautiful amy. her dress was open in front, leaving her splendid breasts entirely bare. her petticoats were elevated above her navel and thrown behind her white belly, her voluptuous thighs, her magnificent limbs, and above all that masterpiece of nature, her lovely mons veneris entirely exposed to my gaze, for she stood directly facing me. his instrument had penetrated the luscious lips of her slit. while i was watching he gave one tremendous heave upwards with his buttocks and sent it into her body clear up to his testicles. she was evidently gorged with delight and enraptured, for her lovely face expressed the most intense enjoyment, and by the quivering of her eyelids i felt assured the crisis would soon come. they now commenced to move together, he directing his thrusts upwards while she worked her bottom in reply to his motions. while this delicious play was going on, i could distinctly see his staff entering in and out of her coral sheath, the lips of which embraced it so tightly that they seemed to be afraid it should escape from them. it was the most voluptuous sight i had ever seen. as the acme approached, amy leaned over and kissed herbert--their tongues sought each other's mouths and they imitated the sexual act. so intense was their feeling of pleasure that they actually bit each other. the working of his lance in her sensitive vagina caused a suction sound delightful to hear. "dear herbert, i am coming," suddenly exclaimed the lovely girl. these words seemed to increase clarence's ardor, for he commenced to work his bottom with lightning rapidity, and suddenly giving a tremendous push upwards which she replied to by a corresponding motion downwards, they both remained motionless, his staff so deeply engulfed in her that the hair of their genitals was intermingled. convulsive movement then seized her whole frame and she fell on his belly. he was still imbedded in her. they remained motionless for ten minutes when she opened her eyes and kissed herbert repeatedly on the lips. the warmth of her caresses appeared to reanimate him and he returned her embraces. "i must now go, darling," said she. "someone may come." "i must once more taste the delights of heaven," he returned. "we shall have no opportunity until tomorrow, dear amy, and i am not half satisfied yet." he withdrew himself from her and wiping the throne of love gently with his pocket handkerchief, he stooped down and kissed her mons veneris. he then drew her on his knee and began gently to titillate her clitoris with his finger, she performing her part by covering and uncovering the ruby head of his lance. they continued this play for some little time--every motion evidently bringing them nearer the consummation. "herbert, i shall spend if you continue your titillations much longer," said amy, beginning to wriggle her buttocks. "come then, darling," replied herbert. "i too am ready." and so saying he reclined her on the divan, and taking her thighs in his arms, he drove his lance to the hilt into her body. they seemed no longer to know what they were about. joined as they were together, they seemed to experience the utmost voluptuousness. amy especially appeared to be enjoying the delights of heaven. her rapid movements, her exclamation of supreme pleasure, the trembling of her eyelids, and the convulsive manner in which she pressed herbert's bottom was sufficient proof of her intense pleasure. a few reciprocal motions and they again discharged. they now rose, adjusted their clothing and i thought it better to retire, which i immediately did. a few minutes afterwards amy entered, apparently as fresh as ever, and greeting me with a kiss, stating that she had been taking a long walk. i did not say a word, determined to take my own time to tell what i had seen. that night when we retired to bed, amy addressed a few words to me and then fell asleep. when i woke up in the morning she was still sleeping. i turned down the bedclothes and found that the lower portion of her body was entirely naked. her nightdress, too, was open in the front, leaving her delicious breasts exposed. they were firm, round and white as the driven snow, and surmounted by delicate pink nipples. her beautiful hair covered the pillow like a veil. her ruby lips were slightly separated, revealing her pearly teeth, and her lovely cheeks were tinged with a slight color which made her appear most lovely. her belly was the smoothest and whitest i had ever seen. her magnificently molded thighs were stretched widely apart, and at the lower part of her belly was her glorious domain of venus. it was indeed a pretty bijou. imagine to yourself, dear reader, a hillock surmounted with curly brown hair, between which could be seen the pouting lips to the entrance of bliss, folded so closely together that a line of coral only showed where they joined. it was a sight that would have tempted an anchorite. i do not know what possessed me but i leaned over her and imprinted a kiss on that fountain of delight. i then gently divided the lips with my finger and sought for her clitoris, which i soon had swelling under my touches. in a few moments it grew quite stiff. a shiver of delight ran through the lovely girl, but she did not awake. with a finger of my other hand i penetrated into the coral passage and began to move it rapidly in and out, while with my other finger i titillated her vagina. amy, still asleep, replied to my titillations by working her bottom up and down. "oh herbert," she exclaimed, "it is too delightful! faster darling, faster." i moved my finger with such extreme rapidity i could feel her vagina beginning to contract on my finger; she wiggled herself to and fro. "i am coming, darling, dear herbert, i am com--com--" she could utter no more, but pushing her bushy mount close up to my hand i felt my fingers endowed with the love potion i had distilled from her. at the moment of discharging she awoke, and opening her eyes gazed with astonishment on me. "is it you, dear kate?" she exclaimed as soon as she could recover her breath. "i really thought it was--" she seemed suddenly to remember and hesitated to finish her sentence. "you thought it was herbert clarence," i remarked. the lovely girl blushed, but made no reply. "i saw your proceedings with him yesterday in the arbor," i continued, "but do not be alarmed, dear amy, for i am willing to confess he has done exactly the same thing to me." "if that be the case, there need be no reserve between us," replied amy, and raising from her reclining posture she seized me by the waist and throwing me on the bed she divested me of my chemise almost before i knew what she was about. when she saw my naked body she uttered an exclamation of pleasure and ran her hands rapidly over my charms. she first of all kissed and molded my bubbies, sucking the very nipples--from this she descended to my belly, smoothing it down with her soft hand--at last she attacked me in the very center of pleasure, running her fingers on the hair surmounting my mons veneris, opening the lips and gazing curiously in the ruby cavity. then she seized on my clitoris, exciting it with her lascivious touches, and at last, as if unable to control herself longer, she forced a finger into the deepest recesses of my vagina and commenced to move it rapidly in and out. "amy, amy!" i exclaimed, "you are killing me with pleasure." "have you not given me the most intense enjoyment this morning, and shall i not be equally kind to you? but stay, darling," she continued, "i have something that will give you even greater delight." she suddenly desisted from her manipulations, and running through her trunk took from it an india-rubber dildo, shaped exactly like a man's instrument. "this is what i amuse myself with when alone," said she, "and now i am going to give you a taste of it. place yourself on your knees dear kate, and recline your head on the pillow." i placed myself in the position she indicated, by which means my buttocks were elevated high in the air. "how glorious you look in this position, kate," said amy, pressing her hands over my bottom. "what a pretty object is your bijou between your swelling thighs, how closely the plump lips come together and how delicately they are shaded by the curling hair growing on that precious buttock! i must--i must kiss it." so saying she stooped down and imprinted a long kiss on the object presented to her regard--nay, she did more, for i actually felt her tongue divide the mysterious portals of venus and penetrate into the most secret recesses of my covered way of love, rendering me almost crazy with the delicious titillation. she was one of the most lascivious girls i ever met with, and evidently enjoyed one of her own sex almost as much as she did one of the male kind. she moved her tongue rapidly for a few moments and i verily believe, had she continued five seconds longer, i should have spent in her mouth. but she suddenly ceased. "now, darling, for something more substantial," she exclaimed. and bringing the point of the dildo to the entrance of my vagina, she suddenly plunged it to the very hilt into my glowing sheath. she now commenced to move it in and out of me somewhat slowly, as if for the purpose of prolonging my exquisite feelings. soon, however, she saw by the motion of my buttocks that i was on the eve of discharging, and placing her hand scientifically between my thighs, she titillated my clitoris and bottom at the same moment, while with the other hand she drove the dildo with lightning rapidity into my lustful cavity. i could hold out no longer. "i must come, dearest amy," i gasped. "there-there-th--" and with a half murmured ejaculation of pleasure i poured down a flood of love's tide and sank motionless on my belly in the bed. in a few minutes i recovered and we both lay side by side. again and again we tasted bliss in each other's arms, i sought to repay her for the delights she had afforded me, and i may say, i succeeded. at last we were unable to do anything more and fell asleep in each other's arms. we were awakened by a tap at the door. amy rose up and ran to open it and who should be there but mr. clarence. a few hurried whispers ensued between them, then herbert stepped into the room. "dear kate," said he, coming to me as i lay in bed. "amy has informed me that you have come to a good understanding together, and i need not tell you how much gratified i am to hear it. god forbid that two such beautiful girls should be rivals. i love you both and i believe i can satisfy you both. my wife, tomorrow, goes to philadelphia to spend a few days--there is no reason we should not enjoy pleasure all together. i propose that tomorrow evening shall be our initiation--we shall have the house entirely to ourselves. do you consent, kate?" "willingly," i replied. jumping up from my bed, regardless of the exposure of my person, and throwing my arms around his neck, i kissed him on the lips. "what do you say, amy, do you consent?" "i shall like it most of all things," replied his sister-in-law, following my example. as we both hung about his neck he pressed us to him, and the sight of our naked charms evidently affected him, and i thought he would there and then give us proof of his prowess, but he controlled himself and advised us to husband our strength for the following night as he intended to do. he then kissed us both and retired from the chamber. chapter iv an orgy the next day at two o'clock mrs. clarence and her two children started for philadelphia, leaving amy, mr. herbert and myself the sole occupants of riverside lodge. we passed a delightful afternoon together, wandering about the grounds, reading amorous books, and filling up intervals with tender conversation. i found amy to be a very intelligent girl who conversed on almost every subject. we stayed out in the open air until it began to grow dark, then we all reentered the house. we then sat down to a delicious repast followed by a bottle or two of champagne. the wine caused our eyes to sparkle and unloosened our tongues. "come, girls," said herbert, rising from his chair after we had finished dessert, "follow me, and i will conduct you to the room destined to be the theater of our joys." we obeyed and he led us to a part of the house i had never visited before. at the end of a passage he unlocked a door and ushered us into a magnificently furnished chamber, in fact it was furnished with a luxury which i had never before imagined. the apartment was of octagon shape and was lighted by a chandelier which hung from the ceiling, suspended therefrom by silver chains. the ceiling itself was beautifully frescoed and was painted with scenes from heathen mythology. placed here and there throughout the chamber were statuettes made of parian marble which almost seemed to breathe in the soft artificial light. the floor was covered with a gorgeous medallion carpet and around the walls were placed easy chairs and sofas of the most costly description. a peculiar intoxicating perfume was shed through the room, which had the effect of inducing a soft languor. there were eight panels formed by the octagon shape of the room. the upper portion of each panel was filled by a beautifully executed oil painting, the lower portion by a mirror or plate glass descending to the floor. each painting was numbered from one to eight, and they were such exciting subjects and so beautifully executed that i cannot refrain from giving a description of them to the reader. number one represented a beautiful girl reclining on a sofa, her petticoats raised to reveal the lower portion of her body. her head was thrown back, her breasts were bare, and her thighs were elevated in the air. in front of her was a young man with the insignia of his sex proudly elevated, menacing the domain of venus with his formidable weapon. another girl seated on the sofa behind him was endeavoring to pull him away from her more fortunate companion--her clothes too were raised above her navel, revealing all the secrets of her person. the artist had painted her charms so perfectly that it was difficult to believe they were not real. the lips of her slit and the hair surmounting the hillock of venus was done to the very life. this picture was labeled _the dispute_. number two, labeled _a water party_, represented a boat gliding down a silver stream. on the edge of the boat sat a man entirely naked with a girl in the same condition in his arms. her arms encircled his neck while he grasped her around the body. her thighs were wrapped tightly around his loins while his instrument was buried to the very hilt in her salacious slit. in the water, a girl was resting on her hands, her plump bubbies just kissing the stream, while behind her stood a man with her legs in his grasp, his staff of love deeply imbedded in her sensitive vagina. the lips of her bijou were beautifully depicted at the lower part of her white bottom. another nymph was getting into the boat with her back turned to the spectator, thus showing the glorious slope of her back and her voluminous white buttocks and thighs. number three, labeled _a complete seat_, represented a man sitting on the edge of a low wall, a lovely girl completely in a state of nature in his lap. she sat sideways. one of her thighs rested on his arm, the other hung down. the elevation of her thigh enabled the spectator to see his pego hovering between the lips of the warm nest destined by nature to receive it. number four, entitled _rural felicity_, depicted a beautiful girl seated on a rock beside a stream of water. she was naked, as also was her companion, a stalwart man who kneeled over her belly in such a manner that he had placed his staff between her bubbies, which she squeezed together for the purpose of holding it tightly in position; below his buttocks could be seen the whole of her domain of love his bottom resting on the hairy mount. number five, entitled _mutual enjoyment_, represented a man and a woman lying on a couch together, but in reversed position. the man's tongue had penetrated into her lustful cavity, while she had his engine in her mouth, at the same time tickling his testicles with her fingers. number six, labeled _garden studies_, represented a beautiful flower garden in the midst of which was a man seated on a rustic bench. a girl was standing over him with her clothes raised up, and his rod was just entering her sheath at the same time that he was titillating her clitoris with his finger. number seven, labeled _a scene in the rocky mountains_, represented a naked nymph seated on a rock, while in front of her stood her lover with her thigh resting on his arms. she had seized his weapon and was just forcing it into her lascivious cavity. a short distance off was another girl, also seated, amusing herself with a dildo, which she had imbedded into her sheath. number eight, entitled _a kitchen scene_, represented a naked man embracing a girl from behind. her head rested on an ottoman placed on a bench, her thighs rested on his shoulders, and he was kissing her bottom, molding her breasts and driving into her vagina all at the same time. the reader can imagine how the sight of these lascivious pictures acted upon two such excitable girls as we were. i forgot to mention that in the center of the apartment was a long divan, evidently made purposely for the sexual act. it was perfectly certain from our sparkling eyes, from our heightened color, and from our trembling limbs that we were almost crazy with desire and that we were ready to do anything to appease our passions. still, there was for a moment or two a kind of restraint as to who should begin. amy was the first to break. "we have come here to enjoy ourselves," she exclaimed. "let us lose no time. i propose the first thing we do is to strip ourselves entirely naked." "agreed," i returned, commencing to unfasten my frock, and in a few moments we had divested ourselves of every particle of clothing. when we all three stood naked, we saw our forms reflected over and over again in the mirrors. herbert came up to us and clasped us both in his arms. he kissed us all over: now it was our bubbies, now it was our whole bellies, now it was the center of love itself until we were all so excited that the consummation could no longer be delayed. amy, indeed, was beyond herself, for she threw herself on her back on the divan and, opening her white thighs to the widest extent, begged for someone to come and give her relief. "if someone does not come and quench the fire burning in me, i shall die," said she. "my slit is on fire-come clarence, drive your delicious pego into my vitals-see, i open the door for you-come, darling, come." and the voluptuous girl, with her finger and thumb, opened the lips of her coral sheath and showed up the pink interior. who could resist such an appeal as this? certainly not herbert, for he rushed to the suffering girl and in a moment his pego was knocking at the mouth of her womb, imbedded to the very hair in her salacious cavity. great god, what a delicious sight it was! amy was crazy with delight; she folded her legs and thighs around his loins and jutted up her mons veneris to meet his thrusts. they had already commenced to move together when amy suddenly called to me. "come here, kate," said she, "you must have your share too--just turn your bottom towards me and straddle across my face." i did as she requested, and my position was such that my notch came directly over her mouth. "now, herbert," said amy, "i will titillate her clitoris with my tongue while you imitate the sexual act with your tongue." i threw my arms around herbert's neck, he brought his face to mine, and his tongue penetrated my lips. in the meantime, i could feel amy's tongue seek out my clitoris, which she no sooner found than she began to titillate it in the most entrancing manner. i was gorged with love and so was amy, for i could feel her whole body shiver with her delicious sensations. herbert began to drive most furiously into her body. amy kept time with her tongue in my slit. we were much too excited to be able to prolong this scene. the crisis soon arrived: amy's burning womb received herbert's boiling sperm while she responded in such profusion that it actually ran down her white thighs; nor was i behind, for amy's tongue brought down from me a copious shower of the elixir of love. this exciting scene over, we all took a bath, which was conveniently situated in an adjoining chamber, and partaking of a few glasses of champagne, we rested ten minutes. "come, dear kate," said clarence, "it is your turn now," and throwing himself on his back on the divan, he drew me on top of him. in another moment his engine of love had penetrated my slit and i felt it rubbing one side of my sensitive vagina. amy stationed herself behind us and watched with flushing eyes and heightened color the in-and-out motion of his pego into my body. at last unable to control herself any longer she passed one hand between our bellies and titillated my clitoris while with her other hand she tickled alternately my bottom and his testicles. soon, however, she changed her tactics and applied some vigorous slaps on my broad buttocks, turning the white cheeks into a rosy hue; each time she struck me it seemed to impale me on his fiery staff, causing it to enter a prodigious way into my mount. i insisted that clarence should remain perfectly passive while i did all the work, and i can assure the reader that i moved my buttocks in fine style. the mirrors around us reflected our actions, and not only was i feeling gratified but, owing to their agency, i could see his weapon entering in and out of my coral crevice. it was a delicious sight and enhanced our pleasures tenfold--i was, however, so full of love's juices that i could hold back no longer. "i am coming, dear herbert," i exclaimed, "come at the same time that i do, darling--come--co--co--" i could perceive that herbert was responding to my invocation, for he suddenly heaved up his buttocks and placing his two hands on my bottom he pressed me so closely to him that the hair surrounding our private parts was mingled in one mass together and i could feel his hot semen rush into me, meeting my own discharge which i emitted most copiously. amy expressed herself as much gratified at witnessing our entrancing enjoyments as if she herself had been the recipient. after half an hour's enjoyment of more wine, herbert's erect weapon, which we had never ceased handling, showed us that he was again ready for combat. this time he devised a new mode for satisfying his desires. he had been playing with my bubbies, admiring their whiteness, firmness, and volume. he pressed them closely together and remarked that the narrow channel thus made would just fit his instrument. he placed me half sitting on an ottoman and made me recline on my back on the divan. he then made amy straddle my chest, her bottom just resting on the top of my breasts, her face turned towards me, thus presenting her delicious buttocks to his gaze. he now stood between my thighs, his right knee coming in contact with my hairy mount. he then placed his instrument between my breasts, and at the same time entered amy's slit from behind. i squeezed my bubbies together and held his staff tight. it was a curious position but it gave us all infinite enjoyment--for while he was satisfying amy's greedy crevice with his pego, he was rubbing my clitoris with his knee--we all discharged together. all these experiences in the field of venus were not sufficient to quench our desires, so excited were we with the voluptuous surroundings. after a few minutes' rest, amy proposed the next tableau. she lay down lengthwise on the divan and made me lie on the top of her with my head between her thighs, by which position my mouth came in contact with her notch, while hers did the same with mine. as i supported myself on my knees my bottom was raised. she then directed herbert to enter me from behind. no sooner was his staff embedded in my vagina than she commenced to titillate my clitoris with her tongue, while i performed the same office for her. i shall not attempt to describe my feelings during this delicious combat. not only did i feel his soul-inspiring thrusts, but the titillations of her tongue almost sent me crazy with delight, to say nothing of the pleasure i experienced from biting and sucking her voluptuous clitoris. we all discharged sooner this time than we had done before. we were now somewhat exhausted and sat down to a splendid collation and drank some delicious wines. after this was over we all reclined on the divan together. "herbert," said amy, "while we are resting, tell us your love adventures--they must be very racy." "willingly, my love, but it is a long story and i am afraid of shocking your modesty for i shall be obliged to use plain language." "i tell you what to do, herbert," said i--"use french terms, that will be an excellent way of getting over the difficulty." "a good idea, kate--and i will follow it. when i want to speak of the throne of venus i will use the word 'con.' when i refer to man's organ i will say 'vit'--the buttocks i will call the 'fesses' and 'cul' indiscriminately. i warn you beforehand, some phrases i shall express entirely in french as they cannot be translated without offending american ears. besides which i love to speak of matters of which i believe you are ignorant; for i am free to confess there is no greater rake than myself." we placed ourselves in listening posture, he with a hand placed over each of our mounts, he then commenced his history in the terms which will be found in the next chapter. chapter v herbert clarence's history "i was born at temperanceville, a village in the interior of the state of new york. my father was a rich man, and the house in which we lived was a fine mansion, beautifully situated in the midst of a grove of trees. up to the age of sixteen, nothing occurred worthy of note. since the time i was eight years of age my father had employed a private tutor to instruct me--but he was a very easy man and allowed me to slight my lessons with impunity; the consequence was that at sixteen i was, comparatively speaking, ignorant. one day my father asked me to write a note for him, and when i handed it to him he was shocked at the numerous mistakes in orthography and composition, and forthwith decided that i must be sent to school. my tutor was dismissed and the very next week i was sent to a large boarding-school in brooklyn, kept by a mr. ames. "i soon felt at home in my new position and liked the change very much, making rapid progress in my studies. i was one of the biggest boys in the school, and having, in more than one instance, proved my courage, i was spared much annoyance from the other boys, who although they might surpass me in learning were not my masters in fisticuffs. "a year passed in this manner, and during that period i almost recovered the time lost in my early education. i was a favorite, both with the boys and the principal of the school, and the days passed very pleasantly until an event occurred which changed the entire tenor of my existence. "i had often heard mr. ames speak of his daughter cordelia, who was in france finishing her education. during my second year at school she returned home and the following day i saw her for the first time in the garden attached to the house. at the moment i first beheld her, she was stooping down gathering flowers. this posture elevated her clothes behind and i saw a considerable portion of her beautiful legs, the sight of which for the first time inspired me with sexual desire. i anxiously waited for her to turn around that i might see her face. in a few moments she did so and i was immediately struck with her beauty. she was a brunette with dark glossy hair, intensely black eyes, regular features, luscious red lips, white teeth, a laughing expression on her countenance, ivory shoulders, rather short stature, broad hips, and a glorious figure. she detected my earnest gaze, but instead of being abashed at it, she merely smiled at me and passed. i judged her to be about twenty years of age. "i could not forget cordelia's smile all that day. it haunted me wherever i went. i was too young to understand its real significance, but it was sufficient to cause an indefinable feeling to take possession of me. when i retired to bed that night (my father had insisted that i should have a room to myself), i noticed that the chamber adjoining mine, which had been shut up ever since i had been at school was now open and fitted up with new furniture. in answer to my inquiry i was told that the room was destined for miss cordelia; i felt pleased to think that i should have her for such a close neighbor, and i began to think we might become more intimately acquainted. "about three nights after this, i retired to bed quite late--in fact, the whole house had already retired. when i came to miss cordelia's room, i was surprised to find the door half open and a brilliant light streaming from it. my curiosity was so much aroused that i peeped into the chamber. great god! a sight met my eyes which took away my breath and riveted me to the floor. "the beautiful cornelia with nothing on but her chemise, was lying on a sofa; but this was not all. her back was towards me and her sole garment was raised above her hips, revealing to me her lovely bottom, the back portion of a pair of the whitest thighs in the world, and the whole of her magnificently formed legs. in lying down she had a curious position which jutted out her buttocks and allowed me to see between her fleshy thighs the luscious lips of her bijou shaded with black hair. "i stood confounded for a moment but soon recovered myself, as the lovely creature appeared to be asleep. i determined to venture into the chamber that i might obtain a closer view of her concealed beauties; i cautiously glided into the chamber and found that she did not wake. i advanced close to her and, kneeling down behind her, examined at leisure the beautiful objects before my eyes. i can find no words to express her exquisite con. the two fleshy lips met close together, showing only a line of coral which curved from her bottom and was lost in a mass of black curly hair. of course i was perfectly excited at this sight. and in spite of all prudent considerations, i could not resist bending my head down and imprinting a kiss on the object offered to my regard. she evidently felt the embrace, for a shiver ran through her body, but she did not open her eyes. i now grew more bold, and dividing the lips of her bijou with my tongue i sought the interior of her grotto and met at the entrance her stiffened clitoris, which i had no sooner touched than as if by instinct she pressed her bushy mount close to my face. i now moved my tongue slowly in and out of the luscious opening and she responded by heaves of her buttocks, and in a few moments she poured down a flood of love's elixir. i rose to my feet and was about to withdraw when cordelia opened her eyes and gazed on me, full in the face. i blushed all over with shame and was about to make a precipitate retreat, when the dear girl smiled on me and, seizing my hand, conveyed it to her splendid bubbies. i already read my pardon on her face, and clasping my arms around her, i pressed her frantically to my heart. i kissed her deliriously, gluing my lips to her, at the same time forcing my tongue into her mouth. she returned all my caresses. "after toying in this manner a little while, i slipped her chemise off her shoulders and exposed her two semiglobes to my greedy gaze. what lovely objects! i kissed them, sucked the nipples, buried my face between them, stroked her belly and played with her hairy mount. she, too, was not unoccupied, for she had unbuttoned my trousers and was caressing my staff with her hand, capping and uncapping its red head and with the other hand she tickled my testicles. in a broken voice she confessed to me that she had only pretended to be asleep during my manipulations of her charms; that she desired to enjoy me as much as i did her, and she begged me at once to satisfy her longings. i was all primed and loaded for the combat, and kneeling on the floor i drew her towards me; she stooped down and with her own hand guided my instrument into her salacious notch. i felt it tearing up her vagina, and in a moment our conjunction was complete. "she now commenced to move her bottom rapidly on my staff, while i, with my arms clasped round her handsome body, pressed her towards me in such a manner that her snowy breasts beat against my face. i took one of her rosy nipples in my mouth, and while she was pumping up my spermatic treasures, i sucked and titillated the cunning little strawberry top of her alabaster globes. nor was this all, for i lowered one of my hands and tickled her bottom--sometimes gently slapping her fleshy cushions, at others forcing a finger in _le trou de son cul_. when she felt this last operation she could no longer withhold her emission, but throwing her arms round my neck she discharged profusely at the same moment that i anointed her vagina and thighs with my love juices. "i enjoyed her three times before leaving her. we came to a very good understanding together, and it was decided that i should visit her again the next evening when everybody had retired to bed. i slept soundly that night and rose the next morning extremely happy, for i was cheered up by the thoughts of the joys i was about to experience. "i stole into her chamber at the time agreed upon and found her already in bed. i undressed myself as quickly as possible and placed the lighted candle at the foot of the bed. i then laid down by her side. during this proceeding, cordelia pretended to be asleep. i placed my hand on her delicious bubbies, and throwing down the sheet, kissed them; she then opened her eyes and smiled sweetly upon me. i placed my hand over her night dress and raised it gently until i reached her pretty con. i played with the hair of her mount and inserted a finger into her warm vagina. while i was doing this i kissed her lips and my tongue met hers. i then felt her bottom and thighs, roving from one to the other. all these touchings excited us both to the highest pitch. i suddenly threw off all the covering of the bed and by the aid of the candle examined all her charms. cordelia made no resistance whatever, but grasping my stiff rod in her hand, commenced to move the foreskin backwards and forwards. i kissed her on the eyes and mouth, and addressed the most endearing epithets to her. she was almost crazy with delirious delight. "'come, darling,' she exclaimed, 'put it into me or i shall die.' "i immediately rolled on top of her and in a moment i had pierced her to the very quick. a few rapid motions and i had inundated the mouth of her womb with a flood of boiling sperm. "it would take me too long to relate all the different ways in which i enjoyed the beautiful cordelia. sometimes i lay on top of her--at others she lay on top of me. sometimes i did it sideways--sometimes i did it kneeling, sometimes before and sometimes behind. sometimes when i was in a hurry and met her in a retired place, i would place her on a trunk, a chair, a mattress, and achieve the results in the most extraordinary position. more than once i made her stoop forward with her head and hands resting on a trunk, and throwing her petticoats over her head from behind, i would regale myself by the sight of her delicious white cul, with her delicate con peeping between her white thighs, and releasing my member from its ordinary place of concealment, i would force it to the very hilt into her body, her beautiful bottom just fitting the hollow of my thighs. "one night i stripped her entirely naked as well as myself. i then strewed a large quantity of roses on the floor and made her pick them up naked as she was, all the time watching her by the light of the lamp; the different postures she assumed were delicious to contemplate. i then rubbed some essence of jasmine on her polished skin and applied some on my own body. we threw ourselves on the bed and assumed a hundred different positions. at last i caused her to kneel before me, and handled at will her belly, her thighs, her bubbies, and at last, though not the least delicious, her con, pressing the two lips together, playing with the hair on her mount, titillating her clitoris and exploring the innermost recesses of her vagina. she appeared to enjoy all these follies as much as myself. i then made her incline forward on her hands and knees and mounted on her back. i maintained this position some little time, then i brought my member down between her two fleshy buttocks, and knocked at the trou de son cul. i did not, however, enter there, but opening the lips of the legitimate passage with my two fingers i inserted my dart into her ruby sheath, and a few in and out motions soon brought down a shower of bliss. "we now rose up, and naked as we were, sat down near the fire. i produced a bottle of cordial with which i had provided myself, and the fire of desire soon burned in our eyes again. we kissed each other over and over; at last i took her by the arm and drew her from her seat in a standing posture and tried to enter her while in this position, but i could not accomplish it. she was so excited that she seized my member in her hand and, dragging me to the bed, fell on her back, pulled me on top of her and guided my instrument into her salacious slit. the bed creaked with our motions, but i paid no attention to it and drove into her delicious body with all my might--she returning heave for heave. we both soon discharged copiously. "we rested an hour, and then i inclined her with her belly on the bed. by this means her beautiful _cul_ was completely exposed to my attack. in the first place, i put my instrument between her buttocks and moved it backwards and forwards in this position. i do not know how it was, but the head of my engine struck against _le trou de son cul_. the contact evidently titillated her, for she wiggled her bottom and begged me '_l'enculer_.' without any further ceremony i moistened the head of my instrument and, separating the two cheeks of her _fesses_, i forced my vit into the narrow passage. she aided me by every means in her power, raising her buttocks to meet my attack. in a moment i was plunged _au fond de son cul_. "how delicious it was. how tightly was my engine grasped by the narrow sheath. i passed my hand around her belly, and put one of my fingers into her _con_, titillating the lips of this seat of happiness. cordelia was beyond herself; she lay palpitating on her belly and her whole body was in agitation; every thrust that i gave from behind caused my fingers to be buried deeply into her sensitive quiver, and the cheeks of her bottom trembled with the shock. her sensitive vagina contracted and she discharged before me, but when i felt my fingers moistened, i withdrew them from their warm nest and, seizing her by her hips, pushed my member for the last time into the narrow path, and she drew from me the liquor of love in such great profusion that when i withdrew my lance from its asylum the white cushions of her buttocks were inundated with my mettle. "when all was over, i assisted her to rise and we were satisfied for the time, for our scene had been a prolonged one. i left her after assuring her of my devotion. "at last the time came for me to leave school and i lost sight of the beautiful cordelia. when i returned home i was quite a young man and my experience with my preceptor's daughter had lighted such a fire in me that i was soon looking about for a means to gratify my passion. i determined that margaret murdock should be the next to receive my embraces and i began immediately to lay my plans for the purpose of effecting that object. "margaret was the daughter of a widow lady who resided in the village. she was a gloriously beautiful girl, about eighteen years of age. her hair was a sunny auburn and hung in natural curls around a snow-white neck. she was voluptuously made and extremely graceful. i managed to get introduced to her, and visited the house quite frequently. i had frequent opportunities to see her alone, and you may rely upon it, i did not let the grass grow under my feet. in a few days i had advanced so far as to put my arms around her waist and kiss her. although at first she somewhat resisted those embraces, she eventually submitted to them and even returned my kisses. "one warm day in the spring of the year, i called at her mother's house as usual and was informed by the servant that mrs. murdock was not home and would not return before evening; but that miss margaret was in the drawing room. i ran upstairs and found her seated on a rocking chair engaged in sewing. i ran up to her and shook her by the hand, asking tenderly after her health. she answered me with civility and i took a seat close by her side and gazed fixedly on her beautiful face. we conversed on different subjects a little while, then i passed my arm round her waist and kissed her. she made no resistance but a deep blush suffused her face and neck. "'kiss me darling,' i whispered in her ear. "the charming creature advanced her face toward mine and brought her lips in contact with my own; before she was aware of it, i gently inserted my tongue into her mouth. this species of kissing appeared to please her, for a shiver ran through her body and i met with hers in reply. i now glided my hand down the front of her dress and felt her plump, firm white bubbies, first molding and pressing them, then forcing my hand as far as possible toward her smooth belly. she murmured a few words of objection to these enterprises on my part, so i withdrew my hand and drew her on my knees. i now commenced to kiss her eagerly, during which time i was cautiously raising her petticoats with my fingers; at last my hand came in contact with her naked thighs. when i felt her deliciously formed limbs i could scarcely restrain myself, but pressed her frantically to my heart. margaret appeared to be as much excited as i was and i saw her direct her eyes to the front of my trousers, which i assure you stuck out in a very unseemly manner. "'someone might come,' said the charming girl, her cheek dyed with the deepest crimson. and she suddenly jumped from my lap and, running to the door, shut and bolted it. she then returned to me and i drew her between my legs. "'i love you darling,' i exclaimed, and while speaking, i raised her petticoats from behind with one hand until it rested on her magnificently formed buttocks--how firm and smooth were those white cushions and what pleasure i took in manipulating them at will! with my unoccupied hand i seized one of hers and brought it down on my rampant member, which was so stiff and unruly that it was ready to burst the bonds which confined it. finding that she made no resistance to my proceedings, i unbuttoned the front of my trousers, and my staff nestled itself in her grasp. she was evidently astonished at the size and condition of my member. "'you must be aware, darling,' i exclaimed, 'that this ought to be hidden from sight, and you have a place proper to receive it.' "so saying, i carried her in my arms to a sofa, and placing her on it on her back, i threw her skirts over her head, disclosing to my gaze her body, naked from her belly to her feet. ye gods, how i feasted my eyes on the glorious sight! i passed my hands over all her hidden charms, now it was her smooth white belly, now it was her voluminous thighs, now it was her delicious bottom and at last it was her lovely _con_, embowered in a mass of auburn hair. i pressed the two lips of this abode of bliss together; i turned my fingers in the curly thicket adorning her mount, and even advanced one into the narrow opening of her vagina. i was now determined on action, and seating myself on the sofa i drew her onto my lap with her face towards me and my knees between her thighs. i let down my trousers, raised my shirt and directed my lance towards her rubicond opening. i soon felt it come in contact with her hairy slit. i then opened the two lips of her con with my fingers and thumb, and jutting my buttocks forwards i felt myself penetrate a little way into her warm vagina. i hurt her, however, a good deal, and she begged of me to desist--but i only altered my position slightly, and making her open her thighs to the widest extent, i again pushed forward, but she again compelled me to stop, complaining that i hurt her dreadfully. i explained to her that the pain would be but momentary, and that when i had once forced a passage, the most delicious pleasures would follow. but seeing she still resisted, i determined to try another mode. "i again placed her lengthwise on the sofa and threw myself on top of her--but it was of no use, i could not enter. i withdrew from her and began to curse my ill-luck. i kissed her, felt her con and advanced a finger into her vagina to see what progress i had done--i found it was very little indeed. to my great joy i saw on the chimney piece a pot of pomade. i immediately appropriated it and anointed my staff. i now placed the dear girl on her hands and knees on the floor and, throwing up her clothes, i entered her from behind. it was now comparatively easy work and in a second, her magnificent bottom was in contact with my belly, my instrument having entered her vagina to the very hilt. i paused a moment to observe the beauties before me, and then commenced slowly the in-and-out movement. margaret was already in the seventh heaven of enjoyment--her white buttocks shivered with the shocks of my thrusts--i passed my hand in front and handled her bubbies, her belly and the upper part of her slit, titillating her clitoris. at last the die-a-way moment approached and i seized her by her buttocks and drove furiously into her--her thirsty vagina sucked from me the essence of life which mingled with her own discharge, and she sank exhausted on her belly. "when she had recovered, i took her to her chamber, which was the very next room, and we both threw ourselves on the bed, having both stripped naked. the contact of our warm bodies soon restored our powers and we indulged in a thousand follies. in a state of nature she appeared perfectly lovely, and i was never tired of admiring her smooth, satin skin, her voluptuous bosom, her swelling thighs, her whole belly and her delicious mons veneris. she too gratified her curiosity by falling all over my body. she half threw herself on top of me, and gluing her lips to mine she at the same time amused herself titillating my testicles. while thus engaged, her snowy bubbies beat against my chest, while her moss-covered slit rubbed against my thigh. "these touchings and titillations worked me up to such a pitch that i could endure it no longer. i drew her to the edge of the bed, first placing a pillow under her bottom, and raising one of her thighs in the air, i rested it on my arm. by this means her lovely slit was completely exposed to my attack. she opened the luscious lips herself with her finger and thumb so that i could see the coral interior. i brought my staff to bear on the inviting entrance, and with a single heave of my buttocks i completely gorged her vagina. i rode, however, easily in the harbor, and the dear girl experienced all the joys of a perfect conjunction without any pain. at first my motions were slow, but as our delirium increased they grew faster. she met my thrust by responsive heaves of her bottom until we could both hold out no longer, but both discharged simultaneously. "i shall not tell you, dear girls, how many times i enjoyed the beautiful margaret before i left her, for fear that you should think that i exaggerate. i only know that when i quitted her apartment i was completely exhausted, and that it took several days for me to recover my wonted energy. "i found margaret adept in the science of love. she soon learned every mode and posture for performing the sexual act and we had many, many happy hours together. "one day we were together in the summer house attached to the house. she began the play of love by kissing me, and forcing her tongue into my mouth, she imitated with that organ the conjugal act. by this mode of procedure she illumined a fire in my body and i pressed her to my heart in delirium. she then unbuttoned my trousers, and seizing my instrument, rubbed it between her hands. i drew her on my knees and raised up her petticoats at the same time. i let down my pantaloons, and felt her naked bottom resting against my belly. how delicious was the sensation of her warm buttocks! my staff forced an entrance between her two thighs, and she leaned forward and kissed it a thousand times, occasionally rubbing it against her lovely con. she even lodged it between the two lips, and by moving her buttocks, titillated it in this position. supreme pleasure began to run through my veins, and i was on the eve of discharging when, slightly raising her _cul_, she guided the stiffened dart of love to the entrance of her vagina, and in another moment, i was _au fond de son cul_. she leaned forward in such a manner that i could see my staff enter in and out of her coral sheath. she moved her buttocks, and after a few violent thrusts i felt her parts contract on my piercer and she pumped the sperm from my testicles at the same moment that she herself discharged profusely. "my acquaintance with margaret lasted four months, during which time we took our surfeit of love's enjoyments. at the end of that time i left to pay a visit to an uncle who lived in the village of b--, in the state of pennsylvania, a few miles from where i now reside. my uncle was a bachelor, possessed of large wealth, and it was generally understood that i was to be his heir. the village i have just referred to was a very quiet place consisting only of about two hundred inhabitants. it contained however, a church and a clergyman who was a widower with an only daughter. i first saw helen roberts at chapel the sunday following my arrival. i was immediately struck with her beauty. her features were perfectly regular and classical. her eyes were large, lustrous and dreamy. her bust was faultless, and her whole form was as if it had been molded by the god of love himself. i was soon destined to know her more intimately. "one afternoon, after i had been at my uncle's about two weeks, i happened to stroll into the church and the first sight that met my eyes was helen roberts herself lying fast asleep in one of the pews. the day was very warm and she had doubtless entered the holy edifice for the purpose of resting herself and, feeling tired, sleep had overcome her. her dress was slightly discomposed at her feet, revealing a considerable portion of her magnificently formed limbs. i advanced cautiously to her side and saw that she slept soundly. i could not resist the temptation offered me, but gently raised her petticoats. she wore no drawers and all the secrets of her charming person were entirely exposed to my gaze. the sight of her lovely white belly, her naked thighs and her pretty hairy bijou inflamed me in the highest degree, and in a moment my lance was as stiff as a poker. i passed my hand over her belly, and although a shiver ran through her at the contact, she did not awake. i then gently divided her thighs and handled at pleasure all the charms of the domain of venus. i played with the hair surmounting that lovely spot, i inserted a finger in the passage and titillated her clitoris, which i found finely developed. my touches became more and more exciting until i believe she was on the point of discharging when she suddenly awoke and found herself in my arms. my instrument was rubbing against her thighs, but i had not effected an entrance. the charming girl, when she found the condition of affairs, took it in good part; she kissed me. however, we were so excited that we both discharged before the act of coition was effected. "i now led her into the vestry-room near the pulpit, and seating myself on a chair, pulled her on my knees. i unfastened her dress and, exposing her two breasts, repeatedly kissed and handled them. i made her put one of her feet on the table while her other leg hung between mine, by this means leaving her thighs stretched widely apart. i forced a finger into her slit while she seized my instrument. i commenced moving my finger, she did the same with her hand, and in a few moments we again discharged, experiencing the most delicious sensations. "after a little repose we recommenced. she longed for something more satisfying and endeavored to excite me. she seized my staff, covering and uncovering the ruby head. she even took the whole of my rod into her mouth, palating it with her tongue, while at the same moment she tickled my testicles and bottom. nor was i idle, for i pressed and kissed her bubbies, sucking the strawberry nipples, stroking down her belly and titillating her anus. i then kneeled down, and making her open her thighs widely apart, i inserted my tongue into her slit, titillating the sides of her vagina and sucking her clitoris. helen was almost mad with the intensity of her desires, and was ready to spend again, when she had the satisfaction of seeing my instrument attain such an enormous size that when she again took it in her mouth it filled it completely. giving it a last kiss she threw herself on a hassock and pulling up all her clothes above her navel, thus leaving her body entirely naked from there downward, spreading her legs open and slightly bending her knees, she exclaimed: "'come love, embrace me well--bury your staff into the deepest and most secret recesses of my body. do not spare me.' "i did not have to be told twice, for i was on her in a moment. i gently introduced the head of my instrument between the lips of her slit, but it would not enter. "it was in vain, i pushed, i could make no headway, but only gave her a great deal of pain. after a little trying of this nature, she was getting exhausted and told me for god's sake to finish my work. i then withdrew my instrument, and, wetting the end of it with spittle, again brought it to bear on the entrance of the abode of bliss. as soon as i got the head well between the lips i began to shove. she was determined, however, to be aggressive with me, and with a tremendous heave of her bottom impaled herself to the hilt on my rod, so much so that the hair surrounding our genitals intermingled. she could not avoid shrieking out, but the pain soon began to pass off and after a few more shoves she evidently began to experience the most delicious sensations. every thrust i gave sent a liquid fire of delirium through her veins. when she felt my instrument rubbing the sensitive sides of her vagina she appeared as if she would die with pleasure. her breasts rose and fell and her buttocks actually quivered with the delights of her sensations. my motion grew faster, my testicles tingled with delight at every shove against her bottom. she threw her legs about in confusion and met every thrust more than halfway. she wiggled herself from side to side on my staff. the finale came. "'herbert, i am coming--o god! what pleasure! dear herbert--closer--clo--ser--clo--' she pantingly exclaimed, and a profuse discharge from the innermost recesses of her body met my own. "we got up and adjusted our clothing and i promised her i would visit her the next night in her own room, the access to which was very easy, and i returned home to reflect on all the pleasures i had experienced." "stop, herbert," said amy, interrupting her brother-in-law in his recital. "before you continue your history, you must give me relief. your descriptions are so voluptuous and lascivious that my slit is on fire--come, darling, you are in fine condition." i seconded amy's request, being no less excited myself. herbert was indeed in splendid condition for performing the rites of venus. we all rose from the couch. "stand up, amy," said herbert. "put one of your feet on this chair and let the other rest on the ground. there, that's it; now your plump thighs are widely separated and i can manipulate your pretty little _con_." "oh, do, darling," returned the delighted girl. "now i am going to titillate your clitoris with my tongue," said herbert. amy placed herself in the position required. herbert seated himself on the ground between her thighs and brought his mouth in contact with her slit. he divided the lips of her bijou with his tongue and forced it in and out of the rosy cavity. "amy," said herbert, when he had indulged in this play a few moments, "you have got the prettiest little con in the world. what soft down adorns this hallowed spot! what delicious folding lips, and what a sweet morsel is your clitoris! how glorious it is to enjoy you to one's heart's content. just fancy this the first time you had ever come in contact with a man. let me rehearse the scene: he would first of all play with your bubbies, he would press and kiss them as i do now, he would suck these rosy nipples until he had excited you to the last degree. he would then grow bolder, but you must lie down for me to perform the scene properly." amy threw her entire length on the divan while i watched with delighted eyes this delicious scene, enjoying it as much as if i were the recipient instead of his beautiful sister-in-law. "when he saw your delicious white belly," continued herbert, "he would shiver with delight and fasten his lips to it, thus and thus. he would then pass his hand backwards and forwards on this smooth white plain and endeavor to peer into the mysteries seated below. in another moment his hand would invade your delicious little con--just as mine does now--his finger separates the lips and he gently rubs your clitoris--you are mad with delight, you open your thighs and wriggle your bottom under his touches. he pushes one of his fingers into your con and moves it in and out as i do now." "oh, darling, it is too much; i cannot bear it," cried the delighted girl, writhing and wriggling her body about in the most delicious manner possible, at the same time seizing herbert's staff and rubbing it up and down. "having toyed with each other some time," continued herbert, "he suddenly fixes his lips on your delicate slit, and pushes his tongue between the lips, and while thus employed he tickles your bottom. you are just ready to spend and beg him for heaven's sake to finish with you. he divides your thighs as i do now and mounts you in this manner." herbert suited the action to the word and threw himself on amy's belly. she herself guided his instrument into her coral sheath, and they both commenced the work of thrust and heave. "delicious, splendid!" exclaimed amy. "i can feel your lovely instrument in my vagina. go on! go on!" "he moves his bottom as i do mine--and soon discharges--as i do now. my darling girl, your lovely slit has extracted the last drop from me." "i too," gasped amy, "there-th--" i was so excited at witnessing this voluptuous scene that i was obliged to give myself relief by rubbing my clitoris. i emitted at the same moment they did. "what delight i have enjoyed," said amy when she had somewhat recovered. "but continue your history, dear herbert." herbert recommenced in the terms to be found in the next chapter. end of volume one volume two chapter i herbert clarence's history continued "i was punctual to the moment with my engagement with the beautiful helen, and the moment i saw her i rushed into her arms. i then proceeded to strip her of her clothes and she did the same office for me. i made her sit naked as she was on my knee, and began kissing her body all over, caressing her breasts and sucking the rosy tips surmounting them. i descended to her belly, smoothing it with my hand, and then i attacked the very center of pleasure, first putting in one finger and then another, and twisting the hair surrounding her mount. i then made her stand with her legs wide apart, and i kneeled before her, and put my tongue into the coral passage, giving her intense pleasure. i seized her clitoris between my lips, at the same time titillating the inside of her con with my finger. i thought she would expire with delight. i stroked down her thighs with my hands. i then made her stoop forward, by which means she exposed her handsome buttocks completely to my gaze. i slapped them with my hand until they were as red as a cherry. this was too much for me, for making her lean with her head on the bed, i had a fine opportunity to enter her from the rear. i was on her in a moment. i felt her warm buttocks rubbing against my belly while my instrument entered a prodigious way into her body and i commenced my movements. at every push i made i could feel my testicles strike against her bottom. my hands at the same time were passed round her body; with one hand i handled her breasts--with the other i rubbed the top of her slit. the pleasure was so great that it could not last--and we both actually swooned away when the crisis came, i falling all my length on her back and she falling on her belly on the bed. "a few minutes' repose served to renew our energies. i now placed a large cushion on the bed, and taking her in my arms i made her recline against it in such a way that i could easily enter her body while in a standing posture. she passed one arm around my neck, the other around my body and her two breasts beat against my chest. my instrument was soon buried in her glowing sheath. i pushed vigorously, and her breasts rebounded, quivered with the shock--even our very hair intermingled. she was beyond herself and could continue her passion no longer, but opening her thighs to the utmost extent she discharged, and i did the same, her pleasures being a hundred times increased as she felt the warm liquor rushing into her womb. "we soon recovered ourselves. this time i seated myself on the bed and drew her, naked as she was onto my knees. how delicious was the sensation of her warm bottom to my thighs! she impaled herself on the object of her divinity--she now moved herself rapidly up and down, but i did not let her finish in this manner, but turning her around with her face towards me, i carried her to a sofa and lay panting and heaving on her bosom. she began to wiggle her bottom again and in a few moments we again dissolved in bliss. "the time had now arrived for us to separate, and hurriedly dressing ourselves we bade an affectionate farewell to each other. i never saw helen after this--for my uncle died suddenly, leaving me his heir, and helen was married shortly after and went south to live. "soon after coming into my uncle's estate i moved to new york, and took up my residence at the st. nicholas hotel, determined to see a little life before settling down as a steady man. i had been at the hotel but a few days when i made the acquaintance of a gentleman about my own age. his name was george darville and he was a first-rate fellow. in the course of conversation we struck on subjects of an amorous character and i soon discovered that my friend was no novice in the field of venus. that same evening we went together to niblo's garden and took our places in the parquet. just before the curtain rose i stood up from my seat to gaze around the house. my eyes were immediately arrested by a beautiful girl stationed in one of the private boxes. she was the most perfect blonde i had ever seen. her hair was a glossy auburn, and shaded a face that might have served for the model of titian's venus. her features were regular, her eyes a deep blue, shaded by long eyelashes which gave a dreamy expression to her lovely countenance. her lips were full and sensuous; a lovely carnation hue, evidently nature's own coloring, adorned her soft velvet cheek. her neck and shoulders, for she wore a low-necked dress, were as white as parian marble and her bust was full and voluptuous. i immediately turned to george and asked him if he knew her. "'why that's harriet wells,' said he--'the most lascivious woman in all new york. she does nothing in the common way, not even the act of sexual intercourse. she is a young girl of immense fortune and puts no restraint on her passions. but come with me and i will introduce you to her. i am in favor with her just now and perhaps we may get an invitation to supper--if we do i can tell you we will see a scene that you will remember to the longest day of your life.' "we immediately proceeded to the box where the beautiful girl was seated. she received us with a charming smile and i was soon on terms of the closest intimacy with her. after we had conversed for about a quarter of an hour, she whispered something to george to which he made the reply 'all right!' she then turned to me and asked me to sup with her that evening after the play was over. to this invitation i gave a willing assent. "the first act of the play was over and the curtain rose for the second. "'what a dull piece!' said harriet. 'let us retire to the rear of the box, where we shall not be seen by the audience--we can then converse with more freedom. i dare say, you don't care about seeing the play, mr. clarence?" "'not at all,' i replied, 'i would a thousand times rather converse with you than see the finest play in the world.' "'that's a very pretty compliment,' said she, rising from her chair and taking up her position at the back of the box, where i followed her. "george now excused himself and said that he would return when the piece was ended, leaving me alone with harriet. in the position we had taken no one could see us, neither from the stage nor from the theater. when we were alone i put my arms round the lovely girl's waist and drawing her towards me imprinted a moist kiss on her soft dewy lips and then begged her pardon for my boldness. "'there is no apology necessary,' said harriet. 'i like it as much as you do yourself, and i like men to be bold.' "she then kissed me of her own accord and i could even feel her tongue penetrate my lips while a deep flush of desire suffused her face. "thus encouraged, i grew more bold and placed my hand on her white shoulders; i gently let it slide down inside the front of her dress and it came in contact with her glorious bubbies. of all the breasts i had ever felt there were none could be compared with hers--so voluptuous, so white and so firm. i handled them at will, pressing them and pulling down her dress, exposing them to my ardent gaze. "harriet placed one of her feet on a chair and placed her other leg across my lap. this movement raised her petticoats in such a manner that it showed me a considerable portion of her gloriously formed limbs. in a moment my hand was under her clothes, handling at will her lovely con. she stretched her thighs widely to assist me in my researches--nay, more, she raised her petticoats with her own hand and exposed to my delighted gaze the lovely domain of venus. "i frantically seized the beautiful girl and stretching her length onto a settee, i strode over her and, forcing my head between her thighs, i kissed her mount over and over, while she nestled my rod between her breasts. i sought out her clitoris, which i easily found, for it was extremely largely developed, and began to titillate it with my tongue. "'stop,' cried harriet--a convulsive shudder running through her system, 'you must reserve yourself for tonight.' "i now desisted and we contented ourselves with feeling and touching only until the piece was ended. just before the conclusion of the play, harriet sent a note to the green room, and informed me that she had invited two well-known actresses to sup with us. they were both beautiful girls--but more of them by and by. as we were leaving the theater, george and the two actresses who had been invited found us and we all proceeded to harriet's house in her carriage. "miss wells resided in a magnificent mansion on fifth avenue. when we entered i was struck with the elegance seen everywhere. the drawing room especially claimed my attention. a delicious perfume was distilled in the atmosphere and the brilliant gas burners shed an effusion of light throughout the apartment. the most elegant furniture was spread through the chamber, consisting of canopies, sofas and chairs of the most costly description. on the floor was spread a carpet so soft that the sound of footsteps was inaudible. the walls were a mass of mirrors extending from the ceiling to the floor, relieved here and there by magnificent paintings, representing woman's form in every attitude and every variety of costume. in fact the most beautiful women could be seen, from those most simply clad to those without a particle of clothing to cover their nakedness. i was transported with the scene. i felt my blood boil in my veins with undefined desires. "we all five sat down to a magnificent supper and partook plentifully of champagne. the three girls looked beautiful in the evening costumes. they were all very lightly clad, revealing a considerable portion of their womanly charms. their dresses were cut very low in the neck revealing almost the whole of their lovely breasts; their dresses too were of the thinnest description and allowed their voluptuous limbs to be distinctly traced through them. one of the actresses was named ernestine, a beautiful girl of about twenty; the other was named isabelle, and was a year or two younger. "after supper we entered a delicious boudoir evidently fitted up purposely for performing the rites of venus. we had no sooner entered the chamber than harriet exclaimed: "'come ladies and gentlemen, you all know what we have come here for--let's have no reserve.' "so saying she deliberately pulled up her skirts above her navel, and seating herself on the ground, stretched her thighs open to the widest extent, giving us a full view of her hidden charms. she then pulled me to her, and unbuttoning my trousers, released my staff and began to kiss and embrace it, titillating the head of it with her tongue. nor was this all; ernestine also raised up her skirts and showed us her magnificently formed thighs and mons veneris, and putting her arms round my neck kissed me passionately. isabelle sat down before george, and shaking her dress from off her shoulders, she nestled his staff between her lovely bubbies. her petticoats too were elevated so that we could see all the lower portion of her naked body. i glanced in the mirrors around the room and beheld a glorious scene. first of all there was the beautiful harriet with her milk-white thighs, stretched widely apart and her pouting bijou, covered with its downy moss, staring me right in the face. then there was the charming ernestine with her luscious con rubbing against my thigh. while isabelle showed me her white buttocks with the lips of her slit peeping between the posterior portion of her splendid thighs. of course the sight of these beauties fired my blood in such a manner that i was completely beside myself--and if harriet had continued her tit-illations with her tongue a minute more i must have emitted in her mouth. but she suddenly stopped. "'let us all strip,' she exclaimed, 'our clothes are only in our way.' "we all seconded her motion, and in a few moments we were all as naked as we were born. ye gods! what a glorious sight it was for me--just imagine, three beautiful women entirely naked before my eyes. thighs, breasts, bellies, bottoms, cons, all merited my admiration and deserved my embraces. i paid my devoirs to all three without any distinction--now it was harriet's beautiful bubbies, now ernestine's lovely bottom, and now isabelle's glorious slit. i kissed them all over, not even omitting their lovely mounts of venus--indeed i can say with truth that before three minutes elapsed i had explored all three of their vaginas with my tongue. nor had they been passive spectators the while for they paid back with interest on my person all that i did to them. they sucked my pego--they titillated my testicles, they forced their fingers into the trou de mon cul. ernestine breathed on my belly while isabelle slapped my buttocks. george went through exactly the same thing; the consequence was we were all inflamed to the highest degree. "when harriet thought we were all sufficiently excited, she raised her finger as a token for us to cease and exclaimed: "'i proclaim myself the priestess of this assembly, and shall take upon myself the ordering of all tableaux. first of all i give as your motto--voluptuousness, lasciviousness, and sexual enjoyment--there must be no modesty, no shamefacedness and everybody must obey the slightest of my commands--let them be ever so outré. i shall make use of the common words when referring to the organs of generation and shall expect everyone else to do the same.' i shall still continue to use the french words, but you must understand that whenever i do so the english common words were used by harriet and her companions. "'and now to begin,' continued harriet. 'fond as i am of being embraced by a man--i like almost equally well to receive the embraces of my own sex, and still more to see others performing the desired act of copulation.' she now sat down on a low sofa and stretched her thighs widely apart. 'my first order is that ernestine shall kneel before me and fete my con with her delicious tongue and that while she is thus engaged, mr.-- shall embrace her from behind while george shall satisfy isabelle's pouting slit with his magnificent staff so close to me that i can feel them both when in the act!' "we immediately began to work in the manner prescribed to us. ernestine knelt down and fastened her head between harriet's lovely thighs, and separating the lips of the latter's con with her finger and thumb, she plunged her tongue into the coral cavity. the position ernestine assumed caused her splendid bottom to be elevated in the air, and between the cheeks of her buttocks i could plainly discern the luscious lips of her con. in a moment i was behind, and pointing my staff, it was quickly imbedded in her warm vagina, the lips of her sheath clasping it like a glove. "george took isabelle and placed her sitting on the sofa beside harriet. the lovely girl raised her thighs in the air. george rushed between them and his instrument pierced her to the quick. harriet clapped her hand as a signal that we were to commence, and we all began to push for the very life. harriet, by means of the mirror, had the whole voluptuous scene before her eyes. while she felt ernestine's tongue in her salacious slit, she could see my instrument enter in and out of the latter's con and saw also george's rod appear and disappear in isabelle's beautiful body. now more, while the two latter were thus engaged our priestess stretched out her hand, placed it underneath isabelle's thighs and titillated their sexual organs while in the act of coition--sometimes it would be the lovely girl's clitoris, another time it would be her bottom, and another george's pendants which she gently squeezed. these touches had the effect of causing those two to go before we did. i suddenly saw isabelle's eyelids tremble--she raised her white thighs high in the air, while a convulsive shudder of delight ran through her whole body. george's strokes now became faster and more furious--his buttocks quivered and he fell palpitating on his companion's belly, while a low cry from her announced that he had sent his fiery mettle up to her very womb, meeting her own emission on the way. about a minute afterwards i felt ernestine's vagina embrace my penis tightly, a convulsive trembling seized her bottom and she wiggled herself from side to side on my staff. in another moment i had inundated her with my sperm while she discharged so copiously that it trickled down the inside of her beautiful thighs. "'i too come,' said harriet, seeing that we were all hors de combat, and she elevated her buttocks and pressing her mount tightly to ernestine's face, found relief in a shower of love's dew, and then sank back exhausted on the sofa. "in a minute or two we all rose, washed ourselves and were ready for another bout. "'seat yourself on the sofa, mr. clarence,' said harriet. "i obeyed. she came and sat on my lap and guided my stiff dart into the innermost recesses of her con. she then leaned forward and making george sit on the other end of the sofa, she took his staff between her magnificent breasts and squeezing them close together, held it a tight prisoner there. she now made isabelle take her place by my side, and ernestine sat next to george--she then ordered us to put our hands on each of their cons. we obeyed. harriet had one of the most delicious bijous in the world--it was so tight and warm that it embraced my pego very closely. i forced the middle finger of my right hand into isabelle's coral passage while i titillated her clitoris with my thumb. with my other hand i tickled harriet's bottom. george did the same for ernestine and we all moved together. i noticed that while george's staff was moving between her two bubbies she frequently bent forward and titillated the ruby head of his rod with her tongue. all at once i saw the white semen gush from his engine all over her white breasts, at the same moment that i shot my charge into harriet's vagina and received isabelle's emission on my hand. ernestine too, almost at the same moment, bedewed george's fingers. "this last engagement seemed rather to increase our sexual desires rather than to quench them. acting according to the orders of our priestess, i sat myself on a chair before a large mirror. isabelle came and straddled my thighs and ernestine guided my engine into isabell's lovely grotto. i cast my eyes in the glass and had a splendid front view of my companion's thighs, notch, etc. i could see my staff imbedded in her vagina and had a distinct view of the luscious lips embracing it. the lovely girl was delighted to be so thoroughly gorged. ernestine laid on her back exactly in front of us and harriet knelt down before her, and with her tongue titillated her clitoris, while george entered harriet from behind. it was a magnificent sight to us, and we all soon emitted. "we now partook of some spiced wine, which had the effect of entirely restoring our energies, and our rampant instruments proved that we were quite ready for another engagement in the courts of venus. "harriet now ordered me to lie on my back on the floor and pushed ernestine on the top of me. my pego entered her con. harriet began to tickle our genitals when we were thus joined while george entered her en cul at the same time passing his hand in front of her and titillating her clitoris with his finger. with her unoccupied hand, harriet took possession of isabelle's con and forced two fingers in it--and in this manner we all again succumbed. i should tire you if i were to enumerate all the manners and modes in which we accomplished the sexual act--suffice it to say that we kept it up until five o'clock the next morning and only ceased from sheer inability to proceed further. during that time i had embraced three girls in every part of their bodies--en con, en cul, between the bubbies, the buttocks, and in short every portion of their bodies. "i took a week's rest after this night's experience. my history is already too long, but i have one more adventure to describe and then i have done. "about a month after my adventure with harriet wells, i received a note from an aunt of mine who kept a ladies' seminary in westchester county, new york, asking me to come and spend a month with her. having no particular business to attend to i determined to accept this invitation, thinking perhaps i might meet with some adventures among so many young girls--besides which i knew that my aunt had a very pretty daughter, and i thought perhaps she and i might become better acquainted. in a few hours i was at my aunt's door, and was received with the utmost cordiality by my aunt. i had scarcely entered the drawing room before my cousin emmeline made her appearance. the moment i cast my eyes upon her i was almost struck dumb with surprise, for she was so much more beautiful than i had expected to find her. it was at least ten years since i had seen her; she was at that time twelve years old and promised to be very pretty, but i never expected to see such an embodiment of female loveliness as now appeared. "my cousin emmeline was twenty-two years of age. she was tall, stately and voluptuously formed. her face was perfectly oval and her features were regular almost to a fault. her hair, which was very abundant, was a dark glossy brown and fell in massive bands on a neck as white and pure as alabaster. her eyes were dark and flashing and shrouded with long eye-lashes while her figure was perfect. she was dressed en negligee but through her morning wrapper i could trace the round form of her voluptuous bust. "she received me with the utmost frankness and made no objection to the kiss that i imprinted on her ruby lips with a cousin's liberty. during her temporary absence from the room, her mother informed me that she was to be married in three weeks to a very rich gentleman who was a good deal older than herself and for whom she did not profess any deep attachment. in the afternoon i was ushered into the schoolroom and found myself surrounded by thirty or forty beautiful girls of all ages and styles of loveliness. some of them were excessively beautiful and all cast on me curious glances as if they wondered what my business could be there. "in the evening, my aunt, cousin and myself met in the drawing room, and the evening was passed with music, singing and conversation. if emmeline looked beautiful in a morning costume, she was perfectly lovely in evening dress. she wore her frock cut so low in the neck that the contours of her lovely bust could be plainly seen. in fact, while she was performing on the piano i bent over her for the purpose of turning the leaves of her music, and as she bent forward i had a most distinct view of the two white semiglobes of her bosom. they were separated by a white valley which led to other hidden charms. the sight of her delicious bubbies so excited me that i was compelled to hold my pocket handkerchief in front of me to hide the protuberance produced by her charms. "several days passed, during which time i attempted to take several liberties with my cousin--but she always stopped me at a certain point, no doubt actuated by the fact of her approaching marriage. i was in despair for i saw no way of accomplishing my designs. the thought struck me, however, that if i could only succeed in exciting her passions i might move her to my will--i determined to make my attempt. i had in my stock amorous books, one in french, entitled: l'academie des dames, an exceedingly lascivious work, interspersed with the most magnificent engravings. it was something like aretino's famous putante errante--but much more full and complete. it purported to be a dialogue between two young girls and gave the fullest information in all sexual matters, interspersed with vivid and glowing descriptions of the sexual act. this book i stealthily lay in my cousin's way, as if i had left it there by accident. i rejoiced to find half an hour afterwards, on returning to the place where i had put it, that it was gone, and i had no doubt but that it had fallen into emmeline's hands. "the house in which my aunt resided was an old-fashioned building, containing very large rooms, all communicating with each other. the bedroom allotted to me was situated next to emmeline's chamber, and there was a communication between the two apartments by means of a closet which served for both rooms. this closet was only divided by a green curtain. i retired to bed very early that night--and the first thing i did was to cut a hole in the curtain and leave my side of the closet door open. i then put out my light and waited for events. i had not to wait long, for i soon heard emmeline's light step ascending the stairs. i had only just taken my position in the closet when she entered the chamber. as luck would have it she did not close her closet door, but immediately began to undress. great god! what beauties she revealed to me as she removed her garments one by one. first it was her beautiful shoulders, next her voluptuous limbs, and lastly her resplendent bosom, for when she stood in her chemise i had a full view of her naked bubbies. no words that i can utter can give the faintest idea of the glories of their form and beauty. they were beyond comparison. she now went to her trunk and took from it a book, which i discovered in a moment to be l'academie des dames and then she threw herself, lightly clad as she was, upon the bed. "her couch was placed exactly opposite my hiding place, so that i had a most perfect view of her as she reclined there. one of her milk-white breasts was entirely bare and her chemise was raised sufficiently high for me to see a portion of her lovely thighs. she began to read and soon i saw a strange change take place in her. her face grew flushed, her bosom heaved and she began to twist her legs and thighs about in a curious manner. suddenly, without any previous intimation of her intention, she seized the lower end of her chemise and slowly raised it above her navel. by this action all her hidden charms were entirely exposed to me. heavens! i glanced on the picture. imagination cannot paint the delicious sight that met my eyes, her 'con' was one of the loveliest i had ever beheld. i could distinctly trace the two pouting lips through a forest of umbrageous covering--while her white belly, her delicious thighs and voluptuous breast formed the adjuncts to a picture which i feel it is in vain for me to attempt to describe. the lovely emmeline still continued reading, little suspecting that prying eyes were eagerly devouring her most secret charms. she held the book in her left hand, her right fell carelessly by her side, her fingers coming in contact with the hair surrounding her mons veneris. a shiver ran through her system when she felt the place on which her hand had fallen, and she instinctively raised up her thighs to admit more easily her researches into her own beauties. the book had evidently grown now quite interesting, for i saw the middle finger of her hand slowly separate the pouting lips of her bijou to find a refuge in her warm vagina. she now began to move it in and out, slowly at first. it appeared to fit very tightly, for every onward motion brought out the myphae, and they disappeared again when the deflowering finger advanced inwards. these titillations were more than the lovely girl could bear, for she threw away the book and set earnestly about giving herself relief. her finger now moved with lightning rapidity in and out of her vagina, while with her thumb she titillated her clitoris. by heavens! she is about to come--i can read it in the voluptuous motions of her charming body. i can read it in the trembling of her buttocks and the heaving of her bubbies. i can read it in the frantic motion of her finger and in the twitching of her eyelids. there--dear girl--now it flows-there--there. the acme was reached and she fainted away. "i was so excited by what i had seen that, regardless of consequences, i rushed into my cousin's bed chamber. she did not hear me for she had not yet recovered her consciousness. i pulled out my pocket handkerchief and wiped her lovely bijou perfectly dry. i then knelt down by the side of the bed and tenderly kissed the theater of her pleasures. the warmth of my embrace doubtless recalled her to herself, for she opened her eyes and gazed on me. the moment she saw me she uttered a faint scream. "'hush, dear emmeline,' i exclaimed. 'it is i, your cousin herbert. after what i have seen, all further reserve would be folly. i love you, my dear cousin, and must enjoy your beautiful body. no one need know anything about it.' "'promise to conceal what you have seen this night, and you may do anything you please with me,' she replied. "'i swear it,' i answered. "the beautiful girl no sooner heard me utter these words than she threw her arms round my neck and kissed me passionately. i twined her beautiful limbs in mine and rolled over her on the bed. i now laid on my back and, turning her magnificent buttocks towards my face, she herself guided my lance into her ruby cavity. a slight upward motion on my part caused it to enter completely, and i had the gratification of seeing my instrument enter in and out of her coral crevice during the act of coition. emmeline, when she felt my proud engine pierce her vitals, was almost delirious with joy. she knelt with my thighs between hers, and in the delirium of pleasure convulsively grasped the bedclothes. i felt that i was about to emit, and finding that she was not quite ready to come, i passed a hand round her hips and titillated her clitoris with my finger. this had the effect of immediately bringing down her emission. we both discharged together. "i have already, my dear girls, made my history too long, or i could detain you for hours yet with an account of the various modes in which i enjoyed my cousin. i could also tell you how i overcame the virtue of five of my aunt's eldest scholars, and how one night we all enjoyed an orgy in my cousin emmeline's chamber. but in such a relation i should necessarily have to repeat scenes i have already depicted so i forbear. "my cousin emmeline was married on the day appointed. i returned home, became acquainted with my present wife and was married. some little time after my marriage i managed to get amy to accept my embraces. i shall leave the details for her to tell." amy blushed and would fain have been excused--but we both insisted. amy was not obdurate, and could not withstand our entreaties. she commenced her history in the terms which will be found in the next chapter. chapter ii amy denmead's history "i was born in philadelphia. my father was a large and successful merchant, doing business there. we lived in a large house in the upper part of chestnut street, and my father's wealth procured me every luxury that the heart could wish for. i never knew my mother, for she died when i was quite young. my sister was married to you, herbert, when i was seventeen years of age. my ideas up to that time were very vague regarding the sexes, but i was soon destined to be fully enlightened. "i felt very dull after my sister had gone away, and my father proposed that i should write and ask my old school fellow, florence maltby, to come and stay on a visit with us. i cordially agreed to this proposition, for i loved florence and had not seen her for several years, although we kept up a constant correspondence. "florence accepted my invitation, and on the day agreed upon she took up her abode with us. "miss maltby was a beautiful girl about twenty years of age, her hair and eyes were black--in fact she was a decided brunette. she was fiery, impulsive and amorous. we had a thousand things to converse about, and in a few hours all our old friendship was reknit, and we became more intimate than ever. of course, we slept together. "for two or three nights nothing occurred of special moment. i noticed, however, that florence would kiss me with a great deal of warmth and press me tenderly in her arms when we were in bed together, but i thought nothing of it. "one night, about a week after she had been an inmate of our house, when we retired to our chamber, instead of undressing as usual, florence seated herself on the side of the bed and watched me in the process of disrobing. i had unhooked the front of my dress, and it had fallen on my shoulders, and my chemise, being open in front, allowed my two breasts to be seen; nay, even a portion of the white plain below was visible. florence no sooner saw this than her eyes brightened and she ran up to me and began to mold my bubbies. although this action somewhat surprised me, i made no resistance, and to tell the truth the contact of her soft hands on my breasts was very agreeable. "'what delicious breasts you have,' said florence. 'how well formed they are, and yet how large! see how stiff the rosy nipples stand out from this field of snow! oh, how i would love to kiss and press them!' and she buried her head between the two semiglobes. 'and then your belly, how soft and white it is,' she continued, passing her hand over it, 'how happy will the man be who presses that belly to his own.' "'oh, fie, florence, you should not talk in that manner,' i replied, my face flushing with the fire kindled in me by her lascivious touchings. 'but you exaggerate my beauties. it is true my breasts are a little larger than yours--but they are not one bit more handsome, more firm, nor more elastic. come dear, let us compare them, for i do not see why i should not be gratified as well as yourself.' "i now unhooked florence's dress and pulled it down to her waist. her two semiglobes were completely exposed. they were beautifully formed, firm, elastic and standing boldly out from her chest. i pressed and caressed them, sucking the rosy nipples which stood out stiff with desire. "'you naughty girl,' said florence, 'you will devour me. your kisses send a fire through my veins--and these delicious globes too--' "'could it be possible to see prettier bubbies than these,' i interrupted. 'just see how stiff the nipples are, and then you talk of my belly--look at yours. how deliciously smooth! how beautifully white.' "'come, darling,' said florence, 'let us rub breasts together--i am sure it will give us mutual delight.' "'i will do anything you wish, florence, for i feel a strange fire burning in me--come, love--come.' "we pulled down our clothes as low as possible so as to leave us a clear field. we then brought our chests together in such a way that our breasts rubbed against each other. to show how amorous we were, i need only say that this strange action gave us great delight. "'is it not exquisite?' said florence. 'the sensations of your breast against mine fires my whole blood.' "'i experience the same feelings,' i returned. 'oh, it is charming.' "'amy,' said florence, after a few minutes repose, 'do you know what i would like to do?' "'no, what?' "i should like to explore your more secret beauties.' "'with all my heart,' i replied, 'if you will allow me the same privilege.' "'willingly--i should love it,' returned florence. "'come then, darling,' i exclaimed, 'i am ready--do with me as you like.' "'dear girl, how good you are!' returned florence. lie down with your belly on the bed that i may admire and manipulate your beauties; that's right, darling.' "i threw myself on my face on the bed. florence came behind me and, lifting up my petticoats, exposed my bottom to her gaze. of course she saw also the pouting lips of my bijou at the bottom of the fleshy cushions, faintly overshadowed with hair. she moved my thighs slightly apart, by which movements the lips of my sheath were slightly separated, revealing a line of coral between them. florence absolutely threw herself on my bottom and devoured it with the most lascivious and ardent kisses. "'does that position suit you, dear florence?' said i, with my face buried in the bed. "'it is charming--delicious,' said florence, molding and pressing my buttocks. 'great heavens! amy, how the sight of your beauties fires me! what magnificent buttocks, how white and firm, how well developed," and again she bent down and smothered them with kisses. 'i should never be tired kissing your lovely bottom,' she continued, 'and the edges of that dear little cleft i see between your thighs--how inviting it looks! how beautiful it is, shaded with silky down. oh! i must--i must!' and she put her finger between the lips of my sheath and titillated my vagina. 'how charming, how delicious,' she repeated. 'amy, i am in a blaze--my slit is on fire. how deliciously tight your vagina clasps my finger and what a delightful warmth is there. there! now i have your clitoris! how stiff it is!' "'dearest florence,' i exclaimed, wiggling my buttocks, for the in-and-out motion of her finger was more than i could bear--'your touchings and titillations are bringing on a crisis. stay the motion of your finger or i shall come--there--there--there it is! oh! i die! i die--' "during this last speech of mine i moved my buttocks up and down, imitating the conjugal act--florence all the time continuing her manipulations until the crisis came and i fell motionless on my belly. "'come, amy,' said florence, withdrawing her dripping finger from my sheath, 'for heaven's sake give me relief or i die.' "i rose from my recumbent posture and, seizing florence by the waist, pushed her on the bed. she fell on her back. i threw her petticoats over her head. this action revealed all the lower portion of florence's body--and a beautiful sight it was. two magnificently developed thighs led up to a charming grotto covered with black hair, between the pouting lips of which could be seen her clitoris, stiff with intense desire. i admired for a moment florence's beauties, and then commenced my manipulations. first of all i stroked her belly, implanting kiss after kiss upon it. i then played with the hair covering her mons veneris, twisting my finger in and out of it. i then divided the lips of her sheath and titillated her highly excited clitoris. "'great heavens, florence,' i exclaimed, 'what a beautiful bijou yours is! what delicious pouting lips! what a forest of black hair and then your clitoris--how finely developed! let me kiss it! let me suck it.' "i now stooped down and inserted my tongue between the lips of florence's ruby passage, and titillated her clitoris with the tip of it. "'great god! how delicious,' i exclaimed, 'i feel ready to come again--i do indeed darling.' "'amy, darling, keep on--keep on--' said florence, almost crazy with delight, 'pass one hand behind and press my buttocks.' "i did as she desired and advanced one finger in the narrow canal adjacent to the legitimate road and kept time with my tongue and finger. "'there--that's it!' she continued, 'i am coming. oh! now--now! there! there! th--' "she opened her thighs to the widest extent and lifted her legs high in the air. a convulsive shudder ran through her frame and she discharged profusely, appearing to be perfectly annihilated by the deliciousness of her sensations. i threw myself by her side on the bed. after a long pause we both rose and kissed each other tenderly. "such was my first initiation in the sports of venus. florence remained with us some months and scarcely a day passed that we did not enjoy the pleasures of the gods. when she left us i was for a time disconsolate--but soon after i received an invitation to visit herbert and my sister. he has left it to me, dear kate, to give the history of my first amour with him. i shall do so, freely speaking, as if he were not present. "i was received with the utmost kindness by my brother-in-law, and truth compels me to state, rogue that he is, that he has always treated me with the most unvarying affection. at the time of my visit my sister was very sick, and i really pitied poor herbert, that he was debarred from those sexual enjoyments of which i felt assured he was so fond. but the thought of taking her place never for a moment entered my mind. "herbert was very polite to me, and time passed very agreeably. one day i stumbled in an obscure corner of the library on some amorous books. i secured them and conveyed them to my chamber. i then examined them and found that they contained pictures of a very lascivious character. in fact men and women, as naked as they were born, were performing the sexual act. i read them with avidity and they soon made me adept in sexual knowledge. one evening when herbert had gone to philadelphia, and my sister was confined to her chamber by sickness, i entered the drawing room with one of those prizes in my hand, determined to enjoy it all myself. i was in a state of delicious languor and, throwing myself carelessly on the sofa, began to read my book. i wore a low-necked dress and the weather being warm i had unfastened two or three of the top loops--thus leaving a considerable portion of my breasts exposed. my dress too was disarranged at my feet--revealing a considerable portion of my limbs. as i read, my cheeks became flushed, my bosom heaved, and i was altogether in a state propitious for an attack. i was suddenly startled by the sound of a voice at my elbow. "'what is the name of that book which seems to engross so much of your attention?' said the voice. "i raised my eyes, and who should i see but herbert himself gazing on me with heightened color and burning eyes. "'it is too bad, herbert,' i replied, raising from my seat, revealing by this movement a considerable portion of my legs; nay, i believe he even caught a glimpse of my thighs, 'you ought not to come so stealthily into the room.' "'my dear girl, you are wrong,' replied herbert, 'i did not come here stealthily, but it was your preoccupation which prevented you from hearing me enter. but you have not replied to my question--what book are you reading?' "'oh, it is a stupid work i found in the library, i have only just glanced at it and do not find it worth reading.' "'will you allow me to judge for myself, my charming sister-in-law,' he replied, taking a seat by my side. "'no, herbert, i will not allow it,' i returned, pressing the book to my bosom. "'i insist,' he cried, endeavoring to snatch the work from my hands. in the struggle his hand came in contact with my bosom and he even touched the strawberry nipples surmounting the semiglobes. at last be conquered and obtained possession of the book. i looked imploringly at him, but he opened it deliberately and read the title. it was the memoirs of a woman of pleasure. "'so, so, amy,' said he. 'this is the subject of your studies, is it?' "'i assure you i have not read a page of it--it appeared to me foolish and uninteresting, and i was just about to return it to the library when you entered.' "he knew that i did not tell the truth, for i blushed and cast my eyes down on the ground. he no longer hesitated, but throwing his arms around me, pressed his lips to mine and kissed me ardently. i was astonished and confounded and endeavored to escape him, but he held me tight and pressed his breast to mine. "'herbert, herbert, this is wrong, let me go, i beg of you.' "he replied by pressing another kiss on my lips. it was in vain i struggled; he appeared to be endowed with the strength of hercules. "'do have done!' i murmured between each embrace, 'someone might come.' "'my love, there is no cause for fear, there is no one in the house but you and i. your sister is confined to her chamber by sickness and i have given positive orders that i am not at home to anyone. we are absolutely alone.' "i could not disguise the pleasure that this news gave me, for my whole body became agitated with the warmth of his embraces, and my bosom palpitated against his. i even dared to return his caresses, and reimbursed with interest the kisses he gave me. "'amy, i love and adore you,' said he. "'herbert, i love you! i love you,' was the only reply that i could make. "again he pressed his lips to mine and sucked in my breath. he even inserted the end of his tongue in my mouth, and he met mine, which was as ardent as his own. i believe i should have died if nature had not given me relief at that moment. i believe the same thing happened to him, for he threw himself upon me, and two or three convulsive shudders ran through his system; he then became calmer and reclined negligently in my arms. "'my beloved, this is true happiness,' said he, 'oh, that we could remain thus forever, and that we might never part again.' "after a few moments repose he rose up, and leaning over me, seized one of my hands and felt my bubbies with his unoccupied hand. the contact renewed the fire in his body and his eyes reassumed their brilliance. when i felt his hand descend on my breast, i shivered and made a pretense of snatching it away, but it was in vain. he cautiously unhooked my dress; i no longer restrained him. my frock fell off my shoulders and my naked bust was entirely exposed to his view. he passed from one to the other of my ivory globes, as he called them, and molded them with his hands, playing with the nipples and applying his lips to them so that he almost sucked my life away. but he was not yet satisfied. he knelt down before me and, placing his head between my bubbies, began to play with my feet. i made but little resistance and he began to raise my petticoats. he touched my legs, he reached my knees, and at last his hand came in contact with my fleshy thighs. he rested here a moment and excited me by kisses. i trembled in his grasp like a leaf--my desires overcame me and i was completely in his power. he then became more bold and his agitated hand ascended the marble columns which would lead us to the center of love. at last he reached my bijou and ran his fingers in the down covering that mossy spot--he even forced one more bold than the rest between the lips, and gently rubbed my clitoris. it was too much for me, i opened my thighs to the widest capacity and absolutely cried with pleasure. he then raised his head from my palpitating bosom, and applied his lips where he had just put his hand. he kissed my mons veneris a thousand times, and inserted his tongue between the folding lips; he again sought out my clitoris and played with it at will. but this could not continue long. i was absolutely drunk with delirious joy. "'oh, what pleasure!' i cried, 'do what you will with me, my dear herbert.' "his only reply was to divest himself of his clothes; he then performed the same office for me, and we were both naked as we were born. he turned me round and round--he patted my buttocks and caressed my body all over. my hands too were not idle. i seized his magnificent instrument and gently rubbed it and tickled his purse. we were both almost crazy. he then reclined me on my back on the sofa and threw himself on the top of me. i eagerly opened my thighs to receive him and guided his fiery dart to the entrance of my 'con.' he entered the lips and met a little resistance, but was not to be conquered, for raising my buttocks i gave a sudden heave upwards, and his instrument was suddenly imbedded in the sheath destined by nature to receive it. then commenced the delicious movements. the motion was delightful. i looked around me and saw our naked bodies reflected in the mirrors. i could see his instrument entering in and out of my coral sheath. at last the consummation came. "'oh, herbert,' i cried--'i die! i die!-clos-er!--closer--clo--' "thus muttering, i closed my eyes. my eyelids trembled and with a convulsive movement i threw my legs around his loins and pressed him so tightly that i almost took away his breath. all was over, for i felt the essence of love rush into my thirsty womb, while i at the same moment poured down my share of venus' libations. my hold relaxed and we both fell all our lengths on the couch. "after remaining without motion a few minutes, he kissed me again, for he was not yet satisfied. he soon rekindled my desires. "he rose from the couch, and raising me up, placed me on its edge and again commenced his labor of love. with one hand he raised one of my arms in the air in such a manner as to leave my bosom entirely at his discretion. he took one of the nipples in his mouth and pressed me to him with his other hand. my thighs were widely separated and he had no difficulty in entering my vagina. he slightly bent his knees and was soon buried in my grotto. how delicious was the sensation of his lovely engine rubbing against the sides of my vagina. i assisted him by every means in my power, and in a short time we were again inundated with our mutual emission. "such, my dear kate, was the manner in which i first became carnally acquainted with herbert. how many times we have enjoyed each other since, i need not tell you. but this i do assure you, no other man has enjoyed me but herbert, and as long as he is kind to me no other shall. my history is ended." we thanked the charming girl for her confession. it was now getting daylight and almost time for us to separate. during amy's recital we had partaken freely of spiced wine, and all of us felt almost as vigorous as ever; we decided we would not separate until we could enter the lists of love no more. herbert brought a new auxiliary to our pleasures into the field, for going to a cupboard, he took from it an india-rubber dildo, which he strapped round amy's waist. and placing me on my side on the couch he made amy insert the dildo into my vagina, while she put her finger on my clitoris and began to rub it, at the same time moving her buttocks as if she were a man. he then went behind me and entered me _en cul_. amy acted her part splendidly. herbert passed his hand over her bottom and inserted his finger in her sheath. both herbert and amy moved together, and i had the delicious pleasure of enjoying a double embrace. herbert's finger too, was active, and we all discharged simultaneously. after we had recovered we danced naked about the room. herbert kissed our breasts, bottoms and mounts. he placed his staff between our bubbies, he tickled our clitorises, and committed a thousand other follies. at last he lay down on the couch and pulled amy on the top of him. she guided his instrument into her coral sheath, and moved herself rapidly up and down, while i clapped her broad white bottom with my hand until they were cherry red, and while i was thus engaged, herbert's toe entered my slit, and in this manner we all again discharged. it would tire the reader to tell all the ways we adopted to arrive at the same result. herbert embraced us _en con_, _en cul_, between the bubbies, between the buttocks--in fact in every possible mode and we did not separate until we were thoroughly exhausted and until the morning sun was several hours in the heavens. chapter iii a change of fortune the very next day following our orgy, i received a letter from my father's lawyer informing me of the death of my only surviving parent, at the same time informing me that he had left all his property to be divided equally between my brother and myself. his wealth was large, for his habits had been penurious, and i found myself the possessor of at least $ , a year. this of course entirely altered my prospects in life and it was natural that i should immediately throw up my engagement as governess and return home for the purpose of assisting the settlement of my father's affairs. i bade an affectionate farewell to herbert and amy, and even shed tears at parting with them. in due time i reached home. how still and quiet the place seemed! my brother was abroad, so that everything connected with the property was left to me. i worked energetically and soon produced something like order. i had been home about a week when i received another letter from my father's lawyer, who resided in new york, stating that my presence was absolutely required in that city to sign certain documents relative to my father's property, and advising me to come at once. i did not hesitate to obey his wishes, and that same evening entered the cars for new york. it was about six o'clock when we started, and i took a seat in the rear end of the car. for some miles i was alone, but a young gentleman of about eighteen got into the car from a way station and sat down by my side. i could see by the dim light that he was very polite and we had quite an agreeable conversation together. by and by it grew quite dark, for the lamp stationed in the middle of the car threw very little light where we sat. our conversation grew more confidential, i may even say affectionate. the young gentleman grew somewhat bold, and taking my hand, pressed it in his. the novelty of the situation and the fact that for ten days i had tasted no sexual pleasure rendered me oblivious to all resemblance of modesty and i allowed him to do as he pleased. nay, i even encouraged him, for i allowed my hand to fall as if by accident on a certain protuberance in front of his pantaloons. i had no sooner touched this sensitive spot than a shiver ran through him and he immediately retained my hand there as a prisoner. all reserve now left him. he had spread a shawl over our knees so that our actions could not be seen by the other passengers. i suddenly felt the rogue dragging up my skirts and petticoats, and in a few moments his hand was on my naked thigh; he glided over it and his fingers came in contact with the hair covering my mons veneris. he had already divided the lips of my coral cavity with his digits and was advancing one in the very center of my vagina when the train entered philadelphia. of course this put a stop to his progress, and we were compelled to assume a decent position. he was very attentive to me on the boat when we crossed the delaware, but he had no opportunity to renew his enterprises. at last we were safely seated in one of the camden and amboy railroad cars. as luck would have it the car was very empty, there not being more than two other persons in it besides ourselves. we took our places as far from them as we could. the young gentleman turned the seats so that he now sat opposite to me. the train had not left the station a hundred yards before he commenced operations by making me rest my two feet in his seat, one on each side of him, so that he sat between my thighs. he now raised my petticoats and amused himself by feeling my thighs, bottom and slit. he played with me for some minutes, titillating the interior of my vagina with his finger, pressing my thighs and tickling my bottom. in the meantime i had released his instrument from its place of confinement, and grasping it in my hand, i covered and uncovered its red head, and at the same time tickled his testicles. after a little time he drew me to the very edge of the seat and, pointing his rod, entered my salacious slit. after a few pushes which sent a thrill of delight through me, he turned up all my clothes and regaled himself with the sight of his engine entering in and out of my coral sheath. i responsively moved my buttocks in answer to his thrusts and in a few minutes we both discharged profusely. four times did he thus embrace me during our journey from philadelphia to new york, and four times did i pour down my libation of love's dew. we parted the best of friends, and from that day to this i have never seen him but the pleasure i enjoyed with him will never be effaced from my mind. late the next day i called on mr. ralph pitman, my father's lawyer. i found him to be a fine looking man of about thirty-six years of age. he was nearly six feet high, and stout in proportion. he appeared to be very strong and evidently enjoyed the most robust health. he received me very warmly and i saw his fine eyes sparkle when he gazed on my womanly charms. my business with him was soon concluded and it was decided that he should visit my late father's residence the ensuing week for the purpose of finally settling up his affairs. i made up my mind that i would return home the next day, as the city with all its noise and confusion was not agreeable to my taste. the next morning i walked out on broadway for the purpose of making a few purchases, when who should be the first person i met but laura castleton, my old teacher at b... seminary--and the first who initiated me in the delights of love. laura was dressed in the height of fashion and was as beautiful as ever. she recognized me immediately and kissed me affectionately. we immediately adjourned to taylor's, where we could converse in private. i told her everything that had occurred to me since i had seen her, disguising nothing. her eyes sparkled and her bottom heaved when i depicted all the love scenes i had gone through. "and now, dear laura," said i, when i had finished, "tell me what you are doing now." "i am the mistress of the head _maison de joie_ in new york." "what!" i returned, "do you mean to tell me that you keep a house of that kind?" "i do indeed, and a delightful time i have of it." "how i should love to know its mysteries." "that you can easily do--come and spend tonight with us. you shall see everything without being seen yourself. i have twenty-four magnificent girls living with me and every one of them will be gloriously embraced tonight, you may depend upon it. the rooms are so arranged that we can see everything that transpires in them. say you will come." "my dear, i should love to--only tell me where it is, and at what hour i should come." "i live at no.--mercer street, and come at seven o'clock." "i will be there, you may depend on it." soon after this we separated. i made my purchases, put off my departure until the next day, and at the appointed hour i was at laura's door. my old friend met me at the entrance. "you have just come in time," said she, "for horace greenwood has just taken olivia, one of the handsomest of my boarders, upstairs. she is from new orleans and one of the most lascivious girls i ever saw; i have no doubt we shall see some fun." so saying she led me upstairs and ushered me into a closet which communicated with the adjoining room. olivia and her friend were already there. i was struck with the beauty of the couple. the girl had intensely black hair and eyes, the latter of which were lighted up with desire and passion. her bust, which her low-necked dress allowed to be seen, was really magnificent. her companion was a fine handsome young fellow of twenty-two or twenty-three. "well, darling," said horace, pressing her voluptuous bosom close to him, "i have come to see you again. the thoughts of once more tasting the delights of your lovely person has kept me in a continued state of excitement all day. my staff is in a state of the fiercest erection." "let me have oracular demonstrations of the fact," said olivia, opening his pantaloons in front; out jumped his member, stiff and erect as a poker. "oh you bad boy," she continued, taking it in her hand and rubbing it up and down--"how gloriously still you are. i must kiss you then, you bad child." so saying, she took his member in her mouth and rolled her tongue over it, at the same time tickling his testicles. "great god!" he cried, "this is too much--i shall spend, dear girl, if you do not cease. all my blood is in a flame." "'it is so delicious, i hate to give it up," she returned, giving it a last kiss. "but i am excited as much as yourself. slip your hand underneath my petticoats and feel how stiff my clitoris is." he lifted up her skirts and took possession of olivia's luscious con with his hand and evidently found the little sentinel as stiff and firm as his own lance, for i saw by his motions that he was rubbing it between his fingers. "how delightful," said olivia, a shudder of delight running through her frame. "it is too much! stay! let me open my thighs a little wider--there, that is much better, now you can manipulate my slit a great deal easier. what intense pleasure! rub my clitoris harder and titillate the interior of my mount with your other finger." "yes, darling, i will, but, your petticoats are in the way," replied horace. "i want to see my finger enter in and out of your luscious grotto." "i will soon remedy that," she replied, lifting her petticoats above her navel, thus exposing her magnificent thighs, a portion of her white belly, and above all, her delicious con. "how beautifully you are made, dear olivia," said horace, devouring with his eyes the luscious sight before him. "what a luscious belly, and then this masterpiece of nature--this splendid bushy mount... what words can i find to express its beauties--what fine silky down surrounds this luscious little con! how deliciously the lips pout, inviting a visitor. let me examine the interior of this abode of happiness." so saying, horace seated himself on the ground between olivia's thighs. with the fingers of one hand he opened the lips of her slit and peered curiously into the ruby cavity. he passed the other hand behind her, molding and pressing her buttocks, even advancing one finger into the narrow passage adjacent to the haven of love. after continuing this play for a minute or two, he inserted his tongue between the lips of her bijou, titillated the interior of her grotto, sucking her clitoris. olivia was almost mad with pleasure, and showed it by opening her thighs to the widest extent. when she felt his tongue come in contact with her clitoris she experienced the acme of delight. "stop, dear horace," said olivia, throwing her arms around his neck, "or i shall spend i shall indeed--oh darling, darling--for heaven's sake, stop." "it is a hard matter to leave the interior of your luscious grotto," said horace withdrawing his tongue from her slit and looking into her face. "the sensitive folds of your vagina embraced my tongue so deliciously, and your clitoris is so beautiful that i hate to give it up. but, darling, let me see your beautiful bubbies." "how fond you are of molding and pressing a woman's breasts," returned olivia, unhooking her dress and shaking it off her shoulders, thus exposing her magnificently developed semiglobes. "then here they are. do what you like with them. see how stiff and firm the nipples stand out." horace then began to toy with her breasts, molding and pressing them and then sucking their rosy nipples. while he was thus engaged, olivia took possession of his staff of love-capping and uncapping its large ruby head. "this is too beautiful," said horace, burying his head between her breasts. "i can contain myself no longer. come dearest, let us perform the last act of love--i must embrace you. you see how eager my member is to enter your delicious con." "i assure you my slit is not less eager to receive it. dear horace, i burn for you--come, my dear angel--come! embrace me. bury this delicious instrument into the deepest recesses of my vagina. do not spare me--push it in to the very hilt, make your testicles knock against my bottom. come, darling, into me quick. see--i open the portals for you--there--now you have a fair mark--come darling--come!" while she was thus speaking, she half reclined herself on the sofa and opened her thighs to the widest extent. he then divided the lips of her salacious con with a finger of each hand and revealed the interior of that ruby grotto. horace rushed between her thighs, and passing one arm around her neck, brought his instrument to the entrance of her slit. olivia placed one of her feet on a table, standing close by the sofa, thus stretching her thighs as widely apart as possible. in another moment he was plunged to the very hilt in her body. "there, dear girl, you have it now," said horace--when his instrument was clasped by the lips of her coral sheath. "oh, how deliciously warm your vagina is! oh, how tightly your lovely con clasps my penis, and your delicious belly, how soft it is! your charming bubbies too, how delightfully they beat against my chest! stay, i must suck the nectar from those rosy lips once more." he continued bending forward and took one of the strawberry nipples in his mouth, at the same time continuing his energetic thrusts. "there, how heavenly! how delicious! how exquisite!" "it is too much, darling!" returned olivia, throwing her legs around his loins. "closer-closer still. look in the mirror and see how deliciously your penis fills my vagina. stay, let me raise my thighs a little, you will see it better then. there, now you see it. how lusciously it enters in and out of the coral cavity--now--i can see its ruby head--now it is lost in the hair covering my mount," (his strokes quickened) "oh! oh! i can stand no more," she continued, wiggling her buttocks. "dear love, i spend--i come--i come!--oh! oh--." "i too am coming--there, dear olivia--come! come!" during this scene their motions had increased rapidly. horace giving violent thrusts and olivia meeting him with corresponding motions of her buttocks. as the climax approached they seemed crazy with excitement and at the moment of emission their legs and thighs mingled together in confusion. you may be sure that i was no passive inspector of this scene; during its continuance, laura had taken possession of my mons veneris, and with her finger sought to give my excited feeling relief. at the moment of their discharge, i too succumbed, and was so much overcome that i was compelled to sit down to catch my breath for a few minutes. when i had somewhat recovered i again took my station at the post to enjoy commanding a view of the chamber. horace was now stretched lengthwise on the sofa; he was perfectly naked and olivia was lying on the top of him, also stark naked. his arm was passed around her loins and he pressed her tightly against his belly. his left hand rested on her shoulder. her mouth was fixed to his, and her breasts rested on his chest. her thighs were stretched widely apart and horace's staff was so deeply imbedded in olivia's slit that the very hair of their genitals intermingled. they evidently experienced intense pleasure. olivia's buttocks were elevated high in the air and she moved them energetically. every time she raised her bottom i could see horace's lance entering in and out of the lips of her bushy mount, and sometimes i could even see the rosy head of his dart as he plunged it again and again into her coral slit. this motion became more rapid, and soon the lips of olivia's glorious con seemed to contract and embrace horace's staff closely. she then gave two or three convulsive struggles and ended by falling without motion on horace's belly, at the same moment i saw the sperm trickle down her thighs. "they have done for the night," whispered laura to me. "come with me and i will show you something else. for i am very much mistaken if rose has not a visitor by this time." so saying we left our place of concealment and entered a similar apartment at the other end of the corridor. we entered a closet in this room and peeped through some cracks in the boarding into the next apartment. i saw a very pretty little plump girl entirely naked on her hands and knees on the bed, presenting her delicious white buttocks with her lovely slit, shaded with brown hair between them. behind her was a tall, fine looking man, about forty years of age, also naked. in his hand was a birch--with which he was gently tickling the lovely girl's bottom. "what does this mean?" i asked of laura. "that girl you see there is rose monson," she replied. "nothing gives her so much pleasure as to be soundly whipped on the bottom by her lover. they always begin in this way. her companion is george coulson, a very rich gentlemen--but watch them and you will see something amusing." i peeped again and saw that george was using the rod a little more freely than when i had first looked, already the cheeks of her buttocks were turned a rosy hue. his instrument was so stiff that it stood boldly up against his belly. "harder, george," murmured rose, her face buried in the pillow. "i scarcely feel it, harder my dear boy, flog me harder." george obeyed her wishes and let fall a shower of cuts on her plump backside. he continued this for a minute or two, when suddenly throwing down the rod he rushed to her, and to my surprise instead of entering her by the legitimate road, he entered her _en cul_--and passing his hand in front of her, buried two of his fingers in her hairy mount. every thrust of his buttocks sent his fingers deeper into her vagina, giving her intense delight. suddenly i saw her put her hand between her own lily-white thighs and tickle his testicles; it immediately brought on an emission from both of them and they sank exhausted on the bed. laura now led me to another apartment and again we took up our position. here i saw a strong man standing in the middle of the room, holding in his arms a naked girl. her arms were clasped around his neck and her thighs around his hips. his instrument was buried to the very depth in her vagina; he had one hand clasped round her body and the other supported her bottom. he moved her rapidly up and down. every time he did so his staff entered in and out of her cavity and in a few moments they both discharged. in the next chamber i saw a somewhat different scene. a beautiful girl, entirely naked, was seated on a low ottoman with her lovely thighs stretched widely apart. her lover was kneeling on the floor before her and was caressing her lovely con with his tongue. i was so placed that i could see his organ of speech enter in and out her ruby sheath--the lips of which appeared to caress it lovingly. this act alone was sufficient to make him discharge copiously at the same moment that his tongue made her dissolve in bliss. in another chamber a couple appeared to relish giving themselves manual pleasure instead of the act itself. for a lovely girl reclined on the bed with nothing but her chemise on, but still having her breasts and the lower portion of her body bare. her companion lay by her side--he had his fingers imbedded in her slit, while she had hold of his instrument. they moved their hands together while he had hold of her bubbies and tickled her bottom with his other hand. a few rapid motions caused the sperm to fly from his staff, and he drew his finger dripping from her vagina at the same moment. another couple had chosen a strange way to satisfy their desires. the girl lay with her head on a pillow near the edge of the bed. the man was behind her and had passed her thighs around the upper part of his chest--supporting her belly with his hand. they were closely joined together--he appearing to be able to enter a prodigious way into her by this mode--her bottom almost touching his face. while he embraced her, he bent his head forward and kissed her buttocks. they both soon emitted. i saw a great many other couples, but as they were for the most part a repetition of what i have already described, i shall omit referring to them. i thought i had seen all when i suddenly heard a ring at the bell, and almost immediately afterwards i heard a gentleman's voice say something in french in the hall. "it is alphonse de la tour," said laura. "now i shall have to show you something really worth seeing. he is the particular friend of eudoxie, the most beautiful girl in my whole establishment and more amorous and lascivious than all of them put together. she is lately from france, and does not speak a word of english. she is perfectly crazy when enjoying the sexual act and acts in the most preposterous manner. her naked body is worth going a hundred miles to see, she is so gloriously beautiful. but come, let us get to her room first for it is best not to miss the slightest preliminary of their love meeting." i was very curious to see this paragon and followed laura to her chamber which joined that of the french girl. we were soon installed in a convenient place of observation. we had been there but a few moments when eudoxie, followed by her lover alphonse, made her appearance. at the first glance i cast on the girl i was struck perfectly dumb at her surpassing loveliness. she was about nineteen years of age. her face was perfectly oval and her features as regular as if they belonged to a grecian statue. her complexion was a rich brown. her hair was intensely black and hung in a thousand little ringlets on her magnificently formed neck and shoulders. her eyes were shaded with long black eyelashes--her teeth were beautifully white and regular, her arms might have formed a model for a sculptor, while her bust, which her low-necked dress allowed to be seen, was the most beautiful i had ever beheld. imagine two lovely globes of snow which were so beautifully developed that they seemed to struggle to get free from the slight bonds that confined them. every breath she drew caused those magnificent orbs to heave in sight. her hips were fine, her figure magnificent, and her hands and feet excessively small. her companion was a fine, handsome young man of about thirty. he was well made, evidently of a very amorous disposition. the moment they entered the chamber she ran up to her lover and throwing herself in his arms, imprinted some hot kisses on his lips. i could even see her velvet organ of speech enter his mouth in search of his, and they remained for a moment glued together. suddenly the amorous girl released one of her divine breasts from its bonds of confinement and pushed it forward for him to kiss. "_baisez mon têton, mon cher alphonse, je meurs pour vous!_" (kiss my breast, my dear alphonse. i die for you ) said she. and she herself slipped the rosy nipple in his mouth. while he was thus engaged she kissed his hair, his ears and forehead. "_o foutez-moi--foutez-moi--mon cher,--mon con est en feu!_" (o fuck me, fuck me, my cunt is on fire) she exclaimed. and with that she began to tear off his clothes, and in a few moments he was quite naked. she then, with trembling fingers, began to disrobe herself, and every garment she took off only revealed new beauties. at last she stood with nothing on but her chemise. "_otez ma chemise. je suis si excitée, que je ne le puis pas_." (take off my chemise i am so excited that i cannot do it.) alphonse slipped her sole remaining garment over her head and she stood in all her naked beauty before us. i had seen many naked women, but none to compare to eudoxie; she was grace, beauty and voluptuousness combined. her skin was dazzling white, her limbs models of beauty--her tapering legs, her plump thighs, her white belly, her magnificent buttocks and her mount of venus, were the most magnificent objects i had ever beheld. the moment she was naked, she knelt down before the object of her adoration (the position she assumed slightly opening the lips of her slit, and giving me a glimpse of the coral interior) and, taking his instrument in her hands, she nestled it between her breasts, and bending her head forward, kissed it again and again. she then rose to her feet again and making him lie with his back on the bed, she kissed his whole body, now it was his staff, now it was his testicles--now she even caressed his buttocks. she placed one of his feet against her mount and, dividing the lips with her fingers, forced his toe into her coral sheath and moved herself rapidly up and down on it. this curious proceeding was very exciting to behold and her lascivious caresses caused alphonse's instrument to assume a prodigious state of erection. now she got on the top of him and, turning her bottom to his face, impaled herself on his staff. i saw its bulbous head distinctly separate the luscious lips of her slit, and then beheld it slowly disappear in her sensitive vagina. but she only kept it there for a minute, for jumping up again she placed it between the fleshy cushions of her buttocks, and holding it there with her hand, moved her bottom up and down. then she suddenly turned around and rubbed her white belly against it--now she put it between her swelling thighs--now her armpit. in fact, there was no part of her body to which she did not conduct it. these manipulations were more than the young frenchman could bear. he suddenly rose up and pressing her palpitating body in his arm, he laid her on her back on the bed. she opened her lovely thighs to the widest extent and revealed to him all the delights of the domain of venus. how can i describe the spectacle that we saw from our hiding place! an eminence shaded with a mass of hair as black as jet, the beauties of which the most delicate pencil could not trace. in a moment he was between her magnificent thighs. eudoxie seized his member and guided it into the delicious interior of her rosy con. it grasped his penis like a glove. eudoxie was almost wild with excitement, she breathed short, and her bubbies rose and fell in the most delicious confusion. their images were reflected in the mirrors surrounding the apartment. it was a glorious sight. there lay eudoxie extended on the bed, her head reposing on the pillow, and her long hair streaming by the side of the bed. one of her legs rested on the ground while the other was a little elevated, by this means extending her thighs to the widest capacity. alphonse was between them, his staff buried in her con, with one of his hands molding a globe of snow while the other was passed round her body. how delicious the contact appeared to be. he suddenly leaned forward and imprinted a thousand kisses on her lips; he then withdrew himself slowly from her, only, however, to plunge more deeply into the innermost recesses of her _con_. so delicious, so transporting, so celestial was the pleasure that they both felt, that eudoxie threw her legs around his loins and pressed him closely to her and they twisted and writhed in each other's arms. eudoxie suddenly exclaimed: "_o ciel! quel transport! o, o, o!_" (o heavens! what transport.) and finishing with a prolonged sigh, she poured down her tribute to the god of love, and then with a few convulsive heaves of her divine bottom, she let go her hold and fainted away. he also emitted copiously and fell annihilated by her side. in a few moments they had both recovered. eudoxie wiped alphonse perfectly dry and her lover performed the same office for her. neither of them appeared to be satisfied, for i could see that the frenchman's instrument was still in a state of fierce erection and eudoxie, by her touches and manipulations, proved that she was as amorous as ever. they now performed a strange action which only shows how foolish young people can be when they sincerely love each other. eudoxie went to a cupboard and took from it a bottle of champagne. she now placed herself on the edge of the bed in a half reclined position. alphonse sat on the floor with his head underneath her thighs so that his mouth came in contact with her hairy mount. eudoxie now uncorked the champagne and, drinking a glass herself, she poured another glass on her belly in such a manner that it ran down to her slit, and from there into alphonse's mouth. he swallowed it with the greatest gusto and the operation was continued until the bottle was emptied. this sight, strange as it was, inflamed me wonderfully. the parties were so beautiful and every portion of their bodies so scrupulously clean that all disgust was removed. the bottle was no sooner empty than they again proceeded to satisfy their amorous desires. alphonse lay on the ground, resting his head on a low stool. she straddled his face so that her mons veneris came in contact with his mouth. as she stood exactly opposite our place of concealment, we could see his tongue enter in and out of her luscious sheath; while he was feting her con, he advanced a finger into the narrow passage adjacent to the legitimate road and kept time with his tongue and finger. every time his tongue came in contact with her clitoris, a convulsive shudder ran through her and her bottom moved responsively to his titillations. at last they both succumbed--he from the force of imagination and she from the actual contact of his organ of speech on her excited clitoris. it was now quite late, and after alphonse had departed, the house closed for the night. i bade my friend an affectionate farewell and returned to my hotel. the next day i started for home. chapter iv my father's lawyer when i arrived home i busied myself putting my father's papers in order, and was so absorbed by the occupation that not even an amorous thought entered my head. this took me a whole week and i had only just finished when mr. ralph pitman was announced. i received him very cordially and treated him so freely that he soon felt quite at home. he had been there but two days when we so far understood each other that he ventured to kiss me. i made no resistance. from his manner of kissing i saw that he was of an excessively amorous temperament, and the fact that i had been ten days without indulgence in sexual pleasure made me very desirous of tasting his capabilities in the school of venus. the next day i entered the library rather suddenly and found my friend deeply engaged in a book. when he saw me he hastily endeavored to conceal the volume. "what are you reading, mr. pitman?" i asked. "something that i cannot show you, miss percival," he replied. "nonsense," i returned. "you need not be afraid, i can look at anything." "you will not be angry or offended if i show you this book?" he exclaimed. "certainly not--i wish to see it, and rest assured that whatever it may contain will neither offend me nor shock me." "then take it and judge for yourself," he answered after a moment's pause, at the same time giving me a burning kiss which sent a thrill through me. i opened the book and found it to be one of a most lascivious character, filled with amorous pictures. i gloated over these engravings and felt my blood all on fire. the engravings were from steel plates and represented the famous thirty-two positions of aretino. as they were extremely curious i will give a short description of them to the reader. their titles were in french and consisted of as follows: first, _la patte debout_ represented a man and woman standing face to face with his instrument plunged deeply in her coral cavity; second, _la grue_--the same position, but with one of the legs raised in the air; third, _la porte de devant_ represented a woman seated with a man standing between her thighs, her lustful crevice completely filled by his instrument, while her legs closely embraced his ribs; fourth, _le cheval fondu_ represented a girl on her hands and knees, while a man was embracing her from behind, her head being reclined forward and her bottom elevated; fifth, _l'allemande_ the same position with the addition that the man has his hands on her con; sixth, _la brebis_--the same position with the woman resting her hands on the ground; seventh, _faire des chandelles de suif_--the girl seated across the thighs of the man; eight, _a l'arbre_--the same position but with the girls legs raised, and with her feet placed against the man's buttocks; ninth, _l'enfant qui dort_--the girl leaning against the man's stomach, her shoulders against his right arm, and her two legs resting on his right thigh; tenth, _l'étendue_--the girl lying down on her back and the man standing between her thighs, embrace her in front, in which position he can see his instrument working in her con, eleventh, _au dos pressé_--a girl seated on a man's highs with her legs wrapped around his loins; twelfth, _cornuse_--the same position, where a man rests one of the girl's thighs on his arm and presses the other down against his buttock; thirteenth, _se seoir au col_--the same position when he raises one leg in the air; fourteenth, _chaussebotte_, a man taking the two lips of the girl's _con_, and drawing them on his penis; fifteenth, _courir la bague_--a man running towards a girl with thighs extended to receive him, and in this manner inserting his instrument into her con; sixteenth, _a la plaine_--the woman extended all her length on her back, with the man lying between her extended thighs; seventeenth, _a la grenouille_--the same position with the woman resting her feet on his heels; eighteenth, _la jannette_--the man lying all his length on the top of a woman; nineteenth, _a l'ondrenette_--when the girl stoops forward and the man embraces her in a standing posture from behind; twentieth, _au profil_--a girl and her companion lying on their sides; twenty-first, _a la botte badine_--the man with one of his legs resting on the woman's flank; twenty-second, _derrière en con_--a woman lying with her back to a man, with one of her legs raised in the air; twenty-third, _riche en fleuve_--the man lying across a woman, belly to belly; twenty-fourth, _chevaucher l'asne_--the woman lying on the top of a man with his instrument in her con; twenty-fifth, _a la galère_--the same position with her side turned to the man; twenty-sixth, _chevaucher en bast_--the woman lying across him; twenty-seventh, _a la mauresque_--the man seated on the bed with his legs open, the woman seated in the same position, but with her thighs resting on his; twenty-eighth, _au clystère_--the girl with her bottom brought to the edge of the bed, separating her buttocks with her hands, and the man standing behind, imbedded in the _trou de son cul;_ twenty-ninth, _sonner du cul_--the woman seated on the edge of the bed with her feet resting against the wall, and during the act of coition she keeps raising one leg and lowering the other; thirtieth, _les jambes au col à la revêche_--the woman lying on her face with her legs resting on the man's shoulders; thirty-first, _la cloche_ represented a man reclining on the ground, resting on his hands and feet--his belly uppermost, while the woman is seated in a basket without a bottom, so that her con comes through the open space, to which was affixed a pulley, so that every time the rope was pulled it brought the woman's notch in contact with the man's penis, and the amorous combat is finished by continual pulling on the rope; thirty-second, _branler la pique_ represented a man with his finger in a girl's con, and by his touches making her discharge--while she was doing the same thing for him. in this manner they enjoyed pleasure without conjunction, either standing, sitting or lying. when i cast my eyes on the magnificent plates, the color mounted to my face, and i involuntarily pressed my thighs closely together. "ah! kate," said ralph, again kissing me and forcing his tongue into my mouth. "i perceive you are as fond of amorous sports as i am. i am delighted to make the discovery. i can foresee some delicious pleasures together," and he pressed my palpitating bosom to his, kissing me in the same manner as before. "dear ralph," i replied, returning his caresses by imitating his actions, and advancing my tongue to meet his, "i have already been initiated in the mysteries of love, and have determined henceforth to devote my whole life to its enjoyments." "bravely spoken, kate," returned ralph. "but come, darling, take me into your bed chamber, and we will talk the matter over." i led the way into my own private room. i had caused it to be neatly furnished, and it was replete with every luxury. a carpet soft as velvet was spread on the floor; capacious sofas, soft and springy, just fitted for the performance of the conjugal act, were placed around the apartment. immense mirrors adorned the walls, relieved by beautiful pictures. no light of day was permitted to enter this nest, but it was illuminated by means of brilliant gas burners, and to crown all, a perfume of the most intoxicating description was distilled through the atmosphere. when we entered this apartment a delicious languor stole over me, and my amorous feelings were excited to an intense degree. i threw myself into ralph's arms, squeezing, kissing, nay even biting him. he returned my embraces with as much ardor as my own. i placed my hand outside his trousers and felt his stiff instrument. "stop, darling," said he, "these invidious clothes are in the way--i should love to feel your hand on my naked staff." so saying he began to undress, and in a few moments he was entirely naked. it was glorious to see his manly form in a state of nature. i rushed to him, i kissed his naked body all over. he shivered in my arms, and i really believe he would have discharged had he not torn himself from my embrace. as for myself i was on fire. the contact of his firm flesh sent a thrill of joy through my system, and i had to exert the greatest control to prevent myself from pouring down the elixir of love. "now, kate," said ralph, "it is nothing but fair that you should let me see you naked." "dearest ralph, do with me as you will; my whole body is yours." "bless you, darling, i only hope i may be able to satisfy you to your heart's content." so saying he actually tore off my clothes and reduced me to a perfect state of nudity. he then led me to a sofa and reclined me upon it. i never saw a man so amorous and lascivious as he was. sexual enjoyment appeared to be a perfect passion with him. when he had placed me on the sofa he stood a few feet off that he might better observe my naked beauties. "great god," he exclaimed, "what glorious beauty! how magnificently formed your body is, dear kate. what a delicious bust, what glorious semiglobes, how firm and hard, and then your belly, how white and smooth! what well developed thighs, what straight legs, and above all that masterpiece of nature--your delicious con. open your thighs a little, dear kate, that i may get a better view of it. there, that's it, now i can see it perfectly. how inviting the lips look amidst that mass of black hair! how closely they fold together showing a line of coral between them! oh, how i long to taste the sweets of that delicious grotto. now, dear kate, turn on your belly, and elevate your buttocks a little--there, that's it exactly. great heavens, the back of the picture is even more glorious than the front! what a delicious bottom! how closely the cheeks come together." he now began to kiss what he had admired. he embraced my bubbies, my belly, my bottom and the mount of venus. i could stand no more, but jumping up from the sofa, i rushed into his arms and exclaimed: "dearest ralph, give me relief or i shall die." he pressed me to him--my bubbies came in contact with his chest--our bellies met. the contact of the warm flesh almost drove us mad--we squirmed and wiggled in each other's arms--we hugged, kissed and bit each other--we rolled on the floor, interlacing our thighs, his staff touched my con, the hair of our genitals intermingled--we rubbed our bubbies together. i rolled myself on the top of him and moved myself backwards and forwards-he placed a hand on each cheek of my bottom, and pressed my hairy slit to his testicles. "great heavens!" i exclaimed, "it is coming--ralph--ralph--i must spend--i must--i must--" "dearest kate, i too--there--now it flows--now--now--now--" a convulsive shudder ran through both our frames; we closed our eyes in the ecstasy of our sensations, and both discharged profusely, the divine liquor running from one to the other. all this had been effected without any actual conjunction. a few minutes' repose followed and we recovered our energies. "kate, my darling," said ralph, "lie down on the sofa again, i want to manipulate your charms a little more at my ease. we were so carried away by our feelings that we discharged before we had sufficiently prolonged our pleasures--let us be more prudent this time." acting upon this wish, i threw myself on the sofa, and ralph seated himself on an ottoman by my side, and commenced to excite me by his caresses. fastening himself on the first instance on my breasts, he sucked my nipples, patted and molded my bubbies and tickled me under my arms. he was not satisfied with his tribute of admiration to my bust, but he straddled my chest and brought his instrument and testicles directly over my two ivory globes. he then lowered his bottom and rubbed his staff and pendants against soft cushions, nay more, he pressed my breasts closely together and nestled his engine between them. great heavens, how these delicious touchings excited me; nor was he less moved, for his buttocks actually quivered with delight. "kate," said he, "how delicious your breasts feel to my pego; i could almost fancy it was its own proper nest," and he commenced to move his buttocks backwards and forwards. "for heaven's sake stop, ralph, or i shall spend, i shall indeed," i exclaimed, "i can feel the crisis approaching." "so do i, darling, but it must not be yet." he then dismounted and took a seat by my side on the sofa and began to play with my belly. he stroked it, rubbed it backwards and forwards with his hand and tickled my navel. he then descended to my slit. there he made a full stop, and a convulsive thrill ran through his body when his hand came in contact with the bushy forest of dark auburn hair surrounding my mons veneris. he twined it in his fingers, gently pulling it, just to cause me the most pleasing titillation without giving me the slightest pain. he then invaded the sanctuary of love itself, and gently dividing the lips of my bijou, cautiously advanced one finger into my vagina. after allowing it to rest there a few moments, he pushed it further in until it was wholly engulfed in my glowing passage. "oh, kate," he exclaimed, moving his finger gently in and out of my slit, "what a charming _con_ you have, how tight it is! and only to think that i am to bury my staff in this lovely cavity." "darling," i replied, "your lascivious touches almost take away my senses." he withdrew his finger from my vagina and carried it to the top of my slit, and tickled my clitoris. "there now, i have the little sentinel between my fingers. heavens, how soft it is," he said, rubbing it gently. during these manipulations on his part, i was not idle, but paid him back in his own coin. i stroked down his belly and rubbed his staff in my hand, making him squirm and wriggle again. had anyone peeped in the door at that moment they would have seen a delicious spectacle. such an observer would see a naked girl and man seated together on a sofa. our faces were close together. ralph had one arm round my neck, his hand resting on my left shoulder; the other arm was pressed underneath my right thigh, which was elevated in the air, and the finger and thumb of that hand were buried in my con, the lips of which clasped them tightly. his left leg rested on the ground while the other was placed on the sofa, thus stretching his thighs widely apart. i was engaged in rubbing his stiff member up and down with my left hand, and intense pleasure was painted on our faces. "it would be impossible to find such a pretty little slit as yours," said he; "it is a veritable bijou--there now, my finger is wholly inserted." he continued forcing his finger to the very hilt into my vagina, so much so that it actually touched the neck of my womb. "how deliciously warm it feels, and it is so tight that when i withdraw i take with it the inner lips. now just fancy my finger a man's pego--now it's in, now it's out--now it's in--now it's out--now--." "for heaven's sake stop! i don't want to spend just yet. it is too delicious," i exclaimed. he then made me get up from my recumbent posture, and placing me in a standing position, put one of my feet on a chair, while the other foot rested on the ground. by this attitude my thighs were stretched widely apart, and my con was fully exposed to view. he then seated himself again on the ottoman between my legs. his face by this means just reached my mount. he commenced to bury his visage in the hair surrounding my slit. "darling kate," he said, "i must now taste the delights of your delicious con. i have felt it, played with it, but i have not yet performed the act which is the most delicious of all to me." "do with me as you will," i replied. "i experience nothing but delight from your touchings." "push your belly a little forward--there, that's right, now i have it exactly." so saying he deliberately separated the lips of my slit with his tongue, and worked it into the innermost recesses of my con. god, how delicious it felt! he then moved his tongue in and out, at the same time by scientific movement caressing my clitoris with his lips--giving me the most intense pleasure. i stood directly before a large mirror, and by looking into it, saw a most delectable sight. there i stood in my nudity, my naked body borrowing roseate hues from the artificial light, and seated between my thighs, his face also turned towards the mirror was the naked form of the handsome ralph. i could see his tongue enter in and out of my coral sheath, while my breast rose and fell with the delights of my sensations. i could tell when his lips came in contact with my clitoris, not only by my sensations but by the tremor and writhings of his thighs. his legs were widely open, and i could see reflected in the glass his glorious engine in a state of princely erection. the motion of his tongue increased. "darling ralph, i am going to spend--harder--come--o--co--." i could hold out no longer, but with a convulsive heaving of my whole body, i emitted a profusion of the elixir vitae. "kate, dear kate!" exclaimed ralph in an excited tone--"i must have relief; i am in flames." i clasped him in my arms, and pushed him to the sofa, i made him place himself on his hands and knees, by which position his buttocks were elevated high in the air. great god, how magnificent he looked thus! his splendid buttocks shone in the gaslight. between his thighs i could see his magnificent pego all surrounded with hair, and the two well-developed pendants. i patted his buttocks, i separated the cheeks, and titillated the division between them. my fingers came in contact with _le trou de son cul_. i cautiously penetrated it and tickled the narrow canal, and kissed his bottom over and over again. when i had wrought him up to the highest pitch of desire, i proceeded with further operations. "open your thighs a little wider, dearest ralph, so that i may get my head between them--you have given me the most ecstatic pleasure, and i am determined to do the same for you." "will that do?" he answered, opening them to the widest extent. "beautifully," i returned, fixing my head in such a manner that the insides of each of his thighs rested against my cheeks. i laid on my back and was so placed that my mouth came in direct contact with his splendid staff. in a moment i had taken his engine entirely in my mouth. i titillated the end of it with my tongue and forced the foreskin backwards with my lips. it was too delicious--i was ready to spend again. "oh, how heavenly!" exclaimed ralph. "how beautiful, dear kate, titillate my anus." i passed my hand behind him, and forced one of my fingers into the narrow way, moving it in and out, and keeping time with both my mouth and finger. i soon had the satisfaction of seeing the climax approach. he pressed his buttocks together, his muscles stiffened. "now i am coming! now--oh! oh! oh!" he exclaimed. and with a cry of pleasure he emitted profusely. when we had rested some little time, i went to a recess and took from it a delicious cordial--of which we both partook freely. it had the effect of completely restoring our energies. we commenced our touchings and titillations and were soon in a glorious state of desire again. "kate," said ralph, "i am going to give you a glorious embracing, and if i don't make you spend as you have never spent before, i shall be very much deceived. i intend to treat your delicious little con to a delicate morsel. now, kate, on your back--open your thighs, and let me engulf my staff in your salacious slit." i laughed heartily and threw myself on my back--he was on the top of me in a moment, and in another second his pego was imbedded in my con. it touched me to the quick and i experienced intense pleasure. ralph, while he was working his instrument in me, sucked my breasts and played with my belly, and just when i was about to spend he placed his hand on the top of my slit and rubbed my clitoris. this finished the business, and with a cry of joy i again discharged--he at the same time pouring down his share of the nectar of venus. this last bout appeared to arouse my amorous desires instead of quenching them, and i exclaimed in a frenzy: "ralph will you do a favor for me--you know that flagellation increases amorous pleasures. i want you to birch me on my bottom, while i make myself come with a dildo." "get me a rod, dear kate, i should like nothing better than to birch your naked buttocks." i went to a cupboard and procured from it a birch and a dildo--the former i handed to him. i then placed myself on my hands and knees on the sofa, thus elevating my bottom in the air. i then brought the dildo to bear on my coral sheath, it entered the lips and in another moment it was plunged to the very hilt into my vagina. he placed himself behind me and began to lay the birch gently on my bottom. the skin turned a rosy hue and i twisted and wriggled under this delectable excitement. i moved the dildo gently in and out of my con. "harder, flog my bottom harder," i exclaimed. he obeyed by letting fall a shower of stripes on my buttocks. the motion of the dildo in and out of my coral slit grew faster. i wriggled my buttocks--i am coming--my bubbies trembled--i was now working for my very life--the instrument moved in and out of my lustful sheath so quickly that its motion was no longer perceptible. "ralph, i spend, i die glorious--delicious--del--del--" a convulsive shudder ran through my frame--the motion of my hand suddenly stopped, leaving the dildo still imbedded in my _con_, and i fell flat on my belly without any sign of life. i was recalled to life again by the energetic thrusts of ralph's instrument--for seeing my delirium, he could not restrain himself any longer but felt that he must share it. before we separated we enjoyed each other several times more. the next day he returned to new york and i saw him no more. i was now left entirely alone, but i was very busy, for the house was full of workmen embellishing the house and grounds. i have but a few more words to add. in due time all the improvements to the house were finished and i began to feel very lonely. one winter's evening just as i was about to retire to bed i was startled by the ringing of the front door bell--and almost immediately afterwards i was clasped in my cousin harry duval's arms. he had just returned from abroad. i shall draw a veil over the pleasures of that night sufficient to say that harry had become more dear to me than ever, and i paled before him in the art of giving sexual delight. the next week we were married, and since that time we have settled down into a quiet life. neither harry nor myself desire any change--and our existence has been fraught with every blessing. the confidence between us is so great, that i have not hesitated to tell him my history. he has reposed the same confidence in me by telling me his, and some day i may perhaps give it to the reader. and now, dear reader, my task is done. i bid you an affectionate farewell. the end [illustration] _mary might have learned a more ladylike trade, but one thing is certain: she had a shining faith in that space guy from earth. now, about that cake she baked ..._ she knew he was coming by kris neville illustrated by ed emsh outside, the bluish sun slanted low across the green dust of the martian desert, its last rays sparkling on the far mountain tops. one by one, lights flickered on in the city. "mary must be expecting that earthman," anne said. she held her glastic blouse tight together over her breasts and leaned a little out of the window. milly nodded. "the _azmuth_ landed this morning." the noises of commerce were fading. from the window anne saw the neon blaze up over the door. for the thousandth time she blinked between the equivocal words: --beautiful hostesses-- . laughter, dry and false, filtered up from the tea bars along the street. she looked westward, toward the spaceport, and made out the shadowy nose of the berthed space liner looming against the night. she could picture the scene--a thousand stevedores unloading cargo, refill men and native spacewriters scurrying over the sleek hull, the earth voyageurs shouting orders and curses. "maybe he isn't even on it." anne turned from the window. she crossed to the couch and sat down, fluffing out the green crinkly glass of her skirt; pendant, multicolored birds flashed from the rings in her ears. she tucked rosy feet under her scented body. "i don't like earthmen," she said. "they spend money." "they make me sick," anne said. "with their pale skins and ugly eyes and hairy bodies." "they have strong arms." anne's wide, red mouth curled in distaste. "they're like a bunch of kids." the room was lighted by soft, overhead fire. heavy drapes hung from the walls. sweet, spicy incense curled bluely from the burners by the window. before the mirror, milly edged in the narrow line of her pink eyebrows with a pencil. she folded her lips in, rubbing them together, licked them, making them a glistening red. she pinched her cheeks. "i wonder when they'll catch crescent?" she said. anne yawned languorously. "it won't be long." "i wouldn't want to be in her shoes," milly said. anne patted her mouth lazily. "she ought to have known she couldn't run away." "what do you think miss bestris will do to her?" anne stood up, brushing out the wrinkles in her dress. "i should care." "but what will she do?" anne shrugged. "whip her, maybe. how should _i_ know?" "don't you feel you'd like to run away, once in a while?" milly asked, turning to look at the other girl. anne laughed coldly. "i've got better sense." "but don't you _want_ to?" anne tossed her purple hair. "where is there to go? who is there to go to?" "yes.... i guess you're right." milly turned back to her reflection. _buzzzzzz_.... both girls turned their heads to the buttons on the wall. the white one was glowing. "it's miss bestris." "we'd better go," milly said. together they walked down the heavily carpeted stairs to the sitting room. the madame was waiting. she was a large woman, rolling in creases of fat, and her pink hair was rough and clipped short. she had a pair of dimples in her cheeks and a single gold band around her right wrist. she was leaning against the piano. "hurry now, girls, hurry right along," she said. more girls were entering the room; they spread out, sitting on the chairs, curling at the madame's feet. their eyes--amethyst, gray or golden--were on her face. many had pink hair, others had tresses of purple or salmon. "now, girls, i suppose you know there's an earth ship in port?" the girls nodded. "so i expect we'll have visitors tonight. i want you to all look your very best." she smiled at them. "anne, why don't you wear that low-cut, orange plastic with the spangles, and june, you the prim white one? you look like an angel in it." june smiled. "and mary...?" "yes, miss bestris?" "mary. did you buy that neo-nylon i told you about?" "no, miss bestris." "mary, mary, mary. i just don't understand you at all." "i'm saving my money, miss bestris," mary said intently. "yes, dear, i know that. we're _all_ saving our money. but we simply must look presentable. we have a reputation to hold up." "yes, miss bestris." "then, mary, dear, do--do, _please_, buy yourself something decent." "yes, miss bestris. i will.... tomorrow. tomorrow morning, if i ..." [illustration] "child? if you what?" "nothing, miss bestris." "well. see that you get it tomorrow. if you don't, i'm afraid i'll have to take some of your money and get it for you." mary looked down at the floor. the flaming glow of the hydrojet torches cast golden lights in her softly purple hair. "by the way, mary. is that your cake in the oven?" "yes, miss bestris." the other girls snickered. "let her alone," said the madame. "if she wants to bake a cake, why shouldn't she?" no one answered. miss bestris went on around the room, discussing the girls' clothing, brushing this girl's hair, pinching that girl's cheek, chucking this one under the chin, smiling, frowning. then finally she stepped back and nodded. "you all look quite good, i think. i can be proud of you. and now, i want you all to go to your rooms and make them extra attractive, and then try to get a little rest, so you'll all be especially beautiful when the boys come. run along now." the girls filed out, and night continued to settle. after a while, her cigarette glowing in the gloom, the madame waddled to her office. there three people were waiting for her. * * * * * the office was plain, businesslike, masculine; no lace, no ribbons, no perfume, only the crisp smell of new paper, the tangy odor of ink, the sweet smell of eraser fluid. when she came in the door the three people stood up. she waved her cigarette hand with a once delicate gesture and flame light glinted dully on the gold band. "please don't get up for me," she said, but her tone was condescending and the three visitors sat down respectfully. miss bestris crossed to her desk; she perched on a corner of it, leaned back, blew smoke. "you wanted to see me about your girls?" two of the people, man and wife, looked at each other. "yes," they said. and the other man said, "yes." "did you bring any pictures?" they handed her pictures, and she held them up to the overhead torch. she studied them critically, pursing and unpursing her lips in secret calculation. "this one," she said finally, holding out one of the pictures. the man and wife rustled their clothing; they smiled faintly proud at each other. the other man got up slowly, retrieved his picture, left the room without saying a word. "we can't do for little lavada," the woman whined. "she was a late child, and we're getting old, and we thought she would be better here. it's hard to do for a growing girl when you get old. and my husband can't keep steady work, because of his health and ..." "i'm sure she will be happy here," the madame said, smiling. "yes," the man agreed. "it's for the best. but--you know--well, we hate to do it." "how old is she?" "... fourteen." miss bestris studied the picture again. "she doesn't look over twelve." "she's fourteen." "and healthy--" "we have doctors to see to that," the madame said. "how much did you have in mind?" "well," the man said, "it's been a month now since i worked, and with debts and everything...." "and something to put aside for winter," his wife added. "we couldn't take less than a _milli dordoc_." "and we wouldn't even think of it, but we don't have a scrap of bread in the house." "and all our bills, and winter coming on...." miss bestris turned the picture this way and that. the parents waited. the woman cleared her throat. the man shuffled his feet. the clock on the wall went tick-tick, tick-tick. "i'll give you eight hundred and thirty _dordocs_," the madame said. "well...." miss bestris bent forward, holding out the picture. "here, then. take it. i wouldn't offer that, but i need a girl right now. one of mine ran away last week, and i'm afraid she won't be able to work for a month or so after they bring her back. i'm being generous. eight hundred and thirty, or take your picture and don't waste my time." the man and woman stared at her. and the clock went _tick-tick_. "take it, chav." "... all right," the man said. "we need the money." miss bestris leaned across the desk, pressed a button on her panel. almost immediately, a door slid silently open and her lawyer entered with a white, printed, standard-form sales contract in his hand. efficiently and rapidly, he entered the particulars. "sign here," he said, and the parents signed. "now," said the madame, "if you'll bring in lavada tomorrow at nine, i'll arrange for a doctor to be here. if his examination is satisfactory, the money will be ready." the lawyer left, and the woman said, "you understand, we wouldn't do this but for ..." "i understand, perfectly," miss bestris said. "you don't need to worry. this is the best kind of house--earthmen only, you know, and they're very particular. my girls are given the best of care. i'm like a mother to them, and if they are thrifty and diligent, they'll be able to save enough money in a--a very short time to redeem their contract as provided by law. you needn't worry at all." "well," the woman said, "i feel better after talking to you. i feel better about the whole thing to hear you talk like that." the clock went _tick-tick_. "uh," the man said, "you won't--? that is, our little daughter is sometimes wilful and ... uh ... well ... sometimes." miss bestris smiled. "we know how to handle girls." "you'll treat her...?" "as i would my own child," miss bestris said; she took out another cigarette, lit it. "i think we'll call her--well--poppy. earthmen like to feel at home, you know." the clock went _tick-tick_. "well, uh," the man said. "uh. thank you." * * * * * in one of the rooms upstairs mary sat before the dressing table with her back to the mirror, while june and adele occupied the two overstuffed chairs. night sounds drifted up from the yellow canal, and fresh flower scents whispered on the warm air. the diaphanous glass curtains rustled at the open window. "they're too expensive," mary said. "i'm sure miss bestris overcharges us for them." "hush," said june, glancing around at the walls nervously. "hush, mary." she smoothed at the delicate, plutolac lace fringe above her breasts. "imported material like this costs money. you can't get it for nothing, and we have to have the best." "i still think she charges too much." adele shrugged delicately and crossed shapely ankles. "i think miss bestris must like you, or she wouldn't let you wear that dress again tonight. you ought to watch out that you don't get on the wrong side of her." mary laughed, her amethyst eyes sparkling. "i won't care. not after tonight." "you're not going to run away?" june asked breathlessly. "you wouldn't dare do that. you'd catch it, sure!" mary shook her head. "not _run_ away." adele leaned forward and said huskily, "you got enough money to redeem your contract?" again mary shook her head. "no. it's nine hundred and ten _dordocs_. i have only ninety-three. but i'll have enough in the morning!" she stood up and crossed to the window, looked out toward the spaceport. "how?" "tell us, mary!" "tell you what?" anne asked, coming into the room. languidly she drew the door closed behind her and rested against it. "tell you what?" she insisted, narrowing milky eyes. "mary says she can redeem her contract tomorrow." anne's wide mouth curled contemptuously. "nonsense!" "it's not," said mary without turning. anne glided sensuously across the room to the bed, her tight fitting plastic rippling with her tigerish muscles. she sat down. "he said he'd take me away, this trip," mary continued. "he'll sign off, and then we'll both get a ship and go to one of the frontier planets. where it won't matter about--all this." anne laughed harshly. "my god! you believe _that_?" "we've both been saving our money," mary said dreamily. "he's in love with me. he said so." "honey, that's what they all say." smiling, mary turned from the window and leaned backward, stretching. "you don't know him. he's different." "they're all the same," anne said, her mouth twisting bitterly. "they're just alike. don't believe any of them." and mary said, "with him, it's different. you'll see." after a moment, anne said, "that earthman? that what's-his-name?" mary nodded, and anne brushed an imaginary something off her knee. "an earthman," anne said. "they're the worst of all." "you don't know him, or you wouldn't say that." adele looked away from anne. "you love him, don't you, mary?" "yes." "you're a fool," anne said. "listen to me. _love_ a man? god! you'll see. after him, there'll be another and another, and--just like rosy--you'll watch 'em leave you and laugh at you until finally you're hurt so bad you don't think you can stand being hurt any more, and then along comes another one, and it starts all over again, and then one night you take a razor blade and go to the sink and stick out your throat and...." "no! no! you're wrong! he's not like the rest!" anne leaned back carelessly, resting, propped on one hand. "see. you know i'm right, already." "you're not!" anne shrugged. "honey, tell me that tomorrow night." "i better go take my cake out," mary said. she fled the room in a swirl of shimmering glastic. anne sneered, "i don't see why miss bestris puts up with her the way she does." "you're jealous," june said quietly. anne did not answer. "mary's decent," adele said. "maybe that's why. she's from the sticks, and her parents still come to see her on visiting days, and there's something about her so--so innocent. maybe that's why miss bestris likes her." june said, "i think she's better than the rest of us. i think miss bestris feels sorry for her in a way." "don't make me laugh," anne said, facing june. "the only one that'll ever feel sorry for her is herself!" "you shouldn't have talked like that to her!" june snapped. "why don't you let her alone? she'll feel bad enough without you helping!" anne rolled over on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. june took a helox lamp from her drawer and started to bake her hair darker. those earthmen were so funny about colors. in the kitchen, mary took the cake out of the oven. it was steamy and light and fluffy, and it smelled sweet and warm. she set it on the table and mixed a two-minute green frosting which she spread, carefully, over the cake. she patted here and there with the spatula and stood back, her eyes proud and serious. she hummed a little tune under her breath as she scrubbed the pots and pans. her hands moved in practiced rhythm, and the water splashed and gurgled. when the kitchen was again spotless, she looked once more at the cake, and then, turning out the light, she went back to her room. anne and adele had left, but june was sitting quietly in the dusky moonlight. her white dress seemed vaguely luminous. laughing, mary flicked on the light. "it's a wonderful cake," she said. "the best one i ever made. just the way it should be." "i wouldn't feel too bad, mary, if he doesn't come to eat it," june said. "i don't want to sound like anne, but there was a lot of sense in what she said." "it's just like a real wedding cake." she hummed the snatch of martian tune. "like in the tele-papers." she laughed with her eyes. "the bridegroom takes the silver knife and cuts two large pieces of the cake while the bride, dressed in filament coral, stands at his right hand. she carries a bouquet of--anne just likes to be mean!" june frowned. mary crossed to the dressing table. she studied her face in the mirror. it was heart shaped, elfin; her purple hair was a riot of curls, and her eyes were amethyst and gold. she smiled at herself. "i want to look as pretty as i can tonight." she twisted around. "you don't think he'll come either, do you?" "i--no, mary." mary looked back at the mirror. "he likes our canal blossom perfume." she dabbed some of it on her ear lobes. "i like it best, too." june stood up, crossed to the musikon, found a slow five-toned waltz. she turned the music very low, and left the color mixer dim enough so that only the faintest ghosts projected hues moved on walls and ceiling. mary continued to stare into the mirror. "but he will come. i know it." june said nothing. "don't you see. i just _know_ he'll come." june crossed back to her seat. mary turned from the mirror. "i'm sure he will. he's--i mean...." june smiled wanly. "well, he will! you'll see!" june said, "even if it is an old dress, you look very nice in it." "i've been learning his language. i can say 'thank you' and 'yes' and 'no' and 'i love you' and all kinds of things in it. he gave me a book, and i've been studying. i want to be able really to talk with him. we've got a lot to talk about. i want to find out about his parents, and what he likes for supper and what kind of music he likes to hear, and--and all sorts of things. i want to find out all about his planet, and...." "yes," june said wearily, "i know." the music played on. the moving lights on the walls were like colored reflections from a sunlit river. "he may be a little late tonight; he has a lot to do, first. but he'll be here." _buzzzzz_.... it was the red button; it blinked on and off. "visitors," june said. "look--" mary said. "look, june. i'm not half ready yet. look. tell miss bestris i'll be down a little late. tell her i have a special boy, and it'll be all right. he wants me to wait for him." june was on her feet. "... all right. you'd better not wait too long!" "i won't." after june was gone, mary returned to the task of making her face pretty, but after a moment, she turned from the mirror, leaned back, and tried to relax. underneath her dress, her heart was pounding. the warm air carried sounds of the night creatures. one of the great canal insects, screeching, flapped by the window. the tiny third moon crept up over the horizon, and the buildings cast triple shadows. _buzzz. buzzzz._ still mary waited. _buzzz. buzzzz. buzzzzzz...._ she was afraid to wait any longer. but by now she was sure that he would be down stairs. there was a last-minute flurry of combing and primping, and then she rustled out of the room, her head erect, her eyes shining. * * * * * the large reception room was filling. overhead, the color organ threw shimmering, prismatic beams on the ceiling. beneath it, stiff, embarrassed spacemen, mostly officers dressed in parade uniforms, chatted in space-pidgin with the laughing, rainbow-haired girls. miss bestris sat in one corner, her eyes roving the room: settling here for a second, there for a second, checking, approving, disapproving, silently. occasionally she would smile or nod at one of the girls or one of the spacemen, and once she frowned ever so slightly and shook her head. anne was reclining on a couch, eating a golden martian apple, listening to a second mate; she played with a lock of his hair and smiled her wide smile. june, angelic, sat primly in a straight-backed chair, the captain at her feet, a boyish, space-pale earthman, drew embarrassed circles on the carpet with his index finger. in the next room, three couples were dancing to the slow music of an earth orchestra. an inner door opened, and a uniformed native sheriff stepped in, a crisp, military figure. "miss bestris?" she stood up. "yes?" the earthmen fell silent, waiting. "we think we have your runaway." he turned to the door. "bring her in." two more sheriffs entered, and between them, there was a young, slender girl. her face was gaunt and tear-stained. her body trembled. she looked at the madame fearfully. "you idiots!" miss bestris screamed. "get her out of here! you'll ruin my party! take her out!" the two men removed the girl. to the remaining sheriff, miss bestris said, "damn you, if you ever do anything like that again, i'll ... i'll...." "i'm sorry, madame. but we wanted immediate identification. would you want us to hold the wrong girl?" "that's her, all right! now, get out! wait for me in my office." when they were gone miss bestris turned to the silent room. in quite passable esperanto she said, "i--am sorry. a misunderstanding. i assure you, nothing. go on with the party, and i'll see what i can do for the poor girl." she stood up and in her own language said, "lively, girls! smile! you, rita, hurry and serve tea!" she made her exit. the spacemen grumbled among themselves, coughed uneasily, watched the closed door through which the madame had gone. listening, they could hear only a muted mumble of sing-song sounds in several voices. with determined animation, the girls moved about, smiled, chatted. rita came in, wheeling the tea tray, and the girls converged on it, each trying to be the first to serve her escort. the tea was the martian stuff, concocted of a kind of local hemp. the earthmen found it harsh and bitter to the taste, but gentle on the soul. anne had filled two cups and returned to the second mate when she caught sight of mary coming down the stairs. on the lowest step, mary stood for a long time; her eyes eagerly searched the crowd. slowly a puzzled, hurt look came over her face. june came to her side after a little while. "isn't he here?" "no. not yet." "i'm sorry," june said, touching mary's arm lightly. "it's all right. it's early yet. i'll just sit down by miss bestris' chair and wait for him." she turned from june and went to the chair. before she could sit down, a space corporal came over, bowed, tried to take her hand. she shook her head. he smiled twistedly and walked stiffly away. another man smiled at her. she shook her head slowly. someone came in the front door, and she leaned forward. then she slumped back limply. she heard a tinkly laugh. she looked in its direction. she met anne's eyes, bright and amused. just then miss bestris came in, her eyes angry and her cheeks flushed. she strode across the room. "well," she said. "i'm glad to see you finally came down." she sank heavily into her chair. "cresent's back. they just brought her in. the idiots came right in here with her. i'll bet i lost half-a-dozen customers. these earthmen are sensitive about such things." mary was still staring at the door; miss bestris looked down at her. "well, what are you sitting here for?" "please, miss bestris. i'm waiting for my special boy friend tonight." she snorted and looked away. "why isn't he here?" "he will be." "he'd better. i'll let you wait another--half an hour. that's all." "thank you, miss bestris. you're very kind to me." "i indulge you more than i ought to, child," she said. "more than is good for you, if the truth were known." a man came in; mary stiffened and then relaxed. the mutter of voices blended into a steady hum. more couples were dancing. miss bestris moved around the room. the music was tinny. another man came in. "your time's up," the madame told mary. "please, let me just wait for another few minutes." miss bestris fixed her lips grimly. "i've had enough nonsense for tonight. you heard me!" "_please!_" "you heard what i said." "miss bestris, i couldn't. not tonight. honest, i couldn't. if i had to talk to anybody, i'd break down and cry. he'll ... come. i know he will." miss bestris whirled on her. "listen, you little--" but she stopped, suddenly. "all right," she said, gritting her teeth. "i can't afford another scene tonight. but you'll be sorry for this." miss bestris stormily looked away. the dancers danced; the music swelled louder. gradually, deliberately, the lights were waning. "haven't i always been good to you, mary?" the madame asked. "yes." "then like an obedient girl, do as i say. if he hasn't come by now, he just won't. he's gone to some other house." "no!" mary said doggedly. "just remember, tomorrow, how you deliberately disobeyed me. your silly emotions are costing me money, and that's one thing i simply won't stand for." "he'll come." mary said. "you won't lose money." couples sat side by side, laughing, talking in whispers. occasionally there were giggles. the room began to empty slowly. the lights continued to dim until the rooms were gloomy. even the shifting shades of the color organ were no more than a faint ambience. anne, laughing, helped her second mate to his feet. "i'll give you one more chance," miss bestris said. "the next man that comes in...." "no! i just couldn't! not tonight!" a few more customers drifted in. then even the stragglers stopped coming. it was very late. "he's deserted you; you see that now?" madame bestris sneered. mary stood up. there were tears in her eyes. "you can't--you don't--know--how i feel," she choked. "you don't care!" she turned and ran up the stairs, crying. several earthmen, still in the big room, turned to watch. the torches were misty twinkles now. the last couples climbed the stairs and then miss bestris, too, went to bed. * * * * * the blue morning came. the town awoke; commerce began. at seven, miss bestris lay in bed frowning, considering the events of the previous evening. but she was not so annoyed that she forgot to call a doctor on the teleview and arrange for him to come at nine to give a physical examination. her bulk out of bed, she dressed and went to the kitchen to brew a pot of hemp tea. the cleaning maid, moving about in the next room, heard miss bestris call sharply: "flavia! come in here!" flavia appeared with a dust rag in her hand. "did you cut this cake?" "no, ma'am." miss bestris glowered. "that little idiot! she must have slipped down here after we were all asleep and sat here and cried her silly little eyes out! if she thinks she can pull that love-sick act on me she'll soon find out different. am i supposed to put up with having her moon over every space tramp that comes in? why, i've taken more from her--!" "yes, ma'am." miss bestris waddled to the stairs, climbed them determinedly. at mary's door she stopped and twisted the knob. locked! miss bestris hammered. "open up, mary!" the door rattled under her hand. "open that door at once!" no answer. miss bestris pounded harder. "open up, i say!" anne sauntered into the hall, her dressing gown swishing. "she really made you look the fool last night, didn't she?" anne said lazily. "you--you slut! mind your own business." anne smiled and shrugged. "open the door, mary! do you hear me! open it!" "maybe she killed herself," anne said. "it has happened." "my god! no.... she wouldn't dare. you think she would?" anne shrugged again. "they do funny things sometimes." miss bestris' face was red. "run down and get my keys. in my desk. you know where they are." then, "_for god's sake, hurry!_" while she waited miss bestris rattled the door, pleading and cursing. finally anne returned. miss bestris snatched the key with a shaking hand. she hurled the door open and burst inside. "see here, you little--!" she stopped. the room was empty. on the neatly made bed reposed a little stack of money. when miss bestris got around to counting it, she found that it contained exactly nine hundred and ten _dordocs_. the end * * * * * transcriber's notes: this etext was produced from if worlds of science fiction may . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed. obvious punctuation errors repaired. page word "lambence" changed to "ambience" (no more than a faint ambience) meaning a faint light. (images generously provided by the internet archive.) the dark by leonid andreev translated by l. a. magnus and k. walter published by leonard and virginia woolf at the hogarth press, hogarth house, richmond as a rule success had accompanied him in all his undertakings, but during the last three days complications had arisen which were unfavourable, not to say critical. his life, though a short one, had long been a game of terrible hazards; he was accustomed to these sudden turns of chance and could deal with them; the stake had before been life itself, his own and others', and this by itself had taught him alertness, swiftness of thought, and a cold hard outlook. chance this time had turned dangerously against him. a mere fluke, one of those unforeseeable accidents, had provided the police with a clue; for two whole days the detectives had been on his track, a known terrorist and nihilist, drawing the net ever closer round him. one after another the conspirators' hiding places had been cut off from him; there still remained to him a few streets and boulevards and restaurants where he might go undiscovered. but his terrible exhaustion, after two sleepless nights and days of ceaseless vigilance, had brought in its train a new danger: he might drop off to sleep anywhere, on a seat in the boulevards, even in a cab, and be ludicrously arrested as a common drunk. it was now tuesday. on thursday--only one day to spare--he had to carry out a terrorist act of great importance. the preparations for the assassination had kept the little organization busy for some considerable time. the »honour« of throwing the last and decisive bomb had fallen to him. he must retain self-command at all costs. but sleep.... it was thus, on that october evening, standing at the crossing of crowded streets, that he decided to take refuge in a brothel. he would have had recourse earlier to this refuge, though none too secure, had it not been for the good reason that all his twenty-six years he had been chaste, had never known women as mere women, had never been in a brothel. now and then he had had to fight sternly against such desires, but gradually restraint had become habit, and had produced in him an attitude of calmness and complete indifference towards the sex. so now, at the thought of being forced into close contact with a woman who traded in such pleasures, and of perhaps seeing her naked, he had forebodings of any number of unpleasantnesses and awkward moments. true, he had only decided to go to a prostitute now, when his passion was quiescent, when a step had to be taken so important and serious that virginity and the struggle for it lost their value. but in any event it was unpleasant, as might be any other obnoxious incident which must be endured. once, when assisting in an important act, in which he played the part of second bomb-thrower, he saw a horse which had been killed with its hind parts burst open and the entrails exposed; this incident, its filthy and disgusting character, and its needlessness, gave him a similar sensation--in its way even more unpleasant than the death of a comrade from an exploding bomb. and the more quietly and fearlessly, and even joyously, he anticipated thursday, when he would probably have to die, the more was he oppressed with the prospect of a night with a woman who practised love as a profession, a thing utterly ridiculous, an incarnation of chaos, senseless, petty, and dirty. but there was no alternative. he was tottering with fatigue. * * * * * it was still early when he arrived, about ten o'clock; but the great white hall with its gilded chairs and mirrors was ready for the reception of guests, and all the fires were lighted. the pianist was sitting beside the piano, a dapper young man in a black frock coat--for it was an expensive house. he was smoking, carefully flicking the ash of his cigarette so as not to soil the carpet, and glancing over the music. in the corner near the darkened dining room there sat all arow, on three chairs, three girls whispering to one another. as he entered with the manageress, two of the girls rose, but the third remained sitting; the two who rose were very décolletée, the third wore a deep black frock. the two looked at him straight, with a look of invitation, half indifferent, half weary; but the third turned aside. her profile was calm and simple, like that of any proper young maiden,--a thoughtful face. apparently she had been telling a story to the others, and the others had been listening, and now she was continuing the train of thought, telling the rest in silence. and just because she was silent and reflective and did not look at him, because she had the appearance of a proper woman, he chose her. never before having been to a brothel he did not know that in every well equipped house of this sort there are one or two such women, dressed in black like nuns or young widows, with pale faces, unrouged, even stern, their task being to provide an illusion of propriety to those who seek it,--but when they go with a man to their room, drinking and becoming like the rest, or even worse,--brawling and breaking the china, dancing about, undressing and dancing into the hall naked, and even killing men who are too importunate. such are the women with whom drunken students fall in love, whom they persuade to begin new, honourable lives. but of all this he knew nothing. and when she rose reluctantly, and looked at him with displeased and averted eyes, glancing at him sharply out of her pale and colourless face, he thought once again, »how very proper she is!«--and felt some relief. but, keeping up the dissimulation, constant, unavoidable, which caused him to have two lives and made his life a stage, he balanced himself elegantly on his feet from his heels to his toes, snapped his fingers, and said to the girl with the careless air of a habitual debauchee:-- »well, what about it, my dear? shall we pay you a visit, now, eh? where is your little nest?« »now--at once?« the girl asked, surprised, and raised her eyebrows. he smiled gaily, disclosing even rows of strong straight teeth, blushed deeply, and replied: »certainly. why lose valuable time?« »there will be some music soon. we can dance.« »dance, my fair charmer? silly twiddles,--catching oneself by the tail. as to the music, it can be heard from up there?« she looked at him and smiled. »fairly well.« she was beginning to like him. he had prominent cheek bones and was clean shaven; his cheeks and the lower part of the mouth, under the clean-cut lips, were slightly blue, as when dark-bearded men shave. he had fine dark eyes, although in expression a little too unswerving; and they moved slowly and heavily, as though every movement were a great distance to be traversed. but despite his shaven face and easy manner, she reasoned, he did not resemble an actor, but rather an acclimatized foreigner. »you are not a german?« she asked. »nnno. not quite. i mean, i am an englishman. do you like englishmen?« »but what good russian you speak! i should never have guessed!« he recollected his british passport and the affected accent he had been using lately, and he blushed again at the thought of having forgotten to keep up the pretence as he ought to have done. then with a slight frown, and assuming a business-like dryness of tone in which a certain amount of weariness was perceptible, he took the girl by the elbow and led her along swiftly. »no, i am a russian, russian. now, where are we to go? show me! this way?« the large mirror showed the full-length figures of the pair sharply and clearly--she in black, pale, and at that distance very pretty; he also in black, and just as pale. under the glare of the electric lights hanging from the ceiling his wide forehead and the hard mass of his prominent cheeks were peculiarly pale; and both in his face and the girl's, where the eyes should have been, there were mysterious, fascinating hollows. and so strange was the picture of such a black stern couple against the white walls, reflected in the broad gilded mirror, that he was startled, and stopped short by the thought: »like a bride and bridegroom.« and, as his imagination was dulled by want of sleep, and his thoughts brusque and inconsequent, the next moment, looking at the stern pair in mourning black, he thought: »as at a funeral.« and both notions were equally unpleasant. apparently his feelings were shared by the girl. she silently, wonderingly glanced at herself and him, him and herself; she tried to wink--but the mirror would not respond to so slight a movement, and in the same dull and obstinate manner persisted in picturing this black shamefast couple. and perhaps this pleased the girl, or recalled something of herself, something sad, for she smiled gently, and lightly pressed his clenched hand. »what a couple!« she said reflectively, and for some reason or other the dark bow of her eye-lashes, with the fine curve of their droop, became more noticeable. this he did not observe, but resolutely dragged the girl along with him, she tapping her way on high french heels on the parquet flooring. there was a corridor, as there always is, and narrow dark little rooms with open doors. at one of them inscribed above in irregular handwriting, »liuba«, they entered. »and now, liuba,« he said, looking round and unconsciously rubbing his hands one over the other, as though carefully washing them in cold water, »don't we want wine and something else? or some fruit?« »fruit is expensive here.« »that doesn't matter. do you drink wine?« he had forgotten himself and was addressing her as you; he noticed it, but did not correct himself, for there had been something in that touch of her hand which made him unwilling to use the familiar pronoun, or play the lover and act a part. this feeling, too, passed on to her; she stared at him fixedly, and answered deliberately, with some uncertainty in her voice, though none in the language she used. »thank you. i do drink. wait a moment. i will return at once. i will tell them to bring only two pears and two apples. will that be enough?« it was now she who was using the pronoun of politeness, and through the tone of voice in which she spoke the word there could be heard the same irresolution, a slight hesitation and interrogation. but he paid no attention to this. when he was alone, he went swiftly to work surveying the room from all sides. he tested the closing of the door--it closed splendidly, on the latch and on the key; went to the window, opened both casements--it was high up on the second floor and looked out on the courtyard. he frowned and shook his head. then he experimented on the lights; there were two of them; when the one on the ceiling was switched off, the other by the bed lit up under a little red hood--just as in the best hotels. but the bed! he grinned and raised his shoulders, as though laughing silently, distorting his face as people must who are stealthy and for some reason secretive, even when they are alone. but the bed! he walked round it, handled the wadded counterpane, and then with a sudden longing to be gay and saucy in his joy at the sleep he was going to have, he twisted his head like a boy, stuck out his lips, made round eyes--all to express his highest degree of amazement. but at once he became serious again, sat down, and wearily waited for liuba. he wanted to think of thursday, that he was now in a brothel--that he was already there--but the thought rebelled and stubbornly resisted him. outraged sleep was taking its revenge. there on the street, sleep had been so gentle; now it no longer caressed his face, as with a soft downy hand, but made his own hands and feet writhe, and racked his body as though it would rend him asunder. suddenly he began yawning, even to the point of tears. he took out his browning and three full clips of cartridges, and savagely blew down the barrel, as into a key. it was all in order ... and he longed insufferably for sleep. when the wine and fruit were brought in, and liuba came in after them, he shut the door, only on the latch, and said: »well ... all right ... please help yourself, liuba. please do.« »and you ...?« the girl, surprised, looked at him askance. »i will ... later on. for two nights, you see, i have been having a gay time of it and have had no sleep, and now....« he yawned frightfully, straining his jaws. »well...?« »i will ... later. just an hour. i will ... soon. and you, please drink and don't spare. and eat the fruit. why did you get so little?« »but may i go into the hall? there will be some music.« this was inconvenient. they might begin talking about him, the strange guest who had gone to sleep, and might start guessing ... and that might be awkward. so, lightly restraining a yawn which was already riving his jaws, he said sedately and earnestly: »no, liuba. i shall ask you to stay here. you see, i don't much like sleeping alone in a room. it's a mere whim, but you will excuse me....« »certainly. you have paid your money and....« »yes, yes,« and he blushed for the third time, »quite true, but that isn't what i mean.... and, if you like ... you can lie down too. i will leave room for you. only please lie next the wall. you don't mind?« »no, i don't want to sleep. i will just sit here.« »will you read?« »there are no books here.« » would you like today's paper? i have it here. there is something interesting in it.« »no, thank you.« »as you like. you know best. but ... with your permission....« he shut and locked the door and put the key in his pocket, without noticing the strange look with which the girl followed his movements. this courteous and decent conversation, such a curious conversation in this home of misery where the very air was thick with the vapours of drunken brawls, seemed to him perfectly natural and quite convincing. with the same polite air, as though he were in the company of young ladies, he touched the edge of his frock-coat and asked: »do you mind if i take off my coat?« the girl scowled slightly. »certainly. of course....« »and my waistcoat? it's so tight.« the girl did not answer, but merely shrugged her shoulders. »here is my pocket-book ... and money. will you be so good as to take care of them for me?« »you had better leave them at the office. we always deposit such things there.« »why?« he looked at the girl, and turned aside in confusion. »oh, of course ... but that's silly!« »but do you know how much you have on you? some people don't know, and then afterwards....« »i understand. quite. you desire....« he lay down, politely leaving room for her by the wall. and enchanting sleep, spaciously smiling, came and nestled with its downy cheek against his, gently fondled him, stroking his knees, and mercifully settling to rest with its soft, velvety head on his shoulder. he smiled. »what makes you smile?« the girl smiled involuntarily. »because i am comfortable.... how soft your pillows are! now we can talk awhile. why don't you drink something?« »i think i shall take off my things ... if you don't mind? i shall have to sit still so long.« her voice had a touch of mockery. but at the sight of his unsuspecting glance, and hearing his simple.... »certainly, please do« ... she explained quite simply and seriously: »my corset is so tight. i shall take it off, too ... if i may.« »certainly, you may.« he turned away, blushing. but, either because insomnia had so addled his thoughts, or because all his life he had been so innocent, his »you may« sounded quite natural to him ... in a house where all things were allowed and nobody ever thought of asking anybody's leave about anything. he heard a rustling of silk and the unbuttoning of a dress,--then a question: »you are not an author?« »what ... an author? no, i am not an author. er ... do you like authors?« »no, i do not.« »why? they are men....« he yawned--a long satisfying yawn. »and what is your name?« silence ... and then: »my name is ... n--no! peter.« »and what are you? what do you do?« the girl questioned him gently, but watchfully, and in a firm tone. the impression conveyed by her voice might have been that she was moving towards the bed. but he by now had ceased to hear her; he was already sleeping. for one moment an expiring thought had flickered in a single picture, in which time and space melted into a motley of shadows, gloom and light, motion and repose, a single picture of crowds and endless streets and a ceaseless turning of wheels depicted the whole of those two days and nights of frenzied chase. and in an instant all of this was stilled, dimmed, and had passed away, and then in the soft half-light, in the deep shadow, he had an image of one of the picture galleries where, the day before, for two hours, he had eluded his pursuers. he seemed to be sitting on a red velvet divan, which was extraordinarily soft, and staring fixedly at a huge black picture; and such a restfulness proceeded from that old black cracked canvas, his eyes were so much rested, his thoughts reposing so gently, that for some moments, even in his sleep, he began fighting sleep, confusedly afraid of it, as though of an unknown disquietude. but the music in the hall played on, the frequent little notes with bare heads hairless jostled up and down, and the thought came: »now i can sleep.« and all at once he fell into a deep slumber. triumphantly, eagerly, gentle glossy sleep soothed and embraced him and in profound silence masking their breathing they went their way into a pellucid melting sea. thus he slept on--one hour and then another--on his back in the polite posture he had assumed awake, his right hand in his pocket holding the key and his revolver; the girl, neck and arms bare sitting opposite, smoking, sipping cognac, gazing on him. now and then, to get a better view, she craned her rather thin, flexible neck, and, when she moved, her lips curled with two deep creases of constraint. she had not thought to turn out the hanging lamp, and under the strong light he was neither young nor old nor strange nor intimate, but some unknown being--the cheeks unknown, the nose ending in a bird's beak of shape unknown, the breathing, so even and powerful and strong, unknown. his thick hair was cut short in military fashion, and she noticed on the left temple, near the eye, a little whitened scar from some former wound. there was no cross strung round his neck. the music in the hall died down or started afresh--piano and violin and songs and the pit-a-pat of dancing feet; but she sat on, smoking cigarettes and observing the sleeper. she stretched her neck inquisitively to look at his left hand which was lying on his breast --a very broad palm and strong restful fingers; it seemed to weigh heavily on him, to hurt, so with a careful movement she lifted it and let it down gently at the side of the big body on the bed. then rose swiftly and noisily, and, as though she wanted to smash the switch, roughly turned out the upper lamp, lighting the lower one under the red hood. but even then he did not stir. his face in the pink light remained as unknown, as terrifying as before, in its immobility and repose. she turned aside, clasped her knees with her arms, now softly reddening, threw her head back and stared motionless at the ceiling from the dusky hollows of her unblinking eyes. and in her teeth, tightly pressed, there hung a cigarette, half smoked, cold, dead. * * * * * something had happened, something unexpected and terrible, something considerable and of consequence, whilst he was sleeping--this much he understood at a flash, even before he was properly awake, at the first sound of a harsh, unknown voice. he took it in with that sharpened sense of danger which to him and his comrades had developed almost into a new special sense. he was up quickly and sat with his hand pressing his revolver hard, his eyes searchingly and sharply exploring the mist of the room. and when he saw her, in the same attitude, with her shoulders of that transparent rosy hue, and her bared breast, and those eyes so enigmatically dark and unswerving, he thought to himself: »she has betrayed me!« then he looked again more steadily, sighed deeply, and corrected himself: »she hasn't yet, but she will.« how miserable it all was! he drew a deep breath and asked curtly: »well, what is it?« she said nothing. she smiled triumphantly and spitefully, looked at him and was silent,--as though she already accounted him her own, and without haste or hurry wanted to gloat over her power. »what did you say just now?« he repeated, with a frown. »what i said? i said, get up!--that's what i said. get up! you 've been asleep. it's time to play the game. this isn't a doss-house, my dear!« »tum on the light,« he commanded. »i will not.« he turned it on himself, and under the white light he saw her eyes infinitely wicked and black and painted, and her mouth compressed with hatred and disdain. and he saw the naked arms, and all of her, alien, decisive, ready to do something irrevocable. he saw the prostitute--a creature repellant to him. »what's the matter with you? are you drunk?« he asked, seriously disquieted, and put out a hand to take his high starched collar. but, anticipating his movement, she snatched at the collar, and without looking hurled it somewhere, anywhere, into the room, behind the chest of drawers, into a corner. »i won't give it to you!« »what are you after now?« he asked calmly enough, but gripping her arm with a hard firm pressure all round like an iron ring, so that the fingers of her thin hand drooped powerlessly. »let go! you're hurting me!« she cried, and he held her more gently, but did not release his hold. »you--look for it!« »what is it, my dear? are you going to shoot me? isn't that a revolver you have in your pocket? well, shoot, shoot! i'll see how you shoot me! or would you like to tell me why you take a woman and then go to sleep by yourself and tell her to drink--'drink, and i'll go to sleep!' with his hair cut and clean shaven, so that he thinks nobody will know him! do you want to go to the police, my dear? to the police, eh?« she laughed, loud and merrily--and in a way that really frightened him, there was such a savage, despairing joy on her face, as though she had gone mad. and then the idea that all was going to be lost in such a ludicrous fashion, that he would have to commit this silly, cruel, and senseless murder, and yet himself probably perish in vain, struck him with even greater horror. deadly pale, but externally calm and with the same resolute air, he looked at her, followed her every movement and word, collecting his thoughts. »well? silent now? lost your tongue?« he could seize this snaky neck and crush it and she would never be able to utter a shriek. he could do it without compunction; actually, while he held her so firmly, she had been twisting herself about like a snake. »so you know, liuba, what i am?« »i do. you«--she enunciated the words syllable by syllable, harshly and with an air of triumph--»you are a revolutionary! that's what you are!« »how do you know?« she smiled mockingly. »we aren't quite in the backwoods here.« »well, suppose we admit that i....« »pooh, suppose we admit! let go of my arm! you're all alike, you men, always ready to use your strength against a woman. let go!« he released her arm and sat down, looking at her with a heavy and obstinate wonder. something was moving about his cheekbones, a little ball of muscle, with a disturbed motion; but his expression was tranquil, serious, somewhat melancholy. and this made him again seem strange and unknown to her--and also very handsome. »well, will you know me again?« she exclaimed, and surprised herself by adding a coarse reproof. he raised his brows in surprise and spoke to her calmly, but without averting his eyes, dully, remotely, as from a great distance. »listen, liuba, certainly you can betray me, not only you, but anyone in this house, or in the street. one shout--halt! arrest him!--and men will come in their tens and hundreds and try to get me--or kill me. and for what reason? merely because i have done no harm, merely because i have devoted all my life to these very people. do you understand what it means, to sacrifice one's life?« »no, i do not,« the girl retorted harshly, but listening attentively. »some do it out of stupidity, some for spite. because, liuba, a common man cannot endure a fine man, and the wicked do not love the good....« »what should they love them for?« »don't think, liuba, that i am simply praising myself. but just look what my life has been, what it is! from the age of fourteen i have been rubbing along in prisons, expelled from school, expelled from home. my parents drove me out. once i was nearly shot dead, saved only by a miracle. try to picture it--all one's life passed in this way, all for the sake of others, and for oneself, nothing--yes, nothing!« »and what induced you to be so ... fine?« she asked jeeringly. but he replied seriously: »i don't know. i must have been born so.« »and i was born such a common sort of thing! and yet i came into the world the same way you did, didn't i?« but he was not listening. all his mind was held by the vision of his own past, so unexpectedly, so simply heroic, called up by his own words. »yes ... think of it ... i'm years old and there are already grey hairs on my head, and yet until today ...« he hesitated a moment and went on firmly, proudly. »up to now i have never known a woman.... never ... do you understand? you are the first i even see ... like that. and to tell the truth, i am just a little ashamed to be looking at your bare arms.« the music rose again wildly, and the floor vibrated with the rhythm of dancing feet, broken by a drunken man's wild whoop, as though he were heading off a herd of stampeding horses. but in the room it was still, and the tobacco smoke rose serenely and melted into a ruddy mist. »that is what my life has been, liuba!« he looked down, thoughtfully and sternly, overcome by the thought of a life so pure, so painfully beautiful. and she made no reply. then she got up and threw a wrap around her bare shoulders. but at the sight of his look of astonishment, almost gratitude, she smiled and brusquely threw the wrap off, and so arranged her chemise that one breast, rosy and soft, was left bared. he turned away and slightly shrugged his shoulders. »take a drink!« she said. »no, i never drink anything.« »what, never drink! but you see, i do!« »if you've got some cigarettes, i'll have one.« »they're very common ones.« »i don't care.« and when he took the cigarette he noticed with pleasure that liuba had put her chemise straight, and the hope that everything might yet go smoothly rose again. he was a poor smoker; he did not inhale, and womanlike held the cigarette between two straight fingers. »you don't even know how to smoke!« the girl exclaimed angrily, and roughly tried to snatch the cigarette from him. »throw it away!« »now, there you are,--angry with me again!« »yes, i am!« »but why, liuba? just think! for two nights i haven't had any sleep, running about the town from pillar to post. and now, you're going to give me up and they'll have me in jail! that's a fine finish, isn't it? but, liuba, i'll never give in alive....« he stopped short. »will you shoot?« »yes, i shall shoot.« the music had ceased for a time, but the wild drunken man was still halloing although apparently someone, as a joke or in earnest, had a hand on his mouth, the sounds coming through the compressed fingers even more desperately and savagely. the room reeked no longer with cheap fragrant soap, but with a thick, moist and repulsive odour; on one wall, uncovered, there hung messily and flat some petticoats and blouses. it was all so repugnant, so strange, to think that this also was life,--that people were living such a life day in, day out,--that he felt dazed and shrugged his shoulders and again looked round slowly. »what a place this is!« he said, bemused and resting his eyes on liuba. »what of it?« she asked curtly. he looked at her as she stood there, and suddenly understood that she was to be pitied; and as soon as he had grasped this he did pity her--ardently. »you are poor, liuba?« »well?« »give me your hand.« and, as though to assert in some way his relation to the girl as a human being, he took her hand and respectfully raised it to his lips. »you mean that ... for me?« »yes, liuba, for you.« then quite quietly, as though thanking him, she said: »off you go! get out of here, you block-head!« he did not understand at once. »what?« »off with you. get out of here! get out!« silently, with a steady step, she crossed the room, picked up the white collar in the corner, and threw it to him with an expression of disgust, as though it had been the dirtiest, filthiest rag. and he, likewise silent, but with an expression of high resolve, without sparing even one glance at the girl, began quietly and slowly buttoning on the collar; but all in a moment, with a savage whine, liuba struck him on his shaven cheek, with all her strength. the collar fell on the floor; he was shaken from his balance, but steadied himself. pale, almost blue, but still silent, with the same look of lofty composure and proud incomprehension, he faced her with a stolid, unswerving stare. she was drawing rapid breaths, and staring at him in terror. »well?« she gasped. he looked at her, still silent. then, maddened beyond endurance by his haughty unresponsiveness, terror-stricken by the stone wall against which she seemed to have flung herself, the girl lost all control of herself and seizing him by the shoulders forcibly thrust him down upon the bed. she bent over him, her face near his, and eye to eye. »well? why don't you answer? what are you trying to do with me? you scoundrel--that's what you are! kiss my hand, will you? come here to boast of yourself, will you? to show off your beauty! what are you trying to do with me? do you think i'm so happy?« she shook him by the shoulders, and her thin fingers, unconsciously curling and uncurling like a cat's claws, scratched his body through his shirt. »and he's never known a woman, hasn't he? you brute, you dare come here and brag about this to me--to me for whom any man is simply.... where's your decency? what do you think you're doing with me? »i'll never give in alive.« that's the tune is it? but i--of course, i'm already dead. you understand, you rascal? i'm dead! but i spit in your face ... ph!... in the face of the living! there! get out, you brute! get out of here!« with anger he could no longer command, he threw her off him and she fell backwards against the wall. apparently his mind was still confused, for his next movement, equally rapid and decisive, was to seize his revolver and look at its grinning, toothless mouth. but the girl never so much as saw his bespattered face, damp and disfigured with demoniac rage, nor the black revolver. she covered her eyes with her hands, as though to crush them into the farthest recesses of her brain, stepped forward swiftly and steadily, and flung herself on the bed, face down, in a fit of silent sobbing. everything had turned out different from what he had anticipated. out of vapidity and nonsense there had crept forth a chaos--savage, drunken, and hysterical, with a crumpled, distorted face. he shrugged his shoulders, put away the useless revolver, and began pacing the room, up and down. the girl was crying. to and fro again. the girl was crying. he stopped beside her, his hands in his pockets, to look at her. there, under his eyes, face down, lay a woman sobbing frantically in an agony of unbearable sorrow, sobbing as one who looks suddenly back on a wasted life or a better life irretrievably lost. her naked, finely tapering shoulder blades were heaving as though to heap fuel on the raging furnace within, and sinking as though to compress the tense anguish in her bosom. the music had started afresh; a mazurka now. and the jingle of spurs could be heard. some officers must have come. such tears he had never seen! he was disconcerted. he took his hands out of his pockets, and said gently: »liuba!« still she sobbed. »liuba! what is the matter, liuba?« she answered, but so faintly that he could not hear. he sat by her on the bed, bent his shorn head, and laid a hand on her shoulders; and his hand responded with a quiver to the trembling of those pitiable shoulders. »i can't hear what you say, liuba?« then something distant, dull, soaked in tears: »wait--before you go ... over there ... some officers have arrived. they might see you ... my god--to think...!« she sat up quickly on the bed, clasping her hands, eyes wide open staring into space in sudden fear. the terror lasted a moment, and then she again lay down and wept. outside the spurs were jingling rhythmically, and the pianist with revived energy was conscientiously beating out a vigorous mazurka. »take a drink of water, liuba, do i you really must ... please ...« he whispered as he bent over her. her ear was covered with her hair, and fearing that she could not hear, he carefully brushed aside those dark curling locks, and discovered a hot little red shell of an ear. »please drink! i beg you!« »no, i don't want a drink. there's no need.... it's all over.« she had quieted down by now. the sobbing stopped; one more long throe, and the shuddering shoulders were pathetically still; he was gently stroking her neck down to the lace of the chemise. »are you better, liuba?« she said nothing, but heaved a long sigh and turned round, quickly glancing at him. then she relaxed and sat up, looked up at him again, and rubbed his face and eyes with the plaits of her hair. she breathed another long sigh and quite gently and simply laid her head on his shoulder, and he as simply put an arm round her and drew her silently closer to him. his fingers touched her naked shoulder, but this no longer disturbed him. and thus they sat a long while without speaking, but with now and then a sigh, staring straight ahead of them into space with unseeing eyes. suddenly there was a sound of voices and steps in the corridor, a jingling of spurs, quite gentle and elegant, like that of young officers. the sound came nearer and halted at the door. he rose promptly. someone was knocking at the door, first tapping with knuckles and then banging with their fists, and a woman's voice called out: »liubka, open the door!« he looked at her and waited. »give me a handkerchief,« she said, without looking at him, and put her hand out. she rubbed her face hard, blew her nose noisily, threw the handkerchief on his knees, and went to the door. he watched and waited. on her way to the door she turned out the light, and it was all at once so dark that he could hear his own rather laboured breathing. and for some reason he sat down again on the creaking bed. »well? what is it? what do you want?« she asked through the door, without opening it, her voice calm, but still betraying some uneasiness. feminine voices were heard in argument and, cutting through them as scissors cut through a tangle of silk, a male voice, young, persuasive, seeming to proceed from behind strong white teeth and a soft moustache. spurs jingled as though the speaker were responding with a bow. and--strange!--liuba smiled. »no. no! i don't want to come--very well, do as you like. no, not for all your 'lovely liubas'. i won't come.« another knock at the door, laughter, a sound of scolding, more jingling of spurs, and it all moved away from the door, and died out somewhere down the corridor. in the dark, fumbling for his knee with her hand, liuba sat down by him, but did not lay her head on his shoulder. she explained briefly: »the officers are starting a dance. they are summoning everybody. they are going to have a cotillion.« »liuba,« he said, pleadingly, »please turn on the light. don't be angry.« she got up without a word and switched it on. and now she no longer sat with him but, as before, on the chair facing the bed. her face was surly, uninviting, but courteous--like that of a hostess who cannot help sitting through an uninvited and overlong visit. »you are not angry with me, liuba?« »no. why should i be?« »i wondered just now when you laughed so merrily.« she laughed without looking up. »when i feel merry, i laugh. but you can't leave just now. you'll have to wait until the officers get away. it won't be long.« »very well. i will wait, thank you, liuba.« she laughed again. »how courteous you are!« »don't you like it?« »not too well. what are you by birth?« »my father is a doctor in the military service. my grandfather was a peasant. we are old-ritualists.« liuba, surprised, looked up at him. »really? but you don't wear a cross round your neck.« »a cross!« he laughed. »we wear our cross on our backs.« the girl frowned slightly. »you want to go to sleep? you'd better lie down than waste time in this way.« »no, i won't lie down. i don't want to sleep any more.« »as you wish.« there was a long and awkward silence. liuba gazed downwards and fixed her attention on turning a ring on her finger. he looked round the room; each time be conspicuously avoided meeting the girl's glance, and rested his eyes on the unfinished glass of cognac. then, all at once, it became overwhelmingly clear to him, even palpably evident, that all this was no longer what it seemed--that little yellow glass with the cognac, the girl so absorbed in twiddling her ring--and he himself, too, he was no longer himself, but someone else, someone alien and quite apart.... just then the music stopped and there followed a quiet jingle of spurs.... he seemed to himself to have lived at some time, not in this house, but in a place very much like it; and that he had been an active and even important person to whom something was now happening. that strange feeling was so powerful that he shuddered and shook his head; and the feeling soon left him, but not altogether; there remained some faint inexpungible trace of the turbulent memories of that which had never been. and quite often, in the course of this unusual night, he caught himself at a point whence he was looking down on some object or person, trying anxiously to recall them out of the deep darkness of the past, even out of what had never existed. had he not known it for a thing impossible, he would have said that he had already been here on some occasion, so familiar and habitual had it all become. and this was unpleasant; it had already imperceptibly estranged him from himself and his comrades, and mysteriously made him a part of this institution, part of its wild and loathesome life. silence became oppressive. »why aren't you drinking?« he asked. she shivered. »what?« »you haven't finished your glass, liuba. why don't you?« »i don't want to by myself.« »i'm sorry, but i don't drink.« »and i don't drink by myself.« »i would rather eat a pear.« »pray do so. they are here for that purposes.« »wouldn't you like a pear?« the girl did not answer, but turned aside and caught his glance resting on her naked and translucently rosy shoulders, and flung a grey knitted shawl over them. »it's rather cold,« she said abruptly. »yes, a little cold,« he agreed, although it was very warm in that little room. and again there was a long and tense silence. from the hall could be heard the catchy rhythm of a noisy _ritornello_. »they are dancing,« he said. »they are dancing,« she replied. »what was it made you so angry with me, that you struck me, liuba?« the girl hesitated and then answered sharply. »there was nothing else for it so i struck you. i didn't kill you, so why make a fuss about it?« her smile was ugly. there was nothing else for it? she was looking straight at him with her dark rounded eyes, with a pallid and determined smile. nothing else for it? he noticed a little dimple in her chin. it was hard to believe that this same head, this evil pallid head, had been lying on his shoulder a minute or two ago, that he had been caressing her! »so that's the reason,« he said gloomily. he paced to and fro in the room once or twice, but not toward the girl; and when he sat down again in the same place his face wore a strangely sullen and rather haughty expression. he said nothing, but, raising his eyebrows, stared at the ceiling where there played a spot of light with red edges. something was crawling across it, something small and black, probably a belated autumn fly, revived by the heat. it had been brought to life in the night, and certainly understood nothing and would soon die. he sighed. but now she laughed aloud. »what is there to make you merry?« he looked up coldly and turned aside. »i suppose--you are very much like the author. you don't mind? he too at first pities me, and then gets angry, because i do not adore him as though he were an icon. he's so touchy. if he were god, he'd never forgive even one candle,« she smiled. »but how do you know any authors? you don't read anything.« »there is one ...« she said curtly. he pondered, fixing on the girl his unswerving gaze, too calm in its scrutiny. living in a turmoil himself, he began vaguely to recognize in the girl a rebellious spirit; and this agitated him and made him try to puzzle out why it was that her wrath had fallen on him. the fact that she had dealings with authors, and probably talked with them, that she could sometimes assume such an air of quiet dignity and yet could speak with such malice--all this gave her interest and endowed her blow with the character of something more earnest and serious than the mere hysterical outburst of a half-drunk, half-naked prostitute. at first he had been only indignant, not offended; but now, in this interval of reflection, he was gradually becoming affronted, and this not only intellectually. »why did you hit me, liuba? when you strike anyone in the face, you should tell them why.« he repeated his question sullenly and persistently. obstinacy and stony hardness were expressed in his prominent cheekbones and the heavy brow that overshadowed his eyes. »i don't know,« she replied with the same obduracy, but avoiding his gaze. she did not wish to answer him. he shrugged his shoulders, and again went on, pertinaciously staring at the girl and weaving his fancies. his thought, usually sluggish, once aroused worked forcibly and could not be deterred--worked almost mechanically, turning into something like a hydraulic press which slowly sinking powders up stones and bends iron beams and crushes anyone that falls beneath it--slowly, indifferently, irresistibly. turning neither to the left nor to the right, unmoved by sophisms, evasions, allusions, his thought would push forward clumsily and heavily until it ground itself down or reached the logical extreme beyond which lay the void and mystery. he did not dissociate his thought from himself; he thought integrally, with the whole of his body; and each logical deduction forthwith became real to him--as happens only with very healthy or direct persons who have not yet turned thought into a pastime. and now, alarmed, driven out of his course, like a heavy locomotive that has slipped its rails on a pitch dark night and by some miracle continues leaping over hillocks and knolls, he was seeking a road and could not anyhow find it. the girl was still silent and evidently did not wish to talk. »liuba, let us have a quiet talk. we must try to....« »i don't want to have a quiet talk.« then again: »listen, liuba. you hit me, and i cannot let matters rest at that.« the girl smiled. »no? what will you do with me? go to the police-court?« »no, but i shall keep coming to you until you explain.« »you will be welcome. madame gets her profit.« »i shall come tomorrow. i shall come....« and then, suddenly, almost simultaneously with the thought that neither tomorrow nor the day after would he be able to come, there flashed upon him the surmise, almost certainty, why the girl had struck him. his face cleared. »oh, that's it then! that's why you struck me--because i pitied you? i offended you with my compassion? yes, it is very stupid ... but really, i didn't mean to--though of course it hurts. after all, you are human, just as i am....« »just as you are?« she smiled. »well, let that pass. give me your hand. let's be friends.« she turned pale. »you want me to smack your face again?« »give me your hand--as friends--as friends,« he repeated sincerely, but for some reason in a low voice. but liuba got up, and moving a little distance away said: »do you know ... either you are a fool or you have been very little beaten!« she looked at him and laughed aloud. »my god, yes! my author! a most perfect author! how could one help hitting you, my dear?« she apparently chose the word author purposely, and with some special and definite meaning. and then, with supreme disdain, taking no more account of him than of a chattel or hopeless imbecile or drunkard, she walked freely up and down, and jeered: »or was it that i hit you too hard? what are you whining about?« he made no reply. »my author says that i'm a hard fighter. perhaps he has a finer face. however hard one smacks your cheeks you seem to feel nothing! oh, i've knocked lots of people's mouths about, but i've never been so sorry for anyone as for my author. 'hit away', he says, 'i deserve it.' a drunken slobberer! it's disgusting hitting him. he's a brute. but i hurt my hand on your face. here--kiss it where it smarts!« she thrust her hand to his lips and withdrew it swiftly. her excitement was increasing. for some minutes it seemed as though she were choking in a fever; she rubbed her breast, breathing deeply through her open mouth, and unconsciously gripped the window curtains. and twice she stopped as she went to and fro to pour out a glass of cognac. the second time he remarked in a surly tone. »you said you didn't drink alone.« »i have no consistency, my dear,« she replied, quite simply. »i'm drugged, and unless i drink at intervals i stifle ... this revives me.« then all at once, as if she had only just noticed him, she raised her eyes in surprise, and laughed. »ah! there you are--still there! not gone yet! sit down, sit down!« with a savage light in her eyes, she threw off the knitted wrap, again baring her rosy shoulders and thin soft arms. »why am i all wrapped up like this? it's hot here and i ... i must have been saving him! how kind!... look here, you might at least take your trousers off. it's only good manners here to do without your trousers. if your drawers are dirty i'll give you mine. oh, never mind the slit. here, put them on. now, my dear boy, you must, you'll have to....« she laughed until she choked, begging and putting out her hands. then she knelt down, clasping his hands, and implored him:-- »now, my darling, do! and i'll kiss your hand!« he moved away, and, with an air of sullen grief, said: »what are you trying to do with me, liuba? what have i done to you? my relations with you are quite proper. i'm being perfectly decent to you. what are you doing? what is it? have i offended you? if i have, forgive me. you know, i am ... i don't know about these things.« with a contemptuous shrug of her naked shoulders, liuba rose from her knees and sat down, breathing heavily. »you mean you won't put them on.« »i'm sorry, but i should look....« he began saying something, hesitated and continued irresolutely, drawling his words. »listen, liuba.... it's quite true! ... it's all such nonsense! but, if you wish it, then we can put out the light? yes, put out the light, please, liuba.« »what?« the girl's eyes opened wide in bewilderment. »i mean,« he continued hurriedly, »that you are a woman and i am ... certainly i was in the wrong.... don't think it was compassion, liuba. no, really it wasn't. really not, liuba. i ... but turn out the light, liuba.« with an agitated smile he put out his hands to her in the clumsy caressing way of a man who has never had to do with women. and this is what he saw: she clenched her fists with a slow effort and raised them to her chin and became, as it were, one immense gasp contained in her swelling bosom, her eyes huge and staring with horror and anguish and inexpressible contempt. »what is the matter, liuba?« he asked, shattered. and with a cold horror, without unclasping her fingers, almost inaudibly she exclaimed: »oh, you brute! my god, what a brute you are!« crimson with the shame of the reproof, and outraged in that he had himself committed outrage, he stamped furiously on the floor and hurled abuse in rough curt words at those wide staring eyes with their unfathomable terror and pain. »you prostitute, you! you refuse! silence! silence!« but she still quietly shook her head and repeated: »my god! my god! what a brute you are.« »silence, you slut! you're drunk. you've gone mad! do you think i need your filthy body? do you think it's for such as you that i've kept myself? sluts like you ought to be flogged!« and he lifted his hand as though to box her ears, but did not touch her. »my god! my god!« »and they even pity you! you ought to be extirpated, all this abomination and vice! those who go with you, too--all that rabble! and you dare to think me anything of that sort!« he roughly took her by the hand and flung her on the chair. »oh, you fine man! fine? fine, are you?« she laughed in a transport of delight. »fine? yes. all my life! honourable! pure! but you? what are you, you harlot, you miserable beast?« »a fine man!« the delight of it was intoxicating her. »yes, fine. after tomorrow i shall be going to my death, for mankind, for you ... and you? you'll be sleeping with my executioners. call your officers in here! i'll fling you at their feet and tell them, 'take your carrion!' call them in!« liuba slowly rose to her feet, and when, in a tempest of emotion, with proud distended nostrils, he looked at her, he was met by a look as proud and even more disdainful. even pity shone in the arrogant eyes of the prostitute; she had mounted miraculously a step of the invisible throne and thence, with a cold and stern attention, gazed down on something at her feet--something petty, clamorous, pitiable. she no longer smiled; there was no trace of excitement; her eyes involuntarily seemed to look for the little step on which she was standing, so conscious was she of the new height from which she looked down on all things beneath her. »what are you?« he repeated, without moving away, as vehement as ever, but already subdued by that calm, haughty gaze. then, with an ominous air of conviction, behind which lay a vista of millions of crushed lives and oceans of bitter tears and the unchecked fiery course of rebellion's cry for justice, she asked sternly: »what right have you to be fine when i am so common?« »what?« he did not understand at once, but instantly felt a dread of the gulf that yawned in all its blackness at his very feet. »i have been waiting for you for a long time.« »you--waiting for me?« »yes, i have been waiting for a fine man. for five years i have been waiting--perhaps longer. all those who came admitted they were brutes--and brutes they were. my author first said he was fine, but then admitted he was a brute, too. i don't want that sort.« »what, then--what do you want?« »i want you, my darling,--you. yes, just such as you.« she scrutinized him carefully and quietly from head to foot and affirmatively nodded her head. »yes--thank you for coming.« then he who feared nothing, trembled. »what do you want with me?« he asked, stepping back. »it had to be a fine man, my dear, a really fine man. those other drivellers--its no good striking them--you only dirty your hands. but now that i have struck you--why, i can kiss my own hand! little hand, you have hit a fine man!« she smiled, and did in fact three times stroke and kiss her right hand. he looked at her wildly, and his usually deliberate thoughts coursed with the speed of desperation. there was approaching, like a black cloud, a thing, terrible and irreparable as death. »what--what did you say?« »i said it's shameful to be fine. didn't you know that?« »i never--« he muttered, and sat down, deeply confused and no longer fully conscious of her. »then learn it now.« she spoke calmly, and only the swelling of her half-bared bosom betrayed how profound the emotion was that lay suppressed behind that myriad cry. »do you realise it now?« »what?« he was recovering himself. »do you realise it, i say?« »have patience!« »i am patient, my dear. i have waited five years. why shouldn't i be patient for another five minutes?« she sat back comfortably on the chair, as though in anticipation of a rare pleasure, and crossed her naked arms and closed her eyes. »you say it's shameful to be fine?« »yes, my pet, shameful.« »but--what you say is....« he stopped short in terror. » ... is so! are you afraid? never mind, never mind--it's only at first that it's frightening.« »but afterwards?« »you are going to stay with me and learn what comes afterwards.« he did not understand. »how can i stay?« the girl, in her turn, was startled. »can you go anywhere now, after this? look, dear, don't be deceitful. you're not a scoundrel like the others. you are really fine, and you will stay. it wasn't for nothing i waited for you.« »you've gone mad!« he exclaimed sharply. she looked up at him sternly, and even threatened him with her finger. »that's not fine. don't speak like that. when a truth comes to you, bow down humbly before it and do not say: 'you have gone mad.' that's what my author says, 'you've gone mad!' but you be honourable!« »and what if i don't stay?« he asked with a wan smile, his lips distorted and pale. »you will,« she said with conviction. »where can you go now? you have nowhere to go. you are honourable. i saw it the moment you kissed my hand. a fool, i thought, but honourable. you are not offended that i mistook you for a fool? it was your own fault. well--why did you offer me your innocence? you thought: i will give her my innocence and she will renounce it. oh, you fool! you fool! at first i was even offended. why, i thought, he doesn't even consider me a human being! and then i saw that this, too, came from this fineness of yours. and this was your calculation: i pay her my innocence, and in return i shall be even purer than before and receive it back like a new shilling that hasn't been in circulation. i give it to the beggar and it will come back to me.... no, my dear, that game is not coming off!« »n--not coming off?« »n--no, dear,« she drawled, »for i am not a fool. i've seen enough of these tradespeople. they pile up millions and then give a pound to a church and imagine they have righted themselves. no, dear, you must build me an entire church. you must give me the most precious thing you have, your innocence. perhaps you are only giving up your innocence because it has become useless to you, because it has tarnished. are you getting married?« »no.« »supposing you had a bride awaiting you tomorrow with flowers and embraces and love, then would you give away your innocence, or not?« »i don't know,« he said reflectively. »this is what i mean. i should have said: take my life, but leave me my honour. you would give away the cheaper of the two. but, no--you must give me the dearest thing of all, the thing without which you cannot live--that and nothing else!« »but why should i give it away? why?« »why? only that it may not be shameful to you.« »but, liuba!« he exclaimed in bewilderment. »listen! you yourself are....« »fine, you were going to say? i've heard that too from my author, more than once. but, my dear, that is not the truth. i'm just an ordinary girl, and you will stay and then you will know it.« »i will not stay,« he cried aloud, between his teeth. »don't shriek, my dear. shrieks avail nothing against the truth--i know that for myself.« and then in a whisper, looking straight in his eyes, she added: »for god, too, is fine!« »well, and then?« »there's no more to be said. think it out for yourself, and i'll stop talking. it's only five years since i went to church. that's the truth.« truth? what truth? what was this unexplored terror, that he had never met before either in the face of death or in life itself? truth? square-cheeked, hard-headed, conscious only of the conflict in his soul, he sat there resting his head on his hands and slowly turning his eyes as though from one extreme of life to the other. and life was collapsing--as a badly glued chest, rained upon in the autumn, falls into unrecognisable fragments of what had been so beautiful. he remembered the good fellows with whom he had lived his life and worked in a marvellous union of joy and sorrow--and they seemed strange to him and their life incomprehensible and their work senseless. it was as though someone with mighty fingers had taken hold of his soul and snapped it in two, as one snaps a stick across one's knee, and flung the fragments far apart. it was only a few hours since he left _there_--and all his life seemed to have been spent _here_, in front of this half-naked woman, listening to the distant music and the jingling of spurs; and that it would always be so. and he did not know which side to turn, up or down, but only that he was opposed, tormentingly opposed, to all that had that day become part of his very life and soul. shameful to be fine.... he recalled the books which had taught him how to live, and he smiled bitterly. books! there before him was one book, sitting with bare shoulders, closed eyes, an expression of beatitude on a pale distracted face, waiting patiently to be read to the end. shameful to be fine.... and, all at once, with unbearable pain, grief-stricken, affrighted, he realized once and for all that that life was done with, that it had already become impossible for him to be fine! he had only lived in that he was fine, it had been his only joy, and his only weapon in the battle of life and death. all this was gone. nothing was left. the dark! whether he stayed there or returned to his own people ... now, for him, his comrades were no more. why had he come to this accursed house! better had he remained on the street, surrendered to the police, gone to prison where it was possible and even not disgraceful to be fine. and now it was too late even for prison. »are you crying?« the girl asked, perturbed. »no,« he answered curtly. »i never cry.« »and no need, dearie; we women can weep; you needn't. if you wept, too, who would there be to give an answer to god?« she was his? this woman was his? »liuba,« he cried in anguish, »what can i do? what can i do?« »stay with me. you can stay with me, for now you are mine.« »and they?« the girl frowned. »what sort of people are they?« »men! men!« he exclaimed in a frenzy. »men with whom i used to work. it was _not_ for myself--no, _not_ for self-satisfaction that i bore all this, that i was getting ready to carry out this assassination!« »don't talk to me about those people,« she said sternly, though her lips trembled. »don't mention them to me or i shall quarrel with you again. you hear me?« »but what are you?« he asked amazed. »i?--perhaps a cur! and all of us curs! but dearie, be careful! you've been able to take shelter behind us, and so be it. but do not try to hide from truth; you will never elude her. if you must love mankind, then pity our sorry brotherhood.« she was sitting with her hands clasped behind her head, in an attitude of blissful repose, foolishly happy, almost beside herself. she moved her head from side to side, her eyes half closed in a daydream, spoke slowly, almost chanting her words. »my own! my love! we will drink together! we will weep together. oh, how delightful it will be to weep with you, dear one. i would so weep all my life. he has stayed with me. he has not gone away. when i saw him today, in the glass, it burst upon me at once: this is he!--my betrothed!--my darling! and i do not know who you are, brother or bridegroom of mine. but oh, so closely kin, so much desired....« he, too, remembered that black dumb pair in the gilded mirror,--and the passing thought: as at a funeral. and all at once the whole thing became so intolerably painful, seemed so wild a nightmare, that he ground his teeth in his grief. his thoughts travelled farther back; he remembered his treasured revolver in his pocket, the two days of constant flight, the plain door that had no handle, and how he looked for a bell, and how a fat lackey who had not yet got his coat on straight had come out in a dirty printed linen shirt, and how he had entered with the proprietress into that white hall and seen those three strange girls. and with it all a feeling of growing freedom came over him and at last he grasped that he was, as he had ever been, free--absolutely free--that he could go wherever he liked. sternly now he surveyed that strange room, severely, with the conviction of a man aroused for an instant from a debauch, seeing himself in foreign surroundings and condemning what he sees. »what is all this? how idiotic! what a senseless nightmare!« but--the music was still playing on. but--the woman was still sitting with her hands clasped behind her head, smiling, unable to speak, almost fainting under the load of a happiness beyond sense and experience. but--this was not a dream! »what is all this? is this--truth?« »truth, my darling! you and i inseparable!« this was truth? truth--those crumpled petticoats hanging on the wall in their bare disorder? truth--that carpet on which thousands of drunken men had scuffled in spasms of hideous passion? truth--this stale, moist fragrance, loathesomely cleaving to the face? truth--that music and the jingling spurs? truth--that woman with her pale and harassed face and smile of pitiful bliss? again he rested his heavy head on his hands, looking askance with the eyes of a wolf at bay; and his thoughts ran on without connection. so she was truth!... that meant that tomorrow and the day after he would not go, and everyone would know why he had not gone, that he had stayed with a girl, drinking; and they would call him traitor and coward and rascal. some would intercede for him--would guess ... no, better not count on that, better see it all as it was! all over then? was this the end? into the dark--thus--into the dark? and what lay beyond? he did not know. in the dark? probably some new horror. but then as yet he did not understand their ways. how strange that one had to learn to be common! and from whom? from her? no, she was no use. she didn't know anything. he would find out for himself. one had to become really common oneself in order to.... yes, he would wreck something that was great! and then? and then, some day he would come back to her, or where they were drinking, or into a prison, and he would say: »now i am not ashamed, now i am not guilty in any respect in your eyes. now i am one like you, besmirched, fallen, unhappy!« or he would go into the open street and say: »look at me, what i am! i had everything--intellect, honour, dignity--stranger still, immortality. and all this i flung at the feet of a whore. i renounced it all because she was common!« what would they say? they would gape, and be astounded, and say, »what a fool!« yes--yes, a fool! was he guilty because he was fine? let her--let everyone--try to be fine! »sell all thou hast and give to the poor.« but that was just what he had done, all that he had. but this was christ--in whom he did not believe.... or perhaps.... »he who loses his soul«--not his life, but his soul.... that was what he was contemplating. perhaps ... did christ himself sin with the sinners, commit adultery, get drunk? no, he only forgave those who did, and even loved them. well, so did he love and forgive and pity her. then, why sacrifice himself? for she was not of the faith. nor he. nor was this christ; but something else, something more dreadful. »oh, this is dreadful, liuba!« »dreadful, darling? yes, it is dreadful to see truth.« truth--again she named it! but what made it dreadful? why should he dread what he so desired? no--no--there was nothing to fear. there, in the open, in front of all those gaping mouths, would he not be the highest of them all? though naked and dirty and ragged--and his face would be horrible then--he who had lost abandoned himself, would he not be the terrible proclaimer of justice eternal, to which god himself must submit--otherwise he were not god? »there is nothing dreadful about it, liuba.« »yes, darling, there is. you are not afraid, and that is well. but do not provoke it. there is no need to do that.« »so that is it--that is my end! it is not what i expected--not what i expected for the end of my young and beautiful life. my god, but this is senseless! i must have gone mad! still it is not too late ... not too late ... i can still escape.« »my darling,« the woman was murmuring, her hands still clasped behind her head. he glanced at her and frowned. her eyes were blissfully closed; a happy, unthinking smile upon her lips expressed an unquenchable thirst, an insatiable hunger, as though she had just tasted something and was preparing for more. he looked down on her and frowned--on her thin soft arms, on the dark hollows of her armpits; and he got up without any haste. with a last effort to save something precious--life or reason, or the good old truth--without any flurry, but solemnly, he began dressing himself. he could not find his collar. »tell me, have you seen my collar?« »where are you going?« the woman looked round. her hands fell away from her head, and the whole of her strained forward towards him. »i am going away.« »you are going away?« she repeated, dragging the words. »you are going? where?« he smiled derisively. »as if i had nowhere to go! i am going to my comrades.« »to the fine folk? have you cheated me?« »yes. to the fine folk.« again the same smile. he had finished dressing, he was feeling his pockets. »give me my pocket-book.« she handed it to him. »and my watch.« she gave it to him. they had been lying together on the little table. »goodbye.« »are you frightened?« the question was quiet and simple. he looked up. there stood a woman, tall and shapely, with thin, almost child-like arms, a pale smile, and blanched lips, asking: »are you frightened?« how strangely she could change! sometimes forceful and even terrible, she was now pathetic and more like a girl than a woman. but all this was of no account. he stepped toward the door. »but i thought you were going to stay....« »what?« »the key's in your pocket--for my sake.« the lock was already creaking. »very well, then! go ... go to your comrades and....« it was then, at the last moment, when he had nothing to do but to open the door and go out and seek his comrades and end a noble life with a heroic death--it was then he committed the wild, incomprehensible act that ruined his life. it may have been a frenzy that sometimes unaccountably seizes hold of the strongest and calmest minds; or it may have been actually that, through the drunken scraping of a fiddle somewhere in that bawdy house, through the sorcery of the downcast eyes of a prostitute, he discovered a last new terrible truth of life, a truth of his own, which none other could see and understand. whichever it were--insanity or revelation, lies or truth, this new understanding of his--he accepted it manfully and unconditionally, with that inflexible spirit which had drawn his previous life along one straight, fiery line, directing its flight like the feathers on an arrow. he passed his hand slowly, very slowly, over his hard, bristly skull, and, without even shutting the door, simply returned and sat in his former place on the bed. his broad cheekbones, his paleness, made him look more than ever a foreigner. »what's the matter? have you forgotten something?« the girl was astonished. she no longer expected anything. »no.« »what is it? why don't you go?« quietly, with the expression of a stone on which life has engraved one last commandment, grim and new, he answered: »i do not wish to be fine.« she still waited, not daring to believe, suddenly shrinking from what she had so much sought and yearned for. she knelt down. he smiled gently, and in the same new and impressive manner stood over her and placed his hand on her head and repeated: »i do not want to be fine.« the woman busied herself swiftly in her joy. she undressed him like a child, unlaced his boots, fumbling at the knots, stroked his head, his knees, and never so much as smiled--so full was her heart. then she looked up into his face and was afraid. »how pale you are! drink something now--at once! are you feeling ill, peter?« »my name is alexis.« »never mind that. here, let me give you some in a glass. well, take care then; don't choke yourself! if you're not used to it, it's not so easy as out of a glass.« she opened her mouth, seeing him drink with slow, sceptical gulps. he coughed. »never mind! you'll be a good drinker, i can see that! oh, how happy i am!« with an animal cry she leapt on him, and began smothering him with short, vigorous kisses, to which he had no time to respond. it was funny--she was a stranger, yet kissed so hard! he held her firmly for a moment, held her immovable, and was silent awhile, himself motionless--held her as though he too felt the strength of quiescence, the strength of a woman, as his own strength. and the woman, joyously, obediently, became limp in his arms. »so be it!« he said, with an imperceptible sigh. the woman bestirred herself anew, burning in the savagery of her joy as in a fire. her movements filled the room, as if she were not one but a score of half-witted women who spoke, stirred, went to and fro, kissed him. she plied him with cognac, and drank more herself. then a sudden recollection seized her; she clasped her hands. »but the revolver--we forgot that! give it to me--quick, quick! i must take it to the office.« »why?« »oh, i'm scared of the thing! would it go off at once?« he smiled, and repeated: »would it go off at once? yes, it would. at once!« he took out his revolver, and, deliberately weighing in his hand that silent and obedient weapon, gave it to the girl. he also handed her the cartridge clips. »take them!« when he was left alone and without the revolver he had carried so many years, the half open door letting in the sound of strange voices and the clink of spurs, he felt the whole weight of the great burden he had taken on his shoulders. he walked silently across the room in the direction where they were to be found, and said one word: »well?« a chill came over him as he crossed his arms, facing them; and that one little word held many meanings--a last farewell--some obscure challenge, some irrevocable evil resolution to fight everyone, even his own comrades--a little, a very little, sense of reproach. he was still standing there when liuba ran in, excitedly calling to him from the door. »dearie, dearie, now don't be angry. i've asked my friends here, some of them. you don't mind? you see, i want so much to show them my sweetheart, my darling; you don't mind? they're dears! nobody has taken them this evening and they're all alone. the officers have gone to bed now. one of them noticed your revolver and liked it. a very fine one, he said. you don't mind? you don't mind, dear?« and the girl smothered him with short, sharp kisses. the women were already coming in, chattering and simpering--five or six of the ugliest or oldest of the establishment--painted, with drooping eyes, their hair combed up over their brows. some of them affected attitudes of shame, and giggled; others quietly eyed the cognac, and looking at him earnestly shook hands. apparently they had already been to bed; they were all in scanty wrappers; one very fat woman, indolent and indifferent, had come in nothing but a petticoat, her bare arms and corpulent bosom incredibly fat. this fat woman, and another one with an evil bird-like aged face, on which the white paint lay like dirty stucco on a wall, were quite drunk; the others were merry. all this mob of women, half naked, giggling, surrounded him; and an intolerable stench of bodies and stale beer rose and mingled with the clammy, soapy air of the room. a sweating lackey hurried in with cognac, dressed in a tight frocks coat much too small for him, and the girls greeted him with a chorus of: »màrkusha! oh, màrkusha! dear màrkusha!« apparently it was a custom of the house to greet him with such exclamations, for even the fat drunken woman murmured lazily, »màrkusha!« they drank and clinked glasses, all talking at once about affairs of their own. the evil-looking woman with the bird-like face was irritably and noisily telling of a guest who took her for a time ... and then something had happened. there was much interchange of gutterswords and phrases, pronounced not with the indifference of men, but with a peculiar asperity, even acidity; and every object was called by its proper name. at first they paid little heed to him, and he maintained an obstinate silence, merely looking on. liuba, full of her happiness, sat quietly beside him on the bed, one arm about his neck, herself drinking little, but constantly plying him, and from time to time whispering in his ear, »darling!« he drank heavily, but it did not make him tipsy; what was happening in him was something different, something which strong alcohol often secretly effects. whilst he drank and sat there silent, the work was going on in him, vast, destructive, swift, and numbing. it was as though all he had known in his past life, all he had loved and meditated--talks with companions, books, perilous and alluring tasks--was noiselessly being burned, annihilated without a trace, and he himself not injured in the process, but rather made stronger and harder. with every glass he drank he seemed to return to some earlier self of his, to some primitive rebel ancestor, for whom rebellion was religion and religion rebellion. like a colour being washed away in boiling water, his foreign bookish wisdom was fading and was being replaced by something of his very own, wild and dark as the black earth--from whose bleak stretches, from the infinitudes of slumbrous forest and boundless plain, blew the wind that was the life-breath of this ultimate blind wisdom of his; and in this wind could be heard the tumultuous jangling of bells, and through it could be seen the blood-red dawn of great fires, and the clank of iron fetters, and the rapture of prayer, and the satanic laughter of myriad giant throats; and above his uncovered head the murky dome of the sky. thus he sat. broad cheeked, pallid, already quite at home with these miserable creatures racketing around him. and, in his soul, laid waste by the conflagration of a desolated world, there glowed and gleamed, like a white fire of incandescent steel, one thing alone--his flaming will; blind now and purposeless, it was still greedily reaching out afar, while his body, undisturbed, was secretly being steeled in the feeling of limitless power and ability to create all things or to shatter all things at will. suddenly he hammered on the table with his fist. »drink, liubka! drink!« and when, radiant and smiling, she had poured herself out a glass, he lifted his, and cried aloud. »here's to our brotherhood!« »you mean them?« whispered liuba. »no, these. to our brotherhood! to the blackguards, brutes and cowards, to those who are crushed by life, to those perishing from syphilis, to....« the other girls laughed, the fat one indolently objecting: »oh, come, that's going a bit too far, my dear!« »hush!« said liuba, turning very pale, »he is my betrothed.« »to those who are blind from birth! ye who can see, pluck out your eyes! for it is shameful«--and he banged on the table--»it is shameful for those who have sight to look upon those who are blind from birth! if with our light we cannot illumine all the darkness, then let us put out the signal fires, let us all crawl in the dark! if there be not paradise for all, then i will have none for myself! and this, girls, this is no part of paradise, but simply and plainly a piggery! a toast, girls! that all the signal fires be extinguished. drink! to the dark!« he staggered a little as he drank off his glass. he spoke rather thickly, but firmly, precisely, with pauses, enunciating every syllable. nobody understood his wild speech, but they found him pleasing in himself, his pale figure and his peculiar quality of wickedness. then liuba suddenly took up the word, stretching out her hands. »he is my betrothed. he will stay with me. he was virtuous and had comrades, and now he will stay with me!« »come and take markusha's place,« the fat woman drawled. »shut up, manka, or i'll smash your face! he will stay with me. he was virtuous....« »we were all virtuous once,« the evil old woman grumbled. and the others joined in: »i was straight four years ago ... i'm an honourable woman still ... i swear to god....« liuba was nearly weeping. »silence, you sluts! you had your honour taken from you; but he gives it me himself. he takes it and gives it for my honour. but i don't want honour! you're a lot of ... and he's still an innocent boy!« she broke into sobs. there was a general outburst of laughter. they guffawed as only the drunken can, without any restraint; the little room, saturated with sounds, and unable to absorb any more, threw it all back in a deafening roar. they laughed until the tears fell; they rolled together and groaned with it. the fat woman clucked in a little thin voice and tumbled exhausted from her chair. and, last of all, he laughed out loud at the sight of them. it was as though the satanic world itself had foregathered there to laugh to its grave that little sprig of virtue, the dead innocence itself joining in the laughter. the only one who did not laugh was liuba. trembling with agitation, she wrung her hands and shouted at them, and finally flung herself with her fists on the fat woman, who even with her beam-like arms could hardly ward off her blows. »so be it!« he shouted in his laughter. but the others could hear nothing. at last the noise died down a little. »so be it!« he cried, a second time. »but, peace! silence!--i have something to show you!« »leave them alone,« said liuba, wiping her tears away with her fist. »we must get rid of them.« still shaking with laughter he turned round to face her. »are you frightened?« he asked. »was it honour you wanted after all? you fool! it's the only thing you ever have wanted! leave me alone!« without taking any more notice of her, he addressed himself to the others, rising and holding his closed hands above his head. »listen! i'll show you something! look here, at my hands!« merry and curious, they looked at his hands, and waited obediently, like children, with gaping mouths. »here! here! see?« he shook his hands. »i hold my life in my hands! do you see?« »yes! yes! go on!« »my life was noble, it was! it was pure and beautiful. yes, it was! it was like those pretty porcelain vases. and now, look! i fling it away....« he let fall his hands, almost with a groan, and all their eyes looked downwards as though there really lay something down there, something delicate and brittle, that had been shattered into fragments--a beautiful human life. »trample on it, now, girls! trample it to pieces until not a bit of it is left!« like children enjoying a new game, with a whoop and a laugh, they leapt up and began trampling on the spot where lay the fragments of that invisible dainty porcelain, a beautiful human life. gradually a new frenzy overcame them. the laughter and shrieks died away, and nothing but their heavy breathing was audible above the continuous stamping and clatter of feet--rabid, unrelenting, implacable. liuba, like an affronted queen, watched it a moment over his shoulder with savage eyes; then suddenly, as though she had only just understood and been driven mad, with a wild groan of elation she burst into the midst of the jostling women and joined the trampling in a faster measure. but for the earnestness of the drunken faces, the ferocity of the bleary eyes, the wickedness of the depraved and twisted mouths, it might all have been taken for some new kind of dance without music, without rhythm. with his fingers gripping into his hard bristly skull, the man looked on, calm and grim. * * * * * two voices were speaking in the dark--liuba's, intimate, tentative, sensitive, with delicate intonations of private apprehension such as a woman's voice always gains in the dark, and his hard, quiet, distant. he spoke his words too precisely, too harshly--the only sign of intoxication not quite passed away. »are your eyes open?« she asked. »yes.« »are you thinking about something?« »yes.« silence--and the dark. then again the thoughtful, vigilant voice of the woman. »tell me something more about your comrades, will you?« »what for?... they--they were.« he said were as the living speak of the dead, or as the dead might speak of the living, and through the even course of his calm and almost indifferent narration it resounded like a funeral knell, as though he were an old man telling his children the heroic tale of a long departed past. and, in the darkness, before the girl's enchanted eyes, there rose the image of a little group of young men, pitifully young, bereft of father and mother, and hopelessly hostile both to the world they were fighting and to the world they were fighting for. having travelled by dream to the distant future, to the land of brotherly men as yet unborn, they lived their short lives like pale blood-stained shadows or spectres, the scarecrows of humanity. and their lives were stupidly short--the gallows awaited every one of them, or penal servitude, or insanity--nothing else to look forward to but prison, the scaffold, or the madhouse. and there were women among them.... liuba started and raised herself on her elbows. »women? what do you mean, darling?« »young, gentle girls, still in their teens. they follow in the steps of the men, manfully, daringly, die with them....« »die! oh my god!« she cried, clutching his shoulder. »what? are you touched by this?« »never mind, darling. i sometimes.... go on with your story! go on!« and he went on with his story, and there happened a wonderful thing. ice was turned into fire. through the funeral notes of hi requiem speech, suddenly rang for the girl, her eyes wide open now and burning, the gospel of a new, joyous, and mighty life. tears rose in her eyes and dried there as in a furnace; she was excited to the pitch of rebellion, eager for every word. like a hammer upon glowing iron, his words were forging in her a new responsive soul steadily, regularly, it fell--beating the soul ever to a finer temper--and suddenly, in the suffocating stench of that room, there spoke aloud a new and unknown voice, the voice of a human being. »darling, am i not also a woman?« »what do you mean?« »i also might go with them?« he did not reply, and in his silence he seemed to her so remarkable and so great (he had been their comrade, had lived with them) that it felt uncomfortable to be lying beside him, embracing him. she moved away a little and left only a hand touching him, so that the contact might be less; and forgetting her hatred of the fine, her tears and curses, and the long years of inviolable solitude in the depths--overcome by the beauty and self-denial of their lives--her face flushed with excitement, and she was ready to weep at the terrible thought that they might not accept her. »dear, but will they take me? my god, if they won't! what do you think? tell me they'll take me--they won't be squeamish! they won't say: you are impossible, you are vile, you have sold yourself! answer me!« silence--and then a reply that rejoiced. »yes, they will! why not, indeed?« »oh, my darling. but....« »fine people, they are!« the man's voice had the finality of a big fat full stop, but the girl triumphantly repeated, with a touching confidence: »yes! they are fine!« and so radiant was her smile that it seemed as if the very darkness smiled in sympathy and some little stars strayed in as well, little blue points of light. for a new truth had reached her--one that brought not fear, but joy. then the shy suppliant voice. »let us go to them, dear? you'll take me with you? you won't be ashamed of having such a companion? for they'll accept me, won't they? just as you did when you came here? surely you were driven here for some purpose! but--to stay here--you would simply drop into the cesspool. as for me, i--i--i will try. why don't you say anything?« grim silence again, in which could be heard the beating of two hearts--one rapid, hurried, excited; the other hard and slow, strongely slow. »would you be shamed to go back with such as me?« a stern prolonged silence, and then a reply, solid and inflexible as unpolished rock: »i am not going back. i don't want to be fine.« silence. then presently: »they are gentlemen,« he said, and his voice sounded solitary and strained. »who?« she asked, dully. »they--those who were.« a long silence--this time as though a bird had thrown itself down and was falling, whirling through the air on its pliant wings, but unable to reach the earth, unable to strike the ground and lie at rest. in the dark he knew that liuba, silently, carefully, making the least stir possible, passed over him; was busying herself with something. »what are you doing?« »i don't like lying there like that. i want to get dressed.« then she must have put something on and sat down; for the chair creaked ever so little; and it became so still--as silent as though the room were empty. the stillness lasted a long time; and then the calm, serious voice spoke: »i think, liuba, there is still one cognac left on the table. take a drink and come and lie down again.« * * * * * day was already dawning, and in the house all was as quiet as in any other house, when the police appeared. after long arguments and hesitations mark had been dispatched to the police station with the revolver and cartridges and a circumstantial account of the strange visitor. the police at once guessed who he was. for three days they had had him on their nerves. they had been seeing him here, there, and everywhere; but finally, all trace of him had been lost. somebody had suggested searching the brothels of the district; but just then somebody else got another false clue, so the public resorts were forgotten. the telephone tinkled excitedly. half an hour later, in the chill of the october morning, heavy boots were scrunching the hoar-frost and along the empty streets moved in silence a company of policemen and detectives. in front of them, feeling in every inch of his body what a mistake it was to take the risks of such exposure, marched the district superintendent, an elderly man, very tall, in a thick official overcoat, the shape of a sack. he was yawning, burying his flabby red nose in his grey whiskers; and he was thinking that he ought to wait for the military; that it was nonsense to go for such a man without soldiers, with nothing but stupid drowsy policemen who didn't know how to shoot. more than once he reached the point of calling himself the slave of duty, yawning every time long and heavily. the superintendent was a drunkard, a regular debauchee of the resorts of his district; and they paid him heavily for the right to exist. he had no desire to die. when they called him from his bed, he had nursed his revolver for a long time from one greasy palm to the other, and although there was little time to spare he had ordered them to clean his jacket, as though for a review. that very night at the police station, he remembered, conversation had turned on this same man who had been dodging them all, and the superintendent, with the cynicism of an old sot, had called the man a hero and himself an old police trollop. when his assistants laughed, he had assured them that such heroes must exist, if only to be hanged. »you hang him--and it pleases you both: him because he is going straight to the kingdom of heaven, and you as a demonstration that brave men still exist. don't snigger--it's true.« on that chill october morning, marching along the cold streets, he appreciated clearly that the talk of yesterday was lies; that the man was nothing but a rascal. he was ashamed of his own boyish extravagance. »a hero, indeed!« the superintendent prayerfully recanted. »lord, if he so much as stirs a finger, the blackguard, i'll kill him like a dog. by god, i will!« and that set him thinking why he, the superintendent, an old man full of gout, so much desired to live. because there was hoar frost on the streets? he turned round and shouted savagely: »quick march, there! don't go like sheep!« the wind blew into his overcoat. his jacket was too wide and his whole body quivered in it like the yolk of an egg in a stirring basin. he felt as if he was suddenly shrinking. the palms of his hands, despite the cold, were still sweaty. they surrounded the house as though they had come to take not one sleeper but a host in ambush. then some of them crept along the dark corridor on tiptoe to the fearsome door. a desperate knock--a shout--threats to shoot through the door. and when, almost knocking liuba, half naked, off her feet, they burst into the little room in close formation and filled it with their boots and cloaks and rifles--then they saw him--sitting on the bed in his shirt, with his bare hairy legs hanging down--sitting there silent. no bomb--nothing terrible--nothing but the ordinary room of a prostitute, filthy and repulsive in the early morning light, with its stretch of tattered carpet and scattered clothes, the table smeared and stained with liquor--and sitting on the bed a man, clean shaven and with drowsy eyes, high cheekbones, a swollen face, hairy legs--silent. »hands up!« shouted the superintendent, holding his revolver tighter in his damp hand. but the man neither raised his arms nor made any answer. »search him!« the superintendent ordered. »there's nothing to search! i took his revolver away. oh, my god!« liuba cried, her teeth chattering with fear. she had nothing on but a crumpled chemise; among the others, all wrapped in their cloaks, the two, man and woman, both half naked, roused feelings of shame, disgust, and contempt. they searched his clothing, ransacked the carpet, peered into the corners, into the cupboard, and found nothing. »i took his revolver from him,« liuba thoughtlessly insisted. »silence liubka!« the superintendent shouted. he knew the girl well, had spent two or three nights with her. he believed her; but his relief was so unexpected that out of sheer pleasure he wanted to shout and command and show his authority. »your name?« »i shall not say. i shall not answer any questions at all.« »all right, sir, all right,« the superintendent replied ironically, but somewhat abashed. then he looked again at the naked hairy feet and at the girl shuddering in the corner, and suddenly became suspicious. »is this the right man?« he said, taking a detective aside. »something seems....« the detective went and stared closely in the man's face, then nodded his head decisively. »yes. it's he. he's only shaved his beard. you can recognise him by his cheekbones.« »a brigand's cheekbones, sure enough.« »and look at the eyes, too. i could pick him out of a thousand by his eyes.« »his eyes? let me see the photograph.« he took a long look at the unfinished proof photograph of a man, very handsome, wonderfully pure and young, with a long bushy russian beard. the expression on the face was the same. not grim, but very calm and bright. the cheekbones were not markedly prominent. »you see! his cheekbones don't stand out like....« »they are concealed by the beard, but if you feel under it with the eye....« »it may be, but.... is he a hard drinker?« the detective, tall and thin, with a yellow face and sparse beard, himself a hard drinker, smiled patronizingly. »there's no drinking among them.« »i know there isn't but still....« the superintendent approached the man. »listen! were you an accomplice in the murder of n----?« it was a very important and well known name. but the man remained silent and only smiled and fidgeted with one hairy leg; the toes were bent and distorted by boots. »you are being examined!« »you may as well leave him alone. he won't reply. we'd better wait for the captain and prosecutor. they'll make him talk.« the superintendent smiled, but in his heart for some reason he felt the shrinking again. they had been tearing up the carpet; they had upset something, and there was a very unpleasant smell in the ill-ventilated room. »what filth!« thought the superintendent, though in the matter of cleanliness he was by no means nice. and he looked with disgust at that naked swinging foot. »so he is still fidgeting with his foot,« he thought. he turned round; a young policeman, with pure white eye-lashes and eyebrows, was sneering at liuba, holding his rifle with both hands as a village night watchman holds his staff. »well, liubka,« the superintendent cried, approaching her. »why didn't you report at once who you had with you, you bitch?« »oh, i was....« the superintendent smacked her face twice, quite neatly, first on one cheek then on the other. »take that then! i'll show you!« the man's brows went up and the foot ceased swinging. »so you don't like that, young fellow?« the contempt of the superintendent was growing apace. »what are you going to do about it? you kissed this face, didn't you, and we'll do what we damn well....« he laughed, and the policeman smiled in some agitation. and what was more surprising, even the downtrodden liuba laughed. she looked at the old superintendent in a friendly way, as though she enjoyed his jokes and jollity. from the moment of the arrival of the police she had never looked at the man, betraying him naturally and openly; and this he saw, and was silent and smiled half scoffingly, a strange smile--as a gray stone in the forest, sunk into the ground and mossgrown, might smile. half dressed women were crowding about the door, amongst them some of those who had visited them. but they looked at him indifferently, with a dull curiosity, as though this was the first time they had seen him. apparently they remembered nothing of the night. they were soon hustled away. it was now daylight, and the room was more bleak and repulsive than ever. two officers who evidently had not had their full sleep came in, their faces ruffled, but properly dressed and clean. »it's no good, gentlemen, really,« the superintendent said with a spiteful glance at the man. the officers approached, looked him up and down from his crown to his naked feet with those bent toes, surveyed liuba, and casually exchanged observations. »yes--he's good looking,« said the young one, the one who had invited them all to the cotillion. he had splendid white teeth and silky whiskers and soft eyes with girlish lashes. he looked at the arrested man with disdainful compassion, and wrinkled his eyes as if he were going to cry. there was a corn on the left little toe ... somehow it was horrible and disgusting to see that little yellow mound. and the legs were dirty. »this is a fine pass for you to come to, sir,« he said, shaking his head and painfully contracting his brows. »so that's how it is, mr. anarchist? you're no better than us sinners with the girls? the flesh was weak, eh?« jeered the other, the elder. »why did you give up your revolver? you might at least have had a shot for it. i understand that you found yourself here, as anyone might find himself; but why did you give up your revolver? a poor example to set your comrades!« said the little officer, hotly; and then explained to the elder: »he had a browning with three cartridge clips. just think of it! stupid!« but the man, smiling contemptuously from the height of his new, unmeasured, and terrible truth, looked on the little excited officer and indifferently kept on swinging his leg. the fact of his being nearly naked, of having dirty hairy legs with bent and crooked toes, gave him no sense of shame. had they taken him just as he was and planted him in the most populous square of the city, in front of all the men and women and children, he would have gone on dangling that hairy leg with the same equanimity, smiling the same disdainful smile. »do they know what comradeship is?« said the superintendent. he was savagely looking askance at that swaying leg, and indolently trying to dissuade the officers. »it's no good talking to him, gentlemen, i swear! no good! you know the kind of thing--instructions!« other officers entered quite freely, surveyed the scene and chatted together. one of them, evidently an old acquaintance of the superintendent, shook hands with him. liuba was already coquetting with the officers. »just imagine! a browning with three clips and, like a fool, he gave it up!« the little officer was relating. »i can't understand that!« »you, misha, will never understand this.« »for, after all, they are no cowards!« »you, misha, are an idealist, and the milk has not yet dried on your lips.« »samson and delilah,« one short snuffling officer said ironically; he had a little drooping nose and thin whiskers combed back and upwards. »oh delilah! what a smiler!« they laughed. the superintendent, smiling pleasantly and rubbing his flabby red nose downwards, suddenly approached the man and stood as if to screen him from the officers with his own carcase encased in the loose hanging coat; and he murmured under his breath, rolling his eyes wildly: »shameful, sir! you might at least have put your drawers on, sir! shameful! and a hero, too? involved with a prostitute ... with this carrion-flesh? what will your comrades say of you,--eh, you cur?« liuba, stretching her naked neck, heard him. they were together now, side by side, these three plain truths of life, the corrupt old drunkard who yearned for heroes, the dissolute woman into whose soul some scattered seeds of purpose and self-denial had fallen--and the man. after the superintendent's words, he paled slightly, and seemed to wish to say something--but changed his mind and smiled, and went on swinging that hairy leg. the officers wandered off; the police accommodated themselves to the situation, to the presence of the half naked couple, and stood about sleepily, with that absence of visible thought which renders the faces of all guards alike. the superintendent put his hands on the table and pondered deeply and sadly--that he would not get a nap today, that he would have to go to the station and set matters on foot. but something else made him even more melancholy and weary. »may i dress myself?« asked liuba. »no!« »i'm cold.« »never mind--sit as you are!« the superintendent didn't even look at her. so she turned away, and, stretching out her thin neck, whispered something to the man, softly, with her lips only. he raised his brows in enquiry, and she repeated: »darling! my darling!« he nodded and smiled affectionately. then seeing him smile to to her so gently, though plainly forgetting nothing--seeing him, who was so handsome and proud, now naked and despised by all, with his dirty bare legs, she was suddenly flushed with a feeling of unbearable love and demoniac blind wrath. she gasped, and flung herself on her knees on that damp floor, and embraced those cold hairy feet. »dress yourself, darling!« she murmured in an ecstasy. »dress yourself!« »liubka, stop this!« the superintendent dragged her away. »he's not worth it!« the girl sprang to her feet. »silence, you old profligate! he's better than the whole lot of you put together!« »he's a swine!« »you're a swine!« »what?« the superintendent promptly lost his temper. »tackle her, my man! hold her down. leave your rifle alone, you block-head!« »oh, darling, why did you give up your revolver?« the girl moaned, struggling with the policeman. »why didn't you bring a bomb? we might have ... might have ... them all to....« »gag her!« the panting woman struggled desperately, trying to bite the rough fingers that were holding her. the policeman with the white eye-lashes, disconcerted, not knowing how to fight a woman, was seizing her by her hair, by her breasts, trying to fling her on the ground and sniffing in his desperation. from the corridor new voices were heard, loud, unconcerned, and the jangle of a police officer's spurs. a sweet, sincere, barytone voice was leading, as though a star was making his entrance and now at last the real and serious opera was about to commence. the superintendent pulled his coat straight. * * * * * the hogarth press hogarth house, paradise road, richmond recent publications the gentleman from san francisco, and other stories, by i. a. bunin. translated from the russian by d. h. lawrence, s. s. koteliansky, and leonard woolf. »i. a. bunin is a well known russian writer, but his short stories have not hitherto been published in an english translation. four stories are included in this volume. the »times literary supplement« in reviewing a french translation of the first story in this volume says: »whatever its faults this is certainly one of the most impressive stories of modern times.« daybreak, a book of poems, by fredegond shove. mrs. shove has the distinction of being the only woman poet whose work has been included in _georgian poetry,_ although she has previously published only one volume, _dreams and journeys._ karn, a poem, by ruth manning-sanders. this is an ambitious narrative poem by a young writer who has previously published one book of short poems. unlike most narrative poems it is vivid and readable. the autobiography of countess sophie tolstoi. with introduction and notes by vasilii spiridonov. translated from the russian by s. s. koteliansky and leonard woolf. this autobiography was written by tolstoi's wife in and is extraordinarily interesting, not only »as a human document,« but in the light which it throws upon tolstoi's life and teaching and on those relations with his wife and family which led up to his »going away«. countess tolstoi wrote it at the request of the late s. a. vengerov, a well known russian critic. he intended to publish it, but this intention was not carried out owing to the war and his death. the ms. was discovered recently among his papers and has just been published in russia. it deals with the whole of tolstoi's married life, but in particular with the differences which arose between him and his wife over his doctrines and his desire to put them into practice in their way of living. it also gives an account of tolstoi's »going away« and death. the book is published with an introduction by vasilii spiridonov and notes and appendices which will contain information regarding tolstoi's life and teachings not before available to english readers. previous publications clive bell poems t. s. eliot poems e. m. forster the story of the siren roger fry twelve original woodcuts. maxim gorky reminiscences of tolstoi. katherine mansfield prelude hope mirrlees paris. a poem j. middleton murry the critic in judgment logan pearsall smith stories from the old testament retold the notebooks of anton tchekhov, together with reminiscences of tchekhov by maxim gorky leonard woolf stories of the east virginia woolf monday or tuesday the mark on the wall. second edition. kew gardens leonard & virginia woolf two stories