CHAPTER XVII
Theguests were eating away at the fruit cup with a relish. It was delicious, Joyce knew, for she had tasted it when it was finished. She was hot and thirsty and she longed for some of it now, but there was none left. She had filled the glasses as full as possible. She heard one of the guests say how delicious it was, and the hostess reply in her languid drawl that it wasn’t what it ought to be, that she had a new maid, and she was sure she didn’t know whether they were to have anything fit to eat or not. She was brand-new, and green, and what was worse, she wasliterary. “Fancy, Clement,” and the lady turned to the tall man with the deep, growling voice and her laugh rang out, “fancy, she wants me to recommend her to you as a teacher in the High School! Isn’t that the limit?”
Joyce was just coming in to take the glasses and replace them with the bouillon cups filled with a delicious concoction that came out of that mixture of bones and meats and vegetables with the addition of a bit of tomato, onion, celery top and parsley, and she stopped short in the pantry with flaming cheeks and quick tears in her eyes, and then stepped hastily back into the kitchen and paused in dismay. What should she do? How could she face that tableful of hateful people with their laughter still upon their lips?
There before her stood the kitchen door wide open to a garden and a path that led around the house to thegate. She could walk out and leave this impossible woman to her fate. Let her get up and serve her own guests, and wash her own dishes afterwards and keep her own ten dollar bill, yes, and her school positions too. There were other people in the world—and the tears rolled down her hot, angry cheeks.
“Surely He shall deliver thee,—Surely—Surely—”
It rang in her ears like a voice, a reminder.
“Yes, I know—” said her tired heart. She mustn’t get into the habit of walking out back doors when she didn’t like things. She really mustn’t. “Dear Jesus, please give me strength, courage—” She dashed the tears away and splashed cold water on her hot cheeks, then in answer to the third ringing of the buzzer appeared in the diningroom as if nothing had happened and quietly removed the glasses from the table.
In her pretty little blue dress with her white collar and apron she looked a slender vision as she entered with her tray and was conscious at once that every eye was fixed upon her, whereupon her cheeks flamed the rosier, but she kept her eyes down upon her work and managed to get through the door with her heavy tray of glasses without breaking down.
“Jove!” she heard the gruff voice say. “She looks as if she could teach if she wanted to.”
“Yes, yes,” chimed in the falsetto, “quite pretty for a kitchen-maid, I should say.”
“Quite too pretty, I should say,” said the cool voice of the lady guest, like a sharp, dividing steel, significant, insulting.
Joyce trembled as she heard Mrs. Powers respond in her affected drawl:
“Yas, I thought so myself. But what could I do? I’d have had to get dinner myself—”
“Well, she seems to know how to cook,” growled Mr. Powers. By this time his soup was steaming at his place and he was regarding it with interest.
Joyce caught his glance fixed pleasantly upon her as she went about placing the soup, and took heart. Perhaps all hope of a chance through Mr. Powers was not lost after all.
“Surely He shall deliver thee. Surely—” The words kept ringing as she went back and forth from kitchen to diningroom, dreading each encounter more than the last.
As the meal progressed it became evident that all were enjoying it and the men at least were loud in their praises of each new dish as it arrived.
“Well, I say. These peas taste as if they had just been picked,” said the guest, and his host replied:
“Say, Anne, these sweet potatoes beat anything we ever had. Get her to stay if you can. Pay her fifty dollars a week if you want to, only get her to stay!”
Mrs. Powers turned a languid smile of disgust on her woman guest and answered scornfully:
“Now, isn’t that just like a man? Candied sweet potatoes and a pretty face! That’s all they think about. I wish you’d see how she left the kitchen floor! And she hadplentyof time to clean it up before she began to get dinner.”
“Well, if you ask me,” said her husband heartily, “I’d say cleaning kitchen floors wasn’t her job.”
All these things she heard in stage whispers that were not intended for her ears, as she went back and forth bringing dishes and serving new courses.
At the salad even the ladies waxed a little kindly, but when the ice cream came on and with it the two great luscious cakes there was loud applause from the gentlemen, and it was evident that if a position in high school depended upon making good cake Joyce had won it. She hastily placed the last coffee-cup and retired precipitately from the diningroom, afraid that after all she was going to break down and cry. She was so tired!
But cry she wouldn’t. She had one more thing yet to do before anybody had a chance to come out in that kitchen. She would scrub that kitchen floor if it took the last bit of force she had left in her body.
So she closed the pantry and kitchen doors, donned her gingham apron again, and got down upon her knees with hot water, soap, and scrubbing-brush, and a great drying cloth she had found in the laundry. Such a scrubbing as that inlaid linoleum had it never had had before and never would likely have again!
She laid a newspaper down by the sink to keep it clean when she was done, and then straightened herself up and rested for a moment, wondering if the ache would ever go out of her back and knees again. It wasn’t just the scrubbing the floor, nor the working hard to get dinner; it was the culmination of the days since she had left home.
But she must not take time to think how tired shewas. There were the dishes yet to wash, and the table to clear. All those dishes! How long the evening looked ahead! They were rising from the table at last and she must hurry with the dishes already there and get them out of the way.
So she went at the dish-pan again, her fingers flying as though she had just begun after a good night’s rest. And one by one, dozen by dozen, those dishes were marshaled again into shining freshness, and the table cleared.
She had just decided that she would slip out the back door and let Mrs. Powers send her the ten dollars when she got ready, when she heard the pantry door open and Mrs. Powers stood in it, surveying her coldly, a crisp ten dollar bill in her hand.
“Oh, you’re going! I was going to ask you to wipe up this floor before you left—”
She paused and glanced down at the shining floor, from which Joyce had just removed the newspapers. She seemed a trifle flustered.
“Oh, you’ve done it. Well, that’s all right. I never feel that a girl has finished until she has cleaned her kitchen.”
She handed out the money and Joyce took it as though it had been a hot coal that she wasn’t sure but she wanted to throw out the back door. Of course she had earned it, earned it hard, but it went against every grain in her body to take it. She felt humiliated and dragged in the dust.
“Surely He shall deliver thee!”
She drew a long breath. It was almost over. She was free to go at last.
“I was going to tell you,” went on the lady as Joyce rolled up her apron preparatory to leaving, “I’m giving a little dinner tomorrow and I shall want you again. You might come over about ten. We don’t get up before that, and then you can clear away the breakfast things. We have dinner about five on Sundays. My husband says the day is so long if we don’t have a good many meals. I’m calling up my butcher to get some chickens. Of course he’s closed, but he always serves me after time if necessary. He knows he has to or lose my trade. I think we’ll have some more of those biscuits, and—”
Joyce suddenly broke into the monologue:
“Mrs. Powers, excuse me, but it isn’t necessary for you to finish. I couldn’t possibly come.”
“You couldn’t possibly come? I’d like to know why not? I suppose you have some date or other with some young man—I might have known a pretty girl would be troublesome—”
“Stop!” said Joyce, her voice trembling, and just then above the wild beating of her angry young heart she heard the words:
“Surely He shall deliver thee—”
It steadied her so that she was able to control the flashing of her eyes and to speak quietly, albeit with a trifle of hauteur in her steady voice.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Powers. You have no right to speak to me in that way. I have no young men friends nor any others in this vicinity and no dates with any one, but I do not work on Sunday. I don’t think it’s right. I was brought up to work only six days in the week.”
“For mercy’s sake!” sneered the woman, “and soyou refuse to help a person out in a tight place? What possible wrong could that be? We have to eat, don’t we?”
“We don’t have to have dinner parties,” said Joyce quietly.
“Well, I think you’re impertinent,” said the lady angrily. “It is none of your business when I have dinner parties. I suppose it’s more pay you want, and I think that’s extortion, but of course seeing you’ve washed the kitchen floor and seeing I can’t very well get any one else I suppose I’ll have to pay it. What do you want for your valuable services?”
“Nothing, Mrs. Powers. I am not going to work. If you were sick or in trouble or starving I’d be glad to help you out, but I shouldn’t accept pay. I am not working on Sunday.”
“Well, I’ll pay you fifteen dollars for the day if you’ll come. That’s outrageous but I’ll pay it because I have to. And if you’ll come early enough in the morning to get breakfast I’ll make it twenty. Come, that’s about as high as any girl could ask.”
“It is impossible for me to accept at any price for Sunday service, Mrs. Powers.”
Joyce had retreated toward the door and picked up her bundle.
“I don’t see how you can possibly expect me to use my influence to get you a school when you act like that,” said the angry woman as a last resort. “I shall tell my husband how unaccommodating and impertinent you have been. You are not a fit person to set over young people. And if you refuse my request I shall take pains to see that you get no position in our schools. As forall this nonsense about working on Sunday, don’t you know, my poor girl, that all that belongs to a bygone day? The Sabbath was made for man, and not to be long-faced in. I am in a far better position than you to know what is right and what is wrong, and I tell you that it is perfectly all right for you to help a person out when they have company, and at the same time help yourself out, and I’ve offered you very liberal wages. I’m perfectly willing also to see that you get a place to teach if you prove to be at all fitted for it, provided you go out of your way to help me.”
Joyce looked at the woman steadily.
“Mrs. Powers, I would rather never have a position to teach than purchase it at the price of doing something I think is wrong. Besides, I couldn’t help hearing what you said about me at the dinner table, and I’ve no expectation of your using your influence to help me in any way. In fact, I think I’d rather you wouldn’t. Good night, Mrs. Powers.”
She was actually gone, out the back door, through the moonlit garden, out the little back gate, and down the street, before Mrs. Powers recovered and realized that she had lost her.
“She won’t come,” she announced, going back to the living room, where her guests and her husband were awaiting her return to the game of cards in which they had been engaged, “and she actually had the nerve to try to preach a sermon to me about having dinner parties on Sunday. Did you ever? Aren’t help the limit these days? I suppose it made her mad for me to ask her to scrub the bath room floor. She’s quite inclined to be above herstation. But isn’t it ridiculous? Now I’ll have to get Martha Allen to cook the dinner and she can’t begin to make mayonnaise like this girl.”
“I thought you told me she wasn’t help,” said her husband. “You said she was a school-teacher.”
“Oh, well—” said the wife indolently, “you know what a school-teacher is that has to go out to work to make a living. Just as soon as I knew she would come I set her down where she belonged, and made up my mind if she was any good I’d get her permanently.”
“Well, that’s a laudable ambition. Coax a girl to come and help you as a favor, and then try to keep her down to the station you’ve put her in! I must say I admire a girl who is willing to cook when she hasn’t anything else to do, and especially when she knows how to cook like that. I believe I’ll look into her case. If she applies for a job in the school I’ll vote for her. I like a girl with ambition and without notions, and I’ll bet she earned her money today.”
“Now, Hatfield, that’s just like you,” complained Mrs. Hatfield Powers. “I take the trouble to tell you what a good-for-nothing girl she is and then you go and vote for her just for sheer stubbornness. Just to oppose me. Just to show you how wrong you are about money, I paid herten dollarstoday for getting that little bit of dinner, and I went so far as to offer her double that if she would come early enough to get breakfast and stay all day tomorrow!” She looked around the room in triumph amid the admiring exclamations of her guests.
“Well, I still say she earned her money,” said her husband.
Joyce Radway let herself into her little dark room, locked her door, tossed her hat on the box table, flung herself on the heap of newspapers in the corner and burst into heart-breaking sobs.
By and by her tears were spent and she grew quieter, and above the tumult of her soul a still small voice seemed saying over the words softly to her troubled heart:
“The Eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the Everlasting Arms.”
How wonderful that that should come to her now!
Once, a long time ago, when she was a little girl and was learning verses with her mother and her aunt, they had told her that these verses they were teaching her were to be stored up for a time of need, and that when any distress came, if they were safely in her heart and memory, they would come out to comfort her or show her the way out of a difficult situation. She had not thought much about it then, but now that all came back. She was in trouble and comfortless, and the verses were coming like a troop of strong angels to comfort and guide her and help her through temptation—to show her that God was not a God afar off, but was nigh to each one of us, even in our hearts. So, comforted, she fell asleep.
And the next day was the Sabbath.