It was at this moment that O-liver stopped under the pepper tree. The
bright light fell directly on Jane's distressed face. He saw the
swept-back brightness of her hair, her clear-cut profile, her white
skin, her white teeth. But he saw more than this. "By Jove," he said,
"she's a lady!"
If he had been talking to the men he would have said "Gosh!" It was only
when he was alone that he permitted himself the indulgence of more
formal language.
That Jane was harried he could see. And suddenly he rode forward on Mary
Pick.
The crowd made way for him expectantly. There were always interesting
developments when O-liver was on the scene.
"Gentlemen," he said, "let the lady speak for herself. I am not sure
what you are trying to do, but it is evidently something she doesn't
want done."
Jane flashed a grateful glance up at him. He was the unknown knight
throwing down the gauntlet in her defense. He was different from the
others--his voice was different.
"They want to auction off my sandwiches," she explained, "and they won't
listen."
"I'm sure they will listen." O-liver on Mary Pick, with his hat off and
his mane tossed back, might have been Henry of the white plumes. "Of
course they'll listen."
And they did!
Jane stood on her box and addressed them.
"I don't want to get any more for my sandwiches than they are worth,"
she said earnestly. "I make good ones, and I sell them for twenty cents
because they are the best of their kind. I am glad you like them. I want
to earn my living and my mother's. She is sick, and I have to stay at
home with her. And I don't mind being called 'Sandwich Jane.' It's a
good name and I shall use it in my business. But I don't like being
treated as you have treated me to-night. If it happens again I shall
have to stop selling sandwiches; and I'd be sorry to have that happen,
and I hope you'd be sorry too."
Her little speech was over. She stepped down composedly from the box,
folded her cloth and picked up her basket. She said "Thank you" to
O-liver, "Come on" to Tommy, and walked from among them with her light
step and free carriage; and they stared after her.
O-liver sitting later in front of the post-office with his satellites
round him found himself compelled to listen to praise of Jane.
"She's made a hit," Atwood said earnestly. "When a woman talks like that
it's the straight goods."
Henry agreed. "She's got grit. It's her kind that get ahead. But it's a
pity that she's got to work to make a living."
Atwood, too, thought it was a pity. And presently he and Henry fell into
silence as they fitted Jane into various dreams. Atwood's dream had to
do with a mansion high on Frisco's hills. But Henry saw her beside him
in his long and lovely car. He saw her, too, in a fur coat.
V
"I feel," said Jane, "like a murderer." Tommy and O-liver had stopped at
her front gate to leave her some books.
"Why?" It was O-liver who asked it.
"Come and see." She led them round the house. Death and destruction
reigned.
"I poured gasoline into the ants' nests and set them on fire--and now
look at them!"
There were a few survivors toiling among the ruins.
"They are taking out the dead bodies," Jane explained. "It's so human
that it's tragic. I'll never do it again."
"You can't let them eat you up."
"I know. It's one of the puzzles." She sat looking down at them. "How
busy they are!"
"Too busy," O-liver stated. "They are worse than bees. There are at
least some drones in the hive."
"Poor drones," said Jane.
"Why?" quickly.
"To miss the best."
"Is work the best?"
She said "Yes," adding after a little: "I don't just mean making
sandwiches. That's just a beginning. There's everything ahead."
She said it as if the world were hers. O-liver, in spite of himself, was
thrilled. "How do you know that everything is ahead?"
"I shall make it come"--securely.
They sat in silence for a while; then O-liver said: "I have brought you
a book."
It was an old copy of Punch.
"I shall like it," she said. "Sometimes the evenings are dull when my
work is over."
"Dullness comes for me when work begins."
Her straight gaze met his. "You say that with your lips; you don't mean
it."
"How do you know?"
"I'm not sure how I know. But you haven't found the thing yet that you
like--the incentive."
"Tommy wants me to go into politics. He and Henry Bittinger. Henry says
I ought to be President." O-liver chuckled.
But she took it seriously. "Why not? You've the brains and the
magnetism. Can't you see how the crowd draws to you on Saturday nights?"
"Like bees round a honey pot? Yes." His face grew suddenly stern. "But
so will mosquitoes buzz round a stagnant pool."
"You're not a stagnant pool and you know it."
"What am I?"
She made a sudden gesture as if she gave him up. "Sometimes I think you
are like the sea--on a lazy day--with a storm brewing."
He wondered as he went home--what storm?
He had seen a good deal of Jane since that Saturday night when he had
championed her cause. It had been fall then, with the hills brown and
the berries red on the pepper trees. It was spring now, with all the
world green and growing.
She had spoken of him to Tommy, and Tommy had been a faithful
go-between. He had played upon their mutual love of books. At first
O-liver had sent her books, then he had taken them. He had met her
mother, had seen her in her home doing feminine things, sewing on
lengths of pink and blue--filling the vases with the flowers that he
brought.
And as they had met and talked his veins had been filled with new wine.
He had never known intimately such a woman. His mother transplanted from
the East by her marriage to a Western man had turned her eyes always
backward. Her son had been born in the East, he had spent his holidays
and vacations with his Eastern relatives. He had gone to an Eastern
school to prepare for an Eastern college. Except for this one obsession
with regard to her son's education his mother was self-centered. She was
an idolized wife, a discontented woman--- she had shown O-liver no
heights to which to aspire.
And so he had not aspired. He had spent his days in what might be
termed, biblically, riotous living. His mother had hoped for an
aristocratic and Eastern marriage. When he married Fluffy Hair she had
allowed him three thousand a year and had asked him not to bring his
wife to see her. His father had refused to give him a penny. O-liver's
wild oats and wilfulness cut him off, he ruled, from parental
consideration. "You are not my son," he had said sternly. "If the time
ever comes when you can say you are sorry, I'll see you."
O-liver having married Fluffy Hair had found her also
self-centered--not a lady like his mother, but fundamentally of the same
type. Neither of them had made him feel that he might be more than he
was. They had always shrunk him to their own somewhat small patterns.
Jane's philosophy came to him therefore like a long-withheld stimulant.
"You might be President of the United States."
When Henry or Atwood or Tommy had said it to him he had laughed. When
Jane said it he did not laugh.