Читать книгу Our Little Life - Jessie Georgina Sime - Страница 11

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When Robert Fulton knocked gently (he was very quiet in all his ways) at the door of Miss McGee's apartment and Miss McGee, after opening the door, stood on her threshold welcoming him in, you could never have told that she had been in a hurry at any time of her life. She looked quite composed, and as if she had never had any other occupation than to sit waiting his arrival, in her best dress. For she had managed, not only to wave her hair, but to "slip into," as she put it, her little summer-gown—a relic from some friendly customer's wardrobe, and relegated to Miss McGee when the friendly customer was tired of it. Miss McGee was not good-looking. In her best days of girlhood she had never been that. But she had had, in those faraway days of youth, a certain beauté de diable; and she retained of that some traces still. Her hair, black in her girlhood, had turned that charming silvery-white which black hair does turn. It had remained as abundant as it had always been—and Miss McGee knew how to dress it becomingly and make the best of it. She waved it in the front (when she had time) and she always drew it droopingly from her forehead to the back where she "did it up" in thick simple coils. Yes, Miss McGee's hair was a distinct acquisition. Her eyes were remarkable. They were eyes that you would have looked at anywhere—large, lustrous, deep blue in color (they looked black in some lights) and fringed with long dark lashes. From those eyes Miss McGee might have been a Saint—or a genius—or a devil. It all depended from what angle you saw them what opinion you might form. And here ended—if you except a soft fine-textured sallow skin—all Miss McGee's claims to beauty. Her nose was ugly; too large and too thick-set. Her mouth was so ugly as sometimes to strike you as almost repulsive. It was thick-lipped and coarse . . . and yet, oddly enough, sometimes, when Miss McGee would smile, you could swear that it was a lovely mouth. Miss McGee's physical body was a mass of contradictions from one end of it to the other. She had a figure that always had been full and now was stoutish; in her early girlhood she had served, in the firm in which she had learned her business, as model for the small, full-busted type of gown. Now she was past all that. She had neat legs still, however, and the shape of foot that gives a springy gait to its owner. The last contradiction about Miss McGee was her hand—a beautiful hand—a charming hand, soft, small, white, dimpled. If Miss McGee was proud of anything in the world it was of her hand; and nothing gave her keener distress than to see this hand of hers in the grasp of rheumatism. She regarded each swelling of each joint as a personal insult. She mourned over the shapelessness that ensued. "I'd used to have the pretty hand," she would say pathetically, "you wouldn't think it now—but it was pretty." And at such times her large blue-black eyes would grow soft and mournful, and for the moment you would say that Miss McGee was beautiful. But she had never struck Robert Fulton that way. He was inexperienced for his years and not very noticing of such things as women (he hadn't had much to do with them) and to him Miss McGee was merely an elderly feminine thing who asked him into tea in a room that was pleasanter than his own.

Miss McGee's room had no business to be pleasanter than Robert Fulton's. It had no intrinsic advantages of its own. But Miss McGee had what is called "a way with her." Partly by dint of long experience, but more by native talent, she was able to make a very little go a very long way. Her room, full of nothing at all that was pretty, looked comfortable. It looked home-like. The way that Miss McGee pulled down her blind and drew her shabby curtain, the way she arranged her poor little sticks of furniture, the exquisite cleanliness that she kept (no one in Penelope's Buildings made a better use of a hand-basin than Miss McGee) shed a glow of warmth and comfort over her home-life: and it was pleasanter to come into Miss McGee's one sitting-room than to go into many halls of the great (as they used to be called) where you would have champagne for dinner and a man in livery to pour it out for you.

"Come in," said Miss McGee. "Come right in, Mr. Fulton. I'm ready for ye—I was just wishin' ye would come."

She stood in her little black and white summer-gown with her waved silvery hair and her ugly mouth curved into a beautiful smile, and she looked—nice. Robert Fulton came in, rather awkwardly as was his way (for he was self-conscious), and put his hat and the little manuscript he had brought with him down on the window-sill, and came over to the fire.

"Sit down," said Miss McGee, "sit right down, and I'll make the tea. Did ever ye hear ut called 'maskin' the tea'?" she went on conversationally. "Ma'a—my mother, that is—used to call ut that."

And she put three generous teaspoonfuls of tea into her crockery tea-pot and poured the steaming water over the tea as if she loved doing it.

"It's—it's a Scotch expression, isn't it?" said Robert Fulton—still awkwardly. He was always awkward till he had got rid of his self-consciousness, and then, when he had got rid of that, he would open out his petals like a flower—expand, till sometimes he showed his heart.

"It wasn't Scotch my mother spoke," said Miss McGee. "She was Irish to the bone. Ma'a came out from Ireland," Miss McGee continued, "but she brought Ireland with her. Yes, Sir. And she brought up me and me sister Irish, and we're Irish to this day. I'm Irish," said Miss McGee fiercely, as if Robert Fulton were denying the fact. "I'm Irish. Make no mistake. . . ."

"Yes, I know," Robert Fulton said, beginning to lose his self-consciousness. "I know. Nobody could doubt it,"—and he laughed. "But," he went on, "don't you know that lots of Irish and Scotch expressions are the same. What part of Ireland did your mother come from," he asked—"the North?"

"Yes, Sir, the North," said Miss McGee. "Ma'a came out from a farm in Ballyhoochlan—near Tyrone there. There's a young man rooming at Mrs. Morphy's now," Miss McGee continued, "and what do you think he calls me? 'Black North!'" Miss McGee laughed. All the fighting blood seemed suddenly to have run out of her. "What do you think of that for gall, eh? He's the South himself, and, when he's out of the drink, he's a nice young man. But he's always drunk. . . ."

"And now, come to the table," Miss McGee said—and suddenly into her voice there had come a sort of undercurrent of pride. "Draw in your chair, Mr. Fulton. We'll have the tea now, and you'll excuse all the shortcomin's, I know, for ye're used to 'em."

Again in her voice there was that undercurrent of pride, and, in response to it, perhaps, Robert Fulton glanced at the table. Up to now he had noticed nothing. He was completely inobservant and at the same time keenly perceptive. No one could be less deceived by the atmosphere of the place he was in, and no one would be able to tell you less of the actual details that went to make up the whole. Up to this moment he had been basking in the warmth of the fire (which had burned up very creditably in its short space of life) and had been content to anticipate, as it were, the on-coming of tea. If you had asked him what Miss McGee had on or what her hair looked like, or whether the table was well-laid or ill-laid, or what was actually on the table, he could have told you almost nothing. But had you wished to know other things—things far less easy to put into words—Robert Fulton could have passed on to you all sorts of perceptions—feelings—what can one call them? He had grasped nothing of his surroundings but he had apprehended everything.

At the undercurrent of pride in Miss McGee's voice, however, he glanced at the table; and there he saw spread a feast of unprecedented splendor. There was a chicken—the "chickun" mentioned in Miss McGee's note: and there was salad, neatly arranged on two plates, one for each of them: and there was a bowl of "boiled dressing" (that transatlantic delicacy). There were two potatoes in their jackets which Miss McGee was just taking out of the pot; and there was an apple pie.

Such a feast as that was a rare thing for both of them. Miss McGee, indeed, at some of the houses she worked at fared pretty well. But in her own house she fared sparely; and as to Robert Fulton, he never fared well at all.

When, therefore, he saw this Lord Mayor's banquet in private life spread out before him, and smelt the fragrance of the tea as Miss McGee poured it into the cups, he couldn't refrain from looking intently at her; and when Miss McGee, lifting her mysterious eyes (they looked lovely at the moment) from the pouring of the tea met his—something for the first time passed between them. So much can a chicken and salad and potatoes and an apple pie do.

"It's a present a lady-customer made me," Miss McGee said, coloring faintly. "She's an old customer, and she's good to me. Will ye car-rve the chickun, Mr. Fulton?"

Miss McGee spoke a confusion of tongues. It was possible for her to relapse into Irish completely, and this she did in moments of great emotion, or sometimes on rather inappropriate occasions, to prove that she was Irish. "It's the Irish in me," she was accustomed to say when she did anything that was unusually trying to the onlooker. In a general way she spoke Canadian—a language impossible to indicate by means of print. Sometimes she would begin in Canadian and end in Irish; sometimes she would float an Irish intonation into the midst of a wholly transatlantic way of speech—it cannot be set down. Her way of speaking at any rate was one of her attractions. She had refinement—God knows where she got it!—when she liked; and she had—when she liked—an extreme coarseness of speech. But this Robert Fulton did not hear. When she spoke of the chicken she was sensibly affected, and so she had a slight relapse into her native tongue. "Will ye car-rve the chickun, Mr. Fulton," said she, and for the moment it might have been one of her ancestresses speaking—one who had never left the emerald beauties of her native isle.

Mr. Fulton carved the chicken, and he carved it well. He had neat hands, and he did things compactly. "White meat, Miss McGee?" said he.

"I'll take a mixture of the two, Mr. Fulton, if you please," said Miss McGee, "and help yerself good."

They supped royally. They ate the chicken and the salad and the potatoes in their jackets, and they drank the tea. And then they went on to the apple-pie, and they ate that. The bread was good—the lady samaritan had lined the bottom of the basket with some home-baked rolls: altogether Robert Fulton hadn't had such a good meal as that for a very long time past, and he enjoyed every bite. Miss McGee enjoyed her own meal, but she enjoyed yet more seeing Robert Fulton open out and become expansive and almost confidential. There is something pathetic in what a good meal will do; it was such a treat to Robert Fulton to see a table spread even as poor Miss McGee could spread it, and to sit down to a meal all ready-prepared and merely to eat it that he couldn't help rising to the occasion. He sat in the warmest corner that Miss McGee had selected for him, and he ate his "tea" and basked in the rays of the fire, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. The ugliness of Miss McGee's room (it was thoroughly ugly), the wicked design of the wall-paper, the criminal shade of the window-curtain, the vicious coloring of the rug . . . all these things he failed to see. He only felt warm and comfortable and comforted—and grateful. And Miss McGee (who had perceptions too) knew that he was feeling like that and, in response to his feelings, became younger every minute. There seemed no reason, at the rate at which she was going, why she should not become a young girl before the evening was over—and what would have happened then!

When they had eaten all they could and before Miss McGee "cleared away" they sat a little bit and talked. "When did your mother come over, Miss McGee," said Robert Fulton, who had never "wondered" at all about Miss McGee and therefore did not hesitate to ask a harmless question when he wanted to.

"Ma'a came over when I was a child," said Miss McGee. "I was a babe in ar'rums when she landed here, Mr. Fulton. And me sister was six."

"Have you ever been back?" said Robert Fulton.

Miss McGee shook her head. "I've never saw no country but Canada," she said, "barrin' the United States on a trip I made. But it's Ireland I'd like to see," she said, her voice growing suddenly passionate. "It's Irish I am, and it's Ireland is me country. Me mother used to tell me of the green grass and the kindly people and the way the McGees lived there."

Miss McGee sat looking at the fire a minute.

"I want you to understand," she said then, and her voice had suddenly become dark and grave, "the McGees go back so far you can't trace them. There was a McGee in Ballyhoochlan before the time of Our Lord . . . and God knows what he believed," said Miss McGee.

She stopped a minute and looked intently at the fire.

"So that's some family, eh, to live up to in a strange land," she said after a bit, raising her eyes to Robert's. "Ye can't feel, Mr. Fulton, ye have all that behind ye and not try an' live up to ut . . ."

Robert said nothing.

"There's times at night," said Miss McGee, "I'll dream of that green Irish grass me mother used to ta'alk about. 'Katie,' she'd say, 'there ain't the like of ut in Canada. The Irish grass is Irish, and I'm Irish an' you're Irish—and never forget ut.' I ain't never forgot ut," said Miss McGee. She stopped again. "The name of the McGees is known far an' wide at Ballyhoochlan," she said. "Why, me mother used to tell me that for ten miles around ye had only to speak the name of McGee and they'd honor ye."

Still Robert Fulton said nothing. It wasn't that he didn't feel sympathetic, but Miss McGee's remarks made him feel awkward and he couldn't think of anything to say.

"Ma'a came over here the young widow she was," Miss McGee went on. "She came out here with me in her ar'rums, and me father dead before I got meself born, and she left the old farm behind her that had went to me father's brother and he not kind to her." "Ah!" said Miss McGee, "it was a sore heart me mother brought to Canada. She was but a young girl, and she come to join her brother here, and when she landed she found um married and his wife not wantin' her . . ."

Miss McGee gazed into the midst of the glowing fire and heaved a big sigh.

"'Tis a hard thing life," she said, "and a sad world. But there's a better one comin', Mr. Fulton."

Once more Robert Fulton said nothing. He felt this subject inspire him even less than the last. He felt by no means so sure as Miss McGee that a better world was awaiting him when he had finished with the butter-and-cheese counter. He knew that Miss McGee was a fervent Catholic and that the nearness of St. Patrick's was one secret of the attachment she felt for Penelope's Buildings.

"It's the next world ye think of as ye git on in this," Miss McGee pursued. "There's not much to this world—barrin' the beauty of ut. But the next world'll be more beautiful, and there'll be peace in ut as well."

Miss McGee stopped once more, and Robert Fulton felt it "laid upon him" as they say in Scotland, to say something.

"Yes," he said awkwardly, "I suppose so."

Robert Fulton had never believed anything very fervently. He hadn't been brought up to anything beyond the ordinary orthodox thing; and his school-days and his years at the university (for he had been three years at College in England) together with a whole-hearted addiction to books of every sort and kind, had successfully undermined anything he had been originally taught in the religious line, and left him with nothing. He didn't think much about any world at all—except this one; and when he thought of this one it was chiefly to find fault with it. Miss McGee's ardent acceptance of life on a Catholic basis was incomprehensible to him. He didn't understand her feeling to the Church, the priests, the nuns (what education she had received had been in a Convent). The way she slipped into the church every morning on her way to her work seemed to him picturesque: no more than that. He was, not so much incapable of understanding, as not ripe for understanding, the passionate sense of protection this gave her; how she was able to go to her work, strengthened—armored from ill—by her little bit of broken prayer before one of the tawdry altars at St Patrick's. He was unwilling to enter on any discussion as to religion. He didn't want to discuss at any time with Miss McGee (who would be irritating in a discussion he felt sure); and especially to-night, when he was warmed and comforted by her chicken and tea, he wouldn't for anything have hurt her feelings. He therefore said in a half-assenting kind of way, "Yes. I suppose so"—and left the conversation there.

"But you like Canada, don't you?" he said, taking up after a minute a new branch of the subject. "You're happy here?"

Miss McGee gave a little laugh.

"Oh yes, I'm happy," she said. "I'm as happy as I deserve."

And she left it at that.

She was quite aware of the gulf that divided them. She knew that Mr. Fulton was "a gentleman" and that she wasn't "a lady." She recognized at once the difference life had put between them. She couldn't have told you how she knew; but she did know. She also knew that there were some things that there would be no good explaining to Mr. Fulton. He wouldn't understand. Her life and how she lived her life was one of these things: and she didn't try to explain it. "Oh yes," she said, "I'm happy enough. I'm as happy as I deserve." And she rose and began to remove the tea things.

She was deft in her movements. She did things so that it was a pleasure to watch her. She gathered together the plates and the cups and saucers and the knives and forks and spoons and she put them away on the shelf in the "kitchenette"—to be washed after Mr. Fulton went away. Then she folded up the cloth and put it into the drawer of the table they were sitting at (it was a plain deal kitchen table with no pretensions to anything except economy); and as a climax to all this she respread the table with a cover almost more unspeakably hideous than anything else in the room. It all took her five minutes or so, and then she sat down again with her little bit of work in her hands. "I'll leave you to make up the fire, Mr. Fulton," she said.

This was meant by Miss McGee as the last concession to friendliness. To no one on earth except Robert Fulton (though Robert had no idea of this) would she have said such a thing. When she said, "I leave you to make up the fire," she meant, "Anything and everything you choose to do will be accepted by me." She watched him take the poker and lean forward and make up the fire (he did it as neatly as he had carved the chicken), and in watching him she felt a deep luxurious pleasure. She didn't frame her pleasure into words, even to herself. She didn't say, even to herself, "How nice if he were here to do that always!" She merely watched him from under her long dark eye-lashes and felt the luxury of the moment. She ceased to feel alone in the world as she watched the masculine hands busy with her fire. Something consoling seemed to come into her life, and, for the moment, the next world ceased to be the aim and goal of this one. This world could be very sweet—so Miss McGee felt—so sweet that one would hesitate to leave it. One might cling to it—love it—care for it inexpressibly.

"So you're not a Canadian," Robert Fulton said, re-seating himself in his chair. "You're Irish born."

"I'm Irish born," Miss McGee answered, choking back a little sigh that her happy moment was over. "I'm Irish born—sure thing. Me sister remembers Ireland," Miss McGee went on, "or says she does. She says it's a lovely place with rivers and streams and the rain always fallin' . . ."

She paused.

"Me mother was a sweet woman, Mr. Fulton," she added inconsequently. "She had the sweetest, prettiest face. 'Where did you come from, ye little black divil,' she'd used to say to me. She had blue eyes and fair hair that she parted in the middle and dressed in smooth strands over her temples. Ah," said Miss McGee, shaking her head over her work, "she had a power of offers, one way and another, me mother. But she stayed faithful to me father's name, God bless her. And when she was old she died."

The fire sent out little jets of flame in response to Robert Fulton's "doing-up." It filled up any pause in the conversation with little friendly noises—hisses and spurts that it made.

"I see Ma'a now," Miss McGee said, "the way she'd used to look. She was a home-woman, bless her. When I'd come in from me work she'd come to the door to welcome me. 'Katie,' she'd say, 'I'm glad to see ye back. Ye're late to-night.' And we'd sit down to tea together—me sister married young and left Ma'a an' me—an' I'd look at her an' think there never was such a pretty thing before . . ."

Miss McGee stopped.

"You must be lonely without her," said Robert gently. We know he was perceptive.

For a minute or two Miss McGee said nothing. And then she looked up and looked him full in the face. "We must all be lonesome at toimes, Mr. Fulton," she said. And she dropped her marvelous eyes and looked ugly again.

"She reared us strict, Ma'a done, you bet," Miss McGee resumed after a while. "She wasn't one of the intimate koind, Mr. Fulton. She kept herself to herself an' she kep' us to ourselves. There was no boys about, be-lieve me. When me sister married it was Ma'a chose the boy. 'I'll have no drunkards brought in me house,' says she, 'not no libertines neither.' So she chose an honest bo'oy an' me sister Mary married um. She's borne um eight kids an' there's four of 'em dead, an' she's a happy woman, Mary Garry is—but she's never cared for her husband . . ."

Robert Fulton saw no way of commenting on these facts, and so he once more held his tongue. His thoughts, now that the chicken and tea were all cleared away, had turned to his manuscript and he wanted to be reading it. But he saw no way of opening that conversation.

"I wonder," he said irrelevantly, "how you would have liked it if your mother had never left Ireland."

"Not at all," said Miss McGee promptly (she divided these three words into distinct entities, not sounding the final consonant on to the following vowel). "Sure, it's good in Canada. I've took a look," she said; "our folks is not so koindly when they comes out here as what they'd used to be in Ireland, but ye git more here I guess."

Robert Fulton, in spite of himself—it was instinctive—glanced about the little room: and Miss McGee, whose eyes had been fixed on her work, raised them suddenly, and fixed them on his.

"Sure," she said, just as if he had spoken, "I haven't made much of ut. It's women alone have the poor toime. But," she hesitated. "Well," she said, "I'm some more re-fined, I guess, Mr. Fulton, eh, than ef I'd stopped back there in Ireland." She glanced down at her hand. "I'd never 've kep' a hand loike that," she said, laughing, "ef I'd stayed back where me father was."

For the first time Robert Fulton looked at Miss McGee's hand. He saw that it was a small hand, a well-shaped hand, a white hand. (She covered her hands with paper bags and slipped elastic bands round her wrists when she had housework to do.) He saw also the nails. Miss McGee's nails wouldn't have been like that—if she had stayed in Ireland. Robert Fulton saw in a flash what she meant.

"Yes," he said. "But is it worth it?"

And Miss McGee saw what he meant.

"Sure ye have to loose some way," she said. "Ye know that's true, Mr. Fulton. Ye can't be koind an' git on in the wor'rld too. Here," she said, "ye have to work an' work har'rd, but ye have the feelin' ye're equal to the best. That's somethin', eh," she added after a minute.

"Miss McGee," said Robert Fulton suddenly, "will you let me read you something I've been—writing?" This last remark of Miss McGee's had pushed up into his mind an early remark in his Paper, 'I should say at the start that my main theme will be not so much Canada in and by itself as Canada's effect upon the European immigrants,' and he longed to be up and reading all that he had written both before and after that remark. "I've been writing," he went on hastily—his self-consciousness had fallen from him as a cloak falls when you undo the clasp—"and I took the liberty of bringing my manuscript down. Would you—if you'd let me read it to you I'd—I'd be very much . . ."

He stopped.

"Sure," said Miss McGee heartily—she had seen him bring the manuscript in and put it under his cap on the window-sill and she had wondered what it was—"sure, Mr. Fulton, I'd think ut the treat an' all. I love a bit of readin'," she said, and there was sincerity in her tone, "but it's rarely I git a chanst of ut."

"I don't know if you'll like this," said Robert hesitatingly: the sentence out of his essay, now that he had had time to turn it over in his mind, seemed hardly applicable to the occasion. His self-consciousness began to envelop him again. "I can't even tell you what it—is," he said.

He came to a stop.

"Whatever it is, Mr. Fulton," Miss McGee said, "I'll take ut as an honor ef ye'll let me hear ut. Why," she cried excitedly, suddenly bethinking herself, "I never in my loife had anyone read me anythin' they'd wrote. I never knew ye did wrote," she said. "I never thought ye . . ."

She was going to say "could" but she stopped herself in time. It was indeed a matter of intense surprise to her that Mr. Fulton, whom she had taken for a mere innocent man, could write anything. She stopped herself in time, but it was only just in time. "Git in roight now," she said, "an' star'rt before the noight gits older. I'll set workin' here, an' ef I don't git on to what ut is—ye'll explain. I've not had much chanst of an education," her voice fell a semi-tone. "I wisht I'd had. I worry some the way I don't know things—I did plan I'd be a school-teacher onest when I was young. But that's neither here nor there," she ended, her voice righting itself. "Go roight ahead so I kin listen. . . ."

Robert Fulton rose and went to the window-sill, took the little rolled-up manuscript and came back to his seat. He felt suddenly nervous. What if she should think him a fool. What if, when he read it out loud, it should sound thoroughly and detestably bad. He cleared his throat. "It's only a very little thing," he said, "just a beginning . . ."

And he unrolled it, twisted the pages backwards to make them flat again, and, spreading the manuscript on the table, began to read.