Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/11

Rh Nor did the creatures who inhabited the basement attract him. Annie changed her guise, but not her nature. And she scarcely changed her guise. If his mother had ever had a servant in the back-street, Gilbert did not remember it. But in Garna's house one naturally had a servant, and one naturally had a Polish girl. Gilbert did not at first understand what Annie was doing in the kitchen, this queer, whitish young woman with many skirts and vast breasts, who gave a sort of growl-smile when you spoke to her, and always started incontinently, with alacrity, to do something without knowing what it was. Gilbert would come in from the garden into the fragrant kitchen on baking-day to look for cookies, and find his mother moving about, with her serious, anxious expression, while Annie sprawled about, cutting up potatoes, and listened to his mother's earnest expostulations. In a few months there would be another Annie; her mouth was perhaps crookeder and her hair yellower, but she would plunge clumsily about in the same old way, and would take up her education not where the other Annie had left off, but precisely in that brutish ignorance where she had begun. To Gilbert's mother, the living and successive tissue of Annie became the absorption of life, but Gilbert was not absorbed in Annies. They were not pretty, and they had a stale odor which Gilbert avoided when he could. He associated the unpleasantness of this strong, docile creature, relapsed in each transformation to her original brutish ignorance, with the whole unpleasantness of that downstairs floor, the dining-room which remained always the same, whose dull squalor nobody ever did anything to take away, for which Gilbert could not do anything, and for which perhaps nothing could be done.

Upstairs, Gilbert liked Garna's house better. The front parlor was a vast and cavernous room, the mysteries of which Gilbert penetrated only slowly. The back parlor was much more comprehensible. Here the sun shone in, and people sat and lived. When you entered the front parlor, you involuntarily lowered your voice, and you moved around subdued, as if someone had died there. Garna never opened the windows, and the shutters of the bay which looked towards the east were always kept tightly closed. But in the back parlor on bright winter days you sent the shade flying up to the top, and let the sun stream in over the floor all the way to the monster of a horsehair-covered sofa which stretched along the wall.

Horsehair made you feel almost as puckery as matting to touch it,