Girl Alone. Anne Austin
form a decorous procession just outside the dining hall doors, Sally and her new little charge were among them. But only the sharp eyes of the other orphans could have detected that the child who clung forlornly to Sally’s hand was a newcomer. The golden curls had disappeared, and in their place were two short yellow braids, the ends tied with bits of old shoe-string. The small face, scrubbed clean of its powder and rouge, was as pale as Sally’s. And instead of lace-trimmed pink crepe de chine, silk socks and white kid slippers, Eloise was clad, like every other orphan, in a skimpy gingham frock, coarse black stockings and heavy black shoes.
And when the marching procession of orphans had distributed itself before long, backless benches, drawn up to long, narrow pine tables covered with torn, much-scrubbed white oilcloth, Eloise, coached in that ritual as well as in many others sacred in the institution, piped up with all the others, her voice as monotonous as theirs:
“Our heavenly Father, we thank Thee for this food and for all the other blessings Thou giveth us.”
Sally Ford, keeping a watchful, pitying eye on her new charge, who was only nibbling at the unappetizing food, found herself looking upon the familiar scene with the eyes of the frightened little new orphan. It was a game that Sally Ford often played—imagining herself someone else, seeing familiar things through eyes which had never beheld them before.
Because Eloise was a “new girl,” Sally was permitted to keep her at her side after the noon dinner. It was Sally who showed her all the buildings of the big orphanage, pointed out the boys’ dormitories, separated from the girls’ quarters by the big kitchen garden; showed her the bare schoolrooms, in which Sally herself had just completed the third year of high school. It was Sally who pridefully showed her the meagerly equipped gymnasium, the gift of a miraculously philanthropic session of the state legislature; it was Sally who conducted her through the many rooms devoted to hand crafts suited to girls—showing off a bit as she expertly manipulated a hand loom.
Eloise’s hot little hand clung tightly to Sally’s on the long trip of inspection of her new “home.” But her cry, hopeless and monotonous now, even taking on a little of the institutional whine, was still the same heartbroken protest she had uttered upon her arrival in the dormitory: “I don’t want to be an orphan! I don’t want to be an orphan, Sal-lee!”
“It ain’t—I mean, isn’t—so bad,” Sally comforted her. “Sometimes we have lots of fun. And Christmas is awf’ly nice. Every girl gets an orange and a little sack of candy and a present. And we have turkey for dinner, and ice cream.”
“My mama gave me candy every day,” Eloise whimpered. “Her men friends brung it to her—boxes and boxes of it, and flowers, too. God was mean to let her die, and make an orphan outa me!”
And because Sally herself had frequently been guilty of the same sinful thought, she hurried Eloise, without rebuking her, to the front lawn which always made visitors exclaim, “Why, how pretty! And so homelike! Aren’t the poor things fortunate to have such a beautiful home?”
For the front lawn, upon which no orphan was allowed to set foot except in company with a lawnmower or a clipping shears, was beautiful. Now, in early June, it lay in the sun like an immense carpet, studded with round or star-shaped beds of bright flowers. From the front, the building looked stately and grand, too, with its clean red bricks and its big, fluted white pillars. They were the only two orphans in sight, except a pair of overalled boys, their tow heads bare to the hot sun, their lean arms, bare to the shoulders in their ragged shirts, pushing steadily against whirring lawnmowers.
“Oh, nasturtiums!” Eloise crowed, the first happy sound she had made since entering the orphanage.
She broke from Sally’s grasp, sped down the cement walk, then plunged into the lush greenness of that vast velvet carpet, entirely unconscious that she was committing one of the major crimes of the institution. Sally, after a stunned moment, sped after her, calling out breathlessly:
“Don’t dast to touch the flowers, Eloise! We ain’t allowed to touch the flowers! They’d skin us alive!”
But Eloise had already broken the stem of a flaming orange and red nasturtium and was cuddling it against her cheek.
“Put it back, honey,” Sally begged, herself committing the unpardonable sin of walking on the grass. “There isn’t any place at all you could hide it, and if you carried it in your hand you’d get a licking sure. But don’t you cry, Eloise. Sally’ll tell you a fairy story in play hour this afternoon.”
The two, Sally’s heart already swelling with the sweet pain of having found a new child to mother, Eloise’s tear-reddened eyes sparkling with anticipation, were hurrying up the path that led around the main building to the weaving rooms in which Sally was to work an extra hour as punishment for her morning’s “play-acting,” when Clara Hodges came shrieking from behind the building:
“Sal-lee! Sal-lee Ford! Mrs. Stone wants you. In the office!” she added, her voice dropping slightly on a note of horror.
“What for?” Sally pretended grown up unconcern, but her face, which had been pretty and glowing a moment before, was dull and institutional and sullen again.
“They’s a man—a farmer man—talking to Stone-Face,” Clara whispered, her eyes furtive and mean as they darted about to see if she were overheard. “Oh, Sal-lee, don’t let ’em ’dopt you! We wouldn’t have nobody to play-act for us and tell us stories! Please, Sal-lee! Make faces at him when Stone-Face ain’t lookin’ so’s he won’t like you!”
“I’m too big to be adopted,” Sally reassured her. “Nobody wants to adopt a 16-year-old girl. Here, you take Eloise to the weaving room with you.”
Her voice was that of a managing, efficient, albeit loving mother, but when she turned toward the front steps of the main building her feet began to drag heavily, weighted with a fear which was reflected in her darkling blue eyes, and in the deepened pallor of her cheeks. But, oh, maybe it wasn’t that! Why did she always have to worry about that—now that she was sixteen? Why couldn’t she expect something perfectly lovely—like—like a father coming to claim his long-lost daughter? Maybe there’d be a mother, too—
The vision Sally Ford had conjured up fastened wings to her feet. She was breathless, glowing, when she arrived at the closed door of the dread “office.”
When Sally Ford opened the door of the office of the orphan asylum, radiance was wiped instantly from her delicate face, as if she had been stricken with sudden illness. For her worst fear was realized—the fear that had kept her awake many nights on her narrow cot, since her sixteenth birthday had passed. She cowered against the door, clinging to the knob as if she were trying to screw up her courage to flee from the disaster which fate, in bringing about her sixteenth birthday, had pitilessly planned for her, instead of the boon of long-lost relatives for which she had never entirely ceased to hope.
“Sally!” Mrs. Stone, seated at the big roll-top desk, called sharply. “Say ‘How do you do?’ to the gentleman.... The girls are taught the finest of manners here, Mr. Carson, but they are always a little shy with strangers.”
“Howdy-do, Mr. Carson,” Sally gasped in a whisper.
“I believe this is the girl you asked for, Mr. Carson,” Mrs. Stone went on briskly, in her pleasant “company voice,” which every orphan could imitate with bitter accuracy.
The man, a tall, gaunt, middle-aged farmer, nodded, struggled to speak, then hastily bent over a brass cuspidor and spat. That necessary act performed, he eyed Sally with a keen, speculative gaze. His lean face was tanned to the color and texture of brown leather, against which a coating of talcum powder, applied after a close shave of his black beard, showed ludicrously.
“Yes, mum, that’s the girl, all right. Seen her when I was here last June. Wouldn’t let me have her then, mum, you may recollect.”
Mrs. Stone smiled graciously. “Yes, I remember, Mr. Carson, and I was very sorry to disappoint you, but we have an unbreakable rule here not to board out one