The Daughter of the Storage.
by William Dean Howells.
I
They were getting some of their things out to send into the country, and Forsyth had left his work to help his wife look them over and decide which to take and which to leave. The things were mostly trunks that they had stored the fall before; there were some tables and Colonial bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mirrors and decorative odds and ends, which they would not want in the furnished house they had taken for the summer. There were some canvases which Forsyth said he would paint out and use for other subjects, but which, when he came to look at again, he found really not so bad. The rest, literally, was nothing but trunks; there were, of course, two or three boxes of books. When they had been packed closely into the five-dollar room, with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and canvases and decorative odds and ends put carefully on top, the Forsyths thought the effect very neat, and laughed at themselves for being proud of it.
They spent the winter in Paris planning for the summer in America, and now it had come May, a month which in New York is at its best, and in the Const.i.tutional Storage Safe-Deposit Warehouse is by no means at its worst. The Const.i.tutional Storage is no longer new, but when the Forsyths were among the first to store there it was up to the latest moment in the modern perfections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick-walled, iron-doored corridors, with their clean concrete floors, branching from a central avenue to the tall windows north and south, offered perspectives sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped with arriving or departing household stuff.
When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice young fellow from the office had gone with them; running ahead and switching on rows of electrics down the corridors, and then, with a wire-basketed electric lamp, which he twirled about and held aloft and alow, showing the dustless, sweet-smelling s.p.a.ciousness of a perfect five-dollar room.
He said it would more than hold their things; and it really held them.
Now, when the same young fellow unlocked the iron door and set it wide, he said he would get them a man, and he got Mrs. Forsyth a gilt armchair from some furniture going into an adjoining twenty-dollar room. She sat down in it, and "Of course," she said, "the pieces I want will be at the very back and the very bottom. Why don"t you get yourself a chair, too, Ambrose? What are you looking at?"
With his eyes on the neighboring furniture he answered, "Seems to be the wreck of a millionaire"s happy home; parlor and kitchen utensils and office furniture all in white and gold."
"Horrors, yes!" Mrs. Forsyth said, without turning her head from studying her trunks, as if she might divine their contents from their outside.
"Tata and I," her husband said, "are more interested in the millionaire"s things." Tata, it appeared, was not a dog, but a child; the name was not the diminutive of her own name, which was Charlotte, but a generic name for a doll, which Tata had learned from her Italian nurse to apply to all little girls and had got applied to herself by her father. She was now at a distance down the corridor, playing a drama with the pieces of millionaire furniture; as they stretched away in variety and splendor they naturally suggested personages of princely quality, and being touched with her little forefinger tip were capable of entering warmly into Tata"s plans for them.
Her mother looked over her shoulder toward the child. "Come here, Tata," she called, and when Tata, having enjoined some tall mirrors to secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran to her, Mrs. Forsyth had forgotten why she had called her. "Oh!" she said, recollecting, "do you know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show mamma? Can you put your hand on it?"
The child promptly put her hand on the end of a small box just within her tiptoe reach, and her mother said, "I do believe she knows everything that"s in it, Ambrose! That trunk has got to be opened the very first one!"
The man that the young fellow said he would send showed at the far end of the corridor, smaller than human, but enlarging himself to the average Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given instructions and obeyed with caressing irony Mrs. Forsyth"s order to pull out Tata"s trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything recognized by the owner: doll by doll, cook-stove, tin dishes, small brooms, wooden animals on feet and wheels, birds of various plumage, a toy piano, a dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog"s-eared linen Mother Goose books, and the rest. Tata had been allowed to put the things away herself, and she took them out with no apparent sense of the time pa.s.sed since she saw them last. In the changing life of her parents all times and places were alike to her. She began to play with the things in the storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she saw them last in the flat. Her mother and father left her to them in the distraction of their own trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread over the s.p.a.ce toward the window and their lids lifted and tried to decide about them. In the end she had changed the things in them back and forth till she candidly owned that she no longer knew where anything at all was.
As she raised herself for a moment"s respite from the problem she saw at the far end of the corridor a lady with two men, who increased in size like her own man as they approached. The lady herself seemed to decrease, though she remained of a magnificence to match the furniture, and looked like it as to her dress of white picked out in gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar room next the Forsyths". In her advance she had been vividly played round by a little boy, who ran forward and back and easily doubled the length of the corridor before he came to a stand and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata.
Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered dreamily above the things in her trunk.
The two mothers began politely to ignore each other. She of the twenty-dollar room directed the men who had come with her, and in a voice of authority and appeal at once commanded and consulted them in the disposition of her belongings. At the sound of the mixed tones Mrs. Forsyth signaled to her husband, and, when he came within whispering, murmured: "Pittsburg, _or_ Chicago. Did you _ever_ hear such a Mid-Western accent!" She pretended to be asking him about repacking the trunk before her, but the other woman was not deceived.
She was at least aware of criticism in the air of her neighbors, and she put on greater severity with the workmen. The boy came up and caught her skirt. "What?" she said, bending over. "No, certainly not.
I haven"t time to attend to you. Go off and play. Don"t I tell you no?
Well, there, then! Will you get that trunk out where I can open it?
That small one there," she said to one of the men, while the other rested for both. She stooped to unlock the trunk and flung up the lid.
"Now if you bother me any more I will surely--" But she lost herself short of the threat and began again to seek counsel and issue orders.
The boy fell upon the things in the trunk, which were the things of a boy, as those in Tata"s trunk were the things of a girl, and to run with them, one after another, to Tata and to pile them in gift on the floor beside her trunk. He did not stop running back and forth as fast as his short, fat legs could carry him till he had reached the bottom of his box, chattering constantly and taking no note of the effect with Tata. Then, as she made no response whatever to his munificence, he began to be abashed and to look pathetically from her to her father.
"Oh, really, young man," Forsyth said, "we can"t let you impoverish yourself at this rate. What have you said to your benefactor, Tata?
What are you going to give _him_?"
The children did not understand his large words, but they knew he was affectionately mocking them.
"Ambrose," Mrs. Forsyth said, "you mustn"t let him."
"I"m trying to think how to hinder him, but it"s rather late," Forsyth answered, and then the boy"s mother joined in.
"Indeed, indeed, if you can, it"s more than I can. You"re just worrying the little girl," she said to the boy.
"Oh no, he isn"t, dear little soul," Mrs. Forsyth said, leaving her chair and going up to the two children. She took the boy"s hand in hers. "What a kind boy! But you know my little girl mustn"t take all your playthings. If you"ll give her _one_ she"ll give _you_ one, and that will be enough. You can both play with them all for the present."
She referred her suggestion to the boy"s mother, and the two ladies met at the invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from the twenty-dollar room.
"Oh yes, indeed," the Mid-Westerner said, willing to meet the New-Yorker half-way. "You"re taking things out, I see. I hardly know which is the worst: taking out or putting in."
"Well, we are just completing the experience," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I shall be able to say better how I feel in half an hour."
"You don"t mean this is the first time you"ve stored? I suppose _we"ve_ been in and out of storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse exactly; we"ve never been here before."
"It seems very nice," Mrs. Forsyth suggested.
"They all do at the beginning. I suppose if we ever came to the end they would seem nicer still. Mr. Bream"s business is always taking him away" (it appeared almost instantly that he was the international inspector of a great insurance company"s agencies in Europe and South America), "and when I don"t go with him it seems easier to break up and go into a hotel than to go on housekeeping. I don"t know that it is, though," she questioned. "It"s so hard to know what to do with the child in a hotel."
"Yes, but he seems the sort that you could manage with anywhere," Mrs.
Forsyth agreed and disagreed.
His mother looked at him where he stood beaming upon Tata and again joyfully awaiting some effect with her. But the child sat back upon her small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in her trunk and made no sign of having seen the heaps of his gifts.
The Forsyths had said to each other before this that their little girl was a queer child, and now they were not so much ashamed of her apparent selfishness or rude indifference as they thought they were.
They made a joke of it with the boy"s mother, who said she did not believe Tata was anything but shy. She said she often told Mr. Bream that she did wish Peter--yes, that was his name; she didn"t like it much, but it was his grandfather"s; was Tata a Christian name? Oh, just a pet name! Well, it _was_ pretty--could be broken of _his_ ridiculous habit; most children--little boys, that was--held onto their things so.
Forsyth would have taken something from Tata and given it to Peter; but his wife would not let him; and he had to content himself with giving Peter a pencil of his own that drew red at one end and blue at the other, and that at once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter, on the pavement. He told Peter not to draw a boy now, but wait till he got home, and then be careful not to draw a blue boy with the red end.
He helped him put his things back into his trunk, and Peter seemed to enjoy that, too.
Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels, watched the rest.i.tution with her dreamy eyes; she paid no attention to the blue boy on the pavement; pictures from her father were nothing new to her.
The mothers parted with expressions of mutual esteem in spite of their difference of accent and fortune. Mrs. Forsyth asked if she might not kiss Peter, and did so; he ran to his mother and whispered to her; then he ran back and gave Tata so great a hug that she fell over from it.
Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in thought which she could not break from, and that night, after she had said her prayers with her mother, her mother thought it was time to ask her: "Tata, dear, why did you act so to that boy to-day? Why didn"t you give him something of yours when he brought you all his things? Why did you act so oddly?"
Tata said something in a voice so low that her mother could not make it out.
"What did you say?"
"I couldn"t tell which," the child still whispered; but now her mother"s ear was at her lips.
"How, which?"
"To give him. The more I looked," and the whisper became a quivering breath, "the more I couldn"t tell which. And I wanted to give them _all_ to him, but I couldn"t tell whether it would be right, because you and papa gave them to me for birthday and Christmas," and the quivering breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the mother had to catch the child up to her heart.
"Dear little tender conscience!" she said, still wiping her eyes when she told the child"s father, and they fell into a sweet, serious talk about her before they slept. "And I was ashamed of her before that woman! I know she misjudged her; but _we_ ought to have remembered how fine and precious she is, and _known_ how she must have suffered, trying to decide."
"Yes, conscience," the father said. "And temperament, the temperament to which decision is martyrdom."
"And she will always have to be deciding! She"ll have to decide for you, some day, as I do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose--she gets it from you."
II
The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want to offer Peter some gift in reparation the next morning, and her father was quite ready, if she said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with her to the Const.i.tutional Storage, which was the only address of Mrs. Bream that he knew. But the child had either forgotten or she was contented with her mother"s comforting, and no longer felt remorse.