At a quarter to seven the alarm-clock went off next her bed--how she
would have liked to sleep for another hour, or lie warm and cosy under
the clothes! The training in the habit of doing what she did not like
helped her into a little tin bath, and to dress close to the radiator,
as it was a bitterly cold morning. At 7.30 she stepped out into a
snow-covered street and then hurried across Washington-square.
Bitterly cold wind shivered through the white coral-like branches of
the trees. The snow brought out the carving on the Washington Arch;
the snow seemed to suit the whole square, and make it seem still less
a part of the City--the Sleepy Hollow in the City of Unrest, with the
solid big houses around it where ladies and gentlemen lived who had
refused to be hustled into joining in the general dollar scramble.
In the street on the other side of the square she entered a
restaurant, already full of breakfasters. She sat down at one of the
marble tables with a couple of men she knew, ordered an orange,
coffee, porridge, roll, two eggs--total, thirty cents. Her friends
were in offices down town, one of them not earning as much as she was.
They were comrades, chums, so much that he often borrowed a dollar
from her during those critical days at the month's end.
[Illustration: General Yule's Column On The Way To Ladysmith.]
Breakfast finished, and a glance at the paper--at least, enough to
read the headings--and then out on Broadway to take the down-town car.
Two passed as she stood at the corner, so packed that there was not
standing-room even on the platform for another; then one stopped from
which a few passengers struggled out, and she got in. All along the
centre of the car men and women were standing, holding on to the
straps, swaying backwards and forwards as the car swooped forward, and
jerking forward every time it stopped. No idea in such a car of the
men sitting down, against whose knees hers rubbed, to get up and
relinquish their seats--why should they? She did not expect it. Was
she not by her very going down town taking the place of a possible man
there? was she not showing that she could do a man's work?
Equality--he might think himself called on to give up his seat to one
of the weaker sex. But there is no sex in the City. Swaying,
squeezing, jostling, twenty minutes of uncomfortable cattle-truck-like
journey brought her to the big office where she worked.
Men do not doff their hats in the down-town elevators which brought
her up to the big office where she was employed, a great room near the
top of one of the high down-town buildings; the windows looked out on
the river, now a white mass of down-flowing ice, through which the
calling steamers worked their way laboriously towards the harbour, to
the Statue of Liberty standing beside what now looked a white gravel
path of entry to the city.
There were about fifty people at work in the room, three-fourths
women, seated at desks and tables, and some occupied the dignified
position of little glass-partitioned rooms. She had one of these to
herself, in which there was also a table for a stenographer. It was a
publishing-house; books, illustrations, manuscripts, were in evidence
everywhere. Near the door was a sort of railed-in pen where men with
bundles of manuscript under their arms were usually to be seen seated,
waiting. Some of these were even shown into her office, and left minus
their bundles, or more often with them. There was a hum of chattering
typewriting machines constantly in the air, like the chirruping of
insects heard from tropical trees. Constantly her telephone rang and
she had to make excursions to the manager's office, and head printers
and printers'-ink-marked men came to her with proof-sheets, and so on,
till 12.30, when she went out to lunch at the women's cafe and had
lunch not unlike her breakfast.
The room was full of girls similarly employed, ten to thirty cents
being the average of their expenditure; all real workers, none of them
the fancy stenographers that their employers frequently take out to
little lunches at the smarter restaurants at safe distance from their
wives up town. They were not a very attractive crowd--thin,
flat-chested, and often anæmic, occasionally with pretty faces, hair,
or eyes; but work, daily work, had left its impress on them all. Some
(their luncheon bills did not exceed ten cents) looked, with their
thin fingers and arms, like human attachments to typewriting machines.
There was a something not in the least mannish, but still not
appealingly womanly, in these self-reliant, quiet business beings. Was
it a sort of neuter gender, a sexless being that was there in course
of development? Somehow, they did not strike one as beings who would
bear and suckle and nurse children. Was this severe struggle and
necessity of existence to eliminate the supreme joy of motherhood from
their lives?
Back to the office, where they joined their fellow men-workers; they
were just fellow-workers, no quarter given or looked for in the
failure to do their work. Some of them earned fine salaries, yet there
seemed a limit-point--thus far and no farther--men were always in the
highest positions. Put it down to tenacity of possession, jealousy,
prejudice--anything but want of perseverance, circumspection,
industry: the obviousness of the fact remains.
Until half-past five her work goes on just the same as before lunch,
and then up town on the elevator. Dry snow is spotting the swirling
wind that eddies round the corners; the sidewalks are thick with
hurrying people; the elevator is packed to the platforms with men and
women tightly crushed together, worse even than coming down. She
dines at a little Italian restaurant, where the proprietor, his wife,
and children personally attend on their customers; it is known only to
a few who mostly know each other--constant _habitués_--magazine
writers and magazine artists, and miscellaneous, but interesting,
nondescripts; and her dinner, with Italian wine included, costs forty
cents. It is the pleasantest part of the day for her--men and women of
that little writing, artistic, thoughtful, and, in a way, thoughtless
set she had known for years; men who could never boom themselves or
others, or keep up a bluff even enough to advertise themselves; the
slow steps of actual merit made their progress seem like marking time.
Ruggles, commonly known to his friends as Rembrandt, saw her home--old
Ruggles, who painted better pictures than half the foreigners who came
to New York, but who would never be a prophet in his own country. Nice
old boy, Ruggles; but the fire was burning low in him, its only fuel
being the ashes of disappointment.
The sky had cleared, and the moon shone out on the glorious old
square, and red lights suggestive of old port and big wood fires
streaked the silent snow from the windows. "Bully, isn't it?" And the
silent pressure of her arm was affirmative of complete understanding.
Her tiny sitting-room was warm; the cheap eastern rugs and dark green
background of the walls and some clever original sketches, all were in
the harmony of taste that loved restfulness. She lit the gas-stove of
imitation logs; Ruggles wheeled a chair in front of it and filled his
pipe; from his match she glowed a cigarette, and with a great sigh of
relief and tiredness lay back on the sofa.
Then they chatted chum-like of many things. She was doing well--doing
a man's work and getting a man's pay, supporting her mother and the
two younger girls in the country. It was a strain; but is not
successful effort Brian L'Estrange's definition of happiness? So they
chatted on until it was time for Ruggles to go.
"Thank you so much for coming, dear old Ruggles; it is so lonely when
I come back here by myself."
"Why don't you get married?"
"Ah! I don't know. Perhaps I'm getting old working, and the men I
would like to marry don't care for me, and those that would I don't
like. I don't think I want really to marry any one, either."
As he shook hands at the door he said, "You ought to get married,
girlie. What a good, and true, and beautiful mother you would make for
a boy-child!"
The shooting of the door-hasp seemed to let go the flood-gates of her
heart. There was the great longing of her heart--to bear a boy-child.
"For joy that a man is born into the world" seemed vaguely ringing in
her ears. Like a deep-down spring surface-seeking, that old desire
welled up, the perfect reward and crown of valiant womanhood--and she
felt how good and tender and true a mother she could be; and as the
desolation of denial flooded her soul she threw herself on that sofa
made of empty cases, held the cushions to her, and cried--cried as if
her heart would break.
Being independent and alone in her own room, she could cry out her
lone cry without any one interfering with unwelcome comforting. Then,
pale-faced and red-eyed, she got up, the sobs still coming in little
gasps. She looked in the glass as she pushed the black hair back from
her blue-veined forehead. With one of those strange revelations of
reality that come to people in life when in solitude they look at
their own reflection in a mirror--she thought--spoke. "It is too
late--too late--for me to be the mother of a boy-child."
Then she went and set her alarm-clock to a quarter to seven in the
morning.