Short Stories and Essays | Page 5

coke
about till she cried with vexation, was one which might not often
present itself, and I do not know what made him forego it, but I know
that he did, and that he finally passed her, as I have seen a young dog
pass a little cat, after having stopped it, and thoughtfully considered
worrying it.
I turned to watch the child out of sight, and when I faced about towards
the river again I received the second instalment of my present
perplexity. A cart, heavily laden with coke, drove out of the coal-yard

which I now perceived I had come to, and after this cart followed two
brisk old women, snugly clothed and tightly tucked in against the cold
like the child, who vied with each other in catching up the lumps of
coke that were jolted from the load, and filling their aprons with them;
such old women, so hale, so spry, so tough and tireless, with the
withered apples red in their cheeks, I have not often seen. They may
have been about sixty years, or sixty-five, the time of life when most
women are grandmothers and are relegated on their merits to the
cushioned seats of their children's homes, softly silk-gowned and
lace-capped, dear visions of lilac and lavender, to be loved and petted
by their grandchildren. The fancy can hardly put such sweet ladies in
the place of those nimble beldams, who hopped about there in the
wind-swept street, plucking up their day's supply of firing from the
involuntary bounty of the cart. Even the attempt is unseemly, and
whether mine is at best but a feeble fancy, not bred to strenuous feats of
any kind, it fails to bring them before me in that figure. I cannot
imagine ladies doing that kind of thing; I can only imagine women who
had lived hard and worked hard all their lives doing it; who had begun
to fight with want from their cradles, like that little one with the pail,
and must fight without ceasing to their graves. But I am not
unreasonable; I understand and I understood what I saw to be one of the
things that must be, for the perfectly good and sufficient reason that
they always have been; and at the moment I got what pleasure I could
out of the stolid indifference of the cart-driver, who never looked about
him at the scene which interested me, but jolted onward, leaving a trail
of pungent odors from his pipe in the freezing eddies of the air behind
him.

II.
It is still not at all, or not so much, the fact that troubles me; it is what
to do with the fact. The question began with me almost at once, or at
least as soon as I faced about and began to walk homeward with the
wind at my back. I was then so much more comfortable that the
aesthetic instinct thawed out in me, and I found myself wondering what
use I could make of what I had seen in the way of my trade. Should I
have something very pathetic, like the old grandmother going out day
after day to pick up coke for her sick daughter's freezing orphans till

she fell sick herself? What should I do with the family in that case?
They could not be left at that point, and I promptly imagined a
granddaughter, a girl of about eighteen, very pretty and rather proud, a
sort of belle in her humble neighborhood, who should take her
grandmother's place. I decided that I should have her Italian, because I
knew something of Italians, and could manage that nationality best, and
I should call her Maddalena; either Maddalena or Marina; Marina
would be more Venetian, and I saw that I must make her Venetian.
Here I was on safe ground, and at once the love-interest appeared to
help me out. By virtue of the law of contrasts; it appeared to me in the
person of a Scandinavian lover, tall, silent, blond, whom I at once felt I
could do, from my acquaintance with Scandinavian lovers in
Norwegian novels. His name was Janssen, a good, distinctive
Scandinavian name; I do not know but it is Swedish; and I thought he
might very well be a Swede; I could imagine his manner from that of a
Swedish waitress we once had.
Janssen--Jan Janssen, say-drove the coke-cart which Marina's
grandmother used to follow out of the coke-yard, to pick up the bits of
coke as they were jolted from it, and he had often noticed her with deep
indifference. At first he noticed Marina--or Nina, as I soon saw I must
call her--with the same unconcern; for in her grandmother's hood and
jacket and check apron, with her head held shamefacedly