Chapter 2

"Gad! your middle name ought to be Nagalene."

"Aw, now, Jimmie, maybe it does sound like nagging, but it ain't, honey. It--it's only my--my fear that I'm losing you, and--and my hate for the every-day grind of things, and--"

"I can't help that, can I?"

"Why, there--there's nothing on God's earth I hate, Jimmie, like I hate that Bargain-Basement. When I think it's down there in that manhole I've spent the best years of my life, I--I wanna die. The day I get out of it, the day I don't have to punch that old time-clock down there next to the Complaints and Adjustment Desk, I--I'll never put my foot below sidewalk level again to the hour I die. Not even if it was to take a walk in my own gold-mine."

"It ain't exactly a garden of roses down there."

"Why, I hate it so terrible, Jimmie, that sometimes I wake up nights gritting my teeth with the smell of steam-pipes and the tramp of feet on the glass sidewalk up over me. Oh. God! you dunno--you dunno!"

"When it comes to that the main floor ain't exactly a maiden's dream, or a fellow's, for that matter."

"With a man it's different, It's his job in life, earning, and--and the woman making the two ends of it meet. That's why, Jimmie, these last two years and eight months, if not for what I was hoping for us, why--why--I--why, on your twenty a week, Jimmie, there's nobody could run a flat like I could. Why, the days wouldn't be long enough to putter in. I--Don't throw away what I been building up for us, Jimmie, step by step! Don't, Jimmie!"

"Good Lord, girl! You deserve better 'n me."

"I know I got a big job, Jimmie, but I want to make a man out of you, temper, laziness, gambling, and all. You got it in you to be something more than a tango lizard or a cigar-store bum, honey. It's only you 'ain't got the stuff in you to stand up under a five-hundred-dollar windfall and--a--and a sporty girl. If--if two glasses of beer make you as silly as they do, Jimmie, why, five hundred dollars would land you under the table for life."

"Aw-there you go again!"

"I can't help it, Jimmie. It's because I never knew a fellow had what's he's cut out for written all over him so. You're a born clerk, Jimmie.

"Sure, I'm a slick clerk, but--"

"You're born to be a clerk, a good clerk, even a two-hundred-a-month clerk, the way you can win the trade, but never your own boss. I know what I'm talking about. I know your measure better than any human on earth can ever know your measure. I know things about you that you don't even know yourself."

"I never set myself up to nobody for anything I wasn't."

"Maybe not, Jimmie, but I know about you and--and that Central Street gang that time, and--"

"You!"

"Yes, honey, and there's not another human living but me knows how little it was your fault. Just bad company, that was all. That's how much I--I love you, Jimmie, enough to understand that. Why, if I thought May Scully and a set-up in business was the thing for you, Jimmie, I'd say to her, I'd say, if it was like taking my own heart out in my hand and squashing it, I'd say to her, I'd say, 'Take him, May.' That's how I--I love you, Jimmie. Oh, ain't it nothing, honey, a girl can come here and lay herself this low to you--"

"Well, haven't I just said you--you deserve better."

"I don't want better, Jimmie. I want you. I want to take hold of your life and finish the job of making it the kind we can both be proud of. Us two, Jimmie, in--in our own decent two-by-four. Shopping on Saturday nights. Frying in our own frying-pan in our own kitchen. Listening to our own phonograph in our own parlor. Geraniums and--and kids--and--and things. Gas-logs. Stationary washtubs. Jimmie! Jimmie!"

Mr. James P. Batch reached up for his hat and overcoat, cramming the newspaper into a rear pocket.

"Come on," he said, stalking toward the side door and not waiting to see her to her feet.

Outside, a banner of stars was over the narrow street. For a chain of five blocks he walked, with a silence and speed that Miss Slayback could only match with a running quickstep. But she was not out of breath. Her head was up, and her hand, where it hooked into Mr. Batch's elbow, was in a vise that tightened with each block.

You who will mete out no other approval than that vouched for by the stamp of time and whose contempt for the contemporary is from behind the easy refuge of the classics, suffer you the shuddering analogy that between Aspasia who inspired Pericles, Theodora who suggested the Justinian code, and Gertie Slayback who commandeered Jimmie Batch, is a sistership which rounds them, like a lasso thrown back into time, into one and the same petticoat dynasty behind the throne.

True, Gertie Slayback's _mise en scène_ was a two-room kitchenette apartment situated in the Bronx at a surveyor's farthest point between two Subway stations, and her present state one of frequent red-faced forays down into a packing-case. But there was that in her eyes which witchingly bespoke the conquered, but not the conqueror. Hers was actually the titillating wonder of a bird which, captured, closes its wings, that surrender can be so sweet.

Once she sat on the edge of the packing-case, dallying a hammer, then laid it aside suddenly, to cross the littered room and place the side of her head to the immaculate waistcoat of Mr. Jimmie Batch, red-faced, too, over wrenching up with hatchet-edge a barrel-top.

"Jimmie darling, I--I just never will get over your finding this place for us."

Mr. Batch wiped his forearm across his brow, his voice jerking between the squeak of nails extracted from wood.

"It was you, honey. You give me the to-let ad, and I came to look, that's all."

"Just the samey, it was my boy found it. If you hadn't come to look we might have been forced into taking that old dark coop over on Simpson Street."

"What's all this junk in this barrel?"

"Them's kitchen utensils, honey."

"Kitchen what?"

"Kitchen things that you don't know nothing about except to eat good things out of."

"What's this?"

"Don't bend it! That's a celery-brush. Ain't it cute?"

"A celery-brush! Why didn't you get it a comb, too?"

"Aw, now, honey-bee, don't go trying to be funny and picking through these things you don't know nothing about! They're just cute things I'm going to cook something grand suppers in, for my something awful bad boy."

He leaned down to kiss her at that. "Gee!"

She was standing, her shoulder to him and head thrown back against his chest. She looked up to stroke his cheek, her face foreshortened.

"I'm all black and blue pinching myself, Jimmie."

"Me too."

"Every night when I get home from working here in the flat I say to myself in the looking-glass, I say, 'Gertie Slayback, what if you're only dreamin'?'"

"Me too."

"I say to myself, 'Are you sure that darling flat up there, with the new pink-and-white wall-paper and the furniture arriving every day, is going to be yours in a few days when you're Mrs. Jimmie Batch?'"

"Mrs. Jimmie Batch--say, that's immense."

"I keep saying it to myself every night, 'One day less.' Last night it was two days. To-night it'll be--one day, Jimmie, till I'm--her."

She closed her eyes and let her hand linger up at his cheek, head still back against him, so that, inclining his head, he could rest his lips in the ash-blond fluff of her hair.

"Talk about can't wait! If to-morrow was any farther off they'd have to sweep out a padded cell for me."

She turned to rumple the smooth light thatch of his hair. "Bad boy! Can't wait! And here we are getting married all of a sudden, just like that. Up to the time of this draft business, Jimmie Batch, 'pretty soon' was the only date I could ever get out of you, and now here you are crying over one day's wait. Bad honey boy!"

He reached back for the pink newspaper so habitually protruding from his hip pocket. "You ought to see the way they're neck-breaking for the marriage-license bureaus since the draft. First thing we know, tine whole shebang of the boys will be claiming the exemption of sole support of wife."

"It's a good thing we made up our minds quick, Jimmie. They'll be getting wise. If too many get exemption from the army by marrying right away, it'll be a give-away."

"I'd like to know who can lay his hands on the exemption of a little wife to support."

"Oh, Jimmie, it--it sounds so funny. Being supported! Me that always did the supporting, not only to me, but to my mother and great-grand-mother up to the day they died."

"I'm the greatest little supporter you ever seen."

"Me getting up mornings to stay at home in my own darling little flat, and no basement or time-clock. Nothing but a busy little hubby to eat him nice, smelly, bacon breakfast and grab him nice morning newspaper, kiss him wifie, and run downtown to support her. Jimmie, every morning for your breakfast I'm going to fry--"

"You bet your life he's going to support her, and he's going to pay back that forty dollars of his girl's that went into his wedding duds, that hundred and ninety of his girl's savings that went into furniture--"

"We got to meet our instalments every month first, Jimmie. That's what we want--no debts and every little darling piece of furniture paid up."

"We--I'm going to pay it, too."

"And my Jimmie is going to work to get himself promoted and quit being a sorehead at his steady hours and all."

"I know more about selling, honey, than the whole bunch of dubs in that store put together if they'd give me a chance to prove it."

She laid her palm to his lips.

"'Shh-h-h! You don't nothing of the kind. It's not conceit, it's work is going to get my boy his raise."

"If they'd listen to me, that department would--"

"'Shh-h! J. G. Hoffheimer don't have to get pointers from Jimmie Batch how to run his department store."

"There you go again. What's J. G. Hoffheimer got that I 'ain't? Luck and a few dollars in his pocket that, if I had in mine, would--

"It was his own grit put those dollars there, Jimmie. Just put it out of your head that it's luck makes a self-made man."

"Self-made! You mean things just broke right for him. That's two-thirds of this self-made business."

"You mean he buckled right down to brass tacks, and that's what my boy is going to do."

"The trouble with this world is it takes money to make money. Get your first few dollars, I always say, no matter how, and then when you're on your feet scratch your conscience if it itches. That's why I said in the beginning, if we had took that hundred and ninety furniture money and staked it on--"

"Jimmie, please--please! You wouldn't want to take a girl's savings of years and years to gamble on a sporty cigar proposition with a card-room in the rear. You wouldn't, Jimmie. You ain't that kind of fellow. Tell me you wouldn't, Jimmie."

He turned away to dive down into the barrel. "Naw," he said, "I wouldn't."

The sun had receded, leaving a sudden sullen gray, the little square room, littered with an upheaval of excelsior, sheet-shrouded furniture, and the paperhanger's paraphernalia and inimitable smells, darkening and seeming to chill.

"We got to quit now, Jimmie. It's getting dark and the gas ain't turned on in the meter yet."

He rose up out of the barrel, holding out at arm's-length what might have been a tinsmith's version of a porcupine.

"What in--What's this thing that scratched me?"

She danced to take it. "It's a grater, a darling grater for horseradish and nutmeg and cocoanut. I'm going to fix you a cocoanut cake for our honeymoon supper to-morrow night, honey-bee. Essie Wohlgemuth over in the cake-demonstrating department is going to bring me the recipe. Cocoanut cake! And I'm going to fry us a little steak in this darling little skillet. Ain't it the cutest!"

"Cute she calls a tin skillet."

"Look what's pasted on it. 'Little Housewife's Skillet. The Kitchen Fairy.' That's what I'm going to be, Jimmie, the kitchen fairy. Give me that. It's a rolling-pin. All my life I've wanted a rolling-pin. Look, honey, a little string to hang it up by. I'm going to hang everything up in rows. It's going to look like Tiffany's kitchen, all shiny. Give me, honey; that's an egg-beater. Look at it whiz. And this--this is a pan for war bread. I'm going to make us war bread to help the soldiers."

"You're a little soldier yourself," he said.

"That's what I would be if I was a man, a soldier all in brass buttons."

"There's a bunch of the fellows going," said Mr. Batch, standing at the window, looking out over roofs, dilly-dallying up and down on his heels and breaking into a low, contemplative whistle. She was at his shoulder, peering over it. "You wouldn't be afraid, would you, Jimmie?"

"You bet your life I wouldn't."

She was tiptoes now, her arms creeping up to him. "Only my boy's got a wife--a brand-new wifie to support, 'ain't he?"

"That's what he has," said Mr. Batch, stroking her forearm, but still gazing through and beyond whatever roofs he was seeing.

"Jimmie!"

"Huh?"

"Look! We got a view of the Hudson River from our flat, just like we lived on Riverside Drive."

"All the Hudson River I can see is fifteen smoke-stacks and somebody's wash-line out."

"It ain't so. We got a grand view. Look! Stand on tiptoe, Jimmie, like me. There, between that water-tank on that black roof over there and them two chimneys. See? Watch my finger. A little stream of something over there that moves."

"No, I don't see."

"Look, honey-bee, close! See that little streak?"

"All right, then, if you see it I see it."

"To think we got a river view from our flat! It's like living in the country. I'll peek out at it all day long. God! honey, I just never will be over the happiness of being done with basements."

"It was swell of old Higgins to give us this half-Saturday. It shows where you stood with the management, Gert--this and a five-dollar gold piece. Lord knows they wouldn't pony up that way if it was me getting married by myself."

"It's because my boy 'ain't shown them down there yet the best that's in him. You just watch his little safety-first wife see to it that from now on he keeps up her record of never in seven years punching the time-clock even one minute late, and that he keeps his stock shelves O. K. and shows his department he's a comer-on."

"With that bunch of boobs a fellow's got a swell chance to get anywheres."

"It's getting late, Jimmie. It don't look nice for us to stay here so late alone, not till--to-morrow. Ruby and Essie and Charley are going to meet us in the minister's back parlor at ten sharp in the morning. We can be back here by noon and get the place cleared enough to give 'em a little lunch--just a fun lunch without fixings."

"I hope the old guy don't waste no time splicing us. It's one of the things a fellow likes to have over with."

"Jimmie! Why, it's the most beautiful thing in the world, like a garden of lilies or--or something, a marriage ceremony is! You got the ring safe, honey-bee, and the license?"

"Pinned in my pocket where you put 'em, Flirty Gertie."

"Flirty Gertie! Now you'll begin teasing me with that all our life--the way I didn't slap your face that night when I should have. I just couldn't have, honey. Goes to show we were just cut and dried for each other, don't it? Me, a girl that never in her life let a fellow even bat his eyes at her without an introduction. But that night when you winked, honey--something inside of me just winked back."

"My girl!"

"You mean it, boy? You ain't sorry about nothing, Jimmie?"

"Sorry? Well, I guess not!"

"You saw the way--she--May--you saw for yourself what she was, when we saw her walking, that next night after Ceiner's, nearly staggering, up Sixth Avenue with Budge Evans."

"I never took any stock in her, honey. I was just letting her like me."

She sat back on the box edge, regarding him, her face so soft and wont to smile that she could not keep her composure.

"Get me my hat and coat, honey. We'll walk down. Got the key?"

They skirmished in the gloom, moving through slit-like aisles of furniture and packing-box.

"Ouch!"

"Oh, the running water is hot, Jimmie, just like the ad said! We got red-hot running water in our flat. Close the front windows, honey. We don't want it to rain in on our new green sofa. Not 'til it's paid for, anyways."

"Hurry."

"I'm ready."

They met at the door, kissing on the inside and the outside of it; at the head of the fourth, third, and the second balustrade down.

"We'll always make 'em little love landings, Jimmie, so we can't ever get tired climbing them."

"Yep."

Outside there was still a pink glow in a clean sky. The first flush of spring in the air had died, leaving chill. They walked briskly, arm in arm, down the asphalt incline of sidewalk leading from their apartment house, a new street of canned homes built on a hillside--the sepulchral abode of the city's trapped whose only escape is down the fire-escape, and then only when the alternative is death. At the base of the hill there flows, in constant hubbub, a great up-and-down artery of street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the baker, and the "every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar corporation". Housewives with perambulators and oil-cloth shopping bags. Children on rollerskates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of every city block where the homes remain unbearded all summer and every wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak and mess of rutabaga.

Then there is the soap-box provender, too, sure of a crowd, offering creed, propaganda, patent medicine, and politics. It is the pulpit of the reformer and the housetop of the fanatic, this soapbox. From it the voice to the city is often a pious one, an impious one, and almost always a raucous one. Luther and Sophocles, and even a Citizen of Nazareth made of the four winds of the street corner the walls of a temple of wisdom. What more fitting acropolis for freedom of speech than the great out-of-doors!

Turning from the incline of cross-street into this petty Baghdad of the petty wise, the voice of the street corner lifted itself above the inarticulate din of the thoroughfare. A youth, thewed like an ox, surmounted on a stack of three self provided canned-goods boxes, his in-at-the-waist silhouette thrown out against a sky that was almost ready to break out in stars; a crowd tightening about him.

"It's a soldier boy talkin', Gert."

"If it ain't!" They tiptoed at the fringe of the circle, heads back.

"Look, Gert, he's a lieutenant; he's got a shoulder-bar. And those four down there holding the flags are just privates. You can always tell a lieutenant by the bar."

"Uh-huh."

"Say, them boys do stack up some for Uncle Sam."

"'Shh-h-h, Jimmie!"

"I'm here to tell you that them boys stack up some."

A banner stiffened out in the breeze, Mr. Batch reading: "Enlist before you are drafted. Last chance to beat the draft. Prove your patriotism. Enlist now! Your country calls!"

"Come on," said Mr. Batch.

"Wait. I want to hear what he's saying."

"... there's not a man here before me can afford to shirk his duty to his country. The slacker can't get along without his country, but his country can very easily get along without him."

Cheers.

"The poor exemption boobs are already running for doctors' certificates and marriage licenses, but even if they get by with it--and it is ninety-nine to one they won't--they can't run away from their own degradation and shame."

"Come on, Jimmie."

"Wait."

"Men of America, for every one of you who tries to dodge his duty to his country there is a yellow streak somewhere underneath the hide of you. Women of America, every one of you that helps to foster the spirit of cowardice in your particular man or men is helping to make a coward. It's the cowards and the quitters and the slackers and dodgers that need this war more than the patriotic ones who are willing to buckle on and go!

"Don't be a buttonhole patriot! A government that is good enough to live under is good enough to fight under!"

Cheers.

"If there is any reason on earth has manifested itself for this devastating and terrible war it is that it has been a maker of men.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am back from four months in the trenches with the French army, and I've come home, now that my own country is at war, to give her every ounce of energy I've got to offer. As soon as a hole in my side is healed up. I'm going back to those trenches, and I want to say to you that them four months of mine face to face with life and with death have done more for me than all my twenty-four civilian years put together."

Cheers.

"I'll be a different man, if I live to come back home after this war and take up my work again as a draftsman. Why, I've seen weaklings and self-confessed failures and even ninnies go into them trenches and come out--oh yes, plenty of them do come out--men. Men that have got close enough down to the facts of things to feel new realizations of what life means come over them. Men that have gotten back their pep, their ambitions, their unselfishness. That's what war can do for your men, you women who are helping them to foster the spirit of holding back, of cheating their government. That's what war can do for your men. Make of them the kind of men who some day can face their children without having to hang their heads. Men who can answer for their part in making the world a safe place for democracy."

An hour they stood there, the air quieting but chilling, and lavishly sown stars cropping out. Street lights had come out, too, throwing up in ever darker relief the figure above the heads of the crowd. His voice had coarsened and taken on a raw edge, but every gesture was flung from the socket, and from where they had forced themselves into the tight circle Gertie Slayback, her mouth fallen open and her head still back, could see the sinews of him ripple under khaki and the diaphragm lift for voice.

There was a shift of speakers then, this time a private, still too rangy, but his looseness of frame seeming already to conform to the exigency of uniform.

"Come on, Jimmie. I--I'm cold."

They worked out into the freedom of the sidewalk, and for ten minutes, down blocks of petty shops already lighted, walked in a silence that grew apace.

He was suddenly conscious that she was crying, quietly, her handkerchief wadded against her mouth. He strode on with a scowl and his head bent. "Let's sit down in this little park, Jimmie. I'm tired."

They rested on a bench on one of those small triangles of breathing space which the city ekes out now and then; mill ends of land parcels.

He took immediately to roving the toe of his shoe in and out among the gravel. She stole out her hand to his arm.

"Well, Jimmie?" Her voice was in the gauze of a whisper that hardly left her throat.

"Well, what?" he said, still toeing.

"There--there's a lot of things we never thought about, Jimmie."

"Aw!"

"Eh, Jimmie?"

"You mean _you_ never thought about it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I know what I mean alrighty."

"I--I was the one that suggested it, Jimmie, but--but you fell in. I--I just couldn't bear to think of it, Jimmie--your going and all. I suggested it, but--but you fell in."

"Say, when a fellow's shoved he falls. I never gave a thought to sneaking an exemption until it was put in my head. I'd smash the fellow in the face that calls me coward, I will."

"You could have knocked me down with a feather, Jimmie, looking at it his way all of a sudden."

"You couldn't knock me down. Don't think I was ever strong enough for the whole business. I mean the exemption part. I wasn't going to say anything. What's the use, seeing the way you had your heart set on--on things? But the whole business, if you want to know it, went against my grain. I'll smash the fellow in the face that calls me coward."

"I know, Jimmie; you--you're right. It was me suggested hurrying things like this. Sneakin'! Oh, God! ain't I the messer-up!"