The charming, laughing, pretty days in the shelter of the studio of her friend had passed into this nightmare of the Sixth Avenue noise, where all seemed ugly, cruel and sinister. Life in America was not the charming kindly thing Sunny had supposed. Beauty indeed she had brought in her heart with her, and that, though she knew it not, was why she had seen only the beautiful; but now, even for her, it had all changed. She had looked into faces full of hatred and malice; she had listened to words that whipped worse than the lash of Hirata.
As she went along that noisy, crowded avenue, there came, like a breath of spring, a poignant lovely memory of the home she had left. Like a vision, the girl saw wide spaces, little blue houses with pink roofs and the lower floor open to the refreshing breezesof the spring. For it was springtime in Japan just as it was in New York, and Sunny knew that the trees would be freighted with a glorified frost of pink and white blossoms. The wistaria vines would hang in purple glory to peer at their faces in the crystal pools. The fluttering sleeves of the happy picnickers threading through lanes of long slender bamboos. The lotus in the ponds would soon open their white fingers to the sun. Rosy cheeked children would laugh at Sunny and pelt her with flower petals, and she would call back to them, and toss her fragrant petals back.
It was strange as she went along that dirty way that her mind escaped from what was before and on all sides of her, and went out across the sea. She saw no longer the passing throngs. In imagination the girl from Japan looked up a hill slope on which a temple shone. Its peaks were twisted and the tower of the pagoda seemed ablaze with gold. Countless steps led upward to the pagoda, but midway of the steps there was a classic Torrii, in which was a small shrine. Here on a pedestal, smiling down upon the kneeling penitents, Kuonnon, the Goddess of Mercy, stood. To Her now, in the streets of the American City, the girl of Japan sent out her petition.
"Oh, Kuonnon, sweet Lady of Mercy, permit the spirit of my honourable mother to walk with me through these dark and noisy streets."
The shining Goddess of Mercy, trailing her robes among the million stars in the heavens above, surely heard that tiny petition, for certain it is that something warm and comforting swept over the breast of the tired Sunny. We know that faith will "remove mountains." Sunny's faith in her mother's spirit caused her to feel assured that it walked by her side. The Japanese believe that we can think our dead alive, and if we are pure and worthy, we may indeed recall them.
It came to pass, that after many hours, during which she walked from 67th Street to 125th, and from the west to the east side of that avenue, that she stopped before a brightly lighted window, within which cakes and confections were enticingly displayed, and from the cellar of which warm odours of cooking were wafted to the famished girl. Sunny's youth and buoyant health responded to that claim. Her feet, in the unaccustomed American shoes—in Japan she had worn only sandals and clogs—were sore and extremely weary from the long walk, and a sense of intense exhaustionadded to that pang of emptiness within.
By the baker's window, therefore, on the dingy Third Avenue of the upper east side, leaned Sunny, staring in hungrily at the food so near and yet so far away. She asked herself in her quaint way:
"What I are now to do? My honourable insides are ask for food."
She answered her own question at once.
"I will ask the advice of first person I meet. He will tell me."
The streets were in a semi-deserted condition, such as follows after the home-going throngs have been tucked away into their respective abodes. There was a cessation of traffic, only the passing of the trains overhead breaking the hush of early night that comes even in the City of New York. It was now fifteen minutes to nine, and Sunny had had nothing to eat since her scant breakfast.
Kuonnon, her mother's spirit, providence—call it what we may—suffered it that the first person whom Sunny was destined to meet should be Katy Clarry, a product of the teeming east side, a shop girl by trade. She was crossing the street, with her few small packages, revealing her pitiful night marketing atadjacent small shops, when Sunny accosted her.
"Aexcuse me. I lig' ask you question, please," said Sunny with timid politeness.
"Uh-h-h?"
Miss Clarry, her grey, clear eye sweeping the face of Sunny in one comprehensive glance that took her "number," stopped short at the curb, and waited for the question.
"I are hungry," said Sunny simply, "and I have no money and no house in which to sleep these night. What I can do?"
"Gee!" Katy's grey eyes flew wider. The girl before her seemed as far from being a beggar as anyone the east side girl had ever seen. Something in the wistful, lovely face looking at her in the dark street tightened that cord that was all mother in the breast of Katy Clarry. After a moment:
"Are you stone broke then? Out of work? You don't look's if you could buck up against tough luck. What you doin' on the streets? You ain't——? No, you ain't. I needn't insult you by askin' that. Where's your home, girl?"
"I got no home," said Sunny, in a very faint voice. A subtle feeling was stealing over the tired Sunny, and the whiteness of her cheeks,the drooping of her eyes, apprized Katy of her condition.
"Say, don't be fallin' whatever you do. You don't want no cop to get 'is hands on you. You come along with me. I ain't got much, but you're welcome to share what I got. I'll stake you till you get a job. Heh! Get a grip on yourself. There! That's better. Hold on to me. I'll put them packages under this arm. We ain't got far to walk. Steady now. We don't want no cop to say we're full, because we ain't."
Katy led the trembling Sunny along the dirty, dingy avenue to one of those melancholy side streets of the upper east side. They came to a house whose sad exterior proclaimed what was within. Here Katy applied her latch key, and in the dark and odorous halls they found their way up four flights of stairs. Katy's room was at the far end of a long bare hall, and its dimensions were little more than the shining kitchenette of the studio apartment.
Katy struck a match, lit a kerosene lamp, and attached to the one half-plugged gas jet a tube at the end of which was a one-burner gas stove. Sunny, sitting helplessly on the bed, was too dazed and weary to hold herposition for long, and at Katy's sharp: "Heh, there! lie down," she subsided back upon the bed, sighing with relief as her exhausted body felt the comfort of Katy's hard little bed. From sundry places Katy drew forth a frying pan, a pitcher of water, a tiny kettle and a teapot. She put two knives and forks and spoons on the table, two cracked plates and two cups. She peeled a single potato, and added it to the two frankfurters frying on the pan. She chattered along as she worked, partly to hide her own feelings, and partly to set the girl at her ease. But indeed Sunny was far from feeling an embarrassment such as Katy in her place might have felt. The world is full of two kinds of people; those who serve, and those who are served, and to the latter family Sunny belonged. Not the lazy, wilful parasites of life, but the helpless children, whom we love to care for. Katy, glancing with a maternal eye, ever and anon at the so sad and lovely face upon her pillow was curiously touched and animated with a desire to help her.
"You're dog-tired, ain't you? How long you been out of work? I always feel more tired when I'm out o' work and looking for a job, than when I got one, though it ain't myidea of a rest exactly to stand on your feet all day long shoving out things you can't afford to have yourself to folks who mostly just want to look 'em over. Some of them shoppers love to come in just about closin' hour. They should worry whether the girl behind the counter gets extra pay for overtime or if she's suffering from female weaknesses or not. Of course, if I get into one of them big stores downtown, I can give a customer the laugh when the dingdong sounds for closin', but you can't do no such thing in Harlem. We're still in the pioneer stage up here. I expect you're more used to the Fifth Avenue joints. You look it, but, say, I never got a look in at one of them jobs. They favour educated girls, and I ain't packed with learning, I'm telling the world."
Sunny said:
"You loog good to me,"—a favourite expression of Jerry's, and something in her accent and the earnestness with which she said it warmed Katy, who laughed and said:
"Oh, go on. I ain't much on looks neither. There, now. Draw up. All—l-lerready! Dinner is served. Stay where you are on the bed. Drop your feet over. I ain't got but theone chair, and I'll have it meself, thank you, don't mention it."
Katy pushed the table beside the bed, drew her own chair to the other side, set the kettle on the jet which the frying pan had released and proudly surveyed her labour.
"Not much, but looks pretty good to me. If there's one thing I love it is a hot dog."
She put on Sunny's plate the largest of the two frankfurters and three-quarters of the potato, cut her a generous slice of bread and poured most of the gravy on her plate, saying:
"I always say sausage gravy beats anything in the butter line. Tea'll be done in a minute, dearie. Ain't got but one burner. Gee! I wisht I had one of them two deckers that you can cook a whole meal at once with. Ever seen 'em? How's your dog?"
"Dog?"
"Frankfurter—weeny, or in polite speech, sausage, dearie."
"How it is good," said Sunny with simple eloquence. "I thang you how much."
"Don't mention it. You're welcome. You'd do the same for me if I was busted. I always say one working girl should stake the other when the other is out of work and broke.There's unity in strength," quoted Katy with conviction. "Have some more—do! Dip your bread in the gravy. Pretty good, ain't it, if I do say it who shouldn't."
"It mos' nices' food I are ever taste," declared Sunny earnestly.
While the tea was going into the cups:
"My name's Katy Clarry. What's yours?" asked Katy, a sense of well-being and good humour toward the world flooding her warm being.
"Sunny."
"Sunny! That's a queer name. Gee! ain't it pretty? What's your other name?"
"Sindicutt."
"Sounds kind o' foreign. What are you, anyway? You ain't American—at least you don't look it or talk it, though heaven knows anything and everything calls itself American to-day," said the native-born American girl with scorn. "Meaning no offence, you understand, but—well—you just don't look like the rest of us. You ain't a Dago or a Sheeny. I can see that, and you ain't a Hun neither. Are you a Frenchy? You got queer kind of eyes—meaning no offence, for personally I think them lovely, I really do. Iseen actresses with no better eyes than you got."
Katy shot her questions at Sunny, without waiting for an answer. Sunny smiled sadly.
"Katy, I are sawry thad I am not be American girl. I are born ad Japan——"
"Youain't no Chink. You can't tell me no such thing as that. I wasn't born yesterday. What are you, anyway? Where do you come from? Are you a royal princess in disguise?"
The latter question was put jocularly, but Katy in her imaginative way was beginning to question whether her guest might not in fact be some such personage. An ardent reader of the yellow press, by inheritance a romantic dreamer, in happier circumstances Katy might have made a place for herself in the artistic world. Her sordid life had been ever glorified by her extravagant dreams in which she moved as a princess in a realm where princes and lord and kings and dukes abounded.
"No, I are not princess," said Sunny sadly. "I not all Japanese, Katy, jos liddle bit. Me? I got three kind of blood on my insides. I sawry thad my ancestors put them there. I are Japanese and Russian and American."
"Gee! You're what we call a mongrel.Meaning no offence. You can't help yourself. Personally I stand up first for the home-made American article but I ain't got no prejudice against no one. And anyway, you cangrowinto an American if you want to. Now we women have got the francheese, we got the right to vote and be nachelised too if we want to. So even if you have a yellow streak in you—and looking at you, I'd say it was gold moren't yellow—you needn't tell no one about it. No one'll be the wiser. You can trust me not to open my mouth to a living soul about it. What you've confided in me about being partly Chink is just as if you had put the inflammation in a tomb. And it ain't going to make the least bit of difference between us. Try one of them Uneeda crackers. Sop it in your tea now you're done with your gravy. Pretty good, ain't it? I'll say it is."
"Katy, to-night I are going to tell you some things about me, bi-cause I know you are my good frien' now forever. I lig' your kind eye, Katy."
"Go on! You're kiddin' me, Sunny. If I had eyes like yours, it'd be a different matter. But I'm stuck on the idea of having you for a friend just the same. I ain't had a chum since I don't know when. If you knew what themgirls was like in Bamberger's—well, I'm not talkin' about no one behind their backs, but, say—Sunny, I could tell you a thing or two'd make your hair stand on end. And as for tellin' me about your own past, say if you'll tell me yours, I'll tell you mine. I always say that every girl has some tradgedy or other in her life. Mine began on the lower east side. I graduated up here, Sunny. It ain't nothing to brag about, but it's heaven compared with what's downtown. I used to live in that gutter part of the town where God's good air is even begrudged you, and where all the dirty forriners and chinks—meanin' no offence, dearie, and I'll say for the Chinks, that compared with some of them Russian Jews—Gee! you're Russian too, ain't you, but I don't mean no offence! Take it from me, Sunny, some of them east side forriners—I'll call them just that to avoid givin' offence—are just exactly like lice, and the smells down there—Gee! the stock yards is a flower garden compared with it. Well, we come over—my folks did—I was born there—I'm a real American, Sunny. Look me over. It won't hurt your eyes none. My folks come over from Ireland. My mother often told me that they thought the streets of New York werejust running with gold, before they come out. That simple they were, Sunny. But the gold was nothing but plain, rotten dust. It got into the lungs and the spine of them all. Father went first. Then mother. Lord only knows how they got it—doctor said it was from the streets, germs that someone maybe dumped out and come flyin' up into our place that was the only clean spot in the tenement house, I'll say that for my mother. There was two kids left besides me. I was the oldes' and not much on age at that, but I got me a job chasin' around for a millinery shop, and I did my best by the kids when I got home nights; but the cards was all stacked against me, Sunny, and when that infantile parallysus come on the city, the first to be took was my k-kid brother, and me li-little s-sister she come down with it too and—Ah-h-h-h!"
Katy's head went down on the table, and she sobbed tempestuously. Sunny, unable to speak the words of comfort that welled up in her heart, could only put her arms around Katy, and mingle her tears with hers. Katy removed a handkerchief from the top of her waist, dabbed her eyes fiercely, shared the little ball with Sunny, and then thrust it down theneck of her waist again. Bravely she smiled at Sunny again.
"There yoh got the story of the Clarry's of the east side of New York, late of Limerick, Ireland. You can't beat it for—for tradgedy, now can you? So spiel away at your own story, Sunny. I'm thinkin' you'll have a hard time handin' me out a worse one than me own. Don't spare me, kid. I'm braced for anything in this r-rotten world."
CHAPTER XVI
It was well for Sunny that her new friend was endowed with a generous and belligerent nature. Having secured for Sunny a position at the Bamberger Emporium, Katy's loyalty to her friend was not dampened when on the third day Sunny was summarily discharged. Hands on hips, Katy flew furiously to her brother's defence, and for the benefit of her brother and sister workers she relieved herself loudly of all her pent-up rage of the months. In true Union style, Katy marched out with Sunny. The excuse for discharging Sunny was that she did not write well enough to fill out the sales slips properly. Nasty as the true reason was, there is no occasion to set forth the details here.
Suffice it to say that the two girls, both rosy from excitement and wrath, arm and arm marched independently forth from the Emporium, Katy loudly asserting that she would sue for her half week's pay, and Sunny anxiously drawing her along, her breath coming and going with the fright she had had.
"Gee!" snorted Katy, as they turned into the street on which was the dingy house in which they lived, "it did my soul good to dump its garbage on that pie-faced, soapy-eyed monk. You don't know what I been through since I worked for them people. You done me a good turn this mornin' when you let out that scream. I'd been expecting something like that ever since he dirtied you with his eyes. That's why I was hangin' around the office, in spite of the ribbon sales, when you went in. Well, here we are!"
Here they were indeed, back in the small ugly room of that fourth floor, sitting, the one on the ricketty chair, and the other on the side of the hard bed. But the eyes of youth are veiled in sun and rose. They see nor feel not the filth of the world. Sunny and Katy, out of a job, with scarcely enough money between them to keep body and soul together, were yet able to laugh at each other and exchange jokes over the position in which they found themselves.
After they had "chewed the rag," as Katy expressively termed it, for awhile, that brisk young person removed her hat, rolled up her sleeves, and declared she would do the "family wash."
"It's too late now," said Katy, "to job hunt this morning. So I'll do the wash, and you waltz over across the street and do the marketin'. Here's ten cents, and get a wiggle on you, because it's 10.30 now, and I got a plan for us two. I'll tell you what it is. There ain't no hurry. Just wait a bit, dearie. First we'll have a bite to eat, though I'm not hungry myself. I always say, though, you can land a job better on a full than a empty stomach. Well, lunch packed away in us, little you and me trots downtown—not to no 125th Street, mind you, but downtown, to Fifth Avenoo, where the swell shops are, do you get me? I'd a done this long ago, for they say it's as easy to land on Fifth Avenoo as it is on Third. It's like goods, Sunny. The real silk is cheaper than the fake stuff, because it lasts longer and is wider, but if one ain't got the capital to invest in it in the first place, why you just have to make the best of the imitation cheese. If I could of dolled myself up like them girls that hold down the jobs on Fifth Avenoo, say, you can take it from me, I'd a made some of them henna-haired ladies look like thirty cents. Nowyougot the looks, and you got the clothes too. That suit you're wearin' don't look like no million dollars, butit's got a kick to it just the same. The goods is real. I been lookin' at it. Where'd you get it?"
"I get that suit ad Japan, Katy."
"Japan! What are you givin' us? You can't tell me no Chink ever made a suit like that."
Sunny nodded vigorously.
"Yes, Katy, Japanese tailor gentleman make thad suit. He copy it from American suit just same on lady at hotel, and he tell me that he are just like twin suits."
"I take off my hat to that Chink, though I always have heard they was great on copying. However, it's unmaterial who made it, and it don't detract from its looks, and no one will be the wiser that a Chink tailor made it. You can trust me not to open my mouth. The main thing is that that suit and your face—and everything about you is going to make a hit on Fifth Avenoo. You see how Bamberger fell for you at the drop, and you could be there still and have the best goin' if you was like some ladies I know, though I'm not mentionin' no names. I'm not that kind, Sunny. Now, here's my scheme, and see if you can beat it. Your face and suit'll land the jobs for us. My brains'll hold 'em for us. Do youget me? You'll accept a position—you don't say job down there—only on condition that they take your friend—that's me—too. Then together we prove the truth of 'Unity being strength.' We'll hang together. Said Lincoln" (Katy raised her head with true solemnity): '"Together we rise, divided we fall!' Shake on that, Sunny." Shake they did. "Now you skedaddle off for that meat. Ask for dog. It goes farther and is fillin'. Give the butcher the soft look, and he'll give you your money's worth—maybe throw in an extra dog for luck."
At the butcher shop, Sunny, when her turn came, favoured the plump gentleman behind the counter to such an engaging smile that he hurriedly glanced about him to see if the female part of his establishment were around. The coast clear, he returned the smile with interest. Leaning gracefully upon the long bloody butcher knife in one hand, the other toying with a juicy sirloin, he solicited the patronage of the smiling Sunny. She put her ten cents down, and continuing the smile, said:
"Please you give me plenty dog meat for those money."
"Surest thing," said the flattered butcher."I got a pile just waitin' for a customer like you."
He disappeared into a hole in the floor, and returned up the ladder shortly, bearing an extremely large package, which he handed across to the surprised and overjoyed Sunny, who cried:
"Ho! I are thang you. How you are kind. I thang you very moach. Good-aday!"
It so happened that when Sunny had come out of the house upon that momentous marketing trip a pimply-faced youth was lolling against the railing of the house next door. His dress and general appearance made him conspicuous in that street of mean and poverty-stricken houses, for he wore the latest thing in short pinch-back coats, tight trousers raised well above silk-clad ankles, pointed and polished tan shoes, a green tweed hat and a cane and cigarette loosely hung in a loose mouth. A harmless enough looking specimen of the male family at first sight, yet one at which the sophisticated members of the same sex would give a keen glance and then turn away with a scowl of aversion and rage. Society has classified this type of parasite inadequately as "Cadet," but the neighbourhood in which hethrives designates him with one ugly and expressive term.
As Sunny came out of the house and ran lightly across the street, the youth wagged his cigarette from the corner of one side of his mouth to the other, squinted appraisingly at the hurrying girl, and then followed her across the street. Through the opened door of the kosher butcher shop, he heard the transaction, and noted the joy of Sunny as the great package was transferred to her arms. As she came out of the shop, hurrying to bear the good news to Katy, she was stopped at the curb by the man, his hat gracefully raised, and a most ingratiating smile twisting his evil face into a semblance of what might have appeared attractive to an ignorant and weak minded girl.
"I beg your pardon, Miss—er—Levine. I believe I met you at a friend's house."
"You are mistake," said Sunny. "My name are not those. Good-a-day!"
He continued to walk by her side, murmuring an apology for the mistake, and presently as if just discovering the package she carried, he affected concern.
"Allow me to carry that for you. It's entirelytoo heavy for such pretty little arms as yours."
"Thang you. I lig' better carry him myself," said Sunny, holding tightly to her precious package.
Still the pimpled faced young man persisted at her side, and as they reached the curb, his hand at her elbow, he assisted her to the sidewalk. Standing at the foot of the front steps, he practically barred her way.
"You live here?"
"Yes, I do so."
"I believe I know Mrs. Munson, the lady that keeps this house. Relative of yours?"
"No, I are got no relative."
"All alone here?"
"No, I got frien' live wiz me. Aexcuse me. I are in hoarry eat my dinner."
"I wonder if I know your friend. What is his name?"
"His name are Katy."
"Ah, don't hurry. I believe, now I think of it, I know Katy. What's the matter with your comin' along and havin' dinner with me."
"Thang you. My frien' are expect me eat those dinner with her."
"That's all right. I have a friend too. Bring Katy along, and we'll all go off for ablowout. What do you say? A sweet little girl like you don't need to be eatin' dog meat. I know a swell place where we can get the best kind of eats, a bit of booze to wash it down and music and dancing enough to make you dizzy. What do you say?"
He smiled at Sunny in what he thought was an irresistible and killing way. It revealed three decayed teeth in front, and brought his shifty eyes into full focus upon the shrinking girl.
"I go ask my frien'," she said hurriedly. "Aexcuse me now. You are stand ad my way."
He moved unwillingly to let her pass.
"Surest thing. More the merrier. Let's go up and get Katy. What floor you on?"
"I bring Katy down," said Sunny breathlessly, and running by the pasty faced youth, she opened the door, and closed it quickly behind her, shooting the lock closed. She ran up the stairs, as if pursued, and burst breathlessly into the little room where Katy was singing a ditty composed to another of her name, and pasting her lately washed handkerchiefs upon the window pane and mirror.
"Beautiful K-Katy—luvully Katy!You're the only one that ever I adore,Wh-en the moon shines, on the cow shed,I'll be w-waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door!"
"Beautiful K-Katy—luvully Katy!You're the only one that ever I adore,Wh-en the moon shines, on the cow shed,I'll be w-waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door!"
sang the light-hearted and valiant Katy Clarry.
"Oh, Katy," cried Sunny breathlessly. "Here are those dog." She laid the huge package before the amazed and incredulous Katy.
"For the love of Mike! Did Schmidt sell you a whole cow?"
Katy tore the wrappings aside, and revealed the contents of the package. An assortment of bones of all sizes, large and small, a few pieces of malodorous meat, livers, lights and guts, and the insides of sundry chickens. Katy sat down hard, exclaiming:
"Good night! What did you ask for?"
"I ask him for dog meat," excitedly and indignantly declared Sunny.
"You got it! You poor simp. Heaven help you. Never mind, there's no need now of crying over spilled beans. It's too late now to change, so here's where we kiss our lunch a long and last farewell, and do some hustling downtown."
"Oh, Katy, I am thad sorry!" cried Sunny tragically.
"It's all right, dearie. Don't you worry.You can't help being ignorant. I ain't hungry myself anyway, and you're welcome to the cracker there. That'll do till we get back, and then, why, I believe we can boil some of them bones and get a good soup. I always say soup is just as fillin' as anything else, especially if you put a onion in it, and have a bit of bread to sop it up with, and I got the onion all right. So cheer up, we'll soon be dead and the worst is yet to come."
"Katy, there are a gentleman down on those street, who are want give us nize dinner to eat, with music and some danze. Me? I am not care for those music, but I lig' eat those dinner, and I lig' also thad you eat him."
"Gentleman, huh?" Katy's head cocked alertly.
"Yes, he speak at me on the street, and he say he take me and my frien' out to nize dinner. He are wait in those street now."
Katy went to the window, leaned far out, saw the man on the street, and drew swiftly in, her face turning first white, then red.
"Sunny, ain't you got any better sense than speak to a man on the street?"
"Ho, Katy, I din nod speag ad those man," declared Sunny indignantly. "He speag ad me, and I do nod lig' hees eye. I do nod lig'hees mout', nor none of hees face, but I speag perlite bi-cause he are ask me eat those dinner."
"Well, you poor little simp, let me tell you whothatis. He's the dirtiest swine in Harlem. You're muddied if he looks at you. He's—he's—I can't tell you what he is, because you're so ignorunt you wouldn't understand. You and me go out with the likes of him! Sa-ay, I'd rather duck into a sewer. I'd come out cleaner, believe me. Now watch how little K-k-k-katy treats that kind of dirt."
She transferred the more decayed of the meat and bones from the package to the pail of water which had recently served for her "family wash." This she elevated to the window, put her head out, and as if sweetly to signal the waiting one below, she called:
"Hi-yi-yi-yi—i-i!" and as the man below looked up expectantly, she gave him the full benefit of the pail's contents in his upturned face.
The sight of the drenched, spluttering and foully swearing rat on the street below struck the funny side of the two young girls. Clinging together, they burst into laughter, holding their sides, and with their young heads tossed back; but their laughter had an element ofhysteria to it, and when at last they stopped, and the stream of profanity from below continued to pour into the room, Katy soberly closed the window. For a while they stared at each other in a scared silence. Then Katy, squaring her shoulders, belligerently said:
"Well, we should worry over that one."
Sunny was standing now by the bureau. A very thoughtful expression had come to Sunny's face, and she opened the top drawer and drew out her little package.
"Katy," she said softly, "here are some little thing ad these package, which mebbe it goin' to help us."
"Say, I been wonderin' what you got in that parcel ever since you been here. I'd a asked you, but as you didn't volunteer no inflamation, I was too much of a lady to press it, and I'm telling the world, I'd not open no package the first time myself, without knowin' what was in it, especially as that one looks kind of mysteriees and foreign looking. I heard about a lady named Pandora something and when she come to open a box she hadn't no right to open, it turned into smoke and she couldn't get it back to where she wanted it to go. What you got there, dearie, if it ain't being too personalto ask? I'll bet you got gold and diamonds hidden away somewhere."
Sunny was picking at the red silk cord. Lovingly she unwrapped the Japanese paper. The touch of her fingers on her mother's things was a caress and had all the reverence that the Japanese child pays in tribute to a departed parent.
"These honourable things belong my mother," said Sunny gently. "She have give them to me when she know she got die. See, Katy, this are kakemona. It very old, mebbe one tousan' year ole. It belong at grade Prince of Satsuma. Thas my mother ancestor. This kakemona, it are so ole as those ancestor," said Sunny reverently.
"Old! Gee, I should say it is. Looks as if it belonged in a tomb. You couldn't hock nothing like that, dearie, meanin' no offence. What else you got?"
"The poor simp!" said Katy to herself, as Sunny drew forth her mother's veil. In the gardens of the House of a Thousand Joys the face of the dancer behind the shimmering veil had aroused the enthusiasm of her admirers. Now Katy bit off the words that were about to explain to Sunny that in her opinion a better veil could be had at Dacy's for ninety-eightcents. All she said, however, was:
"You better keep the veil, Sunny. I know how one feels about a mother's old duds. I got a pair of shoes of my mother's that nothing could buy from me, though they ain't much to look at; but I know how you feel about them things, dearie."
"This," said Sunny, with shining eyes, "are my mother's fan. See, Katy, Takamushi, a grade poet ad Japan, are ride two poem on thad fan and present him to my mother. Thad is grade treasure. I do nod lig' to sell those fan."
"I wouldn't. You just keep it, dearie. We ain't so stone broke that you have to sell your mother's fan."
"These are flower that my mother wear ad her hair when she danze, Katy."
The big artificial poppies that once had flashed up on either side of the dancer's lovely face, Sunny now pressed against her cheek.
"Ain't they pretty?" said Katy, pretending an enthusiasm she did not feel. "You could trim a hat with them if flowers was in fashion this year, but they ain't, dearie. The latest thing is naked hats, sailors, like you got, or treecornes, with nothing on them except the lines. What's that you got there, Sunny?"
"That are a letter, Katy. My mother gave me those letter. She say that some day mebbe I are need some frien'. Then I must put those letter at post office box, or I must take those letter in my hand to thad man it are write to. He are frien' to me, my mother have said."
Katy grabbed the letter, disbelieving her eyes when she read the name inscribed in the thin Japanese hand. It was addressed both in English and Japanese, and the name was, Stephen Holt Wainwright, 27 Broadway, New York City.
"Someone hold me up," cried Katy. "I'm about to faint dead away."
"Oh, Katy, do not be dead away! Oh, Katy, do not do those faint. Here are those cracker. I am not so hungry as you."
"My Lord! You poor ignorunt little simp, don't you reckernise when a fellow is fainting with pure unadulterated joy? How long have you had that letter?"
"Four year now," said Sunny sadly, thinking of the day when her mother had placed it in her hand, and of the look on the face of that mother.
"Why did you never mail it?"
"I was await, Katy. I are not need help. I have four and five good frien' to me then,and I do not need nuther one; but now I are beggar again. I nod got those frien's no more. I need those other one."
"Were you ever abeggar, Sunny?"
"Oh, yes, Katy, some time my mother and I we beg for something eat at Japan. Thad is no disgrace. The gods love those beggar jos' same rich man, and when he go on long journey to those Meido, mebbe rich man go behind those beggar. I are hear thad at Japan."
"Do you know who this letter is addressed to, dearie?"
"No, Katy, I cannot read so big a name. My mother say he will be frien' to me always."
"Sunny, I pity you for your ignorunce, but I don't hold it against you. You was born that way. Why, a child could read that name. Goodness knows I never got beyond the Third Grade, yet IhopeI'm able to read that. It says as plain as the nose on your face, Sunny: Stephen Holt Wainwright. Now that's the name of one of the biggest guns in the country. He's a U. S. senator, or was and is, and he's so rich that he has to hire twenty or fifty cashiers to count his income that rolls in upon him from his vast estates. If you weren't so ignorunt, Sunny, you'd a read about him in theJournal. Gee! his picture's in nearly everyday, and pictures of his luxurious home and yacht and horses and wife, who's one of the big nobs in this suffrage scare. They call him 'The Man of Steel,' because he owns most of the steel in the world, and because he's got a mug—a face—on him like a steel trap. That's what I've heard and read, though I've never met the gentleman. I expect to, however, very soon, seeing he's a friend of yours. And now, lovey, don't waste no more tears over that other bunch of ginks, because this Senator Wainwright has got them all beat in the Marathon."
"Katy, this letter are written by my mother ad the Japanese language. Mebbe those Sen—a—tor kinnod read them. What I shall do?"
"What you shall do, baby mine? Did you think I was goin' to let precious freight like that go into any post box. Perish the idea, lovey. You and me are going to waltz downtown to 27 Broadway, and we ain't going to do no walking what's more. The Subway for little us. I'm gambling on Mr. Senator passing along a job to friends of his friends. Get your hat on now, and don't answer back neither."
On the way downstairs she gave a final stern order to Sunny.
"Hold your hat pin in your hand as we come out. If his nibs so much as opens his face to you, jab him in the eye. I'll take care of the rest of him."
Thus bravely armed, the two small warriors issued forth, the general marshalling her army of one, with an elevated chin and nose and an eye that scorched from head to foot the craven looking object waiting for them on the street.
"Come along, dearie. Be careful you don't get soiled as we pass."
Laughing merrily, the two girls, with music in their souls, danced up the street, their empty stomachs and their lost jobs forgotten. When they reached the Subway, Katy seized Sunny's hand, and they raced down the steps just as the South Ferry train pulled in.
CHAPTER XVII
That was a long and exciting ride for Sunny. Above the roar of the rushing train Katy shouted in her ear. Perfectly at home in the Subway, Katy did not let a little thing like mere noise deter the steady flow of her tongue. The gist of her remarks came always back to what Sunny was to do when they arrived at 27 Broadway; how she was to look; how speak. She was to bear in mind that she was going into the presence of American royalty, and she was to be neither too fresh nor yet too humble. Americans, high and low, so Katy averred, liked folks that had a kick to them, but not too much of a kick.
Sunny was to find out whether at some time or other in the past, Senator Wainwright had not put himself under deep obligations to some member of Sunny's family. Perhaps some of her relatives might have saved the life of this senator. Even Chinks were occasionally heroes, Katy had heard. It might be, on the other hand, said Katy, that Sunny's mother had something "on" the senator. So much thebetter. Katy had no objection, so she said, to the use of a bit of refined ladylike blackmail, for "the end justifies the means," said Katy, quoting, so she said, from Lincoln, the source of all her aphorisms. Anyway, the long and short of it was, said Katy, that Sunny was on no account to get cold feet. She was to enter the presence of the mighty man with dignity and coolness. "Keep your nerve whatever you do," urged Katy. Then once eye to eye with the man of power, she was to ask—it was possible, she might even be able to demand—certain favours.
"Ask and it shall be given to you. Shut your mouth and it'll be taken away. That's how things go in this old world," said Katy.
Sunny was to make application in both their names. If there were no vacancies in the senator's office, then she would delicately suggest that the senator could make such a vacancy. Such things were done within Katy's own experience.
Katy had no difficulty in locating the monstrous office building, and she led Sunny along to the elevator with the experienced air of one used to ascending skyward in the crowded cars. Sunny held tight to her arm as they made the breathless ascent. There was no need to askdirection on the 35th floor, since the Wainwright Structural Steel Company occupied the entire floor.
It was noon hour, and Katy and Sunny followed several girls returning from lunch through the main entrance of the offices.
A girl at a desk in the reception hall stopped them from penetrating farther into the offices by calling out:
"No admission there. Who do you want to see? Name, please."
Katy swung around on her heel, and recognising a kindred spirit in the girl at the desk, she favoured her with an equally haughty and glassy stare. Then in a very superior voice, Katy replied:
"We are friends of the Senator. Kindly announce us, if you please."
A grin slipped over the face of the maiden at the desk, and she shoved a pad of paper toward Katy.
Opposite the word "Name" on the pad, Katy wrote, "Miss Sindicutt." Opposite the word: "Business" she wrote "Private and personal and intimate."
The girl at the desk glanced amusedly at the pad, tore the first sheet off, pushed a button which summoned an office boy, to whomshe handed the slip of paper. With one eye turned appraisingly upon the girls, he went off backwards, whistling, and disappeared through the little swinging gate that opened apparently into the great offices beyond.
"I beg your pardon?" said Katy to the girl at the desk.
"I didn't say nothing," returned the surprised maiden.
"I thought you said 'Be seated.' I will, thank you. Don't mention it," and Katy grinned with malicious politeness on the discomfited young person, who patted her coiffure with assumed disdain.
Katy meanwhile disposed herself on the long bench, drew Sunny down beside her, and proceeded to scrutinise and comment on all passers through the main reception hall into the offices within. Once in a while she resumed her injunctions to Sunny, as:
"Now don't be gettin' cold feet whatever you do. There ain't nothing to be afraid of. A cat may look at a king, him being the king and you the cat. No offence, dearie. Ha, ha, ha! That's just my way of speaking. Say, Sunny, would you look at her nibs at the desk there. Gee! ain't that a job? Some snap, I'll say. Nothin' to do, but give everyone the once over,push a button and send a boy to carry in your names. Say, if you're a true friend of mine, you'll land me that job. It'd suit me down to a double Tee."
"Katy, I goin' try get you bes' job ad these place. I am not so smart like you, Katy——"
"Oh, well, you can't help that, dearie, and you got the face all right."
"Face is no matter. My mother are tell me many time, it is those heart that matter."
"Soundsall right, and I ain't questionin' your mother's opinion, Sunny, but you take it from me, you can go a darn sight further in this old world with a face than a heart."
A man had come into the reception room from the main entrance. He started to cross the room directly to the little swinging door, then stopped to speak to a clerk at a wicket window. Something about the sternness of his look, an air savouring almost of austerity aroused the imp in Katy.
"Well, look who's here," she whispered behind her hand to Sunny. "Now watch little K-k-katy."
As the man turned from the window, and proceeded toward the door, Katy shot out her foot, and the man abstractedly stumbled against it. He looked down at the girl, impudentlystaring him out of countenance, and frowned at her exaggerated:
"Ibegyour pardon!"
Then his glance turning irritably from Katy, rested upon Sunny's slightly shocked face? He stopped abruptly, standing perfectly still for a moment, staring down at the girl. Then with a muttered apology, Senator Wainwright turned and went swiftly through the swinging door.
"Well, ofallthe nerve!" said Katy. Then to the girl at the desk:
"Who was his nibs?"
"Why, your friend, of course. I'm surprised you didn't recognise him," returned the girl sweetly.
"Him—Senator Wainwright."
"The papers sometimes call him 'The Man of Steel,' but of course, intimate friends like you and your friend there probably call him by a nickname."
"Sure we do," returned Katy brazenly. "I call him 'Sen-Sen' for short. I'd a known him in an instant with his hat off."
"I want to know!" gibed the girl at the desk.
The boy had returned, and thrusting his head over the short gate sang out:
"This way, please, la-adies!"
Katy and Sunny followed the boy across an office where many girls and men were working at desks. The click of a hundred typewriters, and the voices dictating into dictagraphs and to books impressed Katy, but with her head up she swung along behind the boy. At a door marked "Miss Hollowell, Private," the boy knocked. A voice within bade him "Come," and the two girls were admitted.
Miss Hollowell, a clear-eyed young woman of the clean-cut modern type of the efficient woman executive, looked up from her work and favoured them with a pleasant smile.
"What can I do for you?" The question was directed at Katy, but her trained eye went from Katy to Sunny, and there remained in speculative inquiry.
"We have come to call upon the Senator," said Katy, "on important and private business."
Katy was gripping to that something she called her "nerve," but her manner to Miss Hollowell had lost the gibing patronising quality she had affected to the girl at the door. Acute street gamin, as was Katy, she had that unerring gift of sizing up human nature at a glance, a gift not unsimilar in fact to that possessedby the secretary of Senator Wainwright.
Miss Hollowell smiled indulgently at Katy's words.
"Isee. Well now, I'll speak for Mr. Wainwright. What can we do for you?"
"Nothing.Youcan't do nothing," said Katy. She was not to be beguiled by the smile of this superior young person. "My friend here—meet Miss Sindicutt—has a personal letter for Senator Wainwright, and she's takin' my advice not to let it out of her hands into any but his."
"I'm awfully sorry, because Mr. Wainwright is very busy, and can't possibly see you. I believe I will answer the purpose as well. I'm Mr. Wainwright's secretary."
"We don't want to speak to no secretary," said Katy. "I always say: 'Go to the top. Slide down if you must. You can't slide up.'"
Miss Hollowell laughed.
"Oh, very well then. Perhaps some other time, but we're especially busy to-day, so I'm going to ask you to excuse us.Good-day."
She turned back to the papers on her desk, her pencil poised above a sheet of estimates.
Katy pushed Sunny forward, and in dumb show signified that she should speak. MissHollowell glanced up and regarded the girl with singular attention. Something in the expression, something in the back of the secretary's mind that concerned Japan, which this strange girl had now mentioned caused her to wait quietly for her to finish the sentence. Sunny held out the letter, and Miss Hollowell saw that fine script upon the envelope, with the Japanese letters down the side.
"This are a letter from Japan," said Sunny. "If you please I will lig' to give those to Sen—Thad is so big a name for me to say." The last was spoken apologetically and brought a sympathetic smile from Miss Hollowell.
"Can't I read it? I'm sure I can give you what information you want as well as Mr. Wainwright can."
"It are wrote in Japanese," said Sunny. "You cannot read that same.Pleaseyou let me take it to thad gentleman."
Miss Hollowell, with a smile, arose at that plea. She crossed the room and tapped on the door bearing the Senator's name.
Even in a city where offices of the New York magnates are sometimes as sumptuously furnished as drawing rooms, the great room of Senator Wainwright was distinctive. The floor was strewn with priceless Persian andChinese rugs, which harmonised with the remarkable walls, panelled half way up with mahogany, the upper part of which was hung with masterpieces of the American painters, whose work the steel magnate especially favoured. Stephen Wainwright was seated at a big mahogany desk table, that was at the far end of the room, between the great windows, which gave upon a magnificent view of the Hudson River and part of the Harbor. He was not working. His elbows on the desk, he seemed to be staring out before him in a mood of strange abstraction. His face, somewhat stony in expression, with straight grey eyes that had a curious trick when turned on one of seeming to pin themselves in an appraising stare, his iron grey hair and the grey suit which he invariably wore had given him the name of "The Man of Steel." Miss Hollowell, with her slightly professional smile, laid the slip of paper on the desk before him.
"A Miss Sindicutt. She has a letter for you—a letter from Japan she says. She wishes to deliver it in person."
At the word "Japan" he came slightly out of his abstraction, stared at the slip of paper, and shook his head.
"Don't know the name."
"Yes, I knew you didn't; but, still, I believe I'd see her if I were you."
"Very well. Send her in."
Miss Hollowell at the door nodded brightly to Sunny, but stayed Katy, who triumphantly was pushing forward.
"Sorry, but Mr. Wainwright will see just Miss Sindicutt."
Sunny went in alone. She crossed the room hesitantly and stood by the desk of the steel magnate, waiting for him to speak to her. He remained unmoving, half turned about in his seat, staring steadily at the girl before him. If a ghost had arisen suddenly in his path, Senator Wainwright could not have felt a greater agitation. After a long pause, he found his voice, murmuring:
"I beg your pardon. Be seated, please."
Sunny took the chair opposite him. Their glances met and remained for a long moment locked. Then the man tried to speak lightly:
"You wished to see me. What can I do for you?"
Sunny extended the letter. When he took it from her hand, his face came somewhat nearer to hers, and the closer he saw that young girl's face, the greater grew his agitation.
"What is your name?" he demanded abruptly.
"Sunny," said the girl simply, little dreaming that she was speaking the name that the man before her had himself invented for her seventeen and a half years before.
The word touched some electrical cord within him. He started violently forward in his seat, half arising, and the letter in his hand dropped on the table before him face up. A moment of gigantic self-control, and then with fingers that shook, Stephen Wainwright slipped the envelope open. The words swam before him, but not till they were indelibly printed upon the man's conscience-stricken heart. Through blurred vision he read the message from the dead to the living.
"On this sixth day of the Season of Little Plenty. A thousand years of joy. It is your honourable daughter, who knows not your name, who brings or sends to you this my letter. I go upon the long journey to the Meido. I send my child to him through whom she has her life. Sayonara. Haru-no."
For a long, long time the man sat with his two hands gripped before him on the desk, steadily looking at the girl before him, devouring every feature of the well-remembered faceof the child he had always loved. It seemed to him that she had changed not at all. His little Sunny of those charming days of his youth had that same crystal look of supreme innocence, a quality of refinement, a fragrance of race that seemed to reach back to some old ancestry, and put its magic print upon the exquisite young face. He felt he must have been blind not to have recognised his own child the instant his eye had fallen upon her. He knew now what that warm rush of emotion had meant when he had looked at her in that outer office. It was the intuitive instinct that his own child was near—the only child he had ever had. By exercising all the self-control that he could command, he was at last able to speak her name, huskily.
"Sunny, don't you remember me?"
Like her father, Sunny was addicted to moments of abstraction. She had allowed her gaze to wander through the window to the harbour below, where she could see the great ships at their moorings. It made her think of the one she had come to America on, and the one on which Jerry had sailed away from Japan. Painfully, wistfully, she brought her gaze back to her father's face. At his question she essayed a little propitiating smile.
"Mebbe I are see you face on American ad-ver-tise-ment. I are hear you are very grade man ad these America," said the child of Stephen Wainwright.
He winced, and yet grew warm with pride and longing at the girl's delicious accent. He, too, tried to smile back at her, but something sharp bit at the man's eyelids.
"No, Sunny. Try and think. Throw your mind far back—back to your sixth year, if that may be."
Sunny's eyes, resting now in troubled question upon the face before her, grew slowly fixed and enlarged. Through the fogs of memory slowly, like a vision of the past, she seemed to see again a little child in a fragrant garden. She was standing by the rim of a pool, and the man opposite her now was at her side. He was dressed in Japanese kimona and hakama, and Sunny remembered that then he was always laughing at her, shaking the flower weighted trees above her, till the petals fell in a white and pink shower upon her little head and shoulders. She was stretching out her hands, catching the falling blossoms, and, delightedly exclaiming that the flying petals were tiny birds fluttering through the air. She was leaning over the edge of the pool, blowing thepetals along the water, playing with her father that they were white prayer ships, carrying the petitions to the gods who waited on the other side. She remembered drowsing against the arm of the man; of being tossed aloft, her face cuddled against his neck; of passing under the great wistaria arbour. Ah, yes! how clearly she recalled it now! As her father transferred her to her mother's arms, he bent and drew that mother into his embrace also.
Two great tears welled up in the eyes of Sunny, but ere they could fall, the distance between her and her father had vanished. Stephen Wainwright, kneeling on the floor by his long-lost child, had drawn her hungrily into his arms.
"My own little girl!" said "The Man of Steel."
CHAPTER XVIII
Stephen Wainwright, holding his daughter jealously in his arms, felt those long-locked founts of emotion that had been pent up behind his steely exterior bursting all bounds. He had the immense feeling that he wanted for evermore to cherish and guard this precious thing that was all his own.
"Our actions are followed by their consequences as surely as a body by its shadow," says the Japanese proverb, and that cruel act of his mad youth had haunted the days of this man, who had achieved all that some men sell their souls for in life. And yet the greatest of all prizes had escaped him—peace of mind. Even now, as he held Sunny in his arms, he was consumed by remorse and anguish.
In his crowded life of fortune and fame, and a social career at the side of the brilliant woman who bore his name, Stephen Wainwright's best efforts had been unavailing to obliterate from his memory that tragic face that like a flower petal on a stream he had so lightly blown away. O-Haru-no was her namethen, and she was the child of a Japanese woman of caste, whose marriage to an attaché of a Russian embassy had, in its time, created a furore in the capital. Her father had perished in a shipwreck at sea, and her mother had returned to her people, there, in her turn, to perish from grief and the cold neglect of the Japanese relatives who considered her marriage a blot upon the family escutcheon.
Always a lover and collector of beautiful things, Wainwright had harkened to the enthusiastic flights of a friend, who had "discovered" an incomparable piece of Satsuma, and had accompanied him to an old mansion, once part of a Satsuma yashiki, there to find that his friend's "piece of Satsuma" was a living work of art, a little piece of bric-a-brac that the collector craved to add to his collections. He had purchased O-Haru-no for a mere song, for her white skin had been a constant reproach and shame in the house of her ancestors. Moreover, this branch of the ancient family had fallen upon meagre days, and despite their pride, they were not above bartering this humble descendant for the gold of the American. O-Haru-no escaped with joy from the harsh atmosphere of the house of her ancestors to the gay home of her purchaser.
The fact that he had practically bought his wife, and that she had been willing to become a thing of barter and sale, had from the first caused the man to regard her lightly. We value things often, not by their intrinsic value, but by the price we have paid for them, and O-Haru-no had been thrown upon the bargain counter of life. However, it was not in Stephen Wainwright's nature to resist anything as pretty as the wife he had bought. A favourite and sardonic jest of his at that time was that she was the choicest piece in his collections, and that some day he purposed to put her in a glass case, and present her to the Museum of Art of his native city. Had indeed Stephen Wainwright seen the dancer, as she lay among her brilliant robes, her wide sleeves outspread like the wings of a butterfly, and that perfectly chiselled face on which the smile that had made her famous still seemed faintly to linger, he might have recalled that utterance of the past, and realised that no object of art in the great museum of which his people were so proud, could compare with this masterpiece of Death's grim hand.
He tried to delude himself with the thought that the temporary wife of his young days was but an incident, part of an idyll that had noplace in the life of the man of steel, who had seized upon life with strong, hot hands.
But Sunny! His own flesh and blood, the child whose hair had suggested her name. Despite the galloping years she persisted ever in his memory. He thought of her constantly, of her strange little ways, her pretty coaxing ways, her smile, her charming love of the little live things, her perception of beauty, her closeness to nature. There was a quality of psychic sweetness about her, something rare and delicate that appealed to the epicure as exquisite and above all price. It was not his gold that had purchased Sunny. She was a gift of the gods and his memory of his child contained no flaw.
It was part of his punishment that the woman he married after his return to America from Japan should have drifted farther and farther apart from him with the years. Intuitively, his wife had recognised that hungry heart behind the man's cold exterior. She knew that the greatest urge in the character of this man was his desire for children. From year to year she suffered the agony of seeing the frustration of their hopes. Highstrung and imaginative, Mrs. Wainwright feared that her husband would acquire a dislike for her.The idea persisted like a monomania. She sought distraction from this ghost that arose between them in social activities and passionate work in the cause of woman's suffrage. It was her husband's misfortune that his nature was of that unapproachable sort that seldom lets down the mask, a man who retired within himself, and sought resources of comfort where indeed they were not to be found. Grimly, cynically, he watched the devastating effects of their separated interests, and in time she, too, in a measure was cast aside, in thought at least, just as the first wife had been. Stephen Wainwright grew grimmer and colder with the years, and the name applied to him was curiously suitable.
This was the man whose tears were falling on the soft hair of the strange girl from Japan. He had lifted her hat, that he might again see that hair, so bright and pretty that had first suggested her name. With awkward gentleness, he smoothed it back from the girl's thin little face.
"Sunny, you know your father now, fully, don't you? Tell me that you do—that you have not forgotten me. You were within a few weeks of six when I went away, and we were the greatest of pals. Surely you have not forgottenaltogether. It seems just the other day you were looking at me, just as you are now. It does not seem to me as if you have changed at all. You are still my little girl. Tell me—you have not forgotten your father altogether, have you?"
"No. Those year they are push away. You are my Chichi (papa). I so happy see you face again."
She held him back, her two hands on his shoulders, and now, true to her sex, she prepared to demand a favour from her father.
"Now I think you are going to give Katy and me mos' bes' job ad you business."
"Job? Who is Katy?"
"I are not told you yet of Katy. Katy are my frien'."
"You've told me nothing. I must know everything that has happened to you since I left Japan."
"Thas too long ago," said Sunny sadly, "and I am hongry. I lig' eat liddle bit something."
"What! You've had no lunch?"
She told him the incident of the dog meat, not stopping to explain just then who Katy was, and how she had come to be with her. He leaned over to the desk and pushed the button. Miss Holliwell, coming to the door, saw a sightthat for the first time in her years of service with Senator Wainwright took away her composure. Her employer was kneeling by a chair on which was seated the strange girl. Her hat was off, and she was holding one of his hands with both of hers. Even then he did not break the custom of years and explain or confide in his secretary, and she saw to her amazement that the eyes of the man she secretly termed "the sphinx" were red. All he said was:
"Order a luncheon, Miss Holliwell. Have it brought up here. Have Mouquin rush it through. That is all."
Miss Holliwell slowly closed the door, but her amazement at what she had seen within was turned to indignation at what she encountered without. As the door opened, Katy pressed up against the keyhole, fell back upon the floor. During the period when Sunny had been in the private office of Miss Holliwell's employer, she had had her hands full with the curious young person left behind. Katy had found relief from her pent-up curiosity in an endless stream of questions and gratuitous remarks which she poured out upon the exasperated secretary. Katy's tongue and spirit were entirely undaunted by the chillingmonosyllabic replies of Miss Holliwell, and the latter was finally driven to the extremity of requesting her to wait in the outer office: