Kitabı oku: «The Daughter of the Storage», sayfa 6
"I don't see how that would do any good. I may want to borrow money of you, and you can't ask a loan from a man you've kicked. Besides, I think what you said may do her good."
IX
BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL
I
Breakfast is my best meal, and I reckon it's always been
Ever since I was old enough to know what breakfast could mean.
I mind when we lived in the cabin out on the Illinoy,
Where father had took up a quarter-section when I was a boy,
I used to go for the cows as soon as it was light;
And when I started back home, before I come in sight,
I come in smell of the cabin, where mother was frying the ham,
And boiling the coffee, that reached through the air like a mile o' ba'm,'N' I bet you I didn't wait to see what it was that the dog
Thought he'd got under the stump or inside o' the hollow log!
But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-joints cracked – you know
That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows make when they go —
And I never stopped to wash when I got to the cabin door;
I pulled up my chair and e't like I never had e't before.
And mother she set there and watched me eat, and eat, and eat,
Like as if she couldn't give her old eyes enough of the treat;
And she split the shortened biscuit, and spread the butter between,
And let it lay there and melt, and soak and soak itself in;
And she piled up my plate with potato and ham and eggs,
Till I couldn't hold any more, or hardly stand on my legs;
And she filled me up with coffee that would float an iron wedge,
And never give way a mite, or spill a drop at the edge.
II
What? Well, yes, this is good coffee, too. If they don't know much,
They do know how to make coffee, I will say that for these Dutch.
But my – oh, my! It ain't the kind of coffee my mother made,
And the coffee my wife used to make would throw it clear in the shade;
And the brand of sugar-cured, canvased ham that she always used —
Well, this Westphalia stuff would simply have made her amused!
That so, heigh? I saw that you was United States as soon
As ever I heard you talk; I reckon I know the tune!
Pick it out anywhere; and you understand how I feel
About these here foreign breakfasts: breakfast is my best meal.
III
My! but my wife was a cook; and the breakfasts she used to get
The first years we was married, I can smell 'em and taste 'em yet:
Corn cake light as a feather, and buckwheat thin as lace
And crisp as cracklin'; and steak that you couldn't have the face
To compare any steak over here to; and chicken fried
Maryland style – I couldn't get through the bill if I tried.
And then, her waffles! My! She'd kind of slip in a few
Between the ham and the chicken – you know how women'll do —
For a sort of little surprise, and, if I was running light,
To take my fancy and give an edge to my appetite.
Done it all herself as long as we was poor, and I tell you
She liked to see me eat as well as mother used to do;
I reckon she went ahead of mother some, if the truth was known,
And everything she touched she give a taste of her own.
IV
She was a cook, I can tell you! And after we got ahead,
And she could 'a' had a girl to do the cookin' instead,
I had the greatest time to get Momma to leave the work;
She said it made her feel like a mis'able sneak and shirk.
She didn't want daughter, though, when we did begin to keep girls,
To come in the kitchen and cook, and smell up her clo'es and curls;
But you couldn't have stopped the child, whatever you tried to do —
I reckon the gift of the cookin' was born in Girly, too.
Cook she would from the first, and we just had to let her alone;
And after she got married, and had a house of her own,
She tried to make me feel, when I come to live with her,
Like it was my house, too; and I tell you she done it, sir!
She remembered that breakfast was my best meal, and she tried
To have all I used to have, and a good deal more beside;
Grape-fruit to begin with, or melons or peaches, at least —
Husband's business took him there, and they had went to live East —
Then a Spanish macker'l, or a soft-shell crab on toast,
Or a broiled live lobster! Well, sir, I don't want to seem to boast,
But I don't believe you could have got in the whole of New York
Any such an oyster fry or sausage of country pork.
V
Well, I don't know what-all it means; I always lived just so —
Never drinked or smoked, and yet, here about two years ago,
I begun to run down; I ain't as young as I used to be;
And the doctors all said Carlsbad, and I reckon this is me.
But it's more like some one I've dreamt of, with all three of 'em gone!
Believe in ghosts? Well, I do. I know there are ghosts. I'm one.
Maybe I mayn't look it – I was always inclined to fat;
The doctors say that's the trouble, and very likely it's that.
This is my little grandson, and this is the oldest one
Of Girly's girls; and for all that the whole of us said and done,
She must come with grandpa when the doctors sent me off here,
To see that they didn't starve him. Ain't that about so, my dear?
She can cook, I tell you; and when we get home again
We're goin' to have something to eat; I'm just a-livin' till then.
But when I set here of a morning, and think of them that's gone —
Mother and Momma and Girly – well, I wouldn't like to let on
Before the children, but I can almost seem to see
All of 'em lookin' down, like as if they pitied me,
After the breakfasts they give me, to have me have to put up
With nothing but bread and butter, and a little mis'able cup
Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can't tell how you feel,
But it fairly makes me sick! Breakfast is my best meal.
X
THE MOTHER-BIRD
She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else of her you knew that she was going out to them.
She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their protection, and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she mentioned her daughters she had the effect of feeling herself chaperoned by them. You could not go behind them and find her wanting in the social guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of lonely birds of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the convention by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her standing; yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of passage, so far as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes only maiden-birds. The day had not ended before they began to hold her off by slight liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers, by quick, evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach, which convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She sailed with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares on a ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of friends coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying. But when the ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone over the side, these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began to restrict themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the women she had known at the pier, or quite all the men.
It was not that she did anything obvious to forfeit this knowledge. Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must not hover too confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would have others believe in one's devotion to one's children in Dresden; one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them as grounds for joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to their children in New York or Boston.
The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that hard woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.
The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at all, as time passed.
It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship, after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth. There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to birds like her.
From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened. Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a feather remained a touching question.
There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else; she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which others wore; but she was not often seen without them.
There is not much walking-weather on a November passage, and she was seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been equally sorrowful to learn.
Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept; but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice if not of desert.
For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering up and down the ship's promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them, and it had doubtless come to that.
One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.
XI THE AMIGO
His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody called him the amigo, because that was the endearing term by which he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish, and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning spirits, he was always the amigo, for, when he hailed you so, you could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.
The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention in the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, amigo!" as if we were now meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogotá; and the amigo clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were, with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.
There were others whom he hailed and adopted his friends, whose legs he clung about and impeded in their walks, or whom he required to toss him into the air as they passed, but I flattered myself that he had a peculiar, because a primary, esteem for myself. I have thought it might be that, Bogotá being said to be a very literary capital, as those things go in South America, he was mystically aware of a common ground between us, wider and deeper than that of his other friendships. But it may have been somewhat owing to my inviting him to my cabin to choose such portion as he would of a lady-cake sent us on shipboard at the last hour. He prattled and chuckled over it in the soft gutturals of his parrot-like Spanish, and rushed up on deck to eat the frosting off in the presence of his small companions, and to exult before them in the exploitation of a novel pleasure. Yet it could not have been the lady-cake which lastingly endeared me to him, for by the next day he had learned prudence and refused it without withdrawing his amity.
This, indeed, was always tempered by what seemed a constitutional irony, and he did not impart it to any one without some time making his friend feel the edge of his practical humor. It was not long before the children whom he gathered to his heart had each and all suffered some fall or bump or bruise which, if not of his intention, was of his infliction, and which was regretted with such winning archness that the very mothers of them could not resist him, and his victims dried their tears to follow him with glad cries of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" Injury at his hands was a favor; neglect was the only real grievance. He went about rolling his small black head, and darting roguish lightnings from under his thick-fringed eyes, and making more trouble with a more enticing gaiety than all the other people on the ship put together.
The truth must be owned that the time came, long before the end of the voyage, when it was felt that in the interest of the common welfare, something must be done about the amigo. At the conversational end of the doctor's table, where he was discussed whenever the racks were not on, and the talk might have languished without their inspiration, his badness was debated at every meal. Some declared him the worst boy in the world, and held against his half-hearted defenders that something ought to be done about him; and one was left to imagine all the darker fate for him because there was nothing specific in these convictions. He could not be thrown overboard, and if he had been put in irons probably his worst enemies at the conversational end of the table would have been the first to intercede for him. It is not certain, however, that their prayers would have been effective with the captain, if that officer, framed for comfort as well as command, could have known how accurately the amigo had dramatized his personal presence by throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a foot in front of his small stomach, and making a few tilting paces forward.
The amigo had a mimic gift which he liked to exercise when he could find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit. Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed it to scorn. "You are not old," he said. "Why?" the flattered dotard inquired. "Because you smile," and that seemed reason enough for one's continued youth. It was then that the amigo gave his own age, carefully telling the Spanish numerals over, and explaining further by holding up both hands with one finger shut in. But he had the subtlety of centuries in his nine years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief always in the interest of the good-fellowship which he offered impartially to old and young; and if it were mere frolic, with no ulterior object, he did not care at all how old or young his playmate was. This endeared him naturally to every age; and the little blond German-American boy dried his tears from the last accident inflicted on him by the amigo to recall him by tender entreaties of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" while the eldest of his friends could not hold out against him more than two days in the strained relations following upon the amigo's sweeping him down the back with a toy broom employed by the German-American boy to scrub the scuppers. This was not so much an injury as an indignity, but it was resented as an indignity, in spite of many demure glances of propitiation from the amigo's ironical eyes and murmurs of inarticulate apology as he passed.
He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of amigos; then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the second officer's legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on board, were hit with the stick that the amigo had been innocently playing shuffle-board with; or some passenger was taken unawares in his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the amigo's passion for active amusement.
At this point I ought to explain that the amigo was not traveling alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to rejoin his father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was seen to be in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the amigo walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the two with a theory we had that the amigo had been found impossible in his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark, silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie between him and the amigo was. He might have been his tutor, or his uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the amigo, who was exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they roomed together, it was his privilege to see the amigo asleep, when that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow, and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed its pleasure and its prey in waking.
It would be idle to represent that the amigo played his pranks upon that shipload of long-suffering people with final impunity. The time came when they not only said something must be done, but actually did something. It was by the hand of one of the amigo's sweetest and kindest friends, namely, that elderly captain, off duty, who was going out to be assigned his ship in Hamburg. From the first he had shown the affectionate tenderness for the amigo which was felt by all except some obdurate hearts at the conversational end of the table; and it must have been with a loving interest in the amigo's ultimate well-being that, taking him in an ecstasy of mischief, he drew the amigo face downward across his knees, and bestowed the chastisement which was morally a caress. He dismissed him with a smile in which the amigo read the good understanding that existed unimpaired between them, and accepted his correction with the same affection as that which had given it. He shook himself and ran off with an enjoyment of the joke as great as that of any of the spectators and far more generous.
In fact there was nothing mean in the amigo. Impish he was, or might be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no malevolence in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence taking part in one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but humorously, not homicidally. He would like to alarm the other faction, and perhaps drive it from power, or overset it from its official place, but if he had the say there would be no bringing the vanquished out into the plaza to be shot. He may now have been on his way to France ultimately to study medicine, which seems to be preliminary to a high political career in South America; but in the mean time we feared for him in that republic of severely regulated subordinations.
We thought with pathos of our early parting with him, as we approached Plymouth and tried to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor and pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as to consent, but he insisted on wearing a pair of glasses which had large eyes painted on them, and on being taken in the act of inflating a toy balloon. Probably, therefore, the likeness would not be recognized in Bogotá, but it will always be endeared to us by the memory of the many mockeries suffered from him. There were other friends whom we left on the ship, notably those of the conversational end of the table, who thought him simply a bad boy; but there were none of such peculiar appeal as he, when he stood by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu, and looking smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the vast liner loomed immense before us. He may have contributed to its effect of immensity by the smallness of his presence, or it may have dwarfed him. No matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little boy, merely and simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys from bad.
