XIX
FANNY DRIES HER TEARS
FANNY GALLUP was taking life easy. She had not been separated from her children, but relieved for the present from the hunger drive to support them. Pidge helped to pay Fanny’s room and board, but didn’t miss the fact that the main expense fell upon Miss Claes.
“There is a little fund back of me for just such cases, Pidge,” Miss Claes said. “I rarely divulge the fact, but there is no reason in the world why you should be inconvenienced.”
“Except that I brought her here——”
“I asked you to.”
“Except that she called on me in her trouble, and I worked elbow to elbow with her for four months, and she pulls out the very devil from me every time I see her.”
“Your feeling of responsibility is what makes you what you are—I never miss that, Pidge. If you weren’t so hard and straight on all the tricky little matters of dollars and cents, you can be very sure I’d never tell you my secret of secrets, about the fund.”
“I’ll have to pay what I can, if only because I hate to so. But I can never pay for bringing her to your house.”
Miss Claes laughed. “That is only the way you see it. Fanny isn’t heavy on us here. Not at all. It’s the dear, possessive Pidge that is hurt. Do you suppose I am torn by what goes on in the rooms and halls? Not torn beyond repair from day to day, at least. Fanny’s only a little more simple than most, a little less secretive.”
“She’s unmoral,” Pidge declared solemnly. “The awful thing is, she doesn’t learn. Life passes through her like a sieve, leaves its muck on her, and she doesn’t learn.”
Philosophy seldom helped Pidge; she had heard too much of it, and money was invariably a serious affair. In the California life there had never been enough money for all needs. Adolph Musser was unable to do without what he wanted, even though the immediate tradespeople of the neighborhood were frequently forced to. The metaphysician relied upon the Law of Providence to take care of them; and this had hacked and hewed into Pidge’s disposition; this had meant red war to her soul up to the last hour in her father’s house.
Here in New York the fight had been different. Even with Miss Claes mysteriously back of her from the beginning, she had faced, in her first few months in New York, the ugly candor of starvation. There was established in Pidge both from Los Angeles and New York experiences, a determination to fix herself unrockingly on her own feet in a financial way; and now, just as she might have gotten a bit ahead, was the expense of Albert’s children, and the claims of their mother, which were getting to look as interminable to Pidge as a ninety-nine years’ lease.
Another trouble was that Fanny was beginning to show fresh traces of her sense of the “fun of the thing.” Her spine was stiffening a little with good food and rest, and curious little suggestions of starch showed in lips and hair and breast that had been utterly draggled. She was often seen hanging over the banisters; sure indication of renewal of life and hope. She didn’t weep over the departed Albert; in fact, Pidge Musser observed, as an added revelation of the hatefulness of life, that Fanny was back on the scene looking for a man—not earnestly, not passionately, but without compunction and entirely unwhipped. Fanny granted that she was nobody, that she never had been; but that was no sign why she should pass up anything that was going by. Pain and hunger were forgotten like a sickness.
One night as she was coming in, Pidge heard Fanny’s low laugh on the floor above, as she ran upstairs in time to shoo a lodger from Fanny’s arms in the doorway. Then she followed into the littered room and a light was made. The two women faced. The laugh remained unwithered on Fanny’s cheerful face.
“Oh, Musser, you look so cross,” she panted.
“Don’t you remember—?” Pidge began.
“Remember wot?”
“What you were in that beast’s nest in Foley Street?”
“That’s what you always want, Musser, always want me to keep rememberin’, just as I’m getting straightened out.”
The fashion of Fanny’s straightening out settled upon Pidge, as she looked around the room. Its awfulness was beyond tears to her, even beyond laughter.
“Fanny Gallup, if you bring another baby here, I’ll—I’ll——”
“There ain’t going to be no other baby here, Musser. I ain’t nobody’s chicken like that.”