"Nothing is."
"I got nothing but my own judgment to rely on."
"You been right three times, Harry."
"There's not as big a gamble in the world as the show business. I can't
take your savings, mother."
"Harry, if--if you don't, I'll tear it up. It's what I've worked for. I'm
too tired, Harry, to stand much. If you don't take it, I--I'm too tired,
Harry, to stand it."
"But, mother--"
"I couldn't stand it, I tell you," she said, the tears now bursting and
flowing down over her cheeks.
"Why, Millie, you mustn't cry! I 'ain't seen you cry in years. Millie! my
God! I can't get my thoughts together! Me to own a show after all these
years; me to--"
"Don't you think it means something to me, too, Harry?"
"I can't lose, Millie. Even if this country gets drawn into the war,
there's a mint of money in that show as I see it. It'll help the people.
The people of this country need to have their patriotism tickled."
"All my life, Harry, I've wanted a gold-mesh bag with a row of sapphires
and diamonds across the top--"
"I'm going to make it the kind of show that 'Dixie' was a song--"
"And a gold-colored bird-of-paradise for a black-velvet hat, all my life,
Harry--"
"With Alma Zitelle in the part--"
"Is it her picture I found in your drawer the other day, Harry, cut out
from a Sunday newspaper?"
"One and the same. I been watching her. There's a world of money in that
woman, whoever she is. She's eccentric and they make her play straight, but
if I could get hold of her--My God! Millie, I--I can't believe things!"
She rose, coming round to lay her arms across his shoulders.
"We'll be rich, maybe, Harry--"
"I've picked the winners for the other fellows every time, Mil."
"Anyhow, it's worth the gamble, Harry."
"I got a nose for what the people want. I've never been able to prove it
from a high stool, but I'll show 'em now--by God! I'll show 'em now!" He
sprang up, pulling the white table-cloth awry and folding her into his
embrace. "I'll show 'em."
She leaned from him, her two hands against his chest, head thrown back and
eyes up to him.
"We--can educate our boy, then, Harry, like--like a rich man's son."
"We ain't rich yet."
"Promise me, Harry, if we are--promise me that, Harry. It's the only
promise I ask out of it. Whatever comes, if we win or lose, our boy can
have college if he wants."
He held her close, his head up and gazing beyond her.
"With a rich daddy my boy can go to college like the best of 'em."
"Promise me that, Harry."
"I promise, Millie."
He released her then, feeling for an envelope in an inner pocket, and,
standing there above the disarrayed dinner-table, executed some rapid
figures across the back of it.
She stood for a moment regarding him, hands pressed against the sting of
her cheeks, tears flowing down over her smile. Then she took up the plate
of cloying fritters and tiptoed out, opening softly the door to a slit of
a room across the hall. In the patch of light let in by that opened door,
drawn up before a small table, face toward her ravaged with recent tears,
and lips almost quivering, her son lay in the ready kind of slumber youth
can bring to any woe. She tiptoed up beside him, placing the plate of
fritters back on a pile of books, let her hands run lightly over his hair,
kissed him on each swollen lid.
"My son! My little boy! My little boy!"
Where Broadway leaves off its roof-follies and its water-dancing, its
eighty-odd theaters and its very odd Hawaiian cabarets, upper Broadway,
widening slightly, takes up its macadamized rush through the city in
block-square apartment-houses, which rise off plate-glass foundations of
the de-luxe greengrocer shops, the not-so-green beauty-parlors, and the
dyeing-and-cleaning, automobile-supplies, and confectionery establishments
of middle New York.
In a no-children-allowed, swimming-pool, electric-laundry, roof-garden,
dogs'-playground, cold-storage apartment most recently erected on a
block-square tract of upper Broadway, belonging to and named after the
youngest scion of an ancestor whose cow-patches had turned to kingdoms, the
fifteenth layer of this gigantic honeycomb overlooked from its seventeen
outside windows the great Babylonian valley of the city, the wide blade
of the river shining and curving slightly like an Arabian dagger, and the
embankment of New Jersey's Palisades piled against the sky with the effect
of angry horizon.
Nights, viewed from one of the seventeen windows, it was as if the river
flowed under a sullen sheath which undulated to its curves. On clear days
it threw off light like parrying steel in sunshine.
Were days when, gazing out toward it, Mrs. Ross, whose heart was like a
slow ache of ever-widening area, could almost feel its laving quality and,
after the passage of a tug- or pleasure-boat, the soothing folding of the
water down over and upon itself. Often, with the sun setting pink and whole
above the Palisades, the very copper glow which was struck off the water
would beat against her own west windows, and, as if smarting under the
brilliance, tears would come, sometimes staggering and staggering down,
long after the glow was cold. With such a sunset already waned, and the
valley of unrest fifteen stories below popping out into electric signs and
the red danger-lanterns of streets constantly in the remaking, Mrs. Harry
Ross, from the corner window of her seventeen, looked down on it from under
lids that were rimmed in red.
Beneath the swirl of a gown that lay in an iridescent avalanche of sequins
about her feet, her foot, tilted to an unbelievable hypothenuse off a
cloth-of-silver heel, beat a small and twinkling tattoo, her fingers
tattooing, too, along the chair-sides.
How insidiously do the years nibble in! how pussy-footed and how cocksure
the crow's-feet! One morning, and the first gray hair, which has been
turning from the cradle, arrives. Another, the mirror shows back a
sag beneath the eyes. That sag had come now to Mrs. Ross, giving her
eye-sockets a look of unconquerable weariness. The streak of quicksilver
had come, too, but more successfully combated. The head lying back against
the brocade chair was guilty of new gleams. Brass, with a greenish alloy.
Sitting there with the look of unshed tears seeming to form a film over
her gaze, it was as if the dusk, flowing into a silence that was solemnly
shaped to receive it, folded her in, more and more obscuring her.
A door opened at the far end of the room, letting in a patch of hall light
and a dark figure coming into silhouette against it.
"You there?"
She sprang up.
"Yes, Harry--yes."
"Good Lord! sitting in the dark again!" He turned a wall key, three
pink-shaded lamps, a cluster of pink-glass grapes, and a center bowl of
alabaster flashing up the familiar spectacle of Louis Fourteenth and the
interior decorator's turpitude; a deep-pink brocade divan backed up by a
Circassian-walnut table with curly legs; a maze of smaller tables; a
marble Psyche holding out the cluster of pink grapes; a gilt grand piano,
festooned in rosebuds. Around through these Mr. Ross walked quickly,
winding his hands, rubbing them.
"Well, here I am!"
"Had your supper--dinner, Harry?"
"No. What's the idea calling me off when I got a business dinner on hand?
What's the hurry call this time? I have to get back to it."
She clasped her hands to her bare throat, swallowing with effort.
"I--Harry--I--"
"You've got to stop this kind of thing, Millie, getting nervous spells like
all the other women do the minute they get ten cents in their pocket. I
ain't got the time for it--that's all there is to it."
"I can't help it, Harry. I think I must be going crazy. I can't stop
myself. All of a sudden everything comes over me. I think I must be going
crazy."
Her voice jerked up to an off pitch, and he flung himself down on the
deep-cushioned couch, his stiff expanse of dress shirt bulging and
straining at the studs. A bit redder and stouter, too, he was constantly
rearing his chin away from the chafing edge of his collar.
"O Lord!" he said. "I guess I'm let in for some cutting-up again! Well,
fire away and have it over with! What's eating you this time?"
She was quivering so against sobs that her lips were drawn in against her
teeth by the great draught of her breathing.
"I can't stand it, Harry. I'm going crazy. I got to get relief. It's
killing me--the lonesomeness--the waiting. I can't stand no more."
He sat looking at a wreath of roses in the light carpet, lips compressed,
beating with fist into palm.
"Gad! I dunno! I give up. You're too much for me, woman."
"I can't go on this way--the suspense--can't--can't."
"I don't know what you want. God knows I give up!
Thirty-eight-hundred-dollar-a-year apartment--more spending-money in a
week than you can spend in a month. Clothes. Jewelry. Your son one of the
high-fliers at college--his automobile--your automobile. Passes to every
show in town. Gad! I can't help it if you turn it all down and sit up here
moping and making it hot for me every time I put my foot in the place. I
don't know what you want; you're one too many for me."
"I can't stand--"
"All of a sudden, out of a clear sky, she sends for me to come home. Second
time in two weeks. No wonder, with your long face, your son lives mostly
up at the college. I 'ain't got enough on my mind yet with the 'Manhattan
Revue' opening to-morrow night. You got it too good, if you want to know
it. That's what ails women when they get to cutting up like this."
She was clasping and unclasping her hands, swaying, her eyes closed.
"I wisht to God we was back in our little flat on a Hundred and
Thirty-seventh Street. We was happy then. It's your success has lost you
for me. I ought to known it, but--I--I wanted things so for you and the
boy. It's your success has lost you for me. Back there, not a supper we
didn't eat together like clockwork, not a night we didn't take a walk or--"
"There you go again! I tell you, Millie, you're going to nag me with
that once too often. Then ain't now. What you homesick for? Your
poor-as-a-church-mouse days? I been pretty patient these last two years,
feeling like a funeral every time I put my foot in the front door--"
"It ain't often you put it in."
"But, mark my word, you're going to nag me once too often!"
"O God! Harry, I try to keep in! I know how wild it makes you--how busy you
are, but--"
"A man that's give to a woman heaven on earth like I have you! A man that
started three years ago on nothing but nerve and a few dollars, and now
stands on two feet, one of the biggest spectacle-producers in the business!
By Gad! you're so darn lucky it's made a loon out of you! Get out more.
Show yourself a good time. You got the means and the time. Ain't there no
way to satisfy you?"
"I can't do things alone all the time, Harry. I--I'm funny that way. I
ain't a woman like that, a new-fangled one that can do things without her
husband. It's the nights that kill me--the nights. The--all nights sitting
here alone--waiting."
"If you 'ain't learned the demands of my business by now, I'm not going
over them again."
"Yes; but not all--"
"You ought to have some men to deal with. I'd like to see Mrs. Unger try to
dictate to him how to run his business."
"You've left me behind, Harry. I--try to keep up, but--I can't. I ain't
the woman to naturally paint my hair this way. It's my trying to keep up,
Harry, with you and--and--Edwin. These clothes--I ain't right in 'em,
Harry; I know that. That's why I can't stand it. The suspense. The waiting
up nights. I tell you I'm going crazy. Crazy with knowing I'm left behind."
"I never told you to paint up your hair like a freak."
"I thought, Harry--the color--like hers--it might make me seem younger--"
"You thought! You're always thinking."
She stood behind him now over the couch, her hand yearning toward but not
touching him.
"O God! Harry, ain't there no way I can please you no more--no way?"
"You can please me by acting like a human being and not getting me home on
wild-goose chases like this."
"But I can't stand it, Harry! The quiet. Nobody to do for. You always gone.
Edwin. The way the servants--laugh. I ain't smart enough, like some women.
I got to show it--that my heart's breaking."
"Go to matinées; go--"
"Tell me how to make myself like Alma Zitelle to you, Harry. For God's
sake, tell me!"
He looked away from her, the red rising up above the rear of his collar.
"You're going to drive me crazy desperate, too, some day, on that jealousy
stuff. I'm trying to do the right thing by you and hold myself in,
but--there's limits."
"Harry, it--ain't jealousy. I could stand anything if I only knew. If you'd
only come out with it. Not keep me sitting here night after night, when I
know you--you're with her. It's the suspense, Harry, as much as anything is
killing me. I could stand it, maybe, if I only knew. If I only knew!"
He sprang up, wheeling to face her across the couch.
"You mean that?"
"Harry!"
"Well, then, since you're the one wants it, since you're forcing me to
it--I'll end your suspense, Millie. Yes. Let me go, Millie. There's no use
trying to keep life in something that's dead. Let me go."
She stood looking at him, cheeks cased in palms, and her sagging
eye-sockets seeming to darken, even as she stared.
"You--her--"
"It happens every day, Millie. Man and woman grow apart, that's all. Your
own son is man enough to understand that. Nobody to blame. Just happens."
"Harry--you mean--"
"Aw, now, Millie, it's no easier for me to say than for you to listen. I'd
sooner cut off my right hand than put it up to you. Been putting it off all
these months. If you hadn't nagged--led up to it, I'd have stuck it out
somehow and made things miserable for both of us. It's just as well you
brought it up. I--Life's life, Millie, and what you going to do about it?"
A sound escaped her like the rising moan of a gale up a flue; then she
sat down against trembling that seized her and sent ripples along the
iridescent sequins.
"Harry--Alma Zitelle--you mean--Harry?"
"Now what's the use going into all that, Millie? What's the difference who
I mean? It happened."
"Harry, she--she's a common woman."
"We won't discuss that."
"She'll climb on you to what she wants higher up still. She won't bring you
nothing but misery, Harry. I know what I'm saying; she'll--"
"You're talking about something you know nothing about--you--"
"I do. I do. You're hypnotized, Harry. It's her looks. Her dressing like
a snake. Her hair. I can get mine fixed redder 'n hers, Harry. It takes a
little time. Mine's only started to turn, Harry, is why it don't look right
yet to you. This dress, it's from her own dressmaker. Harry--I promise you
I can make myself like--her--I promise you, Harry--"
"For God's sake, Millie, don't talk like--that! It's awful! What's those
things got to do with it? It's--awful!"
"They have, Harry. They have, only a man don't know it. She's a bad woman,
Harry--she's got you fascinated with the way she dresses and does--"
"We won't go into that."
"We will. We will. I got the right. I don't have to let you go if I don't
want to. I'm the mother of your son. I'm the wife that was good enough for
you in the days when you needed her. I--"
"You can't throw that up to me, Millie. I've squared that debt."
"She'll throw you over, Harry, when I'll stand by you to the crack of doom.
Take my word for it, Harry. O God! Harry, please take my word for it!"
She closed her streaming eyes, clutching at his sleeve in a state beyond
her control. "Won't you please? Please!"
He toed the carpet.
"I--I'd sooner be hit in the face, Millie, than--have this happen. Swear I
would! But you see for yourself we--we can't go on this way."
She sat for a moment, her stare widening above the palm clapped tightly
against her mouth.
"Then you mean, Harry, you want--you want a--a--"
"Now, now, Millie, try to keep hold of yourself. You're a sensible woman.
You know I'll do the right thing by you to any amount. You'll have the boy
till he's of age, and after that, too, just as much as you want him. He'll
live right here in the flat with you. Money's no object, the way I'm going
to fix things. Why, Millie, compared to how things are now--you're going to
be a hundred per cent, better off--without me."
She fell to rocking herself in the straight chair.
"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"
"Now, Millie, don't take it that way. I know that nine men out of ten would
call me crazy to--to let go of a woman like you. But what's the use trying
to keep life in something that's dead? It's because you're too good for me,
Millie. I know that. You know that it's not because I think any less of
you, or that I've forgot it was you who gave me my start. I'd pay you back
ten times more if I could. I'm going to settle on you and the boy so that
you're fixed for life. When he's of age, he comes into the firm half
interest. There won't even be no publicity the way I'm going to fix things.
Money talks, Millie. You'll get your decree without having to show your
face to the public."
"O God--he's got it all fixed--he's talked it all over with her! She--"
"You--you wouldn't want to force something between you and me, Millie;
that--that's just played out--"
"I done it myself. I couldn't let well enough alone. I was ambitious for
'em. I dug my own grave. I done it myself. Done it myself!"
"Now, Millie, you mustn't look at things that way. Why, you're the kind of
a little woman all you got to have is something to mother over. I'm going
to see to it that the boy is right here at home with you all the time. He
can give up those rooms at the college--you got as fine a son as there is
in the country, Millie--I'm going to see to it that he is right here at
home with you--"
"O God--my boy--my little boy--my little boy!"
"The days are over, Millie, when this kind of thing makes any difference.
If it was--the mother--it might be different, but where the father is--to
blame--it don't matter with the boy. Anyways, he's nearly of age. I tell
you, Millie, if you'll just look at this thing sensible--"
"I--Let me think, let--me--think."
Her tears had quieted now to little dry moans that came with regularity.
She was still swaying in her chair, eyes closed.
"You'll get your decree, Millie, without--."
"Don't talk," she said, a frown lowering over her closed eyes and pressing
two fingers against each temple. "Don't talk."
He walked to the window in a state of great perturbation, stood pulling
inward his lips and staring down into the now brilliantly lighted flow of
Broadway. Turned into the room with short, hasty strides, then back again.
Came to confront her.
"Aw, now, Millie--Millie--" Stood regarding her, chewing backward and
forward along his fingertips. "You--you see for yourself, Millie, what's
dead can't be made alive--now, can it?"
She nodded, acquiescing, her lips bitterly wry.
"My lawyer, Millie, he'll fix it, alimony and all, so you won't--"
"O God!"
"Suppose I just slip away easy, Millie, and let him fix up things so it'll
be easiest for us both. Send the boy down to see me to-morrow. He's
old enough and got enough sense to have seen things coming. He knows.
Suppose--I just slip out easy, Millie, for--for--both of us. Huh, Millie?"
She nodded again, her lips pressed back against outburst.
"If ever there was a good little woman, Millie, and one that deserves
better than me, it's--"
"Don't!" she cried. "Don't--don't--don't!"
"I--"
"Go--quick--now!"
He hesitated, stood regarding her there in the chair, eyes squeezed closed
like Iphigenia praying for death when exiled in Tauris.
"Millie--I--"
"Go!" she cried, the wail clinging to her lips.
He felt round for his hat, his gaze obscured behind the shining glasses,
tiptoed out round the archipelago of too much furniture, groped for the
door-handle, turning it noiselessly, and stood for the instant looking back
at her bathed in the rosy light and seated upright like a sleeping Ariadne;
opened the door to a slit that closed silently after him.
She sat thus for three hours after, the wail still uppermost on the
silence.
At ten o'clock, with a gust that swayed the heavy drapes, her son burst in
upon the room, his stride kicking the door before he opened it. Six feet in
his gymnasium shoes, and with a ripple of muscle beneath the well-fitting,
well-advertised Campus Coat for College Men, he had emerged from the three
years into man's complete estate, which, at nineteen, is that patch of
territory at youth's feet known as "the world." Gray eyed, his dark lashes
long enough to threaten to curl, the lean line of his jaw squaring after
the manner of America's fondest version of her manhood, he was already in
danger of fond illusions and fond mommas.
"Hello, mother!" he said, striding quickly through the chairs and over to
where she sat.
"Edwin!"
"Thought I'd sleep home to-night, mother."
He kissed her lightly, perking up her shoulder butterflies of green
sequins, and standing off to observe.
"Got to hand it to my little mother for quiet and sumptuous el-e-gance!
Some classy spangy-wangles!" He ran his hand against the lay of the
sequins, absorbed in a conscious kind of gaiety.
She moistened her lips, trying to smile.
"Oh, boy," she said--"Edwin!"--holding to his forearm with fingers that
tightened into it.
"Mother," he said, pulling at his coat lapels with a squaring of shoulders,
"you--you going to be a dead game little sport?"
She was looking ahead now, abstraction growing in her white face.
"Huh?"
He fell into short strides up and down the length of the couch front.
"I--I guess I might have mentioned it before, mother, but--but--oh,
hang!--when a fellow's a senior it--it's all he can do to get home once in
a while and--and--what's the use talking about a thing anyway before
it breaks right, and--well, everybody knows it's up to us college
fellows--college men--to lead the others and show our country what we're
made of now that she needs us--eh, little dressed-up mother?"
She looked up at him with the tremulous smile still trying to break
through.
"My boy can mix with the best of 'em."
"That's not what I mean, mother."
"You got to be twice to me what you been, darling--twice to me. Listen,
darling. I--Oh, my God!"
She was beating softly against his hand held in hers, her voice rising
again, and her tears.
"Listen, darling--"
"Now, mother, don't go into a spell. The war is going to help you out
on these lonesome fits, mother. Like Slawson put it to-day in Integral
Calculus Four, war reduces the personal equation to its lowest terms--it's
a matter of--."
"I need you now, Edwin--O God! how I need you! There never was a minute in
all these months since you've grown to understand how--it is between your
father and me that I needed you so much--"
"Mother, you mustn't make it harder for me to--tell you what I--"
"I think maybe something has happened to me, Edwin. I can feel myself
breathe all over--it's like I'm outside of myself somewhere--"
"It's nervousness, mother. You ought to get out more. I'm going to get you
some war-work to do, mother, that 'll make you forget yourself. Service is
what counts these days!"
"Edwin, it's come--he's leaving me--it--"
"Speaking of service, I--I guess I might have mentioned it before, mother,
but--but--when war was declared the other day, a--a bunch of us fellows
volunteered for--for the university unit to France, and--well, I'm
accepted, mother--to go. The lists went up to-night. I'm one of the twenty
picked fellows."
"France?"
"We sail for Bordeaux for ambulance service the twentieth, mother. I was
the fourth accepted with my qualifications--driving my own car and--and
physical fitness. I'm going to France, mother, among the first to do my
bit. I know a fellow got over there before we were in the war and worked
himself into the air-fleet. That's what I want, mother, air service!
They're giving us fellows credit for our senior year just the same. Bob
Vandaventer and Clarence Unger and some of the fellows like that are in the
crowd. Are you a dead-game sport, little mother, and not going to make a
fuss--"
"I--don't know. What--is--it--I--"