Julia found the family as usual in the kitchen, and the kitchen as usual
dirty and close. Her old grandmother, a little bent figure in a loose
calico wrapper, was rocking in a chair by the stove. Julia's mother was
helpless in a great wheeled chair, with blankets and pillows carelessly
disposed about her, and her eager eyes bright in a face chiselled by
pain. Sitting at the table was a heavy, sad-faced woman, with several
front teeth missing, in whom Julia recognized her aunt, Mrs. Torney. A
girl of thirteen, with her somewhat colourless hair in untidy braids,
and a flannel bandage high about her throat, came downstairs at the
sound of Julia's entrance. This was Regina Torney.
"Well, it's Julia!" Mrs. Cox said. "And the darlin' sweetie--you
oughtn't to bring her out such weather, Julie! How's them little hands?"
She took the baby, and Julia kissed her mother and aunt, expecting to
draw from the former the usual long complaints when she said:
"How are you, dear? How does the chair go?"
But Mrs. Page surprised her by some new quality in her look and tone,
something poignantly touching and admirable. She was a thin little
shadow of her former self now, the skin drawn tight and shining over her
cheek bones, her almost useless hands resting on a pillow in her lap.
She wore a soiled dark wrapper, her dark hair, still without a touch of
gray, was in disorder, and her blankets and pillows were not clean. She
smiled at her daughter.
"I declare, Ju, you do seem to bring the good fresh air in with you
whenever you come! Don't her cheeks look pretty, Regina? Why, I'm just
about the same, Ju. To-day's a real bad day, on account of the rain, but
I had a good night."
"She's had an awful week, Julia. She don't seem to get no better," Mrs.
Torney said heavily. "I was just saying that it almost seems like she
isn't going to get well; it just seems like it had got hold of her!"
Julia sat down next to her mother, and laid her own warm young hand over
the hand on the pillow.
"What does the doctor say?" she asked, looking from one discouraging
face to another.
"Oh, I don't know!" Mrs. Page said, sighing, and old Mrs. Cox cackled
out a shrill "Doctors don't know nothing, anyway!"
"Emeline sent for me," Mrs. Torney said in a sad, droning voice. "Mamma
just couldn't manage it, Julia; she's getting on; she can't do
everything. So me and Regina gave up the Oakland house, and we've been
here three weeks. We didn't want to do it, Julia, but you couldn't blame
us if you'd read your Mamma's letter. Regina's going to work as soon as
she can, and help out!"
Julia understood a certain deprecatory and apologetic note in her aunt's
voice to refer to the fact that the Shotwell Street house was largely
supported by Jim's generous monthly cheque, and that in establishing
herself and her youngest daughter there she more or less avowedly added
one more burden to Julia's shoulders.
"I'm glad you did, Auntie," she answered cheerfully. "How's Muriel? And
where's Geraldine?"
"Geraldine's at school," Mrs. Torney said mournfully. "But Regina's not
going to start in here. She done awfully well in school, too, Julia,
but, as I say, she feels she ought to get to work now. She's got an
awful sore throat, too. Muriel's started the nursing course, but I don't
believe she can go on with it, it's something fierce. All my children
have weak stomachs; she says the smell in the hospital makes her awfully
sick. I don't feel real well myself; every time I stand up--my God! I
feel as if my back was going to split in two, and yet with poor Em this
way I felt as if I had ter come. Not that I can do anything for Emeline,
but I was losing money on my boarders. I wish't you'd come out Sunday,
Julia, I cooked a real good dinner, didn't I, Ma?"
Mrs. Cox did not hear, and Julia turned to her mother.
"Made up your mind really to go, Ju?" Mrs. Page asked.
"Oh, really! We leave on the seventh."
"I've always wanted to go somewheres on a ship," Emeline said. "Didn't
care so much what it was when I got there, but wanted to go!"
"So have I," contributed Mrs. Torney. "I was real like you at your age,
Julia, and I used to think I'd do this and that when the children was
big. Well, some of us are lucky and some of us aren't--ain't that it,
Ma? I was talking to a priest about it once," she pursued, "and he said,
'Well, Mrs. Torney, if there was no sorrow and suffering in the world,
there wouldn't be no saints!' 'Oh, Father,' I says, 'there isn't much of
the saint in me! But,' I says, 'I've been a faithful wife and mother, if
I say it; seven children I've raised and two I've buried; I've worked my
hands to the bone,' I says, 'and the Lord has sent me nothing but
trouble!'"
"Ma, ain't you going to put your clothes on and go to the store?" Regina
said.
"I was going to," Mrs. Torney said, sighing, "but I think maybe now I'll
wait, and let Geraldine go--she'll have her things on."
"I suppose you haven't got any milk?" Mrs. Page said. "I declare I get
to feeling awfully gone about this time!"
"We haven't a drop, Em," Mrs. Torney said, after investigating a small
back porch, from which Julia got a strong whiff of wet ashes and
decaying cabbage leaves.
"How much milk do you get regularly?" Julia asked, looking worried.
"Oh, my dear," Mrs. Torney said, from the sink, where she was attacking
a greasy frying pan with cold water and a gray rag worn into holes, "you
forget we ain't rich people here. We don't have him leave milk, but if
we want it we put a bottle out on the back steps."
"You ought to have plenty of milk, Mama, taking those strong, depressing
medicines!" Julia said.
"Well, I ain't got much appetite, Julie," her mother answered, with that
new and touching smile. "Now, last night the girls had cabbage and corn
beef cooking--I used to be real fond of that dinner, but it almost made
me sick, just smelling it! So Geraldine fried me an egg, yet that didn't
taste good, either! Gettin' old and fussy, I guess!"
Julia felt the tears press suddenly behind her eyes as she answered the
patient smile. "Mama, I think you are terribly patient!" said she.
"I guess you can get used to anything!" Emeline said.
Regina coughed, and huddled herself in her chair.
"But I thought since we had the air-tight stove put in the other room
you were going to use it more?" said Julia, as Mrs. Torney shook down
the cooking stove with a violence that filled the air with the acrid
taste of ashes.
"Well, we do sometimes. I meant to clean it to-day and get it started
again," her aunt said. "I'm sure I don't know what we're going to do for
dinner, Ma," she added. "Here it is getting round to five, and Geraldine
hasn't come in. I don't know what on earth she does with
herself--weather like this!"
Mrs. Cox made no response; she was nodding in the twilight over the
little relaxed figure of the baby; a fat little white-clad leg rolled on
her knee as she rocked. A moment later Geraldine, a heavy, highly
coloured girl, much what her sister Marguerite had been ten years
before, burst in, cold, wet, and tired, with a strapful of wet books
which she flung on the table.
"My Lord, what do you keep this place so dark for, Ma!" said Geraldine.
"It's something awful! Hello, Julia!" She kissed her cousin, picked
Julia's big muff from a chair, and pressed the soft sables for a moment
to her face. "Well, the little old darling, she's asleep, isn't she?"
she murmured over the baby. "Say, Mamma," she went on more briskly,
"I've got company coming to-night--"
"_You_!" said Julia, smiling, and laying an affectionate hand on her young
cousin's shoulder, as she stood beside her. "Why, how old are you,
child?"
"I'm sixteen--nearly," Geraldine said stoutly. "Didn't you have beaus
when you were sixteen?"
"I suppose I did!" Julia admitted, smiling. "But you seem awfully
young!"
"I thought--maybe you'd go to the store for me," said Mrs. Torney.
Geraldine glared at her.
"Oh, my God! haven't the things come?" she demanded, in shrill disgust.
"I can't, Mamma, I'm sopping wet, and I've got to clean the parlour.
It's all over ashes, and mud, and the Lord knows what!"
"Well, I couldn't get out to-day, that's all there is to that," Mrs.
Torney defended herself sharply. "My back's been like it was on fire.
I've jest been resting all day. And when you go upstairs you won't find
a thing straightened, so don't get mad about that--I haven't been able
to do one thing! Regina's been real sick, too; she may have made the
beds--she was upstairs a while--"
"She didn't!" supplied Regina herself, speaking over her shoulder as she
lighted the gas. They all blinked in the harsh sudden light.
"Oh, Lord!" Geraldine was beginning, when Julia interrupted soothingly:
"See here, I have the car here; Chadwick was to come back at five. Let
me send him for the things! What do we want?"
"Well, we don't want to keep you, lovey," her mother began. But Julia
was already writing a list.
"Indeed I'm going to stay and have some with you, Mrs. Page," she said
cheerfully. "Chops for the family--aren't those quickest? And a quart of
oysters for Mama, and cake and cheese and jam and eggs--tell me
anything you think of, Aunt May, because he might as well do it
thoroughly!
"Mama and Regina are going to have oyster soup and toast because they
are the invalids!" she announced cheerfully, coming back from the door a
little later, "You like oysters, don't you, Mama?"
"Oh, Julia, I like 'em _so_ much!" Mrs. Page said, with grateful fervour.
"You can have other things, too, you know, Madam," Julia assured her
playfully. "And why don't you let me push you, so--" She wheeled the
chair across the kitchen as she spoke. "Over here, you see, you're out
of the crowd," she said. She presently put a coaxing arm about Regina.
"Do go up and brush your hair and change, dear, you'll feel so much
better," she urged.
"I feel rotten," Regina said, dragging herself stairward nevertheless.
Poor Mrs. Page cried when the moment for parting came. It was still
early in the evening when Julia bundled up the sleeping Anna, and sent
her to the motor car by Chester, a gentle gray-haired man, who had been
extremely appreciative of a good dinner, and who had been sitting with
his wet socks in the oven, and his stupid kindly eyes contentedly fixed
upon Julia and her mother.
"I may not see you again, Julie," Mrs. Page said with trembling lips.
"Mama ain't strong like she once was, dear. And I declare I don't know
what I _shall_ do, when day after day goes by and you don't come
in--always so sweet!" The tears began to flow, and she twisted her head,
and slowly and painfully raised her handkerchief in a crippled hand to
dry her eyes. Julia knelt down to kiss her, her young face very sober.
"Listen, Mama--don't cry! Please don't cry!" said she. "Listen! I'll
_promise_ you to see you again before I go!"
Her mother brightened visibly at this, and Julia kissed her again, and
ran out in the dripping rain to her car. She took the baby into her
arms, and settled back in the darkness for the long trip to her hotel.
And for the first time in many months her thoughts were not of her own
troubles.
She thought of the Shotwell Street house, and wondered what had
attracted her grandfather and grandmother to it, forty years ago. She
tried to see her mother there, a slender, dark-haired child; tried to
imagine her aunt as young and fresh and hopeful. Had the rooms been dark
and dirty even then? Julia feared so; in none of her mother's
reminiscences was there ever any tenderness or affection for early
memories of Shotwell Street. Four young people had gone out from that
house, nearly thirty years ago, how badly equipped to meet life!
Julia's own earliest recollections centred in it. She remembered herself
as an elaborately dressed little child, shaking out her little flounces
for her grandmother's admiration, and having large hats tied over her
flushed sticky face and tumbled curls. She remembered that, instead of
the row of cheap two-story flats that now faced it, there had been a
vacant lot across the street then, where horses sometimes galloped. She
remembered the Chester of those days, a pimply, constantly smoking
youth, who gave her little pictures of actresses from his cigarette
boxes, and other little pictures that, being held to a strong light,
developed additional figures and lettering. He called her "Miss
O'Farrell of Page Street" sometimes, and liked to poke her plump little
person until she giggled herself almost into hysterics.
Still dreaming of the old times, she reached her hotel, and while Ellie
settled the baby into her waiting crib, Julia sat down before a fire,
her slippered feet to the comfortable coals, her loose mandarin robe
deliciously warm and restful after the tiring day.
"You want the lights, Mrs. Studdiford?" asked Ellie, tiptoeing in from
the next room.
"Oh, no, thank you!" Julia said. "I'll just sit here for a while, and
then go to bed."
Ellie went softly out; the clock struck nine--ten--eleven. Against the
closely curtained windows the rain still fell with a softened hiss, the
coals broke, flamed up, died down to a rosy glow. Still Julia sat, sunk
in her deep chair, musing.
She saw the Shotwell Street house changed, and made, for the first time
in its years of tenancy, into a home. There must be paint outside, clean
paint, there must be a garden, with a brick path and rose bushes, where
a little girl might take her first stumbling steps, and where spring
would make a brave showing in green and white for the eyes of tired
homegoers.
Indoors there should be a cool little orderly dining-room, with blue
china on its shelves, and a blue rug under the round table, and there
should be a drawing-room papered in clean tans and curtained in cream
colour, with an upright piano and comfortable chairs. The ugly old
storeroom off the kitchen must be her mother's; it must have new windows
cut, and nothing but what was new and pretty must go in there. And the
kitchen should have blue-and-white linoleum, with curtains and shining
tinware; there must be the gleam of scrubbed white woodwork, the shine
of polished metal. It was a big kitchen, the invalid might still like to
have her chair there.
The basement's big, unused front room must be finished in durable
burlaps and grass matting for Uncle Chester; there must be a bath
upstairs; two rooms for Aunt May and the girls, one for Grandma, one for
Julia and little Anna.
So much for externals. But what of changing the tenants to suit the
house? Would time and patience ever transform Mrs. Torney into a busy,
useful woman? Would Geraldine and Regina develop into hopeless
incompetents like Marguerite, or pay Julia for all her trouble by
becoming happy and helpful and contented?
Time must show. Only the days and the years would answer the question
that Julia asked of the fire. There must be patience, there must be
endless effort, there would be times of bitterest discouragement and
depression. And in the end?
In the end there would only be, at best, one family, out of millions of
other families, saved from unnecessary suffering. There would be only
one household lifted from the weight of incompetence and wretchedness
that burdened the world. There would be no miracle, no appreciation, no
gratitude.
"But--who knows?" mused Julia. "It may save Geraldine and Regina from
lives like Rita's, and bitterness like Muriel's and Evelyn's. It may
save them from clouding their lives as I did mine. Rita's children, too,
who knows what a clean and sweet ideal--held before them, may do for
them? And poor Chess, who has been wronged all his life, and my poor
little grandmother, and Mama--"
It was the thought of her mother that turned the scale. Julia thought of
the dirty blankets and the soggy pillow that furnished the invalid's
chair, of the treat that a simple bowl of oyster soup seemed to the
failing appetite.
"And I can do it!" she said to herself. "It will be hard for months and
months, and it will be hard now to make Aunt Sanna see that I am right;
but I can do it!" She looked about the luxurious room, and smiled a
little sadly. "No more of this!" she thought. And then longing for her
husband came with a sick rush. "Oh, Jimmy!" she whispered, with filling
eyes. "If it was only you and me, my darling! If we were going _anywhere_
together, to the poorest neighbourhood and the meanest cabin in the
world--how blessed I would be! How we could work and laugh and plan
together, for Anna and the others!" But presently the tears dried on her
cheeks. "Never mind, it will keep me from thinking too hard," she
thought. "I shall be needed, I shall be busy, and nothing else matters
much!"
She got up, and went to one of the great windows that looked down across
the city. The rain was over, dark masses of cloud were breaking and
stirring overhead; through their rifts she caught the silver glimmer of
the troubled moon. Across the shadowy band that was the bay a ferryboat,
pricked with hundreds of tiny lights, was moving toward the glittering
chain of Oakland. There was a light on Alcatraz, and other nearer lights
scattered through the dark masts and dim hulks of the vessels in the
harbour below her.
"It will be bright to-morrow!" Julia thought, resting her forehead
against the glass. She was weary and spent; a measureless exhaustion
seemed to enfold her. Yet under it all there glowed some new spark of
warm reassurance and certainty. "Thank God, I see my way clear at last!"
she said softly.