The White Lady (16 page)

“My! Ain’t this pretty!” said Jennie, looking around with satisfaction. “This looks egzactly like a room in my fashion magazine. They tell how you can make rooms real pretty. I been thinking of trying, but I was afraid. Mebbe I’ll try now I’ve seen a real one to pattern after. Oh, do you play the py-ano? Won’t you please play for me? Oh, I’d just love to have a py-ano. I’ve got an organ, cab-net, you know, and I took a whole term of lessons on it. I love to play hymns. I can play ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul,’ and ‘Way Down upon the Swanee River,’ and ‘All by Yourself in the Moonlight.’ Can you play that? I’ve always wanted to see if I got it right. Sarah Briskit sent it to me from Philadelphia. She’s moved there. She was my girlfriend. I haven’t had any since she went away. Mebbe you ’n’ I’ll get to be intimate friends. I think I’d like you real well.”

Constance smiled, though she was conscious of a chilly feeling about her heart. This was not exactly the kind of intimate friend she would have chosen. Nevertheless, it might be that this was all that was left to her. Well, a friend was not to be despised. She would find out what kind of a girl this was.

Jennie rattled on.

“We haven’t been introduced, have we? I’m Jennie Barton. My brother owns the stores across the road. I keep house for him. No, we haven’t anybody else in the family. Pa and Ma died a long while ago. I lived with my aunt in Cross Crick till Si came here and wanted me to keep house for him, but I don’t like it much. I hate to live over a store. I tried to get Si to rent our rooms to another party and get us a house down the street, but he won’t do it. He’s awfully set in his ways. What’s your name? Yes, I know the last part, Weth’rell. Jimmy Watts told me. But I mean your first name. If we’re going to be intimate, we’ll have to know each other’s names. Constance? My! What a funny name! I don’t know but it’s kind of pretty and high sounding, though. But do folks call you that? What do your girlfriends where you come from call you?”

Constance thought quickly. She certainly did not care to have this girl flinging her first name about familiarly in the drugstore. But neither did she care to hurt her feelings.

“Well, you know,” she said pleasantly, “in a city, people are a little more formal than in small places, I guess—”

“Well, what do you like to be called?”

Here was the question. Constance must face it; and in her answer she showed the delicate tact of her high breeding.

“I think I like to be called ‘Miss Wetherill’ usually. That is what I am accustomed to, you know. Except, perhaps here in this room when we are all alone. You might call me ‘Constance’ then, if you wanted to. When other people are by, ‘Miss Wetherill’ would be much more suitable.”

Jennie looked at her in undisguised admiration. Already the subtle something in Constance, which made the difference between them, had impressed her. She was ashamed that she had presumed.

“My!” she said at last. “Constance! I don’t know’s I’d dare! I think I’ll call you just ‘Dear,’ if you don’t mind. You look like ‘Dear,’ do you know it?”

Constance’s heart melted at this sincere admiration. Jennie was crude, but she had possibilities.

The call lasted some time. Constance played for her caller. She explained that “All by Yourself in the Moonlight” was not in her repertoire, but she would play some of her favorites. She tried a bright waltz or two just to test the taste of her guest. Jennie’s eyes shone, and she came and stood beside the piano with great delight in her face, her cheap little high-heeled shoes tapping the floor in time to the music. Then Constance, just out of curiosity, opened a volume of Chopin’s Nocturnes and Preludes.

“Now I’m going to play you something that I love myself. I want to see what you think about it.”

Jennie’s face flashed a smile.

She began to play, and the girl stood in a strange fascination. The music no longer claimed her attention. She was watching the white fingers gliding over the keys, the gleam of the rings, the pretty turn of the wrist, admiring and envying. Oh, to be like this!

She drew a long sigh when the music was over, and sank down in the easy chair near the piano. “I like the other best,” she confessed frankly. “This one makes me feel kind of sad. Do you like to be sad?”

“Why, no,” said Constance, wheeling about to her guest. “It isn’t all sad. Next time you come over I’ll play it again and explain it to you. There’s a meaning to it, you know.”

“There
is
?” said the girl wonderingly. “Is there a meaning to all music? Well, now that’s strange. You know a whole lot of things, don’t you? My! I wish I was like you. I never had much chance. But I take a fashion magazine, and I’m trying to do all I can. I reckon you’ll be a help to me, too. Say, do you mind telling me how you wave your hair? Holly said he thought ’twould be all right for me to ask.”

“Not at all,” said Constance, laughing good-naturedly. “I never wave it at all. It waves itself. It was made that way. But who is Holly?”

“My!” said Jennie. “How nice! Natural curly! I’d just give anything if mine was. Why, Holly? He’s a friend of mine”—Holly had made some progress with Jennie during his walk the night before—“the one I was with for ice cream last night.”

Jennie left soon after that, leaving Constance somewhat shaken in her ideas of things. This was an entirely new type, but amazingly interesting. Yet she could not help wondering what Morris Thayer would say if he could see her playing Chopin to this crude girl.

J
immy had proffered his request about churchgoing early in the week. Constance was somewhat dismayed at the idea at first and told him she would see, but Jimmy was not easily balked in a desire, and he talked so much about the church, the minister, the singing, and the service that Constance, laughing, promised to go with him the following Sabbath evening.

Jimmy appeared with his hair slicked smoothly back and a collar several sizes too large surrounding his thin little neck like a high board fence. It was, in fact, one that had belonged to his elder brother. He put it on for this occasion because it seemed more grown up. He looked very happy and uncomfortable, if those two things can go hand in hand.

Constance, in quiet city Sunday garb, walked by his side, looked at him surreptitiously several times, and tried to keep from smiling. She decided she liked the Jimmy of every day better than this young country coxcomb, and wondered whether it would not be possible for her to persuade him to send for a nice dark blue serge suit from the city and let her pay for it in installments. She did not wish to make him conscious of his attire that evening, so she refrained from suggesting it then, and Jimmy swaggered along by her side, calmly unconscious of the impression he was making upon her. He looked at each one who passed to see whether they saw with whom he was walking. Jimmy was exceedingly proud of his lady.

Constance noticed as they passed into the church how near the drugstore seemed to it. The loungers by the drugstore door could easily hear the singing and preaching when the windows were open. The store was brightly lighted, and business seemed to be going on as briskly as on any other day in the week.

Some of the church windows were open a foot from the bottom, and the heads and shoulders of people could be seen from the street. The church looked pleasant and very bright inside. There was a warmth of spirit in the very atmosphere that made Constance think of her aunt Susan’s home. That was it, it was homelike.

There was only a much-worn red-and-black carpet on the floor reinforced by coarse floor matting in the aisles, and the walls were white plaster, much cracked, with no attempt at decoration. The windows had a border of colored paper in imitation of stained glass, and the rest of the panes were coated with something white that looked like whitewash. The pulpit was plain and stained with a wood grain. The two chairs behind it were covered with haircloth, the donation of an old elder long since departed from this life. It was plain and dingy and unassuming in the extreme, nothing beautiful nor churchlike about it; yet the moment Constance entered, she felt a pleasant sense of cheer and hopefulness.

They sat about halfway up the side, and Constance looked about her in wonder. The church was filling rapidly. It was evident there would be no empty seats. Two old ladies in front nodded their black bonnets together, whispering loudly about some sick one in their family. They took an eager interest in all the newcomers who walked up the aisles, keeping up a running comment on them. Constance quite enjoyed it. Her eyes danced in spite of her, though the rest of her face was demure. She kept reminding herself that this was a church service, though it was so unlike any she had ever attended before that it was hard to realize it.

She compared it to the deeply carpeted aisles and dim arches of the stately edifice in which she had been accustomed to worship on Sundays, and a sense of the vast difference made her wonder whether this church were not a sort of travesty on the sacred temple of the living God. Yet she knew that in her own church there was probably, that evening, no such crowd gathered to worship, for the home church was not well attended in the evening. She had been once at night with a relative who was visiting with them, and there were no more than forty people in the great church. She had heard it said that that was the usual evening attendance except upon special occasions. She had always supposed that most people were weary in the evening and did not care to go to church; for her own part, she had never felt a desire to go again.

The minister came up the aisle just a moment later. The people at the door seemed to flock about him and be anxious each to have a word with him, and many followed in at once as if his coming was what they had been waiting for. The old sexton, a little man with grizzly hair and a roughly shaven face, went to the front door and took hold of the bell rope. With a pause, as if he would give the boys about the steps a warning, he held his hands high for an instant and then threw his weight upon the rope, and the old bell turned and gave forth a doleful utterance, loud, penetrating, wailing, yet solemn as a warning from the grave. The whole church shook with the fervor of its utterance. Constance started, and looked around to see what could possibly be happening. But all the people sat still, and no one seemed to think there was anything unusual going on. Gradually it dawned upon her that the hour for evening service was being rung and that this ceremony had been waited for by that line of boys outside the door, who now were slipping in and filling the back seats decorously enough. An elderly woman with tired eyes and hair sprinkled with gray took her place at the cabinet organ, and as soon as the last reverberation of the bell died away, the organ began.

To Constance’s ear, trained to enjoy a symphony orchestra, the whole thing was awful. The bell seemed like the falling of tin pans and pots and kettles in one awful clanging crash; the organ reminded her of an asthmatic cat, as it drawled out a gospel hymn.

To Jimmy, whose soul rejoiced in both bell and organ, the sounds were solemn and awe-inspiring. Whenever he sat in church—and particularly since this new minister had come—and the old bell began its work, little tingling thrills of mingled joy and awesomeness would go through him. He felt it tonight in double force, because, in a sense, the church was his, and he was displaying it. He glanced at his companion a number of times to see whether she was properly impressed, and was well pleased to see her turn to watch the bell ringer an instant.

Jimmy took delight in song, and he was glad for the tune that had been selected for an opening that evening, “There Is Life for a Look at the Crucified One.” It was a favorite one since Mr. Endicott came there. He had them sing it a great deal. Jimmy liked it. He knew all the words and even growled it out to himself sometimes when he was dressing in the mornings. He found the place in the book and held it out to his companion. Constance took it, her eyes dancing with the merriment she felt over the organ prelude.

But now the people began to sing, and Jimmy was singing. His little colorless brows were drawn together in an earnest frown, and he was putting his whole soul into the words. So were all the people. They dragged horribly, it is true, and their voices were untrained and nasal, but they were singing from the heart, and they were
all
singing. Their minister had trained them to do that. He had impressed it upon them that the music was a part of the service as much as the prayer or the sermon, and it was their part. He had told them that he could not do his part well without their incense of prayer and praise, for which God listened and waited. So they sang.

Presently the spirit in the room came over Constance, too, and she sang. The words were impressive. Constance could not help wondering whether the men around the store heard and whether the words meant anything to them. Was there life for such men as that at this moment if they chose to take it? Could they turn around by simply believing in a system of religion and be different? Did the crucified One have a real power in the world, or not?

Constance was unconsciously dealing with deep theological subjects, but ever since the change had come into her life, she had been more or less filled with the thought of God: how and why He let certain things happen to certain people; whether He really did take any personal interest in individuals as the Bible stated. She would have been incredulous if she had been told that she might as well have been an out-and-out infidel all her life as the kind of negative, indifferent Christian she had been; a Christian only because she had been confirmed when a child and because it belonged to the traditions of her house to be trained that way. It had given her no peace or comfort, nor had it been in any way a part of her daily thought or life. Not until she spent those days with her aunt Susan had it come to her to wonder whether there was anything else in religion for her than the mere going to church once on Sunday and giving to charitable causes when asked.

The people bowed their heads with a slight rustle, and Constance bowed her head also. The minister prayed briefly.