Jewel Weed Part 9

He treasured this crumb of her kindness, not because she was n.i.g.g.ardly, but because there was little that belonged to him and to him alone.

Sometimes, in the rush and roar of the office, came the memory of her eyes and her voice of a.s.surance.

"What will our comrades.h.i.+p be like, when--when she is d.i.c.k's wife?" he questioned himself, and then fell to work with fury.

Thus the delightful summer died into the past; there came a winter only less good, with its dinners and dances, with quiet fireside evenings, and yet another summer of the same close friends.h.i.+p that began to take on the semblance of a permanent thing in life, all the richer as experience grew deeper and knowledge wider and the best things dearer.

Whether they read or sang or discussed, though the world saw little done, these three young people had the inestimable happiness of knowing one another.

CHAPTER VI

JEWEL WEED

Along the wide straight street of the city surged the usual shopping crowd. Largely petticoated was it, for o'daytimes man must be busy at his office that woman may have this privilege of going shopping. Surely there is no other stream in the wide world that is so monotonous as this human never-ending current. The same types, the same clothes, the same subjects of conversation in the fragments that catch the ear. And seldom does one see a face that looks even cheerful, much less happy,--all intent on matching ribbons.

"The world is too much with us; late and soon; Getting and spending we lay waste our powers."

Thus might they cry aloud, if they were condemned to proclaim their sins, like the long banner of bat-like souls that Dante saw pa.s.sing in similar fas.h.i.+on beneath his eye.

And yet, in spite of its monotony, humanity is perennially interesting to itself. Therefore among the strenuous, the hurrying, and the anxious-eyed, one girl loitered on dilatory foot from wide window to wide window.

"Girl" seems an inadequate word to describe Lena Quincy. It may be applied to any youthful feminine person, and Lena, in spite of her carefully-groomed shabbiness, was by no means one of the herd. She affected one like a bit of Tiffany gla.s.s, s.h.i.+mmering, iridescent, ethereal; and no ugliness in her surroundings could take away that impression.

Every one who looked at her at all looked twice. She had grown so used to this tribute that it hardly affected her unless it came from one who merited her interest in return.

Now she was wandering from one to another of the ladies with the waxen faces, the waxen hands and the wooden hearts, who gazed back unmoved from behind their plate-gla.s.s; though it was not the fixed and amiable smiles of the lay-figures that caught her attention, but rather the curious way in which this one's braid was laid on the gown, or the new device in b.u.t.tons, there beyond.

Now she turned and studied the human flux in front. She was not shopping, save in sweet imagination. This was her theater, and she was fain to make the show last as long as possible. Her absorbent gaze saw everything. Yet it was selective too, for it pa.s.sed swiftly over the chaff of the shabby and fixed itself on the wheat of the properly gowned. Sometimes she wove romances about her swiftly-disappearing actors, romances not of heart and soul but of garments, of splendors and of money; but even such entrancing tissues of her brain vanished like p.r.i.c.ked soap-bubbles when there pa.s.sed in the body one of those select few whose skirts proclaimed perfection. Could dreams stand against reality? Yet the dreams were blissful, though, when they were gone, the girl was left steeped in the bitterness of envy.

It is said that there is a consolation in being well-dressed that religion itself can not afford. It is to be remembered that there is also the pharisaism which always forms a hard sh.e.l.l about every kernel of religion; and the pharisaism of the correct costume is the most complacent of all forms of self-righteousness. Lena's lips grew positively pale as she saw it pa.s.s, drawing its rustling petticoats close to its side. She hungered and thirsted for this form of righteousness.

It was early April, and there was a savage nip in the air, for Winter shook his fist at the world long after he dared to come out of his lair.

Spring refused to sit in his lap for more than an instant, but leaped from that affectionate position, ashamed of her intimacy with the h.o.a.ry sinner, and the buds swelled slowly and swelled exceeding small.

Other women hurried, but Lena did not feel the cold except when she saw a set of magnificent Russian sables with a cordial invitation to "Buy now". Her eyes suddenly filled with tears at her own impotence. Why had G.o.d created her such as she was and then denied her the perquisites of her desires? It was as though nature should make the heart of a rose and should leave off all the out-shaken wealth of petals, whose reflected lights and shadows make the flower's heart lovely.

With the mist clearing from her eyes Lena walked onward to the next big sheet of gla.s.s, and looked through a wealth of Easter hats and bonnets at the mirror that was meant to manifold their charms. She did not see the millinery, but there was comfort in the really good gla.s.s, not like her parody at home which cast a pale green tinge over a distorted image.

On Lena nature had really spent herself. The very texture of her skin made the fingers itch to caress its transparent delicacy that let through a tender flush. Every curve of her body suggested hidden beauty, and the way she turned her head on her shoulders left one feeling how music and painting fall short of expressing the loveliest loveliness.

But, having accomplished a miracle, fate had left it without a meaning and thrown it on an ash heap. No wonder that it resented its position.

Every man who pa.s.sed Lena on the street looked at her; some of them spoke to her; but she was possessed of a self-respect that kept her from responding to such overtures. She prided herself on her virtue. Certain it was that the admiration of the other s.e.x never set her vibrating with delicate emotions, never increased by a single beat the pulses of her heart, except when it suggested some definite benefit to herself. With reason, Lena congratulated herself on her firm resistence to the many-formed temptations that come to beauty housed with poverty.

Now, as she looked in the milliner's gla.s.s, she saw her own face, rose-like and delicate. She saw the great violet eyes, so innocent that they almost persuaded herself, as they did others, that some creature more celestial than ordinary humanity wondered from behind them at the world. She saw the fair soft curls that clung about her forehead, and the sight of these things gave a momentary peace to her soul. Then she surveyed the dingy felt hat that rested brutally on the silken wonder of her hair, and rebellion rose again.

"It's a comfort that my collar fits so well," she rea.s.sured herself.

"After all, there is nothing more important than a collar. I don't look in the least 'common'."

Among the hats stood a photograph of a popular actress, pert and pretty.

The sight of it sent Lena's thoughts afield into new wastes of bitterness.

The idea of the stage had once come to her like an inspiration. Nothing could be more easy and natural to her than to act; nothing more delectable than the tribute paid to the star. Money, flowing gowns, footlights, tumults of applause had seemed inevitable. Lena s.h.i.+vered now, with something else than cold inside her flimsy jacket, as she remembered the crumbling of her dream. She saw again the fat man with the sensual mouth who had given her a job; and felt again her tingling resentment when she found how small the part was, and how poorly paid.

She remembered how she had held herself aloof from the other girls, who, like herself, had trivial parts, and how they had snubbed her in return; how even the little that she did was made ridiculous through the trick of a hook-nosed, gum-chewing rival, and how the first audience that she faced had t.i.ttered at her stumble. A wave of heat succeeded the s.h.i.+ver at this point in her remembrance. Then she recalled her impertinent answer to the vituperation of the manager, and how he had sworn at her for a d.a.m.ned minx, who thought herself a professional beauty.

"Vulgar! Vulgar! Vulgar!" she said to herself in impotent anger. She wished they could all know how she despised them. For she could act! She was still sure that she could play any part--except that of patient endurance. Yet, so far, hards.h.i.+p was all that life had offered her. A chance! That was it. So far, she had never had a ghost of a chance.

Would fate--or luck--or Providence--or whatever it is that rules, never give her a turn of the wheel?

Next to the art of the milliner was displayed the art, less interesting to Lena, of the brush. Before the picture store a span of horses shook their jingling harness, and a brightly-b.u.t.toned coachman waited, with impa.s.sive face turned steadily to the front. There came from the doorway a girl who was lifted above the pharisaism of clothes into the purer ether. She was calm-eyed and well-poised, and Lena hated her for the rest of her life for her obliviousness of the sordid. Behind her walked a young man who now opened the carriage door and lingered a moment and laughed as he talked with the girl who had taken her seat. Lena involuntarily drew her feet closer beneath her skirts that no careless glance of that girl should fall upon their shabbiness. She looked at the man as she looked at the Russian sables. He was a type of that delectable world from which she was shut out.

"I should be ashamed to be silly about fellows, the way some girls are,"

was her inward comment. "But I'd just like to have people see me with a thing like that dangling around me. And I shall, some time. I'm a whole heap prettier than she is."

The carriage door shut abruptly. Lena's too thin boots, out of plumb, suddenly slipped on a half-formed piece of ice. She made a desperate grab at the smooth surface of the window and then came ignominiously down--not wholly ignominiously, however, since her accident brought to her aid the man who was a type.

She didn't have to stop to consider that the man would notice neither her hat nor her boots. She knew it instinctively and instantly. But the rose-petal face and the big eyes were overwhelmingly present to her consciousness. She saw them reflected in the look on his face as he bent over her.

"I hope you're not hurt."

"Not in the least. Only humiliated." Lena smiled, because people are always attracted by cheerfulness.

"You are sure you have not twisted your ankle?" he insisted.

"Nothing but my hat and my hair," she pouted. "Thank you for coming to my rescue."

"It wasn't much of a rescue," he said.

"Are you sorry I didn't have a tragedy and give you a chance to play hero?" she inquired navely.

"When you are in need, may I be the one to help?" he said with growing boldness.

Lena flushed and nodded as he lifted his hat and was gone. She walked slowly homeward, actually forgetting to stop at her favorite window in the lace store, so occupied was she with the latest story she was telling herself. It was a story in which a large house with soft rugs and becoming pink lights occupied the foreground, and somewhere in the background hovered a man who was a type and who loved to spend money on diamonds. The vision was so lovable that she lived with it all the way, even through the narrow entrance of the lodging-house and up the narrow stairs, saturated with obsolete smells--smells of dead dinners--to the very instant when she opened the upper door and faced bald reality and her mother. Mrs. Quincy sat by the window in a room on the walls of which the word "shabby" was written in a handwriting as plain, and in language far simpler than ever Belshazzar saw on the walls of Babylon.

It fairly cried itself from the big-figured paper, peeling along its edges; from the worn painted floor; from the frayed rug of now patternless carpet; from the sideboard that looked like a parlor organ.

Even from the closet door it whispered that there was more shabbiness hidden in the depths.

Mrs. Quincy herself was a part of it, for she was to Lena what the faded rose is to the opening one, a once beautiful woman, whose skin now looked like wrinkled cream.

Lena shut the door and came in without speaking. She flung her hat and coat on the bed in the corner, where a forlorn counterpane showed by the hollows and hills beneath that it had given up all attempt to play even.

The girl sat down listlessly with her hands in her lap.

"You've been gone a long time, Lena," said the mother in a delicately querulous voice. "You're fortunate to be able to get out instead of being cooped up in this little room the way I am." Mrs. Quincy coughed with conscious pathos. "I sometimes wonder if you ever think of your poor mother and how lonely she is most of the time. But I'd ought to be used to people's always forgetting me."

"Much I have to come home to!" Lena answered. "You're about as cheerful as barbed wire. But you can comfort yourself! I shan't be able to go out at all much longer, any way."

"Why, what's the matter now?"