The Ticket for Ona

AT thirty, Poul Zellak was a boy. He had worked all night, and the March dawn was raw to flesh tempered to the even climate of the lower coal seams; nevertheless, when he came home to find his boarding place in cinders, he very coolly perched on the opposite fence, laughed once, and began to whistle.

“Matthias Obeloskie and his wife and the hired girl saved everything, everything!” Mrs. Proutas had announced to him in the street. “Jt caught from the house next door; they had plenty of time. Everything! The pieces of stove-pipe, even! The shelves and hooks out of cupboards! Also a few doors.”

It was at this that Poul had laughed; doors made such ridiculous salvage from the wreck of a home. His own trunk and his clothing were of course safe with the other furnishings somewhere, and he did not worry about them. The fire company were in charge of the embers of two houses and needed no assistance from him. Doubtless one could find a place to eat and a place to wash and sleep when the necessity grew pressing; meantime, life was such a varied game!

Poul perched, therefore, and looked the crowd over with an appreciative eye. It was six o’clock, and the hue of rising day revealed some oddities. The Italian woman next door to the burned house knelt in her gate-space burning candles before a holy picture. There was a neighbor in trousers and shoes, and another sheltering bare legs under an overcoat; both of these men had instinctively clapped on miner’s caps, and lighted the lamps to facilitate sight-seeing in the darkness of a four-o’clock alarm.

To Zellak, sitting thus at ease, knees drawn up, face and clothing sooty, cap shoved back revealing a line of forehead under straight hair redder than his lampflame, there appeared Mrs. Obeloskie. She was weeping. She addressed him between sobs.

“ Our home, Poul! Seven years in that house! Our home is gone! Everything gone, —perished! ”

“Hardly that,” spoke Poul, genially. “You only rented the house. People tell me you saved everything of ours.”

“Everything! Every stick, every dish. They are out in the street there. Oh, sorrow comes by night! — Veronika is up there sitting on them now, our trunks and our best clothes and the clock.”

“That’s a fine woman, Marta; oh, you did well, well! Stop crying. Nobody is hurt, nobody is dead. Nobody but the house-boss is any poorer. Why, it is no more for you than a moving. Thus, why trouble yourself?”

“The saints have forgotten me! Ah, ah!”

“They’ll remember you by afternoon, though. The house-bosses will be in their offices by half-past eight, and you and your man can go over to them and rent a house. I will stay and help keep the children and the things.”

“Ah, the children! Five little mites, and no home!”

“Then you can hire a wagon and ride back in it. We will load in the things and move. It will be settled in no time.”

“ Ai, no, no, no! ” screamed the matron in crescendo of mounting distress. “How little you know about it! There is no house!”

Poul laughed cheerfully. “Oh, but there are always houses.”

“There is no house. That empty one next to ours, the one that burned down first, was the only house left. I know! I know! My cousin, Mary Darszas, tried to change houses Saturday, and could not. That was the only empty one. The bosses told her so.”

“What a position!” cried Zellak. He laughed out, heartily and long. “I suppose, then, we shall have to live in a barn ? Why did n’t you think of that before you saved the beds and tables and the pork-barrel ? God, we should be better off without them, should n’t we?”

Mrs. Obeloskie wept on, mopping her eyes with the corner of her shawl.

“Ah, trouble comes by night! — Yes, the furniture will be put in the English baker’s barn on the corner; he told Matthias he would hire him a place for a dollar a month. The boys will go with Matthias and board in some house near their work. I — oh, like a widow with orphans — I go to my cousin’s house down in Keckley. Five little children, and no home!” She sobbed again.

“There, Marta, do not give up to despair. Things will change, see. We’ll be at home yet, just as we used to be.”

“But it is necessary,” pursued the matron, “for Veronika to go with you. You must get married with her now instead of later. There is no room at my cousin’s. And nobody I can hear of wants a hired girl.”

Poul’s hands went deep into his pockets with a jerk. He laughed out blithely once, then fell silent. He jumped to the sidewalk,

“I have arranged it all. Come, we must talk it over with her, see. She can stay at Agalaskie’s house for the wedding, and then you two will board over at Alena Popko’s cousin’s house, on Corn Hill just by your mine. That is convenient, not ?”

“She will ?” cried Poul Zellak, A thrill of more than gayety rang in his voice.

“This way,” ordered Marta Obeloskie. She turned up the street. The tall fellow went behind her, shoulders swinging, red hair vivid in the flare of his mine lamp.

Veronika Boslas had been in America seven months, and her old-country clothes lasted with the endurance of homespun. Her small wages barely supplied a gala wardrobe, so that the Kovno dress, a dark brown woollen thing, plain, stiff, ugly, had to be her work-day uniform. She sat upon a large trunk, her feet braced on a smaller one, and braided her great rope of ash-brown hair. Comb and hairpins were in her lap.

Custom gives the “hired girl ” almost a mother’s authority over the children in a Lithuanian family. Veronika had all five of the Obeloskies with her, wellwrapped, sleepy, docile, though frightened; they sat or stood among the bundles, holding to her dress.

Veronika was nineteen, of medium height, slender, colorless, not pretty. There dwelt about her, nevertheless, a curious femininity, a rare appeal.

As Mrs. Obeloskie and Poul approached her through the crowd she saw them. Her hands let the thick braid fall on her shoulder and rested motionless with locked fingers across her breast. She met Poul’s eyes and smiled. There was no timidity in her air, nor shyness, nor elation; she sat untroubled, the eternal type of women who wait passive upon destiny.

Poul’s soot-masked face was blank of expression. Only his eyes in the uncertain gray of dawn held a dark brilliance, distinct against the lighter iris as a dagger point shows black against the silvered glimmer of its blade.

“I have told him all about the plan,” Mrs. Obeloskie cried, designating Zellak with a twist of the thumb as she penetrated through the outer defense of chairs and tables.

“You are willing, Veronika?”

Poul’s breath came short as if he had been running, and his voice rasped in his throat.

The girl smiled again, an age-old shadow of submissive melancholy touching her features for an instant. One of the Obeloskie twins, a sturdy toddler, rolled to his knees on the table and steadied himself by her hair in the effort to gain his feet. Veronika loosed the clutching baby hands and helped the boy upright.

Half of Carson’s Hollow shared the spectacle with him, but Poul felt something tighten in his throat and in his breast, — a need that in all his careless years had never stung before. Pretty girls, jolly girls, had come and gone, laughed and danced with him, and been forgotten. Now this pale lass had grown to stand for all that was clear womanly.

“You wish it?” he repeated huskily.

“Oh, I suppose so. It would come sometime, and one day is much like another. Besides, the house is burned.”

To-day is Friday. She can stay at my house, and you can begin the wedding Monday,” pronounced Mrs. Agalaskie. “You can get married at the squire’s office on Tuesday; then there will be no waiting for the priest to read your names in church.”

“How black your face is, Red Thatch,” Veronika commented. “And where is there left to wash ? We have soap and a tub, but no house nor hot water. What will you do ? ”

“I’m glad it burned, — yes, if I had to go black till Sunday!” cried Zellak, recovering his voice. “I waited long enough for this to happen, you see.”

The women laughed. “Polite, your man is, Veronika,” Mrs. Agalaskie affirmed, turning away.

Poul Zellak passed through the barricade and seated himself upon the kitchen table, close to the girl, half facing her. He restrained the active twin in the crook of his elbow while he talked.

“Some day, with luck, I’ll give you a house of your own, girl.”

“That will be years away, I think,” Veronika said, smiling, lashes bent on her pale cheek.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. But I suppose you can save my pay better than I can.”

“I have learned the American money, of course. But I understand no English.”

“Oh, that is easy! You will learn. Why, if I talk it to you evenings, — or afternoons, every day, when I come from work —”

His voice trembled oddly, and he stopped.

“I am very stupid, and I shall often make you angry,” continued Veronika.

“Not angry; not angry. There are other things than anger.”

The girl’s wide gaze questioned a dim world, a world of black and gray, dreary under the March fog to its far horizons; a world untried, mysterious. She shivered a little in the raw air. Poul Zellak saw the look; and though in his heart he knew himself to be a part of that cold outer desolation upon which she strained her eyes he yearned to shelter her upon his breast.

“At home, — in the old country, that is, — my brother Jonas used to beat his wife with a stick and a strap from the harness. At the time he brought her to the house he did not; but it began later. When he was taken for a soldier she cursed him as he went out of the housedoor. But afterwards he came back from Pordarta so white and thin and eating nothing, and she wept bitterly, and kissed him many times those days before he died. I saw that myself. She hated him, but at the end the hate faded away.”

Poul stared at the ground, gripping the table-edge hard with both hands. He laughed out shortly.

“You’ll not hate me.”

“Perhaps, yes; perhaps, no. How can one tell about strangers ? ”

“I will not beat you with—” He choked upon the sacrilege.

“I hope not,” cried Veronika, flashing a little wicked smile over his downcast sincerity. “How I shall cry, if you begin! ”

“For one thing, I will not drink after the day of my own wedding. The less beer I have the better I shall know how to behave. It’s a good time to stop, also, because after years one gets too fond of it to leave off.”

“But a man has to do something that is wrong and wastes his money!” the girl protested. “It is necessary. Why, they all do! Else, see, they would be like women! ”

“Oh, I always waste enough,” he answered her. “No danger. And I can still smoke; tobacco is left.”

“Right.”

“Veronika,” he broke out, bending towards her, speaking low and very earnestly, “you do not hate me?”

“No. Why should I? You are goodnatured ; you never hurt me. When I had supper late, you laughed. When I burned your shirt with the iron you laughed again. Oh, no!”

“You like me? You like me well?”

“Why, yes. You are kind to me; you took me to balls and the show oftener than any of the others. And anyway, it seems I am to marry you. Marta Obeloskie arranged it.”

“You like me better than the others, then ? ”

“Maybe, Poul.”

“Better than the Russian ? Better than Vincas Juozapaitis too?”

“Well, no,” admitted Veronika. The hidden coquetry of her nature came to the surface, as sometimes before when Poul had pressed her hard. “Just as those two, — I like you just about as well!” Zellak swore mightily. “I’ll break their backs!”

“In that case, maybe there would be only one man left to like. Or, if it happened the other way in my heart, perhaps I should lie under their coffins and go carrying flowers all day to their graves.”

“Anyhow,” argued the man, “you will not marry them.”

“Matthias and Marta say I had better take you.”

Poul Zellak looked her full in the eyes. The day was brighter now, and unmistakably his lips were trembling.

“Tuesday,” he told her, below his breath. “Tuesday.”

“Poul!” cried Mrs. Agalaskie shrilly from the group of matrons just outside. “Hi, Poul! You will have to go tomorrow to buy the wedding dress. You may as well go to Cranston and get the license on the same trip.”

“You can get a ready-made dress which will do; that is best, for there is no time to hire a dressmaker,” a second neighbor advised.

“They will change the dress to fit the bride as if it was made for her.”

“And she needs the veil, and shoes, and nice white gloves!” another cried.

“I will see to the dinner, Poul, and the beer,” said. Mrs. Agalaskie. “You can pay me out of the money that comes in at the wedding, for I know Veronika has none.”

“A wedding dress, a silk one, and two wrappers to work in, will be enough for her,” pronounced Mrs. Obeloskie, elbowing herself forward to a position of authority. “You listen to me! I know what she needs. You may as well save your money for furniture and children and house-rent and useful things. If a squire marries you, you do not really need a veil. Still, that can be got for two dollars, and it looks sweeter.”

“It looks sweeter,” Veronica echoed. Her love of soft fabrics and gay raiment was inborn and passionate, primitive as her charm itself. “Poul Zellak, how much money I shall cost you!” “Dear God!” cried the bridegroom, coming out of a horrified daze to look from face to face in the vain hope of sympathy. “I—I have no money!”

“No money?” shrieked the mothers in chorus.

“None. At least—” He drew out a buckskin purse, poured a handful of change into his palm, and counted it hurriedly. “I have a dollar and forty-one cents!” he announced despairingly.

“A dollar forty-one!” cried Mrs. Agalaskie.

“To get married on!” Mrs. Proutas groaned.

“To buy his girl the dresses on!”

“The license alone is fifty cents, and the two tickets to Cranston and back, to go and get it, are sixty cents more! That leaves nothing at all to pay a squire.”

“I can borrow a dollar to pay the squire,” spoke Zellak. He knew as the words left his tongue how hopeless the case was, how prejudiced the jury.

“He’s spent all his pay in a week!" one woman cried: her tone was an indictment.

“I—you see, I did n’t expect the house to burn down,” explained the culprit. “I — I didn’t know — I didn’t think

— Oh, I don’t know how I spent it all, — but it seems to be gone. I did n’t count.

— Only I was n’t drunk; I know that.”

“He does n’t know where he spent two

weeks’ pay! ” repeated a voice of horror.

Unexpectedly, at this dreadful moment Veronika came to the rescue.

“I could,” said she, with tears in her eyes, “be married without a wedding dress, I suppose. My Sunday clothes, Marta, would do. If they had to.”

Poul in the fervor of a generous heart blessed her for that saying. But in an instant Mrs. Obeloskie had turned even this kindness to his further undoing.

“If they had to! But he has money. He has money in the bank. I saw his book.”

“Oh-h! ” said the bride.

“I have,” Zellak told her. “Thirty dollars; thirty is all.”

The circle seemed to his desperate eyes to be full of nodding heads, buzzing with whispers.—“Two weeks’ pay — thirty dollars in the bank. Enough to buy one dress, though, for his girl. Enough to buy shoes and a hat. — Unless he’s too stingy to draw it out.”

“But that money is not to be spent. Not to be touched!” he repeated doggedly. “Not a cent to be touched.”

“You could put it back, Poul, from the wedding money.”

“I don’t know. I might not, and I cannot run a risk in this thing. That was for a ticket, an old-country ticket, and I have been saving it four months. From my next pay I will take eighteen dollars more, and that will be enough.”

“Four months! ” said one matron.

“What’s the hurry, after so long?” cried Mrs. Agalaskie.

“Whom is it for, Poul?” Veronika’s voice demanded.

“A ticket for Ona,” he returned. A great longing was upon him to make her plead, even by one word, and so to give up his bank-book and his pledge to her use, staking all things to win or lose in the game of happiness. Yet even as the yearning tortured him, he knew he should not yield.

“And who is Ona? A woman?”

Veronika’s voice was silky, but she came to her feet before his eyes transfigured. Her lower lip showed her little teeth; her left hand stroked her right with leopard softness; her glance burned.

“My sister. My little sister. She has to come away from the old country; she sent me word she was unhappy there. Almost starving, some weeks. There is more war than rye now. She is my little sister. Twenty years old by now, and I’ve not seen her in twelve years.”

“Four months,” spoke Veronika, still with that gentleness. “One week, two weeks, is no great time to wait, after four months. And you know I too have nowhere to go.”

The man shook his head. “I send her the ticket,” he repeated. “She is only a child. I told her I would send the ticket.”

“Then,” said the promised bride, “I will not be married with you unless you get me the wedding dress and the veil. My Sunday clothes will not do, Poul Zellak! You have money enough to afford one of us or the other. Now choose.”

“I must send the ticket.”

”I will marry the Russian, then! He is the finer, bigger man, anyway.”

“I choose,” said Poul Zellak, slowly.

His head dropped upon his breast. He took off his cap to brush a hand across his forehead; it was full day by now, and mechanically he blew out his lampflame.

Then without speaking, he drew from inside his shirt a bunch of keys, went forward to where his trunk stood upon the ground, unlocked and opened it. An armful of his possessions lay upon a chair at one side; he shut them in; then closed and strapped the trunk.

Poul was a strong man. He lifted the awkward burden, set it with some difficulty over his shoulders and upon his back. Then, bending under the load, he turned out of the circle and down the street. The last sounds that he heard were the sobs of the Obeloskie twins and Veronika’s mocking, wicked little laugh.

Zellak found himself another boarding place before noon, and this time it was as near as possible to his work. A widow, a Lithuanian woman, kept the house. She was bitterly poor. Two boys, lads of thirteen and fourteen, earned for her; to buy food for them, four babies, and herself, she took three boarders in her fiveroom dwelling. It was a comfortless place, bare and dirty. Even in the first bitterness of his flight, Poul vowed to himself that he would not endure his shed-loft beyond the week.

Nevertheless, upon the evening of payday his soft heart had the better of his judgment. He came from the mine to find wailing and confusion in the house; the baby, poor starveling, had died of croup, and the girl next older had sickened. Mrs. Lapaitis, mad with grief, alone and penniless, dared not call a doctor or an undertaker. Poul, with thirty-seven dollars in his pocket, could not stand aloof. He paid his bill for the week and a month’s board in advance; then, the total seeming yet pathetically small, a donation of three dollars toward the funeral expenses. Afterwards he fled the premises for the day.

On Main Street, there was the legless blind man, human wreckage of a blast gone wrong. The secretary of a Lithuanian society was buttonholing his countrymen for contributions to a patriotic fund. A foreman from Corn Hill mine was gathering “a bit for poor Tom, now, seeing he’ll never walk a step again.”

Poul denied nobody, and quarters and half-dollars drained steadily away. Then there were shoes to buy, and a minedrill. Later there was a cocking-main in a stable yard: whereat the wasteful Zellak won two bets, lost five, and bought a cock at the owner’s price to save it from being entered in a second match with its breast cut open.

This diversion being pleasantly ended, Poul bandaged the rooster, found a home for his new dependent in a friend’s chicken-yard, and hurried to the bank just before closing hour. He was able to add five dollars to the fund for Ona’s ticket. Forty cents remained, his pocket money for the next two weeks.

Early spring became midsummer; and still, resolve as he would, the history of that first pay-day duplicated itself again and again. Sometimes it was clothing to be bought, instead of the Lapaitis funeral. Sometimes it was a loan to one in need, or a police-court fine paid for a man who had wife and children and must keep to his job. Then for a month the mines worked less than half time. The fund in the savings bank never grew less, but it grew very, very slowly more. Ona had ceased sending those letters which the Jew marketman wrote for her. Poul meant to save for her, of course, as a dutiful brother should; but money would slip away so easily.

Veronika he had not seen through all this time. If an inward heaviness of heart drove him to reckless pleasureseeking while money lasted, at least he had the strength of mind to keep away from her. He knew that she had not married Vincas Juozapaitis; and the Russian had left town. But with which family she lived, and on what street, he did not ask.

That summer grew into August before Zellak had the forty-eight dollars necessary for his sister’s passage. Then, on the eve of buying the money order and so fulfilling his brotherly duty, the unlucky youth engaged in a combat and landed himself in hospital. The details of this encounter were, in fact, highly creditable both to his heart and to his reputation as a fighter; but its result was inconvenient. Now, with forty-eight dollars at last in bank and forty dollars due him from his latest pay, he was flat upon his back on a cot. Even yet the ticket was not sent!

Eppley Hospital was overfull because of those “mine-gas cases” which so abound during the fogs of March and August. Burned men and surgical patients filled the wards; hearty Poul Zellak was sewed, bandaged, and made beautiful with sticking plaster, and then encamped in an east corridor out of the way. Here upon the first visitors’ afternoon a girl found him.

She was a slender thing, pale, with ash-brown hair; she wore her Sunday best, a blue lawn dress that drooped over her shoulders into many ruffles. Her face had the dutiful look of a child who carries out some one else’s orders.

“You!” cried Poul. “You!” He stammered unaccountably, then ended in a lame commonplace. “It’s a long time.”

Veronika did not answer. She dropped upon her knees beside the low cot. Her eyes held with an anguished fascination to the stained bandages, the strips of plaster on his cheek. The instinct of mother-wolf and mother-woman woke to do battle for the helpless. “Poul! Your poor face! Who did it?”

“Oh, nobody,” returned the hero with a shaky laugh. With his one good hand he laid her palms against his cheek and forehead, feeling their trembling in delicious pain. “I ran away from a few Dagoes and fell in a blackberry patch.”

“I know better! ” spoke Veronika tartly. “I was sent to your house to bring you an old-country letter that Marta Obeloskie had been keeping for a week. I saw that widow, that homely Lapaitis thing, and she told me all about it. She told me that you had killed three. — Oh, Poul, do you suppose there will be scars ? All these places ? ”

“No more scars than dead men. Not a scar.”

The fact fell upon Veronika’s impulse as a rebuff. “Oh! I am glad they do not hurt you, of course.” She drew away one hand and leaned well back upon her heels.

“They hurt a good deal, now I think of it,” sighed Poul.

It was an inspiration. Veronika’s look melted with a thousand little curves and coquetries.

“Your head aches, my poor quarreler? ” she asked. She lifted the affected member upon her arm and drew over till his forehead lay upon her breast; the blue ruffles brushed his eyelids at every heartbeat.

With the appeal of a child, big Poul threw his unwounded arm up and about her neck, so clinging.

“Yes. But forget I said it, Veronika. A man is supposed to be strong and not to mind getting hurt. And I do so love to fight, I never think how it will feel, till afterwards! ”

Together they opened the foreign letter, after a time. It was in a strange handwriting, but in the Lithuanian language. It read brief and to the point as Zellak rendered its phrases for the girl’s benefit.

“ Since writing to you before, brother, I have gone to live in Germany. I am married with a German Pole, Jonas Sarlitz. But he can talk our language like our own people. He used to come smuggling from Germany and so I knew him first. He has a nice house and some land. He has only his mother living with him so he is very well-to-do. He is writing this letter so I will not talk about him more than I have said already. My health is good; I hope yours also.

ONA.

“ Address to Jan Sarlitz, Grafschnee by Inklen, East Prussia.”

And the date upon the letter was the first of June!

“So she’s not coming to America,” Veronika summed up. “Poul, you sent that ticket too slowly.”

“Married to a stranger! ” groaned the prostrate hero.

“God, but a woman has to do something! ” Veronika urged. “If the village was all bad, and she did not like Russia, and she could not get to America in weeks and weeks, why — What would you expect, eh ? ”

“Perhaps so,” Poul admitted. “Still, not all women marry. You, now, — you waited, did n’t you, Veronika? You did

not marry the Russian? The fine big man of a Russian.”

Veronika blushed,

“That is different. You see, I was not anxious — about seeing America — ” “Always a nice child, she was; I wish she had got here. Still, in a way, it is lucky after all. We have that money for the dresses. You shall have a proper wedding this time, my flower.”

“You can get the money back from the ticket company? Refunded? Is it that kind of a ticket ? ”

“Not refunded,” Poul mumbled. “I never sent it, yet. There is enough money at last; I was just intending to — I would buy it yesterday — ”

“Yesterday! Ah, you are red in the face, Poul, and no wonder! For shame! Yesterday! She is three months married now.”

“Well, I tried,” urged the spendthrift. “I really tried. But something would always happen to my dollars. However, it is all for the best. And I can save much better when I am married.”

“Oh, Poul. Poul, Poul! ” sighed Veronika blissfully. “How you do need to have somebody to look after your ways! ”