Humoresque: A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It
by Fannie Hurst · English · Gutenberg #9864 · 461,829 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Humoresque: A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Humoresque: A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It
Author: Fannie Hurst
Release date: February 1, 2006 [eBook #9864]
Most recently updated: December 27, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9864
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG Distributed Proofreaders
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUMORESQUE: A LAUGH ON LIFE WITH A TEAR BEHIND IT ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG
Distributed Proofreaders
[Illustration: HE CAPERED THROUGH THE MELODY OF DVORÀK'S, WHICH IS AS
IRONIC AS A GRINNING MASK]
HUMORESQUE
A LAUGH ON LIFE WITH
A TEAR BEHIND IT
By FANNIE HURST
1920
CONTENTS
HUMORESQUE
OATS FOR THE WOMAN
A PETAL ON THE CURRENT
WHITE GOODS
"HEADS"
A BOOB SPELLED BACKWARD
EVEN AS YOU AND I
THE WRONG PEW
HUMORESQUE
On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch
its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity,
steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in _patois_ from
tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls
are terrible and spongy with fungi.
By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the
Mongolian and the red blood of the Caucasian become as oil and water in
the mingling, Mulberry Street, bounded by sixteen languages, runs its
intact Latin length of pushcarts, clotheslines, naked babies, drying
vermicelli; black-eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially big
with child; whole families of buttonhole-makers, who first saw the
blue-and-gold light of Sorrento, bent at home work round a single gas
flare; pomaded barbers of a thousand Neapolitan amours. And then, just
as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by the mere stepping down from
the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grillwork balconies, the
moldy smell of poverty touched up with incense. Orientals whose feet
shuffle and whose faces are carved out of satinwood. Forbidden women,
their white, drugged faces behind upper windows. Yellow children,
incongruous enough in Western clothing. A draughty areaway with an
oblique of gaslight and a black well of descending staircase.
Show-windows of jade and tea and Chinese porcelains.
More streets emanating out from Mott like a handful of crooked rheumatic
fingers, then suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath Elevated
trains, where men burned down to the butt end of soiled lives pass in
and out and out and in of the knee-high swinging doors, a veiny-nosed,
acid-eaten race in themselves.
Allen Street, too, still more easterly, and half as wide, is straddled
its entire width by the steely, long-legged skeleton of Elevated
traffic, so that its third-floor windows no sooner shudder into silence
from the rushing shock of one train than they are shaken into chatter by
the passage of another. Indeed, third-floor dwellers of Allen Street,
reaching out, can almost touch the serrated edges of the Elevated
structure, and in summer the smell of its hot rails becomes an actual
taste in the mouth. Passengers, in turn, look in upon this horizontal of
life as they whiz by. Once, in fact, the blurry figure of what might
have been a woman leaned out, as she passed, to toss into one Abrahm
Kantor's apartment a short-stemmed pink carnation. It hit softly on
little Leon Kantor's crib, brushing him fragrantly across the mouth and
causing him to pucker up.
Beneath, where even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way by a
chink, and babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street
presents a sort of submarine and greenish gloom, as if its humanity were
actually moving through a sea of aqueous shadows, faces rather bleached
and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and shrink. And then,
like a shimmering background of orange-finned and copper-flanked marine
life, the brass-shops of Allen Street, whole rows of them, burn
flamelessly and without benefit of fuel.
To enter Abrahm Kantor's--Brasses, was three steps down, so that his
casement show-window, at best filmed over with the constant rain of dust
ground down from the rails above, was obscure enough, but crammed with
copied loot of khedive and of czar. The seven-branch candlestick so
biblical and supplicating of arms. An urn, shaped like Rebecca's, of
brass, all beaten over with little pocks. Things--cups, trays, knockers,
ikons, gargoyles, bowls, and teapots. A symphony of bells in graduated
sizes. Jardinières with fat sides. A pot-bellied samovar. A
swinging-lamp for the dead, star-shaped. Against the door, an octave of
tubular chimes, prisms of voiceless harmony and of heatless light.
Opening this door, they rang gently, like melody heard through water and
behind glass. Another bell rang, too, in tilted singsong from a pulley
operating somewhere in the catacomb rear of this lambent vale of things
and things and things. In turn, this pulley set in toll still another
bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which overlooked the
front of whizzing rails and a rear wilderness of gibbet-looking
clothes-lines, dangling perpetual specters of flapping union suits in a
mid-air flaky with soot.
Often at lunch, or even the evening meal, this bell would ring in on
Abrahm Kantor's digestive well-being, and while he hurried down, napkin
often bib-fashion still about his neck, and into the smouldering lanes
of copper, would leave an eloquent void at the head of his
well-surrounded table.
This bell was ringing now, jingling in upon the slumber of a still newer
Kantor, snuggling peacefully enough within the ammoniac depths of a
cradle recently evacuated by Leon, heretofore impinged upon you.
On her knees before an oven that billowed forth hotly into her face,
Mrs. Kantor, fairly fat and not yet forty, and at the immemorial task of
plumbing a delicately swelling layer-cake with broom-straw, raised her
face, reddened and faintly moist.
"Isadore, run down and say your papa is out until six. If it's a
customer, remember the first asking-price is the two middle figures on
the tag, and the last asking-price is the two outside figures. See once,
with your papa out to buy your little brother his birthday present, and
your mother in a cake, if you can't make a sale for first price."
Isadore Kantor, aged eleven and hunched with a younger Kantor over an
oilcloth-covered table, hunched himself still deeper in a barter for a
large crystal marble with a candy stripe down its center.
"Izzie, did you hear me?"
"Yes'm."
"Go down this minute--do you hear? Rudolph, stop always letting your
big brother get the best of you in marbles. Iz-zie!"
"In a minute."
"Don't let me have to ask you again, Isadore Kantor!"
"Aw, ma, I got some 'rithmetic to do. Let Esther go!"
"Always Esther! Your sister stays right in the front room with her
spelling."
"Aw, ma, I got spelling, too."
"Every time I ask that boy he should do me one thing, right away he gets
lessons! With me, that lessons-talk don't go no more. Every time you get
put down in school, I'm surprised there's a place left lower where they
can put you. Working-papers for such a boy like you!"
"I'll woik--"
"How I worried myself! Violin lessons yet--thirty cents a lesson out of
your papa's pants while he slept! That's how I wanted to have in the
family a profession--maybe a musician on the violin! Lessons for you out
of money I had to lie to your papa about! Honest, when I think of it--my
own husband--it's a wonder I don't potch you just for remembering it.
Rudolph, will you stop licking that cake-pan? It's saved for your little
brother Leon. Ain't you ashamed even on your little brother's birthday
to steal from him?"
"Ma, gimme the spoon?"
"I'll give you the spoon, Isadore Kantor, where you don't want it. If
you don't hurry down, the way that bell is ringing, not one bite do you
get out of your little brother's birthday cake tonight!"
"I'm goin', ain't I?"
"Always on my children's birthdays a meanness sets into this house!
Rudolph, will you put down that bowl! Izzie--for the last time I ask
you--for the last time--"
Erect now, Mrs. Kantor lifted an expressive hand, letting it hover.
"I'm goin', ma; for golly sakes, I'm goin'!" said her recalcitrant one,
shuffling off toward the staircase, shuffling, shuffling.
Then Mrs. Kantor resumed her plumbing, and through the little apartment,
its middle and only bedroom of three beds and a crib lighted vicariously
by the front room and kitchen, began to wind the warm, the golden-brown
fragrance of cake in the rising.
By six o'clock the shades were drawn against the dirty dusk of Allen
Street and the oilcloth-covered table dragged out center and spread by
Esther Kantor, nine in years, in the sturdy little legs bulging over
shoe-tops, in the pink cheeks that sagged slightly of plumpness, and in
the utter roundness of face and gaze, but mysteriously older in the
little-mother lore of crib and knee-dandling ditties and in the ropy
length and thickness of the two brown plaits down her back.
There was an eloquence to that waiting, laid-out table, the print of the
family already gathered about it; the dynastic high chair, throne of
each succeeding Kantor; an armchair drawn up before the paternal
mustache-cup; the ordinary kitchen chair of Mannie Kantor, who spilled
things, an oilcloth sort of bib dangling from its back; the little chair
of Leon Kantor, cushioned in an old family album that raised his chin
above the table. Even in cutlery the Kantor family was not lacking in
variety. Surrounding a centerpiece of thick Russian lace were Russian
spoons washed in washed-off gilt; forks of one, two, and three tines;
steel knives with black handles; a hartshorn carving-knife. Thick-lipped
china in stacks before the armchair. A round four-pound loaf of black
bread waiting to be torn, and tonight, on the festive mat of cotton
lace, a cake of pinkly gleaming icing, encircled with five pink
little candles.
At slightly after six Abrahm Kantor returned, leading by a resisting
wrist Leon Kantor, his stemlike little legs, hit midship, as it were, by
not sufficiently cut-down trousers and so narrow and birdlike of face
that his eyes quite obliterated the remaining map of his features, like
those of a still wet nestling. All except his ears. They poised at the
sides of Leon's shaved head of black bristles, as if butterflies had
just lighted there, whispering, with very spread wings, their message,
and presently would fly off again. By some sort of muscular contraction
he could wiggle these ears at will, and would do so for a penny or a
whistle, and upon one occasion for his brother Rudolph's dead rat, so
devised as to dangle from string and window before the unhappy
passer-by. They were quivering now, these ears, but because the entire
little face was twitching back tears and gulp of sobs.
"Abrahm--Leon--what is it?" Her hands and her forearms instantly out
from the business of kneading something meaty and floury, Mrs. Kantor
rushed forward, her glance quick from one to the other of them. "Abrahm,
what's wrong?"
"I'll feedle him! I'll feedle him!"
The little pulling wrist still in clutch, Mr. Kantor regarded his wife,
the lower half of his face, well covered with reddish bristles,
undershot, his free hand and even his eyes violently lifted. To those
who see in a man a perpetual kinship to that animal kingdom of which he
is supreme, there was something undeniably anthropoidal about Abrahm
Kantor, a certain simian width between the eyes and long, rather agile
hands with hairy backs.
"Hush it!" cried Mr. Kantor, his free hand raised in threat of descent,
and cowering his small son to still more undersized proportions. "Hush
it or, by golly! I'll--"
"Abrahm--Abrahm--what is it?"
Then Mr. Kantor gave vent in acridity of word and feature.
"_Schlemmil!_" he cried. "_Momser! Ganef! Nebich!_" by which, in smiting
mother tongue, he branded his offspring with attributes of apostate and
ne'er-do-well, of idiot and thief.
"Abrahm!"
"Schlemmil!" repeated Mr. Kantor, swinging Leon so that he described a
large semicircle that landed him into the meaty and waiting embrace of
his mother. "Take him! You should be proud of such a little _momser_ for
a son! Take him, and here you got back his birthday dollar. A feedle!
Honest--when I think on it--a feedle!"
Such a rush of outrage seemed fairly to strangle Mr. Kantor that he
stood, hand still upraised, choking and inarticulate above the now
frankly howling huddle of his son.
"Abrahm, you should just once touch this child! How he trembles!
Leon--mamma's baby--what is it? Is this how you come back when papa
takes you out to buy your birthday present? Ain't you ashamed?"
Mouth distended to a large and blackly hollow O, Leon, between
terrifying spells of breath-holding, continued to howl.
"All the way to Naftel's toy-store I drag him. A birthday present for a
dollar his mother wants he should have, all right, a birthday present! I
give you my word till I'm ashamed for Naftel, every toy in his shelves
is pulled down. Such a cow--that shakes with his head--"
"No--no--no!" This from young Leon, beating at his mother's skirts.
Again the upraised but never quite descending hand of his father.
"By golly! I'll 'no--no' you!"
"Abrahm--go 'way! Baby, what did papa do?"
Then Mr. Kantor broke into an actual tarantella of rage, his hands palms
up and dancing.
"'What did papa do?' she asks. She's got easy asking. 'What did papa
do?' The whole shop, I tell you. A sheep with a baa inside when you
squeeze on him--games--a horn so he can holler my head off--such a knife
like Izzie's with a scissors in it. 'Leon,' I said, ashamed for Naftel,
'that's a fine knife like Izzie's so you can cut up with. All right,
then'--when I see how he hollers--'such a box full of soldiers to have
war with.' 'Dollar seventy-five,' says Naftel. 'All right, then,' I
says, when I seen how he keeps hollering. 'Give you a dollar fifteen for
'em.' I should make myself small for fifteen cents more. 'Dollar
fifteen,' I says--anything so he should shut up with his hollering for
what he seen in the window."
"He seen something in the window he wanted, Abrahm?"
"Didn't I tell you? A feedle! A four-dollar feedle! A moosicer, so we
should have another feedler in the family for some thirty-cents
lessons."
"Abrahm--you mean--he--our Leon--wanted a violin?"
"'Wanted,' she says. I could potch him again this minute for how he
wanted it! _Du_--you little bum you--_chammer_--_momser_--I'll
feedle you!"
Across Mrs. Kantor's face, as she knelt there in the shapeless
cotton-stuff uniform of poverty, through the very tenement of her body,
a light had flashed up into her eyes. She drew her son closer, crushing
his puny cheek up against hers, cupping his bristly little head in her
by no means immaculate palms.
"He wanted a violin! It's come, Abrahm! The dream of all my life--my
prayers--it's come! I knew it must be one of my children if I waited
long enough--and prayed enough. A musician! He wants a violin! He cried
for a violin! My baby! Why, darlink, mamma'll sell her clothes off her
back to get you a violin. He's a musician, Abrahm! I should have known
it the way he's fooling always around the chimes and the bells in
the store!"
Then Mr. Kantor took to rocking his head between his palms.
"Oi--oi! The mother is crazier as her son. A moosician! A _fresser_, you
mean. Such an eater, it's a wonder he ain't twice too big instead of
twice too little for his age."
"That's a sign, Abrahm; geniuses, they all eat big. For all we know,
he's a genius. I swear to you, Abrahm, all the months before he was born
I prayed for it. Each one before they came, I prayed it should be the
one. I thought that time the way our Isadore ran after the organ-grinder
he would be the one. How could I know it was the monkey he wanted? When
Isadore wouldn't take to it I prayed my next one, and then my next one,
should have the talent. I've prayed for it, Abrahm. If he wants a
violin, please, he should have it."
"Not with my money."
"With mine! I've got enough saved, Abrahm. Them three extra dollars
right here inside my own waist. Just that much for that cape down on
Grand Street. I wouldn't have it now, the way they say the wind blows
up them--"
"I tell you the woman's crazy--"
"I feel it! I know he's got talent! I know my children so well. A--a
father don't understand. I'm so next to them. It's like I can tell
always everything that will happen to them--it's like a pain--somewheres
here--like in back of my heart."
"A pain in the heart she gets."
"For my own children I'm always a prophet, I tell you! You think I
didn't know that--that terrible night after the pogrom after we got out
of Kief to across the border! You remember, Abrahm, how I predicted it
to you then--how our Mannie would be born too soon and--and not right
from my suffering! Did it happen on the ship to America just the way I
said it would? Did it happen just exactly how I predicted our Izzie
would break his leg that time playing on the fire-escape? I tell you,
Abrahm, I get a real pain here under my heart that tells me what comes
to my children. Didn't I tell you how Esther would be the first in her
confirmation-class and our baby Boris would be redheaded? At only five
years, our Leon all by himself cries for a fiddle--get it for him,
Abrahm--get it for him!"
"I tell you, Sarah, I got a crazy woman for a wife! It ain't enough we
celebrate eight birthdays a year with one-dollar presents each time and
copper goods every day higher. It ain't enough that right to-morrow I
got a fifty-dollar note over me from Sol Ginsberg; a four-dollar present
she wants for a child that don't even know the name of a feedle."
"Leon, baby, stop hollering. Papa will go back and get the fiddle for
you now before supper. See, mamma's got money here in her waist--"
"Papa will go back for the feedle _not_--three dollars she's saved for
herself he can holler out of her for a feedle!"
"Abrahm, he's screaming so he--he'll have a fit."
"He should have two fits."
"Darlink--"
"I tell you the way you spoil your children it will some day come back
on us."
"It's his birthday night, Abrahm--five years since his little head
first lay on the pillow next to me."
"All right--all right--drive me crazy because he's got a birthday."
"Leon baby--if you don't stop hollering you'll make yourself sick.
Abrahm, I never saw him like this--he's green--"
"I'll green him. Where is that old feedle from Isadore--that
seventy-five-cents one?"
"I never thought of that! You broke it that time you got mad at
Isadore's lessons. I'll run down. Maybe it's with the junk behind the
store. I never thought of that fiddle. Leon darlink--wait! Mamma'll run
down and look. Wait, Leon, till mamma finds you a fiddle."
The raucous screams stopped then, suddenly, and on their very lustiest
crest, leaving an echoing gash across silence. On willing feet of haste
Mrs. Kantor wound down backward the high, ladder-like staircase that led
to the brass-shop.
Meanwhile to a gnawing consciousness of dinner-hour had assembled the
house of Kantor. Attuned to the intimate atmosphere of the tenement
which is so constantly rent with cry of child, child-bearing, delirium,
delirium tremens, Leon Kantor had howled no impression into the motley
din of things. There were Isadore, already astride his chair, leaning
well into center table, for first vociferous tear at the four-pound
loaf; Esther, old at chores, settling an infant into the high chair,
careful of tiny fingers in lowering the wooden bib.
"Papa, Izzie's eating first again."
"Put down that loaf and wait until your mother dishes up, or you'll get
a potch you won't soon forget."
"Say, pop--"
"Don't 'say, pop' me! I don't want no street-bum freshness from you!"
"I mean, papa, there was an up-town swell in, and she bought one of them
seventy-five-cent candlesticks for the first price."
"_Schlemmil! Chammer!_" said Mr. Kantor, rinsing his hands at the sink.
"Didn't I always tell you it's the first price, times two, when you see
up-town business come in? Haven't I learned it to you often enough a
slummer must pay for her nosiness?"
There entered then, on poor, shuffling feet, Mannie Kantor, so marred in
the mysterious and ceramic process of life that the brain and the soul
had stayed back sooner than inhabit him. Seventeen in years, in the down
upon his face and in growth unretarded by any great nervosity of system,
his vacuity of face was not that of childhood, but rather as if his
light eyes were peering out from some hinterland and wanting so terribly
and so dumbly to communicate what they beheld to brain-cells closed
against himself.
At sight of Mannie, Leon Kantor, the tears still wetly and dirtily down
his cheeks, left off his black, fierce-eyed stare of waiting long enough
to smile, darkly, it is true, but sweetly.
"Giddy-app!" he cried. "Giddy-app!"
And then Mannie, true to habit, would scamper and scamper.
Up out of the traplike stair-opening came the head of Mrs. Kantor,
disheveled and a smudge of soot across her face, but beneath her arm,
triumphant, a violin of one string and a broken back.
"See, Leon--what mamma got! A violin! A fiddle! Look! The bow, too, I
found. It ain't much, baby, but it's a fiddle."
"Aw, ma--that's my old violin. Gimme. I want it. Where'd you find--"
"Hush up, Izzie! This ain't yours no more. See, Leon, what mamma brought
you. A violin!"
"Now, you little _chammer_, you got a feedle, and if you ever let me
hear you holler again for a feedle, by golly! if I don't--"
From his corner, Leon Kantor reached out, taking the instrument and
fitting it beneath his chin, the bow immediately feeling, surely and
lightly, for string.
"Look, Abrahm, he knows how to hold it! What did I tell you? A child
that never in his life seen a fiddle, except a beggar's on the street!"
Little Esther suddenly cantered down-floor, clapping her chubby hands.
"Lookie--lookie--Leon!"
The baby ceased clattering his spoon against the wooden bib. A silence
seemed to shape itself.
So black and so bristly of head, his little clawlike hands hovering over
the bow, Leon Kantor withdrew a note, strangely round and given up
almost sobbingly from the single string. A note of warm twining quality,
like a baby's finger.
"Leon--darlink!"
Fumbling for string and for notes the instrument could not yield up to
him, the birdlike mouth began once more to open widely and terribly into
the orificial O.
It was then Abrahm Kantor came down with a large hollow resonance of
palm against that aperture, lifting his small son and depositing him
plop upon the family album.
"Take that! By golly! one more whimper out of you and if I don't make
you black-and-blue, birthday or no birthday! Dish up, Sarah, quick, or
I'll give him something to cry about."
The five pink candles had been lighted, burning pointedly and with
slender little smoke wisps. Regarding them owlishly, the tears dried on
Leon's face, his little tongue licking up at them.
"Look how solemn he is, like he was thinking of something a million
miles away except how lucky he is he should have a pink birthday-cake.
Uh--uh--uh! Don't you begin to holler again. Here, I'm putting the
feedle next to you. Uh--uh--uh!"
To a meal plentifully ladled out directly from stove to table, the
Kantor family drew up, dipping first into the rich black soup of the
occasion. All except Mrs. Kantor.
"Esther, you dish up. I'm going somewhere. I'll be back in a minute."
"Where you going, Sarah? Won't it keep until--"
But even in the face of query, Sarah Kantor was two flights down and
well through the lambent aisles of the copper-shop. Outside, she broke
into run, along two blocks of the indescribable bazaar atmosphere of
Grand Street, then one block to the right.
Before Mattel's show-window, a jet of bright gas burned into a
jibberwock land of toys. There was that in Sarah Kantor's face that was
actually lyrical as, fumbling at the bosom of her dress, she entered.
To Leon Kantor, by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life was a
chromatic scale, yielding up to him, through throbbing, living nerves of
sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of man's emotions.
When he tucked his Stradivarius beneath his chin the book of life seemed
suddenly translated to him in melody. Even Sarah Kantor, who still
brewed for him, on a small portable stove carried from city to city and
surreptitiously unpacked in hotel suites, the blackest of soups, and,
despite his protestation, would incase his ears of nights in an old
home-made device against their flightiness, would oftentimes bleed
inwardly at this sense of his isolation.
There was a realm into which he went alone, leaving her as detached as
the merest ticket purchaser at the box-office.
At seventeen Leon Kantor had played before the crowned heads of Europe,
the aching heads of American capital, and even the shaved head of a
South Sea prince. There was a layout of anecdotal gifts, from the molar
tooth of the South Sea prince set in a South Sea pearl to a
blue-enameled snuff-box incrusted with the rearing-lion coat-of-arms of
a very royal house.
At eighteen came the purchase of a king's Stradivarius for a king's
ransom, and acclaimed by Sunday supplements to repose of nights in an
ivory cradle.
At nineteen, under careful auspices of press agent, the ten singing
digits of the son of Abrahm Kantor were insured at ten thousand dollars
the finger.
At twenty he had emerged surely and safely from the perilous quicksands
which have sucked down whole Lilliputian worlds of infant prodigies.
At twenty-one, when Leon Kantor played a Sunday-night concert, there was
a human queue curling entirely around the square block of the
operahouse, waiting its one, two, even three and four hours for the
privilege of standing room only.
Usually these were Leon Kantor's own people pouring up from the lowly
lands of the East Side to the white lands of Broadway, parched for
music, these burning brethren of his--old men in that line, frequently
carrying their own little folding camp-chairs, not against weariness of
the spirit, but of the flesh; youth with Slavic eyes and cheek-bones.
These were the six-deep human phalanx which would presently slant down
at him from tiers of steepest balconies and stand frankly emotional and
jammed in the unreserved space behind the railing which shut them off
from the three-dollar seats of the reserved.
At a very special one of these concerts, dedicated to the meager purses
of just these, and held in New York's super opera-house, the
Amphitheater, a great bowl of humanity, the metaphor made perfect by
tiers of seats placed upon the stage, rose from orchestra to dome. A
gigantic cup of a Colosseum lined in stacks and stacks of faces. From
the door of his dressing-room, leaning out, Leon Kantor could see a
great segment of it, buzzing down into adjustment, orchestra twitting
and tuning into it.
In the bare little room, illuminated by a sheaf of roses, just arrived,
Mrs. Kantor drew him back by the elbow.
"Leon, you're in a draught."
The amazing years had dealt kindly with Mrs. Kantor. Stouter, softer,
apparently even taller, she was full of small new authorities that could
shut out cranks, newspaper reporters, and autograph fiends. A
fitted-over-corsets black taffeta and a high comb in the graying hair
had done their best with her. Pride, too, had left its flush upon her
cheeks, like two round spots of fever.
"Leon, it's thirty minutes till your first number. Close that door. Do
you want to let your papa and his excitement in on you?"
The son of Sarah Kantor obeyed, leaning his short, rather narrow form in
silhouette against the closed door. In spite of slimly dark evening
clothes worked out by an astute manager to the last detail in boyish
effects, there was that about him which defied long-haired precedent.
Slimly and straightly he had shot up into an unmannered, a short, even a
bristly-haired young manhood, disqualifying by a close shave for the
older school of hirsute virtuosity.
But his nerves did not spare him. On concert nights they seemed to
emerge almost to the surface of him and shriek their exposure.
"Just feel my hands, ma. Like ice."
She dived down into her large silk what-not of a reticule.
"I've got your fleece-lined gloves here, son."
"No--no! For God's sake--not those things! No!"
He was back at the door again, opening it to a slit, peering through.
"They're bringing more seats on the stage. If they crowd me in I won't
go on. I can't play if I hear them breathe. Hi--out there--no more
chairs! Pa! Hancock--"
"Leon, Leon, ain't you ashamed to get so worked up? Close that door.
Have you got a manager who is paid just to see to your comfort? When
papa comes, I'll have him go out and tell Hancock you don't want chairs
so close to you. Leon, will you mind mamma and sit down?"
"It's a bigger house than the royal concert in Madrid, ma. Why, I never
saw anything like it! It's a stampede. God! this is real--this is what
gets me, playing for my own! I should have given a concert like this
three years ago. I'll do it every year now. I'd rather play before them
than all the crowned heads on earth. It's the biggest night of my life.
They're rioting out there, ma--rioting to get in."
"Leon, Leon, won't you sit down, if mamma begs you to?"
He sat then, strumming with all ten fingers upon his knees.
"Try to get quiet, son. Count--like you always do. One--two--three--"
"Please, ma--for God's sake--please--please!"
"Look--such beautiful roses! From Sol Ginsberg, an old friend of papa's
he used to buy brasses from eighteen years ago. Six years he's been away
with his daughter in Munich. Such a beautiful mezzo they say, engaged
already for Metropolitan next season."
"I hate it, ma, if they breathe on my neck."
"Leon darlink, did mamma promise to fix it? Have I ever let you play a
concert when you wouldn't be comfortable?"
His long, slim hands suddenly prehensile and cutting a streak of upward
gesture, Leon Kantor rose to his feet, face whitening.
"Do it now! Now, I tell you. I won't have them breathe on me. Do you
hear me? Now! Now! Now!"
Risen also, her face soft and tremulous for him, Mrs. Kantor put out a
gentle, a sedative hand upon his sleeve.
"Son," she said, with an edge of authority even behind her smile, "don't
holler at me!"
He grasped her hand with his two and, immediately quiet, lay a close
string of kisses along it.
"Mamma," he said, kissing again and again into the palm, "mamma--mamma."
"I know, son; it's nerves!"
"They eat me, ma. Feel--I'm like ice! I didn't mean it; you know I
didn't mean it!"
"My baby," she said, "my wonderful boy, it's like I can never get used
to the wonder of having you. The greatest one of them all should be
mine--a plain woman's like mine!"
He teased her, eager to conciliate and to ride down his own state of
quivering.
"Now, ma--now--now--don't forget Rimsky!"
"Rimsky! A man three times your age who was playing concerts before you
was born! Is that a comparison? From your clippings-books I can show
Rimsky who the world considers the greatest violinist. Rimsky he
rubs into me!"
"All right, then, the press-clippings, but did Elsass, the greatest
manager of them all, bring me a contract for thirty concerts at two
thousand a concert? Now I've got you! Now!"
She would not meet his laughter. "Elsass! Believe me, he'll come to you
yet! My boy should worry if he makes fifty thousand a year more or less.
Rimsky should have that honor--for so long as he can hold it. But he
won't hold it long. Believe me, I don't rest easy in my bed till Elsass
comes after you. Not for so big a contract like Rimsky's, but
bigger--not for thirty concerts, but for fifty!"
"_Brava! Brava!_ There's a woman for you. More money than she knows
what to do with, and then not satisfied!"
She was still too tremulous for banter. "'Not satisfied'? Why, Leon, I
never stop praying my thanks for you!"
"All right, then," he cried, laying his icy fingers on her cheek;
"to-morrow we'll call a _mignon_--a regular old-fashioned Allen Street
prayer-party."
"Leon, you mustn't make fun."
"Make fun of the sweetest girl in this room!"
"'Girl'! Ah, if I could only hold you by me this way, Leon. Always a
boy--with me--your poor old mother--your only girl. That's a fear I
suffer with, Leon--to lose you to a--girl. That's how selfish the mother
of such a wonder-child like mine can get to be."
"All right! Trying to get me married off again. Nice! Fine!"
"Is it any wonder I suffer, son? Twenty-one years to have kept you by me
a child. A boy that never in his life was out after midnight except to
catch trains. A boy that never has so much as looked at a girl and could
have looked at princesses. To have kept you all these years--mine--is it
any wonder, son, I never stop praying my thanks for you? You don't
believe Hancock, son, the way he keeps always teasing you that you
should have a--what he calls--affair--a love-affair? Such talk is not
nice, Leon--an affair!"
"Love-affair poppycock!" said Leon Kantor, lifting his mother's face and
kissing her on eyes about ready to tear. "Why, I've got something, ma,
right here in my heart for you that--"
"Leon, be careful your shirt-front!"
"That's so--so what you call 'tender,' for my best sweetheart that
I--Oh, love-affair--poppycock!"
She would not let her tears come.
"My boy--my wonder-boy!"
"There goes the overture, ma."
"Here, darlink--your glass of water."
"I can't stand it in here; I'm suffocating!"
"Got your mute in your pocket, son?"
"Yes, ma; for God's sake, yes! Yes! Don't keep asking things!"
"Ain't you ashamed, Leon, to be in such an excitement! For every concert
you get worse."
"The chairs--they'll breathe on nay neck."
"Leon, did mamma promise you those chairs would be moved?"
"Where's Hancock?"
"Say--I'm grateful if he stays out. It took me enough work to get this
room cleared. You know your papa how he likes to drag in the whole world
to show you off--always just before you play. The minute he walks in the
room right away he gets everybody to trembling just from his own
excitements. I dare him this time he should bring people. No dignity has
that man got, the way he brings every one."
Even upon her words came a rattling of door, Of door-knob, and a voice
through the clamor.
"Open--quick--Sarah! Leon!"
A stiffening raced over Mrs. Kantor, so that she sat rigid on her
chair-edge, lips compressed, eye darkly upon the shivering door.
"Open--Sarah!"
With a narrowing glance, Mrs. Kantor laid to her lips a forefinger of
silence.
"Sarah, it's me! Quick, I say!"
Then Leon Kantor sprang up, the old prehensile gesture of curving
fingers shooting up.
"For God's sake, ma, let him in! I can't stand that infernal battering."
"Abrahm, go away! Leon's got to have quiet before his concert."
"Just a minute, Sarah. Open quick!"
With a spring his son was at the door, unlocking and flinging it back.
"Come in, pa."
The years had weighed heavily upon Abrahm Kantor in avoirdupois only. He
was himself plus eighteen years, fifty pounds, and a new sleek pomposity
that was absolutely oleaginous. It shone roundly in his face, doubling
of chin, in the bulge of waistcoat, heavily gold-chained, and in eyes
that behind the gold-rimmed glasses gave sparklingly forth his estate of
well-being.
"Abrahm, didn't I tell you not to dare to--"
On excited balls of feet that fairly bounced him, Abrahm Kantor burst
in.
"Leon--mamma--I got out here an old friend--Sol Ginsberg. You remember,
mamma, from brasses--"
"Abrahm--not now--"
"Go 'way with your 'not now'! I want Leon should meet him. Sol, this is
him--a little grown up from such a _nebich_ like you remember
him--_nu_? Sarah, you remember Sol Ginsberg? Say--I should ask you if
you remember your right hand! Ginsberg & Esel, the firm. This is his
girl, a five years' contract signed yesterday--five hundred dollars an
opera for a beginner--six rôles--not bad--_nu_?"
"Abrahm, you must ask Mr. Ginsberg please to excuse Leon until after his
concert--"
"Shake hands with him, Ginsberg. He's had his hand shook enough in his
life, and by kings, to shake it once more with an old bouncer like you!"
Mr. Ginsberg, not unlike his colleague in rotundities, held out a short,
a dimpled hand.
"It's a proud day," he said, "for me to shake the hands from mine old
friend's son and the finest violinist livink to-day. My little
daughter--"
"Yes, yes, Gina. Here, shake hands with him. Leon, they say a voice like
a fountain. Gina Berg--eh, Ginsberg--is how you stage-named her? You
hear, mamma, how fancy--Gina Berg? We go hear her, eh?"
There was about Miss Gina Berg, whose voice could soar to the
tirra-lirra of a lark and then deepen to mezzo, something of the actual
slimness of the poor, maligned Elsa so long buried beneath the buxomness
of divas. She was like a little flower that in its crannied nook keeps
dewy longest.
"How do you do, Leon Kantor?"
There was a whir through her English of three acquired languages.
"How do _you_ do?"
"We--father and I--traveled once all the way from Brussels to Dresden to
hear you. It was worth it. I shall never forget how you played the
'Humoresque.' It made me laugh and cry."
"You like Brussels?"
She laid her little hand to her heart, half closing her eyes.
"I will never be so happy again as with the sweet little people of
Brussels."
"I, too, love Brussels. I studied there four years with Ahrenfest."
"I know you did. My teacher, Lyndahl, in Berlin, was his
brother-in-law."
"You have studied with Lyndahl?"
"He is my master."
"I--Will I some time hear you sing?"
"I am not yet great. When I am foremost like you, yes."
"Gina--Gina Berg; that is a beautiful name to make famous."
"You see how it is done? Gins--berg. Gina Berg."
"Clev--er!"
They stood then smiling across a chasm of the diffidence of youth, she
fumbling at the great fur pelt out of which her face flowered so dewily.
"I--Well--we--we--are in the fourth box--I guess we had better be
going--Fourth box, left."
He wanted to find words, but for consciousness of self, could not.
"It's a wonderful house out there waiting for you, Leon Kantor, and
you--you're wonderful, too!"
"The--flowers--thanks!"
"My father, he sent them. Come, father--quick!"
Suddenly there was a tight tensity seemed to crowd up the little room.
"Abrahm--quick--get Hancock. That first row of chairs--has got to be
moved. There he is, in the wings. See that the piano ain't dragged down
too far! Leon, got your mute in your pocket? Please, Mr. Ginsberg--you
must excuse--Here, Leon, is your glass of water; drink it, I say. Shut
that door out there, boy, so there ain't a draught in the wings. Here,
Leon, your violin. Got your neckerchief? Listen how they're shouting!
It's for you--Leon--darlink--Go!"
The center of that vast human bowl which had shouted itself out, slim,
boylike, and in his supreme isolation, Leon Kantor drew bow and a first
thin, pellucid, and perfect note into a silence breathless to
receive it.
Throughout the arduous flexuosities of the Mendelssohn E minor concerto,
singing, winding from tonal to tonal climax, and out of the slow
movement which is like a tourniquet twisting the heart into the spirited
_allegro molto vivace_, it was as if beneath Leon Kantor's fingers the
strings were living vein-cords, youth, vitality, and the very foam of
exuberance racing through them.
That was the power of him. The vichy and the sparkle of youth, so that,
playing, the melody poured round him like wine and went down seething
and singing into the hearts of his hearers.
Later, and because these were his people and because they were dark and
Slavic with his Slavic darkness, he played, as if his very blood were
weeping, the "Kol Nidre," which is the prayer of his race for
atonement.
And then the super-amphitheater, filled with those whose emotions lie
next to the surface and whose pores have not been closed over with a
water-tight veneer, burst into its cheers and its tears.
There were fifteen recalls from the wings, Abrahm Kantor standing
counting them off on his fingers and trembling to receive the
Stradivarius. Then, finally, and against the frantic negative pantomime
of his manager, a scherzo, played so lacily that it swept the house in
lightest laughter.
When Leon Kantor finally completed his program they were loath to let
him go, crowding down the aisles upon him, applauding up, down, around
him until the great disheveled house was like the roaring of a sea, and
he would laugh and throw out his arm in widespread helplessness, and
always his manager in the background gesticulating against too much of
his precious product for the money, ushers already slamming up chairs,
his father's arms out for the Stradivarius, and, deepest in the gloom of
the wings, Sarah Kantor, in a rocker especially dragged out for her, and
from the depths of the black-silk reticule, darning his socks.
"Bravo--bravo! Give us the 'Humoresque'--Chopin Nocturne--Polonaise
--'Humoresque.' Bravo--bravo!"
And even as they stood, hatted and coated, importuning and pressing in
upon him, and with a wisp of a smile to the fourth left box, Leon Kantor
played them the "Humoresque" of Dvorák, skedaddling, plucking,
quirking--that laugh on life with a tear behind it. Then suddenly,
because he could escape no other way, rushed straight back for his
dressing-room, bursting in upon a flood of family already there: Isadore
Kantor, blue-shaved, aquiline, and already graying at the temples; his
five-year-old son, Leon; a soft little pouter-pigeon of a wife, too,
enormous of bust, in glittering ear-drops and a wrist watch of diamonds
half buried in chubby wrist; Miss Esther Kantor, pink and pretty;
Rudolph; Boris, not yet done with growing-pains.
At the door Miss Kantor met her brother, her eyes as sweetly moist as
her kiss.
"Leon darling, you surpassed even yourself!"
"Quit crowding, children. Let him sit down. Here, Leon, let mamma give
you a fresh collar. Look how the child's perspired. Pull down that
window, Boris. Rudolph, don't let no one in. I give you my word if
to-night wasn't as near as I ever came to seeing a house go crazy. Not
even that time in Milan, darlink, when they broke down the doors, was it
like to-night--"
"Ought to seen, ma, the row of police outside--"
"Hush up, Roody! Don't you see your brother is trying to get his
breath?"
From Mrs. Isadore Kantor: "You should have seen the balconies, mother.
Isadore and I went up just to see the jam."
"Six thousand dollars in the house to-night, if there was a cent," said
Isadore Kantor.
"Hand me my violin, please, Esther. I must have scratched it, the way
they pushed."
"No, son, you didn't. I've already rubbed it up. Sit quiet, darlink!"
He was limply white, as if the vitality had flowed out of him.
"God! wasn't it--tremendous?"
"Six thousand, if there was a cent," repeated Isadore Kantor. "More than
Rimsky ever played to in his life!"
"Oh, Izzie, you make me sick, always counting--counting!"
"Your sister's right, Isadore. You got nothing to complain of if there
was only six hundred in the house. A boy whose fiddle has made already
enough to set you up in such a fine business, his brother Boris in such
a fine college, automobiles--style--and now because Vladimir Rimsky,
three times his age, gets signed up with Elsass for a few thousand more
a year, right away the family gets a long face--"
"Ma, please! Isadore didn't mean it that way!"
"Pa's knocking, ma! Shall I let him in?"
"Let him in, Roody. I'd like to know what good it will do to try to keep
him out."
In an actual rain of perspiration, his tie slid well under one ear,
Abrahm Kantor burst in, mouthing the words before his acute state of
strangulation would let them out.
"Elsass--it's Elsass outside! He--wants--to sign--Leon--fifty
concerts--coast to coast--two thousand--next season! He's got the
papers--already drawn up--the pen outside waiting--"
"Abrahm!"
"Pa!"
In the silence that followed, Isadore Kantor, a poppiness of stare and
a violent redness set in, suddenly turned to his five-year-old son,
sticky with lollipop, and came down soundly and with smack against the
infantile, the slightly outstanding and unsuspecting ear.
"_Momser!_" he cried. "_Chammer! Lump! Ganef_! You hear that? Two
thousand! Two thousand! Didn't I tell you--didn't I tell you to
practise?"
Even as Leon Kantor put pen to this princely document, Franz Ferdinand
of Serbia, the assassin's bullet cold, lay dead in state, and let slip
were the dogs of war.
* * * * *
In the next years, men, forty deep, were to die in piles; hayricks of
fields to become human hayricks of battle-fields; Belgium disemboweled,
her very entrails dragging, to find all the civilized world her
champion, and between the poppies of Flanders, crosses, thousand upon
thousand of them, to mark the places where the youth of her allies fell,
avenging outrage. Seas, even when calmest, were to become terrible, and
men's heart-beats, a bit sluggish with the fatty degeneration of a
sluggard peace, to quicken and then to throb with the rat-a-tat-tat, the
rat-a-tat-tat of the most peremptory, the most reverberating call to
arms in the history of the world.
In June, 1917, Leon Kantor, answering that rat-a-tat-tat, enlisted.
In November, honed by the interim of training to even a new leanness,
and sailing-orders heavy and light in his heart, Lieutenant Kantor, on
two days' home-leave, took leave of home, which can be crudest when it
is tenderest.
Standing there in the expensive, the formal, the enormous French parlor
of his up-town apartment de luxe, from not one of whose chairs would his
mother's feet touch floor, a wall of living flesh, mortared in blood,
was throbbing and hedging him in.
He would pace up and down the long room, heavy with the faces of those
who mourn, with a laugh too ready, too facetious, in his fear for them.
"Well, well, what is this, anyway, a wake? Where's the coffin? Who's
dead?"
His sister-in-law shot out her plump, watch-encrusted wrist. "Don't,
Leon!" she cried. "Such talk is a sin! It might come true."
"Rosie-posy-butter-ball," he said, pausing beside her chair to pinch her
deeply soft cheek. "Cry-baby-roly-poly, you can't shove me off in a
wooden kimono that way."
From his place before the white-and-gold mantel, staring steadfastly at
the floor tiling, Isadore Kantor turned suddenly, a bit whiter and older
at the temples.
"I don't get your comedy, Leon."
"'Wooden kimono'--Leon?"
"That's the way the fellows at camp joke about coffins, ma. I didn't
mean anything but fun! Great Scott! Can't any one take a joke!"
"O God! O God!" His mother fell to swaying softly, hugging herself
against shivering.
"Did you sign over power of attorney to pa, Leon?"
"All fixed, Izzie."
"I'm so afraid, son, you don't take with you enough money in your
pockets. You know how you lose it. If only you would let mamma sew that
little bag inside your uniform, with a little place for bills and a
little place for the asafoetida!"
"Now, please, ma--please! If I needed more, wouldn't I take it? Wouldn't
I be a pretty joke among the fellows, tied up in that smelling stuff!
Orders are orders, ma, I know what to take and what not to take."
"Please, Leon, don't get mad at me, but if you will let me put in your
suit-case just one little box of that salve, for your finger-tips, so
they don't crack--"
Pausing as he paced to lay cheek to her hair, he patted her. "Three
boxes, if you want. Now, how's that?"
"And you won't take it out so soon as my back is turned?"
"Cross my heart."
His touch seemed to set her trembling again, all her illy concealed
emotions rushing up. "I can't stand it! Can't! Can't! Take my life--take
my blood, but don't take my boy--don't take my boy--"
"Mamma, mamma, is that the way you're going to begin all over again,
after your promise?"
She clung to him, heaving against the rising storm of sobs. "I can't
help it--can't! Cut out my heart from me, but let me keep my boy--my
wonderboy--"
"Oughtn't she be ashamed of herself? Just listen to her, Esther! What
will we do with her? Talks like she had a guarantee I wasn't coming
back. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if by spring I wasn't tuning up again
for a coast-to-coast tour--"
"Spring! That talk don't fool me. Without my boy, the springs in my life
are over--"
"Why, ma, you talk like every soldier who goes to war was killed!
There's only the smallest percentage of them die in battle--"
"'Spring,' he says; 'spring'! Crossing the seas from me! To live through
months with that sea between us--my boy maybe shot--my--"
"Mamma, please!"
"I can't help it, Leon; I'm not one of those fine mothers that can be so
brave. Cut out my heart, but leave my boy! My wonder-boy--my child I
prayed for!"
"There's other mothers, ma, with sons!"
"Yes, but not wonder-sons! A genius like you could so easy get excused,
Leon. Give it up. Genius it should be the last to be sent to--the
slaughter-pen. Leon darlink--don't go!"
"Ma, ma--you don't mean what you're saying. You wouldn't want me to
reason that way! You wouldn't want me to hide behind my--violin."
"I would! Would! You should wait for the draft. With my Roody and even
my baby Boris enlisted, ain't it enough for one mother? Since they got
to be in camp, all right, I say, let them be there, if my heart breaks
for it, but not my wonder-child! You can get exemption, Leon, right away
for the asking. Stay with me, Leon! Don't go away! The people at home
got to be kept happy with music. That's being a soldier, too, playing
their troubles away. Stay with me, Leon! Don't go leave
me--don't--don't--"
He suffered her to lie, tear-drenched, back into his arms, holding her
close in his compassion for her, his own face twisting.
"God! ma, this--this is awful! Please--you make us ashamed--all of us! I
don't know what to say. Esther, come quiet her--for God's sake
quiet her!"
From her place in that sobbing circle Esther Kantor crossed to kneel
beside her mother.
"Mamma darling, you're killing yourself. What if every family went on
this way? You want papa to come in and find us all crying? Is this the
way you want Leon to spend his last hour with us--"
"Oh, God--God!"
"I mean his last hour until he comes back, darling. Didn't you just hear
him say, darling, it may be by spring?"
"'Spring'--'spring'--never no more springs for me--"
"Just think, darling, how proud we should be! Our Leon, who could so
easily have been excused, not even to wait for the draft."
"It's not too late yet--please--Leon--"
"Our Roody and Boris both in camp, too, training to serve their country.
Why, mamma, we ought to be crying for happiness. As Leon says, surely
the Kantor family, who fled out of Russia to escape massacre, should
know how terrible slavery can be. That's why we must help our boys,
mamma, in their fight to make the world free! Right, Leon?" trying to
smile with her red-rimmed eyes.
"We've got no fight with no one! Not a child of mine was ever raised to
so much as lift a finger against no one. We've got no fight with
no one!"
"We have got a fight with some one! With autocracy! Only this time it
happens to be Hunnish autocracy. You should know it, mamma--oh, you
should know it deeper down in you than any of us, the fight our family
right here has got with autocracy! We should be the first to want to
avenge Belgium!"
"Leon's right, mamma darling, the way you and papa were beaten out of
your country--"
"There's not a day in your life you don't curse it without knowing it!
Every time we three boys look at your son and our brother Mannie, born
an--an imbecile--because of autocracy, we know what we're fighting for.
We know. You know, too. Look at him over there, even before he was born,
ruined by autocracy! Know what I'm fighting for? Why, this whole family
knows! What's music, what's art, what's life itself in a world without
freedom? Every time, ma, you get to thinking we've got a fight with no
one, all you have to do is look at our poor Mannie. He's the answer.
He's the answer."
In a foaming sort of silence, Mannie Kantor smiled softly from his chair
beneath the pink-and-gold shade of the piano-lamp. The heterogeneous
sounds of women weeping had ceased. Straight in her chair, her great
shelf of bust heaving, sat Rosa Kantor, suddenly dry of eye; Isadore
Kantor head up. Erect now, and out from the embrace of her daughter,
Sarah looked up at her son.
"What time do you leave, Leon?" she asked, actually firm of lip.
"Any minute, ma. Getting late."
This time she pulled her lips to a smile, waggling her forefinger.
"Don't let them little devils of French girls fall in love with my dude
in his uniform."
Her pretense at pleasantry was almost more than he could bear.
"Hear! Hear! Our mother thinks I'm a regular lady-killer! Hear that,
Esther?" pinching her cheek.
"You are, Leon--only--only, you don't know it!"
"Don't you bring down too many beaux while I'm gone, either, Miss
Kantor!"
"I--won't, Leon."
_Sotto voce_ to her: "Remember, Esther, while I'm gone, the royalties
from the discaphone records are yours. I want you to have them for
pin-money and--maybe a dowry?"
She turned from him. "Don't, Leon--don't--"
"I like him! Nice fellow, but too slow! Why, if I were in his shoes I'd
have popped long ago."
She smiled with her lashes dewy.
There entered then, in a violet-scented little whirl, Miss Gina Berg,
rosy with the sting of a winter's night, and, as usual, swathed in the
high-napped furs.
"Gina!"
She was for greeting every one, a wafted kiss to Mrs. Kantor, and then,
arms wide, a great bunch of violets in one outstretched hand, her glance
straight, sure, and sparkling for Leon Kantor.
"Surprise--everybody--surprise!"
"Why, Gina--we read--we thought you were singing in Philadelphia
to-night!"
"So did I, Esther darling, until a little bird whispered to me that
Lieutenant Kantor was home on farewell leave."
He advanced to her down the great length of room, lowering his head over
her hand, his puttee-clad legs clicking together. "You mean, Miss
Gina--Gina--you didn't sing?"
"Of course I didn't! Hasn't every prima donna a larynx to hide behind?"
She lifted off her fur cap, spilling curls.
"Well, I--I'll be hanged!" said Lieutenant Kantor, his eyes lakes of her
reflected loveliness.
She let her hand linger in his. "Leon--you--really going? How--terrible!
How--how--wonderful!"
"How wonderful'--your coming!"
"I--You think it was not nice of me--to come?"
"I think it was the nicest thing that ever happened in the world."
"All the way here in the train I kept saying, 'Crazy--crazy--running to
tell Leon--Lieutenant--Kantor good-by--when you haven't even seen him
three times in three years--'"
"But each--each of those three times we--we've remembered, Gina."
"But that's how I feel toward all the boys, Leon--our fighting
boys--just like flying to them to kiss them each one good-by."
"Come over, Gina. You'll be a treat to our mother. I--Well, I'm hanged!
All the way from Philadelphia!"
There was even a sparkle to talk, then, and a letup of pressure. After a
while Sarah Kantor looked up at her son, tremulous, but smiling.
"Well, son, you going to play--for your old mother before--you go? It'll
be many a month--spring--maybe longer, before I hear my boy again
except on the discaphone."
He shot a quick glance to his sister. "Why, I--I don't know. I--I'd love
it, ma, if--if you think, Esther, I'd better."
"You don't need to be afraid of me, darlink. There's nothing can give me
the strength to bear--what's before me like--like my boy's music.
That's my life, his music."
"Why, yes; if mamma is sure she feels that way, play for us, Leon."
He was already at the instrument, where it lay, swathed, atop the grand
piano. "What'll it be, folks?"
"Something to make ma laugh, Leon--something light, something funny."
"'Humoresque,'" he said, with a quick glance for Miss Berg.
"'Humoresque,'" she said, smiling back at him.
He capered through, cutting and playful of bow, the melody of Dvorák's,
which is as ironic as a grinning mask.
Finished, he smiled at his parent, her face still untearful.
"How's that?"
She nodded. "It's like life, son, that piece. Crying to hide its
laughing and laughing to hide its crying."
"Play that new piece, Leon--the one you set to music. You know. The
words by that young boy in the war who wrote such grand poetry before he
was killed. The one that always makes poor Mannie laugh. Play it for
him, Leon."
Her plump little unlined face innocent of fault, Mrs. Isadore Kantor
ventured her request, her smile tired with tears.
"No, no--Rosa--not now! Ma wouldn't want that!"
"I do, son; I do! Even Mannie should have his share of good-by."
To Gina Berg: "They want me to play that little arrangement of mine from
Allan Seegar's poem. 'I Have a Rendezvous....'"
"It--it's beautiful, Leon. I was to have sung it on my program
to-night--only, I'm afraid you had better not--here--now--"
"Please, Leon! Nothing you play can ever make me as sad as it makes me
glad. Mannie should have, too, his good-by."
"All right, then, ma, if--if you're sure you want it. Will you sing it,
Gina?"
She had risen. "Why, yes, Leon."
She sang it then, quite purely, her hands clasped simply together and
her glance mistily off, the beautiful, the heroic, the lyrical prophecy
of a soldier-poet and a poet-soldier:
"But I've a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear."
In the silence that followed, a sob burst out, stifled, from Esther
Kantor, this time her mother holding her in arms that were strong.
"That, Leon, is the most beautiful of all your compositions. What does
it mean, son, that word, 'rondy-voo'?"
"Why, I--I don't exactly know. A rendezvous--it's a sort of meeting, an
engagement, isn't it, Miss Gina? Gina? You're up on languages. As if I
had an appointment to meet you some place--at the opera-house, for
instance."
"That's it, Leon--an engagement."
"Have I an engagement with you, Gina?"
She let her lids droop. "Oh, how--how I hope you have, Leon."
"When?"
"In the spring?"
"That's it--in the spring."
Then they smiled, these two, who had never felt more than the merest
butterfly wings of love brushing them, light as lashes. No word between
them, only an unfinished sweetness, waiting to be linked up.
Suddenly there burst in Abrahm Kantor, in a carefully rehearsed gale of
bluster.
"Quick, Leon! I got the car down-stairs. Just fifteen minutes to make
the ferry. Quick! The sooner we get him over there the sooner we get him
back! I'm right, mamma? Now, now! No waterworks! Get your brother's
suit-case, Isadore. Now, now! No nonsense! Quick--quick--"
With a deftly manoeuvered round of good-bys, a grip-laden dash for the
door, a throbbing moment of turning back when it seemed as though Sarah
Kantor's arms could not unlock their deadlock of him, Leon Kantor was
out and gone, the group of faces point-etched into the silence
behind him.
The poor, mute face of Mannie, laughing softly. Rosa Kantor crying into
her hands. Esther, grief-crumpled, but rich in the enormous hope of
youth. The sweet Gina, to whom the waiting months had already begun
their reality.
Not so Sarah Kantor. In a bedroom adjoining, its high-ceilinged vastness
as cold as a cathedral to her lowness of stature, sobs dry and terrible
were rumbling up from her, only to dash against lips tightly
restraining them.
On her knees beside a chest of drawers, and unwrapping it from
swaddling-clothes, she withdrew what at best had been a sorry sort
of fiddle.
Cracked of back and solitary of string, it was as if her trembling arms,
raising it above her head, would make of themselves and her swaying body
the tripod of an altar.
The old twisting and prophetic pain was behind her heart. Like the
painted billows of music that the old Italian masters loved to do,
there wound and wreathed about her clouds of song:
But I've a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
OATS FOR THE WOMAN
That women who toil not neither do they spin might know the feel of
fabrics so cunningly devised that they lay to the flesh like the inner
petals of buds, three hundred and fifty men, women, and children
contrived, between strikes, to make the show-rooms of the Kessler
Costume Company, Incorporated, a sort of mauve and mirrored Delphi where
buyers from twenty states came to invoke forecast of the mood of skirts,
the caprice of sleeves, and the rumored flip to the train. Before these
flips and moods, a gigantic industry held semi-annual pause, destinies
of lace-factories trembling before a threatened season of strictly
tailor-mades, velvet-looms slowing at the shush of taffeta. When woman
would be sleazy, petticoat manufacturers went overnight into an oblivion
from which there might or might not be returning. The willow plume waved
its day, making and unmaking merchants.
Destiny loves thus to spring from acorn beginnings. Helen smiled, and
Troy fell. Roast pork, and I doubt not then and there the apple sauce,
became a national institution because a small boy burnt his fingers.
That is why, out from the frail love of women for the flesh and its
humors, and because for the webby cling of chiffon too often no price is
too high, the Kessler Costume Company employed, on the factory side of
the door, the three hundred and fifty sewers and cutters, not one of
whose monthly wage could half buy the real-lace fichu or the
painted-chiffon frock of his own handiwork.
On the show-room side of the door, painted mauve within and not without,
_mannequins_, so pink finger-tipped, so tilted of instep, and so bred in
the thrust to the silhouette, trailed these sleazy products of thick
ringers across mauve-colored carpet and before the appraising eyes of
twenty states.
Often as not, smoke rose in that room from the black cigar of the Omaha
Store, Omaha, or Ladies' Wear, Cleveland. In season, and particularly
during the frenzied dog-days of August, when the fate of the new
waist-line or his daring treatment of cloth of silver hung yet in the
balance, and the spirit of Detroit must be browbeaten by the dictum of
the sleeveless thing in evening frocks, Leon Kessler himself smoked a
day-long chain of cigarettes, lighting one off the other.
In the model-room, a long, narrow slit, roaringly ventilated by a
whirling machine, lined in frocks suspended from hangers, and just wide
enough for two very perfect thirty-sixes to stand abreast, August fell
heavily. So heavily that occasionally a cloak-model, her lot to show
next December's conceit in theater wraps, fainted on the show-dais; or a
cloth-of-gold evening gown, donned for the twentieth time that
sweltering day, would suddenly, with its model, crumple, a glittering
huddle, to the floor.
Upon Miss Hattie Becker, who within the narrow slit had endured eight of
these Augusts with only two casual faints and a swoon or two nipped in
the bud, this ninth August came in so furiously that, sliding out of her
sixth showing of a cloth-of-silver and blue-fox opera wrap, a shivering
that amounted practically to chill took hold of her.
"Br-r-r!" she said, full of all men's awe at the carbon-dioxide paradox.
"I'm so hot I'm cold!"
Miss Clarice Delehanty slid out of a shower of tulle-of-gold
dancing-frock and into an Avenue gown of rough serge. The tail of a very
arched eyebrow threatened, and then ran down in a black rill.
"If Niagara Falls was claret lemonade,
You'd see me beat it to a watery grave."
"That'll be enough canary-talk out of you, Clare. Hand me my shirt-waist
there off the hook."
"Didn't Kess say we had to show Keokuk the line before lunch?"
"If the King of England was buying ermine sport coats this morning, I
wouldn't show 'em before I had a cold cut and a long drink in me. Hurry!
Hand me my waist, Clare, before the girls come in from showing the
bridesmaid line."
Miss Delehanty flung the garment down the narrow length of the room.
"Minneapolis don't know it, but after this showing he's going to blow me
to the frappiest little lunch on the Waldorf roof."
Miss Becker buttoned her flimsy blouse with three pearl beads down its
front, wiping constantly at a constantly dampening brow.
"You'd shove over the Goddess of Liberty if you thought she had her foot
on a meal ticket."
"Yes; and if I busted her, you could build a new one on the lunch money
you've saved in your time."
"Waldorf! You've got a fine chance with Minneapolis. You mean the
Automat, and two spoons for the ice-cream."
Miss Delehanty adjusted a highly eccentric hat, a small green velvet,
outrageously tilted off the rear of its _bandeau_, and a wide black
streamer flowing down over one shoulder. It was the match to the
explosive effect of the _trotteur_ gown. She was Fashion's humoresque,
except that Fashion has no sense of humor. Very presently Minneapolis
would appraise her at two hundred and seventy-five as is. Miss Delehanty
herself came cheaper.
"Say, Hattie, don't let being an old man's darling go to your head. The
grandchildren may issue an injunction."
A flare of crimson rushed immediately over Miss Becker's face, spreading
down into her neck.
"You let him alone! He's a darn sight better than anything I've seen you
girls picking for yourselves. You never met a man in your life whose
name wasn't Johnnie. You couldn't land a John in a million years."
Miss Delehanty raised her face from over a shoe-buckle. A stare began to
set in, as obviously innocent as a small boy's between spitballs.
"Well, who said anything about old St. Louis, I'd like to know?"
"You did, and you leave him alone! What do you know about a real man?
You'd pass up a Ford ride to sit still in a pasteboard limousine
every time!"
"Well, of all things! Did I say anything?"
"Yes, you did!"
"Why, for my part, he can show you a good time eight nights in the week
and Sundays, too."
"He 'ain't got grandchildren--if you want to know it."
"Did I say he had?"
"Yes, you did!"
"Why, I don't blame any girl for showing grandpa a good time."
"You could consider yourself darn lucky, Clarice Delehanty, if one half
as good ever--"
"Ask the girls if I don't always say old St. Louis is all to the good.
Three or four years ago, right after his wife died, I said to Ada,
I said--"
A head showed suddenly through the lining side of the mauve portières,
blue-eyed, blue-shaved, and with a triple ripple of black hair
trained backward.
"Hurry along there with fifty-seven, Delehanty! Heyman's got to see the
line and catch that six-two Chicago flier."
Miss Delehanty fell into pose, her profile turned back over one
shoulder.
"Tell him to chew a clove; it's good for breathless haste," she said,
disappearing through portières into the show-room.
Miss Becker thrust herself from a hastily-found-out aperture, patting,
with final touch, her belt into place.
"Have I been asking you for five years, Kess, to knock before you poke
your head in on us girls?"
Mr. Leon Kessler appeared then fully between the curtains, letting them
drape heavily behind him. Gotham garbs her poets and her brokers, her
employers and employees, in the national pin-stripes and sack coat.
Except for a few pins stuck upright in his coat lapel, Mr. Kessler might
have been his banker or his salesman. Typical New-Yorker is the pseudo,
half enviously bestowed upon his kind by _hinter_ America. It signifies
a bi-weekly manicure, femininely administered; a hotel lobbyist who can
outstare a seatless guest; the sang-froid to add up a dinner check;
spats. When Mr. Kessler tipped, it did not clink; it rustled. In
theater, at each interval between acts, he piled out over ladies' knees
and returned chewing a mint. He journeyed twice a year to a famous
Southern spa, and there won or lost his expenses. He regarded Miss
Becker, peering at her around the fluff of a suspended frock of
pink tulle.
"What's the idea, Becker? Keokuk wants to see you in the wrap line."
Miss Becker swallowed hard, jamming down and pinning into a small
taffy-colored turban, her hair, the exact shade of it, escaping in
scallops. Carefully powdered-out lines of her face seemed to emerge
suddenly through the conserved creaminess of her skin. Thirty-four, in
its unguarded moments, will out. Miss Becker had almost detained
twenty's waistline and twenty-two's ardent thrust of face. It was only
the indentures of time that had begun to tell slightly--indentures that
powder could not putty out. There was a slight bagginess of throat where
the years love to eat in first, and out from the eyes a spray of fine
lines. It was these lines that came out now indubitably.
"If you want me to lay down on you, Kess, for sure, just ask me to show
the line again before lunch. I'm about ready to keel. And you can't put
me off again. I'm ready, and you got to come now."
He dug so deeply into his pockets that his sleeves crawled up.
"Say, look here. I've got my business to attend to, and, when my trade's
in town, my trade comes first. See? Take off and show Keokuk a few
numbers. I want him to see that chinchilla drape."
She reached out, closing her hand over his arm.
"I'll show him the whole line, Kess, when we're back from lunch. I got
to talk to you, I tell you. You put me off yesterday and the day before,
and this--this is the last."
"The last what?"
"Please, Kess, if you only run over to Rinehardt's with me. I got to
tell you something. Something about me and--and--"
He regarded her in some perplexity. "Tell it to me here. Now!"
"I can't. The girls'll be swarming in any minute. I can't get you
anywheres but lunch. It's the first thirty minutes of your time I've
asked in five years, Kess--is that little enough? Let Cissie show
Keokuk the blouses till we get back. It's something, Kess, I can't put
off. Kess, please!"
Her face was so close to him and so eager that he turned to back out.
"Wait for me at the Thirty-first Street entrance," he said, "and I'll
shoot you across to Rinehardt's."
She caught up her small silk hand-bag and ran out toward the elevators.
Down in Thirty-first Street a wave of heat met, almost overpowering her.
New York, enervated from sleepless nights on fire-escapes and in
bedrooms opening on areaways, moved through it at half-speed, hugging
the narrow shade of buildings. Infant mortality climbed with the
thermometer. In Fifth Avenue, cool, high bedrooms were boarded and
empty. In First Avenue, babies lay naked on the floor, snuffing out for
want of oxygen.
Across that man-made Grand Cañon men leap sometimes, but seldom. Mothers
whose babies lie naked on the floor look out across it, damning.
Out into this flaying heat Miss Becker stepped gingerly, almost
immediately rejoined by Mr. Leon Kessler, crowningly touched with the
correct thing in straw sailors.
"Get a move on," he said, guiding her across the soft asphalt.
In Rinehardt's, one of a thousand such _Rathskeller_ retreats designed
for a city that loves to dine in fifteen languages, the noonday cortège
of summer widowers had not yet arrived. Waiters moved through the dim,
pink-lit gloom, dressing their tables temptingly cool and white,
dipping ice out from silver buckets into thin tumblers.
They seated themselves beneath a ceiling fan, Miss Becker's
taffy-colored scallops stirring in the scurry of air.
"Lordy!" she said, closing her eyes and pressing her finger-tips against
them, "I wish I could lease this spot for the summer!"
He pushed a menu-card toward her. "What'll you have? There's plenty
under the 'ready to serve.'"
She peeled out of her white-silk gloves.
"Some cold cuts and a long ice-tea."
He ordered after her and more at length, then lighted a cigarette.
"Well?" he said, waving out a match.
She leaned forward, already designing with her fork on the table-cloth.
"Kess, can you guess?"
"Come on with it!"
"Have you--noticed anything?"
"Say, I'd have a sweet time keeping up with you girls!"
She looked at him now evenly between the eyes.
"You kept up with me pretty close for three years, didn't you?"
"Say, you knew what you were doing!"
"I--I'm not so sure of that by a long shot. I--I was fed up with the
most devilish kind of promises there are. The kind you was too smart to
put in words or--or in writing. You--you only looked 'em."
"I suppose you was kidnapped one dark and stormy night while the
villain pursued you, eh? Is that it?"
"Oh, what's the use--rehashing! After that time at Atlantic City
and--and then the--flat, it--it just seemed the way I felt about you
then--that nothing you wanted could be wrong. I guess I knew what I was
doing all right, or, if I didn't, I ought to have. I was rotten--or I
couldn't have done it, I guess. Only, deep inside of me I was waiting
and banking on you like--like poor little Cissie is now. And you knew
it; you knew it all them three years."
"Say, did you get me over here to--"
"I only hope to God when you're done with Cissie you'll--"
"You let me take care of my own affairs. If it comes right down to it,
there's a few things I could tell you, girl, that ain't so easy to
listen to. Let's get off the subject while the going's good."
"Oh, anybody that plays as safe as you--"
He raised his voice, shoving back his chair. "Well, if you want me to
clear out of this place quicker than you can bat your eye, you just--"
"No, no, Kess! 'Sh-h-h-h!"
"If there ever was a girl in my place had a square deal, that girl's
been you."
"'Square deal!' Because after I held on and--ate out my heart for three
years, you didn't--take away my job, too? Somebody ought to pin a
Carnegie medal on you!"
"You've held down a twenty-dollar-a-week job season in and season out,
when there've been times it didn't even pay for the ink it took to
write you on the pay-roll."
"There's nothing I ever got out of you I didn't earn three times over."
"A younger figure than yours is getting to be wouldn't hurt the line
any, you know. It's because I make it a rule not to throw off the old
girls when their waist-lines begin to spread that makes you so grateful,
is it? There's not a firm in town keeps on a girl after she begins to
heavy up. If you got to know why I took you off the dress line and put
you in the wraps, it's because I seen you widening into a thirty-eight,
and a darn poor one at that. I can sell two wraps off Cissie to one off
you. You're getting hippy, girl, and, since you started the subject, you
can be darn glad you know where your next week's salary's coming from."
She was reddening so furiously that even her earlobes, their tips
escaping beneath the turban, were tinged.
"Maybe I--I'm getting hippy, Kess; but it'll take more than anything you
can ever do for me to make up for--"
"Gad!" he said, flipping an ash in some disgust, "I wish I had a
ten-cent piece for every one since!"
"Oh," she cried, her throat jerking, "you eat what you just said! You
eat it, because you know it ain't so!"
"Now look here," he said, straightening up suddenly, "I don't know what
your game is, but if you're here to stir up the old dust that's been
laid for five years--"
"No, no, Kess! It's only that--what I got to tell you--I--it makes a
difference, I--"
"What?"
"There's nothing in these years since, I swear to God, or in the years
before, that I got to be ashamed of!"
"All right! All right!"
"If ever a girl came all of a sudden to her senses, it was me. If ever a
girl has lived a quiet life, picking herself up and brushing the dust
off, it's been me. Oh, I don't say I 'ain't been entertained by the
trade--I didn't dodge my job--but it's been a straight kind of a
time--straight!"
"I'm not asking for an alibi, Becker. What's the idea?"
"Kess," she said, leaning forward, with tears popping out in her eyes,
"I.W. Goldstone has asked me to marry him."
He laid down his roll in the act of buttering it, gazing across at her
with his knife upright in his hand.
"Huh?"
"Night before last, Kess, in the poppy-room at Shalif's."
"Are you crazy?"
"It's the God's truth, Kess. He's begging me for an answer by to-night,
before he goes back home."
"I.W. Goldstone, of Goldstone & Auer, ladies' wear?"
She nodded, her hand to her throat.
"Well, I'll be strung up!"
"He--he says, Kess, it's been on his mind for a year and a half, ever
since his spring trip a year ago. He wants to take me back with him,
Kess, home."
"Whew!" said Mr. Kessler, wiping his brow and the back of his collar.
"You're no more surprised than me, Kess. I--I nearly fell off the
Christmas tree."
"Good Lord! Why, his wife--he had her in the store it seems yesterday!"
"She's been dead four years and seven months, Kess."
"Old I.W. and you!"
"He's only fifty-two, Kess; I'm thirty-four."
"I.W. Goldstone!"
"I know it. I can't realize it, neither."
"Why, he's worth two hundred thousand, if he's worth a cent!"
"I know it, Kess."
"The old man's stringing you, girl. His kind stop, look, and listen."
"He's not stringing me! I tell you he's begging me to marry him and go
back home with him. He's even told his--daughter about me."
"Good Lord--little Effie! I was out there once when she was a kid.
Stopped off on my way to Hot Springs. They live in a kind of
park--Forest Park Street or something or other. Why, I've done business
with Goldstone & Auer for fifteen years, and my father before me!
Good Lord!"
"What'll I do, Kess?"
"So that's the size of the fish you went out and landed!"
"I didn't! I didn't! He's been asking me out the last three trips, and
post-cards in between, but I never thought nothing of it."
"Why, he can't get away with this!"
"Why?"
"They won't stand for it out in that Middle West town. He's the head of
a big business. He's got a grown daughter."
"He's got her fixed, Kess--settled on her."
"Hattie Becker, Mrs. I.W. Goldstone! Gad! can you beat it? Can't you
just see me, when I come out to St. Louis pretty soon, having dinner out
at Mrs. I.W. Goldstone's house? Say, am I seeing things?"
"What'll I do, Kess? What'll I do?"
"I tell you that you can't get away with it, girl. The old man's getting
childish; they'll have to have him restrained. Why, the woman he was
married to for twenty years, Lenie Goldstone, never even seen a
skirt-dance. I remember once he brought her to New York and then
wouldn't let her see a cabaret show. He won't even buy sleeveless models
for his French room."
"I tell you, Kess, he'll take me to Jersey to-morrow and marry me, if I
give the word."
"Not a chance!"
"I tell you yes. That's why I got to see you. I got to tell him
to-night, Kess. He--goes back to-morrow."
He regarded her slowly, watching her throat where it throbbed.
"Well, what are you going to do?"
"I--I don't know."
"Where do you stand with him? Sweet sixteen and never been kissed?"
"He--he don't ask questions, Kess. I--I'm his ideal, he says, of
the--kind of--woman can take up for him where his wife left off. He says
we're alike in everything but looks, and that a man who was happy in
marriage like him can't be happy outside of it. He--he's sized up pretty
well the way I live, and--and--he knows I don't expect too much out of
life no more. Just a quiet kind of team-work, he puts it--pulling
together fifty-fifty, and somebody's hand to hold on to when old fellow
Time hits you a whack in the knees from behind. But he ain't old when he
talks that way, Kess; he--he's beautiful to me."
"Does he wear a mask when he makes love?"
"He's got a fine face."
"So that's the way you're playing it, is it? Love-stuff?"
"Oh, I've had all the love-stuff knocked out of me. Three years of
eating out my heart is about all the love-stuff I can handle for a
while. He don't want that in a woman. I don't want it in him. He's just
a plain, good man I never in my life could dream of having. A good home
in a good town where life ain't like a red-eyed devil ready to hit in
deep between the shoulder-blades. I know why he says he can see his wife
in me. He knows I'm the kind was cut out for that kind of life--home and
kitchen and my own parsley in my own back yard. He knows, if he marries
me, carpet slippers seven nights in the week is my speed. I never want
to see a 'roof,' or a music-show, or a cabaret again to the day I die.
He knows I'll fit in home like a goldfish in its bowl. Life made a
mistake with me, and it's going to square itself. It's fate, Kess;
that's what it is--fate!"
She clapped her hands to her face, sobbing down into them.
He glanced about him in quick and nervous concern.
"Pull yourself together there, Becker; we're in a public place."
"If only I could go to him and tell him."
"Well, you can't."
"It's not you that keeps me. Only, I know that with his kind of man and
at his age, a woman is--is one thing or another and that ends it. With a
grown daughter, he wouldn't--couldn't--he's too set in his ways to know
how it was with me--and--what'll I do, Kess?"
"Say, I'm not going to stand in your light, if that's what's eating you.
If you can get away with it, I don't wish you nothing but well. Looks to
me like all right, if you want to make the try. I'll even come and break
bread with you when I go out to see my Middle West trade pretty soon.
That's the kind of a hairpin I am."
"It's like I keep saying to myself, Kess. If--if he'd ask me anything,
it--it would be different. He--he says he never felt so satisfied that a
woman had the right stuff in her. And I have! There's nothing in the
world can take that away from me. I can give him what he wants. I know I
can. Why, the way I'll make up to that little girl out there and love
her to death! I ask so little, Kess--just a decent life and rest--peace.
I'm tired. I want to let myself get fat. I'm built that way, to get fat.
It was nothing but diet gave me the anaemia last summer. He says he
wants me to plump out. Perfect thirty-six don't mean nothing in his life
except for the trade. No more rooming-houses with the kitchenette in the
bath-room. A kitchen, he says, Kess, half the size of the show-room,
with a butler's pantry. He likes to play pinochle at night, he says,
next to the sitting-room fire. He tried to learn me the rules of the
game the other night in the poppy-room. It's easy. His first wife was
death on flowers. She used to train roses over their back fence. He
loved to see her there. He wants me to like to grow them. He wants to
take me back to a home of my own and peace, where life can't look to a
girl like a devil with horns. He wants to take me home. What'll I do,
Kess? Please, please, what'll I do?"
He was rather inarticulate, but reached out to pat her arm. "Go--to
it--girl, and--God bless you!"
* * * * *
Forest Park Boulevard comes in sootily, smokestacks, gas-tanks, and
large areas of scarred vacant lots boding ill enough for its destiny.
But after a while, where Taylor Avenue bisects, it begins to retrieve
itself. Here it is parked down its center, a narrow strip set out in
shrubs, and on either side, traffic, thus divided, flows evenly up and
down a macadamized roadway. In summer the shrubs thicken, half
concealing one side of Forest Park Boulevard from its other. Houses
suddenly take on detached and architectural importance, often as not a
gravel driveway dividing lawns, and out farther still, where the street
eventually flows into Forest Park, the Italian Renaissance invades,
somebody's rococo money's worth.
I.W. Goldstone's home, so near the park that, in spring, the smell of
lilacs and gasolene hovers over it, pretends not to period or dynasty.
Well detached, and so far back from the sidewalk that interlocking trees
conceal its second-story windows, an alcove was frankly a bulge on its
red-brick exterior. Where the third-floor bath-room, an afterthought,
led off the hallway, it jutted out, a shingled protuberance on the left
end of the house. A tower swelled out of its front end, and all year
round geraniums and boxed climbing vines bloomed in its three stories.
Across a generous ledge of veranda, more vines grew quite furiously,
reaching their height and then growing down upon themselves. Behind
those vines, and so cunningly concealed by them that not even the white
wrapper could flash through to the passerby, Mrs. I.W. Goldstone, in a
chair that would rock rhythmically with her, loved to sit in the first
dusk of evening, pleasantly idle. A hose twirling on the lawn spun up
the smell of green, abetted by similar whirlings down the wide vista of
adjoining lawns. Occasionally, a prideful and shirt-sleeved landed
proprietor wielded his own hose, flushing the parched sidewalk or
shooting spray against hot bricks that drank in thirstily.
As Mrs. Goldstone rocked she smiled, tilting herself backward off the
balls of her feet. The years had cropped out in her suddenly,
surprisingly, and with a great deal of geniality. The taffy cast to her
hair had backslid to ashes of roses. Uncorseted and in the white
wrapper, she was quite frankly widespread, her hips fitting in tight
between the chair-arms, and her knees wide.
A screen door snapped sharply shut on its spring, Mr. I.W. Goldstone
emerging. There was a great rotundity to his silhouette, the generous
outward curve to his waist-line giving to his figure a swayback
erectness, the legs receding rather short and thin from the bay of
waistcoat.
"Hattie?"
"Here I am, I.W."
"I looped up the sweet-peas."
"Good!"
He sat down beside her, wide-kneed, too, the smooth top of his head and
his shirt sleeves spots in the darkness.
"Get dressed a little, Hattie, and I'll get out the car and ride you out
to Forest Park Highlands."
She slowed, but did not cease to rock.
"It's so grand at home this evening, I.W. I'm too comfortable to even
dress myself."
He felt for her hand in the gloom; she put it out to him.
"You huck home too much, Hattie."
"I guess I do, honey; but it's like I can never get enough of it. The
first year I was a home body, and the second and third year I'm two
of 'em."
"That's something you'll never hear me complain of in a woman. There's
a world of good in the woman who loves her home."
"It's not that, I.W. It's because I--I never dreamed that there
was anything like this coming to me. To live around in rooms, year
in and year out, in the lonesomest town in the world, and then, all
of a sudden, a home of your own and a hubby of your own and a daughter
of your own, why--I dunno--sometimes when I think of them days it's
like life was a big red devil with horns and a tail that I'd got away
from. Why, if it was to get me again, I--I dunno, honey, I
dunno--I--just--dunno."
"You're a good woman, Hattie, and you deserve all that's coming to you.
I wish it was more."
"And you're a good man--they don't come no better."
"I'm satisfied with my bargain."
"And me with mine, honey, if--if you don't mind the talk."
"S-ay, this town would talk if you cut its tongue out."
"You're my nice old hubby!"
"If I ever was a little uneasy it was in the beginning, Hattie--the
girl--those things don't always turn out."
"It's her as much as me, I.W. She's the sweetest little thing."
"Never seen the like the way you took hold, though. I'll bet there's not
one woman in a hundred could have worked it out easier."
"That's right--kid me to death."
"'Kid,' she says, the minute I tell her the truth."
"Put on your cap, I.W.; it's getting damp."
He felt under the chair-cushions, drawing out and adjusting a black
skull-cap.
"Want to go to the picture-show awhile, Hattie?"
"No. When Lizzie's done the dishes, I want to set some dough."
"Let's walk, then, a little. I ate too much supper."
"Just in the side yard, I.W. It's a shame the way I don't dress
evenings."
"S-ay, in your own home, shouldn't you have your own comfort? You can
take it from me, Hattie, no matter what Effie tells you, you're twice
the looking woman with some skin on your bones. I want my wife when she
sits down to table she should not look blue-faced when the gravy is
passed. Maybe it's not the style, but if it suits your old man, we
should worry who else it suits."
"It's not right, I.W., but I love it--this feeling at home for--for
good." She rose out of the low mound she had made in the chair, tucking
up the white wrapper at both sides. "Come; let's walk in the side yard."
A narrow strip of asphalt ran across the housefrontage, turning in a
generous elbow and then back the depth of the lot. They paced it quietly
in the gloom, arm in arm, and their voices under darkness.
"Next month is my New York trip. All of a sudden Effie begs I should
take her. We'll all go. What you say, Hattie? It'll do us good."
"You take the kid, I.W. Lizzie needs watching. Yesterday I had to make
her do the whole butler's pantry over. She just naturally ain't clean."
"You got such luck with your roses, Hattie; it's wonderful!"
They were beneath a climbing bush of them that ran along, glorifying a
wooden fence.
She pulled a fan of them to her face. "M-m-m-m!"
"I must spray for worms to-morrow," he said.
They resumed their soft walking in the gloom. "Where's Effie?"
"Telephoning."
"I ask you, is it a shame a child should hang on to the telephone an
hour at a time? Fifty minutes since she was interrupted from supper
she's been there."
"What's the harm in a young girl telephoning, I.W.? All young folks
like to gad over the wire."
"What can a girl have to say over the telephone for fifty minutes?
Altogether in my life I never talked that long into the telephone."
"Let the child alone, I.W."
"Who can she get to listen to her for fifty minutes?"
"Birdie Harberger usually calls up at this time."
"Always at supper-time! Never in my life has that child sat down at the
table it don't ring in our faces. The next time what it happens you can
take sides with her all you want, not one step does she move till she's
finished with her supper."
"As easy with her as you are, I.W., just as unreasonable you can get."
"On the stairs-landing for an hour a child should giggle into the
telephone! I'm ashamed for the operators. You take sides with her yet."
"I don't, I.W.; only--"
"You do!"
A patch of light from an upper window sprang then across their path.
"She's in her room now, I.W.!" cried Mrs. Goldstone. "She hasn't been
telephoning all this time at all. Now, crosspatch!"
"You know much! Can't you see she just lit up? Effie!"
A voice came down to them, clear and with a quality to it like the ring
of thin glass.
"Coming, pop!"
The light flashed out again, and in a length of time that could only
have meant three steps at a bound she was around the elbow of the
asphalt walk, a coat dangling off one arm, her summery skirts flying
backward and her head ardently forward.
"You'll never guess!"
She flung herself between the two of them, linking into each of their
elbows.
"By my watch, Effie, fifty minutes! If it happens again that you get
rung up supper-time, I--"
"It was Leon Kessler, pop; he didn't leave on the six-two. Can you beat
it? Down at the station he got to thinking of me and turned back. Oh, my
golly! how the boys love me!"
She was jumping now on the tips of her toes, her black curls bouncing.
"You don't tell me!" said Mr. Goldstone. "To-day in the store he says
he must be back in New York by Monday morning."
She thrust her face outward, its pink-and-white vividness very close to
his.
"Is my daddy's daughter going out in a seventy horse-power to Delmar
Garden? She is!"
"Them New York boys spend too much money on the girls when they come.
They spoil them for the home young men."
"Can I help it if he couldn't tear himself away?"
"S-ay, don't fool yourself! I said to him to-day he should stay over
Sunday. After the bill of goods I bought from him this morning, and the
way he only comes out to see his trade once in five or six years, he
should stay and mix with them a little longer. That fellow knows good
business."
She turned her face with a fling of curls to the right of her, linking
closer into the soft arm there.
"Listen to him, Mamma Hat! Let's shove a brick house over on him."
When Mrs. Goldstone finally spoke there was a depth to her voice that
seemed to create sudden quiet.
"Effie, Effie, why didn't you let him go?"
"Let him? Did I tie any strings to him? I said good-by to him in the
store this afternoon. Can I help it that the boys love me? Why didn't I
let him go, she says!"
Her father pinched her slyly at that. "_Echta_ fresh kid," he said.
To her right, the hand at her arm clung closer.
"Effie, you--you're so young, honey. Leon Kessler's an old-timer--"
"I hate kids. Give me a _man_ every time. I like them when they've got
enough sense to--"
"Why didn't you let him go, Effie? Ain't I right, I.W.? Ain't I right?"
"S-ay, what's the difference if he likes to show her a good time? If I
was a young man, I wouldn't pass her up myself."
"But, I.W., she's--so young!"
"Who's young? I'm nineteen, going on--"
"You've been running with him all the three days he's been here, honey.
What's the use getting yourself talked about?"
"Well, any girl in town would be glad to get herself talked about if
Leon Kessler was rushing her."
"Effie, I won't let you--I won't--"
Miss Goldstone unhinged her arm, jerking it free in anger.
"Well, I like that!"
"Effie, I--"
"You ain't my boss!"
"Effie!"
"But, papa, she--"
There was a booming in Mr. Goldstone's voice and a suddenly projected
vibrancy.
"You apologize to your mother--this minute! You talk to your mother the
way you know she's to be talked to!"
"I.W., she didn't--"
"You hear me!"
"I.W.! Don't holler at her; she--"
"She ain't your boss? Well, she just is your boss! You take back them
words and say you're sorry! You apologize to your mother!" Immediate
sobs were rumbling up through Miss Goldstone.
"Well, she--I--I didn't do anything. She's down on him. She--"
"Oh, Effie, would I say anything if it wasn't for your own good?"
"You--you were down on him from the start!"
"Effie darling, you must be mad! Would I say anything if it wasn't for
our girl's good to--"
"I--oh, Mamma Hat, I'm sorry, darling! I never meant a word. I didn't! I
didn't, darling!"
They embraced there in the shrouding darkness, the tears flowing.
"Oh, Effie--Effie!"
"I didn't mean one word I said, darling! I just get nasty like that
before I know it. I didn't mean it!"
"My own Effie!"
"My darling Mamma Hat!"
In the shadow of a flowering shrub Mr. Goldstone stood by, mopping. Mrs.
Goldstone took the small face between her hands, peering down into it.
"Effie, Effie, don't let--"
Just beyond the enclosing hedge, a motor-car drew up, honking, at the
curb, two far-flung paths of light whitening the street and a disused
iron negro-boy hitching-post. Miss Goldstone reared back.
"That's him!"
"Effie!"
"Let me go, dearie; let me go!"
"But, Effie--"
"Say, Hattie, I don't want to butt in, but it don't hurt the child
should go riding a little while out by Delmar Garden--a man that can
handle a car like Leon Kessler. Anyways, it don't pay to hurt the firm's
feelings."
There was a constant honking now at the curb, and violent throbbing of
engine.
"But, I.W.--"
"Popsie darling, I'll be back early. Mamma Hat, please!"
"Your mother says yes, baby. Tell Kess he should come for Sunday dinner
to-morrow."
She was a white streak across the grass, her nervous feet flying. Almost
instantly the honk of a horn came streaming back, faint, fainter.
Left standing there, Goldstone was instantly solicitous of his wife,
feeling along her arm up under the loose sleeve.
"It don't pay, Hattie, to hurt Kessler's feelings, and, anyhow, what's
the difference just so we know who she's running with? It's like this
house was a honey-pot and the boys flies."
She turned to him now with her voice full of husk, and even in the dark
her face bleached and shrunken from its plumpness.
"You oughtn't to let her! You--hadn't the right! She's too young and
too--sweet for a man like him. You oughtn't to let her!"
He stepped out in front of her, taking her by the elbows and holding
them close down against her sides.
"Why, Hattie, that child's own mother that loved her like an angel
couldn't worry no more foolishly about her than you do. Gad! I think you
wimmin love it! It was the same kind of worrying shortened her mother's
life. Always about nothing, too. 'Lenie,' I used to say to her, just to
quiet her, 'it was worry killed a Maltese cat; don't let it kill you.'
That child is all right, Hattie. What if he does like her pretty well?
Worse could happen."
"No, it couldn't! No!"
"Why not? He 'ain't seen her since a child, and all of a sudden he comes
West and finds in front of him an eye-opener."
"He's twice her age--more!"
"The way girls demand things nowadays, a man has got to be twice her age
before he can provide for her. Leon Kessler is big rich."
"He--he's fast."
"Show me the one that 'ain't sowed his wild oats. Them's the kind that
settle down quickest into good husbands."
"He--"
"S-ay, it 'ain't happened yet. I'm the last one to wish my girl off my
hands. I only say not a boy in this town could give it to her so good.
Fifteen years I've done business with that firm, and with his father
before him. A-1 house! S-ay, I should worry that he ain't a
Sunday-school boy. Show me the one that is. Your old man in his young
days wasn't such a low flier, neither, if anybody should ask you." He
made a whirring noise in his throat at that, pinching her cold cheek.
She was walking rapidly now toward the house. "Well, since our daughter
goes out riding in a six-thousand-dollar car, to show that we're sports,
lets her father and mother take themselves out for a ride in their
six-hundred-dollar car. I drive you out as far as Yiddle's farm for some
sweet butter, eh?"
"No, no; I'm cold. It's getting damp."
"S-ay, you can't hurt my feelings. On a cool night like this, a
brand-new sleeping-porch ain't the worst spot in the world."
They were on the veranda, the hall light falling dimly out and over
them.
"She's so young--"
"Now, now, Hattie; worry killed a Maltese cat. Come to bed."
"You go. I want to wait up."
"Hattie, you want to make of yourself the laughingstock of the
neighborhood. A grown-up girl goes out riding with a man like Leon
Kessler, and you wants to wait up and catch your death of cold. If we
had more daughters, I wouldn't have no more wife; I'd have a shadow from
worry. Come!"
"I'll be up in a minute, I.W."
He regarded her in some concern.
"Why, Hattie, if there's anything in the world to worry about, wouldn't
I be the first? Ain't you well?"
"Yes."
"Then come. I'll get a pitcher of ice-water to take up-stairs."
"I'll be up in a minute."
"I don't want, Hattie, you should wait up for that child and take your
death of cold. Because I sleep like a log when I once hit the bed,
don't you play no tricks on me."
"I'll be up in a minute, I.W."
He moved into the house and, after a while, to the clinking of ice
against glass, up the stairs.
"Come, Hattie; and be sure and leave the screen door unhooked for her."
"Yes, I.W."
An hour she sat in the shrouded darkness of the elbow of the veranda.
Street noises died. The smell of damp came out. Occasionally a motor-car
sped by, or a passer-by, each step clear on the asphalt. The song of
crickets grated against the darkness. An infant in the right-side house
raised a fretful voice once or twice, and then broke into a sustained
and coughy fit of crying. Lights flashed up in the windows, silhouettes
moving across drawn shades. Then silence again. The university clock, a
mile out, chimed twelve, and finally a sonorous one. Mrs. Goldstone lay
huddled in her chair, vibrant for sound. At two o'clock the long,
high-power car drew up at the curb again, this time without honking. She
sat forward, trembling.
There followed a half-hour of voices at the curb, a low voice of
undeniable tensity, high laughter that shot up in joyous geysers. It was
a fifteen-minute process from the curb to the first of the porch steps,
and then Mrs. Goldstone leaned forward, her voice straining to keep
its pitch.
"Effie!"
The young figure sprang around the porch pillar.
"Mamma Hat! Honey, you didn't wait up for me?"
Mr. Kessler came forward, goggles pushed up above his cap-visor.
"Well, I'm hanged! What did you think--that I was kidnapping the kid?"
"How--how dared you! It's after two, and--"
Miss Goldstone began then to jump again upon her toes, linking her arm
in his.
"Tell her, Leon! Tell her! Oh, Mamma Hat! Mamma Hat!"
She was suddenly in Mrs. Goldstone's arms, her ardent face burning
through the white wrapper.
Mr. Kessler removed his cap, flinging it upward again and catching it.
"Tell her, Leon!"
"Well, what would you say, Becker, what would you say if I was to come
out here and swipe that little darling there?"
"Oh, Leon--kidder!"
"If--what?"
"I said it!"
"Tell her, Kess; tell it out! Oh, mommie, mommie!"
He leaned forward with his hand on the back of the turbulent head of
curls.
"You little darling, I'm going to put you on my back and carry you off
to New York."
"Oh, mommie," cried Miss Goldstone, flinging back her head so that her
face shone up, "he asked me in Delmar Garden! We're going to live in New
York, darling, and Rockaway in summer. He don't care a rap about the
New York girls compared to me. We're going to Cuba on our honeymoon. I'm
engaged, darling! I got engaged to-night!"
"That's the idea, Twinkle-pinkle. I'd carry you off to-night if I
could!"
"Mommie Hat, ain't you glad?"
"Effie--Effie--"
"Mommie, what is it? What's the matter, darling? What?"
"I--it's just that I got cold, honey, sitting here waiting--the surprise
and all. Run, honey, and get me a drink. Crack some ice, dearie, and
then run up-stairs in the third floor back and see if there's some
brandy up there. Be sure to look for--the brandy. I--I'll be all right."
"My poor, darling, cold mommie!"
She was off on the slim, quick feet, the screen door slamming and
vibrating.
Then Mrs. Goldstone sprang up.
"You wouldn't dare! Such a baby--you wouldn't dare!"
"Dare what?"
"You can't have the child! You can't!"
"What do you mean?"
"What do I mean?"
He advanced a step, his voice and expression lifted in incredulity.
"Say, look here, Becker, are you stark, raving crazy? Is it possible you
don't know that, in your place, nobody but a crazy woman would open
her mouth?"
"Maybe; but I don't care. Just leave her alone, Kess, please! That
little baby can stand nothing but happiness."
"Why, woman, you're crazy with the heat. If you want to know it, I'm
nuts over that little kid. Gad! never ran across anything so full of zip
in my life! I'm going to make life one joy ride after another for that
joy baby. That kid's the showpiece of the world. She's got me so hipped
I'm crazy, and the worst of it is I like it. You don't need to worry. As
the boys say, when I settle down, I'm going to settle hard."
"You ain't fit to have her!"
"Say, the kind of life I've lived I ain't ashamed to tell her own
father. He's a man, and I'm a man, and life's life."
"You--"
"Now look here, Becker. That'll be about all. If you're in your right
senses, you're going to ring the joy bells louder than any one around
here. What you got on your chest you can just as well cut your throat as
tell; so we'll both live happy ever after. There's not one thing in my
life that any jury wouldn't pass, and--"
"I've seen you drunk."
"Well, what of it? It took three of us to yank old I.W. out from under
the table at my sister's wedding."
"You--What about you and Cissie and--"
The light run of feet, and almost instantly Miss Goldstone was
pirouetting in between them.
"Here, dearie! There wasn't anything like brandy up in the third floor.
I found some cordial in the pantry. Drink it down, dearie; it'll
warm you."
They hovered together, Miss Goldstone trembling between solicitude and
her state of intensity.
"Kessie darling, you've got to go now. I want to get mommie up-stairs to
bed. You got to go, darling, until to-morrow. Oh, why isn't it tomorrow?
I want everybody to know. Don't let on, Mamma Hat. I'll pop it on popsie
at breakfast while I'm opening his eggs for him. You come for breakfast,
Leon. You're in the family now." He lifted her bodily from her feet,
pressing a necklace of kisses round her throat.
"Good night, Twinkle-pinkle, till to-morrow."
"Good night, darling. I won't sleep a wink, waiting for you."
"Me, neither."
"One more, darling--a French one."
"Two for good measure."
"Sleep tight, beautiful! Good night!"
"Good night, beautifulest!"
She stood poised forward on the topmost step, watching him between
backward waves of the hand crank, throw his clutch, and steer off. Then
she turned inward, a sigh trembling between her lips.
"Oh, Mamma Hat, I--"
But Mrs. Goldstone's chair was empty. Into it with a second and more
tremulous sigh sank Miss Goldstone, her lips lifted in the smile that
had been kissed.
When Mr. Goldstone slept, every alternate breath started with a rumble
somewhere down in the depths of him and, drawn up like a chain from a
well, petered out into a thin whistle before the next descent. Beside
him, now, on her knees, Mrs. Goldstone shook at his shoulder.
"I.W.! I.W.! Quick! Wake up!"
He let out a shuddering, abysmal breath.
"I.W.! Please!"
He moaned, turning his face from her.
She tugged him around again, now raising his face between her hands from
the pillow.
"I.W.! Try to wake up! For God's sake, I.W.!" He sprang up in a
terrified daze, sitting upright in bed.
"My God! Who? What's wrong? Effie! Hattie."
"No, no; don't get excited, I.W. It's me--Hattie!"
"What?"
"Nothing, I.W. Nothing to get excited about. Only I got to tell you
something."
"Where's Effie?"
"She's home."
"What time is it?"
"Three."
"Come back to bed, then; you got the nightmare."
"No, no!"
"You ain't well, Hattie? Let me light up."
"No, no; only, I got to tell you something! I 'ain't been to bed; I been
waiting up, and--"
"And what?"
"She just came home--engaged!"
"My God! Effie?"
He blinked in the darkness, drawing up his knees to a hump under the
sheet.
"Engaged--how?"
"I.W., don't you remember? Wake up, honey. To Kess, to Leon Kessler that
she went automobiling with."
"Our Effie engaged--to Leon Kessler?"
"Yes, I.W.--our little Effie!"
A smile spread over his face slowly, and he clasped his hands in an
embrace about his knees.
"You don't tell me!"
"Oh, I.W., please--"
"Our little girl. S-ay, how poor Lenie would have loved this happiness!
Our little girl engaged to get married!"
"I.W., she--"
"We do the right thing by them--eh, Hattie? Furnish them up as many
rooms as they want. But, s-ay, they don't need help from us. He's a
lucky boy who gets her, I don't care who he is. Her papa's little Effie,
a baby--old enough to get engaged!"
"I.W., she's too--young. Don't give him our little Effie; she's too
young!"
"I married her mother, Hattie, when she wasn't yet eighteen."
"I know, I.W., but not to Leon Kessler. She's such a baby, I.W.
He--didn't I work for him nine years, I.W.--don't I know what he is!"
"I'm surprised, Hattie, you should hold so against a man his wild oats."
"Then why ain't oats for the man oats for the woman? It's the men that
sow the wild oats and the women--us women that's got to reap them!"
"S-ay, life is life. Do you want to put your head up against a brick
wall?"
"A wall that men built!"
"It's always hard, Hattie, for good women like you and like poor Lenie
was to understand. It's better you don't. You shouldn't even think
about it."
"But, I.W.--"
"If I didn't know Leon Kessler was no worse than ninety-nine good
husbands in a hundred, you think I would let him lay a finger on the
apple of my eye? I don't understand, Hattie; all of a sudden this
evening, you're so worked up. Instead of happiness, you come like with a
funeral. Is that why you wake me up out of a sleep? To cry about it?
Don't think, Hattie, that just as much as you I haven't got the good of
my child at heart. Out of a sound sleep she wakes me to cry because a
happiness has come to us. Leon Kessler can have any girl in this town he
wants. Maybe he wasn't a Sunday-school boy in his day--but say, show me
one that was."
She drew herself up, grasping him at the shoulders.
"I.W., don't let him have our little Effie!"
"Nonsense!" he said, in some distaste for her voice choked with tears.
"Cut out this woman foolishness now and come to bed. Is this something
new you're springing on me? I got no patience with women who indulge
themselves with nervous breakdowns. I never thought, Hattie, you had
nothing like that in you."
Her voice was rising now in hysteria, slipping up frequently beyond her
control.
"If you do, I can't stand it! I can't stand it, I.W.!"
He peered at her in the starlight that came down through the screened-in
top of the sleeping-porch.
"Why?" he said, suddenly awake, and shortly.
"I worked for him nine years, I.W. I--I know him."
"How?"
"I know him, I.W. She's too good for him."
"How do you know him?"
"I--the girls, I.W. One little girl now, Cissie--I--I hear it all from
my friend Delehanty--sometimes she--she writes to me. I--the models
and--the girls and--and the lady buyers--they--they used to gossip in
the factory and--I--I used to hear about it. I.W., don't! Let go! You
hurt!" His teeth and his hands were very tight, and he hung now over the
side of the bed and toward her.
"He--I.W.--he--"
"He what? He what?"
"He--ain't good enough."
"I say he is!"
"But he--I.W.--she--she's such a baby and he--he--. You hurt!"
"Then tell me, he what?"
"I.W., you're hurting me!"
"He what--do you hear?--he what?"
"Don't make me say it! Don't! It--it just happened--with him meaning one
thing all the time and--me another. I was thrown with that kind of a
crowd, I.W., all my life. All the girls, they--It don't make me worse
than it makes him. With me it was once; with him it's--it's--I didn't
know, I.W. My mother she died that year before, and--I needed the job,
and I swear to God, I.W., I--kept hoping even if he never put it in
words he'd fix it. Kill me, if you want to, I.W., but don't throw our
Effie to him! Don't! Don't! Don't!"
She was pounding the floor with her bare palms, her face so distorted
that the mouth drawn tight over the teeth was as wide and empty as a
mask's, and sobs caught and hiccoughed in her throat.
"I didn't know, I.W.! Don't kill me for what I didn't know!"
She crouched back from his knotted face, and he sprang then out of bed,
nightshirt flapping about his knees, and his fists and his bulging eyes
raised to the quiet stars.
"God," he cried, "help me to keep hold of myself! Help me! You--you--"
His voice was so high and so tight in his throat that it stuck, leaving
him in inarticulate invocation.
"I.W.!"
"My child engaged to--to her mother's--you--you--"
"I.W.! Do you see now? You wouldn't let him have her! You wouldn't,
I.W.! Tell me you wouldn't!"
"I want him if he touches her to be struck dead! I want him to be struck
dead!"
"Thank God!" said Mrs. Goldstone, weeping now tears that eased her
breathing.
Suddenly he leaned toward her, his voice rather quieter, but his
forefinger waggling out toward the open door.
"You go!" he said, and then in a gathering hurricane of fury, "go!"
"I.W., don't yell! Don't! Don't!"
"Go--while I'm quiet. Go--you hear?"
She edged around him where he stood, in fear of his white, crouched
attitude.
"I.W.!"
He made a step toward her, and, at the sound in his throat, she ran out
into the hallway and down the stairs to the porch. In the deep shade of
the veranda's elbow a small figure lay deep in sleep in the wicker
rocker, one bare arm up over her head and lips parted.
In a straight chair beside her Mrs. Goldstone sat down. She was
shuddering with chill and repeating to herself, quite aloud and over and
over again:
"What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?"
She was suddenly silent then, staring out ahead, her hands clutching the
chair-arms.
To her inflamed fancy, it was as if, beyond the hedge, the old disused
hitching-post had become incarnate and, in the form of her naive and
horned conception, was coming toward her with the whites of his eyes
bloodshot.
A PETAL ON THE CURRENT
Were I only swifter and more potent of pen, I could convey to you all in
the stroke of a pestle the H2O, the pigment of the red-cheeked apple,
the blue of long summer days, and the magnesia of the earth for which
Stella Schump was the mortal and mortar receptacle.
She was about as exotic as a flowering weed which can spring so strongly
and so fibrously from slack. And yet such a weed can bleed milk. If
Stella Schump was about fourteen pounds too plump, too red of cheek, and
too blandly blue of eye, there was the very milk of human kindness in
her morning punching up of her mother's pillows and her smoothing down
of the gray and poorly hair. She could make a bed freshly, whitely, her
strong young arms manoeuvering under but not even jarring the poor old
form so often prone there.
There was a fine kind of virile peasantry in the willing hands, white
enough, but occasionally broken at the nails from eight hours of this
box in and that box out in a children's shoe department.
Differing by the fourteen pounds, Watteau would have scorned and Rubens
have adored to paint her.
She was not unconscious of the rather flaxen ripple of her hair, which
she wore slickly parted and drawn back, scallop by scallop, to a round
and shining mat of plaits against the back of her head. But neither was
she unconscious that she thereby enhanced the too high pitch of her
cheek-bones and the already too generous width between them. It was when
Stella Schump opened wide her eyes that she transcended the milky
fleshliness and the fact that, when she walked rapidly, her cheeks
quivered in slight but gelatinous fashion. Her eyes--they were the color
of perfect June at that high-noon moment when the spinning of the
humming-bird can be distilled to sound. Laura and Marguerite and Stella
Schump had eyes as blue as Cleopatra's, and Sappho's and Medea's must
have been green.
For reading and occasional headaches, she wore a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles prescribed but not specially ground by the optical
department, cater-corner from the children's shoes. Upon the occasion of
their first adjustment, Romance, for the first time, had leaned briefly
into the smooth monotony of Miss Schump's day-by-day, to waft a scented,
a lace-edged, an elusive kerchief.
"You ought to heard, mamma, that fellow over in the specs, when he gimme
the test for the glasses."
"What?"
"Tee-hee!--it sounds silly to repeat it."
"You got the Schump eyes, Stella. I always used to say, with his big
blue ones, your poor father ought to been a girl, too."
"'Say,' he said to me, he said, just like that, 'I know a society who
will pay you a big fat sum if you'll sign over them eyes for
post-mortem laboratory work. Believe me, Bettina,' he said, just like
that, 'those are some goo-goos!'"
"'Goo-goos'?"
"Yes, ma--the way I look out of them."
"See, Stella, if you'd only mix with the young men and not be so
stiff-like with them. See! Is he the sober, genteel kind who could sit
out an evening in a self-respectin' girl's front parlor?"
"I--I can't ask a fellow if he didn't ask me, can I? I can't make a
pusher out of myself."
"A girl don't have to make a pusher out of herself to have beaus; it's
natural for her to have them in moderation. I don't want my girl shut
out of her natural pleasures."
"'Believe me, Bettina,' he said, 'those are some goo-goos'--just like
that, he said it."
"Before I'd let a girl like Cora Kinealy have all the beaus! I bet
_she'd_ ask him."
"It--it just ain't in me, ma. The other girls do, I know--you ought to
heard the way Mabel Runyan was kiddin' a fellow in the silks to-day--it
just ain't in me to."
"Nowadays, young men got to be made to feel welcome."
"I just don't seem to take."
"'I'll be pleased to have you call of a Saturday night, Mr. So-and-so.'
No one could say there's anything but the genteel in that. Those are
just the words I used to say to your poor father when he was courtin'."
"If only I--I wouldn't turn all red!"
"I bet Cora Kinealy would have asked him." "I--I'll ask him, ma."
When Stella Schump was adjusting her black sleevelets next morning,
somewhat obviously oblivious of the optical department across the aisle,
a blond, oiled head leaned out at her.
"Mornin'. Goo-goo!"
A flush that she could feel rush up and that would not be controlled
threw her into a state of agitation that was almost abashing to behold.
"Tee-hee!"
"Believe me, Bettina, those are some goo-goos!"
"I'd be pleased to have you--come--to--"
"I told the little wifey last night, 'Angel Face, I've found a pair of
goo-goos that are a close runner-up to yours.'"
Miss Schump turned to her first customer of the day, the flush receding
as suddenly as it had come to scorch.
"Copper toes for the little boy? Just be seated, please."
Thus did the odor of romance lay for the merest moment upon the stale
air of Miss Schump's routine.
Evenings, in the high-ceilinged, long-windowed, and inside-shuttered
little flat in very West Thirteenth Street, tucked up in the top story
of one of a row of made-over-into-apartments residences that boasted
each a little frill of iron balcony and railed-in patch of front lawn,
they would sit beside an oil-lamp with a flowered china shade, Mrs.
Schump, gnarled of limb and knotted of joint, ever busy, except on the
most excruciatingly rheumatic of her days, at a needlework so cruel, so
fine that for fifteen years of her widowhood it had found instant market
at a philanthropic Woman's Exchange.
Very often Miss Cora Kinealy, also of the children's shoes, would rock
away an evening in that halo of lamplight, her hair illuminated to
copper and her hands shuttling in and out at the business of knitting.
There were frank personal discussions, no wider in diameter than the
little circle of light itself.
MISS KINEALY (_slumped in her chair so that her knee rose higher than
her waist-line_): I always say of Stella, she's one nut too hard for me
to crack, and I've cracked a good many in my life. Why that girl 'ain't
got beaus galore--well, I give up!
MRS. SCHUMP (_stooped for an infinitesimal stab of needle_): She don't
give 'em a chance, Cora. You can't tell me there is not many a nice,
sober young man wouldn't be glad to sit out a Saturday evening with her.
She's that bashful she don't give 'em a chance. I tell her it's almost
as much ruination to a girl to be too retiring as to be too forward. She
don't seem to have a way with the boys.
MISS SCHUMP (_in a pink, warm-looking flannelette kimono and brushing
out into fine fluff her flaxen-looking hair, and then, in the name of
to-morrow's kink, plaiting it into a multitude of small, tight-looking
braids_): You can talk, mamma. You, too, Cora, with a boy like Archie
Sensenbrenner and your wedding-day in sight. But what's a girl goin' to
do if she don't take; if she ain't got an Archie?
Mrs. Schump (_riding her glasses down toward the end of her nose to
look up sharply over them_): Get one.
"There you go again! Honest, you two make me mad. I can't go out and
lasso 'em, can I?"
"She doesn't give 'em a chance, Cora; mark my word! The trouble is,
she's too good for most she sees. They ain't up to her."
"I can't understand it, Mrs. Schump. I always say there ain't a finer
girl on the floor than Stella. When I see other girls, most of 'em fresh
little rag-timers that ain't worth powder and shot, bringing down the
finest kind of fellows, and Stella never asked out or nothing, I always
say to myself, 'I can't understand it.' Take me--what Arch Sensenbrenner
ever seen in me, with Stella and her complexion working in the same
department--"
"You got a way, Cora. There's just something about me don't take with
the boys. Honest, if I could only see one of you girls alone with a
fellow once, to see how you do it!"
"Just listen to her, Mrs. Schump, with her eyes and complexion and all!"
"There's not a reason my girl shouldn't have it as good and better than
the best of them. She's a good girl, Cora. Stella's a good girl to me."
"Aw, mamma--"
"Don't I know it, Mrs. Schump! I always say if ever a girl would make
some nice-earning, steady fellow a good wife, it's--"
'"Good wife'! That ain't the name! Why, Cora, for ten years that child
has lifted me on my bad days and carried me and babied me like I was a
queen. It's nothing for her to rub me two hours straight. Not a day
before she leaves for work that she don't come to me and--"
"Fellows don't care about that kind of thing. A girl's got to have pep
and something besides complexion and elbow-grease. I'm too fat."
"She's always sayin' she's too fat. With one pound off, would she
look as good, Cora? If I hadn't been as plump as a partridge in my
girl-days--and if I do say it myself, I was as fine a lookin' girl
as my Stella--do you think Dave Schump would have had eyes for me?
Not if I was ten times the woman I was for him."
"Sure she ain't too fat, Mrs. Schump. I always tell her it's her
imagination. I know a girl bigger than she is that's keeping company
with an expert piano-tuner. Why, I know girls twice her size. Stella's
got a right good figure, she has."
"Lots of good it does me! I--It's just like my brains to go right to my
hands, once you put me with a fellow. That time your brother Ed called
for me for that party at your house--honest, I couldn't open my mouth
to him."
"Can't understand it! 'Honest,' I says to Ed that time after the party,
I says to him, 'Ed, why don't you go over and call on Stella Schump and
take her to a movie or something? She's my idea of a girl, Stella is.'
Think I could budge him? 'Naw,' was all I could get out of him. Just,
'Naw.' Honest, I could have shook him. But did he run down to that
little flirt of a Gert Cobb's the very same night? He did. Honest, like
I said to Arch, it makes me sick. Is it any wonder the world is filled
with little flips like Gert Cobb, the way the fellows fall for 'em?"
"I never could be fresh with a boy. Take that time at your party. I bet
your brother Ed would have liked me better if I'd have got out in the
middle of the floor with him, like he wanted me to and like Gert did, to
see who could blow the biggest bunch of suds off his stein. I never
could be fresh with a fellow."
"That's just the trouble, Mrs. Schump. Stella don't see the difference
between what's fresh and what's just fun. Is there anything wrong about
one stein of beer in a jolly crowd? A girl can be nice without being
goody-good. If there's anything a fellow hates, it's a goody-good. Take
a fellow like Arch--you think he'd have any time for me if I wasn't a
good-enough sport to take a glass of beer with him maybe once a week
when he gets to feeling thirsty? Nothing rough. Everything in
moderation, I always say. But there's a difference, Mrs. Schump, between
being rough and being a goody-good."
"There's something in what you say, Cora. I've had her by me so much,
maybe I've tried to raise her a little over-genteel. There ain't one
single bad appetite she's got to be afraid of. It's not in her. I used
to tell her poor father, one glass of beer could make him so crazy loony
he never had to try how two tasted."
"I'm bashful, and what you goin' to do about it?"
"Say, you and Ed's foreman ought to meet together! Honest, you'd be a
pair! Ed brought him to the house one night. Finest boy you ever seen.
Thirty-five a week, steady as you make 'em; and when they put in girls
to work down at the munitions-plant where him and Ed works, Ed said it
was all they could do to keep him from throwing up his job from fright.
Whatta you know? A dandy fellow like him, with a dagger-shaped scar
clear down his arm from standing by his job that time when the whole
south end of the plant exploded. A fellow that could save a whole plant
and two hundred lives afraid to face a few skirts! Crazy to get married.
Told Ed so. Always harping on his idea of blue eyes and yellow hair, and
then, when he gets the chance, afraid of a few skirts!"
"That's me every time with fellows. I get to feelin' down inside of me
something terrible--scary--and all."
"Say, I'll tell you what! I'll get Ed to bring him down to Gert Cobb's
party next Saturday night, and you come, too."
"I?"
"There's two of a kind for you, Mrs. Schump. A fellow that's more afraid
of girls than explosions, and a girl that's afraid to blow a little foam
off a glass of beer! Them two ought to meet. Me and Arch and Ed'll fix
it up. How's that for a scheme? Now say I ain't your friend! Are
you game?"
"I don't go out tryin' to meet fellows that way."
"You see, Mrs. Schump, the way she puts a gold fence around herself?"
"Cora's puttin' herself out for you, Stella. There's no harm in a
Saturday night's party in the company of Cora and some genteel friends."
"Gert Cobb don't know I'm on earth."
"You hear, Mrs. Schump? Is it any wonder she don't get out? All I got to
do is say the word, and any friend of mine is welcome in Gert
Cobb's house."
"I'll make you up them five yards of pink mull for it, Stella. It's a
shame that pretty dress-pattern from your two birthdays ago has never
had the occasion to be made up. It's nice of Cora to be puttin'
herself out."
"Look at 'er, like I was asking her to a funeral!"
"There's such a pretty sash I been savin' to make up with that mull,
Cora. A handsome black-moiré length of ribbon off a beaded basque her
father gimme our first Christmas married."
"I'll lend her my pink pearls to wear. Honest, I never knew a girl could
wear pink like Stella."
Miss Schump leaned forward in the lamplight, the myriad of tight little
braids at angles, but her eyes widening to their astounding blueness.
"Not your--pink beads, Cora?"
"You heard me the first time, didn't you? 'Pink' was what I said."
"Ma!"
"Now ain't that nice of Cora?"
"Quick--are you game?"
"Why, yes--Cora."
* * * * *
There is a section of New York which rays out rather crazily from old
Jefferson Market and Night Court in spokes of small streets that seem
to run at haphazard angles each to the other--that less sooty part of
Greenwich not yet invaded by the Middle West in search of bohemia. An
indescribable smack of Soho here, tired old rows of tired old houses
going down year by year before the wrecker's ax, the model tenement
rising insolently before the scar is cold.
It is that part of the Latin Quarter which is literally just that, lying
slightly to the south and slightly to the west of that odd-fellow's land
of short-haired women and long-haired men. Free love, free verse, free
thought, free speech, and freed I.W.W.'s have no place here. For three
blocks a little Italy runs riot in terms of pastry, spaghetti, and
plaster-of-Paris shops, and quite as abruptly sobers and becomes Soho
again. A Greek church squats rather broadly at the intersection of three
of these streets.
There intervened between Stella Schump's and the six-story model
tenement adjoining the Greek church which Miss Gertrude Cobb called
home, a rhomboid of park, municipally fitted with playground apparatus,
the three-block riot of little Italy, the gloomy barracks of old
Jefferson Market and Night Court, and a few more blocks of still intact,
tired old rows of tired old houses.
On a spring night that was as insinuatingly sweet as the crush of a rose
to the cheek there walked through these lowly streets of lower Manhattan
Mr. Archie Sensenbrenner, bounded on the north by a checked,
deep-visored cap; on the south by a very bulldogged and very tan pair of
number nines; on the east by Miss Cora Kinealy, very much of the
occasion in a peaked hood faced in eider-down and a gay silk bag of
slippers dangling; on the west by Miss Stella Schump, a pink scarf
entwining her head like a Tanagra.
"Honest, Cora, I feel just like I'm intruding."
"'Intrudin'! Would I have invited her if we didn't want her, Arch?"
"Naw."
"'There's always room for one more,' is my motto. I believe it always
comes home to the girl that don't share her good times. If me and Arch
couldn't call by for a girl on our way to a party, I'd feel sorry for
us. Give her your arm, Arch."
"Here! I tried once to, and she wouldn't take it."
Miss Schump hooked a highly diffident hand into Mr. Sensenbrenner's
sharply jutted elbow.
"You two go on and talk together. I've chewed Arch's right ear off
already."
"It's a grand evenin'--ain't it, Mr. Sensenbrenner?"
At that from Miss Schump, Miss Kinealy executed a very soprano squeal
that petered out in a titter of remonstrances.
"Arch Sensenbrenner, if you don't stop pinching me! Honest, my arm's
black and blue! Honest! What'll Stella think we are? Now cut it out!"
They walked a block in silence, but, beside her, Miss Schump could feel
them shaking to a duet of suppressed laughter, and the red in her face
rose higher and a little mustache of the tiniest of perspiration beads
came out over her lip. The desire to turn back, the sudden ache for the
quietude of the little halo of lamplight and the swollen finger-joints
of her mother in and out at work, were almost not to be withstood.
"I--You--you and Mr. Sensenbrenner go on, Cora. I--me not knowin' Gertie
Cobb and all--I--I--feel I'm intruding. You and him go on. Please!"
Miss Kinealy crossed to her, kindly at once and sobered.
"Now, Stella Schump, you're coming right to this party with me and Arch.
We can't do more than tell her she's welcome, can we, Arch?"
"Sure."
"I promised your mother I'm going to see to it that you get away from
her apron-strings and out among young folks more, and you're coming
right to this party with me and Arch. Ain't I right, Arch?"
"Sure."
"You mustn't feel bad, honey, that Ed couldn't get John Gilly to come
around and call after you. Ed says he'd never get him to steam up his
nerve enough to call at a girl's house after her; but ain't it enough
he's coming to Gert's to-night just to meet you? You ought to heard him
when Ed got to telling him what kind of a girl you was. 'Gee!' Ed says
he says. 'Big blue eyes like saucers sounds good to me! Well,' he says,
Ed says he says, 'if my nerve don't lay down on me, I'll show up there
with you.' That's something, ain't it, for a fellow like John Gilly to
do just to meet a girl? Ain't it, Arch, for that fine, big fellow, Ed's
foreman, you seen up at our house that night? You know the one I mean,
the one with his arm scalded up from the explosion."
"Sure."
"Honest, if I wasn't already tagged and spoken for, I'd set my cap for
him myself."
"'Mother, mother, mother, pin a rose on me!'" cried Mr. Sensenbrenner,
with no great pertinence.
Miss Kinealy threw him a northwest glance. "Ain't he the cut-up,
Stella?"
"He sure is."
"Br-a-a-y!" said Mr. Sensenbrenner, again none too relevantly.
"Oh, show her the way the zebra in the Park goes on Sunday morning,
Arch!"
He inserted two fingers, splaying his mouth. "Heigh-ho!
He-e-e-e-e-e-e-e!"
"Ain't that lifelike, Stella?"
"It sure is."
"Oh, look! Up there--the third story--see--those are the Cobbs'
windows, all lit up! Oh, gee! I just can't make my feet behave. Waltz me
around again, Archie! No; you got to take the first dance with Stella."
"Oh no, Cora; he wants--"
"You hear, Arch?"
"Sure; only, I can't force her if she don't want to."
"Sure she wants to! Hurry! I hear Skinnay Flint's ukulele. Gee! I just
can't make my feet be-have!"
They entered an institutional, sanitary, and legislation-smelling box of
foyer and up three flights of fire-proof stairs. At each landing were
four fire-proof doors, lettered. The Cobbs' door, "H," stood open, an
epicene medley of voices and laughter floating down the long neck of
hallway on the syncopated whine of a ukulele.
There was an immediate parting of ways, Mr. Sensenbrenner hanging his
cap on an already well-filled rack of pegs and making straight for the
sound of revelry by night.
The girls made foray into a little side pocket of bedroom for the
changing of shoes, whitening of noses, and various curlicue preambles.
"Stella, your hair looks swell!"
"Ma plaited it up last night with sugar-water."
"Here, just this speck on your lips, just a little to match your
cheeks!--See--all the girls use it."
"Ugh--no--"
"There, just a stroke. Fine! Say, wasn't Arch killing to-night when he
called my cheeks naturally curly?"
"You look grand, Cora. Sure you don't want your pink beads?"
"I'll throw 'em down and step on 'em if you take 'em off."
"I just love that changeable silk on you."
"Does the split under the arm show?"
"Notta bit."
"Come on, then!"
"Oh, Cora--"
"Come on!"
In the Cobb front room a frightened exodus of furniture had taken place.
A leather-and-oak "davenbed" had obviously and literally been dragged to
the least conspicuous corner. An unpainted center of floor space showed
that there had been a rug. Camp-chairs had been introduced against all
available wall space. Only a fan-shaped, three-shelved cabinet of
knickknacks had been allowed its corner. Diagonal from it, the horn of a
talking-machine, in shape a large, a violent, a tin morning-glory, was
directed full against the company.
Not a brilliant scene, except by grace or gracelessness of state of
mind. But to Stella Schump, neither elected nor electing to walk in
greater glory, there was that about the Cobb front room thus lighted,
thus animated, that gave her a sense of function--a crowding around the
heart. The neck of hallway might have been a strip of purple, awninged.
There were greetings that rose in crescendo and falsetto.
"Cora Kinealy! Hello, Cora! How's every little thing?"
"Baby-shoes--tra-la-la!" "Oh, you changeable-silk kiddo! Turn green for
the ladies." "Come on over here, Cora, and make Arch tell fortunes!"
"Gertie, this is my girl friend, Stella, from the shoes, I brought.
Y'know? I told you about her. Ed's bringing down a gentleman friend
for her."
Miss Gertie Cobb, so blond, so small, so titillating that she resembled
nothing so much as one of those Dresden table-candelabra under a pink
glass-fringed shade with the fringe always atinkle, laughed upward in a
voice eons too old.
"Make yourself right at home. At our house, it's what you don't see ask
for. Skin-nay Flint, if you don't stop! Make him quit, Cora; he's been
ticklin' me something awful with that little old feather duster he
brought along. Whatta you think this is--Coney Island? E-e-e-e-e-e!"
There ensued a scramble down the length of the room, Miss Cobb with her
thin, bare little arms flung up over her head, Miss Kinealy tugging and
then riding in high buffoonery over the bare floor, firmly secured to
Mr. Flint's coattails.
"Leggo!"
"Quit--ouch--e-e-e-e-e! That's right; give it to him! Cora--go to
it--e-e-e-e-e--"
Lips lifted to belie a sinkage of heart, Miss Schump, left standing,
backed finally, sinking down to one of the camp-chairs against the wall.
The little glittering mustache had come out again, and, sitting there,
her smile so insistently lifted, the pink pearls at her throat rose and
fell. The ukulele was whanging again, and a couple or two, locked cheek
to cheek, were undulating in a low-lidded kind of ecstasy. Finally, Cora
Kinealy and Archie Sensenbrenner, rather uglily oblivious.
A youth, frantic to outdistance a rival for the dancing-hand of Miss
Gertie Cobb, stumbled across Miss Schump's carefully crossed ankles.
"'Scuse," he said, without glancing back.
"Certainly," said Miss Schump, through aching tonsils.
There was an encore, the raucous-throated morning-glory taking up where
the ukulele had left off. Miss Schump sat on, the smile drawn more and
more resolutely across her face. Occasionally, to indicate a state of
social ease, she caught an enforced yawn with her hand.
After a while Mrs. Cobb entered, quietly, almost furtively, hands
wrapped muff fashion in a checked apron, sitting down softly on the
first of the camp-chairs near the door. She had the dough look of the
comfortable and the uncorseted fat, her chin adding a scallop as,
watching, her smile grew.
"It's great to watch the young ones," she said, finally.
Miss Schump moved gratefully, oh, so gratefully, two chairs over.
"It sure is," she said, assuming an attitude of conversation.
"Like I tell Gert, it makes me young again myself."
"It sure does."
"Give it to 'em in the house, I say, and it keeps 'em in off the
street."
"Your daughter is sure one pretty girl."
"Gert's a good-enough girl, if I could keep her in. I tell 'er of all my
young ones she's the prettiest and the sassiest. Law, how that girl
can sass!"
"Like my mother always says to me about sass, sass never gets a girl
nowheres."
"Indeed it don't! It's lost her more places than my other two, married
now, ever lost put together. You work in the Criterion?"
"Yes'm. Children's shoes."
"I bet you're not the kind of a girl to change places every week."
"No'm. Criterion is the only place I ever worked at. I started there as
Cash."
"I bet you give up at home out of your envelop."
"Yes'm."
"Father?"
"No'm. He was a night watchman and got shot on duty."
"Mother?"
"Yes'm."
"Brother?"
"No'm."
"Sister?"
"No'm."
"Only child, huh?"
"Yes'm."
Then Miss Cobb blew up in a state of breathless haste and bobbing of
curls.
"Eats, maw--eats! The crowd's thirsty--spittin' cotton. What's the idea?
My tongue's out. Eats! Quick, for Gawsakes--eats!"
Mrs. Cobb, wide and quivery of hip, retreated precipitately into the
slit of hallway. Almost immediately there were refreshments, carried in
on portentous black tin trays by a younger Cobb in pigtails and by Mrs.
Cobb, swayback from a great outheld array of tumblers and bottles.
A shout went up.
The tray of sandwiches, piled to an apex, scarcely endured one round of
passing. The fluted tin tops of bottles were pried off. Tumblers
clicked. There were the sing of suds and foamy overflowings.
Enter Mr. Ed Kinealy, very brown and tight of suit, very black and
pomaded of hair.
"Oh, Ed!" This from Miss Kinealy between large mouthfuls of sandwich
and somewhat jerkily from being dandled on Mr. Sensenbrenner's knee,
"Where's your friend--where's John Gilly?"
"Oh, Ed!" "Naouw, Eh-ud!" "I'll give you a slap on the wrist." "Naouw,
Ed!" Delivered by those present in a chorus of catcalls and falsetto
impersonations of Miss Kinealy in plaintive vein.
"Now tell me--where is he, Ed? Shut up every body! Where is he, Ed?"
Mr. Kinealy shot a pair of very striped cuffs.
"That guy had sense. One whiff of this roughhouse and he bolted down
again, six steps at a jump. He slipped me so easy I was talking to
myself all the way up-stairs. That guy had sense. Petticoat shush-shush
can't put nothing over on him."
"Aw, Ed!"
CHORUS: Aw, Eh-ud! Aw, Eh-ud! Naouw--
"And him dated for Stella! Honest, it's a rotten shame!" Suddenly Miss
Kinealy flashed to her feet, her glance running quick. "Where is she?
Well, Stella Schump, sitting over there playing chums with yourself!
Honest, your name ought to be Chump! Whatta you think that is--the amen
corner? You're a fine bunch of social entertainers, you fellows are!
Bring her up a chair. Gee! you are! Honest, Gertie Cobb, I wouldn't want
my cat to be company to you! Bring 'er up a chair, Ed. Here, next to me!
Honest, it's a rotten shame! Give 'er a sandwich. Open 'er up a bottle.
Gee! you're a fine crowd of fish, you are!"
There was a general readjustment of circle and scraping of chairs. Miss
Schump, scarlet, drew up and in, Mr. Kinealy prying off a fluted
top for her.
"Have this one on me, Stella!" he cried. "Your guy bolted of stage
fright; but I'm here, and don't you forget it!"
"Aw--tee-hee!" she said, wiping at her upper lip.
"Here!"
She regarded the foam sing down into amber quiet.
"I'm on the water-wagon," she said, essaying to be light of vein,
crossing her hands and feet and tilting her glance at him.
"Say, here's a girl won't blow the foam off a fellow's glass for fear
she'll get soapsuds in her eyes!"
"Wash her face with 'em!"
MISS KINEALY: Aw, now, Stella; can't you be a good fellow for once? Do
it, if it hurts you. Honest, I hate to say it, but you're the limit, you
are! My God! limber up a little--limber up!
"Here, now--open your mouth and shut your eyes."
"Open it for her, Ed."
"Aw, no; don't force her if she don't want it."
"Gowann, Stella; be human, if it hurts you."
Redly and somewhat painfully, the observed of all observers, Miss Schump
tilted her head and drank, manfully and shudderingly, to the bitter end
of the glass.
"Attaboy! Say, tell it to the poodles and the great Danes! That Jane's
no amachure!"
Eyes stung to tears, pink tip of her tongue quickly circling her lips,
Miss Schump held out to Mr. Kinealy the empty tumbler.
"Now, there!"
"More?"
"I'm game."
"Don't give 'er a whole glass, Ed."
She drank, again at one whiff.
"That's more like it! Didn't kill you, did it? Now eat that Swiss-cheese
sandwich and come over next to me and Arch while he tells fortunes."
Miss Schump rose, rather high of head, the moment hers.
Miss Kinealy stretched her hand out into the center of the closing-in
circle of heads.
"I said palm-reading, Arch, not hand-holding. Leave that part to Ed and
Gert over there. Now quit squeezing--"
Mr. Sensenbrenner bent low, almost nose to her palm.
"I see," he began, his voice widening to a drawl--"I se-e a fellow about
my size and complexion entering your life--"
To Miss Schump, her hand on Miss Kinealy's shoulder and her head peering
over, the voice seemed to trail off somewhere out into infinitudes of
space, off into bogs of eternity, away and behind some beyond.
"Gee! it's hot in here!" she muttered, no one heeding or hearing. "Sure
hot. Whew!"
"Going on a long journey, and a fellow about my size and complexion is
going along with you, and there's money coming--"
"Sure hot!" It was then Miss Schump, with fear of a rather growing and
sickening sense of dizziness and of the wavy and unstable outline of
things, slipped quietly and unobtrusively out into the hallway, her
craving for air not to be gainsaid. The door to the little bedroom stood
open, her pink scarf uppermost on the cot-edge. She stood for an instant
in the doorway, regarding and wanting it, but quite as suddenly turned,
and down the three flights gained the dewy quiet of out-of-doors,
fighting muzziness.
The street had long since fallen tranquil, the Greek church casting
immense shadow. The air had immediate and sedative effect upon Miss
Schump's rather distressing symptoms of unrest, but not quite allaying a
certain state of mental upheaval. She had the distinct sensation of the
top of her head lifted off from the eyebrows up. Her state of
light-headedness took voice.
"Gimme," she said, lifting the pink-mull, ankle-length skirt as if it
trailed a train and marching off down-street; "now you gimme!"
An entirely new lack of self-consciousness enhanced her state of
giddiness. A titter seemed to run just a scratch beneath the surface
of her.
The passing figure of a woman in a black cape and a bulge of bundle
elicited a burst of laughter which her hand clapped to her mouth
promptly subdued. Awaiting the passing of a street-car, she was again
prone to easy laughter.
"Oh, you!" she said, quirking an eye to the motorman, who quirked back.
Crossing the street, she came down rather splashily in a pool of water,
wetting and staining the light slippers.
"Aw!" she repeated, scolding and stamping down at them. "Aw! Aw! You!"
Across from the gloomy pile of old Jefferson Market, she stood, reading
up at an illuminated tower-clock, softly, her lips moving.
"Nine--ten--e-lev-hun--"
A dark figure slowed behind her elbow; she turned with a sense of that
nearness and peered up under the lowering brim of a soft-felt hat.
"Hoddado?"
"Hello!" she answered, slyly.
"Hello!"
She peered closer.
"Got a girl?"
"Nope."
"Blow suds?"
"Where?"
"Cora's."
He flung back his coat, revealing a star.
"You're under arrest," he said, laconically. "Solicitin'. Come on; no
fuss."
Her comprehension was unplumbed.
"O Lord!" she said, pressing inward at her waistline to abet laughter,
following him voluntarily enough, and her voice rising. "You make me
laugh. You make me laugh."
"That'll do," he said.
"Whoop la-la!"
"Now, you get noisy and watch me."
He turned in rather abruptly at a side door of the dark-red pile of
building which boasted the illuminated tower-clock and a jutting ell
with barred windows.
She drew back.
"No, you don't! Aw, no, you don't! Whatta you think I yam? Cora's! Tell
it to the poodles and the great Danes!"
He shoved her with scant ceremony beyond the heavy door. She entered in
one of the uncontrollable gales of laughter, the indoor heat immediately
inducing the dizziness.
"Whatta you think I yam? Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"
Thirty minutes later, in a court-room as smeared of atmosphere as a
dirty window, a bridge officer, reading from a slip of paper, singsonged
to the sergeant-at-arms:
"Stella Schump. Officer Charles Costello."
How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of
a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend
for Stella Schump the vague boundaries of the probable.
The milky-fleshed, not highly sensitized, pinkly clean creature of an
innocence born mostly of ignorance and slow perceptions, who that
morning had risen sweet from eleven hours of unrestless sleep beside a
mother whose bed she had never missed to share, suddenly here in
slatternliness! A draggled night bird caught in the aviary of night
court, lips a deep vermilion scar of rouge, hair out of scallop and
dragging at the pins, the too ready laugh dashing itself against what
must be owned a hiccough.
Something congenital and sleeping subcutaneously beneath the surface of
her had scratched through. She was herself, strangely italicized.
A judge regarded her not unkindly. There were two of him, she would keep
thinking, one merging slightly into his prototype.
She stood, gazing up. Around her swam the court-room--rows of faces;
comings and goings within her railed area. And heat--the dizzying, the
exciting heat--and the desire to shake off the some one at her elbow.
That some one was up before her now, in a chair beside the judge, and
his voice was as far away as Archie Sensenbrenner's.
"And she says to me, she says, your Honor, 'Got a girl?'"
"Were those her exact words to you?"
"Yes, your Honor."
"Proceed."
"And I says to her, I says, 'No,' and then she comes up close and says
to me, she says, 'Buy me a drink?'"
"Were those her exact words?"
"Yes, your Honor, as near as I can remember."
"Go on."
"And I says to her, 'Where do you want to go?' and she says to me,
giving me a wink, 'Cora's.'"
"Cora's?"
"Yes, your Honor; the Cora Jones mulatto woman that was cleaned out last
week."
"She suggested that you accompany her to the house of the Jones woman?"
"Beg pardon, your Honor?"
"She suggested this resort?"
"Yes, your Honor. 'Cora Jones,' she said."
Through the smoke of her bewilderment something irate stirred within
Miss Schump, a smouldering sense of anger that burst out into a brief
tongue of flame.
"You! You! You're no amachure! Cora Jones! Cora Kinealy! Go tell it to
the great Danes! Say it again! Gimme leave! Gimme leave!" The immediate
peremptoriness of the gavel set her to blinking, but did not silence.
"'Gimme leave,' was what I said--"
"Come to order in the court!"
"Aw!"
A new presence at her elbow grasped her sharply. She subsided, but still
muttering.
"Proceed, officer."
"And then, when she starts off with me, I says to her, I says, 'You're
under arrest,' and brought her over."
"That'll do."
"Does the defendant wish to take the chair?"
From her elbow, "His Honor asks if you want to state your case."
"Huh?"
"Do you wish to state your case from the witness-chair? Since you did
not employ counsel, do you wish to state your own case?"
"Nit."
"Look up here, my girl. I am the judge, trying to help you."
"Aw!"
"Is this your first offense?"
"Well, it's my offense, ain't it?"
"Address the court properly. Are you intoxicated or only slightly
dizzy?"
"He lied about Cora Kinealy. He lied--that little skunk lied."
"Didn't you ask him to go there with you?"
"Sure; but he's no amachure."
"Are you?"
"What?"
"An amateur?"
"No, this Jane ain't."
"Will you go quietly into the next room with the matron and tell her all
about it? The court does not want to have to deal too harshly with a
girl like you. Do you want to engage counsel and have your case go over?
If there is a chance, I don't want to have to send a girl like
you away."
"Aw, you--you're a poodle and a great Dane!"
"Ten days," said the judge, rather wearily.
The bridge officer took up the next slip from the pile of them, his
voice the droning quality of a bee bumbling through sultry air:
"Maizie Smith. Officer Jerry Dinwiddie."
* * * * *
Spring and her annual epidemic of aching hearts and aching joints had
advanced ten days and ten degrees. The season's first straw replacement
of derby had been noted by press. The city itched in its last days of
woolens and drank sassafras tea for nine successive mornings. A commuter
wore the first sweet sprig of lilac. The slightly East Sixties took to
boarding up house-fronts into bland, eyeless masks. The very East
Sixties began to smell.
When a strangely larger-eyed, strangely thinner, a whitened and somehow
a tightened Stella Schump drew up, those ten days later, before the
little old row with the little old iron balconies, there was already in
the ridiculous patches of front yards a light-green powdering of grass,
and from the doorbell of her own threshold there hung quite a little
spray of roses, waxy white against a frond of fern and a fold of black.
Deeper within that threshold, at the business of flooding its floor with
a run of water from a tipped pail and sweeping harshly into it, was the
vigorous, bony silhouette of Mrs. O'Connor, landlady.
For the second that it took her presence to be felt, Miss Schump stood
there trembling, all of a sudden more deeply and more rapidly. Then,
Mrs. O'Connor leaned out, bare arms folded atop her broom.
"So!" she said, a highly imperfect row of lower teeth seeming to jut
out, and her voice wavy with brogue and vibrant to express all its
scorn. "So!"
"Mrs. O'Connor--"
"So! Ye've come back in time for the buryin'! Faith, an' it's a foine
toime for the showin'-up of the chief mourner! Faith now it is!"
"Mrs. O'Connor--"
"Ain't ye ashamed? Ain't ye ashamed before the Lord to face your Maker?"
"Please--please--Mrs. O'Connor--what--what--"
"The pasty-faced lyin' ways of ye! I can see now how ye look what ye
are! I'd have believed it as soon of my own. It's the still water that
run deep in ye, is the way your girl friend put it. The hussy under that
white complexion of yours! Your sainted mither! Oh, ain't ye ashamed in
the name of the Lord to face your Maker?"
"O God--please what--"
"Your sainted mither! Niver, after that letter from ye the next night
after her scourin' the city, a whimper more out of her--"
"I wrote--I wrote--they gimme a stamp--I wrote--how--Where is she?"
"A cousin had called ye sudden-like for sickness was how she put it.
Faith and me niver once a-smellin' the mice, the way she lay there,
waitin', waitin' day after day, doubled up in the joints and waitin' for
thim ten days to pass--"
"O God!"
"I found her in bed yisterday, a-clutchin' the letter, or niver to my
own dyin' would I have known the shameful truth of it. It's screw open
her poor hands I had to, for the readin' of the letter that had been
eatin' 'er for all them days of waitin'. Ye hussy! Ye jailbird--and me
niver thinkin' but what it was the sick cousin! Me niver smellin' the
mice! Your own girl friend, neither. Ye hussy! Jailbird!"
"Oh! Oh! Oh!"
"It's only because she was sainted I'm lettin' ye up in on her. She
layin' up there, waitin'. Strangers that crossed her poor hands on her
poor breast and strangers that laid her out. Niver even a priest called
in on her. She a-layin' up there, waitin'--the Lord have mercy on your
soul! If ye ain't afraid before the Lord to look on her, come up. It's
thankin' God I am she can't open her eyes to see ye."
Hands clutching her throat, Miss Schump remained standing there on the
sun-drenched steps, gazing after the figure receding into the musty
gloom of the hallway. She wanted to follow, but instead could only stand
there, repeating and repeating:
"O my God! O my God! God! God! What have I done? What have I done?
Mamma--mamma--mamma! O my God! What? What--"
* * * * *
In the pyramidal plot-structure of this story the line of descent is by
far the sheerer. Short-story correspondence-schools would call it the
brief downward action leading to dénouement.
With Stella Schump it was almost a straight declivity. There were days
of the black kind of inertia when to lift the head from its sullen
inclination to rest chin on chest was not to be endured. There was
actually something sick in the eyes, little cataracts of gray cloud
seeming to float across. She would sit hunched and looking out of them
so long and so unseeingly that her very stare seemed to sleep.
She had removed the stick or two that remained unsold to a little rear
room high up in a large, damp-smelling lodging-house on West Twentieth
Street, within view of a shipping-pier. There was a sign inserted in the
lower front window:
ROOMS. LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING.
INQUIRE WITHIN.
She would sit in that room, so heavy with its odor of mildew, her window
closed against the long, sweetly warm days, hunched dumbly on the
cot-edge and staring into the stripe and vine, stripe and vine of the
wall-paper design, or lie back when the ache along her spine began to
set in. There were occasional ventures to a corner bake-shop for raisin
rolls and to the delicatessen next door for a quarter-pound of Bologna
sausage sliced into slivers while she waited. She would sit on the
cot-edge munching alternately from sliver to roll, gulping through a
throat that was continually tight with wanting to cry, yet would not
relax for that relief.
There was little attempt for employment except when the twenty dollars
left from the sale of effects and funeral expenses began to dwindle. She
would wake up nights, sweaty with the nightmare that her room was some
far-off ward for incorrigibles and that one of the strange, veiny-nosed
inmates was filching her small leather bag from beneath her pillow.
When her little roll had flattened finally down to five one-dollar bills
she took to daily and conscientiously buying morning papers and scanning
want-advertisements as she stood at the news-stand, answering first
those that were within walking-distance.
She would make a five-block détour of the Criterion rather than pass
the nearer to it.
Once, returning after a fruitless tour of the smaller department stores,
and borne along by the six-o'clock tide of Sixth Avenue, her heart
leaped up at sight of Miss Cora Kinealy, homeward bound on her smart
tall heels that clicked, arm in arm with Mabel Runyan of the notions.
Standing there with her folded newspaper hugged to her and the small
hand-bag dangling, Stella Schump gazed after.
It was not only the lack of references or even of experience that
conspired against her every effort at employment. It was the lack
of luster to the eye, an absolutely new tendency to tiptoe, a
furtive lookout over her shoulder, a halting tongue, that, upon
the slightest questioning, would stutter for words. Where there were
application-blanks to be filled in she would pore inkily over them and,
after a while, slyly crunch hers up in her hand and steal out. She was
still pinkly and prettily clean, and her hair with its shining mat of
plaits, high of gloss, but one Saturday half-holiday, rather than break
into her last bill, she ate a three-cent frankfurter-sausage sandwich
from off a not quite immaculate push-cart, leaning forward as she bit
into it to save herself from the ooze of mustard. Again she had the
sense of Cora Kinealy hurrying along the opposite side of the street on
the tall heels that clicked. She let fall the bun into the gutter and
stood there trembling.
She obtained, one later afternoon, at the instance of a window-card, the
swabbing of the tiled floor of an automobile show-room. She left before
her first hour was completed, crying, her finger-tips stinging, two
nails broken.
Finally came that chimera of an hour when she laid down her last coin
for the raisin rolls. She ate them on the cot-edge. And then, because
her weekly dollar-and-twenty-five-cent room rent fell due that evening,
she wrapped two fresh and self-laundered waists, some white but unlacy
underwear, a mound of window-dried handkerchiefs, a little knitted
shoulder-shawl so long worn by her mother, her tooth-brush and tube of
paste, and all her sundry little articles no less indispensable, into a
white-paper package. There were left a short woolen petticoat, too
cumbersome to include, the small wooden rocker and lamp with the china
shade which she had rather unexplainably held out from the dealer's
inventory. She closed the door softly on them one evening and, parcel in
hand, tiptoed down the stonily cold halls and out into a street of long,
thin, high-stooped houses. Outside in the May evening it was as black,
as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if
with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks
her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a
drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man
stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a
Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a
sweater and cap nudged up to her.
"Lonesome?"
She moved on.
In Stuyvesant Square were a first few harbingers of summer scattered
here and there--couples forcing the gladsome season of the dim park
bench; solitary brooders who can sit so long, so droop-shouldered, and
so deeply in silence. On one of these benches, beside a slim,
scant-skirted, light-spatted silhouette, Stella Schump sat finally down.
It was ten o'clock. There was a sense of panic, which she felt mostly at
her throat, rising in her. Then she would force herself into a state of
quiet, hand on bundle, nictitating, as it were--eyes opening, eyes
closing. The figure beside her slid over a bit, spreading the tiny width
of skirt as if to reserve the space between them.
"Workin'?"
"Huh?"
"Lord!" she said, indicating Second Avenue with a nod. "The lane's like
a morgue to-night."
"Cold, ain't it?" said Stella Schump, shivering with night damp.
A figure with a tilted derby came sauntering toward them.
"Lay off my territory. I seen him first."
"Oh--sure--yes--all right."
The place in between them was filled then, the tilted derby well forward
and revealing a rear bulge of head. There was an indeterminate moment of
silence broken by the slim-skirted silhouette.
"Where you goin'?"
Straightening, Miss Schump could hear more.
"No place. Where you goin'?"
"I'm cold."
"Buy you a drink?"
In the shaft of arc-light Miss Schump could see the little face framed
in the wan curls lift and crinkle the nose to smile.
"Come on."
She watched them recede down the narrow asphalt of the parkway. At
eleven o'clock, to lessen her stiffening of joints, she walked twice the
circumference of the fenced-in inclosure, finally sitting again, this
time beneath a gaunt oleander that was heavy with bud.
"O God!" she kept repeating, her stress growing. "O God! God! God!"
With the lateness, footfalls were growing more and more audible, the
gong of a street-car sounding out three blocks down.
"O my God!" And then in rapid succession, closing her eyes and digging
her finger-nails into her palms: "Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!"
She wanted and wanted to cry, but her throat would not let her, and so
she sat and sat.
There were still occasional figures moving through the little lanes and
a couple or two deep in the obscurity of benches. After another while,
at the remote end of her own bench, a figure sat down, lighting a pipe.
She watched him pu-pu-pup. At half after eleven she slid along
the bench.
"Where you goin'?"
He turned to look down.
"Eh?"
"Where you goin'?"
"No place."
"I'm cold."
"Pu-pu-pup."
"I am."
"Pu-pu-pup."
She leaned around, trying to bring her face to front his and to lift her
nose to a little wrinkly smile.
"Aw, you!"
"Go home and go to bed," he said. "A nice-appearin' girl like you ought
to be ashamed."
"I--ain't."
"Run along."
"Where?"
"You're barkin' up the wrong tree."
She fell silent. A chill raced through her.
"O God!" she began, under her breath. "O God! God!" Then: "Mamma! Mamma!
Mamma!"
"You _are_ cold," he said, reaching out to pinch her jacket sleeve.
"That's a warm coat. Where do you live?"
"Lemme alone," she said, staring out before her as if she were seeing
the stripe and vine, stripe and vine.
"You got the shivers," he said. "Better go home."
"Lemme alone."
"Ain't there no way you girls can learn to behave yourselves?
Here"--digging down into his pocket--"here."
"No."
"Where you live?"
"I dunno. I dunno."
"You surely know where you live."
She looked up at him in one of the rare moments of opening wide her
eyes.
"I tell you I dunno."
"What's in there?"
"My--my clothes."
"Let's see."
She plucked at the knot, drawing back for him to lean to see the top
layer of neatly folded waist.
"Don't," she said, withdrawing it quickly from his touch.
"Why," he said, "you poor little kid! What's got you into this mess?"
At that in his voice, such a quick, a thick, a hot layer of tears sprang
to her eyes that she could not relax her throat for words.
"What got you in?"
"I--I--I dunno."
"Aw, now, yes, you do know. Try to think--take your time--what got you
in?"
"I--I--can't--"
"Yes, you can. Go on; I ain't lookin' at you."
He turned off to an angle.
Her first sob burst from her, tearing her throat and ending in a tremolo
of moans in her throat.
"Now, now," he said, still in profile; "that won't do. Not for a
sensible little girl like you. Easy--easy--take your time--"
"You see, mister--you see, it was my--my mamma--my beautiful, darling
mamma--O God!--"
"Yes, yes; it was your mamma--and then what?"
"It was my mamma, my beautiful, darling mamma! What'll I do, mister? I
can't make it up to her. No way--nohow. She's gone--she's gone--"
"Easy--easy--try to keep easy."
"I used to kiss her hands when they was embroiderin'. I used to grease
'em for her all night when she screamed with the pain of 'em. I used to
scream at night, too, when I was doin' my time--her there waitin'--she
died alone--there waitin'--the letter they gave me the stamp for--I--I
was crazy with scare when I wrote it--O God!--mamma--mamma--mamma!"
"'Sh-h-h! 'Sh-h-h! Try to keep easy."
"It was this way--O God, how was it?--it was this way--you see, me and
my mamma and sometimes a friend--Cora Jones--no--no--no--Cora
Kinealy--we used to sit in the lamplight--no--no--first, I was in the
shoes--the children's shoes--they used to come in, little kiddies with
their toes all kicked out wantin' new shoes--cute little baby-shoes that
I loved to try on 'em. My friend--Cora--my friend--O God!--"
"Now, now, like a good girl--go on."
"My friend Cora--my darling little mamma--I never knew nothing about
anything except me and my mamma, we--it worried her that I didn't have
it like--like other girls--I--you see--you see, mister?"
"Yes, yes, I see."
Her voice, so jerked up with sobs, quieted down to a drone finally, to a
low drone that talked on and on through an hour, through two. There were
large, shining beads of tears flowing constantly from her cheeks, but
she wiped at them unceasingly with her handkerchief and talked evenly
through a new ease in her throat.
"She died, mister," she ended up finally, turning her salt-bitten eyes
full upon him; "she died of that letter written when I was so full of a
scared craziness from bein' in--in that place--that terrible, terrible
place--but she didn't die believin' me bad. I never seen her alive again
to hear it from her, but there in her--her little coffin I--I seen it in
her little face, all sunk, she didn't believe it--she didn't die
thinkin' me bad. Mister, did she? Did she?"
He did not answer, sitting there, drooped forward for so long that
finally she put out her hand to touch his.
"Did she?"
He did not turn his face, but reached around, inclosing her wrist,
pressing it, gripping it.
"Did she, mister?"
"No, no," he said, finally, "no, Stella; she didn't die thinkin' you
bad."
She sighed out, eyes closing, and her quivering lips falling quiet.
"Do you think I'm bad, mister?"
"No, Stella! No! No! No! My God, no!"
"I'm cold."
"Come."
"Where?"
"I'm goin' to take you across the street there to the Young Women's
Shelter Home for to-night. Just across there. See the sign? Don't be
afraid, Stella. Please don't be afraid."
"I ain't."
He retied the white-paper package, tucking it up under one arm.
"Come, Stella."
She rose, swaying for the merest second. His arm shot out.
"I'm all right," she said, steadying herself, smilingly, shamefacedly,
but relaxing gratefully enough to the flung support.
"Don't be afraid, Stella," he said. "I'm here. I'm here."
His forearm where the cuff had ridden up bore a scar, as if molten lead
had run a fiery, a dagger-shaped, an excoriating course.
WHITE GOODS
On a slope a white sprinkling of wood anemones lay spread like a patch
of linen bleaching in the sun. From a valley a lark cut a swift diagonal
upward with a coloratura burst of song. A stream slipped its ice and
took up its murmur where it had left off. A truant squelched his toes in
the warm mud and let it ooze luxuriantly over and between them.
A mole stirred in its hole, and because spring will find a way, even
down in the bargain basement of the Titanic Store, which is far below
the level of the mole, Sadie Barnet, who had never seen a wood anemone
and never sniffed of thaw or the wet wild smell of violets, felt the
blood rise in her veins like sap, and across the aisle behind the
white-goods counter Max Meltzer writhed in his woolens, and Sadie
Barnet, presiding over a bin of specially priced mill-ends out mid-aisle
between the white goods and the muslin underwear, leaned toward him, and
her smile was as vivid as her lips.
"Say, Max, guess why I think you're like a rubber band."
Classic Delphi was never more ready with ambiguous retort.
Behind a stack of Joy-of-the-Loom bed-sheets, Max Meltzer groped for
oracular divination, and his heart-beats fluttered in his voice.
"Like a rubber band?"
"Yeh."
"Give up."
"Aw, give a guess."
"Well, I don't know, Miss Sadie, unless--unless it's because I'm stuck
on you."
Do not, ascetic reader, gag at the unsocratic plane. True, Max Meltzer
had neither the grain nor the leisure of a sophist, a capacity for
tenses or an appreciation of Kant. He had never built a bridge, led a
Bible class, or attempted the first inch of the five-foot bookshelf. But
on a two-figure salary he subscribed an annual donation to a
skin-and-cancer hospital, wore non-reversible collars, and maintained a
smile that turned upward like the corners of a cycle moon. Remember,
then, ascetic reader, that a rich man once kicked a leper; Kant's own
heart, that it might turn the world's heart outward, burst of pain; and
in the granite cañon of Wall Street, one smile in every three-score and
ten turns upward.
Sadie Barnet met Max Meltzer's cycle-moon smile with the blazing eyes of
scorn, and her lips, quivering to a smile, met in a straight line that
almost ironed out the curves.
"'Cause you're stuck on me! That's a swell guess. Gee! you're as funny
as a sob, you are."
The words scuttered from her lips like sharp hailstones and she glanced
at him sidewise over a hump of uplifted shoulder and down the length of
one akimbo arm.
"'Cause you're stuck on me! Huh!"
Max Meltzer leaned across a counter display of fringed breakfast
napkins.
"Ain't that a good reason, Miss Sadie? It's a true one."
"You're one swell little guesser, you are _not_. You couldn't get inside
a riddle with a can-opener. 'Cause you're stuck on me! Gee!"
"Well, I am."
"I didn't ask you why you was like a bottle of glue. I asked you why you
was like a rubber band."
"Aw, I give up, Miss Sadie."
"'Cause you're so stretchy, see? 'Cause you're so stretchy you'll yawn
your arm off if you don't watch it."
Max Meltzer collapsed in an attitude of mock prostration against a
stock-shelf.
"Gee! that must have been cracked before the first nut."
"Smarty!"
Across the specially priced mill-ends she flashed the full line of her
teeth, and with an intensity his features ill concealed he noted how
sweet her throat as it arched.
"It's the spring fever gets inside of me and makes me so stretchy, Miss
Sadie. It's a good thing trade is slow down here in the basement to-day,
because it's the same with me every year; the Saturday before
spring-opening week I just get to feeling like all outdoors."
"Wait till you see me with a new red-satin bow stuck on my last
summer's shape. Dee Dee's got to lend me the price for two yards of
three-inch red-satin ribbon for my spring opening."
His breath rose in his throat.
"I bet you look swell in red, Miss Sadie. But a girl like you looks
swell in anything."
"Red's my color. Dee Dee says my mamma was a gay one, too, when it came
to color. Had to have a red bow pinned somewheres around all the months
she was in bed and--and up to the very night she died. Gimme red every
time. Dee Dee's the one that's always kicking against red; she says I
got too flashy taste."
"Say, if she keeps bossing and bossing at you, what do you keep on
living with her for?"
"Wouldn't you live with your own mother's sister if she raised you from
a kid? What am I going to do, put her in cold storage, now that her eyes
are going back on her? Up in the ribbons she can't hardly keep her
colors graduated no more, that's how blind she's getting. Only yesterday
a dame brought back some lavender ribbon and wiped up the whole
department with Dee Dee for putting it over on her as blue. What am I
going to do?"
"Honest, Miss Sadie, I didn't know that she was your aunt and that her
eyes was bad. I've seen you two together a lot and noticed her thick
lenses, but I just didn't think."
"Well, now I'm telling you."
"I just thought she was some old girl up in the ribbons you was living
with for company. Honest, I didn't know she had bad eyes. Gee!"
"No, they ain't bad. Only she's so blind she reads her paper upside down
and gets sore if you tell her about it."
"And me thinking she was nothing but a near-sighted old grouch with a
name like a sparrow."
Miss Barnet laughed with an upward trill.
"Dee Dee ain't her real name. When I was a kid and she took me to raise,
that's the way I used to pronounce Aunt Edith. Gee! you don't think Dee
Dee was the name they sprinkled on her when they christened her,
did you?"
Max Meltzer leaned to the breath of her laughter as if he would fill his
lungs with it.
"Gee! but you're a cute little lady when you laugh like that."
"Say, and ain't you the freshie! Just because you're going to be
promoted to buyer for your department won't get your picture in the
Sunday supplement. No white-goods buyer I know of ever had to build
white marble libraries or present a bread-line to the city to get rid of
his pin-money."
"I bet you was a cute little black-eyed, red-cheeked little youngster,
alrighty."
"I wasn't so worse. Like I tell Dee Dee, the way she's held me down and
indoors evenings, it's a wonder a kid like me grew up with any pep
at all."
"Poor little lady!"
"It's like Dee Dee says, though. I never was cut out for life behind the
counter. Gee! I'd soak my pillow in gasolene every night in the week if
it would make me dream I'm automobiling."
"Poor little lady!"
"Say, ain't it hot? With the Opening on Monday, they better get the fans
working. Last year three girls keeled. Honest, sometimes I think I'd
rather spend the summer under the daisies out on the hill than down here
in this basement."
"Don't I wish I had an auto to take you spinning in to-night."
"You ought to see the flier a friend of mine has got. A Mercury Six with
a limousine top like a grand-opera box."
"Your--your--friend?"
"Yes. He's that slick-looking, little fat fellow that's a cousin to
Mamie Grant up in the ready-to-wears. He was down here talking to me the
other day."
"I seen him."
"Gee! you ought to feel yourself in his Mercury Six. 'Lemme die,' I says
to him the last time I was in it. 'Just lemme close my eyes right in
here and die happy,' I says, cuddled up in the red-leather seat with a
cornucopia of daffodils tickling my nose and a street-car full of
strap-hangers riding along-side of us."
"I--I guess if you got swell friends like that, a boat excursion down
the river 'ain't got much of a sound for you."
"He says he's got a launch in summer--"
"Honest, Miss Sadie, I--I just been trying for the better part of two
weeks to ask permission if I could come and call on you some evening,
Miss Sadie, but--"
"Whoops! ain't he the daredevil!"
"The first boat of the season, Miss Sadie, a swell new one they call the
_White Gull_, goes down to Coney to-night, and, it being real
springtime, and you feeling kind of full of it, I thought maybe, it
being the first boat of the season, maybe you would take a river ride
this grand April night, Miss Sadie."
Her glance slanted toward him, full of quirks.
"My aunt Dee Dee, Mr. Meltzer, she's right strict with me. She don't
think I ought to keep company with any boys that don't come to see me
first at my house."
"I know it, Miss Sadie; that's the right way to do it, but I think I can
get around her all right. Wasn't she down here in the basement the day I
first heard about my promotion, and didn't she give me the glad hand and
seem right friendly to me? I can get around her all right, Miss Sadie. I
can always tell if a person likes me or not."
"Anyways, if her eyes ain't too bad, Mr. Meltzer, I got a date with my
friend if his car is out of the shop from having the limousine top taken
off. We--we're going for a little spin."
A quick red belied her insouciance and she made a little foray into the
bin of mill-ends.
"Gee! if I've made three sales this livelong day I don't know nothing
about two of them."
Max Meltzer met her dancing gaze, pinioning it with his own quiet eyes.
"You're right to pick out the lucky fellows who can buy a good time. A
little girl like you ought to have every enjoyment there is. If I could
give it to you, do you think I would let the other fellows beat me to
it? The best ain't none too good for a little lady like you."
"Aw, Mr. Meltzer!" Her bosom filled and waned. "Aw, Mr. Meltzer!"
"I mean it."
An electric bell grilled through his words. Miss Barnet sprang reflexly
from the harness of an eight-hour day.
"Aw, looka, and I wanted to sneak up before closing and get Dee Dee to
snip me two yards of red satin, and she won't cut an inch after the
bell. Ain't that luck for you? Ain't that luck?"
Her lips drew to a pout.
"Lemme get it for you, Miss Sadie. I know a girl up in the ribbons--"
"No, no, Mr. Meltzer. I--I got to charge it to Dee Dee, and, anyways,
she gets mad like anything if I keep her waiting. I gotta go. 'Night,
Mr. Meltzer! 'Night!"
She was off through the maze of the emptying store, in the very act of
pinning on her little hat with its jaunty imitation fur pompon, and he
breathed in as she passed, as if of the perfume of her personality.
At the ribbon counter on the main floor the last of a streamlet of
outgoing women detached herself from the file as Miss Barnet ascended
the staircase.
"Hurry up, Sadie."
"Dee Dee! How'd you girls up here get on your duds so soon? I thought
maybe if I'd hurry upstairs you--you'd find time to cut me a two-yard
piece of three-inch red satin for my hat, Dee Dee--to-morrow being
Sunday. Two yards, Dee Dee, and that'll make two-sixty-nine I owe you.
Aw, Dee Dee, it won't take a minute, to-morrow Sunday and all! Aw,
Dee Dee!"
Miss Barnet slid ingratiating fingers into the curve of the older
woman's arm; her voice was smooth as salve.
"Aw, Dee Dee, who ever heard of wearing fur on a hat in April? I gotta
stick a red bow on my last summer's sailor, Dee Dee."
Miss Edith Worte stiffened so that the muscles sprang out in the crook
of her arm and the cords in her long, yellowing neck. Years had dried on
her face, leaving ravages, and through her high-power spectacles her
pale eyes might have been staring through film and straining to see.
"Please, Dee Dee!"
Miss Barnet held backward, a little singsong note of appeal running
through her voice.
Miss Worte jerked forward toward the open door. April dusk, the color of
cold dish-water, showed through it. Dusk in the city comes sadly,
crowding into narrow streets and riddled with an immediate quick-shot of
electric bulbs.
"'Ain't you got no sense a-tall? 'Ain't you got no sense in that curly
head of yourn but ruination notions?"
"Aw, Dee Dee!"
They were in the flood tide which bursts through the dam at six o'clock
like a human torrent flooding the streets, then spreading, thinning, and
finally seeping into homes, hall bedrooms, and Harlem flats.
Miss Edith Worte turned her sparse face toward the down-town tide and
against a light wind that tasted of rain and napped her skirts around
her thin legs.
"Watch out, Dee Dee! Step down; there's a curb."
"I don't need you. It's lots you care if I go blind on the spot."
"Dee Dee!"
"God! if I didn't have nothing to worry me but red ribbons! I told the
doctor to-day while he was putting the drops in my eyes, that if he'd
let me go blind I--I--"
"Now, now, Dee Dee! Ain't you seeing better these last few days?"
"If you had heard what the doctor told me to-day when he put the drops
in my eyes you'd have something to think about besides red ribbon,
alrighty."
"I forgot, Dee Dee, to-day was your eye-doctor day. He's always scarin'
you up. Just don't pay no attention. I forgot it was your day."
"Sure you forgot. But you won't forget if I wake up alone in the dark
some day."
"Dee Dee!"
"You won't forget then. You won't forget to nag me even then for duds to
go automobiling with fly men that can't bring you no good."
"Dee Dee, I 'ain't been but one night this week. I been saving up all
my nights for--for to-night."
"To-night. Say, I can't keep you from going to the devil on skates if--"
"It's only the second time this week, Dee Dee, and I--I promised. He'll
have the limousine top off to-night--and feel, it is just like summer. A
girl's gotta have a little something once in a while."
"What do I gotta have? What do I gotta have but slave and work?"
"It's different with you, Dee Dee. You're older even than my mamma was,
and didn't you say when you and her was girls together there wasn't a
livelier two sisters? Now didn't you, Dee Dee?"
"In a respectable way, yes. But there wasn't the oily-mouthed,
bald-headed divorced man alive, with little rat eyes and ugly lips, who
could have took me or your mamma out auto-riding before or after dark.
We was working-girls, too, but there wasn't a man didn't take off his
hat to us, even if he was bald-headed and it was twenty below zero."
"Aw!"
"Yes, 'aw'! You keep running around with the kind of men that don't look
at a girl unless she's served up with rum-sauce and see where it lands
you. Just keep running if you want to, but my money don't buy you no red
ribbons to help to drive you to the devil!"
"The way you keep fussing at me, when I don't even go to dances like the
other girls! I--sometimes I just wish I was dead. The way I got to
watch the clock like it was a taximeter the whole time I'm out
anywheres. It's the limit. Even Max Meltzer gimme the laugh to-day."
"You'd never hear me say watch the clock if you'd keep company with a
boy like Max Meltzer. A straight, clean boy with honest intentions by a
girl lookin' right out of his face. You let a boy like Max Meltzer begin
to keep steady with you and see what I say. You don't see no yellow
streak in his face; he's as white as the goods he sells."
"I know. I know. You think now because he's going to be made buyer for
the white goods in September he's the whole show. Gee! nowadays that
ain't so muchy much for a fellow to be."
"No, I think the kind of fellows that fresh Mamie Grant gets you
acquainted with are muchy much. I'm strong for the old rat-eyed sports
like Jerry Beck, that 'ain't got a honest thought in his head. I bet he
gives you the creeps, too, only you're the kind of a girl, God help you,
that's so crazy for luxury you could forget the devil had horns if he
hid 'em under a automobile cap."
"Sure I am. I 'ain't seen nothing but slaving and drudging and pinching
all my life, while other girls are strutting the Avenue in their furs
and sleeping mornings as long as they want under eider-down quilts.
Sure, when a man like Jerry Beck comes along with a carriage-check
instead of a Subway-ticket I can thaw up to him like a water-ice, and I
ain't ashamed of it, neither."
They turned into a narrow aisle of street lined with unbroken rows of
steep, narrow-faced houses. Miss Worte withdrew her arm sharply and
plunged ahead, her lips wry and on the verge of tremoling.
"When a girl gets twenty, like you, it ain't none of my put-in no more.
Only I hope to God your mother up there is witness that if ever a woman
slaved to keep a girl straight and done her duty by her it was me. That
man 'ain't got no good intentions by--"
"Oh, ain't you--ain't you a mean-thinking thing, ain't you? What kind of
a girl do you think I am? If he didn't have the right intentions by me
do you think--"
"Oh, I guess he'll marry you if he can't get you no other way. Them kind
always do if they can't help themselves. A divorced old guy like him,
with a couple of kids and his mean little eyes, knows he's got to pay up
if he wants a young girl like you. Oh, I--Ouch--oh--oh!"
"Dee Dee, take my arm. That was only an ashcan you bumped into. It's the
drops he puts in your eyes makes 'em so bad to-night, I guess. Go on,
take my arm, Dee Dee. Here we are home. Lemme lead you up-stairs. It's
nothing but the drops, Dee Dee."
They turned in and up and through a foggy length of long hallway. Spring
had not entered here. At the top of a second flight of stairs a slavey
sat back on her heels and twisted a dribble of gray water from her cloth
into her bucket. At the last and third landing an empty coal-scuttle
stood just outside a door as if nosing for entrance.
"Watch out, Dee Dee, the scuttle. Lemme go in first. Gee! it's cold
indoors and warm out, ain't it? Wait till I light up. There!"
"Lemme alone. I can see."
An immemorial federation of landladies has combined against Hestia to
preserve the musty traditions of the furnished room. Love in a cottage
is fostered by subdivision promoters and practised by commuters on a
five-hundred-dollars-down, monthly-payment basis. Marble halls have been
celebrated in song, but the furnished room we have with us always at
three cents per agate line.
You with your feet on your library fender, stupefied with contentment
and your soles scorching, your heart is not black; it is only fat. How
can it know the lean formality of the furnished room? Your little
stenographer, who must wear a smile and fluted collars on eight dollars
a week, knows it; the book agent at your door, who earns eighteen cents
on each Life of Lincoln, knows it. Chambermaids know it when they knock
thrice and only the faint and nauseous fumes of escaping gas answer them
through the plugged keyhole. Coroners know it.
Sadie Barnet and Edith Worte knew it, too, and put out a hand here and
there to allay it. A comforting spread of gay chintz covered the sag in
their white iron bed; a photograph or two stuck upright between the
dresser mirror and its frame, and tacked full flare against the wall was
a Japanese fan, autographed many times over with the gay personnel of
the Titanic Store's annual picnic.
"Gee! Dee Dee, six-twenty already! I got to hurry. Unhook me while I
sew in this ruching."
"Going for supper?"
"Yeh. He invited me. This is cottage-pudding night; tell old lady Finch
when I ain't home for supper you got two desserts coming to you."
"I don't want no supper."
"Aw, now, Dee Dee!"
Miss Worte dropped her dark cape from her shoulders, hung it with her
hat on a door peg, and sat heavily on the edge of the bed.
"God! my feet!"
"Soak 'em."
Miss Barnet peeled off her shirt-waist. Her bosom, strong and _flat_ as
a boy's, rose white from her cheaply dainty under-bodice; at her
shoulders the flesh began to deepen, and her arms were round and full
of curves.
"Here, Dee Dee, I'm so nervous when I hurry. You sew in this ruche; you
got time before the supper-bell. See, right along the edge like that."
Miss Worte aimed for the eye of the needle, moistening the end of the
thread with her tongue and her fluttering fingers close to her eyes.
"God! I--I just 'ain't got the eyes no more. I can't see, Sadie; I can't
find the needle."
Sadie Barnet paused in the act of brushing out the cloud of her dark
hair, and with a strong young gesture ran the thread through the needle,
knotting its end with a quirk of thumb and forefinger.
"It's the drops, Dee Dee, and this gaslight, all blurry from the
curling-iron in the flame, makes you see bad."
Miss Worte nodded and closed her eyes as if she would press back the
tears and let them drip inward.
"Yeh, I know. I know."
"Sure! Here, lemme do it, Dee Dee. I won't stay out late, dearie, if
your eyes are bad. We're only going out for a little spin."
Miss Worte lay back on the chintz bedspread and turned her face to the
wall.
"I should worry if you come home or if you don't--all the comfort you
are to me."
"You say that to me many more times and you watch and see what I do; you
watch and see."
"The sooner the better."
In the act of fluting the soft ruche about her neck, so that her fresh
little face rose like a bud from its calyx, Miss Barnet turned to the
full length of back which faced her from the bed.
"That's just the way I feel about it--the sooner the better."
"Then we think alike."
"You 'ain't been such a holy saint to me that I got to pay up to you for
it all my life."
"That's the thanks I get."
"You only raised me because you had to. I been working for my own living
ever since I was so little I had to He to the inspectors about my age."
"Except what you begged out of my wages."
"I been as much to you as you been to me and--and I don't have to stand
this no longer. Sure I can get out and--and the sooner the better. I'm
sick of getting down on my knees to you every time I wanna squeeze a
little good time out of life. I'm tired paying up for the few dollars
you gimme out of your envelop. If I had any sense I--I wouldn't never
take it from you, nohow, the way you throw it up to me all the time. The
sooner the better is what I say, too; the sooner the better."
"That's the thanks I get; that's the--"
"Aw, I know all that line of talk by heart, so you don't need to ram it
down me. You gotta quit insinuating about my ways to me. I'm as straight
as you are and--"
"You--you--take off that ivory-hand breast-pin; that ain't yours."
"Sure I'll take it off, and this ruche you gimme the money to buy, and
this red bracelet you gimme, and--and every old thing you ever gimme.
Sure I'll take 'em all off. I wish I could take off these gray-top shoes
you paid a dollar toward, and I would, too, if I didn't have to go
barefoot. It's the last time I borrow from--"
"Aw, you commenced that line of talk when you was ten."
"I mean it."
"Well, if you do, take off them gloves that I bought for myself and you
begged right off my hands. Just take 'em off and go barehanded with your
little-headed friend; maybe he can buy--"
"You--Oh, I--I wish I was dead! I--I'll go barehanded to a snowball
feast rather than wear your duds. There's your old gloves--there!"
Tears were streaming and leaving their ravages on the smooth surface of
her cheeks.
"I just wish I--I was dead."
"Aw, no, you don't! There's him now, with a horn on his auto that makes
a noise like the devil yelling! There's your little rat-eyed, low-lived
fellow, now. You don't wish you was dead now, do you? Go to him and his
two divorces and his little roundhead. That's where you belong; that's
where girls on the road to the devil belong--with them kind. There he is
now, waiting to ride you to the devil. He don't need to honk-honk so
loud; he knows you're ready and waiting for him."
Miss Barnet fastened on her little hat with fingers that fumbled.
"Gimme--the key."
"Aw, no, you don't. When you come home tonight you knock; no more
tiptoe, night-key business like last time. I knew you was lying to me
about the clock."
"You gimme that key. I don't want you to have to get up, with all your
kicking, to open the door for me. You gimme the key."
"If you wanna get in this room when you come home to-night, you knock
like any self-respecting girl ain't afraid to do."
"You--oh--you!" With a shivering intake of breath Miss Barnet flung wide
the door, slamming it after her until the windows and the blue-glass
vase on the mantelpiece and Miss Worte, stretched full length on the
bed, shivered.
Two flights down she flung open the front door. There came from the
curb the bleat of a siren, wild for speed.
Stars had come out, a fine powdering of them, and the moist evening
atmosphere was sweet, even heavy. She stood for a moment in the
embrasure of the door, scenting.
"Do I need my heavy coat, Jerry?"
The dim figure in the tonneau, with his arms flung out their length
across the back of the seat, moved from the center to the side.
"No, you don't. Hurry up! I'll keep you warm if you need a coat. Climb
in here right next to me, Peachy. Gimme that robe from the front
there, George.
"Now didn't I say I was going to keep you warm? Quit your squirming,
Touchy. I won't bite. Ready, George. Up to the Palisade Inn, and let out
some miles there."
"Gee! Jerry, you got the limousine top off. Ain't this swell for
summer?"
Mr. Jerome Beck settled back in the roomy embrasure of the seat and
exhaled loudly, his shoulder and shoe touching hers.
She settled herself out of their range.
"Now, now, snuggle up a little, Peachy."
She shifted back to her first position.
"That's better."
"Ain't it a swell night?"
"Now we're comfy--eh?"
They were nosing through a snarl of traffic and over streets wet and
slimy with thaw. Men with overcoats flung over their arms side-stepped
the snout of the car. Delicatessen and candy-shop doors stood wide
open. Children shrilled in the grim shadows of thousand-tenant
tenement-houses.
"Well, Peachy, how are you? Peachy is just the name for you, eh? 'Cause
I'd like to take a bite right out of you--eh, Peachy? How are you?"
"Fine and--and dandy."
"Look at me."
"Aw!"
"Look at me, I say, you pretty little peach, with them devilish black
eyes of yours and them lips that's got a cherry on 'em."
She met his gaze with an uncertain smile trembling on her lips.
"Honest, you're the limit."
"What's your eyes red for?"
"They--they ain't."
"Cryin'?"
"Like fun."
"You know what I'd do if I thought you'd been crying? I'd just kiss them
tears right away."
"Yes, you would _not_."
"Little devil!"
"Quit calling me that." But she colored as if his tribute had been a
sheath of lilies.
They veered a corner sharply, skidding on the wet asphalt and all but
grazing the rear wheels of a recreant taxicab.
"Gad, George! you black devil you, why don't you watch out what you're
doing?"
"But, suh, I--"
"None of your black back-talk."
"Jerry!" She was shivering, and a veil of tears formed over her hot,
mortified eyes. "Gee! what are you made of? You seen he couldn't help it
when that taxi turned into us so sudden."
He relaxed against her. "Aw, did I scare the little Peachy? That's the
way they gotta be handled. I ain't ready by a long shot to let a black
devil spill my brains."
"'Shh-h. He couldn't--"
"Sure he could, if he watched. He's a bargain I picked up cheap,
anyways, 'cause he's lame and can't hold down heavy work. And bargains
don't always pay. But I'll break his black back for him if--Aw, now,
now, did I scare the little peach? Gee! I couldn't do nothing but kill
_you_ with kindness if you was driving for me. I'd just let you run me
right off this road into the Hudson Ocean if you was driving for me."
They were out toward the frayed edge of the city, where great stretches
of sign-plastered vacant lots began to yawn between isolated patches of
buildings and the river ran close enough alongside of them to reflect
their leftward lights. She smiled, but as if her lips were bruised.
"It ain't none of my put-in, but he couldn't help it, and I hate for you
to yell at anybody like that, Jerry."
"Aw, aw, did I scare the little Peachy? Watch me show the little Tootsie
how nice I can be when I want to--Aw--aw!"
"Quit."
She blinked back the ever-recurring tears.
"All tired out, too; all tired out. Wait till you see what I'm going to
buy you to-night. A great big beefsteak with mushrooms as big as dollars
and piping-hot German fried potatoes and onions. M-m-m-m! And more
bubbles than you can wink your eye at. Aw--aw, such poor cold little
hands, and no gloves for such cold little hands! Here, lemme warm 'em.
Wouldn't I just love to wrap a little Peachy like you up in a great big
fur coat and put them little cold hands in a great big muff and hang
some great big headlight earrings in them little bittsie ears. Wouldn't
I, though. M-m-m-m! Poor cold little hands!"
Her wraith of a smile dissolved in a spurt of hot tears which flowed
over her words.
"Gee! Ain't I the nut to--to cry? I--I'll be all right in a minute."
"I knew when I seen them red eyes the little Peachy wasn't up to snuff,
and her cute little devilishlike ways. What's hurting you, Tootsie? Been
bounced? You should worry. I'm going to steal you out of that cellar,
anyways. Been bounced?"
"N-no."
"The old hag 'ain't been making it hot for you, has she?"
"Sh-she--"
"Gad! that old hag gets my fur up. I had a mother-in-law once tried them
tricks on me till I learned her they wouldn't work. But the old hag
of yourn--"
"It's her eyes; the doctor must have scared her up again to-day. When
she gets scared like that about 'em she acts up so, honest, sometimes
I--I just wish I was dead. She don't think a girl oughtta have no life."
"Forget it. Just you wait. She's going to wake up some morning soon and
find a little surprise party for herself. I know just how to handle an
old bird like her."
"Sometimes she's just so good to me, and then again, when she gets sore
like to-night, and with her nagging and fussing at me, I don't care if
she is my aunt, I just _hate_ her."
"We're going to give her a little surprise party." Beneath the lap robe
his hand slid toward hers. She could feel the movement of the arm that
directed it and her own shrank away.
"But ain't I the limit, Jerry, airing my troubles to you, like you was a
policeman."
"Now, now--"
"Quit! Leggo my hand."
They were spinning noiselessly along a road that curved for the moment
away from the river into the velvet shadows of trees. He leaned forward
suddenly, enveloping her.
"I got it. Why don't you lemme kidnap you, kiddo?"
"What--"
"Lemme kidnap you to-night and give the old hag the surprise of her life
when she wakes up and finds you stolen. I'm some little kidnapper when
it comes to kidnapping, I am, kiddo. Say, wouldn't I like to take you
riding all wrapped up in a fur coat with nothing but your cute little
face sticking out."
"Aw, you're just fooling me."
"Fooling! Lemme prove it, to-night. Lemme kidnap you this very night.
I--"
She withdrew stiff-backed against his embrace.
"Is--is that what you mean by--by kidnapping me?"
"Sure. There ain't nothing I'd rather do. Are you on, Peaches? A
sensible little queen like you knows which side her bread is buttered
on. There ain't nothing I want more than to see you all bundled up in a
fur coat with--headlights in your little bittsie pink ears."
She sprang the width of the seat from him.
"You--What kind of a girl do you think I am? O God! What kind of a girl
does he think I am? Take me home--take me--What kind of a girl do you
think I am?"
He leaned toward her with a quick readjustment of tone.
"Just what I said, Peachy. What I meant was I'd marry you to-night if we
could get a license. I'd just kidnap you to-night if--if we could
get one."
"You--you didn't mean that."
"Sure I did, Peachy. Say, with a little girl of my own I ain't one of
them guys that you think I am. Ain't you ashamed of yourself,
Peachy--now ain't you?"
The color flowed back into her face and her lips parted.
"Jerry--Only a girl like me's got to be careful--that was all I meant,
Jerry. Jerry!"
He scooped her in his short arms and kissed her lips, with her small
face crumpled up against his shoulder, and she lay quiescent enough in
his embrace. Wind sang in her ears as they rushed swiftly and surely
along the oiled road, but the two small fists she pressed against his
coat lapels did not relax.
"Aw, now, Peachy, you mustn't treat a fellow cold no more! Ain't I going
to marry you? Ain't I going to set you up right in my house out in
Newton Heights? Ain't I going to give you a swell ten-room house? Ain't
you going to live right in the house with my girl, and ain't she going
to have you for a little stepmother?"
"Jerry, the--the little girl. I wonder if she wants--"
"Sure she does. Her mother gets her every other month. I'd let her go
for good if you don't want her, except it would do her mother too much
good. The courts give her to me every other month and I'll have her down
to the last minute of the last hour or bust."
"Jerry!"
"That's what I gotta keep up the house out there for. The court says I
gotta give her a home, and that's why I want a little queen like you in
it. Gad! Won't her mother throw a red-headed fit when she sees the
little queen I picked! Gad!"
"Oh, Jerry, her your first wife and all! Won't it seem funny my going in
her house and--and living with her kid."
"Funny nothing. Cloonan won't think it's funny when I tell her she's
finished running my house for me. Funny nothing. To-morrow's Sunday and
I'm going to take you out in the afternoon and show you the place, and
Monday, instead of going to your bargain bin, we're going down for a
licens
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/9864