Chapter 3

"Lay easy, girl. I'm going to see it through. I guess there's been fellows before me and will be after me who have done worse. I'm going to see it through. All I got to say is I'll smash up the fellow calls me coward. Come on, forget it. Let's go."

She was close to him, her cheek crinkled against his with the frank kind of social unconsciousness the park bench seems to engender.

"Come on, Gert. I got a hunger on."

'"Shh-h-h, Jimmie! Let me think. I'm thinking."

"Too much thinking killed a cat. Come on."

"Jimmie!"

"Huh?"

"Jimmie--would you--had you ever thought about being a soldier?"

"Sure. I came in an ace of going into the army that time after--after that little Central Street trouble of mine. I've got a book in my trunk this minute on military tactics. Wouldn't surprise me a bit to see me land in the army some day."

"It's a fine thing, Jimmie, for a fellow--the army."

"Yeh, good for what ails him."

She drew him back, pulling at his shoulder so that finally he faced her. "Jimmie!"

"Huh?"

"I got an idea."

"Shoot."

"You remember once, honey-bee, how I put it to you that night at Ceiner's how, if it was for your good, no sacrifice was too much to make."

"Forget it."

"You didn't believe it."

"Aw, say now, what's the use digging up ancient history?"

"You'd be right, Jimmie, not to believe it. I haven't lived up to what I said."

"Oh Lord, honey! What's eating you now? Come to the point."

She would not meet his eyes, turning her head from him to hide lips that would quiver. "Honey, it--it ain't coming off--that's all. Not now--anyways."

"What ain't?"

"Us."

"Who?"

"You know what I mean, Jimmie. It's like everything the soldier boy on the corner just said. I--I saw you getting red clear behind your ears over it. I--I was, too, Jimmie. It's like that soldier boy was put there on that corner just to show me, before it was too late, how wrong I been in every one of my ways. Us women who are helping to foster slackers. That's what we're making of them--slackers for life. And here I been thinking it was your good I had in mind, when all along it's been mine. That's what it's been, mine!"

"Aw, now, Gert--"

"You got to go, Jimmie. You got to go, because you want to go and--because I want you to go."

"Where?"

"To war."

He took hold of her two arms because they were trembling. "Aw, now, Gert, I didn't say anything complaining. I--"

"You did, Jimmie, you did, and--and I never was so glad over you that you did complain. I just never was so glad. I want you to go, Jimmie. I want you to go and get a man made out of you. They'll make a better job out of you than ever I can. I want you to get the yellow streak washed out. I want you to get to be all the things he said you would. For every line he was talking up there, I could see my boy coming home to me some day better than anything I could make out of him, babying him the way I can't help doing. I could see you, honey-bee, coming back to me with the kind of lift to your head a fellow has when he's been fighting to make the world a safe place for dem--for whatever it was he said. I want you to go, Jimmie. I want you to beat the draft, too. Nothing on earth can make me not want you to go."

"Why, Gert--you're kiddin'!"

"Honey, you want to go, don't you? You want to square up those shoulders and put on khaki, don't you? Tell me you want to go!"

"Why--why, yes, Gert, if--"

"Oh, you're going, Jimmie! You're going!"

"Why, girl--you're crazy! Our flat! Our furniture--our--"

"What's a flat? What's furniture? What's anything? There's not a firm in business wouldn't take back a boy's furniture--a boy's everything--that's going out to fight for--for dem-o-cracy! What's a flat? What's anything?"

He let drop his head to hide his eyes.

Do you know it is said that on the Desert of Sahara, the slope of Sorrento, and the marble of Fifth Avenue the sun can shine whitest? There is an iridescence to its glittering on bleached sand, blue bay, and Carrara façade that is sheer light distilled to its utmost.

On one such day when, standing on the high slope of Fifth Avenue where it rises toward the Park, and looking down on it, surging to and fro, it was as if, so manifest the brilliancy, every head wore a tin helmet, parrying sunlight at a thousand angles of refraction.

Parade-days, all this glittering midstream is swept to the clean sheen of a strip of moire, this splendid desolation blocked on each side by crowds half the density of the sidewalk.

On one of these sun-drenched Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire of war.

There is no state of being so finely sensitized as national consciousness. A gauntlet down and it surges up. One ripple of a flag defended can goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it is to give a soldier!

To the seething kinetic chemistry of such mingling emotions there were women who stood in the frontal crowds of the sidewalks stifling hysteria, or ran after in terror at sight of one so personally hers, receding in that great impersonal wave of olive drab.

And yet the air was martial with banner and with shout. And the ecstasy of such moments is like a dam against reality, pressing it back. It is in the pompless watches of the night or of too long days that such dams break, excoriating.

For the thirty blocks of its course Gertie Slayback followed that wave of men, half run and half walk. Down from the curb, and at the beck and call of this or that policeman up again, only to find opportunity for still another dive out from the invisible roping off of the sidewalk crowds.

From the middle of his line, she could see, sometimes, the tail of Jimmie Batch's glance roving for her, but to all purports his eye was solely for his own replica in front of him, and at such times, when he marched, his back had a little additional straightness that was almost swayback.

Nor was Gertie Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance over which she seemed to have no control.

"'By, Jimmie! So long! Jimmie! You-hoo!"

Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.

"You-hoo! Jimmie! So long, Jimmie!"

At Fourteenth Street, and to the solemn stroke of one from a tower, she broke off suddenly without even a second look back, dodging under the very arms of the crowd as she ran out from it.

She was one and three-quarter minutes late when she punched the time-clock beside the Complaints and Adjustment Desk in the Bargain-Basement.

II

SIEVE OF FULFILMENT

How constant a stream is the runnel of men's small affairs!

Dynasties may totter and half the world bleed to death, but one or the other corner _pâtisserie_ goes on forever.

At a moment when the shadow of world-war was over the country like a pair of black wings lowering Mrs. Harry Ross, who swooned at the sight of blood from a penknife scratch down the hand of her son, but yawned over the head-line statistics of the casualties at Verdun, lifted a lid from a pot that exuded immediate savory fumes, prodded with a fork at its content, her concern boiled down to deal solely with stew.

An alarm-clock on a small shelf edged in scalloped white oilcloth ticked with spick-and-span precision into a kitchen so correspondingly spick and span that even its silence smelled scoured, rows of tins shining into it. A dun-colored kind of dusk, soot floating in it, began to filter down the air-shaft, dimming them.

Mrs. Ross lowered the shade and lighted the gas-jet. So short that in the long run she wormed first through a crowd, she was full of the genial curves that, though they bespoke three lumps in her coffee in an elevator and escalator age, had not yet reached uncongenial proportions. In fact, now, brushing with her bare forearm across her moistly pink face, she was like Flora, who, rather than fade, became buxom.

A door slammed in an outer hall, as she was still stirring and looking down into the stew.

"Edwin!"

"Yes, mother."

"Don't track through the parlor."

"Aw!"

"You hear me?"

"I yain't! Gee, can't a feller walk?"

"Put your books on the hat-rack."

"I am."

She supped up bird-like from the tip of her spoon, smacking for flavor.

"I made you an asafetida-bag, Edwin, it's in your drawer. Don't you leave this house to-morrow without it on."

"Aw-w-w-w-w!"

"It don't smell."

"Where's my stamp-book?"

"On your table, where it belongs."

"Gee whiz! if you got my Argentine stamps mixed!"

"Get washed."

"Where's my batteries?"

"Under your bed, where they belong."

"I'm hungry."

"Your father'll be home any minute now. Don't spoil your appetite."

"I got ninety in manual training, mother."

"Did yuh, Edwin?"

"All the other fellows only got seventy and eighty."

"Mamma's boy leads 'em."

He entered at that, submitting to a kiss upon an averted cheek.

"See what mother's fixed for you!"

"M-m-m-m! fritters!"

"Don't touch!"

"M-m-m-m--lamb stew!"

"I shopped all morning to get okra to go in it for your father."

"M-m-m-m-m!"

She tiptoed up to kiss him again, this time at the back of the neck, carefully averting her floury hands.

"Mamma's boy! I made you three pen-wipers to-day out of the old red table-cover."

"Aw, fellers don't use pen-wipers!"

He set up a jiggling, his great feet coming down with a clatter.

"Stop!"

"Can't I jig?"

"No; not with neighbors underneath."

He flopped down, hooking his heels in the chair-rung.

At sixteen's stage of cruel hazing into man's estate Edwin Ross, whose voice, all in a breath, could slip up from the quality of rock in the drilling to the more brittle octave of early-morning milk-bottles, wore a nine shoe and a thirteen collar. His first long trousers were let down and taken in. His second taken up and let out. When shaving promised to become a manly accomplishment, his complexion suddenly clouded, postponing that event until long after it had become a hirsute necessity. When he smiled apoplectically above his first waistcoat and detachable collar, his Adam's apple and his mother's heart fluttered.

"Blow-cat Dennis is going to City College."

"Who's he?"

"A feller."

"Quit crackin' your knuckles."

"He only got seventy in manual training."

"Tell them things to your father, Edwin; I 'ain't got the say-so."

"His father's only a bookkeeper, too, and they live 'way up on a Hundred and Forty-fourth near Third."

"I'm willing to scrimp and save for it, Edwin; but in the end I haven't got the say-so, and you know it."

"The boys that are going to college got to register now for the High School College Society."

"Your father, Edwin, is the one to tell that to."

"Other fellers' mothers put in a word for 'em."

"I do, Edwin; you know I do! It only aggravates him--There's papa now, Edwin, coming in. Help mamma dish up. Put this soup at papa's place and this at yours. There's only two plates left from last night."

In Mrs. Ross's dining-room, a red-glass dome, swung by a chain over the round table, illuminated its white napery and decently flowered china. Beside the window looking out upon a gray-brick wall almost within reach, a canary with a white-fluted curtain about the cage dozed headless. Beside that window, covered in flowered chintz, a sewing-machine that could collapse to a table; a golden-oak sideboard laid out in pressed glassware. A homely simplicity here saved by chance or chintz from the simply homely.

Mr. Harry Ross drew up immediately beside the spread table, jerking open his newspaper and, head thrown back, read slantingly down at the head-lines.

"Hello, pop!"

"Hello, son!"

"Watch out!"

"Hah--that's the stuff! Don't spill!"

He jammed the newspaper between his and the chair back, shoving in closer to the table. He was blond to ashiness, so that the slicked-back hair might or might not be graying. Pink-shaved, unlined, nose-glasses polished to sparkle, he was ten years his wife's senior and looked those ten years younger. Clerks and clergymen somehow maintain that youth of the flesh, as if life had preserved them in alcohol or shaving-lotion. Mrs. Ross entered then in her crisp but faded house dress, her round, intent face still moistly pink, two steaming dishes held out.

He did not rise, but reached up to kiss her as she passed.

"Burnt your soup a little to-night, mother."

She sat down opposite, breathing deeply outward, spreading her napkin out across her lap.

"It was Edwin coming in from school and getting me worked up with his talk about--about--"

"What?"

"Nothing. Edwin, run out and bring papa the paprika to take the burnt taste out. I turned all the cuffs on your shirts to-day, Harry."

"Lordy! if you ain't fixing at one thing, you're fixing another."

"Anything new?"

He was well over his soup now, drinking in long draughts from the tip of his spoon.

"News! In A. E. Unger's office, a man don't get his nose far enough up from the ledger to even smell news."

"I see Goldfinch & Goetz failed."

"Could have told 'em they'd go under, trying to put on a spectacular show written in verse. That same show boiled down to good Forty-second Street lingo with some good shapes and a proposition like Alma Zitelle to lift it from poetry to punch has a world of money in it for somebody. A war spectacular show filled with sure-fire patriotic lines, a bunch of show-girl battalions, and a figure like Alma Zitelle's for the Goddess of Liberty--a world of money, I tell you!"

"Honest, Harry?"

"That trench scene they built for that show is as fine a contrivance as I've ever seen of the kind. What did they do? Set it to a lot of music without a hum or a ankle in it. A few classy nurses like the Mercy Militia Sextet, some live, grand-old-flag tunes by Harry Mordelle, and there's a half a million dollars in that show. Unger thinks I'm crazy when I try to get him interested, but I--"

"I got ninety in manual training to-day, pop."

"That's good, son. Little more of that stew, mother?"

"Unger isn't so smart, honey, he can't afford to take a tip off you once in a while: you've proved that to him."

"Yes, but go tell him so."

"He'll live to see the day he's got to give you credit for being the first to see money in 'Pan-America.'"

"Credit? Huh! to hear him tell it, he was born with that idea in his bullet head."

"I'd like to hear him say it to me, if ever I lay eyes on him, that it wasn't you who begged him to get into it."

"I'll show 'em some day in that office that I can pick the winners for myself, as well as for the other fellow. Believe me, Unger hasn't raised me to fifty a week for my fancy bookkeeping, and he knows it, and, what's more, he knows I know he knows it."

"The fellers that are goin' to college next term have to register for the High School College Society, pop--dollar dues."

"Well, you aren't going to college, and that's where you and I save a hundred cents on the dollar. Little more gravy, mother."

The muscles of Edwin's face relaxed, his mouth dropping to a pout, the crude features quivering.

"Aw, pop, a feller nowadays without a college education don't stand a show."

"He don't, don't he? I know one who will."

Edwin threw a quivering glance to his mother and gulped through a constricted throat.

"Mother says I--I can go if only you--"

"Your mother'd say you could have the moon, too, if she had to climb a greased pole to get it. She'd start weaving door-mats for the Cingalese Hottentots if she thought they needed 'em."

"But, Harry, he--"

"Your mother 'ain't got the bills of this shebang to worry about, and your mother don't mind having a college sissy a-laying around the house to support five years longer. I do."

"It's the free City College, pop."

"You got a better education now than nine boys out of ten. If you ain't man enough to want to get out after four years of high school and hustle for a living, you got to be shown the way out. I started when I was in short pants, and you're no better than your father. Your mother sold notions and axle-grease in an up-State general store up to the day she married. Now cut out the college talk you been springing on me lately. I won't have it--you hear? You're a poor man's son, and the sooner you make up your mind to it the better. Pass the chow-chow, mother."

Nervousness had laid hold of her so that in and out among the dishes her hand trembled.

"You see, Harry, it's the free City College, and--"

"I know that free talk. So was high school free when you talked me into it, but if it ain't one thing it's been another. Cadet uniform, football suit--"

"The child's got talent for invention, Harry; his manual-training teacher told me his air-ship model was--"

"I got ninety in manual training when the other fellers only got seventy."

"I guess you're looking for another case like your father, sitting penniless around the house, tinkering on inventions up to the day he died."

"Pa never had the business push, Harry. You know yourself his churn was ready for the market before the Peerless beat him in on it."

"Well, your son is going to get the business push trained into him. No boy of mine with a poor daddy eats up four years of his life and my salary training to be a college sissy. That's for the rich men's sons. That's for the Clarence Ungers."

"I'll pay it back some day, pop; I--."

"They all say that."

"If it's the money, Harry, maybe I can--"

"If it didn't cost a cent, I wouldn't have it. Now cut it out--you hear? Quick!"

Edwin Ross pushed back from the table, struggling and choking against impending tears. "Well, then, I--I--"

"And no shuffling of feet, neither!"

"He didn't shuffle, Harry; it's just his feet growing so fast he can't manage them."

"Well, just the samey, I--I ain't going into the theayter business. I--I--"

Mr. Ross flung down his napkin, facing him. "You're going where I put you, young man. You're going to get the right kind of a start that I didn't get in the biggest money-making business in the world."

"I won't. I'll get me a job in an aeroplane-factory."

His father's palm came down with a small crash, shivering the china. "By Gad! you take that impudence out of your voice to me or I'll rawhide it out!"

"Harry!"

"Leave the table!"

"Harry, he's only a child--"

"Go to your room!"

His heavy, unformed lips now trembling frankly against the tears he tried so furiously to resist, Edwin charged with lowered head from the room, sobs escaping in raw gutturals.

Mr. Ross came back to his plate, breathing heavily, fist, with a knife upright in it, coming down again on the table, his mouth open, to facilitate labored breathing.

"By Heaven! I'll cowhide that boy to his senses! I've never laid hand on him yet, but he ain't too old. I'll get him down to common sense, if I got to break a rod over him."

Handkerchief against trembling lips, Mrs. Ross looked after the vanished form, eyes brimming.

"Harry, you--you're so rough with him."

"I'll be rougher yet before I'm through."

"He's only a--"

"He's rewarding the way you scrimped to pay his expenses for nonsense clubs and societies by asking you to do it another four years. You're getting your thanks now. College! Well, not if the court knows it--"

"He's got talent, Harry; his teacher says he--"

"So'd your father have talent."

"If pa hadn't lost his eye in the Civil War--"

"I'm going to put my son's talent where I can see a future for it."

"He's ambitious, Harry."

"So'm I--to see my son trained to be something besides a looney inventor like his grandfather before him."

"It's all I want in life, Harry, to see my two boys of you happy."

"It's your woman-ideas I got to blame for this. I want you to stop, Millie, putting rich man's ideas in his head. You hear? I won't stand for it."

"Harry, if--if it's the money, maybe I could manage--"

"Yes--and scrimp and save and scrooge along without a laundress another four years, and do his washing and--"

"I--could fix the money part, Harry--easy."

He regarded her with his jaw dropped in the act of chewing.

"By Gad! where do you plant it?"

"It--it's the way I scrimp, Harry. Another woman would spend it on clothes or--a servant--or matinées. It ain't hard for a home body like me to save, Harry."

He reached across the table for her wrist.

"Poor little soul," he said, "you don't see day-light."

"Let him go, Harry, if--if he wants it. I can manage the money."

His scowl returned, darkening him.

"No. A. E. Unger never seen the inside of a high school, much less a college, and I guess he's made as good a pile as most. I've worked for the butcher and the landlord all my life, and now I ain't going to begin being a slave to my boy. There's been two or three times in my life where, for want of a few dirty dollars to make a right start, I'd be, a rich man to-day. My boy's going to get that right start."

"But, Harry, college will--"

"I seen money in 'Pan-America' long before Unger ever dreamed of producing it. I sicked him onto 'The Official Chaperon' when every manager in town had turned it down. I went down and seen 'em doing 'The White Elephant' in a Yiddish theater and wired Unger out in Chicago to come back and grab it for Broadway. Where's it got me? Nowhere. Because I whiled away the best fifteen years of my life in an up-State burg, and then, when I came down here too late in life, got in the rut of a salaried man. Well, where it 'ain't got me it's going to get my son. I'm missing a chance, to-day that, mark my word, would make me a rich man but for want of a few--"

"Harry, you mean that?"

"My hunch never fails me."

She was leaning across the table, her hands clasping its edge, her small, plump face even pinker.

He threw out his legs beneath the table and sat back, hands deep in pockets, and a toothpick hanging limp from between lips that were sagging.

"Gad! if I had my life to live over again as a salaried man, I'd--I'd hang myself first! The way to start a boy to a million dollars in this business is to start him young in the producing-end of a strong firm."

"You--got faith in this Goldfinch & Goetz failure like you had in 'Pan-America' and 'The Chaperon,' Harry?"

"I said it five years ago and it come to pass. I say it now. For want of a few dirty dollars I'm a poor man till I die."

"How--many dollars, Harry?"

"Don't make me say it, Millie--it makes me sick to my stummick. Three thousand dollars would buy the whole spectacle to save it from the storehouse. I tried Charley Ryan--he wouldn't risk a ten-spot on a failure."

"Harry, I--oh, Harry--"

"Why, mother, what's the matter? You been overworking again, ironing my shirts and collars when they ought to go to the laundry? You--"

"Harry, what would you say if--if I was to tell you something?"

"What is it, mother? You better get Annie in on Mondays. We 'ain't got any more to show without her than with her."

"Harry, we--have!"

"Well, you just had an instance of the thanks you get."

"Harry, what--what would you say if I could let you have nearly all of that three thousand?"

He regarded her above the flare of a match to his cigar-end.

"Huh?"

"If I could let you have twenty-six hundred seventeen dollars and about fifty cents of it?"

He sat well up, the light reflecting in points off his polished glasses.

"Mother, you're joking!"

Her hands were out across the table now, almost reaching his, her face close and screwed under the lights.