The Island of Faith | Page 9

drab-coloured city chameleon.
Rose-Marie, standing by the bench, watched the place where he had
disappeared. And then, all at once, she turned swiftly--just as swiftly as
the boy had--and started back across the park toward the Settlement
House.
"I won't tell them!" she was saying over and over in her heart, as she
went, "I won't tell them! They wouldn't let me go, if I did.... I won't tell
them!"
The kitten was still held tight in her arms. It rested, quite contentedly,
against her blue coat. Perhaps it knew that there was a warm, friendly
place--even for little frightened animals--in the Settlement House.

VI
"THERE'S NO PLACE--"
When Rose-Marie paused in front of the tenement, at three o'clock on
the following afternoon, she felt like a naughty little girl who is playing
truant from school. When she remembered the way that she had
avoided the Superintendent's almost direct questions, she blushed with
an inward sense of shame. But when she thought of the Young Doctor's
offer to go with her--"wherever she was going"--she threw back her
head with a defiant little gesture. She knew well that the Young Doctor
was sorry for yesterday's quarrel--she knew that a night beside the
dying Mrs. Celleni, and the wails of the Cohen baby, had temporarily
softened his viewpoint upon life. And yet--he had said that they were
soulless--these people that she had come to help! He would have
condemned Bennie Volsky from the first--but she had detected the
glimmerings of something fine in the child! No--despite his more
tolerant attitude--she knew that, underneath, his convictions were
unchanged. She was glad that she had gone out upon her adventure
alone.
With a heart that throbbed in quick staccato beats, she mounted the
steps of the tenement. Little dark-eyed children moved away from her,
apparently on every side, but somehow she scarcely noticed them. The

doorway yawned, like an open mouth, in front of her--and she could
think of nothing else. As she went over the dark threshold she
remembered stories that she had read about people who go in at
tenement doorways and are never seen again. Every one has read such
stories in the daily newspapers--and perhaps some of them are true!
A faint light flickered in through the doorway. It made the ascent of the
first flight of creaking stairs quite easy. At least Rose-Marie could step
aside from the piles of rubbish and avoid the rickety places. She
wondered, as she went up, her fingers gingerly touching the dirty
hand-rail, how people could exist under such wretched conditions.
The second flight was harder to manage. The light from the narrow
doorway was shut off, and there were no windows. There might have
been gas jets upon every landing--Rose-Marie supposed that there
were--but it was mid-afternoon, and they had not yet been lighted. She
groped her way up the second flight, and the third, feeling carefully
along each step with her foot before she put her weight upon it.
On the fourth flight she paused for a moment to catch her breath. But
she realized, as she paused, that even breathing had to be done under
difficulties in this place. There was no ventilation of any sort, so far as
she could tell--all about her floated the odours of boiled cabbage, and
fried onions, and garlic. And there were other odours, too; the
indescribable smells of soiled clothing and soap-suds and greasy
dishes.
But in Rose-Marie's mind, the odours--poignant though they
were--took second place to the sounds. Never, she told herself, had she
imagined that so many different sorts of noises could exist in the same
place at one and the same time. There were the cries and sobs of little
children, the moans of sickness, the thuds of falling furniture and the
crashes of breaking crockery. There were yells of rage, and--worst of
all--bursts of appalling profanity. Rose-Marie, standing there in the
darkness of the fourth flight, heard words that she had never expected
to hear--phrases of which she had never dreamed. She shuddered as she
started up the fifth flight, and when, at last, she stood in front of the
Volsky flat, she experienced almost a feeling of relief. At least she
would be shut off, in a moment, from those alien and terrible sounds--at
least, in a moment, she would be in a home.
To most of us--particularly if we have grown up in an atmosphere such

as had always sheltered Rose-Marie--the very sound of the word
"home" brings a certain sense of warmth and comfort. Home stands for
shelter and protection and love. "Be it ever so humble," the old song
tells us, "be it ever so humble ..."
And Rose-Marie, knocking timidly upon the Volsky door, expected to
find a home. She expected it to be humble