"Gladys Moraine! I knew her the minute she came down the aisle. I saw
her last year when she was playing in 'His Wives.' She's prettier off
than on, I think. I waited on her, and the other girls were wild. She
bought a dozen pairs of white kids, and made me give 'em to her huge, so
she could shove her hand right into 'em, like a man does. Two sizes too
big. All the swells wear 'em that way. And only one ring--an emerald the
size of a dime."
"What'd she wear?" Rose's dull face was almost animated.
"Ah yes!" in a dreamy falsetto from Al, "what _did_ she wear?"
"Oh, shut up, Al! Just a suit, kind of plain, and yet you'd notice it.
And sables! And a Gladys Moraine hat. Everything quiet, and plain, and
dark; and yet she looked like a million dollars. I felt like a roach
while I was waiting on her, though she was awfully sweet to me."
Or perhaps Al, the eel-like, would descend from his heights to mingle a
brief moment in the family talk. Al clerked in the National Cigar
Company's store at Clark and Madison. His was the wisdom of the snake,
the weasel, and the sphinx. A strangely silent young man, this Al,
thin-lipped, smooth-cheeked, perfumed. Slim of waist, flat of hip,
narrow of shoulder, his was the figure of the born fox-trotter. He
walked lightly, on the balls of his feet, like an Indian, but without
the Indian's dignity.
"Some excitement ourselves, to-day, down at the store, believe me. The
Old Man's son started in to learn the retail selling end of the
business. Back of the showcase with the rest of us, waiting on trade,
and looking like a Yale yell."
Pa would put down his paper to stare over his reading specs at Al.
"Mannheim's son! The president!"
"Yep! And I guess he loves it, huh? The Old Man wants him to learn the
business from the ground up. I'll bet he'll never get higher than the
first floor. To-day he went out to lunch at one and never shows up again
till four. Wears English collars, and smokes a brand of cigarettes we
don't carry."
Thus was the world brought to Rose. Her sallow cheek would show a faint
hint of colour as she sipped her tea.
At six-thirty on a Monday morning in late April (remember, nothing's
going to happen) Rose smothered her alarm clock at the first warning
snarl. She was wide-awake at once, as are those whose yesterdays,
to-days and to-morrows are all alike. Rose never opened her eyes to the
dim, tantalising half-consciousness of a something delightful or a
something harrowing in store for her that day. For one to whom the
wash-woman's Tuesday visitation is the event of the week, and in whose
bosom the delivery boy's hoarse "Groc-rees!" as he hurls soap and cabbage
on the kitchen table, arouses a wild flurry, there can be very little
thrill on awakening.
Rose slept on the davenport-couch in the sitting-room. That fact in
itself rises her status in the family. This Monday morning she opened
her eyes with what might be called a start if Rose were any other sort
of heroine. Something had happened, or was happening. It wasn't the six
o'clock steam hissing in the radiator. She was accustomed to that. The
rattle of the L trains, and the milkman's artillery disturbed her as
little as does the chirping of the birds the farmer's daughter. A
sensation new, yet familiar; delicious, yet painful, held her. She
groped to define it, lying there. Her gaze, wandering over the expanse
of the grey woollen blanket, fixed upon a small black object trembling
there. The knowledge that came to her then had come, many weeks before,
in a hundred subtle and exquisite ways, to those who dwell in the open
places. Rose's eyes narrowed craftily. Craftily, stealthily, she sat up,
one hand raised. Her eyes still fixed on the quivering spot, the hand
descended, lightning-quick. But not quickly enough. The black spot
vanished. It sped toward the open window. Through that window there came
a balmy softness made up of Lake Michigan zephyr, and stockyards smell,
and distant budding things. Rose had failed to swat the first fly of the
season. Spring had come.
As she got out of bed and thud-thudded across the room on her heels to
shut the window she glanced out into the quiet street. Her city eyes,
untrained to nature's hints, failed to notice that the scraggy,
smoke-dwarfed oak that sprang, somehow, miraculously, from the mangey
little dirt-plot in front of the building had developed surprising
things all over its scrawny branches overnight. But she did see that the
front windows of the flat building across the way were bare of the
Chicago-grey lace curtains that had hung there the day before. House
cleaning! Well, most decidedly spring had come.
Rose was the household's Aurora. Following the donning of her limp and
obscure garments it was Rose's daily duty to tear the silent family from
its slumbers. Ma was always awake, her sick eyes fixed hopefully on the
door. For fourteen years it had been the same.
"Sleeping?"
"Sleeping! I haven't closed an eye all night."
Rose had learned not to dispute that statement.
"It's spring out! I'm going to clean the closets and the bureau drawers
to-day. I'll have your coffee in a jiffy. Do you feel like getting up
and sitting out on the back porch, toward noon, maybe?"
On her way kitchenward she stopped for a sharp tattoo at the door of the
room in which Pa and Al slept. A sleepy grunt of remonstrance rewarded
her. She came to Floss's door, turned the knob softly, peered in. Floss
was sleeping as twenty sleeps, deeply, dreamlessly, one slim bare arm
outflung, the lashes resting ever so lightly on the delicate curve of
cheek. As she lay there asleep in her disordered bedroom, her clothes
strewing chair, dresser, floor, Floss's tastes, mental equipment,
spiritual make-up, innermost thoughts, were as plainly to be read by
the observer as though she had been scientifically charted by a
psycho-analyst, a metaphysician and her dearest girl friend.
"Floss! Floss, honey! Quarter to seven!" Floss stirred, moaned faintly,
dropped into sleep again.
Fifteen minutes later, the table set, the coffee simmering, the morning
paper brought from the back porch to Ma, Rose had heard none of the
sounds that proclaimed the family astir--the banging of drawers, the
rush of running water, the slap of slippered feet. A peep of enquiry
into the depths of the coffee pot, the gas turned to a circle of blue
beads, and she was down the hall to sound the second alarm.
"Floss, you know if Al once gets into the bathroom!" Floss sat up in
bed, her eyes still closed. She made little clucking sounds with her
tongue and lips, as a baby does when it wakes. Drugged with sleep, hair
tousled, muscles sagging, at seven o'clock in the morning, the most
trying hour in the day for a woman, Floss was still triumphantly pretty.
She had on one of those absurd pink muslin nightgowns, artfully designed
to look like crêpe de chine. You've seen them rosily displayed in the
cheaper shop windows, marked ninety-eight cents, and you may have
wondered who might buy them, forgetting that there is an imitation mind
for every imitation article in the world.
Rose stooped, picked up a pair of silk stockings from the floor, and
ran an investigating hand through to heel and toe. She plucked a soiled
pink blouse off the back of a chair, eyed it critically, and tucked it
under her arm with the stockings.
"Did you have a good time last night?"
Floss yawned elaborately, stretched her slim arms high above her head;
then, with a desperate effort, flung back the bed-clothes, swung her
legs over the side of the bed and slipped her toes into the shabby,
pomponed slippers that lay on the floor.
"I say, did you have a g--"
"Oh Lord, I don't know! I guess so," snapped Floss. Temperamentally,
Floss was not at her best at seven o'clock on Monday morning. Rose did
not pursue the subject. She tried another tack.
"It's as mild as summer out. I see the Werners and the Burkes are
housecleaning. I thought I'd start to-day with the closets, and the
bureau drawers. You could wear your blue this morning, if it was
pressed."
Floss yawned again, disinterestedly, and folded her kimono about her.
"Go as far as you like. Only don't put things back in my closet so's I
can't ever find 'em again. I wish you'd press that blue skirt. And wash
out the Georgette crêpe waist. I might need it."
The blouse, and skirt, and stockings under her arm, Rose went back to
the kitchen to prepare her mother's breakfast tray. Wafted back to her
came the acrid odour of Pa's matutinal pipe, and the accustomed
bickering between Al and Floss over the possession of the bathroom.
"What do you think this is, anyway? A Turkish bath?"
"Shave in your own room!"
Between Floss and Al there existed a feud that lifted only when a third
member of the family turned against either of them. Immediately they
about-faced and stood united against the offender.
Pa was the first to demand breakfast, as always. Very neat, was Pa, and
fussy, and strangely young looking to be the husband of the grey-haired,
parchment-skinned woman who lay in the front bedroom. Pa had two manias:
the movies, and a passion for purchasing new and complicated household
utensils--cream-whippers, egg-beaters, window-clamps, lemon-squeezers,
silver-polishers. He haunted department store basements in search of
them.
He opened his paper now and glanced at the head-lines and at the Monday
morning ads. "I see the Fair's got a spring housecleaning sale. They
advertise a new kind of extension curtain rod. And Scouro, three cakes
for a dime."
"If you waste one cent more on truck like that," Rose protested, placing
his breakfast before him, "when half the time I can't make the
housekeeping money last through the week!"
"Your ma did it."
"Fourteen years ago liver wasn't thirty-two cents a pound," retorted
Rose, "and besides--"
"Scramble 'em!" yelled Al, from the bedroom, by way of warning.
There was very little talk after that. The energies of three of them
were directed toward reaching the waiting desk or counter on time. The
energy of one toward making that accomplishment easy. The front door
slammed once--that was Pa, on his way; slammed again--Al. Floss rushed
into the dining-room fastening the waist-band of her skirt, her hat
already on. Rose always had a rather special breakfast for Floss. Floss
posed as being a rather special person. She always breakfasted last, and
late. Floss's was a fastidiousness which shrinks at badly served food, a
spotted table-cloth, or a last year's hat, while it overlooks a rent in
an undergarment or the accumulated dust in a hairbrush. Her blouse was
of the sheerest. Her hair shone in waves about her delicate checks. She
ate her orange, and sipped her very special coffee, and made a little
face over her egg that had been shirred in the oven or in some way
highly specialised. Then the front door slammed again--a semi-slam, this
time. Floss never did quite close a door. Rose followed her down the
hall, shut and bolted it, Chicago fashion. The sick woman in the front
bedroom had dropped into one of her fitful morning dozes. At eight
o'clock the little flat was very still.
If you knew nothing about Rose; if you had not already been told that
she slept on the sitting-room davenport; that she was taken for granted
as the family drudge; that she was, in that household, merely an
intelligent machine that made beds, fried eggs, filled hot water bags,
you would get a characterization of her from this: She was the sort of
person who never has a closet or bureau drawer all her own. Her few and
negligible garments hung apologetically in obscure corners of closets
dedicated to her sister's wardrobe or her brother's, or her spruce and
fussy old father's. Vague personal belongings, such as combings,
handkerchiefs, a spectacle case, a hairbrush, were found tucked away in
a desk pigeon-hole, a table drawer, or on the top shelf in the bathroom.
As she pulled the disfiguring blue gingham dust-cap over her hair now,
and rolled her sleeves to her elbows, you would never have dreamed that
Rose was embarking upon her great adventure. You would never have
guessed that the semi-yearly closet cleaning was to give to Rose a
thrill as delicious as it was exquisitely painful. But Rose knew. And so
she teased herself, and tried not to think of the pasteboard box on the
shelf in the hall closet, under the pile of reserve blankets, and told
herself that she would leave that closet until the last, when she would
have to hurry over it.
* * * * *
When you clean closets and bureau drawers thoroughly you have to carry
things out to the back porch and flap them, Rose was that sort of
housekeeper. She leaned over the porch railing and flapped things, so
that the dust motes spun and swirled in the sunshine. Rose's arms worked
up and down energetically, then less energetically, finally ceased their
motion altogether. She leaned idle elbows on the porch railing and gazed
down into the yard below with a look in her eyes such as no squalid
Chicago back yard, with its dusty débris, could summon, even in
spring-time.
The woman next door came out on her back porch that adjoined Rose's. The
day seemed to have her in its spell, too, for in her hand was something
woolly and wintry, and she began to flap it about as Rose had done. She
had lived next door since October, had that woman, but the two had never
exchanged a word, true to the traditions of their city training. Rose
had her doubts of the woman next door. She kept a toy dog which she
aired afternoons, and her kimonos were florid and numerous. Now, as the
eyes of the two women met, Rose found herself saying, "Looks like
summer."
The woman next door caught the scrap of conversation eagerly, hungrily.
"It certainly does! Makes me feel like new clothes, and housecleaning."
"I started to-day!" said Rose, triumphantly.
"Not already!" gasped the woman next door, with the chagrin that only a
woman knows who has let May steal upon her unawares.
From far down the alley sounded a chant, drawing nearer and nearer,
until there shambled into view a decrepit horse drawing a dilapidated
huckster's cart. Perched on the seat was a Greek who turned his dusky
face up toward the two women leaning over the porch railings. "Rhubarb,
leddy. Fresh rhubarb!"
"My folks don't care for rhubarb sauce," Rose told the woman next door.
"It makes the worst pie in the world," the woman confided to Rose.
Whereupon each bought a bunch of the succulent green and red stalks. It
was their offering at the season's shrine.
Rose flung the rhubarb on the kitchen table, pulled her dust-cap more
firmly about her ears, and hurried back to the disorder of Floss's dim
little bedroom. After that it was dust-cloth, and soapsuds, and
scrub-brush in a race against recurrent water bags, insistent doorbells,
and the inevitable dinner hour. It was mid-afternoon when Rose, standing
a-tiptoe on a chair, came at last to the little box on the top shelf
under the bedding in the hall closet. Her hand touched the box, and
closed about it. A little electric thrill vibrated through her body. She
stepped down from the chair, heavily, listened until her acute ear
caught the sound of the sick woman's slumbrous breathing; then, box in
hand, walked down the dark hall to the kitchen. The rhubarb pie, still
steaming in its pan, was cooling on the kitchen table. The dishes from
the invalid's lunch-tray littered the sink. But Rose, seated on the
kitchen chair, her rumpled dust-cap pushed back from her flushed,
perspiring face, untied the rude bit of string that bound the old candy
box, removed the lid, slowly, and by that act was wafted magically out
of the world of rhubarb pies, and kitchen chairs, and dirty dishes, into
that place whose air is the breath of incense and myrrh, whose paths are
rose-strewn, whose dwellings are temples dedicated to but one small god.
The land is known as Love, and Rose travelled back to it on the magic
rug of memory.
A family of five in a six-room Chicago flat must sacrifice sentiment to
necessity. There is precious little space for those pressed flowers,
time-yellowed gowns, and ribbon-bound packets that figured so
prominently in the days of attics. Into the garbage can with yesterday's
roses! The janitor's burlap sack yawns for this morning's mail; last
year's gown has long ago met its end at the hands of the ol'-clo'es man
or the wash-woman's daughter. That they had survived these fourteen
years, and the strictures of their owner's dwelling, tells more about
this boxful of letters than could be conveyed by a battalion of
adjectives.
Rose began at the top of the pile, in her orderly fashion, and read
straight through to the last. It took one hour. Half of that time she
was not reading. She was staring straight ahead with what is mistakenly
called an unseeing look, but which actually pierces the veil of years
and beholds things far, far beyond the vision of the actual eye. They
were the letters of a commonplace man to a commonplace woman, written
when they loved each other, and so they were touched with something of
the divine. They must have been, else how could they have sustained this
woman through fifteen years of drudgery? They were the only tangible
foundation left of the structure of dreams she had built about this man.
All the rest of her house of love had tumbled about her ears fifteen
years before, but with these few remaining bricks she had erected many
times since castles and towers more exquisite and lofty and soaring than
the original humble structure had ever been.
The story? Well, there really isn't any, as we've warned you. Rose had
been pretty then in much the same delicate way that Floss was pretty
now. They were to have been married. Rose's mother fell ill, Floss and
Al were little more than babies. The marriage was put off. The illness
lasted six months--a year--two years--became interminable. The breach
into which Rose had stepped closed about her and became a prison. The
man had waited, had grown impatient, finally rebelled. He had fled,
probably, to marry a less encumbered lady. Rose had gone dully on,
caring for the household, the children, the sick woman. In the years
that had gone by since then Rose had forgiven him his faithlessness.
She only remembered that he had been wont to call her his Röschen,
his Rosebud, his pretty flower (being a German gentleman). She only
recalled the wonder of having been first in some one's thoughts--she
who now was so hopelessly, so irrevocably last.
As she sat there in her kitchen, wearing her soap-stained and faded blue
gingham, and the dust-cap pushed back at a rakish angle, a simpering
little smile about her lips, she was really very much like the
disappointed old maids you used to see so cruelly pictured in the comic
valentines. Had those letters obsessed her a little more strongly she
might have become quite mad, the Freudians would tell you. Had they held
less for her, or had she not been so completely the household's slave,
she might have found a certain solace and satisfaction in viewing the
Greek profile and marcel wave of the most-worshipped movie star. As it
was, they were her ballast, her refuge, the leavening yeast in the soggy
dough of her existence. This man had wanted her to be his wife. She had
found favour in his eyes. She was certain that he still thought of her,
sometimes, and tenderly, regretfully, as she thought of him. It helped
her to live. Not only that, it made living possible.
A clock struck, a window slammed, or a street-noise smote her ear
sharply. Some sound started her out of her reverie. Rose jumped, stared
a moment at the letters in her lap, then hastily, almost shamefacedly,
sorted them (she knew each envelope by heart) tied them, placed them in
their box and bore them down the hail. There, mounting her chair, she
scrubbed the top shelf with her soapy rag, placed the box in its
corner, left the hall closet smelling of cleanliness, with never a hint
of lavender to betray its secret treasure.
Were Rose to die and go to Heaven, there to spend her days thumbing a
golden harp, her hands, by force of habit, would, drop harp-strings at
quarter to six, to begin laying a celestial and unspotted table-cloth
for supper. Habits as deeply rooted as that must hold, even in
after-life.
To-night's six-thirty stampede was noticeably subdued on the part of Pa
and Al. It had been a day of sudden and enervating heat, and the city
had done its worst to them. Pa's pink gills showed a hint of purple.
Al's flimsy silk shirt stuck to his back, and his glittering pompadour
was many degrees less submissive than was its wont. But Floss came in
late, breathless, and radiant, a large and significant paper bag in her
hand. Rose, in the kitchen, was transferring the smoking supper from pot
to platter. Pa, in the doorway of the sick woman's little room, had just
put his fourteen-year-old question with his usual assumption of
heartiness and cheer: "Well, well! And how's the old girl to-night? Feel
like you could get up and punish a little supper, eh?" Al engaged at the
telephone with some one whom he addressed proprietorially as Kid, was
deep in his plans for the evening's diversion. Upon this accustomed
scene Floss burst with havoc.
"Rose! Rose, did you iron my Georgette crêpe? Listen! Guess what!" All
this as she was rushing down the hall, paper hat-bag still in hand.
"Guess who was in the store to-day!"
Rose, at the oven, turned a flushed and interested face toward Floss.
"Who? What's that? A hat?"
"Yes. But listen--"
"Let's see it."
Floss whipped it out of its bag, defiantly. "There! But wait a minute!
Let me tell you--"
"How much?"
Floss hesitated just a second. Her wage was nine dollars a week. Then,
"Seven-fifty, trimmed." The hat was one of those tiny, head-hugging
absurdities that only the Flosses can wear.
"Trimmed is right!" jeered Al, from the doorway.
Rose, thin-lipped with disapproval, turned to her stove again.
"Well, but I had to have it. I'm going to the theatre to-night. And
guess who with! Henry Selz!"
Henry Selz was the unromantic name of the commonplace man over whose
fifteen-year-old letters Rose had glowed and dreamed an hour before. It
was a name that had become mythical in that household--to all but one.
Rose heard it spoken now with a sense of unreality. She smiled a little
uncertainly, and went on stirring the flour thickening for the gravy.
But she was dimly aware that something inside her had suspended action
for a moment, during which moment she felt strangely light and
disembodied, and that directly afterward the thing began to work madly,
so that there was a choked feeling in her chest and a hot pounding in
her head.
"What's the joke?" she said, stirring the gravy in the pan.
"Joke nothing! Honest to God! I was standing back of the counter at
about ten. The rush hadn't really begun yet. Glove trade usually starts
late. I was standing there kidding Herb, the stock boy, when down the
aisle comes a man in a big hat, like you see in the western pictures,
hair a little grey at the temples, and everything, just like a movie
actor. I said to Herb, 'Is it real?' I hadn't got the words out of my
mouth when the fellow sees me, stands stock still in the middle of the
aisle with his mouth open and his eyes sticking out. 'Register
surprise,' I said to Herb, and looked around for the camera. And that
minute he took two jumps over to where I was standing, grabbed my hands
and says, 'Rose! Rose!' kind of choky. 'Not by about twenty years,' I
said. 'I'm Floss, Rose's sister. Let go my hands!'"
Rose--a transfigured Rose, glowing, trembling, radiant--repeated,
vibrantly, "You said, 'I'm Floss, Rose's sister. Let go my hands!'
And--?"
"He looked kind of stunned, for just a minute. His face was a scream,
honestly. Then he said, 'But of course. Fifteen years. But I had always
thought of her as just the same.' And he kind of laughed, ashamed, like
a kid. And the whitest teeth!"
"Yes, they were--white," said Rose. "Well?"
"Well, I said, 'Won't I do instead?' 'You bet you'll do!' he said. And
then he told me his name, and how he was living out in Spokane, and his
wife was dead, and he had made a lot of money--fruit, or real estate, or
something. He talked a lot about it at lunch, but I didn't pay any
attention, as long as he really has it a lot I care how--"
"At lunch?"
"Everything from grape-fruit to coffee. I didn't know it could be done
in one hour. Believe me, he had those waiters jumping. It takes money.
He asked all about you, and ma, and everything. And he kept looking at
me and saying, 'It's wonderful!' I said, 'Isn't it!' but I meant the
lunch. He wanted me to go driving this afternoon--auto and everything.
Kept calling me Rose. It made me kind of mad, and I told him how you
look. He said, 'I suppose so,' and asked me to go to a show to-night.
Listen, did you press my Georgette? And the blue?"
"I'll iron the waist while you're eating. I'm not hungry. It only takes
a minute. Did you say he was grey?"
"Grey? Oh, you mean--why, just here, and here. Interesting, but not a
bit old. And he's got that money look that makes waiters and doormen and
taxi drivers just hump. I don't want any supper. Just a cup of tea. I
haven't got enough time to dress in, decently, as it is."
Al, draped in the doorway, removed his cigarette to give greater force
to his speech. "Your story interests me strangely, little gell. But
there's a couple of other people that would like to eat, even if you
wouldn't. Come on with that supper, Ro. Nobody staked me to a lunch
to-day."
Rose turned to her stove again. Two carmine spots had leaped suddenly to
her cheeks. She served the meal in silence, and ate nothing, but that
was not remarkable. For the cook there is little appeal in the meat that
she has tended from its moist and bloody entrance in the butcher's
paper, through the basting or broiling stage to its formal appearance on
the platter. She saw that Al and her father were served. Then she went
back to the kitchen, and the thud of her iron was heard as she deftly
fluted the ruffles of the crêpe blouse. Floss appeared when the meal was
half eaten, her hair shiningly coiffed, the pink ribbons of her corset
cover showing under her thin kimono. She poured herself a cup of tea and
drank it in little quick, nervous gulps. She looked deliriously young,
and fragile and appealing, her delicate slenderness revealed by the
flimsy garment she wore. Excitement and anticipation lent a glow to her
eyes, colour to her cheeks. Al, glancing expertly at the ingenuousness
of her artfully simple coiffure, the slim limpness of her body, her
wide-eyed gaze, laughed a wise little laugh.
"Every move a Pickford. And so girlish withal."