VI An Angel Unawares
The man to whom she first spoke, in a stolen instant, descending the darkened stair, was a small shopkeeper, fat and pliable, beyond the age of violence, and, as he had just told her, a husband and the father of a girl of her own age.
“Listen,” she said, with one trembling hand upon his shoulder, “I want you to do me a favor.”
“Anything you say, Violet,” he chuckled.
“Don’t talk so loud, then. I—I want you to take me out of here.”
The man looked at her, through the rosy twilight, in a flattered bewilderment.
“Like me as much as that, do you?” he sparred.
“You don’t understand. Of course, I like you; but what I meant was——”
He interrupted her, his fat fingers complacently patting her cheek.
“It’s not me that don’t tumble to the facts,” he said; “it’s you. I told you I was a family man. I couldn’t put you anywhere.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean——”
But again he cut in upon her labored explanation, his commercial mind traveling along lines in which it had been forced all his life to travel, and his pride entrenching itself behind the trivial rampart of his income.
“You girls!” he laughed, in palpable deception. “You all think I’ve got a lot of money. Why, there ain’t no use thinkin’ you can bleed me. I’m a business man, an’ I do everything on a straight business basis, but I wouldn’t rent a flat for the finest of you that ever walked Fourteenth Street.”
Violet’s answer was brief. That she should have given her confidence to such a beast, that such a beast should continue to thrive in the world that was closed to her, and that, her pitiable confidence once given, she should be so grossly misinterpreted—these things sent a red rage rushing to her now always incarnadined cheeks. She gave the shopkeeper a push that nearly sent him rolling to the foot of the stairs.
“Get away from me!” she whispered hoarsely. “Get away! I wouldn’t have you for a gift!”
The man stumbled and gripped the rose-colored lamp upon the newel-post, which swayed, under his rocking weight, like a palm-tree in a storm. He gasped for breath, got it, and, shaking his fist upward through the shadows, began to bellow forth a storm of oaths that, for foulness, utterly outdid the ejaculations to which, from both sexes, Violet was already becoming accustomed.
“You come down here,” he courageously shouted, “and I’ll give you the worst beating you ever had in your life! Nice place, this is! I’ll have it pinched—you see if I don’t! You can’t make an easy thing out o’ me! You’ve robbed me, anyhow. You’ll get what’s comin’ to you!”—And he ended with the single epithet to which those four walls were unaccustomed.
Rose ran out from the parlor.
“Shut up, you!” she commanded of the disturber, in a low tone that nevertheless compelled obedience. “What’s the trouble, Violet?”
Violet leaned against the stair-wall, half-way up, her burning hands pressed to her burning face. She was mad with anger and shame, but she was also afraid.
“You heard him,” she gasped.
“Yes,” snapped the visitor, his voice uncontrollably resuming its former timbre, “and you heard me, too!”
The mistress is, of necessity, always, in a crisis, against the slave.
“Well,” said Rose, “tell me what she done.”
Violet, however, saw at once the necessity of changing the issue.
“He says he’s been robbed!” she called down the stairs. And then she ran after her words, and stood under the lamp, facing them both, her arms extended, the flowing sleeves trembling with the emotion that they covered but could not conceal. “Search me!” she commanded. “If you think I took a cent of yours, search me!”
She was a vision that brought conviction with it.
Before the sputtering visitor could correct the situation, Rose had, perhaps against her will, been converted. She took the man’s hat from the hall-rack at her side, put it on his head, opened the street-door, and gently propelled him through it.
“You’re drunk,” she said, “an’ you’d better get out before I call the cop. There ain’t no badger business in this house, an’ don’t you forget it!”
She shut the door, and turned calmly to Violet.
“How much did you get?” she asked.
“Why, Miss Rose, you know——”
“I mean what did you touch him for? You mustn’t play that sort of game here: it gives the house a bad name. But just this once we’ll divide up an’ not say anything more about it.”
Violet’s eyes opened wide.
“I didn’t steal a penny,” she declared.
Rose regarded her with a softening countenance.
“Word of honor?” she asked.
“Word of honor,” vowed Violet.
“All right, but even if you do touch them, you mustn’t ever let them think you do. A man’ll forgive you for hurtin’ him anywhere but in his pocket-book.—You’re all worked up, dearie. Come on out to the kitchen an’ have a bottle of beer.”
As they were pouring the drinks, a heavy foot sounded in the outside passageway and a careful four knocks followed upon the rear door.
“That’s Larry,” said Rose, and drew the bolt.
A policeman’s hat was poked through the doorway, followed by a flushed, genial Irish face, and a tall, hulking body in regulation uniform.
“I’m terrible dry,” grinned Larry.
“Then you’ve come to the right shop,” was Rose’s greeting. “We’re just havin’ a little drop ourselves. Larry, this is my new friend, Violet.”
The policeman grinned again, and sat carefully upon the edge of a kitchen-chair, in evident fear that his bulk might prove too great for it.
“Glad to know you,” he said.
“Larry’s on this beat nights,” Rose explained to Violet, “an’ him an’ the lieutenant look after us—don’t you, Riley?”
“Well, what use is a frind if he don’t take care of yez, Miss Rose? We do the bist we can.”
“I know that.—What’ll it be, Larry? We’re takin’ beer, but there’s wine on the ice if you want it.”
“I’ll just have a small drap of liquor, ma’am, please,” said Riley.
Rose poured and handed to him a glass of whiskey.
“When you came by,” she inquired, “did you see a fat man throwin’ fits in our gutter?”
“Why, I did not. Have ye been afther havin’ a rumpus the night?”
“Oh, no—only that fat little fellow that keeps the jewelry-store around the corner. He was drunk, an’ I threw him out. If he tries to get gay, let me know, will you?”
“Of course I’ll let ye know—an’ here’s to your very good health, ma’am an’ miss.—But you may rist aisy; that there won’t be no throuble.”
“I know that: he’s too scared of his wife.—Have another, won’t you?”
The officer rose.
“No, thank ye kindly,” he said. “I wanted but the drap, ma’am.”
“And how are Mrs. Riley and the children?”
Larry’s face became a web of smiling wrinkles.
“Grand,” he said; “the auld woman’s grand—you ought to see her in the new silk dress I bought ’er the day—all grane wid fancy trimmin’s from Six’ Avenoo. An’ the kiddies is thrivin’. Cecilia’ll soon be havin’ to go to work an’ help the family funds, she’s that sthrong and hearty, an’ young Van Wyck is such a divil that the teacher throwed him out of school. He’s licked all the b’ys in his class, an’ I think he’ll end as a champeen pug.”
He went out, still smiling, and, as he did so, Violet saw Rose, after stooping hurriedly, place in his hands a yellow bill. As the door closed, there came into the younger woman’s eyes the question that she would not have dared to ask.
“Yep,” nodded Rose, “that’s my week’s pay for what they call protection.”
“Isn’t he afraid to take it?” Violet, thus encouraged, inquired.
“The man above him isn’t afraid to take two-thirds of it,” said Rose, “an’ the best of it goes past him to the district boss—it’s the regular system with the regular prices. Oh, no, he ain’t afraid; an’ if you ever tried to live on a copper’s pay, you’d soon be afraid not to take it.”
Violet, returning to the parlor, bit her lip: there was indeed small help to be had from the law.
Small help, either there or elsewhere. She turned, naturally, only to the seemingly more prosperous customers, but, even by them, she was met with smiling incredulity: her story was so hackneyed that it could not be true.
“It’s all right enough to want to get out of here,” said her sagest adviser, who at least paid her the rare compliment of credence; “but how are you going to live after you get out? You can’t go home; you haven’t got any trade; you can’t cook; without a recommendation you can’t get even a job at general housework or in a factory.”
He was a quiet, middle-aged widower that said this, an infrequent visitor, a chief clerk in one of the departments of a large insurance company, with a reputation for liberal kindliness at Rose’s and, in his own little world, a position of some influence.
“You get me out,” said Violet, “an’ I’ll do the rest.”
But here again the gate was barred against her. The clerk was burdened with a good name and a place of trust. He could risk neither the one nor the other. He was sorry, genuinely sorry—she saw that; but what could he do?
It was an evening or two later that she found her first pale ray of encouragement, and she found it in the person of Philip Beekman, that same young Beekman to whom Fritzie had casually referred.
Beekman described himself, with some accuracy, as a person of good family and bad morals. “We are getting so confounded poor,” he used to say, “that I sometimes doubt the former; but I have constant visible evidence of the latter, and so I cling to that as the one sure thing in this uncertain life.” Had he but seen the facts, he might well have considered his derelictions as the result of his parentage. At her divorce, his mother had been awarded the custody of her only child, and, now that she had remarried, Philip was forced to play that neither uncommon nor congenial rôle—the part of the young man with too little training to earn a living and too much ancestry to marry one.
“After all,” he said, as he sat with Violet in the many-colored back parlor, a half-empty bottle between them, his usually pale face aglow, his gray eyes filmy, and his black hair tumbled by the constant passage through it of his long, nervous fingers—“after all, you see, you and I are in the same boat. You can’t get out because, if you do, the sharks will eat you, and I daren’t get out because I can’t swim.”
Always haunted by the fear that, in some manner, her true story might reach her own town and her own people, Violet had told him only as much as she dared, and what she had said had moved his impulsive generosity.
“But anyway,” he insisted, “you can do one thing that I can’t.”
She clutched at the straw.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“You can get help from shore.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that if you’ll write a letter home, I’ll mail it.”
She shook her head: the straw crumpled in her fingers.
“There’s no use of that,” she said.
“Of course there is. After all, your father’s your father, you see, and I don’t know a father that wouldn’t help his daughter out of the sort of mess you’ve got into.”
“I know one,” said Violet, grimly.
“Not till you try him, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. If you was in my place would your father——”
“Which father?” laughed Beekman. “My one won’t have anything to do with me because I live with the other, and the other won’t have anything to do with me because I’m the son of his predecessor.—You take my advice and write home.”
“I’d never get an answer.”
She spoke in an even tone, but there was no mistaking the tragedy that underlay it.
Beekman looked at her and blinked queerly. He brought his fist down smartly among the jangling glasses.
“It’s a rotten shame!” he said. “A dirty, rotten shame! Why, don’t you know that that yid who got you into this makes a business of such things? Don’t you know there’s a whole army of them that do? I wish to the Lord I could do something, but there isn’t a policeman or a magistrate in the city who’d listen to me—they know too well where they get the jam for their bread and butter—and I can’t get a job for even myself, let alone you!”
She had not, however, heard his last sentence. Her blue eyes wide, she was hanging on his reference to Max.
“A business?” she repeated. “Do you mean that men make money—that way?”
“Of course I do.” The film passed suddenly from Beekman’s eyes, leaving them alert with purpose. “Look here,” he said, “there is one thing I can do, and I don’t know anything that I’d enjoy more: you give me that little kyke’s name, and I’ll push his face out of the back of his head!”
Then there happened a strange thing. She had long guessed and now she knew, but guessing or knowing, she would not believe. As much for her own sanity as for Max’s safety, she lied.
“The name he gave me,” she said, “wasn’t his right one. It wasn’t even one he mostly used. And I never knew no other.”
Beekman raised his hands in more than mock despair, and got up to go.
“Well,” he declared, “I don’t know what I can do for you. If I got into any scandal, it would punch the last hole in my meal-ticket.”
Violet, who was becoming accustomed to such replies, smiled kindly.
“I don’t want you to get into no trouble for me,” she said.
“I know you don’t, and I couldn’t be any use if I did. But I’ll promise you this: I’ll keep my eyes open, and if anything does turn up, I’ll be Johnny-on-the-spot, all right.”
“Thank you,” said Violet.
“And look here,” pursued Beekman, “I know that it’s all rot to expect you to walk out of here without friends or a job; I know that, unless you’ve got one or the other, you’re just simply in jail here; but if I can’t get you anything, there must be those who can. Why don’t you talk to the coal-men, or the gas-inspectors, or—I tell you, I’ve seen that tow-headed Dutchman who leaves the beer here. He looks straight, and he stops at the door. Why don’t you talk to him? He’s the sort that would know of a job for—for——”
Beekman hesitated, blushing like a schoolboy.
“For my sort?” asked Violet. “Maybe he is. Thank you. Anyhow I’ll see.”
And she did see. When Beekman left her, pressing into her hand the last piece of money that he would have for a week, he gave her at the same time so much of hope. Those who seemed rich could not help her; she would appeal to those who were poor.
She was up early and in the kitchen the next morning at the hour when she knew the brewery-wagon would stop outside, and she sent the ebon Cassie on an errand to the corner pharmacy. The maid had scarcely closed the door before Violet was summoned to open it to the German of whom Beekman had spoken.
Philip had observed well. The brewery’s driver, who stood whistling in the areaway, was a short, stocky man with the neck and arms of a gladiator and the round, smiling face of a child. His blue overalls and dark cloth cap accentuated the fairness of his hair, and his round inquiring eyes were alive with continual good-humor. He had just piled a half-dozen cases of beer beside the doorway.
Violet, in her crimson kimona, took from the table the money that had been left for him.
“Good-morning,” she said as she handed him the bills.
He accepted the money with his left hand and, with his right, raised his cap from his clustering curls. His lips ceased whistling, half regretfully.
“Goot-mornin’,” he replied, smiling.
“Won’t you come in and have a drink?” asked Violet, adopting Rose’s form of salutation.
“No, t’ank you,” the German shook his head. “I neffer trinks nussing bud beer.”
“Well,” said Violet, “we have lots of that now.”
“Und I neffer trink dot till tinner.”
There was an awkward pause. The German, not knowing how to leave without seeming rudeness, was shifting his weight from one heavily shod foot to the other. The woman, uncertain how to say the words she wanted to say, remained with her hand upon the knob.
“You don’t?” she awkwardly repeated.
“No, und so I t’ink—I t’ink I besser be goin’,” he hurriedly concluded, and began to turn on his heel.
The necessity for quick action roused her.
“Wait,” she said. And then, as he faced her again in mute wonder, she pressed another bill into his hand. “I want you to help me,” she continued. “I want to get a job somewhere, and I don’t want Miss Rose to know nothing about it.”
He looked from the bill to her, still wondering.
“So-o?” he responded.
“Yes, I want work—some other kind of work—and I thought perhaps you might”—her voice faltered—“might know of some kind.”
The German’s mobile face underwent a quick change. First astonishment and then something not far removed from tears came into his childlike eyes. He crushed the bill in his big red fist.
“So-o?” he repeated.
“Yes, I—you understand that I must have friends or a job if I am to get away from here, and I thought you might know of something.”
The German bobbed his curls.
“I know dot right vell,” he said; “bud I don’ know no tshob chust now.”
Violet’s face darkened.
“All right,” she answered, “I only hoped maybe——”
“Look here, miss,” the driver cut in with a note of ready feeling in his voice. “You mean all dot?”
“All what?”
“About geddin’ ozzer—aboud a real tshob.”
“If I had the clothes and a place I’d go this minute.”
“Vell, den, listen. I’ve chust god a new blace; I’m goin’ to be bar-tender ofer on Segond Avenue, bud I gan send back here if I hear anysing.—Your name?”
“Violet—just Miss Violet.”
“All righd, Miss Violet, I know some more aboud dese blaces like dis dan you maybe t’ink, und I guess maybe I gan do somesing. Nex’ Sunday I dake my girl to Coney, und den ve’ll dalk sings ofer und ve’ll see vhat Katie says.”
In spite of the promised delay and the growing habit of doubt, Violet’s face kindled.
“You’re good,” she said simply, “and I’ll trust you.”
“Oh, I make nussing,” replied the German, smiling once more, “bud chust you vait: Katie gan fix it; she gan fix anysing.”
Before Violet could reply, he had resumed his whistling and run down the alleyway; and she saw that he had tossed back her money on the topmost beercase.