jaw, and I knew that no airy persiflage would deceive him. Boldly I
waded in.
"I write for the magazines," said I.
"Do they know it?" grinned Tony.
"Just beginning to be faintly aware. Your stand looks like a story to
me. Tell me, does one ever come your way? For instance, don't they come
here asking for their home-town paper--sobs in their voice--grasp the
sheet with trembling hands--type swims in a misty haze before their
eyes--turn aside to brush away a tear--all that kind of stuff, you know?"
Tony's grin threatened his cold-sore. You can't stand on the corner of
Clark and Randolph all those years without getting wise to everything
there is.
"I'm on," said he, "but I'm afraid I can't accommodate, girlie. I guess
my ear ain't attuned to that sob stuff. What's that? Yessir. Nossir,
fifteen cents. Well, I can't help that; fifteen's the reg'lar price of
foreign papers. Thanks. There, did you see that? I bet that gink give
up fifteen of his last two bits to get that paper. O, well, sometimes
they look happy, and then again sometimes they--Yes'm. Mississippi?
Five cents. Los Vegas Optic right here. Heh there! You're forgettin'
your change!--an' then again sometimes they look all to the doleful.
Say, stick around. Maybe somebody'll start something. You can't never
tell."
And then this happened.
A man approached Tony's news stand from the north, and a woman approached
Tony's news stand from the south. They brought my story with them.
The woman reeked of the city. I hope you know what I mean. She bore the
stamp, and seal, and imprint of it. It had ground its heel down on her
face. At the front of her coat she wore a huge bunch of violets, with a
fleshly tuberose rising from its center. Her furs were voluminous. Her
hat was hidden beneath the cascades of a green willow plume. A green
willow plume would make Edna May look sophisticated. She walked with
that humping hip movement which city women acquire. She carried a
jangling handful of useless gold trinkets. Her heels were too high, and
her hair too yellow, and her lips too red, and her nose too white, and
her cheeks too pink. Everything about her was "too," from the black
stitching on her white gloves to the buckle of brilliants in her hat.
The city had her, body and soul, and had fashioned her in its metallic
cast. You would have sworn that she had never seen flowers growing in a
field.
Said she to Tony:
"Got a Kewaskum Courier?"
As she said it the man stopped at the stand and put his question. To
present this thing properly I ought to be able to describe them both at
the same time, like a juggler keeping two balls in the air at once.
Kindly carry the lady in your mind's eye. The man was tall and rawboned,
with very white teeth, very blue eyes and an open-faced collar that
allowed full play to an objectionably apparent Adam's apple. His hair
and mustache were sandy, his gait loping. His manner, clothes, and
complexion breathed of Waco, Texas (or is it Arizona?)
Said he to Tony:
"Let me have the London Times."
Well, there you are. I turned an accusing eye on Tony.
"And you said no stories came your way," I murmured, reproachfully.
"Help yourself," said Tony.
The blonde lady grasped the Kewaskum Courier. Her green plume appeared
to be unduly agitated as she searched its columns. The sheet rattled.
There was no breeze. The hands in the too-black stitched gloves were
trembling.
I turned from her to the man just in time to see the Adam's apple leaping
about unpleasantly and convulsively. Whereupon I jumped to two
conclusions.
Conclusion one: Any woman whose hands can tremble over the Kewaskum
Courier is homesick.
Conclusion two: Any man, any part of whose anatomy can become convulsed
over the London Times is homesick.
She looked up from her Courier. He glanced away from his Times. As the
novelists have it, their eyes met. And there, in each pair of eyes there
swam that misty haze about which I had so earnestly consulted Tony. The
Green Plume took an involuntary step forward. The Adam's Apple did the
same. They spoke simultaneously.
"They're going to pave Main Street," said the Green Plume, "and Mrs.
Wilcox, that was Jeri Meyers, has got another baby girl, and the ladies
of the First M. E. made seven dollars and sixty-nine cents on their
needle-work bazaar and missionary tea. I ain't been home in eleven
years."
"Hallem is trying for Parliament in Westchester and the King is back at
Windsor. My mother wears a lace cap down to breakfast, and the place is
famous for its tapestries and yew trees and family ghost. I haven't been
home in twelve years."
The great, soft light of fellow feeling and sympathy glowed in the eyes
of each. The Green Plume took still another step forward and laid her
hand on his arm (as is the way of Green Plumes the world over).
"Why don't you go, kid?" she inquired, softly.
Adam's Apple gnawed at his mustache end. "I'm the black sheep. Why
don't you?"
The blonde lady looked down at her glove tips. Her lower lip was caught
between her teeth.
"What's the feminine for black sheep? I'm that. Anyway, I'd be afraid
to go home for fear it would be too much of a shock for them when they
saw my hair. They wasn't in on the intermediate stages when it was
chestnut, auburn, Titian, gold, and orange colored. I want to spare
their feelings. The last time they saw me it was just plain brown.
Where I come from a woman who dyes her hair when it is beginning to turn
gray is considered as good as lost. Funny, ain't it? And yet I remember
the minister's wife used to wear false teeth--the kind that clicks. But
hair is different."
"Dear lady," said the blue-eyed man, "it would make no difference to your
own people. I know they would be happy to see you, hair and all. One's
own people----"
"My folks? That's just it. If the Prodigal Son had been a daughter
they'd probably have handed her one of her sister's mother hubbards, and
put her to work washing dishes in the kitchen. You see, after Ma died my
brother married, and I went to live with him and Lil. I was an ugly
little mug, and it looked all to the Cinderella for me, with the coach,
and four, and prince left out. Lil was the village beauty when my
brother married her, and she kind of got into the habit of leaving the
heavy role to me, and confining herself to thinking parts. One day I
took twenty dollars and came to the city. Oh, I paid it back long ago,
but I've never been home since. But say, do you know every time I get
near a news stand like this I grab the home-town paper. I'll bet I've
kept track every time my sister-in-law's sewing circle has met for the
last ten years, and the spring the paper said they built a new porch I
was just dying to write and ask'em what they did with the Virginia
creeper that used to cover the whole front and sides of the old porch."
"Look here," said the man, very abruptly, "if it's money you need,
why----"
"Me! Do I look like a touch? Now you----"
"Finest stock farm and ranch in seven counties. I come to Chicago once a
year to sell. I've got just thirteen thousand nestling next to my left
floating rib this minute."
The eyes of the woman with the green plume narrowed down to two
glittering slits. A new look came into her face--a look that matched her
hat, and heels and gloves and complexion and hair.
"Thirteen thousand! Thirteen thous---- Say, isn't it chilly on this
corner, h'm? I know a kind of a restaurant just around the corner
where----"
"It's no use," said the sandy-haired man, gently. "And I wouldn't have
said that, if I were you. I was going back to-day on the 5:25, but I'm
sick of it all. So are you, or you wouldn't have said what you just
said. Listen. Let's go back home, you and I. The sight of a Navajo
blanket nauseates me. The thought of those prairies makes my eyes ache.
I know that if I have to eat one more meal cooked by that Chink of mine
I'll hang him by his own pigtail. Those rangy western ponies aren't
horseflesh, fit for a man to ride. Why, back home our stables were----
Look here. I want to see a silver tea-service, with a coat-of-arms on
it. I want to dress for dinner, and take in a girl with a white gown and
smooth white shoulders. My sister clips roses in the morning, before
breakfast, in a pink ruffled dress and garden gloves. Would you believe
that, here, on Clark Street, with a whiskey sign overhead, and the
stock-yard smells undernose? O, hell! I'm going home."
"Home?" repeated the blonde lady. "Home?" The sagging lines about her
flaccid chin took on a new look of firmness and resolve. The light of
determination glowed in her eyes.
"I'll beat you to it," she said. "I'm going home, too. I'll be there
to-morrow. I'm dead sick of this. Who cares whether I live or die?
It's just one darned round of grease paint, and sky blue tights, and new
boarding houses and humping over to the theater every night, going on,
and humping back to the room again. I want to wash up some supper dishes
with egg on 'em, and set some yeast for bread, and pop a dishpan full of
corn, and put a shawl over my head and run over to Millie Krause's to get
her kimono sleeve pattern. I'm sour on this dirt and noise. I want to
spend the rest of my life in a place so that when I die they'll put a
column in the paper, with a verse at the top, and all the neighbors'll
come in and help bake up. Here--why, here I'd just be two lines on the
want ad page, with fifty cents extra for 'Kewaskum paper please copy.'"
The man held out his hand. "Good-bye," he said, "and please excuse me if
I say God bless you. I've never really wanted to say it before, so it's
quite extraordinary. My name's Guy Peel."
The white glove, with its too-conspicuous black stitching, disappeared
within his palm.
"Mine's Mercedes Meron, late of the Morning Glory Burlesquers, but from
now on Sadie Hayes, of Kewaskum, Wisconsin. Good-bye and--well--God
bless you, too. Say, I hope you don't think I'm in the habit of talking
to strange gents like this."
"I am quite sure you are not," said Guy Peel, very gravely, and bowed
slightly before he went south on Clark Street, and she went north.
Dear Reader, will you take my hand while I assist you to make a one
year's leap. Whoop-la! There you are.
A man and a woman approached Tony's news stand. You are quite right.
But her willow plume was purple this time. A purple willow plume would
make Mario Doro look sophisticated. The man was sandy-haired, raw-boned,
with a loping gait, very blue eyes, very white teeth, and an
objectionably apparent Adam's apple. He came from the north, and she
from the south.
In story books, and on the stage, when two people meet unexpectedly after
a long separation they always stop short, bring one hand up to their
breast, and say: "You!" Sometimes, especially in the case where the
heroine chances on the villain, they say, simultaneously: "You! Here!"
I have seen people reunited under surprising circumstances, but they
never said, "You!" They said something quite unmelodramatic, and
commonplace, such as: "Well, look who's here!" or, "My land! If it
ain't Ed! How's Ed?"
So it was that the Purple Willow Plume and the Adam's Apple stopped,
shook hands, and viewed one another while the Plume said, "I kind of
thought I'd bump into you. Felt it in my bones." And the Adam's Apple
said:
"Then you're not living in Kewaskum--er--Wisconsin?"
"Not any," responded she, briskly. "How do you happen to be straying
away from the tapestries, and the yew trees and the ghost, and the pink
roses, and the garden gloves, and the silver tea-service with the
coat-of-arms on it?"
A slow, grim smile overspread the features of the man. "You tell yours
first," he said.
"Well," began she, "in the first place, my name's Mercedes Meron, of the
Morning Glory Burlesquers, formerly Sadie Hayes of Kewaskum, Wisconsin.
I went home next day, like I said I would. Say, Mr. Peel (you said Peel,
didn't you? Guy Peel. Nice, neat name), to this day, when I eat lobster
late at night, and have dreams, it's always about that visit home."
"How long did you stay?"
"I'm coming to that. Or maybe you can figure it out yourself when I tell
you I've been back eleven months. I wired the folks I was coming, and
then I came before they had a chance to answer. When the train reached
Kewaskum I stepped off into the arms of a dowd in a
home-made-made-over-year-before-last suit, and a hat that would have been
funny if it hadn't been so pathetic. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and
I held her off, and looked--looked at the wrinkles, and the sallow
complexion, and the coat with the sleeves in wrong, and the mashed hat (I
told you Lil used to be the village peach, didn't I?) and I says:
"'For Gawd's sakes, Lil, does your husband beat you?'
"'Steve!' she shrieks, 'beat me! You must be crazy!'
"'Well, if he don't, he ought to. Those clothes are grounds for
divorce,' I says.
"Mr. Guy Peel, it took me just four weeks to get wise to the fact that
the way to cure homesickness is to go home. I spent those four weeks
trying to revolutionize my sister-in-law's house, dress, kids, husband,
wall paper and parlor carpet. I took all the doilies from under the
ornaments and spoke my mind on the subject of the hand-painted lamp, and
Lil hates me for it yet, and will to her dying day. I fitted three
dresses for her, and made her get some corsets that she'll never wear.
They have roast pork for dinner on Sundays, and they never go to the
theater, and they like bread pudding, and they're happy. I wasn't. They
treated me fine, and it was home, all right, but not my home. It was the
same, but I was different. Eleven years away from anything makes it
shrink, if you know what I mean. I guess maybe you do. I remember that
I used to think that the Grand View Hotel was a regular little oriental
palace that was almost too luxurious to be respectable, and that the
traveling men who stopped there were gods, and just to prance past the
hotel after supper had the Atlantic City board walk looking like a back
alley on a rainy night. Well, everything had sort of shriveled up just
like that. The popcorn gave me indigestion, and I burned the skin off my
nose popping it. Kneading bread gave me the backache, and the blamed
stuff wouldn't raise right. I got so I was crazy to hear the roar of an
L train, and the sound of a crossing policeman's whistle. I got to
thinking how Michigan Avenue looks, downtown, with the lights shining
down on the asphalt, and all those people eating in the swell hotels, and
the autos, and the theater crowds and the windows, and--well, I'm back.
Glad I went? You said it. Because it made me so darned glad to get
back. I've found out one thing, and it's a great little lesson when you
get it learned. Most of us are where we are because we belong there, and
if we didn't, we wouldn't be. Say, that does sound mixed, don't it? But
it's straight. Now you tell yours."
"I think you've said it all," began Guy Peel. "It's queer, isn't it, how
twelve years of America will spoil one for afternoon tea, and yew trees,
and tapestries, and lace caps, and roses. The mater was glad to see me,
but she said I smelled woolly. They think a Navajo blanket is a thing
the Indians wear on the war path, and they don't know whether Texas is a
state, or a mineral water. It was slow--slow. About the time they were
taking afternoon tea, I'd be reckoning how the boys would be rounding up
the cattle for the night, and about the time we'd sit down to dinner
something seemed to whisk the dinner table, and the flowers, and the men
and women in evening clothes right out of sight, like magic, and I could
see the boys stretched out in front of the bunk house after their supper
of bacon, and beans, and biscuit, and coffee. They'd be smoking their
pipes that smelled to Heaven, and further, and Wing would be squealing
one of his creepy old Chink songs out in the kitchen, and the sky would
be--say, Miss Meron, did you ever see the night sky, out West? Purple,
you know, and soft as soap-suds, and so near that you want to reach up
and touch it with your hand. Toward the end my mother used to take me
off in a corner and tell me that I hadn't spoken a word to the little
girl that I had taken in to dinner, and that if I couldn't forget my
uncouth western ways for an hour or two, at least, perhaps I'd better not
try to mingle with civilized people. I discovered that home isn't always
the place where you were born and bred. Home is the place where your
everyday clothes are, and where somebody, or something needs you. They
didn't need me over there in England. Lord no! I was sick for the sight
of a Navajo blanket. My shack's glowing with them. And my books needed
me, and the boys, and the critters, and Kate."
"Kate?" repeated Miss Meron, quickly.
"Kate's my horse. I'm going back on the 5:25 to-night. This is my
regular trip, you know. I came around here to buy a paper, because it
has become a habit. And then, too, I sort of felt--well, something told
me that you----"
"You're a nice boy," said Miss Meron. "By the way, did I tell you that I
married the manager of the show the week after I got back? We go to
Bloomington to-night, and then we jump to St. Paul. I came around here
just as usual, because--well--because----"
Tony's gift for remembering faces and facts amounts to genius.
With two deft movements he whisked two papers from among the many in the
rack, and held them out.
"Kewaskum Courier?" he suggested.
"Nix," said Mercedes Meron, "I'll take a Chicago Scream."
"London Times?" said Tony.
"No," replied Guy Peel. "Give me the San Antonio Express."
X
THE HOMELY HEROINE
Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions, beckoned me with her
finger. I had been standing at Kate O'Malley's counter, pretending to
admire her new basket-weave suitings, but in reality reveling in her
droll account of how, in the train coming up from Chicago, Mrs. Judge
Porterfield had worn the negro porter's coat over her chilly shoulders in
mistake for her husband's. Kate O'Malley can tell a funny story in a way
to make the after-dinner pleasantries of a Washington diplomat sound like
the clumsy jests told around the village grocery stove.
"I wanted to tell you that I read that last story of yours," said Millie,
sociably, when I had strolled over to her counter, "and I liked it, all
but the heroine. She had an 'adorable throat' and hair that 'waved away
from her white brow,' and eyes that 'now were blue and now gray.' Say,
why don't you write a story about an ugly girl?"
"My land!" protested I. "It's bad enough trying to make them accept my
stories as it is. That last heroine was a raving beauty, but she came
back eleven times before the editor of Blakely's succumbed to her charms."
Millie's fingers were busy straightening the contents of a tray of combs
and imitation jet barrettes. Millie's fingers were not intended for that
task. They are slender, tapering fingers, pink-tipped and sensitive.
"I should think," mused she, rubbing a cloudy piece of jet with a bit of
soft cloth, "that they'd welcome a homely one with relief. These
goddesses are so cloying."
Millie Whitcomb's black hair is touched with soft mists of gray, and she
wears lavender shirtwaists and white stocks edged with lavender. There
is a Colonial air about her that has nothing to do with celluloid combs
and imitation jet barrettes. It breathes of dim old rooms, rich with the
tones of mahogany and old brass, and Millie in the midst of it,
gray-gowned, a soft white fichu crossed upon her breast.
In our town the clerks are not the pert and gum-chewing young persons
that story-writers are wont to describe. The girls at Bascom's are
institutions. They know us all by our first names, and our lives are as
an open book to them. Kate O'Malley, who has been at Bascom's for so
many years that she is rumored to have stock in the company, may be said
to govern the fashions of our town. She is wont to say, when we express
a fancy for gray as the color of our new spring suit:
"Oh, now, Nellie, don't get gray again. You had it year before last, and
don't you think it was just the least leetle bit trying? Let me show you
that green that came in yesterday. I said the minute I clapped my eyes
on it that it was just the color for you, with your brown hair and all."
And we end by deciding on the green.
The girls at Bascom's are not gossips--they are too busy for that--but
they may be said to be delightfully well informed. How could they be
otherwise when we go to Bascom's for our wedding dresses and party favors
and baby flannels? There is news at Bascom's that our daily paper never
hears of, and wouldn't dare print if it did.
So when Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions, expressed her
hunger for a homely heroine, I did not resent the suggestion. On the
contrary, it sent me home in thoughtful mood, for Millie Whitcomb has
acquired a knowledge of human nature in the dispensing of her fancy goods
and notions. It set me casting about for a really homely heroine.
There never has been a really ugly heroine in fiction. Authors have
started bravely out to write of an unlovely woman, but they never have
had the courage to allow her to remain plain. On Page 237 she puts on a
black lace dress and red roses, and the combination brings out unexpected
tawny lights in her hair, and olive tints in her cheeks, and there she
is, the same old beautiful heroine. Even in the "Duchess" books one
finds the simple Irish girl, on donning a green corduroy gown cut square
at the neck, transformed into a wild-rose beauty, at sight of whom a
ball-room is hushed into admiring awe. There's the case of jane Eyre,
too. She is constantly described as plain and mouse-like, but there are
covert hints as to her gray eyes and slender figure and clear skin, and
we have a sneaking notion that she wasn't such a fright after all.
Therefore, when I tell you that I am choosing Pearlie Schultz as my
leading lady you are to understand that she is ugly, not only when the
story opens, but to the bitter end. In the first place, Pearlie is fat.
Not, plump, or rounded, or dimpled, or deliciously curved, but FAT. She
bulges in all the wrong places, including her chin. (Sister, who has a
way of snooping over my desk in my absence, says that I may as well drop
this now, because nobody would ever read it, anyway, least of all any
sane editor. I protest when I discover that Sis has been over my papers.
It bothers me. But she says you have to do these things when you have a
genius in the house, and cites the case of Kipling's "Recessional," which
was rescued from the depths of his wastebasket by his wife.)
Pearlie Schultz used to sit on the front porch summer evenings and watch
the couples stroll by, and weep in her heart. A fat girl with a fat
girl's soul is a comedy. But a fat girl with a thin girl's soul is a
tragedy. Pearlie, in spite of her two hundred pounds, had the soul of a
willow wand.
The walk in front of Pearlie's house was guarded by a row of big trees
that cast kindly shadows. The strolling couples used to step gratefully
into the embrace of these shadows, and from them into other embraces.
Pearlie, sitting on the porch, could see them dimly, although they could
not see her. She could not help remarking that these strolling couples
were strangely lacking in sprightly conversation. Their remarks were but
fragmentary, disjointed affairs, spoken in low tones with a queer,
tremulous note in them. When they reached the deepest, blackest,
kindliest shadow, which fell just before the end of the row of trees, the
strolling couples almost always stopped, and then there came a quick
movement, and a little smothered cry from the girl, and then a sound, and
then a silence. Pearlie, sitting alone on the porch in the dark,
listened to these things and blushed furiously. Pearlie had never
strolled into the kindly shadows with a little beating of the heart, and
she had never been surprised with a quick arm about her and eager lips
pressed warmly against her own.
In the daytime Pearlie worked as public stenographer at the Burke Hotel.
She rose at seven in the morning, and rolled for fifteen minutes, and lay
on her back and elevated her heels in the air, and stood stiff-kneed
while she touched the floor with her finger tips one hundred times, and
went without her breakfast. At the end of each month she usually found
that she weighed three pounds more than she had the month before.