The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories
Mrs. Sommers after that did not move in the direction of the bargain
counter. She took the elevator, which carried her to an upper floor
into the region of the ladies’ waiting-rooms. Here, in a retired
corner, she exchanged her cotton stockings for the new silk ones which
she had just bought. She was not going through any acute mental process
or reasoning with herself, nor was she striving to explain to her
satisfaction the motive of her action. She was not thinking at all. She
seemed for the time to be taking a rest from that laborious and
fatiguing function and to have abandoned herself to some mechanical
impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility.
How good was the touch of the raw silk to her flesh! She felt like
lying back in the cushioned chair and reveling for a while in the
luxury of it. She did for a little while. Then she replaced her shoes,
rolled the cotton stockings together and thrust them into her bag.
After doing this she crossed straight over to the shoe department and
took her seat to be fitted.
She was fastidious. The clerk could not make her out; he could not
reconcile her shoes with her stockings, and she was not too easily
pleased. She held back her skirts and turned her feet one way and her
head another way as she glanced down at the polished, pointed-tipped
boots. Her foot and ankle looked very pretty. She could not realize
that they belonged to her and were a part of herself. She wanted an
excellent and stylish fit, she told the young fellow who served her,
and she did not mind the difference of a dollar or two more in the
price so long as she got what she desired.
It was a long time since Mrs. Sommers had been fitted with gloves. On
rare occasions when she had bought a pair they were always “bargains,”
so cheap that it would have been preposterous and unreasonable to have
expected them to be fitted to the hand.
Now she rested her elbow on the cushion of the glove counter, and a
pretty, pleasant young creature, delicate and deft of touch, drew a
long-wristed “kid” over Mrs. Sommers’s hand. She smoothed it down over
the wrist and buttoned it neatly, and both lost themselves for a second
or two in admiring contemplation of the little symmetrical gloved hand.
But there were other places where money might be spent.
There were books and magazines piled up in the window of a stall a few
paces down the street. Mrs. Sommers bought two high-priced magazines
such as she had been accustomed to read in the days when she had been
accustomed to other pleasant things. She carried them without wrapping.
As well as she could she lifted her skirts at the crossings. Her
stockings and boots and well fitting gloves had worked marvels in her
bearing—had given her a feeling of assurance, a sense of belonging to
the well-dressed multitude.
She was very hungry. Another time she would have stilled the cravings
for food until reaching her own home, where she would have brewed
herself a cup of tea and taken a snack of anything that was available.
But the impulse that was guiding her would not suffer her to entertain
any such thought.
There was a restaurant at the corner. She had never entered its doors;
from the outside she had sometimes caught glimpses of spotless damask
and shining crystal, and soft-stepping waiters serving people of
fashion.
When she entered her appearance created no surprise, no consternation,
as she had half feared it might. She seated herself at a small table
alone, and an attentive waiter at once approached to take her order.
She did not want a profusion; she craved a nice and tasty bite—a half
dozen blue-points, a plump chop with cress, a something sweet—a
crème-frappée, for instance; a glass of Rhine wine, and after all a
small cup of black coffee.
While waiting to be served she removed her gloves very leisurely and
laid them beside her. Then she picked up a magazine and glanced through
it, cutting the pages with a blunt edge of her knife. It was all very
agreeable. The damask was even more spotless than it had seemed through
the window, and the crystal more sparkling. There were quiet ladies and
gentlemen, who did not notice her, lunching at the small tables like
her own. A soft, pleasing strain of music could be heard, and a gentle
breeze was blowing through the window. She tasted a bite, and she read
a word or two, and she sipped the amber wine and wiggled her toes in
the silk stockings. The price of it made no difference. She counted the
money out to the waiter and left an extra coin on his tray, whereupon
he bowed before her as before a princess of royal blood.
There was still money in her purse, and her next temptation presented
itself in the shape of a matinee poster.
It was a little later when she entered the theatre, the play had begun
and the house seemed to her to be packed. But there were vacant seats
here and there, and into one of them she was ushered, between
brilliantly dressed women who had gone there to kill time and eat candy
and display their gaudy attire. There were many others who were there
solely for the play and acting. It is safe to say there was no one
present who bore quite the attitude which Mrs. Sommers did to her
surroundings. She gathered in the whole—stage and players and people in
one wide impression, and absorbed it and enjoyed it. She laughed at the
comedy and wept—she and the gaudy woman next to her wept over the
tragedy. And they talked a little together over it. And the gaudy woman
wiped her eyes and sniffled on a tiny square of filmy, perfumed lace
and passed little Mrs. Sommers her box of candy.
The play was over, the music ceased, the crowd filed out. It was like a
dream ended. People scattered in all directions. Mrs. Sommers went to
the corner and waited for the cable car.
A man with keen eyes, who sat opposite to her, seemed to like the study
of her small, pale face. It puzzled him to decipher what he saw there.
In truth, he saw nothing—unless he were wizard enough to detect a
poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop
anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.
THE LOCKET
I
One night in autumn a few men were gathered about a fire on the slope
of a hill. They belonged to a small detachment of Confederate forces
and were awaiting orders to march. Their gray uniforms were worn beyond
the point of shabbiness. One of the men was heating something in a tin
cup over the embers. Two were lying at full length a little distance
away, while a fourth was trying to decipher a letter and had drawn
close to the light. He had unfastened his collar and a good bit of his
flannel shirt front.
“What’s that you got around your neck, Ned?” asked one of the men lying
in the obscurity.
Ned—or Edmond—mechanically fastened another button of his shirt and did
not reply. He went on reading his letter.
“Is it your sweet heart’s picture?”
“’Taint no gal’s picture,” offered the man at the fire. He had removed
his tin cup and was engaged in stirring its grimy contents with a small
stick. “That’s a charm; some kind of hoodoo business that one o’ them
priests gave him to keep him out o’ trouble. I know them Cath’lics.
That’s how come Frenchy got permoted an never got a scratch sence he’s
been in the ranks. Hey, French! aint I right?” Edmond looked up
absently from his letter.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Aint that a charm you got round your neck?”
“It must be, Nick,” returned Edmond with a smile. “I don’t know how I
could have gone through this year and a half without it.”
The letter had made Edmond heart sick and home sick. He stretched
himself on his back and looked straight up at the blinking stars. But
he was not thinking of them nor of anything but a certain spring day
when the bees were humming in the clematis; when a girl was saying good
bye to him. He could see her as she unclasped from her neck the locket
which she fastened about his own. It was an old fashioned golden locket
bearing miniatures of her father and mother with their names and the
date of their marriage. It was her most precious earthly possession.
Edmond could feel again the folds of the girl’s soft white gown, and
see the droop of the angel-sleeves as she circled her fair arms about
his neck. Her sweet face, appealing, pathetic, tormented by the pain of
parting, appeared before him as vividly as life. He turned over,
burying his face in his arm and there he lay, still and motionless.
The profound and treacherous night with its silence and semblance of
peace settled upon the camp. He dreamed that the fair Octavie brought
him a letter. He had no chair to offer her and was pained and
embarrassed at the condition of his garments. He was ashamed of the
poor food which comprised the dinner at which he begged her to join
them.
He dreamt of a serpent coiling around his throat, and when he strove to
grasp it the slimy thing glided away from his clutch. Then his dream
was clamor.
“Git your duds! you! Frenchy!” Nick was bellowing in his face. There
was what appeared to be a scramble and a rush rather than any regulated
movement. The hill side was alive with clatter and motion; with sudden
up-springing lights among the pines. In the east the dawn was unfolding
out of the darkness. Its glimmer was yet dim in the plain below.
“What’s it all about?” wondered a big black bird perched in the top of
the tallest tree. He was an old solitary and a wise one, yet he was not
wise enough to guess what it was all about. So all day long he kept
blinking and wondering.
The noise reached far out over the plain and across the hills and awoke
the little babes that were sleeping in their cradles. The smoke curled
up toward the sun and shadowed the plain so that the stupid birds
thought it was going to rain; but the wise one knew better.
“They are children playing a game,” thought he. “I shall know more
about it if I watch long enough.”
At the approach of night they had all vanished away with their din and
smoke. Then the old bird plumed his feathers. At last he had
understood! With a flap of his great, black wings he shot downward,
circling toward the plain.
A man was picking his way across the plain. He was dressed in the garb
of a clergyman. His mission was to administer the consolations of
religion to any of the prostrate figures in whom there might yet linger
a spark of life. A negro accompanied him, bearing a bucket of water and
a flask of wine.
There were no wounded here; they had been borne away. But the retreat
had been hurried and the vultures and the good Samaritans would have to
look to the dead.
There was a soldier—a mere boy—lying with his face to the sky. His
hands were clutching the sward on either side and his finger nails were
stuffed with earth and bits of grass that he had gathered in his
despairing grasp upon life. His musket was gone; he was hatless and his
face and clothing were begrimed. Around his neck hung a gold chain and
locket. The priest, bending over him, unclasped the chain and removed
it from the dead soldier’s neck. He had grown used to the terrors of
war and could face them unflinchingly; but its pathos, someway, always
brought the tears to his old, dim eyes.
The angelus was ringing half a mile away. The priest and the negro
knelt and murmured together the evening benediction and a prayer for
the dead.
II
The peace and beauty of a spring day had descended upon the earth like
a benediction. Along the leafy road which skirted a narrow, tortuous
stream in central Louisiana, rumbled an old fashioned cabriolet, much
the worse for hard and rough usage over country roads and lanes. The
fat, black horses went in a slow, measured trot, notwithstanding
constant urging on the part of the fat, black coachman. Within the