The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost
steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic
tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and
local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters,
and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come
out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood
policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people
who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on
their way for dinner to a French _table d'hôte_ which they had heard
of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son
and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that
controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the
steps.
It was the early dusk of a December day, and the day was very chilly.
"She seems to be sick or something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or
asleep."
The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They
would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would
happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid
upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn,
and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress,
which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would
not have dressed so for that problematical French _table d'hôte_;
probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in
effect the father's impulse to go closer and look at the woman.
"She seems to be asleep," he reported.
"Shouldn't you think she would take cold? She will get her death
there. Oughtn't we to do something?" the daughter asked, but she left
it to the father, and he said:
"Probably somebody will come by."
"That we could leave her to?" the daughter pursued.
"We could do that without waiting," the son commented.
"Well, yes," the father assented; but they did not go on. They waited,
helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very
definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working
class; she was simply dressed, though with the New York instinct for
clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to stay her involuntarily,
and after a glance in the direction of their gaze she asked the
daughter:
"Is she sick, do you think?"
"We don't know what's the matter. But she oughtn't to stay there."
Something velvety in the girl's voice had made its racial quality
sensible to the ear; as she went up to the crouching woman and bent
forward over her and then turned to them, a street lamp threw its
light on her face, and they saw that she was a light shade of colored
girl.
"She seems to be sleeping."
"Perhaps," the son began, "she's not quite--" But he did not go on.
The girl looked round at the others and suggested, "She must be
somebody's mother!"
The others all felt abashed in their several sorts and degrees, but in
their several sorts and degrees they all decided that there was
something romantic, sentimental, theatrical in the girl's words, like
something out of some cheap story-paper story.
The father wondered if that kind of thing was current among that kind
of people. He had a sort of esthetic pleasure in the character and
condition expressed by the words.
"Well, yes," he said, "if she has children, or has had." The girl
looked at him uncertainly, and then he added, "But, of course--"
The son went up to the woman again, and asked: "Aren't you well? Can
we do anything for you? It won't do to stay here, you know." The woman
only made a low murmur, and he said to his sister, "Suppose we get her
up."
His sister did not come forward promptly, and the colored girl said,
"I'll help you."
She took one arm of the woman and the son took the other, and they
lifted her, without her connivance, to her feet and kept her on them.
Then they walked her down the steps. On the level below she showed
taller than either of them; she was bundled up in different incoherent
wraps; her head was muffled, and she wore a battered bonnet at an
involuntary slant.
"I don't know exactly what we shall do with her," the son said.
"We ought to get her home somehow," the daughter said.
The father proposed nothing, but the colored girl said, "If we keep
walking her along, we'll come to a policeman and we can--"
A hoarse rumble of protest came from the muffled head of the woman,
and the girl put her ear closer. "Want to go home? Well, the policeman
will take you. We don't know where you live, and we haven't the time."
The woman seemed to have nothing to say further, and they began
walking her westward; the colored girl supported her on one hand, and
the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on the other.
The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but the father went along,
enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, "She
must be somebody's mother." It now sounded to him like a catch from
one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the
mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville
ballad with the refrain of "A Boy's Best Friend is his Mother," which,
when he heard it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery floor
under the applauding feet of the frenzied audience. Probably this
colored girl belonged to that order of life; he wished he could know
her social circumstance and what her outlook on the greater world
might be. She seemed a kind creature, poor thing, and he respected
her. "Somebody's mother"--he liked that.
They all walked westward, aimlessly, except that the _table d'hôte_
where they had meant to dine was in that direction; they had heard of
it as an amusingly harmless French place, and they were fond of such
mild adventures.
The old woman contributed nothing to the definition of their progress.
She stumbled and mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and Eighth
she stubbornly arrested her guardians. "She says"--the colored girl
translated some obscure avowal across her back--"she says she wants to
go home, and she lives up in Harlem."
"Oh, well, that's good," the father said, with an optimistic
amiability. "We'd better help walk her across to Ninth Avenue and put
her on a car, and tell the conductor where to let her off."
He was not helping walk her himself, but he enjoyed his son's doing it
in evening dress and opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the
other side of the mother; the composition was agreeably droll. The
daughter did not like it, and she cherished the ideal of a passing
policeman to take the old woman in charge.
No policeman passed, though great numbers of other people met them
without apparently finding anything noticeable in the spectacle which
their group presented. Among the crowds going and coming on the
avenues which they crossed scarcely any turned to look at them, or was
moved by the sense of anything odd in them.
The old woman herself did nothing to attract public notice till they
were midway between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She mumbled something
from time to time which the colored girl interpreted to the rest as
her continued wish to go home. She was now clearer about her street
and number. The girl, as if after question of her own generous spirit,
said she did not see how _she_ could go with her; she was expected at
home herself.
"Oh, you won't have to go with her; we'll just put her aboard the
Ninth Avenue car," the father encouraged her. He would have encouraged
any one; he was enjoying the whole affair.
At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, the mother decided to sit
down on a door-step. It proved to be the door-step of a house where
from time to time colored people--sometimes of one sex, sometimes of
another--went in or came out. The door seemed to open directly into a
large room where dancing and dining were going on concurrently. At a
long table colored people sat eating, and behind their chairs on both
sides of the room and at the ends of the table colored couples were
waltzing.
The effect was the more curious because, except for some almost
inaudible music, the scene passed in silence. Those who were eating
were not visibly incommoded by those revolving at their backs; the
waltzers turned softly around and around, untempted by the table now
before them, now behind them. When some of the diners or dancers came
out, they stumbled over the old woman on the door-step without minding
or stopping to inquire. Those outside, when they went in, fell over
her with like equanimity and joined the strange company within.
The father murmured to himself the lines,
"'Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody--'"
with a remote trouble of mind because the words were at once so
graphic and yet so imperfectly applicable. The son and daughter
exchanged a silent wonder as long as they could bear it; then the
daughter asked the colored girl:
"What is it?"
"It's a boarding-house," the girl answered, simply.
"Oh," the daughter said.
Sounds of more decided character than before now came from the figure
on the door-step.
"She seems to be saying something," the daughter suggested in general
terms. "What is she saying?" she asked the colored girl.