Joan Thursday: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

She rose and strode angrily back to the cubicle she shared with Edna. In a fit of unreasoning rage, snatching her hat from its hook, she impaled it upon her hair with hatpins that stabbed viciously. It had grown too dark to see more than a vague white shape moving on the surface of the mirror. But she did not stop to light the gas to make sure she was armoured against the public eye. In another moment, bag in hand, coat over her arm, she was letting herself out into the hallway.

Time enough tomorrow morning to fret her mother and sister with news of her misfortune: tonight she was in the humour to make a bold move toward freedom....

But on the door-stoop she checked, a trifle dashed by apprehension of the impending storm, which she had quite forgotten. She drew back into the vestibule: she could hardly afford to subject her only decent waist and skirt to danger of a drenching.

An atmosphere if anything more dense than that of the day blanketed heavily the city. Even the gutter-children seemed to feel its influence, and instead of making the evening hideous with screams and rioting, moved with an uncommon lethargy, or stood or squatted apart in little groups, their voices hushed and querulous. The roar of the trains on the nearby Elevated seemed muted, the clangour of the Third Avenue surface cars blunted, and Joan fancied that the street lamps burned with an added lustre. Wayfarers moved slowly if near home, otherwise briskly, with a spirit as unwilling as unwonted: one and all with frequent glances skyward.

Overhead, a low-hung bosom of dusky vapour borrowed a dull blush from the fires of life that blazed beneath. In the west, beyond the silhouetted structure of the Elevated and the less distinct profile of buildings on the far side of Central Park, the clouds blazed luridly with their own dread fires—a fitful, sheeted play athwart gigantic curtains, to an accompaniment of dull and intermittent grumbles.

A soft, warm breath sighed down the breathless street, and sighing, died. Another, more cool and brusque, swept sharp upon the heels of the first, played with the littered rubbish of the pavements, caressed with a grateful touch flesh still stinging with the heat of day, and drove on, preceded by a cloud of acrid dust. A few drops of lukewarm water maculated the sidewalks with spots as big as dollars. There followed a sharper play of fire, and one more near. Children ran shrieking to shelter, and men and women dodged into convenient doorways or scudded off clumsily. The wind freshened, grew more chill.... Then, so suddenly that there might as well have been no warning, on the wings of the howling blast, laced continually with empyrean fire, timed by the rolling detonations of heavy artillery now near, now far, a shining deluge sluiced the streets and made its gutters brawling rivulets.

A lonely, huddled figure, standing back in the entry, well out of the spray from the spattering drops, Joan waited the passing of the storm with neither fascination nor fear. Self-absorbed, her mood almost altogether introspective, she weighed her reckless plans. The crisis bellowed overhead in a series of tremendous, shattering explosions, bathing the empty street in wave after wave of blinding violet light, without seriously disturbing the slow, steady processes of the girl's mentality.

Then she became aware of a young man who had emerged from the darksome backwards of the tenement, so quietly that Joan had no notion how long he might have been standing there, regarding her with interest and amusement in his grey eyes and on his broad, good-humoured countenance. He had a long, strong body poised solidly on sturdy legs, short arms with large and efficient hands; and bore himself with a careless confidence that did much to dissemble the negligence of his mode of dress—the ill-fitting coat and trousers, the common striped "outing shirt," the rusty derby set aslant on his round, close-cropped head. Joan knew him as Ben Austin, one of the few admirers whose attentions she was wont to suffer: by occupation a stage-hand at the Hippodrome; a steady young man, who lived with his mother in one of the rear flats.

He greeted her with a broadening grin and a "Hello, Joan!"

She said with indifference: "Hello, Ben."