CHAPTER TWO
The Mitchells lived in an old-fashioned upper flat on a street that, before the great fire of 1906, had been a street of two-story wooden houses and small cottages set back in pleasant gardens. But the fire, sweeping the City's poorer quarters, had driven the inhabitants to the safety of the Mission hills; the little cottages had been converted into flats, the houses raised and small, congested shops inserted below. For the first two years, until the new city settled to permanent lines, there had been a bustle and cheap glitter through these streets, a cosmopolitan mingling of many different types and nationalities, that had touched the district faintly with romance. But now the better shops had gone, and only a few frowsy Italian immigrants continued in their untidy vegetable stands; disheartened widows managed small notion stores and bewailed to the wives of the petty clerks, also nailed to the district by low rents, the mythical comforts they had enjoyed "before the Fire."
The wooden houses were all dulled to the same sad gray by wind and sun and rain. The once pleasant gardens had shrunk to occasional slabs of hard brown earth railed off with rusty iron pickets. The front doors of the flats, raised three steps from the sidewalk, were all exactly alike, warped and dust-grimed, with oblong insets of glass two-thirds of the way up. Behind these insets, in brilliant curtains of silkoline, or conscientious Battenburg or negligent Nottingham, the tenants expressed their individuality against the engulfing monotony. The Mitchells had plain white scrim, of thick quality and tightly drawn on a brass rod. The doors of the upper flats worked by an uncertain mechanism managed from within. When this mechanism broke, if one lived in the top flat, one descended the endless stairs and worked the latch by hand. As a child, Anne had dreaded calling on friends and ascending, watched suspiciously from the heights above, until her identity was disclosed. There were ghastly stories of unsuspecting women who had so opened to burglars and been at their mercy.
As Anne unlocked the door the smell of pot-roast instantly enveloped her, shutting away the problem of her own immediate future and the broad shoulders of Roger Barton, hunched forward in defiance of John Lowell. Anne's lip quivered.
"To-night—of all nights!"
Slowly she began the long ascent, enclosed by the thickening odor as by the walls of a narrow corridor.
Anne hated pot-roast, not because of itself, but for its associations. Pot-roast was a pretense. It had not the open honesty of stew. Pot-roast was Mrs. Mitchell's final compromise in a line of preference that had started with prime ribs of beef. It meant that James Mitchell had bet away more than the usual portion of his monthly pay check; the meager remnant had stung Hilda's patience to rebellion; her imagination had leaped from the invariable shoulder chops of Wednesday evening to prime roast; but, before it could safely land upon that pinnacle of rebellion, had tripped and clutched at pot-roast. Anne sighed and went slowly on. At the stair-head, the gas jet, stuffed with cotton wool to keep it from ever being extravagantly turned to its full capacity, shed a sickly light through an amber globe. She turned the cock ferociously as far as it would go and then went on down the hall to the curtained niche just outside her own hall bedroom.
Long ago this niche had been formed to hold the overflow from the hall closet. Into it Mrs. Mitchell had since crowded broken and worn-out pieces of household furniture, hideous bisque ornaments of the '90's which Anne and Belle had refused to have about, oil lamps, in case "something happens to the gas"; a sewing-machine that would cost more to fix than to replace; dresses and bits of carpet, some day to be made into new rugs; and the week's accumulation of laundry from which she snatched and ironed pieces as she needed them. Years ago Anne had tried to eliminate this niche, but when her mother had demanded where she should put the things and Anne had suggested burning them, Hilda had looked so grieved at the implication of her bad management in ever letting them accumulate, and had asked Anne in so hurt a tone to pick out "one single thing that might not be needed some day," that Anne relented. Now the niche was like a malignant growth, too late to operate upon, to which one submits. But even yet Anne never let the portière quite fall to behind her and enclose her in this cemetery of odds and ends.
When she had hung up her things she went down the hall, past the dining-room where her father sat in the rocker under the hard, white, incandescent light, staring at the unlit gas log in the grate, the evening paper spread on his knees. In the kitchen her mother was making gravy from the fat in the baking-pan.
"Hello, dear. You're late. I was just going to begin without you."
Mrs. Mitchell wiped the perspiration from her face with the corner of a very soiled apron and kissed her daughter. She was taller and broader than Anne, but she had the same long-lashed, deeply-blue eyes, and her skin had once been even fairer. It was remarkably white and soft yet at the base of her throat, although there were tiny lines about her ears and at the corners of her mouth. Her hair had been dark, however, like Belle's, and now was a fluffy mass of gray curls.
Anne always felt older than her mother and loved her, on the whole, with a passionate, protective tenderness. There were times, however, when Hilda's persistent cheerfulness and muddled thinking annoyed her, and at long intervals Hilda disgusted her. These were the moments of confidence in which her mother, under the pretense of "warning the girls," confided to them, in general terms, "some of the things married women have to put up with." Belle and Anne both knew that these confidences were the result of her relations with the small, gray man, their father. Years ago it had deepened Belle's indifference and Anne's dislike to him.
"What is it now?" Anne took the spoon and tried to beat the lumpy gravy to smoothness. "He's just staring into the grate."
Hilda shrugged. "That oil well, I suppose. I wish to goodness they'd stop discovering gushers and copper and all those things. I thought when the Chinese lottery was put out of business we might get a little ahead."
Anne smashed at the lumps and frowned. "You ought to have put your foot down years ago, that's all there is to it. If you'd made a real row every time instead of just—just spluttering sometimes—he would have had to sit up and behave."
Hilda bridled. "It's one thing to talk and another to do. When you're married yourself, you'll understand. By the time you get 'round to see how you could do it better, it's too late. They've got you saddled with a baby and——"
Feeling a confidence about to descend upon her, Anne snatched the first weapon to hand.
"I've quit the office, mamma."
Hilda's mouth remained open, her eyes held the "if-you-only-understood" look that always accompanied such a confidence.
"You needn't look like that, moms; the world is really rotating just as usual."
"Quit!" Hilda echoed in a whisper. "Quit!"
Anne nodded. "But I'll get another place in a day or two, don't worry, dear."
"Quit!" Hilda echoed more faintly, and emerged into the reality of the situation. "What for? I thought you liked the place. Did Mr. Lowell—did he—anything——?"
Anne stamped her foot. "No. Of course he didn't. I did like it as far the general atmosphere of the office went, although I've had doubts of him lately. But to-day he came out into the open. He's a—crook."
"Good gracious! What did he want you to do?"
"Nothing special. But I can't work in a place where I know things are being done that he's doing. I just can't."
Hilda went back to the gravy. She did not want Anne to work in a dishonest office, but she did wish Anne had not discovered the delinquency of John Lowell for a few days.
"No, dear, of course you can't. But—suppose you don't tell papa to-night. It's gloomy enough as it is."
"Why on earth he should create all the gloom is beyond me. Why shouldn't he be annoyed? It might do him good."
"Please, dear."
"Well, I'll see, moms. I won't promise."
Hilda sighed and dished up the potatoes. For all her slim, frail fairness, Anne was very difficult to manage. As Belle said, "You never know when you're going to strike one of Anne's principles. They're like deep sea mines, unsuspected till they go off under you." Hilda carried the roast into the dining-room, Anne followed with the potatoes, and they sat down to dinner. In silence they began to eat.
Through the glass of the mantel above the gas log, wreathed in asbestos moss, Anne watched her father. He was a small man with thin, gray hair and brown eyes, faded from long years of figuring in bad lights. He bent low over his plate, but ate slowly, through habit acquired in an attack of nervous indigestion when Anne and Belle were children. There was little general conversation at the Mitchell meals, although, when James Mitchell was in a good humor, he was inclined to deliver monologues, chiefly against Radicalism and the Catholic Church. Any newspaper mention of the possibility of a strike precipitated the first, which before its finish, by some complicated process of logic, always included the second.
In the office of the Coast Electric Company, where he had been an assistant bookkeeper for thirty years, James Mitchell was known as one of the most faithful men they had. He never took a vacation nor objected to overtime. He had a tremendous respect for every one in authority above him, and the only temper the office had ever seen him display was when one of the younger clerks had tried to organize a clerks' union. James Mitchell had thrown down his pencil, whirled upon the astonished organizer, and demanded to know "where the city would have been if it hadn't been for the men who started this company?" Apparently he considered that the city would still have been using candles. For this act of faith he had been raised five dollars shortly after.
He disliked open conflict and in the early days of his marriage had once left the house to escape the first real discussion between himself and Hilda on the subject of money. This astonishing act had for years hung over the home, and the fear that "papa would take his hat and go out" had been held as an extinguisher over the children's quarrels and suffocated any tendency Anne or Belle might have had to appeal to him.
Anne could never remember an age when either she or Belle had talked to him of their own accord, although there had been periods when her mother, driven by some hidden impulse, had insisted that they "go and talk to papa. Tell him about school; he likes to hear it." At thirteen Belle had refused, and Anne, three years younger, had managed to slip from the obligation at the same time.
They finished the meat and vegetables in safe silence and Hilda gathered up the dishes, hopeful of peace to the end. But the heavy stillness had weighted Anne's already taut nerves, and when her mother returned with brown betty and hard sauce, and her father came suddenly to consciousness of the elaborate nature of this week-day dinner with a remark on the price of butter and sugar, Anne's hands went cold and her face flamed.
"Well, we don't have it often," Hilda propitiated, "but sometimes it gives one a headache trying to think of changes, everything's so high."
"And going higher." He helped himself sparingly to the hard sauce and pushed it across to Anne, who smothered her pudding in it. "And it'll keep on going up, too, unless people stop buying. Women could bring down the prices in a minute if they had the sense. Nobody needs hard sauce."
"They do," Anne spoke quietly without looking up. Her mother tried to touch her foot under the table, but Anne moved just beyond reach. Hilda began to eat her betty.
"They do, do they?" James Mitchell pounced upon Anne's remark like a small and hungry terrier on a bone. "They do? Well, it would take more than any argument you, or anybody else your age, could put up, to show me."
"I don't doubt that," Anne shot at him, still busy with her dessert; "nothing would convince you because you don't want to see, or else you really can't understand."
"I can't understand, can't I? Oh, no, I suppose nobody can understand anything these days when they're past twenty-five. I've been out bucking the world for more years than you've lived in it, but of course I've had my eyes shut all the time. Now see here, let me tell you this, young lady," he leaned toward Anne and thumped the table, "you've got what this whole country's got—a dose of blind staggers. You can't see what's coming and you won't till it's hit you. You go ranting along about people needing hard sauce and luxuries and you kick like steers when the prices go up. Of course they'll go up. Why shouldn't they? It's the law of supply and demand. When dairymen find out people 'have to have hard sauce' they're going to run up butter and eggs. A fool can see that."
"Only a fool can see that," Anne's voice shook in spite of herself. "Why shouldn't people have hard sauce?"
"Don't you get off any of that Socialistic jargon in this house. I won't have it. If I'd had any say in the bringing up of you girls——"
"Now, papa, please. The girls——"
"If you'd had anything to say, Belle would never have been a trained nurse, nor I a special stenographer. We'd both have been wrapping packages in some department store basement." Anne rolled her napkin and rose in an icy quiet.
"A lot of good either Belle's nursing or your stenography does," he darted now down the personal opening Anne had made him. "We never see Belle except when she has a few moments she doesn't know what to do with, and she wouldn't help out with a dollar if she was asked. And as for you—where could you get the board your mother puts up for what you pay?"
"Now, papa! Anne——"
"Well, I've quit my job, so you'll have to board me for nothing until I get another one."
"Quit!" James Mitchell stared as his wife had stared. "Quit! What for?"
"Because John Lowell is dishonest and I won't work for a dishonest firm."
"How many firms do you suppose are honest? You haven't risen to the management of a firm yet."
"Nor have I sunk to conniving with a thief, either."
James Mitchell opened his lips and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, leaned back. He looked shrunken and grayer, and he stared as if he saw something unseen by the others.
"I've had—the same job—for—thirty—years," he said slowly. "Thirty—years—at the same desk."
Anne softened.
"You ought to have quit long ago. They've used you because you let them. You could have done better. You could do better now. Do you want to quit? I'll get another place to-morrow and stake the house till you get a job."
"No, no, I don't want to quit. No." He seemed fleeing before the suggestion. The strangeness of the new road terrified him and he scuttled back to the familiar. "Used me? Of course they've used me. A man with a family has to get used to being used. A married man has to put up with things. Where would you kids have been if I'd have been getting on my ear all the time you were little?"
"Papa has been faithful," Hilda began, but the sudden tears that filled Anne's eyes astonished her to silence.
Without a word, Anne picked up the plates and went into the kitchen. Hilda followed.
"If he only wouldn't get down behind that pretense of having done it all for us, I might respect him, moms. But he just burrows into that hole like a gopher and you can't get him out."
"Well, after all, dear, I don't suppose he would have stuck if it hadn't been for us. He'd have gotten into some kind of a gambling scheme long ago. After all, he brings home most of his salary most of the time."
And Anne saw herself a small girl watching her mother dividing the contents of the pay envelope, counting and recounting and finally tying up each little package in tissue paper, as if to keep the tiny allotments from spending themselves in another department. They had hurt to tears, those thin little allotments, and her mother's sigh as she gathered them up and went humming about the housework. Anne did not answer and they did the dishes in silence until the phone rang. Hilda came from answering it with such a look of relief that Anne smiled.
"Belle?"
"Yes. She's got an hour off and is coming up."
Anne wiped the last glass and put it away.
"Well, I'm all in and I'm going to bed. The autopsy will have to take place without the corpse." The smile deepened as she kissed her mother. "All nice and safe again, moms?"
"I don't care what you say, Belle has a practical mind. She always seems to know what to do."
"As if we had a fever or a dose of colic."
"I'd a lot rather we had things like that. What with you and papa, sometimes I feel as if I were living in a cloud of feathers."
"You dear thing," Anne patted her shoulder. "Well, Belle will be along with her spray in a minute and wet us all down nice and flat. I don't suppose I'll go right to sleep——"
"She'll look in for a minute, I guess."
Anne laughed. "She sure will."