A Cry in the Wilderness

III

Do you who are reading these life-lines know what it is to be alone in a world none too mindful of anyone, even if he be somebody? Never to experience after the day's work the rest and joy of home-coming to one's own?

Do you know what it is to acknowledge no tie of blood that binds one life to another and makes for a common interest in joy or sorrow? To ask yourself: Do I belong here? To wonder, perhaps, why, in fact, you are here? To feel your isolation in a crowded thoroughfare, your remoteness in the midst of an alien family life? To feel, in truth, a stranger on this earth?

If you have known this, if you have experienced this, or, even if, at times, you have been only dimly conscious of this for another, then you will understand these my life-lines, and it may be they will interpret something of yourself to yourself.

Delia Beaseley walked with me as far as the Bowery. There I insisted on her leaving me. I assured her I was used to the streets of New York in the evening. However, she waited with me for the car.

When I said good night to the woman, who twenty-six years ago saved another woman, "one who had missed her footing",—those words seem to ring constantly in my ears,—in order that I, Marcia Farrell, that stranger's child, might become the living fact I am, I began to realize that during the last hour I had been acting a part, and acting it well; that, without sacrificing the truth at any stage of the evening's developments, I had been able to obtain all this information, which pointed to a crisis in my life, yet had given but little return in kind. I felt justified in withholding it.

Now, as soon as I had left her and entered the car, there was a reaction from the intensity of my emotion. I felt a strange elation of spirit, a rising courage to face the new conditions in that other country, and a consequent physical recuperation. The lassitude that had burdened me since my long illness seemed to have left me. My mind was alert. I felt I had been able to take advantage of a promising circumstance and, in so doing, the mental inertia from which I had been suffering for three months was overcome.

Without being able to find any special reason for it, my life began to assume importance in my thoughts. I suppose this is the normal condition of youth; only, I never felt that I had had much youth. With the thought of this new future, unknown, untried as it was, opening before me, I experienced an unaccountable security, an unwonted serenity of existence. All these thoughts and feelings crowded upon me as I rode up through the noisy Bowery.

All my life hitherto had been undefined to me on the side of expansion; only its limitations impressed me as being ever present, sharply outlined, hedging me in with memories that gave no scope for anticipation. Sometimes it seemed to me as if I had always been old; the seven years in New York, my daily encounter with metropolitan life and its problem of "keep" had intensified this feeling.

When I came down to the city to look for work I was nearly twenty. I had left what to me was a makeshift for a home—and I regretted nothing. I had done my whole duty there in caring for my grandfather, imbecile for years, and my aunt, the last of my family, until they died. Then I was free.

After paying all the debts, I found I had just thirty dollars of my own. With these I started for the city. On my arrival this amount was diminished by nine.

At twenty I was facing life for the first time alone, unfriended, in new conditions; poor, too, but that I had always been. I knew that money must be had somehow, must be forthcoming in a few days at most. But at that time my spirit was indomitable, my courage high. I was my own mistress; and my only feeling, as I sat in the Grand Central Station on that morning of my arrival, reading through the various columns of "wants" in the early newspapers, was that I had escaped, at last, from all associations that were hateful to me.

I was thinking of all this as the car passed with frequent haltings along the noisy Bowery, and of that first experience of this city: its need-driven herds of human beings, the thoroughfares crowded with traffic, its nightmare crossings, the clank and deafening roar of the overhead railroad, when, suddenly, mingled with the steam rising from the pavements, that were cooling rapidly after the recent shower, I smelt the acrid heaviness of fresh printer's ink. That smell visualized for me the column of leaded "Wants," the dismal waiting-room, the uncompromising daylight that spared no wrinkle, no paint, no moth-spot on the indifferent faces about me. That was nearly seven years ago—and now—

I found I was at Union Square, and got out; walked a block to Broadway and waited on the corner for an uptown car. During that minute of waiting, a woman spoke to me:

"If I take a car here can I get up to West Sixty-first street?"

"Yes." My answer was short and sharp. I had heard the kind of question put in that oily voice too many times to pay any further heed to it. I stepped out into the street to take the car.

"If you 're going up that way I might as well go 'long too. I like comp'ny," said the woman, keeping abreast of me and nudging me with an elbow.

The car was nearly full, and the crowd waiting for it made a running assault upon the few vacancies. Just before it stopped I saw some one leave the seat behind the motor-man; I made a rush to secure the place. As I sat down the woman mounted the step.

"You don't get rid of me so easy, duckie," she said with a leer.

I turned squarely to her, looking beneath the wide brim of the tawdry bedraggled hat to find her eyes; her gin-laden breath was hot on my cheek.

"You go your way and I 'll go mine," I said in a low hard voice.

With a curse the woman swung off the step just as the two signal bells rang.

I took off my hat. The night was cooling rapidly after the tempest. The motion of the car created a movement of air against my face. It was grateful to me. I drew a long breath of relief; these evening rides in the open cars were one of my few recreations.

As the car sped along the broad thoroughfare, now so long familiar to me, so wonderful and alluring to my country eyes in those early years, so drearily artificial and depressing in the later ones, I found myself dwelling again on that first experience in this city; I recalled the first time I was accosted by a woman pander. It was when I was reading the wants that morning of my arrival. I looked up to find her taking a seat beside me—a woman who tried by every dives' art of which she was possessed to entice me to go with her on leaving the station. Oh, she was awful, that woman! I never knew there were such till then.

The searchlight of memory struck full upon my thought at that time: And they said my mother was like this!

That thought, horrible as it was to me, was my safeguard then and has been ever since. Such as they said my mother was, I would never be. Nor am I aware that any moral factor was the lever in this decision. Rather it was my pride that had been scourged for many years by a girl's half knowledge of her mother's career, my sensitiveness that was ever ready at the least outside touch to make me close in upon myself, the horror of thinking it might be possible that my name could be used as I had heard my mother's, that had panoplied my nature and warped it until that nature had narrowed to its armor. I was proud, sensitive, cold, or thought I was—and I was glad of it.

It had come to a point, at last, now when I was nearly twenty-six, that in what I termed my strength, lay my weakness. But of this I was, as yet, unaware.

I shut my eyes as the car sped onwards that I might not see the swift succession of glaring lights—the many flashing, changing, nerve-tormenting electric signs and advertisements, the brilliant globes, stars, and whirligigs of all kinds. How they tired me now! And the summer theatre throngs streaming in under the entrance arches picked out in glowing red and white, the saloons flashing a well-known signal to customers—I knew it all and was glad to close my eyes to it all. Now and then I caught a strain of music from the orchestra of some roof-garden.

At Seventy-second Street I changed for Amsterdam Avenue. I wanted to get away to the heights. The air was becoming fresher and I needed more of it. Another twenty minutes and the car stopped near the brow of the hill. I left it and walked a cross block till I came to Morningside Heights, the small, irregular, but beautiful promenade behind St. Luke's.

I leaned on the massive stone coping that crowns the wall of the escarpment; below me the hill sloped sharply to the flats of the Harlem. I looked off over the city.

East, and north-east in the direction of the Sound, great cloud masses, the wrack of the tempest, were piled high towards the zenith; but beneath them there was a clear zone near the city's level. A moon nearly two thirds to the full, was heralding its appearance above them by lighted rifts, bright-rimmed haloes, and the marvellous play of direct shaft light that struck downwards behind the clouds into the clear space above the city and shot white radiance upon its roofs. The sky, also, while yet the moon was invisible, was radiant, but with starlight.

Against this background, I watched the glow-worm lights of the elevated trains winding along the high invisible trestle-work. Beneath me lay Morningside Park, the foliage and its shadows blackened in masses beneath the glaring white of the arc-lights; and beyond, in seemingly interminable perspective, the long converging lines of parallel street lights led my gaze across the city to some large, unknown, uncertain flarings somewhere near the East River shore.

And from all this wide-stretching housing-place of a vast population, there rose into my ears a continuous, dull, peculiar sound, as of the magnified stertorous breathing of a hived and stifled humanity.

I had come here many times in the last four years, at all seasons, at all times. I drew strength and inspiration from this view in all its aspects, until my almost fatal illness in the late spring. After that there came upon me a powerful longing for change. I wanted to get away from this city, its sights and sounds; to escape from the conditions that were sapping my life. And the way was, at last, opened. How I exulted in this thought!

There were others on the promenade, and I was withdrawn from thought of myself by hearing voices, a man's and a woman's, below me on the winding walk that leads down the slope past the poplars to the level of the Harlem streets. The woman's was pleading, strident from excitement; it broke at last in a dry hard sob. The man's was hateful; the tones and accents like a vicious snarl.

I turned away sickened, indignant.

"It's always so in this city!" I said to myself while I walked rapidly towards the hospital. "If I get a chance for a breath of fresh air, or if I take a walk in the park, or have an outlook that, for a moment, is free from all suggestions of crime and horror—then beware! For then I have to shut my ears not to hear the fatal sounds of human brutishness; or I hear a shot in the park, and a life goes out in some thick-foliaged path; or I have to turn away my eyes from a sight in the gutter that offends three of my senses—and so my day is ruined. It's merciless, merciless—and I loathe it!" I cried within myself as I passed the hospital.

I lifted my eyes to the massive purity of noble St. Luke's, the windows rising tier upon tier above me. A light showed here and there. At the sight my mood softened.

"Oh, I know it is merciful too—it is merciful," I murmured; then I stopped short and turned back to the entrance. I entered the main vestibule, mounted the marble steps that lead to the chapel, opened the noiseless heavily-padded doors, and sat down near the entrance.

The air was close and hot after the outer freshness; the lights few. The stained-glass window behind the altar was a meaningless confused mass of leaded opacity. I knew that the daylight was needed to ensoul it, to give to the dead unmeaning material its spiritual symbolism. And because I knew this, I realized, as I sat there, what a long distance in a certain direction I had travelled since that morning in the Grand Central Station, seven years ago.

But the air was very close. I felt depressed, disappointed, that the time and the place yielded me nothing. I was faint, too; I had taken nothing but the cocoa since noon. Without realizing it, another reaction from that strange elation of spirit was setting in. I knew I ought to be in the attic room in Chelsea rather than where I was. It was already nine, and an hour's ride before me on the surface car.

I went out to Amsterdam Avenue. No car was in sight. I walked on down the hill, knowing that one would soon overtake me.

A man and woman were just behind me talking—at least, the woman was. I recognized her voice as one of those I had heard on the winding path by the poplars. A moment after, they passed me in a noticeably peculiar fashion: the man sauntering by on my right, the woman hurrying past on my left. At the same moment I heard the car coming down the hill. I turned at once, but only to see the man, who had passed me, running swiftly along the pavement and up the hill to meet it; the woman was running after him.

I saw that the car was over full. The platform and steps were black with human beings clinging to the guard rails like swarming bees alight. I saw the man struggle madly to catch the guards and gain a footing on the lower step, the woman still running beside him and holding him by the coat. Then I was aware of a sudden sweeping movement of the man's free arm, the roar of the car as it sped down the incline, and of the woman lying, hatless from the force of the man's blow, on the pavement beside the track. He had freed himself so!

Before I could reach her the woman was up and off again, running hatless after the quickly receding car. Only one cry, no scream, escaped her.

I shivered. There was nothing to be done with such as these, no rescue possible. A sudden thought half paralyzed me; I stood motionless: Had my own mother ever been cast off like this? Had such treatment been the cause of her seeking the river? Had I, Marcia Farrell, been fathered by such a brute?

For the second time in my life, I felt my hardness of heart towards the mother I had never known soften with pity; a sob rose in my throat. I shook my shoulders as if freeing them from some nightmare clutch, and hurried to the next corner to meet the car that was following the other closely.

IV

I unlocked my attic room in the fourth storey of the old Chelsea house and lighted the lamp. In contrast to what both ear and eye had been witness during the evening: Delia Beaseley's account of my mother's rescue and death, and that scene of life's brutality on Columbia Heights, the sight of the small plain interior gave me, for the first time in all the seven years, a home-sense, a feeling of welcome and refuge.

I looked at the cretonne-covered cot, the packing boxes curtained with the same, the white painted hanging box-shelves, the one chair—a flour barrel, cut to the required form, well padded and upholstered; all these were the work of my hands in free hours. And I was about to exchange the known for the unknown! This thought added to my depression.

I put out the lamp and sat down by the one window. The night air was refreshingly cool. The many lights on the river gleamed clear; the roar in the streets was subdued. Gradually, my antagonism to the physical features of the metropolis, to its heedless crowds, its overpowering mechanism, its thoroughfares teeming with human beings who passed me daily, knowing little of their own existence and nothing of mine, its racial divergencies, grew less intense; in fact, the whole life of this city, in its aspect of mere Juggernaut, was being unconsciously modified for me as I realized I was about to go forth into a strange country.

I was recalling those ten weeks of mortal weakness and suffering at St. Luke's, the kindness of nurses and physicians. No matter if I had paid my way; theirs was a ready helpfulness, a steady administration of the tonic of human kindness that never could be bought and paid for in the Republic's money. I thought of Delia Beaseley and her noble work among those "who had missed their footing". I relived in imagination that rescue of my own mother, with all of the horror and all of the merciful pity it entailed. I found myself wondering if Doctor Rugvie would be able to lay his hand on those papers immediately after his arrival. I dwelt upon the many kindly advances from my co-workers in the Library; few of these women I had met, for I felt strangely old, apart from them, and the struggle to live and at the same time accomplish my purpose had been so hard. My landlady, too, came in for a share of my softening mood; exacting, but scrupulously honest, she had lodged under this same roof a generation of theological students, yet her best dress remained a rusty alpaca. I thought of the various types of students for the ministry—

I smiled at that thought, a smile that proved the latent youth in me was sufficiently appreciative, at least of that phase of life.

I left the window and, after closing the lower half of the inside shutters, partly undressed and relighted the lamp. Then I took two paper-covered blank books from my trunk. I sat down in my one easy chair of home manufacture and, resting my feet on the cot, began to read.