It was a trade of hard hours, hard walking, and hard drinking, and, in the glaring cafés where she often sat with her fellow-workers waiting to be smiled at by the hunters, Mary, though she met many girls that fared worse than herself, met few that, when truthful, told of faring better. The woman that quitted her landlady's care for "a flat of her own" represented the ideal toward which this whole army was hoping, but was an ideal mythical.
Nearly all were working in health and out, and saving nothing. Nearly all were in bondage to taskmasters that slunk along after them through the streets, saw them strike a bargain, waited in the shadows of a nearby house until the wage was paid, and then came forward, before the customer had turned the corner, to exact their tribute. Born, through the effects of a wasteful industrial system, in cellars upon beds of rags, herded as children in attics where a family of ten slept in a space too small for five, bred in poverty, always underfed and never properly protected from the weather, some of them were used to hardship that no decent social justice would ever have permitted. Others had been lured from comfortable homes. Still others were the faster fettered because they had gone from homes too respectable to allow of any return. But almost everyone, through fear of exposure, dread of jail and reformatory, and awe of their owners' political influences, was the chattel of a slavery as thorough as that of which Max Grossman was a minor instrument.
The majority of these toilers were ready to receive, or had long since received, the seeds of tuberculosis; few could continue their work for five years, and ninety-five per cent., as a drunken young college undergraduate one evening cheerfully informed Mary, were suffering from one or other, and sometimes from all three, of the trio of diseases common to their business. Out from those stuffy bedrooms and those smoke-clouded, song-filled cafés, men carried the scourging social illnesses to innocent wives and to unborn children destined to dwarfed or sightless lives. The sufferer might believe himself cured and bear infection years later.
"Now, take yourself, for instance," the lad had resumed, his cheeks still rosy with youth, but his eyes aflame with liquor. "I know something about these things; but I couldn't tell whether you were free or not. You might be sick a long time before even you could tell, and then you wouldn't risk starvation by telling about it. You might be sick right now for all I know. But look out for the worst of all!"
Mary heard him with as little heed as she had heard most men. She had learned all that he said from women who knew more of it than, she hoped, this boy would ever know, and she had been well assured that it was a danger that no preventive could wholly defy and no care be certain to escape.
After all, she used to reflect, nothing much mattered. She had nothing pleasant to look forward to and, therefore, she wisely refrained, save for one advancing idea, from looking forward. She had no past that did not have its pain for her vision, and, therefore, with this sole exception, she resolutely kept her eyes upon the present day.
Yet gradually one great passion was growing within her. That process of thought which had begun in her encounter with Philip Beekman, when she left his mother's employment, had been hastened in its growth by what Marian Lennox had said and failed to do, and the shock of the girl's embarkation upon her new profession had only momentarily retarded it. She was not large enough—few of us are—to see the conditions behind the individual, nor yet greatly to concern herself with individuals that did not directly concern her; but she saw clearly her own plight, and now saw, or thought she saw, that this plight was due entirely to the machinations of the man who had taken her from her home and brought her to New York. She could have loved him, and so she hated him; she could still feel a tenderness for what he might have been, so she permitted herself to feel only animosity for what he had proved himself to be. To him she traced directly all that had befallen her, and as she could not go beyond him, so from him, she slowly and finally resolved, she would exact payment. That thought waxed in her tired mind; it was fed with every throe of her pained body until it dominated her circumscribed outlook upon the world. It even saved her from suffering, because it so possessed her that it armored her against all lesser things. She had found, at last, a purpose in life.
It was almost coincident with her realization of this that Mary realized something else. She went immediately to a physician.
Dr. Helwig, a man with an enormous paunch and a round face and triple chin, was one of the many excellent practitioners that depend for their living—and it is a good one—upon the class to which Mary belonged. He treated the matter for what it was: a commonplace in his day's work. At the end of a week he confirmed her fears.
For a moment she reeled under the blow. The bookcases with their ponderous volumes in dark bindings, the shelves burdened with phials, the glass medicine-case, the convertible table for minor operations, the crowded desk, and even the fat physician before it, seemed to whirl in a mad saraband.