you handle it right, honey."
"My way is the right way for me."
"But it's a woman's way. Incorporate. Manufacture it. Get a man on the
job. Promote it!"
"Ah, that sounds familiar. The way you promoted away every cent of your
mother's fortune until the bed she died in was mortgaged. One of your
wildcat schemes again! Oh, I watched you before I lost track of you in
South America--just the way you're watching--us--now! I know the way you
squandered your mother's fortune. The rice plantation in Georgia. The
alfalfa ranch. The solid-rubber-tire venture in Atlanta. You don't get
your hands on my affairs. My way suits me!"
The tumult in her was so high and her panic so like a squirrel in the
circular frenzy of its cage that she scarcely noted the bang on the door
and the hairy voice that came through.
"All out!"
"Yes," she said, without knowing it.
"You're losing a fortune, Hattie. Shame on a fine, strapping woman like
you, black-facing herself up like this when you've hit on something with
a fortune in it if you work it properly. You ought to have more regard
for the girl. Black-face!"
"What has her--father's regard done for her? It's my black-face has kept
her like a lily!"
"Admitting all that you say about me is right. Well, I'm here eating
humble pie now. If that little girl doesn't know, bless my heart,
I'm willin' she shouldn't ever know. I'll take you out to Greenwich
to-morrow and marry you. Then what you've told her all these years is
the truth. I've just come back, that's all. We've patched up. It's done
every day. Right promoting and a few hundred dollars in that there cream
will--"
She laughed. November rain running off a broken spout. Yellow leaves
scuttling ahead of wind.
"The picture puzzle is now complete, Morton. Your whole scheme, piece
by piece. You're about as subtle as corn bread. Well, my answer to you
again is, 'Get out!'"
"All right. All right. But we'll both get out, Hattie. Come, I'm a-goin'
to call on you-all up home a little while this evenin'!"
"No. It's late. She's--"
"Come, Hattie, you know I'm a-goin' to see that girl one way or another.
If you want me to catch that fruit steamer to-morrow, if I were you I'd
let me see her my way. You know I'm not much on raisin' my voice, but if
I were you, Hattie, I wouldn't fight me."
"Morton--Morton, listen! If you'll take that fruit steamer without
trying to see her--would you? You're on your uppers. I understand. Would
a hundred--two hundred--"
"I used to light my cigarette with that much down on my rice swamps--"
"You see, Morton, she's such a little thing. A little thing with big
eyes. All her life those eyes have looked right down into me, believing
everything I ever told her. About you too, Morton. Good things. Not that
I'm ashamed of anything I ever told her. My only wrong was ignorance.
And innocence. Innocence of the kind of lesson I was to learn from you."
"Nothin' was ever righted by harping on it, Hattie."
"But I want you to understand--O God, make him understand--she's such a
sensitive little thing. And as things stand now--glad I'm her mother.
Yes, glad--black-face and all! Why, many's the time I've gone home from
the theater, too tired to take off my make-up until I got into my own
rocker with my ankles soaking in warm water. They swell so terribly
sometimes. Rheumatism, I guess. Well, many a time when I kissed her in
her sleep she's opened her eyes on me--black-face and all. Her arms up
and around me. I was there underneath the black! She knows that! And
that's what she'll always know about me, no matter what you tell her.
I'm there--her mother--underneath the black! You hear, Morton! That's
why you must let us--live--"
"My proposition is the mighty decent one of a gentleman."
"She's only a little baby, Morton. And just at that age where being
like all the other boys and girls is the whole of her little life. It's
killing--all her airiness and fads and fancies. Such a proper little
young lady. You know, the way they clip and trim them at finishing
school. Sweet-sixteen nonsense that she'll outgrow. To-night, Morton,
she's at a party. A boy's. Her first. That fine-looking yellow-haired
young fellow and his sister that bring her home every afternoon. At
their house. Gramercy Park. A fine young fellow--Phi Pi--"
"Looka here, Hattie, are you talking against time?"
"She's home asleep by now. I told her she had to be in bed by eleven.
She minds me, Morton. I wouldn't--couldn't--wake her. Morton, Morton,
she's yours as much as mine. That's God's law, no matter how much man's
law may have let you shirk your responsibility. Don't hurt your own
flesh and blood by coming back to us--now. I remember once when you cut
your hand it made you ill. Blood! Blood is warm. Red. Sacred stuff.
She's your blood, Morton. You let us alone when we needed you. Leave us
alone, now that we don't!"
"But you do, Hattie girl. That's just it. You're running things a
woman's way. Why, a man with the right promoting ideas--"
There was a fusillade of bangs on the door now, and a shout as if the
hair on the voice were rising in anger.
"All out or the doors 'll be locked on yuh! Fine doings!"
She grasped her light wrap from its hook, and her hat with its whirl of
dark veil, fitting it down with difficulty over the fizz of wig.
"Come, Morton," she said, suddenly. "I'm ready. You're right, now or
never."
"Your face!"
"No time now. Later--at home! She'll know that I'm there--under the
black!"
"So do I, Hattie. That's why I--"
"I'm not one of the ready-made heroines you read about. That's not my
idea of sacrifice! I'd let my child hang her head of my shame sooner
than stand up and marry you to save her from it. Marcia wouldn't want me
to! She's got your face--but my character! She'll fight! She'll glory
that I had the courage to let you tell her the--truth! Yes, she will,"
she cried, her voice pleading for the truth of what her words exclaimed.
"She'll glory in having saved me--from you! You can come! Now, too,
while I have the strength that loathing you can give me. I don't want
you skulking about. I don't want you hanging over my head--or hers! You
can tell her to-night--but in my presence! Come!"
"Yes, sir," he repeated, doggedly and still more doggedly. "Yes, siree!"
Following her, trying to be grim, but his lips too soft to click.
"Yes--sir!"
They drove up silently through a lusterless midnight with a threat of
rain in it, hitting loosely against each other in a shiver-my-timbers
taxicab. Her pallor showing through the brown of her face did something
horrid to her.
It was as if the skull of her, set in torment, were looking through a
transparent black mask, but, because there were not lips, forced to
grin.
And yet, do you know that while she rode with him Hattie's heart was
high? So high that when she left him finally, seated in her little
lamplit living room, it was he whose unease began to develop.
"I--If she's asleep, Hattie--"
Her head looked so sure. Thrust back and sunk a little between the
shoulders.
"If she's asleep, I'll wake her. It's better this way. I'm glad, now. I
want her to see me save myself. She would want me to. You banked on mock
heroics from me, Morton. You lost."
Marcia was asleep, in her narrow, pretty bed with little bowknots
painted on the pale wood. About the room all the tired and happy muss of
after-the-party. A white-taffeta dress with a whisper of real lace at
the neck, almost stiffishly seated, as if with Marcia's trimness, on
a chair. A steam of white tulle on the dressing table. A buttonhole
gardenia in a tumbler of water. One long white-kid glove on the table
beside the night light. A naked cherub in a high hat, holding a pink
umbrella for the lamp shade.
"Dear me! Dear me!" screamed Hattie to herself, fighting to keep her
mind on the plane of casual things. "She's lost a glove again. Dear me!
Dear me! I hope it's a left one to match up with the right one she saved
from the last pair. Dear me!"
She picked up a white film of stocking, turning and exploring with
spread fingers in the foot part for holes. There was one! Marcia's big
toe had danced right through. "Dear me!"
Marcia sleeping. Very quietly and very deeply. She slept like that.
Whitely and straightly and with the covers scarcely raised for the ridge
of her slim body.
Sometimes Marcia asleep could frighten Hattie. There was something about
her white stilliness. Lilies are too fair and so must live briefly.
That thought could clutch so that she would kiss Marcia awake. Kiss her
soundly because Marcia's sleep could be so terrifyingly deep.
"Marcia," said Hattie, and stood over her bed. Then again, "Mar-cia!" On
more voice than she thought her dry throat could yield her.
There was the merest flip of black on the lacy bosom of Marcia's
nightgown, and Hattie leaned down to fleck it. No. It was a pin--a small
black-enameled pin edged in pearls. Automatically Hattie knew.
"Pi Phi!"
"Marcia," cried Hattie, and shook her a little. She hated so to waken
her. Always had. Especially for school on rainy days. Sometimes didn't.
Couldn't. Marcia came up out of sleep so reluctantly. A little dazed. A
little secretive. As if a white bull in a dream had galloped off with
her like Persephone's.
Only Hattie did not know of Persephone. She only knew that Marcia slept
beautifully and almost breathlessly. Sweet and low. It seemed silly,
sleeping beautifully. But just the same, Marcia did.
Then Hattie, not faltering, mind you, waited. It was better that Marcia
should know. Now, too, while her heart was so high.
Sometimes it took as many as three kisses to awaken Marcia. Hattie bent
for the first one, a sound one on the tip of her lip.
"Marcia!" she cried. "Marcy, wake up!" and drew back.
Something had happened! Darkly. A smudge the size of a quarter and
the color of Hattie's guaranteed-not-to-fade cheek, lay incredibly on
Marcia's whiteness.
Hattie had smudged Marcia! _Hattie Had Smudged Marcia!_
There it lay on her beautiful, helpless whiteness. Hattie's smudge.
* * * * *
It is doubtful, from the way he waited with his soft hat dangling
from soft fingers, if Morton had ever really expected anything else.
Momentary unease gone, he was quiet and Southern and even indolent about
it.
"We'll go to Greenwich first thing in the morning and be married," he
said.
"Sh-h-h!" she whispered to his quietness. "Don't wake Marcia."
"Hattie--" he said, and started to touch her.
"Don't!" she sort of cried under her whisper, but not without noting
that his hand was ready enough to withdraw. "Please--go--now--"
"To-morrow at the station, then. Eleven. There's a train every hour for
Greenwich."
He was all tan to her now, standing there like a blur.
"Yes, Morton, I'll be there. If--please--you'll go now."
"Of course," he said. "Late. Only I--Well, paying the taxi--strapped
me--temporarily. A ten spot--old Hat--would help."
She gave him her purse, a tiny leather one with a patent clasp. Somehow
her fingers were not flexible enough to open it.
His were.
There were a few hours of darkness left, and she sat them out, exactly
as he had left her, on the piano stool, looking at the silence.
Toward morning quite an equinoctial storm swept the city, banging
shutters and signs, and a steeple on 122d Street was struck by
lightning.
And so it was that Hattie's wedding day came up like thunder.
GUILTY
To the swift hiss of rain down soot-greasy window panes and through a
medley of the smells of steam off wet overcoats and a pale stench
of fish, a judge turned rather tired Friday-afternoon eyes upon the
prisoner at the bar, a smallish man in a decent-enough salt-and-pepper
suit and more salt than pepper in his hair and mustache.
"You have heard the charge against you," intoned the judge in the holy
and righteous key of justice about to be administered. "Do you plead
guilty or not guilty?"
"I--I plead guilty of not having told her facts that would have helped
her to struggle against the--the thing--her inheritance."
"You must answer the Court directly. Do you--"
"You see, Your Honor--my little girl--so little--my promise. Yes, yes,
I--I plead guilty of keeping her in ignorance of what she should have
known, but you see, Your Honor, my little gi--"
"Order! Answer to the point. Do you," began the judge again, "plead
guilty or not guilty?" his tongue chiming the repetition into the
waiting silence like a clapper into a bell.
The prisoner at the bar thumbed his derby hat after the immemorial
dry-fingered fashion of the hunted meek, his mouth like an open wound
puckering to close.
"Guilty or not guilty, my man? Out with it."
Actually it was not more than a minute or two before the prisoner found
reply, but it was long enough for his tortured eye to flash inward and
backward with terrible focus....
* * * * *
On its long cross-town block, Mrs. Plush's boarding house repeated
itself no less than thirty-odd times. Every front hall of them smelled
like cold boiled potato, and the gilt chair in the parlor like banana.
At dinner hour thirty-odd basement dining rooms reverberated, not
uncheerfully, to the ironstone clatter of the canary-bird bathtub of
succotash, the three stewed prunes, or the redolent boiled potato, and
on Saturday mornings, almost to the thirty-odd of them, wasp-waisted,
oiled-haired young negro girls in white-cotton stockings and cut-down
high shoes enormously and rather horribly run down of heel, tilted pints
of water over steep stone stoops and scratched at the trickle with old
broom runts.
If Mrs. Plush's house broke rank at all, it did so by praiseworthy
omission. In that row of the fly-by-night and the van-by-day, the moving
or the express wagon seldom backed up before No. 28, except immediately
preceding a wedding or following a funeral. And never, in twenty-two
years of respectable tenancy, had the furtive lodger oozed, under
darkness, through the Plush front door by night, or a huddle of
sidewalk trunks and trappings staged the drab domestic tragedy of the
dispossessed.
The Kellers (second-story back) had eaten their satisfied way through
fourteen years of the breakfasts of apple sauce or cereal; choice of ham
and eggs any style or country sausage and buckwheat cakes.
Jeanette Peopping, born in the back parlor, was married out of the
front.
On the night that marked the seventeenth anniversary of the Dangs into
the third-floor alcove room there was frozen pudding with hot fudge
sauce for dessert, and a red-paper bell ringing silently from the
dining-room chandelier.
For the eight years of their placid connubiality Mr. and Mrs. Henry Jett
had occupied the second-story front.
Stability, that was the word. Why, Mrs. Plush had dealt with her corner
butcher for so long that on crowded Saturday mornings it was her custom
to step without challenge into the icy zone of the huge refrigerator,
herself pinching and tearing back the cold-storage-bitten wings of
fowls, weighing them with a fidelity to the ounce, except for a few
extra giblets (Mr. Keller loved them), hers, anyhow, most of the time,
for the asking.
Even the nearest drug store, wary of that row of the transient
hat-on-the-peg, off-the-peg, would deliver to No. 28 a mustard plaster
or a deck of cards and charge without question.
To the Jett Fish Company, "Steamers, Hotels, and Restaurants
Supplied--If It Swims We Have It," Mrs. Plush paid her bill quarterly
only, then Mr. Jett deducting the sum delicately from his board.
So it may be seen that Mrs. Plush's boarding house offered scanty palate
to the dauber in local color.
On each of the three floors was a bathroom, spotlessly clean, with a
neat hand-lettered sign over each tin tub:
DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU
PLEASE WASH OUT THE TUB AFTER YOU
Upon the outstanding occasion of the fly in the soup and Mr. Keller's
subsequent deathly illness, the regrettable immersion had been directly
traceable, not to the kitchen, but to the dining-room ceiling. It was
November, a season of heavy dipterous mortality. Besides, Mrs. Peopping
had seen it fall.
Nor entered here the dirge of the soggy towel; Mrs. Plush placed fluffy
stacks of them outside each door each morning. Nor groggy coffee; Mrs.
Plush was famous for hers. Drip coffee, boiled up to an angry sea and
half an eggshell dropped in like a fairy barque, to settle it.
The Jetts, with whom we have really to do, drank two cups apiece at
breakfast. Mrs. Jett, to the slight aid and abetment of one of her two
rolls, stopped right there; Mr. Jett plunging on into choice-of--
The second roll Mrs. Jett usually carried away with her from the table.
Along about ten o'clock she was apt to feel faint rather than hungry.
"Gone," she called it. "Feeling a little gone."
Not that there was a suggestion of frailty about Mrs. Jett. Anything but
that. On the contrary, in all the eight years in the boarding house,
she held the clean record of not a day in bed, and although her history
previous to that time showed as many as fifteen hours a day on duty in
the little fancy-goods store of her own proprietorship, those years
showed her guilty of only two incapacitated days, and then because she
ran an embroidery needle under her finger nail and suffered a slight
infection.
Yet there was something about Emma Jett--eight years of married life
had not dissipated it--that was not eupeptic; something of the sear and
yellow leaf of perpetual spinsterhood. She was a wintry little body
whose wide marriage band always hung loosely on her finger with an air
of not belonging; wore an invariable knitted shawl iced with beads
across her round shoulders, and frizzed her graying bangs, which,
although fruit of her scalp, had a set-on look. Even the softness to her
kind gray eyes was cozy rather than warm.
She could look out tabbily from above a lap of handiwork, but in her
boudoir wrapper of gray flannelette scalloped in black she was scrawny,
almost rangy, like a horse whose ribs show.
"I can no more imagine those two courting," Mrs. Keller, a proud twin
herself and proud mother of twins, remarked one afternoon to a euchre
group. "They must have sat company by correspondence. Why, they won't
even kiss when he comes home if there's anybody in the room!"
"They kiss, all right," volunteered Mrs. Dang of the bay-window alcove
room, "and she waves him good-by every morning clear down the block."
"You can't tell about anybody nowadays," vouchsafed some one,
tremendously.
But in the end the consensus of opinion, unanimous to the vote, was:
Lovely woman, Mrs. Jett.
Nice couple; so unassuming. The goodness looks out of her face; and so
reserved!
But it was this aura of reserve that kept Mrs. Jett, not without a bit
of secret heartache about it, as remote from the little world about her
as the yolk of an egg is remote from the white. Surrounded, yet no part
of those surroundings. No osmosis took place.
Almost daily, in some one or another's room, over Honiton lace or the
making of steel-bead chatelaine bags, then so much in vogue, those
immediate, plushy-voiced gatherings of the members of the plain gold
circle took place. Delicious hours of confidence, confab, and the
exchanges of the connubially loquacious.
The supreme _lèse majesté_ of the married woman who wears her state of
wedlock like a crown of blessed thorns; bleeds ecstatically and swaps
afternoon-long intimacies, made nasty by the plush in her voice, with
her sisters of the matrimonial dynasty.
Mrs. Jett was also bidden, by her divine right, to those conclaves of
the wives, and faithfully she attended, but on the rim, as it were.
Bitterly silent she sat to the swap of:
"That's nothing. After Jeanette was born my hair began to fall out just
as if I had had typhoid"; or, "Both of mine, I am proud to say, were
bottle babies"; and once, as she listened, her heart might have been a
persimmon, puckering: "The idea for a woman of forty-five to have her
first! It's not fair to the child."
They could not, of course, articulate it, but the fact of the matter was
not alone that Mrs. Jett was childless (so was Mrs. Dang, who somehow
belonged), it was that they sensed, with all the antennae of their busy
little intuitions, the ascetic odor of spinsterhood which clung to Mrs.
Jett. She was a little "too nice." Would flush at some of the innuendoes
of the _contes intimes_, tales of no luster and dulled by soot, but in
spite of an inner shrinkage would loop up her mouth to smile, because
not to do so was to linger even more remotely outside the privileged rim
of the wedding band.
Evenings, after these gatherings, Mrs. Jett was invariably even a bit
gentler than her wont in her greetings to Mr. Jett.
Of course, they kissed upon his arrival home, comment to the contrary
notwithstanding, in a taken-for-granted fashion, perhaps, but there was
something sweet about their utter unexcitement; and had the afternoon
session twisted her heart more than usual, Mrs. Jett was apt to place a
second kiss lightly upon the black and ever so slightly white mustache,
or lay her cheek momentarily to his, as if to atone by thus yearning
over him for the one aching and silent void between them.
But in the main Henry Jett was a contented and happy man.
His wife, whom he had met at a church social and wooed in the front of
the embroidery and fancy-goods store, fitted him like the proverbial
glove--a suede one. In the eight years since, his fish business had
almost doubled, and his expenses, if anything, decreased, because more
and more it became pleasanter to join in the evening game of no-stakes
euchre down in the front parlor or to remain quietly upstairs, a
gas lamp on the table between them, Mr. Jett in a dressing gown of
hand-embroidered Persian design and a newspaper which he read from first
to last; Mrs. Jett at her tranquil process of fine needlework.
Their room abounded in specimens of it. Centerpieces of rose design.
Mounds of cushions stamped in bulldog's head and pipe and appropriately
etched in colored floss. A poker hand, upheld by realistic five fingers
embroidered to the life, and the cuff button denoted by a blue-glass
jewel. Across their bed, making it a dais of incongruous splendor, was
flung a great counterpane of embroidered linen, in design as narrative
as a battle-surging tapestry and every thread in it woven out of these
long, quiet evenings by the lamp side.
He was exceedingly proud of her cunning with a needle, so fine that its
stab through the cloth was too slight to be seen, and would lose no
occasion to show off the many evidences of her delicate workmanship that
were everywhere about the room.
"It's like being able to create a book or a piece of music, Em, to say
all that on a piece of cloth with nothing but a needle."
"It's a good thing I am able to create something, Henry," placing her
thimbled hand on his shoulder and smiling down. She was slightly the
taller.
It was remarkable how quick and how tender his intuitions could be.
An innuendo from her, faint as the brush of a wing, and he would
immediately cluck with his tongue and throw out quite a bravado of
chest.
"You're all right, Em. You suit me."
"And you suit me, Henry," stroking his hand.
This he withdrew. It was apt to smell of fish and he thought that once
or twice he had noticed her draw back from it, and, anyway, he was
exceedingly delicate about the cling of the rottenly pungent fish odor
of his workadays.
Not that he minded personally. He had long ago ceased to have any
consciousness of the vapors that poured from the bins and the incoming
catches into his little partitioned-off office. But occasionally he
noticed that in street cars noses would begin to crinkle around him,
and every once in a while, even in a crowded conveyance he would find
himself the center of a little oasis of vacant seats which he had
created around himself.
Immediately upon his arrival home, although his hands seldom touched the
fish, he would wash them in a solution of warm water and carbolic
acid, and most of the time he changed his suit before dinner, from a
salt-and-pepper to a pepper-and-salt, the only sartorial variety in
which he ever indulged.
His wife was invariably touched by this little nicety of his, and
sometimes bravely forced his hand to her cheek to prove her lack of
repugnance.
Boarding-house lore had it correctly. They were an exceedingly nice
couple, the Jetts.