"Roody, you make me laugh. I should sit at home now since we got a new
mouth to feed? That would be a fine come-off!"
"Who do you think was just in, Rosie? Emil Hahn."
"Sol is going to make for me, Roody, one of those little packing-case
cribs like he built for Etta up in the pants-factory, so when the
machine works it rocks, too. Did--did the check from Solomon & Glauber
come in on the last mail, Roody?"
"Now, Rosie, you mustn't worry yourself about such--"
"What you looking so funny for, Roody?"
"I was starting to tell you, Rosie--Hahn was just in and--"
"Roody, don't change the subject on me always. You looked funny. Is it
something wrong with Solomon & Glau--"
"If you don't take the cake, Rosie! Now, why should I look funny?
'Funny,' she says I look, I'm hungry. I smell Etta's _borshtsh_."
She half raised herself, the pulling lips of the child drawing up the
little head from the cove of arm.
"Rosie, you mustn't lift up that way!"
"Roody, I can read you like a book! Solomon & Glauber have
countermanded, too."
"Now, Rosie, wouldn't that keep until--"
"They have!"
"Well, if you got to know it, Rosie, they're shipping back the
consignment."
"Roody!"
"What you going to do about it? Give you my word never seen the like.
It's like the rainy-day skirt had died overnight. All of a sudden from a
novelty, I find myself with such a commodity that every manufacturer in
the business is making them up for himself."
"You seen it first, though, Roody. Nobody can take it away from you that
you seen first how the rainy-day skirt and its shortness would be such a
success with the women."
"'Seen it first,' she says! Say, what good does it do me if I didn't see
far enough? I pick for myself such a success that I crowd myself out of
business."
"It's a dirty shame! A big firm like Solomon & Glauber should not be
allowed to--"
"Say, if it wouldn't be Solomon & Glauber, it would be Funk & Hausman or
any other firm. The rainy-day skirt has slipped out of my hands, Rosie,
to the big fellows. We must realize that for ourselves. That's the
trouble when you don't deal in a patented product. What's the little
fellows like myself to do against a firm like Solomon & Glauber? Start
something?"
"Three countermands in a week, and no orders coming in!"
"Say, it don't tickle my ribs no more than yours."
"Roody, maybe it's the worst thing ever happened to us you wouldn't
listen to mamma and be satisfied with being chief cutter at Lipschuts'."
"Shame on you, Rosie! You want your daughter to grow up with a
pants-cutter all her life for a father? You want I should die in
somebody else's harness. Maybe I didn't hit it right away, but I say
yet, if a fellow's got the eyes and the nerve to see ahead a little with
his imagination--"
"'Imagination.' He talks like a story-book."
"Now--now, take Hahn, Rosie--there's a fellow's got imagination--but not
enough. I know it makes you mad when I talk on his picture-machine, but
you take it from me--there's a fellow with a good thing under his very
nose, but he--he 'ain't quite got the eyes to see ahead."
"Say, for such a good thing like Emil Hahn's picture-machine, where his
wife had to work in my own mother's sausage-store, I can't make
myself excited."
"He 'ain't quite got the eyes to see, Rosie, the big idea in it. He's
afraid of life, instead of making it so that life should be afraid of
him. Ten dollars cheaper I can buy that machine to-day than last week. A
song for it, I tell you."
"Ninety dollars to me is no cheap song, Roody."
"The people got to be amused the same as they got to be fed. A man will
pay for his amusements quicker than he will pay his butcher's or his
doctor's bill. It's a cash business, Rosie. All you do with such a
machine like Hahn's is get it well placed, drop your penny in the slot,
and see one picture after another as big as life. I remember back in the
old country, the years before we came over, when I was yet a
youngster--"
"You bet Hahn never put his good money in that machine. I got it from
Birdie Hahn herself. For a bad debt he took it over along with two
feather beds and--"
"One after another pictures as big as life, Rosie, like real people
moving. One of them, I give you my word, it's grand! A woman it shows
all wrapped tight around in white, on a sofa covered over with such a
spotted--what you call--leopard-skin."
"To me that has a sound, Roody, not to be proud of--"
"A living picture, with such neck and arms and--"
"That's enough, Roody! That's enough! I'm ashamed even for your daughter
here!"
"Such a machine, maybe some day two or three, set up in a place like
Coney Island or, for a beginning, in Pleasure Arcade, is an immense
idea, Rosie. Until an invention like this, nine-tenths of the people
couldn't afford the theyater. The drop-picture machine takes care of
them nine-tenths."
"Theyaters are no place for the poor."
"That's where you're wrong--they need it the most. I don't want to get
you worked up, Rosie, while you ain't strong, but every day that we wait
we're letting a great idea slip through our fingers. If I don't buy that
machine off Emil Hahn, somebody else will see in it what I see. Then
all our lives we will have something to reproach ourselves with."
Mrs. Pelz let slide her hand beneath the pillow, eyes closing and her
face seeming to whiten.
"Ninety dollars! Twenty dollars less than every cent we got saved in the
world. It ain't right we should gamble with it, Roody. Not now."
"Why not now, Rosie? It's all the more reason. Is it worth maybe a
little gamble our Bleema should grow up like the best? I got bigger
plans for her and her little mammela than such a back room all their
lives. In a few years, maybe three rooms for ourselves in one of them
newfangled apartment-houses up on Second Avenue with turn-on
hot water--"
"That's right--you'll have her riding in a horseless carriage next!"
"I tell you, it's a big idea!"
"I wish we had ten cents for every big idea you've been struck with."
"That's just why, Rosie, I'm going to hit one right."
Mrs. Pelz withdrew then the slow hand from beneath the pillow and a
small handkerchief with a small wad knotted into it.
"Nearly every--cent--in--the world, Roody, that we've got. Saved nearly
penny by penny. Our Bleema--it's a sin--our--our--"
"Sin nothing!"
"Our week-old little girl--it--"
"Nothing ventured in life, Rosie, nothing squeezed out of it. Don't put
it back! Look, the baby herself wants it! Papa's little Bleema! Look!
She's trying to lift herself. Ain't that remarkable, Rosie--look at
that child lifting for that handkerchief!"
"Our little baby girl! If it was for ourselves alone, all right, maybe,
take a chance--but for--"
Suddenly Mr. Pelz clapped his thigh. "I got it! I got it! Well let the
little Bleema decide it for us. How's that? She should decide it for us
if we take a gamble on her daddy's big idea! Here--I put a five-cents
piece in her little hand and see which way she drops it. The little
mammela will say which way it is to be--heads or tails. How's that,
Rosie--the baby should decide it for us?"
"Roody--we mustn't!"
"Heads or tails, Rosie?"
"I--I--"
"Quick!"
"H-heads!"
"Quick now, papa's baby, open up little fist!"
"Roody, not so rough! She can't hold that big nickel."
"That's just what I want--she should let it fall."
"Roody, Roody, I hope it's tails."
The coin rolled to the bed-edge, bounced off to the floor, rolled to the
zinc edge.
Immediately after, on all-fours, his face screwed up for scrutiny and
the back of his neck hotly ridden with crimson, Mr. Pelz leaned after.
"Roody--what?"
"Heads!"
Where Riverside Drive reaches its rococo climax of the
twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year and twelve-story-high apartment-house de
luxe and duplex, and six baths divided by fourteen rooms is equal to
solid-marble comfort, Elsinore Court, the neurotic Prince of Denmark and
Controversy done in gilt mosaics all over the foyer, juts above the
sky-line, and from the convex, rather pop-eyed windows of its top story,
bulges high and wide of view over the city.
From one of these windows, looking north, Rudolph Pelz, by the
holding-aside of a dead weight of pink brocade and filet lace, could
gaze upon a sweep of Hudson River that flowed majestically between the
great flank of the city and the brobdingnagian Palisades.
After a day when he had unerringly directed the great swinging crane of
this or that gigantic transaction it had a laving effect upon him--this
view of sure and fluent tide that ran so perpetually into infinitude.
Yet for Mr. Pelz to attempt to articulate into words this porcelain-thin
pillar of emotions was to shatter it into brittle bits.
"Say, Rosie, ain't that a view for you? That's how it is with life--a
river that rises with getting born and flows into death, and the
in-between is life and--and--"
"Roody, will you please hurry for sup--dinner? Do you want Feist to
arrive with you not yet dressed?"
Mr. Pelz turned then into an interior that was as pink and as silk as
the inside of a bud--satin walls with side brackets softly simulating
candles; a Canet bed, piled with a careful riot of sheerest and roundest
of pillows; that long suit of the interior decorator, the
_chaise-longue_; the four French engravings in their gilt frames; the
latest original Josephine's _secrétaire_; the shine of a white adjoining
bathroom. Before a door-impaneled mirror, Mrs. Pelz, in a black-lace
gown that was gracious to her rotundity.
"Just look! I'm all dressed already."
Mr. Pelz advanced to her, his clasp closing over each of her bare arms,
smile and gaze lifting.
"Rosie, you've got them all beat! Guess why I wish I was your diamond
necklace."
"Roody, it's nearly seven. Don't make me ashamed for Feist."
"Guess!"
"All right, then, I guess."
"So I could always be round your neck."
His hand flew immediately to the lay of gems at her throat, a small
flush rising.
"Roody, you hear me--hurry! Stop it, I tell you! You pinch." But she was
warmly pink now, the shake of her head setting the heavy-carat gems in
her ears waggling.
Time, probably emulating destiny, had worked kindly here; had brought to
Mrs. Pelz the soft, dove-like maturity of her little swell of bosom; the
white, even creamy shoulders ever so slightly too plump between the
blades; the still black hair polished and waved into expensive
permanence. Out of years that had first veered and finally taken course
under his unquestionable captaincy, Rudolph Pelz, with some of their
storm and stress written in deep brackets round his mouth, the red hair
just beginning to pale and thin, and a certain roundness of back
enhancing his squattiness, had come snugly and simply into harbor. Only
the high cheek-bones and bony jaw-line and the rather inconveniently low
voice, which, however, had the timbre of an ormolu clock in the chiming,
indicating his peculiar and covert power to dominate as dynamically as
ungrammatically a board of directors reckoning in millions across
the mahogany.
"Shall I call in Sato to help you dress, Roody?"
"Please--no! Just to have him in the room with his yellowness and
tiptoes makes me nervous like a cat."
"I got your shirt and studs laid out myself."