The Bird in the Box

by Mary M. Mears

On a summer morning, by merely craning her neck, she could peer down through an open window and learn who were present of her special following. If she spied the old charwoman, whose honesty was not above suspicion, or Dan, who stole grain on the wharves, she nodded her head with satisfaction. It was more than possible, she considered, even if the priest's exhortations were lost on their befuddled minds, that the pure strong notes of the organ might reach their consciences, the beautiful colours of the windows cause some expansion of their dwarfed souls. So she completed her survey like an inquiring angel, then settled to her work of the day.

Emily trimmed hats, furnishing them for a Division Street milliner, and earned a very comfortable livelihood; for she trimmed with an abandon, a daring, a freedom that no other trimmer could equal. That she might have full scope for the expression of her individuality, she was granted the privilege of working at home instead of under the eye of her employer. She was regarded as an artist, and more than once her creations had changed the prevailing styles in that section. If Emily, canny soul, had her own ideas about the beauty of her hats, she kept them to herself and it is not for me to reveal them. It was sufficient that the hats suited the heads they were intended to adorn. Humming under her breath, she curled and looped and tied and twisted with such swiftness that the room was filled with the shimmer of satin, the flutter of laces, the darting of wings, the bursting of flowers; and so unremitting was her industry that by night the wire frames, delivered to her in the morning, had been converted into veritable traps for the captivation of men's hearts.

Working away through the long hours, all the vanity that had never found expression in her own life, flew into her needle; she placed feathers at an irresistible angle, sewed buckles and bows in telling positions. When she fared along the streets, quiet and demure, carrying her great pile of boxes, who would have guessed that she was a great matchmaker? Yet such was the case. And when she met one of her creations, brave and flaunting as youth itself, accompanied by a male hat, she knew that her work was succeeding. When the hats proclaimed a maid and a lad, her spirits rose; but when they proclaimed an errant wife and her admirer, her spirits clouded.

For once they had left her hands with all their potency for good or evil, Emily had no more control over her hats than a parent over the children that have quitted the hearth. Sometimes her pangs were so sharp at what she witnessed that for days she trimmed with a sobriety, a propriety that was the despair of her employers. Indeed, she fairly sewed a sermon into the hats until a protest of loud-voiced dismay stayed her hand. Thereupon the full tide of her remorse was diverted into another channel.

All who came to her she helped, as was her custom, with money, with food, with influence; but her lectures, always forcible, now became inspired. She rated them eloquently, and such an admiration did she exhibit for virtue, and such detestation for evil, that the indigent, the drunken, the lazy, went away not only consoled but strengthened in the "inner man."

Emily's philosophy was comprehended in one word. Work for brain and hand, body and soul,—work was the world's salvation, she declared; and right staunchly, in her own life, did she demonstrate the truth of this theory. Nor did her labours cease with the hours of daylight.

The setting of the sun witnessed a change in her occupation. With the lighting of the gas all the hats that had not been delivered, went to roost, like an array of tropical birds, behind a curtain; and from a corner where it had stood neglected all day, came forth her little work-bench. Forthwith Emily began the practice of the cunning craft that was to her the highest of the arts. Between the fine ardour of the youthful Cellini, as he approached his delicate metals after an irksome day in his father's shop, and Emily's grave exaltation as she seated herself at the bench, there was not the difference of a jot. The thing that we create matters nothing, the divine desire to create is all; and whether we design a medal for a pontiff's honour or a toy for a child's delight, the object is but a little door through which the soul wings to freedom.

Emily had a dream, an ambition. Her ambition was to make toys and one day to see a whole army of them performing on the walks of the popular uptown districts where shoppers throng. To this end she twisted wires with her claw-like fingers, and, as she lacked the proper tools, her fingers were often bruised; to this end she soldered together and hammered into shape. And right fairly did her toys represent her, for, disgusted with the laziness of humanity, Emily endowed her race of tiny men and women with a perfect passion for industry. They seemed obsessed with the notion, and though the work that engaged them would still be unfinished when the spring of their life ran down, was not this the crowning fact in the history of all brave effort? So Emily continued to announce her theory even through her toys.

On a certain sultry morning she had barely settled herself near the window and carefully threaded her first needle, when she dropped the work in her lap.

"There, I haven't made the acquaintance of that child yet," she murmured. "Judging from the smell of cooking they have enough to eat. But something's amiss and I must get her to tell me what it is."