* * * * *
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