A Lyric and a Laundry

THE most insignificant employee of the White Laundry was Jenny Inello. Jenny had come from Naples three years before and had begun to work on the mangle as soon as she was fifteen. Her working-papers read sixteen. She was plain in spite of a pair of luminous brown eyes. Her personality was curiously remote and her coworkers found her dull. Her mother, who also worked at the laundry, resembled a bandit, including the gold ear-hoops and the red neckerchief. Her piercing black eyes followed Jenny always and everywhere.

Jenny was, presumably, as artless as on the day she left Italy. Gradually, however, a new quality had asserted itself in her being. The longing to be prominent among her laundry mates, though a little-guessed passion, had become an obsession. Jenny, after infinite pondering, conceived an idea.

When the ‘stamp lady’ made her weekly visit to the laundry, Jenny saved ten cents regularly, per order of her mother, who confiscated the remainder of her earnings. By means of persistent coaxing, Jenny succeeded in capturing five cents more ‘to spend.’ She secretly started another savingsbook. For her little brother, she explained to the stamp lady, who was loud in commendation. Jenny had no brothers.

Her plan to impress the other members of the laundry was simple. It was merely to save enough to purchase three superb roses, which she would wear at work; for to have a ‘steady’ with cash enough to buy roses was a frankly envied state. She saved fervently, wearing the book around her neck, next her skin, day and night. Finally, the morning dawned when she had one dollar. She planned to draw it out at noon and buy the flowers on her way to work next day, telling her mother that she was asked to purchase them by one of the girls. During lunch, which she ate with her mother at the further end of the laundry, she planned to leave them under her mangle.

The stamp lady appeared in due season, and Jenny produced from the toe of her boot her usual dime. ‘Are n’t you saving for your little brother today?’ asked the stamp lady hopefully.

‘No’m,’ said Jenny remotely, ‘I’m going to cash his book.’

She groped down her neck, and handed it over. His name she had registered on the cover as Edgardo.

‘I have n’t a dollar bill just now, Jenny,’ said the stamp lady; ‘but I’ll give it to you before I leave the laundry.’

The noon hour wore away — and no stamp lady. Jenny’s anxiety rose to a pitch, and remained there through the afternoon. At five, she met her mother for their homeward walk.

‘What is this?’ hissed her parent in raging Italian, holding up an envelope marked Edgardo. ‘The stamp lady was hurried, and left it with me; and after all my watching, you got a feller and you save money for him.’

Jenny’s anguish was such that she failed to notice a listening group of girls just behind her.

Upon reaching home, her mother took Jenny by the ear.

‘You tell me,’ she rasped.

Jenny tried to explain, but the fictitious Edgardo proved her undoing. The dollar bill passed into her father’s pocket, and Jenny fell asleep that night a confirmed man-hater.

The next morning at work she gradually became aware that she was the object of mysterious attention. Whispering, furtive pointing, a newspaper going the rounds. She could not fathom it. She went on nervously feeding napkins into her mangle.

At noon her mother lay on the shaking-table, pillowed her head on a mound of damp linen, and ate her lunch with Jenny near by. Presently approached one Felice, long the admiration and envy of Jenny.

‘I know something,’ she remarked. Jenny’s color mounted. ‘Ha, ha!’ laughed Felice and chorus.

‘What do you know?’

‘I guess Mr. Hunt works on the papers, don’t he?’ went on Felice.

Jenny froze with horror. They knew her tragedy, and were wickedly furnishing her mother with false evidence. But no, Jenny noted respect in Felice’s tone, as she continued.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know your feller wrote you a piece of poetry in this morning’s Post!’ Producing the sheet, she turned to the ‘Personals,’ and read to the electrified Jenny, in her liquid Italian voice, the following stray from the ‘Selected Gems’ column: —

To JENNY

LEIGH HUNT.

‘What do you know about that?’ asked Felice.

Jenny saw her chance and took it.

‘Something, maybe,’ she gave out to her profoundly impressed listeners.

Then she turned, palpitating. Her mother slumbered deeply.

Fate had paid her debt to Jenny.