With one motion he was upon the terrace leading toward the house. Another second, and he would have been well upon his way, when a hand grasped him from behind and drew him back. With a half-articulated imprecation Ben turned—and stood fronting Scotty Baker. The Englishman's face was very white. Behind the compound lenses his eyes glowed in a way Ben had not thought possible; but his voice was steady when he spoke.
"I saw too, Ben," he said, "and I understand. I know what you want to do, and God knows I want to do the same thing myself; but it would do no good; it would only make the matter worse." He looked at the younger man fixedly, almost imploringly. His voice sank. "As you care for Florence, Ben, go away. Don't make a scene that will do only harm. Leave her with me. I came to take her home, and I'll do so at once." The speaker paused, and his hand reached out and grasped the other's with a grip unmistakable. "I appreciate your motive, my boy, and I honor it. I know how you feel; and whatever I may have been in the past, from this time on I am your friend. I am your friend now, when I ask you to go," and he fairly forced his companion away.
Once outside the crowd, Ben halted. He gave the Englishman one long look; his lips opened as if to speak; then, without a word, he moved away.
There was no listlessness about him now. He was throbbing with repressed energy, like a great engine with steam up. His feet tapped with the regularity of clock-ticks over mile after mile of the city walks. He longed for physical weariness, for sleep; but the day, with its manifold mental exaltations and depressions, prevented. It seemed to him that he could never sleep again, could never again be weary. He could only walk on and on.
Down town again, he found the crowds smaller and the border of chairs in front of his hotel largely empty. A few cigars still burned in the half-light, but they were the last flicker of a conflagration now all but extinguished. The restless throb of the human dynamo was lower and more subdued. The street cars were practically empty. Instead of a constant stream of vehicles, an occasional cab clattered past. The city was preparing for its brief hours of fitful rest.
Straight on Ben walked, between the towering office buildings, beside the now darkened department-store hives, past the giant wholesale establishments and warehouses; until, quite unintentionally on his part, and almost before he realized it, he found himself in another world, another city, as distinct as though it were no part of the cosmopolitan whole. Again he came upon throbbing life; but of quite another type. Once more he met people in abundance, noisy, chattering human beings; but more frequently than his own he now heard foreign tongues that he did not understand, and did not even recognize. No longer were the pedestrians well dressed or apparently prosperous. Instead, poverty and squalor and filth were rampant. More loth even than the well-to-do of the suburbs to go within doors, the swarming mass of humanity covered the steps of the houses, and overflowed upon the sidewalk, even upon the street itself. There were men, women, children; the lame, the halt, the blind. The elders stared at the visitor, while the youngsters, secure in numbers, guyed him to their hearts' content.
It was all as foreign to any previous experience of this countryman as though he had come from a different planet. He had read of the city slums as of Stanley's Central African negro tribes with unpronounceable names; and he had thought of them in much the same way. To him they had been something known to exist, but with which it was but remotely probable he would ever come in contact. Now, without preparation or premeditation, thrown face to face with the reality, it brought upon him a sickening feeling, a sort of mental nausea. Ben was not a philanthropist or a social reformer; the inspiring thought of the inexhaustible field for usefulness therein presented had never occurred to him. He wished chiefly to get away from the stench and ugliness; and, turning down a cross street, he started to return.
The locality he now entered was more modern and better lighted than the one he left behind. The decorated building fronts, with their dazzling electric signs, partook of the characteristics of the inhabitants, who seemed overdressed and vulgarly ostentatious. The gaudily trapped saloons, cafés, and music halls, spoke a similar message. This was the recreation spot of the people of the quarter; their land of lethe. So near were the saloons and drinking gardens that from their open doorways there came a pungent odor of beer. Every place had instrumental music of some kind. Mandolins and guitars, in the hands of gentlemen of color, were the favorites. Pianos of execrable tone, played by youths with defective complexions, or by machinery, were a close second. Before one place, a crowd blocked the sidewalk; and there Ben stopped. A vaudeville performance was going on within—an invisible dialect comedian doing a German stunt to the accompaniment of wooden clogs and disarranged verbs. A barker in front, coatless, his collar loosened, a black string tie dangling over an unclean shirt front, was temporarily taking a much-needed rest. An electric sign overhead dyed his cheeks with shifting colors—first red, then green, then white. Despite its veneer of brazen effrontery, the face, with its great mouth and two days' growth of beard, was haggard and weary looking. Ben mentally pictured, with a feeling of compassion, other human beings doing their idiotic "stunts" inside, sweltering in the foul air; and he wondered how, if an atom of self-respect remained in their make-up, they could fail to despise themselves.
But the comedian had subsided in a roar of applause, and again the barker's hands were gesticulating wildly.
"Now's your time, ladies and gentlemen," he harangued. "It's continuous, you know, and Madame—"