The Portion of Labor. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
ma'am; I guess I don't want her to-night,” Ellen had replied, with a little break in her voice. Now, when she reached the doll, she gathered her up in her little arms, and groped her way with her into the closet. She hugged the doll, and kissed her wildly, then she shook her. “You have been naughty,” she whispered—“yes, you have, dreadful naughty. No, don't you talk to me; you have been naughty. What right had you to be livin' with rich folks, and wearin' such fine things, when other children don't have anything. What right had that little boy that was your mother before I was, and that rich lady that gave you to me? They had ought to be put in the closet, too. God had ought to put them all in the closet, the way I'm goin' to put you. Don't you say a word; you needn't cry; you've been dreadful naughty.”
Ellen set the doll, face to the wall, in the corner of the closet, and left her there. Then she crept back into bed, and lay there crying over her precious baby shivering in her thin night-gown all alone in the dark closet. But she was firm in keeping her there, since, with that strange, involuntary grasp of symbolism which has always been maintained by the baby-fingers of humanity for the satisfying of needs beyond resources and the solving of problems outside knowledge, she had a conviction that she was, in such fashion, righting wrong and punishing evil. But she wept over the poor doll until she fell asleep.
Chapter X
When Ellen woke the next morning she had a curious feeling, as if she were blinded by the glare of many hitherto unsuspected windows opening into the greatness outside the little world, just large enough to contain them, in which she had dwelt all her life with her parents, her aunt, her grandmother, and her doll. She tried to adjust herself to her old point of view with her simple childish recognition of the most primitive facts as a basis for dreams, but she remembered what Mr. Atkins, who coughed so dreadfully, had said the night before; she remembered what the young man with the bulging forehead, who frightened her terribly, had said; she remembered the gloomy look in her father's face, the misery in her aunt Eva's; and she remembered her doll in the closet—and either everything was different or had a different light upon it. In reality Ellen's evening in the sound and sight of that current of rebellion against the odds of life which has taken the poor off their foot hold of understanding since the beginning of the world had aged her. She had lost something out of her childhood. She dreaded to go down-stairs; she had a feeling of shamefacedness struggling within her; she was afraid that her father and mother would look at her sharply, then look again, and ask her what the matter was, and she would not know what to say. When she went down, and backed about for her mother to fasten her little frock as was her wont, she was careful to keep her face turned away; but Fanny caught her up and kissed her in her usual way, and then her aunt Eva sung out to know if she wanted to go on a sleigh-ride, and had she seen the snow; and then her father came in and that look of last night had gone from his face, and Ellen was her old self again until she was alone by herself and remembered.
Fanny and Andrew and Eva had agreed to say nothing before the child about the shutting-up of Lloyd's, and their troubles in consequence. “She heard too much last night,” Andrew said; “there's no use in her botherin' her little head with it. I guess that baby won't suffer.”
“She's jest the child to fret herself most to pieces thinkin' we were awful poor, and she would starve or somethin',” Fanny said.
“Well, she sha'n't be worried if I can help it, no matter what happens to me,” Eva said.
After breakfast that morning Eva went to work on a little dress of Ellen's. When Fanny told her not to spend her time over that, when she had so much sewing of her own to do, Eva replied with a gay, hard laugh, that she guessed she'd wait and finish her weddin'-fix when she was goin' to be married.
“Eva Loud, you ain't goin' to be so silly as to put off your weddin',” Fanny cried out.
“I dunno as I've put it off; I dunno as I want to get married, anyhow,” Eva said, still laughing. “I dunno, but I'd rather be old maid aunt to Ellen.”
“Eva Loud,” cried her sister; “do you know what you are doin'?”
“Pretty well, I reckon,” said Eva.
“Do you know that if you put off Jim Tenny, and he not likin' it, ten chances to one Aggie Bemis will get hold of him again?”
“Well,” said Eva, “let her. I won't have been the one to drag him into misery, anyhow.”
“Well, if you can feel that way,” Fanny returned, looking at her sister with a sort of mixed admiration and pity.
“I can. I tell you what 'tis, Fanny. When I look at Jim, handsome and head up in the air, and think how he'd look all bowed down, hair turnin' gray, and not carin' whether he's shaved and has on a clean shirt or not, 'cause he's got loaded down with debt, and the grocery-man and the butcher after him, and no work, and me and the children draggin' him down, I can bear anything. If another girl wants to do it, she must, though I'd like to kill her when I think of it. I can't do it, because—I think too much of him.”
“He might lose his work after he was married, you know.”
“Well, I suppose we'd have to run the risk of that; but I'm goin' to start fair or not at all.”
“Well, maybe he'll get work,” Fanny said.
“He won't,” said Eva. She began to sing “Nancy Lee” over Ellen's dress.
After breakfast Ellen begged a piece of old brown calico of her mother. “Why, of course you can have it, child,” said her mother; “but what on earth do you want it for? I was goin' to put it in the rag-bag.”
“I want to make my dolly a dress.”
“Why, that ain't fit for your dolly's dress. Only think how queer that beautiful doll would look in a dress made of that. Why, you 'ain't thought anything but silk and satin was good enough for her.”
“I'll give you a piece of my new blue silk to make your doll a dress,” said Eva.
But Ellen persisted. When the doll came out of her closet of vicarious penance she was arrayed like a very scullion among dolls, in the remnant of the dress in which Fanny Brewster had done her house-work all summer.
“There,” Ellen told the doll, when her mother did not hear “you look more like the way you ought to, and you ought to be happy, and not ever think you wish you had your silk dress on. Think of all the poor children who never have any silk dresses, or any dresses at all—nothing except their cloth bodies in the coldest weather. You ought to be thankful to have this.” For all which good advice and philosophy the little mother of the doll would often look at the discarded beauty of the wardrobe, with tears in her eyes and fondest pity in her heart; but she never flinched. When the young man Nahum Beals came in, as he often did of an evening, and raised his voice in fierce denunciation against the luxury and extravagance of the rich, Ellen would listen and consider that he would undoubtedly approve of what she had done, did he know, and would allow that she had made her small effort towards righting things.
“Only think what Mr. Beals would say if he saw you in your silk dress; why, I don't know but he would throw you out of the window,” she told her doll once.
Ellen did not feel any difference in her way of living after her father was out of work. “She ain't goin' to be stented in one single thing; remember that,” Andrew told Fanny, with angry emphasis. “That little, delicate thing is goin' to have everything she needs, if I spend every cent I've saved and mortgage the place.”
“Oh, you'll get work before it comes to that,” Fanny said, consolingly.
“Whether I do or not, it sha'n't make any difference,” declared Andrew. “I'm goin' to hire a horse and sleigh and take her sleigh-ridin' this afternoon. It'll be good, and she's been talkin' about a sleigh-ride ever since snow flew.”
“She could