Martha Long stood at the gate, “You’re in a hurry to go,” she remarked.
“To-morrow begins the new month’s rent,” said Emma. “I quit to-day or pay to-morrow. I’m goin’ where there ain’t no rents to pay. I can’t afford rents and city doctors together.”
Martha’s face darkened. “I’m layin’ for him right here,” she called as the funeral carriage moved away. She was surprised at Emma’s good-bye mood; it was so resolute and cheerful. “He’s a pretty low reptile,” was the last thing she called to Emma as the conveyance grew smaller on the distant road.
X.
QUARRY RECKONS WITHOUT HIS
HOSTESS.
“Strife’s a poor thing to come home to.”
In two days’ time Emma was “settled in.” Hers was an odd house for the Stonepastures. She paid no rent for it, but there were curtains at the windows and a shoe-scraper and a mat at the door. She had not been up an hour on her first morning before the grass around the house was cut down with a borrowed sickle. The objectless, listless denizens of the district watched her with some pleasure. They had no individual life, merely existing as a class and watching the individuality of others take shape in thrift and then in prosperity with a dull envy. One man said she “hed a peck of ambition” in a tone that meant on the Pastures, in “Calamity Row,” that any endeavour to better one’s self comes to confusion.
At first the big boulders depressed her somewhat, but Jerry told her she could “garden on them” in the summer time; and, indeed, flowers could grow from the thin soil that edged them. For two weeks and more she lived, quietly amazed to find herself so happy. From day to day she watched the Swede’s improvement. As the pain left him he took to singing, but his voice was not so accurate as in the old days when he heard clearly. Many of the songs she had heard from him in courting time, and she was infinitely happy to know that he remembered them as well as she did. He would tell the meaning of each verse after he had sung it, as she cooked or sewed after shaving all day.
For she shaved again. It seemed very odd and yet very natural to her. She had a good deal of business to arrange before “resuming trade.” Her subscriptions to the Philadelphia Ledger and the Work-fellows’ Union had run out; in fact, her wedding day had been dependent on their expiration. Emma had a great idea of doing things the right way, and news has been the tradition of barber-shops since men’s vanity first devised a shorn chin.
Emma was gratified to find her standing unimpaired by her sojourn with the paupers. Socially she seemed secure. The women were prone to be officiously sympathetic, and were also inclined to disbelieve the tale of Quarry’s misdeed. “There’s faults on both sides, maybe,” and “Who can see the whole show through a slit in the tent?” were felt to be convenient phrases and used largely as such. The phrase “rent-free” found its way from the neighbours’ lips to Emma’s ears rather oftener than she cared for; it spurred her on to grudge herself food and deny herself the midday beer it had been her wont to consume. She worked from eight in the morning to six at night, with nothing but bread and soup at her slack time in the early afternoon.
The soup was much like Quarry’s stories—made up out of almost nothing. She carried it to work in a bottle with a screwed-on tin top; this she put into the little boiler that the shaving water was heated in, “and so,” she would say, to amuse a new customer, “thet’s all the cooking I hev to do; I boil my bottle, and there I am!”