Oh, those were bitter days for Chris, tramping the streets all day, sometimes far into the evening, sometimes walking miles into the country to reach a man who had no influence.
Then came the question of where they would go. Chris faced it bitterly, thinking of lodging houses or a boardinghouse or a hotel apartment. But the next night, when he came home and heard the plan his mother and father had agreed upon, he thought his cup of humiliation was full.
There was a little run-down house on a back street whose kitchen windows looked out upon the railroad, a street where the washerwoman lived. It had recently come into Mr. Walton’s hands through the death of a man without a family, who owed him a debt of long standing and had given him a judgment note against the house. Chris’s family was actually planning to move into it next week and vacate their noble family mansion for the bootlegger’s family. Chris sat down in the nearest chair, aghast.
Elise was there, having been summoned home from her aunt’s, where she had been while her father was ill. Elise, in her pretty blue dress, with her fair curling hair and her lovely, big blue eyes. Somehow, she had never looked so lovely before to her brother’s eyes as when he thought of her in Sullivan Street living next to their washerwoman!
Before he could shut his lips, so carefully guarded during all the weeks when his father lay ill, one awful sentence about Elise and Mother living next to the washerwoman slipped out, and Chris saw the dart of pain in his father’s eyes at once.
“But,” said Elise cheerfully, “she won’t have to be our washerwoman anymore, you know, Chrissy, because, as I understand it, we can’t afford any washerwoman. We have to do the wash ourselves. I think it’ll be fun.” She ended with a grin of good sportsmanship.
“I know!” sighed the father, with a piteous look around upon them all.
“Nothing of the kind!” said Elise. “Mother and I are going to enjoy it, aren’t we, Mother? It’ll be the chance of a lifetime for me to learn to be a good cook and housekeeper. Forget it, Daddy! This is only a game. Get into position and smile!”
And her father, in spite of his heavy heart, smiled at the pretty girl.
“Maybe it’ll be for a little while,” he murmured, trying to make his voice sound hopeful.
That night Chris bought a paper and spent two hours studying the want ads and marking them. As he finally got into his bed, he thought of the fellow who had preached that fool sermon the last time he went to church, and wished he could wring his neck. A lot he could be thankful for the things that were handed out to him now, couldn’t he? Mother and Elise in a place like Sullivan Street! Good night! He’d got to get a job!
He didn’t call it a position anymore; it was just a plain job. He felt he might even be a little thankful if he could just have a few dollars coming in to help out. No creditor was going to get his money, not till he was making enough to put Mother in a comfortable position anyway.
The next morning he started out early and answered three advertisements, but found a long line of discouraged-looking applicants waiting for each. While he was waiting for a fourth place, which had named a time for applicants to arrive, he stepped around to Sullivan Street and found it even worse than he feared.
The house was whitewashed, or had been once, but there was scarcely enough of the original to identify it. It looked, through dirty windows, to have but five rooms and a lean-to kitchen. There were four dirty, limp cords fastened from stakes in the hard ground to the top of the window sash, and twined about them were four dead, dried ghosts of morning glory vines, waving disconsolately about in the chill November breeze. They typified to Chris their family of four Waltons, come down to Sullivan Street from the glory of the ancestral home that had been theirs.
The dead leaves waved and rasped emptily, back and forth against the broken windowpane, making a sad little minor refrain of weird music that sent a lump into the boy’s throat. He dashed around the narrow path to the backyard, a mere patch, mostly paved with ashes, and saw a tattered clothesline stretched from the corner of the house to the fence and back, and fancied his beautiful young sister hanging up the family wash thereon in a chilly wind like this. The tears stung into his eyes. He hurried off and tried to forget it all, wishing for a genie and a magic lamp with which to bring an immediate fortune for the family. He went on to the next place on his list, was told they wanted only college graduates, and turned with more bitterness in his heart.
Thankful for a thing like that? Not he. Where was his father’s God, anyway? Had there really been any God at all, he wondered as he buttoned his coat closer and pulled his hat over his smarting eyes. He had a feeling at the pit of his stomach, like his memory of the day he first discovered there wasn’t any real Santa Claus.
What was going to happen next, he wondered desperately, and pulled his hat further down over his eyes.
The next few days were soul-trying ones for Chris, beyond anything he had ever experienced before. He was appalled to find his mother and father were both determined to move to the Sullivan Street house. Even the first desolate glimpse of the house had not discouraged them.
He had watched them as they came in sight, walking, the first time they had been out since the car was sold, walking down the plebian street like common folks. Chris raged inwardly and followed behind them, dropping his eyes, hoping they would not meet anyone who knew them.
“I’m afraid it looks pretty hopeless,” sighed the father. “If I just didn’t remember what wonders you can work with very simple things, I would give up in despair. But we could be happy there for a little while, couldn’t we, Mary? Perhaps something will change, and we can get into a better neighborhood soon.”
“We can be very happy!” said Mary with a toss of her head and that bright smile she had worn ever since her elderly lover had begun to get well.
“A little paint will work wonders,” she said. “We can save on butter and things, and buy paint, and Chris and I can put it on. I’ll do the inside and Chris will do the outside. There’s a pair of nice new overalls I bought for the chauffeur and never gave him. They will do for Chris, and we have a ladder, haven’t we?”
Whether it was the vision of himself in overalls on a ladder painting that Sullivan Street house, or the rainbow cheerfulness of his mother’s voice, one or the other, or both, brought sudden tears to Chris’s eyes. And he had to duck his head down quickly and pretend to be trying to pick up a round bit of tin that looked like a dime from the sidewalk, lest his father should see him crying. Tears! In a fellow old enough to be in college! Why, he hadn’t felt like crying since he was a baby and licked all the boys in the street, and then found his nose was bleeding and one eye wouldn’t open.
Mother hadn’t been discouraged with the inside of the house, either. She had said how it was good they had never sold that coal range in the cellar at home. Nobody would want to buy that. They were out of date now. But it would practically heat the house in mild weather, and a coal range was wonderful to cook with. You could broil a beefsteak to perfection over hot coals that would make a gas-broiled steak blush with shame. Cheerily like that she talked along, suggesting the old red sofa from the attic—the one that had been her mother’s and she had never been willing to part with, even though it was shabby and old-fashioned—would fit in between the side windows that looked out on the alley. She recalled, also, a little stand and a strange old pine desk that had been her father’s and a few over-stuffed chairs. It had been mere tender memories that had kept them in the attic instead of sending them to the dump. But now, why! She looked almost glad with that tender touch in her eyes, as if she were actually pleased that they were to come into their own again. Her son stood by the dusty window and looked out, marveling.
And the very next morning, he came home and found his mother washing that dirty window, out of which he had looked! He had come home for lunch, and the one maid who was staying with them till they were moved said lunch was ready but his mother had gone down to “the other house.” The words gave h
is heart a wrench. As if that dump down there could be called a house! “The other house!” He had followed hotfoot after her and found her washing the windows, her sleeves rolled up, an old sweater pinned around her closely, and a stray lock of wavy gray hair fallen into her eyes, her face as eager as a child’s. The wife of the president of the Fidelity Bank washing windows in late November in a cold house!
He took her home summarily, walking so fast she was almost out of breath and scolding her all the way, but she only smiled. After that, he went back after lunch and finished the rest of the windows himself. He didn’t do them very well. They had streaks all over them, but at least the dust was off. Then he looked around in dismay at the work still to be done. Walls and floors had to be swept and washed. Dirty paper, dirty paint! Ugh! How could his mother bear it? It was harder to wash a window than to play an afternoon’s game of football. He was trembling from head to foot. After serious consideration he went home and collected some of his treasures—his camera, several tennis rackets, and a set of golf clubs—and took them to a second-hand place and sold them. Then he hunted up a man who did whitewashing and got him to promise to scrub the whole house early the next morning.
After that Chris abandoned his vain search for a job until the moving should be over. Chris and Elise went to work, Chris with a frown on his handsome face, and Elise with laughter and cheerful songs, jokes, and an indefatigable ability to sit down on the stairs anywhere and giggle at his efforts. Often he got furiously angry at her. He found it impossible to treat this whole catastrophe of the family like a joke. It was serious business, the wreck of their whole lives, and here were Mother and Elise laughing as if they enjoyed it. They were just alike.
Then he would glance at his father, sitting back, relaxed, smiling in his invalid chair, not allowed to lift his finger, and looking very peaceful. What did Dad have that kept him so serene? He was satisfied that Dad was deeply hurt that all these things had to be, cut to the heart that his wife and daughter must work so hard, that his son could not go to college, yet the lines of care were not nearly so deep on his forehead as they had been some weeks before the bank closed its doors. Was it just that he was relieved to be doing his best toward paying the depositors? No, it must be something more than that. And in spite of himself, he felt a respect for his father’s faith. It might have no foundation, but whether it did or not, it was beautiful to see such faith. He found a hungry feeling in his own heart to have something like that to stay his furious young heart upon. Yet he told himself he never could believe in a God who would do such things to trusting people, and he readily hardened his heart when he heard his father pray, always beginning his petition with thanksgiving. He simply could not understand it. Elise was only a child, of course. She enjoyed every new thing that came along, even moving into a little seven-by-nine dinky house on a back street, like a child playing dollhouse. His mother was merely glad that his father was up and around again. Neither Mother nor Elise had any sense of what it was going to mean, this terrible change in the family fortunes. But his father understood, and yet he bore up. It was inexplicable.
Yet somehow, in spite of all predictions, when the paint and paper were in place and the few old sticks of furniture disposed about, that had been saved from the wholesale carnage, even the old golden oak sideboard and dining room table and chairs from the servant’s dining room took on an air of comfort. Chris couldn’t explain it.
There were draperies, too, that Chris remembered in the nursery when he was a kid, cheery linens with tie backs, long since packed in an old chest in the attic and only pulled out for home charades when they needed costumes. But now they seemed to make, out of the little shanty on Sullivan Street, a cozy nest where comfort might be found in the midst of a desolated world.
It was that first night that they had supper in the new home.
Elise and her mother, in plain cotton dresses, were in the speck of a kitchen getting supper, and a savory smell was already beginning to pervade the house. The rooms were too near neighbors to have any secrets from the parlor of what was going on in the kitchen. Chris knew there was one of those savory stews he always liked so much, and he was hungry for it already. Anna, the departing maid, had cooked it that morning in the old house before the last load of things they were allowing themselves to call their own from the attic came over. Chris knew that Anna had also made doughnuts and a couple of mince pies on the sly between other duties. He had brought over the stone jar containing the doughnuts and the basket with the mince pies early that morning that Anna’s surprise for his mother might be complete. Oh, there would be a good supper.
Elise was setting the table, humming a cheerful little tune that never gave hint of the tears that were so near the surface. His father was sitting beside the old attic table in the faded old Morris chair with his feet on the extension, reading the evening paper and resting as happily as if he had been in his gorgeous leather chair in his own library, with the carved desk beside him and an alabaster lamp of old world design to light him. Didn’t his father know the difference? Didn’t he care at all?
And now came a call for Chris to go after a loaf of bread.
“It’s only a couple of blocks or so up the avenue, Chris,” said Elise cheerfully, as she saw a frown gather on her brother’s brow. “I’d go but Mother needs me. Dinner’ll be quite ready when you come back. It’s one of those grocery stores, the second block on the right. I bought a cake of soap there yesterday. You can’t miss it.”
“Why? Will I see the rest of the box of soap out watching for me?” asked the brother ill-naturedly as he rose and slung his cap on the back of his head. “I thought you got an A in English. Why would the fact that you bought a cake of soap there yesterday keep me from missing the store?”
“Quit your kidding and hurry, please. I’m making popovers and they need to be eaten at once when they’re done.”
Chris sauntered out into the chilly evening air, perversely refusing to wear his overcoat and feeling as if he had been exiled into an evil world again. The cheeriness of the little house that had half angered him only made the outside world seem the more unfriendly. How dark Sullivan Street was. The city ought to put in more lights. He hurried along angrily. It seemed to him as if he had scarcely been anything but angry since the bank had closed.
He found the grocery store, bright and full of brisk business. Everybody was there inspecting trays of vegetables, buying great creamy slices of cheese, prunes, crackers, coffee, flour, and potatoes. One woman had a long list and a pile of groceries on the counter before her, and now she turned toward the meat side of the store and began to select pork chops.
Chris looked around curiously. It was almost the first time since he was a little boy that he had been in such a store. There hadn’t been any need. Those things were always well ordered by a capable maid over the telephone. Not even his mother had had to mingle with the common herd this way. The store was bright and cheery.
Everything looked clean and appetizing. There were delightful smells of oranges, celery, and coffee in the air. But no one was paying the slightest attention to him. They gave him a curious sensation. He was used to deference everywhere. Well, of course, no one knew him in this section of the city, and there was relief in that. How interested these people were, as if they were selecting a new car or a Christmas present. What did they care which bunch of carrots they bought? Cranberries! How pretty they were in bulk.
But he must get waited on quickly. He didn’t want to stay here all night. He approached a salesman with a lady who was accumulating a great pile of things on the counter. She had come to a pause and was trying to think up something else, gazing up at the top shelves of cereals. He would just cut in on her and get his bread and get out.
But the salesman looked up with a courteous smile.
“Sorry, I’m busy just now. You’ll have ta wait your turn. Somebody’ll be free in a minute, I guess.”
Chris stepped back haughtily and felt as if he had been sl
apped in the face. So, there were rules to this grocery store game. Everyone was just as good as everyone else. The dark color flung up in his face, and he was about to leave, when he suddenly remembered his recent lowly estate and retreated into the background.
Pinned in a corner by a bunch of brooms and a stack of bargain cans of peaches, watching sullenly for a free salesman, he suddenly heard low-spoken words behind him, not meant for his ear for sure.
“That’s him,” said an uncultured voice. “He’s the old man’s son. Some baby! Yep, right behind ya. Nope, he dunno me. I was in grammar when he was in high. He wouldn’t know me from a bag a beans. And anyhow, he wouldn’t. He always was an awful snob! My goodness, no. I wouldn’t speak to him. I wouldn’t wantta be snubbed. I hate snobs!”
Cold, angry prickles went down Chris’s back, and he felt the very back of his neck grow red. He could hardly come out of his fury when his courteous salesman wheeled upon him at last with a free and easy, “Now, sir, what can I get for you?”
His voice sounded unnatural as he asked for the bread. He didn’t remember ever to have bought a loaf of bread before. He wondered if there was a certain way of asking for it. He glowered after the two whispering flappers who had been behind him. They were over at the meat counter now, giggling and chewing gum. The one with the red hair and freckles was vaguely familiar as a kid who once tried to run through a football game in the schoolyard and made all the fellows furious. She wasn’t any account, of course, but was that the way all of the school had regarded him, as a snob?
Then his humiliation would be the greater. They would gloat over his loss of caste. He had never regarded himself anything but a self-respecting son of his father. A snob was one who looked down on most other people. Well, perhaps he had, but he had always supposed they didn’t know it. He had rather regarded it as a breach of etiquette to let others know that they were despised. He must have failed sadly.