Only the other day six little girls of respectable family had been taken from one of these dives: their parents had supposed them to be at school. There were ten thousand vagrant children in New York. The little girls who swept crossings and sold matches or flowers or what-not sold themselves, too. And the homeless boys who blacked boots studied crime and learned drunkenness in their babyhood. Here was the theory of infant damnation demonstrated on earth, with gin-soaked girls of ten and twelve maudlin at the side of their spewing mothers. One smutty-faced chit of twelve sidled up to the shuddering RoBards with words that made him almost faint, and tried to pick his pocket as he fled in horror.
Beggars for coin half besought, half threatened him. Thugs, male and female, glared at him and cursed him for a nob, or meditated attacks upon the “goldfinch,” but their brains were too drenched for action.
The very offal of poverty and crime reeled about his path, yet there was laughter. In one rookery two hundred negroes sang and patted while a juba dancer “laid it down.” Everywhere there was the desperate effort to escape from the dung of existence by way of drug or sleep or song or combat.
He reached the Old Brewery at last. The ancient distillery was now a vast ant hill of swarming misery. In every dirty room, in the grimy cellars beneath it, the victims of want, of disease, of vice slept or quarreled, vomited aloud, whimpered in sickness, or died half-naked and half-noticed. In front of it was a little barren triangle of ground, surrounded by a wooden fence usually draped with filthy clothes. They mocked it with the name of “Paradise Square.”
He glanced into the dark and stinking alley known as Murderers’ Lane, but he dared not thrid it. Baffled and revolted he returned to Broadway, a Dante coming up from the pit of horror.
If Molly were in the Points she was beyond redemption. If she were in a higher circle of hell, she would not listen to him. She might be exploiting her youth in one of the secret “Model Artist” exhibitions of nude men and women. She might be a banker’s friend, a street vendor, a cigar girl, a barmaid, a chambermaid in a hotel or a boarding house or in an honest home. She might have thrown herself in one of the rivers. What else could a girl do for respite from hunger and loneliness but go into menial service, or into the most ancient profession, or into the grave? The stage was the only other open door except the convent, and Molly had probably no genius for either life.
At any rate, he could not hope to find this one among the thousands of New York’s “lost” women by seeking for her. He went slowly to his home in St. John’s Square, despondent and morose, feeling himself soiled by his mere inspection of the muck heap.
Afterward he kept his eyes alert for Molly, but it was months before he found her. She had been dragged into court for working the panel-crib game. She was not only a wanton, but a thief; using her grace and her jocund prettiness to entice fools within the reach of confederates who slid aside a panel in a wall and made off with their wallets after the classic method.
She lured the wrong man once, a fellow who had no reputation to lose and did not hesitate to set up a cry that brought the watch.
When she was arraigned, RoBards happened to be in court on behalf of another client. He saw Molly pink and coquettish, impudently fascinating, and so ready for deportation or conquest that when he advanced to her, she accepted him as a gallant before she recognized him as a neighbor.