You never would guess in visiting Cathedral Court, with its people's hall and its public baths, its clean, paved street and general air of smug propriety, that it harbors a notorious past. But those who knew it by its maiden name, before it was married to respectability, recall Calvary Alley as a region of swarming tenements, stale beer dives, and frequent police raids. The sole remaining trace of those unregenerate days is the print of a child's foot in the concrete walk just where it leaves the court and turns into the cathedral yard.
All the tired feet that once plodded home from factory and foundry, all the unsteady feet that staggered in from saloon and dance-hall, all the fleeing feet that sought a hiding place, have long since passed away and left no record of their passing. Only that one small footprint, with its perfect outline, still pauses on its way out of the alley into the great world beyond.
At the time Nance Molloy stepped into that soft concrete and thus set in motion the series of events that was to influence her future career, she had never been told that her inalienable rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nevertheless she had claimed them intuitively. When at the age of one she had crawled out of the soap-box that served as a cradle, and had eaten half a box of stove polish, she was acting in strict accord with the Constitution.
By the time she reached the sophisticated age of eleven her ideals had changed, but her principles remained firm. She did not stoop to beg for her rights, but struck out for them boldly with her small bare fists. She was a glorious survival of that primitive Kentucky type that stood side by side with man in the early battles and fought valiantly for herself.
On the hot August day upon which she began to make history, she stood in the gutter amid a crowd of yelling boys, her feet far apart, her hands full of mud, waiting tensely to chastise the next sleek head that dared show itself above the cathedral fence. She wore a boy's shirt and a ragged brown skirt that flapped about her sturdy bare legs. Her matted hair was bound in two disheveled braids around her head and secured with a piece of shoe-string. Her dirty round face was lighted up by a pair of dancing blue eyes, in which just now blazed the unholy light of conflict.
The feud between the Calvary Micks and the choir boys was an ancient one, carried on from one generation to another and gaining prestige with age. It was apt to break out on Saturday afternoons, after rehearsal, when the choirmaster had taken his departure. Frequently the disturbance amounted to no more than taunts and jeers on one side and threats and recriminations on the other, but the atmosphere that it created was of that electrical nature that might at any moment develop a storm.
Nance Molloy, at the beginning of the present controversy, had been actively engaged in civil warfare in which the feminine element of the alley was pursuing a defensive policy against the marauding masculine. But at the first indication of an outside enemy, the herd instinct manifested itself, and she allied herself with prompt and passionate loyalty to the cause of the Calvary Micks.
The present argument was raging over the possession of a spade that had been left in the alley by the workmen who were laying a concrete pavement into the cathedral yard.
"Aw, leave 'em have it!" urged a philosophical alleyite from the top of a barrel. "Them ole avenoo kids ain't nothin'!—We could lick daylight outen 'em if we wanted to."
"Ye-e-e-s you could!" came in a chorus of jeers from the fence top, and a brown-eyed youth in a white-frilled shirt, with a blue Windsor tie knotted under his sailor collar, added imperiously, "You get too fresh down there, and I'll call the janitor!"
This gross breach of military etiquette evoked a retort from Nance that was too inelegant to chronicle.
"Tomboy! tomboy!" jeered the brown-eyed youth from above. "Why don't you borrow some girls' clothes?"
"All right, Sissy," said Nance, "lend me yours."
The Micks shrieked their approval, while Nance rolled a mud ball and, with the deadly aim of a sharpshooter, let it fly straight at the white-frilled bosom of her tormentor.
"Soak it to her, Mac," yelled the boy next to him, "the kid's got no business butting in! Make her get out of the way!"
"Go on and make me!" implored Nance.
"I will if you don't stand back," threatened the boy called Mac.
Nance promptly stepped up to the alley gate and wiggled her fingers in a way peculiarly provocative to a juvenile enemy.
"Poor white trash!" he jeered. "You stay where you belong! Don't you step on our concrete!"
"Will if I want to. It's my foot. I'll put it where I like."
"Bet you don't. You're afraid to."
"I ain't either."
"Well, do it then. I dare you! Anybody that would take a—"
In a second Nance had thrust her leg as far as possible between the boards that warned the public to keep out, and had planted a small alien foot firmly in the center of the soft cement.
This audacious act was the signal for instant battle. With yells of indignation the choir boys hurled themselves from the fence, and descended upon their foes. Mud gave place to rocks, sticks clashed, the air resounded with war cries. Ash barrels were overturned, straying cats made flying leaps for safety, heads appeared at doorways and windows, and frantic mothers made futile efforts to quell the riot.
Thus began the greatest fight ever enjoyed in Calvary Alley. It went down in neighborhood annals as the decisive clash between the classes, in which the despised swells "was learnt to know their places onct an' fer all!" For ten minutes it raged with unabated fury, then when the tide of battle began to set unmistakably in favor of the alley, parental authority waned and threats changed to cheers. Old and young united in the conviction that the Monroe Doctrine must be maintained at any cost!
In and out of the subsiding pandemonium darted Nance Molloy, covered with mud from the shoestring on her hair to the rag about her toe, giving and taking blows with the best, and emitting yells of frenzied victory over every vanquished foe. Suddenly her transports were checked by a disturbing sight. At the end of the alley, locked in mortal combat, she beheld her arch-enemy, he of the brown eyes and the frilled shirt, whom the boys called Mac, sitting astride the hitherto invincible Dan Lewis, the former philosopher of the ash barrel and one of the acknowledged leaders of the Calvary Micks.
It was a moment of intense chagrin for Nance, untempered by the fact that Dan's adversary was much the bigger boy. Up to this time, the whole affair had been a glorious game, but at the sight of the valiant Dan lying helpless on his back, his mouth bloody from the blows of the boy above him, the comedy changed suddenly to tragedy. With a swift charge from the rear, she flung herself upon the victor, clapping her mud-daubed hands about his eyes and dragging him backward with a force that sent them both rolling in the gutter.
Blind with fury, the boy scrambled to his feet, and, seizing a rock, hurled it with all his strength after the retreating Dan. The missile flew wide of its mark and, whizzing high over the fence, crashed through the great rose window that was the special pride of Calvary Cathedral.
The din of breaking glass, the simultaneous appearance of a cross-eyed policeman, and of Mason, the outraged janitor, together with the horrified realization of what had happened, brought the frenzied combatants to their senses. Amid a clamor of accusations and denials, the policeman seized upon two culprits and indicated a third.
"You let me go!" shrieked Mac. "My father'll make it all right! Tell him who I am, Mason! Make him let me go!"
But Mason was bent upon bringing all the criminals to justice.
"I'm going to have you all up before the juvenile court, rich and poor!" he declared excitedly. "You been deviling the life out of me long enough! If the vestry had 'a' listened at me and had you up before now, that window wouldn't be smashed. I told the bishop something was going to happen, and he says, 'The next time there's trouble, you find the leaders and swear out a warrant. Don't wait to ask anybody!'"
By this time every window in the tenement at the blind end of the alley had been converted into a proscenium box, and suggestions, advice, and incriminating evidence were being freely volunteered.
"Who started this here racket, anyhow?" asked the policeman, in the bored tone of one who is rehearsing an oft-repeated scene.
"I did," declared Nance Molloy, with something of the feminine gratification Helen of Troy must have felt when she "launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium."
"You Nance!" screamed a woman from a third-story window. "You know you never done no such a thing! I was settin' here an' seen ever'thing that happened; it was them there boys."
"So it was you, Dan Lewis, was it?" said the policeman, recognizing one of his panting victims, the one whose ragged shirt had been torn completely off, leaving his heaving chest and brown shoulders bare. "An' it ain't surprised, I am. Who is this other little dude?"
"None of your business!" cried Mac furiously, trying to wrench himself free. "I tell you my father will pay for the darned old window."
"Aisy there," said the policeman. "Does anybody know him?"
"It's Mr. Clarke's son, up at the bottle works," said Mason.
"You let me go," shrieked the now half-frantic boy. "My father 'll make you pay for this. You see if he don't!"
"None o' your guff," said the policeman. "I ain't wantin' to keep you now
I got your name. Onny more out o' the boonch, Mr. Mason?"
Mason swept a gleaning eye over the group, and as he did so he spied the footprint, in the concrete.
"Who did that?" he demanded in a fresh burst of wrath.
Those choir boys who had not fled the scene gave prompt and incriminating testimony.
"No! she never!" shouted the woman from the third floor, now suspended half-way out of the window. "Nance Molloy was up here a-washin' dishes with me. Don't you listen at them pasty-faced cowards a-puttin' it off on a innercent little girl!"
But the innocent little girl had no idea of seeking refuge in her sex. Hers had been a glorious and determining part in the day's battle, and the distinction of having her name taken down with those of the great leaders was one not to be foregone.
"I did do it," she declared excitedly. "That there boy dared me to. Ketch me takin' a dare offen a avenoo kid!"
"What's your name, Sis?" asked the policeman.
"Nance Molloy."
"Where do you live?"
"Up there at Snawdor's. That there was Mis' Snawdor a-yellin' at me."
"Is she yer mother?"
"Nope. She's me step."
"And yer father?"
"He's me step too. I'm a two-step," she added with an impudent toss of the head to show her contempt for the servant of the law, a blue-coated, brass-buttoned interloper who swooped down on you from around corners, and reported you at all times and seasons.
By this time Mrs. Snawdor had gotten herself down the two flights of stairs, and was emerging from the door of the tenement, taking down her curl papers as she came. She was a plump, perspiring person who might have boasted good looks had it not been for two eye-teeth that completely dominated her facial landscape.
"You surely ain't fixin' to report her?" she asked ingratiatingly of Mason. "A little 'leven-year-ole orphin that never done no harm to nobody?"
"It's no use arguing," interrupted Mason firmly. "I'm going to file out a warrant against them three children if it's the last act of my mortal life. There ain't a boy in the alley that gives me any more trouble than that there little girl, a-throwin' mud over the fence and climbing round the coping and sneaking into the cathedral to look under the pews for nickels, if I so much as turn my back!"
"He wants the nickels hisself!" cried Nance shrilly, pushing her nose flat and pursing her lips in such a clever imitation of the irate janitor that the alley shrieked with joy.
"You limb o' Satan!" cried Mrs. Snawdor, making a futile pass at her. "It's a God's mericle you ain't been took up before this! And it's me as 'll have the brunt to bear, a-stoppin' my work to go to court, a-lying to yer good character, an' a-payin' the fine. It's a pity able-bodied men like policemens an' janitors can't be tendin' their own business 'stid of comin' interferin' with the family of a hard-workin' woman like me. If there's any justice in this world it ain't never flowed in my direction!"
And Mrs. Snawdor, half dragging, half pushing Nance, disappeared into the dark entrance of the tenement, breathing maledictions first against her charge, then against the tyranny of the law.
If ever a place had a down-at-heel, out-of-elbow sort of look, it was Calvary Alley. At its open end and two feet above it the city went rushing and roaring past like a great river, quite oblivious of this unhealthy bit of backwater into which some of its flotsam and jetsam had been caught and held, generating crime and disease and sending them out again into the main current.
For despite the fact that the alley rested under the very wing of the great cathedral from which it took its name, despite the fact that it echoed daily to the chimes in the belfry and at times could even hear the murmured prayers of the congregation, it concerned itself not in the least with matters of the spirit. Heaven was too remote and mysterious, Hell too present and prosaic, to be of the least interest. And the cathedral itself, holding out welcoming arms to all the noble avenues that stretched in leafy luxury to the south, forgot entirely to glance over its shoulder at the sordid little neighbor that lay under the very shadow of its cross.
At the blind end of the alley, wedged in between two towering warehouses, was Number One, a ramshackle tenement which in some forgotten day had been a fine old colonial residence. The city had long since hemmed it in completely, and all that remained of its former grandeur were a flight of broad steps that once boasted a portico and the imposing, fan-shaped arch above the doorway.
In the third floor of Number One, on the side next the cathedral, dwelt the Snawdor family, a social unit of somewhat complex character. The complication came about by the paterfamilias having missed his calling. Mr. Snawdor was by instinct and inclination a bachelor. He had early in life found a modest rut in which he planned to run undisturbed into eternity, but he had been discovered by a widow, who was possessed of an initiative which, to a man of Snawdor's retiring nature, was destiny.
At the time she met him she had already led two reluctant captives to the hymeneal altar, and was wont to boast, when twitted about the fact, that "the Lord only knew what she might 'a' done if it hadn't been fer them eye-teeth!" Her first husband had been Bud Molloy, a genial young Irishman who good-naturedly allowed himself to be married out of gratitude for her care of his motherless little Nance. Bud had not lived to repent the act; in less than a month he heroically went over an embankment with his engine, in one of those fortunate accidents in which "only the engineer is killed."
The bereft widow lost no time in seeking consolation. Naturally the first person to present himself on terms of sympathetic intimacy was the undertaker who officiated at poor Bud's funeral. At the end of six months she married him, and was just beginning to enjoy the prestige which his profession gave her, when Mr. Yager also passed away, becoming, as it were, his own customer. Her legacy from him consisted of a complete embalming outfit and a feeble little Yager who inherited her father's tendency to spells.
Thus encumbered with two small girls, a less sanguine person would have retired from the matrimonial market. But Mrs. Yager was not easily discouraged; she was of a marrying nature, and evidently resolved that neither man nor Providence should stand in her way. Again casting a speculative eye over the field, she discerned a new shop in the alley, the sign of which announced that the owner dealt in "Bungs and Fawcetts." On the evening of the same day the chronic ailment from which the kitchen sink had suffered for two years was declared to be acute, and Mr. Snawdor was called in for consultation.
He was a timid, dejected person with a small pointed chin that trembled when he spoke. Despite the easy conventions of the alley, he kept his clothes neatly brushed and his shoes polished, and wore a collar on week days. These signs of prosperity were his undoing. Before he had time to realize what was happening to him, he had been skilfully jolted out of his rut by the widow's experienced hand, and bumped over a hurried courtship into a sudden marriage. He returned to consciousness to find himself possessed of a wife and two stepchildren and moved from his small neat room over his shop to the indescribable disorder of Number One.
The subsequent years had brought many little Snawdors in their wake, and Mr. Snawdor, being thus held up by the highwayman Life, ignominiously surrendered. He did not like being married; he did not enjoy being a father; his one melancholy satisfaction lay in being a martyr.
Mrs. Snawdor, who despite her preference for the married state derived little joy from domestic duties, was quite content to sally forth as a wage-earner. By night she scrubbed office buildings and by day she slept and between times she sought diversion in the affairs of her neighbors.
Thus it was that the household burdens fell largely upon Nance Molloy's small shoulders, and if she wiped the dishes without washing them, and "shook up the beds" without airing them, and fed the babies dill pickles, it was no more than older housekeepers were doing all around her.
Late in the afternoon of the day of the fight, when the sun, despairing of making things any hotter than they were, dropped behind the warehouse, Nance, carrying a box of crackers, a chunk of cheese, and a bucket of beer, dodged in and out among the push-carts and the barrels of the alley on her way home from Slap Jack's saloon. There was a strong temptation on her part to linger, for a hurdy-gurdy up at the corner was playing a favorite tune, and echoes of the fight were still heard from animated groups in various doorways. But Nance's ears still tingled from a recent boxing, and she resolutely kept on her way until she reached the worn steps of Number One and scurried through its open doorway.
The nice distinction between a flat and a tenement is that the front door of one is always kept closed, and the other open. In this particular instance the matter admitted of no discussion, for there was no front door. The one that originally hung under the fan-shaped Colonial arch had long since been kicked in during some nocturnal raid, and had never been replaced.
When the gas neglected to get itself lighted before dark at Number One, you had to feel your way along the hall in complete darkness, until your foot struck something; then you knew you had reached the stairs and you began to climb. It was just as well to feel along the damp wall as you went, for somebody was always leaving things on the steps for people to stumble over.
Nance groped her way cautiously, resting her bucket every few steps and taking a lively interest in the sounds and smells that came from behind the various closed doors she passed. She knew from the angry voices on the first floor that Mr. Smelts had come home "as usual"; she knew who was having sauerkraut for supper, and whose bread was burning.
The odor of cooking food reminded her of something. The hall was dark and the beer can full, so she sat down at the top of the first flight and, putting her lips to the foaming bucket was about to drink, when the door behind her opened and a keen-faced young Jew peered out.
"Say, Nance," he whispered curiously, "have they swore out the warrant on you yet?"
Nance put down the bucket and looked up at him with a fine air of unconcern.
"Don't know and don't keer!" she said. "Where was you hidin' at, when the fight was goin' on?"
"Getting my lessons. Did the cop pinch the Clarke guy?"
"You betcher," said Nance. "You orter seen the way he took on! Begged to beat the band. Me and Danny never. Me and him—"
A volley of curses came from the hall below, the sound of a blow, followed by a woman's faint scream of protest, then a door slammed.
"If I was Mis' Smelts," said Nance darkly, with a look that was too old for ten years, "I wouldn't stand for that. I wouldn't let no man hit me. I'd get him sent up. I—"
"You walk yourself up them steps, Nance Molloy!" commanded Mrs. Snawdor's rasping voice from the floor above. "I ain't got no time to be waitin' while you gas with Ike Lavinsky."
Nance, thus admonished, obeyed orders, arriving on the domestic hearth in time to prevent the soup from boiling over. Mr. Snawdor, wearing a long apron and an expression of tragic doom, was trying to set the table, while over and above and beneath him surged his turbulent offspring. In a broken rocking-chair, fanning herself with a box-top, sat Mrs. Snawdor, indulging herself in a continuous stream of conversation and apparently undisturbed by the uproar around her. Mrs. Snawdor was not sensitive to discord. As a necessary adjustment to their environment, her nerves had become soundproof.
"You certainly missed it by not being here!" she was saying to Mr. Snawdor. "It was one of the liveliest mix-ups ever I seen! One of them rich boys bust the cathedral window. Some say it'll cost over a thousan' dollars to git it fixed. An' I pray to God his paw'll have to pay every cent of it!"
"Can't you make William J. and Rosy stop that racket?" queried Mr. Snawdor, plaintively. The twins had been named at a time when Mrs. Snawdor's loyalty was wavering between the President and another distinguished statesman with whom she associated the promising phrase, "free silver." The arrival of two babies made a choice unnecessary, and, notwithstanding the fact that one of them was a girl, she named them William J. and Roosevelt, reluctantly abbreviating the latter to "Rosy."
"They ain't hurtin' nothin'," she said, impatient of the interruption to her story. "I wisht you might 'a' seen that ole fool Mason a-lordin' it aroun', an' that little devil Nance a-takin' him off to the life. Everybody nearly died a-laughin' at her. But he says he's goin' to have her up in court, an' I ain't got a blessed thing to wear 'cept that ole hat of yours I trimmed up. Looks like a shame fer a woman never to be fixed to go nowhere!"
Mr. Snawdor, who had been trying ineffectually to get in a word, took this remark personally and in muttering tones called Heaven to witness that it was none of his fault that she didn't have the right clothes, and that it was a pretty kind of a world that would keep a man from gettin' on just because he was honest, and—
"Oh, shut up!" said Mrs. Snawdor, unfeelingly; "it ain't yer lack of work that gits on my nerves; it's yer bein' 'round. I'd pay anybody a quarter a week to keep yer busy!"
Nance, during this exchange of conjugal infelicities, assisted by Lobelia and Fidy, was rescuing sufficient dishes from the kitchen sink to serve for the evening meal. She, too, was finding it difficult to bring her attention to bear on domestic matters after the exciting events of the afternoon.
"An' he says to me,"—she was recounting with dramatic intensity to her admiring audience—"he says, 'Keep offen that concrete.' An' I says, 'It'll take somebody bigger'n you to make me!'"
Now, of course, we know that Nance never said that, but it was what she wished she had said, which, at certain moments in life, seems to the best of us to be quite the same thing.
"Then what?" said Fidy, with a plate suspended in air.
"Then," said Nance with sparkling eyes, "I sticks my foot right in the middle of their old concrete, an' they comes pilin' offen the fence, an' Dan Lewis he—"
"You Nance!" came in warning tones from the other room, "you shet your head an' git on with that supper. Here comes your Uncle Jed this minute!"
At this announcement Nance dropped her dish towel, and dashing to the door flung herself into the arms of a short, fat, baldheaded man who had just come out of the front room across the hall.
"Easy there!" warned the new-comer. "You ain't aimin' to butt the engine clean offen the track, air yer?"
Nance got his arm around her neck, and her arm around his knees, and thus entwined they made their way to the table.
Uncle Jed Burks, uncle by courtesy, was a boarder by day and a gate-tender by night at the signal tower at the railroad crossing. On that day long ago when he had found himself a widower, helpless in the face of domestic problems, he had accepted Mrs. Snawdor's prompt offer of hospitality and come across the hall for his meals. At the end of the week he had been allowed to show his gratitude by paying the rent, and by the end of the month he had become the chief prop of the family. It is difficult to conceive of an Atlas choosing to burden himself with the world, but there are temperaments that seek responsibilities just as there are those, like Mr. Snawdor, who refuse them.
Through endless discomforts, Uncle Jed had stayed on, coaxing Mr. Snawdor into an acceptance of his lot, helping Mrs. Snawdor over financial difficulties, and bestowing upon the little Snawdors the affection which they failed to elicit from either the maternal or the paternal bosom. And the amazing thing was that Uncle Jed always thought he was receiving favors instead of conferring them.
"What's this I hear about my little partner gittin' into trouble?" he asked, catching Nance's chin in his palm and turning her smudged, excited face up to his.
Nance's eyes fell before his glance. For the first time since the fight her pride was mingled with misgiving. But when Mrs. Snawdor plunged into a fresh recital of the affair, with evident approval of the part she had played, her self-esteem returned.
"And you say Mason's fixin' to send her up to the juvenile court?" asked
Uncle Jed gravely, his fat hand closing on her small one.
"Dan Lewis has got to go too!" said Nance, a sudden apprehension seizing her at Uncle Jed's solemn face.
"Oh, they won't do nothin' to 'em," said Mrs. Snawdor, pouring hot water over the coffee grounds and shaking the pot vigorously. "Everybody knows it was the Clarke boy that bust the window. Clarke's Bottle Works' son, you know, up there on Zender Street."
"Was it the Clarke boy and Dan Lewis that started the fracas?" asked
Uncle Jed.
"No, it was me!" put in Nance.
"Now, Nance Molloy, you lemme hear you say that one time more, an' you know what'll happen!" said Mrs. Snawdor, impressively. "You're fixin' to make me pay a fine."
"I'm mighty sorry Dan Lewis is mixed up in it," said Uncle Jed, shaking his head. "This here's his second offense. He was had up last year."
"An' can you wonder?" asked Mrs. Snawdor, "with his mother what she is?"
"Mrs. Lewis ain't a bad looker," Mr. Snawdor roused himself to observe dejectedly.
His wife turned upon him indignantly. "Well, it's a pity she ain't as good as her looks then. Fer my part I can't see it's to any woman's credit to look nice when she's got the right kind of a switch and a good set of false teeth. It's the woman that keeps her good looks without none of them luxuries that orter be praised."
"Mrs. Lewis ain't done her part by Dan," said Uncle Jed, seating himself at the red-clothed table.
"I should say she ain't," Mrs. Snawdor continued. "I never seen nothin' more pathetical than that there boy when he was no more than three years old, a-tryin' to feed hisself outer the garbage can, an' her a comin an' a goin' in the alley all these years with her nose in the air, too good to speak to anybody."
"Dan don't think his mother's bad to him," said Nance. "He saved up his shoe-shine money an' bought her some perfumery. He lemme smell it."
"Oh, yes!" said Mrs. Snawdor, "she's got to have her perfumery, an' her feather in her hat, an' the whitewash on her face, no matter if Dan's feet are on the groun', an' his naked hide shinin' through his shirt."
"Well, I wish him an' this here little girl wasn't mixed up in this business," repeated Uncle Jed. "Courts ain't no place fer children. Seems like I can't stand fer our little Nance to be mixin' up with shady characters."
Nance shot an apprehensive glance at him and began to look anxious. She had never seen Uncle Jed so solemn before.
"You jes' remember this here, Nancy," went on the signalman, who could no more refrain from pointing a moral when the chance presented itself, than a gun can help going off when the trigger is pulled; "nothin' good ever comes from breakin' laws. They wouldn't a-been made into laws if they wasn't fer our good, an' even when we don't see no reason in keepin' 'em, we ain't got no more right to break through than one of them engines up at the crossing's got a right to come ahead when I signals it from the tower to stop. I been handin' out laws to engines fer goin' on thirty year, an' I never seen one yet that bust over a law that didn't come to grief. You keep on the track, Sister, an' watch the signals an' obey orders an' you'll find it pays in the end. An' now, buck up, an' don't be scared. We'll see what we can do to git you off."
"Who's skeered?" said Nance, with a defiant toss of her head. "I ain't skeered of nothin'."
But that night when Mrs. Snawdor and Uncle Jed had gone to work, and Mr. Snawdor had betaken himself out of ear-shot of the wailing baby, Nance's courage began to waver. After she had finished her work and crawled into bed between Fidy and Lobelia, the juvenile court, with its unknown terrors, rose before her. All the excitement of the day died out; her pride in sharing the punishment with Dan Lewis vanished. She lay staring up into the darkness, swallowing valiantly to keep down the sobs, fiercely resolved not to let her bed-fellows witness the break-down of her courage.
"What's the matter, Nance?" asked Fidy.
"I'm hot!" said Nance, crossly. "It feels like the inside of a oven in here!"
"I bet Maw forgot to open the window into the shaft," said Fidy.
"Windows don't do no good," said Nance; "they just let in smells. Wisht I was a man! You bet I would be up at Slap Jack's! I'd set under a 'lectric fan, an' pour cold things down me an' listen at the 'phoney-graf ever' night. Hush! Is that our baby?"
A faint wail made her scramble out of bed and rush into the back room where she gathered a hot, squirming bundle into her arms and peered anxiously into its wizened face. She knew the trick babies had of dying when the weather was hot! Two other beloved scraps of humanity had been taken away from her, and she was fiercely determined to keep this one. Lugging the baby to the window, she scrambled over the sill.
The fire-escape was cluttered with all the paraphernalia that doubles the casualty of a tenement fire, but she cleared a space with her foot and sat down on the top step. Beside her loomed the blank warehouse wall, and from the narrow passage-way below came the smell of garbage. The clanging of cars and the rumbling of trucks mingled with the nearer sounds of whirring sewing machines in Lavinski's sweat-shop on the floor below. From somewhere around the corner came, at intervals, the sharp cry of a woman in agony. With that last sound Nance was all too familiar. The coming and going of a human life were no mystery to her. But each time the cry of pain rang out she tried in vain to stop her ears. At last, hot, hungry, lonesome, and afraid, she laid her dirty face against the baby's fuzzy head and they sobbed together in undisturbed misery.
When at last the child fell into a restless sleep, Nance sat patiently on, her small arms stiffening under their burden, and her bare feet and legs smarting from the stings of hungry mosquitos.
By and by the limp garments on the clothes line overhead began to stir, and Nance, lifting her head gratefully to the vagrant breeze, caught her breath. There, just above the cathedral spire, white and cool among fleecy clouds, rose the full August moon. It was the same moon that at that moment was turning ocean waves into silver magic; that was smiling on sleeping forests and wind-swept mountains and dancing streams. Yet here it was actually taking the trouble to peep around the cathedral spire and send the full flood of its radiance into the most sordid corners of Calvary Alley, even into the unawakened soul of the dirty, ragged, tear-stained little girl clasping the sick baby on Snawdor's fire-escape.
[Illustration: "Her tense muscles relaxed; she forgot to cry"]
Something in Nance responded. Her tense muscles relaxed; she forgot to cry. With eyes grown big and wistful, she watched the shining orb. All the bravado, the fear, and rebellion died out of her, and in hushed wonder she got from the great white night what God in heaven meant for us to get.
While the prodigal son of the house of Clarke was engaged in breaking stained-glass windows in Calvary Alley, his mother was at home entertaining the bishop with a recital of his virtues and accomplishments. Considering the fact that Bishop Bland's dislike for children was notorious, he was bearing the present ordeal with unusual fortitude.
They were sitting on the spacious piazza at Hill-crest, the country home of the Clarkes, the massive foundation of which was popularly supposed to rest upon bottles. It was a piazza especially designed to offset the discomforts of a Southern August afternoon and to make a visitor, especially if he happened to be an ecclesiastical potentate with a taste for luxury, loath to forsake its pleasant shade for the glaring world without.
"Yes, yes," he agreed for the fourth time, "a very fine boy. I must say I give myself some credit for your marriage and its successful result."
Mrs. Clarke paused in her tea-pouring and gazed absently off across the tree tops.
"I suppose I ought to be happy," she said, and she sighed.
"Every heart knoweth its own—two lumps, thank you, and a dash of rum. I was saying—Oh, yes! I was about to remark that we are all prone to magnify our troubles. Now here you are, after all these years, still brooding over your unfortunate father, when he is probably long since returned to France, quite well and happy."
"If I could only be sure. It has been so long since we heard, nearly thirteen years! The last letter was the one you got when Mac was born."
"Yes, and I answered him in detail, assuring him of your complete recovery, and expressing my hope that he would never again burden you until with God's help he had mastered the sin that had been his undoing."
Mrs. Clarke shook her head impatiently.
"You and Macpherson never understood about father. He came to this country without a friend or a relation except mother and me. Then she died, and he worked day and night to keep me in a good boarding-school, and to give me every advantage that a girl could have. Then his health broke, and he couldn't sleep, and he began taking drugs. Oh, I don't see how anybody could blame him, after all he had been through!"
"For whatever sacrifices he made, he was amply rewarded," the bishop said. "Few fathers have the satisfaction of seeing their daughters more successfully established in life."
"Yes, but what has it all come to for him? Made to feel his disgrace, aware of Macpherson's constant disapproval—I don't wonder he chose to give me up entirely."
"It was much the best course for all concerned," said the bishop, with the assured tone of one who enjoys the full confidence of Providence. "The fact that he had made shipwreck of his own life was no reason for him to make shipwreck of yours. I remember saying those very words to him when he told me of Mr. Clarke's attitude. Painful as was your decision, you did quite right in yielding to our judgment in the matter and letting him go."
"But Macpherson ought not to have asked it of me. He's so good and kind and good about most things, that I don't see how he could have felt the way he did about father."
The bishop laid a consoling hand on her arm.
"Your husband was but protecting you and himself against untold annoyance. Think of what it would have meant for a man of Mr. Clarke's position to have a person of your father's habits a member of his household!"
"But father was perfectly gentle and harmless—more like an afflicted child than anything else. When he was without an engagement he would go for weeks at a time, happy with his books and his music, without breaking over at all."
"Ah, yes! But what about the influence of his example on your growing son? Imagine the humiliation to your child."
Mrs. Clarke's vulnerable spot was touched.
"I had forgotten Mac!" she said. "He must be my first consideration, mustn't he? I never intend for him to bear any burden that I can bear for him. And yet, how father would have adored him, how proud he would have been of his voice! But there, you must forgive me for bringing up this painful subject. It is only when I think of father getting old and being ill, possibly in want, with nobody in the world—"
"Now, now, my dear lady," said the bishop, "you are indulging in morbid fancies. Your father knows that with a stroke of the pen he can procure all the financial assistance from you he may desire. As to his being unhappy, I doubt it extremely. My recollection of him is of a very placid, amiable man living more in his dreams than in reality."
Mrs. Clarke smiled through her tears.
"You are quite right. He didn't ask much of life. A book in his hand and a child on his knee meant happiness for him."
"And those he can have wherever he is," said her spiritual adviser. "Now I want you to turn away from all these gloomy forebodings and leave the matter entirely in God's hands."
"And you think I have done my duty?"
"Assuredly. It is your poor father who has failed to do his. You are a model wife and an almost too devoted mother. You are zealous in your work at the cathedral; you—"
"There!" said Mrs. Clarke, smiling, "I know I don't deserve all those compliments, but they do help me. Now let's talk of something else while I give you a fresh cup of tea. Tell me what the board did yesterday about the foreign mission fund."
The bishop, relieved to see the conversation drifting into calmer waters, accepted the second cup and the change of topic with equal satisfaction. His specialty was ministering to the sorrows of the very rich, but he preferred to confine his spiritual visits to the early part of the afternoon, leaving the latter part free for tea-drinking and the ecclesiastical gossip so dear to his heart.
"Well," he said, leaning back luxuriously in his deep willow chair, "we carried our point after some difficulty. Too many of our good directors take refuge in the old excuse that charity should begin at home. It should, my dear Elise, but as I have said before, it should not end there!"
Having delivered himself of this original observation, the bishop helped himself to another sandwich.
"The special object of my present visit," he said, "aside from the pleasure it always gives me to be in your delightful home, is to interest you and your good husband in a mission we are starting in Mukden, a most ungodly place, I fear, in Manchuria. A thousand dollars from Mr. Clarke at this time would be most acceptable, and I shall leave it to you, my dear lady, to put the matter before him, with all the tact and persuasion for which you are so justly noted."
Mrs. Clarke smiled wearily.
"I will do what I can, Bishop. But I hate to burden him with one more demand. Since he has bought these two new factories, he is simply worked to death. I get so cross with all the unreasonable demands the employees make on him. They are never satisfied. The more he yields, the more they demand. It's begging letters, petitions, lawsuits, strikes, until he is driven almost crazy."
The whirr of an approaching motor caused them both to look up. A grizzled man of fifty got out and, after a decisive order to the chauffeur, turned to join them. His movements were quick and nervous, and his eyes restless under their shaggy gray brows.
"Where's the boy?" was his first query after the greetings were over.
"He went to choir practice. I thought surely he would come out with you.
Hadn't we better send the machine back for him?"
"We were just speaking of that fine lad of yours," said the bishop, helping himself to yet another sandwich. "Fine eyes, frank, engaging manner! I suppose he is too young yet for you to be considering his future calling?"
"Indeed he isn't!" said Mrs. Clarke. "My heart is set on the law. Two of his Clarke grandfathers have been on the bench."
Mr. Clarke smiled somewhat grimly.
"Mac hasn't evinced any burning ambition in any direction as yet."
"Mac is only thirteen," said Mrs. Clarke with dignity; "all of his teachers will tell you that he is wonderfully bright, but that he lacks application. I think it is entirely their fault. They don't make the lessons sufficiently interesting; they don't hold his attention. He has been at three private schools, and they were all wretched. You know I am thinking of trying a tutor this year."
"I want her to send him to the public schools," Mr. Clarke said with the air of detached paternity peculiar to American fathers. "I went to the public schools. They gave me a decent start in life; that's about all you can expect of a school."
"True, true," said the bishop, his elbows on the arms of his chair, and his fingers tapping each other meditatively. "I am the last person to minimize the value of the public schools, but they were primarily designed, Mr. Clarke, neither for your boy, nor mine. Their rules and regulations were designed expressly for the children of the poor. I was speaking on this subject only yesterday to Mrs. Conningsby Lee. She's very indignant because her child was forced to submit to vaccination at the hands of some unknown young physician appointed by the city.
"I should feel like killing any one who vaccinated Mac without my consent!" exclaimed Mrs. Clarke, "but I needn't worry. He wouldn't allow it. Do you know we have never been able to persuade that child to be vaccinated?"
"And you don't propose for the State to do what you can't do, do you?"
Mr. Clarke said, pinching her cheek.
"What Mrs. Clarke says is not without weight," said the bishop, gallantly coming to her rescue. "There are few things upon which I wax more indignant than the increasing interference of the State with the home. This hysterical agitation against child labor, for instance; while warranted in exceptional cases, it is in the main destructive of the formation of the habit of industry which cannot be acquired too young. When the State presumes to teach a mother how to feed her child, when and where to educate it, when and where to send it to work, the State goes too far. There is nothing more dangerous to the family than the present paternalistic and pauperizing trend of legislation."
"I wish you would preach that to the factory inspectors," said Mr. Clarke, with a wry smile. "Between the poor mothers who are constantly trying to get the children into the factory, and the inspectors who are trying to keep them out, I have my hands full."
"A mother's love," said the bishop, who evidently had different rules for mothers and fathers, "a mother's intuition is the most unerring guide for the conduct of her child; and the home, however humble, is its safest refuge."
Mrs. Clarke glanced anxiously down the poplar-bordered driveway. Her mother's intuition suggested that as it was now five-thirty, Mac must have been engaged in some more diverting pastime than praising the Lord with psalms and thanksgiving.
"Your theory then, Bishop," said Mr. Clarke, who was evincing an unusual interest in the subject, "carried to its legitimate conclusion, would do away with all state interference? No compulsory education or child-labor laws, or houses of correction?"
"Oh, I don't think the bishop means that at all!" said Mrs. Clarke. "But he is perfectly right about a mother knowing what is best for her child. Take Mac, for instance. Nobody has ever understood him, but me. What other people call wilfulness is really sensitiveness. He can't bear to be criticized, he—"
The sudden appearance of a limping object skirting the bushes caused her to break off abruptly.
"Who on earth is that over there beyond the fountain?" she asked. "Why, upon my word, it's Mac!—Mac!" she called anxiously. "Come here!"
The boy shamefacedly retraced his steps and presented himself on the piazza. His shoes and stockings were covered with mud; the frills on his shirt were torn and dirty; one eye was closed.
"Why, my darling child!" cried his mother, her listless, detached air giving place to one of acute concern, "you've been in an accident!"
She had flown to him and enveloped him, mud and all, in her gauzy embrace—an embrace from which Mac struggled to escape.
"I'm all right," he insisted impatiently. "Those kids back of the cathedral got to bothering us, and we—"
"You mean those rowdies in the alley of whom Mason is always complaining?" demanded the bishop, sternly.
"Yes, sir. They were throwing rocks and stepping on the new walk—"
"And you were helping the janitor keep them out?" broke in Mrs. Clarke. "Isn't it an outrage, Bishop, that these children can't go to their choir practice without being attacked by those dreadful ruffians?"
"You are quite sure you boys weren't to blame?" asked Mr. Clarke.
"Now, Father!" protested his wife, "how can you? When Mac has just told us he was helping the janitor?"
"It is no new thing, Mr. Clarke," said the bishop, solemnly shaking his head. "We have had to contend with that disreputable element back of us for years. On two occasions I have had to complain to the city authorities. A very bad neighborhood, I am told, very bad indeed."
"But, Mac dearest," pursued his mother anxiously as she tried to brush the dried mud out of his hair. "Were you the only boy who stayed to help Mason keep them out?"
Mac jerked his head away irritably.
"Oh! It wasn't that way, Mother. You see—"
"That's Mac all over," cried Mrs. Clarke. "He wouldn't claim any credit for the world. But look at the poor child's hands! Look at his eye! We must take some action at once. Can't we swear out a warrant or something against those hoodlums, and have them locked up?"
"But, Elise," suggested Mr. Clarke, quizzically, "haven't you and the bishop just been arguing that the State ought not to interfere with a child? That the family ties, the mother's guidance—"
"My dear Mr. Clarke," interrupted the bishop, "this, I assure you, is an exceptional case. These young desperados are destroying property; they are lawbreakers, many of them doubtless, incipient criminals. Mrs. Clarke is quite right; some action must be taken, has probably been taken already. The janitor had instructions to swear out a warrant against the next offender who in any way defaced the property belonging to the cathedral."
It was at this critical point that the telephone rang, and a maid appeared to say that Mr. Clarke was wanted. The bishop took advantage of the interruption to order his carriage and make his adieus.
"You may be assured," he said at parting, "that I shall not allow this matter to rest until the offenders are brought to justice. Good-by, good-by, my little man. Bear in mind, my dear Elise, that Mukden matter. Good-by."
"And now, you poor darling!" said Mrs. Clarke in a relieved tone, as she turned her undivided attention on her abused son, "you shall have a nice hot bath and a compress on the poor eye, and whatever you want for your dinner. You are as white as a sheet, and still trembling! You poor lamb!"
Mr. Clarke met them at the drawing-room door:
"Mac!" he demanded, and his face was stern, "did you have anything to do with the breaking of the big window at the cathedral?"
"No, sir," Mac faltered, kicking at the newel post.
"You didn't even know it was broken?"
"Oh, everybody was throwing rocks, and that old, crazy Mason—"
"But I thought you were helping Mason?"