John Howe was a Lincoln divinity student, intermittently working his way through college. He sat up gaunt and weak in the scratched bed of cheap cherry wood and picked with long skeleton fingers at the thin blue and white checked coverlet.
“Maggie, you and your mother’ve been mighty good to me. Look here, I’ve got to pay you back somehow. After this illness I’ll have to stay out of school a year. What do you want?”
Maggie stared at him, her gray eyes going black in the yellow oval of her face.
“There’s only one thing I want, Mr. Howe, and you couldn’t give me that.”
“I could try. What is it?”
“Oh Mr. Howe, if you could just get us out of this awful place, this house, this street! If I could just get to know some decent folks—”
“Well, I don’t see how I could arrange about the folks. Where do you want to live, if you go from here? There’re not many places for colored folks in New York.”
“There are houses for colored people up in Fifty-third Street, and decent folks living in them.”
“But my goodness, Maggie, it costs a fortune to rent one of those houses.”
“I know, oh, I know. But if we could just get started. Mother could fill the house with roomers. Why there’ve been twelve men here for this room since you’ve been sick. The rest of the rooms aren’t much, but mother always keeps this room tidy, and we’re honest. They all know that. Never missed a penny here, any of them. And they tell their friends about us. Lots of times they tell Ma if she only had more room she’d have all the roomers she wanted.”
“But you’ve no furniture.”
“We could buy on the instalment plan.” She had her scheme all worked out. Clearly she had nursed her project. “Mr. Howe, if you could just help us to begin.”
He would, he told her, convinced by her earnestness. “What exactly do you want me to do, Maggie?”
She wanted him to make his headquarters with them for the year, and to pay as much as he could in advance. It was still early summer. He must write and tell other men, who would want rooms, and get a few of them to pay in advance, too. “Trainmen won’t mind that,” she told him shrewdly, “they’ll like to know they have some place to go to when they’ve cleaned themselves out at cards, or whatever it is they do. That will pay a month’s rent, and leave something, and with what we pay on this—this hole, we’ll have something to put on the furniture.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Howe, “I’ll speak to your mother about it.”
But that was useless. Mrs. Ellersley was sure of her livelihood, her mere existence here, but she was doubtful about a great venture. “Of course, for Maggie’s sake I’d like to get away.”
“Oh, Ma, do—do, Ma,” Maggie had pleaded in an ecstasy of longing. “This is our one chance. You see if we don’t take this we’ll never get away.”
Fortunately she had Howe to back her. “She’s right, Mrs. Ellersley, and this is no place for a young girl to grow up. You can count on me. I’ll go look for a house, and see about some furniture. I know plenty of fellows would be glad to come.”
Miraculously the scheme worked. It gave Maggie her first insight into the workings of life. If you wanted things, you thought and thought about them, and when an opportunity offered, there you were with your mind made up to jump at it.
Of course they were poor, but at least they were decent. John Howe, staying for that year in New York, realizing more and more how truly he was indebted to Maggie and her mother, took a proprietary interest. He laid the cheap rugs, he set up the cots, three in a room, he did mysterious jobs in the bathroom which to Maggie was always so marvelous. He bought tools and fixed window-cords which the landlord neglected. Maggie darned his socks for him, and he bought some wallpaper, cheap but clean and virginal, a soft yellow, and papered her square box of a room. A good job he made of it, too. Another roomer at his instigation made a dressing table out of a packing box which Mrs. Ellersley, reinvigorated, covered with scrim.
Gradually, word of her rooming-house spread among the better class of transients. All her lodgers gave her their mending to do, she washed for some of them, gave breakfast to a few chosen spirits, and they paid willingly and well.
Maggie was in transports. This was something like a home. Of course, she had to attend school in the district. Her mother took her as soon as matters were settled. She looked fresh and neat in a dark blue serge dress trimmed with black braid, the gift of melancholy Mis’ Sparrow who in turn had had it from young Mrs. Proctor. The dress was worn, but it was whole, and Maggie had tacked a tiny turnover of white lace in the high collar.
She was assigned to the eighth grade. There were two of them in the school. Her star was in the ascendant, for she was assigned to the one of which Sylvia Marshall was a member. She would have fared differently if it had been Joanna, for unless she were markedly clever, Joanna, who was intellectually a snob, would probably never have seen her. But Sylvia spied her at once. She came over to Maggie at recess.
“You’re a new girl, aren’t you? Want me to show you your way around?”
Maggie looked at the pretty girl, charming in a soft dark red cashmere dress made with a wide pleated skirt. She had on little patent leather, buttoned shoes with cloth tops, and a big red bow perched butterfly fashion on her dark head. Joanna wore her hair rather primly back from her face,
