The Daughter of the Storage: And Other Things in Prose and VerseHowells, William Dean
General
The Daughter of the Storage: And Other Things in Prose and Verse
Howells, William Dean
Poetry; Short stories
"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 diminutive of her own name, which was Charlotte,
but a generic name for a doll, which Tata had learned from her Italian
nurse to apply to all little girls and had got applied 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 splendor they naturally suggested personages of
princely quality, and being touched with her little forefinger 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 enjoined some tall mirrors to
secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran to her, Mrs. Forsyth
had forgotten why she had called her. "Oh!" she said, recollecting,
"do you know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show mamma? Can you
put your hand on it?"
The child promptly 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 caressing irony Mrs. Forsyth's order to pull out Tata's
trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle 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 linen 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 distraction 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 forth till she
candidly owned that she no longer knew where anything at all was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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