Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless bundle of wraps and bandages.
How is this? asked Joe after the usual greetings. Delia laughed, but not very joyously.
Clementina, she explained, insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after her lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at 5 in the afternoon. The General was there. You should have seen him run for the chafing dish, Joe, just as if there wasnt a servant in the house. I know Clementina isnt in good health; she is so nervous. In serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so sorry! But Gen. Pinkney! Joe, that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed downstairs and sent somebody they said the furnace man or somebody in the basement out to a drug store for some oil and things to bind it up with. It doesnt hurt so much now.
Whats this? asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at some white strands beneath the bandages.
Its something soft, said Delia, that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did you sell another sketch? She had seen the money on the table.
Did I? said Joe; just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot to-day, and he isnt sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your hand, Dele?
Five oclock, I think, said Dele, plaintively. The iron I mean the rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen Gen. Pinkney, Joe, when
Sit down here a moment, Dele, said Joe. He drew her to the couch, sat beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.
What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele? he asked.
She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of Gen. Pinkney; but at length down went her head and out came the truth and tears.
I couldnt get any pupils, she confessed. And I couldnt bear to have you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that big Twenty-fourth street laundry. And I think I did very well to make up both General Pinkney and Clementina, dont you, Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was all the way home making up that story about the Welsh rabbit. Youre not angry, are you, Joe? And if I hadnt got the work you mightnt have sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.
He wasnt from Peoria, said Joe, slowly.
Well, it doesnt matter where he was from. How clever you are, Joe and kiss me, Joe and what made you ever suspect that I wasnt giving music lessons to Clementina?
I didnt, said Joe, until to-night. And I wouldnt have then, only I sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this afternoon for a girl upstairs who had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron. Ive been firing the engine in that laundry for the last two weeks.
And then you didnt
My purchaser from Peoria, said Joe, and Gen. Pinkney are both creations of the same art but you wouldnt call it either painting or music.
And then they both laughed, and Joe began:
When one loves ones Art no service seems
But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. No, she said just When one loves.
The Furnished Room
Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing Home, Sweet Home in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates[13] in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths.
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.
He asked if there was a room to let.
Come in, said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat seemed lined with fur. I have the third floor back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.