University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER IV.
M. JACQUES.

NOS. 19 and 21 boasted between them an
outside stairway; this was a luxury in
Thicket Street, so great as to affect the rents.

This stairway scaled the room where Nixy lay;
a door between the eastern windows opened upon
it; the hinges were broken and creaked; a couple
of beds and several sleepers lay between her and
it; it so happened, however, that another of
those ragged curtains, such as Lize had given
her, hung between Nixy, sleepers, and door, and
the waking occupants of the room; these last
were economizing the day's earnings, thievings,
or beggings by means of dice and a little rum,
which accounted for the privacy.

Nixy, after some thought and rest, concluded
to aim for the eastern door. If detected in her
attempt, she had no fears of interruption from
any one but Lize; the rest would give themselves

no trouble about her; but it would take little
trouble to waken Lize.

The child stirred as she started, but she hushed
it, — more softly, it must be owned, than she had
ever hushed him before, — and Lize called her,
but it was in a dream.

She made her way with little difficulty to the
creaking door, turned for a moment to look in at
the gamblers, the sleepers, the stained wall, the
curtain behind which old Lize was lying, with a
dull pain, like that of homesickness, for it was the
only home she knew.

When she had closed the door and sat down
upon the stairs outside, it struck her that she had
never understood before that she lived in a world;
for all in a moment it had grown so large!

The stairs were damp, and she shivered with
chill and weakness. Light in the windows of 21
fell, across the low-roofed passage-way that separated
the two houses, upon her; it would have
been difficult to tell whether she looked most
haggard or most frightened.

Ann Peters used to live in 21. She thought
about Ann as she sat there, with a notion of
warming her hands in the light from the windows;

wondered how she liked it at the 'sylum;
wondered what the doctor with the streaked beard
would say to-morrow, when Lize told him that
she had gone.

This reminded her that she must be in haste,
which, in the confusion consequent on coming,
in her weak condition, from the close room to
the cold air, she had for the moment forgotten.

She got up and felt her way down the stairs;
they were very slippery, and it was a slow process.
She dreaded falling, not so much because
of herself as because of the child, for Lize would
hear it cry. The effort to make the descent successfully
excited her a little, and she crossed the
street with considerable ease.

The guitar-maker's window was shut. What
he was singing, or if he were singing, Nixy could
not make out. She passed his door, and on up
to the corner and Jeb's.

Jeb was serving late suppers yet. The door was
open; the smell of coffee and baked beans puffed
out; the lights were bright; the ragged waiter-girls
were flaunting to and fro; a new one in a
yellow dress had Nixy's tables. Jeb himself

stood behind the cigar-counter, casting accounts
on his thumb-nail.

Nixy folded her shawl closely, so that Jeb
could not see the child, and ventured in. The
girls saw her before Jeb did, and laughed. Nixy
stood still and trembled with sudden shame. It
had not occurred to her before that anybody
could laugh at a thing so miserable as she felt
herself to be. She hated the girls for it; she
did not believe that Jeb would laugh.

Jeb did not; I must say that for him. When
he saw her, looking over his thumb-nail at last,
he swore at her good-naturedly, which was far
more Christian.

But when Nixy begged him to take her back
he shook his head.

“Can't do it! What do them bills say?” —
he pointed to the door, where his bills of fare fluttered
in the dark, like the ghosts of good dinners,
Nixy thought, — “`Re-spectable fust-class
dining-saloon for ladies and gentlemen of the
cheapest kind. Meals at all hours aristocratic!'
That 's what it says. Business is business!
Won't do. Gave your place to that yellow gal
next day.”

“But I must go somewhere!” pleaded Nixy.
“I must have things to eat, you know, and
clothes — and things!”

She had really expected Jeb to take her; her
voice broke into a sharp cry.

“Sorry for 't,” said Jeb; “but it 's no use.
Fact is, Mis' Smith would n't hear on it; an' it
would n't do for me to be crossin' of her wishes
and desires decided, ye see. Mis' Smith 's a partikkelar
woman when her mind is sot. Ye 'd
better go, Nix, afore the customers sees you.”

Nixy went slowly out, with all the little ghosts
of dead dinners fluttering about her head, and
the girl in yellow curiously peering under her
shawl. She seemed to be somewhat bewildered;
walked up and down in a vague way, past the
smaller concert-saloon and the tobacconist's, finally
sat down stupidly on the pavement, just where
she happened to be when the idea struck her.

The little guitar-maker seemed to be practising
in her very ears; she had not known before that
she was under his windows.

“Jacques 's drunk,” said somebody, with a
laugh, at Nixy's side. Nixy knew better;
Jacques never got drunk before Thanksgiving.
She moved indignantly away from Moll, — for it
was Moll, — and laid her hand upon the guitar-maker's
door.

“He 's only practising,” she said, absently.
She was wishing that Moll would go away.
As she did not, Nixy pushed open the guitar-shop
door, and shut it closely behind her. M.
Jacques, in the middle of his favorite dirge,
started and stared as she came into the light
from his low oil lamp.

M. Jacques was a little man, with a well-brushed
red wig, worn in spots on top, very
black boots, patched, and cleansed pink gloves;
the gloves he drew on, as he always did when
not at work, and he had laid aside his instrument
at sight of Nixy.

M. Jacques believed in three things, — Rousseau,

woman, and his guitar. His faith, like his
fancy, was a pot-pourri; the same inventive
stroke which welded odd meanings into his
splintered songs wrought from his ragged creed
a species of chrysalis Christianity, of that kind
which a man himself is the last to detect in
himself.

Nixy liked M. Jacques, partly because he was
an old man and a pure one, partly because, when
he sang to her, she forgot that she lived in Thicket
Street. M. Jacques liked Nixy because she
sat still when he played, because she was pretty,
and because he was sorry for her. He was fond
of testing a new song on her, when she dropped
in of an evening, — struck lights through her as
if she had been a transparency. When she had
gone, he prayed “the Soul of Nature,” or “the
Spirit of the Whole,” to shield the girl; though,
to be sure, he called it philosophizing, not prayer.

“I 've come to say good by,” said Nixy,
“and —” In the middle of her sentence the
baby cried.

“Let me see it,” said the old man, gravely.

Nixy unfolded the shawl, and laid the child
across the guitar-maker's patched knees. M.

Jacques had spoken so gently that her startled
color fled quietly away. It was the first time
that she had touched the little thing without a
sense of shame and horror which choked her.

“Jeb would n't take me back,” she explained,
“and so we 're going away, — me and it, you
know.”

“Ma foi! Going where?”

Jacques gave the child back to her, and wiped
his eyes.

“I — don't know.” She gave the old answer,
with the old frightened look. “There must be
somewheres to go to. There must be folks that
'ud take us in. I don't think I 'm so very bad,
Jacques. There must be somewheres.”

She turned to go, wrapping the baby up in her
shawl again, for it was growing late, and it was
according to her plan to be beyond the reach
of the streaked doctor and the 'sylum, with
“hours for things,” to-morrow.

The little Frenchman, coughing acutely, detained
her, while he hunted for a moment in the
drawer behind his counter. This was rather to
command himself than to find money, for all that
he had was in his pocket. All that was in his

pocket he offered her, with something of the
hesitation you might exhibit in transacting
money affairs in a drawing-room. But Nixy
took it simply enough.

“If one were guitar-maker to the Empereur,
one could double it — double it!” said M.
Jacques, meditating. “That is the consequence
of one countree without l'Empereur: there are
no guitars. And if Dahlia —”

“I know,” said Nixy. She had heard so often
about l'Empereur and the dead Dahlia —
Jacques's young wife, who died, with Jacques's
young guitar business, in the Rue Richelieu —
she knew it quite by heart.

“If it were that Dahlia were but here!”
sighed M. Jacques, “you would not find the
need to go from me in this dark — Ugh!” as
Nixy opened the door, “it is très dark! Well,
well! She was one femme très blanche; she
could well afford to cry over a little girl like
you.”

Nixy, as she wrung his pink kid glove, was
crying hard enough over herself. The little
warm shop, and the guitar, and the songs, and
the faint memory of the “femme blanche,”

seemed so safe! The dark, — it was very dark
as she first stepped outside, — and the noise of
the rising wind, sweeping up from the harbor,
gave her a certain terror of herself, which was
worse than the terror of another.

“I don't suppose I do know very much!” said
Nixy, stopping short, between the guitar-shop
and No. 19, to take a last look at their lighted
windows. An artist should have met this child
just then and there.

“That 's the truth!”

Nixy did not know that she had spoken aloud,
till she heard Moll Manners's sharp laugh. She
was vexed at meeting Moll again, but tried not
to show it; she had the feeling that she had no
right to be vexed even with Moll, — a new feeling,
which gave her the discomfort of an unquiet
dream.

Moll was standing in one of those sharp, triangular
shadows in which Thicket Street abounded;
and it seemed to Nixy, as she looked at her,
that all the drunken houses, with their roofs
tipped over their eyes, were dancing dizzily
about her.

“You 're in a hurry,” said Moll, as Nixy moved
uneasily to pass on.

“Yes,” said Nixy.

“What 's up now?”

“I — don't know.”

“Worse for ye! That 's alwers the way. Nobody
knows. I did n't know.”

Nixy made no answer, and the two girls stood
for a moment in silence, looking at each other
across the sharp shadow, into which Moll had
stepped. Nixy, in the pause, noticed a little
scraggly, dank chickweed upon the wall beside
her, and upon the pavement, where Moll had
crushed it with her foot. In the pause, too, the
opposite concert-saloon flung out a burst of ugly
mirth, and the lights flashed into Nixy's young
eyes.

“Chance for ye there, mebbe,” suggested Moll,
with what she meant for real good-nature. Nixy
had thought of that; there had been good girls
known in concert-halls; one could be what one
liked; it was easy work and comfortable pay; it
looked warm behind the lights, and she was growing
much chilled from standing in the damp street.

“But I want to stay honest. There must be
somewheres else!” This she said with perplexed
alarm in her voice, and stepped away

from Moll's sharp shadow, and down the street,
repeating what she had said to Jacques among
the guitars: —

“There must be somewheres! There must be
folks! There 's honest things to do, and I 'll
hunt till I find 'em!”

“Ye 'll hunt till ye die,” called Moll from her
shadow. “Might as well go to the devil one
time as another time, — for go ye must!”

Nixy shuddered. With sudden strength she
sprang away from Moll, from the shadow, from
the noise of the concert-hall; the sunken houses
reeled about her; the lights of No. 19 twinkled
away; the guitar-shop flitted out of sight; she
struck into tangled wharves and salt air suddenly,
and stopping, out of breath, sat down to collect
her strength.

Very faintly she could hear Monsieur Jacques's
guitar: —

In a few moments, for she was afraid to stay

where she was, she weakly threaded her way
out from among the oil-barrels and codfish, from
among the wharves and shipping, through streets
the like of Thicket Street, and tenements the
counterpart of No. 19, with her face set towards
the open country, and her heart in the ways of
those to whom it is promised that “they shall
see God.”