Through that long, wet spring Nance did her ten hours a day, six days in the week and on the seventh washed her clothes and mended them. Her breaking in was a hard one, for she was as quick of tongue as she was of fingers, and her tirades against the monotony, the high speed, and the small pay were frequent and vehement. Every other week when Dan was on the night shift, she made up her mind definitely that she would stand it no longer.
But on the alternate weeks when she never failed to find him waiting at the gas-pipe to take her home, she thought better of it. She loved to slip in under his big cotton umbrella, when the nights were rainy, and hold to his elbow as he shouldered a way for her through the crowd; she liked to be a part of that endless procession of bobbing umbrellas that flowed down the long, wet, glistening street; best of all she liked the distinction of having a "steady" and the envious glances it brought her from the other girls.
Sometimes when they paused at a shop window, she caught her reflection in a mirror, and smiled approval at the bright face under the red tam. She wondered constantly if Dan thought she was pretty and always came to the conclusion that he did not.
From the time they left the factory until they saw the towering bulk of the cathedral against the dusk, Nance's chatter never ceased. She dramatized her experiences at the factory; she gave a lively account of the doings of the Snawdor family; she wove tales of mystery around old Mr. Demry. She had the rare gift of enhancing every passing moment with something of importance and interest.
Dan listened with the flattering homage a slow, taciturn nature often pays a quick, vivacious one. It was only when problems concerning the factory were touched upon that his tongue lost its stiffness. Under an unswerving loyalty to his employers was growing a discontent with certain existing conditions. The bad lighting system, the lack of ventilation, the employment of children under age, were subjects that rendered him eloquent. That cruel month spent in the reformatory had branded him so deeply that he was supersensitive to the wrongs of others, and spent much of his time in planning ways and means to better conditions.
"Don't you ever want a good time, Dan?" Nance asked. "Don't you ever want to sort of let go and do something reckless?"
"No; but I'll tell you what I do want. I want a' education. I've a good mind to go to night school and try to pick up some of the things I didn't get a chance to learn when I was a kid."
Nance scoffed the idea; school was almost invisible to her from the giddy height of sixteen. "Let's go on a bat," she urged. "Let's go out and see something."
So on the four following Sundays Dan took her to see the library, the reservoir, the city hall, and the jail. His ideas of recreation had not been cultivated.
The time in the week to which she always looked forward was Saturday afternoon. Then they got out early, and if the weather was fine, they would stop in Post-Office Square and, sitting on one of the iron benches, watch the passing throng. There was something thrilling in the jostling crowds, and the electric signs flashing out one by one down the long gay thoroughfare.
Post-Office Square, at the end of the day, was always littered with papers and trash. In its center was a battered, weather kiosk, and facing it, was a huge electric advertisement which indulged in the glittering generality, that "You get what you pay for."
It was not a place to inspire romance, yet every Saturday its benches were crowded with boys and girls who had no place to visit except on the street.
Through the long spring dusks, with their tender skies and silver stars, Nance and Dan kept company, unconcerned with the past or the future, wholly content with the May-time of the present. At a word or touch from Dan, Nance's inflammable nature would have taken fire but Dan, under Mrs. Purdy's influence, was passing through an acute stage of religious conversion, and all desires of the flesh were sternly repressed by that new creed to which he was making such heroic efforts to conform. With the zeal of a new convert, he considered it his duty to guard his small companion against all love-making, including his own.
Nance at an early age had developed a protective code that even without Dan's forbidding looks and constant surveillance might have served its purpose. Despite the high spirits and free speech that brought her so many admiring glances from the boys in the factory, it was soon understood that the "Molloy kid" was not to be trifled with.
"Say, little Sister, I like your looks," Bean had said to her one morning when they were alone in the hall. "It's more than I do yours," Nance had answered coolly, with a critical glance at his pimply nose.
As summer came on, the work, which at first was so difficult, gradually became automatic, and while her shoulders always ached, and her feet were always tired, she ceased for the most part to think of them. It was the confinement that told upon her, and when the long bright days came, and she thought of Forest Home and its woods and streams, her restlessness increased. The stifling finishing room, the endless complaints of the girls, and the everlasting crunching of glass under foot were at times almost unendurable.
One day when the blue of the sky could not be dimmed even by factory smoke, and the air was full of enticement, Nance slipped out at the noon hour, and, watching her chance, darted across the factory yard out through the stables, to the road beyond. A decrepit old elm-tree, which had evidently made heroic effort to keep tryst with the spring, was the one touch of green in an otherwise barren landscape. Scrambling up the bank, Nance flung herself on the ground beneath its branches, and between the bites of a dry sandwich, proceeded to give vent to some of her surplus vitality.
"Arra, come in, Barney McKane, out of the rain," she sang at the top of her voice.
"And sit down until the moon comes out again,Sure a cup of tay I'll brew, just enough for me and you,We'll snuggle up together, and we'll talk about the weather,Do you hear? Barney dear, there's a queerSort of feelin' round me heart, that gives me pain,And I think the likes o' me could learn to like the likes o' ye,Arra, come in, Barney McKane, out of the rain!"
So absorbed was she in trying operatic effects that she did not notice an approaching automobile until it came to a stop in the road below.
"Hi there, Sembrich!" commanded a fresh young voice, the owner of which emphasized his salute with his horn, "are you one of the factory kids?"
Nance rose to a sitting posture.
"What's it to you?" she asked, instantly on the defensive.
"I want to know if Mr. Clarke's come in. Have you seen him?"
"No, indeed," said Nance, to whom Mr. Clarke was as vague as the Deity; then she added good-naturedly, "I'll go find out if you want me to."
The young man shut off his engine and, transferring two struggling pigeons from his left hand to his right, dismounted.
"Never mind," he said. "I'll go myself. Road's too rotten to take the machine in." Then he hesitated, "I say, will you hold these confounded birds 'til I come back? Won't be gone a minute. Just want to speak to the governor."
Nance scrambled down the bank and accepted the fluttering charges, then watched with liveliest interest the buoyant figure in the light suit go swinging up the road. There was something tantalizingly familiar in his quick, imperious manner and his brown, irresponsible eyes. In her first confusion of mind she thought he must be the prince come to life out of Mr. Demry's old fairy tale. Then she caught her breath.
"I believe it's that Clarke boy!" she thought, with rising excitement, "I wonder if he'd remember the fight? I wonder if he'd remember me?"
She went over to the automobile and ran her fingers over the silver initials on the door.
"M.D.C," she repeated. "Itishim! It is!"
In the excitement of her discovery she relaxed her grasp on the pigeons, and one of them escaped. In vain she whistled and coaxed; it hopped about in the tree overhead and then soared away to larger freedom.
Nance was aghast at the catastrophe. She did not wait for the owner's return, but rushed headlong down the road to meet him.
"I let one of 'em go!" she cried in consternation, as he vaulted the fence and came toward her. "I wouldn't 'a' done it for anything in the world. But I'll pay you for it, a little each week. Honest I will!"
The handsome boyish face above her clouded instantly.
"You let it go?" he repeated furiously. "You little fool you! How did you do it?"
Nance looked at him for a moment; then she deliberately lifted the other pigeon as high as she could reach and opened her hand.
"Like that!" she cried.
Mac Clarke watched his second bird wheel into space; then his amazed glance dropped to the slim figure of the young girl in her short gingham dress, with the sunlight shining on her hair and on her bright, defiant eyes.
"You've got your nerve!" he said with a short laugh; then he climbed into his car and, with several backward glances of mingled anger and amusement, drove away.
Nance related the incident with great gusto to Dan that night on the way home.
"He never recognized me, but I knew him right off. Same old Smart Aleck, calling people names."
"I was up in the office when he come in," said Dan. "He'd been held up for speeding and wanted his father to pay his fine."'
"Did he do it?"
"Of course. Mac always gets what he wants. He told Bean he wasn't going to stay at that school in Virginia if he had to make 'em expel him. Sure enough they did. Wouldn't I like to have his chance though!"
"I don't blame him for not wanting to go to school," said Nance. Then she added absently, "Say, he's got to be a awful swell-looker, hasn't he?"
That night, for the first time, she objected to stopping inPost-Office Square.
"It ain't any fun to hang around there," she said impatiently. "I'm sick of doing tame things all the time."
The next time Nance saw Mac Clarke was toward the close of the summer. Through the long sweltering hours of an interminable August morning she had filed and chipped bottles with an accuracy and speed that no longer gave cause for criticism. The months of confinement were beginning to tell upon her; her bright color was gone, and she no longer had the energy at the noon hour to go down the road to the elm-tree. She wanted above all things to stretch out at full length and rest her back and relax all those tense muscles that were so reluctantly learning to hold one position for hours at a time.
At the noon hour she had the unexpected diversion of a visit from Birdie Smelts. Birdie had achieved her cherished ambition of going on the stage, and was now a chorus girl in the "Rag Time Follies." Meager news of her had reached the alley from time to time, but nobody was prepared for the very pretty and sophisticated young person who condescended to accept board and lodging from her humble parents during the interval between her engagements. Nance was genuinely glad to see her and especially gratified by the impression her white coat-suit and black picture hat made on the finishing room.
"It must be grand to be on the stage," said Gert enviously.
"Well, it's living," said Birdie, airily. "That's more than you can claim for this rotten grind."
She put a high-heeled, white-shod foot on the window ledge to adjust its bow, and every eye in the room followed the process.
"I bet I make more money in a week," she continued dramatically, "than you all make in a month. And look at your hands! Why, they couldn't pay me enough to have my hands scarred up like that!"
"It ain't my hands that's worryin' me," said another girl. "It's my feet. Say, the destruction on your shoes is somethin' fierce! You orter see this here room some nights at closin' time; it's that thick with glass you don't know where to step."
"I'd know," said Birdie. "I'd step down and out, and don't you forget it."
Nance had been following the conversation in troubled silence.
"I don't mind the work so awful much," she said restlessly. "What gets me is never having any fun. I haven't danced a step since I left Forest Home, Birdie."
"You'd get your fill of it if you was with me," Birdie said importantly."Seven nights a week and two matinées."
"'Twouldn't be any too much for me," said Nance. "I could dance in my sleep."
Birdie was sitting in the window now, ostensibly examining her full red lips in a pocket-mirror, but in reality watching the factory yard below.
"There goes your whistle!" she said, getting up suddenly. "Say, Nance, can't you scare up an excuse to hook off this afternoon? I'll take you to a show if you will!"
Nance's pulses leapt at the thought, but she shook her head and went reluctantly back to her bench. For the next ten minutes her fingers lagged at their task, and she grew more and more discontented. All the youth in her clamored suddenly for freedom. She was tired of being the slave of a whistle, a cog in a machine. With a sudden rash impulse she threw down her tools and, slipping her hat from its peg, went in swift pursuit of Birdie.
At the foot of the narrow stairs she came to a sudden halt. Outside the door, in the niche made by the gas-pipe and the adjoining wall, stood Mac Clarke and Birdie. He had his arms about her, and there was a look in his face that Nance had never seen in a man's face before. Of course it was meant for the insolent eyes under the picture hat, but instead it fell on Nance standing in the doorway. For a full minute his ardent gaze held her captive; then he dropped his arms in sudden embarrassment, and she melted out of the doorway and fled noiselessly up the stairway.
On the upper landing she suffered a head-on collision with the foreman, who demanded in no gentle tones what in the devil she was doing out there with her hat on at that hour.
"None of your business," said Nance, recklessly.
Bean looked at her flashing eyes and flushed face, and laughed. She was the youngest girl in the factory and the only one who was not afraid of him.
"See here," he said, "I am going to kiss you or fire you. Which'll you have?"
Nance dodged his outstretched hand and reached the top step.
"You won't do neither!" she cried fiercely. "You can't fire me, because I fired myself ten minutes ago, and I wouldn't kiss you to stay in heaven, let alone a damned old bottle factory!"
It was the Nance of the slums who spoke—the Nance whose small bare fists had fought the world too long for the knuckles to be tender. She had drifted a long way from the carefully acquired refinements of Forest Home, but its influence, like a dragging anchor, still sought to hold her against the oncoming gales of life.
When one has a famishing thirst for happiness, one is apt to gulp down diversions wherever they are offered. The necessity of draining the dregs of life before the wine is savored does not cultivate a discriminating taste. Nance saw in Birdie Smelts her one chance of escape from the deadly monotony of life, and she seized it with both hands. Birdie might not be approved of her seniors, but she was a disturbingly important person to her juniors. To them it seemed nothing short of genius for a girl, born as they were in the sordid environs of Calvary Alley, to side-step school and factory and soar away into the paradise of stage-land. When such an authority gives counsel, it is not to be ignored. Birdie's advice had been to quit the factory, and Nance had taken the plunge without any idea of what she was going to put in its place.
For some reason best known to herself, she never mentioned that episode in the factory yard to either Birdie or Dan Lewis. There were many things about Birdie that she did not like, and she knew only too well what Miss Stanley would have said. But then Miss Stanley wouldn't have approved of Mr. Demry and his dope, or Mrs. Snawdor and her beer, or Mag Gist, with her loud voice and coarse jokes. When one lives in Calvary Alley, one has to compromise; it is seldom the best or the next best one can afford, even in friends.
When Mrs. Snawdor heard that Nance had quit work, she was furious. Who was Nance Molloy, she wanted to know, to go and stick up her nose at a glass factory? There wasn't a bloomin' thing the matter with Clarke's.She'dbegun in a factory an' look at her! What was Nance a-goin' to do? Run the streets with Birdie Smelts? It was bad enough, God knew, to have Snawdor settin' around like a tombstone, an' Fidy a-havin' a fit if you so much as looked at her, without havin' Nance eatin' 'em out of house an' home an' not bringin' in a copper cent. If she stayed at home, she'd have to do the work; that was all there was to it!
"Anybody'd think jobs happened around as regerlar as the rent man," she ended bitterly. "You'll see the day when you're glad enough to go back to the factory."
Before the month was over, Nance began to wonder if Mrs. Snawdor was right. With unabating zeal she tramped the streets, answering advertisements, applying at stores, visiting agencies. But despite the fact that she unblushingly recommended herself in the highest terms, nobody seemed to trust so young and inexperienced an applicant.
Meanwhile Birdie Smelts's thrilling prospect of joining her company at an early date threw other people's sordid possibilities into the shade. Every night she practised gymnastics and dance steps, and there being no room in the Smelts' flat, she got into the habit of coming up to Nance's room.
One of the conditions upon which Nance had been permitted to return toCalvary Alley, was that she should not sleep in the same bed with FidyYager, a condition which enraged Mrs. Snawdor more than all the rest.
"Annybody'd think Fidy's fits was ketchin'," she complained indignantly to Uncle Jed.
"That there front room of mine ain't doin' anybody no good," suggestedUncle Jed. "We might let Nance have that."
So to Nance's great joy she was given a big room all to herself. The slat bed, the iron wash-stand, the broken-legged chair, and the wavy mirror were the only articles that Mrs. Snawdor was willing to part with, but Uncle Jed donated a battered stove, which despite its rust-eaten top and sagging door, still proclaimed itself a "Little Jewel".
No bride, adorning her first abode, ever arranged her possessions with more enthusiasm than did Nance. She scrubbed the rough floor, washed the windows, and polished the "Little Jewel" until it shone. The first money she could save out of her factory earnings had gone to settle that four-year-old debt to Mr. Lavinski for the white slippers; the next went for bedclothes and cheese-cloth window curtains. Her ambition was no longer for the chintz hangings and gold-framed fruit pieces of Mrs. Purdy's cottage, but looked instead toward the immaculate and austere bedroom of Miss Stanley, with its "Melodonna" over the bed and a box of blooming plants on the window-sill.
Such an ideal of classic simplicity was foredoomed to failure. Mrs. Snawdor, like nature, abhorred a vacuum. An additional room to her was a sluice in the dyke, and before long discarded pots and pans, disabled furniture, the children's dilapidated toys, and, finally, the children themselves were allowed to overflow into Nance's room. In vain Nance got up at daybreak to make things tidy before going to work. At night when she returned, the washing would be hung in her room to dry, or the twins would be playing circus in the middle of her cherished bed.
"It's lots harder when you know how things ought to be, than when you just go on living in the mess, and don't know the difference," she complained bitterly to Birdie.
"I've had my fill of it," said Birdie, "I kiss my hand to the alley for good this time. What do you reckon the fellers would think of me if they knew I hung out in a hole like this?"
"Does he know?" asked Nance in an unguarded moment.
"Who?"
"Mac Clarke."
Birdie shot a glance of swift suspicion at her.
"What's he got to do with me?" she asked coldly.
"Ain't he one of your fellers?"
"Well, if he is, it ain't anybody's business but mine." Then evidently repenting her harshness, she added, "I got tickets to a dance-hall up-town to-night. I'll take you along if you want to look on. You wouldn't catch me dancing with any of those roughnecks."
Nance found looking on an agonizing business. Not that she wanted to dance with the roughnecks any more than Birdie did. Their common experience at Forest Home had given them certain standards of speech and manner that lifted them just enough above their kind to be scornful. But to sit against the wall watching other people dance was nothing short of agony to one of Nance's temperament.
"Come on and have a try with me, Birdie," she implored. "I'll pay the dime." And Birdie, with professional disdain, condescended to circle the room with her a few times.
That first dance was to Nance what the taste of blood is to a young tiger. For days after she could think of nothing else.
"Never you mind," Birdie promised her. "When I get back on the road, I'm going to see what I can do for you. Somebody's always falling out of the chorus, and if you keep up this practising with me, you'll be dancing as good as any of 'em. Ask old man Demry; he played in the orchestra last time we was at the Gaiety."
But when Nance threw out a few cautious remarks to Mr. Demry, she met with prompt discouragement:
"No, no, my dear child," he said uneasily. "You must put that idea out of your head. The chorus is no place for a nice girl."
"That's what Dan says about the factory, and what Mrs. Snawdor says about housework, and what somebody says about everything I start to do. Looks like being a nice girl don't pay!"
Mr. Demry took her petulant little chin in his thin old hand, and turned her face up to his.
"Nancy," he said, "these old eyes have seen a good deal over the fiddle strings. I would rather see you go back to the glass factory, bad as it is, than to go into the chorus."
"But I do dance as good as some of the girls, don't I, Mr. Demry?" she teased, and Mr. Demry, whose pride in an old pupil was considerable, had to acknowledge that she did.
Uncle Jed's attitude was scarcely more encouraging.
"No; I wouldn't be willin' to see you a playactor," he said, "walkin' round in skin tights, with your face all painted up."
Nance knew before asking that Dan would disapprove, but she couldn't resist mentioning the matter to him.
"That Birdie Smelts has been putting notions in your head," he said sternly. "I wish you'd quit runnin' with girls older than you. Besides, Birdie ain't your kind."
"I'd like to know why?" Nance challenged him in instant loyalty to her friend. "Besides, who else have I got to run with? Maybe you think it ain't stupid drudging around home all day and never having a cent to call my own. I want to get out and do something."
Dan looked down at her in troubled silence.
"Mrs. Purdy's always asking me why I don't bring you to some of the meetings at the church. They have real nice socials."
"I don't want to pray and sing silly old hymns!" cried Nance. "I want to dance."
"I don't believe in dancing," said Dan, firmly; then with a side-glance at her unhappy face, he added, "I can't take you to the swimming school, because they don't allow girls, but I might take you to the new skating-rink some Saturday."
In an instant Nance was all enthusiasm.
"Will you, Dan? I'm just crazy about skating. We used to do it out at the home. You ought to see Birdie and me do a Dutch roll. Say, let's take her along. What do you say?"
Dan was not at all in favor of it, but Nance insisted.
"I think we ought to be nice to Birdie on account of Mr. Smelts' stiff leg. Not that it ever did him any good when it was limber, but I always feel mean when I see it sticking out straight when he sits down."
This was a bit of feminine wile on Nance's part, and it had the desired effect. Dan, always vulnerable when his sympathy was roused, reluctantly included Birdie in the invitation.
On the Saturday night appointed, the three of them set out for the skating rink. Dan, with his neck rigid in a high collar and his hair plastered close to his head, stalked somberly beside the two girls, who walked arm in arm and giggled immoderately at each other's witticisms.
"Wake up, Daniel!" said Birdie, giving his hat a tilt. "We engaged you for a escort, not a pallbearer."
The rink was in an old armory, and the musicians sat at one end of the room on a raised platform under two drooping flags. It was dusty and noisy, and the crowd was promiscuous, but to Nance it was Elysium. When she and Birdie, with Dan between them, began to circle the big room to the rhythm of music, her joy was complete.
"Hullo! Dan Lewis is carrying two," she heard some one say as they circled past the entrance. Glancing back, she saw it was one of the boys from the factory. A sudden impulse seized her to stop and explain the matter to him, but instead she followed quite a contrary purpose and detaching herself from her companions, struck out boldly for herself.
Before she had been on the floor ten minutes people began to watch her. Her plain, neat dress setting off her trim figure, and her severe, black sailor hat above the shining bands of fair hair, were in sharp contrast to the soiled finery and draggled plumes of the other girls. But it was not entirely her appearance that attracted attention. It was a certain independent verve, a high-headed indifference, that made her reject even the attentions of the rink-master, a superior person boasting a pompadour and a turquoise ring.
No one could have guessed that behind that nonchalant air Nance was hiding a new and profoundly disturbing emotion. The sight of Birdie, clinging in affected terror to Dan Lewis, filled her with rage. Couldn't Dan see that Birdie was pretending? Didn't he know that she could skate by herself quite as well as he could? Never once during the evening did Dan make his escape, and never once did Nance go to his rescue.
When they were taking off their skates to go home, Birdie whispered to her:
"I believe I got old slow-coach going. Watch me make him smoke up for a treat!"
"No, you sha'n't," Nance said. "Dan's spent enough on us for one night."
"Another quarter won't break him," said Birdie. "I'm as dry as a piece of chalk."
Ten minutes later she landed the little party in a drug store and entered into a spirited discussion with the soda-water boy as to the comparative merits of sundry new drinks.
"Me for a cabaret fizz," she said. "What'll you have, Nance?"
"Nothing," said Nance, sullenly, turning and taking up her stand at the door.
"What do you want, Dan?" persisted Birdie, adding, with a mischievous wink at the white-coated clerk, "Give him a ginger ale; he needs stimulating."
While Birdie talked for the benefit of the clerk, and Dan sat beside her, sipping his distasteful ginger, Nance stood at the door and watched the people pouring out of the Gaiety Theater next door. Ordinarily the bright evening wraps, the glimpses of sparkling jewels, the gay confusion of the scene would have excited her liveliest interest, but to-night she was too busy hating Birdie Smelts to think of anything else. What right had she to monopolize Dan like that and order him about and laugh at him? What right had she to take his arm when they walked, or put her hand on his shoulder as she was doing this minute?
Suddenly Nance started and leaned forward. Out there in the crowded street a tall, middle-aged man, with grizzled hair and mustache, was somewhat imperiously making way for a pretty, delicate-looking lady enveloped in white furs, and behind them, looking very handsome and immaculate in his evening clothes, walked Mac Clarke.
Nance's eager eyes followed the group to the curbing; she saw the young man glance at her with a puzzled expression; then, as he stood aside to allow the lady to enter the motor, he looked again. For the fraction of a second their eyes held each other; then an expression of amused recognition sprang into his face, and Nance met it instantly with a flash of her white teeth.
The next instant the limousine swallowed him; a door slammed, and the car moved away. But Nance, utterly forgetful of her recent discomfort, still stood in the door of the drug store, tingling with excitement as she watched a little red light until it lost itself in the other moving lights on the broad thoroughfare.
Early in the autumn Birdie took flight from the alley, and Nance found herself hopelessly engulfed in domestic affairs. Mr. Snawdor, who had been doing the work during her long absence, took advantage of her return to have malarial fever. He had been trying to have it for months, but could never find the leisure hour in which to indulge in the preliminary chill. Once having tasted the joys of invalidism he was loathe to forego them, and insisted upon being regarded as a chronic convalescent. Nance might have managed Mr. Snawdor, however, had it not been for the grave problem of Fidy Yager.
"Ike Lavinski says she ought to be in a hospital some place," she urged Mrs. Snawdor. "He says she never is going to be any better. He says it's epilepsy."
"Wel he ain't tellin' me anything' I don't know," said Mrs. Snawdor, "butI ain't goin' to put her away, not if she th'ows a fit a minute!"
It was not maternal solicitude alone that prompted this declaration. The State allowed seventy-live dollars a year to parents of epileptic children, and Mrs. Snawdor had found Fidy a valuable asset. Just what her being kept at home cost the other children was never reckoned.
"Well, I'll take care of her on one condition," stipulated Nance. "You got to keep Lobelia at school. It ain't fair for her to have to stay home to nurse Fidy."
"Well, if she goes to school, she's got to work at night. You was doin' your two hours at Lavinski's long before you was her age."
"I don't care if I was. Lobelia ain't strong like me. I tell you she ain't goin' to do home finishing, not while I'm here."
"Well, somebody's got to do it," said Mrs. Snawdor. "You can settle it between you."
Nance held out until the middle of January; then in desperation she went back to the Lavinskis. The rooms looked just as she had left them, and the whirring machines seemed never to have stopped. The acrid smell of hot cloth still mingled with the odor of pickled herrings, and Mr. Lavinski still came and went with his huge bundles of clothes.
Nance no longer sewed on buttons. She was promoted to a place under the swinging lamp where she was expected to make an old decrepit sewing-machine forget its ailments and run the same race it had run in the days of its youth. As she took her seat on the first night, she looked up curiously. A new sound coming regularly from the inner room made her pause.
"Is that a type-writer?" she asked incredulously.
Mr. Lavinski, pushing his derby from his shining brow, smiled proudly.
"Dat's vat it is," he said. "My Ike, he's got a scholarship offen de high school. He's vorking his vay through de medical college now. He'll be a big doctor some day. He vill cure my Leah."
Nance's ambition took fire at the thought of that type-writer. It appealed to her far more than the sewing-machine.
"Say, Ike," she said at her first opportunity, "I wish you'd teach me how to work it."
"What'll you give me?" asked Ike, gravely. He had grown into a tall, thin youth, with the spectacled eyes and stooped shoulders of a student.
"Want me to wash the dishes for your mother?" Nance suggested eagerly. "I could do it nights before I begin sewing."
"Very well," Ike agreed loftily. "We'll begin next Sunday morning at nine o'clock. Mind you are on time!"
Knowledge to Ike was sacred, and the imparting of it almost a religious rite. He frowned down all flippancy on the part of his new pupil, and demanded of her the same diligence and perseverance he exacted of himself. He not only taught her to manipulate the type-writer, but put her through an elementary course of stenography as well.
"Certainly you can learn it," he said sternly at her first sign of discouragement. "I got that far in my second lesson. Haven't you got any brains?"
Nance by this time was not at all sure she had, but she was not going to let Ike know it. Stung by his smug superiority, she often sat up far into the night, wrestling with the arbitrary signs until Uncle Jed, seeing her light under the door, would pound on the wall for her to go to bed.
She saw little of Dan Lewis these days. The weather no longer permitted them to meet in Post-Office Square, and conditions even less inviting kept them from trying to see each other in Snawdor's kitchen. Sometimes she would wait at the corner for him to come home, but this had its disadvantages, for there was always a crowd of loafers hanging about Slap Jack's, and now that Nance was too old to stick out her tongue and call names, she found her power of repartee seriously interfered with.
"I ain't coming up here to meet you any more," she declared to Dan on one of these occasions. "I don't see why we can't go to Gorman's Chili Parlor of an evening and set down and talk to each other, right."
"Gorman's ain't a nice place," insisted Dan. "I wish you'd come on up to some of the church meetings with me. I could take you lots of times if you'd go."
But Nance refused persistently to be inveigled into the religious fold. The very names of Epworth League, and prayer meeting made her draw a long face.
"You don't care whether we see each other or not!" she accusedDan, hotly.
"I do," he said earnestly, "but it seems like I never have time for anything. The work at the factory gets heavier all the time. But I'm getting on, Nance; they give me another raise last month."
"Everybody's getting on," cried Nance bitterly, "but me! You and Ike andBirdie! I work just as hard as you all do, and I haven't got a bloomingthing to show for it. What I make sewing pants don't pay for what I eat.Sometimes I think I'll have to go back to the finishing room."
"Not if I can help it!" said Dan, emphatically. "There must be decent jobs somewhere for girls. Suppose I take you out to Mrs. Purdy's on Sunday, and see if she knows of anything. She's all the time asking me about you."
The proposition met with little enthusiasm on Nance's part. It was Mrs. Purdy who had got Dan into the church and persuaded him not to go to the theater or learn how to dance. It was Mrs. Purdy who took him home with her to dinner every Sunday after church and absorbed the time that used to be hers. But the need for a job was too pressing for Nance to harbor prejudices. Instead of sewing for the Lavinskis that night, she sewed for herself, trying to achieve a costume from the old finery bequeathed her by Birdie Smelts.
You would scarcely have recognized Dan that next Sunday in his best suit, with his hair plastered down, and a very red tie encircling a very high collar. To be sure Dan's best was over a year old, and the brown-striped shirt-front was not what it seemed, but his skin was clean and clear, and there was a look in his earnest eyes that bespoke an untroubled conscience.
Mrs. Purdy received them in her cozy fire-lit sitting-room and made Nance sit beside her on the sofa, while she held her hand and looked with mild surprise at her flaring hat and cheap lace collar.
"Dan didn't tell me," she said, "how big you had grown or—or how pretty."
Nance blushed and smiled and glanced consciously at Dan. She had felt dubious about her costume, but now that she was reassured, she began to imitate Birdie's tone and manner as she explained to Mrs. Purdy the object of her visit.
"Deary me!" said Mrs. Purdy, "Dan's quite right. We can't allow a nice little girl like you to work in a glass factory! We must find some nice genteel place for you. Let me see."
In order to see Mrs. Purdy shut her eyes, and the next moment she opened them and announced that she had the very thing.
"It's Cousin Lucretia Bobinet!" she beamed. "She is looking for a companion."
"What's that?" asked Nance.
"Some one to wait on her and read to her and amuse her. She's quite advanced in years and deaf and, I'm afraid, just a little peculiar."
"I'm awful good at taking care of sick people," said Nance complacently.
"Cousin Lucretia isn't ill. She's the most wonderfully preserved woman for her years. But her maid, that she's had for so long, is getting old too. Why, Susan must be seventy. She can't see to read any more, and she makes mistakes over cards. By the way, I wonder if you know how to play card games."
"Sure," said Nance. "Poker? seven-up?"
"Isn't there another game called penuchle?" Mrs. Purdy ventured, evidently treading unfamiliar ground.
"Yes!" cried Nance. "That's Uncle Jed's game. We used to play it heaps before Rosy cut up the queens for paper dolls."
"Now isn't it too wonderful that you should happen to know that particular game?" said Mrs. Purdy, with the gentle amazement of one who sees the finger of Providence in everything. "Not that I approve of playing cards, but Cousin Lucretia was always a bit worldly minded, and playing penuchle seems to be the chief diversion of her declining years. How old are you, my child?"
"I'm seventeen. And I ain't a bit afraid of work, am I, Dan?"
"I am sure you are not," said Mrs. Purdy. "Dan often tells me what a fine girl you are. Only we wish you would come to some of our services. Dan is getting to be one of our star members. So conscientious and regular! We call him our model young man."
"I expect it's time we was going," said Dan, greatly embarrassed. But owing to the fact that he wanted very much to be a gentleman, and didn't quite know how, he stayed on and on, until Nance informed him it was eleven o'clock.
At the door Mrs. Purdy gave final instructions about the new position, adding in an undertone:
"It might be just as well, dearie, for you to wear a plainer dress when you apply for the place, and I believe—in fact I am quite sure—Cousin Lucretia would rather you left off the ear-rings."
"Ain't ear-rings stylish?" asked Nance, feeling that she had been misinformed.
"Not on a little companion," said Mrs. Purdy gently.
Nance's elation over the prospect of a job was slightly dashed by the idea of returning to the wornout childish garb in which she had left the home.
"Say, Dan," she said, as they made their way out of Butternut Lane, "do you think I've changed so much—like Mrs. Purdy said?"
"You always look just the same to me," Dan said, as he helped her on with her coat and adjusted the collar with gentle, painstaking deference.
She sighed. The remark to a person who ardently desired to look different was crushing.
"I think Mrs. Purdy's an awful old fogey!" she said petulantly by way of venting her pique.
Dan looked at her in surprise, and the scowl that rarely came now darkened his face.
"Mrs. Purdy is the best Christian that ever lived," he said shortly.
"Well, she ain't going to be a Christian offen me!" said Nance.
The next morning, in a clean, faded print, and a thin jacket, much too small for her, Nance went forth to find Miss Lucretia Bobinet in Cemetery Street. It was a staid, elderly street, full of staid, elderly houses, and at its far end were visible the tall white shafts which gave it its name. At the number corresponding to that on Nance's card, she rang the bell. The door was opened by a squinting person who held one hand behind her ear and with the other grasped the door knob as if she feared it might be stolen.
"Who do you want to see?" she wheezed.
"Miss Bobinet."
"Who?"
"Miss Bobinet!" said Nance, lifting her voice.
"Stop that hollering at me!" said the old woman. "Who sent you here?"
"Mrs. Purdy."
"What for?"
Nance explained her mission at the top of her voice and was grudgingly admitted into the hall.
"You ain't going to suit her. I can tell you that," said the squint-eyed one mournfully, "but I guess you might as well go in and wait until she wakes up. Mind you don't bump into things."
Nance felt her way into the room indicated and cautiously let herself down into the nearest chair. Sitting facing her was an imposing old lady, with eyes closed and mouth open, making the most alarming noises in her throat. She began with a guttural inhalation that increased in ferocity until it broke in a violent snort, then trailed away in a prolonged and somewhat plaintive whistle. Nance watched her with amazement. It seemed that each recurrent snort must surely send the old wrinkled head, with its elaborately crimped gray wig, rolling away under the stiff horse-hair sofa.
The room was almost dark, but the light that managed to creep in showed a gloomy black mantelpiece, with vases of immortelles, and somber walnut chairs with crocheted tidies that made little white patches here and there in the dusk. Everything smelled of camphor, and from one of the corners came the slow, solemn tick of a clock.
After Nance had recovered from her suspense about Miss Bobinet's head, and had taken sufficient note of the vocal gymnastics to be able to reproduce them later for the amusement of the Snawdors, she began to experience great difficulty in keeping still. First one foot went to sleep, then the other. The minutes stretched to an hour. She had hurried off that morning without her breakfast, leaving everything at sixes and sevens, and she wanted to get back and clean up before Mrs. Snawdor got up. She stirred restlessly, and her chair creaked.
The old lady opened one eye and regarded her suspiciously.
"I am Nance Molloy," ventured the applicant, hopefully. "Mrs.Purdy sent me."
Miss Bobinet gazed at her in stony silence, then slowly closed her eye, and took up her snore exactly where she had left it off. This took place three times before she succeeded in getting her other eye open and becoming aware of Nance's presence.
"Well, well," she asked testily, in a dry cracked voice, "what are you sitting there staring at me for?"
Nance repeated her formula several times before she remembered that Miss Bobinet was deaf; then she got up and shouted it close to the old lady's ear.
"Lida Purdy's a fool," said Miss Bobinet, crossly. "What do I want with a chit of a girl like you?"
"She thought I could wait on you," screamed Nance, "and read to you and play penuchle." The only word that got past the grizzled fringe that bordered Miss Bobinet's shriveled ear was the last one.
"Penuchle?" she repeated. "Can you play penuchle?"
Nance nodded.
"Get the table," ordered the old lady, peremptorily.
Nance tried to explain that she had not come to stay, that she would go home, and get her things and return in the afternoon, but Miss Bobinet would brook no delay. Without inviting Nance to remove her hat and jacket, she ordered her to lift the shade, sit down, and deal the cards.
They were still playing when the squinting person hobbled in with a luncheon tray, and Miss Bobinet promptly transferred her attention from royal marriages to oyster stew.
"Have her come back at three," she directed Susan; then seeing Nance's eyes rest on the well filled tray, she added impatiently, "Didn't I tell you to stop staring? Any one would think you were watching the animals feed in the zoo."
Nance fled abashed. The sight of the steaming soup, the tempting bird, and dainty salad had made her forget her manners.
"I reckon I'm engaged," she said to Mrs. Snawdor, when she reached home and had cut herself a slice of dry bread to eat with the warmed-over coffee. "She never said what the pay was to be, but she said to come back."
"What does she look like?" asked Mrs. Snawdor, curiously.
"A horse," said Nance. "And she's deaf as anything. If I stay with her, she'll have to get her an ear-trumpet or a new wig before the month's out. I swallow a curl every time I speak to her."
"Well," said Mrs. Snawdor, "companions ain't in my line, but I got sense enough to know that when a woman's so mean she's got to pay somebody to keep her company, the job ain't no cinch."
Nance's new duties, compared with those at the bottle factory, and the sweat-shop seemed, at first, mere child's play. She arrived at eight o'clock, helped Susan in the basement kitchen, until Miss Bobinet awoke, then went aloft to officiate at the elaborate process of that lady's toilet. For twenty years Susan had been chief priestess at this ceremony, but her increasing deafness infuriated her mistress to such an extent that Nance was initiated into the mysteries. The temperature of the bath, the choice of underclothing, the method of procedure were matters of the utmost significance, and the slightest mistake on the part of the assistant brought about a scene. Miss Bobinet would shriek at Susan, and Susan would shriek back; then both would indulge in scathing criticism of the other in an undertone to Nance.
The final rite was the most critical of all. Miss Bobinet would sit before her dresser with a towel about her neck, and take a long breath, holding it in her puffed-out cheeks, while rice powder was dusted over the corrugated surface of her face. She held the theory that this opened the pores of the skin and allowed them to absorb the powder. The sight of the old lady puffed up like a balloon was always too much for Nance, and when she laughed, Miss Bobinet was obliged to let her breath go in a sharp reprimand, and the performance had to start all over again.
"You laugh too much anyhow," she complained irritably.
When the toilet and breakfast were over, there followed two whole hours of pinochle. Nance came to regard the queen of spades and the jack of diamonds with personal animosity. Whatever possible interest she might have taken was destroyed by the fact that Miss Bobinet insisted upon winning two out of every three games. It soon became evident that while she would not cheat on her own behalf, she expected her opponent to cheat for her. So Nance dutifully slipped her trump cards back in the deck and forgot to declare while she idly watched the flash of diamonds on the wrinkled yellow hands, and longed for the clock to strike the next hour.
At lunch she sat in the kitchen opposite Susan and listened to a recital of that melancholy person's woes. Susan and her mistress, being mutually dependent, had endured each other's exclusive society for close upon twenty years. The result was that each found the other the most stimulating of all subjects of conversation. When Nance was not listening to tirades against Susan up-stairs, she was listening to bitter complaints against Miss Bobinet down-stairs.
In the afternoon she was expected to read at the top of her voice from "The Church Guide," until Miss Bobinet got sleepy; then it was her duty to sit motionless in the stuffy, camphor-laden room, listening to an endless succession of vocal gymnastics until what time the old lady saw fit to wake up.
If Nance had been a provident young person, she might have improved those idle hours during that interminable winter by continuing her study of stenography. But, instead, she crouched on the floor by the window, holding her active young body motionless, while her thoughts like distracted imprisoned things flew round their solid walls of facts, frantically seeking some loophole of escape. Day after day she crouched there, peeping out under the lowered shade with hungry eyes. The dreary street below offered no diversion; sometimes a funeral procession dragged its way past, but for the most part there was nothing to see save an occasional delivery wagon or a staid pedestrian.
She was at that critical time of transition between the romance of childhood, when she had become vaguely aware of the desire of the spirit, and the romance of youth, when she was to know to the full the desires of the flesh. It was a period of sudden, intense moods, followed by spells of languor. Something new and strange and incommunicable was fermenting within her, and nothing was being done to direct those mysterious forces. She was affectionate, with no outlet for her affection; romantic, with nothing for romance to feed upon.
The one resource lay in the bookcase that rose above the old-fashioned secretary in Miss Bobinet's front hall. She had discovered it on the day of her arrival and, choosing a volume at random, had become so engrossed in the doings of one of Ouida's heroes, that she had failed to hear Miss Bobinet's call. From that time on she was forbidden to take any books away from the bookcase, an order which she got around by standing beside it and eagerly devouring bits at a time.
The monotony of the days she might have endured if there had been any relief at the close of them. But when she returned home there was always endless work to be done. Her four years' absence at Forest Home had separated her from the young people she had known, and she had had no time to make new friends. The young bar-keeper at Slap Jack's, who always watched for her to pass in the morning, the good-looking delivery boy who sometimes brought parcels to Cemetery Street, the various youths with whom she carried on casual flirtations on her way to and from work, were her nearest approach to friends.
Dan, to be sure, still came for her every Saturday afternoon, but Cemetery Street was across the city from Clarke's, and their time together was short. Nance lived for these brief interviews, and then came away from them more restless and dissatisfied than before. Dan didn't look or talk or act like the heroes in the novels she was reading. He never "rained fervent kisses on her pale brow," or told her that she was "the day-star of his secret dreams." Instead he talked of eight-hour laws, and minimum wage, and his numerous church activities. He was sleeping at Mrs. Purdy's now, looking after the place while she was away with her brother, and Nance was jealous of his new interests and new opportunities.
As the long weeks stretched into long months, her restlessness grew into rebellion. So this was the kind of job, she told herself bitterly, that nice girls were supposed to hold. This was what Miss Stanley and Mrs. Purdy and Mr. Demry approved. But they were old. They had forgotten. Dan Lewis wasn't old. Why couldn't he understand? What right had he to insist upon her sticking it out when he knew how lonesome and unhappy she was? Dan didn't care, that was the trouble; he thought more of his old church and the factory than he thought of her.
She remembered, with sudden understanding, what red-haired Gert had said in the finishing room; some people weren't content with a good job; they had to have a good time with it. She told herself that she was one of these; she wanted to be good and do what was expected of her; she wanted fervently to please Dan Lewis, but she couldn't go on like this, she couldn't, she couldn't!
And yet she did. With a certain dogged commonsense, she stayed at her post, suppressing herself in a thousand ways, stifling her laughter, smothering the song on her lips, trying to make her prancing feet keep pace with the feeble steps of age. She lived through each day on the meager hope that something would happen at the end of it, that elusive "something" that always waits around the corner for youth, with adventure in one hand and happiness in the other and limitless promise in its shining eyes.
Almost a year crawled by before her hope was realized. Then one Tuesday morning as she was coming to work, she spied a bill poster announcing the appearance of the "Rag-Time Follies." Rows upon rows of saucy girls in crimson tights and gauzy wings smiled down upon her, smiled and seemed to beckon.
Since Birdie's departure from the alley, eighteen months ago, Nance had heard no word of her. Long ago she had given up the hope of escape in that direction. But the knowledge that she was in the city and the possibility of seeing her, wakened all manner of vague hopes and exciting possibilities.
Whatever happened Nance must see the play! She must be on hand to-morrow night when the curtain went up; perhaps she could wait outside for Birdie, and speak to her after the performance!
If only Dan would take her, and they could sit together and share the fun! But the very thought of Dan in connection with those frisky girls made her smile. No; if she went, she would have to go alone.
The all-important question now was how to get the ticket. Miss Bobinet could never be induced to advance a penny on the week's wages, and Susan, while ready to accept financial favors, was adamant when it came to extending them.
By six o'clock Nance had exhausted every resource but one. On her way home she visited a small shop which was all too familiar to the residents of Calvary Alley. When she emerged, the beloved locket, which usually dangled on the velvet ribbon around her neck, was no longer there, but tied in the corner of her handkerchief was a much desired silver coin.
In high spirits she rushed home only to be confronted on the threshold by a serious domestic complication. Mrs. Snawdor, with her hat on, was standing by the bed in the dark inside room that used to be Nance's, futilely applying a mustard plaster to whatever portion of Fidy's anatomy happened to be exposed.
"How long has she been like this?" cried Nance, flinging her jacket off and putting the tea kettle on the stove.
"Lord knows," said Mrs. Snawdor in a tone that implied a conspiracy on the part of poor Fidy and her Maker to interfere with her plans. "When I come in ten minutes ago, she was tryin' to eat the sheet."
"Didn't you give her the medicine the doctor left last time?"
"There ain't a drop left. Mr. Snawdor took every bit of it."
"Where's the bottle? We must get it filled."
"What's the use? It ain't no good. I was handlin' Fidy's fits before that there young dispensary doctor was out of knee pants. Besides I ain't got fifty cents in the house."
Nance stood for a moment irresolute. She looked at the writhing figure on the bed; then she snatched up her hat and jacket.
"Quick! Where's the bottle?" she cried. "I got the money."
But after the medicine had been bought, and Fidy had grown quiet under its influence, Nance went across the hall to her own cold, barren room and flung herself across her narrow bed. The last chance of seeing the play had vanished. The only light of hope that had shone on her horizon for months had gone out.
When she got up, cold and miserable, and lighted the gas, she saw on the floor, where it had evidently been slipped under the door, a mysterious pink envelope. Tearing it open, she found, written in a large, loose scrawl:
"Dear Nance. We have just struck town. Reckon you thought I was a quitter, but I ain't. You be at the Gaiety to-morrow morning at nine A.M. Maybe I can land you something. Don't say a word to anybody about it, and make yourself look as pretty as you can, and don't be late. Don't tell my folks I'm here. I got a room down-town.
"Bye bye,"B.S."
Nance's breath caught in her throat. The bubble was so radiant, so fragile, so unbelievable, that she was afraid to stir for fear of breaking it. She waited until she heard Mrs. Snawdor's heavy feet descending the stairs, and then she crept across the hall and sat on the side of Fidy's bed, waiting to give her the next dose of medicine. Her eyes were fixed on the bare lathes over the headboard where she had once knocked the plaster off tacking up a tomato-can label. But she did not see the hole or the wall. Calvary Alley and Cemetery Street had ceased to exist for her. She was already transported to a region of warmth and gaiety and song. All that was ugly and old and sordid lay behind her, and she told herself, with a little sob of joy, that at last the beautiful something for which she had waited so long was about to happen.