Читать книгу To Him That Hath - Scott Leroy - Страница 5

The next morning David was awakened by the ringing of a gong. He tumbled out of bed in order to be ready for the march to breakfast at half past six; and he had begun to dress before it dawned upon him that he was a free man, and that the ringing was a prank a four-year habit had played upon him – a prank that, by the way, was to be repeated every morning for many a week to come.

He slipped back into bed, and lay there considering what he should first do. He had to find work quickly, but he felt his four walled years had earned him a holiday – one day in which to re-acquaint himself with freedom. So, after he had eaten, he felt his way down the dark, heavy-aired stairways, stepped through the doorway, and then paused in wonderment.

All was as fresh, as marvellous, as yesterday. The narrow street was a bustle of freedom – pounding carts, school-going boys and girls, playing children, marketing wives – no stripes, no lock-steps, no guards. And the yellow sun! He held his bleached face up to it, as though he would press against its sympathetic warmth; and he sucked deeply of the September air. And the colours! – the reds and whites and browns of the children, the occasional green of a plant on a window sill, the clear blue of the strip of sky at the street's top. He had almost forgotten there were colours other than stripes, the gray of stone walls, the black of steel bars.

And how calmly the streetful of people took these marvels!

At first he expected the people he threaded among to look into his face, see his prison record there, draw away from him, perhaps taunt him with "thief." But no one even noticed him, and gradually this fear began to fade from him. As he was crossing the Bowery, a car clanged at his back. He frantically leaped, with a cry, to the sidewalk, and leaned against a column of the elevated railroad – panting, exhausted, heart pounding. He had not before known how weak, nerveless, prison had made him.

He found, as he continued his way, that the sidewalk undulated like a ship's deck beneath his giddy legs; he found himself afraid of traffic-crowded corners that women and children unhesitatingly crossed; he found himself stopping and staring with intensest interest at the common-places of street life – at hurrying men, at darting newsboys, at rushing street cars and clattering trucks, at whatever moved where it willed. Old-timers had told him of the dazedness, the fear, the interest, of the first free days, but he was unprepared for the palpitant acuteness of his every sensation.

After a time, in Broadway, he chanced to look into a mirror-backed show-window where luminous satins were displayed. Between two smirking waxen women in sheeny drapery he saw that which brought him to a pause and set him gazing. It was his full-length self, which he had not seen these four years. The figure was gaunt, a mere framework for his shoddy, prison-made suit; the skin of his face snugly fitted itself to the bones; his eyes were sunken, large; his hair, which he uncovered, had here and there a line of gray. He was startled. But he had courage for the future; and after a few moments he said to himself aloud, a habit prison had given him: "A few weeks, and you won't know yourself."

As he walked on, the consciousness of freedom swelled within him. If he desired, he could speak to the man ahead of him, could laugh, could stand still, could walk where he wished, and no guard to report on him and no warden to subtract from his "good time." More than once, under cover of the rattle of an elevated train, he shouted at his voice's top in pure extravagance of feeling; and once in Fifth Avenue, forgetting himself, he flung his arms wide and laughed joyously – to be suddenly restored to convention by the hurried approach of a policeman.

All day he watched this strange new life – much of the time sitting in parks, for the unaccustomed walking wearied him. When he came to his tenement's door – flanked on one side by a saloon, and on the other side by a little grocery store before which sat a basket of shrunken potatoes and a few withered cabbages and beans, and in which supplies could be bought by the pennyworth – a hand fell upon his arm and a voice called out with wheezy cordiality: "Good evenin', friend."

David glanced about. Beside him was a loose bundle of old humanity, wrapped up in and held together by a very seedy coat and stained, baggy trousers frayed at the bottom. The face was covered with gray bristle and gullied with wrinkles. Over one eye hung a greasy green flap; the other eye was watery and red.

"Good evening," returned David.

"Excuse me for stoppin' you," said the old man with an ingratiating smile that unlipped half a dozen brown teeth. "But we're neighbours, and I thought we ought to get acquainted. Me an' my girl lives just across the hall from you. Morgan's my name – Old Jimmie Morgan."

"Aldrich is mine. I suppose I'll see you again. Good evening." And David, eager to get away from the nodding old man, started through the door.

His neighbour stepped quickly before him, and put a stubby hand against his chest. "Wait a minute, Mr. Aldrich. I'm in a little trouble. I've got to get some groceries, and my daughter – she carries our money – she ain't in. I wonder if you couldn't loan me fifty cents till mornin'?"

David knew that fifty cents loaned to him was fifty cents lost. He shook his head.

"Mebbe I could get along on twenty-five then. Say a quarter."

"I really can't spare it," said David, and tried to press by.

"Well, then make it a dime," wheedled the old man, stopping him again. "You'll never miss a dime, friend. Come, what's a dime to a young man like you. And it'll get me a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee. That'll help an old man like me a lot, for Katie won't be home till mornin'."

Merely to free himself David drew out one of his precious dimes.

"Thank you, thank you!" The dirty, wrinkled hand closed tightly upon the coin. "You've saved an old man from goin' hungry to bed."

David again turned to enter. He almost ran against a slight, neatly-dressed girl, apparently about twenty, who was just coming out of the doorway. Her black eyes were gleaming, and there were red spots in her cheeks. At sight of her the old man started to hurry away.

"Jim Morgan! You come here!" she commanded in a ringing voice.

The old man stopped, and came slowly toward her with a hang-dog look.

"You've been borrowing money of that man!" she declared.

"No I ain't. We were talkin' – talkin' politics. Honest, Katie. We were just talkin' politics."

"You were begging money!" She turned her sharp eyes upon David. "Wasn't he?"

The old man winked frantically for help with his red eye, and started to slip the dime into his pocket. The girl, without waiting for David's answer, wheeled about so quickly that she caught both the signal for help and the move of the hand pocketward. She pointed at the hand. "Stop that! Now open it up!"

"Nothin' in it, Katie," whined her father.

"Open that hand!"

It slowly opened, and in the centre of the grimy palm lay the dime.

"Give it back to him," the girl ordered.

Old Jimmie handed David the coin.

The girl's eyes blazed. Her wrath burst forth. "Now, sir, you will borrow money, will you!" her sharp voice rang out. "You will lie to me about it, will you!"

David hurried inside and heard no more. He made a pot of coffee and warmed half a can of baked beans over his little gas stove. Of this crude meal his stomach would accept little. His condition should have had the delicate and nourishing food that is served an invalid. His appetite longingly remembered meals of other days: the fruit, the eggs on crisp toast, the golden-brown coffee, at breakfast; the soup, the roast, the vegetables, the dessert, at dinner – linen, china, service, food, all dainty. He turned from the meals his imagination saw to the meal upon his chair-table. He smiled whimsically. "Sir," he said reprovingly to his appetite, "you're too ambitious."

He had placed his can of condensed milk and bit of butter out on the fire-escape, which he, adopting the East Side's custom, used as an ice-chest, and had put his washed dishes into the soap-box cupboard, when he was startled by a knock. Wondering who could be calling on him, he threw open the door.

Kate Morgan stood before him. "I want to see you a minute. May I come in?"

"Certainly."

David bowed and motioned her in. Her quick eyes noted the bow and the gesture. He drew his one chair into the open space beside the bed.

"Won't you please be seated?"

She sat down, rested one arm on the corner of his battered wash-stand and crossed her knees.

David seated himself on the edge of the bed. He had a better view of her than when he had seen her in the doorway, and he could hardly believe she was the daughter of the old man who had stopped him. She wore a yellow dress of some cheap goods, with bands of bright red about the bottom of the skirt, bands of red about the short loose sleeves that left the arms bare from the elbows, a red girdle, and about the shoulders a red fulness. The dress was almost barbaric in its colouring, yet it suited her dark face, with its brilliant black eyes.

There was neither embarrassment nor over-boldness in the face; rather the composure of the woman who is acting naturally. There was a touch of hardness about the mouth and eyes, and a touch of cynicism; in ten years, David guessed, those qualities would have sculptured themselves deep into her features. But it was an alert, clear, almost pretty face – would have been decidedly pretty, in a sharp way, had the hair not been combed into a tower of a pompadour that exaggerated her face's thinness.

She did not lose an instant in speaking her errand. "I want you to promise not to lend my father a cent," she began in a concise voice. "I have to ask that of every new person that moves in the house. He's an old soak. I don't dare give him a cent. But he borrows whenever he can, and if he gets enough it's delirium tremens."

"He told me he wanted a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee," David said in excuse of himself.

"Soup and coffee! Huh! Whiskey. That's all he thinks of – whiskey. His idea of God is a bartender that keeps setting out the drinks and never strikes you for the price. If I give him a decent suit of clothes, it's pawned and he's drunk. He used to pawn the things from the house – but he don't do that any more! He mustn't have a cent. That's why I've come to ask you to turn him down the next time he tries to touch you for one of his 'loans.'"

"That's an easy promise," David answered with a smile.

"Thanks."

Her business was done, but she did not rise. Her swift eyes ran over the furnishings of the room – the bed, the crippled wash-stand, with its chipped bowl and broken-lipped pitcher, the dishes in the soap-box cupboard, the gas stove under the bed, the bare, splintered floor, the walls from which the blue kalsomine was flaking – ran over David's shapeless clothes. Then they stopped on his face.

"You're a queer bird," she said abruptly.

He started. "Queer?"

She gave a little jerk of a nod. "You didn't always live in a room like this, nor wear them kind of clothes. And you didn't learn your manners over on the Bowery neither. What's the matter? Up against it?"

David stared at her. "Don't you think there may be another queer bird in the room?" he suggested.

She was not rebuffed, but for a second she studied his face with an even sharper glance, in which there was the least glint of suspicion. "You mean me," she said. "I live across the hall with my father. When I'm at work I'm a maid in swell families – sometimes a nurse girl. Nothing queer about that."

"No – o," he said hesitatingly.

She returned to the attack. "What do you do?"

"I'm looking for work."

"What have you worked at?"

The directness with which she moved at what interested her might have amused David had that directness not been searching for what he desired for the present to conceal. "I only came to New York yesterday," he said evasively.

"But you've been in New York before?"

"Not for several years."

She was getting too close. "I'm a very stupid subject for talk," he said quickly. "Now you – you must have had some very interesting experiences in the homes of the rich. You saw the rich from the inside. Tell me about them."

She was not swerved an instant from her point. "You're very interesting. The first minute I saw you I spotted you for a queer one to be living in a place like this. What've you been doing since you were in New York before?"

David could not hold back a flush; no evasive reply was waiting at his lips. Several seconds passed. "Pardon me, but don't you think you're a little too curious?" he said with an effort.

Her penetrating eyes had not left him. Now understanding flashed into her face. She emitted a low whistle.

"So that's it, is it!" she exclaimed, her voice softer than it had been. "So you've been sent away, and just got out. And you're starting in to try the honesty game."

There was no foiling her quick penetration. He nodded his head.

He had wondered how the world would receive him. She was the first member of the free world he had met who had learned his prison record, and he waited, chokingly, her action. He expected her face to harden accusingly – expected her to rise, speak despisingly and march coldly out.

"Well, you are up against it good and hard," she said slowly. There was sympathy in her voice.

The sympathy startled him; he warmed to her. But straightway it entered his mind that she would hasten to spread her discovery, and to live in the house might then be to live amid insult.

"You have committed burglary on my mind – you have stolen my secret," he said sharply.

"Oh, but I'll never tell," she quickly returned. And David, looking at her clear face, found himself believing her.

She tried with quick questions to break into his past, but he blocked her with silence. After a time she glanced at a watch upon her breast, rose and reached for the door-knob. But David sprang quickly forward. "Allow me," he said, and opened the door for her.

The courtesy did not go unnoticed. "You must have been a real 'gun,' a regular high-flyer, in your good days," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Oh, your kind of manners don't grow on cheap crooks."

She held out her hand. "Well, I wish you luck. Come over and see me sometime. Good night."

When he had closed the door David sat down and fell to musing over his visitor. She was dressed rather too showily, but she was not coarse. She was bold, but not brazen; hers seemed the boldness, the directness, of a child or a savage. Perhaps, in this quality, she was not grown up, or not yet civilised. He wondered how a maid or a nurse girl could support a father on her earnings, as he inferred she did. He wondered how she had so quickly divined that he was fresh from prison. He remembered a yellow stain near the ends of the first two fingers of her left hand; cigarettes; and the stain made him wonder, too. And he wondered at her manner – sharp, no whit of coquetry, a touch of frank good fellow-ship at the last.

Presently a hand which had been casually fumbling in the inside pocket of his coat drew out a folded paper. It was the bulletin of the work at St. Christopher's, and he now remembered that the director of the Mission (Dr. Joseph Franklin, the bulletin gave his name) had handed it to him the night before and that he had mechanically thrust it into his pocket and forgotten it. He began to look it through with pride; in a sense it was the record of his work. He read the schedule of religious services, classes, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. Toward the middle of the latter list this item stopped him short:

Whittier Club – Members aged 17 to 20. Meets Wednesday evenings. Leader, Miss Helen Chambers.

This was Wednesday evening. David put on his hat, and ten minutes later, his coat collar turned up, his slouch hat pulled down, he was standing in the dark doorway of a tenement, his eyes fastened on the club-house entrance twenty yards down the street.

After what seemed an endless time, she appeared. Dr. Franklin was with her, evidently to escort her to her car. David gazed at her, as they came toward his doorway, with all the intensity of his great love. She was tall, almost as tall as Dr. Franklin; and she had that grace of carriage, that firm poise of bearing, which express a noble, healthy womanhood under perfect self-control. David had not seen her face last night; and he now kept his eyes upon it, waiting till it should come within the white circle of the street lamp near the doorway.

When the lamp lifted the shadows from her face, a great thrill ran through him. Ah, how beautiful it was! – beauty of contour and colour, yes, but here the fleshly beauty, which so often is merely flesh for flesh's sake, was the beautiful expression of a beautiful soul. There was a high dignity in the face, and understanding, and womanly tenderness. It was a face that for seven years had to him summed up the richest, rarest womanhood.

She passed so close that he could have touched her, but he flattened himself within the doorway's shadow. After she had gone by he leaned out and followed her with his hungry eyes.

Could he ever, ever win her respect?