The Bird in the Box

by Mary M. Mears

As the summer advanced she refused to accept the dealer's verdict that the demand for all sorts of hand-painted trifles languished in the summer; painting was her one means of support, and with magnificent courage, if with small practical sense, she continued to paint. But when she carried her work to the dealer, though he admired it, he refused to buy it, and she came home again and again as empty of pocket as when she had started out.

She said nothing to Emily Short about her difficulties. Barring a glimpse which she caught of her now and then she seldom saw the little toy-maker, for during the hot weather Emily was unusually busy.

Emily was a famous nurse, and during the season when sickness was rampant among the children of the slums, she put aside her toys and hats and fought bravely for the little lives. She scrubbed faces and cleaned floors and administered doses of medicine, and more than once Rachel had met her at the edge of evening, bringing home an infant in her arms. To see her depositing it where the breeze came in through the open window, cooing to it, directing its wandering attention to the sights and sounds of the church, was enough to bring tears to the eyes. Fate, so prone to interfere with the plans of nature, wins at best but a superficial victory when she attempts to extinguish the motherhood in certain women. Deny them offspring she may, but dam up the love in their hearts, she cannot. Fate makes spinsters, but God makes mothers. And what is a mother but a being that looks with tenderness on all that is weak, with delight on all that is young? To such a being, an infant is ever a bud of promise to which she longs to be the sun. In the most radiant and satisfying sense, Emily Short was a mother, and not a waif in the quarter but knew it. Those who could walk, flocked after her on their little bare feet, clinging to the folds of her dress with their grimy fingers; and those who were too small to walk, looked at her with fixed, unwinking eyes, apparently beholding nothing, while in reality still seeing the something beyond this nothing, their state being one of celestial preoccupation rather than one of dormant thought.

Rachel, aware of the burden Emily carried, hesitated to add to its weight. If truth be told, as long as old David did not lack for food,—and so far he had not gone hungry—as long as the rent was paid for a week ahead, a subject more tyrannical than poverty engrossed her thoughts. In some women the love that has once stirred them, never becomes extinct; it is a flame that never completely dies, a fire of which some sparks always linger among the dead ashes. At a breath from that far-off source of all existence, a breath that quickens alike grain and fruit and human hearts, this spark leaps to renewed life in the sensitive, wounded and restless soul.

With the disingenuousness of a woman in love, with the timidity of a little mouse, Rachel had established herself under the eaves of an obscure garret in lower New York. For a time, following the change, her heart had beat more tranquilly, for now the same sky covered her that covered that egoistic remarkable being who had once played so important a role in her life.

But gradually the sombreness of a storm was created within her; though when she thought of the inventor she experienced little of the chagrin of a woman whom a lover has deserted. Rather, what she felt was a surprised resentment of soul. Emil St. Ives was ordained to understand her, and behold he had forsaken her! With eyes as clear as a child's, though shadowed by indefinable emotions, she often watched from the window the pigeons circling on pointed wings over the house-tops, and they seemed to her like a flurry of white letters tossed by a derisive hand through the sky.

"Why had he never written her?"

At the thought her melancholy was crossed by anger; but at other moments she remembered that it was she herself who had sent him away. Oh, if he had only looked at her with his mind as well as his eyes! But, enlivened continually by the astonished happy perception of the inventor's mastery of the expedients he employs in his tests, joyful with the joy of a creator, Emil had never really seen her. His love for his mother carried him backward into the past, his love for his work carried him forward into the future, until it actually seemed to her he had no present, no to-day.

And she reflected that under one of those million roofs he was working on some foolish instrument for which the world, as yet, did not recognize its own need. The world, therefore, in all probability, was leaving him alone, to live if he could, to starve if he must. Meanwhile, the sound of his drilling, his hammering, above all, his loud-voiced singing, was doubtless causing a commotion among the stars where the important is recorded before it is heralded on this commonplace earth.

Although she did not wish to remember the inventor, the thought of him constantly returned and gradually she began to extract a kind of pleasure from this involuntary analysis which she carried on for hours together. Then roused by some sound from the street, with the languor which results from power held in abeyance, she would resume work on the shades.