A PITIFUL PLIGHT
“There ain’t much to tell,” Etta said bitterly, “but I haven’t always
been miserable. I was happy up to the time I was ten. I lived with my
grandfolks over in Belgium. My mother left me there while she came to
America. She’d heard how money was easy to get, and, after my father died
in the war and the soldiers had robbed my grandfolks of all they had on
the farm, we had to get money somewheres. That’s why she came, takin’ all
that she’d saved for her passage. How my mother got away out here to
Californy, I don’t know, but anyway she did. She was a cook up in Frisco.
Every month she sent money to my grandfolks. My mother kept writing how
lonesome she was for me and how she was savin’ to send for me. The next
year I came over with a priest takin’ charge of me, but when I got here
they told me my mother had died and they put me in an orphanage. My
grandfolks tried to save money to send for me to go back to Belgium, but
what with sickness and they bein’ too old to work the farm, it’s seven
years now, an’ the money ain’t saved. Last year, me bein’ sixteen, I got
turned out o’ the orphanage and sent here to work parin’ vegetables. I
don’t get but three dollars a week and board, and I’ve been savin’ all I
can of it. But ’tain’t no use. That’s why I walked to the railway station
over to Santa Barbara to ask how much money I’d have to save to take me
home to my grandfolks.” The girl paused as though too discouraged to go
on.
Jenny had been so interested that she had not even noticed that Dobbin
had stopped to rest at one side of the steep road.
“Oh, you poor girl, I’m so sorry for you!” she said with a break in her
voice. “I suppose it takes a lot of money for the ticket to New York and
then the passage across the Atlantic in one of those big steamers.”
The tone in which her companion answered was dull and hopeless. “’Tain’t
no use tryin’. I never can make it. Never! It’d take two hundred dollars.
An’ I’ve only got a hundred with what my grandfolks have sent dribble by
dribble.” The dull, despairing expression had again settled in the
putty-pale face. “’Tain’t no use,” she went on apathetically. “I can’t
save the whole three dollars a week. I’ve got to get shoes an’ things.
Cook said yesterday how she’d have to turn me out if I didn’t get some
decent work dresses; a fashionable seminary like that couldn’t have no
slatterns in the kitchen.” Then, after a hard, dry sob that cut deep into
the heart of the listener. Etta ended with “I don’t know what I’m goin’
to do, but it’s got to be done soon, whatever ’tis.”
Jenny felt alarmed, she hardly knew why. “Oh, Etta, you don’t mean you
might take——” She could not finish her sentence. Her active imagination
pictured the unhappy girl going alone to the coast at night and ending
her life in the surf, but to her surprise Etta looked around as though
she feared she might be overheard; then she said, “Yes, I am. I’m going
to take one hundred dollars out of the school safe, and after I’ve got
over to Belgium I’m going to work my fingers to the bone and send it
back. That’s what I’m goin’ to do. I’ve told ’em at the station to keep
me a ticket for the train that goes out tomorrow morning.” Then, when she
felt, rather than saw, that her companion was shocked, she said bitterly,
“I was a fool to tell you. Of course you’ll go and blab on me.” To the
unhappy girl’s surprise she heard her companion protesting, “Oh, no, no!
I won’t tell, Etta. Never, never! But you _mustn’t_ steal. They’d put you
in prison. But, most of all, it would be very, very wrong. You can’t gain
happiness by doing something wicked. I just _know_ that you can’t.”
Then, after a thoughtful moment, Jenny amazed her companion by saying, “I
have some money that is all my very own. If Granny and Granddad will let
me, I’ll loan you a hundred dollars, because I _know_ you’ll pay it
back.”
Radiant joy made Etta’s plain face beautiful, but it lasted only a moment
and was replaced by the usual dull apathy. “They won’t let you, an’ they
shouldn’t. I just told you as how I was plannin’ to steal, and if I’d do
that, how do you know I’d ever send back your hundred dollars?”
“I know that you would,” was the confident reply. Jenny then urged Dobbin
to his topmost speed, and since he had rested quite a while, he did spurt
ahead and around a bend to the very crest of the low foothill where stood
the beautiful buildings of the seminary in a grove of tall pine trees.
The majestic view of the encircling mountain range usually caused Jenny
to pause and catch her breath, amazed anew each time at the grandeur of
the scene, but her thoughts were so busy planning what she could do to
help this poor girl that she was unconscious of aught else.
They turned into the drive, which, after circling among well-kept gardens
and lawns, led back of the main building to the kitchen door.
“I’m awful late and I’ll get a good tongue lashin’ from the cook but what
do I care. This’ll be the last night she’ll ever see me.” Jenny glancing
at her companion, saw again the hard expression in the face that had been
so radiant with joy a few moments before.
“She doesn’t believe that I’m going to loan her my money,” Jenny thought.
“And maybe she’s right. Maybe Granny and Granddad will think I ought
not.” But what she said aloud was: “Etta, let me go in ahead and I’ll fix
things up if you’re late and going to be scolded.” And so, when they
climbed from the wagon, it was the girl from Rocky Point Farm who first
entered the kitchen. “Good afternoon, Miss O’Hara,” she called cheerily
to the middle-aged Irish woman who was taking a roast from the huge oven
of the built-in range.
“Huh,” was the ungracious reply, “so _you_ had that lazy good-for-nothing
out ridin’, did you?” The roast having been replaced, the cook turned and
glared at Etta, her arms akimbo. “Here ’tis, five o’clock to the minute
and not a potato pared. How do you suppose I’m going to serve a dinner
for the young ladies at six-thirty and all that pan of peas to shell
besides.”
Etta was about to reply sullenly when Jenny, who had placed her basket of
eggs on one end of a long white table, turned to say: “Miss O’Hara, I
want to ask you a favor. If I stay and help Etta get the vegetables
ready, will you let her come over to my house to supper? Won’t you
please, Miss O’Hara?”
Jenny smiled wheedlingly at the middle-aged Irish woman who had always
had a soft spot in her heart for “the honey girl,” and so she said
reluctantly, “Wall, if it’s what you’re wishin’, though the Saints alone
know what _you_ see in Etta Heldt to be wantin’ of her company.”
Ignoring the uncomplimentary part of the speech, Jenny cried joyfully:
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Miss O’Hara! Now give me a big allover apron,
please, for I mustn’t soil my fresh yellow muslin.”
Miss O’Hara’s anger had died away, confident that the peas would be
shelled and the potatoes pared on time. She went about her work humming
one of the Irish tunes that always fascinated Jenny.
Etta, without having spoken a word, took her customary place and began to
pare potatoes, jabbing out the spots as though she were venting upon them
the wrath which she felt toward the world in general, but even in her
heart there was dawning a faint hope that somehow, some way, she had come
to a gate on the other side of which, if only she could pass through, a
new life awaited her.
She looked up and out of the window by which they were seated, when
Jenny, pausing a moment in the pea-shelling, exclaimed: “Oh, Etta, do see
those pretty girls. Aren’t they the loveliest? Just like a flock of
butterflies dancing out there on the lawn. There are eight, ten, twelve!
Oh, my, more than I can count! How many girls are there now at the
seminary, Miss O’Hara?”
“With the three that came in today, there’s thirty-one,” the cook
answered as she broke a dozen eggs into a pudding which she was stirring.
“Did three new pupils come today? Isn’t it late in the year to start in
school? Only two months more and the long vacation will begin,” Jenny
turned to inquire.
“It is late,” Miss O’Hara replied, then suddenly she stopped stirring the
batter and stared at Jenny with a puzzled expression in her Irish blue
eyes. “When I saw one of ’em, a haughty, silly minx, I thought to myself
as I’d seen her before somewhere’s though I knew I hadn’t. Now I know why
I thought that. There’s something about you, Jenny Warner, as looks like
her. Folks do look sort of like other folks once in a while, and be no
way related.”
Jenny agreed brightly. “Yes, Miss O’Hara, that’s absolutely true. My
teacher has often said that the reason she has kept on tutoring me is
because I look like a sister she once had. That makes two folks I
resemble, and I suppose likely there are lots more. What is the new
pupil’s name. Miss O’Hara?”
Then it was that the cook recalled something. “Begorrah, and maybe you
know her being as her ma owns the farm you’re living on.”
Jenny looked up with eager interest. “Oh, no, I didn’t even know Mrs.
Poindexter-Jones had a daughter. But I do know the son Harold. That is, I
met him for a few moments once two years ago, and now I do recall that he
mentioned having a sister.” Then, returning to the shelling of the peas,
she concluded with: “You know they have not lived in Santa Barbara
lately. I never saw the mother, that is, only once.”
“Well, you’re not likely to do more than see the daughter. She wouldn’t
speak civil to a farmer’s granddaughter.” Jenny’s bright smile seemed to
reply that it troubled her not at all.
For another ten minutes the girls worked silently, swiftly; then Jenny
sprang up, removed her apron and, as she donned her hat, she exclaimed:
“Miss O’Hara, you just don’t know how grateful I am to you for having
said that Etta might go home to supper with me.”
Although the cook regretted having given the permission, she merely
mumbled a rather ungracious reply.
Etta went up to her room to put on her “’tother dress,” as she told
Jenny, but on reaching there she bundled all her belongings into an
ancient carpet bag, stole out of a side door and was waiting in the buggy
when Jenny reached it.
“Well, I sure certain don’t see how ’twas the ol’ dragon let me go along
with you,” Etta Heldt declared, seeming to breathe for the first time
when, high on the buckboard seat at Jenny’s side, old Dobbin was actually
turning out of the seminary gates that had for many months been as the
iron-barred doors of a prison to the poor motherless, fatherless and
homeless girl. And yet not really homeless, for, far across the sea on a
small farm in Belgium there was a home awaiting her, and a dear old
couple (Jenny was sure that they were as dear and loving and lovable as
were her own grandparents) yearning for the return of their only
grandchild.
Jenny, who always pictured in detail anything and everything of which she
had but the meagerest real knowledge, was seeing the old couple going
about, day by day, planning and striving to save enough to send for their
girl, but failing because of the privation that had been left blightingly
in the trail of the cruel world war. Then her fancy leaped ahead to the
day when Etta would arrive at that far-away farm.
Jenny’s musings were interrupted by a querulous voice at her side.
“Don’t you hear nothing I am saying? What do you see out there between
your horse’s ears that you’re starin’ at so steady?”
Jenny turned a pretty face bright with laughter. “I didn’t see the ears,”
she confessed, “and do forgive me for not listening to what you were
saying. Oh, yes, I recall now. You wondered what the old dragon would say
when she found you were really gone.”
Then, more seriously: “Truly, Etta, Miss O’Hara isn’t dragony; not the
least mite. I have sold eggs and honey to her for two years, long before
you came to be her helper, and she always seemed as glad to see me as the
dry old earth is to see the first rains.”
Then, hesitating and slowly thinking ahead that her words might not hurt
her companion, she continued: “Maybe you didn’t always try to please Miss
O’Hara. Weren’t you sometimes so unhappy that you let it show in your
manner? Don’t you think perhaps that may have been it, Etta?”
“Oh, I s’posen like’s not. How could I help showin’ it when I was so
miserable?”
Then, before Jenny could reply, Etta continued cynically:
“Well, I’m not goin’ to let myself to be any too cheerful even now.
’Tisn’t likely your grandfolks’ll let you loan me a hundred dollars.
How’ll they know but maybe I’d never return it. How do you know?”
Jenny turned and looked full into the china blue eyes of her companion.
The gaze was unflinchingly returned. Impulsively Jenny reached out a
slender white hand and placed it on the rough red one near her.
“Etta Heldt,” she said solemnly, “I know you will return my money if it
lies within your power to do it. I also know that when it came to it, you
would not have stolen money from the Granger place safe. There’s
something in your eyes makes me know it, though I can’t put it into
words.”
As the other girl did not reply, Jenny continued: “I’m _not_ sure certain
that I _can_ loan you my money, of course. I have been saving and saving
it for two years so that I could add it to the money grandpa had if we
needed it to buy Rocky Point Farm, but the farm hasn’t been put on the
market, granddad says, and so I guess we can spare it for awhile.”
Suddenly and most unexpectedly the girl at her side burst into tears.
“Oh, oh, how sweet and good you are to me. Nobody, nowhere has ever been
so kind, not since I came to this country looking for mother. When they
told me she was dead and had been buried two days before I got here, and
all her belongings sold to pay for the funeral, nobody was kind. They
just tagged me with a number and sent me with a crowd of other children
out to an orphan asylum. And there it was just the same: no one knew me
from any of the rest of the crowd.”
There were also tears in her listener’s eyes.
“Poor, poor Etta, and here I’ve been brought up on love. It doesn’t seem
fair, someway.” Then slipping an arm comfortingly about her companion,
Jenny said brightly: “Let’s keep hoping that you can borrow my money.
Look, Etta, we’re coming to the highway now, and that long, long lane
beyond the barred gate leads right up to my home. Don’t cry any more,
dearie. I just _know_ that my grandfolks will help you, somehow. You’ll
see that they will.”
Thus encouraged, the forlorn Etta took heart and, after wiping away the
tears which had brought infinite relief to her long pent-up emotions, she
turned a wavering smile toward Jenny.
“I’ll never forget what all you’re trying to do for me. Never. Never,”
she ended vehemently. “And I’m hoping I’ll have the chance some day to
make up for it.”
“All the reward that I want is to have you get home to your grandfolks
and be as happy with them as I am with mine,” Jenny called brightly as
she leaped out of the wagon to open up the barred gate.