Chapter 6

"Sure! What's an eight-mile walk on a spring night like this? It's all cleared up and stopped raining. Only, gee! I--I hate to be getting home all hours again."

She flipped him a gesture. "Say, it's not my surprise party you're giving."

"It's not that, Gert, only I don't want to keep her waiting until she gets sore enough to have the edge taken off the surprise when it does come."

"Say, suit yourself. It's not my kid I'm going to wheel out to-morrow. I should worry."

"I'll do it."

"You're not doing me a favor. With my cold and my marcel, a three-hour walk ain't the one thing in life I'm craving."

"I'll roll it over the bridge and be home by twelve, easy. You take the Subway, Gert; it's too big a trot for you."

"Nix! I don't start anything I can't finish."

She cocked her hat to a forward angle, so that the hen pheasant's tail swung rakishly over her face, took an Hellenic stride through the aisle of perambulators, flung her arms across her bosom in an attitude of extravaganza, then tossed off a military salute.

"Ready, march!"

"You're a peach, Gert."

"I've tried pretty near everything in my life. Why not wheel another fellow's baby-carriage for another fellow's wife's baby across Brooklyn Bridge at midnight? Whoops! why not!"

"We're off, then, Gert."

"Forward, march!"

"Keep your eye on the steering-wheel, Phonzie, and remember, ten miles is speed limit on the Bridge. One, two, three! Gawd! if my friend from Carson City could only see me now!"

Out on the drying sidewalk they leaned to each other, and the duet of their merriment ran ahead of them down the meager street and found out its dark corners.

"Honest, Phonzie, won't the girls just bust when they hear this!"

"And Mil, poor old girl, she's right weak and full of nerves now, but she'll laugh loudest of all when she knows why I went with Slews."

"Yes. She-can-laugh-loudest-of-all."

"What?"

"Come on, or we won't get home until morning."

And on the crest of her insouciance she thrust out her arm, giving the shining white perambulator a running push from the rear, so that it went rolling lightly from her and with a perfect gear action down the slight incline of sidewalk. They were after it at a bound, light-heeled and full of laughter.

"Whoops, my dear!"

"Whoa!"

* * * * *

At a turn in the dark street the lights of the Bridge flashed suddenly upon them, swung in high festoons across an infinitude of night. Above, a few majestic stars, new coined, gleamed in a clear sky.

"What do you bet that with me at the wheel we can clear the Bridge in thirty minutes, Phonzie?"

"Sure we can; but here, let me shove."

She elbowed him aside, the banter gone suddenly from her voice.

"No, let me."

She fell to pushing it silently along. Stars came out in her eyes. He advanced to her pace, matching his stride to hers, fancies like colored beads slipping along the slender thread of his thoughts.

"Swell sight, ain't it, Gert, the harbor lights so bright and the sky so deep?"

Silence.

"Seeing so much sky all at once reminds me, Gert. You know about that midnight--blue satin Hertz had the brass to dump back on us because the skirt was too tight. Huh?"

Her eyes were far and away.

"Huh, whatta you know about that, Gert?"

Her hands, gripped around the handle-bars, were full of nerves; she could feel them jumping in her palm.

"Huh, Gert?"

"What you say, Phonzie?"

"All right, don't answer. Moon all you like, for my part." And he fell to whistling as he strode beside her, his eyes on the light-spangled outline of the city.

* * * * *

At twelve o'clock the lights in the lower hall of the up-town apartment-house had been extinguished. All but one, which burned like a tired eye beneath the ornate staircase. The misty quiet of midnight, which is as heavy as a veil, hung in the corridors. Miss Gertie Dobriner entered first and, holding wide the door between them, Alphonse Michelson at the front wheels, they tilted the white carriage up the narrow staircase, their whispers floating through the gloom.

"Easy there, Phonzie!"

"There!"

"Watch out!"

"Whew! that was a close shave!"

"Here, let me unlock the door. 'Sh-h-h!"

"Don't go, Gert. Come on in, and after the big show I'll send you home in a cab."

"Nix! After a three-hour walk, a street-car will look good enough to me."

"Well, then, come on in, just a minute, Gert. I want you to see the fun. What you bet she's asleep in the front room, sore as thunder, too? We'll sneak back and dump the kid in and wheel him in on her."

"Aw no! I--I got to go now, Phonzie."

"Come on, Gert, don't be a quitter. Don't you want to see her face when she knows that Slews has been all a fluke? Come on, Gert, I'll wake up the kid if I try to dump him in alone."

"Well, for just a minute. I--I don't want to butt in on your and--and her fun."

They entered with the stealthy espionage of thieves, and in the narrow hallway she waited while he tiptoed to the bedroom and back again, his lips pursed outward in a "'Sh-h-h."

"She must be in the front room. The kid's in his crib. Come on, Gert. 'Sh-h-h!"

He was pink-faced and full of caution, raising each foot in exaggerated stealth. Between them they manoeuvered the carriage down the hallway.

"'Sh-h-h. If she's awake, she can hear every word in the front room."

From her wakeful couch Madam Moores raised herself on her elbow, cupping her ear in her palm, and straining her glance down the long hallway. The tears had dried on her cheeks.

"Here, Gert, you dump in these things and let me lift the kid."

"No, no; let me! Go 'way, Phonzie. You'll wake him! I just want her to be too surprised to open her mouth when she sees him sleeping in it like a top."

She threw back the net drapery and leaned to the heart of the crib, and the blood ran in a flash across her face.

"Little darling--little Phonzie darling!"

"Don't wake him, Gert."

She was reluctant to withdraw herself. "His little darling fists, so pink and curled up! Little Phonzie darling!"

He hung over each process, proud and awkward.

"Little darling--little darling--here, Phonzie help."

They transferred the burden, the child not moving on his pillow. In the shallow heart of the perambulator, the high froth of pillows about him, he lay like a bud, his soft profile against the lace, and his skin like the innermost petal of a rose.

"Phonzie, ain't he--ain't he the softest little darling! Gawd! how--how she'll love to--to be wheeling him!"

His fingers fumbled with excitement and fell to strapping and buckling with a great show and a great ineffectually.

"Here, help me let down the glass top."

"'Sh-h-h-h! Every word carries in this flat."

"Now!"

"Now!"

"You wheel him down and in on her, Gert."

She stiffened with a new diffidence. "No, no. It's your surprise."

"You done all the work on the job as much as me, and it's half your present, anyways. You roll him down the hall and stand next to her till she wakes up. She's a tight little sleeper, but if she don't wake soon I'll drop a book or something. Go on, Gert, roll it in."

"No, no, Phonzie. You and her have your fun out alone. It's your fun, anyways, not mine. This piece of rolling-stock will roll herself along home now."

"Aw, now--"

"Anyways, I'm dead. Look what a rag I am! Look at the hem of this skirt! The next time I do a crazy thing like walk from Brooklyn, I want to be burned in oil."

"Now, Gert, stick around and I'll send you home in a cab."

But she was out and past him craning her neck backward through the aperture of the open door. "Go to it, Phonzie! It's your fun, anyways. Yours and hers. S'long!"

He had already begun his triumphant passage down the hallway, and on her couch among her pillows Madam Moores closed her eyes in a simulation of sleep and against the tears that scalded her lids.

In a south-bound car Gertie Dobriner found a seat well toward the front. Across the aisle a day laborer on a night debauch threw her a watery stare and a thick-tongued, thick-brogued remark. A char-woman with a newspaper bundle hugged under one arm dozed in the seat alongside, her head lolling from shoulder to shoulder. Raindrops had long since dried on the window-pane. Gertie Dobriner cupped her chin in her palm and gazed out at the quiet street and the shuttered shops hurtling past.

Twice the conductor touched her shoulder, his hand outstretched for fare. She sprang about, fumbling in her purse for a coin, but with difficulty, because through the hot blur of her tears she could only grope ineffectually. When she finally found a five-cent piece, a tear had wiggle-waggled down her cheek and fell, splotching the back of her glove.

Across the aisle the day laborer leaned to her batting at the hen pheasant's tail in her hat, and a cold, alcoholic tear dripping from the corner of his own eye.

"Cheer up, my gir-rl," he said, through a beard like old moss--"cheer up and be a spor-r-rt!"

HOCHENHEIMER OF CINCINNATI

When Mound City began to experience the growing-pains of a Million Club, a Louisiana Exposition, and a block-long Public Library, she spread Westward Ho!--like a giant stretching and flinging out his great legs.

When rooming-houses and shoe-factories began to shove and push into richly curtained brown-stone-front Pine Street, reluctant papas, with urgent wives and still more urgent daughters, sold at a loss and bought white-stone fronts in restricted West End districts.

Subdivisions sprang up overnight. Two-story, two-doored flat-buildings, whole ranks and files of them, with square patches of front porch cut in two by dividing railings, marched westward and skirted the restricted districts with the formality of an army flanking. Grand Avenue, once the city's limit, now girded its middle like a loin-cloth. The middle-aged inhabitant who could remember it when it was a corn-field now beheld full-blasted breweries, cinematograph theaters, ten-story office-buildings, old mansions converted into piano-salesrooms and millinery emporiums, business colleges, and more full-blasted breweries up and down its length.

At Cook Street, which runs into Grand Avenue like a small tributary, a pall of smoke descended thick as a veil; and every morning, from off her second-story window-sills, Mrs. Shongut swept tiny dancing balls of soot; and one day Miss Rena Shongut's neat rim of tenderly tended geraniums died of suffocation.

Shortly after, the Adolph Shongut Produce Company signed a heavy note and bought out the Mound City Fancy Sausage and Poultry Company at a low figure. The spring following, large "To Let" signs appeared in the second-story windows of the modest house on Cook Street. And, hard pressed by the approaching first payment of the note and the great iron voice of the Middle West Shoe Company, which backed up against the woodshed; goaded by the no-less-insistent voice of Mrs. Shongut, whose soot balls increased, and by Rena, who developed large pores; shamed by the scorn of a son who had the finger-nails and trousers creases of a bank clerk--Adolph Shongut joined the great pantechnicon procession Westward Ho! and moved to a flat out on Wasserman Avenue--a six-room-and-bath, sleeping-porch, hot-and-cold-water, built-in-plate-rack, steam-heat, hardwood-floor, decorated-to-suit-tenant flat neatly mounted behind a conservative incline of a front terrace, with a square patch of rear lawn that backed imminently into the white-stone garages of Kingston Place.

Friedrichstrasse, Rue de la Paix, Fifth Avenue, Piccadilly, Princess Street and Via Nazionale are the highways of the world. Trod in literature, asterisked in guide-books, and pictured on postal cards, their habits are celebrated. Who does not know that Fifth Avenue is the most rococo boulevard in the world, and that it drinks its afternoon tea from etched, thin-stemmed glasses? Who does not know that Rue de la Paix runs through more novels than any other paved thoroughfare, and that Piccadilly bobbies have wider chest expansion than the Swiss Guards?

Wasserman Avenue has no such renown; but it has its routine, like the history-hoary Via Nazionale, which daily closes its souvenir-shops to seek siesta from two until four, the hours when American tourists are rattling in sight-seeing automobiles along the Appian Way.

At half past seven, six mornings in the week, a well-breakfasted procession, morning papers protruding from sack-coat pockets and toothpicks assiduous, hastens down the well-scrubbed front steps of Wasserman Avenue and turns its face toward the sun and the two-blocks-distant street-car. At half past seven, six days in the week, the wives of Wasserman Avenue hold their wrappers close up about their throats and poke uncoifed heads out of doors to Godspeed their well-breakfasted spouses.

Wasserman Avenue flutters farewell handkerchiefs to its husbands until they turn the corner at Rindley's West End Meat and Vegetable Market. At eventide Wasserman Avenue greets its husbands with kisses, frankly delivered on its rows of front porches.

Do not smile. Gautier wrote about the consolation of the arts; but, after all, he has little enough to say of that cold moment when art leaves off and heart turns to heart.

Most of Wasserman Avenue had never read much of Gautier, but it knew the greater truth of the consolation of the hearth. When Mrs. Shongut waved farewell to her husband that greater truth lay mirrored in her eyes, which followed him until Rindley's West End Meat and Vegetable Market shunted him from view.

"Mamma, come in and close the screen door--you look a sight in that wrapper."

Mrs. Shongut withdrew herself from the aperture and turned to the sunshine-flooded, mahogany-and-green-velours sitting-room.

"You think that papa seems so well, Renie? At breakfast this morning he looked so bad underneath his eyes."

Rena yawned in her rocking-chair and rustled the morning paper. The horrific caprice of her pores had long since succumbed to the West End balm of Wasserman Avenue. No rajah's seventh daughter of a seventh daughter had cheeks more delicately golden--that fine tinge which is like the glory of sunlight.

"Now begin, mamma, to find something to worry about! For two months he hasn't had a heart spell."

Mrs. Shongut drew a thin-veined hand across her brow. Her narrow shoulders, which were never held straight, dropped even lower, as though from pressure.

"He don't say much, but I know he worries enough about that second payment coming due in July and only a month and a half off. I tell you I knew what I was talking about when I never wanted him to buy out the Mound City. I was the one who said we was doing better in little business."

"Now begin, mamma!"

"I told him he couldn't count on Izzy to stay down in the business with him. I told him Izzy wouldn't spoil his white hands by helping his papa in business."

"I suppose, mamma, you think Izzy should have stayed down with papa when he could get that job with Uncle Isadore."

"You know why your Uncle Isadore took Izzy? Because to a strange bookkeeper he has to pay more. Your Uncle Isadore is my own brother, Renie, but I tell you he 'ain't never acted like it."

"That's what I say. What have we got rich relatives with a banking-house for, if Izzy can't start there instead of in papa's little business?"

"Ya, ya! What your Uncle Isadore does for Izzy wait and see. For his own sister he never done nothing, and for his own sister's son he don't do nothing, neither. You seen for yourself, if it was not for Aunt Becky begging him nearly on her knees, how he would have treated us that time with the mortgage. Better, I say, Izzy should stay with his papa in business or get out West like he wants, and where he can't keep such fine white hands to gamble with."

Miss Shongut slanted deeper until her slim body was a direct hypotenuse to the chair. "Honest, mamma, it's a shame the way you look for trouble, and the way you and papa pick on that boy."

"Pick! When a boy gambles the roulette and the cards and the horses until--"

"When a boy likes cards and horses and roulette it isn't so nice, I know, mamma; but it don't need to mean he's a born gambler, does it? Boys have got to sow their wild oats."

"Ya, ya! Wild oats! A boy that gambles away his last cent when he knows just the least bit of excitement his father can't stand! Izzy knows how it goes against his father when he plays. Ya, ya! I don't need to look for trouble; I got it. Your papa, with his heart trouble, is enough by itself."

"Well, we're all careful, ain't we, mamma? Did I even holler the other night when I thought I heard a burglar in the dining-room?"

"Ya! How I worry about the things you should know." Mrs. Shongut flung wide the windows and pinned back the lace curtains, so that the spring air, cool as water, flowed in.

Her daughter sprang to her feet and drew her filmy wrapper closer about her. "Mamma, the Solingers don't need to look right in on us from their dining-room."

"Say, I 'ain't got no time to be stylish for the neighbors. On wash-day I got my housework to do. Honest, Renie, do you think, instead of laying round, it would hurt you to go back and make the beds awhile? Do you think a girl like you ought to got to be told, on wash-day and with Lizzie in the laundry, to help a little with the housework? Do you think, Renie, it's nice? I ask you."

"It's early yet, mamma; the housework will keep."

"Early yet, she says! On Monday, with my girl in the laundry and you with five shirtwaists in the wash, it's early, she says! Your mother ain't too lazy to start now, lemme tell you. Get them Kingston Place ideas out of your head, Renie. Remember we don't do nothing but look out on their fine white garages; remember business ain't so grand with your papa, neither."

"Now begin that, mamma! I know it all by heart."

"I ain't beginning nothing, Renie; but, believe me, it ain't so nice for a girl to have to be told everything. How that little Jeannie Lissman, next door, helps her mother already, it's a pleasure to see. I--"

"You've told me about her before, mamma."

Mrs. Shongut flung a sheet across the upright piano.

"Gimme the broom, mamma. I'll sweep."

"Sweep I never said you need to do. It's bad enough I got to spoil my hands. Go back and wake Izzy up and make the beds."

"Aw, mamma, let him sleep. He don't have to be down until nine."

"Nine o'clock nowadays young men have got to work! Up to five years ago every morning at dark your papa was down-town to see the poultry come in, and now at eight o'clock my son can't be woke up to go to work. Honest, I tell you times is changed!"

"Mamma, the way you pick on that boy!"

Mrs. Shongut folded both hands atop her broom in a solemn and hieratic gesture; her face was full of lines, as though time had autographed it many times over in a fine hand.

"Can you blame me? Can you blame me that I worry about that boy, with his wild ways? That a boy like him should gamble away every cent of his salary, except when he wins a little and buys us such nonsenses as bracelets! That a boy who learnt bookkeeping in an expensive business school, and knows that with his papa business ain't so good, shouldn't offer to pay out of his salary a little board! I tell you, Renie, as he goes now, it can't lead to no good; sometimes I would do almost anything to get him out West. Not a cent does he offer to--"

"He only makes--"

"You know, Renie, how little I want his money; but that he shouldn't offer to help out at home a little--that every cent on cards and clothes he should spend! I ask you, is it any reason him and his papa got scenes together until for the neighbors I'm ashamed, and for papa's heart so afraid? That a fine boy like our Izzy should run so wild!"

Tears lay close to the surface of her voice, and she created a sudden flurry of dust, sweeping with short, swift strokes.

"Izzy's not so worse! Give me a boy like Izzy any time, to a mollycoddle. He's just throwing off steam now."

"Just take up with your wild brother against your old parents! Your papa's a young man, with no heart trouble and lots of money; he can afford to have a card-playing son what has to have second breakfast alone every morning! Just you side with your brother!"

Miss Shongut side-stepped the furniture, which in the panicky confusion of sweeping was huddled toward the center of the room, and through a cloud of dust to the door.

"Every time I open my mouth in this family I put my foot in it. I should worry about what isn't my business!"

"Well, one thing I can say, me and papa never need to reproach ourselves that we 'ain't done the right thing by our children."

"Clean sheets, mamma?"

"Yes; and don't muss up the linen-shelfs."

Her daughter flitted down a narrow aisle of hallway; from the shoulders her thin, flowing sleeves floated backward, filmy, white.

Mrs. Shongut flung open the screen door and swept a pile of webby dust to the porch and then off on the patch of grass.

Thin spring sunshine lay warm along the neat terraces of Wasserman Avenue. Windows were flung wide to the fresh kiss of spring; pillows, comforters, and rugs draped across their sills. Across the street a negro, with an old gunny-sack tied apron-fashion about his loins, turned a garden hose on a stretch of asphalt and swept away the flood with his broom. A woman, whose hair caught the sunlight like copper, avoided the flood and tilted a perambulator on its two rear wheels down the wooden steps of her veranda.

Across the dividing rail of the Shonguts' porch a child with a strap of school-books flung over one shoulder ran down the soft terrace, and a woman emerged after her to the topmost step of the veranda, holding her checked apron up about her waist and shielding her eyes with one hand.

"Jeannie! Jean-nie!"

"Yes'm."

"Watch out for the street-car crossing, Jeannie."

"Yes'm."

"Jean-nie!"

"What?"

"Be sure!"

"Yeh."

"Good morning, Mrs. Shongut."

"Good morning, Mrs. Lissman. Looks like spring!"

"Ain't it so? I say to Mr. Lissman this morning, before he went down-town, that he should bring home some grass seed to-night."

"Ya, ya! Before you know it now, we got hot summer after such a late spring."

"I say to my Roscoe that after school to-day he should bring up the rubber-plant out of the cellar."

"That's right; use 'em while they're young, Mrs. Lissman. When they grow up it's different."

"Mrs. Shongut, you should talk! Only last night I says to my husband, I says, when I seen Miss Renie pass by, 'Such a pretty girl!' I tell you, Mrs. Shongut, such a pretty girl and such a fine-looking boy you can be proud of."

"Ach, Mrs. Lissman, you think so?"

"There ain't one on the street any prettier than Miss Renie. 'I tell you, if my Roscoe was ten years older she could have him,' I says to my husband."

Mrs. Shongut leaned forward on her broom-handle. "If I say so myself, Mrs. Lissman, I got good reasons to have pleasure out of my children. I guess you heard, Mrs. Lissman, what a grand position my Izzy has got with his uncle, of the Isadore Flexner Banking-house. Bookkeeping in a banking-house, Mrs. Lissman, for a boy like Izzy!"

"I tell you, Mrs. Shongut, if you got rich relations it's a help."

"How grand my brother has done for himself, Mrs. Lissman! Such a house he has built on Kingston Place! Such a home! You can see for yourself, Mrs. Lissman, how his wife and daughters drive up sometimes in their automobile."

"I'm surprised they don't come more often, Mrs. Shongut; your Renie and them girls, I guess, are grand friends."

"Ya; and to be in that banking-house is a grand start for my boy. I always say it can lead to almost anything. Only I tell him he shouldn't let fine company make him wild."

"Ach, boys will be boys, Mrs. Shongut. Even now it ain't so easy for me to get make my Roscoe to come in off his roller-skates at night. My Jeannie I can make mind; but I tell her when she is old enough to have beaus, then our troubles begin with her."