V The Birds of Prey
Through all the days that immediately followed—the days that were nights, and the nights that were red noondays—a thousand horrors, from subtle word to recurring experience, conjoined to assure to Mary the reality of her servitude. All of that first day, after Rose had left her with the dark blood oozing from her cut chin upon the scented pillows, she lay, like a wounded dog, now in a faint and then in a stupor, on the disordered bed. As the sunlight shifted and the shadows lengthened in the room, torpor gave way to reawakened fear, and she crawled into a corner and tried to hide herself, trembling, with chattering teeth, at every sound of laughter that rose from the lower floors, at every footstep upon the stair.
Thrice Rose returned. Each time she bore a steaming dish that, as the girl’s physical pain grew less, assailed the nostrils with increasing poignancy. Each time Mary shook her stubborn russet head. And each time the visit ended in a beating.
Escape by door or window was out of the question; to attempt to raise an alarm was to invite fresh violence; and gradually grew the certainty that the situation was genuinely as the jailer had described it: that the street was worse than the house, and that Mary was her own prisoner. She found the bottle labeled “Poison,” and bit one of the tablets, but she was young and afraid, and she spat the burning crumbs from her mouth. She did not dare to die, and when Rose came again to the room, her captive was too weak to refuse the broth that was fed her, as if she were a sick child, from a spoon.
“You’re a dear girl, after all,” said the mistress, as she administered the grateful food. “You do as I say and you won’t never be sorry. All I want is to have you sensible. I’m your friend.”
Mary said nothing: she was too weak to answer.
“And now,” Rose pursued, “I’ll just give you a drink.”
And when she had come back, she had not come back alone.
The worst of prisons is that in which the door is so cunningly closed upon the inmate that, at last, after the brutality is familiar, the inmate seems originally to have closed it upon herself, and in such a fortress of pain Mary now found herself restrained. The process was simple. It was merely first to wound and then to inure. The descent to hell is not easy; it is red with blood and wet with tears; but hell itself must be endured.
It was not for some days that any woman save Rose came to Mary’s cell and then, one afternoon, two women followed the grating key.
They were alike only as to clothes. Both wore loose negligé garments, but whereas the one was sturdy and German-blonde, with straw-colored hair, round and heavy face, blue eyes and peasant frame—a younger Rose—the other was wiry, compact, her brows low and dark under somber hair, her full cheeks red only in defiance of a swarthy skin, her eyes black and her mouth vermillion. It was this one who, with an accent that a more sophisticated ear than Mary’s would have placed along the Seine, was the first to speak.
“‘Ello!” she laughed, her teeth gleaming between her lips like pomegranate seeds. “We have come to make the call.”
Without awaiting a reply, she jumped upon the bed, drew her feet beneath her, and produced and lit a cigarette. The German girl moved more slowly to the other side and there elaborately ensconced herself.
Mary looked at her visitors without immediately replying. She had not, in fact, the remotest idea of what was the fitting word.
But the French girl was unruffled by this silence. She flung her head back upon a white neck and sent a slow column of blue smoke curling toward the ceiling.
“My name,” she explained, with an odd clipping of her speech, “eet ees Celeste, an’ my good frien’ here,” she continued with an easy gesture of the cigarette, “she ees Fritzie—chust a bar-bar-ous German.”
Mary looked at her with a gaze large and listless.
“An’ you’ name?” pursued Celeste, “eet ees—what?”
Fritzie supplied the answer, speaking in a ponderous contralto.
“Her name is Mary,” said she.
“Bien—a pretty name,” Celeste rattled on, precisely as if her unwilling entertainer had made the response. “I like eet well; but”—and she studied with unobtrusive care the russet-framed, indignant face before her—“eet ees not so good as ees yourself. I t’ink—let me see—yaas: I t’ink I shall call you ‘Violet.’—Violet, why you don’t eat more een dees ’ouse?”
“I’m hardly ever hungry,” said Mary.
“Not hongry?—Oh-h, but you mohst be hongry! Anyone so young mohst want to eat, and anyone so beautiful mohst eat so as not to loose the beauty.—Ees eet not so, Fritzie?”
The German girl smiled gently and nodded her blonde head.
“Ach, yes,” she rumbled. “The liebchen!”
“No,” insisted Mary. “I don’t care about nothing. I have a headache all the time. I have one now.”
Celeste jumped lightly to the floor: it was as if to uncoil her feet and to reach the door required but a single movement.
“Un moment!” she laughed. “I shall feex the mal de tête immediate!”
There was no time for remonstrance; the door closed upon her concluding word, and Mary was left there gazing into the stolid, sphinxlike face of the placidly smiling German. It was not a bad face, and soon Mary realized that it was a contented one.
Fritzie was returning her look with an equal curiosity.
“Are you vorried?” she finally inquired.
“No,” lied Mary proudly.
“I dought you looked like vorried,” the German continued. “Bud you should be nod. Dis iss a goot place. Dere are loads vorse blaces in New York dan dis: I know ’em.”
She paused, but Mary’s lips remained closed, her eyes fixed.
“You bed I know ’um!” Fritzie repeated. “Bud dis blace—vhy, ve haf de best meals, so goot nobody gould besser haf! I like dis blace.”
A faint question shot into Mary’s face. At once Fritzie answered it.
“Dat’s righd. Listen: I gome over here two year ago in de steerage. Some of de vomen, men meet dem—oh, most all de nod-family vons—un’ took dem to dese here intelligence office dat are only fakes, un’ sold dem, vidout dere knowin’ nussin’ of it, fur ten un’ fifteen dollar’ each. Bud I vas careful. I get a real tshob.—Ach, himmel!”
She waved a broad palm in disgust.
“Id vas bad enough in de steerage mit all de sailor-mens kissin’ you to-day un’ kickin’ you to-morrow; bud dat tshob of mine, dat vas de real limit! I gome over here because I vouldn’t vork in de fields back home, bud in dat boarding-house vhere I get dat tshob, I get up at dree o’clock every mornin’, because some of de mens vork in Jefferson Market, un’ I haf to scrub, un’ make de beds, un’ help cook, un’ vait on dable, un’ vash dishes, un’ sweep de whole house oud. Un’ den till late at nighd I haf to help cook, un’ vait on dable, un’ vash dishes some more still. Vhenever I am sick, or late, or break von dish, or a boarder don’ pay, I gets docked. Un’ almost every veek I’m sick or late or break a dish or a boarder don’ pay. My vages is d’ree dollar a veek, un’ I never gets more as two-fifty—sometime, two—un’ dat vill nod pay my clothes ad first, un’ don’ pay my doctor bills aftervard.”
The story was told monotonously, without much show of emotion, but it was enough of itself to wring a word from the woman to whom it was addressed.
“You got sick?” asked Mary.
“Who vouldn’t?” said Fritzie. “You bed I get sick, un’ vhen I gome oud of de hospital, de young doctor—he’d been makin’ grand lofe to me—he tell me I vas too nice a girl to vork my hands off fur nussin’ a veek, un’ he gif me his visitin’ card vith a writin’ on it to a voman he knowed, un’ I quit un’ vent dere.”
She paused, but Mary was silent, and the German resumed:
“It vas a goot place, bud nod so goot as dis von. I stay a mont’ till she move to Philadelphia. Den I vent to anozzer house, not so goot as dat first, fur two mont’s till the voman die. Un’ den, after some more, I gome here, pretty soon, to Miss Rose’s. No”—she waved her thick hand toward the door through which Celeste had lately passed—“I’m nod like dat Frenchie. She’s vhat Phil Beekman calls a ‘gongenital,’ vatever dat iss; I vork hard enough now, und I vanted to vork righd den; bud I tell you I could not stand it, dough I vas so strong. No, I’m glad I gome here.”
She leaned back upon her elbow.
“Now, dis Celeste——” she began, but the French girl, just then entering, came with an air that was a sufficient explanation of her never complex temperament.
“Voilà!” she smiled, holding aloft a long glass filled by a dull green liquid. “Let the leetle girl tak some of thees wheech I meex for her.”
Before she had well realized what she was doing, Mary had accepted the glass.
“What is it?” she asked weakly.
“Absinthe,” replied Celeste.
“It smells like licorice,” said Mary.
“Ah, but no; eet ees not that. You try thees, an’ then you can eat.”
“But I don’t think I want to eat.”
“Poof! That ees folly! See, now, I meex thees myself—I myself have frappé eet. Ees eet what you call polite that you say ’no’ to me? Say, now: ees eet?”
Involuntarily Mary smiled. It was a rueful little smile, but it was a smile of exhausted consent.
“It won’t hurt me?”
“Thees? You do not know eet. Eet ees the enemy of all the headache, of all the heartache, of all the bad nerve.”
For answer Mary drained the glass, and when her visitors left her they turned no key upon their exit.
So, slowly, through all those early days, and through the days that immediately followed them, the spell of the situation worked. There was infamy, there was torture. The unending procession of visitors—clerks, drummers, car-conductors, teamsters, gamesters, thieves, brothers in the fraternity of lust, equals in the night of horror, mostly drunken, nearly all unclean of body and everyone filthy of mind—the green government note was their certificate of qualification, the money, however acquired, constituted their right to those counterfeits which the house of Rose Légère was maintained to sell. For that note, themselves the chattels of conditions, they might caress or beat; for that, they might take whatever their hearts demanded. Was the slave wounded? Was she ill? Was she heartbroken? She must smile; she must be one woman to all men. She must receive the blows with laughter, the ribaldry, the insults and the curses as wit. She must pass from this to that—and she must not care.
And yet Mary, who was Violet now, could do nothing but take as final the conclusion that Rose had drawn for her. To return home, even if she had the money, would be impossible, because to do so would be to court her father’s anger and her mother’s shame, with no hope of either pardon or justification. To go out into the cheerless street that sent its growling echoes up to her curtained window would be, she was assured, to deliver herself to arrest or starvation. She was ignorant and young. With no knowledge of the laws and the charities of the monster town, she saw only that the former, in uniform, was a back-door friend of her keepers, and she was told that the latter never helped before they first publicly burned upon their victims’ brows the thenceforth ineradicable brand of infamy. Without there was, at the least, hunger, drudgery and disgrace; at the most, starvation, jail, death. Within, where fresh wounds meant but little, there obtained, under only a velvet-pawed tyranny, a tolerable democracy of disrepute, an equality of degradation, where food, at any rate, and shelter and raiment were certain, and where old scars and fresh bruises were hidden from the world: the price was no more than supine acquiescence.
Anything like financial independence was, of course, impossible: the slaves of Rose Légère were as much slaves as any mutilated black man of the Congo, or any toil-cramped white man in a factory. Their wages were paid to the supervisor, their few belongings secretly searched for gratuities, and though one-half of each payment was, theoretically, the portion of the employé, rent and board and lingerie demanded, and must needs secure, prices that left each woman hopelessly in debt to the mistress of the house.
With her senses in revolt, the mind and body of the newly-christened Violet came, by insidious degrees, nevertheless to approach some likeness to adaptability. Her material wants never went unsupplied, and such intelligence as she possessed began to swing toward that point of view to differ from which could bring nothing save serious discomfort. To the hope of Max’s return she still, in her own heart, clung with that tenacity which only a woman can exert upon an acknowledged impossibility, but she felt even this hope shrink between her clutching fingers, and, doing her best to reason, she knew that, even should the miracle happen, Max had brought her and left her here with the intent that she should fulfill her economic destiny.
Too dull to see deeply into causes, she could only accept the slowly numbing hail of effects. Until a few days since, she had been a child, and, like most children, the individual at fault in every personal catastrophe. It was thus that she began by blaming herself for all that had now befallen her; it was only at moments of growth that she turned her anger first against her own parents, then against the active agent and finally against his principal, and it would be but after deeper vision and harder usage that she could see both herself and them, and the whole company that made them possible, as mere grist in the mill of a merciless machine.
And yet for a long time her one passion was the passion of release. Without clothes and money and protection she could understand no escape; but for these means she at last found courage to appeal to the one source from which she could conceive of their coming.