CHAPTER XIWHAT CHRISTMAS REALLY MEANS
TheTerrible Ten began it. Eleanor Watson had forgotten to bring either peanuts or taffy to their class, and the Arithmetic lesson flagged in consequence, until finally, in despair, she sent Rafael out to buy some refreshments.
“How’s your father to-night, Pietro?” she asked, while they waited. Pietro Senior had slipped on the ice on his way home from work and sprained his wrist badly.
“Better, I tink,” Pietro reported stolidly, his thoughts all on peanuts to come.
“Dat’s nottings—lit’ wrist splain,” Giuseppi announced. “My fader, he had a hand cut off—so.”
“My fader go to de hospital. Hava big cutting.” Nicolo illustrated a “big cutting” vividly with a dangerous swing of his villainous-looking jack-knife.
“My moder she hava two operations dis year.”
“My sister she have tree.”
Rafael had arrived during the debate, but not even the bag of peanuts he set down before Eleanor could distract attention from the bitter rivalry in misfortune. In a minute Rafael too had caught the trend of it.
“Waita lil minute,” he cried, glowering angrily round the circle. “Looka my hand. Dat’s one. My lil sister she died dis year. My muvver she go to hospital. And my big sister, she work to Cannon’s fer der Christmas trade. She say she rather die, she so tired every night, an’ it get worse an’ worse an’ worse every day till it be Christmas.”
“Dat so,” agreed Pietro solemnly. “My sister she work dar too. Doan get home till ten, leben o’clock.”
Cannon’s was the big cheap department store down near the station. Eleanor took mental note of the Ten’s opinion of its treatment of employees, and resolved to ask Mr. Thayer if the girls who worked there really had such a hard time as their small brothers thought. Meanwhile she stopped the ridiculous operation contest with many peanuts. The Ten, being very bright boys, though ignorantof books, had speedily discovered that the bigger numbers you could add right, the faster you could secure large quantities of peanuts. Also, they humbly worshipped the Lovely Lady, whom Rafael had refused to let them call “de peach.” They came regularly to their class, they listened spellbound to the adventures of Robin Hood, they wrote the names of Robin and all his band—also their own and the Lovely Lady’s—without a slip, and when Eleanor declared that nothing would make her so happy as to hear them read the tale of King Arthur and his knights to her out of a book, they set themselves at learning “dose queer book letters” with a will.
“First fellah dat bothers my Lovely Lada, I fixa him,” Rafael had announced at the end of the third lesson.
“Why she your lovely lada?” demanded Pietro mockingly, dodging behind a telegraph pole for safety.
“’Cause I lika her de most,” Rafael declared, “and she goan lika me de most. You jus’ wait.”
But after that one assertion of proprietorship,he changed “my” to “the,” and impressed the revision upon his friends and followers with terrible threats. Rafael’s eyes were brown and melting, his voice was of a liquid softness, his smile as sunny as the skies of his native land. But when he scowled all the fierceness of Sicilian feuds and vendettas flashed out of his deep eyes and straightened his mouth into a cruel, hard line. No wonder the Ten shivered and cowered before the wrath of Rafael, supplemented by the flash of a sharp little dagger that Eleanor, who had been entirely reassured by Mr. Thayer, little suspected the dearest of her dear, curly-haired comical Ten to be carrying inside his gray shirt.
After the class that evening, Eleanor asked Mr. Thayer about Cannon’s.
“Well, I suppose they are pretty hard on their girls,” he said. “Standing up all day waiting on tired, irritable customers who have to make every penny count, with fifteen minutes off for lunch in the busy season, can’t be exactly fun. Then in the evening I suppose they have to go back to straighten up their stock of goods, move things around toshow them off better, trim up the windows, and so on. Christmas means something quite different from a gay holiday with a big dinner and a lot of pretty presents to those girls and to lots of others, Miss Watson. If the Christmas rush is bad at Cannon’s, it must be perfect torture in the big city shops.”
Next day Eleanor persuaded Madeline, who could always be detached from her work to investigate a real novelty, to go with her to Cannon’s.
“If we want to ask the clerks any questions, you can do it safely in Italian, or any other language,” Eleanor urged. “They’re mostly foreigners, I think.”
Madeline nodded. “And I might find the type——” Her voice trailed off into silence, and her face wore a far-away, inscrutable look. Writing a play for Miss Dwight certainly made a person very absent-minded, and one’s conversation very inconsecutive—also one’s actions. Madeline suddenly decided to buy a hat, and dragged Eleanor from one shop to another without finding anything to please her difficult taste, so that it was almost dark when they reached Cannon’s.
The big store was packed with shoppers. The air was clammy and stale; the counters were a mass of soiled and dingy merchandise. Tiny cash-girls ran wearily to and fro, elbowing a difficult way through the jam in the narrow aisles. Behind the counters pale-faced clerks eyed the customers savagely, and attended with languid insolence to their wants.
Eleanor sniffed the air daintily. “What an awful place, Madeline! Where do all these shoppers come from? I don’t feel a bit as if I were in Harding.”
“From Factory Hill, I suppose, and from across the tracks where the French settlement is. Let’s go to the toy department and buy Fluffy a doll. I’m sure they’ll have something unique to add to her collection.”
Eleanor stood near the door, hesitating. “It’s horribly smelly. You don’t think we shall catch anything, do you?”
Madeline laughed. “You’d never do to go really and truly slumming, Eleanor. No, we shan’t catch anything, probably. Come along. I thought you wanted to investigate this place.”
So Eleanor bravely “came along.” They bought a penny doll for Fluffy, from a sad-eyed little clerk who told them she was “tired most to death working nights,” and then, when a floor-walker appeared suddenly from around a corner, took it all back and declared loudly that business was fine this year and she liked the rush of “somethin’ doin’.”
On the way down-stairs—Eleanor had firmly refused to get into one of Cannon’s elevators—they came upon a girl crying bitterly.
“What’s the matter?” Madeline asked in the friendly, companionable way that always got her answers.
“I’ve been fined again,” the girl sobbed. “Ten cents ain’t so much, but neither is four dollars. That’s what I get. I’ve been fined three times this week. What for? Why, once for being late in the morning—it’s awful easy to sleep over when you’ve been working late at night—and once for sitting down on the ledge behind the counter. It’s against the rules to sit down, you know. And this time it was for talking back to an inspector who said my check was wrong. Itwasn’t. If it had been, I’d have been fined for that.”
Eleanor had been hunting through her pocketbook.
“Please take this,” she said, “and don’t cry any more. Can’t you get off to-night and have a good rest?”
The girl shook her head vigorously, smiling at Eleanor through her tears. “I’d lose my job like that, ma’am. I ain’t any worse off than the others; only it did make me sick to lose the money when I got so many depending on me—my old grandmother and two kid brothers—and I wanted to make a little Christmas for the kids. Thank you an awful lot, ma’am.”
The girls went on their way fairly bursting with indignation.
“The idea of fining her for sitting down to rest!” sputtered Madeline. “And for being late, when she’s worked half the night before, it’s outrageous!”
Eleanor had quite forgotten the odors and the risk of infection. “Let’s buy some ribbon,” she suggested. “That counter seems to be the hub of the shopping fray.”
So they bought ribbon of a dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty who proved to be Pietro’s sister. She beamed on Eleanor, and in the safe foreign tongue confided to Madeline that Cannon’s was certainly a bad place to work. She could look out for herself, she explained, flashing an imperious glance at an inspector. She brought in lots of Italian trade, and could interpret both in Italian and French for the women who hadn’t learned English. So they treated her better. Oh, they fined her, of course—that was the rule—and she worked most nights. But she was pretty sure of keeping her place, whatever happened. That was a big help. They should see the dirty hole of a lunch-room before they left, she called gleefully after them, under the very eye of the fat little man whom she had pointed out as Mr. Cannon. It was certainly “a big help” to be able to utter wholesome truths like that with impunity.
“Let’s go and reason with him,” suggested Madeline, looking angrily after the fat little proprietor. “Let’s make him take us to see the dirty hole of a rest-room. Let’s threaten to boycott him if he doesn’t reform his ways.”
Eleanor looked very much frightened. “We should only get the girls we’ve talked to into trouble. The boycott wouldn’t work because we’ve never bought anything anyway until to-day. I—I think I’m beginning to feel faint, Madeline. Let’s go home and talk it over with Betty and Mr. Thayer. They’ll think of just the right thing to do.”
But Mr. Thayer had gone to Boston, via Babbie Hildreth’s, and it was Eugenia Ford’s plan that, after much discussion, was settled upon, for the reason, as Madeline put it, that it was “just wild enough to work.”
So after chapel the next morning Eugenia, Georgia, and Fluffy—Straight had tearfully decided not to cut Logic—chaperoned by Betty, appeared at Cannon’s and asked to see the head of the firm.
“Good-morning, Mr. Cannon,” said Georgia in businesslike tones, when he appeared. “We’ve got a proposition to make to you. We three are Harding girls, and this is Miss Wales, secretary of the Student’s Aid Society,—also proprietor of the Tally-ho Tea-Shop.”
“Indeed! Charmed to meet you, I’m sure.” The fat little man bowed low andsmiled a fatuous, oily smile. “Anything I can do in the way of canned goods, crackers, sweets—to the sweet, ladies.” He bowed and smiled again.
“We want to ask a favor,” pursued Georgia, utterly ignoring his courtesies. “We all have pretty good times generally, and very merry Christmases. We want other girls to have the same. We have just lately realized how hard it is for salespeople just at this time of year—how Christmas means to them just terribly hard work for little or no extra pay—and we want to help at least a few of them. So we’ve gotten up a petition about shopping early in the day, and early in the season, for the Harding girls to sign. Now we also want to arrange to come down and help some of your girls out. We want to take the places of three of them every day from twelve to one, so that they can get a good rest at noon, and also from five to six, so they can, if possible, do any extra work they have then and so avoid night work. If not, they can at least start fresh for the evening.”
Mr. Cannon stared at Georgia in utter amazement. Suddenly his fat face grew red,and he shouted angrily, “Who’s been talkin’ to you? You know an awful lot about my business, don’t you, now? You’d better clear out.”
“Without the canned goods and crackers and sweets—for the sweet?” asked Fluffy gaily, looking down at him with her fascinating, insolent smile.
“We’ve talked to no one, Mr. Cannon,” put in little Eugenia earnestly.
“And we mean to help you too, as is only fair, if you are good enough to give us the chance to help the girls,” added Betty, with quiet dignity.
Mr. Cannon glowered at the circle of pretty, serious, half-frightened faces.
“You don’t know nothing about clerking,” he sputtered at last. “Nice mess you’d make of your hours! Nice kind of help you’d hand out to me!”
“I was a waitress once,” Fluffy informed him calmly, winking at Betty. “The young woman I worked for said I was very good at it. Besides, all my little friends came and patronized me. If you’ll let me try, I’ll ask them to patronize me here.”
“We don’t expect pay,” Georgia explained, “and the first day we come we’d just be extras, watching to see what our duties would be.”
“Don’t be silly, Mr. Cannon,” urged Fluffy, who was never in the least daunted by opposition. “We’ll accomplish more in an hour than these poor dragged-out girls ever do—even if we don’t understand the difficult art of clerking,” she added maliciously. “And they’ll do more in their afternoons, after they’ve had a chance to rest. What you want is your money’s worth, isn’t it? The best service for the smallest wages. Don’t——”
“See here,” Mr. Cannon cut her short, “let’s have a little talk. What did you come here for to-day?” He pointed a pudgy finger at Fluffy, who explained once more, in picturesque phrases, the idea they had had in coming to interview him.
“You say you’ve been a waitress?”
Fluffy nodded, winking solemnly again at Betty.
“You’re not a labor organizer?”
With equal solemnity she denied the charge.
“Far as I can see, you’re more or less luny.If you want to, you can try. Come to-day at twelve. If you get along, maybe the others can take hold. Some o’ my girls are fagged, for sure, and if your little friends, as you call them, come in, that’ll help some. I’ve always said,” added Mr. Cannon proudly, “that if I could once get the college trade to swing my way, I could keep it. Honest values for cash is my motto.” And with a curt little nod he started off.
“Wait!” Fluffy arrested his progress. “You mean I’m to come and not the others?”
Mr. Cannon nodded. “As the most likely specimen. I don’t believe in beginning any new experiment on too sumptoos a scale.” This time he was irrevocably gone.
Fluffy wore a comical air of dismay. “Gracious! Doing it all alone isn’t at all my idea of a stunt. I shall be terribly scared and lonely. Straight’s got to spend the entire hour buying things of me. Oh, dear! She can’t, because it’s a cash store and we haven’t any money left. I wonder, if I should tell him I had a twin, whether he wouldn’t let her try to-day too.”
“No time,” said Georgia firmly. “Psych. 6 beckons. But you shan’t be deserted. We’ll take up a contribution for Straight to spend.”
Fluffy’s experiment in social service was the sensation of the Harding morning. Promptly at twelve she appeared, and was given the place of a wan little girl behind the ribbon counter. Ten minutes later—she had stipulated for that interval in which to learn how to “work” her cash-book—the “college trade” appeared in the persons of a lively delegation conducted by the triumphant Straight, all eagerness to display her adored twin in this new and exciting rôle. They bought ribbons recklessly, with much delicious professional encouragement from Fluffy. They smiled cheerfully upon Mr. Cannon, who lurked in the offing, watching the progress of his “new experiment” with amazed interest. Piloted by Eleanor Watson, they ascended to the doll counter, and provided themselves with souvenirs of the occasion in the shape of dancing dolls which twirled fascinatingly about a central magnet on top of a little tin box. There had been nothing sonice at the regular toy store, they declared loudly, for Mr. Cannon’s benefit. At one they escorted the weary Fluffy triumphantly to the Tally-ho for luncheon.
“He tried to hire me for all the afternoons,” explained Fluffy proudly, “and he says the rest of you may come, and Straight too, seeing she’s my twin; but no more. He doesn’t believe in trying noo experiments on too sumptoos a scale,” mimicked Fluffy joyously.
A good many things besides the easing of the lots of a few tired sales-girls came of the “noo experiment.” One was a queer friendship that sprang up between Fluffy and Mr. Cannon, cemented by a compact, on Fluffy’s part, hereafter to “trade for cash,” which Mr. Cannon considered the only honest way of living, and, on Mr. Cannon’s, to accept Mr. Thayer’s offer of rooms in the club-house where classes in embroidery and music and some amusement clubs might be enjoyed by Mr. Cannon’s girls. Then Madeline’s “Sunday Special” article on the Harding girls’ practical way of helping those less fortunate was copied and discussed through the wholecountry; and many women and men who had never given the matter a thought before realized that shop-girls are human and began treating them as if they were.
Meanwhile Betty Wales, seeing another application of the same principle, got together the committee on the Proper Excitement of the Idle Rich and made them a proposition.
“A store in New York wants two thousand ploshkin candle-shades before Christmas. They won’t handle less than a thousand. Six Morton Hall girls are working their heads off to get them ready in time—that means that the last shipment must go by the fifteenth. Why can’t you help them out by having some candle-shade bees?”
“I haven’t had a chance to do one thing for Christmas myself,” objected Georgia sadly.
“Do you usually make all your presents?” demanded Mary Brooks incisively. “You know you never touch one of them. As the presiding genius of the gift-shop department and the one and only Perfect Patron of the Tally-ho I am bound to help this Excitement along. It’s simply absurd for you to rush down to Cannon’s every day, and then refuseto help the girls in this very college who are just as tired and just as much tied down by this horrible Christmas tradition of buying things all in a heap, regardless of the people who have to make them then, or starve. The first bee can be at my house,” ended Mary sweetly, “and there will be perfectly good refreshments.”
The bees accomplished wonders, but it was still a struggle to finish the candle-shades in time; and when the Thorn cut her hand and the wound got poisoned and wouldn’t heal, things seemed nearly hopeless. But little Eugenia Ford came nobly to the rescue. “There’s no rule against getting up at three in the morning,” she said, and for six consecutive days she woke herself heroically at that hour, and cut, pasted, and put together candle-shades until dawn, hardly taking time for breakfast, but never neglecting her college work—she had learned her lesson about that.
At three o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, the sixteenth, Eugenia hung out a busy sign and curled up on her couch for a much needed nap. When she woke again, it wasalmost dark. She had promised to go to Vespers with Helena Mason.
“I’m afraid I’m late, but she might have called for me,” reflected Eugenia, getting rapidly into a trailing blue broadcloth dress, which, with a big plumed hat, silver-fox furs, and a huge bunch of violets, was calculated to make a very favorable impression upon the Vespers audience.
When she was ready, Eugenia consulted a diminutive watch. “Quarter to seven!” Her expression of consternation gave way suddenly to relief. “I remember now that it was two hours fast. No—I changed it. Well, it’s surely all wrong.” Eugenia dashed down the hall to Helena Mason’s room. Her hurried knock was answered by a rather grudging “Come in.”
“I’m very sorry to be late,” Eugenia began apologetically.
Miss Mason sat at her desk, writing busily. She turned her head at last, and stared hard at Eugenia.
“I should say you were early myself,” she observed, “but why the plumes and the train?”
Eugenia seized a tiny alarm clock that stood on the floor by the bed, which, for some strange reason, was not made up—at Vespers time on Sunday.
“It is quarter to seven,” she cried aghast. “Why didn’t you call me, and why isn’t it dark, and what do you mean by saying I’m early for Vespers?”
“Eugenia Ford, are you crazy?” inquired Miss Mason sternly.
Poor Eugenia looked ready to cry. “I don’t think I am. Tell me what I’m early for, please.”
“Breakfast, of course,” explained Miss Mason. “I got up at six to copy this theme. It’s now almost seven—there’s the rising bell this minute. As for Vespers, now you speak of it I do remember that you promised to call for me, but I went to the Westcott for dinner yesterday and to Vespers right from there, without ever thinking of our engagement.”
Eugenia sank down limply on the disheveled bed. “Then I’ve slept since three o’clock yesterday,” she announced tragically, “in my kimono, on top of my couch, youknow. I never heard of such a thing, did you?”
The Thorn certainly never had, and she was much impressed.
“I always supposed that rich girls like Miss Ford just thought of clothes and dances and traveling and a good time generally,” she confided to Betty. “I never thought one of them would wear herself out helping poor little me. You’ve got to be pretty tired to sleep like that. I shall always feel differently about rich girls after this.”
And she kept her word. The Thorn’s sharp point was dulled. Instead of being a faultfinder and an agitator she threw her influence, which for some obscure reason was considerable, on the side of harmony and good-fellowship.
“I’ve told the third floor to stop spying on Esther Bond,” she informed Betty. “I’m convinced myself that she studies out loud, and for some queer reason doesn’t want it known. She’s awfully secretive. That Helena Mason goes up to see her quite a lot. You’d think she’d be proud of knowing a prominent girl like Miss Mason, but shesmuggles her in and out as if she was a poor relation. All the same, I guess the way she acts is her own affair. She hasn’t said much, but she must know she’s being watched, and I’ve advised them all to stop it. She looks as if she had troubles enough without that. I’ve been reading up about ghosts, and they do seem to be pretty much made up, specially all those seen by several people at one time. Did Miss Dick’s school ever find out about theirs?”
Betty shook her head. “The poor little girl who got the most frightened by it has been terribly ill. They thought last week that she was going to die, but she’s much better now.”
“Some other girl must be feeling pretty bad, if it was done for a joke,” said the Thorn.
“Yes,” agreed Betty, “but Miss Dick thinks it was an accident—and little Shirley’s strong imagination, of course. I hope she’s right. And thank you for taking Miss Bond’s part. We don’t want our silly ghosts to hurt any one’s feelings or make any girl sorry she came to Morton Hall.”