It happened at dusk while they were returning from Central Park, which
Amy had selected as a primary lesson in Jean's civic education. They
were homing by way of Broadway, and were well back into the theatrical
section, when Jean's guide gripped her abruptly by the arm, dragged
her into the nearest doorway, and hurried her half up the dark flight
of stairs to which it led. Even here she enjoined silence, pointing
for explanation to the square of pavement framed by the doorway, into
which an instant later loitered the bedizened key to the riddle--Stella
Wilkes.
There was no mistaking her. For an interminable interval she lingered,
watchful of the street, so distinct under the electrics that they could
even make out her mole. Then, aimlessly as she had come, she drifted
out again and away.
"Thank my stars I saw her first that time!" gasped Amy, still fearfully
intent upon the lighted square.
"You knew she was in New York?"
"Yes. I've seen her before. She came up to me one night looking even
worse than now. She was more painted, and her eyes were like burned
holes. She said she was broke, but had the promise of a place. It was
to sing in some gin-mill, I think. She _can_ sing, you know. Remember
how she'd let her voice go in chapel, just to show off? I loaned her
a dollar to get rid of her. I was afraid somebody I knew might see us
together. I think she saw I was afraid."
"You shouldn't have let her see; it gives her a hold on you. I shan't
dodge."
Jean began consistently to descend, but Amy caught her back.
"Wait," she pleaded. "Do wait a little longer. Wait for my sake, if you
don't care yourself. But you'd better fight shy of her, too, I can tell
you. She hasn't forgotten the prison riot. She mentioned it the night I
saw her, and said she'd get plenty square with you yet."
Tricked by her uncertain nerves, Jean came under the sway of Amy's
panic. They lurked cowering in the hallway till sure of a clear coast;
then, darting forth, hurried round the first corner to a quieter
thoroughfare which Stella would be less apt to haunt. Here, too, they
continually saw her in imagination, and sought other doorways and
rounded other corners for safety. Fear tracked them home, plucked at
them in their own street, mounted their own steps, entered their own
door, and abode with them thereafter.
Nor, for one of them at least, did the crowded weeks next following
bring forgetfulness or reassurance. Jean was ever expecting the
dreaded face to leer at her from the blurred horde which swam daily
by the little island in the toy department, where she sold children's
games. While she elucidated the mysteries of parchesi or dissected
maps to some distraught mother of six, another part of the restless
mechanism of her brain was painting Stella to the life. She pictured
the outcast's vindictive joy at running her down, heard her mouth the
unspeakable for all who would lend an ear. And who would not! She
quailed in fancy before the gaping audience--the curious shoppers, the
round-eyed cash-girls, the smirking clerks, Mr. Rose, the floor-walker.
Once, issuing from such a dream, she found herself face to face with
Mr. Rose, who had come unnoticed to her counter, and so clear-cut was
the vision, she merged the unreal with the real and blenched at his
voice.
"Not taking morphine lunches, are you?" he asked, leaning solicitously
over the counter.
She stared hazily till he repeated his question.
"Morphine lunches! What are they?"
The man enacted the pantomime of applying a hypodermic syringe to his
arm.
"So," he said. "Some of the girls who can't lunch at home get into the
way of it. Bad thing--very."
"Why should you suspect me of such a thing?" demanded Jean,
indignantly. "Do I look like a morphine-fiend?"
"No offence intended. Noticed a queer look in your eyes, that's all.
Stunning eyes! I'd hate to see 'em full of dope. Perfectly friendly
interest, understand."
She welcomed the fretful interruption of a customer, but the woman was
only returning some article, not buying, and the transaction required
the floor-walker's sanction. When the shopper had gone her way, he
leaned to Jean again.
"If it's worry about holding your place after the holidays," he said,
"why, you can't quit it too soon. We've watched your work, and it's
all right. The forelady says you've learned the stock quicker than any
green clerk she's had in a dog's age, and you know she's particular.
Whoever else goes, you stick."
Jean gave a long breath of thankfulness, but she was not too happy to
be practical.
"And the pay?" she asked.
"The same for the present. You're still a beginner, you know."
"It is very little. The girl who had my place left because she could
not live on it, I hear."
Mr. Rose tapped his prominent teeth with a pencil.
"She said something of the kind to me," he admitted. "She was
unreasonable--very. What could she expect of six dollars?"
The handsome saleswoman at the dolls' furniture counter was intoning,
"Oh, Mr. Rose! Oh, Mr. Rose!" with increasing petulance, and the
floor-walker sped to her, leaving his cryptic utterance unexplained.
Jean asked a fellow-clerk more about her predecessor, and learned that
as she lived somewhere in the Bronx, both carfare and lunches had been
serious items. These, fortunately, she herself need not consider. It
was half the battle to feel permanent. She could shift somehow on her
present wage till promotion came.
There was, moreover, a certain compensation in feeling herself a
factor in this great establishment which everybody knew who had heard
of New York at all. It was a show place of the metropolis, one of the
seventy times seven wonders of the New World. Its floor space was
reckoned in acres, its roof housed a whole city block, its capital
represented millions, its wares the habitable globe. Nothing essential
to human life seemed to be lacking. There were scales for your exalted
babyship's earthly advent; patent foods, healing drugs, mechanical
playthings for your childish wants or ills; text-books for your growing
mind; fine feathers for your expanding social wings; the trousseau
for your marriage; furnishings from cellar to attic for your first
housekeeping; a bank for your savings; fittings for your office; the
postal service, the telegraph, the telephone, lest business suffer
while you shop; bronzes, carvings, automobiles, steam yachts, old
wines, old books, old masters for your topping prosperity; comforts
innumerable--oculists, dentists, discreet photographers, what not--for
your lean and slippered decline; and, yes, even the sad few vanities
you may take with you to your quiet grave.
It drew rich and poor alike these days, and sooner or later the toy
department gathered them in. Though Stella came not, there were many
of familiar aspect who did. Hardly a day passed without its greeting
from some one Jean knew. Mrs. St. Aubyn came shopping on account of
an incredible grandchild she must remember; the bookworm for the
cogent reason that a cherubic niece brought him; the birds of passage
to celebrate an engagement obtained at last; the shorn lambs of Wall
Street to revive fading memories of a full pocketbook; the stenographer
and the manicure since they were women; the dentist because of Jean.
It was impossible to mistake Paul's reason. Her fellow-clerks hinted
it, Mr. Rose reënforced their opinion with his own, Amy added
embroidered comment, and finally Paul told her explicitly himself. On
the first evening, when he appeared at her counter near the closing
hour, he bought a game. At his second call, a week later, he examined
at length, but did not purchase. The third time he said that he had
happened by; the fourth he cast subterfuge to the winds and avowed
frankly that he came to walk home with her.
"Fact is, I'm lonesome," he explained, when they reached the street.
"Till you came I never got a chance to talk to the right sort of girl
except in the operating-chair, and that didn't cut much ice, for it
was always about teeth. Hope you don't mind my dropping round for you
once in a while after office hours? It will keep these street-corner
mashers away from you and do a lot toward civilizing me."
Jean accepted his companionship as frankly as it was tendered. There
was nothing loverlike about Paul's attitude. He was precisely the same
whether they walked alone or whether, as frequently happened, Amy came
down with her to the employees' entrance, where Jean had suggested that
they meet. His escort was doubly welcome during the last week before
Christmas when the great store kept open evenings, and the shopping
quarter held its nightly jam. Then, perhaps a fortnight after the
holidays, she overheard a conversation.
It was not about herself, nor among girls she knew, nor indeed in her
department; merely a scrap of waspish dispute between two young persons
of free speech who supposed themselves in sole possession of the
cloak-room. Black Eyes remarked that she knew very well what Blue Eyes
was. She didn't belong there; her place was the East Side. Whereupon
Blue Eyes elegantly retorted that unless Black Eyes shut her mouth, she
would smash her ugly face in. This was evidently purely rhetorical, for
when Black Eyes waxed yet more personal, pointing out the inconsistent
relation of fifteen-dollar picture hats to six dollars a week, with
pertinent reference to a bald floor-walker from the carpet department
who waited for Blue Eyes every night, the only act of violence was the
slamming of a door which covered Blue Eyes's swift retreat.
That evening Jean told the dentist he must come no more.
"Suffering bicuspid!" he gasped. "What have _I_ done?" This despite her
tactful best to assure him that he had done nothing at all.
It seemed enormously difficult of explanation at first, but when she
suggested that she found the department store not unlike a small town
for gossip, he comprehended instantly.
"Who has been talking?" he demanded. "If it was that pup of a
floor-walker--"
"It wasn't. So far as I know, not a soul has mentioned my name. It's
because they mustn't talk, that I've spoken."
Paul squared a by no means puny pair of shoulders.
"Let me catch 'em at it!" he said.
She was more watchful of her fellow-clerks thereafter. A few girls
she doubted, but striking an average, they seemed as a class honest,
hard-working, and monotonously commonplace, with their loftiest
ambitions centered upon tawdry and impracticable clothes. If a girl
dressed better than her wage warranted, as many did, it usually
developed that she lived with her parents or with other relations who
gave her cheap board. These lucky beings had also a social existence
denied to the wholly self-supporting, of which Jean obtained a perhaps
typical glimpse through a vivacious little rattlepate at the adjoining
mechanical-toy counter, with whom friendly overtures between customers
led to the discovery that they were neighbors, and to a call at the
three dormers. This courtesy Jean in due course returned one evening,
at the paternal flat over an Eighth Avenue grocery, where "Flo," as
she petitioned to be called, rejoiced in the exclusive possession of a
small bedroom ventilated, though scarcely illumined, by an air-shaft.
"Mother gave me this room to myself when I began to bring in money,"
she explained. "I only have to hand over two dollars a week. What's
left I spend just as I please. Father says I buy more clothes than the
rest of the family put together, and he nearly threw a fit once when I
paid twelve dollars for a lace hat trimmed with imported flowers; but
all the same he doesn't like to see any of the girls I go with look
better than I do. Our crowd is great for dress. How do you like my cozy
corner? I think these wire racks for photographs are sweet, don't you?
I have such a stack of fellows' pictures! I wonder if you know any of
them. The man in the dress suit is Willy Larkin--he's in the gents'
furnishing department. I put him next to Dan Evans--you know Dan, don't
you?--because they're so tearing jealous of each other. If Dan takes
me to a Sousa concert one night, Willy can't rest till he has spread
himself on vaudeville or some exciting play. They almost came to blows
over a two-step I promised both of them at the subscription hop our
dancing club gave New Year's. That tintype you're looking at is one
Charlie Simmons and I had taken at Glen Island last year. Goodness!
Don't hold _my_ face to the light. I'm a fright in a bathing-suit. I
do love bathing, though, but I think salt water is packs more fun. Last
summer I had enough saved for a whole week at a dandy beach near Far
Rock-away. There was a grand dancing pavilion, and sometimes you could
hear the waves above the band. I just love the sea!"
Jean was not envious, but the girl's chatter made her own existence
outside the store seem humdrum. Mrs. St. Aubyn's circle was more
narrow than had at first appeared. After a few dinners, it was obvious
that the landlady's talk was nearly always confined to the food and
servants, as the librarian's was limited to the weather, the shorn
lambs' to things financial, and the stenographer's, the manicure's, and
Amy's to feminine styles, while the birds of passage, whose side-lights
upon the Profession had been diverting, were now lamentably displaced
by an insurance agent who dwelt overmuch upon the uncertainty of human
life. It had to be admitted, also, that Paul himself talked shop with
frequency. His stories, like his droll ejaculations, were apt to smack
of the office; and he had a habit of carrying gold crowns or specimens
of bridgework in his pockets, which, though no doubt works of art of
their kind, were yet often disconcerting when shown in mixed company.
At such times especially, Jean would evoke that knightlier figure, who
shone so faultless in perspective, and in fancy put him in Paul's place.
She perceived the dentist's foibles, however, without liking the
essential man one whit the less, and, in the absence of the Ideal,
frequently took Sunday trolley trips with him in lieu of the tabooed
walks from the store; but the fear of meeting Stella made her decline
his invitations to the theater and kept her from the streets at night.
Paul took these self-denials for maiden scruples beyond his masculine
comprehension, and was edified rather than offended; but he was at
first puzzled and then hurt, when, as spring drew on, the outings also
ceased. Jean was evasive when questioned, while Amy looked knowing, but
was too loyal to explain. The stenographer or the manicure or, for that
matter, any normal woman could, if asked, have told him that Jean was
merely ashamed of her clothes.
It was largely because Paul misunderstood that Jean resolved no
longer to wait passively for promotion. Six dollars a week had their
limitations, since five went always to Mrs. St. Aubyn for board.
Yet, out of that scant margin of a sixth, she had somehow scraped
together enough to replace what she had used of Mrs. Fanshaw's grudging
contribution, the whole of which she despatched to Shawnee Springs
in a glow of wrathful satisfaction that cheered her for many days.
Nevertheless, the want of it pinched her shrewdly. Those ten dollars
would have helped spare the refuge suit, which, fortunately black,
did duty seven days in the week and looked it, too, now that the mild
days began to outnumber the raw, and other girls bloomed in premature
spring finery. Many of the bargains which the great store was forever
advertising would have aided in little ways, but the management was
opposed to its employees' profiting by these chances.
During the continued ill health of the department manager, Mr. Rose
still wielded an extended authority, and to him, accordingly, Jean
made her appeal, overtaking him on his way to the offices one evening
when the immense staff was everywhere hurrying from the building. The
carpet and upholstery department, where they talked, was ever a place
of muffled quiet, even with business at high tide, and, save for an
occasional night-watchman, they seemed isolated now. Rose heard her
out, lounging with feline complacency upon a soft-hued heap of Oriental
rugs, while his eyes roamed her eager face with candid approval.
Jean saw with anger that he no longer attended.
"You are not listening," she reproached. "Can't you appreciate what
this means to me? Look at my shoes! They're all I have. Look at this
suit! It's my only one. I've saved no money to buy other clothes--it's
impossible. You say I'm efficient--pay me living wages, then. I can't
live on what you give me. I've tried and I've failed--failed like the
girl before me."
The floor-walker slid smiling from the rug pile.
"She was inconceivably plain," he said; "but you--" He spread his white
hands in futile search of adjectives.
"Never mind my looks, Mr. Rose," Jean struck in curtly. "I am talking
business."
"So am I, my dear. I'm pointing out your resources."
She did not take his meaning fully, his leer notwithstanding, and he
drew his own interpretation of her silence.
"You know we don't lack for applicants here," he continued. "There are
a dozen girls waiting to jump into your shoes. We expect our low-paid
girls to have additional means of support. Some of them have families;
others--but you're no fool. There are plenty of men who'd be glad to
help you out. Why don't you arrange things with that young dentist?
Or"--his smile grew more saccharine--"if that affair is off, perhaps
I--"
Then something transpired which he never clearly understood. It was
plain enough to Jean. In the twinkling of an eye she was again an
athletic boxing tomboy, answering to the name of Jack, before whose
scientific "right" Mr. Rose dropped with crumpled petals to the floor.