_ One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in
Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying or
loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed to be
a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women who met at
the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away together. Sam
found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings. In the year since he
had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had grown more and more
reflective. Little things--a smile on the lips of an ill-clad old man
mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the flutter of a child's
hand from the doorway of a farmhouse--had furnished him food for hours of
thought. Now he watched with interest the little incidents; the nods, the
hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances around of the men and women who
met for a moment at the corner. On the sidewalk near his doorway several
middle-aged men, evidently from a large hotel around the corner, were
eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry, furtive eyes the women in the crowd.
A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. "Waiting for some
one?" she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with the harried,
uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the middle-aged men
upon the sidewalk.
"What are you doing here with your husband at work?" he ventured.
She looked startled and then laughed.
"Why don't you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?"
she demanded, adding, "I don't know who you are, but whoever you are I
want to tell you that I've quit my husband."
"Why?" asked Sam.
She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.
"I guess you're bluffing," she said. "I don't believe you know Alf at all.
And I'm glad you don't. I've quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just the
same, if he saw me out here hustling."
Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a
lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and
beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered, "Hello,
Sport!"
Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in the
eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of the
lives of great numbers of people in the cities--of the men and women on
the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe marriage
had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together in the
theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of all modern
city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching hunger stood
in the way of men's getting hold of life and living it earnestly and
purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women
wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than
once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and
actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of
the city he thought that he had got past being startled. "It is a quality
of our lives," he decided. "American men and women have not learned to be
clean and noble and natural, like their forests and their wide, clean
plains."
He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.
"We are no finer nor cleaner than these," he said, "and we sprang from the
big clean new land through which I have been walking all these months.
Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly expressed hunger
in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will it never shrive itself
and understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically toward the
building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?"
"It won't unless you help," came the answer from some hidden part of him.
Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and he
wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of vice,
and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in futile
attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward human
betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or stopping the
playing of baseball on Sunday.
As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously in
league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as
something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague
charm.
"For me," he reflected, "there have been no Francois Villons or Sapphos in
the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only heart-
breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces and
torn, greasy finery."
He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how he,
as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly's
suggestion and had been helped by him--helped and frightened and made to
see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of a
second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed
across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of "Nana's Brother," saying
with a smirk, "That's some sporty stuff." And he wondered what he should
have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
bookseller's comment was intended to arouse.
In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which
he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep
sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman's saloon in
Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that
it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
"Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth," he thought, coming to a
street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy
poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. "It gets into all
modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears lewd
stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men from the
cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the stove in
village stores."
Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the
glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in that
city and in every city he had known.
Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far gone
in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam's mind leaped back to those
first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man he had
left behind him in Caxton.
"You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than
that painter's son of Caxton," he reminded himself, "and yet he embraced
vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading talk
and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part with
able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was too rare a
thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the lips-that-touch-liquor-
shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was reserved for the lips
that did not invite."
He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business men
of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of himself,
quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and to shout the
innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in Chicago barrooms.
Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one to keep himself to
himself. But on these carouses he let himself go, and got a reputation for
daring audacity by slapping men on the back and singing songs with them. A
glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for a time he had really believed
there was such a thing as high flying vice that glistens in the sun.
Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city's streets,
he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.
He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted
questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained
unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they
walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at the
windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams, and
cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the place;
men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their faces;
sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were locked out.
He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from farms
and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men believers in the
golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and women of the town
laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked in that way. He
also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible mistress that
lurked at the bottom of men's tales of the submerged world. He wanted his
golden girl. He was like the naive German lad in the South Water Street
warehouses who had once said to him--he was a frugal soul--"I would like
to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and modest and who will be my
mistress and not charge anything."
Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He
had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and
now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not be
made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks of
vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no
housecleaning days in the tenderloin?
During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this
matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the
scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary decent
social life could not go on without it. Often during the past year Sam had
thought of the man's talk and his brain had reeled before the thought. In
towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little girls come
laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered which of them
would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in his hour of
depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his dinner table
might be made to walk with him and to share with him his thoughts.
Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam continued
his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and soothed his
mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought with gratitude
that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of faces rolling up to
him under the lights filled him with peace. "There is so much of life," he
thought, "it must come to some end."
Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the
faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose, the
faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on which
the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers ached to get
a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas in enduring
pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able to say, "Here
are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves and for your
children."
In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar
counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman
clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to
wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick,
deft fingers and her muscular little arms. "Another such as she," he
muttered, "has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman; a
hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the warm
furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and red
blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws in the
air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her white
limbs, her cheeks, her hair."
For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of
the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the
power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in
the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the
story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.
In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer's talk, and in Chicago and
New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the
artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long
street he thought that he did understand.
Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an
affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her
face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of
the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong, bullet-
like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold. He
remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love passage
with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both
man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place. How her strong
hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office
building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the
marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser
had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face.
On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,
standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called
softly, and turning he went to her.
"I am not a customer," he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands,
"but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting
hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that
I won't get to thinking."
"You're a queer bird," said the woman, taking his arm. "What have you done
that you don't want to think?"
Sam said nothing.
"There's a place over there," she said, pointing to the lighted front of a
cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.
Sam kept on walking.
"If you do not mind," he said, "I will pick the place. I want to buy a
good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook
in the kitchen."
They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he
waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he
went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she
returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam
thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work
on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still
waiting.
"I thought maybe it was a stall," she said.
They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean
washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms.
Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been
well cooked.
They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and
she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying
her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and
because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness
by the church door, had made an appeal.
She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not
defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy's.
Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had
the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother's hands. Now that she sat
before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother.
After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman
of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.
"Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?" she
said.
"I am going to take you to the door of your room, that's all."
"I'm glad," she said; "it's a long time since I've had an evening like
this. It makes me feel clean."
For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town
in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his
mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told
of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which
made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her
and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her
father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long
Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good
housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden
back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five
and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.
The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy
and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the
garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with
thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had
married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the
house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her
life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and
the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,
undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her
husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by
various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a
time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that
her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the
town.
"There wasn't any use wasting words when I found he didn't care for me or
for the baby and wouldn't support us, so I left him," she said in a level,
businesslike way.
When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had
taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her
savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to
work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her
hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a
small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine
man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a
gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to
be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was
seven dollars a week.
"And so," she said, "I began going on the street. I knew no one and there
was nothing else to do. I couldn't do that in the town where the boy
lived, so I came away. I've gone from city to city, working mostly for
patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the
streets. I'm not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of
them care about me. I don't like to have them touch me with their hands. I
can't drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left
alone. Perhaps I shouldn't have married. Not that I minded my husband. We
got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found
where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a
thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found
there wasn't anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried
doing other work, but hadn't the strength, and when it came to the test I
cared more about the boy than I did about myself--any woman would. I
thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.
"It hasn't been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me
I walk along the street praying that I won't shudder and draw away when he
touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won't
get any money.
"And then they talk and lie about themselves. I've had them try to work
off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love
to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That's the hard
part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and
over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these
others lying to me."
She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
sat looking into the fire.
"My mother," she began again, "didn't always wear a clean dress. She
couldn't. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or
out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I'm losing it all. All
evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn't
clean. Most of the time I don't care. Being clean doesn't go with what I
am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop
when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don't go
on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe
myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I
don't seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets."
The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped
by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another
room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices.
The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that
he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he
should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a
quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.
As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.
"I wouldn't mind about you," she said, looking at him frankly.
Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he said,
"we'll go through with it as it stands."
"Thanks for that," she said, "and there is something else I want to tell
you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don't want to
go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders."
As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing
as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved
her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a
feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in
the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted
street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he
lifted up his voice in the night.
"Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt
and destroy?" _