Jane Journeys On

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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 feted 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 coupe, 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 coupe 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."

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