“Eighty-first street—let ’em out, please,” yelled the shepherd in blue.
A flock of citizen sheep scrambled out and another flock scrambled
aboard. Ding-ding! The cattle cars of the Manhattan Elevated rattled
away, and John Perkins drifted down the stairway of the station with
the released flock.
John walked slowly toward his flat. Slowly, because in the lexicon of
his daily life there was no such word as “perhaps.” There are no
surprises awaiting a man who has been married two years and lives in a
flat. As he walked John Perkins prophesied to himself with gloomy and
downtrodden cynicism the foregone conclusions of the monotonous day.
Katy would meet him at the door with a kiss flavored with cold cream
and butter-scotch. He would remove his coat, sit upon a macadamized
lounge and read, in the evening paper, of Russians and Japs slaughtered
by the deadly linotype. For dinner there would be pot roast, a salad
flavored with a dressing warranted not to crack or injure the leather,
stewed rhubarb and the bottle of strawberry marmalade blushing at the
certificate of chemical purity on its label. After dinner Katy would
show him the new patch in her crazy quilt that the iceman had cut for
her off the end of his four-in-hand. At half-past seven they would
spread newspapers over the furniture to catch the pieces of plastering
that fell when the fat man in the flat overhead began to take his
physical culture exercises. Exactly at eight Hickey & Mooney, of the
vaudeville team (unbooked) in the flat across the hall, would yield to
the gentle influence of delirium tremens and begin to overturn chairs
under the delusion that Hammerstein was pursuing them with a
five-hundred-dollar-a-week contract. Then the gent at the window across
the air-shaft would get out his flute; the nightly gas leak would steal
forth to frolic in the highways; the dumbwaiter would slip off its
trolley; the janitor would drive Mrs. Zanowitski’s five children once
more across the Yalu, the lady with the champagne shoes and the Skye
terrier would trip downstairs and paste her Thursday name over her bell
and letter-box—and the evening routine of the Frogmore flats would be
under way.
John Perkins knew these things would happen. And he knew that at a
quarter past eight he would summon his nerve and reach for his hat, and
that his wife would deliver this speech in a querulous tone:
“Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?”
“Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’s,” he would answer, “and play a game
or two of pool with the fellows.”
Of late such had been John Perkins’s habit. At ten or eleven he would
return. Sometimes Katy would be asleep; sometimes waiting up, ready to
melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the
wrought steel chains of matrimony. For these things Cupid will have to
answer when he stands at the bar of justice with his victims from the
Frogmore flats.
To-night John Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the
commonplace when he reached his door. No Katy was there with her
affectionate, confectionate kiss. The three rooms seemed in portentous
disorder. All about lay her things in confusion. Shoes in the middle of
the floor, curling tongs, hair bows, kimonos, powder box, jumbled
together on dresser and chairs—this was not Katy’s way. With a sinking
heart John saw the comb with a curling cloud of her brown hair among
its teeth. Some unusual hurry and perturbation must have possessed her,
for she always carefully placed these combings in the little blue vase
on the mantel to be some day formed into the coveted feminine “rat.”
Hanging conspicuously to the gas jet by a string was a folded paper.
John seized it. It was a note from his wife running thus:
“Dear John: I just had a telegram saying mother is very sick. I am
going to take the 4.30 train. Brother Sam is going to meet me at the
depot there. There is cold mutton in the ice box. I hope it isn’t her
quinzy again. Pay the milkman 50 cents. She had it bad last spring.
Don’t forget to write to the company about the gas meter, and your good
socks are in the top drawer. I will write to-morrow.
Hastily,
KATY.”
Never during their two years of matrimony had he and Katy been
separated for a night. John read the note over and over in a
dumbfounded way. Here was a break in a routine that had never varied,
and it left him dazed.
There on the back of a chair hung, pathetically empty and formless, the
red wrapper with black dots that she always wore while getting the
meals. Her week-day clothes had been tossed here and there in her
haste. A little paper bag of her favorite butter-scotch lay with its
string yet unwound. A daily paper sprawled on the floor, gaping
rectangularly where a railroad time-table had been clipped from it.
Everything in the room spoke of a loss, of an essence gone, of its soul
and life departed. John Perkins stood among the dead remains with a
queer feeling of desolation in his heart.
He began to set the rooms tidy as well as he could. When he touched her
clothes a thrill of something like terror went through him. He had
never thought what existence would be without Katy. She had become so
thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he
breathed—necessary but scarcely noticed. Now, without warning, she was
gone, vanished, as completely absent as if she had never existed. Of
course it would be only for a few days, or at most a week or two, but
it seemed to him as if the very hand of death had pointed a finger at
his secure and uneventful home.
John dragged the cold mutton from the ice-box, made coffee and sat down
to a lonely meal face to face with the strawberry marmalade’s shameless
certificate of purity. Bright among withdrawn blessings now appeared to
him the ghosts of pot roasts and the salad with tan polish dressing.
His home was dismantled. A quinzied mother-in-law had knocked his lares
and penates sky-high. After his solitary meal John sat at a front
window.
He did not care to smoke. Outside the city roared to him to come join
in its dance of folly and pleasure. The night was his. He might go
forth unquestioned and thrum the strings of jollity as free as any gay
bachelor there. He might carouse and wander and have his fling until
dawn if he liked; and there would be no wrathful Katy waiting for him,
bearing the chalice that held the dregs of his joy. He might play pool
at McCloskey’s with his roistering friends until Aurora dimmed the
electric bulbs if he chose. The hymeneal strings that had curbed him
always when the Frogmore flats had palled upon him were loosened. Katy
was gone.
John Perkins was not accustomed to analyzing his emotions. But as he
sat in his Katy-bereft 10×12 parlor he hit unerringly upon the keynote
of his discomfort. He knew now that Katy was necessary to his
happiness. His feeling for her, lulled into unconsciousness by the dull
round of domesticity, had been sharply stirred by the loss of her
presence. Has it not been dinned into us by proverb and sermon and
fable that we never prize the music till the sweet-voiced bird has
flown—or in other no less florid and true utterances?
“I’m a double-dyed dub,” mused John Perkins, “the way I’ve been
treating Katy. Off every night playing pool and bumming with the boys
instead of staying home with her. The poor girl here all alone with
nothing to amuse her, and me acting that way! John Perkins, you’re the
worst kind of a shine. I’m going to make it up for the little girl.
I’ll take her out and let her see some amusement. And I’ll cut out the
McCloskey gang right from this minute.”
Yes, there was the city roaring outside for John Perkins to come dance
in the train of Momus. And at McCloskey’s the boys were knocking the
balls idly into the pockets against the hour for the nightly game. But
no primrose way nor clicking cue could woo the remorseful soul of
Perkins the bereft. The thing that was his, lightly held and half
scorned, had been taken away from him, and he wanted it. Backward to a
certain man named Adam, whom the cherubim bounced from the orchard,
could Perkins, the remorseful, trace his descent.
Near the right hand of John Perkins stood a chair. On the back of it
stood Katy’s blue shirtwaist. It still retained something of her
contour. Midway of the sleeves were fine, individual wrinkles made by
the movements of her arms in working for his comfort and pleasure. A
delicate but impelling odor of bluebells came from it. John took it and
looked long and soberly at the unresponsive grenadine. Katy had never
been unresponsive. Tears:—yes, tears—came into John Perkins’s eyes.
When she came back things would be different. He would make up for all
his neglect. What was life without her?
The door opened. Katy walked in carrying a little hand satchel. John
stared at her stupidly.
“My! I’m glad to get back,” said Katy. “Ma wasn’t sick to amount to
anything. Sam was at the depot, and said she just had a little spell,
and got all right soon after they telegraphed. So I took the next train
back. I’m just dying for a cup of coffee.”
Nobody heard the click and rattle of the cog-wheels as the third-floor
front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of
Things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and
the wheels revolve in their old orbit.
John Perkins looked at the clock. It was 8.15. He reached for his hat
and walked to the door.
“Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?” asked Katy,
in a querulous tone.
“Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’s,” said John, “and play a game or
two of pool with the fellows.”