"I will when I come back. They're showing the third installment of 'The
Adventures of Aline,' and I don't want to come in in the middle of it."
He knew the selfishness of it, this furtive and sprightly old man. And
because he knew it he attempted to hide his guilt under a burst of
temper.
"I've been slaving all day. I guess I've got the right to a little
amusement. A man works his fingers to the bone for his family, and then
his own daughter nags him."
He stamped down the hall, righteously, and slammed the front door.
Rose came from the kitchen, the pink blouse, warm from the iron, in one
hand. She prinked out its ruffles and pleatings as she went. Floss,
burnishing her nails somewhat frantically with a dilapidated and greasy
buffer, snatched the garment from her and slipped bare arms into it. The
front door bell rang, three big, determined rings. Panic fell upon the
household.
"It's him!" whispered Floss, as if she could be heard in the entrance
three floors below. "You'll have to go."
"I can't!" Every inch of her seemed to shrink and cower away from the
thought. "I can't!" Her eyes darted to and fro like a hunted thing
seeking to escape. She ran to the hall. "Al! Al, go to the door, will
you?"
"Can't," came back in a thick mumble. "Shaving."
The front door-bell rang again, three big, determined rings. "Rose!"
hissed Floss, her tone venomous. "I can't go with my waist open. For
heaven's sake! Go to the door!"
"I can't," repeated Rose, in a kind of wail. "I--can't." And went. As
she went she passed one futile, work-worn hand over her hair, plucked
off her apron and tossed it into; a corner, first wiping her flushed
face with it.
Henry Selz came up the shabby stairs springily as a man of forty should.
Rose stood at the door and waited for him. He stood in the doorway a
moment, uncertainly.
"How-do, Henry."
His uncertainty became incredulity. Then, "Why, how-do, Rose! Didn't
know you--for a minute. Well, well! It's been a long time. Let's
see--ten--fourteen--about fifteen years, isn't it?"
His tone was cheerfully conversational. He really was interested,
mathematically. He was as sentimental in his reminiscence as if he had
been calculating the lapse of time between the Chicago fire and the
World's Fair.
"Fifteen," said Rose, "in May. Won't you come in? Floss'll be here in a
minute."
Henry Selz came in and sat down on the davenport couch and dabbed at his
forehead. The years had been very kind to him--those same years that had
treated Rose so ruthlessly. He had the look of an outdoor man; a man who
has met prosperity and walked with her, and followed her pleasant ways;
a man who has learned late in life of golf and caviar and tailors, but
who has adapted himself to these accessories of wealth with a minimum of
friction.
"It certainly is warm, for this time of year." He leaned back and
regarded Rose tolerantly. "Well, and how've you been? Did little sister
tell you how flabbergasted I was when I saw her this morning? I'm darned
if it didn't take fifteen years off my age, just like that! I got kind
of balled up for one minute and thought it was you. She tell you?"
"Yes, she told me," said Rose.
"I hear your ma's still sick. That certainly is tough. And you've never
married, eh?"
"Never married," echoed Rose.
And so they made conversation, a little uncomfortably, until there came
quick, light young steps down the hallway, and Floss appeared in the
door, a radiant, glowing, girlish vision. Youth was in her eyes, her
cheeks, on her lips. She radiated it. She was miraculously well dressed,
in her knowingly simple blue serge suit, and her tiny hat, and her neat
shoes and gloves.
"Ah! And how's the little girl to-night?" said Henry Selz.
Floss dimpled, blushed, smiled, swayed. "Did I keep you waiting a
terribly long time?"
"No, not a bit. Rose and I were chinning over old times, weren't we,
Rose?" A kindly, clumsy thought struck him. "Say, look here, Rose. We're
going to a show. Why don't you run and put on your hat and come along.
H'm? Come on!"
Rose smiled as a mother smiles at a child that has unknowingly hurt her.
"No, thanks, Henry. Not to-night. You and Floss run along. Yes, I'll
remember you to Ma. I'm sorry you can't see her. But she don't see
anybody, poor Ma."
Then they were off, in a little flurry of words and laughter. From force
of habit Rose's near-sighted eyes peered critically at the hang of
Floss's blue skirt and the angle of the pert new hat. She stood a
moment, uncertainly, after they had left. On her face was the queerest
look, as of one thinking, re-adjusting, struggling to arrive at a
conclusion in the midst of sudden bewilderment. She turned mechanically
and went into her mother's room. She picked up the tray on the table by
the bed.
"Who was that?" asked the sick woman, in her ghostly, devitalised voice.
"That was Henry Selz," said Rose.
The sick woman grappled a moment with memory. "Henry Selz! Henry--oh,
yes. Did he go out with Rose?"
"Yes," said Rose.
"It's cold in here," whined the sick woman.
"I'll get you a hot bag in a minute, Ma." Rose carried the tray down the
hall to the kitchen. At that Al emerged from his bedroom, shrugging
himself into his coat. He followed Rose down the hall and watched her as
she filled the bag and screwed it and wiped it dry.
"I'll take that in to Ma," he volunteered. He was up the hall and back
in a flash. Rose had slumped into a chair at the dining-room table, and
was pouring herself a cup of cold and bitter tea. Al came over to her
and laid one white hand on her shoulder.
"Ro, lend me a couple of dollars till Saturday, will you?"
"I should say not."
Al doused his cigarette in the dregs of a convenient teacup. He bent
down and laid his powdered and pale cheek against Rose's sallow one. One
arm was about her, and his hand patted her shoulder.
"Oh, come on, kid," he coaxed. "Don't I always pay you back? Come on! Be
a sweet ol' sis. I wouldn't ask you only I've got a date to go to the
White City to-night, and dance, and I couldn't get out of it. I tried."
He kissed her, and his lips were moist, and he reeked of tobacco, and
though Rose shrugged impatiently away from him he knew that he had won.
Rose was not an eloquent woman; she was not even an articulate one, at
times. If she had been, she would have lifted up her voice to say now:
"Oh, God! I am a woman! Why have you given me all the sorrows, and the
drudgery, and the bitterness and the thanklessness of motherhood, with
none of its joys! Give me back my youth! I'll drink the dregs at the
bottom of the cup, but first let me taste the sweet!"
But Rose did not talk or think in such terms. She could not have put
into words the thing she was feeling even if she had been able to
diagnose it. So what she said was, "Don't you think I ever get sick and
tired of slaving for a thankless bunch like you? Well, I do! Sick and
tired of it. That's what! You make me tired, coming around asking for
money, as if I was a bank."
But Al waited. And presently she said, grudgingly, wearily, "There's a
dollar bill and some small change in the can on the second shelf in the
china closet."
Al was off like a terrier. From the pantry came the clink of metal
against metal. He was up the hall in a flash, without a look at Rose.
The front door slammed a third time.
Rose stirred her cold tea slowly, leaning on the table's edge and gazing
down into the amber liquid that she did not mean to drink. For suddenly
and comically her face puckered up like a child's. Her head came down
among the supper things with a little crash that set the teacups, and
the greasy plates to jingling, and she sobbed as she lay there, with
great tearing, ugly sobs that would not be stilled, though she tried to
stifle them as does one who lives in a paper-thin Chicago flat. She was
not weeping for the Henry Selz whom she had just seen. She was not
weeping for envy of her selfish little sister, or for loneliness, or
weariness. She was weeping at the loss of a ghost who had become her
familiar. She was weeping because a packet of soiled and yellow old
letters on the top shelf in the hall closet was now only a packet of
soiled and yellow old letters, food for the ash can. She was weeping
because the urge of spring, that had expressed itself in her only this
morning pitifully enough in terms of rhubarb, and housecleaning and a
bundle of thumbed old love letters, had stirred in her for the last
time.
But presently she did stop her sobbing and got up and cleared the table,
and washed the dishes and even glanced at the crumpled sheets of the
morning paper that she never found time to read until evening. By eight
o'clock the little flat was very still.
V