Gaslight Sonatas Part 40

"Yes, I know; you snored into my singin' with enjoyment, all right."

"It's the twelve hours on my feet that just seem to make me dead to the world, come evening."

"A girl that had the whole town wavin' flags at her when she sung 'The Holy City' at the nineteen hundred street-carnival! Kittie Scogin Bevins, one of the biggest singers in New York to-day, nothing but my chorus! Where's it got me these eight years? Nowheres! She had enough sense to cut loose from Ed Bevins, who was a lodestone, too, and beat it. She's singing now in New York for forty a week with a voice that wasn't strong enough to be more than chorus to mine."

"Kittie Scogin, Hanna, is a poor comparison for any woman to make with herself."

"It is, is it? Well, I don't see it thataway. When she stepped off the train last week, comin' back to visit her old mother, I wished the whole depot would open up and swallow me--that's what I wished. Me and her that used to be took for sisters. I'm eight months younger, and I look eight years older. When she stepped off that train in them white furs and a purple face-veil, I just wished to G.o.d the whole depot would open and swallow me. That girl had sense. O G.o.d! didn't she have sense!"

"They say her sense is what killed Ed Bevins of shame and heartbreak."

"Say, don't tell me! It was town talk the way he made her toady to his folks, even after he'd been cut off without a cent. Kittie told me herself the very sight of the old Bevins place over on Orchard Street gives her the creeps down her back. If not for old lady Scogin, 'way up in the seventies, she'd never put her foot back in this dump. That girl had sense."

"There's not a time she comes back here it don't have an upsettin'

influence on you, Hanna."

"I know what's upsettin' me, all right. I know!"

He sighed heavily.

"I'm just the way I am, Hanna, and there's no teachin' an old dog new tricks. It's a fact I ain't much good after eight o'clock evenin's. It's a fact--a fact!"

They sat then in a further silence that engulfed them like fog. A shift of wind blew a gust of dry snow against the window-pane with a little sleety noise. And as another evidence of rising wind, a jerk of it came down the flue, rattling the fender of a disused grate.

"We'd better keep the water in the kitchen runnin' to-night. The pipes'll freeze."

Tick-tock. Tick. Tock. She had not moved, still sitting staring above the top of his head. He slid out his watch, yawning.

"Well, if you think it's too raw for the movin' pictures, Hanna, I guess I'll be movin' up to bed. I got to be down to meet a five-o'clock shipment of fifty bales to-morrow. I'll be movin' along unless there's anything you want?"

"No--nothing."

"If--if you ain't sleepy awhile yet, Hanna, why not run over to Widow Dinninger's to pa.s.s the time of evenin'? I'll keep the door on the latch."

She sprang up, s.n.a.t.c.hing a heavy black shawl, throwing it over her and clutching it closed at the throat.

"Where you goin', Hanna?"

"Walkin'," she said, slamming the door after her.

In Adalia, chiefly remarkable for the Indestructo Safe Works and a river which annually overflows its banks, with casualties, the houses sit well back from tree-bordered streets, most of them frame, shingle-roofed veterans that have lived through the cycle-like years of the bearing, the marrying, the burying of two, even three, generations of the same surname.

A three-year-old, fifteen-mile traction connects the court-house with the Indestructo Safe Works. High Street, its entire length, is paved. During a previous mayoralty the town offered to the Lida Tool Works a handsome bonus to construct branch foundries along its river-banks, and, except for the annual flood conditions, would have succeeded.

In spring Adalia is like a dear old lady's garden of marigold and bleeding-heart. Flushes of sweetpeas ripple along its picket fences and off toward the backyards are long grape-arbors, in autumn their great fruit-cl.u.s.ters ripening to purple frost. Come winter there is almost an instant shriveling to naked stalk, and the trellis-work behind vines comes through. Even the houses seem immediately to darken of last spring's paint, and, with windows closed, the shades are drawn. Oftener than not Adalia spends its evening snugly behind these drawn shades in great scoured kitchens or dining-rooms, the house-fronts dark.

When Mrs. Burkhardt stepped out into an evening left thus to its stilly depth, shades drawn against it, a light dust of snow, just fallen, was scurrying up-street before the wind, like something phantom with its skirts blowing forward. Little drifts of it, dry as powder, had blown up against the porch. She sidestepped them, hurrying down a wind-swept brick walk and out a picket gate that did not swing entirely after. Behind her, the house with its wimple of shingle roof and unlighted front windows seemed to recede somewhere darkly. She stood an undecided moment, her face into the wind. Half down the block an arc-light swayed and gave out a moving circle of light. Finally she turned her back and went off down a side-street, past a lighted corner grocer, crossed a street to avoid the black mouth of an alley, then off at another right angle. The houses here were smaller, shoulder to shoulder and directly on the sidewalk.

Before one of these, for no particular reason distinguishable from the others, Mrs. Burkhardt stepped up two shallow steps and turned a key in the center of the door, which set up a buzz on its reverse side. Her hand, where it clutched the shawl at her throat, was reddening and roughening, the knuckles pushing up high and white. Waiting, she turned her back to the wind, her body hunched up against it.

There was a moving about within, the sc.r.a.pe of a match, and finally the door opening slightly, a figure peering out.

"It's me, Mrs. Scogin--Hanna Burkhardt!"

The door swung back then, revealing a just-lighted parlor, opening, without introduction of hall, from the sidewalk.

"Well, if it ain't Hanna Burkhardt! What you doin' out this kind of a night? Come in. Kittie's dryin' her hair in the kitchen. Used to be she could sit on it, and it's ruint from the scorchin' curlin'-iron. I'll call her. Sit down, Hanna. How's Burkhardt? I'll call her. Oh, Kittie! Kit-tie, Hanna Burkhardt's here to see you."

In the wide flare of the swinging lamp, revealing Mrs. Scogin's parlor of chromo, china plaque, and crayon enlargement, sofa, whatnot, and wax bouquet embalmed under gla.s.s, Mrs. Burkhardt stood for a moment, blowing into her cupped hands, unwinding herself of shawl, something Niobian in her gesture.

"Yoo-hoo--it's only me, Kit! Shall I come out?"

"Naw--just a minute; I'll be in."

Mrs. Scogin seated herself on the edge of the sofa, well forward, after the manner of those who relax but ill to the give of upholstery. She was like a study of what might have been the grandmother of one of Rembrandt's studies of a grandmother. There were lines crawling over her face too manifold for even the etcher's stroke, and over her little shriveling hands that were too bird-like for warmth. There is actually something avian comes with the years. In the frontal bone pushing itself forward, the cheeks receding, and the eyes still bright. There was yet that trenchant quality in Mrs. Scogin, in the voice and gaze of her.

"Sit down, Hanna."

"Don't care if I do."

"You can lean back against that chair-bow."

"Hate to muss it."

"How's Burkhardt?"

"All right."

"He's been made deacon--not?"

"Yeh."

"If mine had lived, he'd the makin' of a pillar. Once label a man with hard drinkin', and it's hard to get justice for him. There never was a man had more the makin' of a pillar than mine, dead now these sixteen years and molderin' in his grave for justice."

"Yes, Mrs. Scogin."

"You can lean back against that bow."

"Thanks."

"So Burkhardt's been made deacon."

"Three years already--you was at the church."

"A deacon. Mine went to his grave too soon."

"They said down at market to-day, Mrs. Scogin, that Addie Fitton knocked herself against the woodbin and has water on the knee."

"Let the town once label a man with drinkin', and it's hard to get justice for him."