"'Oh, I can't tell,' he replied 'but it will be soon.'

"'Well,' I said, 'remember I shall be here only a few days. Alice will be back within the week. Come Wednesday evening.'

"But he left with the remark that it might not be possible! I did not care for him deeply, of course, it was only an adventure, but this stung me deeply. The light way he took what he wanted and then seemed to want to have no tie remaining! I felt as he did, too, really, but I did not want him to feel so! I imagined in what a self-satisfied mood he must be, how he walked off, with his lighted cigar! He probably wondered what sort of a girl this was who had given herself so easily? Partly, too, no doubt, he laid it to his charm and masculine virtue: though he knew women were weak creatures, he also knew that men were strong! Ah! I could almost hear him muse aloud, in my imagination. His reveries, perhaps, would run about like this:

"'I was rather lucky to happen along this evening! She was certainly worth while, though pretty weak, I must say. She had fine eyes and, by jove, what a mouth! She said, "Wednesday." I think I will go, though it is never good policy to let girls be too sure of you. Besides, how do I know she isn't playing me some game?'

"I didn't know as much then as I do now about man's nature, but now I make no doubt that as the time pa.s.sed between then and Wednesday Charles's desire grew: it began with indifference, but ended, I am sure, with intensity: for men are like that! Their fancy works in the absence, not in the presence, of the girl. I am sure the girl with the red lips and the deep dark eyes haunted him more and more as time went on!

"At the time, I didn't know just why, but I did know that I wanted nothing more of Charley. He had never been anything but a man to me--he was a moment in my life, that was all. But I decided to meet him, for only in that way could I really finish the affair. Otherwise, if I merely broke the engagement, he could imagine whatever he wanted to account for it. No, he must be under no illusion. He must know that I did not want him!

"I waited for him in front of the house, and on the appointed hour he arrived, looking very happy and eager. He greeted me with much warmth, to which I responded coldly. He suggested going inside, but I said: 'No, I am going away. I have been waiting here to tell you so, in case you came to-night.'

"'But,' he exclaimed in an aggrieved tone, 'Did not you ask me to come, and now you say you are going away. Is that fair to me?'

"I shrugged my shoulders and said, 'I don't know, but I'm going.

Good-bye,' and I turned from him and started to walk away. His tone changed to anger, as he said: 'Now, see here, Marie, I won't stand for any nonsense of this kind. You can't treat me like this, you know. What right have you to act in this lying way?'

"I had been walking away and he following, and as he stopped talking, he took my arm, which I jerked away and impatiently said: 'Well, to be frank, I don't want you to-night. Whether I have a right to act so, I don't know or care. Why I asked you to come I don't know, unless it was because I felt different from what I do now.'

"Charles adopted a more conciliating tone and asked me when he might come. His interest in me seemed to grow with my resistance.

"'I guess you'd better not come at all,' I said, coolly.

"'But I want to,' he said. 'Do name the night, any night you say.'

"Then I turned to him with angry eyes, and cried out, 'Oh, how stupid you are! Don't you understand that I don't want you at all?'

"I again started to walk away, but he seized my arm and shouted angrily: 'You cannot leave me like this without explaining some things to me. In the first place, why did you pull me on last Sat.u.r.day night, and who are you to turn me down like this?' I answered, with flashing eyes, 'I owe you no explanation, but I will answer your questions. As to who the girl is who can dare to turn you down, you know very well she is not what you think, or you wouldn't so much object to being turned down, as you call it. As to pulling you on, you were the first to speak or, at any rate, it was mutual, so you need not demand any explanation. What you really want to know is why I don't want you now. If I were a man like you, I suppose I should never even think of explaining to anyone why I happened to change in feeling toward some persons, but as I'm a woman, it's different. I must explain!'

"This speech I have no doubt made him angry, but his pride came to the rescue and he said with a show of indifference: 'I was angry, it is true, but only for a moment. It was irritating to me to have a girl like you show the nerve to throw me down; for I'm not accustomed to a.s.sociate with your sort.'

"At this insolence my face flushed hotly and I opened my mouth to make some indignant reply, but I thought better of it and only walked away, laughing softly to myself. As I went away, I heard him mutter, 'What a cat.'

"But, I imagine, he didn't forget me so easily. I have no doubt that the girl with the red lips and deep dark eyes haunted him for a long time.

Who was this girl who had given herself to him once and only once? It is this kind of a mystery that makes a man dream and dream and curse himself.

"Probably for some time, as he joined the crowd at State and Madison Streets, he hoped to see me as I pa.s.sed, but all things come to an end and his pa.s.sion for me did, no doubt, too. But, in the routine course of his club life, moments came, perhaps, when he thought of little Marie, her red lips, deep eyes, and pale, pale face. I doubt if he ever told this story to any of his boon companions."

CHAPTER V

_Marie's Salvation_

On account of the irregularity of her life, Marie lost job after job.

Her relations with her mother, never good, grew worse and worse. Her profound need of experience, in which the demand of the senses and the curiosity of the mind were equally represented, impelled her to act after act of recklessness and abandon. But, as in almost all, perhaps all, human beings, there was in her soul a need of justification--of social justification, no matter how few persons const.i.tuted the approving group.

The feeling that everybody was against her, that she was on the road to being what the world calls an outcast, gave to her life an element of sullenness and of despair. Perhaps this added depth to her dissipation, but it took away from it all quality of joy as well as of peace. If her sensuality and her despair had been all there was in her, or if these had const.i.tuted her main characteristics, this story would never have been written. Perhaps another tale might have been told, but it would have been the story of a submerged cla.s.s, not prost.i.tutes, white slaves; and then it would have been the story of a submerged cla.s.s, not of an individual temperament.

What was it that kept Marie in all really essential ways out of this cla.s.s of social victims? It was because, in the first place, of the fact that her nature demanded something better than what the life of the prost.i.tute afforded. And it was natural that the greater quality of personality that she possessed should attract the kind of love and social support needed essentially to justify to herself her instincts.

When she was very young Marie secured the genuine love of two strong and remarkable personalities; and at a later time, there gathered about these three, other people who enlarged the group, which gave to each member of it the social support needed to remove essential despair and desperate self-disapproval.

One of these two persons so necessary to Marie's larger life was a woman whom she had met several years previous to this point in the story.

This woman was a cook, Katie by name. She was born in Germany, and her young girlhood was spent in the old country. She had only a rudimentary education, and even now speaks broken English. But she was endowed with a healthy, independent nature, a spontaneous wit, and a strong demand to take care of something and to love.

As natural as a young dog, she never thought of resisting a normal impulse. Her life as a girl in Germany was as free and untrammelled as a happy breeze. She lived in a little garrison town in the South, and the German soldiers did no essential harm to her and the other young girls of the place. These things were deemed laws of nature in her community.

What would have been dreadful harm to a young American girl was only an occasional moment of anxiety to her. It never occurred to her that it was possible to resist a man. "I had to," she said, very simply, and did not seem to regret it any more than that she was compelled to eat. She is also very fond of her food.

She came to America and worked as cook in private families. She was capable and strong and was never out of a job. She never took any "sa.s.s" from her mistress; in this respect she was quite up to date among American "help."

At the time she first met Marie she had been working for a family several years, and had reduced her employer to a state of wholesome awe.

She remained, like a queen, in the kitchen, whence she banished all objectionable intruders. Her mistress had a married daughter, also living in the house, who at first was wont to give orders to Katie, and to interfere with her generally. One day Katie drove her out of the kitchen with a volley of broken English. The daughter complained to the mother, who took Katie's side. "You don't belong in the kitchen," she said to her indignant daughter.

This episode filled Katie with contempt for her mistress.

"She ought to have taken her daughter's side against me," she said, "you bet I would have, if I had been in her place."

The daughter had two young children. It was to take care of them that Marie came into the household. Marie's mistress liked to stay in bed and read novels, and this experience is the one described by Marie in an earlier chapter, how she locked herself and the children in the store-room and read her mistress's books.

Katie fell in love with Marie almost at once. She was fifteen years older than the young girl and as she had never had any children, all the instinctive love of an unusually instinctive nature seemed to be given to Marie. She saw that Marie was not practical or energetic, and this probably intensified the interest felt by the more active and capable woman. She took the young girl under her wing, and has been, and is, as entirely devoted to her as mothers sometimes are to their children.

The German cook was about thirty years old at that time and had never loved a man, though she had had plenty of temporary and merely instinctive relations with the other s.e.x. So it was her entire capacity for love, maternal and other, that she gave to Marie.

Almost at once Katie began to treat Marie as her ward. She took her side against her mistress, when the latter scolded the girl on account of her indolence or slowness. "Marie is so young," she would say, "almost a child; and we ought to go easy on her." She also looked after Marie's morals and tried to prevent her being out late at night. This kind of care had its amusing side, as Katie herself was none too strict about herself in this regard.

For instance, Katie fancied the butcher's boy who used to come to the kitchen every day with meat. He was only sixteen, and quite inexperienced in the ways of the world.

"I did him no harm," said Katie. "But I taught him everything there was to know. My life was so monotonous and I worked so hard then that I had to have him. I absolutely had to, but I think I did him no harm and he was certainly my salvation. But I didn't let Marie know anything about it. She was too young. When she found out, years afterwards, she was quite cross with me about it."

This kind of relation existed between Katie and Marie for several years.

About the time the girl went to Kenilworth and had her idyllic experience, Katie married. Nick was a good sort of a man, easy and happy, and a sober and constant labourer. Katie had saved some money, in her careful German way, had even a bank-account of several hundred dollars. It was not an exciting marriage; neither of them was very young or very much in love, at least Katie was not, but it was a good marriage of convenience, so to speak, and it might have lasted if it had not been, as we shall see, for Marie, and Katie's affection for her.

When Marie started in on her career of wildness, Katie and Nick, her husband, had a little home together. Into this home Marie was always welcomed by Katie, but Nick was not so cordial. They knew about the girl's looseness, and in their tolerant Southern German way, they did not so much mind that, and Katie was distinctly sympathetic: Marie was old enough now, she thought. But Nick did not like the hold the girl had on Katie's affection.

"You'll leave me for her, sometime," he would say to his wife, ominously. Katie would laugh and call him an old fool. She couldn't foresee the circ.u.mstances that would one day realise her husband's fears.

It was about this time that Marie met the man who has influenced her more deeply than anyone else or anything else in her life, who gave her a social philosophy, though to be sure what would seem to most people a thoroughly perverse and subversive social philosophy; but by means of which she had a social background, and a saving justification--was saved from being a mere outcast.

Terry, at the time he and Marie met, was about thirty-five years old and an accomplished and confirmed social rebel. He had worked for many years at his trade, and was an expert tanner. But, deeply sensitive to the injustice of organised society, he had quit work and had become what he called an anarchist. His character was at that time quite formed, while the young girl's was not. It was he who was to be the most important factor in the conscious part of her education. But to explain his influence on Marie, it is necessary to explain him,--his character, and a part of his previous history.

CHAPTER VI