The Very Best of F & SF v1 Read Online Free PDF

housewife
believes they will—crack a leg from her good table, or set a kitchen chair down
on a lamp. Most of the furniture was loaded by now, and she was deep in that
nervous stage when she knew there was something she had forgotten to
pack—hidden away in the back of a closet somewhere, or left at a neighbor’s and
forgotten, or on the clothesline—and was trying to remember under stress what
it was.
    “This all, lady?”
the chief mover said, completing her dismay.
    Uncertainly, she
nodded.
    “Want to go on
the truck with the furniture, sonny?” the mover asked the boy, and laughed. The
boy laughed too and said to Mr. Johnson, “I guess I’ll have a good time at
Vermont.”
    “Fine time,” said
Mr. Johnson, and stood up. “Have one more peanut before you go,” he said to the
boy.
    The boy’s mother
said to Mr. Johnson, “Thank you so much; it was a great help to me.”
    “Nothing at all,”
said Mr. Johnson gallantly. “Where in Vermont are you going?”
    The mother
looked at the little boy accusingly, as though he had given away a secret of
some importance, and said unwillingly, “Greenwich.”
    “Lovely town,” said
Mr. Johnson. He took out a card, and wrote a name on the back. “Very good
friend of mine lives in Greenwich,” he said. “Call on him for anything you
need. His wife makes the best doughnuts in town,” he added soberly to the
little boy.
    “Swell,” said
the little boy.
    “Goodbye,” said
Mr. Johnson.
    He went on, stepping
happily with his new-shod feet, feeling the warm sun on his back and on the top
of his head. Halfway down the block he met a stray dog and fed him a peanut.
    At the corner,
where another wide avenue faced him, Mr. Johnson decided to go on uptown again.
Moving with comparative laziness, he was passed on either side by people
hurrying and frowning, and people brushed past him going the other way,
clattering along to get somewhere quickly. Mr. Johnson stopped on every corner
and waited patiently for the light to change, and he stepped out of the way of
anyone who seemed to be in any particular hurry, but one young lady came too
fast for him, and crashed wildly into him when he stooped to pat a kitten which
had run out onto the sidewalk from an apartment house and was now unable to get
back through the rushing feet.
    “Excuse me,” said
the young lady, trying frantically to pick up Mr. Johnson and hurry on at the
same time, “terribly sorry.”
    The kitten,
regardless now of danger, raced back to its home. “Perfectly all right,” said
Mr. Johnson, adjusting himself carefully. “You seem to be in a hurry.”
    “Of course I’m
in a hurry,” said the young lady. “I’m late.”
    She was
extremely cross and the frown between her eyes seemed well on its way to
becoming permanent. She had obviously awakened late, because she had not spent
any extra time in making herself look pretty, and her dress was plain and
unadorned with collar or brooch, and her lipstick was noticeably crooked. She
tried to brush past Mr. Johnson, but, risking her suspicious displeasure, he
took her arm and said, “Please wait.”
    “Look,” she said
ominously, “I ran into you and your lawyer can see my lawyer and I will gladly
pay all damages and all inconveniences suffered therefrom but please this
minute let me go because I am late”
    “Late for what?”
said Mr. Johnson; he tried his winning smile on her but it did no more than
keep her, he suspected, from knocking him down again.
    “Late for work,”
she said between her teeth. “Late for my employment. I have a job and if I am
late I lose exactly so much an hour and I cannot really afford what your
pleasant conversation is costing me, be it ever so pleasant.”
    “I’ll pay for it,”
said Mr. Johnson. Now these were magic words, not necessarily because they were
true, or because she seriously expected Mr. Johnson to pay for anything, but
because Mr. Johnson’s flat statement, obviously innocent of irony, could not
be,