There are some who make decisions with the sure swiftness of a sensitive
film, one moment a blank, the next, by a flash of light, a picture,
incisive and clear. Such people, though they may make their share of
mistakes, lead on the whole a comfortable existence. But there are
others who, like the southern girl occupying the second-story back-room
of Mrs. Pickens' boarding-house, find it difficult to determine for
themselves the course which they shall take. And to these who wander in
the valley of indecision the right path to follow becomes daily more
obscured. The more they question the more they are beset with obstacles,
mists gather about them, and some have been known to wait in hesitancy,
until, without having tasted of adventure, they find that their day is
done.
Hertha, however difficult decision might be to her, had determined not
to be in this latter group. When her school work was over, she had
resolved to settle upon her future; but in the days that followed Tom's
visit, when with her lover away there was a chance to stop and think,
she had to confess to herself that the paths down which she looked were
none of them to her liking. And yet she must apparently choose one of
two alternatives or else after seven months of trial start in again with
lessened fortune, without a profession and alone.
As she sat at her books late one afternoon, endeavoring to indite a
business letter she looked up to find Miss Wood standing at her open
door.
"Excuse me," Miss Wood said, "I know you are at work but I wanted to
leave you some of my roses. One of our cases--a woman who got into
trouble--brought them to me from the country to-day. She did the
sensible thing (so few will) and went away with her child to work at
domestic service; and now she can come in for the day and leave me
something as lovely as this." And she held out a spray of rambler roses.
Hertha took the gift with a shy word of thanks, and after placing the
flowers in water invited Miss Wood to sit down.
"No, I'm not going to interrupt you," the older woman said.
"You aren't interrupting," Hertha answered. "Especially," she added, "as
I want very much to ask your advice."
To be asked to assume the role of adviser is the most subtle of
compliments; and Miss Wood, while murmuring that she feared she would be
of little use, took Hertha's rocking-chair by the window and proceeded
to look self-conscious, as though she might thus exude wisdom.
"Do you think," Hertha asked, sitting on the little straight white chair
opposite Miss Wood, "do you think that it needs any special talent to be
a stenographer?"
She put her question hesitatingly, playing the while with her hands, a
habit that had lately come to her with the city's insistent hurry and
nervous demand for quick thought. Her day at school had been a hard one
and only a walk with Bob had brought back courage to face life.
"I certainly think," Miss Wood answered, "that there are plenty of
stenographers in New York to-day without talent. I've had some of them
work for me."
"Yes," said Hertha with a little smile, "but you wouldn't want me to be
that sort!"
The assistant secretary of the Association for Improving the Condition
of the Destitute had her share of humor. Smiling back at her
interlocutor she proceeded to give Hertha's question the thought it
deserved.
"Where do you feel that your talent falls short?" she demanded.
"Oh, everywhere," Hertha answered vaguely, and then added, "it's all so
confusing, especially when you have to hurry."
"You haven't been at work long enough to be speeded," her adviser
answered. "Perhaps they aren't teaching you well."
"The others get ahead." In the answer lurked a hint of tears.
"I don't believe, then," Miss Wood said, weighing her words carefully,
"that you will want to be a stenographer; that is, a stenographer whose
whole time is taken up with typewriting and dictation. But you can be a
secretary with only moderate skill at stenography if you have other
qualifications."
"Probably I haven't got them," Hertha murmured.
"I know you have some of them." Miss Wood became emphatic now, she felt
on safe ground. "You have an attractive personality. Why, I should try
you in my office, if I had one of my own, the first minute I saw you!
You would be courteous to all who came in, and discreet; you wouldn't
talk about your employer's business when you went home; and," looking
about her, "you are orderly. Oh, you have many qualifications." The last
words were vague but Miss Wood left her listener cheered and with
returned self-respect. Especially was Hertha pleased that a woman, not a
smirking man, expressed a desire to employ her if given the opportunity.
Unfortunately, the next day, in her tussle with a business order, she
made such a hodge-podge of words that her teacher laughed. That evening
she knocked at Mrs. Pickens' door.
She was welcomed cordially to a comfortable seat while her landlady
hastily gathered together the bunch of newspapers that she had been
looking over and threw them into a corner.
"What have you been reading about to-night?" Hertha questioned. "A young
woman who doesn't know her own mind?"
"I reckon there're plenty of that sort," was the answer, "or if they do
know what they want they'll never get it. I just read a modest
advertisement in which a refined young woman, graduating from a school
of stenography, says she wants a position with an agreeable gentleman.
Hours short. How would you like that now?"
"I might like it, but I reckon after he tried me with one of his letters
he wouldn't like me."
"Nonsense, then he wouldn't be agreeable."
Hertha was silent, and Mrs. Pickens, seeing that she was in no mood for
banter, asked sympathetically, "You're mighty tired, honey?"
Her voice with its southern drawl reminded Hertha poignantly of her
mammy. She longed childishly to put her head on the older woman's
shoulder as she would have put it on her colored mother's, and be
comforted. But she remained in her seat and answered with the single
word, "Discouraged."
"It's too hot to work," Mrs. Pickens said soothingly. "I've managed
myself to-day to spoil ten pounds of perfectly good fruit."
"What a shame!" Hertha was alert at the disaster. "Why wasn't I here to
help you! I know how to cook."
"You're a clever girl. You know the things you ought to know which is a
lot more than I do, having been spoilt in my youth. And the things you
don't know aren't worth worrying over."
"I don't seem to know how to earn my own living."
"Let some one, who wants to, earn it for you then."
In the silence that followed Mrs. Pickens devoutly hoped that her
bluntness had not hurt Dick's cause.
"Of course I can support myself," Hertha said at length in a low voice,
"I have already been a companion. I would rather do that again than just
to marry for a home. How do you know you are going to like the home you
get? If you're a companion you can leave it, but if you're married
you're expected to stay on no matter how much you may hate every step
you take and dread the thought of to-morrow!"
"Of course," Mrs. Pickens made haste to say, in some consternation, "you
mustn't marry if you feel like that!"
Hertha's voice was hardly audible. "I don't feel that way about Dick
to-day, but I don't know how I might feel to-morrow."
Her valley of indecision was black indeed; but Bob came to say
good-night and she forgot it for a time in her happiness with the child.
June flowered with tropical luxuriance in the city park. Wonderful blue
lilies, that Cleopatra might have inhaled for fragrance, floated on the
little pond by the side of their less foreign white and yellow
neighbors. Roses of all varieties and color grew in straight lines in
the Italian garden. Rhododendrons massed the hillside, gorgeous rose
color, and honeysuckle and sweet-smelling shrubs lined the paths or
clambered over the rustic arbors. There were times when Hertha, country
lover that she was, sighed at the studied prettiness of it all and waxed
weary at the constant stream of people who never gave Bob or herself a
chance to be alone, but it was much better than the view of the
East-side elevated; so, though she had made no friend whom she loved as
she loved Kathleen, she did not regret her change of residence. But
during each day, in the outing that she allowed herself, far back in her
mind, whether feeding the ducks and goldfish or retailing a new phase in
the history of Tom-of-the-Woods, there was a sense of irksome
responsibility, of the necessity shortly of deciding upon the next step
in life.
"I had a letter from Dick to-day," Mrs. Pickens announced to Hertha one
evening in the third week of his departure.
She had not mentioned him before, except casually, since the night they
had talked in her room.
"What does he say?" Hertha asked.
They were sitting out on the stoop, for the evening was a warm one.
"Oh, nothing very much," Mrs. Pickens answered, "chiefly joking about
the dreadful food he gets and how glad he will be to come home."
"Men do care a lot about what they have to eat."
"They surely do. I suppose it's partly because after their work they're
hungry, really hungry, and food tastes good to them. I work, too, but
when I've been over this house, from top to bottom, and seen that Mary
doesn't spoil everything she puts her hand to, I haven't the least
desire for my dinner."
"You take it all very hard," Hertha said.
"Do I? Well, I suspect that's because I am incompetent, like Mary, and
it makes me nervous and doubly anxious over everything."
"That's the way I feel in class."
Mrs. Pickens glanced anxiously at the young girl noting how
fragile-looking she had grown in the past weeks.
"You seemed so well when you came here," she said, "and now you are
certainly thin. I hope it isn't my incompetence that has brought the
change about."
"You know it isn't," the girl answered.
There was a pleasant silence in which neither felt the necessity of
speech and then out of the fast approaching darkness Hertha asked: "Have
you spent the most of your life in New York?"
"No, I only came here after my marriage. My life has been an ordinary
one. A quiet girlhood, fifteen years of perfect married life, and now, a
common struggle to keep from being despondent and to make both ends
meet. The best for me is done."
"Fifteen years wasn't very long, was it?"
"One way it seems about fifteen minutes but another way it seems an
eternity. It was all my life--I'm only existing now. And do you know,"
speaking in a low voice into the twilight, "I've never said this before,
hardly to myself, but I came very near not marrying my husband. I was
young and not romantically in love. He was ten years older and that
seemed frightening. If it had not been for my mother, who appreciated
him better than I, I doubt if I would have accepted him. Afterward, when
we had lived together for months and I had given my whole heart to him,
I used to waken in the night and shake with horror at the thought of
what I might have lost. When I realized what we would have missed
without our life together, I would grow chill with a perfectly
unreasoning fear.
"I asked him once if he had ever questioned that he wanted me," Mrs.
Pickens went on, "and he laughed and said not since the first May
morning when I came to church in a blue gown and sat across the aisle
from him. He surely knew his mind, but that's often the difference
between men and women!"
Another silence and then Mrs. Pickens went within.
Hertha lingered trying to conceive of a love that had in it no romance
and yet blossomed into passionate devotion. And as she strove to imagine
such a condition, as she called up Dick's image and saw him playing with
her in the snow, sitting by her at the opera, rowing with her in the
park, her brain proved for a time obedient; and then the air was
suddenly filled with the scent of orange blossoms.
"Oh, it's no use," she said despairingly, "I can't decide." And then in
a tremor of excitement and determination, "Next Sunday I mean to have
one more talk with Tom."