§ 3
It was not so hard to sell the furniture; she could even read and burn her father’s letters with an unhappy resoluteness. Despite her tenderness, Una had something of youth’s joy in getting rid of old things, as preparation for acquiring the new. She did sob when she found her mother’s straw hat, just as Mrs. Golden had left it, on the high shelf of the wardrobe as though her mother might come in at any minute, put it on, and start for a walk. She sobbed again when she encountered the tiny tear in the bottom of the couch, which her own baby fingers had made in trying to enlarge a pirate’s cave. That brought the days when her parents were immortal and all-wise; when the home sitting-room, where her father read the paper aloud, was a security against all the formidable world outside.
But to these recollections Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart—to the senile canary.
Possibly she could have taken it with her, but she felt confusedly that Dickie would not be appreciated in other people’s houses. She evaded asking the Sessionses to shelter the bird, because every favor that she permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life of married spinsterhood.
“Oh, Dickie, Dickie, what am I going to do with you?” she cried, slipping a finger through the wires of the cage.
The canary hopped toward her and tried to chirp his greeting.
“Even when you were sick you tried to sing to me, and mother did love you,” she sighed. “I just can’t kill you—trusting me like that.”
She turned her back, seeking to solve the problem by ignoring it. While she was sorting dresses—some trace of her mother in every fold, every wrinkle of the waists and lace collars—she was listening to the bird in the cage.
“I’ll think of some way—I’ll find somebody who will want you, Dickie dear,” she murmured, desperately, now and then.
After dinner and nightfall, with her nerves twanging all the more because it seemed silly to worry over one dissolute old bird when all her life was breaking up, she hysterically sprang up, snatched Dickie from the cage, and trotted down-stairs to the street.
“I’ll leave you somewhere. Somebody will find you,” she declared.
Concealing the bird by holding it against her breast with a hand supersensitive to its warm little feathers, she walked till she found a deserted tenement doorway. She hastily set the bird down on a stone balustrade beside the entrance steps. Dickie chirped more cheerily, more sweetly than for many days, and confidingly hopped back to her hand.
“Oh, I can’t leave him for boys to torture and I can’t take him, I can’t—”
In a sudden spasm she threw the bird into the air, and ran back to the flat, sobbing, “I can’t kill it—I can’t—there’s so much death.” Longing to hear the quavering affection of its song once more, but keeping herself from even going to the window, to look for it, with bitter haste she completed her work of getting rid of things—things—things—the things which were stones of an imprisoning past.