Chapter 7

"You ain't mad at mama, baby? It's for your own good as much as mine. It is unnatural a mother should want to see her--"

"No, no, mama. Move, dearie. Let me pull down the bed. There you are. Now!"

With a wrench Mrs. Kaufman threw off her recurring inclination to tears, moving casually through the processes of their retirement.

"To-morrow, baby, I tighten the buttons on them new spats. How pretty they look."

"Yes, dearie."

"I told Mrs. Katz to-day right out her Irving can't bring any more his bicycle through my front hall. Wasn't I right?"

"Of course you were, ma."

"Miss Flora looked right nice in that pink waist to-night--not? Four-eighty-nine only, at Gimp's sale."

"She's too fat for pink."

"You get in bed first, baby, and let mama turn out the lights."

"No, no, mama; you."

In her white slip of a nightdress, her coronet braids unwound and falling down each shoulder, even her slightness had waned. She was like Juliet who at fourteen had eyes of maid and martyr.

They crept into bed, grateful for darkness.

The flute had died out, leaving a silence that was plaintive.

"You all right, baby?"

"Yes, ma." And she snuggled down into the curve of her mother's arm. "Are you, mommy?"

"Yes, baby."

"Go to sleep, then."

"Good night, baby."

"Good night, mommy."

Silence.

Lying there, with her face upturned and her eyes closed, a stream of quiet tears found their way from under Miss Kaufman's closed lids, running down and toward her ears like spectacle frames.

An hour ticked past, and two damp pools had formed on her pillow.

"Asleep yet, baby?"

"Almost, ma."

"Are you all right?"

"Fine."

"You--you ain't mad at mama?"

"'Course not, dearie."

"I--thought it sounded like you was crying."

"Why, mommy, 'course not! Turn over now and go to sleep."

Another hour, and suddenly Mrs. Kaufman shot out her arm from the coverlet, jerking back the sheet and feeling for her daughter's dewy, upturned face where the tears were slashing down it.

"Baby!"

"Mommy, you--you mustn't!"

"Oh, my darling, like I didn't suspicion it!"

"It's only--"

"You got, Ruby, the meanest mama in the world. But you think, darling, I got one minute's happiness like this?"

"I'm all right, mommy, only--"

"I been laying here half the night, Ruby, thinking how I'm a bad mother what thinks only of her own--"

"No, no, mommy. Turn over and go to sl--"

"My daughter falls in love with a fine, upright young man like Leo Markovitch, and I ain't satisfied yet! Suppose maybe for two or three years you ain't so much on your feet. Suppose even his uncle Meyer don't take him in. Don't any young man got to get his start slow?"

"Mommy!"

"Because I got for her my own ideas, my daughter shouldn't have in life the man she wants!"

"But, mommy, if--"

"You think for one minute, Ruby, after all these years without this house on my hands and my boarders and their kicks, a woman like me would be satisfied? Why, the more, baby, I think of such a thing, the more I see it for myself! What you think, Ruby, I do all day without steps to run, and my gedinks with housekeeping and marketing after eighteen years of it? At first, Ruby, ain't it natural it should come like a shock that you and that rascal Leo got all of a sudden so--so thick? I--It ain't no more, baby. I--I feel fine about it."

"Oh, mommy, if--if I thought you did!"

"I do. Why not? A fine young man what my girl is in love with. Every mother should have it so."

"Mommy, you mean it?"

"I tell you I feel fine. You don't need to feel bad or cry another minute. I can tell you I feel happy. To-morrow at Atlantic City if such a rascal don't tell me for himself, I--I ask him right out!"

"Ma!"

"For why yet he should wait till he's got better prospects, so his mother-in-law can hang on? I guess not!"

"Mommy darling. If you only truly feel like that about it. Why, you can keep putting off the lease, ma, if it's only for six months, and then we--we'll all be to--"

"Of course, baby. Mama knows. Of course!"

"He--I just can't begin to tell you, ma, the kind of a fellow Leo is till you know him better, mommy dear."

"Always Vetsburg says he's a wide-awake one!"

"That's just what he is, ma. He's just a prince if--if there ever was one. One little prince of a fellow." She fell to crying softly, easy tears that flowed freely.

"I--I can tell you, baby, I'm happy as you."

"Mommy dear, kiss me."

They talked, huddled arm in arm, until dawn flowed in at the window and dirty roofs began to show against a clean sky. Footsteps began to clatter through the asphalt court and there came the rattle of milk-cans.

"I wonder if Annie left out the note for Mrs. Suss's extra milk!"

"Don't get up, dearie; it's only five--"

"Right away, baby, with extra towels I must run up to Miss Flora's room. That six o'clock-train for Trenton she gets."

"Ma dear, let me go."

"Lay right where you are! I guess you want you should look all worn out when a certain young man what I know walks down to meet our train at Atlantic City this afternoon, eh?"

"Oh, mommy, mommy!" And Ruby lay back against the luxury of pillows.

At eleven the morning rose to its climax--the butcher, the baker, and every sort of maker hustling in and out the basementway; the sweeping of upstairs halls; windows flung open and lace curtains looped high; the smell of spring pouring in even from asphalt; sounds of scrubbing from various stoops; shouts of drivers from a narrow street wedged with its Saturday-morning blockade of delivery wagons, and a crosstown line of motor-cars, tops back and nosing for the speedway of upper Broadway. A homely bouquet of odors rose from the basement kitchen, drifting up through the halls, the smell of mutton bubbling as it stewed.

After a morning of up-stairs and down-stairs and in and out of chambers, Mrs. Kaufman, enveloped in a long-sleeved apron still angular with starch, hung up the telephone receiver in the hall just beneath the staircase and entered her bedroom, sitting down rather heavily beside the open shelf of her desk. A long envelope lay uppermost on that desk, and she took it up slowly, blinking her eyes shut and holding them squeezed tight as if she would press back a vision, even then a tear oozing through. She blinked it back, but her mouth was wry with the taste of tears.

A slatternly maid poked her head in through the open door. "Mrs. Katz broke 'er mug!"

"Take the one off Mr. Krakow's wash-stand and give it to her, Tillie."

She was crying now frankly, and when the door swung closed, even though it swung back again on its insufficient hinge, she let her head fall forward into the pillow of her arms, the curve of her back rising and falling.

But after a while the greengrocer came on his monthly mission, in his white apron and shirt-sleeves, and she compared stubs with him from a file on her desk and balanced her account with careful squinted glance and a keen eye for an overcharge on a cut of breakfast bacon.

On the very heels of him, so that they met and danced to pass each other in the doorway, Mr. Vetsburg entered, with an overcoat flung across his right arm and his left sagging to a small black traveling-bag.

"Well," he said, standing in the frame of the open door, his derby well back on his head and regarding her there beside the small desk, "is this what you call ready at twelve?"

She rose and moved forward in her crackly starched apron. "I--Please, Mr. Vetsburg, it ain't right, I know!"

"You don't mean you're not going!" he exclaimed, the lifted quality immediately dropping from his voice.

"You--you got to excuse me again, Mr. Vetsburg. It ain't no use I should try to get away on Saturdays, much less Easter Saturday."

"Well, of all things!"

"Right away, the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, right one things after another."

He let his bag slip to the floor.

"Maybe, Mrs. Kaufman," he said, "it ain't none of my business, but ain't it a shame a good business woman like you should let herself always be tied down to such a house like she was married to it?"

"But--"

"Can't get away on Saturdays, just like it ain't the same any other day in the week, I ask you! Saturday you blame it on yet!"

She lifted the apron from her hem, her voice hurrying. "You can see for yourself, Mr. Vetsburg, how in my brown silk all ready I was. Even--even Ruby don't know yet I don't go. Down by Gimp's I sent her she should buy herself one of them red straw hats is the fad with the girls now. She meets us down by the station."

"That's a fine come-off, ain't it, to disappoint--"

"At the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, how things can happen. Out of a clear sky Mrs. Finshriber has to-morrow for Easter dinner that skin doctor, Abrams, and his wife she's so particular about. And Annie with her sore ankle and--"

"A little shyster doctor like Abrams with his advertisements all over the newspapers should sponge off you and your holiday! By golly! Mrs. Kaufman, just like Ruby says, how you let a whole houseful of old hens rule this roost it's a shame!"

"When you go down to station, Mr. Vetsburg, so right away she ain't so disappointed I don't come, tell her maybe to-morrow I--."

"I don't tell her nothing!" broke in Mr. Vetsburg and moved toward her with considerable strengthening of tone. "Mrs. Kaufman, I ask you, do you think it right you should go back like this on Ruby and me, just when we want most you should--"

At that she quickened and fluttered. "Ruby and you! Ach, it's a old saying, Mr. Vetsburg, like the twig is bent so the tree grows. That child won't be so surprised her mother changes her mind. Just so changeable as her mother, and more, is Ruby herself. With that girl, Mr. Vetsburg, it's--it's hard to know what she does one minute from the next. I always say no man--nobody can ever count on a little harum-scarum like--like she is."

He took up her hat, a small turban of breast feathers, laid out on the table beside him, and advanced with it clumsily enough. "Come," he said, "please now, Mrs. Kaufman. Please."

"I--"

"I--I got plans made for us to-morrow down by the shore that's--that's just fine! Come now, Mrs. Kaufman."

"Please, Mr. Vetsburg, don't force. I--I can't! I always say nobody can ever count on such a little harum-scarum as--"

"You mean to tell me, Mrs. Kaufman, that just because a little shyster doctor--"

Her hand closed over the long envelope again, crunching it. "No, no, that--that ain't all, Mr. Vetsburg. Only I don't want you should tell Ruby. You promise me? How that child worries over little things. Shulif from the agency called up just now. He don't give me one more minute as two this afternoon I--I should sign. How I been putting them off so many weeks with this lease it's a shame. Always you know how in the back of my head I've had it to take maybe a smaller place when this lease was done, but, like I say, talk is cheap and moving ain't so easy done--ain't it? If he puts in new plumbing in the pantry and new hinges on the doors and papers my second floor and Mrs. Suss's alcove, like I said last night, after all I could do worse as stay here another five year--ain't it, Mr. Vetsburg?"

"I--"

"A house what keeps filled so easy, and such a location, with the Subway less as two blocks. I--So you see, Mr. Vetsburg, if I don't want I come back and find my house on the market, maybe rented over my head, I got to stay home for Shulif when he comes to-day."

A rush of dark blood had surged up into Mr. Vetsburg's face, and he twiddled his hat, his dry fingers moving around inside the brim.

"Mrs. Kaufman," he cried--"Mrs. Kaufman, sometimes when for years a man don't speak out his mind, sometimes he busts all of a sudden right out. I--Oh--e-e-e!" and, immediately and thickly inarticulate, made a tremendous feint at clearing his throat, tossed up his hat and caught it; rolled his eyes.

"Mr. Vetsburg?"

"A man, Mrs. Kaufman, can bust!"

"Bust?"

He was still violently dark, but swallowing with less labor. "Yes, from holding in. Mrs. Kaufman, should a woman like you--the finest woman in the world, and I can prove it--a woman, Mrs. Kaufman, who in her heart and my heart and--Should such a woman not come to Atlantic City when I got everything fixed like a stage set!"

She threw out an arm that was visibly trembling. "Mr. Vetsburg, for God's sake, 'ain't I just told you how that she--harum-scarum--she--."

"Will you, Mrs. Kaufman, come or won't you? Will you, I ask you, or won't you?"

"I--I can't, Mr.--"

"All right, then, I--I bust out now. To-day can be as good as to-morrow! Not with my say in a t'ousand years, Mrs. Kaufman, you sign that lease! I ain't a young man any more with fine speeches, Mrs. Kaufman, but not in a t'ousand years you sign that lease."

"Mr. Vetsburg, Ruby--I--"

"If anybody's got a lease on you, Mrs. Kaufman, I--I want it! I want it! That's the kind of a lease would suit me. To be leased to you for always, the rest of your life!"

She could not follow him down the vista of fancy, but stood interrogating him with her heartbeats at her throat. "Mr. Vetsburg, if he puts on the doors and hinges and new plumbing in--."

"I'm a plain man, Mrs. Kaufman, without much to offer a woman what can give out her heart's blood like it was so much water. But all these years I been waiting, Mrs. Kaufman, to bust out, until--till things got riper. I know with a woman like you, whose own happiness always is last, that first your girl must be fixed--."

"She's a young girl, Mr. Vetsburg. You--you mustn't depend--. If I had my say--."

"He's a fine fellow, Mrs. Kaufman. With his uncle to help 'em, they got, let me tell you, a better start as most young ones!"

She rose, holding on to the desk.

"I--I--" she said. "What?"

"Lena," he uttered, very softly.

"Lena, Mr. Vetsburg?"

"It 'ain't been easy, Lenie, these years while she was only growing up, to keep off my lips that name. A name just like a leaf off a rose. Lena!" he reiterated and advanced.

Comprehension came quietly and dawning like a morning.

"I--I--. Mr. Vetsburg, you must excuse me," she said, and sat down suddenly.

He crossed to the little desk and bent low over her chair, his hand not on her shoulder, but at the knob of her chair. His voice had a swift rehearsed quality.

"Maybe to-morrow, if you didn't back out, it would sound finer by the ocean, Lenie, but it don't need the ocean a man should tell a woman when she's the first and the finest woman in the world. Does it, Lenie?"

"I--I thought Ruby. She--"

"He's a good boy, Leo is, Lenie. A good boy what can be good to a woman like his father before him. Good enough even for a fine girl like our Ruby, Lenie--_our_ Ruby!"

"_Gott im Himmel_! then you--"

"Wide awake, too. With a start like I can give him in my business, you 'ain't got to worry Ruby 'ain't fixed herself with the man what she chooses. To-morrow at Atlantic City all fixed I had it I should tell--"

"You!" she said, turning around in her chair to face him. "You--all along you been fixing--"

He turned sheepish. "Ain't it fair, Lenie, in love and war and business a man has got to scheme for what he wants out of life? Long enough it took she should grow up. I knew all along once those two, each so full of life and being young, got together it was natural what should happen. Mrs. Kaufman! Lenie! Lenie!"

Prom two flights up, in through the open door and well above the harsh sound of scrubbing, a voice curled down through the hallways and in. "Mrs. Kaufman, ice-water--ple-ase!"

"Lenie," he said, his singing, tingling fingers closing over her wrist.

"Mrs. Kauf-man, ice-water, pl--"

With her free arm she reached and slammed the door, let her cheek lie to the back of his hand, and closed her eyes.

IV

HERS _NOT_ TO REASON WHY

In the third winter of a world-madness, with Europe guzzling blood and wild with the taste of it, America grew flatulent, stenching winds from the battle-field blowing her prosperity.

Granaries filled to bursting tripled in value, and, in congested districts, men with lean faces rioted when bread advanced a cent a loaf. Munition factories, the fires of destruction smelting all night, worked three shifts. Millions of shells for millions of dollars. Millions of lives for millions of shells. A country feeding into the insatiable maw of war with one hand, and with the other pouring relief-funds into coffers bombarded by guns of its own manufacture--quelling the wound with a finger and widening it with a knife up the cuff.

In France, women with blue faces and too often with the pulling lips of babes at dry breasts, learned the bitter tasks of sewing closed the coat sleeves and of cutting off and hemming the trousers leg at the knee.

In America, women new to the feel of fur learned to love it and not question whence it came. Men of small affairs, suddenly earthquaked to the crest of the great tidal wave of new market-values, went drunk with wealth.

In New York, where so many great forces of a great country coagulate, the face of the city photographed would have been a composite of fat and jowl, rouge and heavy lip--satiated yet insatiate, the head double-chinned and even a little loggy with too many satisfactions.

But that is the New York of the Saturnite and of Teufelsdröckh alone with his stars.

Upon Mrs. Blutch Connors, gazing out upon the tide of West Forty-seventh Street, life lay lightly and as unrelated as if ravage and carnage and the smell of still warm blood were of another planet.

A shower of white light from an incandescent tooth-brush sign opposite threw a pallid reflection upon Mrs. Connors; it spun the fuzz of frizz rising off her blond coiffure into a sort of golden fog and picked out the sequins of her bodice.

The dinner-hour descends glitteringly upon West Forty-seventh Street, its solid rows of long, lanky hotels, actors' clubs, and sixty-cent _tables d'hôte_ adding each its candle-power.

From her brace of windows in the Hotel Metropolis, the street was not unlike a gully cut through mica, a honking tributary flowing into the great sea of Broadway. A low, high-power car, shaped like an ellipse, cut through the snarl of traffic, bleating. A woman, wrapped in a greatcoat of "baby" pelts and an almost undistinguishable dog in the cove of her arm, walked out from the Hotel Metropolis across the sidewalk and into a taxicab. An army of derby hats, lowered slightly into the wind, moved through the white kind of darkness. Standing there, buffeting her pink nails across her pink palms, Mrs. Connors followed the westward trend of that army. Out from it, a face lying suddenly back flashed up at her, a mere petal riding a swift current. But at sight of it Mrs. Blutch Connors inclined her entire body, pressing a smile and a hand against the cold pane, then turned inward, flashing on an electrolier--a bronze Nydia holding out a cluster of frosted bulbs. A great deal of the strong breath of a popular perfume and a great deal of artificial heat lay sweet upon that room, as if many flowers had lived and died in the same air, leaving insidious but slightly stale memories.

The hotel suite has become the brocaded tomb of the old-fashioned garden. The kitchen has shrunk into the chafing-dish, and all the dear old concoctions that mother used to try to make now come tinned, condensed, and predigested in sixty-seven varieties. Even the vine-covered threshold survives only in the booklets of promoters of suburban real estate. In New York, the home-coming spouse arrives on the vertical, shunted out at whatever his layer. Yet, when Mrs. Connors opened the door of her pink-brocaded sitting-room, her spirit rose with the soughing rise of the elevator, and Romance--hardy fellow--showed himself within a murky hotel corridor.

"Honeybunch!"

"Babe!" said Mr. Blutch Connors, upon the slam of the lift door.

And there, in the dim-lit halls, with its rows of closed doors in blank-faced witness thereof, they embraced, these two, despising, as Flaubert despised, to live in the reality of things.

"My boy's beau-ful cheeks all cold!"

"My girl's beau-ful cheeks all warm and full of some danged good cologne," said Mr. Connors, closing the door of their rooms upon them, pressing her head back against the support of his arm, and kissing her throat as the chin flew up.

He pressed a button, and the room sprang into more light, coming out pinkly and vividly--the brocaded walls pliant to touch with every so often a gilt-framed engraving; a gilt table with an onyx top cheerfully cluttered with the sauciest short-story magazines of the month; a white mantelpiece with an artificial hearth and a pink-and-gilt _chaise-longue_ piled high with small, lacy pillows, and a very green magazine open and face downward on the floor beside it.

"Comin' better, honeybunch?"

"I dunno, Babe. The town's mad with money, but I don't feel myself going crazy with any of it."

"What ud you bring us, honey?"

He slid out of his silk-lined greatcoat, placing his brown derby atop.

"Three guesses, Babe," he said, rubbing his cold hands in a dry wash, and smiling from five feet eleven of sartorial accomplishment down upon her.

"Honey darlin'!" said Mrs. Connors, standing erect and placing her cheek against the third button of his waistcoat.

"Wow! how I love the woman!" he cried, closing his hands softly about her throat and tilting her head backward again.

"Darlin', you hurt!"

"Br-r-r--can't help it!"

When Mr. Connors moved, he gave off the scent of pomade freely; his slightly thinning brown hair and the pointy tips to a reddish mustache lay sleek with it. There was the merest suggestion of _embonpoint_ to the waistcoat, but not so that, when he dropped his eyes, the blunt toes of his russet shoes were not in evidence. His pin-checked suit was pressed to a knife-edge, and his brocaded cravat folded to a nicety; there was an air of complete well-being about him. Men can acquire that sort of eupeptic well-being in a Turkish bath. Young mothers and life-jobbers have it naturally.

Suddenly, Mrs. Connors began to foray into his pockets, plunging her hand into the right, the left, then stopped suddenly, her little face flashing up at him.

"It's round and furry--my honeybunch brought me a peach! Beau-ful pink peach in December! Nine million dollars my hubby pays to bring him wifey a beau-ful pink peach." She drew it out--a slightly runty one with a forced blush--and bit small white teeth immediately into it.

"M-m-m!"--sitting on the _chaise-longue_ and sucking inward. He sat down beside her, a shade graver.

"Is my babe disappointed I didn't dig her coat and earrings out of hock?"

She lay against him.

"I should worry!"

"There just ain't no squeal in my girl."

"Wanna bite?"

"Any one of 'em but you would be hollering for their junk out of pawn. But, Lord, the way she rigs herself up without it! Where'd you dig up the spangles, Babe? Gad! I gotta take you out to-night and buy you the right kind of a dinner. When I walks my girl into a café, they sit up and take notice, all righty. Spangles she rigs herself up in when another girl, with the way my luck's been runnin', would be down to her shimmy-tail."

She stroked his sleeve as if it had the quality of fur.

"Is the rabbit's foot still kicking my boy?"

"Never seen the like, honey. The cards just won't come. This afternoon I even played the wheel over at Chuck's, and she spun me dirt."

"It's gotta turn, Blutch."

"Sure!"

"Remember the run of rotten luck you had that year in Cincinnati, when the ponies was runnin' at Latonia?"

"Yeh."

"Lost your shirt, hon, and the first day back in New York laid a hundred on the wheel and won me my seal coat. You--we--We couldn't be no lower than that time we got back from Latonia, hon?"

He laid his hand over hers.

"Come on, Babe. Joe'll be here directly, and then we're going and blow them spangles to a supper."

"Blutch, answer!"