She had just decided that she would slip out the back door and let Mrs. Powers send her the ten dollars when she got ready, when she heard the pantry door open and Mrs. Powers stood in it, surveying her coldly, a crisp ten-dollar bill in her hand.
“Oh, you’ve done it. Well, that’s all right. I never feel that a girl has finished until she has cleaned her kitchen.”
She handed out the money, and Joyce took it as though it had been a hot coal that she wasn’t sure but she wanted to throw out the back door. Of course she had earned it, earned it hard, but it went against every grain in her body to take it. She felt humiliated and dragged in the dust.
“Surely he shall deliver thee!”
She drew a long breath. It was almost over. She was free to go at last.
“I was going to tell you,” went on the lady as Joyce rolled up her apron preparatory to leaving, “I’m giving a little dinner tomorrow, and I shall want you again. You might come over about ten. We don’t get up before that, and then you can clear away the breakfast things. We have dinner about five on Sundays. My husband says the day is so long if we don’t have a good many meals. I’m calling up my butcher to get some chickens. Of course he’s closed, but he always serves me after time if necessary. He knows he has to or lose my trade. I think we’ll have some more of those biscuits, and—”
Joyce suddenly broke into the monologue. “Mrs. Powers, excuse me, but it isn’t necessary for you to finish. I couldn’t possibly come.”
“You couldn’t possibly come? I’d like to know why not! I suppose you have some date or other with some young man. I might have known a pretty girl would be troublesome—”
“Stop!” said Joyce, her voice trembling, and just then above the wild beating of her angry young heart, she heard the words, “Surely he shall deliver thee.”
It steadied her so that she was able to control the flashing of her eyes and to speak quietly, albeit with a trifle of hauteur in her steady voice.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Powers. You have no right to speak to me in that way. I have no young men friends nor any others in this vicinity and no dates with anyone, but I do not work on Sunday. I don’t think it’s right. I was brought up to work only six days in the week.”
“For mercy’s sake!” sneered the woman. “And so you refuse to help a person out in a tight place? What possible wrong could that be? We have to eat, don’t we?”
“We don’t have to have dinner parties,” said Joyce quietly.
“Well, I think you’re impertinent,” said the lady angrily. “It is none of your business when I have dinner parties. I suppose it’s more pay you want, and I think that’s extortion, but of course seeing you’ve washed the kitchen floor and seeing I can’t very well get anyone else, I suppose I’ll have to pay it. What do you want for your valuable services?”
“Nothing, Mrs. Powers. I am not going to work. If you were sick or in trouble or starving, I’d be glad to help you out, but I shouldn’t accept pay. I am not working on Sunday.”
“Well, I’ll pay you fifteen dollars for the day if you’ll come. That’s outrageous, but I’ll pay it because I have to. And if you’ll come early enough in the morning to get breakfast, I’ll make it twenty. Come, that’s about as high as any girl could ask.”
“It is impossible for me to accept any price for Sunday service, Mrs. Powers.”
Joyce had retreated toward the door and picked up her bundle.
“I don’t see how you can possibly expect me to use my influence to get you a school when you act like that,” said the angry woman as a last resort. “I shall tell my husband how unaccommodating and impertinent you have been. You are not a fit person to set over young people. And if you refuse my request, I shall take pains to see that you get no position in our schools. As for all this nonsense about working on Sunday, don’t you know, my poor girl, that all that belongs to a bygone day? The Sabbath was made for man, and not to be long-faced in. I am in a far better position than you to know what is right and what is wrong, and I tell you that it is perfectly all right for you to help a person out when they have company, and at the same time help yourself out, and I’ve offered you very liberal wages. I’m perfectly willing also to see that you get a place to teach if you prove to be at all fit for it, provided you go out of your way to help me.”
Joyce looked at the woman steadily.
“Mrs. Powers, I would rather never have a position to teach than purchase it at the price of doing something I think is wrong. Besides, I couldn’t help hearing what you said about me at the dinner table, and I’ve no expectation of your using your influence to help me in any way. In fact, I think I’d rather you wouldn’t. Good night, Mrs. Powers.”
She was actually gone, out the back door, through the moonlit garden, out the little back gate, and down the street, before Mrs. Powers recovered and realized that she had lost her.
“She won’t come,” she announced, going back to the living room, where her guests and her husband were awaiting her return to the game of cards in which they had been engaged, “and she actually had the nerve to try to preach a sermon to me about having dinner parties on Sunday. Did you ever? Aren’t help the limit these days? I suppose it made her mad for me to ask her to scrub the bathroom floor. She’s quite inclined to be above her station. But isn’t it ridiculous? Now I’ll have to get Martha Allen to cook the dinner, and she can’t begin to make mayonnaise like this girl!”
“I thought you told me she wasn’t help,” said her husband. “You said she was a schoolteacher.”
“Oh, well,” said the wife indolently, “you know what a schoolteacher is that has to go out to work to make a living. Just as soon as I knew she would come, I set her down where she belonged and made up my mind if she was any good I’d get her permanently.”
“Well, that’s a laudable ambition. Coax a girl to come and help you as a favor, and then try to keep her down to the station you’ve put her in! I must say I admire a girl who is willing to cook when she hasn’t anything else to do, and especially when she knows how to cook like that. I believe I’ll look into her case. If she applies for a job in the school, I’ll vote for her. I like a girl with ambition and without notions, and I’ll bet she earned her money today.”
“Now, Hatfield, that’s just like you,” complained Mrs. Hatfield Powers. “I take the trouble to tell you what a good-for-nothing girl she is, and then you go and vote for her just for sheer stubbornness. Just to oppose me. Just to show you how wrong you are about money, I paid her ten dollars today for getting that little bit of dinner, and I went so far as to offer her double that if she would come early enough to get breakfast and stay all day tomorrow!” She looked around the room in triumph amid the admiring exclamations of her guests.
“Well, I still say she earned her money,” said her husband.
Joyce Radway let herself into her little dark room, locked her door, tossed her hat on the box table, flung herself on the heap of newspapers in the corner, and burst into heartbreaking sobs.
By and by her tears were spent and she grew quieter, and above the tumult of her soul a still, small voice seemed saying over the words softly to her troubled heart: “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
How wonderful that that should come to her now!
Once, a long time ago, when she was a little girl and was learning verses with her mother and her aunt, they had told her that these verses they were teaching her were to be stored up for a time of need, and that when any distress came, if they were safely in her heart and memory, they would come out to comfort her or show her the way out of a difficult situation. She had not thought much about it then, but now that all came back. She was in trouble and comfortless, and the verses were coming like a troop of angels to comfort and guide her and help her through temptation—to show her that God was not a God far off, but was near to each one of us, even in our hearts. So, comforted, she fell asleep.
And the next day was the Sabbath.
/> Chapter 18
When Joyce awoke that first Sunday morning in her new home, the sun was streaming broadly across her bed. By that she knew it was very late. It suddenly came to her consciousness for the first time that she had been so busy getting her dress done in time to reach Mrs. Powers’s at twelve o’clock that it had never occurred to her to do any shopping for Sunday, and of course everything had been closed up tight when she came home at half past ten. Well, there was enough in the house to keep her from starving, and she would just have to get along. There were probably restaurants open, but why go to a restaurant on Sunday? She had not been brought up to be much away from home on the Lord’s day, and while she understood that it might be necessary sometimes for restaurants to be open on Sunday for some poor homeless ones, still, she didn’t see patronizing them if she could help it.
Examination of her cupboard proved that there were still a few crackers, a small piece of cheese, two slices of dried beef, one banana, and almost half a loaf of bread. There was a little milk left in the bottle, too, and she could have that for breakfast. It was not an extensive array for a Sunday dinner, and probably Mrs. Powers’s menu would have offered a more tempting list, but she drew a relieved sigh to think that she did not have to get Mrs. Powers’s dinner that day, no, nor eat it either.
She ate her breakfast of crackers and milk hungrily, for one cannot work as hard as she had worked for the past three days without developing an appetite, and by the time she was finished and everything put away, the church bells were ringing. It was interesting to be going to a new church. All her life she had attended the same church. It came to her while she was brushing her shoes and putting on her serge dress and hat that perhaps some of the dear people would miss her and wonder. Perhaps sometime she would write to the minister or her Sunday school teacher and explain that she had felt an entire change would be good for her, less sad, and that she had gone thus quietly because she dreaded the good-byes. Yes, that would probably be the right thing to do after she had once established herself and had a good-paying job and could report herself as doing well. It made her almost homesick to think of how all the old friends were on their way to Sunday school just now—how her place would be vacant in the class and her spot in the pew empty.
It wouldn’t be the first time though, for Nannette had contrived both Sundays since Aunt Mary’s death to keep Joyce at home, the first time because she had a headache and wanted Joyce to stay and wait on her, the second time because she and Eugene were going somewhere and demanded that Joyce remain at home with the children, who were supposed to be under the weather. People would not think it strange that she had not come this Sunday either, perhaps, and she knew Nannette well enough to be sure that by this time there was some well-arranged story going around explaining, with perfect plausibility, her absence. So she had no uneasiness on the score of her friends.
She chose the pretty church with the stone arches and ivy wreathing for her first entrance into religious worship in her new home. It bore the name of her own denomination on its bronze tablet outside the door, and she entered with a kind of feeling that it partly belonged to her.
The church was filled with well-dressed people, and a vested choir was singing an anthem as she entered. She was annoyed to be late and slipped into a seat near the door.
The vested choir would have been an innovation in the old church in Meadow Brook, but she thought it rather pretty. The church was artistic and beautiful, with deep-toned woods, vaulted ceilings, and gleam of jeweled windows picturing forth sacred themes in memory of certain departed church members. She sat in the softly cushioned pew and listened to the glorious music, the rich tones of the organ, the well-trained voices. Now, indeed, was her soul to find rest and refreshment for the hard times of her life. She relaxed and found peace and a sense of nearness to God in this, His house.
The Powers family entered, to her surprise, a bit noisily, with their guests, and made quite a flutter getting certain seats. They seemed to be important people for whom the ushers hurried to find the place in four hymnbooks and to present schedules of the day with smiles and obsequious bows. The men were fresh from a round on the golf course and had that air of bored patronage and indifference that so many men wear on Sunday morning, as if virtue fairly exuded from their rosy faces because they had come in from the velvety green to this somber, stuffy dullness for a little while to patronize God. The women were attired in spring array and filled the air about them with the faint, sweet perfume of the well groomed. The eyes of their envious sisters were fixed upon their hats and coats in earnest study from the minute of their entrance, and many a woman forsook her mild attention to the service and tortured her mind with such problems as how she could get together a pretty hat like that without paying the price of an imported one, or whether there was enough in the breadths of Grandmother’s old silk gown to cut a silk coat like the one Anne Powers was wearing.
Joyce, in her back seat, was surprised that her employer of yesterday should be in church. She had unconsciously labeled her as a nonchurchgoer. In Meadow Brook the people who gave dinner parties on Sunday did not pay much attention to churchgoing, and as she watched from her shadowed seat under the gallery and saw Mrs. Powers’s delicate airs and the way she held her book and sang, she marveled that this pretty woman with the rapt expression could be the same one who spoke so contemptuously to her the day before.
But when the minister ascended the pulpit for the sermon, she tried to put such thoughts away from her mind and to listen to what was being said. It was not for her to judge people in God’s house, and God Himself might be able to see something acceptable in the worship of these people that was not apparent to her.
The minister had read the story of the man born blind, and it had given her a warm feeling around her heart to remember the dear old story, so linked with thoughts of her aunt Mary, and especially of that wonderful day in the woods, so she settled herself to enjoy the story once more and to thrill over the miracle of the healing as she had always been able to thrill over this particular story even after she had grown up.
As the sermon opened up with an eloquent passage descriptive of the day and setting of the story, her mind was back in the aisles of the grove with the boy and Aunt Mary, and the birds singing far overhead. Her own sweet thoughts leaped ahead in the story, till suddenly she became aware of words that were being spoken, words that did not seem to fit the thread of the story at all. What was this? No miracle? Common sense? Jesus used clay to give the man something to do himself; possibly it might have had some medicinal qualities, as some clays known to the medical profession of the day are known to have healing qualities. But more likely the clay was a mere agent to bestir the man, to awaken him to a sense of himself and stimulate his nerves to action—a mere psychological effect on the man’s spirit, something that Jesus, with His unusually keen insight into men’s natures, saw was needed. Such cures were often performed today, by shock of fire or fright, by inducing the subject to in some way believe that he was healed. There was a great deal in willpower and in the state of mind, and Jesus used common sense and set men right with themselves. Perhaps the man had not been really blind at all from his birth but had merely got in the habit of keeping his eyes shut and thinking he was blind until he and his friends had come to believe that it was true. There was much proof for this theory in the way that his cure was accepted by his friends and neighbors and even by his parents. If there had been a real need of a cure, it was not at all likely that the parents of the invalid would have taken the cure so lightly and even professed that they knew nothing at all about it. The matter was evidently held lightly among them. The work of Jesus on this earth was really to bring men to themselves, to awaken them to a sense of what they could do for themselves, in even rising above weakness and physical infirmity. They called Jesus divine because they could find no better word to call Him, but we were all divine, all the children of God as was Jesus, and all able to do what Jesus did. Perhaps not in t
he same degree, for He was the greatest man who ever lived, but still, in a sense, we could do for suffering humanity just what Jesus did. If we were not actual physicians, able to heal disease, we could yet persuade men to common sense, awake them to open their eyes to things about them.
Joyce sat straighter in her seat, and her cheeks grew hot with excitement. She felt as if some exquisite, sacred fabric that was beyond price and had always been most dear to her had been torn in tatters and scattered to the four winds. She felt as if she must arise and cry out to the man that what he was saying was false—that he was blaspheming!
She looked around, startled, on the indifferent audience composed in a dreamy silence of peace, eyes intent upon the preacher, lips placid, no look of protest in their faces! How strange! How awful! Was there no one, not one, to stand up for the Bible, for the miracle of healing, for the matchless God-nature of Christ?
But other words suddenly arrested her, standing out from the drab background of the sermon sharply. “The time has come when the world no longer needs a bloody atonement to appease an angry God. The world has grown beyond that ghastly idea. The death of Christ was to show the world how much He loved it, not to wash away its evil deeds in some mysterious way. People must undo their own evil deeds. No one could do that for them. We must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is the God in us that works. We all have God in us, only we are not letting Him work, just as that blind man had sight, but he was not using it—”
Joyce almost started to her feet. She seemed to be crying out in her throat so that it hurt: “That is not true, oh, that is not true! Will no one tell him what an awful thing he is saying?” But not a sound came from her lips, of course. She found that her limbs were trembling, and she felt as though she scarcely dared look up. To think that she was here in God’s house listening to this and no one was making any protest! She looked around again, aghast at the smug, satisfied faces of the congregation. It was almost as if they were not listening.