The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories/The Tiger
THE TIGER
THE two little girls, Daisy Mears and Elsie Threamer, were nine years old, and they lived next door to each other; but there the coincidence came to an end; and even if any further similarity between them had been perceptible, it could not have been mentioned openly without causing excitement in Elsie’s family. Elsie belonged to that small class of exquisite children seen on canvas in the days when a painter would exhibit without shame a picture called “Ideal Head.” She was one of those rare little fair creatures at whom grown people, murmuring tenderly, turn to stare; and her childhood was attended by the exclamations not only of strangers but of people who knew her well. “Greuze!” they said, or “A child Saint Cecilia!” or “That angelic sweetness!” But whatever form preliminary admiration might take, the concluding tribute was almost always the same: “And so unconscious, with it all!” When some unobservant and rambling-minded person did wander from the subject without mentioning Elsie’s unconsciousness, she was apt to take a dislike to him.
People often wondered what that ineffable child with the shadowy downcast eyes was thinking about. They would “give anything,” they declared, to know what she was thinking about. But nobody wondered what Daisy Mears was thinking about—on the contrary, people were frequently only too sure they knew what Daisy was thinking about.
From the days of her earliest infancy, Elsie, without making any effort, was a child continually noticed and acclaimed; whereas her next neighbour was but an inconspicuous bit of background, which may have been more trying for Daisy than any one realized. No doubt it also helped great aspirations to sprout within her, and was thus the very cause of the abrupt change in her character during their mutual tenth summer. For it was at this time that Daisy all at once began to be more talked about than Elsie had ever been. All over the neighbourhood and even beyond its borders, she was spoken of probably dozens of times as often as Elsie was—and with more feeling, more emphasis, more gesticulation, than Elsie had ever evoked.
Daisy had accidentally made the discovery that the means of becoming prominent are at hand for anybody, and that the process of using them is the simplest in the world; for of course all that a person desirous of prominence needs to do is to follow his unconventional impulses. In this easy way prodigious events can be produced at the cost of the most insignificant exertion, as is well understood by people who have felt a temptation to step from the roof of a high building, or to speak out inappropriately in church. Daisy still behaved rather properly in church, but several times she made herself prominent in Sunday school; and she stepped off the roof of her father’s garage, merely to become more prominent among a small circle of coloured people who stood in the alley begging her not to do it.
She spent the rest of that day in bed—for after all, while fame may so easily be obtained, it has its price, and the bill is inevitably sent in—but she was herself again the next morning, and at about ten o’clock announced to her mother that she had decided to “go shopping.”
Mrs. Mears laughed, and, just to hear what Daisy would say, asked quizzically: “‘Go shopping?’ What in the world do you mean, Daisy?”
“Well, I think it would be a nice thing for me to do, mamma,” Daisy explained. “You an’ grandma an’ Aunt Clara, you always keep sayin’, ‘I believe I’ll go shopping.’ I want to, too.”
“What would you do?”
“Why, I’d go shopping the way you do. I’d walk in a store an’ say: ‘Have you got any unb’eached muslin? Oh, I thought this’d be only six cents a yard! Haven’t you got anything nicer?’ Everything like that. I know, mamma. I know any amount o’ things to say when I go shopping. Can’t I go shopping, mamma?”
“Yes, of course,” her mother said, smiling. “You can pretend our big walnut tree is a department store and shop all you want.”
“Well” Daisy began, and then realizing that the recommendation of the walnut tree was only a suggestion, and not a command, she said, “Well, thank you, mamma,” and ran outdoors, swinging her brown straw hat by its elastic cord. The interview had taken place in the front hall, and Mrs. Hears watched the lively little figure for a moment as it was silhouetted against the ardent sunshine at the open doors; then she turned away, smiling, and for the rest of the morning her serene thought of Daisy was the picture of a ladylike child playing quietly near the walnut tree in the front yard.
Daisy skipped out to the gate, but upon the public sidewalk, just beyond, she moderated her speed and looked as important as she could, assuming at once the rôle she had selected in the little play she was making up as she went along. In part, too, her importance was meant to interest Elsie Threamer, who was standing in graceful idleness by the hedge that separated the Threamers’ yard from the sidewalk.
“Where you goin’, Daisy?” the angelic neighbour inquired.
Daisy paused and tried to increase a distortion of her face, which was her conception of a businesslike concentration upon “shopping.” “What?” she inquired, affecting absent-mindedness.
“Where you goin’?”
“I haf to go shopping to-day, Elsie.”
Elsie laughed. “No, you don’t.”
“I do, too. I go shopping almost all the time lately. I haf to.”
“You don’t, either,” Elsie said. “You don’t either haf to.”
“I do, too, haf to!” Daisy retorted. “I’m almos’ worn out, I haf to go shopping so much.”
“Where?”
“Every single place,” Daisy informed her impressively. “I haf to go shopping all the way down-town. I’ll take you with me if you haf to go shopping, too. D’you want to?”
Elsie glanced uneasily over her shoulder, but no one was visible at any of the windows of her house. Obviously, she was interested in her neighbour’s proposal, though she was a little timorous. “Well” she said. “Of course I ought to go shopping, because the truth is I got more shopping to do than ’most anybody. I haf to go shopping so much I just have the backache all the time! I guess”
“Come on,” said Daisy. “I haf to go shopping in every single store down-town, and there’s lots o’ stores on the way we can go shopping in before we get there.”
“All right,” her friend agreed. “I guess I rilly better.”
She came out to the sidewalk, and the two turned toward the city’s central quarter of trade, walking quickly and talking with an accompaniment of many little gestures. “I rilly don’t know how I do it all,” said Elsie, assuming a care-worn air. “I got so much shopping to do an’ everything, my fam’ly all say they wonder I don’t break down an’ haf to go to a sanitanarian or somep’m because I do so much.”
“Oh, it’s worse’n that with me, my dear!” said Daisy. “I declare I doe’ know how I do live through it all! Every single day, it’s like this: I haf to go shopping all day long, my dear!”
“Well, I haf to, too, my dear! I never get time to even sit down, my dear!”
Daisy shook her head ruefully. “Well, goodness knows the last time I sat down, my dear!” she said. “My fam’ly say I got to take some rest, but how can I, with all this terrable shopping to do?”
“Oh, my dear!” Elsie exclaimed. “Why, my dear, I haven’t sat down since Christmus!”
Thus they enacted a little drama, improvising the dialogue, for of course every child is both playwright and actor, and spends most of his time acting in scenes of his own invention—which is one reason that going to school may be painful to him; lessons are not easily made into plays, though even the arithmetic writers do try to help a little, with their dramas of grocers and eggs, and farmers and bushels and quarts. A child is a player, and an actor is a player; and both “play” in almost the same sense—the essential difference being that the child’s art is instinctive, so that he is not so conscious of just where reality begins and made-up drama ends. Daisy and Elsie were now representing and exaggerating their two mothers, with a dash of aunt thrown in; they felt that they were the grown people they played they were; and the more they developed these “secondary personalities,” the better they believed in them.
“An’ with all my trouble an’ everything,” Daisy said, “I jus’ never get a minute to myself. Even my shopping, it’s all for the fam’ly.”
“So’s mine,” Elsie said promptly. “Mine’s every single bit for the fam’ly, an’ I never, never get through.”
“Well, look at me!” Daisy exclaimed, her hands fluttering in movements she believed to be illustrative of the rush she lived in. “My fam’ly keep me on the run from the minute I get up till after I go to bed. I declare I don’t get time to say my prayers! To-day I thought I might get a little rest for once in my life. But no! I haf to go shopping!”
“So do I, my dear! I haf to look at Well, what do you haf to look at when we go in the stores?”
“Me? I haf to look at everything! There isn’t a thing left in our house. I haf to look at doilies, an’ all kinds embrawdries, an’ some aperns for the servants, an’ taffeta, an’ two vases for the liberry mantelpice, an’ some new towerls, an’ kitchen-stove-polish, an’ underwear, an’ oilcloth, an’ lamp-shades, an’ some orstrich feathers for my blue vevvut hat. An’ then I got to get some”
“Oh, my dear! I got more’n that I haf to look at,” Elsie interrupted. And she, likewise, went into details; but as Daisy continued with her own, and they both talked at the same time, the effect was rather confused, though neither seemed to be at all disturbed on that account. Probably they were pleased to think they were thus all the more realistically adult.
It was while they were chattering in this way that Master Laurence Coy came wandering along a side-street that crossed their route, and, catching sight of them, considered the idea of joining them. He had a weakness for Elsie, and an antipathy for Daisy, the latter feeling sometimes not unmingled with the most virulent repulsion; but there was a fair balance struck; in order to be with Elsie, he could bear being with Daisy. Yet both were girls, and, regarded in that light alone, not the company he cared to be thought of as deliberately choosing. Nevertheless, he had found no boys at home that morning; he was at a loss what to do with himself, and bored. Under these almost compulsory circumstances, he felt justified in consenting to join the ladies; and, overtaking them at the crossing, he stopped and spoke to them.
“Hay, there,” he said, taking care not to speak too graciously. “Where you two goin’, talkin’ so much?”
They paid not the slightest attention to him, but continued busily on their way.
“My dear Mrs. Smith!” Daisy exclaimed, speaking with increased loudness. “I jus’ pozzatively never have a minute to my own affairs! If I doe’ get a rest from my housekeepin’ pretty soon, I doe’ know what on earth’s goin’ to become o’ my nerves!”
“Oh, Mrs. Jones!” Elsie exclaimed. “It’s the same way with me, my dear. I haf to have the doctor for my nerves, every morning at seven or eight o’clock. Why, my dear, I never”
“Hay!” Laurence called. “I said: ‘Where you goin’, talkin’ so much?’ Di’n’chu hear me?”
But they were already at some distance from him and hurrying on as if they had seen and heard nothing whatever. Staring after them, he caught a dozen more “my dears” and exclamatory repetitions of “Mrs. Smith, you don’t say so!” and “Why, Mis-suz Jones!” He called again, but the two little figures, heeding him less than they did the impalpable sunshine about them, hastened on down the street, their voices gabbling, their heads waggling importantly, their arms and hands incessantly lively in airy gesticulation.
Laurence was thus granted that boon so often defined by connoisseurs of twenty as priceless—a new experience. But he had no gratitude for it; what he felt was indignation. He lifted up his voice and bawled:
“Hay! Di’n’chu hear what I said? Haven’t you got ’ny ears?”
Well he knew they had ears, and that these ears heard him; but on the spur of the moment he was unable to think of anything more scathing than this inquiry. The shoppers went on, impervious, ignoring him with all their previous airiness—with a slight accentuation of it, indeed—even when he bellowed at them a second time and a third. Stung, he was finally inspired to add: “Hay! Are you gone crazy?” But they were halfway to the next crossing.
A bitterness came upon Laurence. “What I care?” he muttered. “I’ll show you what I care!” However, his action seemed to deny his words, for instead of setting about some other business to prove his indifference, he slowly followed the shoppers. He was driven by a necessity he felt to make them comprehend his displeasure with their injurious flouting of himself and of etiquette in general. “Got ’ny politeness?” he muttered, and replied morosely: “No, they haven’t—they haven’t got sense enough to know what politeness means! Well, I’ll show ’em! They’ll see before I get through with ’em! Oh, oh! Jus’ wait a little: they’ll be beggin’ me quick enough to speak to ’em. ‘Oh, Laur-runce, please!’ they’ll say. ‘Please speak to us, Laur-runce. Won’ chu please speak to us, Laurunce? We’d jus’ give anything to have you speak to us, Laurunce! Won’ chu, Laurunce, pull-lease?’ Then I’ll say: ‘Yes, I’ll speak to you, an’ you better listen if you want to learn some sense!’ Then I’ll call ’em everything I can think of!”
It might have been supposed that he had some definite plan for bringing them thus to their knees in supplication, but he was only solacing himself by sketching a triumphant climax founded upon nothing. Meanwhile he continued morbidly to follow, keeping about fifty yards behind them.
“Poot!” he sneered. “Think they’re wunnaful, don’t they? You wait! They’ll see!”
He came to a halt, staring. “Now what they doin’?”
Elsie and Daisy had gone into a small drug-store, where Daisy straightway approached the person in charge, an elderly man of weary appearance. “Do you keep taffeta?” she asked importantly. Since she and her friend were “playing” that they were shopping, of course they found it easily consistent to “play” that the druggist was a clerk in a department store; and no doubt, too, the puzzlement of the elderly man gave them a profound if secret enjoyment.
He moved toward his rather shabby soda-fountain, replying: “I got chocolate and strawb’ry and v’nilla. I don’t keep no fancy syrups.”
“Oh, my, no!” Daisy exclaimed pettishly. “I mean taffeta you wear.”
“What?”
“I mean taffeta you wear.”
“‘Wear’?” he said.
“I want to look at some taffeta,” Daisy said impatiently. “Taffeta.”
“Taffy?” the man said. “I don’t keep no line of candies.”
Daisy frowned, and shook her head. “I guess he’s kind of deaf or somep’m,” she said to Elsie; and then she shouted again at the elderly man: “Taffetah! It’s somep’m you wear. You wear it on you!”
“What for?” he said. “I ain’t deaf. You mean some brand of porous plaster? Mustard plaster?”
“Oh, my, no!” Daisy exclaimed, and turned to Elsie. “This is just the way it is. Whenever I go shopping, they’re always out of everything I want!”
“Oh, it’s exackly the same with me, my dear,” Elsie returned. “It’s too provoking! Rilly, the shops in this town”
“Listen here,” the proprietor interrupted, and he regarded these fastidious customers somewhat unfavourably. “You’re wastin’ my time on me. Say what it is you want or go somewheres else.”
“Well, have you got some very nice blue-silk lamp-shades?” Daisy inquired, and she added: “With gold fringe an’ tassels?”
“Lamp-shades!” he said, and he had the air of a person who begins to feel seriously annoyed. “Listen! Go on out o’ here!”
But Daisy ignored his rudeness. “Have you got any very good unb’eached muslin?” she asked.
“You go on out o’ here!” the man shouted. “You go on out o’ here or I’ll untie my dog.”
“Well, I declare!” Elsie exclaimed as she moved toward the door. “I never was treated like this in all my days!”
“What kind of a dog is it?” Daisy asked, for she was interested.
“It’s a biting dog,” the drug-store man informed her; and she thought best to retire with Elsie. The two came out to the sidewalk and went on their way, giggling surreptitiously, and busier than ever with their chatter. After a moment the injured party in the background again followed them.
“They’ll find out what’s goin’ to happen to ’em,” he muttered, continuing his gloomy rhapsody. “‘Please speak to us, Laurunce,’ they’ll say. ‘Oh, Laurunce, pull-lease!’ An’ then I’ll jus’ keep on laughin’ at ’em an’ callin’ ’em everything the worst I ever heard, while they keep hollerin’: ‘Oh, Laur-runce, pull-lease!’”
A passer-by, a kind-faced woman of middle age, caught the murmur from his slightly moving lips, and halted inquiringly.
“What is it, little boy?” she asked.
“What?” he said.
“Were you speaking to me, little boy? Didn’t you say ‘Please’?”
“No, I didn’t,” he replied, colouring high; for he did not like to be called “little boy” by anybody, and he was particularly averse to this form of address on the lips of a total stranger. Moreover, no indignant person who is talking to himself cares to be asked what he is saying. “I never said a thing to you,” he added crossly. “What’s the matter of you, anyhow?”
“Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “What a bad, rude little boy! Shame on you!”
“I ain’t a little boy, an’ shame on your own self!” he retorted; but she had already gone upon her way, and he was again following the busy shoppers. As he went on his mouth was slightly in motion, though it was careful not to open, and his slender neck was imperceptibly distended by small explosions of sound, for he continued his dialogues, but omitted any enunciation that might attract the impertinence of strangers. “It’s none o’ your ole biznuss!” he said, addressing the middle-aged woman in this internal manner. “I’ll show you who you’re talkin’ to! I guess when you get through with me you’ll know somep’m! Shame on your own self!” Then his eyes grew large as they followed the peculiar behaviour of the two demoiselles before him. “My goodness!” he said.
Daisy was just preceding Elsie into a barber-shop.
“Do you keep taffeta or—or lamp-shades?” Daisy asked of the barber nearest the door.
This was a fat coloured man, a mulatto. He had a towel over the jowl and eyes of his helpless customer, and standing behind the chair, employed his thumbs and fingers in a slow and rhythmic manipulation of the man’s forehead. Meanwhile he continued an unctuous monologue, paying no attention whatever to Daisy’s inquiry. “I dess turn roun’ an’ walk away little bit,” said the barber. “’N’en I turn an’ look ’er over up an’ down from head to foot. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘You use you’ mouth full freely,’ I say, ‘but dess kinely gim me leave fer to tell you, you ain’t got nothin’ to rouse up no int’est o’ mine in you. I make mo’ money,’ I say, ‘I make mo’ money in a day than whut Henry ever see in a full year, an’ if you tryin’ to climb out o’ Henry’s class an’ into mine’”
“Listen!” Daisy said, raising her voice. “Do you keep taffeta or”
“Whut you say?” the barber asked, looking coldly upon her and her companion.
“We’re out shopping,” Daisy explained. “We want to look at some”
“Listen me,” the barber interrupted. “Run out o’ here. Run out.”
Daisy moved nearer him. “What you doin’ to that man’s face?” she asked.
“Nem mine! Nem mine!” he said haughtily.
“What were you tellin’ him?” Daisy inquired. “I mean all about Henry’s class an’ usin’ her mouth so full freely. Who was?”
“Run out!” the barber shouted. “Run out!”
“Well, I declare!” Daisy exclaimed, as she and Elsie followed his suggestion and emerged from the shop. “It’s just this same way whenever I go shopping! I never can find the things I want; they act almos’ like they don’t care whether they keep ’em or not.”
“It’s dreadful!” Elsie agreed, and, greatly enjoying the air of annoyance they were affecting, they proceeded on their way. No one would have believed them aware that they were being followed; and neither had spoken a word referring to Master Coy; but they must have understood each other perfectly in the matter, for presently Daisy’s head turned ever so slightly, and she sent a backward glance out of the very tail of her eye. “He’s still comin’!” she said in a whisper that was ecstatic with mirth. And Elsie, in the same suppressed but joyous fashion, said: “Course he is, the ole thing!” This was the only break in their manner of being the busiest shoppers in the world; and immediately after it they became more flauntingly shoppers than ever.
As for Laurence, his curiosity was now almost equal to his bitterness. The visit to the drug-store he could understand, but that to the barber-shop astounded him; and when he came to the shop he paused to flatten his nose upon the window. The fat mulatto barber nearest the window was still massaging the face of the recumbent customer and continuing his narrative; the other barbers were placidly grooming the occupants of their chairs, while two or three waiting patrons, lounging on a bench, read periodicals of a worn and flaccid appearance. Nothing gave any clue to the errand of Laurence’s fair friends; on the contrary, everything that was revealed to his staring eyes made their visit seem all the more singular.
He went in, and addressed himself to the fat barber. “Listen,” he said. “Listen. I want to ast you somep’m.”
“Dess ’bout when she was fixin’ to holler,” the barber continued, to his patron, “I take an’ slap my money ri’ back in my pocket. ‘You talk ’bout tryin’ show me some class,’ I say. ‘Dess lem me’”
“Listen!” Laurence said, speaking louder. “I want to ast you somep’m.”
“‘Dess lem me tell you, if you fixin’ show me some class,’” the barber went on; “‘if you fixin’ show me some class,’ I say. ‘Dess lem me tell you if’”
“Listen!” Laurence insisted. “I want to ast you somep’m.”
For a moment the barber ceased to manipulate his customer and gave Laurence a look of disapproval. “Listen me, boy!” he said. “Nex’ time you flatten you’ face on nat window you don’ haf to breave on nat glass, do you? Ain’ you’ folks taught you no better’n go roun’ dirtyin’ up nice clean window?”
“What I want to know,” Laurence said: “—What were they doin’ in here?”
“What were who doin’ in here?”
“Those two little girls that were in here just now. What did they come here for?”
“My goo’nuss!” the barber exclaimed. “Man’d think barber got nothin’ do but stan’ here all day ’nanswer questions! Run out, boy!”
“But, listen!” Laurence urged him. “What were they”
“Run out, boy!” the barber said, and his appearance became formidable. “Run out, boy!”
Laurence departed silently, though in his mind he added another outrage to the revenge he owed the world for the insults and mistreatments he was receiving that morning. “I’ll show you!” he mumbled in his throat as he came out of the shop. “You’ll wish you had some sense, when I get through with you, you ole barber, you!”
Then, as he looked before him, his curiosity again surpassed his sense of injury. The busy shoppers were just coming out of a harness-shop, which was making a bitter struggle to survive the automobile; and as they emerged from the place, they had for a moment the hasty air of ejected persons. But this was a detail that escaped Laurence’s observation, for the gestures and chatter were instantly resumed, and the two hurried on as before.
“My gracious!” said Laurence, and when he came to the harness-shop he halted and looked in through the open door; but the expression of the bearded man behind a counter was so discouraging that he thought it best to make no inquiries.
The bearded man was as irritable as he looked. “Listen!” he called. “Don’t block up that door, d’you hear me? Go on, get away from there and let some air in. Gosh!”
Laurence obeyed morosely. “Well, doggone it!” he said.
He had no idea that the pair preceding him might have been received as cavalierly, for their air of being people engaged in matters of importance had all the effect upon him they desired, and deceived him perfectly. Moreover, the mystery of what they had done in the barber-shop and in the harness-shop was actually dismaying; they were his colleagues in age and his inferiors in sex; and yet all upon a sudden, this morning, they appeared to deal upon the adult plane and to have business with strange grown people. Laurence was unwilling to give them the slightest ground for a conceited supposition that he took any interest in them, or their doings, but he made up his mind that if they went into another shop, he would place himself in a position to observe what they did, even at the risk of their seeing him.
Four or five blocks away, the business part of the city began to be serious; buildings of ten or twelve stories, several of much more than that, were piled against the sky; but here, where walked the shoppers and their disturbed shadower, the street had fallen upon slovenly days. Farther out, in the quarter whence they had come, it led a life of domestic prosperity, but gradually, as it descended southward, its character altered dismally until just before it began to be respectable again, as a business street, it was not only shabby but had a covert air of underhand enterprise. And the shop windows had not been arranged with the idea of offering a view of the interiors.
Of course Elsie and Daisy did not concern themselves with the changed character of the street; one shop was as good as another for the purposes involved in the kind of shopping that engaged them this morning; and they were having too glorious a time to give much consideration to anything. Elsie had fallen under the spell of a daring leadership; she was as excited as Daisy, as intent as she upon preserving the illusion they maintained between them; and both of them were delightedly aware that they must be goading their frowning follower with a splendid series of mysteries.
“I declare!” Daisy said, affecting peevishness. “I forgot to look at orstrich feathers an’ unb’eached muslin at both those two last places we went. Let’s try in here.”
By “in here” she referred to a begrimed and ignoble façade once painted dark green, but now the colour of street dust mixed with soot. Admission was to be obtained by double doors, with the word “Café” upon both of the panels. “Café” was also repeated upon a window, where a sign-painter of great inexperience had added the details: “Soft Drinks Candys Cigars & C.” And upon three shelves in the window were displayed, as convincing proof of the mercantile innocence of the place, three or four corncob pipes, some fly-specked packets of tobacco, several packages of old popcorn and a small bottle of catsup.
Daisy tugged at the greasy brass knob projecting from one of the once green doors, and after some reluctance it yielded. “Come on,” she said. The two then walked importantly into the place, and the door closed behind them.
Laurence immediately hurried forward; but what he beheld was discouraging. The glass of the double door was frankly opaque; and that of the window was so dirty and besooted, and so obstructed by the shelves of sparse merchandise, that he could see nothing whatever beyond the shelves.
“Well, dog-gone it!” he said.
Daisy and Elsie found themselves the only visible occupants of an interior unexampled in their previous experience. Along one side of the room, from wall to wall, there ran what they took to be a counter for the display of goods, though it had nothing upon it except a blackened little jar of matches and a short thick glass goblet, dimmed at the bottom with an ancient sediment. A brass rail extended along the base of the counter, and on the wall, behind, was a long mirror, once lustrous, no doubt, but now coated with a white substance that had begun to suffer from soot. Upon the wall opposite the mirror there were two old lithographs, one of a steamboat, the other of a horse and jockey; and there were some posters advertising cigarettes, but these decorations completed the invoice of all that was visible to the shoppers.
“Oh, dear!” Daisy said. “Wouldn’t it be too provoking if they’d gone to lunch or somep’m!” And she tapped as loudly as she could upon the counter, calling: “Here! Somebody come an’ wait on us! I want to look at some of your nicest unb’eached muslin an’ some orstrich feathers.”
There was a door at the other end of the room and it stood open, revealing a narrow and greasy passage, with decrepit walls that showed the laths, here and there, where areas of plaster had fallen. “I guess I better go call in that little hallway,” said Daisy. “They don’t seem to care how long they keep their customers waitin’!”
But as she approached the door, the sound of several muffled explosions came from the rear of the building and reached the shoppers through the funnel of the sinister passage.
“That’s funny,” said Daisy. “I guess somebody’s shootin’ off firecrackers back there.”
“What for?” Elsie asked.
“I guess they think it must be the Fourth o’ July,” Daisy answered; and she called down the passageway: “Here! Come wait on us. We want to look at some unb’eached muslin an’ orstrich feathers. Can’t you hurry up?”
No one replied, but voices became audible, approaching;—voices in simultaneous outbursts, and manifesting such poignant emotion that although there were only two of them, a man’s and a woman’s, Daisy and Elsie at first supposed that seven or eight people were engaged in the controversy. For a moment they also supposed the language to be foreign, but discovered that some of the expressions used were familiar, though they had been accustomed to hear them under more decorous circumstances.
“They’re makin’ an awful fuss,” Elsie said. “What are they talkin’ about?”
“The way it sounds,” said Daisy, “it sounds like they’re talkin’ about things in the Bible.”
Then another explosion was heard, closer; it seemed to come from a region just beyond the passageway; and it was immediately followed by a clatter of lumber and an increase of eloquence in the vocal argument.
“You quit that!” the man’s voice bellowed plaintively. “You don’t know what you’re doin’; you blame near croaked me that time! You quit that, Mabel!”
“I’m a-goin’ to learn you!” the woman’s voice announced. “You come out from under them boards, and I’ll learn you whether I know what I’m doin’ or not! Come out!”
“Please go on away and lea’ me alone,” the man implored. “I never done nothin’ to you. I never seen a cent o’ that money! Honest, George never give me a cent of it. Why’n’t you go an ast him? He’s right in yonder. Oh, my goodness, whyn’t you ast him?”
“Come out from under them boards!”
The man’s voice became the more passionate in its protesting. “Oh, my goodness! Mabel, can’t you jest ast George? He ain’t left the place; you know that! He can’t show his face in daytime, and he’s right there in the bar, and so’s Limpy. Limpy’ll tell you jest the same as what George will, if you’ll only go and ast ’em. Why can’t you go and ast ’em?”
“Yes!” the woman cried. “And while I’m in there astin’ ’em, where’ll you be? Over the alley fence and a mile away! You come out from under them boards and git croaked like you’re a-goin’ to!”
“Oh, my goodness!” the man wailed. “I wish I had somep’m on me to lam you with! Jest once! That’s all I’d ast—jest one little short crack at you!”
“You come out from under them boards!”
“I won’t! I’ll lay here till”
“We’ll see!” the woman cried. “I’m a-goin’ to dig you out. I’m a-goin’ to take them boards off o’ you and then I’m a-goin’ to croak you. I am!”
Elsie moved toward the outer door. “They talk so—so funny!” she said with a little anxiety. “I doe’ b’lieve it’s about the Bible.”
“I guess she’s mad at somebody about somep’m,” Daisy said, much amused; and stepping nearer the passageway, she called: “Here! We want to look at some unb’eached muslin an’ orstrich feathers!”
But the room beyond the passage was now in turmoil: planks were clattering again, and both voices were uproarious. The man’s became a squawk as another explosion took place; he added an incomplete Scriptural glossary in falsetto; and Elsie began to be nervous.
“That’s awful big firecrackers they’re usin’,” she said. “I guess we ought to go home, Daisy.”
“Oh, they’re just kind of quarrellin’ or somep’m,” Daisy explained, not at all disturbed. “If you listen up our alley, you can hear coloured people talkin’ like that lots o’ times. They do this way, an’ they settle down again, or else they’re only in fun. But I do wish these people’d come, because I just haf to finish my shopping!” And, as yet another explosion was heard, she exclaimed complacently: “My! That’s a big one!”
Then, beyond the passage, there seemed to be a final upheaval of lumber; the discussion reached a climax of vociferation, and a powerful, bald-headed man, without a coat, plunged through the passage and into the room. His unscholarly brow and rotund jowls were beaded; his agonized eyes saw nothing; he ran to the bar, and vaulted over it, vanishing behind it half a second before the person looking for him appeared in the doorway.
She was a small, rather shabby woman, who held one hand concealed in the folds of her skirt, while with the other she hastily cleared her eyes of some loosened strands of her reddish hair.
“I got you, Chollie!” she said. “You’re behind the bar, and I’m a-goin’ to make a good job of it, and get George and Limpy, too. I’m goin’ to get all three of you!”
With that she darted across the room and ran behind the bar; whereupon Daisy and Elsie were treated to a scene like a conjuror’s trick. Until the bald-headed man’s arrival, they had supposed themselves to be quite alone in the room, but as the little woman ran behind the counter, not only this fugitive popped up from it, but two other panic-stricken men besides—one with uneven whiskers all over his mottled face, the other a well-dressed person, elderly, but just now supremely agile. The three shot up simultaneously like three Jacks-in-the-box, and, scrambling over the counter, dropped flat on the floor in front of it, leaving the little woman behind.
“Crawl up to the end o’ the bar, George,” the bald-headed man said hoarsely. “When she comes out from behind it, jump and grab her wrist.”
“Think I’m deef?” the little woman inquired raucously. “George’s got a fat chance to grab my wrist!”
Then her eyes, somewhat inflamed, fell upon Daisy and Elsie. “Well, what—what—what” she said.
Daisy stepped toward the counter, for she felt that she had indeed delayed her business long enough.
“We’d like to look at some nice unb’eached muslin,” she said, “an’ some of your very best orstrich feathers.”
The subsequent commotions, as well as the preceding ones, were indistinctly audible to the mystified person who waited upon the sidewalk outside the place. Finding that his eyes revealed nothing of the interior, he had placed his ear against the window, and the muffled reports, mistaken for firecrackers by Daisy and Elsie, were similarly interpreted by Laurence; but he supposed Daisy and Elsie to have a direct connection with the sounds. A thought of the Fourth of July entered his mind, as it had Daisy’s, but it solved nothing for him: the Fourth was long past; this was not the sort of store that promised firecrackers; and even if Daisy and Elsie had taken firecrackers with them, how had it happened that they were allowed to explode them indoors? As for an “ottomatick” or a “revolaver,” he knew that neither maiden would touch such a thing, for he had heard them express their aversion to the antics of Robert Eliot, on an occasion when Master Eliot had surreptitiously borrowed his father’s “good ole six-shooter” to disport himself with in the Threamers’ garage.
Nothing could have been more evident than that Daisy and Elsie had definite affairs to transact in this café; the air with which they entered it was a conclusive demonstration of that. But the firecrackers made guessing at the nature of those affairs even more hopeless than when the pair had visited the barber-shop and the harness-shop. Then, as a closer report sounded, Laurence jumped. “Giant firecracker!” he exclaimed huskily, and his eyes still widened; for now vague noises of tumult and altercation could be heard.
“Well, my go-o-od-nuss!” he said.
Two pedestrians halted near him.
“Say, listen,” one of them said. “What’s goin’ on in there?”
“Golly!” the other exclaimed, adding: “I happen to know it’s a blind tiger.”
Laurence’s jaw dropped, and he stared at the man incredulously. “Wha-wha’d you say?”
“Listen,” the man returned. “How long’s all this been goin’ on in there?”
“Just since they went in there. It was just a little while ago. Wha’d you say about”
But he was interrupted. Several other passers-by had paused, and they began to make interested inquiries of the first two.
“What’s the trouble in there? What’s going on here? What’s all the shooting? What’s”
“There’s something pretty queer goin’ on,” said the man who had spoken to Laurence; and he added: “It’s a blind tiger.”
“Yes, I know that,” another said. “I was in there once, and I know from my own eyes it’s a blind tiger.”
Laurence began to be disconcerted.
“‘A blind tiger’?” he gasped. “A blind tiger?” What caused his emotion was not anxiety for the safety of his friends; the confident importance with which they had entered the place convinced him that if there actually was a blind tiger within, they were perfectly aware of the circumstance and knew what they were doing when they entered the animal’s presence. His feeling about them was indefinite and hazy; yet it was certainly a feeling incredulous but awed, such as any one might have about people well known to him, who suddenly appear to be possessed of supernatural powers. “Honest, d’you b’lieve there’s a blind tiger in there?” he asked of the man who had confirmed the strange information.
“Sure!”
“Honest, is one in there? Do you honest”
But no one paid him any further attention. By this time a dozen or more people had gathered; others were arriving; and as the tumult behind the formerly green door increased, hurried discussion became general on the sidewalk. Several men said that somebody ought to go in and see what the matter was; others said that they themselves would be willing to go in, but they didn’t like to do it without a warrant; and two or three declared that nobody ought to go in just at that time. One of these was emphatic, especially upon the duty men owe to themselves. “A man owes something to himself,” he said. “A man owes it to himself not to git no forty-four in his gizzard by takin’ and pushin’ into a place where somebody’s usin’ a forty-four. A man owes it to himself to keep out o’ trouble unless he’s got some call to take and go bullin’ into it; that’s what he owes to himself!”
Another seemed to be depressed by the scandal involved. He was an unshaven person of a general appearance naïvely villainous, and, without a hat or coat, he had hurried across the street from an establishment not essentially unlike that under discussion—precisely like it, in fact, in declaring itself (though without the accent) to be a place where coffee in the French manner might be expected. “What worries me is,” he said gloomily, and he repeated this over and over, “what worries me is, it gives the neighbourhood kind of a poor name. What worries me, it’s gittin’ the neighbourhood all talked about and everything, the way you wouldn’t want it to, yourself.”
Laurence took a fancy to this man, whose dejection had a quality of pathos that seemed to imply a sympathetic nature.
“Is there one—honestly?” Laurence asked him. “Cross your heart there is one?”
The gloomy man continued to address his lament to the one or two acquaintances who were listening to him. “It’s just like this—what worries me is”
But Laurence tugged at his soiled shirt-sleeve. “Is there honest one in there?”
“Is there one what in there?” the man asked with unexpected gruffness.
“A blind tiger!”
The gloomy man instantly became of a terrifying aspect. He roared:
“Git away f’m here!”
Then, as Laurence hastily retreated, the man shook his head, and added to his grown listeners: “Ain’t that jest what I says? It gits everybody to talkin’—even a lot of awnry dressed-up little boys! It ain’t right, and Chollie and Mabel ought to have some consideration. Other folks has got to live as well as them! Why, I tell you”
He stopped, and with a woeful exclamation pointed to the street-corner south of them. “Look there! It’s that blame sister-in-law o’ George’s. I reckon she must of run out through the alley. Now they have done it!”
His allusion was to a most blonde young woman, whose toilet, evidently of the hastiest, had called upon one or two garments for the street as an emergency supplement to others eloquent of the intimate boudoir. She came hurrying, her blue crocheted slippers scurrying in and out of variegated draperies; and all the while she talked incessantly, and with agitation, to a patrolman in uniform who hastened beside her. Naturally, they brought behind them an almost magically increasing throng of citizens, aliens and minors.
They hurried to the once green doors; the patrolman swung these open, and he and the blonde young woman went in. So did the crowd, thus headed and protected by the law’s very symbol; and Laurence went with them. Carried along, jostled and stepped upon, he could see nothing; and inside the solidly filled room he found himself jammed against a woman who surged in front of him. She was a fat woman, and tall, with a great, bulbous, black cotton cloth back; and just behind Laurence there pressed a short and muscular man who never for an instant relaxed the most passionate efforts to see over the big woman. He stood on tiptoe, stretching himself and pushing hard down on Laurence’s shoulders; and he constantly shoved forward, inclosing Laurence’s head between himself and the big woman’s waist, so that Laurence found breathing difficult and uncomfortable. The black cotton cloth, against which his nose was pushed out of shape, smelled as if it had been in the rain—at least that was the impression obtained by means of his left nostril, which remained partially unobstructed; and he did not like it.
In a somewhat dazed and hazy way he had expected to see Daisy and Elsie and a blind tiger, but naturally, under these circumstances, no such expectation could be realized. Nor did he hear anything said about either the tiger or the little girls; the room was a chaos of voices, though bits of shrill protestation, and gruffer interruptions from the central group, detached themselves.
“I never!” cried the shrillest voice. “I never even pointed it at any of ’em! So help me”
“Now look here” Laurence somehow got an idea that this was the policeman’s voice. “Now look here” it said loudly, over and over, but was never able to get any further; for the shrill woman and the plaintive but insistent voices of three men interrupted at that point, and persisted in interrupting as long as Laurence was in the room.
He could bear the black cotton back no longer, and, squirming, he made his elbow uncomfortable to the aggressive man who tortured him.
“Here!” this person said indignantly. “Take your elbow out o’ my stomach and stand still. How d’you expect anybody to see what’s going on with you making all this fuss? Be quiet!”
“I won’t,” said Laurence thickly. “You lea’ me out o’ here!”
“Well, for heaven’s sakes!” the oppressive little man exclaimed. “Make some more trouble for people that want to see something! Go on and get out, then! Oh, Lordy!”
This last was a petulant wail as Laurence squirmed round him; then the pressure of the crowd filled the gap by throwing the little man against the fat woman’s back. “Dam boy!” he raved, putting all his troubles under one head.
But Laurence heard him not; he was writhing his way to the wall; and, once he reached it, he struggled toward the open doors, using his shoulder as a wedge between spectators and the wall. Thus he won free of the press and presently got himself out to the sidewalk, panting. And then, looking about him, he glanced up the street.
At the next crossing to the north two busy little figures were walking rapidly homeward. They were gesturing importantly; their heads were waggling to confirm these gestures; and they were chattering incessantly.
“Well—dog-gone it!” Laurence whispered.
He followed them; but now his lips moved not at all, and there was no mumbling in his throat. He stared at them amazedly, in a great mental silence.
“What wears me out the most,” Daisy said, as they came into their own purlieus again, “it’s this shopping, shopping, shopping, and they never have one single thing!”
“No, they don’t,” Elsie agreed. “Not a thing! It just wears me out!”
“F’instance,” Daisy continued, “look at how they acted in that las’ place when I wanted to see some orstrich feathers. Just said ‘What!’ about seven hundred times! An’ then that ole pleeceman came in!”
For a moment Elsie dropped her rôle as a tired shopper, and giggled nervously. “I was scared!” she said.
But Daisy tossed her head. “It’s no use goin’ shopping in a store like that; they never have anything, and I’ll never waste my time on ’em again. Crazy things!”
“They did act crazy,” Elsie said thoughtfully, as they paused at her gate. “I guess we better not tell about it to our mothers, maybe.”
“No,” Daisy agreed; and then with an elaborate gesture of fatigue she said: “Well, my dear, I hope you’re not as worn out as I am! My nerves are jus’ comp’etely gone, my dear!”
“So’re mine!” said Elsie; and then, after a quick glance to the south, she giggled. “There’s that ole thing, still comin’ along;—no, he’s stopped, an’ lookin’ at us!” She went into the yard. “Well, my dear, I must go in an’ lay down an’ rest myself. We’ll go shopping again just as soon as my nerves get better, my dear!”
She skipped into the house, and Daisy, humming to herself, walked to her own gate, went in, and sat in a wicker rocking-chair under the walnut tree. She rocked herself and sang a wordless song, but becoming aware of a presence that lingered upon the sidewalk near the gate, she checked both her song and the motion of the chair and looked that way. Master Coy was staring over the gate at her; and she had never known that he had such large eyes.
He was full of formless questions, but he had no vocabulary; in truth, his whole being was one intensified interrogation.
“What you want?” Daisy called.
“I was there,” he announced solemnly. “I was there, too. I was in that place where the pleeceman was.”
“I doe’ care,” Daisy said, and began to sing and to rock the chair again. “I doe’ care where you went,” she said.
“I was there,” said Laurence. “I saw that ole bline tiger. That’s nothin’!”
Daisy had no idea of what he meant, but she remained undisturbed. “I doe’ care,” she sang. “I doe’ care, I doe’ care, I doe’ care what you saw.”
“Well, I did!” said Laurence, and he moved away, walking backward and staring at her.
She went on singing, “I doe’ care,” and rocking, and Laurence continued to walk backward and stare at her. He walked backward, still staring, all the way to the next corner. There, as it was necessary for him to turn toward his own home, he adopted a more customary and convenient manner of walking—but his eyes continued to be of unnatural dimensions.