Chapter 14

Outside, not even to be gainsaid by Sixth Avenue, the night was like a moist flower held to the face. A spring shower, hardly fallen, was already drying on the sidewalks, and from the patch of Bryant Park across the maze of car-tracks there stole the immemorial scent of rain-water and black earth, a just-set-out crescent of hyacinths giving off their light steam of fragrance. How insidious is an old scent! It can creep into the heart like an ache. Who has not loved beside thyme or at the sweetness of dusk? Dear, silenced laughs can come back on a whiff from a florist's shop. Oh, there is a nostalgia lurks in old scents!

Even to Hanna de Long, hurrying eastward on Forty-second Street, huggingly against the shadow of darkened shop-windows, there was a new sting of tears at the smell of earth, daring, in the lull of a city night, to steal out.

There are always these dark figures that scuttle thus through the first hours of the morning.

Whither?

Twice remarks were flung after her from passing figures in slouch-hats--furtive remarks through closed lips.

At five minutes past one she was at the ticket-office grating of a train-terminal that was more ornate than a rajah's dream.

"Adalia--please. Huh? Ohio. Next train."

"Seven-seven. Track nine. Round trip?"

"N-no."

"Eighteen-fifty."

She again bit open the corner knot of her handkerchief.

* * * * *

When Hanna de Long, freshly train-washed of train dust, walked down Third Street away from the station, old man Rentzenauer, for forty-odd springs coaxing over the same garden, was spraying a hose over a side-yard of petunias, shirt-sleeved, his waistcoat hanging open, and in the purpling light his old head merging back against a story-and-a-half house the color of gray weather and half a century of service.

At sight of him who had shambled so taken-for-granted through all of her girlhood, such a trembling seized hold of Hanna de Long that she turned off down Amboy Street, making another wide detour to avoid a group on the Koerner porch, finally approaching Second Street from the somewhat straggly end of it farthest from the station.

She was trembling so that occasionally she stopped against a vertigo that went with it, wiped up under the curtain of purple veil at the beads of perspiration which would spring out along her upper lip. She was quite washed of rouge, except just a swift finger-stroke of it over the cheek-bones.

She had taken out the dicky, too, and for some reason filled in there with a flounce of pink net ripped off from the little ruffles that had flowed out from her sleeves. She was without baggage.

At Ludlow Street she could suddenly see the house, the trees meeting before it in a lace of green, the two iron jardinières empty. They had been painted, and were drying now of a clay-brown coat.

When she finally went up the brick walk, she thought once that she could not reach the bell with the strength left to pull it. She did, though, pressing with her two hands to her left side as she waited. The house was in the process of painting, too, still wet under a first wash of gray. The pergola, also.

The door swung back, and then a figure emerged full from a background of familiarly dim hallway and curve of banister. She was stout enough to be panting slightly, and above the pink-and-white-checked apron her face was ruddy, forty, and ever so inclined to smile.

"Yes?"

"Is--is--"

Out from the hallway shot a cocker spaniel, loose-eared, yapping.

"Queenie, Queenie--come back. She won't bite--Queenie--bad girl!--come back from that nasturtium-bed--bad girl!--all washed and combed so pretty for a romp with her favver when him come home so tired. Queenie!"

She caught her by a rear leg as she leaped back, wild to rollick, tucking her under one arm, administering three diminutive punishments on the shaggy ears.

"Bad! Bad!"

"Is Mr.--Burkhardt--home?"

"Aw, now, he ain't! I sent him down by Gredel's nurseries on his way home to-night, for some tulip-bulbs for my iron jardinières. He ought to be back any minute if he 'ain't stopped to brag with old man Gredel that our arbutus beats his." Then, smiling and rubbing with the back of her free hand at a flour-streak across her cheek: "If--if it's the lady from the orphan asylum come to see about the--the little kid we want--is there anything I can do for you? I'm his wife. Won't you come in?"

"Oh no!" said Miss de Long, now already down two of the steps. "I--I--Oh no, no!--thank you! Oh no--no!--thank you!"

She walked swiftly, the purple veil blown back and her face seeming to look out of it whitely, so whitely that she became terrible.

Night was at hand, and Adalia was drawing down its front shades.

VII

GET READY THE WREATHS

Where St. Louis begins to peter out into brick- and limestone-kilns and great scars of unworked and overworked quarries, the first and more unpretentious of its suburbs take up--Benson, Maplehurst, and Ridgeway Heights intervening with one-story brick cottages and two-story packing-cases--between the smoke of the city and the carefully parked Queen Anne quietude of Glenwood and Croton Grove.

Over Benson hangs a white haze of limestone, gritty with train and foundry smoke. At night the lime-kilns, spotted with white deposits, burn redly, showing through their open doors like great, inflamed diphtheretic throats, tongues of flame bursting and licking out.

Winchester Road, which runs out from the heart of the city to string these towns together, is paved with brick, and its traffic, for the most part, is the great, tin-tired dump-carts of the quarries and steel interurban electric cars which hum so heavily that even the windows of outlying cottages titillate.

For blocks, from Benson to Maplehurst and from Maplehurst to Ridgeway Heights, Winchester Road repeats itself in terms of the butcher, the baker, the corner saloon. A feed-store. A monument- and stone-cutter. A confectioner. A general-merchandise store, with a glass case of men's collars outside the entrance. The butcher, the baker, the corner saloon.

At Benson, where this highway cuts through, the city, wreathed in smoke, and a great oceanic stretch of roofs are in easy view, and at closer range, an outlying section of public asylums for the city's discard of its debility and its senility.

Jutting a story above the one-storied march of Winchester Road, The Convenience Merchandise Corner, Benson, overlooks, from the southeast up-stairs window, a remote view of the City Hospital, the Ferris-wheel of an amusement park, and on clear days the oceanic waves of roof. Below, within the store, that view is entirely obliterated by a brace of shelves built across the corresponding window and brilliantly stacked with ribbons of a score of colors and as many widths. A considerable flow of daylight thus diverted, The Convenience Merchandise Corner, even of early afternoon, fades out into half-discernible corners; a rear-wall display of overalls and striped denim coats crowded back into indefinitude, the haberdashery counter, with a giant gilt shirt-stud suspended above, hardly more outstanding.

Even the notions and dry-goods, flanking the right wall in stacks and bolts, merge into blur, the outline of a white-sateen and corseted woman's torso surmounting the topmost of the shelves with bold curvature.

With spring sunshine even hot against the steel rails of Winchester Road, and awnings drawn against its inroads into the window display, Mrs. Shila Coblenz, routing gloom, reached up tiptoe across the haberdashery counter for the suspended chain of a cluster of bulbs, the red of exertion rising up the taut line of throat and lifted chin.

"A little light on the subject, Milt."

"Let me, Mrs. C."

Facing her from the outer side of the counter, Mr. Milton Bauer stretched also, his well-pressed, pin-checked coat crawling up.

All things swam out into the glow. The great suspended stud; the background of shelves and boxes; the scissors-like overalls against the wall; a clothesline of children's factory-made print frocks; a center-bin of women's untrimmed hats; a headless dummy beside the door, enveloped in a long-sleeved gingham apron.

Beneath the dome of the wooden stud, Mrs. Shila Coblenz, of not too fulsome but the hour-glass proportions of two decades ago, smiled, her black eyes, ever so quick to dart, receding slightly as the cheeks lifted.

"Two twenty-five, Milt, for those ribbed assorted sizes and reinforced heels. Leave or take. Bergdorff & Sloan will quote me the whole mill at that price."

With his chest across the counter and legs out violently behind, Mr. Bauer flung up a glance from his order-pad.

"Have a heart, Mrs. C. I'm getting two-forty for that stocking from every house in town. The factory can't turn out the orders fast enough at that price. An up-to-date woman like you mustn't make a noise like before the war."

"Leave or take."

"You could shave an egg," he said.

"And rush up those printed lawns. There was two in this morning, sniffing around for spring dimities."

"Any more cotton goods? Next month, this time, you'll be paying an advance of four cents on percales."

"Stocked."

"Can't tempt you with them wash silks, Mrs. C.? Neatest little article on the market to-day."

"No demand. They finger it up, and then buy the cotton stuffs. Every time I forget my trade hacks rock instead of clips bonds for its spending-money I get stung."

"This here wash silk, Mrs. C., would--"

"Send me up a dress-pattern off this coral-pink sample for Selene."

"This here dark mulberry, Mrs. C., would suit you something immense."

"That'll be about all."

He flopped shut his book, snapping a rubber band about it and inserting it in an inner coat pocket.

"You ought to stick to them dark, winy shades, Mrs. C. With your coloring and black hair and eyes, they bring you out like a gipsy. Never seen you look better than at the Y.M.H.A. entertainment."

Quick color flowed down her open throat and into her shirtwaist. It was as if the platitude merged with the very corpuscles of a blush that sank down into thirsty soil.

"You boys," she said, "come out here and throw in a jolly with every bill of goods. I'll take a good fat discount instead."

"Fact. Never seen you look better. When you got out on the floor in that stamp-your-foot kind of dance with old man Shulof, your hand on your hip and your head jerking it up, there wasn't a girl on the floor, your own daughter included, could touch you, and I'm giving it to you straight."

"That old thing! It's a Russian folk-dance my mother taught me the first year we were in this country. I was three years old then, and, when she got just crazy with homesickness, we used to dance it to each other evenings on the kitchen floor."

"Say, have you heard the news?"

"No."

"Guess."

"Can't."

"Hammerstein is bringing over the crowned heads of Europe for vaudeville."

Mrs. Coblenz moved back a step, her mouth falling open.

"Why, Milton Bauer, in the old country a man could be strung up for saying less than that!"

"That didn't get across. Try another. A Frenchman and his wife were traveling in Russia, and--"

"If--if you had an old mother like mine up-stairs, Milton, eating out her heart and her days and her weeks and her months over a husband's grave somewhere in Siberia and a son's grave somewhere in Kishinef, you wouldn't see the joke neither."

Mr. Bauer executed a self-administered pat sharply against the back of his hand.

"Keeper," he said, "put me in the brain ward. I--I'm sorry, Mrs. C., so help me! Didn't mean to. How is your mother, Mrs. C.? Seems to me, at the dance the other night, Selene said she was fine and dandy."

"Selene ain't the best judge of her poor old grandmother. It's hard for a young girl to have patience for old age sitting and chewing all day over the past. It's right pitiful the way her grandmother knows it, too, and makes herself talk English all the time to please the child and tries to perk up for her. Selene, thank God, 'ain't suffered, and can't sympathize!"

"What's ailing her, Mrs. C.? I kinda miss seeing the old lady sitting down here in the store."

"It's the last year or so, Milt. Just like all of a sudden a woman as active as mama always was, her health and--her mind kind of went off with a pop."

"Thu! Thu!"

"Doctor says with care she can live for years, but--but it seems terrible the way her--poor mind keeps skipping back. Past all these thirty years in America to--even weeks before I was born. The night they--took my father off to Siberia, with his bare feet in the snow--for distributing papers they found on him--papers that used the word 'svoboda'--'freedom.' And the time, ten years later--they shot down my brother right in front of her for--the same reason. She keeps living it over--living it over till I--could die."

"Say, ain't that just a shame, though!"

"Living it, and living it, and living it! The night with me, a heavy three-year-old, in her arms that she got us to the border, dragging a pack of linens with her! The night my father's feet were bleeding in the snow, when they took him! How with me a kid in the crib, my--my brother's face was crushed in--with a heel and a spur. All night, sometimes, she cries in her sleep--begging to go back to find the graves. All day she sits making raffia wreaths to take back--making wreaths--making wreaths!"

"Say, ain't that tough!"

"It's a godsend she's got the eyes to do it. It's wonderful the way she reads--in English, too. There ain't a daily she misses. Without them and the wreaths--I dunno--I just dunno. Is--is it any wonder, Milt, I--I can't see the joke?"

"My God, no!"

"I'll get her back, though."

"Why, you--she can't get back there, Mrs. C."

"There's a way. Nobody can tell me there's not. Before the war--before she got like this, seven hundred dollars would have done it for both of us--and it will again, after the war. She's got the bank-book, and every week that I can squeeze out above expenses, she sees the entry for herself. I'll get her back. There's a way lying around somewhere. God knows why she should eat out her heart to go back--but she wants it. God, how she wants it!"

"Poor old dame!"

"You boys guy me with my close-fisted buying these last two years. It's up to me, Milt, to squeeze this old shebang dry. There's not much more than a living in it at best, and now, with Selene grown up and naturally wanting to have it like other girls, it ain't always easy to see my way clear. But I'll do it, if I got to trust the store for a year to a child like Selene. I'll get her back."

"You can call on me, Mrs. C., to keep my eye on things while you're gone."

"You boys are one crowd of true blues, all right. There ain't a city salesman comes out here I wouldn't trust to the limit."

"You just try me out."

"Why, just to show you how a woman don't know how many real friends she has got, why--even Mark Haas, of the Mound City Silk Company, a firm I don't do a hundred dollars' worth of business with a year, I wish you could have heard him the other night at the Y.M.H.A., a man you know for yourself just goes there to be sociable with the trade."

"Fine fellow, Mark Haas!"

"'When the time comes, Mrs. Coblenz,' he says, 'that you want to make that trip, just you let me know. Before the war there wasn't a year I didn't cross the water twice, maybe three times, for the firm. I don't know there's much I can do; it ain't so easy to arrange for Russia, but, just the same, you let me know when you're ready to make that trip.' Just like that he said it. That from Mark Haas!"

"And a man like Haas don't talk that way if he don't mean it."

"Mind you, not a hundred dollars a year business with him. I haven't got the demands for silks."

"That wash silk I'm telling you about, though, Mrs. C., does up like a--"

"There's ma thumping with the poker on the up-stairs floor. When it's closing-time she begins to get restless. I--I wish Selene would come in. She went out with Lester Goldmark in his little flivver, and I get nervous about automobiles."

Mr. Bauer slid an open-face watch from his waistcoat.

"Good Lord! five-forty, and I've just got time to sell the Maplehurst Emporium a bill of goods!"

"Good-night, Milt; and mind you put up that order of assorted neckwear yourself. Greens in ready-tieds are good sellers for this time of the year, and put in some reds and purples for the teamsters."

"No sooner said than done."

"And come out for supper some Sunday night, Milt. It does mama good to have young people around."

"I'm yours."

"Good-night, Milt."

He reached across the counter, placing his hand over hers.

"Good-night, Mrs. C.," he said, a note lower in his throat; "and remember that call-on-me stuff wasn't all conversation."

"Good-night, Milt," said Mrs. Coblenz, a coating of husk over her own voice and sliding her hand out from beneath, to top his. "You--you're all right!"

* * * * *

Up-stairs, in a too tufted and too crowded room directly over the frontal half of the store, the window overlooking the remote sea of city was turning taupe, the dusk of early spring, which is faintly tinged with violet, invading. Beside the stove, a base-burner with faint fire showing through its mica, the identity of her figure merged with the fat upholstery of the chair, except where the faint pink through the mica lighted up old flesh, Mrs. Miriam Horowitz, full of years and senile with them, wove with grasses, the écru of her own skin, wreaths that had mounted to a great stack in a bedroom cupboard.

A clock, with a little wheeze and burring attached to each chime, rang six, and upon it Mrs. Coblenz, breathing from a climb, opened the door.

"Ma, why didn't you rap for Katie to come up and light the gas? You'll ruin your eyes, dearie."

She found out a match, immediately lighting two jets of a center-chandelier, turning them down from singing, drawing the shades of the two front and the southeast windows, stooping over the upholstered chair to imprint a light kiss.

"A fine day, mama. There'll be an entry this week. Thirty dollars and thirteen cents and another call for garden implements. I think I'll lay in a hardware line after we--we get back. I can use the lower shelf of the china-table, eh, ma?"

Mrs. Horowitz, whose face, the color of old linen in the yellowing, emerged rather startling from the still black hair strained back from it, lay back in her chair, turning her profile against the upholstered back, half a wreath and a trail of raffia sliding to the floor. Age had sapped from beneath the skin, so that every curve had collapsed to bagginess, the cheeks and the underchin sagging with too much skin. Even the hands were crinkled like too large gloves, a wide, curiously etched marriage band hanging loosely from the third finger.

Mrs. Goblenz stooped, recovering the wreath.

"Say, mama, this one is a beauty! That's a new weave, ain't it? Here, work some more, dearie--till Selene comes with your evening papers."

With her profile still to the chair-back, a tear oozed down the corrugated face of Mrs. Horowitz's cheek. Another.

"Now, mama! Now, mama!"

"I got a heaviness--here--inside. I got a heaviness--"

Mrs. Coblenz slid down to her knees beside the chair.

"Now, mama; shame on my little mama! Is that the way to act when Shila comes up after a good day? 'Ain't we got just lots to be thankful for--the business growing and the bank-book growing, and our Selene on top? Shame on mama!"

"I got a heaviness--here--inside--here."

Mrs. Coblenz reached up for the old hand, patting it.

"It's nothing, mama--a little nervousness."

"I'm an old woman. I--"

"And just think, Shila's mama, Mark Haas is going to get us letters and passports and--"

"My son--my boy--his father before him--"

"Mama--mama, please don't let a spell come on! It's all right. Shila's going to fix it. Any day now, maybe--"

"You'm a good girl. You'm a good girl, Shila." Tears were coursing down to a mouth that was constantly wry with the taste of them.

"And you're a good mother, mama. Nobody knows better than me how good."

"You'm a good girl, Shila."

"I was thinking last night, mama, waiting up for Selene--just thinking how all the good you've done ought to keep your mind off the spells, dearie."

"My son--"

"Why, a woman with as much good to remember as you've got oughtn't to have time for spells. I got to thinking about Coblenz, mama, how--you never did want him, and when I--I went and did it, anyway, and made my mistake, you stood by me to--to the day he died. Never throwing anything up to me! Never nothing but my good little mother, working her hands to the bone after he got us out here to help meet the debts he left us. Ain't that a satisfaction for you to be able to sit and think, mama, how you helped--"

"His feet--blood from my heart in the snow--blood from my heart!"

"The past is gone, darling. What's the use tearing yourself to pieces with it? Them years in New York when it was a fight even for bread, and them years here trying to raise Selene and get the business on a footing, you didn't have time to brood then, mama. That's why, dearie, if only you'll keep yourself busy with something--the wreaths--the--"

"His feet--blood from my--"

"But I'm going to take you back, mama. To papa's grave. To Aylorff's. But don't eat your heart out until it comes, darling. I'm going to take you back, mama, with every wreath in the stack; only, you mustn't eat out your heart in spells. You mustn't, mama; you mustn't."

Sobs rumbled up through Mrs. Horowitz, which her hand to her mouth tried to constrict.

"For his people he died. The papers--I begged he should burn them--he couldn't--I begged he should keep in his hate--he couldn't--in the square he talked it--the soldiers--he died for his people--they got him--the soldiers--his feet in the snow when they took him--the blood in the snow--O my God!--my--God!"

"Mama darling, please don't go over it all again. What's the use making yourself sick? Please!"

She was well forward in her chair now, winding her dry hands one over the other with a small rotary motion.

"I was rocking--Shila-baby in my lap--stirring on the fire black lentils for my boy--black lentils--he--"

"Mama!"

"My boy. Like his father before him. My--"

"Mama, please! Selene is coming any minute now. You know how she hates it. Don't let yourself think back, mama. A little will-power, the doctor says, is all you need. Think of to-morrow, mama; maybe, if you want, you can come down and sit in the store awhile and--"

"I was rocking. O my God! I was rocking, and--"

"Don't get to it--mama, please! Don't rock yourself that way! You'll get yourself dizzy! Don't, ma; don't!"

"Outside--my boy--the holler--O God! in my ears all my life! My boy--the papers--the swords--Aylorff--Aylorff--"

"'Shh-h-h--mama--"

"It came through his heart out the back--a blade with two sides--out the back when I opened the door; the spur in his face when he fell, Shila--the spur in his face--the beautiful face of my boy--my Aylorff--my husband before him--that died to make free!" And fell back, bathed in the sweat of the terrific hiccoughing of sobs.

"Mama, mama! My God! What shall we do? These spells! You'll kill yourself, darling. I'm going to take you back, dearie--ain't that enough? I promise. I promise. You mustn't, mama! These spells--they ain't good for a young girl like Selene to hear. Mama, 'ain't you got your own Shila--your own Selene? Ain't that something? Ain't it? Ain't it?"

Large drops of sweat had come out and a state of exhaustion that swept completely over, prostrating the huddled form in the chair.

"Bed--my bed!"

With her arms twined about the immediately supporting form of her daughter, her entire weight relaxed, and footsteps that dragged without lift, one after the other, Mrs. Horowitz groped out, one hand feeling in advance, into the gloom of a room adjoining.

"Rest! O my God! rest!"

"Yes, yes, mama; lean on me."