Polly Oliver's Problem

"And I don't wonder. There is magic in that girl for sick or sorrowing people. I wish you could have seen and heard her. Her hair is full of warmth and color; her lips and cheeks are pink; her eyes are bright with health and mischief, and beaming with love, too; her smile is like sunshine, and her voice as glad as a wild bird's. I never saw a creature so alive and radiant, and I could feel that the weak little creatures drank in her strength and vigor, without depleting her, as flowers drink in the sunlight.

"As she stood up and made ready to go, she caught sight of me, and ejaculated, with the most astonished face, 'Why, it is my lady in black!' Then, with a blush, she added, 'Excuse me! I spoke without thinking–I always do. I have thought of you very often since I gave you the flowers; and as I did n't know your name, I have always called you my lady in black.'

"'I should be very glad to be your "lady" in any color,' I answered, 'and my other name is Mrs. Bird.' Then I asked her if she would not come and see me. She said, 'Yes, with pleasure,' and told me also that her mother was ill, and that she left her as little as possible; whereupon I offered to go and see her instead.

"Now, here endeth the first lesson, and here beginneth the second, namely, my new plan, on which I wish to ask your advice. You know that all the money Donald and I used to spend on Carol's nurses, physicians, and what not, we give away each Christmas Day in memory of her. It may be that we give it in monthly installments, but we try to plan it and let people know about it on that day. I propose to create a new profession for talented young women who like to be helpful to others as well as to themselves. I propose to offer this little Miss Oliver, say twenty-five dollars a month, if she will go regularly to the Children's Hospital and to the various orphan asylums just before supper and just before bedtime, and sing and tell stories to the children for an hour. I want to ask her to give two hours a day only, going to each place once or twice a week; but of course she will need a good deal of time for preparation. If she accepts, I will see the managers of the various institutions, offer her services, and arrange for the hours. I am confident that they will receive my protegee with delight, and I am sure that I shall bring the good old art of story-telling into fashion again, through this gifted girl. Now, John, what do you think?"

"I heartily approve, as usual. It is a novelty, but I cannot see why it 's not perfectly expedient, and I certainly can think of no other way in which a monthly expenditure of twenty-five dollars will carry so much genuine delight and comfort to so many different children. Carol would sing for joy if she could know of your plan."

"Perhaps she does know it," said Mrs. Bird softly.

And so it was settled.

Polly's joy and gratitude at Mrs. Bird's proposal baffles the powers of the narrator. It was one of those things pleasant to behold, charming to imagine, but impossible to describe. After Mrs. Bird's carriage had been whirled away, she watched at the window for Edgar, and, when she saw him nearing the steps, did not wait for him to unlock the door, but opened it from the top of the stairs, and flew down them to the landing as lightly as a feather.

As for Edgar himself, he was coming up with unprecedented speed, and they nearly fell into each other's arms as they both exclaimed, in one breath, "Hurrah!" and then, in another, "Who told you?"

"How did you know it?" asked Edgar. "Has Tom Mills been here?"

"What is anybody by the name of Mills to me in my present state of mind!" exclaimed Polly. "Have you some good news, too? If so, speak out quickly."

"Good news? I should think I had; what else were you hurrahing about? I 've won the scholarship, and I have a chance to earn some money! Tom Mills's eyes are in bad condition, and the oculist says he must wear blue goggles and not look at a book for two months. His father wrote to me to-day, and he asks if I will read over the day's lessons with Tom every afternoon or evening, so that he can keep up with the class; and says that if I will do him this great service he will be glad to pay me any reasonable sum. He 'ventured' to write me on Professor Hope's recommendation."

"Oh, Edgar, that is too, too good!" cried Polly, jumping up and down in delight. "Now hear my news. What do you suppose has happened?"

"Turned-up noses have come into style."

"Insulting! That is n't the spirit I showed when you told me your good news."

"You 've found the leak in the gas stove."

"On the contrary, I don't care if all the gas in our establishment leaks from now to–the millennium. Guess again, stupid!"

"Somebody has left you a million."

"No, no!" (scornfully.) "Well, I can't wait your snail's pace. My lady in black, Mrs. Donald Bird, has been here all the afternoon, and she offers me twenty-five dollars a month to give up the Baer cubs and tell stories two hours a day in the orphan asylums and the Children's Hospital! Just what I love to do! Just what I always longed to do! Just what I would do if I were a billionaire! Is n't it heavenly?"

"Well, well! We are in luck, Polly. Hurrah! Fortune smiles at last on the Noble-Oliver household. Let's have a jollification! Oh, I forgot. Tom Mills wants to come to dinner. Will you mind?"

"Let him come, goggles and all, we 'll have the lame and the halt, as well as the blind, if we happen to see any. Mamma won't care. I told her we 'd have a feast to-night that should vie with any of the old Roman banquets! Here 's my purse; please go down on Sutter Street–ride both ways–and buy anything extravagant and unseasonable you can find. Get forced tomatoes; we'll have 'chops and tomato sauce' à la Mrs. Bardell; order fried oysters in a browned loaf; get a quart of ice cream, the most expensive variety they have, a loaf of the richest cake in the bakery, and two chocolate eclairs apiece. Buy hothouse roses, or orchids, for the table, and give five cents to that dirty little boy on the corner there. In short, as Frank Stockton says, 'Let us so live while we are up that we shall forget we have ever been down'!" and Polly plunged upstairs to make a toilet worthy of the occasion.

The banquet was such a festive occasion that Yung Lee's Chinese reserve was sorely tried, and he giggled more than once, while waiting on the table.

Polly had donned a trailing black silk skirt of her mother's, with a white chuddah shawl for a court train, and a white lace waist to top it. Her hair was wound into a knot on the crown of her head and adorned with three long black ostrich feathers, which soared to a great height, and presented a most magnificent and queenly appearance.

Tom Mills, whose father was four times a millionaire, wondered why they never had such gay times at his home, and tried to fancy his sister Blanche sparkling and glowing and beaming over the prospect of earning twenty-five dollars a month.

Then, when bedtime came, Polly and her mother talked it all over in the dark.

"Oh, mamacita, I am so happy! It's such a lovely beginning, and I shall be so glad, so glad to do it! I hope Mrs. Bird did n't invent the plan for my good, for I have been frightfully shabby each time she has seen me, but she says she thinks of nothing but the children. Now we will have some pretty things, won't we? And oh! do you think, not just now, but some time in the distant centuries, I can have a string of gold beads?"

"I do, indeed," sighed Mrs. Oliver. "You are certainly in no danger of being spoiled by luxury in your youth, my poor little Pollykins; but you will get all these things some time, I feel sure, if they are good for you, and if they belong to you. You remember the lines I read the other day:–

"'Hast not thy share? On winged feet,Lo! it rushes thee to meet;And all that Nature made thy own,Floating in air or pent in stone,Will rive the hills and swim the seaAnd, like thy shadow, follow thee.'"

"Yes," said Polly contentedly; "I am satisfied. My share of the world's work is rushing to meet me. To-night I could just say with Sarah Jewett's Country Doctor, 'My God, I thank thee for my future.'"

CHAPTER XII.

THE GREAT SILENCE

The months of April and May were happy ones. The weather was perfect, as only California weather understands the art of being; the hills were at their greenest; the wind almost forgot to blow; the fields blazed in wild-flowers; day after day rose in cloudless splendor, and day after day the Golden Gate shone like a sapphire in the sun.

Polly was inwardly nervous. She had the "awe of prosperity" in her heart, and everything seemed too bright to last.

Both she and Edgar were very busy. But work that one loves is no hardship, especially when one is strong and young and hopeful, and when one has great matters at stake, such as the health and wealth of an invalid mother, or the paying off of disagreeable debts.

Even the limp Mrs. Chadwick shared in the general joy; for Mr. Greenwood was so utterly discouraged with her mismanagement of the house, so determined not to fly to ills he knew not of, and so anxious to bring order out of chaos, that on the spur of the moment one day he married her. On the next day he discharged the cook, hired a better one the third, dunned the delinquent boarder the fourth, and collected from him on the fifth; so the May check (signed Clementine Chadwick Greenwood) was made out for eighty-five dollars.

But in the midst of it all, when everything in the outside world danced with life and vigor, and the little house could hardly hold its sweet content,–without a glimmer of warning, without a moment's fear or dread, without the precious agony of parting, Mrs. Oliver slipped softly, gently, safely, into the Great Silence.

Mercifully it was Edgar, not Polly, who found her in her accustomed place on the cushions, lying with closed eyelids and smiling lips.

It was half past five. . . . Polly must have gone out at four, as usual, and would be back in half an hour. . . . Yung Lee was humming softly in the little kitchen. . . . In five minutes Edgar Noble had suffered, lived, and grown ten years. He was a man. . . . And then came Polly,–and Mrs. Bird with her, thank Heaven!–Polly breathless and glowing, looking up at the bay window for her mother's smile of welcome.

In a few seconds the terrible news was broken, and Polly, overpowered with its awful suddenness, dropped before it as under a physical blow.

It was better so. Mrs. Bird carried her home for the night, as she thought, but a merciful blur stole over the child's tired brain, and she lay for many weeks in a weary illness of delirium and stupor and fever.

Meanwhile, Edgar acted as brother, son, and man of the house. He it was who managed everything, from the first sorrowful days up to the closing of the tiny upper flat where so much had happened: not great things of vast outward importance, but small ones,–little miseries and mortifications and struggles and self-denials and victories, that made the past half year a milestone in his life.

A week finished it all! It takes a very short time, he thought, to scatter to the winds of heaven all the gracious elements that make a home. Only a week; and in the first days of June, Edgar went back to Santa Barbara for the summer holidays without even a sight of his brave, helpful girl-comrade.

He went back to his brother's congratulations, his sister's kisses, his mother's happy tears, and his father's hearty hand-clasp, full of renewed pride and belief in his eldest son. But there was a shadow on the lad's high spirits as he thought of gay, courageous, daring Polly, stripped in a moment of all that made life dear.

"I wish we could do something for her, poor little soul," he said to his mother in one of their long talks in the orange-tree sitting-room. "Tongue cannot tell what Mrs. Oliver has been to me, and I 'm not a bit ashamed to own up to Polly's influence, even if she is a girl and two or three years younger than I am. Hang it! I 'd like to see the fellow that could live under the same roof as those two women, and not do the best that was in him! Has n't Polly some relatives in the East?"

"No near ones, and none that she has ever seen. Still, she is not absolutely alone, as many girls would be under like circumstances. We would be only too glad to have her here; the Howards have telegraphed asking her to spend the winter with them in Cambridge; I am confident Dr. Winship will do the same when the news of Mrs. Oliver's death reaches Europe; and Mrs. Bird seems to have constituted herself a sort of fairy Godmother in chief. You see everybody loves Polly; and she will probably have no less than four homes open to her. The fact is, if you should put Polly on a desert island, the bees and the butterflies and the birds would gather about her; she draws everything and everybody to her magically. Then, too, she is not penniless. Rents are low, and she cannot hope to get quite as much for the house as before, but even counting repairs, taxes, and furnishings, we think she is reasonably certain of fifty dollars a month."

"She will never be idle, unless this sorrow makes a great change in her. Polly seems to have been created to 'become' by 'doing.'"

"Yet she does not in the least relish work, Edgar. I never knew a girl with a greater appetite for luxury. One cannot always see the deepest reasons in God's providence as applied to one's own life and character; but it is often easy to understand them as one looks at other people and notes their growth and development. For instance, Polly's intense love for her invalid mother has kept her from being selfish. The straitened circumstances in which she has been compelled to live have prevented her from yielding to self-indulgence or frivolity. Even her hunger for the beautiful has been a discipline; for since beautiful things were never given to her ready-made, she has been forced to create them. Her lot in life, which she has always lamented, has given her a self-control, a courage, a power, which she never would have had in the world had she grown up in luxury. She is too young to see it, but it is very clear to me that Polly Oliver is a glorious product of circumstances."

"But," objected Edgar, "that is not fair. You are giving all the credit to circumstances, and none to Polly's own nature."

"Not at all. If there had not been the native force to develop, experience would have had nothing to work upon. As it is, her lovely childish possibilities have become probabilities, and I look to see the girlish probabilities blossom into womanly certainties."

Meanwhile Polly, it must be confessed, was not at the present time quite justifying the good opinion of her friends.

She had few of the passive virtues. She could bear sharp stabs of misfortune, which fired her energy and pride, but she resented pin pricks. She could carry heavy, splendid burdens cheerfully, but she fretted under humble cares. She could serve by daring, but not by waiting. She would have gone to the stake or the scaffold, I think, with tolerable grace; but she would probably have recanted any article of faith if she had been confronted with life-imprisonment.

Trouble that she took upon herself for the sake of others, and out of love, she accepted sweetly. Sorrows that she did not choose, which were laid upon her without her consent, and which were "just the ones she did not want, and did not need, and would not have, and could not bear,"–these sorrows found her unwilling, bitter, and impatient.

Yet if life is a school and we all have lessons to learn in it, the Great Teacher will be unlikely to set us tasks which we have already finished. Some review there must be, for certain things are specially hard to keep in mind, and have to be gone over and over, lest they fade into forgetfulness. But there must be continued progress in a life school. There is no parrot repetition, sing-song, meaningless, of words that have ceased to be vital. New lessons are to be learned as fast as the old ones are understood. Of what use to set Polly tasks to develop her bravery, when she was already brave?

Courage was one of the little jewels set in her fairy crown when she was born, but there was a round, empty space beside it, where Patience should have been. Further along was Daring, making a brilliant show, but again there was a tiny vacancy waiting for Prudence.

The crown made a fine appearance, on the whole, because the large jewels were mostly in place, and the light of these blinded you to the lack of the others; but to the eye of the keen observer there was a want of symmetry and completeness.

Polly knew the unfinished state of her fairy crown as well as anybody else. She could not plead ignorance as an excuse; but though she would have gone on polishing the great gems with a fiery zeal, she added the little jewels very slowly, and that only on compulsion.

There had been seven or eight weeks of partial unconsciousness, when the sorrow and the loneliness of life stole into her waking dreams only vaguely and at intervals; when she was unhappy, and could not remember why; and slept, to wake and wonder and sleep again.

Then there were days and weeks when the labor of living was all that the jaded body could accomplish; when memory was weak; when life began at the pillow, and ended at the foot of the bed, and the universe was bounded by the chamber windows.

But when her strength came back, and she stood in the middle of the floor, clothed and in her right mind, well enough to remember,–oh! then indeed the deep waters of bitterness rolled over poor Polly's head and into her heart, and she sank beneath them without a wish or a struggle to rise.

"If it had been anything else!" she sobbed. "Why did God take away my most precious, my only one to live for, when I was trying to take care of her, trying to be good, trying to give back the strength that had been poured out on me,–miserable, worthless me! Surely, if a girl was willing to do without a father and sisters and brothers, without good times and riches, willing to work like a galley slave, willing to 'scrimp' and plan and save for ever and ever; surely 'they' might be willing that she should keep her mother!"

Poor Polly! Providence at this time seemed nothing more than a collection of demons which she classified under the word "they," and which she felt certain were scourging her pitilessly and needlessly. She could not see any reason or justification in "their" cruelties,–for that was the only term she could apply to her afflictions.

Mrs. Bird had known sorrow, and she did her best to minister to the troubled and wrong little heart; but it was so torn that it could be healed only by the soft balm of Time.

Perhaps, a long while after such a grief,–it is always "perhaps" in a great crisis, though the certainty is ours if we will but grasp it,–perhaps the hidden meaning of the sorrow steals gently into our softened hearts. We see, as in a vision, a new light by which to work; we rise, cast off the out-grown shell, and build us a more stately mansion, in which to dwell till God makes that home also too small to hold the ever-growing soul!

CHAPTER XIII.

A GARDEN FLOWER, OR A BANIAN-TREE

In August Mr. John Bird took Polly to the Nobles' ranch in Santa Barbara, in the hope that the old scenes and old friends might soothe her, and give her strength to take up the burden of life with something of her former sunshiny spirit.

Edgar was a junior now, back at his work, sunburned and strong from his summer's outing. He had seen Polly twice after his return to San Francisco; but the first meeting was an utter failure, and the second nearly as trying. Neither of them could speak of the subject that absorbed their thoughts, nor had either courage enough to begin other topics of conversation. The mere sight of Edgar was painful to the girl now, it brought to mind so much that was dear, so much that was past and gone.

In the serenity of the ranch-life, the long drives with Margery and Philip, the quiet chats with Mrs. Noble, Polly gained somewhat in strength; but the old "spring," vitality, and enthusiasm had vanished for the time, and the little circle of friends marveled at this Polly without her nonsense, her ready smiles, her dancing dimples, her extravagances of speech.

Once a week, at least, Dr. George would steal an hour or two, and saddle his horse to take Polly for a gallop over the hills, through the cañons, or on the beach.

His half-grave, half-cheery talks on these rides did her much good. He sympathized and understood and helped, even when he chided, and Polly sometimes forgot her own troubles in wondering whether Dr. George had not suffered and overcome a good many of his own.

"You make one great error, my child," he once said, in response to one of Polly's outbursts of grief; "and it is an error young people very naturally fall into. You think that no one was ever chastened as you are. You say, with Jeremiah, 'No prophet is afflicted like unto this prophet!' Now you are simply bearing your own share of the world's trouble. How can you hope to escape the universal lot? There are dozens of people within sight of this height of land who have borne as much, and must bear as much again. I know this must seem a hard philosophy, and I should not preach it to any but a stout little spirit like yours, my Polly. These things come to all of us; they are stern facts; they are here, and they must be borne; but it makes all the difference in the world how we bear them. We can clench our fists, close our lips tightly, and say, 'Since I must, I can;' or we can look up and say cheerfully, 'I will!' The first method is philosophical and strong enough, but there is no sweetness in it. If you have this burden to carry, make it as light, not as heavy, as you can; if you have this grief to endure, you want at least to come out of it sweeter and stronger than ever before. It seems a pity to let it go for nothing. In the largest sense of the word, you can live for your mother now as truly as you did in the old times; you know very well how she would have had you live."

Polly felt a sense of shame steal over her as she looked at Dr. George's sweet, strong smile and resolute mouth, and she said, with the hint of a new note in her voice:–

"I see, and I will try; but how does one ever learn to live without loving,–I mean the kind of loving I had in my life? I know I can live for my mother in the largest sense of the word, but to me all the comfort and sweetness seems to tuck itself under the word in its 'little' sense. I shall have to go on developing and developing until I am almost developed to death, and go on growing and growing in grace until I am ready to be caught up in a chariot of fire, before I can love my mother 'in the largest sense of the word.' I want to cuddle my head on her shoulder, that's what I want. Oh, Dr. George, how does one contrive to be good when one is not happy? How can one walk in the right path when there does n't seem to be any brightness to go by?"

"My dear little girl," and Dr. George looked soberly out on the ocean, dull and lifeless under the gray October sky, "when the sun of one's happiness is set, one lights a candle called 'Patience,' and guides one's footsteps by that!"

"If only I were not a rich heiress," said Polly next morning, "I dare say I should be better off; for then I simply could n't have gone to bed for two or three months, and idled about like this for another. But there seems to be no end to my money. Edgar paid all the bills in San Francisco, and saved twenty out of our precious three hundred and twelve dollars. Then Mrs. Greenwood's rent-money has been accumulating four months, while I have been visiting you and Mrs. Bird; and the Greenwoods are willing to pay sixty dollars a month for the house still, even though times are dull; so I am hopelessly wealthy,–but on the whole I am very glad. The old desire to do something, and be something, seems to have faded out of my life with all the other beautiful things. I think I shall go to a girls' college and study, or find some other way of getting through the hateful, endless years that stretch out ahead! Why, I am only a little past seventeen, and I may live to be ninety! I do not see how I can ever stand this sort of thing for seventy-three years!"

Mrs. Noble smiled in spite of herself. "Just apply yourself to getting through this year, Polly dear, and let the other seventy-two take care of themselves. They will bring their own cares and joys and responsibilities and problems, little as you realize it now. This year, grievous as it seems, will fade by and by, until you can look back at it with resignation and without tears."