The blue wall

by Richard Washburn Child

You have never felt the panic that comes when it seems as if Fate was chewing away the strands of the rope that holds you to self-preservation; it is a terrible thing and soon takes out of you all fancy notions. It grabbed me by the neck and bent my pride and sent me off praying to find a place through an employment agency. Cooking, washing and ironing was good enough for me the minute I found my last dollar staring up at me from the palm of this right hand. The fall had begun to come on, and, believe it or not, as you like, I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed of walking the streets at night, through the driving snow of winter and down to the wharves and the river, with its cakes of ice and its welcome. And when the first day I had gone to sit in the intelligence room and a lady—she seemed like a blurred picture to me and her questions were far away like the rumble of a train at night—had hired me, I took my alligator bag that was left out of the wreck of old elegance, and I stood up and tried to follow her like a dog till she stopped me.

It was only when I’d met her later and was on the train bound for a little town up the state, that I turned my eyes, kind of cautious, to see who it was had hired me. You could not call her pretty, by any means. She was tall and thin, and there was a prominent bone sticking out at the back of her neck. Her shoulders sloped, too, and looked as if they had been bent forward on purpose to squeeze her lungs together. Her skin was a bit too yellow and her teeth too large and her lips too shapeless. But the steel of people has nothing to do with the scabbard, I’m thinking. Bodies are many a time disguises, and there was only one place where that woman’s self peeped through like a flower through the dead coals on an ashheap. It was her eyes.

I never have seen the beat of her eyes for loveliness. No, I never have seen two of them—gray they were—that could toss a God’s blessing to you so easy. They gave the lie to her cold lips and made you forget the looks of her, because you knew she’d been made to wear ugliness to test the sweetness of her soul.

I saw ’em when, from all the falseness and worry, all the paint and powder and the mockery of big cities and the jest of money and all the worry and bitterness of the end of my adventures, I felt the relief of being nobody again and going in a home, whose ever it might be, and being where there was trees and hard work and fewer human faces streaming along and looking into yours, only to forget you forever. For the first time since the day I believed I’d never meet Monty Cranch again, my sight was all fogged with tears.

Probably she saw me. And if you’d know the kind of woman she was, I’ll tell you that the first I knew, her thin fingers was on my big hands, and I looked up and there were those two eyes. The train was thumping along through the meadows, but I heard her say, “There, there,” very soft and she never asked me one word about my past either then or ever after. That was her kind of charity, and may God rest her soul!

Oh, when I look back on that day, I wonder how evil thoughts ever came into my mind and how I could ever wish harm to the white house under the big elms in the centre of the town, where among the business blocks it stood very stubborn, and I wonder how I ever plotted wrong for her or him that was her husband and met us that day at the iron gate.

We saw him reading a paper on the wide porch—a young man then, with a big frame and a habit of looking out very solemn from under his eyebrows and over big tortoise-shell glasses. But he had boyish, joking ways of speech, as you know. He came down the walk between the plats of grass that looked like two peaceful, green rugs spread in the midst of all the noise and bustle of the town, and his long hands pulled up the latch and he smiled at the woman as if he loved her. And she said to me in a very proud and dignified way, “Judge Colfax, my husband.”

That was the first time I ever set eyes on him, and in a quarter of a century, beginning as he was then, a judge of county court, and ending, as well you know, I never could see a change in his way of looking at life. Civilization moves here and there and along with it ways and means and customs and fashions and the looks of the buildings and the furniture, but there is a saying of the Judge that comes back to me now. “The way of vice, virtue, passions, and instincts of men is universal and everlasting,” he’d say, and as for himself, his eyes were watching it all from too high a place for him to be jumping this way and that, like one of the sheep running with the flock.

It showed on the inside of the house then, as it did the day he died in this city. The look of it was the same then, with most everything that was in it used for comfort and not for show, though in those first days there was no end of ornaments, that was kept for memory’s sake—a piece of coral as big as your head brought back by Mrs. Colfax’s father, who had been a minister or something to Brazil, and spears from the South Sea Islands, and two big blue biscuitware jars from China that had been a wedding present to the Judge’s mother from an importer of tea, who had courted her and been rejected, and documents in frames which I can’t remember, except a commission in the army signed by a man named James Madison, and a college degree, and a letter written by Jonathan Edwards to a man dying of consumption. They were hard to keep clean, but I liked those things because they reminded a body of the fact that days had gone by when other people was living with their ambitions and loves, and snoring at night, and pain in their wisdom teeth, and all forgotten now!

Anyway, you’d never know they had wealth, they lived so simply, and Mrs. Colfax had even done much of her own housework. I was hired because a baby was coming, and you can believe it was a happy house in those days, with its peace and the sprinklers spraying water on the lawn in the last hot days of the autumn, and the leaves rustling outside the kitchen window, and the wife singing in her room upstairs, and the Judge looking at her as she sat across the table at breakfast, with his eyes wide open, because, whatever anybody else might think, he believed her the most beautiful looking woman in the world.