Part 11

"No, I must say I never did," I answered, ignoring their mischievous raillery with as much grace as I could summon, but taking care to choose my words so as to avoid further pitfalls.

"And did you never read none of Charlotte M. Braeme's?" drawled Mrs. Smith, with remorseless cruelty--"none of Charlotte M. Braeme's, eye-ther?"

"No."

"Nor none by Effie Adelaide Rowlands, e--y--e-ther?" still persisted Mrs. Smith.

"No; none by her."

"E--y--e--ther!" Both my tormentors now raised their singing-voices into a high, clear, full-blown note of derisive music, held it for a brief moment at a dizzy altitude, and then in soft, long-drawn-out cadences returned to earth and speaking-voices again.

"What kind of story-books do you read, then?" they demanded. To which I replied with the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day classics that the school-boy and-girl are supposed to have read. They had never heard of "David Copperfield" or of Dickens. Nor had they ever heard of "Gulliver's Travels," nor of "The Vicar of Wakefield." They had heard the name "Robinson Crusoe," but they did not know it was the name of an entrancing romance. "Little Women," "John Halifax, Gentleman," "The Cloister and the Hearth," "Les Misérables," were also unknown, unheard-of literary treasures. They were equally ignorant of the existence of the conventional Sunday-school romance. They stared at me in amazement when I rattled off a heterogeneous assortment from the fecund pens of Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, "Pansy," Amanda M. Douglas, and similar good-goody writers for good-goody girls; their only remarks being that their titles didn't sound interesting. I spoke enthusiastically of "Little Women," telling them how I had read it four times, and that I meant to read it again some day. Their curiosity was aroused over the unheard-of thing of anybody ever wanting to read any book more than once, and they pressed me to reciprocate by repeating the story for them, which I did with great accuracy of statement, and with genuine pleasure to myself at being given an opportunity to introduce anybody to Meg and Jo and all the rest of that delightful March family. When I had finished, Phoebe stopped her cornering and Mrs. Smith looked up from her label-pasting.

"Why, that's no story at all," the latter declared.

"Why, no," echoed Phoebe; "that's no story--that's just everyday happenings. I don't see what's the use putting things like that in books. I'll bet any money that lady what wrote it knew all them boys and girls. They just sound like real, live people; and when you was telling about them I could just see them as plain as plain could be--couldn't you, Gwendolyn?"

"Yep," yawned our vis-à-vis, undisguisedly bored.

"But I suppose farmer folks likes them kind of stories," Phoebe generously suggested. "They ain't used to the same styles of anything that us city folks are."

While we had been trying to forget our tired limbs in a discussion of literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients. The quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and exchanging nasty stories with great gusto and frequent fits of wild laughter. At another table the forthcoming ball of the "Moonlight Maids" was under hot discussion, and at a very long table in front of the elevator they were talking in subdued voices about dreams and omens, making frequent reference to a greasy volume styled "The Lucky Dream Book."

Far over, under the windows, the stripper girls were tuning up their voices preparatory to the late-afternoon concert, soon to begin. They hummed a few bars of one melody, then of another; and at last, Angela's voice leading, there burst upon the room in full chorus, to the rhythmic whir of the wheels, the melodious music and maudlin stanzas of "The Fatal Wedding."

Phoebe lent her flute-like soprano to the next song, the rather pretty melody of which was not sufficient to redeem the banality of the words:

"The scene is a banquet where beauty and wealth Have gathered in splendid array; But silent and sad is a fair woman there, Whose young heart is pining away.

"A card is brought to her--she reads there a name Of one that she loved long ago; Then sadly she whispers, 'Just say I'm not here, For my story he never must know.'

"That night in the banquet at Misery Hall She reigned like a queen on a throne; But often the tears filled her beautiful eyes As she dreamed of the love she had known.

"Her thoughts flowed along through the laughter and song To the days she could never recall, And she longed to find rest on her dear mother's breast At the banquet in Misery Hall.

"The time passes quickly, and few in the throng Have noticed the one vacant chair-- Till out of the beautiful garden beyond A pistol-shot rings on the air.

"Now see, in the moonlight a handsome youth lays-- Too quickly his life doth depart; While kneeling beside him, the woman he'd loved Finds her picture is close to his heart."

"What is the name of that song?" I asked when the last cadence of Phoebe's voice, which was sustained long after every other in the room was hushed, had died away.

"That! Why, it's 'The Banquet in Misery Hall,'" answered Mrs. Smith, somewhat impatient of my unfolding ignorance. But I speedily forgot the rebuke in a lively interest in the songs that followed one another without interlude. Phoebe was counting her pile of boxes and ranging them into piles of twelve high; so she couldn't sing, and I, consequently, could not catch all the words of each song. The theme in every case was a more or less ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal rendition of the claptrap morality exploited in the cheap story-books. Reduced to the last analysis, they had to do with but one subject--the frailty of woman. On the one side was presented Virtue tempted, betrayed, repentant; on the other side, Virtue fighting at bay, persecuted, scourged, but emerging in the end unspotted and victorious, with all good things added unto it.

It was to me an entirely new way of looking at life; and though I couldn't in the least explain it to myself, it seemed, to my unsophisticated way of looking at such matters, that the propensity to break the seventh commandment was much exaggerated, and that songs about other subjects would have been much more interesting and not nearly so trying to the feelings. For the sweet voices of the singers could not but make the tears come to my eyes, in spite of the fact that the burden of the song seemed so unworthy.

"You all sing so beautifully!" I cried, in honest admiration, at the close of one particularly melodious and extremely silly ditty. "Where did you learn?"

Phoebe was pleased at the compliment implied by the tears in my eyes, and even Mrs. Smith forgot to throw out her taunting "eye-ther" as she stood still and regarded my very frank and unconcealed emotion.

"I guess we sort of learn from the Ginney girls," explained Phoebe. "Them Ginneys is all nice singers, and everybody in the shop kind of gets into the way of singing good, too, from being with them. You ought to hear them sing Dago songs, oughtn't she, Gwendolyn?"

"Yep," answered Gwendolyn; "I could just die hearing Angela and Celie Polatta singing that--what-d'ye-call-it, that always makes a body bu'st out crying?"

"You mean 'Punchinello.' Yep, that's a corker; but, Lord! the one what makes me have all kinds of funny cold feelings run up my back is that 'Ave Maria.' Therese Nicora taught them--what she says she learned in the old country. I wouldn't want anything to eat if I could hear songs like that all the time."