University of Virginia Library

3. III

BELLE dropped her cloth and hastened heavily to where Alice sat. Her hard face was set in lines of grim resolution. She spoke in a hoarse whisper, looking continually over her shoulder toward the hall. "Ma'am — Mrs. Smithers — don't give up to him so! Paste him one when he comes back. Git ahead of him and he'd let you alone. Give him fits before he has a chance to git started."

Alice looked up in amazement, and spoke with a childish attempt at dignity. "Belle, you forget yourself!"

Her husband came back into the room with his rapid, noiseless tread, cast a black look at the two women, and went again to his mail. There was a silence which was ominous. The scrubwoman went on stolidly with her work, and Alice waited in trembling suspense for the first words. Smithers finished a letter and held it up, saying in a low, measured tone: "If you've quite finished your furtive conversation with your especial friend, you may care to know that this letter is from Jack. I believe you preserve the pose of being devoted to your children."

He pocketed the letter in answer to an imploring gesture for it from his wife, and went on: "No, there's no need for you to read it. I can tell you all that's necessary for you to know. He's hurt his foot again."

His wife screamed out at this, striking her hands together in anguish. "Oh, Will! His lame foot? How badly?"

The man gathered the letters together and threw some loose envelopes in the waste-paper basket before he answered. Then he said sardonically: "It makes me smile to see the way you carry out your attitude about that. If you care so much about it, it's a wonder you carefully arranged matters so he would be lame."

The mother quivered as though under a physical blow. "Oh, Will, how can you?"

Her tormentor went on: "How could you? It was just pure carelessness on your part letting him fall — you, a mother of children! I wonder that you can look at the ugly little cripple without hating yourself."

He listened impatiently to her feeble attempt at self-justification. "Why, Will, you know I was thrown myself, and fell all those steps. The doctor

has always said that if I hadn't held him up he would have been killed, and —"

"Confound the doctor! You got around him with your soft ways the same way you did me before I knew what a fool you were. Besides, it would be better for Jack if he were dead. It makes me sick to see him hobbling about. Anyhow, the fact remains that you were supposed to be taking care of him and let him fall. I notice other mothers seem to be able to avoid those little accidents."

He walked into the study, kicking viciously at Belle's pail and partly over-turning it, so that the water ran out on the carpet. As the door slammed the scrubwoman looked apprehensively at Mrs. Smithers, who returned the look sadly.

"Belle, you know I've always been good to you."

The workwoman brightened at the words and answered fervently, in a hoarse, cracked voice: "Yes, ma'am, Lord knows I know."

Her mistress continued seriously, as though speaking to a naughty child: "There's one thing, though, I can't allow. You must not speak to me as you did just now, or I can never have you here again."

The shapeless body of the other drooped humbly under the reproof. "Just as you say, ma'am. I couldn't help myself that time, but I won't never again. I couldn't live if I had to quit workin' for you. I'm scrubbin' here in the house for less than I could git somewheres else just so's I can git to see you. Why, ma'am — Mrs. Smithers — I'd go through hell every day to see you!"

She flinched again at the deprecating hand of her mistress, and hung her head, shamefaced, at the exhortation: "Oh, Belle, you shouldn't use such language."

The pathos of the unlovely figure went to Alice's heart. "Never mind this time, Belle. You do a great deal for me, too. I couldn't have got along without you, a great many times, and it makes me very happy to think that I'm not so weak that I can't help somebody a little."

The hard-featured face of the other suddenly broke into grotesque lines of emotion. She spoke incoherently, sitting ungracefully on her heels and wiping her eyes with the cleaning-cloth between her sentences. "Oh, ma'am, it just busts me wide open to have you say I help you. When a body's had all done for them you've done for me — keeping me at all! — I know how I look and how rough I talk. There isn't another lady in the world that would have me around, and with the kids and all! And then to give me kind words and looks, and helpin' me through with the typhoid, and goin' to that darned hospital to see me! Not if I live to be a million, which Lord forbid! I couldn't never forget how you looked when you came in the ward with all them flowers, as though I was anybody, and standin' by me all that month when they thought I'd swiped the silver. You're the only livin' soul as ever give me a kind word since I can't remember. I never did anything but fight anywheres else but here. It's just been hell every minute. I cud ha' died like a dog and never knowed what it was to have anybody so much as say — oh, ma'am, Mrs. Smithers —"

She paused, breathless, choked by emotion, unable to express herself, but staring at her mistress, a look of doglike devotion in her somber eyes.

As Alice smiled sweetly at her with a wistful look of gratitude, she came to herself, and began her work again, sniffing unpleasantly and drawing the back of her hand across her nose from time to time.

She moved a picture which stood on the floor to another part of the room, looking at it curiously and at Alice timidly, finally summing up courage to say: "Would it be too darn much trouble, ma'am, to tell me what this picture's about?"

"That? Oh, that's a glacier — ice, you know, on top of a mountain — and two men are tied together with a rope. One of them has just slipped into a great, deep hole, and he's getting out his knife to cut the rope, so he won't drag the other man after him."

Belle seemed unconvinced. "But then he'll fall, won't he?"

Alice replied absently, looking at the picture of a child on the mantel. "Yes, but the other man, his friend will be

saved." She fell into a reverie, from which she was recalled by the other's insistent questioning: "What do the words underneath mean, please, ma'am?"

"I forget what they do call it. What are the words?"

Belle followed the letters with a gnarled forefinger and read laboriously: "Greater love hath no man," and listened with a painful face of endeavor to the explanation: "Oh, that's from the Bible, where it says, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.' It means, you know, that —"