Mrs. O'Connor came out in, a few minutes, inspected the hall and said it would do. She paid Mary her wages and told her to come again the next day, and Mary went home. As she walked along she was very careful not to step on any of the lines on the pavement; she walked between these, and was distressed because these lines were not equally distant from each other, so that she had to make unequal paces as she went.
XIX
The name of the woman from next door was Mrs. Cafferty. She was big and round, and when she walked her dress whirled about her like a tempest. She seemed to be always turning round; when she was going straight forward in any direction, say towards a press, she would turn aside midway so sharply that her clothing spun gustily in her wake—This probably came from having many children. A mother is continually driving in oblique directions from her household employments to rescue her children from a multitude of perils. An infant and a fireplace act upon each other like magnets; a small boy is always trying to eat a kettle or a piece of coal or the backbone of a herring; a little girl and a slop bucket are in immediate contact; the baby has a knife in its mouth; the twin is on the point of swallowing a marble, or is trying to wash itself in the butter, or the cat is about to take a nap on its face. Indeed, the woman who has six children never knows in what direction her next step must be, and the continual strain of preserving her progeny converts many a one into regular cyclones of eyes and arms and legs. It also induces in some a perpetual good-humored irritability wherein one can slap and cuddle a child in the same instant, or shout threateningly or lovingly, call warningly and murmur encouragingly in an astonishing sequence. The woman with six children must both physically and mentally travel at a tangent, and when a husband has to be badgered or humored into the bargain, then the life of such a woman is more complex than is readily understood.
When Mary came home Mrs. Cafferty was sitting on her mother's bed, two small children and a cat were also on the bed, two slightly bigger children were under the bed, and two others were galloping furiously up and down the room. At one moment these latter twain were runaway horses, at another they were express trains. When they were horses they snorted and neighed and kicked, when they were trains they backed and shunted, blew whistles and blew off steam. The children under the bed were tigers in a jungle, and they made the noises proper to such beasts and such a place; they bit each other furiously, and howled and growled precisely as tigers do. The pair of infants on the bed were playing the game of bump; they would stand upright, then spring high into the air and come crashing down on the bed, which then sprung them partly up again. Each time they jumped they screamed loudly, each time they fell they roared delighted congratulations to each other, and when they fell together they fought with strong good humor. Sometimes they fell on Mrs. Makebelieve; always they bumped her. At the side of the bed their mother sat telling with a gigantic voice a story wherein her husband's sister figured as the despicable person she was to the eye of discernment, and this story was punctuated and shot through and dislocuted by objurgations, threats, pleadings, admirations, alarms and despairs addressed to the children separately and en masse, by name, nickname, and hastily created epithet.
Mary halted in amazement in the doorway. She could not grasp all the pandemonium at once, and while she stood Mrs. Cafferty saw her.
"Come on in, honey," said she. "Your ma's as right as a trivet. All she wanted was a bit of good company and some children to play with. Deed," she continued, "children are the best medicine for a woman that I know of. They don't give you time to be sick, the creatures! Patrick John, I'll give you a smack on the side of the head if you don't let your little sister alone, and don't you, Norah, be vexing him or you'll deserve all you get. Run inside, Julia Elizabeth, cut a slice of bread for the twins, and put a bit of sugar on it, honey. Yes, alanna, you can have a slice for yourself, too, you poor child you, well you deserve it."
Mrs. Makebelieve was sitting up in the bed with two pillows propping up her back. One of her long thin arms was stretched out to preserve the twins from being bruised against the wall in their play. Plainly they had become great friends with her, for every now and then they swarmed over her, and a hugging match of extreme complexity ensued. She looked almost her usual self, and all the animation that had been so marked a feature of her personality had returned to her.
"Are you better, mother?" said Mary.