Part 58 (1/2)
”After a while we'll be too rich to come here, Ted!” she said as they went out.
”Wull we?” Teddy asked regretfully. They went into the pus.h.i.+ng and crowding of the streets; heard the shrill trill of the crossing policeman's whistle again; caught a glimpse of Broadway's lights, fanning lower and higher, and as the big signs rippled up and down.
Martie drank it in eagerly, no faintest shadow of apprehension fell upon this evening. She and Teddy walked to their little hotel; to-morrow she would see her editor, and they would search for cheaper quarters. She would get the half-promised position or another; it mattered not which. She would board economically, or find diminutive quarters for housekeeping; be comfortable either way. If they kept house, some kindly old woman would be found to give Teddy bread and b.u.t.ter when he came in from school. And on hot summer Sundays she and Teddy would pack their lunch, and make an early start for the beach; theoretically, it would be an odd life for the child, but actually--how much richer and more sympathetic she would make it than her own had been! Children are natural gypsies, and Teddy would never complain because his mother kept him up later than was quite conventional in the evening, and sometimes took him to her office, to draw pictures or look at books for a quiet hour.
And she would have friends: women who were working like herself, and men, too. She was as little afraid of the other as of the one now.
There would be visits to country cottages; there would be winter dinners, down on the Square. And some day, perhaps, she would have the studio with the bare floors and the dark rugs. Over and over again she said the words to herself: she was free; she was free.
Dependence on Pa's whim, on Wallace's whim, was over. She stood alone, now; she could make for herself that life that every man was always free to make; that every woman should be offered, too. She had suffered bitterly; she might live to be an old, old woman, but she knew that the sight of a fluffy-headed girl baby must always stab her with unendurable pain. She had been shabby, hungry, ashamed, penniless, humiliated. She had been ill, physically handicapped for weary weeks upon weeks.
And she had emerged, armed for the fight. The world needed her now, Cliff and Pa needed her, even Dr. Ben and Sally and Len would have been proud to offer her a home. Miss f.a.n.n.y was missing her now; a dozen persons idling into the Library in sleepy little Monroe's summer fog, to-morrow morning, would wish that Miss David was not so slow, would wish that Mrs. Bannister was back.
The editor himself was out of town; but his a.s.sistant was as encouraging as a somewhat dazzled young man could be.
”She's a corker,” said the a.s.sistant later. ”She's pretty and she talks fast and she's full of fun; but it's not that. She's got a sort of PUSH to her; you'll like her. I bet she'll be just the person. I told her that you'd be here this morning, and she said she'd call again.”
”I hope she does!” the editor said. Her card was handed him a moment later.
In came the tall, severely gowned woman with the flas.h.i.+ng smile and blue eyes, and magnificent bronze hair. She radiated confidence and power. He had hoped for something like this from her letters; she was better than his hopes. She wanted a position. She hoped, she said innocently, that it was a good time for positions.
It was always a good time for certain people, the editor reflected.
They talked for half an hour, irrelevant talk, Martie thought it, for it was princ.i.p.ally of her personal history and his own. Then a stenographer interrupted; the little boy was afraid that his mother had gone away through some other door!
The little boy came in, and shook hands with Mr. Trowbridge, and subsided into his mother's lap. Then the three had another half-hour's talk. Mr. Trowbridge had boys, too, but they were up in the country now.
He himself escorted them over the office, through large s.p.a.ces filled with desks, past closed doors, through a lunch-room and a library.
Respectful greetings met them on all sides. Martie was glad she had on her wedding suit, and the new hat that had been in a department store on Sixth Avenue yesterday afternoon. Mr. Trowbridge called Mrs.
Bannister's attention to a certain desk. When they went back to the privacy of his own office, he asked her if she would like to come to use that desk, say on Monday?
”There's a bunch of confidential letters there now, for you to answer,”
he said. ”Then there are always articles to change, or cut, or adapt.
Also our Miss Briggs, in the 'My Own Money Club,' needs help. We may ask you sometimes to take home a bunch of stories to read; we may ask you to do something else!”
”I'll address envelopes or stoke the furnace!” said Martie, bright tears in her smiling eyes. ”I don't know whether I'm worth all that money,” she added, ”for it doesn't seem to me that anybody in the world really EARNS as much as twenty dollars a week, but I'll try to be! I'm twenty-eight years old, and I've been waiting all my life for this chance!”
”Well, even at that age, you may have a year or two of usefulness left, if your health is spared you.” the editor said. They parted laughing, and Martie went out into the wonderful, sunny, hospitable city as gay as Teddy was. Oh, how she would work, how she would work! She would get down to the office first of all; she would wear the trimmest suits; she would never be cross, never be tired, never rebel at the most flagrant imposition! She would take the cold baths and wear the winter underwear that kept tonsilitis at bay; she would hire a typewriter, and keep on with her articles. If ever a woman in the world kept a position, then Martie would keep hers!
And, of course, women did. There was that pretty, capable woman who came into Mr. Trowbridge's office, and was introduced as the a.s.sistant editor. Coolly dressed, dainty and calm, she had not suggested that the struggle was too hard. She had smilingly greeted Martie, offered a low-voiced suggestion, and vanished unruffled and at peace.
”Why, that's what this world IS,” Martie reflected. ”Workers needing jobs, and jobs needing workers.” And suddenly she hit upon the keynote to her new philosophy. ”MEN don't worry and fidget about keeping their jobs, and _I_'M not going to. I'm just as necessary and just as capable as if I were--say, Len. If Len came on here for a job I wouldn't worry myself sick about his ever getting it!”
What honeymoon would have been half so thrilling, she reflected, as this business of getting herself and Teddy suitably established? Her choice, not made until Sunday afternoon, fell upon a quiet boarding-house on West Sixty-first Street. It was kept by a kindly Irishwoman who had children younger and older than Teddy, and well-disposed toward Teddy, and it was only half a block from the Park.
At first Mrs. Gilfogle said she would charge nothing at all for the child; a final price for the two was placed at fifteen dollars a week.
Martie suspected that the young Gilfogles would accompany Teddy and herself on their jaunts occasionally, and would help him scatter his stone blocks all over her floor on winter nights. But the luncheon for which they stayed was exceptionally good, and she was delighted with her big back room.
”I'm alone wid the two of thim to raise,” said Mrs. Gilfogle. ”I know what it is. He died on me just as I got three hundred dollars' worth of furniture in, G.o.d rest him. I didn't know would I ever pay for it at all, with Joe here at the breast, and Annie only walking. But I've had good luck these seven years! You'll not find elegance, but at that you'll never go hungry here. And you lost the child, too?--that was hard.”
”My girl would be three,” Martie said wistfully. And suddenly reminded, she thought that she would take Teddy and go to see the old Doctor and Mrs. Converse.