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Page 76
Sometimes after my morning classes were over, I used to encounter Lena
downtown, in her velvet suit and a little black hat, with a veil tied
smoothly over her face, looking as fresh as the spring morning. Maybe she
would be carrying home a bunch of jonquils or a hyacinth plant. When we
passed a candy store her footsteps would hesitate and linger. `Don't let
me go in,' she would murmur. `Get me by if you can.' She was very fond of
sweets, and was afraid of growing too plump.
We had delightful Sunday breakfasts together at Lena's. At the back of her
long work-room was a bay-window, large enough to hold a box-couch and a
reading-table. We breakfasted in this recess, after drawing the curtains
that shut out the long room, with cutting-tables and wire women and
sheet-draped garments on the walls. The sunlight poured in, making
everything on the table shine and glitter and the flame of the alcohol lamp
disappear altogether. Lena's curly black water-spaniel, Prince,
breakfasted with us. He sat beside her on the couch and behaved very well
until the Polish violin-teacher across the hall began to practise, when
Prince would growl and sniff the air with disgust. Lena's landlord, old
Colonel Raleigh, had given her the dog, and at first she was not at all
pleased. She had spent too much of her life taking care of animals to have
much sentiment about them. But Prince was a knowing little beast, and she
grew fond of him. After breakfast I made him do his lessons; play dead
dog, shake hands, stand up like a soldier. We used to put my cadet cap on
his head--I had to take military drill at the university-- and give him a
yard-measure to hold with his front leg. His gravity made us laugh
immoderately.
Lena's talk always amused me. Antonia had never talked like the people
about her. Even after she learned to speak English readily, there was
always something impulsive and foreign in her speech. But Lena had picked
up all the conventional expressions she heard at Mrs. Thomas's dressmaking
shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties, and
the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very
funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena's soft voice, with her
caressing intonation and arch naivete. Nothing could be more diverting
than to hear Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature, call a leg a `limb'
or a house a `home.'
We used to linger a long while over our coffee in that sunny corner. Lena
was never so pretty as in the morning; she wakened fresh with the world
every day, and her eyes had a deeper colour then, like the blue flowers
that are never so blue as when they first open. I could sit idle all
through a Sunday morning and look at her. Ole Benson's behaviour was now
no mystery to me.
`There was never any harm in Ole,' she said once. `People needn't have
troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the drawside
and forget about his bad luck. I liked to have him. Any company's welcome
when you're off with cattle all the time.'
`But wasn't he always glum?' I asked. `People said he never talked at
all.'
`Sure he talked, in Norwegian. He'd been a sailor on an English boat and
had seen lots of queer places. He had wonderful tattoos. We used to sit
and look at them for hours; there wasn't much to look at out there. He was
like a picture book. He had a ship and a strawberry girl on one arm, and
on the other a girl standing before a little house, with a fence and gate
and all, waiting for her sweetheart. Farther up his arm, her sailor had
come back and was kissing her. "The Sailor's Return," he called it.'
I admitted it was no wonder Ole liked to look at a pretty girl once in a
while, with such a fright at home.
`You know,' Lena said confidentially, `he married Mary because he thought
she was strong-minded and would keep him straight. He never could keep
straight on shore. The last time he landed in Liverpool he'd been out on a
two years' voyage. He was paid off one morning, and by the next he hadn't
a cent left, and his watch and compass were gone. He'd got with some
women, and they'd taken everything. He worked his way to this country on a
little passenger boat. Mary was a stewardess, and she tried to convert him
on the way over. He thought she was just the one to keep him steady. Poor
Ole! He used to bring me candy from town, hidden in his feed-bag. He
couldn't refuse anything to a girl. He'd have given away his tattoos long
ago, if he could. He's one of the people I'm sorriest for.'
If I happened to spend an evening with Lena and stayed late, the Polish
violin-teacher across the hall used to come out and watch me descend the
stairs, muttering so threateningly that it would have been easy to fall
into a quarrel with him. Lena had told him once that she liked to hear him
practise, so he always left his door open, and watched who came and went.
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