Jane Journeys On Part 18

My dears, here I am! I lasted just exactly one week. But I don't care. I didn't wait to be fired--I went off--spontaneous combustion.

I did my honest best at first. It was a horrible house, spilling over with fretful people and fretful things. There wasn't a cool s.p.a.ce to hang your eye on anywhere on the walls; you had to make your way through the furniture and bric-a-brac as through traffic. The food, save when there were guests, was wretched. The other servants--a cross cook and a sharp-tongued second-girl--were inefficient and lazy and quarrelsome.

The father was a dim, infrequent person who hardly registered on the family film at all. He looked overworked and underfed and the only time I ever heard him speak with any vigor was the night before I left, when he was vehemently insisting (their room was just across the hall from the nursery) that they simply had to cut down expenses, and she was just as vehemently maintaining that it couldn't be done.

And the children! If any one had told me, eight days ago, that there were two children loose in the land that I could not love, I should have done battle. The boy was the sort of little boy who makes you feel that Herod had the right idea, and the girl was the sort of little girl who makes you feel it was a pity to stop with the slaughter of the male infant.

It was the last day of my week. The youngsters and I had had a bad breakfast and a skimpy, cold luncheon, and I was bidden to dress them in their fussiest best and bring them in at the tag end of Mrs.

Laney's bridge afternoon. They were just sitting down to tea as I came in. Tea! I was absolutely hungry after the long succession of miserable meals, ready to recite "Only Three Grains of Corn, Mother,"

with moving gestures, and the sallow little wretches beside me were clear cases of malnutrition. Well, there were three kinds of delectable sandwiches and consomme with whipped cream and chocolate with whipped cream and an opulent salad and wonderful little cakes--four kinds--and candy and salted nuts. My mouth watered and I know my nostrils quivered. First, I blush to say, I thought of hungry me, and then I thought of the undernourished children, and then I thought of the badly fed and badly cared for and badly treated husband, and I looked over the other eight or ten women and catalogued them at once as Mrs. Laney's type, and suddenly I decided to give myself a treat. I reached calmly over and selected a handful of sandwiches and cakes and gave them to the youngsters and sent them up to the nursery, and then, my dears, with what solid satisfaction you cannot possibly guess, I told my mistress exactly what I thought of her. She was aghast and scared; she thought I was a maniac, a desperate fanatic.

"Edna, Edna," she gasped, "be quiet! My guests--these ladies----"

"Ladies! _Ladies!_" I pounced on it. "Do you know what 'ladies'

means? Of course you don't,--you're much too ignorant. It means--'loaf-givers', providers, dispensers of bounty, care-takers, home-makers. You--all of you--with your lazy, thick bodies trussed into your straight fronts and your fat feet crammed into bursting pumps and your idle hands blazing with jewels" (I know I was bromidic there, but my Phillipic was too swift to be polished) "and your empty heads dyed and marcelled, you're not loaf-givers,--you're not givers at all, you're takers! You're loafers--c.u.mberers of the earth--fat slugs, that's what you are, each and every one of you!

_You_"--I pointed to Mrs. Laney--"you don't even see that your children are properly fed! You don't make home livable, let alone lovable for your husband, and at this moment"--I swept the feast with a fierce and baleful eye--"you're a thief!"

She shrieked at that and all the women got to their feet. It was as if I'd thrown a bomb--and I daresay they thought I might at any instant.

"A thief," I said, "takes what doesn't belong to him, and this doesn't belong to you! You're deep in debts,--bills that your poor, hara.s.sed husband cannot pay!"--and before she could emit the furious words on her lips--"Oh, no, you're not going to discharge me! You can't, for I've left already! I wouldn't stay another night in your wretched house, I wouldn't eat another of your wretched meals. You may keep my week's wage. I wish you'd buy the children beefsteak with it but I've no doubt it will go for c.o.c.ktails and henna!"

Then, while they gasped and jibbered with rage and got behind each other and shook in their bulging pumps, I turned on my heel and made a stunning exit, gathered up my belongings and came away.

There was no welcome on Mrs. Mussel's mat, but I'm still glowing.

Aren't you both immensely pleased with me? I am with myself!

J.

CHAPTER XIV

_The Next Night._

MY DEARS,

You know, the woman who runs the Stupidity Bureau didn't think me a heroine at all! Quitting your job at the end of the first week, going off explosively, as I did, doesn't endear the Honest Working Girl to the management. It simply isn't done. She was so frigid that I decided to scratch domestic labor from my list. I shall join the gainful army in the busy marts.

Mrs. Mussel telephoned to the Stranger's Friend and the kind little S.F. bustled right out and took me to a stereopticon lecture on the bee. Subtle, wasn't it? Treatment by indirection.

And she gave me a note to a department store which will probably take me on.

Meanwhile,

G--N--

J.

_Next Night._

They did, dear people, they did. In the bas.e.m.e.nt. In the kitchen ware. All day long I was learning to sell clothespins and eggbeaters and wringers and cookie cutters and I wish you could see my hands! I wonder if they'd consider me up stage if I wore gloves? I'd better not chance it.

They were all ever so decent about helping me. The floorwalker was especially kind. (I can see you fling up your head like a warhorse at the smell of powder, Emma Ellis, but he's a meek young thing who likes to burble of his baby.)

But I'm a woman of my word and this chronicle is faithful and true.

Coming home on the L, I saw the beamish Buffalo, and he saw me and plunged to me through the crowd, saying gleefully, "Say, girlie, I've thought of you a million times, and I--say, listen, I got in awful Dutch with the wife about you, and she said"--but I slipped nimbly into my local and the door slapped shut between us.

Your heroines, Emma, were not so light on their feet. But I honestly felt mean,--he did look so friendly and fat.

I'm to have eight a week in my bas.e.m.e.nt. Mrs. Mussel gets five of it and the rest I may waste in riotous living.

Good night!

JANE.

_Three Nights Later._

DEAR M.D. AND E.E.,

Please dash downtown and have a million service medals struck off and then rush around and pin them on all the shop girls in the world! The unutterable weariness--the aching, burning, sagging, sickening, faint _tiredness_!

If ever again, as long as I live, I'm cross to a saleswoman, no matter how cross she may be to me, then may G.o.d send a sudden angel down to grasp me by the hair and bear me far and drop me into the kitchen ware on eight a week and my throbbing feet!

JANE.

_Sat.u.r.day Night._

MY DEARS, I'm turned off. After all the trying and enduring and the dead-tiredness, I'm turned off. The kind little floorwalker hated to do it. "Say, listen, sister," he said, "it's like this. We gotter let somebuddy go. Holidays comin', people ain't goin' to buy kitchen ware. Sure they ain't. Plug up th' leakin' kettle an' buy Mummer th'

rhinestone combs! Well, you're the last to come, see? You gotter be the first to go."

I bought Mrs. Mussel a shrinking bunch of violets to soften the blow, but she wondered if I couldn't get my money back (_her_ money she figures, poor thing!) if I hurried right downtown with them and explained that I'd changed my mind.

Heavens, but we had a horrible supper.

Very down indeed,

JANE.

_Monday Night._

DEAR PEOPLE,

I'm doing my best to uplift Mrs. Mussel, but she's the undisputed Queen of all the Glooms and my sprightly efforts fall on stony ground. For her peace of mind I divulged the fact that I have nearly thirty dollars left which makes me really a capitalist, but in her eyes I am simply an Unemployed.