The Island of Faith | Page 6

that had not
been there when she went, an hour before, to the luncheon table. It was
the look of one who has resolutions that cannot be shattered--dreams
that are unbreakable. She glanced at her wrist watch and there was a
shade of defiance in the very way she raised the arm that wore it.
"They make a baby of me here," she told herself, "they treat me like a
silly child. It's a wonder that they don't send a nurse-maid with me to
my classes. It's a wonder"--she was growing vehement--"that they give
me credit for enough sense to wear rubbers when it's raining! I," again
she glanced at the watch, "I haven't a single thing to do until four
o'clock--and it's only just a little after two. I'm going out--now. I'm
going into the streets, or into a tenement, or into a--a _dive_, if
necessary! I'm going to show them"--the plural pronoun, strangely,
referred to a certain young man--"that I can help somebody! I'm going
to show them--"
She was struggling eagerly into her coat; eagerly she pulled her
tam-o'-shanter over the curls that, even in the city slums, were full of
sunshine. With her hands thrust staunchly into her pockets, she went
out; out into the jungle of streets that met, as in the center of a labyrinth,
in front of the Settlement House.
Always, when she had gone out alone, she had sought a small park not
far from her new home. It was a comfortingly green little oasis in the
desert of stone and brick--a little oasis that reminded one of the country.
She turned toward it now, quite blindly, for the streets confused
her--they always did. As the crowds closed around her she hurried
vaguely, as a swimmer hurries just before he loses his head and goes
down. She caught her breath as she went, for the crowds always made
her feel submerged--quite as the swimmer feels just before the final
plunge. She entered the park--it was scarcely more than a square of
grass--with a very definite feeling of relief, almost of rescue.
As usual, the park was crowded. But park crowds are different from

street crowds--they are crowds at rest, rather than hurrying, restless
throngs. Rose-Marie sank upon an iron bench and with wide, childishly
distended eyes surveyed the people that surged in upon her.
There was a woman with a hideous black wig--the badge of revered
Jewish motherhood--pressed down over the front of her silvered hair.
Rose-Marie, a short time ago, would have guessed her age at
seventy--now she told herself that the woman was probably forty.
There was a slim, cigarette-smoking youth with pale, shifty eyes. There
was an old, old man--white-bearded like one of the patriarchs--and
there was a dark-browed girl who held a drowsy baby to her breast. All
of these and many more--Italians, Slavs, Russians, Hungarians and an
occasional Chinaman--passed her by. It seemed to the girl that this
section was a veritable melting pot of the races--and that every example
of every race was true to type. She had seen any number of young men
with shifty eyes--she had seen many old men with white beards. She
knew that other black-wigged women lived in every tenement; that
other dark-browed girls were, at that same moment, rocking other
babies. She fell to wondering, whimsically, whether God had fashioned
the people of the slums after some half-dozen set patterns--almost as
the cutter, in many an alley sweatshop, fashions the frocks of a season.
A sharp cry broke in upon her wonderings. It was the cry of an animal
in utter pain--in blind, unreasoning agony. Rose-Marie was on her feet
at the first moment that it cut, quiveringly, through the air. With eyes
distended she whirled about to face a small boy who knelt upon the
ground behind her bench.
To Rose-Marie the details of the small boy's appearance came back,
later, with an amazing clarity. Later she could have described his dark,
sullen eyes, his mouth with its curiously grim quirk at one corner, his
shock of black hair and his ragged coat. But at the moment she had the
ability to see only one thing--the scrawny gray kitten that the boy had
tied to the iron leg of the bench; the shrinking kitten that the boy was
torturing with a cold, relentless cruelty.
It shrieked again--with an almost human cry--as she started around the
bench toward it. And the wild throbbing of her heart told her that she
was witnessing, for the first time, a phase of human nature of which she
had never dreamed.

V
ROSE-MARIE COMES TO THE RESCUE
Rose-Marie's hand upon the small boy's coat collar was not gentle.
With surprising strength, for she was small and slight, she jerked him
aside.
"You wicked child!" she exclaimed,