An Ambitious Woman Part 7

"All right. Jus' step inside an' wait fur 'em both."

Claire looked straight at the speaker. She did not know of the droop in each full-fringed lid of her beautiful eyes. It was an unconscious token of her abhorrence.

"Suppose that they should not return," she said.

"All right," replied Sloc.u.mb, brutally impervious. "_I'll_ take yer home, if they don't."

"Thank you," faltered Claire. This view of the question gave her a new shock. It was like hearing that the ferry-boats between New York and Greenpoint had stopped running for the night. "But I won't trouble you,"

she added, trying to make her voice and mien indifferently calm. "I will wait here a little while, and then, if I don't find Josie, I will go home alone."

"Go home alone?" repeated Sloc.u.mb, with a sort of sympathetic interrogation that was detestable to her. "Why, how far is it?"

"Oh, not very far," she replied, turning her back on him, and feeling that in another moment she might treat his offensive persistence with the blunt rigor it deserved.

"I thought you was livin' over to Greenpoint," said Sloc.u.mb, s.h.i.+fting with tough pertinacity round to her side.

What a man of cleaner life and thought would simply have praised as sweet and chaste about her fired in this corrupt oaf his one gross subst.i.tute for sentiment. She could no more appeal to him by her fineness of line, coloring, or movement than the field-flower when cropped by the brute mouth whose appet.i.te its very grace and perfume may perhaps whet. And Claire divined this. Pure things know impure ones, all through the large scheme of nature. There are nicer grades of intelligence, of course, as we move along the upward scale of such antagonisms. The milk will not cloud till we dilute it with the ink-drop, but a white soul can usually note a black one by earlier and wiser signals of alarm.

"Why should I not go home alone?" Claire had been saying to herself. "No one would know me--I could reach the Tenth Street Ferry--I could ask some one, and get the right car--Yes, I will try no more to find Josie--I will break away from this low creature--I have enough money to bring me safely home--I don't care; I will take my chances and slip off--he will not follow me when he sees me shun him like that."

She ignored his last remark. She did not even glance at him where he now stood. Her gaze was fixed on the crowd, and she was watching to find a brief break in its edge, through which she might flit and be lost. The next instant such a chance came. Claire seized it. She made an oblique dart through the large doorway, slanted her nimble steps across the pavement, and was soon breasting the adverse tide, so to speak, of a little human sea. Each man or woman stood in the place of a choppy, obstructive wave. At every moment poor Claire found herself gently buffeting a new impediment, male or female, as the case might be. Since she wanted to move in a course different from that of nearly every one before or beside her, the carrying out of her object involved a good amount of determined propulsion. But she at length gained the open, as it were. She had now only to strike along in a northerly direction until she reached the point at which a certain line of small cars crossed Broadway. She was not sure at just what street this intersection occurred; she knew that it was by no means near by. A c.u.mbrous omnibus rolled clamorously toward her, and for a moment she was inclined to hail it; but a swift look into its lighted s.p.a.ce, well freighted with pa.s.sengers, made her shrink from the concentration of stares that her s.e.x and loneliness must equally provoke. The publicity of the long, lamp-fringed sidewalk, with its incidents of potential if not always tangible policemen, expressed, after all, a more secure privacy. When she took one of the little trundling cars which would bring her eastward to the ferry, she would not be forced to clamber and stoop and stagger before getting a seat. Their mode of conveyance, too, would be somehow more safely plebeian; they would hold their last fragments of the work-a-day world going back to Greenpoint; in case of insult, she might have her final appeal to some reputable occupant bound for the same destination as herself.

Meanwhile, the big-bodied omnibus clattered by. Claire had resolved to walk. The high-perched driver had not seen her pause, hurry to the curbstone, and then lift a hand which was straightway dropped at the bidding of her changed mood. But this action, while it wrought delay in her progress, rendered somewhat earlier her meeting with one who still obstinately pursued her. Just as she had again started, with slightly quickened pace, the inexterminable Sloc.u.mb appeared at her side. He seemed to have used no effort in catching up with her. There was a terrible ease in the way his length of limb accommodated its free stride to Claire's more repressed motions. He had not immediately given chase.

She had got rather deep into the crowd about the theatre-doors before his impudence, positive as it always was, had trumped up sufficient real nerve to follow her. Claire continued walking; but she looked at him with fixity as she said, "I suppose you saw that I wanted to go alone."

"'T aint right, nohow," he replied, peering into her face with his bad, hard eyes. "A putty gal like you hadn't ought t' walk the streets all by herself after dark. You lemme go along. Don' look scared; I wouldn't hurt ye fur a cent."

"Oh, I am not afraid of you," said Claire, between her teeth. "Why should I be?"

"That's the ticket. W'y should ye be?"

"I don't want your company. I have shown this to you, and now I tell it to you."

Sloc.u.mb laughed. It seemed to Claire that his laugh had the cold of ice and the thrust of steel in it. His lowered arm touched hers with intentional pressure, but she swerved sideways, at once thwarting the contact. He, however, promptly narrowed the distance thus made between them.

"Say!" he now broke forth, in peculiar, confidential undertone, as though a third party were listening. "W'at ye mad fur, hey? You was along with Jimmy MacNab, wasn't ye? An' wasn't we intrerdooced all reg'lar? I'm a better feller 'n Jim, any day in the year. Jus' gimme a show. Won't ye? Say, now, _won't_ ye? I took a dead s.h.i.+ne to you the minnit I clapped eyes on them two nice pink cheeks--blowed if I didn't!

I sez to myself, 'She can walk round any gal I've seen fur a devil of a time,' I sez."

Claire looked straight ahead. She still went quickly along. Her feet and limbs felt light, almost void of sense. Fear had to do with this, and she was keenly frightened. For the first time in her life she knew the terror that feminine honesty has when fronted with the close chance of physical insult.

Sloc.u.mb justified her dread. He had no more regard for common laws of restraint than the majority of untamed brutes, when conscious, as in his case, of firm thews and active bulk. As for moral bravery, his nature harbored no concern with such nicer elements. The only vices he did not possess were those for which he had never known an hour of temptation.

His father had drank himself to death, and he inherited what was perhaps an embryo taste in the same direction. He got drunk once a fortnight, now, in his twenty-seventh year, whereas, two years ago, these diversions had been much rarer; in a decade, under his uncontrolled conditions, there was a fair chance of his becoming a sot. To speak more generally, the vast social momentum of heredity, which seems to be so plainly understood and so ill appreciated in our golden century, had Sloc.u.mb well in its stern grip. There were no outward incident forces, as the philosophic phrase goes, to make his case in any way a hopeful one. He had seen Claire; he had exchanged a word with her; he had liked her. If his liking were put in the baldest form of explanation it would have to deal with rather darksome realisms. And it is always preferable that the pursuant satyr and the unwilling nymph be treated wholly from the poetic and picturesque point of view.

Claire would not speak. She was very frightened, as before has been recorded: she seemed to see, between the gloomy inters.p.a.ces of the lamps, a phantasmal semblance of her father, looking untold rebuke at her, and then vanis.h.i.+ng only to reappear. She walked onward with fleet energy. An idea shot through her mind that she might call a policeman to rid her of this incubus. But she dismissed the idea at once. It was too savagely desperate even for the confronting dilemma.

By this time Sloc.u.mb had begun to see plainly that Claire was proof against all his known methods of conquest. But she was unprotected, and he had a dogged dislike of giving up the siege. The silence continued for nearly five blocks. During this time his eyes scarcely once left her face, gleaming distinct or dim as the lamplight waxed or waned.

"Say!" he at length re-addressed her. "Ain't ye hungry? I was thinkin' a stew would go putty good, just now, or a dish o' ice-cream. P'r'aps ye'd rather tackle sumpn sweet. Hey?"

She made no answer. He peered closer into her face, and repeated the last odious little interrogative monosyllable a good many times. But Claire remained as mute and irresponsive as though it had fallen on stone-deaf ears.

This lure suddenly held out to appet.i.te was his last persuasive stroke.

It sprang naturally enough from the man who dealt it. It expressed in the most exhaustive terms just how narrow and barren his conception was of Claire's reasons for shunning him. He stood as the hideous result of a hideous phase of society; and he could no more divine or imagine higher and richer levels of life than if to know of these had meant to be familiar with the soil and climates of a remote star.

He was disappointed and chagrined, but not angry. Anger could not consort with his present state; another kind of heat already filled his veins; one flush kept the other aloof. He had now decided that Claire was not to be conciliated, and yet the perfect lawlessness of his past made him in a manner unable to snap the bond of attraction and leave her. Self-control was a sealed book to him; he had not even opened its cover, apart from learning its rudimentary lessons.

When they had gone five or six blocks further, and the street at which Claire would take the cross-town car was by no means far away, he abruptly caught her arm and drew it close to his side, so holding it with an exertion of purely muscular strength, beside which her own resistance counted for little more than the flutter of a bird.

Even at this most trying juncture she still moved on. He continued to walk, as well. She veered her face toward his, however, forced out of all her previous pitiful disdain, and he saw that she had grown pale as death.

"Let me go," she said. "Don't dare to hold me like this!"

"Look here!" he returned, his tones taking a nasal whisper, and his breath sweeping so close to her nostrils that she caught in it a stale taint, as of liquor drank some time ago. "I wouldn't harm a hair o' your head; you can jus' bet on that. I've took a likin' to you, an' I'll treat ye good. If you wus a lady livin' up t' Fifth Avenyer, ye wouldn't git more respectfuller behaved to nur I'll do."

"If you don't let me go," said Claire, gasping a little as she got out the words, "I'll complain to the first policeman we meet."

He dropped her arm at once, stopping short. "D' ye mean it?" he asked, with great show of reproach. "Say! d' ye mean it?"

But Claire hurried on. She had a wild momentary hope that she had hit at random upon a blessed source of deliverance. Here, however, she had quite miscalculated. Sloc.u.mb's outburst had merely formed a bit of the cheap sentimentality which one of his race and stamp would select as the lame makes.h.i.+ft in a forlorn cause.

It chanced that when Claire reached the desired corner a car was opportunely pa.s.sing. She signaled to it; the driver saw her; it stopped, and she entered it. Meanwhile Sloc.u.mb had kept at her side, though with the distance between them materially widened. She paid no heed to the question of whether or not he entered with her. The car was entirely empty as she took her seat. A little later she slipped a five-cent piece into the small gla.s.s repository for pa.s.sengers' fares--that touching proof of the confidence reposed in drivers by those who employ them.

Shortly afterward she saw Sloc.u.mb standing on the outer platform. Her heart and courage almost failed her, then. He presently walked inside the car, and paid his fare, as she had done. She expected him to sit down and resume his persecutions, but he did neither. He went out again and stood on the platform.

The little car jingled along Eighth Street. It pa.s.sed the grim, b.a.s.t.a.r.d architecture of the Mercantile Library, once, long ago, an opera house, in which Steffenone sang to a.s.semblages where a gentleman in evening-dress or a lady without her bonnet was a rare enough incident, and nothing prophesied the horse-shoe of resplendent boxes before which Patti and Nilsson have since revealed their vocal charms. Soon afterward it came to Third Avenue, easily betrayed by the flare of gaslight in beer-saloon or liquor-shop, and a thoroughfare in which night revelry seems to have claimed especial stronghold. Near at hand, that hideous monument of philanthropy, the Cooper Union, frowns its unavailing displeasure upon the malt of Schneider and the alcohol of Moriarty, both of which project their noxious forces southward through the Bowery to the City Hall, and northward across many reputable side streets on to the shabby vulgarity of Harlem.

But Claire was naturally unprepared, just now, either to recognize or ponder the importance of this great popular boulevard which we call Third Avenue; how it blends our ruling Irish and German elements in one huge strand of commercial interests, each petty by itself, yet all, when ma.s.sed together, of enormous metropolitan note; how its very name is p.r.o.nounced with a mild sneer by our so-called better cla.s.ses; how it is held common and of ill repute; how one must not speak of it in a Fifth Avenue drawing-room, lest he shall be suspected of having trodden its tainted pavements; and yet how there pulses through its big, tough artery nearly all the hot, impure political blood that feeds the venality of our elective systems, making it for this reason a fact to be always deplored but never lightly dismissed. Should the sombre growl against that sin of over-possession which we term monopoly ever grow into a revolutionary roar, it is very thinkable that the Robespierre of such an event would be born in Third Avenue; but if not, he might safely be depended on for having near relations there. The little car presently crossed Second Avenue, at its most quiet portion. All the garish brilliance had now quite vanished. Once beloved of respectability, this broad street, here in what we designate its lower portion, has preserved abundant souvenirs of perished fame. Many of the roomy old mansions that line it may be dispeopled of their pristine Knickerbockers, but even these retain much of their old stately repose. Up beyond, the tenement-house thrives, and the tavern flaunts a bottle-decked cas.e.m.e.nt; but here, within generous limits, it remains a quarter full of decent though not dismal gloom, and touched with an occasional solid grandeur.

The car soon advanced into a very different region. It had reached one of the two long if not deep river-edges which skirt the central domain of our wealth and thrift. That squalor which dogs the heel of poverty was everywhere manifest. The very street-lamps seemed to burn with a dejected flicker. Night, however, was kind, and spared from view much unsightly soilure. The high brick houses, thronged with inmates whom all degrees of want and all modes of toil oppressed, lost themselves in shadow; but now and then you caught glimpses of the liquid filth clogging the gutters, and perhaps of a half-submerged cabbage-leaf or a more buoyant egg-sh.e.l.l, to fleck its slime with baleful color. Here spoke a crying munic.i.p.al disgrace. The prosperous part of our city has its streets kept cleanly throughout the year, but dread injustice is wreaked upon these that are skirted by abodes of penury and need. Fat appropriations are of no avail; the tax-money slips into fingers that are deft in legerdemain; fraud and mismanagement meet as friends; it is not enough that our beautiful island must crowd her sh.o.r.es with all the disfeaturing accompaniments of commerce; she is forced, as well, to see them polluted, far inland, by the foulness born of bad legislation. This is one of the too frequent cases where, in our enlightened polity, democracy plays wantonly into the hands of monarchism.

A little later the car came into a wide, airy expanse, along two of whose sides it journeyed for a considerable distance. Here was Tompkins Square, now lighted with innumerable lamps, but only a few years ago a dark horror to all decent citizens living near it. By day set aside as a parade-ground for the city militia, which paraded there scarcely twice a year, its lampless lapse of earth was by night at least four good acres of brooding gloom, which he who ventured to cross stood the risk of thievish a.s.sault, if nothing more harmful. What added to the unique repulsiveness of the place for peace-loving denizens of its near streets, was an occasional concourse of growling and saturnine German socialists, held with stormy harangues and blood-thirsty diatribes under moon or star, and amid the congenial environing shadow, which was relieved, on these lurid occasions, by torches whose fitful flames typified the feverish theories disclosed.

But the car now pa.s.sed a very different Tompkins Square from that of old. The grim blank has become, since then, a bright-lit realm where the tramp may fall p.r.o.ne on some of its many neat-built benches, but where the highwayman will find slim chance to ply his fell trade. When this region had been pa.s.sed there remained only a brief s.p.a.ce to be traversed before the ferry was reached. The avenues by this time had ceased to be numerically named; they had become alphabetical. But Avenues A, B, C, and D are all quite h.o.m.ogeneous as regards dolorous discomfort. The city here hides some of its worst lairs, and many a desperado infests them.

After a little journey, such as Claire now took, you gain the small, dull-looking ferry.

Meanwhile seven or eight new pa.s.sengers had entered the car. They were mostly Germans, and of both s.e.xes. Claire felt a sense of protection.

One stout woman, of truly colossal build, with a sleeping baby in her arms and an evident husband so hollow-cheeked and slight that it seemed wrong for him even to a.s.sume the responsibility of paying their double fare, especially rea.s.sured her. The rest were commonplace people enough.

One was a weary work-girl; one was a collier, grimy with his trade and drowsy from drink; one was a dapper, bejeweled Hebrew, with oily amber whiskers and large, loose red lips; still another was a handsome young woman, smartly geared, who had said good-night, on entering, to a male escort, and who now glanced uneasily about her at intervals, as though fearful of being known. All this while Sloc.u.mb remained on the outer platform.

Presently the car stopped. Everybody alighted. The Tenth Street Ferry was close at hand. Claire knew that her hateful adherent was close at hand also. She paid her toll to the ferryman and glided through the narrow bit of pa.s.sage-way forth upon the long dark dock beyond. She expected, at every new step, to be re-accosted by Sloc.u.mb. A boat had landed, and was soon to disembark again. From the opposite dimness came an ominous clank of chains, made by the men at either of the two wheels, and a sudden "All aboard!" flung out in gruff tones as a stimulating monition. The other pa.s.sengers all hastened forward. Claire was among them, though in the rear of the hurry. The foremost had gained the boat, when she felt a strong clutch upon her arm. Compelled by sheer force to pause, now, she turned, meeting Sloc.u.mb's face quite near her own. He at once spoke, in the same intimate sort of whisper that she had before found so distressing.

"Say! 'T ain't right t' shake me like this. I ain't goin' t' stand it, either. Come, change your mind. Treat me square. Will ye?"

Claire, driven to bay, did what her s.e.x is sometimes held by a few renowned cynics as having a special talent for doing; she employed stratagem.

Her voice shook as she said: "Very well. What is it you wish me to do?"

She could feel the tense grasp upon her arm relax a little. This was just the kind of result she had aimed for.

"I want ye t' stay this side the river a spell yet, an' we'll eat somepn somewhere. Hey?"