She peered at the sheet over his shoulder, her cheek against his and still
sobbing a bit in her throat. The jerking of her breath stopped then; in
fact, it was as if both their breathing had let down with the oneness of a
clock stopped.
It was she who moved first, falling back from him, her mouth dropping open
slightly.
He let the paper fall between his wide-spread knees, the blood flowing down
from his face and seeming to leave him leaner.
"Charley--Charley--darling!"
"My--poor old man!" he said in a voice that might have been his echo in a
cave.
"He--his heart must have give out on him, Charley, while he slept in the
night."
"My--poor--old--man!"
She stretched out her hand timidly to his shoulder.
"Charley--boy--my poor boy!"
He reached up to cover her timid touch, still staring ahead, as if a mental
apathy had clutched him.
"He died like--he--lived. Gad--it's--tough!"
"It--it wasn't your fault, darling. God forgive me for speaking against the
dead, but--everybody knows he was a hard man, Charley--the way he used to
beat you up instead of showing you the right way. Poor old man, I guess he
didn't know--"
"My old man--dead!"
She crept closer, encircling his neck, and her wet cheek close to his dry
one.
"He's at peace now, darling--and all your sins are forgiven--like you
forgive--his."
His lips were twisting.
"There was no love lost there, girl. God knows there wasn't. There was once
nine months we didn't speak. Never could have been less between a father
and son. You see he--he hated me from the start, because my mother died
hating him--but--_dead_--that's another matter. Ain't it, girl--ain't it?"
She held her cheek to his so that her tears veered out of their course,
zigzagging down to his waistcoat, stroked his hair, placing her rich, moist
lips to his eyelids.
"My darling! My darling boy! My own poor darling!"
Sobs rumbled up through him, the terrific sobs that men weep.
"You--married a rotter, Loo--that couldn't even live decent with his--old
man. He--died like a dog--alone."
"'Sh-h-h, Charley! Just because he's dead don't mean he was any better
while he lived."
"I'll make it up to you, girl, for the rotter I am. I'm a rich man now,
Loo."
"'Sh-h-h!"
"I'll show you, girl. I can make somebody's life worth living. I'm going to
do something for somebody to prove I'm worth the room I occupy, and that
somebody's going to be you, Loo. I'm going to build you a house that'll go
down in the history of this town. I'm going to wind you around with pearls
to match that skin of yours. I'm going to put the kind of clothes on you
that you read of queens wearing. I've seen enough of the kind of meanness
money can breed. I'm going to make those Romans back there look like
pikers. I'm--"
She reached out, placing her hand pat across his mouth, and, in the languid
air of the room, shuddering so that her lips trembled.
"Charley--for God's sake--it--it's a sin to talk that way!"
"O God, I know it, girl! I'm all muddled--muddled."
He let his forehead drop against her arm, and in the long silence that
ensued she sat there, her hand on his hair.
The roar of traffic, seventeen stories below, came up through the open
windows like the sound of high seas, and from where she sat, staring out
between the pink-brocade curtains, it was as if the close July sky dipped
down to meet that sea, and space swam around them.
"O God!" he said, finally. "What does it all mean--this living and dying--"
"Right living, Charley, makes dying take care of itself."
"God! how he must have died, then! Like a dog--alone."
"'Sh-h-h, Charley; don't get to thinking."
Without raising his head, he reached up to stroke her arm.
"Honey, you're shivering."
"No-o."
"Everything's all right, girl. What's the use me trying to sham it's not.
I--I'm bowled over for the minute, that's all. If it had to come, after
all, it--it came right for my girl. With that poor old man out there,
honey, living alone like a dog all these years, it's just like putting him
from one marble mausoleum out there on Kingsmoreland Place into one where
maybe he'll rest easier. He's better off, Loo, and--we--are too. Hand me
the paper, honey; I--want to see--just how my--poor old man--breathed out."
Then Mrs. Cox rose, her face distorted with holding back tears, her small
high heels digging into and breaking the newspaper at his feet.
"Charley--Charley--"
"Why, girl, what?"
"You don't know it, but my sister, Charley--Ida Bell!"
"Why, Loo, I sent off the message to your mama. They know it by now."
"Charley--Charley--"
"Why, honey, you're full of nerves! You mustn't go to pieces like this.
Your sister's all right. I sent them a--"
"You--you don't know, Charley. My sister--I swore her an oath on my
mother's prayer-book. I wouldn't tell, but, now that he's dead, that--lets
me out. The will--Charley, he made it yesterday, like he always swore he
would the next time you got your name on the front page."
"Made what, honey? Who?"
"Charley, can't you understand? My sister Ida Bell and Brookes--your
father's lawyer. She's his private stenographer--Brookes's, honey. You know
that. But she told me last night, honey, when I went home. You're cut off,
Charley! Your old man sent for Brookes yesterday at noon. I swear to God,
Charley! My sister Ida Bell she broke her confidence to tell me. He's give
a million alone to the new college hospital. Half a million apiece to
four or five old people's homes. He's give his house to the city with the
art-gallery. He's even looked up relations to give to. He kept his word,
honey, that all those years he kept threatening. He--he kept it the day
before he died. He must have had a hunch--your poor old man. Charley
darling, don't look like that! If your wife ain't the one to break it to
you you're broke, who is? You're not 'Million Dollar Charley' no more,
honey. You're just my own Charley, with his chance come to him--you hear,
_my_ Charley, with the best thing that ever happened to him in his life
happening right now."
He regarded her as if trying to peer through something opaque, his hands
spread rather stupidly on his wide knees.
"Huh?"
"Charley, Charley, can't you understand? A dollar, that puts him within the
law, is all he left you."
"He never did. He never did. He wouldn't. He couldn't. He never did. I
saw--his will. I'm the only survivor. I saw his will."
"Charley, I swear to God! I swear as I'm standing here you're cut off.
My sister copied the new will on her typewriter three times and seen the
sealed and stamped one. He kept his word. He wrote it with his faculties
and witnesses. We're broke, Charley--thank God, we're flat broke!"
"He did it? He did it? My old man did it?"
"As sure as I'm standing here, Charley."
He fell to blinking rapidly, his face puckering to comprehend.
"I never thought it could happen. But I--I guess it could happen. I think
you got me doped, honey."
"Charley, Charley!" she cried, falling down on her knees beside him,
holding his face in the tight vise of her hands and reading with such
closeness into his eyes that they seemed to merge into one. "Haven't you
got your Loo? Haven't you got her?"
He sprang up at that, jerking her backward, and all the purple-red gushed
up into his face again.
"Yes, by God, I've got you! I'll break the will. I'll--"
"Charley, no--no! He'd rise out of his grave at you. It's never been known
where a will was broke where they didn't rise out of the grave to haunt."
He took her squarely by the shoulders, the tears running in furrows down
his face.
"I'll get you out of this, Loo. No girl in God's world will have to find
herself tied up to me without I can show her a million dollars every time
she remembers that she's married to a rotter. I'll get you out of this,
girl, so you won't even show a scratch. I'll--"
"Charley," she said, lifting herself by his coat lapels, and her eyes again
so closely level with his, "you're crazy with the heat--stark, raving
crazy! You got your chance, boy, to show what you're made of--can't you see
that? We're going West, where men get swept out with clean air and clean
living. We'll break ground in this here life for the kind of pay-dirt
that'll make a man of you. You hear? A man of you!"
He lifted her arms, and because they were pressing insistently down,
squirmed out from beneath them.
"You're a good sport, girl; nobody can take that from you. But just the
same, I'm going to let you off without a scratch."
"'Good sport'! I'd like to know, anyways, where I come in with all your
solid-gold talk. Me that's stood behind somebody-or-other's counter ever
since I had my working-papers."
"I'll get you out of--"
"Have I ever lived anywheres except in a dirty little North St. Louis flat
with us three girls in a bed? Haven't I got my name all over town for
speed, just because I've always had to rustle out and try to learn how
to flatten out a dime to the size of a dollar? Where do I come in on the
solid-gold talk, I'd like to know. I'm the penny-splitter of the world, the
girl that made the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store millinery department famous. I
can look tailor-made on a five-dollar bill and a tissue-paper pattern. Why,
honey, with me scheming for you, starting out on your own is going to make
a man of you. You got stuff in you. I knew it, Charley, the first night
you spied me at the Highlands dance. Somewhere out West Charley Cox is now
going to begin to show 'em the stuff in Charley Cox--that's what Charley
Cox & Co. are going to do!"
He shook his head, turning away his eyes to hide their tears.
"You been stung, Loo. Nothing on earth can change that."
She turned his face back to her, smiling through her own tears.
"You're not adding up good this morning, Mr. Cox. When do you think I
called you up last night? When could it have been if not after my sister
broke her confidence to tell me? Why do you think all of a sudden last
night I seen your bluff through about Gerber? It was because I knew I had
you where you needed me, Charley--I never would have dragged you down the
other way in a million years, but when I knew I had you where you needed
me--why, from that minute, honey, you didn't have a chance to dodge me!"
She wound her arms round him, trembling between the suppressed hysteria of
tears and laughter.
"Not a chance, Charley!"
He jerked her so that her face fell back from him, foreshortened.
"Loo--oh, girl! Oh, girl!"
Her throat was tight and would not give her voice for coherence.
"Charley--we--we'll show 'em--you--me!"
Looking out above her head at the vapory sky showing through the parting of
the pink-brocade curtains, rigidity raced over Mr. Cox, stiffening his hold
of her.
The lean look had come out in his face; the flanges of his nose quivered;
his head went up.
VI
NIGHTSHADE
Over the silent places of the world flies the vulture of madness, pausing
to wheel above isolated farm-houses, where a wife, already dizzy with the
pressure of rarefied silence, looks up, magnetized. Then across the flat
stretches, his shadow under him moving across moor and the sand of desert,
slowing at the perpetually eastern edge of a mirage, brushing his actual
wings against the brick of city walls; the garret of a dreamer, brain-sick
with reality. Flopping, until she comes to gaze, outside the window of one
so alone in a crowd that her four hall-bedroom walls are closing in upon
her. Lowering over a childless house on the edge of a village.
Were times when Mrs. Hanna Burkhardt, who lived on the edge of a village
in one such childless house, could in her fancy hear the flutter of wings,
too. There had once been a visit to a doctor in High Street because of
those head-noises and the sudden terror of not being able to swallow. He
had stethoscoped and prescribed her change of scene. Had followed two weeks
with cousins fifty miles away near Lida, Ohio, and a day's stop-over in
Cincinnati allowed by her railroad ticket. But six months after, in the
circle of glow from a tablelamp that left the corners of the room in a
chiaroscuro kind of gloom, there were again noises of wings rustling and
of water lapping and the old stricture of the throat. Across the table, a
Paisley cover between them, Mr. John Burkhardt, his short spade of beard
already down over his shirt-front, arm hanging lax over his chair-side and
newspaper fallen, sat forward in a hunched attitude of sleep, whistling
noises coming occasionally through his breathing. A china clock, the
centerpiece of the mantel, ticked spang into the silence, enhancing it.
Hands in lap, head back against the mat of her chair, Mrs. Burkhardt looked
straight ahead of her into this silence--at a closed door hung with a
newspaper rack, at a black-walnut horsehair divan, a great sea-shell on
the carpet beside it. A nickelplated warrior gleamed from the top of a
baseburner that showed pink through its mica doors. He stood out against
the chocolate-ocher wallpaper and a framed Declaration of Independence,
hanging left. A coal fell. Mr. Burkhardt sat up, shook himself of sleep.
"Little chilly," he said, and in carpet slippers and unbuttoned waistcoat
moved over to the base-burner, his feet, to avoid sloughing, not leaving
the floor. He was slightly stooped, the sateen back to his waistcoat hiking
to the curve of him. But he swung up the scuttle with a swoop, rattling
coal freely down into the red-jowled orifice.
"Ugh, don't!" she said. "I'm burnin' up."
He jerked back the scuttle, returning to his chair, and, picking up the
fallen newspaper, drew down his spectacles from off his brow and fell
immediately back into close, puckered scrutiny of the printed page.
"What time is it, Burkhardt? That old thing on the mantel's crazy."
He drew out a great silver watch.
"Seven-forty."
"O God!" she said. "I thought it was about ten."
The clock ticked in roundly again except when he rustled his paper in the
turning. The fire was crackling now, too, in sharp explosions. Beyond
the arc of lamp the room was deeper than ever in shadow. Finally John
Burkhardt's head relaxed again to his shirt-front, the paper falling gently
away to the floor. She regarded his lips puffing out as he breathed. Hands
clasped, arms full length on the table, it was as if the flood of words
pressing against the walls of her, to be shrieked rather than spoken, was
flowing over to him. He jerked erect again, regarding her through blinks.
"Must 'a' dozed off," he said, reaching down for his newspaper.
She was winding her fingers now in and out among themselves.
"Burkhardt?"
"Eh?"
"What--does a person do that's smotherin'?"
"Eh?"
"I know. That's what I'm doing. Smotherin'!"
"A touch of the old trouble, Hanna?"
She sat erect, with her rather large white hands at the heavy base to her
long throat. They rose and fell to her breathing. Like Heine, who said so
potently, "I am a tragedy," so she, too, in the sulky light of her eyes
and the pulled lips and the ripple of shivers over her, proclaimed it of
herself.
"Seven-forty! God! what'll I do, Burkhardt? What'll I do?"
"Go lay down on the sofa a bit, Hanna. I'll cover you with a plaid. It's
the head-noises again bothering you."
"Seven-forty! What'll I do? Seven-forty and nothing left but bed."
"I must 'a' dozed off, Hanna."
"Yes; you must 'a' dozed off," she laughed, her voice eaten into with the
acid of her own scorn. "Yes; you must 'a' dozed off. The same way as you
dozed off last night and last month and last year and the last eight years.
The best years of my life--that's what you've dozed off, John Burkhardt.
He 'must 'a' dozed off,'" she repeated, her lips quivering and lifting to
reveal the white line of her large teeth. "Yes; I think you must 'a' dozed
off!"
He was reading again in stolid profile.
She fell to tapping the broad toe of her shoe, her light, dilated eyes
staring above his head. She was spare, and yet withal a roundness left
to the cheek and forearm. Long-waisted and with a certain swing where it
flowed down into straight hips, there was a bony, Olympian kind of bigness
about her. Beneath the washed-out blue shirtwaist dress her chest was high,
as if vocal. She was not without youth. Her head went up like a stag's to
the passing of a band in the street, or a glance thrown after her, or the
contemplation of her own freshly washed yellow hair in the sunlight. She
wore a seven glove, but her nails had great depth and pinkness, and each a
clear half-moon. They were dug down now into her palms.
"For God's sake, talk! Say something, or I'll go mad!"
He laid his paper across his knee, pushing up his glasses.
"Sing a little something, Hanna. You're right restless this evening."
"'Restless'!" she said, her face wry. "If I got to sit and listen to that
white-faced clock ticking for many more evenings of this winter, you'll
find yourself with a raving maniac on your hands. That's how restless I
am!" He rustled his paper again. "Don't read!" she cried. "Don't you dare
read!"
He sat staring ahead, in a heavy kind of silence, breathing outward and
passing his hand across his brow.
Her breathing, too, was distinctly audible.
"Lay down a bit, Hanna. I'll cover you--"
"If they land me in the bug-house, they can write on your tombstone when
you die, 'Hanna Long Burkhardt went stark raving mad crazy with hucking at
home because I let her life get to be a machine from six-o'clock breakfast
to eight-o'clock bed, and she went crazy from it.' If that's any
satisfaction to you, they can write that on your tombstone."
He mopped his brow this time, clearing his throat.
"You knew when we married, Hanna, they called me 'Silent' Burkhardt. I
never was a great one for talking unless there was something I wanted to
say."
"I knew nothin' when I married you. Nothin' except that along a certain
time every girl that can gets married. I knew nothin' except--except--"
"Except what?"
"Nothin'."
"I've never stood in your light, Hanna, of having a good time. Go ahead.
I'm always glad when you go up-town with the neighbor women of a Saturday
evening. I'd be glad if you'd have 'em in here now and then for a little
sociability. Have 'em. Play the graphophone for 'em. Sing. You 'ain't done
nothin' with your singin' since you give up choir."
"Neighbor women! Old maids' choir! That's fine excitement for a girl not
yet twenty-seven!"
"Come; let's go to a moving picture, Hanna. Go wrap yourself up warm."
"Movie! Oh no; no movie for me with you snorin' through the picture till
I'm ashamed for the whole place. If I was the kind of girl had it in me to
run around with other fellows, that's what I'd be drove to do, the deal
you've given me. Movie! That's a fine enjoyment to try to foist off on a
woman to make up for eight years of being so fed up on stillness that she's
half-batty!"
"Maybe there's something showin' in the op'ry-house to-night."
"Oh, you got a record to be proud of, John Burkhardt: Not a foot in that
opera-house since we're married. I wouldn't want to have your feelin's!"
His quietude was like a great, impregnable, invisible wall inclosing him.
"I'm not the man can change his ways, Hanna. I married at forty, too late
for that."
"I notice you liked my pep, all righty, when I was workin' in the feed-yard
office. I hadn't been in it ten days before you were hangin' on my laughs
from morning till night."
"I do yet, Hanna--only you don't laugh no more. There's nothin' so fine in
a woman as sunshine."
"Provided you don't have to furnish any of it."
"Because a man 'ain't got it in him to be light in his ways don't mean he
don't enjoy it in others. Why, there just ain't nothin' to equal a happy
woman in the house! Them first months, Hanna, showed me what I'd been
missin'. It was just the way I figured it--somebody around like you,
singin' and putterin'. It was that laugh in the office made me bring it
here, where I could have it always by me."
"It's been knocked out of me, every bit of laugh I ever had in me; lemme
tell you that."
"I can remember the first time I ever heard you, Hanna. You was standin"
at the office window lookin' out in the yards at Jerry Sims unloadin' a
shipment of oats; and little Old Cocker was standin' on top of one of the
sacks barkin' his head off. I--"
"Yeh; I met Clara Sims on the street yesterday, back here for a visit, and
she says to me, she says: 'Hanna Burkhardt, you mean to tell me you never
done nothing with your voice! You oughta be ashamed. If I was your husband,
I'd spend my last cent trainin' that contralto of yours. You oughtn't to
let yourself go like this. Women don't do it no more.' That, from the
tackiest girl that ever walked this town. I wished High Street had opened
up and swallowed me."
"Now, Hanna, you mustn't--"
"In all these years never so much as a dance or a car-ride as far as
Middletown. Church! Church! Church! Till I could scream at the sight of
it. Not a year of my married life that 'ain't been a lodestone on my neck!
Eight of' 'em! Eight!"
"I'm not sayin' I'm not to blame, Hanna. A woman like you naturally likes
life. I never wanted to hold you back. If I'm tired nights and dead on my
feet from twelve hours on 'em, I never wanted you to change your ways."
"Yes; with a husband at home in bed, I'd be a fine one chasin' around
this town alone, wouldn't I? That's the thanks a woman gets for bein'
self-respectin'."
"I always kept hopin', Hanna, I could get you to take more to the home."
"The home--you mean the tomb!"
"Why, with the right attention, we got as fine an old place here as there
is in this part of town, Hanna. If only you felt like giving it a few more
touches that kinda would make a woman-place out of it! It 'ain't changed a
whit from the way me and my old father run it together. A little touch here
and there, Hanna, would help to keep you occupied and happier if--"
"I know. I know what's comin'."
"The pergola I had built. I used to think maybe you'd get to putter out
there in the side-yard with it, trailin' vines; the china-paintin' outfit
I had sent down from Cincinnati when I seen it advertised in the _Up-State
Gazette_; a spaniel or two from Old Cocker's new litter, barkin' around;
all them things, I used to think, would give our little place here a
feelin' that would change both of us for the better. With a more home-like
feelin' things might have been different between us, Hanna."
"Keepin" a menagerie of mangy spaniels ain't my idea of livin'."
"Aw, now, Hanna, what's the use puttin' it that way? Take, for instance,
it's been a plan of mine to paint the house, with the shutters green and a
band of green shingles runnin' up under the eaves. A little encouragement
from you and we could perk the place up right smart. All these years it's
kinda gone down--even more than when I was a bachelor in it. Sunk in,
kinda, like them iron jardinières I had put in the front yard for you to
keep evergreen in. It's them little things, Hanna. Then that--that old idea
of mine to take a little one from the orphanage--a young 'un around the--"
"O Lord!"
"I ain't goin' to mention it if it aggravates you, but--but makin' a home
out of this gray old place would help us both, Hanna. There's no denyin'
that. It's what I hoped for when I brought you home a bride here. Just had
it kinda planned. You putterin' around the place in some kind of a pink
apron like you women can rig yourselves up in and--"
"There ain't a girl in Adalia has dropped out of things the way I have, I
had a singin' voice that everybody in this town said--"
"There's the piano, Hanna, bought special for it."
"I got a contralto that--"
"There never was anything give me more pleasure than them first years you
used it. I ain't much to express myself, but it was mighty fine, Hanna, to
hear you."
"Yes, I know; you snored into my singin' with enjoyment, all right."
"It's the twelve hours on my feet that just seem to make me dead to the
world, come evening."
"A girl that had the whole town wavin' flags at her when she sung 'The Holy
City' at the nineteen hundred street-carnival! Kittie Scogin Bevins, one of
the biggest singers in New York to-day, nothing but my chorus! Where's it
got me these eight years? Nowheres! She had enough sense to cut loose from
Ed Bevins, who was a lodestone, too, and beat it. She's singing now in New
York for forty a week with a voice that wasn't strong enough to be more
than chorus to mine."
"Kittie Scogin, Hanna, is a poor comparison for any woman to make with
herself."