Hertha, when she slipped from Miss Witherspoon's charge, experienced no
difficulty in finding a suitable dwelling place in New York. She had not
studied for years in a school conducted by northern teachers without
learning of the philanthropies that were showered upon people in the
North. The Young Women's Christian Association was for just such girls
as she, and therefore, under the direction of a friendly policeman, she
soon reached headquarters and was given temporary shelter. As she walked
about in the comfortable rooms, luxurious in her eyes, she felt that she
had indeed entered the white world, her lawful heritage; and if it was
hard to lose all family ties--mother, sister, brother, swept away as
though in some swift disaster of nature--on the other hand, life of a
sudden had become strangely simplified. How easy it was to move through
the world if you were white! She had always been conspicuous, a mark for
astonished comment when with her black brother and sister, for whispered
commiseration when working out in service. Now no one could comment at
all. She was like every one else. She need not shrink if she were rudely
treated, she might answer back; no longer must she "keep her place,"
hers was the place of the dominant race. When she remembered her lover,
her cheeks flamed. No need to fear that she, a white girl, would ever
again think to give herself without exacting a full return.
But what should she do? She was young and white and had something less
than two thousand dollars to her credit at the bank; moreover, she had
stored in her mind a multiplicity of suggestions to be turned over and
reviewed as she made her way through the streets or lay in her bed at
night. Had she gone to Boston with Miss Witherspoon, she would at once
have used a fair share of her fortune on her education; but, perhaps
because she had cut loose from old plans, she rejected the taking up of
dressmaking. She inclined to stenography and typewriting; but Ellen, who
knew her better than any one else, had looked surprised on learning that
she considered this means of earning a livelihood. She knew she was no
scholar, and a chosen career that involved the swift jotting down of the
ideas of others, later to be transcribed in black type on a white sheet
from which a misspelled word shone with hideous clearness, might end in
disgrace. So stenography was set aside.
Equally she was sure she would not take the advice of Miss Patty. To be
a companion was the highest position that could have been reached by
Hertha, colored; but it was menial service to Hertha, white. She had
renounced a sheltered home; now that she was in the North she meant to
live a new life of freedom.
After three days of happy wandering about the city and of careful
consideration of her personal problem, she made a practical decision.
Her legacy was small, and for the present she knew too little of the
life about her or of her own ability to risk spending it upon an
education. The operating work of which Miss Witherspoon had once spoken
lay along the line of her natural aptitude. Why, then, not try it? If
you were a good workwoman, it paid well. She was in a mood for the
unusual, and therefore, under the guidance of the efficient and
business-like Association secretary, she found herself, a week after her
arrival in New York, doing her part in manufacturing muslin shirtwaists.
Kathleen she had discovered herself. She could not remain long at the
Association, since the rooms for permanent guests were occupied; and
with a list provided her by the secretary, she went out one afternoon to
secure a suitable boarding place. The first and only house she entered
was in charge of a thin, meager woman, the type of Miss Witherspoon, but
with a more domineering manner and a flatter bust. The room for rent had
a red carpet which smelt moldy, and brilliantly painted blue walls.
Hertha hated it at once, but with difficulty succeeded in leaving
without renting it, so persistent was the person in charge. Indeed, she
only escaped with the proviso that she might look in again.
Once in the street, her confidence returned and she resolved to have
nothing to do with this or any other cheap boarding place. In so immense
a city it must be possible to find an attractive home.
She looked no further that day, and in the evening, standing in the
office, she saw a large, fine looking Irish woman come up to the desk.
Laughing and talking to a friend, her cheeks pink with her exertions
from the gymnasium, her gray eyes glowing, Kathleen seemed the exact
opposite of the disturbing landlady of the afternoon. "I know I'm
bothering you, Miss Jones," she began, addressing the secretary, who was
insignificant beside her, "but it's what you like. You couldn't be happy
if you didn't have a dozen girls wanting you at once. What I'm after is
some one to share my flat with me this winter. The boss has sent my
brother to Chicago, where they need his work more than they do here.
Hard luck for me, for he was bringing in a good wage! And now I've a
little flat and only myself in it. Is there any girl here, do you think,
would like a bedroom and the use of a kitchen and parlor? I'd let her
have it for fifteen dollars a month."
Hertha was standing at the end of the desk, quite by Miss Jones's elbow.
She expected that the secretary would introduce them, but instead Miss
Jones looked down, moved some papers, and handed an elaborately ruled
card for Kathleen to fill.
The Irishwoman took it up clumsily. "You fill it in," she said. "It's
Kathleen O'Connor, 204 East 8th Street, fourth floor. I'll be home
to-morrow night to any one who comes."
When she had gone Hertha asked for the address, explaining that she
would like to see the room.
"Would you?" Miss Jones questioned, looking her over as though to place
her again. "I thought of you, but did not know whether it was what you
desired. It's rather a poor neighborhood, and yet it costs as much as a
better one. Kathleen is Irish, you know. She only comes to the
gymnasium, and she's irregular at that. She's a sort of nurse; not
trained, of course, but good of her kind. Take the address; it's near
your, work, and if you like----" and her voice trailed off as she turned
to the next girl who came to her for guidance.
Hertha did "like." She went to Kathleen's the following evening and
settled the bargain with a week's rent in advance. She liked the rear
alcove room with its iron bed and fresh cover; and, though it was dark,
it opened with wide doors into the parlor. "For the both of us,"
Kathleen explained, "unless you're wanting to go straight to bed and
then it's yours." The parlor had little furniture--a plain table, two
straight chairs, a comfortable rocker and a couch with a Bagdad cover.
Kathleen had a small bedroom opening into a court; but the attractive
spot was the kitchen. It faced the south and its two windows were filled
with red geraniums in full bloom. The walls were light buff, the kitchen
table was covered with a white oilcloth, and the wooden chairs were
painted like the wall. For convenience, it was beyond anything Hertha
had ever known with its gas stove, its hot and cold water for sink and
tubs. She remembered the thousands of pails of water that her mother and
Ellen had carried during the years she had been with them, and the
millions of pieces of wood that Tom had piled up and brought into the
kitchen. Getting meals and washing your clothes here would be fun, not
work.
"I can make corn bread for breakfast," she said to Kathleen
confidentially, as they looked into the closet with its wealth of pots
and pans, spoons and egg beaters, skillets and toasters--more kitchen
utensils than Hertha had imagined any one could own.
Kathleen regarded her quizzically.
"When do you go to work?" she queried.
"At eight o'clock."
"That's better than it used to be, but if you make corn bread it's
likely it will only be for a week. Then you'll be so tired when you wake
that the best tasting food in the world won't equal an extra nap,
cuddled under the clothes, with the sure knowledge that it's wrong. It
will be oatmeal cooked the night before and warmed up, and coffee made
the way that's quickest, and a slice of toast, maybe, from the bread
bought of the baker. You can boil yourself an egg, but they put the
price on eggs up every winter to pay for the chemicals they use to keep
them young."
"How about Sunday morning?" Hertha queried.
"Sundays you won't be getting up until it's time for dinner."
And while Kathleen's prophecy was in part true, while the increasingly
cold weather and the hard hours made the morning nap imperative, Hertha
did more for their little home than her companion had expected. She made
curtains for the windows; she bought occasional attractive magazines;
she framed a striking picture taken from the Sunday supplement. It was a
landscape by Inness of great trees with heavy foliage, the clouds massed
as though about to break in storm. Before a month was over the tenement
rooms took on a deeper look of home.
The life within the rooms was very quiet. Kathleen's work made her hours
most irregular. As an "experienced nurse" she was rarely on a case for
more than two or three days and nights, so poor were the people among
whom she worked. She had no diploma and was not recognized by the
profession. During one year of her hard life she had acted as nurse in a
woman's prison, but the time had never come when she could afford to go
into a hospital. "And now it's too late; I'm too old," she would
explain, "and besides I haven't got the education. Schooling don't go
with starting in at the mill with your dresses at your knees, and your
hands so little you can hardly manage the machine." Her hands were still
small and well formed, and she had a pleasant touch. She was skillful at
massage, and in the winter season had a few society women whose surplus
flesh she vigorously rubbed off and whose faces she smoothed into
comparative youth. Leaving the sumptuous house of some wealthy woman,
she would hurry to a dark room in a tenement, where the cold and poverty
made her eyes flame with anger, to spend the night by an ailing child,
ministering with patience and even merriment to its many wants. And as
her life carried her from one extreme to another, so she herself varied
in mood, from the smiling, youthful looking woman whom Hertha had seen
and loved from the first to an intense, angry iconoclast who found life
for the many both cruel and unjust. She never ministered and brought to
health the one ailing without remembering the ten others who were
needlessly suffering and whom she could not aid. "I know that my work is
nothing but putting courtplaster on a cancer," she would say to Hertha
savagely as she came back from a home where she had coaxed the growing
boy back to life, to see him in his convalescence go out to a ten-hour
day of racking work. "I ain't fooled, though. I done what I could, but
why won't his father fight for better hours and living conditions? He
sits there and lets the boss use his boy worse than he'd use a machine.
He's got the backbone of a chocolate eclair, that man." And then she
would take up a copy of the daily "Worker" and become absorbed in the
vision of the successful class struggle and a world set free.
"What shall we have for dinner to-night?" she had smilingly asked
Hertha. "Shall we celebrate together with an Irish stew and ice cream
and then go to the movies?"
"But this is your evening for the Y. W. C. A.," Hertha answered.
The smile left Kathleen's face. "I'm through there," she said. "It's not
for me."
Hertha wanted to know more, but she was reticent with questions. As it
happens, however, the silent person learns more of another's life than
one who shows a voluble sympathy, and Kathleen was soon telling her
friend that all girls' clubs and Christian Associations were nothing but
charities; that she could have nothing to do with a charity herself, and
that, had it not been for a moment's temptation, offered by a friend,
she would never have entered the class. It was the exercise that she
needed and the marching to music had been the best part. "And it's
grand," she explained, "if only for an hour a week to be living as the
Lord intended you with your legs apart." But this morning she had been
giving massage to a rich uptown customer. "And after I had pommeled off
the two pounds she'd gained at a twelve-course dinner the night before,
she begins to tell me of her charities. 'I like best to help the working
girl,' she says, 'and I gave my mite to their new building, but I'm
troubled at the obstinacy of the young women in refusing to become
servants. They have a false pride in the matter.' I kept my mouth shut,
for I couldn't afford to lose a good customer, but I was that mad to
think I might have been taking money off her as a gift that I stopped in
at the office and told Miss Jones I should quit. 'Is that so, Kathleen?'
she says quietly. 'It is for you to decide.' And then she asks: 'And how
is Miss Ogilvie?' She always calls me Kathleen. Not that I mind it, but
I'm fifteen years older than you, and Miss Jones needn't 'Miss Ogilvie'
you to me. I don't wonder she does, though, for you wear your clothes as
though you had always lived in a palace, and you speak like a princess."
"Don't be foolish," Hertha said, and then laughed--an odd, short laugh
in which Kathleen joined, though as it happened she did not understand
the joke. "Let's have the stew, only don't put quite so much onion in
it, and we'll get the ice cream on the way home."
The stew was delicious and Hertha enjoyed it, while Kathleen consoled
herself for the loss of the extra onion by a plentiful use of
condiments. "I've just a good plain appetite," she explained. Then they
went out into the noisy street to the theater where they sat in the
orchestra and Hertha felt like a queen. In the South she had been only a
few times to some cheap playhouse where she had been repelled by the
vulgarity of the people and the performance; but here in New York the
comfortable theater, darkened now, the music, the quiet audience, filled
her with happy anticipation. She squeezed Kathleen's hand as the picture
of a lovely young girl in gingham dress and pink sunbonnet flashed upon
the screen, and the story began.
It was one of the fifty-seven varieties of moving pictures, all of
which, Kathleen knew, were canned in the same syrup, but which to Hertha
were freshly sweet. A beautiful girl, a pink sunbonnet, a young lover,
blossoming apple trees. A coal mine discovered under the apple boughs. A
cruel father and separation. The girl in a gilded palace registering
despair. The lover seeking fame and gold. A titled villain mocking the
girl's pure love. The villain's machination, the lover tied to the
railroad track, the train dashing to within two inches of its victim.
The escape, a night in the woods, the friendly beasts. The disclosure.
"I love you still." The villain's contrition. His death. The coal mine
exhausted. Soft music, two lovers and one kiss. Blossoming apple trees
and the pink sunbonnet again. Far in the distance the sound of wedding
bells. Then sudden darkness, and The Best Flavored Chewing Gum thrown
upon the screen.
Hertha's heart beat fast during the whole of the story and she felt wave
after wave of pleasurable excitement. It was so sad and yet so
beautiful. The only thing to temper her enjoyment was Kathleen, who
would laugh in the wrong places. When the hero and heroine were in great
danger, Kathleen showed no apprehension. She chuckled at the approaching
train, and gave little grunts of amusement when the villain threatened
the girl. The only thing she seemed to care for was the bear who gave
the boy shelter in his cave for the night. "The dear!" exclaimed
Kathleen.
"But it's so improbable," Hertha whispered as the piano played Nevin's
lullaby while the bear rocked the youth in his arms.
"Not half so improbable as the rest," Kathleen whispered back. "You can
trust the brutes to do the right thing enough sight better than the
men."
As the light went up Kathleen yawned.
"Haven't we got our money's worth of romance, infant?" she asked.
"There's a meeting on Peonage to-night at Cooper Union. Let's go there."