One can hold a scrubbing-brush with two good fingers
and the stumps of two others even if both joints of
the thumb are gone, but it takes considerable practice
to get used to it.
Trina became a scrub-woman. She had taken council
of Selina, and through her had obtained the position
of caretaker in a little memorial kindergarten over
on Pacific Street. Like Polk Street, it was an
accommodation street, but running through a much poorer
and more sordid quarter. Trina had a little room
over the kindergarten schoolroom. It was not
an unpleasant room. It looked out upon a sunny
little court floored with boards and used as the children’s
playground. Two great cherry trees grew here,
the leaves almost brushing against the window of Trina’s
room and filtering the sunlight so that it fell in
round golden spots upon the floor of the room.
“Like gold pieces,” Trina said to herself.
Trina’s work consisted in taking care of the
kindergarten rooms, scrubbing the floors, washing
the windows, dusting and airing, and carrying out
the ashes. Besides this she earned some five dollars
a month by washing down the front steps of some big
flats on Washington Street, and by cleaning out vacant
houses after the tenants had left. She saw no
one. Nobody knew her. She went about her
work from dawn to dark, and often entire days passed
when she did not hear the sound of her own voice.
She was alone, a solitary, abandoned woman, lost in
the lowest eddies of the great city’s tide—the
tide that always ebbs.
When Trina had been discharged from the hospital after
the operation on her fingers, she found herself alone
in the world, alone with her five thousand dollars.
The interest of this would support her, and yet allow
her to save a little.
But for a time Trina had thought of giving up the
fight altogether and of joining her family in the
southern part of the State. But even while she
hesitated about this she received a long letter from
her mother, an answer to one she herself had written
just before the amputation of her right-hand fingers—the
last letter she would ever be able to write.
Mrs. Sieppe’s letter was one long lamentation;
she had her own misfortunes to bewail as well as those
of her daughter. The carpet-cleaning and upholstery
business had failed. Mr. Sieppe and Owgooste
had left for New Zealand with a colonization company,
whither Mrs. Sieppe and the twins were to follow them
as soon as the colony established itself. So
far from helping Trina in her ill fortune, it was
she, her mother, who might some day in the near future
be obliged to turn to Trina for aid. So Trina
had given up the idea of any help from her family.
For that matter she needed none. She still had
her five thousand, and Uncle Oelbermann paid her the
interest with a machine-like regularity. Now
that McTeague had left her, there was one less mouth
to feed; and with this saving, together with the little
she could earn as scrub-woman, Trina could almost
manage to make good the amount she lost by being obliged
to cease work upon the Noah’s ark animals.
