BOOK I
BREADCHAPTER I
“Oneand two and three and four and—oneand two and three and four and....”
Mrs. Sturgis had a way of tapping the ivory keys of the piano with her pencil when she was counting the beat during a music lesson. It made her little pupils nervous and sometimes upset them completely. Now she abruptly interrupted herself and rapped the keys sharply.
“Mildred, dearie—it doesn’t go that way at all; the quarter note is on ‘three.’ It’s one and two andthreeand.... You see?”
“Mama.” A tall dark girl stood in the doorway of the room.
Mrs. Sturgis affected not to hear and drew a firm circle with her pencil about the troublesome quarter note. There was another insistent demand from the door. Mrs. Sturgis twisted about and leaned back on the piano bench so that Mildred’s thin little figure might not obstruct the view of her daughter. Her air was one of martyred resignation but she smiled indulgently. Very sweetly she said:
“Yes, dearie?” Jeannette recognized the tone as one her mother used to disguise annoyance.
“It’s quarter to six....” Jeannette left the sentence unfinished. She hoped her mother would guess the rest, but Mrs. Sturgis only smiled more sweetly and looked expectant.
“There’s no bread,” Jeannette then said bluntly.
Mrs. Sturgis’ expression did not change nor did she ease her constrained position.
“Well, dearie ... the delicatessen shop is open. Perhaps you or Alice can run down to Kratzmer’s and get a loaf.”
“But we can’t do that, Mama.” There was a note of exasperation in the girl’s voice; she looked hard at her mother and frowned.
“Ah....” Mrs. Sturgis gave a short gasp of understanding. Kratzmer had been owed a little account for some time and the fat German had suggested that his bills be settled more promptly.
“My purse is there, dearie”; she indicated the shabby imitation leather bag on the table. Then with a renewal of her alert smile she returned to the lesson.
“One and two and three and four and—oneand two and——”
“Mama, I’m sorry to interrupt....”
Mrs. Sturgis now turned a glassy eye upon her older child, and the patient smile she tried to assume was hardly more than a grimace. It was eloquent of martyrdom.
“I’m sorry to have to interrupt,” Jeannette repeated, “but there isn’t any money in your purse; it’s empty.”
The expression on her mother’s face did not alterbut the light died in her eyes. Jeannette realized she had grasped the situation at last.
“Well ... dearie....” Mrs. Sturgis began.
Jeannette stood uncompromisingly before her. She had no suggestion to offer; her mother might have foreseen they would need bread for dinner.
The little music-teacher continued to study her daughter, but presently her gaze drifted to Mildred beside her perched on a pile of music albums.
“You haven’t a dime or a nickel with you, dearie?” she asked the child. “I could give you credit on your bill and your papa, you see, could pay ten cents less next time he sends me a check....”
“I think I got thome money,” lisped Mildred, wriggling down from her seat and investigating the pocket of her jacket which lay near on a chair. “Mother alwath givth me money when I goeth out.” She drew forth a small plush purse and dumped the contents into her hand. “I got twenty thenth,” she announced.
“Well, I’ll just help myself to ten of it,” said Mrs. Sturgis, bending forward and lifting one of the small coins with delicate finger-tips. “You tell your papa I’ll give him credit on this bill.”
She turned to Jeannette and held out the coin.
“Here, lovie; get a little Graham, too.”
There was color in the girl’s face as she accepted the money; she drew up her shoulders slightly, but without comment, turned upon her heel and left the room.
Mrs. Sturgis brought her attention once more cheerfully back to the lesson.
“Now then, Mildred dearie:oneand two and threeand four and—oneand two andthreeand four and.... Now you have it; see how easy that is?”
Jeannette passed through the dark intervening rooms of the apartment, catching up her shabby velvet hat from her bed, and came upon her sister Alice in the kitchen.
There was a marked contrast between the two girls. Jeannette, who was several months past her eighteenth birthday, was a tall, willowy girl with a smooth olive-tinted skin, dark eyes, brows and lashes, and straight, lustreless braids of hair almost dead black. She gave promise of beauty in a year or two,—of austere stateliness,—but now she appeared rather angular and ungainly with her thin shoulders and shapeless ankles. She was too tall and too old to be still dressed like a schoolgirl. Alice was only a year her junior, but Alice looked younger. She was softer, rounder, gentler. She had brown hair, brown eyes and a brown skin. “My little brown bird,” her mother had called her as a child. She was busy now at the stove, dumping and scraping out a can of tomatoes into a saucepan. Dinner was in process of preparation. Steam poured from the nozzle of the kettle on the gas range and evaporated in a thin cloud.
“Mama makes me so mad!” Jeannette burst out indignantly. “Iwishshe wouldn’t be borrowing money from the pupils! She just got ten cents out of Mildred Carpenter.”
She displayed the diminutive coin in her palm. Alice regarded it with a troubled frown.
“It makes me so sick,” went on Jeannette, “wheedling a dime out of a baby like that! I don’t believe it’s necessary, at least Mama ought to manage better. Just think of it! Borrowing money to buy a loaf of bread! ... We’ve come to a pretty state of things.”
“Aw—don’t, Janny,” Alice remonstrated; “you know how hard Mama tries and how people won’t pay their bills.... The Cheneys have owed eighty-six dollars for six months and it never occurs to them we need it so badly.”
“I’d go and get it, if I was Mama,” Jeannette said with determination, putting on her hat and bending her tall figure awkwardly to catch her reflection in a lower pane of the kitchen door. “I wouldn’t stand it. I’d call on old Paul G. Cheney at his office and tell him he’d have to pay up or find someone else to teach his children!”
“Oh, no, you wouldn’t, Janny!—You know that’d never do. Paul and Dorothy have been taking lessons off Mama for nearly three years. Mama’d lose all her pupils if she did things like that.”
“Well—” Jeannette drawled, suddenly weary of the discussion and opening the kitchen door into the hall, “I’m going down to Kratzmer’s.”
In the delicatessen store she was obliged to wait her turn. The shop was well filled with late customers, and the women especially seemed maddeningly dilatory to the impatient girl.
“An’ fifteen cents’ worth of ham ... an’ some of that chow-chow ... and a box of crackers....”
Jeannette studied the rows of salads, pots of baked beans, the pickled pig’s-feet, and sausages. Everything looked appetizing to her, and the place smelled fragrantly of fresh cold meat and creamy cheeses. Most of the edibles Kratzmer offered so invitingly, she had never tasted. She would have liked to begin at one end of the marble counter and sample everything that was on it. She looked curiously at the woman near her who had just purchased some weird-looking, pickled things called “mangoes,” and gone on selecting imported cheeses and little oval round cans with French and Italian labels upon them. Jeannette wondered if she, herself, would ever come to know a time when she could order of Kratzmer so prodigally. She was sick of the everlasting struggle at home of what they should get for lunch or dinner. It was always determined by the number of cents involved.
“Well, dearie,” her mother invariably remonstrated at some suggestion of her own, “that would cost thirty cents and perhaps it would be wiser to wait until next week.”
A swift, vague vision arose of the vital years that were close at hand,—the vital years in which she must marry and decide the course of her whole future life. Was her preparation for this all-important time ever to be beset by a consideration of pennies and makeshifts?
“Vell, Miss Sturgis, vat iss it to-night?”
Fat Mrs. Kratzmer smiled blandly at her over the glass shelf above the marble counter. Jeannette watched her as she deftly crackled thin paper about the two loaves, tied and snapped the pink string. Kratzmerand his wife were fat with big stomachs and round, double chins; even Elsa Kratzmer, their daughter, who went to the High School with Jeannette and Alice, was fat and had a double chin. The family had probably all they wanted to eat and a great deal more; there must be an enormous amount of food left on the platters and dishes and in the pans at the end of each day that would spoil before morning. Kratzmer, his wife and daughter must gormandize, stuff themselves night after night, Jeannette reflected as she began to climb the four long flights of stairs to her own apartment. It was disgusting, of course, to think of eating that way,—but oh, what a feast she and Alice would have if they might change places with the trio for a night or two!
As she reached the second landing, a thick smell of highly seasoned frying food assailed her. This was the floor on which the Armenians lived, and a pungent odor from their cooking frequently permeated the entire building. The front door of their apartment was open and as Jeannette was passing it, Dikron Najarian came out. He was a tall young man of twenty-three or-four, of extraordinary swarthy beauty, with black wavy masses of hair, and enormous dark eyes. He and his sister, Rosa,—she was a few years older and equally handsome,—often met the young Sturgis girls on the stairs or fumbling with the key to the mail-box in the entrance-way below. Jeannette and Alice used to giggle sillily after they had encountered Dikron, and would exchange ridiculous confidences concerning him. They regarded the young man as far too old to be interested in either of themselvesand therefore took his unusual beauty and odd, foreign manner as proper targets for their laughter.
Jeannette now instinctively straightened herself as she encountered her neighbor. Upon the instant a feminine challenge emanated from her.
“Hello,” Dikron said, taken unawares and obviously embarrassed. “Been out?”
For some obscure reason Jeannette did not understand, she elected at that moment to coquet. She had never given the young Armenian a serious thought before, but now she became aware of the effect their sudden encounter had had upon him. She paused on the lower step of the next flight and hung for a moment over the balustrade. Airily, she explained her errand to Kratzmer’s.
“What smells so good?” she asked presently.
She thought the odor abominable, but it did not suit her mood to say so.
“Mother’s cooking mussels to-night; they’re wonderful, stuffed with rice and peppers.... Have you ever tasted them? Could I send some upstairs?”
Jeannette laughed hastily, and shook her head.
“No—no,—thanks very much.... I’m afraid we wouldn’t....” She was going to say “appreciate them” but left the sentence unfinished. “I must go on up; Mother’s waiting for the bread.”
But she made no immediate move, and the young man continued to lean against the wall below her. Their conversation, however, died dismally at this point, and after a moment’s uncomfortable silence, the girl began nimbly to mount the stairs, flinging over her shoulder a somewhat abrupt “Good-night.”
“Get your bread, dearie?” Mrs. Sturgis asked cheerfully as Jeannette came panting into the kitchen and flung her package down upon the table. Her daughter did not answer but dropped into a chair to catch her breath.
Mrs. Sturgis was bustling about, pottering over the gas stove, stirring a saucepan of stewing kidneys, banging shut the oven door after a brief inspection of a browning custard. Alice had just finished setting the table in the dining-room, and now came in, to break the string about the bread and begin to slice it vigorously. Jeannette interestedly observed what they were to have for dinner. It was one of the same old combinations with which she was familiar, and a feeling of weary distaste welled up within her, but a glimpse of her mother’s face checked it.
Mrs. Sturgis invariably wore lace jabots during the day. These were high-collared affairs, reinforced with wires or whalebones, and they fastened firmly around the throat, the lace falling in rich, frothy cascades at the front. They were the only extravagance the hard-working little woman allowed herself, and she justified them on the ground that they were becoming and she must be presentable at the fashionable girls’ school where she was a teacher, and also at Signor Bellini’s studio where she was the paid accompanist. Jeannette and Alice were always mending or ironing these frills, and had become extremely expert at the work. There was a drawer in their mother’s bureau devoted exclusively to her jabots, and her daughters made it their business to see that one of these lacy adornments wasalways there, dainty and fresh, ready to be put on. Beneath the brave show of lace about her neck and over the round swell of her small compact bosom, there was only her “little old black” or “the Macy blue.” Mrs. Sturgis had no other garments and these two dresses were unrelievedly plain affairs with plain V-shaped necks and plain, untrimmed skirts. The jabots gave the effect of elegance she loved, and she had a habit of flicking the lacy ruffles as she talked, straightening them or tossing them with a careless finger. The final touch of adornment she allowed herself was two fine gold chains about her neck. From the longer was suspended her watch which she carried tucked into the waist-band of her skirt; while the other held her eye-glasses which, when not in use, hung on a hook at her shoulder.
The tight lace collars creased and wrinkled her throat, and made her cheeks bulge slightly over them, giving her face a round full expression. When she was excited and wagged her head, or when she laughed, her fat little cheeks shook like cups of jelly. But as soon as her last pupil had departed for the day, off came the gold chains and the jabot. She was more comfortable without the confining band about her neck though her real reason for laying her lacy ruffles aside was to keep them fresh and unrumpled. Stripped of her frills, her daughters were accustomed to see her in the early mornings, and evenings, with the homely V-shaped garment about her withered neck, her cheeks, lacking the support of the tight collar, sagging loosely. Habit was strong with Mrs. Sturgis. Jeannette and Alice were often amused at seeing their mother stillflicking and tossing with an unconscious finger an imaginary frill long after it had been laid aside.
Now as the little woman bent over the stove, her older daughter noted the pendant cheeks criss-crossed with tiny purplish veins, the blue-white wrinkled neck, and the vivid red spots beneath the ears left by the sharp points of wire in the high collar she had just unfastened. There were puffy pockets below her eyes, and even the eyelids were creased with a multitude of tiny wrinkles. Jeannette realized her mother was tired—unusually tired. She remembered, too, that it was Saturday, and on Saturday there were pupils all day long. The girl jumped to her feet, snatched the stirring spoon out of her mother’s hand and pushed her away from the range.
“Get out of here, Mama,” she directed vigorously. “Go in to the table and sit down. Alice and I will put dinner on.... Alice, make Mama go in there and sit down.”
Mrs. Sturgis laughingly protested but she allowed her younger daughter to lead her into the adjoining room where she sank down gratefully in her place at the table.
“Well, lovies, your old motherispretty tired....” She drew a long breath of contentment and closed her eyes.
The girls poured the kidney stew into an oval dish and carried it and the scalloped tomatoes to the table. There was a hurried running back and forth for a few minutes, and then Jeannette and Alice sat down, hunching their chairs up to the table, and began hungrily to eat. It was the most felicitous, unhurriedhour of their day usually, for mother and daughters unconsciously relaxed, their spirits rising with the warm food, and the agreeable companionship which to each was and always had been exquisitely dear.
The dining-room in the daytime was the pleasantest room in the apartment. It and the kitchen overlooked a shabby back-yard, adjoining other shabby back-yards far below, in the midst of which, during summer, a giant locust tree was magnificently in leaf. There were floods of sunshine all afternoon from September to April, and a brief but pleasing view of the Hudson River could be seen between the wall of the house next door and an encroaching cornice of a building on Columbus Avenue. At night there was little in the room to recommend it. The wall-paper was a hideous yellow with acanthus leaves of a more hideous and darker yellow flourishing symmetrically upon it. There was a marble mantelpiece over a fireplace, and in the aperture for the grate a black lacquered iron grilling. Over the table hung a gaselier from the center of which four arms radiated at right angles, supporting globes of milky glass.
Mrs. Sturgis’ bedroom adjoined the dining-room and was separated from it by bumping folding-doors, only opened on occasions when Jeannette and Alice decided their mother’s room needed a thorough cleaning and airing. The latter seemed necessary much oftener than the former for the room had only one small window which, tucked into the corner, gave upon a narrow light-well. It was from this well, which extended clear down to the basement, that the evil smells arose when the Najarians, two flights below, began cooking one of their Armenian feasts.
In the center of the apartment were two dark little chambers occupied by the girls. Neither possessed a window, but the wall separating them was pierced by an opening, fitted with a hinged light of frosted glass which, when hooked back to the ceiling, permitted the necessary ventilation. These boxlike little rooms had to be used as a passageway. The only hall was the public one outside, at one end of which was a back door giving access to the kitchen and the dining-room, and, opposite this, a front one, opening into the large, commodious sitting-room, or studio—as it was dignified by the family—in which Mrs. Sturgis gave her music lessons.
It was this generous front room, with its high ceiling, its big bay window, its alcove ideally proportioned to hold the old grand piano, which had intrigued the little music-teacher twelve years before, when she had moved into the neighborhood after her husband’s death and begun her struggle for a home and livelihood. Whether or not the prospective pupils would be willing to climb the four long flights of stairs necessary to reach this thoroughly satisfactory environment for the dissemination of musical instruction was a question which only time would answer. Mrs. Sturgis had confidently expected that they would and her expectations had been realized. The dollar an hour, which was all she charged, had appealed to the more calculating of their parents; moreover Henrietta Spaulding Sturgis was a pianist of no mean distinction. She was a graduate of the Boston Conservatory, was in charge of the music at Miss Loughborough’s Concentration School for Little Girls on Central Park West, and was the accompanist for Tomaso Bellini, a well-known instructorin voice culture who had a studio in Carnegie Hall. These facts the neighborhood inevitably learned, and that lessons at such a price could be had from a teacher so well equipped was confided by one shrewd mother to another. The stairs were ignored; a little climbing, if taken slowly, never hurtanychild!
But while year after year it became more and more advertised that bustling, round-faced, cheerful Mrs. Sturgisdidhave charge of the music at Miss Loughborough’s school on Tuesdays and Fridays of each week, anddidplay the accompaniments for the pupils of Signor Bellini at his Carnegie Hall studio on Mondays and Thursdays, no one suspected that sharp Miss Loughborough handed Mrs. Sturgis a check for only twenty-five dollars twice a month and that thrifty Signor Bellini paid but five dollars a day to his accompanist. Wednesdays and Saturdays were left for private lessons at a dollar an hour, and although Mrs. Sturgis could have filled other days of the week with pupils, Miss Loughborough and Signor Bellini represented an income that was certain, while nothing was more uncertain than the little pupils whose parents sent them regularly for a few months and then moved away or summarily discontinued the instruction often without explanation. Jeannette and Alice had urged their mother repeatedly to drop one or the other of her close-handed employers and take on more pupils, but to these entreaties Mrs. Sturgis had shaken her head with firm determination until her round little cheeks trembled.
“No—no, lovies; that may be all very well,—they may be underpaying me,—perhaps they are, but the money’ssureand that’s the comfort. It’s worth muchmore to me to knowthatthan to earn twice the amount.”
It was the dreary hot summers that Mrs. Sturgis and her daughters dreaded when Miss Loughborough’s school closed its doors and Signor Bellini made his annual pilgrimage to Italy, and the little pupils who had filled the Wednesday and Saturday lesson hours drifted away to the beaches or the mountains. July and August were empty, barren months and against their profitlessness some provision had to be made; a little must be put by during the year to take care of this lean and trying period. But somehow, although Mrs. Sturgis firmly determined at the beginning of each season that never again would she subject her girls to the self-denials, even privations, they had endured during the summer, every year it became harder and harder to save, while each summer brought fresh humiliations and a slimmer purse. Even in the most prosperous seasons the small family was in debt, always a little behind, never wholly caught up, and as time went on, it became evident that each year found them further and further in arrears. They were always harassed by annoying petty accounts. Miss Loughborough’s and Signor Bellini’s money paid the rent and the actual daily food, and when a parent took it into his or her head to send a check for a child’s music, the amount had to be proportioned here and there: so much to the druggist, the dentist and doctor; so much to the steam laundry; so much to the ice company and dairy; so much for gas and fuel.
Emerging from the chrysalis of girlhood, Jeannette and Alice were rapidly becoming young women, with a healthy, normal appetite for pretty clothes andamusement. These were simple enough and might so easily have been gratified, Mrs. Sturgis often sadly thought, if her income would keep but a lagging pace with modestly expanding needs. It required a few extra dollars only each year, but where could she lay her hands on them? When a business expanded and its earnings grew proportionately, an employee’s salary was sure to be raised after a time of faithful service. Mrs. Sturgis did not dare increase the rates she charged for her lessons. She felt she was facing a blank wall; she could conceive of no way whereby she might earn more. Skimping what went on the table was an old recourse to which she and her children were now thoroughly accustomed. She did not see how she could possibly cut down further and still keep her girls properly nourished.
She watched them affectionately now as they finished their dinner, observing her older daughter’s fastidious manipulation of her fork, the younger one’s birdlike way of twisting her small head as she ate. A fleeting wonder of what the future held in store for each passed through her mind. Jeannette was the more impetuous, and daring, was shrewd-minded, clear-thinking, efficient, was headstrong, and actuated ever by a suffering pride; she would undoubtedly grow into a tall, beautiful woman. Alice,—her mother’s “brown bird,”—seemed overshadowed by comparison and yet Mrs. Sturgis sometimes felt that Alice, with her simpler, unexacting, contented nature, her gentle faith, her meditative mind, was the morefortunate of the two. She, herself, turned to Jeannette for advice, for discussion of ways and means, and to Alice for sympathetic understanding and uncritical loyalty. They were both splendid girls, she mused fondly, who would make admirable wives. They must marry, of course; she had brought them up since they were tiny girls to consider a successful, happy marriage as their outstanding aim in life; she had trained them in the duties of wives, even of mothers, but she shuddered and her heart grew sick within her as she began dimly to perceive the time approaching when she must surrender their bloom and innocence and her complete proprietorship in them to some confident, ignorant young male who would unhesitatingly set up his half-baked judgment for his wife’s welfare against her hard-won knowledge of life. Yet both girls must marry; her heart was set on that. Marriage meant everything to a girl, and to the right husbands, her daughters would make ideal wives.
With the speed of long practice, the remains of the dinner were swept away and the kitchen set to rights. Both girls attempted to dissuade their mother from performing her customary dish-washing task, urging her that to-night she must rest. But Mrs. Sturgis would not listen; she was quite rested, she declared, and there was nothing to washing up the few dishes they had used; why, it wasn’t ten minutes’ work! She invariably insisted upon performing this dirtier, more vigorous task; Alice’s part was to wipe; Jeannette’s to clear the table, brush the cloth, put away the china and napkins, and replace the old square piece of chenille curtaining which had for years done duty as a table cover. Then there was the gas drop-light toset in its center, and connect with the gaselier above by a long tube ending in a curved brass nozzle that fitted over one of the burners. Where this joining occurred, there was always a slight escape of gas, and it frequently gave Mrs. Sturgis or her daughters a headache, but beyond an impatient comment from one of them, such as “Mercy me! the gas smells horribly to-night!” or “Open the window a little, dearie,—the gas is beginning to make my head ache,” nothing was ever done about it. It was one of those things in their lives to which they had grown accustomed and accepted along with the rest of the ills and goods of their days.
Mother and girls used the dining-room as the place to congregate, sew, read or idle. They rarely sat down or attempted to make themselves comfortable in the spacious front room. It was not nearly so agreeably intimate, and they felt it must always be kept in order for music lessons and for rare occasions when company came. “Company” usually turned out to be a pupil’s mother or a housemaid who came to explain that little Edna or Gracie had the mumps or was going to the dentist’s on Saturday and therefore would not be able to take her lesson, or a messenger from Signor Bellini to inquire if Mrs. Sturgis could play for one of his pupils the following evening. Such was the character of the callers, but the fiction of “company” was maintained.
The group Mrs. Sturgis and her daughters made about the dining-room table in the warm yellow radiance of the drop-light was intimately familiar and dear to each of them. There was always a certain amount of sewing going on,—mending or darning,—andhardly an evening passed without one or another industriously bending over her needle. Usually they were all three at it, for they made most of their own clothes. Each had her own particular side of the table and her own particular chair. They were extremely circumspect in the observance of one another’s preferences, and would apologize profusely if one happened to be found on the wrong side of the table or incorrectly seated. Mrs. Sturgis, on the rare occasions when she found herself with nothing particular to do, spread out a pack of cards before her and indulged in a meditative solitaire; Alice had always a novel in which she was absorbed. Generally three or four books were saved up in her room, and she considered herself dreadfully behind in her reading unless she had disposed of one of them as soon as she acquired another. Jeannette studied the fashions in the dress magazines and sometimes amused herself by drawing costume designs of her own.
But dressmaking occupied most of the evenings. There was usually a garment of some kind in process of manufacture, or a dress to be ripped to pieces and its materials used in new ways. Alice acted as model no matter for whom the work was intended. She had infinite patience and could stand indefinitely, sometimes with a bit of sewing in her hands, sometimes with a book propped before her on the mantel, indifferent and unconcerned, while her mother and sister crawled around her on the floor, pinning, pulling and draping the material about her young figure, or else sitting back on their heels and arguing with each other, while they eyed her with heads first on one side, then on the other.
To-night Jeannette was making herself a corset cover, Alice was struggling over a school essay on “Home Life of the Greeks in the Age of Pericles,” and Mrs. Sturgis was darning. They had not been more than half-an-hour at their work, when there was the sound of masculine feet mounting the stairs, a hesitating step in the hall, and a brief ring of the doorbell. They glanced at one another questioningly and Alice rose. Alice always answered the bell.
“If it’s old Bellini wanting you to-night....” Jeannette began in annoyance. But the man’s voice that reached them was no messenger’s; it was polite and friendly, and it was for Alice’s sister he inquired. Jeannette found Dikron Najarian in the front room. The young man was all bashful breathlessness.
“There’s an Armenian society here in New York, Miss Sturgis. My father was one of its organizers, has been a member for years. We’re having a dance to-night at Weidermann’s Hall on Amsterdam Avenue, and my cousin, Louisa, who was going with me, is ill; she has a bad toothache. I have her ticket and ... will you come in her place? Rosa’s going, of course, and ... tell your mother I’ll bring you home at twelve o’clock.”
It was said in an anxious rush, with hopeful eagerness. Jeannette, bewildered, went to consult her mother. Mrs. Sturgis hastily pinned one of her jabots around her neck and appeared to confront young Najarian in the studio. She listened to the invitation thoughtfully, her head cocked upon one side, her lips pursed in judicial fashion. Janny was still very young,she explained; she had never attended anything quite—quite so grown-up, she was used only to the parties her school friends sometimes asked her to, and Mrs. Sturgis was afraid....
Suddenly Jeannette wanted to go. She pinched her mother’s arm, and an impatient protest escaped her lips.
“Oh, please, Mrs. Sturgis....” pleaded the young man.
A rich contralto voice sounded from the hallway of the floor below. The door to the apartment had been left open and now they could see big handsome Rosa Najarian’s face through the banisters as she stood halfway up the stairs.
“Do let your daughter come, Mrs. Sturgis. They are all nice boys and girls. I will keep a sharp eye on her and bring her home to you safely.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Sturgis, “I just wanted to feel satisfied that everything was right and proper.”
There were some further words. Jeannette left her mother talking with Dikron and flew to the dining-room, to her sister.
“Quick, Alice dearie! Dikron Najarian’s asked me to a dance. I must fly! Help me get ready. He’s waiting.”
Instantly there was a scurry, a jerking open of bureau drawers, a general diving into crowded closets. The question immediately arose, what was Jeannette to wear? In a mad burst of extravagance, she had sent her dotted Swiss muslin to the laundry. There remained only her old “party” dress, which had been done over and over, lengthened and lengthened, until now the velvet was worn and shiny, the covering ofsome of the buttons was gone and showed the bright metal beneath, the ribbon about the waist was split in several places. Yet there was nothing else, and while the girl was hooking herself into it, Alice daubed the metal buttons with ink, and sewed folds of the ribbon over where it had begun to split. Jeannette borrowed stockings from her sister and wedged her feet into a pair of her mother’s pumps which were too small for her. Her black lusterless locks were happily becomingly arranged, and excitement brought a warm dull red to her olive-tinted cheeks. She was in gay spirits when Najarian called for her some fifteen minutes later, and went off with him chattering vivaciously.
Mrs. Sturgis stood for a moment in the open doorway of her apartment and listened to the descending feet upon the stairs, to the lessening sound of gay young voices. She assured herself she caught Rosa Najarian’s warmer accents as the older girl met her brother and Jeannette two flights below; she still bent her ear for the last sounds of the little party as it made its way down the final flight of stairs, paused for an interval in the lowest hallway, and banged the front door behind it with a dull reverberation and a shiver of glass. As the house grew still she waited a minute or two longer with compressed lips and a troubled frown, then shook her round little cheeks firmly, turned back into her own apartment, and without comment began to help Alice hang up Jeannette’s discarded clothing and set the disordered room to rights.
Jeannette found her mother sitting up for her when she returned a little after twelve. Mrs. Sturgis wasengaged in writing out bills for her lessons which she would mail on the last day of the month. The old canvas-covered ledger with its criss-crossed pages, its erasures and torn edges in which she kept her accounts was a familiar sight in her hands. She was forever turning its thumbed and ink-stained leaves, studying old and new entries, making half-finished calculations in the margins or blank spaces. She sat now in the unbecoming flannelette gown she wore at night, her thin hair in two skimpy pig-tails on either side of her neck, a tattered knitted shawl of a murderous red about her shoulders, and a comforter across her knees. In the yellow light of the hissing gas above her head, she appeared haggard and old, with dark pockets underneath her scant eyebrows and even gaunt hollows in the little cheeks that bulged plumply and bravely during the day above her tight lace collars.
“Well,—dear-ie!” Bright animation struggled into the mother’s face, and her voice at once was all eagerness and interest. “Did you have a good time? ... Tell me about it.”
Immediately she detected something was amiss. There was none of the gay exhilaration and youthful exuberance in her daughter’s manner, she had confidently expected. One searching glance into the glittering dark eyes, as the girl stooped to kiss her, told her Jeannette was fighting tears, struggling to control a burst of pent-up feeling.
“Why, dearie! What’s the matter? ... Tell me.”
“Oh——!” There was young fury in the exclamation. Jeannette flung herself into a chair and buried her face in her hands, plunging her finger-tips deep into her thick coils of black hair. For several minutesshe would not answer her mother’s anxious inquiries.
“Wasn’t Mr. Najarian nice to you? Didn’t he look after you? Didn’t you have a good time? Tell Mama,” Mrs. Sturgis persisted.
“Oh, yes,—he was very nice, ... yes, he took good care of me,—and Rosa did, too.”
“Then what is it, dearie? What happened? Mama wants to know.”
Jeannette drew a long breath and got brusquely to her feet.
“Oh, it’s this!” she burst out, striking the gown she wore with contemptuous fingers. “It’s these miserable things I have to wear! There wasn’t a girl there, to-night,—not even one,—that wasn’t better dressed. I was a laughing-stock among them! ... Oh, I know I was, I know I was! ... They all felt sorry for me: a poor little neighbor of Dikron Najarian’s on whom he had taken pity and whom he had asked to a dance! ... Oh! I can’t andwon’tstand it, Mama.”
Tears suddenly choked her but she fought them down and stilled her mother’s rush of expostulations.
“No—no, Mama! ... It’snobody’sfault. You work your fingers to the bone for Allie and me; you work from daylight till dark to keep us in school and in idleness. I’m not going to let you do it any longer.... No, Mama, I’m not going to let things go on as they are. I needed some experience like to-night’s to make me wake up.”
“What experience? Don’t talk so wild, baby.”
“Finding out for myself I was the shabbiest dressed girl in the room! There were a lot of other girls there,—reallynice girls. I didn’t expect it. I suppose I thought I wouldn’t find any American girls like myself at an Armenian dance. I don’t knowwhatI thought! ... But there were only a few like Rosa and Dikron, and all the other girls were beautifully dressed.”
Jeannette broke off and began to blink hard for self-control. Her mother, her face twisted with sympathy and distress, could only pat her hand and murmur soothingly over and over: “Dearie—my poor dearie—my dearie-girl——”
“I saw one old lady sizing me up,” Jeannette went on presently. “I could see right into her brain and I knew every thought she was thinking. She looked me over from my feet to my hair and from my hair to my feet. There wasn’t a thing wrong or right with me that that old cat missed! She didn’t mean it unkindly; she was merely interested in noting how shabby I was.... And Mama,—it was a revelation to me! I could just see ahead into the years that are coming, and I could see that that was to be my fate always wherever I went: to be shabbily dressed and be pitied.”
“Now—now, dearie,—don’t take on so. Mama will work hard; we’ll save——”
“But that’s just what I won’t have!” Jeannette interrupted passionately. “I’m not going to let you go on slaving for Allie and me, making yourself a drudge.... What’s it all for? Just so Allie and I can marry suitable rich young men! Isn’t that it? Ever since I can remember, I’ve heard you talk about our future husbands and what kind of men they are to be. You’ve been describing to us for years the time when we’ll be going to dances and theatres. Going, yes, but how?Dressed like this? Worn, shabby old clothes? To be pitied by other women? ... No, Mama, I won’t do it. I’d rather stay home with you for the rest of my life and grow up to be an old maid!”
“Oh, Janny, don’t talk so reckless. You take things so seriously, and you’re always imagining the worst side of everything. There are thousands of girls a great deal worse off than you. There are thousands of mothers and fathers and daughters in this city right this minute who are facing just this problem. It’s as old as the hills. But there’s always a way out,—a way that’s right and proper. Don’t let it trouble you, dearie; leave it to Mama; Mama’ll manage.”
“No, Mama, Iwon’tleave it to you! I’ve got eyes in my head and I see how hard you have to struggle. We’re always behind as it is,—pestered by bills and the tradespeople. Why, this very afternoon we didn’t have a cent in the house,—not even a copper,—and you had to borrow a dime from Mildred Carpenter to buy bread! Just think of it!We didn’t have money enough for bread!”
“But, dearie, I’ve got Miss Loughborough’s check in my purse.”
“Yes, and we owe ten times its amount! ... We’re running steadily behind. I don’t see anything better ahead. It’s going to be this way year after year, always falling a little more and a little more behind, until—until, well—until people won’t trust us any more.”
“Perhaps we could cut down a bit somewheres, Janny.”
“Oh, Mama, don’t talk nonsense! I’m going to work,—that’s all there is about it.”
“Jeannette! ... You can’t! ... You mustn’t!”
“Well, I am just the same. Rosa Najarian is a stenographer with the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and she gets eighteen dollars a week! ... Think of it, Mama! Eighteen dollars a week! She took a ten weeks’ course at the Gerard Commercial School and at the end of that time they got her a job. She didn’t have to wait a week! ... No, I’m not going to High School another day. To-morrow I’m going down to that Commercial School.”
“But, dearie—dearie! You don’t want to be a working girl!”
“You’re a working woman, aren’t you?”
“But, my dear, I had no other choice. I had my girls to bring up, and I’ve grubbed and slaved, as you say, just so my daughters would never have to take positions. I’ve worked hard to make ladies of you, dearie,—and no lady’s a shop-girl.... Oh, I couldn’t bear it! You and Allie shop-girls! ... Janny,—it wouldfinishme.”
“Well, Mama, you don’t feel so awfully about Rosa Najarian—do you? You consider Rosa a lady, don’t you?”
“She’s an Armenian, Jeannette, and I know nothing about Armenians. Besides she is notmydaughter. The kind of men I want for husbands to my girls will not be looking for their wives behind shop counters!”
“But, Mama, stenographers don’t work behind counters.”
“Oh, yes, they do.... Anyway it’s the same thing.”
Jeannette felt suddenly too tired to continue the discussion. Her mind began turning over the changesthe step she contemplated would occasion. Mrs. Sturgis’ fingers played a nervous tattoo upon her tremulous lips. She glanced apprehensively at her daughter and in that moment realized the girl would have her way.
“Oh, dearie, dearie!” she burst out. “I can’thaveyou go to work!”
Jeannette knew that no opposition from her mother would alter her purpose. Where her mind was made up, her mother invariably capitulated. It had been so for a long time, and Jeannette, at least, was aware of it. As she foresaw the full measure of her mother’s distress when she put her decision into effect, she came and knelt beside her chair, gathered the tired figure in its absurd flannelette nightgown in her arms and kissed the thin silky hair where it parted and showed the papery white skin of her scalp. Mrs. Sturgis bent her head against her daughter’s shoulder, while the tears trickled down her nose and fell upon the girl’s bare arm. Jeannette murmured consolingly but her mother refused to be comforted, indicating her disapproval by firm little shakes of her head which she managed now and then between watery sniffles.
There were finally many kisses between them and many loving assurances. The girl promised to do nothing without careful consideration, and they would all three discuss the proposition from every angle in the morning. When they had said a last good-night and the girl had gone to her room, Mrs. Sturgis still sat on under the hissing gas jet with the red, torn shawl about her shoulders, the comforter across her knees. The tears dried on her face, and for a longtime she stared fixedly before her, her lips moving unconsciously with her thoughts.
The little suite of rooms she had known so intimately for twelve long years grew still; the chill of the dead of night crept in; Jeannette’s light went out. Mrs. Sturgis reached for the canvas-covered ledger on the table beside her and began a rapid calculation of figures on its last page. For a long time she stared at the result, then rose deliberately, and went into her room. There she cautiously pulled an old trunk from the wall, unlocked its lid, raised a dilapidated tray, and knelt down. In the bottom was an oldpapier-machébox, battered and scratched, with rubbed corners. She opened this and began carefully to examine its contents. There was the old brooch pin Ralph had given her after the first concert they attended together, and there were her mother’s coral earrings and necklace, and the little silver buckles Jeannette had worn on her first baby shoes. There were some other trinkets: a stud, Ralph’s collapsible gold pencil, a French five-franc piece, a scarf-pin from whose setting the stone was missing. Tucked into a faded leather photograph case was a sheaf of folded pawn tickets. That was the way her rings had gone, and the diamond pin, Ralph’s jeweled cuff-links and the gold head of her father’s ebony cane. She picked up the pair of silver buckles and examined them in the palm of her hand; presently she added the gold brooch and the collapsible pencil before she put back the contents of the trunk and locked it. For some moments she stood in the center of her room gently jingling these ornaments together. Then her eye travelled to her bureau; slowly she approachedit, and one after another lifted the gold chains she wore during the day. These she disengaged from her eye-glasses and watch, and wrapped them with the buckles and the brooch in a bit of tissue paper pulled from a lower drawer. But still she did not seem satisfied. With the tissue-paper package in her hand, she sat on the edge of her bed, frowning thoughtfully, her fingers slowly tapping her lips. Presently a light came into her eyes. She lit a candle and stole softly through the girls’ rooms, into the great gaunt chamber that was the studio. In one corner was a bookcase, overflowing with old novels, magazines, and battered school-books. It was a higgledy-piggledy collection of years, a library without value save for five substantial volumes of Grove’s Musical Dictionary on a lower shelf. Mrs. Sturgis knelt before these, drew them out one by one, and laid them beside her on the floor. She opened the first volume and read the inscription: “To my ever patient, gentle Henrietta, for five trying years my devoted wife, true friend, and loving companion, from her grateful and affectionate husband, Ralph.” There was the date,—twelve years ago,—and he had died within six months after he had written those words. Her fingers moved to her trembling lips and she frowned darkly.
She closed the book, carried the five volumes to a shelf in a closet near at hand, and tucked them out of sight in a far corner. There was one last business to be performed: the books in the bookcase must be rearranged to fill the vacant place where the dictionary had stood. Mrs. Sturgis was not satisfied until her efforts seemed convincing. At last she picked up her wavering candle and made her way back to herown room. As she got into bed the old onyx clock on the mantel in the dining-room struck three blurred notes upon its tiny harsh gong. Only when darkness had shut down and the night was silent, did tears come to the tired eyes. There was then a blinding rush, and a few quick, strangling sobs. Mrs. Sturgis stifled these and wiped her eyes hardily upon a fold of the rough sheet. She steadied a trembling lip with a firm hand and resolutely turned upon her side to compose herself for sleep.