TO YOU Blue Wednesday
The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day—a day tobe awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste.Every floor must be spotless, every chair dustless, and every bedwithout a wrinkle. Ninety-seven squirming little orphans must bescrubbed and combed and buttoned into freshly starched ginghams; andall ninety-seven reminded of their manners, and told to say, 'Yes,sir,' 'No, sir,' whenever a Trustee spoke.
It was a distressing time; and poor Jerusha Abbott, being the oldestorphan, had to bear the brunt of it. But this particular firstWednesday, like its predecessors, finally dragged itself to a close.Jerusha escaped from the pantry where she had been making sandwichesfor the asylum's guests, and turned upstairs to accomplish her regularwork. Her special care was room F, where eleven little tots, from fourto seven, occupied eleven little cots set in a row. Jerusha assembledher charges, straightened their rumpled frocks, wiped their noses, andstarted them in an orderly and willing line towards the dining-room toengage themselves for a blessed half hour with bread and milk and prunepudding.
Then she dropped down on the window seat and leaned throbbing templesagainst the cool glass. She had been on her feet since five thatmorning, doing everybody's bidding, scolded and hurried by a nervousmatron. Mrs. Lippett, behind the scenes, did not always maintain thatcalm and pompous dignity with which she faced an audience of Trusteesand lady visitors. Jerusha gazed out across a broad stretch of frozenlawn, beyond the tall iron paling that marked the confines of theasylum, down undulating ridges sprinkled with country estates, to thespires of the village rising from the midst of bare trees.
The day was ended—quite successfully, so far as she knew. TheTrustees and the visiting committee had made their rounds, and readtheir reports, and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying home to theirown cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome little charges foranother month. Jerusha leaned forward watching with curiosity—and atouch of wistfulness—the stream of carriages and automobiles thatrolled out of the asylum gates. In imagination she followed first oneequipage, then another, to the big houses dotted along the hillside.She pictured herself in a fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed withfeathers leaning back in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring 'Home' tothe driver. But on the door-sill of her home the picture grew blurred.
Jerusha had an imagination—an imagination, Mrs. Lippett told her, thatwould get her into trouble if she didn't take care—but keen as it was,it could not carry her beyond the front porch of the houses she wouldenter. Poor, eager, adventurous little Jerusha, in all her seventeenyears, had never stepped inside an ordinary house; she could notpicture the daily routine of those other human beings who carried ontheir lives undiscommoded by orphans.
Je-ru-sha Ab-bott
You are wan-ted
In the of-fice,
And I think you'd
Better hurry up!
Tommy Dillon, who had joined the choir, came singing up the stairs anddown the corridor, his chant growing louder as he approached room F.Jerusha wrenched herself from the window and refaced the troubles oflife.
'Who wants me?' she cut into Tommy's chant with a note of sharp anxiety.
Mrs. Lippett in the office,
And I think she's mad.
Ah-a-men!
Tommy piously intoned, but his accent was not entirely malicious. Eventhe most hardened little orphan felt sympathy for an erring sister whowas summoned to the office to face an annoyed matron; and Tommy likedJerusha even if she did sometimes jerk him by the arm and nearly scrubhis nose off.
Jerusha went without comment, but with two parallel lines on her brow.What could have gone wrong, she wondered. Were the sandwiches not thinenough?