Jane Journeys On

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19. 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!"