she says, you understand?”
“Sure, Madame, I understand. I’ll leave it.”
The neat little delivery car, with its one word, Grevet’s, in silver script on a mulberry background, slid away on its well-oiled wheels, and the service persons in their black satin straight frocks turned their black satin bobbed heads and looked meaningfully at one another with glances that said eagerly: “I told you so. That girl was different!” and Madame looked thoughtfully out of her side window into the blank brick wall of the next building and wondered how this was going to turn out. She did not want to have those expensive outfits returned, and she could not afford to anger young Van Rensselaer; he was too good a customer. Hehad expected her to carry out his instructions. It might be that she would have to go herself to explain the matter. Anyone could see that girl was too unsophisticated to understand. Her mother would probably be worse. She would have notions. Madame had had a mother once herself, so long ago she had forgotten many of her precepts, but she could understand. Madame was clever. This was going to be a case requiring clever action. But Madame was counting much upon Thomas. Thomas, too, could be clever on occasion. That was why he wore the silver buttons on the mulberry uniform and earned a good salary. Thomas knew that his silver buttons depended on his getting things across when Madame spoke to him as she had just done, and Madame believed Thomas would get this across.
In the early dusk of the evening when it came closing time at Grevet’s, the service women in chic wraps and small cloche hats flocked stylishly out into the city and made their various ways home. The thoughtful one and the outspoken one wound their way together out toward the avenue and up toward obscure streets tucked in between finer ones, walking to save carfare; for even those who worked at Grevet’s, there were circumstances in which it was wise in good weather to save carfare.
Their way led past the houses of wealth, a trifle longer perhaps, but pleasanter, with a touch of something in the air which their narrow lives had missed but which they liked to be near and enjoy if only in the passing. Their days at Grevet’s had fostered this love of the beautiful and real, perhaps, that made a glimpse into the windows of the great a pleasant thing: the drifting of a rare lace curtain, the sight of masses of flowers within, the glow of a handsome lamp, and the mellow shadows of a costly room, the sound of fine machinery as the limousines passed almost noiselessly, the quiet perfect service of the butler at the door, the well-groomed women who got out of the cars and went in, delicately shod, to eat dinners that others had prepared, with no thought or worry about expense. These were more congenial surroundings to walk amid, even if it took one a block or two farther out of the way, than a crowded street full of common rushing people, jostling and worried like themselves, and the air full of the sordid things of life.
They were talking about the events of the day, as people will, the happenings of their little world, the only points of contact they had in common out of their separate lives.
“How much have you sold today, Mrs. Hanley?” questioned the girl eagerly. “I had the biggest sale this month yet.”
The sad-eyed one smiled pleasantly.
“Oh, I had a pretty good day, Florence. This is always a good time of year, you know.”
“Yes, I know. Everybody getting new things.” She sighed with a fierce longing that she, too, might have plenty of money to get new things. A sigh like that was easily translatable by her companion. But for some reason Mrs. Hanley shrank tonight from the usual wail that the girl would soon bring up about the unfairness of the division of wealth in the world, perhaps because she, too, was wondering how to make both ends meet and get the new things that were necessary. She roused herself to change the subject. They were passing the Van Rensselaer mansion now, well known to both of them. She snatched at the first subject that presented itself.
“Why do you suppose Madame is so anxious to please that young man when everybody says he doesn’t pay his bills?”
“Oh,” said Florence almost bitterly, “she knows his dad’ll pay ‘em. It’s everything to have a name like that. He could get away with almost anything if he just told people who he was.”
“I suppose so,” said Mrs. Hanley almost sadly. “But I hope that girl doesn’t keep those clothes. She’s too fine for such as he is.”
“Yes, isn’t she?” said Florence eagerly. “I suppose most folks would think we were crazy talking like that. He’s considered a great catch. But somehow I couldn’t see a girl like that getting soiled with being tied up to a man that’s got talked about as much as he has. She’s different. There aren’t many like that living. That is the way she looks to me. Why, she’s like some angel just walking the earth because she has to; at least that’s the impression her face gave to me. Just as if she didn’t mind things us other folks think so much about; she had higher, wonderful things to think about. I don’t often see anyone that stirs me up this way and makes me think about my mother. I guess I ain’t much myself, never expected to be, but when you see someone that is, you can’t help but think!”
After that incoherent sentence, Florence, with a cheerful good night, turned off at her corner, and Mrs. Hanley went home to a little pent-up room high up in a fourth-rate boardinghouse, to wash off her makeup and prepare a tiny supper on a small gas stove, and be a mother for a few brief hours to her little crippled son, who lay on a tiny couch by the one window all day long and waited for her to come.
CHAPTER VII
More than four hundred miles away, a freight train bumped and jerked itself into the town of Marlborough and lumberingly came to a halt. With its final lurch of stopping, a hasty figure rolled from under one of the empty cars and hurried stiffly away into the shadows as if pursued by a fear that the train upon which he had been riding without a right might come after him and compel him to ride farther.
The train was over an hour late. It was due at five. It had been held up by a wreck ahead.
It was the first time that Murray Van Rensselaer had ever taken a journey under a freight car, and he felt sure it would be the last. Even though he might be hard pressed, he would never resort to that mode of travel again. That the breath of life was still in him was a miracle, and he crawled into the shadow of a hedge to take his bearings.
There were others who had stolen rides in that manner, for thousands of miles, and seemed to live through it. He had read about it in his childhood and always wanted to try it, and when the opportunity presented itself just in the time of his greatest need, with a cordon of policemen in the next block and his last dollar from the ample roll he started with spent, he had lost no time in availing himself of it. But he felt sure now that if he had been obliged to stay under that fearful rumbling car and bump over that uneven roadbed for another ten minutes, he would have died of horror, or else rolled off beneath those grinding, crunching wheels. His head was aching, as if those wheels were going around inside his brain. His back ached with an ache unspeakable, and his cramped legs ached as if they were being torn from his aching body. He had never known before how many places there were in a human body to ache.
He had eaten no breakfast nor dinner. There was no buffet in the private berth he had chosen, and he had no money in his pocket to purchase with if there had been. It was his first realization of what money meant, of what it was to be utterly without it. For the moment, the fear that was driving him in his flight was obliterated by the simple pangs of hunger and weariness. He had started for the far West, where he hoped to strike some remote cattle ranch where men herded whose pasts were shady, and where no questions were asked. He felt that his experience in polo would stand him in good
