Mr. Bauman eventually, “I guess it’s all right this time. Do what you can for me Saturday.”
He laid out the bread and bacon, and when about to hand it to them added, with a touch of cynicism:
“When you get money again, I guess you’ll go and trade somewhere else.”
“No,” returned Mrs. Gerhardt, “you know better than that.” But she was too nervous to parley long.
They went out into the shadowy street again, and on past the low cottages to their own home.
“I wonder,” said the mother wearily, when they neared the door, “if they’ve got any coal?”
“Don’t worry,” said Jennie. “If they haven’t, I’ll go.”
“A man run us away,” was almost the first greeting that the perturbed George offered, when the children had gathered in the kitchen to discuss developments with their mother. “I got some though,” he added. “I threw it off a car.”
Mrs. Gerhardt only smiled, but Jennie laughed.
“How is Veronica?” she inquired.
“She seems to be sleeping,” said the father. “I gave her medicine again at five.”
While the scant meal was being thus tardily prepared, the mother went to the cot-side, taking up another night’s vigil that was almost without sleep.
During the preparation of the meal, such as it was, Sebastian made a suggestion. His larger experience in social and commercial matters made this valuable. Though only a car-builder’s apprentice, without any education, except such as pertained to Lutheran doctrine, to which he objected very much, he was imbued with American color and energy. His transformed name of Bass suited him exactly. Tall, athletic and well-featured for his age, he had already received those favors and glances from the young girls that tend to make the bright boy a dandy. With the earliest evidence of such interest, he had begun to see that appearances were worth something, and from that to the illusion that they were more important than anything else, was but an easy step. At the car-works he got in with a half-dozen other young boys, who knew Columbus and its possibilities thoroughly, and with them he fraternized until he was a typical stripling of the town. He knew all about ball-games and athletics, had heard that the state capital contained the high and mighty of the land, loved the theatre, with its suggestion of travel and advertisement, and was not unaware that to succeed one must do something—associate, or at least, seem to, with those who were foremost in the world of appearances.
For this reason, the young boy loved to hang about the Columbus House. It seemed to him that this hotel with its glow and shine was the centre and circumference of all that was worth while in the social sense. He would go downtown evenings, when he first secured money enough to buy a decent suit of clothes, and stand around the hotel entrance with his friends, kicking his heels, smoking a two-for-five-cent cigar, preening himself on his stylish appearance and looking after the girls. Others were there with him, town dandies and nobodies, those who gambled, or sought other pleasures, and young men who came there to get shaved or to drink a glass of whiskey. And all of these he both admired and sought to emulate. Clothes were the main persuasion. If they wore nice clothes and had rings and pins, whatever they did seemed appropriate. He wanted to be like them, and act like them, and so his experience of the more pointless forms of life rapidly broadened.
It was he who had spoken to his mother more than once of the Columbus House, and now that she was working there, much to his mortification, he thought that it would be better if they only took laundry from it. Work they had to, in some such difficult way, but if they could get some of these fine gentlemen’s laundry to do, how much better it would be. Others did it.
“Why don’t you get some of those hotel fellows to give you their laundry?” he asked of Jennie after she had related the afternoon’s experiences to him. “It would be better than scrubbing the stairs.”
“How do you get it?” she replied.
“Why, ask the clerk, of course.”
This struck her as very much worth while.
“Don’t you ever speak to me if you meet me around there,” he cautioned her a little later, privately. “Don’t you let on that you know me.”
“Why?” she asked, innocently.
“Well, you know why,” he answered, having indicated before that when they looked so poor he did not want to be disgraced by having to own them as relatives. “Just you go on by. Do you hear?”
“All right,” she returned, meekly, for although this youth was not much over a year her senior, his superior will dominated.
The next day on their way to the hotel, Jennie spoke to her mother.
“Bass said we might get some of the laundry of the men at the hotel to do.”
Mrs. Gerhardt, whose mind had been straining all night at the problem of adding something to the three dollars which her six afternoons would bring her, approved of the idea.
“So we might,” she said. “I’ll ask that clerk.”
When they reached the hotel, however, no immediate opportunity presented itself. They worked on until late in the afternoon. Then, as fortune would have it, the housekeeper sent them in to scrub up the floor behind the clerk’s desk. That individual felt very kindly toward both mother and daughter. He liked the former’s sweetly troubled countenance, and the latter’s pretty face. When they were working about him on their knees, he did not feel irritated at all. Finally they got through, and Mrs. Gerhardt ventured very meekly to put the question which she had been anxiously revolving in her mind all the afternoon.
“Is there any gentleman here,” she said, “who would give me his washing to do? I’d be so very much obliged for it.”
The clerk looked at her, and again saw what was written all over her face, absolute want.
“Let’s see,” he answered, thinking of Senator Brander and Marshall Hopkins. Both were men of large, charitable mould who would be more than glad to aid a poor woman. “You go up and see Senator Brander. He’s in twenty-two. Here,” he added, writing out the number, “you go up and tell him I sent you.”
Mrs. Gerhardt took the card with a tremor of gratefulness. Her eyes looked the words she could not say.
“That’s all right,” said the clerk, observing her emotion. “You go right up. You’ll find him in his room now.”
With the greatest diffidence Mrs. Gerhardt knocked at number twenty-two. Jennie stood silently at her side.
After a moment the door was opened, and in the full radiance of the bright room stood the senator. He was as faultlessly attired as before, only this time, because of a fancy smoking coat, he looked younger.
“Well, madam,” he said, recognizing the couple, and particularly the daughter, he had seen upon the stairs, “what can I do for you?”
Very much abashed, the mother hesitated in her reply.
“We would like to know if you have any washing you could let us have to do?”
“Washing,” he repeated after her, in a voice which
