“Take my advice, young man, and adopt a safer and more honorable business,” said Mr. Phillips, as he gave him the twenty-dollar bill.
“Keep your advice for them that ask it!” was flung back in his face. A look of hate and revenge burned in the fellow’s eyes. After glaring at Mr. Phillips and Martin in a threatening way for several moments, he left more hurriedly than he had entered.
“And take my advice,” said the officer, laying his hand on Martin’s arm,—he spoke in a warning tone,—”and keep out of that man’s way. He’ll never forgive you. I know him and his prowling gang, and they are a set of as hardened and dangerous villains as can be found in the city. You are ‘spotted’ by them from this day, and they number a dozen at least. So, if you would be safe, avoid their haunts. Give drinking saloons and billiard rooms a wide berth. One experience like this should last you a life-time.”
Thus Martin escaped from his dangerous entanglement, but never again to hold the unwavering confidence of his employer. Mr. Phillips pitied, but could not trust him fully. A year afterwards came troublesome times, losses in business, and depression in trade. Every man had to retrench. Thousands of clerk condition were apt to be as quick with a blow as with a caress. But, having gained his point, he was amiable.
“Get your things on and come out. We can take in a roof-garden.”
“I’ve told you I’m not doing that sort of thing.”
He was ugly in a flash.
“You’ve got somebody else on the string.”
“Honestly, no. There—there has never been anybody else, Palmer.”
He caught her suddenly and jerked her toward him.
“You let me hear of anybody else, and I’ll cut the guts out of him!”
He held her for a second, his face black and fierce. Then, slowly and inevitably, he drew her into his arms. He was drunk, and she knew it. But, in the queer loyalty of her class, he was the only man she had cared for. She cared now. She took him for that moment, felt his hot kisses on her mouth, her throat, submitted while his rather brutal hands bruised her arms in fierce caresses. Then she put him from her resolutely.
“Now you’re going.”
“The hell I’m going!”
But he was less steady than he had been. The heat of the little flat brought more blood to his head. He wavered as he stood just inside the door.
“You must go back to your wife.”
“She doesn’t want me. She’s in love with a fellow at the house.”
“Palmer, hush!”
“Lemme come in and sit down, won’t you?”
She let him pass her into the sitting-room. He dropped into a chair.
“You’ve turned me down, and now Christine—she thinks I don’t know. I’m no fool; I see a lot of things. I’m no good. I know that I’ve made her miserable. But I made a merry little hell for you too, and you don’t kick about it.”
“You know that.”
She was watching him gravely. She had never seen him just like this. Nothing else, perhaps, could have shown her so well what a broken reed he was.
“I got you in wrong. You were a good girl before I knew you. You’re a good girl now. I’m not going to do you any harm, I swear it. I only wanted to take you out for a good time. I’ve got money. Look here!” He drew out the roll of bills and showed it to her. Her eyes opened wide. She had never known him to have much money.
“Lots more where that comes from.”
A new look flashed into her eyes, not cupidity, but purpose.
She was instantly cunning.
“Aren’t you going to give me some of that?”
“What for?”
“I—I want some clothes.”
The very drunk have the intuition sometimes of savages or brute beasts.
“You lie.”
“I want it for Johnny Rosenfeld.”
He thrust it back into his pocket, but his hand retained its grasp of it.
“That’s it,” he complained. “Don’t lemme be happy for a minute! Throw it all up to me!”
“You give me that for the Rosenfeld boy, and I’ll go out with you.”
“If I give you all that, I won’t have any money to go out with!”
But his eyes were wavering. She could see victory.
“Take off enough for the evening.”
But he drew himself up.
“I’m no piker,” he said largely. “Whole hog or nothing. Take it.”
He held it out to her, and from another pocket produced the eighty dollars, in crushed and wrinkled notes.
“It’s my lucky day,” he said thickly. “Plenty more where this came from. Do anything for you. Give it to the little devil. I—” He yawned. “God, this place is hot!”
His head dropped back on his chair; he propped his sagging legs on a stool. She knew him—knew that he would sleep almost all night. She would have to make up something to tell the other girls; but no matter—she could attend to that later.
She had never had a thousand dollars in her hands before. It seemed smaller than that amount. Perhaps he had lied to her. She paused, in pinning on her hat, to count the bills. It was all there.
CHAPTER XXVII
K. spent all of the evening of that day with Wilson. He was not to go for Joe until eleven o’clock. The injured man’s vitality was standing him in good stead. He had asked for Sidney and she was at his bedside. Dr. Ed had gone.
“I’m going, Max. The office is full, they tell me,” he said, bending over the bed. “I’ll come in later, and if they’ll make me a shakedown, I’ll stay with you to-night.”
The answer was faint, broken but distinct. “Get some sleep…I’ve been a poor stick…try to do better—” His roving eyes fell on the dog collar on the stand. He smiled, “Good old Bob!” he said, and put his hand over Dr. Ed’s, as it lay on the bed.
K. found Sidney in the room, not sitting, but standing by the window. The sick man was dozing. One shaded light burned in a far corner. She turned slowly and met his eyes. It seemed to K. that she looked at him as if she had never really seen him before, and he was right. Readjustments are always difficult.
Sidney was trying to reconcile the K. she had known so well with this new K., no longer obscure, although still shabby, whose height had suddenly become presence, whose quiet was the quiet of infinite power.
She was suddenly shy of him, as he stood looking down at her. He saw the gleam of her engagement ring on her finger. It seemed almost defiant. As though she had meant by wearing it to emphasize her belief in her lover.
They did not speak beyond their greeting, until he had gone over the record. Then:—
“We can’t talk here. I want to talk to you, K.”
He led the way into the corridor. It was very dim. Far away was the night nurse’s desk, with its lamp, its annunciator, its pile of records. The passage floor reflected the light on glistening boards.
“I have been thinking until I am almost crazy, K. And now I know how it happened. It was Joe.”
“The principal thing is, not how it happened, but that he is going to get well, Sidney.”
She stood looking down, twisting her ring around her finger.
“Is Joe in any danger?”
“We are going to get him away to-night. He wants to go to Cuba. He’ll get off safely, I think.”
“WE are going to get him away! YOU are, you mean. You shoulder all our troubles, K., as if they were your own.”
“I?” He was genuinely surprised. “Oh, I see. You mean—but my part in getting Joe off is practically nothing. As a matter of fact, Schwitter has put up the money. My total capital in the world, after paying the taxicab to-day, is seven dollars.”
“The taxicab?”
“By Jove, I was forgetting! Best news you ever heard of! Tillie married and has a baby—all in twenty-four hours! Boy—they named it Le Moyne. Squalled like a maniac when the water went on its head. I—I took Mrs. McKee out in a hired machine. That’s what happened to my capital.” He grinned sheepishly. “She said she would have to go in her toque. I had awful qualms. I thought it was a wrapper.”