From somewhere in the shadows she produced a black flask and, as Mary, with the sailor's tattooed hand tightly under her arm, began the steep ascent, Big Lou settled herself at her post of gatekeeper upon the lowest step.
Those stairs seemed almost perpendicular. They rose out of the darkness of the hallway at an alarming angle; each step was close upon a foot high; they were not a yard wide, their upper half was boxed between two walls, and they opened directly into the room that evidently served as the parlor of Big Lou Summerton's establishment.
The room was small and badly lighted by a kerosene hand-lamp, which stood upon a circular center-table and sent up a thin column of smoke to the sooty ceiling. A spotted lounge with dilapidated springs stood in one corner; the faded paper was peeling from the plaster, and a broken stove, which glowed an angry red, heated the place to a degree that was well-nigh unbearable. The air was stale and rancid, both from the company that was present and from a long entertainment of similar companies, in days gone by.
There were only two persons in the room. Both were seated at the table, both were drinking whiskey poured into ragged-edged glasses from a bottle that stood between them, and both were, or had been, women. Of these one coughed so sharply and constantly between her toothless gums, and was so shrunken under her blue calico mother-hubbard, that it was plain she would soon be nothing; while the other was a creature with face red and bloated, features stunted and coarse, eyes that glowed dully, and the voice of a crow.
Stevens presented Mary to them, and wasted no formalities.
"This here's a new one," he said, and, motioning his charge to a third chair, himself pulled up a fourth.
The two inmates received her with a loud duet that was almost a choral jeer. Two more glasses were produced from a shadowy cupboard, and the drinking recommenced.
Mary took one long drink and, wasted by privation, passed at once for some time into a daze in which, though she saw all, she reckoned little. She heard Stevens drop into the babbling stage of drunkenness; she noted that, though the women kept pace with his potations, they poured water into their own whiskey and gin into the sailor's; she saw him loll in his chair and sway over the table; she felt his heavy head drop at last on her thin shoulder, and she did not move while, as he lay there, his companions—now hers—went through his clothes and tiptoed out of a rear door.
It was then that, with a quick start, she regained control of herself at the sound of speech below and the tread of feet on the stairs. A rough voice had assured Big Lou that "it was all right," and another voice was supplementing:
"Rest easy, my dear lady: we are paying as we go. Michael, here, is, as you know, a deck-hand on the admirable yacht of my admirable friend Marsden Payne, with whom I have been on a winter excursion; and he has kindly consented to show me his own section of little old New York."