The Job Part 13

Una found a marvelously clean, new restaurant on Sixth Avenue, with lace curtains at the window and, between the curtains, a red geranium in a pot covered with red-crepe paper tied with green ribbon. A new place!

She was tired of the office, the Elevated, the flat on 148th Street, the restaurants where she tediously had her week-day lunches. She entered the new restaurant briskly, swinging her black bag. The place had Personality--the white enameled tables were set diagonally and clothed with strips of j.a.panese toweling. Una smiled at a lively photograph of two bunnies in a basket. With a sensation of freedom and novelty she ordered coffee, chicken patty, and cocoanut layer-cake.

But the patty and the cake were very much like the hundreds of other patties and cakes which she had consumed during the past two years, and the people about her were of the horde of lonely workers who make up half of New York. The holiday enchantment dissolved. She might as well be going back to the office grind after lunch! She brooded, while outside, in that seething summer street, the pageant of life pa.s.sed by and no voice summoned her. Men and girls and motors, people who laughed and waged commerce for the reward of love--they pa.s.sed her by, life pa.s.sed her by, a spectator untouched by joy or n.o.ble tragedy, a woman desperately hungry for life.

She began--but not bitterly, she was a good little thing, you know--to make the old familiar summary. She had no lover, no friend, no future.

Walter--he might be dead, or married. Her mother and the office, between them, left her no time to seek lover or friend or success. She was a prisoner of affection and conscience.

She rose and paid her check. She did not glance at the picture of the bunnies in a basket. She pa.s.sed out heavily, a woman of sterile sorrow.

- 5

Una recovered her holiday by going shopping. An aisle-man in the dress-goods department, a magnificent creature in a braided morning-coat, directed her to the counter she asked for, spoke eloquently of woolen voiles, picked up her bag, and remarked, "Yes, we do manage to keep it cool here, even on the hottest days." A shop-girl laughed with her. She stole into one of the elevators, and, though she really should have gone home to her mother, she went into the music department, where, among lattices wreathed with newly dusted roses, she listened to waltzes and two-steps played by a red-haired girl who was chewing gum and talking to a man while she played. The music roused Una to plan a wild dissipation. She would pretend that she had a sweetheart, that with him she was a-roving.

Una was not highly successful in her make-believe. She could not picture the imaginary man who walked beside her. She refused to permit him to resemble Walter Babson, and he refused to resemble anybody else. But she was throbbingly sure he was there as she entered a drug-store and bought a "Berline bonbon," a confection guaranteed to increase the chronic nervous indigestion from which stenographers suffer. Her shadow lover tried to hold her hand. She s.n.a.t.c.hed it away and blushed. She fancied that a matron at the next tiny table was watching her silly play, reflected in the enormous mirror behind the marble soda-counter. The lover vanished. As she left the drug-store Una was pretending that she was still pretending, but found it difficult to feel so very exhilarated.

She permitted herself to go to a motion-picture show. She looked over all the posters in front of the theater, and a train-wreck, a seaside love-scene, a detective drama, all invited her.

A man in the seat in front of her in the theater nestled toward his sweetheart and harshly muttered, "Oh you old honey!" In the red light from the globe marking an exit she saw his huge red hand, with its thicket of little golden hairs, creep toward the hand of the girl.

Una longed for a love-scene on the motion-picture screen.

The old, slow familiar pain of congestion in the back of her neck came back. But she forgot the pain when the love-scene did appear, in a picture of a lake sh.o.r.e with a hotel porch, the flat sheen of photographed water, rus.h.i.+ng boats, and a young hero with wavy black hair, who dived for the lady and bore her out when she fell out of a reasonably safe boat. The actor's wet, white flannels clung tight about his ma.s.sive legs; he threw back his head with masculine arrogance, then kissed the lady. Una was dizzy with that kiss. She was shrinking before Walter's lips again. She could feel her respectable, typewriter-hardened fingers stroke the actor's swarthy, virile jaw. She gasped with the vividness of the feeling. She was shocked at herself; told herself she was not being "nice"; looked guiltily about; but pa.s.sionately she called for the presence of her vague, imaginary lover.

"Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear!" she whispered, with a terrible cloistered sweetness--whispered to love itself.

Deliberately ignoring the mother who waited at home, she determined to spend a riotous evening going to a real theater, a real play. That is, if she could get a fifty-cent seat.

She could not.

"It's been exciting, running away, even if I can't go to the theater,"

Una comforted herself. "I'll go down to Lady Sessions's this evening.

I'll pack mother off to bed. I'll take the Sessionses up some ice-cream, and we'll have a jolly time.... Mother won't care if I go. Or maybe she'll come with me"--knowing all the while that her mother would not come, and decidedly would care if Una deserted her.

However negligible her mother seemed from down-town, she loomed gigantic as Una approached their flat and a.s.sured herself that she was glad to be returning to the dear one.

The flat was on the fifth floor.

It was a dizzying climb--particularly on this hot afternoon.

- 6

As Una began to trudge up the flat-sounding slate treads she discovered that her head was aching as though some one were pinching the top of her eyeb.a.l.l.s. Each time she moved her head the pain came in a perceptible wave. The hallway reeked with that smell of onions and fried fish which had arrived with the first tenants. Children were dragging noisy objects about the halls. As the throb grew sharper during the centuries it took her to climb the first three flights of stairs, Una realized how hot she was, how the clammy coolness of the hall was penetrated by stabs of street heat which entered through the sun-haloed windows at the stair landings.

Una knocked at the door of her flat with that light, cheery tapping of her nails, like a fairy tattoo, which usually brought her mother running to let her in. She was conscious, almost with a physical sensation, of her mother; wanted to hold her close and, in the ecstasy of that caress, squeeze the office weariness from her soul. The Little Mother Saint--she was coming now--she was hurrying--

But the little mother was not hurrying. There was no response to Una's knock. As Una stooped in the dimness of the hallway to search in her bag for her latch-key, the pain pulsed through the top of her head again.

She opened the door, and her longing for the embrace of her mother disappeared in healthy anger.

The living-room was in disorder. Her mother had not touched it all day--had gone off and left it.

"This is a little too much!" Una said, grimly.

The only signs of life were Mrs. Golden's pack of cards for solitaire, her worn, brown Morris-chair, and accretions of the cheap magazines with pretty-girl covers which Mrs. Golden ransacked for love-stories. Mrs.

Golden had been reading all the evening before, and pages of newspapers were crumpled in her chair, not one of them picked up. The couch, where Una had slept because it had been too hot for the two of them in a double bed, was still an eruption of bedclothes--the pillow wadded up, the sheets dragging out across the unswept floor.... The room represented discomfort, highly respectable poverty--and cleaning, which Una had to do before she could rest.

She sat down on the couch and groaned: "To have to come home to this! I simply can't trust mother. She hasn't done one--single--thing, not one single thing. And if it were only the first time--! But it's every day, pretty nearly. She's been asleep all day, and then gone for a walk. Oh yes, of course! She'll come back and say she'd forgotten this was Sat.u.r.day and I'd be home early! Oh, of course!"

From the bedroom came a cough, then another. Una tried to keep her soft little heart in its temporary state of hardness long enough to have some effect on household discipline. "Huh!" she grunted. "Got a cold again.

If she'd only stay outdoors a little--"

She stalked to the door of the bedroom. The blind was down, the window closed, the room stifling and filled with a yellow, unwholesome glimmer.

From the bed her mother's voice, changed from its usual ring to a croak that was crepuscular as the creepy room, wheezed: "That--you--deary? I got--summer--cold--so sorry--leave work undone--"

"If you would only keep your windows _open_, my dear mother--"

Una marched to the window, snapped up the blind, banged up the sash, and left the room.

"I really can't see why!" was all she added. She did not look at her mother.

She slapped the living-room into order as though the disordered bedclothes and newspapers were bad children. She put the potatoes on to boil. She loosened her tight collar and sat down to read the "comic strips," the "Beauty Hints," and the daily instalment of the husband-and-wife serial in her evening paper. Una had nibbled at Shakespeare, Tennyson, Longfellow, and _Vanity Fair_ in her high-school days, but none of these had satisfied her so deeply as did the serial's hint of s.e.x and husband. She was absorbed by it. Yet all the while she was irritably conscious of her mother's cough--hacking, sore-sounding, throat-catching. Una was certain that this was merely one of the frequent imaginary ailments of her mother, who was capable of believing that she had cancer every time she was bitten by a mosquito. But this incessant crackling made Una jumpily anxious.

She reached these words in the serial: "I cannot forget, Amy, that whatever I am, my good old mother made me, with her untiring care and the gentle words she spoke to me when worried and hara.s.sed with doubt."

Una threw down the paper, rushed into the bedroom, crouched beside her mother, crying, "Oh, my mother sweetheart! You're just everything to me," and kissed her forehead.

The forehead was damp and cold, like a cellar wall. Una sat bolt up in horror. Her mother's face had a dusky flush, her lips were livid as clotted blood. Her arms were stiff, hard to the touch. Her breathing, rapid and agitated, like a frightened panting, was interrupted just then by a cough like the rattling of stiff, heavy paper, which left on her purple lips a little colorless liquid.

"Mother! Mother! My little mother--you're sick, you're really _sick_, and I didn't know and I spoke so harshly. Oh, what _is_ it, what is it, mother dear?"

"Bad--cold," Mrs. Golden whispered. "I started coughing last night--I closed the door--you didn't hear me; you were in the other room--"

Another cough wheezed dismally, shook her, gurgled in her yellow deep-lined neck. "C-could I have--window closed now?"

"No. I'm going to be your nurse. Just an awfully cranky old nurse, and so scientific. And you must have fresh air." Her voice broke. "Oh, and me sleeping away from you! I'll never do it again. I don't know what I _would_ do if anything happened to you.... Do you feel any headache, dear?"

"No--not--not so much as-- Side pains me--here."

Mrs. Golden's words labored like a steamer in heavy seas; the throbbing of her heart shook them like the throb of the engines. She put her hand to her right side, shakily, with effort. It lay there, yellow against the white muslin of her nightgown, then fell heavily to the bed, like a dead thing. Una trembled with fear as her mother continued, "My pulse--it's so fast--so hard breathing--side pain."

"I'll put on an ice compress and then I'll go and get a doctor."

Mrs. Golden tried to sit up. "Oh no, no, no! Not a doctor! Not a doctor!" she croaked. "Doctor Smyth will be busy."

"Well, I'll have him come when he's through."

"Oh no, no, can't afford--"