The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Forum rules
Communication only in English!!!
Messages in other languages will be deleted!!!
User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 12938Unread post Didier
16 Oct 2017, 18:47

Image
Image

CHAPTER I

If you have lived in a certain street in sleepy old South Brooklyn within the past few years, you must have seen me and come to know me by sight. For I am rather a con­spicuous figure — which is unfortunate for a woman. Not that I am endowed with any especial dispensation of good looks or that you can read figure in my case into any marvelous juxtaposition of curves and hollows. For I have a peculiar, striding gait — a gait made necessary these many years by reason of an un­ending serfdom to a sturdy pair of crutches. As I look back now upon it all I only dimly re­call when they made me lame. But still I can remember that when I was a little girl I had two good sturdy legs and could run and play with other girls — sometimes by preference, the little boys — and share all their mischief and happiness with them. Those were the days when my eternal crutches were not always with­in arm's reach. . . . After that they took my right leg off and for long months I struggled with my vanity.
Since then I have struggled with my vanity many and many a time. Once I found myself listening to the others and I experimented with the Artificial. But after I had tried and tried and tried, I found I could not make it go as easily as the interesting and optimistic cata­logues had promised and back I came — al­most gladly — to the stacks that were destined to be my companions for the rest of my life.
After all, the crutches are not nearly so bad as they might seem to one who has never accus­tomed herself to them. They have become pretty faithful servants to me throughout the long years and, by a certain grim determination on mine own part to conquer them, I have suc­ceeded in good measure. Of course there come times — many times — when I grow very tired of them and long for the freedom of other folk, but these are the times that come further and further apart
My crutches are close to my table as I write. They will never be beyond my easy reach. How the years dim! There was a time when I hated them and my vanity prayed to God for the courage to go out among folk hanging upon them I
But this is destined to be my autobiography and I have not even started at the beginning. Honeytown is the beginning. There is no be­ginning bade of Honeytown, for we have lived there since the very beginnings of the little place. We lived there when the wild forests grew close to the settlement and the folk did not stir out at night without protection. We lived there in its golden days. It was an important port upon the canal. It had a Bank and an Academy. It dreamed of greater wealth and greater influence. You can find all these things recorded in the United States Gazetteer for 1846.
It was a place for culture, too — this Honeytown. Its boys went to Yale, its girls to Mount Holyoke. I have among my few treasured mementoes of my mother, her di­ploma from Mount Holyoke, also the faded parchment that still tells of her creditable achievements at the Emma Willard School at Troy — for both the Oldest Inhabitant at Honeytown and the Rival Claimant remember her as a woman of brilliant attainments... But neither wealth nor influence nor culture dwelt long in Honeytown. The Rail­road came and ran its main line a dozen miles away, and Honeytown faded like a picked flower. The Academy stands deserted and forlorn. The Bank burned years and years before I came into the world. It was a very old town. We were a very old family.
Our house stood upon a bleak ridge-top at the edge of the town, and it, too, was old. It was the sort of house that one sometimes sees pictured in the summer resort advertisements of the railroads, big and white and rambling and set in among trees and rose bushes. A great ivy thrust itself like the flattened palm of an outstretched hand upon the sun-warmed south end of the house. The ivy had been born when the house was new. They grew into old age together, their loving embrace be­coming closer with the years.
It was the sort of house that a city man associates with all that is ideal in life. He sits in the crowded town and lets his vision go winging out to such a habitation — he calls it 44 homeM and lingers upon the word. He thinks of " home cooking " and home life and home love and by and by his throat begins to choke and he benignly thinks himself some­thing of a big-hearted man after all.
Shall I tell you the truth about our old house ?
It was an arrant fraud. That seems a hard thing to say about the roof that covered your head when you were ushered into the world. But even after all these years — and, like every blessed one of us, I try to bathe the past in rather bright colors — there are some things that I cannot forget. Our house was a vile, cold place in winter and my little room up under the roof was hot and stuffy all summer. More than that, there was no drainage or sewerage in the place, and my dear mother died in it of the fever — just as her mother had died twenty years before.
My father was dead, too — only we did not mention the cause of his being taken off. I was fourteen years old before I knew the reason — by a rare inadvertence on the part of my aunt. The thing made me flush with anger. I swung about on her, in a burst of temper and said:
Is it so awful that it should be whispered like an unclean thing?" I demanded of her: 11 Suppose he did die — drunk? Is it a crime? I always thought that folks died of disease.91
She did not answer me, and I fled from the room — up to my stuffy little cubby-hole under the attic — to cry the problem out to my heart's content. All that I could discover that my aunt ever said was to tell Elam, our hired man, that " Kate was a queer girl." I think that she had a distinct impression that my crutches were making inroads upon my mental balance.
We had little comfort out of life there in Honeytown. Please do not think that I am anxious to bring these memories upon the page here but they must show you how it was that I came to hate that place with heart and soul and body, to crave the big and distant city. . . . Our living was almost archaic. We had a room, a little less habitable and a little more stuffy than the others, that we called the parlor, and we never went in there save to say a final good-by to one whom we loved as our own. . . . We had another stuffy box in which we fed. " Fed " is the word I choose to write. We had a big garden and we shipped all our garden-truck into town. We ate salt pork and fried potatoes and pie and preserves without stint and then we wondered why God punished some of us by making us dyspeptics. Once I suggested that we fit a little summer dining-room out on the porch. I wish you could have seen my aunt's face — she was still trying to take my mother's place as homemaker and failing lamentably.
"Porch — nonsense, child" - she stormed at me in her petulant way. - " Think of the flies. I do wish you would try and get those silly book notions out of your head."
It is needless to say that we continued to eat in the stuffy little room.
I saw but little of the other boys and girls after I had been ill a long while and they had removed my leg. It was quite a distance down into the village, where the stores and the churches grouped themselves about the dusty open square and it was a long time before I could go any considerable distance on my crutches without being jolted into pain. After that time we were apart — the town children and myself. We were apart in many ways. They seemed afraid of me because I always hung upon crutches> and I remember that I re­sented that. Then during the long time of my convalescence I had stopped within a new world. We had a great many books in our old house, as houses in the country went in those days. I had never had much time for these before, for I had been a very active child. But when physical activity was denied to me I turned quickly to mental activity.
I can still see myself, sprawled on my stomach in the grass in front of the house, my rudely fashioned crutches that Mr. Stoneham, the village carpenter, had made for me, within easy reach, the sunlight splashing down upon the printed pages of the great new world that was opening to me. I read all the books that we had in our house and then I read all the books of all the neighbors. After that I had to stop and find some new form of recreation. I loved music and I dreamed of the drama. The first of these things was within my reach, for in the closed parlor of our house stood an old-fashioned square piano. Ours had been a prosperous farming country in its day and pianos were not uncommon in the decades that its boys had gone to Yale and its girls to Mount Holyoke. But while I loved to thrum the keys of the sturdy old instrument and then to sit and remember that my mother's fingers had lin­gered lovingly over them, I do not think that I was ever destined to be a musician. For one thing I had not the patience. It is a quality that I have ever lacked and never for a moment regretted. But I could play the sim­ple old tunes that my mother had loved, in my own fashion — and if aunty, with all of her be­lief in the showier graces for girls, thought but little of my talent, I was satisfied in knowing that I could bring a piano into my life for com­panionship.
The drama was a different thing in Honey-town, half-hidden from the growing, bustling world, but I used to dream it, as you shall presently see, and soon it came into my life as a sort of reality — which seems a strange sort of possibility for a girl, crutched for life.
There was an ancient burying-ground up the road that passed our house. It was a tiny af-fair, for there was a far showier cemetery down in the village. But in that enclosure those that I loved were buried — mother, father, all of them — and to the little sacred spot I used to hurry at every opportunity.
The larger cemetery down in the village was a neat, snug place and something of a place of public resort by quiet folk on Sabbath after­noons. My little burying-ground was rank with weeds and overgrowth, and the ancient stones and vaults pitched drunkenly at every angle. Still that made little difference to me. To me it was not a burying-ground — at least not a burying-ground and nothing more. For my imagination began to wing at that time. The little burying-ground was a city! Its shabby entrance was the guarded gate. My grandfather's great tomb was the Temple of Apollo. Each tiny lane was some great street or square — only one place was not peopled in my imagination — my mother's grave. When I came to that I could not forget That was too vitally within the realities of my life to lend itself to the delightful romance of imag­ination.
I had read something of the classics, and the city on the hilltop was the result. No one else saw, no one else appreciated. Two of the little village girls came up one afternoon to see me — I have always felt sure their mothers must have bribed them. I took them up to the burying-ground and let them walk within my city. But their eyes were not perceiving and they could not see the city gate, could not stand thrilled before the facade of the Temple of Apollo. They tittered as I told them of it and. I cried — cried bitterly. I was not often given to tears but I cried then. They went back to the village and told all the other girls that Kate Senton was an odd girl. After that I was an odd girl all the days that I remained in Honey-town. Nothing could shake our village's be­lief in that.
But there was one girl who could see the city, could see each detail of its infinite beauty — see and understand. Strange though it was, she saw nothing of worldly things. For Tessie Hessler was the blind girl of the village, just as I was its cripple. A great pair of blue gog­gles sat upon her face but sat so loosely that one could easily see the sightless eyes behind them. Yet Tessie Hessler, stumbling along, her
fingers pressed in the crook of my elbow, saw that city upon the hill. I made her see it. We went to it often. I carried book after book along and away we two went from Honeytown, across many seas, through many lands. It was glorious to get away from our miserable and broken human frames. Our very unhappiness brought us very close together. We met upon a common ground. I was eyes to her all the while, and she a comfort and a solace to me.
That summer I began keeping a diary. Thin, black, beloved books, they are within reach of my hand as I write. If I am going to give you my life I must take it from my diary. I shall not bother you with the date lines. They are not consequential and the sequence of events will not remain obscure to you. I want you to turn back the pages with me, to see things as I saw them when I went out into the world.



User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

Re: The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 13677Unread post Didier
25 Oct 2017, 18:03

CHAPTER II

In some way I realized that my life in Honeytown could not go on idly forever Yet the road ahead seemed full of turnings — a perplexing path to follow for a girl who walked alone. I had come almost all the way from girlhood into young womanhood. I wa9 twenty-two. At that age in Honeytown girls either had beaux and were looking ahead into matrimony, or else they were in some faint measure beginning to see themselves " old maids " and long years of drudgery ahead.
There was no idle class in our little town. People there lived their lives in dull sodden labor, and when they were done, they went to their last rest; other generations of toilers came on to take up the emotionless existence of a village in which life was anything but a pas­time. There was no room in Honeytown for idlers. It had been said that Mr. Drake, who had come up from the city years before, was of no account and did not do much for his keep, but those who said these things were the chatterers and did not know the little man who lived in the little house in the little street which ran beside the white meeting-house of the Sev­enth Day Adventists. Mr. Drake was an art­ist. He had always been kind to me, without being patronizing or sympathetic, and I came to know his wife and himself, and to come into some of the secrets of his life.
He was a painter. His rear parlor was a studio and there he worked before his easel long hours. He was a delicate little man, and before I left Honeytown I came to know his life-story. I had thought him a great painter, albeit it was perplexing as to why he had drifted into our little town. Mrs. Drake in a burst of lonely confidence had told me — of how many great painters fought to succeed in the city and failed. It cost so very much to live there — and income came in so slowly to an artist. In Honeytown food was cheap, house-rent almost nothing. Mr. Drake had almost all the orders at Honeytown that he could fill for pictures — and they spent so little on their living. Mrs. Drake gave me to un­derstand that her husband had married money — it afterwards was known in Honeytown thatshe had an income of thirty dollars a month from a trust fund in the city — and that they preferred to live in a bit of aristocracy. Mr. Drake's art seemed to run to highly colored pictures of dog's heads, to remarkable land­scapes that he found round about our town, even to a realistic school of kittens becoming enmeshed in balls of bright red twine. But it all seemed very fine to me then and I felt very superior to the rest of the town — for I was beginning to understand a higher sort of life.
The Drakes kept a hired man — who was known to our town as the Drake's William in contradistinction to the Perkins's William who was the chief caretaker of the large cupolaed Perkins mansion at the top of the long hill in Main Street. Mr. Drake did no manual labor, although Mr. Perkins was himself to be seen at times in front of his store struggling hard with his boxes and his barrels. Mr. Drake was the town dilettante, and the town, in its turn, lifted its eyebrows at thought of him. It did not regard art as real endeavor, and it regarded as the height of humor the occasional anonymous postal-card which somewag would send him, asking him to paint that fence, or this barn, or the Congregational church shed. And when that last card came, Mr. Drake put on his oldest suit, went down to Perkins & Perkins's store, bought a can of white lead, took his turpentine, a ladder and a large brush, and within three days painted the church tshed — which had long been regarded as a slovenly disgrace to our tidy town. After that no one ever sent him a postal-card of that sort again.
The whole town worked. Even the min­isters of the three struggling churches were not above long hours of hard labor in their garden-patches, and as for the women, they must have worked harder than the men of Honeytown. For theirs was the unrecognized sort of labor — the endless drudgery of the kitchen and the other monotonies of their little principalities to which their responsibility and keen competi­tion for recognition as able housewives but added more hard toil. Men married girls in Honeytown because they were said to be " good home girls," which meant that they were will­ing to give long years of their lives to the dull drudgeries of housework. They were serv-ants, without the name — and without the recognition and the wages of their craft.
It was plain to be seen that no Honeytown man would have had me for a wife. I was useless as a worker and then — there were my crutches. Folk still stared at me when I went into church of a Sabbath morning and I could feel that they were whispering about me — sympathy perhaps — and my face would flush when I thought of that. No man in our county would marry a girl on crutches. I never for one moment deluded myself with a belief of that sort. I was not a homely girl — and yet I was barred.
In some way I realized that my idle life could not go on forever. At twenty-two I found my­self chafing more than ever before at the re­straint that hedged my life within so narrow a channel.
" Auntie, I want to do my part in the world/' I said.
My aunt looked placidly at me and mean­ingly at the crutches that hung upon the post of my chair.
" We will always take good care of you," shesaid, blandly. " I don't see what part you can do in the world."
How I hated her for those things. That was the way she had talked since I was fifteen and I had accumulated hate each time she re­peated it. But that time she must have seen it in my face, for she colored and softened. She said:
"And what part in the world would you want to take, Kate? "
I answered her without hesitation.
" If it were to be a part at all," I said, " I should like a star part."
And then I laughed at my own whimsicality. Auntie did not laugh. I saw the black lines of eyebrows draw more closely together.
" I do not understand you, girl," said she.
" Nor ever will," I told her, " for I was only dreaming, aunt. I was dreaming that I was — well, like other women — and then — a great actress. A wonderful woman who could stand upon the stage and hold a thousand folk silent, then sweep them into laughter — a moment later bring them to the edge of the tears."
My aunt was immovable." Perhaps it was better/1 said she, sharply, " that you should be a cripple than a play-actress."
I felt the tears come close to my own eyes that moment — in all my life I had not hated her before as I hated her then. And yet with it all there came over me a feeling of deep sorrow for her — for the narrow lines of con­ventionality that bound her in so very closely. I stood my ground — and said nothing. And after a moment I could not have forced myself into tears. She was apart from my life — and I was not sorry of it.
" I hoped that you were forgetting such fool ideas," she said after a few minutes.
I knew the thing to which she referred. It had begun three or four or five summers before when I was still frivolous, and in my heart, still a little girl. One thing led to another. I had read book after book to Tessie Hessler, and together we had gone through almost every one of the plays of Shakespeare. Nothing else in book lore had won my heart like those dramas of an Englishman of whom Honeytown had never known and who himself had never known that there was to be a Honey-town or even a great nation in America. Yet they seemed very real to both of us. We read and reread the little books until we could say long portions of them from memory.
And then on a lazy summer's day when the sun hung high in the heavens and the shadows were thick and black and cool I had thrown my­self into the very heart of the drama. I had found my way up into the loft of our barn, had thrown a dusty carriage robe over my shoulders and was transformed! No longer was I lame Kate Senton, of Honeytown — I was Juliet, of the Capulets, the dusty roof-truss that passed in front of me was a balcony* rail, and from below me my lover was speaking up to me. And my lips were framing " Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name for my sake; or if thou wilt not, be but my sworn love, and I no longer will be a Capulet." . . . It was all very real. . . . Another time I was the mad Ophelia, with a rough wreath on my hair, still another time the shrewish Kath­arine, and once in my fancy I played Hamlet, and again King Lear.
And while I played the King, I heard a stepupon the steep stair that led from the barn-floor up into the loft. My aunt! My blood almost chilled for the instant. But the step was slow and heavy, and I knew that Elam, our hired man, had come back from the field and had overheard me. It was embarrassing, but I braved it out.
"What yer a doin' Miss Kitty? " he stam­mered out at me.
" How now, my lord," I laughed back in my bravado, " wouldst thou invade a lady's boudoir and she speaking not even the word of command ?"
He looked puzzled. If in that moment he did not feel that I had gone completely crazy, he must have believed at last that my aunt was entirely right in proclaiming me " a queer girl." . . .\ I hastened to reassure him. I slipped my crutches under my shoulders, dropped the dusty carriage robe from off them and came over to where he stood.
" Don't be alarmed, Elam," I laughed at him, " I was only dreaming, just playing that I was a great actress."
" Play-acting," he said, " I like that sort of thing."And then he told me of going up to the county-seat twice a year where there was a reg­ular theater — of the plays that he had seen there — " East Lynne " and " Uncle Tom's Cabin " and " Shadows of a Great City " and Thatcher, Primrose and West's minstrels. He gained my confidence — my interest.
" I like play-acting," he smacked. " Give me some o' yourn."
And so just as I had gained a theater, so I gained an audience. In a little while the audi­ence was doubled in size. The Perkins's Wil­liam had long acquired a simple habit of com­ing around to our barn on rainy afternoons to play seven-up with Elam. I think that if my aunt had even suspected the iniquity that dwelt within that barn of a rainy afternoon she would never have trusted a single one of us there­after.
I had an audience. Two lanky full-grown men sat cross-legged on the dirty floor of the barn-loft, silent for long hours while I, under the noisy protection of the patter of the rain upon the shingles — while I, a girl, led them from out of the hard world of realities and into the dreamland of fancy. They had the ex-quisite imaginings of the English poet, and I had — admiration. I fed on that sort of thing. Even their silent approbation set my very soul afire — it seemed so simple and so easy to be play-acting.
" We've had a deal of tragedy, and while I'm not saying that I don't exactly like the tragic," interrupted the Perkins's William one afternoon,- " there's a pleasure in variety."
I knew. He wanted comedy. I thought of Will Shakespeare and then I thought of something close to home. I thought of Mr. Perkins, his employer, of Mrs. Perkins, big and fat and uncomfortable, of their pretty plump Alice, who had the reputation of being the best looking girl in Honeytown; of all the peculiari­ties of the three Penkinses and then — I was all three. I had discovered that I had the gift of mimicry. The discovery had been simple.
Their William had sat silent on the floor when I began. His jaw was long, his upper lip thin and severe. Gradually it relaxed, a grin was born somewhere on the honest, sober countenance. It spread over his great face like a racing blaze. He guffawed. Our Elam guffawed. Then they became alarmed. 'Myaunt? They had that thought at a single moment and into their great, capacious mouths they stuffed their handkerchiefs. Admiration. I told you that I could have had it three times a day for meat and water and waxed strong. I had talent for acting — and I also had two stout yellow crutches for life-time companions.
Once the Perkins's William brought the Drake's William for an afternoon in the barn and I gave the three more of the character im­personations of the folks in our village. But that was a mistake. The Drake's William did not keep the secret He told Mr. Drake that Kate Senton was play-acting in the old Senton barn, and one day as I slipped up the narrow street that ran beside the Congregational Church he came out and asked me in.
He took me into his studio, which was a rare privilege to Honeytown folk, and bade me be seatedv Then he faced me quite calmly.
" I understand that you are quite an actress," he said, quietly.
Then I knew that his William had not kept the secret pact But I kept cool. If Mr. Drake proposed to lecture me for my foolish­ness, even if he was going to do far worse —make fun of me — well, I could brave it out. I was a woman then and fully capable of fight­ing my own battles. But little Mr. Drake had no intention of scolding me.
" A good many years ago, so long ago that the madam must have almost forgotten, I was in a barn-storming company, myself," he said, gently. " Perhaps you would like to see my old costume trunk ?"
I must have shown my pleasure in my face, for without further ado he led up into the attic of his little house. He knelt beside a battered black trunk. On its end the magic word, " Theater " was still decipherable in faded red letters and I felt my heart beat a little faster. He opened the lid of the trunk, and I slipped down on the floor beside him.
" Oh, but they are men's costumes," I said.
" I am going to tell you a state secret," he said in a voice that was scarce above a whisper. " Mrs. Drake was an actress. We toured the country together. It was a hard life and when she came into her property we looked for a haven — a town without even a suspicion of a theater — and here we found it."
It seemed incredible. Big fat Mrs, Drake— a dull gray, plodding sort of a woman — an actress. If Honeytown had even suspected I
" I had never dreamed it," I told her hus-•band. " An actress!" I began to tell him of what I had read of Charlotte Cushman and of Mary Anderson.
" Oh, but she was not a great star actress," he said quickly. " She was just a hard-working little woman of the theater — as slim and as girlish then as you are to-day."
And so she must have been from the quaint dresses, fantastic and yet, oh, so beautiful 1 that came to my fingers. Here was a treasure-house. I looked at each bit of woman's finery in the old trunk with longing and my eyes must have shown my beauty hunger for he turned to me again and said:
" You can use any of these any time you wish."
I shook my head. He did not understand; with all of his lovely generosity he could not understand. I could not have taken costumes into our barn. My aunt would never have permitted it I explained to him as best I could.
"Very well, then, Miss Senton," said he.-"My studio shall be your theater. Mrs. Drake shall be waiting for you there when you are ready in your costume."
He had fixed a great chair on a dais in the corner of the studio — with a red door curtain thrown over it, it seemed like a real throne. In that chair I seated myself — wrapped in a long gray cloak, a great gray hat with deep red plume set low upon my head, red gauntlets upon my hands, my slim, trim foot in its high-heeled slipper of red just showing underneath the skirt of my cloak. They sat before me in the little room, their William stood half-hidden in the door. Again I was in a theater — and this time my audience was giving me the benefit of appreciative and intelligent attention. Again I fed on admiration, my heart beat quick, my very soul went out into the lines that the great poet had written . . . When it was all over he sent his wife out to the kitchen to fix some tea and cakes for the three of us. He came close to my throne, bent low over me.
" Oh, God, you are beautiful," he said.
I looked straight into his eyes. I saw there a look that I had never before seen in the eyesof man or of woman and I was frightened. He must have seen that, for he comforted me.
" I am not going to hurt you," he said. " I am an artist and to an artist it is given to see the beauty in all the corners of this world.
He brought a great mirror and propped it up where I could see myself as he saw me. I could see the even contour of my face, the blackness of my inky black hair, under my straight deep brows, the dull depths of my black eyes, which Mrs. Drake had made darker still through the mysteries of her old make-up box, the pallor of my house-nursed skin. The artist was right. I was beautiful. I had talent. I might have made a Mary Anderson or a Char­lotte Cushman. God had made atonement for my warped frame. He had given me the thing that women pray for — the charm and beauty of countenance. But then I remembered the other things.
" Please give me my crutches," I said to him.
He brought them from the corner of the room where he had placed them while I was the actress upon the stage. I slipped them under my shoulders and stood erect. I was conscious of his brown eyes fixed hard upon meand I looked straight at him . . . The look, the wicked, half-animal look was fading out of those eyes. Mr. Drake had been fight­ing a battle with himself. He was a loyal little man and loyalty for him meant an eternal devotion to his fat and homely wife . . . Mr. Drake was himself. I never again saw that look in his eyes.
" Will you let me paint you? " he asked, in his gentle, deferential way.
I granted his request, even though the barest form created a scene with my aunt, and to his house I came every pleasant day for weeks. How could I refuse him? I got into the costume of gray and red, and for long hours I stood, held by a single crutch hidden in the folds of the cloak, while he made his picture. It was tiresome — there were days when I could have fairly dropped from fatigue, but all the while his enthusiasm spurred me to fresh strength. His heart was in his work and I loved him for that . . . After a long time the picture was done. Ready money was a deal of a stranger at the little house in the lane by the church, and Mr. Drake, who was ingenious within the house, if helpless without,made his own frame for it. It seemed very simple, compared with the elaborate picture frames we had in our house, but when it was done I liked it
I liked the picture. It made me a great beauty, and what woman could help loving any­thing of that sort! He had filled in the back­ground with the paraphernalia of a theater dressing-room, a screened gas-jet, costumes hung upon pegs along the walls, a Littered dressing-table at one side. " The Girl Who Loved Shakespeare," Mr. Drake had called the picture.
" I am going to send it to a great art show in Chicago," he told me. " I hope that they will hang it upon the line."
And then, as he explained to me just what he meant by " the line," he told me that he would let me hear the first news about his pic­ture. It was a great step for him — the first painting he had sent to an exhibition in many years.
But I did not hear about the picture. Be­fore he had received word of it a new episode had come into my life.



User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

Re: The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 14093Unread post Didier
27 Oct 2017, 20:15

CHAPTER III

I was, as I have told you, but twenty-two when I realized that my life must take a change. I was at a turning point in my road of life. My aunt had discovered my fondness for dramatics — although she might have real­ized from the beginning that my lifelong lame­ness would forever bar me from the stage. Still my aunt was not of that sort.
" I want to do my part in the world," I had told her when I was quite calmed, after my conversation about the theater. She looked at me over the tops of her spectacles, without ceas­ing her knitting. She spoke to me of her close friend who was the milliner of our little village.
" If time is hanging on your hands, Kate," she told me, " why don't you go in with Mary Dunbar and learn her trade. I'm sure your ma wouldn't have liked it, an1 I ain't a goin' to have you whinin' 'round the house in this oneasy fashion."
It always made me angry when she referredto my mother in this way, and so I answered:
" It isn't the house — not so much. I'm tired of more than that. I want to go to the city — New York. I don't want to be a mil­liner."
" The house was good enough for your father an' his father an' his father before him."
" It's a dear old house," I responded. I could feel the blood mounting to my temples. " But I'm tired of it for a time. I've a great longing for the city, aunt."
She gave me one contemptuous look.
"A lot of use you'd be in the city," she sneered. " You'd better go with Mary. You've got the making of a milliner. Alice Perkins copied your new hat last week."
For the first time within memory my aunt was paying me a compliment. My long and tiring hours in Mr. Drake's studio had not been wasted. For there had been a time there when the patient enthusiasm that he put into his work had enthused me, too. I had fancied that perhaps I might learn to sketch and to use color. A few attempts under his kindly guidance showed me that it was quite impossible . . . But he did one thing.He showed me the science of color in dress, of the laws of the harmonies between colors, and how a woman by following those laws could make herself well-dressed no matter how inex­pensive the materials from which she cut her garments. It was all fascinating, and I began experimenting — with the trimming of my hats at first. In a week I had Mary Dunbar inter­ested, and in another Alice Perkins, the village beauty of our town, was copying my style.
But I had not studied those things to be the milliner of Honeytown. In a quick moment that was my aunt's precise intention. We had come to the parting of the ways, and my short­sighted eyes could see no other path ahead than that which led to the greatest of all cities — New York.
" A lot of use you'd be in the city," my aunt repeated once again and again let her glance fall upon my crutches.
There was a time when that would have cut deeply, but that was not this time.
" I could try to be of use in the city," I ven­tured.
" And wouldn't be," she snarled.
I saw that it would be no use, trying to con-vince my aunt. So I saved my breath and dreamed of the city. Slowly the great plan came to me. At first I did not dare to think of it. It was revolutionary, and the Sentons are a conservative folk. It runs in our blood. Still the idea was fascinating, if revolutionary, and I continued to entertain it, to speculate upon it.
I had a little money of my own — just a few hundred dollars then — but it has seemed a fortune to me sometimes. It was a heritage, and put away to earn a meager interest. But the idea came to me to draw my money and go to New York, wasting no further words with my aunt. At first it seemed impossible. By and by it grew more possible, and the plan was so enchanting that I began to contrive to put it into operation. The idea seized upon me. I am sure that I was fearfully nervous, more sure that my nervousness must have first be­trayed me to my aunt. But I was committed to my plan and mentally far beyond the point that left me any possibility of turning back. I made my plans as carefully as the man must make his when he is going to rob in the dark.
On Tuesdays my aunt went to the sewingsociety at one of the white churches down in the village. On Tuesdays I was alone in the house; it had been a favorite day for my sitting at Mr. Drake's studio. On that final particu­lar Tuesday I could hardly await her starting from our house; I was afever with excitement. I wondered if she could have noticed.
"You've promised to come with me to sew­ing society for quite a spell past," urged my aunt, as she parted from me.
" I'm tired, aunt," was my reply. It was my stock excuse but she had to accept it.
" It will do you good to get out into the fresh air, Kate," she urged.
I began to wonder if she suspected.
" I am really very tired," I persisted and she left me. I stood in the door watching her as she made her way down toward the road. Two or three times she turned about and looked. I wondered what she expected to say, and I must have been afraid to face her for I would not let her glance catch mine, even at that distance. Finally she disappeared. I waited even longer — quite a few minutes in all. I did not wish to risk her returning and surprising me. Finally I was sure in my ownmind. I turned quickly and hurried up to the dusty attic—another delightful playground of my girlhood and a retreat to be sought when I wished to be alone and with memories of the past. But this was no time for soliloquies. I poked in among the dust-strewn rubbish crowded back there under the eaves and I found an ancient valise. I do not know how old it was, but I think that my mother told me it belonged to my grandfather Senton.
It was quick work for me to get the valise down to my own little room, the one place in all this world that was my own. Then for a busy hour, for our neighbor's boy was in the plot and I listened for his step all the while I threw my contraptions into the musty old valise. I picked my treasures with exceeding care. Perhaps there were some things there that New York would like to see. You see I knew little of New York and had much to learn of the big town, which I was yet to see.
But the valise was packed and stoutly fast­ened long before the boy came for it. Then a new worry beset me. Suppose that the boy should fail me. Suppose that he should have told my aunt and she . . . But I tried to comfort myself and to steady myself for real trouble, not giving nervous ear to every troublous possibility that might suggest itself to me.
Still I worried until Aaron finally came, so late that I began to pray that the sewing society would last a long time that afternoon. It was a new business, this preparing to run away to the city, and it would have been a sad busi­ness if it had been discovered in the very nick of plan.
I gave Aaron a dollar from the stock that I had hidden upon my person. Truly, I think it was the first that he had ever seen, for he seemed to blush as he gazed upon it.
" I don't want your money, ma'm," he said and said in sincerity with one of those meaning looks that folks are always inclined to give to­ward my crutches. That touched me, for I knew that the dollar must have been very big to him — bigger than that proverbial cart­wheel that was dinned into me all the early years of my life. In the end I succeeded in making him stuff it away in the bottom of his pocket. I cautioned him — again and again —to care and to secrecy. He was to take thebag down to the depot and leave it with Mr. Hopkins, the agent there, saying that Kate Senton would call for it in the morning. For I planned that the morning train was to take me into the city.
I watched the boy carefully as he took the long way round to the depot — the shortest cut led straight by the church and danger — and when he was gone I felt that I was already started; certainly my bridges had been burned behind me.
I had not planned to leave the house till sun­up, and the early dawn should light my path. I knew that the men folks were early risers and that I should have to be awake very early to escape before they were about, but the problem of waking solved itself for me — I did not sleep a wink that last night. The bigness of the step that I was taking, the dangers attend­ant upon my getting away from the house made sleep an impossibility.
Sometime after midnight I arose and dressed. A vague feeling of dread impressed itself upon me. For the final times I moved quietly about the little room that had been myabiding place so many years — then I was all ready. I closed my eyes, I could not bear to look upon that memorable place at the very end, and swung softly toward the door. I turned its knob softly. It seemed as if the rattling of that latch might wake the very dead that slept in the little graveyard across the way.
The door did not openl
I tried it — again and again. The door did not open. Slowly the truth forced itself upon me. My aunt suspected, my aunt knew! She had wasted no time in useless words but had locked me in my room, just as if I had been a child, without a reasoning mind of my own. Well, she was consistent, that aunt of mine! That was the way she had always treated me — treated me like a child unable to think and plan reasonably for itself.
I could have screamed in my anger but, thank God, I did not. I gave up trying at the door. It was an impossibility, with the injunc­tion of silence forced upon me. I retreated to my pudgy feather bed and threw myself across it again, while I planned for the immediate future.All idea of staying in the house I abandoned. It would be impossible to live there longer. I must leave, and I must leave on the morning train. I do not often set my heart on things — life has broken me of that fantasy these many years — but when I plan I must make every effort to fulfil my plans.
In this case the fulfilment seemed all but im­possible. I was a prisoner in my room, furi­ously angry and at the point of tears. My aunt must have laughed as she slept that night.



User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

Re: The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 14290Unread post Didier
30 Oct 2017, 19:20

CHAPTER IV

That I escaped from my aunt's house in the early hours of a summer morning is a fact — else I might not now be writing these lines. How I escaped borders on the improbable.
Below my window was the sloping roof of the long porch. At the end of the porch furthest from my room a great tree grew close to the house. It was a small chance of escape and desperate for a girl with skirts and crutches to manage, but I was in a mood to take the small chance, and take it I did.
I crept along the porch roof. It was misty; it had been raining and was about to rain once again. I crept because I did not dare attempt to walk on that slippery, noisy roof. It must have taken me an hour to cover the distance to the tree, it seemed two. But finally I knew that the worst of my escape was past. The tree was comparatively easy. It would have been impossible if I had had to ascend it, but to descend it simply meant an ungraceful andchecked fall stage by stage, down its stout stem. How I came down that tree I cannot even now remember. It was not an easy descent, every­thing wet and rough and slimy and my hands and clothes being torn all the time. My arms are powerful — fifteen years and more on crutches had even then done that much for me — and with them and something that must have been a providential help I got to the ground in safety, if not in comfort. I had tossed my crutches down before me. I picked them up, slipped them under my shoulders in the way that has become mechanical to me, and was away from the house without incurring the danger of an instant's delay.
My plan had been to go to my mother's grave and stay there in the city of my girlhood fancy until time came to go to the depot, but it began to rain in sheets as I walked out from the old house and I did not dare to risk failure at the outset by courting either pneumonia or rheumatism.
Where to go became a problem. For an in­stant I thought of the barn, so desperate was I for resource. But that was only a forlorn hope, for that involved getting away from thevicinity of the homestead before dawn. Once I had thought of the Drakes, and then as quickly dismissed that thought. If they had harbored me it might have become known through the town — their William was a deal of a sieve, you remember — and I had no de­sire to expose my friend or his wife to the ill will of my powerful aunt. Other refuges seemed out of the question, for each seemed to involve the risk of an exposure to my aunt, and I well knew what that would mean.
Finally my mind was fixed, and I went plung­ing down the road in all the mud and wet. I made my way to a tiny house set in the back street — Honeytown was big enough for just one real back street. It was frightfully dark that rainy, murky night. It was a long way arid a slow way, for I was poking my crutches forward all the while into the unknown, and constantly fearful, as I always am in the dark, of a fall. But some unseen hand must have guided me, for none came, and after a while I was at the gate of a tiny house in the back street, opening the gate and still slowly feeling my way along the stone-flagged walk that ran alongside the cottage. I knew it all well frommemory, even when I stopped and tapped gently on a window pane.
Two or three times I tapped and then I heard someone coming across the room. The window was thrown open and the occupant of the room looked out at me. Yes, looked out at me. For she could have seen me no better in the strong sunlight, this Tessie Hessler.
"Who is it?" she asked eagerly, for the blind seem to know no fear.
" It's Kate," I whispered.
" At this hour of night! How did you come ? "
" I poked down here in the dark. I'm run­ning away."
She came to the little side door of the cot­tage and let me in. She wanted me to turn in with her even then, but I knew that there would be no sleep for me that night, and so we sat in the darkness that was ever her allot­ment in life, planning for the future. I was filled with a new enthusiasm over my coming to the city. It seemed so near, and poor Tes­sie seemed so envious of the great opportunity so close ahead of me that I began to appreci­ate what I was doing in leaving Honeytownbehind. For a moment I almost thought of bringing Tessie with me. But then — the fu­ture was so uncertain and Tessie so helpless — I dismissed the idea. I decided that some day when I grew great and rich and famous — how important those words look on paper — I was going to send for her and keep her close to me. It was enough for me then to know that I had her love and affection — there was little enough of woman's love and affection given me for companionship.
Tessie went with me to the early train. Aaron had brought my bag and it was a proud moment when I paid my money — such a lot of money — and bought the ticket that would carry me to New York. It was a prouder moment still, and enough to fill a girl's heart with excitement, when we heard the call of the locomotive, down past the lower mill, and the rush of the oncoming train in the distance. I gathered dear little simple trusting Tessie into my arms for a last farewell — how good it was to have some one to kiss you good-by 1 — was reaching to gather up my skirts to board the cars, when------Around the corner of the shabby little depot came the quick footfalls of a woman who was afraid she might miss that train. I dropped my skirts when I heard them for they were familiar footfalls. They were familiar to Tessie, too, and she clasped me the more tightly.
" Your aunt," she whispered to me.
Here was a nice piece of business. After all my maneuvering I was doomed to a last-minute failure of this sort. I stood my ground boldly.
" It's out of the question," I told her in a low voice. " I cannot go back."
She did not answer for a moment for she was breathless and speech a difficulty.
" I do not want you to go back — after this," she said finally, looking at me sharply, but not unkindly after all.
I could not find words for answer. The train was at hand and slowing opposite the depot.
44 No, Kate," she continued. " I see how it is for the best. You must go to the city, take your medicine and learn your lesson."
A cheery parting, that! My aunt leanedover and pecked at my cheek. It was evident that she had some more to say.
" You have an uncle in New York," she told me, hastily, for the conductor of the train was urging me to hurry. " Aneas Strong. He was our uncle, too. We had a quarrel with Aneas years ago, when you were a little girl, and we haven't heard from him since. I've heard tell, Kate, that he's done well in the city. You might go an* see him. Your ma was about the only one of us girls your Uncle Aneas took to."
I did not wonder at that, but had the good sense to keep my mouth shut about it. I pecked back at my aunt's rough cheek, gave Tessie Hessler a farewell hug for luck and bundled aboard the cars.
" You kin come back any time. There'll be room for you in Mary Dunbar's shop! "
In Mary Dunbar's shop! Not for me. No more Honeytown for Kate Senton. I was in a new and a great world. I sat in the cars all day and then it began to grow dusk, the trees and the farmhouses and the country vil­lages were fading sleepily off into the oncoming night. Here and there they gave faint pro-tests and I caught the gleam of yellow lights — in the bigger places the blue-white sheen of electricity — the thing of which I had read all my life but rarely seen until that night.
The train carried me miles arid miles away from Honeytown, and still I had no regrets. Finally even the cars that bore me away from the shire-town of our county were left behind. I crossed rivers and valleys, counties and whole States. I threaded the country villages and had hurried glimpses of the great cities through which we wormed our way.
It was great — that train. Great when it pierced the hills and we went steadily ahead through the inky blacknesses of the tunnels, great as we pushed fearlessly across the narrow ledge of some dizzily high trestle or embank­ment, great as we plunged through the black­ness of the night. God's world was great and Honeytown a million miles behind.
Mary Dunbar's millinery shop? No. No. No. Never that for Kate Senton.
The trip grew very long. I was tired, and I leaned back in the car seat for a moment of rest for my old eyes. When I opened themagain I had a companion in the seat. We had neared New York and the train was crowded. The first I knew somebody was begging the half-seat that was unoccupied beside me.
Somebody was of the male species. He looked like the men whom I had seen pictured in the magazines, but who never came to life and being in Honeytown. He must have been tall — remember that my eyes were closed when he slipped in the seat beside me — and I liked his big muscular frame, and his long stern profile, the profile of a man who has known sorrow and temptation and battle.
But with the manliness of his face there was boyishness. He could not have been over thirty. With all his struggles and his tempta­tions I knew that he must be at heart a boy — it seemed from the beginning as if I could reach each detail of his being. I studied him without his ever once knowing it.
For a long time he kept his eyes straight ahead. Then I saw him glance sidewise at me. He must have seen the plain little coun­try girl, a little tired and much travel-stained after a long day on the cars. He must have seen my crutches tucked in the corner of theseat and wondered on the whys and the where­fores of them. But he kept his srience a long while and his eyes straight ahead into the long vista of the car.
I suppose that it was very wrong in me, but I was lonesome — all day in the cars and not a soul to talk to, save an occasional curt word from the conductor — and it seemed unsoci­able to be sitting so close to a person and never exchanging a word of courtesy. They had told me that that was the way you had to do in New York: meet thousands and thou­sands of people and act as if you did not care who they were or what might ever happen to them. But it seemed to me that it must be a mighty cruel way and that is why I asked Mr. Somebody if our train was not going to be late into New York. After that I was quite afraid. It seemed to me, then, when it was too late, that I had done a very rash thing.
He said I think that we were a little late. Still it does not now make any material differ­ence what he said and I hardly recognized his words. He had a fine voice, a kind voice. How you can judge people by their voices when everything else is deceptive or fails entirely.We fell into conversation and I forgot my silly little fears. It did seem so good to have companionship. I think that the biggest thing that I have missed out of my life is compan­ionship. It has always seemed to me that everything else, poverty, Honeytown, my in­evitable crutches, would have been as nothing if I could have had companionship — the com­panionship of boys and girls, the great com­panionship of my father and my mother.
I did not know Mr. Somebody's name. He was a New Yorker and that delighted me, for he told me so much more of the great city to which the train was so rapidly bringing me, than I had before known. He talked very im­personally, and as he talked I wondered what could be the very great harm in a girl who knows her own mind and her own dignity talk­ing to a strange man whom chance had sent as her companion on a train. He told me the harm before he left me.
We were on the ferryboat crossing the North River and I was entranced by the toothed and fantastic skyline of the great New York that faced me — almost with unseen open arms saying: " Come, girlie, come to me andI will make you both rich and famous." We were leaning against the deck rail of the boat. He had been very kind and courteous to me and had brought my valise for me, although I saw it was very much different from the smart leather case he carried.
" Isn't it great . . . New York?" I said to him and I laughed as I spoke. " It is my opportunity and it means so much to me. I want to make so much out of my life in New York."
He did not laugh in reply but grew very serious.
" There are so many of you, so many to whom New York sends its glamour hundreds and hundreds of miles. It is a magnet that is drawing the many of you to it all the while. Some of you it keeps good and sweet and gracious and some of you — it doesn't." He must have caught himself going in deeper and floundering, and for a moment he stopped abruptly. Then, again he told me more of the city as we grew nearer the ferry slip. He cau­tioned care upon me so strictly that I grew alarmed.
" It seems to me that I need not be afraidto be confident," I told him. " I spoke to you and you have treated me with the greatest con­sideration."
He did not say it, for he had a decent mod­esty, but I felt sure that he meant me to feel that all New York men might not treat me with the same consideration he had given me.
" You will have to be very careful to whom you speak," he said. " And speak to no stranger when you can possibly avoid it. It seems cruel, I know. It's our abominable way of doing things here in New York."
Only once could I come to New York for the first time, only once could the impression of its vastness and its strength strike me full between the eyes and send me reeling mentally. Only once, apparently, could I talk with the kind-hearted, big-hearted man who was my companion when I came here. For, although he was very kind and took me to the house where I was told that a strange girl would be accepted late at night, without suspicion and without insult, there came the moment when good-nights must be said.
I hesitated at the last. I hoped against hope that he would ask my name and if hemight come and see me again. I wanted to ask his name and ask him to come and talk to me again.
But he must have been a gentleman, for he did not ask either thing of me. He said that he hoped that I would have a happy time in New York and be very successful and then he turned and left me. After he was gone I felt that I had lost a friend. I had lost more. I had lost a rare companionship, rare because as you now know companionship was not a daily visitor to my life.



User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

Re: The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 14486Unread post Didier
02 Nov 2017, 17:40

CHAPTER V

My first week in New York must have been the busiest week of my life. In it I had my first glimpses of the wonderful city which was even more wonderful than I had imagined it, and in that seven days I found a snug little lodging in a quaint old house in South Brooklyn. For I found that the place that harbored me my first night in New York was quite too expensive for a regular diet. One of the girls there told me of the South Brooklyn boarding-house and to it I went with­out delay.
The house was one of a monotony that lined the shadow side of a quiet street. It was a shabby street, poking its head against a shab­bier, noisy way where the trolley cars ran, and leading from it to the point where it dipped its feet in the harbor — the wonderful place where the ships came and went from all cor­ners of the world that seemed so much closer to New York than ever to Honeytown.
The house had once been a great house.Not even the indignities of time or the insults of careless children of the neighborhood could hide that. Its door was broad and it must have sometimes dispensed a generous hospi­tality. Its rooms were cavernous and a regi­ment might have mounted its stair. It seemed a wicked perversity of fate that had brought this fine old Brooklyn gentleman to such a fate. Better that it should have been pulled apart, timber from timber and brick from brick, and superseded by the giant tenements that gener­ally come to follow these old aristocrats, than this fate. The old house showed its years the more plainly each advancing season. It looked upon the single, shabby grass-plot in its area and the dying maple at the curb as if it must have sighed for a single look at the glories of the long agoes. Imagine the folk who must Have once dwelt within it and then — after them — the Stripes 1
Mrs. Stripe was my landlady — a good enough soul in her way. She had two grown daughters — two Stripes, as it were. One of these — Miss Claribel — was fat, quite a broad Stripe. The other — Miss Clarice — if you wished to be expelled from the houseyou pronounced that like solidified water — was thin. I secretly called her the pin-Stripe,, after I had come to know her better. The girls were the jewels of their mother's eye and they knew it. They felt little embarrassment about leaving the cares of the establishment upon their mother's broad shoulders. And she, for her part, had grown well used to that.
So it was Mrs. Stripe who met me at the door when first I came to her house. Her mission must have been one of cleansing for she wore a wipe-cloth a VOriental draped about her coifure — I feel reasonably sure that she had never called it anything else than coiffure. She took me into her house and, for a consideration carefully named in advance, gave me a little roosting place right up under the roof that I might call my own. It was a cheerless sort of cell, miserably furnished with a collection of overworked and very tired fur­niture— but it was New York!
Every time I looked from my low-browed window and saw the slovenly rears of the houses in the next street — how different city houses do look from behind the scenes! — Idid not see the dirt and the squalor. I simply saw New York. I was in New York. I was a New Yorker. A girl must be a New Yorker, I thought, when she comes to the big town and determines to stick it out.
I made no effort at the very first to find work. I wanted to look into my new setting the more carefully, to plan my new suit and trig hat very carefully, for it seemed to me that my appearance would count very much for me or against me. And I had an intuitive feeling that my crutches counted hard against me. It would take good clothes to counteract them.
So I tramped many weary miles and rode in the trolley-cars for still more miles. I saw much of the city. I found its people very kind and very considerate — but perhaps that was because of my crutches. My landlady at the first was not very considerate of me — and I even think that that, too, might have been for the same reason.
She looked at them when I first came to her and after she thought it a safe question she asked me if I had been sick for a long time.When I told her that I had not been sick a day in fifteen years she seemed abashed. I think that there was something about my crutches, themselves, that made me seem like a sort of temporary invalid, although the drug-store man at Honeytown had ordered them for me from the city and they had seemed wonderfully slick and comfortable with their bright yellow sides and their soft leather saddles to receive my shoulders. For I had realized two years be­fore that the crutches that Mr. Stoneham, our village carpenter, had been making for me throughout my girlhood, lengthening them by inches as my slender figure lengthened by inches, were not the right sort. Despite his loving interest and patient kindness they were crude and clumsy and all too heavy. I realized all of this when the drug-store man sent to the city and I bought my saddle crutches from him.
But after I had been in New York but a little while I saw a girl on crutches in upper Broadway — a girl who used her sticks with the skill and precision that can only come when a woman's crutches are as second nature to her. I envied the smart and altogether professionalsticks that she swung upon — and I yielded to temptation and bought a pair for myself. . . . My new crutches were strong and light and handsome. They were cut from a very dark rosewood and instead of the leather saddles which wear out all too quickly, they were mounted with simple shoulder-rests of shiny ebony, smoothed and polished, so as to give the highest possible degree of comfort. They had big rubber disks, set in metal ferrules to catch the ground securely as I walked, for to a woman who is dependent upon but one foot and two sticks it is something more than merely important that these be faithful serv­ants to her.
I was proud of my first pair of rosewood crutches. I paid ten dollars of my carefully hoarded money for them and did not regret it. I still have them stowed carefully away. They are battered and bruised and long since re­placed by other pairs, but always by others of the same sort. Sometimes when I come across them I stop to think of my first pride in them. For I was proud-to go forth before a big city and show it that my crutches were not more than a mere detail of my life, no more a partof my real life than the gloves upon my fingers. I have never been ashamed of my crutches since first I came to the full growth of woman­hood, I have been rather proud of my pro­ficiency in the management of the sticks throughout all of the various emergencies where I have had to use them. I am a cripple, a cripple for life, and Heaven knows I have long since ceased to be ashamed of that. I am almost proud of it, as proud as any woman can be who really conquers.
I should have known that other girl on crutches — the one whom I saw that day on Broadway. I have never really known another such as myself, although I have seen plenty of other women on crutches, and I should like to look into the soul of another who struggles against the same handicap as was long ago placed upon me. I should like to know how she has struggled against a great world, physically and mentally.
For a moment I was tempted to stop that girl on Broadway. Then I remembered what my big-minded acquaintance of the train had told of speaking to strangers in the city andher own smooth and shiny sticks had carried her far from me while I stood there, still irresolute. ?
Oh, no, I had not forgotten him. It seemed strange, did it not, that a girl should obey such a mere chance acquaintance, but such chance acquaintances have come all too rarely into my life. For a time I rather longed and expected to see him again. I am quite a conspicuous figure and he could have noted me from a long distance. But New York seemed to be tre­mendous, and I supposed there were some folk who do not cross paths once in a twelvemonth. Still I hoped. There was none who could say me nay in that.
Then came the night when I went to the opera. Summer was close upon us, but a chance late performance gave me an oppor­tunity for which I had wished all my life. It seemed sinful the way that I was digging into my meager capital, but I felt that I might be willing to die after I had satisfied just a few of my human desires. I've few heavenly ambi­tions just yet, but always a whole lot of tre­mendously human desires. So I slipped intomy best bib and tucker — there had been a new bib and a new tucker since I left Honey-town. Rosewood crutches demanded a black velvet suit, although I am frank to say that I had hungered for a black velvet suit long be­fore I even knew that they made crutches from rosewood. Mr. Drake had said that I had a long, slim back such as artists love and Mr. Aylesworth, the young illustrator who also boarded at the Stripes, had said the same thing, too. I have always managed to keep my figure slim and trim and girlish. Perhaps my crutches have aided in that. And I have always held my affection for black velvet suits — which is another matter, perhaps.
We climbed high up under the ceiling of the opera-house. It was a wonderful picture, even before the curtain rose. I kept thinking that my mother had never heard an opera. Poor mother, how narrow a rut was her path in Honeytown! Here was her daughter enjoy­ing a thing of which she had never been per­mitted to dream. Hers was a musical ear. She could have given a real appreciation to such an evening. I could only sit and dream and wonder.There was a new element to the picture — the rich folk and the great who came to sit in the boxes. It was the first time that I had ever seen a flesh and blood woman in a low-neck dress and I must confess that I was ready to be very much shocked and was not shocked at all! In fact I dismissed one of my heav­enly ambitions and substituted a new earthly desire. I wanted to wear, wanted to own, a low-necked gown of my own. As if such a thing was even in the question! For my capital had fallen lower and lower and each foolish im­pulse brought me closer to the bottom of my slender purse. Still I knew that night that I would love an evening gown and I confided that much to Sadie.
There, there, I have not told of Sadie. Sadie lived in the prison, too. She had the next cell to mine. Sadie said that she had a " swell job " and a young man, so Sadie's cup of happiness was brimful. Sadie's young man had a " swell job," too. He was a steam-fitter or some such delicate sort of position. At any rate he drew a pay-envelope, and on Saturday nights he put on a white tie and other gay attire and regularly took Sadie to a show,and afterwards they had oyster stews together. I asked Sadie once if she had ever calculated the number of gallons of oyster stews they consumed in the course of twelve months and she replied that she never had, but sat right down and began figuring that moment.
But Sadie was big-hearted, as well as big-handed and big-footed, and a dear. Sadie's young man could testify to that. She was as different from the Stripes as — but it is wicked to criticise. I realized that there were worse things on earth than being winged to the end of one's days.
So she came that night with me, for I talked so much of the treat that was so soon to be mine, that the enthusiasm became contagious. I do not know quite what she expected, but I saw soon after the great music drama began that she was visibly disappointed. She knew as little of Italian as myself and had a some­what lesser ear for music. I think that she was relieved when I told her about my ambi­tion for a low-necked gown and opened a route for whispered conversation.
Sadie was decided in her opinion — decid­edly negative." Folks in my set," she said, stolidly, " don't think they're proper like."
Which was also Honeytown's verdict.
" I think I could wear one," I whispered, modestly, " quite as becomingly as some of those women down there in the boxes."
She thought it a matter upon which I needed admonition.
" You wouldn't be popular in our crowd if you did," she continued. " You know we go out a good deal together. We're Tigers."
Tigers? I looked at big and gentle Sadie again.
" The Tigers," she explained, " is the branch of Jim's political club that looks after their lady friends. We're having a dance next week and we'll see that you get a bid."
" I'll see that I don't wear a low-necked gown that night," I told her.
When the opera was over and its delights were but a memory with me, we shuffled down the long stairs and out into the street with all those other people. By the time we were upon the sidewalk you might have imagined that we had come from the lower floors, if you had not looked too sharply at our clothes. Thoseabout were those who had really come from below and who were now seeking their car­riages and you could look at their clothes sharply.
Sadie plucked my sleeve to call my attention to a lovely pink opera cloak; I saw the cloak, but I did not turn quickly. I kept my gaze steadily to the left as she had directed it and after a while it puzzled her phlegmatic nature to know the reason why, and she asked.
" The tall man there with the long sharp profile," I whispered in answer. " Do not forget him. That is my Mr. Somebody.*'
Try as I might I could not put myself in a position where he might see me. I looked at the girl sharply. What was she to him? He was helping her into a carriage and showing her a deal of courtesy for a man to show his sister, for instance. Then he climbed into the carriage himself — beside that strange woman. His eye ran the gamut of the crowd and it seemed as if he must have seen me. Still he could not have seen, for his expression was unchanged as he turned from me.
"Why do you call him Mr. Somebody?" Sadie asked after we were in the car, Brooklyn bound.But I only laughed and she forgot. She was telling about the opera. It had not been at all to her expectations. She had hoped to under­stand and she spoke vaguely of there having been no funny men at all. She was used to opera of a different sort.
Still she was a dear and companionable, and I loved her for both of these things.
There was a man in an upper room of a vine-clad house farther down our sleepy Brooklyn street who lay abed, his thin and bearded face looking down day after day to gaze upon the passers-by, to watch the sturdy flowers in the area court record the passing of the seasons. It was twenty-seven years since that man last stood beside the flower-beds of his house, and when I went by and caught sight of his pale face at that upper window I clutched my crutches the more tightly and went flying down the walk. I thanked God then for the good health he gave me all the while. I even thanked Him for the rosewood crutches, them­selves, that carried me a-scooting through the lovely town and ofttimes out into the open country just beyond.



User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

Re: The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 14903Unread post Didier
06 Nov 2017, 18:36

CHAPTER VI

The warm spring days came upon us, the first breath of early summer blew into our faces, and for a moment I had a keen hankering for my own open country once again. But it was only a temporary regret. For second thought always brought to me all of the unpleasant memories of Honeytown. And then New York in late May was delightful. The organ-men had not forgotten our shabby street of faded gentility, even if the fashion­able folk of Brooklyn had. They came into it morning after morning and we all loved them. I could have fairly danced upon my sticks at the melody they rolled out. The sick-abed man would turn to hear their familiar airs, real pleasure on his face. Mr. Jessup's window would fly open and he would lean upon the ledge, smoking his old pipe and thinking of the days that had gone before.
Mr. Jessup was the star boarder at the Stripes'. It was said that he had even ante­dated Mrs. Stripe, herself, that he had cometo her with the faded old house, just as its doors and its windows and its pieces of heavy furniture had come to her. He had a little annuity from some unknown source, and with it he held to the big square room of the second floor front. That was his castle, the only home that he had known for a quarter of a century, and he was immensely proud of it.
For Mr. Jessup had known our house when it had been one of the show places of the quiet street, and the street itself, one of the proud­est of the Brooklyn of Beecher and Talmage days. He could remember when the Governor of the State lived in another great house across the way, and he had seen both the street and its fine houses fall together into shabby re-spectability. And so it was that he smoked in the window of the warm spring days, dozed betimes, and dreamed that the days had come again when the tall figure of the Governor, carrying his silk hat in hand, was emerging from the dooryard across the way.
Sometimes he sat alone and sometimes Ayles-worth came and sat with him. The two men — one with life all but a closed book, the other just turning beyond its title-page — were alike,and yet different withal. Aylesworth was a puzzle. He was a slim and boyish fellow, who had at the beginning incurred almost the abso­lute enmity of the Stripes by saying nothing about himself. It was apparent to me that he was poor — also equally apparent that he was a gentleman — in the fullest sense of that much abused word. To me he gave a respect that was almost deferential. He accepted me, my lameness and all, without comment or question, and I could have almost loved him for that alone.
Once I tired of the sameness of Mrs. Stripe's meals and dropped in at a cheap little restau­rant not far from the Brooklyn City Hall — not an elaborate place, but it offered at least a faint hope of variety. There was little change in the Stripe bill-of-fare from week to week. On Sundays we had chicken and ice­cream and on Wednesdays we repeated the Sunday dinner. On Friday, fish, of course. On Thursdays we had roast-beef and on the other nights of the week we had " fixed-up " dishes. I made my escape on a " fixed-up" night.In the crowded restaurant I strained my rather short-sighted eyes for a seat. A man beckoned his way and I saw that it was Ayles-worth. He sat at one of the long bare tables and there was an empty space beside him. As I slipped into my chair, he caught my crutches for me with a dexterity that might almost have been born of long practice and carefully tucked them away against the wall. . . . Some­how I felt a little flutter of pleasure at being seated beside a real man once again. Mrs. Stripe for reasons of her own had carefully guarded against any such possibilities in her eminently proper dining-room, where I was sandwiched in between big, good-natured Sadie and an anaemic Miss Saunders who worked tedious hours each day in a Fulton street de­partment store, and my opportunities for con­versation were limited, to say the least. . . . But on this night I was free from all of that, and with good-looking Aylesworth beside me I could hardly help feeling as gay as if I had been in the smartest of the big restaurants over in the heart of New York.
I had counted upon the delights of good eat­ing— you do not know how fried oysters cantaste to a girl who has just come out of the back-woods country — and here I was eating, mechanically of food, and mentally of the sharp nervous talk which came from my fellow lodger. . . . He began telling me of him­self, and I felt that I was privileged. He was English, had been in America less than a twelvemonth, and I could see, without his ever telling me, that some of it had been hard sail­ing. He was an illustrator and there was little demand for his work. He said but little of that, for he was not of that sort, but I could read between the lines. For myself, I could understand without questioning. I could re­member in the little time that I had lived with the Stripes the bulky packages that stood awaiting him in the hall with the mail of the other boarders — the rejected drawings that the publishers were returning to him. . . . We sat and talked a long time, while nerv­ous tired waiters stood and frowned at us. Finally one of them came to us and told us that it was near nine o'clock — the closing time for that little place. I reached for my wallet and he thrust out one of his slim hands as if to stop me." Oh, no," he said, as if with authority.
I motioned to him for my crutches and said:
" Do you want me to be very angry with you and never eat with you again?" I felt the color come to my cheeks.
" No, no, no," said he, impetuously.
I paid my own check. . . . We went home together, he talking of little things in his nervous pleasant manner, and I — well, I was just happy in mannish companionship again. I felt sure that he was something just a little bit more than perfunctorily polite to a fellow boarder, something more than merely sympa­thetic to a girl whose trim brown crutches rested in the crook of her elbow, and as we sat there in the trolley-car, I felt that my neat-fitting suit, my slim figure, my well-set toque, even the twist and turn of my veil must have at­tracted him; perhaps his heart beat a little faster at the sight of the girl who wore all of these things. I was only a woman after all, and my woman's soul was ever starving for the fine-cooked foods of admiration. . . . When we were back again at our own shabby house in the shabby street, he took my hands in his for a single moment." I think that you are a good fellow," he said.
And so I must have been a good fellow, perhaps, for after that he brought me into the manlike intimacy between old Mr. Jessup and himself. I had to listen to old Mr. Jessup's single anecdote — how one day he met the Governor at the corner of our street and how Mr. Jessup said this and the Governor said that—it was an anecdote that ran to great lengths. But it was music and peace to an old man's soul, and when you come into manlike intimacy with men, you must take them as they are. . . . Perhaps my readiness to do that very thing brought me all the nearer to those two oddly assorted men. At any rate Mr. Jessup used to suffer me to sit for hours on rainy days squatted in the corner of the big divan that must have been his bed by night, listening to their sage views on men and things, sometimes interpolating my woman's way of thought into their talk. It was camaraderie of a sort that does not often exist outside of books.
And sometimes young Aylesworth accom­panied me in my trips about the city. It wasa dream delight to go through a great gallery with a man who understood the very souls of pictures, who could explain to a country lass the half hidden stories that so many of them told. Time hung rather heavily on his fingers — for the publishers seemed to have untiring patience in returning his drawings — and he had plenty of it for companionship. After all this time I still remember his consideration and his kindness, the consideration with which he veiled both of these.
All this time I was living on my slender and diminishing capital and in a vague way I began to be alarmed. I knew my money could not last forever, but then I was no more of a financier than many other women and I simply tided over the day of reckoning by refusing to think of it. I brought my expenditures in a bit, although the shops of New York were a constant temptation to a girl who had come from an obscure country town, hungry for the beautiful things that a city must hold for her.
And then came the day when I called on my uncle, Aneas Strong.
My aunt was quite right in telling me thatUncle Aneas had done well in the city. I might say that if Uncle Aneas had done as well as he really wanted, there would be little city left. I found him through the kindly help of the telephone directory, and bearded him in his house, a great and fussy habitation set in one of the brownstone side-clefts of New York. I threaded the servants, and sat awaiting the coming of my uncle in the huge entry-hall.
I kept picturing him all the while I waited. He would be fat and comfy looking, with nice benevolent-looking white whiskers and a kindly eye and, my, oh, my, how glad he would be to see me! He would fairly rush at me open armed and say something of this sort:
" Well, well, I am astonished. Kitty Sen-ton's girl and another Kitty, too. YouVe your mother's black eyes and your mother's pretty mouth and your mother's hair and bless my weak old eyes if it isn't Kitty Senton right over again!"
After that a pause to catch breath and swal­low that inevitable lump in the throat and per­haps a stray vagabond tear or two. It was a pretty picture and so affected me that I nearly dropped a vagrant tear myself and began pic-turing Uncle Aneas insisting that I move from the Stripes right up to his own home, sweet home.
I had a long time to make mental pictures, for Uncle Aneas prinked as slowly as a woman. I hoped that he would be as glad to see me as I gaily fancied. Somehow New York was less of a novelty, and I needed help.
I had begun to look actually for work. There is a great range between the simple pro­cess of looking for work and the complex pro­cess of getting it. It is strange what preju­dices employers seem to hold against hiring a woman who is physically handicapped in slight degree. You know that I had not thought it would be thus when I left Honeytown. But then Honeytown knew me and knew my crutches well, and so I was quite unprepared when I came to the city for the starings and still less for the rebuffs.
I might easily have forgiven the starers. After all, a woman walking on a pair of crutches — particularly a young woman of good looks — and with a brand new pair of rosewood crutches is not a usual sight, even in the city, and the New Yorkers were perhapsnot to be blamed for their enthusiastic interest. Then, I suppose, a girl has no business to be sensitive. But how can I forgive the em-ployers who shook their heads slowly at the first sight of my crutches, who would not give me the benefit of a little trial? For no matter how favorably my written applications might have appealed, my sticks brought the quick negatives. The penny papers had pages that blossomed richly each morning of places for unemployed women, and yet when I went out into these fields all the blossoms closed their petals before my coming.
When Uncle Aneas finally came, he kept his long arms close beside his slim body. He was an elongated specimen, just if the fat and comfy Uncle Aneas that I had so fondly pic­tured had been put through some sort of roll-press and had come out slimmer amidships and longer above decks. He had no whiskers, a long close-shaved chin instead, and the good­nature I had so confidently fancied must have at my card as if my very name were unfamil-oozed out in that roll-press. He kept looking iar and then he looked at me, head to foot,sharp scrutiny each moment of it. Finally, when I thought I could stand it no longer, he burst out into speech.
" So you're a cripple ? " said he.
How was that for a greeting to a heart­sick girl? I felt the blood rush to my face and I weakly slipped back into a chair — I had risen to greet him. It always grills me to be called " a cripple." The very word grates on me. You already know I am rather proud nowadays of my lameness, assuredly proud of the facility with which I bend my crutches to the task of making me equally able with other women, but there is something in " cripple " that brands me as inferior and that always stings me through and through.
" So you're a cripple 1"
After that Uncle Aneas and I could never be friends, no, not if we each lived a million years and he showered me with the wealth of Croesus. So why give the details of that un­fortunate meeting. I stayed a very little while, and he, in his stiff polite way, offered vaguely to be of such assistance as he could to me. I thanked him. I wanted none of his assistance. I wanted to get out I wantednever to see him again. As I made my way to the door two women came in, his wife and daughter. He presented me to them as a Honeytown girl. They were not Honeytown folk and could have no more than a passing interest in me. They were about as cheery as Uncle Aneas. They looked me over, face, hands, clothes, hat, crutches — all. Then they said:
" So you're a cripple."
Oh, no, they did not say that in words; they said it in thought and I reeled again, but did not catch the meaningless politeness that they were firing at me. Then there was another thing, a far, far bigger thing.
I do not forget faces. The girFs face was not new. It was very familiar to me. It was the girl that my Mr. Somebody had helped into the carriage the night I caught a passing glimpse of him after the opera. If things had been different. If these folk had been my friends, not only my relatives — then I might have known of him. As it was I began to wonder more and more—wonder and hope for better luck next time.



User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

Re: The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 15350Unread post Didier
09 Nov 2017, 17:57

CHAPTER VII

I came to the day when I discontinued eating my meals in the stuffy basement dining-room of Mrs. Stripe's house. At least that was what I told Mr. Jessup and Ayles-worth and Sadie - the three among her family whom I could call my friends. I told them that the room was stuffy and that I was going to try eating in restaurants. It gave so much variety.
I kept a stiff upper lip and they believed me - or pretended to. I began to think that Aylesworth suspected. He had quit Mrs. Stripe's table a little time before and his excuse was much the same as mine. But he said nothing. He was too much of a gentleman, and then, too, the rejected drawings were still clogging the mail table in our front hall. For you must have guessed the truth. A room at Mrs. Stripe's cost something less than half the price of a room with board, and my worldly wealth had descended until there was less thantwo hundred miserable dollars left in my own wallet. . . . So I lunched on crackers and cheese in my room - Mrs. Stripe was ugly with those boarders who had the hardihood to try cookery in their own apartments - and ate sparingly in the cheap restaurants with which downtown Brooklyn abounded - and began to wonder what would be the outcome of it all. . . . I was disqpuraged with answering advertisements for positions, with the unfailing answers that came to my appeals for work.
One night - it was hardly a week after I had ceased the board of Mrs. Stripe, which in all of its greasy poor-cooked misery began to seem to my hungry memory like a veritable horn of plenty - Sadie met me in the hall of our house. It was still early in the evening and the boarders were filing up the narrow en-closed stair from the basement. Fascinating odors from the kitchen were wafted up to tor-ture my very nostrils.
"Would you go to our ball - to-night?" she said, hesitantly, and in a low voice, so that none of the others should know. " You know - the Tigers."For an instant I hesitated, then I saw the doubting look in her eyes - I was beginning to think that she was growing distrustful of the smart new clothes that I was buying for myself
- and I accepted with alacrity.
" Didn't know as you'd care to go," she stammered, " we'd - that's Jim an' me ?- we'd like to have you."
I laughed gaily back ahher.
" Dear child," I told her, " I would love to
go-So it came to pass that at the ninth hour I
went to the Tigers' Ball. I had an escort, too
- Jim's brother. Whether Jim had to horse-whip him into the ordeal, I never knew. Still, he was a man, and as such he filled all the con-ventionalities of a Tigers' Ball. In the nature of things he was not a gifted conversationalist, but gabbers sometimes tire, and, Heaven knows, Teddy was not a gabber.
Mindful was I of each of Sadie's instructions as to dress. I followed each of them care-fully, wore a dark skirt and a " tasty " waist. She loaned me a " goldlike " brooch to wear at my throat. One of Jim's predecessors had given it to her, and I afterwards discoveredthat Jim did not like to have her wear it at any time. . . . The Tigers met in the ward po-litical club to which Jim and Teddy had sworn an undying allegiance. They gathered at about the same hour, and they were dressed nearly to the same limit. There was a band, display-ing a framed union card at the end of the room, and when I asked what that was, Jim explained.
" We couldn't afford to have scab tooters," he told me. "If we was to begin by makin' that sort of a break, ourselves, the big boss would never stand for it. He makes no breaks. He doesn't want to stand queered along about election day."
Later that evening I saw the big boss. He came late enough to be the last guest and to make the most impressive entry to the ball. He was a tall, spare man, inclining toward in-creasing baldness, but never for a moment did he forget the part he played. Around him hovered a score of lesser satellites, each seek-ing the pleasure of the Great Person. I re-marked upon that to Jim - Teddy seemed quite hopeless by that time.
" Oh, P. G. can give them the smooth talk,all right," he explained, " and he can do better by them than that when the time comes. I've seen him sit all day in the parlor of the Andrew Jackson Club downtown and shell out two dol-lars apiece to the boys that come along. No questions, mind you, miss, but just if he was sure you was always with him, two dollars. He knew well enough you'd take care of the double bone. . . . To-night's different. To-night they're gettin' the smooth talk, all right. There isn't one o' them dead ones after he gets talkin' with th' old man who ain't sure that he's goin' to run for alderman from this time-honored and battle-scarred old ward."
He laughed, was silent for a moment, and then he resumed:
" He made me think so, myself, in me kid days."
Sadie had seen the big boss before, and he was not a novelty to her. Besides, she con-fided to me that she was anxious about the souvenirs. At last year's annual ball they gave away canaries as souvenirs - a truly live canary to every lady - and Sadie's could sing and did sing, but then it caught the pneumoniaor the peritonitis - she never could remember which - and died a rather lingering death. It was all quite sad to the big and simple minded girl and she sobered a bit as she thought of it. Jim brought her out of the brown-study.
" Cheer up, kid," said he. " The worst is yet to come. They're getting the line for the grand march. P. G. an* his mother are a goin' to lead the shin-dig."
The mother game was not yet dead in South Brooklyn and " P. G." got every mother's love and good wishes and vote-pulling powers.
Jim and Sadie were up in a moment and link-ing arms, and Teddy was growing wonderfully ruddy-faced. He was looking helplessly at my trim, brown crutches and wondering just how . he might meet the situation.
I saved it for him.
Now to chat with Teddy was like trying to hold conversation with the wall-paper, but I did not purpose to be left alone on the side of the ballroom while every marcher's eyes were turned upon me. As we slipped out of the place, unobserved in the confusion of forming the march, we passed by the Hon. P. G. himself.He gave me a very gracious nod. After that immense event was again history, we came back into the room, as mute as we had left it, and I sank down into a seat in a secluded corner. I was by myself for a moment. But only for a moment - Sadie had quite appointed herself my guardian and she came hurrying over to me.
"What's the matter; aren't you well?" she asked.
" A little tired," I smiled in return. I dared not tell her the truth, tell her that I had not eaten since early morning and that I was far more faint than tired, but somehow she wormed it out of me.
" You look faint," she said. " Did you have a good, hearty supper? "
I could not face her kind eyes.
" I was a little late, to-night - I missed my supper," I stammered out, without looking up.
Then the truth came to the surface and Teddy was brought up with a sharp turn and sent downstairs to fill me up with oyster stew. I do not think that I have ever tasted anything as good before, that I will ever eat anything half as good again. It made me ashamed of all the fun that I had at first poked at Sadieabout oyster stews. When I came back we had a heart-to-heart talk, the most confidential talk that we have ever had, and the upshot of it was that I was going to work with Sadie on Monday. It was horrid work, running a sew-ing machine in some hat-factory that was just a grade better than a sweatshop - whatever that might mean. It was not the sort of work that I anticipated when I dreamed of coming to New York, but I could not go back to Honeytown - think of facing my aunt after failure!
Later that evening I had a chance to come nearer the boss. He moved over toward our side of the big room and stood there for a time receiving the obsequious attentions of those who served him. Jim and Teddy were hyp-notized into absolute silence and even noisy, big-hearted Sadie impressed to a degree by the close presence of Greatness. Thank Heaven, I was not. I sat back and slitted my eyes and stared at the big man to my heart's content.
And then - I had better opportunity, for he began moving toward us. It was not often that the big boss came to folks - most personswaited upon him. But straight to us he came - Jim and Teddy only recovering their pres-ence of mind just in time to make the introduc-tions - with all the formality of a Fifth avenue ballroom. I was new to the district and he knew, and so it was only natural that he should drop into a seat behind me - just as natural as that Sadie should pop out of it that he might talk to me.
. . . If there was anything that he could ever do - well, just command him. Just give him a try. There were lots of good jobs for girls in the Hall of Records - desk jobs, at that - and then I knew that, he, too, was star-ing at my crutches. Jim and Teddy and Sadie moved away - I wondered if he had given them a hint of eye and our talk became a bit confidential.
"... I would not .want you to think me a softy," he said, in a low tone, for he seemed to know that he was ever the cynosure of curi-ous eyes. "... I buried six of the nicest kids - and their mother. . . . Fever took the kids and the mother. . . ." He choked. I did not understand. Yet I did appreciate in a vague way that this man wastrying to take me straight into his inner life. He was a man of few confidences - Sadie and Jim had told me that long ago - and yet he was saying:
". . . 'Twas bad enough with {he kids
- but her. If she'd a lived - she'd have been
- crippled. But Fd a loved her twicet as much. But I couldn't have her anyhow and somehow - I can't forget - and you have made me remember again - that's all -"
" I'm sorry, Mr. McManigal," was all that I could muster to my lips. I saw one of his lieutenants move closer to us and I felt that we were more than observed. He also saw the man coming nearer, but before he rose he said:
" Don't be. Be glad you gave me a chance to remember again -and remember if ever I can do a turn for you - I'll turn the county government over to accomplish it. I'd -"
He hesitated. I felt intuitively that he was waiting for me to ask him to come and see me
- but I was afraid to take such a step. . . . He rose from the chair, and moved away from me. . . . Someone else was hailing him - hailing him in a cheery, boyish voice." Hello, Pat," laughed the newcomer, " doing the jolly act again to-night ? No babies to kiss? Well, there are some draw-backs even to a swell event like this, aren't there, old man."
This was no satellite. Satellites did not ad-dress the big boss familiarly or dare to slap Greatness upon the back. Yet here was the Hon. P. G. laughing and slapping back - as if he had not just remembered the happiness that had been stolen away from him.
I think that if the long-distance telephone ever becomes near enough universal so that our local central tells me that Constantinople is calling me at my little New England home, I would know one voice - a voice that comes winging half-way around the world through the genius of man and the very grace of God. It is the Boy's voice, my Mr. Somebody's voice - the voice I first heard at the end of a tire-some trip from Honeytown to the city.
It was the Boy's voice calling the Hon. P. G. familiarly, slapping Greatness upon the back, it was the Boy - whom I had once awkwardly called a Mr. Somebody - whomade that evening long to be remembered for me. I had liked the Boy from the beginning and indirectly I was pleased to see that Great-ness could not have disliked him, for he smiled his long mouth into as close a semblance of a real smile as he could readily give.
" He's one of them fresh reporters," prof-fered Jim. " P. G.'s got to keep in with that crowd."
I wondered if the Boy would see me - hoped against hope, alternated between a dis-like at being found at a jollification of the Tigers and a real desire to have him close be-side me again - as he had been for two long hours in the close intimacy of a seat in a rail-road coach. ... I lost. I was sure that I had lost when he moved away and I had not even had the comfort of a single glance of recognition. ... I was ready to leave, although the ball was hardly more than well begun.
We stayed late. It was considered insult-ing by the Tigers if one went away early. There were various refreshments served - mostly liquid. A very pretty and a very loud girl stood with a party of other girls and men.They were drinking whiskey - not a very pleasant sight.
One of the men was rather foppish.
" Don't we get any refreshments?" he asked, with the invariable masculine fore-thought for his stomach.
The loud girl turned on him with a rough laugh.
"Refreshments?" she repeated. "You don't want food when you can get whiskey, do you?"
Which was all very funny to her companions and they laughed long and loud at her sally. It was not funny to me. It was late and I wanted no more of that. So we stole away, just as the bar down under the ballroom was at the height of its trade and the liquor was beginning to get in its work.
I was glad, after all, that the Boy had not seen me at the Tigers' Ball.



User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

Re: The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 15854Unread post Didier
13 Nov 2017, 17:43

CHAPTER Vlll

"If I were you," he was saying, " I would not even think of attempting another Tigers' Ball."
I looked up at young Aylesworth. I was sitting back among the faded pillows on old Mr. Jessup's comfy divan, my head pillowed in my slender arms, my long slim body re­laxed, my foot in its neat and shining patent leather tie stretched out straight in front of me. I looked up at him quickly, slitted my eyes after the fashion of most short-sighted folk and demanded that he explain himself.
"Well, Mr. Aylesworth," said I, "perhaps I had better follow your English fashion and appoint you censor of my amusements."
" I think that you better had," he smiled, " rather than go to another thing of that sort. You are more of a stranger here than I and — well, I don't like to see you do it."
I looked around the room. I wanted sym­pathy and support that moment. My eyes fell upon old Mr. Jessup. But old Mr. Jessupsimply sat in his big chair by the sunshine in the window, smoked his pipe and said nothing.
My heart beat quickly. I was annoyed at Aylesworth's impudence and yet, womanlike, it really appealed to me. I came out of my indolence among the pillows and sat bolt up­right on the sofa, pulling my little foot in under me. He came close to me and my heart beat the more quickly.
" I don't see — how — why — you," I be­gan to stammer, enraged at myself that I could not frame my thoughts into speech more quickly.
" You're another sort," said he, without re­moving his pipe from between his teeth, " and our bonds of comradeship here permit me to speak frankly to you. Womanlike, you do not know the Hon. P. G. McManigal, as you call him. You do not know him in relation to other women."
I remembered how he had led the grand march at the ball with his mother and I began to tell of that.
" There is another phase of politics and women in a big city that I do not purpose to discuss with you this fine Sabbath morning.I'm in too gay a mood for that. But it's true, as you shall know, when you have been a New Yorker long enough. . . . And so I don't like your political friend or his balls — not for you. . . ."
He was close to me and I thought that I saw in his big gray eyes the same man-look that had once — and only once — come into the face of Mr. Drake. But he did not tell me that I was beautiful. And I know that I was beautiful that June morning with the pink of warm sunshine in my skin, with my white throat showing where my waist lay open at the collar, my black hair brought low over my dark eyes in the fashion of the moment. I was beauti­ful, even if my first black velvet suit, which I had worn with the pride of a princess, was growing a bit faded and not at all suited for a June Sabbath morn. Still if I was too poor to replace it, I was none the less beautiful and he might have told me that.
But he continued to pace the room for some time, smoking his pipe furiously and saying nothing — in his beastly English fashion. Mr. Jessup's pipe was not smoking. The old man had fallen into a doze in the warmth ofthe Sabbath sunshine. To him we were as two silly children, with our little quarrels.
Finally Aylesworth brought my crutches and stood them meaningly in front of me.
" Come," said he, " what so rare as a day in June! We'll go up into the Park and for­get all the troubles of old earth."
I was still angry at him, but I could not have resisted him. I took the sticks from his hands and stood erect upon them, without saying a word. I slipped out from that room and into my own. When I came back to him I still had my staunch black velvet suit, my one stout standby in job-getting; the little hat he liked so well. I was pulling my long sleek gloves up over my elbows. . . . And so we set forth into Paradise in Brooklyn that Sabbath morning. As we went down the street the sick-abed man waved to me and I blew him a kiss from off my finger-tips.
A man told me in Paris last season that he had traveled through many lands and tarried in many cities, but that he considered Prospect Park in Brooklyn the most beautiful pleasure-ground in the world, with the possible excep-tion of the Bois de Boulogne. As I remember Prospect Park on that June Sabbath morning, I think that it was a corner out of Paradise — a Paradise come down to a sunny corner of old earth. ... A trolley-car bore us out to the Park, and Aylesworth was alive with youth and spirit.
" We are going to breakfast — the loveliest meal of the life-long day," he told me. " We are going to breakfast — you and I— where the roses climb to the very table-edge."
I hesitated — my vanishing stock of pennies. Breakfast cost money and ... I think he must have divined my thoughts, for he said:
" This is my party this day."
" Oh, no," I protested, " remember the agreements of the bonds of comradeship."
" Contracts are void on the Sabbath. And then — look at this."
He thrust a square envelope into my fingers. I opened and read the letter that it held. It was a letter from Mr. Mitchell, the editor of Life. Aylesworth had sold a picture — and for every cent of one hundred dollars. And the editor, as if he had divined the real situa-tion, had sent the check on in advance of pub­lication.
" My party," said the artist, " my little Sun­day morning breakfast—with the birds and yourself."
I glanced sidewise at him. I was wearing the glasses which I had purchased to aid my near-sighted eyes when out upon the street, and I could catch his clean-cut profile in reflection upon one of the lenses. It was a clean-cut profile — the profile of a manly man. . . . I began dreaming. I wondered if it was to be Aylesworth, after all. . . . For the mo­ment I forgot the Boy and then when I remem­bered him I almost laughed aloud. For he was but a dream, himself, a fantasy, a hope. This man was flesh and blood — and he cared. He must have cared. After all these years I was to have the thing that I had craved as my woman's right — admiration and something more — a man'" devotion. . . . My crutches bore me beside him into the leafy fastnesses of the lovely park as if they had been real wings, and not the mere creations of human hands. We passed the boat-house, paused to see the many equipages crowding through the drive,finally halted beside a little restaurant that served meals in the open.
I have eaten far better breakfasts in my life than that which was placed before me that morning in Prospect Park, but none that ever tasted half so sweet. Eat 1 How could a girl eat at such a time. I toyed with the food upon the plate before me and looked from it straight into his eyes. He told me more of himself, of his hopes and his ambitions in his profession. He was in the seventh heaven of happiness. The ice had been broken. An important pub­lication had not only accepted one of his draw­ings but had asked him for more. I caught the very contagion of his enthusiasm. . . .
We finished our breakfast, and then we went to a corner of the big park where we were quite alone. We passed through a lovely place that they called the Vale Cashmere and he told me of the real Vale of Cashmere from which it took its name. Then others came into our garden and we moved on. We went through other gardens and then we sat in an arbor. We must have sat there for long hours, neither of us ever knowing of the passing of time.
He drew out a sketch block and began makinga little picture of me. Now he was going to tell me that I was beautiful and my heart was leaping at the same old swift pace. I picked up my crutches from beside me, thinking to hide them behind the bench, but he lifted his finger in protest.
" They are part of you, part of your per­sonality," he said to me, gently, " and that is why I want to sketch them there beside you.'*
I could have loved Aylesworth that moment, for he was one of the few who really under­stood.
When he was done he showed me the sketch. It was a darling thing, for it showed me as any woman wants to be shown — beautiful. It still hangs above my desk and upon the yel­lowed margin the words he wrote there:
" The Girl With the Rosewood Crutches."
" You are not angry? " he said that day as he wrote those words across his little sketch.
Angry? Angry at Aylesworth. Aylesworth was telling me in his own best way that he ad­mired my beauty. ... I smiled upon him, radiant, and he, in turn, caught the con­tagion of my own enthusiasm.
Angry? And Aylesworth telling me againof his hopes and his ambitions, of the English cottage that he had left, his village, so differ­ent from mine in every phase of its life. He had crossed the threshold, everything was ahead for him. He could plan squarely for the future, establish his work, launch a real career, marry, for marrying was a part of man's true career if the right girl blessed his life. . . .
Marrying? What was Aylesworth saying
»
about marriage and about girls? Who was this girl of whom he spoke?
I knew then. The scales fell from my eyes. She was a girl, whose hair caught and held the sunshine captive and who dwelt among the primroses of old England. She was Ayles-worth's one romance and he was telling that romance into my ears. She was his hope, his romance, his ambition, his very life and he was still telling me of her. I sat — transfixed — my eyes upon the pattern of the pavement. There was a queer little break in the asphalt that seemed to be the crude outline of a broken jug — of a broken heart, perhaps — and I can still remember that pattern in its every de­tail. . . . He was telling me of thegirl whom he was going to bring back from England. . . .
" I knew, comrade, that you would care," he said, after a little time. There was a softness in his voice. " And you did care, didn't you? "
I reached for one of his hands with mine.
" Of course I cared, Aylesworth," I said, truthfully. But I did not dare raise my eyes from the pavement to look into his.
Paradise had vanished. The sun still sprinkled down upon the arbor floor through the infinite traceries of the leaves, the blossoms of the flowers were red and rich. God seemed to kiss the world upon His day — but Paradise — for me — was gone.
The next day I went to work with Sadie in the hat-factory. She had kept her promise and I had a real job. . . . We went out in the early dawn of a summer's day, took our place in the long shuffling army of those of the great city who must toil to earn their bread.



User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

Re: The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 16373Unread post Didier
16 Nov 2017, 16:08

CHAPTER IX

I had to give up my work at the sewing-machine in the hat-factory. It was all quite impossible, because of my eyes. Never overstrong, under the constant strain that I gave them at the factory, they gave way most miserably within a month. . *. . I tried my best to combat them, but, of course, it was little use. I have memories of my work blur­ring before me, of my making horrible mis­takes— I was fighting against a fresh handi­cap.
So came the morning in midsummer that I could not go to work with Sadie. Instead the doctor came to my room and shook his head gravely. He was a big, black-bearded man, and I hated him, because I was afraid of him. He gave me no encouragement, and I hated him all the more for that. He ordered me to solitude in a darkened room and I compounded the hatred once again.
Did you ever have to lie long hours in adarkened room in midsummer with a bandage pressing tightly down over your closed eyes? If you have not, you cannot begin to realize what those seven days of confinement meant to me. I dwelt alone there with my thoughts and my fears. My fears — what of them?
Suppose I should cease to know the world of light and color and brilliancy and be forced to know only the world of sound and shape in its place? I thought of Tessie Hessler and her wandering through an endless night and I was very much afraid again. Suppose God should take me by the hand and lead me through the last twilight out into the Eternal Night — was that to be my portion, now ?
Those were the thoughts that were my com­panions for the fortnight that I was alone — and afraid. The Stripes were kind to me, and I was ashamed of myself for the many hard things that I had thought of them. Ayles-worth was selling more pictures, and one day I thrust my nose into a great bunch of roses that he had sent me. But I ordered the flow­ers from my room. J lied to Clarice Stripe and told her that the odor of flowers made me faint and ill. And once he asked if he mightcome and talk or read to me, and I can still re­member how the very minutes dragged and how my fears were with me night and day, and still I would not let him enter.
But after a week abed the big black-bearded doctor ordered me up and about, and it was Aylesworth who led me into Mr. Jessup's big parlor, to my old accustomed throne-seat in the big divan. He fixed me there as neatly as any woman nurse might have done. I forgave him '— forgave him when there was nothing to be forgiven. But my heart forgave him and my heart could not forget that few of woman's rightful opportunities came to it. My heart could tell me that I was of the sort who most needs a man's companionship — and the doors of Paradise had been slammed in my face one day in Paradise.
Each day Aylesworth led me into the big par­lor, and there the two good fellows took care of me. Mr. Jessup told me the Governor story over and over again with interesting and unique variations and Aylesworth read to me, as once I had read to another who walked in darkness. . . . But the fears were gone. The big, cross black-bearded doctor had saidnot this time, and I knew that God could be very good to his children—when least they appreciated it.
After that fortnight, the longest two weeks of my entire life, they lifted my bandages and let me gaze out upon my world once again, dimly through the protection of heavy-lensed black spectacles that fitted tightly to the con­tour of my face. ... I gave up my work at the factory after two days of weak attempt and again I faced the problem of existence in a big city.
They were very kind to me at the factory, and they were folk from whom at first thought one might not expect exceeding kindness, for little kindness comes into their pale lives. They were awake very early in the morning, when the salt gray ocean fogs were still en­veloping great, straggling Brooklyn, and the very street lamps twinkled but faindy in the mists. They were struggling toward the over­crowded trains and cars, and at their places in the dull dreary factory beginning the daily monotony, before a good part of the rest of the idle, selfish city was even astir.
It was a long day — that day in the factory.There was a brief respite at noon for a bite of badly prepared lunch, and at night there were more overcrowded cars to be taken for longer miles than the miles of morning because one had not a body fortified by rest and food to withstand them.
Yet they were very kind to me. I suppose my crutches made the first appeal to them and after that those last two days in black specta­cles must have touched them only the more deeply. For when I came to leave them they gathered around me in kind farewells and they would have raised a little purse for me out of their meager salaries if I had permitted it. Even the factory owners, two Jews, were very kind. It seems to be the rule in this jostling New York that kindness invariably comes from the unexpected sources. For Steinmeier and Spero, who had not dropped me from their payroll, gave me two weeks' salary in advance, said that they were sorry I had to go and when I was quite myself to come back to them. There would always be a machine waiting for me in the factory. But I never went back. My eyes were too precious. I decided vaguely to turn my paths toward something else.After a time — and a short time, too, for my funds were getting woefully low — I started out for work of another sort. I could not well begin my search until I was rid of my black spectacles, for a combination of black (goggles and crutches was almost too much for me to expect any finicky man to swallow. And I can see them now looking at me, wondering if some sort of traveling hospital had burst in upon them.
So I loafed another enforced vacation in this entrancing — if frightfully cruel — city. I found the way to the ocean and spent long August hours beside the beach. It was all so different to a country girl, the almost infinite ocean stretching all the way around the world and I could just picture my miserable eyes see­ing untold miles and the fascinating cities of Europe rising on the opposite shore. For Aylesworth had stimulated my imagination and I was dreaming of Europe. I must have wanderlust in my veins, perhaps some unknown strain of ancestral gypsy blood is pulsing in me this very minute. It is just as you view the thing. When I was still but a young girl I thought that it would be the sum of my ambi-tion to go to the county-seat It seemed like a great city — compared with Honeytown. The first time I went to the county-seat it was a great city. There was a big open square en­tirely surrounded by stores — instead of only two or three, as in Honeytown — street-cars, too, and my cousins took me to dinner in a real hotel. But after that the county-seat began to seem small and I dreamed of going to Balti­more city, as the folk around Honeytown have called it for years. Baltimore city made a big impression upon me. I found that I could ride and ride and ride on the trolley-cars and never catch a single glimpse of green fields. After that —- New York. I began dreaming of New York and when I came to New York you know my heart was afire with the enthusiasm of gaz­ing upon its high-toothed skyline. I have always loved New York, even those long monotonous streets of Harlem, where there are nothing but apartments, and they remind me of the shoe-boxes packed in the high shelves of a store — and still each box a separate human habitation — a home, with all the tragedies and all the comedies of a home, all that goes to make a little ganglia of life within a great city.Now that I knew my New York and oft-times came close to the sea, I began longing for the farther things. I had heard Aylesworth tell of Paris, and the joyous way the chestnut trees along the boulevards leaf out in the spring, and I was wild to see it all with my own eyes. It seemed so fascinating and the world of to-day so much smaller than the world of my mother's day. She went to Baltimore twice in her secluded life after she came home from college, and there was I, a step beyond Baltimore.
The world is small — to one with means. To one with means I That was the question that August day with me. For although I might blink out at the sea, it was not going to carry me across its bosom without its price. Every turn reminded me now of my approaching poverty. I had to rid myself of these awful spectacles and then start for work anew.
My eyes grew better slowly, the rest was the best tonic that I could have offered them. Finally there came a gray and shady day in September, and I ventured out without my smoked spectacles for the first time — once more in search of work. As I sat in the verytrolley-car that carried me to Manhattan town, I could not help looking sharply at all the others there and wondering which of them were in such desperate straits, too. They all looked a monotonously even average. None looked poor, none prosperous. They were the vein and fiber of a great city, the folk who, in an infinite multiplication, go to make the popu­lation of a really metropolitan city.
But the doors still closed to me. I could rid myself of the goggles, but never of my crutches, and they still seemed to bar the way to me. I tried to bring my talents to the res­cue, but what are talents when they are crude and undeveloped and then are forced into com­petition with all the talents of high cultivation?
You will laugh now when I tell you that I even dreamed of newspaper work. You see that Mr. Somebody, my acquaintance of the train, whom I found again as a reporter at the Tigers* Ball, had his impression upon «me — he was such a nice looking chap and so different from those with whom I had been thrown of late.
So I went to a newspaper office and after a tremendous amount of red-tape, I saw the chiefjournalist — they called him the city editor, I think. He was a rough looking man who worked in his shirt-sleeves, but he was kind to me. Still, he was quite like the others and shook his head rather slowly at my crutches. I was nearly on the point of tears and for the first time, I expostulated.
" I have used them for fifteen years," I told him, letting him know how clearly I read his prejudices. " They are no handicap to me. For the life of me I cannot see how they would affect my ability to work upon a newspaper.'*
" If we only had a desk job," he began.
111 do not want a desk job," was my reply. " I am willing to come and go with the others, to fight it out upon the same lines as they."
But the newspaper man was a resolute man and I read in his eyes that there was no chance for me.
" I think that you would be handicapped by your lameness in more ways than that," he said, coldly.
Bitterly unfair, this New York. My fidelity was not crippled nor my ability lamed. My powers of delivering service for wages were not upon crutches — and yet I was barred.I must take the judgment of " no work " from their angle and not have even the smallest crumb of opportunity passed my way. For the first time my slim rosewood crutches seemed to be real barriers in my path — and unjustly so. The injustice of New York began to fester un­derneath my skin. I wished that I had dared to tell the newspaper man what I really thought of him.
It was now a question of resources and I went to the last of these. I swallowed whole quarts of humble pie and called upon the Hon. P. G. McManigal — at his offices in the An­drew Jackson Club. Finally I would let him bring to bear all those mighty influences of which he had boasted to find me a " job."
Pride was a fine thing, but food and cloth­ing and shelter were finer, and life was guiding me close towards its essentials.
For McManigal was not in town. A snip of a boy told me that the boss had gone to Texas for six weeks and that night Sadie tele­phoned Jim, and with all the roundabout diplomacy that she could muster found that the snip of a boy had told the truth.The night that I called at the Andrew Jack­son Club I was alone — yes, alone and discour­aged. New York had begun to lose the wild charm it first threw out to me. I found my way into Mr. Jessup's room, for I wanted some advice from Aylesworth. But the old man sat alone by the window, smoking his eternal pipe. I asked after the other corner of our little triangle. Mr. Jessup answered me slowly, as an old man ever does.
" The boy — he's got a big new contract —
drawings for H---------'s Weekly. They are
wanting English pictures and he's gone home to fetch them." The old man was fond of the sound of his own voice.
" He's gone home," he repeated, " to get — his English pictures. Do ye understand,
girl?"
I understood.



User avatar

Topic Author
Didier
Автор
Posts: 2152
Joined: 11 Jun 2017, 20:06
Reputation: 2493
Sex: -
Has thanked: 151 times
Been thanked: 4367 times
Gender:
Burundi

Re: The Girl with the Rosewood Crutches

Post: # 17069Unread post Didier
21 Nov 2017, 16:37

CHAPTER X

After New York - Honeytown ! A nice prospect, that was for me. Still what prospect did New York hold out to me? What would become of me at that rate, with-out work and without any money coming in? I counted the money in my thin little wallet the first morning of October. There were two ten dollar bills tucked away in there and a miserable group of greasy coins. It would take half of that sum to repay some outstand-ing indebtedness to the Stripes and the railroad fare to Honeytown was just a little less than ten dollars. I had no further chance to delay decision. If I should stay another day I would start into another of Mrs. Stripe's weeks, and returning home would be out of the question. That was a question of that minute.
I turned it over and over and over again, and finally I decided. New York had never seemed so fascinating until I was about to re-treat from it; even the squalid areas betweenthe backs of these old houses had a beauty of their own to a girl who was to turn her back upon them forever. But there was no beauty in poverty, neither necessarily disgrace in re-treat. It was hard for me to even think of going back to Honeytown, to start in finally at the town millinery shop. But I felt that I could live it down. I have had to live down some mighty hard things in my life and have succeeded. Then Honeytown did not seem so very bad at that moment. I could remember its big houses and its grassy lawns, its great shady trees and, I could not forget that would have enough to eat once more! There were some things in New York that were hard.
There was still another phase to the situa-tion. When I got back to Honeytown I must put behind me all hope of seeing my Mr. Somebody, or Mr. Reporter, if you will, come down its desolate street, and hope was for years my great fortification. There would be none coming down the main street of Honeytown for me and yet Honeytown was my only possible decision. No doubt I should be a competent milliner. I had not forgotten then how AlicePerkins had copied my hats. After a time my aunt would die and I would be the village milliner as well as the village cripple and the village old maid.
After New York - Honeytown!
All my wretched little effects were packed and my old valise ready for the expressman to take it back from whence it came. I bade them all farewell, took the final look at the long area between the houses of our street and the houses of the next, finally a last look at the rusty old house that I had fondly fancied was to be my home for years and years and years. As I slipped down our street for the last time I slowed and turned my head long enough to see the sick-abed man. He smiled at me that morning as I flew past down the walk. I sup-pose he sympathized, for God had given him the way of understanding.
I knew the railroad office where nine dollars and sixty cents would be the instant passport to take me back to Honeytown. I had not dreamed that I would be going into it on this errand - so soon. But I stuck my lips tightly together and swung into the place. I wasarmed for every preparation that made for the end of my great dream of happiness.
There was a woman talking to the agent who was on duty in the railroad office. I wondered if she, too, were discouraged and going home again. But then a second look showed me that she was of a different sort. Her face was hard - it had been painted. Her hair was of a false color and fancifully arranged about her head in imitation of the popular style. Her clothes were showy, after the fashion of a cheap actress, her shoes had spool-like steeple heels, her gloves were dirty, her hat was big and loaded down with cheap feathers. But she was a woman - a woman in trouble - and I could scarce help overhearing what she said to the snip of a ticket clerk.
" Couldn't you cut a couple of dollars off," she pleaded. " I'd be willin' to go to Kansas City in the caboose if you'd make the cut for me.
The young agent was very much embar-rassed and said that he did not see how he could do anything to help her.
" It'll make a hull lot o' difference to her an' to me," the woman pleaded. "You see youcan't understand an* I ain't likely to tell you the hull story. But it's enuff for you to know that I can't see the ole lady die an' me goin' off in a huff that time. If you was to trust me for them two dollars I'd cum back an' pay if I had to walk here all the way from Missouri." She hung expectant over the counter for a moment, but the young man only grew more embarrassed and again shook his head.
Did you ever do a fool thing and then won-der the next moment why you did it ? I always was impulsive as a girl, and that time before I knew it I had swung myself up to that ticket-counter and given the stranger the two dollars that she needed to take her to Kansas City. Two dollars; what was that? You will spend ten times two dollars at a bargain-counter sale on a Saturday afternoon and not buy one one-thousandth of the happiness that two dollars brought me. I have spent two dollars at a matinee - at a play that folk said would fill you with cheer and happiness - and yet there came to me no such cheer as the look in that tired woman's eyes gave me. No matter what the woman said. I do not remember and thatdoesn't count here, anyway. It was enough for me that she thanked me before she picked up her skirts and went clicking off over the marble floor towards the door. I took her place at the ticket counter.
" Where to? " asked the agent.
" Honeytown -" I started to say and began opening my pocketbook again.
" Nine-sixty," he replied, in what must have been a mechanical fashion with him.
Nine-sixty!
I had just eight dollars in my purse 1
I had forgotten! It was quite evident that I had burned my bridges behind me. New York having once received me was not going to let go of me so easily. I was not going back to learn the millinery trade with my aunt.
I can never recall just what I said to that young ticket-agent, but I must have fled from the place in consternation, little choosing my path or noticing where I was headed. I was broke, broke in New York. A girl broke in New York and a girl, crippled and handicapped at that! It began to scare me at first, but I tried hard to keep cool. There was going to be big music to be faced and I needed everyreserve talent and ability to dance before that music.
When I cooled my thoughts and took notice of my surroundings once again I found that I was hurrying through one of the busy side-streets of downtown New York, a wilderness of whole-sale warehouses, the narrow roadway blocked with trucks and horses, the narrow sidewalks all but blocked with packing-boxes. I had but roughly planned to retrace my steps to South Brooklyn when a voice behind me called and a hand touched my shoulder:
" Say, you! "
My heart began beating quickstep again. I stopped short and faced about. The person who had halted me was none other than the woman whom I had befriended such a short time before.
" 'Scuse me for buttin' in," she said. " I seed you up at the corner of Broadway an' I wanted to stop you. I didn't 'spose you cud get about so fas'." She was panting in com-pliment to my handiness upon my crutches. " I wa'n't really awake jus' now to what you done for me. Won't you come an' have a drink with me?"I nearly yielded. Surely I was nearly at the low water mark of my life and I had always heard that liquor stimulated one. If ever I needed a stimulant it was at that very minute.
But you cannot overcome years of training and environment in an instant. I was touched by the friendliness of this stranger and I turned and compromised the matter with her.
" I'm tired - and faint," I confessed although my exhaustion came upon me in a moment. " And I'd rather have coffee and a bite to eat."
She smiled.
" I know a place that's right handy that'll do. It ain't anything fancy, but the grub is fillin'."
How good it was to hear a friendly voice in the wilderness of strangers! She steered me toward a cheap little eating-house. It was a cheap little eating-house. Messenger boys, unshaven clerks, noisy truck drivers were its chief source of patronage and it was not over clean. Still it was of a sort that had not been unfamiliar to me and I was glad of a place where I might rest and collect my thoughts. As we sipped our muddy coffee and eachmunched a thick sandwich, the woman who had come into companionship with me asked:
"Got a job?"
" No - but I'm on the lookout for one," I answered.
" Don't you find it hard with them things? " She nodded toward my crutches, which I had rested upon a chair hard by.
I told how nearly impossible I had found it among a great city full of strangers.
She began fumbling for her purse.
" Say, I can't take your money," she said. " I guess I can give up my trip to Kansas City to-night. Come on up there again and I'll make that young ticket-fellow give me the money back."
I would not hear of that and she was silent for some time, pursing her brow and thinking intently.
" I ain't got so many fren's in this neck-o'-woods, meself," she began. " But I guess I can put my fingers on one that's uptown ? If it weren't for them sticks o' yourn. Say, have you any musical talent? "
You will remember that a faded piano had been one solace of a half-lived childhood. Ihad sat for hours at my mother's square old box drumming on the keys and wishing for some of the talent, the real ability, that God had given her without ever giving her the oppor-tunity of making use of it.
I confessed to my companion that I could play the piano.
" Good," she said, decisively. " Harry Clinch's the man for you, then. I dunno what he'll do for you, but if any one can do any-thing, he'll do it. It's jest surprisin' what he can do when he gets the chance."
She fumbled about in her worn wallet for a scrap of paper on which to write a note - per-haps for a card, although I am sure that cards of another sort must have been more familiar to her.
" I don't seem to have nuthin' 'round me," she muttered.
I handed her one of my own. She took it and after a somewhat laborious time scribbled upon it the magic - if misspelled - words that should bring me to the favorable attention of Mr. Harry Clinch.
After that we had more coffee and sand-wiches and she told me a little of her sad,rough life. When we came to go I felt that I was saying good-by to a friend - and I forgot her appearance in that feeling. After we were apart, I turned once or twice and each time I caught her looking back at me.
How wretched it would have been if she had been denied the sight of her mother, all for want of a miserable two dollars!



Post Reply
  • Similar Topics
    Replies
    Views
    Last post

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests