Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

(Escaping from a truly dreadful  family situation and under an assumed name, the proper — and yet adventurous young Bostonian lady Sophia Brewer — has landed a job as a Harvey Girl. The year is 1886, and she has landed up in Newton, Kansa, to be trained in the Harvey method. The Newton Harvey house is a refuge for Sophia – and yet, can she do the kind of work which would be seen by kin and friends back in Boston as demeaning?)

Chapter 10 – Chance Met in Newton

Morning – if not precisely dawn – arrived far too early, in Sophia’s groggy estimation. The first harbinger sounded at first like a storm of blows upon the panels of the door to the room in which she and Laura had slept. She swam up out of as deep a state of sleep as she ever had had under the effect of Dr. Cotton’s disgusting potions, and the storm resolved into a polite tapping, and Jenny Maitland’s voice.

“Miss Teague, Miss Nyland? Wake up – there’s a train due into Newton in half an hour – and we must be ready. We’ll have our breakfast in the interval between that and the next, but you must be downstairs and inspection-ready in twenty minutes. Miss Teague…”

“I’m awake,” Sophia found her voice. From the other bed, she could hear Laura grumbling – probably strong oaths, from the level and passion of her voice. “So is Miss Nyland. We’ll be ready directly.”

There was some little starlight seeping into their room through the thin muslin curtains over the window which they had left open for fresh air. The moon was a small mother-of-pearl circle, just hovering over the buildings opposite – it shed just enough pale light to allow Sophia to light the gas fixture, as Laura heaved the bedclothes aside.

“Time to see to the cows,” she said, with remarkable cheer, and Sophia giggled.

“Not cows, Laura,” she replied, searching in her as-yet-unpacked carpet-bag for her cleanest shift. “But hungry travelers on the railway.”

“They wish to be fed, and will eat of what is put in front of them,” Laura replied. “Men … cows. Little difference that I can see.”

“Except that men don’t expect to be milked, as well.” Sophia said, and was disconcerted by Laura’s knowing chuckle.

“They want their service, just as the bull does,” Laura replied, inscrutably. She had found her stockings, and rolled them up around her pale shins as she sat on the bed. Sophia did not know what to say to that. She and Laura dressed in relative silence; combing out their long hair before the single mirror, and pinning it into plain and serviceable buns.

“We look like nuns,” Laura remarked, looking over Sophia’s shoulder as they stood in front of the small square of mirror over the wash-stand. Sophia regarded herself, and Laura – pale rounded faces reflected in the watery glass; Elsie collar buttoned high and close, plain black dress and narrow sleeves, with the white bibbed apron … it did appear positively nun-like. All that they lacked was a coif and a black veil. “I think that may be the idea,” Sophia replied. She had been considering this, ever since Jenny Maitland had outlined the code of appearance and dress, on the previous night. “You know how ordinary people think of a single woman who must work for a living, away from her family and friends … or at least, I know of how they are seen in respectable Boston society – most usually of the servant class and sometimes no better than they ought to be. It’s very hard, Laura, for a woman alone, without friends or family, to have any kind of respectable life … so Mr. Harvey and his strict rules are a defense, a protection, even – against vicious gossip. Like Caesar’s wife – we must be above suspicion.”

“You are likely right about this,” Laura made a brief moue of distaste. “Still – how very dull for us!”

“We may not flirt with customers, and we must not cultivate particular friendships among our fellow employees within the house … but Miss Maitland said that there was nothing in Mr. Harvey’s rules for us forbidding such attachments to gentlemen employed on the railroad. The telegraphists and engineers and such; they are reputed to be daring and clever young men, skilled and prepared to move up in the world. I might like to be courted by an intelligent and ambitious young man of no particular family background … if, that is – I would like to be courted at all…”

Sophia set down the comb with which she had been taming the last rebellious curls of her hair, bidding them forcefully to go along into the modest bun at the back of her head. “The main thing for me, Laura – I think I should like to work in something associated with the railroad – so new and exciting! You have no idea how boring my life in Boston was … there was not a person I knew, or met, save my great-aunt who had never had a thought or said a word that their farthest ancestors had not already said. I suppose that I have never felt quite so …alive. As if I were a new woman.”

“Me, I am tired of chickens and cows and slaving over a wash-tub,” Laura gave one last look at herself in the mirror. Sophia thought that Laura looked like some magnificent ancient Nordic goddess come to life. “Now – we go be new woman, ya?”

“Modern women,” Sophia echoed. They turned off the gaslight as they left their room. Out in the corridor there were already a bevy of girls in black dresses and white aprons, chirping excitedly or yawning. Sophia and Laura followed them down the staircase, through the kitchen – already a hub-bub of activity, redolent with the odor of baking bread and ham, of bacon and apple pies, muffins and sausages and clamorous with the voices of men shouting at each other in several languages besides English, and clanging iron pans on the tops of stoves – a clamor which diminished slightly at the first appearance of the girls in black and white. The girls went around the edge of the kitchen, into that hallway which led to the larders, the ice-room, the locked liquor store, the manager’s office, the telegraphist’s office, and the parlor set aside for the waitresses. This was a comfortable room, if set about with chairs, settees and tables of rather plain and unadorned make, all around the walls.  The parlor was brilliantly and mercilessly lit, the gas-lamps turned up to their highest extent so that it was nearly as bright as daylight. The girls made a circle, as if for a country-dance; Sophia and Laura followed suit – oh, yes, Jenny Maitland had told them the night before that she would inspect them – all of them and in a most stringent manner before they went on duty today.

Now the senior waitress went around the inside of the circle; each woman holding out her hands, first palm-up and then down for inspection. Jenny looked severely at their hands, their aprons and their hair, each in turn. Just as she began this process, a young man appeared in the doorway of the parlor, a piece of paper in his hand.

“Just come over the telegraph from Florence, Miss Maitland,” he said, with the air of someone bearing an important message. “Thirty-five for the lunchroom, twenty-four for the dining room.”

“Thank you, Mr. Boatwright,” Jenny said over her shoulder, “We’ll be ready.” The young man vanished like a mechanical Jack-in-the-box.   “You have a spot on your cuffs,” she said to the girl standing next to Laura. “Run upstairs and change – quick now.” Another girl had a crumpled apron – she also made a swift departure for upstairs, both of them returning, out of breath within a few minutes. Now all of her attention was on Laura and Sophia.  It appeared to Sophia that they both received a particularly exacting examination – for Jenny made them turn around, and to lift the hems of skirt and apron to show that they had on black shoes and stockings, and that their hair was tied with the plain white ribbon. Was this what it might be like to join the Army, she wondered – and found the supposition rather amusing.

“Miss Nyland, Miss Teague? You will start out in the lunchroom – it is sometimes a bit rowdier than the dining room, but the menu and the arrangements are somewhat simpler.”

“And the boys don’t tip like they do in there, either,” remarked one of the girls who had returned at that last minute. She had a gap between her teeth and wildly curly hair, even curlier than Sophia’s, but still firmly contained in a disciplined bun tied with a white ribbon. “But it’s a start. You follow after me, Miss Teague for the first round – watch what I do. I’m Selina Bennett – this’s my sister Frances. New girls always start in the lunchroom. Do you know the cup code yet?”

“Not well enough to be quick about it,” Sophia replied honestly, and Selina Bennett laughed, frank and honest. She and her sister both wore small round pewter brooches on their pinafores, each with an inset numeral 3.

“You’ll learn quick enough – it’s all very tidy and orderly; a systematical method for every motion, a place for everything, and everything in its proper place, just so. It’s like doing counted stitch needlework,” Selena added, as somewhere outside on the station platform, a whistle shrilled over the metallic shriek and clanging of a train coming into the station and applying the steam brakes.   To that symphony of noise was added the ringing notes of a gong.

“Here they come, girls,” Jenny Maitland swiped an invisible soot-fleck from her white apron. “The first train of the day – to work, now.”

Chapter 9 – The Harvey Way

            Her feet were feather-light, as Sophia sped down the stairway to the street, the load from her shoulders similarly light. Exuberant with joy and relief, she felt as if she should dance along the sidewalk, sing and shout. She was not tired, she was not a desperate and near to penniless fugitive. She had a pass for travel without charge on the next train … to Newton, which Mr. Benjamin had explained – with some amusement – was some six or seven hours journey farther west. She had just missed the most recent train west, and had some hours wait for the next. Her feet slowed … yes; there was one thing she ought to do, now that she was truly in the west. If she was a woman inclined to making careless, symbolic gestures, she might have dropped the gold Armitage engagement ring into the Missouri River, but the Brewers – and also the Teagues – were not given to indulge in such wastefulness.

The Union Depot in Kansas City seemed to be at the core of a district very like old North Town in Boston, which was a pity in Sophia’s eyes, for it was a magnificent building. It took her no little time, or distance from the ornamented red-brick façade and towers, to find a pawnbroker and get a hundred dollars for the gold, diamond, and pearl ring. She might have bargained for better, in accordance with the advice of Mendelson the Jew, but in truth she cared little enough, now that she was assured of employment by Harvey contract, and truly in the west … although so far, it did seem to be too much on the respectable side to be considered wild. She walked away from the pawnbroker’s establishment, feeling an odd sense of being unburdened. The last significant physical link to her old life was cut and she was free … or mostly free. She swung the carpet-bag as if it were a light thing. The railroad pass and the vouchers in her reticule crackled; the stiff paper they were written on a talisman and an assurance.

She found the proper platform for the next train, after assuring herself of the correct time. It was early yet, only mid-morning. There was only one other passenger waiting, a Junoesque young woman about her own age, in a plain dark traveling dress and jacket. She was a striking figure, with white-blond braids pinned in a coronet around her head, underneath the brim of her hat.   She also had a small trunk at her feet. Sophia wondered if she were also traveling to Newton – just as the young woman glanced in her direction and said,

“’ello – are you also for Newton? The train does not leave for another hour and a half. So Mr. Harvey told me.” The young woman had a faint, but pleasing accent; foreign-born, but fluent enough in English. Sophia rapidly made connections, from overheard mention.

“Are you Miss Nyland – Yes, I am also bound for Newton … to work in Mr. Harvey’s establishment. I am Sophie Teague– from Boston. I am an orphan, with no living family.”

“Oh!” the woman replied, instant sympathy in her face, and wide blue eyes. “How sad for you, Sophie! I am Laura Nyland, from Minnesota … and I have six brothers and five sisters, all older. My old papa; he cried when I said I would answer Mr. Harvey’s newspaper thing. But he gave me his blessing … I did not want to work on the farm any longer. You have not worked on a farm, Sophia? A very fine farm, but … oh, the muck! And the milking of cows, the laundry and the cooking … eh! To work in a fine restaurant! I like! And save for a dowry! I want to be married, some day – but to have a dowry. My papa could not afford a dowry for any past my third sister Kristin. My brothers, they find their own way – so why not I?”

“Indeed,” Sophia agreed, and settled onto the bench beside Laura Nyland. In the space of time spent waiting for the train and in spite of the considerable differences between them, she and Laura became fast friends, not least because Laura possessed a sharp eye and an even sharper wit … and a robust confidence in expressing it, which convulsed Sophia with laughter many times while they waited for the train, and during the hours to Newton. Laura had also been presented with a selection of sheets of paper, all printed in different typefaces, and not a few written out by hand.

“They want everything to be just so,” Laura pronounced, as they read them together, the fair head and the sandy-haired one bent together, as the midday train to Newton and points farther west rolled through Kansas. “There is a rule for everything.”

“But it is logical,” Sophia agreed. “This … it is nothing more than setting a proper table for a formal dinner party … haven’t you ever done such a thing, Laura?”

“On the farm!” Laura hooted with laughter. “With my brothers and the hired men hungry from a day of work? As if the forks and knives would even rest on the table next to the plate! And what is this … about cups and saucers?”

“A signaling code,” Sophia had already gone to the next page. “For what the guest has ordered to drink, so that it may be provided within seconds.”

“It is required to be efficient,” Laura nodded. “For the train stops for half an hour exactly for water and coal. In that time, they must order their meal, it must be served promptly and they must eat …”

“Did they say anything about where we shall live?” Sophia asked, regretting that she had either not pressed Mr. Benjamin for this intelligence, or if he had provided it, she did not recall.

“Above the restaurant,” Laura answered. “All the ladies live in rooms … two sharing. This is provided, as are all of our meals. But they are very strict with us. We must be home before a curfew at 11:00 every night, and if a gentleman wishes to pay court, he must ask permission, first. As if we were living with our very watchful papa and mama – but on one day a week, we are free to do what we wish. Is very good, Sophie – much better than the farm. And seventeen dollars a month! My papa paid the hired men only two dollars a month; my brother Sven is a carpenter in town, and he earns twenty dollars a month, when there is building in the summer. We will be earning almost as much as a man with a skilled trade, more than a woman teaching school! Think on that, Sophie!”

“We will have to earn it first,” Sophia warned, somberly. “And prove our worth in the first month.”

“Pooh! It is only work! I am not afraid of work!” Laura exclaimed; her confidence in herself was an infectious tonic. “Kansas now … the western territory – I do not know of this place, Sophie. Do you?”

Silently, they looked out of the train window, at the endless waves of grassland stretching as far as the eye could see; a sea of grass, with a faultlessly blue sky arching over it, an endless dome, unmarred by a single cloud. They had long left the river behind, and it seemed a long way between those small towns with names which suggested high civic hopes  – Osage City, Emphoria, Strong City … each a tiny island in the ocean of grasslands.

“It used to be called the Great American Desert, in the books of geography in my grandfather’s house,” Sophia said at last. “There was nothing but herds of buffalo, and wild Indians, and it was perilous beyond belief to venture into it, even on the established trail … but now it is becoming settled. The soil is very rich, they say.”

“No trees to clear away!” Laura giggled. For the first time since Lucius Armitage had fumbled with his hat and his calling card in the parlor of the Brewer house, all those weeks ago, Sophia felt a return to her usual good spirits. She was in the west, which was sufficiently far enough away from Boston, on the verge of an adventure, and had a place and purpose to go.

They reached Newton as dusk fell, sweeping down on the prairie like the wings of a vast dark bird. Stars had begun to spangle the night sky, as cold, pale and distant as the lanterns which lit the platform and the station were warm, golden and close. Sophia and Laura stepped down from the train.

“Where are we supposed to go?” Sophia asked. “Was there someone we should speak to? I suppose that we can ask for them.”

The other passengers alighting at Newton seemed to be making in a group toward the nearest doorway; a double door with large glass panes in the center of each. The doors allowed hints of the activity within to spill out onto the platform, and Laura sniffed appreciatively.

“Good food cooking!” she exclaimed. “This must be Mr. Harvey’s place.”

“I suppose we should go inside,” Sophia ventured, but before they could follow after the other passengers, a young woman emerged from between the doors – a young woman clad in a black dress with a narrow white collar and a starched white bibbed apron.

“Miss Teague and Miss Brewer?” she asked, with a smile. “Welcome to the Newton Harvey House – I am Miss Maitland – Jenny for short. Mr. Benjamin sent me a telegram this morning, telling me to expect you. You must be tired … and hungry, too. Come inside – but this will be the last time you will ever sit down when a train stops here.” Jenny Maitland added with a twinkle in her eye. “May as well eat first, and have some notion of what to expect – then I will show you upstairs when the rush is over.”

Sophia gasped involuntarily, on beholding the dining room; never in the world would she have expected such splendor in such a place as this – out beyond the frontier of the Missouri River; spotless white table linen, silverware that shone as splendidly as if it had just come from the hands of the silversmith, monogrammed china, all lade out with superhuman precision on each table. The room was presided over by a pair of enormous silver urns on a table of their own – a table also dressed with a faultlessly white cloth. Jenny showed them to a table in the farthest corner, saying,

“What would like to drink?”

“Milk for me,” replied Laura, and Sophia ventured,

“Tea – orange pekoe, if you …”

“Of course,” Jenny twinkled at them again, arranging one cup off the saucer, and the other – with the handle pointed in a specific direction. “You both look so hungry – let me bring you that which we have done the best with, today … and take your time in savoring it, for at least you do not have to get onto the train again in twenty-eight minutes.”

She swirled away, her skirts and apron rustling, to be replaced in seconds with another girl in a black dress and starched pinafore apron, bearing a tray laden with carafes. Milk for Laura, orange pekoe tea for Sophia, appeared as if by magic from the carafes – the girl grinned at them both and whispered,

“I’m Emily Adams – you must be the new girls!” She also swirled away, a black-and-white clad sprite in constant motion, before either of them could reply.

“It’s … marvelous,” Sophia ventured. “It’s like a dance – like a ballet. Look at them, Laura!”

The lamp-lit dining room presented a picture of constant purposeful motion – the dozen or so women in nun-like black dresses and white pinafores moving between the tables. Not a minute or two had passed since the passengers had come from the station platform;  now the women in black and white danced between the tables bearing plates – of soup, and salads, then bread and savory entrees, emerging from a farther door.

For once, Laura seemed to have lost some of her previous easy assurance.

“Oh, Sophie … do you suppose we will ever learn this?”

“We’d better do so,” Sophia pointed out. “If we want to earn that generous living, and you your dowry. Besides – they all have. Every one of these girls had to learn the system, and so can we.”