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IV
THE RETURN TO FAVOR
He never, by any chance, quite kept his word, though there was a moment in every case when he seemed to imagine doing what he said, and he took with mute patience the rakings which the ladies gave him when he disappointed them.
Disappointed is not just the word, for the ladies did not really expect him to do what he said. They pretended to believe him when he promised, but at the bottom of their hearts they never did or could. He was gentle-mannered and soft-spoken, and when he set his head on one side, and said that a coat would be ready on Wednesday, or a dress on Saturday, and repeated his promise upon the same lady's expressed doubt, she would catch her breath and say that now she absolutely must have it on the day named, for otherwise she would not have a thing to put on. Then he would become very grave, and his soft tenor would deepen to a bass of unimpeachable veracity, and he would say, "Sure, lady, you have it."
The lady would depart still doubting and slightly sighing, and he would turn to the customer who was waiting to have a button sewed on, or something like that, and ask him softly what it was he could do for him. If the customer offered him his appreciation of the case in hand, he would let his head droop lower, and in a yet deeper bass deplore the doubt of the ladies as an idiosyncrasy of their sex. He would make the customer feel that he was a favorite customer whose rights to a perfect fidelity of word and deed must by no means be tampered with, and he would have the button sewed on or the rip sewed up at once, and refuse to charge anything, while the customer waited in his shirt-sleeves in the small, stuffy shop opening directly from the street. When he tolerantly discussed the peculiarities of ladies as a sex, he would endure to be laughed at, "for sufferance was the badge of all his tribe," and possibly he rather liked it.
The favorite customer enjoyed being there when some lady came back on the appointed Wednesday or Saturday, and the tailor came soothingly forward and showed her into the curtained alcove where she was to try on the garments, and then called into the inner shop for them. The shirt-sleeved journeyman, with his unbuttoned waistcoat-front all pins and threaded needles, would appear in his slippers with the things barely basted together, and the tailor would take them, with an airy courage, as if they were perfectly finished, and go in behind the curtain where the lady was waiting in a dishabille which the favorite customer, out of reverence for the sex, forbore to picture to himself. Then sounds of volcanic fury would issue from the alcove. "Now, Mr. Morrison, you have lied to me again, deliberately lied. Didn't I tell you I must have the things perfectly ready to-day? You see yourself that it will be another week before I can have my things."
"A week? Oh, madam! But I assure you – "
"Don't talk to me any more! It's the last time I shall ever come to you, but I suppose I can't take the work away from you as it is. When shall I have it?"
"To-morrow. Yes, to-morrow noon. Sure!"
"Now you know you are always out at noon. I should think you would be ashamed."
"If it hadn't been for sickness in the family I would have finished your dress with my own hands. Sure I would. If you come here to-morrow noon you find your dress all ready for you."
"I know I won't, but I will come, and you'd better have it ready."
"Oh, sure."
The lady then added some generalities of opprobrium with some particular criticisms of the garments. Her voice sank into dispassionate murmurs in these, but it rose again in her renewed sense of the wrong done her, and when she came from the alcove she went out of the street door purple. She reopened it to say, "Now, remember!" before she definitely disappeared.
"Rather a stormy session, Mr. Morrison," the customer said.
"Something fierce," Mr. Morrison sighed. But he did not seem much troubled, and he had one way with all his victims, no matter what mood they came or went in.
One day the customer was by when a kind creature timidly upbraided him. "This is the third time you've disappointed me, Mr. Morrison. I really wish you wouldn't promise me unless you mean to do it. I don't think it's right for you."
"Oh, but sure, madam! The things will be done, sure. We had a strike on us."
"Well, I will trust you once more," the kind creature said.
"You can depend on me, madam, sure."
When she was gone the customer said: "I wonder you do that sort of thing, Mr. Morrison. You can't be surprised at their behaving rustily with you if you never keep your word."
"Why, I assure you there are times when I don't know where to look, the way they go on. It is something awful. You ought to hear them once. And now they want the wote." He rearranged some pieces of tumbled goods at the table where the customer sat, and put together the disheveled leaves of the fashion-papers which looked as if the ladies had scattered them in their rage.
One day the customer heard two ladies waiting for their disappointments in the outer room while the tailor in the alcove was trying to persuade a third lady that positively her things would be sent home the next day before dark. The customer had now formed the habit of having his own clothes made by the tailor, and his system in avoiding disappointment was very simple. In the early fall he ordered a spring suit, and in the late spring it was ready. He never had any difficulty, but he was curious to learn how the ladies managed, and he listened with all his might while these two talked.
"I always wonder we keep coming," one of them said.
"I'll tell you why," the other said. "Because he's cheap, and we get things from a fourth to a third less than we can get them anywhere else. The quality is first rate, and he's absolutely honest. And, besides, he's a genius. The wretch has touch. The things have a style, a look, a hang! Really it's something wonderful. Sure it iss," she ended in the tailor's accent, and then they both laughed and joined in a common sigh.
"Well, I don't believe he means to deceive any one."
"Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to do everything he says. And one can't help liking him even when he doesn't."
"He's a good while getting through with her," the first lady said, meaning the unseen lady in the alcove.
"She'll be a good while longer getting through with him, if he hasn't them ready the next time," the second lady said.
But the lady in the alcove issued from it with an impredicable smile, and the tailor came up to the others, and deferred to their wishes with a sort of voiceless respect.
He gave the customer a glance of good-fellowship, and said to him, radiantly: "Your things all ready for you, this morning. As soon as I – "
"Oh, no hurry," the customer responded.
"I won't be a minute," the tailor said, pulling the curtain of the alcove aside, and then there began those sounds of objurgation and expostulation, although the ladies had seemed so amiable before.
The customer wondered if they did not all enjoy it; the ladies in their patience under long trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of practising upon it. But perhaps he did believe in the things he promised. He might be so much a genius as to have no grasp of facts; he might have thought that he could actually do what he said.
The customer's question on these points found answer when one day the tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised them perfectly finished.
"He will do your clothes all right," he explained to the customer. "He is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business."
"But why – why – " the customer began.
"I couldn't stand it. The way them ladies would talk to a person, when you done your best to please them; it's something fierce."
"Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it, from the way you always promised them and never kept your word."
"And if I hadn't promised them?" the tailor returned with some show of feeling. "They wanted me to promise them – they made me – they wouldn't have gone away without it. Sure. Every one wanted her things before every one. You had got to think of that."
"But you had to think of what they would say."
"Say? Sometimes I thought they would hit me. One lady said she had a notion to slap me once. It's no way to talk."
"But you didn't seem to mind it."
"I didn't mind it for a good while. Then I couldn't stand it. So I sold."
He shook his head sadly; but the customer had no comfort to offer him. He asked when his clothes would be done, and the tailor told him when, and then they were not. The new proprietor tried them on, but he would not say just when they would be finished.
"We have a good deal of work already for some ladies that been disappointed. Now we try a new way. We tell people exactly what we do."
"Well, that's right," the customer said, but in his heart he was not sure he liked the new way.
The day before his clothes were promised he dropped in. From the curtained alcove he heard low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor and the voice of some lady trying on, and being severely bidden not to expect her things at a time she suggested. "No, madam. We got too much work on hand already. These things, they will not be done before next week."
"I told you to-morrow," the same voice said to another lady, and the new proprietor came out with an unfinished coat in his hand.
"I know you did, but I thought you would be better than your word, and so I came to-day. Well, then, to-morrow."
"Yes, to-morrow," the new proprietor said, but he did not seem to have liked the lady's joke. He did not look happy.
A few weeks after that the customer came for some little alterations in his new suit.
In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs of trying on, much cheerfuller murmurs than before; the voice of a lady lifted in gladness, in gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, "Oh, sure, madam."
Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt-sleeves and slippers, with his waistcoat-front full of pins and needles, just like the new proprietor in former days.
"Why!" the customer exclaimed. "Have you bought back?"
"No. I'm just here like a journeyman already. The new man he want me to come. He don't get along very well with his way. He's all right; he's a good man and a first-class tailor. But," and the former proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and picked off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get along better with the ladies."
V
SOMEBODY'S MOTHER
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.
The girl stooped over and listened. Then she answered, "She's swearing."
"Swearing? What about? Whom is she swearing at?"
"At me, I reckon. She says, why don't I take her home."
"Well, why doesn't she get up, then?"
"She says she won't."
"We can't carry her to the car," the daughter noted.
"Oh, why not?" the father merrily demanded.
The daughter turned to her brother. They were both very respectful to their father, but the son agreed with his sister when she said: "Papa would joke about anything. But this has passed a joke. We must get this old thing up and start her off."
Upon experiment they could not get the old thing up, even with the help of the kind colored girl. They had to let her be, and the colored girl reported, after stooping over her again, "She says she can't walk."
"She walked here well enough," the daughter said.
"Not very well," the father amended.
His daughter did not notice him. She said to her brother: "Well, now you must go and find a policeman. It's strange none has gone by."
It was also strange that still their group remained without attracting the notice of the passers. Nobody stopped to speak or even stare; perhaps the phenomena of that boarding-house had ceased to have surprises for the public of the neighborhood, and they in their momentary relation to it would naturally be without interest.
The brother went away, leaving his sister with their father and that kind colored creature in charge of the old woman, now more and more quiescent on the door-step; she had ceased to swear, or even to speak. The brother came back after a time that seemed long, and said that he could not find a policeman anywhere, and at the same moment, as if the officer had been following at his heels, a policeman crossed the street from just behind him.
The daughter ran after him, and asked if he would not come and look at the old woman who had so steadfastly remained in their charge, and she rapidly explained.
"Sure, lady," the policeman said, and he turned from crossing the street and went up to the old woman. He laid his hand on her shoulder, and his touch seemed magical. "What's the matter? Can't you stand up?" She stood up as if at something familiar in the voice of authority. "Where do you live?" She gave an address altogether different from that she had given before – a place on the next avenue, within a block or two. "You'd better go home. You can walk, can't you?"
"I can walk well enough," she answered in a tone of vexation, and she made her word good by walking quite actively away in the direction she had given.
The kind colored girl became a part of the prevalent dark after refusing the thanks of the others. The daughter then fervently offered them to the policeman.
"That's all right, lady," he said, and the incident had closed except for her emotion at seeing him enter a police-station precisely across the street, where they could have got a dozen policemen in a moment.
"Well," the father said, "we might as well go to our French table d'hôte now."
"Oh," the son said, as if that reminded him, "the place seems to be shut."
"Well, then, we might as well go back to the hotel," the father decided. "I dare say we shall do quite as well there."
On the way the young people laughed over the affair and their escape from it, especially at the strange appearance and disappearance of the kind colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the instant compliance of the old woman with the suggestion of the policeman.
The father followed, turning the matter over in his mind. Did mere motherhood hallow that old thing to the colored girl and her sort and condition? Was there a superstition of motherhood among such people which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and reverence? Did such people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people of larger means? Would a mother in distress or merely embarrassment instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness in the neighborhood always appealed to their compassion? Would her family now welcome the old thing home from her aberration more fondly than the friends of one who had arrived in a carriage among them in a good street? But, after all, how little one knew of other people! How little one knew of one self, for that matter! How next to nothing one knew of Somebody's Mother! It did not necessarily follow from anything they knew of her that she was a mother at all. Her motherhood might be the mere figment of that kind colored girl's emotional fancy. She might be Nobody's Mother.