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Dust Flower

<h2>Chapter XXI</h2> Having the choice between going southward either by Fifth Avenue or by Madison Avenue, Letty took the former for the reason that there were no electric cars crashing through it, so that she would be less observed. It seemed to her important to get as far from East Sixty-seventh Street as possible before letting a human glance take note of her personality, even as a drifting silhouette. In this she was fortunate. For the hour between one and two in the early morning this part of Fifth Avenue was unusually empty. There was not a pedestrian, and only a rare motor car. When one of the latter flashed by she shrank into the shadow of a great house, lest some eye of miraculous discernment should light on her. It seemed to her that all New York must be ready to read her secret, and be on the watch to turn her back. She didn’t know why she was going southward rather than northward, except that southward lay the Brooklyn Bridge, and beyond the Brooklyn Bridge lay Beehive Valley, and within Beehive Valley the Excelsior Studio, and in the Excelsior Studio the faint possibility of a job. She was already thinking in the terms that went with the old gray rag and the battered hat, and had come back to them as to her mother-tongue. In forsaking paradise for the limbo of outcast souls she was at least supported by the fact that in the limbo of outcast souls she was at home. She was not frightened. Now that she was out of the prince’s palace she had suddenly become sensationless. She was like a soul which having reached the other side of death is conscious only of release from pain. She was no longer walking on blades; she was no longer attempting the impossible. Between her and the life which Barbara Walbrook understood the few steps she had taken had already marked the gulf. The gulf had always been there, yawning, <ins class="trnote" title="unbridgable in original text">unbridgeable</ins>, only that she, Letty Gravely, had tried to shut her eyes to it. She had tried to shut her eyes to it in the hope that the man she loved might come to do the same. She knew now how utterly foolish any such hope had been. She would have perceived this earlier had he not from time to time revived the hope when it was about to flicker out. More than once he had confessed to depending on her sympathy. More than once he had told her that she drew out something he had hardly dared think he possessed, but which made him more of a man. Once he harked back to the dust flower, saying that as its humble and heavenly bloom brightened the spots bereft of beauty so she cheered the lonely and comfortless places in his heart. He had said these things not as one who is in love, but as one who is grateful, only that between gratitude and love she had purposely kept from drawing the distinction. She did not reproach him. On the contrary, she blessed him even for being grateful. That meed he gave her at least, and that he should give her anything at all was happiness. Leaving his palace she did so with nothing but grateful thoughts on her own side. He had smiled on her always; he had been considerate, kindly, and very nearly tender. For what he called the wrong he had done her, which she held to be no wrong at all, he would have made amends so magnificent that the mere acceptance would have overwhelmed her. Since he couldn’t give her the one thing she craved her best course was like the little mermaid to tremble into foam, and become a spirit of the wind. It was what she was doing. She was going without leaving a trace. A girl more important than she couldn’t have done it so easily. A Barbara Walbrook had she attempted a freak so mad, would be discovered within twenty-four hours. It was one of the advantages of extreme obscurity that you came and went without notice. No matter how conspicuously a Letty Gravely passed it would not be remembered that she had gone by. With regard to this, however, she made one reserve. She couldn’t disappear forever, not any more than Judith of Bethulia when she went to the tent of Holofernes. The history of Judith was not in Letty’s mind, because she had never heard of it; there was only the impulse to the same sort of sacrifice. Since Israel could be delivered only in one way, that way Judith had been ready to take. To Letty her prince was her Israel. One day she would have to inform him that the Holofernes of his captivity was slain—that at last he was free. There were lines along which Letty was not imaginative, and one of those lines ran parallel to Judith’s experience. When it came to love at first sight, she could invent as many situations as there were millionaires in the subway. In interpreting a part she had views of her own beyond any held by Luciline Lynch. As to matters of dress her fancy was boundless. Her limitations were in the practical. Among practical things “going to the bad” was now her chief preoccupation. She had always understood that when you made up your mind to do it you had only to present yourself. The way was broad; the gate wide open. There were wicked people on every side eager to pull you through. You had only to go out into the street, after dark especially—and there you were! Having walked some three or four blocks she made out the figure of a man coming up the hill toward her. Her heart stopped beating; her knees quaked. This was doom. She would meet it, of course, since her doom would be the prince’s salvation; but she couldn’t help trembling as she watched it coming on. By the light of an arc-lamp she saw that he was in evening dress. The wicked millionaires who, in motion-pictures, were the peril of young girls, were always so attired. Iphigenia could not have trodden to the altar with a more consuming mental anguish than Letty as she dragged herself toward this approaching fate; but she did so drag herself without mercy. For a minute as he drew near she was on the point of begging him to spare her; but she saved herself in time from this frustration of her task. The man, a young stock-broker in a bad financial plight, scarcely noticed that a female figure was passing him. Had the morrow’s market been less a matter of life and death to him he might have thrown her a glance; but as it was she did not come within the range of his consciousness. To her amazement, and even to her consternation, Letty saw him go onward up the hill, his eyes straight before him, and his profile sharply cut in the electric light. She explained the situation by the fact that he hadn’t seen her at all. That a man could actually see a girl, in such unusual conditions, and still go by inoffensively, was as contrary to all she had heard of life as it would have been to the principles of a Turkish woman to suppose that one of this sex could behold her face and not fall fiercely in love with her. As, however, two men were now coming up the hill together Letty was obliged to re-organize her forces to meet the new advance. She couldn’t reason this time that they hadn’t seen her, because their heads turned in her direction, and the intonation of the words she couldn’t articulately hear was that of faint surprise. Further than that there was no incident. They were young men too, also in evening dress, and of the very type of which all her warnings had bidden her beware. The immunity from insult was almost a matter for chagrin. As she approached Fifty-ninth Street encounters were nearly as numerous as they would have been in daylight; but Letty went on her way as if, instead of the old gray rag, she wore the magic cloak of invisibility. So it was during the whole of the long half mile between Fifty-ninth Street and Forty-second Street. In spite of the fact that she was the only unescorted woman she saw, no invitation “to go to the bad” was proffered her. “There’s quite a trick to it,” Steptoe had said, in the afternoon; and she began to think that there was. At Forty-second Street, for no reason that she could explain, she turned into the lower and quieter spur of Madison Avenue, climbing and descending Murray Hill. Here she was almost alone. Motor-car traffic had practically ceased; foot-passengers there were none; on each side of the street the houses were somber and somnolent. The electric lamps flared as elsewhere, but with little to light up. Her sense of being lost became awesome. It began to urge itself in on her that she was going nowhere, and had nowhere to go. She was back in the days when she had walked away from Judson Flack’s, without the same heart in the adventure. She recalled now that on that day she had felt young, daring, equal to anything that fate might send; now she felt curiously old and experienced. All her illusions had been dished up to her at once and been blown away as by a hurricane. The little mermaid who had loved the prince and failed to win his love in return could have nothing more to look forward to. She was drifting, drifting, when suddenly from the shadow of a flight of broad steps a man stalked out and confronted her. He confronted her with such evident intention that she stopped. Not till she stopped could she see that he was a policeman in his summer uniform. “Where you goin’, sister?” “I ain’t goin’ nowheres.” She fell back on the old form of speech as on another tongue. “Where you come from then?” Feeling now that she had gone to the bad, or was at the beginning of that process, she made a reply that would seem probable. “I come from a fella I’ve been—I’ve been livin’ with.” “Gee!” The tone was of deepest pity. “Darned sorry to hear you’re in that box, a nice girl like you.” “I ain’t such a nice girl as you might think.” “Gee! Anyone can see you’re a nice girl, just from the way you walk.” Letty was astounded. Was the way you walked part of Steptoe’s “trick to it?” In the hope of getting information she said, still in the secondary tongue: “What’s the matter with the way I walk?” “There’s nothin’ the matter with it. That’s the trouble. Anyone can see that you’re not a girl that’s used to bein’ on the street at this hour of the night. Ain’t you goin’ anywheres?” Fear of the police-station suddenly made her faint. If she wasn’t going anywheres he might arrest her. She bethought her of Steptoe’s scrawled address. “Yes, I’m goin’ there.” As he stepped under the arc-light to read it she saw that he was a fatherly man, on the distant outskirts of youth, who might well have a family of growing boys and girls. “That’s a long ways from here,” he said, handing the scrap of paper back to her. “Why don’t you take the subway? At this time of night there’s a train every quarter of an hour.” “I ain’t got no bones. I’m footin’ it.” “Footin’ it all the way to Red Point? You? Gee!” Once more Letty felt that about her there was something which put her out of the key of her adventure. “Well, what’s there against me footin’ it?” “There’s nothin’ against you footin’ it—on’y you don’t seem that sort. Haven’t you got as much as two bits? It wouldn’t come to that if you took the subway over here at––” “Well, I haven’t got two bits; nor one bit; nor nothin’ at all; so I guess I’ll be lightin’ out.” She had nodded and passed, when a stride of his long legs brought him up to her again. “Well, see here, sister! If you haven’t got two bits, take this. I can’t have you trampin’ all the way over to Red Point—not you!” Before knowing what had happened Letty found her hand closing over a silver half-dollar, while her benefactor, as if ashamed of his act, was off again on his beat. She ran after him. Her excitement was such that she forgot the secondary language. “Oh, I couldn’t accept this from you. Please! Don’t make me take it. I’m—” She felt it the moment for making the confession, and possibly getting hints—“I’m—I’m goin’ to the bad, anyhow.” “Oh, so that’s the talk! I thought you said you’d gone to the bad already. Oh, no, sister; you don’t put that over on me, not a nice looker like you!” She was almost sobbing. “Well, I’m going—if—if I can find the way. I wish you’d tell me if there’s a trick to it.” “There’s one trick I’ll tell you, and that’s the way to Red Point.” “I know that already.” “Then, if you know that already, you’ve got my four bits, which is more than enough to take you there decent.” He lifted his hand, with a warning forefinger. “Remember now, little sister, as long as you spend that half dollar it’ll bind you to keep good.” He tramped off into the darkness, leaving Letty perplexed at the ways of wickedness, as she began once more to drift southward. But she drifted southward with a new sense of misgiving. Danger was mysteriously coy, and she didn’t know how to court it. True, there was still time enough, but the debut was not encouraging. When she had gone forth from Judson Flack’s she had felt sure that adventure lay in wait for her, and Rashleigh Allerton had responded almost instantaneously. Now she had no such confidence. On the contrary; all her premonitions worked the other way. Perhaps it was the old gray rag. Perhaps it was her lack of feminine appeal. Men had never flocked about her as they flocked about some girls, like bees about flowers. If she was a flower, she was a dust flower, a humble thing, at home in the humblest places, and never regarded as other than a weed. She wandered into Fourth Avenue, reaching Astor Place. From Astor Place she descended the city by the long artery of Lafayette Street, in which teams rumbled heavily, and all-night workers shouted raucously to each other in foreign languages. One of a band of Italians digging in the roadway, with colored lanterns about them, called out something at her, the nature of which she could only infer from the laughter of his compatriots. Here too she began to notice other women like herself, shabby, furtive, unescorted, with terrible eyes, aimlessly drifting from nowhere to nowhere. There were not many of them; only one at long intervals; but they frightened her more than the men. They frightened her because she saw what she must look like herself, a thing too degraded for any man to want. She was not that yet, perhaps; but it was what she might become. They were not wholly new to her, these women; and they all had begun at some such point as that from which she was starting out. Very well! She was ready to go this road, if only by this road her prince could be freed from her. Since she couldn’t give up everything for him in one way, she would do it in another. The way itself was more or less a matter of indifference—not entirely, perhaps, but more or less. If she could set him free in any way she would be content. The rumble and stir of Lafayette Street alarmed her because it was so foreign. The upper part of the town had been empty and eerie. This quarter was eerie, alien, and occupied. It was difficult for her to tell what so many people were doing abroad because their aims seemed different from those of daylight. What she couldn’t understand struck her as nefarious; and what struck her as nefarious filled her with the kind of terror that comes in dreams. By these Italians, Slavs, and Semites she was more closely scrutinized than she had been elsewhere. She was scrutinized, too, with a hint of hostility in the scrutiny. In their jabber of tongues they said things about her as she passed. Wild-eyed women, working by the flare of torches with their men, resented her presence in the street. They insulted her in terms she couldn’t understand, while the men laughed in frightful, significant jocosity. The unescorted women alone looked at her with a hint of friendliness. One of them, painted, haggard, desperate, awful, stopped as if to speak to her; but Letty sped away like a snowbird from a shrike. At a corner where the cross-street was empty she turned out of this haunted highway, presently finding herself lost in a congeries of old-time streets of which she had never heard. Her only knowledge of New York was of streets crossing each other at right angles, numbered, prosaic, leaving no more play to the fancy than a sum in arithmetic. Here the ways were narrow, the buildings tall, the night effects fantastic. In the lamp light she could read signs bearing names as unpronounceable as the gibbering monkey-speech in Lafayette Street. Warehouses, offices, big wholesale premises, lairs of highly specialized businesses which only the few knew anything about, offered no place for human beings to sleep, and little invitation to the prowler. Now and then a marauding cat darted from shadow to shadow, but otherwise she was as nearly alone as she could imagine herself being in the heart of a great city. Still she went on and on. In the effort to escape this overpowering solitude she turned one corner and then another, now coming out beneath the elevated trains, now on the outskirts of docks where she was afraid of sailors. She was afraid of being alone, and afraid of the thoroughfares where there were people. On the whole she was more afraid of the thoroughfares where there were people, though her fear soon entered the unreasoning phase, in which it is fear and nothing else. Still headed vaguely southward she zigzagged from street to street, helpless, terrified, longing for day. She was in a narrow street of which the high weird gables on either side recalled her impressions on opening a copy of Faust, illustrated by Gustave Doré, which she found on the library table in East Sixty-seventh Street. On her right the elevated and the docks were not far away, on the left she could catch, through an occasional side street the distant gleam of Broadway. Being afraid of both she kept to the deep canyon of unreality and solitude, though she was afraid of that. At least she was alone; and yet to be alone chilled her marrow and curdled her blood. Suddenly she heard the clank of footsteps. She stopped to listen, making them out as being on the other side of the street, and advancing. Before she had dared to move on again a man emerged from the half light and came abreast of her. As he stopped to look across at her, Letty hurried on. The man also went on, but on glancing over her shoulder to make sure that she was safe she saw him pause, cross to her side of the street, and begin to follow her. That he followed her was plain from his whole plan of action. The ring of his footsteps told her that he was walking faster than she, though in no precise hurry to overtake her. Rather, he seemed to be keeping her in sight, and watching for some opportunity. It was exactly what men did when they robbed and murdered unprotected women. She had read of scores of such cases, and had often imagined herself as being stalked by this kind of ghoul. Now the thing which she had greatly feared having come upon her she was nearly hysterical. If she ran he would run after her. If she only walked on he would overtake her. Before she could reach the docks on one side or Broadway on the other, where she might find possible defenders, he could easily have strangled her and rifled her fifty cents. It was still unreasoning fear, but fear in which there was another kind of prompting, which made her wheel suddenly and walk back towards him. She noticed that as she did so, he stopped, wavered, but came on again. Before the obscurity allowed of her seeing what type of man he was she cried out, with a half sob: “Oh, mister, I’m so afraid! I wish you’d help me.” “Sure!” The tone had the cheery fraternal ring of commonplace sincerity. “That’s what I turned round for. I says, that girl’s lost, I says. There’s places down here that’s dangerous, and she don’t know where she is.” Hysterical fear became hysterical relief. “And you’re not going to murder me?” “Gee! Me? What’d I murder you for? I’m a plumber.” His tone making it seem impossible for a plumber to murder anyone she panted now from a sense of reassurance and security. She could see too that he was a decent looking young fellow in overalls, off on an early job. “Where you goin’ anyhow?” he asked, in kindly interest. “The minute I see you on the other side of the street, I says Gosh, I says! That girl’s got to be watched, I says. She don’t know that these streets down by the docks is dangerous.” She explained that she was on her way to Red Point, Long Island, and that having only fifty cents she was sparing of her money. “Gee! I wouldn’t be so economical if it was me. That ain’t the only fifty cents in the world. Look-a-here! I’ve got a dollar. You must take that––” “Oh, I couldn’t.” “Shucks! What’s a dollar? You can pay me back some time. I’ll give you my address. It’s all right. I’m married. Three kids. And say, if you send me back the dollar, which you needn’t do, you know—but if you must—sign a man’s name to the letter, because my wife—well, she’s all right, but if––” Letty escaped the necessity of accepting the dollar by assuring him that if he would tell her the way to the nearest subway station she would use a portion of her fifty cents. “I’ll go with you,” he declared, with breezy fraternity. “No distance. They’re expecting me on a job up there in Waddle Street, but they’ll wait. Pipe burst—floodin’ a loft where they’ve stored a lot of jute—but why worry?” As they threaded the broken series of streets toward the subway he aired the matrimonial question. “Some think as two can live on the same wages as one. All bunk, I’ll say. My wife used to be in the hair line. Some little earner too. Had an electric machine that’d make hair grow like hay on a marsh. Two dollars a visit she got. When we was married she had nine hunderd saved. I had over five hunderd myself. We took a weddin’ tour; Atlantic City. Gettin’ married’s a cinch; but stayin’ married—she’s all right, my wife is, only she’s kind o’ nervous like if I look sideways at any other woman—which I hardly ever do intentional—only my wife’s got it into her head that....” At the entrance to the subway Letty shook hands with him and thanked him. “Say,” he responded, “I wish I could do something more for you; but I got to hike it back to Waddle Street. Look-a-here! You stick to the subway and the stations, and don’t you be in a hurry to get to your address in Red Point till after daylight. They can’t be killin’ nobody over there, that you’d need to be in such a rush, and in the stations you’d be safe.” To a degree that was disconcerting Letty found this so. Having descended the stairs, purchased a ticket, and cast it into the receptacle appointed for that purpose, she saw herself examined by the colored man guarding the entry to the platform. He sat with his chair tilted back, his feet resting on the chain which protected part of the entrance, picking a set of brilliant teeth. Letty, trembling, nervous, and only partly comforted by the cavalier who was now on his way to Waddle Street, shrank from the colored man’s gaze and was going down the platform where she could be away from it. Her progress was arrested by the sight of two men, also waiting for the train, who on perceiving her started in her direction. The colored man lifted his feet lazily from the chain, brought his chair down to four legs, put his toothpick in his waistcoat pocket, and dragged himself up. “Say, lady,” he drawled, on approaching her, “I think them two fellas is tough. You stay here by me. I’ll not let no one get fresh with you.” Languidly he went back to his former position and occupation, but when after long waiting, the train drew in he unhooked his feet again from the chain, rose lazily, and accompanied Letty across the otherwise empty platform. “Say, brother,” he said to the conductor, “don’t let any fresh guy get busy with this lady. She’s alone, and timid like.” “Sure thing,” the conductor replied, closing the doors as Letty stepped within. “Sit in this corner, lady, next to me. The first mutt that wags his jaw at you’ll get it on the bean.” Letty dropped as she was bidden into the corner, dazed by the brilliant lighting, and the greasy unoccupied seats. She was alone in the car, and the kindly conductor having closed his door she felt a certain sense of privacy. The train clattered off into the darkness. Where was she going? Why was she there? How was she ever to accomplish the purpose with which two hours earlier she had stolen away from East Sixty-seventh Street? Was it only two hours earlier? It seemed like two years. It seemed like a space of time not to be reckoned.... She was tired as she had never been tired in her life. Her head sank back into the support made by the corner. “There’s quite a trick to it,” she found herself repeating, though in what connection she scarcely knew. “An awful wicked lydy, she is, what’d put madam up to all the ropes.” These words too drifted through her mind, foolishly, drowsily, without obvious connection. She began to wish that she was home again in the little back spare room—or anywhere—so long as she could lie down—and shut her eyes—and go to sleep.... <hr class='major' /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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