“My children are there. They are getting supper now,” she said.
She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam’s companion kept time with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood looking up the river.
“Turn back,” he said, “I am tired of this crew.”
On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.
“We will go to my house,” she said quietly, “just you and me. I will show you the kids.”
Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam her story.
She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.
“I drove him crazy,” she said, laughing quietly. “He wanted me to stay at home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me down town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn’t come he would go away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn’t a man. He would do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids on my hands.”
In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in an open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place, eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.
“We will go to my house. I want to have you alone,” said the woman.