Three Women

$By$ E. Nesbit

HE had a hard face rather like a hen’s, and that indescribable air of being a competent lodging-house keeper which marks the bust of the Empress Faustina. Her skirt, obviously ready-made, was a little too long behind, a little too short in front, and disclosed buttoned boots of an aggressive cut. These boots, one felt, could trample on anything, and would. She had a fur hat with a large, defiant feather, a jacket trimmed with dyed rabbit, black gloves, and a cotton umbrella with a gilt-hooked handle.

She swung into the waiting room, walking with that strut which suggests that the walker is not merely bifurcate like ordinary human beings, but has its legs stuck on at the corners of the trunk, like a table or a wooden horse. Her violet dress, black-braided, contrasted unpleasingly with the yellow varnished seat as she sat down and arranged her belongings beside her. A strapped basket, two brown paper bags, a newspaper parcel, and Ellaline’s Weekly Haporth of Real Romance, a pestilent print, combining hints on dressmaking with the history of the New Pamela. The belongings spread themselves as she rearranged their contents till half the seat was littered with them.

The woman at the other end of the seat moved a little as she remolded her handkerchief in her thin, red hand, seeking for a dry part. Her eyelids were red as well as her hands. And her dress was of the cheapest black. There was time-honored crape, brown and a little dusty, on her ugly bonnet. Her eyes were pale and gray. Her face was pale and her lips, too, that trembled. Only the eyelids and the hands were red. The rest was black and white.

When she moved, the other woman swept her property nearer to her with a gesture indescribably insulting. If you had seen her you would have wanted to say:

“She wasn’t going to touch your wretched paper bags and things, Mrs. Faustina.”

You would not have said it, maybe, and you would have been right, for the pale woman did not notice, did not mind, She had something else to think about, perhaps. Outside, the rain was falling straight*and steady; perhaps she was thinking of that. She looked once at the leaden-colored square of sky that the window framed, and shivered.

If she had stood up she could have seen the white stones of the cemetery through a curtain of gray rain. There the two sat, each alone.

The third woman who entered was not alone. She held in her arms a little baby. The third woman was very young, thickset, short, with the eyes of a frightened deer and the face of a florid rabbit. She was dressed as servant girls dress on their days out, in a hot brown costume and the most unbecoming blue hat in Europe. She sat down opposite the other two, and frankly suckled the child.

Faustina turned her full eyes from the indelicate spectacle. The pale woman watched as though she did not want to watch. It is not manners to stare, but there are things stronger than manners.

The three women sat in silence till the child, satisfied, sighed and slept. Then the mother adjusted its cloak. Her coarse, foolish face, bent over the baby, took on for an instant that beauty which comes to women’s faces thus inclined. She raised the child from her knee, kissed it, stood up with it.

Then for the first time she looked directly at each of the other women, looked from one to the other, as if appraising, comparing values. Her decision was soon made. Perhaps she saw only that Faustina’s clothes had cost more money than the other woman’s, that Faustina was at least well nourished, in her sphere obviously prosperous. At any rate it was toward Faustina that she advanced,

“You might hold him a minute,” said, “while I get me ticket.”

“I don’t mind,” said Faustina, too surprised to refuse.

The sleeping child changed hands, and the mother walked away on large boots that creaked. She looked in through the window a moment later; the baby was lying in Faustina’s lap. And that was the last that either of the other women saw of her. For the minutes went by, and she did not return.

Faustina rose as the whistle of the down train sounded.

“She’s a long time over that ticket,” she, said aloud, yet not to the other woman, and went to the window, the baby in her arms.

The down train was in, on the other side of the station.

Suddenly Faustina turned with a fierce cry.

“She’s bolted,” she cried. “I see her blue hat get into that train. It’s a fair do. Here, take the child.”

She thrust the baby into the hands of the woman in black, and rushed from the waiting room, tore along the platform, and over the bridge, just as the up train steamed in to the platform she had left, and the down train steamed out from the platform at which she had arrived too late. The down train bore with it the blue-hatted mother, successful in flight.

“Wait till the up train’s gone,” said the station master, whom Faustina furiously importuned. “Can’t attend to you till that’s gone.”

When it had gone, Faustina, voluble and fierce, led the station master to the waiting room, where the baby had been given her to hold.

“As fair a plant as I could wish to see,” she said. “A nice set out, I don’t think. Well, you can send the child to the union, I suppose, and set the police onto the mother—nasty, low hussy—pawning off her brat on a respectable married woman. It’s in here, sir; you just see.”

But there was nothing to see save the empty waiting room and Faustina’s littered luggage.

And in a corner of a third-class carriage of that opportune up train, a woman in black, with red eyes and thin hands, clasped closely, delicately, passionately, a little, stolen baby. It is quite easy to become a thief, all in a moment, without meaning to, if only you want a thing badly enough. And this that she had stolen, no one else had wanted it, not even the mother who had borne it, in fear and shame and wretched secrecy.

The rain was still falling. The woman looked out of the carriage window, and now she saw the bleak acres of gravestones and graves, newly filled, not marked with any stone.

“Perhaps he doesn’t feel it,” she told herself; “perhaps it’s not really cold in the grave when once you're covered up with earth.” But she shivered all the same.

Then she pressed the little, warm, sleeping shape up under her chin and thrilled to the soft touch of it.

“Oh, you dear! You dear! I’m glad I didn’t let Emma have the cot blankets,” she said.