“Polly?” said Miss Hobbs, her homely face lighting up under her Salvation Army bonnet, “Polly Nemor? That is the name of a beautiful girl I have been hunting for for weeks. We will look for her everywhere to-night. You must go with us, for perhaps you can induce her to come away.”
CHAPTER XXXV
The search for Polly was like going down through the open gates of Hell.
Miss Hobbs left her fire burning, and her door half-opened. Then we went out through the gloomy court into the street.
In the gleam of flickering electric lights, my old feeling of the unreality of all I saw came back to me. We were in a broad thoroughfare, where night after night is played the tragedy of a great city’s sin. The actors passed and re-passed. The scene shifted. We saw the leering faces of men, and heard the evil laughter of women. The sights and sounds faded, then came again, but the curtain never fell. Even closed eyelids could not shut the horror out.
I shrank back and would have given up the search, but the old man’s face was always before my eyes, begging me to go on; and the woman at my side knew no fear. She walked with charmed feet. Ruffians on the street kicked each other out of the way to let her pass; the carousers in every dance hall and saloon fell back that she might enter; drunken women rose when she touched them, and followed her home to the fresh beds that she had made ready for all who would come.
Polly was nowhere here. She must have drifted still lower. We went from the glaring lights down where, under the tracks of an elevated road, the streets narrowed and darkened and closed in upon us. We were near the wharves and the bridges.
Here is cast up a whole city’s refuse. Tides of foul life, subsiding, leave here on the street, or in dive and den, the sodden-faced women who have shared the flood of passion in its fury, and must suffer its ebb. There is nothing lower. There is nothing beyond, except the river, which runs foul and slimy here along the dirty wharves.
We found a girl waiting on a street corner, alone. Under the little shawl tied over her head I saw tears on her cheeks. I held out my hand to her, and she came with us. In one saloon a pink-eyed, foolish woman clung to us, and followed of her own will when we came away.
But we could not find Polly. There was no one on any street, or in any drinking-den who looked like the woman that my old friend had called his “little girl.”