THE Louders lived on the second floor, at the head of the stairs, in the Lossing Building. There is a restaurant to the right; and a new doctor, every six months, who is every kind of a healer except “regular,” keeps the permanent boarders in gossip, to the left; two or three dressmakers, a dentist, and a diamond merchant up-stairs, one flight; and half a dozen families and a dozen single tenants higher—so you see the Louders had plenty of neighbors. In fact, the multitude of the neighbors is one cause of my story.
Tilly Louder came home from the Lossing factory (where she is a typewriter) one February afternoon. As she turned the corner, she was face to the river, which is not so full of shipping in winter that one cannot see the steel-blue glint of the water. Back of her the brick paved street climbed the hill, under a shapeless arch of trees. The remorseless pencil of a railway has drawn black lines at the foot of the hill; and, all day and all night, slender red bars rise and sink in their black sockets, to the accompaniment of the outcry of tortured steam. All day, if not all night, the crooked pole slips up and down the trolley wire, as the yellow cars rattle, and flash, and clang a spiteful little bell, that sounds like a soprano bark, over the crossings.
It is customary in the Lossing Building to say, “We are so handy to the cars.” The street is a handsome street, not free from dingy old brick boxes of stores below the railway, but fast replacing them with fairer structures. The Lossing Building has the wide arches, the recessed doors, the balconies and the colonnades of modern business architecture. The occupants are very proud of the balconies, in particular; and, summer days, these will be a mass of greenery and bright tints. To-day, it was so warm, February day though it was, that some of the potted plants were sunning themselves outside the windows.
Tilly could see them if she craned her neck. There were some bouvardias and fuchsias of her mother\'s among them.
“It IS a pretty building,” said Tilly; and, for some reason, she frowned.
She was a young woman, but not a very young woman. Her figure was slim, and she looked better in loose waists than in tightly fitted gowns. She wore a dark green gown with a black jacket, and a scarlet shirt-waist underneath. Her face was long, with square chin and high cheek-bones, and thin, firm lips; yet she was comely, because of her lustrous black hair, her clear, gray eyes, and her charming, fair skin. She had another gift: everything about her was daintily neat; at first glance one said, “Here is a person who has spent pains, if not money, on her toilet.”
By this time Tilly was entering the Lossing Building. Half-way up the stairway a hand plucked her skirts. The hand belonged to a tired-faced woman in black, on whose breast glittered a little crowd of pins and threaded needles, like the insignia of an Order of Toil.
“Please excuse me, Miss Tilly,” said the woman, at the same time presenting a flat package in brown paper, “but WILL you give this pattern back to your mother. I am so very much obliged. I don\'t know how I WOULD git along without your mother, Tilly.”
“I\'ll give the pattern to her,” said Tilly, and she pursued her way.
Not very far. A stout woman and a thin young man, with long, wavy, red hair, awaited her on the landing. The woman held a plate of cake which she thrust at Tilly the instant they were on the same level, saying: “The cake was just splendid, tell your mother; it\'s a lovely recipe, and will you tell her to take this, and see how well I succeeded?”
“And—ah—Miss Louder,” said the man, as the stout woman rustled away, “here are some Banner of Lights; I think she\'d be interested in some of the articles on the true principles of the inspirational faith——” Tilly placed the bundle of newspapers at the base of her load—“and—and, I wish you\'d tell your dear mother that, under the angels, her mustard plaster really saved my life.”
“I\'ll tell her,” said Tilly.
She had advanced a little space before a young girl in a bright blue silk gown flung a radiant presence between her and the door. “Oh, Miss Tilly,” she murmured, blushing, “will you just give your mother this?—it\'s—it\'s Jim\'s photograph. You tell her it\'s ALL right; and SHE was exactly right, and I was wrong. She\'ll understand.”
Tilly, with a look of resignation, accepted a stiff package done up in white tissue paper. She had now only three steps to take: she took two, only two, for—“Miss Tilly, PLEASE!” a voice pealed around the corner, while a flushed and breathless young woman, with a large baby toppling over her lean shoulder, staggered into view. “My!” she panted, “ain\'t it tiresome lugging a child! I missed the car, of course, coming home from ma\'s. Oh, say, Tilly, your mother was so good, she said she\'d tend Blossom next time I went to the doctor\'s, and——”
“I\'ll take the baby,” said Tilly. She hoisted the infant on to her own shoulder with her right arm. “Perhaps you\'ll be so kind\'s to turn the handle of the door,” said she in a slightly caustic tone, “as I haven\'t got any hands left. Please shut it, too.”
As the young mother opened the door, Tilly entered the parlor. For a second she stood and stared grimly about her. The furniture of the room was old-fashioned but in the best repair. There was a cabinet organ in one corner. A crayon portrait of Tilly\'s father (killed in the civil war) glared out of a florid gilt frame. Perhaps it was the fault of the portrait, but he had a peevish frown. There were two other portraits of him, large ghastly gray tintypes in oval frames of rosewood, obscurely suggesting coffins. In these he looked distinctly sullen. He was represented in uniform (being a lieutenant of volunteers), and the artist had conscientiously gilded his buttons until, as Mrs. Louder was wont to observe, “It most made you want to cut them off with the scissors.” There were other tintypes and a flock of photographs in the room. What Mrs. Louder named “a throw” decorated each framed picture and each chair. The largest arm-chair was drawn up to a table covered with books and magazines: in the chair sat Mrs. Louder, reading.
At Tilly\'s entrance she started and turned her head, and then one could see that the tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“Now, MOTHER!” exploded Tilly. Kicking the door open, she marched into the bed-chamber. An indignant sweep of one arm sent the miscellany of gifts into a rocking-chair; an indignant curve of the other landed the baby on the bed. Tilly turned on her mother. “Now, mother, what did you promise—HUSH! will you?” (The latter part of the sentence a fierce “ASIDE” to the infant on the bed.) In a second Mrs. Louder\'s arms were encircling him, and she was soothing him on her broad shoulder, where I know not how many babies have found comfort.
Jane Louder was a tall woman—tall and portly. She had a massive repose about her, a kind of soft dignity; and a stranger would not guess how tender was her heart. Deprecatingly she looked up at her only child, standing in judgment over her. Her eyes were fine still, though they had sparkled and wept for more than half a century. They were not gray, like Tilly\'s, but a deep violet, with black eyelashes and eyebrows. Black, once, had been the hair under the widow\'s cap, now streaked with silver; but Jane Louder\'s skin was fresh and daintily tinted like her daughter\'s, for all its fine wrinkles. Her voice when she spoke was mellow and slow, with a nervous vibration of apology. “Never mind, dear,” she said, “I was just reading \'bout the Russians.”
“I KNEW it! You promised me you wouldn\'t cry about the Russians any more.”
“I know, Tilly, but Alma Brown lent this to me, herself. There\'s a beautiful article in it about \'The Horrors of Hunger.\' It would make your heart ache! I wish you would read it, Tilly.”
“No, thank you. I don\'t care to have my heart ache. I\'m not going to read any more horrors about the Russians, or hear them either, if I can help it. I have to write Mr. Lossing\'s letters about them, and that\'s enough. I\'ve given all I can afford, and you\'ve given more than you can afford; and I helped get up the subscription at the shops. I\'ve done all I could; and now I ain\'t going to have my feelings harrowed up any more, when it won\'t do me nor the Russians a mite of good.”
“But I cayn\'t HELP it, Tilly. I cayn\'t take any comfort in my meals, thinking of that awful black bread the poor children starve rather than eat; and, Tilly, they ain\'t so dirty as some folks think! I read in a magazine how they have GOT to bathe twice a week by their religion; and there\'s a bath-house in every village. Tilly, do you know how much money they\'ve raised here?”
“Over three thousand. This town is the greatest town for giving—give to the cholera down South, give to Johnstown, give to Grinnell, give to cyclones, give to fires. The Freeman always starts up a subscription, and Mr. Bayard runs the thing, and Mr. Lossing always gives. Mother, I tell you HE makes them hustle when he takes hold. He\'s the chairman here, and he has township chairmen appointed for every township. He\'s so popular they start in to oblige him, and then, someway, he makes them all interested. I must tell you of a funny letter he had to-day from a Captain Ferguson, out at Baxter. He\'s a rich farmer with lots of influence and a great worker, Mr. Lossing says. But this is \'most word for word what he wrote: \'Dear Sir: I am sorry for the Russians, but my wife is down with the la grippe, and I can\'t get a hired girl; so I have to stay with her. If you\'ll get me a hired girl, I\'ll get you a lot of money for the Russians.\'”
“Did he git a girl? I mean Mr. Lossing.”
“No, ma\'am. He said he\'d try if it was the city, but it was easier finding gold-mines than girls that would go into the country. See here, I\'m forgetting your presents. Mother, you look real dragged and—queer!”
“It\'s nothing; jist a thought kinder struck me \'bout—\'bout that girl.”
Tilly was sorting out the parcels and explaining them; at the end of her task her mind harked back to an old grievance. “Mother,” said she, “I\'ve been thinking for a long time, and I\'ve made up my mind.”
“Yes, dearie.” Mrs. Louder\'s eyes grew troubled. She knew something of the quality of Tilly\'s mind, which resembled her father\'s in a peculiar immobility. Once let her decision run into any mould (be it whatsoever it might), and let it stiffen, there was no chance, any more than with other iron things, of its bending.
“Positively I could hardly get up the stairs today,” said Tilly—she was putting her jacket and hat away in her orderly fashion; of necessity her back was to Mrs. Louder—“there was such a raft of people wanting to send stuff and messages to you. You are just working yourself to death; and, mother, I am convinced we have got to move!”
Mrs. Louder dropped into a chair and gasped. The baby, who had fallen asleep, stirred uneasily. It was not a pretty child; its face was heavy, its little cheeks were roughened by the wind, its lower lip sagged, its chin creased into the semblance of a fat old man\'s. But Jane Louder gazed down on it with infinite compassion. She stroked its head as she spoke.
“Tilly,” said she, “I\'ve been in this block, Mrs. Carleton and me, ever since it was built; and, some way, between us we\'ve managed to keep the run of all the folks in it; at least when they were in any trouble. We\'ve worked together like sisters. She\'s \'Piscopal, and I guess I\'m Unitarian; but never a word between us. We tended the Willardses through diphtheria and the Hopkinses through small-pox, and we steamed and fumigated the rooms together. It was her first found out the Dillses were letting that twelve-year-old child run the gasoline stove, and she threatened to tell Mr. Lossing, and they begged off; and when it exploded we put it out together, with flour out of her flour-barrel, for the poor, shiftless things hadn\'t half a sack full of their own; and her and me, we took half the care of that little neglected Ellis baby that was always sitting down in the sticky fly-paper, poor innocent child. He\'s took the valedictory at the High School, Tilly, now. No, Tilly, I couldn\'t bring myself to leave this building, where I\'ve married them, and buried them, and born them, you may say, being with so many of their mothers; I feel like they was all my children. Don\'t ASK me.”
Tilly\'s head went upward and backward with a little dilatation of the nostrils. “Now, mother,” said she in a voice of determined gentleness, “just listen to me. Would I ask you to do anything that wouldn\'t be for your happiness? I have found a real pretty house up on Fifteenth Street; and we\'ll keep house together, just as cosey; and have a woman come to wash and iron and scrub, so it won\'t be a bit hard; and be right on the street-cars; and you won\'t have to drudge helping Mrs. Carleton extra times with her restaurant.”
“But, Tilly,” eagerly interrupted Mrs. Louder, “you know I dearly love to cook, and she PAYS me. I couldn\'t feel right to take any of the pension money, or the little property your father left me, away from the house expenses; but what I earn myself, it is SUCH a comfort to give away out of THAT.”
Tilly ran over and kissed the agitated face. “You dear, generous mother!” cried she, “I\'LL give you all the money you want to spend or give. I got another rise in my salary of five a month. Don\'t you worry.”
“You ain\'t thinking of doing anything right away, Tilly?”
“Don\'t you think it\'s best done and over with, after we\'ve decided, mother? You have worked so hard all your life I want to give you some ease and peace now.”
“But, Tilly, I love to work; I wouldn\'t be happy to do nothing, and I\'d get so fleshy!”
Tilly only laughed. She did not crave the show of authority. Let her but have her own way, she would never flaunt her victories. She was imperious, but she was not arrogant. For months she had been pondering how to give her mother an easier life; and she set the table for supper, in a filial glow of satisfaction, never dreaming that her mother, in the kitchen, was keeping her head turned from the stove lest she should cry into the fried ham and stewed potatoes. But, at a sudden thought, Jane Louder laid her big spoon down to wipe her eyes.
“Here you are, Jane Louder”—thus she addressed herself—“mourning and grieving to leave your friends and be laid aside for a useless old woman, and jist be taken care of, and you clean forgetting the chance the Lord gives you to help more\'n you ever helped in your life! For shame!”
A smile of exaltation, of lofty resolution, erased the worry lines on her face. “Why, it might be to save twenty lives,” said she; but in the very speaking of the words a sharp pain wrenched her heart again, and she caught up the baby from the floor, where he sat in a wall of chairs, and sobbed over him: “Oh, how can I go away when I got to go for good so soon? I want every minnit!”
She never thought of disputing Tilly\'s wishes. “It\'s only fair,” said Jane. “She\'s lived here all these years to please me, and now I ought to be willing to go to please her.”
Neither did she for a moment hope to change Tilly\'s determination. “She was the settest baby ever was,” thought poor Jane, tossing on her pillow, in the night watches, “and it\'s grown with every inch of her!”
But in the morning she surprised her daughter. “Tilly,” said she at the breakfast-table, “Tilly, I got something I must do, and I don\'t want you to oppose me.”
“Good gracious, ma!” said Tilly; “as if I ever opposed you!”
“You know how bad I have been feeling about the poor Russians———”
“Well?”
“And how I\'ve wished and wished I could do something—something to COUNT? I never could, Tilly, because I ain\'t got the money or the intellect; but s\'posing I could do it for somebody else, like this Captain Ferguson who could do so much if he just could get a hired girl to take care of his wife. Well, I do know how to cook and to keep a house neat and to do for the sick——”
Tilly could restrain herself no longer; her voice rose to a shout of dismay—“Mother Louder, you AIN\'T thinking of going to be the Ferguson\'s hired girl!”
“Not their hired girl, Tilly; just their help, so as he can work for those poor starving creatures.” Jane strangled a sob in her throat. Tilly, in a kind of stupor of bewilderment, frowned at her plate. Then her clouded face cleared. If Mrs. Louder had surprised her daughter, her daughter repaid the surprise. “Well, if you feel that way, mother,” said she, “I won\'t say a word; and I\'ll ask Mr. Lossing to explain to the Fergusons and fix everything. He will.”
“You\'re real good, Tilly.”
“And while you\'re gone I guess it will be a good plan to move and git settled——”
For some reason Tilly\'s throat felt dry, she lifted her cup. She did not intend to look across the table, but her eyes escaped her. She set the coffee down untasted. The clock was slow, sh............