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 passing in
similar fashion 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 glass, shimmering, 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-glass; 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 buttons, 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 passed 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
pricked soap-bubbles when there passed 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 shell 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 pass, 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 hoary
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
God 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 glass, 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 glass, 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 passed 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 sex 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 glass, 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 reassured 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 shivered
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 tittered at her stumble. A wave of heat succeeded the shiver
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 damned 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, hardship 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-buttoned coachman waited, with
impassive 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 naïvely.
"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?"
"Do you expect me to wear a felt hat all summer?" Lena asked sharply.
"I'm ashamed to be seen in that old thing and I should think you'd be
ashamed to be so stingy with me."
Her mother sighed and lapsed into the creaking comfort of her
rocking-chair.
"I ain't stingy," she said at last. "But if you had your way you'd spend
every last cent of the pension the very day it comes. I've got to look
out we don't starve. If you'd only make up your mind to work and earn a
little instead of livin' so pinched! I'm sure I'd work if I could. But
there! there ain't nothing for me to do but to set and suffer, and
nobody knows what I endure."
"I wasn't born to be a working girl," said Lena sullenly. "I've got the
blood of a lady if I haven't got the clothes of one."
"Well, when it comes to eating and drinking, blood don't count much.
Everybody's got the same appetite."
"No, everybody hasn't," retorted the girl. "I haven't any appetite for
canned baked-beans and liver."
"You eat them, anyway."
"I know it, worse luck!"
There was a tingling silence for a moment and then Lena spoke with
sudden energy.
"Mother, what can I do? I'm not one of those girls who can go ahead and
don't care. I haven't been brought up as they have. The only thing
you've taught me is that my father was a gentleman and that I am a
beauty. And what good does that do me?"
"Teachin' is respectable."
"I can't teach. I couldn't pass a teacher's examination to save my life.
I don't know how to do anything. And I won't sink below the level of
decent society. I'd starve first. Do you suppose I haven't thought it
all over a hundred times?"
"You can sew very nicely. I'm sure everything you make has real style."
"Go into a shop at starvation wages to make pretty things for other
girls to wear? I stopped along near Madame Cerise's to-day and looked at
some of the girls near the window, with their hair all lanky and their
faces sunk in, working for dear life on finery. Mother, is that what you
want for me?"
There was hungry appeal in Lena's voice, that some mothers would have
felt; but Mrs. Quincy was not on the lookout for other people's shades
of emotion.
"Well, if you'd any sense you'd take Joe Nolan, as I've told you fifty
times if I've told you once. He's got real good wages, and you could
twist him around your little finger."
Lena's teeth came together with a click.
"Joe! Well, perhaps, when there's nothing else left but the poorhouse.
It's pretty tough if I have to marry a mechanic."
"Joe's a good deal of a man. He won't always be a mechanic, Lena. He's
got too much ambition."
"He may, or he may not. Anyway, he'll bear the marks of a mechanic all
his days. I'm not his kind."
Lena rose and went across the room to lean on the little dressing-table
and survey herself in the old green glass. This was her panacea for
every woe. The little pucker in her forehead straightened itself out.
"Look at me, mother," she demanded, turning around. "Do you think all
this is meant to scrub and sew and cook for the foreman in locomotive
works? Because I don't."
She was smiling, but her mother did not smile in return.
"I believe I was most as pretty as you are when I was a girl," Mrs.
Quincy said. "And that was all the good it did. I thought I was making a
grand marriage when I got your father; but he seemed to sort of flatten
out and lose all his ambition after we was married. He didn't seem to
care about anything, though I used to give him my opinion pretty plain.
And it's mighty little he left me when he was took," she added
vindictively.
Her daughter eyed her speculatively.
"Well, I'm not going to be taken in the way you were," she said sharply.
"You thought a good old name and a promising career were enough; and
father didn't keep his promises. I want money and not the promise of
money."
"And where will you find him?" sniffed Mrs. Quincy, to whom "it" and
"he" were synonymous. "I don't notice any millionaires crowding up to
you, for all your big eyes and your great opinion of yourself."
"That's just it. If I could only meet them!" Lena got up and walked
restlessly about the room. Her eyes fell on the last night's copy of the
_Star_, opened to that chatty column headed "Woman's Fancies". She had
read it with absorbed interest. Her body halted now, for the muscles
often stop work when the mind becomes possessed of a great idea. She
stood for a long time and looked from the unwashed window-pane while a
new resolve slowly hardened itself within.
"I'll try, I'll try, I'll try," she said to herself, and her heart
thumped uncomfortably. "And if I take it to the office myself, when they
see me perhaps they--"
Aloud she said nothing, for she had early learned the great lesson that
the best way of getting her own will with her mother was to do what she
wished first and argue about it afterward.
"What have we got for supper, mother?" she asked.
"Nothing," said Mrs. Quincy sharply.
"Nothing? Well, give me some money and let me go and get something."
Mrs. Quincy reluctantly lifted her skirt and began to explore her
petticoat below. She shook open the mouth of a pocket into which she
dived to return with a knotted handkerchief. Lena looked on impatiently
as the knot was slowly untied and a small hoard of silver disclosed.
"There," said Mrs. Quincy. "You can take this quarter, Lena, and do get
something nourishing. Don't buy cream-cakes. I feel the need of what
will stay my stomach."
"I'll get baked-beans," answered the girl with a short laugh.
"Yes, do. I shan't have another cent till next pay-day comes. We've got
to make this last. Get some tea, Lena--green, remember. The beans won't
cost more than twelve cents. I don't see how you can have a new hat."
"Well, give me ten cents, anyway," Lena answered with unexpected
submission.
"What do you want it for?"
"Please, mammy," Lena said coaxingly. "I won't buy cream-cakes or
anything to eat. I want to invest in a gold mine."
Mrs. Quincy gave her a sharp look and grudgingly handed out a dime; for
Lena's voice was instinct with hope, and hope was such a rare visitor in
the dingy little lodgings that Mrs. Quincy grew generous under its
magnetic warmth.
"Now what'd you want that ten cents for?" she asked curiously when the
girl came back. "My land! Only paper and pencil? I thought you was going
to do something grand."