“Well, he just went into the saloon over there.”
“Huh-uh. Mine’s upstairs, drunk. He must be Mr. Kelly,” and she goes quickly on with her bucket.
* * * * *
I am sitting in my room one night, listening to the sounds that float vaguely about this curious little unit of metropolitan life, when a dénouement in the social complications of this same coal-heaver’s life is reached. I already know him now to be a rough man, for once or twice I heard him damning his children very loudly. But I did not suspect that there were likely to be complications over and above the world of the purely material.
“Die frau hat sich selbst umgebracht!” (“The woman has taken her life!”) I hear some one crying out in the hall, and then there is such a running and shuffling in the general hubbub. A score of tenants from the different floors are talking and gesticulating, and in the rear of the hall the door opening into the coal-heaver’s dining-room is open. My landlady, Mrs. Witty, is on the scene, and even while we gaze a dapper little physician of the region, in a high hat and frockcoat, comes running up the steps and enters the open door in the rear.
“The doctor! The doctor!” The word passes from one to another.
“What is it?” I ask, questioning a little girl whom I had often seen playing tag on the sidewalk below.
“She took poison,” she answers.
“Who?”
“That woman in there.”