Ellen was sitting beside her father on a bench at the Battery. She was looking at her new brown button shoes. A glint of sunlight caught on the toes and on each of the little round buttons when she swung her feet out from under the shadow of her dress.
“Think how it’d be,” Ed Thatcher was saying, “to go abroad on one of those liners. Imagine crossing the great Atlantic in seven days.”
“But daddy what do people do all that time on a boat?”
“I dunno … I suppose they walk round the deck and play cards and read and all that sort of thing. Then they have dances.”
“Dances on a boat! I should think it’d be awful tippy.” Ellen giggled.
“On the big modern liners they do.”
“Daddy why dont we go?”
“Maybe we will some day if I can save up the money.”
“Oh daddy do hurry up an save a lot of money. Alice Vaughan’s mother an father go to the White Mountains every summer, but next summer they’re going abroad.”
Ed Thatcher looked out across the bay that stretched in blue sparkling reaches into the brown haze towards the Narrows. The statue of Liberty stood up vague as a sleepwalker among the curling smoke of tugboats and the masts of schooners and the blunt lumbering masses of brickbarges and sandscows. Here and there the glary sun shone out white on a sail or on the superstructure of a steamer. Red ferryboats shuttled back and forth.
“Daddy why arent we rich?”
“There are lots of people poorer than us Ellie. … You wouldn’t like your daddy any better if he were rich would you?”
“Oh yes I would daddy.”
Thatcher laughed. “Well it might happen someday. … How would you like the firm of Edward C. Thatcher and Co., Certified Accountants?”
Ellen jumped to her feet: “Oh look at that big boat. … That’s the boat I want to go on.”
“That there’s the Harabic,” croaked a cockney voice beside them.
“Oh is it really?” said Thatcher.
“Indeed it is, sir; as fahne a ship as syles the sea sir,” explained eagerly a frayed creakyvoiced man who sat on the bench beside them. A cap with a broken patentleather visor was pulled down over a little peaked face that exuded a faded smell of whiskey. “Yes sir, the Harabic sir.”
“Looks like a good big boat that does.”
“One of the biggest afloat sir. I syled on er many’s the tahme and on the Majestic and the Teutonic too sir, fahne ships both, though a bit light’eaded in a sea as you might say. I’ve signed as steward on the Hinman and White Star lahnes these thirty years and now in me old age they’ve lyed me hoff.”
“Oh well, we all have hard luck sometimes.”
“And some of us as it hall the tahme sir. … I’d be a appy man sir, if I could get back to the old country. This arent any plyce for an old man, it’s for the young and strong, this is.” He drew a gout-twisted hand across the bay and pointed to the statue. “Look at er, she’s alookin towards Hengland she is.”
“Daddy let’s go away. I dont like this man,” whispered Ellen tremulously in her father’s ear.
“All right we’ll go and take a look at the sealions. … Good day.”
“You couldn’t fahnd me the price of a cup o coffee, could you now sir? I’m fair foundered.” Thatcher put a dime in the grimy knobbed hand.
“But daddy, mummy said never to let people speak to you in the street an to call a policeman if they did an to run away as fast as you could on account of those horrible kidnappers.”
“No danger of their kidnapping me Ellie. That’s just for little girls.”
“When I grow up will I be able to talk to people on the street like that?”
“No deary you certainly will not.”
“If I’d been a boy could I?”
“I guess you could.”
In front of the Aquarium they stopped a minute to look down the bay. The liner with a tug puffing white smoke against either bow was abreast of them towering above the ferryboats and harborcraft. Gulls wheeled and screamed. The sun shone creamily on the upper decks and on the big yellow blackcapped funnel. From the foremast a string of little flags fluttered jauntily against the slate sky.
“And there are lots of people coming over from abroad on that boat arent there daddy?”
“Look you can see … the decks are black with people.”
Walking across Fiftythird Street from the East River Bud Korpenning found himself standing beside a pile of coal on the sidewalk. On the other side of the pile of coal a grayhaired woman in a flounced lace shirtwaist with a big pink cameo poised on the curve of her high bosom was looking at his stubbly chin and at the wrists that hung raw below the frayed sleeves of his coat. Then he heard himself speak:
“Dont spose I could take that load of coal in back for you ma’am?” Bud shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“That’s just what you could do,” the woman said in a cracked voice. “That wretched coal man left it this morning and said he’d be back to bring it in. I suppose he’s drunk like the rest of them. I wonder if I can trust you in the house.”
“I’m from upstate ma’am,” stammered Bud.
“From where?”
“From Cooperstown.”
“Hum. … I’m from Buffalo. This is certainly the city for
