THE SNOB
We happen to be on the same street car. A drizzle softens the windows. She sits with her pasty face and her dull, little eyes looking out at the dripping street. Her cotton suit curls at the lapels. The ends of her shoes curl like a pair of burlesque Oriental slippers. She holds her hands in her lap. Red, thick fingers that whisper tiredly, "We have worked," lie in her lap.
A slavey on her day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off and she goes riding into the country on a street car.
She will get off and slosh with her heavy feet through wet grass. She will walk down the muddied roads and drink in the odor of fields and trees once more. These are romantic conjectures. The car jolts along. It is going west. The rain continues. It runs diagonal dots across the window.
Everybody out. This is the end of the line. I have gone farther than necessary. But there is the slavey. We have been talking. At least I talked. She listened, her doltish face opening its mouth, her little eyes blinking. She has pimples, her skin is muddied. A distressful-looking creature. Yet there is something. This is her day off—a day free from the sweat of labor—and she goes on a street car into the country. So it would seem that under this blinking, frowzy exterior desire spreads its wings. She has memories, this blousy one. She has dreams.
The drizzle flies softly through the air. The city has disappeared. We walk down an incongruous stretch of pavement. It leads toward a forest or what looks like a forest. There are no houses. The sky asserts itself. I look up, but the shambling one whose clothes become active under water keeps her eyes to the pavement. This is disillusioning! "Here, slavey, is the sky," I think; "it becomes romantic for the moment because to you it is the symbol of lost dreams, or happy hours in fields. To me it is nothing but a sky. I have no interest in skies. But I am looking at it for you and enjoying it through your romantic eyes."
But her romantic eyes are oblivious. They consult the rain-washed pavement before her and nothing else. Very well, there are other and nicer skies in her heart that she contemplates. This is an inferior sky overhead. We walk on.
You see, I have been wrong. It is not green fields that lured the heavy feet of this slavey. She is not a peasant Cinderella. Grief, yes, hidden sorrow, has led her here. This is a cemetery.
It rains over the cemetery. There is silence. The white stones glisten. They stand like beggars asking alms of the winding paths. And this blousy one has come to be close to one of the white stones. Under one of them lies somebody whose image still lives in her heart.
She will kneel in the wet grass and her pasty little face will blink its dull eyes over a grave. Like a little clown in her curling cotton suit, her lumpy shoes, her idiotic hat, she will offer her tears to the pitiless silence of trees, wind, rain and white stones.
"Do you like them there?" She asks. She points to a cluster of fancy headstones.
"Do you?" I ask.
She smiles.
"Oh yes," she says. And she stops. She is admiring the tombstones. We walk on.
It is incredible. This blousy one, this dull-eyed one has come to the cemetery on her day off—to admire the tombstones. Ah, here is drama of a poignant kind. Let us pray God there is nothing pathologic here and that this is an idyl of despair, that the lumpish little slavey sits on the rain-washed bench dreaming of fine tombstones as a flapper might dream of fine dresses.
Yes, at last we are on the track. We talk. These are very pretty, she says. Life is dull. The days are drab. The place where she works is like an oven. There is nothing pretty to look at—even in mirrors there is nothing cool and pretty. Clothes grow lumpy when she puts them on. Boys giggle and call names when she goes out. And so, outcast, she comes here to the cemetery to dream of a day when something cool and pretty will belong to her. A headstone, perhaps a stately one with a figure above it. It will stand over her. She will be dead then and unable to enjoy it. But now she is alive. Now she can think of how pretty the stone will look and thus enjoy it in advance. This, after all, is the technique of all dreams.
We grow confidential. I have asked what sort she likes best, what sort it pleases her most to think about as standing over her grave when she dies. And she has pointed some out. It rains. The trees shake water and the wind hurries past the white stones.
"I will tell you something," she says. "Here, look at this." From one of her curled pockets she removes a piece of paper. It is crumpled. I open it and read:
"In Case of Accident please notify Misses Burbley,—Sheridan Road, and have body removed to Home of Parents who are residants of Corliss Wisconsin where they have resided for twenty Years and the diseased is a only Daughter named Clara. Age nineteen and educated in Corliss public Schools where she Graduated as a girl but came to Chicago in serch of employment and in case of accident funeral was held from Home of the Parents, many Frends attending and please Omit flours…."
"I got lot of them writ out," said Clara, blinking. "You wanna read more? Why I write them out? Oh, because, you can't tell, maybe you get run over and in accident and how they going to know who you are or what to do with the diseased if they don't find something?"
Her thick red hands grew excited. She produced further obituaries. From her pocketbook, from her bosom, from her pockets and one from under her hat. I read them. They were all alike, couched in vaguely bombastic terms. We sat in the rain and I thought:
"Alas, Clara is a bounder. A snob. She writes her own obituaries. Alive she can think of herself only as Clara, the slavey at whom the boys giggle and call names. But dead, she is the 'deseased'—the stately corpse commanding unprecedented attention. The prospect stirs a certain snobbishness in her. And she sits and writes her death notices out—using language she tries to remember from reading the funeral accounts of rich and powerful people."
Clara, her hat awry, her doltish body sagging in the rain—shuffled down the dirt road once more. Her outing is over. Cinderella returns to the ashes of life.