Short Stories E-Book

Kate Chopin

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 84

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Einige Kurzgeschichten von Kate Chopin im englischem Original / Some Short Stories by Kate Chopin

Leseprobe

Table Of Contents

A December Day in DixieA Little Free-MulattoA Shameful AffairA Morning WalkA Little Country GirlA Family AffairThe UnexpectedCopyright

A December Day in Dixie

The train was an hour and a half late. I failed to hear any complaints on that score from the few passengers who disembarked with me at Cypress Junction at 6:30 a.m. and confronted an icy blast that would better have stayed where it came from. But there was Emile Sautier’s saloon just across the tracks, flaunting an alluring sign that offered to hungry wayfarers ham and eggs, fried chicken, oysters and delicious coffee at any hour.

Emile’s young wife was as fat and dirty as a little pig that has slept over time in an untidy sty. Possibly she had slept under the stove; the night must have been cold. She told us Emile had come home “boozy” the night before from town. She told it before his very face and he never said a word – only went ahead pouring coal-oil on the fire that wouldn’t burn. She wore over her calico dress a heavy cloth jacket with huge pearl buttons and enormous puffed sleeves, and a tattered black-white “nubia” twined about her head and shoulders as if she were contemplating a morning walk. It is impossible for me to know what her intentions were. She stood in the doorway with her little dirty, fat, ring-bedecked hands against the frame, seeming to guard the approach to an adjacent apartment in which there was a cooking stove, a bed and other articles of domestic convenience.

“Yas, he come home boozy, Emile, he don’ care, him; dat’s nuttin to him w’at happen’.”

In his indifference to fate, the youth had lost an eye, a summer or two ago, and now he was saving no coal-oil for the lamps.

We were clamoring for coffee. Any one of us was willing to forego the fried chicken, that was huddled outside under a slanting, icy board; or the oysters, that had never got off the train; or the ham that was grunting beneath the house; or the eggs, which were possibly out where the chicken was; but we did want coffee.

Emile made us plenty of it, black as ink, since no one cared for the condensed milk which he offered with the sugar.

We could hear the chattering of a cherub in the next room where the bed and cook stove were. And when the piggish little mother went in to dress it, what delicious prattle of Cadian French! what gurgling and suppressed laughter! One of my companions – there were three of us, two Natchitoches men and myself – one of them related an extraordinary experience which the infant had endured a month or two before. He had fallen into an old unused cistern a great distance from the house. In falling through the arms by some protecting limbs, and thus insecurely sustained he had called and wailed for two hours before help came.

“Yas,” said his mother who had come back into the room, “’is face was black like de stove w’en we fine ‘im. An’ de cistern was all fill’ up wid lizard’ an’ snake’. It was one big snake all curl’ up on de udder en’ de branch, lookin’ at ‘im de whole time.” His little swarthy, rosy moon-face beamed cheerfully at us from over his mother’s shoulder, and his black eyes glittered like a squirrel’s. I wondered how he had lived through those two hours of suffering and terror. But the little children’s world is so unreal, that no doubt it is often difficult for them to distinguish between the life of the imagination and of reality.

The earth was covered with two inches of snow, as white, as dazzling, as soft as northern snow and a hundred times more beautiful. Snow upon and beneath the moss-draped branches of the forests; snow along the bayou’s edges, powdering the low, pointed, thick palmetto growths; white snow and the fields and fields of white cotton bursting from dry bolls. The Natchitoches train sped leisurely through the white, still country, and I longed for some companion to sit beside me who would feel the marvelous and strange beauty of the scene as I did. My neighbor was a gentlemen of too practical a turn.

“Oh! the cotton and the snow!” I almost screamed as the first vision of a white cotton field appeared.

“Yes, the lazy rascals; won’t pick a lock of it; cotton at 4 cts, what’s the use they say.”

“What’s the use,” I agreed. How cold and inky black the negroes looked, standing in the white patches.

“Cotton’s in the fields all along here and down through the bayou Natchez country.”

“Oh! it isn’t earthly – it’s Fairyland!”

“Don’t know what the planters are going to do, unless they turn half the land into pasture and start raising cattle. What you going to do with that Cane river plantation of yours?”

“God knows. I wonder if it looks like this. Do you think they’ve picked the cotton – Do you think one could ever forget-“

Well some kind soul should have warned us not to go into Natchitoches town. The people were all stark mad. The snow had gone to their heads.

“Keep them curtains shut tight,” said the driver of the rumbling old hack. “They don’t know what they about; they jus’ as lief pelt you to death as not.”

The horses plunged in their break neck speed; the driver swore deep under his breath; pim! pam! the missles rained against the protecting curtains; the shrieks and yells outside were demoniac, blood curdling. – There was no court that day – the judges and lawyers were rolling in the snow with the boys and girls. There was no school that day; the professors at the Normal – those from the North-states, were showing off and getting the worst of it. The nuns up on the hill and their little charges were like march hares. Barred doors were no protection if an unguarded window had been forgotten. The sanctity of home and person was a myth to be demolished with pelting, melting, showering, suffocating snow.

But the next day the sun came out and the snow all went away, except where bits of it lay here and there in protected roof angles. The magnolia leaves gleamed and seemed to smile in the sunshine. Hardy rose-vines clinging to old stuccoed pillars plumed themselves and bristled their leaves with satisfaction. And the violets peeped out to see if it was all over.

“Ah! this is a southern day,” I uttered with deep gratification as I leisurely crossed the bridge afoot. A warm, gentle breeze was stirring. On the opposite side, a dear old lady was standing in her dear old doorway waiting for me.

A Little Free-Mulatto

M’sié Jean-Ba’ – that was Aurélia’s father – was so especially fine and imposing when he went down to the city, with his glossy beard, his elegant clothes, and gold watch-chain, that he could easily have ridden in the car “For Whites.” No one would ever have known the difference. But M’sié Jean-Ba’ was too proud to do that. He was very proud. So was Ma’ame Jean-Ba’. And because of that unyielding pride, little Aurélia’s existence was not altogether a happy one.

She was not permitted to play with the white children up at the big-house, who would willingly have had her join their games. Neither was she allowed to associate in any way with the little darkies who frolicked all day long as gleefully as kittens before their cabin doors. There seemed nothing for her to do in the world but to have her shiny hair plaited, or to sit at her mother’s knee learning to spell or to patch quilt pieces.

It was well enough so long as she was a baby and crawled about the gallery satisfied to play with a sun-beam. But growing older she pined for some more real companionship.

“La p’tite, ‘pear tu me lack she gittin’ po’, yere lately,” remarked M’sié Jean-Ba’ solicitiously to his wife one day when he noted his little daughter’s drooping mien.

“You right, Jean-Ba; Aurélia a’n’t pick up none, the las’ year.” And they watched the child carefully after that. She seemed to fade like a flower that wants the sun.

Of course M’sié Jean-Ba’ could not stand that. So when December came, and his contract with the planter had ceased, he gathered his family and all his belongings and went away to live – in paradise.

That is, little Aurélia thinks it is paradise, the change is so wonderful.

There is a constant making and receiving of visits, now. She trudges off every morning to the convent where numbers of little children just like herself are taught by the sisters. Even in the church in which she, her mamma and papa make their Sunday devotions, they breathe an atmosphere which is native to them. And then, such galloping about the country on little creole ponies!

Well, there is no question about it. The happiest little Free-Mulatto in all Louisiana is Aurélia, since her father has moved to “L’Isle des Mulâtres.”

A Point at Issue!

Married – On Tuesday, May 11, Eleanor Gail to Charles Faraday.

Nothing bearing the shape of a wedding announcement could have been less obtrusive than the foregoing hidden in a remote corner of the Plymdale Promulgator, clothed in the palest and smallest of type, and modestly wedged in between the big, black-lettered offer of the Promulgator to mail itself free of extra charge to subscribers leaving home for the summer months, and an equally somber-clad notice (doubtless astray as to place and application) that Hammersmith & Co. were carrying a large and varied assortment of marble and granite monuments!

Yet notwithstanding its sandwiched condition, that little marriage announcement seemed to Eleanor to parade the whole street.

Whichever way she turned her eyes, it glowered at her with scornful reproach.

She felt it to be an indelicate thrusting of herself upon the public notice; and at the sight she was plunged in regret at having made to the properties the concession of permitting it.

She hoped now that the period for making concessions was ended. She had endured long and patiently the trials that beset her path when she chose to diverge from the beaten walks of female Plymdaledom. Had stood stoically enough the questionable distinction of being relegated to a place amid that large and ill-assorted family of “cranks,” feeling the discomfit and attending opprobrium to be far outbalanced by the satisfying consciousness of roaming the heights of free thought, and tasting the sweets of a spiritual emancipation.