she broke out with: “My dear, I asked you just to have coffee with me,
but now--well, to tell you the truth--I am quite faint. I breakfast
at half-past six, that I may have the strong morning light for my
work, and somehow I feel a bit exhausted to-day, and--and I’d like
my dinner now, if you can pardon an old woman’s offence against all
conventionalities, and stay and dine with me!”
Could I have known, I would have taken the coffee only and denied my
hunger; but I knew nothing, and cheerfully consented to dine with her.
I wondered where her kitchen was, and, supposing she would be some time
preparing the simplest meal, I looked about for something to help me
pass away the time. There was no paper, and but one book in the room,
a family bible that might have been bound in a pair of old boots--its
leather was so browned with age, so worn, so scruffed it looked. I went
over to take it up, when my hostess, with distinct satisfaction in
her voice, announced, “Dinner!” All my life long my generally-absent
appetite has been pursued like an “_ignus fatuus_” by those near to me,
but this time my appetite met its match; old Myra’s saw mine and went
it about four better. The knives and forks had now appeared, simply
as a mockery, I believe. Lying on a plate were four biscuits, or, as
we called them then, crackers. They belonged to that branch of the
cracker family known as “soda”--soda crackers, and while I looked on
in stupid wonder, she carefully opened a handsomely-cut, glass box,
with a silver lid, which, beyond the shadow of a doubt, had been her
powder-box in days gone by, and delicately lifted out _four little,
thin scraps_ of smoked beef--four crackers and those scraps of beef--no
more, no less--and we fell to and “dined” upon them. But when I saw
her trying not to eat too eagerly, I had a lump in my throat bigger
than our whole dinner. No wonder her weight was less than a pound for
each year of her weary life. I wished I could gather her up in my arms
and kiss the fierceness out of her eyes and promise her fire enough
for real comfort, and coffee, and food--real food--that would not make
the promise of nourishment to the eye to break it to the stomach. My
thoughts were broken by “You, girl! is there anything the matter with
your dinner?”
“Nothing in the world,” I cried, “but I was not very hungry, and, in
fact, I do want to get back to my coffee.”
“Well,” she answered, “I must say you eat fairer than ever Sally did,
for, I give you my word, for years on end that parrot cheated me out of
at least half a cracker every day of her life, and yet, my dear, when
she died she was as thin as I am.”
When I was about leaving her, she said to me: “You, girl, I like you!
You are queer. You are uneven, and you make me guess. You know more
and you know less than most girls of your age, and, thank God, you
don’t giggle! You may come again.” She paused and looked at me with a
deprecating expression, and finished almost meekly: “That is, if you
care to share your spare time with me.”
I told her, and I told her truly, how glad I should be to come. How
glad I was to live in Lake street too, and so near to her, and then,
rather shyly, I added: “I think, if you will let me, I will tell you my
name, Mrs. Worden”--and I mentioned it.
She was looking out at the dreary lake again, and, without
withdrawing her eyes, she made answer: “H’m’m! Clara, eh? Cla--ra,
Claire--Clarice--that’s a fool name, Clarice? but Clara--that’s light,
illustrious, clear, bright! My dear, I’m glad you are named Clara. It’s
a good name. I hope it may fit you as well as mine has fitted me. My
French mother meant to call me Marie, which is, you know, a form of
Mary--‘Star of the Sea,’ and he who did the sprinkling and the crossing
and the rest was deaf, and he named me Myra--‘she who weeps.’ Good
God! Good God! Have I not been well named? ‘She who weeps.’ The tears
are all gone from the eyes, now, and they are dry enough, but hot, my
dearies--so very hot! Internal, cruel tears that ooze slowly, like
drops of thin, old blood, still fall from my heart, my dearies, while
I wait and wait. Aye, it was before the altar, and with the sign of
the sacred cross, and the touch of the holy-water on my brow, that he
baptized me ‘Myra’--‘she who weeps!’”
I stole out of the room, where well-bred hunger showed its teeth so
plainly, and softly closed the door, leaving her in the gathering
darkness, a ghost talking to other ghosts, from whom she was separated
by the thinnest, frailest shell of mortality I ever saw.
And so we went our ways, and did the work that fell to us. Some
nights I pranced cheerily about the stage in country dances, and made
announcements anent that carriage that always seemed to be waiting for
some one in the old plays, particularly the comedies. “My Lord, the
carriage waits!” It is a famous line, a short one, I know, but powerful
enough to produce temporary paralysis of the limbs and complete
dumbness, for the moment, in strong and lusty youths and maidens.
Well, I was on most friendly terms with that line, and some nights
said nothing more, while on other nights I went on and played really
first-class parts, that being the manner in which we used to work our
way upward from the very bottom, and felt no shame in it either; but
_nous avons changés tout cela_.
While I was thus bobbing up and down upon the restless waters of my
profession, my strange “old lady,” who had grown to be my friend,
was sitting “like a gray, old Fate, toiling, toiling, weaving” the
fairy-like stitches that made whole again the torn or injured among
rare and precious laces. Her knowledge of them was wonderful, her love
for them almost tender. She would shake her head and croon over them,
when they were, in her words, “badly hurt.” The day she came nearest
to loving me was the day I said I thought laces were the poetry of
a woman’s wardrobe. “Aye, aye,” she answered, “that’s a good word
and well said, girl Clara. It’s strange that, without teaching or
information, your keen instinct guides you to the _real_ beauties of
life as surely as the sense of smell guides a young hound on the trail.
There’s nothing made by the hand of poverty that is so beautiful as
lace; so delicate yet so strong. Ah! girl Clara, some day, may you see
a bit of Venetian ‘point,’ ‘round point,’ but if you do, you’ll smash a
commandment, mark my words!”
Laces were sent to her from distant cities, and the package I had
caught up from under the horses’ feet came, as did many others, from
the then greatest merchant of New York. She had received much work from
the South, but the war deprived her of that. So she went on cutting her
expenses down to meet her earnings, starving quite slowly and making
her moan to no man.
One day I paid a long-promised, much-dreaded visit to a young friend
of mine. We had made our first appearance in the ballet together, the
same night, the same play, and she was still in the ballet. She was the
young person who gave me the decorated fly-trap for a Christmas gift.
Somehow that remarkable selection of a gift always seems to have had
something to do with her remaining so many years the chief ornament of
that ballet. I had gone with her from rehearsal to her boarding-house.
Now, there are boarding-houses and boarding-houses, but this was just a
boarding-house. The sadly experienced ones will understand exactly what
I mean. The happy, inexperienced ones may just skip the sentence.
Rehearsal had been long, so we were late for dinner and we seated
ourselves at the long, narrow, untidy, unfriendly-looking table, with
heavy forebodings. Everything seemed to have been devoured by the
boarders before us, except the pickles. They alone coldly and sourly
faced us. But when the slatternly waitress came in, I asked myself why,
oh, why had I come at all? A slattern with a cheerful face is hard to
bear, but a slattern who sulks is more than even a boarder should be
asked to endure. I saw my friend, whose name was Mary, quail as this
fell creature looked insolently at her; but before our doom was sealed
the landlady passed through the room. Now, Mary always said that had
she been alone that incident would have passed for nothing, and that
she would have dined on pickles and cold water, or not dined at all,
but I was there, and Mrs. Bulkley knew of me, and being stricken for
the moment with madness, saw in me a possible boarder, therefore she
paused and greeted me, and rather unnecessarily explained that the
dinner was all gone, but added that she reckoned they could scrape
something together for us. And Mary rather ungratefully whispered,
“she was used to living on scrapings now.” While we waited, the sulky
slattern, regardless of our presence, proceeded with her duties,
snatching everything from the table, except the shame-faced cover and
the pickles.
Presently Mrs. Bulkley appeared, and our dinner materialized in the
form of liver and bacon and warmed potatoes, a vulgar dish, but, being
freshly cooked, a welcome one to two tired and hungry girls. Had it not
been for the table-cover we might have been quite happy, but the sins
of the boarders against it had been many, and as they had not yet been
washed away, they were not pleasant to look upon.
Just as we were being served, Mary remarked that she had “seen that
awful, old Mrs. Worden giving a gentleman fits in the street that
morning, and that two other gentlemen were waiting for him, and they
had laughed at him,” and she ended by asking me “had I ever seen her?”
“Oh, yes,” I answered, “I saw her in her room yesterday.”
“What?” cried Mrs. Bulkley, dropping the spoon noisily from her hand.
“What’s that? You saw Mrs. Worden in her room, her own room where she
lives? Oh, nonsense, you don’t mean our Mrs. Worden! She hasn’t had a
soul inside that room since old poll Sal died.”
I explained that my Mrs. Worden was “Myra,” owner of Sally, living at
number so-and-so Lake street, mender of laces, etc., and then Mrs.
Bulkley dropped herself, a friendly chair catching her; then she said:
“Well, I’m dummed!” Then she took off her spectacles and wiped them on
a corner of the table-cover, which made them worse, as I knew it would,
and she took them off again and wiped them on a grimy handkerchief, and
put them on, and looked hard at me and said: “She had you in her room,
and you a theatre-girl? Well, then, she’s breaking up at last. Well!
Well!”
She leaned her head upon her ugly, old hand, and I asked:
“Do you know her personally?”
“Do I know her!” she snapped out at me. “Don’t she come here every once
in a while? and sometimes she takes tea with me!”
“Yes,” faintly murmured Mary, “and when she comes, a clean cloth goes
on the table, and every boarder in the house who has ‘a past,’ keeps in
his or her own room.”
I smiled comprehendingly, while Mrs. Bulkley went on: “Do I know her?
good Lord! haven’t I known her since I was a green girl in my early
’teens?”
I was startled. Looking at her foxy, false front, her steel-bowed
spectacles, her leathery skin, and the small framed platter she wore on
her chest as a breast-pin, it was so hard to believe she had ever had
any ‘’teens’ at all!
“Yes,” she went on, “I know her, as my mother before me did. She worked
for Mrs. Worden for more than eighteen years, and now she’s breaking
up. Here, Hannah, make me some tea! You, oh, well, yes--you may make
enough for us three, and bring it here. I feel all tuckered out.”
And the old body did look worried and anxious. I was surprised, and I
was grateful for her interest in Mrs. Worden, for whom I now had a real
affection as well as a great pity.
“Oh, Mrs. Bulkley!” I cried, “don’t be uneasy; Mrs. Worden seems quite
as well as usual. She works as hard as ever, too, and she is very kind
to me.”
“There!” exclaimed Mrs. Bulkley, “that settles it! Myra Worden kind to
anyone in her eighty-third year? She’s breaking; she’ll get the sign
she’s been waiting for so long pretty soon, I reckon, poor thing!”
I simply could not help putting the question: “Do you know, Mrs.
Bulkley, why Mrs. Worden hates theatres so bitterly?”
“Do I know, my Suz!--Oh, here’s the tea, and glad I am for it!”
The tea was good, and I saw by the gratified astonishment of Mary’s
face that it was a treat. When the “Busy B” (as Mrs. Bulkley was
generally called behind her back) had had her first cup, as a
pick-me-up--a sort of green-tea cocktail--she felt better. She loosened
her specs and let them slide well down her nose, so she could look at
me over their tops; she planted her black alpaca elbow on the dingy
table, and unlimbered, ready for conversation, while, for the first
time in my life, I recognized these signs in a landlady without
instantly taking flight. “Why,” she began, “it was like this: Right
from the first every one said she’d throwed herself away when she took
up with that great, big, pink-and-white chuckle-head, Phil Worden. But
she was just plumb crazy in love with him. I suppose he must have cared
a little for her at first, but mother always said he just married her
out of vanity--like gals do sometimes--she being the biggest catch in
town. Good looks, and money and family the hull thing! Well, anyway,
he was a foolin’ her, or thought he was, before they was married a
year. She knew of it in no time. Mother thought there’d be an awful
rumpus, but Mrs. Worden shut herself up all afternoon alone, and walked
and walked, but when supper-time come she just met him as kind and as
sweet! Oh! Myra used to be sweet enough in them days, and she just
talked and laughed, and he looked like a great school-boy expecting a
good trouncing. Well, that blowed over, but Myra Worden was always on
the watch, I reckon, after that. Mother used to say he was, somehow,
afraid of her. She loved books--good Lord! the books she had; lots of
’em writ in French, too; and she first off tried to talk of ’em to him,
same as to visitors, and he didn’t know a thing about ’em. Then she
tried to read them to him, and mother said she didn’t know which one
she felt the sorriest for, him or her; him trying to keep awake, or
her trying to hide her disappointment. Well, by-and-by, she gives it
all up, and, if you’ll believe me, that educated, fine-minded woman
just took to readin’ out loud to him a nasty, low-down paper--I can’t
just call its name now, but all about cock-fights--oh, yes! they had
dog-fights and cock-fights in my time, my dear--and ring fights, and
horse-races, and he’d just drink it all in, every word. She was fond
of music, and he couldn’t tell one tune from another, he said; but
that was just an excuse, because he hated to have to sit and listen to
decent music. Common fiddling suited him well enough. He was almost
stupid in behavior or sulky-like in company--proper company; but
if, by chance, he was left home at night and his wife was out, he’d
carry on with the servants, and sing songs, and play tricks with the
cards, and imitate things--pigs gruntin’ and corks poppin’, and that
like, until you’d laugh to split. In that sort of way, mother used to
say, she thought he felt afraid of his wife’s finding out his real
disposition, and she--why, she just followed him about with them black
eyes of hers, and fair worshipped him. She was nigh tickled to death
when her girl baby came into the world; yellow-headed like him. She
was only like him in color, however, for of all the domineerin’ little
hectoring brats I ever saw! Well, as I was saying, Mrs. Worden was the
law of this town then, and it was card parties and coach parties and
sleigh parties and lake moonlight parties, accordin’ to the time a
year, and dinners and suppers and ‘routs’--that’s what they called ’em
then, I remember--and people used to come from other places and they’d
stay a week at a time, and them weeks was Phil Worden’s picnics, his
two-forty-on-a-plank days, I tell you. Now, I never see nobody so dead
crazy about theatres as Miss Worden was. Whenever a company came here
she had the first box, and every night of her life, unless she gave
a ‘rout,’ she was in that old theatre. Yes, I know it, an alley now,
and only a few low variety shows go there, and no women ever enters
its doors, but then it was, my Suz! it just was a fine theatre. Well,
Phil was fond of the show, too, and she was awful proud of that, and
it was ‘my Philip is so fond of the play,’ and ‘Mr. Worden will be at
the theatre whether or no--’ Poor soul! it was so seldom they liked
the same things, but Lord! even then she was deceivin’ herself. He
didn’t care for no play; he just went for them dances they used to
have between the acts, and the slack wire performers and that like;
but he knew every man and woman behind the scenes, and knocked about
with them in the daytime, and I don’t mean no slurs against you two
girls now, but in them days actors was a rather common lot. The men
nearly all drank too much, and, what’s worse, some of the women did,
too; and well, one crowd came here for a long stay, and Phil Worden was
just cock of the walk with them, and before long there was talk about
one special female. She wasn’t even a leadin’ actor among ’em, just
a brazen hussy who put paint an inch thick on her cheeks and daubed
her mouth with a dye thing they called ‘vinegar rouge,’ because it
wouldn’t come off easy, and she was poorer than Job, and all at once
she had beaver bonnets and velvet pelisses and feathers and long gloves
and a muff big enough for a bass drum. And because the woman was drunk
oftener and oftener, and in her cups was a noisy and quarrelsome jade
who would fight her best friend, and talked everything right out, all
Cleveland began to wink and nod and say Phil Worden. Well, of course,
Myra must have suspected, but never one cross word did she give him,
nor show him the frown mother said she had on pretty often them days
when he was away. But, one day, in he comes, near supper-time--even
Mrs. Worden took her dinner at two o’clock them times, and people said
it was all airs to have dinner so sinful late. Well, in he comes, all
bunged up, a sight to see! His eye was all swelled up, and there was
blood smears on his face, and his lip was hurt. Mother happened to be
right there when he came in, and she looked first thing at Mrs. Worden,
and she said her eyes flashed fire. She stood right in her tracks,
looking in her husband’s face, and her hands were shut tight, and at
last she said, and her voice cut like a knife: ‘_How did you get your
hurt, Mr. Worden?_’ and he looked away across the room and mumbled
something about ‘sky-larking with a fellow who was drunk and hit harder
than he knew,’ and she, as white as death and as cold as ice, said:
‘You lie, you coward! You lie! Not even a drunken man fights with
his nails! A woman did that work for you--’ and she threw open the
door and pointed for him to go, but in came the two children in their
gowns, with the nurse behind, to tell them both good-night. Her arm
fell like a log, and she made a spring and caught him by the shoulder
and turned him so the young ones couldn’t see his face, and pushed him
towards her dressin’-room and said all in one moment, ‘poor daddy! has
got hurted, so mammy must tell you good-night alone this time,’ and
when she kissed them the boy said, ‘Sall ’ou tiss him hurt, mammy?’
and she says: ‘God knows! God knows!’ and mother said she got away
with the dresses she was carryin’ and only knows that Myra nursed him
faithfully till he was able to face the world again, and for her pay,
one week later he left her, to follow the third-rate actress, who beat
him in her drunken frenzies--like the dog he was. He left a letter for
her. My mother stood, shaking like a leaf with fright, but Mrs. Worden
stood like a rock and read it all out loud: ‘How he was not her equal,
how she had been too generous and too kind,’ and then mother said he
quite worked up there, and blamed her hard for not flying out at him
when he done wrong. He said he could have stood it better if she had
abused him, but she held her tongue or only spoke gently to him, and at
the very end that’s what he said, ‘You should have lashed me, I could
have understood that, but your tongue was not sharp enough,’ and then
she stopped, my mother said, and then she read that line again, ‘your
tongue was not sharp enough,’ and then, says she, with blazing eyes
and white lips, ‘By God! no other man shall make that complaint of me!
I’ll sharpen my tongue like a serpent’s, and adder’s poison shall lurk
under my lips!’ and then suddenly she began to laugh and laughed and
laughed, and while we all went a running for doctors, she laughed her
way into the fever that came nigh to killin’ her.”
The tears were on my cheeks, and my tea was stone cold, when Mrs.
Bulkley paused to refill her exhausted lungs and swallow another
bracer. Mary had, meantime, been steadily eating, grinding with
the regularity of a machine, swallowing with the satisfaction of a
_gourmet_. She had devoured her own share of the meal and was now
making predatory attacks upon certain portions belonging by rights to
me, and I, believing that the “Busy B” was only getting her second wind
and would start again directly, told her in a whisper to go ahead and
eat it all, an arrangement satisfactory to us both, since I preferred
Mrs. Worden’s story to eating, and Mary preferred eating to any story
of any woman alive or dead. Mrs. Bulkley was about to resume her
narrative, when she paused to shout an order to the cook in the kitchen
“not to use none of that _good_ butter in no cooking out there,” and I
actually felt my flesh creep. It was the double shock that told upon
the nerves. There was first that awful attack upon poor Lindley Murray,
pounding him with negatives, then there were the rending possibilities
connected with the butter that _would_ be used in the cooking out
there. And I was glad that I was not Mary. Mary, hearing that order,
had simply let her eyebrows slide up her forehead a bit and then slide
down again, while she went on eating. Mrs. Bulkley suddenly remarked:
“I see you’re crying; well, well, I used to cry about Myra Worden
myself, sometimes. But when you get old your tears come harder, like
everything else, pretty nigh. I don’t know’s I exactly sense why you
should cry for her losin’ that great hulk of a fellow, though.”
“Oh!” I cried, “her pride, think of that! To have been abandoned for
some great woman, some rare beauty, would have been bad enough, but to
have been cast aside for a gross and common thing that cursed and tore
him like a beast, and all in the very face of the public! How could she
bear it all, poor thing?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Bulkley, “she done it somehow. But I must tell you
a queer sort of thing about when she was sick--yet it jest shows you
what dummed fools women be. Mrs. Worden had the most amazin’ head of
hair I ever seen in my born days, as black as jet and hangin’ to a
length I darsen’t name, for fear you’d think it lies, and thick! good
mercy! Well, she was in for a long sickness, the doctor said, and no
nurse could do anything with that mop of hern; and so they ups and
cuts it off, and mother cryin’ like a baby when they done it. But when
she found out herself what they had done to her--good Lord! she give a
screech, and wrung her hands and sobbed: ‘It was the only thing that
Philip ever loved about me. He called it his great, black mantle, and
once he wound it round and round and round his strong, white throat,
and now _it’s_ gone; thanks to these meddlin’ fools, who don’t see that
I can’t die!’ and she jest cursed every man and woman in the house,
and raved over that hair of hern every hour when she was out of her
head--when she was right-minded she never let on she noticed about it.
Well, at last she got well, and straight she put on the widow’s weeds
that she’s worn for five and fifty years. Poor soul! she held her head
so high and looked so hard right into folks’s eyes, they darsen’t ask
the questions nor make the remarks they’d like to. And she used to
spend an awful lot of time and money on the poor--and she jest guarded
them children as though they was chuck full of dimonds. But ’twas
_then_ she began to use the sharp edge of her tongue. She didn’t talk
_about_ folks, she never was one for slander, but the things she’d say
_to_ ’em was jest awful, and the worst of it all was, that she always
told the truth. If she’d jest been abusive and have made up things
outen whole cloth, nobody would ’a cared much; but what was it, now,
that big lawyer said about her once? Let’s see, she had been giving him
a hidin’ right before folks, and when she was done, he says, ‘The woman
who is armed with sarcasm and truth is a woman whose tongue is sharp on
both edges.’ Yes, them’s the words.