Ikey stood on the street corner and fingered her veil to keep passersby
from seeing her lips tremble. She was sure that she was going to cry
right there in the open, and she was furious about it, because she did
not approve of weepy females.
"If you dare," she whispered fiercely, "if you dare, I'll--I'll--you
shan't have that nickel's worth of peanut candy, or those currant buns,
either."
This threat proving effective, she turned, head held high, and entered
the bakery.
There was the usual Saturday afternoon crowd, jostling on the shoddy
thoroughfare. To-day the jostling was intensified; for the car strike
was on in full blast, feeling ran high, and demonstrations were being
made against the company. Now and again a car passed slowly up or down
the street, drays and express wagons blocking its progress wherever
possible, scab conductor and motorman hooted at by San Francisco men and
beplumed ladies for their pains.
Ikey looked at the mob in disgust. Then she hurried around the corner
and away from the scene of commotion.
"And to think that it has come to this, that I can't ride up and down in
those cars all day long--_just to show 'em_."
The beach was what she really wanted--one of those little sand hummocks
with juicy plants sprawling over it, that protect one from the wind and
yet reveal beyond ravishing glimpses of cliff and breaker and sapphire
shining sea.
But the beach was not to be found in the heart of town. And she was too
tired to walk there--not having had any lunch and being very angry
besides. And she would lose her "job"--her miserable, wretched,
disgusting, good-for-nothing job (Ikey loved adjectives), if she rode.
For any and all women connected with any and all union men had been
forbidden to use the company's cars. And business houses--who had
anything to gain from it--had promised their employees instant dismissal
for even one ride. And the firm that employed Ikey would lose
three-fourths of its trade if the union boycotted it.
So the sand-dunes would have to wait. But there were some vacant lots,
backed by a scraggle of rough, red rock, only half a dozen blocks away.
If luck were with her, the loafers might be in temporary abeyance and
the refugee tents not unduly prominent.
Luck was with her. And Ikey sat down on the lea of the little cliff,
quite alone, spread out her buns,--you got three for ten cents these
catastrophe days,--and faced the situation.
The landlady had raised the rent.
Ikey could have screamed with laughter over the situation--if only the
matter were not so vital.
"This'll make the thirteenth move for you, Ikey, my love, since the
eighteenth of April--and the thirteenth move is bound to be unlucky. But
you'll have to go, sure as Fate; for you can't stand another raise. The
Wandering Jew gentleman takes the road again."
She pursed her lips as she said it. She had invented the appelation for
herself after nine moves in three months. "I don't know what his name
really was," she confessed--there was no one else to talk to, no one she
cared for, so she talked, sub voice, to herself--"but it must have been
Ikey. I'm sure it was Ikey--and that I look just like him." And deriving
much comfort from this witticism, she went on her way.
"Ikey, the Wandering Jew, on the move again," she repeated. "But where
to move _to_, that is the question. It's funny what a difference money
makes"--her eyebrows went up--"or rather, lack of it. I've never
considered that until recently."
Then her eyes fell on her shoes.
They had been very swagger little shoes in the beginning--Ikey had made
rather a specialty of footgear--but they were her "escape" shoes; and
their looks told the tale of their wanderings. Also, she had had no
others since.
She wriggled her toes.
"You'll be poking through before long, looking at the stars," she told
them severely. "Imagine your excitement."
And her suit.
[Illustration: "'I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING YOU EVER SINCE YOU LEFT YOUR
OFFICE,' HE SAID"]
Ikey looked away so as not to see the perfect cut of it, the perfect fit
of it, the utter shabbiness of it. It was her "escape" suit, too. She
had slept on the hills in it to the tune of dynamiting and the flare of
the burning city. She would never have another like it--never. For her
job----
Her job.
She leaned back suddenly and closed her eyes. Her job. The rage of this
noon was coming back again; rage, and with it a strange, new
sensation--fear. She had never known fear before, not even during the
earthquake days. "Only at the dentist's," she told herself, giggling
half hysterically behind closed lids.
And back of it all--back of the landlady's unconcealed dislike and
latest slap, back of the disintegration of a wardrobe that could not be
replaced, and the question as to whether her "job" had not become an
impossibility since to-day--and that job simply could not become an
impossibility: one had to live--back of all this was the dull hurt,
smothered and always coming again, that Bixler McFay had not taken the
trouble to look her up when his regiment came through on the way to
Manila.
"You may as well face that, too, while you're about it," Ikey observed
sarcastically. She opened her eyes with a snap and bit into the first
bun.
"The regiment was only here three days," a little voice inside of her
whispered fearfully.
"Three days!" Ikey's scorn was unbounded. "If he had cared, he could
have found you in three hours--and he always said he cared. It's a thing
you've got to live with. It's nothing so unusual. It happens every day.
Why can't you treat it like a poor relation?"
And her thoughts went back to Fort Leavenworth, and the gowns on gowns
she had worn, all burned up at the St. Francis last spring, with the
rest of her things, a week after she had reached the city; and Cousin
Mary, suave and elegant and impressive as her chaperon; and herself,
petted and made much of on all sides, and incidentally pointed out as
the richest girl on the field, and an orphan; and Bixler McFay,
handsome, brilliant, devoted, always on hand, always protesting----
A whimsical, sarcastic little smile curved her lips for a moment. The
earthquake had certainly made a difference. A vision of Cousin Mary
arose--not the suave and elegant chaperon of a wealthy young relative,
but a frightened, self-centered, middle-aged woman, who had taken the
earthquake as a personal affront put upon her by her young charge and
insisted on being the first consideration in no matter what environment
she found herself.
[Illustration: "'IT'S A DESPICABLE LETTER,' SHE TOLD HERSELF"]
Then came another vision. She recalled her parting with Bixler McFay in
the late winter, when she had left Leavenworth for the Coast, saying it
wasn't decent not to know anything about the place where all your income
came from, and he had left Leavenworth to rejoin his regiment in
Arizona. How his voice had trembled that morning as he bade her
good-bye, declaring he should always consider himself engaged to her,
even if she did not consider herself engaged to him; begging that she
wear his class pin, or at least keep it for him if she would not wear
it, because the thought of its being in her possession would comfort him
in his loneliness.
It had comforted her in those first dreadful days after the fire to
think that he was alive and on his way to her. It never entered her head
but what he would come at once: when friends were looking for friends
and enemies were succoring one another, how should he fail her?
And then--not one word. Not even an inquiry in the paper; when that was
about all the papers were made up of for days after--column after column
of addresses and inquiries, along with the death notices.