The Uncalled

I

It was about six o’clock of a winter’s morning. In the eastern sky faint streaks of grey had come and were succeeded by flashes of red, crimson-cloaked heralds of the coming day. It had snowed the day before, but a warm wind had sprung up during the night, and the snow had partially melted, leaving the earth showing through in ugly patches of yellow clay and sooty mud. Half despoiled of their white mantle, though with enough of it left to stand out in bold contrast to the bare places, the houses loomed up, black, dripping, and hideous. Every once in a while the wind caught the water as it trickled from the eaves, and sent it flying abroad in a chill unsparkling spray. The morning came in, cold, damp, and dismal.

At the end of a short, dirty street in the meanest part of the small Ohio town of Dexter stood a house more sagging and dilapidated in appearance than its disreputable fellows. From the foundation the walls converged to the roof, which seemed to hold its place less by virtue of nails and rafters than by faith. The whole aspect of the dwelling, if dwelling it could be called, was as if, conscious of its own meanness, it was shrinking away from its neighbours and into itself. A sickly light gleamed from one of the windows. As the dawn came into the sky, a woman came to the door and looked out. She was a slim woman, and her straggling, dusty-coloured hair hung about an unpleasant sallow face. She shaded her eyes with her hand, as if the faint light could hurt those cold, steel-grey orbs. “It’s mornin’,” she said to those within. “I’ll have to be goin’ along to git my man’s breakfast: he goes to work at six o’clock, and I ain’t got a thing cooked in the house fur him. Some o’ the rest o’ you’ll have to stay an’ lay her out.” She went back in and closed the door behind her.

“La, Mis’ Warren, you ain’t a-goin’ a’ready? Why, there’s everything to be done here yit: Margar’t’s to be laid out, an’ this house has to be put into some kind of order before the undertaker comes.”

“I should like to know what else I’m a-goin’ to do, Mis’ Austin. Charity begins at home. My man’s got to go to work, an’ he’s got to have his breakfast: there’s cares fur the livin’ as well as fur the dead, I say, an’ I don’t believe in tryin’ to be so good to them that’s gone that you furgit them that’s with you.”

Mrs. Austin pinched up her shrivelled face a bit more as she replied, “Well, somebody ought to stay. I know I can’t, fur I’ve got a ter’ble big washin’ waitin’ fur me at home, an’ it’s been two nights sence I’ve had any sleep to speak of, watchin’ here. I’m purty near broke down.”

“That’s jest what I’ve been a-sayin’,” repeated Mrs. Warren. “There’s cares fur the livin’ as well as fur the dead; you’d ought to take care o’ yoreself: first thing you know you’ll be flat o’ yore own back.”

A few other women joined their voices in the general protest against staying. It was for all the world as if they had been anxious to see the poor woman out of the world, and, now that they knew her to be gone, had no further concern for her. All had some thing to do, either husbands to get off to work or labours of their own to perform.

A little woman with a weak voice finally changed the current of talk by saying, “Well, I guess I kin stay: there’s some cold things at home that my man kin git, an’ the childern’ll git off to school by themselves. They’ll all understand.”

“That’s right, Melissy Davis,” said a hard-faced woman who had gone on about some work she was doing, without taking any notice of the clamorous deserters, “an’ I’ll stay with you. I guess I’ve got about as much work to do as any of you,” she added, casting a cold glance at the women who were now wrapped up and ready to depart, “an’ I wasn’t so much of a friend of Margar’t’s as some of you, neither, but on an occasion like this I know what dooty is.” And Miss Hester Prime closed her lips in a very decided fashion.

“Oh, well, some folks is so well off in money an’ time that they kin afford to be liberal with a pore creature like Margar’t, even ef they didn’t have nothin’ to do with her before she died.”

Miss Prime’s face grew sterner as she replied, “Margar’t Brent wasn’t my kind durin’ life, an’ that I make no bones o’ sayin’ here an’ now; but when she got down on the bed of affliction I done what I could fur her along with the best of you; an’ you, Mandy Warren, that’s seen me here day in an’ day out, ought to be the last one to deny that. Furthermore, I didn’t advise her to leave her husband, as some people did, but I did put in a word an’ help her to work so’s to try to keep her straight afterwards, though it ain’t fur me to be a-braggin’ about what I done, even to offset them that didn’t do nothin’.”

This parting shot told, and Mrs. Warren flared up like a wax light. “It’s a wonder yore old tracts an’ the help you give her didn’t keep her sober sometimes.”

“Ef I couldn’t keep her sober, I wasn’t one o’ them that set an’ took part with her when she was gittin’ drunk.”

“ ’Sh! ’sh!” broke in Mrs. Davis: “ef I was you two I wouldn’t go on that way. Margar’t’s dead an’ gone now, an’ what’s past is past. Pore soul, she had a hard enough time almost to drive her to destruction; but it’s all over now, an’ we ought to put her away as peaceful as possible.”

The women who had all been in such a hurry had waited at the prospect of an altercation, but, seeing it about to blow over, they bethought themselves of their neglected homes and husbands, and passed out behind the still irate Mrs. Warren, who paused long enough in earshot to say, “I hope that spiteful old maid’ll have her hands full.”

The scene within the room which the women had just left was anything but an inviting one. The place was miserably dirty. Margaret had never been a particularly neat housewife, even in her well days. The old rag carpet which disfigured the floor was worn into shreds and blotched with grease, for the chamber was cooking—and dining—as well as sleeping-room. A stove, red with rust, struggled to send forth some heat. The oily black kerosene lamp showed a sickly yellow flame through the grimy chimney.

On a pallet in one corner lay a child sleeping. On the bed, covered with a dingy sheet, lay the stark form out of which the miserable life had so lately passed.

The women opened the blinds, blew out the light, and began performing the necessary duties for the dead.

“Anyhow, let her body go clean before her Maker,” said Miss Hester Prime, severely.

“Don’t be too hard on the pore soul, Miss Hester,” returned Mrs. Davis. “She had a hard time of it. I knowed Margar’t when she wasn’t so low down as in her last days.”

“She oughtn’t never to ’a’ left her husband.”

“Oh, ef you’d ’a’ knowed him as I did, Miss Hester, you wouldn’t never say that. He was a brute: sich beatin’s as he used to give her when he was in liquor you never heerd tell of.”

“That was hard, but as long as he was a husband he was a protection to her name.”

“True enough. Protection is a good dish, but a beatin’s a purty bitter sauce to take with it.”

“I wonder what’s ever become of Brent.”

“Lord knows. No one ain’t heerd hide ner hair o’ him sence he went away from town. People thought that he was a-hangin’ around tryin’ to git a chance to kill Mag after she got her divorce from him, but all at once he packed off without sayin’ a word to anybody. I guess he’s drunk himself to death by this time.”

When they had finished with Margaret, the women set to work to clean up the house. The city physician who had attended the dead woman in her last hours had reported the case for county burial, and the undertaker was momentarily expected.

“We’ll have to git the child up an’ git his pallet out of the way, so the floor kin be swept.”

“A body hates to wake the pore little motherless dear.”

“Perhaps, after all, the child is better off without her example.”

“Yes, Miss Hester, perhaps; but a mother, after all, is a mother.”

“Even sich a one as this?”

“Even sich a one as this.”

Mrs. Davis bent over the child, and was about to lift him, when he stirred, opened his eyes, and sat up of his own accord. He appeared about five years of age. He might have been a handsome child, but hardship and poor feeding had taken away his infantile plumpness, and he looked old and haggard, even beneath the grime on his face. The kindly woman lifted him up and began to dress him.

“I want my mamma,” said the child.

Neither of the women answered: there was something tugging at their heartstrings that killed speech.

Finally the little woman said, “I don’t know ef we did right to let him sleep through it all, but then it was sich a horrible death.”

When she had finished dressing the child, she led him to the bed and showed him his mother’s face. He touched it with his little grimy finger, and then, as if, young as he was, the realization of his bereavement had fully come to him, he burst into tears.

Miss Hester turned her face away, but Mrs. Davis did not try to conceal her tears. She took the boy up in her arms and comforted him the best she could.

“Don’t cry, Freddie,” she said; “don’t cry; mamma’s—restin’. Ef you don’t care, Miss Prime, I’ll take him over home an’ give him some breakfast, an’ leave him with my oldest girl, Sophy. She kin stay out o’ school today. I’ll bring you back a cup o’ tea, too; that is, ef you ain’t afeared—”

“Afeared o’ what?” exclaimed Miss Prime, turning on her.

“Well, you know, Miss Hester, bein’ left alone—ah—some people air funny about—”

“I’m no fool, Melissy Davis. Take the child an’ go on.”

Miss Hester was glad of the chance to be sharp. It covered the weakness to which she had almost given way at sight of the child’s grief. She bustled on about her work when Mrs. Davis was gone, but her brow was knit into a wrinkle of deep thought. “A mother is a mother, after all,” she mused aloud, “even sich a one.”