Bab Bab 24 · Chapter V

After Lena came To Black Hawk, I often met her downtown, where she

would be matching sewing silk or buying ‘findings’ for Mrs. Thomas. If

I happened to walk home with her, she told me all about the dresses she

was helping to make, or about what she saw and heard when she was with

Tiny Soderball at the hotel on Saturday nights.

The Boys’ Home was the best hotel on our branch of the Burlington, and

all the commercial travellers in that territory tried to get into Black

Hawk for Sunday. They used to assemble in the parlour after supper on

Saturday nights. Marshall Field’s man, Anson Kirkpatrick, played the

piano and sang all the latest sentimental songs. After Tiny had helped

the cook wash the dishes, she and Lena sat on the other side of the

double doors between the parlour and the dining-room, listening to the

music and giggling at the jokes and stories. Lena often said she hoped

I would be a travelling man when I grew up. They had a gay life of it;

nothing to do but ride about on trains all day and go to theatres when

they were in big cities. Behind the hotel there was an old store

building, where the salesmen opened their big trunks and spread out

their samples on the counters. The Black Hawk merchants went to look at

these things and order goods, and Mrs. Thomas, though she was ‘retail

trade,’ was permitted to see them and to ‘get ideas.’ They were all

generous, these travelling men; they gave Tiny Soderball handkerchiefs

and gloves and ribbons and striped stockings, and so many bottles of

perfume and cakes of scented soap that she bestowed some of them on

Lena.

One afternoon in the week before Christmas, I came upon Lena and her

funny, square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the

drugstore, gazing in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah’s Arks

arranged in the frosty show window. The boy had come to town with a

neighbour to do his Christmas shopping, for he had money of his own

this year. He was only twelve, but that winter he had got the job of

sweeping out the Norwegian church and making the fire in it every

Sunday morning. A cold job it must have been, too!

We went into Duckford’s dry-goods store, and Chris unwrapped all his

presents and showed them to me -- something for each of the six younger

than himself, even a rubber pig for the baby. Lena had given him one of

Tiny Soderball’s bottles of perfume for his mother, and he thought he

would get some handkerchiefs to go with it. They were cheap, and he

hadn’t much money left. We found a tableful of handkerchiefs spread out

for view at Duckford’s. Chris wanted those with initial letters in the

corner, because he had never seen any before. He studied them

seriously, while Lena looked over his shoulder, telling him she thought

the red letters would hold their colour best. He seemed so perplexed

that I thought perhaps he hadn’t enough money, after all. Presently he

said gravely:

‘Sister, you know mother’s name is Berthe. I don’t know if I ought to

get B for Berthe, or M for Mother.’

Lena patted his bristly head. ‘I’d get the B, Chrissy. It will please

her for you to think about her name. Nobody ever calls her by it now.’

That satisfied him. His face cleared at once, and he took three reds

and three blues. When the neighbour came in to say that it was time to

start, Lena wound Chris’s comforter about his neck and turned up his

jacket collar—he had no overcoat—and we watched him climb into the

wagon and start on his long, cold drive. As we walked together up the

windy street, Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woollen glove.

‘I get awful homesick for them, all the same,’ she murmured, as if she

were answering some remembered reproach.