The Flower Brides

  In the wildness and flurry of the sordid atmosphere, the thought of going to God seemed only a thought of quietness and peace. Nothing else seemed to matter if He cared enough just to set her free from all these worries of the world into which she had wandered, where there were no open doors to go back to home and safety and peace.

  It was in this state of mind, and while she lingered an instant standing by a shelf in the kitchen, trying to swallow a cup of weak coffee that was not even hot, that she heard her name shouted by the manager.

  “Jane! Here! Customer calling for you, Jane! Make it snappy!”

  Her hand trembled as she set down the distasteful cup hastily, caught up her tray, and hurried away, praying as she had of late fallen into the habit of doing, Oh, God, help me to get through this once more.

  She was almost up to the table the manager had indicated before she realized who the customer was that had called for her. It was a man who had been there three times before that week. He was a large sensuous brute, with thick lips and a cruel face. She remembered his fulsome flattery the first time he had come in; his little pig-eyes upon her had seemed to soil her very soul. She had avoided waiting upon him several times since that first experience. But now it was too late for that, and she had been ordered by the manager to wait upon him.

  She gathered all her dignity and went forward, a shudder of horror passing over her slender shoulders in spite of her best efforts, and when she reached him she found that he was drunk!

  Frightened, she paused, keeping the table between them, but he reached out a burly arm and grasped her wrist, trying to draw her nearer.

  “Come over here, sweetie,” he demanded in a loud tone that everybody in the room could hear! “I need sympathy! That’s why I sent for you, Jane! Come clost an’ tell me whatcha got ta eat—!”

  But Diana, more frightened than she had ever been in her life, struggled with all her might to get her wrist free from that terrible grasp, and suddenly she felt a stout arm around her waist and a familiar voice towering over her.

  “Hey you, Mortie Matzan, you lay off my gal! She’s my sweetie, an’ I don’t want nobody else buttin’ in. Scram there! Hear what I say? This dame is mine. Ain’t you, sweetheart!”

  The voice was not loud on account of the roomful of customers, but the manager’s hideous face loomed over her in a possessive leer that almost took her senses away.

  Diana gave one terrified sound like a wounded animal, and tearing herself loose from the hateful arm, she suddenly raised a glass of water from the table before her and flung it full in the proprietor’s face. The glass, falling heavily down on the drunken man’s foot, brought a howl from him to add to the confusion. But Diana was not there to see. She was madly dashing down the room toward the kitchen, colliding with another waitress in the doorway, leaving a shower of tray and dishes in her wake, flying through the kitchen and out the open door into the alley at the back, barely escaping a fall over the big garbage can that stood in her way. She rounded the corner into the alley, went blindly up one street and down another, through any alley that presented itself in her way, only so that it lay in the general direction of her own little third-story room.

  It was only about two o’clock, and there were people all around her everywhere, but she dared not look behind her. It seemed to her that the whole restaurant—proprietor, employees, customers, drunk and sober—must be following. She did not remember that she had left her hat and jacket. Even her purse was of no concern to her now. They were in her locker and she wore the key around her neck, but she would never go back for them, not if she starved to death. There was only fifty cents in the purse, anyway, and what was fifty cents now?

  She was panting and frightened, more frightened than she had ever been in her life before, and the tears were rolling down her cheeks, though she did not know it. She turned at last into her own street and fled up the block like a shadow.

  She did not see the shabby form that lurked across the street in the narrow arched court between two houses, all unsuspected, watching for her arrival. Having nothing to do for the time being, and having a hunch it might be useful, he had stationed himself there to discover if possible her comings and goings; and now she came so startlingly, flying through the street hatless and fairly flinging herself at the door with the key in her trembling hand, that he had to look carefully to be sure it was really she. He had never seen her before without a hat on, not since she had been a little girl in school, but there was something about her lithe way of running, even in her fright, that made him sure of her. And so he stood there watching until she had disappeared from sight and the grim door had slammed behind her. Then he slowly disengaged himself from the shadows of the archway and slithered down the street and around the corner, skulking close to the houses, skirting the block until he disappeared into the alley behind the house that she had entered. There he took up his stand to watch for a possible vision of a girl in the third-story back window.

  But Diana was lying facedown across her bed weeping her heart out, and he presently slipped away to refresh himself with a glass of something heartening. It was not the first time he had watched in the alley under that window.

  Earlier in the day Stephen Disston had gone in desperation to his bank and had it out with the bank president. He had spent three lonely nights in the damaged house with no word from his recalcitrant wife and three grilling days in his office waiting for results that did not come, and there had been ample opportunity to think about his lost child. There had come no encouragement as yet from the private detective whom he had hired several days ago to hunt for Diana, and he was almost in despair. But he gained nothing by his anxious questioning of the bank president except an added load of anxiety. And finally Mr. Dunham, growing weary of the interview in the midst of his busy morning, had politely suggested to his friend that the best way to find his daughter was to page her on the radio. The idea was shocking to Diana’s father. It seemed as if he would be descending among the criminals of the world to seek her. As if Diana had run away and gotten married or done some sensational thing that should not be blazoned to the world. But the more he walked around the city and saw the lurking humanity on every hand, with faces of might-be criminals, the more his tormented soul entertained the thought that something terrible must have happened to Diana or she never would have kept this long continued silence. It did not occur to him to wonder what her reaction had been to his withdrawal of her money. That seemed a simple matter. He did not realize how it had stunned her to have her beloved father take such drastic action against her. What did occur to him, and worried him beyond expression, was the fact that she had no money. He was a man who had had money all his life and plenty of it, and he could not conceive it possible that his daughter out in the world alone could get along without it. He had been entirely convinced when Helen suggested it that Diana would come home at once when she found she had nothing with which to buy food and shelter.

  But Diana had not come home! What had she done? Had something terrible befallen her? He could think of no friends or relatives with whom she might have taken refuge whom he had not already questioned, and now it seemed to him that he should go crazy if there was not some immediate way of finding her. And added to all the strain and worry he had dreamed for three nights in succession now, alone in that house where he had lived so happily with his first wife, that Marilla had come to him and stood beside his bed looking at him with mournful eyes and had reproached him. “Stephen, what have you done with our little girl?” Just that question and then she would vanish with his sleep and leave him to the long, wakeful hours before the dawn.

  Back in his office alone again after the interview with the banker he thought of his advice and at last surrendered to the idea. He would trail his pride of family in the dust and descend to broadcast his anxiety. If that was the only way to find Diana he would try that. He would leave no stone unturned.

  And now he wondered that he had waited so long, and he sat with t
rembling fingers, writing feverishly, the words that were to go on the air: “Paging Miss Diana Disston, who left her father’s house several weeks ago to visit relatives and has not been heard from for ten days. When last seen in this city she was dressed in—” The hurried pen paused and the father tried to conjure up a vision of his sweet, young daughter, the blinding tears filling his eyes and falling on the page as he recalled her, straight and slender in her dark dress. His description after all was vague, not helped much by the banker who had given mainly his impression of her lovely eyes shadowed by sorrow, her noble bearing, and her proud little chin. No, one couldn’t put those things on the air, not even to find Diana!

  But a few minutes later that afternoon, just after Diana had fled the restaurant in the noisy little plebeian street, an announcer startled suddenly into the midst of a musical comedy program of the afternoon: “Paging Miss Diana Disston, five feet two inches, slender, dark hair and eyes, weighing one hundred and ten pounds, dressed in black—”

  The voice of the announcer boomed out solemnly as though he were pronouncing a requiem on the dead. One more unfortunate dead! And Stephen Disston sat in the far corner of the stuffy recreation room of a strange downtown hotel where he had never been before and knew nobody, and listened. His hat was drawn down over his eyes and his open paper flung up in front of his face. He listened while the blood crept shamedly up into his haggard face, suffusing it with a kind of purple shadow, and then receded, leaving his face white and drawn. To think it was his daughter, his little Diana, whose precious name was being called out that way to the world! And it was his own act, his hasty words, his refusal to listen to her pleadings that had sent her from home and him.

  Several miles away across the city in an uptown apartment where a throng of Helen’s friends were gathered playing bridge with the radio going full blast to drown their quarrels, Helen heard the words boom out and looked up with a laugh, saw no one was noticing, and hurried to turn the dial to another number. But on her way back to her seat she laughed. With no apparent reason she laughed immoderately. But no one looked at her curiously. It was a free and easy party, and no one thought anything was strange. The stranger, the better! They were combing life for thrills. It was the thing to do.

  Edith Maythorn and a few of her friends spending a pleasant afternoon together heard it and looked up at one another, startled.

  “Oh, that’s not our Diana,” said Edith carelessly after listening for a minute. “She was here just a short time ago, and besides, she never wears black, not that I ever saw. But isn’t that strange? Two people of that unusual name. I’ll have to telephone Diana about it. Won’t she be amused? That’s almost as funny as when my brother Jimmy saw his name in the papers as having won in a prize fight!” They chattered on and presently forgot all about it.

  Standing at a bar in a fashionable hotel, Jerry Lange heard it as he tossed down a cocktail and paused thoughtfully. Diana Disston! Where had he heard that name? Wasn’t that what they called that quiet little girl at Maythorn’s? But it was probably not the same name after all. He never remembered names very well. He always thought of her as “beautiful,” somehow. Of course, it wouldn’t be the same name. Still you couldn’t tell these days. Things were happening! So he ordered another highball and tossed it down and went on his way whistling.

  Mrs. MacCarroll heard it as she sat darning Gordon’s socks and setting neat patches in partly worn garments. She heard it and, gathering up her work, stuffed it into her sewing basket summarily and went to the window to look out up to the great house. Oh, poor, poor man! What was coming now? And where was the sweet little girl? Had something awful happened to her?

  Maggie, in her sister’s neat parlor entertaining the baby while her sister went to the store for a spool of thread, heard and went to the window again and again hoping her sister would return. Hussy or no hussy, she must go to the master as soon as Mary came to care for the child. And Diana! Poor wee thing, where was she, and night coming on again? Maggie’s cheeks grew redder than their wont with excitement, and her blue eyes were drenched with tears as she stood by the window looking out and wiping her eyes with the corner of her neat white apron.

  And down in the cellar of the miserable roomhouse where the scum of the city found refuge, Bill Sharpe sat at a sloppy wooden table, guiltless of even an oilcloth cover, and slowly drank a glass of vile beer while a cheap radio over in the darkness whined out whatever came along on the air. His eyes narrowed cunningly as he listened, put down his glass, and stared at the corner from which the sound came. He sat listening to the end of the announcement. Then lifting his glass he gulped the rest of the beer and wiped his mouth on his ragged sleeve as he slunk off from the table with a motion between a slouch and stealth and vanished up the cellar steps.

  Down the dirty street to a dirty little shop with dusty windows, where children bought all-day suckers for a cent and their elders found salacious literature, he went. He purchased a sheet of paper and an envelope for two cents and stole away to a shelter he knew down by the river where a box would afford all the writing desk he needed, and there in the late afternoon he wrote out a communication, brief and to the point. He needed no study or thought to distort the spelling almost beyond recognition, for he came by bad spelling naturally. And while he wrote with his stub of a pencil on the cheap paper that was by no means fresh, did he have a vision perhaps of a little girl with brown curls and golden lights in her brown eyes, wearing a fresh white dress, sitting at a far desk in the same room at school with him? For a few days only it was, until he graduated backward into the grade below, and she passed on out of his horizon entirely.

  The note when it was finished read:

  Yor doter is huld fer ransom. Putt fifty thousand dolers under the big stun in yor springe howse tanite an she will cum bake tanite otherwiz she will be kilt. Don’t tel tha perlise ore yor lif wil not be wuth 6 pents.

  Yors DESPRIT

  He addressed the letter and stole away out of the precinct, and just before the sun set he emerged cautiously from the woods around the little creek that ran below the garden at the big house. Stealthily he approached from shrub to shrub until he stood hidden behind the bushes that fringed the top of the terrace, and from there he reached out a ragged arm with one quick motion and hung the letter by a dirty string to the doorknob. Then he melted back into the shadows and was gone, and not even Mother MacCarroll, keeping her steady vigil from window to window, caught a glimpse of him.

  A few minutes later Stephen Disston swung himself stiffly off the bus and walked slowly up the drive. He walked like an old man, with his head bent down, and Mother MacCarroll watched him from the window and longed to run out and try to comfort him, only she felt that perhaps he would not like it, so she stood there at the window watching him and praying for him. Poor sad, lonely man! And where could the new wife be? Had Maggie been mistaken perhaps? Maybe there wasn’t any new wife after all.

  She watched him until he reached the front door. There was just light enough for her to make him out standing there fumbling with the lock. How long it took him to open the front door!

  Then the telephone rang, and she had to go.

  It was only a wrong number, and she was soon back; but she couldn’t see the master of the house anymore, and the door was shut. He had probably gone in and the light would spring up in a moment. She had watched him for three nights now and it always did, but though she watched for five minutes there came no light, and—was it imagination or was there something dark lying on the white steps?

  Imagination, of course. She had better go about her business instead of watching her neighbors. But poor man, poor man!

  So she turned around and flashed on her own lights, hurrying to get dinner ready. Gordon would be coming home hungry soon, and she wasn’t ready. She had been daydreaming for the last hour. But she cast an anxious glance out the window now and then and there was no light in the great house!

  Chapter 22

  Diana lay upo
n her bed and wept her heart out, wept until exhausted nature took revenge and sleep fell down upon her. Just a locking of her tired senses in oblivion for a little time, a fitful sleep wherein the terrors of the day were for a moment forgotten. Then suddenly somebody slammed up a window across the alley and loud angry voices broke her quiet release, mingled with a sudden sharp whine of two radios of different themes. The usual suppertime pandemonium had broken loose on the neighborhood, and Diana, not used to it at this hour, awoke with a start and sat up looking around her.