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 Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Warehouse4 is by no means at its worst. The Constitutional 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 strictly5 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 picturesquely6 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 spaciousness7 of a perfect five-dollar room. He said it would more than hold their things; and it really held them.
[Pg 5]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 gilt8 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 wreck9 of a millionaire's happy home; parlor10 and kitchen utensils11 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 diminutive12 of her own name, which was Charlotte, but a generic13 name for a doll, which Tata had learned from her Italian nurse to apply to all little girls and had got applied14 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 splendor15 they naturally suggested [Pg 6]personages of princely quality, and being touched with her little forefinger16 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 enjoined17 some tall mirrors to secrecy18 with a frown and a shake of the head, ran to her, Mrs. Forsyth had forgotten why she had called her. "Oh!" she said, recollecting19, "do you know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show mamma? Can you put your hand on it?"
The child promptly20 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 caressing21 irony22 Mrs. Forsyth's order to pull out Tata's trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle23 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 linen24 [Pg 7]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 passed 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 distraction25 of their own trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread over the space 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 forth26 till she candidly27 owned that she no longer knew where anything at all was.
As she raised herself for a moment's respite28 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 vividly29 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 fixed30 on Tata. [Pg 8]Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered31 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 disposition32 of her belongings33. 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 [Pg 9]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, chattering34 constantly and taking no note of the effect with Tata. Then, as she made no response whatever to his munificence35, he began to be abashed36 and to look pathetically from her to her father.
"Oh, really, young man," Forsyth said, "we can't let you impoverish37 yourself at this rate. What have you said to your benefactor38, 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 [Pg 10]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 inspector39 of a great insurance company's agencies in Europe and South America), "and when I don't go with him it seems easier [Pg 11]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 joyfully40 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 indifference41 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 Christian42 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 [Pg 12]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 restitution43 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 mutual44 esteem45 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?"
[Pg 13]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 sobbing46 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 temperament47, 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 [Pg 14]do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose—she gets it from you."
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1
decorative
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| adj.装饰的，可作装饰的 | |
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odds
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| n.让步，机率，可能性，比率；胜败优劣之别 | |
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3
literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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4
warehouse
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| n.仓库；vt.存入仓库 | |
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5
strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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6
picturesquely
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7
spaciousness
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| n.宽敞 | |
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8
gilt
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| adj.镀金的；n.金边证券 | |
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9
wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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parlor
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| n.店铺，营业室；会客室，客厅 | |
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11
utensils
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| 器具，用具，器皿( utensil的名词复数 )； 器物 | |
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12
diminutive
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| adj.小巧可爱的，小的 | |
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13
generic
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| adj.一般的，普通的，共有的 | |
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14
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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15
splendor
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| n.光彩；壮丽，华丽；显赫，辉煌 | |
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16
forefinger
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| n.食指 | |
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17
enjoined
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| v.命令( enjoin的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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18
secrecy
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| n.秘密，保密，隐蔽 | |
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19
recollecting
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| v.记起，想起( recollect的现在分词 ) | |
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20
promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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21
caressing
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| 爱抚的，表现爱情的，亲切的 | |
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22
irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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23
tangle
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| n.纠缠；缠结；混乱；v.(使)缠绕；变乱 | |
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24
linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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25
distraction
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| n.精神涣散，精神不集中，消遣，娱乐 | |
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26
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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candidly
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| adv.坦率地，直率而诚恳地 | |
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28
respite
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| n.休息，中止，暂缓 | |
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29
vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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30
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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31
hovered
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| 鸟( hover的过去式和过去分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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32
disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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33
belongings
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| n.私人物品，私人财物 | |
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34
chattering
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| n. （机器振动发出的）咔嗒声，(鸟等)鸣，啁啾 adj. 喋喋不休的，啾啾声的 动词chatter的现在分词形式 | |
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35
munificence
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| n.宽宏大量，慷慨给与 | |
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36
abashed
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| adj.窘迫的，尴尬的v.使羞愧，使局促，使窘迫( abash的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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37
impoverish
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| vt.使穷困，使贫困 | |
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38
benefactor
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| n. 恩人，行善的人，捐助人 | |
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39
inspector
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| n.检查员，监察员，视察员 | |
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40
joyfully
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| adv. 喜悦地, 高兴地 | |
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41
indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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42
Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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43
restitution
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| n.赔偿；恢复原状 | |
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44
mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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45
esteem
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| n.尊敬，尊重；vt.尊重，敬重；把…看作 | |
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46
sobbing
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| <主方>Ⅰ adj.湿透的 | |
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47
temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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