As I opened the door to leave, on the steps stood my young lady. It is not often that a man opens a door and finds an angel on the step outside; but I did it that evening. I should not have been more surprised if I had found a real one. But if one believes that angels never visit men, these days, he should have seen Eleanor Leigh as she stood there. She did not appear at all surprised. Her eyes looked right into mine, and I took courage enough to look into hers for an instant. I have never forgotten them. They were like deep pools, clear and bottomless, filled with light. She did not look at all displeased and I did not envy St. Martin.
All she said was, "How do you do, Mr. Glave?" It was quite as if she expected to find me there—and she had. She had seen me stop little Janet and put the gloves on her. She was on her way to the house, and she had stopped and waited, and then had followed us. I did not know this until long afterward; but I asked her to let me wait and see her home, and so I did.
That walk was a memorable one to me. The period of explanations was past. I dared harbor the hope that I was almost in sight of port. When I put her on the car, she was so good as to say her father would be glad to see me some time at their home, and I thought she spoke with just the least little shyness, which made me hope that she herself would not be sorry.
When I left her, I went to see my old Drummer, and told him of the outrages which had been perpetrated on the poor woman. It was worth while seeing him. He was magnificent. As long as I was talking only of the man, he was merely acquiescent, uttering his "Ya, Ya," irresponsively over his beer; but when I told him of the woman and children, he was on his feet in an instant—"Tamming te strikers and all teir vorks." He seized his hat and big stick, and pouring out gutturals so fast that I could not pretend to follow him, ordered me to show him the place. As he strode through the streets, I could scarcely keep up with him. His stick rang on the frozen pavement like a challenge to battle. And when he reached the house he was immense. He was suddenly transformed. No mother could have been tenderer, no father more protecting. He gathered up the children in his great arms, and petted and soothed them; his tone, a little while before so ferocious, now as soft and gentle as the low velvet bass of his great drum. I always think of the Good Shepherd now as something like him that evening; rugged as a rock, gentle as a zephyr. He would have taken them all to his house and have adopted them if the woman would have let him. His heart was bigger than his house. He seemed to have filled all the place; to have made it a fortress.
The strike had cast its black cloud over all the section, and not all of its victims were murdered by the mob.
I fell in with the man who had spoken to me so cheerily one morning of the sun's shining for him. He looked haggard and ill and despairing. He was out of work and could find none. In our talk he did not justify the strike; but he bowed to it with resignation as a stricken Orestes might have bowed to the blows of Fate. His spirit was not then broken—it was only embittered. His furniture which was so nearly paid for had gone to the loan sharks; his house of which he boasted had reverted to the Building Company. He looked fully twenty years older than when I had seen him last. I offered him a small sum which he took gratefully. It was the first money he had had in weeks, he said, and the stores had stopped his credits. A few weeks later I saw him staggering along the street, his heart-eating sorrow drowned for an hour in the only nepenthe such poverty knows.
XXXVII
WOLFFERT'S NEIGHBORS
I had not been to visit Wolffert and, indeed, had but a hazy idea of where he lived, knowing only that he had a room in the house of some Jew in the Jewish quarter. Hitherto our meetings had taken place either in John Marvel's narrow little quarters or in mine at the old Drummer's. But having learned from John that he was ill, I got the address from him, and one afternoon went over to see him. I found the place in a region more squalid than that in which John Marvel and I had our habitation and as foreign as if it had been in Judea or in a Black Sea province. In fact, it must have exhibited a mixture of both regions. The shops were small and some of them gay, but the gayest was as mean as the most sombre. The signs and notices were all in Yiddish or Russian, the former predominating, and as I passed through the ill-paved, ill-smelling, reeking streets I could scarcely retain my conviction that I was still in an American city. It was about the hour that the manufactories of clothing, etc., closed and the street through which I walked was filled with a moving mass of dark humanity that rolled through it like a dark and turgid flood. For blocks they filled the sidewalk, moving slowly on, and as I mingled in the mass, and caught low, guttural, unknown sounds, and not a word of English all the while, I became suddenly aware of a strange alien feeling of uncertainty and almost of oppression. Far as eye could see I could not descry one Saxon countenance or even one Teuton. They were all dark, sallow, dingy, and sombre. Now and then a woman's hat appeared in the level moving surge of round black hats, giving the impression of a bubble floating on a deep, slow current to melt into the flood. Could this, I reflected sombrely, be the element we are importing? and what effect would the strange confluence have on the current of our life in the future? No wonder we were in the throes of a strike vast enough to cause anxiety!