Chapter 7

"Oh, you!" she said, quirking an eye to the motorman, who quirked back.

Crossing the street, she came down rather splashily in a pool of water, wetting and staining the light slippers.

"Aw!" she repeated, scolding and stamping down at them. "Aw! Aw! You!"

Across from the gloomy pile of old Jefferson Market, she stood, reading up at an illuminated tower-clock, softly, her lips moving.

"Nine--ten--e-lev-hun--"

A dark figure slowed behind her elbow; she turned with a sense of that nearness and peered up under the lowering brim of a soft-felt hat.

"Hoddado?"

"Hello!" she answered, slyly.

"Hello!"

She peered closer.

"Got a girl?"

"Nope."

"Blow suds?"

"Where?"

"Cora's."

He flung back his coat, revealing a star.

"You're under arrest," he said, laconically. "Solicitin'. Come on; no fuss."

Her comprehension was unplumbed.

"O Lord!" she said, pressing inward at her waistline to abet laughter, following him voluntarily enough, and her voice rising. "You make me laugh. You make me laugh."

"That'll do," he said.

"Whoop la-la!"

"Now, you get noisy and watch me."

He turned in rather abruptly at a side door of the dark-red pile of building which boasted the illuminated tower-clock and a jutting ell with barred windows.

She drew back.

"No, you don't! Aw, no, you don't! Whatta you think I yam? Cora's! Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"

He shoved her with scant ceremony beyond the heavy door. She entered in one of the uncontrollable gales of laughter, the indoor heat immediately inducing the dizziness.

"Whatta you think I yam? Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"

Thirty minutes later, in a court-room as smeared of atmosphere as a dirty window, a bridge officer, reading from a slip of paper, singsonged to the sergeant-at-arms:

"Stella Schump. Officer Charles Costello."

How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend for Stella Schump the vague boundaries of the probable.

The milky-fleshed, not highly sensitized, pinkly clean creature of an innocence born mostly of ignorance and slow perceptions, who that morning had risen sweet from eleven hours of unrestless sleep beside a mother whose bed she had never missed to share, suddenly here in slatternliness! A draggled night bird caught in the aviary of night court, lips a deep vermilion scar of rouge, hair out of scallop and dragging at the pins, the too ready laugh dashing itself against what must be owned a hiccough.

Something congenital and sleeping subcutaneously beneath the surface of her had scratched through. She was herself, strangely italicized.

A judge regarded her not unkindly. There were two of him, she would keep thinking, one merging slightly into his prototype.

She stood, gazing up. Around her swam the court-room--rows of faces; comings and goings within her railed area. And heat--the dizzying, the exciting heat--and the desire to shake off the some one at her elbow. That some one was up before her now, in a chair beside the judge, and his voice was as far away as Archie Sensenbrenner's.

"And she says to me, she says, your Honor, 'Got a girl?'"

"Were those her exact words to you?"

"Yes, your Honor."

"Proceed."

"And I says to her, I says, 'No,' and then she comes up close and says to me, she says, 'Buy me a drink?'"

"Were those her exact words?"

"Yes, your Honor, as near as I can remember."

"Go on."

"And I says to her, 'Where do you want to go?' and she says to me, giving me a wink, 'Cora's.'"

"Cora's?"

"Yes, your Honor; the Cora Jones mulatto woman that was cleaned out last week."

"She suggested that you accompany her to the house of the Jones woman?"

"Beg pardon, your Honor?"

"She suggested this resort?"

"Yes, your Honor. 'Cora Jones,' she said."

Through the smoke of her bewilderment something irate stirred within Miss Schump, a smouldering sense of anger that burst out into a brief tongue of flame.

"You! You! You're no amachure! Cora Jones! Cora Kinealy! Go tell it to the great Danes! Say it again! Gimme leave! Gimme leave!" The immediate peremptoriness of the gavel set her to blinking, but did not silence. "'Gimme leave,' was what I said--"

"Come to order in the court!"

"Aw!"

A new presence at her elbow grasped her sharply. She subsided, but still muttering.

"Proceed, officer."

"And then, when she starts off with me, I says to her, I says, 'You're under arrest,' and brought her over."

"That'll do."

"Does the defendant wish to take the chair?"

From her elbow, "His Honor asks if you want to state your case."

"Huh?"

"Do you wish to state your case from the witness-chair? Since you did not employ counsel, do you wish to state your own case?"

"Nit."

"Look up here, my girl. I am the judge, trying to help you."

"Aw!"

"Is this your first offense?"

"Well, it's my offense, ain't it?"

"Address the court properly. Are you intoxicated or only slightly dizzy?"

"He lied about Cora Kinealy. He lied--that little skunk lied."

"Didn't you ask him to go there with you?"

"Sure; but he's no amachure."

"Are you?"

"What?"

"An amateur?"

"No, this Jane ain't."

"Will you go quietly into the next room with the matron and tell her all about it? The court does not want to have to deal too harshly with a girl like you. Do you want to engage counsel and have your case go over? If there is a chance, I don't want to have to send a girl like you away."

"Aw, you--you're a poodle and a great Dane!"

"Ten days," said the judge, rather wearily.

The bridge officer took up the next slip from the pile of them, his voice the droning quality of a bee bumbling through sultry air:

"Maizie Smith. Officer Jerry Dinwiddie."

* * * * *

Spring and her annual epidemic of aching hearts and aching joints had advanced ten days and ten degrees. The season's first straw replacement of derby had been noted by press. The city itched in its last days of woolens and drank sassafras tea for nine successive mornings. A commuter wore the first sweet sprig of lilac. The slightly East Sixties took to boarding up house-fronts into bland, eyeless masks. The very East Sixties began to smell.

When a strangely larger-eyed, strangely thinner, a whitened and somehow a tightened Stella Schump drew up, those ten days later, before the little old row with the little old iron balconies, there was already in the ridiculous patches of front yards a light-green powdering of grass, and from the doorbell of her own threshold there hung quite a little spray of roses, waxy white against a frond of fern and a fold of black. Deeper within that threshold, at the business of flooding its floor with a run of water from a tipped pail and sweeping harshly into it, was the vigorous, bony silhouette of Mrs. O'Connor, landlady.

For the second that it took her presence to be felt, Miss Schump stood there trembling, all of a sudden more deeply and more rapidly. Then, Mrs. O'Connor leaned out, bare arms folded atop her broom.

"So!" she said, a highly imperfect row of lower teeth seeming to jut out, and her voice wavy with brogue and vibrant to express all its scorn. "So!"

"Mrs. O'Connor--"

"So! Ye've come back in time for the buryin'! Faith, an' it's a foine toime for the showin'-up of the chief mourner! Faith now it is!"

"Mrs. O'Connor--"

"Ain't ye ashamed? Ain't ye ashamed before the Lord to face your Maker?"

"Please--please--Mrs. O'Connor--what--what--"

"The pasty-faced lyin' ways of ye! I can see now how ye look what ye are! I'd have believed it as soon of my own. It's the still water that run deep in ye, is the way your girl friend put it. The hussy under that white complexion of yours! Your sainted mither! Oh, ain't ye ashamed in the name of the Lord to face your Maker?"

"O God--please what--"

"Your sainted mither! Niver, after that letter from ye the next night after her scourin' the city, a whimper more out of her--"

"I wrote--I wrote--they gimme a stamp--I wrote--how--Where is she?"

"A cousin had called ye sudden-like for sickness was how she put it. Faith and me niver once a-smellin' the mice, the way she lay there, waitin', waitin' day after day, doubled up in the joints and waitin' for thim ten days to pass--"

"O God!"

"I found her in bed yisterday, a-clutchin' the letter, or niver to my own dyin' would I have known the shameful truth of it. It's screw open her poor hands I had to, for the readin' of the letter that had been eatin' 'er for all them days of waitin'. Ye hussy! Ye jailbird--and me niver thinkin' but what it was the sick cousin! Me niver smellin' the mice! Your own girl friend, neither. Ye hussy! Jailbird!"

"Oh! Oh! Oh!"

"It's only because she was sainted I'm lettin' ye up in on her. She layin' up there, waitin'. Strangers that crossed her poor hands on her poor breast and strangers that laid her out. Niver even a priest called in on her. She a-layin' up there, waitin'--the Lord have mercy on your soul! If ye ain't afraid before the Lord to look on her, come up. It's thankin' God I am she can't open her eyes to see ye."

Hands clutching her throat, Miss Schump remained standing there on the sun-drenched steps, gazing after the figure receding into the musty gloom of the hallway. She wanted to follow, but instead could only stand there, repeating and repeating:

"O my God! O my God! God! God! What have I done? What have I done? Mamma--mamma--mamma! O my God! What? What--"

* * * * *

In the pyramidal plot-structure of this story the line of descent is by far the sheerer. Short-story correspondence-schools would call it the brief downward action leading to denouement.

With Stella Schump it was almost a straight declivity. There were days of the black kind of inertia when to lift the head from its sullen inclination to rest chin on chest was not to be endured. There was actually something sick in the eyes, little cataracts of gray cloud seeming to float across. She would sit hunched and looking out of them so long and so unseeingly that her very stare seemed to sleep.

She had removed the stick or two that remained unsold to a little rear room high up in a large, damp-smelling lodging-house on West Twentieth Street, within view of a shipping-pier. There was a sign inserted in the lower front window:

ROOMS. LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING.

INQUIRE WITHIN.

She would sit in that room, so heavy with its odor of mildew, her window closed against the long, sweetly warm days, hunched dumbly on the cot-edge and staring into the stripe and vine, stripe and vine of the wall-paper design, or lie back when the ache along her spine began to set in. There were occasional ventures to a corner bake-shop for raisin rolls and to the delicatessen next door for a quarter-pound of Bologna sausage sliced into slivers while she waited. She would sit on the cot-edge munching alternately from sliver to roll, gulping through a throat that was continually tight with wanting to cry, yet would not relax for that relief.

There was little attempt for employment except when the twenty dollars left from the sale of effects and funeral expenses began to dwindle. She would wake up nights, sweaty with the nightmare that her room was some far-off ward for incorrigibles and that one of the strange, veiny-nosed inmates was filching her small leather bag from beneath her pillow.

When her little roll had flattened finally down to five one-dollar bills she took to daily and conscientiously buying morning papers and scanning want-advertisements as she stood at the news-stand, answering first those that were within walking-distance.

She would make a five-block detour of the Criterion rather than pass the nearer to it.

Once, returning after a fruitless tour of the smaller department stores, and borne along by the six-o'clock tide of Sixth Avenue, her heart leaped up at sight of Miss Cora Kinealy, homeward bound on her smart tall heels that clicked, arm in arm with Mabel Runyan of the notions. Standing there with her folded newspaper hugged to her and the small hand-bag dangling, Stella Schump gazed after.

It was not only the lack of references or even of experience that conspired against her every effort at employment. It was the lack of luster to the eye, an absolutely new tendency to tiptoe, a furtive lookout over her shoulder, a halting tongue, that, upon the slightest questioning, would stutter for words. Where there were application-blanks to be filled in she would pore inkily over them and, after a while, slyly crunch hers up in her hand and steal out. She was still pinkly and prettily clean, and her hair with its shining mat of plaits, high of gloss, but one Saturday half-holiday, rather than break into her last bill, she ate a three-cent frankfurter-sausage sandwich from off a not quite immaculate push-cart, leaning forward as she bit into it to save herself from the ooze of mustard. Again she had the sense of Cora Kinealy hurrying along the opposite side of the street on the tall heels that clicked. She let fall the bun into the gutter and stood there trembling.

She obtained, one later afternoon, at the instance of a window-card, the swabbing of the tiled floor of an automobile show-room. She left before her first hour was completed, crying, her finger-tips stinging, two nails broken.

Finally came that chimera of an hour when she laid down her last coin for the raisin rolls. She ate them on the cot-edge. And then, because her weekly dollar-and-twenty-five-cent room rent fell due that evening, she wrapped two fresh and self-laundered waists, some white but unlacy underwear, a mound of window-dried handkerchiefs, a little knitted shoulder-shawl so long worn by her mother, her tooth-brush and tube of paste, and all her sundry little articles no less indispensable, into a white-paper package. There were left a short woolen petticoat, too cumbersome to include, the small wooden rocker and lamp with the china shade which she had rather unexplainably held out from the dealer's inventory. She closed the door softly on them one evening and, parcel in hand, tiptoed down the stonily cold halls and out into a street of long, thin, high-stooped houses. Outside in the May evening it was as black, as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a sweater and cap nudged up to her.

"Lonesome?"

She moved on.

In Stuyvesant Square were a first few harbingers of summer scattered here and there--couples forcing the gladsome season of the dim park bench; solitary brooders who can sit so long, so droop-shouldered, and so deeply in silence. On one of these benches, beside a slim, scant-skirted, light-spatted silhouette, Stella Schump sat finally down. It was ten o'clock. There was a sense of panic, which she felt mostly at her throat, rising in her. Then she would force herself into a state of quiet, hand on bundle, nictitating, as it were--eyes opening, eyes closing. The figure beside her slid over a bit, spreading the tiny width of skirt as if to reserve the space between them.

"Workin'?"

"Huh?"

"Lord!" she said, indicating Second Avenue with a nod. "The lane's like a morgue to-night."

"Cold, ain't it?" said Stella Schump, shivering with night damp.

A figure with a tilted derby came sauntering toward them.

"Lay off my territory. I seen him first."

"Oh--sure--yes--all right."

The place in between them was filled then, the tilted derby well forward and revealing a rear bulge of head. There was an indeterminate moment of silence broken by the slim-skirted silhouette.

"Where you goin'?"

Straightening, Miss Schump could hear more.

"No place. Where you goin'?"

"I'm cold."

"Buy you a drink?"

In the shaft of arc-light Miss Schump could see the little face framed in the wan curls lift and crinkle the nose to smile.

"Come on."

She watched them recede down the narrow asphalt of the parkway. At eleven o'clock, to lessen her stiffening of joints, she walked twice the circumference of the fenced-in inclosure, finally sitting again, this time beneath a gaunt oleander that was heavy with bud.

"O God!" she kept repeating, her stress growing. "O God! God! God!"

With the lateness, footfalls were growing more and more audible, the gong of a street-car sounding out three blocks down.

"O my God!" And then in rapid succession, closing her eyes and digging her finger-nails into her palms: "Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!"

She wanted and wanted to cry, but her throat would not let her, and so she sat and sat.

There were still occasional figures moving through the little lanes and a couple or two deep in the obscurity of benches. After another while, at the remote end of her own bench, a figure sat down, lighting a pipe. She watched him pu-pu-pup. At half after eleven she slid along the bench.

"Where you goin'?"

He turned to look down.

"Eh?"

"Where you goin'?"

"No place."

"I'm cold."

"Pu-pu-pup."

"I am."

"Pu-pu-pup."

She leaned around, trying to bring her face to front his and to lift her nose to a little wrinkly smile.

"Aw, you!"

"Go home and go to bed," he said. "A nice-appearin' girl like you ought to be ashamed."

"I--ain't."

"Run along."

"Where?"

"You're barkin' up the wrong tree."

She fell silent. A chill raced through her.

"O God!" she began, under her breath. "O God! God!" Then: "Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!"

"You _are_ cold," he said, reaching out to pinch her jacket sleeve. "That's a warm coat. Where do you live?"

"Lemme alone," she said, staring out before her as if she were seeing the stripe and vine, stripe and vine.

"You got the shivers," he said. "Better go home."

"Lemme alone."

"Ain't there no way you girls can learn to behave yourselves? Here"--digging down into his pocket--"here."

"No."

"Where you live?"

"I dunno. I dunno."

"You surely know where you live."

She looked up at him in one of the rare moments of opening wide her eyes.

"I tell you I dunno."

"What's in there?"

"My--my clothes."

"Let's see."

She plucked at the knot, drawing back for him to lean to see the top layer of neatly folded waist.

"Don't," she said, withdrawing it quickly from his touch.

"Why," he said, "you poor little kid! What's got you into this mess?"

At that in his voice, such a quick, a thick, a hot layer of tears sprang to her eyes that she could not relax her throat for words.

"What got you in?"

"I--I--I dunno."

"Aw, now, yes, you do know. Try to think--take your time--what got you in?"

"I--I--can't--"

"Yes, you can. Go on; I ain't lookin' at you."

He turned off to an angle.

Her first sob burst from her, tearing her throat and ending in a tremolo of moans in her throat.

"Now, now," he said, still in profile; "that won't do. Not for a sensible little girl like you. Easy--easy--take your time--"

"You see, mister--you see, it was my--my mamma--my beautiful, darling mamma--O God!--"

"Yes, yes; it was your mamma--and then what?"

"It was my mamma, my beautiful, darling mamma! What'll I do, mister? I can't make it up to her. No way--nohow. She's gone--she's gone--"

"Easy--easy--try to keep easy."

"I used to kiss her hands when they was embroiderin'. I used to grease 'em for her all night when she screamed with the pain of 'em. I used to scream at night, too, when I was doin' my time--her there waitin'--she died alone--there waitin'--the letter they gave me the stamp for--I--I was crazy with scare when I wrote it--O God!--mamma--mamma--mamma!"

"'Sh-h-h! 'Sh-h-h! Try to keep easy."

"It was this way--O God, how was it?--it was this way--you see, me and my mamma and sometimes a friend--Cora Jones--no--no--no--Cora Kinealy--we used to sit in the lamplight--no--no--first, I was in the shoes--the children's shoes--they used to come in, little kiddies with their toes all kicked out wantin' new shoes--cute little baby-shoes that I loved to try on 'em. My friend--Cora--my friend--O God!--"

"Now, now, like a good girl--go on."

"My friend Cora--my darling little mamma--I never knew nothing about anything except me and my mamma, we--it worried her that I didn't have it like--like other girls--I--you see--you see, mister?"

"Yes, yes, I see."

Her voice, so jerked up with sobs, quieted down to a drone finally, to a low drone that talked on and on through an hour, through two. There were large, shining beads of tears flowing constantly from her cheeks, but she wiped at them unceasingly with her handkerchief and talked evenly through a new ease in her throat.

"She died, mister," she ended up finally, turning her salt-bitten eyes full upon him; "she died of that letter written when I was so full of a scared craziness from bein' in--in that place--that terrible, terrible place--but she didn't die believin' me bad. I never seen her alive again to hear it from her, but there in her--her little coffin I--I seen it in her little face, all sunk, she didn't believe it--she didn't die thinkin' me bad. Mister, did she? Did she?"

He did not answer, sitting there, drooped forward for so long that finally she put out her hand to touch his.

"Did she?"

He did not turn his face, but reached around, inclosing her wrist, pressing it, gripping it.

"Did she, mister?"

"No, no," he said, finally, "no, Stella; she didn't die thinkin' you bad."

She sighed out, eyes closing, and her quivering lips falling quiet.

"Do you think I'm bad, mister?"

"No, Stella! No! No! No! My God, no!"

"I'm cold."

"Come."

"Where?"

"I'm goin' to take you across the street there to the Young Women's Shelter Home for to-night. Just across there. See the sign? Don't be afraid, Stella. Please don't be afraid."

"I ain't."

He retied the white-paper package, tucking it up under one arm.

"Come, Stella."

She rose, swaying for the merest second. His arm shot out.

"I'm all right," she said, steadying herself, smilingly, shamefacedly, but relaxing gratefully enough to the flung support.

"Don't be afraid, Stella," he said. "I'm here. I'm here."

His forearm where the cuff had ridden up bore a scar, as if molten lead had run a fiery, a dagger-shaped, an excoriating course.

WHITE GOODS

On a slope a white sprinkling of wood anemones lay spread like a patch of linen bleaching in the sun. From a valley a lark cut a swift diagonal upward with a coloratura burst of song. A stream slipped its ice and took up its murmur where it had left off. A truant squelched his toes in the warm mud and let it ooze luxuriantly over and between them.

A mole stirred in its hole, and because spring will find a way, even down in the bargain basement of the Titanic Store, which is far below the level of the mole, Sadie Barnet, who had never seen a wood anemone and never sniffed of thaw or the wet wild smell of violets, felt the blood rise in her veins like sap, and across the aisle behind the white-goods counter Max Meltzer writhed in his woolens, and Sadie Barnet, presiding over a bin of specially priced mill-ends out mid-aisle between the white goods and the muslin underwear, leaned toward him, and her smile was as vivid as her lips.

"Say, Max, guess why I think you're like a rubber band."

Classic Delphi was never more ready with ambiguous retort.

Behind a stack of Joy-of-the-Loom bed-sheets, Max Meltzer groped for oracular divination, and his heart-beats fluttered in his voice.

"Like a rubber band?"

"Yeh."

"Give up."

"Aw, give a guess."

"Well, I don't know, Miss Sadie, unless--unless it's because I'm stuck on you."