A STRANGE NEW HOME
Lena May's clasp on the hand of her older sister grew unconsciously
tighter as they passed a noisy tobacco factory which faced the East River
and loomed, smoke-blackened and huge.
The old Pensinger mansion was just beyond, set far back on what had once
been a beautiful lawn, reaching to the river's edge, but which was now
hard ground with here and there a half-dead tree struggling to live
without care. A wide road now separated it from the river, which was
lined as far up and down as one could see with wharves, to which coal and
lumber barges were tied.
The house did indeed look as though it were a century old. The windows
had never been boarded up, and many of the panes had been broken by
stones thrown by the most daring of the street urchins, though, luckily,
few dared go near enough to further molest the place for fear of stirring
up the "haunt."
"A noble house gone to decay," Gloria said. She had to speak louder than
usual because of the pounding and whirring of the machinery in the
neighboring factory. Lena May wondered if anywhere in all the world there
were still peaceful spaces where birds sang, or where the only sound was
the murmuring of the wind in the trees.
"Is it never still here?" she turned big inquiring eyes toward their
guide.
"Never," Miss Selenski told her. "That is, not for more than a minute at
a time, between shifts, for when the day work stops the night work
begins."
"Many of the workers are women, are they not?" Gloria was looking at the
windows of the factory where many foreign women could be seen standing at
long tables.
"They leave their children at the Settlement House. They work on the day
shift, and the men, if they can be made to work at all, go on at night."
"Oh, Gloria!" this appealingly from the youngest, "will we ever be able
to sleep in the midst of such noise, when we have been used to such
silent nights at home?"
"I don't much wonder that you ask," Bobs laughingly exclaimed, as she
thrust her fingers in her ears, for at that moment a tug on the river,
not a stone's throw away from them, rent the air with a shrill blast of
its whistle, which was repeated time and again.
"You won't mind the noises when you get used to them," Miss Selenski told
them cheerfully. "I lived on Seventy-sixth Street, right under the Third
Avenue L, and the only time I woke up was when the trains stopped
running. The sudden stillness startles one, I suppose."
Lena May said nothing, but she was remembering what Bobs had said when
they had left the Third Avenue Elevated: "Now we are to see how the
'other half' lives."
"Poor other half!" the young girl thought. "I ought to be willing to live
here for a time and bring a little of the brightness I have known into
their lives, for they must be very drab."
"Just wait here a minute," Miss Selenski was saying, "and I'll run over
to the grocery and get the key."
She was back in an incredibly short time and found the three girls
examining with great interest the heavy front door, which had wide
panels, a shapely fan light over them, with beautiful emerald glass panes
on each side.
"I simply adore this knocker," Bobs declared, jubilantly. "Hark, let's
hear the echoes."
The knocker was lifted and dropped again, but though they all listened
intently, a sudden confusion on the river made it impossible to hear
aught else.
"My private opinion is that Marilyn's ghost would much prefer some other
spot for midnight prowls," Bobs remarked, as the old key was being fitted
into the queerly designed lock. "Imagine a beautiful, sensitive girl of
seventy-five years ago trying to prowl down there where barges are tied
to soot-black docks and where derricks are emptying coal into waiting
trucks. No really romantic ghost, such as I am sure Marilyn Pensinger
must be, would care to prowl around here."
Miss Selenski smiled at Bobs' nonsense. "I'm glad you feel that way," she
said, "for, of course, if you don't believe in the ghost, you won't mind
renting the house."
At that moment the derrick of which Bobs had spoken emptied a great
bucket of coal with a deafening roar, and a wind blowing from the river
sent the cloud of black dust hurling toward them.
"Quick! Duck inside!" Bobs cautioned, as they all leaped within and
closed the door with a bang.
"Jimminy-crickets!" she then ejaculated, using her favorite tom-boy
expression. "The man who has this place to rent can't advertise it as
clean and quiet, a good place for nervous people to recuperate." Then
with a wry face toward her older sister. "I can't imagine Gwen in this
house, can you?"
There was a sudden troubled expression in Gloria's eyes. "No, dear, I
can't. And I'm wondering, in fact I have often been wondering this
morning, if we ought not to select some place where Gwen and little Lena
May would be happier, for, of course, Gwen _can't_ keep on visiting her
friends forever. She will have to come home some day." The speaker felt a
hand slip into hers and, glancing down, she saw a pleading in the
uplifted eyes of their youngest. "I'd _like_ to live here, Glow, for a
while, if you would."
"Little self-sacrificing puss that you are." Gloria smiled at Miss
Selenski, then said: "May we look over the old house and decide if we
wish to take it? Time is passing and we have much packing to do if we are
to return in another day or two."
Although she did not say so, Bobs and Lena May knew that their mothering
sister was eager to return to their Long Island home that she might see
Gwendolyn before her departure.
The old colonial mansion, like many others of its kind, had a wide hall
extending from the front to the back. At the extreme rear was a fireplace
with built-in seats. In fact, to the great delight of Bobs, who quite
adored them, a fireplace was found in each of the big barren rooms. Four
of these were on that floor, with the old kitchen in the basement, and
four vast silent rooms above, that had been bed chambers in the long ago.
Too, there was an attic, which they did not visit.
When they had returned to the front hall, Bobs exclaimed: "We might rent
just one floor of this mansion and then have room to spare."
But the oldest sister looked dubious. "I hardly think it advisable to
attempt to live in this place--" she began. "There is enough room here to
home an orphanage, and the kiddies wouldn't be crowded, either."
Roberta was plainly disappointed. "Oh, I say, Glow, haven't you always
told us younger girls not to make hasty conclusions, and here you have
hardly more than crossed the threshold and you have decided that we
couldn't make the old house livable. Now, I think this room could be made
real cozy."
How the others laughed. "Bobs, what a word to apply to this old
high-ceiled salon with its huge chandeliers and----"
"Say, girls," the irrepressible interrupted, "wouldn't you like to see
all of those crystals sparkle when the room is lighted?" Then she
confessed, "Perhaps cozy isn't exactly the right word, but nevertheless I
like the place, and now, with the door closed, it isn't so noisy either.
It's keen, take it from me."
"Roberta," Gloria sighed, "now and then I congratulate myself that you
have actually reformed in your manner of speech, when----"
"Say, Glow, I'll make a bargain," Bobs again interrupted. "I'll talk like
the daughter of Old-dry-as-dust-Johnson, if you'll take this place. Now,
my idea is that we can just furnish up this lower floor. Make one of the
back rooms into a kitchen and dining-room, put in gas and electricity,
and presto change, there you are living in a modern up-to-date apartment.
Then we could lock up the basement and the rooms upstairs and forget they
are there."
"If you are permitted to forget," Miss Selenski added, with her pleasant
smile. Then, for the first time, the girls remembered that the old house
was supposed to be supernaturally occupied.
It was Bobs who exclaimed: "Well, if that poor girl, Marilyn Pensinger,
wants to come back here now and then and prowl about her very own
ancestral mansion, I, for one, think we would be greatly lacking in
hospitality if we didn't make her welcome."
Then pleadingly to her older sister: "Glow, be a sport! Take it for a
month and give it a try-out."
Lena May's big brown eyes wonderingly watched this enthusiastic sister,
who was but one year her senior, but whose tastes were widely different.
Her gentle heart was already desperately homesick for the old place on
Long Island, for the gardens that were a riot of flowers from spring
until late fall.
Gloria walked to one of the windows and looked out meditatively. "If this
is the only place in the neighborhood in which we can live," she was
thinking, "perhaps we would better take it, and, after all, Bobs may be
right: this one floor can be made real homelike with the furniture that
we will bring, and what we do not need can be stored in the rooms
overhead."
Bobs was eagerly awaiting her older sister's decision, and when it was
given, that hoidenish girl leaped about the room, staging a sort of wild
Indian dance that must have amazed the two chandeliers which had in the
long ago looked down upon dignified young ladies who solemnly danced the
minuet, and yet, perhaps the lonely old house was glad and proud to think
that it had been chosen as a residence for three girls, and that once
again its walls would reverberate with laughter and song.
"We must start for home at once," Gloria said. Then, to Miss Selenski,
"We will stop on our way to the elevated and tell Mr. Tenowitz that we
will take the place for a time; and thank you so much for having helped
us find something. We shall want you to come often to see us."
Bobs was the last one to leave, and before she closed the heavy
old-fashioned door, she peered back into the musty dimness and called,
"Good-bye, old house, we're going to have jolly good times, all of us
together."