Part 5

"You mean you'll cook, scrub, do the servant's drudgery you've learned here? That would be a nice tale to go the rounds of the Springs!"

"I would cook or scrub if I had to, but I've been taught other things. One of the girls who's leaving this fall--her name is Amy Jeffries--knew no more about earning a living than I when she came here, but she has an eight-dollar-a-week place waiting for her in New York. She's going with a ready-made cloak firm. It was Miss Archer who got her the place, and she says when the time comes she can probably do as well by me."

"New York!" Mrs. Fanshaw shied with rural timidity from the fascinating name. "You in New York! I must get Amelia's opinion. What if it should prove a way out!"

During the remainder of the call the talk strayed mainly in a maze of Shawnee Springs gossip which Jean followed in a lethargy beneath which throbbed an ache. She had grown to value her home, not for what it had been, but for what it might be, and to realize that it was beyond doubt the more a home without her, cut deep. Mrs. Fanshaw had amputated an ideal.

It in no way eased the smart to feel that her mother intended no downright brutality. Indeed, as Jean did her the justice to perceive, she tried in her clumsy way to be kind. She reverted again to the agreeable change in the girl's voice, approved her quieter manner, and, looking closer, even discerned a neatness in general upon which she bestowed measured praise. It was in the midst of these final note-takings that she detected her daughter in a vain attempt to conceal some object in the folds of a pocketless dress.

"What are you doing?" she demanded in abrupt suspicion. "What are you hiding from me?"

The girl started.

"Nothing," she said evasively.

"Nothing! You were always truthful at least."

"I mean nothing important."

Mrs. Fanshaw laid a firm grasp upon the shrinking hand, and dragged its secret to light.

"Embroidery!" she exclaimed.

Jean's cheeks were poppies.

"Yes," she faltered.

"Whose is it?"

"Mine."

The reluctant monosyllables whipped Mrs. Fanshaw's curiosity wide awake.

"No more nonsense," she charged. "Tell me at once who gave you this."

"Nobody," confessed Jean faintly. "I--I made it."

"You!" A pair of glasses, black-rimmed and formidable, bore instantly upon the marvel and searched it stitch by stitch.

Jean waited breathless. Wrought with infinite labor not of the hands alone, the little piece of needlework was absurdly freighted with meaning. In the old days she had loathed such employment as ardently as her sister loved it, but of late she had set herself doggedly to learn the art, since it seemed to her that this more than anything else would typify her new outlook, her return to sex. As such a symbol she had brought her handiwork into the visitors' room. As such, before their meeting, she had hoped her mother might interpret it. Even now, bereft of illusions as she was, she still hoped something, she knew not what.

In fairness to Mrs. Fanshaw it should be recorded that she apparently grasped some hint of this. Relatively speaking, her smile was encouraging. Viewed from her own standpoint, she all but scaled the top note of praise when, extending the embroidery at last, she said,--

"It is almost as good as Amelia's."

The new Jean was still no candidate for sainthood. White to the lips with anger, she caught the emblem of her regeneration from Mrs. Fanshaw's profaning hand and tore it to little strips.

VIII

Thenceforward Jean dreaded nothing so much as any return to Shawnee Springs whatsoever. Here, for once, she found herself in perfect accord with her mother, for, as the time of her release drew near, young Mr. Fargo's sauntering courtship took a sudden spurt, not clearly explicable to himself, whose prime and bewildering result was the fixing of his wedding day.

Dear Amelia naturally longed for her sister's presence at the culmination of her happiness (so Mrs. Fanshaw put it), but there were the Fargos to consider--they were not cordial, by the way--and if the refuge authorities made no objection, would it not perhaps be better if she met the official having Jean in charge at some intermediate point, from which she could proceed at once to her new calling? Jean, she was convinced, would understand.

Jean understood very well, but was thankful. She would rather serve another month in the refuge than be an unwelcome guest at Amelia's marriage. In truth, had she been put to a choice, she would have elected further confinement to her mother's roof in any case. She thought of the reformatory, not Shawnee Springs, as home, and this in a sense which embraced more than Miss Archer and the transformed Cottage No. 6. She loathed the life no less than in the beginning, but time had knit her to its every phase. The cowed, drab ranks had long since ceased to seem alien. Their deprivations, their meager privileges, their rights, their wrongs, their sorrows, their spectral gayeties, all were hers. She had thought to dart from the gatehouse like a wild thing from a trap. In reality she paused to look back with a lump in her throat.

Yet it was a blithe world outside, the fog and gloom of a November rain notwithstanding. Even the wet glisten of the mire seemed cheery. A hundred trivialities, unheeded by her companion, absorbed her unjaded eyes. The red and green liquids of a druggist's window lured her as in childhood; then the glitter of a toy-shop enticed, or the ruddy invitation of a forge. Station and train were each a mine of entertainment. The ticket-buying was an event of the first magnitude; the slot-machines, the time-tables, the news-stands, the advertisements, all the prosaic human spectacle had the freshness of novelty. She noted that women's sleeves had a fullness of which the little tailor-shop in the refuge was but dimly aware; that men's hats curled closer at the brim; that the trainmen wore a different uniform; that one rural depot or another had received a coat of paint.

Mrs. Fanshaw was in waiting.

"There's a train back to the Springs in twenty minutes," she announced briskly, after a preoccupied dab at Jean's cheek, "and under the circumstances"--she was always under circumstances--"I know you won't mind if I take it instead of waiting till your own goes out. What with presents arriving, the dressmaker, and the snobbish behavior of Harry's family, I expect as it is to find Amelia on the edge of nervous prostration. Every minute is precious, we're so rushed. In fact, I could not find time to pack a single stitch for you to take to New York. Anyhow, I understood from your last letter that the refuge would fit you out with the necessaries, which is certainly a help at this time when I'm paying out right and left for Amelia. Why," she wound up suddenly, "your suit is actually tailor-made!"

"Yes," said Jean.

"Excellent material, too," commented Mrs. Fanshaw, fingering the texture. "Does every girl fare as well?"

"The low-grade girls get no jackets, only capes; and their material isn't so good."

"Then you're high grade! You never wrote me."

"I did not think it would interest Shawnee Springs."

Mrs. Fanshaw looked aggrieved.

"You are a strange child," she complained; "so secretive, so self-centered. I suppose your suit was made in the refuge?"

"Yes."

"By one of the inmates?"

"By one of the inmates--myself."

"Strange child!" said her mother again. "Strange child!"

Linked by nothing save a distasteful past, they sat together for an interval in constrained silence. Even at their friendliest, mother and daughter had lacked conversational small change. Presently Mrs. Fanshaw's roving eye encountered the dial of a train-indicator and brightened.

"The Shawnee Springs accommodation is on time for once," she announced.

Jean responded with sincerity that she was glad. That her own train was as plainly registered an hour late, with the equally obvious consequence that she must arrive after nightfall in a strange city, was unimportant.

Mrs. Fanshaw opened her hand-bag.

"Here is the price of your ticket to New York," she said, counting out the exact fare. "You had better buy it at once."

Jean did so. When she returned from the ticket-office her mother was smoothing the creases from a bank-note.

"Did they supply you with any money?" she asked cautiously.

"With two dollars."

"Is that all?"

"They paid my fare here."

"How niggardly in a great state! I can spare you so little myself. But you will begin work at once?"

"To-morrow morning."

"Then ten dollars ought to answer until you draw your first earnings, if you are not extravagant."

"I shan't stop at the Waldorf," promised Jean, grimly. She took the bill, as she had taken the money for the ticket, without thanks, saying only, "I will pay it back."

Another blank silence fell. Mrs. Fanshaw stirred restively.

"I hope that Jeffries girl can be depended on to meet you," she presently remarked.

"I think she can."

"It's certainly a convenience to know somebody at the start, but I don't feel that she is a very desirable associate, whatever Miss Archer thinks. You can drop her later, of course, whenever it seems best."

"Drop her!"

Mrs. Fanshaw jumped at the vehemence of the exclamation.

"How abrupt you are! What I mean to say is that you will hardly want to keep up these reformatory acquaintances. If I were you I should make it a rule to recognize none of them you can by hook or crook avoid. Possibly this girl is superior to most of her class. I don't think you ever mentioned just why she was sent to the refuge?"

Jean's eyes discharged an angry spark.

"You're quite right," she retorted. "I never have."

Mrs. Fanshaw was still waiting in becoming patience for Jean to repair this omission when her train was announced. They rose and faced each other awkwardly.

"Well, good-by," said the elder woman, presenting her cheek.

"Well, good-by," said Jean.

She watched her mother into a car, and through successive windows traced her bustling progress to a seat. Mrs. Fanshaw found no leisure for a last glance outward, and Jean, by aid of certain sharply etched memories, divined that she was absorbed in repelling seat-mates. So occupied, she vanished. Jean could have cried with ease, but sternly denied herself the luxury. She yet retained something of her old boy-like intolerance of the tear-duct, though the refuge, acquainting her with nerves, had dulled the confident edge of her scorn. Tears, she now perceived, like tea, had uses for women other than purely physical.

Happily life's common things still wore a bloom of surpassing freshness for her cloistered eye. This second station, like yet unlike the first; the tardy train, thundering importantly in at last; the stirring flight into the unknown, each served its diverting turn. As dusk settled, the landscape became increasingly littered with signs trumpeting the virtues of breakfast foods, women's wear, or plays current in the metropolitan theatres; while the villages grew smarter in pavement and lighting till she mistook one or two for near suburbs of the great city itself. Then the open spaces grew rare. Did the semblance of a field survive, it was gridironed by streets of the future or sprawled upon by huge factories, formless leviathans of a thousand gleaming eyes. Town linked itself to town.

When they had run for a long time within what she knew must be the limits of the city itself, a brakeman mouthed some unintelligible remark from the door, and the train came to a stop. Jean caught up her bag, but observing that a drummer of flirtatious propensities, who for an hour past had shared her seat, made no move, was left in doubt.

"Isn't this New York?" she asked.

Her seatmate surveyed her facetiously.

"Some of it," he said. "Want any particular part of the village?"

"The main station," blushed the provincial.

"You mean the Grand Central. Sit tight then. This is only a Hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street--Harlem, you know, where the goat joke flourishes. Never saw a billy there myself, and I boarded a year on Lenox Avenue, too."

Jean turned from a disquisition on boarding-houses to the car-window. In its night-time glitter of electricity the street which he dismissed with a careless numeral quite fulfilled her rural notion of Broadway. If these were but the outposts, what was the thing itself!

They shot a tunnel presently, which the drummer berated in terms long since made familiar by the newspapers, threaded a maze of block-signals and switch-lights, and halted at last in an enormous cavern of a place which she needed no hint from her now too friendly neighbor to assure her was truly New York.

The drummer urged his escort, but she eluded him in leaving the car and hurried on in the press. Nearing the gate, however, her pace slackened. The bigness of the train-shed confused her, and she was daunted by the clamor of hackmen and street-cars which penetrated from without. Amy had written that she would meet her if she could leave her work, but Jean could spy her nowhere in the waiting crowd banked in the white glare of the arc-lights beyond the barrier. They were unfamiliar to the last pallid urban face.

She had gone slowly down the human aisle and was wavering on the outskirts, uncertain whether to wait longer or adventure for herself, when the drummer reappeared at her elbow.

"Didn't your party show up?" he said. "I call that a mean trick. You had better let me help you out, after all. You look like a girl with sand. What say we give 'em a lesson? We can have supper at a nice, quiet little place I know up the street, take in a show afterward, and then when we're good and ready hunt up your slow-coach friends. Is it a go?"

She looked every way but toward him, saw a policeman, and aimed forthwith for the shelter of his uniform. Halfway she felt her hand seized, turned hotly, expecting the drummer, and plumped joyfully into the arms of a young person of fashion who greeted her with an ecstatic hug.

"Amy! I was never so glad to see you!"

The girl emerged from the embrace, panting.

"I really think you are," she said. "Sorry to keep you waiting. There was a block on the 'L.' What was that fellow saying to you?"

When Jean had told her she peered eagerly into the crowd.

"I find blond hair lets you in for a lot of that," she commented. "He was a traveling man, you say?"

"I think so."

"Sort of sandy, with a reddish mustache? I could only see his back."

"Sandy? I'm not sure. I avoided looking at him."

Amy was silent while they passed to the street, and continued to scan the faces about her. When they had wormed into a street-car packed with standing women and seated men she spoke again of Jean's adventure.

"Did he say what line of goods he was carrying?" she asked.

"No," Jean answered indifferently. The spectacle of the pavement without had already ousted the drummer from her thoughts.

"Or where he lived?"

"Where he lived?" She turned now and saw that the girl's eyes were very bright. "He mentioned that he had boarded here somewhere--Harlem, was it?"

"Harlem!" Amy's pink cheeks turned rose-red. "And did he have a scar, a little white scar, near his eyebrow?"

"I didn't notice."

"I wish you had."

Jean eyed her narrowly.

"I wish I had, too, if it matters so much," she returned.

Amy donned a mask of transparent indifference.

"Of course it doesn't matter," she said. "At first I thought it might be somebody I used to know."

IX

They alighted at a kind of wooded island, girt by trolley lines and crisscrossed by many paths, along one of which they struck. Although it was November, the benches by the way frequently held slouching forms, sodden men or unkempt women, at whom none glanced save a fat policeman. Neighboring electric signs lit the lower end of the little park brilliantly, and here, cheek by jowl with restaurant, vaudeville, and saloon, Jean suddenly spied an august figure with which school-history woodcuts had made her familiar from pinafores.

"Why, this is Union Square!" she cried triumphantly. "I know it by Washington's statue over there. And this street we're coming to must be Broadway."

"You're not so slow," said Amy, halting at the curb. "Here's another chance to show your speed. Mind you step lively when I see a chance." In the same breath she dragged her charge into a narrowing gap between two street-cars, dodged a truck, circled a push-cart, and issued miraculously, safe and sound, upon the farther side.

They traversed now a street of entrancing shop-windows over which Jean exclaimed, but which Amy in her sophistication dismissed with the brief comment that the real thing was elsewhere. With the same careless unconcern she dropped, "This is Fifth Avenue," at their next crossing; but she immediately discounted Jean's awe by adding, "Not the swell section, you know," and hurried from its unworthy precincts toward an avenue which the elevated railroad bestrode. This, too, was wonderfully curious, with its countless little shops and stalls, but Amy allowed her a mere taste of it only and whipped round a corner into a dimly lit street of dwellings, each with a scrap of a dooryard tucked behind an iron fence.

As they mounted the high steps of one of these houses, Jean remarked with due respect that it was unmistakably a brownstone front--a species of metropolitan grandeur upon which untravelled Shawnee Springs often speculated vaguely; though its dilapidation, obvious even by night, helped to put her at her ease. A placard inscribed, "Furnished Rooms and Board," held a prominent station in one of the basement windows, which was further adorned with a strange symbol upon red pasteboard, explained by Amy, while they waited, as a mute appeal to a certain haughty city official whose business was the collection of garbage.

"The landlady's name is St. Aubyn," Amy further imparted; "or at any rate that's what she goes by. She's the grass-widow of an actor. Some people say her real name is Haggerty, but that needn't bother us. We can't afford to be finicky, or at least I can't."

"Nor I," agreed Jean.

Mrs. St. Aubyn, who at this juncture opened the door in person, looked a weary-eyed woman of fifty-odd, in whose face still lingered some melancholy vestiges of charm. She greeted, without enthusiasm, Amy's buoyant announcement that she had brought her a new boarder, saying that, although she had no complaint to make of Miss Jeffries and supposed she should get on equally well with her friend, on the whole she preferred men.

"They all do," cried Amy, in mock dudgeon. "Every blessed boarding-house in New York prefers men."

The actor's grass-widow did not question this sweeping statement, evidently deeming it a truism which needed neither explanation nor defence, but went on to say that inasmuch as Miss Jeffries already knew the rooms and prices, and since she herself was dog-tired, and the turnips were burning, and the cream-puffs had not come, and one could not trust the best of servants beyond one's nose, she would leave them to themselves, all of which she delivered with dwindling breath, backing meanwhile toward the basement stair, till voice and speaker vanished together.

"Don't mind her little ways," consoled Amy, leading the way upward. "She is really tickled to death to see you. The elevator's out of order," she added facetiously, "but I'm on the first floor--counting from the roof down. A good place it is, too, on hot summer nights when breezes are scarce."

She showed the narrow rear hall-bedroom she now occupied; a rather bigger cell, deriving its ventilation solely from a skylight, which Jean might have at the same price; and, finally, in enviable contrast, a really spacious chamber at the front, possessing no less than three windows,--dormers, it was true, yet windows,--a generous closet, and a steam-radiator, all within their united means did they care to room together. Amy tried to state the case dispassionately, but she could not weigh the advantages of three dormers, a full-grown closet, and a steam-radiator with perfect calm, and after one glance, not at these persuasive features, but Amy's, Jean promptly voted for the joint arrangement.

Amy hugged her rapturously.

"If you only knew how I've wanted it!" she exclaimed. "You can't possibly do better for your money than here. Take my word for it, I've tramped everywhere to see. It has a lot of good points. For one thing, you'll be within walking distance of a warm lunch that won't cost extra, and that's a big item, I can tell you. Besides, you'll meet nice people. A dentist has the second floor front who's a regular swell, but real sociable, and in the hall-bedroom, third floor back, there's an old man who works in the Astor Library. He knows so much, I'm almost afraid to talk to him. Why, they say he had a college education! Then, there's a girl who typewrites for a law firm down in Nassau Street--she's on our floor; another who's a manicure; and a quiet old couple that used to have money, but lost it in Wall Street. All those are permanents. There are two others, a man and his wife, who may go any time because they belong to the profession."

"Which?" asked Jean, innocently.

"Why, the stage. Mrs. St. Aubyn always calls it 'the profession.' She gets actors off and on who are waiting for engagements. She must have known a stack of them once."

Jean shrank from the thought of dining with this array of fashion, learning, and talent, particularly when she discovered that one long table held them all; but nothing could have been less formal than the meal. The prodigy of learning from the Astor, who, by virtue of intellect or seniority, sat at the head of the board in pleasing domestic balance to Mrs. St. Aubyn at the foot, chatted amiably with Jean and Amy, quite like a person of ordinary attainments. The stenographer exchanged ideas upon winter styles with the wife of the shorn lamb of Wall Street, who, on his part, forgot his losses in a four-sided discussion, with the manicure and the professional birds of passage, of the President's latest speech, a document which it tardily developed none of them had read.

Mrs. St. Aubyn's conversation dealt mainly with the food, and was aimed at the maid, whose blunders were apparently legion, but even she found leisure, as did every person in the room, for a quip with the jocund ruling spirit of the feast, Dr. Paul Bartlett. Coming last, the dentist instantly leavened the whole lump. He drew gems of dramatic criticism from the players, got the bookworm's opinion of a popular novel, inquired the day's happenings on 'Change' from the shorn lamb, discussed a murder trial with the legal stenographer, the outrageous rise in price of coal with Mrs. St. Aubyn, and the growing extravagance of women's sleeves with Amy and the manicure, all between the soup and fish. In fine, as Mrs. St. Aubyn loudly whispered to Jean in leaving the dining room, he was the life of the occasion. Whether he heard this or not, Doctor Bartlett redoubled his efforts, if they were efforts, when after eddying uncertainly about the newel post of the main hall the company finally drifted into the drawing-room.