But to these recollections Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart-to the senile canary.
Possibly she could have taken it with her, but she felt confusedly that Dickie would not be appreciated in other people's houses. She evaded asking the Sessionses to shelter the bird, because every favor that she permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life of married spinsterhood.
"Oh, Dickie, Dickie, what am I going to do with you?" she cried, slipping a finger through the wires of the cage.
The canary hopped toward her and tried to chirp his greeting.
"Even when you were sick you tried to sing to me, and mother did love you," she sighed. "I just can't kill you-trusting me like that."
She turned her back, seeking to solve the problem by ignoring it. While she was sorting dresses-some trace of her mother in every fold, every wrinkle of the waists and lace collars-she was listening to the bird in the cage.
"I'll think of some way-I'll find somebody who will want you, Dickie dear," she murmured, desperately, now and then.
After dinner and nightfall, with her nerves twanging all the more because it seemed silly to worry over one dissolute old bird when all her life was breaking up, she hysterically sprang up, snatched Dickie from the cage, and trotted down-stairs to the street.
"I'll leave you somewhere. Somebody will find you," she declared.
Concealing the bird by holding it against her breast with a hand supersensitive to its warm little feathers, she walked till she found a deserted tenement doorway. She hastily set the bird down on a stone balustrade beside the entrance steps. Dickie chirped more cheerily, more sweetly than for many days, and confidingly hopped back to her hand.
"Oh, I can't leave him for boys to torture and I can't take him, I can't-"
In a sudden spasm she threw the bird into the air, and ran back to the flat, sobbing, "I can't kill it-I can't-there's so much death." Longing to hear the quavering affection of its song once more, but keeping herself from even going to the window, to look for it, with bitter haste she completed her work of getting rid of things-things-things-the things which were stones of an imprisoning past.
§ 4
Shyness was over Una when at last she was in the house of strangers. She sat marveling that this square, white cubby-hole of a room was hers permanently, that she hadn't just come here for an hour or two. She couldn't get it to resemble her first impression of it. Now the hallway was actually a part of her life-every morning she would face the picture of a magazine-cover girl when she came out of her room.
Her agitation was increased by the problem of keeping up the maiden modesty appropriate to a Golden, a young female friend of the Sessionses', in a small flat with gentlemen lodgers and just one bathroom. Una was saved by not having a spinster friend with whom to share her shrinking modesty. She simply had to take waiting for her turn at the bathroom as a matter of course, and insensibly she was impressed by the decency with which these dull, ordinary people solved the complexities of their enforced intimacy. When she wildly clutched her virgin bathrobe about her and passed a man in the hall, he stalked calmly by without any of the teetering apologies which broad-beamed Mr. Sessions had learned from his genteel spouse.
She could not at first distinguish among her companions. Gradually they came to be distinct, important. They held numberless surprises for her. She would not have supposed that a bookkeeper in a fish-market would be likely to possess charm. Particularly if he combined that amorphous occupation with being a boarding-house proprietor. Yet her landlord, Herbert Gray, with his look of a track-athlete, his confessions of ignorance and his naïve enthusiasms about whatever in the motion pictures seemed to him heroic, large, colorful, was as admirable as the several youngsters of her town who had plodded through Princeton or Pennsylvania and come back to practise law or medicine or gentlemanly inheritance of business. And his wife, round and comely, laughing easily, wearing her clothes with an untutored grace which made her cheap waists smart, was so thoroughly her husband's comrade in everything, that these struggling nobodies had all the riches of the earth.
The Grays took Una in as though she were their guest, but they did not bother her. They were city-born, taught by the city to let other people live their own lives.
The Grays had taken a flat twice too large for their own use. The other lodgers, who lived, like monks on a bare corridor, along the narrow "railroad" hall, were three besides Una:
A city failure, one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was "in the collection business." He read Dickens and played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great lawyers. But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm. He was grateful to any one for noticing him. Like most of the failures, he had learned the art of doing nothing at all. All Sunday, except for a two hours' walk in Central Park, and one game of chess with Herbert Gray, he dawdled in his room, slept, regarded his stocking-feet with an appearance of profound meditation, yawned, picked at the Sunday newspaper. Una once saw him napping on a radiant autumn Sunday afternoon, and detested him. But he was politely interested in her work for Troy Wilkins, carefully exact in saying, "Good-morning, miss," and he became as familiar to her as the gas-heater in her cubicle.
Second fellow-lodger was a busy, reserved woman, originally from Kansas City, who had something to do with some branch library. She had solved the problems of woman's lack of place in this city scheme by closing tight her emotions, her sense of adventure, her hope of friendship. She never talked to Una, after discovering that Una had no interesting opinions on the best reading for children nine to eleven.
These gentle, inconsequential city waifs, the Grays, the failure, the library-woman, meant no more to Una than the crowds who were near, yet so detached, in the streets. But the remaining boarder annoyed her by his noisy whine. He was an underbred maverick, with sharp eyes of watery blue, a thin mustache, large teeth, and no chin worth noticing. He would bounce in of an evening, when the others were being decorous and dull in the musty dining-room, and yelp: "How do we all find our seskpadalian selves this bright and balmy evenin'? How does your perspegacity discipulate, Herby? What's the good word, Miss Golden? Well, well, well, if here ain't our good old friend, the Rev. J. Pilkington Corned Beef; how 'r' you, Pilky? Old Mrs. Cabbage feelin' well, too? Well, well, still discussing the movies, Herby? Got any new opinions about Mary Pickford? Well, well. Say, I met another guy that's as nutty as you, Herby; he thinks that Wilhelm Jenkins Bryan is a great statesman. Let's hear some more about the Sage of Free Silver, Herby."
The little man was never content till he had drawn them into so bitter an argument that some one would rise, throw down a napkin, growl, "Well, if that's all you know about it-if you're all as ignorant as that, you simply ain't worth arguing with," and stalk out. When general topics failed, the disturber would catechize the library-woman about Louisa M. Alcott, or the failure about his desultory inquiries into Christian Science, or Mrs. Gray about the pictures plastering the dining-room-a dozen spiritual revelations of apples and oranges, which she had bought at a department-store sale.
The maverick's name was Fillmore J. Benson. Strangers called him Benny, but his more intimate acquaintances, those to whom he had talked for at least an hour, were requested to call him Phil. He made a number of pretty puns about his first name. He was, surprisingly, a doctor-not the sort that studies science, but the sort that studies the gullibility of human nature-a "Doctor of Manipulative Osteology." He had earned a diploma by a correspondence course, and had scrabbled together a small practice among retired shopkeepers. He was one of the strange, impudent race of fakers who prey upon the clever city. He didn't expect any one at the Grays' to call him a "doctor."