People Like That: A Novel

by Kate Langley Bosher

CHAPTER X

For the past ten days I have been a very restless person. Mrs. Mundy looks at me out of the corners of her kind and keen and cheery little eyes when she does not think I am noticing, but she asks me nothing. Mrs. Mundy is the wisest woman I know.

If only I could sleep! During the days I am busy, but I dread the long nights when questions crowd that, fight as I may, I cannot keep from asking. Selwyn is my friend. I never doubt a friend. But why does he not come to me? Why does he not make clear that which he must know is inexplicable to me?

I may never marry Selwyn, but certainly I shall marry no one else. How could we hope for happiness when we feel so differently toward much that is vital, when our attitude to life is as apart as the poles? When each thinks the other wrong in points of view and manner of living? Selwyn was born in a house with high walls around it. He likes its walls. He does not care for many to come in, and cares still less to go outside to others. Few people interest him. All sorts interest me. We are both selfish and stubborn, but both hate that which is not clean and clear, and save from his own lips I would not believe that in his life is aught of which he could not tell me.

I have never told him I loved him, never promised to marry him. To live in his high-walled house with its conventional customs, its age-dimmed portraits, its stiff furnishings, and shut-out sunshine, would stifle every cell in brain and lungs, and to marry him would be to marry his house. I hate his house, hate the aloofness, the lack of sympathy it represents. Its proud past I can appreciate, but not its useless present. Save his brother Harrie, it is the one thing of his old life left Selwyn. At the death of his father he bought Harrie's interest and it is all his now. I would not ask him to live elsewhere, but I would choke and smother did I live in his house. And yet—

Ten days have passed and I have neither seen nor heard from Selwyn.

I have often wondered, on waking winter mornings in my very warm bed, how it would feel to go out in the gray dawn of a new day and hurry off to work. Now I know.

For more than a week I have been up at five forty-five, and at six-thirty have been hurrying with Lucy Hobbs, who lives around the corner, to the overalls-factory, where she is a forewoman. It is dark and cold and raw at half-past six on a winter morning, and the sunrise is very different from what it is in summer.

Each morning as I started out with Lucy, and hurried down street after street, I watched the opening doors of the shabby, dull-looking houses we passed with keen interest. Ash-cans and garbage-pails were in front of many of them, and through unshuttered windows a child could occasionally be seen with its face pressed against the pane, waiting to wave good-by to some one who was leaving. Out of the doors of these houses came men and women and boys and girls, who hurried as we hurried, and with a word to some, a wave of her uplifted hand to others, a blank stare at others again, Lucy seemed leading a long procession. Around each corner and from every car that passed came more "Hands," and each morning when the factory was reached a crowd that jammed its entrance and extended half a block up and down the street was waiting for the opening of the door, out of which it would not come until darkness fell again.

For the first day or two I was noticed with indifference on the part of some, resentment on the part of others, but on the third day, as I took my place in the pushing, laughing, growling crowd that made its way up several flights of stairs to the big room where shabby clothes are changed for yet shabbier working ones, my good-mornings were greeted with less grudging acknowledgments, and now we are quite friendly, these "Hands" and I, and through their eyes I am seeing myself and others like me—seeing much and many things from an angle never used before.

They nodded to me less hesitatingly as the days went by, and at the noon hour, when I have my lunch with first one group and then another, I find them, on the whole, frank and outspoken, find they have as decided opinions concerning what they term people like that—which term is usually accompanied by a gesture in the direction where I once lived—as said people have concerning them, to whom, as a rule, they also refer in much the same manner and with the same words. With each group on either side of its separating gulf the conviction is firm that little is to be hoped for or expected from the other, and common qualities are forgotten in the realization of distinctive differences.

"What's the most you ever made a week?" The girl who asked the question moved up for me to sit on the bench beside her, and, unwrapping a newspaper parcel, took from it a large cucumber pickle, a piece of cheese, a couple of biscuits, and half of a cocoanut pie, and laid them on a table in front of her. "Help yourself." She pushed the paper serving as tray and cloth toward me. "I ain't had much appetite lately. Hello, Mamie! Come over here and sit on our bench. What you got good for lunch? My stomach's turned back on pie. I'd give ten cents for a cup of coffee."

"Everywhere else but this old hothouse sells it for two cents a cup without, and three cents with." The girl called Mamie nodded to me and took her seat on the bench. "I don't like milk nohow, and I'd give the money glad for something hot in the middle of the day. Don't nothing do your insides as much good as something piping hot. Say—I saw Barker last night." Her voice lowered but little. "He and I are going to see 'Some Girl' at the Bijou next week. It's all make-up—his being sweet on Ceeley Bayne! That knock-kneed, slew-footed, pop-eyed Gracie Jones got that off. I'm going to get one them lace-and-chiffon waists at Plum's for $2.98 if don't nobody get sick and need medicine between now and Wednesday. Seems like somebody's always sick at our house."

The question asked me had been forgotten, and, glad to escape the acknowledgment that I had never earned a dollar in my life, I got up on the plea that I must see a girl at the other end of the room, and walked across it. As I went I scanned each face I saw. Consciously or subconsciously I had been hoping for days that I would see a face which ever haunts me, a face I wanted to forget and could not forget. Everywhere I go, in factories or mills or shops or homes; in the streets, and at my windows, I am always wondering if I shall see her. She was very unhappy. Who is she? Why was Selwyn with her? It is my last thought at night, my first in the morning.

Yesterday I was at the box-factory where Jimmy Gibbons works. It is his last week there. On the fifteenth he starts again to school. Knowing the president of the company well, I asked that Jimmy should be my guide through the various departments, and permission was given. I wish Jimmy were mine.

"Miss High-Spy 'ain't got any love for on-lookers, and we'd better not stay in here long." Jimmy's voice was cautious, but his eyes merry, and, glancing in the direction of the sour and snappy person watching each movement of each worker, I agreed with him that it was not well to linger. The room was big and bare, its benches filled with white-faced workers, and the autocrat who presided over it seemed unconscious of its stifling, steamy heat and sickening smells of glue and paste. Going out into the hall, Jimmy and I went to a window, opened it, and gave our lungs a bath.

"What does she do it for? Is she crazy?"

"Not asylum-crazy—mean-crazy." Jimmy's head nodded first negatively, then with affirmation. "She's come up from the beginning place, and used to be a fire-eater before she got to be boss of our bunch, and the men say people like that, people who ain't used to driving, drive harder than any other kind when they get the chance. She's a bully to the under ones, but the uppers—" Jimmy's eyes were lifted to mine and his lips made a whistling sound. "If Mr. Pritchard kicked her in the face, she'd lick the soles of his shoes when he was doing it, if she could. She wants to be boss of the room up-stairs and Mr. Pritchard can put her where he pleases. If he don't do it, he'd better, the women say, 'count of her knowing more about him than he knows she knows. I don't know what 'tis, but I hate her. All of us hate her."

"Why doesn't some one speak to Mr. Johns? Certainly he can't know—"

"Yes 'm, he does. Joe Dickson and Bob Beazley told him once, and the next week they got a hand-out. High-Spy made Mr. Pritchard do it. Mr. Johns leaves those kinds of things to him. Swell folks like him 'ain't got time to look after folks like us. He's awful rich, ain't he?"

"He isn't poor. When are you going to have your lunch?" I looked at my watch. "Can't you go out and have it with me? I'll ask Mr. Johns. Come on, quick. I'll see the other rooms when I come back."

Jimmy shook his head. "I can't go. I ain't being docked 'count of being with you, because Mr. Pritchard sent me, but he wouldn't let me come back if I went out. I been sent down to him once to-day, and please 'm don't ask him, please 'm don't!"

In Jimmy's voice was something of terror, and his hands slipped in and out of his trousers' pockets with nervous, frightened movements. His usually merry little mouth with its pale lips quivered oddly, and in his eyes, as he turned away, were tears I could not understand.

I put my hand on his shoulder, lifted his face to mine. "What is it, Jimmy? What has happened that you don't want me to ask Mr. Johns to tell Mr. Pritchard you can go with me? Why are you afraid?"

"I ain't afraid. Yes 'm, I am. I—I've been docked once to-day. Please 'm don't ask Mr. Pritchard nothing! High-Spy makes him punish me whenever—"

"Punish you!" I straightened indignantly. "Why does he punish you?
What right—"

"I don't mean licking. But he keeps me out of the room when I'm sent out, and docks me at the end of the week. Mother needs every cent. She's back in the rent. I was sent out to-day."

"But why? What were you doing?"

"Nothing—leastways I didn't mean to. There wasn't none of us sick this morning, and Billy Coons was acting down behind High-Spy's back, and I tried not to laugh. She don't let us laugh. But she said I did. I didn't laugh—" Jimmy's voice was protesting. "I just smiled and it—it busted."

"Is that why she made you go out of the room?" I turned away and looked out of the window lest the accident to Jimmy's smile be mine. "Is that why she sent you out?"

He nodded. "Mr. Pritchard kept me out an hour. Sometimes he lets me make it up at lunch. I was going to ask him to let me to-day, but—"

"I'm preventing. I'm glad of it! When are you going to eat your lunch?"

"I've done et it—" Jimmy's tongue moistened his lips. "I et it on my way here this morning. I got paid off last night and I took out five cents and gave the rest to mother, and this morning I bought a pie with it and et up every bite. It might have been hooked when I was out the room, so I'm glad I didn't save none. I got it at Heck's. He keeps the best pies in town for five cents. They're real fat."

I was paying little attention to Jimmy. At the open window I could see a young girl across the street with a baby in her arms. She had brought it from a small frame house with high steps leading to a sagging porch, in the door of which a large and kindly-faced woman was standing, arms folded and eyes watching the movements of the girl. As the latter lifted her head, on which was no hat, I leaned forward, my heart in my throat. The odd, eager young face, the boyish arrangement of the hair above it, the quick, bird-like movements of the slender body, had burned for days and nights in my brain, and I recognized her at once.

"Jimmy," I said, "come here." I drew him to the window with nervous haste, my fingers twitching, my breath unsteady. "Who is that girl with the baby? There she is, turning the corner. Look quick! Do you know her?"

Jimmy shook his head. "Never saw her. Can't see her now." He leaned far out the window, but the girl had disappeared, and the woman in the doorway had gone in and closed the door.

I must have said something, made some sort of sound, for Jimmy, turning from the window, looked at me uneasily, in his eyes distress and understanding.

"What's the matter, Miss Heath? You'd better sit down. Did the heat make you sick? You're—you're whiter than that wall."