New Britain Herald Newspaper, July 5, 1927, Page 8

SALLY’S SHOULDERS In every family in this world of ours there always is one member who shoulders the burden for the rest— the work beast. Sometime it is a mother, working all day long and far into the night for those she loves. Sometime it is a father, slaving and saving to make both ends meet. In the Jerome family it was Sally. It was Sally who carried the family burdens—and they were many and heavy—upon her slender young shoulders. But it is doubtful that she knew what a load she bore. Certainly she did not know what it was to feel sorry for herself. She was the sort of a person who sees a load to be lifted and lifts it as if it were a feather instead of a dead weight. The sort of person who sees a hard job to be done, and does it cheerfully. She didn’t look the least bit like a beast of burden, either. If you had seen her you would have said that she hadn’t a single care in all the world. Her smile was like sudden sunrise, as it flashed out from her eyes and from the lifted corners of her mouth. She walked as lightly as if there were wings fastened to her heels, and she carried those shoulders of hers so proudly that nobody ever guessed that troubles were piled high on both of them. That was Sally Jerome for you! Clever and courageous and up-and-coming, and without an ounce of silly self-pity about her. * It was 6 o'clock on the third Monday morning in August, and hot as only an August day knows how to be hot. In the Jerome family's second-floor flat on Trellis street the green window-shades were pulled down to the sills to shut out the heat that had been hanging over the town for a week, heavy and depressing as fog. An electric fan had whirred and hummed all night long in Mrs. Jerome’s bedroom—the largest and airiest room in the flat. But in spite of it she had had a bad night, one of the worst ones she had ever slept through. Three or four times she had had to get her daughter Sally up to ask her for a glass of ice-water from the kitch- en, and for one of the new headache powders—the only kind she had ever found that did not upset her stomach. Mrs. Jerome enjoyed poor health to the utmost. She was asleep now and had been for hours, although later she would declare she hadn’t slept a wink. Her soft plump hands were still holding the novel she had been reading when she “dropped off.” In the middle room, Beauregard, her only son and the ap- ple of her eye, moved restlessly in his slumbers. Every now and then he sighed and groaned as if he were dreaming of the week’s work ahead of him. Beauregard was called “Beau” for short, but he did not live up to his dashing nickname. For the only sweetheart he had ever had was little Mabel Wilmot, and he was go- ing to marry her just as soon as he could afford to. Mabel, had come home with Beau at midnight and was aslep now in Sally’s bed in the room that Sally and Millie Jerome shared at the back of the flat. Mabel often spent a night with the Jeromes when Beau was too tired to take her home. Sally had spent the night in the hammock couch on the front porch. It had been anything but a comfortable night for her. First of all she had got up at midnight to give her bed to Mabel. Then the hammock couch was three inches too short for her straight young body and there had been some mosquitoes to bother her, besides. In short, it had been a night of horrors. But it takes more than one such night to dim the fresh loveliness of twenty, and Sally was just twenty. Her skin was as smooth as a healthy baby’s, and her eyes were bright and dewy when she opened them to the glare of the morning. High above the housetops across the street the red Au- gust sun stood in a sky of brass. Sally blinked at -it. “Hello, Sun! Up and at it again, aren’t you?” she said gently. “And here’s where I rise, myself!” She folded her sheets, set the cushions upright on the swinging couch, and went indoors. The darkened living-room was a sea of tossed Sunday newspapers. There were cigarette ashes scattered on the rug and Beau’s straw hat lay on the seat of the arm-chair beside the window. Across the back of it hung his limp collar and necktie. On the dining-room table were the remnants of the mid- night meal that he and his Mabel had eaten there six hours hefore—crusts of rye bread on a plate, a bowlful of cream cheese with green onions chopped up in it, and two half- emptied glasses of ginger-ale. Mabel's little lipstick-stained handkerchief and her meshbag lay beside them. Under the table were the navy-blue sandals she had kicked off and left lying there. Sally picked them up and tiptoed down the long narrow hall to the bathroom. Making as little noise as possible, she bathed, cleaned her teeth and brushed her hair. It was lovely blue-black hair, clipped close to show the shape of her pretty head, and it shone like satin. Sally’s eyes were deeply blue with thick upcurling lash- es that cast shadows against her lids. Unusual eyes that changed with her moods, and became gay and tender and grave by turn. She had the flawless white skin that is a real gift of the gods to blue-eyed brunettes, and a red-lipped smile that people never forgot once they had seen it. But her greatest beauty was one that she did not know she had. Her shoulders. In a world of round shoulders, freckled shoulders, too-fat should to bony shoulders, and shoulders that do not match. 's were a marvel. They were straight where shoulders should be straight, and they were beautifully curved where shoulders should be beautifully curved. Many a beautiful chorus-girl in Mr. Ziegfeld's famous “Follies” would have given her eve-teeth and a week's salary for shoulders like Sally Jerome's. The pity of it was that nobody ever saw them. But nobody ever did. For Sally had never owned a low-necked dress in her Jife. When she went out in the evening with Ted Sloan, who lived in the flat downstairs, she went to a movie or a restaurant where the women did not “dress;” and the WEW BRITAIN DAILY HERALD, TUESDAY, JULY 5, 1927. The world was her dance floor frocks that she wore there were plain straight little things with high round collars. In the mornings, “around home” Sally always wore cal- ico bungalow aprons—the kind that can be bought for ninety cents in any neighborhood dry-goods store. There was one of them hanging on the hook hehind the bathroom door and she slipped into it before she started her morning “up-setting” exercises, as she called them. Every morning of her life Sally did these exercises for fifteen minutes, standing before the open window of the bathroom. They kept her fit as a fiddle, so she said. “One-two-three-four,” she began to count aloud, as she bent from the waist down, time after time, to touch the floor with her fingertips. Then she began to hum, swinging back and forth in per- fect rvthm: “Five-six-seven-eight.” And, then without re- alizing it, she began to sing Nick Lucas’ little soug, keep- ing time to her movements. “High—high—high Up on the hill, Watching the clouds Go—by—" What a nice hapy song that was, she was thinking, as she sang. She shut her eyes and thought of a green hill-top with the wind ruffling the tall grass, and the clouds sail- ing by like silver ships...Wouldn’t it be gorgeous to get out of town on a sweltering day like this and find some green hill-top far away in the country? To be there with someone you loved to be with. With someone you loved. : . Not Ted Sloan. . .No, not Ted Sloan. Decidedly not. “High—high—high “Up—on the hill—" Sally was singing at the top of her voice now as she did her daily dozen with ali her might and main. “Well, for Pete’s sake! What are you trying to do— Wake the dead?” At the sound of the peevish voice behind her Sally jumped and swung around sharply. Her happy little song stopped. Millie, her younger sister, had opened the bathroom door without a sound. She stood now on the threshold in her pink nightgown and bare feet, and her little face was dark with ill-nature. “Not seven o'clock yet, and you shrieking all over the house like an alarm clock she whined crossly, “You woke me up, and I'm dead for sleep—" She sagged against the wall and yawned, opening her little pink mouth like a kitten. You would have marvelled, if you had seen them to- gether, that the same family could produce a Sally and a Millie. For Sally was all pep and life and “go” while Millie was a clinging vine, in drone in the hive. Her blue eyes were slow-moving, her voice was a drawl, and every movement of her body was lazy. She drove Sx\llf’ wild at times. Nevertheless, she was a pretty thing in a baby-faced kind of fashion. Like Beau, who was her twin, Millie was exceedingly blond. Her hair was pale gold. So were her brows and lash- es but she kept them dyed with some sticky stuff that she called “Chinese black.” There was always a bottle of it somewhere in the house. “How soon are you going to be through with the bath- Millie asked when she had yawned four times, “Because I'd like a bath now that I'm up—" “It's time for you to be up, anyway!” Sally cut her short, “That is, u want to get to the office on time for once in your life.” She began to gather together her brushes and clothes. “I don’t, though. 1 don’t care whether I EVER get to that offic ain or not!"Millie's little rose-and-white face set itself into stubborn lines. “I just loathe the thought of going down there and taking dictation from -that horrid Mr. Bursall, any more, e always puts his hand on the " room?"” back of my chair and leans over me so that 1 don’t know which way to look, Sally!'—He embarrasses me so! I just know that one of these days he’s going to get a little bit too fresh—and there Il be, walking the weary again for another new job—" She shrugged her thin shoulders in a hopeless and resigned way. Poor Millie. . .She was always leaving her jobs. And she always had to leave them for the same reason: because some man or other in the office “got smart™ with her. Aft- er that there was nothing for her to do but walk out, was there? No nice giri would stay in a place where the men made love to her, would she?. ..Certainly not. Ask Millie. She knew! “Start my bath-water for me, Sally,” she drawled. She wasn't six feet away from the tub, herself, but it never occurred to her to do anything herself so long as Sally was there to do it for her. She and Beau were a year older than Sally, but Sally always felt that they were a couple of irresponsible babies and treated them as,if they were. She looked after their clothes, got most of their meals, gave them advice that they never took, and loaned them money that they never failed to take. She was like an older sister to them. She was the real head of the family, as well as its willing siave. And so, without thinking, she obediently bent over the bath-tub and turned on both of the faucets. Then she spread a faded bath mat on the floor, and took two clean fluffy towels from the linen-closet under the window. “There you are, Hon!” she said briskly and went out, closing the door gently so as not to wake the sleepers on the other side of the hall. By half past seven she had breakfast all ready to put on the table; and was pouring the strained chilled orange juice into five little glasses when her mother came into the kitchen. Mrs. Jerome had onee been a beauty. There were traces of beauty still in her plump pale face, her blue eyves, and thick fair hair that was just beginning to gray. “Good morning, Mother. Did you have a wretched night?” asked Sally, all concern and sympathy. “Wretched. I didn't sleep a wink until it was broad day- light,” Mrs. Jerome declared with a moan. She sank down besides the table, and her chair creaked under her weight. Mrs. Jerome was stout. “Pour me a cup of coffee, Sally,” she said, “Just a drop, and then I'll go back to bed and have forty winks. I'm as limp as a rag.” She looked it, too, sitting there in her faded gray kimo- no and Sally’s heart went out to her. Her blue eyes were full of tenderness as she watched her mother drain a sec- ond cup of coffec. “Just nine years ago today that your father walked out and left me with you three children to'raise!” Mrs. Jerome remarked when she had finished a piece of toast. “You were only eleven then, Sally, and the twins a year older. . . My soul, but it's no wonder I can’t sleep nights when I think of all the trouble I've had!” She picked up her book—it was Edna Ferber's “Show Boat"—and went slowly and heavily back to her bed. Books were practically the only excitement in Mrs. Je- rome's life. She lived on books. Just lived on them. Perhaps she loved the romance and glamour in them more than most readers because there was so little gla- mour and romance in her own life. They had gone out of it 11 years before when her good- looking husband had walked out of the front door for the last time. “I'm not coming back, so don't look for me,” he had told her, “I'm going where I can get a decent meal once in a while and a bed that’s fit to sleep in.” Evidently he had found what he wanted for there had never been any word from him except an occasional money- order. But it was too bad he hadn't stayed at home for a year or two longer; for by the time Sally was 13 she could keep house far better than her mother ever had. She was a born housekeeper, was Sally. The meal that she put upon the table at a quarter of eight was delicious, even if the food was simple and plain. It was well-served too. The glasses, cups and plates shone, a"ld] there was a bowl of yellow daisies in the middle of the table. “How tricky everything looks!” Mabel Wilmot cried when she came popping into the room. “May I have my coffee this minute, Sally? I've got to shake a leg or I'll be late for work!” Mabel worked at Bursall's, in the same office with Millie. “Millie tells me she is going to quit her job at the end of this week,” she went on, pouring cream into her cup. “I tell her she’s crazy to do it, but you know Millie— She ,Rlst \\:’on‘t stay in a place unless she’s having a good time here. “Good time?” echoed Sally, “I don't know what you mean, Mabel.” Mabel laughed. Her laugh was an odd little sound, sharp as a paring knife, “Well, she won’t stay in an office unless there’s some- body there that she’s got a crush on,” she explained blunt- ly. “And I don’t blame her in away. I know just how she feels. After all, she's got to meet somebody worthwhile or how's she ever going to get married, 1 ask you. No girl wants to work around an office forever and ever, amen.” . With that Beau's future wife jumped up from her chair. “Well, trolley-car! I must scoot!” she called in shrill fare- well, “You'd better go and drag Beau out of bed or he'll never get his job-of-work today, either By-by and ta-tal” The door slammed behind her. 1t took Sally three hours to put the flat into order that morning. It always was at its worst on Monday after the litter and confus wspapers everywhere, dust everywhere, clothes scattered about. But Sally had her own way of working. She played the phonograph in the living-room all the time she was busy, and every now and then she would stop for a second to try some kind of a new dance step—one of the fifty ones that she and Ted Sloan had worked out together. “There’s something nice about everyone, S * “But there’s everything nice about you—" sang Sally, dusting her mother’s room when Mrs. Jerome went into the bathroom at eleven o'clock to dress herself for the day. The tune went to her heels, and she stoped for a second to do a Black-bottom shimmy step at the foot of her by BEATRICE BURTON Author of ; “HER MAN”, “HONEY LOU”, “THE HOLLYWOOD GIRL”, Etc. * mother’s old black walnut bed. Music always went straight to Sally's feet, and when- ever she heard it, they would begin to tap the floor. She would dance anywhere and everywhere, and the world became her dance floor. Or at any rate that part of the world that was her world—the little world of the flat, the restaurants that she and Ted Sloan knew, and Mr. Peevey’'s office where she worked afternoons for $21 a week. Mr. Peevey did a small mail-order business, and six days a week Sally appeared at his office at noon to do his typewriting for him. He had a delicate stomach, and practically lived on little wholewheat biscuits and raw milk. Every day Sally brought him a pint of milk, heated it. on a .small electric stove in the office, and served it to him along with three of the little biscuits. " He made it a rule to have the little meal at 12:15 sharp, and one of the chief worries of Sally’s life was to get to the office on time every day. This morning it was perilotsly ‘closé to' noon when she opened the door of the flat and ran down the stairs that led to the street. A door at the bottom of them opened and a stocky young man with gray eyes and rumpled red hair stepped out in- to her path. Ted Sloan sold a certain make of cheap automobiles for a living and he kept no regular working hours. “I'm just on my way downtown, Babe,” he said to her with a wide friendly grin that showed square white teeth, “I'll take you in the buggy,” - He took her arm to help her into the little car that stood waiting at the curb, but she shook his hand off. “I can get in by myself, thanks.” she said. She didn't mind his touch when she danced with him, but at all other times it irritated her and made her nervous. . Just why this was so was a deep dark mystery to young Mr. Sloan. Sally, herself, never thought about it. She was too busy keeping the family fed and mended—Kkeeping Mr. Peevey fed and soothed — to worry much about her own personal problems. With scarcely a word, she and Ted Sloan drove all the way downtown to the Nye-Naylor building where Mr. Peevey had his small dark office that smelled like a musty pantry. “Thanks for the buggy-ride, Teddy,” Sally said as she got out of the car and started across the sunbaked side- walk.“See you tonight, 1 suppose.” And then she forgot all about him. For something hap- pened that swept everything else from her mind. To Be Coutinued MOTHER LIKED COFFEE, SANDWICHES, BOOKS AND INDIGESTION Mother enjoyed poor health! Millie carried the looks, and made the most of them. Sally was left to carry the burders of the Jerome family. Read how in “SALLY'S SHOULDERS" BY BEATRICE BURTON The Latest and Best of the Many Serials by this Talented Novelist STARTING TODAY in THE HERALD