Just Around the Corner Part 34

"Then he'd go off in a real fit of laughin' again. 'You ain't got no ideas of the breakers ahead, Cottie dearie,' he'd holler, 'and in this business there ain't many of us got the strength to fight 'em.'"

"Wasn't that like him--stealin' a letter!"

"Then he'd laugh some more, wag his finger at me and make me cry, and keep yellin' 'Breakers ahead! Breakers ahead!'"

"There, there, dearie; it's all over, now. He was too dumb and too mean to know that Lily was as jealous as a snake of me and you--always, even, when we was kids. Sure she don't want us in her show--we'd walk away with it. John was too dumb to see the letter was only--"

"'Sh-h-h; it's a sin to run down the dead."

"Anyway, you never lied to John like he did to you. I can still hear him that dark night, down by the quarry, trying to scare you. Lyin' to you about what girls got to buck up against in the city, that night, when they first put the bandages on maw's eyes, and he was beggin' and beggin' you to marry him."

"Gawd! I was ashamed to listen to some of the things he tried to scare me with that night."

"He couldn't answer when I piped up about his cousin, Tessie Hobbs, that went to St. Louis to learn millinery and sends home four dollars a week. He couldn't answer that, could he?"

"No, he couldn't, Cottie."

A silence--the great stone silence of a coliseum--closed in about them.

Della s.h.i.+vered and burrowed her head deeper into her sister's lap.

"Aw, Gawd, us talkin' like this, with him layin' in there!"

"If he wasn't layin' in there we wouldn't be talkin'."

A shutter swung in on its hinges.

"There, there! It ain't nothin' but the wind, Della."

"He was goin' to fix that shutter to-day when he was off s.h.i.+ft. Gawd, he didn't have no more idea of dyin' than I did!"

"That's just like maw. Sometimes in the night I can almost hear her stop breathin'--she's so weak, but she's always talkin' about next year--next year."

"It'll be awful for you, little sister, with me gone and you alone with her."

"It--it ain't a sin to say it, Delia. She--she ain't here for long, and I'll be comin' to join you soon. You'll tell 'em I'm comin'."

"Gawd, how I wish we was going together, little sister! Leavin' you is just like leavin' my heart. There's n.o.body I love like you, Cottie."

"Della darlin', look at Lily--she went alone."

"I--I ain't afraid--you got the best voice of us two, but I'll make the way for you, dearie. I'll make it easier for you to come."

"It won't be long."

"If I could only have got his name that time on the train, Cottie!"

"You got Lily's boardin'-house, dearie. Ain't that something?"

"Oh, darlin'--him layin' in there!"

"Don't begin that again, dearie."

"Listen, Cottie--listen--that can't be the six-thirty accommodation already, is it? It ain't the funeral-day already, is it?"

"Yes, dearie; but it's a long way off. See, it's just gettin' light through the crack in the shade."

"Don't raise it, Cottie. It's a sin to let in the light, with him layin'

there and dead."

"Darlin', it ain't goin' to hurt him, and the lamp's low. See; there ain't no harm in raisin' it--look how light it's gettin'!"

Off toward the east dawn trembled on the edge of eternity and sent up, as if the earth were lighting the horizon, a pearlish light shotted with pink. A smattering of stars lingered and trembled as though cold. They paled; dawn grew pinker, and the black village, with its naked trees standing darkly against the sky, sent up wispy spirals of smoke. A derrick in the jagged bowl of the quarry moved its giant arms slowly, and a steam-whistle shrieked.

The New York accommodation hallooed to the trembling dawn and tore through Slateville.

The sisters pressed their white faces close to the cold pane and watched it rush into the sunrise. A c.o.c.k crowed to the dawn, and, from afar, another. A dirt-team rumbled up the road, and the steam-whistle from the quarry blew a second reveille.

"You--you take the accommodation, darlin'. It's cheaper, and you'll be feelin' scary about the flyer for a while. You can catch it down by Terre Haute at five-thirty-one, Monday morning--eh, darlin'?"

"So--so soon, Cottie--only three days after, and him hardly cold."

"Don't let's drag it out, darlin'."

"Oh, Cottie, I'll be waitin' for you! There won't be a day that I won't be waitin' for you. There's nothin' I love like you."

Their faces were close and wet with tears, and the first ray of sun burnished their heads and whitened their white bosoms.

"Kiss me, Cottie."

"Della--Della!"

"My little sister!"

"You're goin', Della--try to think, darlin', what it means--you're goin'."

"'Sh-h-h, dearie--'sh-h-h. Yes--I--I'm goin'."

And in the room adjoining John Blaney lay dead with a dent in his head.

The city has a thousand throats, its voice is like a storm running on the wind, and like s.h.i.+p-high waves plunging on s.h.i.+p-high rocks, and like unto the undertone of lost souls adrift in a sheol of fog and water.

The voice of the city knows none of the acoustic limitations of architects and prima donnas. Its dome is as high as fifty-story sky-sc.r.a.pers, and its sounding-board the bases of a thousand thousand tired brains.

It penetrates the Persian-velvet hangings of the most rococo palace toward which the sight-seeing automobile points its megaphone, and beats against brains neurotic with the problems of solid-gold-edged bonds and solid-gold cotillion favors. It is the birth-song of the tenement child and the swan-song of the weak. It travels out over fields of new-mown hay and sings to the boy at the plow. It shouts to the victor and whispers to the stranger.

Through the morning bedlam of alarm-clocks, slamming doors, the rattle of ash-cans, and the internal disorders of a rooming-house, came the voice a-whispering to Della.