Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories Part 20

Anna, inclined to be wroth, retorted: 'I suppose you'd be preferring one o' them tight ganzy [sweater] things that fit the figger like a jersey, all b.u.t.toned down before.'

A sudden light flamed in the old face. 'I have it!' she cried. 'Tis what I've been seeking this good while. 'Twill come now--the red coat! I must be getting back to the beginning.'

With that, she was off, relaxing and composing herself, as if surrendering to the spell of a hypnotist.

To reach any desired picture in her gallery, she must start at the outset. Then they followed on, in due order--all that procession of little girls: pink clad, blue-print clad, bare-legged or brogan-shod; flirting their short skirts, plaiting their heavy braids. About half way along, a new figure a.s.serted itself--a girl of nine or ten, who twisted this way and that before a blurred bit of mirror and frowned at the red coat that flapped about her heels,--bought oversize, you may be sure, so that she shouldn't grow out of it too soon. The sleeves swallowed her little brown hands, the shoulders and back were grotesquely sack-like, the front had a puss [pout] on it.

"Tis the very fetch of Paddy the gander I am in it. I'll not be wearing it so.' She frowned with sudden intentness. 'Could I be fitting it a bit, I wonder, the way mother does cut down John's coats for Martin?'

With needle, scissors and thread, she crept up to her little chamber under the eaves. It was early in the forenoon when she set to work ripping. The morning pa.s.sed, and the dinner hour.

'Peggy! Where's the girl gone to, I wonder?'

'To Aunt Theresa's, I'm thinking.'

'Well, it's glad I am she's out o' my sight, for my hands itched to be shaking her. Stand and twist herself inside out she did, fussing over the fit of the good coat I'm after buying her. The little fustherer!'

For the small tailoress under the roof, the afternoon sped on winged feet: pinning, basting, and st.i.tching; trying on, ripping out again, and re-fitting. 'I'll be taking it in a wee bit more.' She had to crowd up to the window to catch the last of the daylight. At dusk, she swept her dark hair from her flushed cheeks and forced her st.u.r.dy body into the red coat. It was a 'fit,' believe you me! Modeled on the lines of the riding-habit of a full-figured lady she had seen hunting about the country-side, it b.u.t.toned up tight over her flat, boyish chest and bottled up her squarish little waist. About her narrow hips, it rippled out in a short 'frisk.' Beneath, her calico skirt, and bramble-scratched brown legs.

Warmed with triumph, she flew downstairs. Her mother and a neighbor were sitting in the glow of the peat fire. She tried to meet them with a.s.surance, but at sight of their amazed faces, misgiving clutched her.

She pivoted before the mirror.

'Holy hour!' cried her mother. 'What sausage-skin is that you've got into?' Then, as comprehension grew: 'Glory b' t' G.o.d, Ellen! 'tis the remains of the fine new coat, I'm after buying her, large enough to last her the next five years!'

"Twas too large!' the child whimpered. 'A gander I looked in it!' Then, cajolingly, 'I'm but after taking it in a bit, ma. 'Twill do grand now, and maybe I'll not be getting much fatter. Look at the fit of it, just!'

'Fit! G.o.d save the mark!' cried her mother.

'Is the child after making that jacket herself?' asked the neighbor.

'I am,' Margaret spoke up, defiantly. 'I cut it and shaped it and put it together. It has even a frisk to the tail.'

'Maggie,' said the neighbor to Margaret's mother. "Tis as good a piece o' work for a child of her years as ever I see. You ought not to be faulting her, she's done that well. And,' bursting into irrepressible laughter, 'it's herself will have to be wearing it, woman dear! All she needs now is a horse and a side-saddle to be an equeestrieen!'

So the wanton destruction of the good red coat--in that house where good coats were sadly infrequent--ended with a laugh after all. How long she wore that tight jacket, and how grand she felt in it, let the other children laugh as they would!

What joy the old woman took in this incident! With its fullness of detail, it achieved a delicious suggestion of permanence, in contrast to the illusiveness of other isolated moments. Margaret O'Brien _saw_ all these other figures, but she really _was_ the child with the red coat.

In the long years between, she had fas.h.i.+oned many fine dresses--gowned gay girls for their conquests and robed fair brides for the altar. Of all these, nothing now remained; but she could feel the good stuff of the red kersey under her little needle-scratched fingers, and see the glow of its rich color against her wind-kissed brown cheek.

'To the life!' she exclaimed aloud, exultantly. 'To the very life!'

'What life, Aunt Margaret?' asked Anna, with gentle solicitude. 'Is it afraid of the end you are, darling?'

'No, no, asth.o.r.e. I've resigned myself long since, though 'twas bitter knowledge at the outset. Well, well, G.o.d is good and we can't live forever.'

Her eyes, opening to the two flaring patent gas-burners, winked as if she had dwelt long in a milder light. 'What's all this glare about?' she asked, playfully. 'I guess the chandler's wife is dead. Snuff out the whole of them staring candles, let you. 'Tis daylight yet; just the time o' day I always did like the best.'

Anna obeyed and sat down beside the bed in the soft spring dusk. A little wind crept in under the floating white curtains, bringing with it the sweetness of new gra.s.s and pear-blossoms from the trim yard. It seemed an interval set apart from the hurrying hours of the busy day for rest and thought and confidences--an open moment. The old woman must have felt its invitation, for she turned her head and held out a shy hand to her niece.

'Anna, my girl, you imagine 'tis the full o' the moon with me, I'm thinking. But, no, never woman was more in her right mind than I. Do you want I should be telling you what I've been hatching these many long days and nights? 'Twill be a good laugh for you, I'll go bail.'

And, as best she could, she gave the trend of her imaginings.

Anna did not laugh, however. Instead--with the ever-ready sympathy and comprehension of the Celt--she showed br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes. "Tis a thought I've often myself, let me tell you,' she admitted. 'Of all the little girls that were me, and now can be living no longer.'

'You've said it!' cried the old woman, delighted at her unexpected responsiveness. 'Only with me, 'tis fair pit'yus. There's all those poor dear la.s.ses there's n.o.body but me left to remember, and soon there'll not be even that. Sometimes they seem to be pleading just not to be forgotten, so I have to be keeping them alive in my head. I'm succeeding, too, and, if you'll believe me, 'tis them little whips seem to be the real ones, and the live children here the shadders.' Her voice choked with sudden tears. 'They're all the children ever I had. My grief! that I'll have to be leaving them! They'll die now, for no man lives who can remember them any more.'

Anna's beauty, already fading with the cares of house and children, seemed to put on all its former fresh charm. She leaned forward with girlish eagerness. 'Auntie Margaret,' she breathed, with new tenderness, 'there's many a day left you yet. I'll be sitting here aside of you every evening at twilight just, and you can be showing me the la.s.ses you have in mind. Many's the time my mother told me of the old place, and I can remember it well enough myself, though I was the youngest of the lot. So you can be filling it with all of our people--Mary and Margaret, John, Martin and Esther, Uncle Sheamus and the rest. I'll see them just as clear as yourself, for I've a place in my head where pictures come as thick and sharp as stars on a frosty night, when I get thinking. Then, with me ever calling them up, they'll be dancing and stravaging about till doomsday.'

So the old woman had her heart's desire. She re-created her earlier selves and pa.s.sed them on, happy in the thought that she was saving them from oblivion. 'Do you mind that bold la.s.s clouting her pet bull, now?'

she would ask, with delight, speaking more and more as if of a third person. 'And that other hussy that's after making a ganzy out of her good coat? I'd admire to have the leathering of that one.'

Still the old woman lingered, a good month beyond her allotted time. As spring ripened, the days grew long. In the slow-fading twilights, the two women set their stage, gave cues for entrances and exits. Over the white counterpane danced the joyous figures, so radiant, so incredibly young, the whole cycle of a woman's girlhood. Grown familiar now, they came of their own accord, soothing her hours of pain with their laughing beauty, or, suddenly contemplative, a.s.sisting with seemly decorum at her devotional ecstasies.

'A saintly woman,' the young priest told Anna on one of the last days.

'She will make a holy end. Her meditations must be beautiful, for she has the true light of Heaven on her face. She looks as if she heard already the choiring of the angels.'

And Anna, respectfully agreeing, kept her counsel. He was a good and sympathetic man and a priest of G.o.d, but, American-born, he was, like her stolid, kindly husband, outside the magic circle of comprehension.

'He sees nothing, poor man,' she thought, indulgently. 'But he does mean well.' So she set her husband to 'mind' the young ones, and, easily doffing the sordid preoccupations of every day, slipped back into the enchanted ring.

THE FAILURE

BY CHARLES CALDWELL DOBIE

I

At an unearthly hour in the morning John Scidmore sat up suddenly in his bed and remembered Julia Norris's telephone message. He rose at once, switched on the shaded light on the bureau, and looked at his watch: the minute hand had just swung past three o'clock.

Undisturbed by her husband's nocturnal prowling, Kitty Scidmore slept with almost childish naturalness. He plunged the room into darkness again and felt his way out into the hall and down the short flight of stairs to the dining-room.

The night was unusually warm. As he opened the garden window, pungent odors of dry stubble wet with a late October dew floated toward him. He leaned out and drew in a deep breath, but his attempts at calmness failed utterly.

He knew that it was absurd to fret; he might just as well go back to bed and sleep peacefully. One could not place a line of insurance at three o'clock in the morning. Upon what day had Julia Norris telephoned? Was it last Friday? Yes, he remembered now, perfectly. He had been busy with a peevish customer who haggled about a twenty-five-cent overcharge. In the midst of the controversy, in her characteristically impulsive way, Julia Norris had rung up:--

'O John! is that you, John? Place ten thousand dollars with the Falcon Insurance Company on my flats in the Richmond District.'

He had recognized her voice even before she gave her name. And he had been _so sure_ he would not forget. Why, he had been so _very_ sure that he had not troubled to make a memorandum. And to think that the excitement of arguing a twenty-five-cent overcharge should have so completely put to rout Julia Norris's order!

A sudden rage at his carelessness seized him. How he loathed his life, his work, and the soul-killing routine and cramped vision of the figurative counting-house! He switched on the light and peered into the mirror over the mantel, smiling satirically at the reflection greeting him,--the reflection of plain Johnny Scidmore, insurance broker's clerk, a commonplace, rather undersized, law-abiding citizen just turning forty, whose face showed the lack of that forceful ability necessary to convert opportunity into success.

As he drew back from the gla.s.s with a shrug of disgust, the futility of his life flashed over him. He still could remember the time when he went blithely to the day's work, buoyed by youth's intangible hope of better things. But the years soon took their toll of enthusiasm, and there were days when John Scidmore went through his paces like a trick horse urged by the whip of necessity. Lately he had been worried to find how easily he was forgetting things--telephone messages, instructions from his chief, orders to place insurance. So far nothing very important had slipped by him, but now he felt quite sure that he could never trust himself again. There were many reasons why he should have remembered Julia Norris's orders. First, because she was his wife's friend; second, because a ten-thousand-dollar order to his credit was not an everyday occurrence; and third, because the circ.u.mstance that had overshadowed it was relatively of so little importance.

For over a week, then, Julia Norris's property had gone without insurance protection. What if it had burned up? What if it were burning up at this very moment? He sat down suddenly.

He got up again, fumbled about, and found cigarettes and a box of matches. Two cigarettes quieted him. He began to think that he was a silly fool, mooning about when he should have been sleeping. In the morning he would take an early train to San Francisco and place the line without further ado. Yes, after all, he was as silly and notional as a young schoolgirl. He put down the window, turned off the lights, and crawled upstairs to bed.