Chapter ONE: I

Mrs. Kennedy was very tired that afternoon. She had just finished scrubbing a kitchen for a tenant, crawling laboriously across the greasy soft-wood boards with her brush and her pail and her cloth. There had been some foreign sort of fish stew cooking on the stove all the time, and the smell had turned her sick. She had got splinters into her water-softened hands, and her back ached with a ferocious, burning ache. She came down the basement stairs carrying the empty pail, slowly--far more slowly than she used to come.

"There’s not a thing in for my supper," she thought. "Well, I shan’t bother to go out and get anything. I’ll just lay me down and rest. I’m tired--tired _out_!"

The front door was unlatched. She pushed it open with her foot, and went along to the kitchen. She wanted a cup of tea, but she couldn’t make the effort to get it ready. She couldn’t even lie down. She sat on the step-ladder chair, straightening her aching back and supporting it with one hand while her eyes roved about her neat and dismal little domain, hoping to discover what she very well knew wasn’t there--something to eat, prepared and ready.

She was beginning to be dulled and blunted by solitude. Her life’s incentive was gone; she had no reason for working and living other than an animal reason--to feed herself. Her spirit had no food, and it was perishing.

She had a vague distaste for death, which was just sufficiently stronger than her apathy to preserve her existence. She slept in her underground cave, cooked and ate what was essential, kept it and herself respectable and clean, and went dully on working, working, going wherever she was bidden, doing whatever she was told.

She had decided to go out to the corner, to buy two bananas for her supper, when the door opened and Angelica came in.

She was just the same--jaunty, swaggering. It might have been one of those long-past evenings when she came back from work, tired, but restless and hungry. She had the same shabby suit and ungloved hands.

"Hello, mommer!" she said.

Amazing to see the change in that worn face!

"_Angie!_ For goodness’ sake! I never looked for _you_! Why ever didn’t you write, deary, so’s I’d have something in for your supper?"

"It don’t matter, mommer. I’ll go out and get something."

"I’ll get my purse----”

"No--I got some money. Listen, mommer, I’m going to stay home with you a while. Mr. Eddie’s gone to the war and Mrs. Geraldine’s gone away. Now, for Gawd’s sake, don’t begin to ask a lot of questions! I’m dead tired. I’ll go out and get something for us to eat, and we’ll go to the movies after. You put on the water for tea now, while I run to the corner."

But even after the front door had slammed, it was some time before Mrs. Kennedy got up to put on the kettle.

"What ever is she doing home now, all of a sudden, like this?" she asked herself. "I don’t see. Oh, I do hope there’s nothing wrong! She’s so hasty!"

Angelica came in again with a great paper bag.

"I got a regular treat," she said. "Sardines, rolls, cheese, and a nice big can of cherries!"

"You mustn’t waste your money, deary," said her mother mechanically.

They both set to work to open the tins, brew the tea, and lay out the supper.

"It does taste good," Mrs. Kennedy admitted. "Somehow, when I’m alone, I haven’t got the heart to buy things and cook them. It’s nice to see you again, Angie!"

"I dare say you’ll soon be sick of me," said Angelica. "Now, come along, mommer, put on your hat and coat!"

They went out together, the tall, swaggering daughter, the small, decorous mother, along the swarming streets to their favourite moving-picture "palace." It was exactly the sort of picture Mrs. Kennedy liked, a "society" one, and in addition her daughter bought her a box of caramels. In every way a treat, a notable evening!

And yet, all the time, her vague anxiety persisted. She had questions which she felt she must ask. They went home, and to bed, without her having summoned courage to put them. Then, at last:

"Angie!" she said softly in the dark. "Angie!"

Not a sound. Angelica must have fallen asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

II

Mrs. Kennedy was very much surprised to see Angelica spring out of bed the next morning at six o’clock, for she had always liked to lie in bed till the last possible instant. Her mother was still more surprised to hear her say:

"I’ll get the breakfast, mommer!"

"You needn’t to, deary. I guess you want a little rest."

"Rest, nothing! I’m going out to hunt for a job this morning."

"But aren’t you ever going back there--to Mrs. Russell’s?"

"Not much! I’m going back to the factory again."

"Oh, Angie! I’m sorry!"

"Why? You made enough row about my going to Mrs. Russell’s."

"Only because I didn’t think you could get the place; but now that you did, I’d hate to see you go back. I’d like to see you better yourself."

"Oh, for Gawd’s sake! That stuff again! No! Let me tell you, mommer, I’m through with all that. I’m all right the way I am. I’m good enough--as good as any of _them_, anyway."

She put on her hat and went out, without a kiss, without a good-by, and Mrs. Kennedy saw no more of her till six o’clock, when she came in, pale and scowling.

"What’s the matter with the supper?" she said, roughly. "Why ain’t it ready?"

"I just got in myself," said Mrs. Kennedy. "I had a hard day."

"Well, you’re not the only one," said Angelica. "What you got?"

"I’ll have to run to the corner."

"Now, see here!" said her child. "I won’t stand this! I’m not going to wait this way. If you can’t have my supper ready when I get home, I won’t come home--d’ye understand?"

This was but the first indication of a change, a profound change, in Angelica. Her mother saw it with anguish. She was rougher, coarser, more cruel. She was brusque with her mother in a way quite different from her old, careless fashion. She was cold, critical, scornful.

She had got back her job in the factory where she had worked before, but she didn’t bring her money home now. Her mother was obliged to ask for some when she had nothing left to buy what her child demanded; and then, fiercely reluctant, Angelica would throw down on the table a crumpled dollar bill.

Her habits were altogether changed. She spent no more evenings with her mother at home or at the movies. She went about with other factory girls, to dance-halls and cabarets of the cheapest sort. She bought herself daring blouses, thin as a veil, through which her lean brown shoulders shone; she wore short skirts, and had gauzy silk stockings on her long legs; she painted her face with exaggeration.

"Angie!" her mother remonstrated. "You don’t look _decent_!"

"I don’t want to," she replied.

Night after night she stopped out until one o’clock. Then her mother would be awakened by voices in the courtyard--a kiss, very likely, a scuffle, a slap. That was Angelica and her escort, saying good night.

Then she would come in, jaded, irritable, the paint very brilliant on her pale face, and begin undressing--not in the dark, as she had done formerly, to avoid disturbing her mother. She would come into the room with no effort to be quiet, light the gas, and dawdle about, while the poor anxious woman in bed lay watching her, sometimes asking questions, but timidly, dreading a rebuff.

"Bah! I’m so sick of it!" Angelica told her one night. "Those cheap dances--those smart Johnnies mauling you round with their sweaty hands--and then a glass of beer and a whole lot of their cheap talk. _Cheap_, all of it! I’m sick of--everything!"

She had flung herself down fully dressed on her cot, her soiled white shoes on the clean spread.

"Just _sick_!" she repeated, with a break in her voice.

Her mother was moved.

"Maybe it’s because you got used to better sort of people out where you were," she said.

Angelica raised herself and looked at her.

"_Better!_ Well, maybe they were. I don’t know. Only--I don’t know--I did get to like having things nice, and hearing nice voices. All this is kind of a sudden change. And the bunch I go out with--Lord, what a bunch!"

"Then why do you go out so much, deary? Why don’t you stay home?"

"Oh, for Gawd’s sake, mommer! After working all day, a girl my age can’t sit home alone all evening."

Alone! The poor woman winced.

"You could read magazines, or get books out of the library."

"I don’t want to read. There’s nothing in books. I want to live. I want to find out if there’s anything--anywhere."

"What do you mean, deary? If there’s anything anywhere?"

"Oh, it don’t matter! I’m going to bed. Good night!"

They went on in this way for weeks. What misery for the mother! She was nothing to her child; she could not even serve her. Angelica had become completely independent. She didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Kennedy, to go out with her, to stay at home with her.

Moreover, she had grown indifferent to the little niceties about which she had once been so fastidious. Sometimes she would get in earlier than her mother. Then, without waiting, she would get some sort of meal for herself, eaten off the tub tops, from the saucepan in which it was cooked. She would spend a long time dressing herself in her vivid finery, leaving the dirty pots for her mother to wash. Then again she wouldn’t appear until late, long after Mrs. Kennedy had disposed of her meal.

"We met some of the fellers," she would say; "and we hung around a while and ate a lot of candy. I don’t want any dinner."

One evening her mother weakly reproached her for her lateness.

"There I had a nice bit of chopped meat fried and ready for you," she said. "You ought to let me know when you’re not coming in. It’s a trouble to me and a waste of money to buy things and you not to touch them."

"Forget it!" said her child. "I’m never in any hurry to get home, I can tell you. To this hole! Why should I?"

"To see me!" cried her mother in desperation.

"Been seeing you every day for nineteen years. No, mommer, you can’t keep me hanging round you any more. I got to be free."

"That don’t mean you’re not to be kind and loving to----”

"Well, I’m _not_ kind and loving. Gawd didn’t make me that way."

Her mother grew more and more certain that Angelica had met with some disaster in her past situation. She thought over it at night when she lay in bed, in the day while she worked--thought of it with anguish and terror. Her peasant soul forgot its acquired American sophistication, and craved that age-old solace nowhere to be found in her present mode of life--a priest, a pastor, some one in authority to reassure her.

She hadn’t even neighbours to gossip with, as people had in the "old country." There was no one who had seen her child grow up, who knew all about her, and could and would discuss her with kindly penetration. A stranger in a strange land, but--how wretchedly!--a stranger to whom no country was home. Certainly America was not her heart’s land; certainly Scotland, the home of her parents, would have seemed wholly alien; while her husband’s birthplace, to her, was little more than a fantastic dream-land.

Unto the third generation does this strangeness persist. Angelica herself had that peculiar lack of ease, that exotic quality; she was an outsider. Her factory friends, too--they were of every race, and they had all become alike. Bohemian, Irish, Russian, Italian--they had all the same air; but it was a foreign air. Their adopted country had undeniably changed them into something different, but it had not made them American. It had made them only strangers.

III

One morning Angelica didn’t get up. Her mother, in great anxiety, came over to her, to make enquiries, but Angelica drove her away with fierceness, swearing at her, abusing her.

"Let me alone!" she cried. "Shut your mouth and mind your own business!"

"Oh, Angie, Angie!" said the poor soul. "If you’d only talk to me! If you only had the sense to know how I could help you!"

"Shut up!" screamed Angelica, hysterically. "And get out! Don’t speak to me again!"

Mrs. Kennedy took up her pail and went out; but half-way up the stairs she collapsed. She sat down on one of the steps and tried to pray; but she didn’t know quite what to ask of God.

Because she _knew_; she couldn’t doubt any longer. She knew what was wrong with Angelica!

She didn’t really want to pray. She wanted God to do the talking. She wanted to listen to Him, not to talk to Him; to discuss it, to ask questions, to have an explanation, to hear the voice of authority.

What was the use of sitting there telling Him what He surely knew? Or to beg for mercy or pity, when what she wanted was advice? Not that vague sort of "guidance" which one prayed for, and which really meant puzzling things out alone as best one could. There was one thing, though----

"Oh, Lord!" she prayed. "Soften Thou her heart and let her turn to me!"

She remembered afterward how miraculously this prayer was answered.

She was scrubbing the vestibule--a task of peculiar hopelessness, because people always came in to walk over it all the time she was trying to clean it. She heard a voice say "Mommer!" and, looking up, saw her child, huddled in an old wrapper, standing before her. Angelica was struggling with a deadly nausea. She was frightened and desperate, her face a sickly white, her hair in dank disorder.

"Mommer!" she said again. "Come down-stairs! I feel awful sick!"

Her mother got up, leaving pail and brush where they were, and put an arm around this beloved child, so much taller and stronger than she, and yet, in her youth and her ignorance, so much weaker. She helped her down-stairs and into bed again.

"Lie still!" she said. "That’s the best you can do, my deary. It’ll pass away."

"Can’t you get me some sort of medicine, mommer?"

"Nothing that would help you, my deary," Mrs. Kennedy told her. "You’ve just got to bear it, Angelica."

The girl looked up with somber eyes.

"Mommer," she said, "listen! What do you guess is the matter with me?"

"Angelica, my deary, I _know_!"

"Then, mommer, I’m going to kill myself!"

Her mother said nothing at all, but to herself she thought:

"Why not? It would be the best and the quickest for both of us. If you don’t--oh, what’s ahead of us, and how ever can we go through with it?"

Angelica searched her mother’s face, but in vain; it was impassive.

"What else _can_ I do?" she cried.

"There’s always something that can be done," said her mother. "We’ll try and think, deary."

"Mommer!"

"Yes, my deary?"

"Do you feel--different to me?"

"No, Angelica, nor ever shall!"

But she did. Strong in the simple soul was the old worship of the virgin. Angelica had been before a mystic and holy thing. She was now no more than a woman, like herself; and a woman is no fit object for worship.

Mrs. Kennedy wasn’t shocked, in a moral sense. She didn’t dwell much upon that side of the case. Her great concern was with practical problems--above all, how they were to get the money which she knew would be needed. She always spoke of girls in similar situations as "unfortunate," and that is just the way she saw it.

She sat at the bedside, trying her best to make some sort of plan.