In the Closed Room | Page 3

enamoured of her shop-girl
good looks and high spirits. They had married as soon as Jem had had
the "raise" he was anticipating and had from that time lived with much
harmony in the flat building by which the Elevated train rushed and
roared every few minutes through the day and a greater part of the night.
They themselves did not object to the "Elevated"; Jem was habituated
to uproar in the machine shop, in which he spent his days, and Jane was
too much absorbed in the making of men's coats by the dozens to
observe anything else. The pair had healthy appetites and slept well
after their day's work, hearty supper, long cheerful talk, and loud
laughter over simple common joking.
"She's a queer little fish, Judy," Jane said to her husband as they sat by
the open window one night, Jem's arm curved comfortably around the
young woman's waist as he smoked his pipe. "What do you think she
says to me to-night after I put her to bed?"
"Search ME!" said Jem oracularly.
Jane laughed.
"'Why,' she says, 'I wish the Elevated train would stop.'
"'Why?' says I.
"'I want to go to sleep,' says she. 'I'm going to dream of Aunt Hester.'"
"What does she know about her Aunt Hester," said Jem. "Who's been
talkin' to her?"

"Not me," Jane said. "She don't know nothing but what she's picked up
by chance. I don't believe in talkin' to young ones about dead folks.
'Tain't healthy."
"That's right," said Jem. "Children that's got to hustle about among live
folks for a livin' best keep their minds out of cemeteries. But, Hully
Gee, what a queer thing for a young one to say."
"And that ain't all," Jane went on, her giggle half amused, half nervous.
"'But I don't fall asleep when I see Aunt Hester,' says she. 'I fall awake.
It's more awake there than here.'
"'Where?' says I, laughing a bit, though it did make me feel queer.
"'I don't know' she says in that soft little quiet way of hers. 'There.' And
not another thing could I get out of her."
On the hot night through whose first hours Judith lay panting in her
corner of the room, tormented and kept awake by the constant roar and
rush and flash of lights, she was trying to go to sleep in the hope of
leaving all the heat and noise and discomfort behind, and reaching Aunt
Hester. If she could fall awake she would feel and hear none of it. It
would all be unreal and she would know that only the lightness and the
air like flowers and the lovely brightness were true. Once, as she tossed
on her cot-bed, she broke into a low little laugh to think how untrue
things really were and how strange it was that people did not
understand--that even she felt as she lay in the darkness that she could
not get away. And she could not get away unless the train would stop
just long enough to let her fall asleep. If she could fall asleep between
the trains, she would not awaken. But they came so quickly one after
the other. Her hair was damp as she pushed it from her forehead, the
bed felt hot against her skin, the people in the next flat quarreled more
angrily, Judith heard a loud slap, and then the woman began to cry. She
was a young married woman, scarcely more than a girl. Her marriage
had not been as successful as that of Judith's parents. Both husband and
wife had irritable tempers. Through the thin wall Judith could hear the
girl sobbing angrily as the man flung himself out of bed, put on his
clothes and went out, banging the door after him.

"She doesn't know," the child whispered eerily, "that it isn't real at all."
There was in her strange little soul a secret no one knew the existence
of. It was a vague belief that she herself was not quite real--or that she
did not belong to the life she had been born into. Her mother and father
loved her and she loved them, but sometimes she was on the brink of
telling them that she could not stay long--that some mistake had been
made. What mistake--or where was she to go to if she went, she did not
know. She used to catch her breath and stop herself and feel frightened
when she had been near speaking of this fantastic thing. But the
building full of workmen's flats, the hot room, the Elevated Railroad,
the quarrelling people, were all a mistake. Just once or twice in her life
she had seen places and things which did not seem so foreign. Once,
when she had been taken to