know you can wind me round--wind me round."
"Baby! Baby!"
He smoothed her hair away from her salt-bitten eyes, laid his cheek pat
against hers, and murmured to her through the scratch in his throat,
like a parrakeet croons to its mate.
"Pussy-cat! Pussy!"
The river of difference between them dried in the warm sun of her
forgiveness, and she sobbed on his shoulder with the exhaustion of a
child after a tantrum.
"You won't leave me alone nights no more, Harry?"
"Thu--thu--thu--such a little Goldie-eyes!"
"I can't stand for the worry of the board no more, Harry. McCaskys are
gettin' ugly. I ain't got a decent rag to my back, neither."
"I'm going to take a shipping-room job next week, honey, and get back in
harness. Bill's going to fix me up. There ain't nothin' in this rotten
game, and I'm going to get out."
"Sure?"
"Sure, Goldie."
"You ain't been drinking, Harry?"
"Sure I ain't. Me and Cutty had a rube out, I tell you."
"You'll keep straight, won't you, Harry? You're killin' me, boy, you
are."
"Come, dry your face, baby."
He reached to his hip-pocket for his handkerchief, and with it a sparse
shower of red and green and pink and white and blue confetti showered to
the floor like snow through a spectrum. Goldie slid from his embrace
and laughed--a laugh frapped with the ice of scorn and chilled as her
own chilled heart.
"Liar!" she said, and trembled as she stood.
His lips curled again into the expression that so ill-fitted his
albinism.
"You little cat! You can bluff me!"
"I knew you was up at the Crescent Cotillon! I felt it in my bones. I
knew you was up there when I read on the bill-boards that the Red
Slipper was dancing there. I knew where you was every night while I been
sittin' here waitin'! I knew--I knew--"
The piano-salesman rapped against the folding-doors thrice, with
distemper and the head of a cane. At that instant the lower half of Mr.
Trimp's face protruded suddenly into a lantern-jawed facsimile of a
blue-ribbon English bull; his hand shot out and hurled the chair that
stood between them half-way across the room, where it fell on its side
against the wash-stand and split a rung.
"You--you little devil, you!"
The second-floor front beat a tattoo of remonstrance; but there was a
sudden howling as of boiling surf in Mr. Trimp's ears, and the hot ember
of an oath dropped from his lips.
"You little devil! You been hounding me with the quit game for eight
months. Now you gotta quit!"
"I--I--"
"There ain't a man livin' would stand for your long face and naggin'!
If you don't like my banking-hours and my game and the company I keep
you quit, kiddo! Quit! Do you hear?"
"Will--I--quit? Well--"
"Yeh; I been up to the Crescent Confetti--every night this week, just
like you say! I been round live wires, where there ain't no long, white
faces shoving board bills and whining the daylights out of me."
"Oh, you--you ain't nothing but--"
"Sure, I been up there! I can get two laughs for every long face you
pull on me. You quit if you want to, kiddo--there ain't no strings to
you. Quit--and the sooner the better!" Mr. Trimp grasped his wife by her
taut wrists and jerked her to him until her head fell backward and the
breath jumped out of her throat in a choke. "Quit--and the sooner the
better!"
"Lemme go! Lem-me-go!"
He tightened his hold and inclined toward her, so close that their faces
almost touched. With his hot clutches on her wrists and his hot breath
in her face it seemed to her that his eyes fused into one huge Cyclopean
circle that spun and spun in the center of his forehead, like a fiery
Catharine Wheel against a night sky.
"Bah! You little whiteface, you! You played a snide trick on me,
anyway--lost your looks the second month and went dead like a punctured
tire! Quit when you want to--there ain't no strings. Quit now!"
He flung her from him, so that she staggered backward four steps and
struck her right cheek sharply against the mantel corner. A blue-glass
vase fell to the hearth and was shattered. With the salt of fray on his
lips, he kicked at the overturned chair and slammed a closet door so
that the windows rattled. A carpet-covered hassock lay in his path, and
he hurled it across the floor. Goldie edged toward the wardrobe, hugging
the wall like one who gropes in the dark.
"If you're right bright, kiddo, you'll keep out of my way. You got me
crazy to-night--crazy! Do you hear me, you little--"
"My hat!"
He flung it to her from its peg, with her jacket, so that they fell
crumpled at her feet.
"You're called on your bluff this time, little one. This is one night
it's quits for you--and I ain't drunk, neither!"
She crowded her rampant hair, flowing as Ophelia's, into her cheap
little boyish hat and fumbled into her jacket. A red welt, shaped like a
tongue of flame, burned diagonally down her right cheek.
"Keep out of my way--you! You got me crazy to-night--crazy to-night!"
He watched her from the opposite side of the room with lowered head,
like a bull lunging for onslaught.
She moved toward the door with the rigidity of an automaton doll, her
magnetized eyes never leaving his reddening face and her hands groping
ahead. Her mouth was moist and no older than a child's; but her skin
dead, as if coated over with tallow. She opened the door slowly, fearing
to break the spell--then suddenly slipped through the aperture and
slammed it after her. Then the slam of another door; the scurrying of
feet down cold stone steps that sprung echoes in the deserted street.
The douse of cold air stung her flaming cheek; a policeman glanced after
her; a drunken sailor staggered out of a black doorway, and her
trembling limbs sped faster--a labyrinth of city streets and rows of
blank-faced houses; an occasional pedestrian, who glanced after her
because she wheezed in her throat, and ever so often gathered her
strength and broke into a run; then a close, ill-smelling apartment
house, with a tipsy gas-light mewling in the hall, and a dull-brown door
that remained blank to her knocks and rings. The sobs were rising in her
throat, and the trembling in her limbs shook her as with ague.
A knock that was more of a pound and a frenzied rattling of the knob!
Finally from the inside of the door a thump-thump down a long
hallway--and the door creaked open cautiously, suspiciously!
In its frame a pale figure, in the rumpled clothes of one always sitting
down and hunched on a pair of silver-mounted mahogany crutches that
slanted from her sides like props.
"Goldie! Little Goldie!"
"Oh, Addie! Addie!"
* * * * *
Youth has rebound like a rubber ball. Batted up against the back fence,
she bounces back into the heart of a rose-bush or into the carefully
weeded, radishless radish-bed of the kitchen garden.
Mrs. Trimp rose from the couch-bed davenport of the Bopp
sitting-dining-sleeping-room, with something of the old lamps burning
in her eyes and a full-lipped mouth to which clung the memory of smiles.
Even Psyche, abandoned by love, smiled a specious smile when she posed
for the scalpel.
Eddie Bopp reached out a protective arm and drew Goldie by the sleeve of
her shirt-waist down to the couch-bed davenport again.
"Take it easy there, Goldie. Don't get yourself all excited again."
"But it's just like you say, Eddie--I got the law on my side. I got him
on the grounds of cruelty if--if I show nothin' but--but this cheek."
"Sure, you have, Goldie; but you just sit quiet. Addie, come in here and
make Goldie behave her little self."
"I'm all right, Eddie. Gee! With Addie treating me like I was a queen in
a gilt crown, and you skidding round me like a tire, I feel like cream!"
Eddie regarded her with eyes that were soft as rose-colored lamps at
dusk.
"You poor little kid!"
Addie hobbled in from the kitchen.
"I got something you'll like, Goldie. It's hot and good for you, too."
God alone knew the secret of Addie. He had fashioned her in clay and
water, even as you and me--from the same earthy compound from which is
sprung ward politicians and magic-throated divas, editors and plumbers,
poet laureates and Polish immigrants, kings and French ballet dancers,
propagandists and piece-workers, single-taxers and suffragettes.
He fashioned her in clay; and it was as if she came from under the teeth
of a Ninth Avenue street-car fender--broken, but remolded in alabaster,
and with the white light of her stanch spirit shining through--Addie,
whose side, up as high as her ribs, was a flaming furnace and whose
smile was sunshine on dew.
"You wouldn't eat no supper; so I made you some chicken broth, Goldie.
You remember when we was studying shorthand at night school how we used
to send Jimmie over to White's lunch-room for chickenette broth and a
slab of milk chocolate?"
"Do I? Gee! You were the greatest kid, Addie!"
"Eat, Goldie--gwan."
"I ain't hungry--honest!"
"Quit standing over her, Eddie; you make her nervous. Let me feed you,
Goldie."
"Gee! Ain't you swell to me!" Ready tears sprang to her eyes.
"Like you ain't my old chum, Goldie! It don't seem so long since we were
working in the same office and going to Recreation Pier dances together,
does it?"
"Addie! Addie!"
"Do you remember how you and me and Ed and Charley Snuggs used to walk
up and down Ninth Avenue summer evenings eating ice-cream cones?"
"Do I? Oh, Addie, do I?"
"I'm glad we had them ice-cream days, Goldie. They're melted, but the
flavor ain't all gone." Addie's face was large and white and
calm-featured, like a Botticelli head.
"You two girls sure was cut-ups! Remember the night Addie first
introduced us, Goldie? You came over to call for her, and us three went
to the wax-works show on Twenty-third Street. Lordy, how we cut up!"
"And I started to ask the wax policeman if we was allowed to go past the
rail!" They laughed low in their throats, as if they feared to raise an
echo in a vale of tears. "It's like old times for me to be staying all
night with you again, Addie. It's been so long! He--he used to get mad
like anything if I wanted to see any of the old crowd. He knew they
didn't know any good of him. He was always for the sporty, all-night
bunch."
"Poor kid!"
"Don't get her to talking about it again, Eddie; it gets her all
excited."
"He could have turned me against my own mother, I was that crazy over
him."
"That," said Addie, softly, "was _love_! And only women can love like
that; and women who do love like that are cursed--and blessed."
"I'm out of it now, Addie. You won't never send me back to him--you
won't ever?"
"There now, dearie, you're gettin' worked up again. Ain't you right
here, safe with us?"
"That night at Hinkey's was the worst, Goldie," said Eddie. "It makes my
blood boil! Why didn't you quit then; why?"
"I ain't told you all, neither, Eddie. One night he came home about two
o'clock, and I had been--"
"Just quit thinking and talking about him, Goldie. You're right here,
safe with me and Eddie; and he's going to get you a job when you're
feeling stronger. And then, when you're free--when you're free--"
Addie regarded her brother with the tender aura of a smile on her lips
and a tender implication in her eyes that scurried like a frightened
mouse back into its hole. Eddie flamed red; and his ears, by a curious
physiological process, seemed to take fire and contemplate instant
flight from his head.
"Oh, look, Ad. We got to get a new back for your chair. The stuffin's
all poking through the velvet."
"So it is, Eddie. It's a good thing you got your raise, with all these
new-fangled dangles we need."
"To-night's his lodge night. He never came home till three--till three
o'clock, lodge nights."
"There you go, Goldie--back on the subject, makin' yourself sick."
"Gee!"
"What's the matter, Goldie?"
"To-night's his lodge. I could go now and get my things while he ain't
there--couldn't I?"
"Swell! I'll take you, Goldie, and wait outside for you."
"Eddie, can't you see she ain't in any condition to go running round
nights? There's plenty time yet, Goldie. You can wear my shirt-waists
and things. Wait till--"
"I got to get it over with, Addie; and daytimes Eddie's working, and I'd
have to go alone. I--I don't want to go alone."
"Sure; she can't go alone, Addie; and she's got to have her things."
Eddie was on his feet and beside Goldie's palpitating figure, as though
he would lay his heart, a living stepping-stone, at her feet.
"We better go now, Addie; honest we had! Eddie'll wait outside for me."
"You poor kid! You want to get it over with, don't you? Get her coat,
Eddie, and bring her my sweater to wear underneath. It's getting colder
every minute."
"I ain't scared a bit, Addie. I'll just go in and pack my things
together and hustle out again."
"Here's a sweater, Goldie, and your coat and hat."
"Take care, children; and, Goldie, don't forget all the things you need.
Just take your time and get your things together--warm clothes and all."
"I'll be waiting right outside for you, Goldie."
"I'm ready, Eddie."
"Don't let her get excited and worked up, Eddie."
"I ain't scared a bit, Addie."
"Sure you ain't?"
"Not a bit!"
"Good-by, Addie. Gee, but you're swell to me!"
"Don't forget to bring your rubbers, Goldie; going to work on wet
mornings you'll need them."
"I--I ain't got none."
"You can have mine. I--I don't need them any more."
"Good-by, Ad--leave the dishes till we come back. I can do 'em swell
myself after you two girls have gone to bed."
"Yes. I'll be waiting, Goldie; and we'll talk in bed like old times."
"Yes, yes!" It was as if Addie's frail hands were gripping Goldie's
heart and clogging her speech.
"Good-by, children!"
"Good-by."
"S'long!"
The night air met them with a whoop and tugged and pulled at Goldie's
hat.
"Take my arm, Goldie. It's some howler, ain't it?"
Their feet clacked on the cold, dry pavement, and passers-by leaned into
the wind.
"He was a great one for hating the cold, Eddie. Gee, how he hated
winter!"
"That's why he wears a fur-collared coat and you go freezing along in a
cheese-cloth jacket, I guess."
"It always kind of got on his chest and gave him fever."
"What about you? You just shivered along and dassent say anything!"
"And I used to fix him antiphlogistin plasters half the night. When he
wasn't mad or drunk he was just like a kid with the measles! It used to
make me laugh so--he'd--"
"Humph!"
"But one night--one night I got the antiphlogistin too hot while I was
straightening up--'cause he never liked a messy-looking room when he was
sick--and he was down and out from one of his bad nights; and it--and it
got too hot, and--" She turned away and finished her sentence in the
teeth of the wind; but Eddie's arm tightened on hers until she could
feel each distinct finger.
"God!" he said.
"I ain't scared a bit, Eddie."
"For what, I'd like to know! Ain't I going to be waiting right here
across the street?"
"See! That's the room over there--the dark one, with the shade half-way
up. Gee, how I hate it!"
"I'll be waiting right here in front of Joe's place, Goldie. If you need
me just shoot the shade all the way up."
"I won't need you."
"Well, then, light the gas, pull the shade all the way down, and that'll
mean all's well."
"Swell!" she said. "Down comes the shade--and all's well!"
"Good!"
They smiled, and their breaths clouded between them; and down through
the high-walled street the wind shot javelin-like and stung red into
their cheeks, and in Eddie's ears and round his heart the blood buzzed.
Goldie crossed the street and went up the steps lightly, her feet
grating the brown stone like fine-grained sandpaper. When she unlocked
the front door the cave-like mustiness and the cold smell of unsunned
hallways and the conglomerate of food smells from below met her at the
threshold. Memories like needle-tongued insects stung her.
The first-floor front she opened slowly, pausing after every creak of
the door; and the gas she fumbled because her hand trembled, and the
match burned close to her fingers before she found the tip.
She turned up the flame until it sang, and glanced about her fearfully,
with one hand on her bruised cheek and her underlip caught in by her
teeth.
Mr. Trimp's room was as expressive as a lady's glove still warm from her
hand. He might have slipped out of it and let it lie crumpled, but in
his own image.
The fumes of bay-rum and stale beer struggled for supremacy. The
center-table, with a sickening litter of empty bottles and dead ashes,
was dreary as cold mutton in its grease, or a woman's painted face at
crack o' dawn, or the moment when the flavor of love becomes as tansy.
A red-satin slipper, an unhygienic drinking-goblet, which has leaked and
slopped over full many a non-waterproof romance, lay on the floor, with
its red run into many pinks and its rosette limp as a wad of paper.
Goldie picked her careful way round it. Fear and nausea and sickness at
the heart made her dizzy.
The dresser, with its wavy mirror, was strewn with her husband's
neckties; an uncorked bottle of bay-rum gave out its last faint fumes.
She opened the first long drawer with a quivering intake of breath and
pulled out a shirt-waist, another, and yet another, and a coarse white
petticoat with a large-holed embroidery flounce. Then she dragged a
suit-case, which was wavy like the mirror, through the blur of her
tears, out from under the bed; and while she fumbled with the lock the
door behind her opened, and her heart rose in her throat with the sudden
velocity of an express elevator shooting up a ten-story shaft.
In the dresser mirror, and without turning her head or gaining her feet,
she looked into the eyes of her husband.
"Pussy-cat!" he said, and came toward her with his teeth flashing like
Carrara marble in sunlight.
She sprang to her feet and backed against the dresser.
"Don't! Don't you come near me!"
"You don't mean that, Goldie."
She shivered in her scorn.
"Don't you come near me! I came--to get my things."
"Oh!" he said, and tossed his hat on the bed and peeled off his coat.
"Help yourself, kiddo. Go as far as you like."
She fell to tearing at the contents of her drawer without
discrimination, cramming them into her bag and breathing furiously, like
a hare in the torture of the chase. The color sprang out in her cheeks,
and her eyes took fire.
Her husband threw himself, in his shirt-sleeves and waistcoat, across
the bed and watched her idly. Only her fumbling movements and the sing
of the too-high gas broke the silence. He rose, lowered the flame, and
lay down again.
Her little box of poor trinkets spilled its contents as she packed it;
her hair-brush fell from her trembling fingers and clattered to the
floor.
"Can I help you, Goldie-eyes?"
Silence. He coughed rather deep in his chest, and she almost brushed
his hand as she passed to the clothes wardrobe. He reached out and
caught her wrist.
"Now, Goldie, you--"
"Don't--don't you touch me! Let go!"
He drew her down to the bed beside him.
"Can't you give a fellow another chance, baby? Can't you?" She tugged
for her freedom, but his clasp was tight as steel and tender as love.
"Can't you, baby?"
"You!" she said, kicking at the sloppy satin slipper at her feet, as if
it were a loathsome thing that crawled. "I--I don't ever want to see you
again, you--you--"
"You drove me to it, pussy; honest you did!"
"You didn't need no driving. You take to it like a fish to water--nobody
can drive you. You just ain't--no--good!"
"You drove me to it. When you quit I just went crazy mad. I kicked the
skylight--I tore things wide open. I was that sore for you--honest,
baby!"
"I've heard that line of talk before. I ain't forgot the night at
Hinkey's. I ain't forgot nothing. You or horses can't hold me here!" She
wrenched at her wrists.
"I got a job yesterday, baby. Bill made good. Eighty dollars, honey! Me
and Cutty are quits for good. Ain't that something--now, ain't it?"
"Let me go!"
"Pussy-cat!"
"Let me go, I say!"
He coughed and turned on his side toward her.
"You don't mean it."
"I do! I do! Let go! Let go!"
She tore herself free and darted to the wardrobe door. He closed his
eyes and his lashes lay low on his cheeks.
"Before you go, Goldie, where's the antiphlogistin? I got a chest on me
like an ice-wagon."
"Sure, you have. That's the only time you ever show up before crack of
dawn."
He reached out and touched her wrist.
"I'm hot, ain't I?"
She placed a reluctant hand on his brow.
"Fever?"
"It ain't nothing much. I'll be all right."
"It's just one of your spells. Stay in bed a couple of days, and you'll
soon be ready for another jamboree!"
"Don't fuss at me, baby."
"It's in the wash-stand drawer in a little tin can. Don't make the
plaster too hot."
"Sure, I won't. I'll get along all righty."
She threw a shabby cloth skirt over her arm and a pressed-plush coat
that was gray at the elbows and frayed at the hem. He reached out for
the dangling empty sleeve as she passed.
"You was married in that coat, wasn't you, hon?"
"Yes," she said, and her lips curled like burning paper; "I was married
in that coat."
"Goldie-eyes, you know I can't get along without my petsie; you know it.
There ain't no one can hold a candle to you, baby!"
"Yes, yes!"
"There ain't! I wish I was feelin' well enough to tell you how sorry,
baby--how sorry a fellow like me can get. I just wish it, baby--baby--"
She surrendered like a reed to the curve of a scythe and crumpled in a
contortional heap beside the bed.
"You--you always get me!"
He gathered her up and laid her head backward on his shoulder, so that
her face was foreshortened and close to his.
"Goldie-eyes," he said, "I'll make it up to you! I'll make it up to
you!" And he made a motion as though to kiss her where the curls lay on
her face, but drew back as if sickened.
"Good God!" he said. "Poor little baby!"
Quick as a throb of a heart she turned her left cheek, smooth as a lily
petal, to his lips.
"It's all right, Harry!" she said, in a voice that was tight. "I'm
crazy, I guess; but, gee, it's great to be crazy!"
"I'll make it up to you, baby. See if I don't! I'll make it up to you."
She kissed him, and his lips were hot and dry.
"Lemme fix your plaster, dearie; you got one of your colds."
"Don't get it too hot, hon."
"Gee! Lemme straighten up. Say, ain't you a messer, though! Look at this
here wash-stand and those neckties! Ain't you a messer, though, dearie!"
She crammed the ties into a dresser drawer, dragged a chair into place,
removed a small tin can from the wash-stand drawer, hung her hat and
jacket on their peg, and lowered the shade.
MARKED DOWN
Along with radium, parcels post, wireless telegraphy, and orchestral
church music came tight skirts and the hipless movement.
Adolph Katzenstein placed his figurative ear to the ground, heard the
stealthy whisper of soft messalines and clinging charmeuse, and sold out
the Empire Shirt-waist Company for twenty-five hundred dollars at a
slight loss.
Five years later the Katzenstein Neat-Fit Petticoat was flaunted in the
red and white electric lights in the lightest part of Broadway, and the
figure of an ecstatic girl in an elastic-top, charmeuse-ruffled
petticoat had become as much of an epic in street-car advertising as the
flakiest breakfast food or the safest safety razor.
Then the Katzensteins moved from a simplex to a complex apartment,
furnished the dining-room in Flemish oak and the bedroom in white
mahogany; Mrs. Katzenstein telephoned to her fancy grocer's for
artichokes instead of buying cabbages from the street-vender, and Mr.
Katzenstein walked with the four fingers of each hand thrust into the
distended front pockets of his trousers.
On the first Tuesday of each month Mrs. Katzenstein entertained at
whist--an antediluvian survival of a bridgeless era.
At eight o'clock in the morning of one of these first Tuesdays she
entered her daughter's white-mahogany bedroom, raised the shades with a
clatter, and drew back the curtains.
"Birdie, get up! It's late, and we got house-cleaning this morning.
Papa's been gone already an hour."
The pink-and-white flowered comforter on the bed stirred, and two plump
arms, with frills of lace falling backward, raised up like sturdy
monoliths in the stretch that accompanies a yawn.
"Aw--yaw--yaw--mamma! Can't you let a girl sleep after she's been up
late? Tell Tillie she should begin her sweeping in the hall."