It was bitter bread they had to eat, Mrs. Anders and her daughter.
“You deaf, hey?” bellowed Oscar Anders. “Don’t you hear that bell, hey?
_No!_ Ingeborg, you stay where you are! Marie, you go!”
The sight of them standing there, so downcast, filled him with anger.
“You two dumb ones!” he shouted. “Marie, you go!”
Mrs. Anders went. Ingeborg turned to the stove again, and lifted the lid
of a saucepan; but she could not see through her tears. From the hall
upstairs she could hear her mother’s voice, faltering out her broken
English; then the front door slammed. Some one else had gone away,
impatient and annoyed, unable to understand her.
Outside the snow was falling--the first snow Ingeborg had seen. It was
not like the snow her mother had told her there was in Denmark. There
were no sleigh bells here, no dark fir trees to catch and hold a
glittering burden, no blazing fire within. This snow was sorrowful and
faint, vanishing as it touched the pavement, and through it monstrous
trucks thundered by, and people were passing, all hurried, all
strangers, never a familiar face.
It was growing dark in the basement kitchen. The gas stove burned with a
clear blue flame in its shadowy corner. Mrs. Anders, coming into the
room, was almost invisible, but Oscar saw her.
“Well?” he demanded.
She answered him in Danish, and that made him so angry that he banged
down the legs of his tilted chair.
“Speak American!” he shouted.
“He don’t vant a r-room,” said Mrs. Anders. “He vent avay.”
“Yes, and everybody’s going to ‘vent avay,’ if you don’t learn some
sense! I give you your food, and a nice room, and a pair of shoes last
week! A hat, even, for the girl! Everything you take, and bring nothing.
The two of you--_ach, Gott_, so dumb!”
They said nothing, Mrs. Anders and her daughter. They had to endure
this, and they did endure it.
“Oscar is a good man,” said Mrs. Anders to herself. “He gives us a
home--that I won’t forget. It is a home for me and Ingeborg.”
Six months ago her husband had died. The poor man had been ill a long
time, and he left very little. A very bad time that had been, even
though the neighbors had been so kind. Then Oscar Anders, her husband’s
brother, had sent her the fare to New York, and had written that she and
Ingeborg could come to live with him, and maybe could help a little in
the rooming house he had just bought.
“That was kind,” said Mrs. Anders to herself. “Oscar is a good man.”
So they had left St. Croix, where Ingeborg had been born, and where Mrs.
Anders had lived for twenty years, and they had come to New York; and
Mrs. Anders had tried to repay Oscar’s kindness. From six in the morning
until perhaps nine at night she worked, keeping the big, old-fashioned
house clean and neat, and cooking meals for Oscar. It was hard work, but
she did not mind that. What she did mind was any contact with the alien
world outside.
She had led a sheltered life in the West Indies, just with her husband
and his people. She had never troubled to learn English, and now nobody
understood her; and her timid air and poor clothes won very little
patience for her. She was sick with dread when she had to enter a new
shop to buy anything. She would return from one of these expeditions and
shut the door of Oscar’s house behind her with a long sigh of relief.
Inside the house there were Oscar and the lodgers, all so cross! Well,
let them be; she knew she did not deserve it. She was a respectable
woman, and the mother of Ingeborg, and that was something to be proud
of. Such a neat little woman, too--small and spare, with a long nose and
a thin face with two spots of red on the high cheek bones; but only
Ingeborg looked at her kindly now. Her man was gone, and she had nobody
but Ingeborg, who was still a child to her mother.
“Oh, thou dear little one!” thought Mrs. Anders, looking at her
daughter. “Thou little Ingeborg--so dear!”
Ingeborg was making the coffee. Oscar was a good man, but he ought not
to call Ingeborg “dumb.” That was not right. Just think what the girl
could do in the house--so clever and quick at cooking, fine ironing,
sewing, anything you wanted done--
“The _bell_!” shouted Oscar. “_Ach, Gott_, she grows deaf now, the dumb
old woman!”
“_Ach_, I don’t hear dot,” said Mrs. Anders hastily. “I go, Oscar!”
She hurried up the stairs, whispering to herself the English words she
might need. She opened the front door, and there was another young man.
So many of them came!
“Room?” he asked curtly.
“Nice room,” said Mrs. Anders. “Top floor. Seven dollars. I show you.”
“Seven?” said he. “Well, I’ll take a look.”
Mrs. Anders had already begun to mount the stairs, and he followed her.
On the top floor she opened a door and showed him a bare little room,
very clean.
“Seven dollars?” he repeated.
Mrs. Anders was terribly anxious to let the room, because Oscar said it
was her fault that nobody had taken it yet. Perhaps seven dollars was
too much for it. She knew nothing about such matters; only she did so
want to let it.
“Ver-ry goot room!” she said, and looked about for advantages to praise.
“Heatness!” she said, touching her worn shoe against the register, from
which came a tepid current of air. “Vater!” And she turned on the tap in
the wash basin.
Still the young man did not seem impressed.
“Well, see here,” he said. “What about--”
The rest of his question Mrs. Anders could not understand.
“Excoos?” she said, straining every nerve to catch his meaning. She saw
that he was growing impatient. A formidable young man he was, big and
blond, with eyes like blue ice, and a dogged jaw.
“Vait, plis!” she cried. “Yoost a minoot!”
“No!” he said, but Mrs. Anders was already hastening down the stairs.
He called after her, but she paid no attention. Down the last dark
flight she stole, and looked into the kitchen, and behind Oscar’s back
made a signal to her daughter. Ingeborg came out into the passage. They
dared not even whisper, for fear of their tyrant; but Mrs. Anders
pointed up the stairs, and Ingeborg followed her like a shadow.
The young man had not waited. He had come down into the hall, and was
about to let himself out of the front door, when Ingeborg spoke.
“Is there something you want to ask about, please?”
He turned and looked at her. The hall was dim, with only a single gas
jet high overhead, but he could see her well enough. She was small, and
looked very slight in her plain, dark dress. Her dark hair was wound in
braids about her head. Her face was pale and wide-browed, with clear,
dark eyes that looked back at him steadily. A colorless, quiet little
thing; what was there in _her_ to catch at his heart?
“Yes,” he said curtly. “I wanted to know if I could get my breakfast
here, and what you’d charge.”
Ingeborg explained the question to her mother in Danish, and then told
the young man:
“I’ll find out, if you’ll please wait a moment.”
His blue eyes followed her as she moved away. Then he turned his head
and looked out through the glass of the door. Mrs. Anders watched him,
terribly anxious.
“Such a fine young man!” she thought. “So tall, and such a beautiful,
rich overcoat! I only hope he’ll take that room!”
Now there came a great bellowing from downstairs. She could understand
those words. Oscar was angry, and shouting at little Ingeborg.
“Excoos!” she cried. “Yoost a minoot!”
“No!” he said with a frown. “Never mind, anyhow--I’ll take the room,
without breakfast. I’ll be back later.”
He opened the door and let himself out. Mrs. Anders stood in the hall,
with tears in her eyes. She had not understood what he said. She thought
he had gone away, as so many others went away, angry because she was so
dumb.
As a matter of fact, if the young man was angry with any one, it was
with himself, for his own folly. He ran down the steps and set off along
the street as if he were in a hurry to get away from that house.
He had to wait at a crossing for the traffic to pass. On the opposite
corner he could see the snow swirling about the street lamp in a little
tumult; and it reminded him of something he had loved when he was a
child. His mother had had a glass ball with a paper landscape in it, and
when the ball was shaken a fierce snowstorm would fill the tiny world
inside it. He remembered it so well, and somehow the thought of it made
him recall other memories of his boyhood days, faint and sad and
beautiful--the jingle of sleigh bells, a glimpse of the lighted window
of a little house among the snow-covered hills, the long hoot of a train
speeding swiftly through the dark.
He did not want to think of the past. He walked faster, but those
thoughts went along with him, and in them, all the time, was the face of
little Ingeborg. He had never seen her before, yet she seemed familiar
to him, like a figure from his own past, or from a dream.
That pale face of hers, with its steadfast eyes--it was like a picture
in his old fairy tales of a snow queen, dressed in fur, driving off in a
sleigh shaped like a swan, and looking back sorrowfully over her
shoulder. It was like a face he had seen long, long ago, at some window.
It was the face of the beloved maiden who is always waiting, in every
tale, in every dream--waiting her deliverance.
Not for him! He would not have it so. He had chosen another road, and
nothing should stop him. What did he care for that girl--a little,
shadowy, humble thing like that?
He thought of Mabel, with her pearls about her throat, and her red lips,
and he laughed aloud. Who, seeing Mabel, would look again at that other?
Not he!
He went back to his old room and packed his bag; then he walked over to
a little Italian restaurant for his dinner. He had _minestrone_ and
_ravioli_--queer food for that blond son of vikings; but he was used to
things like that. He had eaten stranger food in more unlikely places--in
Naples, in Calcutta, in Marseilles. He had seen the world--the beauty of
it and the worst of it.
He took his time over his dinner, and it was nearly nine o’clock when he
ran up the steps of Oscar Anders’s house and rang the bell. Nobody came
to open the door. The young man set down his heavy bag, and frowned
impatiently. He was cold and wet, he was tired, and for some reason he
did not feel happy. He rang again.
Then she came. She opened the door, and he entered and threw down his
bag. He did not want to look at her, but he could not help seeing her.
She was wearing a white blouse with a funny little plaid bow at the
collar, and a long, dark skirt. She was altogether foreign in those
clothes, with her dark braids about her head, and her subdued
air--foreign, and yet in some way familiar to him, and dear.
“Well!” he said, with his masterful smile. “Here I am!”
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she replied.
“What about?”
“My mother didn’t understand you. She thought you weren’t coming back.”
“I told her I was.”
“But she doesn’t understand English very well. She thought--I’m so
sorry--but just a little while ago we let the room.”
“What?” said he. He was angry now. “I should have paid, eh? Somebody
came along with money--”
“No,” she said. “It was a mistake.”
“Ingeborg!” shouted a great voice.
The girl started a little, but she did not turn.
“I’m very sorry,” she said.
As she spoke, she looked straight at the young man, and she let him see
that she really was sorry--as if she were his friend, and really anxious
about him. Though she was so young and slight, there was a fine dignity
about her.
“All right--I don’t care,” he said. “I can find another room.”
“There’s a telephone here,” she suggested. “You could--”
“No!” he interrupted roughly.
“Ingeborg!” shouted the voice again. From the basement stairs there
appeared a great, fierce old head with grizzled brows and mustache.
“You!” cried Oscar. “What you doing here, hey? Who’s this?”
“He came to see about a room,” said Ingeborg.
“Well, we have no room for him.”
“All right! Your daughter just told me--”
“Daughter? She’s no daughter of mine. You, Ingeborg, get downstairs!
When there comes a man, you shall call your mother. You hear me? Get
downstairs!”
The girl turned away, toward the stairs; and at sight of her mute
submission a great anger rose in the young man. Not even a glance over
her shoulder for him, not a smile at that old bully! She was just one of
those foreign girls, with no pride.