Clara E. Laughlin - Everybody\'s Lonesome
C >>
Clara E. Laughlin >> Everybody\'s Lonesome
[Frontispiece: "Both wanted to toast, and they took turns."]
Everybody's Lonesome
A True Fairy Story
By
CLARA E. LAUGHLIN
Author of "Evolution of a Girl's Ideal," "The Lady in Gray," etc.
Illustrated by
A. I. KELLER.
New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh
Copyright, 1910, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
To
Mabel Tallaferro,
The Faery Child
CONTENTS
I. DISAPPOINTED IN LIFE
II. YOUR OWN IS WAITING
III. FINDING THE FIRST FAIRY
IV. BEING KIND TO A TIRED MAN
V. GOING TO THE PARTY
VI. THE "LION" OF THE EVENING
VII. AT CANDLE-LIGHTIN' TIME
VIII. LEARNING TO BE BRAVE AND SWEET
IX. TELLING THE SECRET TO MOTHER
X. THE OLD WORLD AND THE KING
XI. A MEETING AND A PARTING
XII. AT OCEAN'S EDGE
ILLUSTRATIONS
"BOTH WANTED TO TOAST, AND THEY TOOK
TURNS" . . . . . . _Title_
". . . . FOUND HERSELF LOOKING INTO EYES
THAT SMILED AS WITH AN OLD FRIENDLINESS"
Everybody's Lonesome
I
DISAPPOINTED IN LIFE
Mary Alice came home quietly from the party. Most of the doors in the
house were closed, because it was cold, and the halls were hard to
heat. Mary Alice knew exactly what she should see and hear if she
opened that door at her right as she entered the house, and went into
the sitting-room. There was a soft-coal fire in the small,
old-fashioned grate under the old, old-fashioned white marble mantel.
Dozing--always dozing--on the hearth-rug, at a comfortable distance
from the fire, was Herod, the big yellow cat. In the centre of the
room, under the chandelier, was a table, with a cover of her mother's
fancy working, and a drop-light with a green shade. By the unbecoming
light of this, her mother was sewing. What day was this? Tuesday!
She was mending stockings. Mary Alice could see it all. She had been
seeing it for twenty years during which nothing--it seemed to her--had
changed, except herself. If she went in there now, her mother would
ask her the same questions she always asked: "Did you have a nice
time?" "Who was there?" "Anybody have on anything new?" "What
refreshments did they serve?"
Mary Alice was tired of it all--heartsick with weariness of it--and she
stole softly past that closed sitting-room door and up, through the
chilly halls where she could see her own breath, to her room.
She did not light the gas, but took off in the dark her "good" hat and
her "best" gloves and her long black cloth coat of an ugly
"store-bought" cut, which was her best and worst. Then, in an abandon
of grief which bespoke real desperation in a careful girl like Mary
Alice, she threw herself on her bed--without taking off her "good"
dress--and buried her head in a pillow, and _hated everything_.
It is hard to be disappointed in love, but after all it is a rather
splendid misery in which one may have a sense of kinship with earth's
greatest and best; and it has its hopes, its consolations. There is
often the hope that this love may return; and, though we never admit
it, there is always--deep down--the consolation of believing that
another and a better may come.
But to be disappointed in the love of life is not a splendid misery.
And Mary Alice was disappointed in her love of life. To be twenty, and
not to believe in the fairies of Romance; to be twenty and, instead of
the rosy dreams you've had, to see life stretching on and on before
you, an endless, uninspired humdrum like mother's, darning stockings by
the sitting-room fire--that is bitterness indeed.
Hardship isn't anything--while you believe in life. Stiff toil and
scant fare are nothing--while you expect to meet at any turning the
Enchanter with your fortune in his hands. But to be twenty and not to
believe----!
Mary Alice had never had much, except the wonderful heart of youth, to
feed her faith with. She wasn't pretty and she wasn't clever and she
had no accomplishments. Her people were "plain" and perpetually
"pinched" in circumstance. And her life, in this small town where she
lived, was very narrow.
In the mornings, Mary Alice helped her mother with the housework. In
the afternoons, after the midday dinner was cleared away, Mary Alice
had a good deal of time on her hands. Sometimes she sewed--made new
clothes or remade old ones; sometimes she read. Once in a while she
took some fancy work and went to see a girl friend, or a girl friend
brought some fancy work and came to see her. Occasionally she and
another girl went for a walk. Semi-occasionally there was a church
social or a sewing circle luncheon, or somebody gave a party.
Somebody had given a party to-day, and Mary Alice had gone to it with
high hope of finding it "interesting" and had come away from it with a
deep despair of ever finding in life that which would make the monotony
of it worth while.
Many another girl, feeling as Mary Alice did, would have gone away from
home seeking "life" in a big city. But Mary Alice, besides having no
qualifications for earning her way in a big city, had a most unhappy
shyness. She was literally afraid of strangers, and never got very
well acquainted even with persons she had associated with for a long
time.
At the party to-day--it was an afternoon tea--Mary Alice had been more
bitterly conscious than ever before of her lack of charms and the bleak
prospect that lack entailed upon her. For the tea was given for a girl
who was visiting in town, a girl of a sort Mary Alice had never seen
before. She was pretty, that visiting girl, and she was sweet; she had
a charm that was irresistible; she seemed to like everybody, and there
was no mistake about everybody liking her. Even the town girls liked
her and were not jealous. Even Mary Alice liked her, and was not
afraid of her. But there she was--that girl!--vital, radiant, an
example of what life might be, at twenty. And Mary Alice came away
hating as she had never done before, life as it was for her and as it
promised to continue.
Presently she withdrew her head from the pillow and lay looking into
the dark where, as we all know, the things that might be, that should
have been, shape themselves so much more readily than in any light.
And, lying there, Mary Alice wondered if there were any fairy power on
earth that could make of her a being half so sweet as that girl she had
seen this afternoon.
Then she heard her mother open the sitting-room door and call her. It
was time to get their simple supper ready.
"In a minute!" she called back. "I'm changing my dress." And she
jerked at the hooks of her blue taffeta "jumper dress" with uncareful
haste; bathed her face in cold water; put on her dark red serge which
had been "good" last year; and went down-stairs to help her mother.
She could see it all as she went--all she was to do. There was the
threadbare blanket they used for a silence cloth, and the table-cloth
with the red stain by Johnny's place where he had spilled cranberry
jelly the night before last, when the cloth was "span clean." There
were the places to set, as always, with the same old dishes and the
same old knives and forks; and with the mechanical precision born of
long practice she would rightly place, without half looking at them,
the various napkins each in its slightly different wooden ring. The
utmost variety that she could hope for would be hot gingerbread instead
of the last of Sunday's layer-cake, and maybe frizzled beef, since they
had finished Sunday's roast in a meat pie this noon.
"I didn't hear you come in," said her mother as Mary Alice opened the
sitting-room door, "and I was listening for you."
"I went right up-stairs to change my things," said Mary Alice, hoping
that would end the matter.
"That's what I knew you must have done when it got to be six o'clock
and I didn't hear you. I could hardly wait for you to come. I've such
a surprise for you."
Mary Alice could hardly believe her ears. "A surprise?" she echoed,
incredulously.
"Yes. I got a letter this afternoon from your dear godmother."
"Oh!" Mary Alice's tone said plainly: Is that all? She had her own
opinion of her godmother, whom she had not seen since she was a small
child, and it was not an enthusiastic one. Her name--which she
hated--was her godmother's name. And aside from that, all she had ever
got from her godmother was an occasional letter and, on Christmas and
birthdays, a handkerchief or turnover collar or some other such trifle
as could come in an envelope from Europe where her godmother lived.
Even in the matter of a godmother, it seemed, it was Mary Alice's luck
to have one without any of the fairy powers. For although Mary Alice's
mother had dearly loved, in her girlhood, that friend for whom she had
called her first baby, she had always to admit, to Mary Alice's eager
questioning, that the friend was neither beautiful nor rich nor gifted.
She was a "spinster person" and years ago some well-to-do friend had
taken her abroad for company. And there she had stayed; while the
friend of her girlhood, whose baby was called for her, heard from her
but desultorily.
"Your godmother has come back," said Mary Alice's mother, her voice
trembling with excitement; "she's in New York. And she wants you to
come and see her."
For a moment, visions swam before Mary Alice's eyes. Then, "How kind
of her!" she said, bitterly; and turned away.
Her mother understood. "She's sent a check!" she cried, waving it.
After that, until Mary Alice went, it was nothing but talk of clothes
and other ways and means. Just what the present circumstances of
Godmother were, they could not even conjecture; but they were probably
not very different than before, or she would have said something about
them. And the check she sent covered travelling expenses only. Nor
did she write: Never mind about clothes; we will take care of those
when she gets here.
"I haven't the least idea what kind of a time you'll have," Mary
Alice's mother said, "but you mustn't expect many parties or much young
society. Your godmother has been abroad so long, she can't have many
acquaintances in this country now. But you'll see New York--the crowds
and the shops and the great hotels and the places of historic interest.
And even if you don't meet many people, you'll probably have a very
interesting time."
"I don't care about people, anyway," returned Mary Alice.
Her mother looked distressed. "I wouldn't say that, if I were you,"
she advised. "Because you _want_ to care about people--you _must_!
Sights are beguiling, but they're never satisfying. We all have to
depend on people for our happiness--for love."
"Then I'll never be happy, I guess," said Mary Alice.
"I'm afraid, sometimes, that you've started out not to be," her mother
answered, gravely, "but we'll hope for the best."
II
YOUR OWN IS WAITING
Mary Alice dreaded to meet her godmother. The excitement of getting
away was all very well. But once she was alone in the Pullman, and the
friendly faces on the station platform were left behind, she began to
think apprehensively of what she was going to. She was sure to feel
"strange" with her godmother, and there was at least a pretty good
chance that she might actually dislike her. Also, there was every
reason to doubt if her godmother would like Mary Alice. Mary Alice had
several times met persons who had "been to Europe," and she had never
liked them; their conversation was all about things she did not know,
and larded with phrases she could not understand. Those years in
Europe made her doubly dread her godmother.
But the minute she saw her godmother at the Grand Central Station, she
liked her; and before they had got home, in the Fourth Avenue car, she
liked her very much; and when she lay dozing off to sleep, that first
night in New York, she was blissfully conscious that she loved her
godmother.
Godmother lived in an apartment in Gramercy Park. It was an
old-fashioned apartment, occupying one floor of what had once been a
handsome dwelling of the tall "chimney" type common in New York. All
around the Square were the homes of notable persons, and clubs
frequented by famous men. Godmother was to point these out in the
morning; but this evening, before dinner was served, while she and Mary
Alice were standing in the window of her charming drawing-room, she
showed which was The Players, and indicated the windows of the room
where Edwin Booth died. It seemed that she had known Edwin Booth quite
well when she was a girl, and had some beautiful stories of his
kindness and his shyness to tell.
Mary Alice was surprised and delighted, and she looked over at the
windows with eager, shining eyes. "He must have been wonderful to
know," she said. "Do you suppose there are many other great people
like that?"
"A good many, I should say," her godmother replied. And as they sat at
dinner, served by Godmother's neat maid-of-all-work, it "kind o' came
out," as Mary Alice would have said, how many delightful people
Godmother had counted among her friends.
"You've had a beautiful time, all your life, haven't you?" Mary Alice
commented admiringly, when they were back in the cozy drawing-room and
Godmother was serving coffee from the copper percolator.
"Not all my life, but most of it--yes," said Godmother. "It took me
some time to find the talisman, the charm, the secret--or whatever you
want to call it--of having a happy time."
"But you found it?"
Godmother flushed as if she were a little bit embarrassed. "Well," she
said, "I found one--at last--that worked, for me."
"I wish I could find one," sighed Mary Alice, wistfully.
"I'm going to try to give you mine," said Godmother, "or at least to
share it with you. And all I ask of you is, that if it 'works' for
you, you'll pass it on to some one else."
"Oh, I will!" cried Mary Alice. "What is it?"
"Wait a minute! I have to tell you about me, first--so you'll
understand."
"Please do!" urged Mary Alice. "I'd love to hear."
"Well, you see, when the invitations to my christening were sent out,
my folks forgot the fairies, I guess. And as I grew up, I found that I
hadn't been gifted with wealth or beauty or talents or charm----"
"I know," Mary Alice broke in.
Godmother looked surprised.
"I mean, I know how that feels," Mary Alice explained.
"Then you know I was pretty unhappy until--something happened. I met a
charming woman, once, who was so sweet and sympathetic that my heart
just opened to her as flowers to sunshine; and I told her how I felt.
'Well, that _was_ an oversight!' she said, 'but you know what to do
about it, don't you?' I said I didn't. 'Why!' she said, 'the fairies
had their gifts all ready to bring, and when they were not invited to
the party, what would they naturally do?' 'Give them to some one
else!' I cried. I shall never forget how reproachfully she looked at
me. 'That is a purely human trick!' she said; 'fairies are never
guilty of it. When they have something for you, they keep it for you
till you get it. If they were not asked to your party, it's your
business to hunt them out and get your gifts. Somewhere in the world
your own is waiting for you.' That was a magic thought: Somewhere in
the world your own is waiting for you. I couldn't get away from it; it
filled my mind, waking and asleep. And I set out to find if it was
true."
"And _was_ it?"
"Well, it must have been. For I've found some of my own, surely, and I
believe I shall find more. And oh! the joy it is to look and look,
believing that you will surely find. I haven't found wealth, nor
beauty, nor accomplishments--perhaps I didn't look in the right places
for any of those--but I've found something I wouldn't trade for all the
others. It is all I have to bequeath you, dear. But the beautiful
part of this bequest is, I don't have to die to enrich you with it, nor
do I have to impoverish myself to give it away. I just whisper
something in your ear--and then you go and see if it isn't so."
"Whisper it now, please," begged Mary Alice, going over to her
godmother and putting her ear close.
"Oh, no," said Godmother, kissing Mary Alice's ear, "this isn't the
time at all. And it's _fatal_ to tell till the right time comes."
And no teasing would avail to make her change her mind.
III
FINDING THE FIRST FAIRY
The next few days were spent in sightseeing; and Mary Alice would never
have believed there could be any one so enchanting to see sights with
as Godmother. They looked in all the wonderful shop-windows and
"chose" what they would take from each if a fairy suddenly invited them
to take their choice. No fairy did; but they hardly noticed that.
Then they'd go and "poke" in remnant boxes on the ends of counters in
the big department stores, and unearth bits of trimming and of lace
with which Godmother, who was clever with her needle and "full of
ideas," showed Mary Alice how to put quite transforming touches on her
clothes.
They visited art galleries, and Godmother knew things about the
pictures that made them all fascinating. Instead of saying,
"Interesting composition, that!" or "This man was celebrated for his
chiaroscuro," Godmother was full of human stories of the struggles of
the painters and their faithfulness to ideals; and she could stand in
front of a canvas by almost any master, and talk to Mary Alice about
the painter and the conditions of his life and love and longing when he
painted this picture, in a way that made Mary Alice feel as if she'd
like to _shake_ the people who walked by with only an uninterested
glance; as if she'd like to bring them back and prod them into life,
and cry, "Don't you see? How _can_ you pass so carelessly what cost so
much in toil and tears?"
Godmother had that kind of a viewpoint about everything, it seemed.
When they went to the theatre, she could tell Mary Alice--before the
curtain went up, and between the acts--such things about the actors and
the playwright and the manager, as made the play trebly interesting.
On the East Side they visited some of the Settlements and "prowled" (as
Godmother loved to call it) around the teeming slums; and Godmother
knew such touching stories of the Old World conditions from which these
myriads of foreign folk had escaped, and of the pathos of their trust
in the New World, as kept Mary Alice's eyes bright and wet almost every
minute.
One beautiful sunny afternoon they rode up on top of a Fifth Avenue
motor 'bus to 90th Street, and Godmother pointed out the houses of many
multi-millionaires. She knew things about many of them, too--sweet,
human, heart-touching things about their disappointments and
unsatisfied yearnings--which made one feel rather sorry for them than
envious of their splendours.
Thus the days passed, and Mary Alice was so happy that--learning from
Godmother some of her pretty ways--she would go closer to that dear
lady, every once in a while, and say: "Pinch me, please--and see if I'm
awake; if it's really true." And Godmother always pinched her,
gravely, and appeared to be much relieved when Mary Alice cried "Ouch!
I _am_!"
They didn't see anybody, except "from a distance" as they said, for
fully a week; they were so busy seeing sights and getting acquainted.
Every night when Godmother came to tuck Mary Alice in, they had the
dearest talks of all. And every night Mary Alice begged to be told the
Secret. But, "Oh, dear no! not yet!" Godmother would always say.
One night, however, she said: "Well, if I'm not almost forgetting to
tell you!"
Mary Alice jumped; that sounded like the Secret. But it
wasn't--although it was "leading up to it."
"Tell me what?" she cried, excitedly.
"Why, to-day I saw one of your fairies."
"My what?"
"Your fairies that you said were left out of your christening party."
"You did! Where?"
"I'll tell you that presently. But it seems, from what this fairy
said, that there are a great number of your fairies with gifts for you,
all waiting quite impatiently to be found. She says that it is
considered quite 'ordinary' now, to send all of a great gift by one
fairy--yes, and not at all safe. For if that one fairy should miss you
and you should not find her, you'd be left terribly unprovided for, you
see. So the gift is usually divided into many parts, and a different
fairy has each part. Now, the gift of beauty, for instance; she is one
of the fairies who has that gift for you."
Mary Alice's eyes opened wide. Her belief in this wonderful Godmother
was such that she was almost prepared to see Godmother wave a wand and
command her to become beautiful--and then, on looking into a mirror, to
find that she was so. "What did she say?" she managed at last to gasp.
"She said: 'Has she pretty hair?' And I answered, 'Yes.' 'Then,' the
fairy went on, 'the one who had that gift must have got to the
christening, somehow. Maybe the mother wished for her--and that is as
good as an invitation.'"
"She did!" cried Mary Alice. "She's always said she watched me so
anxiously when I was a wee baby, hoping I'd have pretty hair."
"Well, that's evidently how that fairy got to you. But it seems there
were two. This one I saw to-day says there are two beauties in 'most
everything--but especially in hair--one is in the thing itself and the
other is in knowing what to do with it. It seems she is the 'what to
do' fairy."
And so she proved to be. For, when she came to luncheon next day, she
told Mary Alice how she had always been "a bit daft about hair." "When
I played with my dolls," she said, "I always cared much more for
combing their hair and doing it up with mother's 'invisible' pins, than
for dressing them. And it used to be the supreme reward for goodness
when I could take down my mother's beautiful hair and play with it for
half an hour. I'm always wanting to play with lovely hair. And when I
saw yours at the theatre the other evening, I couldn't rest until I'd
asked your godmother if she thought you'd let me play with it."
So after luncheon they went into Mary Alice's room and wouldn't let
Godmother go with them. "Not at all!" said the "what to do fairy,"
"you are the select audience. You go into the drawing-room and
'compose yourself.' When we're ready for you, we'll come out."
Then, behind locked doors, with much delightful nonsense and
excitement, she divested Mary Alice's head of sundry awful rats and
puffs, combed out the bunches which Mary Alice wore in her really
lovely hair, brushed smooth the traces of the curling iron, and then
made Mary Alice shut her eyes and "hope to die" if she "peeked once."
When permission to "peek" was given, Mary Alice didn't know herself.
"There!" said the fairy, when the excitement of Godmother's delight had
subsided, "I've always said that the three most important beauty
fairies for a girl to find are the how-to-stand fairy, the how-to-dress
fairy, and the what-to-do-with-your-hair fairy. Anybody can find them
all; and nobody who has found them all needs to feel very bad if she
can't find some of the others who have her christening gifts."
Mary Alice began looking for the others, right away. But even one
fairy had transformed her, outside, from an ordinary-looking girl into
a young woman with a look of remarkable distinction; just as Godmother
had transformed her, within, from a girl with a dreary outlook on life,
to one who found that
"The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."
"Is this the Secret?" she asked Godmother, that night.
"Oh, dear, no!" laughed Godmother, "only the first little step towards
realizing it."
IV
BEING KIND TO A TIRED MAN
One day when Mary Alice had been in New York nearly two weeks--and had
found several fairies--Godmother was obliged to go out, in the
afternoon, to some sort of a committee meeting which would have been
quite uninteresting to an outsider. But Mary Alice had some sewing to
do--something like taking the ugly, ruffly sleeves of cheap white lace
out of her blue taffeta dress and substituting plain dark ones of net
dyed to match the silk; and she was glad to stay at home.
"If an elderly gentleman comes in to call on me, late in the afternoon
but before I get back home," said Godmother, in departing, "ask him in
and be nice to him. He's a lonely body, and he'll probably be tired.
He works very hard."
Mary Alice promised, and went happily to work on the new sleeves which
were to give her arms and shoulders something of an exquisite outline,
in keeping with the fairy way of doing her hair, which Godmother had
taught her to admire in a beautiful marble in the Metropolitan Museum.
About five o'clock, when Godmother's neat little maid had just lighted
the lamps in the pretty drawing-room and replenished the open fire
which was one of the great compensations for the many drawbacks of
living in an old-fashioned house, the gentleman Godmother had expected
called.
Mary Alice went in to see him, and explained who she was. He said he
had heard about her and was glad to make her acquaintance.
