_Wednesday._
Well, Sally, mia, life looks a bit more rosy! I've separated Dolores
from her cigarette, from her furry coat of powder, from her athletic
perfume, from her circus clothes, and to-day, in spite of her
incredible size (the inches and pounds she has acquired in six
months!) the years have fallen from her. In a slim, brown tricotine
with a wide, untrimmed hat of silky brown straw her loveliness has
come back, and with it my enthusiasm.
She is docile in the main, when not too violently opposed, and I feed
my fancy on the joy and pride I shall have in her, when she has
finished school, in five years.
She starts on Monday, a splendid, firm, well-disciplined school where
they have sensible rules about not letting the pupils come home for
weekends. The head-mistress was charmed with Dolores and Dolores has
"kissed up to God" her resolve to be good.
I'm honestly ashamed of my panic over first impressions. She's really
an angel.
JANE.
_Thursday._
She's really a demon.
J.
_New York City,
June 29th._
DEAREST SALLY,
It's weeks since I've written you, but I'm a broken woman, old before
my time. I may not look quite so forlorn as the geologist did, but I
feel it.
Did I write something about the rosy but dim and distant date when
Dolores would be "through school?" Well, it's come. She's through
school. And school, I might mention in passing, is through with
her,--five of them, from Miss Trenchard's Spartan smartness to the
gentle Spanish convent. She's a demon-baby. She's a cross between
Carmen and Mary Maclane.
Of course the wedding has had to be postponed. Michael Daragh is
angelic about it, and he hasn't been able to help me with Dolores as
much as he would like because he's been engulfed with a new
settlement house, and his dope fiend has been wobbling again, but our
calendar is finished and accepted now, and a really nice girl is
being really nice to him--liking him, trusting him, and M.D. is at
peace about him.
Dolores came definitely home from the convent to-day with a clever
note from the Mother Superior ... they feel that the child needs more
space ... freedom....
Good heavens, so do I! _Ay de mi_, that I ever saw Mexico! And yet,
the demon-baby loves me, and I love her, but I also love Michael
Daragh and would like exceedingly to marry him. My house is ready,
my clothes are finished, and so--nearly--am I.
But I cannot go off on a honeymoon unless I leave her in safety.
Sarah, now that your mother is so improved, wouldn't you like to
take a boarder? You could chain her to the baby-grand....
Distractedly,
THE VIRGIN MOTHER OF HER SOUL.
P.S. A friend, knowing of my plight, has just telephoned about a very
fine New Thought school which will be glad to receive my ward. Well,
they'll have some entirely new thoughts in that school which they've
never had before!
J.
_July Sixth._
SALLY DARLING,
I jibber with joy! The best and most beautiful of all my leading men
was sent by a kind Providence to take tea with me to-day and talk
over the new play idea, and while he was here Dolores Tristeza
arrived in state and a taxi from the N.T. school, along with her
trunk and her temper and her temperament and Santa Catalina and
José-María. Utterly ignoring him, she launched upon a monologue of
her fancied wrongs, dramatizing every incident, impersonating every
one from the Principal to the taxi driver. I'd seen her through so
many of these Mad Scenes that it left me quite cold, but not so my
actor-man. When she had finished, spitting (dryly but venomously)
upon all schools, and flung herself out of the room, he sprang to his
feet.
"Good gad, Jane Vail,--don't you know what you've got here? A young
Nazimova! An infant Kalich! Schools--nonsense! Teach her the
A.B.C.'s--but don't touch that accent--and turn her loose on the
stage!"
Sarah, he's right. It's the thing, the only thing, to do with her. I
took her to see Nazimova to-night, and she sat star-eyed and hardly
breathing. When we came home I told her my new ideal for her and she
wept with joy. She swears by the green tail of Santa Catalina and
kisses up to God that she will never be wicked again, and she
believes it, and so do I, for I've touched her imagination at last.
I've been trying to keep a Bird of Paradise in a chicken coop! I'll
put her with the right people for training, and have her with me a
great deal, and not try to muss up her poor little mind with
mathematics.
She is lying sleepless and bright-eyed in her bed, and I must go in
to her now, to soothe her off to the Poppy Fields with happy plans
and prophesies.
_When_ are you coming?
JANE.
_July Eighth._
MY DEAR,
I float on a sea of rosy bliss. Randal's girl has almost promised to
marry him, and he's a new man, and Dolores is a lamb, dreaming of the
time she may begin her study for the stage, in the early fall.
We are to be married on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, and take
the night boat for Boston and thence to Maine, to Three Meadows. It
was M.D. who sent me there by scolding me into realization of my
grubbiness four years ago; I want to have my honeymoon there. The
Deacon and "Angerleek" have a little house which they rent, and they
are making it ready for us.
I'm afraid every one at home will think me quite mad to be married
here instead of in my dear old house, but Sally, after all, my
wedding belongs to this world, not to that. I shall be married here
at Mrs. Hills' in her big old double parlors, the ugliness conquered
with flowers, and I shall wear my traveling things--as the village
paper would say--"the bride, attired in a modish going-away gown"--I
know you'll wail for all the trimmings, Sally dear,--the veil and the
train and all the rest, but that sort of thing belongs to eighteen,
not twenty-eight. I'm beyond the age of opera bouffe weddings,--I
don't vision myself coming down a white-ribboned aisle with wobbly
knees, covered with orange blossoms and gooseflesh! But--oh, Sally,
the truth is that I would be married in a mackintosh or a bathing
suit, I'm so dizzily, dazedly happy!
Dolores Tristeza, good as an angel out of a frieze, agrees to stay
docilely with Emma Ellis at Hope House while we are away. She calls
her "_Ella de la barba_" with reference to the small but determined
little fringe on poor E.E.'s chin and I tremble--no, I don't! I'm
not afraid of anything now. Everything is and will be perfect.
If only you can come, best of friends!
Happily,
JANE.
_The Day!_
MY DEAREST SALLY,
"I must be making haste,
I have no time to waste--
This is--this is my wedding morning!"
But my haste is done. I am radiantly ready now, and there are seven
still and shining hours ahead.
My trunk is packed with jolly Island clothes; my bag stands ready to
close; my sitting room is running over with gifts, little and large,
proud and pitiful,--from Marty Wetherby's opulent clock and Rodney
Harrison's gorgeous silver service to "Angerleek's" preserves and the
hand-painted mustard pot from Ethel and Jerry and Billiken, and a
virtuously ugly dusting cap from Mrs. Mussel. If only you were here,
Sally dearest! But I know your mother needs you, and it must be a
blessed thing to have a mother to need you!
Sally, I'm feeling very proud and very humble, very----
_Later._
Just as I wrote that, Michael Daragh came, white, tight-lipped, more
than ever like the Botticelli St. Michael; he was the
"Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven." All he needed was a sword.
"Woman, dear," he said, "I've the sad, terrible news will be breaking
your heart."
"Have you decided not to marry me?" I asked, facetiously, but I
didn't feel in the least humorous.
"'Tis my lad," he said, "Randal. She's thrown him over, that girl.
Destroyed he is with grief and shame, bound again for the black pit."
I tried to comfort him. I said I was sure the boy was too firmly on
his feet to slip now, but he knew better, or worse, and he said he
dared not leave him for an hour, and then, Sarah, I began to see what
it meant, and it turned me to iron and ice.
"You mean," I said, "you want to postpone our marriage?"
"Never that, Acushla, but--couldn't we be taking him with us? 'Tis
the wild thing to be asking you, but after all, woman dear, we've the
whole of our lives ahead, and for him it means all the world! Say
we'll be taking him!"
Now, Sarah Farraday, I ask you, as a reasonable human being, what you
think of that? _To take a dope fiend with us on our honeymoon!_
I seemed to see the future in one blinding flash--always our own
rights, our own happiness, relentlessly pushed aside. I'm glad I
can't remember all I said, but I shall remember the look on his face
as long as I live. But I was right--I was right. He belongs in a
painted picture, St. Michael, not in a warm, vital, human world.
So, it isn't my wedding morning after all.
J.
_Three P.M._
I'm putting a special delivery stamp on this, Sally dear, so you'll
get it before the other one.
I relented in sackcloth and ashes and shame, of course, and
telephoned to tell him so, but I couldn't get him because he was on
his way here to tell me _he_ would yield, that he wouldn't ask me to
take Randal with us. Then we had another moving scene, reversed this
time, I pleading penitently to take him. M.D. said he had had a good
talk with the poor lad, and he had sworn to brace up alone.
I shall always be glad I yielded, but I know now _just_ how Abraham
felt when he found the ram caught in the bushes! And I'll always be
glad that for once M.D. chose happiness for himself.
Very shakily, but gratefully,
JANE.
_Midnight,
On the Boston Boat._
My dear, do you remember a silly song of our childhood with a refrain
like this--
"I'm not blessed with surplus wealth,
Bump tiddy ump bump, bump tiddy ump bump,--
Off on a honeymoon all by myself,
Bump tiddy ump bump bay!"
Well, my dear Sarah, that is exactly the sort of wedding journey
which has fallen to me.
We were married. Yes, I'm very clear about that. Dolores, my
dewy-eyed dove, stood with me, and Randal, ghastly and trembling, by
Michael Daragh. The solemn old minister knotted us securely. Michael
kissed me. (I'm very clear about that, too.)
Suddenly, like a cyclone, like a typhoon, Dolores Tristeza cast
herself upon me. "Virgin mawther of my soul," she howled, "do not
leave me! I keel myself! _Ella de la barba_ ees nawthing to me!
Do not leave me to die with these so ugly strangers! _No tengo más
amiga que tu!_" (Thou art my only friend!)
She was working up into a frenzy which made all her earlier efforts
sound like lullabies with the soft pedal on, and she was shaking
herself into convulsions and crying real tears. "Behold," she sobbed,
"_las lágrimas de la huérfanita_!" (The tears of the little orphan!)
I counted ten. Then I turned to my new husband.
"Michael Daragh," I said, meekly, "will you take Randal with you and
let me take Dolores with me?"
I wish you could have seen people's faces as we went off in a
groaning taxi, ourselves, our luggage, Randal, white and protesting,
Dolores, tearful but triumphant, José-María, snapping and snarling,
Santa Catalina, strongly urging every one to shut his ugly mouth for
the love of all the saints.
Sally, you've read a hundred stories, haven't you, which went like
this--the ceremony, the good wishes, the rice, the old shoes,
then--"he jerked down the curtain of the cab window,"--"Alone at
last," he murmured, "my _wife_!" "He folded her in his arms."
I think Michael Daragh's feeling was that we were not _entirely_
alone, and that it was a rather large order to fold in his arms a
swearing parrot, a shivering, hairless dog, a robust Mexican orphan,
a bride and a dope fiend, for he made not the first gesture of the
above ritual.
It is after midnight. Dolores is asleep here in my stateroom, a smile
of seraphic peace on her face, but in the room next door I hear the
steady murmur of M.D.'s voice reading to poor Randal, who cannot
sleep, who has tried to jump overboard. Michael dares not leave him
for an instant, even to tell me good-night.
Sally, it _is_ really funny, but I have to keep assuring and
reminding myself that it is.
JANE.
_Morning,
At Three Meadows._
SALLY, MY DEAR,
Once again I crept up a river of mother-of-pearl in the gauzy dawn to
this island sanctuary. The Deacon met us, amazed at our number, and
led us to the silver gray house just beyond theirs on a little,
lifting hill, where "Angerleek" will "do for us."
Morning brought counsel. While my husband (carelessly said--just like
that!) while my husband looked after luggage I talked to Randal, sane
again, haggard, abased. "My dear boy," I said, "_you_ aren't going
to be in the way at all! You'll look after yourself and be company
for Michael when he wants good man-talk. It's this demon-child.
If--_do_ you suppose you could look after her for me!"
He wrung my hand. "Count on me! If there's anything I can do, to
atone, to square myself--I'll be her nurse, her governess, her
jailer!"
Then to a meek _huérfanita_, feeding her menagerie, I made oration.
"Daughter of my soul, thou knowest thy presence is a joy of purest
ray serene, but this Randal creature, tagging ever at the heels of
my spouse----"
"Star of my heart," she said, grinding her teeth, "he is a pig and
the son of a pig! Have no fear, _Madrecita_, I will herd him, like
cattle, away from thy sight." She kissed up to God.
JANE.
_The Silver Gray House,
On the Lifting Hill,
Three Meadows._
I have ceased to reckon time by calendars, Sally dearest, but I think
we have been here, Michael Daragh and I, seven or ten days.
Oh, yes, the others are still here,--at least, they are on the
island, but we never see them. They come and go like Brownies, like
elves, like the "Little People" of Michael's land, bringing our
meals and our mail, vanishing silently.... They stand between us and
the village and the Deacon and the world. They are our shields and
barriers; our sure defense; our shock absorbers. I shouldn't _think_
of ever going on a honeymoon without them. We have signed them up
for all our anniversary excursions, and between whiles we'll loan
them to friends for wedding trips and rent them to a select
public,--there'll be miles of Waiting List as soon as they are
known!
Make your reservations early!
Whole islands and oceans of love, old dear!
Devotedly,
JANE VAIL DARAGH.
(_Mrs. Michael Daragh!!!_)
P.S. Sally, dearest, remember what I said, the night before I left
Wetherby Ridge for the first time?--That I wasn't really "going away"
from you all, but only "going on?" I lost my way for a while, Sally;
I was content with just "getting on," but he found me and herded
me sternly back to the highroad, and now, always and forevermore,
no credit to the likes of me, but because I've espoused the
Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven, I'll be going on--and
_on_--with Michael Daragh. And, oh, my dear, but indeed--as he said
of me long ago--I have been _anointed with the oil of joy above my
fellows_!
J. V. D.
End of Project Gutenberg's Jane Journeys On, by Ruth Comfort Mitchell