University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.
“STAYING HONEST.”

“HE who has seen the suffering of men has
seen nothing, he must see the suffering of
women; he who has seen the suffering of women
has seen nothing, he must see the suffering of
children.”

Nixy united in her own experience at this
time the suffering of the child and the woman.

Not being familiar with Victor Hugo, she did
not reflect upon the fact in the Frenchman's apt
language. But she considered herself to be very
unhappy, and when a Thicket Street girl considers
herself to be unhappy, she usually means
it. The life which Nixy had led had not cultivated
in her a tendency to “the blues,” it must
be understood.

Upon leaving the service and the house of Mrs.
Zerviah Myrtle, she struck out several miles into
the open country.

The country always seemed to Nixy like a long
breath. It was, to her fancy, purity, rest, renovation.
It was, in her own language, “chances.”

With a certain dogged determination not to
return hastily to Thicket Street, the concertroom,
and Moll, — a determination which I
think even Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle would not have
found “depressing” in view of Nixy's possible
“reformation,” — the girl travelled about in
the beautiful autumn weather, searching for some
one to help her to “stay honest” for seven
days.

It was wonderful weather. All the golden air
melted about her. All the trees hung out, so
she thought, Chinese lanterns for her. A few
brown butterflies lingered languidly in the sun.
A few bright birds twittered on the warm fences.
Torpid grasshoppers, roused and heated, sprung
from the fading grass. The leaves rustled, and
the nuts were sweet upon the ground.

Nixy's eyes and heart took these things in. At
times they reminded her of Lize, and of what
she said about her boy, should he come home.
At other times they recalled the song which
Marthy Ann sung; the birds sang it, the grass-hoppers

hummed it, the butterflies nodded time;
Nixy, stopping to rest, listened, and felt still and
clean for a little while.

It was only for a little while. Some one, suspicious
of “tramps,” disturbed her roughly, or
questioned her curiously; she then forgot about
Marthy; she generally fell to wondering why the
world should be full of butterflies and yellow
leaves, and no place in it for a girl who never
saw either before. Generally, then, she was reminded
that she had eaten no dinner, and both
leaves and butterflies were forgotten.

Through the day, and by sunlight, the edge of
her hungry, homeless, heart-sick life was blunted
a little thus, in spots. They were the nights
which were hard. Some of them she spent out
of doors, under fences, in barns, in sheds. Some
of them she spent under suspicious or ungracious
roofs. We do not, as a people, take to stragglers
kindly; in the thickly settled regions of “Institutions”
and “Retreats,” it is not, perhaps, considered
good sense or good charity. Nothing
romantic happened to Nixy; nobody offered to
adopt or endow her, educate or marry her. People
looked curiously into her colorless face, considered

her young to be travelling alone, gave
her food or advice, as the case might be, and
went about their business. Men and women
who would have wept over her at a prayer-meeting
sent her on her lonely, tempted way without
a thought.

One excellent man, who had lodged her and
prayed with her on Sabbath night, refused her
work in his factory on Monday morning; yet
no rack or stake could have extorted from that
man a deliberate wrong; and for the Lord Jesus
Christ, whose feet the sinner washed, he would
have died as calmly as he cast accounts; he
simply failed to see the links of a syllogism.

Why lay all the stupidity of good men to the
charge of Christianity?

So, years after, I used to hear Nixy say.

As I said, she suffered; she was hungry, cold,
sick, frightened, tempted. These are very simple
words; to a girl of sixteen they are very tremendous
facts.

The worst of it was that nobody wanted her.
Of this she became slowly convinced. Nobody
wanted her “honest” life; there was no room for
it in all this lighted, unspotted, golden country,

as there had been none in Jeb Smith's saloon.
There was no room for it in all God's world.

What then?

Nixy had decided what then, on a certain
damp, drizzly, dreary morning which found her
on the outskirts of a little busy town, very tired
and weak.

“Pale as a peppermint,” the woman said who
gave her breakfast, and did not ask her where
she belonged, “for fear,” she explained, “of hearing
some dreadful story.”

“If nobody does want me,” thought Nixy,
“afore night, I might as well go back. I thought
there was places; I thought there was folks.”

But “nobody had wanted her” when the night
fell. It was rather a chilly night, and she
stopped, caring little where she went, in search
of a convenient place to warm her hands.

Leaning weakly and dejectedly on a fence,
partly in thought, partly in exhaustion, a young
girl, passing, saw her. There was low light in
the west, and Nixy's face turned westward.
Her hair was much tumbled, and her dress disordered.
She was perfectly pale, and her mouth
had drawn at the corners like the mouth of a

person in a fever. Her hands were dropped at
her sides, like a paralytic's. There was a little
of the same kind of attraction about her which
there is about the Dying Gladiator. She would
haunt one's dreams rather than touch one's
heart. Her youth and possible beauty softened,
but did not mitigate, this impression. On
a background of Roman ruins she would have
been as effective as a rich romance; against a
Yankee fence she was simply painful.

The girl who passed her — warm, rosy, elastic,
wrapped in some kind of soft white woollen garment
— half paused, turning to see who the
straggler was. Nixy, too, turned, and their eyes
met for a moment.

“You look cold!” said the young lady, just as
she would have said good morning.

“I do well enough,” said Nixy, sullenly.

“Come into the house and get warm, Mother
would be glad to have you.”

Nixy refused shortly, and moved away. She
felt instinctively repelled from this snow-white,
safe, comfortable girl; did not wish to be under
obligations to her, — a girl no older than herself,
yet so white, so safe, so comfortable!

The young lady tripped up the steps and shut
the door. Nixy heard her as she roamed defiantly
away; wondered what was inside of the
door; half wished that she had stayed to get
warm and see.

She warmed herself finally in a grocery store.
The store had a bright sign, a bright window,
a bright fire, and a bright old man, and only one,
behind the counter. The old man was singing.
Partly because he was old, and partly because
he was singing, he reminded her of Monsieur
Jacques, and she ventured in.

The old man gave her a keen look over his
spectacles.

“The world,” said he, “is upside-down, — quite.
It is like the Scotchman's favorite parson; it
`joombles the joodgment and confoonds the
sense.' I give it up! One must stand on one's
own feet. Sit down.”

Nixy, supposing herself to be so directed, had
remained standing on “her own feet” by the
fire. Much perplexed, she sat down. She
leaned her head upon her hand, and, as the
grocer offered no further remarks, she sat very
still.

“She ought to be in the nursery,” said the old
gentleman, after a pause. “I give it up!”

The old gentleman appeared to be answering
an unasked conundrum, which embarrassed Nixy,
because she did not know but she was expected
to guess it. She had, indeed, half decided to ask
him; but customers came in, and she refrained.

She discovered, in a few moments, that she
was becoming the object of remark, and, thinking
that it might be unpleasant to the old gentleman
to be found sheltering her, she started to
leave the store. But he stopped her peremptorily.

“Give it up? No! If it 's anybody's business
whom I choose to have sit by my fire, the
world 's come to a pass indeed. Stay where
you are!”

The grocer nodded so furiously, and glared at
his customers so alarmingly, that Nixy, not knowing
what else to do, stayed.

“Hobbs — all over,” observed a little fellow
buying coffee, glancing at Nixy then, and whispering.
Uncomfortable at being thus discussed,
Nixy rose with a sigh of relief when the grocer's
customers, one by one, had dropped out.

“I did n't mean to make you trouble,” she said,

speaking quite low. It was beginning to grow
upon her that she made a great deal of trouble in
the world.

“Trouble, indeed!” exclaimed Mr. Hobbs.
“You 'd better give that up! If Mrs. Hobbs —
well, in fact, there never was a Mrs. Hobbs (the
world is all upside-down!) or you 'd go to my
house to-night short metre. But if money —”

“I 'm not a beggar,” said Nixy; for this did
not seem to her like taking money from Monsieur
Jacques.

“One must stand on one's own feet, to be sure,”
meditated Mr. Hobbs. “Perhaps you 're right.
All I 've got to say, then, is, Don't give it up!”

But Nixy was just about ready to give it up.

Dusk deepened into dark early that night,
and heavily. Lights twinkled thickly, however,
all over the little town, and the girl seemed to
herself, on leaving the grocer's, to be walking confusedly
in a golden net. It reminded her of the
red web that the red spider had woven on the
walls of the second front seaward corner in No.
19. In the same manner it grew and brightened.
It narrowed and tightened in the same manner.
It was probably the association of the fancy, or

want of supper, or the tremulous confusion caused
by Mr. Hobbs's coffee-customer, who, from a
doorstep somewhere, startled and spoke rudely to
her, which induced the conviction that she heard
Monsieur Jacques; but all the way through the
golden web she heard him: —

Following the bright meshes of the web, quite
at the will of the web it seemed to her, she found
herself suddenly leaning on the fence again,
where the girl in snow-white woollen had spoken
with her. Before, she had scarcely noticed the
house. Now, the lamps being lighted, and the
curtains raised, one could not but notice it, — not
so much for any one thing, or any rich thing in
the furnishing of the house, but for a certain
fine, used, home-like air which invested the whole,
as far as Nixy could see it, to the very crickets, —
an air which even Nixy, and even then, felt, as
one feels the effect of a very intricate harmony
which one appreciates without understanding.

She unlatched the gate very softly, and crept
— still, as it seemed, in the will of the glittering
web — through the yard to the window.