A "STEER".
It might have been about four o'clock in the afternoon when she awoke.
Room No. 19 looked westward--not over green swells of grass and grazing
cattle, and a wind swinging as a censer in the sky-temple, but over a
hot gravelled roof, parapetted with brick and crossed by three radial
clotheslines, upon which human garments jiggled grotesquely, like
scissored paper men. The only jig-makers extant, these, on that busy
midweek afternoon.
At one end of this low one-story level of roof, a brick rear-wall rose,
with a row of doors that opened out upon those merry clothes-lines.
Through one of these doors, as Daisy looked, came a young girl of about
her own age. Plainly soon to become a mother, the girl's eyes had that
mild, pondering look characteristic of her condition. She dragged over
the gravel a basket of clothes; and, when she had reached an unoccupied
part of one of the clotheslines, commenced to pin the washed things
up--a mechanic's moleskin shirt, a cheap, print house-dress, a limp,
lacy blouse, a little frilled dust-cap, and other little sartorial
coquetries that told their tale of a marriage less than a year old.
Daisy was taking her first look at "light housekeeping"; and, as she was
new from the country, with all her distaste of fields and cows and
"chores" uppermost, this back-roof prospect held her, as the new always
holds. To her, it was not sordid, but sunny and cosy, with the wonderful
city-sounds rising all about. She could almost have leaped across to the
brick parapet, which was just below the level of her window; and for one
gay adventurous moment, she came nearly doing it. She wanted to look in
those doors; to see how people lived, in the city; to talk to the young
urban housewife. She wanted to explore endlessly, to feed her boundless
and exuberant youth's appetite of the eye.
A knock came at the door. Daisy felt a little anxious as she thought of
old Jim Hogle. He had served her turn--secured her purse for her from
Markey, toward whom she bore no grudge but felt instead a mischievous
desire to "tame down" into a wooer--and she did not want any meddling,
old, self-appointed foster-father handicapping her movements here in
town. She must let the old man, who reminded her distastefully of the
farm, know, once and for all, that her plans were "none of his
business". Perhaps, though, he would not be put aside so easily. With
this last thought in her mind, it was a very cold and hostile face that
Daisy presented, as she unlocked the door and opened it.
"Oh-h! Woo-oo!" exclaimed a voice, with a burlesque of shivering. The
sylph of the blond coiffure skipped in, shrinking away playfully as she
closed the door. "I say--you do chill one, you know!"
Daisy relaxed her face.
"I thought it was that old What's-his-name," she said.
"Ar, yes", the sylph had bobbed over, and was poking at her hair with a
forefinger, canting and turning her head before the looking
glass--trying, doubtless, to reduce her order to some semblance of
Daisy's pretty disorder; "ar, yes--'e _is_ a bit of an old nuisance, 'e
is. You carn't guess what 'e's up to now".
"What?" Daisy's eyes widened.
"Arskin' the boss to take you on 'ere, as a dinin'-room girl. The boss,
'e'll do it, too. 'Im and Jim-jam's old pals--'old-timers' they calls
it, among the colownials--and the 'Ogle person 'e can have any think 'e
wants for the arskin'. D'you know, I shouldn't take it, if I were you".
"I'm not going to take it," said Daisy, with considerable fervor.
The sylph, pulling herself away at length from the glass, came over and
sat down on the side of the bed--dangling her high heels kittenishly
and eyeing Daisy up and down.
"Do you know what I should do, if I were in your boots?" she said.
Daisy's eyes came up interrogatively.
"I should go into service," pursued the sylph; "like as not, you'll 'ave
a charnce at some rich young man, that way, sooner or later. 'Ousemaids
have done that, by good management, even owver in the Old Country. Out
'ere, it's a--a caution, 'ow often it happens".
"I don't want to marry anybody, rich or poor, just now", said Daisy;
"but how do you get into 'service', and what is it? What do you have to
do?"
"Oh, down't you know what service is?" her companion simulated surprise
broadly; then, looking a little aside, as though addressing a third
party, the sylph murmured: "Ow, the denseniss of the mahsses! It's a
cortion, it is!"
After this soliloquy, she faced Daisy again, looking the girl up and
down as through the mistress' lorgnette. "W'y", she said, "domestic
service, I mean--service: I carn't use any other word--in some big
'ouse, with your two evenin's off a week, if you're a good bargainer,
an' a charnce to have your comp'ny in the kitchin, when the Missis isn't
abaout--she carn't always be on 'and, can she?"
Daisy was so attracted--not by the "company" aspect of the suggested
vocation, as by the thought that she might not only view, but actually
dwell in, some of the rich and romantic interiors she had seen in
photoplays at Thompson's Hall in Toddburn, and perhaps have an adventure
of her own in a "big 'ouse"--that she forgot to ask her companion the
obvious question: why she herself was not 'in service'.
"I know a girl as is just leavin' her place," the sylph pursued; "I
shall give you the address, if you wish, and phone her to be on the
lookout, so you'll 'ave no trouble a-findin' the servants' entrance.
'Ave you a bit of pyper abaout you?"
Daisy fumbled in her telescope grip and brought out an old letter, from
which she tore off the blank sheet. The sylph drew out of her coiffure a
thin pencil that had been skewered there. In a leaning, long-lettered
hand, she wrote a street name and number.
"There", she said, as she handed the scrap of paper to Daisy, "take a
taxi--that's quickest, and it will save you arskin' your way. You'll do
withaout references--the Missis in this place I'm sendin' you to is a
bit of a soft un, and Annie will see to that paht of it. I say, I should
nip out naow, if I were you," the sylph glanced at her wrist-watch,
"while 'Ogle's away at the station with 'is bus. 'E just left as I came
up. I shan't tell him where you've gone."
Daisy, her heart dancing with the spirit of adventure, went over to the
looking-glass to do up her hair. After a glance into the mirror, she
turned.
"I ought to have a clean blouse," she said; then in her spirit of blunt,
brisk self-advantage, she added: "If you could lend me one, it would
help, perhaps, to make sure I get the job."
The sylph's head came up with a snap.
"I shouldn't be surprised if it did 'elp," she fluted, "but I sharn't do
it, just the same. W'y don't you arsk for the loan of my Sunday frock,
and 'ave done with it? Arn't I helping you enough, as it is?"
Daisy, unabashed and with a little shrug, donned her slightly soiled
waist and brushed the worst of the lint from her travel-wrinkled skirt.
Then she picked up her telescope grip, and swung it gaily.
"Well, I'm off," was the verbal fashion of her parting, as she skipped
down the stairs.
In spite of the sylph's assiduity of helpfulness, the latter made no
particular demonstration of partiality as, from the head of the
stairway, she watched the girl descend.
"Ee-yes," she murmured to herself, "they _would_ put that saucy miss
waitin' at table, in 'ere where my Bob is clerkin'. 'E's a bit rough at
the start-off with the gels, Bob is--but 'e's dreadful soft-'artid when
a gel once gets 'im gowing."