Chapter 13

"Safe journey, Spencer! Remember you've got a precious piece of anxiety waiting back here for you."

"Oh, Mr. Feist--isn't--isn't--it awful--submarine-time and all? I--I just can't bear it!"

"Now! Now! Is that the way for a brave little girl to talk?"

"Bleema, if you can't control yourself, you had better go sit in the car. I'm ashamed before the company."

"Roody, the poor child!"

"He--that's the only way papa talks to me these days--fault-finding!"

"Now, now, Miss Bleema! Here--take mine; yours is all wet."

Another blast then, reverberating into the din.

"All aboard!"

"Good-by, Lester--good-by, darling--cable every day--by--good-by--boy!"

"Good-by, little Reddie! Thanks for the beautiful fruits and letters. Good-by, Mr. Pelz!"

"Play fair in the picture, Spencer. Don't hog the scenes. Help instead of hinder Sopinsky."

"Indeed I will, sir! Good-by, Mrs. Pelz!"

"Good-by, Lester! God bless you, my boy! Take care of yourself, and remember my little girl is--"

"Lester--Lester, a cable every day!"

"Bleema, will you please let the man catch his boat? It's an embarrassment to even watch you."

"Lester--Lester--"

"Yes, yes; good-by, everybody!"

"I'll be out at the pier-edge--wave back, darling!"

"Yes, yes! Good-by, Miss Beautiful! By, all!" And then, from an upper deck, more and more shouted farewells.

"They're moving! Come, Mr. Feist--please--with me--I've got the permit--don't let papa see us--come--the pier-edge!"

"Sure! This way, Miss Bleema--here--under--quick!"

Out in the open, May lay with Italian warmth over a harbor that kicked up the tiniest of frills. A gull cut through the blueness, winging it in festoons.

"Over this way, Miss Bleema; we can see her steaming out."

"Lester--good-by--Lester--a cable every day! I'll be waiting. Good-by!"

All this unavailingly flung to the great hulk of boat moving so proud of bow and so grandly out to sea, decks of faces and waving kerchiefs receding quickly.

"Good-by--darling--oh--oh--"

"'Sh-h--'sh-h-h, Miss Bleema. Here--take another of mine. Yours is all wet again. My--what a rainy day! Here--let me dry them for you. Hold still!"

"Oh--oh--cable every day, darling--write--oh, Mr. Feist--he don't see us--he's out of sight--don't wipe 'em so hard, Mr. Feist--you--you h-hurt!"

Out toward the blue, the billowing fields sailed away the gray steamer, cutting a path that sprayed and sang after. Sunlight danced and lay whitely as far as the eye could reach. It prolonged for those on shore the contour of the line of faces above each deck; it picked points of light from off everywhere--off smokestacks and polished railings, off plate-glass and brass-bound port-holes and even down the ship's flank, to where gilt letters spelled out shiningly:

"_LUSITANIA._"

A BOOB SPELLED BACKWARD

How difficult it is to think of great lives in terms of the small mosaics that go to make up the pattern of every man's day-by-day--the too tepid shaving-water; the badly laundered shirt-front; the three-minute egg; the too-short fourth leg of the table; the draught on the neck; the bad pen; the neighboring rooster; the misplaced key; the slipping chest-protector.

Richelieu, who walked with kings, presided always at the stitching of his red robes. Boswell says somewhere that a badly starched stock could kill his Johnson's morning. It was the hanging of his own chintzes that first swayed William Morris from epic mood to household utensils. Seneca, first in Latin in the whole Silver Age, prepared his own vegetables. There is no outgrowing the small moments of life, and to those lesser ones of us how often they become the large ones!

To Samuel Lipkind, who, in a span of thirty years, had created and carried probably more than his share of this world's responsibilities, there was no more predominant moment in all his day, even to the signing of checks and the six-o'clock making of cash, than that matinal instant, just fifteen minutes before the stroke of seven, when Mrs. Lipkind, in a fuzzy gray wrapper the color of her eyes and hair, kissed him awake, and, from across the hall, he could hear the harsh sing of his bath in the drawing.

There are moments like that which never grow old. For the fifteen years that Samuel Lipkind had reached the Two Dollar Hat Store before his two clerks, he had awakened to that same kiss on his slightly open mouth, the gray hair and the ever-graying eyes close enough to be stroked, the pungency of coffee seeming to wind like wreaths of mundane aroma above the bed, and always across the aisle of hallway that tepid cataract leaping in glory into porcelain.

Take the particular morning which ushers in our story, although it might have been any of twelve times three hundred others.

"Sammy!" This upon opening his door, then crossing to close the conservative five inches of open window and over to the bedside for the kissing him awake. "Sammy, get up!"

The snuggle away into the crotch of his elbow.

"Sammy! _Thu, thu_! I can't get him up! Sammy, a quarter to seven! You want to be late? I can't get him up!"

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

"You want your own clerks to beat you to business so they can say they got a lazy boss?"

"I'm awake, ma." Reaching up to stroke her hair, thin and gray now, and drawn back into an early-morning knob.

"Don't splash in the bath-room so this morning, Sammy; it's a shame for the wall-paper."

"I won't"--drawing the cord of his robe about his waist, and as if they did not both of them know just how faithfully disregarded would be that daily admonition.

Then Mrs. Lipkind flung back the snowy sheets and bed-coverings, baring the striped ticking of the mattress.

"Hurry, Sammy! I'm up so long I'm ready for my second cup of coffee."

"Two minutes." And off across the hall, whistling, towel across arm.

It was that little early moment sublimated by nothing more than the fusty beginnings of a workaday, the mere recollecting of which was one day to bring a wash of tears behind his eyes and a twist of anguish into his heart.

Next breakfast, and to dine within reach of the coal-range which brews it is so homely a fashion that even Mr. Lipkind, upon whom such matters of bad form lay as a matter of course, was wont to remonstrate.

"What's the matter with the dining-room, ma? Since when have dining-rooms gone out of style?"

Pouring his coffee from the speckled granite pot, Mrs. Lipkind would smile up and over it.

"All I ask is my son should never have it worse than to eat all his lifetime in just such a kitchen like mine. Off my kitchen floor I would rather eat than off some people's fine polished mahogany."

The mahogany was almost not far-fetched. There was a blue-and-white spick-and-spanness about Mrs. Lipkind's kitchen which must lie within the soul of the housewife who achieves it--the lace-edged shelves, the scoured armament of dishpan, soup-pot, and what not; the white Swiss window-curtains, so starchy, and the two regimental geraniums on the sill; the roller-towel too snowy for mortal hand to smudge; the white sink, hand-polished; the bland row of blue-and-white china jars spicily inscribed to nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves. That such a kitchen could be within the tall and brick confines of an upper-Manhattan apartment-house was only another of the thousand thousand paradoxes over which the city spreads her glittering skirts. The street within roaring distance, the highway of Lenox Avenue flowing dizzily constantly past her windows, the interior of Mrs. Lipkind's apartment, from the chromos of the dear dead upon its walls to the upholstery of another decade against those walls, was as little of the day as if the sweep of the city were a gale across a mid-Victorian plain and the flow past the windows a broad river ruffled by wind.

"You're right, ma; there's not a kitchen in New York I'd trade it for. But what's the idea of paying rent on a dining-room?"

"Sa-y, if not for when Clara comes and how in America all young people got extravagant ideas, we was just as well off without one in our three rooms in Simpson Street."

"A little more of that mackerel, please."

You to whom the chilled grapefruit and the eggshell cup of morning coffee are a gastronomic feat not always easy to hurdle, raise not your digestive eyebrows. At precisely fifteen minutes past seven six mornings in the week, seven-thirty, Sundays, Mrs. Lipkind and her son sat down to a breakfast that was steamingly fit for those only who dwell in the headacheless kingdom of long, sleepful nights and fur-coatless tongues.

"A few more fried potatoes with it, Sammy?"

"Whoa! You want to feed me up for the fat boys' regiment!"

Mrs. Lipkind glanced quickly away, her profile seeming to quiver. "Don't use that word, Sam--even in fun--it's a knife in me."

"What word?"

"'Regiment.'"

He reached across to pat the vein-corduroyed back of her hand.

"My little sweetheart mamma," he said.

She, in turn, put out her hand over his, her old sagging throat visibly constricting in a gulp, and her eyes as if they could never be finished with yearning over him. "You're a good boy, Sammy."

"Sure!"

"I always say no matter what it is bad my life has had for me with my twenty-five years a widow, my only daughter to marry out six hundred miles away from me, my business troubles when I had to lose the little store what your papa left me, nothing ain't nothing, Sammy, when a mother can raise for herself a boy like mine."

"You mean when a fellow can pick out for himself a little sweetheart mamma like mine."

"Sammy, stop it with your pinching-me nonsense like I was your best girl!"

"Well, ain't you?"

She paused, her cup of coffee half-way to her lips, the lines of her face seeming to want to lift into what would be a smile. "No, Sammy; your mother knows she ain't, and if she was anything but a selfish old woman, she would be glad that she ain't."

"'Sh! 'Sh!" said Mr. Lipkind, reaching this time half across the table for a still steaming muffin and opening it so that its hot fragrance came out. '"Sh! No April showers! Uh! Uh! Don't you dare!"

"I ain't," said Mrs. Lipkind, smiling through her tear and dashing at it with the back of her hand. "For why should I when I got only everything to be thankful for?"

"Now you're shouting!"

"How you think, Sammy, Clara likes a cheese pie for supper to-night? Last week I could see she didn't care much for the noodle pudding I baked her."

Mr. Lipkind, who was ever so slightly and prematurely bald and still more slightly and prematurely rotund, suffered a rush of color then, his ears suddenly and redly conspicuous.

"That's--that's what I started to tell you last night, ma. Clara telephoned over to the store in the afternoon she--she thought she wouldn't come to supper this Wednesday night, ma."

"Sammy--you--you and Clara 'ain't got nothing wrong together, the way you don't see each other so much these two months?"

"Of course not, ma; it's just happened a few times that way. The trade's in town; that's all."

"How is it all of a sudden a girl in the wholesale ribbon business should have the trade to entertain like she was in the cloak-and-suit chorus?"

"It's not that Clara's busy to-night, ma. She--she only thought she--for a change--there's a little side table for two--for three--where she boards--she thought maybe if--if you didn't mind, I'd go over to her place for Wednesday-night supper for a change. You know how a girl like Clara gets to feeling obligated."

"Obligated from eating once a week supper in her own future house!"

"She asked I should bring you, too, ma, but I know how bashful you are to go in places like that."

"In such a place where it's all style and no food--yes."

"That's it; so we--I thought, ma, that is, if you don't mind, instead of Clara here to-night for supper, I--I'd go over to her place. If you don't mind, ma."

There was a silence, so light, so slight that it would not have even held the dropping of a pin, but yet had a depth and a quality that set them both to breathing faster.

"Why, of course, Sammy, you should go!"

"I--we thought for a change."

"You should have told me yesterday, Sammy, before I marketed poultry."

"I know, ma; I--just didn't. Clara only 'phoned at four."

"A few more fried potatoes?"

"No more."

"Sit up straight, Sam, from out your round shoulders."

"You ain't--mad, ma?"

"For why, Sammy, should I be mad that you go to Clara for a change to supper. I'm glad if you get a change."

"It's not that, ma. It's just that she asked it. You know how a person feels, her taking her Wednesday-night suppers here for more than five years and never once have I--we--set foot in any of her boarding-houses. She imagines she's obligated. You know how Clara is, so independent."

"You should go. I hear, too, how Mrs. Schulem sets a good table."

"I'll be home by nine, ma--you sure you don't mind?"

"I wouldn't mind, Sammy, if it was twelve. Since when is it that a grown-up son has to apologize to his mother if he takes a step without her?"

"You can believe me, ma, but I've got so it don't seem like theater or nothing seems like going out without my little sweetheart mamma on one arm and Clara on the other."

"It's not right, Sammy, you should spoil me so. Don't think that even if you don't let me talk about it, I don't know in my heart how I'm in yours and Clara's way."

"Ma, now just you start that talk and you know what I'll do--I'll get up and leave the table."

"Sammy, if only you would let me talk about it!"

"You heard what I said."

"To think my son should have to wait with his engagement for five years and never once let his mother ask him why it is he waits. It ain't because of to-night I want to talk about it, Sam, but if I thought it was me that had stood between you and Clara all these five years, if--if I thought it was because of me you don't see each other so much here lately, I--"

"Ma!"

"I couldn't stand it, son. If ever a boy deserved happiness, that boy is you. A boy that scraped his fingers to the bone to marry his sister off well. A boy that took the few dollars left from my notion-store and made such a success in retail men's hats and has given it to his mother like a queen. If I thought I was standing in such a boy's way, who ain't only a grand business man and a grand son and brother, but would make any girl the grandest husband that only his father before him could equal, I couldn't live, Sammy, I couldn't live."

"You should know how sick such talk makes me!"

"I haven't got hard feelings, Sammy, because Clara don't like it here."

"She does."

"For why should an up-to-date American girl like Clara like such an old-fashioned place as I keep? Nowadays, girls got different ideas. They don't think nothing of seventy-five-dollar suits and twelve-dollar shoes. I can't help it that it goes against my grain no matter how fine a money-maker a girl is. In the old country my sister Carrie and me never even had shoes on our feet until we were twelve, much less--"

"But, ma--"

"Oh, I don't blame her, Sam. I don't blame her that she don't like it the way I dish up everything on the table so we can serve ourselves. She likes it passed the way they did that night at Mrs. Goldfinger's new daughter-in-law's, where everything is carried from one to the next one, and you got to help yourself quick over your shoulders."

"Clara's like me, ma; she wants you to keep a servant to do the waiting on you."

"It ain't in me, Sam, to be bossed to by a servant, just like I can't take down off the walls pictures of your papa _selig_ and your grandma, because it ain't stylish they should be there. It's a feeling in me for my own flesh and blood that nothing can change."

"Clara don't want you to change that, ma."

"She's a fine, up-to-date girl, Sam. A girl that can work herself up to head floor-lady in wholesale ribbons and forty dollars a week has got in her the kind of smartness my boy should have in his wife. I'm an old woman standing in the way of my boy. If I wasn't, I could go out to Marietta, Ohio, by Ruby, and I wouldn't keep having inside of me such terrible fears for my boy and--and how things are now on the other side and--and--"

"Now, now, ma; no April showers!"

"An old woman that can't even be happy with a good daughter like Ruby, but hangs always on her son like a stone around his neck!"

"You mean like a diamond."

"A stone, holding him down."

"Ma!" Mr. Lipkind pushed back, napkin awry at his throat and his eyes snapping points of light. "Now if you want to spoil my breakfast, just say so and I--I'll quit. Why should you be living with Ruby out in Marietta if you're happier here with me where you belong? If you knew how sore these here fits of yours make me, you'd cut them out--that's what you would. I'm not going over to Clara's at all now for supper, if that's how you feel about it."

Mrs. Lipkind rose then, crossed, leaning over the back of his chair and inclosing his face in the quivering hold of her two hands. "Sammy, Sammy, I didn't mean it! I know I ain't in your way. How can I be when there ain't a day passes I don't invite you to get married and come here to live and fix the flat any way what Clara wants or even move down-town in a finer one where she likes it? I know I ain't in your way, son. I take it back."

"Well, that's more like it."

"You mustn't be mad at mamma when she gets old-fashioned ideas in her head."

He stroked her hand at his cheek, pressing it closer.

"Sit down and finish your breakfast, little sweetheart mamma."

"Is it all right now, Sammy?"

"Of course it is!" he said, his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

"Promise mamma you'll go over by Clara's to-night."

"But--"

"Promise me, Sammy; I can't stand it if you don't."

"Alright, I'll go, ma."

The Declaration of Economic Independence is not always a subtle one. There was that about Clara Bloom, even to the rather Hellenic swing of her very tailor-made back and the firm, neat clack of her not too high heels, which proclaimed that a new century had filed her fetter-free from the nine-teen-centuries-long chain of women whose pin-money had too often been blood-money or the filched shekels from trousers pocket or what in the toga corresponded thereto.

And yet, when Miss Bloom smiled, which upon occasion she did spontaneously enough to show a gold molar, there were not only Hypatia and Portia in the straight line of her lips, but lurked in the little tip-tilt at the corners a quirk from Psyche, who loved and was so loved, and in the dimple in her chin a manhole, as it were, for Mr. Samuel Lipkind.

At six o'clock, where the wintry workaday flows into dusk and Fifth Avenue flows across Broadway, they met, these two, finding each other out in the gaseous shelter of a Subway kiosk. She from the tall, thin, skylightless skyscraper dedicated to the wholesale supply of woman's insatiable demand for the ribbon gewgaw; he from a plate-glass shop with his name inscribed across its front and more humbly given over to the more satiable demand of the male for the two-dollar hat. There was a gold-and-black sign which ran across the not inconsiderable width of Mr. Lipkind's store-front and which invariably captioned his four inches of Sunday-news-paper advertisement:

SAMMY LIPKIND WANTS YOUR HEAD

As near as it is possible for the eye to simulate the heart, there was exactly that sentiment in his glance now as he found out Miss Bloom, she in a purple-felt hat and the black scallops of escaping hair, blacker because the red was out in her cheeks.

He broke into the kind of smile that lifted his every feature, screw-lines at his eyes coming out, head bared, and his greeting beginning to come even before she was within hearing distance of it.

There was in Mr. Lipkind precious little of Lothario, Launcelot, Galahad, or any of that blankety-blank-verse coterie. There remains yet unsung the lay of the five-foot-five, slightly bald, and ever so slightly rotund lover. Falstaff and Romeo are the extremes of what Mr. Lipkind was the not unhappy medium. Offhand in public places, men would swap crop conditions and city politics with him. Twice, tired mothers in railway stations had volunteered him their babies to dandle. Young women, however, were not all impervious to him, and uncrossed their feet and became consciously unconscious of him across street-car aisles. In his very Two Dollar Hat Store, Sara Minniesinger, hooked of profile, but who had impeccably kept his debits and credits for twelve years back under the stock-balcony and a green eye-shade, was wont to cry of evenings over and for him into her dingy pillow. He was so unconscious of this that, on the twelfth anniversary of her incarceration beneath the stock-balcony, he commissioned his mother to shop her a crown of thorns in the form of a gold-handled umbrella with a bachelor-girl flash-light attachment.

There are men like that, to whom life is not only a theosophy of one God, but of one women who is sufficient thereof. When Samuel Lipkind greeted Clara Bloom there was just that in his ardently appraising glance.

"Didn't mean to keep you waiting, Clara--a last-minute customer. _You_ know."

"I've been counting red heads and wishing the Subway was pulled by white horses."

"Say, Clara, but you look a picture! Believe me, Bettina, that is some lid!"

Miss Bloom tucked up a rear strand of curl, turning her head to extreme profile for his more complete approval.

"Is it an elegant trifle, Sam? I ask you is it an elegant trifle?"

"Clara, it's--immense! The best yet! What did it set you back?"

"Don't ask me! I'm afraid just saying it would give your mother heart-failure by mental telepathy."

He linked her arm. "Whatever you paid, it's worth the money. It sets you off like a gipsy queen."

"None of that, Sam! Mush is fattening."

"Mush nothing! It's the truth."

"Hurry. Schulem's got a new rule--no reserving the guest-table."

They let themselves be swept into the great surge of the underground river with all of the rather thick-skinned unsensitiveness to shoulder-to-shoulder contact which the Subway engenders. Swaying from straps in a locked train, which tore like a shriek through a tube whose sides sweated dampness, they talked in voices trained to compete with the roar.

"What's the idea, Clara? When you telephoned yesterday I was afraid maybe it was--Eddie Leonard cutting in on my night again."

"Eddie nothing. Is it a law, Sam, that I have to eat off your mother every Wednesday night of my life?"

"No--only--you know how it is when you get used to things one way."

"I told you I had something to talk over, didn't I?"

They were rounding a curve now, so that they swayed face to face, nose to nose.

A few crinkles, frequent with him of late, came out in rays from his eyes.

"Is it anything you--you couldn't say in front of ma?"

"Yes."

He inserted two fingers into his collar, rearing back his head.

"Anything wrong, Clara?"

"You mean is anything right."

They rode in silence after that, both of them reading in three colors the border effulgencies of frenzied advertising.

But when they emerged to a quieter up-town night that was already pointed with a first star, he took her arm as they turned off into a side-street that was architecturally a barracks to the eye, brownstone front after brownstone front after brownstone front. Block after block of New York's side-streets are sunk thus in brown study.

"You mustn't be so ready to be put out over every little thing I say, Clara. Is it anything wrong to want you up at the house just as often as we can get you?"

"No, Sam; it ain't that."

"Well then, what is it?"

"Oh, what's the use beginning all that again? I want to begin to-night where we usually leave off."

"Is it--is it something we've talked about before, Clara?"

"Yes--and no. We've talked so much and so long without ever getting anywheres--what's the difference whether we've ever talked it before or not?"

"You just wait, Clara; everything is going to come out fine for us."