THE HEART OF THE FLATIRON
IT was Mrs. Jimmy George that found the road to the heart of The
Flatiron.
“Gracious me! what if ’t was my Jim—and my baby!” she wailed, twisting
her little hard─worked hands over Blue’s story of the dancer and her
passionately─expressed longing to lie “side o’ Jim and the baby.” “Why,”
mourned she, her blue eyes tearful, “I’d ’a’ carried her some o’ my
strawb’ry jell, if I’d only known! Gracious me, ther’ ’s sights o’
things we’d do, but we don’t have no chance! I’m awful sorry! You say
she’d saved up to pay her fun’ral expenses? Wouldn’t ther’ be ’nough to
take her out home?”
Blue shook a prompt negative. “Mother says ther’ ain’t, and Giles
Gaylord says ther’ ain’t. Wish ther’ was!”
Mrs. Jimmy George picked up her whimpering Evangeline, while her
forehead puckered into two little hard lines above her nose.
“Say,” she burst out excitedly, “it’s a roarin’ shame to let that poor
thing be buried in th’ town lot, ’way off f’m her own folks! Gracious,
what if ’t was me! Say, you just tell Gaylord not to make no ’rangements
till I see him!”
Blue stared. Had Mis’ George suddenly gone crazy? “Maybe he’s started,”
he said slowly. “He was goin’—”
“Well, run tell him! Quick!” she urged, skipping across the hall and
disappearing behind a neighbor’s door.
Mrs. Jimmy George was neither a beauty nor a scholar; but—as her still
worshipful husband often averred—she was “game clear through.”
During the next hour the peevish Evangeline was pacified only on the
fly, and for the first time in her short life she began to realize that
her mother was not always hers to command.
At the end of that hour Mrs. George astonished Mr. Gaylord by putting
into his hand a teacupful of small coin gathered from those residents of
The Flatiron whom she had been able to reach.
“An’ you just wait till th’ men folks come home to dinner,” she exulted;
“if they don’t fork over enough to carry that poor little thing out to
her Jim, I ain’t no guesser!”
Giles Gaylord waited, and again the cracked teacup surprised him. How
many sacrifices those half dollars and quarters and dimes and nickels
and pennies stood for nobody knew, for they kept their secrets well.
Some were guessed about. There was little Tillie Shook, the dressmaker
apprentice, who had been planning to buy some “real” lace to trim the
neck of her best frock; she finally purchased “imitation Val.” which
was, she said, just as good for her. Then, John Braunersreuther, who
supported his wife and seven children by driving a pair of fat horses
for the brewery, gave up his cherished Sunday newspaper for two whole
months—and the paper boy wondered why. Leona Montgomery and Frederica
Schine suddenly stopped patronizing the “movies,” and their
fellow─workers in the box shop rallied them about it without discovering
the reason. Mrs. Jimmy George herself never bought the blue messaline
girdle she had been scrimping and saving for, not even when it was
marked down, in the department store window, to sixty─nine cents, and
The Flatiron respected her reticence on the subject. But there was no
longer any doubt that the little dancer was going home to lie “side o’
Jim and the baby.”
On a cold December afternoon Granny O’Donnell opened her hospitable
door, and The Flatiron streamed in, to honor the loyal woman whom in
life many of the tenants had never seen. They came by two’s, by three’s,
by whole families; they filled the room, they overflowed into the
hallway, they even dropped down upon the stairs, and everywhere was
gentleness, courtesy, and reverence. The Curate of St. Mark’s read the
service for the dead, and Doodles sang “Rock of Ages.” Leona Montgomery,
in her clear soprano voice, started “Crossing the Bar”; but sobs soon
choked the song, and a girl from the theater went on with it to the end.
“It was a lovely fun’ral anyway!” declared Mrs. Homan, wiping her eyes,
as the crowd trooped up The Flatiron stairs, after having followed the
dancer to the very door of the baggage car. “’Twas a fun’ral that would
satisfy any earthly mortal, livin’ or dead!” And no one disagreed with
her.
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