by Kate Chopin
There was a restaurant at the corner. She had never entered its doors; from the outside she had sometimes caught glimpses of spotless damask and shining crystal, and soft-stepping waiters serving people of fashion.
When she entered her appearance created no surprise, no consternation, as she had half feared it might. She seated herself at a small table alone, and an attentive waiter at once approached to take her order. She did not want a profusion; she craved a nice and tasty bite — a half dozen blue-points, a plump chop with cress, a something sweet — a crème-frappée, for instance; a glass of Rhine wine, and after all a small cup of black coffee.
While waiting to be served she removed her gloves very leisurely and laid them beside her. Then she picked up a magazine and glanced through it, cutting the pages with a blunt edge of her knife. It was all very agreeable. The damask was even more spotless than it had seemed through the window, and the crystal more sparkling. There were quiet ladies and gentlemen, who did not notice her, lunching at the small tables like her own. A soft, pleasing strain of music could be heard, and a gentle breeze was blowing through the window. She tasted a bite, and she read a word or two, and she sipped the amber wine and wiggled her toes in the silk stockings. The price of it made no difference. She counted the money out to the waiter and left an extra coin on his tray, whereupon he bowed before her as before a princess of royal blood.
There was still money in her purse, and her next temptation presented itself in the shape of a matinée poster.
It was a little later when she entered the theatre, the play had begun and the house seemed to her to be packed. But there were vacant seats here and there, and into one of them she was ushered, between brilliantly dressed women who had gone there to kill time and eat candy and display their gaudy attire. There were many others who were there solely for the play and acting. It is safe to say there was no one present who bore quite the attitude which Mrs. Sommers did to her surroundings. She gathered in the whole — stage and players and people in one wide impression, and absorbed it and enjoyed it. She laughed at the comedy and wept — she and the gaudy woman next to her wept over the tragedy. And they talked a little together over it. And the gaudy woman wiped her eyes and sniffled on a tiny square of filmy, perfumed lace and passed little Mrs. Sommers her box of candy.
The play was over, the music ceased, the crowd filed out. It was like a dream ended. People scattered in all directions. Mrs. Sommers went to the corner and waited for the cable car.
A man with keen eyes, who sat opposite to her, seemed to like the study of her small, pale face. It puzzled him to decipher what he saw there. In truth, he saw nothing — unless he were wizard enough to detect a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.
A VOCATION AND A VOICE
I
“Is this Adams avenue?” asked a boy whose apparel and general appearance marked him as belonging to the lower ranks of society. He had just descended from a street car which had left the city an hour before, and was now depositing its remnant of passengers at the entrance of a beautiful and imposing suburban park.
“Adams avenue?” returned the conductor. “No this is Woodland Park. Can’t you see it ain’t any avenue? Adams is two miles northeast o’here. Th’ Adams Avenue car turned north on Dennison, just ahead of us, a half hour ago. You must a’ taken the wrong car.”
The boy was for a moment perplexed and undecided. He stood a while staring towards the northeast, then, thrusting his hands into his pockets, he turned and walked into the park.
He was rather tall, though he had spoken with the high, treble voice of a girl. His trousers were too short and so were the sleeves of his ill-fitting coat. His brown hair, under a shabby, felt cap, was longer than the prevailing fashion demanded, and his eyes were dark and quiet; they were not alert and seeking mischief, as the eyes of boys usually are.
The pockets into which he had thrust his hands were empty — quite empty; there was not so much as a penny in either of them. This was a fact which gave him cause for some reflection, but apparently no uneasiness. Mrs. Donnelly had given him but the five cents; and her mother, to whom he had been sent to deliver a message of some domestic purport, was expected to pay his return fare. He realized that his own lack of attention had betrayed him into the strait in which he found himself, and that his own ingenuity would have to extricate him. The only device which presented itself to him as possible, was to walk back to “The Patch,” or out to Mrs. Donnelly’s mother’s.
It would be night before he could reach either place; he did not know the way anywhere; he was not accustomed to long and sustained walks. These considerations, which he accepted as final, gave him a comfortable sense of irresponsibility.
It was the late afternoon of an October day. The sun was warm and felt good to his shoulders through the old coat which he wore. There was a soft breeze blowing, seemingly from every quarter, playing fantastic tricks with the falling and fallen leaves that ran before him helter-skelter as he walked along the beaten, gravel path. He thought they looked like little live things, birds with disabled wings making the best of it in a mad frolic. He could not catch up with them; they ran on before him. There was a fine sweep of common to one side which gave an impression of space and distance, and men and boys were playing ball there. He did not turn in that direction or even more than glance at the ball-players, but wandered aimlessly across the grass towards the water and sat down upon a bench.
With him was a conviction that it would make no difference to any one whether he got back to “The Patch” or not. The Donnelly household, of which he formed an alien member, was overcrowded for comfort. The few dimes which he earned did not materially swell its sources of income. The seat which he occupied in the parish school for an hour or two each day would not remain long vacant in his absence. There were a dozen boys or more of his neighborhood who would serve Mass as ably as he, and who could run Father Doran’s errands and do the priest’s chores as capably. These reflections embodied themselves in a vague sense of being unessential which always dwelt with him, and which permitted him, at that moment, to abandon himself completely to the novelty and charm of his surroundings.
He stayed there a very long time, seated on the bench, quite still, blinking his eyes at the rippling water which sparkled in the rays of the setting sun. Contentment was penetrating him at every pore. His eyes gathered all the light of the waning day and the russet splendor of the Autumn foliage. The soft wind caressed him with a thousand wanton touches, and the scent of the earth and the trees — damp, aromatic, — came pleasantly to him mingled with the faint odor of distant burning leaves. The blue-gray smoke from a smoldering pile of leaves rolled in lazy billows among the birches on a far slope.
How good it was to be out in the open air. He would have liked to stay there always, far from the noise and grime of “The Patch.” He wondered if Heaven might not be something like this, and if Father Doran was not misled in his conception of a celestial city paved with gold.
He sat blinking in the sun, almost purring with contentment. There were young people out in boats and others making merry on the grass near by. He looked at them, but felt no desire to join in their sports. The young girls did not attract him more than the boys or the little children. He had lapsed into a blessed state of tranquility and contemplation which seemed native to him. The sordid and puerile impulses of an existence which was not living had retired into a semi-oblivion in which he seemed to have no share. He belonged under God’s sky in the free and open air.
When the sun had set and the frogs were beginning to croak in the waste places, the boy got up and stretched and relaxed his muscles which had grown cramped from sitting so long and so still. He felt that he would like to wander, even then, further into the Park, which looked to his unaccustomed eye like a dense forest across the water of the artificial lake. He would like to penetrate beyond into the open country where there were fields and hills
and long stretches of wood. As he turned to leave the place he determined within himself that he would speak to Father Doran and ask the priest to assist him in obtaining employment somewhere in the country, somewhere that he might breathe as freely and contentedly as he had been doing for the past hour here in Woodland Park.
II
In order to regain “The Patch” there was nothing for the boy to do but follow the track of the car which had brought him so far from his destination. He started out resolutely, walking between the tracks, taking great strides with his long, growing legs and looking wistfully after each car as he stepped out of the way of its approach. Here and there he passed an imposing mansion in the dusk, splendid and isolated. There were long stretches of vacant land which enterprising dealers had laid out in building lots. Sometimes he left the track and walked along the line of a straggling fence behind which were market-gardens, the vegetables all in stiff geometrical designs and colorless in the uncertain light.
There were few people abroad; an occasional carriage rolled by, and workingmen, more fortunate than he, occupied the cars that went jangling along. He sat for awhile at the back of a slow-moving wagon, dropping down into the dust when it turned out of his course.
The boy, as he labored along in the semi-darkness that was settling about him, at once became conscious that he was very hungry. It was the odor of frying bacon and the scent of coffee somewhere near that had suddenly made him aware of the fact.
At no great distance from the road he saw a canvas-covered wagon and a small tent, the rude paraphernalia of “movers.” A woman was occupied in vigorously beating with a stick a strip of burning grass which had caught from the fire with which she had been cooking her evening meal. The boy ran to her assistance, and, thrusting her aside, lest her garments should become ignited, he began stamping the incipient blaze until he had succeeded in extinguishing it. The woman threw aside her stick and standing upright wiped her whole face indiscriminately with her bended arm.
“Damn him,” she said, “I wish the whole thing had took fire and burnt up,” and turning upon the boy, “did you see a man anywhere coming this way, leading a couple of mules?”
She was robust and young — twenty or thereabouts — and comely, in a certain rude, vigorous fashion. She wore a yellow-cotton handkerchief bound around her head somewhat in the manner of a turban.
Yes, the boy had seen a man watering two mules at the trough before a road-house some distance away. He remembered it because the man was talking loud in some sort of a foreign, unfamiliar accent to a group of men standing by.
“That’s him; damn him,” she reiterated, and, moving towards the fire where she had been cooking; “want something to eat?” she asked, kindly enough.
The boy was not shocked at her language; he had not been brought up in “The Patch” for nothing. He only thought she had a more emphatic way of expressing herself than good manners or morals demanded. He did not swear himself; he had no positive leaning towards the emphatic, and moreover it was a custom not held in high esteem by Father Doran, whose teachings had not been wholly thrown away upon the boy.
Her offer of food was tempting and gratifying. A premonition that she was a woman who might take a first refusal as final, determined him to overcome all natural shyness and frankly accept without mincing.
“I’m mighty hungry,” he admitted, turning with her towards the frying-pan and coffee-pot that rested upon the coals near the tent. She went inside and presently emerged bearing a brace of tin cups and a half loaf of bread. He had seated himself upon an inverted pine box; she gave him two slices of bread interlarded with bacon and a mug of coffee. Then, serving herself with the same homely fare, she sat down upon a second box and proceeded to eat her bread and bacon with great relish and to drain her cup of coffee.
It was quite dark now, save for the dim light of a road lamp nearby and the dull glow of the embers. The stars were coming out and the breeze was beating capriciously about the common, blowing the soiled canvas of the tent and buffeting a strip of cotton cambric that was loosely stretched between two poles at the edge of the road. The boy, looking up, remembered that he had read the inscription on the cambric, as he passed in the car: “The Egyptian Fortune Teller,” in huge black letters on a yellow back-ground. It was fashioned to arrest the eye.
“Yes,” said the woman, following his upward glance, “I’m a fortuneteller. Want your fortune told? But I don’t talk like this here when I’m telling fortunes reg’lar. I talk a kind of Egyptian accent. That’s his notion,” motioning contemptuously with her head, down the road. “Because my skin’s dark and my eyes, he goes to work and calls me ‘The Egyptian Maid, the Wonder of the Orient.’ I guess if my hair was yellow he’d call me ‘The Swiss Fortune Teller,’ or something like that and make me talk some kind of a nicks-com-araus. Only there’s too many Dutch in this here country; they’d ketch on.”
“You bet,” said the boy.
The expression smacked of sympathy and reached her, some way. She looked up quickly and laughed. They both laughed. She had taken his cup from him and she was beating the two tins softly together, her arms resting on her knees.
“Where do you come from?” she asked with an awakened interest.
He told her he had come from Woodland Park, and how he had got there and why he was tramping it back to “The Patch.” He even told her he was in no haste to regain “The Patch”; that it made no difference whether he ever got back or not; that he detested the crowded city and hoped soon to obtain employment in the country and stay there the rest of his life. These opinions and intentions took positive shape with him in the telling.
A notion or two got into her head as she listened to him. He seemed a companionable boy, though he was a good five years younger than herself. She thought of the long, slow journey ahead of her, the dreary road, the lonely hill-side, of those times in which her only human associate was a man who more than half the while was drunk and abusive.
“Come, go ‘long with us,” she said abruptly.
“Why?” he demanded. “What for? To do what?”
“Oh! there’s lots of things you could do — help around, tell fortune maybe— ‘taint hard when you once get the hang of it, sell his old herbs and things when he’s too drunk to talk. Why, lots o’ things. Here, I ought to be pulling up stakes right now. Wait till you hear him when he comes back and finds I ain’t done a thing! Hope I may die if I lay a finger to a stick of the measly truck,” and she flung the tin cups, one after the other, into the open tent and maintained her careless, restful position on the soap box.
“Let me,” offered the boy. “What you got to do? I’ll do it.” And he arose willingly, prompted by a decent feeling that he should do something in return for his supper.
“You can jerk them poles up and roll up the sign and stick it in the wagon; we’re going to pull out of here in the morning. Then those pots and things got to be hooked under the wagon. Leave out the coffee pot.”
While the boy busied himself in following her various instructions she talked on:
“I guess he’s drunk down there — him and his mules! He thinks more of them mules than he does of me and the whole world put together. Because he paid two hundred and ten dollars for ‘em he thinks they are made out o’ some precious composition that’s never been duplicated outside of Paradise. Oh! I’m about sick of playing second fiddle to a team of mules. Mr. Man ‘ll wake up some o’ these here mornings and find that I’ve cut an’ run. Here! let that frying pan alone. He forgets I been used to better things than living in a tent. I sung in the chorus of an opera when I wasn’t more than sixteen. Some people said if I’d had means to cultivate my voice I’d be — well, I wouldn’t be here to-day, I can tell you.”
The object of scorn and contumely was even then approaching; a short, broad-girted man, leading his sleek bay mules — splendid looking animals — and talking to them as he came along. In the dim light the boy could see that his hair, as well as his beard, was lo
ng, curly and greasy; that he wore a slouch felt hat over a knotted red handkerchief and small golden hoops in his ears. His dialect, when he spoke, was as indescribable as his origin was undiscernable. He might have been Egyptian, for aught the boy could guess, or Zulu — something foreign and bestial for all he knew.
The woman’s name, originally Susan, had been changed to Suzima to meet the exigencies of her oriental character. The Beast pronounced it “Tzutzima.”
“You can thank this here boy,” she began by way of greeting. “If it hadn’t been for him you wouldn’t a found nothing here but a pile of ashes.”
“So!” exclaimed the man in his greasy guttural, with utter lack of interest.
“Yes, ‘so’! The whole blamed shooting-match was afire when he come along and put it out. If it hadn’t been for him you wouldn’t ‘a found nothing here but a pile of ashes. He says he’ll go along with us in the morning if we like. Looks like he knows how to work.”
“That’s good,” agreed the man, “bring ‘im along. Plenty of room where we live.”
Usually “pulling up” time was one of contention between these two, each maintaining that the brunt of the work should be borne by the other. So the presence and timely services of the boy seemed to introduce a certain unlooked-for harmony into this unconventional menage. Suzima arose and went over to join the man, still occupied with the well-being of his mules. He was smoking a short-stemmed pipe, which indicated that he had — wherever he got it — a sufficiency of food and drink, and would not trouble her on that score. They chatted pleasantly together.
When they retired into the tent for the night, the boy crept into the wagon, as he was instructed to do. It was broad and roomy and there he slept at ease the night through on a folded cotton “comforter.”
III
They wandered toward the south, idly, listlessly. The days were a gorgeous, golden processional, good and warm with sunshine, and languorous. There were ten, twelve, twenty such days when the earth, sky, wind and water, light and color and sun, and men’s souls and their senses and the odor and breath of animals mingled and melted into the harmony of a joyful existence.