Elsie Marley, Honey

by Joslyn Gray

As for Elsie herself, the lullaby didn't prove a lullaby at all, and, as usual these days, the girl cried herself to sleep. Every night, of late, the reaction came. Every morning she awoke with a sense of a heavy burden weighing her down. All day her heart ached, though dully and vaguely for the most part; for if the pain threatened to become acute, she could still drug it with anticipation of the excitement of the evening.

In the weeks that had passed, Elsie hadn't once faced her conscience. She had never squarely confronted the situation which was now so much further complicated. When the unexpected and thrilling opportunity had come to her the day after Christmas—the very day that was to consummate her renunciation—the girl had been completely carried away by it. She hadn't repudiated the decision she had come to so painfully, she had simply disregarded it—ignored it utterly as if there had been no such thing. And she had gone on ignoring it. In the very first of it, the excitement of working directly for the stage had rendered her oblivious of everything else. Then when certain faint murmurings of conscience began to be audible, came the actual prospect of the Merry Nickel to stifle them, and then there was the stage itself and the actual footlights. Nevertheless, avoid the issue as she would, more and more had her daylight hours come to be haunted with misgivings, and now her heart was never light except in the evenings. And combat any such direct thought as she might, she felt dimly that in giving over her purpose to square her conduct with the right, she had doubled and trebled the original wrong. Unvowing a vow must be equivalent to signing a covenant with the powers of darkness. Now and again lines from the poem Cousin Julia had repeated to her so impressively that she could never forget it, came to her suddenly in uncanny fashion. At such times, if questioned, Elsie would have acknowledged that her Palladium had indeed fallen, with all the awful consequences.

Lines from another and more familiar poem came to the girl the next day as she sat in the afternoon with Miss Pritchard in their sitting-room, the snow falling outside as if it were December. As she gazed at the steadily falling, restful, soothing curtain of flakes which deadened all sound and veiled all save its own beauty, unconsciously she was repeating verses of a poem she had learned as a child. But as she came to the words, "I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn," she recollected herself. And somehow her mind turned instinctively to Miss Pritchard's lover. It was because he, too, was dead, she supposed, and this snow was rounding above his grave. But before she made the natural application or drew the familiar comparison between his failure and her own, Elsie clapped the lid down on her thoughts with a thud. Turning resolutely to Miss Pritchard, she asked her, with strange intonation, if she thought the snow would continue all night.

"I rather hope so," Miss Pritchard returned in a quiet voice that was like a part of the silent storm, "for it's so late that we can't expect another snowfall, and it seems really a privilege to have it now—like plucking violets at Thanksgiving."

For a little, her gaze, too, lost itself outside. Then she turned and looked at Elsie with a kindness in which there was something wistful.

"I know what you have been thinking, dear," she said. "You're thinking that I'm not consistent nor fair—and you're right. I am neither. I agree with you absolutely. Having in the first place consented to your studying for the stage, I should have looked ahead and faced just this. As you say, one can't begin at the tip-top—nor yet at the top. One must make use of humble stepping-stones."

But it seemed that the struggle she had been through to bring herself to this attitude had been in vain. On a sudden she lost all that she had gained. Her heart sank as Elsie's face brightened eagerly—became transformed, indeed.

"The trouble is," she went on sadly, "that the stepping-stones—oh, Elsie, I'm so afraid the stepping-stones will only lead on and on and on—never higher. They'll be and remain on a dead level, and you will step from one to another, one to another, year after year, over the same dreary waste. I hate awfully to say all this, dear, but when those people refuse to allow you to do anything but the Elsie-Honey business over and over, it comes to me what a fate it would be to be doomed forever to that one stunt."

"Oh, Cousin Julia!" Elsie cried deprecatingly.

"Yes, dear, that's what I am exactly, an old killjoy; but truly I cannot help it, though I have tried. I have struggled hard against my prejudice. Elsie, last night you stopped yourself as you were about to tell me something, but I fear I can guess what it was like. Some one suggested your going on the road, as they say, with that one thing as your repertoire—making a tour of the cheap moving-picture houses of a certain section?"