TWO

The second time Father Dowling went to see the two girls in the hotel was the evening of the first Thursday in February. All evening he had been hearing confessions. He sat in the confessional with his elbow on the rail by the grating, with the faint musk-like priest odor pervading the confessional box, listening tirelessly to girls and old men, and giving himself sympathetically to their sorrow for the slightest sin. But after an hour and a half he grew very weary. The last confession he heard was from a young hysterical girl who seemed to him to be making up a chain of small sins so that she could imagine herself full of remorse. Growing exasperated, he thrust his face against the wire grating and said sharply, “My goodness, child, you’re entitled as a human being to certain judgments about your fellow creatures. Every time you have an opinion about your neighbor you’re not committing a mortal sin. Don’t you understand that?” The girl was startled by his face and breath and moving lips so close to her, and dropping her head down in the darkness she whispered, “Yes, Father, I understand.” Then she seemed unable to lift her head. Father Dowling, giving her absolution very quickly, wondered whether he should explain that a priest ought not to be worried by such trifles, but he smiled as he saw her standing up hurriedly, and when she swung aside the curtain and went out he leaned back with relief.

For a long time he waited and no one entered the confessional. He waited and reflected on the young girl’s imagined sorrow, her fictitious sin and her fancied penitence, and he suddenly remembered the two girls, Midge and Ronnie. It seemed to him sitting there silently in the darkness, with one hand twisting the end of the purple stole around his neck, that there had been something very beautiful and real about their regret that night in the hotel room, with Midge biting her lip and crying and Ronnie’s face full of dogged despair. It seemed astonishing yet consoling that human beings so fettered in degradation could rise so swiftly when moved by simple friendliness. Father Dowling was suddenly eager to see them again.

After waiting twenty minutes longer, he went out to the aisle and looked up and down at the almost empty church, where a few women were saying their penance up at the front by the altar rail. No one was sitting on the penitent’s bench waiting to go into the confessional. He walked rapidly up the aisle and across the altar, genuflecting before the tabernacle, and then crossed through to the sacristy.

When he was dressed and out on the street, he felt a peculiar exhilaration and joy in life and his work in the parish. It was a very clear, cold night, with a brilliantly starred, faraway winter sky. His feet scrunched on the snow. All of his work since his ordination, as he thought of it, seemed groping and incomplete unless the way he had helped Midge and Ronnie was included, too. It seemed to him now, going along the street with a long swinging stride and his hands in his pockets, that his prayers for these girls would never be unheeded. He smiled very happily to himself.

He was on the other side of the block, walking more slowly and wondering if it would be better to pull his scarf up high around his neck so he would not be recognized as a priest when he came in sight of the hotel. In one way he hated any such deception. Yet he knew that he ought to avoid giving scandal in the presence of ignorant stupid people, who were ever anxious to sneer at the Church. For a moment he stopped on the other side of the street, opposite the barber shop, giving himself a little more time to decide whether he would conceal his collar, while he looked at the dimly lighted hotel entrance. Then he saw a girl coming up the street and when she passed under the light he knew it was Ronnie with her red coat and the bit of gray fur on the collar, but he stood there without moving because he noticed her glancing over her shoulder twice at a short, wide-shouldered man in a peak cap who was following her, and when she got to the hotel, she made a slight motion with her head toward the door, waited till he got closer, and then went in with the man in the peak cap right behind her. This happened so very quickly, so furtively, that Father Dowling, who was across the street, did not seem to understand its meaning. “That was the tall girl, Ronnie, all right,” he thought, while his heart beat heavily and he grew dreadfully uneasy. “God help her for her shamelessness,” he thought, growing angry. Up and down and back and forth he paced, feeling a rage within him. It seemed terrible that a mortal soul that he had loved and prayed for was being degraded almost within reach of him while he stood helpless on the street. It was this helplessness, so much deeper within him than his anger, that he could not understand, and bit by bit this helplessness possessed him till soon his anger was completely submerged.

In a surprisingly short time there was a shadow in the hotel door across the road. The man with the peak cap came out, looked up and down very carefully, stood long enough to light a cigarette and then began to loaf down the street with a slow contented rolling gait and an air of complete well-being. Father Dowling hated him, feeling big and strong enough to beat him. All his mixed-up anger and disappointment grew into a steady hatred of this man who loafed along lazily till out of sight. Father Dowling thought of rushing into the hotel and speaking to Ronnie, but the notion of going into the room so shortly after such a man had glutted himself and left disgusted him. “I’ll wait just a little longer. I’ll walk up the street a bit and maybe she’ll come out,” he thought, pretending he was not cold and that the weather was very mild, when his ears were actually red and tingling and even his hands thrust deep in his pockets felt cold. His feet, too, were chilled, and hurt him when he moved and the blood began to circulate again.

He had almost decided it would be better to return to the church and possibly visit the hotel the following afternoon when he saw Midge crossing the road. There was just enough light slanting from the broken sign over the hotel door to shine on her tilted face, which was smiling up coaxingly at the very heavy, respectable, sober-faced man of middle age who was on her arm. She did not go into the hotel furtively. She did not walk ahead of the man as Ronnie had done. She was hanging on his arm as if she had known him intimately for years, and had always given him an abundant happiness out of her own deep love. If it had not been for the anxious expression on the gray middle-aged man’s face they might have looked like a pair of lovers.

Father Dowling felt a little weary. Midge and her man passed not twenty feet away from him. At first he thought the disgust in him was for this mean hotel and the girls, but then it became, too, a weariness and disgust for himself as he remembered how he had felt sure that his presence and his eagerness had meant very much that other night to the two girls. It seemed now like a kind of rare conceit that had been making him, even in his prayers, feel joyful and sure of himself. At most he ought only to have dared to hope and prayed very humbly. Instead he had been going around smiling happily at everybody as if he had a secret that neither other priests nor parishioners would ever understand.

But he waited till he saw the middle-aged man in the gray coat come hurriedly out of the hotel, pull his hat down far over his eyes and start to walk furtively up the street, gradually increasing his pace and almost running as if expecting to be arrested at any moment, or to have some one touch him on the shoulder and point back at the hotel.

Father Dowling crossed over and entered the hotel. He did not even look at the man at the desk. He went straight to the stair with the bits of brass on the edges. His face was full of sober earnestness and there was a peculiar dignity about the way he carried his head. His scarf was high up around his neck, though he was so little concerned he never wondered whether the desk man noticed him. But Mr. Baer’s glasses were thrust up on the bridge of his nose, the head with heavy woodenly arranged hair shot forward, and grinning with his thick underlip tight against his teeth, he said to himself, “There goes the lamb of God again. I wonder which one he likes. Probably the little one. I’ll ask her about him. He’s the best-looking customer she ever had. More power to her good right arm.”

Father Dowling rapped on the white door at the head of the stairs, and when it was opened a few inches, he said mildly, “May I come in?”

“Lordy, it’s Father. Hello, Father.” He could just see the lower part of Ronnie’s jaw, the lighted tip of a cigarette and a cloud of smoke. “Come on in,” she said.

He nodded gravely. Midge, who was sitting on the chair where he had sat the other night, had on a very loose blue dress, like a slip. Her hair was done in curls on her neck. As soon as she saw the priest she stood up, making her little bow and putting out her left hand with the elbow extended from her body. “Hello, Father, how are you?” she said.

“You won’t mind sitting on the bed, will you, Father?” Ronnie said. Both girls were feeling good-humored, almost exhilarated, with their rouged cheeks flushed and their eyes full of animation. Ronnie, standing up with a good-natured grin on her stubborn face, pointed to the bed. “Sit down. How’ve you been, Father?” she said. He dreaded sitting on that bed, but finally he sat down, and was unable to do anything but stare at them severely. His big strong hands were lying heavily on his knees. His face looked white and full of uneasiness.

“You don’t look so cheerful, so chirpy to-night, Father,” Midge said. She seemed really concerned. “You look as if you’d been working at something too hard,” she said.

“What’s the matter with you, Father. You’re sitting there like an extra bed-post,” Ronnie said irritably.

“Tell me this,” he said with sudden anger. “Didn’t my coming here the other night mean anything to you at all?”

“It sure did,” Midge said. “Do you know, Father, I couldn’t get to sleep at all that night. Honest to God I couldn’t. I kept wanting to talk to Ronnie. I’d keep waking up and nudging her till she wanted to crown me.”

“Didn’t you regret the life you were leading?”

They didn’t answer him. The sullen dogged expression was on Ronnie’s face and Midge kept shifting her glance away, trying to avoid the priest’s angry eyes. But they did not look like persons aware of guilt. They were merely uneasy and resentful, as if they did not want to listen. Sometimes Midge looked directly at him with a bold impatience and he saw she was pretty, and remembered how she had taken the middle-aged man into the hotel half an hour ago. “I was on the street and I saw you both come in here with men,” he said quietly, without any anger, just as if stating a fact. “I stood there, waiting till the men came out. I know both of you. You don’t understand the anxiety a priest can feel for two girls like you. It was terrible to have to stand out there and know what was going on up here.”

“You might as well get off your high horse, Father. There’s no use talking to us like that,” Ronnie said.

“I’m on no high horse. I’m not talking down to you. I’m talking about something that happened.”

Ronnie was now sitting on the arm of Midge’s chair with her hand on the smaller girl’s shoulder. There was something Father Dowling admired in the direct and simple gestures of this big girl with the businesslike manner and the blunt speech. “Now see here, both of you, I’m not trying to be harsh,” he said. “Only I have been praying a lot for you and I thought I had really touched you in some way the other night….”

“Oh, don’t keep nagging at us,” Midge said. “Why do you come here if you want to nag us?”

“What’s that, my child? I don’t want to nag you.”

“You have a good time talking about praying for us, don’t you, but prayers won’t pay for our room, prayers won’t help me get my hair curled. You can’t eat prayers. How do you think we’re going to live? Did you ever stop to figure that out?”

“There are millions of girls with decent jobs. You seem full of bitterness.”

“There are more girls than jobs. What are you going to do with the girls left over? And this is the middle of a cold winter, too.”

“Isn’t it better to starve than lose your…”

“If that’s what’s worrying you and if it will buck you up and make us seem like tin saints, we’re just about starving now. Look around this dump. See all the silks and satins. What do you see? See that old brown coat of mine over there? I’ve been wearing it for three years. I have to take it off like it was tissue paper or it’ll fall to pieces. Isn’t this a lovely room? Don’t you hate to put your wet boots on that lovely rug? It’s filthy, filthy, filthy, but I’d rather be here than out there,” she said, pointing to the window. The little dark girl was pouring the words out of her as if she had become full of hate. “We’re not even high-class whores, see,” she said. “We take what comes our way and mighty glad to get it.” She was speaking with all the fury of an indignant, respectable woman and the mingling of her strange humility and her passion was so convincing that Father Dowling began to feel doubtful, as if there might be many things he did not understand. He could see the twisted heels on Ronnie’s shoes, the broken toe-cap, and the stockings with the sewn-up runs. A long time ago he had heard a Redemptorist priest preaching a sermon about the luxurious life of vice which was always a temptation to poor girls. Somehow, he himself had always thought of vice as yielding to the delights of the flesh, as warmth and good soft living and laziness. But as he looked around this room and at these angry girls he felt close to a dreadful poverty that was without any dignity. He felt, too, that Ronnie and Midge worked far harder than almost any young women he knew. Bewildered, he said, “I don’t want to seem stupid. I don’t want to abuse you, either. There’s no more degraded an existence than yours, but, listen, don’t be impatient with me. I’m not sure I’m wise enough to blame you. Perhaps there are many things I don’t altogether understand. I know it’s hard to be hungry and be a Christian. I understand that.”

“You bet your boots you can understand that. We can understand anything that touches our bellies.”

“Oh, she doesn’t hate you, Father. Don’t get excited, Midge.”

“Why should she hate me, Ronnie?”

“She doesn’t hate you. She’s just up in the air. Take it easy, Midge.”

“I’ll hate him if I want to. I hate everybody in the whole damned lousy world,” Midge said, jumping up from her chair, her round brown eyes brilliant with indignation. “I’ll hate his old man and his old woman and his whole damned family if I want to. See.” But she saw Father Dowling smiling very gently, as if her indignation was so honest he couldn’t help liking it. She grew quiet and after looking at him for a moment, she smiled a bit too, and said, “I guess I’m flying off the handle, Father.”

Father Dowling was smiling because he felt some of his eagerness returning. There was much he had not understood, there was a whole economic background behind the wretched lives of these girls. They were not detached from the life around them. They had free will only when they were free. He remembered suddenly, with a quick smile that brightened his face, how he had learned in the seminary that St. Thomas Aquinas has said we have not free will when we are completely dominated by passion. Hunger was an appetite that had to be satisfied and if it was not satisfied it became a strong passion that swept aside all free will and rational judgment. If he properly understood the lives of these girls, he thought, he might realize they were not free but strongly fettered and he would not be so sure of judging them. And as if he were longing for some explanation that might restore his hope for the girls, he decided that he must first try and help them to live decently. He looked at them warmly and moistened his lips.

“What did you use to do?” he asked Ronnie.

“I worked in a department store. It wasn’t steady work, though.”

“Didn’t you like it?”

“Sure, only I’m telling you, I only worked part time.”

“Wouldn’t you like a decent job now?”

“Try and get me one.”

“I certainly will try,” he said.

He leaned back on the bed, almost at ease now, and began to ask Midge about Montreal, where she had lived, and how many children there were in the family. Smiling at him, as if she thought him very funny, she said there were twelve children in her family. She started to name them all. “Louise, George, Henry, Theresa,” then she stopped, frowned very seriously, tried to get the children in the right order of their emergence into life, giggled, and began to count slowly on her fingers. “How many’s that?” But when she had finished naming all the children and had described how their mother had managed to feed them all properly, she explained that she had left home with a fellow she had thought might possibly marry her. He had definitely promised to at the time. Then she was silent, reflective, frowning, trying to understand many things about those times, years ago.

She was silent so long that Father Dowling coughed, then laughed boyishly and began to explain that he had come from a country town up around the lakes. There had only been, as far as he could remember, his mother and one brother, and they had had a hard time putting him through the seminary. He could not remember his father, though he had a picture of him in his bureau drawer. It was always a satisfaction, it was more than that, it was delightful to see his mother and brother in the town when he went home for a holiday. They wanted to parade him into every neighbor’s home. His mother strutted around the main street and in the stores with her chest thrown out looking and talking like a bishop. Indeed, since his ordination, she had become the town bishop and was very severe about every one’s morals. Father Dowling started to laugh, a rolling hearty laugh, and Ronnie and Midge laughed too. Soon they were all feeling jolly and friendly. They kept on talking till Father Dowling heard the sound of wheels on the frozen road, the squeaking of iron wheels on hard snow echoing on the clear night air. “My goodness, it can’t be the milk wagon, can it?” he said, and he got up to go.

But when he had his hat and coat on he became very embarrassed and even blushed. Resolutely he put his hand in his pocket and took out a bill-fold. “I’m going to try and get jobs for you,” he said. “Won’t you let me help you until then?” He took two five-dollar bills, all there was in the bill-fold, and said, “Please take this. I know you won’t go on the streets if you don’t need money. Isn’t that true? At least the strongest temptation will be gone. Please take it.” He was actually pleading with them.

Midge looked at Ronnie. Both girls grinned. “Thanks, Father,” Ronnie said. “My goodness. You must excuse anything we’ve said. I had no idea–we did not expect anything like this. It’s mighty decent of you.”

“Oh, thank you, Father. You’re a peach,” Midge said.

“Now, good night, both of you. Think of me. Keep trying hard, and if you could only say a little prayer…well, never mind. Good night.”

Father Dowling went downstairs. This time, as he passed the desk, he did not like the way the proprietor smiled. There was a kind of leering comprehension in the smile that disturbed him.

But when he was outside in the clear night air, he knew it was very late. “My goodness,” he said and began to rush home. He was already planning whom he might ask to find jobs for the girls. Then suddenly he wondered if he ought to have given them money. He tried to define the objection to giving them money, but it remained too deeply hidden within him.