rain about midnight, a steady rain, long and full of the secrets of
autumn. And Henriette lay in her bed and thought about death and dying.
She thought about her grandchildren, how good they were. Somehow she
always felt sorriest for young people when anyone died. Not for little
children, or the very old; but the ones in between. The ones between
eighteen and forty, say. They took it hardest. How terrible death was
to them, how _everlasting_! If only they could know what _she_ knew,
she and the little children.... Of course, she wailed and carried on;
that was her business, her calling. But how often, right in the midst
of a funeral, even as she stood and gazed in the grave, she had longed
to go and whisper to youth’s white, impassioned grief, “There, there,
_chère_ ... don’t sorrow so hard. Me, I know. I tell you, I _know_.”
But what she knew she could not have said.... Henriette stirred in her
bed, sought a new place for her pillow. How often she had longed to say
to some bereft mother, she who had buried six, “Do not grieve overmuch,
little Mammy. He is not here. See! He is dragging a little tin can for
a train, across the white courts of Heaven.”
Henriette slept, and after a time a bell tolled in her dreaming. It
awakened her. A gray light had come into the room, and the rain was
gone. Well, and who could be dead? Somebody old and rich was dead, the
bell had been tolling so long. The light about her bed grew brighter,
and the ceiling shone with rose. She dozed again; but when she again
awakened the bell was still tolling.... It must be an old person dead.
Suddenly Henriette became aware of a flow, a movement in the house.
The windows rattled; a door was opened somewhere and shut. And then
there was a swishing of skirts, a running of feet. Her grandchildren!
They crowded about her bed, three-deep, tense and excited. The cheeks
of the littlest ones glowed, the way they did when there was bad news
to be broken; when the sugar was out, or the cat had fallen down in
the cistern. “Granny, what you think is happen? Old lady Josephine’s
gone!” ... They crowded closer, to see how Henriette “took it.” “Poor
Josephine, she got sick in the night and she passed away early this
morning.”
Henriette sat up against her pillow, blinking. She looked like the kind
of old woman children make out of their knuckles, with black-headed
pins for eyes. And now the older ones, her daughters, stole into the
room on their tiptoes. They took her hands. “How you feel, Gran’mammy?
Is your throat all right? Well, they’ve done sent for you, honey. They
said Josephine asked for you in the night, to come and sing for her
funeral.... Well, _le bon Dieu_ is love you, sho’, Mammy.”
All day her children were busy, getting Henriette ready: her best
alpaca cleaned and pressed; her mourning veil laid out, her gloves and
her shoes. Shiny and speckless they must be, to follow the honoured
dead. “Mammy,” her daughters said, “you stay in bed and rest, so your
voice will be good to-morrow.” They were nice daughters; they were
trying to make her feel prideful again.... All day long Henriette lay
and gazed out at the white gravelled road, stretching away, on past
Josephine’s house. Looked like she could see Josephine, sitting there
on her gallery, the fat running over!
Well, she would miss Josephine, her old crony. Toni and Josie both
gone. It would be queer, a sort of joke, wailing for Josephine’s
funeral. It would be like singing beside her own grave.
* * * * *
The next morning, at the first peep of day, her children came in to
help her. “How you feel, Gran’mammy?” They looked at her and shook
their heads. She was so thin and so old. With her friends all gone she
seemed like something from some other life.... “Well, we won’t have
Mammy much longer,” they said. They crowded about her, solicitous.
Old Henriette sat up in bed. “Fetch me my specs,” she grumbled.
They brought her specs, her false teeth, her rosary, and her snake-oil.
They washed her feet and rubbed them, and helped her to dress. With her
mourning veil on she looked like a little black bride. And when she was
dressed and ready they brought her the funeral book. “Now, Mammy, look!
Mark it down--one hundred funerals. You’ve sung for more buryings than
anyone else in the parish.”
But Henriette stared at the funeral book; she seemed mad about
something, offended. “Don’t meddle so much,” she cackled. “You wait
till I come home from Josephine’s funeral.”
She set out in the ditch, holding tight to her little black bag and
her glasses. The grandchildren, who were to go on in the car, stood
and watched her sorrowfully. Once she turned back and waved.... She
was so little, so little and thin, so _perverse_! She hobbled along
in the ditch. Her funeral shoes felt stiff and heavy, and caught in
the Queen Anne’s lace; and whenever an automobile thundered by on the
highway, Henriette, terrified, put her hands to her ears.... Once, half
fainting, she stopped and clutched at the branch of a cottonwood tree.
And a loneliness passed over her, a loneliness and a heartache....
“Josie,” she called, hopelessly, “Josie.... I’m a-coming....”
But when she got to the turn of the road where the willows grew, she
faltered, distressed and alarmed. She could get no farther down in the
ditch. A freshet poured from a hole in the side of the road, and the
ditch in front of her was flooded with water. The black water boiled
and licked at her feet, treacherous and angry; and Henriette shrank
and backed away. For a moment she stood, trembling, uncertain; and she
stared at the road above her that stretched away in the sunlight, on
past Josephine’s house. Then, tottering and dizzy and sick with fright,
she pulled herself up the embankment, and with her face turned toward
Josephine’s house, began to hobble along on the highway.
“Josie--” she whispered, and a numbness, a darkness took hold of
her--“Josie.... I mind as how, after all, my friend, you and me ull
quit even....”
WITH GLORY AND HONOUR
BY ELISABETH COBB CHAPMAN
From _Century_
In a cross street of the riant fifties stands the Club Levering, an
old brownstone building in a brave new coat of tan plaster, with
wrought-iron lamps by its doors and an imposing uniformed figure to bow
you out politely, or with the force of a strong arm, in nice accordance
to the decorum or lack of it that you preserve within the precincts
which he guards.
The Club Levering is not a club; it is a cabaret, a dance hall, and a
theatre, with a strong attraction for Broadway luminaries. They drop in
after the theatre to hear Hal Levering sing his new songs and to watch
the swells, strayed from up town East, dance and enjoy themselves. And
they love Hal. “He’s a great boy,” they say. “An artist. Some kid.
Listen to that now. Boy, how he can put it over!”
Levering, born Lipwitz, had been driven to this place by a dim dream.
There was struggle behind him, years of the unbelievable struggle of
the poor man, of the immigrant Jew, against a relentless city. He
could remember dimly a night in southern Russia, the pogrom, flames
and the sounds of shots in the dark, driving out the Jew. He had been
held up by his mother, crying, on the deck of an immigrant ship to
see the Promised City blazing tall and splendid in the sunlight. They
had all been held up to see it, he and Lena and Roziska and Leo and
little Moses, even though Moses was too young to know what it was all
about--and the Promised Land, as it materialized, a tenement in the
crowded ghetto, too hard on the little Moses, who died in a few months.
Behind Hal were the years as a singing waiter in cheap cabarets, as
a “song plugger,” small-time vaudeville, and then a revue; and now
marvellously he was Hal Levering, star and part owner of the Club
Levering, and packing them in at higher prices than any other night
club dared charge.
He had done that single-handed. And he had carried the Lipwitz family
with him. Lena was now a dancer, a good one; Isaac, a partner in a
clothing store. Rosie had married a doctor. Mama kept house for Lena,
and if Papa had been alive, Hal would undoubtedly have found something
lucrative for him.
Always his dream had driven him. The dream of the artist, inarticulate,
clumsy, hunting for the ultimate beauty. He sang jazz now and he
wore fine clothes, while around him were the flash of jewels and the
white faces of gaudy women and the throb of Bennie Bernstein’s music.
Everybody paid him homage, bowing, pounding on the table for Hal
Levering, the artist, singing “Abie’s an Irisher Now,” a song whose
words were a cry of pain, written by a Jew in contempt of his race. He
sang it gorgeously, with exaggerated gestures, flexible hands, and when
he did the part where Abie pretends to be the Irish plug-ugly, one saw
the cringe of the homeless race that was ingrained in Abie in spite of
the defiant throw of an Irish jaw. It was a beautiful bit of mimicking,
and even though he was a Jew he did not mind the ugly words at all.
He had one song, “When My Little Baby Boy Says His Prayers to Me,” that
never failed to make his hearers cry. And there were tears in his own
eyes, when he came off, not because of the song--he knew hokum even
when he sang it himself--but because he could “get them” with it. Hal
Levering, the artist, his triumph ringing in his ears clapped out by
enthusiastic hands.
The grinding afternoon before his new summer show went on; he was in
his element. About him were excited waiters arranging their tables,
decorators at work on the flowers, Bennie Bernstein in his shirt
sleeves, sweating over the new songs, Lilian Laine begging help with
the duet they were to sing. And then, as Hal went over his new numbers
alone, the waiters and the decorators, Lilian and song-wise Bennie
himself, stopped to listen to him.
He had worked that day until his face was gray with fatigue, but when
at last he went out for his dinner, he walked bravely, with his head
up, a conqueror, Hal Levering of the Club Levering, a king on Broadway.
The opening of the summer show had been an enormous success. The
entrance was choked with disappointed people who could not get in, and
at the door the page boys battled with the crowd clamouring for tables,
among which the lucky ones who had reservations battled their way. And
Hal moved from table to table to welcome his guests and receive homage.
This was his big night, his triumph, the end, he thought with a choke
in his throat, of his struggle toward the ultimate beauty.
* * * * *
Constance Corthwaite came to the Club Levering that night. She had
never been there before, but Hal Levering recognized her at once. She
was as much a celebrity to Broadway as she was to Fifth Avenue. One saw
her everywhere, a pirate of a woman with a face moulded firm in lines
of complete and terrible ennui, hunting for amusement, scattering her
millions with a disdainful hand. She had been Constance Corthwaite
for thirty-five years now, for she had never found a man to hold her
interest long enough to marry him.
Levering had gone at once to her table, had been introduced, had
accepted a glass of excellent champagne, had bragged, had strutted, had
told jokes.
“Your place is quite amusing,” Constance Corthwaite said. “I hear you
sing very well.”
Hal Levering laughed. “That’s what they say. Have you ever heard me?”
She shook her head.
“Well, the stuff I do here is--well, no artist can put anything over
in a restaurant, but I’m opening in a new act, just a side line, you
know, at the Palace next week, and that’s where I knock ’em right out
of their seats. We’ve tried it out, and it’s great. Next week--come and
see me.” Then in a magnificent burst of cordiality: “Come around during
the show and see it from behind. How’d you like that, huh? See, I do a
skit, new songs, new patter--it’s a wow!”
She had favoured him with a glance from her long eyes. “Thank you.”
“What would you like to have me sing for you now?” he asked.
“Try something good--I should like to see how it went here.”
He sang “Sweet Siren” and “Pretty Little Mama” for her. She did
not applaud. He was disappointed. He had realized that she wasn’t
demonstrative, but he had hoped to win her.
Her friends seemed to enjoy themselves, and he took no more trouble
with them. He noticed that they laughed, drank, and danced. Later
there was an animated discussion; he could see that from the floor
as he sang. Constance Corthwaite’s friends were arguing with her.
They leaned toward her, protesting. The attitudes were unmistakable.
Apparently unmoved, she blew smoke from her nostrils and with a wave
of her cigarette turned their attention back to him. They watched him,
shrewdly, for a few seconds, and then went off into quiet laughter.
Laughter at some joke which that long-eyed woman had designed. From the
floor, singing, he saw all this, for his early training had made him
observant.
As Constance was leaving she beckoned to him. She stood at the door,
wrapped in her dark cloak. He went out at her nod, with alacrity. As
he went he wondered what she wanted and decided definitely that he did
not like her. “Too damned ritzy,” and he thought her ugly and badly
dressed, too, but after all she was Constance Corthwaite. Probably she
had fallen for him. Most of ’em did.
She recognized his approach with the smallest possible nod.
“Thank you for the songs. We enjoyed them. As I can’t watch you ‘knock
’em off their seats’ at the Palace, I suggest that you come down to
my place in the country next week-end and knock us off our seats down
there.”
She was asking him to visit her. So she _had_ fallen for him. They
all did. He was inundated with female attentions. But a visit to the
Corthwaite place! Well, he had arrived! He accepted blandly.
* * * * *
Mommer and Lena helped him pack. They came from their apartment across
the hall to his and favoured him with their advice and assistance. It
was a lengthy business. Before he got off, the plush splendour of his
rooms was strewn with discarded clothing.
“Take your dress suit, Hermie,” advised his mother. “Your new suit for
those swells is none too good.”
“Wear your lavender sport suit for the golfing.”
“A bathing suit.”
“Your silk socks, Hermie. Hermie, you have forgot your silk socks,
Hermie.”
“The lavender suit, Hermie.”
* * * * *
He got off at last. His big car seemed to eat the miles, exaltation
keeping time to the healthy song of his motor. He went swiftly through
the mean towns squatting on the island’s edge out to the rolling hills
of the North Shore. He dreamed dreams. Now a new billing suggested
itself. “Hal Levering--Society’s Favourite”--or better, “Hal Levering,
Society’s Favoured Comedian.” In his mind’s eye he could see an article
in _Vanity Fair_--perhaps--“Hal Levering, the erstwhile mammy songster
a belated society discovery.”
He turned the nose of the car into the Corthwaite gates and at
a reduced speed moved up the driveway. In spite of the explicit
directions given him by the policeman in Jonestown, he wasn’t at all
sure that this was the place.
He had passed, on his drive from New York, many great stone gates, so
high and so formidable that they gave only a niggard glimpse of blue
stone road, perhaps the outline of proud roofs upheld above the trees,
and he had expected the Corthwaite driveway to be at least as fine as
the finest of these.
But this was just a comfortable country road, distinguished from its
kind only by a pair of lowly stone pillars and a squat frame cottage
doing duty as a gatekeeper’s lodge.
He drove through a small woodland, not pruned or landscaped at all,
turned a corner, and found himself facing an expanse of lawn and a
rambling frame house, painted a soft faded yellow and adorned with
plain white shutters. The Corthwaite house laid claim to no other
beauty than that which is inherent in old colonial houses and in
ancient Greek vases, the unadorned beauty of line. Hal Levering was
disappointed in it. A butler, not in livery, met him at the door. He
was an old man and grumpy.
“Mr. Levering?” he asked. Levering had an uncomfortable feeling that
his clothes, his car, and his abilities were all being evaluated, but
he dismissed the suspicion as absurd, for the old man’s eyes had not
moved. He was at the moment holding open the door.
“Miss Corthwaite left word that if she had not returned at the time of
your arrival you were to make yourself at home and ask me for anything
you might require--sir.”
Levering entered.
“The Car?” he asked, and one had, as always, a feeling that he was
thinking of it with at least a capital “C.” “The Car will be all right
there?”
“The chauffeur will take it around if you will give me the keys--sir,”
said the old man.
“Oh!” There was an appreciative pause from Levering. This place was
like one of those English places he had heard of--all service--no show.
The old man led him upstairs, and down a long hall to a bedroom, which
like the rest of the house gave the impression of luxury, although the
chintz was faded and the old furniture austerely simple.
The windows gave one a view of a garden, a box hedge, and, looming
friendly in the rear, fruit trees not bowed as yet with the crop, but
holding the green fruit as sturdily as a street lamp its light. That
was no drawing room of a garden. The fruit trees were welcome to come
in if they liked. “I don’t call that much,” Levering remarked to the
air at large. He compared unfavourably the gay simple little flower
beds before him to the marble swimming pool and formal terraces of his
friend, Isaac Lowenstein, the moving-picture magnate. He carefully
dusted his gray tweeds, straightened his tie an infinitesimal fraction,
and from his bag searched out a bottle of brilliantine, and, anointing
a comb, smoothed his hair.
Downstairs again, Levering found himself in the great room he had first
entered, and through which he had passed too quickly for an impression.
Now he frankly took its measure. It did not impress him. It was big, to
be sure, but the hangings were not velvet, the upholstery was not rich.
He decided that the early-American maple was cool looking but plain,
and the dim rosy riot of the chintz, comfortable but cheap. He wondered
at the house because he was sure that here, if any place in the world,
things would be correct, and he had expected to find a glorified Club
Levering with more crystal and more plush and more grandeur.
The old butler found him there and offered liquid refreshment, which
was accepted gratefully.
“Did Miss Corthwaite say when she’d be home?” asked Levering. It made
him lonely to be left to himself. The din of his days had beaten upon
his nerves until solitude was a thing abhorred.
“She did not--sir,” said the butler. Hal was offended with his welcome.
He was doing Constance Corthwaite a favour in coming all the way down
here to the country, and she had made no effort to receive him. Left
alone, he looked about him for some source of amusement. Tentatively
he opened two small cabinets, hoping vainly that they might contain
phonograph or radio. He found only riding gloves, golf balls, a pair of
garden shears, and some sheet music. The music offered possibilities,
and in that room the big piano was the only piece of furniture that
looked like any furniture he had ever seen, but the music was queer
stuff. He did not know any of it, nor did he want to.
There were magazines piled on the long centre table, and he looked
through them hopefully. Here was the bland impudence of the young
intellectuals with their opinions supported by the dignity of a Duncan
Phyfe table. If Hal Levering had possessed a subtle mind, he would have
fathomed Constance Corthwaite at that instance. Eccentricity upheld by
Duncan Phyfe.
Half buried in the pile of papers and magazines he found an old book,
_The Book of the Corthwaites_, and in idle curiosity he turned the
leaves. There were long lists of names in it, explained by short
sentences.
In 1732, Colonel Abednego Corthwaite married Eliza Pepperidge. He
settled in the city of Boston and became one of its most prominent
citizens. His children were Abednego, Elisha, John, Eliza, Aaron, and
Piety. Abednego died in infancy. Elisha married Patience Cabot. Their
children were----
“Good-night!” Levering’s surprise was jolted out of him. “What does
anybody care who those dead ones married?” But Constance Corthwaite and
her kind must care, or the book would not be here. He carried it out on
to the porch that gave a view of the garden and the apple trees.
When Constance Corthwaite and the rest of her house party returned from
the golf links, they found Hal Levering reading....
“In 1802 Solomon Corthwaite married Sarah Emerson,” and in his eyes a
dazed, bored, yet questioning expression.
“How d’ye do?” said Miss Corthwaite. She did not offer to shake hands.
“Sorry to be so late. Golf, you know. Did Lake make you comfortable?”
With a little wave of a hand she indicated her other guests, who,
apparently without seeing him at all, were settling themselves in the
low wicker chairs. “Miss Bromley, Mr.--er--Levering.” Miss Bromley,
whose sunburned face and quite frankly dirty hands gave evidence that
she had played a hard game, indeed, acknowledged the introduction by
not the faintest flicker of an eye. She was seemingly impervious to
introductions. Her bow was not to be considered as directed at him
at all. She merely happened to be bowing at that moment. Miss Paine
and Mrs. Douglass and an Englishwoman, Lady Greville, to whom he was
in turn presented, acknowledged his presence with equal enthusiasm.
The men were more cordial, “My cousin, Mr. Herton, Lord Greville, Mr.
Paine, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Valentine.”
Levering instantly assumed the genial air of the club. That air, half
ingratiating, half bold, wholly impudent. From his smiling lips to the
bob of the little blue tassels that held up his blue golf stockings, he
radiated cordiality.
They stayed out on the porch for a long time, discussing their golf
and the long cold drinks. Levering, whose ignorance of the game was
abysmal, and whose drink was finished, found himself rather out of
this. Sitting as he was in the centre of the group, it seemed as
though he were encircled by silence, while beyond there went on a very
animated chatter. And as the dusk slid over them he was conscious of
being lonelier than he had ever been in his life.
After dinner that night things picked up a bit. They led him to the
piano and settled themselves expectantly around the room waiting to be
entertained. They were. He sang them new popular songs and old songs
that he had written himself, and he “got them” as he always got them at
the Club Levering.
He gave them pathos for a finale, “When My Little Baby Boy Lisps His
Prayers at Twilight,” and as an encore, “Mamma, Sweet Mamma,” in his
rich tenor, “Please don’t hold out on m-e-e.”
Miss Bromley and Mr. Taylor were inspired to do an apache dance. Lady
Greville came over to him. “How quaint!” she said in her staccato
voice and clipped pronunciation that he found difficult to understand.
“Rippin’--teach it me, won’t you?” He made room for her on the piano
bench. “See--like this--Ma-ma--sweet Mama--” she picked out the treble
with clever trained fingers. In a moment she was playing it very
well. “You’re some kid at the piano yourself, ain’t you?” he said
enthusiastically, boldly bending his head to look in her eyes. “But you
haven’t got it quite. Don’t play it like grand opera--see. It’s got a
wow--like this--SWEET MAMA!”
From a corner Constance Corthwaite watched them with amusement. She
looked like a cat luxuriously gorging itself with cream. There was on
her face exactly that complacent, contented, and cynical expression.
* * * * *
The next morning he came down late. They had kept him at the piano a
long time the night before, and besides, not for years had he risen
early. He found the house deserted as it had been the afternoon
before. Not until the butler told him they were all out riding did he
remember dimly that something had been said about riding, that they had
suggested he come along.
Out on the porch there were Sunday papers and warm sunshine. Levering
settled himself in a comfortable, soft-cushioned wicker chair and
picking up a paper turned to the Broadway page, where he found a
flattering notice of the Club Levering activities during the past week.
Yes, it was a triumph. Such a notice! “Quaintest night club in town.”
“Levering’s songs draw the élite.”