Musing upon her ignorance and goodness one evening, her father was, by a dissociation of ideas, reminded of his promise to look for Mrs. Lasher’s girl Molly. It would be a partial atonement for destroying the son, if he could retrieve the daughter from what was decently referred to (when it had to be) as “a fate worse than death.” He rose abruptly, and said that he had to go to his office. He left Patty with a parlorful of callers who brought condolences for her in her loss of both parents.
RoBards thought that nothing could make death more hateful than to receive sympathy for it on a hot night in a crowded room.
As he sauntered the streets he thought that nothing could make life or love more hateful than their activity on a hot night on crowded streets.
Mrs. Lasher had feared that Molly had joined the “eighteen thousand women” of a certain industry. The number was probably inexact, but RoBards was convinced that none of them all was idle that night. Every age and condition seemed to be represented, and every allurement employed from vicious effrontery to the mock demure. But he found no one like Molly Lasher in the long, straggling parade.
He glanced in at many of the restaurants, the bar rooms, the oyster palaces, the dance houses, the “watering places,” the tobacco counters; but he dared not even walk down some of the streets where music came faintly through dark windows. His face was known, his true motive would not be suspected, and it would be priggish to announce it.
He saw much that was heartbreaking, much that was stomach-turning. He ventured to drift at last even to the infamous Five Points. It was foolhardy of him to wander alone in that region where human maggots festered among rotten timbers. Mr. Charles Dickens, the popular English novelist, had recently gone there with two policemen, and found material for a hideous chapter in his insulting volume American Notes.
But RoBards felt that he owed Mrs. Lasher a little of his courage, and he gripped his walking stick firmly. The policemen with their stars glinting in the dark gave him some courage, but even the policemen’s lives were not safe here, where murder was the cleanest thing that happened.
The thronged hovels were foul enough, but their very cellars were a-squirm with men and women and children. In some of these rat holes there were filthy soup houses, bars, dance dives where blacks, whites and mulattoes mixed. Such odious folk the whites were that RoBards wondered how the negroes could mix with them. And children danced here, too, with the slime from the wharves and the foreign ships.
The poverty was grisly. In one sink, three men with three spoons drained one penny bowl of broth. A man shared a glass of turpentine gin with his five-year-old son. Another fought with his shrieking wife over a mug of bog-poteen. Men whiffed rank tobacco at a penny a load in rented clay pipes they could not even buy, but borrowed for the occasion.
On the cellar steps, in the gutters, on the door sills and hanging out of the windows were drunkards, whole families drunk from grandam to infant at a boozy breast. RoBards had trouble in dodging the wavering steps of a six-year-old girl who was already a confirmed sot. Children offered themselves with terrifying words.