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Read Ebook: Bread by Norris Charles G Charles Gilman
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Ebook has 2184 lines and 136856 words, and 44 pages
PAGE
BOOK I
BREAD
? 1
Mrs. Sturgis had a way of tapping the ivory keys of the piano with her pencil when she was counting the beat during a music lesson. It made her little pupils nervous and sometimes upset them completely. Now she abruptly interrupted herself and rapped the keys sharply.
"Mama." A tall dark girl stood in the doorway of the room.
Mrs. Sturgis affected not to hear and drew a firm circle with her pencil about the troublesome quarter note. There was another insistent demand from the door. Mrs. Sturgis twisted about and leaned back on the piano bench so that Mildred's thin little figure might not obstruct the view of her daughter. Her air was one of martyred resignation but she smiled indulgently. Very sweetly she said:
"Yes, dearie?" Jeannette recognized the tone as one her mother used to disguise annoyance.
"It's quarter to six...." Jeannette left the sentence unfinished. She hoped her mother would guess the rest, but Mrs. Sturgis only smiled more sweetly and looked expectant.
"There's no bread," Jeannette then said bluntly.
Mrs. Sturgis' expression did not change nor did she ease her constrained position.
"Well, dearie ... the delicatessen shop is open. Perhaps you or Alice can run down to Kratzmer's and get a loaf."
"But we can't do that, Mama." There was a note of exasperation in the girl's voice; she looked hard at her mother and frowned.
"Ah...." Mrs. Sturgis gave a short gasp of understanding. Kratzmer had been owed a little account for some time and the fat German had suggested that his bills be settled more promptly.
"My purse is there, dearie"; she indicated the shabby imitation leather bag on the table. Then with a renewal of her alert smile she returned to the lesson.
"Mama, I'm sorry to interrupt...."
Mrs. Sturgis now turned a glassy eye upon her older child, and the patient smile she tried to assume was hardly more than a grimace. It was eloquent of martyrdom.
"I'm sorry to have to interrupt," Jeannette repeated, "but there isn't any money in your purse; it's empty."
The expression on her mother's face did not alter but the light died in her eyes. Jeannette realized she had grasped the situation at last.
"Well ... dearie...." Mrs. Sturgis began.
Jeannette stood uncompromisingly before her. She had no suggestion to offer; her mother might have foreseen they would need bread for dinner.
The little music-teacher continued to study her daughter, but presently her gaze drifted to Mildred beside her perched on a pile of music albums.
"You haven't a dime or a nickel with you, dearie?" she asked the child. "I could give you credit on your bill and your papa, you see, could pay ten cents less next time he sends me a check...."
"I think I got thome money," lisped Mildred, wriggling down from her seat and investigating the pocket of her jacket which lay near on a chair. "Mother alwath givth me money when I goeth out." She drew forth a small plush purse and dumped the contents into her hand. "I got twenty thenth," she announced.
"Well, I'll just help myself to ten of it," said Mrs. Sturgis, bending forward and lifting one of the small coins with delicate finger-tips. "You tell your papa I'll give him credit on this bill."
She turned to Jeannette and held out the coin.
"Here, lovie; get a little Graham, too."
There was color in the girl's face as she accepted the money; she drew up her shoulders slightly, but without comment, turned upon her heel and left the room.
Mrs. Sturgis brought her attention once more cheerfully back to the lesson.
? 2
Jeannette passed through the dark intervening rooms of the apartment, catching up her shabby velvet hat from her bed, and came upon her sister Alice in the kitchen.
There was a marked contrast between the two girls. Jeannette, who was several months past her eighteenth birthday, was a tall, willowy girl with a smooth olive-tinted skin, dark eyes, brows and lashes, and straight, lustreless braids of hair almost dead black. She gave promise of beauty in a year or two,--of austere stateliness,--but now she appeared rather angular and ungainly with her thin shoulders and shapeless ankles. She was too tall and too old to be still dressed like a schoolgirl. Alice was only a year her junior, but Alice looked younger. She was softer, rounder, gentler. She had brown hair, brown eyes and a brown skin. "My little brown bird," her mother had called her as a child. She was busy now at the stove, dumping and scraping out a can of tomatoes into a saucepan. Dinner was in process of preparation. Steam poured from the nozzle of the kettle on the gas range and evaporated in a thin cloud.
She displayed the diminutive coin in her palm. Alice regarded it with a troubled frown.
"It makes me so sick," went on Jeannette, "wheedling a dime out of a baby like that! I don't believe it's necessary, at least Mama ought to manage better. Just think of it! Borrowing money to buy a loaf of bread! ... We've come to a pretty state of things."
"Aw--don't, Janny," Alice remonstrated; "you know how hard Mama tries and how people won't pay their bills.... The Cheneys have owed eighty-six dollars for six months and it never occurs to them we need it so badly."
"I'd go and get it, if I was Mama," Jeannette said with determination, putting on her hat and bending her tall figure awkwardly to catch her reflection in a lower pane of the kitchen door. "I wouldn't stand it. I'd call on old Paul G. Cheney at his office and tell him he'd have to pay up or find someone else to teach his children!"
"Oh, no, you wouldn't, Janny!--You know that'd never do. Paul and Dorothy have been taking lessons off Mama for nearly three years. Mama'd lose all her pupils if she did things like that."
"Well--" Jeannette drawled, suddenly weary of the discussion and opening the kitchen door into the hall, "I'm going down to Kratzmer's."
? 3
In the delicatessen store she was obliged to wait her turn. The shop was well filled with late customers, and the women especially seemed maddeningly dilatory to the impatient girl.
"An' fifteen cents' worth of ham ... an' some of that chow-chow ... and a box of crackers...."
Jeannette studied the rows of salads, pots of baked beans, the pickled pig's-feet, and sausages. Everything looked appetizing to her, and the place smelled fragrantly of fresh cold meat and creamy cheeses. Most of the edibles Kratzmer offered so invitingly, she had never tasted. She would have liked to begin at one end of the marble counter and sample everything that was on it. She looked curiously at the woman near her who had just purchased some weird-looking, pickled things called "mangoes," and gone on selecting imported cheeses and little oval round cans with French and Italian labels upon them. Jeannette wondered if she, herself, would ever come to know a time when she could order of Kratzmer so prodigally. She was sick of the everlasting struggle at home of what they should get for lunch or dinner. It was always determined by the number of cents involved.
"Well, dearie," her mother invariably remonstrated at some suggestion of her own, "that would cost thirty cents and perhaps it would be wiser to wait until next week."
A swift, vague vision arose of the vital years that were close at hand,--the vital years in which she must marry and decide the course of her whole future life. Was her preparation for this all-important time ever to be beset by a consideration of pennies and makeshifts?
"Vell, Miss Sturgis, vat iss it to-night?"
Fat Mrs. Kratzmer smiled blandly at her over the glass shelf above the marble counter. Jeannette watched her as she deftly crackled thin paper about the two loaves, tied and snapped the pink string. Kratzmer and his wife were fat with big stomachs and round, double chins; even Elsa Kratzmer, their daughter, who went to the High School with Jeannette and Alice, was fat and had a double chin. The family had probably all they wanted to eat and a great deal more; there must be an enormous amount of food left on the platters and dishes and in the pans at the end of each day that would spoil before morning. Kratzmer, his wife and daughter must gormandize, stuff themselves night after night, Jeannette reflected as she began to climb the four long flights of stairs to her own apartment. It was disgusting, of course, to think of eating that way,--but oh, what a feast she and Alice would have if they might change places with the trio for a night or two!
As she reached the second landing, a thick smell of highly seasoned frying food assailed her. This was the floor on which the Armenians lived, and a pungent odor from their cooking frequently permeated the entire building. The front door of their apartment was open and as Jeannette was passing it, Dikron Najarian came out. He was a tall young man of twenty-three or-four, of extraordinary swarthy beauty, with black wavy masses of hair, and enormous dark eyes. He and his sister, Rosa,--she was a few years older and equally handsome,--often met the young Sturgis girls on the stairs or fumbling with the key to the mail-box in the entrance-way below. Jeannette and Alice used to giggle sillily after they had encountered Dikron, and would exchange ridiculous confidences concerning him. They regarded the young man as far too old to be interested in either of themselves and therefore took his unusual beauty and odd, foreign manner as proper targets for their laughter.
Jeannette now instinctively straightened herself as she encountered her neighbor. Upon the instant a feminine challenge emanated from her.
"Hello," Dikron said, taken unawares and obviously embarrassed. "Been out?"
For some obscure reason Jeannette did not understand, she elected at that moment to coquet. She had never given the young Armenian a serious thought before, but now she became aware of the effect their sudden encounter had had upon him. She paused on the lower step of the next flight and hung for a moment over the balustrade. Airily, she explained her errand to Kratzmer's.
"What smells so good?" she asked presently.
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