The Kennys did not know what had happened to Misther Fairfax. He sang on
the stairs now and again as he had done when he first came to Nut
Street. He bought the children sweet Jackson balls and the baby nearly
died from "wan in its troat," and his mother picked him up by his socks
and rattled the sticky sweet out of the child's larynx, and the cat
finished it.
Tony's foreman was asked in to have supper and a late cup of coffee, and
Miss Cora Kenny, whom "Pop" had sent to the Troy convent the first week
of Antony's appearance in the Gents' Boarding and Lodging House, came
home for a Catholic holiday, and she helped her mother. They made
macaroni for Tito Falutini--"high Falutini," as Mrs. Kenny called him.
The name stuck, and the macaroni stuck as well, fast to the plate; but
the Italian, in bashful gratitude, his eyes suffused with smoke and
tears, ate gratefully, gesticulating his satisfaction, and Cora Kenny
studied him from the stove where she slaved to tempt the appetites of
Fairfax and his friend.
Fairfax was proud of Falutini: he was not an ordinary acquaintance; he
sang after supper, standing stiffly in a corner of the kitchen, his red
shirt well opened at the throat, and his moustache like black velvet
above his red lips.
"He sings betther than the theayter, Misther Fairfax," Mr. Kenny said;
"it makes yer eyes thrick ye," and blew his nose, and Cora asked the
singer softly if he could give them "When the band begins to play," or
"Gallagher's Daughter Belle." Tito smiled hopefully, and when Fairfax
laughingly translated, assured Cora Kenny by means of Fairfax again,
that if determination could make a man learn a foreign song, he would
sing her "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" next Saturday night.
"Ah," she breathed, "she'd not be home then!"
"No," said Kenny, who was a lazy husband but a remarkable father, "that
she _wud_ not!"
The Italian fireman and the Irish lodging-house keeper's daughter gazed
in each other's eyes. "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" ... dum ... dum ...
Fairfax hummed it, he knew it. Kenny's daughter Cora--_that_ would be
more to the point: and he thought of Molly. He had not seen her since he
had kissed her a fortnight before. Cora said she had never been bold
before, had never let herself think how jealous she was, but to-night
Mr. Tito High-Falutini's eyes made her a new woman. Cora said to her
mother over her shoulder--
"Shure, Molly Shannon's the onlucky gurl."
"How's that, Cora?"
"Lost her job."
"No!" exclaimed Mrs. Kenny, sympathetically, "and with what doin'?"
Shure, the foreman's daughter was a chum with Cora. The boss had made
the girl prisents of collars, and it seemed, so Bridget said--Cora with
exquisite subtlety dropped her voice, and after a second Mrs. Kenny
exclaimed--
"Cora, you're a bad gurl to hark to such goings on, much less belave
thim," and pushed her daughter back and brought out herself the crowning
delicacy of the feast, a dish that needed no foreign help to compose,
steaming praties cooked in their shimmies, as she expressed it. Cora sat
down by High-Falutini, Mrs. Kenny went into the next room to her
littlest children, and Kenny lit a fresh pipe, held the bowl in his
hand, and opposite his distractingly pretty little daughter kept a
thoughtful eye upon the pair. And Fairfax went upstairs two steps at a
time.
* * * * *
It was after eleven, dense and hot, but he had gone up eagerly. Of late,
whenever he had a few spare moments he took them, and all Sundays he
remained in his room. There was an odour in the apartment, one that
persistently rose above the tenement smells, a damp, moist, earthy
perfume, to Fairfax delicious beyond words. Mosquitoes were rampant,
but he had been brought up in a mosquito-ridden country, and he had
rigged a bit of muslin across his window, and burned Mrs. Kenny's gas
with heartless inconsideration.
On a small wooden stool stood something covered with cloths damped night
and morning by Fairfax, and during the day by Matty Kenny, a
public-school girl of twelve years of age, a pretty, half-witted little
creature, whom of all Nut Street Fairfax liked and whom he blindly
trusted. Between school hours the little girl ran up and patted with a
sponge the mysterious image in Misther Fairfax's hall room. Tell? Ah,
shure, Misther Fairfax, cross her heart and hope to die but she'd not.
As her duties consisted in tidying Antony's room, her visits were not
remarked. Now Antony lifted off the first cloth; he drew out the stool
under the light, flung off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, loosened his
cravat, got from his drawer a small spatular instrument, and looking at
his unveiled work, meditatively wiped the dried clay from his tool. Then
he drew off the last bit of cheesecloth, uncovering a statuette modelled
in clay with great delicacy and great assurance. The gaslight fell
yellow on it and the little statue seemed to swim, to oscillate and
illumine. It was the figure of a little girl, her hair loose around her
face, holding to her cheek a dead blackbird. The art of the work was its
great sincerity, the calm, assured modelling, the tender truthfulness;
the form of the child, her dress, even her strapped shoes were only
indicated, nevertheless it was a perfect bit of realism, though crude.
But the head, the attitude, the cheek and the face, the little caressing
enfolding hands, were Greek in their perfect execution.
A flush rose on the young man's face, his eyes brightened, he gave a
soft touch here and there with the little instrument, but he had done
all he could to this creation. It was only in perishable clay, it must
crumble and dry; how could he perpetuate it? He thought of having it
cast in terra-cotta, but how and where? The figure vacillated in the
gaslight, and taunted him with its perishability, its evanescence,
frail, transient as childhood is transient. "Bella," he mused before it,
"little cousin." His right hand had not quite lost its cunning, then?
He could construct and direct a locomotive, but he had not lost all his
skill. For what the statue proved to him, for its evidence of his living
art and his talent, he loved it, he turned it and viewed it on all
sides, whistling softly under his breath, not morbid about his tunes
now.
Tito High-Falutini pushed the door open. "Goin' home, Tony, la Signora
Kenni has turned me out."
Fairfax pointed to his statue. "Look. If we were in Carrara somebody
would lend me a quarry or I would steal one, and turn little Bella into
a snow image." He spoke in English, entirely uncomprehended by his
companion. He put his hand on Tito's arm.
"Did you do that, Tony? It is valuable. In Italy we make terra-cotta
figures like that and sell them."
"Do you think, Tito," his companion replied, "that I would sell little
Bella for a few lire, you commercial traveller?"
Tito was acquainted with the Italian quarter, he would find some one who
baked in terra-cotta. They had brought their trades with them. Tony
could do others: a Savoyard with a hand-organ, those things were very
gentile, very brave indeed, and money, said Tito, gloating, money,--why
that would cost a dollar at least.
Fairfax covered up the clay and pushed the stool back in its corner.
"You can make a fool of yourself, too," he said good-humouredly, and
pushed Falutini out. "Go home and dream of Kenny's daughter Cora, and
don't forget to buy a can of crude oil and order a half dozen of those
cock-screws. Good-night." He banged the door.
He undressed, still softly whistling, unpinned the curtain from the
window, and what there was of heat and freshness came into the room with
the mosquitoes that had huddled at the glass and the sill. He had heard
Cora Kenny's information: Molly had lost her place because she would not
do what the boss wanted. They always wanted one thing in the collar
factories. The boss was a beast. He heaved a deep sigh. He had not been
lonely the last fortnight, his work had absorbed him. There was no way
for him to go on with it, he had no time, nor means. It had brought him
near to his people, to his mother, to his kinsmen, to the child who had
died, to the one that remained. But he knew his loneliness would return,
his need of companionship, of expression and life, and he was too
healthy, too strong to be nourished by his sentimental thought of the
child-woman or to live on the sale of terra-cotta statues. He cradled
his young head with its fair hair on his arm and fell asleep, and over
the yards the harvest moon rose yellow and shone through the small
window and on Antony. He might have been a boy asleep at school, his
face looked so young and so unstained, and the same light shone on the
angel of the resurrection at the gate of the rural cemetery, on
Gardiner's little grave in Woodlawn, and on his mother's grave in New
Orleans, where the brick walls keep the coffins high above the
Mississippi's tide and silt.
The moonlight could not penetrate to the corner where, under the damp
cloths, Bella wept over the blackbird pressed against her cheek.