People Like That Part 25

Again the room grew still and presently, with dragging steps, Etta turned toward the door. Quickly I followed her. She must not go. I had said nothing, gotten nowhere, and there was much that must be said that something might be done. To have her leave without some plan to work toward would be loss of time. She was but one of thousands of bits of human wreckage, in danger herself and of danger to others, and somebody must do something for her. I put my hand on her shoulder to draw her back and as I did so the door, half ajar, opened more widely.

Motionless, and as one transfixed, she stared at it wide-eyed, and into her face crept the pallor of death.

Selwyn and Harrie were standing in the doorway.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Stumbling back as if struck, Harrie leaned against the door-frame, and the hat in his hand dropped to the floor. Selwyn, too, for a half-minute drew back, then he came inside and spoke to Etta, and to me, and to Mrs. Mundy, and to Kitty. Pus.h.i.+ng a chair close to the fire, he took Harrie by the arm and led him to it.

"Sit down," he said, quietly. "You'll be better in a minute."

Harrie had given Etta no sign of recognition, but the horror in his once-handsome face, now white and drawn, told of his shock at finding her with me, and fear and recoil weakened him to the point of faintness. In his effort to recover himself, to resist what might be coming, he struggled as one for breath, but from him came no word, no sound.

Infinite pity for Selwyn made it impossible for me to speak for a moment, and before words would come Mrs. Mundy and Kitty had gone out of the room and Selwyn had turned to Etta.

With shoulders again drawn back, and eyes dark with fear and defiance, she looked at him. "Why have you come here?" she asked.

"What are you going to do? You've taken him home and left me to go back to where he drove me. Isn't that enough? Why have you brought him here?"

"To ask Miss Heath to say what he must do. That is why I have come."

Pus.h.i.+ng the trembling girl in a chair behind Harrie's, Selwyn looked up at me. "You must decide what is to be done, Dandridge. This is a matter beyond a man's judgment. I do not seem able to think clearly.

You must tell me what to do."

"I? Oh no! It is not for me. Surely you cannot mean that I must tell you--" The blood in my body surged thickly, and I drew back, appalled that such decision should be laid upon me, such responsibility be mine. "What is it you want--of me?"

"To tell me--what Harrie must do." In Selwyn's face was the whiteness of death, but his voice was quiet. "I did not know, until David Guard told me, that there was a child, and that Harrie was its father, and that because of the child Etta would not go away as I had tried to make her. I did not know she had no father or brother to see that, as far as possible, her wrong is righted. I want you to forget that Harrie is my brother and remember the girl, and tell me--what he must do."

From the chair in which Harrie sat came a lurching movement, and I saw his body bend forward, saw his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands, and then I heard a sudden sob, a soft, little cry that stabbed, and Etta was on the floor beside him, crouching at his feet, holding his hands to her heart, and uttering broken, foolish words and begging him to speak to her, to tell her that he would marry her--that he would marry her and take her away.

"Harrie--oh, Harrie!" Faintly we could hear the words that came stumblingly. "Could we be married, Harrie, and go away, oh, far away, where n.o.body knows? I will work for you--live for you--die for you, if need be, Harrie! We could be happy. I would try--oh, I would try so hard to make you happy, and the baby would have a name.

You would not hate her if we were married. She was never to know she had a mother, she was to think her real mother was dead and that I was just some one who loved her. But if we were married I would not have to die to her. Tell me--oh, tell me, Harrie, that we can be married--and go away--where n.o.body knows!"

But he would tell her nothing. With twitching shoulders and head turned from her he tried to draw his hands from those which held his in piteous appeal, and presently she seemed to understand, and into her face came a ghastly, shuddering smile, and slowly she got up and drew a deep breath.

As she stood aside Harrie, with a sudden movement, was on his feet and at the door. His hand was on the k.n.o.b and he tried to open the door, but instantly Selwyn was by him, and with hold none too gentle he was thrust back into the room.

"You d.a.m.ned coward!" Selwyn's voice was low. "She is the mother of your child, and you want to quit her; to run, rather than pay your price! By G.o.d! I'll see you dead before you do!"

Again the room grew still. The ticking of the clock and the beat of raindrops on the windowpanes mingled with the soft purring of the fire's flames, and each waited, we knew not for what; and then Etta spoke.

"But you, too, would have to pay--if he were made to pay--the price."

She looked at Selwyn. "It is not fair that you should pay. I will go away--somewhere. It does not matter about the baby or me. Thank you, but-- Good-by. I'm going--away."

Before I could reach her, hold her back, she was out of the room and running down the steps and the front door had closed. Mrs. Mundy looked up as I leaned over the banister. "It is better to leave her alone to-day," she said, and I saw that she was crying. "We can see her to-morrow. She had better be by herself for a while."

Back in the room Selwyn and I looked at each other with white and troubled faces. We had bungled badly and nothing had been done.

"Come to-morrow night. I must see David Guard, must see Etta again, before I-- Come to-morrow and I will tell you. I must be sure." I turned toward Harrie, but he had gone into the hall. Quickly my hands went out to Selwyn, and for a long moment he held them in his, then, without speaking, he turned and left me.

CHAPTER XXIX

I know I should not think too constantly about it. I try not to, but I cannot shake off the shock, the horror of Etta's death. Selwyn inclosed the note she wrote him in the letter he sent me just before leaving with Harrie for the West, but he did not come to see me before he left.

When I try to sleep the words of Etta's note pa.s.s before me like frightened children, crying--crying, and then again these children sing a dreary chant, and still again the chant becomes a chorus which repeats itself until I am unnerved; and they seem to be calling me, these little children, and begging me to help make clean and safe the paths that they must tread. I am just one woman. What can I do?

I knew Etta was dead before Selwyn received her note. Mrs. Banch, the woman who kept the child for her, came running to Mrs. Mundy the day after Etta had been to see me, and incoherently, sobbingly, with hands twisting under her ap.r.o.n, she told us of finding Etta, with the baby in her arms, lying on her bed, as she thought, asleep. But she was not asleep. She was dead.

"She had done it as deliberate as getting ready to go on a long journey," the woman had sobbed. "Everything was fixed and in its place, and after bathing and dressing the baby in a clean gown, she wrote on a piece of paper that all of its clothes were for my little girl, and that she wouldn't do what she was doing if there was any other way."

With a fresh outburst of tears, the woman handed me a half-sheet of note-paper. "Bury us as we are," it read. "I am taking the baby with me.--Etta."

"We will come with you." Mrs. Mundy, who had gotten out her hat and coat to go to see Etta before Mrs. Banch came in, hurriedly put them on, while I went for mine, and together we followed the woman to the small and shabby house in the upper part of which Etta had been living for some weeks past; the lower part being occupied by an old shoemaker and his wife who had been kind to her; and as we entered the room where the little mother and her baby lay I did not try to keep them back--the tears that were too late.

"Last night I was standing in the door when she came by with a letter in her hand." As Mrs. Banch talked, she was still quivering from the shock of her discovery, and her words came brokenly. "On her way back from mailing it I asked her to come in and set with me, but she wouldn't do it; she said she was going to take the baby with her to spend the night, as she didn't want to be by herself; and, going up-stairs, she wrapped her up good and took her away with her. I don't know why, but I felt worried all last night, and this morning I couldn't get down to nothing 'til I ran around to see how she was and how the baby was, and when I went up in her room--" The woman's work-worn hands were pressed to her breast. "G.o.d--this world is a hard place for girls who sin! It don't seem to matter about men, but women--" Presently she raised her head and looked at us. "I never seen a human being what had her spirit for enduring. She paid her price without whining, but something must have happened what she couldn't stand. She had a heart if she was--if she was--"

Two days later, as quietly as her life had ended, Etta's body, with her baby on its breast, was put into the ground, and mingled with David Guard's voice as he read the service for the dead was the far-off murmur of city noises, the soft rise and fall of city sounds.

With Mrs. Mundy and Mrs. Banch, the old shoemaker and his wife, I stood at the open grave and watched the earth piled into a mound that marked a resting-place at last for a broken body and a soul no one had tried to reach that it might save, but I did not hear the beating of the clods of clay, nor the twittering of the birds in the trees, nor the wind in their tops. I heard instead Etta's cry to Kitty and to me: "In G.o.d's name, can't somebody do something to make good women understand!"

It is these words that beat into my brain at night; these and the words I did not speak in time and which, on the next day, were too late. The note she sent Selwyn also keeps me awake.

"I am going," she wrote, "so the thought of me will not make you afraid. You tried to help me, but there isn't any help for girls like me. I am taking the baby with me. I want to be sure she will be safe. It would be too hard for her, the fight she'd have to make.

I can't leave her here alone. ETTA."

Last night David Guard came in for a few minutes. Leaning back in a big chair, he half closed his eyes and in silence watched the flames of the fire, and, seeing he was far away in thought, I went on with the writing of the letter I had put aside when he came in. I always know when he is tired and worn, and I have learned to say nothing, to be as silent as he when I see that the day's work has so wearied him he does not wish to talk. At other times we talk much--talk of life and its possibilities, of old cults and new philosophies, of books and places; of the endless struggles of men like himself to be intellectually honest and spiritually free. But oftenest we speak of the people around us, the people on whom the injustices of a selfish social system fall most heavily; and among them, sharing their hards.h.i.+ps, understanding their burdens, recognizing their limitations and weaknesses, leading and directing them, he has found life in losing it, and it now has meaning for him that is bigger and finer than the best that earth can give.

Presently he stirred, drew a long breath as one awaking, but when he spoke he did not turn toward me.

"I saw Mr. Thorne the night before he left with Harrie for his friend's ranch in Arizona. He is going to give him another chance, and it's pretty big of him to do it, but I doubt if anything will come of it. Harrie belongs to a type of humanity beyond awakening to a realization of moral degeneracy; a type that believes so confidently in the divine right of cla.s.s privilege that it believes little else. Harrie's failure to appreciate the hideousness of certain recent experiences has made them all the more keenly felt by his brother. I have rarely seen a man suffer as the latter has suffered in the past few days, but unless I am mistaken--"

The pen in my hand dropped upon the desk, and for a while I did not speak. Then I got up and went toward David Guard, who had also risen. "You mean--" The words died in my throat.

"That he is beginning to understand why you came to Scarborough Square; to grasp the necessity of human contact for human interpretation. He, too, is seeing himself, his life, his world, from the viewpoint of Scarborough Square, and what he sees gives neither peace nor pride nor satisfaction. He will never see so clearly as you, perhaps, but certain cynicisms, certain intolerances, certain indifferences and endurances will yield to keener perception of the necessity for new purposes in life." He held out his hand.

"He needs you very much. I've got to go. Good-by."

For a long time I sat by the fire and watched it die. Was David Guard right, or had it been in vain, the venture that had brought me to Scarborough Square? I had told Selwyn I had come that I might see from its vantage-ground the sort of person I was and what I was doing with life; but it was also in the secret hope that he, too, might see the kindred of all men to men, the need of each for each, that I had come. If together we could stand between those of high and low degree, between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, with hands outstretched to both, and so standing bring about, perhaps, a better understanding of each other, then my coming would have been worth while. But would we ever so stand? All that I had hoped for seemed as dead as the ashes on the hearth. I had brought him pain and humiliation, drawn back, without intention, curtains that hid ugly, cruel things, and for him Scarborough Square would mean forever bitter memories of bitter revealing. I had failed. I had tried, and I had failed, and I could hold out no longer.

Getting up, I pressed my hands to my heart to still triumphant throbbing. It had won, I did not hate his house. I hated its walls.

But I could no longer live without him. I would marry him when he came back.

CHAPTER x.x.x