The Island of Faith | Page 6

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, and the Young Doctor would have chuckled to hear her tone. "You wicked child, what are you doing?"
Without waiting for an answer she knelt beside the pitiful little animal that was tied to the bench, and with trembling fingers unloosed the cord that held it, noting as she did so how its bones showed, even through its coat of fur. When it was at liberty she gathered it close to her breast and turned to face the boy.
He had not tried to run away. Even with the anger surging through her, Rose-Marie admitted that the child was not--in one sense--a coward. He had waited, brazenly perhaps, to hear what she had to say. With blazing eyes she said it:
"Why," she questioned, and the anger that made her eyes blaze