Noise! Thundering, reverberating noise. Noise that never ceases, noise that deadens the brain and makes the hand jerk in response to the jarred nerves; always, day and night, throughout the length of the city streets, the clamor of inanimate things.
In the morning when Hertha slipped to her seat, the last but one in the fourth line, she started her own thundering whir. The forty machines, all going at once, sounded like nothing so much as the great beetles that flew about her southern home in the summer evenings. But the beetles came but rarely and went with the withdrawal of the lamp, while here in the workroom the drumming was incessant. Always it was hurrying her, calling upon her to make better speed, to push the white fabric more quickly that the needle might make a greater number of punctures to the minute; to hasten, though her hands trembled, and though the tension drew her mouth into a narrow line and brought her brows together in a frown.
When noon came and the whirring stopped, Hertha would look down the long line of beetle-beasts, for so she called them to herself. At length they were quiet. Surely they had had enough. For hours they had been devouring, eating up the muslin fed to them. No, rather they had disgorged; for the muslin was left, and with it thousands of yards of cotton thread that they had doled out through their small needle jaws. But their rest would be short and they would soon thunder tirelessly on again.
Usually she went out to her luncheon. The nearby restaurant furnished appetizing and inexpensive things to eat, but they were accompanied by a new and disturbing clamor. As she took her seat at one of the many long tables, she was enveloped in a sound of falling plates. Heavy china cup struck heavy china saucer and both struck the marble table. Knives, forks and spoons fell on platters, and platters fell on trays and slipped and rattled one against another. Little plates dropped on big plates and all went with a terrific smash into the dumb waiter; while from some inexhaustible source new knives and forks and plates came clattering up to take the places of the old.
"Butter cakes, please."
Hertha's voice was scarcely audible. As she ate, she listened attentively, hoping that for a moment the noise would cease; but it only varied in intensity, rising now to such a height that it seemed as if an avalanche of white pottery was falling into space; again dropping to a steady, clanging sound of utensils taking their appointed places. But no one but herself seemed to notice, and the men and women about her ate on diligently, silent for the most part, concerned only with securing needed nourishment in a short period of time.
The noises on the avenue down which she walked to and from her home were not wearying like those in the shop and the restaurant, for they came and went. The silent moving motors had their horns that gave warning with a silly, childish squeak or with a deep note as hoarse as a frog's. At the corner where she turned east to go home a policeman was stationed, and she enjoyed waiting for the sound of his shrill whistle. But the avenue left behind, the way was less pleasant. Three busy thoroughfares must be crossed without the policeman's aid, the last a dirty boulevard where heavy trains crashed overhead and surface cars clanged swiftly by. She would stand waiting on the sidewalk until a friendly cart from a side street opened up a path of safety that brought her a little breathless to the opposite walk.
Now she was almost home—the second door, three flights up, and then restful quiet. Kathleen, her new friend, with whom she had come to live, was away, and with windows closed she would sit in the front room, quite by herself, her hands in her lap, enjoying the silence. Later, dinner over, she would take up a novel, one of the books she had always wanted to read, but could not afford to buy, that here in New York any one might have at the library for the asking. Immersed inLorna Doone, she forgot the pounding machines and the clattering dishes and was very happy; but when the book was put away and she lay down to sleep, through the open window the world of tumult came back again.
"Why do men invent so many things that make a noise?" she would ask herself. She had heard city people when they came to the Merryvales' complain bitterly to her of being wakened in the morning by the cock's crowing; but she had not made the cocks, and, moreover, they did not crow all night. Here in her room, however, near the ugly boulevard of the East Side, the man-made cocks never ceased to crow. The trolley cars were the most aggressive; their wheels ground on their axles and jarred upon the rails; they stopped with a loud jolt, and with another jar and jolt were off again. They were always jerking, Hertha felt. Overhead the elevated road vibrated to the heavy cars that moved over its rails day and night. You heard the coming train a long way off. First, a gentle, rumbling noise that you might imagine to be the sea; then a louder and louder roar, and, finally, a crash as the long line of cars rushed past. Sometimes she was sure they would sway too far and fall thundering into the street. And hardly had their sound died away when a second rumbling would be heard and another train come tearing after its fellow, or a third dash by from the opposite side.
After a time the clamor ceased to be incessant. Trains followed at longer intervals, and would-be street car passengers waited for some minutes at the corner. But in these intervals there was always upon the street the sound of footsteps. And long after midnight, if Hertha awoke from her troubled sleep, she heard the tread of feet. Sometimes they were slow and hesitating, sometimes swift and hurried, oftenest a steady, quiet step. Where do all these footsteps lead, she thought. What were the people doing who thronged the elevated railroad, crowding one upon another so that it was difficult to breathe if one pushed one's way among them? And the surface cars were filled with a hurrying crowd, while underneath the city the subways carried their millions of women and men. Was there any need of moving about so much? It might be necessary to travel to and from your work, but why go on and on? Supposing all these cars should stop suddenly, should cease their jar and clang? There would still be the footsteps in the street, for man was always moving, some way, somewhere. Had not Tom moved? And now she, too, was moving, to the whir of the machine, to the crash of the advancing train, moving through the new, clamorous world.
"And you didn't sleep well last night, darling," Kathleen said to her as she came in to breakfast. "Your eyes are looking tired this lovely morning. I'm thinking the trains kept you awake. Don't notice them. They'll go on and never once jump the tracks, but make big profits for their owners and a fine place to hang on the strap for you and me. You'll soon be used to the clatter. Once I heard it, but now I don't mind it any more than I do the sparrows. Take a help of the oatmeal, and tell me what you'll like for dinner, for I'm staying home to-night."
Hertha, when she slipped from Miss Witherspoon's charge, experienced no difficulty in finding a suitable dwelling place in New York. She had not studied for years in a school conducted by northern teachers without learning of the philanthropies that were showered upon people in the North. The Young Women's Christian Association was for just such girls as she, and therefore, under the direction of a friendly policeman, she soon reached headquarters and was given temporary shelter. As she walked about in the comfortable rooms, luxurious in her eyes, she felt that she had indeed entered the white world, her lawful heritage; and if it was hard to lose all family ties—mother, sister, brother, swept away as though in some swift disaster of nature—on the other hand, life of a sudden had become strangely simplified. How easy it was to move through the world if you were white! She had always been conspicuous, a mark for astonished comment when with her black brother and sister, for whispered commiseration when working out in service. Now no one could comment at all. She was like every one else. She need not shrink if she were rudely treated, she might answer back; no longer must she "keep her place," hers was the place of the dominant race. When she remembered her lover, her cheeks flamed. No need to fear that she, a white girl, would ever again think to give herself without exacting a full return.
But what should she do? She was young and white and had something less than two thousand dollars to her credit at the bank; moreover, she had stored in her mind a multiplicity of suggestions to be turned over and reviewed as she made her way through the streets or lay in her bed at night. Had she gone to Boston with Miss Witherspoon, she would at once have used a fair share of her fortune on her education; but, perhaps because she had cut loose from old plans, she rejected the taking up of dressmaking. She inclined to stenography and typewriting; but Ellen, who knew her better than any one else, had looked surprised on learning that she considered this means of earning a livelihood. She knew she was no scholar, and a chosen career that involved the swift jotting down of the ideas of others, later to be transcribed in black type on a white sheet from which a misspelled word shone with hideous clearness, might end in disgrace. So stenography was set aside.
Equally she was sure she would not take the advice of Miss Patty. To be a companion was the highest position that could have been reached by Hertha, colored; but it was menial service to Hertha, white. She had renounced a sheltered home; now that she was in the North she meant to live a new life of freedom.
After three days of happy wandering about the city and of careful consideration of her personal problem, she made a practical decision. Her legacy was small, and for the present she knew too little of the life about her or of her own ability to risk spending it upon an education. The operating work of which Miss Witherspoon had once spoken lay along the line of her natural aptitude. Why, then, not try it? If you were a good workwoman, it paid well. She was in a mood for the unusual, and therefore, under the guidance of the efficient and business-like Association secretary, she found herself, a week after her arrival in New York, doing her part in manufacturing muslin shirtwaists.
Kathleen she had discovered herself. She could not remain long at the Association, since the rooms for permanent guests were occupied; and with a list provided her by the secretary, she went out one afternoon to secure a suitable boarding place. The first and only house she entered was in charge of a thin, meager woman, the type of Miss Witherspoon, but with a more domineering manner and a flatter bust. The room for rent had a red carpet which smelt moldy, and brilliantly painted blue walls. Hertha hated it at once, but with difficulty succeeded in leaving without renting it, so persistent was the person in charge. Indeed, she only escaped with the proviso that she might look in again.
Once in the street, her confidence returned and she resolved to have nothing to do with this or any other cheap boarding place. In so immense a city it must be possible to find an attractive home.
She looked no further that day, and in the evening, standing in the office, she saw a large, fine looking Irish woman come up to the desk. Laughing and talking to a friend, her cheeks pink with her exertions from the gymnasium, her gray eyes glowing, Kathleen seemed the exact opposite of the disturbing landlady of the afternoon. "I know I'm bothering you, Miss Jones," she began, addressing the secretary, who was insignificant beside her, "but it's what you like. You couldn't be happy if you didn't have a dozen girls wanting you at once. What I'm after is some one to share my flat with me this winter. The boss has sent my brother to Chicago, where they need his work more than they do here. Hard luck for me, for he was bringing in a good wage! And now I've a little flat and only myself in it. Is there any girl here, do you think, would like a bedroom and the use of a kitchen and parlor? I'd let her have it for fifteen dollars a month."
Hertha was standing at the end of the desk, quite by Miss Jones's elbow. She expected that the secretary would introduce them, but instead Miss Jones looked down, moved some papers, and handed an elaborately ruled card for Kathleen to fill.
The Irishwoman took it up clumsily. "You fill it in," she said. "It's Kathleen O'Connor, 204 East 8th Street, fourth floor. I'll be home to-morrow night to any one who comes."
When she had gone Hertha asked for the address, explaining that she would like to see the room.
"Would you?" Miss Jones questioned, looking her over as though to place her again. "I thought of you, but did not know whether it was what you desired. It's rather a poor neighborhood, and yet it costs as much as a better one. Kathleen is Irish, you know. She only comes to the gymnasium, and she's irregular at that. She's a sort of nurse; not trained, of course, but good of her kind. Take the address; it's near your, work, and if you like——" and her voice trailed off as she turned to the next girl who came to her for guidance.
Hertha did "like." She went to Kathleen's the following evening and settled the bargain with a week's rent in advance. She liked the rear alcove room with its iron bed and fresh cover; and, though it was dark, it opened with wide doors into the parlor. "For the both of us," Kathleen explained, "unless you're wanting to go straight to bed and then it's yours." The parlor had little furniture—a plain table, two straight chairs, a comfortable rocker and a couch with a Bagdad cover. Kathleen had a small bedroom opening into a court; but the attractive spot was the kitchen. It faced the south and its two windows were filled with red geraniums in full bloom. The walls were light buff, the kitchen table was covered with a white oilcloth, and the wooden chairs were painted like the wall. For convenience, it was beyond anything Hertha had ever known with its gas stove, its hot and cold water for sink and tubs. She remembered the thousands of pails of water that her mother and Ellen had carried during the years she had been with them, and the millions of pieces of wood that Tom had piled up and brought into the kitchen. Getting meals and washing your clothes here would be fun, not work.
"I can make corn bread for breakfast," she said to Kathleen confidentially, as they looked into the closet with its wealth of pots and pans, spoons and egg beaters, skillets and toasters—more kitchen utensils than Hertha had imagined any one could own.
Kathleen regarded her quizzically.
"When do you go to work?" she queried.
"At eight o'clock."
"That's better than it used to be, but if you make corn bread it's likely it will only be for a week. Then you'll be so tired when you wake that the best tasting food in the world won't equal an extra nap, cuddled under the clothes, with the sure knowledge that it's wrong. It will be oatmeal cooked the night before and warmed up, and coffee made the way that's quickest, and a slice of toast, maybe, from the bread bought of the baker. You can boil yourself an egg, but they put the price on eggs up every winter to pay for the chemicals they use to keep them young."
"How about Sunday morning?" Hertha queried.
"Sundays you won't be getting up until it's time for dinner."
And while Kathleen's prophecy was in part true, while the increasingly cold weather and the hard hours made the morning nap imperative, Hertha did more for their little home than her companion had expected. She made curtains for the windows; she bought occasional attractive magazines; she framed a striking picture taken from the Sunday supplement. It was a landscape by Inness of great trees with heavy foliage, the clouds massed as though about to break in storm. Before a month was over the tenement rooms took on a deeper look of home.
The life within the rooms was very quiet. Kathleen's work made her hours most irregular. As an "experienced nurse" she was rarely on a case for more than two or three days and nights, so poor were the people among whom she worked. She had no diploma and was not recognized by the profession. During one year of her hard life she had acted as nurse in a woman's prison, but the time had never come when she could afford to go into a hospital. "And now it's too late; I'm too old," she would explain, "and besides I haven't got the education. Schooling don't go with starting in at the mill with your dresses at your knees, and your hands so little you can hardly manage the machine." Her hands were still small and well formed, and she had a pleasant touch. She was skillful at massage, and in the winter season had a few society women whose surplus flesh she vigorously rubbed off and whose faces she smoothed into comparative youth. Leaving the sumptuous house of some wealthy woman, she would hurry to a dark room in a tenement, where the cold and poverty made her eyes flame with anger, to spend the night by an ailing child, ministering with patience and even merriment to its many wants. And as her life carried her from one extreme to another, so she herself varied in mood, from the smiling, youthful looking woman whom Hertha had seen and loved from the first to an intense, angry iconoclast who found life for the many both cruel and unjust. She never ministered and brought to health the one ailing without remembering the ten others who were needlessly suffering and whom she could not aid. "I know that my work is nothing but putting courtplaster on a cancer," she would say to Hertha savagely as she came back from a home where she had coaxed the growing boy back to life, to see him in his convalescence go out to a ten-hour day of racking work. "I ain't fooled, though. I done what I could, but why won't his father fight for better hours and living conditions? He sits there and lets the boss use his boy worse than he'd use a machine. He's got the backbone of a chocolate eclair, that man." And then she would take up a copy of the daily "Worker" and become absorbed in the vision of the successful class struggle and a world set free.
"What shall we have for dinner to-night?" she had smilingly asked Hertha. "Shall we celebrate together with an Irish stew and ice cream and then go to the movies?"
"But this is your evening for the Y. W. C. A.," Hertha answered.
The smile left Kathleen's face. "I'm through there," she said. "It's not for me."
Hertha wanted to know more, but she was reticent with questions. As it happens, however, the silent person learns more of another's life than one who shows a voluble sympathy, and Kathleen was soon telling her friend that all girls' clubs and Christian Associations were nothing but charities; that she could have nothing to do with a charity herself, and that, had it not been for a moment's temptation, offered by a friend, she would never have entered the class. It was the exercise that she needed and the marching to music had been the best part. "And it's grand," she explained, "if only for an hour a week to be living as the Lord intended you with your legs apart." But this morning she had been giving massage to a rich uptown customer. "And after I had pommeled off the two pounds she'd gained at a twelve-course dinner the night before, she begins to tell me of her charities. 'I like best to help the working girl,' she says, 'and I gave my mite to their new building, but I'm troubled at the obstinacy of the young women in refusing to become servants. They have a false pride in the matter.' I kept my mouth shut, for I couldn't afford to lose a good customer, but I was that mad to think I might have been taking money off her as a gift that I stopped in at the office and told Miss Jones I should quit. 'Is that so, Kathleen?' she says quietly. 'It is for you to decide.' And then she asks: 'And how is Miss Ogilvie?' She always calls me Kathleen. Not that I mind it, but I'm fifteen years older than you, and Miss Jones needn't 'Miss Ogilvie' you to me. I don't wonder she does, though, for you wear your clothes as though you had always lived in a palace, and you speak like a princess."
"Don't be foolish," Hertha said, and then laughed—an odd, short laugh in which Kathleen joined, though as it happened she did not understand the joke. "Let's have the stew, only don't put quite so much onion in it, and we'll get the ice cream on the way home."
The stew was delicious and Hertha enjoyed it, while Kathleen consoled herself for the loss of the extra onion by a plentiful use of condiments. "I've just a good plain appetite," she explained. Then they went out into the noisy street to the theater where they sat in the orchestra and Hertha felt like a queen. In the South she had been only a few times to some cheap playhouse where she had been repelled by the vulgarity of the people and the performance; but here in New York the comfortable theater, darkened now, the music, the quiet audience, filled her with happy anticipation. She squeezed Kathleen's hand as the picture of a lovely young girl in gingham dress and pink sunbonnet flashed upon the screen, and the story began.
It was one of the fifty-seven varieties of moving pictures, all of which, Kathleen knew, were canned in the same syrup, but which to Hertha were freshly sweet. A beautiful girl, a pink sunbonnet, a young lover, blossoming apple trees. A coal mine discovered under the apple boughs. A cruel father and separation. The girl in a gilded palace registering despair. The lover seeking fame and gold. A titled villain mocking the girl's pure love. The villain's machination, the lover tied to the railroad track, the train dashing to within two inches of its victim. The escape, a night in the woods, the friendly beasts. The disclosure. "I love you still." The villain's contrition. His death. The coal mine exhausted. Soft music, two lovers and one kiss. Blossoming apple trees and the pink sunbonnet again. Far in the distance the sound of wedding bells. Then sudden darkness, and The Best Flavored Chewing Gum thrown upon the screen.
Hertha's heart beat fast during the whole of the story and she felt wave after wave of pleasurable excitement. It was so sad and yet so beautiful. The only thing to temper her enjoyment was Kathleen, who would laugh in the wrong places. When the hero and heroine were in great danger, Kathleen showed no apprehension. She chuckled at the approaching train, and gave little grunts of amusement when the villain threatened the girl. The only thing she seemed to care for was the bear who gave the boy shelter in his cave for the night. "The dear!" exclaimed Kathleen.
"But it's so improbable," Hertha whispered as the piano played Nevin's lullaby while the bear rocked the youth in his arms.
"Not half so improbable as the rest," Kathleen whispered back. "You can trust the brutes to do the right thing enough sight better than the men."
As the light went up Kathleen yawned.
"Haven't we got our money's worth of romance, infant?" she asked. "There's a meeting on Peonage to-night at Cooper Union. Let's go there."
They walked briskly down lower Broadway to where Grace Church lifted its delicate spire into the night, the electric light from the street casting long shadows upward on its white stone. Once or twice Hertha from pure pleasure gave a little skip as they went along.
"I don't know how it is," she said confidentially, "but I never felt so well before in all my life. You'd suppose I'd be tired from my work."
"That will come later," said Kathleen dryly. "Now you're living on the strength you've put away in your long country life."
"I think it's the air," Hertha went on. "It's such wonderful air to breathe, it's like—well, it's like food when you're hungry. It's fresh and cold so that you can taste it."
"It's too cold for that thin suit of yours, I wouldn't wonder."
"I'm not cold in the least. Perhaps I have a lot of warmth stored up in me; but I promise if it gives out to buy a new coat."
"Like that, now." A young girl passed them clad in brilliant scarlet. Her face was painted to match her coat; her hat was the latest extravagance in fashion, immensely brimmed, with a feather that, extending beyond the broad wake of black velvet, swept against Kathleen's cheek as she passed. "The dirty style!" Kathleen said indignantly. "Who knows what germs she hands out every day. The city government ought to forbid the wearing of them feather dusters; at any rate, on public highways."
Hertha smiled and presently slipped back into her thoughts, recalling the story she had just seen and going on with it, which was a way she had; but Kathleen watched the people. The men strolled along, all alike in derby hats and readymade clothes; while the women took little steps in high-heeled shoes, and talked shrilly, striving to be heard above the city's tumult. They used the slovenly street vernacular which scores of nationalities have helped to produce, contributing nothing from their own wealth of speech but changing consonants, slurring vowels, making at length of the beautiful English tongue an ugly, degraded thing. "Aw, I say, gimme dat!"
Kathleen prided herself upon her speech. She was born in Ireland, though she had little recollection of the fact, having arrived at the port of New York while taking nourishment at the maternal fount. "And it was you was screaming and beating me with your little fists, mavourneen," her mother used to say, "when I was making shift to button up my dress decently and carry you down the gangplank." She kept something of the richness of the Irish speech that had surrounded her in her childhood, despising the slang that with many an emigrant takes the place of a language. She might make a slip in grammar, but she never wittingly misused a word. Hertha's ladylike talk with its soft accent was a delight, and a little warm wave of pride swept over her as she looked at the girl walking by her side and remembered that she had chosen to come to her home.
"Just here to the left a step, dear," she said, "and we'll be out of the cold."
The air within the large, ill-ventilated hall could also be tasted, but no one could truthfully describe it as cold and fresh. It took the vitality out of Hertha, leaving her both tired and sleepy; but to Kathleen it was the breath of a new life. Moving amongst her fellows, nodding here, whispering a friendly "Good evening, comrade," there, she found the seats that she wanted, and, leaning well forward in her chair, gave herself to the discussion.
The address of the evening was over, but the speaker, a small man, ill shaven, with a sallow skin and sharp features, was answering questions. To Hertha he was a familiar and an unpleasant type of rural southern white, and she paid him little attention, slipping back into her dream story which had already reached the point where the beautiful and still young looking couple were being presented with sturdy grandchildren. To the audience, however, the meeting was growing in interest. Some one from the floor was casting doubt upon the picture the southerner had presented, suggesting that poverty in the country, in a warm climate, could not equal the severity of poverty in a northern slum.
As the speaker rose to reply his eyes shone with excitement. "Have I exaggerated the suffering of the country?" he asked. "Let me tell you of just one tenant farmer, and, remember, there are hundreds of thousands like him. He's a decent man, uneducated, but kindly, who, when I saw him, had a wife and ten children; the oldest was fifteen. There wasn't one of them that was clothed, not really clothed. One had a coat, another a shirt, two out of the ten had shoes. The girls went in rags, folks' left-over clothes that had been worn out years ago. But it was the woman who was the pitifullest. She looked like she had never had an hour's rest since she was grown, and I reckon she hadn't. It was the business of the landlord to keep her busy. She had to have children to help work the place, and she had to work herself to keep from being turned out of house and home. There was a baby dragging at her skirt, and it was put the one down on the bed and set the other to watch it, while she went into the fields. Her face was so thin her eyes stood out like a bird's, and her cheek was the color of an old shuck of corn. I haven't seen an old man or an old woman in this city walk with the weariness that she walked out from her broken down cabin to make her crops.
"At noon there was nothing to eat in the place, but in the evening the man went down to the store and came back with a bit of cornmeal and a few slices of bacon. The children fell upon it like starving dogs. Perhaps the woman got some, but I didn't see her.
"I talked with her when night came on. She wasn't but thirty-three. In the last five years she told me she hadn't had a new thing to wear. She hadn't been anywhere, not to ride in a buggy or on a train. She hadn't felt well, she told me, not really well, since her first child was born.
"And there was that family held there, as I've been trying to explain to you," he pounded his fist on the table, "held in the peonage that's slavery. There aren't any debtors' prisons to-day with walls about them; but there're millions of debtors' prisons, little sordid cabins on little plots of land, that are locking tired slaves within their bounds to-day."
The man sat down and Kathleen was on her feet. "Break the walls down!" she cried. "Take them our message as workers to break down the walls and join in the social revolution."
There was loud applause and Kathleen dropped back, her face flushed, her gray eyes gleaming.
The meeting over, the Irishwoman was the center of a group of excited talkers. Hertha slipped into the background and watched the people gesticulating and arguing. There were a few burly Irish among them, men in the building trades, who found a chance to laugh in the midst of their debate; but the majority were spare, hollow-cheeked Jews; tailors, small tradesmen, lawyers, eager, often aggressive personalities. The women were in the minority, and offered a contrast to the girls Hertha had seen at the theater or parading the street. They were all simply dressed, usually in white, somewhat mussy shirtwaists, with cheap, ill-hanging skirts. Men and women, however, despite their shabby clothes, were all intensely virile spirits to whom the story of the evening had been a living fact; not a tale to weep over and forget, but a truth to grip and to remedy.
"Come up to the platform with me, Kathleen," one of the women said, "and meet the comrade from the South." Kathleen started to go, and then, glancing back at Hertha, who had dropped into a seat, shook her head. "No, I'll be off with my friend," she answered, and the two made their way out. A few minutes' walk in the reviving air brought them to their home.
"Goodness," Kathleen exclaimed, as she took off her coat, "we forgot the ice cream!"
"Never mind," Hertha answered, "it's cold for ice cream. Sit down and I'll make some cocoa," and she started to walk into the kitchen.
Kathleen followed her. "I'll make the cocoa myself."
"No you won't," Hertha declared. "You got the dinner and it's my turn now."
She put a big apron over her dress and went quietly about her work. Kathleen, as she sat watching, felt a little tightening at her throat, so rarely did any one do her a service. She was a strong, capable woman, the eldest in the family, and it had naturally fallen to her to wait upon others. At eight her father had been killed in an accident, and the mill, not satisfied with his life, had dragged the loved school books from her hands and, opening its cruel door, held her from sunrise to sunset amid dirt and turmoil performing stupid, monotonous tasks. She had nursed her mother during her last illness, two weary years of suffering. Brother and sister had accepted her sacrifices, enjoying the education that she had been denied, receiving her ministrations thoughtlessly and as thoughtlessly giving nothing in return. She could never remember when either of them had waited upon her, had made her a cup of tea, had so much as hung up her hat and coat. Feeling herself the stronger, she had always waited upon others, and now for the first time, in this gentle, ladylike girl whom she had known less than a month, she had found a helpmate, one who showed her sympathy and consideration.
The cocoa was hot and foamy and delicious. They drank it sitting each at an end of the table with its white cloth that stood between the two windows.
"You're a smart young lady," Kathleen announced. "Who taught you to cook so well?"
"Oh, I just picked it up."
That was all the answer. Kathleen had already noticed that she received short replies when she questioned Hertha about her past.
"I can't keep that poor woman out of my head," Kathleen went on after a pause. "Here am I supping this elegant drink, and she without a crumb in the house."
"What woman?" Hertha asked. "Oh, yes, I know," guiltily. "You mean the woman the man told us about? But you don't know what may have happened. Perhaps she has all she wants now."
"Perhaps she has, in heaven."
"Oh, you can't tell. Lucky things happen sometimes."
"Do they? I've mostly seen unlucky ones. But luck is a poor thing for any of us to be counting on."
"I don't know, I've been lucky, very lucky."
"Have you? When?"
"Well, once, down South, not so long ago. And I was lucky when I met you."
"Indeed it was I had the luck then."
"Indeed, I had. If you could have seen the awful room, Kathleen, that Miss Jones sent me to look at! In a cheap boarding house, and with a landlady who looked as though she would cheat you half the time and scold you the other half."
"That would have been a happy home to return to when you'd been out at night to see two lovers parted only to meet again! Now, sit where you are. The cook doesn't wash the dishes."
"No, but she dries them," Hertha said decisively; and together they cleared away the things.
"I'd give a penny to know your thoughts," Kathleen remarked as she wrung out the dishcloth and hung it up to dry.
Hertha did not answer. She was pulling a leaf from the geraniums, crushing it in her fingers. She had left the lovers of the play and was back in an orange grove, her own lover close to her side. "You are Snowdrop of the fairy tale," he was saying. It had come true, she was Snowdrop, and yet of her own will she had destroyed the fairy tale. Whom might he not be making love to now? All at once she felt homesick and very tired.
Perhaps Kathleen a little guessed her thoughts. "It must be slow enough for you here with nobody but an old maid around like me. I wish I knew a fine young fellow to ask to dinner on Sunday."
"Ask Billy," Hertha said, looking up. "I'm sure it's time for him to come and look after the flowers."
William Applebaum, or Billy, as Kathleen called him, was a short man, stockily built, whose little length of limb and small hands were overtopped by a large head that commanded attention. It was well shaped, with an abundance of blond hair, a straight forehead, clear blue eyes and a fair, healthy skin. His mouth and chin were too small for the rest of his face, but he wisely concealed them with a beard which, as time went on, he kept closely clipped.
His grandfather, of whom he was justly proud, had been a revolutionist in Germany, in 1848, one of the band that strove bravely, but unsuccessfully, to bring political democracy to the Fatherland. Young Wilhelm was imprisoned for his activities, but he made his escape, and in a series of perilous adventures, in which his daring was only equaled by his good luck, at length found himself in America. There he settled in a small town in the Middle West, married, and brought up a family; and in his old age found himself with a son William and a grandson of the same name, living in the town of his adoption.
Those who love to dwell upon the past are grateful for any audience, and the grandfather, harking back at the end of his life to its one dramatic happening, was happy in the garden, working among his bright shrubs and clambering vines, or of a winter night seated by the ugly but heat-giving stove, to tell his always attentive small grandson of his great adventures. It would be, "Billy, I never hear a knock like that at the door that I don't remember the time I was drinking a glass of beer at the back of the house and the police knocked at the front and spoke my name." Or, "That's a strong grape-vine, Billy, growing against the arbor, and I like to see you climb up and get the fruit for us; but would you have been able to climb down the vine that saved my life the night I left prison?"
The story that Billy liked the best was the one where his grandfather—he must think of him not as gray-haired and rheumatic, but as a swift-running, strong youth—hid in a cart filled with hay. He lay close to the bottom, scarcely able to breathe for the seed about his face, jolting to the town on the seacoast. Suddenly there appeared the always pursuing soldiers. They came up, and the captain, staring suspiciously at the cart, called upon the driver to stop, and ordered the men to probe the hay with their bayonets. The soldiers reached over and jabbed again and again, going down deep until they touched the floor of the cart. But they found nothing and at length, turning about, put spurs to their steeds and galloped away. "When we reached the coast, and my good friend and comrade unloaded his hay, I lay there safe and sound," the old man would end impressively. "For it was not always the floor of the cart that they touched, but sometimes the board that I had put above my body as I lay huddled against the planks."
But while the first William had showed an adventurous spirit, the third of the name was content with a quiet and orderly existence. His grandfather became an intensely patriotic American, who fought through the Civil War, and to his death never voted any but the Republican ticket. To do otherwise would have seemed to him to doubt his adopted but intensely beloved land. He was impatient of any criticism of America. "It is only those who have fled from a despotism," he would say, "who can appreciate the United States." And so his grandson had taken things much as they came, and had done nothing more startling in his life than at twenty to come to New York where he found better opportunity for advancement than in the town of his birth. He obtained a position as bookkeeper, and for fifteen years, with absolute regularity, appeared at eight o'clock in the little stationer's shop, tucked among the great office buildings on the downtown street, to remain until half-past five when, with equal regularity, he returned to his well-kept boarding house, his only home in New York.
His annual vacation of two weeks for some years was spent in his western town, but marriage and death broke up the home there, the house was sold, and those remaining to him moved to the Pacific coast. After this, he rarely left the city, staying to care for the flowers that in the summer his landlady allowed him to plant in her back yard—though they were a trouble Monday with the wash—and to play long hours on the piano that stood against the wall by the further window in his south room. Sometimes he went for a day to a beach, but night found him in his bed at home. Vacation over, he was quite ready to take up work. His German singing society was the greatest excitement in his methodical life, and if the chorus master assigned him a solo part, never an ambitious one, he practised at home night after night, his pleasant bass sounding through the old house.
He was just the sort of man who should have married; but whether he was held by a romance of the days before he left his western town, or whether his elderly landlady, knowing that she could not have him herself was yet successful in guarding him against all comers, it was certain that he had made love to no woman since he had come to the great city, until, at thirty-five years of age, he met Kathleen. Then the pleasant clerk of precise ways, whose sentiment had been satisfied in singing "lieder" and watering tender plants, was consumed by a great, unselfish passion. His life no longer moved about his books in the comfortable cage in the stationer's shop, nor about the boarding-house room in the quiet street, but day and night it found its happiness, its sorrow, too, and unrest, in the life of a woman.
It was at the bedside of an acquaintance, a clerk whom he had met in his work, that he first saw Kathleen. The sick man lived in a dingy, furnished-room house; and as William Applebaum mounted the stairs, noticed the dust in rolls against the wall, smelt to-day's dinner and yesterday's, he found himself extremely sorry for his sick friend. What must the end be if the beginning was like this? Then, fumbling in the dark to find his way, the knob on which he had hesitatingly put his hand was pulled from his fingers, the door opened, and a large, comely woman, in a nurse's blue dress and white apron, stood before him.
"Is Mr. Saunders here?" he managed to ask.
"Indeed he is," was the answer, "and likely to remain here for some time. Will you come in and speak to him?"
"If I may."
Mr. Saunders proved to have typhoid fever, not a severe case but a long one, and Kathleen nursed him with Billy as her faithful assistant. "Mr. Applebaum is too long a name for so short a man," she explained to him. "But it's Billy all right with that beard." It was after this that he kept his beard closely clipped. He shared many a night's work with her; and long before Mr. Saunders was well, William Applebaum was at the feet of the lady of his choice.
If she knew it, she gave no sign. But as the sick man grew better and was able to sit in a chair, propped up with pillows, she stayed on in the evenings after her assistant came to relieve her, and the three visited together. Then Kathleen would regale them with stories of her work and of her plans for the future. She was always going to do something different, but always something held her to her present task. Just now it was a brother who needed her to keep house for him. When she was free, however, she meant to buy a horse and cart, to stock it with goods, and drive across the continent as a peddler. They were two evenings filling that cart, and Mr. Saunders was each time so exhausted with merriment that he slept all night without waking. "I may never buy the cart," she once said confidentially to Billy, "but for many a year it's been a good stock in trade." Again, she meant to save enough to go to Paris where they were always wanting American nurses and paid fabulously for them, and where she could work for a year; and then, on the proceeds, travel for the rest of her days. And where to go? That brought up endless suggestions and much useful information. After Mr. Saunders, who had gone once to South America as a salesman, had explained to her the ways of the insect life of the tropics, and his experience with snakes, she struck out everything south of thirty degrees of the equator. She could be as merry as a child in runabouts; but when the occasion came for discipline and serious work the men dared not jest with her, fearing the set look that came into her face.
Mr. Saunders got well and went back to his work, but before that time Mr. William Applebaum had asked Kathleen to be his wife.
"Marry an Appletree," she said, "you must think me Eve herself."
She always refused to give him a serious answer. "She had no idea of marrying any one. She had enough to do taking care of folk who took such ties upon themselves. And, if she did marry, did he suppose she'd choose a little man with a head on him like a comic supplement? Did he think he'd like to be a good husband sitting up nights for her, waiting patiently till he heard her footfall on the stair? As for wanting a home, she'd had more than enough home in her life. Caring for her own had worn her to the shadow she was, and it was a blessed comfort to be a free woman."
The last of Kathleen's rejoinders contained something more than mockery. She had had her share in the rearing and supporting of her kin, and this winter with Hertha was proving a beautiful respite. Had her lover been of a jealous disposition he would have disliked the southern girl who occupied so strong a place in Kathleen's affection, but he was devoid of pettiness. For a year he had unavailingly striven to win his goddess, but there were more years in the calendar; and though he received nothing in return for his unstinted affection and admiration, his love did not take from him the right to give.
He came regularly to see Kathleen of a Sunday, to dinner if she were gracious enough to invite him; if not, then in the afternoon, when once in awhile she would go out with him to dinner, and to a meeting afterwards. Sometimes it would be at the forum at Cooper Union, sometimes in a liberal church, but always the great problem of the world, the relation of labor to capital, would come under discussion. Then Kathleen would sit tense in her seat or lean forward to make sure that she caught each of the speaker's words. She would grunt with disgust at the rank conservatism of an argument; or again, applaud with all her might the denunciation of oppression and greed. The man at her side would watch her, filled with admiration at her splendid spirit, but himself moved not at all by what he heard. Only, occasionally, he would be almost angry at the invective hurled at the capitalist class, and had once said as he went out, "If the dirty Jew didn't like America he might go back to Russia on the first boat, and the country be all the better." Kathleen was furious at this heresy, and they walked the streets for an hour afterward discussing the sins and virtues of America. It was then that he told her of his grandfather, and she listened with enthusiastic interest to the recital of the revolutionist's political activities and his escape. "But what did he do after he got here?" was her question, and when she learned that he had then sat down and worshiped the land of his adoption, she lost interest. "His light burned out in his youth," was her comment. William Applebaum, third, for the first time resented her speech, and told hotly of the Civil War and of his grandfather's part in it. He won Kathleen's favor by his defense of his hero, and she never again spoke in any way but appreciatively of his revolutionary forbear, but she showed no greater favor to him.
When she took the flat on East Eighth Street, he made shelves for her at the two south windows and brought to her kitchen a wealth of potted plants. The delicate flowers died, for the Irish woman was very forgetful of them; and then, with sorrow at his heart for his cherished slips, but with no word of blame, he filled up the ranks with hardy geraniums that neglect could not kill. Attracted at the outset by the gay window shelves, Hertha soon assumed all care of the flowers, much to their profit; and on the Sunday after her night's outing with Kathleen, when she had secured an invitation for him to come to dinner, looked with some pride at the objects of her care.
"I'm glad I remembered to move this new fern last night when it was so cold," she said to Kathleen as she worked among the window plants. "Mr. Applebaum will see that I didn't forget what he told me. And, oh, Kathleen, let me set the table, I like to."
"And you know how," Kathleen added, and left her task. "There's many an uptown mistress, Hertha, would say that it was wrong for you to be manufacturing shirtwaists, when she needs you to wait on her table. I can just hear her telling you, 'Leave the factory, my child, and come to me where you will have easy work, (only fourteen hours a day) and a good home. (Her son will likely make love to you and you'll be sent from the house in disgrace.) Leave your coarse companions and learn the ways of a lady, (only you have them already)."
"Oh, stop, Kathleen. Let me finish with the dinner, and you put on that fresh waist I ironed for you. It's on your bed."
Kathleen went into her room to her perspiring work,—it made her hot to get into even the simplest dress,—and while struggling to hook her skirt over on the left side, she heard her lover's knock and Hertha's cordial greeting.
"More flowers, Mr. Applebaum? A begonia? We used to have those at home." Then the voices fell away into the distance as the speakers went into the front room.
"If this dinner is good, Billy," Kathleen said, when they were all three seated together about the kitchen table, spread with their best linen and china, "it's all Hertha's doings."
Hertha smiled but shook her head.
"Miss Hertha did her part, Kitty, I know," the guest made answer, "but the mashed potatoes are yours."
"And lumps in them at that! I've not much patience with potatoes or the world; but if you're liking them, take some more."
They all took part in clearing off the course of meat and vegetables, and then Hertha served a dessert of her own making, a fluffy-looking pudding of orange and custard and meringue.
"And did you think I cooked this?" said Kathleen. "Come now and own up that in cooking the South beats the Irish."
"The Germans are good cooks," said Hertha. "Perhaps Mr. Applebaum will cook the dinner for us some day."
"A man cook the dinner?" the Irishwoman said in astonishment; and with a touch of resentment, "That's a woman's work."
"Don't men cook here?" Hertha asked. Then, turning to the man present, "Don't men cook in Germany?"
"Miss Hertha," Mr. Applebaum made answer, "I don't know any more about that than you do. I've never been to Germany and my mother was an American who asked me only to make the fire and bring in the wood."
"You can take it from me," said Kathleen, "that the women do the cooking and the housework. Did you ever have a man cook for you?"
"Yes," Hertha answered, "my brother."
"Just like a nigger," commented Kathleen.
There was an awkward silence broken by the Irishwoman's muttered, "I beg your pardon."
Hertha looked straight at the begonia in the center of the table. How could she have said anything so stupid! Hertha Ogilvie had no brother. Now she would have to begin making up a story, lying about things. She ought to appear very angry. Imagine a white girl hearing her brother called a nigger and not resenting it; but again, imagine Hertha Williams sitting by the fire and warming herself and denying her brother Tom.
"I don't know why American men should not cook," William Applebaum at length broke in with his deep, pleasant voice. "The greatest chefs in the world are men. I wish, Miss Hertha, you would let me turn cook like your brother and show me how to make this pudding."
The meal finished, they left the dishes to be washed later and went into the front room where William Applebaum admired the picture which Hertha had framed.
"Yes," Kathleen said, "Hertha is spoiling me with her pretty rooms and her good things to eat. I've not been to my Socialist local for a month now. It's so comfortable here the nights I can be home."
"We went out last Thursday, Kathleen."
"You're right, we did. And you should have been with us, Billy. Such a talk as we heard of the poverty in the South."
"Perhaps Mr. Applebaum would have preferred the movie," Hertha said mischievously.
She was quite herself again, and curled up on the cot, her back against the wall, was prepared to watch the two in their talk, for she knew well enough that she would soon be forgotten. Kathleen had given the armchair to her guest and sat erect in her straight seat. Her soft white shirtwaist set off her fresh cheeks, her gray eyes, her large but sensitive mouth. But she had no thought of her appearance, she was prepared to be serious.
Her guest stretched in comfort in the big chair, his handsome head thrown back, his lighted pipe in his hand as he blew the smoke from between his lips. He would have been greatly pleased if Kathleen had chosen to tell of the moving pictures, but he saw at once that this was not her mood.
"I wish I had been with you at both places," he said courteously, with a little touch of formality that the Irish girl ridiculed and the southern girl liked. "It must have been like going to the theater and seeing both a comedy and a tragedy, only in that case they usually put the comedy last."
"That may be what they do at the theater but it isn't what they do in life."
Kathleen was ready to talk. She sat in her chair and told the story of southern peonage and wrong.
Hertha, who had failed to listen at Cooper Union, was moved in spite of herself at the tragic tale as it came from Kathleen's lips. It was the same in all essentials, but vivified by a rare imagination and a compelling sympathy. The Irishwoman became herself the thin, yellow, starved mother dragging her steps from her unlovely home into the hot, relentless fields.
"Have you ever seen anything like that?" William Applebaum asked of Hertha when the story came to an end.
Hertha hesitated as she answered. "No, I don't think I have. I lived much of the time in the city. I haven't known about such things." She thought of Ellen as she spoke, and was sure, had she been there, she could have talked intelligently about peonage and poverty among white and black. She remembered that Ellen used to say the Negro never fell as low as the lowest white. "Those are the folks," she added, "that we call poor white trash."
Her friend flared up at her. "Yes, and why are they trash? Because you treat them worse than slaves! You hold them in debt, steal from them with every piece of bacon or cup of meal they buy from your store, work their children when they should be at school or playing out under the blue skies; and then you live in idleness and sneer at the trash that done the work of the world for you."
"Miss Hertha doesn't sneer, and neither do I, Kitty, but I think you're talking of an exceptional case. At any rate, as I have seen things in the North and West, I've found that it was the fault of the man if he didn't live decently in the world, and keep his woman that way, too. Why didn't this woman's husband pay off his debt and go to another farm?"
"For the same reason likely that his children won't. Because he was starved and worked until all the life was squeezed out of him."
"Well, it's not that way in the North."
"Isn't it? Haven't I seen the tenement child sewing on the buttons to pants, and coughing fit to send her in a few years to heaven—for if those babies that have no chance in this world don't have one in the next, there's no God."
"And I've seen things, too, Kitty. I've known a good many families that were down and out, and it's always been one person of the lot who's been to blame. If every one did his share, kept sober, worked hard and saved money, he would get out of the tenement. When the family doesn't do better, when it keeps staying in the dirt, it's because there's a father perhaps who only works three days in the week and gets drunk the other three, or there's a son who can't find the right job, a round peg in a square hole. There's somebody who doesn't do right and keeps the family back."
"And do you mean to say that rich folk aren't like that?" Kathleen was growing very angry. "And yet I'm noticing they're not starved for it."
"If they're rich it's because they're industrious. My grandfather used to tell me that America was the land of opportunity, and that it rested with the individual whether or not he made a success."
"Oh!" Kathleen rose. She looked as though she could personally assault the little man. He in the meantime had resumed his pipe and was talking in a pleasant, matter-of-fact tone.
"Of course, I'm not denying, Kitty, that there are wrong things that ought to be remedied. That case in the South, now. It's very hard. Of course, the children should have schooling, and if the Blair Bill for federal aid to education hadn't been killed, they would be having it to-day. My grandfather used to say that this put back the South fifty years. But given an education, it's a fair field and no favor for the growing boy in the United States."
"I don't know how far back your Mr. Blair and his education may be, but he can't be as far back as you are, Billy, with your fair field. Fair indeed, with two per cent of the people controlling the wealth of the country!"
"Those figures are exaggerated."
"Indeed, they are! It should be one per cent and it will be that soon."
"But suppose for argument that it is. Don't they control it for good?"
"For good! And every night you see the bread line for a block down the Bowery?"
Applebaum laid down his pipe and spoke with emphasis.
"Oh, I've no sympathy with that. Those are just bums, nothing else. They wouldn't do a day's job if you gave it to them. They don't mean to work. All they want is a bite and a drink and a dirty hole to sleep in until they can get the drink again. They ought to be forced to work. The trouble is the men don't have to work long enough. With their eight-hour day you see them in the saloon before they go to work getting a drink. And they're after it again when the day's work is over or some other foolishness."
"You fool!" Kathleen said, her eyes blazing, and she lifted her hand as if to strike him.
He seized it in his own and carried it to his lips.
"I'm wise enough to love you, Kathleen."
Hertha found this an excellent time to slip from her seat and into the kitchen. When she came back the two were seated as before, but talking of indifferent things, and the light had gone out of Kathleen's face.
It was Saturday evening and early December. Kathleen was away for the night on a case, and Hertha, after a dinner alone, decided to go to the library to secure a book to read on Sunday. She was quite accustomed by this time to going out in the evening by herself; yet it always seemed a little an adventure, the streets were so gaily lighted and the people so many. She put a raincoat over her suit for the sky was lowering and there was a chilliness in the air, a harsh feeling that made her shiver and turn gladly, her short walk over, into the warm, brightly lighted reading-room.
Accustomed all her life to having few books about her, with no opportunity for individual choice, she made mistakes at first amid the plethora of volumes that the city offered. It had been disappointing, for instance, to reach home in the evening to learn thatThe Four Georgeswas not about four little boys or to find out thatSesame and Liliehad nothing to do with flowers. But part of the stack was open, and she soon found what she desired and drenched herself in the world of romance. Under the guidance of the librarian she read two novels of Dickens, and carried home and returned with suspicious swiftness one each of Scott and Thackeray; under her own guidance she became intimate with the heroines of those best sellers that a conscientious library board permitted upon the open shelves. Rather to her relief the librarian this evening was very busy and she went at once to the open stack.
It was with a guilty feeling that she habitually walked past the rows of history and travel. Ellen would have stopped here, she knew, and have carried home volumes telling of Europe and China and India and other lands unknown to Hertha even by name. Tom in her place would have asked for Livingstone'sTravels in Africa, a book he had always wanted to own. She hoped they would surely have it in the school where he was reading or studying that night. Well, Ellen was industrious, and Tom liked to stop and think; but she, Hertha, never had cared for heavy reading—except poetry, and poetry belonged under the pines or by the river, not in noisy New York. So excusing herself, she reached the jaunty, attractively bound fiction and joined the large group of borrowers who were intent on securing a thrilling story for the morrow.
"Excuse me, but do you know anything about these books?"
She turned to see a young man at her elbow. He was tall, not in the least good-looking, with a long, thin face, a small mouth and a sharp nose. His eyes, however, were attractive—deep blue with long lashes like a child's. He was dressed in cheap, conspicuously patterned clothes, and his gay necktie bore a large scarfpin. She hesitated to answer, and yet there was a tone of entreaty in his voice that gave her confidence. She felt sure that he was from the country and was floundering about amid this multitude of volumes as she had floundered a few weeks ago. He should, of course, consult the official-looking librarian seated at her desk whose business it was to instruct newcomers, but the newcomer is the one who instinctively avoids the official class. Glancing down she answered shyly, "Very little."
They were between two stacks, and looking along the line of volumes, Hertha saw a familiar title and took downThe Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
"Have you read this?" she asked.
"No, ma'am," was the answer.
She smiled at the "ma'am" for it reminded her of home. "I feel like you'll enjoy it," she ventured.
"There," the young man cried, so loudly that a number of borrowers turned to look at them both. "I knew the minute I set eyes on you that you were from the South!"
Hertha was very much annoyed. This forward youth was making her conspicuous. Leaving him she went quickly to the reading-room, and seating herself at a table took up a magazine. In a few minutes, however, she saw him at her side.
"I didn't mean to make such a noise," he said in a peculiarly penetrating whisper, "but what the dickens do you do after you find your book?"
It is always a pleasure to be placed in the superior position of an imparter of knowledge, and Hertha, unbending from her dignity, found herself whispering instructions.
Once put on the right path, the youth showed no further shyness, and was soon talking familiarly with the librarian who equipped him with a card.
"It's all hunky," he explained, coming back to Hertha. "She gave me the book and as long as you think it's good I'm going to read it through. I'm not much on reading," he added as though apologizing for his new taste. "Never entered a library before, but there ain't such a lot to do of a Sunday."
Hertha nodded but did not look up, and after some minutes of aimless wandering the young man went out.
She found herself thinking of him after he had gone. His type was not unfamiliar. The tall, lank figure, the yellowish skin, looking as though indigestion lurked around the corner, the hard, narrow mouth—white men like this had been customary figures in her Southern life. They were the sort who monopolized four places in the train, lolling back on one seat and putting their feet up on another. More than once, on a street car, she and Ellen had been obliged to stand when such a man, quite oblivious of whether or not he usurped the jim-crow section, had taken his lazy comfort. But a person of this type would be courteous to a white girl, would be glad to sacrifice his pleasure to do her a kindness. She had recognized at once that he was from the South, and her speech had proclaimed to him her birthplace. But what if he had seen her when she was colored? She found the blood rush to her face at the thought. Then, remembering Mammy's injunction, she grew calm again. It was for her to-day, in New York, to live only in the white world.
Going to the shelves she selected a book to take home, and then as the librarian was making ready to close, pushed at the outside door, which was a little stiff in opening, and walked into the street.
Into the street? Oh, no, into Heaven!
Everywhere about her white crystals were falling through the air—on her hat, on her coat, on her upturned face. As she looked overhead they came in multitudes, like a soft curtain. They made a carpet at her feet, and as far as she could see down the street they dropped one after another, millions upon millions, shimmering golden in the light of the lamp.
It was a miracle of beauty. Here in this ugly city, where she had missed the clean sand and the growing flowers, from the very heavens had come a sacred robe, for were not the angels clothed in white? And the robe was covering the world. The gray stone stoops were shining, and on each bit of cornice or projecting woodwork was a line of light; and she was moving through it; feeling the soft flakes encircle her, stepping as lightly as she could that she might not crush the lovely things that had come straight from God.
That night, as she flung open her window, for the first time she heard no sound. The jolt and jar of the street car, the rumble of the elevated, fell upon deaf ears. All her mind was in her eyes that watched, with ever-growing reverence, the falling flakes of white. And as she slipped into unconsciousness her last thought was of the heavenly city that would be building throughout the night.
"Be sure to put on your rubbers, Hertha," said Kathleen the next morning.
"Why," asked Hertha, "is the snow wet?"
"Is the snow wet? Is the sun hot? It's a mercy you didn't take your death of cold last night, wandering around with your face turned up to the sky, and the snow falling about you! Put on your rubbers, darling, just as though it were rain, for it may turn to that before the morning's over."
Hertha did as she was bid and returned for general inspection. Freezing weather had begun to exhaust her extra supply of warmth, and she had purchased a heavy coat of soft brown material trimmed with brown fur and with a fur muff to match. A little brown hat with a red quill had been another recent purchase. She had dipped into her bank account to get these things and had feared that Kathleen might think it extravagant—she was sure that Ellen would have—but Kathleen had silenced any misgivings.
"Spend your money when you have the chance," she advised, as Hertha began to speak apologetically of her expenditures. "The poorhouse at the end is a pleasanter life than scraping and denying yourself all along the road. And you can't be a brown fairy with a quiver of a smile on your lips and a glint of sorrow in your eyes for many years more. The sorrow or joy will get the better of you, and that's the end of youth."
"You haven't lost your youth, then."
"Oh, be off with you! You're going to church?"
"Yes, but I'm leaving early to see the snow."
"If I hadn't been up all night I'd go with you too, but it's a morning when bed can't be resisted. So good-by, little brown angel, and come back for a homely dinner of corn beef."
Few people had passed since the snow had ceased falling and the sidewalks were still beautiful, one side dazzling white, the other luminous purple in the shadow of the walls. Anxious not to miss any of the spectacle before the city made for its destruction—some boys were already shoveling the snow into the street—Hertha hastened to the open square on one side of which stood her church. Tall English elms with nobly branching limbs stood out against the clear blue sky; and the bushes, bared of their leaves, bore on each twig a mass of crystal flowers. She moved in and out among the paths, crunching the snow beneath her feet, now circling the dismantled fountain, now walking through the broad gateway only to return again. Looking at the church clock she found she had still half an hour left to enter into the treasures of the snow.
As she stood in the sunlight by the park bench she became conscious that some one was watching her. This, she had learned, was one of the distressing features of city life; only at a shop window could one stop to gaze without being conspicuous. Provoked at the sense of interruption she started to walk away.
"I beg your pardon."
Turning she saw the young man of the evening before. He looked almost attractive in the daylight in his soft hat and dark overcoat, the winter cold bringing a little color to his face. His deep blue eyes were clear and friendly, and she felt sure from his manner that he meant no impertinence.
"I beg your pardon," he said again, "but I noticed you here in the early morning looking at things and I thought they might be as strange to you as to me."
"I have never seen the snow before," said Hertha.
"There, I was on to it, all right. Do you know what it's like," he went on, "all this snow? It's like a field of cotton with the stuff lying around in heaps, but with some bolls still sticking to the plant. Look at it there on that bush. The Bible says 'white as wool' but I say, 'white as cotton.'"
Hertha looked down at her feet which were beginning to feel cold, and struck one against the other; but while she did not speak she did not go away, and the young man still tried to make talk.
"It certainly is a pretty day," he said desperately.
Then Hertha looked up and laughed. She had not heard that greeting since she left home.
The young man laughed back heartily, even noisily. He was delighted at his success.
"Won't you tell me your name?" he said pleadingly. "Mine's Brown, Richard Shelby Brown's the whole of it, but Dick is what everybody uses at home. I come from Georgia and that's the best state in the union except yours. I'm working as salesman with a wholesale firm over on Broadway not far from here—I'll show you the place if you'll walk over there. I'm twenty-five years old and I don't drink, brought up prohibition and won't touch the stuff. Now, please, it's your turn. Won't you tell me your name?"
Hertha still stood hesitating, pushing one foot over the other, clasping her hands together in her muff and striving to decide in her mind what to do. She looked so shyly pretty that the young man watching her, his heart in his mouth, felt that the sentence would be beyond his deserts if she sent him away. Yet he would have gone without question, so much a lady did she seem, so far above the social circle attainable by Richard Shelby Brown. She in her turn was thinking it would be easy to go and escape all questionings; and yet easier to let him have his way, at least to recognize him, not continually to pass him if they met; and easiest of all just to stand there, looking down at her muff or up at the church and the white clouds piled back of it; and then, at length to say, still not looking at him, "My name is Hertha Ogilvie."
"That's a lovely name, and Georgia, too. You came from that state, didn't you, Miss Hertha?"
"No, my family came from Florida."
"That's queer, for it's a Georgia name."
"Didn't any one ever leave Georgia for Florida?"
She was looking up at him now, her brown eyes shining, a little smile on her lips.
"I can't conceive it," he said in a loud, jovial voice to hide his own embarrassment. She was far above him, he felt sure, in birth and breeding. "It's a fine name, I know that. I wish we could find we were kin."
"Everybody is kin in the South," she said decidedly, anxious to leave the subject of family. And then, pointing to the gate, asked, "What has that boy trailing after him?"
A little boy of about eight, in shabby coat and broken shoes, had come into the park and, behind him, drawn by a rope, was a sled. Stopping a moment to survey the ground, the boy lifted the sled, ran a few steps, flung himself upon it, and coasted along the path, slowing down close to where they stood.