XXX Her Father’s House
Her way must have led her first to the river and then well northward: she did not know. She did not even know whether she ran or walked. All that she did know was that, at least for hours to come, she must put as many miles as she could between her own tossing thoughts and that still face with the staring eyes which lay at the foot of the steep, dark stairs in Summerton’s. The clocks, had she looked at them, would have told her that the night was gone, but the winter darkness still enveloped the city when she found herself at last standing before an illuminated ticket-window and addressing a sleepy clerk at a ferry.
“I want a ticket,” she said, and laid down one of the bills that Philip Beekman had given her.
“Where to?” yawned the clerk.
How did it happen that the name which rose to her lips was the name of her native town—a word that she had not uttered since the morning of her awakening in the house of Rose Légère? Perhaps it was because the dead man had, with almost his last words, pleaded with her to go home; perhaps it was because that name, of which she had for so long tried never to think, was, in reality, the one always nearest to her heart; perhaps it was only because no other town was familiar to her. In any event, the name was spoken without consideration of the consequences, and, before she had time to pause or to repent, the clerk had handed her the change, and with it the bit of pasteboard that would bear her home.
“There’s a boat in ten minutes,” he said: “but you’ll have to wait an hour in Jersey City. The first train doesn’t go till six-five.”
Of what immediately followed she had, thereafter, no clear recollection. She remembered only buying a cold sandwich and a half-pint of whiskey in a deserted café; crossing a bitterly cold, sullen stretch of water from a twinkling cañon to a shadowy shore; walking, for warmth, weary though she was, up and down, and up and down, along a damp, echoing train-shed, and then, at last, passing a clanging iron gate, climbing into a coach, and falling, nearly stupefied, into an uncomfortable, red-plush covered seat. She had but the faintest mental picture of changing cars, and none at all of any subsequent incident, until, in a black dawn, there flashed upon her, from between the frost-figures on the window, a bit of landscape that warned her she was approaching home.
The track came suddenly to the river-side. Beneath a gray sky, which, though the morning was well advanced, the sun seemed afraid to climb, there raced the mile-and-a-half wide strip of gray water. It crashed across a ruined dam; it swept above a submerged “chute” through which, years before, the big pine-rafts from the upper Alleghanies used to be hurled on their way to the Chesapeake. There had been a thaw: only here and there could Mary see the ominous crests of the rocks that threatened the mid-channel; the islands, with trees bare of foliage, were under water, and far away, from the cloudy York County shore, the high hills rose above the mist, dun and cheerless, forbidding and cold. With a quick catch in her throat, she saw the river-road that she had so often tramped on holidays, now axle-deep in mud. Over there were the leafless woods where, when the boughs were green, the children used to picnic, and here, nearer the town, where patches of soiled snow hid under the stunted pines, was the path where one time came, for pink laurel branches, a girl that she had been. The engine whistled sharply and stopped.
Mary mechanically readjusted the hat that she had not touched since she had put it on for the work of the evening previous—the evening so long ago. She stepped to the platform.
The station was just as it had always been. It looked smaller and dirtier, but she knew that it had not changed; and a sharp pain shot through her heart at the realization that, in this town, everything had gone on its placid way while so much had been happening to one of its children. There were the same grinning gamins waiting for the New York newspapers; the same negro porters from the two hotels; the same station-master “calling the train,” just as he used to call it in the days when she had watched the outgoing coaches with envious longings for a sight of the strange lands toward which they were bound.
Then, as her aching feet touched the cinder of the thoroughfare, she realized her danger. She had no plan, no scheme of accounting for herself; some unreasoned impulse, partly, doubtless, the primal instinct that drives the wounded beast to its den, had overcome her fears and turned her face in the direction of the home whither she had, for so long, dreaded to return. But now she was seized with a terror of recognition by the townspeople, and so she lowered her head and walked, with the swiftness of panic, among the little knot of loafers about the station-door.
Now that she was here, what was she to say, what to do, where to turn? She moved, unable to evolve any order from the chaos of her thoughts. She could only go over and over the memory of that last day in school; the early violets, purple and fragrant, peeping through the lush grass on the lawns of Second Street; the flaming oriole in the Southwark yard; the lazy sunlight flowing through the open windows of Miss England’s sleepy classroom. Mary’s blue eyes were bright then, her mouth was red, her cheeks pink; lithe, strong-limbed, and firm of body, her walk had owned the easy, languid grace of a wild animal. And now, the lawns were bare; only a few persistent sparrows hopped in the gutters and along the ground; the sky was empty of sunlight, and she——
She came to a supreme pause. Habit had led her aimless feet. She was standing, in the full morning, before the two-story brick house that was her father’s home.
She knew that the door remained unlocked from dawn to night; but she did not at once enter. She was afraid to go in, afraid to stand still, afraid to go away.
Then, from the next house, came decision. It was Etta’s, her married sister’s place, and she heard someone within it rattle at its door. Anything was better than a meeting with Etta: Mary quietly opened the door to her father’s house and slipped inside.
She went down the brief, darkened hallway, past the drawn curtains of the parlor, through the twilight of the dining-room, and stopped at the open entrance to the small, crowded kitchen, where, among neatly arranged and brightly polished pots and pans, her mother was bending over the glowing stove.
Mrs. Denbigh looked up with a start. Still stooped, still hatchet-faced, but grayer and more shrunken, she stood there, her sleeves rolled from her thin forearms, her forehead wet by present labor, her mouth set hard by labors gone.
“Get out o’ here!” she said.
“Mom!”
Mary raised and spread her arms in quick petitioning, and then, in that stranger, Mrs. Denbigh recognized her child.
“You?” she cried.
She dashed her damp hands to her checkered apron; she stepped toward her daughter with her own arms wide. She bent to kiss her—and she drew as suddenly away.
“There’s liquor on your breath!” she gasped.
“I know,” said Mary, her voice low and trembling. “I—I ain’t been well, mom.”
The kiss was given, but less abandonedly than it had promised, and, as the mother drew away, her keen eyes searched the girl from face to feet. Over the multitude of maternal questions there rose the three for which Mary was least prepared.
“Mary—what is it? Where is he? Didn’t he treat you right?”
They caught the girl at her weakest point.
“Who?” she asked.
“Who?”—Mrs. Denbigh’s eyes grew stern again.—“Who? You needn’t say no more than that still! I ought to have knowed when I seen you. Nobody could look at you yet and not know. Why, you’re—you’re old! Your things are worn out. You——” her tone increased to loud accusations. “Where did you get them clothes?”
Mary’s lips faltered.
“I bought ’em,” she said.
“Did anybody see you come in here?”
“I don’t know.—No, nobody did.”
“Thank God for that!” Mrs. Denbigh pointed a long, gnarled finger at her daughter. She pointed it at the bedraggled hat, still bearing traces of a finery too pronounced for that small town. She pointed to the waist and to the skirt. “It’s true, then!” she cried. “It’s true, then! You’ve been a bad woman!”
In the doorway Mary swayed. She leaned heavily against the wall. She was too tired to lie.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Yes,” her mother echoed; “yes—an’ you own up to it! The whole town said it; your pop said it; they all told me yet—an’ I stood up fer you; I showed ’em your letter; I says you was married; I kep’ on believin’ you’d write; I stuck to it—an’ now you come here to shame me. You come here when you’re worn out—when no one else’ll have you—you come here, brazen, not carin’ still, a bad woman—a bad woman—an’ I guess you think I’ll take you in!”
Her poor face writhed. Her dim eyes shot fire. Her withered breasts rose and fell in a spasm of indignation and wounded pride.
Mary, still leaning against the kitchen wall, put out her hands as if to ward away a blow.
“Don’t, mom,” she said. “Please don’t.”
“I will! I’ve a mind to beat you. I’d like to know what possessed you to flaunt yourself in this place. You can’t stay here. You can’t stay in this house that you’ve shamed still, an’ you can’t stay in this town.”
“Mom!”
“You can’t stay in this town. Do you hear that? If you do, if you try to stay here and mock me, a decent woman, I’ll have you arrested; I’ll have you sent to the lock-up; I’ll——”
“Mom,” interrupted Mary. “I won’t hurt you. I didn’t mean to hurt nobody. I didn’t come here to do no harm.”
“How kin you come here yet without doin’ harm? Ain’t you done enough without comin’ back here to shame your own folks?”
“But, mom,” Mary pleaded, “I won’t shame nobody; I’ll do whatever you say.”
Little Mrs. Denbigh collapsed upon a kitchen chair. She rocked from side to side. She fanned herself with her checkered apron; grief conquered anger; and long dried tears came at last to her old eyes and coursed, unrestrained, down her hard cheeks.
“What did I ever do fer to deserve this?” she moaned. “What did I ever do to receive this judgment? A child o’ mine! A child o’ mine! An’ her the baby that she was! Didn’t her pop an’ me bring her up the best we could? Ain’t I always lived accordin’ to the Lord’s word? What have I done to deserve this?”
Mary stepped to the weeping woman’s side. She put her fingers to the gray hair and stroked it, timidly.
“Go away!” cried the mother. “Don’t you dare to touch me! Don’t you dare yet to pollute me! Oh! A child o’ mine to do this!”
She fell into another paroxysm of grief, and Mary sank to her knees and took one of the gnarled hands between her own hands.
“Listen, mom,” she said; “I’ll tell you all about it, an’ then you’ll know.”
She did tell her, as much as she dared; but Mrs. Denbigh only half understood. The elder woman’s life had been cast in a mold; it had long since hardened into a destined shape, and no sympathy on her own part, no explanations on the part of another, could alter her. Dire necessity she had often known, but she had not known it amid surroundings where the sufferer’s only course was that which alone had been possible for Mary. If she softened, it was not because she comprehended, but because Mary was her child.
“Don’t tell me no more,” she said at last. “You could ‘a’ gone to work.”
“I tried that, an’ nobody’d have me.”
“You could ‘a’ gone to some church-folk.”
“I did, but they couldn’t get me a job.”
“You could ‘a’ gone to some institution a’ready.”
“How’d I have lived after I come out?”
“Well, you shouldn’t ‘a’ run away in the first place. Didn’t we treat you right?”
To have answered that question in the negative would not have been to be altogether true, and Mary did not even yet see enough clearly to discern that the conditions which had driven her from home were economic forces that made parents and child equally blameless.
“Can’t I stay here?” she appealed. “Can’t I please stay here an’ work for you?”
Mrs. Denbigh shook her head.
“I’d work hard. I’d help you. I wouldn’t never complain. All I want is just to be quiet. I’d work hard. Nobody’d never know.”
“It’d be all over town by evenin’ still.”
“No, it wouldn’t. I’d say I was a widow. I’d say——”
“Think o’ your pop,” sobbed Mrs. Denbigh. “Why, he’d—he’d kill you, Mary!” The mother shivered as she considered the wrath of the giant, whom hard work had hardened past the touch of all the tenderer emotions. “He’d just beat you up an’ throw you into the street for everybody to see!” She half rose in a new anxiety. “Why, he’s on the early shift, an’ he might come here ‘most any minute. Etta might come in, an’ Sallie’ll be back from school soon.”
“But, mom,” Mary blindly persisted. “I’d work so hard! I wouldn’t never be cross. I’d help you. I’d do all the housework, an’ you could teach me to cook the way you do.”
“We got to think o’ Sallie yet,” continued Mrs. Denbigh. “Every time she gets mad now she says she’ll run away like you done. We got to think o’ her. She’s a growin’ girl, an’ what’d it be to have you around her?”
“But, mom, I won’t hurt her. Can’t I just stay an’ work, an’ wash dishes, an’ such things? I wouldn’t mind washin’ dishes”—Mary smiled wanly—“like I once did.”
“An’ then there’s Etta,” said the mother, still busied in her own confusion. “She’s got a baby——”
“A baby!” Mary’s heart leaped.
“Such a lovely baby girl——”
“Can’t I——? Oh, mom, can’t I just get a peep at it?”
“How could you?—An’ we have to think what it’d be for her if you was here an’ she growed up.”
The prodigal choked with tears.
“Mom, mom!” she pleaded. “How’d I hurt ’em? You don’t think I’d——?”
“The town’d think so, an’ the town’d tell ’em so, too. An’ anyways, Mary, we’re poor, we’re dreadful poor. The mill was shut down all summer an’ fall. It’s only just started a’ready, an’ it’s only workin’ half-time now. We ain’t had money fer months still, an’ now it all goes fer old bills. We couldn’t do it, even if we wanted to.”
For half an hour more Mary begged, but she begged in vain; and though the mother ended by another attack of tears, and though the two wept together in each other’s arms, they knew that they were together for the last time.
“Your clothes are so thin!” quavered Mrs. Denbigh, with a pathetic endeavor to sink her grief in practical anxiety. “You ain’t got no coat, an’ your feet are near on the ground still.”
Mrs. Denbigh had no money; there was literally not a cent in the house; but she unearthed from an old trunk, and pressed, for pawning, upon Mary, a heavy, old-fashioned gold bracelet, which had been a wedding-present; and, though the daughter protested that she had money enough to buy some clothes, the mother got her own coat upon the daughter’s shoulders.
They were still standing in the kitchen, as women awaiting the summons of death, when first one steam-whistle and then another began to call across the town. It was noon, and the moment of puddler Denbigh’s return.
Without a word they walked, hand in hand, across the short back-yard, for Mary, it was tacitly agreed, must not risk an appearance upon the street in the neighborhood of her father’s house. Without a word, Mrs. Denbigh’s knotted fingers opened the latch of the white-washed gate. Without a word mother and daughter flung themselves into each other’s arms again, and then, still in silence, Mary trudged away.
She did not look back until she came to the first corner, and, when she got there, she saw her mother’s shrunken body still at the gate, the old hand waving, the aproned figure shaking with sobs. It was still there when Mary reached the second corner; but when she turned at the third, it was gone.
Her pain was no longer poignant. Grief had reached the mark whence it passes to stupefaction; and Mary pursued her way as if her actions were those suggested to a subject of hypnotic control. In order to avoid the crowd at the station, she walked on up the alley, until the alley ended in an intersecting turnpike along which ran the trolley line to the county-town. She waited there, stolidly, for a car, mounted that, descended at the end of the road, and, after another delay, climbed upon a train that would take her without change to Jersey City. For nearly twenty-four hours she had eaten nothing; but she bought another small flask at the terminus, and, as the ferry-boat glided between the creaking slips into the tossing water, she took a deep draught of whiskey.
She walked to the stern and looked over the side. It was night. Here gleamed the railway signs under which the boat had just passed—the signs of those roads that, she had now discovered, ended as fatally for her freedom as if they had ended in an insurmountable wall. Ahead towered the other walls, the black walls of that living prison—that vast, malevolent, conscious jail—into which she had once gone with such a store of hopes whereof not one had ever been fulfilled, of anticipated pleasures whereof not one had ever been tasted, and to which she must now, to serve out a life-sentence, return.
Must she return?
She looked up and down the dismal river, crowded with trafficking craft, and she remembered that other river at home as she had seen it on the spring afternoon when she had played the truant from school. She remembered the swirling eddies across which the nearer hills had been changing from brown to green; she remembered the descending Donegal Valley, fresh with germinating life, the flowering shrubs, and the sap-wet trees along the shore, the scent of a warm April, and the music of the Susquehanna. These things she remembered, and then she looked again at the nearing city.
Must she return?
She touched the rail. Over that lay certain escape. The deck was deserted; the movement would be quick; the plunge——
She leaned forward, she saw the leaping, greedy, icy waves, and, with a loud sob, staggered back to the bench that ran along the exterior of the upper saloon.
She could not do it. With nothing but suffering and horrors to live for, she could not put an end to life. She was afraid of the cold; she was afraid of the struggle; she was afraid of the pang; she was afraid of Death. It was a new thing—Death; she had been afraid of it ever since that morning of her awakening when the thought of seeking it had first occurred to her. Since her first crossing of this water, her experiences had been a procession of new things, each more terrible than the last; she had come to dread the new, and this novelty of death she dreaded lest it should be the most terrible of all. Life, which had robbed her of everything else, had, at this last, robbed her of the courage to quit it.
Youth, hope, purity, strength, beauty, the ability to work, even lust and hate—all these were dead within her, dead beyond possibility of resurrection. If Max had only given her a child! If he, or anyone of the others, had only killed her! But they had murdered Love, and the only thing that lived in her was the fear of death.
Out of the bitterness of her own heart, out of the abysses of her own knowledge of things as they are, she saw much of the truth. A rare good fortune had favored Katie Flanagan; but Mary, her parents, Rose and her girls, Carrie, Policeman Riley and Magistrate Dyker, even Angel and Max—not one of them, well regarded, could be unequivocally condemned. They were all, preying or preyed upon, an inevitable result. They were but the types of millions everywhere. New York itself, with all its women-slaves and men-slaves, must be but an illustration of what the other cities of the world are and have been. No rescue of a slave could put an end to the slavery. Something was wrong; but what that something was, or how it was ever to be made right, she could not guess. She knew only that, down the years, wherever walked the great god Poverty, that great god led Prostitution by the hand.
Finally comprehending, if unable to formulate, these things, at ten o’clock that night Mary Denbigh, remembering what Philip Beekman had told her, rang the doorbell of a familiar house and faced what she would once have feared more than death—she faced complacent, untroubled, prosperous, and protected Rose Légère.
The woman, still the good-natured woman of the brewery-calendar, cut short Mary’s flow of apologies.
“Ferget it,” she said. “It don’t matter what you did. You didn’t know any better. Here: just take this ten dollars and tell me what else I can do for you.”
And Mary pushed the money away.
“I don’t want that,” she said. “I want—oh, Miss Rose, won’t you please take me back?”
But Rose, surveying the human ruin before her, shook, very positively, her masses of yellow hair.
“No,” she answered, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be good business. You see, the life’s got you, Violet: you’re all in.”