The day before Christmas--an anxious day in Regalberg's department
store, where the "extra help" were wondering which of them would be kept
on. Most of them were given dismissals with their pay-envelopes.
Mother's fate was not decided. She was told to report on the following
Monday; the toy-department would be reduced, but possibly they would
find a place for her in the children's dresses department, for the
January white sale.... At the very least, they would be glad to give her
an excellent recommendation, the buyer told her. More distraught than
one stunned by utter hopelessness and ruin, she came home and, as Father
had once been wont to do for her, she made her face bright to deceive
him.
Under her arm she carried a wonderful surprise, a very large bundle.
Father was agitated about it when she plumped gaily into their
housekeeping room. At last she let him open it. He found an overcoat, a
great, warm, high-collared overcoat.
He had an overcoat--an overcoat! He could put it on, any time, and go
about the streets without the pinned coat-collar which is the sign of
the hobo. He could walk all day, looking for a job--warm and prosperous.
He could find work and support Mother. He had an overcoat! He was a
gentleman again!
With tears, he kissed her, lingeringly, then produced his own present,
which he had meant to keep till Christmas Day itself. It was seven
dollars, which he had earned as waiter at the piggery.
"And we're going out and have dinner on it, too," he insisted.
"Yes, yes; we will. We've been economizing--so much!"
But before they went they carefully cached in the window-box the cabbage
he had cooked for dinner.
With a slow luxurious joy in every movement he put on the overcoat. Even
in the pocket in which he stuck the seven Christmas dollars he had a
distinct pleasure, for his undercoat pockets were too torn, too holey,
to carry anything in them. They went prancing to the Hungarian
restaurant. They laughed so much that Father forgot to probe her about
the overcoat, and did not learn that she had bought it second-hand, for
three dollars, and had saved the three dollars by omitting lunch for
nearly four weeks.
They had a table at the front of the restaurant, near the violin. They
glowed over soup and real meat and coffee. There were funny people at
the next table--a man who made jokes. Something about the "Yiddisher
gavotte," and saying, "We been going to dances a lot, but last night the
wife and I wanted to be quiet, so I bought me two front seats for
Grant's Tomb!" It was tremendous. Father and Mother couldn't make many
jokes, these days, but they listened and laughed. The waiter remembered
them; they had always tipped him ten cents; he kept coming back to see
if there was anything they wanted, as though they were important people.
Father thanked her for the overcoat in what he blithely declared to be
Cape Cod dialect, and toasted her in coffee. They were crammed with good
cheer when Mother paid the check from a dollar she had left over, and
they rose from the table.
Father stood perplexedly gazing at the hat-rack behind them. He gasped,
"Why, where--Why, I hung it----"
He took down his old hat with a pathetic, bewildered hesitancy, and he
whispered to Mother, "My overcoat is gone--it's been stolen--my new
overcoat. Now I can't go out and get a job--"
They cried out, and demanded restitution of the waiter, the head-waiter,
the manager. None of these officials could do more than listen and ask
heavy questions in bad English and ejaculate, "Somebody stole it from
right behind you there when you weren't looking."
One of the guests dramatically said that he had seen a man who looked
suspicious, and for a moment every one paid attention to him, but that
was all the information he had. The other guests gazed with apathetic
interest, stirring their coffee and grunting one to another, "He ought
to watched it."
The manager pointed at one of the signs, "This restaurant is not
responsible for the loss of hats, coats, or packages," and he shouted,
"I am very sorry, but we can do nuttin'. Somebody stole it from right
behind you there--no one was looking. If you leaf your name and
address--"
Father didn't even hear him. He was muttering to himself, "And the seven
dollars that I saved for Sarah was in it."
He took Mother's arm; he tried to walk straight as he turned his back on
the storm of windy words from the manager.
Once they were away from spectators, on dark Fifteenth Street, Father
threw up his hands and in a voice of utter agony he mourned, "I can't do
anything more. I'm clean beaten. I've tried, and I've looked for work,
but now-- Be better if I went and jumped in the river."
She took his arm and led him along, as though he were a child and
helpless. She comforted him as well as she could, but there was nothing
very convincing to say. As she grew silent her thoughts grew noisy. They
shouted separate, hard, brutal sentences, so loudly that she could not
hear even the scraping feet of the stooped man beside her. They
clamored:
"I can't do anything more, either.
"I don't believe I will be kept on at the store, after all. Only through
January, anyway.
"All the money we've got now is the nine dollars they gave me to-day.
"Suppose that's been stolen, too, from our room.
"Suppose I died.
"What would happen to Father if I died? He'd have to go--some dreadful
place--poor-house or some place--
"What would happen to me if he died? I'd be so lonely I couldn't stand
it. He's always been so dear to me.
"That clerk in the book-department that died from asphyxiation--I wonder
if it was accident, after all. They said so, but she was so unhappy and
all when she talked to me at lunch.
"'Better jump in the river.' That would be cold and he hasn't got an
overcoat. No, of course, that wouldn't make any difference--
"I wonder if gas suicide hurts much?
"If we could only die together and neither of us be left--
"God wouldn't call that suicide--oh, He couldn't, not when there's two
people that nobody wants and they don't ask anything but just to be
together. That nobody really wants--my daughter don't--except maybe the
Tubbses. And they are so poor, too. Nobody needs us and we just want to
find a happy way to go off together where we can sleep! Oh, I wouldn't
think that would be wrong, would it?"
They were at home. She hastened to burrow among the pile of stewpans for
the nine dollars, her week's salary, which she had hidden there. When
she found that it was safe, she didn't care so much, after all. What
difference would it have made if the money had been gone?
Father staggered like a drunkard to one of the flimsy, straight,
uncomfortable chairs. But he got himself up and tried to play on the
mouth-organ a careless tune of grassy hills and a summer breeze. While
he played he ridiculed himself for such agony over the loss of an
overcoat, but his philosophizing didn't mean anything. He had lost the
chance of finding work when he had lost the overcoat. He couldn't really
think, and the feeble trickle of music had a tragic absurdity. He
petulantly threw the mouth-organ on the bed, then himself slumped on the
coverlet. His face was grayly hopeless, like ashes or dust or the snow
of great cities.
Mother had been brooding. She was only distantly conscious of his final
collapse. She said, suddenly, bluntly: "Let's go away together. If we
could only die while we are still together and have some nice things to
remember--"
Hers was the less conventional mind of the two. He protested--but it
was a feeble mumble. The world had come to seem unreal; the question of
leaving it rather unimportant.
Much they talked, possibly for hours, but the talk was as confused as
the spatter of furniture in that ill-lighted room--lighted by a gas-jet.
All that they said was but repetition of her first demand.
While he lay on the bed, flat, his arms out, like a prisoner on a rack,
wondering why all his thoughts had become a void in which he could find
no words with which to answer her, she slowly stood up, turned out the
gas, then again opened the gas-cock.
She hastily stripped off her overcoat and fitted it over the crack at
the bottom of the door, where showed a strip of light from the slimy
hall without. She caught up the red cotton table-cloth and stuffed it
along the window, moving clumsily through the room, in which the
darkness was broken only by pallid light that seeped through the window
from cold walls without. She staggered over and lay down beside him. Her
work was done, and in the darkness her worried frown changed to a smile
of divine and mothering kindliness which did not lessen as a thin,
stinging, acid vapor of illuminating gas bit at her throat and made her
cough.
Father raised his head in stupefied alarm. She drew him down, put his
head on her shoulder. She took his hand, to lead him, her little boy,
into a land of summer dreams where they would always be together. The
Innocents were going their way, asking no one's permission, yet harming
no one.... His hand was twitching a little; he coughed with a sound of
hurt bewilderment; but she held his hand firmly, and over this first
rough part of the road the mother of tenderness led him pityingly on.