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We passed several of those forlorn figures that hurry through the slowly-awakening streets to bed or to work. Finally, there came by an old, old woman a scrubwoman, I guess, on her way home from cleaning some office building. Beside her was a thin little boy, hopping along on a crutch. I stopped them. "Hold out your hand," said I to the boy, and he did. I laid the five hundred-dollar bill in it.
In every respect save declamation he had all the elegances and charm of manner that the stage can give, and he would receive and bow out a scrubwoman who had fallen down a flight of back stairs and wanted to make the landlord pay for her broken head with a grace truly Chesterfieldian.
This Thursday up in the recreation room I found an ancient scrubwoman, patched and darned to pieces, with stringy thin hair, and the fat, jovial Irishwoman from the help's pantry. The three of us had as giddy a half hour as anyone in all New York. We laughed at one another's jokes till we almost wept, and forgot all about the thermometer.
Colonel Derringer's first shot caught a boot an' shoe drummer fr'm Chicago square in th' back amid consid'rable applause. Major Lyddite tied th' scoor be nailin' a scrubwoman on th' top iv a ladder.
"Then she yelled again. Oh, dear, I was never so sorry for a high-born lady in my life, but to encourage her I told her I read of a white woman in Alabama that turned black in a single night, and the niggers would never have anything to say to her, because she was a hoodoo, and wasn't in their class, and then she yelled again and wanted me to send for a doctor, and I told her there wasn't any negro doctor in town, and what she wanted was to send for a scrubwoman, and then I showed her the box of shoe paste and told her she had got in the wrong box, and she laid it to me and shooed me out of the room like I was a hen, and she has been all the forenoon trying to wash that shoe paste off, but it will have to wear off, 'cause it is fast colors, and aunty has got to go to a heathen meeting at the church to-night, and she will have to send regrets.
The Sunday editor glanced the item over and said: "H'm!" Afterward he sent for a reporter and expanded his comment. "You might see General Ludlow," he said, "and make a story out of this if you can. Diamond stories are a drug; but this one is big enough to be found by a scrubwoman wrapped up in a piece of newspaper and tucked under the corner of the hall linoleum.
I ain't going to do no fancy dishwashing, no, not for no one; I'm a scrubwoman." And she clambered up into the train with the alacrity of a woman whose dignity had received a hard blow.
Do you suppose I was able then to understand the sheer tragic fortitude to live of a scrubwoman! The head you thought unpleasant haven't you seen her going home in the March slush of a city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, the ragged shawl about a body twisted with forty, fifty, sixty years of wet stone floors and steps? Did you wonder what she had for supper?" "No, Dodge, I didn't.
Average Jones pondered a moment. "Do you think he could have passed the night here?" "I know he did," was the prompt response. "The scrubwoman heard him when she came this morning." "Heard him?" "Yes' sir. Sobbing, like." The nerves of Average Jones gave a sharp "kickback," like a mis-cranked motor-car. His trend of thought had suddenly been reversed.
He was generally awakened about half-past seven by the jangling bell that balanced on a coiled spring at the foot of the stairs. This ringing announced the arrival of Becky, the old scrubwoman who came each morning to sweep out the shop and clean the floors for the day's traffic.
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