“I wish we were rich,” murmured Jennie, half to herself.
“I don’t know just what to do,” confided her mother with a long-drawn sigh. “I don’t believe there’s a thing to eat in the house.”
“Let’s stop and see Mr. Bauman again,” exclaimed Jennie, her natural sympathies restored by the hopeless note in her mother’s voice.
“Do you think he would trust us any more?”
“Let’s tell him where we’re working. I will.”
“Well,” said her mother, wearily.
Into the small, dimly lighted grocery store, which was two blocks from their house, they ventured nervously. Mrs. Gerhardt was about to begin, but Jennie spoke first.
“Will you let us have some bread to-night, and a little bacon? We’re working now at the Columbus House, and we’ll be sure to pay you Saturday.”
“Yes,” added Mrs. Gerhardt, “I have something to do.”
Bauman, who had long supplied them before illness and trouble began, knew that they told the truth.
“How long have you been working there?” he asked.
“Just this afternoon.”
“You know, Mrs. Gerhardt,” he said, “how it is with me. I don’t want to refuse you. Mr. Gerhardt is good for it, but I am poor, too. Times are hard,” he explained further, “I have my family to keep.”
“Yes, I know,” said Mrs. Gerhardt, weakly.
Her old shoddy shawl hid her rough hands, red from the day’s work, but they were working nervously. Jennie stood by in strained silence.
“Well,” concluded Mr. Bauman, “I guess it’s all right this time. Do what you can for me Saturday.”
He wrapped up the bread and bacon, and, handing Jennie the parcel, he 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, 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 mother made her inquiry about the coal. “I got a little, 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 scanty meal was being prepared the mother went to the sick child’s bedside, taking up another long night’s vigil quite as a matter of course.
While the supper was being eaten Sebastian offered a suggestion, and his larger experience in social and commercial matters made his proposition worth considering. Though only a car-builder’s apprentice, without any education except such as pertained to Lutheran doctrine, to which he objected very strongly, he was imbued with American colour and energy. His transformed name of Bass suited him exactly. Tall, athletic, and well-featured for his age, he was a typical stripling of the town. Already he had formulated a philosophy of life. To succeed one must do something — one must associate, or at least seem to associate, 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 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, young men who came there to get shaved or to drink a glass of whisky. And all of these he admired and sought to emulate. Clothes were the main touchstone. If men wore nice clothes and had rings and pins, whatever they did seemed appropriate. He wanted to be like them and to act like them, and so his experience of the more pointless forms of life rapidly broadened.
“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. “It would be better than scrubbing the stairs.”
“How do you get it?” she replied.
“Why, ask the clerk, of course.”
This plan struck Jennie 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 she spoke of it 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 important individual felt very kindly toward mother and daughter. He liked the former’s sweetly troubled countenance and the latter’s pretty face. So he listened graciously when Mrs. Gerhardt ventured meekly to put the question which she had been 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 recognised that absolute want was written all over her anxious face.
“Let’s see,” he answered, thinking of Senator Brander and Marshall Hopkins. Both were charitable men, who would be more than glad to aid a poor woman. “You go up and see Senator Brander,” he continued. “He’s in twenty-two. Here,” he added, writing out the number, “you go up and tell him I sent you.”
Mrs.
