PART II
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jean touched the electric button on her desk and Josephine Grimes appeared with notebook and pencil. She was a tall, spare woman, impelled through life by devotion to an invalid sister, to the Charity Organization Society of New York City, and to Jean. The three were somehow connected in Miss Grimes' mind and she never tried to separate them.
Jean handed her a pile of mail. "All the regular thing, except that one on top. That's very extra special. It's from Gregory Allen, the architect Selina Mitchell thinks might be interested in the tubercular tenements. He says he'd like to talk things over. So write him, conveying something between abject gratitude and decent self-respect, and make it to-morrow at 3.30."
Miss Grimes nodded and turned to the door. She never made any comment on these semi-personal confidences from Jean, but at night they were retailed verbatim to the invalid sister.
"And tell any one who rings up that I won't be back to-day, but, under pain of death, don't give them the house number. Except Rachael Cohen. But I don't think she will, because she knows I know about the meeting to-morrow night and I'll be there."
Again Miss Grimes nodded and disappeared. Jean sat on at the desk for a few moments, smiling into space. Then she locked the lid with a snap, put on her hat without looking into the glass, snatched her gloves and black leather wallet and left the office for the Grand Central Station.
The train was just pulling in, as Jean elbowed her way through the waiting crowd, pressed close to the iron grille. It seemed as if all the people in the world went by before she saw her, the same stout figure, the same eager peering through the gold pince-nez. Jean waved frantically. Mary stopped, stared for a reassuring second, dropped her grip and came at a trot, calling back over her shoulders to the bewildered red-cap to pick it up.
"Mary—oh—you——"
"Not a word or I shall weep. Lead me to the decent seclusion of a cab. I haven't wanted to cry for thirty years."
Safe in a taxi, they looked at each other and laughed.
"Mary, I haven't been able to do a thing since I got your wire. Why didn't you write me?"
"Didn't know it myself. I just woke up one morning with such a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach when I looked at Lucy Phillips that I knew the hour had come. I took a leave of absence for a year and I may extend it. I'm going to absorb and study what the rest of the world's been doing. In short, I'm going to stay until IloveLucy Phillips. I was going to make my point of saturation Chicago, until I got to really visioning you. Then I wired. I couldn't very well before, could I?"
"Hardly." Jean hugged her. "Mary, it's been an age. I don't believe I've known, myself, how much and how often I've wanted you."
"I was thinking about it the other night. Almost seven years since you came walking into the clinic and told me The Kitten was up at the studio and you weren't going back."
"And mummy trotted over the next afternoon, and when she found we'd both gone to keep our engagement with that Building Trades man as if nothing had happened, she sat down and cried. Poor little mummy."
"How is mummy, Jean? I never could quite picture her here in New York. I could never make her fit."
"Fits like a glove. But, then, no one can ever tell what mummy is going to do. She not only likes it, but is happy, really happy, for the first time in her life. I believe she has learned the trick at last."
"Much incense and lace altar clothes and Jeany all to herself, I take it."
"Pretty near. But we have been happy, both of us, these six years here. Mummy still believes social service is connected, or ought to be, with religion, and she calls my very finest pieces of work 'the act divorced from the spirit', but she lets me send out all the laundry and have a woman in once a week—a maid she absolutely forbade—and there's a church run by Father Something-or-other a few blocks away, and I'd get fatty degeneration of the soul if it weren't for Pedloe. He gets six thousand a year and poses as a radical, but he has the imagination of a mouse. Some day he's going to fire me, if I don't do it first myself. I work ten hours a day, get more and more furious at the whole business, and come home every evening like a novice to her convent. Our chief excitement is having Pat bring the children over for the week-end, when her husband is out of town. She has two children and is going to have another, all in four years, exactly like an immigrant. She hasn't changed a bit, manages her family as if it were a college committee and her husband adores her. Once in a while she brings an uncle of Stephen's with her, a fat, good-natured creature about fifty, who, I sometimes think, is a fool and sometimes I'm sure he's a philosopher. Mummy likes him and makes all his pet dishes. Years ago he was married to an impossible creature in an Arizona mining camp and she ran away in six months. So you see he's had his 'sorrow' too."
"You don't mean that she still looks on Franklin as a 'sorrow'?"
"He's my 'lesson.' She never speaks of him, but I know she prays for him."
"Good Lord!"
And for the remaining few moments of the drive, Dr. Mary sat chuckling.
"Here we are." Jean led the way toward the cool marble entrance of a huge apartment house facing the Hudson. Young mothers in summer white sat on camp stools, doing embroidery in the shade of the high walls, under the trees that lined the Drive, and in the vacant lot across the street. They chatted and moved white perambulators with the tips of their white canvas shoes. Fat white babies slept under dainty white coverlets. Older children in white played in the earth.
Dr. Mary stopped in the vestibule. "It looks like miles of them. I've never seen so many baby buggies at once in my life."
"Mary, that sight has done more to inspire me with a love of work than any other thing I know. Whenever I feel like sneaking a day I just take one look out there and jump into my office clothes."
"I should think you might. Do they keep it up all day?"
"All day, every day, from spring till fall. They must sew miles of scallops. Wait till you see the last rites. About six the husbands come along; they're all young and rather slight, wear blue serge and straw hats. They all look exactly alike. Each one detaches his special piece of white property and off they go. Behold the female backbone of our nation!"
"It makes me homesick for my frowsy crab-fishers and those poor bowlegged mites that crawl over the hills alone."
As the key turned in the lock, Martha Norris rose from her chair by the window where she had been reading in the green-gold light that slanted up under the window awnings. Dr. Mary took the outstretched hand in hers.
"I suppose you were surprised, but not more than I was myself. When it came right down to it, I started at a moment's notice."
"I know. Jean was in the greatest state of excitement yesterday when she got your wire." Martha smiled and it made the small face, rested in the peace of the last six years, astonishingly young. But she could think of nothing else to say. There had always been something breathless about Dr. Mary's energy that made Martha feel inadequate. Something a little indecent, in an enthusiasm and exuberance that could carry a woman well over fifty across the continent, at a moment's notice, to study. It was almost as if she infringed on a younger generation, wore mental rouge and powder.
"It's a frightful journey, especially in this heat. You must be very tired."
Martha drew a chair to the window and Mary dropped gratefully into it.
"I'll just make a cup of tea and we'll have cold supper later."
She pattered out and Jean and Mary looked at each other and smiled.
When tea was ready they had it close to the window looking to the Palisades. Jean made valiant efforts to hold Martha in the talk but it kept drifting away from her, and soon she was sitting quietly to one side, as she always did, listening, while Jean and Mary talked and interrupted one another and made a thousand plans.
"I tell you, Jean, I was getting to be a big frog in a small puddle and that's not good for the soul. I'm not going to give a single scrap of advice to a living soul for three months at least."
Jean patted the plump shoulder. "Croak on, Mary, croak on. Why, you'll be taking the tenements out of my hands, if I don't step lively. Not to mention the garment strike and Rachael herself."
"Never. I wouldn't offer a suggestion for ten additional years of life. I'm going to sit to one side and watch."
"Mary MacLean, you'll sit to one side exactly as long as I'll let you—forty-eight hours perhaps to get rested. And then—Lord; I feel as if I had been asleep for years. Mary, this is going to be one glorious summer."
"I have a slight feeling that way myself, Jean."
Martha got up and began clearing the table.
Out in the kitchen, Martha filled the pan with hot soapy water and began washing the dishes. The voices went on. Once she stopped to listen.
"Now, Jean, not another word. Please. I appreciate the offer and all that, but I shouldn't do a thing but sit and stare at that river and overeat, and where would my serious study be then? No, to-morrow I find an apartment."
Jean laughed. "All right, go ahead, but you won't escape me that way."
There was a pause, and then Jean added softly: "Oh, Mary, this is going to be a glorious summer."