Jane Journeys On

6. 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 anything till I knew--everything!" 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!"