The Dust Flower Part 40

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 cras.h.i.+ng 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, unbridgeable, 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.e.x 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-pa.s.sengers 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 sc.r.a.p 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 pa.s.sed, 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.