Partners (8 page)

"But--where is it? What could I do at night?"

"Why, it's with a very high-grade nightclub," he said calmly. "They want you for a hostess. An acquaintance of mine is at the head of it, and I found he was looking for somebody, and I suggested you. From what I told him of you he was so interested that he came in here yesterday to look you over and was quite pleased with your appearance. You know appearance goes a long way in such work. He said he felt that you might work into the business wonderfully well if you were adaptable. I told him I had found you so, and I could recommend you heartily. Your salary will be satisfactory, I am quite sure."

He mentioned a sum that the man had suggested, and it was so breathtaking that Dale didn't even take it in.

"Oh!" she said in dismay. She felt as if she were sinking, sinking down, down, through unfathomable depths, and she wasn't at all sure she would be able to keep her head and answer him.

"Oh, but, Mr. Fletcher! I couldn't work at a nightclub!"

"Why not?" said the man sharply. He thought he had done well for her, and now she was beginning an argument.

She looked at him steadily for an instant, and then in a firm little voice she answered with her head held up.

"It isn't my world," she said clearly. "I don't belong in a place like that."

"Why not?" came the question sharply again. "Make it your world, then. That's all nonsense. It's all a matter of clothes, I suppose, and they will look after those for you. They will pay you enough to cover any amount of garments they want you to wear. And they'll send you to the best beauty parlor you can find, and when you get your hair done the way they want it and your face made up to bring out your type, you won't know yourself, my dear girl! They would brush you up on your dancing and teach you exactly what to do. You wouldn't need to be embarrassed."

"No!" said Dale definitely. "No! I could not possibly do that!"

"Well, I still say, why not?" said the man with almost contempt in his voice. "It is a perfectly respectable nightclub! Everybody in the best society goes there. I go there sometimes myself. You'd go there yourself if you had the time and money!"

"No!" said Dale quietly. "I would never go to nightclubs! Not if I had all the money in the world. They are not the kind of place I would think it was right to go!"

"Why not? What's the matter with nightclubs? And what has
right
got to do with it anyhow when you have your living to earn?"

Dale was still for a minute, and then she lifted her head and looked at him steadily with a strange new sweetness in her eyes.

"It is because I am a child of God," she said clearly, "and I don't want to do anything that I know my Lord would not like me to do, even if I can't earn my living. I would rather starve!"

The man looked at her brave young face with astonishment, and almost a kind of shame. He had never had a girl, much less an employee, talk to him like that. He had never seen a girl who was willing even to suggest starving for the sake of doing right. This was a strange new thing to him. But he rallied and was back to normal after a brief moment of bewilderment.

"That is pure nonsense, of course. Pure fanatical nonsense! Anybody who takes up with a standard like that ought to try a mild form of starving, and see how quickly they would turn around and walk the other way. There just aren't any sensible people who act like that. Well, I'm sorry," he added in a hostile voice. "If that is your unalterable decision, I guess that's about all I can do for you. If you're so choosey you'll have to get your own job, and I'd hate to say I hope you starve a little just to take some of the cockiness out of you. But of course, if by tomorrow morning you have changed your mind and come to see this matter in a more reasonable manner you might drop in and see me, and I think I can still turn things your way. That'll be about all, Miss Hathaway! Here's your order. Just stop down at the desk and take your pay."

He handed out a card such as she usually received on paydays, and turned away toward the papers on his desk.

Dale accepted the card, hesitated a second with a glance at the manager. Then she said in a controlled voice: "Good-bye, Mr. Fletcher. I thank you for your kind intentions," and walked quietly out of the room, and the man sat and watched her in amazement. It could not be that she meant to let it go like this! Surely she would come back tomorrow!

But Dale had walked as definitely out of his life as if she had stepped into another country.

Somehow Dale felt strangely stronger as she put on her things and walked down the street, away from that place that had seemed so good to her when she first came.

The others had gone out to their lunch and so there was no opportunity to explain that she was leaving them. Well, perhaps she would meet them somewhere again. She was too much excited and almost frightened at the words she had dared to speak to Mr. Fletcher to be able to talk intelligently with anyone else.

She went to a restaurant at some distance from the office where she had been working. Just now she did not want to meet anyone.

It was not until she settled down and had ordered a comforting hot meal that would not require much determination to eat, that she discovered that Mr. Fletcher had ordered an extra fifteen dollars put into her envelope to cover the other three days of the week. Well, that would help. She was glad, and she gave a bit of thanksgiving for it as she closed her eyes for an instant and bowed her head before eating. And while she ate her meal in a leisurely way she was trying to think out the course ahead of her.

If possible she must keep Mrs. Beck from finding out that she had no more work. To that end it would be a good idea to leave the house at her usual time in the morning and not return to it until her usual time at night. The interval of the day could be filled with hunting for a job again. It was near to Christmas, and surely she could get some kind of a job now.

After she had finished her meal she went to the great railroad station. It was big and warm there, and she could even get a meal there in the restaurant if necessary. A railroad station could be a refuge for her if the days continued to multiply without a place to work. There was even a big restroom with rocking chairs, and a couch upon which one could like to rest if the day got too strenuous. There were other places, too. She wouldn't need to occupy a conspicuous place in the station too often. There were libraries and museums. One could kill time in several places.

She went and bought a paper and studied the advertisements. Then with a choice list in hand she started out, for it was still early in the afternoon. But none of the advertisements proved of any use. They were either already filled, or trained workers of some sort were wanted. Some of the openings were utterly impossible.

She went home that night at her usual time, made some milk toast on her little oil stove, and went to bed, for she found herself greatly shaken by the occurrences of the day, and she didn't want to sit and think them over. She would just commit them all to her Lord and go to sleep.

For the three succeeding days she had much the same experience, tramping the city over in search of work with no result.

The fourth day she found a place in the toy section of a small department store, selling picture puzzles and blocks. They took her on, only waiting to telephone Mr. Fletcher for his character reference, and she went to work at once. But the work was not to last beyond Christmas, and perhaps not all that time. It depended on how well the picture puzzles sold. She was an extra and must be content to work from day to day. And the salary was a mere pittance compared with what she had been getting. Still, every cent would help, and she could not hope to get anything steady until after Christmas now, unless a miracle happened on her behalf.

The toy store kept open evenings, and her day was long. She was on her feet continually, and too weary to get her supper and eat it when she went home at night. She would generally stop somewhere and get a cup of coffee or a glass of milk, and find no appetite for anything more. She was too weary to read or do anything but go to bed, and some days she found it almost impossible to waken in the morning in time to get a bite to eat and get to the store in time.

She had begun to count the days until Christmas, and wonder if she would be able to get something better after the holidays passed. Her faith was often at the breaking point, and night after night, the tears would come. Could she hold out till Christmas?

And then one night, the fire sirens screamed and the sky grew lurid with raging flames. When she reached the toy store in the morning, it was gone, root and branch! Only charred walls and ghastly ghosts of blackened toys scattered grotesquely about showed what had been the merchandise. And her job was gone! Gone in a breath of smoke and flame! Stunned she crept away to try and find another, but there was nothing, apparently, now. Everybody was in a fever getting ready for Christmas. There were no more vacant places. Soon the Christmas rush would be over, and merchants did not want to take on any more salespeople just to dismiss them in a few days, so Dale crept back that night and lay down in despair. She didn't even stop to undress, she was so worn out. And it was so cold. She felt her clothes were all needed to keep her warm. For even the double blankets that Mrs. Beck had grudgingly meted out to her did not seem sufficient this night. Besides she had a strange obsession upon her that any house might burn up in the night, and it would be better to be dressed and be ready for anything. At least that was the way she felt when she lay down, though really in the back of her mind she intended to get up by and by and undress regularly. She knew that only so could she get real rest, and if she was to go on hunting a job, and of course she must, it was only through sleeping and eating regularly that she could keep fit.

It had begun to snow fitfully through the day, little hard grains of snow that increased toward night and pelted against her windowpanes with loud ominous clicks, like shot. She shuddered as she lit her oil stove. The slatternly maid had had it downstairs all day supposedly cleaning it and filling it. It was to be hoped that she had improved it. For in these days when she was gone so long, even into the evening, her room did not get much chance to heat up. So she shivered as she lay down, glad that she had stopped downtown to get a little supper and hadn't depended on cooking anything tonight.

The wicked little stove was well fed that night, and didn't smell of kerosene quite as much as usual. It gave forth a bright, cheery light and comforted her. So she tried to rest. Christmas! What was Christmas going to be! And she had always loved Christmas so much!

Well, never mind. Though she couldn't understand just what all this dread and loneliness was doing for her, she intended to trust to the end.

Gradually the little pellets of snow that bounded on the windowpane grew less pronounced, softer and plushier, and changed into big soft flakes that were making a lacy cover for the windows. Their plush blanket on the city wiped out the sharpness of the earlier snow, and softened the city everywhere into a beautiful white world of wonder.

Dale, as she lay there listening, hearing the sounds of the house die away to silence, was thinking about it all, the world around her. The tap-dancing girls gone to their theater, coming home long afterward to babble silly nothings and drop into a drunken sleep. Mrs. Beck gone to the movies as usual. The two schoolteachers on the second-story front who had recently come to the house, sitting in their big chilly room with sweaters around them, or even blankets, correcting school papers. The newspaper young man on the third-story front, somewhere. Off reporting some happening of the night, perhaps. She hadn't seen or heard of him in several weeks. He might have moved, though Mrs. Beck had implied that he had been sent away on what she said he called "a consignment" covering some political gathering. She wondered idly where he was. Likely he had friends, or he had gone to some entertainment, if he wasn't working. How she wished, even tired as she was, that she had to work tonight. It was desolate, lying here, waiting to be conformed into His image.

Now and again she would drift off into a doze, and come awake again at a sound from the world outside.

Once she got up and went to her window to see if she dared open it a crack. But the wind swept in with a drift of snow so quietly and damply that she closed it at once, and breathing on the pane to clear a place where she could look through she stood there a moment and gazed down at the city in this wild whirl of snow. There came to her memory a poem she had read during that first year of college before her mother had been taken sick. It spoke of the dim lovely vision of a city, in the early morning with the mists upon it, just waking to the work of the world. And then there was another, about that same city at night, and the throngs that filled its streets, the darkness and the trouble that creeps in hidden places, the gaudy glitter and the folly sought by men trying to forget the agony and shame and woe that is theirs.

That poem haunted her now as she looked out on the city spread before her through a mist of snow, made visible by gleaming, garish, brilliant lights that seemed out of place amid the soft whiteness now filling the world. She tried to repeat the words of the poem to herself:

 

"The stars of God that seemed to rest us so

Are shut in outer darkness by the light

That flares down on the life which fills the city

With what we love or loathe, but ever pity."

 

But there were no stars now. One could not see the darkness above, for everything was deep whiteness. Even that darkness about was white and dense. And if it had not been for the city lights, those brilliant man-made garish lights, she could not have seen the city, not even the high domes and spires, snowcapped. But yet the evil and the agony and the shame and sorrow were all there in that wide white city, its only thought of God one of blame for the unhappiness.