The Shadow Part 19

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 ma.s.sed 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 ma.s.sage, 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.sociations 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 cla.s.s. 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 ma.s.sage 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 appet.i.te," 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 antic.i.p.ation. 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 t.i.tled villain mocking the girl's pure love. The villain's machination, the lover tied to the railroad track, the train das.h.i.+ng 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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."

CHAPTER XV

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 pa.s.sed them clad in brilliant scarlet.

Her face was painted to match her coat; her hat was the latest extravagance in fas.h.i.+on, immensely brimmed, with a feather that, extending beyond the broad wake of black velvet, swept against Kathleen's cheek as she pa.s.sed. "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 s.h.i.+ft to b.u.t.ton 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 st.u.r.dy 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 s.h.i.+rtwaists, 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!"