Chapter 28: The Price of Enlightenment

It was November of the following year that the bird of ill-omen, which had been flapping its wings over Calvary Alley for so long, decided definitely to alight. A catastrophe occurred that threatened to remove the entire population of the alley to another and, we trust, a fairer world.

Mrs. Snawdor insists to this day that it was the sanitary inspector who started the trouble. On one of his infrequent rounds he had encountered a strange odor in Number One, a suspicious, musty odor that refused to come under the classification of krout, kerosene, or herring. The tenants, in a united body, indignantly defended the smell.

“It ain’t nothin’ at all but Mis’ Smelts’ garbage,” Mrs. Snawdor declared vehemently. “She often chucks it in a hole in the kitchen floor to save steps. Anybody’d think the way you was carryin’ on, it was a murdered corpse!”

But the inspector persisted in his investigations, forcing a way into the belligerent Snawdor camp, where he found Fidy Yager with a well-developed case of smallpox. She had been down with what was thought to be chicken-pox for a week, but the other children had been sworn to secrecy under the threat that the doctor would scrape the skin off their arms with a knife if they as much as mentioned Fidy’s name.

It was a culmination of a battle that had raged between Mrs. Snawdor and the health authorities for ten years, over the question of vaccination. The epidemic that followed was the visible proof of Mrs. Snawdor’s victory.

Calvary Alley, having offered a standing invitation to germs in general, was loathe to regard the present one as an enemy. It resisted the inspector, who insisted on vaccinating everybody all over again; it was indignant at the headlines in the morning papers; it was outraged when Number One was put in quarantine.

Even when Fidy Yager, who “wasn’t all there,” and who, according to her mother, had “a fit a minute,” was carried away to the pest-house, nobody was particularly alarmed. But when, twenty-four hours later, Mr. Snawdor and one of the Lavinski helpers came down with it, the alley began to look serious, and Mrs. Snawdor sent for Nance.

For six months now Nance had been living at a young women’s boarding home, realizing a life-long ambition to get out of the alley. But on hearing the news, she flung a few clothes into an old suitcase and rushed to the rescue.

Since that never-to-be-forgotten day a year ago when word had reached her of Dan’s marriage to Birdie Smelts, a hopeless apathy had possessed her. Even in the first weeks after his departure, when Mac’s impassioned letters were pouring in and she was exerting all her will power to make good her promise to his father, she was aware of a dull, benumbing anxiety over Dan. She had tried to get his address from Mrs. Purdy, from Slap Jack’s, where he still kept some of his things, from the men he knew best at the factory. Nobody could tell her where he had gone, or what he intended to do.

Just what she wanted to say to him she did not know. She still resented bitterly his mistrust of her, and what she regarded as his interference with her liberty, but she had no intention of letting matters rest as they were. She and Dan must fight the matter out to some satisfactory conclusion.

Then came the news of his marriage, shattering every hope and shaking the very foundation of her being. From her earliest remembrance Dan had been the most dependable factor in her existence. Whirlwind enthusiasms for other things and other people had caught her up from time to time, but she always came back to Dan, as one comes back to solid earth after a flight in an aeroplane.

In her first weeks of chagrin and mortification she had sought refuge in thoughts of Mac. She had slept with his unanswered letters under her pillow and clung to the memory of his ardent eyes, his gay laughter, the touch of his lips on her hands and cheeks. Had Mac come home that Christmas, her doom would have been sealed. The light by which she steered had suddenly gone out, and she could no longer distinguish the warning coast lights from the harbor lights of home.