One Woman's Life Part 15

"And you want me to trust him with my money some more? No, thank you."

His tone changed insensibly. No one could be rough with Milly for long.

Snowden volunteered some explanations of the tea and coffee business not related by Mrs. Ridge. It seemed that Horatio had made rather a mess of things all around.

"So you see I must try and save what I can before it's _all_ gone.... I've got a family of my own, you know."

Milly knew that, and wished she had been nicer to Mrs. Snowden and the uninteresting daughter when she had had the chance. She had never had them to the Acacia Street house in all these years.

"Can't you wait a few months?... Please!..."

Entreaty was all the argument life had given Milly. There was a leap of something in the man's flushed face that caused the girl to retreat a step or two. She had not meant to rouse his graceless pa.s.sion, but that was what she had almost succeeded in doing by her coaxing. As she drew back Snowden laughed.

"You see, Milly, people _pay_ in this world for what they want--men and women too. They have to _pay_ somehow!"

And, this enigmatic taunt ringing in her ears, Milly departed with all the dignity that remained to her. She was conscious of the bookkeeping woman's hostile sneer upon her back as she disappeared. Her face burned with the man's coa.r.s.e words: "In this world people have to _pay_ for what they want."

That was too true! She had not been willing to pay, except with smiles and pretty speeches, the small change, and it seemed that was not enough. She had not been willing to pay the price of a good position in her world which she wanted, nor Snowden's price for mercy to her father.

Of course not that! But now she must pay somehow for what she got: for her food and her clothes and her shelter first of all. It had come to that. Thus Milly had her first lesson in the manifold realities of life.

Soberly but bravely she faced the winter wind and made her way home to her father's house.

VII

MILLY TRIES TO PAY

The next months were in some respects the dreariest that Milly was ever to know. It was not long before the illusion about her work for Eleanor Kemp wore thin. It was, in a word, one of those polite, parasitic occupations for women, provided by the rich for helpless friends, and it was satisfying to neither party. A good deal of time for both was wasted in "talking things over," with much discursive chatter on matters in general, and all sorts of consulting back and forth about the job to be done. There were letters to be carefully written, then rewritten after delicately guarded criticisms had been made; shopping to be done where it took hours to decide whether this "matched" or not and whether Danner's or Dround's was a better place for purchasing this or that.

Milly still tried to keep up some social life, and so she usually came in at the Kemps rather late in the morning, and after lunching with her friend went back to the city on errands. She was a miracle of un-system, and frequently forgot. But she was so genuinely penitent and abased when her omissions were discovered that her friend had not the heart to be severe. Milly, on the other hand, began to think that the work took a great deal of time and that fifty dollars a month was small pay for her services, yet did not like even to hint that she wanted more.

Walter Kemp summed the matter up in the brutal fas.h.i.+on of man-financier, "Better give Milly her money and let me send you a trained woman from the bank to do your work, Nell."

But Eleanor Kemp was shocked at this evidence of male tactlessness.

"Milly would never take a gift like that!"

That was the trouble: Milly belonged to the cla.s.s too proud to take charity and too incompetent to earn money. So Mrs. Kemp continued to do as much as she had done before and to pay Milly fifty dollars a month out of her private purse.

"Pity she didn't marry Parker," Kemp said brusquely. "He'll be a very rich man one of these days."

"You see she couldn't, Walter," his wife explained eagerly. "She didn't love him enough."

"Well," this raw male rejoined, "she'd better hurry up and find some one she does love who can support her."

"Yes," Mrs. Kemp admitted, "she _ought_ to marry."

For in those days there didn't seem to be any other way of providing for the Milly Ridges.

Milly realized her inadequacy, but naturally did not ascribe it wholly to incompetency. She wanted to give up her irregular job: it could not be concealed from her friends, and it marked her as a dependent. But the stern fact remained that she needed the money, even the paltry fifty dollars a month, as she had never needed anything in life. If she refrained from spending a dollar for several years, she could hardly clear herself of the acc.u.mulated bills from her halcyon days of hope.

And the household needed money, too. After that regrettable interview with Snowden, the catastrophe in the tea and coffee business came with the swiftness of long-delayed fate. One morning Horatio did not rise from the breakfast table, as had been his wont for so many years, and throwing out his chest with the sensual satisfaction of the well-fed male shout boisterously:--

"Good-by, folks, I must be off to the office!"

For there was no longer any office to go to.

Instead, Horatio sat glumly at the table reading the want columns of the morning paper, down and up, and then as the morning wore on he silently departed for the city--"to look for something." Hopeless task, when the streets were filled with men out of work, and businesses everywhere were closing down and turning off old employees. Milly, watching Horatio reach gropingly for his hat and coat, like a stricken animal, realized that her father was no longer young and brave. He had pa.s.sed fifty,--the terrible deadline in modern industry. "n.o.body wants an old dog, any way," he said to his mother forlornly.

Then Milly was almost sorry for what she had done. But it was not really her fault, she still thought.

It was a mournful experience, this, of having a grown man--the one male of the family--sitting listlessly about the house of a morning and going forth aimlessly at irregular times, only to return before he should be expected. The habit of her life, as it had been the habit of Horatio's, was to have the male sally forth early from the domestic hearth and leave it free to the women of the family for the entire day.... Usually optimistic to a fault, with a profound conviction that things must come right of themselves somehow, Milly began to doubt and see dark visions of the family future. What if her father should be unable to find another place--any sort of work--and should come to hang about the house always, getting seedier and sadder, to be supported by her feeble efforts? Milly refused to contemplate the picture.

One day her grandmother asked money from Milly. The old lady was a grim little nemesis for the girl these days,--a living embodiment of "See what you have done," though never for a moment would Milly admit that she was responsible for the acc.u.mulation of disaster. It should be said in behalf of Grandma Ridge that now the blow of fate had fallen, which she had so persistently predicted for four long years, she set her lips in grim puritan silence and did that which must be done without reproach.

Somehow she found the money for the rent from month to month and gave Horatio his carfare and lunch money each morning. But she came to Milly for money to buy food, and Milly gave it generously although she owed all she earned and much more. But food came before bills. If it hadn't been for Eleanor Kemp's luxurious luncheons, the girl would often have gone hungry.... And through it all she never took refuge in tears.

"What's the use?" she said.

It was during the darkest of these days that a new turn in Milly's fate came unexpectedly. She had been to a Sunday luncheon at the Nortons, and was walking back along the Drive, thinking a little sadly that even her old pals had invited her only at the last moment, "to fill in." She was no more any sort of social "card." She was revolving this and other dreary thoughts in her worried mind when she heard her name,--"Miss Ridge--I say, Miss Ridge!"

She turned to meet the beaming face of old Christian Becker, the editor-proprietor of the _Morning Star_, who was hurrying towards her as fast as his short, fat person would permit him. As he came along he raised his s.h.i.+ny silk hat above his bald head, and his broad face broke into a larger smile than was its wont. Becker was an amusing character, tempting to set before the reader, but as he has to do only incidentally with Milly Ridge it cannot be. Enough to say that after forty years of hard struggle in the land of his adoption, he had preserved the virtues of a simple countryman and the heart of a good-natured boy. Every one in the city knew Christian Becker; every one laughed and growled at his newspaper,--the G.o.d of his heart.

"Thought it must be you," he gasped. "Never forget how a pretty woman walks!" (How _does_ she walk? Milly wondered.) "How are you, Miss Ridge?

Haven't seen you for some time--not since that swell dinner at the Bowman place, d'ye remember?"

Milly remembered very well,--the apex moment of her career hitherto.

He smiled good naturedly, and Milly smiled, too. Then Becker added in a childlike burst of confidence:--

"Let me tell you, you did just right, my girl! Don't tie yourself up with any man you can't run with. It don't work. It saves tears and trouble to quit before you're hitched by the parson."

Milly flushed at the frank reference to her broken engagement, then laughed at the crude phrasing. But her heart warmed with the word of sympathy. Gradually she unburdened herself of all her troubles, and at the conclusion the kindly newspaper man said wisely:--

"Never you mind how folks behave, Miss Ridge. Keep a stiff upper lip--hold up your head--and you'll have all of 'em running after you like hens after corn 'fore you know it. That's what happened to me when I went broke that time."

"But I'm not fit to do anything," Milly confessed truthfully, "and I must support myself somehow."

"Why don't you try newspaper work? You are a clever girl and you know the world.... Come to my office to-morrow noon--no, I've got a Was.h.i.+ngton n.o.b on my hands for lunch--" (Becker was vain of his political influence, which consisted for the most part of entertaining visiting politicians at luncheon.) "Come in 'bout four, and we'll see what we can do to help you out."

With a fatherly nod he hurried off down a side street, and Milly went home with a new fillip to her lively imagination.

As a matter of fact the proprietor of the _Star_ was not entirely disinterested in his kindness. He had been looking for some woman to take "Madame Alpha's" place and furnish the paper with that column of intimate social t.i.ttle-tattle about people the readers knew only by name, which every enterprising American newspaper considers a necessary ingredient of the "news." The estimable lady, who signed herself "Madame Alpha," had grown stale in the business, as such social chroniclers usually do. The widow of an esteemed citizen, with wide connections in the older society of the city, she had done very well at first. But she had "fallen down" lamentably, to use Becker's phrase, during the recent period of Chicago's social expansion. She neither knew the new G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, nor did she know how to invent stories about their doings.