by Thomas Wolfe
“But, then, God knows, there’s not a better-hearted sort of people in the world—there’s no one I’d rather work for, than Mrs. Jack, they’d give ye everything they have, if they like ye—I’ve been here twenty years next April and in all that time no one has ever been turned away from the door who needed food. Sure, there’s far worse who go to Mass six days a week—yes, and would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes if they got the chance. It’s a good home we’ve been given here—as I keep tellin’ all the rest of ’em,” she thought with virtuous content, “and Molly Fogarty’s not the one to turn and bite the hand that’s feedin’ her—no matter what the rest of them may do!”
* * * * *
All this had passed in the minds and hearts of the two women with the speed of light, the instancy of thought. Meanwhile, the maid, having set the tray down on a little table by the bedside, had gone to the windows, lowered one of them and raised the shades to admit more light, slightly adjusted the curtains, and was now in the bath room drawing the water for her mistress’ bath, an activity signalized at first by the sound of thick tumbling waters, and later by a sound more quiet and sustained as she reduced the flow and tempered the boiling fluid to a moderate heat.
While this was going on, the other woman had seated herself on the edge of her bed, crossed her legs briskly in a strong, jaunty and yet graceful movement, poured out a cup of the black steaming coffee from the tall silver pot, opened the newspaper which lay folded on the tray, and now, as she drank her coffee, she was staring with a blank troubled frown at the headlines of the paper, meanwhile slipping one finger in and out of a curious and ancient ring which she wore on her right hand. It was an action which she performed unconsciously, but with great speed and deftness—a single swift and nervous movement of her hand which, when she was with people, always indicated in her a statement of impatience, nervousness, or strained attention and when she was alone, indicated the swift and troubled reflection of a mind that was rapidly collecting itself for a decisive action.
And now, her first emotions of regret, pity, and curiosity having passed, the more practical necessity of some vigorous and immediate action was pressing at her.
“He’s been furious about it—That’s where Fritz’s liquor has been going,” she thought. “She’s got to stop it. If she keeps on at the rate she’s going she’ll be no good for anything in another month or two—God! I could kill her for being such a fool!” she thought furiously. “What gets into these people, anyway?”—Her small and lovely face now red with anger and determination, the space between her troubled eyes cleft deeply by a frown, she determined suddenly to speak plainly and sternly with the maid without any more delay.
And, this decision being made, the woman was conscious instantly of a feeling of great relief and certitude, almost of happiness. For indecision was alien to the temper of her soul, and the knowledge of the maid’s delinquency had been nagging at her conscience for some time: now, with a feeling of surprise and relief, she wondered why she had ever hesitated. Yet, when the maid came back into the room again, and paused before going out for a moment as if waiting for further orders, and looking at her with a glance that now seemed affectionate and warm, she was conscious of a feeling of acute embarrassment and regret, as she began to speak to her and, to her surprise, she found herself beginning in a hesitant and almost apologetic tone, “Oh, Molly!” she said rapidly in a sharp and somewhat excited tone, as she slipped the ring swiftly on and off her finger—“There’s something I want to speak to you about—”
“Yes, Mrs. Jack,” Molly answered humbly, and paused respectfully.
“It’s something Miss Edith wanted me to ask you,” she went on quickly, somewhat timidly, discovering to her amazement that she was beginning her stern warning and reproof in quite a different way from the way she had intended.
Molly waited in an attitude of studious and respectful attention.
“I wonder if you or any of the other girls remember seeing a dress Miss Edith had,” she said and went on quickly—“One of those dresses she brought back last year from Paris. It had a funny grey-green kind of color and she used to wear it in the morning when she went to business. Do you remember?” she said sharply, clapping her hand to her ear, “Hah?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Molly with a solemn wondering air. “I’ve seen it, Mrs. Jack.”
“Well, Molly, she can’t find it. It’s gone.”
“Gone?” said Molly, staring at her with a stupid and astonished look.
But even as she spoke the other woman saw a furtive ghost of a smile, thin, evil, Irish and corrupt, at the corner of the servant’s mouth, in her sly and sullen humor, and a look of triumph in her eye, and she thought instantly:
“Yes! She knows where it is! Of course she knows! They’ve taken it!—Of course, they’ve taken it!—the lying sluts! It’s perfectly disgraceful and I’m not going to stand it any longer!”—and a wave of angry indignation, hot, swift and choking boiled up in her, flushing the delicate rose color of her face a thick and angry red.
“Yes, gone! It’s gone, I tell you!” she said angrily to the staring maid. “What’s become of it? Where do you think it’s gone to?” she asked bluntly.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Jack,” Molly answered in a slow, wondering tone. “Miss Edith must have lost it.”
“Lost it! Oh, Molly, don’t be stupid!” she cried furiously. “How could she lose it? She’s been nowhere. She’s been here all the time—and the dress was here, too, hanging in the closet, up to a week ago! How can you lose a dress?” she cried impatiently. “Is it just going to crawl off your back and walk away from you when you’re not looking?” she said sarcastically. “You know she didn’t lose it! Someone’s taken it!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Molly said with a dutiful acquiescence. “That’s what I think, too. Someone must have sneaked in here when all of yez was out an’ taken it. Ah, I tell ye,” she remarked with a regretful movement of the head, “It’s got so nowadays ye never know who to trust and who not to,” she remarked sententiously. “A friend of mine who works fer some big people up at Rye was tellin’ me just the other day about a man who came there wit some new kind of a floor-mop that he had to sell—ast to try it out an’ show ‘em how it worked upon their floors, ye know, an’ a finer, cleaner lookin’ boy, she says, ye wouldn’t see again in yer whole life-time. ‘And my God!’ she says—I’m tellin’ ye just the way she told it to me, Mrs. Jack—‘I couldn’t believe me own ears when they told me later what he’d done! If he’d been me own brother I couldn’t have been more surprised,’ she says.—Well, it just goes to show ye that—”
“Oh, Molly, for heaven’s sake!”—the other woman cried with an angry and impatient gesture—“Don’t talk such rot to me! Who could come in here without you knowing it? You girls are here all day long, there’s only the elevator and the service entrance, and you see everyone who comes here—and besides, if anyone ever took the trouble to break in, you know he wouldn’t stop with just one dress. He’d be after money or jewelry, or something valuable that he could sell.”
“Well, now, I tell ye,” Molly said, “that man was here last week to fix the frigidaire—I says to May at the time—‘I don’t like the look of him. There’s something in his face that I don’t like, you keep your eye on him,’ I says, ‘because—’”
“Molly!”—At the sharp, stern warning in her mistress’s voice, the maid paused suddenly, looked sharply at her, and then was silent, with a dull, sullen flush of shame and truculence upon her face. For a moment the other woman stared at her with a burning and indignant look. Then she burst out on her plainly, with an open blazing anger before which the maid stood sullenly, hostile, silent and resentful.
“Look here!” the other woman broke out furiously. “I think it’s a dirty shame the way you girls are acting! We’ve been fine to you! Molly, there are no girls in this town who’ve been treated better than you have.”
“Don’t I know it, Mrs. Jack,” Molly cri
ed in a lilting and earnest tone—“Haven’t I always said the same? Wasn’t I saying the same thing meself to Annie just the other day? ‘Sure,’ I says, ‘but we’re the lucky ones! There’s no one in the world I’d rather work for than Mrs. Jack. Twenty years,’ I says, I’ve been here, and in all that time,’ I says, ‘I’ve never heard a cross word from her. They’re the best people in the world,’ I says, ‘and any girl who gets a job wit them is lucky,’” she cried richly. “Sure, haven’t I lived with ye all like ye was me own family? Don’t I know ye all—Mister Jack an’ Miss Edith and Miss Alma and Mr. Ernie—Wouldn’t I get down on me knees right now an’ scrub me fingers to the bone if it would help ye any—?”
“Oh, scrub your fingers to the bone!” the other woman cried impatiently. “Who’s asking you to scrub your fingers to the bone? Lord, Molly, you girls have had it pretty soft. There’s mighty little scrubbing that you’ve had to do!” she said. “It’s the rest of us who scrub,” she cried. “We go out of here every morning—six days in the week—and work like hell-”
“Don’t I know it, Mrs. Jack?” Molly cried. “Wasn’t I sayin’ to May just the other day—”
“Oh, damn what you said to May!” the woman said. For a brief moment she looked at the servant with a straight, burning face of indignation. Then she spoke more quietly to her. “Molly, listen to me,” she now said. “We’ve always given you girls everything you ever asked for. You’ve had the best wages anyone can get for what you do. And you’ve lived here with us just the same as the rest of us—you’ve had the same food, the same shelter—yes! even the same clothes—” she cried, “for you know very well that—”
“Sure,” Molly interrupted in a richly sentimental tone. “It hasn’t been like I was workin’ here at all! Ye couldn’t have treated me any better if I’d been one of the family!”
“Oh, one of the family my eye!” the other said impatiently. “Don’t make me laugh! There’s no one in the family—unless maybe it’s my daughter Alma—who doesn’t do more in a day than you girls do in a week! You’ve lived the life of Riley here!—The life of Riley!” she repeated, almost comically, and then stood there looking at the other woman for a moment, a formidable little dynamo trembling with her indignation, slowly clenching and unclenching her small hands at her sides. “Good heavens, Molly!” she burst out in a furious tone. “It’s not as if we ever begrudged you anything! It’s not as if we ever denied you anything you asked for! It’s not the value of the dress—you know very well that Edith would have given it to you if you had gone to her and asked her for it. But—oh! It’s intolerable! Intolerable!” She stormed out suddenly in a furious and uncontrollable anger. “That you should have no more sense or decency than to do a thing like that to people who have always been your friends!”
“Sure, and do you think I’d be the one who’d do a thing like that?” cried Molly in a trembling voice. “Is it me ye’re accusin,’ Mrs. Jack, when I’ve lived here wit yez almost twenty years? Sure, they could take me right hand”—in her rush of feeling she raised and held the member up, “and drop it from me arm before I’d take a button that belonged to one of yez. And that’s God’s truth,” she added solemnly. “I swear it to ye as I hope to live and be forgiven for me sins. Yes, I’ll swear it to ye,” she declared more passionately as the other woman started to speak—“that I never took a pin or penny that belonged to one of yez—and so help me God, that’s true! And yes! I’ll swear it to ye by everything that’s holy!” she now cried, tranced in a kind of ecstasy of sacred vows.—“By the soul an’ spirit of me blessed mother who is dead”—
“Ah! Molly!” the other woman cried with a furious and impatient exclamation, turning angrily away, and, in spite of her indignation, breaking into a short and angry laugh at the extravagance of the servant’s oaths as she thought with a bitter, scornful and contemptuous humor: “God! There’s not an honest bone in her whole body—yet she’ll swear a thousand oaths and thinks that makes an honest woman out of her! Yes! And will stay stinking drunk all night and go to Mass next morning if she has to crawl to get there—and cross herself with holy water—and listen to the priest say words she cannot understand—and come out glorified—to steal from us all day! What strange and magic things these oaths and ceremonies are!” she thought. “They give a kind of life to people who have none of their own. They make a kind of truth for people who have found none for themselves. Love, beauty, everlasting truth, salvation—all that we hope and suffer for on earth is in them for these people, all that we have to do with our own blood and labor, and by the ambush of our soul, is done for them, somehow” she thought ironically, “if they can only swear to it ‘by the soul an’ spirit of me blessed mother who is dead!—’”
“—And, so help me God, by all the Blessed Saints, and by the Holy Virgin, too,” she heard Molly’s voice intoning, and instantly she turned upon her with a movement of furious and exasperated impatience.
“Molly, for God’s sake, have a little sense!” she cried. “What is the use of all this swearing by the saints and virgins, and getting up and going out to Mass, when all you do is come back home to swill down Mr. Jack’s whiskey? Yes, and to lie and steal from the people who have been the best friends that you ever had!” she cried out bitterly, and seeing the old and mutinous look which had returned now to the maid’s sullen and distempered eye, she went on with an almost pleading earnestness: “Molly, for God’s sake, try to have a little wisdom! Is this all you’ve been able to get from life?—To come in here and sneer and lie, and blow your stinking breath on me, when all we’ve ever done has been to help you?”—The woman’s voice was trembling with her passionate and open anger, and yet one would instantly have known, had he heard her, that her anger was something more than personal, that she was speaking not so much because she felt the maid had lied to her and stolen from her sister, but because she felt that the maid had betrayed and insulted something decent and inviolable in life—a faith and integrity in human feeling that she felt should be kept and honored everywhere. And this fine, bold, passionate quality of indignation was so plainly and earnestly written down in every feature of her face, and in every line and member of her vital and determined little figure, that it somehow made the woman wonderful. For it was plain that she would have spoken out without fear or favor to anyone, and at any place and time, as she had spoken to the maid, if she had seen some cut of cruelty, injustice or dishonor; yet it was also evident that she was in no way a quarrelsome or officious woman, but as kind, happy, and liberal in her nature as anyone could be.
Finally, the very sight of her as she stood there would have been sufficient to evoke a whole human faith again, a belief in a high, rare, and wonderful value of human dignity—and with a strength and truth in her which was so much greater than anything in the maid that it soared triumphantly above the maid’s sullen figure, establishing victoriously and forever above the servant’s feeble sneer the reality of beauty, joy, and glorious and abundant living on the earth. And it was this quality, that sprang and flourished from the everlasting earth, that the maid had seen and hated dumbly in her rancourous and barren soul, and that made the woman wonderful.
This quality of exultancy, energy, and joy which this woman had is not only the most rare and wonderful thing in the world, it is also so familiar and living a possession that when people see it, even though they have never seen it before, they feel instantly not only its power and beauty, but they feel that they have known it forever, that it belongs to them, and that everyone should be a part of it. Yet not one person in ten thousand has it; when he has, it is scarcely too much to say that nothing else matters. People will want to be near him, to feel the power, joy, and beauty of his presence, to live in the world of ecstasy and magic that springs to life everywhere around him and that lives in everything he touches. What is this quality? From where does it come? Where does it go? In what kind of people does it live? It seems to be a power that is completely arbitrary and indifferent to human choice. It cho
oses, rather than is chosen, and one finds it as often in brutal, ignorant and indifferent men, as in people distinguished by their talent or intelligence.
One finds it sometimes in the heavy shambling figure of a man with the brutal and battered face of a vagabond: as he swings along at a shambling step he will carelessly thrust one hand into the pocket of his shapeless coat, draw forth a cigarette, light it briefly between a cupped palm and hard and twisted mouth, and then walk on, with a wire of acrid smoke expiring slowly from his nostrils. Yet this simple and familiar gesture will not only awaken in the beholder an overpowering desire to smoke, but that man has somehow discovered tobacco again: all the joy, the pungent fragrance, the relish and the deep content that the first man who ever smoked must have known has been revived in the wink of an eye by the gesture of a tramp.
In the same way a workman tearing the thick and glutinous halves of a meat sandwich between his blackened fingers may awaken an almost intolerable hunger in the spectator as the finest chef on earth could never do; an old man sitting at the throttle of a mighty locomotive as he steams slowly past, by his one gloved hand of curving, his lean and somewhat withered applecheeks, his glint of demon hawkeyes on the rail, may evoke in the beholder a sense of glory, power, and joy, a music of space and ecstasy, an instant vision of the whole vast structure of the earth, the sleeping woods, the great dark continent of night, and new lands, morning, and a shining city, as all the eightlocked driving wheels and flashing pistons in the world could never do.