Chapter 10

"And what's this next room here, Jerry? Ain't it sweet and quiet-looking! Spare room? Ain't it pretty with them little white curtains? Quit, quit, Jerry! You mustn't--you mustn't."

She broke from his embrace, confusion muddling her movements.

"Is this the--the spare room?"

"It is, now. It used to be the old woman's till I laid down on the mother-in-law game and squealed. Yeh, I used to have a little mother-in-law in our house that was some mother-in-law. Believe me, she makes that old devil of yourn look like a prize angel."

"I--This'll be just the room for Dee Dee, Jerry, where she can feel the morning sun and hear the street-cars over there when she gets lonesome. She ought to have the sunniest room, because it's something she can feel without seeing--poor thing. This will be a swell room for poor old blind Dee Dee, won't it, Jerry? Won't it, Jerry dear?"

"Cut the comedy, Peachy. There's a neat free ward waiting for her just the other direction from the city than Newton Heights. Cut the comedy, Peachy."

"Jerry, I--I gotta have her with me. I--Now that she--she's in the dark. She couldn't stand an institution, Jerry, she--she just couldn't."

"That's what they all say, but they get over it. I know a--"

"She couldn't, Jerry. She 'ain't had much in her life, but she's always had a roof over her head that wasn't charity, and she always said, Jerry, that she couldn't never stand a--a institution. She can take any other room you say, Jerry. Maybe there's a little one up-stairs in the third story we could fix up comfy for her; but she's in the dark now, Jerry, and, my God! Jerry, she just couldn't stand an institution!"

He patted her shoulder and drew her arm through his.

"You lemme take care of that. She don't need to know nothing about it. We'll tell her we're sending her for a visit to the country for a while. After the second day she'll be as snug as a bug in a rug. They're good to 'em in those places; good as gold."

"No, no, Jerry! No, no! I gotta have her with me! She raised me from a kid and--and she couldn't stand it, Jerry! I gotta have her, I gotta! I want her!"

His mouth sagged downward suddenly and on an oblique.

"Say, somebody must have given you a few lessons in nagging, yourself. Them's the lines she used to recite to me about her she-devil of a mother, too. Gad! she used to hang on her mother's apron-strings like she was tied."

"Jerry, I--"

"Come, Peachy, don't get me sore. Come, let's talk about to-morrow. We gotta get the license first and--"

"Jerry, I--Promise me I can have her with me first. I--Just a little yes is all I want--Jerry dear--just a little yes."

A frown gathered in a triple furrow on his brow.

"Now, kiddo, you got to cut that with me, and cut it quick. If there's two things I can't stand it's nagging and pouting. Cloonan can tell you what pouting can drive me to. I'll beat it out of that girl of mine before she's through with me, and I won't stand it from no one else. Now cut it, Peachy, that's a nice girl."

He paced the carpeted space of floor between the dresser and bed, his mouth still on the oblique.

"Now cut it, Peachy, I said, and cut it quick."

She stood palpitating beside the window, her eyes flashing to his face and fastening there.

"God! I--I wanna go."

"Where?"

Her glance flashed past him out of the window and across the patch of rear lawn. A street-car bobbed across the country; she followed it with eager eyes.

"I wanna go."

He advanced, conciliatory. "Aw, now, Peachy, a row just the day before we are married. You don't want to start out making me train you just like you was a little kid. If you was a little girl I could beat your little ways out of you, but I wanna be on the level with you and show you how nice I can be. All the things I'm going to give you, all--"

"Quit, you! I wanna go! I wanna go!"

"You can go to hell, for my part. I'm going to get a steak inside of me before we budge. Quit your fooling. See, you nearly got me sore there. Come, the car won't be back for us until six. Come, Peachy, come."

She was past him and panting down the stairs, out across the patch of rear lawn, and toward the bobbing street-car, the streamer of ribbon at her throat flying backward over her shoulder.

In the bargain basement of the Titanic Store the first day of the spring opening dragged to its close. In a meadow beside a round pond a tree dripped apple blossoms, each so frail a thing that it fluttered out and away, too light to anchor.

In careless similitude the bargain basement of the Titanic Store resuscitated from its storerooms, and from spring openings long gone by, dusty garlands of cotton May blossoms, festooning them between the great white supporting pillars of the basement and intertwining them.

Over the white-goods counter and over Sunday, as it were, a papier-mache pergola of green lattice-work and more cotton-back May blossoms had sprung up as if the great god Wotan had built it with a word. Cascades of summer linens, the apple green and the butter yellow, flowed from counters and improvised tables. Sadie Barnet's own mid-aisle bin had blossomed into a sacrificial sale of lawn remnants, and toward the close of the day her stock lay low, depleted.

Max Meltzer leaned out of his bower, and how muted his voice, as if it came from an inner throat that only spoke when the heart bade it.

"Little one, them remnants went like hot cakes, didn't they?"

"Hot cakes! Well, I guess. You'd have thought there was a mill-end sale on postage stamps."

"And if you don't look all tired out! If you just don't!"

The ready tears swam in her voice.

"It's--it's been awful--me away from her all day like this. But, anyways, I got news for her when I go home to-night about her five weeks' benefit money. Old Criggs was grand. He's going to send the committee to see her. Anyways, that's some good news for her."

"I just can't get her out of my mind, neither. Seems like I--I just can see her poor blind face all the time."

"M-me, too."

"They say the girls up in the ribbons been crying all day. She was no love-bird, but they say she wasn't bad underneath."

"God knows she--she wasn't."

"That's the way with some folks; they're hard on top, but everybody knows hard-shell crabs have got sweeter meat than soft."

"Nobody knows that she was a rough diamond better than me. I got sore at her sometimes, but I--I know she was always there when I--I needed her, alrighty."

"Now, now, little girl, don't cry! You're all worn out."

"She--she was always there to stand by me in--in a pinch."

"Honest, Miss Sadie, you look just like a pretty little ghost. What you need is some spring air, girlie, some spring air for a tonic. Wouldn't I just love to take you all by your little self down the river to-night on one of them new Coney boats, where we could be--right quiet. Say, wouldn't I?"

"No--no!"

"I wanna talk to you, Miss Sadie. Can't you guess? I wanna get you all by yourself and talk to you right in your little ear."

'"Shh-h-h! You mustn't talk like that."

"That's the only way I have of trying to tell you how--how I feel, Miss Sadie--dearie."

'"Shh-h-h!"

"When I call you that it means--well, you know, dearie, you know. That's why I wanna take you to-night, dearie, all by your little self and--"

"No, no, Mr. Meltzer! I can't leave her alone like that. I promised I would never leave her alone in the dark if--if I could help it."

"Ain't I the dub? Sure you can't leave her. We gotta stick by her now, dearie. 'Ain't we? 'Ain't we?"

A red seepage of blood surged across his face and under his hair. Beneath his little hedge of mustache his lips quivered as if at their own daring.

"We gotta stick by her, dearie."

All her senses swam, nor could she control the fluttering of her hands.

"Oh--Mr. Meltzer--Max!"

"What you and poor old Dee Dee need is some of this spring air. Gee! wouldn't I love to take you--and her down the river to-night on one of them new Coney boats? Gee! would I? Just you and--and her."

"Max--oh, Max dearie!"

"HEADS"

By the great order of things which decreed that about the time Herod, brother to no man, died, Jesus, brother to all men, should be born; and that Rabelais, moral jester, should see light the very year that orthodox Louis XI passed on, by that same metaphysical scheme reduced to its lowliest, Essman's drop-picture machine, patent applied for, was completed the identical year that, for Rudolph Pelz, the rainy-day skirt slumped from a novelty to a commodity.

At a very low tide in the affairs of the Novelty Rainy Day Skirt Company, Canal Street, that year of our Lord, 1898, when letter-head stationery was about to be rewritten and the I-haven't-seen-you-since-last-century jocosity was about to be born, Rudolph Pelz closed his workaday by ushering out Mr. Emil Hahn, locking his front door after his full force of two women machine-stitchers, and opening a rear door upon his young manhood's estate. A modest-enough holding in the eyes of you or me as beholders; but for the past week not an evening upon opening that door but what tears rushed to his throat, which he laughed through, for shame of them.

On a bed, obviously dragged from its shadowy corner to a place beside the single window, and propped up so that her hair, so slickly banding her head in two plaits, sprang out against the coarsely white pillows, Mrs. Rosa Sopinsky Pelz, on an evening when the air rose sultry, stale, and even garbage-laden from a cat-and-can-infested courtyard, flashed her quick smile toward that opening door, her week-old infant suckling at her breast.

"You ought to seen, Roody; she laughed! Puckered herself up into the cutest little grin when mamma left just now."

Mr. Pelz wound his way through an overcrowded huddle of furniture that was gloomily, uglily utilitarian. A sideboard spread in pressed glass; a chest of drawers piled high with rough-dry family wash; a coal-range, and the smell and sound of simmering. A garland of garlic, caught up like smilax, and another of drying red peppers. On a shelf above the sink, cluttered there with all the pitiful unprivacy of poverty, a layout, to recite which will label me with the nigritude of the realist, but which is actually the nigritude of reality--a dish of brown-and-white blobs of soap; a coffee-cup with a great jag in its lip; a bottle of dried beans; a rubber nipple floating in a saucer of water; a glass tumbler containing one inverted tooth-brush; a medicine-bottle glued down in a dark-brown pool of its own substance; a propped-up bit of mirror, jagged of edge; a piece of comb; a rhinestone breastpin; a bunion-plaster; a fork; spoon; a sprouting onion. Yet all of this somehow lit by a fall of very coarse, very white, and very freshly starched lace curtains portiere-fashion from the door, looped back in great curves from the single window, and even skirting stiffly and cleanly the bureau-front and bed-edge.

"How is my little mammela?" said Mr. Pelz, leaning over the bed to kiss Mrs. Pelz on the shining plaits, the light-tan column of throat and the little fist pressed so deeply into her bosom.

"Just ought to seen, Roody--honest, she laughed and nearly jerked off mamma's _sheidel!_" [Footnote: Black wig worn by orthodox Jewish women after marriage.]

"Red head!" he said, stroking down at the warm "bulge of blanket, so snugly enclosed in the crotch of mothering arm.

"It's redder than yours already, Roody."

"She's sure a grand little thing cuddled up there, ain't it so, mammela?"

She reached up to pat his blue shirt-sleeve.

"There's some herring on the table mamma brought over, and some raw meat and onions. That's some _borshtsh_ on the stove Etta carried all the way over from Hester Street for your supper."

"And what for the little mammela?"

"I'm fed up, Roody. Mamma closed the store at five to run over with some of that milk-shake like Doctor Aarons said. He sent his little son Isadore over with the prescription. Like I said to mamma, she should let the Canal Street Kosher Sausage Company do double the business from five until six while she closes shop to carry her daughter a milk-shake! Like I was used to it from home!"

"When my girl gets to be a little mammela, the best shouldn't be none too good."

She continued to stroke up at his sleeve and occasionally on up into his uneven shock of red hair.

"You miss me in the shop, Roody?"

"You should just see once how that Ruby Grabenheiner sits at your machine! She does one-half your work not one-half so good."

"I'll be back next week Monday."

He patted her quickly. "No! No! A mammela's place is with her baby."

"Roody, you make me laugh. I should sit at home now since we got a new mouth to feed? That would be a fine come-off!"

"Who do you think was just in, Rosie? Emil Hahn."

"Sol is going to make for me, Roody, one of those little packing-case cribs like he built for Etta up in the pants-factory, so when the machine works it rocks, too. Did--did the check from Solomon & Glauber come in on the last mail, Roody?"

"Now, Rosie, you mustn't worry yourself about such--"

"What you looking so funny for, Roody?"

"I was starting to tell you, Rosie--Hahn was just in and--"

"Roody, don't change the subject on me always. You looked funny. Is it something wrong with Solomon & Glau--"

"If you don't take the cake, Rosie! Now, why should I look funny? 'Funny,' she says I look, I'm hungry. I smell Etta's _borshtsh_."

She half raised herself, the pulling lips of the child drawing up the little head from the cove of arm.

"Rosie, you mustn't lift up that way!"

"Roody, I can read you like a book! Solomon & Glauber have countermanded, too."

"Now, Rosie, wouldn't that keep until--"

"They have!"

"Well, if you got to know it, Rosie, they're shipping back the consignment."

"Roody!"

"What you going to do about it? Give you my word never seen the like. It's like the rainy-day skirt had died overnight. All of a sudden from a novelty, I find myself with such a commodity that every manufacturer in the business is making them up for himself."

"You seen it first, though, Roody. Nobody can take it away from you that you seen first how the rainy-day skirt and its shortness would be such a success with the women."

"'Seen it first,' she says! Say, what good does it do me if I didn't see far enough? I pick for myself such a success that I crowd myself out of business."

"It's a dirty shame! A big firm like Solomon & Glauber should not be allowed to--"

"Say, if it wouldn't be Solomon & Glauber, it would be Funk & Hausman or any other firm. The rainy-day skirt has slipped out of my hands, Rosie, to the big fellows. We must realize that for ourselves. That's the trouble when you don't deal in a patented product. What's the little fellows like myself to do against a firm like Solomon & Glauber? Start something?"

"Three countermands in a week, and no orders coming in!"

"Say, it don't tickle my ribs no more than yours."

"Roody, maybe it's the worst thing ever happened to us you wouldn't listen to mamma and be satisfied with being chief cutter at Lipschuts'."

"Shame on you, Rosie! You want your daughter to grow up with a pants-cutter all her life for a father? You want I should die in somebody else's harness. Maybe I didn't hit it right away, but I say yet, if a fellow's got the eyes and the nerve to see ahead a little with his imagination--"

"'Imagination.' He talks like a story-book."

"Now--now, take Hahn, Rosie--there's a fellow's got imagination--but not enough. I know it makes you mad when I talk on his picture-machine, but you take it from me--there's a fellow with a good thing under his very nose, but he--he 'ain't quite got the eyes to see ahead."

"Say, for such a good thing like Emil Hahn's picture-machine, where his wife had to work in my own mother's sausage-store, I can't make myself excited."

"He 'ain't quite got the eyes to see, Rosie, the big idea in it. He's afraid of life, instead of making it so that life should be afraid of him. Ten dollars cheaper I can buy that machine to-day than last week. A song for it, I tell you."

"Ninety dollars to me is no cheap song, Roody."

"The people got to be amused the same as they got to be fed. A man will pay for his amusements quicker than he will pay his butcher's or his doctor's bill. It's a cash business, Rosie. All you do with such a machine like Hahn's is get it well placed, drop your penny in the slot, and see one picture after another as big as life. I remember back in the old country, the years before we came over, when I was yet a youngster--"

"You bet Hahn never put his good money in that machine. I got it from Birdie Hahn herself. For a bad debt he took it over along with two feather beds and--"

"One after another pictures as big as life, Rosie, like real people moving. One of them, I give you my word, it's grand! A woman it shows all wrapped tight around in white, on a sofa covered over with such a spotted--what you call--leopard-skin."

"To me that has a sound, Roody, not to be proud of--"

"A living picture, with such neck and arms and--"

"That's enough, Roody! That's enough! I'm ashamed even for your daughter here!"

"Such a machine, maybe some day two or three, set up in a place like Coney Island or, for a beginning, in Pleasure Arcade, is an immense idea, Rosie. Until an invention like this, nine-tenths of the people couldn't afford the theyater. The drop-picture machine takes care of them nine-tenths."

"Theyaters are no place for the poor."

"That's where you're wrong--they need it the most. I don't want to get you worked up, Rosie, while you ain't strong, but every day that we wait we're letting a great idea slip through our fingers. If I don't buy that machine off Emil Hahn, somebody else will see in it what I see. Then all our lives we will have something to reproach ourselves with."

Mrs. Pelz let slide her hand beneath the pillow, eyes closing and her face seeming to whiten.

"Ninety dollars! Twenty dollars less than every cent we got saved in the world. It ain't right we should gamble with it, Roody. Not now."

"Why not now, Rosie? It's all the more reason. Is it worth maybe a little gamble our Bleema should grow up like the best? I got bigger plans for her and her little mammela than such a back room all their lives. In a few years, maybe three rooms for ourselves in one of them newfangled apartment-houses up on Second Avenue with turn-on hot water--"

"That's right--you'll have her riding in a horseless carriage next!"

"I tell you, it's a big idea!"

"I wish we had ten cents for every big idea you've been struck with."

"That's just why, Rosie, I'm going to hit one right."

Mrs. Pelz withdrew then the slow hand from beneath the pillow and a small handkerchief with a small wad knotted into it.

"Nearly every--cent--in--the world, Roody, that we've got. Saved nearly penny by penny. Our Bleema--it's a sin--our--our--"

"Sin nothing!"

"Our week-old little girl--it--"

"Nothing ventured in life, Rosie, nothing squeezed out of it. Don't put it back! Look, the baby herself wants it! Papa's little Bleema! Look! She's trying to lift herself. Ain't that remarkable, Rosie--look at that child lifting for that handkerchief!"

"Our little baby girl! If it was for ourselves alone, all right, maybe, take a chance--but for--"

Suddenly Mr. Pelz clapped his thigh. "I got it! I got it! Well let the little Bleema decide it for us. How's that? She should decide it for us if we take a gamble on her daddy's big idea! Here--I put a five-cents piece in her little hand and see which way she drops it. The little mammela will say which way it is to be--heads or tails. How's that, Rosie--the baby should decide it for us?"

"Roody--we mustn't!"

"Heads or tails, Rosie?"

"I--I--"

"Quick!"

"H-heads!"

"Quick now, papa's baby, open up little fist!"

"Roody, not so rough! She can't hold that big nickel."

"That's just what I want--she should let it fall."

"Roody, Roody, I hope it's tails."

The coin rolled to the bed-edge, bounced off to the floor, rolled to the zinc edge.

Immediately after, on all-fours, his face screwed up for scrutiny and the back of his neck hotly ridden with crimson, Mr. Pelz leaned after.

"Roody--what?"

"Heads!"

Where Riverside Drive reaches its rococo climax of the twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year and twelve-story-high apartment-house de luxe and duplex, and six baths divided by fourteen rooms is equal to solid-marble comfort, Elsinore Court, the neurotic Prince of Denmark and Controversy done in gilt mosaics all over the foyer, juts above the sky-line, and from the convex, rather pop-eyed windows of its top story, bulges high and wide of view over the city.

From one of these windows, looking north, Rudolph Pelz, by the holding-aside of a dead weight of pink brocade and filet lace, could gaze upon a sweep of Hudson River that flowed majestically between the great flank of the city and the brobdingnagian Palisades.

After a day when he had unerringly directed the great swinging crane of this or that gigantic transaction it had a laving effect upon him--this view of sure and fluent tide that ran so perpetually into infinitude.

Yet for Mr. Pelz to attempt to articulate into words this porcelain-thin pillar of emotions was to shatter it into brittle bits.

"Say, Rosie, ain't that a view for you? That's how it is with life--a river that rises with getting born and flows into death, and the in-between is life and--and--"

"Roody, will you please hurry for sup--dinner? Do you want Feist to arrive with you not yet dressed?"

Mr. Pelz turned then into an interior that was as pink and as silk as the inside of a bud--satin walls with side brackets softly simulating candles; a Canet bed, piled with a careful riot of sheerest and roundest of pillows; that long suit of the interior decorator, the _chaise-longue_; the four French engravings in their gilt frames; the latest original Josephine's _secretaire_; the shine of a white adjoining bathroom. Before a door-impaneled mirror, Mrs. Pelz, in a black-lace gown that was gracious to her rotundity.

"Just look! I'm all dressed already."

Mr. Pelz advanced to her, his clasp closing over each of her bare arms, smile and gaze lifting.

"Rosie, you've got them all beat! Guess why I wish I was your diamond necklace."

"Roody, it's nearly seven. Don't make me ashamed for Feist."

"Guess!"

"All right, then, I guess."

"So I could always be round your neck."

His hand flew immediately to the lay of gems at her throat, a small flush rising.

"Roody, you hear me--hurry! Stop it, I tell you! You pinch." But she was warmly pink now, the shake of her head setting the heavy-carat gems in her ears waggling.

Time, probably emulating destiny, had worked kindly here; had brought to Mrs. Pelz the soft, dove-like maturity of her little swell of bosom; the white, even creamy shoulders ever so slightly too plump between the blades; the still black hair polished and waved into expensive permanence. Out of years that had first veered and finally taken course under his unquestionable captaincy, Rudolph Pelz, with some of their storm and stress written in deep brackets round his mouth, the red hair just beginning to pale and thin, and a certain roundness of back enhancing his squattiness, had come snugly and simply into harbor. Only the high cheek-bones and bony jaw-line and the rather inconveniently low voice, which, however, had the timbre of an ormolu clock in the chiming, indicating his peculiar and covert power to dominate as dynamically as ungrammatically a board of directors reckoning in millions across the mahogany.

"Shall I call in Sato to help you dress, Roody?"

"Please--no! Just to have him in the room with his yellowness and tiptoes makes me nervous like a cat."

"I got your shirt and studs laid out myself."

He pinched her cheek again. "Rosie Posy!"

"You had a hard day, Roody? You look tired."

"I don't like the battle of Waterloo in the 'Saint Elba' picture."