The One Woman Part 8

"While I have been around the corner laughing and dancing with a lot of idiots. And you seem as cheerful as though you had been listening to ravis.h.i.+ng music!"

"Yes, I must be cheerful."

"How do you endure it? Yet it fascinates me, this life--in touch with drama more thrilling than poets dream. It seems to me I'm just beginning to live. I am very grateful to you."

He looked into her face, smiling.

"The grat.i.tude is on my side. You are going to be more popular than the pastor."

"I'm sure you will not be jealous."

"Hardly, as long as I hear the extravagant things you are telling your girls about loyalty to the leader."

She blushed and turned her violet eyes frankly on him.

"I believe in loyalty."

He answered with a look of grat.i.tude.

"We must go first to that store for Ludlow. He's the best deacon in the church, a staunch friend, a loyal, tireless worker."

Gordon waited patiently at the store a half hour and succeeded in reaching the Manager. As they left, he said to Kate:

"Did you see that crowd of two hundred men waiting at his door?"

"Yes; what were they doing there?"

"Waiting their turn to see the Manager. They will come back to-morrow, and next day and next day, just like that. I felt mean to sneak in ahead of them by a private door because my card could open it. The Manager gave me a note to the head of the department Ludlow wishes to enter and asked him to suspend the rule against men fifty years of age and give my man a trial. In return for this favour he coolly asked me to deliver a lecture before his employees that will cost me a week's work. I had to do it. The head of the department who read the note told me to send Ludlow to see him, but he scowled at me as though he would like to tear my eyes out.

He will put him on and discharge him in a month for some frivolous offense."

They boarded a Broadway car and got off at City Hall Park.

"Where are you going down here?" she asked.

"To a building that collapsed yesterday and killed thirty working people. That house was condemned fifteen years ago by the Inspector.

But its owner was a friend of the Boss, and it stood till it fell and killed those people."

The street was blocked by the fire department playing their streams on the smouldering ruins, while gangs of men worked cleaning away the rubbish and searching for dead bodies.

A crowd of relatives and friends were pressing close to the ropes.

Many of them had stood there all night, crazed with grief, wringing their hands, hoping and praying they might find some token of love left of those dear to them, and yet hoping against hope that they might find nothing and that their beloved would appear, saved by some miracle.

Gordon had promised a mother whose daughter was missing to help her in the search. She did not know where her own child worked.

She only knew it was downtown near the City Hall. A building had fallen in, and she had not come home.

Just as they approached the ruins a body was found and brought to the enclosure for identification. The mother recognized her daughter by an earring. She flung herself across the black-charred trunk with a shriek that rang clear and soul-piercing above the roar and thunder of the city's life at high tide. Above the rumble of car, the rattle of wagon, the jar of machinery, the tramp and murmur of millions the awful cry pierced the sky.

Kate put her hand on Gordon's arm and pressed her red lips together, s.h.i.+vering. "O dear! O dear! what a cry! I can't go any closer. I'll wait for you out at the edge of the crowd."

He pushed into the throng, lifted the woman, spoke a few words of tenderness to her, and told her he would call at her home later.

As he was about to leave, a tall, delicate man working among the ruins reeled and sank in a faint. When he revived, he quit his job and went home without a word.

"What was the matter with that man?" Gordon asked the foreman of the wrecking company.

"Starved, to tell you the truth. He came here yesterday and begged for a job. He looked so pale and sick I couldn't refuse him. He fainted the first hour and went home. He came back this morning and begged me to try him again. I did, but you see he is too weak. He told me his family was starving."

He joined Kate and they crossed the City Hall Square and walked down Centre Street to the Tombs prison.

She was pale and quiet, glancing at him now and then.

"I've an engagement at the Tombs," he told her, "with a lady to whom I used to make innocent love in our youth in a college town.

I got a note from her yesterday, written in the clear, beautiful hand I recognised from the memory of little perfumed things she used to send me. You don't know what a queer sick feeling came over me when I recognised from the street number that she was in prison.

I haven't seen her in fifteen years. She was the village belle and made what was supposed to be a brilliant marriage."

They entered the grim old prison, that looked like an Egyptian temple, with its huge slanting walls of granite squatting low on Centre Street like a big pot-bellied spider, watching with one eye the brilliant insects of wealth on Broadway and with the other the gray vermin swarming under the Bridge and along the river.

Kate put her hand on Gordon's arm and drew closer as they pa.s.sed down its gloomy corridor to the warden's office.

She tried to smile, but by the twitching at the corners of her full lips he could see she was nearer to crying. Again, as her body touched his, he felt the warmth and glow of her beauty, her blue eyes, cordial and grave, her waving auburn hair with its glowing fires, her step luxurious and rhythmic, and. now as her hand trembled, instead of the gleam of cruelty and conscious power, the timid appeal to the strength of the man.

She looked at him and lowered her eyes, and then flashed them up straight into his face with a smile.

"I'm not afraid!" she said impulsively.

"Of course not."

His steel-gray eyes looked into hers, and they both laughed.

Gordon asked the warden's permission to see the woman whose letter had brought him and also the young man who had returned from Sing Sing for a new trial.

"What is the charge against the woman?" he asked.

"Shoplifting, sir. She's been here before and begged off. But they are going to send her up this time. I'll allow her to see you in the reception room."

She came in, with a poor attempt at dignity, and then collapsed into whining but hopeful lying. She was dressed in an old sunburnt frock. Her hair was tousled, her shoes untied, and a corset-string was hanging outside her skirt. Her front teeth were out, and the red blotches on her face told the story of drink and drugs.

"Doctor, it's all a mistake. I swear to you I am innocent. You don't know how it humiliates me for you to see me like this--you, who knew me in the old days at home, when I was rich and petted and loved. And now I haven't a friend in the world. My husband left me. If you will tell them to let me off, they will do it for your sake. I swear to you I will leave New York, go back to my old home and try to begin life over again." She buried her face in her hands.

"What shall I do?" he whispered to Kate. "She is lying. She will never leave New York."

"Promise her--promise her; I'll try to do something for her."

They pa.s.sed inside, along Murderers' Row, and stopped before the cell in which stood the man waiting his new trial. He poured out his story again, and as Gordon looked sadly through the bars at his face the certainty of his guilt gave the lie to every fair word.

As his glib tongue rattled on, Gordon's mind was farther and farther away. He was thinking of that grim sentence from the old Bible, "Sin when it is full grown bringeth forth death." And again this problem of sin, the wilful and persistent violation of known law, threw its shadow for a moment over his dream of social brotherhood.

The voice of the man angered him. He frowned, bade him good-by and left.

And as he pa.s.sed out, he felt, in spite of the charm of Kate's companions.h.i.+p, the shadow of that veiled mother by his side, and heard the bitter cries of her broken heart, until the sin and shame of the man seemed his own. The pity and pathos of it all haunted and filled him with vague forebodings.--"Now for something more cheerful," he said, as they pa.s.sed out of the Tombs and boarded an uptown car.