Maggie | Page 4

wall as if resolved to grimly bide his time.
In the quarrel between husband and wife, the woman was victor. The
man grabbed his hat and rushed from the room, apparently determined
upon a vengeful drunk. She followed to the door and thundered at him
as he made his way down stairs.

She returned and stirred up the room until her children were bobbing
about like bubbles.
"Git outa deh way," she persistently bawled, waving feet with their
dishevelled shoes near the heads of her children. She shrouded herself,
puffing and snorting, in a cloud of steam at the stove, and eventually
extracted a frying-pan full of potatoes that hissed.
She flourished it. "Come teh yer suppers, now," she cried with sudden
exasperation. "Hurry up, now, er I'll help yeh!"
The children scrambled hastily. With prodigious clatter they arranged
themselves at table. The babe sat with his feet dangling high from a
precarious infant chair and gorged his small stomach. Jimmie forced,
with feverish rapidity, the grease-enveloped pieces between his
wounded lips. Maggie, with side glances of fear of interruption, ate like
a small pursued tigress.
The mother sat blinking at them. She delivered reproaches, swallowed
potatoes and drank from a yellow-brown bottle. After a time her mood
changed and she wept as she carried little Tommie into another room
and laid him to sleep with his fists doubled in an old quilt of faded red
and green grandeur. Then she came and moaned by the stove. She
rocked to and fro upon a chair, shedding tears and crooning miserably
to the two children about their "poor mother" and "yer fader, damn 'is
soul."
The little girl plodded between the table and the chair with a dish-pan
on it. She tottered on her small legs beneath burdens of dishes.
Jimmie sat nursing his various wounds. He cast furtive glances at his
mother. His practised eye perceived her gradually emerge from a
muddled mist of sentiment until her brain burned in drunken heat. He
sat breathless.
Maggie broke a plate.
The mother started to her feet as if propelled.

"Good Gawd," she howled. Her eyes glittered on her child with sudden
hatred. The fervent red of her face turned almost to purple. The little
boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake.
He floundered about in darkness until he found the stairs. He stumbled,
panic-stricken, to the next floor. An old woman opened a door. A light
behind her threw a flare on the urchin's quivering face.
"Eh, Gawd, child, what is it dis time? Is yer fader beatin' yer mudder,
or yer mudder beatin' yer fader?"
Chapter III
Jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall. Above the muffled
roar of conversation, the dismal wailings of babies at night, the
thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the
sound of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels
over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the
mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering.
The old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could don,
at will, an expression of great virtue. She possessed a small music-box
capable of one tune, and a collection of "God bless yehs" pitched in
assorted keys of fervency. Each day she took a position upon the stones
of Fifth Avenue, where she crooked her legs under her and crouched
immovable and hideous, like an idol. She received daily a small sum in
pennies. It was contributed, for the most part, by persons who did not
make their homes in that vicinity.
Once, when a lady had dropped her purse on the sidewalk, the gnarled
woman had grabbed it and smuggled it with great dexterity beneath her
cloak. When she was arrested she had cursed the lady into a partial
swoon, and with her aged limbs, twisted from rheumatism, had almost
kicked the stomach out of a huge policeman whose conduct upon that
occasion she referred to when she said: "The police, damn 'em."
"Eh, Jimmie, it's cursed shame," she said. "Go, now, like a dear an' buy
me a can, an' if yer mudder raises 'ell all night yehs can sleep here."

Jimmie took a tendered tin-pail and seven pennies and departed. He
passed into the side door of a saloon and went to the bar. Straining up
on his toes he raised the pail and pennies as high as his arms would let
him. He saw two hands thrust down and take them. Directly the same
hands let down the filled pail and he left.
In front of the gruesome doorway he met a lurching figure. It was his
father, swaying about on uncertain legs.
"Give me deh can. See?" said the man,