Part 23 (2/2)

Janet arguing with the fish man, Janet experimenting with the telephone the lawyer had put in the hall, Janet simultaneously polis.h.i.+ng a window and singing.

”Ouch--” Felicia would pull imaginary rheumatism through an imaginary cas.e.m.e.nt, ”Oh weel--oh weel--to look at the du-urt! it's sickenin'!

weel--

You tak the high road And I'll tak the low road And I'll be in Scotland before ye, Oh, I and my true luv shall never be--

oot of the way below there--summat is drapping--Th' De'il tak my bit of soapie!--

'On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.'”

The folk who lived in the rear alley used to lean, sill-warming fas.h.i.+on on their windows, the children shrilly whistling the chorus, the men forgetting their pipes, the women sniffling as women do when they hear old ballads, for of course once Felice had started ”pretending” she didn't stop. A moment after she'd been Janet she'd be Marthy, dear, lean, grizzled old Marthy, dead these many years, singing,

”In the gloaming Oh, my darling, Think not bitterly of me--”

It never occurred to any of them, least of all Felice, how many, many hours she spent ”pretending.” Two evenings a week at chess with Uncle Peter--(thank heaven Dudley Hamilt came no more--!) Sunday afternoons with the Wheezy's gentle old fellow sufferers, almost all the other evenings in the garden. She was using ounce after ounce of her precious strength, pouring out her self to the whole world around her, making it laugh, making it weep, making it thrill, making it--work.

She stopped one morning to see Justice Harlow. He stared at her as though it were the first time he had ever seen her. She no longer wore eccentric garb. Dulcie had divided with her. She had a simple hat and a serge frock. She was shabby, to be sure, but it was no longer a ridiculous shabbiness. She was pale and wan, even paler than when she had first come to him but the timidity, the uncertainty, had gone. Her eyes were deeper. They shone like jewels; the softened outlines of her profile were thinner, clearer; her beautiful mouth had grown firm and a bit of gray showed in her hair. She was altogether adorable, like a wee wren after a stormy day. The stilted phrases were slipping away.

She spoke more alertly. Bits of Dulcie's lingo were creeping into her speech. But she still answered with a literalness that took one's breath away.

”Now whadda ye know about that?” asked the Justice all unconscious that he was colloquial.

”I do not know anything about it,” she said demurely, and added with one of her casual references to the ill.u.s.trious dead--she treated them all as though they were contemporary--”I think Heloise might know what to do. One of the things Abelard loved about her was that she always knew what to do--she was vairee good at administrating, like Janet, don't you think?”

All the while she was filling her house--with gentle paupers! Think you how Janet raged the day she brought home the most useless citizen of all--the Poetry Girl.

Felice had been sewing for two or three days for a dentist's wife, a rather amusing job for she was stationed in an upstairs window that let one look down two streets, and at the other window in the room the dentist's white haired mother sat and gossiped softly about all the persons who came.

It was the dentist's mother who saw the Poetry Girl first, a thin figure who walked uncertainly up and down the street, eyeing doctors'

signs. It was a regular streetful of doctors.

”There's a poor thing that's lost her address,” crooned Mrs. Miller, ”she does look sick. It's a tooth, too, see how she holds her hand to her face, you can almost see the pain.”

Felice saw, that is she thought she saw. Of course no one could really see such an ENORMOUS pain as the one that was sweeping the Poetry Girl along. It was too big to see.

It was something like this. Orange red, pale blue, E flat minor, acrobatic, Ariel-like in its changes. Sometimes it made her careen heavily toward the curb--that was the time it made her head seem big and her feet very far away. Sometimes she could walk but she wanted to scream, sometimes she felt like a volcano, a Vesuvius of shooting pains, sometimes it hammered at her ears and she couldn't hear at all.

But one thing she remembered all the time, that she had exactly twenty-seven cents in her purse.

She was planning whether she'd better dash up to a door and act as though she had an appointment and give a false address for the bill to be sent or whether she'd better announce she hadn't any way to pay the dentist and would he take his pay in poetry, or whether she'd just shriek, ”Stop it!”

In the end her body decided for her. It just flopped down outside the house where Felicia and Mrs. Miller were watching.

The Poetry Girl was normally very sweet tempered but she wasn't at all her usual self when she opened her eyes. She was in an operating chair and she looked accusingly at the man beside her.

”You shouldn't sprinkle me,” she murmured reproachfully, ”I'm wet enough as it is and I've no rubbers;--” the faint blue shadows under her eyes accused them all. Her thin hand tried to pat her rumpled hair, ”I do believe you've lost another hairpin for me--I'd only three--” she was petulant, ”And if you do pull it I can't pay you--”

she was defiant. ”Not unless you need some poetry written.

”Or a play. I can write a play. But I can't sell knit underwear or I can't do general housework--I'm only--a toothache--Bobby Burns wrote me--maybe you've read me--”

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