KATHLEEN
CHAPTER XIII
Noise! Thundering, reverberating noise. Noise that never ceases, noise that deadens the brain and makes the hand jerk in response to the jarred nerves; always, day and night, throughout the length of the city streets, the clamor of inanimate things.
In the morning when Hertha slipped to her seat, the last but one in the fourth line, she started her own thundering whir. The forty machines, all going at once, sounded like nothing so much as the great beetles that flew about her southern home in the summer evenings. But the beetles came but rarely and went with the withdrawal of the lamp, while here in the workroom the drumming was incessant. Always it was hurrying her, calling upon her to make better speed, to push the white fabric more quickly that the needle might make a greater number of punctures to the minute; to hasten, though her hands trembled, and though the tension drew her mouth into a narrow line and brought her brows together in a frown.
When noon came and the whirring stopped, Hertha would look down the long line of beetle-beasts, for so she called them to herself. At length they were quiet. Surely they had had enough. For hours they had been devouring, eating up the muslin fed to them. No, rather they had disgorged; for the muslin was left, and with it thousands of yards of cotton thread that they had doled out through their small needle jaws. But their rest would be short and they would soon thunder tirelessly on again.
Usually she went out to her luncheon. The nearby restaurant furnished appetizing and inexpensive things to eat, but they were accompanied by a new and disturbing clamor. As she took her seat at one of the many long tables, she was enveloped in a sound of falling plates. Heavy china cup struck heavy china saucer and both struck the marble table. Knives, forks and spoons fell on platters, and platters fell on trays and slipped and rattled one against another. Little plates dropped on big plates and all went with a terrific smash into the dumb waiter; while from some inexhaustible source new knives and forks and plates came clattering up to take the places of the old.
"Butter cakes, please."
Hertha's voice was scarcely audible. As she ate, she listened attentively, hoping that for a moment the noise would cease; but it only varied in intensity, rising now to such a height that it seemed as if an avalanche of white pottery was falling into space; again dropping to a steady, clanging sound of utensils taking their appointed places. But no one but herself seemed to notice, and the men and women about her ate on diligently, silent for the most part, concerned only with securing needed nourishment in a short period of time.
The noises on the avenue down which she walked to and from her home were not wearying like those in the shop and the restaurant, for they came and went. The silent moving motors had their horns that gave warning with a silly, childish squeak or with a deep note as hoarse as a frog's. At the corner where she turned east to go home a policeman was stationed, and she enjoyed waiting for the sound of his shrill whistle. But the avenue left behind, the way was less pleasant. Three busy thoroughfares must be crossed without the policeman's aid, the last a dirty boulevard where heavy trains crashed overhead and surface cars clanged swiftly by. She would stand waiting on the sidewalk until a friendly cart from a side street opened up a path of safety that brought her a little breathless to the opposite walk.
Now she was almost home—the second door, three flights up, and then restful quiet. Kathleen, her new friend, with whom she had come to live, was away, and with windows closed she would sit in the front room, quite by herself, her hands in her lap, enjoying the silence. Later, dinner over, she would take up a novel, one of the books she had always wanted to read, but could not afford to buy, that here in New York any one might have at the library for the asking. Immersed in Lorna Doone, she forgot the pounding machines and the clattering dishes and was very happy; but when the book was put away and she lay down to sleep, through the open window the world of tumult came back again.
"Why do men invent so many things that make a noise?" she would ask herself. She had heard city people when they came to the Merryvales' complain bitterly to her of being wakened in the morning by the cock's crowing; but she had not made the cocks, and, moreover, they did not crow all night. Here in her room, however, near the ugly boulevard of the East Side, the man-made cocks never ceased to crow. The trolley cars were the most aggressive; their wheels ground on their axles and jarred upon the rails; they stopped with a loud jolt, and with another jar and jolt were off again. They were always jerking, Hertha felt. Overhead the elevated road vibrated to the heavy cars that moved over its rails day and night. You heard the coming train a long way off. First, a gentle, rumbling noise that you might imagine to be the sea; then a louder and louder roar, and, finally, a crash as the long line of cars rushed past. Sometimes she was sure they would sway too far and fall thundering into the street. And hardly had their sound died away when a second rumbling would be heard and another train come tearing after its fellow, or a third dash by from the opposite side.
After a time the clamor ceased to be incessant. Trains followed at longer intervals, and would-be street car passengers waited for some minutes at the corner. But in these intervals there was always upon the street the sound of footsteps. And long after midnight, if Hertha awoke from her troubled sleep, she heard the tread of feet. Sometimes they were slow and hesitating, sometimes swift and hurried, oftenest a steady, quiet step. Where do all these footsteps lead, she thought. What were the people doing who thronged the elevated railroad, crowding one upon another so that it was difficult to breathe if one pushed one's way among them? And the surface cars were filled with a hurrying crowd, while underneath the city the subways carried their millions of women and men. Was there any need of moving about so much? It might be necessary to travel to and from your work, but why go on and on? Supposing all these cars should stop suddenly, should cease their jar and clang? There would still be the footsteps in the street, for man was always moving, some way, somewhere. Had not Tom moved? And now she, too, was moving, to the whir of the machine, to the crash of the advancing train, moving through the new, clamorous world.
"And you didn't sleep well last night, darling," Kathleen said to her as she came in to breakfast. "Your eyes are looking tired this lovely morning. I'm thinking the trains kept you awake. Don't notice them. They'll go on and never once jump the tracks, but make big profits for their owners and a fine place to hang on the strap for you and me. You'll soon be used to the clatter. Once I heard it, but now I don't mind it any more than I do the sparrows. Take a help of the oatmeal, and tell me what you'll like for dinner, for I'm staying home to-night."
CHAPTER XIV
Hertha, when she slipped from Miss Witherspoon's charge, experienced no difficulty in finding a suitable dwelling place in New York. She had not studied for years in a school conducted by northern teachers without learning of the philanthropies that were showered upon people in the North. The Young Women's Christian Association was for just such girls as she, and therefore, under the direction of a friendly policeman, she soon reached headquarters and was given temporary shelter. As she walked about in the comfortable rooms, luxurious in her eyes, she felt that she had indeed entered the white world, her lawful heritage; and if it was hard to lose all family ties—mother, sister, brother, swept away as though in some swift disaster of nature—on the other hand, life of a sudden had become strangely simplified. How easy it was to move through the world if you were white! She had always been conspicuous, a mark for astonished comment when with her black brother and sister, for whispered commiseration when working out in service. Now no one could comment at all. She was like every one else. She need not shrink if she were rudely treated, she might answer back; no longer must she "keep her place," hers was the place of the dominant race. When she remembered her lover, her cheeks flamed. No need to fear that she, a white girl, would ever again think to give herself without exacting a full return.
But what should she do? She was young and white and had something less than two thousand dollars to her credit at the bank; moreover, she had stored in her mind a multiplicity of suggestions to be turned over and reviewed as she made her way through the streets or lay in her bed at night. Had she gone to Boston with Miss Witherspoon, she would at once have used a fair share of her fortune on her education; but, perhaps because she had cut loose from old plans, she rejected the taking up of dressmaking. She inclined to stenography and typewriting; but Ellen, who knew her better than any one else, had looked surprised on learning that she considered this means of earning a livelihood. She knew she was no scholar, and a chosen career that involved the swift jotting down of the ideas of others, later to be transcribed in black type on a white sheet from which a misspelled word shone with hideous clearness, might end in disgrace. So stenography was set aside.
Equally she was sure she would not take the advice of Miss Patty. To be a companion was the highest position that could have been reached by Hertha, colored; but it was menial service to Hertha, white. She had renounced a sheltered home; now that she was in the North she meant to live a new life of freedom.
After three days of happy wandering about the city and of careful consideration of her personal problem, she made a practical decision. Her legacy was small, and for the present she knew too little of the life about her or of her own ability to risk spending it upon an education. The operating work of which Miss Witherspoon had once spoken lay along the line of her natural aptitude. Why, then, not try it? If you were a good workwoman, it paid well. She was in a mood for the unusual, and therefore, under the guidance of the efficient and business-like Association secretary, she found herself, a week after her arrival in New York, doing her part in manufacturing muslin shirtwaists.
Kathleen she had discovered herself. She could not remain long at the Association, since the rooms for permanent guests were occupied; and with a list provided her by the secretary, she went out one afternoon to secure a suitable boarding place. The first and only house she entered was in charge of a thin, meager woman, the type of Miss Witherspoon, but with a more domineering manner and a flatter bust. The room for rent had a red carpet which smelt moldy, and brilliantly painted blue walls. Hertha hated it at once, but with difficulty succeeded in leaving without renting it, so persistent was the person in charge. Indeed, she only escaped with the proviso that she might look in again.
Once in the street, her confidence returned and she resolved to have nothing to do with this or any other cheap boarding place. In so immense a city it must be possible to find an attractive home.
She looked no further that day, and in the evening, standing in the office, she saw a large, fine looking Irish woman come up to the desk. Laughing and talking to a friend, her cheeks pink with her exertions from the gymnasium, her gray eyes glowing, Kathleen seemed the exact opposite of the disturbing landlady of the afternoon. "I know I'm bothering you, Miss Jones," she began, addressing the secretary, who was insignificant beside her, "but it's what you like. You couldn't be happy if you didn't have a dozen girls wanting you at once. What I'm after is some one to share my flat with me this winter. The boss has sent my brother to Chicago, where they need his work more than they do here. Hard luck for me, for he was bringing in a good wage! And now I've a little flat and only myself in it. Is there any girl here, do you think, would like a bedroom and the use of a kitchen and parlor? I'd let her have it for fifteen dollars a month."
Hertha was standing at the end of the desk, quite by Miss Jones's elbow. She expected that the secretary would introduce them, but instead Miss Jones looked down, moved some papers, and handed an elaborately ruled card for Kathleen to fill.
The Irishwoman took it up clumsily. "You fill it in," she said. "It's Kathleen O'Connor, 204 East 8th Street, fourth floor. I'll be home to-morrow night to any one who comes."
When she had gone Hertha asked for the address, explaining that she would like to see the room.
"Would you?" Miss Jones questioned, looking her over as though to place her again. "I thought of you, but did not know whether it was what you desired. It's rather a poor neighborhood, and yet it costs as much as a better one. Kathleen is Irish, you know. She only comes to the gymnasium, and she's irregular at that. She's a sort of nurse; not trained, of course, but good of her kind. Take the address; it's near your, work, and if you like——" and her voice trailed off as she turned to the next girl who came to her for guidance.
Hertha did "like." She went to Kathleen's the following evening and settled the bargain with a week's rent in advance. She liked the rear alcove room with its iron bed and fresh cover; and, though it was dark, it opened with wide doors into the parlor. "For the both of us," Kathleen explained, "unless you're wanting to go straight to bed and then it's yours." The parlor had little furniture—a plain table, two straight chairs, a comfortable rocker and a couch with a Bagdad cover. Kathleen had a small bedroom opening into a court; but the attractive spot was the kitchen. It faced the south and its two windows were filled with red geraniums in full bloom. The walls were light buff, the kitchen table was covered with a white oilcloth, and the wooden chairs were painted like the wall. For convenience, it was beyond anything Hertha had ever known with its gas stove, its hot and cold water for sink and tubs. She remembered the thousands of pails of water that her mother and Ellen had carried during the years she had been with them, and the millions of pieces of wood that Tom had piled up and brought into the kitchen. Getting meals and washing your clothes here would be fun, not work.
"I can make corn bread for breakfast," she said to Kathleen confidentially, as they looked into the closet with its wealth of pots and pans, spoons and egg beaters, skillets and toasters—more kitchen utensils than Hertha had imagined any one could own.
Kathleen regarded her quizzically.
"When do you go to work?" she queried.
"At eight o'clock."
"That's better than it used to be, but if you make corn bread it's likely it will only be for a week. Then you'll be so tired when you wake that the best tasting food in the world won't equal an extra nap, cuddled under the clothes, with the sure knowledge that it's wrong. It will be oatmeal cooked the night before and warmed up, and coffee made the way that's quickest, and a slice of toast, maybe, from the bread bought of the baker. You can boil yourself an egg, but they put the price on eggs up every winter to pay for the chemicals they use to keep them young."
"How about Sunday morning?" Hertha queried.
"Sundays you won't be getting up until it's time for dinner."
And while Kathleen's prophecy was in part true, while the increasingly cold weather and the hard hours made the morning nap imperative, Hertha did more for their little home than her companion had expected. She made curtains for the windows; she bought occasional attractive magazines; she framed a striking picture taken from the Sunday supplement. It was a landscape by Inness of great trees with heavy foliage, the clouds massed as though about to break in storm. Before a month was over the tenement rooms took on a deeper look of home.
The life within the rooms was very quiet. Kathleen's work made her hours most irregular. As an "experienced nurse" she was rarely on a case for more than two or three days and nights, so poor were the people among whom she worked. She had no diploma and was not recognized by the profession. During one year of her hard life she had acted as nurse in a woman's prison, but the time had never come when she could afford to go into a hospital. "And now it's too late; I'm too old," she would explain, "and besides I haven't got the education. Schooling don't go with starting in at the mill with your dresses at your knees, and your hands so little you can hardly manage the machine." Her hands were still small and well formed, and she had a pleasant touch. She was skillful at massage, and in the winter season had a few society women whose surplus flesh she vigorously rubbed off and whose faces she smoothed into comparative youth. Leaving the sumptuous house of some wealthy woman, she would hurry to a dark room in a tenement, where the cold and poverty made her eyes flame with anger, to spend the night by an ailing child, ministering with patience and even merriment to its many wants. And as her life carried her from one extreme to another, so she herself varied in mood, from the smiling, youthful looking woman whom Hertha had seen and loved from the first to an intense, angry iconoclast who found life for the many both cruel and unjust. She never ministered and brought to health the one ailing without remembering the ten others who were needlessly suffering and whom she could not aid. "I know that my work is nothing but putting courtplaster on a cancer," she would say to Hertha savagely as she came back from a home where she had coaxed the growing boy back to life, to see him in his convalescence go out to a ten-hour day of racking work. "I ain't fooled, though. I done what I could, but why won't his father fight for better hours and living conditions? He sits there and lets the boss use his boy worse than he'd use a machine. He's got the backbone of a chocolate eclair, that man." And then she would take up a copy of the daily "Worker" and become absorbed in the vision of the successful class struggle and a world set free.
"What shall we have for dinner to-night?" she had smilingly asked Hertha. "Shall we celebrate together with an Irish stew and ice cream and then go to the movies?"
"But this is your evening for the Y. W. C. A.," Hertha answered.
The smile left Kathleen's face. "I'm through there," she said. "It's not for me."
Hertha wanted to know more, but she was reticent with questions. As it happens, however, the silent person learns more of another's life than one who shows a voluble sympathy, and Kathleen was soon telling her friend that all girls' clubs and Christian Associations were nothing but charities; that she could have nothing to do with a charity herself, and that, had it not been for a moment's temptation, offered by a friend, she would never have entered the class. It was the exercise that she needed and the marching to music had been the best part. "And it's grand," she explained, "if only for an hour a week to be living as the Lord intended you with your legs apart." But this morning she had been giving massage to a rich uptown customer. "And after I had pommeled off the two pounds she'd gained at a twelve-course dinner the night before, she begins to tell me of her charities. 'I like best to help the working girl,' she says, 'and I gave my mite to their new building, but I'm troubled at the obstinacy of the young women in refusing to become servants. They have a false pride in the matter.' I kept my mouth shut, for I couldn't afford to lose a good customer, but I was that mad to think I might have been taking money off her as a gift that I stopped in at the office and told Miss Jones I should quit. 'Is that so, Kathleen?' she says quietly. 'It is for you to decide.' And then she asks: 'And how is Miss Ogilvie?' She always calls me Kathleen. Not that I mind it, but I'm fifteen years older than you, and Miss Jones needn't 'Miss Ogilvie' you to me. I don't wonder she does, though, for you wear your clothes as though you had always lived in a palace, and you speak like a princess."
"Don't be foolish," Hertha said, and then laughed—an odd, short laugh in which Kathleen joined, though as it happened she did not understand the joke. "Let's have the stew, only don't put quite so much onion in it, and we'll get the ice cream on the way home."
The stew was delicious and Hertha enjoyed it, while Kathleen consoled herself for the loss of the extra onion by a plentiful use of condiments. "I've just a good plain appetite," she explained. Then they went out into the noisy street to the theater where they sat in the orchestra and Hertha felt like a queen. In the South she had been only a few times to some cheap playhouse where she had been repelled by the vulgarity of the people and the performance; but here in New York the comfortable theater, darkened now, the music, the quiet audience, filled her with happy anticipation. She squeezed Kathleen's hand as the picture of a lovely young girl in gingham dress and pink sunbonnet flashed upon the screen, and the story began.
It was one of the fifty-seven varieties of moving pictures, all of which, Kathleen knew, were canned in the same syrup, but which to Hertha were freshly sweet. A beautiful girl, a pink sunbonnet, a young lover, blossoming apple trees. A coal mine discovered under the apple boughs. A cruel father and separation. The girl in a gilded palace registering despair. The lover seeking fame and gold. A titled villain mocking the girl's pure love. The villain's machination, the lover tied to the railroad track, the train dashing to within two inches of its victim. The escape, a night in the woods, the friendly beasts. The disclosure. "I love you still." The villain's contrition. His death. The coal mine exhausted. Soft music, two lovers and one kiss. Blossoming apple trees and the pink sunbonnet again. Far in the distance the sound of wedding bells. Then sudden darkness, and The Best Flavored Chewing Gum thrown upon the screen.
Hertha's heart beat fast during the whole of the story and she felt wave after wave of pleasurable excitement. It was so sad and yet so beautiful. The only thing to temper her enjoyment was Kathleen, who would laugh in the wrong places. When the hero and heroine were in great danger, Kathleen showed no apprehension. She chuckled at the approaching train, and gave little grunts of amusement when the villain threatened the girl. The only thing she seemed to care for was the bear who gave the boy shelter in his cave for the night. "The dear!" exclaimed Kathleen.
"But it's so improbable," Hertha whispered as the piano played Nevin's lullaby while the bear rocked the youth in his arms.
"Not half so improbable as the rest," Kathleen whispered back. "You can trust the brutes to do the right thing enough sight better than the men."
As the light went up Kathleen yawned.
"Haven't we got our money's worth of romance, infant?" she asked. "There's a meeting on Peonage to-night at Cooper Union. Let's go there."
CHAPTER XV
They walked briskly down lower Broadway to where Grace Church lifted its delicate spire into the night, the electric light from the street casting long shadows upward on its white stone. Once or twice Hertha from pure pleasure gave a little skip as they went along.
"I don't know how it is," she said confidentially, "but I never felt so well before in all my life. You'd suppose I'd be tired from my work."
"That will come later," said Kathleen dryly. "Now you're living on the strength you've put away in your long country life."
"I think it's the air," Hertha went on. "It's such wonderful air to breathe, it's like—well, it's like food when you're hungry. It's fresh and cold so that you can taste it."
"It's too cold for that thin suit of yours, I wouldn't wonder."
"I'm not cold in the least. Perhaps I have a lot of warmth stored up in me; but I promise if it gives out to buy a new coat."
"Like that, now." A young girl passed them clad in brilliant scarlet. Her face was painted to match her coat; her hat was the latest extravagance in fashion, immensely brimmed, with a feather that, extending beyond the broad wake of black velvet, swept against Kathleen's cheek as she passed. "The dirty style!" Kathleen said indignantly. "Who knows what germs she hands out every day. The city government ought to forbid the wearing of them feather dusters; at any rate, on public highways."
Hertha smiled and presently slipped back into her thoughts, recalling the story she had just seen and going on with it, which was a way she had; but Kathleen watched the people. The men strolled along, all alike in derby hats and readymade clothes; while the women took little steps in high-heeled shoes, and talked shrilly, striving to be heard above the city's tumult. They used the slovenly street vernacular which scores of nationalities have helped to produce, contributing nothing from their own wealth of speech but changing consonants, slurring vowels, making at length of the beautiful English tongue an ugly, degraded thing. "Aw, I say, gimme dat!"
Kathleen prided herself upon her speech. She was born in Ireland, though she had little recollection of the fact, having arrived at the port of New York while taking nourishment at the maternal fount. "And it was you was screaming and beating me with your little fists, mavourneen," her mother used to say, "when I was making shift to button up my dress decently and carry you down the gangplank." She kept something of the richness of the Irish speech that had surrounded her in her childhood, despising the slang that with many an emigrant takes the place of a language. She might make a slip in grammar, but she never wittingly misused a word. Hertha's ladylike talk with its soft accent was a delight, and a little warm wave of pride swept over her as she looked at the girl walking by her side and remembered that she had chosen to come to her home.
"Just here to the left a step, dear," she said, "and we'll be out of the cold."
The air within the large, ill-ventilated hall could also be tasted, but no one could truthfully describe it as cold and fresh. It took the vitality out of Hertha, leaving her both tired and sleepy; but to Kathleen it was the breath of a new life. Moving amongst her fellows, nodding here, whispering a friendly "Good evening, comrade," there, she found the seats that she wanted, and, leaning well forward in her chair, gave herself to the discussion.
The address of the evening was over, but the speaker, a small man, ill shaven, with a sallow skin and sharp features, was answering questions. To Hertha he was a familiar and an unpleasant type of rural southern white, and she paid him little attention, slipping back into her dream story which had already reached the point where the beautiful and still young looking couple were being presented with sturdy grandchildren. To the audience, however, the meeting was growing in interest. Some one from the floor was casting doubt upon the picture the southerner had presented, suggesting that poverty in the country, in a warm climate, could not equal the severity of poverty in a northern slum.
As the speaker rose to reply his eyes shone with excitement. "Have I exaggerated the suffering of the country?" he asked. "Let me tell you of just one tenant farmer, and, remember, there are hundreds of thousands like him. He's a decent man, uneducated, but kindly, who, when I saw him, had a wife and ten children; the oldest was fifteen. There wasn't one of them that was clothed, not really clothed. One had a coat, another a shirt, two out of the ten had shoes. The girls went in rags, folks' left-over clothes that had been worn out years ago. But it was the woman who was the pitifullest. She looked like she had never had an hour's rest since she was grown, and I reckon she hadn't. It was the business of the landlord to keep her busy. She had to have children to help work the place, and she had to work herself to keep from being turned out of house and home. There was a baby dragging at her skirt, and it was put the one down on the bed and set the other to watch it, while she went into the fields. Her face was so thin her eyes stood out like a bird's, and her cheek was the color of an old shuck of corn. I haven't seen an old man or an old woman in this city walk with the weariness that she walked out from her broken down cabin to make her crops.
"At noon there was nothing to eat in the place, but in the evening the man went down to the store and came back with a bit of cornmeal and a few slices of bacon. The children fell upon it like starving dogs. Perhaps the woman got some, but I didn't see her.
"I talked with her when night came on. She wasn't but thirty-three. In the last five years she told me she hadn't had a new thing to wear. She hadn't been anywhere, not to ride in a buggy or on a train. She hadn't felt well, she told me, not really well, since her first child was born.
"And there was that family held there, as I've been trying to explain to you," he pounded his fist on the table, "held in the peonage that's slavery. There aren't any debtors' prisons to-day with walls about them; but there're millions of debtors' prisons, little sordid cabins on little plots of land, that are locking tired slaves within their bounds to-day."
The man sat down and Kathleen was on her feet. "Break the walls down!" she cried. "Take them our message as workers to break down the walls and join in the social revolution."
There was loud applause and Kathleen dropped back, her face flushed, her gray eyes gleaming.
The meeting over, the Irishwoman was the center of a group of excited talkers. Hertha slipped into the background and watched the people gesticulating and arguing. There were a few burly Irish among them, men in the building trades, who found a chance to laugh in the midst of their debate; but the majority were spare, hollow-cheeked Jews; tailors, small tradesmen, lawyers, eager, often aggressive personalities. The women were in the minority, and offered a contrast to the girls Hertha had seen at the theater or parading the street. They were all simply dressed, usually in white, somewhat mussy shirtwaists, with cheap, ill-hanging skirts. Men and women, however, despite their shabby clothes, were all intensely virile spirits to whom the story of the evening had been a living fact; not a tale to weep over and forget, but a truth to grip and to remedy.
"Come up to the platform with me, Kathleen," one of the women said, "and meet the comrade from the South." Kathleen started to go, and then, glancing back at Hertha, who had dropped into a seat, shook her head. "No, I'll be off with my friend," she answered, and the two made their way out. A few minutes' walk in the reviving air brought them to their home.
"Goodness," Kathleen exclaimed, as she took off her coat, "we forgot the ice cream!"
"Never mind," Hertha answered, "it's cold for ice cream. Sit down and I'll make some cocoa," and she started to walk into the kitchen.
Kathleen followed her. "I'll make the cocoa myself."
"No you won't," Hertha declared. "You got the dinner and it's my turn now."
She put a big apron over her dress and went quietly about her work. Kathleen, as she sat watching, felt a little tightening at her throat, so rarely did any one do her a service. She was a strong, capable woman, the eldest in the family, and it had naturally fallen to her to wait upon others. At eight her father had been killed in an accident, and the mill, not satisfied with his life, had dragged the loved school books from her hands and, opening its cruel door, held her from sunrise to sunset amid dirt and turmoil performing stupid, monotonous tasks. She had nursed her mother during her last illness, two weary years of suffering. Brother and sister had accepted her sacrifices, enjoying the education that she had been denied, receiving her ministrations thoughtlessly and as thoughtlessly giving nothing in return. She could never remember when either of them had waited upon her, had made her a cup of tea, had so much as hung up her hat and coat. Feeling herself the stronger, she had always waited upon others, and now for the first time, in this gentle, ladylike girl whom she had known less than a month, she had found a helpmate, one who showed her sympathy and consideration.
The cocoa was hot and foamy and delicious. They drank it sitting each at an end of the table with its white cloth that stood between the two windows.
"You're a smart young lady," Kathleen announced. "Who taught you to cook so well?"
"Oh, I just picked it up."
That was all the answer. Kathleen had already noticed that she received short replies when she questioned Hertha about her past.
"I can't keep that poor woman out of my head," Kathleen went on after a pause. "Here am I supping this elegant drink, and she without a crumb in the house."
"What woman?" Hertha asked. "Oh, yes, I know," guiltily. "You mean the woman the man told us about? But you don't know what may have happened. Perhaps she has all she wants now."
"Perhaps she has, in heaven."
"Oh, you can't tell. Lucky things happen sometimes."
"Do they? I've mostly seen unlucky ones. But luck is a poor thing for any of us to be counting on."
"I don't know, I've been lucky, very lucky."
"Have you? When?"
"Well, once, down South, not so long ago. And I was lucky when I met you."
"Indeed it was I had the luck then."
"Indeed, I had. If you could have seen the awful room, Kathleen, that Miss Jones sent me to look at! In a cheap boarding house, and with a landlady who looked as though she would cheat you half the time and scold you the other half."
"That would have been a happy home to return to when you'd been out at night to see two lovers parted only to meet again! Now, sit where you are. The cook doesn't wash the dishes."
"No, but she dries them," Hertha said decisively; and together they cleared away the things.
"I'd give a penny to know your thoughts," Kathleen remarked as she wrung out the dishcloth and hung it up to dry.
Hertha did not answer. She was pulling a leaf from the geraniums, crushing it in her fingers. She had left the lovers of the play and was back in an orange grove, her own lover close to her side. "You are Snowdrop of the fairy tale," he was saying. It had come true, she was Snowdrop, and yet of her own will she had destroyed the fairy tale. Whom might he not be making love to now? All at once she felt homesick and very tired.
Perhaps Kathleen a little guessed her thoughts. "It must be slow enough for you here with nobody but an old maid around like me. I wish I knew a fine young fellow to ask to dinner on Sunday."
"Ask Billy," Hertha said, looking up. "I'm sure it's time for him to come and look after the flowers."
CHAPTER XVI
William Applebaum, or Billy, as Kathleen called him, was a short man, stockily built, whose little length of limb and small hands were overtopped by a large head that commanded attention. It was well shaped, with an abundance of blond hair, a straight forehead, clear blue eyes and a fair, healthy skin. His mouth and chin were too small for the rest of his face, but he wisely concealed them with a beard which, as time went on, he kept closely clipped.
His grandfather, of whom he was justly proud, had been a revolutionist in Germany, in 1848, one of the band that strove bravely, but unsuccessfully, to bring political democracy to the Fatherland. Young Wilhelm was imprisoned for his activities, but he made his escape, and in a series of perilous adventures, in which his daring was only equaled by his good luck, at length found himself in America. There he settled in a small town in the Middle West, married, and brought up a family; and in his old age found himself with a son William and a grandson of the same name, living in the town of his adoption.
Those who love to dwell upon the past are grateful for any audience, and the grandfather, harking back at the end of his life to its one dramatic happening, was happy in the garden, working among his bright shrubs and clambering vines, or of a winter night seated by the ugly but heat-giving stove, to tell his always attentive small grandson of his great adventures. It would be, "Billy, I never hear a knock like that at the door that I don't remember the time I was drinking a glass of beer at the back of the house and the police knocked at the front and spoke my name." Or, "That's a strong grape-vine, Billy, growing against the arbor, and I like to see you climb up and get the fruit for us; but would you have been able to climb down the vine that saved my life the night I left prison?"
The story that Billy liked the best was the one where his grandfather—he must think of him not as gray-haired and rheumatic, but as a swift-running, strong youth—hid in a cart filled with hay. He lay close to the bottom, scarcely able to breathe for the seed about his face, jolting to the town on the seacoast. Suddenly there appeared the always pursuing soldiers. They came up, and the captain, staring suspiciously at the cart, called upon the driver to stop, and ordered the men to probe the hay with their bayonets. The soldiers reached over and jabbed again and again, going down deep until they touched the floor of the cart. But they found nothing and at length, turning about, put spurs to their steeds and galloped away. "When we reached the coast, and my good friend and comrade unloaded his hay, I lay there safe and sound," the old man would end impressively. "For it was not always the floor of the cart that they touched, but sometimes the board that I had put above my body as I lay huddled against the planks."
But while the first William had showed an adventurous spirit, the third of the name was content with a quiet and orderly existence. His grandfather became an intensely patriotic American, who fought through the Civil War, and to his death never voted any but the Republican ticket. To do otherwise would have seemed to him to doubt his adopted but intensely beloved land. He was impatient of any criticism of America. "It is only those who have fled from a despotism," he would say, "who can appreciate the United States." And so his grandson had taken things much as they came, and had done nothing more startling in his life than at twenty to come to New York where he found better opportunity for advancement than in the town of his birth. He obtained a position as bookkeeper, and for fifteen years, with absolute regularity, appeared at eight o'clock in the little stationer's shop, tucked among the great office buildings on the downtown street, to remain until half-past five when, with equal regularity, he returned to his well-kept boarding house, his only home in New York.
His annual vacation of two weeks for some years was spent in his western town, but marriage and death broke up the home there, the house was sold, and those remaining to him moved to the Pacific coast. After this, he rarely left the city, staying to care for the flowers that in the summer his landlady allowed him to plant in her back yard—though they were a trouble Monday with the wash—and to play long hours on the piano that stood against the wall by the further window in his south room. Sometimes he went for a day to a beach, but night found him in his bed at home. Vacation over, he was quite ready to take up work. His German singing society was the greatest excitement in his methodical life, and if the chorus master assigned him a solo part, never an ambitious one, he practised at home night after night, his pleasant bass sounding through the old house.
He was just the sort of man who should have married; but whether he was held by a romance of the days before he left his western town, or whether his elderly landlady, knowing that she could not have him herself was yet successful in guarding him against all comers, it was certain that he had made love to no woman since he had come to the great city, until, at thirty-five years of age, he met Kathleen. Then the pleasant clerk of precise ways, whose sentiment had been satisfied in singing "lieder" and watering tender plants, was consumed by a great, unselfish passion. His life no longer moved about his books in the comfortable cage in the stationer's shop, nor about the boarding-house room in the quiet street, but day and night it found its happiness, its sorrow, too, and unrest, in the life of a woman.
It was at the bedside of an acquaintance, a clerk whom he had met in his work, that he first saw Kathleen. The sick man lived in a dingy, furnished-room house; and as William Applebaum mounted the stairs, noticed the dust in rolls against the wall, smelt to-day's dinner and yesterday's, he found himself extremely sorry for his sick friend. What must the end be if the beginning was like this? Then, fumbling in the dark to find his way, the knob on which he had hesitatingly put his hand was pulled from his fingers, the door opened, and a large, comely woman, in a nurse's blue dress and white apron, stood before him.
"Is Mr. Saunders here?" he managed to ask.
"Indeed he is," was the answer, "and likely to remain here for some time. Will you come in and speak to him?"
"If I may."
Mr. Saunders proved to have typhoid fever, not a severe case but a long one, and Kathleen nursed him with Billy as her faithful assistant. "Mr. Applebaum is too long a name for so short a man," she explained to him. "But it's Billy all right with that beard." It was after this that he kept his beard closely clipped. He shared many a night's work with her; and long before Mr. Saunders was well, William Applebaum was at the feet of the lady of his choice.
If she knew it, she gave no sign. But as the sick man grew better and was able to sit in a chair, propped up with pillows, she stayed on in the evenings after her assistant came to relieve her, and the three visited together. Then Kathleen would regale them with stories of her work and of her plans for the future. She was always going to do something different, but always something held her to her present task. Just now it was a brother who needed her to keep house for him. When she was free, however, she meant to buy a horse and cart, to stock it with goods, and drive across the continent as a peddler. They were two evenings filling that cart, and Mr. Saunders was each time so exhausted with merriment that he slept all night without waking. "I may never buy the cart," she once said confidentially to Billy, "but for many a year it's been a good stock in trade." Again, she meant to save enough to go to Paris where they were always wanting American nurses and paid fabulously for them, and where she could work for a year; and then, on the proceeds, travel for the rest of her days. And where to go? That brought up endless suggestions and much useful information. After Mr. Saunders, who had gone once to South America as a salesman, had explained to her the ways of the insect life of the tropics, and his experience with snakes, she struck out everything south of thirty degrees of the equator. She could be as merry as a child in runabouts; but when the occasion came for discipline and serious work the men dared not jest with her, fearing the set look that came into her face.
Mr. Saunders got well and went back to his work, but before that time Mr. William Applebaum had asked Kathleen to be his wife.
"Marry an Appletree," she said, "you must think me Eve herself."
She always refused to give him a serious answer. "She had no idea of marrying any one. She had enough to do taking care of folk who took such ties upon themselves. And, if she did marry, did he suppose she'd choose a little man with a head on him like a comic supplement? Did he think he'd like to be a good husband sitting up nights for her, waiting patiently till he heard her footfall on the stair? As for wanting a home, she'd had more than enough home in her life. Caring for her own had worn her to the shadow she was, and it was a blessed comfort to be a free woman."
The last of Kathleen's rejoinders contained something more than mockery. She had had her share in the rearing and supporting of her kin, and this winter with Hertha was proving a beautiful respite. Had her lover been of a jealous disposition he would have disliked the southern girl who occupied so strong a place in Kathleen's affection, but he was devoid of pettiness. For a year he had unavailingly striven to win his goddess, but there were more years in the calendar; and though he received nothing in return for his unstinted affection and admiration, his love did not take from him the right to give.
He came regularly to see Kathleen of a Sunday, to dinner if she were gracious enough to invite him; if not, then in the afternoon, when once in awhile she would go out with him to dinner, and to a meeting afterwards. Sometimes it would be at the forum at Cooper Union, sometimes in a liberal church, but always the great problem of the world, the relation of labor to capital, would come under discussion. Then Kathleen would sit tense in her seat or lean forward to make sure that she caught each of the speaker's words. She would grunt with disgust at the rank conservatism of an argument; or again, applaud with all her might the denunciation of oppression and greed. The man at her side would watch her, filled with admiration at her splendid spirit, but himself moved not at all by what he heard. Only, occasionally, he would be almost angry at the invective hurled at the capitalist class, and had once said as he went out, "If the dirty Jew didn't like America he might go back to Russia on the first boat, and the country be all the better." Kathleen was furious at this heresy, and they walked the streets for an hour afterward discussing the sins and virtues of America. It was then that he told her of his grandfather, and she listened with enthusiastic interest to the recital of the revolutionist's political activities and his escape. "But what did he do after he got here?" was her question, and when she learned that he had then sat down and worshiped the land of his adoption, she lost interest. "His light burned out in his youth," was her comment. William Applebaum, third, for the first time resented her speech, and told hotly of the Civil War and of his grandfather's part in it. He won Kathleen's favor by his defense of his hero, and she never again spoke in any way but appreciatively of his revolutionary forbear, but she showed no greater favor to him.
When she took the flat on East Eighth Street, he made shelves for her at the two south windows and brought to her kitchen a wealth of potted plants. The delicate flowers died, for the Irish woman was very forgetful of them; and then, with sorrow at his heart for his cherished slips, but with no word of blame, he filled up the ranks with hardy geraniums that neglect could not kill. Attracted at the outset by the gay window shelves, Hertha soon assumed all care of the flowers, much to their profit; and on the Sunday after her night's outing with Kathleen, when she had secured an invitation for him to come to dinner, looked with some pride at the objects of her care.
"I'm glad I remembered to move this new fern last night when it was so cold," she said to Kathleen as she worked among the window plants. "Mr. Applebaum will see that I didn't forget what he told me. And, oh, Kathleen, let me set the table, I like to."
"And you know how," Kathleen added, and left her task. "There's many an uptown mistress, Hertha, would say that it was wrong for you to be manufacturing shirtwaists, when she needs you to wait on her table. I can just hear her telling you, 'Leave the factory, my child, and come to me where you will have easy work, (only fourteen hours a day) and a good home. (Her son will likely make love to you and you'll be sent from the house in disgrace.) Leave your coarse companions and learn the ways of a lady, (only you have them already)."
"Oh, stop, Kathleen. Let me finish with the dinner, and you put on that fresh waist I ironed for you. It's on your bed."
Kathleen went into her room to her perspiring work,—it made her hot to get into even the simplest dress,—and while struggling to hook her skirt over on the left side, she heard her lover's knock and Hertha's cordial greeting.
"More flowers, Mr. Applebaum? A begonia? We used to have those at home." Then the voices fell away into the distance as the speakers went into the front room.
"If this dinner is good, Billy," Kathleen said, when they were all three seated together about the kitchen table, spread with their best linen and china, "it's all Hertha's doings."
Hertha smiled but shook her head.
"Miss Hertha did her part, Kitty, I know," the guest made answer, "but the mashed potatoes are yours."
"And lumps in them at that! I've not much patience with potatoes or the world; but if you're liking them, take some more."
They all took part in clearing off the course of meat and vegetables, and then Hertha served a dessert of her own making, a fluffy-looking pudding of orange and custard and meringue.
"And did you think I cooked this?" said Kathleen. "Come now and own up that in cooking the South beats the Irish."
"The Germans are good cooks," said Hertha. "Perhaps Mr. Applebaum will cook the dinner for us some day."
"A man cook the dinner?" the Irishwoman said in astonishment; and with a touch of resentment, "That's a woman's work."
"Don't men cook here?" Hertha asked. Then, turning to the man present, "Don't men cook in Germany?"
"Miss Hertha," Mr. Applebaum made answer, "I don't know any more about that than you do. I've never been to Germany and my mother was an American who asked me only to make the fire and bring in the wood."
"You can take it from me," said Kathleen, "that the women do the cooking and the housework. Did you ever have a man cook for you?"
"Yes," Hertha answered, "my brother."
"Just like a nigger," commented Kathleen.
There was an awkward silence broken by the Irishwoman's muttered, "I beg your pardon."
Hertha looked straight at the begonia in the center of the table. How could she have said anything so stupid! Hertha Ogilvie had no brother. Now she would have to begin making up a story, lying about things. She ought to appear very angry. Imagine a white girl hearing her brother called a nigger and not resenting it; but again, imagine Hertha Williams sitting by the fire and warming herself and denying her brother Tom.
"I don't know why American men should not cook," William Applebaum at length broke in with his deep, pleasant voice. "The greatest chefs in the world are men. I wish, Miss Hertha, you would let me turn cook like your brother and show me how to make this pudding."
The meal finished, they left the dishes to be washed later and went into the front room where William Applebaum admired the picture which Hertha had framed.
"Yes," Kathleen said, "Hertha is spoiling me with her pretty rooms and her good things to eat. I've not been to my Socialist local for a month now. It's so comfortable here the nights I can be home."
"We went out last Thursday, Kathleen."
"You're right, we did. And you should have been with us, Billy. Such a talk as we heard of the poverty in the South."
"Perhaps Mr. Applebaum would have preferred the movie," Hertha said mischievously.
She was quite herself again, and curled up on the cot, her back against the wall, was prepared to watch the two in their talk, for she knew well enough that she would soon be forgotten. Kathleen had given the armchair to her guest and sat erect in her straight seat. Her soft white shirtwaist set off her fresh cheeks, her gray eyes, her large but sensitive mouth. But she had no thought of her appearance, she was prepared to be serious.
Her guest stretched in comfort in the big chair, his handsome head thrown back, his lighted pipe in his hand as he blew the smoke from between his lips. He would have been greatly pleased if Kathleen had chosen to tell of the moving pictures, but he saw at once that this was not her mood.
"I wish I had been with you at both places," he said courteously, with a little touch of formality that the Irish girl ridiculed and the southern girl liked. "It must have been like going to the theater and seeing both a comedy and a tragedy, only in that case they usually put the comedy last."
"That may be what they do at the theater but it isn't what they do in life."
Kathleen was ready to talk. She sat in her chair and told the story of southern peonage and wrong.
Hertha, who had failed to listen at Cooper Union, was moved in spite of herself at the tragic tale as it came from Kathleen's lips. It was the same in all essentials, but vivified by a rare imagination and a compelling sympathy. The Irishwoman became herself the thin, yellow, starved mother dragging her steps from her unlovely home into the hot, relentless fields.
"Have you ever seen anything like that?" William Applebaum asked of Hertha when the story came to an end.
Hertha hesitated as she answered. "No, I don't think I have. I lived much of the time in the city. I haven't known about such things." She thought of Ellen as she spoke, and was sure, had she been there, she could have talked intelligently about peonage and poverty among white and black. She remembered that Ellen used to say the Negro never fell as low as the lowest white. "Those are the folks," she added, "that we call poor white trash."
Her friend flared up at her. "Yes, and why are they trash? Because you treat them worse than slaves! You hold them in debt, steal from them with every piece of bacon or cup of meal they buy from your store, work their children when they should be at school or playing out under the blue skies; and then you live in idleness and sneer at the trash that done the work of the world for you."
"Miss Hertha doesn't sneer, and neither do I, Kitty, but I think you're talking of an exceptional case. At any rate, as I have seen things in the North and West, I've found that it was the fault of the man if he didn't live decently in the world, and keep his woman that way, too. Why didn't this woman's husband pay off his debt and go to another farm?"
"For the same reason likely that his children won't. Because he was starved and worked until all the life was squeezed out of him."
"Well, it's not that way in the North."
"Isn't it? Haven't I seen the tenement child sewing on the buttons to pants, and coughing fit to send her in a few years to heaven—for if those babies that have no chance in this world don't have one in the next, there's no God."
"And I've seen things, too, Kitty. I've known a good many families that were down and out, and it's always been one person of the lot who's been to blame. If every one did his share, kept sober, worked hard and saved money, he would get out of the tenement. When the family doesn't do better, when it keeps staying in the dirt, it's because there's a father perhaps who only works three days in the week and gets drunk the other three, or there's a son who can't find the right job, a round peg in a square hole. There's somebody who doesn't do right and keeps the family back."
"And do you mean to say that rich folk aren't like that?" Kathleen was growing very angry. "And yet I'm noticing they're not starved for it."
"If they're rich it's because they're industrious. My grandfather used to tell me that America was the land of opportunity, and that it rested with the individual whether or not he made a success."
"Oh!" Kathleen rose. She looked as though she could personally assault the little man. He in the meantime had resumed his pipe and was talking in a pleasant, matter-of-fact tone.
"Of course, I'm not denying, Kitty, that there are wrong things that ought to be remedied. That case in the South, now. It's very hard. Of course, the children should have schooling, and if the Blair Bill for federal aid to education hadn't been killed, they would be having it to-day. My grandfather used to say that this put back the South fifty years. But given an education, it's a fair field and no favor for the growing boy in the United States."
"I don't know how far back your Mr. Blair and his education may be, but he can't be as far back as you are, Billy, with your fair field. Fair indeed, with two per cent of the people controlling the wealth of the country!"
"Those figures are exaggerated."
"Indeed, they are! It should be one per cent and it will be that soon."
"But suppose for argument that it is. Don't they control it for good?"
"For good! And every night you see the bread line for a block down the Bowery?"
Applebaum laid down his pipe and spoke with emphasis.
"Oh, I've no sympathy with that. Those are just bums, nothing else. They wouldn't do a day's job if you gave it to them. They don't mean to work. All they want is a bite and a drink and a dirty hole to sleep in until they can get the drink again. They ought to be forced to work. The trouble is the men don't have to work long enough. With their eight-hour day you see them in the saloon before they go to work getting a drink. And they're after it again when the day's work is over or some other foolishness."
"You fool!" Kathleen said, her eyes blazing, and she lifted her hand as if to strike him.
He seized it in his own and carried it to his lips.
"I'm wise enough to love you, Kathleen."
Hertha found this an excellent time to slip from her seat and into the kitchen. When she came back the two were seated as before, but talking of indifferent things, and the light had gone out of Kathleen's face.
CHAPTER XVII
It was Saturday evening and early December. Kathleen was away for the night on a case, and Hertha, after a dinner alone, decided to go to the library to secure a book to read on Sunday. She was quite accustomed by this time to going out in the evening by herself; yet it always seemed a little an adventure, the streets were so gaily lighted and the people so many. She put a raincoat over her suit for the sky was lowering and there was a chilliness in the air, a harsh feeling that made her shiver and turn gladly, her short walk over, into the warm, brightly lighted reading-room.
Accustomed all her life to having few books about her, with no opportunity for individual choice, she made mistakes at first amid the plethora of volumes that the city offered. It had been disappointing, for instance, to reach home in the evening to learn that The Four Georges was not about four little boys or to find out that Sesame and Lilie had nothing to do with flowers. But part of the stack was open, and she soon found what she desired and drenched herself in the world of romance. Under the guidance of the librarian she read two novels of Dickens, and carried home and returned with suspicious swiftness one each of Scott and Thackeray; under her own guidance she became intimate with the heroines of those best sellers that a conscientious library board permitted upon the open shelves. Rather to her relief the librarian this evening was very busy and she went at once to the open stack.
It was with a guilty feeling that she habitually walked past the rows of history and travel. Ellen would have stopped here, she knew, and have carried home volumes telling of Europe and China and India and other lands unknown to Hertha even by name. Tom in her place would have asked for Livingstone's Travels in Africa, a book he had always wanted to own. She hoped they would surely have it in the school where he was reading or studying that night. Well, Ellen was industrious, and Tom liked to stop and think; but she, Hertha, never had cared for heavy reading—except poetry, and poetry belonged under the pines or by the river, not in noisy New York. So excusing herself, she reached the jaunty, attractively bound fiction and joined the large group of borrowers who were intent on securing a thrilling story for the morrow.
"Excuse me, but do you know anything about these books?"
She turned to see a young man at her elbow. He was tall, not in the least good-looking, with a long, thin face, a small mouth and a sharp nose. His eyes, however, were attractive—deep blue with long lashes like a child's. He was dressed in cheap, conspicuously patterned clothes, and his gay necktie bore a large scarfpin. She hesitated to answer, and yet there was a tone of entreaty in his voice that gave her confidence. She felt sure that he was from the country and was floundering about amid this multitude of volumes as she had floundered a few weeks ago. He should, of course, consult the official-looking librarian seated at her desk whose business it was to instruct newcomers, but the newcomer is the one who instinctively avoids the official class. Glancing down she answered shyly, "Very little."
They were between two stacks, and looking along the line of volumes, Hertha saw a familiar title and took down The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
"Have you read this?" she asked.
"No, ma'am," was the answer.
She smiled at the "ma'am" for it reminded her of home. "I feel like you'll enjoy it," she ventured.
"There," the young man cried, so loudly that a number of borrowers turned to look at them both. "I knew the minute I set eyes on you that you were from the South!"
Hertha was very much annoyed. This forward youth was making her conspicuous. Leaving him she went quickly to the reading-room, and seating herself at a table took up a magazine. In a few minutes, however, she saw him at her side.
"I didn't mean to make such a noise," he said in a peculiarly penetrating whisper, "but what the dickens do you do after you find your book?"
It is always a pleasure to be placed in the superior position of an imparter of knowledge, and Hertha, unbending from her dignity, found herself whispering instructions.
Once put on the right path, the youth showed no further shyness, and was soon talking familiarly with the librarian who equipped him with a card.
"It's all hunky," he explained, coming back to Hertha. "She gave me the book and as long as you think it's good I'm going to read it through. I'm not much on reading," he added as though apologizing for his new taste. "Never entered a library before, but there ain't such a lot to do of a Sunday."
Hertha nodded but did not look up, and after some minutes of aimless wandering the young man went out.
She found herself thinking of him after he had gone. His type was not unfamiliar. The tall, lank figure, the yellowish skin, looking as though indigestion lurked around the corner, the hard, narrow mouth—white men like this had been customary figures in her Southern life. They were the sort who monopolized four places in the train, lolling back on one seat and putting their feet up on another. More than once, on a street car, she and Ellen had been obliged to stand when such a man, quite oblivious of whether or not he usurped the jim-crow section, had taken his lazy comfort. But a person of this type would be courteous to a white girl, would be glad to sacrifice his pleasure to do her a kindness. She had recognized at once that he was from the South, and her speech had proclaimed to him her birthplace. But what if he had seen her when she was colored? She found the blood rush to her face at the thought. Then, remembering Mammy's injunction, she grew calm again. It was for her to-day, in New York, to live only in the white world.
Going to the shelves she selected a book to take home, and then as the librarian was making ready to close, pushed at the outside door, which was a little stiff in opening, and walked into the street.
Into the street? Oh, no, into Heaven!
Everywhere about her white crystals were falling through the air—on her hat, on her coat, on her upturned face. As she looked overhead they came in multitudes, like a soft curtain. They made a carpet at her feet, and as far as she could see down the street they dropped one after another, millions upon millions, shimmering golden in the light of the lamp.
It was a miracle of beauty. Here in this ugly city, where she had missed the clean sand and the growing flowers, from the very heavens had come a sacred robe, for were not the angels clothed in white? And the robe was covering the world. The gray stone stoops were shining, and on each bit of cornice or projecting woodwork was a line of light; and she was moving through it; feeling the soft flakes encircle her, stepping as lightly as she could that she might not crush the lovely things that had come straight from God.
That night, as she flung open her window, for the first time she heard no sound. The jolt and jar of the street car, the rumble of the elevated, fell upon deaf ears. All her mind was in her eyes that watched, with ever-growing reverence, the falling flakes of white. And as she slipped into unconsciousness her last thought was of the heavenly city that would be building throughout the night.
"Be sure to put on your rubbers, Hertha," said Kathleen the next morning.
"Why," asked Hertha, "is the snow wet?"
"Is the snow wet? Is the sun hot? It's a mercy you didn't take your death of cold last night, wandering around with your face turned up to the sky, and the snow falling about you! Put on your rubbers, darling, just as though it were rain, for it may turn to that before the morning's over."
Hertha did as she was bid and returned for general inspection. Freezing weather had begun to exhaust her extra supply of warmth, and she had purchased a heavy coat of soft brown material trimmed with brown fur and with a fur muff to match. A little brown hat with a red quill had been another recent purchase. She had dipped into her bank account to get these things and had feared that Kathleen might think it extravagant—she was sure that Ellen would have—but Kathleen had silenced any misgivings.
"Spend your money when you have the chance," she advised, as Hertha began to speak apologetically of her expenditures. "The poorhouse at the end is a pleasanter life than scraping and denying yourself all along the road. And you can't be a brown fairy with a quiver of a smile on your lips and a glint of sorrow in your eyes for many years more. The sorrow or joy will get the better of you, and that's the end of youth."
"You haven't lost your youth, then."
"Oh, be off with you! You're going to church?"
"Yes, but I'm leaving early to see the snow."
"If I hadn't been up all night I'd go with you too, but it's a morning when bed can't be resisted. So good-by, little brown angel, and come back for a homely dinner of corn beef."
Few people had passed since the snow had ceased falling and the sidewalks were still beautiful, one side dazzling white, the other luminous purple in the shadow of the walls. Anxious not to miss any of the spectacle before the city made for its destruction—some boys were already shoveling the snow into the street—Hertha hastened to the open square on one side of which stood her church. Tall English elms with nobly branching limbs stood out against the clear blue sky; and the bushes, bared of their leaves, bore on each twig a mass of crystal flowers. She moved in and out among the paths, crunching the snow beneath her feet, now circling the dismantled fountain, now walking through the broad gateway only to return again. Looking at the church clock she found she had still half an hour left to enter into the treasures of the snow.
As she stood in the sunlight by the park bench she became conscious that some one was watching her. This, she had learned, was one of the distressing features of city life; only at a shop window could one stop to gaze without being conspicuous. Provoked at the sense of interruption she started to walk away.
"I beg your pardon."
Turning she saw the young man of the evening before. He looked almost attractive in the daylight in his soft hat and dark overcoat, the winter cold bringing a little color to his face. His deep blue eyes were clear and friendly, and she felt sure from his manner that he meant no impertinence.
"I beg your pardon," he said again, "but I noticed you here in the early morning looking at things and I thought they might be as strange to you as to me."
"I have never seen the snow before," said Hertha.
"There, I was on to it, all right. Do you know what it's like," he went on, "all this snow? It's like a field of cotton with the stuff lying around in heaps, but with some bolls still sticking to the plant. Look at it there on that bush. The Bible says 'white as wool' but I say, 'white as cotton.'"
Hertha looked down at her feet which were beginning to feel cold, and struck one against the other; but while she did not speak she did not go away, and the young man still tried to make talk.
"It certainly is a pretty day," he said desperately.
Then Hertha looked up and laughed. She had not heard that greeting since she left home.
The young man laughed back heartily, even noisily. He was delighted at his success.
"Won't you tell me your name?" he said pleadingly. "Mine's Brown, Richard Shelby Brown's the whole of it, but Dick is what everybody uses at home. I come from Georgia and that's the best state in the union except yours. I'm working as salesman with a wholesale firm over on Broadway not far from here—I'll show you the place if you'll walk over there. I'm twenty-five years old and I don't drink, brought up prohibition and won't touch the stuff. Now, please, it's your turn. Won't you tell me your name?"
Hertha still stood hesitating, pushing one foot over the other, clasping her hands together in her muff and striving to decide in her mind what to do. She looked so shyly pretty that the young man watching her, his heart in his mouth, felt that the sentence would be beyond his deserts if she sent him away. Yet he would have gone without question, so much a lady did she seem, so far above the social circle attainable by Richard Shelby Brown. She in her turn was thinking it would be easy to go and escape all questionings; and yet easier to let him have his way, at least to recognize him, not continually to pass him if they met; and easiest of all just to stand there, looking down at her muff or up at the church and the white clouds piled back of it; and then, at length to say, still not looking at him, "My name is Hertha Ogilvie."
"That's a lovely name, and Georgia, too. You came from that state, didn't you, Miss Hertha?"
"No, my family came from Florida."
"That's queer, for it's a Georgia name."
"Didn't any one ever leave Georgia for Florida?"
She was looking up at him now, her brown eyes shining, a little smile on her lips.
"I can't conceive it," he said in a loud, jovial voice to hide his own embarrassment. She was far above him, he felt sure, in birth and breeding. "It's a fine name, I know that. I wish we could find we were kin."
"Everybody is kin in the South," she said decidedly, anxious to leave the subject of family. And then, pointing to the gate, asked, "What has that boy trailing after him?"
A little boy of about eight, in shabby coat and broken shoes, had come into the park and, behind him, drawn by a rope, was a sled. Stopping a moment to survey the ground, the boy lifted the sled, ran a few steps, flung himself upon it, and coasted along the path, slowing down close to where they stood.
Dick Brown looked at the youngster as he lay happily sprawling on his stomach, and then turned to Hertha. "And I've lived for twenty-five years without a chance at that!"
"It's never too late to learn," she suggested.
He thrust his hand in his pocket and pulled out a nickel. "Say," he said, calling to the boy who was starting off, "Gimme a ride!"
The youngster grinned derisively. "What 'er givin' me?" he asked, and slid away on the path.
Brown ran after him. "I'm giving you this," he answered and produced the nickel.
This altered the situation. The boy looked a little doubtfully at his sled and at the tall young man beside him, but, financial gain outweighing distrust, he took the money and handed over his property. "Go a little easy," he said, "it ain't yer size."
The man from Georgia eyed the bit of board on runners and then looked down at his long overcoat, his gloved hands, his highly polished shoes. Suddenly he felt very foolish. He glanced up at Hertha who was standing some rods away watching.
Moved by an impulse of mischief, she ran over to where he was. "I'm waiting to see you do it," she said. "It's perfectly easy, isn't it?" turning to the boy.
"I bet you two are dagoes," the youngster said by way of answer. "Dagoes don't know any more about snow 'n the fleas they bring wid 'em. Say, mister, this sled ain't your fit. Why don't you give your girl a ride?"
"Will you?" said Dick Brown, glowing with pleasure at the suggestion.
The park was filling up. Ahead on the path were two girls, one not more than a baby, clad in so many jackets that she looked like a little ball, sitting upright on a sled, which her little sister, in red coat and white hood, was pulling. She same running down the path, steering with accuracy and care.
"I could do that all right," Brown said with assurance. "Won't you try?"
"Oh, no, I couldn't!"
"Please do," he pleaded.
There were only children about, and, to Hertha, Dick Brown himself was beginning to seem just a big boy. The intoxicating air and the dazzling snow were breaking down convention and leaving her quite gay and daring.
"Well, just a little way," she said curling herself up on the sled.
Dick at once took off his overcoat and wrapped it about her, tucking it well under her feet. To her expostulations he paid not the slightest attention.
"There you are, all right," he cried joyously, and ran with her down the path.
The owner of the sled followed after, steering occasionally from behind when expert skill was needed, or firing a snowball at any boy who got in the way of their triumphal progress. It was glorious sport, and there was no knowing how long it might have continued had not Dick Brown, careless in his growing skill, looked away from duty for a moment and striking an obstacle in the path, rolled Hertha into the snow.
Protected by his great coat she was entirely unhurt, both in person and in dress and she found herself laughing immoderately as he helped her up; but he was prostrate in his contrition.
"I'm the stupidest hill billy in Casper County," he said. "I'd like to kick myself. Are you sure you aren't hurt?"
"Of course, I'm not! The snow is as soft as a pillow. Don't mind, please, Mr. Brown, we've had such fun."
"Have you? I have, but I wouldn't have dumped you out that way, not for a hundred dollars."
"You could have done it for five cents."
The snow was brushed from her dress and she was standing, her muff pulled over her arm, settling her hat in place.
"It's not quite straight," he said and moved as though to put it right for her.
She drew back, indignant. Was he going to be fresh and spoil everything after their jolly time together?
"Excuse me!" he grew red with embarrassment. Here was a girl with whom evidently he must never practise the code of manners agreeable to the girls at his own home. He added somewhat lamely, "It's all right now."
"I'm glad," she was her shyest self again; "and now good-by."
"You won't let me take you home?"
"I'm not going home," and she held out her hand.
He shook it heartily. "I mean to read the book through," he declared.
"I think you'll like it. Good-by."
"Good-by."
Watching her walk across the park and down the street until the little hat with its red feather was lost to sight, Dick Brown saw before him many evenings spent in a public library reading-room. He had been lonely since he had come, four months ago, a stranger to New York. It was not his first experience away from Casper County—a year of business in Atlanta had proved a preface to his New York position—but he had never before been in a city quite without home acquaintances. New York was a fine place for movies and restaurants, for walks up Broadway, a cigar in your mouth, watching whisky and petticoats, spool cotton and the latest leg show, wink their merits at you overhead; but it was poor in nice girls. There were plenty of the other kind. He felt disgust as he remembered with whom he had already chaffed and dallied, but only by chance would he be likely to meet such a young woman as Hertha Ogilvie. Setting his hat firmly on his head and pulling on his gloves, he said to himself that he was glad she was so careful but that he must find some way of breaking through her reserve.
A snowball struck him in the neck, and turning he found his new boy acquaintance grinning at him. Here was a time to take off, not to put on, the gloves. Stripping himself of impediments, he entered upon his first snowball fight to emerge wet but triumphant.
Hertha walked west for a few blocks, then north, then back to the east again. She meant to go to church, but she did not mean that Richard Shelby Brown should know where her church was. As she hurried down the street, all aglow once more, she felt girlishly happy. It came upon her quite suddenly that she had rarely been happy like this before. Her life at home, at school, with Miss Patty, had brought her quiet content; the hours with her lover which were slowly receding from her thoughts had stirred her passion; but save with a little boy like Tom she had never played as she had played this morning. In the South there was rest and passion, the warm breath of the refulgent summer; but in the North, there was cold, tingling air, and jolly times. It was a place in which to work hard; but also a place to play in, to go coasting, to run, perhaps to dance.
She looked so young and sweet when she entered her church that the woman at the end of the seat into which she was ushered smiled at her; an unholy liberty in New York.
"All ye snow and hail, praise ye the Lord, praise Him and glorify Him forever!"
She found it in her prayerbook, and all through the service, through the Te Deum and prayer and litany, she was entering into the treasures of the snow.
That night the thermometer rose twenty degrees and the next morning there was only a dirty gray slush upon the street.
CHAPTER XVIII
New York had been preparing for Christmas. From all over the world beautiful things had poured in at her docks and stations to be distributed among her stores and shops. From the great steamers that came daily to her ports, from the trains that snorted up to her depots, were unloaded cases filled with garments of every texture and color; rich silks; fanciful ribbons, undergarments far too lovely to be hidden, that later would shine resplendent in shop windows. Household possessions came; graceful vases; plates of china rimmed with gold; many-hued glass; tables and chairs with slender fragile legs; soft, sumptuous rugs; heavy figures in white marble. Out of the boxes came gay and intricate toys; dolls of varied ages but all newly born; brightly illustrated picture books; tinkling music boxes. The shop windows each day, in number beyond number, recorded the multitude of possessions that make up the life of civilized man.
These possessions, however, were to be found in the city all the year, though they grew more lovely and numerous at holiday time; but as December advanced the trains brought in the special harbingers of Christmas. From Maine came the fir-balsam, most fragrant of trees, some tall and thickly boughed, others a child's measure in height; ground-pine and laurel were brought from nearer by; while holly and mistletoe traveled up from the South. All stood in display upon the sidewalks in both the poor and the resplendent sections of the town.
When the noon hour came, and, seated by the machines, the other girls opened their packages of luncheon and ate and visited with one another, Hertha went out to walk. She did not spend more than ten minutes in the clattering restaurant, but hurried on to the great department store where the wealth of the world was on exhibit. There she would wander each day, sometimes in toy-land, sometimes where the pianos were playing or the victrolas singing, sometimes among the lovely dresses or under the great rotunda where the silks shone in rainbow colors. At first she was fearful lest she had no right to examine these wonderful things that she could not purchase, but she soon found that no one was troubled by her presence. Once in a while she would buy a little candy or a picture card to feel the importance of a customer, but the very multiplicity of the things about her and the simplicity and narrowness of her own life made expensive purchases incredible. She smiled sometimes as she thought of Miss Patty's suggestion of a large expenditure upon clothes. The soft blue evening dress with the touch of yellow at the neck would have become her; but Miss Patty would have recognized as soon as she, that there was nothing in her present life to claim kinship with the gown. To have worn it, or a cheap imitation of it, to some dance-hall would never have entered the head of either of them. Whether wisely or not, she had chosen the position of a working girl in this, her new life, and the doors of social intercourse that might, as a student, have been ajar had she gone with Miss Witherspoon, were now closed.
Nevertheless, the splendor of the shop did make its impression upon her and she felt that her aristocratic lineage became her as she walked among its beautiful and costly things. "Now remember," she would say to herself each day as she entered, "you are Hertha Ogilvie, Miss Ogilvie of Florida. Your grandfather was a distinguished judge and left you money, and after his death you came to New York to live." So far, so good; but she must have a fuller story if she were to satisfy the natural questions of her friends. Kathleen had respected her reserve, for which she was most grateful, but if she saw Richard Brown again, and accepted him in her life, he would want to know a great deal. Southern folk were always talking about personal affairs with a kindly, active curiosity, and there was little hope that a short sojourn in the North would cure any one of them of such a trait. Yes, she must build up an unreal past in which she moved among strange people, a white child unknown even to herself. To have told her life as she had lived it, with its strange and dramatic change from one race to another, was repugnant to her. It was partly to escape the curious glances, the whispered remarks about her appearance—"Yes, one could see she might have been taken for a Negro, that curly hair"—the inquisitive questions regarding her bringing up among blacks, that she had turned from the Boston world that Miss Witherspoon had prepared for her. But Hertha Williams found it difficult to create a life story for Hertha Ogilvie and to carry it through its normal vicissitudes and adventures for twenty-three years. It was repugnant to her to conceive and carry out a lie; and as she walked down one long aisle and up another, she had an annoying way of forgetting her grandfather and the many years she had lived with him (she made no effort to visualize other relatives) and of recalling her own black people at home.
They should know, these dear people whom she could not forget, that Christmas found her alive and well, but she would send no address and would receive no welcome word in return. That was what they had meant. Hertha Ogilvie's two feet were not yet planted firmly enough in the white world for her to return, even for a short time, to the black. So on a little card that showed a cottage standing in a field of snow, she sent to foster-mother and sister her greeting of love and her assurance of health and happiness. To Tom she sent a top, his favorite toy. He had been famous at spinning his top, and it was pleasant to send him a child's gift. And when she had dropped both card and toy in the box at the post-office she turned away winking the drops from her eyes.
William Applebaum at this time was a great comfort. He was a whole Christmas, in himself, for he loved every custom associated with the day, German, English, American, and carried them all to Kathleen's home. With Hertha he hung up wreaths of holly in the four windows, and two days before Christmas he appeared carrying a ten-pound turkey. "I bought it myself," he said, as Kathleen glared as though she thought it might have come from the Salvation Army. "I wanted to make sure of my dinner here, and if Miss Hertha will let me, I'll cook it under her supervision." On Christmas eve, which happened to be Sunday, he took them to a concert given by his choral society, and leaving them in the best seats in the house, went upon the stage and sang the choruses in The Messiah with a rapture of happiness and good-will. When the two women returned home, after saying good-night to him at the door, they found within a little tree, not four feet in height, but set out in the regalia of the season, tinsel, cornucopias, candles, and at the top a golden star. They lighted the candles and sat for a time in their radiance until Hertha declared that they must be blown out that they might be lighted again to-morrow.
"He's a good man," Kathleen said as she examined the little gilt toys on the boughs, "but he lacks vision."
Christmas morning was lowering, but after she had tidied up her room, Hertha went out to church. She walked through the park, a gray and cheerless place to-day, and felt aggrieved that no one was there to meet her. There was, of course, no reason why she should have thought to see her new acquaintance, but she had half expected it both Sunday and now and his absence was a disappointment. And at the library, while she had scrupulously kept to her usual routine, visiting it neither more nor less than usual, she had not seen him either. Her life, whether set in the South, where roses and purple clematis were blooming now over the doorways, or in the North of gray clouds and snow, was just a place into which people entered for a time to play a part, and, at the end of the act, went out and left her to finish as best she could alone.
Once within the church, however, with the organ pealing out the music she had heard the night before of the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks, she ceased to feel aggrieved and with deep emotional happiness entered into the service. As Hertha Ogilvie she had at once gone to the Episcopal Church. To enter its portals and take part in its ritual seemed to her as much in keeping with her new character as sitting down at table with white men and women. But her nature so swiftly responded to beauty, there were so many sensitive chords of the spirit that vibrated to the chant of the service, or to the moments of silent prayer within the darkened church amid the multitude of throbbing souls, that she grew to love the church of her adoption. "How glad I am to be white," she thought as she stood up and heard the Te Deum ring through the softly lighted spaces. "And yet how queer it is to be glad, for I've always been just the same."
The snow began to fall at one o'clock, and when Applebaum appeared for dinner at three (he had not been allowed to help in its preparation) he made much ado of standing in the hall and shaking off the flakes.
"I especially ordered a white Christmas for you, Miss Hertha," he called as he stood in the open doorway.
She smiled in reply and asked him to come in.
"Could I have a word with Kitty?" he stammered.
Leaving him still in the hall, clutching nervously at his umbrella, she went into the kitchen and sent out Kathleen.
Applebaum was much embarrassed. "Would you mind, Kitty?" he said. "There's a little boy downstairs that was in the street a minute ago, yelling loud enough to drown a whole orchestra because they were taking his mother away to the hospital. He was pounding and kicking the doctor until I promised him a turkey dinner, when he stopped as if his mouthpiece was broken. Do you mind if I bring him up?"
"Why, of course not," she answered, "it's only you that would mind, for you're not used to children."
When he appeared in the hall again he was accompanied by a singularly unattractive boy of eight with a colorless face and incredibly dirty hands.
"We hadn't time to fix up," Applebaum said with forced cheerfulness, endeavoring to make proper connections between a very shabby pair of trousers and a soiled shirt. "There, that's better."
"Come this way," Hertha called, and to the surprise of the others the boy followed her down the hall into her bedroom.
Getting some hot water, she helped him roll up his sleeves and then, handing him her soap, told him to wash.
At this point he shook his head vigorously. "I can't, Miss," he explained; "it would chap 'em. Yer don't wash yer hands in winter."
"Just try," she suggested.
With a great splash he plunged in his hands, found the warm water pleasant, the soap agreeably slippery; and while he scowled as he rubbed, under Hertha's silent supervision, he made a thorough job.
"Now, look," she said when he had finished with her towel.
The boy looked down and out beyond his coat-sleeves, where once there had been black, were now white, astonishingly white, hands. They gleamed against his dark trousers. Slowly a smile spread over his face as though he were welcoming back summer friends.
"Tom could never get a result like that," Hertha thought as they walked into the kitchen together. She placed the lad at Kathleen's left where he watched voraciously the carving of the deliciously browned turkey. He grabbed at the first plate, which, nevertheless, went on its way to Hertha. But when the second turned not to the left but to the right and landed in front of Applebaum, his anger rose.
"Damn you," he said, grabbing Kathleen by the arm, "gimme something to eat!"
In a flash she had boxed his ear. "Keep your mouth shut," she commanded, "if you want to get anything in it. No wonder your poor mother's in the hospital!"
The boy sniffled a little, but remained silent. When he received his portion he fell upon it voraciously, swallowing potato in gulps, tearing at bones, and cleaning the plate of its last drop of gravy. This accomplished (it occupied not more than five minutes) he seized his cap, ran from the room, leaving the doors wide open in his flight so that they heard the front door slam, and rushed into the street.
Hertha looked at the empty plate. "I've seen hungry boys before, but never one so hungry as that," she said.
"Poor little kid," said Kathleen, "and he missed his pudding!"
"You weren't pitying him a while ago." There was reproach in Hertha's voice.
Kathleen made haste to explain. "That was the only language he knew. I done that or he would have had us in hell in a minute. Perhaps you could have managed better," she added, almost humbly, "you got him to wash his hands."
Applebaum had risen from his place while they were talking and had taken away the boy's plate. The exit of his unsightly, bad mannered guest was a great relief, and he now sat down and attacked his food with interest. "We have fed the hungry," he said solemnly from the depths of his plate.
Kathleen flew at him. "And so that's why you done it! I was wondering you were so thick with the kids all of a sudden. You wanted to ease your conscience on Christmas day! Well, you're in it now with the Bowery Mission and the Salvation Army and Tim Sullivan and you can enjoy yourself. Charity to-day is on the job."
"Why not say the Christmas spirit?" he made answer. "I meant it kindly."
A lovely look came over the Irish woman's face. All her irritability vanished, and, smiling at them like some strong saint, she lifted her coffee cup. "To the Christmas spirit, then, and may it stay with us all the year round."
"Hertha, here, is the Christian," she said later, when they were all comfortably seated in the front room, "she goes to church more times than I can count."
"It's a good habit for a woman," Billy retorted. "What did they preach about this morning?"
"I hardly know," Hertha answered. "The sermon was very short, but the service and the singing by the choir boys was most beautiful."
"And the priests in their robes and the altar with its candles and the incense," Kathleen added.
"Oh, we are not High Church like that."
"Why not do the whole thing if you're about it? I wouldn't stop at one gown, I'd have two, a dozen for the great events, and as many candles as the rich could pay for. But what is there in it all for a hungry heart?
"I remember once," Kathleen continued, a look of sorrow coming into her gray eyes, "going to church of a Palm Sunday. I had broken from the faith since the priest went against me and the girls in my big strike, but I thought of how my father and mother, if they'd been living, would have asked me to go, and I went to please them. I'd hardly entered the door, though, when the smell of the incense and the sight of the priests' rich robes sickened me. I thought of the lowly Nazarene who had not where to lay His head, and it seemed to me that I must scream; so I left and walked down the street, and across the way I saw another building, with a plain entrance, and over the doorway the words 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' 'I don't know what it may mean,' I thought to myself, 'but that must be the place for me.' So I went inside and sat at the back against the wall where no one saw me.
"There was a pleasant looking man on the platform, dressed as he would be dressed to go into the street, and he was telling the meaning of Palm Sunday. It was when our Saviour was coming into Jerusalem riding on an ass, the people following Him. But His followers all being poor, like Himself, had nothing to give, so they tore the leaves from the palm trees as He rode by and threw them in His path, their only offering. And as I sat there and listened, and heard of the hard road that the poor must tread, something broke in my heart and I leaned against the wall and sobbed."
Hertha was deeply moved. "Where did that man preach, Kathleen?" she asked.
"It was a long way from here, darling, and likely as not they've thrown him out of his church by this time. He was too good to be let long to do as he liked."
"Oh, Kathleen, Kathleen!"
"Well, well, I mustn't be making remarks like that on Christmas. Has Billy told you the story yet, Hertha, of how his grandfather fought in the German Revolution and made his escape from prison?"
Their visitor left early, and for a time they worked together in the kitchen clearing away the things. This task done, Kathleen brought out her Christmas cards and gifts and looked them over, commenting on this or that friend or patient, while Hertha sat quietly by, her hands in her lap. The day had brought her no remembrance save a gift from Kathleen.
"There's one thing I do love about you, Hertha," her friend said, "you're not always fidgeting; you know how to rest."
"Yes. It's been a real vacation for me, these two days."
"Still it must be hard not to be home at playtime."
Hertha remained silent.
"I'm not asking questions, dearie," her friend went on. "It's for you to talk or not, as you wish. But sometimes when we're by ourselves we want to speak and yet we don't know how. If there's anything you'd feel like saying, I'd keep it to myself. I know," looking closely at the young girl, "you've heard nothing at all from home."
It was very quiet. As Hertha sat looking at her hands in her lap, she heard the clock tick and smelled the fragrance of the geranium blossoms. She was struggling with a desire to get up and, throwing her arms about her friend's neck, tell her her whole story. Hating deception, fearing that she could play her part but poorly, she wanted above everything else to do as her friend asked and reveal what was close to her heart. But reticence and, too, a feeling that she must keep to the plan that she had formulated, held her back. So she only said in a half whisper, "I am very much alone, Kathleen."
"I'm knowing that, darling."
"I never knew my father or my mother. I saw more of my grandfather than of any one else. But he died last summer and left me with a little money, only a little, and I came to New York."
"You've no sister to turn to?"
"No," very slowly.
"You said you had a brother once?"
"Yes, but he's a long way off. I don't see him any more."
"That's a lonely way to be. And is your grandmother alive now?"
"No." Then, with a touch of petulance, "I didn't like her much."
"But you're grieving, dear, I can tell that; and it's not for the dead, but the living."
"Perhaps."
"Is it some man now that you're needing?"
"No," Hertha said with a little laugh that ended in a sob, "it's not a man, Kathleen, it's my black mammy."
She put her arms around her friend's neck and kissed her good-night; and then went to her room, her head erect, her carriage that of the granddaughter of Judge Ogilvie. She had taken the first step and the next would not be so difficult. But Kathleen, out in the kitchen, shook her head and looked mystified.
CHAPTER XIX
The "Imperial," to which Hertha went every morning, was a high-grade shop. The large room in which she spent forty-nine hours a week was as clean as a conscientious scrubwoman could make it; the ventilation was not bad, and few of the workers were obliged to use artificial light. At rare moments of interruption, when stopping to catch a bit of thread or to adjust a piece of trimming, Hertha would look about at her companions bent over their machines, one running a tuck here, another attaching the lace to the muslin there, and would marvel at their dexterity and at the speed with which the finished product came out ready to go to another room to be pressed. Later she might see it at a department store, thrown over a show figure, and priced at $5.65 or $3.95, according to the day of the week. They were pretty shirtwaists and she took a pride in her part in their production.
By January the trade became brisk. Orders for "Imperial" waists were shipped to-day to give place to new orders to be shipped to-morrow. The girls were paid by the piece, and were, for their own interest, likely to work as fast as they could; but foreman and manufacturer were continually calling for greater speed. The exigencies of the trade—capricious changes of style, a keen competition among the manufacturers—created a period of swift production to be followed by a period of unemployment. Now, in midwinter, work was speeded up; and, bending over each whirring machine, was a taut, tired girl whose one thought, if she thought at all, was of the signal that should come at last to tell her that this day's work was done.
Hertha never became accustomed to the daily speeding. Not only did her body rebel against it, but her spirit refused to accept its sacrilege. She had always enjoyed making clothes, seeing a garment grow under her fingers. No matter how simple the article might be at which she was at work, she had felt the satisfaction of the creator when the final stitch was taken and the parts had become a useful whole. But now nothing grew; everything was made artificially by a series of explosions as they made puffed rice. At her machine she ran row after row of small tucks, fashioning the shoulders to give fullness to the bust. It was a graceful pattern, but if she stopped a moment to think of it she lost money for her employer and for herself. Her mind must be concentrated on her machine and on the goods that she fed it with the constant suggestion of hurrying, and again hurrying, and under the accusing eye of the foreman hurrying yet again.
Among the few American girls who worked at the shop was one Annie Black, who lived in a suburb. Annie seemed always to be running to and from trains. Her life on the road bore a striking similarity to her life at her machine. She rushed in the morning to get the 6:59, which, if it were on time, got her in and at work by eight. By shortening her noon hour she could just catch the 5:51 train for home. But if the 6:59 was late, then it was futile to attempt to make up lost time and she must work until nearly six and take the 6:41 back to a late dinner. And as her trains moved so moved her machine with its girl engine driver impatient for each run to be over and done.
We all love to make things, and the tragedy of the modern factory is that it denies this joy to the worker. Within the great buildings that we see from the street car window or that we flash by on the railroad train, men and women are not fashioning shirtwaists or shoes or automobiles; they are not seeing one out of the million things of man's creation grow beneath their touch; they are performing a series of motions for which they receive remuneration. The swifter and more accurate the performance of these motions the better the pay; but of the finished product they have neither knowledge nor thought. At ten years of age, with needle or wheel, they are better, more intelligent creators than at thirty, when, with fagged brain, they mechanically add their part to the multitude of parts that make up the factory product. At ten they take joy in the thing they have made and may sell it for a nickel or a kiss; at thirty they have but one desire, to dispose of their part of the product as dearly as they can. For, as they have no part in the creation of the whole, so they have no share in the intricate ways of business that make possible the factory's life. They are only tools like the machines they operate, to be used by the few, the creators, who, like the gods themselves, conceive and command.
At the Imperial shop most of the girls were Jewish. Annie Black and half a dozen other young Americans sat by themselves at a north window and when luncheon time came rehearsed the very lively happenings of the night before over their indigestible food; but the other girls were Russian Jews and spoke in Yiddish. Hertha was glad to have been seated with the latter group, for from the first she liked them better than her compatriots. Her shyness, coupled with her dislike of the vulgar, kept her from making any acquaintances among the American girls, but she sometimes regretted that the barrier of language separated her from the Jewish. Some of them were, to be sure, foolish and vain, but the majority were serious, and a few appealed to her sense both of decorum and beauty. These girls had broad foreheads and wore their dark hair parted and drawn down over the upper part of their ears. Their deep brown eyes had long curling lashes. They carried serious looking books to and from their work. She often wondered what they were talking about when they got together at luncheon, and she always smiled when she passed them to go out at noon.
One night, early in January, she got into conversation with one of them as they left the factory. It was Sophie Switsky, a small, thin young woman of eighteen whose dark hair and eyes made almost too striking a contrast to her white face. "I go with you?" she had asked, looking up at Hertha as they went out into the rain, "I go under your umbrella?" Hertha had said "yes" eagerly, ashamed not to have offered shelter herself. Then, looking down at her companion's feet that were rapidly becoming soaked, she asked, smiling, "You didn't think it would rain when you left home this morning?"
"No," Sophie answered, without the smile that is as much a part of the American greeting as a handshake. "I did not to forget. All the money I have I save for my brother in Lithuania to bring him here to me."
"Yes?"
"Then I must keep money for the summer when we shall have no work."
"No work?" Hertha questioned.
"Did you not know? This trade is very bad, very bad. In the winter we work like the slaves and in the summer no work. And before the work will stop we sit in the room and wait and wait to see if we will be needed for the day. Sometimes we sit for one week, two weeks, and only work a day; we cannot tell."
"Why don't we work all the year through, but have shorter hours, and not speed?" Hertha asked.
"The trade is like that," Sophie Switsky answered wisely. "People want everything the same time, made the same way. Then the fashions change, and people throw away all that they have and buy again."
"How silly," Hertha thought to herself. The ways of trade seemed to her lacking not so much in humanity as in ordinary common sense.
Their way lay along the same streets until they came almost to Hertha's door when they said good-night, Sophie refusing to allow her new acquaintance to go further. "It is nothing to get wet," she averred, "I used to it;" and she hurried on, mingling so swiftly with the crowd that thronged the Bowery that Hertha soon lost sight of her small figure. She felt attracted to this young Jewish girl, and yet she half feared that she, too, like Kathleen, had a vision, and she questioned whether she desired another friend who wished to change the world.
And yet, when she had finished a supper alone and had dropped wearily into a chair by the lamp, she found she was almost ready for a world-change herself. She was too tired to care to read, too tired for coherent thought. In her head buzzed and hummed and roared the machines of the shop and every now and then her whole body twitched convulsively. Outside the rain beat steadily upon the pavement. It was a night like this, she remembered, that she had been carried, a little new-born baby, and placed on mammy's big bed. Who did such a thing? Not her young mother who had died so soon after her birth. Not her grandfather who in the end had given her his name. Was it her mother's mother who had tried to hide the family shame? She shrewdly suspected so. Well, she had not succeeded, for here was Hertha Ogilvie, after all. It was not so easy to hide a white child, not so easy to stifle the spirit of remorse.
As she sat in her chair, her eyes half closed, she found her thoughts, as so often happened, drifting back to her home among the pines, to the cabin with the white sand at the doorway and the red roses clambering over the porch. Instead of coming home to this empty flat, Ellen and her mother and Tom were on hand to welcome her. They helped take off her things, they dried her shoes, they gave her hot coffee to drink. Was it foolish to have gone away to enter the life of this ruthless city that held you in a mad whirl of work for half the year and for the other half left you to starve; this city in which there was no time for a pleasant homecoming and an evening meal together; this city in which you met a friendly face and lost it again in the great crowds that swarmed in millions over the miles of narrow streets? Her head drooped as though nodding yes to her questions, and her eyes wholly closed.
But just then the doorbell rang.
CHAPTER XX
It was the bell of the outer door, and Hertha went to the kitchen to push the button that released the latch. Who could be coming to see Kathleen, she thought, on such a wretched night? Of course, some one who needed her services as nurse; and, going into the hall, she opened the outer door of the flat the better to guide the stranger upstairs.
"May I come in?"
It was a very wet figure that stood before her clasping a hat in one hand and in the other a large cotton umbrella that dripped puddles of water upon the floor. The question was asked in a jovial tone, and yet the man's attitude betrayed something like timidity.
"Certainly," Hertha answered. "Give me your umbrella; it's very wet."
"No, tell me where to put it; you mustn't get any of this rain on you," and Richard Shelby Brown followed Hertha as she led the way into the kitchen.
Together they put the umbrella into the washtub where it could drip harmlessly, and then, divested of his coat and hat, the young man went with his hostess into the front room where she insisted that he sit close to the radiator to get dry.
When she had seated him to her satisfaction and was back in her chair by the table there was silence. Now that Dick Brown's bodily wants were cared for, Hertha began to question herself how he had ever gotten there, and to wonder whether she should not be angry with him for following her uninvited to her home. But she was too homesick, too much in need of companionship, not to feel a little pleasure in seeing him, his long legs tucked under his straight chair, his thin face making a grotesque silhouette against the window shade. He was certainly homely and a pusher, just an ordinary "hill billy," as he had described himself. She decided that since he had come uninvited he must begin the conversation.
Dick Brown, as though appreciating his position, opened his mouth to speak and then sneezed—not once, but a number of times.
"You've taken a cold already," Hertha said sympathetically. "You shouldn't have come out to-night."
"No, I haven't, indeed I haven't. I'm just getting over one."
"How long have you had it?"
"About a month."
"I believe you got it that morning in the park. You shouldn't have given me your overcoat."
"That had nothing to do with it!" Brown spoke with a kindly bluster. "Nothing to do with it. Don't you think that for a minute. You see, after you left, I got playing with the kids and they squeezed snow down my neck and I lambasted them and we had a grand lark. It was mighty fine, but I learned that snow melts and then——"
He sneezed again.
"It was too bad," Hertha exclaimed. "It's so hard to be ill away from home."
"I reckon it is! Your meals set down by the side of your bed, the gruel cold and full of lumps, no one to growl at when your head aches and you can't go to sleep! It's a mighty poor state of things."
"I'm afraid you were pretty sick."
"Just missed pneumonia."
"You ought not to have come out to-night." Hertha spoke with emphasis.
"Oh, I'm all hunky now. I've sat in the library most every night since they let me out. Wouldn't they grin at home if they saw me fooling this way with books! Why, I know more news out of the magazines this month than all of Casper County ever knew since the first moonshiner set up his still! I'm reeking with information. But I bet you're reading one of those three-volume novels they tell about that last a year. I couldn't wait any longer, so I came to headquarters."
"How did you get my address?" Hertha had not meant to ask the question, but it slipped out unawares.
"Don't make me explain, please. It's against all the rules and regulations and the librarian only told because at times I'm a beautiful liar."
His thin face, looking thinner than ever from his sickness, wore a worried expression, and one of his long hands moved nervously against his side. At home he was accounted a confident youth who could grab up a girl and swing away with her a little faster than the next man, but here in New York he was off his ground. Moreover, this very pretty young woman with her aristocratic ways gave him no help, but sat quite silent as though questioning what right he had in her home. Awkwardly he rose and played his last card.
"I've a letter I want you to see," he said, "it's from my mother. I wrote and told her about you and how I hoped we'd get acquainted, only New York's such a big place a girl has to be careful. It ain't much like our country towns in Dixie, is it? Anyway, she wrote in answer, and here's the letter. You can read it, postmark and all. Seems like it was written for you."
He handed the letter to her with an attempt at self-confidence; but she took it with so serious a face that, saying nothing further, he stood, almost humbly, awaiting her decision.
Hertha read the letter through. It was badly written and showed more than one lapse in spelling. Two pages were filled with admonitions to keep sober and serve the Lord; the third contained bits of local news: Cousin Sally Lou's visit, the number of partridges Uncle Barton had brought in for dinner. But on the last was the message that was doubtless meant for Hertha's eyes. "The young lady, from all you say, must be mighty grand, but she needn't be afraid of you. You weren't one to hang round the station every evening, or to steal out nights with the fellows to get whisky. You've been a good son, Dick, and every mother can't say that. Look at Jim Slade's mother, now——" and the letter ended with an account of Jim's latest escapade.
Hertha handed it back with a pleasant smile. "It reads just like the South, doesn't it?" she said cordially. "Down there we know every little happening, while in New York you have to tell a story to learn where I live."
The young man laughed noisily; his relief was great.
"You're right, all right," he said, sitting nearer her. "It's like one big family down there, and if a visitor drops in there ain't a person in town from the Baptist preacher to the poorest nigger who won't have the news. Are you a Baptist, Miss Hertha?"
"No, I'm an Episcopalian."
"Whew! We only know 'em by name our way. It's Baptist or Methodist with us, with once in a while a Christian place of worship. Ever seen a revival now?"
"Yes."
"Have you? I wouldn't have supposed that an Episcopalian would so much as go to one. But it's a wonderful sight, don't you think, when the sinners come to the penitent seat? I've seen 'em, big men, crying like babies. And then the preacher with his great voice calling 'em to repent and showing 'em the way to righteousness. And out from somewhere a woman'll start a song, perhaps 'Rock of Ages,' and the whole room'll be full of the sound of the hymn."
He grew eloquent as he spoke, picturing the scene he knew so well. In his narrow life the church and its emotional appeal had occupied an important place. He wanted to tell her that he had been among that group kneeling in repentance, that he was a sinner saved by grace; but there was an aloofness about her that kept him from going further. He could not guess that she had wholly forgotten him, and was sitting in a bare room where the dim lamp lighted a multitude of black faces; where the cries of "Amen" rang from the penitent seat, and where the black preacher, the only father she had ever known, called upon the Lord to give to His children mercy and forgiveness. Her visitor had never listened to such a revival as she!
There was a long silence. Then Richard Brown strove again to make conversation.
"The niggers, now, they're a worthless lot, don't you think?"
Hertha started nervously. "I don't think so," she said.
"Don't you? I suppose you've had 'em in your family for a long time—old mammies and uncles. They don't grow that kind round our way, only a lot of worthless coons that won't do a lick of work unless they're driven to it."
"There's the funniest nigger minstrel show at the Hippodrome," he went on, "you ought to see it. Greatest thing out. There ain't anything much funnier, anyway, than to see a black buck dressed in a high hat and a pair of fancy shoes, opening his frog mouth and singing a coon song. Mighty funny songs they've got there, too. Wish you could hear one of them."
He wanted to ask her to go to the show with him the next week, but she looked further removed from him than ever. Had he said anything to warrant it he would have thought that she was angry; but that could hardly be the case. She just wasn't his kind and he had better accept the fact and go home. But as he sat crossing and recrossing his knees, wishing inexpressibly for the relief of a smoke, her face in the lamplight was so lovely that he shut his teeth and resolved to hang on.
Then a sneeze came to his relief, a big-throated sneeze, followed by a second and a third.
"Oh," Hertha cried, rousing herself, "aren't you warm enough? Perhaps it's warmer in the kitchen."
"Don't bother."
"It isn't any bother. I often sit there."
He followed her into the bright little kitchen, hoping that in a new environment he might be able to break through her reticence; but Hertha herself helped him.
"I'm going to make you a cup of cocoa," she said. "You're cold and you need something to warm you up."
Beyond allowing him to light the gas stove, she refused all assistance, and as he stood watching her go through her deft movements, measuring, stirring, and at last pouring a foaming liquid into their two cups—for to his delight she was to share the meal—he was more attracted and yet more puzzled than ever.
"You cook mighty well," he said as she poured the hot cocoa.
"I'm used to doing little things about the house," she answered. "Before I came here I was a companion in a family."
The statement was made on the spur of the moment, but as Hertha thought it over she was delighted that she had been able to say something that opened up a way to live in the past without embarrassment, almost without falsehood. To conjure up the world of white people in her grandfather's home had been beyond her power; even in her thoughts she had stumbled in her endeavor to climb the ladder that led to their eminence. But as a companion in the Merryvale household she was in familiar surroundings.
Richard Brown on his part was a little disappointed. He had been dreaming of a princess in disguise and he found only a poor relation. In the large families of the South there were sometimes girls like this, though when they were so pretty they usually soon married, girls who had to do the odd tasks, give up the good times, go to live with some distant cousin or aunt as the case might be. That sort of thing made a girl shy and quiet. For the first time that evening he felt at ease.
"I bet there ain't anybody in New York can make cocoa to beat yours,", he declared emphatically. "I never liked the stuff before."
"I should have made you coffee," Hertha said regretfully. "I forgot, because coffee keeps me awake."
"Does me, too." He was ready to agree with anything. "Now, down home, tramping through the woods, I could drink a dozen cups a day. But it's different in the city."
"Were your woods pines?" she asked, "and were there streams with cypresses by the banks?"
Here at last they had found a meeting place, a common ground. If she would not play or laugh with him, they could wander through the woods together, tasting the tang of the evergreen or watching the buds burst on the wild plum. Drawing his chair a little forward, he hugged his knee and sang the song of the country of his birth.
Outside the rain splashed upon the street, making great puddles at the crossings, the wind blew fiercely down the narrow roadways and shook the windows in their frames; but within the little tenement the southern boy moved without a cloud to shadow him through the playtime of his years. Sometimes it was winter and he was among the hills trapping birds and shooting rabbits. Again it was early spring and with rod in hand he trailed the brown stream until the trout rose and brought him all attention to the game they played that through his skill ended in death and victory. Or it was summer and too hot to walk, but glorious to gallop in the early morning over the rough road and down the hollow to where the brook broadened into a swimming-pool that called him to bathe in its reviving water. Again he moved among the woods in autumn, hunting, but not too intent upon his game to fail to find the nuts scattered upon his path or to stop and, putting his hand in a hole of a decaying tree, bring out a blinking, monkey-faced owl.
"Why, it's half past ten," he cried, looking at the clock on the shelf above the stove. "I must go, for we both have to work to-morrow."
He ventured this at a hazard, but she did not contradict him.
"Your coat is quite dry," she answered, feeling it as she came to take it from the hook where it hung.
They stood in the narrow hallway and as he swung the coat upon his high shoulders he was a little awkward and brushed against her arm. She laughed away his apology, but he felt this slight contact as something tender, exquisite. As he opened the door he could only mutter an embarrassed good-evening.
"Thank you for coming out in the rain," she said, "and you mustn't take cold or I shall think you ought not to have risked it."
"I'm tough." He moved out onto the stair. Wasn't she going to ask him to come again? "By the way," he called out, "I've read Sherlock Holmes. It's great!"
"I'm glad you liked it," she replied, "and I'll try to find another good story for you next Saturday evening."
He went away rapturously happy in having won the chance to know so beautiful a southern girl. Whether she lived as a worker in a tenement or as a companion in an old family mansion, she was the most refined person he had ever met and he planned great days when they should be together. The rain fell unheeded. Despite the bright light from the electric lamp, he walked into a deep puddle, drenching his feet and ankles and splashing his best clothes with dirty water. Oblivious of such trivial happenings, dreaming of the future, counting the evenings to Saturday night, he reached his home, where, lying down to sleep, the lady of his heart followed him in his dreams.
Hertha, as she washed the cups and tidied up the kitchen, was happy, too, for a time, recollecting with pleasurable excitement the look of admiration in her visitor's eyes. But shortly her cheeks grew hot with anger at him and at herself. He had insulted the colored people, "her people," as she had so recently called them, and she had said no word of protest. If she could not talk, she argued to herself, she could refuse to see this young man again. It was men like this who stole the Negro's crops, who kept their children in ignorance, who even broke down jail doors and lynched black prisoners. Why had she ever allowed herself to be kind to such a man? Then as she looked about her, as she seemed to see Dick in the chair by the table, she smiled a little. Probably it was foolish to get so excited on the matter. Mammy's last instructions were not to try to stand in two worlds, and if the white world showed more indifference, more antagonism to the black than even she had expected, she was in it and it was as well to know it as it was. In her loneliness she taught herself to believe that she had a right to become acquainted with this southern youth, but she resolved firmly not to let him have the conversation all to himself if he should again broach the Negro question. However bashful she might be, it should be possible for her to utter some forceful word.
CHAPTER XXI
With the coming of February, speeding did not stop at the "Imperial," while overtime crept in. Owing to rush orders the girls found themselves working half an hour or even an hour over the usual time to close. The 5:51 train became a thing of the past with Annie Black and she bemoaned it bitterly; but Hertha noticed that while there was complaint among the American girls and much grumbling over unfairness and meanness, it seemed to end there, while with the Jewish girls some plan was afoot. Seated, together at the luncheon hour, their eyes shining, a slight touch of color in their cheeks, a number of the more serious, with Sophie Switsky at their head, talked of something beside their feeling of fatigue, the forlornness of a cold dinner, or the loss of an evening with a gentleman friend. One day, coming in earlier than usual from luncheon, Hertha found herself drawn into the circle while Sophie explained the meaning of the conference.
The shop must be unionized. Only by this means was there any hope for justice. Without the union to back them, the employers could treat them as they pleased, could confer or withdraw favors at their pleasure. But with the union behind their demands this overtime work would cease and they would secure a better wage. Did Hertha not think the conditions abominable?
Hertha felt embarrassed. To these girls the trade which they worked was their one means of livelihood; they were intense in their attitude toward it, while to her it was only a step to something more, she did not yet know what. She regretted the long hours, but they would not last for many weeks, and as long as she could endure them and make good pay she had not thought of change. Richard Brown, whom she was seeing a good deal of now, urged her to drop the whole thing; but since he knew nothing of her affairs she took his advice lightly. Her little legacy kept her for the time in safety, but Sophie Switsky in her old dress with her wet shoes, sending money to her brother and striving to save for the summer, was not safe. Any day she might face starvation.
"I don't know about these things," Hertha stammered in answer to the question put to her.
"What's doing?" Annie Black asked good naturedly, coming over to them; but before she could receive a reply the signal came to turn to work again.
"I see there's a strike in the 'Parisian,'" Kathleen said the next morning as she scanned the paper. "Perhaps you'll be going out before long; you aren't organized."
"Kathleen," Hertha questioned, "do you believe in the union?"
"Do I believe in the union? Do I believe in God? There, don't be shocked, but there's something tangible about what the union done for me; while, when my sister Maggie broke her arm, just as Johnnie came down with the measles and her husband lost his job, I had to live by faith—and that's a poor thing to fill an empty stomach."
"Please talk sensibly," Hertha said.
"Am I not? I'm only saying that the ways of the Almighty are mysterious while the ways of the union, if you believe in the man who keeps the cash box, are clear and plain. The union is the only thing that stands between the working girl and starvation and sickness and sin. Don't forget that."
There was no laughter now in Kathleen's voice and her eyes glowed with emotion as she looked across the table at her questioner.
"We aren't unionized, Kathleen, but the 'Imperial' is one of the best shops in the city; all the girls say so."
"Then you're living on the work others have done and not doing your part. In sweat and suffering some union made the standard for your shop."
At work much the same talk was in the air. When luncheon came Annie received the answer to her question and learned of what was on foot. For some weeks Sophie and her colleagues had been working upon the other Jewish girls striving to win them to unionism. Now they were ready to turn to the Americans.
"We must join the union," Sophie called out in her clear if broken English. "See how we work long hours, and when the rush is over, no work. And if we say anything we lose our job."
"Shut up, then," said Annie crossly.
She looked about nervously, but as the foreman was absent, proceeded to enter the debate.
"It ain't so bad here," she announced. "There's lots worse shops in New York, Sophie, if you don't know it."
"That's right, Annie," one of her companions chimed in, "I got a lady friend works in a bum shop. You can smell the place before you come up the stairs."
"Sure," echoed another, "this ain't a bad shop; the boss is good to us."
"Good?" Sophie cried indignantly, "I do not call it good. We work and the boss pays us as small as he can."
"Listen!" Annie put down the pickle she was eating and proceeded to instruct the foreigner. "You don't know as much about America as I do, Sophie; you come from Russia where people are slaves. Yes, I read about it in the Sunday paper. But here in the United States every one is free. We don't need unions. If I don't like this shop I can up and go to another. There's nothing to stop me, and if you don't like it you can go, too."
"And if the boss don't like it he can fire us all!"
"Ain't he the right? He pays us. But sure he won't fire us if we stand by him. My father's worked for thirty years with the same house. You bet he don't get fired, and he don't belong to no union either."
Annie was very much in earnest. In her heart she felt intense disdain for these foreigners who came to her country and tried to lead her and other girls into a betrayal of their employer's trust.
Sophie had no idea of being worsted, but her position was difficult. She must try to convert the ignorant mind that felt itself superior to her, and she must do it with an imperfect knowledge of the tongue in which she spoke.
She made a brave attempt. In a torrent of broken English she explained the class struggle and the necessity for organization. She put before the girls the helplessness of the individual worker and her inability to bargain. The whim of a foreman or forelady, a day's sickness, a slackening in the trade, and she might be thrown out on the street. She made them all remember the uncertainty of obtaining work, the days of going from shop to shop, the long hours waiting on the chance of being taken on, only at last to return home disconsolate! She pictured the boss living in luxury while the girls who created his wealth were without proper clothes or food; and yet when they demanded a further share in his prosperity, that but for them could never have existed, he sneered as though they came for charity. Then came her picture of organization: the individual impotent, the mass of individuals, each helping one another, a mighty power that could grapple with the employer and force from him a generous wage. She told them of their trade as it had been in the past, of the battles that the workers had fought to secure for them their present measure of freedom. She decried Annie's free America. If America were free it was because there had been brave men who had overthrown England's tyranny and other brave men who had fought to free the slaves. And with her queer little accent she quoted, "Who would be free, himself must strike the blow."
Unquestionably she overawed her audience. Annie and her companions found her knowledge embarrassing and a little humiliating. They had all been to grammar school, Annie herself had recited a poem once before her class, but she had never looked upon knowledge with much zest and she found it difficult to follow Sophie's arguments. But when one of her companions asked, rather sheepishly, what it meant to join the union she was on safe ground.
"It means twenty cents a week of good pay out of your envelope," she declared with emphasis, "that's what it means, and you can bet your life you'll never get a penny of it back!"
For the next few days the girls marshaled their forces at noon and debated the union shop; at least, the Jewish girls debated while Annie and her friends gave that answer, so exasperating to the serious thinker, the retort irrelevant. Nothing so hurt the earnest supporters of organized industry as the way the Americans made a joke of it. "Of course Sophie wants us to join," Annie remarked once, not ill-humoredly, "it's up to her to bring in members. Didn't I see her going away last night with the organizer, an all-rightniker, sure enough?"
Sophie was enraged at the personal motive ascribed to her, but still more at having a devoted and unselfish union man called by a name used to describe self-seeking climbers. "He's not like that," she said indignantly, "he would to help us. I only talk with him to learn what to do."
"Well, find me a good looking man who can speak English," Annie went on, "and who'll take me to the theayter, and I'll go out on your strike," and she turned to receive reassuring smiles at her repartee and to start on a new piece of chewing gum, for there was little time when Annie was not in some fashion exercising her jaws.
Watching the two girls, one wondered whether in another generation Sophie would resemble Annie; there seemed little reason to believe that Annie would ever resemble Sophie. Annie was a loosely put together girl, with nondescript features and an air of good-humored carelessness. An unkind critic would have described her as common. She meant to have a good time when she was young and perhaps to marry later when the good time was over; that is, if marriage would assure her an easier life than the one she now led—otherwise she would have nothing of it. She had seen her mother burdened with many children and she did not mean to follow her mother's example. Long hours were disagreeable, but it would be more serious if the moving picture show across the way from where she lived were to close its doors; that indeed would have aroused her righteous wrath. Under her father's tutelage she had grown to believe that an organization of girls was unfeminine, and she enjoyed ridiculing Sophie's serious arguments and her picture of the coming day when the worker should own the product of his toil. If the Jewish girl, however, had made a personal appeal, if she had begged her to join the union not for a principle but as a favor to herself, Annie would have walked to headquarters and have put down her twenty cents; for she was a spendthrift by nature and cared less for twenty cents than Sophie did for one.
When the crash came it was a dramatic one. The "Parisian" girls had been out for two weeks, the strikers demanding better pay, while the employers tried to carry on their business with unskilled hands. Sophie reported the situation each day at noon, and urged upon the "Imperial" girls to stand by their striking sisters. Save with her own small group, this argument missed fire. Nevertheless, the most of them were interested in the struggle at the "Parisian" shop and watched hopefully for the triumph of the strikers. On a Thursday morning in February, as the girls began their work, the keener ones noted that there was a difference in the stock. To Hertha it meant nothing, but to Sophie it was portentous; and at noon, contrary to her custom, she rushed out into the street. A few minutes before the noon hour was over she was back again.
"Girls," she cried, hurrying into the room, "see, they give us scabs' work!"
Standing by her machine, she waved her unfinished shirtwaist as though it were an enemy banner. "It's 'Parisian,'" she cried, "there were not enough scabs to do it in their own shop and so they sent it here! We are breaking their strike, their strike for better pay!"
She spoke in Yiddish and the Jewish girls followed her excitedly, expressing indignation at her news.
"We will strike, Sophie," her friend, Rachel, said. "We cannot do work like this; it would be wicked."
Sophie again waved her enemy banner. "Will you be scabs?" she called out, this time in English. "Do you not see? This is not our waist; it is the 'Parisian.' I see the girls; they are downstairs, and they ask us to stop, to stand by them as sisters."
"What's all this noise?" cried the foreman sternly as he entered the room. And then without waiting for a response, though it was a few minutes too soon, he threw on the power.
Sophie, Rachel, and a dozen other Jewish girls stood excitedly in the aisle, failing to go to their seats.
"Get to work!" the foreman called above the din. Then thinking it advisable to consult with a higher authority, he left the room.
In a moment Sophie had thrown off the power.
"Sisters," she cried, "down below are the 'Parisian' girls, waiting for us. Will you be scabs? Will you take their work?"
"We'll pull down the shop," came from her adherents.
"No, you don't," came from Annie Black. "Those 'Parisian' sheenies can stay out if they want for all me. I stop here."
"Oh!" Sophie cried. "Shame!"
She was a little figure, thin, underfed, but with the soul of the fanatic gleaming from her deep eyes. Having known oppression in the land of her birth, she recognized it in the land of her adoption. Poverty was not something to accept as the beggar accepted his dole, nor was it something to struggle against alone. It was a grievous disease that the body politic might cure if only those who suffered courageously battled for health. Before her was the vision of a world set free, and for the moment at least there was to her no sacrifice in accepting hunger and cold if such privation might bring a step nearer the freedom that she worshiped. Only a few of the girls understood her call, but none doubted her sincerity.
"See!" she said, drawing an imaginary line with her foot upon the floor. "All who will not be scabs, all who will not take bread from the mouths of others, come to me, cross the line!"
A number of the Jewish girls rose and walked to Sophie's side. Some went with heads erect, eyes shining, exultant, as though drawing the fine breath of freedom. Others moved slowly, hesitatingly, sometimes casting angry looks at Sophie as though they wished to disobey her call and yet dared not stand out against her. "You go?" asked the girl at Hertha's right.
The call had been so sudden that Hertha, accustomed to taking her time before making any decision, had not moved. The voice at her side aroused her to do her part. Sophie was looking entreatingly in her direction; and with the realization that her choice one way or the other was of little personal moment, she rose from her chair and, saying quietly to her seatmate, "I think we ought to go," crossed the line.
Her stand, little as she appreciated it, had its influence. She had represented the aristocracy of the workroom. Had she been arrogant she would have been hated, but her uniform gentleness coupled with her refined face and graceful carriage, had made her a romantic character about whom one might weave tales of former greatness or unrequited love. That she should join the labor movement, linking herself with the despised foreigner, made a dozen of the doubtful follow in her lead.
"You come, too?" called Sophie to the few remaining Jews and the group of Americans.
"No!" cried Annie, "we ain't no dirty sheenies. We stand by the boss!"
"Scabs! Scabs!" Sophie hissed the word between her teeth. "Dirty scabs!" and with a swift movement she flung the power on again. "Keep on, you dirty scabs," she yelled, and, gathering her followers about her, rushed from the room.
Below stood the "Parisian" girls, and as the strikers appeared, hastily wrapped in their outer clothing, some with hats awry, others with coats flung over their arms, they gave cheer after cheer.
"We knew you'd pull down the shop, Sophie," a big, handsome Jewess cried, grasping the fragile strike-breaker by the arm. "We knew you'd never let the boss keep you working at our leavings."
"Girls," called out another of the leaders, "this is the fourth shop to go out this week. We'll win. Hurrah for the 'Imperial!' We'll win."
"Move on!" a policeman said sharply, pushing his way into the crowd. "What are you doing blocking the street this way? You girls should be at work!"
"We're on a strike," Sophie replied, "we go to Union Hall."
The officer watched them as they moved from the factory building, muttering to himself that they were sure to make trouble striking at the height of the season.
Hertha, though she tried to slip away, found herself caught up by the crowd. She was embarrassed and conscious that they were all the source of amused comment on the part of the spectators. Talking excitedly in Yiddish, the "Imperials" swung into line with their "Parisian" sisters and all started a triumphant progress down the avenue.
"Sure, you was fine," Sophie said to Hertha.
The little Jewish girl had grabbed her new recruit by the arm and with glowing face was leading her along the road to organization and industrial battle. There would be days and months ahead dedicated to the struggle to secure a better wage. The time was momentous, the opening of a great conflict. But to Hertha the time was auspicious for slipping away from these noisy working girls. She had given up her job at their call but she had no thought of following them in their struggle to get their jobs back again. Yet here she was on the avenue in a crowd that was attracting attention from the many passers-by. Supposing Richard Brown should see her or one of the nice people who bowed to her at church! She tried to make her escape, but it was as impossible to get from Sophie's grasp as from the clutch of a small and very friendly bear who had tucked your arm in his. So down the avenue and across into a side street she was swept with the eager, excited band of strike-breakers to Union Hall.
It was a small hall and crowded before they entered it. Confusion was piled upon confusion. Hertha, dropped for a moment by Sophie, who turned to speak to her organizer about whom the girls had joked, started at once to leave the building, but, half lifted off her feet, was forcibly pushed into a seat between two workers. Here she was compelled to remain while a man with a long, dirty beard addressed the meeting in an unknown tongue. So many people were moving about and talking in the rear of the hall that, it seemed to her, even if she had understood Yiddish, she would not have known what was being said. But occasionally the woman at her left would interpret. "He tell you to get a card. Give name. See?"
There was nothing to attract her in the crowd, now that she saw it assembled in this ill-smelling place. She thought the men rude and she wished heartily to get away. But she was wedged in her seat and must remain until time brought release. For a few minutes, however, when Sophie Switsky was on the platform, Hertha listened with attention. Not that she understood the words—Sophie used Yiddish—but emotion may transcend and illumine any speech. Here stood a working girl, young, almost childlike in appearance, whose face and tragic tones told of a willingness to die if need be for a cause. Watching her, for the first time since she had joined the crowd of strikers, Hertha forgot herself. For a little she felt her heart beat in sympathy. But with a sudden shock self-consciousness returned. Sophie had beckoned her, asking her to come to the platform. "Tell what you did!" she called out, smiling. "Some understand the English." The southern girl shook her head and when the woman at her side tried to help her to the aisle, gripped her seat with both hands. The horror of being made conspicuous swept over her again, and she sat with burning cheeks until Sophie mercifully went back to her Yiddish and left her alone.
The speeches were at length over and by dodging and doubling, running from one "Imperial" girl only to have to run from another, Hertha escaped from Union Hall leaving no trace behind. Home at last, she looked with dismay at herself in the glass. The red quill was gone from her hat, her curly hair was tumbling about her face, her coat was a mass of wrinkles and she had caught her sleeve upon a nail and made a bad rent. In a minute, however, she laughed. Freedom had come to her. She would no longer spend her days in a noisy room bending over a machine. She could mend the rent and press the coat and there were other quills to be had in the shops. Life was before her again to do with as she pleased. She recalled Sophie's dramatic cry. "Those who will not be scabs, cross the line!"
"That's the second time I've done it," she said to herself.
CHAPTER XXII
Hertha and Kathleen were estranged. From enthusiastic, joyful praise at her courage and pluck in leaving the shop, Kathleen had changed to tiresome nagging because her friend would not picket. Seated opposite her at table in the evening by the lamp in the front room, the Irishwoman, once a successful, aggressive labor leader, would explain, sometimes impetuously, sometimes with slow emphasis as if to a child, the ethics of the strike. To go out, she declared, was but the beginning; the end was the winning of better conditions in the trade. What good was it that all these young strikers, many of them supporting mother or sister or brother, should lose their jobs, unless they might obtain them again under better conditions than before? Was it likely that the manufacturer of "Imperial" waists would go about asking his girls to return to him? Could not Hertha see that these workers were engaged in a desperate battle for better working-class conditions that, with good generalship, might result in victory; but that without sacrifice and heroism, and forgetfulness of self, would end in disastrous defeat? Then she pictured the defeat; the homes without food, the drawn, girlish faces, the bitter disappointment as the shop took on more and more scabs and continued to manufacture its goods. If the talk were in the morning at the late breakfast in which Hertha was reveling, it was, "There they are, dearie, out in the street in front of the building you left, waiting for you to come and help them in their weary work." Or if the hour were evening, "And to-morrow, mavourneen, I'll be getting a fine breakfast for you with a cup of coffee and the bacon with the egg the way you like it, and you'll go to your sisters who are doing their duty as pickets, trying to keep the scabs from taking their jobs."
But Hertha would not picket. She said little in response to Kathleen's explanations, her pleading or her upbraidings. It had never been her way to talk. Probably what Kathleen said was true but she was not going to picket. She loathed it from every point of view held up to her. She could not go to a girl whom she had never seen before and ask her not to take her job. It would be impertinent and rude and lastly ridiculous, for she was very glad that she had left the "Imperial" shop. Nor could she walk hour after hour up and down the street always keeping in motion lest the policeman call out at her that she was blocking the way. She shrank at the thought of the hundreds of eyes that she believed would be cast upon her. No, she would not picket.
Moreover she was beginning to think for herself. As Sophie Switsky had explained the ways of trade the whole thing was silly. She could not accept the ethics, or lack of ethics, in the relation of the worker to his task. That against which she rebelled the girls accepted as inevitable. She was glad to be out of the "Imperial," not primarily because of its hours or its wage but because she hated to be worked like a machine. The months of tortured speeding had made her detest the sight of a cotton shirtwaist. But the girls were picketing, not for a sane and attractive task but only for more money. When they got more they would work faster than ever with tired backs and straining eyes. She was sick at the thought of it. In her room at home doing her neglected mending, drawing the needle in a leisurely way through the cloth, she wondered whether all the girls in the city worked as they had worked at the 'Imperial' and if so whether any of them lived to become old? Well, the subject was beyond her fathoming. She had touched the labor world and now was well out of it. Had she gone on longer her back would have become tired, her eyes have smarted, her body have weakened under the unnatural strain of production demanded by the changing fashions. Life was before her again, and of one thing she was sure, she had closed the factory door.
Despite all her reasoning, however, there was a faint possibility that Kathleen might have put her on the picket-line, at least for a day, had Hertha as in the beginning of their acquaintance been quite alone, but Richard Brown was calling assiduously and his influence was not one that encouraged martyrdom. Thus on the Saturday morning after nine days of happy idleness when Kathleen was awakening in her an uneasy sense of her obligation to her little sisters (that name always brought up a picture of Ellen battling for her through heat and cold), a note from Dick, inviting her to go to the opera with him that evening, blotted out the little sisters and the cold. She told Kathleen of the invitation only to receive a lecture on the inequalities of this world. Hertha felt aggrieved. Certainly she had waited many years for this, her first opera, and she believed she had a right to it when it came.
It was not far to the great department store where she had wandered for many noon hours, and, with a sense of delightful importance, she entered the shop and purchased a shirtwaist—not of cotton like those she had helped manufacture, but of filmy silk. This, with a pair of white gloves, cost a week's earnings, but life to-day was not measured by wages. At home again, she got her own luncheon, for Kathleen was away for the day, and spent the afternoon in bed, dozing and day-dreaming and dozing again. She felt that she understood why rich people were lazy, but wondered whether an afternoon in bed would bring happiness unless many other afternoons and mornings had been spent in difficult toil.
"Gee," cried Richard Brown as, seated by him in the balcony of the opera house, she took off her hat and coat, "I ought to take a back seat to-night and get one of those swallow-tailed fellows downstairs to come up here by you."
Hertha smiled a negative to his suggestion, wishing nevertheless that his taste in neckties was a little less flamboyant and that he did not talk so loud. She determined however not to notice these things, and they discussed,—she, gently, he, with jovial outbursts,—the building, the audience and the opera that they were about to witness. Dick had bought the libretto, "Il Trovatore," but neither of them knew what was before them. He had seen a musical comedy or two but she was ignorant of every form of operatic music. Reading the plot to her companion she found him chagrined that he had come to a tragedy. "Shucks!" he exclaimed when she had finished, "I thought I was bringing you to something funny." Her assurance that this would be interesting and that she liked a sad story brought back his spirits. He chaffed her about her dress and her new gloves, until she was glad when the overture began and they were silent. And her heart gave a great bound of excitement when the curtain rose and she saw the courtyard of the palace with Ferrando calling to his men.
A first opera or a first play is a memorable event and those are fortunate whose introduction to the stage is neither trivial nor coarse. "Trovatore" might have grown a little threadbare to some in the audience, but to one it was a revelation of splendid scene, of exquisite melody, of the actor's art. That all this panorama of beautiful color and costume, of count and troubadour and lovely lady, should be gathered together under this roof was wonderful; but that it should be set to such harmony, that human beings clad in kingly robes should sing such heavenly music, was a miracle. Hertha's eyes grew big and her whole being responded to the story that was taking place before her on the spacious stage.
"Deserto sulla terra."
Her love was calling to her, across the continent, across the whole world, telling of his longing to see her face, his passionate desire to hold her in his arms again. She heard him in every note of the wonderful song, and when the voice ceased and the audience began to applaud, she woke from her dream of his presence with a start of shame that turned to anger as she heard the frantic clapping and saw the actor drop his part and bow to the audience. To her it had been reality, but to these people it was only beautiful singing. But the applause stopped, the play went on; and Hertha, watching through Leonora's eyes, saw the fate of lovers whose station in life is not the same; saw the count, glowering, hateful; heard Leonora plead for the gipsy's son; and in a passion of excitement, watched the curtain drop upon the two men with swords drawn, upon the woman lying senseless on the ground.
"Some girl," said Dick when the lights came up and the people, ceasing their close attention, settled themselves more comfortably in their seats. "But the guy playing the banjo, I could give him points. If he doesn't want to die of apoplexy he'd better drop whisky and take to riding horseback."
"I say, won't you talk to a fellow?" he asked at the intermission between the third and last acts. "You just sit with your head buried in that book and all you'll say is how it's going to end. It sounds pretty crazy to me, burning the wrong baby! But of course, they must do something to make a story. Don't you want to go out into the hall and walk?"
It was the second time he had asked her, and she could not well refuse him, so, together they joined the throng of richly garbed men and women who promenaded up and down the corridor. She felt poorly clad as she noted the wonderful evening dresses of the women. Here were gowns such as she had seen on the figures in the department store, rainbow colors and with them thin lacy black and soft cream and ivory white. The people indeed seemed very like a show, a line of models moving up and down that they might be viewed each by the other; it was only when Dick, to hide his shyness at the strange scene, talked loudly and familiarly, that their amused glances made her appreciate they were fully alive.
"I'd like a gown like that," she said to Dick in a confidential tone as a pretty girl went by in a soft filmy blue silk.
"Shall I ask her for it?" He turned as though to stop the gown's owner.
"Don't be silly," was Hertha's sufficient answer.
"That's a grand fellow walking with her," Dick announced. "He might be a colonel out of uniform, but the girl isn't in it with you."
"Well, you needn't tell every one your opinion, please."
She blushed as she spoke for they had attracted the attention of the people about them. A middle-aged gentleman, whose seat she knew was behind Dick's, was smiling and she quite erroneously believed was enjoying her discomfiture. "Let's go back," she suggested, touching Dick lightly on the arm; and the youth, happy at even so slight a sign of favor, and anxious to do her least bidding, returned with her to their seats.
"You aren't going back to your old work again, now are you?" he asked.
"No."
"I was thinking, if you want to take up stenography, I know the best school in town. It's across the river, a mighty nice place, where you'll meet a good class of girls. It don't cost such a lot, and you can enter any time you want."
"Yes?"
"And there's something I want to talk with you about. It's really important. Won't you take a walk with me to-morrow?"
"I don't know, I haven't much time. You see, I want to go to church in the morning and I'm going out to dinner at night."
"Who are you going with?"
The question was asked with some imperiousness.
"With a friend."
"A gentleman friend?"
Defiantly. "I don't think that is anything you need to know."
"Oh, of course it's none of my business, you needn't tell me that. But say, won't you go out first with me? I'll be around at two o'clock and bring you back by five or six. That'll be in time for your little dinner, won't it now?"
"Perhaps so."
She buried herself again in her libretto. "Mr. Brown," she said after a minute. "Listen to what the last scene will be. It's a horrid dungeon, for Manrico and his mother are in prison. As she lies there on her bed she thinks of the mountains where she was born, and that she and her son will go back there together and live in peace. When she sings it, just think about the hills in your own home."
He looked at her in some surprise. "I will," he said, "just the way you say, and about my mother, too. It all seems real to you, don't it?"
"Very real!"
"Somehow it hasn't to me. I can't seem to think of people standing up and singing this way if they've anything to tell. It takes so everlastingly long. Just suppose that when I went to business to-morrow I should throw my hand out like this," with a broad, forward gesture that barely missed the head of the lady in front of him, "and sing:
Oh, Mr. Weinstein, it's nine o'clock, sir,
Oh, don't you want me to walk down the block, sir?
And then he'd answer with his arms folded like this:
Oh, Mr. Brown, get on to your job——
And there'd be some swearing in the last line. If you want to get anything over you've got to drop the poetry business. It isn't real like a play. Will you go with me to a play next week?"
"Thank you ever so much, but——"
"Oh, drop the 'but.' I'll get the tickets Monday. We'll go to something jolly."
"I shouldn't enjoy it as much as this. This is the most beautiful, the most wonderful thing, I've ever seen."
Dick flushed with pleasure and settled in his seat as the curtain rose upon the last act.
Even he was moved by the Miserere, and when the dungeon scene was reached he whispered, "Golly, I like that, I've heard it on the hand-organs. I never guessed though that it was about the mountains." He started to hum it but Hertha gently silenced him, and he was quiet and attentive until the curtain went down.
"Your first opera, young man?" said the middle-aged gentleman from behind, whom Hertha had noticed smiling at them.
Dick was helping her with her coat, and he answered as he pulled up her collar, "Right you are! I'm just that much of a jay."
"Come again," the man said cordially as though the place belonged to him.
Hertha started to express her gratitude as they stood outside her door but Dick waved it away. "You're the one who's been good," he said, "and I bet no one ever thought it was your coming-out party. I'll be here to-morrow at two; so long," and he was gone.
The next day found them together again walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.
"Ever done this before?" asked Dick.
"No," answered Hertha, "but isn't it wonderful?"
"You bet! Say, you're a good walker, though. I reckon you've walked a lot."
"Yes, I've often walked of a Sunday afternoon."
"Who with?"
"My brother."
There was a defiant tremor in her voice. Ever since her slip with Kathleen she had made up her mind that her past life should include a brother.
"Oh, if you've got a brother," turning on her abruptly, "why don't he take care of you?"
"He's too young; but anyway I wouldn't let him. I mean to support myself."
"Oh, I say, Miss Hertha, don't feel like that! Don't get like these modern girls up here who won't even let a man pick up a handkerchief for 'em. That isn't the kind of girl a man likes."
"Isn't it?"
"No. A man likes a girl he can help over places, whether they're out walking together just for the day or for life."
"I suppose you think a man never wants to be helped."
"Yes, he does, lots of ways. They're no end of ways a woman helps a man, to keep him straight and all that." He reddened a little. "But he ought to do the hard work, all the dirty jobs, and it's a dirty job going out to earn your living. And if it isn't dirty, it's too hard. Women ought not to have long hours like men. I bet your brother's reckoning on caring for you when he gets old enough."
Hertha was silent.
"Isn't he?"
"I reckon he'd like to."
"You let him then. Only likely you'll be married long before that."
They reached the end of the bridge and were rushed along in an elevated train until they got out at Prospect Park.
The March day was clear and almost warm, and as they walked down a pleasant path by the lake, Hertha was sure that she saw signs of the spring. Buds were swelling, the willow trees showed faint touches of yellow, while on a bare elm tree branch perched a bluebird.
"How lovely it will be here later," she said.
"There, that's exactly what I want to talk with you about," Dick Brown exclaimed. "Isn't this a lot nicer now than off the Bowery?"
The girl glanced at him questioningly.
"It's going to be mighty hot where you are as soon as summer comes. I'm right sure of it. And noise! Think of the noise when you have to sit with your windows open. Now, over in this part of the town it's always quiet, and there are trees and pleasant places to go for a walk. Won't it be bully here when spring comes! There's a robin, see him? And the folks say the flowers in the park are great; some of the bushes will be bright yellow, and then will come honeysuckle and no end of things."
"What are you driving at?"
"Just turn down this path, won't you? There's a little summerhouse at the end where we can sit down and look out over the lake."
They reached the summerhouse and by a bit of good fortune found it empty. The artificial pond was very muddy, and to two young people from the country the set, pretty outlook was a poor substitute for the coming spring by the woods and streams at home. But a substitute may be better than nothing, and as with hungry eyes they viewed the brown water and saw the sun glowing on the trunks of the bare trees, they felt refreshed and nourished. For the first time since Hertha had met him, Richard Brown was ready to sit quite still, looking into the treetops and beyond to the blue sky with its floating clouds.
At length he turned and told her what he had done. It seemed an old friend had turned up for a week in New York, and introduced him to a southern woman who had a house at the park's edge and who took a few boarders. She had not been especially successful with her rooms, and partly to help her, partly because he'd hated his stupid hall bedroom ever since he'd been sick in it, he had moved over here. It was a good way from work, but that didn't matter. There was rapid transit, and it didn't hurt him to stand up a few minutes night and morning. It was a lot better than living in the noisy, ugly city that they had just left. Mrs. Pickens, his landlady, was the nicest person to cheer a fellow up, and care for him if he needed it. It was a pleasant house with good board, the sort of cooking you got at home, plenty of gravy on your meat, beaten biscuit for breakfast, and the best coffee in the city. She had a room left to rent, looking over the park where you could see the trees. She would enjoy to meet Miss Ogilvie, and if Hertha would go there this afternoon, just look in and see what the house was like, she'd be doing a favor to everybody. Of course she needn't decide now, but wasn't it worth considering? And he was sure he had found the best school at which she could study stenography and shorthand, only a few minutes in the cars from here.
So he talked, and Hertha, looking out over the lake to the tall trees, watched the purple grackles flying back and forth and wished that she did not have to decide so many things.
Was Dick Brown growing to be fond of her? She hoped that he was not, for he was the last man in the world for whom she could ever care. But if he really was learning to love her, what a nuisance to live in the same house with him; how demanding he would be, and how she would have to plan to get rid of him! No, it would be far better to stay on in the noisy little tenement with Kathleen.
"And I've one more thing to tell you, Miss Hertha," Dick said as though he believed it would be wise to change the subject. "My boss says that he's going to send me on the road this spring."
"On the road?"
"Yes, to sell goods. It means an advancement. Aren't you glad for me?"
"Why, of course, if you're glad."
"I'm glad of anything that means more money. Up here in New York that's the one thing to have. If you haven't money you'd better get up and go home. Look at those men at the opera last night! Why, they can give their women anything, all the music they want, silk clothes and pretty slippers, and automobiles to ride home in. It's slick here if you've plenty of cash, but it's bum if you haven't. So I feel fine to think there's going to be more cash for me."
They left the summerhouse, and retracing their steps walked out upon a pleasant street where Dick led the way up a stoop, and pulled out a latchkey.
"I didn't say I'd go in," Hertha exclaimed.
"You aren't coming to look for a room if you don't want it," Dick pleaded; "but please come in and see Mrs. Pickens. She's admiring to meet you."
He swung open the door and before Hertha had made any decision she found herself in the hallway, with Mrs. Pickens, who had been watching for them from the window, holding out her hand.
Dick's landlady was a small woman of about fifty, with blonde hair that was fading in color, and a complexion from which the color, if there had ever been any, had fled. Her eyes no longer looked bright, but her smile was cordial and kindly, and her voice almost caressing as she gave her greeting.
"Dick tells me that you came to the city this autumn to make your way. It's a big place, isn't it? Sometimes I feel like I never want to go out in it again. I took this house here so as to be near something green and quiet; but after I got settled, do you know I missed the noise!"
She led Hertha into her parlor, a singularly ugly room, the floor covered with a series of brightly colored, cheap rugs, the walls decorated with colored lithographs that might have been bought by the dozen at some store, so little did they show any individual taste. And not only did every variety of color leap up from the floor and shine down from the walls, but the furniture also was bright, the wood a high varnish in imitation of mahogany, the upholstering in gay green with lines of yellow.
"I like this room," Dick said emphatically as he seated himself; "it's so jolly. Now there's a picture for every season of the year. The Spring's right over your head, Miss Hertha; apple blossoms and a pretty girl sitting under the tree. And there's Winter in the farther corner with the snow on the ground like we found it that Sunday morning. It's fine to have a lot of stories like this hanging on the wall. And Mrs. Pickens is better than any story, the way she looks after us. There aren't many here. Only old Mrs. Wood and her daughter and me, and I hope you."
He had chosen the largest chair, crossed his legs, and looked quite at home. Mrs. Pickens, beaming at him from the other side of the room, evidently made much of her one masculine guest. Hertha could see him as he would come back from work at night, loud-voiced, a little domineering, wanting attention, demanding that every one laugh at his least joke. Decidedly, she would not leave Kathleen.
"Won't you show Miss Hertha your vacant room, Mrs. Pickens?" Dick said as, leaning back in his chair, he stroked the gleaming knob at the end of the arm. "If you'd just look at it, please?" he added, changing his tone to one of entreaty as he addressed Hertha.
"I should be glad to," Mrs. Pickens answered. And Hertha, not wishing to be rude, followed the woman upstairs.
When she turned into the vacant room on the second story at the back, she gave a start of surprise. Nothing could have been more unlike the many-hued parlor that she had left. Here was simple furnishing, a white bed and plain white chairs, a soft gray rug, white curtains, no color save in the pretty flowered paper that covered the pictureless wall. A vacant lot in the rear gave an outlook across the next street to the park, where a long line of trees would soon begin to show their first blossoms.
"I don't wonder you're surprised," Mrs. Pickens said, "after the parlor. Don't imagine that this house is my taste. I rent it from an agent, and am not responsible for anything in it, good or bad. My theory is that the couple who bought the furnishings settled upon a simple method of suiting their diametrically different tastes. One took one half of the house and the other the other, and made a dwelling that's part an installment plan furniture shop and part a hospital. I was sure you would like the hospital, just as I knew our friend Dick wouldn't. Sit down in this chair, won't you, while I run off a minute to see whether I can do anything for Mrs. Wood. Her daughter is away and I promised I'd look in during the afternoon."
Left to herself Hertha did sit down, and looking out of the window upon the pleasant landscape, tried to make some decision. A moment before she had definitely put aside any thought of staying here; but the lovely room, the cordial greeting, the sense of companionship, made her hesitate. After all, it was nice to have a man to go out with once in a while, and it had been very lonely often at Kathleen's. This was a second turning point in her life. Her legacy was almost untouched since she had drawn upon it to come North, but it would be used lavishly if she decided to devote some months to learning a profession. To enter upon a new career was a great venture, and it might be that it would more easily be carried out if she were in new surroundings, under unfamiliar conditions. Looking out into the street and on to the treetops beyond, or glancing around the pretty room, thinking of Kathleen and her kindness, of Dick and his devotion, of the perversity of both of them in not understanding that there are many times when one wants not to talk but to sit silent; feeling suddenly a great homesickness for a Sunday afternoon out with Tom, strolling quietly, dreamily, among the pines; uncertain yet expectant, Hertha sat and meditated, letting her thoughts wander, while Dick crossed and uncrossed his knees in his big chair downstairs.
CHAPTER XXIII
"Well?"
"I said I'd let her know Wednesday."
"Good! You'll say yes, I bet you will. And you'll go to the theater with me Monday."
"No, not Monday."
"Tuesday, then."
"No, I don't want to go this week. Good-by."
"What do you mean?" Dick looked with amazement at Hertha's outstretched hand. "Think I'm going to bring you here and then leave you to go back alone?"
"I don't need you. I know the way from here and I'd rather go alone."
"Say," said Dick much perturbed, "what have I done?"
"You haven't done anything, but I want to go back by myself. All I have to do is to change when I'm over the bridge. I'll let you and Mrs. Pickens know when I decide."
She pushed her fare in at the ticket-window, moved through the turnstile, and without looking around hurried down the platform and boarded the incoming train. Dick, deciding that this was a time to let a girl have her own way, however foolish it might be, turned back to his home and indulged in delicious thoughts of the future with Hertha each morning opposite him at table and each evening going with him somewhere, it mattered not where, so long as they were together.
What to do? What to do? The bumping cars gave no answer to the riddle. To go to this new home or to stay in the old one? How could she decide which was best when there were advantages and disadvantages in both? It was a nuisance to weigh and balance. Perhaps the suggestion she had made in talking with Ellen was worth something. She could not go ahead and plan things, but if she waited things would happen. She had not planned the strike but it had relieved her of overtaxing work; she had not thought of moving but Dick Brown had, and unquestionably he had found an attractive home. Probably he was right, too, regarding the business school. Why not let other people do the planning and fall in with their schemes if they seemed good? If there was anything odious it was having to make changes, but if a change were made for you, you might accept it as the easiest thing to do. And yet she did not want to leave Kathleen.
But Kathleen did not help her case as she and Hertha and William Applebaum sat together at the little dinner that had so disturbed the mind of Richard Brown. It was a usual enough affair, at the French table d'hôte that they all three liked, and Madame and her daughters waited on the table and saw to it that the meat and vegetables were upon hot plates and the salad upon cold ones. But this evening, Hertha, tired from her previous night of excitement, without an opportunity to rest after her outing with Dick, found her Irish friend's propaganda regarding capital and labor wearying and even unkind. Applebaum, appreciating her fatigue, tried to turn the conversation into indifferent channels, but Kathleen would not be moved from her course. She had learned that the girls were in danger of losing their strike, that the "Imperial" was succeeding in securing reliable non-union help, and she longed to send Hertha out to redeem the situation. Perhaps her confidence in her new friend was excessive, certainly she exaggerated her activity at the walkout, but she knew that a shy, attractive girl, without ambition for position, could sometimes wield a greater influence than the best organizer. Only the shy girl would so seldom use her power.
"A strike," she said, putting down her soup-spoon, "a strike is the one power the lords of the universe, meaning the capitalists, leave us. They can take away fresh air and sunlight, they can rob us of our childhood like they done me when I was a little girl in the country up-state, but they can't make us work. If I stop, and the rest of the workers stop with me, it's starvation for the world until we start to work again."
"Did you live in the country when you were a child?" Hertha asked, interested at once.
"That I did," Kathleen answered.
"Didn't you love it? The sky is so big in the country—you get such miserable smoky patches here—and there are great stretches of earth. You feel like running with your arms thrown out and singing; and while you're feeling the air and the sky and the big things you look down at your feet and see the little spring flowers."
"Is it like that?" asked Kathleen. "Do you know I hardly remember it."
"Did you leave when you were so young?"
"Eleven."
"But, Kathleen——"
"The sky and air and flowers were dear where I lived, they were only for the rich. For a little girl like me, who slaved in the factory from sun to sun, they were luxuries that came Sundays and holidays and that she was too weary to enjoy."
"At work in the factory at eleven?"
"I worked when I was eight. I remember how my teacher looked when she met me one Sunday and asked why I didn't come to school. I told her my mother had put me to work in the cotton mill. 'It's a sin,' she said and the tears in her eyes. And then she went on to tell how I was her best pupil, and my mother must leave me with her. But that was all come of it, just words. Words from her and the mill for me."
Hertha was silent; but she pictured a little girl, with clear gray eyes and bright hair, holding her thumb tight on her book while she read from its pages, or playing tag at recess; and again, sober, tired-eyed, walking slowly in the twilight back from the factory to her home. "I didn't know such things happened in the North," she said.
"They don't now, thanks to the unions. To-day's children have a better chance than I had. But that's why the sky and flowers aren't so close to my memory as the walls of the spinning-room and the whirring bobbins."
"Do eat your soup, Kathleen," Applebaum said, looking from his empty plate. "It's quite cold."
"Well, if it's cold I won't bother with it. Yes, Miss Marie, you can take it away. And who's that coming in? Major Hayes, I do believe! Come over here and sit with us, Major. It's a long day since you've been here."
An old man, walking slowly but with a soldierly bearing, came to where Kathleen sat. He greeted her quietly, responded silently to her introduction of Applebaum and Hertha, and, taking the fourth place at the table, applied himself assiduously to his dinner. Hertha welcomed his advent as relieving her of Kathleen's labor talk. He sat at her right, and she noted his thin, aristocratic face, his high forehead and long straight nose, his clear blue eyes and soft white hair. She thought him the handsomest old gentleman she had ever seen—a little like old Mr. Merryvale but with more of wisdom and worldliness. There was little talk for a time, only Applebaum occasionally making pleasant if unilluminating remarks on the day's happenings; but with the coming of dessert and coffee Kathleen took command of the conversation and resumed her charge. The Irishwoman, true to her race, was always ready for a fight and could never see when she was beaten.
"We were talking of factories and unions before you came in," she said turning to the Major. "Miss Ogilvie here went out on strike not long since, the 'Imperial' shop. She led the girls out——"
"I did not," Hertha interrupted.
She was angry that Kathleen should represent her as doing anything so aggressive.
"Well, you helped to, I'm proud to say. But I was telling them how I worked in the mill when I was a kid. I was starting on the story of my first strike, and I leading it, when the sight of you put it out of my head."
"Tell it to us all now, Kitty," the Major said.
It was a pleasant time to hear a story. The room was quiet, for most of the diners had left. Madame sat at the desk in the corner counting her receipts, while a couple of elderly men in the middle of the room played at dominoes. There was an air of homelikeness about the place. Major Hayes and William Applebaum, lighting their cigars, leaned back in their chairs to listen, while Hertha sipped her coffee that she knew she should not drink, and looked with apprehension, but with admiration also, into Kathleen's face. What wonderful gray eyes this Irishwoman had, and how whole-heartedly she flung herself into whatever she had to say! She was like a bright beam of sunlight falling suddenly into a dull room; or, again, like a flash of lightning that carried with it an ominous rumble of thunder. The world would be a wonderful, sublimely happy place when it let the sunlight triumph in lives like Kathleen's.
"I was eleven years old," she began, "when I led out the spinning-room in the factory up in the hills in this glorious old state. We were all a lot of children, some bigger than me, some smaller, and we worked from sun to sun. For wages, we had none, not that we ever knew, and I doubt if our fathers or mothers ever saw a penny from us, for what with the rent and the bills at the company store, it's little money they ever handled. But every morning we went into the huge building that shut out the world from us and turned our red lips white, and every night we came back, the boys too tired to throw stones at a stray hen.
"Well, one day when we started work we found a new foreman. The man before him had been a decent sort of chap, rough after his fashion, pulling our ears maybe to make us work faster, or batting a boy over the head, but with a heart in his body. But this morning he was gone, and in his place a great giant of a creature named Hicks who roared at us in a voice that made our hearts jump. Not but what we was always ruled by terror. It was do as you were bid or death, and no incarnation, but forever and ever annihilation. But Hicks was the very ogre of the story book, and we expected to hear him call out any minute:
"'Fee, fi, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Irishman!"
And make a pounce on one of us. And we weren't mistaken, for soon the pounce came.
"It's hard work in the spinning-room and I wonder now how such children as we ever managed to do it at all. I suppose our strength and power, that ought to have gone out into lessons at school, and learning to keep house at home, and baseball and fishing and swimming, went into watching the spools as they whirled on the spindles or keeping our eyes open to catch the broken threads. How I used to see those spools, hundreds there were that I took care of, twirling around and around before my eyes when I'd lie down to go to sleep! Some of us was quicker than others, but to do the work right we needed to keep together a bit and it was when Jules Claire, a little French Canadian, got ahead of us at doffing time, that trouble began.
"Jules was a born Frenchman. There was a gesture in everything he did, and he couldn't live without showing off. He was the fastest worker in the room, and when we were taking the full spools off and putting the empty ones on, one child one side the frame, the other the other, Jules must go ahead of his mate. We tried to stop him for we didn't want the foreman to think we could all work at that pace, but he was an artist and must do things his own way. So he hurries down his line, his little hands moving like lightning, and when he comes to the end, and we still plodding, he jumps on an empty truck and stamping with his bare feet, gives himself three cheers.
"Then the ogre sees him, and the great hulking sneak jumps on the boy, clouts him over the head, and kicks him with his boot. All he saw was an idle child. The little fellow was too surprised to cry. 'My God,' he whispers coming to me, 'did you see dat?' 'I did,' I answers, 'and you got what was coming to you for going ahead of the rest!' But while I said it I laid my plans, for there was fire in my heart.
"There's one way a child can always leave her place whether at the mill or the school and that's by asking for a drink of water. The good Lord must have made the little ones so dry that they would be sure of moving about once in a while during the long day. After a time, when Hicks had us whiter than the cotton we was working on, I got permission to get a drink. That meant I must go through another room to where the bucket of water was. After I'd drunk my fill I walked back, and there were the two girls in charge of the warper looking out of the window, the machines going merrily all the while. They glanced around at me and then turned to the window again, and just then I slipped my roller-hook into a nice place in the machinery where I thought it would do me some good, and, as innocent looking as a cat that's stole the cream, went back to the spinning-room.
"It isn't but three or four minutes before one of the two girls come to the old ogre to say something's wrong with the machinery. The man gives an oath and leaves us. I knew he'd be some minutes finding the trouble, and I began talking to my mates. There was a big window near where I worked that looked out on an embankment, and one by one I called the boys and girls to me, and explained that we must go on a strike. We oughtn't to work for a man that beat and hollered at us the way Hicks did. 'Twas the time now to show our strength and get out of this dirty hole.
"I don't remember my arguments very well. I think they were somewhat hurried, with one eye on the window and the other on the door where the ogre might come back. But the children got into the spirit of the thing, and it was jump out of the window and the strike was on!
"Jules went first. We made him, but he was game for it anyway. And then the rest of us dropped down the few feet on the grass and away to the hills at the back of the town.
"Ah, that was a great day! I can see it now! The apple trees were in blossom and the grass was thick with violets, while in the woods were frail blue and white flowers. Everything smelled of the sunshine and the fresh earth, and we little white-faced youngsters swung in the trees, and picked the flowers, and played tag, and called and shouted to one another. Some of the boys gathered stones and made a barricade and when any one from the town came to get us, he was so pelted with rocks that he beat a quick retreat. So we played on through the long spring day, while in the spinning-room the spools twirled round and round, and the cotton tangled and knotted and broke, and enough damage was done to take days to set right again. It was a great time! But every day must come to an end, and the sun went down on our day, until at last, tired and rosy and hungry we turned with lagging and timid steps toward home."
CHAPTER XXIV
When Kathleen ceased speaking there was a little murmur of applause throughout the room. Every one had been listening—Madame at her desk, the men at their table, their dominoes dropped from their hands, Marie in the doorway. Kathleen's own guests had been wholly absorbed. To all, from this time, child labor would no longer be an academic question but a vivid reality.
The Major was the first to break the silence. "That was a fine tale," he said, bowing gravely to the story-teller who sat opposite him, her cheeks rosy with excitement, one hand drumming the Marseillaise on the table cloth. "Thank you for letting me hear it."
"I told it for Hertha," Kathleen said pointedly.
"Yes?" The Major looked at the southern girl, not for the first time that evening, and was struck anew by her beauty and her repose. While evidently embarrassed, she said nothing in reply to Kathleen, but sat, a quiet listener, her hands in her lap. The city, he realized, had not yet taught her to think in flashes or to move in jerks.
"What has Miss Ogilvie to learn from this strike?" the old man asked. "Didn't you tell me that she had already led one out?"
"Led it out only to leave it," Kathleen answered vehemently. "The girls are in the street now working to keep their clothes from being snatched off their backs by a lot of dirty scabs."
Seeing that an explanation was demanded of her, Hertha turned to the Major and said with a blush, "I am not willing to picket." Then, with more animation in her manner, she questioned her friend. "You didn't tell us how your strike ended. What happened after the children went home?"
"Well, I'm not saying how their fathers and mothers took it, but they won at the mill all right. The ogre was given another job."
"I'm glad of that," with a pleasant, propitiatory smile; "I was afraid you had only won a holiday."
But Kathleen would not be cajoled. "No, indeed," she answered; "we got our rights by standing out for them."
"Don't be a fool, Kitty," the Major remarked abruptly.
Kathleen looked at him, bewildered and aggrieved. Formerly he had been her champion when in this same room she had been attacked by bourgeois guests armed with conventional arguments. Then he had spoken more bitterly than she and had been placed by her among her revolutionists. For him to turn upon her now was not only unkind but treacherous. What did she know about him after all, she thought? Only the common talk of this place where he was accounted one familiar with strange lands who could speak in any tongue that sounded over Madame's tables.
"You're an old man, Major," she said a little stiffly, "and I was counting you a good comrade. Maybe you'll show me the folly in saying that you get your rights by standing out for them."
"You didn't get your rights," was the blunt answer. "When you led the children out you merely exchanged one foreman for another a little less brutal. You did not win the sunshine and the fresh air for every day."
"But that has come now," Applebaum said.
Leaning back in his chair, smoking a good cigar, the younger man had listened tolerantly to the talk. He spoke now, not to defend Kathleen who, he knew, was a captain in dialectics where he was a cabin boy, but to sound his note of confident optimism.
"The good time has come to more children than formerly," the Major answered, "but those who can really bask in the sunshine are few."
"They are very many." The young man spoke in a cheerful, assertive manner. "And the others will later receive their due. We must wait for the slow processes of evolution."
He looked about the company, his pleasant mouth smiling, his eyes shining good-will; but when his glance encountered the Major his countenance dropped. That former soldier eyed him as he might in the old days have eyed a sentry caught asleep at his post.
"The slow processes of evolution," the Major said, contempt in every drawling word. "Did man wait for the slow processes of evolution that you are so glib about, when he invented the machinery that sucked up and still sucks up the life of the child? If you're not incredibly ignorant you know that man does not leave nature to go her slow way, but makes changes with the rapidity of lightning. Two things, though, never change," lifting up two long fingers, "poverty and greed."
Applebaum put down his cigar, his face flushed with anger; but, looking across at Hertha, his brow cleared. She was smiling at him—a grateful smile—as though to thank him for drawing the fire from her quarter. Kathleen, too, had a relieved expression upon her face. Girding up his loins, he decided to continue the discussion though he might later be forced to retreat. It was scarcely a fair fight when one of the contestants had the handicap of venerable age.
"Surely," he said augmentatively, "times have improved with some rapidity. There are fewer of the poor and oppressed than there were one hundred years ago."
"How do you know?" the Major asked.
While Applebaum drew breath to summon his facts in proof of progress, the Major answered his own question as though his opponent were already disposed of.
"Small thievery is controlled," he said; "held in check better than formerly. Sturdy beggars are not so often seen in the market-place. But these men rarely stole from the poor. Your powerful thief, however, never had so good a chance as to-day. There's no government he cannot buy, and our rapid means of transportation make it possible for him to gather a harvest from more fields than were gleaned by his cleverest and most rapacious predecessors."
"But, granting for the sake of argument that he may not always get his money honestly, doesn't he give a fair share of all he gathers to the poor?" Applebaum asked.
"To the producers, you mean, the men who made his wealth? Not such a noble portion as you might think. I was in India once, during a famine. Children lay dead by the wayside, their thin little arms stiff at their sides. At night when you went by a native hut you heard a baby sobbing as it pulled at an empty breast, or you listened to that saddest cry in the world, a mother wailing for her dead child."
"Bad crops?" Billy questioned.
"Thievery!" the Major answered in a tone that made Madame jump at her distant table, while the three immediate listeners felt as though a bomb had exploded. Then in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, as though narrating a commonplace: "Down at the coast I saw ships laden with grain for England, loaded by those people who you feel give a fair share of what they gather to the poor."
"That's like the English!" Kathleen cried, her Irish blood asserting itself. "They're the oppressors of the world!"
"Nonsense," the Major retorted, "you don't know what you're talking about. When the English conquered India the natives exchanged one master for another, that was all. If the native princes and rajahs stole less than the British, and I don't know that this was the case, it was stupidity not kindliness that kept them from making a complete job."
"I don't believe they were such hypocrites as the English," Kathleen muttered.
She felt much aggrieved. Customarily she held the floor and her listeners either contented themselves with silent dissent or uttered short, ineffectual protests. To-night a friend, a revolutionist like herself, characterized her ideas as foolish and nonsensical, while the audience she was accustomed to routing looked on delighted at her discomfiture. She was mistaken in her interpretation of Applebaum's feeling. He was grieved that any one should show her rudeness; but Hertha, it is to be confessed, was pleased at the turn events were taking. She looked at the Major for another broadside, but to her surprise, he nodded acquiescence to Kathleen's last remark.
"You're right about that," he said, "though hypocrisy isn't English, it belongs to civilization. When you do wrong and know it, but desire to go on in wrong-doing, if you are a savage you continue without apology. If you are civilized you begin the process, the slow, evolutionary process," nodding his head at Applebaum, "of deceiving yourself. It's a process that takes longer with some than with others, but after a while wrong becomes right in your mind and you can do evil from the highest motives. And after you deceive yourself you deceive others, using good people for your tools. The devil always chooses the best people to do his work."
"And isn't it because of this," Kathleen rushed in, believing that she would secure recognition at last, "that we're fighting in the unions and in the Party [there was but one political party to Kathleen] to down the oppressor and to take possession of the earth?"
"Whom are you going to do it with?" the Major asked dryly. "Why do you think one set of men will be better than another? It's all right for you to try, but you will never succeed. Just when your impetus is at its best, rapacious leaders will appear and steal all that you have given your lives to gain."
"There is no animal so easily deceived as man," he went on. "Stupidity," and he looked hard at Applebaum, "is the most noticeable of human traits. You can trap a man with a piece of tainted meat that a wolf would despise. Give him a symbol, it matters not what—a delphic oracle, a church, an empire—and he will rally to the call of greed and fight its battles manfully. With the cry of victory on their lips I could, and have led native troops to destroy their own homes."
"Oh, Major dear!" Kathleen cried incredulously.
"Of course they didn't know what they were doing," the old man said. A smile lit up his face and in a moment he looked so handsome and venerable that two of his listeners, at least, forgot his rudeness. "Most men do not see the end of the road. My father was a soldier and sincerely religious. He thought when fighting in the service that he was bringing Christ to the heathen; but when he got home and read of his achievements he found that he had only forced China to trade in opium."
William Applebaum could no longer keep silent. "Why will you show only the rotten side of things?" he asked, real passion in his voice. "All wars are not actuated by greed and all men are not dupes. My grandfather fought here in this country. He was a colonel and he battled to free the slave."
"Yes?" said the Major. He turned and looked at Hertha. "You're from the South?"
She nodded in affirmation.
"I heard it in your speech. Now how many colonels might there have been in your family?"
"More than I can count," Hertha made answer, smiling. But the smile was not for him but for her own cleverness.
"You hear?" the Major turned to Applebaum. "And those young colonels fought with the same ardor, the same unselfish courage as your ancestor, though he battled for freedom and they gave their lives that men might go on buying black people as they bought horses and sheep."
Applebaum looked indignant but made no further attempt at an answer.
"It's a strange world!" The old man spoke now more to himself than to the others. "I have known men of every color and caste, I have eaten the coolie's rice and slept in the black man's hut, I have been a commander and ruled my kingdom, but everywhere life looms the same. Nature makes a few leaders and of these the crafty and unscrupulous become the lords of all. First they win to their side those of ability, giving them high places. Next they turn to the stupid, and in the name of God show them how to do the devil's bidding. And last they find a few whom they cannot down or deceive, men who see goodness so clearly that nothing can blind them to its light, and these they imprison or kill. It's a simple method and has been practised since the caveman drew his gods upon his cavern walls. Man has a finer mentality than the beast, and he uses it to give this wilderness of beauty that we call the earth to the few. Why, the foxes have holes——"
He stopped, ashamed of his emotion, and as he stopped looked into Hertha's face. He had aroused her attention by his words upon the Negro and she was following him now, eagerly, questioningly. Was this terrible thing that he was saying true? Would Ellen's and Kathleen's dreams remain always dreams? Would the few forever bruise the hearts of the many?
"What are you thinking about?" the Major's tone, though kindly, held a command. He had ceased to be interested in his other listeners, he knew their types too well; but this silent, beautiful girl piqued his curiosity.
She on her part felt impelled to answer him. The picture had flashed before her eyes of other Sunday evenings with her colored father reading from the New Testament as they sat about the table at home. She could see his finger moving slowly down the page.
"Don't you believe," she questioned the old soldier, "that the meek shall inherit the earth?"
He answered gravely: "That was the prophecy of a noble youth, whose life was soon blotted out. But before his day a wiser man, wiser because he lived in a kindlier state that permitted him to grow old, said the same thing. But even he was killed at last, since there is nothing so hateful, so much to be feared, as a wise and gentle life."
Hertha's brow clouded, and dropping his irony the Major went on gently:
"Before he died, however, this old man, in talking with his friend, pronounced his golden rule: 'We should never repay wrong with wrong nor do harm to any man no matter how much we may have suffered from him.' But mark Socrates' wisdom. 'I know,' he added, 'few men hold or ever will hold this opinion.' That was over two thousand years ago, my dear, and you see the meek have not inherited the earth. They still drink the cup of hemlock or are nailed upon the cross."
"Don't!" Kathleen cried. She was shaken by his speech and the tears were on her cheeks. "Major, dear, I'm not meek. I'm fighting with my comrades for the new world. What is there for me?"
"Defeat!" the old man answered gravely, shaking his head. "Defeat. And yet, there will be the joy of battle, and who knows but that the struggle is better than any possible heaven of achievement? But for your friend," and his face lightened as he looked at Hertha's appealing beauty, "for her there is the joy of youth." He rose and addressed himself directly to Hertha. "My child," he said, "don't let them make you picket. Get all the joy you can out of life. Dance to beautiful music. The springtime is coming, play with your mates. Grasp whatever of happiness you can, and, above all, keep out of the conflict. Don't forget, keep out of the conflict."
With a nod of good-by he picked up his hat and coat and left them.
"Kitty," William Applebaum said as he bade her good-night, "don't believe that terrible man."
He was standing in the hall of the flat. Hertha had gone to her room and quite evidently Kathleen was impatient to have him leave.
"Oh, shut up," was her answer.
"But I mean it," Applebaum went on earnestly. "What does he know about life? Just because he's traveled, why should you think he tells the truth? He's irreligious and he's unwholesome. I hate that kind of thing, it's the talk of the devil."
Then, to Kathleen's utter amazement, he kissed her. He had never been so daring before and, overcome by his temerity, he rushed down the stairs. But before she had closed the door he called back, "Don't believe anything he said except about the joy of youth." And then the outer door slammed.
"Good heavens," cried Kathleen, "did that red ink claret go to his head!"
Hertha was so tired that she went at once to her room, but the coffee that she had taken kept her long awake. Since the night before she had experienced a series of vivid impressions; the music of the opera with its passion of love and tragic sorrow; the home she had visited that afternoon, its white bedroom looking out into the trees that would soon be green; the great stone towers of the bridge from which hung innumerable threads of steel; and, last, the little table with Billy opposite and this strange old man reciting his doctrine of eternal defeat. "Keep out of the conflict!" That was what he had said. That ought not to be a difficult thing to do. When she was colored she was in the conflict, a part of the great problem of an oppressed race. But to-day she was white and free; and since this was so, and she could go where she would, was it not foolish to stay in this atmosphere of turmoil, of noisy street and strenuous talk? She shut her eyes and tried to think of quiet nothings, and after much tossing she dropped off to sleep.
She was awakened by a bright light in her room. "What is it?" she called sitting upright in bed.
"It's me, dear," said Kathleen coming to her.
The Irish girl was dressed and had her hat and coat on. "I'm called on a case," she explained, "way up in the Bronx. It's pneumonia and I'm afraid I shan't be home for some days."
"Oh," Hertha cried, in real distress, "why must you go now? I want you myself."
"You're not sick, are you?"
"No, but I'm worried. I wanted to talk with you."
Kathleen sat down by the side of the bed. "I'm sorry that I've bothered you so, Hertha," she said in her pleasantest voice. "There's something in what the Major said to-night. You're young and it's not for me to push you into anything just because I think it's right. You ought to be your own judge. Perhaps you'll soon decide on a new trade and the factory will drop out of your life."
"Yes, Kathleen," Hertha said hesitating, "I am thinking of something new. I believe I'll study stenography."
"That's a good trade if you've the education, and I don't doubt you have. There's many in it, but not many like you."
"Mr. Brown has been looking up schools for me."
"Has he?"
There was silence. Kathleen had not taken a fancy to Mr. Brown.
"The school that he likes the best is in Brooklyn, and——" Hertha swallowed hard. If she were going to say anything it must be now. "To-day I looked at a room over there, near the school."
"In Brooklyn, good Lord! Why, nobody goes to Brooklyn except to be buried! You can't mean Brooklyn! What do you want to be leaving here for anyway?"
Kathleen got off the bed. As Hertha remained silent she moved out of the little alcove. "Of course, if you're wanting to go, Hertha, it's not for me to keep you."
"I want to talk with you about it. I haven't decided yet, and I don't want to leave you, but there're so many things to think about."
Hertha's voice was plaintive, for she was almost in tears.
"I suppose it's that long-legged southern chap. Well, if it's a man trying to get you away, there's no hope for me. But how you can like that thin-nosed, sallow-faced son of a snuff-dipping mother is beyond me."
Kathleen did not see Hertha's flushed cheeks, but she felt her silent protest. Remembering the words of the Major, the call of youth and springtime, she went back and again seated herself by Hertha's side.
"It's a shame they should be calling me out to-night and you and me needing a long talk together. But that's my life and perhaps it's lonely here for a young girl like you."
"I am lonely," Hertha declared, "when you are away."
It was the first time she had confessed to her dislike to be so much by herself. And while she said it she knew that though she might be timid at being alone she minded more being unable ever to get away from people. If she went to a boarding-house, perhaps she would never be really alone. The memory of the Merryvale household and its paying guests came back to her, and she tried to recall whether the northern women who stopped there were able to secure the privacy that she craved.
"With the summer, dear," Kathleen was saying, "I'm not likely to be away so much and there's many good times we could have together. Away to the country, perhaps, for a Sunday, or down at the beach where the waves knock you off your feet one second and pound the breath out of you the next."
Hertha gave a little rueful laugh. "That must be jolly," she assented.
"And as for business schools that will fit you for a job in two months or two days, according to the cash you've got, there's as many of them in New York, I'll be bound, as in Brooklyn. You don't have to cross the river to go to school."
"No."
"I asked Billy to bring one of the fellows who works where he does around with him next Sunday. He's a nice little chap, though he doesn't know a mockingbird from a jack rabbit."
"I don't have to have young men around. I'm not going because of Dick Brown."
"Oh, so it's settled then. Well, I wish you good-by."
The Irish girl rose and stood stiffly by the bed.
"It isn't settled," Hertha cried, "I can't settle things quickly. Oh, I do wish everything wasn't so difficult."
"I must be going," said Kathleen. "Good-night."
Hertha dragged her friend toward her and threw her arms about her neck. "If I do go to Brooklyn," she said, "I can still see you sometimes, and you'll come to see me."
"There was a New York man once, Hertha, and he had two daughters, one lived in Australia and one in Brooklyn, and he made one visit in his life to each."
"That's silly!"
"Perhaps. But it's a big city, and if you leave here and go to foreign parts of it, I'm afraid it's good-by."
"Well, it isn't good-by for me, wherever I go." Hertha kissed her friend and held her close. "It's never going to be good-by like that. I love you, Kathleen."
The older woman returned the embrace. "Play with your mates!" she heard in her ears. "Grasp whatever of happiness you can."
"Have you money?" she questioned.
"Yes, enough for my education."
"Oh, how will I ever get along with you away!"
And with this cry Kathleen put out the light and went away to a difficult and sorrowful night.
When she returned on Wednesday evening, snatching a few hours from her harassing case, she hurried up the stairs and into the front room. One glance told her that her friend had left. The framed picture was there and the curtains that Hertha had bought and made herself. On the table was the magazine out of which she had read a story the week before; but the room was desolate, for in the alcove all the little things that belonged to a young girl's dress were missing. The stiff, unnatural order of bed and bureau mocked the looker-on. Going into the kitchen, Kathleen saw a letter addressed to herself, but she made no attempt to read it. Wearily entering her bedroom, she changed her gown and more wearily returned to cook her dinner. The water hissed at her in the kettle as she set her solitary place.
"Why does everybody leave me just when I've learned to love them?" she asked herself. And, receiving no answer, she sat down in the rocker by the red geraniums and buried her face in her hands.