democracy. Does a little mother with something like that to bank on have
time to be miserable over family rows? You're going to knit while I'm gone.
The busiest little mother a fellow ever had, doing her bit for her country!
There's signs up all over the girls' campus: 'A million soldiers "out
there" are needing wool jackets and chest-protectors. How many will you
take care of?' You're going to be the busiest little mother a fellow ever
had. You're going to stop making a fuss over me and begin to make a fuss
over your country. We're going into service, mother!"
"Don't leave me, Edwin! Baby darling, don't leave me! I'm alone! I'm
afraid."
"There, there, little mother," he said, patting at her and blinking,
"I--Why--why, there's men come back from every war, and plenty of them.
Good Lord! just because a fellow goes to the front, he--"
"I got nothing left. Everything I've worked for has slipped through my life
like sand through a sieve. My hands are empty. I've lost your father on
the success I slaved for. I'm losing my boy on the fine ideas and college
education I've slaved for. I--Don't leave me, Edwin. I'm afraid--Don't--"
"Mother--I--Don't be cut up about it. I--"
"Why should I give to this war? I ain't a fine woman with the fine ideas
you learn at college. I ask so little of life--just some one who needs me,
some one to do for. I 'ain't got any fine ideas about a son at war. Why
should I give to what they're fighting for on the other side of the ocean?
Don't ask me to give up my boy to what they're fighting for in a country
I've never seen--my little boy I raised--my all I've got--my life! No! No!"
"It's the women like you, mother--with guts--with grit--that send their
sons to war."
"I 'ain't got grit!"
"You're going to have your hands so full, little mother, taking care of the
Army and Navy, keeping their feet dry and their chests warm, that before
you know it you'll be down at the pier some fine day watching us fellows
come home from victory."
"No--no--no!"
"You're going to coddle the whole fighting front, making 'em sweaters and
aviation sets out of a whole ton of wool I'm going to lay in the house for
you. Time's going to fly for my little mother."
"I'll kill myself first!"
"You wouldn't have me a quitter, little mother. You wouldn't have the other
fellows in my crowd at college go out and do what I haven't got the guts to
do. You want me to hold up my head with the best of 'em."
"I don't want nothing but my boy! I--"
"Us college men got to be the first to show that the fighting backbone of
the country is where it belongs. If us fellows with education don't set the
example, what can we expect from the other fellows? Don't ask me to be a
quitter, mother. I couldn't! I wouldn't! My country needs us, mother--you
and me--"
"Edwin! Edwin!"
"Attention, little mother--stand!"
She lay back her head, laughing, crying, sobbing, choking.
"O God--take him and bring him back--to me!"
On a day when sky and water were so identically blue that they met in
perfect horizon, the S. S. _Rowena_, sleek-flanked, mounted fore and aft
with a pair of black guns that lifted snouts slightly to the impeccable
blue, slipped quietly, and without even a newspaper sailing-announcement
into a frivolous midstream that kicked up little lace edged wavelets,
undulating flounces of them. A blur of faces rose above deck-rails, faces
that, looking back, receded finally. The last flag and the last kerchief
became vapor. Against the pier-edge, frantically, even perilously forward,
her small flag thrust desperately beyond the rail, Mrs. Ross, who had
lost a saving sense of time and place, leaned after that ship receding in
majesty, long after it had curved from view.
The crowd, not a dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips
whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly,
thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city.
Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing
out and quivering for the smell of war. Finally, he too, turned back
reluctantly.
Now only Mrs. Ross. An hour she stood there, a solitary figure at the rail,
holding to her large black hat, her skirts whipped to her body and snapping
forward in the breeze. The sun struck off points from the water, animating
it with a jewel-dance. It found out in a flash the diamond-and-sapphire top
to her gold-mesh hand-bag, hoppity-skippiting from facet to facet.
"My boy--my little boy!"
A pair of dock-hands, wiping their hands on cotton-waste, came after a
while to the door of the pier-house to observe and comment. Conscious of
that observation, she moved then through the great dank sheds in and among
the bales and boxes, down a flight of stairs and out to the cobbled
street. Her motor-car, the last at the entrance, stood off at a slant,
the chauffeur lopping slightly and dozing, his face scarcely above the
steering-wheel. She passed him with unnecessary stealth, her heels
occasionally wedging between the cobbles and jerking her up. Two hours she
walked thus, invariably next to the water's edge or in the first street
running parallel to it. Truck-drivers gazed at and sang after her. Deck-
and dock-hands, stretched out in the first sun of spring, opened their eyes
to her passing, often staring after her under lazy lids. Behind a drawn
veil her lips were moving, but inaudibly now. Motor-trucks, blocks of them,
painted the gray of war, stood waiting shipment, engines ready to throb
into no telling what mire. Once a van of knitted stuffs, always the gray,
corded and bound into bales, rumbled by, close enough to graze and send her
stumbling back. She stood for a moment watching it lumber up alongside a
dock.
It was dusk when she emerged from the rather sinister end of West Street
into Battery Park, receding in a gracious new-green curve from the water.
Tier after tier of lights had begun to prick out in the back-drop of
skyscraping office-buildings. The little park, after the six-o'clock
stampede, settled back into a sort of lamplit quiet, dark figures, the
dregs of a city day, here and there on its benches. The back-drop of
office-lights began to blink out then, all except the tallest tower in the
world, rising in the glory of its own spotlight into a rococo pinnacle of
man's accomplishment.
Strolling the edge of that park so close to the water that she could hear
it seethe in the receding, a policeman finally took to following Mrs. Ross,
his measured tread behind hers, his night-stick rapping out every so often.
She found out a bench then, and never out of his view, sat looking out
across the infinitude of blackness to where the bay so casually meets the
sea. Night dampness had sent her shivering, the plumage of her hat, the
ferny feathers of the bird-of-paradise, drooping almost grotesquely over
the brim.
A small detachment of Boy Scouts, sturdy with an enormous sense of uniform
and valor, marched through the asphalt alleys of the park with trained,
small-footed, regimental precision--small boys with clean, lifted faces. A
fife and drum came up the road.
Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!
High over the water a light had come out--Liberty's high-flung torch.
Watching it, and quickened by the fife and drum to an erect sitting
posture, Mrs. Ross slid forward on her bench, lips opening. The policeman
standing off, rapped twice, and when she rose, almost running toward the
lights of the Elevated station, followed.
Within her apartment on upper Broadway, not even a hall light burned
when she let herself in with her key. At the remote end of the aisle of
blackness a slit of yellow showed beneath the door, behind it the babble of
servants' voices.
She entered with a stealth that was well under cover of those voices,
groping into the first door at her right, feeling round for the wall key,
switching the old rose-and-gold room into immediate light. Stood for a
moment, her plumage drooping damply to her shoulders, blue foulard dress
snagged in two places, her gold mesh bag with the sapphire-and-diamond top
hanging low from the crook of her little finger. A clock ticked with almost
an echo into the rather vast silence.
She entered finally, sidling in among the chairs.
A great mound of gray yarn, uncut skein after uncut skein of it, rose off
the brocade divan, more of them piled in systematic pyramids on three
chairs. She dropped at sight of it to the floor beside the couch, burying
her face in its fluff, grasping it in handfuls, writhing into it. Surges of
merciful sobs came sweeping through and through her.
After a while, with a pair of long amber-colored needles, she fell to
knitting with a fast, even furious ambidexterity, her mouth pursing up with
a driving intensity, her boring gaze so concentrated on the thing in hand
that her eyes seemed to cross.
Dawn broke upon her there, her hat still cockily awry, tears dried in
a vitrified gleaming down her cheeks. Beneath her flying fingers, a
sleeveless waistcoat was taking shape, a soldier's inner jacket against the
dam of trenches. At sunup it lay completed, spread out as if the first of
a pile. The first noises of the city began to rise remotely. A bell pealed
off somewhere. Day began to raise its conglomerate voice. On her knees
beside the couch there, the second waistcoat was already taking shape
beneath the cocksure needles.
The old pinkly moist look had come out in her face.
One million boys "out there" were needing chest-protectors!
III
ICE-WATER, PL--!
When the two sides of every story are told, Henry VIII. may establish an
alibi or two, Shylock and the public-school system meet over and melt that
too, too solid pound of flesh, and Xantippe, herself the sturdier man than
Socrates, give ready, lie to what is called the shrew in her. Landladies,
whole black-bombazine generations of them--oh, so long unheard!--may
rise in one Indictment of the Boarder: The scarred bureau-front and
match-scratched wall-paper; the empty trunk nailed to the floor in security
for the unpaid bill; cigarette-burnt sheets and the terror of sudden fire;
the silent newcomer in the third floor back hustled out one night in
handcuffs; the day-long sobs of the blond girl so suddenly terrified of
life-about-to-be and wringing her ringless hands in the fourth-floor
hall-room; the smell of escaping gas and the tightly packed keyhole; the
unsuspected flutes that lurk in boarders' trunks; towels, that querulous
and endless paean of the lodger; the high cost of liver and dried peaches,
of canned corn and round steak!
Tired bombazine procession, wrapped in the greasy odors of years of
carpet-sweeping and emptying slops, airing the gassy slit of room after the
coroner; and padding from floor to floor on a mission of towels and towels
and towels!
Sometimes climbing from floor to floor, a still warm supply of them looped
over one arm, Mrs. Kaufman, who wore bombazine, but unspotted and with
crisp net frills at the throat, and upon whose soft-looking face the years
had written their chirography in invisible ink, would sit suddenly, there
in the narrow gloom of her halls, head against the balustrade. Oftener than
not the Katz boy from the third floor front would come lickety-clapping
down the stairs and past her, jumping the last four steps of each flight.
"Irving, quit your noise in the hall."
"Aw!"
"Ain't you ashamed, a big boy like you, and Mrs. Suss with her neuralgia?"
"Aw!"--the slam of a door clipping off this insolence.
After a while she would resume her climb.
And yet in Mrs. Kaufman's private boarding-house in West Eighty-ninth
Street, one of a breastwork of brownstone fronts, lined up stoop for stoop,
story for story, and ash-can for ash-can, there were few enough greasy
odors except upon the weekly occasion of Monday's boiled dinner; and,
whatever the status of liver and dried peaches, canned corn and round
steak, her menus remained static--so static that in the gas-lighted
basement dining-room and at a remote end of the long, well-surrounded table
Mrs. Katz, with her napkin tucked well under her third chin, turned _sotto_
from the protruding husband at her right to her left neighbor, shielding
her remark with her hand.
"Am I right, Mrs. Finshriber? I just said to my husband in the five years
we been here she should just give us once a change from Friday-night lamb
and noodles."
"Say, you should complain yet! With me it's six and a half years day after
to-morrow, Easter Day, since I asked myself that question first."
"Even my Irving says to me to-night up in the room; jumping up and down on
the hearth like he had four legs--"
"I heard him, Mrs. Katz, on my ceiling like he had eight legs."
"'Mamma,' he says, 'guess why I feel like saying "Baa."'"
"Saying what?"
"Sheep talk, Mrs. Finshriber. B-a-a, like a sheep goes."
"Oh!"
"'Cause I got so many Friday nights' lamb in me, mamma,' he said. Quick
like a flash that child is."
Mrs. Finshriber dipped her head and her glance, all her drooping features
pulled even farther down at their corners. "I ain't the one to complain,
Mrs. Katz, and I always say, when you come right down to it maybe Mrs.
Kaufman's house is as good as the next one, but--"
"I wish, though, Mrs. Finshriber, you would hear what Mrs. Spritz says at
her boarding-house they get for breakfast: fried--"
"You can imagine, Mrs. Katz, since my poor husband's death, how much
appetite I got left; but I say, Mrs. Katz, just for the principle of the
thing, it would not hurt once if Mrs. Kaufman could give somebody else
besides her own daughter and Vetsburg the white meat from everything,
wouldn't it?"
"It's a shame before the boarders! She knows, Mrs. Pinshriber, how my
husband likes breast from the chicken. You think once he gets it? No. I
always tell him, not 'til chickens come doublebreasted like overcoats can
he get it in this house, with Vetsburg such a star boarder."
"Last night's chicken, let me tell you, I don't wish it to a dog! Such a
piece of dark meat with gizzard I had to swallow."
Mrs. Katz adjusted with greater security the expanse of white napkin across
her ample bosom. Gold rings and a quarter-inch marriage band flashed in
and out among the litter of small tub-shaped dishes surrounding her, and a
pouncing fork of short, sure stab. "Right away my husband gets mad when I
say the same thing. 'When we don't like it we should move,' he says."
"Like moving is so easy, if you got two chairs and a hair mattress to take
with you. But I always say, Mrs. Katz, I don't blame Mrs. Kaufman herself
for what goes on; there's _one_ good woman if there ever was one!"
"They don't come any better or any better looking, my husband always says.
'S-ay,' I tell him, 'she can stand her good looks.'"
"It's that big-ideaed daughter who's to blame. Did you see her new white
spats to-night?" Right away the minute they come out she has to have 'em.
I'm only surprised she 'ain't got one of them red hats from Gimp's what is
all the fad. Believe me, if not for such ideas, her mother could afford
something better as succotash for us for supper."
"It's a shame, let me tell you, that a woman like Mrs. Kaufman can't see
for herself such things. God forbid I should ever be so blind to my
Irving. I tell you that Ruby has got it more like a queen than a
boarding-housekeeper's daughter. Spats, yet!"
"Rich girls could be glad to have it always so good."
"I don't say nothing how her mother treats Vetsburg, her oldest boarder,
and for what he pays for that second floor front and no lunches she can
afford to cater a little; but that such a girl shouldn't be made to take up
a little stenography or help with the housework!"
"S-ay, when that girl even turns a hand, pale like a ghost her mother
gets."
"How girls are raised nowadays, even the poor ones!"
"I ain't the one to complain, Mrs. Katz, but just look down there, that red
stuff."
"Where?"
"Ain't it cranberry between Ruby and Vetsburg?"
"Yes, yes, and look such a dish of it!"
"Is it right extras should be allowed to be brought on a table like this
where fourteen other boarders got to let their mouth water and look at it?"
"You think it don't hurt like a knife! For myself I don't mind, but my
Irving! How that child loves 'em, and he should got to sit at the same
table without cranberries."
From the head of the table the flashing implements of carving held in
askance for stroke, her lips lifted to a smile and a simulation of interest
for display of further carnivorous appetites, Mrs. Kaufman passed her nod
from one to the other.
"Miss Arndt, little more? No? Mr. Krakower? Gravy? Mrs. Suss? Mr. Suss?
So! Simon? Mr. Schloss? Miss Horowitz? Mr. Vetsburg, let me give you this
little tender--No? Then, Ruby, here let mama give you just a little
more--"
"No, no, mama, please!" She caught at the hovering wrist to spare the
descent of the knife.
By one of those rare atavisms by which a poet can be bred of a peasant
or peasant be begot of poet, Miss Ruby Kaufman, who was born in Newark,
posthumous, to a terrified little parent with a black ribbon at the throat
of her gown, had brought with her from no telling where the sultry eyes and
tropical-turned skin of spice-kissed winds. The corpuscles of a shah
might have been running in the blood of her, yet Simon Kaufman, and Simon
Kaufman's father before him, had sold wool remnants to cap-factories on
commission.
"Ruby, you don't eat enough to keep a bird alive. Ain't it a shame, Mr.
Vetsburg, a girl should be so dainty?"
Mr. Meyer Vetsburg cast a beetling glance down upon Miss Kaufman, there so
small beside him, and tinked peremptorily against her plate three times
with his fork. "Eat, young lady, like your mama wants you should, or, by
golly! I'll string you up for my watch-fob--not, Mrs. Kaufman?"
A smile lay under Mr. Vetsburg's gray-and-black mustache. Gray were his
eyes, too, and his suit, a comfortable baggy suit with the slouch of the
wearer impressed into it, the coat hiking center back, the pocket-flaps
half in, half out, and the knees sagging out of press.
"That's right, Mr. Vetsburg, you should scold her when she don't eat."
Above the black-bombazine basque, so pleasantly relieved at the throat by a
V of fresh white net, a wave of color moved up Mrs. Kaufman's face into her
architectural coiffure, the very black and very coarse skein of her hair
wound into a large loose mound directly atop her head and pierced there
with a ball-topped comb of another decade.
"I always say, Mr. Vetsburg, she minds you before she minds anybody else in
the world."
"Ma," said Miss Kaufman, close upon that remark, "some succotash, please."
From her vantage down-table, Mrs. Katz leaned a bit forward from the line.
"Look, Mrs. Finshriber, how for a woman her age she snaps her black eyes
at him. It ain't hard to guess when a woman's got a marriageable
daughter--not?"
"You can take it from me she'll get him for her Ruby yet! And take it from
me, too, almost any girl I know, much less Ruby Kaufman, could do worse as
get Meyer Vetsburg."
"S-say, I wish it to her to get him. For why once in a while shouldn't a
poor girl get a rich man except in books and choruses?"
"Believe me, a girl like Ruby can manage what she wants. Take it from me,
she's got it behind her ears."
"I should say so."
"Without it she couldn't get in with such a crowd of rich girls like she
does. I got it from Mrs. Abrams in the Arline Apartments how every week she
plays five hundred with Nathan Shapiro's daughter."
"No! Shapiro & Stein?"
"And yesterday at matinée in she comes with a box of candy and laughing
with that Rifkin girl! How she gets in with such swell girls, I don't know,
but there ain't a nice Saturday afternoon I don't see that girl walking on
Fifth Avenue with just such a crowd of fine-dressed girls, all with their
noses powdered so white and their hats so little and stylish."
"I wouldn't be surprised if her mother don't send her down to Atlantic City
over Easter again if Vetsburg goes. Every holiday she has to go lately like
it was coming to her."
"Say, between you and me, I don't put it past her it's that Markovitch boy
down there she's after. Ray Klein saw 'em on the boardwalk once together,
and she says it's a shame for the people how they sat so close in a
rolling-chair."
"I wouldn't be surprised she's fresh with the boys, but, believe me, if she
gets the uncle she don't take the nephew!"
"Say, a clerk in his own father's hotel like the Markovitches got in
Atlantic City ain't no crime."
"Her mother has got bigger thoughts for her than that. For why I guess she
thinks her daughter should take the nephew when maybe she can get the uncle
herself. Nowadays it ain't nothing no more that girls marry twice their own
age."
"I always say I can tell when Leo Markovitch comes down, by the way her
mother's face gets long and the daughter's gets short."
"Can you blame her? Leo Markovitch, with all his monograms on his
shirt-sleeves and such black rims on his glasses, ain't the Rosenthal
Vetsburg Hosiery Company, not by a long shot! There ain't a store in this
town you ask for the No Hole Guaranteed Stocking, right away they don't
show it to you. Just for fun always I ask."
"Cornstarch pudding! Irving, stop making that noise at Mrs. Kaufman! Little
boys should be seen and not heard even at cornstarch pudding."
"_Gott_! Wouldn't you think, Mrs. Katz, how Mrs. Kaufman knows how I hate
desserts that wabble, a little something extra she could give me."
"How she plays favorite, it's a shame. I wish you'd look, too, Mrs.
Finshriber, how Flora Proskauer carries away from the table her glass of
milk with slice bread on top. I tell you it don't give tune to a house the
boarders should carry away from the table like that. Irving, come and
take with you that extra piece cake. Just so much board we pay as Flora
Proskauer."
The line about the table broke suddenly, attended with a scraping of chairs
and after-dinner chirrupings attended with toothpicks. A blowsy maid
strained herself immediately across the strewn table and cloying lamb
platter, and turned off two of the three gas jets.
In the yellow gloom, the odors of food permeating it, they filed out and up
the dim lit stairs into dim-lit halls, the line of conversation and short
laughter drifting after.
A door slammed. Then another. Irving Katz leaped from his third floor
threshold to the front hearth, quaking three layers of chandeliers. From
Morris Krakower's fourth floor back the tune of a flute began to wind down
the stairs. Out of her just-closed door Mrs. Finshriber poked a frizzled
gray head.
"Ice-water, ple-ase, Mrs. Kauf-man."
At the door of the first floor back Mrs. Kaufman paused with her hand on
the knob.
"Mama, let me run and do it."
"Don't you move, Ruby. When Annie goes up to bed it's time enough. Won't
you come in for a while, Mr. Vetsburg?"
"Don't care if I do".
She opened the door, entering cautiously. "Let me light up, Mrs. Kaufman."
He struck a phosphorescent line on the sole of his shoe, turning up three
jets.
"You must excuse, Mr. Vetsburg, how this room looks. All day we've been
sewing Ruby her new dress."
She caught up a litter of dainty pink frills in the making, clearing a
chair for him.
"Sit down, Mr. Vetsburg."
They adjusted themselves around the shower of gaslight. Miss Kaufman
fumbling in her flowered work-bag, finally curling her foot up under her,
her needle flashing and shirring through one of the pink flounces.
"Ruby, in such a light you shouldn't strain your eyes."
"All right, ma," stitching placidly on.
"What'll you give me, Ruby, if I tell you whose favorite color is pink?"
"Aw, Vetsy!" she cried, her face like a rose, "_your_ color's pink!"
From the depths of an inverted sewing-machine top Mrs. Kaufman fished out
another bit of the pink, ruffling it with deft needle.
The flute lifted its plaintive voice, feeling for high C.
Mr. Vetsburg lighted a loosely wrapped cigar and slumped in his chair.
"If anybody," he observed, "should ask right this minute where I'm at, tell
'em for me, Mrs. Kaufman, I'm in the most comfortable chair in the house."
"You should keep it, then, up in your room, Mr. Vetsburg, and not always
bring it down again when I get Annie to carry it up to you."
"Say, I don't give up so easy my excuse for dropping in evenings."
"Honest, you--you two children, you ought to have a fence built around you
the way you like always to be together."
He sat regarding her, puffing and chewing his live cigar. Suddenly he
leaped forward, his hand closing rigidly over hers.
"Mrs. Kaufman!"
"What?"
"Quick, there's a hole in your chin."
"_Gott_! a--a--what?"