Upturn in Jerusha’s Life

Chapter 1

Here comes the day! A day to be awaited with awe, confronted with courage and forgotten with haste is the first Wednesday of every month. Stainless floors, dustless chairs and wrinkleless beds were the need of the hour. All ninety-seven notorious little orphans had to be neatly dressed into newly starched ginghams and were reminded of their manners, and told to say, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ whenever a Trustee questions.

It was a distressing time; and poor Jerusha Abbott, being the oldest orphan, had to swallow the bitter part of it. This particular first Wednesday, like its predecessors, finally dragged itself to a close. Jerusha had been making sandwiches for the orphan asylum’s guests and soon escaped from the pantry to accomplish her regular work. She was the in charge of room F, where eleven little tots, from four to seven, occupied eleven little cots set in a row. Jerusha assembled her charges, straightened their rumpled outfits, wiped their noses, and started them in an orderly and willing line towards the dining-room to engage themselves for a blessed half hour with bread and milk and prune pudding.

Tired Jerusha dropped down on the window seat and leaned throbbing temples against the cool glass. She had been obeying everybody’s instructions, got scolded and hurried by a nervous matron, Mrs. Lippett, since five that morning. Behind the scenes, Mrs. Lippett did not always maintain that calm and pompous dignity with which she faced an audience of Trustees and lady visitors. Jerusha gazed out across a broad stretch of frozen lawn, beyond the tall iron paling that marked the confines of the asylum, down undulating ridges sprinkled with country estates, to the spires of the village rising from the midst of bare trees.

The day was ended—quite successfully, as far as she knew. The Trustees and the visiting committee had completed their work, and read their reports, and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying home to their own cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome little charges for another month. Watching with curiosity—and a touch of wistfulness—Jerusha saw the stream of carriages and automobiles that rolled out of the orphanage gates. In her head she followed first one carriage, then another, to the big houses dotted along the hillside. She pictured herself in a Fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed with feathers leaning back in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring ‘Home’ to the driver. But as soon as she reached the doorstep of her home the picture grew blurred.

Jerusha had an imagination—an imagination that would get her into trouble if she didn’t take care, as told by Mrs. Lippett—but keen as it was, it could not carry her beyond the front porch of the houses she would enter. Poor, eager, adventurous little Jerusha, in all her seventeen years, had never stepped inside an ordinary house; she could not picture the daily routine of those other human beings who carried on their lives unencumbered by orphans.

Je-ru-sha Ab-bott
You are wan-ted
In the of-fice,
And I think you’d
Better hurry up!

She dropped down on the window seat and leaned throbbing temples against the cool glass.

Tommy Dillon, another orphan who had just joined the chorus group, came singing up the stairs and down the corridor, his chant growing louder as he approached room F. Jerusha pulled herself from the window and refaced the troubles of life.

‘Who wants me?’ said Jerusha cutting into Tommy’s chant with a solicitous note.
Mrs. Lippett in the office,
And I think she’s mad.
Ah-a-men! Ah-e-m!

Tommy piously intoned, but his accent was not entirely malicious. Even the most hardened little orphan felt sympathy for a sister who was summoned to the office to face an annoyed matron. Jerusha went without comment, but with two parallel lines on her brow. What could have gone wrong, she wondered. Were the sandwiches not thin enough? Were there shells in the nut cakes? Had a lady visitor seen the hole in Susie Hawthorn’s stocking? Horror Of horrors!—one of the cherubic little babes in her own room F ‘sassed’ a Trustee? The long lower hall had not been lighted, and as she came downstairs, a last Trustee stood, on the point of departure. Jerusha caught only a fleeting impression of the man—and the impression consisted entirely of tallness. He was waving his arm towards an automobile waiting in the curved drive. As it sprang into motion and approached, head on for an instant, the glaring headlights threw his shadow sharply against the wall inside. The shadow pictured grotesquely elongated legs and arms that ran along the floor and up the wall of the corridor. It looked, for the entire world, like a huge, wavering daddy-long-legs.

Jerusha’s anxious frown gave place to quick laughter. She was by nature a sunny soul, and had always snatched the tiniest excuse to be amused. If one could derive any sort of entertainment out of the oppressive fact of a Trustee, it was something unexpected to the good. She advanced to the office quite cheered by the tiny episode, and presented a smiling face to Mrs. Lippett. She was surprised to see the matron, not exactly smiling but with a friendly gesture; she wore an expression almost as pleasant as the one she donned for visitors.

‘Sit down, Jerusha, I have something to tell you.’

Jerusha sat on the chair and waited while holding her breath. An automobile flashed past the window and Mrs. Lippett peeped over it.

‘Did you notice the gentleman who has just gone?’
‘I saw his back.’

‘He is one of our most affluential Trustees, and has supported the orphanage with large sums of money. I do not have the right to mention his name; he prefers to remain unknown.’

Jerusha’s eyes widened slightly, she was not habitual to being called to the office to discuss the peculiarities of Trustees with the matron.

‘This gentleman has taken an interest in several of our boys. No matter how deserving the girls of this institution are, I have never been able to gather his concern in the slightest degree in any of the girls. He does not, I may tell you, bother much for girls.’

‘No, ma’am,’ Jerusha murmured, since some gesture was appropriate at this point.

‘While I was in the meeting today discussing the eccentricities, the question of your future was brought up.’

Mrs. Lippett allowed a moment of silence to fall, then resumed in a slow, placid manner extremely trying to her hearer’s suddenly tightened nerves.

‘Usually, as you know, the children are not allowed to stay in the asylum the day they turn sixteen, but an exception was made in your case. You finished the school at fourteen, and since you have done so well in your studies—not always, I must say, in your conduct—the committee decided to let you attend the village high school. Now that it is coming to an end, the institution can no longer support you.’

Mrs. Lippett brought accusing eyes to bear upon the prisoner in the dock, and the prisoner look guilty because it seemed to be expected—not because she could remember any strikingly black pages in her record.

‘Of course the usual disposition of one in your place would be to put you in a position where you could yourself earn your bread, but having done quite well in school in certain branches, it seems that your work in English has even been brilliant. Miss Pritchard, who is on our visiting committee, is also on the school board; she has been talking with your rhetoric teacher, and made a speech in your favour. She even read aloud an essay for everyone to hear that you wrote entitled, “Blue Wednesday”.’

Jerusha’s guilty expression this time was not assumed.
‘It seemed to me that you care less if the institution that has done so much for you is offended. You would not have been pardon, had you not managed the humour in the essay. But fortunately for you, Mr.—, that is, the gentleman who just left—appears to have an excessive sense of humour. On the basis of that impertinent paper, he has offered to send you to college.’

‘To college?’ Jerusha said with widened eyes. Mrs. Lippett nodded.

‘He waited to discuss the terms with me. They are unusual. He believes that you have originality, and he is planning to educate you to become a writer.’

‘A writer?’ Jerusha’s mind was numbed. She could only repeat Mrs. Lippett’s words.

‘That is his wish. The future will show, what will come of it. He is giving you a very liberal allowance, almost, for a girl who has never had any experience in taking care of money, too liberal. He had planned the matter in detail, and giving suggestions was not wise on my part. You are to remain here throughout the summer. Your board and tuition will be paid directly to the college, and you will receive in addition during the four years you are there, an allowance of thirty-five dollars a month. This will enable you to enter on the same standing as the other students. Every month the gentleman’s private secretary will deliver you the allowance and in return, you will write a letter of acknowledgment once a month. That is—you are not to thank him for the money; he doesn’t care to have that mentioned, but you are to write a letter telling him of the progress in your studies and the details of your daily life. Just such a letter as you would write to your parents if they were living.

‘These letters will be addressed to Mr. John Smith and will be sent in care of the secretary. The gentleman’s name is not John Smith, but he prefers to remain unknown as told before. To you he will never be anything but John Smith. His reason in requiring the letters is that he thinks nothing so fosters facility in literary expression as letter-writing. Along with keeping track of your studies, he desires you to write the letter as if you are corresponding to you family. He will never answer any of your letters, nor in the slightest particular take any notice of them. He detests letter-writing and does not wish you to become a burden. If any point should ever arise where an answer would seem to be imperative—such as in the event of your being expelled, which I trust will not occur—you may correspond with Mr. Griggs, his secretary. These monthly letters are the only payment that Mr. Smith requires and are absolutely mandatory on your part; so you must be as punctilious in sending them as though it were a bill that you were paying. I hope that they will always be respectful in tone and will reflect credit on your training. You must remember that you are writing to a Trustee of the John Grier Home.’

Jerusha’s eyes longingly sought the door. Her head was in a whirl of excitement, and she wished only to escape from Mrs. Lippett’s platitudes. She rose and took a tentative step backwards.

‘I trust that you are suitably thankful for this very rare good fortune that has befallen you? You are one of the few girls who got a chance to emerge in the world. You must always remember—’

‘I—yes, ma’am, thank you. I think, if that’s all, I must leave for I have to sew a patch on Freddie Perkins’s trousers.’
The door closed behind her, and Mrs. Lippett watched her leave with dropped jaw, her peroration in mid-air.

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