Complete Stories Page 10

  The New Yorker, October 9, 1926

  Travelogue

  The woman in the spangled black dress left the rest of the party, and made room on the sofa for the sunburned young man with the quiet eyes.

  “You just sit yourself right down here this minute,” she said. “And give an account of yourself. The idea! Running away for nearly two years, and not even a post-card out of you! Aren’t you ashamed? Answer Muvver. Izzun you tebble shame you’self?”

  “I’m rotten about writing letters,” he said. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m hopeless. I always mean to write, and I never seem to get around to it. It isn’t because I don’t think of people. It’s just I’m terrible about writing letters.”

  “Where have you been, anyway?” she said. “Nearly two years! Where dat bad boy been teepin’ himself?”

  “Well, I was in Arabia, mostly,” he said.

  “You’re crazy,” she said. “Just simply crazy. What on earth did you want to go to a place like that for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just sort of thought I’d like to see it.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m just like you. I love traveling. Freddy always says, just give me a couple of trunks and a letter of credit, and I’m all right. Well, you ask Freddy. It’s the funniest thing, but I was saying to him only last night at dinner—we were all alone, the Allens were coming, but their baby was sick at the last minute, the poor little thing, it’s so delicate it would scare you to death to see it, oh, my God, I must call up Kate Allen and find out how it is, I told Freddy to remind me—I was telling him, ‘One of these fine days,’ I said, ‘you won’t see me sitting here,’ I said. ‘I’m going to just pack up a toothbrush and an extra pair of stockings,’ I said, ‘and the next you’ll hear of me, I’ll be in Egypt or India or somewhere,’ I said. Oh, I’m a born traveler!”

  “Really?” he said.

  “Arabia!” she said. “Well, just imagine that. Tell me all about it. How did you like it, anyway?”

  “Why, I had a good time,” he said.

  “Imagine,” she said. “Way off there. Well, I’ve often wondered about Arabia. Tell me some more about it. Isn’t there an awful lot of sand and everything?”

  “Well, there is,” he said. “But, you see—”

  “Sand!” she said. “Don’t sand me! After this summer down at Dune Harbor, I’ve had enough of sand, thank you. I could write a book about sand. Always in your shoes, no matter what you did, and the children tracking it into the house till I thought I’d go crazy. I did. I thought I’d simply go crazy. Ever been to Dune Harbor?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, don’t,” she said. “Nothing but sand, sand, sand. You can get all the sand you want right there, without going off to any Arabia.”

  “Well, you see,” he said, “the way it is in Arabia—”

  “And Freddy on that beach!” she said. “You’d have died. The first day he got down there he just lay out there, and lay out there, and the first thing you knew, his shoulders! I thought about you, right away. I said if you could have seen those shoulders of his, you just simply would have died.”

  “It must have been awfully funny,” he said. “You see, what I was going to say, in Arabia—”

  “That’s right,” she said. “That’s just exactly what I want you to do. Tell me all about your trip. I want to hear every single thing. What was it like? What are the people like? Are they all Arabs and everything?”

  “Well, of course,” he said, “there’s a lot of—”

  “Imagine!” she said. “Arabs! Isn’t it exactly like something in a book? Oh, it must be just the way I pictured it. Tell me about all these Arabs. What are they like, anyway?”

  “Why, they’re pretty much like everybody else,” he said. “Some of them are great, and some of them aren’t so good. Most of them are pretty—”

  “You know,” she said, “I’ve always been sure I could get along with people like that. Arabs and everything. I’m so interested in people, they just seem to know, and they let me see their inside selves. Oh, I’m always making friends with the darndest people! You just ask Freddy. ‘Well,’ he said to me, ‘nobody could ever call you a snob,’ he said. And you know, I took it for a compliment. Arabs! Oh, I’d love anything like that. Well, go on, tell me about it. Where did you stay?”

  “Why, a lot of the time,” he said, “I lived right with the natives. You see, I wanted to—”

  “Imagine! Right with them!” she said. “But wasn’t it terribly uncomfortable and everything?”

  “They were darn decent to me,” he said. “And as soon as you got used to it, you—”

  “Oh, I could do it,” she said. “I could do it in a minute. I don’t care what I have to put up with, just as long as I’m traveling and seeing new things. When we were in Milan, three years ago, we went to this little hotel—the place was so crowded, there was nothing but Americans, wherever you went. I used to say to Freddy, ‘You’d think some of them would have sense enough to stay home.’ So we stayed at this little hotel, and do you know what we got? Well, I’ll tell you, because you’re an old friend, but if you ever—! We got fleas. Absolutely. Fleas. Freddy was nearly crazy, you know how he is, but I just said to him, ‘Well, that’s the kind of thing you’ve got to expect when you’re traveling.’ Oh, that’s the way I am. Nothing fazes me. But look, these Arabs. Don’t they all have a lot of wives or something?”

  “Why, lots of them have more than one wife,” he said. “You see, the way they look at it, it’s a question of—”

  “Aren’t they terrible?” she said. “Imagine, more than one wife! Isn’t that the Oriental of it, for you? They’re terrible. And don’t they all pretend to be terribly religious or something?”

  “Their religion seems to mean a lot to them,” he said. “No matter how poor a man is, or no matter where he goes, he always has his little mat, to—”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “Prayer rugs. That’s what they call them. Prayer rugs. I’ll never forget, before I was married, we had this perfectly beautiful prayer rug in the living-room, right in front of the piano. We girls used to have a regular joke about it. We used to keep teasing Father, which one of us he was going to give it to—oh, he thought the world and all of that prayer rug! So then Father got married again, and of course, he kept the prayer rug right there. Oh, we often have a good laugh about that prayer rug!”

  “Is that so?” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “My, that prayer rug! Oh, it was a beautiful thing, to anybody that appreciated it. Blue and yellow and I don’t know what all colors. And everything in the design meant something. Oh, they’re awfully clever that way, those Arabs. They make some really lovely things. I suppose you’ve seen a lot of them.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I have.”

  “I’m crazy about their work,” she said. “I’d love to see them doing it. I’ve often thought, what I’d like to do, I’d like to—Oh, there’s Freddy, over in the door. He wants to go home. Isn’t he just the old stick-in-the-mud? Always wants to go home at half-past eleven. I say to him, ‘You’re as good as a clock,’ I tell him. ‘Whenever we’re out at a party I can always tell when it’s half-past eleven.’ Honestly. I just tease the life out of him. But he never minds what I say. He just laughs. Well, I’m pretty dead, myself. Been shopping all day—it just kills me. I just put it off till the last minute, I hate it so. Now, listen, you’ve got to come and see us. We’re pretty hurt, the way you’ve acted. Will you come soon? Please? Please?”

  “Thank you very much,” he said.

  “And it was simply too wonderful,” she said, “to hear all about Arabia. My, you’ve made me feel as if I was in an awful rut, just living here. But I’m going to do it some day. I warn you. One of these fine days you’ll wake up and I’ll be way off the other side of the world. That’s the way I am—I’ve just got to do it, sooner or later. Will you look at Freddy scowling!
He probably thinks you and I are fixing up a plan to elope, sitting here so long. Oh, he knows what you travelers are! Now you are coming soon, aren’t you? There’s heaps more things I want to ask you about. You needn’t think you’re done with Arabia yet, by any manner of means. You come soon! Now you mind Muvver! Don’t you be bad, naughty, wicked, tebble boy ever adain. You hear me?”

  “Thank you very much,” he said.

  “Nighty-ni’,” she said. “S’eet d’eams.”

  “Good-night,” he said.

  She went on away to Freddy.

  The New Yorker, October 30, 1926

  Little Curtis

  Mrs. Matson paused in the vestibule of G. Fosdick’s Sons’ Department Store. She transferred a small parcel from her right hand to the crook of her left arm, gripped her shopping-bag firmly by its German-silver frame, opened it with a capable click, and drew from its orderly interior a little black-bound book and a neatly sharpened pencil.

  Shoppers passing in and out jostled her as she stood there, but they neither shared in Mrs. Matson’s attention nor hurried her movements. She made no answer to the “Oh, I beg your pardons” that bubbled from the lips of the more tender-hearted among them. Calm, sure, glo riously aloof, Mrs. Matson stood, opened her book, poised her pencil, and wrote in delicate, prettily slanting characters: “4 crepe-paper candy-baskets, $.28.”

  The dollar-sign was gratifyingly decorative, the decimal point clear and deep, the 2 daintily curled, the 8 admirably balanced. Mrs. Matson looked approvingly at her handiwork. Still unhurried, she closed the book, replaced it and the pencil in the bag, tested the snap to see that it was indisputably shut, and took the parcel once more in her right hand. Then, with a comfortable air of duty well done, she passed impressively, and with a strong push, from G. Fosdick’s Sons’ Department Store by means of a portal which bore a placard with the request, “Please Use Other Door.”

  Slowly Mrs. Matson made her way down Maple Street. The morning sunshine that flooded the town’s main thoroughfare caused her neither to squint nor to lower her face. She held her head high, looking about her as one who says, “Our good people, we are pleased with you.”

  She stopped occasionally by a shop-window, to inspect thoroughly the premature autumn costumes there displayed. But her heart was un-fluttered by the envy which attacked the lesser women around her. Though her long black coat, of that vintage when coats were puffed of sleeve and cut sharply in at the waist, was stained and shiny, and her hat had the general air of indecision and lack of spirit that comes with age, and her elderly black gloves were worn in patches of rough gray, Mrs. Matson had no yearnings for the fresh, trim costumes set temptingly before her. Snug in her was the thought of the rows of recent garments, each one in its flowered cretonne casing, occupying the varnished hangers along the poles of her bedroom closet.

  She had her unalterable ideas about such people as gave or threw away garments that might still be worn, for warmth and modesty, if not for style. She found it distinctly lower-class to wear one’s new clothes “for every day”; there was an unpleasant suggestion of extravagance and riotous living in the practice. The working classes, who, as Mrs. Matson often explained to her friends, went and bought themselves electric ice-boxes and radios the minute they got a little money, did such things.

  No morbid thought of her possible sudden demise before the clothes in her closet could be worn or enjoyed irked her. Life’s uncertainty was not for those of her position. Mrs. Matsons pass away between seventy and eighty; sometimes later, never before.

  A blind colored woman, a tray of pencils hung about her neck, with a cane tapping the pavement before her, came down the street. Mrs. Matson swerved sharply to the curb to avoid her, wasting a withering glance upon her. It was Mrs. Matson’s immediate opinion that the woman could see as well as she could. She never bought of the poor on the streets, and was angry if she saw others do so. She frequently remarked that these beggars all had big bank-accounts.

  She crossed to the car-tracks to await the trolley that would bear her home, her calm upset by her sight of the woman. “Probably owns an apartment-house,” she told herself, and shot an angry glance after the blind woman.

  However, her poise was restored by the act of tendering her fare to the courteous conductor. Mrs. Matson rather enjoyed small and legitimate disbursements to those who were appropriately grateful. She gave him her nickel with the manner of one presenting a park to a city, and swept into the car to a desirable seat.

  Settled, with the parcel securely wedged between her hip and the window, against loss or robbery, Mrs. Matson again produced the book and pencil. “Car-fare, $.05,” she wrote. Again the exquisite handwriting, the neat figures, gave her a flow of satisfaction.

  Mrs. Matson, regally without acknowledgment, accepted the conductor’s aid in alighting from the car at her corner. She trod the sun-splashed pavement, bowing now and again to neighbors knitting on their porches or bending solicitously over their iris-beds. Slow, stately bows she gave, unaccompanied by smile or word of greeting. After all, she was Mrs. Albert Matson; she had been Miss Laura Whitmore, of the Drop Forge and Tool Works Whitmores. One does not lose sight of such things.

  She always enjoyed the first view of her house as she walked toward it. It amplified in her her sense of security and permanence. There it stood, in its tidy, treeless lawns, square and solid and serviceable. You thought of steel-engravings and rows of Scott’s novels behind glass, and Sunday dinner in the middle of the day, when you looked at it. You knew immediately that within it no one ever banged a door, no one clattered up- and down-stairs, no one spilled crumbs or dropped ashes or left the light burning in the bathroom.

  Expectancy pervaded Mrs. Matson as she approached her home. She spoke of it always as her home. “You must come to see me in my home some time,” she graciously commanded new acquaintances. There was a large, institutional sound to it that you didn’t get in the word “house.”

  She liked to think of its cool, high-ceilinged rooms, of its busy maids, of little Curtis waiting to deliver her his respectful kiss. She had adopted him almost a year ago, when he was four. She had, she told her friends, never once regretted it.

  In her absence her friends had been wont to comment sadly upon what a shame it was that the Albert Matsons had no child—and with all the Matson and Whitmore money, too. Neither of them, the friends pointed out, could live forever; it would all have to go to the Henry Matsons’ children. And they were but quoting Mrs. Albert Matson’s own words when they observed that those children would be just the kind that would run right through it.

  Mr. and Mrs. Matson held a joint view of the devastation that would result if their nephews and nieces were ever turned loose among the Matson and Whitmore money. As is frequent in such instances, their worry led them to pay the other Matson family the compliment of the credit for schemes and desires that had never edged into their thoughts.

  The Albert Matsons saw their relatives as waiting, with a sort of stalking patience, for the prayed-for moment of their death. For years they conjured up ever more lurid pictures of the Matson children going through their money like Sherman to the sea; for years they carried about with them the notion that their demise was being eagerly awaited, was being made, indeed, the starting-point of bacchanalian plans.

  The Albert Matsons were as one in everything, as in this. Their thoughts, their manners, their opinions, their very locutions were phenomena of similarity. People even pointed out that Mr. and Mrs. Matson looked alike. It was regarded as the world’s misfortune that so obviously Heaven-made a match was without offspring. And of course—you always had to come back to it, it bulked so before you—there was all that Matson and Whitmore money.

  No one, though, ever directly condoled with Mrs. Matson upon her childlessness. In her presence one didn’t speak of things like having children. She accepted the fact of babies when they were shown to her; she fastidiously disregarded their mode of arrival.

  She had told none
of her friends of her decision to adopt a little boy. No one knew about it until the papers were signed and he was established in the Matson house. Mrs. Matson had got him, she explained, “at the best place in New York.” No one was surprised at that. Mrs. Matson always went to the best places when she shopped in New York. You thought of her selecting a child as she selected all her other belongings: a good one, one that would last.

  She stopped abruptly now, as she came to her gate, a sudden frown creasing her brow. Two little boys, too absorbed to hear her steps, were playing in the hot sun by the hedge—two little boys much alike in age, size, and attire, compact, pink-and-white, good little boys, their cheeks flushed with interest, the backs of their necks warm and damp. They played an interminable, mysterious game with pebbles and twigs and a small tin trolley-car.

  Mrs. Matson entered the yard.

  “Curtis!” she said.

  Both little boys looked up, startled. One of them rose and hung his head before her frown.

  “And who,” said Mrs. Matson deeply, “who told Georgie he could come here?”

  No answer. Georgie, still squatting on his heels, looked inquiringly from her to Curtis. He was interested and unalarmed.

  “Was it you, Curtis?” asked Mrs. Matson.

  Curtis nodded. You could scarcely tell that he did, his head hung so low.

  “Yes, mother dear!” said Mrs. Matson.

  “Yes, mother dear,” whispered Curtis.

  “And how many times,” Mrs. Matson inquired, “have I told you that you were not to play with Georgie? How many times, Curtis?”

  Curtis murmured vaguely. He wished that Georgie would please go.

  “You don’t know?” said Mrs. Matson incredulously. “You don’t know? After all mother does for you, you don’t know how many times she has told you not to play with Georgie? Don’t you remember what mother told you she’d have to do if you ever played with Georgie again?”

  A pause. Then the nod.