EIGHT TO SIX
Through that long, wet spring Nance did her ten hours a day, six days in
the week and on the seventh washed her clothes and mended them. Her
breaking in was a hard one, for she was as quick of tongue as she was of
fingers, and her tirades against the monotony, the high speed, and the
small pay were frequent and vehement. Every other week when Dan was on
the night shift, she made up her mind definitely that she would stand it
no longer.
But on the alternate weeks when she never failed to find him waiting at
the gas-pipe to take her home, she thought better of it. She loved to
slip in under his big cotton umbrella, when the nights were rainy, and
hold to his elbow as he shouldered a way for her through the crowd; she
liked to be a part of that endless procession of bobbing umbrellas that
flowed down the long, wet, glistening street; best of all she liked the
distinction of having a "steady" and the envious glances it brought her
from the other girls.
Sometimes when they paused at a shop window, she caught her reflection in
a mirror, and smiled approval at the bright face under the red tam. She
wondered constantly if Dan thought she was pretty and always came to the
conclusion that he did not.
From the time they left the factory until they saw the towering bulk of
the cathedral against the dusk, Nance's chatter never ceased. She
dramatized her experiences at the factory; she gave a lively account of
the doings of the Snawdor family; she wove tales of mystery around old
Mr. Demry. She had the rare gift of enhancing every passing moment with
something of importance and interest.
Dan listened with the flattering homage a slow, taciturn nature often
pays a quick, vivacious one. It was only when problems concerning the
factory were touched upon that his tongue lost its stiffness. Under an
unswerving loyalty to his employers was growing a discontent with certain
existing conditions. The bad lighting system, the lack of ventilation,
the employment of children under age, were subjects that rendered him
eloquent. That cruel month spent in the reformatory had branded him so
deeply that he was supersensitive to the wrongs of others, and spent much
of his time in planning ways and means to better conditions.
"Don't you ever want a good time, Dan?" Nance asked. "Don't you ever want
to sort of let go and do something reckless?"
"No; but I'll tell you what I do want. I want a' education. I've a good
mind to go to night school and try to pick up some of the things I
didn't get a chance to learn when I was a kid."
Nance scoffed the idea; school was almost invisible to her from the giddy
height of sixteen. "Let's go on a bat," she urged. "Let's go out and see
something."
So on the four following Sundays Dan took her to see the library, the
reservoir, the city hall, and the jail. His ideas of recreation had not
been cultivated.
The time in the week to which she always looked forward was Saturday
afternoon. Then they got out early, and if the weather was fine, they
would stop in Post-Office Square and, sitting on one of the iron benches,
watch the passing throng. There was something thrilling in the jostling
crowds, and the electric signs flashing out one by one down the long gay
thoroughfare.
Post-Office Square, at the end of the day, was always littered with
papers and trash. In its center was a battered, weather kiosk, and facing
it, was a huge electric advertisement which indulged in the glittering
generality, that "You get what you pay for."
It was not a place to inspire romance, yet every Saturday its benches
were crowded with boys and girls who had no place to visit except on
the street.
Through the long spring dusks, with their tender skies and silver stars,
Nance and Dan kept company, unconcerned with the past or the future,
wholly content with the May-time of the present. At a word or touch from
Dan, Nance's inflammable nature would have taken fire but Dan, under Mrs.
Purdy's influence, was passing through an acute stage of religious
conversion, and all desires of the flesh were sternly repressed by that
new creed to which he was making such heroic efforts to conform. With the
zeal of a new convert, he considered it his duty to guard his small
companion against all love-making, including his own.
Nance at an early age had developed a protective code that even without
Dan's forbidding looks and constant surveillance might have served its
purpose. Despite the high spirits and free speech that brought her so
many admiring glances from the boys in the factory, it was soon
understood that the "Molloy kid" was not to be trifled with.
"Say, little Sister, I like your looks," Bean had said to her one morning
when they were alone in the hall. "It's more than I do yours," Nance had
answered coolly, with a critical glance at his pimply nose.
As summer came on, the work, which at first was so difficult, gradually
became automatic, and while her shoulders always ached, and her feet were
always tired, she ceased for the most part to think of them. It was the
confinement that told upon her, and when the long bright days came, and
she thought of Forest Home and its woods and streams, her restlessness
increased. The stifling finishing room, the endless complaints of the
girls, and the everlasting crunching of glass under foot were at times
almost unendurable.
One day when the blue of the sky could not be dimmed even by factory
smoke, and the air was full of enticement, Nance slipped out at the noon
hour, and, watching her chance, darted across the factory yard out
through the stables, to the road beyond. A decrepit old elm-tree, which
had evidently made heroic effort to keep tryst with the spring, was the
one touch of green in an otherwise barren landscape. Scrambling up the
bank, Nance flung herself on the ground beneath its branches, and between
the bites of a dry sandwich, proceeded to give vent to some of her
surplus vitality.
"Arra, come in, Barney McKane, out of the rain," she sang at the top of
her voice.
"And sit down until the moon comes out again,
Sure a cup of tay I'll brew, just enough for me and you,
We'll snuggle up together, and we'll talk about the weather,
Do you hear? Barney dear, there's a queer
Sort of feelin' round me heart, that gives me pain,
And I think the likes o' me could learn to like the likes o' ye,
Arra, come in, Barney McKane, out of the rain!"
So absorbed was she in trying operatic effects that she did not notice
an approaching automobile until it came to a stop in the road below.
"Hi there, Sembrich!" commanded a fresh young voice, the owner of which
emphasized his salute with his horn, "are you one of the factory kids?"
Nance rose to a sitting posture.
"What's it to you?" she asked, instantly on the defensive.
"I want to know if Mr. Clarke's come in. Have you seen him?"
"No, indeed," said Nance, to whom Mr. Clarke was as vague as the Deity;
then she added good-naturedly, "I'll go find out if you want me to."
The young man shut off his engine and, transferring two struggling
pigeons from his left hand to his right, dismounted.
"Never mind," he said. "I'll go myself. Road's too rotten to take the
machine in." Then he hesitated, "I say, will you hold these confounded
birds 'til I come back? Won't be gone a minute. Just want to speak to the
governor."
Nance scrambled down the bank and accepted the fluttering charges, then
watched with liveliest interest the buoyant figure in the light suit go
swinging up the road. There was something tantalizingly familiar in his
quick, imperious manner and his brown, irresponsible eyes. In her first
confusion of mind she thought he must be the prince come to life out of
Mr. Demry's old fairy tale. Then she caught her breath.
"I believe it's that Clarke boy!" she thought, with rising excitement, "I
wonder if he'd remember the fight? I wonder if he'd remember me?"
She went over to the automobile and ran her fingers over the silver
initials on the door.
"M.D.C," she repeated. "It _is_ him! It is!"
In the excitement of her discovery she relaxed her grasp on the pigeons,
and one of them escaped. In vain she whistled and coaxed; it hopped about
in the tree overhead and then soared away to larger freedom.
Nance was aghast at the catastrophe. She did not wait for the owner's
return, but rushed headlong down the road to meet him.
"I let one of 'em go!" she cried in consternation, as he vaulted the
fence and came toward her. "I wouldn't 'a' done it for anything in the
world. But I'll pay you for it, a little each week. Honest I will!"
The handsome boyish face above her clouded instantly.
"You let it go?" he repeated furiously. "You little fool you! How did
you do it?"
Nance looked at him for a moment; then she deliberately lifted the other
pigeon as high as she could reach and opened her hand.
"Like that!" she cried.
Mac Clarke watched his second bird wheel into space; then his amazed
glance dropped to the slim figure of the young girl in her short
gingham dress, with the sunlight shining on her hair and on her bright,
defiant eyes.
"You've got your nerve!" he said with a short laugh; then he climbed into
his car and, with several backward glances of mingled anger and
amusement, drove away.
Nance related the incident with great gusto to Dan that night on
the way home.
"He never recognized me, but I knew him right off. Same old Smart Aleck,
calling people names."
"I was up in the office when he come in," said Dan. "He'd been held up
for speeding and wanted his father to pay his fine."'
"Did he do it?"
"Of course. Mac always gets what he wants. He told Bean he wasn't going
to stay at that school in Virginia if he had to make 'em expel him. Sure
enough they did. Wouldn't I like to have his chance though!"
"I don't blame him for not wanting to go to school," said Nance. Then she
added absently, "Say, he's got to be a awful swell-looker, hasn't he?"
That night, for the first time, she objected to stopping in
Post-Office Square.
"It ain't any fun to hang around there," she said impatiently. "I'm sick
of doing tame things all the time."
The next time Nance saw Mac Clarke was toward the close of the summer.
Through the long sweltering hours of an interminable August morning she
had filed and chipped bottles with an accuracy and speed that no longer
gave cause for criticism. The months of confinement were beginning to
tell upon her; her bright color was gone, and she no longer had the
energy at the noon hour to go down the road to the elm-tree. She wanted
above all things to stretch out at full length and rest her back and
relax all those tense muscles that were so reluctantly learning to hold
one position for hours at a time.
At the noon hour she had the unexpected diversion of a visit from Birdie
Smelts. Birdie had achieved her cherished ambition of going on the stage,
and was now a chorus girl in the "Rag Time Follies." Meager news of her
had reached the alley from time to time, but nobody was prepared for the
very pretty and sophisticated young person who condescended to accept
board and lodging from her humble parents during the interval between her
engagements. Nance was genuinely glad to see her and especially gratified
by the impression her white coat-suit and black picture hat made on the
finishing room.
"It must be grand to be on the stage," said Gert enviously.
"Well, it's living," said Birdie, airily. "That's more than you can
claim for this rotten grind."
She put a high-heeled, white-shod foot on the window ledge to adjust its
bow, and every eye in the room followed the process.
"I bet I make more money in a week," she continued dramatically, "than
you all make in a month. And look at your hands! Why, they couldn't pay
me enough to have my hands scarred up like that!"
"It ain't my hands that's worryin' me," said another girl. "It's my feet.
Say, the destruction on your shoes is somethin' fierce! You orter see
this here room some nights at closin' time; it's that thick with glass
you don't know where to step."
"I'd know," said Birdie. "I'd step down and out, and don't you
forget it."
Nance had been following the conversation in troubled silence.
"I don't mind the work so awful much," she said restlessly. "What gets me
is never having any fun. I haven't danced a step since I left Forest
Home, Birdie."
"You'd get your fill of it if you was with me," Birdie said importantly.
"Seven nights a week and two matinées."
"'Twouldn't be any too much for me," said Nance. "I could dance in
my sleep."
Birdie was sitting in the window now, ostensibly examining her full red
lips in a pocket-mirror, but in reality watching the factory yard below.
"There goes your whistle!" she said, getting up suddenly. "Say, Nance,
can't you scare up an excuse to hook off this afternoon? I'll take you to
a show if you will!"
Nance's pulses leapt at the thought, but she shook her head and went
reluctantly back to her bench. For the next ten minutes her fingers
lagged at their task, and she grew more and more discontented. All the
youth in her clamored suddenly for freedom. She was tired of being the
slave of a whistle, a cog in a machine. With a sudden rash impulse she
threw down her tools and, slipping her hat from its peg, went in swift
pursuit of Birdie.
At the foot of the narrow stairs she came to a sudden halt. Outside the
door, in the niche made by the gas-pipe and the adjoining wall, stood Mac
Clarke and Birdie. He had his arms about her, and there was a look in his
face that Nance had never seen in a man's face before. Of course it was
meant for the insolent eyes under the picture hat, but instead it fell on
Nance standing in the doorway. For a full minute his ardent gaze held her
captive; then he dropped his arms in sudden embarrassment, and she melted
out of the doorway and fled noiselessly up the stairway.
On the upper landing she suffered a head-on collision with the foreman,
who demanded in no gentle tones what in the devil she was doing out there
with her hat on at that hour.
"None of your business," said Nance, recklessly.
Bean looked at her flashing eyes and flushed face, and laughed. She
was the youngest girl in the factory and the only one who was not
afraid of him.
"See here," he said, "I am going to kiss you or fire you. Which'll
you have?"
Nance dodged his outstretched hand and reached the top step.
"You won't do neither!" she cried fiercely. "You can't fire me, because I
fired myself ten minutes ago, and I wouldn't kiss you to stay in heaven,
let alone a damned old bottle factory!"
It was the Nance of the slums who spoke--the Nance whose small bare fists
had fought the world too long for the knuckles to be tender. She had
drifted a long way from the carefully acquired refinements of Forest
Home, but its influence, like a dragging anchor, still sought to hold her
against the oncoming gales of life.