Part 19 (1/2)
Kathleen regarded her quizzically.
”When do you go to work?” she queried.
”At eight o'clock.”
”That's better than it used to be, but if you make corn bread it's likely it will only be for a week. Then you'll be so tired when you wake that the best tasting food in the world won't equal an extra nap, cuddled under the clothes, with the sure knowledge that it's wrong. It will be oatmeal cooked the night before and warmed up, and coffee made the way that's quickest, and a slice of toast, maybe, from the bread bought of the baker. You can boil yourself an egg, but they put the price on eggs up every winter to pay for the chemicals they use to keep them young.”
”How about Sunday morning?” Hertha queried.
”Sundays you won't be getting up until it's time for dinner.”
And while Kathleen's prophecy was in part true, while the increasingly cold weather and the hard hours made the morning nap imperative, Hertha did more for their little home than her companion had expected. She made curtains for the windows; she bought occasional attractive magazines; she framed a striking picture taken from the Sunday supplement. It was a landscape by Inness of great trees with heavy foliage, the clouds ma.s.sed as though about to break in storm. Before a month was over the tenement rooms took on a deeper look of home.
The life within the rooms was very quiet. Kathleen's work made her hours most irregular. As an ”experienced nurse” she was rarely on a case for more than two or three days and nights, so poor were the people among whom she worked. She had no diploma and was not recognized by the profession. During one year of her hard life she had acted as nurse in a woman's prison, but the time had never come when she could afford to go into a hospital. ”And now it's too late; I'm too old,” she would explain, ”and besides I haven't got the education. Schooling don't go with starting in at the mill with your dresses at your knees, and your hands so little you can hardly manage the machine.” Her hands were still small and well formed, and she had a pleasant touch. She was skillful at ma.s.sage, and in the winter season had a few society women whose surplus flesh she vigorously rubbed off and whose faces she smoothed into comparative youth. Leaving the sumptuous house of some wealthy woman, she would hurry to a dark room in a tenement, where the cold and poverty made her eyes flame with anger, to spend the night by an ailing child, ministering with patience and even merriment to its many wants. And as her life carried her from one extreme to another, so she herself varied in mood, from the smiling, youthful looking woman whom Hertha had seen and loved from the first to an intense, angry iconoclast who found life for the many both cruel and unjust. She never ministered and brought to health the one ailing without remembering the ten others who were needlessly suffering and whom she could not aid. ”I know that my work is nothing but putting courtplaster on a cancer,” she would say to Hertha savagely as she came back from a home where she had coaxed the growing boy back to life, to see him in his convalescence go out to a ten-hour day of racking work. ”I ain't fooled, though. I done what I could, but why won't his father fight for better hours and living conditions? He sits there and lets the boss use his boy worse than he'd use a machine.
He's got the backbone of a chocolate eclair, that man.” And then she would take up a copy of the daily ”Worker” and become absorbed in the vision of the successful cla.s.s struggle and a world set free.
”What shall we have for dinner to-night?” she had smilingly asked Hertha. ”Shall we celebrate together with an Irish stew and ice cream and then go to the movies?”
”But this is your evening for the Y. W. C. A.,” Hertha answered.
The smile left Kathleen's face. ”I'm through there,” she said. ”It's not for me.”
Hertha wanted to know more, but she was reticent with questions. As it happens, however, the silent person learns more of another's life than one who shows a voluble sympathy, and Kathleen was soon telling her friend that all girls' clubs and Christian a.s.sociations were nothing but charities; that she could have nothing to do with a charity herself, and that, had it not been for a moment's temptation, offered by a friend, she would never have entered the cla.s.s. It was the exercise that she needed and the marching to music had been the best part. ”And it's grand,” she explained, ”if only for an hour a week to be living as the Lord intended you with your legs apart.” But this morning she had been giving ma.s.sage to a rich uptown customer. ”And after I had pommeled off the two pounds she'd gained at a twelve-course dinner the night before, she begins to tell me of her charities. 'I like best to help the working girl,' she says, 'and I gave my mite to their new building, but I'm troubled at the obstinacy of the young women in refusing to become servants. They have a false pride in the matter.' I kept my mouth shut, for I couldn't afford to lose a good customer, but I was that mad to think I might have been taking money off her as a gift that I stopped in at the office and told Miss Jones I should quit. 'Is that so, Kathleen?'
she says quietly. 'It is for you to decide.' And then she asks: 'And how is Miss Ogilvie?' She always calls me Kathleen. Not that I mind it, but I'm fifteen years older than you, and Miss Jones needn't 'Miss Ogilvie'
you to me. I don't wonder she does, though, for you wear your clothes as though you had always lived in a palace, and you speak like a princess.”
”Don't be foolish,” Hertha said, and then laughed--an odd, short laugh in which Kathleen joined, though as it happened she did not understand the joke. ”Let's have the stew, only don't put quite so much onion in it, and we'll get the ice cream on the way home.”
The stew was delicious and Hertha enjoyed it, while Kathleen consoled herself for the loss of the extra onion by a plentiful use of condiments. ”I've just a good plain appet.i.te,” she explained. Then they went out into the noisy street to the theater where they sat in the orchestra and Hertha felt like a queen. In the South she had been only a few times to some cheap playhouse where she had been repelled by the vulgarity of the people and the performance; but here in New York the comfortable theater, darkened now, the music, the quiet audience, filled her with happy antic.i.p.ation. She squeezed Kathleen's hand as the picture of a lovely young girl in gingham dress and pink sunbonnet flashed upon the screen, and the story began.
It was one of the fifty-seven varieties of moving pictures, all of which, Kathleen knew, were canned in the same syrup, but which to Hertha were freshly sweet. A beautiful girl, a pink sunbonnet, a young lover, blossoming apple trees. A coal mine discovered under the apple boughs. A cruel father and separation. The girl in a gilded palace registering despair. The lover seeking fame and gold. A t.i.tled villain mocking the girl's pure love. The villain's machination, the lover tied to the railroad track, the train das.h.i.+ng to within two inches of its victim.
The escape, a night in the woods, the friendly beasts. The disclosure.
”I love you still.” The villain's contrition. His death. The coal mine exhausted. Soft music, two lovers and one kiss. Blossoming apple trees and the pink sunbonnet again. Far in the distance the sound of wedding bells. Then sudden darkness, and The Best Flavored Chewing Gum thrown upon the screen.
Hertha's heart beat fast during the whole of the story and she felt wave after wave of pleasurable excitement. It was so sad and yet so beautiful. The only thing to temper her enjoyment was Kathleen, who would laugh in the wrong places. When the hero and heroine were in great danger, Kathleen showed no apprehension. She chuckled at the approaching train, and gave little grunts of amus.e.m.e.nt when the villain threatened the girl. The only thing she seemed to care for was the bear who gave the boy shelter in his cave for the night. ”The dear!” exclaimed Kathleen.
”But it's so improbable,” Hertha whispered as the piano played Nevin's lullaby while the bear rocked the youth in his arms.
”Not half so improbable as the rest,” Kathleen whispered back. ”You can trust the brutes to do the right thing enough sight better than the men.”
As the light went up Kathleen yawned.
”Haven't we got our money's worth of romance, infant?” she asked.
”There's a meeting on Peonage to-night at Cooper Union. Let's go there.”
CHAPTER XV