My feeling that I was predestined to see, with Susan, that there wasn't
anybody like Jimmy--that I was further predestined to take him into my
heart and home--proved, very much to my own surprise and to the
disappointment of Susan, to be unjustified. This was the first bitter
defeat that Susan had been called upon to bear since leaving Birch
Street. She took it quietly, but deeply, which troubled my private sense
of relief, and indeed turned it into something very like regret. The
simple fact was that much had happened in Birch Street since the tragedy
of the four-room house; life had not stood still there; chance and
change--deaths and marriages and births--had altered the circumstances
of whole families. In short, that steady flux of mortality, which
respects neither the dignity of the Hillhouse Avenues nor the obscurity
of the Birch Streets of the world, had in its secret courses already
borne Jimmy Kane--elsewhere. Precisely where, even his mother did not
know; and first and last it was her entire and passionate ignorance as
to Jimmy's present location which foiled us. "West" is a geographical
expression certainly, but it is not an address.
Jimmy's mother lived with her unwashed brood, you will remember, above
old Heinze's grocery store, and on the following afternoon I ran Susan
over there for a tactful reconnaissance. At Susan's request we went
slowly along Birch Street from its extreme right end to its ultimate
wrong, crossing the waste land and general dump at the base of East
Rock--historic ground!--mounting the long incline beyond, and so passing
the four-room house, which now seemed to be occupied by at least three
families of that hardy, prolific race discourteously known to young
America as "wops." Throughout this little tour Susan withdrew, and I
respected her silence. She had not yet spoken when we stopped at
Heinze's corner and descended.
Here first it was that forebodings of chance and change met us upon the
pavement, in the person of old Heinze himself, standing melancholy and
pensive before the screened doorway of his domain. Him Susan accosted.
He did not at first recognize her, but recollection returned to him as
she spoke.
"_Ach_, so!" he exclaimed, peering with mildest surprise above
steel-rimmed spectacles. "Id iss you--nod? Leedle Susanna!"
My formal introduction followed; nor was it without a glow of
satisfaction that I heard old Heinze assure me that he had read certain
of my occasional essays with attention and respect. "Ard for ard--yah!
Dot iss your credo," he informed me, with tranquil noddings of his
bumpy, oddly shaped skull. "Dot iss der credo of all arisdograds. Id iss
nod mine."
But Susan was in no mood for general ideas; she descended at once to
particulars, and announced that we were going up to see Mrs. Kane. Then
old Heinze snaggily, and I thought rather wearily, smiled.
"_Aber_," he objected, lifting twisted, rheumatic hands, "dere iss no
more such a vooman! Alretty, leedle Susanna, I haf peen an oldt fool
like oders. I haf made her my vife." And though he continued to smile,
he also sighed.
Our ensuing interview with Frau Heinze, formerly the Widow Kane, fully
interpreted this sigh. Prosperity, Susan later assured me, had not
improved her. She greeted us, above the shop, in her small, shiny,
colored lithograph of a parlor, with unveiled suspicion. Her eyes were
hostile. She seemed to take it for granted, did Mrs. Heinze, that we
could have no kindly purpose in intruding upon her. A dumpy, grumpy
little woman, with the parboiled hands and complexion of long years at
the wash-tubs, her present state of comparative freedom from bondage had
not lightened her heart. Her irritability, I told Susan after our
escape, was doubtless due to the fact that she could not share in old
Heinze's intellectual and literary tastes. Susan laughed.
"She wouldn't bother much about that; Birch Street's never lonely, and
it's only a step to the State Street movies. No; I think it's corsets."
Corsets? The word threw a flood of light. I saw at once that it must be
a strain upon any disposition to return after a long and figureless
widowhood to the steel, buckram, and rebellious curves of conventional
married life. I remembered the harnesslike creaking of Mrs. Heinze's
waistline, and forgave her much.
There was really a good deal to forgive. It was neither Susan's fault
nor mine that turned our call into a bad quarter of an hour. I had
looked for a pretty scene as I mounted the stairs behind Susan. I had
pictured the child, in her gay summer frock, bursting like sunshine into
Mrs. Heinze's stuffy quarters--and so forth. Nothing of the kind
occurred.
"Who is ut?" demanded Mrs. Heinze, peering forth. "Oh, it's you--Bob
Blake's girl. What do you want?" Susan explained. "Well, come in then,"
said Mrs. Heinze.
Susan, less daunted than I by her reception, marched in and asked at
once for Jimmy. At the sound of his name Mrs. Heinze's suspicions were
sharply focused. If the gentleman knew anything about Jimmy, all right,
let him say so! It wouldn't surprise her to hear he'd been gettin'
himself into trouble! It would surprise her much more, she implied, if
he had not. But if he had, she couldn't be responsible--nor Heinze
either, the poor man! Jimmy was sixteen--a man grown, you might say. Let
him look after himself, then; and more shame to him for the way he'd
acted!
But what way he had acted, and why, Susan at first found it difficult to
determine.
"Oh!" she at length protested, following cloudy suggestions of evil
courses. "Jimmy couldn't do anything mean! You know he couldn't. It
isn't in him!"
"Isn't ut indeed! Me slavin' for him and the childer ever since Kane was
took off sudden--and not a cint saved for the livin'--let alone the
dead! Slavin' and worritin'--the way you'd think Jimmy'd 'a' jumped wid
joy when Heinze offered! And an easier man not to be found--though he's
got his notions. What man hasn't? If it's not one thing, it's another.
'Except his beer, he don't drink much,' I says to Jimmy; 'and that's
more than I could say for your own father, rest his soul!' 'My father
wasn't a Dutchman,' Jimmy says; givin' me his lip to me face. 'He didn't
talk out against the Pope,' he says. 'Nor the Pris'dint,' he says. 'He
wasn't a stinkin' Socialist,' he says--usin' them very words! 'No,' I
says, 'he was a Demycrat--and what's ut to you? All men'll be blatherin'
polytics after hours,' I says. 'Heinze manes no harm by ut, no more nor
the rest. 'Tis just his talk,' I says. And after that we had more words,
and I laid me palm to his head."
"Oh!" cried Susan.
"I'll not take lip from a son of mine, Susan Blake; nor from you, wid
all your grand clothes! I've seen you too often lackin' a modest stitch
to your back!"