he would remain silent, drooping there, wrists crossed in his lap,
palms turned upward, fingers curled, until supper had been placed
before him on the table. "Fingers bent like claws," muttered Great
Taylor, "and doing nothing while I set the table."
Sometimes he would eat enormously, which irritated Nell; sometimes he
would eat nothing except bread and molasses, which irritated Nell even
more. "A good molasses jug," he would say; "got it for a dime. Once I
set a price I'm a stone wall; never give in." This was his one boast,
his stock phrase. After using it he would look up at his wife for a
word of approval; and as the word of approval was never forthcoming,
he would repeat: "Nell, I'm a stone wall; never give in."
After supper he would ask what she had been doing all day. A weary,
almost voiceless, man, he had told her nothing. But Great Taylor while
washing the dishes would rattle off everything that had happened since
that morning. She seldom omitted any important detail, for she knew by
experience that Grit would sit there, silent, wrists crossed and palms
turned up, waiting. He had always seemed to know when she had left
anything out, and she always ended by telling him. Then he would take
a long breath, eyes closed, and, after fumbling back of the molasses
jug, would soon be seated again beneath the streaming gas-jet spelling
to himself the words of his coverless book.
So vivid was the picture, the personality and routine of Grit, that
Great Taylor felt the awe with which he, at times, had inspired her.
She had been afraid of Grit--afraid to do anything she could not tell
him about; afraid not to tell him about everything she had done. But
now she determined: "I'll do what I please." And the first thing it
pleased Great Taylor to do was to get rid of the odious molasses jug.
She plucked it from the shelf, holding the sticky handle between two
fingers, and dropped it into the peach crate that served as a
waste-basket. The noise when the jug struck the bottom of the crate
startled her. Great Taylor stood there--listening. Someone was slowly
ascending the circular staircase. The woman could hear a footfall on
the iron steps.
"Grit's gone," she reassured herself. "I'll do what I please."
She reached for the grimy book, "Grit's Bible," the most offensive
article in the room, and with sudden determination tore the book in
two, and was about to throw the defaced volume into the basket along
with the earthen jug when fear arrested the motion of her hands. Her
lips parted. She was afraid to turn her head. The door back of her had
opened.
Great Taylor was only ordinarily superstitious. She had buried Grit
that morning. It was still broad daylight--early afternoon. And yet
when she turned, clutching the torn book, she fully expected to see a
pair of baggy breeches preceding a collarless, long-necked man with a
broken nose, and smudges in the hollows of his cheeks.
Instead, she wheeled to see a pair of fastidiously pressed blue serge
trousers, an immaculate white collar, a straight nose and ruddy
complexion. In fact, the man seemed the exact opposite of Grit. Nell
glanced at the open door, back at the man, exhaled tremulously with
relief, and breathed: "Why didn't you knock?"
"Sorry if I startled you," puffed the man, entirely winded by the six
flights. "Must have pushed the wrong button in the vestibule. No great
harm done."
"Who are you? What you want?"
"Junk. That's one of the things I came to see about--the junk in back
of my place. I suppose it's for sale." He thrust his white hands into
the side pockets of his coat, pulling the coat snugly around his waist
and hips, and smiled amiably at Great Taylor's patent surprise.
"You!.... Buy Grit's junk business!" What did _he_ want with junk? He
was clean! From head to foot he was clean! His hair was parted. It was
not only parted, it was brushed into a wave, with ends pointing
stiffly up over his temples (a coiffure affected by bartenders of that
day); and Nell even detected the pleasant fragrance of pomade. "You
ain't a junkman."
The man laughed. "I don't know about that."
He studied her a moment in silence. Nell was leaning back against the
washtubs, her sleeves rolled up, her head tilted quizzically, lips
parted, while tints of colour ebbed and flowed in her throat and
cheeks. She had attained the ripeness of womanhood and very nearly
animal perfection. The man's attitude might have told her this. One of
his eyes, beneath a permanently cocked eyebrow, blinked like the
shutter of a camera and seemed to take intimate photographs of all
parts of her person. The other eye looked at her steadily from under a
drooping lid. "No," he said, after the pause of a moment, "I'm not
going into the junk business." But he wanted to get the rubbish away
from the back of his place. "I'll buy it and have it carted away. It's
too near the 'Garden.'" He rocked up on his toes and clicked his heels
gently. "I own the house just around the corner."
"I knew it," Nell murmured fatuously. The man was vaguely familiar,
even though she could not remember having seen him before.
"Set your price." He turned away, and Nell imagined that his
camera-like eye was taking instantaneous photographs of all the broken
and mended things in the immaculate room. A wave of hot blood made her
back prickle and dyed her throat crimson.
"I don't like rubbish," said the man. "I don't like junk."
"Who does?" stammered Great Taylor.
"You dislike junk, and yet there was your husband, a junkman." He
watched her narrowly from beneath his drooping eyelid.
Great Taylor was not of the noblesse, nor did she know the meaning of
noblesse oblige; and had she been a man, perhaps she would have denied
her former lord and master--once, twice, or even thrice--it has been
done; but being a woman, she said: "Leave Grit out of it."
This seemed to please the man from around the corner. "I think we are
going to get on," he said significantly. "But you must remember that
Grit can't take care of you any longer."
"Grit's gone," assented Nell; "gone for good."
"Uhm." The man allowed his singular eyes to move over her. "I think we
can arrange something. I've seen you pass my place, looking in; and I
had something in mind when I started up here--something aside from
junk. I could make a place over there--matron or cashier. How would
you like that--cashier at the Garden?" He rocked up on his toes and
clicked his heels quite audibly.
"I don't know anything about it."
"You'll soon learn," he was confident. He mentioned the salary, and
that a former cashier was now half owner of an uptown place. And for
half an hour Great Taylor's saturnine mind followed in the wake of his
smoothly flowing words.
Why couldn't Grit have talked like that? she kept asking herself. Grit
never said anything. Why couldn't he been clean like that, with hair
brushed into a curl that sat up like that? ... The man's words
gradually slipped far beyond her, and only his pleasant voice
accompanied her own thoughts. No reason why she shouldn't be cashier
at the Garden. Only one reason, anyway, and that wasn't any reason at
all....
On an afternoon more than a year ago she had gone to the place around
the corner. She had told Grit all about it, and Grit had said in his
weary voice, "Don't never go again, Nell." She had argued with Grit.
The Garden wasn't wicked; nothing the matter with it; other people
went there of an afternoon; she liked the music.... And Grit had
listened, drooping in his chair, wrists crossed and palms turned
upward. Finally, when Nell had finished, he had repeated, "Don't go
again." He had not argued, for Grit never argued; he was always too
weary. But this had been one of his longest speeches. He had ended:
"The Devil himself owns that place. I ought to know, my junkyard's
right back of it." And he had closed his eyes and taken a long, deep
breath. "When I say a thing, Nell, I'm a stone wall. You can't go
there again--now or never." And that had settled it, for Great Taylor
had been afraid of Grit. But now Grit was dead; gone for good. She
would do as she pleased....
When she looked up the man had stopped talking. He glanced at the
clock.
"What time?" murmured Great Taylor.
"Five," said the man from just around the corner.
Nell nodded her head and watched as the man's fastidiously pressed
trousers and polished shoes cleared the closing door. Nell immediately
went to the looking-glass--a cracked little mirror that hung by the
mantelpiece--and studied the reflection of herself with newly awakened
interest. She had never seemed so radiant--her smooth hair, her
lineless face, her large gray eyes and perfect throat. "I ain't so bad
looking," she admitted. Grit had never made her feel this way. And
again she asked herself why he could not have been clean like the man
from around the corner.
She rehearsed all that had been said. She thought of the salary the
man had mentioned, and made calculations. It was more than Grit had
averaged for the two of them to live on. With prodigal fancy she spent
the money and with new-born thrift she placed it in bank. Limited only
by her small knowledge of such things, she revelled in a dream of
affluence and luxury which was only dissipated when gradually she
became conscious that throughout the past hour she had been clinging
to a grimy, coverless book.
Damp finger-prints were upon the outer leaves, and the pages adhered
to her moistened hand. She loosened her grip, and the book opened to a
particularly soiled page on which a line had been underscored with a
thick red mark. Dully, Great Taylor read the line, spelling out the
words; but it conveyed nothing to her intellect. It was the fighting
phrase of a famous soldier: "_I have drawn the sword and thrown away
the scabbard_."
"What does that mean?" she mumbled. Her eyes wandered to the top of
the page, where in larger type was the title: "Life of 'STONEWALL'
JACKSON." "Stonewall," repeated Nell. "Stonewall!" The word had the
potency to bring vividly before her Grit's drooping, grimy form. Her
ears rang with his ridiculous boast. His voice seemed no longer low
and weary. "When I say a thing ... stone wall. Can't go there
again--now or never." Great Taylor mumbled disparagingly, "He got it
from a book!" And again she read the fighting phrase of Grit's hero:
"_I have drawn the sword and thrown away the scabbard_." "Can't mean
Grit," she mused. "He never threw away anything...." And she tossed
his desecrated Bible toward the peach crate; but missing its aim, the
book slid along the floor with a slight rustle, almost like a sigh,
and struck the chair-board behind the washtubs, where it lay limp and
forgotten.
Back of Nell the clock struck the half hour, and she turned quickly,
her heart thumping with the fear of being late. But the hour was only
three thirty. "Plenty time." She gazed at the broken clock. "A good
clock," Grit used to say; "keeps time and only cost a quarter." "Stone
wall!... Humph!..."
Nell transformed the washtubs into a bath by the removal of the centre
partition, and within an hour was bathed and dressed. Sticking the
pins through her straw hat, dyed black, she took from the bottom
drawer of the cupboard a patent-leather hand-bag with colourful
worsted fruit embroidered upon its shining sides. She thought of the
night Grit had brought it home to her, his pride--he had bought it at
a store. But a glance around the room obliterated this memory, and she
mumbled, "Wish I warn't never, _never_ going to see this place again!
Wait till I get money...." She glared at the broken furniture, each
piece of which brought back some memory of the man. She could see him
drooping in the armchair, with his wrists crossed, fingers curled. She
glared at the shelf and imagined him fumbling for something that was
not there. She started for the door, then, turning back, reached into
the peach crate. "There! Keep your old molasses jug!" she said, in a
dry voice, and, replacing the jug on the shelf, she went out into the
hall.
Winding down through the tenement-house gloom, Great Taylor was not
without fear. Her footfall on the uncarpeted landings and iron treads
sounded hollow and strangely loud. The odours that in the past had
greeted her familiarly, making known absorbing domestic details of her
neighbours, caused her neither to pause nor to sniff. She reached the
narrow entrance hall, dark and deserted, and, hurrying down its
length, fumbled with the knob and pulled open the street door.
Dazzling sunlight, a blast of warm air and the confused clatter of the
sidewalk engulfed her. She stood vacillating in the doorway, thinly
panoplied for the struggle of existence. Her body was splendid, it is
true, but her spirit was small. Despite the sunlight and warmth she
was trembling. And yet, for years she had gone down into this street
confident of herself, mingling on equal terms with its wayfarers, her
ear catching and translating the sounds that, converging, caused this
babel. Now, suddenly, all of it was meaningless, the peddlers with
whom she had bickered and bargained in a loud voice with gestures,
breast to breast, were strangers and the street an alien land. Many
things seemed to have passed backward out of her life. She was no
longer Grit's wife, no longer the Great Taylor of yesterday. She was
something new-born, free of will; all the old ties had been clipped.
She could do as she pleased. No one could stop her. And she pleased to
become a denizen of a world which, though just around the corner, was
unrelated to the sphere in which she had moved.
"What's the matter with me?" she asked herself. "Nothing to be afraid
of. He's gone. I'll do as I please." With such assertions she
bolstered her courage, but nevertheless she was trembling....
Glossy-haired women jostled her with their baskets. Taller by a head,
Nell pushed her way oblivious of the crowd. At the corner she paused.
"I ain't going to be early." A clock across the avenue, visible
beneath the reverberating ironwork of the elevated, seemed to have
stopped at the half hour. It was four thirty. She watched the long
hand until it moved jerkily. A policeman, half dragging a shrieking
woman and followed by a jostling, silent crowd, swept Great Taylor
aside and put in a call for the wagon.
She hurriedly rounded the corner and passed a window that displayed a
pyramid of varnished kegs backed by a mirror with a ram's head painted
on it in colours. Beyond was the side entrance. Over the door hung a
glass sign, one word in large red letters: "DANCING." She caught the
odour of cheap wine and stale beer. Again she said, "I ain't going to
be early," and moved away aimlessly.
Beyond the end of this building was a vacant lot and Great Taylor
moved more swiftly with head averted. She had passed nearly to the
next building before she stopped and wheeled around defiantly. "I
ain't afraid to look," she said to herself and gazed across at Grit's
junk-cart, with its string of bells, partly concealed back against the
fence. It was standing in the shadow, silent, unmanned. She walked on
for a few steps and turned again. The cart was standing as before,
silent, unmanned. She stood there, hands on her hips, trying to
visualize Grit drooping over the handle--his collarless neck, his
grimy face and baggy breeches; but her imagination would not paint the
picture. "Grit's gone for good," she said. "Why couldn't he been clean
like other people, like the man that owns the Garden? No excuse for
being dirty and always tired like that. Anybody could push it and keep
clean, too--half clean, anyway." She slipped a glance at the clock. It
stood at twenty minutes before the hour of her appointment. "A baby
could push it...."
She picked her way across the vacant lot to the junk-cart and laid her
hand upon the grimy handle. The thing moved. The strings of bells set
up a familiar jingle. "Easy as a baby carriage!" And Great Taylor
laughed. The cart reached the sidewalk, bumped down over the curb and
pulling Great Taylor with it went beyond the centre of the street. She
tried to turn back but a clanging trolley car cut in between her and
the curb, a wheel of the junk-cart caught in the smooth steel track
and skidded as if it were alive with a stupid will of its own. "It
ain't so easy," she admitted. With a wrench she extracted the wheel,
narrowly avoided an elevated post and crashed head on into a
push-cart, laden with green bananas resting on straw. An Italian swore
in two languages and separated the locked wheels.
Hurriedly Great Taylor shoved away from the fruit man and became
pocketed in the traffic. Two heavy-hoofed horses straining against wet
leather collars crowded her toward the curb and shortly the traffic
became blocked. She looked for a means of escape and had succeeded in
getting one wheel over the curb when a man touched her on the arm.
"Someone is calling from the window up there," he said in a low weary
voice like Grit's. Nell swung around, gasping, but the man had moved
away down the sidewalk and a woman was calling to her from a
second-story window.
"How much?" called the woman, waving a tin object that glinted in the
sunlight. Great Taylor stared stupidly. "Clothes boiler," yelled the
woman. "Fifty cents.... Just needs soldering." "What?" stammered Nell.
"Fifty cents," shouted the woman in the window. And something prompted
Great Taylor to reply, "Give you a dime."
"Quarter," insisted the woman. "Dime ... Ten cents," repeated Great
Taylor, somewhat red in the face. "Once I set a price I'm a ..." But
the woman's head had disappeared and her whole angular person soon
slid out through the doorway. Entirely befogged, Great Taylor fumbled
in her patent-leather bag with its worsted fruit, discovered two
nickels, and placed the leaky boiler beside the rusty scales on the
junk-cart.
"Ain't I got enough junk without that?" she grumbled. But the traffic
of the Devil's Own city was moving again and Great Taylor was moving
with it. She passed a corner where a clock in a drug store told her
the time--ten minutes of the hour. "I got to get back," she told
herself, and heading her cart determinedly for an opening succeeded in
crossing to the opposite side of the congested avenue. There, a child,
attracted by the jingling of the bells, ran out of a house with a
bundle of rags tied in a torn blue apron. The child placed the bundle
on the scales and watched with solemn wide eyes. Great Taylor again
fumbled in the bag and extracted a coin which transformed the little
girl into an India-rubber thing that bounced up and down on one foot
at the side of the junk-cart. "Grit never gave me only a penny a
pound," she cried.
"Grit is dead," said Great Taylor.
"Dead!" echoed the child, clinging motionless to the wheel. "_Grit_ is
dead?" She turned suddenly and ran toward the house, calling: "Mamma,
poor old Grit is dead."
Great Taylor put her weight against the handle of the cart. She pushed
on desperately. Something had taken hold of her throat. "What's the
matter with me?" she choked. "Didn't I know he was dead before this?
Didn't I know it all along? I ain't going to cry over no man ... not
in the street, anyway." She hurriedly shoved her cart around a corner
into a less-congested thoroughfare and there a mammoth gilded clock at
the edge of the sidewalk confronted her. The long hand moved with a
sardonic jerk and indicated the hour--the hour of her appointment. But
Great Taylor turned her eyes away. "Pushing a junk-cart ain't so
easy," she said, and for a moment she stood there huddled over the
handle; then, taking a long, deep breath, like Grit used to do, she
straightened herself and sang out, clear and loud, above the noises of
the cavernous street: "Rags ... old iron ... bottles and ra-ags."
The city that people call the Devil's Own lost its sharp outline and
melted into neutral tints, gray and blue and lavender, that blended
like an old, old tapestry. It was dusk. Great Taylor strode slowly
with laborious long strides, her breast rising and falling, her body
lengthening against the load, her hands gripping the handle of the
cart, freighted with rusty, twisted, and broken things. At crossings
she paused until the murmuring river of human beings divided to let
her pass. Night settled upon the high roofs and dropped its shadow
into the streets and alleys, and the windows began to glow. Light
leaped out and streaked the sidewalks while at each corner it ran
silently down from high globes like full moons and spattered over the
curb into the gutter and out as far as the glistening car tracks. She
passed blocks solid with human beings and blocks without a human soul.
Cataracts of sound crashed down into the street now and again from
passing elevated trains, and the noise, soon dissipated, left
trembling silence like pools of sinister black water. She passed
through stagnant odours and little eddies of perfume. She lifted her
drooping head and saw a door open--the darkness was cut by a rectangle
of soft yellow light, two figures were silhouetted, then the door
closed. A gasolene torch flared above a fruit stand hard against the
towering black windowless wall of a warehouse and a woman squatted in
the shadow turning a handle. Nell pushed on past a cross street that
glittered and flared from sidewalk to cornice, and at the next corner
a single flickering gas-jet revealed a dingy vestibule with rows of
tarnished speaking tubes....
The air became thick with noise and odours and the sidewalks swayed
with people. Great Taylor slowly rounded a familiar corner, slackened
the momentum of the junk-cart, and brought up squarely against the
curb. Dragging the wheels, she gained the sidewalk and, beyond, the
rims of the cart cut into soft earth. She crossed the vacant lot. A
city's supercilious moon alone gave its half-light to the junkyard of
Grit and here the woman unloaded the cart, carrying heavy unyielding
things against her breast. She did not linger. She was trembling from
fatigue and from emotions even more novel to her. She closed the gate
without looking back at the weird crêpe-like shadows that draped
themselves among the moonlit piles of twisted things. Nearing the
corner, she glanced with dull eyes at a glaring red sign: "Dancing."
Voices, laughter, and music after a kind came from the doorway, A man
was singing. Great Taylor recognized the voice but did not pause. She
was not to see the man from just around the corner again for many
years.
Hurrying, without knowing why she hurried, Nell climbed the circular
iron staircase up through parallels of odorous gloom and, entering her
flat, closed the door and quickly locked it against the world
outside--the toil, the bickering, the sneers, the insults and curses
flung from alley gates and down upon her in the traffic of the Devil's
Own city. She closed her eyes and took a long deep breath almost like
a sigh. She was home. It was good to be home, but she lacked the words
and was far too weary to express her emotions.
Lighting the gas she sank into a chair. What did it matter if the gas
was screeching? She drooped there, hands in her lap, wrists crossed,
palms turned upward and fingers curled stiffly like claws--from
holding to the jarring handle of the junk-cart.
Presently she raised her eyes and glanced across at the shelf with its
row of tin boxes marked "Bread," "Coffee," "Sugar." On the next shelf
was Grit's molasses jug. She arose and fumbled behind this, but
nothing was there--Grit's Bible was gone. Then she remembered, and
striking a match placed her cheek to the floor and found the grimy
book beneath the stationary washtubs. "Stone wall," she murmured,
"Grit was a stone wall." At the mantelpiece she caught a glimpse of
herself in the cracked little mirror, but she was too weary to care
what she looked like, too weary to notice that her hair was matted,
that grime and smudges made hollows in her cheeks, and that even her
nose seemed crooked.
She sank again into the chair beneath the screeching gas-jet. "Grit,"
she repeated dully, "was a stone wall." And between very honest,
tired, and lonely tears she began slowly to spell out the words of the
coverless book, having gained within the past few hours some
understanding of what it means in the battle of life to draw the sword
and throw away the scabbard.