From “Cheerful--By Request,” copyright, 1918, by F. A. Stokes Co.
By special permission from the author.
Those of you who have dwelt--or even lingered--in Chicago, Illinois
(this is not a humorous story), are familiar with the region known
as the Loop. For those others of you to whom Chicago is a transfer
point between New York and San Francisco there is presented this
brief explanation:
The Loop is a clamorous, smoke-infested district embraced by the
iron arms of the elevated tracks. In a city boasting fewer millions,
it would be known familiarly as downtown. From Congress to Lake
Street, from Wabash almost to the river, those thunderous tracks
make a complete circle, or loop. Within it lie the retail shops, the
commercial hotels, the theaters, the restaurants. It is the Fifth
Avenue (diluted) and the Broadway (deleted) of Chicago. And he who
frequents it by night in search of amusement and cheer is known,
vulgarly, as a Loop-hound.
Jo Hertz was a Loop-hound. On the occasion of those sparse first
nights granted the metropolis of the Middle West he was always
present, third row, aisle left. When a new loop café was opened Jo’s
table always commanded an unobstructed view of anything worth
viewing. On entering he was wont to say, “Hello, Gus,” with careless
cordiality to the head waiter, the while his eye roved expertly from
table to table as he removed his gloves. He ordered things under
glass, so that his table, at midnight or thereabouts, resembled a
hot-bed that favors the bell system. The waiters fought for him. He
was the kind of man who mixes his own salad dressing. He liked to
call for a bowl, some cracked ice, lemon, garlic, paprika, salt,
pepper, vinegar, and oil and make a rite of it. People at near-by
tables would lay down their knives and forks to watch, fascinated.
The secret of it seemed to lie in using all the oil in sight and
calling for more.
That was Jo--a plump and lonely bachelor of fifty. A plethoric,
roving-eyed and kindly man, clutching vainly at the garments of a
youth that had long slipped past him. Jo Hertz, in one of those
pinch-waist belted suits and a trench coat and a little green hat,
walking up Michigan Avenue of a bright winter’s afternoon, trying to
take the curb with a jaunty youthfulness against which every one of
his fat-encased muscles rebelled, was a sight for mirth or pity,
depending on one’s vision.
The gay-dog business was a late phase in the life of Jo Hertz. He
had been a quite different sort of canine. The staid and harassed
brother of three unwed and selfish sisters is an under dog. The tale
of how Jo Hertz came to be a Loop-hound should not be compressed
within the limits of a short story. It should be told as are the
photo plays, with frequent throwbacks and many cut-ins. To condense
twenty-three years of a man’s life into some five or six thousand
words requires a verbal economy amounting to parsimony.
At twenty-seven Jo had been the dutiful, hardworking son (in the
wholesale harness business) of a widowed and gummidging mother, who
called him Joey. If you had looked close you would have seen that
now and then a double wrinkle would appear between Jo’s eyes--a
wrinkle that had no business there at twenty-seven. Then Jo’s mother
died, leaving him handicapped by a death-bed promise, the three
sisters and a three-story-and-basement house on Calumet Avenue. Jo’s
wrinkle became a fixture.
Death-bed promises should be broken as lightly as they are seriously
made. The dead have no right to lay their clammy fingers upon the
living.
“Joey,” she had said, in her high, thin voice, “take care of the
girls.”
“I will, Ma,” Jo had choked.
“Joey,” and the voice was weaker, “promise me you won’t marry till
the girls are all provided for.” Then as Joe had hesitated,
appalled: “Joey, it’s my dying wish. Promise!”
“I promise, Ma,” he had said.
Whereupon his mother had died, comfortably, leaving him with a
completely ruined life.
They were not bad-looking girls, and they had a certain style, too.
That is, Stell and Eva had. Carrie, the middle one, taught school
over on the West Side. In those days it took her almost two hours
each way. She said the kind of costume she required should have been
corrugated steel. But all three knew what was being worn, and they
wore it--or fairly faithful copies of it. Eva, the housekeeping
sister, had a needle knack. She could skim the State Street windows
and come away with a mental photograph of every separate tuck, hem,
yoke, and ribbon. Heads of departments showed her the things they
kept in drawers, and she went home and reproduced them with the aid
of a two-dollar-a-day seamstress. Stell, the youngest, was the
beauty. They called her Babe. She wasn’t really a beauty, but some
one had once told her that she looked like Janice Meredith (it was
when that work of fiction was at the height of popularity). For
years afterward, whenever she went to parties, she affected a
single, fat curl over her right shoulder, with a rose stuck through
it.
Twenty-three years ago one’s sisters did not strain at the household
leash, nor crave a career. Carrie taught school, and hated it. Eva
kept house expertly and complainingly. Babe’s profession was being
the family beauty, and it took all her spare time. Eva always let
her sleep until ten.
This was Jo’s household, and he was the nominal head of it. But it
was an empty title. The three women dominated his life. They weren’t
consciously selfish. If you had called them cruel they would have
put you down as mad. When you are the lone brother of three sisters,
it means that you must constantly be calling for, escorting, or
dropping one of them somewhere. Most men of Jo’s age were standing
before their mirror of a Saturday night, whistling blithely and
abstractedly while they discarded a blue polka-dot for a maroon tie,
whipped off the maroon for a shot-silk in favor of a plain
black-and-white, because she had once said she preferred quiet ties.
Jo, when he should have been preening his feathers for conquest, was
saying:
“Well, my God, I am hurrying! Give a man time, can’t you? I just got
home. You girls have been laying around the house all day. No wonder
you’re ready.”
He took a certain pride in seeing his sisters well dressed, at a
time when he should have been revelling in fancy waistcoats and
brilliant-hued socks, according to the style of that day, and the
inalienable right of any unwed male under thirty, in any day. On
those rare occasions when his business necessitated an out-of-town
trip, he would spend half a day floundering about the shops
selecting handkerchiefs, or stockings, or feathers, or fans, or
gloves for the girls. They always turned out to be the wrong kind,
judging by their reception.
From Carrie, “What in the world do I want of a fan!”
“I thought you didn’t have one,” Jo would say.
“I haven’t. I never go to dances.”
Joe would pass a futile hand over the top of his head, as was his
way when disturbed. “I just thought you’d like one. I thought every
girl liked a fan. Just,” feebly, “just to--to have.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake!”
And from Eva or Babe, “I’ve got silk stockings, Jo.” Or, “You
brought me handkerchiefs the last time.”
There was something selfish in his giving, as there always is in any
gift freely and joyfully made. They never suspected the exquisite
pleasure it gave him to select these things; these fine, soft,
silken things. There were many things about this slow-going, amiable
brother of theirs that they never suspected. If you had told them he
was a dreamer of dreams, for example, they would have been amused.
Sometimes, dead-tired by nine o’clock, after a hard day downtown, he
would doze over the evening paper. At intervals he would wake,
red-eyed, to a snatch of conversation such as, “Yes, but if you get
a blue you can wear it anywhere. It’s dressy, and at the same time
it’s quiet, too.” Eva, the expert, wrestling with Carrie over the
problem of the new spring dress. They never guessed that the
commonplace man in the frayed old smoking-jacket had banished them
all from the room long ago; had banished himself, for that matter.
In his place was a tall, debonair, and rather dangerously handsome
man to whom six o’clock spelled evening clothes. The kind of man who
can lean up against a mantel, or propose a toast, or give an order
to a man-servant, or whisper a gallant speech in a lady’s ear with
equal ease. The shabby old house on Calumet Avenue was transformed
into a brocaded and chandeliered rendezvous for the brilliance of
the city. Beauty was here, and wit. But none so beautiful and witty
as She. Mrs.--er--Jo Hertz. There was wine, of course; but no
regular display. There was music; the soft sheen of satin; laughter.
And he the gracious, tactful host, king of his own domain--
“Jo, for heaven’s sake, if you’re going to snore go to bed!”
“Why--did I fall asleep?”
“You haven’t been doing anything else all evening. A person would
think you were fifty instead of thirty.”
And Jo Hertz was again just the dull, gray, commonplace brother of
three well-meaning sisters.
Babe used to say petulantly, “Jo, why don’t you ever bring home any
of your men friends? A girl might as well not have any brother, all
the good you do.”
Jo, conscience-stricken, did his best to make amends. But a man who
has been petticoat-ridden for years loses the knack, somehow, of
comradeship with men. He acquires, too, a knowledge of women, and a
distaste for them, equalled only, perhaps, by that of an
elevator-starter in a department store.
Which brings us to one Sunday in May. Jo came home from a late
Sunday afternoon walk to find company for supper. Carrie often had
in one of her school-teacher friends, or Babe one of her frivolous
intimates, or even Eva a staid guest of the old-girl type. There was
always a Sunday night supper of potato salad, and cold meat, and
coffee, and perhaps a fresh cake. Jo rather enjoyed it, being a
hospitable soul. But he regarded the guests with the undazzled eyes
of a man to whom they were just so many petticoats, timid of the
night streets and requiring escort home. If you had suggested to him
that some of his sisters’ popularity was due to his own presence, or
if you had hinted that the more kittenish of these visitors were
probably making eyes at him, he would have stared in amazement and
unbelief.
This Sunday night it turned out to be one of Carrie’s friends.
“Emily,” said Carrie, “this is my brother, Jo.”
Jo had learned what to expect in Carrie’s friends. Drab-looking
women in the late thirties, whose facial lines all slanted downward.
“Happy to meet you,” said Jo, and looked down at a different sort
altogether. A most surprisingly different sort, for one of Carrie’s
friends. This Emily person was very small, and fluffy, and
blue-eyed, and sort of--well, crinkly looking. You know. The corners
of her mouth when she smiled, and her eyes when she looked up at
you, and her hair, which was brown, but had the miraculous effect,
somehow, of being golden.
Jo shook hands with her. Her hand was incredibly small, and soft, so
that you were afraid of crushing it, until you discovered she had a
firm little grip all her own. It surprised and amused you, that
grip, as does a baby’s unexpected clutch on your patronizing
forefinger. As Jo felt it in his own big clasp, the strangest thing
happened to him. Something inside Jo Hertz stopped working for a
moment, then lurched sickenly, then thumped like mad. It was his
heart. He stood staring down at her, and she up at him, until the
others laughed. Then their hands fell apart, lingeringly.
“Are you a school-teacher, Emily?” he said.
“Kindergarten. It’s my first year. And don’t call me Emily, please.”
“Why not? It’s your name. I think it’s the prettiest name in all the
world.” Which he hadn’t meant to say at all. In fact, he was
perfectly aghast to find himself saying it. But he meant it.
At supper he passed her things, and stared, until everybody laughed
again, and Eva said acidly, “Why don’t you feed her?”
It wasn’t that Emily had an air of helplessness. She just made you
feel you wanted her to be helpless, so that you could help her.
Jo took her home, and from that Sunday night he began to strain at
the leash. He took his sisters out, dutifully, but he would suggest,
with a carelessness that deceived no one, “Don’t you want one of
your girl friends to come along? That little What’s-her-name--Emily,
or something. So long’s I’ve got three of you, I might as well have
a full squad.”
For a long time he didn’t know what was the matter with him. He only
knew he was miserable, and yet happy. Sometimes his heart seemed to
ache with an actual physical ache. He realized that he wanted to do
things for Emily. He wanted to buy things for Emily--useless,
pretty, expensive things that he couldn’t afford. He wanted to buy
everything that Emily needed, and everything that Emily desired. He
wanted to marry Emily. That was it. He discovered that one day, with
a shock, in the midst of a transaction in the harness business. He
stared at the man with whom he was dealing until that startled
person grew uncomfortable.
“What’s the matter, Hertz?”
“Matter?”
“You look as if you’d seen a ghost or found a gold mine. I don’t
know which.”
“Gold mine,” said Jo. And then, “No. Ghost.”
For he remembered that high, thin voice, and his promise. And the
harness business was slithering downhill with dreadful rapidity, as
the automobile business began its amazing climb. Jo tried to stop
it. But he was not that kind of business man. It never occurred to
him to jump out of the down-going vehicle and catch the up-going
one. He stayed on, vainly applying brakes that refused to work.
“You know, Emily, I couldn’t support two households now. Not the way
things are. But if you’ll wait. If you’ll only wait. The girls
might--that is, Babe and Carrie--”
She was a sensible little thing, Emily. “Of course I’ll wait. But we
mustn’t just sit back and let the years go by. We’ve got to help.”
She went about it as if she were already a little match-making
matron. She corralled all the men she had ever known and introduced
them to Babe, Carrie, and Eva separately, in pairs, and en masse.
She arranged parties at which Babe could display the curl. She got
up picnics. She stayed home while Jo took the three about. When she
was present she tried to look as plain and obscure as possible, so
that the sisters should show up to advantage. She schemed, and
planned, and contrived, and hoped; and smiled into Jo’s despairing
eyes.
And three years went by. Three precious years. Carrie taught school,
and hated it. Eva kept house, more and more complainingly as prices
advanced and allowances retreated. Stell was still Babe, the family
beauty; but even she knew that the time was past for curls. Emily’s
hair, somehow, lost its glint and began to look just plain brown.
Her crinkliness began to iron out.
“Now, look here!” Jo argued, desperately, one night. “We could be
happy, anyway. There’s plenty of room at the house. Lots of people
begin that way. Of course, I couldn’t give you all I’d like to, at
first. But maybe, after a while--”
No dreams of salons, and brocade, and velvet-footed servitors, and
satin damask now. Just two rooms, all their own, all alone, and
Emily to work for. That was his dream. But it seemed less possible
than that other absurd one had been.
You know that Emily was as practical a little thing as she looked
fluffy. She knew women. Especially did she know Eva, and Carrie, and
Babe. She tried to imagine herself taking the household affairs and
the housekeeping pocketbook out of Eva’s expert hands. Eva had once
displayed to her a sheaf of aigrettes she had bought with what she
saved out of the housekeeping money. So then she tried to picture
herself allowing the reins of Jo’s house to remain in Eva’s hands.
And everything feminine and normal in her rebelled. Emily knew she’d
want to put away her own freshly laundered linen, and smooth it, and
pat it. She was that kind of woman. She knew she’d want to do her
own delightful haggling with butcher and vegetable pedlar. She knew
she’d want to muss Jo’s hair, and sit on his knee, and even quarrel
with him, if necessary, without the awareness of three ever-present
pairs of maiden eyes and ears.
“No! No! We’d only be miserable. I know. Even if they didn’t object.
And they would, Jo. Wouldn’t they?”
His silence was miserable assent. Then, “But you do love me, don’t
you, Emily?”
“I do, Jo. I love you--and love you--and love you. But, Jo,
I--can’t.”
“I know it, dear. I knew it all the time, really. I just thought
maybe, somehow--”
The two sat staring for a moment into space, their hands clasped.
Then they both shut their eyes, with a little shudder, as though
what they saw was terrible to look upon. Emily’s hand, the tiny hand
that was so unexpectedly firm, tightened its hold on him, and his
crushed the absurd fingers until she winced with pain.
That was the beginning of the end, and they knew it.
Emily wasn’t the kind of girl who would be left to pine. There are
too many Jo’s in the world whose hearts are prone to lurch and then
thump at the feel of a soft, fluttering, incredibly small hand in
their grip. One year later Emily was married to a young man whose
father owned a large, pie-shaped slice of the prosperous state of
Michigan.
That being safely accomplished, there was something grimly humorous
in the trend taken by affairs in the old house on Calumet. For Eva
married. Of all people, Eva! Married well, too, though he was a
great deal older than she. She went off in a hat she had copied from
a French model at Field’s, and a suit she had contrived with a home
dressmaker, aided by pressing on the part of the little tailor in
the basement over on Thirty-first Street. It was the last of that,
though. The next time they saw her, she had on a hat that even she
would have despaired of copying, and a suit that sort of melted into
your gaze. She moved to the North Side (trust Eva for that), and
Babe assumed the management of the household on Calumet Avenue. It
was rather a pinched little household now, for the harness business
shrank and shrank.
“I don’t see how you can expect me to keep house decently on this!”
Babe would say contemptuously. Babe’s nose, always a little inclined
to sharpness, had whittled down to a point of late. “If you knew
what Ben gives Eva.”
“It’s the best I can do, Sis. Business is something rotten.”
“Ben says if you had the least bit of--” Ben was Eva’s husband, and
quotable, as are all successful men.
“I don’t care what Ben says,” shouted Jo, goaded into rage. “I’m
sick of your everlasting Ben. Go and get a Ben of your own, why
don’t you, if you’re so stuck on the way he does things.”
And Babe did. She made a last desperate drive, aided by Eva, and she
captured a rather surprised young man in the brokerage way, who had
made up his mind not to marry for years and years. Eva wanted to
give her her wedding things, but at that Jo broke into sudden
rebellion.
“No, sir! No Ben is going to buy my sister’s wedding clothes,
understand? I guess I’m not broke--yet. I’ll furnish the money for
her things, and there’ll be enough of them, too.”
Babe had as useless a trousseau, and as filled with extravagant
pink-and-blue and lacy and frilly things as any daughter of doting
parents. Jo seemed to find a grim pleasure in providing them. But it
left him pretty well pinched. After Babe’s marriage (she insisted
that they call her Estelle now) Jo sold the house on Calumet. He and
Carrie took one of those little flats that were springing up,
seemingly over night, all through Chicago’s South Side.
There was nothing domestic about Carrie. She had given up teaching
two years before, and had gone into Social Service work on the West
Side. She had what is known as a legal mind--hard, clear,
orderly--and she made a great success of it. Her dream was to live
at the Settlement House and give all her time to the work. Upon the
little household she bestowed a certain amount of grim, capable
attention. It was the same kind of attention she would have given a
piece of machinery whose oiling and running had been entrusted to
her care. She hated it, and didn’t hesitate to say so.
Jo took to prowling about department store basements, and household
goods sections. He was always sending home a bargain in a ham, or a
sack of potatoes, or fifty pounds of sugar, or a window clamp, or a
new kind of paring knife. He was forever doing odd little jobs that
the janitor should have done. It was the domestic in him claiming
its own.
Then, one night, Carrie came home with a dull glow in her leathery
cheeks, and her eyes alight with resolve. They had what she called a
plain talk.
“Listen, Jo. They’ve offered me the job of first assistant resident
worker. And I’m going to take it. Take it! I know fifty other girls
who’d give their ears for it. I go in next month.”
They were at dinner. Jo looked up from his plate, dully. Then he
glanced around the little dining-room, with its ugly tan walls and
its heavy, dark furniture (the Calumet Avenue pieces fitted
cumbersomely into the five-room flat).
“Away? Away from here, you mean--to live?”
Carrie laid down her fork. “Well, really, Jo! After all that
explanation.”
“But to go over there to live! Why, that neighborhood’s full of
dirt, and disease, and crime, and the Lord knows what all. I can’t
let you do that, Carrie.”
Carrie’s chin came up. She laughed a short little laugh. “Let me!
That’s eighteenth-century talk, Jo. My life’s my own to live. I’m
going.”
And she went.
Jo stayed on in the apartment until the lease was up. Then he sold
what furniture he could, stored or gave away the rest, and took a
room on Michigan Avenue in one of the old stone mansions whose
decayed splendor was being put to such purpose.
Jo Hertz was his own master. Free to marry. Free to come and go. And
he found he didn’t even think of marrying. He didn’t want to come or
go, particularly. A rather frumpy old bachelor, with thinning hair
and a thickening neck. Much has been written about the unwed,
middle-aged woman; her fussiness, her primness, her angularity of
mind and body. In the male that same fussiness develops, and a
certain primness, too. But he grows flabby where she grows lean.
Every Thursday evening he took dinner at Eva’s, and on Sunday noon
at Stell’s. He tucked his napkin under his chin and openly enjoyed
the homemade soup and the well-cooked meats. After dinner he tried
to talk business with Eva’s husband, or Stell’s. His business talks
were the old-fashioned kind, beginning:
“Well, now, looka here. Take, f’rinstance your raw hides and
leathers.”
But Ben and George didn’t want to “take, f’rinstance, your raw hides
and leathers.” They wanted, when they took anything at all, to take
golf, or politics or stocks. They were the modern type of business
man who prefers to leave his work out of his play. Business, with
them, was a profession--a finely graded and balanced thing,
differing from Jo’s clumsy, downhill style as completely as does the
method of a great criminal detective differ from that of a village
constable. They would listen, restively, and say, “Uh-uh,” at
intervals, and at the first chance they would sort of fade out of
the room, with a meaning glance at their wives. Eva had two children
now. Girls. They treated Uncle Jo with good-natured tolerance. Stell
had no children. Uncle Jo degenerated, by almost imperceptible
degrees, from the position of honored guest, who is served with
white meat, to that of one who is content with a leg and one of
those obscure and bony sections which, after much turning with a
bewildered and investigating knife and fork, leave one baffled and
unsatisfied.
Eva and Stell got together and decided that Jo ought to marry.
“It isn’t natural,” Eva told him. “I never saw a man who took so
little interest in women.”
“Me!” protested Jo, almost shyly. “Women!”
“Yes. Of course. You act like a frightened schoolboy.”
So they had in for dinner certain friends and acquaintances of
fitting age. They spoke of them as “splendid girls.” Between
thirty-six and forty. They talked awfully well, in a firm, clear
way, about civics, and classes, and politics, and economics, and
boards. They rather terrified Jo. He didn’t understand much that
they talked about, and he felt humbly inferior, and yet a little
resentful, as if something had passed him by. He escorted them home,
dutifully, though they told him not to bother, and they evidently
meant it. They seemed capable, not only of going home quite
unattended, but of delivering a pointed lecture to any highwayman or
brawler who might molest them.
The following Thursday Eva would say, “How did you like her, Joe?”
“Like who?” Jo would spar feebly.
“Miss Matthews.”
“Who’s she?”
“Now, don’t be funny, Jo. You know very well I mean the girl who was
here for dinner. The one who talked so well on the emigration
question.”
“Oh, her! Why, I liked her all right. Seems to be a smart woman.”
“Smart! She’s a perfectly splendid girl.”
“Sure,” Jo would agree cheerfully.
“But didn’t you like her?”
“I can’t say I did, Eve. And I can’t say I didn’t. She made me think
a lot of a teacher I had in the fifth reader. Name of Himes. As I
recall her, she must have been a fine woman. But I never thought of
her as a woman at all. She was just Teacher.”
“You make me tired,” snapped Eva impatiently. “A man of your age.
You don’t expect to marry a girl, do you? A child!”
“I don’t expect to marry anybody,” Jo had answered.
And that was the truth, lonely though he often was.
The following spring Eva moved to Winnetka. Any one who got the
meaning of the Loop knows the significance of a move to a
north-shore suburb, and a house. Eva’s daughter, Ethel, was growing
up, and her mother had an eye on society.
That did away with Jo’s Thursday dinner. Then Stell’s husband bought
a car. They went out into the country every Sunday. Stell said it
was getting so that maids objected to Sunday dinners, anyway.
Besides, they were unhealthy, old-fashioned things. They always
meant to ask Jo to come along, but by the time their friends were
placed, and the lunch, and the boxes, and sweaters, and George’s
camera, and everything, there seemed to be no room for a man of Jo’s
bulk. So that eliminated the Sunday dinners.
“Just drop in any time during the week,” Stell said, “for dinner.
Except Wednesday--that’s our bridge night--and Saturday. And, of
course, Thursday. Cook is out that night. Don’t wait for me to
’phone.”
And so Jo drifted into that sad-eyed, dyspeptic family made up of
those you see dining in second-rate restaurants, their paper propped
up against the bowl of oyster crackers, munching solemnly and with
indifference to the stare of the passer-by surveying them through
the brazen plate-glass window.
And then came the War. The war that spelled death and destruction to
millions. The war that brought a fortune to Jo Hertz, and
transformed him, over night, from a baggy-kneed old bachelor, whose
business was a failure, to a prosperous manufacturer whose only
trouble was the shortage in hides for the making of his
product--leather! The armies of Europe called for it. Harnesses!
More harnesses! Straps! Millions of straps. More! More!
The musty old harness business over on Lake Street was magically
changed from a dust-covered, dead-alive concern to an orderly hive
that hummed and glittered with success. Orders poured in. Jo Hertz
had inside information on the War. He knew about troops and horses.
He walked with French and English and Italian buyers--noblemen, many
of them--commissioned by their countries to get American-made
supplies. And now, when he said to Ben or George, “Take f’rinstance
your raw hides and leathers,” they listened with respectful
attention.
And then began the gay-dog business in the life of Jo Hertz. He
developed into a Loop-hound, ever keen on the scent of fresh
pleasure. That side of Jo Hertz which had been repressed and crushed
and ignored began to bloom, unhealthily. At first he spent money on
his rather contemptuous nieces. He sent them gorgeous fans, and
watch bracelets, and velvet bags. He took two expensive rooms at a
downtown hotel, and there was something more tear-compelling than
grotesque about the way he gloated over the luxury of a separate
ice-water tap in the bathroom. He explained it.
“Just turn it on. Ice-water! Any hour of the day or night.”
He bought a car. Naturally. A glittering affair; in color a bright
blue, with pale-blue leather straps and a great deal of gold
fittings, and wire wheels. Eva said it was the kind of thing a
soubrette would use, rather than an elderly business man. You saw
him, too, in the Pompeian room at the Congress Hotel of a Saturday
afternoon when doubtful and roving-eyed matrons in kolinsky capes
are wont to congregate to sip pale amber drinks. Actors grew to
recognize the semi-bald head and the shining, round, good-natured
face looming out at them from the dim well of the parquet, and
sometimes, in a musical show, they directed a quip at him, and he
liked it. He could pick out the critics as they came down the aisle,
and even had a nodding acquaintance with two of them.
“Kelly, of the ‘Herald,’” he would say carelessly. “Bean, of the
‘Trib.’ They’re all afraid of him.”
So he frolicked, ponderously. In New York he might have been called
a Man About Town.
And he was lonesome. He was very lonesome. So he searched about in
his mind and brought from the dim past the memory of the luxuriously
furnished establishment of which he used to dream in the evenings
when he dozed over his paper in the old house on Calumet. So he
rented an apartment, many-roomed and expensive, with a man-servant
in charge, and furnished it in styles and periods ranging through
all the Louises. The living-room was mostly rose color. It was like
an unhealthy and bloated boudoir. And yet there was nothing
sybaritic or uncleanly in the sight of this paunchy, middle-aged man
sinking into the rosy-cushioned luxury of his ridiculous home. It
was a frank and naïve indulgence of long-starved senses, and there
was in it a great resemblance to the rolling-eyed ecstasy of a
schoolboy smacking his lips over an all-day sucker.
The War went on, and on, and on. And the money continued to roll
in--a flood of it. Then, one afternoon, Eva, in town on shopping
bent, entered a small, exclusive, and expensive shop on Michigan
Avenue. Exclusive, that is, in price. Eva’s weakness, you may
remember, was hats. She was seeking a hat now. She described what
she sought with a languid conciseness, and stood looking about her
after the saleswoman had vanished in quest of it. The room was
becomingly rose-illumined and somewhat dim, so that some minutes had
passed before she realized that a man seated on a raspberry brocade
settee not five feet away--a man with a walking stick, and yellow
gloves, and tan spats, and a check suit--was her brother Jo. From
him Eva’s wild-eyed glance leaped to the woman who was trying on
hats before one of the many long mirrors. She was seated, and a
saleswoman was exclaiming discreetly at her elbow.
Eva turned sharply and encountered her own saleswoman returning,
hat-laden. “Not to-day,” she gasped. “I’m feeling ill. Suddenly.”
And almost ran from the room.
That evening she told Stell, relating her news in that telephone
pidgin-English devised by every family of married sisters as
protection against the neighbors and Central. Translated, it ran
thus:
“He looked straight at me. My dear, I thought I’d die! But at least
he had sense enough not to speak. She was one of those limp, willowy
creatures with the greediest eyes that she tried to keep softened to
a baby stare, and couldn’t, she was so crazy to get her hands on
those hats. I saw it all in one awful minute. You know the way I do.
I suppose some people would call her pretty. I don’t. And her color!
Well! And the most expensive-looking hats. Aigrettes, and paradise,
and feathers. Not one of them under seventy-five. Isn’t it
disgusting! At his age! Suppose Ethel had been with me!”
The next time it was Stell who saw them. In a restaurant. She said
it spoiled her evening. And the third time it was Ethel. She was one
of the guests at a theater party given by Nicky Overton II. You
know. The North Shore Overtons. Lake Forest. They came in late, and
occupied the entire third row at the opening performance of “Believe
Me!” And Ethel was Nicky’s partner. She was glowing like a rose.
When the lights went up after the first act Ethel saw that her Uncle
Jo was seated just ahead of her with what she afterward described as
a blonde. Then her uncle had turned around, and seeing her, had been
surprised into a smile that spread genially all over his plump and
rubicund face. Then he had turned to face forward again, quickly.
“Who’s the old bird?” Nicky had asked. Ethel had pretended not to
hear, so he had asked again.
“My uncle,” Ethel answered, and flushed all over her delicate face,
and down to her throat. Nicky had looked at the blonde, and his
eyebrows had gone up ever so slightly.
It spoiled Ethel’s evening. More than that, as she told her mother
of it later, weeping, she declared it had spoiled her life.
Eva talked it over with her husband in that intimate, kimonoed hour
that precedes bedtime. She gesticulated heatedly with her hair
brush.
“It’s disgusting, that’s what it is. Perfectly disgusting. There’s
no fool like an old fool. Imagine! A creature like that. At his time
of life.”
There exists a strange and loyal kinship among men. “Well, I don’t
know,” Ben said now, and even grinned a little. “I suppose a boy’s
got to sow his wild oats sometime.”
“Don’t be any more vulgar than you can help,” Eva retorted. “And I
think you know, as well as I, what it means to have that Overton boy
interested in Ethel.”
“If he’s interested in her,” Ben blundered, “I guess the fact that
Ethel’s uncle went to the theater with some one who wasn’t Ethel’s
aunt won’t cause a shudder to run up and down his frail young frame,
will it?”
“All right,” Eva retorted. “If you’re not man enough to stop it,
I’ll have to, that’s all. I’m going up there with Stell this week.”
They did not notify Jo of their coming. Eva telephoned his apartment
when she knew he would be out, and asked his man if he expected his
master home to dinner that evening. The man had said yes. Eva
arranged to meet Stell in town. They would drive to Jo’s apartment
together, and wait for him there.
When she reached the city Eva found turmoil there. The first of the
American troops to be sent to France were leaving. Michigan
Boulevard was a billowing, surging mass: flags, pennants, banners,
crowds. All the elements that make for demonstration. And over the
whole--quiet. No holiday crowd, this. A solid, determined mass of
people waiting patient hours to see the khaki-clads go by. Three
years of indefatigable reading had brought them to a clear knowledge
of what these boys were going to.
“Isn’t it dreadful!” Stell gasped.
“Nicky Overton’s only nineteen, thank goodness.”
Their car was caught in the jam. When they moved at all it was by
inches. When at last they reached Jo’s apartment they were flushed,
nervous, apprehensive. But he had not yet come in. So they waited.
No, they were not staying to dinner with their brother, they told
the relieved houseman.
Jo’s home has already been described to you. Stell and Eva, sunk in
rose-colored cushions, viewed it with disgust, and some mirth. They
rather avoided each other’s eyes.
“Carrie ought to be here,” Eva said. They both smiled at the thought
of the austere Carrie in the midst of those rosy cushions, and
hangings, and lamps. Stell rose and began to walk about, restlessly.
She picked up a vase and laid it down; straightened a picture. Eva
got up, too, and wandered into the hall. She stood there a moment,
listening. Then she turned and passed into Jo’s bedroom. And there
you knew Jo for what he was.
This room was as bare as the other had been ornate. It was Jo, the
clean-minded and simple-hearted, in revolt against the cloying
luxury with which he had surrounded himself. The bedroom, of all
rooms in any house, reflects the personality of its occupant. True,
the actual furniture was panelled, cupid-surmounted, and ridiculous.
It had been the fruit of Jo’s first orgy of the senses. But now it
stood out in that stark little room with an air as incongruous and
ashamed as that of a pink tarleton _danseuse_ who finds herself in
a monk’s cell. None of those wall-pictures with which bachelor
bedrooms are reputed to be hung. No satin slippers. No scented
notes. Two plain-backed military brushes on the chiffonier (and he
so nearly hairless). A little orderly stack of books on the table
near the bed. Eva fingered their titles and gave a little gasp. One
of them was on gardening.
“Well, of all things!” exclaimed Stell. A book on the War, by an
Englishman. A detective story of the lurid type that lulls us to
sleep. His shoes ranged in a careful row in the closet, with a
shoe-tree in every one of them. There was something speaking about
them. They looked human. Eva shut the door on them, quickly. Some
bottles on the dresser. A jar of pomade. An ointment such as a man
uses who is growing bald and is panic-stricken too late. An
insurance calendar on the wall. Some rhubarb-and-soda mixture on the
shelf in the bathroom, and a little box of pepsin tablets.
“Eats all kinds of things at all hours of the night,” Eva said, and
wandered out into the rose-colored front room again with the air of
one who is chagrined at her failure to find what she has sought.
Stell followed her furtively.
“Where do you suppose he can be?” she demanded. “It’s”--she glanced
at her wrist--“Why, it’s after six!”
And then there was a little click. The two women sat up, tense. The
door opened. Jo came in. He blinked a little. The two women in the
rosy room stood up.
“Why--Eve! Why, Babe! Well! Why didn’t you let me know?”
“We were just about to leave. We thought you weren’t coming home.”
Jo came in, slowly.
“I was in the jam on Michigan, watching the boys go by.” He sat
down, heavily. The light from the window fell on him. And you saw
that his eyes were red.
And you’ll have to learn why. He had found himself one of the
thousands in the jam on Michigan Avenue, as he said. He had a place
near the curb, where his big frame shut off the view of the
unfortunates behind him. He waited with the placid interest of one
who has subscribed to all the funds and societies to which a
prosperous, middle-aged business man is called upon to subscribe in
war time. Then, just as he was about to leave, impatient at the
delay, the crowd had cried, with a queer, dramatic, exultant note in
its voice, “Here they come! Here come the boys!”
Just at that moment two little, futile, frenzied fists began to beat
a mad tattoo on Jo Hertz’s broad back. Jo tried to turn in the
crowd, all indignant resentment. “Say, looka here!”
The little fists kept up their frantic beating and pushing. And a
voice--a choked, high little voice--cried, “Let me by! I can’t see!
You man, you! You big fat man! My boy’s going by--to war--and I
can’t see! Let me by!”
Jo scrooged around, still keeping his place. He looked down. And
upturned to him in agonized appeal was the face of little Emily.
They stared at each other for what seemed a long, long time. It was
really only the fraction of a second. Then Jo put one great arm
firmly around Emily’s waist and swung her around in front of him.
His great bulk protected her. Emily was clinging to his hand. She
was breathing rapidly, as if she had been running. Her eyes were
straining up the street.
“Why, Emily, how in the world!--”
“I ran away. Fred didn’t want me to come. He said it would excite me
too much.”
“Fred?”
“My husband. He made me promise to say good-by to Jo at home.”
“Jo?”
“Jo’s my boy. And he’s going to war. So I ran away. I had to see
him. I had to see him go.”
She was dry-eyed. Her gaze was straining up the street.
“Why, sure,” said Jo. “Of course you want to see him.” And then the
crowd gave a great roar. There came over Jo a feeling of weakness.
He was trembling. The boys went marching by.
“There he is!” Emily shrilled, above the din. “There he is! There he
is! There he--” And waved a futile little hand. It wasn’t so much a
wave as a clutching. A clutching after something beyond her reach.
“Which one? Which one, Emily?”
“The handsome one. The handsome one. There!” Her voice quavered and
died.
Jo put a steady hand on her shoulder. “Point him out,” he commanded.
“Show me.” And the next instant. “Never mind. I see him.”
Somehow, miraculously, he had picked him from among the hundreds.
Had picked him as surely as his own father might have. It was
Emily’s boy. He was marching by, rather stiffy. He was nineteen, and
fun-loving, and he had a girl, and he didn’t particularly want to go
to France and--to go to France. But more than he had hated going, he
had hated not to go. So he marched by, looking straight ahead, his
jaw set so that his chin stuck out just a little. Emily’s boy.
Jo looked at him, and his face flushed purple. His eyes, the
hard-boiled eyes of a Loop-hound, took on the look of a sad old man.
And suddenly he was no longer Jo, the sport; old J. Hertz, the gay
dog. He was Jo Hertz, thirty, in love with life, in love with Emily,
and with the stinging blood of young manhood coursing through his
veins.
Another minute and the boy had passed on up the broad street--the
fine, flag-bedecked street--just one of a hundred service-hats
bobbing in rhythmic motion like sandy waves lapping a shore and
flowing on.
Then he disappeared altogether.
Emily was clinging to Jo. She was mumbling something, over and over.
“I can’t. I can’t. Don’t ask me to. I can’t let him go. Like that. I
can’t.”
Jo said a queer thing.
“Why, Emily! We wouldn’t have him stay home, would we? We wouldn’t
want him to do anything different, would we? Not our boy. I’m glad
he enlisted. I’m proud of him. So are you glad.”
Little by little he quieted her. He took her to the car that was
waiting, a worried chauffeur in charge. They said good-by,
awkwardly. Emily’s face was a red, swollen mass.
So it was that when Jo entered his own hallway half an hour later he
blinked, dazedly, and when the light from the window fell on him you
saw that his eyes were red.
Eva was not one to beat about the bush. She sat forward in her
chair, clutching her bag rather nervously.
“Now, look here, Jo. Stell and I are here for a reason. We’re here
to tell you that this thing’s got to stop.”
“Thing? Stop?”
“You know very well what I mean. You saw me at the milliner’s that
day. And night before last, Ethel. We’re all disgusted. If you must
go about with people like that, please have some sense of decency.”
Something gathering in Jo’s face should have warned her. But he was
slumped down in his chair in such a huddle, and he looked so old and
fat that she did not heed it. She went on: “You’ve got us to
consider. Your sisters. And your nieces. Not to speak of your own--”
But he got to his feet then, shaking, and at what she saw in his
face even Eva faltered and stopped. It wasn’t at all the face of a
fat, middle-aged sport. It was a face Jovian, terrible.
“You!” he began, low-voiced, ominous. “You!” He raised a great fist
high. “You two murderers! You didn’t consider me, twenty years ago.
You come to me with talk like that. Where’s my boy! You killed him,
you two, twenty years ago. And now he belongs to somebody else.
Where’s my son! that should have gone marching by to-day?” He flung
his arms out in a great gesture of longing. The red veins stood out
on his forehead. “Where’s my son! Answer me that, you two selfish,
miserable women. Where’s my son!” Then, as they huddled together,
frightened, wild-eyed, “Out of my house! Out of my house! Before I
hurt you!”
They fled, terrified. The door banged behind them.
Jo stood, shaking, in the center of the room. Then he reached for a
chair, gropingly, and sat down. He passed one moist, flabby hand
over his forehead and it came away wet. The telephone rang. He sat
still. It sounded far away and unimportant, like something
forgotten. I think he did not even hear it with his conscious ear.
But it rang and rang insistently. Jo liked to answer his telephone,
when at home.
“Hello!” He knew instantly the voice at the other end.
“That you, Jo?” it said.
“Yes.”
“How’s my boy?”
“I’m all right.”
“Listen, Jo. The crowd’s coming over to-night. I’ve fixed up a
little poker game for you. Just eight of us.”
“I can’t come to-night, Gert.”
“Can’t! Why not?”
“I’m not feeling so good.”
“You just said you were all right.”
“I am all right. Just kind of tired.”
The voice took on a cooing note. “Is my Joey tired? Then he doesn’t
need to play if he don’t want to. No, sir.”
Jo stood staring at the black mouthpiece of the telephone. He was
seeing a procession go marching by. Boys, hundreds of boys, in
khaki.
“Hello! Hello!” the voice took on an anxious note. “Are you there?”
“Yes,” wearily.
“Jo, there’s something the matter. You’re sick. I’m coming right
over.”
“No!”
“Why not? You sound as if you’d been sleeping. Look here--”
“Leave me alone!” cried Jo, suddenly, and the receiver clacked onto
the hook. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.” Long after the
connection had been broken.
He stood staring at the instrument with unseeing eyes. Then he
turned and walked into the front room. All the light had gone out of
it. Dusk had come on. All the light had gone out of everything. The
zest had gone out of life. The game was over--the game he had been
playing against loneliness and disappointment. And he was just a
tired old man. A lonely, tired old man in a ridiculous, rose-colored
room that had grown, all of a sudden, drab.