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Title: Jane Journeys On
Author: Mitchell, Ruth Comfort, 1882-1954
Language: English
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[Illustration: "SAY, GIRLIE, DIDN'T I TELL YOU I'D PUT THE RAISIN IN IT?"]
JANE JOURNEYS ON
BY
RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL
AUTHOR OF
"PLAY THE GAME," ETC.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: 1922 :: LONDON
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1918, by The International Magazine Co.
Copyright, 1919, by McCall Co., Inc.
Copyright, 1916, 1917, by the Century Co.
Copyright, 1919, by the Crowell Publishing Co.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
W. C. MORROW
GUIDE AND FRIEND,
WHO HAS SET SO MANY
OF US ON OUR WAY
Transcriber's Note:
The Table of Contents is not printed in the book but has
been generated here for the convenience of the reader.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
JANE JOURNEYS ON
CHAPTER I
With but one exception, everybody in the upper layer of life in that
placid Vermont village was sure that Jane Vail was going to marry Martin
Wetherby. The one exception was Jane herself; she was not sure--not
entirely.
There were many sound and sensible reasons why she should, and only two
or three rather inconsequent ones why she should not. To begin with, he
was a Wetherby, and the family went steadily back in an unbroken line to
Colonial days; it was their grave old house with the fanlight over its
dignified door which had given Wetherby Ridge its name. He was doing
remarkably well at the bank; it was conceded that he would be assistant
cashier at the first possible moment; his habits were exemplary and he
was the most carefully dressed young man in the community. His mother
freely admitted at the Ladies' Aid and the Tuesday Club that he was as
perfect a son as any woman ever had, and that he would one day make some
girl a perfect husband.
Jane, after long and rebellious thought, could find nothing to set down
on the other side of the ledger beyond the fact that he was just a little
too good-looking, that he was already beginning, at twenty-six, to put on
the flesh which had always been intended for him, that his hands were
softer than hers, with fingers which widened puffily at the base, and
that she nearly always knew what he was going to say before he said it.
She was twenty-four years old, and the immemorial custom of that village
gave her a scant remaining year in which to make up her mind. All girls
who ran true to pattern were either snugly married or serenely teaching
by the time they were twenty-five, and the choice was not always their
own. There had been more marriageable maidens than eligible youths in the
set, and it was rather, Jane told herself grimly, like a game of Musical
Chairs--a gay, excited scramble, and some one always left out. Now, with
the exodus of a few and the marrying of many, it had narrowed down to
three of them--herself, Martin Wetherby, and Sarah Farraday, who was her
best friend during childhood and girlhood; and Sarah, an earnest, blonde
girl with nearsighted eyes and insistent upper front teeth, had, so to
speak, stopped playing. She had converted her dead father's old stable
into a studio by means of art burlap and framed photographs of famous
composers, and was giving piano lessons daily from ten to four. This left
the field entirely to Jane, and Jane was carrying about with her an
increasing conviction that she was not going to do the thing every one
expected her to do.
It came curiously to a crisis on a mild and unimportant day in November.
Jane spent a footless forenoon in her own room in the green-shuttered,
elm-shaded house where she lived with her adoring Aunt Lydia Vail, trying
to start a story. Miss Vail took great care to tiptoe whenever she passed
her door, and refrained from summoning her to the telephone, but her
pleasant old voice, explaining why her niece could not come, was clearly
audible.
"Yes, dear, she's at home, but she's at work at her writing, and you know
I never disturb her.... Yes, she's been shut away in her room since right
after breakfast.... Yes, it's a new story, but I don't know what it's
about. I'll ask her at dinner.... How's your mother, dear?... Oh, that's
_good_! That's what I always use and it never fails to relieve me. You
give her my love, won't you? I'll have Jane call you up when she comes
out for dinner."
The story simply would not start. It lay inert in the back of her brain,
listening for the telephone and Aunt Lydia's softly padding footfalls,
and at last she gave it up and got out the paper she was to read on "The
Modern Irish Dramatists" before the Tuesday Club that afternoon and went
carefully over its typed pages.
"Oh," said Aunt Lydia at the dinner table, her plump face clouding over,
"I'm _sorry_ the story didn't go well! It wasn't because you were
interrupted, was it, dear? I was especially careful this morning. You
know, I believe, without realizing it, you're just the least mite nervous
about your program. I know I am myself, though I know, of course, you're
going to do just beautifully."
Three and a half hours later, thirty-four matrons and spinsters were
warmly asserting that she had. They smiled up at her where she stood on
the shallow little platform with approval and affection, and the Chairman
of the Program Committee said she was sure they were all deeply indebted
to Miss Vail for a most enlightening little lecture. "I am free to
confess," she said, smiling, "that it is a subject upon which I,
personally, have been ignorant, and I believe many of our club ladies
would say the same."
Jane, looking down into their pleasant, best-family faces knew this was
the fact. The word "Irish" conveyed to most of them only the red-armed
minions in their kitchens; the boys who ran noisily up alleyways with
butchers' parcels; the short-tempered dames in battered hats who came--or
distressingly did not come--to them on Monday mornings, and who
frequently bore away with them bars of perfectly new soap; and the
chuckles and sobs and moonlit whimsies of Yeats and Synge and Lady
Gregory did not, in their minds, connect up at all.
"And now," said the President, in her sweet New England voice, "I know
you will all wish to express your appreciation both to the Chairman of
our Program Committee, who has arranged so many literary treats for us,
and to Miss Vail for her delightful paper by a rising vote of thanks."
Then the thirty-four ladies of the Tuesday Club clutched at their gloves
and handbags and came to their feet with soft rustlings of new foulards
and taffetas and rich old silks, and the President declared the meeting
adjourned but trusted that every one would remain for a cup of tea and a
social hour.
Martin Wetherby's handsome mother took brisk and proprietary charge of
Jane and shared her laurels happily. "Yes, in_deed_," she beamed, her
gray crêpe arm through the girl's, "I can tell you, _we're_ pretty proud
of her!" She had clearly cast herself already for the rôle of adoring and
devoted mother-in-law, and the Tuesday Club was just as clearly taking
the same view of it.
Jane, in her wine-red velvet and her glowing, gipsy beauty against the
sober blacks and grays and faded cheeks of the gathering, looking like a
Kentucky cardinal alighted in a henyard, felt her smile stiffening.
Sudden and inexplicable panic and rebellion descended upon her; it seemed
certain that if she heard Mrs. Wetherby say "proud of this dear girl of
ours" once again she would scream. She disengaged her arm and declined
tea and little frosted cakes.
"I'm so sorry--it looks so tempting, doesn't it?--but I really must fly!"
She looked earnestly at her wrist watch. "This very minute! Thank you all
so much! You've been wonderful--quite turned my head! But I _must_
hurry!"
Out in the quiet, pretty street the sense of pursuit fell away from her
and she was smiling derisively at herself when she reached Sarah
Farraday's house and passed through the side garden to the studio. An
hour with old Sally would be good for her.
Sarah was tenderly dusting her severe-looking upright piano and putting
away a pile of lesson books, and turned gladly to greet her. "Jane, dear!
Why, how did you get away so early? Didn't they serve tea? I was just
_sick_ about not going, but the little Macey girl has had so many
interruptions and is so far behind, and she does want to play at my
recital, so that I felt I couldn't put her off again. How did your paper
go?"
"Oh, well enough. They were very nice about it."
"I know they loved it. I want to read it!" She closed the music cabinet
and came to take the typed manuscript. "Why, _Jane_! What's the matter?"
"I don't know, Sally--Yes, I do know! It's--it's Mrs. Wetherby, and every
one else! She acts as if--every one acts--" it made her angrier still to
feel the color mounting hotly in her cheeks.
"Well, Jane, _dear_," a faint, sympathetic flush warmed her small, pale
face, "isn't that perfectly natural? Of course, I suppose it teases you,
but you know how happy every one is about it."
"But there isn't anything to be happy about--yet!"
"Then it's just because you have--have held things off, dear, that's all.
And I think Marty has been awfully faithful and patient--for _years_!
Ever since you were tiny kiddies!" She looked anxiously at her best
friend's mutinous face. "I'll tell you," she said, brightly, "let's run
around to Nannie's for a moment! She'll just be giving the 'Teddy-bear'
his oil rub. I'll run through the house and get my things--you wait out
in front!"
Nannie Slade Hunter (Mrs. Edward R.) was their second-best friend and
they had been among her bridesmaids two years earlier. A few minutes of
brisk footing through the fading November afternoon delivered them at the
Hunters' new, little house and in the nursery of their little son.
Sarah's knowledge of schedule had been correct. Nannie, in an enveloping
pinafore, her sleeves rolled high, her hands glistening, was anointing
her infant with the most expensive olive oil on the market. The house was
furnace heated and a small electric stove was radiating fierce warmth,
and her cheeks were blazing. Jane and Sarah flung off their wraps and
gave themselves whole-heartedly over to the business of worship and
praise.
Little Mrs. Hunter, on whom matronhood and maternity sat with the effect
of large spectacles on a small child, inquired indulgently into the
activities of her friends. "Paper go nicely, Janey? Sorry I couldn't
go.--Yes, he was his muzzie's lamby-lamby-boy! Yes, he was!--And how many
pupils have you now, Sally?"
"Seventeen," said Sarah, thankfully, "and if everything goes well I'll
have my baby-grand in four years!"
Edward R. Hunter, unmistakable father of the glistening infant, came into
the room as she spoke and at once propounded a conundrum.
"Here's a good one, Jane! What's the difference between Nannie and Sally?
Give it up? Why, Sally'll have a baby-grand, but Nannie has a grand
baby!" The hot and breathless nursery rang with mirth; it seemed to Jane
that the very pink room was growing hotter and hotter, and it smelt
stiflingly of moist varnish and talcum powder and warm olive oil and
expensive soap, and the baby, sitting solemnly erect for his powdering, a
steadying hand at his fat back, looked like a pink celluloid Kewpie
leering at her knowingly. She heard herself saying with unconsidered
mendacity that she had an errand to run for her Aunt Lydia, and that
Sally mustn't hurry away on her account, and presently she was down in
the dim street again, with Edward R.'s jocose reproach that old Marty
Wetherby was fading away to skin and bone echoing in her ears. She went
dutifully for a magazine Miss Vail had mentioned and went home the "long
way 'round," so that she was barely in time for supper, which consisted
of three slices of cold boiled ham, shaved to a refined thinness and
spread upon an ancient and honorable platter of blue willow pattern ware,
hot biscuit, a small pot of honey and two kinds of preserves, delicate
cups of not-too-strong tea, sugar cookies and a pallid custard.
Her aunt was fond and proud over the afternoon's triumph but didn't quite
understand her having gone away so abruptly, and feared that Mrs.
Wetherby had been "just the least mite hurt about it."
"But then," she hastened to add, at Jane's impatient movement, "it'll be
all right, dear! You're going to see her to-night, and I know you
can--sort of smooth it over."
"I was thinking," said her niece, dark eyes on her plate, "that perhaps I
wouldn't go this evening, Aunt Lyddy."
"Not _go_? Not go to Mrs. _Wetherby's_? Why,--_Jane_!" Miss Vail laid
down her fork and stared, her mild eyes wide with astonishment. "You
aren't sick, are you?"
"I think I'm sick of always and always going to the same places with the
same person, and hearing the same people say the same things!" Instantly
she wished she might recall the sharp words, satisfying as they were to
herself, for little Miss Lydia was regarding her much as the aunt of the
wretched girl in the fairy tale might have done,--the girl out of whose
mouth a frog jumped every time she opened it. Indeed, the sentence seemed
actually visible between them, like a squat and ugly small beast on the
shining white cloth. "Sorry, Aunt Lyddy," said Jane, penitently. "I'm a
crosspatch to-night, and I ought to sit by the fire and spin, instead of
gamboling."
Miss Vail's face cleared. "No, indeed, dearie, it'll be much better for
you to go and have a merry time with your young companions. That paper
was a nervous strain, _that's_ all! Now you just eat a good supper and
then run upstairs and make yourself as pretty as you can!" Her plump face
broke up into sly lines and she nodded happily. "Marty'll come for you at
quarter before eight; he telephoned before you got home."
Martin Wetherby was even better than his word, which was one of his most
sterling traits. He arrived at twenty-five minutes before eight and
waited contentedly in converse with her aunt until Jane came down. "I
didn't bring the car," he said. "I thought we'd like to walk." When they
reached the sidewalk he lifted her right forearm in a warm, moist grasp
and held it firmly close against him. "The car's too quick, Janey," he
said, huskily. "Gets us there too soon!"
"Well," said Jane, brightly, "we mustn't be late, your mother likes
people to be prompt, you know!" She managed to tug her arm away the
fraction of an inch.
"She likes _you_, any old time," he said, blissfully. He always got husky
and thick sounding in emotion, Jane reflected, and breathed heavily.
"Aren't we going to stop by for Sally?"
"No; I asked Edward R. and Nannie to pick her up in their little old
boat. No, we aren't going to have anybody--but just--_us_!" He squeezed
her arm against him again. "Janey, I guess you know all right how I----"
"Oh!" cried Jane,--"here they are, now! Hello, people!"
"Hello yourselves!" said Edward R. Hunter, bringing his machine to a stop
beside them. "Want to hop in? Plenty room."
"No, of course they don't want to hop in, goose!" said his wife,
reprovingly. "Edward R. Hunter, I wonder at you! Were you never young
yourself?"
"Oh, but we do!" Jane was capably opening the front door of the little
car. "We're late! I kept Marty waiting! I'm going to ride with the
chauffeur, and Marty can sit with the girls. When Mrs. Wetherby says
'eight o'clock' she means it, not quarter past." She was chatty and
intensely friendly with them all during the brief drive. She even
produced the proper degree of articulate mirth for the young father's
painstaking jest about his son's nickname being Teddy b-a-r-e, bear, most
of the time.
When they stopped before the Wetherby house Martin was out of the
automobile with heavy swiftness and lifted Jane bodily to the sidewalk
and hurried her up the walk. "All right for you, girlie," he chuckled,
"all right for you! But you just wait! Wait till going home to-night!"
Jane drew Sarah Farraday aside when they were in Mrs. Wetherby's phrase,
"taking off their things in the north chamber,"--a solid and
dependable-looking room. "Sally, I want you to come home with me and stay
over night."
"Oh, Jane, I don't believe I could,--not to-night! If I'd known sooner--I
haven't anything with me."
"I'll loan you everything you need. Please, Sally! You can telephone your
mother now."
"But Edward and Nannie brought me, and it seems sort of----"
"Sally, don't be a nuisance! I want you. I--_need_ you!"
Sarah Farraday peered closely at her through her nearsighted eyes. "Jane!
You haven't quarreled with Marty, have you? Oh, Jane!"
"No, but I shall if you don't come home with me!"
Her best friend looked long and anxiously at her and then went with a
sigh to telephone her mother, and the evening, which Mrs. Wetherby
described as "a little gathering of the young folks," got under way. Jane
played cards sedately for the earlier part of it and joined with
conscientious liveliness in the games which came later, just before Mrs.
Wetherby's conception of "light refreshments" was served,--pineapple and
banana salad with whipped cream and maraschino cherries on it, three
kinds of exceptionally sweet and sticky cake, thick chocolate with melted
marshmallows floating on its surface, and large quantities of home-made
fudge in crystal bonbon dishes.
To Martin Wetherby, watching her contentedly out of his small, bright
eyes, Jane Vail was what he and his mother termed the life of the party,
but although she played an unfaltering part in the comedy of, "Well,
_partner_! Didn't you get my signal? _Now_ who's asleep?" and the
sprightly games which followed, and exclaimed prettily over the decked
supper table, deep under the high-piled masses of her dark hair, dark
thoughts were stirring. She seemed to herself to be marching inexorably
to the crossroads, which was silly, because she had spent exactly that
sort of day and evening hundreds of times before and would again, she
told herself impatiently, but the feeling was not to be eluded. She held
herself up to her own high scorn. Why this dramatizing of the pleasant
and placid course of Wetherby Ridge events? Why shouldn't she do as the
other girls of the set had done? Was she, then, so much finer clay? If
she didn't want to be another Nannie--hot pink nursery in a shining
little new house--expensive olive oil--home-coming husband in punning
mood--pink celluloid Kewpie--half a dozen of everything in flat silver
and two _really_ good rugs to start with--then why couldn't she cast
herself serenely for the Sarah Farraday sort of thing, substituting a
typewriter for a piano? There was nothing so bleak and dreadful about
that; old Sally was busily happy, toiling hopefully for her baby-grand.
_She_ was enormously lucky, as a matter of fact, lucky beyond her
deserts. She could be, it appeared, a Nannie or a Sarah, as she chose,
and the time for choosing had arrived. And presently the girls were
exclaiming that it was twenty minutes past eleven and they really _must_
go, but it was Mrs. Wetherby's fault for always giving them such a
perfectly wonderful time that they forgot to watch the clock, and Mrs.
Wetherby was beaming back at them and insisting that she had enjoyed it
all just as much as they had, and that she hoped she could always keep
young at heart.
Sally lagged behind as they went down the steps. "Come along!" Jane
called back to her. "I know you'll talk half of what's left of the night,
and I want to get you started as soon as possible."
"She going to stay all night with you?" There was sulky surprise in
Martin's voice.
"Yes," said Jane. "But isn't 'stay _all_ night' a silly expression? As if
she might rise and stalk home in the middle of it! I wonder why we don't
say, 'stay over night'?" She ran on, ripplingly, but her escort at one
side and Sarah Farraday at the other were maintaining, respectively, a
sullen and an uncomfortable silence. When they were passing her own house
Sarah broke away from them with a little gasp.
"Oh,--do you mind waiting just a minute? I believe I'll just run up and
get my things, Jane. You know what a fussbudget I am about my own things.
And I'll just slip into another dress so I won't have to put this on for
breakfast. It won't take me two _minutes_--" She flew up the front steps
and let herself softly in with her latch key, and instantly ill humor
fell from Martin Wetherby.
"Sally's all right," he chuckled. "I'm for Sally!" He swept Jane out of
the circle of light from the street lamp, into the black shadow of the
Farraday shrubbery, and into a breathless embrace. "You--little--rascal--"
he said, huskily, gasping a trifle as he always did in moments of high
emotion. "You--little--witch! Now I've got you--and I'm going to keep
you! Now I guess you'll listen to what I've got to say and--and answer
me!" His broad, warm face was coming inexorably nearer; life--the
pleasant and placid pattern of Wetherby Ridge--was coming inexorably
nearer; life with melted marshmallows floating on its surface!
"Oh, Marty, please!" She was fatally calm and earnest about it. "I'm so
sorry--sorrier than I can tell you,--but you mustn't say it! You mustn't
make me answer you."
He was busily getting both her cool hands into the hot grasp of one of
his own, and the fingers of his other hand, a little moist, were forcing
themselves beneath her chin, but there was something in the honest
sorriness of her tone which made him pause even in that triumphant and
satisfying moment. "Why? You little----"
"Because," said Jane, steadily, "I do like you such a lot, Marty dear,
and I wish you wouldn't ask me, and make me tell you that I don't--I
can't----"
Then with a swift and amazing sense of rescue, of sanctuary, she heard
herself saying, "Besides, you see, I'm going away!"
CHAPTER II
While Jane's astounding utterance seemed to float and echo on the
November night air, Sarah Farraday let herself as stealthily out of her
front door as she had let herself in, and came softly down the steps. "I
didn't wake mother," she said in a whisper. She was in sober, every-day
serge now, and pulling on her second-best cloak. She carried a small bag
and was faintly pink with her haste. There was apprehension in the look
she gave her friend. "Wasn't I quick, Jane?" She had left them alone to
give Martin Wetherby his chance, but ancient girl loyalty had winged her
heels.
"Yes," said Jane, slipping her hand through Sarah's arm. "Sally, I've
just been telling Marty that I'm going away for a while."
"Jane Vail! Going _away_? What for? Where?" She stood still on the
sidewalk, exploding into tiny, staccato sentences.
"To New York," Jane heard herself saying with entire conviction. "I'm
going away to work."
"To _work_?" They were all in the brightness of the street light now, and
Sarah brought her nearsighted gaze close to Jane's glowing face. "Have
you lost your senses?"
"Neither my senses nor my cosy little hundred-a-month," said Jane. "Come
along, people,--it's a scandalous hour." She started briskly up the
silent thoroughfare and the others followed. "No, it's really all quite
sane and simple." (The astounding thing was that she had known it less
than five minutes herself, and now it was a solid and settled fact to
her. Happily, gloriously, she didn't have to choose, after all. She
didn't have to be either a Nannie Slade Hunter or a Sally Farraday; there
was a chance to be something quite fresh and new.) "I'm going to _New
York_ to write. I mean, to see if I can write."
Martin Wetherby, heavily keeping step beside her, not even touching her
arm at crossings, was silent, but her best friend was vocal and vehement.
"Jane Vail! I never heard anything so--so far-fetched in all my life!
Going to _New York_ to write! Can't you write here in your own town, in
your own home? Of course you can. Why,--see what you've accomplished
already."
"I haven't accomplished anything, old dear, except a few papers for the
Tuesday Club and the Ladies' Aid, and----"
"You've had three stories accepted and published and one of them _paid
for_,--I think you've had a _great deal_ of encouragement, don't you,
Martin?"
The stout young man made a husky assent.
"But Sally, you don't realize the interruptions, the distractions----"
"Interruptions! Distractions!" Sarah cut in hotly. "Why, your Aunt Lydia
is perfectly wonderful about not letting you be disturbed! And anyhow--what
about Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ with poverty and
sickness and a debilitating climate and seven children?"
"My good woman," said Jane, cautiously, "it's entirely possible that I
may not have exactly the same urge. I want to find out if I have any at
all." She slipped an arm through Sarah's and through Martin's and gave
each of them a gay little squeeze. "Don't be so horrified, old dears. It
isn't across the world, you know, and I'll be coming home for all
high-days and holidays. After I really get started I daresay I _can_
work at home,--and perhaps, you know, it will be Bo-Peep herself who
comes home, bringing her tales behind her!"
But Sarah Farraday was still protesting in a cross panic when they had
taken leave of a subdued Martin and were creeping upstairs in Miss Lydia
Vail's house.
"Look!" said Jane, nodding at the transom over her aunt's door. "She's
fallen asleep again without turning off her light. You go on, Sally, I'll
be right in."
Miss Lydia was propped up on two pillows, an open book before her on the
patchwork quilt, and her head had sagged forward on the breast of her
blue flannelette nightgown. She was making a low comedy sound which would
have distressed her beyond measure if she had heard it. When Jane took
the book from under her plump hands and gently removed one of the pillows
she came back to consciousness with a jerk.
"I wasn't asleep," she stated with dignity. "Not really asleep; I just
closed my eyes to rest them and sort of lost myself for an instant." Her
eyes narrowed intently. "My dear, what is it? You look--you look queer!
Sort of--excited!" A quick, pink blush mounted over her face. "Jane! Oh,
my _darling_ child--is it--has Martin"--then, disappointedly, as the girl
shook her head,--"Is it just that you've been having a wonderful time?"
"It's just that I've been having a wonderful idea, Aunt Lyddy!" She
patted the pillow. "I'll tell you to-morrow!"
"What, Jane? What _is_ it? I sha'n't sleep a wink if you don't tell me!"
"I'm going away for a while, Aunt Lyddy, dear,--to New York. I want to
see if I can really do something with my writing."
The little spinster paled. "Jane! Going _away_?" Her eyes brimmed up with
sudden tears. "My dearest girl, aren't you happy in your home? I've
tried, oh, how I've tried to take your dear, dead mother's place! But it
seems----"
"Of course I'm happy,--I've always been happy, Aunt Lyddy! Now, we'll
wait till morning and then talk it all over." She pulled up the gay quilt
smoothly, but her aunt sat stiffly upright, her face twisted with alarm.
"My _dear_ child! What _is_ it?"
Jane stood looking down at her for an instant before she stooped and
gathered her into a hearty hug. "It's nothing to be frightened about.
It's just this, Aunt Lyddy; I do want to write, and I don't want to marry
Martin Wetherby!"
* * * * *
In the difficult days which followed she found Sarah Farraday the most
rebellious. Miss Vail had a little creed or philosophy which was as plump
and comfortable as she was herself, and which had helped to make her,
Jane considered, the world's most satisfactory maiden aunt, and after a
few tears and those briskly winked away, she was able to be sure that her
dear girl knew best what was best for herself, _much_ as she would miss
her, _empty_ as the house would be without her. Nannie Slade Hunter,
though she disapproved, was too deeply engulfed in the real business of
life to be much concerned over the vagaries of a just-about-to-be-engaged
girl, and Martin Wetherby, coached, Jane knew, by the sapient father of
the Teddy-bear, was presently able to translate her exodus into something
very soothing to his own piece of mind. Jane could watch his mental
processes as easily as she could watch the activities of a goldfish in a
glass globe; he was concluding that it was the regular old startled fawn
stuff ... he _had_ been rushing her pretty hard ... better let her have a
little time ... play around with this writing game. He'd be Asst. Cashier
(that was the way he visualized it) the first of the year, and that would
be a great time to get things settled.
But Sarah, in the burlapped studio, between piano pupils, was aghast and
bitter. "'Going to seek your fortune!' I never heard anything so absurd,
Jane! You've got more than most girls right now,--a hundred dollars a
month of your very own to do just what you like with, and when your Aunt
Lydia--is taken from you, you'll have that adorable old house, jammed
full of rosewood and mahogany and willow pattern ware!" Wrath rose and
throve in her. "I've sometimes--I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's the
truth--I've sometimes envied you your advantages, Jane,--going away to
that wonderful school, and six months in Europe after you graduated--but
if the result has been to make you dissatisfied with your own home and
your own friends"--she was crying now--"why, then I'm thankful I've
always stayed here, and never known or wanted anything different!"
Jane crossed over to her and put penitent arms about her, and at the
touch Sarah began to cry in earnest.
"Oh, _Jane_! I can't stand it! I can't have you go away! Jane,--for you
to _go away_----"
"Oh, Sally dear," said Jane, patting her, "it isn't really going
away,--geography doesn't matter! It's just--going _on_, Sally! That's
it,--I'm just going on. _And_ on, I hope! And I'll write you miles of
letters."
"Letters!" her friend sniffed. "What are letters?"
"Mine are something rather special, I've been told. I'll write you
everything, Sally,--letters like diaries, letters like stories, letters
like books. Think of all the marvelous things I'll have to write about!
Why, Rodney Harrison thinks my letters from Wetherby Ridge, with
nothing----"
Sarah Farraday jerked away from her, her cheeks suddenly hot, her eyes
accusing. "So, that's it! That's the reason! It's the man you met on the
boat!" She said it with hyphens--"The-man-you-met-on-the-boat!" She knew
his name quite well, but she always spoke of him thus descriptively; it
was her little way of keeping him in his place, which was well outside of
the sacred circle of Wetherby Ridge.
Jane laughed. "Goose! Of course, he's part of the picture, and a very
pleasant part, and it will be very nice to have him meet me and drive me
opulently to Hetty Hills' sedate boarding-house. Aunt Lyddy is so
rejoiced to have me there with some one from the village that I couldn't
refuse, but I suspect it will be a section of the Old People's Home."
"Poor Marty!" said Sarah. "Poor old Marty! After all his years of
devotion----"
"But don't you think he got large chunks of enjoyment out of them?" Her
best friend's earnestness made her flippant, and it was a curious fact
that good old Sally, a predestinate spinster herself, settled on her
moated grange of music teaching, always took a most militant part in
other people's love affairs. In every lovers' quarrel in the village, in
the rare divorces, she had stood fiercely, hot dabs of color on her
cheekbones, for the swain or the husband. "I still contend," she would
say, "that with all his faults, and I'm not denying that he has faults, a
different sort of a woman could have saved him and made something of
him!"
Sarah came to stay the night with her before she was to leave in the
morning, and cried herself to sleep with a thin drizzle of tears which
Jane found at once flattering and touching and irritating, and when at
last the weeper was drawing long and peaceful breaths she slipped out of
bed and flung on her orange-colored kimono and knelt down before the open
window, her shining hair, so darkly brown that it was almost black,
hanging gypsylike about her shoulders. (The greater portion of Sarah's
hair was at rest upon the rosewood bureau top, coiled like a pale snake,
and the remainder was done up on curlers in Topsy twists.)
Over in the east there was the first graying advance of the dawn. (There
had been a "little gathering of the young folks" and then Jane had
finished packing and they had talked for two hours.) Jane felt a little
guilty, and a little foolish--leaping thus into the village spotlight,
sallying forth into the wide world--and a little gay and thrilled. The
morning was coming steadily up the sky; the daily miracle was going on.
And she was going on--_on_! Old Sally's scoldings didn't matter, nor
Marty's smug confidence. She shivered a little but kept her eyes on the
growing glory. She was--going--_on_!
A week later Sarah Farraday tore open the first letter with the New York
postmark.
SALLY DEAR, the typed page began, I meant to write at once, but I've
been settling down so busily! Of course Aunt Lyddy telephoned you of
my safe arrival?--Safe, my dear?--It was positively regal. Visiting
royalty effect. Rodney Harrison met me and I find I had quite
forgotten how very easy to look at he is! He apologized for the taxi
which seemed most opulent to me, because his own speedster was in
the shop, he having "broken a record and some vital organ the night
before, and the mater was using the limousine and the governor was
out of town with the big bus." His pretty plan was for dinner and
the theater and then supper and some dancing, but I thought there
was just the least bit of the King and the Beggar Maid lavishness
about that, so I discreetly revised it to tea.
We purred extravagantly up the Avenue, and how horrified Aunt Lyddy
would be at the taximeter! It makes me think of when we used to play
Hide-and-Seek, "_Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five,
fifty--ready or not you shall be caught_!"
He had brought me a corsage of orchids and lilies-of-the-valley, and
I had to wear it at tea--and the price of that tea, my dear, would
feed a first family in Wetherby Ridge for a day!--and when I came up
here to my room I found three dozen red roses with stems like stilts
and a three-story red satin box of chocolates. Hardly a thrifty
person, this man-I-met-on-the-boat, as you persist in calling him,
Sally, but the last word in Reception Committees! Just as I had
forgotten his charms, so he seemed to have mislaid the memory of
mine, and we really made a very pleasant fuss over each other. Rodney
had several bright and beamish ideas for the next few days, but I
reminded him that while he may be an Idle Rich, I'm a Laboring Class,
and I frugally accepted one invitation out of four. "A Country Mouse
came to visit a Town Mouse--" But I can clearly see that he will
greatly add to the livableness of life.
I have bought myself a second-hand, elderly, but still spry
think-mobile with only a slight inclination to stutter, and a
pompous-looking eraser with a little fringe of black whiskers on its
chin, and I'm beginning to begin, Sally, dear!
It's going to be a marvelous place to work. Nice old Hetty Hills
keeps a really super-boarding house, and the personnel isn't going to
be in the least distracting,--staid, concert-going ladies, some
teachers, a musician or two, a middle-aged bank clerk; only two other
youngish people, both Settlement workers, a man and a woman. Her name
is Emma Ellis and she's only about thirty, but she acts fifty--you
know--shabby hair and dim fingernails and a righteously shining
nose,--and I wish you could see her hat! It looks exactly like the
lid to something. She doesn't like me at all, though I've been
virtuously nice to her. The man is a big, lean Irishman, named
Michael Daragh. Don't you like the sound of that, Sally? It makes me
think of those Yeats and Synge things I was reading up on just before
I left home. He's like a person in a book,--very tall and very thin
and yet he seems like a perfect tower of strength, some way. His hair
is ash blond and his eyes are gray and look straight through you and
for miles beyond you, and he has splashes of good color in his thin,
clear cheeks. He has a quaint, long, Irish, upper lip. I'd describe
him as a large body of man entirely surrounded by conscience. (I'm
describing him so fully to you because it's such good practice for
me, and I know you don't mind.) His clothes are old, but not so much
shabby as mellow, like old, good leather. And such a brogue, Sally!
It could be eaten with a spoon! He asked me at once what I meant to
do (he can't conceive, of course, that one isn't a do-er!), and when
I said that I meant to write, at least, to try, he said:
"'Tis the great gift, surely. When our like"--he looked at Emma
Ellis--"are toiling with our two hands and wishing they were twenty,
yourself can reach the wide world over with your pen." Miss Ellis
didn't seem especially impressed with his figure, but he nodded
gravely and went on. "'Tis a true word. You can span the aching world
with a clean and healing pen." (Isn't that delicious, Sally?) I tried
to explain that I was just starting, that I was afraid I hadn't
anything of especial importance to say, and then he said, very
sternly--and he has the eyes of a zealot and a fighter's jaw--"Let
you be stepping over to the tenements with me and I'll show you tales
you'll dip your pen in tears and blood to tell!"
He's going to be enormously interesting to study.--There--I've just
this instant placed the resemblance that's been teasing me! He's like
the St. Michael in my favorite Botticelli, the one of Tobias led by
the archangels, carrying the fish to heal his father, Tobit, you
know,--there's a tiny copy of it in my room at home. Next time you
stop by to see Aunt Lyddy (you're a lamb to do it so often!) run up
and look at it. I loved it better than any other picture in Florence;
you can't get the lovely old tones from the little brown copy, but
everything else is there--Tobias, carrying his fish in the funny
little strap and handle, utter trust on his lifted face, the
wonderful lines of drapery, the swaying lily, the absurd little dog
with his tasseled tail (I wonder if he was Botticelli's dog?) and
at the side, guarding and guiding, with sword and symbol, stern St.
Michael _Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven_. This Michael
Daragh is really like him, name and all. Isn't it curious?
Write me soon and much, old dear. My best to every one, and I sent
the Teddy-bear a bib from the proudest baby-shop on the avenue.
Devotedly,
JANE.
P.S. You might ring up Aunt Lyddy and ask her to send me that little
Botticelli picture--my bare walls are rather bleak.
CHAPTER III
Jane settled jubilantly into the new life,--a brisk walk after breakfast,
up the gay Avenue or down the gray streets below the Square, then three
honest hours at the elderly typewriter, writing at top speed ... tearing
up all she had written ... writing slowly, polishing a paragraph with
passionate care, salvaging perhaps a page, perhaps a sentence out of the
morning's toil. Then she hooded her machine, lunched, and gave herself
up to an afternoon of vivid living,--a Russian pianist, or an exhibition
of vehemently modern pictures screaming their message from quiet walls
in a Fifth Avenue Gallery, an hour at Hope House Settlement with Emma
Ellis or Michael Daragh, tea and dancing with Rodney Harrison, or dinner
and a play with him, or a little session of snug coziness with Mrs.
Hetty Hills, giving the exile news of the Vermont village,--nothing was
dull or dutiful; the prosiest matters of every day were lined with rose.
She dramatized every waking moment. She was going to _work_, she wrote
Sarah.
I have been just marking time before, but now I'm marching, Sally.
I was up at six-thirty, had a cold dip and a laborer's breakfast,--I'm
afraid I haven't any temperament in my appetite, you know--and
sped off for atmosphere _and_ ozone, far below the Square, on a
two-mile tramp, and now I'm about to write. Rodney Harrison, who
knows everybody who _is_ anybody, has introduced me to some
vaudeville-powers-that-be and I am encouraged to try my hand at
what they call a sketch--a one-act play. It seems that they are in
need of something a little less thin than the usual article they've
been serving up to their patrons,--more of a playlet; something, I
suppose, to edify the wife of the Tired Business Man after he has
enjoyed the Tramp Juggler and the Trained Seals. Rodney Harrison has
helped me no end,--trotted me about to all the best places and
helped me to study and learn from them, and now I'm ready to begin.
And--heavens--how I adore it, Sally!
It's breaking my iron schedule to write a letter in business hours
but I knew you'd love to picture me here, gleefully clicking off
dollars and fame. Poor lamb! I wish you were on a job like this,
instead of pegging away at your piano. I wish there could be as much
fun in your work as mine. Of course, music is the most marvelous
thing in the world, but isn't there something of deadly monotony in
it?
But I fly to my toil!
Busily,
JANE.
_January Ninth_, 8.30 A.M.
It is just one week since I wrote you. I rend my garments, Sarah
Farraday, and sit in the dust. That fatuous note I sent you was a
thin crust of bluff over an abyss of fright. Who am I to write a
one-act play? I have sat here for eight solid horrible days with a
fine fat box of extra quality paper untouched and the keyboard
leering at me, and not a line, not a word, have I written! The
hideous period of beginning to begin! I imagine it's like the tense
moment in a football game, just before the kickoff, only those lucky
youths are pushed and prodded into action, willynilly. If only a
whistle would blow or a pistol crack for me!
I have come to realize that the most dangerous thing for a writer to
have is uninterrupted leisure. _Now_ I know how Harriet Beecher
Stowe could write _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ with poverty and sickness
and a debilitating climate and seven children. So could I. It's the
awful quiet of this orderly room, the jeering taunt of Washington
Square, looking in at my window to say, "What! here you are in my
throbbing, thrilling midst at last, having left your sylvan home
because it ceased to nourish you,--and you have nothing to say?"
I've simulated a mad business. I've answered every letter--some that
I've owed for years; I've put my bureau and chiffonier and closet in
sickening order; I've mended every scrap of clothing I possess,
reinforced all my buttons and run in miles of ribbon; I've visited
the sick and even been to the dentist. I really ought to die just
before I start a new piece of work. At no other time is my house of
life in such shining order.
Sally, didn't I say something nitwitted about music? Now, indeed, I
pour ashes on my head. Lucky you, who need only sit down and spill
out your soul in something thoughtfully arranged for that very
purpose by Mr. Chopin or Mr. Tschaikovsky! While I--"out of senseless
nothing to evoke"--I wish I did something definite and tangible like
plain sewing! If I don't start soon I'll sell this think-mobile for
junk and put out a sign--"Mending and Washing and Going Out by the
Day Taken in Here."
Just now the painted ship upon the painted ocean is a bee-hive of
activity compared to me.
JANE.
_Monday Noon._
SARAH,
Sh-h...! I'm off!
J.
_Wednesday, more than midnight._
DEAREST S.,
I'm a dying woman but my sketch is done! I've lived on board the
typewriter since twelve o'clock on Monday, coming briefly ashore for
a snatch of food or sleep, but it's done and I adore it! (Says the
author, modestly.) The heavenly mad haste of the actual doing makes
up for all the agonies of the start, restoring the years that the
locusts have eaten. I'll tell you all about it in the morning.
Drowsily but triumphantly,
JANE.
_Thursday._
Sally, my dear, I wouldn't thank King George to be my uncle, as Aunt
Lyddy would say! I never experienced anything in all my life as
satisfying as pounding out that word CURTAIN!
Want to hear about it? You must,--you can't elude me.
Well, I've called it "ONE CROWDED HOUR." The scene is a lonely
telegraph station on the desert and the time is the present. The
characters are: THE GIRL--THE BROTHER--THE MAN.
The setting shows the front room of the telegraph station crude and
rough and bare, just the ticker on the table, another table and three
chairs, yet there is a pathetic attempt at softening the ugliness,--a
bunch of dried grasses, magazine covers pinned to the wall, gay
cushions in the chairs, a work basket, books.
At rise of curtain GIRL is discovered alone, sewing. She is faintly,
quaintly pretty in a mild New England way, no longer young, yet with
a pathetic, persistent girlishness about her. A faint whistle is
heard. She rises, goes to door of rear room and calls to BROTHER
that the train has whistled for the bend. The two trains--east-bound
and west-bound--are the events of their silent and solitary days.
She brings him from rear room, her arm about him, steadying him. He
is younger than his sister, frail, despondent. She seats him at the
instrument and brings him a cup of hot broth, standing over him
until he drinks it up.
The necessary exposition comes in brief dialogue: he has been sent
west for his cough, has become so weak he is unable to do his work,
has taught her, and she in reality carries on all the affairs of the
lonely station. He stays in bed most of the time, only dragging
himself up at train time, so that the trainmen will not suspect their
secret.
The noise of the approaching limited grows louder and louder until
it arrives with loud clamor just off stage. GIRL runs out with the
orders and the train is heard pulling out again. She comes in and is
about to help him back to bed when the instrument begins to click
and instantly they are electrified.
"THE HAWK," a daring hold-up man who has baffled justice for a year,
has just made off with the Bar K Ranch paysack and posses are
forming, but the new sheriff has sworn to take him single-handed.
BROTHER excitedly asserts that the sheriff can do it,--a regular
fellow, that new sheriff,--looks and acts just like a man in a
movie! He regrets that his sister was not at home the day he came to
see them--the one time she'd left the station for more than an hour.
She'd have liked him fine! They excitedly discuss the chances of the
bandit's coming their way, for just beyond their station is the
famous Pass through the mountains, through which so many rogues have
ridden to freedom. In feverish haste BROTHER gets out his clumsy
pistol and loads it, to her timid distress. Their drab day has
turned to scarlet; he talks glowingly of the new sheriff, envies
him.... Instrument clicks again. It is the sheriff, asking if they
have seen a solitary horseman, and saying that he is on his way
there, to watch the Pass.
BROTHER gets himself so wrought up that he brings on a fit of
coughing and she makes him go back to bed.
Left alone again in the front room, she tries to settle down to her
sewing, but she sings as she rocks--
"In days of old
When knights were bold,
And barons held their sway--"
Then, childishly, half ashamed, she begins to "pretend." She snatches
off the red table cover and drapes it about herself for a train,
casts the crude furniture for the roles of moat and drawbridge and
castle wall, and herself for a captive princess, held by a robber
chief, flinging herself into her fantasy with such abandon that she
does not hear the approaching hoof beats. At the pinnacle of her big
speech the door is wrenched open and THE MAN stands there, a gun in
each hand, demanding--
"Who's here?"
It fits in with her make-believe so amazingly that for an instant she
is dazed and can hardly tell reality from romance, but then she
gathers herself and says with a little gasp--
"Why, Mister Sheriff, we aren't hiding THE HAWK!"
THE MAN, who is, of course, the bandit, instantly catches her mistake
and poses as the sheriff. She asks him eagerly if she may send a
message for him, to cover up her confusion as she takes off her
table-cloth train. Then, realizing that she has betrayed their
secret, she throws herself on his mercy and tells of her brother's
failing health, and of how she has had to do the work to hold the
job, and begs him not to tell. He promises, and then has her send
several messages for him in the name of the sheriff, and from his
expression as she is telegraphing, the audience will infer that he
has good and sufficient reason to know that the sheriff will not
arrive. He states to the several ranches where she wires for him that
he--the sheriff--will guard the Pass.
BROTHER, roused by voices, comes silently to the door. Their backs
are toward him and they do not see him. BROTHER hears her call him
"Mister Sheriff," stares, takes in the situation, his face speaking
his terror. He softly pulls the door to and disappears.
GIRL and MAN talk. He is a gay, dashing, Robin Hood sort of chap and
she is charmed. She asks him to step outside to see the gallant
little garden she is raising in the desert. They go out, and
instantly BROTHER creeps out, stumbles to table, waits until they are
out of hearing, sends a quick message. Then he creeps to the door and
conveys by his mutterings that he is going to untie THE HAWK's horse
and let him run away. Apparently the horse doesn't go, for he reaches
back, picks up a cane and leans out again. This time there is the
sound of skurrying hoofs and the horse tears away. BROTHER staggers
back into the rear room, closing the door.
MAN and GIRL rush in. He is desperate,--the horse,--a wild and
half-broken one, has made straight for the Pass. GIRL wants to wire
for another horse to be brought to him, but after a moment's grim
thought, he decides to jump on the eastbound train, due in a few
minutes, and go on to the next station, where he can get a good
horse.
Then there is a pretty scene between them, when she confesses her
pity for THE HAWK and her wicked hope that he may get away--"I can't
bear to have even _things_ hunted, let alone a man!"
THE MAN is touched, and tells her that he knows a good deal about the
bandit; that he has had a rotten deal straight through life; that
there's a streak of decency in him for all the yellow; that he's
heard that THE HAWK meant to make this his last job ... to go back
east again and make a fresh start....
THE GIRL, star-eyed and pink-cheeked now, tells him of her home "down
east," of how keen she was to come to the wild, wonderful west, of
how she thinks that "one crowded hour of glorious life" is worth a
whole leaden existence. That reminds her of her graduating essay,
which she digs out of the trunk, tied with baby-blue ribbon. "One
Crowded Hour" was her burning topic, but her hours and days and years
have been crowded only with homely toil and poverty and worries.
THE MAN, softened incredibly, tells her she is the gentlest thing he
ever knew.... He takes the blue ribbon and says he's going to keep it
for luck. There is a beautiful, wordless moment for her, touched by
magic into girlhood again.
Then--shouts, galloping hoofs, shots! THE MAN springs to his feet,
hands on his guns.
BROTHER, at door of rear room, his old pistol describing wavering
circles in his shaking hand, cries hoarsely,
"Harriet Mary, you come here to me! That's not the sheriff! That's
THE HAWK!"
THE MAN, with a gentle word to her, tells her to stand aside....
"They'll never put THE HAWK in a cage!"
THE GIRL, after a dazed moment, turns to a veritable fury of
resolution. The east-bound train whistles. There is still a chance,
if she can get him on board. Sound of posse riding nearer. She makes
MAN hide under the curtain where her dresses hang.
BROTHER starts toward the front door but she seizes him roughly,
pushing him back toward the bedroom.
"Listen," he gasps, "Harriet Mary--that's THE HAWK!"
"I don't care! I don't care! I don't _care_! You hush! You keep
still!" She pushes him into the room so violently that he falls,
coughing terribly, to the floor. A look of fleeting horror crosses
her face but she bangs and bolts the door. She draws the curtain more
carefully over THE MAN, flings open the front door and calls above
the clamor of the on-coming train--
"He's gone! Gone! We tried to keep him--quick--through the Pass!
_Don't you see the hoof-prints?_"
The posse wheels and thunders away. The train roars in. THE MAN,
coming out from under the curtain, snatches up her thin hand, kisses
it, dashes out. She forces herself to take the message out to the
trainmen. She comes back, stands in strained and breathless
listening.... The train pulls noisily out.
Little by little her tension relaxes. The magic robe of youth,
renewed, falls from her thin shoulders. At a sound from the inner
room she gasps, clutches her hands together on her breast, her eyes
wide with terror and remorse, starts running to her brother.
CURTAIN!
Can you _see_ it, Sally? Do you think it will "get across?" Will
I be able to "put it over"?
Now, convoyed by Rodney Harrison, I'm off to the Booking Office with
a 'script, enchantingly typed in black and scarlet, under my arm and
hope in my heart.
Jauntily,
JANE.
_Later._
P.S. They were quite wonderful to me, which is to say, they
pronounced "not bad" and will cast it at once. They talk vaguely of
changes and "gingering it up," and "adding a little pep," but say
that can be done at rehearsals.
I started to say I preferred not to have any alterations made, but I
thought it would be more tactful to wait and see.
Oh, but the forlorn wretches in the waiting room! Some of them had
been there for hours and when the proud and prosperous-looking Rodney
sent in his name and we were taken in at once without waiting for our
turn and they looked at me with their mournful made-up eyes I felt as
if my wicked French heels were on their necks. I noticed one girl,
particularly; there was something so gallant about her cracked and
polished shoes, her mended gloves, her collar, laundered to a cobweb
thinness, and about the improbable sea-shell pink in her hollow
cheeks. She had a sort of eager, sharpened sweetness in her face and
a regular Burne-Jones jaw.
I refused tea and said farewell to Rodney uptown and walked home, and
on the way I saw her again, standing outside of one of the white and
shining _Café des Enfants_, watching the man turn the muffins. She
opened a collapsed little purse and poked about in it for an instant
and then shut it again and turned away. Before I knew what I meant
to do, I heard myself saying, "Hello! I saw you just now at the
Booking Office, didn't I? I wish you'd come in and have some coffee
and butter cakes,--I detest eating alone!"
She hung back a bit but they are not formal in her world, and in we
went. Sally, I wish you could have seen that poor thing eat! She's
been sick and out of work and fearfully depressed. I've got her name
and address and if all goes as well with this vaudeville work as
Rodney thinks it will, I may be able to help her. At any rate, she's
stuffed like a Christmas turkey at this moment.
Sally, I can't tell you how happy I am!
Much love, old dear,
JANE.
P.S. II. I read the act to Michael Daragh and he set the seal of his
sober approval on it. He thinks I'm going personally to uplift the
two-a-day.
CHAPTER IV
_Friday._
DEAREST SALLY:
It just happened that they need a new sketch act, so they cast "ONE
CROWDED HOUR" at once and it is already in rehearsal.
BROTHER is excellent, a wistful-eyed, shabby youth who really looks
convincingly ill and coughs in a way to carry conviction. Oh, but THE
GIRL! My quaint New England spinster is gone and with her all the
point of my playlet. They've given the part to a blooming, buxom,
down-to-the-minute young person, late of "Oh, You Kewpie-Kid!" (in
the chorus) and frankly contemptuous of this rôle. And THE MAN--the
bandit--a fair-haired canary, an inch shorter than she is! They
quarrel like fishwives and scold about the number of "sides" each
other has, and refuse to play up prettily, and I'm heartsick over it
all, Sally. The producing agent says it would be utterly impossible
to "put it over" with the characters as I wrote it. He was fairly
mild and merciful with me (thanks to Rodney, I daresay) but
unbudgably firm, and at every rehearsal some touch of coyness or
kittenishness is added. As an elixir of youth, I recommend him.
The girl patronizes me until I am ready to fling myself on the floor
and squeal with rage. "Listen, girlie," she cooes, "don't you worry
about this lil' ol' act! You leave it to me, hon'! I'll put the
raisin in it!"
Rodney Harrison is hugely amused at my woe. He says I must remember
that you can't slip the Idylls of the King in between the Black-faced
Comedian and the Elephant Act. I suppose I must just bear it,
grinning if possible, until I have won my footing and then I won't
allow so much as a comma to be changed.
BROTHER is a dear. He opened his heart and gave me a five-act play of
his own to read. The stage business is much funnier than the
dialogue. After a melting moment he has--"Exeunt Mother." The old
lady was clearly beside herself. Also me.
Wearily,
JANE.
_Tuesday._
DEAR SALLY,
We open Thursday afternoon at a weird little try-out theater 'way
downtown. I am like to perish of weariness and exasperation. GIRL and
MAN have been fighting like Kilkenny cats. Yesterday she said,
"Dearie, God is my witness, he uses me like I was the dirt under his
feet!" The brother of BROTHER, a lean, clean-looking chap, lounges
about at rehearsals and comforts me vastly with his under-the-breath
comments on them. She has worked up the bit before THE MAN arrives,
when she is pretending, you remember, into screaming comedy. She
assures me it will "knock 'em dead!" And they have introduced a
dance! Yes. He shows her "the coyote lope." I'm telling you the
solemn truth, Sarah Farraday. Do you wonder that I'm an old woman
before my time?
And as if I did not have enough to annoy me, Michael Daragh has been
quite superfluously unpleasant about it. I wrote you how much he
liked it when I read the original 'script to him? Well, he has kept
talking about the glorious privilege of doing really good work and
leavening the lump, and of how the public really wants the best, only
the managers haven't faith to know it, and when I had to tell him
about the changes,--the comedy and the dance and so on, he just
looked at me and looked at me as if I were a lost soul. It was very
tiresome.
"Good gracious, Michael Daragh," I said, "you don't suppose I like
it, do you? But I've got to get my foothold. You can't be high-brow
in the two-a-day, it seems. You've got to capitulate. It's simply
what they call 'putting it over.'"
And he said, "I should be calling it 'putting it under,'" and stalked
away.
Excuse a cross letter. So am I.
J.
P.S. Just for which, I won't even tell him when or where the tryout
is to be.
_Thursday Night._
Well, my dear, they say it went fairly well. But it was absolutely
the most harrowing thing I ever had to bear. BROTHER was a gem but
GIRL and MAN messed up their lines and gave an alien interpretation
to everything. How I hated the audience for roaring at her common
comedy! They howled with delight when she pushed BROTHER over, and
the coyote lope got the biggest hand of the day. I was behind the
scenes, holding the 'script. Oh, but it's a grim land of disillusion
back there! As she came off she gave me a kindly pat and said--
"Ain't they eatin' it up? Say, girlie, didn't I tell you I'd put the
raisin in it?"
Unbelievably, heaven alone knows why, we are to open at the Palace
next Monday. Some big act is canceled owing to illness and they have
to have a sketch. We play two more performances downtown and then
rehearse day and night to smooth over the rough places. I ought to be
bubbling with thankful joy--the Palace! But I'm not. I doubt if I go
on with vaudeville work after this.
Jadedly,
JANE.
_Friday._
DEAR S.,
Something made me think of that girl I fed the other day and I looked
her up. She was actually starving and her room rent long overdue and
her landlady a regular story-book demon, so I fed her up and brought
her home and coaxed Mrs. Hills to put a cot in my room for her. Her
Burne-Jones jaw is sharper than ever and she has the mournfully
grateful eyes of a setter. She's sleeping now as if she could never
have enough,--just thirstily drinking up sleep.
Performance no better to-day. Terrific rehearsing starts early
to-morrow morning.
Hastily,
JANE.
_Sunday Morning._
DEAREST SALLY,
Rehearsal was called for nine sharp yesterday. BROTHER and his
brother were waiting. GIRL and MAN appeared at ten-ten. She said--
"Dearie, I hate to tell you, but I got bad news for you." Then,
turning to him, she said, compassionately, "Say, hon', you tell her!
I haven't got the heart."
"Why," said the bandit, regretfully, "what she means is this: she's
got a swell chance to go on tour with 'Kiss and Tell,' and she feels
like she hadn't ought to turn it down. It's more her line than this
kind of thing, you know."
I counted ten to myself, slowly, and then I said:
"Very well. I daresay you know of some girl who is a quick study and
can get up in the part by Monday, with your help."
She stared and then began to giggle. "Say, girlie, I'm the limit.
Didn't I tell you? I _married_ the boy!" At my gasp she went on,
confidentially, linking her arm in mine. "Yes, dearie. You see, it's
like this. I gotter have somebody, anyhow, to look after luggage, and
you know what this life is. A girl's gotter have protection."
When they were gone I turned to look at BROTHER. I almost thought he
was going to cry, and he began to cough, just as he does in the
sketch.
"Oh, please," I said, "don't keep doing that! We aren't rehearsing
now."
And he stopped and said, "That's just it, Miss Vail. I'm not
rehearsing. It's--that's how it is with me. That's why I knew I
could get by with the part. I thought if we got good bookings, why,
I'd be fixed to take a good long rest, afterwards,--out on the desert
or up in the snow. It isn't bad, yet. They tell me I've got a great
chance." Then his chin quivered. "That's why it kind of hits me right
where I live, having this thing go on the rocks."
"It mustn't," I said. "It can't! We won't let it!" I knew it was only
a miracle that could save us, in that breathlessly short time, but I
have a vigorous belief in miracles. "There must be a man and a girl,
somewhere----"
Then the lean, silent brother of BROTHER spoke. "I don't suppose
you'd give me a whack at it, would you? I've learned every word of
the whole 'script, watching every day the way I have. I can do it. I
can do it if you'll let me. I don't think that fellow ever had your
idea of it. Look,--the part where THE HAWK tells her what a rotten
deal he's always had, isn't this how you meant it?"--and he dropped
into a chair, took a knee between his brown, lean hands, looked off
into the empty theater for a moment--and then, Sally, he read the
lines as I'd written them. Instantly, I was happier than I'd been
since I tore the final page out of the typewriter, visualizing the
thing as I meant it to be.
"It's yours," I chortled in my joy. "You can have it on a silver
salver!"
"If only we can get a girl," BROTHER was worrying. "We ought to get
one, easy. She needn't be so much of a looker."
"And we'll cut the comedy and the dance," I said, thankfully.
"There must be a hundred girls crazy for the job, with all the idle
acts there are now. All she's got to do is walk through,--it's
actress proof, that part. If we could just get a girl, not too young,
kind of pathetic looking----"
Then, suddenly and serenely, I knew what I was going to do. And I
knew that, sink or swim, never again was I going to "put it under." I
told them to wait. I taxied opulently home. My waif was curled up in
my kimono, feeding my fan-tailed goldfish. "Hurry up," I said,
briskly. "You're holding the rehearsal!"
While she was scrambling, bewilderedly, into her clothes, I explained
to her and dug out the old 'scripts and carbons, and on the way back
I told her the story and gave her the idea of how she was to play it.
She hadn't had time to put on her sea-shell tint, but the hollows in
her cheeks filled up with pink excitement as I talked. When I marched
in with her the men gave her one look, grinned, and heaved gusty
sighs of relief. We rehearsed all day and half the night. We haven't
told the office a word about the defection of the two vaude-villains.
The printing is out, of course, and the old names will stand. She is
stiff with fright and bodily unfit for the strain, but she's giving
everything she's got, and she's delicious in quality for the part.
Yours in weary bliss,
J.
_Monday._ 3.15 A.M.
Sarah, I feel like Guido Reni (if it was Guido Reni) when he stabbed
his servant to get the actual agony for the "Ecce Homo!" My girl
fainted away in the middle of her big speech an hour ago. I have
tucked her up in bed after a rub and a cup of hot milk and she is to
sleep until noon. BROTHER'S brother tried pitifully, but he didn't
get through a single speech without prompting. I'm terrified! Suppose
they muddle it utterly, what will the Powers say to me--after not
telling them of the change in cast? I wish I hadn't asked Michael
Daragh to come to the matinée. I _must_ stop. I know I won't sleep a
wink, but I'll put out the light and lie down and shut my eyes.
JANE.
_Monday Midnight._
Oh, Sally dearest, I don't know where to begin! I'll make myself
start with the morning. I slipped out before my starveling was awake,
leaving a cheering note for her. I took the bus up to Grant's Tomb
and walked back along the river to Seventy-second Street. It was the
most marvelous blue-and-gold morning; I speeded myself to a glow on
shady paths or sat steeping for a moment in the sun. I held happy
converse with democratic dogs and reserved and haughty babies and
dawdled, but even so I found myself with a panicky margin of time on
my hands. Then I bethought myself of my never-failing remedy for
troublesome thoughts and I went joyously forth like a he-goat on the
mountains and bought a ruinous pair of proud shoes and put them on. I
knew the gloating over them would leave me small room for
forebodings. You know how I've always been. You used to call me
"Goody Two-Shoes." These are cunningly contrived to make my No. 4,
triple A, look like a 2, and I walked upon air, narrowly missing
being mown down by traffic, my eyes upon my feet. On the way to the
Palace I made myself repeat that lovely thing of Gelett Burgess's--
"My feet, they haul me round the house;
They hoist me up the stairs;
I only have to steer them, and
They ride me everywheres!"
I purchased an orchestra seat and inquired carelessly at what hour my
sketch (only I didn't say it was my sketch) went on. I found we were
sandwiched in between the newest Tramp Juggler and the Trained Seals!
Then I went behind and saw my gallant little company, made up and
dressed too soon, waiting in awful idleness with strained smiles and
ghastly cheer. I petted and patted them all round and cast an
agitated eye over the set. A grimy young stagehand made a minor
change for me with a languid, not unkind contempt. "What's the big
idea?" he wanted to know. "Goner slip 'em some high-brow stuff? Say,
this is the wrong pew, sister. They won't stand for nothing like that
here. Up in the Bronx, maybe--" I turned and basely fled. I went out
in front and found my place. The orchestra rollicked through the
overture and people poured in and ushers slid down the aisles and
snapped down the seats. I studied the people's faces as a gladiator
might have done in the arena. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? A row behind
me, across the aisle, sat Michael Daragh, but he did not see me. Two
petulantly pretty girls in regal furs sank into seats beyond me, and
a white-spatted, rosy-wattled gentleman in a subduedly elegant
waistcoat took the one on the end.
The annunciator flashed A and a pair of black-face comedians "opened
the show," but they did not get it very far open for people were
jamming in and elbows were silhouetted against the light. They
doggedly plugged away, firing their tragic comedy, making brave
capital even of the silences, but through my glasses I was sure I
could see the strained anxiety of their eyes. It was a relief to have
them go. Then the Trained Seals were with us, lovely things like
gentle, tidy, sleek-headed little girls. My heart was going like a
metronome set for a tarantella and my wrist-watch ticked
breathlessly--"Coming--Coming--Coming!"
If only we were Z instead of C!
"Funny thing, you know," said the occupant of the end seat,
conversationally, "they tell me they're easier than any other animal
in the world to train, except a pig. Fact. Circus man told me."
He had a genial face, creased into jolly patterns, and my heart
warmed to him, and to Michael Daragh and the pretty girls and the fat
old lady in front of me. Nice people, kind people. It seemed certain
that they must want real things, clean things.
I took out a pencil to make notes for corrections, but the annunciator
said D, and a lady who would have done nicely as Venus came out
attired as Cupid and the house rocked with welcome. I was cold with
conjecture. _What_ had happened back there? Had my poor starveling
fainted again? Had BROTHER'S brother died of fright? I sat shivering
through the sprightly number until C, said the electric lights, and
the orchestra began softly to play--
"In days of old,
When knights were bold--"
The curtain rose on the bleak telegraph station, on my thin spinster
in her rocking chair. It was a lean vision for eyes lately ravished
by the Venus lady's charms; programs rattled; the Tramp Juggler was
to follow. I could see her chest rising and falling jerkily with her
frightened breath and her hands shook so that she could hardly hold
her sewing. From far aloft came that loud guffaw that speaks the
vacant mind and one of the pretty girls next me giggled in echo. Then
something seemed to go through my waif; the Burne-Jones jaw was taut;
she got hold of herself; then, slowly, steadily, surely, little by
little, she got hold of the house. The man on the end who had
slouched comfortably down in his seat, sat sharply upright and the
girls stopped whispering. BROTHER came on, and his brother as the
MAN. The tempo was perfect, the acceleration blood-quickening. Laughs
came at unexpected places, friendly and cordial. The girl was like a
melody in low tones; she built up her climax cunningly, warming,
coloring, kindling.
"Good gad!" ejaculated the spatted gentleman in the aisle seat, "you
know, that girl can act!" The old lady in front lifted a frank
handkerchief; the giggling girls were raptly watching. Now the GIRL'S
big moment came. Her voice, faded and gentle before, was harsh and
strident. "_I don't care! I don't care! You hush! You keep
still!_"
When she gave him his broth she had seemed the gentlest of living
creatures; now, pushing him ruthlessly to the floor, she was a fury,
pitiless, obsessed. All the starved romance, all the pinched poverty
of her life, all the lean and lonely years she had known cried out in
hunger, not to be denied; she was a tigress doing battle for her
mate.
And then, when the rattle and roar of the train died away, BROTHER'S
hacking cough sounded from behind the closed door, and stark reality
laid hold on her again. Her thin hands went together on her breast
and then fell slackly to her sides. She seemed visibly to shrink and
shrivel. Racked and spent with her one crowded hour, she stood
looking into the bleak and empty vista of the years.
I was in the aisle before the curtain fell, speeding past the people,
the applauding people, the beautiful, kind, understanding people,
past the benediction of Michael Daragh's lifted look. The applause
followed me out through the lobby--oh, Sally dear, no choir invisible
could make half so celestial a sound!--and when I got behind the
scenes it was still coming in--solid, genuine, hearty waves of it.
I heard hurrying feet behind me but I did not pause. I guessed who it
was, but I wouldn't turn to look. In the orderly chaos of props and
people--and it was an ugly land of disillusion no longer but the land
of heart's desire, Sally--I found my gallant little band of fighting
hope, beaming and breathless after the fifth honest curtain, coming
to me on buoyant feet.
Stern St. Michael had caught up with me then, and he bent his austere
head to say very humbly, "Woman, dear, I'm so high with pride for
you, and so low with shame for me, that I could ever be doubting----"
But the grimy young stagehand, halting in front of me with an armful
of the Tramp Juggler's playthings, cut his sentence in two.
"Say,"--he held out a dark and hearty paw--"put her there, sister!
Say, I guess maybe that's poor? Say, I guess maybe that's not puttin'
it over!"
Jubilantly,
JANE.
CHAPTER V
The grave Irishman, Michael Daragh, was a constant delight. He was no
more aware, she saw clearly, of her as a person, as a woman, than he was
of Emma Ellis of the lidlike hats and shabby hair. Nothing that was human
was alien to him, certainly, and nothing that was feminine was anything
more than merely human to him. It appeared, however, that he did have a
sense of values of a sort, for he halted her in the hall, one dark
December day, with a request. Would she be coming with him to-morrow to
the Agnes Chatterton Home, where there was a girl in black sorrow?
"Why, yes, of course I'll come, but--why?" Jane wanted to know. "What
makes you think I could help? I don't know very much about--that sort of
thing."
He smiled swiftly and winningly and it was astonishing to see how the
process lighted up his lean face. "Ah, that's the reason! She's had her
fill of us, God help her. The way we've been exhorting her for days on
end. You'll be bringing a fresh face and a fresh feeling to the case.
And"--he stopped and looked her over consideringly--"'tis your sort can
help and heal."
"Why?" Jane persisted. She was finding the conversation piquantly
interesting.
"Because," said Michael Daragh, and she had the startled feeling that he
was not in the least paying her a compliment but rather laying a charge
upon her, "you have been anointed with the oil of joy above your
fellows." Then, quite as if the matter were wholly settled, he gave her
directions and went his way.
Jane had never seen an Agnes Chatterton Home. She had heard of them, of
course, as asylums for what the village called Unfortunate Girls, furtive
and remote retreats for stricken creatures who fled the light of day, but
when she found herself actually on her way to see one, the following day,
she slackened her pace and made her way more slowly and with conscious
reluctance. She was a little annoyed with herself for acquiescing so
meekly to the big Irishman's plan. After all, she had not broken the old
home ties (to put it lyrically) for this sort of thing, now, had she? She
had to come to New York to seek her fortune, not to--to--whatever it was
that Michael Daragh wanted her to do. And yet, she was always being
drawn, willynilly, into any woe within her ken. Herself a contained
creature of radiant health and placid nerves with a positively masculine
aversion to scenes and applied emotion of any sort, people were always
coming and confiding in her. She had been the reluctant repository for
the secrets of half her little town. As a matter of fact, and this she
could not know of herself, it was because she demonstrated the solid
theory that one happy person was worth six who were trying to make others
happy. But now she was marching deliberately into the heart of a misery
which did not in the least concern her and where, she felt sure, she
would be wholly unwelcome. She stood still in an unsavory thoroughfare,
seriously considering a retreat, but she saw Michael Daragh waiting for
her on the next corner, and she kept on.
"I very nearly turned back," she said. "And I very nearly didn't come at
all. I had the most alluring invitation for matineé and tea." (Rodney
Harrison had been most insistent.)
"I had your word you'd be coming," said the Irishman. He looked at her
impersonally. She was buttoned to the chin in a cloak the color of old
red wine and there was a jubilant red wing in her dark turban, and it may
have occurred to him that she made a thread of good cheer in the dull
woof of that street, but he went at once into the story.
"Ethel's lived on at the Home ever since her baby was born. It'll be two,
soon, and herself going for eighteen."
"_Eighteen?_ Oh----"
"Yes. Doing grandly, she is, in the same shop as her good elder sister.
Well, one day she tells the matron she has a sweetheart, a decent chap,
wanting to marry her.
"'Fine,' says Mrs. Richards. 'What were we always telling you? And will
he be good to the baby?'
"'He doesn't know I've the baby,' says Ethel, 'and what's more he never
will!'
"'You'll be giving up your child, that you kept of your own free will,
that you've worked and slaved for, and be wedding him with the secret on
your soul?'
"'I will,' says the girl, and not all the king's horses and all the
king's men can move her, Jane Vail." They were picking their way through
a damp and squalid street and he stooped to set a wailing toddler on its
unsteady feet.
"'Tis the sister's doing, we think, she the hard, managing kind and Ethel
the weak slip of a thing. Coming to-day, Irene is, to carry it off to the
place she's found for it--some distant kin down Boston way, long wanting
to adopt and never dreaming this child is their own blood."
"Doesn't Ethel care for the baby?"
"There's the heart scald. 'Tis the light of her eyes. But Irene, d'you
see, has scared her into feeling sure she'll lose him if she tells. Wait
till you see the look she has on her. 'Supping the broth of sorrow with
the spoon of grief,' they would be calling it, home in Wicklow."
"And I'm to talk to her--to beg her to tell him?"
He nodded.
Jane sighed. "She'll loathe me, of course,--an absolute outsider. Coming
in--nobly giving up a matinée and tea--to rearrange her life for her. Oh,
I don't believe I dare!"
He nodded again, comprehendingly. "I know well the way you're feeling.
But with the likes of her, poor child, somebody has to rearrange the
lives they've mussed and mangled!"
Jane sighed again. "I'll try, Michael Daragh. You know, your two names
make me think of the wind off the three lakes on the road to Kenmare and
the black line of the McGillicuddy Reeks against the sky?"
His eyes lighted. "'Tis good, indeed, to know you've seen Ireland.
Whiles, I'm destroyed with the homesickness." He kept a long silence
after that, his eyes brooding.
Jane watched him and wondered. "He's a mystery to me," Mrs. Hetty Hills
always appended after a mention of him. (It teased her to have mysteries
in her boarding-house.) "Has an income, of course--has to have, to
live--doesn't earn anything worth mentioning with all this uplift
work--and gives away what he does get. Emma Ellis doesn't know any more
about him than I do. But I will say he's less trouble than any man I ever
had under my roof. And, of course, he's not _common_ Irish." (Mrs. Hills
had still her Vermont village feeling of red-armed, kitchen minions,
freckled butcher boys running up alley-ways, short-tempered dames in
battered hats who came--or distressingly didn't come--to you of a Monday
morning.)
They walked swiftly and without speech now, and Jane had again her sense
of his resemblance to the Botticelli St. Michael. "He ought really to be
carrying his sword and his symbol," she told herself, "and I daresay
Raphael and Gabriel are beside him if I could only see them. Am I Tobias?
And have I a fish to heal a blindness?"
"There's the house," said Michael Daragh, at length.
"Of course," said Jane, indignantly. "I should have known it at once,
even without the hideous sign, for its smugly dreary look of good works!
_Why_ must they have that liver-colored glass in the door?" They mounted
the worn steps. "And 'Welcome' on the mat! Oh, Michael Daragh, how
ghastly! Who did that to them?"
He shook his head. "Most of our things are given, you see." He rang the
bell and they heard its harsh and startling clamor.
A sullen-faced girl in a coarse, enveloping pinafore opened the door. Her
hands and arms were red and dripping and from a dim region at the rear
came the smell of dishwater. Down the narrow, precipitate stairway
floated an infant's thin, protesting wail and Jane felt a sick sense of
sudden nausea.
"Thank you, Lena," said the Irishman. "This lady is Jane Vail, a good
friend come to see us."
The girl, who might have been sixteen, gave Jane a stolid, incurious look
and shuffled down the hall, closing the door on a portion of the stale
smell.
Mrs. Richards was in her office. She greeted Jane civilly but eyed her in
some puzzlement. Here was a strange bird, clearly, to alight in this
dingy barnyard.
"Jane Vail will be trying her hand at Ethel for us," Michael Daragh said.
The matron bridled a little. She was a pallid, tired woman with skeptical
eyes. "Well, I'm sure that's very kind of her but I'm afraid it's no use.
I've just come down from talking to her, nearly all her noon hour. She
wouldn't go to the table. She's turned sullen, now. She won't take any
interest in the Christmas preparations; wouldn't help the girls a bit."
She sighed and looked at a table cluttered with paper paraphernalia for
holiday decorations. In her world of bleak realities the tinsel trimmings
for _fête_ days left her cold. "I declare, Mr. Daragh, I believe we've
worried with her long enough. I've about made up my mind that we'd
better tell the young man ourselves and have done with it. I believe
it's our duty."
"It's her right," said Michael Daragh.
"But, if she won't? They're planning to be married Monday, and Irene's
coming to-day to take Billiken away with her."
"Let Jane Vail be trying her hand. Will you come up to her now?" He
strode out of the room and Jane followed him, smiling back at Mrs.
Richards with a deprecatory shake of her head. She wished the matron
could know how much of an intruder she felt. But once out of the severe
little office, mounting the stairs after Michael Daragh, her usual vivid
sense of drama came back to her. This was, after all, what she had left
the snug harbor for and put out to sea. This was better than tea with
Sarah Farraday in the "studio"--than "little gatherings of the young
people,"--than walking home with Marty Wetherby--than laughing
painstakingly at the jokes of Teddy-bear's father. This was life more
abundantly.
It didn't even matter that the grave Irishman took so for granted her
dedication to this obscure girl's need. That had been very nice ... about
the oil of joy.
"Here's where she'll be," he said, pausing at a closed door, "feeding her
child."
"I'll do what I can," said Jane, lifting a look of girded resolve.
"I know that, surely," said Michael Daragh, knocking for her.
CHAPTER VI
"Going for eighteen," he had said, but even that had not prepared Jane
for the poignant youth of the girl. She looked a child, in her shrunken
middy blouse, her fair hair hanging about her eyes. She was sitting on
the floor, urging bread and milk on a fat and gurgling baby in a little
red chair. She did not look up at first, but went on speaking to the
child.
"Please, Billiken, eat for Muddie! Billiken--when it's the last time
Muddie'll ever have to feed you? Take it quick or Muddie'll give it to
the kitty-cat!"
"Ethel?" Jane closed the door softly and came toward her.
The other eyed her defensively and she tried to tidy her hair with hands
that shook. On the left was a tiny, pinhead solitaire.
"I am Michael Daragh's friend, Ethel. He asked me to talk with you."
"Oh, my God!" Little red spots of rage flamed in her thin cheeks and she
struck her hands together. "Can't they leave me alone? I've told 'em I
won't talk any more. I've told 'em my mind's made up for keeps. But they
keep at me and _keep_ at me!"
Jane stood still. "I know I haven't any right here," she said,
distressedly, "and I know you don't want me."
The girl scrambled to her feet and went to the bureau where she stood
pulling and patting at her hair. "What'd you come for, then?" She
muttered it under her breath, but Jane caught the words.
"Well, if you know Michael Daragh, you must know that when he asks you to
do a thing, even a hard one, you--just do it!" Ethel did not comment or
turn her head and Jane found the sense of drama which had borne her so
buoyantly up the stairs deserting her. She wanted to go out of that drab
room and down those drab stairs and out of that drab house forever, but
she resolutely forced herself to cross the room and bent down beside the
giddy little red chair.
"Why do you call her Billiken?"
"Can't you see?" It was curt and sullen, not at all the tone for an
Unfortunate Girl to employ toward a young lady anointed with the oil of
joy. "She grins just like the Billikens do. Ever since she was a teenty
thing." She gave her caller a long, rebellious stare. "You don't look
like a nurse or a Do-gooder."
"I'm not," said Jane promptly. "I'm merely Michael Daragh's fr----" She
broke off, catching herself up. Well, now, was she? His friend, after a
few weeks of slenderest acquaintance? She had a feeling that the grave
Irishman had obeyed the command to come apart and be separate. Rodney
Harrison was a warm and tangible friend, but this stern and
single-purposed person--"Michael Daragh asked me to talk with you," she
said, sitting down beside the baby. "I'd love to feed her. May I?"
"No!" Ethel swooped down on her child, jealously snatching up the bowl.
"Not when it's my last chance!" She leveled a spoonful and held it to the
widely grinning Billiken. "Come! Gobble--gobble! Eat for poor Muddie!" A
wave of self-pity went visibly over her and she held her head down to
keep Jane from seeing her tears.
"I don't see how you can bear to give her up."
"D'you s'pose I want to?" she snarled it, savagely. Here was maternity,
parenthood, another breed than that of the Teddy-bear's hot, pink
nursery.
Jane picked up the baby's stubby little hand and patted it. "Then, why do
you?"
Ethel's face flamed, but she looked her inquisitor more fully in the eye
than she had done at any time before. "Because--Jerry! _Jerry!_ That's
why."
"Oh ... I see. You care more for him than for your baby?"
Now there came into the childish face a look of shrewd and calculating
wisdom. "I can--I _could_--have other babies, but I couldn't ever have
another--_him_!" Strength here, of a sort, it appeared, in this Weak
Sister.
"It must be very wonderful to care for any one like that," said Jane,
respectfully. The girl looked at her with quick suspicion, but her eyes
were entirely honest. "What is he like, this Jerry person?"
Ethel relaxed a little and the tensest lines smoothed out of her face.
"Well ..." she took her time to it, sorting and choosing her words, "he's
not good-looking, but he looks--_good_."
Jane nodded understandingly. "I know. I know people like that."
"Handsome men ... you can't trust 'em...." A look of wintry reminiscence
came into her eyes for an instant. "I think more of Jerry than--than
anybody, ever. I can't remember my folks. They died when I was just a
little thing. My sister Irene, well, I guess she meant all right, only,
she was so awful proper, always. She was always scared to talk
about--things. I never knew _any_thing till I knew--_every_thing!" A
small shiver went over her at that and she was still for a moment. "But
Jerry!" Her mouth was young and soft again on that word. "He's different
from anything I ever thought a man could be. He's almost like a girl,
some ways. You know, I mean just as nice and comfortable to talk to and
be with." She kept her gaze on Jane's warmly comprehending face, now.
"And he's awful smart, too. The firm wants to send him to the branch
store in Rochester and put him in charge of Gent's Furnishings. I guess
I'd like to live there ... where everybody'd be strange. Jerry, he don't
know where I live. I never let him bring me clear home. Mrs.
Richards--she's the matron--she says he'll find out about me some day
and hate me, but he won't find out. Nobody knows except Irene and the
people here,--and nobody'd be mean enough to just go and tattle to
him,--would they?"
"Oh, I don't believe any one would, intentionally. But" (how appeal to a
sense of fair play where no fair play had been?) "that isn't what
frightens me, Ethel."
"What? You needn't be scared about Billiken. She'll be all right. They're
awful nice people, rich and everything, and they're crazy to have her. 'A
blue-eyed girl with curly hair and a cheerful disposition,' they says to
Irene. And they think her mother's dead."
"I wasn't thinking of Billiken."
"Oh," said Ethel, warily.
"I was thinking of Jerry. If he's as fine as you say he is----"
"He is!"
"Then I think it's pretty mean not to play fair with him, don't you?
Come," said Jane with a brisk heartiness she was far from feeling, "tell
him to-day, right now, when you go back."
She shook a stubborn head. "Now you're being just like all the rest of
'em. I thought you sort of--understood."
"I think I do. But I believe you must tell him."
"Well, it's too late now. Irene's coming today to take Billiken. It's
all settled and everything. It's too late now, even if I wanted to.
Besides"--she flamed with hot color again--"I couldn't tell him in the
daytime ... right there in the store!"
"Oh, Ethel--in anything so big,--something that means your whole
life,--time and place can't matter."
The girl began to dab at her eyes with a damp, small wad of blue-bordered
handkerchief. "I just couldn't tell him in the daytime. I nearly did,
last night. I meant to, 'cross-my-heart,' I did! We went for a walk, and
I was just--just sort of beginning when a woman came sneaking by
and--said something to him. _You_ know. And he said--'Poor devil!'
That's what he called her. '_Poor devil!_' That's just how he said it."
Now she dropped her inadequate handkerchief and wept convulsively into
her hands and a thin shaft of sunshine lighted up the meager solitaire.
Billiken leaned forward, her fat, small face filled with contrition and
patted her mother on her bowed head. "Billiken gob--gobble din--din!
Muddie not cly!"
It seemed to Jane that she was marching endlessly round a Jericho with
walls that reached to the sky with a flimsy tin toy trumpet in her hands.
How blow a blast to shatter them? "Ethel, the only thing you can bring
him is the truth. Are you going to give him a lie for his wedding gift?"
She winced but her mouth was sullen. "You can make me feel terrible, but
you can't make me tell."
"No," said Jane, "I can't make you tell. And Mrs. Richards can't make you
tell, nor even Michael Daragh. But--your own heart can." She leaned
swiftly nearer and put an arm about the flat, little figure. "Ethel, how
much do you love him?"
"More'n--_anything_ in the world."
"More than Irene?" The affirming nod was quick and positive. "More than
the baby?" Again the nod, slower, but still sure. "But that's not enough,
Ethel. You don't know anything about loving unless you love him more than
you love yourself."
The girl wriggled out of her clasp and stared at her.
"Do you know what I'm trying to say to you? I don't know as much about
loving as you do, Ethel. I've never loved any one--yet. But I know this!
Your Jerry may never find out about your trouble, but whether he does or
not, you couldn't be happy while you knew you were cheating him,--while
you knew you had married him without telling him the thing it's his right
to know. Ethel, you've got to love him more than yourself. You've got to
love him more than you want him!"
The color ebbed slowly out of Ethel's small face and Billiken began to
whimper. Far down the street the inevitable hurdy-gurdy ground out the
inevitable "Marseillaise." "_La jour de gloire est arrivé!_" Was it?
"Love him,--more than I want him?" She said it over in a halting whisper.
"Love him more than I--" Her lips moved inaudibly, forming the second
half of the sentence. She bent over Billiken, crushing her in an embrace
which made her cry. Then she caught up her foolish little hat and jammed
it on without a glance at the mirror and flung herself into her coat. "I
better go quick!" She was still whispering. "I better go quick!" She ran
out of the room. Jane heard her on the stairs, then the slam of the front
door and the sharp staccato of her feet upon the sidewalk.
Billiken, released from the spell, lifted up her voice and shrilly wept,
passionately pushing away her bowl and spoon, roaring with rage when Jane
tried to touch her. It seemed to Jane that there was furious accusation
in the small, red countenance. "_Don't_ shriek at me like that," she
said, indignantly. "I'm not taking your mother away from you,--I'm
trying to keep her for you!"
The door opened and Michael Daragh came in, his face glowing. "From the
look she had on her when she flew by," he said, "I'm thinking you've
surely won where the rest of us lost."
"I think she's going to tell him," said Jane, soberly.
"Glory be!" he said, fervently.
Jane sighed. "She's going to tell him, in the garish daylight, at the
Gent's Furnishing counter. If she can! But she's left me with the
'heart-scald'!"
Michael Daragh had picked up Billiken at once and at once she had ceased
to roar and soothed to a whimpering cry. "Hush, now _acushla_," he said,
"hush now,--let you be still, _solis na suile_!" The baby stopped
altogether, her ear intrigued by the purling Gaelic. "If you'll be
slipping out now, the way she won't be noticing, I'll have her fine and
fast asleep in two flips of a dead lamb's tail!"
Jane slipped out obediently and stepped softly down the precipitate
stair. The matron looked up, her lips thinly compressed.
"Mr. Daragh thinks you have persuaded her to tell."
"I can't be sure. I think she meant to tell him when she left here."
"Well, I guess she'll change her mind by the time she gets to the store.
She's very weak, Ethel is."
"But there isn't anything weak about the way she cares for the Jerry
person."
Mrs. Richards' lips tightened to a taut line. "When they get mad crazy
about a man" (the plural pronoun pigeonholed Ethel in a class) "they're
like the Rock of Gibraltar."
"I'd like to stay the rest of the afternoon, if you don't mind," said
Jane, at her winningest. "That is, if there's something I can do?" She
looked at the littered table.
"How'd you like to cut out the paper joy-bells?" The matron melted a
little. "A lady brought in the paper and the pattern yesterday, but I
haven't had time to get the girls at them yet."
"But--that's magenta-colored!" Jane picked up a sheet of the paper.
"Well, I guess it isn't the regular Christmas shade, but I don't know
that it matters, particularly. I expect it was some she had in the house.
You might put the girls at cutting them out and you could do the Merry
Christmas sign." She gave her a long and narrow placard in mustard green
and shook out some pattern letters from an envelope. Then she rang a firm
and authoritative bell. "I'll have the girls assemble in the dining room
and they can work at the big table."
Immediately there were shuffling feet in the hall, slow feet on the
stair, a heavy tread in the dining room behind them. Where was the youth
in those young feet? There was something in the dragging gait that made
Jane shiver. Seventeen of them seated themselves about the long table,
all in huge, enveloping pinafores of dull brown stuff, coarse and stiff.
They ranged in age from twenty to twelve but on every face, pretty or
plain, stolid or wistful, sullen or sweet, she read the same look of
crushed and helpless waiting. She spread out her materials and gave her
directions and the girls set soberly to work. Seventeen heads bent in
silence over the table; scissors creaked; upstairs a baby cried
fretfully. There leapt into Jane's mind a memory picture of Nannie Slade
Hunter before the joyfully hailed arrival of the Teddybear,--the tiny,
white, enameled chiffonier with its little bunches of painted flowers
spilling over with offerings--Lilliputian garments as 'fine as a fairy's
first tooth'--the chortling pride of Edward R.--the beaming, nervous
mother and mother-in-law--the endless flowers and books; Nannie herself,
cunningly draped and swathed in Batik crêpe, prettier than ever before in
her pretty life--
Jane went quickly out of the room and sat down on the bottom step of the
stairs which seemed to be rushing headlong out of the house of drab
tragedy.
"What is it?" Michael Daragh bent over her.
She lifted a twisting face. "Michael Daragh, I never cry, even at
funerals, but I'm going to cry now!"
"Now that would be the great waste of time surely," he smiled down at
her. "Masefield has the true word for it,--'Energy is agony expelled,'
says he. Let you be making that Merry Christmas sign the while you're
sorrowing."
"There they sit--in those awful, mud-colored pinafores--making paper
joy-bells! I can't _bear_ it! _Magenta_ joy-bells!" The matron started
upstairs and Jane drew aside to let her pass. "What are they going to
have for Christmas, Mrs. Richards?"
"Well, we have a real nice dinner,--not turkey, of course, but a nice
dinner," said the matron, "and every girl gets a pair of stockings and a
handkerchief and a Christmas postcard----"
"With more joy-bells?" Jane wanted hotly to know, "or an angel in a
nightdress and a snow scene?"
Mrs. Richards went firmly up the stairs. "We naturally cannot take much
time to pick out the subjects, but every girl gets a pretty card."
Jane got swiftly to her feet. "Michael Daragh, do you know what I'm going
to do?" She hadn't known herself an instant earlier. "I'm not going home
to Vermont for the holidays! I'm going to stay and help with the
Christmasing here--and I'll spend the money I would have spent on my
trip. I'm going to buy holly and greens and miles of red ribbon and acres
of tissue paper and a million stickers, and seventeen presents--seventeen
perfectly useless, foolish, unsuitable, beautiful things! Do you hear,
Michael Daragh?"
"I hear," he said, and again his lean face lighted oddly from within, "I
hear, God save you kindly, and I'm rare and thankful to you, Jane Vail!"
CHAPTER VII
The doorbell cut jaggedly into Jane's exalted mood and she went into the
office and sat down to work on the Merry Christmas sign. She meant to
replace it with a joyful scarlet one, but meanwhile it would keep her
fingers busy and give her an excuse for lingering until Ethel came back
with the news of her confession and its results, and she could be
planning the holiday cheer she meant to make in this melancholy house.
She was still rather startled at her sudden decision but pleased with
herself beyond words. To give up the festive return to the village ...
her Aunt Lydia's damp-eyed delight, the "little gatherings of the young
people" in her honor, the gay and jingling joy of the season ... and stay
in a boarding house and make determined merriment for the Agnes
Chatterton home. Then, tracing a large and ugly M, she laughed aloud. The
truth was, she told herself flatly, she was pleased to the marrow of her
bones to be here instead of there, not only in fresh fields and pastures
thrillingly and picturesquely new, but away from the reckless necessity
for settling the Marty Wetherby matter once and for all. And the big
Irishman seemed almost pathetically pleased at her announcement, and it
was entirely conceivable that Rodney Harrison would provide flesh-pots
and diversions. All in all, she was cannily glad to abide by her hasty
and handsome offer, and she worked steadily at her letters while Mrs.
Richards wrote at her littered desk.
The doorbell rang again and Mrs. Richards peered out into the hall.
"Well, there's Irene, come for Billiken! That doesn't look much as if
Ethel had told him." There was a good deal of triumph in the glance she
flung at Jane. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised; I didn't think she'd
have the courage."
Michael Daragh came in, his face grave. "Here's Irene, come for the
child. I don't like the look of it."
"Well, _I'm_ not surprised," said Mrs. Richards again.
A young woman presented herself at the office door. There was resolute
respectability in her blue serge suit, brushed shiny, too thin for
December wear. She carried a small straw telescope and her voice sounded
capable and firm. "Can I go right up, Mrs. Richards?"
"Why, I suppose you may as well, Irene. You've come for Billiken?"
"Yes. I'm taking her on the night-boat."
"Wait," said the Irishman, as she turned toward the stairs. "Did Ethel
tell him?"
"You mean, did she tell Jerry about--about the baby?" The good sister of
the erring sister flushed painfully. "Not that I've heard of. I guess she
knows better than that."
"There is no 'better than that,'" said Michael Daragh, sternly. "There is
nothing better than the truth." The line of his lean jaw was salient.
"If I can once get her respectably married," said Irene, nippingly, her
small face resolute, "I won't worry about what she tells or doesn't tell.
It's been hard enough on _me_, I can tell you!" She went briskly upstairs
and they heard her firm closing of the door.
"You see?" the matron wanted to know.
"I'm fearing we've lost the fight," said Michael Daragh.
Jane insisted on hope. "Perhaps she did tell him, and everything's all
right, but she had no chance to see Irene and explain! Surely you won't
let her take Billiken until we are sure?"
Then the front door opened quietly and Ethel came in to stand before
them, her tragic and accusing eyes on Jane. "You made me tell," she
said. "_You_ made me!" And when Jane ran to her, questioning, eager, she
pushed her away. "It's you! It's you did it!"
Michael Daragh strode to her and put a steadying arm about her shoulders.
"Child, tell us the way of it."
Her teeth were chattering and her face seemed to grow whiter and whiter.
"I told him. I told him everything. I kept saying to myself over and
over, all the way to the store, just what she told me"--she flung a
bruised and bitter look at Jane--"'I must love him more than I want
him'--and I went straight up to him at his counter, right there in the
daytime. He was selling a necktie to a fat old man with a red neck. It
was a dark blue tie with light blue spots on it." She added the detail
carefully in her spent little voice. "I waited until he was gone and then
I told Jerry. He just looked at me and _looked_ at me, and made me say
it again, and then--then he just walked away without looking back. I had
to go to work, but I watched and watched, and _watched_. He never came
back to his counter. Pretty soon I just got crazy. I went over and
asked. They said he was sick, and gone home." She sagged in Michael
Daragh's hands and he lifted her and carried her into the matron's room,
the matron hurrying beside him.
Then Jane Vail sat alone in the ugly office, contemplating the result of
her eloquence. She could hear Ethel's sobbing and the matron's sharp
treble, and the steady and rhythmic flow of the Irishman's voice. She
rose to follow them, but the closed door halted her. They had wanted her
to do this thing, to do the thing they had failed to do, and she had done
it; and now they shut her away while they strove to heal where she had
hurt.
Why had she done it? Why had she come at all? Why had she mixed and
muddled in this sordid tangle which was none of her bright business? And
why--chief of all whys--had she rashly and sentimentally offered to give
up her holidays at home for the futile endeavor to make Christmas merry
for these miserable girls?
Rage rose in her, rage at herself, rage at the sobbing, tarnished
girlhood in there, at her sharp sister, at the matron, at the zealot who
had dragged her into it all. Let him take Emma Ellis next time. This was
her work, and she--Jane Vail--belonged in the world of clean and pretty
things and in that world she would stay. She decided against undignified
flight; she would wait for Michael Daragh and walk home with him to Mrs.
Hills' boarding house, and she would be very civil about it all, but she
would make it clear, even to an other-worldly settlement worker, that her
brief detour into this sort of thing was finished; that she was on the
highway again, speeding toward the place she had visioned for herself.
Now she drove her mind resolutely away from the Agnes Chatterton Home,
to the Vermont village, then across the sea ... Florence ... the old
palaces ... the Arno ... the little tea room in the Via Tornabuoni where
she went sometimes at this very hour ... little heart-shaped cakes with
green icing--Upstairs three babies began to scream at once, harshly and
hideously, and an opened door somewhere at the rear of the house
confessed to cabbage for dinner, and the present came swiftly and
unbeautifully back. It came back with a bang. Jane resolutely set
herself to think the thing out clearly. If the matron or the Irishman
had persuaded Ethel to divulge her dark young past to her suitor, he
would have repudiated her just the same; therefore she--Jane--might
shake off her mantle of guilty responsibility. And after all, bleak as
life looked to the little creature now, still sobbing stormily in Mrs.
Richards' room, wasn't she safer than she would be married to her Jerry
with that stalking secret?--"Whose happiness resteth upon a lie is as a
spirit in prison." The whole world, the whole godly, gossiping,
ferreting world, would have conspired together to tell him. Now she
climbed nimbly to secure conviction in the eternal justice of things.
The girl had gone gallantly, in garish daylight, holding her happiness
in her hand, and told the truth. Now she was in the dust, but wouldn't
it all come right for her in the end? Wouldn't it _have_ to come right
for her? The sense of helpless misery fell away from her and she was so
confident of coming joy that she started toward the closed door of the
matron's room. No; she would not go in, but she was warm with comfort.
It seemed close and breathless in the office and she went to the street
door and opened it for a swallow of the keen winter air, and stood out
upon the top step, looking down into the dingy thoroughfare. There was a
young man, half a block away, on the opposite side. He was walking
slowly, looking at the numbers on the houses, and presently he looked
across at the Agnes Chatterton Home. Then he stood quite still, staring
at it.
Gladness and certainty rose in Jane and she beckoned to him.
He came over very slowly, and mounted the steps with lagging feet, and he
was still staring, his eyes rather dazed.
"Oh," said Jane, "I think I know who you are!" She was a little
breathless with happy excitement. "Aren't you--I don't know the rest of
your name, but aren't you--Jerry?"
"Yes, ma'am," said the youth. There was a close color harmony about him;
his jubilant cravat picked up the dominant note of his striped silk shirt
and the royal purple of his hose struck it again, an octave lower. The
removal of his velvet hat disclosed wide and flanging ears which gave his
face an expression of quaint comedy, now at variance with his aghast and
solemn look.
Jane's bright presence there on that dreary doorstep, her hailing of him,
her knowledge of his identity, seemed to awake no wonder in him. He
looked as if he had finished with surprise; as if nothing could ever
startle him again.
"I want to see Ethel," he said.
"Yes!" said Jane, gladly. "Come!"
She left him in the correct and cheerless little reception room and flew
up the headlong stairs and into Ethel's room, her face luminous. The good
sister was just finishing her packing of Billiken's belongings into the
telescope and the child, snug in tiny sweater and knitted cap, watched
her absorbedly. Jane caught her up without a word and carried her out of
the room.
"I'm about ready to go," the young woman called after her, sharply.
"Please don't take her things off!"
Jane did not answer her. She sped down the stairs as swiftly and easily
as a person in a dream, and opened the closed door boldly, without even a
knock, and marched in, Billiken in her arms. She felt like an army with
banners.
Ethel's first fury of grief had spent itself and she sat leaning limply
back, her eyes closed, breathing in long, quivering sighs.
"Look," cried Jane, "here's Billiken!"
Billiken flung herself at her mother with a lilting squeal of joy, and
Ethel's eyes opened and narrowed with a cold and appraising scrutiny. Her
hands twisted together in her lap; she seemed to be weighing and
balancing. At length, with a little brooding cry, she caught the baby in
her arms.
Michael Daragh smiled sunnily at Jane, but she had no instant to spare
for him then. She pulled Ethel to her feet. "Come," she said,
imperiously. "Come and bring Billiken!" She led her out of the room.
The matron and the Irishman followed them, wondering.
Jane was guiding the girl, her face buried against the baby's woolen cap.
"Look!" she said again, at the door of the dim reception room.
Ethel halted on the threshold, peering through the gathering winter dusk.
"Oh,--_Jerry_?" she gasped, uncertainly.
The young man from the Gent's Furnishings strode forward to meet her, his
eyes on her blurred and swollen face. "Say, listen," he began, "say,
listen--" Then his gaze dropped to the child in her arms and grew bleak,
and Ethel shrank back and away from him, her eyes wide and terrified.
It seemed to Jane, standing there in the ugly hall of the Agnes
Chatterton Home, between the sharp-visaged matron and the Irishman who
looked like Botticelli's saint, as if all the love and pity in the world
hung by a hair above the pit.
It was a new and unpleasing thing to Billiken, to find cold eyes upon
her, level, unloving, hostile eyes, but she had an antidote. Gazing
blithely back at him with the wide little grin which had earned her the
name of "the God of Things as They Ought to Be," she held out her arms
with a gurgling cry and flung herself at the young man with the gay
cravat as she had flung herself at her mother two minutes before.
The hot color flooded his face, his freckles were drowned in a red sea,
his flanging ears were crimson. Suddenly, gropingly, he reached out for
them both, and got the two of them into his arms. "It'll be O.K.," he
said, huskily, winking hard. "It'll be O.K.! Say, listen, I got it all
figured out! They been wantin' me to go to the Rochester store anyway,
and we don't know a livin' soul there!"
They went away, the other three, and left them there together, and there
were two little dabs of color on the matron's high cheekbones and her
sharp eyes looked oddly dim. "Well," she said, "well--I guess that's
settled right enough. And I guess we've got you to thank for it, Miss
Vail."
"We have, surely, God save you kindly," said Michael Daragh, and his face
had what Jane called its stained-glass-window look.
She felt very flushed and humbled under their beaming approbation.
"There's only her own courage to thank!" But she snatched up a bit of the
despised decoration, her cheeks scarlet. "You know,--I'm so happy--so
gorgeously, dizzily happy--I can hear that magenta-colored paper joy-bell
ring a silvery chime!"
CHAPTER VIII
It was November when Jane made her exodus from the Vermont village and
her entry into New York, and by early summer she had written and sold
three one-act plays for vaudeville which yielded plump little weekly
royalties and gave her a reputation quite out of proportion to her output
and experience. They began to advertise her sketches as "different" and
to build up a vogue. "So and So in a Jane Vail act," said a pretty
billboard, and Rodney Harrison gave himself jocularly proud airs as her
discoverer and sponsor.
"I see clearly," said Jane, "that I must call you my Fairy God-brother!"
"I do not seem to crave the brother effect," said Mr. Harrison
deliberately, before he gave his attention to a hovering head waiter. He
was distinctly what her village called "not a marrying man," but he was
beginning to have his moments of meaningful look and word.
"Well, then," said Jane, after agreeing to alligator pear salad, "shall
we say Fairy God-cousin? That's a gay and pleasing relationship without
undue responsibilities. Will that do?"
"That will do for the present," said Mr. Harrison. He regarded her across
the small table with perfectly apparent satisfaction. Nothing bucolic
here; a dark and gypsy beauty which glowed and kindled beside the fainter
types about them, a wholly modish smartness, an elusive something to
which he could not put a name, which gave him always the sense of glad
pursuit. There had been in his early attitude, as she had divined, just a
trifle of the King and the Beggar Maid, the Town Mouse and the City
Mouse, but that was gone now. She knew his New York very nearly as well
as he did himself and with her increased activities had come decreased
dependence on him. She was either so gayly busy or so busily gay that she
was able to accept only one invitation in four, which made it very
necessary to ask her early and often. He was a wary young man, Rodney
Harrison, urban from head to heel; marriage had not entered into his
calculations. Yet he was aware of his growing fondness and approval, his
growing conviction that domesticity with Jane Vail need not of necessity
be the curbing and cloying thing he had visioned.
It was May when he told her that his mother wanted to come to see her,
and it was the following day that Jane wrote home to tell them she was
coming to Vermont for the summer months. She wasn't quite ready for
Rodney Harrison's mother to call on her; she wanted a little time and a
little perspective, and she knew that the hour had struck for her to go
back and put a firm if mournful period to the affair of Marty Wetherby.
There had been constantly recurring scoldings by mail from Sarah Farraday
and Nannie Slade Hunter, and, while he was the poorest and least
articulate of correspondents, his stammering letters had still achieved a
pathos of their own, and the thing was no longer to be shirked.
So she said good-by at the boarding house to Mrs. Hills and Emma Ellis
and Michael Daragh and at the station to Rodney Harrison; and went back
in smart triumph with a wardrobe trunk full of clever clothes and the
latest shining model in typewriters.
They were out in force to meet her; her Aunt Lydia Vail, happily tearful
and trembling; Nannie Slade Hunter and Edward R. with the amazingly
enlarged and humanized Teddy-bear, in their new roadster; Sarah Farraday,
a little thinner after her hard-driven winter of teaching; and Martin
Wetherby, panting a little even in his thin summer suit, removing his
handsome Panama to mop a steaming brow.
The first evening was all Miss Lydia's, save that Sarah was coming over
later to stay the night, and again Jane sat in the rosewood and mahogany
dining room, served by the middle-aged maid who did not know that there
was a servant problem, and ate the reliable stock supper--the three
slices of pink boiled ham on the ancient and honorable platter of blue
willow pattern ware, the small pot of honey, the two kinds of preserves,
the hot biscuit, the delicate cups of not-too-strong, uncolored Japan
tea, the sugar cookies, the pale custard.
Miss Vail had missed her niece acutely, as she would have missed a lovely
elm from the street or the silhouette of the mountain which she got from
her bedroom window, but she had wanted the dear girl to be happy, and she
clearly was happy, brimmingly, radiantly, and she had gone down to her
twice for merry and bewildered little visits and had come thankfully home
again.
She beamed at her now across the table and insisted, as of old, that she
eat two of the three slices of pink ham shaved to a refined thinness, and
then they went into the pretty parlor and visited cozily until the little
spinster's head began to jerk forward in the pauses, and Sarah Farraday,
who had waited conscientiously until nine o'clock, appeared. Then Miss
Lydia went upstairs to take off her plump, snug things and slip into her
flannelette nightdress--the nights were still what she called "pretty
sharp," and get into bed and "read until she got sleepy."
"Hannah says she sneaks in every night and snaps off the light after
she's sound asleep," said Sarah. "It's a mercy she doesn't have to use a
lamp,--she'd have burnt the house down years ago."
"She 'doesn't sleep,'" said Jane, looking tenderly after her, plodding
plumply up the stairs, "she 'just rests her eyes for a moment.' Sally,
let's go up to my room and have a regular, old-time talk-fest!"
So they went up the narrow stairs with their arms entwined about each
other and took off their dresses and slipped into kimonos and let down
their hair, but they found a strange and baffling constraint.
"Sally, _dear_," Jane determinedly broke the spell, "what's the silly
matter with us?"
The blonde music teacher's eyes filled up with her ready tears.
"It's--you've been away so long, and we've drifted so far apart....
Your life--your wonderful life----"
"Now, Sarah Farraday," her friend pounced upon her, "after the miles upon
miles of letters I've written you, do you dare to feel that you don't know
as much about my life as I do? Viper-that-bites-the-hand-that-writes-to-it!
Why, I could have done another playlet--two--in the time I've taken to
tell you everything!"
"You've been marvelous about letters," Sarah admitted with a grateful
sniff, "but----"
"And what's more--and this admits of no argument--next winter you're
coming down to me for a month of giddy gamboling and to soak your soul in
symphonies and operas!"
Sarah Farraday gave a little gasp and her thin cheeks flushed. "Oh, my
dear, you're a lamb to think of it, but of course I couldn't. It's
wonderful, just even to _think_ about it, but it couldn't possibly
happen."
"Why not?"
"Because," said Sarah, doggedly, "it's much too good to be true."
"Now that," said Jane sternly, "is a wicked and immoral remark! There is
nothing too good to be true, and it's blasphemy to say so."
"Oh, well ... of course, with _you_--" She left her sentence trailing
and let her thin hands fall in her lap limply, palm upward and stared at
Jane. Her dark hair was shimmering and floating about her and her dark
eyes were pools of light. "Janey," she leaned toward her and spoke
wistfully, "are you really as impossibly happy as you look?"
"Happier," said Jane, promptly. She began to brush her dusky mane with
long and sweeping strokes. "Still doing this a hundred and twenty times a
night, Sally, no matter at what scandalous hour I come in."
But the other persisted with sudden sapience. "I mean, are you really as
happy as you act, or are you just--gay?"
"Both," said Jane, stoutly. ("Sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four--) I've
had a bright and shining time, work and play, with my feet very much on
the earth,--or the pavements, rather. I'm satisfied, Sally."
"But oh," said Sarah, forlornly, "you said you wouldn't be really 'going
away' from us, but you have! Millions of miles away--a whole world away,
Jane! You've proved your point,--succeeded beyond our wildest dreams----"
"Not beyond _my_ wildest dreams, old dear," said her best friend with
happy impudence. "You were more modest for me than I was for myself!"
"--beyond our wildest dreams," Sarah repeated stubbornly, "and you can
carry on your work just as well here, now, and wouldn't it be the
loveliest, most natural thing in the world for you to stay at home?
Jane--_poor_ old Marty!" She ran to Jane and flung her arms emotionally
about her.
"Sally, there's no more chance----"
But the other cut in, panic-stricken, "Oh,--don't make up your mind
now--to-night! Wait! Just spend the summer in the dear old way, as we've
always done, and see if you don't fit right into your old niche again,
with--with----"
"With a steadily fattening Marty," said Jane, bright-cheeked, "and a hot,
pink nursery with a fat and well-oiled Kewpie?"
"Jane," said Sarah coldly, "there are some things too sacred to----"
"To be anything but decently and sanely frank about," said Jane. "My
child, the story isn't going to have that particular happy ending for
which you pant. You see all my life in a proscribed pattern. Like a
sentimental ballad's second verse ... back to the grassy meadows ...
childhood's happy hours again.... Once again he sang--
"'For you are my li--hittel--sw--heet--heart.'"
"Then," said Sarah with conviction, "it's either the man-you-met-on-the-boat,
or that Irish missionary person!"
Jane laughed. Wasn't it amazing how good old Sally, herself conceived for
celibacy, yearned to mate up every one within her ken! Nature's little
way of evening up, perhaps; if Sarah herself was to carry on the race
chain, was she to make it up by tireless toil in urging others on?
"Sally, Michael Daragh, as I've tried to make clear, is an over-soul. His
large feet lug his large frame about on this terrestrial sphere, but in
reality he isn't here at all. He is quite literally absent from the body
and present with the Lord. As I told you before,--a large body of man
entirely surrounded by conscience. No more aware of me, as a woman, than
he is of Emma Ellis--and you don't get the force of that"--she grinned
shamelessly--"unless you know Emma."
"Then, how about--the other one?"
Jane considered, picking and choosing her words as she loved to do.
"Well, Michael feels I am too much of the world, Rodney that I am too
little; Michael is above me, spiritually speaking, and Rodney is
beneath--which would, of course, make him much the pleasanter person to
live with! Rodney is thoroughly and comfortably this-worldly; Michael
is--other-worldly! This is the truth of the matter, Sally; Rodney
Harrison is keen about my neat little brain and Michael Daragh is gravely
concerned about my soul, but I think neither one is interested in my
heart!"
She sprang to her feet and threw a gorgeous robe about her. "Come along,
Sally! Let's go down and make some chocolate! I've come to crave
nocturnal nourishment, and much as I adore talking about myself I've
really had enough of the topic for to-night. How many pupils have you
now? And how near is the baby-grand?"
* * * * *
She stayed three months at home, tapping briskly at her typewriter in the
mornings and giving her afternoons and evenings to the old innocuous
routine, and it was said of her that she had changed and gotten citified,
of course, but seemed very much interested in everything and everybody,
and many were the placid hours in the pink nursery, the drives with the
Edward R. Hunters in the new roadster, the teas in the burlapped studio
with Sarah Farraday, the meetings of the Ladies' Aid and the Tuesday Club
where she gave gay little talks and readings and vague old ladies asked
her gently if she was still going on with her literary work.
The only radical change was Martin Wetherby, whose case came up for
decision at once, in spite of the sage counsels of the Teddy-bear's
father.
The second evening at home Miss Lydia Vail had risen flutteringly and
left them alone on the porch in the soft dusk, and at once he had plunged
to his doom. There was no serene confidence about him this time, no
snatching her into a short-breathed embrace; he was rather pathetically
humble before her new poise and achievements, pleading, desperate.
"Marty, dear," said Jane unhappily, "I don't want to be unsympathetic,
but indeed I don't think I'm ruining your life! You're so nice and young,
and you're doing famously at the bank! Oh, I know it's just because
you've held to the idea for so long--and so many other people have, and
made it seem--settled. It's just your _habit_--not your heart, that's
aching!"
But in spite of this cheering reassurance she had to admit to Sarah that
Marty continued to droop at the corners, and to have, in spite of the
assistant cashiership, a look of shaken confidence. His mother, that
former arranger of little gatherings for the young people and dispenser
of light refreshments, treated Jane with coolness, and had her adherents
here and there in the village.
Jane went back to New York the first of September and sold immediately
the one-act play she had written during the summer, and was engulfed in
the business of putting it on, and presently Rodney Harrison brought her
a well-known actor from the legitimate who wanted to rest and make a
corpulent salary in the two-a-day, and she succeeded in fitting him to a
sketch. It brought her fresh laurels and a larger audience and a better
royalty, and she told herself stoutly (as Rodney Harrison had first told
her) that it didn't matter in the least that he wanted a good deal of
broad and rather edgy comedy and, failing to get it from her, had put it
in himself, and, therefore, had his name on the program as joint author.
Every one would know that the clean and clever little story was her own
and the edginess his. She took great pains to write this to Sarah and to
repeat it often to herself and she glowed under Rodney Harrison's pride
in her and the cordial respect of the booking offices and the dazzled
admiration of the boarding house.
But one humid evening, when all the vigor and backbone seemed to have
melted out of the world, Michael Daragh asked her to ride with him on the
top of the bus to Grant's Tomb and walk back along the river, and
presently they sat down on the damp grass like a shop girl and her
gentleman friend and looked off across the river, shining in the
moonlight, and after a silence Jane said pleasantly, with her new
admixture of aloofness and indulgence, "Well, Michael Daragh, I know you
haven't marched me here merely to revel in the beauty of the evening.
It's more a case of--'thank you,' said the oysters, 'we've had a pleasant
run!' You may as well begin. I'm feeling very peaceful and very
prosperous. Who is the poor thing you're concerned with now?"
And the big Irishman, a dull flush mounting in his lean cheeks, faced her
squarely. "The poor thing I'm concerned with now, God save you kindly, is
yourself, Jane Vail!"
She hadn't any words in that first dazed moment. She sat staring at him,
her great eyes wide.
"It's yourself, surely," he said, sternly, "the way you've wandered from
the high road and lost yourself in a bog."
She was still too startled and bewildered to be angry. "I haven't the
vaguest idea what you mean. Have you?"
"I have, indeed, Jane Vail. The thing you've just written and sold,
now,--are you proud in your heart of it?"
"Certainly I am," she said stoutly, her voice beginning to warm with
resentment. "It isn't a classic, of course, but it's a thoroughly
workmanlike, snappy little act, sure to get over, and----"
He shook his head. "Lost in the bog you are, and sinking deeper every
day."
"Sinking, my good Michael? If you'll read this week's _Variety_ you'll
find there are those who talk about my phenomenal rise! I loathe saying
things like that about myself, but you make me do it, in decent
self-defense. It's simply that you don't understand these things--that
you're looking at them from the wrong angle." She talked on, angrily,
defensively, but inwardly she was feeling attacked and abused and
crushed. There had been nothing but praise and congratulation and
rejoicing now for ten months, and this shabby settlement worker
dared--"I'm sure you mean to be very kind," her voice was ice and
velvet, "but I'm afraid you've got rather in the way of lecturing young
women, haven't you? And I really think you might save your admonitions
and exhortations for those who need and want them. Personally, I'm
entirely satisfied with the way I'm getting on."
"'Getting on,' yes, God forgive you," he said mournfully, "and that's all
you're doing, Jane Vail!"
"I consider you incapable of judging a matter like this," said Jane with
cool disdain. "You see life always through a stained-glass window and it
gives you distorted values. What do you mean,--only 'getting on'?"
"Wasn't it yourself told me what you said to your friend back in the
village--that you were 'going on'? Woman dear," the purling brogue
dropped an octave, "there's the wide world of difference between the two!
'Getting on' you are surely, the way your name screams from the
billboards and your bank balance fattens like a stalled ox, but are you
'going on,' Jane Vail? Are you 'going on'? Woman, dear," the purling
brogue--"the rare, high places you can climb if you will? Or will you
stop content with the pavement, the likes of you that was made for the
mountain peaks? Are you going on, I say? Answer me, Jane Vail!"
But instead, with flashing eyes and scorching cheeks she took leave of
him, requesting him curtly not to follow, and walked alone to the Drive
and hailed a bus, and sat staring darkly ahead of her as it jolted and
swayed down the long blocks to Washington Square.
When Michael Daragh came down to breakfast next day he found the dining
room in a state of excited conjecture. Miss Vail, dressed for a journey,
had roused Mrs. Hills at six in the morning to say that she was going out
of town for several weeks, and had immediately driven off in a taxi with
her handbag and suitcase, her steamer trunk and her typewriter.
CHAPTER IX
Nevertheless, when Emma Ellis came in to luncheon, a little early, the
third day following, she espied at Michael Daragh's place a letter with a
Boston postmark, addressed in a firm, small hand she knew. She was the
only person in the room and she had time to examine it thoroughly, even
as to thickness, before Mrs. Hills came in. It happened that there were
mail deliveries just before the three meal times and it was the
boarding-house keeper's guileless custom to sort and distribute letters
at the table, thus saving a wearisome climb and much pedestrianism
through long halls.
"Well, I've got a line from Jane and I'm free to say I'm relieved. I was
afraid she was sick or something, rushing off like that, rousing me out
of a sound sleep at six in the morning, just saying she was going out of
town. _I_ supposed, of course, she was going home to her Aunt Lydia
Vail."
"Didn't she?"
"No, she didn't." Mrs. Hills took the note out of her apron pocket and
consulted it. "No, she's going to Maine. Foot'n alone. Says she needs
quiet for some special work."
"Mr. Daragh has something from her, too." Emma Ellis stood behind the
Irishman's chair, her pale eyes lapping up the inscription.
"No!" said Mrs. Hills, advancing with interest, frank and unashamed. "You
don't say! Well, he has! Sure's you're a foot high! Well, now, that beats
me!"
Emma Ellis tucked in her lips in a way she had before making a certain
type of remark. "It is rather strange.... They were out walking in the
evening, and in the morning she left, precipitately."
"'Tis kinder queer," Mrs. Hills clucked. "Couldn't have quarreled or
anything--never paid enough attention to each other for that."
"Oh," said Emma Ellis in a hushed voice, "don't you think Miss Vail has
always devoted a great deal of attention to Mr. Daragh?"
"Well, Jane's a great one to make up to folks and be friendly; always
was, as a child. I can remember her, four years old, after her folks died
and she came to live with Miss Lydia. Wasn't afraid of anything or
anybody, ever. Used to slip out and run off down Main Street after a
peddler or a gypsy or anybody she took a fancy to. But--" she came back
into the present--"Mr. Daragh's been kinder queer these last two, three
days. But then, far's that goes, he's always queer. Oddest mortal I ever
met up with in all my born days. Odder'n Adam's off ox."
"If it is odd," said the Settlement worker, dull color flooding her
sallow skin, "for a man to turn his back on greed and gain and devote his
life to altruism----"
"Now, now," said the boarding-house keeper, pacifically, "you've no call
to take me up like that. Land knows I set a great store by Mr. Daragh, if
he is Irish as the pigs. Never had a human being under my roof that was
easier to suit and made less fuss, but he's _queer_ and I'd say it on my
dying bed!"
The other woman stood looking down at Jane Vail's pretty letter which
managed, in spite of the plain, creamy envelope and the many alien hands
through which it had passed, to retain a startling individuality, and she
spoke in the little smothered voice which was her proclamation of intense
feeling. "If--_she_--with the life she leads--has--has disturbed Mr.
Daragh----"
"Now, then, you look here," said the Vermont villager with sudden
sharpness, "I guess her life is about as important as anybody else's I
might name! I guess if Mr. Daragh's 'disturbed,' as you call it, it's no
worse for him than it's been for others. My land, Jane Vail could of had
her choice of the town, where she comes from. There's _four_ wanted her,
to my certain knowledge, and they say Martin Wetherby (Wetherby Ridge is
named for his family--they go back to Revolutionary days) never _will_
get over it. And I guess that Mr. Harrison that rolls up here in taxis
and limousines is sitting up and taking notice, sure's gun's iron! And
if Mr. Michael Daragh----"
"Sh ..." said Emma Ellis.
The big Irishman came into the room, graver even than usual, but his eyes
lighted warmly at sight of the missive at his place. He nodded to the
watching women, tore it open and read it swiftly, and as he read the
gladness spread and deepened in his face.
"_I_ had a letter from Jane, too," said Mrs. Hills, seating herself.
"Going to Maine for some special work she's got to do."
"Yes," said Michael Daragh. "Special work, indeed." He folded the letter
and put it back in his pocket, and the table filled up with the other
members of the household, the music students and the school teachers and
the elderly concert-going ladies in their staid silks ... all the sound
and sensible persons whom the missing boarder made so drab and colorless
by her glowing presence. He smiled sunnily at Emma Ellis and was
astonished to see tears in her light eyes, but he was used to tears and
woes and secret sorrows, so he smiled again and more convincingly and
went sturdily on with his meal. When he was alone in his bare and austere
room on the top floor he took out Jane's letter and read it again, slowly
and with thankful care.
I've decided to forgive you, Michael Daragh, it began, but it takes a
bit of doing! It's easy enough to forgive any one for being in the
wrong; that's a really pleasant and soothing sensation; but to pardon
you for being in the right--that's taken me all these hours! I said
that you always saw life through a stained-glass window and that it
gave you distorted values, didn't I? That was temper, pure and
simple. You were perfectly right to wail like one of your own
Banshees because the likes of me--once content when the pale shadow
of Pegasus passed her by--is become an ink-spattered, carbon-grimed
gold digger! Ten months ago, shivering and quivering over "ONE
CROWDED HOUR," I cowered back in my semi-occasional taxicab and
watched the meter with a creeping scalp.... Now I can ride from
Yonkers to the Square and admire the scenery all the way. But this
isn't what I intended to do. It's been warm, human, jolly sort of
work, knitting up the spatted broker in the box to the newsboy in the
gallery and I've adored it, but I've lost my way, Michael Daragh. It
isn't what I intended to do; it isn't what I intended to be; the dew
is drying on my dreams and my soul shrieks S.O.S.!
For the first time in my snug, smug life I've had large chunks of
truth told me; I didn't like it. I don't _enjoy_ it even yet, but
I've arrived at the decent stage of gratitude, Michael Daragh. Thank
you--and good-by. Shall I send you bulletins of my pilgrim progress?
I'm off to a lean, clean island in Maine, to live on eight dollars a
week and snare back the thing I lost.
JANE VAIL.
Thereafter, Mrs. Hills and Emma Ellis were to see and to marvel over the
creamy buff envelopes which came to the Irishman, now thin, now thick,
postmarked in Maine, often only two or three days apart, never less
frequently than once a week. The boarding-house keeper had her own
pleasant little note, occasionally, and Emma Ellis had three
conscientious picture postcards, but it was to Michael Daragh that the
letters came in a steady stream.
"Mark my words," said Mrs. Hills, "there's nothing in it. My land, he's
as offhand about 'em as if they were circulars, and I don't believe he
answers one in six."
"Yet she continues to write him constantly," said Emma Ellis.
"Well, if she does, it's _her_ business, that's all I've got to say,"
said the older woman, dangerously. "Jane Vail never ran after anybody
yet and I don't believe she's going to begin now. He says--and _she_
says--she's doing some special work, and I suppose maybe he's advising
her about it."
"I've never understood before that Mr. Daragh was a literary authority,"
said the Settlement worker in her little, smothered voice.
"Well, I'm free to say it beats me. But all I know is, Jane Vail's
nobody's fool."
And Michael Daragh, meanwhile, read his letters in his room, monklike in
its simplicity, three times, and then he tore them up, quickly, the line
of his lean jaw salient. The second one to come had been dated at six in
the morning, on the wharf at Bath, and ran--
I'm shivering, Michael Daragh,--shivering in September! The
incredible freshness of this morning, the bracing miracle of cold! I
left Boston on the night boat and the stewardess rapped me firmly up
at three-thirty to see the sun rise. I stayed stubbornly in my berth,
at first, but presently a length of Quaker gray sky interlined with
faintest rose brought me to my elbow and then to the window. The
little steamer was feeling her cautious way up a river of dull silver
between banks of taupe and mauve. After a moment I could pick up
objects here and there in somber silhouette--a windmill, a battered
barn, crude landings reaching out to graze the boat. In that
tremulous moment before the break of day, shore and stream and sky
melted and ran together in the liquid pattern of an abalone shell.
Then, suddenly, the sun shot up over the rim of the world, "out of
the gates of the day," a clear persimmon, gorgeous as a Chinese
lantern, and the realm of faery warmed into reality,--river and river
banks, houses and little hummocky hills.
I must walk now to keep warm. There is a young old woman in shabby
corduroy footing it briskly to and fro, who may be going to take my
toy steamer,--tossing a mane of smoke and champing its bit at the
upper wharf--and I'm going to speak to her.
_7 A.M. Going up the River._
She was taking the down boat, but she gave her valuable
experience to me. She asked me for which island I was heading,
and when I said I didn't know,--that I meant to line them up and
say,--"My-mother-told-me-to-take-_this_,--" she said,--"Oh, then do
take Three Meadows!" She has been there all summer, and she thinks I
can board at the same place--with Angelique Larideau Gillespie,
"Mis' Deac'n Gillespie." She is Canadian-French and the only woman
on the island who can cook any other way than frying. The bad little
hotel is closing. She was so merry and footloose and free, Michael!
That's exactly the sort of old maid I mean to be----
"_Love of roving foot and joy of roving eye_----"
We have been wriggling up a cunning little river, bumping into
clumsy landings here and there and now the porter-purser-steward-
newsagent-cabin-boy-and-guide says the next one is mine.
Wish me luck, Michael Daragh!
J. V.
_Three Meadows, Maine,
Friday Afternoon._
It would be tea time anywhere else, Michael Daragh, but it gives no
tea here. Eating between meals is deplored and is referred to as
"piecing." Will you ask Mrs. Hills to express my tea basket and two
cups?
This is a lamb of an island. The land lifts away to low hills and the
village has splashed a little way up on the sides. A curtain of filmy
fog has just risen clear of the treetops and everything is graciously
gray. No one ever comes so late in the season and this awful, little
hotel is closing,--it ought to be closed and sealed forever.
Everything about the tiny town is refreshing. A citizen finished up a
game of checkers before he went down to consider the case of my
trunk. Then it took him some time to wake up his horse, which did a
bewildered Lady Macbeth up the street. I was walking beside, and
suddenly a roly-poly puppy slipped away from a boy and ran straight
under the clumsy hoofs.... You never heard such ki-yi's. You'd think
he was being vivisected. There was a shrieking streak of white and he
disappeared under a culvert. The old mare stopped, wide-awake and
horror-stricken, and the boy--a pitiful little person with his head
held tautly back, almost a hunchback--and the driver and I flew to
the spot and all the village Hectors laid their helmets by and gave
themselves to the hour. The sweetest old man in rusty black laid
right down flat on his stomach and peeked into the dusty tunnel,
calling, "Come, pup! Come, pup! Come, _dear_!" But the yammerings
went on.
Finally the blacksmith next door put down a pink horseshoe and came
out. I'm much obliged for blacksmiths nowadays, aren't you, Michael
Daragh? I love their leaping fires and their worn, leather aprons and
their dim, rich Flemish interiors,--in our soft world of push
buttons.
This one said, "Was they a string around his neck, Dan'l?" Then he
went back into his shop and returned with a long stick with a bent
nail in the end and began to fish absorbedly into the culvert.
Presently a wild crescendo of shrieks announced his catch. I shut my
eyes and covered my ears and when I looked again he was hauling out a
quivering lump of baby dog. He felt him all over with grimy, gentle
fingers and "allowed they warn't nothin' broke ... just skairt him
outer a year's growth," handed him back to the boy and went again to
his horseshoe. The people pressed close with little clucks of
sympathy and made the nicest fuss about it, and the boy turned out to
be Daniel Gillespie and I went right on home with him and arranged to
move there to-morrow--his mother desiring a day in which to "red up"
for me. I wanted to go at once--I'm so afraid this hotel might close
with a snap, with me on the inside. At noon to-day I did not crave
any of the ready-to-wear effects on the zebra menu card and asked the
aloof young lady under the pompadour how long the chops would take.
"'Bout fifteen minutes." "Very well, then," I said, "I'll take the
chops." "_Ain't_ any."
Don't you adore that, Michael Daragh?
_The Next Friday,
At Deacon Gillespie's._
The top of the morning to you, Michael Daragh! Here in the rich cream
of the day we're waiting for the mail, Dan'l and I and the pup. Guess
where? In the graveyard, and I'm sitting on a tumbled-over tombstone.
I wish I could make you see this spot. I've always hated cemeteries,
the sleek, prosperous, well-fed, well-groomed sort, but this is
indeed God's Acre. You step over the broken stones of the wall into a
land of gracious gray; gray stone and moss, gray sky and feathery
fog. Twice only in my vista a note of color--a low-growing lobelia,
intensely blue against the foot of a new grave, and further on a
brave geranium, flaunting the scarlet flag of defiance at death; for
the rest, the quiet gray of peace and permanence. Involuntarily, one
treads softly, as in a room with sleepers ... sleepers of a long,
soft sleep ... who have laid them thankfully down to rest and left no
call!
I hear the _klip-klup_ of Lizzie, the postman's horse, so I can't
tell you about the Gillespies until next letter.
Dear M.D., I'm growing so nice you wouldn't know me for the frenzied
vaude-villain of a fortnight past. Some of the old cells in my brains
are coming to life again. _Thanks_, Michael Daragh! Do you know what
M.D. stands for?--Do-er of Miracles. Isn't it pretty much of a
miracle to make me turn my back on five orders and bring my soul up
here to renovate it?
J. V.
_Tuesday._
Michael Daragh, I'm up in my cunning little room with its heaving
ceiling and its braided mats and patchwork quilt, and I can look down
on the corner of the graveyard and see Dan'l and his dog waiting for
Uncle Robert. He is not a real postman but he drives down for his own
mail every day and "stops by" with the Gillespies'. (Not that they
ever have any!) He's the old man who got down on his rusty black
stomach to peek into the culvert and call "Come, pup, come, _dear_!"
He's the sweetest old thing with Dan'l. The child lives in constant
hope of a letter, and every day Uncle Robert (he's everybody's
uncle) says, "Wall, not _to-day_, Dan'l!" And then Dan'l and the pup
trot home.
Dan'l is the most appealing child! I've always fancied the freckles
and splinters and grime and cheek type of little boy, but Dan'l gets
into your heart, some way. He makes me think of Andrea del Sarto's
young St. John in the Wilderness, for he has, in addition to the
unearthly sweetness in his eyes, a warmth of coloring at variance
with the drained fairness of these islanders. His Canadian mother
explains that,--"her that was Angerleek Larrydoo," as the neighbors
say, and that just expresses it. She was--but she isn't any more.
She's just the Deacon's "woman." (That is his own gallant phrase: "I
guess likely my woman'll cal'late she c'n do fer y'u," he said when I
asked for board.)
She has a sort of petrified prettiness, the ghost of girlhood in a
face furrowed and sagging with fretted years. Age and unhappiness
have hardened about the sweetness of long ago--like a rose imbedded
in ice at a country fair.
And the Deacon! I didn't know it gave his like, in these lax days. He
has a beautifully chiseled old face with an eagle beak and ice-blue
eyes, and he looks as if his favorite winter sport were Turning
Erring Daughters Out into the Snow.
Dan'l is the only child at home now and they both adore him,--the
mother with timid tenderness and the old man with fierce repression.
Even the pup takes on character from the family. I call it
Sweet-Alice-Ben-Bolt, because it very nearly weeps with delight when
you give it a smile and trembles with fear at your frown. The Deacon
is of that large and austere order of persons who "like dogs, in
their place"; S.A.B.B. wears his stumpy, little tail at half mast
whenever the head of the house is near.
There is some mystery about Dan'l's watching for a letter. His mother
yearns over him and says,--"But, maybe to-morrow, Dannie!" but his
father sneers, and then the child seems to shrivel before my eyes.
I wish I could slip some silver-gray fog in this letter, to rub on
your burning brow!
J. V.
_Some Day in October._
My days slip by like pearl-gray beads on a rosary, Michael Daragh. I
honestly haven't an idea of the date. But I know Dan'l's story. We
were sitting on the toppled-over tombstone of a sturdy old patriarch
who had buried four wives, just after the postman went by one day,
and the child said, defensively, as if in answer to my thought----
"But I did get a letter, once!"
I kept mouse-still, and he told me. Last summer there came to Three
Meadows a lazy, charming, gypsy sort of fellow from nowhere, stony
broke, to whom the Deacon gave work for his board. Out of Danny's
clipped phrases I could build up the rogue's personality,--the gay,
lavish, careless, happy-go-lucky-ness which warmed the cockles of the
little lad's hungry heart.
He was here four months, and then a pal wrote him he could get him a
job as handy man with a small circus then in Vermont. But Dan'l's
beloved vagabond hadn't a sou, and before he could tramp there, the
show would be far on its southern way. Naturally, the Deacon refused
a loan--I can just see the way his mouth would snap shut like a trap,
but Dan'l, what with egg money and his tiny garden, and errand money
from summer boarders, had gathered together twenty slow dollars, and
he came lavishly forward. The rover blithely promised to pay him back
in two monthly payments. He's never sent a penny. He wrote once;
Danny showed me the letter, worn with many rapt readings,--a silly,
flowing hand which looks as if it had been done up in curl papers
over night--and explained that he'd been sick, and had to buy
clothes, but next month, _sure_! And Dan'l was a sport and true
blue and a little old pal, and he'd never forget him.
Dan'l's "bein' so puny" saved him the whole brunt of his father's
rage, but this sneering scorn has been harder to bear,--and the
amazing part of it is that the boy doesn't really care about the
money,--lean little Islander though he is. That is merely the symbol
of his friend's good faith. "Ef only he'd jest write 'n tell me
things," he sighed, "th' money c'd wait. He needs it worse'n I do."
Meanwhile, with eternal-springing hope in his little flat chest he
trots down to the graveyard corner every day, and every day Uncle
Robert says, with a cheery chirp in italics, "Wall, not
_to-day_, Dan'l!"
The child is getting thinner and paler, now the sharp weather is
coming. His father wrote a laborious letter by the lamp, one evening,
and a week later a good gruff old doctor came over from the mainland
and chaffed Danny about his pup and told him to play in the sun and
drink plenty of milk and not to fret about school this year. I
waylaid him privately and asked if there was anything I could get or
do--a tonic, a change. He patted my shoulder and said, "Land
t'goodness, no! That youngun's been a-dying ever since I borned him,
fourteen years ago. He warn't meant for old bones."
Oh, Michael Daragh, I can't stand it--poor little Daniel in a Lion's
Den of broken faith, and scorn, and creeping death! What can I
_do_?
J. V.
CHAPTER X
But it was well into October before the Irishman got the letter which he
had been waiting for--the one which sent the color mounting gladly in his
lean cheeks. It was not long, but it fairly sang with jubilance and the
feel of it in his hand was warm.
_On a Gold and Scarlet Afternoon._
Michael Daragh, I'm at work! Steadily, sanely, surely, at work again!
Long ago, before I began to run after strange gods, I got a story
back from the _New England Monthly_--that Dean of Magazines in
her sober brown frock with no jewels or adornments at all,--with a
quite wonderful personal note. If I had followed it up, I do believe
I'd have landed on that stern and rock-bound coast, but I went over
to the flesh pots instead. Now I have made a stern and rock-bound
compact with myself. I'm not coming back to New York, and you are not
to write me a line, until I've written a tale that brown-gowned
magazine will take. "Where there is no vision, the people perish,"
the Deacon thundered, at a meeting. I was very near to perishing,
when you scolded me awake, Michael Daragh, M.D., Miracle Do-er, God
save you kindly!
That vaudeville work--and I shall do more of it, some day--was like a
fast and furious game of tennis under a scorching sun; now I'm
delving in a dim, cool library.
I'm going to be as patient as a locust bridge-builder. I know that
flocks of long envelopes are coming back, bringing their tales behind
them, but one day I shall hear a jubilant note in the _klip-klup_
of Lizzie's hoofs and Uncle Robert will hand me an envelope of
bewitching smallness, with a tiny typed letter inside.... "It is
with very great pleasure...."
Until _that_ day break, and the shadows flee away----
J. V.
It was Michael Daragh's custom to read these letters three times,
carefully, and then to tear them in pieces which would be annoyingly and
impossibly small to the chambermaid, and to throw them into his
waste-paper basket, but this time, after his third perusal, instead of
destroying it he put it away in his worn leather wallet. "I'll be keeping
it, just, till the next one comes," he told himself, silently, "so I can
be comparing the way she's coming on--God love her."
But the next letter to come and several following held no mention of her
task. It was as if she had opened the heart of her mind further than she
meant to do, and was shyly standing in front of it, now, talking of
things remote and removed.
_Friday Morning._
I've found a way to make Dan'l happy, M.D. I was reading to him last
night, and suddenly he said in his shy, repressed way, "Was you ever
to a circus?" I started to say that they bored me to the bone, even
in infancy, but I happened to glance up and see his eyes. He's been
following his beloved vagabond about in his heart, you see. So I
tried to create a circus for him--the round rag rug was the sawdust
ring, the steaming kettle was the calliope, wheezing a strident song
about a wooden leg, and out of thin air came the haughty ringmaster
and the clown and the pink acrobats, and I remembered thankfully that
I'd memorized Vachel Lindsey's "Kallyope" long ago----
"Tooting joy, tooting hope,
I am the Kallyope!
Hoot, toot, hoot, toot,
Willy, willy wah hoo,
Sizz--fizz----"
Dan'l held his breath, his eyes starry, and his mother stopped her
work, and I could see that the old man was listening slyly. Do you
know it, Michael? It's pure witchcraft of words.
"See the flags; snow-white tent;
See the bear and elephant;
See the monkey jump the rope;
Listen to the lion roar,
LISTEN TO THE LION ROAR!
Listen to the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope!"
(He must have been thinking of the Deacon's sort:)
"I will blow the proud folk low,
Humanize the dour and slow,
I will shake the proud folk down----"
Dan'l went to sleep pink and happy. So did I!
J. V.
_Wednesday._
I haven't told you about the "Low-down Wilkes," have I? They're the
pleasantest people in Three Meadows and we're very clubby. The nice
old maid on the wharf at Bath told me about them and advised me to
have the woman do my washing, but warned me that I should have to
come unto her delicately, like Agag. Being the poorest and most
destitute family on the Island they are correspondingly proud and
"techy."
Shiftlessness is a fine art with them, they've carried it so far.
Last winter they lived in a very good two-story house, and as it was
a very bitter season and Mr. L.D.W. was "kinder run down, someway,"
he very ingeniously burnt it for fuel while they were living in
it,--first the partitions in the second story, then the floor, then
the stairs, then the downstairs walls and doors. Wasn't that clever
of him? Now it's just a charred shell, and--grace of a more opulent
relative--they are camping in an unused barn. They fish a little, and
pick blueberries, and wonder, vaguely, "jest how they'll make out,
come wintuh."
I wish you might have seen her when, after a long social call, I
subtly introduced the subject of laundry and dilated on my helpless
predicament. She weighed and considered and consulted with her
spouse, and said at last, "Wall, I don't keer if I do--but I wunt
fetch'n kerry fer nobuddy!" Since when I have myself fetched and
carried my garments, and they are rapidly taking on the tinge of
prevailing Island grayness. The L.D.W.'s are gentle and gay, and they
love Dan'l and "Angerleek" even if she is "a furriner," and they sigh
that the Deacon is "a good man, but ha'ad." His severity has driven
all the older children away from home, two of them girls. (Wasn't I
right about the Erring Daughters and the Snow?)
I asked Mrs. L.D.W. if I might bestow upon her a tailored suit which
has almost worn me out. She hesitated, shifted the 1920 model in
Low-Down Wilkes to the other hip (babies are their only lavish
luxury!) and allowed she didn't mind, if I was a mind to fetch it
down to the graveyard corner some night after dusk. Every human being
in Three Meadows has seen me wear it and could describe it to the
last stitch and button, and every one will know where she got it.
Nevertheless, in a world of foot-lickers, isn't pride like that
delicious?
I did for myself when I started that indoor circus effect; sentenced
to be Scheherazade! Lady chariot drivers and spotted clowns and
strange beasts swarm through the prim, gray farmhouse. Dan'l has
stayed in bed for two days, and Uncle Robert's chirp is growing
husky.
Between circus performances I'm working like a riverful of beavers.
The best story I've ever written is almost ready to launch.
J. V.
_Tuesday._
DEAR MICHAEL DARAGH, I can't _bear_ it about Dan'l! I don't mean
about his going,--the old doctor is right about that, but oh, that
wretched rover! Dan'l makes loyal excuses for him--he must be sick
again or out of work or too busy; the flame of his faith never burns
dim.
This morning I went to the Deacon. "Look here," I said, "that fellow
will never pay up and Dan'l is breaking his heart." He nodded.
"Well," I went on, "I mean to make up a letter and put in twenty
dollars and send it to a friend of mine in New York to mail back to
Dan'l."
His eagle eye grew bleak. "Falsehood and forgery!" he thundered. "I'm
a plain man, sinful, Adam's seed as we all are, but I never yet
soiled my lips with a lie."
"Oh, you needn't bother about it at all," I assured him. "I'll do the
whole thing. You see, my lips aren't so immaculate, or so fussy!"
"I wunt act a lie, neither," he said.
I could feel myself generating temper, and it was a relief for it
deadened my grief over Dan'l to be fine and mad at his father. I
looked him straight in his ice-blue eye. "Just what do you mean by
that, Mr. Gillespie?"
"I wunt have the boy deceived. Ain't no peace comin' from a lie!
Land t' goodness," he regarded me mournfully, "don't we have to
strive night an' day, 'thout takin' any extry sins on our souls?"
"Why, no, Deacon Gillespie," I told him sweetly, "I don't have a bit
of trouble being good. It just seems to come naturally to me!"
I know he yearned to box my ears. Instead, he roared, "We are as
prone to evil as the sparks to fly upward!"
"_You_ may be," I said. "I shouldn't wonder at all if you are. But
as for me, I'm not a miserable sinner and I never was. I shouldn't
know an evil impulse if I met it in my mush bowl!" Then I left him,
purple with scandalized rage, and found Angelique and told her my
pretty plan. Oh, Michael, if you could have seen the poor thing! Her
knees fairly gave way under her and she sank into a chair and put
her apron over her head. I said, "I thought if you were willing,
perhaps the Deacon--" but she cried out, "No, no! One time the
oldes' boy, Lem," she still has a bit of the soft _habitant_ accent,
"he do something bad, an' I tell a lie, so hees father shall not
beat heem. By and by, he fin' out ..." she shut her eyes and
shivered. "Heem he beat twice as hard ... me, he nevair believe
again, all these years...."
Michael Daragh, I hate the Deacon. I know you consider hate the
lowest form of human activity, but I hate the Deacon with a husky,
hearty, healthy hate and it has a tonic effect which I'm sure must be
good for me. I feed my fancy on boiling him in oil.
Gibbering with perfectly proper rage,
J. V.
The next note which came to the Irishman was only a line in length and a
coolly typed line, but even so the letters seemed fairly to sing and to
dance----
The story is done. It is good, Michael Daragh.
The letter which followed it went back to the human concerns about her.
_Friday._
I'm sitting on the gravestone of the four-time widower, M.D., my
sweater turned up about my ears, my fingers navy blue, my nose
magenta. The world is bleak and bare, indoors and out. Dan'l grows
hourly weaker, but he brightens at mail time, and grins his gallant
little grin at disappointment. "But he _will_," he stoutly whispers.
Gentle old Uncle Robert grows fierce. "Ef I had that varmint here, I
vum I c'd wring his neck!"
I'm sorry to report that I am not getting on very well with hating
the Deacon. (Of course, you've kept the intervening air quivering
with your admonitory wirelesses!) He is suffering so hideously, and
so determinedly, like a fakir. He feels he must speed the parting
soul with the Scriptures and he reads terrifying things about weird
beasts,--lion-mouthed leopards with feet like bears--and when he goes
downstairs I try--very clumsily, M.D.--to tell Dan'l about the God
you know, the one who goes with you into dark alleys and dark hearts.
I wish you were here to do it.
Dan'l's faith is indeed the substance of things hoped for and the
evidence of things not seen, but I want to put a warm, tangible lie
into his thin little claws before he goes.... Uncle Robert has "been
an' went" since I began this letter, and again I must go up to Dan'l
and tell him "Not _to-day_."
I'm a coward, M.D. I've never seen death so close before, and I want
to run away. But I won't.
J. V.
P.S. I called on the Low Down Wilkes this morning. Mrs. L.D.W. was
wearing my suit over a wrapper of faded red calico, but there was
nothing in her manner to indicate that I had ever seen it before.
_Saturday._
Here is my story, Michael Daragh, and it is your story, too, for you
shamed me into doing it. I am sending it off to the brown-gowned
monthly on the stern and rock-bound coast, and this carbon to you.
Now will you write and tell me if you like it? _Honestly!_ (I know I
said I didn't want you to write me until I had landed a story there,
but all this grief and grimness brings a sense of bleak loneliness,
and _if_ you think I've won back what I've lost, if you think I've
found the vision which will keep my soul from perishing, tell me
so.)
J. V.
_Sunday Night._
I've been making circus all day, M.D.----
"Tooting joy, tooting hope,
Willy wully wah hoo ...
I am the golden dream,
Singing science, singing steam--
Listen to the lion roar--"
I've roared myself hoarse but I got him to sleep at last. I have
figured it out and I see that I can't hear from either you or the
Monthly before Wednesday at the earliest, and I won't let myself
really look for anything before Friday.
J. V.
Again there came a single line----
_Monday Night._
It's too heart-breaking to write about, M.D., even to you.
_Tuesday Morning._
I've had to stop hating the poor old Deacon altogether; this morning
he carried S.A.B.B. upstairs with his own hands and put him on the
bed beside the boy.
J. V.
_Tuesday Night._
It's very late, Michael Daragh, but there are things I must tell you
before I sleep.
I went for a walk this morning, and when I came back I saw Angelique
waving to me from the window. I _knew_, and I ran into the house
and upstairs. The Deacon was praying aloud, a terrible, cast-iron
prayer, and Angelique was sobbing and S.A.B.B. was whining and
shivering. I knelt down beside Dan'l and he opened his eyes. I could
just make out the whisper--"My ... letter?"
I jumped up and ran over to his father and took him by the elbow and
marched him into my room and shut the door and stood with my back
against it. My teeth were chattering so I could hardly speak. "He's
dying," I said. "_Now_ will you let me?"
He was shaking, too, but he quavered, "I wunt bear false witness! I
wunt take a lie on my soul!"
Then something boiled up and over in my heart, Michael Daragh. I
caught hold of him and shook him and I was so strong I scared myself.
"You pitiful, craven-hearted old coward," I said, "all you can think
of is your sour old self! If you loved him--if you knew the first
faint beginning of love--" I snatched up the letter I had addressed
to Dan'l and ran over to the dresser for my purse. "You stay in here
with the truth and keep your musty little soul safe! I'm going in
there and tell him a beautiful lie!"
But he fumbled some bills from his lean old wallet. "Wait! Here's
twenty dollars! I'm a-comin', too!"
We went in together, and he bent over the bed and held the bills
close to the boy's eyes. "Look a-here, Dan'l! Look a-here, boy!
Here's your money! Here's your _money_, Dan'l!" (Wasn't it pitiful,
Michael? Even then, he still thought the money meant most.)
Dan'l opened his eyes and I said, "You were right all along, Danny!
You were right to trust and believe in him! He _was_ grateful!"--and
I held the envelope where he could see it,--the one I had addressed
in a silly, flowing screed.
His pinched little face lighted up from within--cheerily, exquisitely,
and his chin went up the tiniest fraction in glad pride. "_I_ ...
knew ..." He just barely breathed it, Michael, and then he sort of
relaxed all over and gave a long, comfortable sigh, like a tired
puppy, and--and went to sleep.
His mother screamed and fell down beside the bed, and the Deacon
said, "Loose him an' let him go, Angerleek!"--but he lifted her up
and kept his arms around her.
I went away and left them there with Dan'l and S.A.B.B. I had
forgotten all about mail time, but I found myself presently at the
graveyard corner. It was one of those gentle, warmed-over summer
days and the air was mild and filled with little whispers. I was
so happy, Michael Daragh, that in my heart I heard the "harpers
harping with their harps," but by and by I was aware of a nearer,
more intimate sound--not "_klip-klup_" as on other days, but
_klipety-klipety-KLIPETY_--a panic of frantic speed.
Down the road they came, Old Lizzie's hoofs scattering dust and
pebbles, Uncle Robert leaning far forward, laying on the lash. When
he saw me he cried out:--"Oh, it ain't too late? Oh, my dear Lord'n
Saviour, it _ain't_ too late?"
Then he handed me a plump registered letter, addressed in a foolish,
flowing screed which looked as if it had been done up in curl papers
over night, and I began to cry for the first time.
"No," I said, "oh, no, it's not too late!" And I ran up to Dan'l's
still little room and gave it to the Deacon and he took it with a
great wonder in his ice-blue eyes and slipped it under the cold
little claw, beside our merciful lie.
Then I went into my own room, and I noticed for the first time that
Uncle Robert had given me two other letters and I stopped crying and
stared at them.
One was a very small envelope and the name printed in the corner was
that of the brown-gowned magazine on the stern and rock-bound. The
other was yours.
J. V.
P.S. Guess which one I opened first, Michael Daragh, Do-er of
Miracles?
CHAPTER XI
Jane stayed on at Three Meadows until after the bleak and austere little
funeral, and long enough to help Angelique soften the harshly new grave
with flowers and sturdily started plants, and stopped over at Bath and
ordered a quaintly simple headstone which would be the Gillespie's pride
and solace.
She was very happy on her return journey to New York,--in vastly
different mood than the one of nine weeks before. Michael Daragh had
written her a brief and beautiful letter, a letter she would always keep,
as soon as he had read her story, and the thought of it warmed her like
a summer sun, but as she went down the twisting silver river she had
a vexed feeling that her postscript had been a bit of foolishness.
"_Guess which one I opened first, Michael Daragh, Do-er of Miracles?_"
Their relationship had shifted in these long weeks; ever since the
evening on Riverside Drive when he had sternly recalled her to herself,
they had gone by leaps and bounds, by hedge and byway, into a deeper and
more intimate friendship, and yet, she told herself, that added line at
the end of her letter to him was a High School girlish thing to have
done; it presupposed something between them which wasn't there at all.
She had flung it in without weighing it; she had honestly meant at the
moment, that his approval of her new and serious story was more precious
to her even than the editor's, but ... would Michael Daragh understand
it that way?
She did not write him the exact time of her arrival, and it was the
merest chance that she found him starting up the steps as her taxicab
drew up at Mrs. Hills' door. They went up together and at his first
hearty look and word she was able to laugh at herself for having worried
an instant.
"It's rare and fine to have you back, Jane Vail," he said, glowing with
gladness. "And you were good indeed to be sending me the long story
letters all the while. 'Twas like a journey itself, the way I'd be
following you up and down on that Island with all the queer folk and sad,
and waiting at the graveyard corner for the mail!"
Jane glowed in return. "It's good to be back, Michael Daragh." (The nice,
sane, sensible, dependable creature that he was! What a solid comfort it
was to have him! This was exactly the way she wanted him to act and to
feel and to be, and she wasn't--she was at some pains to assure
herself--in the very least feeling vaguely disappointed or let down by
his attitude.) "But it was the best time I ever had,--best in the sense
of being the best for me." Generously and sweetly she gave him his due.
"I'm still thanking you, you know, M.D.!"
He nodded gravely. "You've found your way back to the highroad in that
tale you were sending me. I'm doubting you'll ever lose it again all the
long days of your life."
"I won't" said Jane, stoutly. (Good to be back with him, good to hear his
purling brogue and his lyrical construction. He talked like an old song.)
The door of the boarding-house opened at their ring and Jane hurried in.
"Here's Mrs. Hills! Hello, Mrs. Hills! Here I am!" She embraced the
ex-villager warmly and espied Emma Ellis in the shadows of the hall, over
her shoulder. "And Miss Ellis! How-do-you-do?"
Miss Ellis did very well, according to her own statement, but it was
pathetically clear to one pair of sharp eyes at least that she would have
done better if Michael Daragh had not been bringing in Jane's suitcase
and handbag and umbrella while a taxi got under way in the street.
"It's so nice to be back with you all," said the returned exile,
heartily. The Settlement worker came out into the light and it was to be
observed that she was still more pinched and sallow than of yore and
Jane's heart melted within her to swift mercy. "I found Michael Daragh on
the sidewalk and pressed him into service as porter. Thanks, Michael
Daragh. Am I to give you the quarter for your Poor and Needy?"
"You are, indeed," said the Irishman, firmly, taking the stairs two at a
bound. "More than that, you'll be giving me for a case I know, with the
proud and prosperous look you have on you this day!"
"I hope," said Emma Ellis, conscientiously, the taut lines of her face
loosening a little, "you had a pleasant outing?"
"Yes," said Jane, flippantly, "but my outing was an inning--and I've
delved like a riverful of beavers, and I'll be at work at nine to-morrow
morning."
"That Mr. Harrison has been 'phoning and _'phoning_," Mrs. Hills
announced, complacently. "And he wants you should ring him up the minute
you got in--something about this evening, I guess, he was so set on
having you get the message."
"That listens alluringly! I'll call him now,--may I?" She shook herself
out of her topcoat and fur and sat down at the hall telephone. Mrs. Hills
and Miss Ellis discreetly withdrew to the living room, but the low tones
of her voice were carrying and it was presently made clear to them that
gayety was afoot for the evening, a sort of gayety they two had never
known, would never know ... little tables with shaded candles, lights,
music, subtle, wheedling music, hovering head-waiters ... the newest
play ... then more little tables, more wheedling, coaxing music, more
hovering head-waiters, dancing.... The boarding-house keeper told herself,
comfortably, that it would never do for _her_, and pushed a tolerant
curiosity back into the ragbag of her mind, and the Settlement worker
tucked in her lips and reminded herself that there would be undernourished
children, _hungry_ children, not a mile from where Miss Vail would be
eating out-of-season delicacies, and thanked her God that she was not as
other women.
Michael Daragh came into the room an instant before Jane did. She was
flushed and bright-eyed and smiling. "Well! I'll have to _fly_! I won't
be here for dinner, Mrs. Hills,--I'm sorry, but it seems this is a
rather special party to-night."
"It's your kind of clam chowder, too," said Mrs. Hills, shaking her head.
"Oh, what a shame! But save mine for tomorrow's lunch,--I adore it warmed
over! Here, Michael Daragh"--she opened her brown, beaded bag with its
high lights of orange and gold--"catch!" She tossed the little suede
purse to him. "That's exactly the way I feel to-night, scattering largess
to the multitude, regally pitching purses about! Take what you want--all
you want--for that case! I _must_ fly!" She looked at her wrist watch.
"Mrs. Hills, will you let Mabel come and do me up in twenty minutes? See
you all at breakfast!" She ran out of the room and they heard her swift
feet on the stair.
The boarding-house keeper beamed. Jane Vail was her link with the world.
"I declare, she's a marvel to me! Wouldn't you think she'd be dead on her
feet and want to crawl into bed quick's ever she had her supper? She
won't close an eye before two o'clock in the morning if she does then,
but she'll be down to breakfast, right on the dot, fresh as paint, and
out for her walk, rain, hail or snow, and then she'll hammer that
typewriter all the forenoon!"
"Of course," said Emma Ellis in her small, smothered voice, "Miss Vail
_often_ takes a little nap in the afternoon...."
Mrs. Hills was not to be diverted from her star boarder's glories. "Well,
it didn't take that Mr. Rodney Harrison very long to get in action, did
it?"
"It did not, indeed," said the Irishman, cheerfully. "How long till
dinner, Mrs. Hills? Half an hour? Then I'll be stepping up to my room for
a letter is keening to be written."
The two women were silent until they heard him mounting the stairs to the
third floor. "You see?" said the elder, triumphantly. "What did I tell
you? Not a thing on earth between them! Would she be tearing off with
another young man, first evening home? And isn't he cool as a cucumber?"
Miss Ellis's narrow little face seemed to ease visibly into looser lines
and she sighed. "Yes. You were quite right. Mr. Daragh's mind is on
higher things."
The other bridled. "Well, I don't know as you've any call to put it just
that way. I guess Jane Vail's a high enough thing for any man to think
of! And I guess the truth is, Jane Vail's got other fish to fry!"
Jane, meanwhile, into her tub, out of her tub, flinging herself once more
into urban silk and fine linen, doing her hair with swift craft, was
entirely happy. It was good to have gone away, at Michael Daragh's
rousing word, good to have stayed those sober weeks on the lean, clean
Island, good to have done good work and to have speeded Dan'l's parting
soul; and it was good to be back, to be going presently into the bright
warm world with Rodney Harrison; it was best of all to find her big
Irishman as she had found him. Her friend. Her _best_ friend ... best
for her. It was a solid satisfaction to have him tabulated and
pigeonholed at last and for all time. Michael Daragh was her best
friend. That was settled. And she had been a vain, light-minded goose to
fancy for an instant that he would misinterpret that foolish little
postscript on her last letter,--that he would _want_ to misinterpret
it. Michael Daragh had clearly obeyed the command to come apart and be
separate, and she should never worry for an instant about him again.
And while she flew into her most satisfactory frock and stood still for
Mabel's slow hookings and fastenings and then sent her down to tell the
gentleman she would be with him in two minutes, her best friend, newly
elected to that high estate, sat alone in his room on the third floor,
and there was in his thin face none of the calm which had helped Mrs.
Hills to carry her point with Emma Ellis.
There had been a little rite, the evening before, of burning such few
letters as he had allowed himself to keep, but he had snatched the last
one back from the blaze and cut off the final line, the postscript, with
his desk scissors, and put the narrow shred of paper into his wallet. And
now, hearing the sound of a taxicab in the street below, he approached
his window and looked down through the fast-thickening dusk of the late
fall evening. He could not see Jane's exit from the house nor her
entrance into the waiting vehicle, but he remained there, his face
pressed against the pane, until the machine set noisily forth upon its
uptown way. Then he went back to stand before his fire, and he opened his
wallet and took out the folded strip of paper and threw it on the coals
without reading it again, for he knew it very well by heart, and he was
still standing there when the sound of Mabel's vigorous gong summoned him
down to dinner.
* * * * *
Rodney Harrison was a trifle annoyed and a trifle amused at Jane's exile,
frankly contemptuous of the achievement of a tale in the _New England
Monthly_ as compared to vaudeville bill-toppers, wholly glad to have
her back. His mother was visiting her people in Boston at the moment, but
as soon as she returned, he was very sure, she would want to make that
long-delayed call on his young writing friend. As a matter of fact, it
was the tale that did it. Mrs. Ormsby Dodd Harrison had not seen her way
to the cultivation of a young woman whose end and aim in life was the
writing of headline acts for the two-a-day, but a gifted young author who
had two charming and thoughtful stories in the brown-gowned magazine that
winter and passed likewise the sober portals of the other three of the
"Big Four," was quite another thing. Before the holidays, in spite of her
telescoping activities at that season, Mrs. Harrison motored down to
Washington Square and called on Miss Vail at Mrs. Hills' boarding house,
and asked her with just the right admixture of formality and cordiality
to dine with them one evening quite simply ... just themselves.
But Miss Vail, it appeared, was not only a very hard-working and
ambitious young author, but very much fêted and dated socially, and in
addition, gave generously of her play time to certain worthy settlements
and their concomitant affairs, and two more months elapsed before an
evening could be arranged.
Jane wrote of the dinner to Sarah Farraday.
* * * * *
A shame, isn't it, Sally, that we can't be frank and honest? You
can't think how it would have comforted Rodney's mother in her black
hand-run Spanish lace and the Harrison pearls to have me say, "Be of
good cheer, dear lady! I neither design nor aspire to marry your
son!"
Then she could have removed her invisible armor and laid her polished
weapons by and given herself over to the delights of my sprightly
chatter. Rodney's the only son and the only child, and one cannot
blame her for being a bit choosey! Harrison's pater, however, seemed
to think that he could bear up very cheerfully under such a
contingency--charmingly cordial, the dear old thing! Rodney won't be
nearly so nice at his age because he's come up in a less gracious
period.
But at that he'll be very nice! He is now!
CHAPTER XII
Before the end of her second year in New York, many things, grave and
gay, came to pass. Sarah Farraday came down for a fortnight of operas and
concerts and went home to spread the marvels of Jane's full and glowing
life over the Vermont village; Emma Ellis reluctantly gave up her room at
Mrs. Hills' and became resident superintendent of the Hope House
Settlement, and Michael Daragh took his noon meal there. Jane went home
twice for little visits and found changes even there,--the Teddy-bear,
now trudging sturdily about in rompers, had a small sister, and Nannie
Slade Hunter was prettier than ever, if a trifle too rotund, and Edward
R., very prosperous and pleased with himself, had bought his wife an
electric coupé, in which to take his offspring for a safe and opulent
airing. Martin Wetherby, Assistant Cashier, had somehow put youth aside.
His stoutness had closed in on him like an enemy. His mother admitted to
Jane that he did not take sufficient exercise. "He doesn't seem to ...
care," she said, and looked pointedly away. To herself she put it
dramatically, with great relish; never, to the day of her death, would
she forgive the girl who had ruined her son's life. Jane wished with all
her good-natured heart that Marty would marry, happily and handsomely--it
would be such a relief to have Mrs. Wetherby complacently triumphant
instead of heavily reproachful. And even Sarah Farraday never referred to
him as other than, "Poor old Marty." Jane had her moments of wishing that
they might, in village parlance, "make a match of it," but they were
moments only. Sarah was much too fine; she must find Sarah a suitor of
parts, somehow, somewhere.
It was during the second of her visits home that Miss Lydia Vail died.
There was no dreariness of illness or misery of suffering; she died
exactly as she had lived, plumply and pleasantly, in the plump and
pleasant faith that was hers, and Jane left the middle-aged maid in
charge of the elm-shaded, green-shuttered house and went back to New York
with a grief which was more pensive than poignant. She refused,
thereafter, to rent the old home, but loaned it instead, the servant with
it, to various and sundry of her city clan,--now the girl who had carried
her first playlet to success, now to shabby music students at Mrs. Hills'
whom Sarah Farraday was pledged to regale with tea and cheer in the
afternoons, now to sad-eyed women of Michael Daragh's recommendation.
Sometimes she ran up herself with a little house-party,--down-at-the-heel
vaudevilleans, elderly, concert-going ladies from the boarding house,
Emma Ellis and another settlement worker--and made an expenditure for
food and entertainment which secretly scandalized the ancient maid.
She wrote her first slim little novel which was accepted for serial
publication and Rodney Harrison insisted that there was the germ of a
three-act play in it. She set to work on it and labored harder than ever
before in her life, happily, hot-cheeked, shining-eyed, wrote and rewrote
and clipped and amplified and smoothed and polished, and one day Sarah
Farraday ran over to the Hunter's house with a telegram.
"Nannie! It's accepted! Jane's three-act play is accepted! Did you ever
in all your born days see such luck? She just can't fail!" Her earnest,
blonde face was a little wistful. "I never knew any human being to have
so much!"
Mrs. Edward R. was herding the Teddy-bear into the coupé and she handed
little Sarah Anne to her friend. "Get in, Sally dear, and I'll run you
home. I'm taking the children over to Mother Hunter's for the day." She
steadied Sarah and her burden to a seat and then tucked herself neatly
in, and started her bright vehicle competently. "Well, I don't know....
It's all very fine, of course, but I can think of a good deal she hasn't
got!"
"Oh, of course ..." said the music teacher. After a moment she sighed.
"Poor old Marty.... Well, we can't lead other people's lives for them,
can we?"
"No, we can't," Mrs. Edward R. admitted, contentedly. She bowled Sarah
smoothly back to the burlapped studio in time for the eleven-twenty
pupil.
* * * * *
Jane, meanwhile, after wiring to Sarah, flew to Michael Daragh with her
joyful tidings and lunched with him and Emma Ellis at Hope House. The
Irishman, who had read the little play and knew its clean verve and
charm, was radiant for her, and the superintendent managed grudging
congratulations. They were in the sitting room after the meal, and
something seemed to smite Jane, swiftly, with regard to Emma Ellis; her
bright eyes traveled over the whole of her,--the shabby hair, the hot and
steaming face, the moist fingers with their dull and shapeless
nails,--the needlessly cruel ugliness of blouse and skirt and shoes; the
utter unloveliness of her. As on the day of her return from Three
Meadows, when Emma Ellis had supposed Michael Daragh had met her at the
train, again her heart melted to mercy within her. Oh, the poor thing!
The _poor_ thing----
"Miss Ellis, I've taken your chair, haven't I?"
"It doesn't matter where I sit, Miss Vail. This one does well enough for
me," she answered, virtuously.
Jane sat down on a footstool near the window. "Do take it--not that
there's any cloying luxury, even there! Is it in the constitution of Hope
House to have only hideous and uncomfortable furniture?"
"You cannot know much about this sort of work, Miss Vail, or you'd
realize that our funds are always limited, and that we must conserve them
for necessities." It was a depressingly warm day, and the superintendent
felt it and showed it, and she reflected bitterly that Jane Vail was the
sort of person who was warm and glowing in January, when normal people
were pinched and blue, and cool and crisp in September, when those who
had to keep right on working, no matter what the weather was, had pools
of perspiration under their eyes and shirtwaists adhering gummily to
their backs. And she always wore things in summer which gave out cunning
suggestions of shady brooksides, and managed--in that theatrical way of
hers--the effect of bringing a breeze in with her.
"I wonder," said Jane, "if my silly little paper people get the breath of
life blown into them and my play goes over and I have regal royalties, if
I couldn't do something for Hope House?"
"You could, indeed, God save you kindly for the thought," said Michael
Daragh, happily. "If your play'll run to it, you could be buying us two
bathtubs and----"
"The linoleum in the kitchen"--Miss Ellis forgot her bitterness for a
moment--"is simply in shreds!"
"I will not!" said Jane, crisply. "Bathtubs and linoleum, indeed! Wring
them out of your Board! I shall give you a Sleepy Hollow couch with
bide-a-wee cushions, and deep, cuddly armchairs and a lamp or two
with shades as mellow as autumn woods! And some perfectly frivolous
pictures which aren't in the least inspiring or uplifting,--and every
single girl's room shall have a _pink pincushion_!" Then at their
blankness, she softened. "Oh, very well,--you shall have your tubs and
your linoleum, if you'll let me humanize the rest of the house,--will
you?" She came to her feet with a spring of incredible energy. "Come
along, Miss Ellis,--let's have a look upstairs! We don't need you,
M.D.--this is woman-stuff."
The superintendent pulled herself upstairs with a sticky hand on the
banister, "Well, I don't know where you'd begin, Miss Vail. Everything's
threadbare...."
They went through drab halls and into drab rooms where drab occupants
greeted them drably, and Jane ached with the ugliness of it. Wasn't it
going to be fun--_if_ the play went over "big"--to vanquish this much of
the hideousness of the world?
She stopped before a closed door. "What is this?"
Miss Ellis was walking past it. "That's my room."
"Well, may I see it?"
"Oh," she said, colorlessly, "I didn't suppose you'd want to fix _it_
over...." She opened the door and stepped in, crossing to the undraped
window and running up the stiff shade of faded and streaked olive green.
"But of course I shall," said Jane, following her in. "Well--I might
have known!"
"What?" asked Miss Ellis, defensively.
"That you'd take the smallest and shabbiest room in the house for
yourself."
"Oh, well ... it doesn't matter. I'm not in it very much." She walked
over to the warped golden oak bureau and straightened the metal button
hook with the name of a shoe shop pressed into it into line with the
whisk broom. Besides these two articles there bloomed upon the bureau's
top a small pincushion made from a piece of California redwood bark, and
a widowed saucer enrolled as a pin-tray, and into the frame of the mirror
was stuck a snapshot of an unnecessarily plain small boy.
"That's my little nephew," said Emma Ellis, seeing Jane's eye upon it.
"My sister Bertha's boy."
"He--he looks _bright_, doesn't he?" said Jane, hastily. She looked
about her, consideringly. "You know, I'd like to do this room in deep
creamy yellow. That will make it look lighter and seem larger, and it
will be nice with your hair."
"My hair?..." said Miss Ellis, limply.
"You have such nice hair, but I do wish you'd do it differently," said
Jane with anxious friendliness. "You have a _mile_ of it, haven't you?"
The superintendent's tucked-in lips and her whole taut figure visibly
relaxed. "I _used_ to have nice hair," she admitted in the time-hallowed
formula. "I wish you could have seen it four years ago. It's come out
something terrible! Well," she made a virtue of it--"I never spend any
time fussing with it."
"But you ought to, you know! Let me play with it a minute, will you? I
adore doing hair. Please sit down--I just want to try something with
it--something I thought of as I watched you to-day." She pressed her into
a stiff chair.
"Well ..." said Miss Ellis grudgingly. She produced a comb from a bleakly
neat top drawer.
"Heavens, what neatness," said Jane. "And the brush, please! You ought to
give it a hundred and twenty strokes a night,--see, like this? No, it
wouldn't be wasting time! Just consider the good thoughts you could be
thinking. You could memorize poetry or dates in history or say your
prayers,--and you'd say a prayer of thankfulness in a year, when you
looked at the result. It would shine like patent leather." Her fingers
flew. "There! Now you can look. See how it brings out the good lines of
your face? Wait,--where's your hand mirror? You haven't one? My word!
Well, you can get the idea, even so! Will you try doing it this way? It
won't take but a minute longer. Just to please me?"
"Well ..." she couldn't seem to think of anything else to say, and she
had a ridiculous feeling that she might be going to cry.
"And--do you mind my saying these things?--I've always bullied my friends
about their clothes and colors--I do wish you wouldn't wear white, and
navy blue."
"I always supposed _white_ was right for every one."
"It's wicked for most people! Cream, buff, tan, apricot, burnt
orange--Let me come down and go shopping with you some day, will you? I
never cared about dressing dolls but I revel in dressing people."
"Well ..." said Miss Ellis once more, and this time her stubborn chin
quivered.
"Shall we go downstairs?" Jane moved ahead of her, her eyes averted, her
voice cheerfully commonplace. "Simply torrid up here, isn't it? I'll come
some cool morning, and we'll make lists and plans--_if_ my play goes
over----"
But before her gay little play had been running three months, picking up
speed like a motor as it ran--she had kept her word to Hope House. She
became the Lady Bountiful of the bathtubs and linoleums, of the frivolous
lay pictures and the autumn shaded lamps, and she wrote impudently to
Sarah Farraday that when she looked upon all that she had created she saw
that it was very good.
Even Emma Ellis has undergone a sea change; she's learned to do her
hair decently, and I've actually persuaded her that while it's quite
right to let her light so shine before men, it's different with her
nose, and you can't think what a dusting of flesh-colored powder does
for her! And I've got her out of blue serge and white blouses, and
into cream and buff and orange and brown, and I daresay Michael
Daragh will now fall in love with her excellent qualities and her
enhanced appearance, and I shall lose my best friend. (E.E. would
never allow friendships.) I shall probably wish I'd left her in her
state of Ugly Ducklingness, for I simply can't spare St. Michael from
my scheme of things!
CHAPTER XIII
Jane and the Irishman came into the Settlement one day to find the
superintendent red-eyed, with two books on her desk. It was clear that
she had been having a luxuriously miserable time. "I've just finished two
of the most powerful stories," she said, polishing the precious powder
from her nose with a damp handkerchief. "Every girl should read them--and
every _man_!"
"I wonder at you, Emma Ellis," said Michael Daragh, "the way you'll be
keening over a printed tale, when you've your heart and head and hands
full of real woes about you, surely!"
"Oh, Mr. Daragh, if you'd just sit down and read _I_ and _The Narrow
Path_! Both written anonymously,--and you just _feel_ the human
heartthrob in every line."
"I'll not be cluttering my mind with the likes of that, woman dear!"
"I've read them both," said Jane, slipping out of her furs and cuddling
into one of the great new chairs, "and I'm afraid I think they're fearful
piffle."
"Miss Vail!" Her face snapped back into its old lines. (Miss Vail really
mustn't think that because she was so situated, financially, that she
could do kind and generous things--which others would do if they
could--that her word was law on every subject!)
"I'll have to be reading them, to decide between the two of you," said
Michael, lighting his mellowed old pipe.
Miss Ellis winced a little as she looked at her new curtains.
"But it's good for moths," said Jane, catching her eye. "No, Michael, you
needn't fuss up your orderly mind with anything so frivolous and
distracting. I can tell you the gist of them both in a few well-chosen
phrases! The theme of both is that when lovely--and lonely--woman stoops
to earning her own living she finds--not too late, but alas,
immediately--that men betray! That every prospect pleases and only man is
vile! These two heroines set out to make their own way; their faces are
their fortune and very nearly their finish! One is a very young girl, the
other an unhappy wife, fleeing with, and, one might be pardoned for
imagining, protected by, a young child. Each is a pattern of dewy
innocence and determined virtue, but no matter where they hie or hide,
the villains still pursue."
"Of course," said Miss Ellis in her small, smothered voice, "if you're
going to make a _joke_ of it----"
"My dear Miss Ellis, it _is_ a joke! One of them gets no further than
the station in her initial flight when she is accosted by a young
millionaire--insulted. (If you were a Constant Reader of popular
fiction, Michael Daragh, you'd know how difficult it is for millionaires
to retain the shreds of human decency.) And that's just the prelude,
but it introduces the motif which runs through the entire composition.
Staid, middle-aged husbands of friends, editors, business men,
authors,--Don Juans all! Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor,
lawyer, Indian chief, enmesh the road the ladies are to wander in."
"Well," said Michael Daragh, shaking his head, "I'm telling you there's a
rare lot of enmeshing, Jane Vail."
Emma Ellis wagged an eager head. "You can't possibly know, in your
sheltered life----"
"But I've been about a bit in my day--(didn't I come from my verdant
village to the wicked metropolis?)--and I've known men in all ages and
stages. My feeling is that these girls must have had a small
'come-hither' in one eye at least, or occasionally men might have passed
the butter without a sinister meaning, might have seen them home without
attempting to abduct them!"
"You came directly to Mrs. Hills, whom you had known for years," said
Emma Ellis. "And you knew that Mr. Harrison who helped you to place your
writing, and you had enough money to live on."
"But I've roamed the city alone, all hours of night or day, and I used to
go back and forth to boarding-school alone--a day's and a night's
journey, and abroad I used to trot off to galleries and museums by
myself, and----"
"But you always had your background, Jane Vail, the way you knew how safe
you were."
"You can't prove these books are foolish by _your_ experience, Miss
Vail." Emma Ellis was glowing from the Irishman's championship.
Jane was still for a moment. "No; I don't suppose I can prove it by any
experience I've had in the past," she said, slowly, "but I can prove it
by an experience I'm going to have!"
"Now what do you mean by that?" Daragh wanted to know. "Are you telling
your fortune?"
Jane sat up straight, warm-cheeked, excited. "No, but I'm going out,
alone and unaided, under a neat new name, with some cheap, plain clothes
in a cheap, plain trunk, to Chicago, with fifty dollars only between me
and the cold world,--and see what I see!"
"Well, now, God save us, but that's the mad plan, surely!"
"It isn't mad at all! I want a little change,--I've been working like a
dynamo--and it will be loads of fun and I'll get corking copy out of it."
"It won't be a fair test," the superintendent protested. "You'll be--you,
all the time."
"That's very nice of you," Jane gave her her glad boy's grin, "but I
won't be. Don't you suppose I have imagination enough to project myself
into another type? For a month I'll support myself in any way I can,
nursery governess, mother's helper, upstair-work, shop, anything I can
get. I'll _be_ that sort of girl, dress, diction, everything. I'll
write a truthful bulletin of my luck to you two, but you won't have any
address, and no one will know that--let's see ... _Edna Miles_--isn't
that reasonable?--that Edna Miles is the lucky Jane Vail who wrote
_Cross Your Heart_ and has a wicked balance in the bank!" She pulled
herself up out of the depths of the great chair and put on her furs.
"I'm quite keen about it! It's going to be more fun than anything I've
ever done. Tell Jane good-by, old dears! You'll hear from Edna Miles
before long!"
"Wait a bit till we talk it over," said Daragh. "'Tis a wild plan, I'm
telling you, will waste your time and----"
But Jane was out of the door, with only the echo of her laugh behind her.
"I don't think she'll really do it," said Miss Ellis. "When she comes to
think it over, and realizes how uncomfortable she'll be----"
"She'll be doing it if she says she will," said the Irishman, gloomily,
"and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't be stopping
her, the way she----"
Jane thrust her bright head in at the door again. "I'll play fair, and
I'll prove my point,--that you see pretty much what you look for, that
you get pretty nearly what you give, that common or garden kindness is
mirrored in kindness, that affection fairly boomerangs back! And after
all, you know, the thing that made the lamb love Mary so is the axis on
which the world turns! With which pearl of wisdom I give you
good-morrow!"
This time she went in earnest, and the Settlement workers were left alone
in their transformed parlor to consider the madness or merit of her
little plan. Michael saw her at breakfast next morning but she was gayly
uncommunicative as to her plans, and that night Mrs. Hills reported that
her star boarder (who had the two best and biggest rooms, now, and a
dressing-room and bath and her own telephone) had gone west for a month
or so for a change.
The first letter came two days later and was addressed to Miss Emma Ellis
at the Hope House Settlement, but the salutation was to them both----
DEAR EMMA ELLIS AND MICHAEL DARAGH,
I am writing this on the train as the intelligent readers will gather
from the chirography. I have just had my breakfast, and it was funny
to study the menu card for inexpensive nourishment with staying
powers. I shared a tiny table with a large gentleman whose rubicund
neck hung over his collar in back in what was distinctly not the line
of beauty, a chatty soul, conversation not at all impeded by food ...
needed a few table traffic regulations ... The noble head of the
animal to whose tribe he belongs beamed from his lapel and his genial
heart from his bright little eyes, and he worried heartily because I
didn't "tuck away a regular breakfast."
I had loads of fun getting my adventure trousseau together yesterday!
I flatter myself that I quite look the part,--my meek, brown serge
and cotton gloves and my oldest shoes and a well-meaning little hat
which took more courage than all the rest. I couldn't quite rise--or
sink--to a straw suitcase. I have my shabbiest one--without labels!
This is a slow, cheap train and my bye-bye box was in the upper flat,
and I haven't spent a penny for chocolate or magazines, and I'm
actually beginning to _be_ Edna Miles!
_Next Morning, Nearly in Chicago._
Last night the beamish Buffalo, who had chatted off and on all day
and had worried over my modest luncheon from across the aisle,
insisted that dinner was to be not only with but "on" him, but I only
consented on the "with" plan, and paid my own little check and tip.
He said I was a darned independent little piece but he liked my
spunk! He asked me where I was bound and I said--sighing a little for
good measure, Emma--that I was going to Chicago to earn my living.
Now in _I_ or _The Narrow Path_ he would at once have given me his
card and offered to "fix me up with something at the office," but
the Buffalo merely said "That so!" mistily through his pie _à la
mode_ and that "Chi" was a great little old berg.
Isn't that one-in-the-eye for your theory, at the start?
Time to be brushed off. Edna Miles gives the Ethiopian only a
quarter, but she hasn't demanded any service.
JANE, THE HONEST WORKING GIRL.
_Same Night, 9.30._
Before I get into my doll's-size bed I'll pen these sleepy lines. My
room is just about the dimensions of a bath mat. It contains the
aforementioned bed (I shall have to put myself into it with a shoe
horn!) _an_ chair, on which I sit, and a bureau. The room must have
been built around them ... clearly they didn't come in through the
door. My little trunk has to wait outside in the hall like a
faithful dog. When I look at my face in the mirror I'm sure that
Heaven will protect this particular working girl; that my face will
be not my fortune but my defender. It looks as if a nervous student
had been practicing facial surgery on me. The carpet is just the
color of deviled ham, and on the wall is a shiny, violent-colored
picture in a tarnished gilt frame which shows a dangerously fat
infant in a crib with a kitten standing on its stomach.
I left the train without incident. I didn't even see the Buffalo to
say good-by. In the station I purposely wandered about a bit and
asked questions and suddenly a brisk little woman with "Stranger's
Friend" on her bonnet dashed up and asked me where I was going. I
told her I was alone in her great city, looking for work, and she
told me not to worry,--that she would look after me, and she
has,--oh, but hasn't she! She thought a minute and then said, "I know
of a good Christian room for you." I was so intrigued by the thought
of a Christian room that I could hardly wait to see it. (I'm in it.
This is it.)
She told me just where to sit and wait for her, and there I dutifully
sat, clutching my luggage, and she ran off to telephone and said it
was all fixed--the lady would have me, and it would be five dollars a
week for room, breakfast and dinner. And she would put me on the
right car and tell me just where to get off, and the landlady would
direct me to the Employment Agency later. Just as she was seeing me
to the street I spied the Buffalo in the offing, waving to me, and I
waved back, and he started briskly toward me.
"Who is that man?" the Stranger's Friend wanted to know. I said he
was a kind gentleman I had met on the train but I didn't know his
name. Well, the next thing I knew she had whirled me cleverly into an
eddy of crowd and thence into the Ladies' Waiting-Room and was
regarding me sternly. "We will wait here until he goes away. That is
the very _first_ thing to remember, my dear. Never talk to
strange men!" And I said, "Yes, ma'am, I will," and "No, ma'am, I
won't," and presently she reconnoitered and said that the coast was
clear, and put me on my car, with minute directions for finding my
new home.... It is easy and comforting to believe that there is,
literally, no place like home, no other place. I shall call my
landlady Mrs. Mussel,--it suits her so perfectly, the way she clings
to her drab background, and closes up with a snap at every approach.
I daresay she means well. It is necessary to believe that she does.
She states that she sets only a plain home table ... and there is a
sort of atmospheric menu card--coming events casting their savors
before, stale memories of the past....
She marched me straight off to the Intelligence Office. There was
nothing for me, but I signed up and am to be there at eight in the
morning. And now, unless I stop, I shall fall asleep and out of my
chair and dash my brains out on the deviled-ham carpet. The Laboring
Classes keep early hours.
G--N--
J.
Thereafter the bulletins came thick and fast to Hope House, always to the
two of them together, now addressed to Miss Ellis and then to the
Irishman. The second followed swiftly on the heels of the first.
_The Next Night._
I went early to the Intelligence Office. (_Intelligence!_) The other
Judy O'Gradys and I sat in waiting while our sisters under the skin,
the Colonel's ladies, looked us over. I registered for nursery
governess, Mother's Help, second maid, or companion, with Mrs.
Mussel and the S.F. for reference, but to-day all the cry for help
was for kitchen mechanics!
When I reported my empty net to Mrs. Mussel on returning, she emitted
a little desolate cluck. She foresees her Christian room rent
overdue, poor thing. The kind little S.F. dropped in and bade me be
of good cheer. She's a brick, and I feel so guiltily aware of
tricking her.
I tried to lure my landlady out to a movie, but she thriftily
refused. She was watching at the window when I came home to-night and
just at the steps I dropped my five cents' worth of literature and a
man who was passing picked it up for me. He glanced at the page as he
handed it back and grinned, "That's a great little old story!" And I
agreed cordially, "It sure is!" and thanked him and ran up the steps.
I wish you could have seen my landlady's face. I thought at first I
would be sent to bed without my supper. When it comes to your sex,
Michael Daragh, her slogan is--"Run, daughter, the Indians are upon
us!"
G--N--
J.
It was several days, then, before they heard again from her, and Emma
Ellis secretly considered that Miss Vail was without doubt giving up and
coming home, but Michael Daragh found himself angrily anxious. But the
letter was reassuring.
_On the Job._
DEAR PEOPLE,
Edna Miles is nursery governess to the two small offspring of Mrs.
Arnold Laney, an opulent, hard-finished lady who cleverly found the
one pearl in the oyster bed, meaning me, this morning. I dashed
thankfully home and almost jolted Mrs. Mussel out of her gloom,
bought two gingham dresses for mornings and hied me to my new home. I
have a cot in the nursery and one bureau drawer and two hooks in the
closet and wrath in my heart, but the kiddies want a story now and I
must stop. They are sallow, fretty, plain little things, but I'm
conscientiously liking them as hard as ever I can. The work shouldn't
be hard, and I have forty a month and three hours every Thursday
afternoon and every other Sunday. I don't like my missus very much,
but the master of the house is a typical T.B.M., only I should say,
from my brief glimpse, that things at home make him _tireder_ than
his business does. I eat with the children in the breakfast room and
the food is rather awful. However, the game is young. Wish me luck,
old dears!
It was eight days before another letter came, and then it was headed----
_Back in my Christian Room!_
My dears, here I am! I lasted just exactly one week. But I don't
care. I didn't wait to be fired--I went off--spontaneous combustion.
I did my honest best at first. It was a horrible house, spilling over
with fretful people and fretful things. There wasn't a cool space to
hang your eye on anywhere on the walls; you had to make your way
through the furniture and bric-a-brac as through traffic. The food,
save when there were guests, was wretched. The other servants--a
cross cook and a sharp-tongued second-girl--were inefficient and lazy
and quarrelsome.
The father was a dim, infrequent person who hardly registered on the
family film at all. He looked overworked and underfed and the only
time I ever heard him speak with any vigor was the night before I
left, when he was vehemently insisting (their room was just across
the hall from the nursery) that they simply had to cut down expenses,
and she was just as vehemently maintaining that it couldn't be done.
And the children! If any one had told me, eight days ago, that there
were two children loose in the land that I could not love, I should
have done battle. The boy was the sort of little boy who makes you
feel that Herod had the right idea, and the girl was the sort of
little girl who makes you feel it was a pity to stop with the
slaughter of the male infant.
It was the last day of my week. The youngsters and I had had a bad
breakfast and a skimpy, cold luncheon, and I was bidden to dress them
in their fussiest best and bring them in at the tag end of Mrs.
Laney's bridge afternoon. They were just sitting down to tea as I
came in. Tea! I was absolutely hungry after the long succession of
miserable meals, ready to recite "Only Three Grains of Corn, Mother,"
with moving gestures, and the sallow little wretches beside me were
clear cases of malnutrition. Well, there were three kinds of
delectable sandwiches and consommé with whipped cream and chocolate
with whipped cream and an opulent salad and wonderful little
cakes--four kinds--and candy and salted nuts. My mouth watered and I
know my nostrils quivered. First, I blush to say, I thought of hungry
me, and then I thought of the undernourished children, and then I
thought of the badly fed and badly cared for and badly treated
husband, and I looked over the other eight or ten women and
catalogued them at once as Mrs. Laney's type, and suddenly I decided
to give myself a treat. I reached calmly over and selected a handful
of sandwiches and cakes and gave them to the youngsters and sent them
up to the nursery, and then, my dears, with what solid satisfaction
you cannot possibly guess, I told my mistress exactly what I thought
of her. She was aghast and scared; she thought I was a maniac, a
desperate fanatic.
"Edna, Edna," she gasped, "be quiet! My guests--these ladies----"
"Ladies! _Ladies!_" I pounced on it. "Do you know what 'ladies'
means? Of course you don't,--you're much too ignorant. It
means--'loaf-givers', providers, dispensers of bounty, care-takers,
home-makers. You--all of you--with your lazy, thick bodies trussed
into your straight fronts and your fat feet crammed into bursting
pumps and your idle hands blazing with jewels" (I know I was
bromidic there, but my Phillipic was too swift to be polished) "and
your empty heads dyed and marcelled, you're not loaf-givers,--you're
not givers at all, you're takers! You're loafers--cumberers of the
earth--fat slugs, that's what you are, each and every one of you!
_You_"--I pointed to Mrs. Laney--"you don't even see that your
children are properly fed! You don't make home livable, let alone
lovable for your husband, and at this moment"--I swept the feast
with a fierce and baleful eye--"you're a thief!"
She shrieked at that and all the women got to their feet. It was as
if I'd thrown a bomb--and I daresay they thought I might at any
instant.
"A thief," I said, "takes what doesn't belong to him, and this
doesn't belong to you! You're deep in debts,--bills that your poor,
harassed husband cannot pay!"--and before she could emit the furious
words on her lips--"Oh, no, you're not going to discharge me! You
can't, for I've left already! I wouldn't stay another night in your
wretched house, I wouldn't eat another of your wretched meals. You
may keep my week's wage. I wish you'd buy the children beefsteak with
it but I've no doubt it will go for cocktails and henna!"
Then, while they gasped and jibbered with rage and got behind each
other and shook in their bulging pumps, I turned on my heel and made
a stunning exit, gathered up my belongings and came away.
There was no welcome on Mrs. Mussel's mat, but I'm still glowing.
Aren't you both immensely pleased with me? I am with myself!
J.
CHAPTER XIV
_The Next Night._
MY DEARS,
You know, the woman who runs the Stupidity Bureau didn't think me a
heroine at all! Quitting your job at the end of the first week, going
off explosively, as I did, doesn't endear the Honest Working Girl to
the management. It simply isn't done. She was so frigid that I
decided to scratch domestic labor from my list. I shall join the
gainful army in the busy marts.
Mrs. Mussel telephoned to the Stranger's Friend and the kind little
S.F. bustled right out and took me to a stereopticon lecture on the
bee. Subtle, wasn't it? Treatment by indirection.
And she gave me a note to a department store which will probably take
me on.
Meanwhile,
G--N--
J.
_Next Night._
They did, dear people, they did. In the basement. In the kitchen
ware. All day long I was learning to sell clothespins and eggbeaters
and wringers and cookie cutters and I wish you could see my hands! I
wonder if they'd consider me up stage if I wore gloves? I'd better
not chance it.
They were all ever so decent about helping me. The floorwalker was
especially kind. (I can see you fling up your head like a warhorse at
the smell of powder, Emma Ellis, but he's a meek young thing who
likes to burble of his baby.)
But I'm a woman of my word and this chronicle is faithful and true.
Coming home on the L, I saw the beamish Buffalo, and he saw me and
plunged to me through the crowd, saying gleefully, "Say, girlie, I've
thought of you a million times, and I--say, listen, I got in awful
Dutch with the wife about you, and she said"--but I slipped nimbly
into my local and the door slapped shut between us.
Your heroines, Emma, were not so light on their feet. But I honestly
felt mean,--he did look so friendly and fat.
I'm to have eight a week in my basement. Mrs. Mussel gets five of it
and the rest I may waste in riotous living.
Good night!
JANE.
_Three Nights Later._
DEAR M.D. AND E.E.,
Please dash downtown and have a million service medals struck off and
then rush around and pin them on all the shop girls in the world! The
unutterable weariness--the aching, burning, sagging, sickening, faint
_tiredness_!
If ever again, as long as I live, I'm cross to a saleswoman, no
matter how cross she may be to me, then may God send a sudden angel
down to grasp me by the hair and bear me far and drop me into the
kitchen ware on eight a week and my throbbing feet!
JANE.
_Saturday Night._
MY DEARS, I'm turned off. After all the trying and enduring and the
dead-tiredness, I'm turned off. The kind little floorwalker hated to
do it. "Say, listen, sister," he said, "it's like this. We gotter let
somebuddy go. Holidays comin', people ain't goin' to buy kitchen
ware. Sure they ain't. Plug up th' leakin' kettle an' buy Mummer th'
rhinestone combs! Well, you're the last to come, see? You gotter be
the first to go."
I bought Mrs. Mussel a shrinking bunch of violets to soften the blow,
but she wondered if I couldn't get my money back (_her_ money she
figures, poor thing!) if I hurried right downtown with them and
explained that I'd changed my mind.
Heavens, but we had a horrible supper.
Very down indeed,
JANE.
_Monday Night._
DEAR PEOPLE,
I'm doing my best to uplift Mrs. Mussel, but she's the undisputed
Queen of all the Glooms and my sprightly efforts fall on stony
ground. For her peace of mind I divulged the fact that I have nearly
thirty dollars left which makes me really a capitalist, but in her
eyes I am simply an Unemployed.
I rush into the house glowing and braced from a brisk walk but my
cheer soon gutters out,--I might as well try to illuminate a London
fog with a Christmas tree candle.
I try to help her with her errands and marketing and to-day I was
staggering home under a load of parcels and slipped on the glassy
pavement just in front of the house and fell flat. A smart motor
which was spinning by slid to a standstill and the driver jumped out
and ran back to me. He was a beautiful big youth and the machine was
one of those low, classy, dachshund effects in mauve. THE MAIDEN'S
DREAM picked me up and all my packages and looked us all over to make
sure we weren't damaged. One of the parcels contained liver, and it
became unwrapped.... (Dost like the picture, Jane Vail bearing home
the liver for her frugal evening meal?) He did it up very deftly and
then he asked me if he couldn't give me a lift. I said he certainly
could but for the fact that I was already arrived at my destination.
Then he said, "I'll give you a hand with the plunder, then. Which
house?"--and THE MAIDEN'S DREAM and the liver and I mounted Mrs.
Mussel's steps together. He was as big and bonny as the impossible
young persons in the backs of magazines, and he said it was tough
weather to be walking and I said it was tough weather to be out of a
job, and he said that was tough luck. (See how I gave him an opening,
E.E.?) I thanked him and he said it was nothing and sped down to his
speedster and I went in to my Christian room. Mrs. Mussel had been
doing her regular Sister Anne act at the window and had "seen it
all," she assured me ... I will omit her Phillipic....
JANE.
_Wednesday._
Still no gainful occupation, people! Compared to her present
attitude, Mrs. Mussel was Jest and Youthful Jollity before. And the
blacker things get the earlier we rise. It seems to me that no sooner
have I fitted myself compactly into my doll's-size bed and closed my
eyes than I hear her mournful summons to another day. Oh, the inky
gloom of these murky mornings! I know that the young woman who said
so lyrically, "_If you're waking, call me early, call me early,
Mother dear!_" is popularly supposed to have died without issue,
but that is a misconception. I shrink from putting a Spoon River
scandal on her mossy tombstone, but my Mrs. Mussel is her lineal
descendant.
To-day I was racked by a yearning for the flesh-pots. I made myself
as near smart as possible and flew for the smartest tea-room on
Michigan Avenue. If I could stay me with Orange Pekoe and comfort me
with toasted crumpets and English marmalade--But just as I was
blithely footing it across the threshold the S.F. rose up behind me
like a genie from a bottle and plucked me back.
"Edna Miles," she gasped, "my poor child, you can't eat in there!
It's the most expensive place in the city. Besides,--it is half-past
four,--you'll spoil your dinner!"
_Very_ peevishly and hollowly,
JANE.
_Thursday Night. On the Joyful New Job._
Oh, my dear people, but I do believe in Fairies! I've met one
personally! While we sat at melancholy mending this morning, my
doleful landlady and I, after my fruitless tour of the agencies, who
should dash up to our dull door but THE MAIDEN'S DREAM! In his
shining chariot! Mrs. Mussel said, "Edna, you go straight upstairs
and lock yourself in your room and _I'll_ 'tend to him!" But I was at
the door before he had time to ring the bell.
"Great luck," he said, "'fraid you'd be gone. Got a job yet?"
"No."
"Well, I was telling my sister about you, and she thinks she has just
the place for you. Want to hop in the boat and run out to see her now
and talk it over?"
Mrs. Mussel said of course he hadn't any sister, and that I ought to
be ashamed of myself and I would probably never be seen or heard of
again, and she knew he had a poison needle and she rang up the
Stranger's Friend, but before she got her connection I was spinning
up the North Shore. THE MAIDEN'S DREAM lives in a young palace and
Miss Marjorie, his sister, is also Peter Pan's sister. He explained
to me, as we went, that she had been thrown from her horse and would
never walk again, and so she "did things for girls, you know--keeps
her busy----"
She looks exactly like a Fra Angelico angel! She kept me to luncheon
in her room with her--oh, flesh-pots!--hot broth and tiny chops and
pop-overs and magic salad and chocolate and ginger-bread--and told me
about this extraordinary job. Then THE MAIDEN'S DREAM whizzed me home
for my things (I found Mrs. M. and the S.F. holding an agitated
Directors' Meeting), but when the S.F. heard Miss Marjorie's last
name, she beamed and brought me out here.
Miss Marjorie explained that I'm to be more or less of a
maid-companion to my pretty little mistress. She's a limp and lovely
nymph who's quarreled with her husband and is in hiding in this funny
old house which belonged to her family, in a weird neighborhood where
none of her own set would ever discover her. The house is comfortable
enough inside, but the locality is a rather rough one, and there is
not even a telephone. There is a cook and a cleaner-by-the-day, and
the new maid-companion, so she should be reasonably well looked
after.
Whoops, my dears! Fifty dollars a month and almost nothing to do!
This is the Promised Land!
Joyfully,
JANE.
_Monday._
DEAR PEOPLE,
The cook is cross because she drinks and she drinks because she is
cross, and I have persuaded my nymph to let her go and give me a try
at it. The cleaner-by-the-day will do the grubby things and I shall
like it. Time to get luncheon! Wish you might drop in to sample my
fare!
JANE.
P.S. There is the most engaging grocery boy with red hair and a
heart-twisting grin. I'm not sure I wasn't considering him when I
turned kitchen mechanic. Denny Dolan is his name and God loves the
Irish!
J.
_Wednesday._
It's fun, my dears, every inch of it, from my little lady's breakfast
tray to Denny's extra trips with things he "forgot."
She wanted to give me the cook's wages in addition to mine, because
she says I do all the work of both places, but I modestly compromised
on seventy-five and on my first day out I'm going to take Mrs. Mussel
a regal present.
Opulently,
JANE.
_Friday._
MY DEAR PEOPLE,
My nymph is ill and unhappy and grieving for her husband, but she
won't send for him, and it's the time of all times when he should be
with her. I went the five blocks to the drug store and telephoned
Miss Marjorie about her, and she sent the old family doctor, and when
he left her eyes were red, and I suppose he was urging her to make it
up.
She's such a vague, sweet, helpless thing! This dreary neighborhood
is bad for her.
Denny Dolan says "there's a hard-boiled bunch hangin' around here,"
and warns me against venturing out after dark, even to the post-box.
JANE.
P.S. He brought me a paper bag of gum drops to-day!
_A Week Later._
Almost too busy to write, my dears, what with cooking and catering
and maiding and companioning. Besides, I'll have you to know I'm
keeping company! It's walking out with Denny Dolan I am! I get the
cleaning woman to stay with my nymph for an hour, and I'm stepping
out with my young man. Twice to the movies we've been, and had
dripping ice-cream cones afterwards!
So no more at present, for a girl would be thinking of her beau the
way she has no time to be palavering on paper and he waiting in the
alley!
DENNY'S GIRL.
_The Next Night._
I went into town to-day and I met the Buffalo just as I was leaving a
Loop car, and it seemed only the fair and sporting thing to let him
speak to me.
He beamed more beamishly than ever. "Say, listen, girlie," he said,
"I've had the deuce of a time, losin' you every time I find you! Say,
I was startin' to tell you the other day,--the wife gimme fits when I
told her about you. Sure, she did." I stood very still and looked at
him and listened. "Yeah. Calls me a big boob. 'You big boob,' she
says. 'You sleeper! Her tellin' you she was a stranger and all that,
and lookin' for work, an' you never give her my address!' Honest, she
trimmed me for fair. I got to beat it now, but here's her card,
see?--Telephone'n everything, and she wants you to call her up. She
wants to have you out to dinner, Aggie does, and have you meet some
of her lady friends and get you acquainted. Say, ring her up, will
you, sure? Gee, she was some sore at the old man! Bye!"
He leaped into his Express, and vanished, and I could have sat down
in the midst of the scurrying crowd and wept with shame and joy and
gratitude. I rang Aggie up at once, and I could just _see_ her,
from her cozy voice.
How about it, Emma Ellis? Do I score? I'm dining with them soon.
JANE.
P.S.--Do you realize that my month is up? And my point is won? But
I'm going to stay on and see my nymph safely through her dark days.
_A Week Later._
Denny and I went to see "Twin Hearts" this evening and in the
meltingest part of the film he held my hand. I thought it was about
time to unmask, so I said--retrieving my hand--that I wasn't a
regular kitchen mechanic but a volunteer.
"My real job," I said, "is writing. I'm a writer."
"Sure you are!" he chuckled delightedly. "You'n me both! I wrote this
spiel here! I'm Henry W. Dickens!"
I couldn't seem to convince him of anything but that I was "some
little kidder." He undertook to tell the world about that. To-morrow,
in the garish light of day, when he dumps his neat parcels on my
spotless table, I must really explain that----
_The Next Afternoon._
DEAR E.E. AND M.D.,
I'm perished for sleep, but I'll write what I can. Just as I got to
"that" above, my nymph called me. She was ill,--terribly,
terrifyingly ill, and even I saw that there wasn't an instant to
lose. And not a soul to send to the telephone.
I couldn't leave her--but I had to leave her! It didn't enter my head
to be afraid--only of not getting the doctor in time. Denny's
warnings were forgotten. I had done one block of the five when a man
stepped out of a dark hallway, and halted in front of me.
Even then, until he spoke, I wasn't really frightened. But when he
did,--I tell you, Emma Ellis and Michael Daragh, all the horror and
wickedness, all the filth and sin of the world seemed to be closing
in on me, stifling me, blinding me, hobbling my feet. All the windows
about me were blank and black; a block and a half ahead of me was a
blaze of light--Boldini's Saloon--"a rotten bad one," Denny had said.
I ran, oh, how I ran, but he ran, too, faster, faster. I tried to
reach out for something to cling to--for a shield--Just fragments
came--"_angels charge over thee ... snare of the fowler ... terror
by night_...."
We were almost at Boldini's Saloon, and I couldn't run any faster,
and twice he had caught hold of my arm.... Suddenly another fragment
came--"_in all thy ways_ ..." _All!_ I ran through the swinging
doors into the saloon, out of the horrid, dark night into the horrid
light, and I stumbled and went down onto my knees and pulled myself
up by the bar, and I heard my voice--"Men--men--_Please_--I was
going to the drug store to telephone--a woman is sick--a baby--she's
all alone there--and this man--this man--" I hung onto the edge of
the bar and everything spun dizzily round with me, but I saw three
men bolt through the door and fall upon him.
Michael Daragh, I suppose some day I can remember with horror how
they beat him, but I can't now. I can't be sorry for him. I can't be
anything but gloatingly glad. They were drunk, all of them, but when
they finished with him they escorted me to the drug store, one on
each side and one marching on before and banged up the night man and
while I telephoned the doctor they waited for me, and then they took
me home.
I wanted to scream with laughter--they couldn't walk straight, two of
them--and I wanted more to cry,--"_angels charge over thee_--" They
were! I shook hands with them and thanked them, and they mounted
guard outside the house and I flew in to my lady.
Well, presently the doctor came, and then the nurse came, and then
Roderick Frost III came, a frantic young man with penitent eyes, and
presently Roderick Frost _IV_ came, a bad-tempered young tenor who
protested lustily at being born in a spot so far removed from his
own rightful social orbit, and then morning came, and I fell into
bed for three hours of sodden sleep.
Now the haughty chef from the Lake Shore Drive is here, taking royal
charge, and Edna Miles' job is over. I'm going to see little Miss
Marjorie and 'fess up, and take farewell of Mrs. Mussel and my kind
S.F., and then, my dears, I'm coming home,--home with palms of
victory.
Haven't I won, Emma Ellis? Haven't I won, Michael Daragh? Do you dare
to count the one exception that gloriously proved the rule? Didn't my
three unsteady angels more than make up for one poor devil? Nearly
six weeks alone in the wide, cold world, dozens of kindly conductors
and policemen and L guards and clerks and fellow citizens, the kind
little floorwalker and Denny Dolan, and the beamish Buffalo and THE
MAIDEN'S DREAM, and my three avenging knights!
Own up, old dears! Admit you're beaten! I have walked _The Narrow
Path_ and found it clean and safe and good!
Triumphantly--gloatingly--
JANE.
CHAPTER XV
It would be the private opinion of Emma Ellis to her dying day that Miss
Vail had suppressed a good deal and had embellished a good deal, in that
dramatic way of hers. She had written so much fiction and lived so much
in her imagination that it was doubtful if she could (with the best
intentions) tell the exact and unadorned truth about anything. Besides,
even if things had happened exactly as she had chronicled them, it was
not a fair test anyway; it was a very different case from those of the
heroines in the two stories. Jane Vail knew she was Jane Vail, with an
assured position in the literary world and a large income, and that the
whole thing was only play-acting after all. But with Mr. Daragh entirely
convinced and more maudlinly worshipful than ever, what was the use of
saying anything? But she could _think_.
Jane swung happily into her fourth year in New York, flying home to Sarah
Farraday for Christmas, meeting the young year with high hopes and canny
plans, a definite part, now, of the confraternity of ink. Her circle
widened and widened; important persons came down from their heights of
achievement to make much of her, and the late spring saw the successful
launching of another gay little play, and early fall found her
deep--head, hands, and heart--in her first serious novel, but she found
amazing margins of time for Rodney Harrison, for Hope House, for Michael
Daragh.
Sarah Farraday, resigned but never reconciled, shared vicariously in the
life-more-abundantly which had come to her best friend, and she always
said, with a small sigh, that nothing Jane did or said could ever
surprise her again, but she was nevertheless startled, after a long
silence, to receive a fat letter bearing a Mexican stamp.
_On a Meandering Train, bound, more or less for Guadalajara_, it began,
and was dated December the seventh.
SALLY DEAR,
You must be thinking me quite mad at last, not hearing from me for
weeks, and then--this! Like the old woman in the fairy tale,--"Can
this be I?"
I decided all in a wink to fly to California and visit my mother's
cousins, the Budders. I needed a drastic change, Sally. I haven't had
a real play-time for a year, and it's four years and a month since I
left home for New York--can you realize it? Four lucky, beautiful,
shining years. But oh, I'm tired, old dear! So tired that my brain
creaks. I think there comes a time, in creative work, for playing
hooky. Write and run away and live to write another day. So I wired
the Budders I was coming and took the train the same day, and when I
reached San Francisco I found them all packed up for this Mexican
trip,--indeed, they were sitting on their trunks with a tentative
ticket for me in their hands. And I was pleased pink to come. The
Budders (doesn't Budder sowd as if I ad a code id by ed?) are nice,
comfortable creatures,--the sort who are called the salt of the earth
but in reality aren't anything so piquant. They're the boiled
potatoes and graham bread and rice pudding. You, now, Sally darling,
are the angel cake, and there's not half enough of you; I'm the
olives and anchovies and caviar ... a little goes a long way ... and
Michael Daragh is the rich and creamy milk of human kindness, always
being skimmed by a needy, greedy world.
Behold me, then, ambling through Mexico, a Spanish phrase book in my
lap and peace in my heart.
_Adiós!_
JANE.
P.S. I have just read this over, Sarah. Fiction of purest ray serene.
I'm not tired. I don't need to play. It was a very bad time for me to
leave,--my work screamed after me all across the continent. I had to
fly for my life and liberty.
Sally, friend of my youth, patient receptacle of all my moods and
tenses, I was falling in love. At least, I felt myself slipping. All
these four years I have intended Michael Daragh to be an interesting
character part in my drama of New York, down in the cast as "her best
friend." He is threatening to take the lead, and it isn't going to do
at all. Sally, the man's goodness is simply ghastly; I couldn't
endure having a husband so incontestibly better than I am. Why, you
know that all my life I've been "a wonderful influence for good" with
_man_kind! Didn't I always coax sling shots away from bad little
boys and make them sign up for the S.P.C.A.? And wasn't I always
getting bad big boys to smoke less and drink less and pass ex'es and
dance with wallflowers and write to their mothers? Really, when I
think of the twigs I've bent and the trees I've inclined, I feel that
there should be a tablet erected to me somewhere. But the woman who
weds Michael Daragh, I don't care who she is (lie: I care
enormously!) will always be burning incense to him in her lesser
soul, always straining on tiptoe to breathe the air in which he lives
and moves and has his being.
Michael Daragh, that time he renounced the flesh-pots and "took to
bride the Ladye Povertye with perfect blithenesse," did it so
thoroughly that any literal spouse will be only a sort of morganatic
wife, anyway. I don't mean that he might not adore her and be
wonderful to her _after_ he'd ministered unto a drove of sticky
immigrants and a Settlement full of drab down-and-outs and an Agnes
Chatterton Home full of Fallen Sisters, but he would really expect
her to _prefer_ having him assist at the arrival of the eleventh
little Lascanowitz in a moldy cellar to keeping a birthday dinner
date with her.
Now, Sally dear, in these four years since I left my village home
(soft chords) I have labored somewhat, and I confess that I have
frankly looked forward to matrimony as a sort of glorified vacation.
I couldn't ever give up my work, of course,--it wouldn't give me
up--and I don't crave to "sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam and
live upon strawberries, sugar and cream" exclusively, but somewhere
in the middle ground between that and washing dishes and "feeding the
swine," I did visualize a sort of gracious lady leisure, with a
vague, worshipful being in the background making me "take care of
myself."
Therefore, feeling myself melting unduly on the Irish question, I fly
while there is yet time.
Much love, old dear!
JANE.
_December 8th._
That was a silly screed, yesterday, Sally dearest, but getting it off
my chest was a great relief. And at that it wasn't a complete
confession. There was another reason for a strategic retreat. The
other reason was Rodney Harrison. Yes, the House of Harrison has
capitulated, handsomely, lavishly, Mater and Pater as well, but I'm
very sure that I can never be theirs. Just as I feel that Michael
Daragh is too good for me, so do I feel that Rodney Harrison is not
quite good enough! I mean by that not quite concerned enough with
drying the world's tears. With--as G.B.S. says--"a character that
needs looking after as much as my own," I feel I should have some one
a little less Philistine than the cheerful Rodney. At any rate, I
needed perspective on the whole situation, and who knows but I shall
meet my nice new fate on this romantic pilgrimage? (Sounds more like
eighteen than twenty-eight, doesn't it?) But, seriously, I've been so
constantly with Michael Daragh and Rodney in these four years that I
know every dip and spur, every line and leaf of their mental scenery;
fresh fields and pastures new are what I need. And "one meets so many
delightful people in traveling--" as witness the good Budders and
their niece, Miss Vail ('sh ... they say she's a _writer_!)
Something, which is to say, some_body_, may turn up at any moment.
Yours, Micawber-ing,
J.
P.S. I trust you won't expect to glean any useful information or
statistics about Mexico from these chronicles? The Budders are deep
in histories and guidebooks but I know not whether the _Chichimecs_
were people or pottery and I hope I never shall!
P.S. II. Cousin Dudley, having just returned from the smoker, reports
chatting with a most interesting young civil engineer----
_December 9th._
We are now so late, Sally dear, that we have lost all social
standing; we slink into sidings and wait in shame for prompt and
proper trains to bustle by. But I don't mind. At this rate I shall be
able to converse rippingly in Spanish by the time we reach
Guadalajara. Cousin Dudley knows a professor person there who will
help us to plan our trip.
Spanish is deliciously easy. It seems rather silly to make it a
regular study in our schools.
I adore the stations, especially at night,--black velvet darkness
studded with lanterns and torches and little leaping fires; old blind
minstrels whining their ballads; the mournful voices of the sweetmeat
venders chanting--"_Dulce de Morelia!_"--"_Cajeta de Celaya!_" These
candies, by the way, are the most----
_December 11th._
Alas, _muy_ Sally _mia_, when I meant to add a few paragraphs to
this letter diary every day! I was interrupted just there by Cousin
Dudley who came in with his civil engineer, and there hasn't seemed
to be any spare time since. (How is that for a demonstration of Mr.
Burroughs' well-known theory about folding your hands and waiting
and having your own come to you?)
He is an _extremely_ civil engineer and very easy to look at. He
has close-cropped, bronzy brown hair and gentian-blue eyes and his
skin is burned to a glowing copper luster. He is just idling about,
slaying time during a vacation too brief to warrant his going home to
Virginia, and he shows strong symptoms of willingness to act as
guide, philosopher and friend to wandering Touri. We are actually
going to reach Guadalajara tomorrow! Some one must be giving us a
tow.
_Adiós, muy amiga mía!_
JUANA.
P.S. The C.E. is going to hear my Spanish lesson now.
P.S. II. Isn't NETZAHUALCOYOTL a cunning word?
_Guadalajara,
December 12th._
QUERIDA SARITA,
We sight-saw all morning in this lovely, languid, ladylike city, and
this afternoon we called on Cousin Dudley's friend, Professor
Morales and his family. They were expecting us and as our _coche_
drew up at the curb, the door flew open and _el profesor_ flew out,
seized Cousin Ada's hand, held it high, and led her into the house,
minuet fashion. The _señora_, a mountainous lady with a rather
striking mustache and the bosom of her black gown sprinkled with a
snow fall of powder which couldn't find even standing room on her
face, conducted Cousin Dudley in the same manner, and I fell to the
lot of a beautiful youth.
The _sala_ was crazy with what-nots and knick-knacks and bamboo
furniture and running over with people--plump, furrily powdered
_señoritas_ with young mustaches, cherubs with gazelle eyes and
weak-coffee-colored skin, and the oldest woman ever seen out of a
pyramid.
There was an agonizing time getting us all introduced and a still
more agonizing time of stage wait afterward. Then Cousin Dudley (I
thirsted for his gore) said chirpily, "My niece has learned to speak
Spanish, you know."
My dear, it made the Tower of Babel seem like "going into the
silence." Everybody in that room talked to me at once. In my frantic
boast and foolish word about the easiness of Spanish it had never
occurred to me that people would talk to _me_! If the fiends had
only held their tongues and let _me_ ask _them_ to have the kindness
to do me the favor to show me which way was the cathedral, or
whether it was the silk handkerchief of the rich Frenchman which the
young lady's old sick father required, all would have been well, but
instead--a madhouse!
Then came rescue. The sweetest, softest pussy willow of a girl with a
delicious accent said, "So deed I also feel, in the conevent, when
they all at once spik _inglés_!" She was in pearl gray, no powder,
no mustache, slim as a reed. Her gentle name is Maria de Guadalupe
Rosalia Merced Castello, but they call her "Lupe" ("Loopie," Sally,
not Loop!) She is a penniless orphan, just visiting her kin at
present, but lives with an uncle in Guanajuato (where delves my C.E.
at his mine) and she is in disgrace because of an undesirable love
affair, so the _señora_ told Cousin Ada. They are taking us to the
_Plaza_ to-night, and meanwhile we sup.
Delightedly,
JANE.
P.S. 11.30 P.M. The _Plaza_ is still the parlor in Guadalajara and
it's enchanting! The staid background of the chaperones in _coches_,
the slow procession of youths and maidens, two and two, boys in one
line, girls in another, the eager, forward looks, the whisper at
passing, the note slipped from hand to hand, the backward glances,
all classes, and over all, through all, the pleading, pulsing call
of the music.
Sarah, never did you make melody like that, decent New Englander that
you are! It's so poignantly searching-sweet, so _sin verguenza_
(without shame!) _El profesor_ had them play _La Golondrina_, their
national anthem, really, which means merely The Swallow, to start
with, but everything else a hungry heart can pack into it. Lupe and
I walked together and she was pouring out her dewy young confidences
before we'd been twice round the circle. Montagues and Capulets! The
rich uncle who has reared her is the bitterest enemy of her Emilo's
papa who is a general of revolutionary tendencies. "Me," she said
with a shrug, "I can never marry! _Vestiré los santos!_" (Which
means, "I shall dress the saints!" Old maids having unlimited time
for church work!)
_Buenas noches_,
J.
_December 14th._
DEAREST SALLY,
The loveliest idea came and sat on my chest in the pearly dawn! I'm
going to take María de Guadalupe Rosalía Merced Castello with me on
this tour as Spanish teacher! She accepted with tears of joy and
the Morales family bore up bravely. They will be frankly glad of
a few nights' sleep,--Lupe's gallants come nightly to "make a
serenade,"--not a lone guitar but the tenor from the opera house and
a piano trundled through the streets. The more costly the musical
ingredients, the greater the swain's devotion!
To-day we went with various members of the Morales clan to visit the
_Hospicio_ (see the Budders for dates and data!). I only remember a
girl of twelve who sat by herself in the playground, the small,
cameo, clear face with its sorrowing eyes, the pathetic arrogance in
the lift of the chin, her withdrawal from the other noisy little
orphans. I knew she must have a story, and when I asked the pretty
sister in charge, she burst into eager narrative.
Twelve years ago, approximately, a young physician was called at
night to the _peon_ quarter, and to his amazement found that his
patient was a lady, a girl whose patrician manner was proof against
all her terror and suffering. She utterly refused to look at her
child and threatened to smother it if he left it within her reach.
He took it to the _Hospicio_ to be cared for temporarily, and a few
days later, going as usual to attend the young mother, he found her
vanished. There was a lavish fee left for him, and a note, bidding
him insolently to banish the whole matter from his memory. The
neighbors knew only that they had heard a _coche_ in the dead of
night. The child, whom they named in their mournful fashion Dolores
Tristeza--sorrows and sadness--was always the doctor's protegée. One
day he came in great excitement to tell the pretty sister the
sequel. He had been summoned the night before to the bedside of a
dying man,--one of the great names of the city. The family was
grouped about the father and among the weeping daughters he espied
his mysterious patient! Afterward, when he was leaving, she looked
him squarely in the eye and said, "You are a newcomer in
Guadalajara? You must be, for _I have never seen you before_!" He
told no one but the sister at the _Hospicio_ and not even to her did
he divulge the name, but two days later, in a lonely suburb of the
city, he was shot and killed.
Sarah, doesn't that make your scalp creep? Dolores Tristeza! "Sorrows
and Sadness!" I dashed out and bought her a gorgeous doll and she
gave me a gracious smile but she was not at all overcome. She clearly
feels her quality. Loads of people have wanted to adopt her but she
would never go with them.
And to-morrow we are off to Querétaro to drop a silent tear on
Maximilian's dressy little tomb, the Budders, Lupe, the C.E. and I.
We are gathering as we roll!
_Adíos, querida mia!_
J.
_Queretaro._
I've paid proper tribute to that poor pawn of Empire who lived so
poorly and who died so well, but the real zest of this journey is
Lupe! Fresh every hour! Her mental processes are delicious. I was
lamenting her frank delight in bull-fights and she said, "Oh, the
firs' time I see horse keel,' I am ver' seek. _Now_ they keel four,
seven, eleven horse,' I like ver' moach!" When I tried to make
her realize the enormity of her taste, she turned on me like a
flash--"But you American girl, you go see you' brawther get keel' in
football game!"
"Pussy willow," I said, "it's not a parallel case. Our brothers are
free agents,--they adore doing it. They're toiling and sweating and
praying for the chance--perhaps for years,--and they're heroes, and
thousands are making the welkin ring with their names!"
She shrugged. "Oh--_eef_ you care more for some ol' horse than you'
_brawther_----"
The C.E. (although he could dispense with her society very
cheerfully) helps me to understand her, and through her, Mexico,
this sad, bad, pitiful, charming, lovable, hateful land!
Lupe's Emilio is by way of being a poet, it seems, and he has sent
her a little song, which we have translated, and I put it into rhyme,
and the C.E.--who has a very decorative voice indeed--hums it to a
lonesome little tune distantly related to La Golondrina. Here it is:
"Thro' the uncolored years before I knew you
My days were just a string of wooden beads;
I told them dully off, a weary number ...
The silly cares, the foolish little needs.
"But now and evermore, because I've known you,
They've turned to precious pearls and limpid jade,
Clear amethysts as deep as seas eternal,
And heart's-blood rubies that will never fade.
"You never knew, and now you never will know;
Some joys are given; mine were only lent.
You see, I do not reckon years or distance;
Somewhere I know you _are_; I am content.
"I do not need your pity or your presence
To bridge the widening gulf of now and then;
It is enough for me to know my jewels
Can never turn to wooden beads again."
Of course, to be tiresomely exact, he's _always_ known her, and she
is entirely aware of his devotion, and he can reckon the time and
distance quite easily with the aid of a time-table, but, as the C.E.
says, "it listens well."
Off to La Ciudad de Mexico in the morning!
_Con todo mi corazon_,
JANE.
P.S. I might remark in passing that it's a perfectly good _corazon_
again, sane and sound and whole, and summons only dimly a memory of
New York....
_Mexico City._
SARAH, my dear, I've given up trying to date my letters. I've lost
count of time. We've been here for many golden days and silver
nights, in a land of warm eyes and soft words, where _peons_ take off
their _sombreros_ and step aside to let my Grace pass, and Murillo
beggar boys are named--"Florentino Buenaventura, awaiting your
commands!"
We sight-see so ardently that lazy little Lupe says she is "tired
until her bones!" and when she surrenders, we go on alone, the C.E.
and I. (Oh, yes, the Budders are still with us, but they are keener
on facts than fancies, and we deign but seldom to go with them and
improve our minds.) Yesterday, however, we consented to see Diaz'
model prison. My dear, after seeing how the people live at large, one
is convinced that here the wages of sin are sanitation and education.
I should think ex-convicts would be hugely in demand for all sorts of
positions. In the parlor we were fascinated with a display of the
skulls of prisoners who had been executed there. I saw one small,
round, innocent-looking one which couldn't possibly have ever
contained a harsh thought, I was sure, and I indignantly read the tag
to see what he had been martyred for. Sarah, the busy boy had done
twenty-one ladies to death!
We listen to melting music in the Alameda, we ride in the fashion
parade in the Calle San Francisco, we drive out along the beautiful
Paseo de la Reforma and drink chocolate in the shadow of the Castle
of Chapultepec--chocolate made with cinnamon and so rich and sweet it
almost bends the spoon to stir it. Miss Vail remembers with
difficulty that she is the heir of all the ages in the foremost files
of time, a self-supporting young business woman who beats bright
thoughts from a typewriter four earnest hours per diem ... or that
she was....
_Hoy_--to-day, is very satisfying; I forget _ayer_--yesterday;
_Mañana_--to-morrow, may never come!
Juana.
_Christmas Eve, Cuernavaca._
_Felisces Pascuas_, Sally dear! You in the snow and I in fairyland!
It's a comic opera Christmas here, but a very fetching one,--the
pretty processions of singing children through the streets, the gay,
grotesque _piñatis_--huge paper dolls filled with _dulces_, the
childish and merry little people, the color, the music, the smile
and the sob of it all!
I wish I could have little Dolores Tristeza with me. I sent her a box
of delights.
My pussy willow girl is star-eyed over a telegram and my much more
than civil engineer has told me what he wants for Christmas. If he
had told me on Fifth Avenue or at home, on Wetherby Ridge, I should
have said at once that I was sorry, and I liked him immensely, and so
on, but--but here, in Cuernavaca, in the Borda Gardens, beside the
crumbling pinky palace, where the ghosts of Maximilian and Carlotta
walk at the full of the moon, when he told me that all his days were
wooden beads before I came, and--I don't know, Sally! I don't know!
New York seems very far away ... Rodney Harrison and my St. Michael
seem palely unreal.... Can it be possible, in these gay little weeks,
that, as Lupe would say, "I have arrive'" to love this boy?
Distractedly,
JANE.
CHAPTER XVI
_Orizaba._
MY DEAR SALLY,
In the market place to-day I found such a bored old bear dancing for
a bored crowd. I've never seen anything quite so tired and patient as
his eyes. His little old master was half asleep but he whacked his
tambourine and whined his mournful song without a pause. I left Lupe
and the C.E. and went out and patted the bear and asked the man (I am
as handy as that with my Spanish!) how much he earned in a day. Less
than fifteen cents in our money! Well, I asked him if I could buy the
bear a week's vacation if I paid him three weeks' earnings in
advance. He accepted thankfully and I believe he will keep his word,
being just as bored as the bear. The old beast came down on his four
feet with a gusty sigh and they padded peacefully away. The crowd
thought me mildly mad and the C.E. was a little annoyed with me. He
said he would gladly have attended to it for me if I had asked him.
I answered him very impertinently--something Lupe had taught
me--"_Cuando tu vas, ya yo vengo!_" which means in crude English,
"By the time you get started I'll be on the way back!"
I purr with pleasure when I think of the bear!
JANE.
P.S. One hopes it isn't a habit with him ... being a little
annoyed....
_Cordoba._
Sally, dear, this isn't a comic opera country at all, but a land of
grim melodrama; stark tragedy.
We're here in the prettiest city, on the edge of the _tierra
caliente_, but it's been a horrid day. It started wrong. An
unsavory but beautiful cherub of eight or so, smoking a cigarette,
tried to sell me a baby lizard. You remember how I've always loved
lizards, but I couldn't take it on a day's sight-seeing so I gave him
a copper and refused. He said in liquid Spanish, "So, Your Grace will
not buy my little lizard? Very well! Behold!"--and before my
horrified eyes he held it to his cigarette and burned it to death
before I could jump out of the machine and get to him. I suppose I'm
tired out with all this rushing about, for I just went to pieces
over it, and when Lupe said sympathetically, "Oh, deed you _want_
it?" it made me turn on her. I made the rest go on the drive without
me and I sat down in the Plaza alone to think things over. There was
a little old fountain with a gurgling drip, and I rested in the
ragged shade of the banana trees and heard two hours tinkled from
the crumbling, creamy-colored cathedral, and came gradually to the
point of understanding that the boy was just as much an object of
pity as the lizard. I knew that Michael Daragh would
say--there--that's the first time, even to myself----
Well, I sat there, cooled and calmed, and presently I heard something
and looked up to see two soldiers on horseback bringing a prisoner.
His arms were bound behind him, and great, rough ropes ran from their
saddles to his neck and the skin was rubbed raw. The horses were
steaming; they must have come fast. Another soldier went on to report
or something and told them to wait there, and they were halted right
by me. The man's mouth was open and his swollen tongue hanging out
and he was panting just like a dog. He gasped, "_Agua! Por
Dios--agua!_" but his guards just laughed and shouted to the
_pulquería_ across the street, and a boy came out and brought them
drinks. Their backs were toward me, and I got up without making a
sound and crept to the fountain and filled the big iron cup to the
brim and held it till he'd drained every drop, and then let him have
a little more, and then I dipped my handkerchief in the water and
put it in his mouth. And just at that very moment--of course!--the
guards turned round and saw me, _and_ the Budders and the C.E. and
Lupe drove up!
My dear Sarah, they very nearly arrested _me_! The man is, they
claim, a dangerous revolutionist, and I was giving aid to him. Lupe
was shaking like a leaf and the C.E. was white as paper, but between
them they got me off.
I don't care! I'd do it again!
It seems the whole country is simmering and seething in revolution;
old Diaz' throne is tottering under him. Lupe was tearful over a
wailing letter from her Emilio, begging her to return, and the C.E.
is recalled to his mine, and the Budders are a little nervous and
anxious to hurry northward, so we're off for Guanajuato to-morrow,
but I'm not very keen about it.
I'm not very keen about anything.
Drearily,
J.
_Two Hours Later._
P.S. We took a little _paseo_ in the moonlight and things looked
brighter in the dark! The only reason the C.E. gets a little annoyed
is that he cannot bear to see me in distress or danger. He was very
nice about promising to help me smooth the path for _Romeo_ and
_Juliet_.
We pass through Guadalajara and I'll run in to see Dolores Tristeza.
J.
_On the Train to Guanajuato._
Sally, she came running to meet me and flung herself into my arms!
The sister says she's never done that to any one before, and she told
me the child had talked of me constantly. They're going to let me
take her out for a whole day when we come back. She called "_Hasta
la vista!_"--and threw me a kiss. She has quite wiped out the
lizard and the _insurrecto_.
_Later._
This is the most fascinating place yet! I'm glad the C.E. lives here,
rather than in the cloying prettiness of the _tierra caliente_. It's
great fun, arriving at a new place after dark. The town is high in
the hills above the station and we came up in a mule car, rattling
through the twisting, narrow streets. I sat near the driver, only
his soft, bright eyes showing between his high-wrapped _serape_ and
his low-drawn _sombrero_, and he told me that his mules were named
Constantino and The Pine Tree, faithful animals both of whom he
tenderly loved. The few pedestrians scuttled into doorways or
flattened themselves against the walls as we caromed past, and from
time to time he blew a deafening blast on a crumpled horn.
We stepped from the car straight into the office of the hotel, and
then the C.E. and I set out with Lupe to escort her to her uncle's
house, but at the first dark turning she gave a smothered little
scream and melted into the arms of a dusky cavalier. Emilio, when
he could spare the time to be introduced, proved something of a
landscape,--large for a Mexican, very much the patrician with his
slim hands and feet and correct Castilian manner. Guanajuato is
rather old-fashioned and he wears the high class, native costume,
and when Lupe is at home here, she always wears a _reboso_ instead
of a hat.
He is the son of so many revolutions, it must make him dizzy to
remember them, but I like him and I mean to help him win his pearl
maiden. He discreetly left us before we reached Lupe's house and
delivered her over to a very impressive Blue-beardish sort of person
who was very gracious to us and asked me to visit Lupe. I shall,--it
fits in perfectly with my plans! I go there to-morrow.
Meanwhile, I go to sleep!
Drowsily,
JANE.
_At Señor Don Diego's Palacio._
Sally, _mía_, how you'd adore this house! The floors are of dull-red
tiles and they are massaged three times a day, and the whole thing
is medieval in flavor,--a flock of velvet-voiced, dove-eyed servants
who adore Lupe and are pledged to her cause. Old Cristina, who was
her mother's nurse, is to be our stoutest ally.
Every night for an hour Emilio stands under her balcony "playing the
bear." Lupe, her face shrouded in her _reboso_, leans over and
whispers. I hover in the background like _Juliet's_ nurse. Afterward
the C.E., having ridden in from his mine, comes for me, and we sally
forth in the night like the Caliph and walk slowly up and down the
Street of Sad Children, where the music comes daintily to us,
filtered through the trees. Sometimes "Emily," as the C.E. wickedly
calls him, joins us, to talk of his two loves,--Lupe, and Mexico.
Sally, never laugh again at the Mexican revolutions,--they're not
funny, only pitiful.
My chief task now is to infuse a quality of hope and--_ginger_--into
these little lovers. Sometimes their attitude of _Dios no lo
quiso_--heaven wills otherwise--makes me want to shake them, but
slowly and surely I'm rousing them to action.
To-day we visited the prison here ... not the show model of Mexico
City. This one is a hold-over from the Dark Ages. Young and old,
gentle and simple, murderers and thieving children--all herded in
together. In the huge court, before pillars with chains, a _peon_
was mopping up some dark stains.... Ugh! This is the broken heart of
Mexico where tears and blood are brewing.
JANE.
_One Momentous Morning!_
All our little plans are perfected, Sally! We have to act quickly for
Lupe's Tio Diego is more irate than usual, and "Emily's" papa
languishes in prison, and there is a plot on foot to rescue him and
make him Governor or something.
The Budders find the situation singularly lacking in thrill, and feel
they would enjoy the safe and uneventful streets of San Francisco,
and we start north day after to-morrow night. They are interested in
my pretty _novios_ and will timidly help us.
It is all very simple. In the afternoon Lupe and I will stroll to the
little church where she was baptized and where the gentle old priest
is a friend of "Emily's" family. Emilio and the C.E. will be waiting.
Two of us are expeditiously wed. Lupe and I stroll back alone,
halting to take a cup of chocolate with cinnamon in the _dulcería_;
dine sedately with Tio Diego. Then I, reminding him that I am about
to return to the States with my relatives, take farewell of him,
thanking him (feeling a good deal of the viper that bites the hand
that feeds it) for his hospitality. Lupe and I then repair to her
rooms for a last chat. Presently Emilio and the C.E. arrive beneath
the balcony. I emerge, join the C.E., and go briskly with him
through the dusk to the street car and thence to the station where
the Budders are waiting and leave for Silao on the nine-o'clock
train.
Only, as the intelligent reader will have gathered, it will be Lupe
who melts into the distance in my frock and cloak, with my thickest
chiffon veil over her face, and Emilio who strides at her side in the
C.E.'s suit and overcoat and hat and the big, dark goggles he's been
diligently wearing lately, and a scarf about his neck against the
menace of the night air, while the C.E. in actuality, in _caballero_
costume, gazes adoringly up at me on Lupe's _Juliet_ balcony! Rather
neat, what?
We hold the pose, the C.E. and I, until we hear the heartening
whistle of the train, when he slips away to change his clothes and I,
escorted by old Cristina, go back to the hotel and follow the Budders
to Guadalajara in the morning. I don't see how it can possibly fail.
Emilio's family owns large _ranchos_ up in Durango, where the
elopers will be quite safe in a mountain fastness, and they will
arrive there by craft, not buying through tickets, doubling now and
then.
This is much more fun than eloping myself!
Excitedly,
JANE.
P.S. Speaking of which, the C.E. thinks it high time his case came up
for hearing, and I've promised to give it serious consideration as
soon as E. and L. are on their train. He had a quaint idea that the
old priest might as well make it a double wedding!
_The Next Night._
Only think, Sally dear, this time to-morrow night it will all be
accomplished! I've never been so thrilled in all my days.
And there's another reason for it beside my pussy willow maid's
romance! (No, not that! Not yet, at any rate!) It was this evening,
early, when she and I were walking, and they were playing _La
Golondrina_. Lupe was silent, deep in her own rosy thoughts. We
passed the entrance to the "Street of Sad Children" and the name and
the mournful magic of the music conjured up Dolores Tristeza for me,
and the thought that I should soon see her again, but only to say
good-by.
Then, quite suddenly and serenely, with no bothering doubts or
"if's," I knew. I knew the thing I am going to do. I'm going to take
her, to have her and keep her always. I'm twenty-eight years old,
sound body and sane mind, with a steadily fattening income; I defy
them to say I'm not the fittest adopter they ever saw. I know she'll
want to come with me, and I know I couldn't leave Mexico heart-whole
without her. Just as I arrived at this satisfying conclusion I
glanced up; we were passing a little _pulquería_ whose
name--painted gorgeously--was "The Orphan's Tear!" Wasn't that
fitting?
I can't wait to see her and tell her!
JANE.
_The Afternoon._
SALLY DEAREST,
We are just home from the wedding and I wish you could see Lupe's
dewy-eyed joy. I ache with tenderness for her. I know now why mothers
always weep at weddings--I very nearly did myself, and I know I shall
in ten years or so, when I see my Dolores Tristeza, standing like
that, star-eyed, quivering-lipped.
When she slips away in the dusk to-night I shall put a period to my
thought of María de Guadalupe Rosalía Merced Castello. I want to keep
this fragrant memory of her.
"Yet, ah, that spring should vanish with the rose!
That youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!"
I refuse to fancy my pussy-willow girl, my pearl maiden, in ten
years, with a mustache and no corsets and eight weak-coffee-colored
babies! _Adíos, Lupe mía!_ Go with God!
Everything is in readiness. The dear old Budders, trembling with
excitement, will be waiting at the train. As for me--as for my own
little affair--I'm pushing that away, until my _novios_ are safe.
I'm pushing away that moment on the balcony, when we hear the train
whistle. Sally, I don't _know_! This lovely, lazy, ardent land works
moon magic on staid professional women!
Mistily,
JANE.
_Guadalajara,
Two Days Later._
SALLY DEAREST,
It was mean to make you wait for the next thrilling installment of my
Mexican best-seller, but this is the first moment when I've thought I
could put down, coherently and cohesively, what happened. Happened is
a palely inadequate word;--burst,--exploded--erupted, would be
better!
It worked like a charm. They got away. I leaned from Lupe's balcony
in the fragrant dusk and listened to their footfalls dying away. The
C.E., shrouded to his eyes, looked up and whispered that "Emily's"
_charro_ trousers had nearly ruined everything at the last moment;
he had needed vaseline and a shoehorn and a special supplication to
St. James to get them on. We giggled like sixteen-year-olds. The
C.E. said--
"Lettice, Lettice, let down your golden hair,
That I may climb by a golden stair!"
I was so pleased with him for remembering his fairy-tales. I was so
pleased with him and so fond of him and so happy over my _novios_
that I couldn't keep my beautiful plan a secret any longer. I told
him what I had decided about Dolores Tristeza.
My dear! I wish you could have heard him! He was another person
entirely. He said it was the maddest, wildest, most sickly
sentimental, impractical thing he'd ever heard! He raved on and on,
always coming back to the point of her clouded parentage. I told him
he was perfectly mid-Victorian,--that any one living in the present
century knows that there are no illegitimate _children_--just
illegitimate fathers and mothers! But it never budged him. He was,
for the first time, a most uncivil engineer. "Besides," I said,
"beauty and wit is the love child's portion!"
It must have been funny, really, raging at each other in whispers. He
began to burble about heredity and I told him I was planning an
environment that would bleach out the heredity of the Piper Family,
and he said that it couldn't be done, and I said that he was a
pagan-suckled-in-a-creed-outworn, and just then the train
whistled--the signal for what was to have been our melting moment,
and we were both so mad we were fairly jibbering! And at that very
instant old Cristina came running to tell us to fly at once, as Don
Diego had decided to have Emilio arrested!
Before we could spread a wing, a little guard of opera bouffe
soldiers was rounding the corner. I just whispered--"Stick! They'd
stop them at Silao!" when they were upon him. He was a brick, I must
admit. He just hitched the _serape_ higher and pulled the _sombrero_
lower and trudged away in somber silence. It seemed the only decent
and sporting thing for me to stick, too, so I flung on Lupe's cape
and covered my face with a _mantilla_ and fled after them. The C.E.
was furious and tried his frantic best to make me go back, but I
wouldn't and I whispered to him that I'd never forgive him as long
as I lived if he told and spoiled everything. My dear, they took us
to that horrible prison ... with the bloodstains on the floor! The
man at the desk was nearly asleep. He scribbled something in his
Dream Book and produced a key three feet long at least, unlocked a
door, pushed us in, and clanged it shut behind us. We were in the
main court with the murderers and the newsboys and the sodden
drunkards.... A guard with a gun showed us two cells opening off the
court. We crouched on stools in the back of one of them and the C.E.
said between his teeth, "Keep that thing over your face and keep
_still_!"
Then I stopped admiring myself and realized what I had done and where
I was ... a Gringo woman in a Guanajuato prison at night.... But
every hour that I stayed there saw my _novios_ nearer to safety,
and the Budders wouldn't know and wouldn't worry. Sally, I'm glad I
had a firm Vermont Scriptural upbringing! I can always find
something, ready to my hand,--a staff to lean on. I thought of a
funny one I've always loved--one of the Proverbs, I think----
"_The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous runneth
into it and is safe._"
I wasn't very sure I was "a righteous" but I tried valiantly to
remember all the worthy actions I had done, and I don't mind telling
you they rather piled up,--from Lupe to the bored old bear. I
runneth-ed into my tower and felt a good deal safer, I make no doubt,
than my poor C.E.
There was a nameless age of black silence, and then there was a
crowded hour of glorious life. When I heard the shouts and then the
shots I tried to remember Sydney Carton and the French aristocrats
taking snuff on the steps of the guillotine, and I tried to think of
something handsome and dressy in the way of a farewell speech, in
case it might ever be reported in the States. The C.E. was splendid,
only, when the great doors clanged open and the mob streamed in
calling wildly for Emilio Hernandez, he very naturally failed to hold
up his hand and say "Present." We both thought that his hour had
struck and you may imagine my horror and remorse. Well, they began a
cell-to-cell canvass, but when they flashed the lantern on us they
shouted with joyful triumph. They were not executioners but rescuers!
They were revolutionists, come to save Emilio and his papa, the
General. That gentleman arrived on the run, panting, demanding his
son. Alarums and excursions! Explanations. I think the bitterest
moment of the whole hideous time for the poor C.E. was when "Emily's"
papa kissed him!
Sally, I'm running down like a mechanical toy,--I can hardly write
another word. I was escorted to my hotel and thence to a dawn train
for Guadalajara. The meek C.E. renewed his suit; he said I could
adopt the whole _hospicio_ if I wanted to, but I said "_Adios_" and
I think in his head, if not his heart, he was rather relieved. Poor,
dear, extremely civil engineer! His tastes are simple and his wants
are few,--just a limp, lovely lady in the background of his life,
waiting prettily for him to come home and tell her what to think.
That man doesn't want a help-meet; he wants a _harîm_.
They are unwinding several thousand miles of red tape, but at the
end, like the pot of gold and the rainbow, I shall find my Dolores
Tristeza, and there will be one pair of mournful eyes the less in
this land of smiles and sobs.
_Adíos_, poor, pretty, passionate, shrugging Mexico! Go with God!
I'm coming _home_, Sally _mía_!
J.
P.S. The C.E.'s days before he knew me were just a string of wooden
beads; afterward, they were a string of fire-crackers!
P.S. II. Michael Daragh is going to be frightfully pleased with me
for wiping the orphan's tear; but he'll make me see that there's just
as much poetry and more punch in wiping the orphan's nose!
CHAPTER XVII
Once, long ago, coming home from her self-imposed exile to the lean,
clean Island in Maine, Jane had dreaded, a little, her re-meeting with
Michael Daragh, but on the trip home from Mexico and California she had
no such feeling. Doubts were over and done with forever. The flight had
been for the purpose of getting perspective; perspective made her grave
Irishman, her stern St. Michael, loom up and up until he filled her
horizon. Her heart had been allowed to drift with the tide in the lyrical
interlude in the lovely, lazy land she had come from, but--save perhaps
for certain misty moments--it had insisted on swimming stoutly upstream.
"I am going back to Michael Daragh," she told herself gladly and unashamed,
and the rhythm of the train, hurrying across the continent, repeated it
in a joyful, endless litany--"Going--back--to--Michael--Daragh!"
Jane leaned back in her quiet compartment (tangible evidence of solid
success) and watched the desert miles and the prairie miles sliding away
beside her, and warmed her heart and soul with the thought of Michael's
face when he should first see her again. Now, when the swift gladness
leapt up in his eyes and the color ran up in his thin cheeks and his
whole face glowed from within with its stained-glass-window look, she
would not turn away from him, but to him,--gladly, royally, lavishly,
with all that she had and all that she was.
She wired Mrs. Hills from Chicago the day but not the hour of her return,
but sent no word to Michael Daragh. That would savor of a command, a
summons, and she was too happily humble for that. He would know from the
boarding-house keeper that she was near, and he would be waiting for her.
Like a timid tourist, she was hatted and veiled and gloved long before
they entered the grimy outskirts of the city, and sat, hot-cheeked,
breathing fast, on the edge of her seat, far more thrilled and shaken
than she had been, four years and more ago, when she made her exodus from
the village to the wide world. The narrow strip of mirror between the
windows framed her radiant face; now indeed was she _anointed with the
oil of joy above her fellows_.
Between a slight delay of the train, and the snail's pace of the taxicab
through the traffic, it would be quite six o'clock before she reached
Mrs. Hetty Hills' house in Washington Square; he would be absolutely
certain to be home.
Everything took on an especial beauty and significance,--the crowded
streets, the shop windows, the lights, the people,--her heart went out to
all of them--rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; they were Michael's
and they would be hers. He should have that oil of joy for his work, for
his high, selfless purposes.
It was hard to wait even an instant to see him, to have him ask, and to
answer, but it was wonderful to wait, in faith and utter confidence. The
sense of haste and impatience fell away; it must happen as it would,
serenely, naturally.
She did not mind that it took her many seconds to find the exact amount
and then a lavish tip for her driver, and she noted with satisfaction
that the faithful Mabel had seen her from an upper window and would
spread the glad tidings.
Mrs. Hetty Hills, a little stouter and grayer and more prosperous than
she had been four years earlier, stood in the doorway. "Well, now, I
_am_ glad!" she declared. "I'm free to say I thought it was a risk, your
traipsing round Mexico with all those revolutions and epidemics and
things! My, but you look fine, child! I believe my soul it's done you a
world of good! 'Praise to the face is open disgrace,' but you don't look
a day over eighteen and I'd swear it on a stack of Bibles!"
"_Nice_ Mrs. Hills," said her star boarder, hugging her heartily. "How
are you? And how is everybody?"
"Well, I'm pretty good now," said the ex-villager, earnestly, "but you
can tell your folks I was miserable enough a week ago yesterday. I guess
if I was the give-up kind I'd have been flat on my back. I don't know
when I've ever had such a spell. My throat ached and I could hardly drag
one foot after another, and even my eyeballs----"
"But you're fine now, aren't you? I'm so glad! I'm sure you'd been
overdoing. And how is--how are all the others?"
"Oh ... about the same. Mrs. Ramsey doesn't get out to her concerts any
more, on account of her leg, and that makes her bluer'n a whetstone, but
otherwise I guess we're all pretty much of a muchness. Everybody
misses--land t' goodness," she caught herself up, "I guess there _is_
one piece of news! I guess there _is_ one change, sure enough!"
"What?" asked Jane, sitting down suddenly on one of the stiff hall
chairs.
"Why, Mr. Daragh! He's gone home to Ireland!"
("You've got to say something! You've got to make a remark!") Jane told
herself, fiercely, but it seemed a fearful pause before she heard her
voice and it sounded thin and queer. "Oh, is that so? Has he?"
"Yes, went off like a shot! Got a cable from some of his folks. All he
said was he was called home. Awful close-mouthed for an Irishman. All the
Irish _I_ ever knew before--I think he gave Mabel a note to put in your
room. Want I should send her up for it?" asked the landlady eagerly.
"No, thanks," said Jane, very creditably. "There isn't any hurry. And how
is Emma Ellis, Mrs. Hills?" She sat chatting for ten minutes by her wrist
watch and then took her leisurely way upstairs and then she chatted
another five with Mabel before she attacked the mile of mail upon the
desk in her sitting room.
It was a brief little note; illness and imminent death in his family--he
had time for this line only--and he wanted God to save her kindly and he
was her friend, Michael Daragh. It was the sort of little note, she told
herself, that a thoughtful man would write with the good Mabel in the
back of his mind. She felt a sense of daze and dizziness and she sat with
her hat and cloak on until the dinner gong rent the air, waiting much as
Michael Daragh had waited, long ago, when he had listened for the sound
of the motor, bearing her uptown with Rodney Harrison, and then had torn
up the narrow strip of paper which bore her foolish little postscript.
She took herself resolutely in hand and went briskly down to dinner, and
regaled Mrs. Hills and the music students and the teachers and bank
clerks and elderly, concert-going ladies (one of whom went no more) with
the gay but expurgated text of her conquest of Mexico. There was talk of
Michael Daragh, and one of the younger music students ventured, pinkly,
the theory that Mr. Daragh had been called home to inherit a title.
"Yes," said Jane with quick sympathy, "I shouldn't wonder in the least!
He's always seemed a belted earl sort of person, for all his
other-worldly ways, hasn't he?" It was a relief to talk of him lightly
and easily like this. "Or a Squire, at any rate! Something
picturesque,--something story bookish!"
"Oh," giggled the music student, delighted at her backing, "won't it be
thrilling to get a letter with a crest and be told that he'll never be
back again?"
"Lord Lovel, he stood at his castle gate,
A-combing his milk-white steed,----"
chanted Jane, merrily. "I can quite picture him, can't you? Only the
milk-white steed will be immediately hitched to a delivery wagon of his
worldly goods, for distribution to the poor. Yes, that is without doubt
what has happened! I can see adoring yokels pulling their forelocks to
him! He'll fit beautifully into that background!" Thus her tongue,
running ripplingly on, while her heart, suddenly released from its numb
depression, wired her blithe reassurance. "He's coming back,--coming back
to _me_--coming back _soon_!"
The high mood stayed with her, even though the days and weeks slipped by
without word from him. She was entirely happy and confident, but she
found herself too restless to settle down to her work. She had a sense of
excited waiting for something beautiful to happen, and a warm and kindly
yearning to make every one else as happy as herself. She went often to
Hope House and sparred with Emma Ellis; neither of them had heard from
the Irishman, and while Jane was secretly able to interpret this with
comfort to herself, the other was not. Miss Ellis leaned romantically
toward the theory of the younger music student; Mr. Daragh had probably
gone home to inherit property and assume responsibilities; she had always
known there was nothing ordinary about Mr. Daragh; she had always felt
that he was a great person, stooping to this life of abnegation.
"But I think," said Jane flippantly, "he's much more likely to have been
a Sin-eater!"
"A--_what_?"
"A Sin-eater. I'm sure they're still being worn in Ireland. A Sin-eater
is a man who has had a great sorrow or committed a great crime----"
"Miss _Vail_!"
"--and lives in a damp and dismal cave across a slimy moor and whenever
any one dies unshriven, he is sent for, and he comes after dark, his face
shrouded, and prays and moans all night beside the corpse, eating all he
possibly can of the food which has been placed about it, and what he
can't consume on the spot he takes away before dawn, in a sack, and that
is his larder, you see, until the next sudden death! And, of course, the
idea is that he has taken the sins of the departed upon his own soul, and
that when he has done it long enough and meekly enough he will be
permitted to die, himself, and other people's sins will have miraculously
cleansed him of his own!"
"I never heard anything so--so revolting," said the Superintendent in her
most smothered voice.
"Oh, do you find it so? To me it seems very quaint and charming." She was
ashamed of her small-boy impishness but for sheer high spirits she could
not seem to stop. "But perhaps," she allowed it grudgingly, "he didn't
commit a crime; perhaps he was merely crossed in love, or--likeliest of
all--assumed the burden of another's misdeed! A wild young brother, or
The Heir! That's it,--The Heir! And Michael, with proper younger-son
humility, realized that he didn't count, and took the blame and fled to
the States, and now The Heir has died, first doing the decent thing in
the way of death-bed remorse and confession. And, of course, there's a
girl in it somewhere, and I'm sure she has waited for Michael all these
years instead of marrying The Heir, aren't you?"
But for the most part her mood was one of amazing gentleness and
serenity, with that insistent desire for being good enough and worthy
enough for the glory about to descend upon her. She made little
pilgrimages to all the people they had helped together,--to Ethel and
Jerry and Billiken in Rochester, snugly prosperous and happy, with a
little Jerry, now, whose ears flanged exactly as his father's did; to
Chicago, to confer with little Miss Marjorie and the Roderick Frosts
about the making of the old house where Roderick IV was born into a
Maternity Home, and to gladden the good little Stranger's Friend with a
fat check for her work, and to puncture Mrs. Mussel's gloom with
substantial gifts and the bright and bonny refurnishing of the Christian
room for girls such as Edna Miles pretended to be; to catch up with the
girl who had taken her "CROWDED HOUR" to success, always on tour now, in
one of her playlets, and married to the brother of "BROTHER" ("BROTHER"
himself having given up and gone to make the long fight on the desert).
She went, fur-bundled and red-cheeked, to spend a week-end with Deacon
Gillespie and "Angerleek" at Three Meadows, and found one of the
daughters at home, and the old man told her that two of the sons were
coming for their summer vacations. Angelique was animated with timid
cheer; _he'd_ been different, gentler, since Danny....
Jane went back to New York with June in her heart. Was not this a part of
her life with Michael since he had sent her to that lean, clean island to
snare back her soul? This was part of the harvest they had sown together,
for everything she had done since coming to know him had been shared with
him. There came a moment, of course, when her sense of sanctification
broke like a bubble. "I feel like the Elsie Books," she said, grinning
her boy's grin at herself. "I'd better go home and let Mrs. Wetherby put
me in my place!"
But even in her Vermont village she found balm. They might hold, with
Mrs. Hills, that "Praise to the face is open disgrace," and be chary of
effusions, but Jane Vail was the brightest jewel in their crown, and it
was only the deafest and dimmest old ladies who asked her if she was
still going on with her literary work.
Mrs. Wetherby, although she would never forgive Jane to her dying day,
was clearly thankful to have Martin all to herself. She fed him to
repletion and washed and ironed his silk shirts with her own hands, and
she loved to say at meetings of The Ladies' Aid or The Tuesday Club,
"Well, Marty says his mother's _his_ girl!" Martin himself was heavily
cheerful; he could see that Edward R. Hunter was pretty much tied down.
It would not be very long, now, before there was no "Asst." in front of
the "Cashier" on his door at the bank.
The Hunters had now what the humorist, Edward R., called "almost three
children," and they were building on a new nursery which would be,
without doubt, a hot, pink one. They had a little way of saying, "What
have you been writing lately, Janey?" which conveyed, pleasantly but
unmistakably, that people with their full and busy lives could not be
expected to keep up with all the lighter current literature. Sarah
Farraday, her earnest, blonde face a little lined and sharpened, had more
piano pupils than she could possibly manage; two of her older girls were
taking the beginners for her, and there was a recital almost every month
in the burlapped studio where once the chubby driving horses had been
housed. And in the old, elm-shaded house where the middle-aged maid still
held sway, and where Aunt Lydia Vail had lived and died in her plump and
pleasant creed, Jane and Sarah spent the night together, and this time
there was no sprightly talk of Michael Daragh or Rodney Harrison and no
pungent comparisons of them and their feelings for her; she was not
talking now, the nimble-tongued Miss Vail, but the friend of her youth
looked long at her glowing face, her deeply joyful eyes, and wondered,
and sighed a little, and went back to talk of her most brilliant pupils
and the worrying way her mother had of taking hard colds and keeping
them....
Jane came away from her village with an entirely clear conscience; no one
needed her there. She was her own woman, without let or hindrance, with a
shining sense of good work and good works she could wait for the joy
which was coming as certainly as the morning.
Then she came in late, one evening, to find Michael Daragh at the dinner
table, a little browned and warmed from good sea air, and Emma Ellis was
there--Mrs. Hills having telephoned and asked her to come to dinner and
welcome home the wanderer--and at once the old life, the old routine, the
old world, seemed to open and swallow him completely.
Lying wide-eyed in the dark, hours later, Jane told herself that even in
the midst of the watching boarders his look and word for her had been
filled with meaning; that it was inevitable that he should take Emma
Ellis home to Hope House; that there had been no opportunity to ask her
to wait up for him; that she had done the only possible thing in taking a
bright and cheery leave of Mrs. Hills and coming up to her rooms. She had
waited an hour in her sitting room--Michael Daragh had often dropped in
for a chat before she went to Mexico--but when at last she heard his feet
upon the stairs, they had carried him steadily on and up to his own
floor.
And the next day and the day after that she told herself that it was
perfectly natural for Hope House and Agnes Chatterton and kindred calls
to fill his every hour. She was waiting happily and surely, and a special
delivery letter from Rodney Harrison hardly registered on her
consciousness when Mabel brought it up to her one afternoon. It was a
brief letter, turgid, almost fierce in its tone. Rodney Harrison was not
going to be put off any longer, it appeared. He would meet Jane at the
theater that evening (where she must go to pass upon the performance of a
new character-man in her second gay little play) and then she was going
to supper with him, and to drive in his new speedster, and to make up her
mind--no, not that, he'd made it up for her, once and for all--but to
settle this matter definitely and right. She read it with an indulgent
smile and put it down on her desk. Good old Rodney ... good old
man-she-met-on-the-boat....
Her telephone rang at her elbow. She had had a soft little sleigh bell
substituted for the harsh, commercial clang and even the most utilitarian
call took on a tone of revelry, but now it had an especially gay and
lilting sound, she thought. Michael Daragh's voice over the wire lacked
its usual quality of serenity; he sounded unsure of himself; almost--shy,
and Jane's grip on the receiver grew taut and her cheeks flamed.
"It's the way I'm asking you something now I've never dared ask you
before, Jane Vail," purled the brogue, "and I'm wondering, dare I?"
"I--I'm wondering, too," said Jane.
"'Tis nothing at all you might be thinking it is! Ever since I'm back
I've been screwing up my courage--but 'tis the boldest and brazenest
thing my like would ever be daring to ask the likes of you!" She had
never heard him talk so like a stage Irishman before; she had never known
him so moved. "Whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'yes,' and whiles I'm
thinking you'll say me 'no' and whiles I'm destroyed entirely with the
doubt! I'll be there inside the hour, or a half-hour itself, and let you
be merciful, Jane Vail!"
"I will be waiting," she said, "and I will be merciful."
"God love you!" he cried and hung up abruptly.
She rose from her chair and stood in the middle of her clever orange and
black room, icy hands clamped tightly to her burning cheeks. So!
Journeys' end! She flew into the other room and with unsteady fingers
divested herself of her severely smart business dress and flung a creamy
cloud over her head. She justified this costume vigorously to herself. It
was five o'clock--almost evening--and she wanted him to see her thus, he
who had hardly ever seen her in other than the bread-and-butter garb of
every day, but when she looked in the glass she shook her head. If he had
at last dared to ask her to leave her sunny fields for his shadowed
paths, was this the vision to reassure him?
She put on a mellow velvet of deepest brown, cunningly cut, and she had
the satisfaction of knowing that it made her look like a young queen in
an old frieze, but not, it was to be admitted, like a durable help-meet
for a Settlement worker.
Her windows were wide to the tentative advances of spring and now she
heard a ringing tread upon the pavement below, and with breathless haste
she pulled off her regal raiment and flung herself into the primmest and
plainest of her work frocks--a stern little brown serge with Puritan
collar and cuffs, and this time she nodded approval at her reflection.
Here was, indeed, a creature for human nature's daily food!
She heard his feet upon the stairs, his knuckles on the door of her
sitting room, but she waited for a last long look. When she looked into
that mirror again, she would see the glorified, glad face of Michael
Daragh's love.
CHAPTER XVIII
The big Irishman was pulling burdened breaths and haste had flushed his
lean cheeks, and they faced each other for an instant in silence before
he caught her hands in a hard clutch. "I will be swift," he said, "the
way the courage won't be oozing out of me!"
"Yes, Michael Daragh!" She stood up straight and proud before him,
waiting for his word. She had waited long for it, turning her back alike
on prosperous, opulent love and busy and purposeful spinsterhood, knowing
that happiness for her was the grave, young saint whose chief concern
would be always for the world's woe. Richly dowered though she was in
body and brain, fit for a man's whole devotion, she would be content to
share him with the submerged, with the besmirched and befouled of the
earth. And at last he was speaking.
"Many's the bold boon I've begged, but never the like of this," he said,
his gray eyes holding hers, "but _never_ the like of this! Would
you--_could_ you--be dining with a dope fiend?"
It seemed a long time to Jane before she worked her hands free of his
clasp and heard her voice, "I--don't believe I understand----"
"Why would you, indeed?" he cried, penitently. "Let you sit down till I'm
telling you."
She seated herself in her straight desk chair, and--"Dining with a dope
fiend," she heard herself saying. "It sounds rather like a line from a
comic song, doesn't it?"
"A lad he is, just," said Daragh, earnestly. "It got hold of him after a
sickness in the smooth devil's way it has. Six months, now, I'm toiling
with him. Times I have him on his feet, times he's destroyed again. 'Twas
a terrible pity I had to be leaving him the while I was home in Ireland.
Well, I found him doing rare and fine, God love him, back at his drawing
again in the scrap of a studio I found for him, but a pitiful tangle of
nerves and fancies. What he needs now is a friend--his own sort--some one
that speaks his own tongue. He thinks the decent world will have none of
him,--a weak, pitiful thing isn't worth the saving. Fair perished with
the lonesomeness, he is. 'I used to know women,' he was telling me,
'pretty women, clever ones; I miss them--the sound of their voices and
the look of their white hands and their making tea, and the light, gay
talk we'd be having!' Then he sat, limp, with the grit gone out of him.
'Not one of them would come near me, now,' he said. 'Holding their skirts
away from me, passing by on the other side.' And then--may the devil fly
away with my tongue, Jane Vail--I heard myself saying, 'There's one won't
be doing that, lad! There's one, the best and fairest and cleverest of
them all, the wonder-worker of the world,' I said, 'will be putting on
her gayest gear and be coming here to make tea-talk with you, the way
you'll think the month of June itself is happened in your studio!'" He
stopped, looking down at her with anxious eyes.
Jane took her own time about looking at him, and when she did it was
almost as if she had never seen him before. He was still wearing his
winter suit, this soft spring weather, and it wanted pressing and his
boots were far from new. He stooped a little as he stood there, waiting
for her verdict, as if even the broadest shoulders wearied finally of
other people's loads, and the line of his zealot's jaw was sharper than
ever. She felt nothing but scorn for him. He had birth, breeding,
abilities; why must he wrap himself in monkish sackcloth, in monkish
celibacy? Rage rose in her, rage and ridicule for herself. So, this was
the man for whom she had dressed herself three times, cunningly and
provocatively? This was the man to whom she had come running with her
heart held out in her hands,--her sane, sound, hitherto unassailable
heart, twenty-eight years old,--when he required of her merely a service
such as he might ask of any of his Settlement workers,--money from this
one, work from that one, charm and cheer from her, Jane Vail.
Worry throve in his eyes. "I'm doubting I had the right to ask you. Is it
too much, indeed?"
Jane rose, lifting her shoulders ever so slightly. "The right? Why,
surely. You're asking me for an hour or so of my time just as you would
ask me for a check. I am to lift up the light of my countenance on this
young gentleman, then, and convince him that he is still socially
desirable?"
"I'll be praising you all the long days of my life if you will," he said
humbly, continuing to stand.
"Sit down, then, while I put on my hat," she said carelessly, quite as
she would have spoken to a messenger, and moved toward her bedroom door.
"Please"--he took one step after her--"it's riot but your little brown
gown would charm the birds off the bush,--and it's not that I'd be
mentioning it or asking it for myself, but----"
"No," said Jane, and her voice was as bright and dry as her eyes, "one
could hardly fancy you asking anything for yourself."
"I would not, indeed," he said, grateful for the exoneration, "but I'm
wondering ... wouldn't you seem grander to the lad in a--a gayer frock,
perhaps?"
"Very possibly I would," said Jane, reasonably. "But I shall have to keep
you waiting a little longer then." She went into the other room and shut
the door slowly and softly to demonstrate the perfect control of her
nerves, and proceeded to make her fourth toilet for the hour. She took
her time and did her best, which was very good indeed when she put her
mind to it, and she hummed a snatch of song all the while, just loud
enough to carry to the study, but every time she met her shamed and
furious eyes in the glass her face crisped into hotter flame and she
stopped singing.
She kept him waiting for twenty-five minutes, but his eyes silently
acquitted her of having wasted her time. They set off at once, Jane
agreeing pleasantly that it would be better to walk. Michael Daragh had
never seen her more alert and alive to the things about her. Nothing
escaped her darting glance,--the lyrical, first grass in the Square, the
stolid and patient tiredness of an Italian crone on a bench, the
pictorial quality of a hurdy-gurdy man, and yet, for all her chattiness,
the smart young person beside him seemed leagues upon leagues away from
him. He supposed, miserably, that she was aghast at him for this
preposterous demand upon her, but he was not penitent; he would have done
it again. His people's needs were to be met with anything he would buy,
borrow, or beg for them, and this radiant creature's beauty and light
were only given to her in trust, after all, to be dispensed and diffused.
"You've the step of a gypsy boy," he said presently, "for all the foolish
shoes you will be wearing. We're here now. 'Tis here he has his little
hole of a studio."
It was a decent enough place for working and living and Jane had no doubt
whatever that Daragh paid the rent. Their host was discovered bending
over a chafing dish which gave forth an arresting aroma. He was a sallow
youth with quick hands and too-bright eyes and he spoke in nervous jerks.
"How-do-you-do? How-do-you-do? Awfully good of you. Daragh says you are
interested in drawings--just look round, will you? I'll have this mess
ready in a minute. Daragh said he had to go up to town early, so we'll
have a combination supper tea." He flew to test the coffee, sputtering in
a percolator.
Jane, slipping out of her wrap, moved slowly and graciously about the
little room, well and pleasantly aware of Michael's anxious eyes upon
her. His wretched friend should have all the charm and cheer which he had
begged for him, but he himself should sit hungry at the feast. She picked
up a bold sketch in strong color and held it off with a very real
exclamation of interest. "This is _good_, Mr. Randal! This thing of the
old woman and pushcart! I like it a lot. And the bakeshop! It's good
stuff, all of it. What are you doing with it?"
"Nothing," said the young man, sullenly, his thin fingers beginning to
pluck at his face. "I've just started again. I've been ... ill. I suppose
Daragh's told you--about me?"
"Yes," said Jane, easily, "he's told me everything, I think, but what I'm
interested in now is--what are you going to do with this stuff?"
"I don't know," he said, slackly. "It depends on how I feel. Some
days"--his eyes shifted and fled before her gaze--"well, you know how it
is yourself with your own work,--when you're in the mood--when you have
an inspiration----"
"I don't know anything about that sort of piffle," said his guest,
severely. "It's my mood to beat my poet's piano four solid hours a day,
and I shouldn't know an inspiration if I met one in my mush bowl!"
He produced a nervous laugh. "Ah,--but you have your market! You're
_there_! There's the urge--the spur----"
She looked from the crisp and living lines of his pictures to his dead,
young flesh, to his fingers, locked together and straining, to keep them
from their telltale plucking. "Look here," she said, "why shouldn't we do
something together?"
"We--togeth--" he sat down limply on the end of his bed-couch, staring,
and she heard Michael's quickened breath behind her.
"Yes! Let's try a calendar of New York. I've always had one in the attic
of my mind. Twelve pictures, you know, with bits of verse, of
prose,--sketches like these of yours here. There are several which would
do just as they stand. This sort of thing, you know, but balanced--Grand
Street pushcarts and a group of girls going into Lucy-Gertrude's on Fifth
Avenue."
"I get you," he cried, jumping to his feet. "Colonel's lady and Judy
O'Grady----"
"But no propaganda!"
"No, no,--cut the Sob Sister stuff,--just the pattern of it all, the
mosaic----"
"Yes,--done objectively!"
"Right! Gad,--that sounds like a corking idea! When can we start? Have
you the text or--Good Lord--my eats!" He dashed to the noisy chafing-dish,
a faint color creeping up into the unpleasant whiteness of his skin.
"Everything's done! Where will you sit, Miss Vail? Give her this tray,
will you, Daragh--_and_ the napkin, man! Can she reach the sandwiches?
Oh, I'm forgetting my perfectly good salad! Well, how is it? I'm not
much of a cheffonier, but----"
"It's melt-in-the-mouth," said Miss Vail, warmly. "I'm going to have
twice of everything!" She drew him out; she led him on; she kept the
color in his face and his fingers quiet. By every pretty means in her
power she made it clear that she was having an uncommonly good time, that
he was distinctly her sort of person.
Michael Daragh sat back with deep wonder in his eyes. In all her
exquisite plumage she had alighted in this dull place, filling it with
freshness. And an onlooker would have gathered that the young artist and
the beautiful lady who wrote were the best of merry chums, the silent man
in the background a civilly tolerated outsider.
After a while something of this seemed to strike young Randal. "Look
here, Daragh, you haven't to start uptown yet! Why don't you contribute
something to the gayety of nations? Haven't you any parlor tricks?" Then
he caught up his own work and his grin faded. "Tricks ... yes, that's
what he can do, Miss Vail. Conjuring tricks. He can turn a skulking alley
rat into something faintly resembling a man--but"--his courage and
brightness fell from him like a masker's domino on the stroke of twelve
and the fingers rose to his face, picking and plucking--"he can't keep it
from turning back again."
"I can, indeed, lad," said the Irishman, stoutly.
"I don't know, Daragh ... I don't know." He leaned back on the couch,
spineless with nervous exhaustion, and Jane felt a sick distaste and
horror enveloping her.
"'Tis a true word, laddie," said Michael. "You don't know; none of us
know--and we don't have to know, praises be, beyond the next hour, beyond
the next step on the path." He rose and crossed slowly to the young man
and pushed him gently down until he was resting at full length on the
couch. "Easy, now! Let you lie there at your ease. Miss Vail knows how
you haven't the whole of your strength in you yet, and you painting and
drawing the day long!"
Young Randal muttered something brokenly and tried to rise, but the big
Irishman held him firmly. "Easy, I'm telling you!" The boy relaxed,
stretching out to his lank length, one arm crooked childishly over his
eyes, and Michael Daragh sat down beside him, his long legs folded under
him, on the floor. "'Tis the true word, surely," he said. "We don't know,
indeed. And--glory be--there's many the time that the thing you've braced
yourself so fine and strong to stand doesn't happen at all, and you never
have to stand it. That was the way of it with Maggie Kinsella at home,"
he said.
Jane, seeing his intention, stepped to the door and snapped off the
overhead light, and tilted the shade on the lamp until Randal's couch was
in shadow.
"I'm so ashamed ... with her here ..." it was a muffled whisper from
under the shrouding arm,--"so rotten weak...."
"This Maggie Kinsella makes the finest lace for miles about," said
Michael, unhearing, unheeding. "Rare tales she would be telling me and I
no higher than the sill of the window there, and I'd thought to find her
long dead and buried surely, the way she was always as old as the Abbey
itself. But no--there she was still in her bit of a cottage, the time I
was just home, the oldest old woman I ever saw out of a mummy's wrappings
and like a witch indeed with the poor, pockmarked face she has."
The figure on the couch was relaxing more and more now, and the Irishman
sank his voice to a purling murmur of brogue.
Jane found a low chair and propped her elbow on the arm of it and leaned
her cheek on her hand and closed her eyes. She did not want to look at
young Randal and she found that she could not look at Michael Daragh. She
was glad to be in a corner of the little room where the faint light of
the lamp did not penetrate; she wished it might have been complete
darkness to cover her. She was so unutterably tired ... never in her life
had she been so tired. And Michael Daragh, her best friend of four good
years, her--what should she say?--dream lover? Yes, that was sufficiently
cheap and sentimental and maudlin for the sort of thing she had indulged
in,--her dream lover for two blissful months, seemed as much of a
stranger to her now, as strange and as unpleasantly distasteful as the
young artist and dope fiend on the sagging bed-couch.
When the boy fell asleep, she would creep away, and _away_!
CHAPTER XIX
Meanwhile, the Irishman's voice went steadily on.
"Well, I told her there were great tales going the world over about her
lace making and her getting famous and proud through the length of the
land and I mind well the cackle of a laugh she gave. 'The loveliest lace,
is it? Now, isn't that the great wonder surely? The wizenedy, wrinkled
old hag with the God-help-you face makes the loveliest lace--' Then she
stopped short off and clapped a claw over her mouth and the scar on her
pockmarked face was a pitiful thing to see.
"'The curse of the crows on my tongue,' she said. 'Is himself out there
in the sun the way he'd be hearing me? No? Glory be to God then, he's off
to the Crossroads, to be picking up a copper maybe and the people going
by to the Fair.'
"I asked her why she didn't want her husband to be hearing her make mock
of her face, and she said, 'Have you the hunger on you for a tale, still,
man grown that you are? Well, then, let you sit down, lad, and listen
till I'm telling you the whole of it. Time was when I had a face on me
would keep a man from his sleep, and 'tis no lie I'm telling you. Tall
and fine I was, hair like a blackbird's wing, skin like new milk with the
flush of the dawn on it, eyes like a still pool in the deep of a wood.
Larry Kinsella was ever the great lad for making verses up out of his own
head. "Roses in Snow," is the silly name he would be calling me.' Then
she rocked herself to and fro and crooned in the cracked old voice she
had--
"'Faith and hope and charity,
A man has need of three!
I've the faith and hope in you,
You've charity for me!
"'With your lips and cheeks the rose,
That is blooming in the snow,
Yourself is all the miracle
A man would need to know!'
"'The proud, brazen hussy I was, God be good to us! Tossing my head,
stealing the other girls' lads the time we'd be footing it to the tune of
the Kerry Dance at the Crossroads in the full of the moon! Father
Quinn--may the angels spread his bed smooth--was always telling me to
take heed of my soul which would last me forever, and have done with the
sinful pride in the skin and the hair which would wither like grass. But
I went my ways with a scandalous come-hither in my eye, leaning over a
still pool till I'd see my bold face smiling back at me, and Larry
Kinsella stealing behind to whisper his verses in my ear.
"'Then came the sickness, the plague that shadowed five counties the way
you'd see a black cloud sailing down the sky of a June day. Nary a
village but paid its toll in death and doom. One of the first I was, and
one of the worst. Wirra, the weeks I lay on the sill of death's
door,--the gray days, the black nights.
"'Came the time when I heard Father Quinn's voice and he sitting beside
me, telling me slow and easy, the way you'd be talking to a child itself,
that Larry Kinsella was mending and calling for me. Well, I rose up,
destroyed with the weakness though I was, to be on the way to him, but
there in the bit of a glass on my wall I saw my face ... my face ...
Mary, be good to us ... _my face_! Back I fell in the black pit of
despair, praying for death itself. But it would not come to my bidding.
In the black of the night, in the gray of the dawn, the dreams that
tormented me! Larry's voice, wheedling and soft in my ear--
"'With your lips and cheeks the rose,
That is blooming in the snow----'
"'And always Father Quinn, wasted and worn with care for the living and
prayer for the dead, bidding me rise up on my two feet and go to the lad
I loved. Love, was it? God forgive me, the way I misnamed it then.
"'Well, then, in the dusk of one day I went with him, me leaning for
weakness on his tired arm. Out of every house peered a face, but there
was no lad begging a smile of me and no green envy at all in the glance
of the girls. When we were well past the whole of them I went down on my
two knees in the dirt of the road, the way I'd be praying at a shrine
itself, for there was a white moon rising in the soul of me and I began
to see clear. "Mary, Mother," I said, "God forbid the likes of me to be
driving a bargain with yourself, but give me the one thing only and I'll
never pester your ear again all the days of my life. Here in the dust I
make a heap of all my sins and vanities,--the toss of my head and the
tilt of my chin, the love-looks of the lads and the black hate of the
girls, and I'll burn them for a sacrifice the way the heathen would be
doing and go joyful on my way with the ashes in my mouth! Leave the
children to run from me, me, the one-time wonder of the weeping west;
leave the girls to make mock of my face; only Mary, Mother, for the sake
of the joy he had in me, let Larry Kinsella only of all the world be
seeing me still with the eyes of love, and see me fair!"
"'Then was a glad cry sounding and the pinched face of Father Quinn
shining like an altar and it lighted up for Easter itself. "Glory be to
God," he cried out in a great voice. "Now let you make haste to your
lad, for I heard the rustle of wings on that prayer will carry it high!"
"'When Larry Kinsella heard the sound of my foot on his step he leapt
up. Wirra ... down all the years I can hear the wild joy of him
still---- "Core of my heart, have you come? Alannah!--_With your lips
and cheeks the rose_----"
"'I opened my mouth to cry shame on him, mocking my face, but then the
peace of God came down on me like a deep rain on a parched field, and I
knew what way it would be with the two of us all the long days of this
world. Larry Kinsella was blind.'"
Michael had been speaking more and more slowly and softly and he did not
move for many moments after he had finished his tale. Then he stealthily
rose and bent over young Randal, and tiptoed away. "Asleep," his lips
barely formed the word, and he motioned Jane to follow him. She caught up
her wrap and crept after him.
"I wonder," Daragh paused in the outer hall, "would I better cover him
up?"
Jane nodded.
"Wait, then! I'll be soon back!"
When he came out again he was smiling. "Fine and fast asleep he is. He'll
never open an eye for hours! I'll look in on him again, on my way home
to-night. You were the wonder of the world to him, Jane Vail. But"--he
halted on the sidewalk and peered contritely at her through the soft
spring twilight,--"you are cruel weary!"
"I am ... tired," said Jane.
His voice gathered alarm. "I've never seen you the like of this. Shall I
be finding a cab to rush you home?"
Pride (where was her decent pride?) rallied in her, and took the place of
the earlier, racking rage. "I am not going home. I am going uptown--to
the theater. I've a new man in the character part." Suddenly she knew
what she was going to do. "I am going to meet Rodney Harrison there, and
we are going to have supper, and to drive!" Her voice grew decisive
again. That was it. Rodney Harrison. The man-she-met-on-the-boat. He
would be waiting for her, and he wanted her, and she intended to want
him. She visualized his special delivery letter, lying on her desk.
Rodney was quite justified. They would "settle the matter once and for
all, definitely and right." She would marry Rodney Harrison, and they
would live like sane human beings, comfortably, logically, merrily, and
there would be no dope fiends with plucking fingers and no Fallen Sisters
and self-righteous settlement workers and no drab days and drab ways in
their scheme of things.
"Well, then," Michael was still staring at her, unhappily, "will it be
the bus, or a taxi? Myself must go in the subway to another poor lad who
is waiting in Ninety-first Street, but----"
"I may as well take the subway, too." (He was not to suppose or surmise
that it bothered or burdened her to be with him.) "It will make me too
early, but there's a lot to talk over with them all. I've rather
neglected things lately." (Mooning in her candy-motto paradise!)
"I'm doubting the upper air is better for you, the way you're so white
and weary," Michael shook his head, but they went down from the mild
spring weather into the glare and blare of the world beneath. It was the
hour of the last mad homeward rush of the workers. They found seats, but
at the next station the packing and jamming began, and when they left the
third stop the car was a solid, cohesive mass of steaming humanity. Talk
was mercifully impossible. Only once Michael spoke, when he got up to
give his place to a thin girl in a soiled middy blouse.
"You could be getting out at the next, you know, to fill your lungs with
decent air, and go on in the bus----"
She shook her head and smiled very reasonably. She fixed her eyes on a
vehement advertisement in shrieking colors and tried to see how many
small words she could make out of the large one. "L-i-n-e, line, and
L-i-s-t, list"--(she would go into the leading lady's dressing room and
do her hair and put some color in her cheeks before she saw Rodney. Good
old Rodney! He had been faithful, as faithful and patient as Marty
Wetherby!)--"i-n, in, and r-i-"--the car was plunged into swift darkness
and the train shrieked and jolted to a dead stop.
The girl to whom Michael had given his seat jumped up and began to emit
short, gasping screams.
"There's no harm at all," said Daragh, pushing her back into her seat.
"The lights will be on again in two flips of a dead lamb's tail!"
The crowd took it good-naturedly enough. There were whistles and catcalls
from one end of the car and a noisy imitation of a kiss. Girls giggled
nervously. A man grew querulous: "Where are we? That's all I want to
know. Where are we? If we're near a station, we can get out and walk.
Where _are_ we?"
The minutes dragged. Men hurried by in the outer darkness with lanterns,
dim and ghoulish figures. Some one's foot was trodden on and a surly
scuffle ensued. "Cut that out!" said a sharp voice. "You don't want to
start nothin' here!"
Then the first man began again. "Where _are_ we? That's what I want
to know!" A woman whimpered that she was going to faint.
"Can't!" called a gruff voice, facetiously. "There ain't room!"
But it was immediately evident that she had carried out her program for
there was a shrill cry, "Oh, for God's sake! Get her up! Get her up! Get
her _up_! I'm--I'm _standing_ on her!"
People began to sway and mutter, to push and surge. Jane felt herself
lifted and swung to her feet on the seat where she had been sitting, and
the Irishman's big body was spread like a shield before her. His hands
were clamped upon the thin shoulders of the girl in the middy blouse, but
he twisted his head to speak to Jane. "It will be all right in a wink,"
he said.
"Yes," she answered.
The first man began to shout, "Open this door! Want us to die like rats
in a trap! Open this _door_!" There was a sound of splintering glass and
the acrid smell of smoke.
"Fire!" squealed the girl in Michael's hold, fighting to free herself.
"Steady!" he soothed. "Let you be still now, till----"
"Fire! Fire! Fire!" It ran from solo shrieks into a frantic chorus. The
middy blouse girl bit and clawed herself out of the Irishman's hands and
he turned and faced Jane, his grasp on the rail above them, covering her
with his body. "Lay hold of me," he commanded, and she locked her arms
about his neck. The smoke-laden air was filled now with the sound of
smashing windows, with labored breathing and moans and gasping sobs, with
the dull impact of blows, with the grinding, rasping contact of tightly
packed bodies. From time to time Michael called out to them to have
patience, to have courage, to wait, and other voices echoed his words,
but they were drowned out in the red sea of panic. Slowly, for all its
insane haste, the crowd, that portion of it still on its feet, began to
work its way through the shattered windows and doors into the black
passage outside. The pressure against Jane and Michael was greatly
lessened and she spoke with her lips close to his ear.
"Are we just to wait here until help comes?"
"We are just to wait here."
Presently she spoke again. "I am not afraid, M.D."
"I know you are not." He added a swift line in Gaelic.
When there was a cleared space about them, they sat down again on the
seat, hand in hand, like good children. The air was growing difficult.
"We must just wait until they come for us, mustn't we?" She was coughing
a little.
"We must just wait."
There was a shuddering groan from the floor, just at their feet, and he
bent with his pocket flash. It was the gaunt girl in the middy blouse....
"Keep fast hold of my coat," said Daragh. He bent and lifted the girl on
to the opposite seat. "There must be others. I must look."
"Let me hold the flash," said Jane. "That will give you both hands free.
I won't let go of you." They traversed the black length of the car, doing
the grim little they could do where there was anything to be done, and
then they went back to their corner. Jane's teeth were chattering. "But
I'm not afraid, M.D.," she said. "It's just--the ghoulishness of it! The
abysmal savagery--I can't _bear_ it!"
"Many there were as cool as ourselves," he said, "swept on by the panic
and couldn't help themselves. It was the wild few only that brought the
curse. And let you remember this--for every one that pushed and fought
and trampled there are twenty up there now, above ground, wondering what
way they'll help us the soonest, working for us, risking, daring----"
"Yes, I know it," said Jane obediently. She leaned back in her corner. It
was true that she was not afraid. She felt very peaceful and very gentle.
The red rage was gone and the gray depression, and the scorn and the
bitterness, and Rodney Harrison was gone. She began to talk, easily and
interestedly. "You know, one looks back on this sort of thing, after it's
all over, as educational. One doesn't enjoy _having_ an experience like
this, but _having_ had it makes for growth, shouldn't you say?" His
grasp on her hand tightened but he did not answer. "Well, Michael
Daragh, I've crowded about every sensation into my life except--death.
This is really not so bad as being in that Mexican prison was! For one
thing, you're here"--she curled her fingers more tightly into his--"and
there I had only my extremely civil engineer. I did my best to fall in
love with him, M.D., but I couldn't seem to manage it." She stopped to
cough. "The air is getting pretty awful, isn't it? But I don't believe
it will be much longer, now, do you?"
"I do not," he said.
"I'm rather proud of us, aren't you, Michael Daragh?--Of course, I
expect I shouldn't be so--so Nathan Hale and Casabianca and--and Lady
Jane Grey--if I didn't know that we'll soon be up in the air again,
safe--_breathing_ ..." She coughed again, but her voice went on, husky,
gallant. "If we could have looked an hour ahead an hour ago, you and I,
dripping pity on that boy, feeling so utterly secure ourselves--'_Why
should the spirit of mortal be proud?_' M.D., I got a silver thimble for
learning that by heart when I was eight. Rollicking nursery rhyme,
wasn't it? But I adored it, especially the parts I didn't understand.
'_From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud_'--you know, for
years I thought it meant one of those fascinating places with swinging
half-doors and rows and rows of feet visible from the outside, into
which one's nurse would never let one peer, and I thought 'shroud' was a
sort of cracker to be eaten with the beer! Wasn't that funny? I remember
thinking----"
But now the big Irishman stopped her with a groan which shook him from
head to heel. "Core of my heart," he said, "will you hush your
pretending? God forgive me for a heedless fool has dragged you down to a
black death this night!"
"What," said Jane interestedly, "what was it you called me?"
He caught her up to him, fiercely, furiously, and she could feel him
trembling, that tall tower of strength, like a terrified child. "Core of
my heart," he said again, and now his wild kisses separated his wild
words--"_Acushla ... Mavourneen ... Solis na Suile_ ..." and the tide of
fear which had been rising in her turned and slipped away into a sea of
rose and silver bliss, and with it went forever the hot shame of the
afternoon and the cold misery of the evening.
It seemed to her that she could not breathe at all now, what with the
acrid air and the power of his arms about her, but it did not matter. "I
that loved you from the first moment my eyes were resting on the wonder
of your face and heard the harps sounding in your voice, I have brought
you death!"
"No, Michael Daragh," she said hoarsely, breathlessly, "you have brought
me life!"
His voice was scorched and dry with smoke, and she had to strain her ears
to hear his lyric lovemaking. "Journeys' end"--she thought again as she
had thought that afternoon. Sarah Farraday would say that she was making
phrases, trying to be clever, even in this great and terrible moment,--to
be thinking that she had taken the subway to the heights.... Presently
she put a reproving hand over his lips.
"Oh, Michael Daragh! I expect I don't know God as well as you do, but I
know Him better than that! _Of course_ we'll be saved! _Don't_ keep
saying you wouldn't tell me this if we weren't dying! Nothing could
happen to us ... _now_ ... what do you suppose makes me so sleepy?... Do
you mind if I just sleep a--f--few minutes? I'm pretty--t--tired...."
He gathered her up wholly into his arms. "No, no! Don't go to sleep!
Don't be leaving me till you must!"
She cuddled down cozily like a drowsy baby. "M.D. ... did you ever
play----"
"What, Acushla?"
"Babes in the Woods? That's what we are, aren't we?" and she tried to
sing, huskily, gasping----
"'And when they were dead,
The robins so red
Brought straw ... berry ... blos ... soms
And over them----'"
"Core of my heart," he cried out, "Don't be leaving me!"
"Michael Daragh, dearest," she said quite clearly and steadily, "I love
you better than all the world--and I've loved the world a lot!" Her lips
groped to find his and then she was limp in his clasp.
* * * * *
Waves; _waves_; WAVES! Little, lulling ones, singing her to sleep; great,
shining ones, splashing and crashing, lifting and flinging her; voices,
tiresome, insistent, calling her, calling her, calling her in from
play----
* * * * *
"There, now, God love her, she'll do!" said Michael Daragh. "No, praises
be, we'll not need the ambulance! I've a machine here will take us round
the park till she's drunk her fill of clean air again.... No, thank you
kindly, I can take her myself.... If you'll open the door, just----"
Out in the sharp night wind, memory picked its way back, hesitating,
through the chaos. "Let you rest easy, now," said the Irishman's voice,
steady, cheerful, reassuring. "Don't be talking yet, the way you've no
breath in you at all. Drink deep of the good air, just, till--what? Well,
then, 'twas an accident in the subway, and you fainted and I carried you
out, and we came up a manhole."
Barren words these, naked of charm ... bleak ... bare. She beheld
herself, her bright spring plumage smirched and draggled, all her pinions
trailing. About the man, too, there was something lacking, something
failing, something unendurably missing and gone. "Your arms ..." she
said, fretfully. Speech was still a burden. She lifted his arms and laid
them about her, but they fell slackly away.
"We are back in the world again, Jane Vail," he said. "You in yours and I
in mine, and 'tis a far cry between the two. 'Twas the black hole of
death loosed my tongue, but now----"
"Michael Daragh"--she stopped speaking and gave herself over to the task
of tugging his arm about her and holding it there with both her grimy
hands--"Michael Daragh, we d--died together very splendidly--b--but we're
going to l--live together just as well!"
CHAPTER XX
(TELEGRAM)
New York, N.Y.
4--10.
MISS SARAH FARRADAY,
VALLEY VIEW,
VERMONT.
Engaged.
JANE VAIL.
(TELEGRAM)
New York, N.Y.
4--11.
MISS SARAH FARRADAY,
VALLEY VIEW,
VERMONT.
Michael Daragh, of course, you goose.
JANE VAIL.
_New York,
April Twelfth._
SALLY DARLING,
Thanks for your two wires, though the first one--"So happy, but who
is it?" was a bit feeble-minded, you must admit. Could you imagine
me marrying any one in the wide world _but_ Michael Daragh? Haven't
I always intended to (no matter what I may have babbled of a
man-I-met-on-the-boat, or of an extremely civil engineer!) from the
first instant I set my wishful eye on his zealot's brow and his
fighter's jaw and heard the burbling brogue that might be eaten with
a spoon?
It's taken me four years and a subway accident, but I consider the
time wholly well spent. I'm snugly and securely engaged to marry
Michael Daragh and he's entirely resigned to it. In fact, one might
even go so far as to say, without undue exaggeration, that he is
pleased!
(I'll wager you dashed right down to the Woman's Exchange and got
towels! Aren't you glad V. is such a nice, easy letter to embroider?)
That subway affair was ghastly, useful as it did prove to me. We
thought surely our hour had struck, but we behaved with Early
Christian Martyr fortitude and much more sprightly cheer, and when
Michael Daragh thought the end had come he staged a love scene which
made all the love scenes I ever wrote and all the love scenes I ever
read sound like time-tables or statistics! Months of misunderstanding
were explained away in minutes; he honestly believed me to be
secretly engaged to Rodney Harrison (there I see the fine Italian
hand of Emma Ellis, poor thing, oh, _poor_ thing--to want Michael
Daragh and not to have him!) and he still more honestly believed
that I lived and moved and had my brilliant being in a world too far
removed from his shabby and cumbered one, and that he was only my
more or less valued but humble friend--oh, miles of that sort of
piffle! Well, when we were safe in the upper air again, he basely
tried to repudiate me,--handsome speeches about not shadowing my
bright life and all that--very fetching as literature but not at all
satisfying to a young woman who had just achieved a betrothal after
long and earnest endeavor! I foiled him! You can't think how brazen
I was. I was still a bit hazy with smoke and exhaustion, and I
honestly believe if he hadn't given in I'd have screamed for a
policeman!
But once he gave up the fruitless struggle, he began to have a very
good time indeed. I will even go so far as to state that he hugs his
chains.
Yours in "a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy,"
JANE.
_New York.
April Eighteenth._
SALLY MACHREE,
(See how Irish she is already!) The first towel has come and makes me
feel such a housekeeper! You're a lamb, but you'll finish life with a
tin cup and a "Pity the Blind" sign if you go on making "stitches as
fine as a fairy's first tooth."
We are to be married (see how calmly and steadily she sets down that
astounding word?) in June, and domesticity has descended upon me. I
read only women's magazines, household departments only, I read
recipes and memorize them, I haunt linen shops and furniture stores.
But, oh, I need a mother and a sister or two, and you'll simply have
to come down to me for a month. Can't you? Of course you can. Your
mother will feed the piano. I must have you.
I've found a house in West Ninth Street, near the blessed old Square,
close enough to the Brevoort when the kitchen is bolsheviking. It is
deliciously old with high ceilings and haughty chandeliers and
austere marble mantels, and all sorts of inconveniences which I
picturesquely adore, but which will leave the noble army of labor
quite cold. I shall make the drawing-room very English, part of my
precious rosewood and mahogany sent down from Valley View (though I
shall keep that house largely as it is) and cunning Kensington
curtains and little pots of ivy, and "set-pieces" of bead work, and
that dear, dim portrait of great-grandmother Vail in cap and
ringlets. The dining room will be sober, too, but there's a nook just
off it which I shall use for a breakfast room, looking out into the
prim, Prunella scrap of garden, and that I will make giddy-gay with
chintz and Minton. There'll be a remote workroom for me, far
upstairs, and a friendly brown study where Michael Daragh's lame dogs
may come to be helped over their stiles.
Sarah, I'm as domestic as a setting hen! I foresee I shall be a
living version of Mr. Solomon's lady of the Proverb--_working
willingly with my hands, rising while it is yet night_. (M.D. keeps
fearfully early hours)--_My candle going not out by night_ (candles
will be perfect in that house!). My husband shall, indeed, _be known
in the gates_, but he won't _sitteth_ there, for home will be far
too attractive. Nine to one, as always, I'll ply my trade, but
before and after office hours I'll be _looketh_-ing _well to the
ways of my household_ and _eateth_-ing not the bread of idleness
(except at tea!). _Many daughters have done virtuously_ but I shall
excel them all. I admit it.
JANE.
P.S. Michael Daragh is beamish with bliss. He's done himself out in
purple and fine linen and yet manages, miraculously, not to look in
the least like other men, and he doesn't even stoop any more. Sally,
you know when he was in Ireland we all--especially Emma Ellis and the
romantic music students--conjectured as to what he was when he was at
home, and cast him for many fetching rôles, from a sacrificial
younger son to a Sin-eater, and always a belted earl at the very
least. He has told me all about himself now, naturally, and it would
be a blow to Emma E. and the little music makers, so I mercifully
mean never to let them know. He hasn't any immediate family, and was
brought up by an uncle who had a large and prosperous wholesale
grocery business in Cork! (Could anything be less lyrical, I ask
you?) He wanted M.D. to go into the business after he had finished
college, and M.D., quite naturally, being M.D., wouldn't and they
quarreled, and M.D. came over here with just his small income from
his father's small estate, and went into settlement work. He was
called home to the uncle's death-bed, but the uncle, contrary to the
best literary precedents, hadn't softened to any extent worth
mentioning, and died as crabbed as he had lived, greatly annoyed, no
doubt, to realize that his demise released certain decent little
incomes from the main family estate to the stubborn nephew, but
immensely pleased with himself for making his fortune over to
outsiders. So, my other-worldly spouse will have a comfortable income
after all, but he may divide it with dope-fiends and Fallen Sisters
and their ilk to his heart's content since my royalties, like
snowballs, gather as they roll!
Sally, you must come down and stay with me. "Please, pretty please!"
JANE.
_New York City,
May Twentieth._
Dearest Sally,
I'm distressed beyond words that your mother is still so wretched,
and I see, of course, that you cannot leave her yet. But she must
hurry and be well enough to let you come for the wedding,--middle or
end of June.
A rather startling thing has happened. I have _a letter from Profesor_
Morales in Guadalajara, saying that--after all the tangling up of
the red tape in the various revolutionary merry-go-rounds--things
are in order at last, and little Dolores Tristeza starts me-ward as
soon as a suitable traveling companion can be found. I must admit
I'm a little aghast. Six months ago, I yearned to have her as a prop
for my spinsterhood, but that Dark Age is about to be folded by. Of
course I must stand by what I've said, and I want to, but I've
answered _Señor_ Morales, explaining my approaching marriage and
that I would send for Dolores in the early fall (perhaps Michael
Daragh and I can go and get her!) and inclosing a fat check for her
maintenance in the meantime.
But isn't it rather a comedy situation? A big little daughter
suddenly bestowed upon a busy bride-elect! But she is an angel, and
I'll adore having her, just as soon as I get used to the idea again.
Love and warmest wishes to your mother, and I'm sending her some
books.
Devotedly,
JANE.
_New York City,
May Twenty-seventh._
OLD DEAR,
So glad your mother is even a wee bit better! House and clothes are
coming on famously but I'm rather rebellious at not having more of M.
D.'s time. My life work will be to drag him down from his pinnacle of
selflessness! His chief concern just now is for his brilliant young
dope fiend, and I really shouldn't begrudge M.D. to him, for if we
hadn't had supper with him that night, and gone uptown in the subway,
who knows if I'd ever have won my elusive swain? Randal is doing
fairly well, as regards the drug, and making some corking sketches
for our joint calendar, but he needs a world of cheering and
chumminess and countenance.
But one would like a little less of him, a little more of one's
lover.
Rather crossly,
J.
_Friday Morning._
Sally, dear, another letter has come from Mexico, and Dolores
Tristeza is on her way! A highly proper geologist was returning to
New York, and they dared not miss so excellent an opportunity of
sending her.
And she'll be here day after to-morrow! I find myself rather gasping!
I must telephone the steamship office, and I'll close this later.
_Next Evening._
She will arrive on the _Pearl of Peru_ at about three P.M. to-morrow,
and M.D. is going with me to meet her. He is dear about it all, and
so am I, now that I've got my breath! I'm remembering what a
dewy-eyed little dove of a thing she is. A few days of happy holiday
for her, and then the mildest and gayest school I can find, one
where they have no stuffy rules about not letting the pupils come
home for week-ends.
The _Profesor_ explained that the _Hospicio_ had fallen on evil days
during the revolution and the children are now cared for in private
families. The three different households which had been sheltering
Dolores had been obliged from various circumstances to give her up,
and Señor Morales regretted the limitations of his own
establishment.
Poor, pitiful little creature ... little "Sorrows and Sadness!" I must
pledge myself to make her over into Joys and Gladness--_Alegrías y
Felicidad_, if I remember my Spanish at all.
I'm ashamed of those mean moments at first when I didn't want her!
Penitently,
JANE.
P.S. I mean to have her call me Aunt Jane, which will be "_Tia
Juana_." Isn't that charming? I really don't care to be called
"Mother" just now by a twelve-year-old daughter. It's--a bit
un-bridal.
_Sunday Night._
MY DEAR SARAH,
I wasn't up to writing you yesterday--I'm not really able to, now,
but I'll try to tap you out a few feeble lines....
Oh, yes, she came. She's here! As some of my vaude-villains would
say--I'll say she is!
M.D. and I met the steamer, the _Pearl of Peru_. Gentle,
innocent-sounding name, isn't it? Sounds as if it might fitly convoy
the dewy-eyed dove of my dreams.... It took a long time to dock and
all the passengers were at the rail. I looked in vain for my
daughter-to-be, but I was particularly struck by a sad,
broken-looking, elderly man whose eager eyes raked the wharf. He
turned to ask a question of a large girl beside him, a creature clad
in strident hues, furrily powdered, bearing a caged parrot in one
hand, a shivering, hairless, Mexican dog under her arm, a cigarette
in her mouth. Her gaze became riveted upon me. She emitted a
piercing shriek of joy.
"_Madre virgen de mi alma!_"
Then, in order that all persons present on shipboard and on the wharf
might have the benefit of her remark, she translated it--"Virgin
Mother of my soul!"--and every one at once laid by all other
preoccupations and gave himself whole-heartedly to looking and
listening.
I have never seen a more radiant expression of joy and release than
that which overspread the countenance of the geologist at sight of
me, and even at that instant I began to understand his emotion. It
seemed an hour before the gangplank was put down. Dolores Tristeza
held the parrot up so that she might see me. "Behold the virgin
mother of my soul!"
"Shut your ugly mouth!" shrieked the sweet bird, happily in Spanish.
"See, little mother mine," called Dolores, shaking the cage, "Santa
Catalina, the parrot of a thousand pretty talents! And here"--she
held up the hairless, squirming canine--"behold little José-María,
joy of my orphan heart!"
I got as close to her as possible and besought her to moderate her
transports until she had landed, and I was amazed and aghast and
horrified at the size of her. "But, how you've grown, Dolores!" I
stammered.
She chuckled gleefully. "They lied to thee at the _Hospicio,
Madrecita_. I was not twelve years but past fourteen! They desired,
naturally, to keep me with them in the juvenile department. Thus am
I loved wherever I go! Dost thou not burn to fold me to thy breast?"
What I burned to do at that instant was to turn the _Pearl of Peru_
about and send her speeding swiftly back across the foam.
"So, now I am more than fourteen years and a half, large of my age,
beautiful as all may see, of a wisdom to astonish you. In one year
more, thou shalt find me a husband. Many _novios_ have I had
already! Four serenades were made to me the night before I left
Guadalajara, and on the boat--" She turned to the elderly gentleman
with a complacent and pitying smile. "But"--she took account for the
first time of Michael Daragh--"_quién es el hombrón?_" (Who is the
big man?) "_Tu novio?_"
I admitted that he was my betrothed.
"_No es tu esposo?_" she quivered with tentative rage.
I assured her that he was not yet my husband.
"Very well, then," she said in English, "we shall see. Only, I warn
thee, if when thy children come, thou lovest them more than me, I
will burn out their eyes with red-hot curling irons!" (Her English is
heavily accented but perfectly--horribly--understandable.)
A merciful Providence let down the gangplank and she flung herself,
her shrieking, cursing parrot, her shivering dog, into my arms. Santa
Catalina's seed and water cups were emptied on my frock; José-María
set his little dagger teeth in my sleeve; a fierce scent assailed my
nostrils; a shower of powder frosted my shoulder.
I freed myself to speak to the geologist who seemed eager to be on
his way. "I am very grateful to you," I said, mendaciously. "I hope
it has not been too much trouble."
"I got her here, didn't I?" he said with an air of weary pride. He
looked so haggard that my heart smote me. "_Señor_ Morales should
not have burdened you. You look ill and----"
"I was a well, strong man when I left Vera Cruz," he said darkly. "I
wish you luck, Miss Vail." He took one step and halted. "Do you
believe in corporal punishment?"
"Mercy, no! It's a relic of barbarism. No one does, now!"
"You will," he said, earnestly, "you will! Corporal punishment?--My
God,--_capital_!"
"Farewell, old camel," Dolores called, kindly, after his retreating
figure. "Go with God!"
"Michael Daragh," I whispered, when we at last were packed into the
taxi, "couldn't we stop at some school on the way home and leave
her?"
"Not in those clothes, woman dear,--not with those animals."
"_Cuidado, Hombrón!_" said my dewy-eyed dove. "If you seek to
turn from me the heart of my virgin mother (she pronounces it
veergeen mawther), I will not let her marry with you, and you will
be old sour face _soltero_, and she will dress the saints! But," she
went on indulgently, "if you are good to me, I am good to you!
See,--I kiss up to God!"--and she wafted a heavily scented kiss
toward the ceiling of the taxicab.
Desperately,
JANE.
CHAPTER XXI
_Wednesday._
Well, Sally, mia, life looks a bit more rosy! I've separated Dolores
from her cigarette, from her furry coat of powder, from her athletic
perfume, from her circus clothes, and to-day, in spite of her
incredible size (the inches and pounds she has acquired in six
months!) the years have fallen from her. In a slim, brown tricotine
with a wide, untrimmed hat of silky brown straw her loveliness has
come back, and with it my enthusiasm.
She is docile in the main, when not too violently opposed, and I feed
my fancy on the joy and pride I shall have in her, when she has
finished school, in five years.
She starts on Monday, a splendid, firm, well-disciplined school where
they have sensible rules about not letting the pupils come home for
weekends. The head-mistress was charmed with Dolores and Dolores has
"kissed up to God" her resolve to be good.
I'm honestly ashamed of my panic over first impressions. She's really
an angel.
JANE.
_Thursday._
She's really a demon.
J.
_New York City,
June 29th._
DEAREST SALLY,
It's weeks since I've written you, but I'm a broken woman, old before
my time. I may not look quite so forlorn as the geologist did, but I
feel it.
Did I write something about the rosy but dim and distant date when
Dolores would be "through school?" Well, it's come. She's through
school. And school, I might mention in passing, is through with
her,--five of them, from Miss Trenchard's Spartan smartness to the
gentle Spanish convent. She's a demon-baby. She's a cross between
Carmen and Mary Maclane.
Of course the wedding has had to be postponed. Michael Daragh is
angelic about it, and he hasn't been able to help me with Dolores as
much as he would like because he's been engulfed with a new
settlement house, and his dope fiend has been wobbling again, but our
calendar is finished and accepted now, and a really nice girl is
being really nice to him--liking him, trusting him, and M.D. is at
peace about him.
Dolores came definitely home from the convent to-day with a clever
note from the Mother Superior ... they feel that the child needs more
space ... freedom....
Good heavens, so do I! _Ay de mi_, that I ever saw Mexico! And yet,
the demon-baby loves me, and I love her, but I also love Michael
Daragh and would like exceedingly to marry him. My house is ready,
my clothes are finished, and so--nearly--am I.
But I cannot go off on a honeymoon unless I leave her in safety.
Sarah, now that your mother is so improved, wouldn't you like to
take a boarder? You could chain her to the baby-grand....
Distractedly,
THE VIRGIN MOTHER OF HER SOUL.
P.S. A friend, knowing of my plight, has just telephoned about a very
fine New Thought school which will be glad to receive my ward. Well,
they'll have some entirely new thoughts in that school which they've
never had before!
J.
_July Sixth._
SALLY DARLING,
I jibber with joy! The best and most beautiful of all my leading men
was sent by a kind Providence to take tea with me to-day and talk
over the new play idea, and while he was here Dolores Tristeza
arrived in state and a taxi from the N.T. school, along with her
trunk and her temper and her temperament and Santa Catalina and
José-María. Utterly ignoring him, she launched upon a monologue of
her fancied wrongs, dramatizing every incident, impersonating every
one from the Principal to the taxi driver. I'd seen her through so
many of these Mad Scenes that it left me quite cold, but not so my
actor-man. When she had finished, spitting (dryly but venomously)
upon all schools, and flung herself out of the room, he sprang to his
feet.
"Good gad, Jane Vail,--don't you know what you've got here? A young
Nazimova! An infant Kalich! Schools--nonsense! Teach her the
A.B.C.'s--but don't touch that accent--and turn her loose on the
stage!"
Sarah, he's right. It's the thing, the only thing, to do with her. I
took her to see Nazimova to-night, and she sat star-eyed and hardly
breathing. When we came home I told her my new ideal for her and she
wept with joy. She swears by the green tail of Santa Catalina and
kisses up to God that she will never be wicked again, and she
believes it, and so do I, for I've touched her imagination at last.
I've been trying to keep a Bird of Paradise in a chicken coop! I'll
put her with the right people for training, and have her with me a
great deal, and not try to muss up her poor little mind with
mathematics.
She is lying sleepless and bright-eyed in her bed, and I must go in
to her now, to soothe her off to the Poppy Fields with happy plans
and prophesies.
_When_ are you coming?
JANE.
_July Eighth._
MY DEAR,
I float on a sea of rosy bliss. Randal's girl has almost promised to
marry him, and he's a new man, and Dolores is a lamb, dreaming of the
time she may begin her study for the stage, in the early fall.
We are to be married on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, and take
the night boat for Boston and thence to Maine, to Three Meadows. It
was M.D. who sent me there by scolding me into realization of my
grubbiness four years ago; I want to have my honeymoon there. The
Deacon and "Angerleek" have a little house which they rent, and they
are making it ready for us.
I'm afraid every one at home will think me quite mad to be married
here instead of in my dear old house, but Sally, after all, my
wedding belongs to this world, not to that. I shall be married here
at Mrs. Hills' in her big old double parlors, the ugliness conquered
with flowers, and I shall wear my traveling things--as the village
paper would say--"the bride, attired in a modish going-away gown"--I
know you'll wail for all the trimmings, Sally dear,--the veil and the
train and all the rest, but that sort of thing belongs to eighteen,
not twenty-eight. I'm beyond the age of opera bouffe weddings,--I
don't vision myself coming down a white-ribboned aisle with wobbly
knees, covered with orange blossoms and gooseflesh! But--oh, Sally,
the truth is that I would be married in a mackintosh or a bathing
suit, I'm so dizzily, dazedly happy!
Dolores Tristeza, good as an angel out of a frieze, agrees to stay
docilely with Emma Ellis at Hope House while we are away. She calls
her "_Ella de la barba_" with reference to the small but determined
little fringe on poor E.E.'s chin and I tremble--no, I don't! I'm
not afraid of anything now. Everything is and will be perfect.
If only you can come, best of friends!
Happily,
JANE.
_The Day!_
MY DEAREST SALLY,
"I must be making haste,
I have no time to waste--
This is--this is my wedding morning!"
But my haste is done. I am radiantly ready now, and there are seven
still and shining hours ahead.
My trunk is packed with jolly Island clothes; my bag stands ready to
close; my sitting room is running over with gifts, little and large,
proud and pitiful,--from Marty Wetherby's opulent clock and Rodney
Harrison's gorgeous silver service to "Angerleek's" preserves and the
hand-painted mustard pot from Ethel and Jerry and Billiken, and a
virtuously ugly dusting cap from Mrs. Mussel. If only you were here,
Sally dearest! But I know your mother needs you, and it must be a
blessed thing to have a mother to need you!
Sally, I'm feeling very proud and very humble, very----
_Later._
Just as I wrote that, Michael Daragh came, white, tight-lipped, more
than ever like the Botticelli St. Michael; he was the
"Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven." All he needed was a sword.
"Woman, dear," he said, "I've the sad, terrible news will be breaking
your heart."
"Have you decided not to marry me?" I asked, facetiously, but I
didn't feel in the least humorous.
"'Tis my lad," he said, "Randal. She's thrown him over, that girl.
Destroyed he is with grief and shame, bound again for the black pit."
I tried to comfort him. I said I was sure the boy was too firmly on
his feet to slip now, but he knew better, or worse, and he said he
dared not leave him for an hour, and then, Sarah, I began to see what
it meant, and it turned me to iron and ice.
"You mean," I said, "you want to postpone our marriage?"
"Never that, Acushla, but--couldn't we be taking him with us? 'Tis
the wild thing to be asking you, but after all, woman dear, we've the
whole of our lives ahead, and for him it means all the world! Say
we'll be taking him!"
Now, Sarah Farraday, I ask you, as a reasonable human being, what you
think of that? _To take a dope fiend with us on our honeymoon!_
I seemed to see the future in one blinding flash--always our own
rights, our own happiness, relentlessly pushed aside. I'm glad I
can't remember all I said, but I shall remember the look on his face
as long as I live. But I was right--I was right. He belongs in a
painted picture, St. Michael, not in a warm, vital, human world.
So, it isn't my wedding morning after all.
J.
_Three P.M._
I'm putting a special delivery stamp on this, Sally dear, so you'll
get it before the other one.
I relented in sackcloth and ashes and shame, of course, and
telephoned to tell him so, but I couldn't get him because he was on
his way here to tell me _he_ would yield, that he wouldn't ask me to
take Randal with us. Then we had another moving scene, reversed this
time, I pleading penitently to take him. M.D. said he had had a good
talk with the poor lad, and he had sworn to brace up alone.
I shall always be glad I yielded, but I know now _just_ how Abraham
felt when he found the ram caught in the bushes! And I'll always be
glad that for once M.D. chose happiness for himself.
Very shakily, but gratefully,
JANE.
_Midnight,
On the Boston Boat._
My dear, do you remember a silly song of our childhood with a refrain
like this--
"I'm not blessed with surplus wealth,
Bump tiddy ump bump, bump tiddy ump bump,--
Off on a honeymoon all by myself,
Bump tiddy ump bump bay!"
Well, my dear Sarah, that is exactly the sort of wedding journey
which has fallen to me.
We were married. Yes, I'm very clear about that. Dolores, my
dewy-eyed dove, stood with me, and Randal, ghastly and trembling, by
Michael Daragh. The solemn old minister knotted us securely. Michael
kissed me. (I'm very clear about that, too.)
Suddenly, like a cyclone, like a typhoon, Dolores Tristeza cast
herself upon me. "Virgin mawther of my soul," she howled, "do not
leave me! I keel myself! _Ella de la barba_ ees nawthing to me!
Do not leave me to die with these so ugly strangers! _No tengo más
amiga que tu!_" (Thou art my only friend!)
She was working up into a frenzy which made all her earlier efforts
sound like lullabies with the soft pedal on, and she was shaking
herself into convulsions and crying real tears. "Behold," she sobbed,
"_las lágrimas de la huérfanita_!" (The tears of the little orphan!)
I counted ten. Then I turned to my new husband.
"Michael Daragh," I said, meekly, "will you take Randal with you and
let me take Dolores with me?"
I wish you could have seen people's faces as we went off in a
groaning taxi, ourselves, our luggage, Randal, white and protesting,
Dolores, tearful but triumphant, José-María, snapping and snarling,
Santa Catalina, strongly urging every one to shut his ugly mouth for
the love of all the saints.
Sally, you've read a hundred stories, haven't you, which went like
this--the ceremony, the good wishes, the rice, the old shoes,
then--"he jerked down the curtain of the cab window,"--"Alone at
last," he murmured, "my _wife_!" "He folded her in his arms."
I think Michael Daragh's feeling was that we were not _entirely_
alone, and that it was a rather large order to fold in his arms a
swearing parrot, a shivering, hairless dog, a robust Mexican orphan,
a bride and a dope fiend, for he made not the first gesture of the
above ritual.
It is after midnight. Dolores is asleep here in my stateroom, a smile
of seraphic peace on her face, but in the room next door I hear the
steady murmur of M.D.'s voice reading to poor Randal, who cannot
sleep, who has tried to jump overboard. Michael dares not leave him
for an instant, even to tell me good-night.
Sally, it _is_ really funny, but I have to keep assuring and
reminding myself that it is.
JANE.
_Morning,
At Three Meadows._
SALLY, MY DEAR,
Once again I crept up a river of mother-of-pearl in the gauzy dawn to
this island sanctuary. The Deacon met us, amazed at our number, and
led us to the silver gray house just beyond theirs on a little,
lifting hill, where "Angerleek" will "do for us."
Morning brought counsel. While my husband (carelessly said--just like
that!) while my husband looked after luggage I talked to Randal, sane
again, haggard, abased. "My dear boy," I said, "_you_ aren't going
to be in the way at all! You'll look after yourself and be company
for Michael when he wants good man-talk. It's this demon-child.
If--_do_ you suppose you could look after her for me!"
He wrung my hand. "Count on me! If there's anything I can do, to
atone, to square myself--I'll be her nurse, her governess, her
jailer!"
Then to a meek _huérfanita_, feeding her menagerie, I made oration.
"Daughter of my soul, thou knowest thy presence is a joy of purest
ray serene, but this Randal creature, tagging ever at the heels of
my spouse----"
"Star of my heart," she said, grinding her teeth, "he is a pig and
the son of a pig! Have no fear, _Madrecita_, I will herd him, like
cattle, away from thy sight." She kissed up to God.
JANE.
_The Silver Gray House,
On the Lifting Hill,
Three Meadows._
I have ceased to reckon time by calendars, Sally dearest, but I think
we have been here, Michael Daragh and I, seven or ten days.
Oh, yes, the others are still here,--at least, they are on the
island, but we never see them. They come and go like Brownies, like
elves, like the "Little People" of Michael's land, bringing our
meals and our mail, vanishing silently.... They stand between us and
the village and the Deacon and the world. They are our shields and
barriers; our sure defense; our shock absorbers. I shouldn't _think_
of ever going on a honeymoon without them. We have signed them up
for all our anniversary excursions, and between whiles we'll loan
them to friends for wedding trips and rent them to a select
public,--there'll be miles of Waiting List as soon as they are
known!
Make your reservations early!
Whole islands and oceans of love, old dear!
Devotedly,
JANE VAIL DARAGH.
(_Mrs. Michael Daragh!!!_)
P.S. Sally, dearest, remember what I said, the night before I left
Wetherby Ridge for the first time?--That I wasn't really "going away"
from you all, but only "going on?" I lost my way for a while, Sally;
I was content with just "getting on," but he found me and herded
me sternly back to the highroad, and now, always and forevermore,
no credit to the likes of me, but because I've espoused the
Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven, I'll be going on--and
_on_--with Michael Daragh. And, oh, my dear, but indeed--as he said
of me long ago--I have been _anointed with the oil of joy above my
fellows_!
J. V. D.
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