The Gay Cockade
wares. "Don't stick round, Tommy," she said. "I shall do better alone."
But as she raised her head and saw the eyes of the men upon her a rich
color surged into her cheeks.
She put out her little sign bravely:
HOME-MADE SANDWICHES--TWENTY CENTS
With a sense of adventure upon them the men flocked down at once. They
bought at first because the wares were offered by a pretty girl. They
came back to buy because never had there been such sandwiches.
Jane had improved upon her first idea. There were not only ham
sandwiches; there were baked beans between brown bread, thin slices of
broiled bacon in hot baking-powder biscuit. Henry Bittinger said to
Atwood Jones afterward: "The food was so good that if she had been as
ugly as sin she'd have got away with it."
"She isn't ugly," said Atwood, and had a fleeting moment of speculation
as to whether Jane with her red hair would fit into his plutocratic
future.
Jane had made fifty sandwiches. She sold them all, and took ten dollars
home with her.
"I shall make a hundred next time," she said to Tommy, whom she picked
up on the way back. "And--it wasn't so dreadful, Tommy."
But that night as she lay in bed looking out toward the mountain,
silver-tipped in the moonlight, she had a shivering sense of the eyes of
some of the men--of Tillotson, who kept the hotel, and of others of his
kind.
O-liver had stayed at home that Saturday night to write a certain weekly
letter. He had stayed at home also because he didn't approve of Jane.
"But you haven't seen her," Tommy protested.
"I know the type."
On Sunday morning Tommy brought him a baked-bean sandwich. "It isn't as
fresh as it might be. But you can see what she's giving us."
There were months of O-liver's life which had been spent with a
grandmother in Boston. His grandmother had made brown bread and she had
baked beans. And now as he ate his sandwich there was the savor of all
the gastronomic memories of a healthy and happy childhood.
"It's delicious," he said, "but she'd better not mix with that crowd."
"She doesn't mix," said Tommy.
"She'll have to." O-liver had in mind a red-haired woman, raw-boned,
with come-hither eyes. Her kind was not uncommon. Tommy's infatuation
would of course elevate her to a pedestal.
"She's going to make a hundred sandwiches next week," Tommy vouchsafed.
O-liver's mind could scarcely compass one hundred sandwiches. "She'd
better stick to her leeks and lettuce."
He rode away the next Saturday night. It was his protest against the
interest roused in the community by this Jane who sold sandwiches. He
heard of her everywhere. Some of the men were respectful and some were
not. It depended largely on the nature of the particular male.
O-liver rode Mary Pick and wore his straw helmet. His way led down into
the valley and up again and down, until at last he came to the sea. Then
he followed the water's edge, letting Mary Pick dance now and then on
the hard beach, with the waves curling up like cream, and beyond the
waves a stretch of pale azure to the horizon.
He reached finally a fantastic settlement. Against the sky towered walls
which might have inclosed an ancient city--walls built of cloth and wood
instead of stone. Beyond these walls were thatched cottages which had no
occupants; a quaint church which had no congregation; a Greek temple
which had no vestals, no sacred fire, no altar; hedges which had no
roots. O-liver weighing the hollowness of it all had thought whimsically
of an old nursery rime:
The first sent a goose without a bone;
The second sent a cherry without a stone;
The third sent a blanket without a thread;
The fourth sent a book that no man could read.
At the end of the settlement was a vast studio lighted by a glass roof.
Entering, O-liver was transported at once to the dance hall on the
Barbary Coast--a great room with a bar at one end, the musicians on a
platform at the other, a stairway leading upward. Groups of people
waited for a signal to dance, to drink, to act whatever part had been
assigned them--people with unearthly pink complexions. The heat was
intense.
With her face upturned to the director, who was mounted on a chair,
stood a childish creature who was pinker, if possible, than the rest.
She had fluffy hair of pale gold. She ran up the stairway presently, and
the light was turned on her. It made of her fluffy hair a halo. In the
strong glare everything about her was overemphasized, but O-liver knew
that when she showed up on the screen she would be entrancing.
He had first seen her on the screen. He had met her afterward at her
hotel. She had seemed as ingenuous as the parts she played. Perhaps she
was. He could never be quite sure. Perhaps the money she had made
afterward had spoiled her. She had jumped from fifty dollars a week to a
thousand.
After that O-liver could give her nothing. He had an allowance from his
mother of three thousand a year. Fluffy Hair made as much as that in
three weeks. Where he had been king of his own domain he became a sort
of gentleman footman, carrying her sables and her satchels. But that was
not the worst of it. He found that they had not a taste in common. She
laughed at his books, at his love of sea and sky. She even laughed at
his Mary Pick, whose name suggested a hated rival.
And so he left her--laughing.
A certain sense of responsibility, however, took him to her once a
month, and a letter went to her every week. She was his wife. He
continued in a sense to watch over her. Yet she resented his watching.
From her stairway she had seen him, and when a rest was granted she came
down to him.
"I'll be through presently," she said. "We can go to my hotel."
Her rooms in the hotel overlooked the sea. There was a balcony, and they
sat on it in long lazy chairs and had iced things to drink.
O-liver drank lemonade. His wife had something stronger.
"I have not been well," she said; "it's a part of the doctor's
prescription."
She had removed the pink from her face, and he saw that she was pale.
"You are working too hard," he told her. "You'd better take a month in
the desert, out of doors."
She shivered. She hated the out-of-doors that he raved about. They had
spent their honeymoon in a tent. She had been wild to get back to
civilization. It had been their first moment of disillusion.
She showed him before he went some of the things she had acquired since
his last visit--an ermine coat, a string of pearls.
"I saw them in your last picture," he told her. "You really visit me by
proxy. I find your name on the boards, and walk in with a lot of other
men and look at you. And not one of them dreams that I've ever seen the
woman on the screen."
"Well, they wouldn't of course." She had never taken his name. Her own
was too valuable.
When he told her good-bye he asked a question: "Are you happy?"
For a moment her face clouded. "I'm not quite sure. Is anybody? But I
like the way I am living, Ollie."
He had a sense of relief. "So do I," he said. "I earn fifteen dollars a
week. The papers say that you earn fifteen hundred--and you're not quite
twenty."
"There isn't a man in this hotel that makes so much," she told him
complacently. "The women try to snub me, but they can't. Money talks."
It seemed to him that in her case it shouted. As he rode back on Mary
Pick he thought seriously of his fifteen dollars a week and her fifteen
hundred; and of how little either weighed in the balance of happiness.
IV
It was not until the following Saturday that he saw Jane. She had made
two hundred sandwiches. She had got Tommy's mother to help her. She had
invented new combinations, always holding to the idea of satisfying the
substantial appetites of men.
There would be no use, she argued, in offering five-o'clock-tea
combinations.
She was very busy and very happy and very hopeful.
"If this keeps up," she told her mother, "I shall rent a little shop and
sell them over the counter."
Her mother had an invalid's pessimism. "They may tire of them."
They were not yet tired. They gave Jane and her basket vociferous
greeting, crowding round her and buying eagerly. Atwood and Henry having
placed orders hung back, content to wait for a later moment when she
might have leisure to talk to them.
Tommy helped Jane to hand out sandwiches and make change. He felt like
the faithful squire of a great lady. He had read much romantic
literature, and he served as well if not as picturesquely as a page in
doublet and hose.
So O-liver saw them. He had been riding all the afternoon on Mary Pick.
He had gone up into the Canon of the Honey Pots. No one knew it by that
name but O-liver, but at all the houses one could buy honey. Up and down
the road were little stands on which were set forth glasses and jars of
amber sweet. The bees flashed like motes in the sunlight, the air was
heavy with the fragrance of the flowers which yielded their largess to
the marauders.
It was dark when he rode down toward the town. It lay before him, all
twinkling lights. Above it hung a thin moon and countless stars. It
might have been a fairy town under the kindly cover of the night.
But when he reached the central square the illusion ceased. It was what
men had made it--sordid, cheap. He stopped Mary Pick under a pepper tree
and surveyed the scene.
Jane and her basket were the center of an excited group. She had almost
reached the end of her supplies, and some one had suggested auctioning
off the remainder. Jane had protested, but her protests had not availed.
She had turned to Tommy for help, to Henry, to Atwood. They had done
their best. But the man who led the crowd had an object in his
leadership. It was Tillotson of the little hotel--red-faced,
whisky-soaked.
"Sandwich Jane, Sandwich Jane!" he shouted. "That's the name for her,
boys."
And they took it up and shouted "Sandwich Jane!"
It was at this moment that O-liver stopped under the pepper tree. The
bright light fell directly on Jane's distressed face. He saw the
swept-back brightness of her hair, her clear-cut profile, her white
skin, her white teeth. But he saw more than this. "By Jove," he said,
"she's a lady!"
If he had been talking to the men he would have said "Gosh!" It was only
when he was alone that he permitted himself the indulgence of more
formal language.
That Jane was harried he could see. And suddenly he rode forward on Mary
Pick.
The crowd made way for him expectantly. There were always interesting
developments when O-liver was on the scene.
"Gentlemen," he said, "let the lady speak for herself. I am not sure
what you are trying to do, but it is evidently something she doesn't
want done."
Jane flashed a grateful glance up at him. He was the unknown knight
throwing down the gauntlet in her defense. He was different from the
others--his voice was different.
"They want to auction off my sandwiches," she explained, "and they won't
listen."
"I'm sure they will listen." O-liver on Mary Pick, with his hat off and
his mane tossed back, might have been Henry of the white plumes. "Of
course they'll listen."
And they did!
Jane stood on her box and addressed them.
"I don't want to get any more for my sandwiches than they are worth,"
she said earnestly. "I make good ones, and I sell them for twenty cents
because they are the best of their kind. I am glad you like them. I want
to earn my living and my mother's. She is sick, and I have to stay at
home with her. And I don't mind being called 'Sandwich Jane.' It's a
good name and I shall use it in my business. But I don't like being
treated as you have treated me to-night. If it happens again I shall
have to stop selling sandwiches; and I'd be sorry to have that happen,
and I hope you'd be sorry too."