The mother sat blinking at them. She delivered
reproaches, swallowed potatoes and drank from a yellow-brown
bottle. After a time her mood changed and she
wept as she carried little Tommie into another room
and laid him to sleep with his fists doubled in an
old quilt of faded red and green grandeur. Then
she came and moaned by the stove. She rocked
to and fro upon a chair, shedding tears and crooning
miserably to the two children about their “poor
mother” and “yer fader, damn ’is
soul.”
The little girl plodded between the table and the
chair with a dish-pan on it. She tottered on
her small legs beneath burdens of dishes.
Jimmie sat nursing his various wounds. He cast
furtive glances at his mother. His practised
eye perceived her gradually emerge from a muddled
mist of sentiment until her brain burned in drunken
heat. He sat breathless.
Maggie broke a plate.
The mother started to her feet as if propelled.
“Good Gawd,” she howled. Her eyes
glittered on her child with sudden hatred. The
fervent red of her face turned almost to purple.
The little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a
monk in an earthquake.
He floundered about in darkness until he found the
stairs. He stumbled, panic-stricken, to the
next floor. An old woman opened a door.
A light behind her threw a flare on the urchin’s
quivering face.
“Eh, Gawd, child, what is it dis time?
Is yer fader beatin’ yer mudder, or yer mudder
beatin’ yer fader?”
Jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall.
Above the muffled roar of conversation, the dismal
wailings of babies at night, the thumping of feet
in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound
of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling
of wheels over cobbles, they heard the screams of the
child and the roars of the mother die away to a feeble
moaning and a subdued bass muttering.
The old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage
who could don, at will, an expression of great virtue.
She possessed a small music-box capable of one tune,
and a collection of “God bless yehs” pitched
in assorted keys of fervency. Each day she took
a position upon the stones of Fifth Avenue, where
she crooked her legs under her and crouched immovable
and hideous, like an idol. She received daily
a small sum in pennies. It was contributed, for
the most part, by persons who did not make their homes
in that vicinity.
Once, when a lady had dropped her purse on the sidewalk,
the gnarled woman had grabbed it and smuggled it with
great dexterity beneath her cloak. When she
was arrested she had cursed the lady into a partial
swoon, and with her aged limbs, twisted from rheumatism,
had almost kicked the stomach out of a huge policeman
whose conduct upon that occasion she referred to when
she said: “The police, damn ’em.”
