Thursby lifted his head and raked the three faces with an angry glance.
"In God's name!" he cried--"can't you women hold your tongues?"
The girls made their resentment variously visible: Joan with a scowl and
a toss of her head, Edna with a timid pout. The mother's face betrayed
no emotion whatsoever. Thereafter, as far as they were concerned, the
meal progressed in silence.
Thursby bent low over his plate, in the intervals devoted to mastication
intently studying the file of dope at his elbow. Now and again he would
drop knife and fork to take up his pencil and check the name of a horse
or jot additional memoranda in his note-book. Infrequently he spoke or,
rather, grunted, to indicate a desire for some dish beyond his reach.
Curiously enough (Joan remarked for the thousandth time) he was
punctilious to say "please" and "thank you." The idiosyncrasy was all a
piece (she thought) with the ease with which he employed knife, fork,
and spoon: a careless grace which the girl considered "elegant" and did
him the honour to imitate.
Furtively throughout the meal she studied her father. These little
peculiarities of his, these refinements which sat so strangely on his
gross, neglected person and were so exotic to his circumstances, exerted
a compelling fascination upon the nimble curiosity of the girl. She both
feared and despised him, but none the less cherished a sneaking
admiration for the man. Beyond the fact that their estate had not always
been so sorry, she knew nothing of the history of her parents; but she
liked to think of her father, that he had once been, in some unknown
way, superior: that he was a man ruined by a marriage beneath his
station. To think this flattered her own secret dreams of rising out of
her environment: girls, she had heard, took after their fathers--and
_vice-versa_: perhaps she had inherited some of Anthony Thursby's keener
intelligence, adaptability, and sensitiveness--those qualities with
which she chose to endow the man who had been Thursby before he became
her father. Other circumstances lent colour to this theory: Butch, for
instance, had unquestionably inherited his mother's physique and her
reticence, while Joan had her father's vigorous constitution and a body
like his for sturdiness and good proportion....
Suddenly thrusting back his chair, Thursby rose, buttoned a soiled
collar round his neck, shrugged a shabby coat upon his shoulders and,
pocketing his dope, departed with neither word nor glance for his
womenfolk.
His heavy footsteps were pounding the second flight of steps before a
voice broke the hush in the stuffy little room, a voice faint and
toneless, dim and passionless. It was Mrs. Thursby's.
"He's had a bad day, I guess...."
Edna placed a tender hand over the scalded, listless one that rested on
the oilcloth. Joan, abandoning her determination to air her personal
grievances at the first available instant, said suddenly:
"Never mind, ma. It ain't like he was a drinking man."
The vacant eyes in the faded face of the mother were fathoming distances
remote from the four walls of the slatternly room. Her thin and
colourless lips trembled slightly; little more than a whisper escaped
them:
"Sometimes I wish he was--wish he had been. It'd 've been easier to
stand--all this." A faltering gesture indicated vaguely the misery of
their environment.
Edna continued to pet the unresponsive hand.
"Don't, mother!" she pleaded.
The woman stirred, withdrew her hand, and slowly got up.
"Come on, Edna. Le's get done with them dishes."
With eyes hard and calculating, Joan watched the two drift into the
kitchen. Their wretched state touched her less than the fact that she
must continue forever to share it, or else try to better it in open
defiance of her father's prejudices.
"Something's got to be done for this family," she grumbled--"and I don't
see anybody even thinking of doing anything but me!"
She rose and strode angrily back to the cubicle she shared with Edna. In
a fit of unreasoning rage, snatching her hat from its hook, she impaled
it upon her hair with hatpins that stabbed viciously. It had grown too
dark to see more than a vague white shape moving on the surface of the
mirror. But she did not stop to light the gas to make sure she was
armoured against the public eye. In another moment, bag in hand, coat
over her arm, she was letting herself out into the hallway.
Time enough tomorrow morning to fret her mother and sister with news of
her misfortune: tonight she was in the humour to make a bold move toward
freedom....
But on the door-stoop she checked, a trifle dashed by apprehension of
the impending storm, which she had quite forgotten. She drew back into
the vestibule: she could hardly afford to subject her only decent waist
and skirt to danger of a drenching.
An atmosphere if anything more dense than that of the day blanketed
heavily the city. Even the gutter-children seemed to feel its influence,
and instead of making the evening hideous with screams and rioting,
moved with an uncommon lethargy, or stood or squatted apart in little
groups, their voices hushed and querulous. The roar of the trains on the
nearby Elevated seemed muted, the clangour of the Third Avenue surface
cars blunted, and Joan fancied that the street lamps burned with an
added lustre. Wayfarers moved slowly if near home, otherwise briskly,
with a spirit as unwilling as unwonted: one and all with frequent
glances skyward.
Overhead, a low-hung bosom of dusky vapour borrowed a dull blush from
the fires of life that blazed beneath. In the west, beyond the
silhouetted structure of the Elevated and the less distinct profile of
buildings on the far side of Central Park, the clouds blazed luridly
with their own dread fires--a fitful, sheeted play athwart gigantic
curtains, to an accompaniment of dull and intermittent grumbles.
A soft, warm breath sighed down the breathless street, and sighing,
died. Another, more cool and brusque, swept sharp upon the heels of the
first, played with the littered rubbish of the pavements, caressed with
a grateful touch flesh still stinging with the heat of day, and drove
on, preceded by a cloud of acrid dust. A few drops of lukewarm water
maculated the sidewalks with spots as big as dollars. There followed a
sharper play of fire, and one more near. Children ran shrieking to
shelter, and men and women dodged into convenient doorways or scudded
off clumsily. The wind freshened, grew more chill.... Then, so suddenly
that there might as well have been no warning, on the wings of the
howling blast, laced continually with empyrean fire, timed by the
rolling detonations of heavy artillery now near, now far, a shining
deluge sluiced the streets and made its gutters brawling rivulets.
A lonely, huddled figure, standing back in the entry, well out of the
spray from the spattering drops, Joan waited the passing of the storm
with neither fascination nor fear. Self-absorbed, her mood almost
altogether introspective, she weighed her reckless plans. The crisis
bellowed overhead in a series of tremendous, shattering explosions,
bathing the empty street in wave after wave of blinding violet light,
without seriously disturbing the slow, steady processes of the girl's
mentality.
Then she became aware of a young man who had emerged from the darksome
backwards of the tenement, so quietly that Joan had no notion how long
he might have been standing there, regarding her with interest and
amusement in his grey eyes and on his broad, good-humoured countenance.
He had a long, strong body poised solidly on sturdy legs, short arms
with large and efficient hands; and bore himself with a careless
confidence that did much to dissemble the negligence of his mode of
dress--the ill-fitting coat and trousers, the common striped "outing
shirt," the rusty derby set aslant on his round, close-cropped head.
Joan knew him as Ben Austin, one of the few admirers whose attentions
she was wont to suffer: by occupation a stage-hand at the Hippodrome; a
steady young man, who lived with his mother in one of the rear flats.