1. The brown-stone house; the father coming home
worried from a bad day’s business; the wife meets him
in the marble pav’d vestibule; she throws her arms
about him; she presses him close to her; she looks him
full in the face with affectionate eyes; the frown from
his brow disappearing.
Darling, she says, Johnny has fallen down and cut his
head; the cook is going away, and the boiler leaks.
2. The mechanic’s dark little third-story room, seen
in a flash from the Elevated Railway train; the
sewing-machine in a corner; the small cook-stove; the
whole family eating cabbage around a kerosene lamp;
of the clatter and roar and groaning wail of the
Elevated train unconscious; of the smell of the cabbage
unconscious.
Me, passant, in the train, of the cabbage not quite so
unconscious.
3. The French Flat; the small rooms, all right-angles,
unindividual; the narrow halls; the gaudy, cheap
decorations everywhere.
The janitor and the cook exchanging compliments up and
down the elevator-shaft; the refusal to send up more
coal, the solid splash of the water upon his head, the
language he sends up the shaft, the triumphant laughter
of the cook, to her kitchen retiring.
4. The widow’s small house in the suburbs of the city;
the widow’s boy coming home from his first day down
town; he is flushed with happiness and pride; he is no
longer a school-boy, he is earning money; he takes on
the airs of a man and talks learnedly of business.
5. The room in the third-class boarding-house; the
mean little hard-coal fire, the slovenly Irish
servant-girl making it, the ashes on the hearth, the
faded furniture, the private provender hid away in the
closet, the dreary backyard out the window; the young
girl at the glass, with her mouth full of hairpins,
doing up her hair to go downstairs and flirt with the
young fellows in the parlor.
6. The kitchen of the old farm-house; the young convict
just returned from prison—it was his first offense,
and the judges were lenient on him.
He is taking his first meal out of prison; he has been
received back, kiss’d, encourag’d to start again; his
lungs, his nostrils expand with the big breaths of free
air; with shame, with wonderment, with a trembling
joy, his heart too, expanding.
The old mother busies herself about the table; she has
ready for him the dishes he us’d to like; the father
sits with his back to them, reading the newspaper,
the newspaper shaking and rustling much; the children
hang wondering around the prodigal—they have been
caution’d: Do not ask where our Jim has been; only say
you are glad to see him.
The elder daughter is there, palefac’d, quiet; her
young man went back on her four years ago; his folks
would not let him marry a convict’s sister. She sits
by the window, sewing on the children’s clothes, the
clothes not only patching up; her hunger for children
of her own invisibly patching up.
The brother looks up; he catches her eye, he fearful,
apologetic; she smiles back at him, not reproachfully
smiling, with loving pretence of hope smiling—it is
too much for him; he buries his face in the folds of
the mother’s black gown.
7. The best room of the house, on the Sabbath only
open’d; the smell of horse-hair furniture and
mahogany varnish; the ornaments on the what-not in
the corner; the wax fruit, dusty, sunken, sagged
in, consumptive-looking, under a glass globe, the
sealing-wax imitation of coral; the cigar boxes with
shells plastered over, the perforated card-board motto.
The kitchen; the housewife sprinkling the clothes
for the fine ironing to-morrow—it is the Third-day
night, and the plain things are ready iron’d, now in
cupboards, in drawers stowed away.
The wife waiting for the husband—he is at the tavern,
jovial, carousing; she, alone in the kitchen sprinkling
clothes—the little red wood clock with peaked top,
with pendulum wagging behind a pane of gayly painted
glass, strikes twelve.
The sound of the husband’s voice on the still
night air—he is singing: “We won’t go home until
morning!”—the wife arising, toward the wood-shed
hastily going, stealthily entering, the voice all the
time coming nearer, inebriate, chantant.
The husband passing the door of the wood-shed; the club
over his head, now with his head in contact; the sudden
cessation of the song; the benediction of peace over
the domestic foyer temporarily resting.
I sing the soothing influences of home.
You, young man, thoughtlessly wandering, with courier, with
guide-book wandering,
You hearken to the melody of my steam-calliope
Yawp!
_Henry Cuyler Bunner._