"Like who?" Jo would spar feebly.
"Miss Matthews."
"Who's she?"
"Now, don't be funny, Jo. You know very well I mean the girl who was
here for dinner. The one who talked so well on the emigration question.
"Oh, her! Why, I liked her all right. Seems to be a smart woman."
"Smart! She's a perfectly splendid girl."
"Sure," Jo would agree cheerfully.
"But didn't you like her?"
"I can't say I did, Eve. And I can't say I didn't. She made me think a
lot of a teacher I had in the fifth reader. Name of Himes. As I recall
her, she must have been a fine woman. But I never thought of her as a
woman at all. She was just Teacher."
"You make me tired," snapped Eva impatiently. "A man of your age. You
don't expect to marry a girl, do you? A child!"
"I don't expect to marry anybody," Jo had answered.
And that was the truth, lonely though he often was.
The following spring Eva moved to Winnetka. Any one who got the meaning
of the Loop knows the significance of a move to a north-shore suburb,
and a house. Eva's daughter, Ethel, was growing up, and her mother had
an eye on society.
That did away with Jo's Thursday dinner. Then Stell's husband bought a
car. They went out into the country every Sunday. Stell said it was
getting so that maids objected to Sunday dinners, anyway. Besides, they
were unhealthy, old-fashioned things. They always meant to ask Jo to
come along, but by the time their friends were placed, and the lunch,
and the boxes, and sweaters, and George's camera, and everything, there
seemed to be no room for a man of Jo's bulk. So that eliminated the
Sunday dinners.
"Just drop in any time during the week," Stell said, "for dinner. Except
Wednesday--that's our bridge night--and Saturday. And, of course,
Thursday. Cook is out that night. Don't wait for me to phone."
And so Jo drifted into that sad-eyed, dyspeptic family made up of those
you see dining in second-rate restaurants, their paper propped up
against the bowl of oyster crackers, munching solemnly and with
indifference to the stare of the passer-by surveying them through the
brazen plate-glass window.
And then came the War. The war that spelled death and destruction to
millions. The war that brought a fortune to Jo Hertz, and transformed
him, over night, from a baggy-kneed old bachelor, whose business was a
failure, to a prosperous manufacturer whose only trouble was the
shortage in hides for the making of his product--leather! The armies of
Europe called for it. Harnesses! More harnesses! Straps! Millions of
straps. More! More!
The musty old harness business over on Lake Street was magically changed
from a dust-covered, dead-alive concern to an orderly hive that hummed
and glittered with success. Orders poured in. Jo Hertz had inside
information on the War. He knew about troops and horses. He talked
with French and English and Italian buyers--noblemen, many of
them--commissioned by their countries to get American-made supplies. And
now, when he said to Ben or George, "Take f'rinstance your raw hides and
leathers," they listened with respectful attention.
And then began the gay-dog business in the life of Jo Hertz. He
developed into a Loop-hound, ever keen on the scent of fresh pleasure.
That side of Jo Hertz which had been repressed and crushed and ignored
began to bloom, unhealthily. At first he spent money on his rather
contemptuous nieces. He sent them gorgeous fans, and watch bracelets,
and velvet bags. He took two expensive rooms at a downtown hotel, and
there was something more tear-compelling than grotesque about the way
he gloated over the luxury of a separate ice-water tap in the bathroom.
He explained it.
"Just turn it on. Ice-water! Any hour of the day or night."
He bought a car. Naturally. A glittering affair; in colour a bright
blue, with pale blue leather straps and a great deal of gold fittings,
and wire wheels. Eva said it was the kind of thing a soubrette would
use, rather than an elderly business man. You saw him driving about in
it, red-faced and rather awkward at the wheel. You saw him, too, in
the Pompeian room at the Congress Hotel of a Saturday afternoon when
doubtful and roving-eyed matrons in kolinsky capes are wont to
congregate to sip pale amber drinks. Actors grew to recognise the
semi-bald head and the shining, round, good-natured face looming out at
them from the dim well of the parquet, and sometimes, in a musical show,
they directed a quip at him, and he liked it. He could pick out the
critics as they came down the aisle, and even had a nodding acquaintance
with two of them.
"Kelly, of the _Herald_," he would say carelessly. "Bean, of the _Trib_.
They're all afraid of him."
So he frolicked, ponderously. In New York he might have been called a
Man About Town.
And he was lonesome. He was very lonesome. So he searched about in his
mind and brought from the dim past the memory of the luxuriously
furnished establishment of which he used to dream in the evenings when
he dozed over his paper in the old house on Calumet. So he rented an
apartment, many-roomed and expensive, with a man-servant in charge, and
furnished it in styles and periods ranging through all the Louises. The
living room was mostly rose colour. It was like an unhealthy and bloated
boudoir. And yet there was nothing sybaritic or uncleanly in the sight
of this paunchy, middle-aged man sinking into the rosy-cushioned luxury
of his ridiculous home. It was a frank and naïve indulgence of
long-starved senses, and there was in it a great resemblance to the
rolling eyed ecstasy of a schoolboy smacking his lips over an all-day
sucker.
The War went on, and on, and on. And the money continued to roll in--a
flood of it. Then, one afternoon, Eva, in town on shopping bent, entered
a small, exclusive, and expensive shop on Michigan Avenue. Exclusive,
that is, in price. Eva's weakness, you may remember, was hats. She was
seeking a hat now. She described what she sought with a languid
conciseness, and stood looking about her after the saleswoman had
vanished in quest of it. The room was becomingly rose-illumined and
somewhat dim, so that some minutes had passed before she realised that a
man seated on a raspberry brocade settee not five feet away--a man with
a walking stick, and yellow gloves, and tan spats, and a check suit--was
her brother Jo. From him Eva's wild-eyed glance leaped to the woman who
was trying on hats before one of the many long mirrors. She was seated,
and a saleswoman was exclaiming discreetly at her elbow.
Eva turned sharply and encountered her own saleswoman returning,
hat-laden. "Not to-day," she gasped. "I'm feeling ill. Suddenly." And
almost ran from the room.
That evening she told Stell, relating her news in that telephone
pidgin-English devised by every family of married sisters as protection
against the neighbours and Central. Translated, it ran thus:
"He looked straight at me. My dear, I thought I'd die! But at least he
had sense enough not to speak. She was one of those limp, willowy
creatures with the greediest eyes that she tried to keep softened to a
baby stare, and couldn't, she was so crazy to get her hands on those
hats. I saw it all in one awful minute. You know the way I do. I suppose
some people would call her pretty. I don't. And her colour! Well! And
the most expensive-looking hats. Aigrettes, and paradise, and feathers.
Not one of them under seventy-five. Isn't it disgusting! At his age!
Suppose Ethel had been with me!"
The next time it was Stell who saw them. In a restaurant. She said it
spoiled her evening. And the third time it was Ethel. She was one of the
guests at a theatre party given by Nicky Overton II. You know. The North
Shore Overtons. Lake Forest. They came in late, and occupied the entire
third row at the opening performance of "Believe Me!" And Ethel was
Nicky's partner. She was glowing like a rose. When the lights went up
after the first act Ethel saw that her uncle Jo was seated just ahead of
her with what she afterward described as a blonde. Then her uncle had
turned around, and seeing her, had been surprised into a smile that
spread genially all over his plump and rubicund face. Then he had turned
to face forward again, quickly.
"Who's the old bird?" Nicky had asked. Ethel had pretended not to hear,
so he had asked again.
"My Uncle," Ethel answered, and flushed all over her delicate face, and
down to her throat. Nicky had looked at the blonde, and his eyebrows had
gone up ever so slightly.
It spoiled Ethel's evening. More than that, as she told her mother of it
later, weeping, she declared it had spoiled her life.
Eva talked it over with her husband in that intimate, kimonoed hour that
precedes bedtime. She gesticulated heatedly with her hair brush.
"It's disgusting, that's what it is. Perfectly disgusting. There's no
fool like an old fool. Imagine! A creature like that. At his time of
life."
There exists a strange and loyal kinship among men. "Well, I don't
know," Ben said now, and even grinned a little. "I suppose a boy's got
to sow his wild oats some time."
"Don't be any more vulgar than you can help," Eva retorted. "And I
think you know, as well as I, what it means to have that Overton boy
interested in Ethel."
"If he's interested in her," Ben blundered, "I guess the fact that
Ethel's uncle went to the theatre with some one who wasn't Ethel's aunt
won't cause a shudder to run up and down his frail young frame, will
it?"
"All right," Eva had retorted. "If you're not man enough to stop it,
I'll have to, that's all. I'm going up there with Stell this week."
They did not notify Jo of their coming. Eva telephoned his apartment
when she knew he would be out, and asked his man if he expected his
master home to dinner that evening. The man had said yes. Eva arranged
to meet Stell in town. They would drive to Jo's apartment together, and
wait for him there.
When she reached the city Eva found turmoil there. The first of the
American troops to be sent to France were leaving. Michigan Boulevard
was a billowing, surging mass: Flags, pennants, banners crowds. All the
elements that make for demonstration. And over the whole--quiet. No
holiday crowd, this. A solid, determined mass of people waiting patient
hours to see the khaki-clads go by. Three years of indefatigable reading
had brought them to a clear knowledge of what these boys were going to.
"Isn't it dreadful!" Stell gasped.
"Nicky Overton's only nineteen, thank goodness."
Their car was caught in the jam. When they moved at all it was by
inches. When at last they reached Jo's apartment they were flushed,
nervous, apprehensive. But he had not yet come in. So they waited.
No, they were not staying to dinner with their brother, they told the
relieved houseman.
Jo's home has already been described to you. Stell and Eva, sunk in
rose-coloured cushions, viewed it with disgust, and some mirth. They
rather avoided each other's eyes.
"Carrie ought to be here," Eva said. They both smiled at the thought of
the austere Carrie in the midst of those rosy cushions, and hangings,
and lamps. Stell rose and began to walk about, restlessly. She picked up
a vase and laid it down; straightened a picture. Eva got up, too, and
wandered into the hall. She stood there a moment, listening. Then she
turned and passed into Jo's bedroom. And there you knew Jo for what he
was.
This room was as bare as the other had been ornate. It was Jo, the
clean-minded and simple-hearted, in revolt against the cloying luxury
with which he had surrounded himself. The bedroom, of all rooms in any
house, reflects the personality of its occupant. True, the actual
furniture was panelled, cupid-surmounted, and ridiculous. It had been
the fruit of Jo's first orgy of the senses. But now it stood out in that
stark little room with an air as incongruous and ashamed as that of a
pink tarleton _danseuse_ who finds herself in a monk's cell. None of
those wall-pictures with which bachelor bedrooms are reputed to be
hung. No satin slippers. No scented notes. Two plain-backed military
brushes on the chiffonier (and he so nearly hairless!). A little orderly
stack of books on the table near the bed. Eva fingered their titles and
gave a little gasp. One of them was on gardening.
"Well, of all things!" exclaimed Stell. A book on the War, by an
Englishman. A detective story of the lurid type that lulls us to sleep.
His shoes ranged in a careful row in the closet, with a shoe-tree in
every one of them. There was something speaking about them. They looked
so human. Eva shut the door on them, quickly. Some bottles on the
dresser. A jar of pomade. An ointment such as a man uses who is growing
bald and is panic-stricken too late. An insurance calendar on the wall.
Some rhubarb-and-soda mixture on the shelf in the bathroom, and a little
box of pepsin tablets.
"Eats all kinds of things at all hours of the night," Eva said, and
wandered out into the rose-coloured front room again with the air of one
who is chagrined at her failure to find what she has sought. Stell
followed her furtively.
"Where do you suppose he can be?" she demanded. "It's"--she glanced at
her wrist--"why, it's after six!"
And then there was a little click. The two women sat up, tense. The door
opened. Jo came in. He blinked a little. The two women in the rosy room
stood up.
"Why--Eve! Why, Babe! Well! Why didn't you let me know?"
"We were just about to leave. We thought you weren't coming home."
Joe came in, slowly.
"I was in the jam on Michigan, watching the boys go by." He sat down,
heavily. The light from the window fell on him. And you saw that his
eyes were red.
And you'll have to learn why. He had found himself one of the thousands
in the jam on Michigan Avenue, as he said. He had a place near the curb,
where his big frame shut off the view of the unfortunates behind him. He
waited with the placid interest of one who has subscribed to all the
funds and societies to which a prosperous, middle-aged business man is
called upon to subscribe in war time. Then, just as he was about to
leave, impatient at the delay, the crowd had cried, with a queer
dramatic, exultant note in its voice, "Here they come! Here come the
boys!"
Just at that moment two little, futile, frenzied fists began to beat a
mad tattoo on Jo Hertz's broad back. Jo tried to turn in the crowd, all
indignant resentment. "Say, looka here!"
The little fists kept up their frantic beating and pushing. And a
voice--a choked, high little voice--cried, "Let me by! I can't see! You
man, you! You big fat man! My boy's going by--to war--and I can't see!
Let me by!"
Jo scrooged around, still keeping his place. He looked down. And
upturned to him in agonised appeal was the face of little Emily. They
stared at each other for what seemed a long, long time. It was really
only the fraction of a second. Then Jo put one great arm firmly around
Emily's waist and swung her around in front of him. His great bulk
protected her. Emily was clinging to his hand. She was breathing
rapidly, as if she had been running. Her eyes were straining up the
street.
"Why, Emily, how in the world!--"
"I ran away. Fred didn't want me to come. He said it would excite me too
much."
"Fred?"
"My husband. He made me promise to say good-bye to Jo at home."
"Jo?"
"Jo's my boy. And he's going to war. So I ran away. I had to see him. I
had to see him go."
She was dry-eyed. Her gaze was straining up the street.
"Why, sure," said Jo. "Of course you want to see him." And then the
crowd gave a great roar. There came over Jo a feeling of weakness. He
was trembling. The boys went marching by.
"There he is," Emily shrilled, above the din. "There be is! There he is!
There he--" And waved a futile little hand. It wasn't so much a wave as
a clutching. A clutching after something beyond her reach.
"Which one? Which one, Emily?"
"The handsome one. The handsome one. There!" Her voice quavered and
died.
Jo put a steady hand on her shoulder. "Point him out," he commanded.
"Show me." And the next instant. "Never mind. I see him."
Somehow, miraculously, he had picked him from among the hundreds. Had
picked him as surely as his own father might have. It was Emily's boy.
He was marching by, rather stiffly. He was nineteen, and fun-loving, and
he had a girl, and he didn't particularly want to go to France and--to
go to France. But more than he had hated going, he had hated not to go.
So he marched by, looking straight ahead, his jaw set so that his chin
stuck out just a little. Emily's boy.
Jo looked at him, and his face flushed purple. His eyes, the hard-boiled
eyes of a Loop-hound, took on the look of a sad old man. And suddenly he
was no longer Jo, the sport; old J. Hertz, the gay dog. He was Jo Hertz,
thirty, in love with life, in love with Emily, and with the stinging
blood of young manhood coursing through his veins.
Another minute and the boy had passed on up the broad street--the fine,
flag-bedecked street--just one of a hundred service-hats bobbing in
rhythmic motion like sandy waves lapping a shore and flowing on.
Then he disappeared altogether.
Emily was clinging to Jo. She was mumbling something, over and over. "I
can't. I can't. Don't ask me to. I can't let him go. Like that. I
can't."
Jo said a queer thing.
"Why, Emily! We wouldn't have him stay home, would we? We wouldn't want
him to do anything different, would we? Not our boy. I'm glad he
enlisted. I'm proud of him. So are you glad."
Little by little he quieted her. He took her to the car that was
waiting, a worried chauffeur in charge. They said good-bye, awkwardly.
Emily's face was a red, swollen mass.
So it was that when Jo entered his own hallway half an hour later he
blinked, dazedly, and when the light from the window fell on him you saw
that his eyes were red.
Eva was not one to beat about the bush. She sat forward in her chair,
clutching her bag rather nervously.
"Now, look here, Jo. Stell and I are here for a reason. We're here to
tell you that this thing's got to stop."
"Thing? Stop?"
"You know very well what I mean. You saw me at the milliner's that day.
And night before last, Ethel. We're all disgusted. If you must go about
with people like that, please have some sense of decency."
Something gathering in Jo's face should have warned her. But he was
slumped down in his chair in such a huddle, and he looked so old and fat
that she did not heed it. She went on. "You've got us to consider. Your
sisters. And your nieces. Not to speak of your own--"
But he got to his feet then, shaking, and at what she saw in his face
even Eva faltered and stopped. It wasn't at all the face of a fat,
middle-aged sport. It was a face Jovian, terrible.
"You!" he began, low-voiced, ominous. "You!" He raised a great fist
high. "You two murderers! You didn't consider me, twenty years ago. You
come to me with talk like that. Where's my boy! You killed him, you two,
twenty years ago. And now he belongs to somebody else. Where's my son
that should have gone marching by to-day?" He flung his arms out in a
great gesture of longing. The red veins stood out on his forehead.
"Where's my son! Answer me that, you two selfish, miserable women.
Where's my son!" Then, as they huddled together, frightened, wild-eyed.
"Out of my house! Out of my house! Before I hurt you!"
They fled, terrified. The door banged behind them.
Jo stood, shaking, in the centre of the room. Then he reached for a
chair, gropingly, and sat down. He passed one moist, flabby hand over
his forehead and it came away wet. The telephone rang. He sat still. It
sounded far away and unimportant, like something forgotten. I think he
did not even hear it with his conscious ear. But it rang and rang
insistently. Jo liked to answer his telephone, when at home.
"Hello!" He knew instantly the voice at the other end.
"That you, Jo?" it said.
"Yes."
"How's my boy?"
"I'm--all right."
"Listen, Jo. The crowd's coming over to-night. I've fixed up a little
poker game for you. Just eight of us."
"I can't come to-night, Gert."
"Can't! Why not?"
"I'm not feeling so good."
"You just said you were all right."
"I _am_ all right. Just kind of tired."
The voice took on a cooing note. "Is my Joey tired? Then he shall be all
comfy on the sofa, and he doesn't need to play if he don't want to. No,
sir."
Jo stood staring at the black mouth-piece of the telephone. He was
seeing a procession go marching by. Boys, hundreds of boys, in khaki.
"Hello! Hello!" the voice took on an anxious note. "Are you there?"
"Yes," wearily.
"Jo, there's something the matter. You're sick. I'm coming right over."
"No!"
"Why not? You sound as if you'd been sleeping. Look here--"
"Leave me alone!" cried Jo, suddenly, and the receiver clacked onto the
hook. "Leave me alone. Leave me alone." Long after the connection had
been broken.
He stood staring at the instrument with unseeing eyes. Then he turned
and walked into the front room. All the light had gone out of it. Dusk
had come on. All the light had gone out of everything. The zest had gone
out of life. The game was over--the game he had been playing against
loneliness and disappointment. And he was just a tired old man. A
lonely, tired old man in a ridiculous, rose-coloured room that had
grown, all of a sudden, drab.