Calvary Alley | Page 6

goin' on?"
"Getting my lessons. Did the cop pinch the Clarke guy?"
"You betcher," said Nance. "You orter seen the way he took on!
Begged to beat the band. Me and Danny never. Me and him--"
A volley of curses came from the hall below, the sound of a blow,
followed by a woman's faint scream of protest, then a door slammed.
"If I was Mis' Smelts," said Nance darkly, with a look that was too old
for ten years, "I wouldn't stand for that. I wouldn't let no man hit me. I'd
get him sent up. I--"
"You walk yourself up them steps, Nance Molloy!" commanded Mrs.
Snawdor's rasping voice from the floor above. "I ain't got no time to be
waitin' while you gas with Ike Lavinsky."
Nance, thus admonished, obeyed orders, arriving on the domestic
hearth in time to prevent the soup from boiling over. Mr. Snawdor,
wearing a long apron and an expression of tragic doom, was trying to
set the table, while over and above and beneath him surged his
turbulent offspring. In a broken rocking-chair, fanning herself with a
box-top, sat Mrs. Snawdor, indulging herself in a continuous stream of
conversation and apparently undisturbed by the uproar around her. Mrs.
Snawdor was not sensitive to discord. As a necessary adjustment to
their environment, her nerves had become soundproof.
"You certainly missed it by not being here!" she was saying to Mr.
Snawdor. "It was one of the liveliest mix-ups ever I seen! One of them
rich boys bust the cathedral window. Some say it'll cost over a thousan'
dollars to git it fixed. An' I pray to God his paw'll have to pay every
cent of it!"
"Can't you make William J. and Rosy stop that racket?" queried Mr.
Snawdor, plaintively. The twins had been named at a time when Mrs.
Snawdor's loyalty was wavering between the President and another

distinguished statesman with whom she associated the promising
phrase, "free silver." The arrival of two babies made a choice
unnecessary, and, notwithstanding the fact that one of them was a girl,
she named them William J. and Roosevelt, reluctantly abbreviating the
latter to "Rosy."
"They ain't hurtin' nothin'," she said, impatient of the interruption to her
story. "I wisht you might 'a' seen that ole fool Mason a-lordin' it aroun',
an' that little devil Nance a-takin' him off to the life. Everybody nearly
died a-laughin' at her. But he says he's goin' to have her up in court, an'
I ain't got a blessed thing to wear 'cept that ole hat of yours I trimmed
up. Looks like a shame fer a woman never to be fixed to go nowhere!"
Mr. Snawdor, who had been trying ineffectually to get in a word, took
this remark personally and in muttering tones called Heaven to witness
that it was none of his fault that she didn't have the right clothes, and
that it was a pretty kind of a world that would keep a man from gettin'
on just because he was honest, and--
"Oh, shut up!" said Mrs. Snawdor, unfeelingly; "it ain't yer lack of
work that gits on my nerves; it's yer bein' 'round. I'd pay anybody a
quarter a week to keep yer busy!"
Nance, during this exchange of conjugal infelicities, assisted by
Lobelia and Fidy, was rescuing sufficient dishes from the kitchen sink
to serve for the evening meal. She, too, was finding it difficult to bring
her attention to bear on domestic matters after the exciting events of the
afternoon.
"An' he says to me,"--she was recounting with dramatic intensity to her
admiring audience--"he says, 'Keep offen that concrete.' An' I says, 'It'll
take somebody bigger'n you to make me!'"
Now, of course, we know that Nance never said that, but it was what
she wished she had said, which, at certain moments in life, seems to the
best of us to be quite the same thing.
"Then what?" said Fidy, with a plate suspended in air.

"Then," said Nance with sparkling eyes, "I sticks my foot right in the
middle of their old concrete, an' they comes pilin' offen the fence, an'
Dan Lewis he--"
"You Nance!" came in warning tones from the other room, "you shet
your head an' git on with that supper. Here comes your Uncle Jed this
minute!"
At this announcement Nance dropped her dish towel, and dashing to
the door flung herself into the arms of a short, fat, baldheaded man who
had just come out of the front room across the hall.
"Easy there!" warned the new-comer. "You ain't aimin' to butt the
engine clean offen the track, air yer?"
Nance got his arm around her neck, and her arm around his knees, and
thus entwined they made their way to the table.
Uncle Jed Burks,