"I always wonder we keep coming," one of them said.
"I"ll tell you why," the other said. "Because he"s cheap, and we get things from a fourth to a third less than we can get them anywhere else. The quality is first rate, and he"s absolutely honest. And, besides, he"s a genius. The wretch has _touch_. The things have a style, a look, a hang! Really it"s something wonderful. Sure it iss,"
she ended in the tailor"s accent, and then they both laughed and joined in a common sigh.
"Well, I don"t believe he means to deceive any one."
"Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to do everything he says. And one can"t help liking him even when he doesn"t."
"He"s a good while getting through with her," the first lady said, meaning the unseen lady in the alcove.
"She"ll be a good while longer getting through with _him_, if he hasn"t them ready the next time," the second lady said.
But the lady in the alcove issued from it with an impredicable smile, and the tailor came up to the others, and deferred to their wishes with a sort of voiceless respect.
He gave the customer a glance of good-fellowship, and said to him, radiantly: "Your things all ready for you, this morning. As soon as I--"
"Oh, no hurry," the customer responded.
"I won"t be a minute," the tailor said, pulling the curtain of the alcove aside, and then there began those sounds of objurgation and expostulation, although the ladies had seemed so amiable before.
The customer wondered if they did not all enjoy it; the ladies in their patience under long trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of practising upon it. But perhaps he did believe in the things he promised. He might be so much a genius as to have no grasp of facts; he might have thought that he could actually do what he said.
The customer"s question on these points found answer when one day the tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised them perfectly finished.
"He will do your clothes all right," he explained to the customer. "He is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business."
"But why--why--" the customer began.
"I couldn"t stand it. The way them ladies would talk to a person, when you done your best to please them; it"s something fierce."
"Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it, from the way you always promised them and never kept your word."
"And if I hadn"t promised them?" the tailor returned with some show of feeling. "They _wanted_ me to promise them--they made me--they wouldn"t have gone away without it. Sure. Every one wanted her things before every one. You had got to think of that."
"But you had to think of what they would say."
"Say? Sometimes I thought they would _hit_ me. One lady said she had a notion to slap me once. It"s no way to talk."
"But you didn"t seem to mind it."
"I didn"t mind it for a good while. Then I couldn"t stand it. So I sold."
He shook his head sadly; but the customer had no comfort to offer him.
He asked when his clothes would be done, and the tailor told him when, and then they were not. The new proprietor tried them on, but he would not say just when they would be finished.
"We have a good deal of work already for some ladies that been disappointed. Now we try a new way. We tell people exactly what we do."
"Well, that"s right," the customer said, but in his heart he was not sure he liked the new way.
The day before his clothes were promised he dropped in. From the curtained alcove he heard low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor and the voice of some lady trying on, and being severely bidden not to expect her things at a time she suggested. "No, madam. We got too much work on hand already. These things, they will not be done before next week."
"I told you to-morrow," the same voice said to another lady, and the new proprietor came out with an unfinished coat in his hand.
"I know you did, but I thought you would be better than your word, and so I came to-day. Well, then, to-morrow."
"Yes, to-morrow," the new proprietor said, but he did not seem to have liked the lady"s joke. He did not look happy.
A few weeks after that the customer came for some little alterations in his new suit.
In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs of trying on, much cheerfuller murmurs than before; the voice of a lady lifted in gladness, in gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, "Oh, sure, madam."
Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt-sleeves and slippers, with his waistcoat-front full of pins and needles, just like the new proprietor in former days.
"Why!" the customer exclaimed. "Have you bought back?"
"No. I"m just here like a journeyman already. The new man he want me to come. He don"t get along very well with his way. He"s all right; he"s a good man and a first-cla.s.s tailor. But," and the former proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and picked off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get along better with the ladies."
V
SOMEBODY"S MOTHER
The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters, and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on their way for dinner to a French _table d"hote_ which they had heard of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the steps.
It was the early dusk of a December day, and the day was very chilly.
"She seems to be sick or something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or asleep."
The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn, and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress, which his unb.u.t.toned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would not have dressed so for that problematical French _table d"hote_; probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in effect the father"s impulse to go closer and look at the woman.
"She seems to be asleep," he reported.
"Shouldn"t you think she would take cold? She will get her death there. Oughtn"t we to do something?" the daughter asked, but she left it to the father, and he said:
"Probably somebody will come by."
"That we could leave her to?" the daughter pursued.
"We could do that without waiting," the son commented.
"Well, yes," the father a.s.sented; but they did not go on. They waited, helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working cla.s.s; she was simply dressed, though with the New York instinct for clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to stay her involuntarily, and after a glance in the direction of their gaze she asked the daughter:
"Is she sick, do you think?"
"We don"t know what"s the matter. But she oughtn"t to stay there."
Something velvety in the girl"s voice had made its racial quality sensible to the ear; as she went up to the crouching woman and bent forward over her and then turned to them, a street lamp threw its light on her face, and they saw that she was a light shade of colored girl.