ROOMS. LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING.
INQUIRE WITHIN.
She would sit in that room, so heavy with its odor of mildew, her window closed against the long, sweetly warm days, hunched dumbly on the cot-edge and staring into the stripe and vine, stripe and vine of the wall-paper design, or lie back when the ache along her spine began to set in. There were occasional ventures to a corner bake-shop for raisin rolls and to the delicatessen next door for a quarter-pound of Bologna sausage sliced into slivers while she waited. She would sit on the cot-edge munching alternately from sliver to roll, gulping through a throat that was continually tight with wanting to cry, yet would not relax for that relief.
There was little attempt for employment except when the twenty dollars left from the sale of effects and funeral expenses began to dwindle. She would wake up nights, sweaty with the nightmare that her room was some far-off ward for incorrigibles and that one of the strange, veiny-nosed inmates was filching her small leather bag from beneath her pillow.
When her little roll had flattened finally down to five one-dollar bills she took to daily and conscientiously buying morning papers and scanning want-advertisements as she stood at the news-stand, answering first those that were within walking-distance.
She would make a five-block détour of the Criterion rather than pass the nearer to it.
Once, returning after a fruitless tour of the smaller department stores, and borne along by the six-o'clock tide of Sixth Avenue, her heart leaped up at sight of Miss Cora Kinealy, homeward bound on her smart tall heels that clicked, arm in arm with Mabel Runyan of the notions. Standing there with her folded newspaper hugged to her and the small hand-bag dangling, Stella Schump gazed after.
It was not only the lack of references or even of experience that conspired against her every effort at employment. It was the lack of luster to the eye, an absolutely new tendency to tiptoe, a furtive lookout over her shoulder, a halting tongue, that, upon the slightest questioning, would stutter for words. Where there were application-blanks to be filled in she would pore inkily over them and, after a while, slyly crunch hers up in her hand and steal out. She was still pinkly and prettily clean, and her hair with its shining mat of plaits, high of gloss, but one Saturday half-holiday, rather than break into her last bill, she ate a three-cent frankfurter-sausage sandwich from off a not quite immaculate push-cart, leaning forward as she bit into it to save herself from the ooze of mustard. Again she had the sense of Cora Kinealy hurrying along the opposite side of the street on the tall heels that clicked. She let fall the bun into the gutter and stood there trembling.
She obtained, one later afternoon, at the instance of a window-card, the swabbing of the tiled floor of an automobile show-room. She left before her first hour was completed, crying, her finger-tips stinging, two nails broken.
Finally came that chimera of an hour when she laid down her last coin for the raisin rolls. She ate them on the cot-edge. And then, because her weekly dollar-and-twenty-five-cent room rent fell due that evening, she wrapped two fresh and self-laundered waists, some white but unlacy underwear, a mound of window-dried handkerchiefs, a little knitted shoulder-shawl so long worn by her mother, her tooth-brush and tube of paste, and all her sundry little articles no less indispensable, into a white-paper package. There were left a short woolen petticoat, too cumbersome to include, the small wooden rocker and lamp with the china shade which she had rather unexplainably held out from the dealer's inventory. She closed the door softly on them one evening and, parcel in hand, tiptoed down the stonily cold halls and out into a street of long, thin, high-stooped houses. Outside in the May evening it was as black, as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a sweater and cap nudged up to her.