Читать книгу Bread - Charles G. Norris - Страница 20

Love swept them tumultuously onward. There was no time to pause, to consider, no time to calculate, none to take stock of one’s self. In a week Jeannette Sturgis and Roy Beardsley were friends, in ten days they were lovers. Every morning he met her on the Avenue and walked with her to within a block of the office, and in the evening he joined her for the tramp homeward. He begged her again and again to lunch with him but to this she would not agree. They knew they loved each other now, but dared not speak of it. He was diffident, eager to ingratiate himself with her, fearful of her displeasure; and she,—while she confessed her love to herself,—passionately resolved he should never guess it nor persuade her to acknowledge it. She had an unreasonable primitive dread of what might follow if Roy should speak. Their love was all too sweet as it was. She did not want to risk spoiling it, and trembled at the thought of its avowal.

Yet in her heart she knew what must inevitably happen. Their attraction for one another was stronger than either; it was rushing them both headlong down the swift current of its precipitous course.

On the very day the words were trembling on her lover’s lips came the staggering announcement that on the fifteenth day of May the activities of the Soulé Publishing Company in selling the Universal History of the World would cease, and the services of all employees would terminate on that date.

The girls told Jeannette the news the moment she arrived at the office, and she found it confirmed on a slip of paper in an envelope on her typewriting table.

“All? Every one?” she asked blankly. She had confidently expected that she would be kept on,—for a month at least.

“Well, that’s what they say; Mr. Beardsley, Miss Gibson,—everybody.”

“Oh,” murmured Jeannette, betraying her disappointment.

“Did you think they’d keep you on the pay-roll after the rest of us were fired?” asked Miss Flannigan airily.

Jeannette perceptibly straightened herself and levelled a cool glance at the girl.

“Perhaps,” she admitted.

“Oh-h,—is that so?” mimicked Miss Flannigan. “Well, you got another think coming,—didn’t you?”

Jeannette drowned the words by attacking her machine, her fingers flying, the warning ping of the tiny bell sounding at half-minute intervals. But her heart was lead within her, and her throat tightened convulsively. She was going to lose her job! She was going to be thrown out of work! She was going to be among the unemployed again! Her mother! ... And Alice! ... That precious five dollars a week that was all her own!

The rest of the day was dreary, interminable. Demoralization was in the air. The girls whispered openly among themselves, and filtered by twos and threes to the dressing-room, where they congregated and gossiped. The spring sunshine grew stale, and poured brazenly through the west windows. Miss Flannigan chewed gum incessantly as she giggled noisily over confidences with a neighbor. Even Beardsley seemed to have lost interest for Jeannette.

Yet when she came to his desk later in the day for the usual dictation, he handed her a paper on which he had written:

“You mustn’t be downhearted. There is always a demand for good stenographers. You won’t have the slightest difficulty in getting another job. I wish I was as sure of one myself. May I walk home with you this evening?”

She gave him no definite answer but she liked him for his encouragement and sympathy. Whenever she sat near his desk, note-book in hand, waiting for him to dictate to her, he was to her a superior being, one whose judgment and perception were above her own; he was her “boss.” It was different when she met him outside the office; he was just a boy then,—a boy who had flunked out of college. Now he, too, had lost his job. Like her, he would soon be unemployed. No longer need she fear his possible censure of her work, or take pleasure in his praise of it. She realized he had lost weight with her.

After office hours that evening, he met her outside the building and as he walked home with her was full of philosophical counsel.

“Why, Miss Sturgis, it’s never hard for a girl to get a job, —a,girl who’s got a profession, and who’s shown herself to be a first-rate stenographer. The offices downtown are just crazy to get hold of girls like you. You won’t have the slightest difficulty in finding another position.... If you were me, you’d have something to worry about. I’ve got to get a job that will land me somewhere,—a job in which I can rise to something better.”

“But so have I,” said Jeannette.

“Well, yes, I know.... But girls’re different. They only want a job for a little while,—a year, two or three years perhaps, and then they get married. Working for girls is only a sort of stop-gap.”

“No, it isn’t; not always. There’s many a girl who perhaps doesn’t regard matrimony with such awful importance as you men think. I mean girls who aren’t thinking about marriage at all, and who really want to become smart, capable business women.”

Roy smiled deprecatingly. “But I’m talking about the average girl,” he said.

“And so am I. Girls have a right to be economically independent, and I can’t see why they have to stop working just because they marry,—any more than men do.”

“Girls have to stay home and run the house.”

“Oh, what nonsense!” cried Jeanette. “It’s no more her home than it is the man’s.”

Roy shrugged his slight shoulders. He had no desire to argue with her. He was more concerned with the thought that in the future there would be no office to bring them together daily.

“There are only two days more. Saturday we get our last pay envelope.”

They walked on in silence.

“I hope you’ll let me come to see you. We’ve become such good friends. I’d hate to....”

He left the sentence awkwardly unfinished.

“Oh,—I’d like to have you call some evening,” she said with apparent indifference. “I’d like to have you meet my mother and sister.”

“I’d love to.... I want to know them both.”

“Well, come Sunday,—to—to dinner. We have it at one o’clock. I suppose it’s really lunch, but we’re awfully old-fashioned and we always have our Sunday dinner in the middle of the day.... You mustn’t expect much; we live very simply.”

“Thanks, awfully....”

“We don’t keep any servant, you know.”

“I quite understand. You’re very good to invite me.”

“I’m sure my mother and sister will be glad to meet you.”

“I’m awfully anxious to know them.”

“Well, come Sunday.”

“You bet I will.”

“Of course, they’ve heard about ‘Mr. Beardsley.’”

“Have they? ... Do you talk about me sometimes to them?”

“Why, of course! ... Naturally.... What do you expect?”

“I hope you’ve given me a good character.”

“I daresay they think you’re an old bald-headed man with a thick curly beard.”

“Oh, no! ... They’ll be terribly disappointed!”

“I’m going to tell them you’re a gruff old codger with a perpetual grouch.”

“Miss Sturgis,—please!”

They were both laughing hilariously.

“Here’s your home. I had no idea we had walked so far.... Shall I see you to-morrow? I’ll be waiting at the Seventy-second Street entrance to the Park.”

“All right.”

“At eight o’clock?”

She nodded, waved her hand to him, and ran up the stone steps. He waited until she had fitted her key into the lock, and the heavy glass-panelled door had closed behind her.