gentle villanelle of his emotions writ frankly across his features.
"Pearlie--"
"She'll be all right in a minute, Mr. Teitlebaum--like her papa she is,
always so afraid of a little sickness."
"Pearlie, ain't you going to look at me?"
She sprang from his light hand on her shoulder, and the tears grew to
little globules, trembled, fell. Then a sudden rod of resolution
straightened her back.
"We--I been lying to you, Max; I ain't--sick!"
"Poil!"
"I--I think I know, little Pearlie!"
"Poil!"
"No, no; it's best we tell the truth, mamma."
"Ya, ya. Oh, my--"
"We--we're in big trouble, Max. Business trouble. The store, ever--ever
since the traction--it ain't been the same."
"I know, little Pearlie. I--"
"Wait a minute, Max. We--we ain't what you maybe think we are. To-morrow
two weeks we got to meet creditors and extension notes. We can't pay
with even twenty cents on the dollar. We're gone under, Max!"
"I--"
"We ain't got it to meet them with. Papa--if a man like papa couldn't
make it go nobody could--"
"Such a man, Mr. Teitlebaum, so honest, so--"
"Shh-h-h, mamma."
"It's our--my fault, Max. He was afraid even last year, but I--even then
I was the one that wanted the expense of the city. Mamma didn't want
it--he didn't--it--was me--I--I--"
"My fault, too, Poil--_ach, Gott_, my fault! How I drove him! How I
drove him!"
"We--we got to go back home, Max. We're going back and help him to
begin over again. We--we been driving him like a pack of wolves. He
never could refuse nobody nothing. If he thought mamma wanted the moon
up he was ready to go for it; even when we was kids he--"
"_Ach_, my husband, such a good provider he's always been! Such a
husband!"
"Always we got our way out of him. But to- night--to-night, Max, right
here in this chair all _little_ he looked all of a sudden. So little!
His back all crooked and all tired and--and I done it, Max--I ain't what
you think I am--oh, God, I done it!"
"_Ach_, my--"
"Don't cry, mamma. 'Sh-h-h-h! Ain't you ashamed, with Mr. Teitlebaum
standing right here? You must excuse her, Max, so terrible upset she is.
'Sh-h-h-h, mamma--'sh-h-h-h! We're going back home and begin over again.
'Sh-h-h-h! You won't have to dress for supper no more like you hate.
We'll be home in time for your strawberry-preserves season, mamma, and
rhubarb stew out of the garden, like papa loves. 'Sh-h-h-h! You must
excuse her, Max--you must excuse me, too, to-night--you--come some other
time--please."
"Pearlie!" He came closer to the circle of light, and his large features
came out boldly. "Pearlie, don't you cry neither, little girl--"
"I--I ain't."
"All what you tell me I know already."
"Max!"
"Mr. Teitlebaum!"
"You must excuse me, Mrs. Binswanger, but in nearly the same line of
business news like that travels faster than you think. Only to-day I
heard for sure--how--shaky things stand. You got my sympathies, Mrs.
Binswanger, but--but such a failure don't need to happen."
Mrs. Binswanger clutched two hands around a throat too dry to swallow.
"He can't stand it. He isn't strong enough. It will kill him. Always so
honest to the last penny he's been, Mr. Teitlebaum, but never when he
used to complain would I believe him. Always a great one for a poor
mouth he was, Mr. Teitlebaum, even when he had it. So plain he always
was, and now I--I've broke him--I--I--"
"'Sh-h-h-h, mamma! Do you want papa should hear you in the next room?
'Sh-h-h-h! Please, you must excuse her, Max."
"Pearlie"--he placed his hand lightly on her shoulder--"Pearlie--Mrs.
Binswanger, you must excuse me, too, but I got to say it--while--while I
got the courage. Can't you guess it, little Pearlie? I'm in love with
you. I'm in love with you, Pearlie, since the first month you came to
this hotel to live."
"Max!"
"_Ach, Gott!_"
"I only got this to say to you: I love you, little Pearlie. To-day, when
I heard the news, I was sorry, Pearlie, and--and glad, too. It made
things look easier for me. Right away I invited Izzy to lunch so like a
school-boy I could hint. I--two years I been wanting to get out of the
store, Pearlie, where there ain't a chance for me to build up nothing.
Like I told Izzy to-day, I want to find a run-down business that needs
building up where I can accomplish things."
"Max!"
"I wanted him to know what I meant, but like--like a school-boy so mixed
up I got. Eight thousand dollars I got laying for a opening. This
failure--this failure don't need to happen, Pearlie. With new capital
and new blood we don't need to be afraid of tractions and
competitions--with me and Izzy, and my eight thousand dollars put in out
there, we--we--but this ain't no time to talk business. I--you must
excuse me, Mrs. Binswanger, but--but--"
"Poil, my baby! Max!"
"I love you, Pearlie girlie. Ever since we been in the same hotel
together, when I seen you every day fresh like a flower and so fine,
I--I been heels over head in love with you, Pearlie. You should know how
my father and my married brothers tease me. I--I love you, Pearlie--"
She relaxed to his approaching arms, and let her head fall back to his
shoulder so that her face, upturned to his, was like a dark flower, and
he kissed her where the tears lay wet on her petal-smooth cheeks and on
her lips that trembled.
"Max!"
"My little girlie!"
Mrs. Binswanger groped through tear-blinded eyes.
"This--this--ain't no place for a--old woman,
children--this--this--_ach_, what I'm sayin' I don't know! Like in a
dream I feel."
"Me, too, mamma; me, too. Like a dream. Ah, Max!"
"I tiptoe in and surprise papa, children. I surprise papa. _Ach_, my
children, my children, like in a dream I feel."
She smiled at them with the tears streaming from her face like rain down
a window-pane, opened the door to the room adjoining gently, and closed
it more gently behind her. Her face was bathed in a peace that swam deep
in her eyes like reflected moonlight trailing down on a lagoon, her lips
trembled in the hysteria of too many emotions. She held the silence for
a moment, and remained with her wide back to the door, peering across
the dim-lit room at the curve-backed outline of her husband's figure,
hunched in a sitting posture on the side of the bed.
Beside him on the white coverlet a green tin box with a convex top like
a miniature trunk lay on one end, its contents, bits of old-fashioned
jewelry, and a folded blue document with a splashy red seal, scattered
about the bed.
She could hear him wheeze out the moany, long-drawn breaths that
characterized his sleepless nights, his face the color of old ivory, wry
and etched in the agony of carrying his trembling palm closer, closer to
his mouth.
Suddenly Mrs. Binswanger cried out, a cry that was born in the
unexplored regions of her heart, wild, primordial, full of terror.
It was as if fear had churned her blood too thick to flow, and through
her paralysis tore the spasm of a half-articulate shriek.
"Jule--Jule-ius--Jule-ius!"
His hand jerked from his lips reflexly, so that the six small pink
tablets in the trembling palm rolled to the corners of the room. His
blood-driven face fell backward against the pillow, and he relaxed
frankly into short, dry sobs, hollow and hacking like the coughing of a
cat. His feet lay in the little heap of jewelry and across the crumpled
insurance policy.
"Becky--it--it's all what I--I could do--it's--it--"
"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"
She dragged her trembling limbs across the room to his side. She held
him to her so close that the showy lace yoke transformed its imprint
from her bosom to the flesh of his cheek. She could feel his sobs of
hysteria beating against her breast, and her own tears flowed.
They racked her like a storm tearing on the mad wings of a gale; they
scalded down her cheeks into the furrows of her neck. She held him tight
in the madness of panic and exultation, and his arm crept around her
wide waist, and his tired head relaxed to her breast, and her hands were
locked tight about him and would not let him go.
"We--we're going _home_, Julius--we--we're going home."
"Ya, ya, Becky, it's--it's all right. Ya, ya, Becky."
SUPERMAN
The canker of the city is loneliness. It flourishes--an insidious
paradox--where men meet nose to nose in Subway rushes and live layer on
layer in thousand-tenant tenement houses. It thrives in
three-dollars-a-week fourth-floor back rooms, so thinly partitioned that
the crumple of the rejection-slip and the sobs of the class poetess from
Molino, Missouri, percolate to the four-dollars-a-week fourth-floor
front and fuddle the piano salesman's evening game of solitaire. It is a
malignant parasite, which eats through the thin walls of hall bedrooms
and the thick walls of gold bedrooms, and eats out the hearts it finds
there, leaving them black and empty, like untenanted houses.
Sometimes love sees the To Let sign, hangs white Swiss curtains at the
window, paints the shutters green, plants a bed of red geraniums in the
front yard, and moves in. Again, no tenant applies; the house mildews
with the damp of its own emptiness; children run when they pass it after
dark; and the threshold decays. The heart must be tenanted or it falls
out of repair and rots. Doctors called in the watches of the night to
resuscitate such hearts climb out of bed reluctantly. It is a malady
beyond the ken of the stethoscope.
One such heart beat in a woman's breast so rapidly that it crowded out
her breath; and she pushed the cotton coverlet back from her bosom, rose
to her elbow, and leaned out beyond her bed into the darkness of the
room.
"Jimmie? Essie? That you, Jimmie?"
The thumping of her heart answered her, and the loud ticking of a clock
that was inaudible during the day suddenly filled the third-floor rear
room of the third-floor rear apartment. The continual din of the street
slumped to the intermittent din of late evening; the last graphophone in
the building observed the nine-o'clock silence clause of the lease at
something after ten, and scratched its last syncopated dance theme into
the tired recording disk of the last tired brain. An upholstered chair,
sunk in the room's pool of darkness, trembled on its own tautened
springs, and the woman trembled of that same tautness and leaned
farther out.
"Who's there? That you, Jimmie?"
Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock!
She huddled the coverlet up under her chin and lay back on her pillow,
but with her body so rigid that only half her weight relaxed to the
mattress; and behind her tight-closed eyes flaming wheels revolved
against the lids. Tears ran backward toward her ears like
spectacle-frames and soaked into the pillow, a mouse with a thousand
feet scurried between the walls.
"Essie? Jimmie, that you?"
Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock!
More tears leaked out from her closed eyes and found their way to her
mouth, so that she could taste their salt. Then for a slight moment she
dozed, with her body at full stretch and hardly raising the coverlet,
and her thin cheek cupped in the palm of her thin hand. The mouse
scurried in a light rain of falling plaster, and she woke with her pulse
pounding in her ears.
"Jimmie? Jimmie? Who's there?"
Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock!
Sobs trembled through her and set the bed-springs vibrating, and she
buried her head under her flat pillow and fell to counting the
immemorial procession of phantom sheep that graze the black grasses of
the Land of Wakeful Hours and lead their sleepless shepherds through the
long, long, long pastures of the night.
"Three hundred 'n' five; three hundred 'n' six; three hundred 'n'
seven; three hundred 'n'--Jimmie?"
A key scratched at the outer lock, and she sprang two-thirds from the
bed, dragging the coverlet from its moorings.
"Jimmie, that you?"
"Sure, ma! 'Smatter?"
She relaxed as though her muscles had suddenly snapped, her tense toes
and fingers uncurled, and the blood flowed back.
"I--Nothin', Jimmie; I was just wondering if that was you."
"No, ma; it ain't me--it's my valet coming home from a dance at his
Pressing Club. You ain't sick, are you, ma?"
"No. What time is it, Jimmie? It's so dark."
"You been havin' one of your spells again, ma?"
"No, no, Jimmie."
"Didn't you promise to keep a light going?"
"I'm all right."
"Ouch! Geewhillikins, ma, if you'd burn half a dime's worth of gas till
me and Essie get home from work nights we'd save it in wear and tear on
our shins. I ain't got no more hips left than a snake."
"It's a waste, Jimmie boy; gas comes so high."
"You should worry, ma! Watch me light 'er up!"
"Be careful in there, Jimmie! Stand on a chair. I got a little supper
spread out on the table for Essie and her friend. You take a sandwich
yourself--"
"Forty cents in tips to-day, ma."
"Forty cents!"
"Yeh; and a dame in Seventieth Street gimme a quarter and hugged the
daylights out of me till my brass buttons made holes in me and cried
brineys all over the telegram, and made me read it out loud twice, once
for each ear: 'Unhurt, Sweetheart, and homeward bound--Bill.' Can you
beat it? Five cents a word!"
"Jimmie, wasn't you glad to carry her a message like that?"
"It's a paying business, ma, if you're lucky enough to deal only in good
news."
A chair squealed on its castors, a patch of light sprang through the
transom, and the chocolate-ocher bedroom and its chocolate-ocher
furniture emerged into a chocolate-ocher half-light.
"Jimmie?"
"Huh?"
"I'm--I wish--Oh, nothin'!"
"Ain't you feelin' right, in there, ma?"
"Yes, Jimmie; but--but come in and talk to your old mother awhile, my
boy."
"Surest thing you know! Say, these are some sandwiches! You must 'a'
struck pay-dirt in your sardine-mine, ma."
"They're for her gen'l'man friend, Jimmie."
The door flung open and threw an island of light pat on the bed. In the
gauzy stream the face on the pillow, with the skin drawn over the cheeks
tight as a vellum on a snare-drum, was vague as a head by Carriere after
he had begun to paint through the sad film of his growing blindness.
"Jimmie, my boy!"
"Hello, ma!"
"Ain't your cheeks cold, though, Jimmie? It's right sharp out, ain't it?
And Essie in her thin coat! You--you're a little late to-night, ain't
you, Jimmie?"
He drew his loose-jointed figure up from over the bedside; and his
features, half-formed as a sculptor's head just emerging from the
marble, took on the easy petulance of youth, and he wiped the moist
lips' print off his downy cheek with the back of his hand.
"Ah, there you go again! You been layin' here frettin' and countin' the
minutes again, ain't you? Gee, it makes a fellow sore when he just can't
get home no sooner!"
"No, no, Jimmie; I been layin' here sleepin' sound ever since I went to
bed. I woke up for the first time just now. I'm all right, Jimmie,
only--only--"
"Honest, ma, you ought to ask the company to put me in short-pants
uniform, day duty, carrying telegrams of the day's catechism to
Sunday-school classes."
"I--Don't fuss at me, Jimmie! I--I guess I must 'a' had one of them
smothering spells, and I didn't wait up for Essie and Joe to-night. I'm
all right now, Jimmie--all right."
He placed his heavy hand on her brow in half-understanding sympathy.
"Geewhillikins, why don't you tell a fellow? You want some of that black
medicine, ma. You--gee!--you ain't lookin' kinda blue-like round the
gills, are you? Old man Gibbs said we should send for him right away
if--"
"No, no, Jimmie; I'm all right now."
"Look! I brought you a carnation one of the operators gimme--one swell
little queen, too. You want some of that black medicine, ma?"
"I'm all right now, Jimmie. It was just earlier in the evening I kinda
had a spell. Ain't that pink pretty, though! Here, put it in the glass,
and gimme a French kiss. Always ashamed like a big baby when it comes to
kissin', ain't you? Ashamed to even kiss your old ma!"
"Aw!" He shuffled his feet and bent over her, with the red mounting
above the gold collar of his uniform.
"And such a mamma-boy you used to be before you had to get out and
hustle--such a mamma-boy, and now ashamed to give your old ma a kiss!"
"Ashamed nothin'! Here, ma, I'll smooth your hair for you the wrong way
like Essie used to do when you came home from the store dead after the
semiannual clearings."
"No, no, Jimmie; these days I ain't got no more hair left to smooth."
"You look good to me."
"Aw, Jimmie, quit stringing your old ma. How can a stack o' bones look
good to anybody?"
"You do."
"Your papa used to say so, too, Jimmie; but in them days my hair was
natural curly--little cute, springy curls like Essie's. The first day he
seen me he fell for 'em; and the night before he died, Jimmie, with you
and Essie asleep in your folding-cribs and me little thinkin' that the
next week I'd be back in the department clerking again, he took me in
his arms and--"
"Yes, yes; I know, ma--but didn't old man Gibbs say not to get excited?
Lay back and don't talk, ma. I can feel your heart beatin' way down in
your hands."
"You're all tired out, ain't you, Jimmie?--too tired to listen to my
talk; but you're going to wait up for your sister's young man to-night,
ain't you, my boy? Go wet your hair and smooth it down. You'll wanna see
him, Jimmie."
"Fine chance."
"Sure he's coming to-night, Jimmie. I got their supper all waitin'; and,
see, there's my flowered wrapper at the foot of the bed, so I can get up
and go in when--"
"Aw, cut out the comedy, ma! She ain't comin' straight home after the
show any more'n a crooked road; and if she does he ain't coming with
her."
"Jimmie, she promised sure to-night."
"Didn't she promise last night and the night before and the night before
that?"
"But this afternoon when she left for the matinee, Jimmie, I wasn't
feelin' so well, and she promised so sure."
"Them girl ushers down there is too lively a bunch for her, ma. Ushin'
in a theayter is next to bein' in the chorus--only--"
"Jimmie!"
"Sure it is--only it ain't so good one way, and it ain't so bad another.
This new-fangled girl ushin' gets my goat, anyways. It ain't doin' her
any good."
"Oh, Gawd, Jimmie, don't I know it? I hated to see her take it--her so
little and cute and pretty and all! Night-work ain't nothin' for our
Essie."
"Sure it ain't!"
"But what could we do, Jimmie? After I gave out, her six a week in the
notions wasn't a drop in the bucket. What else could we do, Jimmie?"
"Just you wait, ma! This time next year life'll be one long ice-cream
soda for you and her. Wait till my dynamo gets to charging like I want
her to--I'll be runnin' this whole shebang with a bang!"
"You're a good boy, Jimmie; but a kid of seventeen ain't expected to
have shoulders for three."
"Just the samey, I showed a draft of my dynamo to the head operator, ma,
and he's comin' up Sunday to have a look. Leave it here on the table
just like it is, ma. You'll be ridin' in your Birdsong self-charging
electric automobile yet!"
She let her fingers wander up and down his cheek and across his
shoulders and into his uneven nappy hair.
"Poor Jimmie! If only you had the trainin'! Miss Maisie was up from the
store to-day in her noon-hour and seen it standing here next to my bed;
and she thought it was such a pretty-lookin' dynamo, with its copper
wires and all."
"You didn't let her--"
"No--honest, Jimmie! See--it ain't been touched; I didn't even let her
go near the table's edge. She wanted to know when I was comin' back to
the store--she says the corsets have run down since they got the new
head saleslady, Jimmie."
"If I'd 'a' been here I'd 'a' told her you ain't going back."
"Sometimes I--I think I ain't, neither, Jimmie."
"What?"
"Nothin'."
"When you get well, ma, then I--"
"Then I'm going back on my job, Jimmie. Eighteen years--not countin' the
three years your papa lived--at doing one thing sort of makes you
married to it. I got my heart as set as always, Jimmie, on gettin' you
in at the Electric Training School next door. If I hadn't broke down--"
"Nix for mine, ma!"
"Every day I sit by the window, Jimmie, and see the young engineers and
electricians who board there goin' to work; and it breaks my heart to
think of you, with your mind for inventions, runnin' the streets--a
messenger boy--just when I was beginnin' to get where I could do for
you."
"Aw, cut that, ma! Don't I work round on my dynamo every morning till I
go on duty? Wouldn't I look swell with an electricity book under my arm?
I'd feel like Battling John drinking tea out of an egg-shell."
"The trainin'-school's the place for you, Jimmie. If you'd only take the
dynamo over to the superintendent and show him where you're stuck he'd
help you, Jimmie. I been beggin' you so long, and if only you wasn't so
stubborn!"
"I ain't got the nerve buttin' in over there; it's for fellows who got
swell jobs already."
"There's classes for boys, too, Jimmie; the janitor told me. Just go
to-morrow and show your dynamo. It won't hurt nothin', and maybe they'll
know just what the trouble is--it's only a little thing, Jimmie--three
times in succession it worked last night, didn't it? It won't hurt to
go, Jimmie--just to go and show it."
"Nix; I ain't got the nerve. You just wait! I ain't got the trainin';
but didn't I sell my double lens the day after I got the patent? Didn't
I make that twenty-five just like battin' your eye?"
"The janitor says you was robbed in it, Jimmie."
"We should worry! Didn't we get a rockin'-chair and a string of beads
and a tool-chest out of it?"
"It ain't you worries me so much, Jimmie. Here, put your head here on
the pillow next to me, Jimmie. My heart's actin' up to-night. It ain't
you worries me you're a man like your papa was and can hit back; but
Essie--if only Essie--"
"You don't handle her right, ma; you're too easy-going with her. Since
she went on her new job she's gettin' too gay--too gay!"
"Jimmie!"
"Sure she is. Like I told her last night when she came in all hours from
dancing--if she didn't take that war-paint off her face I'd get her in a
corner and rub it off till--"
"I've begged her and begged her, Jimmie, just as hard as I ever begged
you about the dynamo, to wash her face of it. It's eatin' me,
Jimmie--eatin' me! There wasn't a girl in the store that didn't envy
that girl her complexion. Oh, Gawd, Jimmie, it ain't paint alone--it's
where it can lead to."
"She needs an old-time spankin'."
"Them girls down at the theayter where she works put them ideas in her
head. It's only of late with her, Jimmie. Wasn't she like a little baby
when I had her across from me in the notions?"
"She's gotta keep her face clean or I'll--"
"She needs somebody strong like her papa was to handle her, Jimmie.
She's stubborn in ways, like you, and needs somebody older, my
boy--somebody strong that can handle her and love her all at once."
"She's gotta quit sneakin' home at all hours. She don't pay no attention
to me; but she's gotta quit or I--I'll go down and smash up that whole
theayter crowd of 'em!"
"If she'd 'a' had a father to grow up under it would 'a' been different.
He was one of the strongest men in the power-house, Jimmie. Mechanics
make strong men, my boy, and that's why my heart's set on you, Jimmie,
takin' up where he left off."
"It's that job of hers, ma; it ain't no hang-out for her down there
round the lights. She's gettin' too gay. I'll smash that
ticket-speculator to gelatin if he don't show up or leave her alone!"
"'Sh-h-h, Jimmie! He's her young man; she says he's a upright and
honorable young man with intentions."
"Where she hidin' him, then?"
"He--he's bashful about comin', Jimmie. Last night on her knees right
here by this bed she told me, Jimmie, with her eyes like saucers, that
he's said everything but come right out and ask her."
"What's the matter? Is he tongue-tied?"
"A fine fellow, she says, Jimmie--up to date as a new dime, makin' from
thirty to forty a week. Get that, Jimmie? Gawd--forty a week! On forty a
week, Jimmie, what they could do for themselves and for you!"
"I wanna look him over first. I knew a fellow in that game got forty a
week and ninety days once, too."
"Jimmie!"
"There's a bunch of speculators used to hang round the Forty-second
Street telegraph office, with one eye always on the cop and the other
always open for rubes. They was all hunchbacks from dodging the law."
"He ain't one of them kind, Jimmie."
"Then why don't he have a roof over his head instead of doing sidewalk
business?"