II
The days dragged by. There seemed to be a complete lapse of the stone-cutting industry, so Casey had nothing to take his mind from his "ditictive" operations, which were interesting and unexhausting, though expensive in car-fare and unproductive of results. Angela Ann's weekly wage, for many years the main dependence of the family, being lost to them, they were closer even than was their wont to starvation and eviction; and winter was beginning to snarl around their warped, ill-fitting doors.
As time wore on, the poignant horror of Angela Ann's absence grew mercifully less for all but Mary Casey. Night after night she wept the long hours through, until Casey complained of the depressing effect of her grief, and she felt constrained to hide it.
"If I could on'y know she were dacintly dead," was her heart's cry, as better hopes died in her, "Ag'in' a bye l'ave home, he kin knock around an' pick up a bite here an' a lodgin' theer, an' be none th' worse fer it. But a gyurl bees diff'runt! Theer's always thim watchin' 'round thot's riddy t' do her harm."
Meanwhile she lied bravely to the neighbors. "Angela Ann bees livin' out an' have th' graandes' plaace," she told them impressively; "th' lady she live wid 's after takin' her to Floridy fer to mind her little bye."
Mary's hope was strong that Christmas would see the wanderer's return, but the holidays passed in unrewarded waiting. Casey had perforce abandoned his search, and worked a day or two now and then. Though the traces of really terrible suffering were still in his weak, winsome face, he had long since forsaken all hope of Angela Ann's "safety with honor," and, when it had come to seem unlikely that she ever would do so, took comfort in vowing that she should never again darken the door of his outraged home.
Mary gave over pleading for her girl, in the interests of family peace, but, more and more like a specter as the weeks wore away, she haunted localities where Angela Ann had been or might be. Sometimes she had the baby in her arms, but oftener she left it with Dewey at their Aunt Maggie's, and roamed the streets unhampered in her never-ending quest.
Evenings she would say, "I'll be goin' t' yer aunt's a bit," and slip away into the engulfing dark, to reappear in the glare of light marking the entrance to some cheap West Side theater or dance hall. Gradually her excursions extended downtown, where she would take up her station at the door of some place of amusement and stand watching the pleasure-seekers pour in, then turn away and wander aimlessly up and down the streets for an hour or so before facing homeward. In some way she heard about stage doors, and took to haunting them. She saw many girls of Angela's type, and wondered sadly if their mothers knew where they were, but her own girl was not among them. In those nights on the flaming streets she learned more about vice than she had ever dreamed of in all her life, and the world came to seem to her a vast trap set by the bestial for the unwary.
Not hunger, nor cold, nor abuse, nor sickness, nor death, as it came to five of her children, had driven Mary Casey to anything like the poignancy of feeling that was hers now. Heretofore she had been patiently dumb under affliction; now her spirit cried out in a passion of pain that called straight upon Almighty God for an answer to its anguished questionings.
With the aid of Casey, who was a "scollard," and could "r'ade 'n' write joost as aisy," she pored over the sensational papers in search of stories about girls in trouble, and never a horror happened to an unidentified girl anywhere but Mary was sure it was Angela Ann.
Once there was an account of an unknown young woman found dead on the prairies near Dunning, the county institution. It was Johnnie who laboriously spelled out this story for her—Casey having gone to that club of congenial spirits, O'Shaughannessy's saloon—and at ten o'clock, when the children were all abed, her anxieties could brook no more delay. Throwing a shawl about her head and shoulders, she stole along the pitchy passageway, up the long flight of steps to the sidewalk, clutching the torn fragment of newspaper in the hand that held the shawl together beneath her chin.
It was Saturday night, and the avenue was still brightly lighted. One or two acquaintances greeted her, but she hurried by with only a nod and a word. At Harrison and Halsted and Blue Island Avenue, where three streams of ceaseless activity converge, there is always a whirlpool rapids of traffic and humanity, and here, in a brilliant drug store, Mary felt far enough from her own haunts and all who knew her and Angela Ann to venture on her errand.
"I want t' tillyphome," she whispered to the clerk, who pointed impatiently to the booth.
"I dunno how," said Mary imploringly. "I want ye t' do it fer me. R'ade that." She thrust the dirty, crumpled fragment of the evening's yellow journal into his hand.
The young man glanced at it, and then curiously at her. "I've read it," he said.
"Down here, somewheers," said Mary, pointing vaguely towards the last paragraph, "it till wheer she be, an' I want ye t' tillyphome that place an' ask thim have she a laarge brown mole on her lift side. If she have, I'm goin' out theer this night, fer 'tis my gyurl I t'ink she be."
This was not as startling an episode to the young man addressed as it might have been to one in a quieter locality. Nevertheless, it smacked of the dramatic sufficiently to interest him, and when Mary proffered her nickel he called up the Dunning morgue.
After what seemed an interminable wait, while the sleepy morgue attendant at the county poor-house was being summoned by repeated rings, and the brief colloquy was in progress, the clerk emerged from the booth.
"The girl has been identified this evening," he said.
Disappointment mingled with relief in Mary's countenance: she had reached that stage where it would have been not altogether unendurable to look at Angela Ann's dead face, even in a morgue.
As she retraced her way home, the chill of the sharp February night struck into her mercilessly. When she set forth, she had scarcely noticed in it her preoccupation; but now that another expectation, however tragic, had proved false, and the situation stretched ahead of her indefinitely dull and despairing again, the abrupt relaxation left her physically as well as mentally "let down," and she shivered violently as she hurried along.
"Mother o' God," she cried, the tears rolling swiftly down her shrunken cheeks, "wheer is my gyurl this noight? If I could on'y know she had a roof over her head an' a fire t' kape her warrm!"
Casey was still out when she got back, and she was thankful, for the sight of her tears made him ugly these days. "She've disgraaced us," he said of Angela Ann, "an' she be dead t' me, an' ought t' be t' you, if ye had proper shame."
Mary could give herself up to the luxury of grief, therefore, and she did, until she fell asleep. The next morning she was up betimes, meaning to go to early mass in the basement of the church before "drissy folks" were abroad in their Sunday finery. For more than one reason Mary avoided the later masses; her rags were small shame to her compared with the more than half-suspicious inquiries of acquaintances as to the whereabouts of Angela Ann.
"'Tis more lies I'm after tellin'," thought poor Mary, "than th' praste kin iver take aft o' me. 'N' ag'in' I do pinance enough t' kape me busy half me time, an' go t' git me holy c'munion, I'm not out o' th' prisence o' th' blissed Sacrament befoore I'm havin' t' lie ag'in t' save that poor, silly gyurl's name!"
This morning, however, in spite of her early rising and her efforts to get to seven o'clock mass, events conspired to thwart her intentions. Mollie woke up with a headache, and Johnnie had to be despatched on a vinegar-borrowing expedition, so that the time-honored application of brown paper soaked in vinegar might be made to the poor little head. The baby cried lustily, with a colicky cry, and Mary had to hasten the boiling of tea, that wee Annie might have a good, hot cup to soothe her. Casey, complaining profanely of broken slumbers, was in no mood to be left home with fretting children while Mary went to mass.
It was nine o'clock before she could get away; the last mass in the basement was at nine o'clock. But the Elevation of the Host had been celebrated before she got there, and she turned disappointedly to the stairs; she would have to wait for half-past nine mass in the main church. It seemed as if Providence were balking her, but on the stairway she learned the reason why.
"Ye mus' be sure t' say a spicial prayer on this mass," said one woman who passed her to another, "'tis the first mass this young praste have iver said, an' a blissin' go wid it t' thim thot prays wid him."
Saul on the Damascus road had no more overwhelming sense of arrest and redirection than Mary Casey had, as, trembling with excitement, she reached the top of the stairway.
"Think o' that now," she told herself, "an' if I had come t' th' airly mass I'd niver 'a' known it!"
Hardly would her knees uphold her until she could sink into an obscure pew, far back under the gallery. And there, at the tense moment when the silver-toned bell proclaimed commemoration of the great lifting-up in suffering, Mary raised her faith-full prayer: "A'mighty God, sind me gyurl back t' me! But if it don' be in yer heart t' do thot mooch, maake her a good gyurl wheeriver she be. Fer th' love av Christ, Amin."
Not often in any lifetime, perhaps, does it come to pass that one prays with such sublime assurance of crying straight into the listening ear of Omnipotence that will inevitably keep faith with poor flesh. For nigh on to forty years Mary Casey had listened to reiterations of the old and new Covenants, but they had fallen on sterile ground in her soul. It was the little chance remark about the new priest's first mass, dropping into harrowed and watered soil, that flowered in immediate faith.
The mass ended and the throngs of worshipers passed out, but Mary sat unheeded and unheeding in her dim corner, her simple mind grappling with the stupendous idea of its Covenant with Heaven.
Before she had any realizing sense of time, the church had filled again for high mass. Then the lighting of the great white altar fascinated her, and she felt an intense desire to live again through such a moment of assurance as she had lately experienced—to hear that bell ring again, to smell the incense, and to believe that in some wonderful, wonderful way it was all a part of that prayer of hers that Heaven was bound to answer.
So she stayed on, in her far-away pew, to the remotest corner of which she was crowded as the enormous church filled to its capacity. With the entrance of the preacher into the pulpit, though, she was conscious of a distinct "let-down." She had never liked sermons; they dealt with things so formally. Even when the priests made their greatest efforts to be plain-spoken and understandable, she seldom got any personal help from their discourse. They were prone to denunciations of adultery and drunkenness and other sins of which she was innocent, and to vague exhortations looking toward a hereafter on which her imagination had never taken any but the feeblest hold. But what was this priest saying? Something about a little household that the Lord had loved, and one of its two sisters had gone astray!
The woman sitting next to Mary nudged her other neighbor and glanced in the direction of Mary's face, thrust forward as if so as not to lose a syllable, the tears chasing each other unheeded down its furrows. In her lap Mary's gnarled hands were clasped in painful intensity.
Over and over, since she was a tiny child in Ireland, she had heard this Catholic rendering, of Mary of Bethany's story, but it had never meant anything to her. To-day it meant everything.
"MARY SAT UNHEEDED AND UNHEEDING IN HER DIM CORNER, HER MIND GRAPPLING WITH THE STUPENDOUS IDEA"
"An' I said I niver wanted t' see her ag'in if she'd disgraaced me," she told herself, and was appalled at the remembrance.
That afternoon, toward the early dusk, she sat in the dark kitchen holding Annie in her lap; all the other children were out. Casey, who had not left the house all day, was huddled up to the stove, smoking his rank pipe; he was unshaven and unwashed, and wore a coarse undershirt of a peculiar mustard color which lent his pallid, grime-streaked face a ghastly hue. He had been talking about a "gran' job" of which a man had told him, and building large castles about moving to a better street and a better house and buying a "parlie suit be aisy paymints."
Mary listened believingly; twenty years of listening to these dreams which never came true had not killed her hopefulness. As she listened, though, her hopes outran Casey's, for she could conceive no possible felicity without Angela Ann. How to introduce the now-forbidden subject of Angela was a problem, but clearly the only way was to plunge in.
"Yis," she assented, "I t'ink we should have a parlie. It have always been my belafe thot if we'd had a parlie Ang'la wouldn't niver 'a' wint away. Ag'in' she come home, I'm goin' t' kape th' parlie noice fer her an' lave her have her beau ivry noight, an' no wan t' bother thim. An' I ain't goin' t' lave her go downtown t' work no more—theer's too manny bad min. She kin stay home an' moind th' house, an' I'll git scrubbin' t' do t' th' Imporium. Wid what you earn an' what I earn, we kin give her mebbe a dollar a wake fer spindin' money."
Mary waxed excited as her dream unfolded, but Casey was ironical.
"Whin d'ye ixpict her?" he inquired, with pride in the sarcasm.
"I dunno," said Mary, undaunted, "but I know she'll come. An' whin she do, I'll not ask her anny quistions. I don' keer how she come t' me, so she come. No matter what she've done, theer mus' be dipths she haven't r'ached yit, an' all I ask now is t' save her from gittin' anny worse than she be. D'ye know what I prayed t' th' Mother o God befoore I lift th' church this mornin'? I prayed that our Ang'la Ann'd git in trouble—in tur'ble trouble 'n' disgraace so thot thim thot's lid her away'd t'row her out, 'n' no wan but God 'n' her mother'd take her in!"
In speechless astonishment Casey gazed at the vehement woman before him. Some instinct made him hold his peace while she told about the priest's first mass, about the sermon, about the answer she confidently expected to her prayer. While he listened, his easy Irish emotionalism caught the contagion of her belief, and his tears flowed unchecked as he alternately cursed the man that had led Angela away, and prophesied glowingly of the "parlie" that was to be.
It was pitchy dark in the kitchen now, and Mary got up to light the lamp. As she did so, a sound at the door caused her nearly to drop the lamp. Hurrying to the door, she threw it open, and with the light in one hand peered out into the black yard.
"Here, pussy, pussy," she called. Then, as her call was answered, "My God! what did I tell ye? Tis the wan-eyed cat!"