“SMALL JANE.”
The Story of a Little Heroine.
SINCE my experience with the case of “Sallie,” I feel a hesitation in presenting a new heroine to the attention of the public.
You see, I do not mind the real sorrow that I experienced when my sincere efforts to improve the condition of this child came to naught. But I was staggered and sickened by the fact that most of my friends were rejoiced at her downfall.
I do not remember anything that gave more genuine joy to the town than the relapse of this wretched girl into the slums from which she had been lifted. It was the occasion of general hilarity—this falling back of an immortal soul into Death—this terrible spectacle of a child staggering blindly from sunlight into shame. I was poked in the ribs facetiously. A perfect shower of chuckles fell on my ear. It was the joke of the season—this triumph of the Devil over the body of a girl. One mad young wag, who, with a keen nose for a joke, followed her into her haunts of crime, came back, his honest face convulsed with laughter, and bearing on his lips a statement from her, to the literal effect that “I was a d—d fool.”
I was staggered, I say, at the enjoyment created by the downfall of this girl. For myself, I can hardly imagine a more pitiful sight than her childish figure, as with face averted and hands raised, blinded by the white light of virtue and bewildered by her new condition, she slipped back in despair to her old shame. I may be a “d—d fool,” but I cannot find the heart to laugh at that.
I don’t know how it is, but I have a mania for looking into cases of this sort. It is not philanthropy with me; it is a disease.
At the editorial desk, I sit opposite a young man of a high order of mind.
He makes it a point to compass the problems of nations. I dodge them. He has settled, to his own agreement, every European problem of the past decade. Those problems have settled me. He soars—I plod. Once in a while, when he yearns for a listener, he reaches down for my scalp, and lifts me up to his altitude, where I shiver and blink, until his talented fingers relax, and I drop home. It delights him to adjust his powerful mind to the contemplation of contending armies,—I swash around with the swarm that hangs about me.
His hero is Bismarck, that phlegmatic miracle that has yoked impulse to an ox, and having made a chess-board of Europe, plays a quiet game with the Pope. My hero is a blear-eyed sot, that having for four years waged a gigantic battle with drink, and alternated between watery Reform and positive Tremens, is now playing a vague and losing game with Spontaneous Combustion. My friend discusses Bismarck’s projects with a vastness of mind that actually makes his discourse dim, and I slip off to try my hero’s temper, and see whether I shall have him wind his intoxicated arms about my neck and envelop me in an atmosphere of whisky and reform, or fall recumbent in the gutter, his weak but honest face upturned to the sky, and his moist, white hand working vaguely upward from his placid breast, in token of abject surrender.
Bismarck is a bigger man than Bob.
But I can’t help thinking that Bob is engaged in the most thrilling and desperate conflict. Anyhow, I had rather see his watery eyes grow clear and his paroxysmal arms grow steadfast, than to see Bismarck wipe out every potentate in Europe. It’s a grave thing to watch the conflicts of kings, and see nations embattled rushing against each other. But there are greater and deeper conflicts waged in our midst every day, when the legions of Despair swarm against stout hearts, and Hunger and Suffering storm the citadel of human lives!
But I started to tell you of my new heroine.
Her name is Jane.
She presented herself one morning about three months ago. A trim, slender figure, the growth of nine years. It was such a small area of poverty that I felt capable of attending to it myself. But I remembered that small beggars usually represent productive but prostrated parents and a brood of children. The smaller the beggar the larger the family. I therefore summoned the good little woman who guides my household affairs.
She claims to be an expert in beggars. She has certain tests that she applies to all comers. Her fundamental rule is that all applicants are entitled to cold bread on first call. After this she either grades them up to cake and preserves, or holds them to scraps. I remember that she kept Col. Nash on dry biscuit for thirteen months, while other applicants have gone up to pie in three visits. I never felt any hesitation in taking her judgment after that, for of all wheedling mendicants Col. Nash, the alleged scissors-grinder, takes the lead.
But Jane was not a beggar. She carried on her arm a basket. It was filled with some useless articles that she wanted to sell. Would the lady look at them? Oh! of course! They were bits of splints embroidered with gay worsted. What were they for? Why, she didn’t know. She just thought somebody would buy them, and she needed some money so badly.
“Who is your mother?”
“I haven’t any. She is dead. I have a father, though.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s sick most of the time. He works when he is well.”
“What’s his name?”
“Robert ——!”
(Saints! My “Bob!” Sick indeed! The weak rascal!)
Jane was asked in, and I began to investigate. I learned that this child was literally alone in the world. She had a sister, a puny two-year-old, and a drunken father—my flabby friend. They lived in a rickety hovel, out of which the last chair had been sold to pay rent. The mother, a year an invalid, had been accustomed to work little trifles in splints and worsted. She dying, the child picked up the splints, and worked grotesque baby fancies in wood and worsted. She had no time for weeping. Her hunger dried her eyes. The cooing baby by her side, crying for bread, made her forget the dead mother. So she fashioned the splints together, and with a brave heart went out to sell them.
Bob reformed at the bedside of his dying wife. Possibly at that moment the angels that had come to guide the woman home swept away the mist of the man’s debauch, and gave him a glimpse of the pure life that lay behind. Certain it is that his moist, uncertain hands crept vaguely up the cover till they caught the wasted cheeks of his wife, and his shaggy head bent down till his quivering lips found hers. And the poor wife, yielding once more to the love that had outlived shame and desertion, turned her eyes from her children and fixed them on her husband. Ah! how this earthly hope and this earthly love chased even the serenity of Heaven from her face, and lighted it with tender rapture! How quickly this drunkard supplanted God in the dying woman’s soul? “Oh, Bob! my darling!” she gasped, and raising her face toward him with a masterful yearning, she died.
“Mother didn’t seem to know we were there after father came,” Jane told me. And I wondered if the child had not been hurt, that all her months of patient love and watching had been forgotten in a tempest of love for a vagabond husband that had wrought nothing but disaster and death.
After the funeral, through which he went in a dazed sort of stupor, Bob got drunk, I don’t know why or how. He seemed tenderer since then than before. I noticed that he reformed oftener and got over it quicker. A piece of crape that Jane had fixed about his hat seemed to possess sacred properties to him. When he touched it and swore abstinence, he generally held out two or three days. One night, as he lay in the gutter, a cow, full of respect for his person, and yet unable to utterly control her hunger, chewed his hat. Since then he seemed to have lost his moorings, and drifted about on a currentless drunk.
He was always kind to Jane and the little biddie. In his maudlin way he would caress them, and cry over them, and reform with them, and promise to work for them. Even when he ate their last crust of bread, he accompanied the action with a sort of fumbling pomposity that robbed it of its horror. He never did it without promising to go out at once and bring back a sack of flour. Once he went so high as to promise four sacks. So that the child, in love like her mother with the old rascal, and like her mother fresh always in faith, was rather rejoiced than otherwise when he ate the bread. Did he bring the flour?
“Why, how could he? They had to bring him home. So of course I did not blame him. Poor father!”
I must do Bob the justice to say that he never earned a cent in all these days that he did not intend giving to Jane. Of course he never did it, but I desire him to have the credit of his intention. If the Lord held the best of us strictly to performance and ruled out intention, we wouldn’t be much better in his sight than Bob is in ours.
One day I was sitting behind a window looking at Jane, who stood in the kitchen door. Her oldish-looking, chipper little face was turned straight to me. It was a pretty face. The brown eyes were softened with suffering, and fear and anxiety had driven all color from her thin cheeks. I noticed that her mouth was never still. Though she was alone and silent, her lips quivered and trembled all the time. At times they would break into a dumb sob. Then she would draw them firmly together. Again they would twitch convulsively in the terrible semblance of a smile. Then in that pretty, feminine way she would pucker them together.
Long suffering had racked the child until she was all awry, and her nerves were plunging through her tender frame like devils.
“Jane, were you ever hungry?”
“Sir!” and she started painfully, while her starved heart managed to send a thin coating of scarlet into her cheeks. She was a proud little body, and never talked of her sorrows.
May the Lord forgive me for repeating the question!
“Sometimes, sir, when I couldn’t sell anything. Last Saturday we had only some bread for dinner. We never had anything else until Sunday night. I wouldn’t have minded it then, but Mary cried so for bread that I went out, and a lady that I knew gave me some things.”
Now, think of that. From a crust at Saturday noon, on nothing till Sunday night. Of all the abundant marketing of Saturday evening; of all the luxuries of Sunday breakfast and dinner, not a crumb for this poor child. While we were dressing our children for their trip to Sunday-school, or their romp over the hills, this poor child, gnawed by hunger, deserted by her drunken father, holding a starving baby, sat crouched in a hovel, given up to despair and hopelessness. And that, too, within the sound of the bells that made the church-steeples thrill with music, and called God’s people to church!
A friend who had heard Jane’s story had given me three dollars for her. I gave it to her, and told her that as her rent was paid, she could with this lay in some provisions. She was crying then, but she dried her tears and hurried off.
“Will you please come here and look?” called a lady whose call I always obey, about an hour afterward.
I went, and there stood Jane, flushed and happy.
“I declare I am astonished at this child!” said the lady.
And therewith she displayed Jane’s purchases. A little meal and meat had been sent home. The rest she had with her. First, there was a goblet of strained honey; then a bundle of candy “for baby,” a package of tea “for father,” and a chip straw hat, with three gayly colored ribbons, “for herself.” And that’s where the money had gone!
“I am just put out with her,” said the arbitress of my affairs, after Jane had gathered up her treasures and departed. “To waste her money like that! I can imagine how the poor, half-starved child couldn’t help buying the honey-goblet; I should die myself if I didn’t have something sweet; but how she came to buy that hat and ribbons I can’t see!”
Ah, blue-eyed woman! There’s a yearning in the feminine soul stronger than hunger. There’s a passion there that starvation cannot conquer. The hat and ribbons were bought in response to that craving. The hat, I’ll bet thee, was bought before the honey,—aye, before the meal or meat. “Can’t understand it?” Then, my spouse, I’ll explain: Jane is a woman!
I must confess that I was pleased at the misdirection of Jane’s funds. Have you ever had a child deep in a long-continued stupor from fever? How delighted you were then when, tempted by some trifle, he gave signs of eagerness! So I was rejoiced to see that the long years of suffering had not crushed hope and emotion out of this girl’s life.
The tea and the candy showed that her affections, working up to the father and drawn to the baby, were all right. The honey gave evidence that the fresh impulses of childhood had not been nipped and chilled. The hat and ribbons—best and most hopeful purchase of all—proved that the womanly vanity and love of prettiness still fluttered in her young soul. Nothing is so charming and so feminine in woman as the passion for dress. Laugh at it as we may, I think that men will agree that there is nothing so pathetic as a young woman out of whom all hope of fine appearance has been pressed. A gay ribbon is the sign in which woman conquers. I wager that Eve made a neat, many-colored thing of fig-leaves.
But to return to Jane.
I know that this desultory sketch should be closed with something unusual. Jane should die or get married. But she’s too young for either. And so her life is running on ever. She plods the streets as she used to do. She has quit selling the flaming scraps she used to sell, and now knits her young but resolute brow over crochet work, which she sells at marvelous prices. Her path is flecked with more sunshine than ever before, and at Sunday-school she is as smart a little woman as can be seen. If the shadow of a staggering figure, that falls so often across her course, could be lifted, she would have little else to grieve over. Not that she complains of this—not a bit of it. “Poor father is sick so much. How can he be expected to work?” And so she goes on, with her woman’s nature clinging to him closer than ever; even as the ivy clings to the old ruin. Hiding his shame from the world, wrapping him in the plenitude of her faith, and binding up his shattered resolves with her heart-strings.
And as for Bob:
I am strongly tempted to tell a lie, and say that he is either sober or dead. But he is neither. He is the same shiftless, irresponsible fellow that I have known for three years. His face is heavier, his eyes are smaller, his nose redder, his flesh more moist than ever. But in the depth of his debauch there seems to have been winged some idea of the excellence of Jane’s life, and the fineness of her martyrdom. He catches me anywhere he sees me, and, falling on my shirt-front, weeps copious tears of praise and pop-skull, while talking of her. He swears by her.
By the way, I must do him justice. Yesterday he came to me very much affected. He was white-lipped, and trembling, and hungry. He had spent the night in the gutter, and the policeman who was scattering the disinfecting lime, either careless or wise beyond his kind, had powdered him all over. He seemed to be terribly in earnest. He raised his trembling hand to his hat and touched the place where the crape used to be, and swore that he intended to reform, for good and all. “S’elp me Jane!” he said.
I have not seen him since. I hope that the iron has at last entered his soul and will hold him steadfast. Ha! that sounds like him stumbling up the steps now. Hey! he has rolled back to the bottom! Here he comes again. That must be him. “Of course!”