CHAPTER 5
"Is you hurt yo'self, little girl?" asked a warm, husky voice, which brought back to her the scent of earth by the pool in which Old Mortality lived.
Opening her eyes, she looked up into a handsome face, very nearly but not quite coloured, and felt herself lifted by hard, smooth arms and pressed against a deep bosom in clean-smelling blue gingham. "Come in and let me wash the blood off yo' head. It ain't nothin' worse than a cut."
"I'm afraid I've knocked out my front tooth."
"There. Let me see. No, you ain't. Just spit out the blood, an' you'll find your tooth is all right. Don't you want to come in an' lie down till you feel better?" Bending down, she unstrapped the roller-skates and examined the fresh scraped place on the child's knee.
"Have I ever seen you before?"
"I'm Memoria. You've seen me bringin' the clothes to Mrs. Birdsong. I wash for the Birdsongs."
Jenny Blair struggled to her feet. Yes, she remembered now. Memoria was the name of the proud-looking coloured woman who carried away a clothes-basket covered with a piece of striped calico and brought it back foaming over with fluted cambric and lace ruffles. She walked with long, graceful strides, and seldom had anything to say to the children. Occasionally, her eldest child, a boy of ten, very light in colour, would accompany her, and then the basket would arrive perched on top of a red wagon. Jenny Blair had always stood a little in awe of Memoria; for she knew that she was what her mother called a superior negro, and had almost dropped the friendly dialect when her "white folks," Mr. Birdsong's parents, had sent her to school.
"Yes, you're Memoria. What are you doing here?"
"I live here. This is Canal Street. What made you come down to Canal Street? It ain't a good place to skate."
"Oh, I came just so. Is this the house you live in?"
"Yes, I live here. I've got Mrs. Birdsong's clothes hangin' out now in the back yard. Are you able to walk home?"
"It's only my head that hurts," Jenny Blair answered, "but that hurts very bad." She tried to take a step forward; but the evening air thickened and grew suddenly cold. Horror seized her lest she be sick out in the street, where all the rude boys and the young women at windows could see her. A sensation more of despair than nausea surged up like a black chill from the pit of her stomach. Hurriedly, with all the politeness she could summon for so dreadful a fact, she said, "I'm afraid I'm going to throw up, Memoria," and did so immediately.
"Don't you bother, honey. I'll take care of you," Memoria said kindly. "You just hold on to me till you feel better." Then, when the worst was over, she picked up Jenny Blair as if she had been a baby, and carried her through the broken gate and into a small frame house with curtains of Nottingham lace at the front windows. Here, after she had been properly sick in private and in a basin, the child was stretched out on a hard sofa, which had once belonged to a good family and was still upholstered in respectable horsehair. Shutting her eyes as tight as she could, she opened them quickly and looked at the pots of begonia on the window-sill, and beyond the flowers to the back yard, where she could see the white and coloured garments swinging on the clothes-line.
The light hurt her head, and she lowered her eyelids again on a flash of red roofs and blue sky. For an instant it seemed to her that she had fallen asleep and wakened in the old nursery, when she was very little, and that her father would presently stoop and lift her over the high sides of her crib. Without surprise, quite as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she discovered that it was not her father but Mr. Birdsong who bent over her and placed his hand on her head. He must have come into the room while her eyes were closed, but he appeared perfectly at home in the midst of all the crazy colours and cheap furniture. Never had he looked so fresh and ruddy and hard and vigorous; and never before had she seen him in his shirt-sleeves, with his grey coat neatly hanging on the back of a chair. "He's forgotten his tie," she thought; but this, she understood after a moment, was not really important. Nothing was important except this queer sense of his belonging here, of his being at home in Canal Street, and in Memoria's house. For he stood there, in the centre of what Jenny Blair thought of vaguely, as "a coloured room," with an unchanged air of physical exuberance, of vital well-being, of sanguine expectancy. He had, indeed, the manner of dispensing happiness that she associated with Sunday after church and mint juleps in silver goblets. Yet she knew, of course, being a wise child, that he must be pretending, just as she herself was pretending in an effort to make Memoria feel that her hospitality was appreciated.
Her first startled wonder faded to friendly recognition before she became aware that he was looking down on her with his clear grey eyes which never, not even when the rest of his face was serious, seemed to stop smiling. Memoria, who was holding a bottle of camphor to Jenny Blair's nostrils, accepted his presence as naturally as she accepted good or bad weather, or the going down of the sun. She gave no sign of astonishment, or indeed of any other sensation, when she handed him the bottle of camphor, and moved with her majestic step into the kitchen. Returning with a towel over her arm and a basin of water in her hand, she washed the blood and dust from the child's face, and lowered her upon the pillows Mr. Birdsong was arranging.
"Do you feel better?" he inquired in his light-hearted voice.
Jenny Blair looked up with eyes that seemed enormous beneath the bandage Memoria had left on her forehead. "Where did you come from?" she asked politely, and then, feeling the necessity to make conversation, she added, "I hope you did not have an accident too."
"Well, rather." He had slipped on his coat while he answered, and he stood now, smooth, supple, instinct with vitality, by the side of the sofa. His parted chestnut hair had been brushed so severely that it must have hurt him, she thought, and his eyes were as bright and sparkling as if they had been left out in the rain.
"Was it a fall?" Puzzled but sympathetic, she gazed up at him.
"Not exactly. I mean it was only a stitch in my side. I got a stitch just as I was passing along the street."
"I didn't know nice people ever walked on Canal Street."
"Maybe I'm not nice, but you are. I'll wager," he concluded gaily, "that your mother doesn't know you are down here."
"Well, it's only three squares away," she answered evasively.
"And you weren't walking," he laughed, "you were skating."
She shook her head while she accepted the brandied peach in a chipped pink saucer Memoria brought to her. Of course he was laughing at her; but she had learned long ago that men only laugh over things that are not really funny. Eating the peach in very small pieces so that the taste would last longer, she remarked sympathetically, "It was a blessing, anyhow, that we were both in front of Memoria's gate."
"That it was. I couldn't have gone on until I felt better."
"What would you have done if the stitch had come sooner."
"I can't think. Dropped on the curb, perhaps, or on somebody's steps."
"There aren't many nice steps around here. Did she have to help you into the house? I don't see how she managed it."
"Oh, well, it was only in one side, you know. I could still keep going with the other."
With her eyes on the saucer, Jenny Blair swallowed the last taste of peach as slowly as possible. "I think Memoria is very kind, don't you?"
"Very. If you want to know the truth, I think Memoria is an unusually capable laundress. Isn't that what your grandfather would say?"