John Marvel, Assistant

by Thomas Nelson Page

"Do you want money?"

She slowly shook her head without looking at me.

"What is it, then? Maybe, I can help you?"

She turned slowly and looked at me with such indescribable hopelessness in her face that my heart went out to her.

"No, I'm past help now."

"Oh, no, you're not." My spirits rose with the words, and I felt suddenly as if I had risen out of the slough which had been engulfing me, and as though I had gotten my feet on a firm place where I could reach out a hand to help this despairing and sinking sister.

"Yes, past help now."

"Come and walk with me." And as she did not stir, I took her hand and drew it through my arm and gently led her forward along the street. I had a strange feeling as I walked along. I somehow felt as though I had escaped from something which had been dragging me down. It was a strange walk and a strange and tragic story that she told me—of having left her home in the country, inspired by the desire to do something and be something more than she was, a simple farmer's daughter in another State, with some little education such as the country schools could give; of having secured a position in a big shop where, for a small sum, she worked all day and learned to see and love fine clothes and beautiful things; of having fallen in with one or two gay companions in this and other shops who wore the fine clothes and had the beautiful things she admired; of having been put forward because she was pretty and polite; and then of having met a young man, well dressed and with fine manners; of having fallen in love with him and of having accepted his attentions and his gifts; and then, of having been led astray by him; and then—of such an act of base betrayal as, had I not had it substantiated afterward in every horrid detail, I should never have believed. I had known something of the wickedness of men and the evil of an uncontrolled life in the city, where the vilest passions of the heart are given play, but I had never dreamed of anything so revolting as the story this girl told me that night. She had been deliberately and with malice aforethought lured not only to her destruction but to a life of slavery so vile as to be unbelievable. The man who had secured her heart used his power over her to seize and sell her into a slavery for which there is no name which could be used on the printed page. Here, stricken by the horror of her situation, she had attempted to escape from her captors, but had been bodily beaten into submission. Then she had made a wild dash for liberty and had been seized and slashed with a knife until she fell under her wounds and her life was in imminent danger.

From this time she gave up and became the slave of the woman of the house: "Smooth Ally," she said they called her; but she would not give me her name or her address. She would have her killed, she feared, if she did so. Here she gradually had yielded to her fate and had lived in company with her other slaves, some willing, some as unwilling as herself, until finally her place was needed for one more useful to her owner, when she had been handed on from one owner to another, always sinking in the scale lower and lower, until at last she had been turned into the street with her choice limited only to the river or the gutter. Long before she had finished her story I had made up my mind that life still held for me something which I might do, however poor and useless I knew myself to be. The only person I could think of who might help her was Miss Leigh. How could I reach her? Could I write her of this poor creature? She could not go back to her home, she said, for she knew that they had heard of her life, and they were "good and Christian people." She used to write to and hear from them, but it had been two years and more since she had written or heard now. Still she gave me what she said was her father's address in another State, and I told her I would find out how they felt about her and would let her know. I gave her a part of what I had. It was very little, and I have often wished since then that I had had the courage to give her all.

I was walking on with her, trying to think of some place where she might find a shelter and be taken care of until her friends could be informed where she was, when, in one of the streets in front of a bar-room, we heard mingled laughter and singing and found a group of young men, ruffians and loafers, standing on the sidewalk, laughing at the singers who stood in the street. As we drew near, I saw that the latter were a small group of the Salvation Army, and it appeared to me a providence. Here were some who might help her. At the moment that we approached they ended the dirge-like hymn they had been singing, and kneeling down in the street one of them offered a prayer, after which a woman handed around something like a tambourine, asking for a collection. The jeers that she encountered might have daunted a much bolder spirit than mine, and as each man either put in or pretended to put something in, one a cent, another a button or a cigarette-stump, she responded, "Thank you and God bless you." I was ashamed to make an appeal to them there for the poor girl, so I walked with her a little further on and waited until the blue-clad detachment came along and their tormentors retired to warm themselves, without and within, in the saloon in front of which they had been standing. I accosted the woman who had taken up the collection and asked her if she could take care of a poor girl who needed help badly, and I was struck by the kindness with which she turned and, after a moment's glance, held out her hand to the girl.