around for spring dimities."
"Any more cotton goods? Next month, this time, you'll be paying an advance
of four cents on percales."
"Stocked."
"Can't tempt you with them wash silks, Mrs. C.? Neatest little article on
the market to-day."
"No demand. They finger it up, and then buy the cotton stuffs. Every time I
forget my trade hacks rock instead of clips bonds for its spending-money I
get stung."
"This here wash silk, Mrs. C., would--"
"Send me up a dress-pattern off this coral-pink sample for Selene."
"This here dark mulberry, Mrs. C., would suit you something immense."
"That'll be about all."
He flopped shut his book, snapping a rubber band about it and inserting it
in an inner coat pocket.
"You ought to stick to them dark, winy shades, Mrs. C. With your coloring
and black hair and eyes, they bring you out like a gipsy. Never seen you
look better than at the Y.M.H.A. entertainment."
Quick color flowed down her open throat and into her shirtwaist. It was as
if the platitude merged with the very corpuscles of a blush that sank down
into thirsty soil.
"You boys," she said, "come out here and throw in a jolly with every bill
of goods. I'll take a good fat discount instead."
"Fact. Never seen you look better. When you got out on the floor in that
stamp-your-foot kind of dance with old man Shulof, your hand on your hip
and your head jerking it up, there wasn't a girl on the floor, your own
daughter included, could touch you, and I'm giving it to you straight."
"That old thing! It's a Russian folk-dance my mother taught me the first
year we were in this country. I was three years old then, and, when she got
just crazy with homesickness, we used to dance it to each other evenings on
the kitchen floor."
"Say, have you heard the news?"
"No."
"Guess."
"Can't."
"Hammerstein is bringing over the crowned heads of Europe for vaudeville."
Mrs. Coblenz moved back a step, her mouth falling open.
"Why, Milton Bauer, in the old country a man could be strung up for saying
less than that!"
"That didn't get across. Try another. A Frenchman and his wife were
traveling in Russia, and--"
"If--if you had an old mother like mine up-stairs, Milton, eating out her
heart and her days and her weeks and her months over a husband's grave
somewhere in Siberia and a son's grave somewhere in Kishinef, you wouldn't
see the joke neither."
Mr. Bauer executed a self-administered pat sharply against the back of his
hand.
"Keeper," he said, "put me in the brain ward. I--I'm sorry, Mrs. C., so
help me! Didn't mean to. How is your mother, Mrs. C.? Seems to me, at the
dance the other night, Selene said she was fine and dandy."
"Selene ain't the best judge of her poor old grandmother. It's hard for a
young girl to have patience for old age sitting and chewing all day over
the past. It's right pitiful the way her grandmother knows it, too, and
makes herself talk English all the time to please the child and tries to
perk up for her. Selene, thank God, 'ain't suffered, and can't sympathize!"
"What's ailing her, Mrs. C.? I kinda miss seeing the old lady sitting down
here in the store."
"It's the last year or so, Milt. Just like all of a sudden a woman as
active as mama always was, her health and--her mind kind of went off with a
pop."
"Thu! Thu!"
"Doctor says with care she can live for years, but--but it seems terrible
the way her--poor mind keeps skipping back. Past all these thirty years in
America to--even weeks before I was born. The night they--took my father
off to Siberia, with his bare feet in the snow--for distributing papers
they found on him--papers that used the word 'svoboda'--'freedom.' And the
time, ten years later--they shot down my brother right in front of her
for--the same reason. She keeps living it over--living it over till
I--could die."
"Say, ain't that just a shame, though!"
"Living it, and living it, and living it! The night with me, a heavy
three-year-old, in her arms that she got us to the border, dragging a pack
of linens with her! The night my father's feet were bleeding in the snow,
when they took him! How with me a kid in the crib, my--my brother's face
was crushed in--with a heel and a spur. All night, sometimes, she cries in
her sleep--begging to go back to find the graves. All day she sits making
raffia wreaths to take back--making wreaths--making wreaths!"
"Say, ain't that tough!"
"It's a godsend she's got the eyes to do it. It's wonderful the way she
reads--in English, too. There ain't a daily she misses. Without them and
the wreaths--I dunno--I just dunno. Is--is it any wonder, Milt, I--I can't
see the joke?"
"My God, no!"
"I'll get her back, though."
"Why, you--she can't get back there, Mrs. C."
"There's a way. Nobody can tell me there's not. Before the war--before she
got like this, seven hundred dollars would have done it for both of us--and
it will again, after the war. She's got the bank-book, and every week that
I can squeeze out above expenses, she sees the entry for herself. I'll get
her back. There's a way lying around somewhere. God knows why she should
eat out her heart to go back--but she wants it. God, how she wants it!"
"Poor old dame!"
"You boys guy me with my close-fisted buying these last two years. It's up
to me, Milt, to squeeze this old shebang dry. There's not much more than a
living in it at best, and now, with Selene grown up and naturally wanting
to have it like other girls, it ain't always easy to see my way clear. But
I'll do it, if I got to trust the store for a year to a child like Selene.
I'll get her back."
"You can call on me, Mrs. C., to keep my eye on things while you're gone."
"You boys are one crowd of true blues, all right. There ain't a city
salesman comes out here I wouldn't trust to the limit."
"You just try me out."
"Why, just to show you how a woman don't know how many real friends she has
got, why--even Mark Haas, of the Mound City Silk Company, a firm I don't
do a hundred dollars' worth of business with a year, I wish you could have
heard him the other night at the Y.M.H.A., a man you know for yourself just
goes there to be sociable with the trade."
"Fine fellow, Mark Haas!"
"'When the time comes, Mrs. Coblenz,' he says, 'that you want to make that
trip, just you let me know. Before the war there wasn't a year I didn't
cross the water twice, maybe three times, for the firm. I don't know
there's much I can do; it ain't so easy to arrange for Russia, but, just
the same, you let me know when you're ready to make that trip.' Just like
that he said it. That from Mark Haas!"
"And a man like Haas don't talk that way if he don't mean it."
"Mind you, not a hundred dollars a year business with him. I haven't got
the demands for silks."
"That wash silk I'm telling you about, though, Mrs. C., does up like a--"
"There's ma thumping with the poker on the up-stairs floor. When it's
closing-time she begins to get restless. I--I wish Selene would come in.
She went out with Lester Goldmark in his little flivver, and I get nervous
about automobiles."
Mr. Bauer slid an open-face watch from his waistcoat.
"Good Lord! five-forty, and I've just got time to sell the Maplehurst
Emporium a bill of goods!"
"Good-night, Milt; and mind you put up that order of assorted neckwear
yourself. Greens in ready-tieds are good sellers for this time of the year,
and put in some reds and purples for the teamsters."
"No sooner said than done."
"And come out for supper some Sunday night, Milt. It does mama good to have
young people around."
"I'm yours."
"Good-night, Milt."
He reached across the counter, placing his hand over hers.
"Good-night, Mrs. C.," he said, a note lower in his throat; "and remember
that call-on-me stuff wasn't all conversation."
"Good-night, Milt," said Mrs. Coblenz, a coating of husk over her own voice
and sliding her hand out from beneath, to top his. "You--you're all right!"
* * * * *
Up-stairs, in a too tufted and too crowded room directly over the frontal
half of the store, the window overlooking the remote sea of city was
turning taupe, the dusk of early spring, which is faintly tinged with
violet, invading. Beside the stove, a base-burner with faint fire showing
through its mica, the identity of her figure merged with the fat upholstery
of the chair, except where the faint pink through the mica lighted up old
flesh, Mrs. Miriam Horowitz, full of years and senile with them, wove with
grasses, the écru of her own skin, wreaths that had mounted to a great
stack in a bedroom cupboard.
A clock, with a little wheeze and burring attached to each chime, rang six,
and upon it Mrs. Coblenz, breathing from a climb, opened the door.
"Ma, why didn't you rap for Katie to come up and light the gas? You'll ruin
your eyes, dearie."
She found out a match, immediately lighting two jets of a
center-chandelier, turning them down from singing, drawing the shades of
the two front and the southeast windows, stooping over the upholstered
chair to imprint a light kiss.
"A fine day, mama. There'll be an entry this week. Thirty dollars and
thirteen cents and another call for garden implements. I think I'll lay in
a hardware line after we--we get back. I can use the lower shelf of the
china-table, eh, ma?"
Mrs. Horowitz, whose face, the color of old linen in the yellowing, emerged
rather startling from the still black hair strained back from it, lay back
in her chair, turning her profile against the upholstered back, half a
wreath and a trail of raffia sliding to the floor. Age had sapped from
beneath the skin, so that every curve had collapsed to bagginess, the
cheeks and the underchin sagging with too much skin. Even the hands were
crinkled like too large gloves, a wide, curiously etched marriage band
hanging loosely from the third finger.
Mrs. Goblenz stooped, recovering the wreath.
"Say, mama, this one is a beauty! That's a new weave, ain't it? Here, work
some more, dearie--till Selene comes with your evening papers."
With her profile still to the chair-back, a tear oozed down the corrugated
face of Mrs. Horowitz's cheek. Another.
"Now, mama! Now, mama!"
"I got a heaviness--here--inside. I got a heaviness--"
Mrs. Coblenz slid down to her knees beside the chair.
"Now, mama; shame on my little mama! Is that the way to act when Shila
comes up after a good day? 'Ain't we got just lots to be thankful for--the
business growing and the bank-book growing, and our Selene on top? Shame on
mama!"
"I got a heaviness--here--inside--here."
Mrs. Coblenz reached up for the old hand, patting it.
"It's nothing, mama--a little nervousness."
"I'm an old woman. I--"
"And just think, Shila's mama, Mark Haas is going to get us letters and
passports and--"
"My son--my boy--his father before him--"
"Mama--mama, please don't let a spell come on! It's all right. Shila's
going to fix it. Any day now, maybe--"
"You'm a good girl. You'm a good girl, Shila." Tears were coursing down to
a mouth that was constantly wry with the taste of them.
"And you're a good mother, mama. Nobody knows better than me how good."
"You'm a good girl, Shila."
"I was thinking last night, mama, waiting up for Selene--just thinking how
all the good you've done ought to keep your mind off the spells, dearie."
"My son--"
"Why, a woman with as much good to remember as you've got oughtn't to have
time for spells. I got to thinking about Coblenz, mama, how--you never did
want him, and when I--I went and did it, anyway, and made my mistake, you
stood by me to--to the day he died. Never throwing anything up to me! Never
nothing but my good little mother, working her hands to the bone after
he got us out here to help meet the debts he left us. Ain't that a
satisfaction for you to be able to sit and think, mama, how you helped--"
"His feet--blood from my heart in the snow--blood from my heart!"
"The past is gone, darling. What's the use tearing yourself to pieces with
it? Them years in New York when it was a fight even for bread, and them
years here trying to raise Selene and get the business on a footing, you
didn't have time to brood then, mama. That's why, dearie, if only you'll
keep yourself busy with something--the wreaths--the--"
"His feet--blood from my--"
"But I'm going to take you back, mama. To papa's grave. To Aylorff's. But
don't eat your heart out until it comes, darling. I'm going to take you
back, mama, with every wreath in the stack; only, you mustn't eat out your
heart in spells. You mustn't, mama; you mustn't."
Sobs rumbled up through Mrs. Horowitz, which her hand to her mouth tried to
constrict.
"For his people he died. The papers--I begged he should burn them--he
couldn't--I begged he should keep in his hate--he couldn't--in the square
he talked it--the soldiers--he died for his people--they got him--the
soldiers--his feet in the snow when they took him--the blood in the snow--O
my God!--my--God!"
"Mama darling, please don't go over it all again. What's the use making
yourself sick? Please!"
She was well forward in her chair now, winding her dry hands one over the
other with a small rotary motion.
"I was rocking--Shila-baby in my lap--stirring on the fire black lentils
for my boy--black lentils--he--"
"Mama!"
"My boy. Like his father before him. My--"
"Mama, please! Selene is coming any minute now. You know how she hates it.
Don't let yourself think back, mama. A little will-power, the doctor says,
is all you need. Think of to-morrow, mama; maybe, if you want, you can come
down and sit in the store awhile and--"
"I was rocking. O my God! I was rocking, and--"
"Don't get to it--mama, please! Don't rock yourself that way! You'll get
yourself dizzy! Don't, ma; don't!"
"Outside--my boy--the holler--O God! in my ears all my life! My boy--the
papers--the swords--Aylorff--Aylorff--"
"'Shh-h-h--mama--"
"It came through his heart out the back--a blade with two sides--out the
back when I opened the door; the spur in his face when he fell, Shila--the
spur in his face--the beautiful face of my boy--my Aylorff--my husband
before him--that died to make free!" And fell back, bathed in the sweat of
the terrific hiccoughing of sobs.
"Mama, mama! My God! What shall we do? These spells! You'll kill yourself,
darling. I'm going to take you back, dearie--ain't that enough? I promise.
I promise. You mustn't, mama! These spells--they ain't good for a young
girl like Selene to hear. Mama, 'ain't you got your own Shila--your own
Selene? Ain't that something? Ain't it? Ain't it?"
Large drops of sweat had come out and a state of exhaustion that swept
completely over, prostrating the huddled form in the chair.
"Bed--my bed!"
With her arms twined about the immediately supporting form of her daughter,
her entire weight relaxed, and footsteps that dragged without lift, one
after the other, Mrs. Horowitz groped out, one hand feeling in advance,
into the gloom of a room adjoining.
"Rest! O my God! rest!"
"Yes, yes, mama; lean on me."
"My--bed."
"Yes, yes, darling."
"Bed."
Her voice had died now to a whimper that lay on the room after she had
passed out of it.
When Selene Coblenz, with a gust that swept the room, sucking the lace
curtains back against the panes, flung open the door upon that chromatic
scene, the two jets of gas were singing softly into its silence, and within
the nickel-trimmed baseburner the pink mica had cooled to gray. Sweeping
open that door, she closed it softly, standing for the moment against it,
her hand crossed in back and on the knob. It was as if--standing there
with her head cocked and beneath a shadowy blue sailor-hat, a smile coming
out--something within her was playing, sweetly insistent to be heard.
Philomela, at the first sound of her nightingale self, must have stood
thus, trembling with melody. Opposite her, above the crowded mantelpiece
and surmounted by a raffia wreath, the enlarged-crayon gaze of her deceased
maternal grandfather, abetted by a horrible device of photography, followed
her, his eyes focusing the entire room at a glance. Impervious to that
scrutiny, Miss Coblenz moved a tiptoe step or two farther into the room,
lifting off her hat, staring and smiling through a three-shelved cabinet
of knickknacks at what she saw far and beyond. Beneath the two jets, high
lights in her hair came out, bronze showing through the brown waves and the
patches of curls brought out over her cheeks.
In her dark-blue dress, with the row of silver buttons down what was hip
before the hipless age, the chest sufficiently concave and the silhouette a
mere stroke of a hard pencil, Miss Selene Coblenz measured up and down
to America's Venus de Milo, whose chief curvature is of the spine.
Slim-etched, and that slimness enhanced by a conscious kind of collapse
beneath the blue-silk girdle that reached up half-way to her throat, hers
were those proportions which strong women, eschewing the sweet-meat, would
earn by the sweat of the Turkish bath.
When Miss Coblenz caught her eye in the square of mirror above the
mantelpiece, her hands flew to her cheeks to feel of their redness. They
were soft cheeks, smooth with the pollen of youth, and hands still casing
them, she moved another step toward the portièred door.
"Mama!"
Mrs. Coblenz emerged immediately, finger up for silence, kissing her
daughter on the little spray of cheek-curls.
"'Shh-h-h! Gramaw just had a terrible spell."
She dropped down into the upholstered chair beside the base-burner, the
pink and moisture of exertion out in her face, took to fanning herself with
the end of a face-towel flung across her arm.
"Poor gramaw!" she said. "Poor gramaw!"
Miss Coblenz sat down on the edge of a slim, home-gilded chair, and took to
gathering the blue-silk dress into little plaits at her knee.
"Of course, if you don't want to know where I've been--or anything--"
Mrs. Coblenz jerked herself to the moment.
"Did mama's girl have a good time? Look at your dress, all dusty! You
oughtn't to wear your best in that little flivver."
Suddenly Miss Coblenz raised her glance, her red mouth bunched, her eyes
all iris.
"Of course--if you don't want to know--anything."
At that large, brilliant gaze, Mrs. Coblenz leaned forward, quickened.
"Why, Selene!"
"Well, why--why don't you ask me something?"
"Why, I--I dunno, honey. Did--did you and Lester have a nice ride?"
There hung a slight pause, and then a swift moving and crumpling-up of Miss
Coblenz on the floor beside her mother's knee.
"You know--only, you won't ask."
With her hand light upon her daughter's hair, Mrs. Coblenz leaned forward,
her bosom rising to faster breathing.
"Why--Selene--I--Why--"
"We--we were speeding along, and--all of a sudden, out of a clear sky,
he--he popped. He wants it in June, so we can make it our honeymoon to his
new territory out in Oklahoma. He knew he was going to pop, he said, ever
since that first night he saw me at the Y.M.H.A. He says to his uncle Mark,
the very next day in the store, he says to him, 'Uncle Mark,' he says,
'I've met _the_ little girl.' He says he thinks more of my little finger
than all of his regular crowd of girls in town put together. He wants to
live in one of the built-in-bed flats on Wasserman Avenue, like all the
swell young marrieds. He's making twenty-six hundred now, mama, and if he
makes good in the new Oklahoma territory, his Uncle Mark is--is going to
take care of him better. Ain't it like a dream, mama--your little Selene
all of a sudden in with--the somebodies?"
Immediate tears were already finding staggering procession down Mrs.
Coblenz's face, her hovering arms completely encircling the slight figure
at her feet.
"My little girl! My little Selene! My all!"
"I'll be marrying into one of the best families in town, ma. A girl who
marries a nephew of Mark Haas can hold up her head with the best of them.
There's not a boy in town with a better future than Lester. Like Lester
says, everything his Uncle Mark touches turns to gold, and he's already
touched Lester. One of the best known men on Washington Avenue for his
blood-uncle, and on his poor dead father's side related to the Katz &
Harberger Harbergers. Was I right, mama, when I said if you'd only let me
stop school I'd show you? Was I right, momsie?"
"My baby! It's like I can't realize it. So young!"
"He took the measure of my finger, mama, with a piece of string. A diamond,
he says, not too flashy, but neat."
"We have 'em, and we suffer for 'em, and we lose 'em."
"He's going to trade in the flivver for a chummy roadster, and--"
"Oh, darling, it's like I can't bear it!"
At that Miss Coblenz sat back on her tall wooden heels, mauve spats
crinkling.
"Well, you're a merry little future mother-in-law, momsie!"
"It ain't that, baby. I'm happy that my girl has got herself up in the
world with a fine upright boy like Lester; only--you can't understand,
babe, till you've got something of your own flesh and blood that belongs to
you, that I--I couldn't feel anything except that a piece of my heart was
going if--if it was a king you was marrying."
"Now, momsie, it's not like I was moving a thousand miles away. You can
be glad I don't have to go far, to New York or to Cleveland, like Alma
Yawitz."
"I am! I am!"
"Uncle--Uncle Mark, I guess, will furnish us up like he did Leon and
Irma--only, I don't want mahogany; I want Circassian walnut. He gave them
their flat-silver, too, Puritan design, for an engagement present. Think of
it, mama, me having that stuck-up Irma Sinsheimer for a relation! It always
made her sore when I got chums with Amy at school and got my nose in it
with the Acme crowd, and--and she'll change her tune now, I guess, me
marrying her husband's second cousin."
"Didn't Lester want to--to come in for a while, Selene, to--to see--me?"
Sitting there on her heels, Miss Coblenz looked away, answering with her
face in profile.
"Yes; only--I--well, if you want to know it, mama, it's no fun for a girl
to bring a boy like Lester up here in--in this crazy room, all hung up
with gramaw's wreaths and half the time her sitting out there in the dark,
looking in at us through the door and talking to herself."
"Gramaw's an old--"
"Is it any wonder I'm down at Amy's half the time? How do you think a girl
feels to have gramaw keep hanging onto that old black wig of hers and not
letting me take the crayons or wreaths down off the wall? In Lester's crowd
they don't know nothing about revolutionary stuff and persecutions. Amy's
grandmother don't even talk with an accent, and Lester says his grandmother
came from Alsace-Lorraine. That's French. They think only tailors and
old-clothes men and--."
"Selene!"
"Well, they do. You--you're all right, mama, as up to date as any of them,
but how do you think a girl feels, with gramaw always harping right in
front of everybody the way granpa was a revolutionist and was hustled off
barefooted to Siberia like a tramp? And the way she was cooking black beans
when my uncle died. Other girls' grandmothers don't tell everything they
know. Alma Yawitz's grandmother wears lorgnettes, and you told me yourself
they came from nearly the same part of the Pale as gramaw. But you don't
hear them remembering it. Alma Yawitz says she's Alsace-Lorraine on both
sides. People don't tell everything they know. Anyway where a girl's got
herself as far as I have!"
Through sobs that rocked her, Mrs. Coblenz looked down upon her daughter.
"Your poor old grandmother don't deserve that from you! In her day she
worked her hands to the bone for you. With the kind of father you had we
might have died in the gutter but for how she helped to keep us out, you
ungrateful girl--your poor old grandmother, that's suffered so terrible!"
"I know it, mama, but so have other people suffered."
"She's old, Selene--old."
"I tell you it's the way you indulge her, mama. I've seen her sitting here
as perk as you please, and the minute you come in the room down goes her
head like--like she was dying."