train last week, comin' back to visit her old mother, I wished the whole
depot would open up and swallow me--that's what I wished. Me and her that
used to be took for sisters. I'm eight months younger, and I look eight
years older. When she stepped off that train in them white furs and a
purple face-veil, I just wished to God the whole depot would open and
swallow me. That girl had sense. O God! didn't she have sense!"
"They say her sense is what killed Ed Bevins of shame and heartbreak."
"Say, don't tell me! It was town talk the way he made her toady to his
folks, even after he'd been cut off without a cent. Kittie told me herself
the very sight of the old Bevins place over on Orchard Street gives her the
creeps down her back. If not for old lady Scogin, 'way up in the seventies,
she'd never put her foot back in this dump. That girl had sense."
"There's not a time she comes back here it don't have an upsettin'
influence on you, Hanna."
"I know what's upsettin' me, all right. I know!"
He sighed heavily.
"I'm just the way I am, Hanna, and there's no teachin' an old dog new
tricks. It's a fact I ain't much good after eight o'clock evenin's. It's a
fact--a fact!"
They sat then in a further silence that engulfed them like fog. A shift of
wind blew a gust of dry snow against the window-pane with a little sleety
noise. And as another evidence of rising wind, a jerk of it came down the
flue, rattling the fender of a disused grate.
"We'd better keep the water in the kitchen runnin' to-night. The pipes'll
freeze."
Tick-tock. Tick. Tock. She had not moved, still sitting staring above the
top of his head. He slid out his watch, yawning.
"Well, if you think it's too raw for the movin' pictures, Hanna, I guess
I'll be movin' up to bed. I got to be down to meet a five-o'clock shipment
of fifty bales to-morrow. I'll be movin' along unless there's anything you
want?"
"No--nothing."
"If--if you ain't sleepy awhile yet, Hanna, why not run over to Widow
Dinninger's to pass the time of evenin'? I'll keep the door on the latch."
She sprang up, snatching a heavy black shawl, throwing it over her and
clutching it closed at the throat.
"Where you goin', Hanna?"
"Walkin'," she said, slamming the door after her.
In Adalia, chiefly remarkable for the Indestructo Safe Works and a river
which annually overflows its banks, with casualties, the houses sit well
back from tree-bordered streets, most of them frame, shingle-roofed
veterans that have lived through the cycle-like years of the bearing, the
marrying, the burying of two, even three, generations of the same surname.
A three-year-old, fifteen-mile traction connects the court-house with the
Indestructo Safe Works. High Street, its entire length, is paved. During a
previous mayoralty the town offered to the Lida Tool Works a handsome bonus
to construct branch foundries along its river-banks, and, except for the
annual flood conditions, would have succeeded.
In spring Adalia is like a dear old lady's garden of marigold and
bleeding-heart. Flushes of sweetpeas ripple along its picket fences and
off toward the backyards are long grape-arbors, in autumn their great
fruit-clusters ripening to purple frost. Come winter there is almost an
instant shriveling to naked stalk, and the trellis-work behind vines comes
through. Even the houses seem immediately to darken of last spring's paint,
and, with windows closed, the shades are drawn. Oftener than not Adalia
spends its evening snugly behind these drawn shades in great scoured
kitchens or dining-rooms, the house-fronts dark.
When Mrs. Burkhardt stepped out into an evening left thus to its stilly
depth, shades drawn against it, a light dust of snow, just fallen, was
scurrying up-street before the wind, like something phantom with its skirts
blowing forward. Little drifts of it, dry as powder, had blown up against
the porch. She sidestepped them, hurrying down a wind-swept brick walk and
out a picket gate that did not swing entirely after. Behind her, the house
with its wimple of shingle roof and unlighted front windows seemed to
recede somewhere darkly. She stood an undecided moment, her face into the
wind. Half down the block an arc-light swayed and gave out a moving circle
of light. Finally she turned her back and went off down a side-street, past
a lighted corner grocer, crossed a street to avoid the black mouth of an
alley, then off at another right angle. The houses here were smaller,
shoulder to shoulder and directly on the sidewalk.
Before one of these, for no particular reason distinguishable from the
others, Mrs. Burkhardt stepped up two shallow steps and turned a key in
the center of the door, which set up a buzz on its reverse side. Her hand,
where it clutched the shawl at her throat, was reddening and roughening,
the knuckles pushing up high and white. Waiting, she turned her back to the
wind, her body hunched up against it.
There was a moving about within, the scrape of a match, and finally the
door opening slightly, a figure peering out.
"It's me, Mrs. Scogin--Hanna Burkhardt!"
The door swung back then, revealing a just-lighted parlor, opening, without
introduction of hall, from the sidewalk.
"Well, if it ain't Hanna Burkhardt! What you doin' out this kind of a
night? Come in. Kittie's dryin' her hair in the kitchen. Used to be she
could sit on it, and it's ruint from the scorchin' curlin'-iron. I'll call
her. Sit down, Hanna. How's Burkhardt? I'll call her. Oh, Kittie! Kit-tie,
Hanna Burkhardt's here to see you."
In the wide flare of the swinging lamp, revealing Mrs. Scogin's parlor
of chromo, china plaque, and crayon enlargement, sofa, whatnot, and wax
bouquet embalmed under glass, Mrs. Burkhardt stood for a moment, blowing
into her cupped hands, unwinding herself of shawl, something Niobian in her
gesture.
"Yoo-hoo--it's only me, Kit! Shall I come out?"
"Naw--just a minute; I'll be in."
Mrs. Scogin seated herself on the edge of the sofa, well forward, after the
manner of those who relax but ill to the give of upholstery. She was like a
study of what might have been the grandmother of one of Rembrandt's studies
of a grandmother. There were lines crawling over her face too manifold for
even the etcher's stroke, and over her little shriveling hands that were
too bird-like for warmth. There is actually something avian comes with the
years. In the frontal bone pushing itself forward, the cheeks receding, and
the eyes still bright. There was yet that trenchant quality in Mrs. Scogin,
in the voice and gaze of her.
"Sit down, Hanna."
"Don't care if I do."
"You can lean back against that chair-bow."
"Hate to muss it."
"How's Burkhardt?"
"All right."
"He's been made deacon--not?"
"Yeh."
"If mine had lived, he'd the makin' of a pillar. Once label a man with hard
drinkin', and it's hard to get justice for him. There never was a man had
more the makin' of a pillar than mine, dead now these sixteen years and
molderin' in his grave for justice."
"Yes, Mrs. Scogin."
"You can lean back against that bow."
"Thanks."
"So Burkhardt's been made deacon."
"Three years already--you was at the church."
"A deacon. Mine went to his grave too soon."
"They said down at market to-day, Mrs. Scogin, that Addie Fitton knocked
herself against the woodbin and has water on the knee."
"Let the town once label a man with drinkin', and it's hard to get justice
for him."
"It took Martha and Eda and Gessler's hired girl to hold her in bed with
the pain."
"Yes, yes," said Mrs. Scogin, sucking in her words and her eyes seeming to
strain through the present; "once label a man with drinkin'."
Kittie Scogin Bevins entered then through a rain of bead portières.
Insistently blond, her loosed-out hair newly dry and flowing down over a
very spotted and very baby-blue kimono, there was something soft-fleshed
about her, a not unappealing saddle of freckles across her nose, the eyes
too light but set in with a certain feline arch to them.
"Hello, Han!"
"Hello, Kittie!"
"Snowing?"
"No."
"Been washing my hair to show it a good time. One month in this dump and
they'd have to hire a hearse to roll me back to Forty-second Street in."
"This ain't nothing. Wait till we begin to get snowed in!"
"I know. Say, you c'n tell me nothing about this tank I dunno already. I
was buried twenty-two years in it. Move over, ma."
She fitted herself into the lower curl of the couch, crossing her hands at
the back of her head, drawing up her feet so that, for lack of space, her
knees rose to a hump.
"What's new in Deadtown, Han?"
"'New'! This dump don't know we got a new war. They think it's the old
Civil one left over."
"Burkhardt's been made a deacon, Kittie."
"O Lord! ma, forget it!" Mrs. Scogin Bevins threw out her hands to Mrs.
Burkhardt in a wide gesture, indicating her mother with a forefinger, then
with it tapping her own brow. "Crazy as a loon! Bats!"
"If your father had--"
"Ma, for Gossakes--"
"You talk to Kittie, Hanna. My girls won't none of 'em listen to me no
more. I tell 'em they're fightin' over my body before it's dead for this
house and the one on Ludlow Street. It's precious little for 'em to be
fightin' for before I'm dead, but if not for it, I'd never be gettin' these
visits from a one of 'em."
"Ma!"
"I keep tellin' her, Kittie, to stay home. New York ain't no place for a
divorced woman to set herself right with the Lord."
"Ma, if you don't quit raving and clear on up to bed, I'll pack myself out
to-night yet, and then you'll have a few things to set right with the Lord.
Go on up, now."
"I--"
"Go on--you hear?"
Mrs. Scogin went then, tiredly and quite bent forward, toward a flight of
stairs that rose directly from the parlor, opened a door leading up into
them, the frozen breath of unheated regions coming down.
"Quick--close that door, ma!"
"Come to see a body, Hanna, when she ain't here. She won't stay at home,
like a God-fearin' woman ought to."
"Light the gas-heater up there, if you expect me to come to bed. I'm used
to steam-heated flats, not barns."
"She's a sassy girl, Hanna. Your John a deacon and hers lies molderin' in
his grave, a sui--"
Mrs. Scogin Bevins flung herself up, then, a wave of red riding up her
face.
"If you don't go up--if you--don't! Go--now! Honest, you're gettin' so luny
you need a keeper. Go--you hear?"
The door shut slowly, inclosing the old figure. She relaxed to the couch,
trying to laugh.
"Luny!" she said. "Bats! Nobody home!"
"I like your hair like that, Kittie. It looks swell."
"It's easy. I'll fix it for you some time. It's the vampire swirl. All the
girls are wearing it."
"Remember the night, Kit, we was singin' duets for the Second Street
Presbyterian out at Grody's Grove and we got to hair-pullin' over whose
curls was the longest?"
"Yeh. I had on a blue dress with white polka-dots."
"That was fifteen years ago. Remember Joe Claiborne promised us a real
stage-job, and we opened a lemonade-stand on our front gate to pay his
commission in advance?"
They laughed back into the years.
"O Lord! them was days! Seems to me like fifty years ago."
"Not to me, Kittie. You've done things with your life since then. I
'ain't."
"You know what I've always told you about yourself, Hanna. If ever there
was a fool girl, that was Hanna Long. Lord! if I'm where I am on my voice,
where would you be?"
"I was a fool."
"I could have told you that the night you came running over to tell me."
"There was no future in this town for me, Kit. Stenoggin' around from one
office to another. He was the only real provider ever came my way."
"I always say if John Burkhardt had shown you the color of real money! But
what's a man to-day on just a fair living? Not worth burying yourself in
a dump like this for. No, sirree. When I married Ed, anyways I thought I
smelled big money. I couldn't see ahead that his father'd carry out his
bluff and cut him off. But what did you have to smell--a feed-yard in a
hole of a town! What's the difference whether you live in ten rooms like
yours or in four like this as long as you're buried alive? A girl can
always do that well for herself after she's took big chances. You could be
Lord knows where now if you'd 'a' took my advice four years ago and lit out
when I did."
"I know it, Kit. God knows I've eat out my heart with knowin' it!
Only--only it was so hard--a man givin' me no more grounds than he does.
What court would listen to his stillness for grounds? I 'ain't got
grounds."
"Say, you could 'a' left that to me. My little lawyer's got a factory where
he manufactures them. He could 'a' found a case of incompatibility between
the original turtle-doves."
"God! His stillness, Kittie--like--"
"John Burkhardt would give me the razzle-dazzle jimjams overnight, he
would. That face reminds me of my favorite funeral."
"I told him to-night, Kittie, he's killin' me with his deadness. I ran out
of the house from it. It's killin' me."
"Why, you poor simp, standing for it!"
"That's what I come over for, Kit. I can't stand no more. If I don't talk
to some one, I'll bust. There's no one in this town I can open up to. Him
so sober--and deacon. They don't know what it is to sit night after night
dyin' from his stillness. Whole meals, Kit, when he don't open his mouth
except, 'Hand me this; hand me that'--and his beard movin' up and down so
when he chews. Because a man don't hit you and gives you spending-money
enough for the little things don't mean he can't abuse you with--with just
gettin' on your nerves so terrible. I'm feelin' myself slip--crazy--ever
since I got back from Cincinnati and seen what's goin' on in the big towns
and me buried here; I been feelin' myself slip--slip, Kittie."
"Cincinnati! Good Lord! if you call that life! Any Monday morning on
Forty-second Street makes Cincinnati look like New-Year's Eve. If you call
Cincinnati life!"
"He's small, Kittie. He's a small potato of a man in his way of livin'. He
can live and die without doin' anything except the same things over and
over again, year out and year in."
"I know. I know. Ed was off the same pattern. It's the Adalia brand. Lord!
Hanna Long, if you could see some of the fellows I got this minute paying
attentions to me in New York, you'd lose your mind. Spenders! Them New
York guys make big and spend big, and they're willing to part with the
spondoolaks. That's the life!"
"I--You look it, Kit. I never seen a girl get back her looks and keep 'em
like you. I says to him to-night, I says, 'When I look at myself in the
glass, I wanna die.'"
"You're all there yet, Hanna. Your voice over here the other night was
something immense. Big enough to cut into any restaurant crowd, and that's
what counts in cabaret. I don't tell anybody how to run his life, but if
I had your looks and your contralto, I'd turn 'em into money, I would.
There's forty dollars a week in you this minute."
Mrs. Burkhardt's head went up. Her mouth had fallen open, her eyes
brightening as they widened.
"Kit--when you goin' back?"
"To-morrow a week, honey--if I live through it."
"Could--you help me--your little lawyer--your--"
"Remember, I ain't advising--"
"Could you, Kit, and to--to get a start?"
"They say it of me there ain't a string in the Bijou Cafe that I can't pull
my way."
"Could you, Kit? Would you?"
"I don't tell nobody how to run his life, Hanna. It's mighty hard to advise
the other fellow about his own business. I don't want it said in this town,
that's down on me, anyways, that Kit Scogin put ideas in Hanna Long's
head."
"You didn't, Kit. They been there. Once I answered an ad. to join a county
fair. I even sent money to a vaudeville agent in Cincinnati. I--"
"Nothing doing in vaudeville for our kind of talent. It's cabaret where the
money and easy hours is these days. Just a plain little solo act--contralto
is what you can put over. A couple of 'Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night'
sob-solos is all you need. I'll let you meet Billy Howe of the Bijou.
Billy's a great one for running in a chaser act or two."
"I--How much would it cost, Kittie, to--to--"
"Hundred and fifty done it for me, wardrobe and all."
"Kittie, I--Would you--"
"Sure I would! Only, remember, I ain't responsible. I don't tell anybody
how to run his life. That's something everybody's got to decide for
herself."
"I--have--decided, Kittie."
At something after that stilly one-o'clock hour when all the sleeping
noises of lath and wainscoting creak out, John Burkhardt lifted his head to
the moving light of a lamp held like a torch over him, even the ridge
of his body completely submerged beneath the great feather billow of an
oceanic walnut bedstead.
"Yes, Hanna?"
"Wake up!"
"I been awake--"
She set the lamp down on the brown-marble top of a wash-stand, pushed back
her hair with both hands, and sat down on the bed-edge, heavily breathing
from a run through deserted night's streets.
"I gotta talk to you, Burkhardt--now--to-night."
"Now's no time, Hanna. Come to bed."
"Things can't go on like this, John."
He lay back slowly.
"Maybe you're right, Hanna. I been layin' up here and thinkin' the same
myself. What's to be done?"
"I've got to the end of my rope."
"With so much that God has given us, Hanna--health and prosperity--it's a
sin before Him that unhappiness should take root in this home."
"If you're smart, you won't try to feed me up on gospel to-night!"
"I'm willin' to meet you, Hanna, on any proposition you say. How'd it be
to move down to Schaefer's boardin'-house for the winter, where it'll be
a little recreation for you evenings, or say we take a trip down to
Cincinnati for a week. I--"
"Oh no," she said, looking away from him and her throat throbbing. "Oh no,
you don't! Them things might have meant something to me once, but you've
come too late with 'em. For eight years I been eatin' out my heart with
'em. Now you couldn't pay me to live at Schaefer's. I had to beg too long
for it. Cincinnati! Why, its New-Year's Eve is about as lively as a real
town's Monday morning. Oh no, you don't! Oh no!"
"Come on to bed, Hanna. You'll catch cold. Your breath's freezin'."
"I'm goin'--away, for good--that's where--I'm goin'!"
Her words threatened to come out on a sob, but she stayed it, the back of
her hand to her mouth.
Her gaze was riveted, and would not move, from a little curtain above the
wash-stand, a guard against splashing crudely embroidered in a little
hand-in-hand boy and girl.
"You--you're sayin' a good many hasty things to-night, Hanna."
"Maybe."
He plucked at a gray-wool knot in the coverlet.
"Mighty hasty things."
She turned, then, plunging her hands into the great suds of feather bed,
the whole thrust of her body toward him.
"'Hasty'! Is eight years hasty? Is eight years of buried-alive hasty? I'm
goin', John Burkhardt; this time I'm goin' sure--sure as my name is Hanna
Long."
"Goin' where, Hanna?"
"Goin' where each day ain't like a clod of mud on my coffin. Goin' where
there's a chance for a woman like me to get a look-in on life before she's
as skinny a hex at twenty-seven as old lady Scog--as--like this town's full
of. I'm goin' to make my own livin' in my own way, and I'd like to see
anybody try to stop me."
"I ain't tryin', Hanna."
She drew back in a flash of something like surprise.
"You're willin', then?"
"No, Hanna, not willin'."
"You can't keep me from it. Incompatibility is grounds!"
The fires of her rebellion, doused for the moment, broke out again, flaming
in her cheeks.
He raised himself to his elbow, regarding her there in her flush, the
white line of her throat whiter because of it. She was strangely, not
inconsiderably taller.
"Why, Hanna, what you been doin' to yourself?"
Her hand flew to a new and elaborately piled coiffure, a half-fringe of
curling-iron, little fluffed out tendrils escaping down her neck.
"In--incompatibility is grounds."
"It's mighty becomin', Hanna. Mighty becomin'."
"It's grounds, all right!"
"'Grounds'? Grounds for what, Hanna?"
She looked away, her throat distending as she swallowed.
"Divorce."
There was a pause, then so long that she had a sense of falling through its
space.
"Look at me, Hanna!"
She swung her gaze reluctantly to his. He was sitting erect now, a kind of
pallor setting in behind the black beard.
"Leggo!" she said, loosening his tightening hand from her wrists. "Leggo;
you hurt!"
"I--take it when a woman uses that word in her own home, she means it."
"This one does."
"You're a deacon's wife. Things--like this are--are pretty serious with
people in our walk of life. We--'ain't learned in our communities yet not
to take the marriage law as of God's own makin'. I'm a respected citizen
here."
"So was Ed Bevins. It never hurt his hide."
"But it left her with a black name in the town."
"Who cares? She don't."
"It's no good to oppose a woman, Hanna, when she's made up her mind; but
I'm willin' to meet you half-way on this thing. Suppose we try it again.
I got some plans for perkin' things up a bit between us. Say we join the
Buckeye Bowling Club, and--"
"No! No! No! That gang of church-pillars! I can't stand it, I tell you; you
mustn't try to keep me! You mustn't! I'm a rat in a trap here. Gimme a few
dollars. Hundred and fifty is all I ask. Not even alimony. Lemme apply.
Gimme grounds. It's done every day. Lemme go. What's done can't be undone.
I'm not blamin' you. You're what you are and I'm what I am. I'm not blamin'
anybody. You're what you are, and God Almighty can't change you. Lemme go,
John; for God's sake, lemme go!"
"Yes," he said, finally, not taking his eyes from her and the chin
hardening so that it shot out and up. "Yes, Hanna; you're right. You got to
go."
* * * * *
The skeleton of the Elevated Railway structure straddling almost its entire
length, Sixth Avenue, sullen as a clayey stream, flows in gloom and crash.
Here, in this underworld created by man's superstructure, Mrs. Einstein,
Slightly Used Gowns, nudges Mike's Eating-Place from the left, and on the
right Stover's Vaudeville Agency for Lilliputians divides office-space
and rent with the Vibro Health Belt Company. It is a kind of murky drain,
which, flowing between, catches the refuse from Fifth Avenue and the
leavings from Broadway. To Sixth Avenue drift men who, for the first time
in a Miss-spending life, are feeling the prick of a fraying collar. Even
Fifth Avenue is constantly feeding it. A _couturier's_ model gone hippy; a
specialty-shop gone bankrupt; a cashier's books gone over. Its shops are
second-hand, and not a few of its denizens are down on police records as
sleight-of-hand. At night women too weary to be furtive turn in at its
family entrances. It is the cauldron of the city's eye of newt, toe of
frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog. It is the home of the most daring
all-night eating-places, the smallest store, the largest store, the
greatest revolving stage, the dreariest night court, and the drabest night
birds in the world.
War has laid its talons and scratched slightly beneath the surface of Sixth
Avenue. Hufnagel's Delicatessen, the briny hoar of twenty years upon it,
went suddenly into decline and the hands of a receiver. Recruiting
stations have flung out imperious banners. Keeley's Chop-House--Open
All Night--reluctantly swings its too hospitable doors to the
one-o'clock-closing mandate.
To the New-Yorker whose nights must be filled with music, preferably jazz,
to pass Keeley's and find it dark is much as if Bacchus, emulating the
newest historical rogue, had donned cassock and hood. Even that half of
the evening east of the cork-popping land of the midnight son has waned at
Keeley's. No longer a road-house on the incandescent road to dawn, there is
something hangdog about its very waiters, moving through the easy maze of
half-filled tables; an orchestra, sheepish of its accomplishment, can lift
even a muted melody above the light babel of light diners. There is a
cabaret, too, bravely bidding for the something that is gone.