VI
"THERE'S NO PLACE—"
When Rose-Marie paused in front of the tenement, at three o'clock on the following afternoon, she felt like a naughty little girl who is playing truant from school. When she remembered the way that she had avoided the Superintendent's almost direct questions, she blushed with an inward sense of shame. But when she thought of the Young Doctor's offer to go with her—"wherever she was going"—she threw back her head with a defiant little gesture. She knew well that the Young Doctor was sorry for yesterday's quarrel—she knew that a night beside the dying Mrs. Celleni, and the wails of the Cohen baby, had temporarily softened his viewpoint upon life. And yet—he had said that they were soulless—these people that she had come to help! He would have condemned Bennie Volsky from the first—but she had detected the glimmerings of something fine in the child! No—despite his more tolerant attitude—she knew that, underneath, his convictions were unchanged. She was glad that she had gone out upon her adventure alone.
With a heart that throbbed in quick staccato beats, she mounted the steps of the tenement. Little dark-eyed children moved away from her, apparently on every side, but somehow she scarcely noticed them. The doorway yawned, like an open mouth, in front of her—and she could think of nothing else. As she went over the dark threshold she remembered stories that she had read about people who go in at tenement doorways and are never seen again. Every one has read such stories in the daily newspapers—and perhaps some of them are true!
A faint light flickered in through the doorway. It made the ascent of the first flight of creaking stairs quite easy. At least Rose-Marie could step aside from the piles of rubbish and avoid the rickety places. She wondered, as she went up, her fingers gingerly touching the dirty hand-rail, how people could exist under such wretched conditions.
The second flight was harder to manage. The light from the narrow doorway was shut off, and there were no windows. There might have been gas jets upon every landing—Rose-Marie supposed that there were—but it was mid-afternoon, and they had not yet been lighted. She groped her way up the second flight, and the third, feeling carefully along each step with her foot before she put her weight upon it.
On the fourth flight she paused for a moment to catch her breath. But she realized, as she paused, that even breathing had to be done under difficulties in this place. There was no ventilation of any sort, so far as she could tell—all about her floated the odours of boiled cabbage, and fried onions, and garlic. And there were other odours, too; the indescribable smells of soiled clothing and soap-suds and greasy dishes.
But in Rose-Marie's mind, the odours—poignant though they were—took second place to the sounds. Never, she told herself, had she imagined that so many different sorts of noises could exist in the same place at one and the same time. There were the cries and sobs of little children, the moans of sickness, the thuds of falling furniture and the crashes of breaking crockery. There were yells of rage, and—worst of all—bursts of appalling profanity. Rose-Marie, standing there in the darkness of the fourth flight, heard words that she had never expected to hear—phrases of which she had never dreamed. She shuddered as she started up the fifth flight, and when, at last, she stood in front of the Volsky flat, she experienced almost a feeling of relief. At least she would be shut off, in a moment, from those alien and terrible sounds—at least, in a moment, she would be in a home.
To most of us—particularly if we have grown up in an atmosphere such as had always sheltered Rose-Marie—the very sound of the word "home" brings a certain sense of warmth and comfort. Home stands for shelter and protection and love. "Be it ever so humble," the old song tells us, "be it ever so humble …"
And Rose-Marie, knocking timidly upon the Volsky door, expected to find a home. She expected it to be humble in the truest sense of the word—to be ragged and poverty-stricken and mean. And yet she could not feel that it would be utterly divorced from the ideals she had always built around her conception of the word. She expected it to be a home because a family lived there together—a mother, and a father, and children.
In answer to her knock the door swung open—a little way. The glow of a dingy lamp fell about her, through the opening—she felt suddenly as if she had been swept, willy-nilly, before the footlights of some hostile stage. For a moment she stood blinking. And as she stood there, quite unable to see, she heard the voice of Bennie Volsky, speaking in a hoarse whisper.
"It's you, Miss!" said the voice, and it was as full of intense wonderment as a voice could be. "I never thought that you'd come—I didn't think you was on th' level. So many folks say they'll do things—" he broke off, and then—"Walk in, quiet," he told her slowly. "Don't make any noise, if yer can help it! Pa's come home, all lit up. An' he's asleep, in th' corner! There'll be—" he broke off—"There'll be th' dickens t' pay, if Pa wakes up! But walk in, still-like. An' yer can see Ma an' all, an'—Lily!"
Rose-Marie, whose eyes had now become accustomed to the dim light, stepped past the boy and into the room. Her hand, in passing, touched his arm lightly, for she knew that he was labouring under intense excitement. She stepped into the room, on mousy-quiet feet—and then, with a quick gasp, drew back again.
Never, in her wildest dreams of poverty, had Rose-Marie supposed that squalor, such as she saw in the Volsky home, could exist. Never had she supposed that a family could live in such cramped, airless quarters. Never had she thought that filth, such as she saw in the room, was possible. It all seemed, somehow, an unbelievably bad dream—a dream in which she was appearing, with startling realism. Her comfortable picture of a home was vanishing—vanishing as suddenly and completely as a soap bubble vanishes, if pricked by a pin.
"Why—why, Bennie!" she began. But the child was not listening. He had darted from her side and was dragging forward, by one listless, work-coarsened hand, a pallid, drooping woman.
"Dis is my ma," he told Rose-Marie. "She didn't know yer was comin'. I didn't tell her!"
It seemed to Rose-Marie that there was a scared sort of appeal in the woman's eyes as they travelled, slowly, over her face. But there was not even appeal in the tone of her voice—it was all a drab, colourless monotone.
"Whatcha come here fer?" she questioned. "Pa, he's home. If he should ter wake up—" She left the sentence unfinished.
Almost instinctively the eyes of Rose-Marie travelled past the figure of Mrs. Volsky. There was nothing in that figure to hold her gaze—it was so vague, so like a shadow of something that had been. She saw the few broken chairs, the half-filled wash tub, the dish-pan with its freight of soiled cups and plates. She saw the gas stove, with its battered coffee-pot, and a mattress or two piled high with dingy bedding. And, in one corner, she saw—with a new sense of horror—the reclining figure of Pa.
Pa was sleeping. Sleeping heavily, with his mouth open and his tousled head slipping to one side. One great hairy hand was clenched about an empty bottle—one huge foot, stockingless and half out of its shoe, was dragging limply off the heap of blankets that was his bed. A stubble of beard made his already dark face even more sinister, his tousled hair looked as if it had never known the refining influences of a comb or brush. As Rose-Marie stared at him, half fascinated, he turned—with a spasmodic, drunken movement—and flung one heavy arm above his head.
The room was not a large one. But, at that moment, it seemed appallingly spacious to Rose-Marie. She turned, almost with a feeling of affection, toward Bennie. At least she had seen him before. And, as if he interpreted her feeling, Bennie spoke.
"We got two other rooms," he told her, "one that Ella an' Lily sleep in, an' one that Jim pays fer, his own self. Ma an' Pa an' me—we sleep here! Say, don't you be too scared o' Pa—he'll stay asleep fer a long time, now. He won't wake up unless he's shook. Will he, Ma?"
Mrs. Volsky nodded her head with a worn out, apathetic movement. Noiselessly, but with the appearance of a certain terrible effort under the shell of quiet, she moved away across the room toward the stove.
"She's goin' t' warm up th' coffee," Bennie said. "She'll give you some, in a minute, if yer want it!"
Rose-Marie was about to speak, about to assure Bennie that she didn't want any of the coffee, when steps sounded on the stairs. They were hurried steps; steps suggesting to the listener that five flights were nothing, after all! Rose-Marie found herself turning as a hand fell heavily upon a door-knob, and the door swung in.
A young man stood jauntily upon the threshold. Rose-Marie's first impression of him was one of extreme, almost offensive neatness—of sleek hair, that looked like patent leather, and of highly polished brown shoes. She saw that his blue and white striped collar was speckless, that his blue tie was obviously new, that his trousers were creased to an almost dangerous edge. But it was the face of the young man from which Rose-Marie shrank back—a clever, sharp face with narrow, horribly speculative eyes and a thin-lipped red mouth. It was a handsome face, yes, but—
The voice of Bennie broke, suddenly, across her speculations.
"Jim," he said.
Still jauntily—Rose-Marie realized that jauntiness was his keynote—the young man entered the room. His sharp eyes travelled with lightning-like rapidity over the place, resting a moment on the sleeping figure of Pa before they hurried past him to Rose-Marie. He surveyed her coolly, taking in every feature, every fold of her garments, with a studied boldness that was somehow offensive.
"Who's she?" he questioned abruptly, of any one who cared to answer, and one manicured finger pointed in her direction. "Where'd she come from?"
Bennie was the one who spoke. Rather gallantly he stepped in front of
Rose-Marie.
"She's a friend of mine," he said; "she lives by th' Settlement House. She come up here t' see me, 'n' Ma, 'n' Lily. You leave her be—y' understand?"
The young man laughed, and his laugh was curiously hard and dry.
"Oh, sure!" he told Bennie. "I'll leave her be! What," he turned to
Rose-Marie with an insolent smile, "what's yer name?"
Rose-Marie met his insolent gaze with a calm expression. No one would have guessed that she was trembling inwardly.
"My name," she told him, "is Rose-Marie Thompson. I live in the
Settlement House, and I came to see your sister."
"Well," the young man's insolent gaze was still studying Rose-Marie, "well, she'll be up soon. I passed 'er on th' stairs. But," he laughed again, "why didn't yer come t' see me—huh?"
Rose-Marie, having no answer, turned expectantly toward the door. If this Jim had passed his sister on the stairs, she couldn't be very far away. As if in reply to her supposition, the door swung open again and a tall, dark-eyed girl came into the room. Rose-Marie saw with her first swift glance that the red upon the girl's cheeks was too high to be quite natural—that the scarlet of her lips was over-vivid. And yet, despite the patently artificial colouring, she realized that the girl was beautiful with a high strung, almost thoroughbred beauty. She wondered how this beauty had been born of the dim woman who seemed so colourless and the sodden brute who lay snoring in the comer.
Her train of thought was broken, suddenly. For the young man was speaking. Rose-Marie disliked, somehow, the very tone of his voice.
"Here's a girl t' see you, Ella," he said. "She's from th' Settlement
House—she says! Maybe she wants," sarcastically, "that you should join a
Bible Class!"
The girl's eyes were flashing with a dangerously hard light. She turned angrily to Rose-Marie. But before she could say anything, the child, Bennie, had interposed.
"She didn't come t' see you" he told his older sister—"she don't want t' see you—like those other wimmen did. She come t' see Lily—"
He paused and Rose-Marie, who had gathered that social service workers were not welcome visitors, went on breathlessly, from where he left off.
"I am from the Settlement House," she told Ella, "and I'd like awfully to have you join our classes. But that wasn't why I came here. Bennie told me that he had a dear little sister. And I came to see her."
A change swept miraculously over Ella's cold face. Rose-Marie could see, all at once, that she and her young brother were strikingly alike—that Jim was the different one in this family.
"I'll get Lily," Ella said simply, and there was a warmth, a tenderness in her dark eyes that had been so hard. "I didn't understand," she added, as she went quickly past Rose-Marie and into the small inner room that Bennie had said his sisters shared. In a moment she came out leading a small girl by the hand.
"This is Lily!" she said softly.
Even in that dingy place—perhaps accentuated by the very dinginess of it—Lily's blond loveliness struck Rose-Marie with a sense of shock. The child might have been a flower—the very flower whose name she bore—growing upon an ash heap. Her beauty made the rest of the room fade into dim outlines—made Jim and Ella and Bennie seem heavy, and somehow overfed. Even Pa, snoring lustily, became almost a shadow. Rose-Marie stepped toward the child impulsively, with outflung arms.
"Oh, you dear!" she said shakily, "you dear!"
Nobody spoke. Only Ella, with gentle hands, pushed her little sister forward. The child's great blue eyes looked past Rose-Marie, and a vague smile quivered on her lips.
"Oh, you dear!" Rose-Marie exclaimed again, and went down on her knees on the dirty floor—real women will always kneel before a beautiful child.
Lily might have been four years old. Her hair, drawn back from her white little face, was the colour of pale gold, and her lips were faintly coral. But it was her deep eyes, with their vague expression, that clutched, somehow, at Rose-Marie's heart.
"Tell me that you're going to like me, Lily!" she almost implored. "I love little girls."
The child did not answer—indeed, she did not seem to hear. But one thin little hand, creeping out, touched Rose-Marie's face with a gesture that was singularly appealing, singularly full of affection. When the fingers touched her cheek, Rose-Marie felt a sudden suspicion, a sudden dread. She noticed, all at once, that no one was speaking—that the room was quite still, except for the beastial grunts of the sleeping Pa.
"Why," she asked, quite without meaning to, "why doesn't she answer me?
She isn't afraid of me, is she? Why doesn't she say something?"
It was, curiously enough, Mrs. Volsky who answered. Even her voice—that was usually so dull and monotonous—held a certain tremor.
"Lily," she said slowly, "can't spick—'r hear…. An' she's—blind!"