CHAPTER I
"It ain't exactly what you would call a society job, Robson, but it will pay the milkman and the baker, and that's something."
Nellie Whitehead kicked off a shoe that she had unbuttoned, resting her unshod foot upon a chair as she sighed with luxurious satisfaction.
Claire Robson began to draw down the shades. A cold March rain was falling outside and Claire felt that her shabby living-room seemed less bleak with the night shut out. For the past three weeks Nellie Whitehead had been the only point of contact with the outside world and Claire had grown to listen eagerly for the three quick rings at the door-bell which announced her solitary visitor. There was something about Nellie Whitehead which usually revived Claire's drooping spirits to an extraordinary degree, but to-night she felt no reaction to the slightly acrid optimism of her friend.
"A job?" Claire questioned, increduously, seating herself. "I'm ready for anything in reason. Only.... Well, the truth is, the Finnegans are moving. I heard about it to-day. I'll have to hire some one to look after mother, and...." Her hands lifted and dropped in hopeless resignation.
"It ain't an office job," pursued Miss Whitehead; "it's playing the piano. You know that little friend I told you about who sings at Tait's?... Well, she had an offer to sing in the same place. But of course she's in pretty soft where she is."
Nellie Whitehead was not given to indirectness, and Claire had a feeling that for some reason her friend was finding it advisable to lead up to her project rather cautiously.
"I'm ready for anything," she repeated.
Nellie Whitehead settled back comfortably. "I suppose I might just as well quit beating around the bush. You see, it isn't such a snap for the real professional ... otherwise it wouldn't be going begging. It's ... it's in a Greek café on Third Street."
A Greek café on Third Street! Claire Robson stared in amazement at her friend. For a moment she had a feeling that Nellie Whitehead must be joking. Claire Robson had heard of such places. Professional reformers always found them a perennial source of exploitation when the vice crop in other quarters failed, and every now and then the newspapers discovered, to their horror, that young and tender girls were being hired to serve Turkish coffee and almond syrup to the patrons of the Greek coffee-houses. Indeed, Claire had once listened to an eager young woman describe for the young people's section of the Home Missionary Society all the pitfalls to the weaker sex which lurked in this godless section of the community where men drank thick coffee and smoked cigarettes and even kissed pretty girls on provocation. Claire had never been prone to pass snap judgment, but the very word Greek had an outlandish sound, and it seemed quite possible that everything that had been said about the evils of the Greek quarter must have some basis. Even the term Greek labor which she chanced upon again and again in the daily news was full of sinister suggestion. And she had a flashing picture of this café in search of a pianist crowded with heavily-booted, sweating humanity fresh from construction-camps and fields.
"Well ... I don't know," she finally faltered. "I fancy they won't find my playing to their taste."
Nellie Whitehead sat up challengingly. "You mean you don't find playing in a Greek café to your taste.... As a matter of fact, I'm not keen about suggesting such a thing to you. But lots of girls make a living that way, and even if they don't move in select circles they're pretty human."
"Oh, it isn't the café side of it," Claire protested; "it's the ... the...."
"The Greek side of it, eh? Well, as a matter of fact, Robson, I guess a Greek café ain't any worse than what my little friend calls 'one of them gilded vice-cages....' And even at that, any girl who lasted six weeks in the private office of Sawyer Flint, Esquire, has run up against as much fancy roller-skating as she's apt to. If you managed to keep your balance on a slippery floor like that, I guess you'll be good for a spin on the asphalt pavement any day in the week. It may be a little bit rougher, but it ain't a bit more dangerous. In fact, I shouldn't wonder whether there wasn't a good deal more elbow room."
Nellie Whitehead leaned back again and closed her eyes. Claire was silent. There was no logical answer to her friend's shrewd estimate, but prejudice dies hard and Claire was still in the bondage of a vague distrust for the unknown.
"Good Lord! I know how you feel!" Miss Whitehead went on with a sudden genial air of understanding. "I remember when I had my first Italian dinner at Lombardi's. I thought the man who invited me had a grudge against my appetite. Honest, in those days if you mentioned spaghetti most folks thought you were talking about a deadly disease. And now...." Nellie Whitehead finished with an eloquent and descriptive sweep of hands.
Claire put a thoughtful finger to her lips and was silent. After all, what did it matter where she worked or what she did? She felt a dangerous indifference, a negative contempt for life.
"I guess you're right," she said, finally, with a sudden hardening of voice that made Nellie Whitehead look up quickly. "One can get accustomed to almost anything. Where did you say the café was?"
Claire went next morning before nine o'clock to look up the Greek café on Third Street. It was a raw, blustering, traditional March day, and she pulled her shabby cloak about her in a vain attempt to shut out a chill which seemed somehow to be clutching at her very heart. It was years since she had ventured south of Market, and she was surprised to find its old atmosphere quite vanished. She remembered the section of the town beyond Mission Street as a squalid mass of tumbledown houses out of which issued a perennial stream of shawl-cloaked women carrying empty white pitchers to the nearest corner grocery and retracing their steps with the pitchers half hidden in the folds of the aforesaid shawls, from which dripped betraying flecks of foam. Third Street was now by no means an opulent thoroughfare, but it had the virtue of a certain cheap newness. The frowsy women were no more. It was undeniably a street of men, stretching out in a succession of lodging-houses, saloons, and cheap eating-places. Past Howard Street the Greek coffee-houses began. Claire looked in at them curiously. In the drowse of morning they seemed very lifeless and still. She noted, as she passed, the prim rows of marble-topped tables with their old-fashioned call-bells for signaling the waiter, the window-plants turning sickly green faces toward the sun, the line of Oriental water-pipes setting in their racks over the coffee-shelves. One café seemed very much like another, and in spite of the extreme simplicity of their equipment they contrived to shed an air fascinating and strange.
Claire hurried on, eager to be through with the suspense of this plunge into bizarre life which she could not realize would ever be her portion. She was carrying the whole thing through in a spirit of bravado, and she was conscious that her hopes leaned unmistakably toward finding the position filled or her qualifications not up to the mark. Her glimpses into the coffee-houses led her to expect that the café she was in search of might be some such place. She was surprised then to come upon a totally different institution in the shape of what appeared to be a saloon as she halted before the number that corresponded to the address on the card she was carrying. Café Ithaca—she read the sign twice before venturing through the swinging doors.
A long mahogany-colored bar ran the full length of the room; small tables fully set for a meal filled the rest of the floor space. Claire decided at once upon retreat. But suddenly at the back of the room a green curtain parted and a man came toward her. He had a pale, round face and a mass of black hair that reminded Claire of pictures of John the Baptist.
"I am looking for the proprietor," Claire began, desperately.
The man brought his right hand toward his heart, letting his head fall in salutation. Claire took courage.
"I understand ... it seems you are looking for a pianist." The man stared and bowed again. "To play.... Do you understand ... I play?" She began instinctively to make the proper descriptive motions with her fingers.
"Ah, yes! Thank you ... thank you!" The man continued to keep his hand over his heart and to bow deeply.
The sound of hammering floated from the space screened by the green curtains. The man called to some one. A waiter appeared. The two conversed long and volubly. Finally the waiter, turning to Claire, said, in excellent English:
"Mr. Lycurgus does not understand very well. What is it you want?"
"I hear he is looking for a pianist," Claire returned.
"Oh yes. In the back ... the piano is there."
The three passed through the screened opening and Claire found herself in a huge room still in the process of being put into shape as a café in the American fashion.
"Mr. Lycurgus," the waiter explained to Claire, "is fixing up a swell place here. He bought a piano yesterday. After a while, when he gets a permit, we shall have dancing. We want now somebody to play ... from six o'clock to twelve."
Claire sat down to the piano. It was new and had a good tone. She ran over a simple negro melody. The proprietor smiled and bowed again. "Thank you! Thank you!" he kept repeating. Then he and the waiter began to talk again. Claire waited.... She had to admit that the prospects were not so terrible. And she rather liked Mr. Lycurgus with his sweeping and naïve bows and his thick clustering black hair.
Finally the waiter turned to her and said:
"Do you sing?"
"Yes ... a little." And she made good her words with a sentimental trifle that her mother had taught her years ago.
The waiter and the proprietor talked again.
"He thinks you will do, and he will pay you twenty dollars a week," the waiter finally announced.
Claire rose from the piano stool.
"Thank you ... thank you!" said the proprietor.
"Thank you," replied Claire, at a loss for anything better to say.
"Can you begin to-night?"
Claire hesitated. "Yes," she answered.
And as she said it she had a feeling that she suddenly had been transported miles from all the familiar scenes and faces that had previously made up her life.
She returned to the café promptly at six o'clock. But on this first night there was really nothing to do. The carpenters were still busily laying a tiny hardwood dancing-floor and a smell of fresh paint enveloped everything. Claire contented herself with sitting idly at the piano and peering through the green-curtained entrance into the saloon. The situation was still an extraordinary one for her and she had not yet grasped it. The tables in the saloon proper were crowded with diners, all men, and a huge orchestrion was grinding out strange and unfamiliar melodies. She was not near enough to get any estimate of the diners as individuals, but she had to confess that the composite impression they made was far from unpleasant. They ate frankly and with despatch as men in groups, undisturbed by feminine companionship, do the world over. She noticed two things particularly—they all had extraordinary thick black hair and their white teeth flashed pleasantly when they smiled.
At eight o'clock the proprietor came in and stood before her. The waiter was behind him. Mr. Lycurgus in halting English was inviting her to have something to eat. She was not hungry, but she decided to see what sort of cheer the Café Ithaca provided.
The waiter cleared away some tools which the workmen had scattered on a side-table and began to lay the cloth. Claire sat down and Mr. Lycurgus took a place opposite her. Anchovies and ripe olives with a bitter but fascinating taste came first, followed by a delicious soup flavored with lemon. Claire began to feel hungry. The waiter explained the ingredients of the soup to her as she was finishing the last mouthful.
"Chicken broth and the white of egg with paste and a dash of lemon," he announced. Then he set a huge portion of boiled lamb before her, stewed up with rice and lettuce leaves. It was plain that they were providing something extra in the way of fare for her.
Mr. Lycurgus, who had eaten earlier in the evening, seemed to be keeping her company from a sense of naïve and charming hospitality. Claire tried to think of what to say to him. Finally she hit upon a subject.
"What part of Greece do you come from?" she asked.
He was uncertain as to her question, but the waiter translated it quickly. Mr. Lycurgus began to talk. Claire did not understand one-half of what he was saying, but she was conscious that she had struck the proper note. He had come from Athens, he explained to her, and immediately he launched into lyrical praise of his native city. Claire assumed an air of interest, asked more questions. The waiter brought salad, and fried chicken, and a curd cheese, and finally a cup of thick Turkish coffee. Mr. Lycurgus was called outside to join some patrons in a drink. He left Claire with his hand upon his heart and his head thrown forward in a suggestion of perfect surrender that was almost Oriental. The waiter also grew friendly. It appeared that he came from the mountain districts of Greece—from shepherd stock. He described the Greek mountains to her.
"Birds and flowers and sweet smells!" he told her. He had been a bootblack in New York, at first. But he liked San Francisco better. He talked about America and democracy.
"We Greeks, you understand, we come from a free people." And he began to revive the glories of ancient Greece. It was plain to Claire that these people were living in retrospection, harking back to a racial past very much in the fashion of her mother trying to gather warmth from the memory of a former opulence.
Claire rose from the table, amazed at the extent of the meal which she had been tempted to eat. But it had all been so frank and friendly and lacking any savor of condescension. She did not make the mistake of fancying that just this thing would be a regular occurrence, but there was a certain beauty about the humanness of this welcome that had been given her, as if the rite of breaking bread had suddenly made her a part of a large family.
Since there was nothing to do, she left early, at ten o'clock. The waiter followed her to the door.
"In a day or two things will be different," he assured her.
"What is your name?" she asked.
"Demetrio—the same as Jimmy." He threw back his head, smiling.
She said good night and started off. Third Street was crowded. There was scarcely a woman in sight. Men, men everywhere. And yet she felt not the slightest fear. All evening she had felt detached, remote, cut off from the past, as one is cut off from a familiar view by a sharp turn in the road. But as she swung into Market Street and crossed over to the north side again the chill of reality swept over her. She was coming back to familiar scenes, familiar problems, familiar griefs. She began to think about her mother's hopeless condition, the fact that Mrs. Finnegan was preparing to move away.
"She's tired of having mother on her hands so often," flashed through Claire's mind. "She's moving to get out of it gracefully. Why did I permit such a thing?"
Her cheeks burned with the shame of it. She would have to talk to Nellie Whitehead about getting some one to come in and sit with her mother at night. Nellie Whitehead would know of somebody; she always was equal to any emergency.... She needed to have her shoes resoled, and her gloves were in a dreadful state. Well, fortunately, she would not have to keep up much of an appearance now. Twenty dollars a week—eighty dollars a month—she began to lay out plans for its expenditure. She owed two months to the butcher, and even the grocery bill had been long overdue. And there was Nellie Whitehead—she should have paid Nellie back. But there seemed always to have been something else more pressing. She thought all these things out swiftly, darting from one subject to another in a feverish anxiety to fill her mind with food for impersonal thought.
When she got home she found a letter awaiting her. It bore a special-delivery stamp and the envelope was in Stillman's handwriting. She felt suddenly weak and she sat down.... She sat staring at the envelope a long time before she gathered courage to open it. When she did, a thin blue slip of paper fluttered out. It was a check for twenty dollars, payment for the last week she had spent in Stillman's service. There was no other word from him, just this brief symbol of what his decision was in regard to her.
She rose to her feet. She did not move, she stood staring ahead....
Presently she heard her mother call. She started guiltily.
"What am I wasting time here for?" she asked herself, with a strange fierceness. She saw Stillman's blue check lying on the table. She caught it up and tore it into bits.
Her mother's voice sounded again, this time querulously.
Claire Robson pushed her sagging hair from her forehead and went into her mother's room.