Calvary Alley

Chapter XIII. Eight to Six

Through that long, wet spring Nance did her ten hours a day, six days in the week and on the seventh washed her clothes and mended them. Her breaking in was a hard one, for she was as quick of tongue as she was of fingers, and her tirades against the monotony, the high speed, and the small pay were frequent and vehement. Every other week when Dan was on the night shift, she made up her mind definitely that she would stand it no longer.

But on the alternate weeks when she never failed to find him waiting at the gas-pipe to take her home, she thought better of it. She loved to slip in under his big cotton umbrella, when the nights were rainy, and hold to his elbow as he shouldered a way for her through the crowd; she liked to be a part of that endless procession of bobbing umbrellas that flowed down the long, wet, glistening street; best of all she liked the distinction of having a "steady" and the envious glances it brought her from the other girls.

Sometimes when they paused at a shop window, she caught her reflection in a mirror, and smiled approval at the bright face under the red tam. She wondered constantly if Dan thought she was pretty and always came to the conclusion that he did not.

From the time they left the factory until they saw the towering bulk of the cathedral against the dusk, Nance's chatter never ceased. She dramatized her experiences at the factory; she gave a lively account of the doings of the Snawdor family; she wove tales of mystery around old Mr. Demry. She had the rare gift of enhancing every passing moment with something of importance and interest.

Dan listened with the flattering homage a slow, taciturn nature often pays a quick, vivacious one. It was only when problems concerning the factory were touched upon that his tongue lost its stiffness. Under an unswerving loyalty to his employers was growing a discontent with certain existing conditions. The bad lighting system, the lack of ventilation, the employment of children under age, were subjects that rendered him eloquent. That cruel month spent in the reformatory had branded him so deeply that he was supersensitive to the wrongs of others, and spent much of his time in planning ways and means to better conditions.

"Don't you ever want a good time, Dan?" Nance asked. "Don't you ever want to sort of let go and do something reckless?"

"No; but I'll tell you what I do want. I want a' education. I've a good mind to go to night school and try to pick up some of the things I didn't get a chance to learn when I was a kid."

Nance scoffed the idea; school was almost invisible to her from the giddy height of sixteen. "Let's go on a bat," she urged. "Let's go out and see something."

So on the four following Sundays Dan took her to see the library, the reservoir, the city hall, and the jail. His ideas of recreation had not been cultivated.

The time in the week to which she always looked forward was Saturday afternoon. Then they got out early, and if the weather was fine, they would stop in Post-Office Square and, sitting on one of the iron benches, watch the passing throng. There was something thrilling in the jostling crowds, and the electric signs flashing out one by one down the long gay thoroughfare.

Post-Office Square, at the end of the day, was always littered with papers and trash. In its center was a battered, weather kiosk, and facing it, was a huge electric advertisement which indulged in the glittering generality, that "You get what you pay for."

It was not a place to inspire romance, yet every Saturday its benches were crowded with boys and girls who had no place to visit except on the street.

Through the long spring dusks, with their tender skies and silver stars, Nance and Dan kept company, unconcerned with the past or the future, wholly content with the May-time of the present. At a word or touch from Dan, Nance's inflammable nature would have taken fire but Dan, under Mrs. Purdy's influence, was passing through an acute stage of religious conversion, and all desires of the flesh were sternly repressed by that new creed to which he was making such heroic efforts to conform. With the zeal of a new convert, he considered it his duty to guard his small companion against all love-making, including his own.

Nance at an early age had developed a protective code that even without Dan's forbidding looks and constant surveillance might have served its purpose. Despite the high spirits and free speech that brought her so many admiring glances from the boys in the factory, it was soon understood that the "Molloy kid" was not to be trifled with.

"Say, little Sister, I like your looks," Bean had said to her one morning when they were alone in the hall. "It's more than I do yours," Nance had answered coolly, with a critical glance at his pimply nose.

As summer came on, the work, which at first was so difficult, gradually became automatic, and while her shoulders always ached, and her feet were always tired, she ceased for the most part to think of them. It was the confinement that told upon her, and when the long bright days came, and she thought of Forest Home and its woods and streams, her restlessness increased. The stifling finishing room, the endless complaints of the girls, and the everlasting crunching of glass under foot were at times almost unendurable.

One day when the blue of the sky could not be dimmed even by factory smoke, and the air was full of enticement, Nance slipped out at the noon hour, and, watching her chance, darted across the factory yard out through the stables, to the road beyond. A decrepit old elm-tree, which had evidently made heroic effort to keep tryst with the spring, was the one touch of green in an otherwise barren landscape. Scrambling up the bank, Nance flung herself on the ground beneath its branches, and between the bites of a dry sandwich, proceeded to give vent to some of her surplus vitality.

"Arra, come in, Barney McKane, out of the rain," she sang at the top of her voice.

So absorbed was she in trying operatic effects that she did not notice an approaching automobile until it came to a stop in the road below.

"Hi there, Sembrich!" commanded a fresh young voice, the owner of which emphasized his salute with his horn, "are you one of the factory kids?"

Nance rose to a sitting posture.

"What's it to you?" she asked, instantly on the defensive.

"I want to know if Mr. Clarke's come in. Have you seen him?"

"No, indeed," said Nance, to whom Mr. Clarke was as vague as the Deity; then she added good-naturedly, "I'll go find out if you want me to."

The young man shut off his engine and, transferring two struggling pigeons from his left hand to his right, dismounted.

"Never mind," he said. "I'll go myself. Road's too rotten to take the machine in." Then he hesitated, "I say, will you hold these confounded birds 'til I come back? Won't be gone a minute. Just want to speak to the governor."

Nance scrambled down the bank and accepted the fluttering charges, then watched with liveliest interest the buoyant figure in the light suit go swinging up the road. There was something tantalizingly familiar in his quick, imperious manner and his brown, irresponsible eyes. In her first confusion of mind she thought he must be the prince come to life out of Mr. Demry's old fairy tale. Then she caught her breath.

"I believe it's that Clarke boy!" she thought, with rising excitement, "I wonder if he'd remember the fight? I wonder if he'd remember me?"

She went over to the automobile and ran her fingers over the silver initials on the door.

"M.D.C," she repeated. "It is him! It is!"

In the excitement of her discovery she relaxed her grasp on the pigeons, and one of them escaped. In vain she whistled and coaxed; it hopped about in the tree overhead and then soared away to larger freedom.

Nance was aghast at the catastrophe. She did not wait for the owner's return, but rushed headlong down the road to meet him.

"I let one of 'em go!" she cried in consternation, as he vaulted the fence and came toward her. "I wouldn't 'a' done it for anything in the world. But I'll pay you for it, a little each week. Honest I will!"

The handsome boyish face above her clouded instantly.

"You let it go?" he repeated furiously. "You little fool you! How did you do it?"

Nance looked at him for a moment; then she deliberately lifted the other pigeon as high as she could reach and opened her hand.

"Like that!" she cried.

Mac Clarke watched his second bird wheel into space; then his amazed glance dropped to the slim figure of the young girl in her short gingham dress, with the sunlight shining on her hair and on her bright, defiant eyes.

"You've got your nerve!" he said with a short laugh; then he climbed into his car and, with several backward glances of mingled anger and amusement, drove away.

Nance related the incident with great gusto to Dan that night on the way home.

"He never recognized me, but I knew him right off. Same old Smart Aleck, calling people names."

"I was up in the office when he come in," said Dan. "He'd been held up for speeding and wanted his father to pay his fine."'

"Did he do it?"

"Of course. Mac always gets what he wants. He told Bean he wasn't going to stay at that school in Virginia if he had to make 'em expel him. Sure enough they did. Wouldn't I like to have his chance though!"

"I don't blame him for not wanting to go to school," said Nance. Then she added absently, "Say, he's got to be a awful swell-looker, hasn't he?"

That night, for the first time, she objected to stopping in Post-Office Square.

"It ain't any fun to hang around there," she said impatiently. "I'm sick of doing tame things all the time."

The next time Nance saw Mac Clarke was toward the close of the summer. Through the long sweltering hours of an interminable August morning she had filed and chipped bottles with an accuracy and speed that no longer gave cause for criticism. The months of confinement were beginning to tell upon her; her bright color was gone, and she no longer had the energy at the noon hour to go down the road to the elm-tree. She wanted above all things to stretch out at full length and rest her back and relax all those tense muscles that were so reluctantly learning to hold one position for hours at a time.

At the noon hour she had the unexpected diversion of a visit from Birdie Smelts. Birdie had achieved her cherished ambition of going on the stage, and was now a chorus girl in the "Rag Time Follies." Meager news of her had reached the alley from time to time, but nobody was prepared for the very pretty and sophisticated young person who condescended to accept board and lodging from her humble parents during the interval between her engagements. Nance was genuinely glad to see her and especially gratified by the impression her white coat-suit and black picture hat made on the finishing room.

"It must be grand to be on the stage," said Gert enviously.

"Well, it's living," said Birdie, airily. "That's more than you can claim for this rotten grind."

She put a high-heeled, white-shod foot on the window ledge to adjust its bow, and every eye in the room followed the process.

"I bet I make more money in a week," she continued dramatically, "than you all make in a month. And look at your hands! Why, they couldn't pay me enough to have my hands scarred up like that!"

"It ain't my hands that's worryin' me," said another girl. "It's my feet. Say, the destruction on your shoes is somethin' fierce! You orter see this here room some nights at closin' time; it's that thick with glass you don't know where to step."

"I'd know," said Birdie. "I'd step down and out, and don't you forget it."

Nance had been following the conversation in troubled silence.

"I don't mind the work so awful much," she said restlessly. "What gets me is never having any fun. I haven't danced a step since I left Forest Home, Birdie."

"You'd get your fill of it if you was with me," Birdie said importantly. "Seven nights a week and two matinees."

"'Twouldn't be any too much for me," said Nance. "I could dance in my sleep."

Birdie was sitting in the window now, ostensibly examining her full red lips in a pocket-mirror, but in reality watching the factory yard below.

"There goes your whistle!" she said, getting up suddenly. "Say, Nance, can't you scare up an excuse to hook off this afternoon? I'll take you to a show if you will!"

Nance's pulses leapt at the thought, but she shook her head and went reluctantly back to her bench. For the next ten minutes her fingers lagged at their task, and she grew more and more discontented. All the youth in her clamored suddenly for freedom. She was tired of being the slave of a whistle, a cog in a machine. With a sudden rash impulse she threw down her tools and, slipping her hat from its peg, went in swift pursuit of Birdie.

At the foot of the narrow stairs she came to a sudden halt. Outside the door, in the niche made by the gas-pipe and the adjoining wall, stood Mac Clarke and Birdie. He had his arms about her, and there was a look in his face that Nance had never seen in a man's face before. Of course it was meant for the insolent eyes under the picture hat, but instead it fell on Nance standing in the doorway. For a full minute his ardent gaze held her captive; then he dropped his arms in sudden embarrassment, and she melted out of the doorway and fled noiselessly up the stairway.

On the upper landing she suffered a head-on collision with the foreman, who demanded in no gentle tones what in the devil she was doing out there with her hat on at that hour.

"None of your business," said Nance, recklessly.

Bean looked at her flashing eyes and flushed face, and laughed. She was the youngest girl in the factory and the only one who was not afraid of him.

"See here," he said, "I am going to kiss you or fire you. Which'll you have?"

Nance dodged his outstretched hand and reached the top step.

"You won't do neither!" she cried fiercely. "You can't fire me, because I fired myself ten minutes ago, and I wouldn't kiss you to stay in heaven, let alone a damned old bottle factory!"

It was the Nance of the slums who spoke--the Nance whose small bare fists had fought the world too long for the knuckles to be tender. She had drifted a long way from the carefully acquired refinements of Forest Home, but its influence, like a dragging anchor, still sought to hold her against the oncoming gales of life.