Chapter 15

"It's this: you see, ma, the way the draft goes. When a fellow's called to war, drafted, he's got to go, no questions asked. But when a fellow enlists for war, volunteers, you see, before the government calls him, then thataway he can pick out for himself the thing he wants to be in the army. Y'see? And then maybe the thing he picks out for himself can keep him right here at home. Y'see, ma--so he don't have to go away. See the point?"

"You mean when a boy enlists he offers himself instead of gets offered."

"Exactly."

"You got something behind all this. You mean you--you want to enlist."

"Now, ma--you see, if I was to enlist--and stay right here in this country--with you near the camp or, as long as it's too rough life for you, with--with Clara there--a woman to look in on--"

"Sammy--you mean it's enlistment!"

Her voice rose in velocity; he could feel her pulse run beneath his fingers.

"It's the best way, ma. The draft is sure to get me. Let me beat it and keep myself home--near you. We might as well face the music, ma. They'll get me one way or another. Let me enlist now, ma. Like a man. Right away. For my country!"

Do you know the eyes of Bellini's "Agony in a Garden"? Can you hear for yourself the note that must have been Cassandra's when she shouted out her forebodings? There were these now in the glance and voice of Mrs. Lipkind as she drew back from him, her face actually seeming to shrivel.

"No, Sammy! No! No! No!"

"Ma--please--"

"You wouldn't! You couldn't! No, Sammy--my son!"

"Ma, for God's sake don't go on so!"

"Then tell me you wouldn't! Against your own flesh and blood! Tell me you wouldn't!"

"No, no, ma! For God's sake, don't take a fit--a stroke--no, no; I wouldn't--I wouldn't!"

"Your own blood, Sammy! Your own baby cousins what I tucked you in bed with--mine own sister's children! Her babies what slept with you. Mine own sister who raised me and worked down her hands to the bone to make it so with my young husband and baby we could come to America--no--no!"

"Mamma, for God's sakes--"

"Three years like a snake here inside of it's eating me--all night--all day--I'm a good American, Sammy; I got so much I should be thankful for to America. Twenty-five years it's my home, the home where I had prosperity and good treatment, the home where I had happiness with your papa and where he lies buried, but I can't give you to fight against my own, Sammy--to be murdered by your own--my sister what never in her life harmed a bird--my child and her children--cousins--against each other. My beautiful country what I remember with cows and green fields and clover--always the smell of clover. It ain't human to murder against your own flesh and blood for God knows what reason!"

"Mamma, there is a reason it--"

"I tell you I'm a good American, Sammy. For America I give my last cent, but not to stick knives in my own--it ain't human--Why didn't I die before we got war? What good am I here? In my boy's way for his country--his marriage--his happiness--why don't I die?"

"Ma, I tell you you mustn't! You're making yourself sick. Let me fan you. Here, ma, I didn't mean it. See--I'm holding you tight. I won't never let go. You're my little sweetheart mamma. You mustn't tremble like that. I'm holding you tight--tight--little mamma."

"My boy! My little boy! My son! My all! All in their bed together. Three. Her two. Mine. The smell of clover--my boy--Sammy--Sam--" She fainted back into his arms suddenly, very white and very quiet and very shriveled.

He watched beside her bed the next five hours of the night, his face so close above hers that, when she opened her eyes, his were merged into one for her, and the clasp of his hand never left hers.

"You all right, ma? Sure? Sure you don't need the doctor?"

She looked up at him with a tired, a burned-out, an ashamed smile. "The first time in my life, Sammy, such a thing ever happened to me."

He pressed a chain of close kisses to the back of her hand, his voice far from firm. "It was me, ma. I'll never forgive myself. My little mamma, my little mamma sweetheart!"

"I feel fine, son; only, with you sitting here all night, you don't let me sleep for worry that you ain't in bed."

"I love it. I love to sit here by you and watch you sleep. You're sure you've no fever? Sure?"

"I'm well, Sammy. It was nothing but what you call a fainting-fit. For some women it's nothing that they should faint every time they get a little bit excited. It's nothing. Feel my hands--how cool! That's always a sign--coolness."

He pressed them both to his lips, blowing his warm breath against them.

"There now--go to sleep."

The night-light burning weakly, the great black-walnut bedstead ponderous in the gloom, she lay there mostly smiling and always shamefaced.

"Such a thing should happen to me at my age!"

"Try to sleep, ma."

"Go in your room to bed, and then I get sleep. Do you want your own clerks should beat you to business to-morrow?"

"A little whisky?"

"Go away; you got me dosed up enough with such _Schnapps_."

"The light lower?"

"No. If you don't go in your room, I lay here all night with my eyes open, so help me!"

He rose, stiff and sore-kneed, hair awry, and his eyes with the red rims of fatigue. "You'll sure ring the little bell if you want anything, ma?"

"Sure."

"You promise you won't get up to fix breakfast."

"If I don't feel good, I let you fix mine."

"Good night, little sweetheart mamma."

"You ain't--mad at me, Sam?"

"Mad! Why, ma, you mustn't ask me a--a thing like that; it just kills me to hear you. Me that's not even fit to black your shoes! Mad at you? Why, I--I--Good night--good--night--ma."

* * * * *

At just fifteen minutes before seven, to the pungency of coffee and the harsh sing of water across the hall, Mrs. Lipkind in a fuzzy wrapper the color of her eyes and hair, kissed her son awake.

"Sam! Sammy! Get up! _Thu, thu_! I can't get him up in the morning!"

The snuggle away and into the crotch of his elbow.

"Sam-my--quarter to seven!"

He sprang up then, haggard, but in a flood of recollection and remorse. "Ma, I must 'a' dropped off at the last minute. You all right? What are you doing up? Go right back! Didn't I tell you not to get up?"

"I been up an hour already; that's how fine I feel. Get up, Sammy; it's late."

He flung on his robe, trying to withdraw her from the business of looping back the bed-clothing over the footboard and pounding into the pillows.

"I tell you I won't have it! You got to lay in bed this morning."

"I'm all right, Sammy. Wouldn't I say so if I wasn't?" But she sat down rather weakly on the edge of the bed, holding the right side of her, breathing too hard.

"I--I shouldn't have beat that pillow is all. Let me get my breathing. I'm all right." Nevertheless, she let him relax her to his pillow, draw the covers down from the footboard, and cover her.

"This settles it," he said, quietly. "I'm going to get a doctor."

She caught his hand. "If--if you want to get me excited for sure, just you call a doctor--now--before I talk with you a minute--I want to talk--I'm all right, Sammy, if you let me talk to you. One step to that telephone, and I get excited--"

"Please, ma--"

"Sammy?"

"Yes."

"Will you listen to me and do like I want it?"

"Yes."

"I--been a bad old woman."

"That's right--break my heart."

"I got a brave boy for a son, and I want to make from him a coward."

"Ma--please!"

"I laid saying to myself all night, a mother should have such a son like mine and make things hard for him yet!"

"Please, get it all out of your head--"

"From America what has given to me everything I should hold back my son from fighting for. In war, it ain't your own flesh and blood what counts; it's the flesh and blood of your country--not, Sam? I been thinking only it's my family affair. If God lets be such a terrible thing like war, there is somewhere a good reason for it. I want you to enlist, Sammy, for your country. Not for in an office, but for where they need you. I want you to enlist to get some day to be such a lieutenant and a captain like you used to play it with tin soldiers. I want--"

"Mamma, mamma, you know you don't mean it!"

"I want it, I tell you. All night I worked on it how dumb I've been, not right away to see it--last night. With Clara near you in the camp--"

"Ma, I didn't mean it that way; I--"

"Clara near you for a woman to look in on, I been so dumb not to right away see it. I'm glad you let it out, Sam. I wouldn't take five thousand dollars it didn't happen--I feel fine--I want it--I--"

"I didn't mean it, ma--I swear! Don't rub it in this way--please--please--"

"Why, I never wanted anything in my life like I want this, Sammy--that you should enlist--a woman to look in on--I been a bad woman, Sammy, I--I--oh--"

It was then that Mr. Lipkind tore to the telephone, his hands so frenzied that they would not properly hold the receiver.

At eight o'clock, and without even a further word, Mrs. Lipkind breathed out quietly, a little tiredly, and yet so eloquent of eye. To her son, pleading there beside her for the life she had not left to give, it was as if the swollen bosom of some stream were carrying her rapidly but gently down its surface, her gaze back at him and begging him to stay the current.

"Mamma! Darling! Doctor--please--for God's sakes--please--she wants something---she can't say it--give it to her! Try to make her tell me what she wants--she wants something--this is terrible--don't let her want something--mamma--just one word to me--try--try--O my God--Doctor--"

A black arm then reached down to withdraw him from the glazed stare which had begun to set in from the pillow.

By ten o'clock a light snow had set in, blowing almost horizontally across the window-pane. He sat his second hour there in a rather forward huddle beside the drawn shade of that window, the _sotto-voce_ comings and goings, all the black-coated _parvenus_ that follow the wake of death, moving about him. A clock shaped like a pilot's wheel, a boyhood property which had marked the time of twenty years, finally chimed the thin, tin stroke of eleven and after a swimming, nebulous interval, twelve. He glanced up each time with his swollen eyes, and then almost automatically out to the wall telephone in the hall opposite the open door. But he did not move. In fact, for two more hours sat there impervious to proffered warmth of word or deed. Meanwhile, the snow behind the drawn shade had turned to rain that beat and washed against the pane.

Just so the iciness that had locked Samuel Lipkind seemed suddenly to melt in a tornado of sobs that swept him, felled him into a prostration of the terrible tears that men weep.

At a training-camp--somewhere--from his side of a tent that had flapped like a captive wing all through a wind-swept night, Lieutenant Lipkind stirred rather painfully for a final snuggle into the crotch of an elbow that was stiff with chill and night damp.

Out over the peaked city that had been pitched rather than built, and on beyond over the frozen stubble of fields, sounded the bugle-cry of the reveille, which shrills so potently:

I can't get 'em up; I can't get 'em up; I can't get 'em up in the morn--ing!

EVEN AS YOU AND I

There is an intensity about September noonday on Coney Island, aided and abetted by tin roofs, metallic facades, gilt domes, looking-glass fronts, jeweled spires, screaming peanut and frankfurter-stands, which has not its peculiar kind of equal this side of opalescent Tangiers. Here the sea air can become a sort of hot camphor-ice to the cheek, the sea itself a percolator, boiling up against a glass surface. Beneath the tin roofs of Ocean Avenue the indoor heat takes on the kind of intense density that is cotton in the mouth and ringing in the ears.

At one o'clock the jibberwock exteriors of Ocean Avenue begin fantastic signs of life. The House of Folly breaks out, over its entire facade, into a chicken-pox of red and green, blue and purple, yellow, violet, and gold electric bulbs. The Ocean Waves concession begins its side-splitting undulations. Maha Mahadra, India's foremost soothsayer (down in police, divorce, and night courts as Mamie Jones, May Costello, and Mabel Brown, respectively), loops back her spangled portiere. The Baby Incubator slides open its ticket-windows. Five carousals begin to whang. A row of hula-hula girls in paper necklaces appears outside of "Hawaii," gelatinously naughty and insinuating of hip. There begins a razzling of the razzle-dazzle. Shooting-galleries begin to snipe into the glittering noon, and the smell of hot spiced sausages and stale malt to lay on the air.

Before the Palace of Freaks, a barker slanted up his megaphone, baying to the sun:

"Y-e-a-o-u! Y-e-a-o-u! The greatest show on the Island! Ten cents to see the greatest freak congress in the world. Shapiro's freaks are gathered from every corner of the universe. Enter and shake hands with Baron de Ross, the children's delight, the world's smallest human being; age, forty-two years, eight months; height, twenty-eight inches; weight, fourteen and one-half pounds, certified scales. Enter and see the original and only authentic Siamese Twins! The Ossified Man! You are cordially invited to stick pins into this mystery of the whole medical world. Jastrow, the world's most famous strong man end glass-eater, will perform his world-startling feats. Show about to begin! Our glass-eater eats glass, not rock candy--any one doubting same can sample it first. We have on view within, and all included in your ten-cents admission, the famous Teenie, absolutely the heaviest woman in captivity. We guarantee Teenie to tip the certified scales at five hundred and fifty-five, a weight unsurpassed by any of the heavyweights in the history of the show business. Come in and fox-trot with Teenie, the world wonder. Come in and fox-trot with her. Show begins immediately. Y-e-a-o-u! Y-e-a-o-u!"

Within the Palace of Freaks, her platform elevated and railed in against the unduly curious, Miss Luella Hoag, all that she was so raucously purported to be, sat back in her chair, as much in the attitude of relaxing as her proportions would permit.

There is no way in which I can hope to salve your offended estheticisms with any of Miss Hoag's better points. What matters it that her skin was not without the rich quality of cream too thick to pour, when her arms fairly dimpled and billowed of this creaminess, and above her rather small ankles her made-to-order red-satin shoes bulged over of it, the low-cut bosom of her red and sequin dress was a terrific expanse of it, her hands small cushions of it, her throat quivery, and her walk a waddle with it. All but her face; it was as if the suet-like inundation of the flesh had not dared here. The chin was only slightly doubled; the cheeks just a shade too plump. Neither was the eye heavy of lid or sunk down behind a ridge of cheek. Between her eyes and upper lip, Miss Hoag looked her just-turned twenty; beyond them, she was antediluvian, deluged, smothered beneath the creamy billows and billows of self.

And yet, sunk there like a flower-seed planted too deeply to push its way up to bloom, the twenty-year-old heart of Miss Hoag beat beneath its carbonaceous layer upon layer, even skipped a beat at spring's palpitating sweetness, dared to dream of love, weep of desire, ache of loneliness and loveliness.

Isolated thus by the flesh, the spirit, too, had been caught in nature's sebaceous trick upon Miss Hoag. Life had passed her by slimly. But Miss Hoag's redundancy was not all literal. A sixth and saving sense of humor lay like a coating of tallow protecting the surface of her. For nature's vagary, she was pensioned on life's pay-roll at eighteen dollars a week.

"Easy money, friends," Miss Hoag would _ad lib_. to the line-up outside her railing; "how would some of you like to sit back and draw your wages just for the color of your hair or the size of your shoes? You there, that sailor boy down there, how'd you like to have a fox-trot with Teenie? Something to tell the Jackies about. Come on, Jack Tar, I'm light on my feet, but I won't guarantee what I'll be on yours. Step up and have a round."

Usually the crowd would turn sheepish and dissolve at this Terpischorean threat. In fact, it was Miss Hoag's method of accomplishing just that.

In the August high noon of the Coney Island Freak Palace, which is the time and scene of my daring to introduce to you the only under-thirty-years, and over-one-hundred-and-thirty-pounds, heroine in the history of fiction, the megaphone's catch of the day's first dribble of humanity and inhumanity had not yet begun its staring, gaping invasion.

A curtain of heat that was almost tangible hung from the glass roof. The Ossified Man, sworn by clause of contact impervious alike to heat and cold, urged his reclining wheel-chair an imperceptible inch toward the neighboring sway of Miss Hoag's palm-leaf. She widened its arc, subtly.

"Ain't it a fright?" she said.

"Sacred Mother of the Sacred Child!" said the Ossified Man, in a _patois_ of very south Italy.

Then Miss Hoag turned to the right, a rail partitioning her from the highly popular spectacle of the Baron de Ross, christened, married, and to be buried by his nomenclature in disuse, Edwin Ross MacGregor.

"Hot, honey?"

The Baron, in a toy rocker that easily contained him, turned upon Miss Hoag a face so anachronistic that the senses reeled back. An old face, as if carved out of a paleolithic cherry-stone; the years furrowed in; the eyes as if they had seen, without marveling, the light of creation; even the hands, braceleted in what might have been portiere-rings, leanly prehensile. When the Baron spoke, his voice was not unlike the middle C of an old harpsichord whose wires long since had rusted and died. He was frock-coated like a clergyman or a park statue of a patriot.

Of face, a Chaldean sire; of dress, a miniature apotheosis of the tailor's art; of form, a paleolithic child.

"Blow me to a ice-cream cone? Gowann, Teenie, have a heart!"

Miss Hoag billowed into silent laughter. "Little devil! That's six you've sponged off me this week, you little whipper-snapper!"

The Baron screwed up into the tightest of grimaces.

"Nice Teenie--nice old Teenie!"

She tossed him a coin from the small saucerful of them on the table beside her. He caught it with the simian agility of his tiny hands.

"Nice Teenie! Nice old Teenie!"

A first group had strolled up, indolent and insolent at the spectacle of them.

"Photographs! Photographs! Take the folks back home a signed photograph of Teenie--only ten cents, one dime. Give the kiddies a treat--signed photograph of little Teenie!"

She would solicit thus, canorous of phrase, a fan of her cardboard likenesses held out, invitational.

Occasionally there were sales, the coins rattling down into the china saucer beside her; oftener a mere bombardment of insolence and indolence, occasionally a question.

This day from a motorman, loitering in uniform between runs, "Say, skinnay, whatcha weigh?"

Whatever of living tissue may have shrunk and quivered deep beneath the surface of Miss Hoag was further insulated by a certain professional pride--that of the champion middleweight for his cauliflower ear, of the beauty for the tiny mole where her neck is whitest, the _ballerina_ for her double joints.

"Wanna come up and dance with me and find out?"

"O Lord!"--receding from the crowd and its trail of laughter. "O Lord! Excuse me. Good night!"

A CHILD: Missus, is all of you just one lady?

"Bless your heart, little pettie, they gimme a good measure, didn't they? Here's a chocolate drop for the little pettie."

"Come away! Don't take nothing from her!"

"I wouldn't hurt your little girl, lady. I wouldn't harm a pretty hair of her head; I love the kiddies."

"Good-by, missus."

"Good-by, little pettie."

A MAN: Say, was you born in captivity--in this line o' work, I mean?

"Law, no, friend! I never seen the light of the show business up to eight year ago. There wasn't a member of my family, all dead and put away now, weighed more 'n one-fifty. They say it of my mother, she was married at ninety pounds and died at a hundred and six."

"You don't say so."

"I was born and raised on a farm out in Ohio. Bet not far from your part of the country, from the looks of you, friend. Buckeye?"

"Not a bad guess at that--Indiana's mine."

"Law! to my way of thinking, there's no part of the Union got anything on the Middle States. Knock me around all you want, I always say, but let me be buried in the Buckeye State. Photographs? Signed photographs at ten cents each. Take one home to the wife, friend, out in Indiana. Come, friends, what's a dime? Ten cents!"

The crowd, treacle-slow, and swinging its children shoulder-high, would shuffle on, pause next at the falsetto exhortations of the Baron, then on to the collapsibilities of the Boneless Wonder, the flexuosities of the Snake-charmer, the goose-fleshing, the terrible crunching of Jastrow the Granite Jaw. A commotion, this last, not unlike the steam-roller leveling of a rock road.

Miss Hoag retired then back to her chair, readjusting the photographs to their table display, wielding her fan largely.

"Lord!" she said, across the right railing, "wouldn't this weather fry you!"

The Baron wilted to a mock swoon, his little legs stiffening at a hypotenuse.

"Ice-cream cone!" he cried. "Ice-cream cone, or I faint!"

"Poor Jastrow! Just listen to him! Honest, that grinding goes right through me. He hadn't ought to be showing to-day, after the way they had to have the doctor in on him last night. He hadn't ought to be eating that nasty glass."

"Ain't it awful, Mabel!"

"Yes, it's awful, Mabel! A fellow snagging up his insides like Jastrow. I never knew a glass-eating artist in my life that lived to old age. I was showing once with a pair of glass-eating sisters, the Twins Delamar, as fine a pair of girls as ever--"

"Sure, the Delamars--I know 'em."

"Remember the specialty they carried, stepping on a piece of plate glass and feeding each other with the grounds--"

"Sure."

"Well, I sat up for three weeks running, with one of them girls--the red-haired one, till she died off of sorosis of the liver--"

"Sure enough--Lizzie Delamar!"

"Lida, the other one, is still carrying the act on street-fair time, but it won't surprise me to hear of her next. That's what'll happen to Granite Jaw one of these days, too, if he--"

"Pretty soft on the Granite Jaw, ain't cha? M-m-n! Yum-yum! Pretty soft!" When the Baron mouthed he became in expression Punchinello with his finger alongside his nose, his face tightening and knotting into cunning. "Pretty soft on the Granite Jaw! Yum--yum--yum!"

"Little devil! Little devil! I'll catch you and spank you to death."

"Yum! Yum!"

"It's better to have loved a short man Than never to have loved atall."

"Little peewee, you! Jastrow ain't short. Them thick, strong-necked kind never look their height. That boy is five feet two, if he's an inch. Them stocky ones is the build that make the strong kind. Looka him lift up that cannon-ball with just his left hand. B-r-r-r-r! Listen how it shakes the place when he lets its fall! Looka! Honest, it makes me sick! It's a wonder he don't kill himself."

"Better to have loved a short man Than never to have loved atall."