"How much?" called the woman, waving a tin object that glinted in the sunlight. Great Taylor stared stupidly. "Clothes boiler," yelled the woman. "Fifty cents…. Just needs soldering." "What?" stammered Nell. "Fifty cents," shouted the woman in the window. And something prompted Great Taylor to reply, "Give you a dime."
"Quarter," insisted the woman. "Dime … Ten cents," repeated Great Taylor, somewhat red in the face. "Once I set a price I'm a …" But the woman's head had disappeared and her whole angular person soon slid out through the doorway. Entirely befogged, Great Taylor fumbled in her patent-leather bag with its worsted fruit, discovered two nickels, and placed the leaky boiler beside the rusty scales on the junk-cart.
"Ain't I got enough junk without that?" she grumbled. But the traffic of the Devil's Own city was moving again and Great Taylor was moving with it. She passed a corner where a clock in a drug store told her the time—ten minutes of the hour. "I got to get back," she told herself, and heading her cart determinedly for an opening succeeded in crossing to the opposite side of the congested avenue. There, a child, attracted by the jingling of the bells, ran out of a house with a bundle of rags tied in a torn blue apron. The child placed the bundle on the scales and watched with solemn wide eyes. Great Taylor again fumbled in the bag and extracted a coin which transformed the little girl into an India-rubber thing that bounced up and down on one foot at the side of the junk-cart. "Grit never gave me only a penny a pound," she cried.
"Grit is dead," said Great Taylor.
"Dead!" echoed the child, clinging motionless to the wheel. "Grit is dead?" She turned suddenly and ran toward the house, calling: "Mamma, poor old Grit is dead."
Great Taylor put her weight against the handle of the cart. She pushed on desperately. Something had taken hold of her throat. "What's the matter with me?" she choked. "Didn't I know he was dead before this? Didn't I know it all along? I ain't going to cry over no man … not in the street, anyway." She hurriedly shoved her cart around a corner into a less-congested thoroughfare and there a mammoth gilded clock at the edge of the sidewalk confronted her. The long hand moved with a sardonic jerk and indicated the hour—the hour of her appointment. But Great Taylor turned her eyes away. "Pushing a junk-cart ain't so easy," she said, and for a moment she stood there huddled over the handle; then, taking a long, deep breath, like Grit used to do, she straightened herself and sang out, clear and loud, above the noises of the cavernous street: "Rags … old iron … bottles and ra-ags."
The city that people call the Devil's Own lost its sharp outline and melted into neutral tints, gray and blue and lavender, that blended like an old, old tapestry. It was dusk. Great Taylor strode slowly with laborious long strides, her breast rising and falling, her body lengthening against the load, her hands gripping the handle of the cart, freighted with rusty, twisted, and broken things. At crossings she paused until the murmuring river of human beings divided to let her pass. Night settled upon the high roofs and dropped its shadow into the streets and alleys, and the windows began to glow. Light leaped out and streaked the sidewalks while at each corner it ran silently down from high globes like full moons and spattered over the curb into the gutter and out as far as the glistening car tracks. She passed blocks solid with human beings and blocks without a human soul. Cataracts of sound crashed down into the street now and again from passing elevated trains, and the noise, soon dissipated, left trembling silence like pools of sinister black water. She passed through stagnant odours and little eddies of perfume. She lifted her drooping head and saw a door open—the darkness was cut by a rectangle of soft yellow light, two figures were silhouetted, then the door closed. A gasolene torch flared above a fruit stand hard against the towering black windowless wall of a warehouse and a woman squatted in the shadow turning a handle. Nell pushed on past a cross street that glittered and flared from sidewalk to cornice, and at the next corner a single flickering gas-jet revealed a dingy vestibule with rows of tarnished speaking tubes….
The air became thick with noise and odours and the sidewalks swayed with people. Great Taylor slowly rounded a familiar corner, slackened the momentum of the junk-cart, and brought up squarely against the curb. Dragging the wheels, she gained the sidewalk and, beyond, the rims of the cart cut into soft earth. She crossed the vacant lot. A city's supercilious moon alone gave its half-light to the junkyard of Grit and here the woman unloaded the cart, carrying heavy unyielding things against her breast. She did not linger. She was trembling from fatigue and from emotions even more novel to her. She closed the gate without looking back at the weird crêpe-like shadows that draped themselves among the moonlit piles of twisted things. Nearing the corner, she glanced with dull eyes at a glaring red sign: "Dancing." Voices, laughter, and music after a kind came from the doorway, A man was singing. Great Taylor recognized the voice but did not pause. She was not to see the man from just around the corner again for many years.
Hurrying, without knowing why she hurried, Nell climbed the circular iron staircase up through parallels of odorous gloom and, entering her flat, closed the door and quickly locked it against the world outside—the toil, the bickering, the sneers, the insults and curses flung from alley gates and down upon her in the traffic of the Devil's Own city. She closed her eyes and took a long deep breath almost like a sigh. She was home. It was good to be home, but she lacked the words and was far too weary to express her emotions.
Lighting the gas she sank into a chair. What did it matter if the gas was screeching? She drooped there, hands in her lap, wrists crossed, palms turned upward and fingers curled stiffly like claws—from holding to the jarring handle of the junk-cart.