"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.
THE WAY HOME
He shuffles around in front of the Clinton Street employment agency. The signs say: "Pick men wanted, section hands wanted, farm laborers wanted."
A Mexican stands woodenly against the window front. His eyes are open but asleep. He has the air of one come from a far country who lives upon memories.
There are others—roughly dressed exiles. Their eyes occasionally study the signs, deciphering with difficulty the crudely chalked words on the bulletin boards. Slav, Swede, Pole, Italian, Greek—they read in a language foreign to them that men are wanted on the farms in the Dakotas, in the lumber camps, on the roadbeds in Montana. Hard-handed men with dull, seamed faces and glittering eyes—the spike-haired proletaire from a dozen lands looking for jobs.
But this one who shuffles about in a tattered mackinaw, huge baggy trousers frayed at the feet, this one whose giant's body swings loosely back and forth under the signs, is a more curious exile. His Mexican brother leaning woodenly against the window has a slow dream in his eyes. Life is simple to his thought. It was hard for him in Mexico. And adventure and avarice sent him northward in quest of easier ways and more numerous comforts. Now he hunts a job on a chilly spring morning. When the proper job is chalked up on the bulletin board he will go in and ask for it. He stands and waits and thinks how happy he was in the country he abandoned and what a fool he was to leave the white dust of its roads, its hills and blazing suns. And some day, he thinks, he will go back, although there is nothing to go back for. Yet it is pleasant to stand and dream of a place one has known and whither one may return.
But this one who shuffles, this giant in a tattered mackinaw who slouches along under the bulletin signs asking for section hands and laborers, there is no dream of remembered places in his eyes. Dull, blue eyes that peer bewilderedly out of a powerful and empty face. The forehead is puckered as if in thought. The heavy jaws protrude with a hint of ferocity in their set. There is a reddish cast to his hair and face and the backs of his great hands, hanging limply almost to his knees, are covered with red hair.
The nose of this shuffling one is larger than the noses in the city streets. His fingers are larger, his neck is larger. There is a curious earthy look to this shuffling one seldom to be seen about men in streets. He is a huge creature with great thighs and Laocoön sinews and he towers a head above his brothers in front of the employment office. He is of a different mold from the men in the street. Strength ripples under his tattered mackinaw and his stiff looking hands could break the heads of two men against each other like eggshells while they rained puny blows on his dull face.
And yet of all the men moving about on the pavement in front of the Clinton Street bulletin boards it is this shuffling one who is the most impotent seeming. His figure is the most helpless. It slouches as under a final defeat. His eyes are the dullest.