The rink was in an old armory, and the musicians sat at one end of the room on a raised platform under two drooping flags. It was dusty and noisy, and the crowd was promiscuous, but to Nance it was Elysium. When she and Birdie, with Dan between them, began to circle the big room to the rhythm of music, her joy was complete.
"Hullo! Dan Lewis is carrying two," she heard some one say as they circled past the entrance. Glancing back, she saw it was one of the boys from the factory. A sudden impulse seized her to stop and explain the matter to him, but instead she followed quite a contrary purpose and detaching herself from her companions, struck out boldly for herself.
Before she had been on the floor ten minutes people began to watch her.
Her plain, neat dress setting off her trim figure, and her severe, black sailor hat above the shining bands of fair hair, were in sharp contrast to the soiled finery and draggled plumes of the other girls. But it was not entirely her appearance that attracted attention. It was a certain independent verve, a high-headed indifference, that made her reject even the attentions of the rink-master, a superior person boasting a pompadour and a turquoise ring.
No one could have guessed that behind that nonchalant air Nance was hiding a new and profoundly disturbing emotion. The sight of Birdie, clinging in affected terror to Dan Lewis, filled her with rage. Couldn"t Dan see that Birdie was pretending? Didn"t he know that she could skate by herself quite as well as he could? Never once during the evening did Dan make his escape, and never once did Nance go to his rescue.
When they were taking off their skates to go home, Birdie whispered to her:
"I believe I got old slow-coach going. Watch me make him smoke up for a treat!"
"No, you sha"n"t," Nance said. "Dan"s spent enough on us for one night."
"Another quarter won"t break him," said Birdie. "I"m as dry as a piece of chalk."
Ten minutes later she landed the little party in a drug store and entered into a spirited discussion with the soda-water boy as to the comparative merits of sundry new drinks.
"Me for a cabaret fizz," she said. "What"ll you have, Nance?"
"Nothing," said Nance, sullenly, turning and taking up her stand at the door.
"What do you want, Dan?" persisted Birdie, adding, with a mischievous wink at the white-coated clerk, "Give him a ginger ale; he needs stimulating."
While Birdie talked for the benefit of the clerk, and Dan sat beside her, sipping his distasteful ginger, Nance stood at the door and watched the people pouring out of the Gaiety Theater next door. Ordinarily the bright evening wraps, the glimpses of sparkling jewels, the gay confusion of the scene would have excited her liveliest interest, but to-night she was too busy hating Birdie Smelts to think of anything else. What right had she to monopolize Dan like that and order him about and laugh at him?
What right had she to take his arm when they walked, or put her hand on his shoulder as she was doing this minute?
Suddenly Nance started and leaned forward. Out there in the crowded street a tall, middle-aged man, with grizzled hair and mustache, was somewhat imperiously making way for a pretty, delicate-looking lady enveloped in white furs, and behind them, looking very handsome and immaculate in his evening clothes, walked Mac Clarke.
Nance"s eager eyes followed the group to the curbing; she saw the young man glance at her with a puzzled expression; then, as he stood aside to allow the lady to enter the motor, he looked again. For the fraction of a second their eyes held each other; then an expression of amused recognition sprang into his face, and Nance met it instantly with a flash of her white teeth.
The next instant the limousine swallowed him; a door slammed, and the car moved away. But Nance, utterly forgetful of her recent discomfort, still stood in the door of the drug store, tingling with excitement as she watched a little red light until it lost itself in the other moving lights on the broad thoroughfare.
CHAPTER XV
MARKING TIME
Early in the autumn Birdie took flight from the alley, and Nance found herself hopelessly engulfed in domestic affairs. Mr. Snawdor, who had been doing the work during her long absence, took advantage of her return to have malarial fever. He had been trying to have it for months, but could never find the leisure hour in which to indulge in the preliminary chill. Once having tasted the joys of invalidism he was loathe to forego them, and insisted upon being regarded as a chronic convalescent. Nance might have managed Mr. Snawdor, however, had it not been for the grave problem of Fidy Yager.
"Ike Lavinski says she ought to be in a hospital some place," she urged Mrs. Snawdor. "He says she never is going to be any better. He says it"s epilepsy."
"Wel he ain"t tellin" me anything" I don"t know," said Mrs. Snawdor, "but I ain"t goin" to put her away, not if she th"ows a fit a minute!"
It was not maternal solicitude alone that prompted this declaration. The State allowed seventy-live dollars a year to parents of epileptic children, and Mrs. Snawdor had found Fidy a valuable a.s.set. Just what her being kept at home cost the other children was never reckoned.
"Well, I"ll take care of her on one condition," stipulated Nance. "You got to keep Lobelia at school. It ain"t fair for her to have to stay home to nurse Fidy."
"Well, if she goes to school, she"s got to work at night. You was doin"
your two hours at Lavinski"s long before you was her age."
"I don"t care if I was. Lobelia ain"t strong like me. I tell you she ain"t goin" to do home finishing, not while I"m here."
"Well, somebody"s got to do it," said Mrs. Snawdor. "You can settle it between you."
Nance held out until the middle of January; then in desperation she went back to the Lavinskis. The rooms looked just as she had left them, and the whirring machines seemed never to have stopped. The acrid smell of hot cloth still mingled with the odor of pickled herrings, and Mr.
Lavinski still came and went with his huge bundles of clothes.
Nance no longer sewed on b.u.t.tons. She was promoted to a place under the swinging lamp where she was expected to make an old decrepit sewing-machine forget its ailments and run the same race it had run in the days of its youth. As she took her seat on the first night, she looked up curiously. A new sound coming regularly from the inner room made her pause.
"Is that a type-writer?" she asked incredulously.
Mr. Lavinski, pushing his derby from his shining brow, smiled proudly.
"Dat"s vat it is," he said. "My Ike, he"s got a scholarship offen de high school. He"s vorking his vay through de medical college now. He"ll be a big doctor some day. He vill cure my Leah."
Nance"s ambition took fire at the thought of that type-writer. It appealed to her far more than the sewing-machine.
"Say, Ike," she said at her first opportunity, "I wish you"d teach me how to work it."
"What"ll you give me?" asked Ike, gravely. He had grown into a tall, thin youth, with the spectacled eyes and stooped shoulders of a student.
"Want me to wash the dishes for your mother?" Nance suggested eagerly. "I could do it nights before I begin sewing."
"Very well," Ike agreed loftily. "We"ll begin next Sunday morning at nine o"clock. Mind you are on time!"
Knowledge to Ike was sacred, and the imparting of it almost a religious rite. He frowned down all flippancy on the part of his new pupil, and demanded of her the same diligence and perseverance he exacted of himself. He not only taught her to manipulate the type-writer, but put her through an elementary course of stenography as well.
"Certainly you can learn it," he said sternly at her first sign of discouragement. "I got that far in my second lesson. Haven"t you got any brains?"
Nance by this time was not at all sure she had, but she was not going to let Ike know it. Stung by his smug superiority, she often sat up far into the night, wrestling with the arbitrary signs until Uncle Jed, seeing her light under the door, would pound on the wall for her to go to bed.
She saw little of Dan Lewis these days. The weather no longer permitted them to meet in Post-Office Square, and conditions even less inviting kept them from trying to see each other in Snawdor"s kitchen. Sometimes she would wait at the corner for him to come home, but this had its disadvantages, for there was always a crowd of loafers hanging about Slap Jack"s, and now that Nance was too old to stick out her tongue and call names, she found her power of repartee seriously interfered with.
"I ain"t coming up here to meet you any more," she declared to Dan on one of these occasions. "I don"t see why we can"t go to Gorman"s Chili Parlor of an evening and set down and talk to each other, right."
"Gorman"s ain"t a nice place," insisted Dan. "I wish you"d come on up to some of the church meetings with me. I could take you lots of times if you"d go."
But Nance refused persistently to be inveigled into the religious fold.
The very names of Epworth League, and prayer meeting made her draw a long face.
"You don"t care whether we see each other or not!" she accused Dan, hotly.
"I do," he said earnestly, "but it seems like I never have time for anything. The work at the factory gets heavier all the time. But I"m getting on, Nance; they give me another raise last month."