MYSTERIES OF ELEUSIS
211
with snaggled teeth and lips brown from tobacco chews. A voice like
something not human. The filthy, old gray shawl, the cold house, and
the same clothes on day and night.) 'We was scared to let her lie
down. They die when they lie down and she used to cry like a baby
wanting some rest. Well, one night everybody was out and granny
commenced to bawl. I got scared and let her lie down. She died in
my arms.'
At eight-thirty she took off her nightgown and began to put on
the new clothe..c; that had been carefully arranged the night before.
The dress was robin-egg blue, her shoes were black, short with round
toes. She was dressed now. Her gloves and hat lay on the bed, her
coat was brushed, her purse had been emptied of papers and loose
tobacco. She sat down again and regretted that it had not taken her
more time to dress. Too much waiting spoiled the sense of living. She
looked at her face in the mirror. Her hair was brown, tightly curled
on the ends. Her skin was dry and lipstick seemed to tum into a
bmwnish orange when she wore it.. For the first time, her body began
to react to the strangeness of the day. Her heart beat wildly and,
though there was still that remarkable emptiness in her head, that
sense of no thought, her muscles were becoming tense. Her eyes felt
hot and she was certain a strained expression appeared on her face.
She was terrified.
The city was now bright and active. She sat close to the window
and watched some workers in the side of a factory in view. There was
an old man hunched over a drawing board. She could see the wrinkl–
ed side of his face, his high, thin nose, and the thick gray hair that
lay flat on his head. In the window above him, a woman was at work
over a sewing machine. A bare arm held the cloth in place and the
wo~an's
head was bent over in concentration upon the sewing. The
watching girl made a deep response to the attentiveness displayed by
the working people. She wondered if she, at work, had ever seemed
so absorbed to, the onlooker. In everything connected with the factory
there was a sense of design which the girl intuited. First the steam,
then the lights, then the workers. At last, the end of the day and
people going home, purposefully, to various places. She was struck
by the dreadful and yet appealing calm of drudgery, the singleness
of it, and forgot her hatred of the work and routine of her life. She
remembered days and months and years of hatred at the far-away
home and her break from all that. Freedom had led her to many
furnished rooms, many glasses of liquor and many male heads beside
hers on a limp, greyish pillow. Drudgery was the payment she owed
to some nameless source, her appeal to the revenge that pursued her.
