Part 6

Jean wondered how grammatical accuracy could further the making of cloaks, but Amy had suddenly become too drowsy to explain. Rest came less easily to the newcomer. The muffled roar of the elevated railroad, heeded by the urban ear no more than the beat of surf, teased her excited senses to insomnia. Oblivion came abruptly when she despaired of sleep at all, and then, as quickly, morning, with Amy shaking her awake. The light from the three dormers was still uncertain and the air chill, for though the prized radiator clanked and whistled prodigiously, it emitted no warmth.

Jean sprang up hurriedly.

"Am I late?"

"No; early. I thought you'd better get down to Meyer & Schwarzschild's a little before time the first day. You'll have to wear your street-suit there, of course, but you need another skirt and a big apron for work. Just use these I've laid out as long as you like."

"But you'll need them yourself."

Amy smiled mysteriously.

"No, I shan't," she returned, shaking down a smart black skirt over a petticoat which gave forth the unmistakable rustle of silk. "In fact, this is my work-dress--or one of them." She revolved slowly before the glass a moment, relishing Jean's astonishment, then went on: "I'll have to own up now. The cat was almost out of the bag last night. I didn't want to tell you till this morning. I thought it might discourage you. I'm not with Meyer & Schwarzschild any more."

"You've left the cloak firm!" Jean was taken aback, but tried to hide her disappointment. "I'm glad you've done better," glancing again at Amy's magnificence; "it's easy to see you have."

"Well, I guess! I'm a cloak-model in one of the biggest department stores in the United States."

"A cloak-model!" The term suggested only a wax-faced dummy to Jean. "What do you do?"

"Walk up and down before the millionaires' wives, and make the pudgy old things think they'll look as well as I do if they buy the garment. But they never do look as well. I got the place through a buyer who came to Meyer & Schwarzschild's once in a while. He saw that I have style and a good figure, and don't say 'ain't'--he really mentioned that!--and told the cloak department that I was the girl they were looking for. Sounds easy, doesn't it?"

It sounded anything but easy to Jean.

"And you like it?" she said. "But I needn't ask you that."

"Don't I! Maybe it doesn't give you thrills to parade up and down with a three-hundred-dollar evening wrap on your back! But cheer up," she added quickly, reading Jean's face. "I'm going down to Meyer & Schwarzschild's with you this morning and give you a rousing send-off."

X

The section of Broadway to which Amy piloted Jean, showing her all the short cuts which would save precious time at lunch hour, seemed wholly given over to wholesale establishments with signs bearing Hebrew names.

"Yes; this is Main Street of the New Jerusalem, all right," she assented to Jean's comment; "but you'll find there are Jews and Jews in the clothing trade. I'd hate to work for some of the chosen people I've seen, but you'd have to hunt a long time to find a more well-meaning man than old Mr. Meyer. I only hope he'll be down this morning."

Other workers, chiefly women and girls, crowded into the rough freight elevator by which they ascended, and one or two who got off with them at Meyer & Schwarzschild's loft greeted Amy by name. They inventoried her finery minutely, Jean saw, and nudging one another, arched significant brows when her back was turned. On her part, Amy took little notice of them, and, without introducing Jean, swept by toward the flimsy partition of wood and ground glass which shut the workrooms from the counting-room, brushed aside an office boy, who demanded her business, and knocked at a half-open door lettered, "Jacob Meyer, Sr."

The head of the firm, who bade them enter, was a very old man with a patriarchal beard. He smiled benignantly, recognized Amy after a moment's hesitation, asked about her new position, and patted her on the shoulder when she told him he must be as good to Miss Fanshaw as he had been to her. Turning to Jean, he said that Miss Archer had never sent them a poor worker.

"I have the highest opinion of Miss Archer," he added, with the air of a presiding officer who relished the taste of his own periods. "Her charity knows neither Jew nor Gentile. I met her first here in New York when some of us were trying a philanthropic experiment in the so-called Ghetto. It presented grave difficulties, very grave difficulties, and it is hardly too much to say,--in fact, I have no hesitation in saying,--that Miss Archer saved the day. I recall one most signal instance of her tact--"

He would have rambled on willingly, but Amy cut in with the statement that she must be off, squeezed Jean's hand encouragingly, and whisked out forthwith. Her abrupt exit seemed to disorder the deliberate clockwork of old Mr. Meyer's thoughts, for he sat some little time staring at a letter-file with his mouth ajar, till, recollecting himself at last, he brought forth, "As I was saying, my dear, I trust you'll like our ways,"--which Jean was certain he had not said at all,--and thereupon led her to the door of one of the workrooms and turned her over to its forewoman, a stout Jewess with oily black hair combed low to disguise her too prominent ears.

Work had begun, and the place was deafening with the whir of some thirty-odd close-ranked machines which, their ends almost touching, filled all the floor save the narrowest of aisles, where stood the chairs of the operators. To one of these sewing-machines and a huge pile of unstitched sleeves Jean was assigned. The task itself was simple, after the sound training of the refuge school, but the conditions under which she worked told heavily against her efficiency. The din was incessant, the light poor, the low-ceiled room crowded beyond its air-space, and the floor none too clean. As the morning drew on, the atmosphere became steadily worse. Now and then the forewoman would open a window,--she stood mainly by a door herself, turning and turning a showy ring upon her fat index finger,--but the relatively purer air thus admitted reached only the girls who worked nearest, of whom Jean was not one, and these soon shivered and complained of drafts.

By the time the hands of a dingy clock marked ten, her head was throbbing violently and her spine seemed one prolonged ache. Her neighbors, except a thin-cheeked woman who stopped now and again to cough, turned off their stints with the regularity of long habit, straightening only to seize fresh supplies for their insatiable machines. At twelve o'clock, when whistles blew from all quarters and the other employees, dropping work as it stood, scrambled for lunch-boxes or wraps, Jean relaxed in her chair, too jaded to rise. Food was out of the question,--even the look of the pickle-scented luncheons which some of the cloak-makers opened made her ill,--but she presently dragged herself outdoors, and striking down a cross street, at whose farther end she could see trees, came to a little park distinguished by a marble arch, where she wandered aimlessly till she judged it time to return.

The streets she retraced were now thronged with masculine wage-earners lounging and smoking in the doorways of their various places of employment. All paid her the tribute of a stare, and some made audible comments on her hair or eyes, or what they termed her shape. Her own doorway was also crowded. These idlers were, for the most part, girls from the many garment-manufactories of one sort and another which the great building housed; but a man stood here and there, either the leader or the butt of some horse-play. One of the young women who had scrutinized Amy in the elevator nodded to her and seemed about to speak, but Jean felt too heart-sick for words, and returned at once to her appointed corner in the hive, where, although it still lacked something of one o'clock, she again sat down to her machine. The air was better, for the windows had been thrown open during the noon-hour, but the room was in consequence very chill, and her fellow-workers, now drifting back in twos and threes, grumbled as they came. Among them was the girl who had greeted her below, and looking at her with more interest Jean read kindness in her freckled face. Their eyes met again, with a half-smile, and the girl edged down the narrow lane for a moment's gossip.

"You'll find it better to take a bite of lunch, even if you don't hanker for it," she observed.

"How do you know I haven't?" Jean asked.

"That's easy. For one reason, I seen you walkin' in Washington Square. For another, a green hand here don't never want lunch. Not used to this kind of thing, are you?"

"To the work, yes; not the noise, the bad air."

"Where'd you work last?"

"In a small town," she eluded.

"That's different. You don't have the sweat-shop in the country, I guess."

"Sweat-shop!" Jean had heard that sinister term before. "Is that what they call Meyer & Schwarzschild's?"

The girl laughed at her simplicity.

"I call it one," she rejoined, "even if it is on Broadway. Don't low wages and dirt and bad air and disease make a sweat-shop?"

"Disease! What do you mean?"

"Well, consumption, for instance. It isn't bronchitis, as she thinks, that ails the woman next machine to you. I could tell you other things, but what's the use! You won't stop here any longer than I will, and that's just long enough to find a better job."

The afternoon lapsed somehow. Once, a youngish, overdressed man with blustering manners and thick, bright-red lips came into their workroom and told the forewoman that a certain order must be rushed. He idled near Jean's machine for an interval, under pretence of examining her work, but he mainly looked her in the face. As he passed down the aisles, he touched this girl and that familiarly. Those so favored were without exception pretty, and they usually simpered under his attentions, though one or two grimaced afterward. When he had gone, Jean's thin-cheeked neighbor told her between coughs that this was the younger Meyer.

She met him again when she passed the offices in leaving for the night, and he again stared fixedly, wearing his repulsive, scarlet smile. She jumped at the conclusion that old Mr. Meyer had mentioned that she came from a reformatory, and hurried by with burning cheeks. The night air refreshed her a little, but the way home seemed endless, and the three flights from Mrs. St. Aubyn's door to the dormered bedroom were appalling in prospect. She entered faint with hunger and fagged with a thoroughness she had not known since the earlier days in the refuge laundry.

Amy sprang up from a novel.

"Don't say a word," she charged. "I suspicioned how it would be when you didn't show up for lunch. Not that I expected you, though. I'd have bet a pound of chocolates you wouldn't come."

Jean was content to say nothing and let herself be mothered. Amy showed no trace of fatigue. She had changed her black blouse for a white one of some soft fabric, and looked as fresh and pink-cheeked as if she had idled the live-long day.

"Now for the pick-me-up," she said briskly, after making Jean snug among the pillows; and what with a tiny kettle and a spirit-lamp, some sugar which she rummaged from a bureau drawer, and a little milk from the natural refrigerator of the window-sill, she concocted in no time a really savory cup of tea.

Then, only, Jean found voice.

"Did you know all the time," she demanded, "that Meyer & Schwarzschild's is no better than a sweat-shop?"

"I worked there a year," Amy returned sententiously. "I'm not saying it was as bad all along as now. It was as decent as any at first, and I hear that even now the room where the cutters work is pretty fair."

"Does Miss Archer know? But that's impossible."

"Of course she doesn't. And, though you mayn't believe it, old Mr. Meyer doesn't know either. You saw what he is! It's only hospitals and orphan asylums he thinks about. He totters down to business for about an hour a week, and if he ever pokes his dear old nose into one of the workrooms, it's early in the morning before the air gets so thick you could slice it."

"But his partner--Schwarzschild? Where is he?"

"Dead. They keep the name because the firm is an old one. It's all Meyer now, and that doesn't mean Jacob Meyer, Sr., but Jake. You probably saw Jake. He has tomato-colored lips and an affectionate disposition."

Jean shivered.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"How could I? Everything was settled before I knew you were going there. Anyhow, it's a living while you are hunting something better. I'm in hopes to get you in where I am. I spoke to a floor-walker I know to-day. My department is full, but they'll probably need more help downstairs for the Christmas rush."

"That would be merely temporary."

"Most every place is temporary till they size you up. If you're what they want, they'll keep you on after the holidays, never fear. You may have to take less money to begin with than you get now, but it will be easier earned. Any old thing is better than Jake Meyer's joint, _I_ think."

This hope carried Jean through the three ensuing days. The conditions at the cloak-factory were at no time better--in fact, once or twice, when it rained and the girls came with damp clothing, they were worse; but she omitted no more meals, and after the second day accustomed herself to the steady treadmill of the machine.

At luncheon, Friday, Amy had news.

"Come up to the store after you stop work to-night," she directed. "Beginning to-day, we keep open longer. Take the elevator to the fourth floor."

"There's a place for me?"

"I'm not saying that. I spoke to my friend, the floor-walker, again--he's in the toy department--and he told me to bring you round."

Jean found the vast establishment easily. The difficulty would have been to miss it. Pushing her way through the holiday shoppers crowding the immense ground-floor, she wormed into an elevator, got out as Amy bade, and, after devious wanderings in a wonderful garden of millinery, came finally upon her friend's special province and Amy herself.

Or was it Amy? She looked twice before deciding. It was not so much the costly garment, a thing of silks, embroideries, and laces, which effected the transformation,--Jean expected something of the kind,--as it was the actress in Amy herself, which impelled her to play the part the costume implied. With eyes sparkling, cheeks flushed, shoulders erect, she was not Amy Jeffries, cloak-model, but a child of luxury apparelled for the opera or the ball.

"Did she buy it?" Jean asked, when, free at last, Amy perceived her waiting and came to her.

Amy sighed dolefully.

"Yes; it's gone," she said. "You can't imagine how I hate to lose it. It had come to seem like my very own."

Jean could not conceive Amy in an occupation more congenial, and wished heartily that as enviable a fortune might fall to her.

"It seems easy work," she said. "What do they require of a cloak-model?"

"A thirty-six inch bust, at least, for a starter. Did I ever tell you that they call us by our bust measures? We never hear our own names. I'm Thirty-six; that big girl with the red hair is Thirty-eight; and so it goes. Then you must have good proportions and a stylish carriage, and be attractive generally," she added, naïvely regarding her trim reflection in the nearest pier-glass.

At this point "Thirty-eight" approached, and Amy introduced her, saying:--

"My friend here thinks she'd like to be a cloak-model. 'Tisn't all roses, is it?"

The red-haired girl gave the indulgent smile of experience.

"Wholesale or retail, it's harder than it looks," she declared. "I don't mean displaying gowns so much as the side issues. Why, the amount of dieting, lacing, and French heels some models put up with to keep in form is something awful. Give me the retail trade, though. I'd rather deal with shopping cranks than buyers."

"I suppose some of the buyers are fresh," Amy demurely remarked.

"_Some!_ Better say one out of every two," retorted Thirty-eight, tersely. "I know what I'm talking about. I was a display model in wholesale houses for three years--showing evening costumes, too! Oh, I know buyers! A decent girl simply has to make herself a dummy, that's all. She can't afford to have eyes and ears and feelings."

It was now quite the closing hour, and Amy conducted Jean to a lower floor which looked like Kriss Kringle's own kingdom. They came upon the floor-walker, frowning portentously at an atom of a cash-girl who had stopped to play with a toy which she should have had wrapped immediately for a suburban customer; but he smoothed his wrinkled front at sight of Amy, with whom he seemed on excellent terms. Jean looked for a rigid inquiry into her qualifications, but after some mention of a reference, which Amy forestalled by glibly offering her own, Mr. Rose merely told her to report for trial Monday, at six dollars a week, remarking in the same breath that she had a heart-breaking pair of eyes.

Jean was puzzled.

"Do they take on everybody with no more ceremony than that?" she asked, as they made their way out. "It seems a slack way of doing things."

Amy laughed gayly.

"Not much! In some stores--most, I guess--the superintendent does the hiring. I had to face the manager of my department. You would have had to see the manager down here, probably, if he wasn't sick. I knew this when I struck Rosey-posy for the place. He took you as a personal favor to me, or that's what he said, for he's rushing me a bit. For my part, I think your heart-breaking eyes did it. You don't seem to realize it, but you're a mighty handsome girl. I didn't half appreciate it when you wore the refuge uniform. Don't blush! You'll get used to it. Trust the men to tell you. Anyhow, you've got your chance and can snap your fingers at Meyer & Schwarzschild."

"I'll tell them to-morrow morning."

"Better wait till to-morrow night after you've drawn your pay," counselled Amy, sagely. "Then you needn't listen to any more back talk than you please."

Jean followed this advice, giving the forewoman notice only when she turned from the cashier's window with her hard-earned wage safe in her grasp.

The Jewess bridled, her fat shoulders quivering.

"Place not good enough?" she queried tartly.

"I've a better one."

"With another cloak firm?"

"No; with a department store."

The forewoman smiled sarcastically.

"Don't you fool yourself that you'll be better off. Mr. Meyer! Mr. Meyer!" she called, raising her voice as the son of the house made his appearance in a doorway. "Here's another girl what's got the department-store fever."

Jean shrank from further explanations, particularly with young Meyer, but he bustled up at once and put the same questions as the forewoman.

"Which store is it?" he continued.

She told him, and wondered why he smirked.

"Does Amy Jeffries work there still?" he said.

"Yes."

"Seems to be prospering? Wears good clothes?"

"Yes."

Young Meyer leered again.

"Come round when you're sick of it," he invited. "Tell Amy, too. You're both good cloak-makers."

She turned from his satyr-face, vaguely disquieted. His whole manner was an evil innuendo. The girl with the freckles, who had called the place a sweat-shop, went down with her in the freight-elevator and walked beside her for a block, when they gained the street.

"I heard Jake chewin' the rag up there," she said. "Why didn't you cuff his ears? Anybody'd know to look at you that no buyer got you _your_ position."

"What are you talking about?"

"You didn't catch on to what he was hintin'?"

"No."

The girl gave an incredulous exclamation.

"And maybe you don't know either how Amy Jeffries got her place?" she added.

"She said a buyer for the firm saw her at Meyer & Schwarzschild's and liked her looks."

"That's straight," grinned the sceptic.

Jean shook her impatiently by the arm.

"What _isn't_ straight?" she demanded. "You are the one hinting now. What do you mean? Out with it!"

But the girl squirmed out of her grasp and darted laughing away.

"Ask Amy," she called.

XI

Jean meant to probe the mystery at the first possible moment, but her resolve weakened in Amy's presence. If the girl's light-heartedness did not of itself quiet suspicion, it at least disarmed it, while her unselfish joy at Jean's release from the thraldom of Meyer & Schwarzschild alone made the questions Jean had thought to put seem churlish and ungrateful. Moreover, Amy was full of a plan for the evening.

"I knew it was coming," she exulted. "Anybody with a pair of eyes could see by the way he's picked you out to talk to every night that you've got him going. He came to me first to ask if I thought you'd come, and when I accepted for both, he hustled right out to get the tickets."

"What tickets?" She did not ask who was the purchaser; she, too, had eyes.

"Tickets for the theatre--a vaudeville show."

Jean's face lit.

"Vaudeville! I've often wondered what it was like."

"You're not telling me you've never seen a vaudeville show?"

"Never. Nothing worth seeing ever came to Shawnee Springs. Ought we to go?"

"Do you mean, is it respectable? Sure! One of the best in the city."

"I don't mean that. Ought we to go in this way? I don't know him."

"Well, I do," rejoined Amy, decisively; "and if there's a nicer fellow between High Bridge and the Battery, I'll miss my guess. Of course, if you want to scare up a headache and back out, why, you can. I'm going, anyway, and I reckon the extra ticket won't go a-begging. The stenographer or the manicure would jump at the chance."

"Would he be offended?"

"Awfully. Why, he only asked me because he wanted you! Next time it will be you alone."

Jean needed little coaxing. She wanted exceedingly to see a New York theater, and she really liked the breezy young dentist. It had surprised her in their evening talks to find how much they had in common. He, too, had spent his youth in a country town, and, though he had migrated first to a smaller city to study for his profession, his early impressions of New York coincided very closely with her own. She later discovered the same community of interest with nearly every one so reared, but it now chanced that none other of Mrs. St. Aubyn's boarders--or, as she preferred to call them, guests--were country-bred, and Paul Bartlett got the credit of a readier sympathy accordingly. Thus, to-night, he did not share Amy's rather too frequently expressed wonder that Jean had never witnessed a vaudeville performance.

"Never saw anything nearer to it than a minstrel show myself, up to the time I went away to dental college," he confessed frankly, as they set out. "We only got 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and 'East Lynne' troupes in our burg. Say, but they were a rocky aggregation! I could see that even then."

This also struck Jean as a notable coincidence.

"It seems as if you were describing the Springs," she said. "But we did get a circus or two."

"Then your town beat mine," Paul laughed. "We had to jog over to the county seat for Barnum's. Otherwise they seem to have been cut off the same piece of homespun. I'll bet you even had box socials?"

Jean's face suddenly lost its animation.

"Yes," she answered.

"Just about the limit, weren't they? I wonder Newport doesn't take 'em up. They're foolish enough. Yet I thought they were great sport once. I used to try to change the boxes when I suspected that some love-sick pair were scheming to beat the game. Maybe you've done that, too?"

"Yes," Jean assented again unsteadily.