At the minute when Junia Collingham was laying before her husband a plan
which would bring comparative wealth to the Follett family, a number of
things were happening in and about New York.
First, Lizzie Follett had dropped into a chair to think, an action rare
with her. She generally thought as she whisked about her work, but this
problem called for concentration. Briefly, it was as to how to cook the
supper without heat. The gas-man had just gone away, and the gas for the
range had been cut off because she couldn't pay a bill of twenty-nine
dollars and sixty-seven cents, or anything on account. This was
Wednesday, and she would have no more money till the children got their
various pay-envelopes on Saturday.
Though in the back of her mind she blamed herself for an unwise
distribution of the week's funds, it was one of those situations in
which you blame yourself without seeing how you could have done
otherwise. With six to feed, and all the subsidiary expenses of a family
to meet, she had twenty-two dollars a week. Of his eighteen, Teddy gave
her fifteen, three being needed for car fares and other small
necessities. From the six she earned at the studio, Jennie contributed
three. Gladys, who was now a cash girl on seven a week, was able to turn
in four. Gussie brought nothing to the common fund as yet, for the
reason that the three-fifty which Madame Corinne conceded for the
privilege of "teaching her the millinery" allowed no margin over what
she had to spend.
To Lizzie, during the past six months, life had become an exciting game.
How to pay the minimum on every account and yet keep alive her credit
had been the calculation with which she rose in the morning and lay down
at night. It was a game that could be played successfully for two
months, or three months, or four. When it came to six, the heaping-up of
unpaid balances made it harder to go on.
It was making it impossible to go on. During the past fortnight she had
found her credit stopped at three places in The Square where Pemberton
Heights did its shopping. In vain she had tried to transfer her account
elsewhere, but Pemberton Heights is no more than a huge village where
the status of most families is known. More and more her small amount of
cash was needed for cash purposes in order that the family might live.
Lizzie sat down to cast up her assets. She had the small remnants of a
ham which could be eaten cold. She had bread and butter. If she could
only make tea.... She might have done that in a neighbor's house, but
she shrank from exposing a situation which a lucky stroke might change.
----
At the same moment Josiah was turning away from a wooden bar which shut
off an office from the public. He had entered and stood there, meek,
unobtrusive, trembling, while none of the young men or young women busy
at desks or with one another paid him any attention. When a girl with
hair combed over her ears, very bright eyes, and very short skirts,
tripped by him accidentally, he managed to stammer out something in
which she caught the word "job." The word being significant, and
Josiah's appearance more so, she whispered to a gentleman, who left his
desk and came forward.
"No; I'm very sorry. We can't do anything for you."
He hadn't waited for the word "job"; he hadn't waited for Josiah to
speak at all. He knew the situation so well that his method was to end
it there and then. Josiah turned away meekly as he had entered, and with
no sinking of the heart. His heart used to sink; but that was four and
five months previously, before he had exhausted his emotions. Now the
bitterness of death was past. It had passed day by day and inch by inch,
by stages of slow agony, leaving him with a dried soul that couldn't
suffer any more.
----
And also at this minute Teddy was standing in his cage at the bank in a
very peculiar situation. At least it struck him as peculiar, because for
the first time he perceived its opportunities.
For Teddy, too, six months had been a period of development, just as it
is for a green fruit when you pick it and lay it in the sun. It ripens,
but it ripens green. When you eat it, it has a green flavor, or a flat
flavor, or none at all. Teddy was a fruit to be left on the tree to take
its time. He was now twenty-one, with the promptings of sixteen. At his
own rate of progress, he would probably have reached twenty by the time
he was twenty-two, but thirty at twenty-five.
As it was, he had been called on to be thirty when his growth was just
beginning. Not merely the circumstances had made this demand on him, but
the dependence, more or less unconscious, of the members of the family.
They looked to him to do something big because he was a young man.
Having heard of other young men who had been financially heroic, they
expected him to be the same. The possibilities, open to a bank clerk of
twenty-one had no relation to their hopes. Even his mother, chiefly
because of her adoration, seemed to feel that he should spring from
eighteen to a hundred dollars a week by the force of inner flame.
She didn't say so, of course. She only revealed her sentiments as Pansy
revealed hers, by an inextinguishable look. The father did no more than
throw emphasis on the boy's responsibility. Jennie and Gladys never said
anything at all, but Gussie was quite frank.
"A great big fellow like you and only making eighteen per! Look at poor
momma, working her fingers to the bone. I'd be ashamed if I were you.
Why, Fred Inglis orders his clothes at Love's and keeps his own Ford."
It was all there in a nut shell--his inability to rise to the occasion
in a land where everyone else who was worth his salt had only to shake
the money tree and pick up coin. How Fred Inglis did it Teddy couldn't
think, when your value by the week was so definitely fixed and a raise
lay so far ahead. If he had developed during the past six months, it was
mainly through a carking sense of inefficiency.
Meanwhile, he had to do what Gussie told him--watch his mother work her
fingers to the bone. In spite of a tendency to squabble, the Folletts
were an affectionate family, and the mother was the center of their
love. Teddy didn't stop to analyze what she was to them; he only knew
that there was nothing he wouldn't be to her. If he could only have
compassed it, she would have had a bar-pin like their neighbor, Mrs.
Weatherby; she would have worn the skunk neckpiece for which he had once
heard her utter a desire; she would have gone out in his Ford oftener
than Fred Inglis's mother in his. These things he would have done for
her and more, had he but been the financial Titan all American example
called on him to become. Between Gussie's taunts and his own What lack I
yet? he was reaching a condition of despair.
And now, on this particular afternoon, when nearly everyone had left the
bank and Mr. Brunt, to whom he was specially attached, was working later
than usual, there was the fruit of the money tree piled up on the
ground. Mr. Brunt had gone to the other end of the main office, and
would return presently to stow these piles of bills in the safe. These
bills were money. Teddy had never consciously dwelt on that fact before.
He had been in this same situation a thousand times, when he had nothing
to do but put out his hands and stuff his pockets with food and fuel and
gas and the interest on the mortgage, and all the other things of which
there was such a lack at home, and had never considered that the needed
things were here.
He remembered that as a child in Nova Scotia he would occasionally swipe
an apple from a cart-load, knowing that the owner couldn't miss it, and
had the same sensation now. Here were the piles of bills, all arranged
in rows according to their values--a pile of hundreds, a pile of
fifties, a pile of twenties, and so on down. Mr. Brunt would come back,
as he had done at other times, and put them away without counting them.
Having counted them already, he would accept this reckoning for the day.
He, Teddy, was left there to see that nothing happened to this treasure.
He was never able to tell how it came about, but without seemingly being
able to control the action of his hand he had slipped a twenty-dollar
bill from the top of the pile into his own pocket. It was an instant's
weakness, followed the next instant by repentance. Teddy knew what theft
was. He had not, through his father, had so much to do with banks
without being fully aware of the sure and pitiless punishment meted out
to it. He didn't mean to steal. He was horror-stricken at the act. Quick
as a flash his hand went into his pocket again--but Mr. Brunt was back.
The thing that could have been done at once had to be deferred.
Looking for a chance to drop the bill to the floor and make restitution
by picking it up, it was annoying that Mr. Brunt should give him none.
Mr. Brunt seemed possessed by a demon of speed, so quickly had he locked
all the piles in the safe, and then locked the cage behind him. Teddy
found himself outside with the bill still burning in his pocket.
Even so there were other possibilities. Going to the washroom, he hung
on there till Mr. Brunt had gone home. The cage was made of open
wire-work. It was a simple thing to slip a bill through one of the
interstices. It would be found next morning on the floor and a fresh
running-over of accounts would show where it belonged. Mr. Brunt would
wonder how he came to be so careless, but with his balance straight he
would be satisfied.
But as Teddy reached the cage, there was Doolan, the night watchman.
Doolan was an ex-policeman, too old for public office, but equal to
sounding an alarm in case the bank was being robbed. He was a friendly
soul, and in strolling up to Teddy had no motive beyond asking after the
"ould man" and whether or not he had yet found a job. But Teddy
suspected that he was being watched. He didn't know but that Doolan
might have seen the movement of the hand which snatched the bill from
the pile. When he stirred to go homeward, Doolan might clutch him by the
neck. It was a strange, new sensation to feel that within a minute,
within a few seconds, the law might have its grip on him. Having said
good-by to Doolan and turned away, he took the first steps in
expectation of a stern command to come back.
It was another strange new sensation to be walking the familiar ways of
Broad Street and Wall Street with this strange new consciousness. There
were thousands of bright young men and women streaming to electrics,
subways, and ferries in the first stages of commuting, and among them he
bore a secret mark. Tramping along in the crowd, he felt like a soldier
marching with his comrades to the trenches, but knowing himself picked
for death. Luckily, his folly was not even now beyond reparation. He
would get to the bank early in the morning, discover the cursed bill
lying in some artfully chosen corner of the floor, and restore it to Mr.
Brunt. All the same, it was a relief to get away from the fear of
detection which he felt to be haunting the streets by plunging into the
maw of the subway, where his identity was swallowed up.
----
At this minute, too, in the studio, Hubert Wray was leaning over Jennie
Follett's shoulder and placing before her a rough pencil sketch.
"Take it away!" Jennie cried, tearfully. "I don't want to look at it."
"But, Jennie, I only wish you to see how little it involves."
It was a drawing of a nude woman, her hair coiled on the top of her
head, sitting very upright in a marble Byzantine chair, her knees
pressed together in the manner of the Egyptian cat-goddess. On a level
with her face and poised on the tips of her fingers, she held a human
skull which she inspected with slanting, mysterious eyes.
Wray continued to keep the sketch before Jennie, hanging over her
shoulder. He was so close that she felt his breath on her neck. He could
easily have pressed his lips against her amber-colored hair, and Jennie
wished he would. But having long ago made up his mind that she could
best be won by a system of starving out, he refrained from doing it. As,
however, she persisted in brushing the sketch aside, he straightened
himself up.
"Then, Jennie, I'm afraid I can't use you any more--that is, for the
present. Since you won't do it, I must get some one who will."
"You could paint another kind of picture," she argued indignantly, "with
me with clothes on."
"You don't understand. I'm an artist. An artist doesn't paint the
picture he chooses, but the one that's given him to paint."
"No one gave you this to paint. It isn't a commission. It's just your
own bad mind."
"I'm not ready to explain what it is. You wouldn't understand. Something
comes to you. You've got to obey it. This is the picture I've seen and
which I'm obliged to do next. And, besides, it isn't a bad mind, Jennie.
The human form is the most--"
"Oh, you don't have to hand me out any hokum about the human form. It's
all very well in its place. But you fellows are crazy--the way you stick
it up where it doesn't belong. Look at that picture of Sims's you were
all so wild about--three women walking in a field, and not a stitch
between them. Who'd go out like that? There's no sense in it--"
"It isn't a question of sense, Jennie; it's one of business. If you want
to be a model, you must _be_ a model and meet the demands of the
market."
She wore the cheap linen suit that had been her best last summer, and
the corresponding hat; but her beauty being of the type which
subordinates externals to itself, she was more than adorable; she was
elegant. With tears still rolling down her cheeks, she pointed at the
sketch Wray held in his hand as he stood before her at a distance.
"Do you know what my father would do if he thought I was going to be
painted like that? He'd turn me out of doors."
Wray tossed the sketch on the table.
"Then, Jennie, there's no use talking of it any more. You're not that
kind of a model, and it's that kind of a model I'm looking for."
"I'm the kind of model you were looking for when you put that
advertisement in the paper nearly a year ago. I answered it because you
said a pretty girl, not a professional--"
"Yes; that was a year ago. That's what I wanted then. But now it's
something else. It doesn't follow that because you're satisfied with an
egg for breakfast, that an egg will be enough for every meal all the
rest of your life."
She looked up reproachfully.
"Yes; all the rest of your life! That's the way you talk. Nothing will
ever be enough for you all the rest of your life."
"No, Jennie; nothing--not as far as I see now."
"And yet you expect me to stake everything--"
"You must choose your words there, Jennie. I don't _expect_ you to do
anything. There may have been a time when I hoped--but that's all over.
We won't talk of it. You've made up your mind; I must make up mine.
There's nothing between us now but a question of business. I'm looking
for a model who does this kind of thing, and it doesn't suit you to
serve my turn. Well, that settles it, doesn't it? Our little account is
paid up to date, and so--"
She stumbled to her feet. The only form her resentment took was a
trembling of the lip and the streaming of more tears.
"But what can I _do_?"
"Do you mean for a living?"
As she nodded speechlessly, he smiled, with a faint shrug of the
shoulders.
"That's not for me to decide, is it, Jennie? Once you've left me--"
"I'm not leaving you. You're driving me away."
"Suppose we said that life was separating us? Wouldn't that express it
better? We've--we've liked each other. I've never made any secret of it
on my side--have I, Jennie?--though you're so terribly discreet on
yours. And yet life--"
"I've only been discreet about one thing."
"But that one thing is the whole business."
"And I wouldn't be discreet about that if there was any other way."
"There's the way I've told you about."
"Yes; and be left high and dry after two or three years, neither one
thing nor the other."
"Isn't that looking pretty far ahead?"
"It's not looking farther ahead than a girl has to. It's easy enough to
talk. There _you'd_ be, able to walk off without a sign on you; whereas
I'd have to lie down and die or--or find some one else."
"Well, there'd be that possibility, wouldn't there? They're not so
difficult for a pretty girl to find when--"
She stamped her foot.
"I hate you!"
"Oh no, you don't, Jennie. You love me--only, you won't let yourself--"
"And I never will--never--never--never! Not if I was starving in the
streets--so help me God!"
She was running toward the model's exit when he called after her.
"Then you leave me to work with another woman, Jennie--another woman
sitting in your place--another woman--" When she threw him a despairing
glance he snatched the sketch from the table and held it up to her.
"Another woman--dressed like that!"
But out on the stairs she paused. Anger was giving place to fear. It
was, first of all, a fear of the other woman _dressed like that_, and
then it was a fear not less agonizing of the loss of her six a week.
Her six a week was all that stood between Jennie and the not very
carefully veiled contempt of the family. In the testing to which the
past half year had subjected them all, Jennie had not made very good.
Six a week had been her measure. For obscure reasons which none of them
could fathom, she had proved incapable of really lucrative work. She had
tried to get employment with other artists who would leave her free for
her hours with Wray, but she had failed. She had failed, too, in stores,
factories, offices, and dressmaking establishments. Perhaps they saw she
was only half hearted in her attempts; perhaps her air of helplessness
told against her. "She was too much like a lady," had been one
employer's verdict, and possibly that was true. Whatever the reason, she
seemed a creature not primarily meant to work, but to be utilized in
some other way. The question was as to that way. "You're splendid to
love," little Gladys had whispered one day, when Jennie was crying to
herself, and much in her recent experience confirmed this opinion. In
her applications for something to do, it had more than once been made
plain to her that money could be made by other means than by punching a
time clock at seven.
But she couldn't retrace her steps and go back to Wray. She thought of
it. She had chosen to descend by the stairs instead of by the lift which
served the huge studio building, in order to give herself the chance of
changing her mind. She went down a few steps and stood still, then a few
more steps and stood still. If it had been only a question of the money
she might have swallowed her pride and returned to throw herself at his
feet.
But there was the other woman--_dressed like that_! He had dared to
invoke her. Well, let him invoke her. Let him paint her; let him do
anything he liked. She, Jennie, would break her heart over it; but it
would be easier to break her heart than go back.
And yet not to go back made her feet like lead as she dragged herself
down the interminable steps.