The Island of Faith Part 3

"I love Lily," he told her. "I wouldn't let n.o.body touch Lily! If Pa so much as spoke mean to her--I'd kill him. I'd kill him with a knife!"

Rose-Marie shuddered inwardly at the thought. But her voice was very even as she spoke.

"Who is Lily?" she asked.

The boy had slid down along the bench. He was so close to her that his shabby coat sleeve touched her blue one.

"Lily's my kid sister," he said, and, miracle of miracles, his voice held a note of tenderness. "Say--Miss, I'm sorry I hurt th' cat."

With a sudden feeling of warmth Rose-Marie moved just a fraction of an inch closer to the boy. She knew, somehow, that his small, curiously abject apology was in a way related to the "kid sister"; she knew, almost instinctively, that this Lily who could make a smile come to the dark little face, who could make a tenderness dwell in those hard young eyes, was the only avenue by which she could reach this strange child. She spoke to him suddenly, impulsively.

"I'd like to see your Lily; I'd like to see her, awfully," she told him. "Will you bring her some time to call on me? I live at the Settlement House."

A subtle change had come over the child's face. He slid, hurriedly, from the bench.

"Oh," he said, "yer one o' them! You sing hymns 'n' pray 'n' tell folks t' take baths. I know. Well, I can't bring Lily t' see you--not ever!"

Rose-Marie had also risen to her feet.

"Then," she said eagerly, "let me come and see Lily. Where do you live?"

The boy's eyes had fallen. It was plain that he did not want to answer--that he was experiencing the almost inarticulate embarra.s.sment of childhood.

"We live," he told her at last, "in that house over there." His pointing finger indicated the largest and grimiest of the tenements that loomed, dark and high, above the squalor of a side street. "But you wouldn't wanter come--there!"

Rose-Marie caught her breath sharply. She was remembering how the Superintendent had forbidden her to do visiting, how the Young Doctor had laughed at her desire to be of service. She knew what they would say if she told them that she was going into a tenement to see a strange child named Lily. Perhaps that was why her voice had an excited ring as she answered.

"Yes, I would come there!" she told the boy. "Tell me what floor you live on, and what your name is, and when it would be best for me to come?"

"My name's Bennie Volsky," the boy said slowly. "We're up five flights, in th' back. D'yer really mean that you'll come--an' see Lily?"

Rose-Marie nodded soberly. How could the child know that her heart was all athrob with the call of a great adventure?

"Yes, I mean it," she told him. "When shall I come?"

The boy's grubby hand shot out and rested upon her sleeve.

"Come to-morrow afternoon," he told her. "Say, yer all right!" He turned, swiftly, and ran through the crowd, and in a moment had disappeared like a small drab-coloured city chameleon.

Rose-Marie, standing by the bench, watched the place where he had disappeared. And then, all at once, she turned swiftly--just as swiftly as the boy had--and started back across the park toward the Settlement House.

"I won't tell them!" she was saying over and over in her heart, as she went, "I won't tell them! They wouldn't let me go, if I did.... I won't tell them!"

The kitten was still held tight in her arms. It rested, quite contentedly, against her blue coat. Perhaps it knew that there was a warm, friendly place--even for little frightened animals--in the Settlement House.

VI

"THERE'S NO PLACE--"

When Rose-Marie paused in front of the tenement, at three o'clock on the following afternoon, she felt like a naughty little girl who is playing truant from school. When she remembered the way that she had avoided the Superintendent's almost direct questions, she blushed with an inward sense of shame. But when she thought of the Young Doctor's offer to go with her--"wherever she was going"--she threw back her head with a defiant little gesture. She knew well that the Young Doctor was sorry for yesterday's quarrel--she knew that a night beside the dying Mrs. Celleni, and the wails of the Cohen baby, had temporarily softened his viewpoint upon life. And yet--he had said that they were soulless--these people that she had come to help! He would have condemned Bennie Volsky from the first--but she had detected the glimmerings of something fine in the child! No--despite his more tolerant att.i.tude--she knew that, underneath, his convictions were unchanged. She was glad that she had gone out upon her adventure alone.

With a heart that throbbed in quick staccato beats, she mounted the steps of the tenement. Little dark-eyed children moved away from her, apparently on every side, but somehow she scarcely noticed them. The doorway yawned, like an open mouth, in front of her--and she could think of nothing else. As she went over the dark threshold she remembered stories that she had read about people who go in at tenement doorways and are never seen again. Every one has read such stories in the daily newspapers--and perhaps some of them are true!

A faint light flickered in through the doorway. It made the ascent of the first flight of creaking stairs quite easy. At least Rose-Marie could step aside from the piles of rubbish and avoid the rickety places. She wondered, as she went up, her fingers gingerly touching the dirty hand-rail, how people could exist under such wretched conditions.

The second flight was harder to manage. The light from the narrow doorway was shut off, and there were no windows. There might have been gas jets upon every landing--Rose-Marie supposed that there were--but it was mid-afternoon, and they had not yet been lighted. She groped her way up the second flight, and the third, feeling carefully along each step with her foot before she put her weight upon it.

On the fourth flight she paused for a moment to catch her breath. But she realized, as she paused, that even breathing had to be done under difficulties in this place. There was no ventilation of any sort, so far as she could tell--all about her floated the odours of boiled cabbage, and fried onions, and garlic. And there were other odours, too; the indescribable smells of soiled clothing and soap-suds and greasy dishes.

But in Rose-Marie's mind, the odours--poignant though they were--took second place to the sounds. Never, she told herself, had she imagined that so many different sorts of noises could exist in the same place at one and the same time. There were the cries and sobs of little children, the moans of sickness, the thuds of falling furniture and the crashes of breaking crockery. There were yells of rage, and--worst of all--bursts of appalling profanity. Rose-Marie, standing there in the darkness of the fourth flight, heard words that she had never expected to hear--phrases of which she had never dreamed. She shuddered as she started up the fifth flight, and when, at last, she stood in front of the Volsky flat, she experienced almost a feeling of relief. At least she would be shut off, in a moment, from those alien and terrible sounds--at least, in a moment, she would be in a _home_.

To most of us--particularly if we have grown up in an atmosphere such as had always sheltered Rose-Marie--the very sound of the word "home" brings a certain sense of warmth and comfort. Home stands for shelter and protection and love. "Be it ever so humble," the old song tells us, "be it ever so humble ..."

And Rose-Marie, knocking timidly upon the Volsky door, expected to find a home. She expected it to be humble in the truest sense of the word--to be ragged and poverty-stricken and mean. And yet she could not feel that it would be utterly divorced from the ideals she had always built around her conception of the word. She expected it to be a home because a family lived there together--a mother, and a father, and children.

In answer to her knock the door swung open--a little way. The glow of a dingy lamp fell about her, through the opening--she felt suddenly as if she had been swept, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, before the footlights of some hostile stage. For a moment she stood blinking. And as she stood there, quite unable to see, she heard the voice of Bennie Volsky, speaking in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

"It's you, Miss!" said the voice, and it was as full of intense wonderment as a voice could be. "I never thought that you'd come--I didn't think you was on th' level. So many folks say they'll do things--"

he broke off, and then--"Walk in, quiet," he told her slowly. "Don't make any noise, if yer can help it! Pa's come home, all lit up. An' he's asleep, in th' corner! There'll be--" he broke off--"There'll be th'

d.i.c.kens t' pay, if Pa wakes up! But walk in, still-like. An' yer can see Ma an' all, an'--_Lily_!"

Rose-Marie, whose eyes had now become accustomed to the dim light, stepped past the boy and into the room. Her hand, in pa.s.sing, touched his arm lightly, for she knew that he was labouring under intense excitement.

She stepped into the room, on mousy-quiet feet--and then, with a quick gasp, drew back again.

Never, in her wildest dreams of poverty, had Rose-Marie supposed that squalor, such as she saw in the Volsky home, could exist. Never had she supposed that a family could live in such cramped, airless quarters.

Never had she thought that filth, such as she saw in the room, was possible. It all seemed, somehow, an unbelievably bad dream--a dream in which she was appearing, with startling realism. Her comfortable picture of a home was vanishing--vanishing as suddenly and completely as a soap bubble vanishes, if p.r.i.c.ked by a pin.

"Why--why, Bennie!" she began. But the child was not listening. He had darted from her side and was dragging forward, by one listless, work-coa.r.s.ened hand, a pallid, drooping woman.

"Dis is my ma," he told Rose-Marie. "She didn't know yer was comin'. I didn't tell her!"

It seemed to Rose-Marie that there was a scared sort of appeal in the woman's eyes as they travelled, slowly, over her face. But there was not even appeal in the tone of her voice--it was all a drab, colourless monotone.

"Whatcha come here fer?" she questioned. "Pa, he's home. If he should ter wake up--" She left the sentence unfinished.

Almost instinctively the eyes of Rose-Marie travelled past the figure of Mrs. Volsky. There was nothing in that figure to hold her gaze--it was so vague, so like a shadow of something that had been. She saw the few broken chairs, the half-filled wash tub, the dish-pan with its freight of soiled cups and plates. She saw the gas stove, with its battered coffee-pot, and a mattress or two piled high with dingy bedding. And, in one corner, she saw--with a new sense of horror--the reclining figure of Pa.

Pa was sleeping. Sleeping heavily, with his mouth open and his tousled head slipping to one side. One great hairy hand was clenched about an empty bottle--one huge foot, stockingless and half out of its shoe, was dragging limply off the heap of blankets that was his bed. A stubble of beard made his already dark face even more sinister, his tousled hair looked as if it had never known the refining influences of a comb or brush. As Rose-Marie stared at him, half fascinated, he turned--with a spasmodic, drunken movement--and flung one heavy arm above his head.

The room was not a large one. But, at that moment, it seemed appallingly s.p.a.cious to Rose-Marie. She turned, almost with a feeling of affection, toward Bennie. At least she had seen him before. And, as if he interpreted her feeling, Bennie spoke.

"We got two other rooms," he told her, "one that Ella an' Lily sleep in, an' one that Jim pays fer, his own self. Ma an' Pa an' me--we sleep _here_! Say, don't you be too scared o' Pa--he'll stay asleep fer a long time, now. He won't wake up unless he's shook. Will he, Ma?"

Mrs. Volsky nodded her head with a worn out, apathetic movement.