CHAPTER TWO
The Mitchells lived in an old-fashioned upper flat on a street that, before the great fire of 1906, had been a street of two-story wooden houses and small cottages set back in pleasant gardens. But the fire, sweeping the City's poorer quarters, had driven the inhabitants to the safety of the Mission hills; the little cottages had been converted into flats, the houses raised and small, congested shops inserted below. For the first two years, until the new city settled to permanent lines, there had been a bustle and cheap glitter through these streets, a cosmopolitan mingling of many different types and nationalities, that had touched the district faintly with romance. But now the better shops had gone, and only a few frowsy Italian immigrants continued in their untidy vegetable stands; disheartened widows managed small notion stores and bewailed to the wives of the petty clerks, also nailed to the district by low rents, the mythical comforts they had enjoyed "before the Fire."
The wooden houses were all dulled to the same sad gray by wind and sun and rain. The once pleasant gardens had shrunk to occasional slabs of hard brown earth railed off with rusty iron pickets. The front doors of the flats, raised three steps from the sidewalk, were all exactly alike, warped and dust-grimed, with oblong insets of glass two-thirds of the way up. Behind these insets, in brilliant curtains of silkoline, or conscientious Battenburg or negligent Nottingham, the tenants expressed their individuality against the engulfing monotony. The Mitchells had plain white scrim, of thick quality and tightly drawn on a brass rod. The doors of the upper flats worked by an uncertain mechanism managed from within. When this mechanism broke, if one lived in the top flat, one descended the endless stairs and worked the latch by hand. As a child, Anne had dreaded calling on friends and ascending, watched suspiciously from the heights above, until her identity was disclosed. There were ghastly stories of unsuspecting women who had so opened to burglars and been at their mercy.
As Anne unlocked the door the smell of pot-roast instantly enveloped her, shutting away the problem of her own immediate future and the broad shoulders of Roger Barton, hunched forward in defiance of John Lowell. Anne's lip quivered.
"To-night—of all nights!"
Slowly she began the long ascent, enclosed by the thickening odor as by the walls of a narrow corridor.
Anne hated pot-roast, not because of itself, but for its associations. Pot-roast was a pretense. It had not the open honesty of stew. Pot-roast was Mrs. Mitchell's final compromise in a line of preference that had started with prime ribs of beef. It meant that James Mitchell had bet away more than the usual portion of his monthly pay check; the meager remnant had stung Hilda's patience to rebellion; her imagination had leaped from the invariable shoulder chops of Wednesday evening to prime roast; but, before it could safely land upon that pinnacle of rebellion, had tripped and clutched at pot-roast. Anne sighed and went slowly on. At the stair-head, the gas jet, stuffed with cotton wool to keep it from ever being extravagantly turned to its full capacity, shed a sickly light through an amber globe. She turned the cock ferociously as far as it would go and then went on down the hall to the curtained niche just outside her own hall bedroom.
Long ago this niche had been formed to hold the overflow from the hall closet. Into it Mrs. Mitchell had since crowded broken and worn-out pieces of household furniture, hideous bisque ornaments of the '90's which Anne and Belle had refused to have about, oil lamps, in case "something happens to the gas"; a sewing-machine that would cost more to fix than to replace; dresses and bits of carpet, some day to be made into new rugs; and the week's accumulation of laundry from which she snatched and ironed pieces as she needed them. Years ago Anne had tried to eliminate this niche, but when her mother had demanded where she should put the things and Anne had suggested burning them, Hilda had looked so grieved at the implication of her bad management in ever letting them accumulate, and had asked Anne in so hurt a tone to pick out "one single thing that might not be needed some day," that Anne relented. Now the niche was like a malignant growth, too late to operate upon, to which one submits. But even yet Anne never let the portière quite fall to behind her and enclose her in this cemetery of odds and ends.
When she had hung up her things she went down the hall, past the dining-room where her father sat in the rocker under the hard, white, incandescent light, staring at the unlit gas log in the grate, the evening paper spread on his knees. In the kitchen her mother was making gravy from the fat in the baking-pan.
"Hello, dear. You're late. I was just going to begin without you."