Silent Sam and other stories of our day

Contents

PAGE

I SILENT SAM 3

II HIS MOTHER 29

II

That mood passed, and a more characteristic one succeeded it.

She told herself that the girl would be some " gumchewin' young gad-about with no more than brains enough to dress herself like a fool." A shop-girl, no doubt — a shop-girl that carried all her wages on her back and walked with a wiggle! There were no girls, no more, like the girls of her day. !N"ever a one. Now, they went to work in offices instead of staying home and learning the things a girl ought to know. They made poor wives and worse mothers. They were half of them sickly and all of them silly. They knew no more about their proper business in life than a peacock knows about hatching duck's eggs.

She muttered and grumbled it over and over while she dressed — angry at herself now, because she had dared Larry to bring the girl. What could she say to the fool creature ? Let him marry her and go off with her out of this. She could take care of herself — and that 's all she would do. She did n't want to see the girl. Why should she? Drat the young snip. Who wanted to listen to her cackle? If Larry liked it, let him take it and live with it. There was no accounting for tastes. Larry ! Of all boys in the world ! Well, live and learn. Live and learn.

She plumped herself down in her rocking-chair by the window and waited indignantly for them to come. She looked very sour, very stiff and forbidding. Hard work had kept her thin and angular. She snorted and muttered to herself. And she was still in this frame of mind when the arrival of Larry and his " girl brought her to her feet. " Now then/' she said. N"ow then!"

There entered a meekly dressed young woman, about thirty years old, tall, in black, with a plain pale face and a subdued manner. " Miss McCarty," Larry introduced her, very proud and somewhat apprehensive. ("God help us," Mrs. Regan said afterward, I thought 'twas a joke he was playin'. She was no thin' at all to look at. An' old enough to marry two of him ! ") He did not notice how his mother received Miss Mc- Carty; he was only anxious about how Miss McCarty would be impressed. And the mother received her as a rival who, at first sight, disproved all the formidable re^ ports concerning her; and Miss McCarty showed no more impression than is indicated by the deepening of reserve.

She had a broad, flat forehead ; and her eyes were set under it, far apart and colorless, with a quiet despondency of expression. Her mouth had the same flatness — a wide mouth, thin-lipped and full of the character of a woman who has a mind of her own. When she sat down she folded in her lap a pair of immaculate hands, large, firm, very white, and evidently very capable. Her physical largeness was obviously of the same quality of graceful strength.

" Well, now ! " Mrs. Eegan said, at last. " Will yuh tell me somethin' ? Wherever did yuh meet ? " Her excitement gave her voice the shrillness that made her sound shrewish to those who did not know her.

" Down-town," Larry answered, with his eyes still fixed on the girl.

" Do yuh work ? " the mother asked her.

" Oh, yes," she said, " I 've always worked." And she spoke in the voice that had glamored Larry.

It was not the voice of a dialect; it was not even markedly the plaintive intonation of the Celt. It was a rich full breathing of deepened vowels and blurred consonants that put a sort of pastoral gentleness and charm on every word — as soft as an Irish mist on the green undulations of an Irish landscape.

" What do yuh do ? " Mrs. Eegan demanded.

Larry answered for her : " She 's a manicurist."

" A — What's that?" she cried, annoyed because the girl had an appearance of ignoring her.

Larry laughed nervously. It was evident that Miss McCarty did not understand the brusk kindliness of his mother's inquiries. " Never mind what it is," he said. " What diff'rence does it make ? "

Mrs. Eegan contained herself by folding her arms on her pride. " True enough," she said. " What diff'- rence ? 'Tis none o' my bus'ness. None at all." And with that she assumed an attitude of silent self -suppression that was comical — as well as tragic.

" It only took us twenty minutes to get down to Fourteenth Street from a Hundred an' Third/' Larry told her.

" Did it/' she said, shortly.

" Lots o' flats to rent up there."

She said nothing.

" Better air, too."

With one hand supporting an elbow, she fingered her lips as if she were fingering a padlock on them. Miss McCarty was very reposedly looking aside out of the window. Larry tried to make talk.

The end of it came when the girl, having carried on five minutes' futile conversation with him — about flats, comparative rents, and the possible construction of more subways — rose placidly to say good night ; and Mrs. Eegan awoke, too late, to the inhospitality of her behavior.

" Yuh 're never goin' so soon ! " she cried. " Wait a bit. Have a cup o' tea now." The girl refused firmly, but Mrs. Began hurried out to the kitchen to put on the kettle and open the cake box. She heard Larry call out something which she did not understand. And when she returned with her pewter cake-basket and her tray of cups, the room was empty.

They had gone.

She went back to the kitchen, thumped the cake into the box, banged the basket down on the table, and snatched the kettle from the stove. " There ! " she said.

" Now ! " And seating herself in the chair by the fire-escape window she began to weep.

She had done it. She had quarreled with them. The girl would take Larry away from her. It was the end of everything!

Ill

Larry had first seen Miss McCarty in a down-town barber shop — and if he had not hung up his hat before he had seen her, he might have backed out of the place. As it was, he had taken his seat in the chair nearest her with an uncomfortable feeling that she had intruded on his toilet. She was manicuring at a little table near the door.

" Hair cut/' he said, in a husky undertone, and felt like a fool when the barber swathed him in striped calico and tucked it in around his neck. It was no position for a man to be seen in by any young woman. In the best of circumstances haircutting was to Larry an operation of personal beautification that was to be rushed through with a scornful lack of attention; he would scarcely look at himself in the glass until he could do it alone and unashamed, and curse the barber who had made the parting an inch too high on his head. And now, when his hair had been ruffled up unbecomingly, he kept darting irritated glances at her out of the corner of his eye, to see that she was not staring at him.

She was polishing the finger-nails of a man who had his back to Larry, so that Larry could not see his face.

It was enough for him to see hers. !N'ot that she was beautiful — or even of an interesting ugliness. He thought her merely plain looking, with a nose too large. What he saw in her face was the evidence that her customer was annoying her ; and as Larry watched her, he added his irritated embarrassment about his own toilet to an accession of uncultured contempt for the man who could loll back, ogling, in a barber shop, while a woman polished his nails.

The barber slewed Larry's head around — first this way and then that way — with the masterful hand of his trade ; and Larry caught but fleeting glimpses of the girl's reddened ears and frigid haughtiness. The man was leaning forward on one elbow, a roll of flesh bulging above his collar. Larry's slanted eye fixed on that fat roll malevolently for a moment before the barber swung him around again. And when he was sheared and sleeked down with bay rum and out of the chair finally, he reached for his hat — with his eyes on the remembered neck — just as the girl, dropping her chamois pad, looked up appealingly at the barber as if for aid against insult.

Larry stepped forward, jabbed his fingers in between the neck and the collar and raised the man with one hand while he withdrew the chair with the other. The tightened collar prevented any but a guttural, choked outcry. Larry jerked him clear of the table and propelled him swiftly toward the screen door, shoved him through that, ran him across the sidewalk, and there, bumping him behind with a bent knee, sent him sprawling into the gutter. Then, without any undignified haste, but with sufficient celerity, he shouldered his way through the midday crowd on Broadway, turned a corner, and hurried back to his work.

He had almost forgotten the incident before he saw her again. He had not gone near the barber shop meanwhile. He had not given her a thought — except a vaguely resentful one. And when he met her, face to face, in City Hall Park, he was not sure where he had seen her before. She said, quite frankly and unembarrassed : " I want to thank you. Don't you remember me ? "

" Sure I do," he replied, and he did not say it flippantly. She had spoken in that wonderful voice of hers, and it had made him respectful at once.

He turned back with her, and she accepted his escort as a matter of course. They said nothing of any importance ; they parted at the step of the " El.'' in Park Place, with a nod and a smile ; and Larry was half way back to his own station of the Third Avenue Elevated at Brooklyn Bridge before it occurred to him that he would like to see her again and had not provided the opportunity.

The omission made it necessary for him to stand opposite the barber shop, next noon, and wait for her to come out for luncheon.

There is, in such affairs, an unwritten code that prohibits the asking of personal questions. The young man must accept the young woman " sight unseen " — as the boys say when they " swap " with their hands behind them — until the first trial of acquaintance has been proven. Then, if the interest becomes serious, mutual confidences are naturally exchanged, the right to receive them having been established. It was for this reason that even after Larry and she had gone to the theaters together, sat in the parks, and patronized the museums of art and of natural history — v^hich a thoughtful public has erected for the use of JSTew York lovers who need sheltered benches on wet Sunday afternoons — he knew as little about her past, her parentage and the private circumstances of her life as she knew about his. She remained placid, uncoquettish and still reserved with the reserve of a woman whose voice was not made for chatter. That voice haunted him. He heard it even in the midst of the crashed metallic tinklings of the linotypes.

Then, one evening, when he called upon her by appointment to take her to the theater, she did not meet him at the door of the flat-house; and he ascended to the top floor apartment to find her with a headache and unwilling to go out. She was sharing the flat with two friends — one a head waitress in a dairy restaurant, the other a black-haired little Socialist who was trying to organize a union among the shop-girls of a department store where she worked. And it was here that Larry began to " see things different," as he told his mother, in the matter of politics. Here, too, he got another impression of Miss McCarty, from the deference which her two room mates showed her and the air of right with which she accepted it — - to say nothing of the graceful dignity of the way in which she reclined upon a shabby corner couch and listened to the argument between Larry and the Socialist.

She gave him an impression not only of superior experience and superior age, but even of superior culture ; and when he left her that night he had an uneasy suspicion that she was, perhaps, " above " him.

He was ambitious. He was also proud — as proud as his mother. And when he came to ask the girl to call on Mrs. Eegan with him, he gave the invitation as if it were a defiance. She accepted it — after a moment's reflection — with some of that feminine, Old-World dignity that refuses to recognize a lover until he makes his formal declaration.

It was this dignity that carried her outwardly unmoved through the interview with Mrs. Regan ; and it was this dignity that sat so stiff upon her as she journeyed back to One Hundred and Third Street with Larry, in the roaring subway, after she had refused Mrs. Regan's cup of tea. There was nothing to say; the noise about them, in any case, prevented them from saying anything; and Larry waited until they were in the street before he even asked when he might see her again.

She replied calmly : I don't know." " Will you come to — to the theater to-morrah night?"

" 'No, thank you," she said.

"Why?"

Her manner replied that she did not feel he had any claim upon Her that would justify tlie question. She looked straight ahead of her in silence.

Larry put his hands in his coat pockets, with the air of a boy who has been insulted and who puts away his fists temporarily until he can make sure that the insult was intended. He asked : " Don't you want me to come to see you ? "

" I think not," she said, in her smoothest voice.

Larry took her to her door without another word. He stopped on the pavement. " Good night," he challenged.

She looked back over her shoulder as she took the first step. " Good-by," she replied cheerfully ; and it was a cheerfulness that only made finality sound more final.

Larry nodded briefly and turned away. And to match the finality in her cheerfulness, there was, in his nod of dismissal, an anger that was as implacable as an Irish hate.