“Well, run tell him! Quick!” she urged, skipping across the hall and disappearing behind a neighbor’s door.
Mrs. Jimmy George was neither a beauty nor a scholar; but—as her still worshipful husband often averred—she was “game clear through.”
During the next hour the peevish Evangeline was pacified only on the fly, and for the first time in her short life she began to realize that her mother was not always hers to command.
At the end of that hour Mrs. George astonished Mr. Gaylord by putting into his hand a teacupful of small coin gathered from those residents of The Flatiron whom she had been able to reach.
“An’ you just wait till th’ men folks come home to dinner,” she exulted; “if they don’t fork over enough to carry that poor little thing out to her Jim, I ain’t no guesser!”
Giles Gaylord waited, and again the cracked teacup surprised him. How many sacrifices those half dollars and quarters and dimes and nickels and pennies stood for nobody knew, for they kept their secrets well. Some were guessed about. There was little Tillie Shook, the dressmaker apprentice, who had been planning to buy some “real” lace to trim the neck of her best frock; she finally purchased “imitation Val.” which was, she said, just as good for her. Then, John Braunersreuther, who supported his wife and seven children by driving a pair of fat horses for the brewery, gave up his cherished Sunday newspaper for two whole months—and the paper boy wondered why. Leona Montgomery and Frederica Schine suddenly stopped patronizing the “movies,” and their fellow-workers in the box shop rallied them about it without discovering the reason. Mrs. Jimmy George herself never bought the blue messaline girdle she had been scrimping and saving for, not even when it was marked down, in the department store window, to sixty-nine cents, and The Flatiron respected her reticence on the subject. But there was no longer any doubt that the little dancer was going home to lie “side o’ Jim and the baby.”
On a cold December afternoon Granny O’Donnell opened her hospitable door, and The Flatiron streamed in, to honor the loyal woman whom in life many of the tenants had never seen. They came by two’s, by three’s, by whole families; they filled the room, they overflowed into the hallway, they even dropped down upon the stairs, and everywhere was gentleness, courtesy, and reverence. The Curate of St. Mark’s read the service for the dead, and Doodles sang “Rock of Ages.” Leona Montgomery, in her clear soprano voice, started “Crossing the Bar”; but sobs soon choked the song, and a girl from the theater went on with it to the end.
“It was a lovely fun’ral anyway!” declared Mrs. Homan, wiping her eyes, as the crowd trooped up The Flatiron stairs, after having followed the dancer to the very door of the baggage car. “’Twas a fun’ral that would satisfy any earthly mortal, livin’ or dead!” And no one disagreed with her.