Thenceforward Jean dreaded nothing so much as any return to Shawnee
Springs whatsoever. Here, for once, she found herself in perfect accord
with her mother, for, as the time of her release drew near, young
Mr. Fargo's sauntering courtship took a sudden spurt, not clearly
explicable to himself, whose prime and bewildering result was the
fixing of his wedding day.
Dear Amelia naturally longed for her sister's presence at the
culmination of her happiness (so Mrs. Fanshaw put it), but there were
the Fargos to consider--they were not cordial, by the way--and if the
refuge authorities made no objection, would it not perhaps be better if
she met the official having Jean in charge at some intermediate point,
from which she could proceed at once to her new calling? Jean, she was
convinced, would understand.
Jean understood very well, but was thankful. She would rather serve
another month in the refuge than be an unwelcome guest at Amelia's
marriage. In truth, had she been put to a choice, she would have
elected further confinement to her mother's roof in any case. She
thought of the reformatory, not Shawnee Springs, as home, and this in a
sense which embraced more than Miss Archer and the transformed Cottage
No. 6. She loathed the life no less than in the beginning, but time
had knit her to its every phase. The cowed, drab ranks had long since
ceased to seem alien. Their deprivations, their meager privileges,
their rights, their wrongs, their sorrows, their spectral gayeties, all
were hers. She had thought to dart from the gatehouse like a wild thing
from a trap. In reality she paused to look back with a lump in her
throat.
Yet it was a blithe world outside, the fog and gloom of a November
rain notwithstanding. Even the wet glisten of the mire seemed
cheery. A hundred trivialities, unheeded by her companion, absorbed
her unjaded eyes. The red and green liquids of a druggist's window
lured her as in childhood; then the glitter of a toy-shop enticed,
or the ruddy invitation of a forge. Station and train were each a
mine of entertainment. The ticket-buying was an event of the first
magnitude; the slot-machines, the time-tables, the news-stands, the
advertisements, all the prosaic human spectacle had the freshness of
novelty. She noted that women's sleeves had a fullness of which the
little tailor-shop in the refuge was but dimly aware; that men's hats
curled closer at the brim; that the trainmen wore a different uniform;
that one rural depot or another had received a coat of paint.
Mrs. Fanshaw was in waiting.
"There's a train back to the Springs in twenty minutes," she announced
briskly, after a preoccupied dab at Jean's cheek, "and under the
circumstances"--she was always under circumstances--"I know you won't
mind if I take it instead of waiting till your own goes out. What
with presents arriving, the dressmaker, and the snobbish behavior of
Harry's family, I expect as it is to find Amelia on the edge of nervous
prostration. Every minute is precious, we're so rushed. In fact, I
could not find time to pack a single stitch for you to take to New
York. Anyhow, I understood from your last letter that the refuge would
fit you out with the necessaries, which is certainly a help at this
time when I'm paying out right and left for Amelia. Why," she wound up
suddenly, "your suit is actually tailor-made!"
"Yes," said Jean.
"Excellent material, too," commented Mrs. Fanshaw, fingering the
texture. "Does every girl fare as well?"
"The low-grade girls get no jackets, only capes; and their material
isn't so good."
"Then you're high grade! You never wrote me."
"I did not think it would interest Shawnee Springs."
Mrs. Fanshaw looked aggrieved.
"You are a strange child," she complained; "so secretive, so
self-centered. I suppose your suit was made in the refuge?"
"Yes."
"By one of the inmates?"
"By one of the inmates--myself."
"Strange child!" said her mother again. "Strange child!"
Linked by nothing save a distasteful past, they sat together for an
interval in constrained silence. Even at their friendliest, mother
and daughter had lacked conversational small change. Presently Mrs.
Fanshaw's roving eye encountered the dial of a train-indicator and
brightened.
"The Shawnee Springs accommodation is on time for once," she announced.
Jean responded with sincerity that she was glad. That her own train
was as plainly registered an hour late, with the equally obvious
consequence that she must arrive after nightfall in a strange city, was
unimportant.
Mrs. Fanshaw opened her hand-bag.
"Here is the price of your ticket to New York," she said, counting out
the exact fare. "You had better buy it at once."
Jean did so. When she returned from the ticket-office her mother was
smoothing the creases from a bank-note.
"Did they supply you with any money?" she asked cautiously.
"With two dollars."
"Is that all?"
"They paid my fare here."
"How niggardly in a great state! I can spare you so little myself. But
you will begin work at once?"
"To-morrow morning."
"Then ten dollars ought to answer until you draw your first earnings,
if you are not extravagant."
"I shan't stop at the Waldorf," promised Jean, grimly. She took the
bill, as she had taken the money for the ticket, without thanks, saying
only, "I will pay it back."
Another blank silence fell. Mrs. Fanshaw stirred restively.
"I hope that Jeffries girl can be depended on to meet you," she
presently remarked.
"I think she can."
"It's certainly a convenience to know somebody at the start, but I
don't feel that she is a very desirable associate, whatever Miss Archer
thinks. You can drop her later, of course, whenever it seems best."
"Drop her!"
Mrs. Fanshaw jumped at the vehemence of the exclamation.
"How abrupt you are! What I mean to say is that you will hardly want to
keep up these reformatory acquaintances. If I were you I should make
it a rule to recognize none of them you can by hook or crook avoid.
Possibly this girl is superior to most of her class. I don't think you
ever mentioned just why she was sent to the refuge?"
Jean's eyes discharged an angry spark.
"You're quite right," she retorted. "I never have."
Mrs. Fanshaw was still waiting in becoming patience for Jean to repair
this omission when her train was announced. They rose and faced each
other awkwardly.
"Well, good-by," said the elder woman, presenting her cheek.
"Well, good-by," said Jean.
She watched her mother into a car, and through successive windows
traced her bustling progress to a seat. Mrs. Fanshaw found no leisure
for a last glance outward, and Jean, by aid of certain sharply etched
memories, divined that she was absorbed in repelling seat-mates. So
occupied, she vanished. Jean could have cried with ease, but sternly
denied herself the luxury. She yet retained something of her old
boy-like intolerance of the tear-duct, though the refuge, acquainting
her with nerves, had dulled the confident edge of her scorn. Tears, she
now perceived, like tea, had uses for women other than purely physical.
Happily life's common things still wore a bloom of surpassing freshness
for her cloistered eye. This second station, like yet unlike the first;
the tardy train, thundering importantly in at last; the stirring flight
into the unknown, each served its diverting turn. As dusk settled,
the landscape became increasingly littered with signs trumpeting the
virtues of breakfast foods, women's wear, or plays current in the
metropolitan theatres; while the villages grew smarter in pavement and
lighting till she mistook one or two for near suburbs of the great city
itself. Then the open spaces grew rare. Did the semblance of a field
survive, it was gridironed by streets of the future or sprawled upon by
huge factories, formless leviathans of a thousand gleaming eyes. Town
linked itself to town.
When they had run for a long time within what she knew must be the
limits of the city itself, a brakeman mouthed some unintelligible
remark from the door, and the train came to a stop. Jean caught up her
bag, but observing that a drummer of flirtatious propensities, who for
an hour past had shared her seat, made no move, was left in doubt.
"Isn't this New York?" she asked.
Her seatmate surveyed her facetiously.
"Some of it," he said. "Want any particular part of the village?"
"The main station," blushed the provincial.
"You mean the Grand Central. Sit tight then. This is only a
Hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street--Harlem, you know, where the goat joke
flourishes. Never saw a billy there myself, and I boarded a year on
Lenox Avenue, too."
Jean turned from a disquisition on boarding-houses to the car-window.
In its night-time glitter of electricity the street which he dismissed
with a careless numeral quite fulfilled her rural notion of Broadway.
If these were but the outposts, what was the thing itself!
They shot a tunnel presently, which the drummer berated in terms
long since made familiar by the newspapers, threaded a maze of
block-signals and switch-lights, and halted at last in an enormous
cavern of a place which she needed no hint from her now too friendly
neighbor to assure her was truly New York.
The drummer urged his escort, but she eluded him in leaving the car and
hurried on in the press. Nearing the gate, however, her pace slackened.
The bigness of the train-shed confused her, and she was daunted by the
clamor of hackmen and street-cars which penetrated from without. Amy
had written that she would meet her if she could leave her work, but
Jean could spy her nowhere in the waiting crowd banked in the white
glare of the arc-lights beyond the barrier. They were unfamiliar to the
last pallid urban face.
She had gone slowly down the human aisle and was wavering on the
outskirts, uncertain whether to wait longer or adventure for herself,
when the drummer reappeared at her elbow.
"Didn't your party show up?" he said. "I call that a mean trick. You
had better let me help you out, after all. You look like a girl with
sand. What say we give 'em a lesson? We can have supper at a nice,
quiet little place I know up the street, take in a show afterward, and
then when we're good and ready hunt up your slow-coach friends. Is it a
go?"
She looked every way but toward him, saw a policeman, and aimed
forthwith for the shelter of his uniform. Halfway she felt her hand
seized, turned hotly, expecting the drummer, and plumped joyfully into
the arms of a young person of fashion who greeted her with an ecstatic
hug.
"Amy! I was never so glad to see you!"
The girl emerged from the embrace, panting.
"I really think you are," she said. "Sorry to keep you waiting. There
was a block on the 'L.' What was that fellow saying to you?"
When Jean had told her she peered eagerly into the crowd.
"I find blond hair lets you in for a lot of that," she commented. "He
was a traveling man, you say?"
"I think so."
"Sort of sandy, with a reddish mustache? I could only see his back."
"Sandy? I'm not sure. I avoided looking at him."
Amy was silent while they passed to the street, and continued to scan
the faces about her. When they had wormed into a street-car packed with
standing women and seated men she spoke again of Jean's adventure.
"Did he say what line of goods he was carrying?" she asked.
"No," Jean answered indifferently. The spectacle of the pavement
without had already ousted the drummer from her thoughts.
"Or where he lived?"
"Where he lived?" She turned now and saw that the girl's eyes were
very bright. "He mentioned that he had boarded here somewhere--Harlem,
was it?"
"Harlem!" Amy's pink cheeks turned rose-red. "And did he have a scar, a
little white scar, near his eyebrow?"
"I didn't notice."
"I wish you had."
Jean eyed her narrowly.
"I wish I had, too, if it matters so much," she returned.
Amy donned a mask of transparent indifference.
"Of course it doesn't matter," she said. "At first I thought it might
be somebody I used to know."