XVII
UPON A WET EVENING, several months after the last
chapter, two interminable rows of cars, pulled by slipping horses,
jangled along a prominent side-street. A dozen cabs, with
coat-enshrouded drivers, clattered to and fro. Electric lights,
whirring softly, shed a blurred radiance. A flower dealer, his feet
tapping impatiently, his nose and his wares glistening with
rain-drops, stood behind an array of roses and chrysanthemums. Two
or three theatres emptied a crowd upon the storm-swept pavements.
Men pulled their hats over their eyebrows and raised their collars
to their ears. Women shrugged impatient shoulders in their warm
cloaks and stopped to arrange their skirts for a walk through the
storm. People having been comparatively silent for two hours burst
into a roar of conversation, their hearts still kindling from the
glowings of the stage.
The pavements became tossing seas of umbrellas. Men
stepped forth to hail cabs or cars, raising their fingers in varied
forms of polite request or imperative demand. An endless procession
wended toward elevated stations. An atmosphere of pleasure and
prosperity seemed to hang over the throng, born, perhaps, of good
clothes and of having just emerged from a place of
forgetfulness.
In the mingled light and gloom of an adjacent park,
a handful of wet wanderers, in attitudes of chronic dejection, was
scattered among the benches.
A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went
along the street. She threw changing glances at men who passed her,
giving smiling invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern and
usually seeming sedately unconscious of the men with a metropolitan
seal upon their faces.
Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the
throng emerging from the places of forgetfulness. She hurried
forward through the crowd as if intent upon reaching a distant
home, bending forward in her handsome cloak, daintily lifting her
skirts and picking for her well-shod feet the dryer spots upon the
pavements.
The restless doors of saloons, clashing to and fro,
disclosed animated rows of men before bars and hurrying
barkeepers.
A concert hall gave to the street faint sounds of
swift, machine-like music, as if a group of phantom musicians were
hastening.
A tall young man, smoking a cigarette with a
sublime air, strolled near the girl. He had on evening dress, a
moustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui, all of which he
kept carefully under his eye. Seeing the girl walk on as if such a
young man as he was not in existence, he looked back transfixed
with interest. He stared glassily for a moment, but gave a slight
convulsive start when he discerned that she was neither new,
Parisian, nor theatrical.15 He
wheeled about hastily and turned his stare into the air, like a
sailor with a searchlight.
A stout gentleman, with pompous and philanthropic
whiskers, went stolidly by, the broad of his back sneering at the
girl.
A belated man in business clothes, and in haste to
catch a car, bounced against her shoulder. “Hi, there, Mary, I beg
your pardon! Brace up, old girl.” He grasped her arm to steady her,
and then was away running down the middle of the street.
The girl walked on out of the realm of restaurants
and saloons. She passed more glittering avenues and went into
darker blocks than those where the crowd travelled.
A young man in light overcoat and derby hat
received a glance shot keenly from the eyes of the girl. He stopped
and looked at her, thrusting his hands in his pockets and making a
mocking smile curl his lips. “Come, now, old lady,” he said, “you
don’t mean to tell me that you sized me up for a farmer?”
A laboring man marched along with bundles under his
arms. To her remarks, he replied: “It’s a fine evenin’, ain’t
it?”
She smiled squarely into the face of a boy who was
hurrying by with his hands buried in his overcoat, his blonde locks
bobbing on his youthful temples, and a cheery smile of unconcern
upon his lips. He turned his head and smiled back at her, waving
his hands.
“Not this eve—some other eve!”
A drunken man, reeling in her pathway, began to
roar at her. “I ain’ ga no money, dammit,” he shouted, in a dismal
voice. He lurched on up the street, wailing to himself, “Dammit, I
ain’ ga no money. Damn ba’ luck. Ain’ ga no more money.”
The girl went into gloomy districts near the river,
where the tall black factories shut in the street and only
occasional broad beams of light fell across the pavements from
saloons. In front of one of these places, from whence came the
sound of a violin vigorously scraped, the patter of feet on boards
and the ring of loud laughter, there stood a man with blotched
features.
“Ah, there,” said the girl.
“I’ve got a date,” said the man.
Further on in the darkness she met a ragged being
with shifting, blood-shot eyes and grimey hands. “Ah, what deh
hell? Tink I’m a millionaire?”
She went into the blackness of the final block. The
shutters of the tall buildings were closed like grim lips. The
structures seemed to have eyes that looked over her, beyond her, at
other things. Afar off the lights of the avenues glittered as if
from an impossible distance. Street car bells jingled with a sound
of merriment.
When almost to the river the girl saw a great
figure. On going forward she perceived it to be a huge fat man in
torn and greasy garments. His grey hair straggled down over his
forehead. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great
rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face. He
laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a grey,
grizzled moustache from which beerdrops dripped. His whole body
gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish. Chuckling
and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions.
At their feet the river appeared a deathly black
hue. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a
moment the waters lapping oilily against timbers. The varied sounds
of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness,
came faintly and died away to a silence.