“You will come to the barracks early to-morrow morning?” he asked, turning to Kit.
She promised to do so, and, passing into the dark hall, climbed upward to where Con lay in drunken stupor.
The following morning Kit stepped into a new world—a world of friendly words and close companionship. The squalidly poor know nothing of that luxury called friendship. They are huddled together in vast crowds, squeezed and packed by scores within narrow limits, jostled and elbowed by their kind at every turn. They are suffocated by close association. But of fellowship, of interest in one another’s aims, of sympathy with one another’s hardships, they know nothing. Like starving dogs over a bone, they growl and snarl and fly straight at throats. So, when Kit crept half sullenly into the barracks and was greeted by a loud chorus of interested questions and by unstinted praise, the unfamiliar warmth of friendly words thawed into life her sluggish sensibilities. And, too, an entirely new view of herself and the world was suddenly opened to her bewildered gaze,—for the first time in her hard life she was looked upon as a human being of some importance. They told her that she was suddenly become different from her kind, she was better than they, she was “saved.” Not only that, but she must “save” others. She must quit the old life, and work for the common good. Her new friends were as uncouth and as poor and as hard pressed as herself. In their attitude there was none of that maddening condescension, none of that supercilious casting of surplus comforts at her feet, as one would toss a half-eaten orange toward a hungry-eyed beggar brat, which was the only sort of charity Kit had known of hitherto. The friendship of the Salvationists was the frank comradeship of plain men and women; their charity was the outcome of a crude, but living, religious idea. And their wild enthusiasm caught her dull soul in its sweep and lifted it a little above the fetid mists of her world. Some latent spark of womanly ambition was stirred into life, and with halting, dogged feet she tried to climb out of the dank valley of her past.
It was a wearisome task, but the exhilarating sense of friendly interest in her success sustained her. The old appetite for strong drink stung her, but the excitement of the new life helped to dull the craving. She tramped the streets with her companions, her cracked voice shouting quaveringly with them as they sang. She stepped sometimes into the little semicircle at the street corners to tell excitedly “how glad she was that she was saved.” She knelt with the others and prayed aloud for those who were not as she. She was one of a great, enthusiastic army, held up and aided by the superficial strength which comes of close fellowship and common aims. But with that growth of strength in one quarter there came a strange weakness in another. She was growing childishly afraid of Con, and with the growth of that fear there started into life and waxed strong a new loathing and hatred for his rum-soaked person. She would have fled from him, only that her new masters told her she must stick to him. It was her duty to cling to him and to “save” him. Their first injunction she obeyed meekly; but to their second command she turned a deaf ear. She knew what Con was; they did not. Every human creature in the wide world might be saved—except her husband. He was beyond the pale of humanity. So long as she did not bother him, he paid little attention to her goings and comings. Only once she ventured to protest when he had spent a week’s earnings for drink (Con had a “pull” with the ward “boss,” and when there were no other means of getting money for drink he found employment with the street-cleaners), and he had knocked her down for her temerity, and after that she held her peace and wished dumbly that he might die.
At length there came a proud day when Kit, after unwonted labor over her wash-tub, was the possessor of a decent black gown and of the long-coveted poke bonnet. It was the eve of a great rally at the barracks, when some officer of high degree from “headquarters” was to review the ranks of his army. At the close of day, when the long shadows were beginning to steal across the bare little room, with its musty bed, its one chair, and its rickety table pushed into a corner, Kit crouched upon the floor close up under the gray light of her window, intent upon her work. There were but a few stitches needed to complete her gown, and her stiff fingers fumbled eagerly with the unfamiliar needle. Her thoughts were busy with the glories of the morrow, and she crooned one of the Salvationist hymns as she sewed. And to her singing in the twilight there came the sound of shuffling footsteps outside her door. She looked up apprehensively as the door flew open to admit her husband. He was drunk, sullenly, brutally drunk.
“Where’s my supper?” he demanded, falling heavily into the chair. “Where’s my supper, I say?” he repeated, fixing an evil eye upon her.
“I’ll get it now, Con. I was busy workin’ on my dress, an’ I clean forgot your supper,” she explained, humbly.
“Yer dress?” he asked. “What right’s a measly fool like you with dresses? Le’s see it.” He stretched forth his hand. She caught the black garment sharply away from him.
“No, you’ll spoil it!” she cried, tossing the dress into a corner behind the bed. “You just set still there, an’ I’ll get you somethin’ to eat.”
“Eatin’ be damned!” he replied, surlily. “I want somethin’ to drink. Here! you take the can an’ get somethin’ from Mike’s. ‘F you can buy clothes, you can buy drinks.”