“You won’t care,” says Mis’ Beach, “if I keep on with the leggings?”
“Leggings?” says I.
She nodded to the basket. “It’s bad pairs,” she said. “They leave me catch up the dropped stitches.”
“How much do they give you?” says I, brutal. If it had been Silas Sykes I’d never have dreamt of asking him how much anybody give him for anything. But—well, sometimes we hound folks and hang folks and ask folks questions, merely because they’re poor.
“Six cents a dozen,” she says.
I remember they had a fly-paper on the window sill, and the caught flies and the uncaught ones whirred and buzzed. I can see the room: The floor that sagged, the walls that cracked, the hot, nameless smell of it. And in it a woman with the strength and the figure of a race that hasn’t got here yet, and three children—one of them beautiful, and David, taking a clock to pieces and putting it together again, without ever having been taught. You know all about it—and so did I. And while I set there talking with her, I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else but that hole of a home, and the three splendid beings chained there, like folks in a bad dream. Someway I never get used to it, and I know I never shall. It makes me feel as if I was looking on the inside of a table spoon and seeing things twisted, and saying: “Already such things can’t be. Already they sound old and false—like thumbscrews!”
And the worst of it was, David’s mother was so used to it. She was so bitter used to it. And oh—don’t things turn round in the world? A few years before if somebody like me had gone to see her, I’d of been telling her to be resigned, and to make the best of her lot, and trying to give her to understand that the Lord had meant it personal. And instead, when she said she was doing nice, I longed to say to her:
“No, no, Mis’ Beach! Don’t you make that mistake. You ain’t doing nice. As long as you think you are, this world is being held back. It’s you that’s got to help folks to know that you aren’t doing nice. And to make folks wonder why.”
But I didn’t say it to her. I s’pose I haven’t got that far—yet.
She said she’d like to come to the club that Silas proposed, and Mary, she said she’d come. They didn’t question much about it—they merely accepted it and said they’d come. And I went out into the April after-supper light, with a bird or two twittering sleepy, and an orange and lemon and water-melon sunset doing its best to attract my attention, and I says out loud to April in general: