He was defenseless. He could not dodge them. Anybody could come up and ask him anything—and did. And while he could learn something about the new leathers, still it was difficult for him to remember the Long Island Railroad time-table well enough to reply instantly when an irate shopper snapped at him, “Do you know what’s the next train for Hempstead?”
The most difficile woman in a shoe-store has at least a definite, tangible foot to fit. But the holiday crowd were buying presents for persons of whom Father knew nothing—though the shoppers expected him to know everything, from the sizes of their wrists to their tastes in bill-folds. They haggled and pushed and crowded; they wanted it to be less expensive, as well as more blessed, to give than to receive. He spent twenty minutes in showing the entire line of diaries to one woman. She apparently desired to make sure that they were all of them moral or something of the sort. At the end of the time she sighed, “Oh dear, it isn’t time for the matinée even yet. Shopping is so hard.” And oozed away into the crowd.
Father had started his first day with a superior manner of knowing all about leather and the ways of cranky customers. He ended it with a depressed feeling that he knew nothing about anything, that he couldn’t keep up the holiday pace of the younger clerks—and that the assistant buyer of the department had been watching him. He walked home with strained, weary shoulders, but as he turned into the gloomy hallway leading to their room he artificially brightened his expression, that he might bring joy home to Mother, who would have been lonely and anxious and waiting all day.
He pictured her as sitting there, hunched up, depressed. He would bounce in with news of a good day. He tried the door carefully. Mother stood in the middle of the floor, in a dream. In the dimness of the room the coal fire shone through the front draught of the stove, and threw a faint rose on her crossed hands. Taller she seemed, and more commanding. Her head was back, her eyes sparkling. She was clean-cut and strong against the unkempt walls.
“Why, Mother! You look so happy! What is it?”
“I’m going to help! I’m not going to be a lazybones. I’ve got a job, too! In the toy-department at Regalberg’s. And they are going to pay me nine dollars a week. How’s that for your stupid old woman?”
“Why—why—you don’t need— I don’t know as I like—” began the conventional old Father to whom woman’s place was in the home whether or not there was a home in which to have a place. Then the new Father, the adventurer, declared, “I think it’s mighty fine, Mother. Mighty fine. If it won’t be too hard on you.”
“I’m going to take you to dinner to-night, instead of you taking me. That is, if you’ll lend me a dollar!”
Laughing till they nearly cried, with Father shamelessly squeezing her arm on public thoroughfares, they again plunged into the Roman pleasures of the little tinsel restaurant. And like two lovers, like the telephone-girl in your office and the clerk next door, they made an engagement to meet at noon, next day, in a restaurant half-way between Regalberg’s and Father’s store.
When she came breathlessly into that beef-stew and paper-napkin restaurant at noon, Mother already had something of the busy, unself-conscious look of the woman who can compete with men. Her cheeks were flushed with walking. Her eyes were young. She glanced about the room, found Father, smiled quickly, and proceeded to order her own lunch in a business-like way.