She would sit in that room, so heavy with its odor of mildew, her window
closed against the long, sweetly warm days, hunched dumbly on the
cot-edge and staring into the stripe and vine, stripe and vine of the
wall-paper design, or lie back when the ache along her spine began to
set in. There were occasional ventures to a corner bake-shop for raisin
rolls and to the delicatessen next door for a quarter-pound of Bologna
sausage sliced into slivers while she waited. She would sit on the
cot-edge munching alternately from sliver to roll, gulping through a
throat that was continually tight with wanting to cry, yet would not
relax for that relief.
There was little attempt for employment except when the twenty dollars
left from the sale of effects and funeral expenses began to dwindle. She
would wake up nights, sweaty with the nightmare that her room was some
far-off ward for incorrigibles and that one of the strange, veiny-nosed
inmates was filching her small leather bag from beneath her pillow.
When her little roll had flattened finally down to five one-dollar bills
she took to daily and conscientiously buying morning papers and scanning
want-advertisements as she stood at the news-stand, answering first
those that were within walking-distance.
She would make a five-block détour of the Criterion rather than pass
the nearer to it.
Once, returning after a fruitless tour of the smaller department stores,
and borne along by the six-o'clock tide of Sixth Avenue, her heart
leaped up at sight of Miss Cora Kinealy, homeward bound on her smart
tall heels that clicked, arm in arm with Mabel Runyan of the notions.
Standing there with her folded newspaper hugged to her and the small
hand-bag dangling, Stella Schump gazed after.
It was not only the lack of references or even of experience that
conspired against her every effort at employment. It was the lack
of luster to the eye, an absolutely new tendency to tiptoe, a
furtive lookout over her shoulder, a halting tongue, that, upon
the slightest questioning, would stutter for words. Where there were
application-blanks to be filled in she would pore inkily over them and,
after a while, slyly crunch hers up in her hand and steal out. She was
still pinkly and prettily clean, and her hair with its shining mat of
plaits, high of gloss, but one Saturday half-holiday, rather than break
into her last bill, she ate a three-cent frankfurter-sausage sandwich
from off a not quite immaculate push-cart, leaning forward as she bit
into it to save herself from the ooze of mustard. Again she had the
sense of Cora Kinealy hurrying along the opposite side of the street on
the tall heels that clicked. She let fall the bun into the gutter and
stood there trembling.
She obtained, one later afternoon, at the instance of a window-card, the
swabbing of the tiled floor of an automobile show-room. She left before
her first hour was completed, crying, her finger-tips stinging, two
nails broken.
Finally came that chimera of an hour when she laid down her last coin
for the raisin rolls. She ate them on the cot-edge. And then, because
her weekly dollar-and-twenty-five-cent room rent fell due that evening,
she wrapped two fresh and self-laundered waists, some white but unlacy
underwear, a mound of window-dried handkerchiefs, a little knitted
shoulder-shawl so long worn by her mother, her tooth-brush and tube of
paste, and all her sundry little articles no less indispensable, into a
white-paper package. There were left a short woolen petticoat, too
cumbersome to include, the small wooden rocker and lamp with the china
shade which she had rather unexplainably held out from the dealer's
inventory. She closed the door softly on them one evening and, parcel in
hand, tiptoed down the stonily cold halls and out into a street of long,
thin, high-stooped houses. Outside in the May evening it was as black,
as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if
with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks
her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a
drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man
stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a
Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a
sweater and cap nudged up to her.
"Lonesome?"
She moved on.
In Stuyvesant Square were a first few harbingers of summer scattered
here and there--couples forcing the gladsome season of the dim park
bench; solitary brooders who can sit so long, so droop-shouldered, and
so deeply in silence. On one of these benches, beside a slim,
scant-skirted, light-spatted silhouette, Stella Schump sat finally down.
It was ten o'clock. There was a sense of panic, which she felt mostly at
her throat, rising in her. Then she would force herself into a state of
quiet, hand on bundle, nictitating, as it were--eyes opening, eyes
closing. The figure beside her slid over a bit, spreading the tiny width
of skirt as if to reserve the space between them.
"Workin'?"
"Huh?"
"Lord!" she said, indicating Second Avenue with a nod. "The lane's like
a morgue to-night."
"Cold, ain't it?" said Stella Schump, shivering with night damp.
A figure with a tilted derby came sauntering toward them.
"Lay off my territory. I seen him first."
"Oh--sure--yes--all right."
The place in between them was filled then, the tilted derby well forward
and revealing a rear bulge of head. There was an indeterminate moment of
silence broken by the slim-skirted silhouette.
"Where you goin'?"
Straightening, Miss Schump could hear more.
"No place. Where you goin'?"
"I'm cold."
"Buy you a drink?"
In the shaft of arc-light Miss Schump could see the little face framed
in the wan curls lift and crinkle the nose to smile.
"Come on."
She watched them recede down the narrow asphalt of the parkway. At
eleven o'clock, to lessen her stiffening of joints, she walked twice the
circumference of the fenced-in inclosure, finally sitting again, this
time beneath a gaunt oleander that was heavy with bud.
"O God!" she kept repeating, her stress growing. "O God! God! God!"
With the lateness, footfalls were growing more and more audible, the
gong of a street-car sounding out three blocks down.
"O my God!" And then in rapid succession, closing her eyes and digging
her finger-nails into her palms: "Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!"
She wanted and wanted to cry, but her throat would not let her, and so
she sat and sat.
There were still occasional figures moving through the little lanes and
a couple or two deep in the obscurity of benches. After another while,
at the remote end of her own bench, a figure sat down, lighting a pipe.
She watched him pu-pu-pup. At half after eleven she slid along
the bench.
"Where you goin'?"
He turned to look down.
"Eh?"
"Where you goin'?"
"No place."
"I'm cold."
"Pu-pu-pup."
"I am."
"Pu-pu-pup."
She leaned around, trying to bring her face to front his and to lift her
nose to a little wrinkly smile.
"Aw, you!"
"Go home and go to bed," he said. "A nice-appearin' girl like you ought
to be ashamed."
"I--ain't."
"Run along."
"Where?"
"You're barkin' up the wrong tree."
She fell silent. A chill raced through her.
"O God!" she began, under her breath. "O God! God!" Then: "Mamma! Mamma!
Mamma!"
"You _are_ cold," he said, reaching out to pinch her jacket sleeve.
"That's a warm coat. Where do you live?"
"Lemme alone," she said, staring out before her as if she were seeing
the stripe and vine, stripe and vine.
"You got the shivers," he said. "Better go home."
"Lemme alone."
"Ain't there no way you girls can learn to behave yourselves?
Here"--digging down into his pocket--"here."
"No."
"Where you live?"
"I dunno. I dunno."
"You surely know where you live."
She looked up at him in one of the rare moments of opening wide her
eyes.
"I tell you I dunno."
"What's in there?"
"My--my clothes."
"Let's see."
She plucked at the knot, drawing back for him to lean to see the top
layer of neatly folded waist.
"Don't," she said, withdrawing it quickly from his touch.
"Why," he said, "you poor little kid! What's got you into this mess?"
At that in his voice, such a quick, a thick, a hot layer of tears sprang
to her eyes that she could not relax her throat for words.
"What got you in?"
"I--I--I dunno."
"Aw, now, yes, you do know. Try to think--take your time--what got you
in?"
"I--I--can't--"
"Yes, you can. Go on; I ain't lookin' at you."
He turned off to an angle.
Her first sob burst from her, tearing her throat and ending in a tremolo
of moans in her throat.
"Now, now," he said, still in profile; "that won't do. Not for a
sensible little girl like you. Easy--easy--take your time--"
"You see, mister--you see, it was my--my mamma--my beautiful, darling
mamma--O God!--"
"Yes, yes; it was your mamma--and then what?"
"It was my mamma, my beautiful, darling mamma! What'll I do, mister? I
can't make it up to her. No way--nohow. She's gone--she's gone--"
"Easy--easy--try to keep easy."
"I used to kiss her hands when they was embroiderin'. I used to grease
'em for her all night when she screamed with the pain of 'em. I used to
scream at night, too, when I was doin' my time--her there waitin'--she
died alone--there waitin'--the letter they gave me the stamp for--I--I
was crazy with scare when I wrote it--O God!--mamma--mamma--mamma!"
"'Sh-h-h! 'Sh-h-h! Try to keep easy."
"It was this way--O God, how was it?--it was this way--you see, me and
my mamma and sometimes a friend--Cora Jones--no--no--no--Cora
Kinealy--we used to sit in the lamplight--no--no--first, I was in the
shoes--the children's shoes--they used to come in, little kiddies with
their toes all kicked out wantin' new shoes--cute little baby-shoes that
I loved to try on 'em. My friend--Cora--my friend--O God!--"
"Now, now, like a good girl--go on."
"My friend Cora--my darling little mamma--I never knew nothing about
anything except me and my mamma, we--it worried her that I didn't have
it like--like other girls--I--you see--you see, mister?"
"Yes, yes, I see."
Her voice, so jerked up with sobs, quieted down to a drone finally, to a
low drone that talked on and on through an hour, through two. There were
large, shining beads of tears flowing constantly from her cheeks, but
she wiped at them unceasingly with her handkerchief and talked evenly
through a new ease in her throat.
"She died, mister," she ended up finally, turning her salt-bitten eyes
full upon him; "she died of that letter written when I was so full of a
scared craziness from bein' in--in that place--that terrible, terrible
place--but she didn't die believin' me bad. I never seen her alive again
to hear it from her, but there in her--her little coffin I--I seen it in
her little face, all sunk, she didn't believe it--she didn't die
thinkin' me bad. Mister, did she? Did she?"
He did not answer, sitting there, drooped forward for so long that
finally she put out her hand to touch his.
"Did she?"
He did not turn his face, but reached around, inclosing her wrist,
pressing it, gripping it.
"Did she, mister?"
"No, no," he said, finally, "no, Stella; she didn't die thinkin' you
bad."
She sighed out, eyes closing, and her quivering lips falling quiet.
"Do you think I'm bad, mister?"
"No, Stella! No! No! No! My God, no!"
"I'm cold."
"Come."
"Where?"
"I'm goin' to take you across the street there to the Young Women's
Shelter Home for to-night. Just across there. See the sign? Don't be
afraid, Stella. Please don't be afraid."
"I ain't."
He retied the white-paper package, tucking it up under one arm.
"Come, Stella."
She rose, swaying for the merest second. His arm shot out.
"I'm all right," she said, steadying herself, smilingly, shamefacedly,
but relaxing gratefully enough to the flung support.
"Don't be afraid, Stella," he said. "I'm here. I'm here."
His forearm where the cuff had ridden up bore a scar, as if molten lead
had run a fiery, a dagger-shaped, an excoriating course.