CREEPING JENNY
Jenny Lane lived in a shabby little farmhouse on the Back Nippin' Road that led from Riverboro to Moderation Village. The house was small and compact and as neat as wax inside, for there Jenny was Master of her fate and Captain of her soul.
Outside, alas, things were different. There was only the shell of a former stable; the shed was tumbling down, and, when rain descended in anything worse than gentle showers, Jenny's "indoors" looked like a syndicate of milk pans, the leaks were so many and the dripping of water so continuous.
It had been that way for three years, ever since the autumn that her mother had died; and her father, who had followed his wife in everything, followed her to the grave a month later.
His last words to his daughter had been: "I'm sorry to leave you alone, Jenny, but I'd feel better if only I'd left you shingled. Your mother and me was laying up and laying up ever since we got married. We bought the house and field, paid off the mortgage and gave you good schooling. We are furnished up as well as most o' the neighbors, but when your mother's health got slim and my strength begun to fail, we couldn't seem to get any farther than meat, drink, and clothes for the three of us. The buildings couldn't be kept up, that was the long and short of it."
"I know, I know, Father. Haven't I seen how hard you tried?"
"Now I'm on my death-bed," said the old man. "There's money enough in the bank to buy the shingles, but God knows whether you can afford to hire a man to put 'em on, labor's so scarce and so high."
"Don't worry, Father! I don't want your last days troubled with fears about me and the roof. I'm twenty-two and I can earn my living somehow, somewhere!"
"'Tisn't so easy to earn your living and keep your buildings shingled too!" sighed her father.
"Maybe not, but I'll do it, in course of time!" said Jenny stoutly. "I've heard enough, all my life, about shingles; also about clapboards and paint. There isn't a young man in the neighborhood that I'd want to go to church with, but if one of them should ever chance to ask me to have him, I'd say: 'Shingle the house and I'll say yes!'"
The girl's father smiled in spite of his pain as he whispered: "Don't be too easy when it comes to bargaining, Jenny! Stiperlate first quality cedar shingles, him to buy 'em as well as put 'em on! You're worth it!"
"I shall never have a chance to 'stiperlate,'" thought Jenny, as she went to the kitchen to make gruel; and, as a matter of fact, although Jenny was good to look upon, and had an acre of timber land that would bring in something, fifteen years later, no lovelorn swain had offered to take her and her leaky house for better, for worse.
Later on there were other reasons why Jenny had no opportunity to "stiperlate." The anxious and dreary months went on relentlessly after her father's death, when new misfortunes descended upon her—an accident—unskillful treatment, too long delayed—finally, the loss of a foot—a crutch—eternal lameness. No wonder, as she dragged herself about the house and little garden before she had had time to accustom herself to her infirmity, that Riverboro sympathetically called her "Creeping Jenny." Her nearest neighbor, Mrs. Day, a widow, lived within easy walking distance (it seemed longer when you limped!), and the village itself was only a quarter of a mile away, so she did not lack an occasional call, the offer of an errand or message, and often a drive to church, made wretched by the difficulty of mounting and descending the wagon, with the added mortification of limping into a rear pew.
Still she kept things together, sewing, crocheting, knitting, sending braided and drawn-in rugs to Boston, selling the butter from the one cow's milk and the hay from her eight-acre field.
She got "Pollyanna" from the village library and read it faithfully, but she was rebellious and it did her no good. She allowed to herself grudgingly that if she had lost a hand instead of a foot she couldn't have earned her living; but she never got to the point of being grateful that it was a foot, not a hand; she was unregenerate and wanted both.
It was late November now, and even at the end of the month there was a hint of Indian summer in the air, though a soft rain had been falling for many hours. Jenny's side-door stood open; there was a pale flicker of sun now and then and she was in the pantry wondering if she could venture to take away some of the milk pans that dotted the kitchen floor, all of them a third full of drippings from the ceiling.
She heard the swinging of the garden gate and a knock made her take her crutch and limp to the kitchen door.
A good-looking young man, fairly well clad, with his left sleeve hanging in a strange sort of stiffness, raised a shabby felt hat with his right hand and asked:
"Is this Miss Jenny Lane?"
"Yes, sir."
"They told me at the station you were minus a man and might have a few days' work for me."
"Everybody in Riverboro is minus a man, and everybody needs a little help. There's plenty to do here, for I live alone, but I have little money to spend on keeping up the place."
The young man glanced in at the door with a boyish sort of informality and asked: "Do you keep a dairy farm?"
Jenny laughed outright, and kept on laughing as she answered: "No wonder you asked, but I shouldn't set milk on the floor and it's water in the pans. It's a water farm!"
The laughter was mutual now, and the audacious youth, moving to the lower step and glancing upward, said: "I see you're a little shy on shingles?"
"Just a trifle, but I'm long on milk pans!"
"They told me you were a first-class farmer but—er—a little handicapped on outside work."
Jenny leaned against the door-frame and stroked her crutch with a smile.
"Footicapped would be a better word," she said. "Are you a stranger in Riverboro? Won't you rest a moment? Make your way through the milk pans to the rocking chair. I do need a little help in getting my winter wood in."
"You'll require a lot of wood unless you get a tight roof over your head," said the stranger. "I'm a Western farmer's son, or at least I was; but my mother and father died while I was in France and I'm alone in the world."
"France?" echoed Jenny, with a new glance in her eye and a new tone in her voice.
"Yes, but we'll cut that out! I landed in Boston the other day and now I'm just kind of 'adventuring' till I get my 'peace legs' on."
"You couldn't have come to a worse place than Riverboro. There hasn't been an adventure here in a hundred years."
"I don't know about that! I've only been in town half an hour and I've seen a water farm and a lady that runs it to the Queen's taste!"
Jenny laughed again; the sweetest, most tuneful laugh in the world; one that she seldom used nowadays but had kept over from her long-ago youth. What a droll stranger! And how much more interesting he would be in the intervals of sawing and splitting wood, than old George Gibson.
"It is too ridiculous that you should have seen the milk pans and noticed the shingles. I am going to have the roof fixed next spring if I live. Father saved up money for the stock but—but, I had to use it in a long illness."
"Yes, yes!" interrupted the stranger. "It beats all how that runs through life! You save up money for shingles and then you can't get enough more to put 'em on."
"I'm nearly ready for the second time," Jenny's tone was cheerful and incisive, "but I don't think I have quite enough to pay for labor. Besides, you couldn't, I mean you wouldn't—shingle—could you?"
"Sure I would, and could! You're strong on the subjunctive, aren't you? You've noticed I'm handicapped (I don't have to invent a word, it's all right for my case!). But just you wait and see what I can do with the substitute presented me by the U.S.A.! I'm going to have something more stylish later on, but I don't believe it will serve me any better; you see it's only my left arm!"
Jenny stopped her ears.
"Don't tell me you've read 'Pollyanna' and are glad it isn't your right arm!"
"Sure I'm glad! Who wouldn't be? Who's Pollyanna?"
"She's a girl in a book who's always glad that things aren't any worse."
"All right for Polly! More power to her elbow! Now I'm by no means dead broke and I've got back-pay coming to me from Washington, when they get 'round to it. But I want to train myself to work at anything that comes. If I can't make good I'll go to a vocational school, but I want to harden myself first."
"My roof in November would be a good place for that!" said Jenny contemplatively. "What wages do you ask?"
"Half what the other men get around here, because I'm not a skilled worker at present. Now if you've got a ladder on the premises I can get up and tear off the old shingles while you negotiate for the new ones. Going to buy first quality cedars?"
Jenny grew red and then white, for her memory flashed back, and by an odd trick she remembered her father's injunction to "stiperlate," a word that was to be used in far more romantic circumstances.
"Can't manage first quality; seconds will have to do," she said, with some embarrassment.
"O.K. I've had nothing but 'seconds' all my life. Sometimes I wonder I didn't have a second wife."
"Why didn't you?" The question suddenly popped out of Jenny's mouth without any warning.
"Because I never had a first! Ha! ha!" (He certainly was the most unusual young man she had ever met and the most informal on the occasion of a first call. She felt as if she'd been to high-school and singing-school and dancing-school with him!)
The stranger rose from his chair. "I'll 'lime' the 'seconds' for you myself to save expense. Want me to get them for you, because I know a shingle when I see it and maybe you don't? I'll go in to the village, get a boarding-place, and come back after lunch for a half-day's work."
"Thank you—that will be very kind."
"I'll pick up the milk pans and empty 'em for you, first. Poor old things! They don't know they're going out of business! Let me look at your ladder, please. A man that works with a woman's farming implements ought to carry a big life insurance!"
Jenny laughed again, joyously. Then, entirely forgetting decorum, she wiped her eyes with her apron and said, "If I only knew what your wages were going to be I'd raise them, you are so funny! The ladder is in the shed. I think it's all right."
He looked about the shed in amazement at its cleanliness and order. "Holy Moses!" he thought, "does that little creature sweep and scrub this place and pile up this wood and kindling, skipping about on a crutch? And us great husky lubbers getting 'orders of merit' for doing our duty by the country. Wonder if Miss Jenny Lane has had any medals handed out to her? She can have mine when I get well enough acquainted to give it to her."
Jenny followed him out to the shed.
"Is the ladder quite safe?" she asked.
"Safe as a meeting-house."
"Then, as you go to the village, you'll see twin boys hanging over the gate at the next house, Mrs. Day's. Ask the red-haired, freckled one (his name is Alfinso) if he'll come up this afternoon and help you, for five cents. He'll hold the ladder, pick up the shingles or commit any crime if you just tell him that Jenny'll have fresh doughnuts for you and him at supper-time. Don't ask Alfonso, the dark-haired twin; he doesn't like work and doesn't like doughnuts."
"Well," said the stranger, wiping his hand on a potato sack, "I wasn't in the Salvation Army belt when they were distributing doughnuts to the boys and my mouth is fairly watering for one. My name's Rufus Holt, of Lawrence, Kansas." Here he held out his hand which Jenny took, stunned by the suddenness of his action. "I'm your hired man till this roof is fixed. You look to me like a grand little boss. I'll be back in an hour and I hope I don't get Alfinso and Alfonso mixed!"
"Creeping Jenny" has a method all its own of making its way upward and onward, silently, smoothly, under and over, betwixt and between obstacles. The slender little green vine climbs, not so much with strength, as with swiftness and grace, and accomplishes its growth in a miraculously short space of time. You can leave your garden rake against the barn door some warm night, and next morning Jenny will have crept up to the top of the handle, leaned over and flung down a few little fragrant blossoms here and there just to give you a hint of Nature's magic.
By a like process and another sort of magic, Jenny Lane crept into Rufus Holt's heart, which was a big lonesome one, howling with emptiness, at the time he began shingling her house. They came to know more of each other as the days went by. He and she, with Alfinso, ate luncheon together on the shed bench so that the day's labor need not be delayed by a trip to the village for Rufus. (At least that is what he said, and she said, and Alfinso said, and Mrs. Day said, and nobody doubted it but the postmistress.)
Alfinso, whose pay had now been increased to ten cents a day, was the most faithful of "gooseberries," but even he sometimes wandered away to the wood-pile to work on a motor that he was constructing, to be used in connection with the power of an old alarm clock.
At such times Rufus and Jenny would talk together before she gathered up the dishes. She allowed him a pipe, and when she attempted to rise and go to the kitchen he would say: "Take your 'nooning,' Miss Jenny, same as the rest of us. The minute you drop your housework you take out your needle."
"I've had to be busy to keep from thinking, these last two years," she said, quietly arranging the knives and forks for clearing away. "Now I'm afraid of getting idle, for what with company at lunch, the sound of hammer or saw all day, and the smell of paint all night, it seems as if Boston couldn't be any gayer than my little house."
Rufus liked to watch the dimple come and go in Jenny's cheek, a dimple that had enjoyed little use till lately; he also admired the whiteness of the neck that rose out of the blue gingham working dress, and the long eyelashes that too often lay on her cheek and hid her brown eyes. He often tried to say something that would bring a quick upward glance full of fun or understanding. As for his talk, no words can tell what it was to the girl who had spent hundreds of long, silent, lonely days, feeling her youth slipping by, a tragedy without a single witness.
"Where were you last Christmas, Miss Jenny Wren?" Rufus asked between pipe-puffs, after lunching gloriously on shoulder-of-mutton stew. (He had always called her Miss Jenny Wren after the first week.)
"Here, of course!" she said, smiling. "I was born here, lived here and probably shall die here. All the rooms but the kitchen had icicles hanging from the ceilings and window-frames. The parlor looked like that famous cave in Kentucky with the stalactites in the roof. There had been a blizzard on the twenty-third and I couldn't go to the church Christmas tree. It was nearly as bad the Christmas before. I've never celebrated Christmas day, except to plant a little hemlock twig in a flower pot and hang Mother's and Father's pictures on it."
"Jehosaphat!" ejaculated Rufus. "It wasn't so bad as that in the trenches where I was. Plenty of company—of one sort and another; I declare women always have the hardest of it in this old world somehow. Trenches and over-the-tops were exciting compared to what you've gone through. They were life! A man generally has life and adventure with his hard knocks; but women are always saving, scrimping, doing without, suffering, nursing, burying, paying other people's debts and bearing other people's burdens. Rotten luck, being a woman!" and he knocked the ashes from his pipe furiously.
"I never thought of it that way," said Jenny serenely. "I have my one burden, but it's my own, nobody else's!"
"Say, if I'm hereabouts to help, suppose you give a kind of a housewarming this year; some sort of a make-shift Christmas and show off the shingles! Hey?"
"Who would come?" cried Jenny. "And how could I compete with the church Christmas? Besides you are going to Boston."
"I haven't decided about Boston yet." (Jenny's heart leaped into her mouth and stopped her breath.) "As for the company, Mrs. Day could come, Alfinso and Alfonso (hateful little beggar, Alfonso!), Mrs. Strout, who boards me; and there's the station master that advised me to come to you for a job, and the man I bought the shingles of, and the storekeeper we owe for nails—that's quite a good crowd! You put in a few lady friends and I believe we could frame up a party that would make Boston look dull. What's the matter with the parson? Why couldn't he come? You're in his parish, aren't you?"
Jenny swayed to and fro with mirth. The point of view was so fresh, so young, so unlike Riverboro. "You don't know how funny you are!" she exclaimed. "The minister calls twice a year, but always in summer."
"Tell him to make it once and come Christmas Eve!" said Rufus, imperturbably. "Tell him your leaks are stopped and you'll show him a wounded soldier who did the shingling. 'Feature' me, don't you know? Tell him you'll have my Medal of Honor on the marble-top table."
"You've never shown it to me," said Jenny, softly.
"It's in Boston with my best clothes. Besides I've told you all about it. There happened to be a lot of fellows about when I was up against a hard job and they told on me. The boys didn't all have that luck or the U.S.A. couldn't have turned out medals enough to go around.... Now it's time to work again. You think about that Christmas party before I buy my ticket to Boston. I'm going to patch up that bad place by the chimney," and Rufus went out the shed door and mounted the ladder.
Oh! the terrors of that high ladder and that sloping roof to Jenny, from the very beginning! With a white, knit cape over her shoulders and a white scarf tied round her head, she used to limp to some unseen point of vantage and watch Rufus with her heart in her mouth, lest he should slip and lose his hold. Sometimes he would catch her at her post, and looking down, think that her face looked like a love-apple, all pinky red and creamy white. And the warm glow of having some one down below caring a little whether he slipped—he, Rufus Holt, a down-and-outer!
He never did make a misstep, for he was a very demon of ingenuity and skill in using his one arm.
"Brave, clever, good, big-hearted!" sang Jenny's heart from the ground.
"Plucky, cheery, sweet and sound!" sang the heart of Rufus from the roof—but neither of them said anything in words.
Mrs. Day said considerable, but she liked Jenny Lane and stood up for her when the postmistress said there was more in that shingling business than met the eye.
"I don't see anything wrong in it," Mrs. Day maintained stoutly. "Jenny's roof would have fallen in on her if she hadn't shingled this fall. It looks like Providence to me."
"He's so slow at it that it looks like courting to me," observed the postmistress while scanning the morning's postcards to see if anything interesting was likely to happen in the neighborhood.
"Alfinso thinks the world of Mr. Holt, and he's getting ten cents a day now. It's true Alfonso takes three of it away from him every night. He says five is due to him because he's a twin, but he only takes three cents because he don't do any work."
"Alfonso's goin' to make a good business man when he grows up," said the post-mistress.
It was half-past four in the afternoon, but in the short December days it was nearly as dark as midnight.
A cheerful fire snapped in Jenny's highly polished kitchen stove. The yellow-painted floor with its braided rugs reflected the light of the kerosene lamp, the cat was asleep in the rocking-chair with the cretonne cushion, and Jenny sat by the table making out a crochet pattern from a magazine in front of her. She had changed into her afternoon dress of brown cashmere with pongee collar and cuffs and apron, so that she looked more than ever like Jenny Wren, Rufus Holt thought, as he came in from the tool-house with a lantern.
"Alfinso is splitting and piling his kindling," he said. "He wants me to wait and go along home with him. Alfonso has told him there's a ghost between here and the corner. Gracious! Can any parlor in the world beat a kitchen for comfort when it's rigged out and kept like yours! (No, puss, I wouldn't have you move for the world, even if you offered to! I'll take a wooden chair!)"
"The cat is spoiled," said Jenny, "and you look tired. You ought not to be doing rough work or you won't get to be yourself again."
"I'm myself, right enough; in fact I never was so much myself since I was born. I'm not tired; the sight of you and this kitchen rests me clean through to the bone."
Jenny changed color, but studied the crochet pattern with renewed care.
"I don't miss my arm any more," Rufus continued, playing with her thread. "I've learned to do without it. I never thought I should, but I have, with a little help from a lady friend. I never was bitter about it like some. When you come to think of it, Miss Jenny Wren, it's wonderful how Almighty God has given us two of a kind in most things—on the outside, anyway. As to the inside furniture, the doctors have shown us how to get along without most of that. If we'd been started out with one eye, one ear, one arm and one leg, where would we have been nowadays?"
"We've only one nose and one mouth," objected Jenny.
"And how would we have looked with two?" laughed Rufus. "But that's not to the point. The house is finished, Jenny Wren, and what would you think of buying a few second-hand boards and letting me make the cow-shed more comfortable for winter?"
This moment had to come. Jenny had been dreading it for days. There was a pause, then: "I'm going to sell the cow," she stammered.
Rufus looked surprised. "Are you troubled about the price of feed, or afraid the winter work will be too much for you? That's why I'd like to make a better place for her and patch up the piece of shed you have to walk through to get to her—after I leave. It's a wonderful season but it's the eighteenth of December and snow must be coming along soon."
There was another moment of silence, then Jenny spoke recklessly. "You see, Mr. Holt, we've gone on from one thing to another for three weeks, because the leaky roof ruined the house in so many ways, and there's never been a man to help, since father died. We've patched the flooring, put in new door-sills and weather-strips on the windows, papered the sitting-room and plastered the kitchen ceiling—and all the time I've known I was going too far. I paid you fifteen dollars the first week, but it wasn't half what you earned and you gave me back three for lunches. Then you wouldn't take the last two weeks' wages because I was buying bricks and lumber and you said we could settle up when the work was finished.... I can't let it run on, Mr. Holt, I can't! I'm not in want; I've something in the bank and my hayfield more than pays for my winter fuel; but I have to be careful, and the house is so nice and cozy now it would be self-indulgent to do more. I'd better sell the cow. You're as kind and generous as you can be, but you are a stranger after all, and I have no claim on you."
Rufus gave her a long, searching look.
"You honestly feel I'm a stranger, do you?"
"Well, I—I don't exactly feel that you are, I only know it. My mind tells me so."
"It's funny!" said Rufus. "Now—I feel like a partner, not a stranger."
Jenny clutched at the saving word. "You have been the best of partners," she acknowledged, straightforwardly.
"Oh, no! Not the best! I'm capable of being a heap better partner than I have been. Now stop crocheting, listen to me, and don't speak till I get through.... In the first place, do you like me?"
Jenny flared at this.
"Why do you ask a question like that? You know that nobody could help liking you! You know you're as sunshiny and thoughtful as you can be, and as for being interesting and funny and unlike anybody else in the world, you know well enough you're that; so why do you ask such foolish questions only to hear yourself praised?"
Rufus made a sudden movement and then subsided again into his chair.
"That's satisfactory, so far as it goes," he said calmly, "though it doesn't go far enough to suit me. There are things I've got to say to you, and when they're over, we need never speak of them again. I haven't any home, nor any people but a married brother in Kansas, whose wife and four children I've never seen. He always worked the farm and it fell to him, as was right. I got a little money from my father, earned more at my trade in Chicago and saved it. Then I went across with the other boys. You don't really know anything about me except what I tell you, but I've got a clean record to show the neighbors, and I swear to God there's nothing wrong with me except that I've got one arm instead of two. When I came down this road from the station three weeks ago I took a good look at you, skimming around with your crutch, and swinging your right foot off the ground."
"Don't!" cried Jenny, covering her eyes.
Rufus put his big hand over her little ones and wiped the tears away with her crochet work. "I've got to show how I feel about you, and then I'll ask what you think of me," he explained. "I said to myself that day: 'Here's a chance to help somebody that's had to bear what I have.' They told me at the station you needed some work done, so I just plunged in, made good, and got the job. But I had no idea of falling in love with you, Jenny; that's your fault, not mine. I want to marry you, but I don't know how you feel about it."
"I don't want to be pitied and married just to be helped," said Jenny stubbornly. "After my accident I just made up my mind I would never marry."
"Why?" asked Rufus.
"You know why," Jenny answered.
"Then the reason you don't want to marry me shows me that I had no right to ask you, isn't that so?"
"No, it isn't; it's different with a woman. Besides, I do want to marry you, but I won't."
Rufus moved a little nearer. "Jenny, we've each got a minus sign against us—there's no getting over that; but Holy Moses! you're hung all over so thick with plus signs that your minus doesn't show up at all! Your face, your eyes, your hair, your voice, your disposition, your spunk, your common sense—all plus! The trouble is with me. There would be times when a girl might blush if she had a one-armed husband!"
"Blush? If she did she ought to be struck by lightning!"—and Jenny's eyes flashed.
Rufus caught her hands. "Jenny, Jenny, be true with me, speak straight out! Do I seem a little short of a full man? How do you see me in your secret heart?"
Jenny rose to her feet under a kind of spell that made him rise to meet her. She leaned against him and said: "I see you whole, and strong and precious and splendid, Rufus!"
Rufus held her close, drying his secret tears on her hair.
"Oh, you little brick!" he whispered. "You darling, winsome little brick! Would you mind kissing me?"
"Not in the least!" she answered, and was proceeding to do it with all her heart when Alfinso entered with a huge armful of kindling, which he dropped into the woodbox with such force that the house shook.
"Alfinso, you dropped something. I heard you distinctly." Rufus was cool and collected as he put Jenny back in her chair. "Now I've some news for you. Jenny and I are going to be married on Christmas Eve and your family is invited. Will you take care of the house while I go to Boston and get all my papers and passports and identifications and finger-prints and certificates and army records and honorable discharges and pedigrees, and draw my back pay—because I am a stranger in Riverboro and I want to get into society. Why don't you speak? Aren't you surprised?"
"I would 'a' been," said the boy, '"cept that Alfonso and the postmistress both said it would turn out that way; but Mother stood up for Jenny; she said it wouldn't."
"That's what all the women will have said," laughed Rufus.
"Well, all the men will say I jumped at you, so accounts will be square!" and Jenny smiled triumphantly back at Rufus, all blushes and confusion, her heart beating like a wild bird in her breast. "Go, Rufus, please," she said in a low tone, "and take Alfinso. I want to be alone with myself and get used to—happiness."
He bent over her and kissed her cheek while Alfinso went for his muffler and mittens.
"Good-by! I'll bring back the ring; don't forget the party. We won't stint refreshments. I'll give the twins a dollar to bring you little trees and evergreens for garlands and we'll make a brave showing of the house. Isn't it lucky there'll be a full moon on the shingles? No doubt about the minister now! He'll have to come in the performance of his duty. Oh! my dear, my dear, God is being very good to me!"
"Good to us," whispered Creeping Jenny, putting her lips softly and shyly against his sleeve.