Watching her walk across the park and down the street until the little hat with its red feather was lost to sight, d.i.c.k Brown saw before him many evenings spent in a public library reading-room. He had been lonely since he had come, four months ago, a stranger to New York. It was not his first experience away from Casper County--a year of business in Atlanta had proved a preface to his New York position--but he had never before been in a city quite without home acquaintances. New York was a fine place for movies and restaurants, for walks up Broadway, a cigar in your mouth, watching whisky and petticoats, spool cotton and the latest leg show, wink their merits at you overhead; but it was poor in nice girls. There were plenty of the other kind. He felt disgust as he remembered with whom he had already chaffed and dallied, but only by chance would he be likely to meet such a young woman as Hertha Ogilvie.
Setting his hat firmly on his head and pulling on his gloves, he said to himself that he was glad she was so careful but that he must find some way of breaking through her reserve.
A s...o...b..ll struck him in the neck, and turning he found his new boy acquaintance grinning at him. Here was a time to take off, not to put on, the gloves. Stripping himself of impediments, he entered upon his first s...o...b..ll fight to emerge wet but triumphant.
Hertha walked west for a few blocks, then north, then back to the east again. She meant to go to church, but she did not mean that Richard Shelby Brown should know where her church was. As she hurried down the street, all aglow once more, she felt girlishly happy. It came upon her quite suddenly that she had rarely been happy like this before. Her life at home, at school, with Miss Patty, had brought her quiet content; the hours with her lover which were slowly receding from her thoughts had stirred her pa.s.sion; but save with a little boy like Tom she had never played as she had played this morning. In the South there was rest and pa.s.sion, the warm breath of the refulgent summer; but in the North, there was cold, tingling air, and jolly times. It was a place in which to work hard; but also a place to play in, to go coasting, to run, perhaps to dance.
She looked so young and sweet when she entered her church that the woman at the end of the seat into which she was ushered smiled at her; an unholy liberty in New York.
"All ye snow and hail, praise ye the Lord, praise Him and glorify Him forever!"
She found it in her prayerbook, and all through the service, through the Te Deum and prayer and litany, she was entering into the treasures of the snow.
That night the thermometer rose twenty degrees and the next morning there was only a dirty gray slush upon the street.
CHAPTER XVIII
New York had been preparing for Christmas. From all over the world beautiful things had poured in at her docks and stations to be distributed among her stores and shops. From the great steamers that came daily to her ports, from the trains that snorted up to her depots, were unloaded cases filled with garments of every texture and color; rich silks; fanciful ribbons, undergarments far too lovely to be hidden, that later would shine resplendent in shop windows. Household possessions came; graceful vases; plates of china rimmed with gold; many-hued gla.s.s; tables and chairs with slender fragile legs; soft, sumptuous rugs; heavy figures in white marble. Out of the boxes came gay and intricate toys; dolls of varied ages but all newly born; brightly ill.u.s.trated picture books; tinkling music boxes. The shop windows each day, in number beyond number, recorded the mult.i.tude of possessions that make up the life of civilized man.
These possessions, however, were to be found in the city all the year, though they grew more lovely and numerous at holiday time; but as December advanced the trains brought in the special harbingers of Christmas. From Maine came the fir-balsam, most fragrant of trees, some tall and thickly boughed, others a child"s measure in height; ground-pine and laurel were brought from nearer by; while holly and mistletoe traveled up from the South. All stood in display upon the sidewalks in both the poor and the resplendent sections of the town.
When the noon hour came, and, seated by the machines, the other girls opened their packages of luncheon and ate and visited with one another, Hertha went out to walk. She did not spend more than ten minutes in the clattering restaurant, but hurried on to the great department store where the wealth of the world was on exhibit. There she would wander each day, sometimes in toy-land, sometimes where the pianos were playing or the victrolas singing, sometimes among the lovely dresses or under the great rotunda where the silks shone in rainbow colors. At first she was fearful lest she had no right to examine these wonderful things that she could not purchase, but she soon found that no one was troubled by her presence. Once in a while she would buy a little candy or a picture card to feel the importance of a customer, but the very multiplicity of the things about her and the simplicity and narrowness of her own life made expensive purchases incredible. She smiled sometimes as she thought of Miss Patty"s suggestion of a large expenditure upon clothes. The soft blue evening dress with the touch of yellow at the neck would have become her; but Miss Patty would have recognized as soon as she, that there was nothing in her present life to claim kinship with the gown. To have worn it, or a cheap imitation of it, to some dance-hall would never have entered the head of either of them. Whether wisely or not, she had chosen the position of a working girl in this, her new life, and the doors of social intercourse that might, as a student, have been ajar had she gone with Miss Witherspoon, were now closed.
Nevertheless, the splendor of the shop did make its impression upon her and she felt that her aristocratic lineage became her as she walked among its beautiful and costly things. "Now remember," she would say to herself each day as she entered, "you are Hertha Ogilvie, Miss Ogilvie of Florida. Your grandfather was a distinguished judge and left you money, and after his death you came to New York to live." So far, so good; but she must have a fuller story if she were to satisfy the natural questions of her friends. Kathleen had respected her reserve, for which she was most grateful, but if she saw Richard Brown again, and accepted him in her life, he would want to know a great deal. Southern folk were always talking about personal affairs with a kindly, active curiosity, and there was little hope that a short sojourn in the North would cure any one of them of such a trait. Yes, she must build up an unreal past in which she moved among strange people, a white child unknown even to herself. To have told her life as she had lived it, with its strange and dramatic change from one race to another, was repugnant to her. It was partly to escape the curious glances, the whispered remarks about her appearance--"Yes, one could see she might have been taken for a Negro, that curly hair"--the inquisitive questions regarding her bringing up among blacks, that she had turned from the Boston world that Miss Witherspoon had prepared for her. But Hertha Williams found it difficult to create a life story for Hertha Ogilvie and to carry it through its normal vicissitudes and adventures for twenty-three years.
It was repugnant to her to conceive and carry out a lie; and as she walked down one long aisle and up another, she had an annoying way of forgetting her grandfather and the many years she had lived with him (she made no effort to visualize other relatives) and of recalling her own black people at home.
They should know, these dear people whom she could not forget, that Christmas found her alive and well, but she would send no address and would receive no welcome word in return. That was what they had meant.
Hertha Ogilvie"s two feet were not yet planted firmly enough in the white world for her to return, even for a short time, to the black. So on a little card that showed a cottage standing in a field of snow, she sent to foster-mother and sister her greeting of love and her a.s.surance of health and happiness. To Tom she sent a top, his favorite toy. He had been famous at spinning his top, and it was pleasant to send him a child"s gift. And when she had dropped both card and toy in the box at the post-office she turned away winking the drops from her eyes.
William Applebaum at this time was a great comfort. He was a whole Christmas, in himself, for he loved every custom a.s.sociated with the day, German, English, American, and carried them all to Kathleen"s home.
With Hertha he hung up wreaths of holly in the four windows, and two days before Christmas he appeared carrying a ten-pound turkey. "I bought it myself," he said, as Kathleen glared as though she thought it might have come from the Salvation Army. "I wanted to make sure of my dinner here, and if Miss Hertha will let me, I"ll cook it under her supervision." On Christmas eve, which happened to be Sunday, he took them to a concert given by his choral society, and leaving them in the best seats in the house, went upon the stage and sang the choruses in The Messiah with a rapture of happiness and good-will. When the two women returned home, after saying good-night to him at the door, they found within a little tree, not four feet in height, but set out in the regalia of the season, tinsel, cornucopias, candles, and at the top a golden star. They lighted the candles and sat for a time in their radiance until Hertha declared that they must be blown out that they might be lighted again to-morrow.
"He"s a good man," Kathleen said as she examined the little gilt toys on the boughs, "but he lacks vision."
Christmas morning was lowering, but after she had tidied up her room, Hertha went out to church. She walked through the park, a gray and cheerless place to-day, and felt aggrieved that no one was there to meet her. There was, of course, no reason why she should have thought to see her new acquaintance, but she had half expected it both Sunday and now and his absence was a disappointment. And at the library, while she had scrupulously kept to her usual routine, visiting it neither more nor less than usual, she had not seen him either. Her life, whether set in the South, where roses and purple clematis were blooming now over the doorways, or in the North of gray clouds and snow, was just a place into which people entered for a time to play a part, and, at the end of the act, went out and left her to finish as best she could alone.
Once within the church, however, with the organ pealing out the music she had heard the night before of the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks, she ceased to feel aggrieved and with deep emotional happiness entered into the service. As Hertha Ogilvie she had at once gone to the Episcopal Church. To enter its portals and take part in its ritual seemed to her as much in keeping with her new character as sitting down at table with white men and women. But her nature so swiftly responded to beauty, there were so many sensitive chords of the spirit that vibrated to the chant of the service, or to the moments of silent prayer within the darkened church amid the mult.i.tude of throbbing souls, that she grew to love the church of her adoption. "How glad I am to be white," she thought as she stood up and heard the Te Deum ring through the softly lighted s.p.a.ces. "And yet how queer it is to be glad, for I"ve always been just the same."
The snow began to fall at one o"clock, and when Applebaum appeared for dinner at three (he had not been allowed to help in its preparation) he made much ado of standing in the hall and shaking off the flakes.
"I especially ordered a white Christmas for you, Miss Hertha," he called as he stood in the open doorway.
She smiled in reply and asked him to come in.
"Could I have a word with Kitty?" he stammered.
Leaving him still in the hall, clutching nervously at his umbrella, she went into the kitchen and sent out Kathleen.
Applebaum was much embarra.s.sed. "Would you mind, Kitty?" he said.
"There"s a little boy downstairs that was in the street a minute ago, yelling loud enough to drown a whole orchestra because they were taking his mother away to the hospital. He was pounding and kicking the doctor until I promised him a turkey dinner, when he stopped as if his mouthpiece was broken. Do you mind if I bring him up?"
"Why, of course not," she answered, "it"s only you that would mind, for you"re not used to children."
When he appeared in the hall again he was accompanied by a singularly unattractive boy of eight with a colorless face and incredibly dirty hands.
"We hadn"t time to fix up," Applebaum said with forced cheerfulness, endeavoring to make proper connections between a very shabby pair of trousers and a soiled shirt. "There, that"s better."
"Come this way," Hertha called, and to the surprise of the others the boy followed her down the hall into her bedroom.
Getting some hot water, she helped him roll up his sleeves and then, handing him her soap, told him to wash.
At this point he shook his head vigorously. "I can"t, Miss," he explained; "it would chap "em. Yer don"t wash yer hands in winter."
"Just try," she suggested.
With a great splash he plunged in his hands, found the warm water pleasant, the soap agreeably slippery; and while he scowled as he rubbed, under Hertha"s silent supervision, he made a thorough job.
"Now, look," she said when he had finished with her towel.
The boy looked down and out beyond his coat-sleeves, where once there had been black, were now white, astonishingly white, hands. They gleamed against his dark trousers. Slowly a smile spread over his face as though he were welcoming back summer friends.
"Tom could never get a result like that," Hertha thought as they walked into the kitchen together. She placed the lad at Kathleen"s left where he watched voraciously the carving of the deliciously browned turkey. He grabbed at the first plate, which, nevertheless, went on its way to Hertha. But when the second turned not to the left but to the right and landed in front of Applebaum, his anger rose.
"d.a.m.n you," he said, grabbing Kathleen by the arm, "gimme something to eat!"
In a flash she had boxed his ear. "Keep your mouth shut," she commanded, "if you want to get anything in it. No wonder your poor mother"s in the hospital!"
The boy sniffled a little, but remained silent. When he received his portion he fell upon it voraciously, swallowing potato in gulps, tearing at bones, and cleaning the plate of its last drop of gravy. This accomplished (it occupied not more than five minutes) he seized his cap, ran from the room, leaving the doors wide open in his flight so that they heard the front door slam, and rushed into the street.
Hertha looked at the empty plate. "I"ve seen hungry boys before, but never one so hungry as that," she said.
"Poor little kid," said Kathleen, "and he missed his pudding!"
"You weren"t pitying him a while ago." There was reproach in Hertha"s voice.
Kathleen made haste to explain. "That was the only language he knew. I done that or he would have had us in h.e.l.l in a minute. Perhaps you could have managed better," she added, almost humbly, "you got him to wash his hands."
Applebaum had risen from his place while they were talking and had taken away the boy"s plate. The exit of his unsightly, bad mannered guest was a great relief, and he now sat down and attacked his food with interest.
"We have fed the hungry," he said solemnly from the depths of his plate.
Kathleen flew at him. "And so that"s why you done it! I was wondering you were so thick with the kids all of a sudden. You wanted to ease your conscience on Christmas day! Well, you"re in it now with the Bowery Mission and the Salvation Army and Tim Sullivan and you can enjoy yourself. Charity to-day is on the job."
"Why not say the Christmas spirit?" he made answer. "I meant it kindly."
A lovely look came over the Irish woman"s face. All her irritability vanished, and, smiling at them like some strong saint, she lifted her coffee cup. "To the Christmas spirit, then, and may it stay with us all the year round."