Movie Pictorial (September 19, 1914)

THE MOVIE PICTORIAL li The Mafcin £> 01 an By WILLIAM CURRY ILLUSTRATED BY C H A S . D E A A CORNWELL VIII G OING back to work at the counter was not easy for Yera. Or, rather, it was easy enough to go back—the hard thing was to stay. She had reckoned scarcely at all on the things that would make it difficult; her action had been, in a sense, impulsive. And she had no guide of experi- ence, of course, to help her to realize, in ad- vance, how much worse the work was going to seem than in the old days before the won- derful incursion into the movies. Then it had been hard. There had been few easy days. She had risen sometimes with the feeling that she could not force herself to go through with the day’s work; she had felt that her feet would not sustain her through the long drawn out agony of ten hours of con- stant standing. Gudge and Bartlett, of course, provided chairs, or stools, rather, for the girls. They had to do that, under the law. But the law politely ignored the fact that the firm fined any girl who was seen sitting down, whether there were customers about or not! The deadly monotony of the work had af- fected her before, too. She had wondered, dully, at times, if she was never to do any- thing else, never have a chance to do some- thing she could enjoy. And with her scanty wages, she had had to pinch and starve, had had to go without clothes that she might eat, or, sometimes, go without food that she might be decently covered. But—in the old days only her imagination had supplied her with a different outlook. Only her imagination had enabled her to feel what it must be like to have plenty of money, to have work that was enjoyable in itself, to be amply fed. And her imagination, vivid as it was, had fallen far short of the reality. Now she had that—the memory of a time in which her dreams had come true. She could subject every moment of her life, now that she had returned to the drudgery of the store, with its cor- responding moment in the wonder time that was over. And it was hard. Vera was conscious of no wrongdoing. She felt that she had maintained the standards that, in some miraculous fashion, she had created and preserved for herself since she had been thrown upon her own resources. In every crisis she had confronted she had asked herself which course was right, which wrong— and each time she had chosen what her conscience told her was right, irre- spective of the conse- quences to herself. And now—it had brought her back to the store—after an experience that had sickened her of stores, and all the humiliations, all the petty sufferings, that they impose upon their employees. Inevitably, therefore, contrasting what she must do now, what she must endure, with the ease and splendor, from her point of view, that her work with the Climax company had given her, Vera came to the point of asking the eternal question of those placed as she was placed: “Is it worth while? Does it pay to be straight?” The most dangerous of questions that, that a man or woman can ask! For it implies a mood dangerous in itself; a mood wherein sophistry, always on the side of self-indulgence, been fired, they knew, at a time when work was hard, if not impossible, to get. She had not found work in another store, or some one of them would have known it. Instead, in- deed, she had left her boarding house, and dropped completely out of sight of her old associates. Yet she returned with every evi- dence of prosperity. There was only one ex- planation possible, as they saw it—and, nine times out of ten, unhappily, they would have been right. Some man had given her these things, had cared for—at the usual price. Now there had been trouble with him; she was forced to re- turn—and had been lucky enough to get back. The inevitable result was a sort of ostracism. The girls with whom she had formerly associated would have none of her; they felt, fighting as they were, always on the battle line, that they must keep their skirts clear of one who had given up the fight. And the other girls, not numer- ous, but important in the store, who had frankly given up the fight long be- fore, and welcomed the Hazzards and the others of his type, horrified Vera. She had never had any- thing to do with them; she repelled their insinuat- ing advances, which were quickly made now, with horror. They regarded her as one of themselves. With the instinct that drives those who have gone down to welcome anyone who follows, they courted her. But she felt toward them, in a milder way, as the other girls did toward her. She knew too much, she had learned too much, for her old savage intolerance to have survived. She pitied them now. But— she still held herself above them. And so she was sus- pended in space. She be- longed in neither camp. Inevitably, therefore, the question of whether it paid to be straight, that she was beginning to ask herself, was coupled with another, just as sinister in its im- ‘I Wonder if it Pays plications, in its indications to Be Straight!” % , .’. . of a shifting mood and a changing point of view. She had paid part of the price of surrender; should she suffer without reaping any of the benefits? So Vera learned the lesson, as it was neces- sary and inevitable that she should do, that cutting the Gordian knot is seldom enough to resolve a difficulty. She had, as a matter of fact, evaded, or tried to evade, the problem created by Forster’s resignation. For that she had felt herself to blame. She had believed that he had, on her account, risked his entire future. And, being determined that he should not be allowed to do anything of the sort, she had tried to solve the problem by her disappear- ance. There had been another reason too; . . . She had been touched by his loyalty to her; by the passionate vehemence of his speech when he had explained what he meant to do. is re-enforced by such innumerable evidences that it does not pay. Against abstract prin- ciples concrete necessities, hardships, depriva- tions rear their heads. It was so with Vera. Now for the first time .she knew, out of her own experience, just what she was giving up. She could match every rough spot she had to travel with the ease she might be enjoying. And another element entered into her suffer- ing. She found in the other girls in the store a derisive unwilling- ness to think of any expla- nation save one of her absence, of the sleek plumpness she had acquired during its term, of the good clothes she was wearing now that she was back. In her essential, innate decency Vera had never thought of the construction these other girls were so cruelly certain to put upon- her absence. None of them knew what she had been doing; a true, wise instinct, that served her well, had impelled her to silence. She had told no one—and had spared herself, by her silence, the fruitless annoyance of knowing that she was not believed. They had only one explanation. She had