Jane Journeys On
R >>
Ruth Comfort Mitchell >> Jane Journeys On
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15
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 matinee 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 matinee 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 _fete_ 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 arrive!_" 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 crepe, prettier than ever before in
her pretty life--
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15