The Auction Block Part 24

"So, you like my home, do you?" she queried, after a time.

"I've never seen one so beautiful."

Lilas nodded. "Hitchy sleeps out, and that leaves me the whole place. Jarvis furnished it, even to the books, and I'm studying to be a lady." Again she laughed mockingly. "I make a bluff at reading, but so long as I talk about Napoleon he never thinks to question me. I know that French gink backward."

"I wish I had a hobby--something to interest me, something to live for," said Lorelei, lamely.

"Yes. It gives you something to think about when you're alone. It helps you to--stand things." For the first time Lilas showed a trace of feeling in her voice; she dropped her chin into her palm and, leaning upon the table, stared as if at a vision. Her dark eyes were somber, her brows were lowered and drawn together.

The slipshod informality of the meal, the constant faultfinding of the hostess, made it something of a trial. Lorelei was not sorry when it was over and Lilas took her to look at the vacant flat.

Miss Moore's apartment offered a wide contrast to the one they had just quitted, being very small and very modestly furnished; but it was on the second floor, convenient to both elevator and stairway, it boasted a piano, and the superintendent allowed his prospective tenant to name her own terms. She descended with relief, feeling that she had made not a bad bargain.

She stated, as she sank into Lilas's big library chair, "I feel quite independent at last. The rent is ridiculous, and I can do my own cooking."

"Don't make a fool of yourself. You can do as well as I've done.

You have the looks."

"But I'm not engaged to a multimillionaire."

"It seems queer, when I think of it," Lilas mused. "Jarvis is one of the richest men in New York, and he made his money out of the steel business--the business into which I was born. Have you ever been through a mill?"

"No."

"It's wonderful, terrible. I can smell the hot slag, the scorching cinders, the smoke, to this day. Some nights I wake up--screaming, it's so vivid. I see the glare of the furnaces, the belching flames, the showers of sparks from the converters, the streams of white-hot metal, and they seem to pour over me. I have the same dream always; I've had it ever since the night after my father was killed."

"You told me he was killed in a steel-mill."

"Yes, before my eyes. I saw it." Lilas shuddered. "I was a little girl then, but I've never forgotten. We were poor, dreadfully poor, like all the Jews--Oh yes; didn't you know I'm a Jew?"

"Then 'Lilas Lynn'--?"

"Stage name. It's really Lily Levinski. We were Polish. I was dragged up, along with the other workmen's children, in the soot and grime of the Pennsylvania mills. We never saw anything green; nothing grew in our town. I learned to play on a slag-pile, and my shoes, when I had any, were full of holes--the scars are on my feet yet. Everything was grim and gray there, and the children were puny, big-eyed little things. ... The mills were hideous by day, but at night they became--oh, tremendous. They changed the sky into a flaring canopy, they roared with the clas.h.i.+ng of rolls and the rumble of gears; the men looked black and tiny, like insects, against the red glow from the streaming metal. ...

"h.e.l.l must be like those mills--it couldn't be worse. I used to watch the long rows of little cars, each with an upright ingot of hot steel on its way to the soaking-pit, and I used to fancy they were unhappy spirits going from one torture to another. When the furnaces opened and the flames belched out into the night--they threw horrible black shadows, you know, like eddies of pitch--or when the converters dumped. ... They lit up the sky with an explosion of reds and yellows and whites that put out the stars.

It--it was like nothing so much as h.e.l.l."

Lorelei had never heard her room-mate speak with such feeling nor in such a strain. But Lilas seemed quite unconscious of her little burst of eloquence. She was seated, leaning forward now with hands locked between her knees; her eyes were brilliant in the gathering dusk. Her memories seemed to affect her with a kind of horror, yet to hold her fascinated and to demand expression.

"I was an imaginative kid," she continued. "It's a trait of our people, like--well, like their distrust of authority and their fear of law. You see, persecution made them cunning, but underneath they are fierce and revengeful and--lawless. I inherited all these traits--but that has nothing to do with the story. Father worked in the Bessemer plant, like any hunkie, and the women used to bring the men's lunches to them. Mother wasn't strong, and that duty fell to me; I had my stand where I used to wait for the whistle to blow. ...

"It was one of the biggest mills in Pennsylvania, and its tonnage was always heavy because the superintendent was a slave-driver. He was one of those men who are born without soul or feeling, and he had no interest in anything except rails and plates. His plant held the record, month after month, but at last he lost the broom at the stack. That was the pennant of victory--a broom tied to the highest chimney. I remember hearing father and the others talk about it, and they seemed to feel the loss--although, goodness knows, they had little reason for wanting to keep the broom, since it meant only more sweat and labor for them, while the glory all went to the superintendent. But that's the way with men. ...

"One day I took my bucket and joined the line of women and girls that filed in through the gates. I was twelve then, but stunted with smoke and thin from poverty. I'll never forget that day; the sole of one of my shoes was worn through, and cinders kept working in. I took my stand just outside the Bessemer plant. It was a big sh.e.l.l of steel girders and corrugated iron, and the side where we were was open. Away up above were the roaring crucibles where the metal was fluxed; beneath ran the little flat-cars waiting for the ingots to be poured. Father saw me and waved his hand--he always waved at me--then I saw the superintendent coming through--a big, square-faced man whom everybody feared. We kids used to think he was an ogre and ate little people. He was raging and swearing and spurring the men on to more haste--I heard later that he had sworn to win the broom back if he wrecked the plant. Wherever he went, the hunkies danced; he could put life into a dead man's limbs, that man. It was because of their great fear of him and his furious urging that--something happened."

Lilas had begun her recital slowly, without apparent object, but once into it she seemed unable to stop; and now, although her words came haltingly, it was plain that she had worked herself into a sort of hysteria in which she gave little heed to her hearer. It was characteristic of her that she could so excite herself by the power of visualization as to be completely transported.

"Something went wrong overhead; the operator got rattled or somebody was late in his duties and fouled the machinery; anyhow, the converter dumped too soon. Men were working directly underneath, father among the rest. Being so young, I had no idea of what it all meant at the time--but the memory stuck. I saw him go down under a stream of liquid steel--"

Lorelei's horrified exclamation went unnoticed; Lilas's voice was shrill.

"Yes. He was blotted out, right there before my eyes, in an instant. In the time it takes to snap your finger, he--and the others--were gone, changed into smoke, into absolute nothingness.

One moment he was whole, alive, flesh and bone, the next he didn't exist; tons of boiling metal ran over the spot. Nothing in the world was ever so horrible. You've never seen liquid steel nor felt the awful breath of it, have you? There wasn't even a funeral. Twelve men, twelve pinches of ashes, were lost somewhere, swallowed up in that ma.s.s--nothing more. There was no insurance, and n.o.body took the blame. Another Jew family, a few more widowed and fatherless foreigners, among that army, meant nothing.

Scarcely a month went by without accidents of some sort.

"The shock finished mother, for she was emotional and she had imagination, too. I've never forgotten that day, nor the figure of that shouting, swearing man who came through the Bessemer mill crying for more speed, more speed, more speed--so that a broom could be hoisted on a halyard and so that other men in other cities, for one short month, could point to him with envy.

"I suppose I was too little to make any foolish vows of vengeance, for I was only a ragged mite of a child among a horde of slaves, but when I grew older I often dreamed of having that man in my power, and--making him suffer. Who would--who COULD have imagined that I'd ever be living on money wrung from the labor of men like my father, and be in a position to meet that man on an equal footing? _I_ never did--not in my wildest moments, and yet--here I am. Steel-money bought these books, these rugs and paintings. Any one of those pictures represents the wages of a lifetime for a man like my father. He was murdered, so was my mother--but things are queer. Anyhow, here I am, rich--and the day of reckoning gets closer all the time."

She ended with an abruptness that evidenced her agitation. Rising, she jerked a beaded chain that depended from the center lamp, and the room was flooded with mellow light; then she drew out the table drawer at her guest's elbow, and with shaking hands selected a small box from the confusion within. Lorelei recoiled at the sight of a revolver half hidden among the disorder.

"Goodness! I hope it isn't loaded," the latter exclaimed. "Your story gives me the creeps and that thing--seems to fit in."

"It's loaded, all right. I keep it for protection," Lilas explained, carelessly, then rang for the j.a.p. She opened the box, which contained several compartments, in one of which was a package of white powder, in another a silver tablespoon. When the obedient Hitchy Koo appeared she ordered a gla.s.s of water.

"I don't know why I told you all this," she half apologized to Lorelei. "It has upset me, as it always does."

"How did you ever grow up and--educate yourself?"

"I hardly know. Some neighbors took me in at first, and I worked for them; then I got a job in a dry-goods store, and finally in the corset department. I filled out when I began to get something to eat and I developed a good figure. Finally I got to be a model.

I was quick to learn, and when rich dames came in I watched them.

I became good-looking, too, although not so pretty as I am now, for I couldn't put the time or the money on it. But I was pretty enough, and I seemed to appeal strongly to men. Some girls do, you know, without understanding how or why. First, it was the buyer for our department; he lost his head completely, and, although he was married and I didn't care for him, I realized he could do me good. I was seventeen then; he taught me to dress and to take care of myself--he had wonderful taste in such things. It was his affair with me that finally cost him his place--and his wife, too, for that matter. When I'd got all he had I left him and came to New York. The rest isn't a pretty story, for I went the way most girls do who have that appeal I spoke about."

Miss Lynn made this declaration calmly as she busied herself with the gla.s.s her servant had fetched. She dissolved a portion of the powder in the spoon, then carefully transferred the liquid into the cap of a pearl-and-gold fountain-pen. Inserting the open end of the receptacle into first one, then the other nostril, she inhaled the contents.

"What are you doing?" asked Lorelei, curiously.

"Something to quiet my nerves. I--wonder why I told you all this?"

She eyed her guest speculatively, then shrugged. "Well, since we're to be neighbors, we must be friends, and there's no harm done. Now that Jarvis and I are engaged, he's awfully particular about the company I keep, but he likes you. How different they act when they're in earnest! He even wants me to quit work now, but I like the excitement--it's better than waiting." She glanced at her wrist-watch and drew herself together. "Our time is up, dear; we must get back to the show-shop."

CHAPTER XII

Lorelei exploded her bomb at breakfast Sunday morning, and the effect was all she had dreaded. Fortunately, Jim had gone out, so she had only to combat her mother's panic-stricken objections and her father's weak persuasions. So keen, however, was the girl's humiliation at Merkle's disclosure that Mrs. Knight dared not go to the lengths she would otherwise have allowed herself, and Lorelei's merciless accusations left little to be said in self- defense. Of course, the usual tears followed, likewise repet.i.tions of the time-worn plea that it had all been done for Lorelei's own good and had been prompted by unselfish love for her.

"I'm beginning to doubt that," Lorelei said, slowly. "I think you all look upon me as a piece of property to do with as you please.

Perhaps I'm disloyal and ungrateful, but--I can't help it. And I can't forgive you yet. When I can I'll come home again, but it's impossible for me to live here now, feeling as I do. I want to love you--so I'm--going to run away."

Tragically, through her tears, Mrs. Knight inquired: "What will become of us? We can't live--Jim never does anything for us." In Peter's watery stare was abject fright. "Lorelei wouldn't let us suffer," he ventured, tremulously. "I'm sick. I may die any time, so the doctor says." He was indeed a changed man; that easy good humor that had been his most likable trait had been lost in habitual peevishness.

"I'll keep the house running as before," his daughter a.s.sured them, "and I'll manage to get along on what's left. But you mustn't be quite so extravagant, that's all. I sha'n't be--and you wouldn't force me to do anything I'd regret, I'm sure." She choked down her pity at the sight of the invalid's pasty face and flabby form, then turned to the window. Her emotion prevented her from observing the relief that greeted her words.

The moment was painful; Lorelei's eyes were dim, and she hardly saw the dreary prospect of fire-escapes, of whitewashed brick, of bare, gaping back yards overhung with clothes-lines, like nerves exposed in the process of dissection.

"Yes, things will go on just the same," she repeated, then clenched her hands and burst forth miserably, "Oh, I know how badly you need money! I know what the doctor says, and--I'll get it somehow. It seems to me I'd pay any price just to see dad walking around again and to know that you were both provided for.