American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American -- Periodicals
Glossy-haired women jostled her with their baskets. Taller by a head,
Nell pushed her way oblivious of the crowd. At the corner she paused.
"I ain't going to be early." A clock across the avenue, visible
beneath the reverberating ironwork of the elevated, seemed to have
stopped at the half hour. It was four thirty. She watched the long
hand until it moved jerkily. A policeman, half dragging a shrieking
woman and followed by a jostling, silent crowd, swept Great Taylor
aside and put in a call for the wagon.
She hurriedly rounded the corner and passed a window that displayed a
pyramid of varnished kegs backed by a mirror with a ram's head painted
on it in colours. Beyond was the side entrance. Over the door hung a
glass sign, one word in large red letters: "DANCING." She caught the
odour of cheap wine and stale beer. Again she said, "I ain't going to
be early," and moved away aimlessly.
Beyond the end of this building was a vacant lot and Great Taylor
moved more swiftly with head averted. She had passed nearly to the
next building before she stopped and wheeled around defiantly. "I
ain't afraid to look," she said to herself and gazed across at Grit's
junk-cart, with its string of bells, partly concealed back against the
fence. It was standing in the shadow, silent, unmanned. She walked on
for a few steps and turned again. The cart was standing as before,
silent, unmanned. She stood there, hands on her hips, trying to
visualize Grit drooping over the handle--his collarless neck, his
grimy face and baggy breeches; but her imagination would not paint the
picture. "Grit's gone for good," she said. "Why couldn't he been clean
like other people, like the man that owns the Garden? No excuse for
being dirty and always tired like that. Anybody could push it and keep
clean, too--half clean, anyway." She slipped a glance at the clock. It
stood at twenty minutes before the hour of her appointment. "A baby
could push it...."
She picked her way across the vacant lot to the junk-cart and laid her
hand upon the grimy handle. The thing moved. The strings of bells set
up a familiar jingle. "Easy as a baby carriage!" And Great Taylor
laughed. The cart reached the sidewalk, bumped down over the curb and
pulling Great Taylor with it went beyond the centre of the street. She
tried to turn back but a clanging trolley car cut in between her and
the curb, a wheel of the junk-cart caught in the smooth steel track
and skidded as if it were alive with a stupid will of its own. "It
ain't so easy," she admitted. With a wrench she extracted the wheel,
narrowly avoided an elevated post and crashed head on into a
push-cart, laden with green bananas resting on straw. An Italian swore
in two languages and separated the locked wheels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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