The Rag Doll

by Harvey J. O'Higgins

THE RAG DOLL

By HARVEY O'HIGGINS

Author of “The Smoke Eaters,” “Don-a-Dreams,” etc.

 

THERE is a modern cast of mind for which no idealized beauty of features—of whatever classical regularity and calm—half the charm that there is in a distressed and imperfect human face, crudely molded by life and suffering. There is a despised “cult of the ugly” which compares the French wax doll of love-in-idleness with any bedraggled rag puppet that has been nursed and fondled by a passionate little make-believer in a gutter—and prefers the latter. And perhaps to such as these, even Judson Street, with its stories of the lives that were lived there, would not be merely low and meaningless.

Certainly Judson Street, at any hour, in any season, was not beautiful. It was given over to butchers' stalls and stale bakery windows, shoddy dry-goods “emporiums,” and corner saloons—and to the tenement-house poor who crowded the human burrows above the shops. On such a night as this, two days after a heavy snowfall, it was as untidy as a back lane, clogged with a churned mass of mud and frozen slush as coarse as butcher's salt. And yet little Nellie Moore had come back from her convent boarding-school, to spend her Christmas holidays in Judson Street, as glad as any other exile to be home. It may have been the home-loving Irish in her, her dead father's blood. (It was certainly no strain inherited from her American mother, who hated Judson Street as she hated poverty.) But the girl fairly tingled with affectionate emotion at sight of the remembered sign-boards over the shops, the rusty lamp-posts and the broken hydrants, the window-sills aslant, and the friendly door-posts worn greasy with the rub of the unwashed lounger. All the familiar details of the street were to her as good to see as the wrinkles on her mother's face or the lines of Johnny Curry's shy grin; and there were as many smiling memories for her around the old base-burner in her mother's little grocery small grocery stores, little tobacco shops, and shop as there are about the children's apple-tree in a family orchard.

She had drawn up a stool beside the fire, and she was leaning forward, round-backed, her hands clasped between her knees, smiling at a crack in the browned mica of the stove door. Johnny Curry was scooping “coffee” sugar out of an open barrel bide the counter and weighing it up in quarter-dollar packages for the next day's trade. It was the Friday night of Christmas week, and they were alone in the shop, shut in from the curious glance of any one in the street by the thick frost on the window. They were so quiet that they could hear the purring of the flames in the stove and the muffled voices of passers-by on the sidewalk; and they were so busy with their thoughts that they did not notice their own silence.

“Why didn't she want me to come home?”

He understood that she referred to her mother; and he chose his words carefully to reply: “I guess she didn't want yuh to know 'at she was sick.”

“Has she been sick long?”

He answered evasively: “Quite a while.” He added: “She wouldn't let me go get the doctor.”

“Has she been working all the time?”

“No,” he said. “Not all the time.”

“Who's been tending the store?”

He wiped his hands on his soiled apron and went around the counter to tie up the bags he had filled. He replied, still reluctantly: “Me an' Larry. He's been deliverin' the goods.”

She recognized his unselfish devotion to the family, but it was a thing she had been used to all her life, and it had become as much a matter of course to her as it was to him. Besides, at this moment, she wished him to show her the frankness of a personal friend rather than the silent devotion of a family servant; and his reticence had the manner of a “hired man” in the presence of the daughter of his mistress.

“I don't see why she sends me to the convent, anyway,” she said. “I don't learn anything that's any use.”

This seemed to interest him. He stopped his work to ask, with an accent almost of hopefulness: “What d'yuh want to learn?”

“Why, bookkeeping—or something to help her with. French and playing the piano—they're no use, are they?”

He did not answer. He went on with his work.

She said: “None of the other girls—their mothers never ask them to stay at the convent for Christmas.”

He was aware of Mrs. Moore's ambitious desire to lift the girl above the life around her; and to this desire he was loyal in his silence. He looked up at her with a sort of wistful furtiveness. She had the delicate pallor of a nun, in her conventual black dress, with a touch of color in the red ribbon that held her hair back straightly from her forehead. He saw her frail wrists, touchingly feminine, daintily white. Her thin fingers, clasped between her knees for warmth, were delicate and ladylike.

When his gaze returned to his own clumsy paws, black with the dirt of labor that was rubbed into the chapped skin, numb with the cold, and fumbling with the twine that clung to their roughness—he saw the distance that had widened between himself and her in the years that she had been at the boarding-school; and he knew that Mrs. Moore had succeeded in lifting her at least above him.

He was pale, with a tenement-house pallidness—the color of the potato shoots that sprouted in Mrs. Moore's dark cellar. His face fell into an expression of dogged meekness as he continued his work.

She asked suddenly: “Do you remember the time you gave me the rag doll?”

He shook his head, reddening bashfully. (It had happened years before, when they were both children. He had tried to make her a rag doll, after seeing one in a toy-shop window; and his desire to make it had been so strong that he had convinced himself he could succeed. His mother had found him crying over the failure of his impossible attempt; and she had made the toy for him. It shamed him, now, to remember such childishness.) “No,” he said thickly. “Why?”

“Yes, you do too,” she insisted. “Mummy was talking about it—in her sleep—just now.”

He shook his head again, keeping his eyes busy with the bag he was tying.

But she was designedly appealing from his present manner to the comradery of their past; and she insisted: “Well, you remember the day you licked Jimmy because he wouldn't give her back after I'd lost her out of the cart?”

He laughed. “Uh-huh!”

“And don't you remember how mad Mummy was because I played with her—and wouldn't play with the one she gave me?”

“Yeh.”

She reflected; “I wonder what became of her. Mummy hid her, didn't she?”

He did not know,

She smiled at him reminiscently. “You used to look so funny with your father's suspenders on—with the loops gathered up in them that you used to put your thumbs in.”

He did not reply,

He had taken her by the hand and led her off to her first day at the parochial school; he had used to prop her up among the packages when he was “delivering,” and trundle her from door to door in a push-cart made of a starch-box and the hind wheels of a velocipede; he had been at once a friend and a family servant, a playmate and a bodyguard.

But the girl's manner of recalling the past, as a thing to her distantly over and done, did not bring her any nearer to him, to whom this feast was a continuous part of the life he was still living; and he worked in an embarrassed silence.

They were saved from an awkward situation by the entrance of a shivering boy who wanted “ten cents' worth” of butter; and while Johnny was digging it out of a firkin, she went back to the living-rooms behind the shop to see how her mother was resting.

The boy was no more than out on the street again before she came running excitedly in to Johnny, crying under her voice: “There's something the matter! She's getting up! She's dressing!”

He dropped his sugar scoop. “She's——”

“There's something the matter with her. She won't listen to me. She—she's talking to herself. What is it?”

“I don' know,” he said, alarmed by her manner. “Wait here. I'll get the doctor.”

She caught him by the straw cuff that he wore to protect his shirt-sleeve. “No! Don't leave me. I'm afraid! What's the matter with her?”

“She's sick, I guess,” he said. “Yuh better le' me go. Unless you'll——”

She raised the shawl from her shoulders and dropped it over her head with the deft movement of a daughter of the tenements. She muffled her arms in it across her breast. “Who'll I get?”

“Ol' Cassidy. Corner o' Glover.”

She hurried out, closing the door softly behind her, but with a hastily sharp click of the latch. He retreated behind the counter, and stood gazing, wide-eyed, at the stool on which she had been sitting. He allowed himself a momentary expression of fond and smiling pity as he looked. Then he frowned at himself and went back to his work.

II

Mrs. Moore had been ill, to his knowledge, for two weeks; and for a long time previous she had seemed weak and irritable. But she had refused to allow him to call in a doctor; and when he had brought his mother to see her, Mrs. Moore had almost driven the woman from the shop. “You want me to be sick,” Mrs. Moore had accused him, afterward. “You're all trying to make me think I'm sick. The next one that says I'm sick, I'll run him out of here, hotfoot. Now then!” She had glared at him in a wild way that was not like her usual cold steeliness of eye; he had reported the situation to his mother. “Never mind,” she said cheerfully. “If she's got what I think she's got, she'll be on her back an' talkin' small quick enough.”

On the unexpected arrival of the daughter Mrs. Moore had taken to her bed in the little dark room behind the shop, but she still insisted that there was nothing wrong with her; and though she ate little, slept in fitful dozes, and talked much in her sleep, she would have no one to nurse her, and would not even let Nellie bring a lamp into the room to see her by—complaining that the light hurt her eyes. She had no relatives known to the quarter, and no friends among her neighbors. It was understood by the gossips of Judson Street that she had run away with “Tim” Moore from a comfortable home up town; and certainly there were in her manner, in her speech, in the determined vigor of her mind traces of a better origin than her husband's. She was alone, even in the crowded life of Judson Street; and she lay alone in her room, at bay, fighting the malady that was sapping the strength of her body but still failing to weaken her will.

“What for is it all, at all?” Mrs. Curry had chafed. “Why don't she give up to it? Does she want to die in her boots?” And Johnny had explained: “It's on account o' Nellie, o' course. Can't yuh see? She didn't want her to come home this Christmas. An' now 'at she's here, she's tryin' to let on she ain't sick, so she won't stay.”

“Then she's a fool about the girl entirely,” Mrs. Curry had concluded. “She's always been that—sendin' her off to a ladies' school 'stead o' learnin' her somethin' or other to be earnin' a livin' with.” And Johnny had replied: “Aw, leave her alone, can't yuh?”

He had a respect for Mrs. Moore that was not unmixed with fear. She had never confided in him, never unbent to him. She had always kept her own accounts and done her own managing. She had been strictly just with him, but she had never given him a penny that he had not earned; and, of late, when he had been going to night school and getting his brother Larry to fill his place behind the counter, she had reduced his wages a dollar a week because, as she said, Larry was worth less than he.

He waited now for the return of the doctor in a nervous apprehension that Mrs. Moore would turn on him for having allowed Nellie to go for help; and he glanced, every now and then, at the door of her bedroom as he tied the bags mechanically and snapped the string.

He was folding the top of the last bag when he looked up and saw her in the doorway.

She came forward, her face flushed and swollen with fever, her eyes sunken and wild—a tall, gaunt woman, gray as a witch. She had wrapped herself in a long street cloak, which she held about her in a sort of drunken dignity; her bare ankles showed above a pair of crocheted bed slippers that Nellie had once made for her; her hair, which she wore cut short, was in a matted disorder on her head. “Now then!” she said strongly. “Yes. yes. … Now then!”

She did not look at him. She did not seem to see him there at all. She walked, stiffly uncertain, to the stool that the girl had left, and she sat down, crouching, before the stove. She put back the hair from her eyes. She said, in a low voice, as if from the middle of a long conversation: “Of course, I'm better. Who's to plan for Nellie if I don't get better? … Doctors! Hah, doctors! What'd the doctors do for you? Buried you—yes, buried you! And left me to fight it out alone—me and Nellie!”

He recognized the bellicose tone of a woman talking to her husband, and it frightened him as if she were speaking to a ghost. He turned a greasy white, staring like a man hypnotized.

“Well,” she said, “we've fought it. She's up and out of it. Read her letters. Read where she's going to spend her summer holidays. Yes.… Yes.” There were wandering pauses between her sentences, but the words came out with a febrile decisiveness in a full voice. “Where do you think? With her friend—with her friend Mabel—Mabel Perrin, in Rochester. That's where! Instead of coming back to this hole. What's for her here? There she'll meet some one—some one decent—and marry.” She straightened up resolutely. “No more of it. I'll end here myself—but no more of it for Nellie. … Poor, poor … No more of it.”

She had gathered the folds of her cloak about her as if she were about to rise to her feet again, and Johnny began to tiptoe down the sawdust of the floor in the rear of the counter, intending to screen himself behind a pile of biscuit boxes there. At the sound of his own name—“Johnny Curry!”—he clutched the side of a basket of eggs and turned fearfully. She was wagging her forefinger at the barrel of sugar. “I tell you I see through you. I've watched you. Oh, yes—yes.… She's not for you, let me tell you. Not for you, nor the likes of you—no! She'll never live to blame the mother that didn't keep her from marrying poverty.” She dropped her voice. “Oh, you're a good boy. I don't deny it—no! But you're not working for me. I know it. I see through you.” She chuckled, with a malicious and contemptuous mirth. “Work for her then. That's the way. Work for her! That's the boy. She'll not be back this Christmas. No, nor next, maybe. But she'll come back—some day—to say good-by to Judson Street. She'll be back with her young man. … That's the boy, Johnny. You're a good boy, Johnny.” She laughed—an insane, cracked cackle. “So! … Well,now!”

He stared and swallowed with the face of a detected thief.

“You and your night-school!” she broke out, with a fierce, inconsequent anger. “You think you'll keep pace with her, will you? Will you study French, Johnny? Will you play the piano? You young street arab! Wait! Wait, my boy, now.… Huh!”

The blood burned over his face so hot that the tears came. He made no allowance for the fact that the woman was delirious. He heard in her voice only the contempt that for all these years had been hidden behind her silence; and it outraged every loyal sentiment of respect and devotion that he had felt for her. He began to untie his apron, his lips trembling, his eyes fixed on her in a speechless reproach, like an old servant who takes his discharge in silence because his devotion has been silent and only silence can express the unspeakable injustice of ingratitude.

She muttered: “You and your rag doll! Where's the one I bought you, girl? Why don't you play with the one I bought you? Lugging that pauper's thing around! What ragamuffin's trick will you be picking up next?” She threw out her hand, raising her voice. “That settles it. You go away to school out of this. Him and his rag doll! No girl of mine …” She sighed and grumbled indistinctly. Johnny laid his apron on the counter and put his straw cuffs beside it. And his face was tragical.

When she raised her voice again it was to complain. “Ah, well, you needn't be afraid of me, child. What'm I working here at all for, if it's not for you? God knows it's all that keeps me going.… Stop that crying. I didn't mean to frighten you. You're as soft as your father.”

She looked around her sightlessly, her head thrown back like the blind. “You're a hard one,” she muttered to herself in hoarse undertones. “A hard old woman, and a lonely one—to send your daughter off and never let her come home.… Who's to put her arms around you and go to sleep on your shoulder? There's nothing but the pain now to sleep with.” She rocked herself from side to side, hugging herself in her bony arms. “Hish, hish! Will you never stop tearing at me?”

She rose from her stool and began to pace up and down the little shop, swaying drunkenly and crooning a delirious lullaby to herself, her face distorted, her eyes glassed. Johnny, weak from nervous shock, in a cold fear of remaining shut in alone with a woman of such an aspect, wiped the perspiration from his face with his forearm and the back of his hand.

She saw the movement and stopped. She fixed on him her hot and inflamed eyes. “Ah, there you are,” she said, almost in a whisper, with a fierce tenderness. “I've been lonely. Why do you go away and leave me?—leave me so long?” she cried. “Why? You brought me here! You couldn't live without me! You ruined me and you brought me here. Why do you leave me now? Why?” Her anger rose with his silence. She leaned across the counter at him, with the face of a fury. “What? You are! You are! Now then! Now then!” She struck the counter with her fist. “If you ever come home again like that, I'll kill you! I will!” She reached for him. “I'll——”

He gasped “Don't!” shrinking back from her in a fascinated terror.

There was an awful menace in her face.

He turned and ran toward the front door in a panic, catching his coat and hat down from the peg beside the window as he went. He jerked the door open, looking back over his shoulder to see that she had fallen across the counter, face down, clutching at nothing with fingers that were stiffened like hooks. He slammed the door behind him and held it, panting, until the cold—pouring over him like the douse of an icy bath—brought him to his senses. He put on his hat and coat, his teeth chattering; and he stood huddled in the doorway, afraid to leave her, staring at the single jet of gas in the window that showed through the frost on the glass, red-ringed, like the moon through a mist.

There was no sound from within. The cold had cleared the street of all but a few late shoppers who stumbled by, without glancing aside at him, their ears in their collars. He buttoned up his coat and stood guard there until he saw Dr. Cassidy turn the corner, with Mrs. Cassidy and Nellie following. Then he slunk off in the shadows of the wooden awnings of the neighboring shops and went away toward his home.

III

He was nineteen years old and his growing acquaintance with the world had already made him conscious of the stain of poverty and low breeding that marked him out to men whom he passed on the sidewalk and met in the street-cars. Of late, in an attempt to educate himself, he had attended night classes and studied during his otherwise idle moments behind Mrs. Moore's counter. He had become something of a dreamer, and a boy with ambitions for bettering himself in the world. His affection for Nellie had glowed vaguely in the background of those dreams; it was a sentiment that he had never examined, and it involved a hope that he had never consciously formulated; and yet it had been a light and guide to him in all his plans.

Now, as he turned away from Mrs. Moore's shop-door, he knew that this light was out. The girl was above him, and the mother despised him, and his service with them was done. He could never go back there, even though they might wish him to; he hated, with all an Irish boy's intensity, the place where he had suffered such an agony of humiliation. He did not know what calamity had befallen them, because he was not thinking of them, but of himself. He knew only that he would not return in the morning to sweep up the dirtied sawdust and sprinkle the floor with fresh; that he would not roll out the barrel of herrings, and set the baskets of vegetables on the benches outside the window, and fill the twine boxes, and hang the paper bags on their hooks under the shelves. And he had so long looked out on the world from Mrs. Moore's doorway—the routine of his work there had been, for so long, the routine of life itself—that he felt himself lost, unsettled, miserably outcast. He was like a boy who has run away from a home in which he has been unbearably ill-treated—and who, in the midst of his desperate indignation, has to fight back the tears of homesickness.

He went through the dark streets slowly, insensible to the cold. He mounted heavily the four flights of stairs that led to the rooms into which the Currys crowded themselves. He found his mother waiting him in the kitchen—where the younger children slept, for warmth—darning a boy's long stocking that had been torn at the knee. He said in an undertone: “I guess yuh better go over there. They've sent fer the doctor.”

She dropped her knitting. “Whur's me shawl? What is it? What's she got?”

“I don' know.” He sat down beside the stove with his chin in his hands. “She's gone batty.”

“What's wrong with yeh?” She had caught the offended bitterness in his voice. “Yeh've not been quarrelin' with a sick woman, have yeh?”

He did not answer. She wrapped herself in her shawl. “Come along now.”

He did not move.

“What ails yeh? Ain't yeh goin' back thin? Have yeh shut up the stoor?”

He muttered indistinctly. She took him by the shoulder and shook him. “Get up out o' that,” she ordered. “Have yeh lost yer wits? They'll be needin' yeh—as much as me.” And when he rose sulkily she cried: “Faith, yeh've not got the spirit of a sick cat to be leavin' Nellie alone, so, in her trouble. Come along with yeh.”

He followed her unwillingly, hanging back.

“Button yer coat now,” she said when they came out on the street. “Who sent fer the doctor? What happened, annyway?”

“She got up an' got dressed. She was talkin' crazy talk. Nellie went.”

“Ah!” She shook her head wisely. “That's it! It's got to her head. That's the blood fever fer yeh! That's what I thought 't'ud be. I knew 't the minute I seen the two eyes of her. She'll not fool with that anny longer, poor woman.” She walked so fast that he could hardly keep pace with her, and he did not try to listen to what she was saying. “She'll go the way of Mrs. Tomlinson that hadn't a drop o' blood into her body when it was done—they do say. She was as dry as a cork with the heat of it. Well, well! Poor Nellie! I hope 'tis not too late, poor gurrl. They'll have a bit o' money put by—if her mother hasn't squandered it all on her schoolin'. An' her without a relative in the wide worrld! 'Tis hard, sure enough. We'll have to coax her back with us to-night, thin. We'll put a bed in the front room for her. They'll be takin' her mother to the hospital, no doubt. There's no way to be mindin' her in that shebang 'f a place!”

To all of this—and to much more in the same vein—Johnny made no reply. And when they came to the shop, he followed his mother in, silently.

Nellie was sitting beside the stove, weeping with a hushed and heart-broken convulsiveness. Mrs. Curry, swallowing an exclamation of alarm, hurried into the living-rooms. Johnny stood a moment looking at the girl, and listened blankly to the sobs that she was trying to stifle. Then he hung up his hat and coat, put on his apron, and returned to his work of weighing out the sugar.

She asked at last, in a choked voice: “Wh-why didn't you tell me?”

“Tell yuh what?”

She tried to answer, but she could not make the words. He waited, his hands in the sugar, blinking as the possibilities of her situation dawned on him. He began huskily: “Isn't she——?”

She sobbed: “They—they've sent for Father O'Brien——”

“Isn't she goin' to get better?”

She shook her head in a passionate outburst of tears; and suddenly she raised her voice in a despairing wail of “Mummy-—mummy—mummy!” that quivered like the shrieks of one in torture. He ran to her and put his hand on her mouth, and she clung to him, biting his fingers, appealing to him with the terror-stricken eyes of a child in pain, at once fighting him and holding to him. He dropped on a knee beside her. “Aw, don't,” he pleaded. “Don't, Nellie! … Aw, don't, don't! … Aw, don't.”

He pressed her head against his shoulder, smothering her sobs; for her cries had roused her mother from her stupor, and he heard the wild voice from the inner room calling: “It's the rag one! It's the rag one! Nellie, girl!” He muffled her ears in the shawl, and with a big boy's tears trickling down his contorted face, he turned defiantly to the sound of the voice.

It was the rag one, but it was the only one left to the girl now, and Johnny knew it. She was to play her little make-believe of life with the rag puppet of his affection instead of with the wax doll that her mother had struggled to give her. And with that thought he looked down at her in his arms, as a grown man, helpless in the stress of grief and misfortune, will look at the wife whom he has vowed to protect.