One little prince of a fellow." She fell to crying softly, easy tears that
flowed freely.
"I--I can tell you, baby, I'm happy as you."
"Mommy dear, kiss me."
They talked, huddled arm in arm, until dawn flowed in at the window and
dirty roofs began to show against a clean sky. Footsteps began to clatter
through the asphalt court and there came the rattle of milk-cans.
"I wonder if Annie left out the note for Mrs. Suss's extra milk!"
"Don't get up, dearie; it's only five--"
"Right away, baby, with extra towels I must run up to Miss Flora's room.
That six o'clock-train for Trenton she gets."
"Ma dear, let me go."
"Lay right where you are! I guess you want you should look all worn out
when a certain young man what I know walks down to meet our train at
Atlantic City this afternoon, eh?"
"Oh, mommy, mommy!" And Ruby lay back against the luxury of pillows.
At eleven the morning rose to its climax--the butcher, the baker, and every
sort of maker hustling in and out the basementway; the sweeping of upstairs
halls; windows flung open and lace curtains looped high; the smell of
spring pouring in even from asphalt; sounds of scrubbing from various
stoops; shouts of drivers from a narrow street wedged with its
Saturday-morning blockade of delivery wagons, and a crosstown line of
motor-cars, tops back and nosing for the speedway of upper Broadway. A
homely bouquet of odors rose from the basement kitchen, drifting up through
the halls, the smell of mutton bubbling as it stewed.
After a morning of up-stairs and down-stairs and in and out of chambers,
Mrs. Kaufman, enveloped in a long-sleeved apron still angular with starch,
hung up the telephone receiver in the hall just beneath the staircase and
entered her bedroom, sitting down rather heavily beside the open shelf of
her desk. A long envelope lay uppermost on that desk, and she took it up
slowly, blinking her eyes shut and holding them squeezed tight as if she
would press back a vision, even then a tear oozing through. She blinked it
back, but her mouth was wry with the taste of tears.
A slatternly maid poked her head in through the open door. "Mrs. Katz broke
'er mug!"
"Take the one off Mr. Krakow's wash-stand and give it to her, Tillie."
She was crying now frankly, and when the door swung closed, even though it
swung back again on its insufficient hinge, she let her head fall forward
into the pillow of her arms, the curve of her back rising and falling.
But after a while the greengrocer came on his monthly mission, in his white
apron and shirt-sleeves, and she compared stubs with him from a file on her
desk and balanced her account with careful squinted glance and a keen eye
for an overcharge on a cut of breakfast bacon.
On the very heels of him, so that they met and danced to pass each other in
the doorway, Mr. Vetsburg entered, with an overcoat flung across his right
arm and his left sagging to a small black traveling-bag.
"Well," he said, standing in the frame of the open door, his derby well
back on his head and regarding her there beside the small desk, "is this
what you call ready at twelve?"
She rose and moved forward in her crackly starched apron. "I--Please, Mr.
Vetsburg, it ain't right, I know!"
"You don't mean you're not going!" he exclaimed, the lifted quality
immediately dropping from his voice.
"You--you got to excuse me again, Mr. Vetsburg. It ain't no use I should
try to get away on Saturdays, much less Easter Saturday."
"Well, of all things!"
"Right away, the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, right one things after
another."
He let his bag slip to the floor.
"Maybe, Mrs. Kaufman," he said, "it ain't none of my business, but ain't it
a shame a good business woman like you should let herself always be tied
down to such a house like she was married to it?"
"But--"
"Can't get away on Saturdays, just like it ain't the same any other day in
the week, I ask you! Saturday you blame it on yet!"
She lifted the apron from her hem, her voice hurrying. "You can see for
yourself, Mr. Vetsburg, how in my brown silk all ready I was. Even--even
Ruby don't know yet I don't go. Down by Gimp's I sent her she should buy
herself one of them red straw hats is the fad with the girls now. She meets
us down by the station."
"That's a fine come-off, ain't it, to disappoint--"
"At the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, how things can happen. Out of a clear
sky Mrs. Finshriber has to-morrow for Easter dinner that skin doctor,
Abrams, and his wife she's so particular about. And Annie with her sore
ankle and--"
"A little shyster doctor like Abrams with his advertisements all over the
newspapers should sponge off you and your holiday! By golly! Mrs. Kaufman,
just like Ruby says, how you let a whole houseful of old hens rule this
roost it's a shame!"
"When you go down to station, Mr. Vetsburg, so right away she ain't so
disappointed I don't come, tell her maybe to-morrow I--."
"I don't tell her nothing!" broke in Mr. Vetsburg and moved toward her with
considerable strengthening of tone. "Mrs. Kaufman, I ask you, do you think
it right you should go back like this on Ruby and me, just when we want
most you should--"
At that she quickened and fluttered. "Ruby and you! Ach, it's a old saying,
Mr. Vetsburg, like the twig is bent so the tree grows. That child won't be
so surprised her mother changes her mind. Just so changeable as her mother,
and more, is Ruby herself. With that girl, Mr. Vetsburg, it's--it's hard to
know what she does one minute from the next. I always say no man--nobody
can ever count on a little harum-scarum like--like she is."
He took up her hat, a small turban of breast feathers, laid out on the
table beside him, and advanced with it clumsily enough. "Come," he said,
"please now, Mrs. Kaufman. Please."
"I--"
"I--I got plans made for us to-morrow down by the shore that's--that's just
fine! Come now, Mrs. Kaufman."
"Please, Mr. Vetsburg, don't force. I--I can't! I always say nobody can
ever count on such a little harum-scarum as--"
"You mean to tell me, Mrs. Kaufman, that just because a little shyster
doctor--"
Her hand closed over the long envelope again, crunching it. "No, no,
that--that ain't all, Mr. Vetsburg. Only I don't want you should tell Ruby.
You promise me? How that child worries over little things. Shulif from the
agency called up just now. He don't give me one more minute as two this
afternoon I--I should sign. How I been putting them off so many weeks with
this lease it's a shame. Always you know how in the back of my head I've
had it to take maybe a smaller place when this lease was done, but, like I
say, talk is cheap and moving ain't so easy done--ain't it? If he puts in
new plumbing in the pantry and new hinges on the doors and papers my second
floor and Mrs. Suss's alcove, like I said last night, after all I could do
worse as stay here another five year--ain't it, Mr. Vetsburg?"
"I--"
"A house what keeps filled so easy, and such a location, with the Subway
less as two blocks. I--So you see, Mr. Vetsburg, if I don't want I come
back and find my house on the market, maybe rented over my head, I got to
stay home for Shulif when he comes to-day."
A rush of dark blood had surged up into Mr. Vetsburg's face, and he
twiddled his hat, his dry fingers moving around inside the brim.
"Mrs. Kaufman," he cried--"Mrs. Kaufman, sometimes when for years a man
don't speak out his mind, sometimes he busts all of a sudden right out.
I--Oh--e-e-e!" and, immediately and thickly inarticulate, made a tremendous
feint at clearing his throat, tossed up his hat and caught it; rolled his
eyes.
"Mr. Vetsburg?"
"A man, Mrs. Kaufman, can bust!"
"Bust?"
He was still violently dark, but swallowing with less labor. "Yes, from
holding in. Mrs. Kaufman, should a woman like you--the finest woman in the
world, and I can prove it--a woman, Mrs. Kaufman, who in her heart and
my heart and--Should such a woman not come to Atlantic City when I got
everything fixed like a stage set!"
She threw out an arm that was visibly trembling. "Mr. Vetsburg, for God's
sake, 'ain't I just told you how that she--harum-scarum--she--."
"Will you, Mrs. Kaufman, come or won't you? Will you, I ask you, or won't
you?"
"I--I can't, Mr.--"
"All right, then, I--I bust out now. To-day can be as good as to-morrow!
Not with my say in a t'ousand years, Mrs. Kaufman, you sign that lease! I
ain't a young man any more with fine speeches, Mrs. Kaufman, but not in a
t'ousand years you sign that lease."
"Mr. Vetsburg, Ruby--I--"
"If anybody's got a lease on you, Mrs. Kaufman, I--I want it! I want it!
That's the kind of a lease would suit me. To be leased to you for always,
the rest of your life!"
She could not follow him down the vista of fancy, but stood interrogating
him with her heartbeats at her throat. "Mr. Vetsburg, if he puts on the
doors and hinges and new plumbing in--."
"I'm a plain man, Mrs. Kaufman, without much to offer a woman what can give
out her heart's blood like it was so much water. But all these years I been
waiting, Mrs. Kaufman, to bust out, until--till things got riper. I know
with a woman like you, whose own happiness always is last, that first your
girl must be fixed--."
"She's a young girl, Mr. Vetsburg. You--you mustn't depend--. If I had my
say--."
"He's a fine fellow, Mrs. Kaufman. With his uncle to help 'em, they got,
let me tell you, a better start as most young ones!"
She rose, holding on to the desk.
"I--I--" she said. "What?"
"Lena," he uttered, very softly.
"Lena, Mr. Vetsburg?"
"It 'ain't been easy, Lenie, these years while she was only growing up, to
keep off my lips that name. A name just like a leaf off a rose. Lena!" he
reiterated and advanced.
Comprehension came quietly and dawning like a morning.
"I--I--. Mr. Vetsburg, you must excuse me," she said, and sat down
suddenly.
He crossed to the little desk and bent low over her chair, his hand not on
her shoulder, but at the knob of her chair. His voice had a swift rehearsed
quality.
"Maybe to-morrow, if you didn't back out, it would sound finer by the
ocean, Lenie, but it don't need the ocean a man should tell a woman when
she's the first and the finest woman in the world. Does it, Lenie?"
"I--I thought Ruby. She--"
"He's a good boy, Leo is, Lenie. A good boy what can be good to a woman
like his father before him. Good enough even for a fine girl like our Ruby,
Lenie--_our_ Ruby!"
"_Gott im Himmel_! then you--"
"Wide awake, too. With a start like I can give him in my business, you
'ain't got to worry Ruby 'ain't fixed herself with the man what she
chooses. To-morrow at Atlantic City all fixed I had it I should tell--"
"You!" she said, turning around in her chair to face him. "You--all along
you been fixing--"
He turned sheepish. "Ain't it fair, Lenie, in love and war and business a
man has got to scheme for what he wants out of life? Long enough it took
she should grow up. I knew all along once those two, each so full of life
and being young, got together it was natural what should happen. Mrs.
Kaufman! Lenie! Lenie!"
Prom two flights up, in through the open door and well above the harsh
sound of scrubbing, a voice curled down through the hallways and in. "Mrs.
Kaufman, ice-water--ple-ase!"
"Lenie," he said, his singing, tingling fingers closing over her wrist.
"Mrs. Kauf-man, ice-water, pl--"
With her free arm she reached and slammed the door, let her cheek lie to
the back of his hand, and closed her eyes.
IV
HERS _NOT_ TO REASON WHY
In the third winter of a world-madness, with Europe guzzling blood and wild
with the taste of it, America grew flatulent, stenching winds from the
battle-field blowing her prosperity.
Granaries filled to bursting tripled in value, and, in congested districts,
men with lean faces rioted when bread advanced a cent a loaf. Munition
factories, the fires of destruction smelting all night, worked three
shifts. Millions of shells for millions of dollars. Millions of lives for
millions of shells. A country feeding into the insatiable maw of war with
one hand, and with the other pouring relief-funds into coffers bombarded by
guns of its own manufacture--quelling the wound with a finger and widening
it with a knife up the cuff.
In France, women with blue faces and too often with the pulling lips of
babes at dry breasts, learned the bitter tasks of sewing closed the coat
sleeves and of cutting off and hemming the trousers leg at the knee.
In America, women new to the feel of fur learned to love it and not
question whence it came. Men of small affairs, suddenly earthquaked to the
crest of the great tidal wave of new market-values, went drunk with wealth.
In New York, where so many great forces of a great country coagulate, the
face of the city photographed would have been a composite of fat and jowl,
rouge and heavy lip--satiated yet insatiate, the head double-chinned and
even a little loggy with too many satisfactions.
But that is the New York of the Saturnite and of Teufelsdröckh alone with
his stars.
Upon Mrs. Blutch Connors, gazing out upon the tide of West Forty-seventh
Street, life lay lightly and as unrelated as if ravage and carnage and the
smell of still warm blood were of another planet.
A shower of white light from an incandescent tooth-brush sign opposite
threw a pallid reflection upon Mrs. Connors; it spun the fuzz of frizz
rising off her blond coiffure into a sort of golden fog and picked out the
sequins of her bodice.
The dinner-hour descends glitteringly upon West Forty-seventh Street, its
solid rows of long, lanky hotels, actors' clubs, and sixty-cent _tables
d'hôte_ adding each its candle-power.
From her brace of windows in the Hotel Metropolis, the street was not
unlike a gully cut through mica, a honking tributary flowing into the great
sea of Broadway. A low, high-power car, shaped like an ellipse, cut through
the snarl of traffic, bleating. A woman, wrapped in a greatcoat of "baby"
pelts and an almost undistinguishable dog in the cove of her arm, walked
out from the Hotel Metropolis across the sidewalk and into a taxicab. An
army of derby hats, lowered slightly into the wind, moved through the white
kind of darkness. Standing there, buffeting her pink nails across her pink
palms, Mrs. Connors followed the westward trend of that army. Out from it,
a face lying suddenly back flashed up at her, a mere petal riding a swift
current. But at sight of it Mrs. Blutch Connors inclined her entire body,
pressing a smile and a hand against the cold pane, then turned inward,
flashing on an electrolier--a bronze Nydia holding out a cluster of frosted
bulbs. A great deal of the strong breath of a popular perfume and a great
deal of artificial heat lay sweet upon that room, as if many flowers had
lived and died in the same air, leaving insidious but slightly stale
memories.
The hotel suite has become the brocaded tomb of the old-fashioned garden.
The kitchen has shrunk into the chafing-dish, and all the dear old
concoctions that mother used to try to make now come tinned, condensed,
and predigested in sixty-seven varieties. Even the vine-covered threshold
survives only in the booklets of promoters of suburban real estate. In
New York, the home-coming spouse arrives on the vertical, shunted out
at whatever his layer. Yet, when Mrs. Connors opened the door of her
pink-brocaded sitting-room, her spirit rose with the soughing rise of the
elevator, and Romance--hardy fellow--showed himself within a murky hotel
corridor.
"Honeybunch!"
"Babe!" said Mr. Blutch Connors, upon the slam of the lift door.
And there, in the dim-lit halls, with its rows of closed doors in
blank-faced witness thereof, they embraced, these two, despising, as
Flaubert despised, to live in the reality of things.
"My boy's beau-ful cheeks all cold!"
"My girl's beau-ful cheeks all warm and full of some danged good cologne,"
said Mr. Connors, closing the door of their rooms upon them, pressing her
head back against the support of his arm, and kissing her throat as the
chin flew up.
He pressed a button, and the room sprang into more light, coming out pinkly
and vividly--the brocaded walls pliant to touch with every so often a
gilt-framed engraving; a gilt table with an onyx top cheerfully cluttered
with the sauciest short-story magazines of the month; a white mantelpiece
with an artificial hearth and a pink-and-gilt _chaise-longue_ piled high
with small, lacy pillows, and a very green magazine open and face downward
on the floor beside it.
"Comin' better, honeybunch?"
"I dunno, Babe. The town's mad with money, but I don't feel myself going
crazy with any of it."
"What ud you bring us, honey?"
He slid out of his silk-lined greatcoat, placing his brown derby atop.
"Three guesses, Babe," he said, rubbing his cold hands in a dry wash, and
smiling from five feet eleven of sartorial accomplishment down upon her.
"Honey darlin'!" said Mrs. Connors, standing erect and placing her cheek
against the third button of his waistcoat.
"Wow! how I love the woman!" he cried, closing his hands softly about her
throat and tilting her head backward again.
"Darlin', you hurt!"
"Br-r-r--can't help it!"
When Mr. Connors moved, he gave off the scent of pomade freely; his
slightly thinning brown hair and the pointy tips to a reddish mustache
lay sleek with it. There was the merest suggestion of _embonpoint_ to the
waistcoat, but not so that, when he dropped his eyes, the blunt toes of his
russet shoes were not in evidence. His pin-checked suit was pressed to a
knife-edge, and his brocaded cravat folded to a nicety; there was an air
of complete well-being about him. Men can acquire that sort of eupeptic
well-being in a Turkish bath. Young mothers and life-jobbers have it
naturally.
Suddenly, Mrs. Connors began to foray into his pockets, plunging her hand
into the right, the left, then stopped suddenly, her little face flashing
up at him.
"It's round and furry--my honeybunch brought me a peach! Beau-ful pink
peach in December! Nine million dollars my hubby pays to bring him wifey a
beau-ful pink peach." She drew it out--a slightly runty one with a forced
blush--and bit small white teeth immediately into it.
"M-m-m!"--sitting on the _chaise-longue_ and sucking inward. He sat down
beside her, a shade graver.
"Is my babe disappointed I didn't dig her coat and earrings out of hock?"
She lay against him.
"I should worry!"
"There just ain't no squeal in my girl."
"Wanna bite?"
"Any one of 'em but you would be hollering for their junk out of pawn.
But, Lord, the way she rigs herself up without it! Where'd you dig up the
spangles, Babe? Gad! I gotta take you out to-night and buy you the right
kind of a dinner. When I walks my girl into a café, they sit up and take
notice, all righty. Spangles she rigs herself up in when another girl, with
the way my luck's been runnin', would be down to her shimmy-tail."
She stroked his sleeve as if it had the quality of fur.
"Is the rabbit's foot still kicking my boy?"
"Never seen the like, honey. The cards just won't come. This afternoon I
even played the wheel over at Chuck's, and she spun me dirt."
"It's gotta turn, Blutch."
"Sure!"
"Remember the run of rotten luck you had that year in Cincinnati, when the
ponies was runnin' at Latonia?"
"Yeh."
"Lost your shirt, hon, and the first day back in New York laid a hundred on
the wheel and won me my seal coat. You--we--We couldn't be no lower than
that time we got back from Latonia, hon?"
He laid his hand over hers.
"Come on, Babe. Joe'll be here directly, and then we're going and blow them
spangles to a supper."
"Blutch, answer!"
"Now there's nothin' to worry about, Babe. Have I ever landed anywhere
but on my feet? We'll be driving a racer down Broadway again before the
winter's over. There's money in motion these wartimes, Babe. They can't
keep my hands off it."
"Blutch, how--how much did you drop to-day?
"I could tell clear down on the street you lost, honey, the way you walked
so round-shouldered."
"What's the difference, honey? Come; just to show you I'm a sport, I'm
going to shoot you and Joe over to Jack's in one of them new white
taxi-cabs."
"Blutch, how much?"
"Well, if you gotta know it, they laid me out to-day, Babe. Dropped that
nine hundred hock-money like it was a hot potato, and me countin' on
bringin' you home your coat and junk again to-night. Gad! Them cards
wouldn't come to me with salt on their tails."
"Nine hundred! Blutch, that--that leaves us bleached!"
"I know it, hon. Just never saw the like. Wouldn't care if it wasn't my
girl's junk and fur coat. That's what hurts a fellow. If there's one thing
he ought to look to, it's to keep his wimmin out of the game."
"It--it ain't that, Blutch; but--but where's it comin' from?"
He struck his thigh a resounding whack.
"With seventy-five bucks in my jeans, girl, the world is mine. Why, before
I had my babe for my own, many's the time I was down to shoe-shine money.
Up to 'leven years ago it wasn't nothing, honey, for me to sleep on a
pool-table one night and _de luxe_ the next. If life was a sure thing for
me, I'd ask 'em to put me out of my misery. It's only since I got my girl
that I ain't the plunger I used to be. Big Blutch has got his name from the
old days, honey, when a dime, a dollar, and a tire-rim was all the same
size."
She sat hunched up in the pink-satinet frock, the pink sequins dancing, and
her small face smaller because of the way her light hair rose up in the
fuzzy aura.
"Blutch, we--we just never was down to the last seventy-five before. That
time at Latonia, it was a hundred and more."
"Why, girl, once, at Hot Springs, I had to hock my coat and vest, and I got
started on a run of new luck playin' in my shirt-sleeves, pretending I was
a summer boy."
"That was the time you gave Lenny Gratz back his losings and got him back
to his wife."
"Right-o! Seen him only to-night. He's traveling out of Cleveland for an
electric house and has forgot how aces up looks. That boy had as much
chance in the game as a deacon."
Mrs. Connors laid hold of Mr. Connors's immaculate coat lapel, drawing him
toward her.
"Oh, Blutch--honey--if only--if only--"
"If only what, Babe?"
"If you--you--"
"Why, honey, what's eatin' you? I been down pretty near this low many a
time; only, you 'ain't known nothing about it, me not wanting to worry your
pretty head. You ain't afraid, Babe, your old hubby can't always take care
of his girl A1, are you?"
"No, no, Blutch; only--"
"What, Babe?"
"I wish to God you was out of it, Blutch! I wish to God!"
"Out of what, Babe?"
"The game, Blutch. You're too good, honey, and too--too honest to be in it.
What show you got in the end against your playin' pals like Joe Kirby and
Al Flexnor? I know that gang, Blutch. I've tried to tell you so often how,
when I was a kid livin' at home, that crowd used to come to my mother's--"
"Now, now, girl; business is--"
"You're too good, Blutch, and too honest to be in it. The game'll break you
in the end. It always does. Blutch darling, I wish to God you was out of
it!"
"Why, Ann 'Lisbeth, I never knew you felt this way about it."
"I do, Blutch, I do! For years, it's been here in me--here, under my
heart--eatin' me, Blutch, eatin' me!" And she placed her hands flat to her
breast.
"Why, Babe!"
"I never let on. You--I--You been too good, Blutch, to a girl like--like
I was for me to let out a whimper about anything. A man that took a girl
like--like me that had knocked around just like--my mother and even--even
my grandmother before me had knocked around--took and married me, no
questions asked. A girl like me 'ain't got the right to complain to no man,
much less to one like you. The heaven you've given me for eleven years,
Blutch! The heaven! Sometimes, darlin', just sittin' here in a room like
this, with no--no reason for bein' here--it's just like I--"
"Babe, Babe, you mustn't!"
"Sittin' here, waiting for you to come and not carin' for nothing or nobody
except that my boy's comin' home to me--it's like I was in a dream, Blutch,
and like I was going to wake up and find myself back in my mother's house,
and--"
"Babe, you been sittin' at home alone too much. I always tell you, honey,
you ought to make friends. Chuck De Roy's wife wants the worst way to get
acquainted with you--a nice, quiet girl. It ain't right, Babe, for you
not to have no friends at all to go to the matinée with or go buyin'
knickknacks with. You're gettin' morbid, honey."