Elizabeth's head ached, too; it would be a relief to be delivered out of this atmosphere. But still the face of the young man pursued her. She could not follow the deliberations of the committee; she could think of nothing but that face. Where, she continually asked herself, had she seen it before? She sat by a window, and looked down into the street, preoccupied by the effort to identify it. She gave herself up to the pain of the process, as one does when trying to remember a name. Now and then she caught phrases of the sentences the women began, but seemed never able to finish:--"Oh, I hardly think that--" "As a class, of course--" "Oriental hangings would be best--" "Cheese-cloth looks cheap--" "Of course, flags--" "We could solicit the merchants--" "My husband was saying last night--"
But where had she seen that face before? Why should it pursue and worry her? What had she ever done? Finally, after two hours of the mighty effort and patience that are necessary to bring a number of minds to grasp a subject and agree even on the most insignificant detail, two hours in which thoughts hovered and flitted here and there, and could not find expression, when minds held back, and continually balked at the specific, the certain, the definite, and sought refuge from decision in the general and the abstract, the committee exhausted itself, and decided to adjourn. Then, although it had reached no conclusions whatever, the matron who presided smiled and said:
"Well, I feel that we're making progress."
"I don't feel as if we'd done much," some one else said. "And I can not come on Friday."
"Do you know, I really haven't got a single one of my Christmas presents yet."
"I have to give sixty-seven! Just think! What a burden it all is!"
Elizabeth dreaded the sight of that boy's face again, but it was growing late, the early winter twilight was expanding its gloom in the room.
She made haste, and walked swiftly through the outer office. The young man was no longer there. But though this was a relief, his face still followed her. Who could he be?
The air out of doors was grateful. It soothed her hot cheeks, and, though her head throbbed more violently for an instant from the exertion of coming down the steps, she drew in great drafts of the winter air with a comforting sense that it was cleansing her lungs of all that foul atmosphere of poverty she had been breathing for two days. She walked hurriedly to the corner, to wait for a car; beside her, St. Luke's, as with an effort, lifted its Gothic arches of gray stone into the dark sky; across the street the City Hall loomed, its windows bright with lights. The afternoon crowds were streaming by on the sidewalk, wagons and heavy trucks jolted and rumbled along the street; she saw the drivers of coal-wagons, the whites of their eyes flashing under the electric lights against faces black as negroes with the grime.
Politicians were coming from the City Hall; here and there, in and out of the crowd, newsboys darted, shouting "All 'bout the murder!" The shops were ablaze, their windows tricked out for the holidays; throngs of people hurried by, intent, preoccupied, selfish. As Elizabeth stood there, the constant stream of faces oppressed her with an intolerable gloom; the blazing electric lights, signs of theaters and restaurants, were mere mockeries of pleasure and comfort. And always the roar of the city. It was the hour when the roar became low and dull, a deep, ugly note of weariness and discontent was in it, the grumble of a city that was exhausted from its long day of confusion and wearing, complicated effort. On the City Hall corner, a man with the red-banded cap of the Salvation Army stood beside an iron kettle suspended beneath a tripod, swaying from side to side, stamping his huge feet in the cold, jangling a little hand-bell, and constantly crying in a bass voice:
"Remember the poor! Remember the poor!"
She recalled, suddenly, that the outcasts at the Charities invariably sneered whenever the Salvation Army was suggested, and she was impatient with this man in the cap with the red band, his enormous sandy mustache frozen into repulsive little icicles. Why must he add his din to this tired roar of the worn-out city?
Her car came presently, jerking along, stopping and starting again in the crowded street. The crowd sweeping by brushed her now and then, but suddenly she felt a more personal contact--some one had touched her.
She shrank; she shuddered with fear, then she ran out to her car.
Inside she began again that study of faces. She tried not to do so, but she seemed unable to shake off the habit--that face seemed always to be looking out at her from all other faces, white and sensitive, with the black mark on the neck where the coat collar had rubbed its color. And the eyes more and more reproached her, as if she had been responsible for the sadness that lay in them. The car whirred on, the conductor opened the door with monotonous regularity, and called out the interminable streets. The air in the car, overheated by the little coal-stove, took on the foul smell of the air at the Charities.
Elizabeth's head ached more and more, a sickness came over her. At last she reached the street which led across to Claybourne Avenue, and got off. She crossed the little triangular park. The air had suddenly taken on a new life, it was colder and clearer. The dampness it had held in suspense for days was leaving it. Looking between the black trunks of the trees in the park she saw the western sky, yellow and red where the sun had gone down; and she thought of her home, with its comfort and warmth and light, and the logs in the great fireplace in the library. She hastened on, soothed and reassured. In the sense of certain comfort she now confidently anticipated, she could get the poor out of her mind, and feel as she used to feel before they came to annoy her. The clouds were clearing, the sky took on the deep blue it shows at evening; one star began to sparkle frostily, and, just as peace was returning, that young man's face came back, and she remembered instantly, in a flash, that it was the face of Harry Graves.
XVI
Elizabeth was right; it was Harry Graves. Four weeks before he had been released from the penitentiary. On the day that he was permitted to go forth into the world again as a free man, the warden gave him a railroad ticket back to the city, a suit of prison-made clothes, a pair of prison-made brogans, and a shirt. These clothes were a disappointment and a chagrin to Graves. When he went into the prison, the fall before, he had an excellent suit of clothes and a new overcoat, and during the whole year he had looked forward to the pleasure he would experience in donning these again. He had felt a security in returning to the world well-habited and presentable. But one of the guards had noticed Graves's clothes when he entered the penitentiary and had stolen them, so that when he was released, Graves was forced to go back wearing a suit of the shoddy clothes one of the contractors manufactured in the prison, and sold to the state at a profit sufficient to repay him and to provide certain officials of the penitentiary with a good income as well. These clothes were of dull black. A detective could recognize them anywhere. Before Graves had reached the city, the collar had rubbed black against his neck.
Things, of course, had changed while he was in prison. His mother had died and he had no home to go to. Besides this, he had contracted tuberculosis in the penitentiary, as did many of the convicts unless they were men of exceptionally strong constitutions. Nevertheless Graves was glad to be free on any terms, and glad to be back in the city in which he had been born and reared. And yet, no sooner was he back than the fear of the city lay on him. He dreaded to meet men; he felt their eyes following him curiously. He knew that he presented an uncouth figure in those miserable clothes and the clumsy prison brogans.
Besides, he had so long walked in the lock-step that his gait was now constrained, awkward and unnatural; having been forbidden to speak for more than a year, and having spoken at all but surreptitiously, he found it impossible to approach men with his old frankness; having been compelled to keep his gaze on the ground, he could not look men in the eyes, and so he seemed to be a surly, taciturn creature with a hang-dog air.
During the three weeks Graves had been confined in jail, prior to his plea and sentence, he had thought over his misdeeds, recognized his mistakes and formed the most strenuous resolutions of betterment. He was determined, then, to live a better life; but as he could not live while in prison, but merely "do time," he was compelled, of course, to wait a year before he could begin life anew. During the eleven months he spent in the penitentiary he had tried to keep these resolutions fresh, strong and ever clear before him. This was a difficult thing to do, for his mind was weakened by the confinement, and his moral sense was constantly clouded by the examples that were placed before him. On Sundays, in the chapel, he heard the chaplain preach, but during the week the guards stole the comforts his mother sent to him before she died, the contractors and the prison officials were grafting and stealing from the state provisions, household furniture, liquors, wines, and every other sort of thing; one of the prison officials supplied his brother's drug store with medicines and surgical appliances from the prison hospital. Besides all this, the punishments he was compelled at times to witness--the water-cure, the paddle, the electric battery, the stringing up by the wrists, not to mention the loathsome practices of the convicts themselves--benumbed and appalled him, until he shuddered with terror lest his mind give way. But all these things, he felt, would be at an end if he could keep his reason and his health, and live to the end of his term. Then he could leave them all behind and go out into the world and begin life anew.
Graves came back to town during those last glorious days of the autumn, and the fact that he had no place to go was not so much a hardship. He did not care to show himself to his old friends until he had had opportunity to procure new clothes, and he felt that he was started on the way to this rehabilitation when almost immediately he found a place trucking merchandise for a wholesale house in Front Street. He felt encouraged; his luck, he told himself, was good, and for three days he was happy in his work. Then, one morning, he noticed a policeman; the policeman stood on the sidewalk, watching Graves roll barrels down the skids from a truck. The policeman stood there a good while, and then he spoke to the driver, admired the magnificent horses that were hitched to the truck, patted their glossy necks, picked up some sugar that had been spilled from a burst barrel and let the horses lick the sugar from the palm of his hand. The horses tossed their heads playfully as they did this, and, meanwhile, the policeman glanced every few minutes at Graves.
Presently, he went into the wholesale house, and through the window Graves saw him talking to the manager. That evening the manager paid Graves for his three days' work and discharged him.
On this money, four dollars and a half, Graves lived for a week, meanwhile hunting another job. He could do nothing except manual labor, for he was not properly clothed for any clerical employment. He walked along the entire river front, seeking work on the wharves as a stevedore, but no one could work there who was not a member of the Longshoremen's Union, and no one could be a member of the Longshoremen's Union who did not work there; so this plan failed. He visited employment bureaus, but these demanded fees and deposits. Graves read the want advertisements in the newspapers, but none of these availed him; each prospective employer demanded references which Graves could not give.
The snow-storm brought him a prosperity as fleeting as the snow itself; he went into the residence district--where as yet he had not had the heart to go because of memories that haunted it--and cleaned the sidewalks of the well-to-do. After a day or so, the sidewalks of the well-to-do were all cleaned,--that is, the sidewalks of those who respected the laws sufficiently to have their sidewalks cleaned. Then the rain came, and Graves tramped the slushy streets. His prison-made shoes were as pervious to water as paper, of which substance, indeed, they were made; he contracted a cold, and his cough grew rapidly worse.
He had no place to sleep. He spent a night in each of the two lodging-houses in the city, then he "flopped" on the floor of a police station. In this place he became infested with vermin, though this was no new experience to him after eleven months in the cells of the penitentiary. Meanwhile, he had little to eat. Once or twice, he visited hotel kitchens and the chefs gave him scraps from the table; then he did what for days he had been dreading--he tried to beg. After allowing twenty people to go by, he found the courage to hold out his hand to the twenty-first; the man passed without noticing him; a dozen others did likewise. Then a policeman saw him and arrested him on a charge of vagrancy. At the police station the officers, recognizing his prison clothes, held him for three days as a suspicious character. Then he was arraigned before Bostwick, who scowled and told him he would give him twenty-four hours in which to leave the city.
It was now cold. The wind cut through Graves's clothing like a saw; he skulked and hid for two days; then, intolerably hungry, he went to the Organized Charities. He sat there for two hours that afternoon, glad of the delay because the room was warm. He thought much during those two hours, though his thoughts were no longer clear. He was able, however, to recall a belief he had held before coming out of the penitentiary,--a belief that he had paid the penalty for his crime, that, having served the sentence society had imposed on him, his punishment was at an end.
This view had seemed to be confirmed by the certificate that had been issued to him, under the Great Seal of State and signed by the governor, restoring him to citizenship. But now he realized that this belief had been erroneous, that he had not at all paid the penalty, that he had not served his sentence, that his punishment was not at an end, and that he had not been restored to citizenship. The Great Seal of State had attested an hypocrisy and a lie, and the governor had signed his name to this lie with a conceited flourish at the end of his pen. Graves formulated this conclusion with an effort, but he grasped it finally, and his mind clung to it and revolved about it, finding something it could hold to.
And then, suddenly, Elizabeth Ward entered the room. He knew her instantly, and his heart leaped with a wild desperate hope. He watched her; she was beautiful in the seal-skin jacket that fitted her slender figure so well; her hat with its touch of green became her dark hair.
He noted the flush of her cheek, the sparkle of her eyes behind the veil. He remembered her as he had seen her that last day she came into her father's office; he remembered how heavy his own heart had been under its load of guilty fears. He recalled the affection her father had shown, how his tired face had smiled when he saw her. Graves remembered that the smile had filled him with a pity for Ward; he seemed once more to see Ward fondly take her little gloved hand and hold it while he looked up at her, and how he had laughed and evidently joked her as he swung about to his desk and wrote out a check. And then, as she went out, she had smiled at the clerks and spoken to them; she had smiled on him and spoken to him; would she smile now, this day? The hope leaped wild in his heart. If she did! She was the apple of her father's eye--he would do anything for her; if she would but see and recognize him now, give him the least hint of encouragement or permission, he would tell her, she would speak to her father and he would help him. His whole being seemed to melt within him--he half started from his chair--his eyes were wide with the excitement of this hope. He never once took them from her; he must not permit an instant to escape him, lest she look his way. He watched her as she sat by the window; she made a picture he never could forget. Once she turned. Ah!
it was coming now!--but no--yes, she was moving! She had gone into the other room. He hoped now that his case would be one of the last. He must see her. After a while the agent beckoned him, looked at him suspiciously, and said:
"How long have you been out?"
"A month," said Graves.
"Well, I haven't got no use for convicts," said the agent.
Graves waited in the hall. He waited until it was dark, but not so dark that the agent could not recognize him.
"You needn't hang around," he said; "there's nothing to steal here."
Graves waited, then, outside. He feared he would miss Elizabeth in the dark, or confuse her among the other women. The thought made him almost frantic. The women came out, and finally--yes, it was Elizabeth! He could nowhere mistake that figure. He pressed up, he spoke, he put forth a hand to touch her--she turned with a start of fright. He saw a policeman looking at him narrowly. And then he gave up, slunk off, and was lost in the crowd.
XVII
Seated in the library at the Wards', Eades gave himself up to the influences of the moment. The open fire gave off the faint delicious odor of burning wood, the lamp filled the room with a soft light that gleamed on the gilt lettering of the books about the walls, the pictures above the low shelves--a portrait of Browning among them--lent to the room the dignity of the great souls they portrayed. Eades, who had just tried his second murder case, was glad to find this refuge from the thoughts that had harassed him for a week. Elizabeth noticed the weariness in his eyes, and she had a notion that his hair glistened a little more grayly at his temples.
"You've been going through an ordeal this week, haven't you?" She had expressed the thought that lay on their minds. He felt a thrill. She sympathized, and this was comfort; this was what he wanted!
"It must have been exciting," Elizabeth continued. "Murder trials usually are, I believe. I never saw one; I never was in a court-room in my life. Women do go, I suppose?"
"Yes--women of a certain kind." His tone deprecated the practice.
"We've had big audiences all the week; it would have disgusted you to see them struggling and scrambling for admission. Now I suppose they'll be sending flowers to the wretch, and all that."
Eades chose to forget how entirely the crowd had sympathized with him, and how the atmosphere of the trial had been wholly against the wretch.
"Well, I'll promise not to send him any flowers," Elizabeth said quickly. "He'll have to hang?"
"No, not hang; we don't hang people in this state any more; we electrocute them. But I forgot; Gordon Marriott told me I mustn't say 'electrocute'; he says there is no such word."
"Gordon is particular," Elizabeth observed with a laugh.
Eades thought she laughed sympathetically; and he wanted all her sympathy for himself just then.
"He calls it killing." Eades grasped the word boldly, like a nettle.
"Gordon doesn't believe in capital punishment."
"So I understand."
"I don't either."