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Half Portions

by Edna Ferber · English · Gutenberg #14714 · 398,560 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Half Portions

Author: Edna Ferber


        
Release date: January 17, 2005 [eBook #14714]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14714

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HALF PORTIONS ***

                        HALF PORTIONS

                              BY

                         EDNA FERBER



                   GARDEN CITY    NEW YORK
                  DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
                             1920






CONTENTS                       PAGE

I. THE MATERNAL FEMININE         3
II. APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL        36
III. OLD LADY MANDLE            76
IV. YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH   113
V. LONG DISTANCE               148
VI. UN MORSO DOO PANG          157
VII. ONE HUNDRED PER CENT      201
VIII. FARMER IN THE DELL       230
IX. THE DANCING GIRLS          280




HALF PORTIONS




THE MATERNAL FEMININE


Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy you would have to coin a term or fall
back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried woman,"
states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young."
That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most
certainly no longer young. In figure she was, at fifty, what is known in
the corset ads as a "stylish stout." Well dressed in blue serge, with
broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The blue serge was
practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was
strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute and
ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin. Chippewa's
East-End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the mill hands and
hired girls bought the naïve ones. But whether lumpy or possessed of
that indefinable thing known as line, Sophy Decker's hats were honest
hats.

The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable women
of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family of married
sisters and tolerant, good-humoured brothers-in-law, and careless nieces
and nephews.

"Poor Aunt Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such a good old
thing. And she's had so little in life, really."

She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing--Aunt Soph. Forever sending a
spray of sweeping black paradise, like a jet of liquid velvet, to this
pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, sister Flora's daughter,
to Chicago or New York, as a treat, on one of her buying trips.
Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozen
foolish shopping commissions for the idle women folk of her family.
Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about their
husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. It
was always the same.

"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another living
soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for the
children--"

There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead of
to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held for each
other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making a
confidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comes
of dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing it plunk,
safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that it cannot
rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by
saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm sure I
don't know why I'm telling you all this."

But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know"--they paid little
heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it is that
she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all her life,
has given and given and in return has received nothing. Sophy Decker had
never used the word inhibition in her life. I doubt if she knew what it
meant. When you are busy copying French models for the fall trade you
have little time or taste for Freud. She only knew (without in the least
knowing she knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her
time, of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would
have been shocked if you had told them that there was about this old
maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being at all
what is known as a masculine woman she had, somehow, acquired the man's
viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyed her
food. She did not care for those queer little stories that married women
sometimes tell, with narrowed eyes, but she was strangely tolerant of
what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that you wondered how
she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery business.

You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from
one of fifty people: from a dapper salesman in a New York or Chicago
wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First
National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and
trimmer; from almost any one, in fact, except a member of her own
family. They knew her least of all, as is often true of one's own
people. Her three married sisters--Grace in Seattle, Ella in Chicago,
and Flora in Chippewa--regarded her with a rather affectionate
disapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal ingle-nooks.

"I don't know. There's something--well--common about Sophy," Flora
confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent and Sophy, seeking hats, had
made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She talks to
everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our train.
Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social occasion.
You know how packed the seven fifty-two is. Every seat in the parlour
car taken. And Sophy asking the coloured porter about how his wife was
getting along--she called him William--and if they were going to send
her west, and all about her. I _wish_ she wouldn't."

Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings.
You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevator
starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks--all that aloof,
unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they bloomed
and spread and took on colour as do those tight little Japanese paper
water-flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosity
in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her your
innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragement of
her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well that sister
Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the men millinery salesmen at
Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as,
with one arm flung about her plump blue serge shoulder, they revealed to
her the picture of their girl in the back flap of their bill-folder.

Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the
East-End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the
millinery business in Elm Street.

"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and
all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now
that she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats
of her aunt. Not that I--but you know how it is."

H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew. But perhaps you, until you are
made more intimately acquainted with Chippewa, Wisconsin; with the
Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora's husband, H. Charnsworth
Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may feel a little
natural bewilderment.

The Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the
original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an
unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree
in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front
porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From
May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing
the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the vines,
accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the creak-creak
of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks. Flora, Ella, and Grace
Decker had more beaux and fewer clothes than any other girls in
Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things they were, undoubtedly,
the prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted)
Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose
never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite nose,
purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that
vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were faint violet
shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. If there
is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than
to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are free to use it.
Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual physical pang. Only
her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and
as sentimental as a hungry shark. The strange and cruel part of it was
that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a
photograph, Sophy resembled Flora. It was as though Nature, in prankish
mood, had given a cabbage the colour and texture of a rose, with none of
its fragile reticence and grace.

It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, and given to
ice-wool shawls, referred to her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence,
as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she
walked--rheumatism, or a spinal affection. Small wonder, then, that
Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hat-making, a knack at eggless
cake-baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that last year's style
met this year's without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in
the centre of the old twine hammock on the front porch.

That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as
inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did not manage
badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness and the
twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty, captured H.
Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. Charnsworth Baldwin drove a
skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout (this was twenty years
ago); had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee, and talked
about a game called golf. It was he who advocated laying out a section
of land for what he called links, and erecting a club house thereon.

"The section of the bluff overlooking the river," he explained, "is full
of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view."

Chippewa--or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its
exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the
grass evenings after supper--laughed as it read this interview in the
Chippewa _Eagle_.

"A golf course," they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cow
pasture, up the river. It's full of natural--wait a minute--what
was?--oh, yeh, here it is--hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say,
couldn't you die!"

For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went
East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and
gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournament played
on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. And his name,
in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glass windows of
the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago:

              NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY.
                H. CHARNSWORTH BALDWIN, PRES.

Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering,
which read:

                      MISS SOPHY DECKER
                          Millinery

Sophy's hat-making, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had
always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an occasional
hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married Sophy found herself
in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare time. The hat
trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather botchy little
bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin at the top,
awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's death Sophy still
stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee,
came home, stuck up a home-made sign in the parlour window (the untidy
cucumber vines came down), and began her hat-making in earnest. In five
years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm; had painted the
old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and
transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of
green lawn and bright flower-beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street,
and the Chippewa _Eagle_ ran a half column twice a year describing her
spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin,
and marcel wave, and her most relentless corsets was, in all the
superficial things, not a pleat, or fold, or line, or wave behind her
city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases:

"This is awfully good this year."

"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model.... Well, but my dear, it's the
style--the line--you're paying for, not the material."

"I've got the very thing for you. I had you in mind when I bought it.
Now don't say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on."

When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant before the
mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head, holding it
in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your fascinated
eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it descended,
slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. Her fingers firm against your temples.
A little sigh of relieved suspense.

"That's wonderful on you!... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's because
you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you had to have
a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with your nose, until I
proved to you that if the head-size was only big ... Well, perhaps this
needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it."

And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat
against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist
and too shrewd a business woman for that. She preferred that you go out
of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether you
bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shop something
more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her
admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow:

"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do.
You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my hat
and veil as soon's I get my hair combed."

In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight
brassière and scant petticoat, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat
and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the
bedroom from the shoulders down.

The East-End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modish and
expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and
lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as
well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these
opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said,
frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart
trade.

"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say.
They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to sell
them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't understand 'em,
or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think I was trying to
cheat them. They want a velvet hat with something good and solid on it.
Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It's the
same idea."

Her shop windows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely,
severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick. In the
other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes.

At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques
completely covered with violets. No one ever bought a hat like that. No
one ever will. That violet-covered toque is a symbol.

"I don't expect 'em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody
feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a
fruit centre-piece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it but it has to
be there."

The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop a
treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of
satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace, and ribbon and jet as to make
her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of
the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little
scavenger.

"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt
Sophy. "You must have barrels of it."

Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore. "I
keep it," she said.

When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say
'Poor Sophy'?"

"Because Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married, and
has always worked."

Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you're
poor?"

"Well--yes--"

"Then I'll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child,
skinny and rather foreign looking.

The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl's. Very
tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora
of twenty years ago. "If only Adele could have had his looks," his
mother used to say. "They're wasted on a man. He doesn't need them but a
girl does. Adele will have to be well-dressed and interesting. And
that's such hard work."

Flora said she worshipped her children. And she actually sometimes still
coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to
baby talk when endeavouring to coax something out of someone. Her
admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her
selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen
years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great
deal of baking soda and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or
twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the
beautiful, and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change.
It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had
taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily,
unhealthily. With the encroaching fat Flora's small, delicate features
seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large
white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of
those enlarged photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a
telescope. A self-centred face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's
large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating
strength, courage, and a great human understanding.

From her husband and her children Flora exacted service that would have
chafed a galley-slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in a
lavender bed-jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele or Eugene, or
her husband. They all hated it.

"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had
stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as
an excuse for everything and has, ever since 'Gene and I were children.
She's as strong as an ox." Not a very ladylike or daughterly speech,
but shockingly true.

Years before a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call,
had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of
pillows.

"Well, I don't blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way
you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with
all that lovely colour!"

Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives me
credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my
blood is in my cheeks."

Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary
for success in that direction.

"I love my family," she would say. "They fill my life. After all, that's
a profession in itself--being a wife and mother."

She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband's
land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear
he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity
and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of
beauty.

"I don't understand it," she used to say in the child's very presence.
"Her father's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a
fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little, dark, skinny thing."

The boy Eugene grew up a very silent, handsome shy young fellow. The
girl dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more
immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods;
irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited
following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid
bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Any
one but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would
have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a
giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection
unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having
her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a
prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not
a step.

Sometimes Sophy the clear-eyed and level-headed, seeing this state of
affairs, tried to stop it.

"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day,
bluntly, to her sister.

"I!" Flora's dimpled hands had flown to her breast like a wounded thing.
"I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother in the
world. That's the trouble. I love them too much."

"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's
nervousness--your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance.
You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's
ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom
she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban
that Angie Hatton--"

"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your
shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's to
your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in the
minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it.
That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her
come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little,
cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't
know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have
suffered. If you had brought two children into the world--"

So then, it had come about, during the years between their childhood and
their youth, that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences,
their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in
some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one.

"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How
can Aunt Sophy hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then."

This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and
became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house--the old
frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was
something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear,
that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin
house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the
Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best
residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively and correctly
furnished. The hall consol alone was enough to strike a preliminary
chill to your heart.

The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and
snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not
unpleasant smell of dyes, and stuffs, and velvet, and glue, and steam,
and flatiron, and a certain heady scent that Julia Gold, the head
trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark gray
patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him
for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have
around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush reason, the girls
would not go home to dinner or supper, but would bring their lunches and
cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold,
especially, drank quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from
Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the
best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or
Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original
design, or she would never have been content to be head milliner in a
small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory
down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her
invaluable.

The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very
black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick, dark
line. Her face, as she bent over her work, was sullen and brooding, but
when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by
a vivid flash of teeth, and eyes, and smile. Her voice was deep and low.
She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking
something. Around the work table, mornings she used to relate the dream
she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being
pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming." Neither she nor the
sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers.
But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it.

"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a
boarding house. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you
good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me
company."

Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the
house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy kimonos with big
flowers embroidered on them. They made her hair look blacker and her
skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in
and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny
game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand,
always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a
partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.

It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly
into the living room from the kitchen where she and Adele were foraging
for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms
clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she came
in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was
thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite
twenty-one.

"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a
leaf of lettuce in her hand at the time, and still she did not look
comic.

"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other. We're
going to be married."

Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons and
plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen--" she began.

"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!"

Except that it was very white and, somehow, old looking, Aunt Sophy's
face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That
isn't love and you know it. I'm an old maid, but I know what love is
when I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you.
Hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother,
pretty near."

"Now, look here, Aunt Soph! I'm fond of you but if you're going to talk
that way--Why, she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to
really--"

"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking, suddenly, very sick and
old.

And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh! What's the
idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's everybody?"

Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand--a
capable, firm, steadying hand on the arm of each. The woman drew back
but the boy did not.

"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Will
you promise me? Will you?"

"Are you going to tell Father?"

"Not for a week if you'll promise not to see each other in that week.
No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to--You're not a
bad girl. It's just--he's never had--at home they never gave him a
chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talk things over
then."

Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen.

"Quick!"

"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing.

"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot,
sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. 'Gene, see if you can open
the olives with this fool can opener. I tried."

There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy;
what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just
hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three
days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she knew
that her prayers were answered.

Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't quite
twenty-one, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely."
She was almost hysterical.

Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt
Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said
nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora
took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted colour marking her
cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of the
recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing
up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the
floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted
curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and
crafty look.

"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My
nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something or
other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more
economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could he
do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children--"

H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at
the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her
teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.

Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her
hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood there,
she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and
simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own
affairs, must have marked it.

The girl's head came up, stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel
Oakley."

Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he had
been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She and
Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking about his
strength and endurance, his walks, his golf, his rugged health; pounding
his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and Baldwin had
had business relations as well as friendly ones.

At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth
stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer
look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in motion
a whole maze of mental machinery within his brain.

"When did he ask you?"

"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the men will
be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England and France.
I'm not going to be left." She turned squarely toward her father, her
young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You know what I mean."

Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have told your
mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there and say,
'I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley.' Oh, I _am_ so faint ... all of a
sudden ... get the spirits of ammonia...."

Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weeks
later. They had a regular pre-war wedding--veil, flowers, dinner, and
all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil. The
girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half-smile
twisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever.

"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a quart of
milk," she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she turned to her aunt
who stood behind her and clung to her, holding her tight, tight. "I
can't!" she gasped. "I can't! I can't!"

Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the girl.

"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean you don't
want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are you marrying for?
Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy."

But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed folds of
her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead, of course. Just
like the girl in the play." She laughed a little. But Aunt Sophy did not
laugh.

"Now look here, Delia. If you're--"

But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers. "It's
all right," she said.

Aunt Sophy stood with her back against the door. "If it's money," she
said. "It is! It is, isn't it! Listen. I've got money saved. It was for
you children. I've always been afraid. I knew he was sailing pretty
close, with his speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all.
It isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby."

"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has been
wonderful, really. Don't look like that. I'd have hated being poor,
anyway. Never could have got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't
it? Like one of those melodramas, or a cheap movie. I don't mind. I'm
lucky, really, when you come to think of it. A plain little black thing
like me."

"But your mother--"

"Mother doesn't know a thing."

Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony but Adele was composed
enough for two.

When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his face
drawn and queer, Sophy knew.

"How much?" she said.

"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than that--"

"I thought Oakley--Adele said--"

"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It's
this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People got
scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash."

"Speculating with it, were you?"

"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals."

"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me."

"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it,
and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to for the
money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that."

Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for the
children, anyway. They won't need it now."

He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won't
they?"

"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream."

"Eugene?"

"Yes."

"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and
presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About this
money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understand
these things but I can talk to you. It's like this--"

"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm doing it,
not for you, but for Flora, and Delia--and Eugene. Flora has lived such
a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew any of you.
Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feeling that Delia
and Eugene are my children--were my children."

When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was
getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers," he said.

"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And she's
lived her little narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats
and her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mother
suffers--poor Sophy."

"Um," Baldwin grunted.

When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the War
Department Aunt Sophy was so calm that it might have appeared that Flora
had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora, and they
thought that her grief would end in madness. Sophy neglected everything
to give comfort to the stricken two.

"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sit
there like that! Even if you weren't his mother surely you must feel
something."

"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy.

"What difference does that make! What difference does that make!"

This is the letter that made a difference to Aunt Sophy. You will have
to read it to understand, though you are likely to skip letters on the
printed page. You must not skip this.

     AMERICAN RED CROSS
     (CROIX ROUGE AMÉRICAINE)

     MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN:

     I am sure you must have been officially notified, by now, by
     the U.S. War Dept. of the death of your son Lieut. Eugene H.
     Baldwin. But I want to write you what I can of his last
     hours. I was with him much of that time as his nurse. I'm
     sure it must mean much to a mother to hear from a woman who
     was privileged to be with her boy at the last.

     Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassed
     from the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not
     receive gassed patients, as they are sent to a special
     hospital near here. But two nights before the Germans wrecked
     this hospital, so many gassed patients have come to us.

     Your son was put in the officers' ward where the doctors who
     examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as
     he had inhaled the gas so much that it was only a matter of a
     few hours. I could scarcely believe that a man so big and
     strong as he was could not pull through.

     The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly
     choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were
     both with him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not
     to leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good
     to have a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his
     head on my shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more
     easily. I stayed with him all that night, though I was not on
     duty. You see, his eyes also were badly burned. But before he
     died he was able to see very well. I stayed with him every
     minute of that night and have never seen a finer character
     than he showed during all that dreadful fight for life. He had
     several bad sinking attacks that night and came through each
     one simply because of his great will power and fighting
     spirit. After each attack he would grip my hand and say,
     "Well, we made it that time, didn't we, nurse? And if you'll
     only stay with me we'll win this fight." At intervals during
     the night I gave him sips of black coffee which was all he
     could swallow. Each time I gave it to him he would ask me if I
     had had some. That was only one instance of his thoughtfulness
     even in his suffering. Toward morning he asked me if he was
     going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed all
     his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand. He
     seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in
     bed and shaking his fist, he said: "Then by the Lord I'll
     fight for it!" We kept him alive for three days, and actually
     thought we had won when on the third day....

     But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been
     the mother of such a son....

     I am a Wisconsin girl--Madison. When this is over and I come
     home will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than
     I can possibly write?

     MARIAN KING.

It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They had hoped
for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four people were waiting in
the living room of the big Baldwin house overlooking the river. Flora
and her husband, Adele and Aunt Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then
Adele would rise, nervously, and go to the window that faced the street.
Flora was weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair frowning
a little, a dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. Only Aunt Sophy sat
quietly, waiting.

There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes. Flora
broke the silence, dabbing at her face with her handkerchief as she
spoke.

"Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don't envy you. I
do. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to say, 'Poor
Sophy.' But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after all. It's the
married woman who drinks the cup to the last bitter drop. There you sit,
Sophy, fifty years old, and life hasn't even touched you. You don't know
how cruel life is."

Suddenly, "There!" said Adele. The other three in the room stood up and
faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping outside. Daniel Oakley's
hearty voice: "Well, it only took us five minutes from the station.
Pretty good."

Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They faced
her, the four--Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy. Marian King stood
a moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She looked at the two older
women with swift, appraising glance. Then she came into the room,
quickly, and put her two hands on Aunt Sophy's shoulders and looked into
her eyes straight and sure.

"You must be a very proud woman," she said. "You ought to be a very
proud woman."




APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL


Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She
started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar
in strict accordance with Article I, Section 1, Unwritten Rules for
House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five
years she had hated it--being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five
years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled
up--the costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of
What's-Her-Name mother of Lemuel (see Proverbs)--Mrs. Brewster had gone
through the ceremony twice a year.

Furniture on the porch, woollens on the line, mattresses in the
yard--everything that could be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed,
flapped, shaken, or aired was dragged out and subjected to one or all of
these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were dragged in
again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar,
things had piled up higher and higher--useless things, sentimental
things; things in trunks; things in chests; shelves full of things
wrapped up in brown-paper parcels.

And boxes--oh, above all, boxes: pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square
and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencillings on one end;
cryptic, that is, to any one except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned
an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long, slim box. Another
stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents
under "Sip Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing
fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key
they translated themselves simply enough into such homely items as
Hosey's fishing tackle, canvas curtains for Ted's sleeping porch, slip
covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-parlour valance.

The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American
household life as lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago,
Wisconsin. Hosey's rheumatism had prohibited trout fishing these ten
years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the li'l' ol' sky" was his
sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the
neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pinky's rose-cretonne room had
lacked an occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the
Chicago Art Institute, thence to New York and those amazingly successful
magazine covers that stare up at you from your table--young lady, hollow
chested (she'd need to be with that dêcolletage), carrying feather fan.
You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves
the black net dress and the sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too
tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded.

Now, don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking,
ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a
palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and
slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin,
were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at
Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless
heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of
citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and
to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's.

Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and georgette and alligator pears; and
Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up
above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the
afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster
place was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen
closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises,
as your well-to-do Middle-Western house is likely to be.

That house had long ago grown too large for the two of them--physically,
that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had they--in
tolerance and understanding and humanness--until now, as you talked with
them, you felt that here was room and to spare of sun-filled mental
chambers, and shelves well stored with experience; and pantries and bins
and closets for all your worries and confidences.

But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every
woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I
only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it
weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago,"
complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood
floored, spacious, light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social,
æsthetic, educational, and spiritual progress of the entire family as
clearly as if a sociologist had charted it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the
crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a
junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon
portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each
of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink
cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the
labyrinthian scrolls of her sextuple gold frame, was rouged like a
soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes
behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky--and in fact the entire Brewster
household--had thought these massive atrocities the last word in
artistic ornament. By the time she reached her sophomore year, Pinky had
prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining room. Then, two
years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living room and the
dining room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall.

Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with
them for the vacations. Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel
and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the
entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the cheeks
as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting place in a
nondescript back chamber known as the sewing room. Then the new sleeping
porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in
the attic.

One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove.
Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples,
cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C.
Brewster's _bête noir_ and plaything, tyrant and slave--the furnace.
"She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or:
"Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn
mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' know
what's got into her."

By noon of this particular September day--a blue-and-gold Wisconsin
September day--Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of
the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly
again. Taking into consideration Miz' Merz (Miz' Merz by-the-day, you
understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little
necessity for Mrs. Brewster's official house-cleaning uniform. She might
have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves, and
left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier,
no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that
it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this
relentless and expert crew.

Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened
and its contents revealed, Miz' Merz would say: "You keepin' this, Miz'
Brewster?"

"That? Oh, dear, yes!" Or: "Well--I don't know. You can take that home
with you if you want it. It might make over for Minnie."

Yet, why in the name of all that's ridiculous did she treasure the
funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame? Nothing is more _passé_ than a
last summer's hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the
tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the
plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had
worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven--well, these
were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) passed
by unbrightened by covetousness.

The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth balls, and dust, and
the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic.
Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen
and not to seem not to listen to Miz' Merz's recital of her husband's
relations' latest flagrancy.

"'Families is nix,' I says. 'I got my own fam'ly to look out fur,' I
says. Like that. 'Well,' s's he, 'w'en it comes to _that_,' s's he, 'I
guess I got some--'" Punctuated by thumps, spatterings, swashings, and
much heavy breathing, so that the sound of light footsteps along the
second-floor hallway, a young, clear voice calling, then the same
footsteps, fleeter now, on the attic stairway, were quite unheard.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pinky's arms were around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it
looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent
had been Mrs. Brewster's start of surprise.

Incoherent little cries, and sentences unfinished:

"Pinky! Why--my baby! We didn't get your telegram. Did you--"

"No; I didn't. I just thought I--Don't look so dazed, mummy--You're all
smudged, too--what in the world!" Pinky straightened her hat and looked
about the attic. "Why, mother! You're--you're house cleaning!" There was
a stunned sort of look on her face. Pinky's last visit home had been in
June, all hammocks, and roses, and especially baked things, and motor
trips into the country.

"Of course. This is September. But if I'd known you were coming--Come
here to the window. Let mother see you. Is that the kind of hat
they're--why, it's a winter one, isn't it? Already! Dear me, I've just
got used to the angle of my summer one. You must telephone father."

Miz' Merz, damply calicoed, rose from a corner and came forward, wiping
a moist and parboiled hand on her skirt. "Ha' do, Pinky. Ain't forgot
your old friends, have you?"

"It's Mrs. Merz!" Pinky put her cool, sweet fingers into the other
woman's spongy clasp. "Why, hello, Mrs. Merz! Of course when there's
house cleaning--I'd forgotten all about house cleaning--that there was
such a thing, I mean."

"It's got to be done," replied Miz' Merz, severely.

Pinky, suddenly looking like one of her own magazine covers (in tailor
clothes), turned swiftly to her mother. "Nothing of the kind," she said,
crisply. She looked about the hot, dusty, littered room. She included
and then banished it all with one sweeping gesture. "Nothing of the
kind. This is--this is an anachronism."

"Mebbe so," retorted Miz' Merz with equal crispness. "But it's got to be
cleaned just the same. Yessir; it's got to be cleaned."

They smiled at each other then, the mother and daughter. They descended
the winding attic stairs happily, talking very fast and interrupting
each other.

Mrs. Brewster's skirt was still pinned up. Her hair was bound in the
protecting towel. "You must telephone father. No, let's surprise him.
You'll hate the dinner--built around Miz Merz; you know--boiled. Well,
you know what a despot she is."

It was hot for September, in Wisconsin. As they came out to the porch
Pinky saw that there were tiny beads of moisture under her mother's eyes
and about her chin. The sight infuriated her somehow. "Well, really,
mother!"

Mrs. Brewster unpinned her skirt and smoothed it down; and smiled at
Pinky, all unconscious that she looked like a plump, pink Sister of
Mercy with that towel bound tightly about her hair. With a swift
movement Pinky unpinned the towel, unwound it, dabbed with it tenderly
at her mother's chin and brow, rolled it into a vicious wad, and hurled
it through the open doorway.

"Now just what does that mean?" said Mrs. Brewster, equably. "Take off
your hat and coat, Pinky, but don't treat them that way--unless that's
the way they're doing in New York. Everything is so informal since the
war." She had a pretty wit of her own, Mrs. Brewster.

Of course Pinky laughed then, and kissed her mother and hugged her hard.
"It's just that it seems so idiotic--your digging around in an attic in
this day and age! Why, it's--it's--" Pinky could express herself much
more clearly in colours than in words. "There is no such thing as an
attic. People don't clean them any more. I never realized before--this
huge house. It has been wonderful to come back to, of course. But just
you and dad." She stopped. She raised two young fists high in impotent
anger. "Do you _like_ cleaning the attic?"

"Why, no. I hate it."

"Then why in the world--"

"I've always done it, Pinky. And while they may not be wearing attics in
New York, we haven't taken them off in Winnebago. Come on up to your
room, dear. It looks bare. If I'd known you were coming--the slip
covers--"

"Are they in the box in the attic labelled 'Slp Cov Pinky Rm'?" She
succeeded in slurring it ludicrously.

It brought an appreciative giggle from Mrs. Brewster. A giggle need not
be inconsistent, with fifty years, especially if one's nose wrinkles up
delightfully in the act. But no smile curved the daughter's stern young
lips. Together they went up to Pinky's old room (the older woman stopped
to pick up the crumpled towel on the hall floor). On the way they paused
at the door of Mrs. Brewster's bedroom, so cool, so spacious, all soft
grays and blues.

Suddenly Pinky's eyes widened with horror. She pointed an accusing
forefinger at a large, dark object in a corner near a window. "That's
the old walnut desk!" she exclaimed.

"I know it."

The girl turned, half amused, half annoyed. "Oh, mother dear! That's the
situation in a nutshell. Without a shadow of doubt there's an eradicable
streak of black walnut in your gray-enamel make-up."

"Eradicable! That's a grand word, Pinky. Stylish! I never expected to
meet it out of a book. And, fu'thermore, as Miz' Merz would say, I
didn't know there was any situation."

"I meant the attic. And it's more than a situation. It's a state of
mind."

Mrs. Brewster had disappeared into the depths of her clothes closet. Her
voice sounded muffled. "Pinky, you're talking the way they did at that
tea you gave for father and me when we visited New York last winter."
She emerged with a cool-looking blue kimono. "Here. Put this on.
Father'll be home at twelve-thirty, for dinner, you know. You'll want a
bath, won't you, dear?"

"Yes. Mummy, is it boiled--honestly?--on a day like this?"

"With onions," said Mrs. Brewster, firmly.

Fifteen minutes later Pinky, splashing in a cool tub, heard the voice of
Miz' Merz high-pitched with excitement and a certain awful joy: "Miz'
Brewster! Oh, Miz' Brewster! I found a moth in Mr. Brewster's winter
flannels!"

"Oh!" in choked accents of fury from Pinky; and she brought a hard young
fist down in the water--spat!--so that it splashed ceiling, hair, and
floor impartially.

Still, it was a cool and serene young daughter who greeted Hosea
Brewster as he came limping up the porch stairs. He placed the flat of
the foot down at each step instead of heel and ball. It gave him a
queer, hitching gait. The girl felt a sharp little constriction of her
throat as she marked that rheumatic limp. "It's the beastly Wisconsin
winters," she told herself. Then, darting out at him from the corner
where she had been hiding: "S'prise! S'prise!"

His plump blond face, flushed with the unwonted heat, went darkly red.
He dropped his hat. His arms gathered her in. Her fresh young cheek was
pressed against his dear prickly one. So they stood for a long
minute--close.

"Need a shave, dad."

"Well, gosh, how did I know my best girl was coming!" He held her off.
"What's the matter, Pink? Don't they like your covers any more?"

"Not a thing, Hosey. Don't get fresh. They're decorating my studio--you
know--plasterers and stuff. I couldn't work. And I was lonesome for
you."

Hosea Brewster went to the open doorway and gave a long whistle with a
little quirk at the end. Then he came back to Pinky in the wide-seated
porch swing. "You know," he said, his voice lowered confidentially, "I
thought I'd take mother to New York for ten days or so. See the shows,
and run around and eat at the dens of wickedness. She likes it for a
change."

Pinky sat up, tense. "For a change? Dad, I want to talk to you about
that. Mother needs--"

Mrs. Brewster's light footstep sounded in the hall. She wore an
all-enveloping gingham apron. "How did you like your surprise, father?"
She came over to him and kissed the top of his head. "I'm getting dinner
so that Gussie can go on with the attic. Everything's ready if you want
to come in. I didn't want to dish up until you were at the table, so's
everything would be hot." She threw a laughing glance at Pinky.

But when they were seated, there appeared a platter of cold, thinly
sliced ham for Pinky, and a crisp salad, and a featherweight cheese
soufflé, and iced tea, and a dessert coolly capped with whipped cream.

"But, mother, you shouldn't have--" feebly.

"There are always a lot of things in the house. You know that. I just
wanted to tease you."

Father Brewster lingered for an unwonted hour after the midday meal. But
two o'clock found him back at the cold-storage plant. Pinky watched him
go, a speculative look in her eyes.

She visited the attic that afternoon at four, when it was again neat,
clean, orderly, smelling of soap and sunshine. Standing there in the
centre of the big room, freshly napped, smartly coifed, blue-serged,
trim, the very concentrated essence of modernity, she eyed with stern
deliberation the funeral wheat wreath in its walnut frame; the trunks;
the chests; the boxes all shelved and neatly inscribed with their "H's
Fshg Tckl" and "Blk Nt Drs."

"Barbaric!" she said aloud, though she stood there alone. "Medieval!
Mad! It has got to be stopped. Slavery!" After which she went downstairs
and picked golden glow for the living-room vases and scarlet salvia for
the bowl in the dining room.

Still, as one saw Mrs. Brewster's tired droop at supper that night,
there is no denying that there seemed some justification for Pinky's
volcanic remarks.

Hosea Brewster announced, after supper, that he and Fred were going to
have a session with the furnace; she needed going over in September
before they began firing up for the winter.

"I'll go down with you," said Pinky.

"No, you stay up here with mother. You'll get all ashes and coal dust."

But Pinky was firm. "Mother's half dead. She's going straight up to bed,
after that darned old attic. I'll come up to tuck you in, mummy."

And though she did not descend to the cellar until the overhauling
process was nearly completed she did come down in time for the last of
the scene. She perched at the foot of the stairs and watched the two
men, overalled, sooty, tobacco-wreathed, and happy. When, finally, Hosea
Brewster knocked the ashes out of his stubby black pipe, dusted his
sooty hands together briskly, and began to peel his overalls, Pinky came
forward.

She put her hand on his arm. "Dad, I want to talk to you."

"Careful there. Better not touch me. I'm all dirt. G'night, Fred."

"Listen, dad. Mother isn't well."

He stopped then, with one overall leg off and the other on, and looked
at her. "Huh? What d'you mean--isn't well? Mother." His mouth was open.
His eyes looked suddenly strained.

"This house--it's killing her. She could hardly keep her eyes open at
supper. It's too much for her. She ought to be enjoying herself--like
other women. She's a slave to the attic and all those huge rooms. And
you're another."

"Me?" feebly.

"Yes. A slave to this furnace. You said yourself to Fred, just now, that
it was all worn out, and needed new pipes or something--I don't know
what. And that coal was so high it would be cheaper using dollar bills
for fuel. Oh, I know you were just being funny. But it was partly true.
Wasn't it? Wasn't it?"

"Yeh, but listen here, Paula." He never called her Paula unless he was
terribly disturbed, "About mother--you said--"

"You and she ought to go away this winter--not just for a trip, but to
stay. You"--she drew a long breath and made the plunge--"you ought to
give up the house."

"Give up--"

"Permanently. Mother and you are buried alive here. You ought to come to
New York to live. Both of you will love it when you are there for a few
days. I don't mean to come to a hotel. I mean to take a little
apartment, a furnished apartment at first, to see how you like it--two
rooms and kitchenette, like a playhouse."

Hosey Brewster looked down at his own big bulk, then around the great
furnace room. "Oh, but listen--"

"No, I want you to listen first. Mother's worn out, I tell you. It isn't
as if she were the old-fashioned kind; she isn't. She loves the
theatres, and pretty hats, and shoes with buckles, and lobster, and
concerts."

He broke in again: "Sure; she likes 'em for a change. But for a steady
diet--Besides, I've got a business to 'tend to. My gosh! I've got a
business to--"

"You know perfectly well that Wetzler practically runs the whole
thing--or could, if you'd let him." Youth is cruel like that, when it
wants its way.

He did not even deny it. He seemed suddenly old. Pinky's heart smote her
a little. "It's just that you've got so used to this great barracks you
don't know how unhappy it's making you. Why, mother said to-day that she
hated it. I asked about the attic--the cleaning and all--and she said
she hated it."

"Did she say that, Paula?"

"Yes."

He dusted his hands together, slowly, spiritlessly. His eyes looked
pained and dull. "She did, h'm? You say she did?" He was talking to
himself, and thinking, thinking.

Pinky, sensing victory, left him. She ran lightly up the cellar stairs,
through the first-floor rooms, and up to the second floor. Her mother's
bedroom door was open.

A little mauve lamp shed its glow upon the tired woman in one of the
plump, gray-enamel beds. "No, I'm not sleeping. Come here, dear. What in
the world have you been doing in the cellar all this time?"

"Talking to dad." She came over and perched herself on the side of the
bed. She looked down at her mother. Then she bent and kissed her. Mrs.
Brewster looked incredibly girlish with the lamp's rosy glow on her face
and her hair, warmly brown and profuse, rippling out over the pillow.
Scarcely a thread of gray in it. "You know, mother, I think dad isn't
well. He ought to go away."

As if by magic the youth and glow faded out of the face on the pillow.
As she sat up, clutching her nightgown to her breast, she looked
suddenly pinched and old. "What do you mean, Pinky! Father--but he isn't
sick. He--"

"Not sick. I don't mean sick exactly. But sort of worn out. That
furnace. He's sick and tired of the thing; that's what he said to Fred.
He needs a change. He ought to retire and enjoy life. He could. This
house is killing both of you. Why in the world don't you close it up, or
sell it, and come to New York?"

"But we do. We did. Last winter--"

"I don't mean just for a little trip. I mean to live. Take a little
two-room apartment in one of the new buildings--near my studio--and
relax. Enjoy yourselves. Meet new men and women. Live! You're in a
rut--both of you. Besides, dad needs it. That rheumatism of his, with
these Wisconsin winters--"

"But California--we could go to California for--"

"That's only a stop-gap. Get your little place in New York all settled,
and then run away whenever you like, without feeling that this great
hulk of a house is waiting for you. Father hates it; I know it."

"Did he ever say so?"

"Well, practically. He thinks you're fond of it. He--"

Slow steps ascending the stairs--heavy, painful steps. The two women
listened in silence. Every footfall seemed to emphasize Pinky's words.
The older woman turned her face toward the sound, her lips parted, her
eyes anxious, tender.

"How tired he sounds," said Pinky; "and old. And he's only--why, dad's
only fifty-eight."

"Fifty-seven," snapped Mrs. Brewster, sharply, protectingly.

Pinky leaned forward and kissed her. "Good-night, mummy dear. You're so
tired, aren't you?"

Her father stood in the doorway.

"Good-night, dear. I ought to be tucking you into bed. It's all turned
around, isn't it? Biscuits and honey for breakfast, remember."

So Pinky went off to her own room (_sans_ slp cov) and slept soundly,
dreamlessly, as does one whose work is well done.

       *       *       *       *       *

Three days later Pinky left. She waved a good-bye from the car platform,
a radiant, electric, confident Pinky, her work well done.

"_Au 'voir!_ The first of November! Everything begins then. You'll love
it. You'll be real New Yorkers by Christmas. Now, no changing your
minds, remember."

And by Christmas, somehow, miraculously, there were they, real New
Yorkers; or as real and as New York as any one can be who is living in a
studio apartment (duplex) that has been rented (furnished) from a lady
who turned out to be from Des Moines.

When they arrived, Pinky had four apartments waiting for their
inspection. She told them this in triumph, and well she might, it being
the winter after the war, when New York apartments were as scarce as
black diamonds and twice as costly.

Father Brewster, on hearing the price, emitted a long, low whistle and
said: "How many rooms did you say?"

"Two--and a kitchenette, of course."

"Well, then, all I can say is the furniture ought to be solid gold for
that; inlaid with rubies and picked out with platinum."

But it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't solid anything, being mostly of a very
impermanent structure and style. Pinky explained that she had kept the
best for the last. The thing that worried Father Brewster was that, no
matter at what hour of the day they might happen to call on the
prospective lessor, that person was always feminine and hatted. Once it
was eleven in the morning. Once five in the afternoon.

"Do these New York women wear hats in the house all the time?" demanded
Hosea Brewster, worriedly. "I think they sleep in 'em. It's a wonder
they ain't bald. Maybe they are. Maybe that's why. Anyway, it makes you
feel like a book agent."

He sounded excited and tired, "Now, father!" said Mrs. Brewster,
soothingly.

They were in the elevator that was taking them up to the fourth and
(according to Pinky) choicest apartment. The building was what is known
as a studio apartment, in the West Sixties. The corridors were done in
red flagstones, with gray-tone walls. The metal doors were painted gray.

Pinky was snickering. "Now she'll say: 'Well, _we've_ been very
comfortable here.' They always do. Don't look too eager."

"No fear," put in Hosey Brewster.

"It's really lovely. And a real fireplace. Everything new and good.
She's asking two hundred and twenty-five. Offer her one seventy-five.
She'll take two hundred."

"You bet she will," growled Hosea.

She answered the door--hatted; hatted in henna, that being the season's
chosen colour. A small, dark foyer, overcrowded with furniture; a studio
living room, bright, high-ceilinged, smallish; one entire side was
window. There were Japanese prints, and a baby grand piano, and a lot of
tables, and a davenport placed the way they do it on the stage, with its
back to the room and its arms to the fireplace, and a long table just
behind it, with a lamp on it, and books, and a dull jar thing, just as
you've see it in the second-act library.

Hosea Brewster twisted his head around and up to gaze at the lofty
ceiling. "Feel's if I was standing at the bottom of a well," he
remarked.

But the hatted one did not hear him. "No; no dining room," she was
saying, briskly. "No, indeed. I always use this gate-legged table. You
see? It pulls out like this. You can easily seat six--eight, in fact."

"Heaven forbid!" in fervent _sotto voce_ from Father Brewster.

"It's an enormous saving in time and labour."

"The--kitchen!" inquired Mrs. Brewster.

The hat waxed playful. "You'll never guess where the kitchen is!" She
skipped across the room. "You see this screen?" They saw it. A really
handsome affair, and so placed at one end of the room that it looked a
part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was
dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon.
And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the
miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of the
Brewster's Winnebago china closet.

"Why, how--how wonderful!" breathed Mrs. Brewster.

"Isn't it? So complete--and so convenient. I've cooked roasts, steaks,
chops, everything right here. It's just play."

A terrible fear seized upon Father Brewster. He eyed the sink and the
tiny range with a suspicious eye. "The beds," he demanded, "where are
the beds?"

She opened the little oven door and his heart sank. But, "They're
upstairs," she said. "This is a duplex, you know."

A little flight of winding stairs ended in a balcony. The rail was hung
with a gay mandarin robe. Two more steps and you were in the bedroom--a
rather breathless little bedroom, profusely rose-coloured, and with
whole battalions of photographs in flat silver frames standing about on
dressing table, shelf, desk. The one window faced a gray brick wall.

They took the apartment. And thus began a life of ease and gayety for
Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pinky had dinner with them the first night, and they laughed a great
deal, what with one thing and another. She sprang up to the balcony, and
let down her bright hair, and leaned over the railing, _à la_ Juliet,
having first decked Hosey out in a sketchy but effective Romeo costume
consisting of a hastily snatched up scarf over one shoulder, Pinky's
little turban, and a frying pan for a lute. Mother Brewster did the
Nurse, and by the time Hosea began his limping climb up the balcony,
the turban over one eye and the scarf winding itself about his stocky
legs, they ended by tumbling in a heap of tearful laughter.

After Pinky left there came upon them, in that cozy little two-room
apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible
loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room
house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the
winding stairs together and stood a moment on the balcony, feigning a
light-heartedness that neither of them felt.

They lay very still in the little stuffy rose-coloured room, and the
street noises of New York came up to them--a loose chain flapping
against the mud guard of a taxi; the jolt of a flat-wheeled Eighth
Avenue street car; the roar of an L train; laughter; the bleat of a
motor horn; a piano in the apartment next door, or upstairs, or down.

She thought, as she lay there, choking, of the great, gracious
gray-and-blue room at home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet!

He thought, as he lay there, choking, of the gracious gray-blue room at
home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet!

Then, as he had said that night in September: "Sleeping, mother?"

"N-no. Not yet. Just dozing off."

"It's the strange beds, I guess. This is going to be great, though.
Great!"

"My, yes!" agreed Mrs. Brewster, heartily.

They awoke next morning unrefreshed. Pa Brewster, back home in
Winnebago, always whistled mournfully, off key, when he shaved. The more
doleful his tune the happier his wife knew him to be. Also, she had
learned to mark his progress by this or that passage in a refrain.
Sometimes he sang, too (also off key), and you heard his genial roar all
over the house. The louder he roared, and the more doleful the tune, the
happier his frame of mind. Milly Brewster knew this. She had never known
that she knew it. Neither had he. It was just one of those subconscious
bits of marital knowledge that make for happiness and understanding.

When he sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament" and came to the passage, "Oh,
take me to the churchyard and lay the sod o-o-over me," Mrs. Brewster
used to say: "Gussie, Mr. Brewster'll be down in ten minutes. You can
start the eggs."

       *       *       *       *       *

In the months of their gay life in Sixty-Seventh Street Hosey Brewster
never once sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet
By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or when he did, gay bits of
jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He
deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail
off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again,
heavily, as though it were a physical weight.

Theatres! Music! Restaurants! Teas! Shopping! The gay life!

"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" he would say.

"Time of my life, father."

She had her hair dressed in those geometrical undulations without which
no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less
frequently as time went on and her feeling of responsibility lessened.
Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for
her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster's hat,
slippers, gown, and manner equalled in line, style, cut, and texture
those of any other woman present, which rather surprised her until she
had talked to five or six of them.

She and Hosey drifted together and compared notes. "Say, Milly," he
confided, "they're all from Wisconsin--or approximately; Michigan, and
Minnesota, and Iowa, and around. Far's I can make out there's only one
New Yorker, really, in the whole caboodle of 'em."

"Which one?"

"That kind of plain little one over there--sensible looking, with the
blue suit. I was talking to her. She was born right here in New York,
but she doesn't live here--that is, not in the city. Lives in some place
in the country, in a house."

A sort of look came into Mrs. Brewster's eyes. "Is that so? I'd like to
talk to her, Hosey. Take me over."

She did talk to the quiet little woman in the plain blue suit. And the
quiet little woman said: "Oh, dear, yes!" She ignored her r's
fascinatingly, as New Yorkers do. "We live in Connecticut. You see, you
Wisconsin people have crowded us out of New York; no breathing space.
Besides, how can one live here? I mean to say--live. And then the
children--it's no place for children, grown up or otherwise. I love
it--oh, yes, indeed. I love it. But it's too difficult."

Mrs. Brewster defended it like a true Westerner. "But if you have just a
tiny apartment, with a kitchenette--"

The New York woman laughed. There was nothing malicious about her. But
she laughed. "I tried it. There's one corner of my soul that's still
wrinkled from the crushing. Everything in a heap. Not to speak of the
slavery of it. That--that deceitful, lying kitchenette."

This was the first woman who Mrs. Brewster had talked to--really talked
to--since leaving Winnebago. And she liked women. She missed them. At
first she had eyed wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on
Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvellously coifed
and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a
mysterious, heady scent, they were more like strange, exotic birds than
women.

The clerks in the shops, too--they were so remote, so contemptuous. When
she went into Gerretson's, back home, Nellie Monahan was likely to say:
"You've certainly had a lot of wear out of that blue, Mrs. Brewster.
Let's see, you've had it two--three years this spring? My land! Let me
show you our new taupes."

       *       *       *       *       *

Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine
individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was
startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's
simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two--perhaps
two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York.

"I guess you ain't a New Yorker, huh?" Mike said.

"Me? No."

"Th' most of the folks in th' buildin' ain't."

"Ain't!" Hosea Brewster was startled into it. "They're artists, aren't
they? Most of 'em?"

"No! Out-of-town folks, mostly, like you. West--Iowa an' Californy an'
around there. Livin' here, though. Seem t' like it better'n where they
come from. I dunno."

Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women.
He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath,
buttoned so snugly into their shining shoes and their tailored clothes,
with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white
linen collars. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn't his
square-toed shoes that made the difference, or his gray hat, or his
baggy trousers. It was something inside him--something he lacked, he
thought. It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed
that they did not.

"Enjoying yourself, Milly?"

"I should say I am, father."

"That's good. No housework and responsibility to this, is there?"

"It's play."

She hated the toy gas stove, and the tiny ice chest, and the screen
pantry. All her married life she had kept house in a big, bounteous way:
apples in barrels; butter in firkins; flour in sacks; eggs in boxes;
sugar in bins; cream in crocks. Sometimes she told herself, bitterly,
that it was easier to keep twelve rooms tidy and habitable than one
combination kitchen-dining-and-living room.

"Chops taste good, Hosey?"

"Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out
to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show."

"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?"

"It's the life, mother! It's the life!"

       *       *       *       *       *

His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department store
kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream
whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily
with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even
known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used
to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lively. The price
of butter, eggs, milk, cream, and the like horrified his Wisconsin
cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market
before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with
tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the
buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.

Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had
known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around,
naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg
acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous Wisconsin
farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a
ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had
sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on
Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out
on the porch early, very early summer mornings.

You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant
there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he
had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its
black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to
struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had
thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.

"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just
seemed to kind of pine away."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this
memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market.
Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of
eggs, the butter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness
over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway
he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face
was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung
loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.

"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I--"

He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into
the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A
great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick.

The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The
glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have
gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged
corridor softly; turned the key ever so cautiously. She might still be
sleeping. He turned the knob gently, gently; tiptoed in and, turning,
fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim
little hall.

A barked shin. A good, round oath.

"Hosey! What's the matter? What--" She came running to him. She led him
into the bright front room.

"What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the
door. What the--"

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I
didn't know--"

Something in her voice--he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up
at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her
head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves
were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments, were huddled in a
promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house.

"Milly!" he began, sternly. "And that's just the thing you came here to
get away from. If Pinky--"

"I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a
letter--a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She
asked if I'd go to the hall closet--the one she reserved for her own
things, you know--and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about,
and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and--look!"

Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in
the closet. Boxes--pasteboard boxes--each one bearing a cryptic
pencilling on the end that stared out at you. "Drp Stud Win," said one;
"Sum Slp Cov Bedrm," another; "Toil. Set & Pic Frms."

Mrs. Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a
little air of defiance. "It--I don't know--it made me--not homesick,
Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but--well, I guess I'm not the only woman
with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman--she came
to the door with her hat on, and yet--"

Truth--blinding, white-hot truth--burst in upon him. "Mother," he
said--and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert--"mother, let's go
home."

Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt. "When?"

"Now."

"But, Hosey! Pinky--this flat--until June--"

"Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this--this
make-believe, double-barrelled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let's
go home, mother. Let's go home--and breathe."

In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April--snow or slush. The
Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from the station in 'Gene
Buck's flivver taxi they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of
daisies.

At the corner of Elm and Jackson streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head
out of the window. "Stop here a minute, will you, 'Gene?"

They stopped in front of Hengel's meat market, and Hosey went in. Mrs.
Brewster leaned back without comment.

Inside the shop. "Well, I see you're back from the East," said Aug
Hengel.

"Yep."

"We thought you'd given us the go-by, you stayed away so long."

"No, sir-ree! Say, Aug, give me that piece of bacon--the big piece. And
send me up some corned beef to-morrow for corned beef and cabbage. I'll
take a steak along for to-night. Oh, about four pounds. That's right."

It seemed to him that nothing less than a side of beef could take out of
his mouth the taste of those fiddling little lamb chops and the
restaurant fare of the past six months.

       *       *       *       *       *

All through the winter Fred had kept up a little heat in the house, with
an eye to frozen water pipes. But there was a chill upon the place as
they opened the door now. It was late afternoon. The house was very
still, with the stillness of a dwelling that has long been uninhabited.
The two stood there a moment, peering into the darkened rooms. Then
Hosea Brewster strode forward, jerked up this curtain, that curtain
with a sharp snap, flap! He stamped his feet to rid them of slush. He
took off his hat and threw it high in the air and opened his arms wide
and emitted a whoop of sheer joy and relief.

"Welcome home! Home!"

She clung to him. "Oh, Hosey, isn't it wonderful? How big it looks!
Huge!"

"Land, yes." He strode from hall to dining room, from kitchen to
library. "I know how a jack-in-the-box feels when the lid's opened. No
wonder it grins and throws out its arms."

They did little talking after that. By five o'clock he was down in the
cellar. She heard him making a great sound of rattling and bumping and
shaking and pounding and shovelling. She smelled the acrid odour of his
stubby black pipe.

"Hosey!"--from the top of the cellar stairs. "Hosey, bring up a can of
preserves when you come."

"What?"

"Can of preserves."

"What kind?"

"Any kind you like."

"Can I have two kinds?"

He brought up quince marmalade and her choicest damson plums. He put
them down on the kitchen table and looked around, spatting his hands
together briskly to rid them of dust. "Sh's burning pretty good now.
That Fred! Don't any more know how to handle a boiler than a baby does.
Is the house getting warmer?"

He clumped into the dining room, through the butler's pantry, but he was
back again in a wink, his eyes round. "Why, say, mother! You've got out
the best dishes, and the silver, and the candles, and all. And the
tablecloth with the do-dads on it. Why--"

"I know it." She opened the oven door, took out a pan of biscuits and
slid it deftly to one side. "It seems as if I can't spread enough. I'm
going to use the biggest platters, and I've put two extra boards in the
table. It's big enough to seat ten. I want everything big, somehow. I've
cooked enough potatoes for a regiment, and I know it's wasteful, and I
don't care. I'll eat in my kitchen apron, if you'll keep on your
overalls. Come on."

He cut into the steak--a great, thick slice. He knew she could never eat
it, and she knew she could never eat it. But she did eat it all,
ecstatically. And in a sort of ecstatic Nirvana the quiet and vastness
and peace of the big old frame house settled down upon them.

The telephone in the hall rang startlingly, unexpectedly.

"Let me go, Milly."

"But who in the world! Nobody knows we're--"

He was at the telephone. "Who? Who? Oh." He turned: "It's Miz' Merz. She
says her little Minnie went by at six and saw a light in the house.
She--Hello! What?... She says she wants to know if she's to save time
for you at the end of the month for the April cleaning."

Mrs. Brewster took the receiver from him: "The twenty-fifth, as usual,
Miz' Merz. The twenty-fifth, as usual. The attic must be a sight."




OLD LADY MANDLE


Old lady Mandle was a queen. Her demesne, undisputed, was a six-room
flat on South Park Avenue, Chicago. Her faithful servitress was Anna, an
ancient person of Polish nativity, bad teeth, and a cunning hand at
cookery. Not so cunning, however, but that old lady Mandle's was more
artful still in such matters as meat-soups, broad noodles, fish with egg
sauce, and the like. As ladies-in-waiting, flattering yet jealous,
admiring though resentful, she had Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs.
Wormser, themselves old ladies and erstwhile queens, now deposed. And
the crown jewel in old lady Mandle's diadem was my son Hugo.

Mrs. Mandle was not only a queen but a spoiled old lady. And not only a
spoiled old lady but a confessedly spoiled old lady. Bridling and
wagging her white head she admitted her pampered state. It was less an
admission than a boast. Her son Hugo had spoiled her. This, too, she
acknowledged. "My son Hugo spoils me," she would say, and there was no
proper humbleness in her voice. Though he was her only son she never
spoke of him merely as "Hugo," or "My son," but always as "My son
Hugo." She rolled the three words on her tongue as though they were
delicious morsels from which she would extract all possible savour and
sweetness. And when she did this you could almost hear the click of the
stiffening spines of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. For
they envied her her son Hugo, and resented him as only three old ladies
could who were living, tolerated and dependent, with their married sons
and their sons' wives.

Any pleasant summer afternoon at four o'clock you might have seen Mrs.
Mandle holding court. The four old women sat, a decent black silk row,
on a shady bench in Washington Park (near the refectory and afternoon
coffee). Three of them complained about their daughters-in-law. One of
them bragged about her son. Adjective crowding adjective, pride in her
voice, majesty in her mien, she bragged about my son Hugo.

My son Hugo had no wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no
thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine
about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It
may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his
thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form
a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old
mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been
hard, like to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked
over the South Park Avenue flat. She quarrelled wholesomely and
regularly with Polish Anna. Alternately she threatened Anna with
dismissal and Anna threatened Ma Mandle with impending departure. This
had been going on, comfortably, for fifteen years. Ma Mandle held the
purse and her son filled it. Hugo paid everything from the rent to the
iceman, and this without once making his mother feel a beneficiary. She
possessed an infinitesimal income of her own, left her out of the ruins
of her dead husband's money, but this Hugo always waved aside did she
essay to pay for her own movie ticket or an ice cream soda. "Now, now!
None of that, Ma. Your money's no good to-night."

When he returned from a New York business trip he usually brought her
two gifts, one practical, the other absurd. She kissed him for the first
and scolded him for the second, but it was the absurdity, fashioned of
lace, or silk, or fragile stuff, that she pridefully displayed to her
friends.

"Look what my son Hugo brought me. I should wear a thing like that in my
old days. But it's beautiful anyway, h'm? He's got taste, my son Hugo."

In the cool of the evening you saw them taking a slow and solemn walk
together, his hand on her arm. He surprised her with matinée tickets in
pairs, telling her to treat one of her friends. On Anna's absent
Thursdays he always offered to take dinner downtown. He brought her
pound boxes of candy tied with sly loops and bands of gay satin ribbon
which she carefully rolled and tucked away in a drawer. He praised her
cooking, and teased her with elephantine playfulness, and told her that
she looked like a chicken in that hat. Oh, yes, indeed! Mrs. Mandle was
a spoiled old lady.

At half-past one she always prepared to take her nap in the quiet of her
neat flat. She would select a plump, after-lunch chocolate from the box
in her left-hand bureau drawer, take off her shoes, and settle her old
frame in comfort. No noisy grandchildren to disturb her rest. No
fault-finding daughter-in-law to bustle her out of the way. The sounds
that Anna made, moving about in the kitchen at the far end of the long
hall, were the subdued homely swishings and brushings that lulled and
soothed rather than irritated. At half-past two she rose, refreshed,
dressed herself in her dotted swiss with its rows of val, or in black
silk, modish both. She was, in fact, a modish old lady as were her three
friends. They were not the ultra-modern type of old lady who at sixty
apes sixteen. They were neat and rather tart-tongued septuagenarians,
guiltless of artifice. Their soft white hair was dressed neatly and
craftily so as to conceal the thinning spots that revealed the pink
scalp beneath. Their corsets and their stomachs were too high, perhaps,
for fashion, and their heavy brooches and chains and rings appeared
clumsy when compared to the hoar-frost tracery of the platinumsmith's
exquisite art. But their skirts had pleats when pleated skirts were
worn, and their sleeves were snug when snug sleeves were decreed. They
were inclined to cling over-long to a favourite leather reticule,
scuffed and shapeless as an old shoe, but they could hold their own at
bridge on a rainy afternoon. In matters of material and cut Mrs. Mandle
triumphed. Her lace was likely to be real where that of the other three
was imitation.

So there they sat on a park bench in the pleasant afternoon air, filling
their lives with emptiness. They had married, and brought children into
the world; sacrificed for them, managed a household, been widowed. They
represented magnificent achievement, those four old women, though they
themselves did not know it. They had come up the long hill, reached its
apex, and come down. Their journey was over and yet they sat by the
roadside. They knew that which could have helped younger travellers
over the next hill, but those fleet-footed ones pressed on, wanting none
of their wisdom. Ma Mandle alone still moved. She still queened it over
her own household; she alone still had the delightful task of making a
man comfortable. If the world passed them by as they sat there it did
not pass unscathed. Their shrewd old eyes regarded the panorama,
undeceived. They did not try to keep up with the procession, but they
derived a sly amusement and entertainment from their observation of the
modes and manners of this amazing day and age. Perhaps it was well that
this plump matron in the over-tight skirt or that miss mincing on
four-inch heels could not hear the caustic comment of the white-haired
four sitting so mildly on the bench at the side of the path.

Their talk, stray as it might, always came back to two subjects. They
seemed never to tire of them. Three talked of their daughters-in-law,
and bitterness rasped their throats. One talked of her son, and her
voice was unctuous with pride.

"My son's wife--" one of the three would begin. There was something
terribly significant in the mock respect with which she uttered the
title.

"If I had ever thought," Mrs. Brunswick would say, shaking her head, "if
I had ever thought that I would live to see the day when I had to
depend on strangers for my comfort, I would have wished myself dead."

"You wouldn't call your son a stranger, Mrs. Brunswick!" in shocked
tones from Mrs. Mandle.

"A stranger has got more consideration. I count for nothing. Less than
nothing. I'm in the way. I don't interfere in that household. I see
enough, and I hear enough, but I say nothing. My son's wife, she says it
all."

A silence, thoughtful, brooding. Then, from Mrs. Wormser: "What good do
you have of your children? They grow up, and what do you have of them?"

More shaking of heads, and a dark murmur about the advisability of an
Old People's Home as a refuge. Then:

"My son Hugo said only yesterday, 'Ma,' he said, 'when it comes to
housekeeping you could teach them all something, believe me. Why,' he
says, 'if I was to try and get a cup of coffee like this in a
restaurant--well, you couldn't get it in a restaurant, that's all. You
couldn't get it in any hotel, Michigan Avenue or I don't care where.'"

Goaded, Mrs. Lamb would look up from her knitting. "Mark my words, he'll
marry yet." She was a sallow, lively woman, her hair still markedly
streaked with black. Her rheumatism-twisted fingers were always
grotesquely busy with some handiwork, and the finished product was a
marvel of perfection.

Mrs. Wormser, plump, placid, agreed. "That's the kind always marries
late. And they get it the worst. Say, my son was no spring chicken,
either, when he married. And you would think the sun rises and sets in
his wife. Well, I suppose it's only natural. But you wait."

"Some girl is going to have a snap." Mrs. Brunswick, eager, peering, a
trifle vindictive, offered final opinion. "The girls aren't going to let
a boy like your Hugo get away. Not nowadays, the way they run after them
like crazy. All they think about is dress and a good time."

The three smiled grimly. Ma Mandle smiled, too, a little nervously, her
fingers creasing and uncreasing a fold of her black silk skirt as she
made airy answer: "If I've said once I've said a million times to my son
Hugo, 'Hugo, why don't you pick out some nice girl and settle down? I
won't be here always.' And he says, 'Getting tired of me, are you, Ma? I
guess maybe you're looking for a younger fellow.' Only last night I
said, at the table, 'Hugo, when are you going to get married?' And he
laughed. 'When I find somebody that can cook dumplings like these. Pass
me another, Ma'."

"That's all very well," said Mrs. Wormser.

"But when the right one comes along he won't know dumplings from mud."

"Oh, a man of forty isn't such a--"

"He's just like a man of twenty-five--only worse."

Mrs. Mandle would rise, abruptly. "Well, I guess you all know my son
Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies?"

They would proceed solemnly and eagerly to the columned coolness of the
park refectory where they would drink their thick, creamy coffee. They
never knew, perhaps, how keenly they counted on that cup of coffee, or
how hungrily they drank it. Their minds, unconsciously, were definitely
fixed on the four-o'clock drink that stimulated the old nerves.

Life had not always been so plumply upholstered for old lady Mandle. She
had known its sharp corners and cruel edges. At twenty-three, a strong,
healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandle, a dour man
twenty-two years her senior. In their twenty-five years of married life
together Hattie Mandle never had had a five-cent piece that she could
call her own. Her husband was reputed to be wealthy, and probably was,
according to the standards of that day. There were three children: Etta,
the oldest; a second child, a girl, who died; and Hugo. Her husband's
miserliness, and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving
necessary to clothe and feed her two children would have crushed the
spirit of many women. But hard and glum as her old husband was he never
quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun. The habit of
heart-breaking economy clung to her, however, even when days of plenty
became hers. It showed in little hoarding ways: in the saving of burned
matches, of bits of ribbon, of scraps of food, of the very furniture and
linen, as though, when these were gone, no more would follow.

Ten years after her marriage her husband retired from active business.
He busied himself now with his real estate, with mysterious papers,
documents, agents. He was forever poking around the house at hours when
a household should be manless, grumbling about the waste where there was
none, peering into bread boxes, prying into corners never meant for
masculine eyes. Etta, the girl, was like him, sharp-nosed, ferret-faced,
stingy. The mother and the boy turned to each other. In a wordless way
they grew very close, those two. It was as if they were silently matched
against the father and daughter.

It was a queer household, brooding, sinister, like something created in
a Brontë brain. The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two when
the financial avalanche of '93 thundered across the continent sweeping
Herman Handle, a mere speck, into the débris. Stocks and bonds and real
estate became paper, with paper value. He clawed about with frantic,
clutching fingers but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands
more hopelessly hurt. You saw him sitting for hours together with a
black tin box in front of him, pawing over papers, scribbling down
figures, muttering. The bleak future that confronted them had little of
terror for Hattie Mandle. It presented no contrast with the bleakness of
the past. On the day that she came upon him, his head fallen at a
curious angle against the black tin box, his hands, asprawl, clutching
the papers that strewed the table, she was appalled, not at what she
found, but at the leap her heart gave at what she found. Herman Handle's
sudden death was one of the least of the tragedies that trailed in the
wake of the devastating panic.

Thus it was that Hugo Handle, at twenty-three, became the head of a
household. He did not need to seek work. From the time he was seventeen
he had been employed in a large china-importing house, starting as a
stock boy. Brought up under the harsh circumstances of Hugo's youth, a
boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and
responsibility of middle age. In Hugo's case the second was true. From
his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material
values. From his mother, a certain patience and courage, though he never
attained her iron indomitability.

It had been a terrific struggle. His salary at twenty-three was most
modest, but he was getting on. He intended to be a buyer, some day, and
take trips abroad to the great Austrian and French and English china
houses.

The day after the funeral he said to his mother, "Well, now we've got to
get Etta married. But married well. Somebody who'll take care of her."

"You're a good son, Hugo," Mrs. Handle had said.

Hugo shook his head. "It isn't that. If she's comfortable and happy--or
as happy as she knows how to be--she'll never come back. That's what I
want. There's debts to pay, too. But I guess we'll get along."

They did get along, but at snail's pace. There followed five years of
economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate. Etta, the
acid-tongued, the ferret-faced, was not the sort to go off without the
impetus of a dowry. The man for Etta, the shrew, must be kindly,
long-suffering, subdued--and in need of a start. He was. They managed a
very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in cash.
Every stitch in the trousseau and every penny in the dowry represented
incredible sacrifice and self-denial on the part of mother and brother.
Etta went off to her new home in Pittsburg with her husband. She had
expressed thanks for nothing and had bickered with her mother to the
last, but even Hugo knew that her suit and hat and gloves and shoes were
right. She was almost handsome in them, the unwonted flush of excitement
colouring her cheeks, brightening her eyes.

The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound
steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A
new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle.

Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle
side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them
a bond indissoluble. Hugo, at twenty-eight, had the serious mien of a
man of forty. At forty he was to revert to his slighted twenty-eight,
but he did not know that then. His music lessons were his one protest
against a beauty-starved youth. He played rather surprisingly well the
cheap music of the day, waggling his head (already threatening baldness)
in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar
smoke, happily. His mother, seated in the room, sewing, would say, "Play
that again, Hugo. That's beautiful. What's the name of that?" He would
tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming, off-key,
in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and
son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo
kissed his mother with a resounding smack and assured her that she
looked like a kid she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat
her hair into place, and pretend annoyance. "Go away, you big rough
thing!" she would cry. But all unconsciously she got from it a thrill
that her husband's withered kisses had never given her.

Twelve years had passed since Etta's marriage. Hugo's salary was a
comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit
of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady
Mandle. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spend
freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his
savings. When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a
time, she spent only a tithe of the generous sum he left with her. She
and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtain in a manless household.
When Hugo was home the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma
Mandle often went blocks out of her way to save three cents on a bunch
of new beets. So strong is usage. She would no more have wasted his
money than she would have knifed him in the dark. She ran the household
capably, but her way was the old-fashioned way. Sometimes Hugo used to
protest, aghast at some petty act of parsimony.

"But, Ma, what do you want to scrimp like that for! You're the worst
tightwad I ever saw. Here, take this ten and blow it. You're worse than
the squirrels in the park, darned if you ain't!"

She couldn't resist the ten. Neither could she resist showing it, next
day, to Mrs. Brunswick, Mrs. Lamb, and Mrs. Wormser. "How my son Hugo
spoils me! He takes out a ten-dollar bill, and he stuffs it into my hand
and says 'Ma, you're the worst tightwad I ever saw.'" She laughed
contentedly. But she did not blow the ten. As she grew older Hugo
regularly lied to her about the price of theatre tickets, dainties,
articles of dress, railway fares, luxuries. Her credulity increased with
age, shrewd though she naturally was.

It was a second blooming for Ma Mandle. When he surprised her with an
evening at the theatre she would fuss before her mirror for a full
hour. "Some gal!" Hugo would shout when finally she emerged.
"Everybody'll be asking who the old man is you're out with. First thing
I know I'll have a police-woman after me for going around with a
chicken."

"Don't talk foolishness." But she would flush like a bride. She liked a
musical comedy with a lot of girls in it and a good-looking tenor. Next
day you would hear her humming the catch-tune in an airy falsetto.
Sometimes she wondered about him. She was, after all, a rather wise old
lady, and she knew something of men. She had a secret horror of his
becoming what she called fast.

"Why don't you take out some nice young girl instead of an old woman
like me, Hugo? Any girl would be only too glad." But in her heart was a
dread. She thought of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Wormser, and Mrs. Brunswick.

So they had gone on, year after year, in the comfortable flat on South
Park Avenue. A pleasant thing, life.

And then Hugo married, suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does.

Afterward, Ma Mandle could recall almost nothing from which she might
have taken warning. That was because he had said so little. She
remembered that he had come home to dinner one evening and had spoken
admiringly of a woman buyer from Omaha. He did not often speak of
business.

"She buys like a man," he had said at dinner. "I never saw anything like
it. Knew what she wanted and got it. She bought all my best numbers at
rock bottom. I sold her a four-figure bill in half an hour. And no fuss.
Everything right to the point and when I asked her out to dinner she
turned me down. Good looking, too. She's coming in again to-morrow for
novelties."

Ma Mandle didn't even recall hearing her name until the knife descended.
Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week, after dinner.
Sentimental things, with a minor wail in the chorus. Smoked a good deal,
too. Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly
during the process and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of
angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going. The
following week he didn't touch the piano and took long walks in
Washington Park, alone, after ten. He seemed uninterested in his meals.
Usually he praised this dish, or that.

"How do you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?"

"'S all right." And declined a second piece.

The third week he went West on business. When he came home he dropped
his bag in the hall, strode into his mother's bedroom, and stood before
her like a schoolboy. "Lil and I are going to be married," he said.

Ma Mandle had looked up at him, her face a blank. "Lil?"

"Sure. I told you all about her." He hadn't. He had merely thought about
her, for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else. "Ma, you'll
love her. She knows all about you. She's the grandest girl in the world.
Say, I don't know why she ever fell for a dub like me. Well, don't look
so stunned. I guess you kind of suspicioned, huh?"

"But who--?"

"I never thought she'd look at me. Earned her own good salary, and
strictly business, but she's a real woman. Says she wants her own home
an--'n everything. Says every normal woman does. Says--"

Ad lib.

They were married the following month.

Hugo sub-leased the flat on South Park and took an eight-room apartment
farther east. Ma Mandle's red and green plush parlour pieces, and her
mahogany rockers, and her rubber plant, and the fern, and the can of
grapefruit pits that she and Anna had planted and that had come up,
miraculously, in the form of shiny, thick little green leaves, all were
swept away in the upheaval that followed. Gone, too, was Polish Anna,
with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her
gutturals. In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the
afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons. The sight of the neat
Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never
failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury. Anna had been an all-day
scrubber.

But Lil. Hugo thought her very beautiful, which she was not. A plump,
voluble, full-bosomed woman, exquisitely neat, with a clear, firm skin,
bright brown eyes, an unerring instinct for clothes, and a shrewd
business head. Hugo's devotion amounted to worship.

He used to watch her at her toilette in their rose and black mahogany
front bedroom. Her plump white shoulders gleamed from pink satin straps.
She smelled pleasantly of sachet and a certain heady scent she affected.
Seated before the mirror, she stared steadily at herself with a
concentration such as an artist bestows upon a work that depends, for
its perfection, upon nuances of light and shade. Everything about her
shone and glittered. Her pink nails were like polished coral. Her hair
gleamed in smooth undulations, not a strand out of place. Her skin was
clear and smooth as a baby's. Her hands were plump and white. She was
always getting what she called a facial, from which process she would
emerge looking pinker and creamier than ever. Lil knew when camisoles
were edged with filet, and when with Irish. Instinctively she sensed
when taffeta was to be superseded by foulard. The contents of her
scented bureau drawers needed only a dab of whipped cream on top to look
as if they might have been eaten as something soufflé.

"How do I look in it, Hugo? Do you like it?" was a question that rose
daily to her lips. A new hat, or frock, or collar, or negligée. Not that
she was unduly extravagant. She knew values, and profited by her
knowledge.

"Le's see. Turn around. It looks great on you. Yep. That's all right."

He liked to fancy himself a connoisseur in women's clothes and to prove
it he sometimes brought home an article of feminine apparel glimpsed in
a shop window or showcase, but Lil soon put a stop to that. She had her
own ideas on clothes. He turned to jewellery. On Lil's silken bosom
reposed a diamond-and-platinum pin the size and general contour of a
fish-knife. She had a dinner ring that crowded the second knuckle, and
on her plump wrist sparkled an oblong so encrusted with diamonds that
its utilitarian dial was almost lost.

It wasn't a one-sided devotion, however. Lil knew much about men, and
she had an instinct for making them comfortable. It is a gift that makes
up for myriad minor shortcomings. She had a way of laying his clean
things out on the bed--fresh linen, clean white socks (Hugo was addicted
to white socks and tan, low-cut shoes), silk shirt, immaculate
handkerchief. When he came in at the end of a hard day downtown--hot,
fagged, sticky--she saw to it that the bathroom was his own for an hour
so that he could bathe, shave, powder, dress, and emerge refreshed to
eat his good dinner in comfort. Lil was always waiting for him cool,
interested, sweet-smelling.

When she said, "How's business, lover?" she really wanted to know. More
than that, when he told her she understood, having herself been so long
in the game. She gave him shrewd advice, too, so shrewdly administered
that he never realized he had been advised, and so, man-like, could
never resent it.

Ma Mandle's reign was over.

To Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser Ma Mandle lied
magnificently. Their eager, merciless questions pierced her like knives,
but she made placid answer: "Young folks are young folks. They do things
different. I got my way. My son's wife has got hers." Their quick ears
caught the familiar phrase.

"It's hard, just the same," Mrs. Wormser insisted, "after you've been
boss all these years to have somebody else step in and shove you out of
the way. Don't I know!"

"I'm glad to have a little rest. Marketing and housekeeping nowadays is
no snap, with the prices what they are. Anybody that wants the pleasure
is welcome."

But they knew, the three. There was, in Ma Mandle's tone, a hollow
pretence that deceived no one. They knew, and she knew that they knew.
She was even as they were, a drinker of the hemlock cup, an eater of
ashes.

Hugo Mandle was happier and more comfortable than he had ever been in
his life. It wasn't merely his love for Lil, and her love for him that
made him happy. Lil set a good table, though perhaps it was not as
bounteous as his mother's had been. His food, somehow, seemed to agree
with him better than it used to. It was because Lil selected her
provisions with an eye to their building value, and to Hugo's figure.
She told him he was getting too fat, and showed him where, and Hugo
agreed with her and took off twenty-five burdensome pounds, but Ma
Mandle fought every ounce of it.

"You'll weaken yourself, Hugo! Eat! How can a man work and not eat? I
never heard of such a thing. Fads!"

But these were purely physical things. It was a certain mental
relaxation that Hugo enjoyed, though he did not definitely know it. He
only knew that Lil seemed, somehow, to understand. For years his mother
had trailed after him, putting away things that he wanted left out,
tidying that which he preferred left in seeming disorder. Lil seemed
miraculously to understand about those things. He liked, for example, a
certain grimy, gritty old rag with which he was wont to polish his golf
clubs. It was caked with dirt, and most disreputable, but it was of just
the right material, or weight, or size, or something, and he had for it
the unreasoning affection that a child has for a tattered rag doll among
a whole family of golden-haired, blue-eyed beauties. Ma Mandle, tidying
up, used to throw away that rag in horror. Sometimes he would rescue it,
crusted as it was with sand and mud and scouring dust. Sometimes he
would have to train in a new rag, and it was never as good as the old.
Lil understood about that rag, and approved of it. For that matter, she
had a rag of her own which she used to remove cold cream from her face
and throat. It was a clean enough bit of soft cloth to start with, but
she clung to it as an actress often does, until it was smeared with the
pink of makeup and the black of Chicago soot. She used to search remote
corners of it for an inch of unused, unsmeared space. Lil knew about
not talking when you wanted to read the paper, too. Ma Mandle, at
breakfast, had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the
milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before and that
had spoiled overnight in the icebox. A shame! Sometimes he had wanted to
say, "Let me read my paper in peace, won't you!" But he never had. Now
it was Lil who listened patiently to Ma Mandle's small grievances, and
Hugo was left free to peruse the head-lines.

If you had told Ma Mandle that she was doing her best to ruin the life
of the one person she loved best in all the world she would have told
you that you were insane. If you had told her that she was jealous she
would have denied it, furiously. But both were true.

When Hugo brought his wife a gift he brought one for his mother as well.

"You don't need to think you have to bring your old mother anything,"
she would say, unreasonably.

"Didn't I always bring you something, Ma?"

If seventy can be said to sulk, Ma Mandle sulked.

Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim,
well-shod, immaculate. Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat
but sketchy, would eye her disapprovingly. "Are you going out?"

"Just to market. I thought I'd start early, before everything was picked
over."

"Oh--to market! I thought you were going to a party, you're so dressy."

In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the
marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly. "Oh, no," she had said.
"This is your household now."

But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen
table after delivery. She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a
head of lettuce; poke a pot-roast with disapproving finger; turn a plump
chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with
meaning.

Ma Mandle disapproved of many things. Of Lil's silken, lacy lingerie; of
her social activities; of what she termed her wastefulness. Lil wore the
fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and
she worried, good-naturedly, about additional plumpness that was the
result of leisure and of rich food. She was addicted to afternoon
parties at the homes of married women of her own age and
station--pretty, well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate too
much. They served a mayonnaise chicken salad, and little hot buttery
biscuits, and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes
of salted almonds, and great, shining, oily, black ripe olives, and a
heavy, rich dessert. When she came home she ate nothing.

"I couldn't eat a bite of dinner," she would say. "Let me tell you what
we had." She would come to the table in one of her silken, lace-bedecked
teagowns and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner and eyed
her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the
sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm. She kept her
clear, rosy skin in spite of the pastry and sweets and the indolent
life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing
her face had not coarsened its texture.

Hugo, man-like, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between
the two women. He was very happy. He only knew that Lil understood about
cigar ashes; that she didn't mind if a pillow wasn't plumped and patted
after his Sunday nap on the davenport; that she never complained to him
about the shortcomings of the little Swede, as Ma Mandle had about
Polish Anna. Even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandle had always
treated as a scourge, things were as smooth-running and peaceful as at
ordinary times. Just a little bare, perhaps, as to floors, and smelling
of cleanliness. Lil applied businesslike methods to the conduct of her
house, and they were successful in spite of Ma Mandle's steady efforts
to block them. Old lady Mandle did not mean to be cruel. She only
thought that she was protecting her son's interests. She did not know
that the wise men had a definite name for the mental processes which
caused her, perversely, to do just the thing which she knew she should
not do.

Hugo and Lil went out a great deal in the evening. They liked the
theatre, restaurant life, gayety. Hugo learned to dance and became
marvellously expert at it, as does your fat man.

"Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother," Lil would say.

"Sure!" Hugo would agree, heartily. "Come along, Ma. We'll show you some
night life."

"I don't want to go," Ma Mandle would mutter. "I'm better off at home.
You enjoy yourself better without an old woman dragging along."

That being true, they vowed it was not, and renewed their urging. In the
end she went, grudgingly. But her old eyes would droop; the late supper
would disagree with her; the noise, the music, the laughter, and shrill
talk bewildered her. She did not understand the banter, and resented
it.

Next day, in the park, she would boast of her life of gayety to the
vaguely suspicious three.

Later she refused to go out with them. She stayed in her room a good
deal, fussing about, arranging bureau drawers already geometrically
precise, winding endless old ribbons, ripping the trimming off hats long
passé and re-trimming them with odds and ends and scraps of feathers and
flowers.

Hugo and Lil used to ask her to go with them to the movies, but they
liked the second show at eight-thirty while she preferred the earlier
one at seven. She grew sleepy early, though she often lay awake for
hours after composing herself for sleep. She would watch the picture
absorbedly, but when she stepped, blinking, into the bright glare of
Fifty-third Street, she always had a sense of let-down, of depression.

A wise old lady of seventy, who could not apply her wisdom for her own
good. A rather lonely old lady, with hardening arteries and a dilating
heart. An increasingly fault-finding old lady. Even Hugo began to notice
it. She would wait for him to come home and then, motioning him
mysteriously into her own room, would pour a tale of fancied insult into
his ear.

"I ran a household and brought up a family before she was born. I don't
have to be told what's what. I may be an old woman but I'm not so old
that I can sit and let my own son be made a fool of. One girl isn't
enough, she's got to have a wash woman. And now a wash woman isn't
enough she's got to have a woman to clean one day a week."

An hour later, from the front bedroom, where Hugo was dressing, would
come the low murmur of conversation. Lil had reached the complaining
point, goaded by much repetition.

The attitude of the two women distressed and bewildered Hugo. He was a
simple soul, and this was a complex situation. His mind leaped from
mother to wife, and back again, joltingly. After all, one woman at a
time is all that any man can handle successfully.

"What's got into you women folks!" he would say. "Always quarrelling.
Why can't you get along."

One night after dinner Lil said, quite innocently, "Mother, we haven't a
decent picture of you. Why don't you have one taken? In your black
lace."

Old lady Mandle broke into sudden fury. "I guess you think I'm going to
die! A picture to put on the piano after I'm gone, huh? 'That's my dear
mother that's gone.' Well, I don't have any picture taken. You can think
of me the way I was when I was alive."

The thing grew and swelled and took on bitterness as it progressed.
Lil's face grew strangely flushed and little veins stood out on her
temples. All the pent-up bitterness that had been seething in Ma
Mandle's mind broke bounds now, and welled to her lips. Accusation,
denial; vituperation, retort.

"You'll be happy when I'm gone."

"If I am it's your fault."

"It's the ones that are used to nothing that always want the most. They
don't know where to stop. When you were working in Omaha--"

"The salary I gave up to marry your son was more money than you ever
saw."

And through it all, like a leit-motiv, ran Hugo's attempt at
pacification: "Now, Ma! Don't, Lil. You'll only excite yourself. What's
got into you two women?"

It was after dinner. In the end Ma Mandle slammed out of the house,
hatless. Her old legs were trembling. Her hands shook. It was a hot June
night. She felt as if she were burning up. In her frantic mind there was
even thought of self-destruction. There were thousands of motor cars
streaming by. The glare of their lamps and the smell of the gasoline
blinded and stifled her. Once, at a crossing, she almost stumbled in
front of an on-rushing car. The curses of the startled driver sounded
in her terrified ears after she had made the opposite curb in a frantic
bound. She walked on and on for what seemed to her to be a long time,
with plodding, heavy step. She was not conscious of being tired. She
came to a park bench and sat down, feeling very abused, and lonely and
agonized. This was what she had come to in her old days. It was for this
you bore children, and brought them up and sacrificed for them. How
right they were--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Useless.
Unconsidered. In the way.

By degrees she grew calmer. Her brain cooled as her fevered old body
lost the heat of anger. Lil had looked kind of sick. Perhaps ... and how
worried Hugo had looked....

Feeling suddenly impelled she got up from the bench and started toward
home. Her walk, which had seemed interminable, had really lasted
scarcely more than half an hour. She had sat in the park scarcely
fifteen minutes. Altogether her flight had been, perhaps, an hour in
duration.

She had her latchkey in her pocket. She opened the door softly. The
place was in darkness. Voices from the front bedroom, and the sound of
someone sobbing, as though spent. Old lady Mandle's face hardened again.
The door of the front bedroom was closed. Plotting against her! She
crouched there in the hall, listening. Lil's voice, hoarse with sobs.

"I've tried and tried. But she hates me. Nothing I do suits her. If it
wasn't for the baby coming sometimes I think I'd--"

"You're just nervous and excited, Lil. It'll come out all right. She's
an old lady--"

"I know it. I know it. I've said that a million times in the last year
and a half. But that doesn't excuse everything, does it? Is that any
reason why she should spoil our lives? It isn't fair. It isn't fair!"

"Sh! Don't cry like that, dear. Don't! You'll only make yourself sick."

Her sobs again, racking, choking, and the gentle murmur of his soothing
endearments. Then, unexpectedly, a little, high-pitched laugh through
the tears.

"No, I'm not hysterical. I--it just struck me funny. I was just
wondering if I might be like that. When I grow old, and my son marries,
maybe I'll think everything his wife does is wrong. I suppose if we love
them too much we really harm them. I suppose--"

"Oh, it's going to be a son, is it?"

"Yes."

Another silence. Then: "Come, dear. Bathe your poor eyes. You're all
worn out from crying. Why, sweetheart, I don't believe I ever saw you
cry before."

"I know it. I feel better now. I wish crying could make it all right.
I'm sorry. She's so old, dear. That's the trouble. They live in the past
and they expect us to live in the past with them. You were a good son to
her, Hughie. That's why you make such a wonderful husband. Too good,
maybe. You've spoiled us both, and now we both want all of you."

Hugo was silent a moment. He was not a quick-thinking man. "A husband
belongs to his wife," he said then, simply. "He's his mother's son by
accident of birth. But he's his wife's husband by choice, and
deliberately."

But she laughed again at that. "It isn't as easy as that, sweetheart. If
it was there'd be no jokes in the funny papers. My poor boy! And just
now, too, when you're so worried about business."

"Business'll be all right, Lil. Trade'll open up next winter. It's got
to. We've kept going on the Japanese and English stuff. But if the
French and Austrian factories start running we'll have a whirlwind year.
If it hadn't been for you this last year I don't know how I'd have stood
the strain. No importing, and the business just keeping its head above
water. But you were right, honey. We've weathered the worst of it now."

"I'm glad you didn't tell Mother about it. She'd have worried herself
sick. If she had known we both put every cent we had into the
business--"

"We'll get it back ten times over. You'll see."

The sound of footsteps. "I wonder where she went. She oughtn't to be out
alone. I'm kind of worried about her, Hugo. Don't you think you'd
better--"

Ma Mandle opened the front door and then slammed it, ostentatiously, as
though she had just come in.

"That you, Ma?" called Hugo.

He turned on the hall light. She stood there, blinking, a bent, pathetic
little figure. Her eyes were averted. "Are you all right, Ma? We began
to worry about you."

"I'm all right. I'm going to bed."

He made a clumsy, masculine pretence at heartiness. "Lil and I are going
over to the drug store for a soda, it's so hot. Come on along, Ma."

Lil joined him in the doorway of the bedroom. Her eyes were red-rimmed
behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled
bravely.

"Come on, Mother," she said. "It'll cool you off."

But Ma Mandle shook her head. "I'm better off at home. You run along,
you two."

That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone.
Something new, something gentle, something wise.

She went on down the hall to her room. She took off her clothes, and
hung them away, neatly. But once in her nightgown she did not get into
bed. She sat there, in the chair by the window. Old lady Mandle had
lived to be seventy and had acquired much wisdom. One cannot live to be
seventy without having experienced almost everything in life. But to
crystallize that experience of a long lifetime into terms that would
express the meaning of life--this she had never tried to do. She could
not do it now, for that matter. But she groped around, painfully, in her
mind. There had been herself and Hugo. And now Hugo's wife and the child
to be. They were the ones that counted, now. That was the law of life.
She did not put it into words. But something of this she thought as she
sat there in her plain white nightgown, her scant white locks pinned in
a neat knob at the top of her head. Selfishness. That was it. They
called it love, but it was selfishness. She must tell them about it
to-morrow--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Only yesterday
Mrs. Brunswick had waxed bitter because her daughter-in-law had let a
moth get into her husband's winter suit.

"I never had a moth in my house!" Mrs. Brunswick had declared. "Never.
But nowadays housekeeping is nothing. A suit is ruined. What does my
son's wife care! I never had a moth in my house."

Ma Mandle chuckled to herself there in the darkness. "I bet she did. She
forgets. We all forget."

It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from
the lake, but not often.... How red Lil's eyes had been ... poor girl.
Moved by a sudden impulse Ma Mandle thudded down the hall in her bare
feet, found a scrap of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a
line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room.
With a pin from the tray on the dresser she fastened the note to Lil's
pillow, high up, where she must see it the instant she turned on the
light. Then she scuttled down the hall to her room again.

She felt the heat terribly. She would sit by the window again. All the
blood in her body seemed to be pounding in her head ... pounding in her
head ... pounding....

At ten Hugo and Lil came in, softly. Hugo tiptoed down the hall, as was
his wont, and listened. The room was in darkness. "Sleeping, Ma?" he
whispered. He could not see the white-gowned figure sitting peacefully
by the window, and there was no answer. He tiptoed with painful
awkwardness up the hall again.

"She's asleep, all right. I didn't think she'd get to sleep so early on
a scorcher like this."

Lil turned on the light in her room. "It's too hot to sleep," she said.
She began to disrobe languidly. Her eye fell on the scrap of paper
pinned to her pillow. She went over to it, curiously, leaned over, read
it.

"Oh, look, Hugo!" She gave a little tremulous laugh that was more than
half sob. He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder.

"My son Hugo and my daughter Lil they are the best son and daughter in
the world."

A sudden hot haze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished
reading them.




YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH


When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi
Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the
personalities helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in
newspaper parlance as national figures. One n.f. is enough for any short
story. Three would swamp a book. It's like one of those plays advertised
as having an all-star cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and
been greeted, and done his twinkling the play has faded into the
background. You can't see the heavens for the stars.

Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honour at a dinner, needs no
introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been
described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on
Page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though
quoted, thus:

"Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a
genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive,
artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very
force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the
eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a
comic ol' clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to
a vice."

Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine
diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say,
"It's scarlet! No--it's blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--"

That was Sid Hahn.

I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his
likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the
theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and
top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black
cigar--unlighted--in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone
interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include!) knew
all about Sid Hahn--and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those
middle-western towns with a high-falutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or
something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the
profession which he was to dominate in America. There's no record of his
having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it,
indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally
controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing
in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It
had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized
in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was,
at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing,
producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy
with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don't know that Sid
Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever
said to himself in so many words:

"I'm going to be what he is. I'm going to concentrate on it. I won't let
anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I'm going to
be. But I know.... And you've got to be selfish. You've got to be
selfish."

Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in
the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination
running through the whole fibre of his being could have been
crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.

By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than
Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them
even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood
behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But
taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of
the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.

He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early
love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved
what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as
though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions.
Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by
people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular
east-side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with
make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play
with real ones, like God. But always kind.

No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn
appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him: the red-haired
ingénues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war
horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit
there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and
inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol while the fair ones burnt incense
and made offering of shew-bread. Figuratively, he kicked over the basket
of shew-bread, and of the incense said, "Take away that stuff! It
smells!"

Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from
years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly
afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had
thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as
they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the
treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes.

It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the
famous Renée Paterne of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and
swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when
she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he
regarded her with what is known as a long, level look. She knew at that
time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said,
very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as
a sort of secretary, "Wallie, can't you do something to make her stop
rolling her eyes around at me like that? It's awful! She makes me think
of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney. Take away my ink-well."

Renée had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in
French. Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear. "What's that she said?"

"She says," translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, "that monsieur is
a woman-hater."

"My God! I thought she didn't understand English!"

"She doesn't. But she's a woman. Not only that, she's a French woman.
They don't need to know a language to understand it."

"Where did you get that, h'm? That wasn't included in your Berlitz
course, was it?"

Wallie Ascher had grinned--that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen
face. "No. I learned that in another school."

Wallie Ascher's early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might
almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn's beginning. And what Augustin
Daly had been to Sid Hahn's imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to
Wallie's. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre--if having a
tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator's foil for a mother can be
said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre.

He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed
him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs
suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of
office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very
firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless,
how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those
expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring
precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable
high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up--up--up he would go,
while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high
note--took it easily, insouciantly--held it, trilled it, tossed it.

"Now, look here," Miss Feldman would snap--Miss Feldman of the outer
office typewriter--"look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling
and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain't a--a--"

"Aviary," suggested Wallie, almost shyly.

Miss Feldman glared. "How did you know that word?"

"I don't know," helplessly. "But it's the word, isn't it?"

Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter. "You're too smart for your
age, you are."

"I know it," Wallie had agreed, humbly.

There's no telling where or how he learned to play the piano. He
probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he
whistled--brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious,
too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn't know one note from
another, and doesn't to this day.

At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls,
he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream. And it bore no resemblance
to twenty's accepted dreams. At that time he was living in one room
(rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street. And this was
the dream: By the time he was--well, long before he was thirty--he would
have a bachelor apartment with a Jap, Saki. Saki was the perfect
servant, noiseless, unobtrusive, expert. He saw little dinners just for
four--or, at the most, six. And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot
plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be
cold. Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one--when,
in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and
wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he
would say, "That will do, Saki." Then, all evening, he would play softly
to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the
firelight with just one lamp glowing softly--almost sombrely--at the
side of the piano (grand).

His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing
of this image. Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the
office and about the theatre. They had spoken, too, many times. Hahn
called him vaguely, "Heh, boy!" but he grew to know him later as Wallie.
From errand-boy, office-boy, call-boy he had become, by that time, a
sort of unofficial assistant stage manager. No one acknowledged that he
was invaluable about the place, but he was. When a new play was in
rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues,
lights, and lines than the director himself. For a long time no one but
Wallie and the director were aware of this. The director never did admit
it. But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable.

He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November
evening, to deliver a play manuscript to Hahn at his apartment. Wallie
might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of
Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble. He buttoned his coat
over the manuscript, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold
drizzle of the November evening.

Hahn's apartment--he lived alone--was in the early fifties, off Fifth
Avenue. For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to
which he was subject. He was unable to leave the house. Hence Wallie's
errand.

It was Saki--or Saki's equivalent--who opened the door. A white-coated,
soft-stepping Jap, world-old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond.
Someone was playing the piano with one finger, horribly.

"You're to give this to Mr. Hahn. He's waiting for it."

"Genelmun come in," said the Jap, softly.

"No, he don't want to see me. Just give it to him, see?"

"Genelmun come in." Evidently orders.

"Oh, all right. But I know he doesn't want--"

Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully at
his shoes, and passed through the glowing little foyer into the room
beyond. He stood in the doorway. He was scarcely twenty then, but
something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled,
and then hardened. He didn't know it then but it was his great resolve.

Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure, with
those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes--the kindest
eyes in the world. He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared. He
glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on playing
the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly. Wallie waited. He
had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus, for hours,
the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of the music he
could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of his own
inability to reproduce it.

The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped. He looked up at Wallie.

"God, I wish I could play!"

"Helps a lot."

"You play?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"Oh, most anything I've heard once. And some things I kind of make up."

"Compose, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Play one of those."

So Wallie Ascher played one of those. Of course you know "Good
Night--Pleasant Dreams." He hadn't named it then. It wasn't even
published until almost two years later, but that was what he played for
Sid Hahn. Since "After The Ball" no popular song has achieved the
success of that one. No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was
sentimental, but so, too, are "The Suwanee River" and "My Old Kentucky
Home," and they'll be singing those when more classical songs have long
been forgotten. As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam
and glow in the lamplight.

When he had finished Sid Hahn was silent for a moment. Then, "What're
you going to do with it?"

"With what?"

"With what you've got. You know."

Wallie knew that he did not mean the song he had just played. "I'm going
to--I'm going to do a lot with it."

"Yeh, but how?"

Wallie was looking down at his two lean brown hands on the keys. For a
long minute he did not answer. Then: "By thinking about it all the time.
And working like hell.... And you've got to be selfish ... You've got to
be selfish ..."

As Sid Hahn stared at him, as though hypnotized, the Jap appeared in the
doorway. Sid Hahn said, "Stay and have dinner with me," instead of what
he had meant to say.

"Oh, I can't! Thanks. I--" He wanted to terribly, but the thought was
too much.

"Better."

They had dinner together. Even under the influence of Hahn's
encouragement and two glasses of mellow wine whose name he did not know,
Wallie did not become fatuous. They talked about music--neither of them
knew anything about it, really. Wallie confessed that he used it as an
intoxicant and a stimulant.

"That's it!" cried Hahn, excitedly. "If I could play I'd have done more.
More."

"Why don't you get one of those piano-players, What-you-call'ems?" Then,
immediately, "No, of course not."

"Nah, that doesn't do it," said Hahn, quickly. "That's like adopting a
baby when you can't have one of your own. It isn't the same. It isn't
the same. It looks like a baby, and acts like a baby, and sounds like a
baby--but it isn't yours. It isn't you. That's it! It isn't you!"

"Yeh," agreed Wallie, nodding. So perfectly did they understand each
other, this ill-assorted pair.

It was midnight before Wallie left. They had both forgotten about the
play manuscript whose delivery had been considered so important. The big
room was gracious, quiet, soothing. A fire flickered in the grate. One
lamp glowed softly--almost sombrely.

As Wallie rose at last to go he shook himself slightly like one coming
out of a trance. He looked slowly about the golden, mellow room. "Gee!"

"Yes, but it isn't worth it," said Hahn, "after you've got it."

"That's what they all say"--grimly--"_after_ they've got it."

The thing that had been born in Sid Hahn's mind thirty years before was
now so plainly stamped on this boy's face that Hahn was startled into
earnestness. "But I tell you, it's true! It's true!"

"Maybe. Some day, when I'm living in a place like this, I'll let you
know if you're right."

In less than a year Wallie Ascher was working with Hahn. No one knew his
official title or place. But "Ask Wallie. He'll know," had become a sort
of slogan in the office. He did know. At twenty-one his knowledge of the
theatre was infallible (this does not include plays unproduced; in this
no one is infallible) and his feeling for it amounted to a sixth sense.
There was something uncanny about the way he could talk about Lottie,
for example, as if he had seen her; or Mrs. Siddons; or Mrs. Fiske when
she was Minnie Maddern, the soubrette. It was as though he had the power
to cast himself back into the past. No doubt it was that power which
gave later to his group of historical plays (written by him between the
ages of thirty and thirty-five) their convincingness and authority.

When Wallie was about twenty-three or -four Sid Hahn took him abroad on
one of his annual scouting trips. Yearly, in the spring, Hahn swooped
down upon London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, seeking that of the foreign
stage which might be translated, fumigated, desiccated, or otherwise
rendered suitable for home use. He sent Wallie on to Vienna, alone, on
the trail of a musical comedy rumoured to be a second Merry Widow in
tunefulness, chic, and charm. Of course it wasn't. Merry Widows rarely
repeat. Wallie wired Hahn, as arranged. The telegram is unimportant,
perhaps, but characteristic.

     MR. SID. HAHN,
     Hotel Savoy,
     London,
     England.

     It's a second all right but not a second Merry Widow. Heard of
     a winner in Budapest. Shall I go. Spent to-day from eleven to
     five running around the Ringstrasse looking for mythical
     creature known as the chic Viennese. After careful
     investigation wish to be quoted as saying the species if any
     is extinct.

     WALLIE.

This, remember, was in the year 1913, B.W. Wallie, obeying instructions,
went to Budapest, witnessed the alleged winner, found it as advertised,
wired Hahn to that effect, and was joined by that gentleman three days
later.

Budapest, at that time, was still Little Paris, only wickeder. A city of
magnificent buildings, and unsalted caviar, and beautiful, dangerous
women, and frumpy men (civilian) and dashing officers in red pants, and
Cigány music, and cafés and paprika and two-horse droshkies. Buda, low
and flat, lay on one side; Pest, high and hilly, perched picturesquely
on the other. Between the two rolled the Blue Danube (which is yellow).

It was here that Hahn and Wallie found Mizzi Markis. Mizzi Markis, then
a girl of nineteen, was a hod carrier.

Wallie had three days in Budapest before Hahn met him there. As the
manager stepped from the train, looking geometrically square in a long
ulster that touched his ears and his heels, Wallie met him with a bound.

"Hello, S.H.! Great to see you! Say, listen, I've found something. I've
found something big!"

Hahn had never seen the boy so excited. "Oh, shucks! No play's as good
as that."

"Play! It isn't a play."

"Why, you young idiot, you said it was good! You said it was darned
good! You don't mean to tell me--"

"Oh, that! That's all right. It's good--or will be when you get through
with it."

"What you talking about then? Here, let's take one of these things with
two horses. Gee, you ought to smoke a fat black seegar and wear a silk
hat when you ride in one of these! I feel like a parade." He was like a
boy on a holiday, as always when in Europe.

"But let me tell you about this girl, won't you!"

"Oh, it's a girl! What's her name? What's she do?"

"Her name's Mizzi."

"Mizzi what?"

"I don't know. She's a hod carrier. She--"

"That's all right, Wallie. I'm here now. An ice bag on your head and
real quiet for two-three days. You'll come round fine."

But Wallie was almost sulking. "Wait till you see her, S.H. She sings."

"Beautiful, is she?"

"No, not particularly. No."

"Wonderful voice, h'm?"

"N-n-no. I wouldn't say it was what you'd call exactly wonderful."

Sid Hahn stood up in the droshky and waved his short arms in windmill
circles. "Well, what the devil does she do then, that's so good? Carry
bricks!"

"She is good at that. When she balances that pail of mortar on her head
and walks off with it, her arms hanging straight at her sides--"

But Sid Hahn's patience was at an end. "You're a humourist, you are. If
I didn't know you I'd say you were drunk. I'll bet you are, anyway.
You've been eating paprika, raw. You make me sick."

Inelegant, but expressive of his feelings. But Wallie only said, "You
wait. You'll see."

Sid Hahn did see. He saw next day. Wallie woke him out of a sound sleep
so that he might see. It was ten-thirty A.M. so that his peevishness was
unwarranted. They had seen the play the night before and Hahn had
decided that, translated and with interpolations (it was a comic opera),
it would captivate New York. Then and there he completed the
negotiations which Wallie had begun. Hahn was all for taking the first
train out, but Wallie was firm. "You've got to see her, I tell you.
You've got to see her."

Their hotel faced the Corso. The Corso is a wide promenade that runs
along the Buda bank of the Danube. Across the river, on the hill, the
royal palace looks down upon the little common people. In that day the
monde and the demi-monde of Budapest walked on the Corso between twelve
and one. Up and down. Up and down. The women, tall, dark, flashing-eyed,
daringly dressed. The men sallow, meagre, and wearing those trousers
which, cut very wide and flappy at the ankles, make them the dowdiest
men in the world. Hahn's room and Wallie's were on the second floor of
the hotel, and at a corner. One set of windows faced the Corso, the
river, and Pest on the hill. The other set looked down upon a new
building being erected across the way. It was on this building that
Mizzi Markis worked as hod carrier.

The war accustomed us to a million women in overalls doing the work of a
million men. We saw them ploughing, juggling steel bars, making shells,
running engines, stoking furnaces, handling freight. But to these two
American men, at that time, the thing at which these labouring women
were employed was dreadful and incredible.

Said Wallie "By the time we've dressed, and had breakfast, and walked a
little and everything, it'll be almost noon. And noon's the time. After
they've eaten their lunch. But I want you to see her before."

By now his earnestness had impressed Hahn who still feigned an
indifference he did not feel. It was about 11:30 when Wallie propelled
him by the arm to the unfinished building across the way. And there he
met Mizzi.

They were just completing the foundation. The place was a busy hive.
Back and forth with pails. Back and forth with loads of bricks.

"What's the matter with the men?" was Hahn's first question.

Wallie explained. "They do the dainty work. They put one brick on top of
the other, with a dab of mortar between. But none of the back-breaking
stuff for them. The women do that."

And it was so. They were down in the pits mixing the mortar, were the
women. They were carrying great pails of it. They were hauling bricks up
one ladder and down. They wore short, full skirts with a
musical-comedy-chorus effect. Some of them looked seventy and some
seventeen. It was fearful work for a woman. A keen wind was blowing
across the river. Their hands were purple.

"Pick Mizzi," said Wallie. "If you can pick her I'll know I'm right. But
I know it, anyway."

Five minutes passed. The two men stood silent. "The one with the walk
and the face," said Hahn, then. Which wasn't very bright of him, because
they all walked and they all had faces. "Going up the pit-ladder now.
With the pail on her head." Wallie gave a little laugh of triumph. But
then, Hahn wouldn't have been Hahn had he not been able to pick a
personality when he saw it.

Years afterward the reviewers always talked of Mizzi's walk. They called
it her superb carriage. They didn't know that you have to walk very
straight, on the balls of your feet, with your hips firm, your stomach
held in flat, your shoulders back, your chest out, your chin out and a
little down, if you are going to be at all successful in balancing a
pail of mortar on your head. After a while that walk becomes a habit.

"Watch her with that pail," said Wallie.

Mizzi filled the pail almost to the top with the heavy white mixture.
She filled it quickly, expertly. The pail, filled, weighed between
seventeen and twenty kilos. One kilo is equal to about two and one fifth
pounds. The girl threw down her scoop, stooped, grasped the pail by its
two handles, and with one superb, unbroken motion raised the pail high
in her two strong arms and placed it on her head. Then she breathed
deeply, once, set her whole figure, turned stiffly, and was off with it.
Sid Hahn took on a long breath as though he himself had just
accomplished the gymnastic feat.

"Well, so far it's pretty good. But I don't know that the American stage
is clamouring for any hod carriers and mortar mixers, exactly."

A whistle blew. Twelve o'clock. Bricks, mortar, scoops, shovels were
abandoned. The women, in their great clod-hopping shoes, flew
chattering to the tiny hut where their lunch boxes were stored. The men
followed more slowly, a mere handful of them. Not one of them wore
overalls or apron. Out again with their bundles and boxes of food--very
small bundles. Very tiny boxes. They ate ravenously the bread and
sausage and drank their beer in great gulps. Fifteen minutes after the
whistle had blown the last crumb had vanished.

"Now, then," said Wallie, and guided Hahn nearer. He looked toward
Mizzi. Everyone looked toward her. Mizzi stood up, brushing crumbs from
her lap. She had a little four-cornered black shawl, folded cross-wise,
over her head and tied under her chin. Her face was round and her cheeks
red. The shawl, framing this, made her look very young and cherubic.

She did not put her hands on her hips, or do any of those story-book
things. She grinned, broadly, showing strong white teeth made strong and
white through much munching of coarse black bread; not yet showing the
neglect common to her class. She asked a question in a loud, clear
voice.

"What's that?" asked Hahn.

"She's talking a kind of hunky Hungarian, I guess. The people here won't
speak German, did you know that? They hate it."

The crowd shouted back with one voice. They settled themselves
comfortably, sitting or standing. Their faces held the broad smile of
anticipation.

"She asked them what they want her to sing. They told her. It's the same
every day."

Mizzi Markis stood there before them in the mud, and clay, and straw of
the building débris. And she sang for them a Hungarian popular song of
the day which, translated, sounds idiotic and which runs something like
this:

    A hundred geese in a row
    Going into the coop.
    At the head of the procession
    A stick over his shoulder--

No, you can't do it. It means less than nothing that way, and certainly
would not warrant the shrieks of mirth that came from the audience
gathered round the girl. Still, when you recall the words of "A Hot
Time":


    When you hear dem bells go ding-ling-ling,
    All join round and sweetly you must sing
    And when the words am through in the chorus all join in
    There'll be a _hot time_
    In the _old town_
    To-night.
          My
           Ba-
             By.

And yet it swept this continent, and Europe, and in Japan they still
think it's our national anthem.

When she had finished, the crowd gave a roar of delight, and clapped
their hands, and stamped their feet, and shouted. She had no unusual
beauty. Her voice was untrained though possessed of strength and
flexibility. It wasn't what she had sung, surely. You heard the song in
a hundred cafés. Every street boy whistled it. It wasn't that expressive
pair of shoulders, exactly. It wasn't a certain soothing tonal quality
that made you forget all the things you'd been trying not to remember.

There is something so futile and unconvincing about an attempted
description of an intangible thing. Some call it personality; some call
it magnetism; some a rhythm sense; and some, genius. It's all these
things, and none of them. Whatever it is, she had it. And whatever it
is, Sid Hahn has never failed to recognize it.

So now he said, quietly, "She's got it."

"You bet she's got it!" from Wallie. "She's got more than Renée Paterne
ever had. A year of training and some clothes--"

"You don't need to tell me. I'm in the theatrical business, myself."

"I'm sorry," stiffly.

But Hahn, too, was sorry immediately. "You know how I am, Wallie. I
like to run a thing off by myself. What do you know about her? Find out
anything?"

"Well, a little. She doesn't seem to have any people. And she's decent.
Kind of a fierce kid, I guess, and fights when offended. They say she's
Polish, not Hungarian. Her mother was a peasant. Her father--nobody
knows. I had a dickens of a time finding out anything. The most terrible
language in the world--Hungarian. They'll stick a _b_ next to a _k_ and
follow it up with a _z_ and put an accent mark over the whole business
and call it a word. Last night I followed her home. And guess what!"

"What?" said Hahn, obligingly.

"On her way she had to cross the big square--the one they call Gisela
Tér, with all the shops around it. Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's--"

"What's Gerbeaud's?"

"That's the famous tea room and pastry shop where all the swells go and
guzzle tea with rum in it and eat cakes--and say! It isn't like our
pastry that tastes like sawdust covered with shaving soap. Marvellous
stuff, this is!"

After all, he was barely twenty-four. So Hahn said, good-naturedly, "All
right, all right. We'll go there this afternoon and eat an acre of it.
Go on. When she came to Gerbeaud's...?"

"Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's she stopped and stood there, outside.
There was a strip of red carpet from the door to the street. You
know--the kind they have at home when there's a wedding on Fifth Avenue.
There she stood at the edge of the carpet, waiting, her face, framed in
that funny little black shawl, turned toward the window, and the tail of
the little shawl kind of waggling in the wind. It was cold and nippy. I
waited, too. Finally I sort of strolled over to her--I knew she couldn't
any more than knock me down--and said, kind of casual, 'What's doing?'
She looked up at me, like a kid, in that funny shawl. She knew I was an
Englees, right away. I guess I must have a fine, open countenance. And I
had motioned toward the red carpet, and the crowded windows. Anyway, she
opens up with a regular burst of fireworks Hungarian, in that deep voice
of hers. Not only that, she acted it out. In two seconds she had on an
imaginary coronet and a court train. And haughty! Gosh! I was sort of
stumped, but I said, 'You don't say!' and waited some more. And then
they flung open the door of the tea shop thing. At the same moment up
dashed an equipage--you couldn't possibly call it anything less--with
flunkeys all over the outside, like trained monkeys. The people inside
the shop stood up, with their mouths full of cake, and out came an old
frump with a terrible hat and a fringe. And it was the Archduchess, and
her name is Josefa."

"Your story interests me strangely, boy," Hahn said, grinning, "but I
don't quite make you. Do archduchesses go to tea rooms for tea? And
what's that got to do with our gifted little hod carrier?"

"This duchess does. Believe me, those tarts are good enough for the
Queen of Hearts, let alone a duchess, no matter how arch. But the plot
of the piece is this. The duchess person goes to Gerbeaud's about twice
a week. And they always spread a red carpet for her. And Mizzi always
manages to cut away in time to stand there in front of Gerbeaud's and
see her come out. She's a gorgeous mimic, that little kid. And though I
couldn't understand a word she said I managed to get out of it just
this: That some day they're going to spread a red carpet for Mizzi and
she's going to walk down it in glory. If you'd seen her face when she
said it, S.H., you wouldn't laugh."

"I wouldn't laugh anyway," said Hahn, seriously.

And that's the true story of Mizzi Markis's beginning. Few people know
it.

       *       *       *       *       *

There they were, the three of them. And of the three, Mizzi's ambition
seemed to be the fiercest, the most implacable. She worked like a horse,
cramming English, French, singing. In some things she was like a woman
of thirty; in others a child of ten. Her gratitude to Hahn was pathetic.
No one ever doubted that he was in love with her almost from the
first--he who had resisted the professional beauties of three decades.

You know she wasn't--and isn't--a beauty, even in that portrait of her
by Sargent, with her two black-haired, stunning-looking boys, one on
either side. But she was one of those gorgeously healthy women whose
very presence energizes those with whom she comes in contact. And then
there was about her a certain bounteousness. There's no other word for
it, really. She reminded you of those gracious figures you see posed for
pictures entitled "Autumn Harvest."

While she was studying she had a little apartment with a middle-aged
woman to look after her, and she must have been a handful. A born cook,
she was, and Hahn and Wallie used to go there to dinner whenever she
would let them. She cooked it herself. Hahn would give up any engagement
for a dinner at Mizzi's. When he entered her little sitting room his
cares seemed to drop from him. She never got over cutting bread as the
peasant women do it--the loaf held firmly against her breast, the knife
cutting toward her. Hahn used to watch her and laugh. Sometimes she
would put on the little black head-shawl of her Budapest days and sing
the street-song about the hundred geese in a row. A delightful, impudent
figure.

With the very first English she learned she told Hahn and Wallie that
some day they were going to spread a fine red carpet for her to tread
upon and that all the world would gaze on her with envy. It was in her
mind a symbol typifying all that there was of earthly glory.

"It'll be a long time before they do any red carpeting for you, my
girl," Sid Hahn had said.

She turned on him fiercely. "I will not rest--I will not eat--I will not
sleep--I will not love--until I have it."

Which was, of course, an exaggerated absurdity.

"Oh, what rot!" Wallie Ascher had said, angrily, and then he had thought
of his own symbol of success, and his own resolve. And his face had
hardened. Sid Hahn looked at the two of them; very young, both of them,
very gifted, very electric. Very much in love with each other, though
neither would admit it even in their own minds. Both their stern young
faces set toward the goal which they thought meant happiness.

Now, Sid Hahn had never dabbled in this new stuff--you know--complexes
and fixed ideas and images. But he was a very wise man, and he did know
to what an extent these two were possessed by ambition for that which
they considered desirable.

He must have thought it over for weeks. He was in love with Mizzi,
remember. And his fondness for Wallie was a thing almost paternal. He
watched these two for a long, long time, a queer, grim little smile on
his gargoyle face. And then his mind was made up. He had always had his
own way. He must have had a certain terrible enjoyment in depriving
himself of the one thing he wanted most in the world--the one thing he
wanted more than he had ever wanted anything.

He decided that Destiny--a ponderous, slow-moving creature at
best--needed a little prodding from him. His plans were simple, as all
effective plans are.

Mizzi had been in America just a year and a half. Her development was
amazing, but she was far from being the finished product that she became
in later years. Hahn decided to chance it. Mizzi had no fear of
audiences. He had tried her out on that. An audience stimulated her. She
took it to her breast. She romped with it.

He found a play at last. A comedy, with music. It was frankly built for
Mizzi. He called Wallie Ascher into his office.

"I wouldn't try her out here for a million. New York's too fly. Some
little thing might be wrong--you know how they are. And all the rest
would go for nothing. The kindest audience in the world--when they like
you. And the cruelest when they don't. We'll go on the road for two
weeks. Then we'll open at the Blackstone in Chicago. I think this girl
has got more real genius than any woman since--since Bernhardt in her
prime. Five years from now she won't be singing. She'll be acting. And
it'll _be_ acting."

"Aren't you forcing things just a little?" asked Wallie, coolly.

"Oh, no. No. Anyway, it's just a try-out. By the way, Wallie, I'll
probably be gone almost a month. If things go pretty well in Chicago
I'll run over to French Lick for eight or ten days and see if I can't
get a little of this stiffness out of my old bones. Will you do
something for me?"

"Sure."

"Pack a few clothes and go up to my place and live there, will you? The
Jap stays on, anyway. The last time I left it alone things went wrong.
You'll be doing me a favour. Take it and play the piano, and have your
friends in, and boss the Jap around. He's stuck on you, anyway. Says he
likes to hear you play."

He stayed away six weeks. And any one who knows him knows what hardship
that was. He loved New York, and his own place, and his comfort, and his
books; and hotel food gave him hideous indigestion.

Mizzi's first appearance was a moderate success. It was nothing like the
sensation of her later efforts. She wasn't ready, and Hahn knew it.
Mizzi and her middle-aged woman companion were installed at the
Blackstone Hotel, which is just next door to the Blackstone Theatre, as
any one is aware who knows Chicago. She was advertised as the Polish
comedienne, Mizzi Markis, and the announcements hinted at her royal
though remote ancestry. And on the night the play opened, as Mizzi
stepped from the entrance of her hotel on her way to the stage door,
just forty or fifty feet away, there she saw stretched on the pavement a
scarlet path of soft-grained carpet for her feet to tread. From the
steps of the hotel to the stage door of the theatre, there it lay, a
rosy line of splendour.

The newspapers played it up as a publicity stunt. Every night, while the
play lasted, the carpet was there. It was rolled up when the stage door
closed upon her. It was unrolled and spread again when she came out
after the performance. Hahn never forgot her face when she first saw it,
and realized its significance. The look was there on the second night,
and on the third, but after that it faded, vanished, and never came
again. Mizzi had tasted of the golden fruit and found it dry and
profitless, without nourishment or sweetness.

The show closed in the midst of a fairly good run. It closed abruptly,
without warning. Together they came back to New York. Just outside New
York Hahn knocked at the door of Mizzi's drawing room and stuck his
round, ugly face in at the opening.

"Let's surprise Wallie," he said.

"Yes," said Mizzi, listlessly.

"He doesn't know the show's closed. We'll take a chance on his being
home for dinner. Unless you're too tired."

"I'm not tired."

The Jap admitted them, and Hahn cut off his staccato exclamations with a
quick and smothering hand. They tiptoed into the big, gracious,
lamp-lighted room.

Wallie was seated at the piano. He had on a silk dressing gown with a
purple cord. One of those dressing gowns you see in the haberdashers'
windows, and wonder who buys them. He looked very tall in it, and rather
distinguished, but not quite happy. He was playing as they came in. They
said, "Boo!" or something idiotic like that. He stood up. And his face!

"Why, hello!" he said, and came forward, swiftly. "Hello! Hello!"

"Hello!" Hahn answered; "Not to say hello-hello."

Wallie looked at the girl. "Hello, Mizzi."

"Hello," said Mizzi.

"For God's sake stop saying 'hello!'" roared Hahn.

They both looked at him absently, and then at each other again.

Hahn flung his coat and hat at the Jap and rubbed his palms briskly
together. "Well, how did you like it?" he said, and slapped Wallie on
the back. "How'd you like it--the place I mean, and the Jap boy and all?
H'm?"

"Very much," Wallie answered, formally. "Very nice."

"You'll be having one of your own some day, soon. That's sure."

"I suppose so," said Wallie, indifferently.

"I would like to go home," said Mizzi, suddenly, in her precise English.

At that Wallie leaped out of his lounging coat. "I'll take you!
I'll--I'll be glad to take you."

Hahn smiled a little, ruefully. "We were going to have dinner here, the
three of us. But if you're tired, Mizzi. I'm not so chipper myself when
it comes to that." He looked about the room, gratefully. "It's good to
be home."

Wallie, hat in hand, was waiting in the doorway, Mizzi, turning to go,
suddenly felt two hands on her shoulders. She was whirled around.
Hahn--he had to stand on tiptoe to do it--kissed her once on the mouth,
hard. Then he gave her a little shove toward the door. "Tell Wallie
about the red carpet," he said.

"I will not," Mizzi replied, very distinctly. "I hate red carpets."

Then they were gone. Hahn hardly seemed to notice that they had left.
There were, I suppose, the proper number of Good-byes, and
See-you-to-morrows, and Thank yous.

Sid Hahn stood there a moment in the middle of the room, very small,
very squat, rather gnomelike, but not at all funny. He went over to the
piano and seated himself, his shoulders hunched, his short legs clearing
the floor. With the forefinger of his right hand he began to pick out a
little tune. Not a sad little tune. A Hungarian street song. He did it
atrociously. The stubby forefinger came down painstakingly on the white
keys. Suddenly the little Jap servant stood in the doorway. Hahn looked
up. His cheeks were wet with tears.

"God! I wish I could play!" he said.




LONG DISTANCE


Chet Ball was painting a wooden chicken yellow. The wooden chicken was
mounted on a six-by-twelve board. The board was mounted on four tiny
wheels. The whole would eventually be pulled on a string guided by the
plump, moist hand of some blissful six-year-old.

You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet Ball.
Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast with any
wooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse. Everything about
him, from the big, blunt-fingered hands that held the ridiculous chick
to the great muscular pillar of his neck, was in direct opposition to
his task, his surroundings, and his attitude.

Chet's proper milieu was Chicago, Illinois (the West Side); his job that
of lineman for the Gas, Light and Power Company; his normal working
position astride the top of a telegraph pole supported in his perilous
perch by a lineman's leather belt and the kindly fates, both of which
are likely to trick you in an emergency.

Yet now he lolled back among his pillows, dabbling complacently at the
absurd yellow toy. A description of his surroundings would sound like
Pages 3 to 17 of a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. The place was all
greensward, and terraces, and sun dials, and beeches, and even those
rhododendrons without which no English novel or country estate is
complete. The presence of Chet Ball among his pillows and some hundreds
similarly disposed revealed to you at once the fact that this particular
English estate was now transformed into Reconstruction Hospital No. 9.

The painting of the chicken quite finished (including two beady black
paint eyes) Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had not told him
to stop painting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was at the
other end of the sunny garden walk, bending over a wheel-chair. So Chet
went on painting, placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he
painted all his finger nails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the
whole of his left thumb, and was starting on the second joint of the
index finger when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently
from his strong hands.

"You shouldn't have painted your fingers," she said.

Chet surveyed them with pride. "They look swell."

Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted wooden
chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letter
bearing an American postmark and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball,
with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such as
A.E.F. and Co. 11.

"Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into her voice. But
Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, "Yeh?"

"I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat One."

Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss Kate began
to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scent of the
centuries-old English garden.

It marked an epoch in Chet's life--that letter. But before we can
appreciate it we'll have to know Chester Ball in his Chicago days.

Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all men
whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could
shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wield his
pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. It was
his pleasure--and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of all lineman's
gangs the world over--to whistle blithely and to call impudently to any
passing petticoat that caught his fancy.

Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would cling,
protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the
law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of
their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street
below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!"

There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of
beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt
as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's
has no meanness in him. A certain dare-deviltry went hand in hand with
his work--a calling in which a careless load dispatcher, a cut wire, or
a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girls laughed and
called back to them or went on more quickly, the colour in their cheeks
a little higher.

But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-weeks' job on
the new plant of the Western Castings Company Chet Ball, glancing down
from his dizzy perch atop an electric light pole, espied Miss Anastasia
Rourke going to work. He didn't know her name nor anything about her,
except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more
remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia was a lady not to
be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't.

So then: "Hoo-Hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Wait for me and
I'll be down."

Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the
streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, which
would make them border on the red.

"You big coward, you!" she called, in her clear, crisp voice. "If you
had your foot on the ground you wouldn't dast call to a decent girl like
that. If you were down here I'd slap the face of you. You know you're
safe up there."

The words were scarcely out of her mouth before Chet Ball's sturdy legs
were twinkling down the pole. His spurred heels dug into the soft pine
of the pole with little ripe, tearing sounds. He walked up to Stasia and
stood squarely in front of her, six feet of brawn and brazen nerve. One
ruddy cheek he presented to her astonished gaze. "Hello, sweetheart," he
said. And waited. The Rourke girl hesitated just a second. All the Irish
heart in her was melting at the boyish impudence of the man before her.
Then she lifted one hand and slapped his smooth cheek. It was a ringing
slap. You saw the four marks of her fingers upon his face. Chet
straightened, his blue eyes bluer. Stasia looked up at him, her eyes
wide. Then down at her own hand, as if it belonged to somebody else. Her
hand came up to her own face. She burst into tears, turned, and ran. And
as she ran, and as she wept, she saw that Chet was still standing there,
looking after her.

Next morning, when Stasia Rourke went by to work, Chet Ball was standing
at the foot of the pole, waiting.

They were to have been married that next June. But that next June Chet
Ball, perched perilously on the branch of a tree in a small woodsy spot
somewhere in France, was one reason why the American artillery in that
same woodsy spot was getting such a deadly range on the enemy. Chet's
costume was so devised that even through field glasses (made in Germany)
you couldn't tell where tree left off and Chet began.

Then, quite suddenly, the Germans got the range. The tree in which Chet
was hidden came down with a crash, and Chet lay there, more than ever
indiscernible among its tender foliage.

Which brings us back to the English garden, the yellow chicken, Miss
Kate, and the letter.

His shattered leg was mended by one of those miracles of modern war
surgery, though he never again would dig his spurred heels into the pine
of a G.L. & P. Company pole. But the other thing--they put it down
under the broad general head of shell shock. In the lovely English
garden they set him to weaving and painting, as a means of soothing the
shattered nerves. He had made everything from pottery jars to bead
chains; from baskets to rugs. Slowly the tortured nerves healed. But the
doctors, when they stopped at Chet's cot or chair, talked always of "the
memory centre." Chet seemed satisfied to go on placidly painting toys or
weaving chains with his great, square-tipped fingers--the fingers that
had wielded the pliers so cleverly in his pole-climbing days.

"It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend," said the
nerve specialist. "Time may do it--but I doubt it. Sometimes just a
word--the right word--will set the thing in motion again. Does he get
any letters?"

"His girl writes to him. Fine letters. But she doesn't know yet
about--about this. I've written his letters for him. She knows now that
his leg is healed and she wonders--"

That had been a month ago. To-day Miss Kate slit the envelope postmarked
Chicago. Chet was fingering the yellow wooden chicken, pride in his
eyes. In Miss Kate's eyes there was a troubled, baffled look as she
began to read:

     Chet, dear, it's raining in Chicago. And you know when it
     rains in Chicago, it's wetter, and muddier, and rainier than
     any place in the world. Except maybe this Flanders we're
     reading so much about. They say for rain and mud that place
     takes the prize.

     I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chet
     darling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else and
     nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's something
     you're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just the
     leg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any difference
     with me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care how
     bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without any
     features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever's
     happened to the outside of you, they can't change your
     insides. And you're the same man that called out to me, that
     day, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you a piece
     of my mind climbed down off the pole, and put your face up to
     be slapped, God bless the boy in you--

A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ball
was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand.

"What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice.

Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easy
and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood."

"What'm I doin' with it?"

"You've just finished painting it."

Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief moment,
struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger and amusement
he put it down on the table none too gently and stoop up, yawning a
little.

"That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in utter contrition: "Oh,
beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! I didn't--"

But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face.
She was registering joy--pure joy.




UN MORSO DOO PANG


When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy,
in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset that
Belasco himself could not have improved upon had wrung from her only a
casual tribute such as: "My! Look how red the sky is!" delivered as
unemotionally as a weather bulletin.

Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert
heap in a cotton kimono whose colour and design were libels on the
Nipponese. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her
hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where
shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no
answering radiance in the girl's face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky.

       *       *       *       *       *

Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wis., Tessie Golden of the
pre-sunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the kitchen:
"Ma, what'd you do with my pink georgette waist?"

And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collar was
kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a little pressing
while my iron was on."

At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink
georgette blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to
texture and precariously V-cut as to neck had Tessie herself not been so
reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, lavishly shirred and very
brief; white kid shoes, high-laced, whose height still failed to achieve
the two inches of white silk stocking that linked skirt hem to shoe top;
finally, a hat with a good deal of French blue about it.

As she passed through the sitting room on her way out her mother would
appear in the doorway, dish towel in hand. Her pride in this slim young
thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping
criticism.

"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose." A keen eye on the swishing skirt
hem.

Tessie, the quick-tongued, would pat the arabesque of shining hair that
lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I
just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto
and picked me up for a little ride. So's not to keep her waiting."

Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Any one in the Fox River
Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at
the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the Pulp
and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch
factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing
this, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as
unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose
family residence was in Chippewa, Wis., but who wintered in Italy,
summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very
hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the town
used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton line.
Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and
zephyrs, was of voile and silk and crêpe de Chine and satin--materials
that we had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for
party dresses and wedding gowns. Of course two years later they were
showing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. But that
was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went to
Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her.

Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen
door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes,
following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare,
caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a
water colour may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth
curved into humour lines. She was the cut-up of the escapement
department at the watch factory; the older woman's lips sagged at the
corners. Tessie was buoyant and colourful with youth. The other was
shrunken and faded with years and labour. As the girl minced across the
room in her absurdly high-heeled white kid shoes the older woman
thought: "My, but she's pretty!" But she said aloud: "Them shoes could
stand a cleaning. I should think you'd stay home once in a while and not
be runnin' the streets every night."

"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you."

And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding. But in
families such as Tessie's demonstration is a thing to be ashamed of;
affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was janitor of the
Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled by rheumatism,
loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neat gray frame
house, and his new cement sidewalk, and his carefully tended yard and
garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caress exchanged
between her parents.

Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie's
evening diversion. She no longer had cause to say: "Always gaddin'
downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, like you didn't have a home to
stay in. You ain't been in a evening this week, 'cept when you washed
your hair."

Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back
porch--she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at
half-past six to go to work.

Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the
limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart.
She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some
errand or other--to empty the coffee grounds; to turn the row of
half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing; to flap and hang up a
damp tea towel.

"Ain't you goin' out, Tess?"

"No."

"What you want to lop around here for? Such a grand evening. Why don't
you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere,
h'm?"

"What for?"--listlessly.

"What for! What does anybody go out for!"

"I don't know."

If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might
have found relief. But the family shyness of their class was too strong
upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy:
"Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' the
last fella left in the world."

A grim flash of the old humour lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He
is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe
Fatty Weiman, driving the hack. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see
if I can't make a hit with one of them."

She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of Tessie
Golden's world.

       *       *       *       *       *

In order to understand the Tessie of to-day you will have to know the
Tessie of six months ago; Tessie the impudent, the life-loving, the
pleasureful. Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room
foreman that any one else would have been fired for. Her wide mouth was
capable of glorious insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter
from the girls' wash room at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth
to an admiring group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with
the gift of burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from
Europe wearing the first hobble skirt that Chippewa had ever seen Tessie
gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand
Avenue in this restricted garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity,
though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She
followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie
Haynes, cloak and suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from
the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall
styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of
the last cry in Paris modes--and no model in Mattie's newly selected
stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it.

You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker.
Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a shirt waist or
retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not
sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and
arbour and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low benches
along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls
worked with pincers and gas flame, screwing together the three tiny
parts of the watch's anatomy that was their particular specialty. Each
wore a jeweller's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch
factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket
had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to
experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her,
somehow, a spiritual look which made her diablerie all the more piquant.

Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation
for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap Ballou,
the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of
nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed
laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew that Tessie
Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is turned, had
directed one of her sure shafts at him.

Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew
it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence
and audacity saved her.

"Some day," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll
find yourself looking for a job."

"Go on--fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"--a
form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type
of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless,
ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through
the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham,
Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable,
certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady
worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn,
regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore his cap on one side
of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite
drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender, sensitive fingers like
an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate
mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room. It was
said he had a wife or two. Forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort
of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money,
it was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without
retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy.

When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs
something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, he
ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watch works. All he needs
is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good eatin'
as a relish."

And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of the American
Express wagon, hatless, sunburnt, stockily muscular, shouting to his
horse as he galloped clattering down Winnebago Street on his way to the
depot and the 7:50 train.

I suppose there was something about the clear simplicity and uprightness
of the firm little figure that appealed to Nap Ballou. He used to regard
her curiously with a long, hard gaze before which she would grow
uncomfortable. "Think you'll know me next time you see me?" But there
was an uneasy feeling beneath her flip exterior. Not that there was
anything of the beautiful, persecuted factory girl and villainous
foreman about the situation. Tessie worked at watchmaking because it was
light, pleasant, and well paid. She could have found another job for the
asking. Her money went for white shoes and pink blouses and lacy boudoir
caps which she affected Sunday mornings. She was forever buying a vivid
necktie for her father and dressing up her protesting mother in gay
colours that went ill with the drab, wrinkled face. "If it wasn't for
me, you'd go round looking like one of those Polack women down by the
tracks," Tessie would s

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