Jane Journeys On

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12. 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!