An Ambitious Woman: A Novel. Fawcett Edgar
of a choppy, obstructive wave. At every moment poor Claire found herself gently buffeting a new impediment, male or female, as the case might be. Since she wanted to move in a course different from that of nearly every one before or beside her, the carrying out of her object involved a good amount of determined propulsion. But she at length gained the open, as it were. She had now only to strike along in a northerly direction until she reached the point at which a certain line of small cars crossed Broadway. She was not sure at just what street this intersection occurred; she knew that it was by no means near by. A cumbrous omnibus rolled clamorously toward her, and for a moment she was inclined to hail it; but a swift look into its lighted space, well freighted with passengers, made her shrink from the concentration of stares that her sex and loneliness must equally provoke. The publicity of the long, lamp-fringed sidewalk, with its incidents of potential if not always tangible policemen, expressed, after all, a more secure privacy. When she took one of the little trundling cars which would bring her eastward to the ferry, she would not be forced to clamber and stoop and stagger before getting a seat. Their mode of conveyance, too, would be somehow more safely plebeian; they would hold their last fragments of the work-a-day world going back to Greenpoint; in case of insult, she might have her final appeal to some reputable occupant bound for the same destination as herself.
Meanwhile, the big-bodied omnibus clattered by. Claire had resolved to walk. The high-perched driver had not seen her pause, hurry to the curbstone, and then lift a hand which was straightway dropped at the bidding of her changed mood. But this action, while it wrought delay in her progress, rendered somewhat earlier her meeting with one who still obstinately pursued her. Just as she had again started, with slightly quickened pace, the inexterminable Slocumb appeared at her side. He seemed to have used no effort in catching up with her. There was a terrible ease in the way his length of limb accommodated its free stride to Claire's more repressed motions. He had not immediately given chase. She had got rather deep into the crowd about the theatre-doors before his impudence, positive as it always was, had trumped up sufficient real nerve to follow her. Claire continued walking; but she looked at him with fixity as she said, "I suppose you saw that I wanted to go alone."
"'T aint right, nohow," he replied, peering into her face with his bad, hard eyes. "A putty gal like you hadn't ought t' walk the streets all by herself after dark. You lemme go along. Don' look scared; I wouldn't hurt ye fur a cent."
"Oh, I am not afraid of you," said Claire, between her teeth. "Why should I be?"
"That's the ticket. W'y should ye be?"
"I don't want your company. I have shown this to you, and now I tell it to you."
Slocumb laughed. It seemed to Claire that his laugh had the cold of ice and the thrust of steel in it. His lowered arm touched hers with intentional pressure, but she swerved sideways, at once thwarting the contact. He, however, promptly narrowed the distance thus made between them.
"Say!" he now broke forth, in peculiar, confidential undertone, as though a third party were listening. "W'at ye mad fur, hey? You was along with Jimmy MacNab, wasn't ye? An' wasn't we intrerdooced all reg'lar? I'm a better feller 'n Jim, any day in the year. Jus' gimme a show. Won't ye? Say, now, won't ye? I took a dead shine to you the minnit I clapped eyes on them two nice pink cheeks – blowed if I didn't! I sez to myself, 'She can walk round any gal I've seen fur a devil of a time,' I sez."
Claire looked straight ahead. She still went quickly along. Her feet and limbs felt light, almost void of sense. Fear had to do with this, and she was keenly frightened. For the first time in her life she knew the terror that feminine honesty has when fronted with the close chance of physical insult.
Slocumb justified her dread. He had no more regard for common laws of restraint than the majority of untamed brutes, when conscious, as in his case, of firm thews and active bulk. As for moral bravery, his nature harbored no concern with such nicer elements. The only vices he did not possess were those for which he had never known an hour of temptation. His father had drank himself to death, and he inherited what was perhaps an embryo taste in the same direction. He got drunk once a fortnight, now, in his twenty-seventh year, whereas, two years ago, these diversions had been much rarer; in a decade, under his uncontrolled conditions, there was a fair chance of his becoming a sot. To speak more generally, the vast social momentum of heredity, which seems to be so plainly understood and so ill appreciated in our golden century, had Slocumb well in its stern grip. There were no outward incident forces, as the philosophic phrase goes, to make his case in any way a hopeful one. He had seen Claire; he had exchanged a word with her; he had liked her. If his liking were put in the baldest form of explanation it would have to deal with rather darksome realisms. And it is always preferable that the pursuant satyr and the unwilling nymph be treated wholly from the poetic and picturesque point of view.
Claire would not speak. She was very frightened, as before has been recorded: she seemed to see, between the gloomy interspaces of the lamps, a phantasmal semblance of her father, looking untold rebuke at her, and then vanishing only to reappear. She walked onward with fleet energy. An idea shot through her mind that she might call a policeman to rid her of this incubus. But she dismissed the idea at once. It was too savagely desperate even for the confronting dilemma.
By this time Slocumb had begun to see plainly that Claire was proof against all his known methods of conquest. But she was unprotected, and he had a dogged dislike of giving up the siege. The silence continued for nearly five blocks. During this time his eyes scarcely once left her face, gleaming distinct or dim as the lamplight waxed or waned.
"Say!" he at length re-addressed her. "Ain't ye hungry? I was thinkin' a stew would go putty good, just now, or a dish o' ice-cream. P'r'aps ye'd rather tackle sumpn sweet. Hey?"
She made no answer. He peered closer into her face, and repeated the last odious little interrogative monosyllable a good many times. But Claire remained as mute and irresponsive as though it had fallen on stone-deaf ears.
This lure suddenly held out to appetite was his last persuasive stroke. It sprang naturally enough from the man who dealt it. It expressed in the most exhaustive terms just how narrow and barren his conception was of Claire's reasons for shunning him. He stood as the hideous result of a hideous phase of society; and he could no more divine or imagine higher and richer levels of life than if to know of these had meant to be familiar with the soil and climates of a remote star.
He was disappointed and chagrined, but not angry. Anger could not consort with his present state; another kind of heat already filled his veins; one flush kept the other aloof. He had now decided that Claire was not to be conciliated, and yet the perfect lawlessness of his past made him in a manner unable to snap the bond of attraction and leave her. Self-control was a sealed book to him; he had not even opened its cover, apart from learning its rudimentary lessons.
When they had gone five or six blocks further, and the street at which Claire would take the cross-town car was by no means far away, he abruptly caught her arm and drew it close to his side, so holding it with an exertion of purely muscular strength, beside which her own resistance counted for little more than the flutter of a bird.
Even at this most trying juncture she still moved on. He continued to walk, as well. She veered her face toward his, however, forced out of all her previous pitiful disdain, and he saw that she had grown pale as death.
"Let me go," she said. "Don't dare to hold me like this!"
"Look here!" he returned, his tones taking a nasal whisper, and his breath sweeping so close to her nostrils that she caught in it a stale taint, as of liquor drank some time ago. "I wouldn't harm a hair o' your head; you can jus' bet on that. I've took a likin' to you, an' I'll treat ye good. If you wus a lady livin' up t' Fifth Avenyer, ye wouldn't git more respectfuller behaved to nur I'll do."
"If you don't let me go," said Claire, gasping a little as she got out the words, "I'll complain to the first policeman we meet."
He dropped her arm at once, stopping short. "D' ye mean it?" he asked, with great show of reproach. "Say! d' ye mean it?"
But Claire hurried on. She had a wild momentary hope that she had hit at random upon a blessed source of deliverance. Here, however, she had quite miscalculated. Slocumb's outburst had merely formed a bit of the cheap sentimentality which one of his race and stamp would select as