I
Angelica was ready by nine o’clock the next morning, with a bag in which
was packed every decent thing she owned. The people in the flat above
had been astounded by the sound of Mrs. Kennedy’s sewing-machine at two
o’clock in the morning, for she and her child had sat up nearly all
night, making ready. It was a melancholy, a heart-breaking work for the
poor mother. _She_ wasn’t going away. She had no adventure to excite
her, no ambition, no hope, nothing but the bitter certainty of
loneliness and poverty. She tried to be--not cheerful, for that she
never was, but calm and reasonable, while all the time she had before
her the spectre of the evening when she would come home to empty rooms,
to eat her supper alone. A groan escaped her, which she tried to turn
into a sigh.
"It’s the very, very worst that can happen to any one in this wide
world," she thought; "to be left all alone, and getting old!"
She hadn’t been able to keep her eyes from Angelica, sitting bent over a
blouse she was finishing, with her hair, just washed, hanging down her
back, wet, straight, and heavy, drying about her face in a sort of mist
of feathery tendrils.
Angelica was glad, she was delighted to go. She certainly loved her
mother, but a separation of a week, a month, a year, didn’t trouble her,
didn’t cause her a pang. She knew in theory that life is terribly
uncertain, but she didn’t really believe it. She felt sure that no
matter where she went, or how long she stayed, her mother would be there
at home, absolutely unchanged.
She was the child who has never been burnt, sitting before the glowing
fire. Having as yet never lost anything, she didn’t value anything. In
that enticing future toward which she looked, she expected to live once
more with her mother. In the meantime it didn’t matter.
"Well!" said Mrs. Kennedy. "I’ll have no one to go to the movies with
now."
"You wait!" said Angelica. "One of these days I’ll take you to a _real_
show, mommer!"
Already she saw herself the benefactor. She had forgotten, or perhaps
didn’t even know, how limitlessly she had received.
They went to bed in the early morning, and Angelica slept, while her
weary mother lay awake at her side in the narrow bed they shared. The
room was too dark for her to see anything, but she could hear the
breathing of her dear child, and with a furtive hand feel that soft,
slippery hair, still fresh and redolent of white soap.
"I’ve got to expect it!" she told herself over and over. "I’ve got to
expect it! They all go, for one reason or another. We’ve got to make up
our minds to lose everything in this world."
She got up again at six, and set to work cleaning her little flat from
end to end, so that it should be ready for Mrs. Russell’s inspection.
Angelica insisted upon helping her.
"Oh, mommer, for Gawd’s sake! I won’t get tired, and I won’t get dirty.
She won’t come before ten, anyway--prob’ly later. I bet she has her
breakfast in bed!"
"She must be a queer one," said Mrs. Kennedy, "from what you tell me."
"A freak! I wish you could have seen her--with pants on and her hair
coming down her back. And there’s something mean about her, too. I don’t
like her--telling them all they’d get their turns, and then putting them
out, that way. And look at what she’s paying me!"
"Angie, if you’re going to work for her," said Mrs. Kennedy gravely,
"you’d better hold your tongue about her. If you can take her money----”
"I only wish I had a chance to take a little more of it! I don’t see how
you’ll get along, mommer."
"Oh, I’ll manage," said her mother.
She might have mentioned that she had supported her child for many, many
years, and that even after Angelica had become a wage-earner she had
taken very little of the girl’s money--only what had to be used to
conform to Angie’s ever more and more exacting standards.