A Prologue To Love (13 page)

Caroline was now always afraid. Her foremost and overpowering terror was the terror of being poor, of being at the mercy of relentless horrors in the shape of men. She remembered a certain day last December, and the memory never left her; it woke her in a nightmare in the middle of the night. It haunted her life without surcease. The experience removed forever any doubts she may have had about her father’s convictions concerning money.

It had been a few days before Christmas. She had found, to her surprise, that her father did not particularly object to gift-giving in Cynthia’s house and that he gave gifts to her aunt, her cousin, and Melinda. (In her simplicity she had not as yet asked herself what status her father occupied in this cool and well-bred household on Beacon Street.) So Caroline was confronted with the fact of Christmas-giving beyond the gift she usually bought for Beth Knowles. She had saved the greater part of the allowance her father grudgingly gave her. She had assigned one dollar for her aunt, seventy-five cents for Timothy, from whom she shrank in real fear, and the same for Melinda, whose beauty and grace alarmed as well as entranced her. But she would spend two dollars on Beth, thriftily and sensibly, buying her some black cotton stockings and a box of the tea Beth especially liked.

Shyly one day she told Cynthia that she would do her Christmas shopping in town after school. Cynthia immediately made plans. Both Caroline and Melinda would be brought home as usual from Miss Stockington’s in the carriage. Melinda would be dropped off, and the carriage would then convey Caroline to Boston’s ‘nicest shopping district’. Caroline was not so unworldly as to be unaware that shops recommended by Cynthia would be fearfully expensive. She knew the shops Beth patronized, in a very sleazy neighborhood, where gifts could be bought cheaply. So she hurriedly told Cynthia that she particularly liked to ride in the horse cars and that the carriage would bring Melinda home alone. Cynthia had wrinkled her brows at this and thought of the dangers to unaccompanied young girls in the crowded streets. Then she studied Caroline, her clumsy clothing, the broad strong face which only the beautiful hazel eyes saved from absolute unattractiveness, and the occasional charming smile, and decided that Caroline was plain enough and appeared poor enough not to draw hostile or thieving glances. She was certainly old enough, thought Cynthia. “It will be a long walk to the best shops from the streetcars,” she had warned the girl, but Caroline, who knew it was only a very short walk to the shops she preferred, had only smiled.

Caroline had saved seventy-five dollars over a year from her allowance. She carried her money with her always, in a deplorably cheap and battered bag made of coarse carpeting and snapped together with a brass-plated lock. Caroline, in spite of paternal neglect, had never really been much alone for a considerable period of time until she had come to Cynthia’s house, and even there there were servants all about her when Cynthia was away attending many parties. So she was unused to isolation, in the full sense, and quite unused to being alone on the streets of a city. It was this which had partly led Cynthia to give her permission to this lonely shopping. It was time that Caroline developed self-confidence.

A feeling of freedom came to Caroline when she boarded the horse car for downtown Boston and the area of cheap shops in a frowzy neighborhood. Not even the strange and resentful faces about her in the car made her shrink too much. She found a secluded rattan-covered seat over the rear wheels and huddled herself together for warmth. Her ugly brown coat, too short, too tight, hardly met across her body; her long plaid skirt just brushed the tops of her buttoned boots, and as she sat an area of coarse black stocking was revealed. Her velvet hat, too wide for her face, its blackness too old, was tied down firmly under her thick chin with cotton ribbons, and her gloves were of black wool made by Beth. There was nothing in her clothing to distinguish her from the others in the car; she was as poorly dressed as they, and as dun-colored. She had the aspect of a strong kitchen maid on a half day’s outing. Nothing that Cynthia had been able to do as yet had brightened Caroline’s wardrobe, nor had Cynthia been successful in persuading the girl to abandon her old clothing. “They are still wearable,” Caroline had said stubbornly, surprised at Cynthia’s suggestion.

A dull, brownish mixture of sleet and rain was falling over Boston. Out of this disheartening murk the buildings emerged in chocolate shapes; the brick walks glimmered wetly; the cobbled streets appeared smeared with grease. Umbrellas bobbed everywhere; the horses clopped wearily. The stench of wet hay, wet old clothes, and wet wool pervaded the horse car; the windows steamed from the miserable little heat emanating from the passengers. Aunt Cynthia, reflected Caroline, might call Boston a sherry-and-topaz city. To Caroline it appeared liverish and snuff-colored, with an overtone of rust. Caroline’s thoughts were not happy. She was homesick for Lyndon at this time of the year, where Beth, in John Ames’ absence, would keep fires going, and there was a gaiety in running from icy narrow halls into a firelit room, and a pleasure in dashing down from a frigid bedroom into a warm kitchen full of the smell of porridge and hot bread and coffee. Caroline had discovered the harsh joy of contrasts which Cynthia would never understand in her uniformly warm and pleasant rooms, in her guarded and comfortable life.

Caroline’s thoughts turned to Beth, to whom she hardly wrote any longer but whom she still loved. Beth was too sharp; she sensed too many things, and her tongue was too ready. She would, given time, understand from Caroline’s face and even from letters, the sorrowful transformation as sorrowful; she thought it sensible. Yet she did not want Beth to know of it, Beth who would argue and try to convince her to the contrary; Beth who loved. As yet, Caroline had no arguments of her own to counter Beth’s arguments; she had only the fearful instinct born in her on the night her father had spoken freely to her. Loyalty to her father also prevented Caroline from seeing too much of Beth now or writing to her regularly; everything that Beth said was a refutation of John’s philosophy of fear, mistrust, and penuriousness.

The horse car came to a stop with a clang of bells, and Caroline started, jumped to her feet, and ran out of the car on her strong young legs. She was in her chosen neighborhood. Here the sleet and the rain seemed to have concentrated in a muddy downpour. The little murky shops winked feebly in the gloom; they were like evil old men loitering under streaming eaves. Caroline had no umbrella. She was jostled by dubious throngs who never gave her a second glance. No lecherous young laborer winked at her. Her head bowed against the icy sleet, she scurried into her favorite shop, one larger than the others, where one could buy anything from cotton and lisle stockings (seconds) to used coats and dresses, men’s fusty suits, rough cotton and wool underwear, children’s cheap toys, some groceries, and mended ancient furniture long thrown out of servants’ attics and rudely repaired here. Gaslights, yellow and unshaded, blinked down on the heaped and scarred counters, and shopgirls and salesmen, shivering and chapped and white with hunger and cold, hovered about, waiting like starved spiders for customers. The wood floor was slippery with mud and damp; the few windows were blurred with filth.

Caroline paused in a crowded aisle for a moment and was promptly and profanely pushed aside by a woman with a following of many starveling children. Caroline had a problem. She had decided quite suddenly to send a gift to Tom Sheldon, who would be home this Christmas in Lyme. She had not answered Tom’s last three letters; he, like Beth, was a threat. But he seemed beside her now, a vital presence, and she saw him as clearly as if he were actually there, and her young heart rose poignantly. She would buy him a secondhand watch. It would not be a new dollar watch; that was too much to spend. But somewhere in this shop she would find a repaired nickel watch for seventy-five cents or even fifty cents. She remembered having seen these watches before.

She was methodical. There was a rule in this shop that one could gather up his own purchases, take them to a counter near the door, where they were itemized and counted and paid for. It was a very efficient arrangement, invented by the proprietor, who could then hold only two clerks responsible for any losses. It also minimized stealing by both clerks and customers. He had strong men — three of them — patrolling the aisles, men with brutal faces whom he had recruited from the docks. Sudden cries and screams were not unknown in this shop; in fact, the customers barely looked around in curiosity to see who was caught in the act of thievery, for thievery was a way of life in this neighborhood. The men were armed with short clubs which they only partly concealed in the pockets of their coats. It was not customary to call the police; the guardians of the wretched stock were quite sufficient either to seize the stolen goods and beat the customer thereafter with dispatch or to force payment. Caroline did not know of this arrangement; she never knew that it was the voice of a thief which was occasionally raised in dismal fear or pain. She knew only that the prices here were ‘reasonable’.

She was shy and afraid of strangers. So she kept her head down and only mumbled at clerks as she purchased three pairs of black cotton stockings for Beth, a sewing box with a japanned lid, all chipped and crocked, for Melinda, a box of tea also for Beth, and an anonymous little wicker basket for Cynthia. It would be handy for buttons, thought Caroline. She admired the basket. A bunch of flowers had been painted on the uneven lid, and their colors were vital and alive. This part of her shopping concluded and the unwrapped purchases in her arms, she looked for the counter where the secondhand watches were for sale.

It was then that she became aware that in her meanderings she had lost her purse, which contained every dollar she owned. The purse, in truth, had been deftly cut from her arm during her preoccupation. This did not occur to Caroline, to whom theft was only a word. Her first panicked thought was that she had left it on the counter nearest the door, where the stockings were sold. Her purchases jostling in her arms, she raced back to the first counter, and in so doing attracted the attention of one of the burly men, who followed silently but swiftly on the heels of a girl whose clothing proclaimed her a servant wench, a kitchen maid lowly and badly recompensed.

Caroline, gasping and quite livid with panic, reached the stocking counter and stammered out her loss to the cynical clerk. “Seventy-five dollars!” cried Caroline as the clerk stood immobile and grinning into her face. Still clutching her purchases, Caroline began frantically to paw at the heaped stockings with her right hand. The purse was not there. “But I must have left it here!” she sobbed, frightened by the loss of the money. “It must be under something!”

A hoarse voice spoke easily beside her. “And where would you be gettin’ seventy-five dollars, miss?” Caroline swung to see a huge and ugly man beside her, teetering on his heels. “Maybe stole it, eh, from your mistress?”

“What?” faltered Caroline, shrinking instinctively. “I — You don’t understand! I must have left my purse here when I was examining the stockings. You must have seen my purse!” she exclaimed to the clerk.

“No,” said the clerk, languidly patting her ‘waterfall’ of dirty yellow curls. “You didn’t have no purse. I was watchin’ you.”

“Then,” said Caroline, her panic growing, “I must have left it on the horse car!”

Blindly, urged again only by instinct, she turned and ran to the door, past the checker who tried without success to seize her arm, thrusting her way in terror through the staring mobs. Her one thought, glazed by anguish and so blurred beyond real thought, was to reach the street and somehow find the horse car, long gone over half an hour ago. She was caught at the very door by the burly man, who swung her about savagely, and even while she glared at him dazedly in her despair, still thinking of her purse, he slapped her face so brutally that the slap was heard above the hubbub of the customers.

No one had ever struck Caroline before in all her immured life. She staggered back under the blow, feeling the pain less than the stupefied bewilderment. Uppermost in her thoughts there still remained the loss of her purse. Recovering almost instantly, and never questioning why she had been assaulted — that was unimportant in view of her loss — she tried again to reach the door. She was seized by the shoulder and torn away and flung headlong into an aisle. Before she could fall she was caught by a powerful hand whose fingers clamped like crushing iron about her arm.

“Dirty, s — g thief!” said the burly man, shaking her furiously. “I’ll learn you ! Yessir, I’ll learn you!”

He fumbled for his club. The gaslights, the staring eyes, the giggling faces, the curses of the mob of customers, the joyful shriek of anticipating children dazed Caroline. And reality poured upon her with one appalling throb and roar. She stopped struggling. She saw the upraised club; she knew it would descend upon her head, crushing her to the floor. A vomitous fluid rushed into her mouth, and her legs stiffened, and sweat broke out on her pallid face. She stood rigid and waited for the final terror, the final ignominy, the final horror. She did not even tremble.

Perhaps it was the look in her eyes, wild and startled, or the fact that she did not fight and try to evade the impending blow, or perhaps it was the alien aura which hovered about her that made the burly man pause in the very act of bringing his club down upon her. A glove had fallen from her hand; he saw that her hand, though large and broad, was well shaped and smooth, not the hand of the usual servant girl. He saw that she was well fed. Glaring at her with mingled perplexity and hate, he pushed his club into his pocket and began to drag her toward the rear of the shop, parting a way for his passage with oaths and kicks. Caroline, gulping desperately and trying to keep her footing, began to cry feebly. But she had no words. It was a nightmare; she would wake up soon.

The burly man, who had a considerable retinue of the avid now, urging him eagerly to beat the girl, reached a double door and kicked it open and pulled Caroline inside. He flung her into the center of the room, where she fell heavily on her hands and knees. He shut the door against the hungry faces pressing toward it. Caroline remained in her fallen position, dimly shaking her head, a dimness in her mind and eyes. It was not until some moments had passed that she became aware of the gigantic boots and trunklike legs beside her. Then in abysmal fear beyond any fear she had ever known, she fell over on her side, sprawling, to put as much space between her and those menacing boots and legs as possible. She saw then that she was lying on a dirty floor smeared with the spittle from chewing tobacco and that everything about her was hot and stinking.

Trembling violently, she looked around her. Two other men were in this room, which was intensely heated by a pot-bellied black coal stove in the center. Large gaslights hanging from the ceiling filled the room with a light fearful to the girl. One man sat at a scarred roll-top desk heaped with papers; he was in his shirt sleeves, and Caroline, with the clarified vision of unrelieved fear, saw that his shirt was striped in red and white, that he was scrawny, withered, and wore steel-rimmed spectacles, and that he was old. Another man sat at a rickety table, also heaped with papers, and he was younger and had a pale, bloated face and mean little blue eyes. Green steel files lined the walls.

“What’s this, what’s this?” protested the old man in a querulous voice. “Can’t you handle thieves alone, Aleck?” He chewed, coughed, and spat on the floor.

“Mr. Fern, I don’t know about this one,” said Aleck, and made as if to kick Caroline. When she shrank back on the floor, he bellowed with laughter. “No sir, this one’s new to me. Kind of funny.”

“Funny, eh?” said the young man at the table. He got up languidly; his body was swollen.

“Sure is, Mr. Johnny. Maybe an amateur or something. But look at her hands. No kitchen drab or sewing girl from some factory. Don’t want to make mistakes, y’see. There’s always the police.”

He bent and grasped one of Caroline’s hands and displayed it to the two men. “See what I mean? Smooth. No burns; no pricks. No calluses. Like a lady’s hand. You’d think she was a lady ‘cept for her clothes and the looks of her.”

The young man giggled; it was a high and feminine sound. He bent over the cowering Caroline and stared at her. “That ain’t no lady,” he blatted. “And maybe she’s in some other work besides the kitchen or the shop. Maybe she works where she don’t have to use her hands. See? Maybe she uses somethin’ else, if you follow me.”

The old man cackled, and the burly man roared and slapped his thighs. Johnny lifted his hand in modest deprecation of this applause. “Corrected. She ain’t the type; look at her. Not my type anyways. But there is no accountin’ for tastes, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow. Get her up on her feet, Aleck.”

Aleck obligingly tugged at Caroline’s arm and pulled her upright. She made no sound. She had heard of nothing in her life that could act as a frame of reference for her now. She did not know why she was here, nor what she had done, nor why these evil men smirked at her. She had heard the word ‘thief’ but did not, in her dazed state, connect it remotely with herself. She knew only that she had been struck, that she had been prevented from trying to find her purse, that she had been dragged into this place. Was she to be murdered? And if so, why? Tears of primitive fear began to roll down her face; her voice was locked in her throat as in a nightmare. She tried to scream; the sound emerged as a whimper.