Part 14

"See, Poil! Wake up a minute, papa, and listen. When I mentioned Max Teitlebaum, papa, you always said a grand boy like one of the Teitlebaum boys, with such prospects, ain't got no time for a goil like our Poil. Always I told you that you got to work up the appetite. See, papa, how things work out! See, Poil! What else did he have to say, Izzy--he likes her, eh?"

Isadore turned on his side and flecked a rim of ash off his cigarette with a manicured forefinger.

"Don't get excited too soon, ma. He didn't come out plain and say anything, but I guess a boy like Max Teitlebaum thinks we don't need a brick house to fall on us."

"What you mean, Izzy?"

"What I mean? Say, ain't it as plain as the nose on your face? You don't need two brick houses to fall on you, do you?"

Mrs. Binswanger admitted to a mental phthisis, and threw out her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"Believe me, Izzy, maybe I am dumb. So bad my head works when your papa worries me, but what you mean I don't know."

"Me neither, Izzy!"

"Say, there ain't much to tell. He likes Pearlie--that much he wasn't bashful to me about. He likes Pearlie, and he wants to go in the general store and ladies' furnishing goods business. Just clothing like his father's store he hates. Why should he stay in a business, he says, that is already built up? His two married brothers, he says, is enough with his father in the one business."

"Such an ambitious boy always anxious to do for hisself. I wish, Izzy, you had some of his ambitions. You hear, Poil, in the same business as papa he wants to go?"

Mrs. Binswanger rocked complacently, a smile crawled across her lips, and she nodded rhythmically to the tilting of her rocking-chair, her eyes closed in the pleasant phantasmagoria of a dream.

Mr. Binswanger slumped lower in his chair.

"A good head for business that Max Teitlebaum has on him. Like your mamma says, Izzy, you should have one just half so good."

"There you go again, pa, pickin', pickin'! If you'd give a fellow a start and lend him a little capital--I'd have some ambition, too, and start for myself."

Mr. Binswanger leaped forward full stretch, as a jetty of flame shoots through a stream of oil.

"For yourself! On what? From where would I get it? Cut it out from my heart? Two months already I begged you to come out by me in the store and see if you can't help start something to get back the trade--How we need young blood in the store to get--"

"Aw, I--"

"Five thousand dollars I give you for to lose in the ladies' ready-to-wear. Another white elephant we need in the family yet. Not five thousand dollars outside my insurance I got to my name, and even if I did have it I wouldn't--"

"Julius!"

"I mean it, so help me! Even if I did have it, not a cent to a boy what don't listen to his old father."

"For God's sakes, pa, quit your hollering; if you ain't got it to your name I'm sorry for Pearlie."

"For me?"

"You think, pa, a boy like Max Teitlebaum, a boy that banker Finburg's daughter is crazy after, is getting married only because you got a nice daughter?"

"What do you mean, Izzy?"

"The woods are full of 'em just as nice. I didn't need no brick house to fall on me to-day at lunch. He didn't come right out and say nothing, but when he said he wanted to get in a business he could build up, right away I seen what he meant."

"What?"

"Sure I seen it. I guess his father gives him six or seven thousand dollars to get his start, and just so much he wants from the girl's side. He can get it easy, too. If--if you'd fork over, pa, I--him and I could start maybe together and--"

"You--you--"

"Your papa, Izzy, can do for his girl just like the best can do for theirs Julius, can't you?"

"_Gott in Himmel!_ I--I--you--you pack of wolfs, you!"

"Such names you can't call your wife, Julius! Just let me tell you that! Such names you can't call me!"

Anger trembled in Mrs. Binswanger's vocal cords like current running over a wire. But Mr. Binswanger sprang suddenly to his feet and crashed the white knuckles of his clenched fist down on the table with a force that broke the flesh. The red lights of anger lay mirrored in the pool of his eyes like danger lanterns on a dark bridge are reflected in black water.

"Wolfs--wolfs, all of you! You--you--to-night you got me where I am at an end! To-night you got to _know_--I--I can't keep it in no more--you got--to _know_ to-night--to-night!"

His voice caught in a tight knot of strangulation; he was dithering and palsied.

"To-night--you--you got to know!"

A sudden trembling took Mrs. Binswanger.

"For God's sakes, know what, Julius--know what?"

"I'm done for! I'm gone under! Till it happened you wouldn't believe me. Two years I seen it coming, two years I been fightin' and fightin'--fightin' it by myself! And now for yourselves you look in the papers two weeks from to-morrow, the first of March, and see--I'm done for--I'm gone under, I--"

"Julius--my God, you--you ain't, Julius, you ain't!"

His voice rose like a gale.

"I'm gone under--I ain't got twenty cents on the dollar. I'm gone, Becky. Beat up! To-morrow two weeks the creditors, they're on me! My last extension expires, and they're on me. I been fightin' and fightin'. Twenty cents on the dollar I can't meet, Becky--I can't, Becky, I can't! I been fightin' and fightin', but I can't, Becky--I--can't! I'm gone!"

"Pa."

"Julius, Julius, for God's sakes, you--you don't mean it, Julius--you--don't--mean it--you're fooling us--Julius!"

Small, cold tears welled to the corners of his eyes.

"I'm gone, Becky--and now he--he wants the shirt off my back--he can have it, God knows. But--but--_ach_, Becky--I--I wish I could have saved _you_--but that a man twice so strong as his father--_ach, Gott_, what--what's the use? I'm gone, Becky, gone!"

Mr. Isadore Binswanger swung to his feet and regarded his parent with the dazed eyes of a sleepwalker awakening on a perilous ledge.

"Aw, pa, for--for God's sake, why didn't you tell a fellow? I--we--aw, pa, I--I can knuckle down if I got to. Gee whiz! how was a fellow to know? You--you been cuttin' up about everything since--since we was kids; aw, pa--please--gimme a chance, pa, I can knuckle down--pa--pa!"

He approached the racked form of his father as if he would throw himself a stepping-stone at his feet, and then because his voice stuck in his throat and ached until the tears sprang to his eyes he turned suddenly and went out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

The echo hung for a moment.

Miss Binswanger lay whitely in her chair, weakened as if the blood had flowed out of her heart. From the granitoid square at the base of the air-shaft came the rattle of after-dinner dishes and the babble of dialect. Mr. Binswanger wept the tears of physical weakness.

"I--I'm gone, Becky. What you want for Poil I can't do. I'm gone under. We got to start over again. It was the interurban done it, Becky. I needed new capital to meet the new competition. I--I could have stood up under it then, Becky, but--but--"

"_Ach_, my husband--for myself I don't care. _Ach_, my husband."

"I--I'm gone, Becky--gone."

He rose to his feet and shambled feebly to his bedroom, his fingers feeling of the furniture for support, and his breath coming in the long wheezes of dry tears. And in the cradle of her mother's arms Miss Binswanger wept the hot tears of black despair; they seeped through the showy lace yoke and scalded her mother's heart.

"Oh, my baby! _Ach_, my husband! A good man like him, a good man like him!"

"Don't cry, mamma, don't--cry."

"Nothing he ever refused me, and now when we should be able to do for our children and--"

"Don't cry, mamma, don't cry."

"If--if he had the money--for a boy like Max--he'd give it, Poil. Such a good husband--such--_ach_, I go me in to papa now--poor papa. I've been bad, Poil; we must make it up to him; we--"

"'Sh-h-h!"

"We got to start over again, Poil--to the bone I'll work my fingers, I--"

"'Shh-h-h, mamma,'sh-h-h--somebody's knocking."

They raised their tear-ravaged faces in the attitude of listening, their eyes salt-bitten and glazed.

"It's--it's Izzy, baby. See how sorry he gets right away. He ain't a bad boy, Poil, only always I've spoilt him. Come in, my boy--come in, and go in to your papa."

The door swung open and fanned backward the stale air in a sharp gust, and the women sprang apart mechanically as automatons, the sagging, open-mouthed vacuity of surprise on Mrs. Binswanger's face, the tears still wet on her daughter's cheeks and lying lightly on her lashes like dew.

"Mr. Teitlebaum."

"Max!"

Mr. Teitlebaum hesitated at the threshold, the flavor of his amorous spirit tasty on his lips and curving them into a smile.

"That's my name! Hello, Pearlie girlie! How-dye-do, Mrs. Binswanger--what what--"

He regarded them with dark, quiet eyes, the quick red of embarrassment running high in his face and under his tight-fitting cap of close-nap black hair.

"Ah, excuse me; I might have known. I--I'm too early. Like my mother says, I was in such a hurry to--to get back here again I--I nearly got out and pushed the Subway--I--you must excuse me. I--"

"No, no; sit down, Mr. Teitlebaum. Pearlie ain't feelin' so well this evening; she's all right now, though. Such a cold she's got, ain't you, Poil?"

"Yes--yes. Such a cold I got. Sit--sit down, Max."

He regarded her with the rims of his eyes stretched wide in anxiety.

"Down at supper so well you looked, Pearlie; I says to my mother, like a flower you looked."

A fog of tears rose sheer before her.

"Her papa, Mr. Teitlebaum, he ain't so well, neither. Just now he went to bed, and he--he said to you I should give his excuses."

"So! Ain't that too bad, now!"

"Sit down, Max, there, next to mamma."

He leaned across the table toward the little huddle of her figure, the gentle villanelle of his emotions writ frankly across his features.

"Pearlie--"

"She'll be all right in a minute, Mr. Teitlebaum--like her papa she is, always so afraid of a little sickness."

"Pearlie, ain't you going to look at me?"

She sprang from his light hand on her shoulder, and the tears grew to little globules, trembled, fell. Then a sudden rod of resolution straightened her back.

"We--I been lying to you, Max; I ain't--sick!"

"Poil!"

"I--I think I know, little Pearlie!"

"Poil!"

"No, no; it's best we tell the truth, mamma."

"Ya, ya. Oh, my--"

"We--we're in big trouble, Max. Business trouble. The store, ever--ever since the traction--it ain't been the same."

"I know, little Pearlie. I--"

"Wait a minute, Max. We--we ain't what you maybe think we are. To-morrow two weeks we got to meet creditors and extension notes. We can't pay with even twenty cents on the dollar. We're gone under, Max!"

"I--"

"We ain't got it to meet them with. Papa--if a man like papa couldn't make it go nobody could--"

"Such a man, Mr. Teitlebaum, so honest, so--"

"Shh-h-h, mamma."

"It's our--my fault, Max. He was afraid even last year, but I--even then I was the one that wanted the expense of the city. Mamma didn't want it--he didn't--it--was me--I--I--"

"My fault, too, Poil--_ach, Gott_, my fault! How I drove him! How I drove him!"

"We--we got to go back home, Max. We're going back and help him to begin over again. We--we been driving him like a pack of wolves. He never could refuse nobody nothing. If he thought mamma wanted the moon up he was ready to go for it; even when we was kids he--"

"_Ach_, my husband, such a good provider he's always been! Such a husband!"

"Always we got our way out of him. But to- night--to-night, Max, right here in this chair all _little_ he looked all of a sudden. So little! His back all crooked and all tired and--and I done it, Max--I ain't what you think I am--oh, God, I done it!"

"_Ach_, my--"

"Don't cry, mamma. 'Sh-h-h-h! Ain't you ashamed, with Mr. Teitlebaum standing right here? You must excuse her, Max, so terrible upset she is. 'Sh-h-h-h, mamma--'sh-h-h-h! We're going back home and begin over again. 'Sh-h-h-h! You won't have to dress for supper no more like you hate. We'll be home in time for your strawberry-preserves season, mamma, and rhubarb stew out of the garden, like papa loves. 'Sh-h-h-h! You must excuse her, Max--you must excuse me, too, to-night--you--come some other time--please."

"Pearlie!" He came closer to the circle of light, and his large features came out boldly. "Pearlie, don't you cry neither, little girl--"

"I--I ain't."

"All what you tell me I know already."

"Max!"

"Mr. Teitlebaum!"

"You must excuse me, Mrs. Binswanger, but in nearly the same line of business news like that travels faster than you think. Only to-day I heard for sure--how--shaky things stand. You got my sympathies, Mrs. Binswanger, but--but such a failure don't need to happen."

Mrs. Binswanger clutched two hands around a throat too dry to swallow.

"He can't stand it. He isn't strong enough. It will kill him. Always so honest to the last penny he's been, Mr. Teitlebaum, but never when he used to complain would I believe him. Always a great one for a poor mouth he was, Mr. Teitlebaum, even when he had it. So plain he always was, and now I--I've broke him--I--I--"

"'Sh-h-h-h, mamma! Do you want papa should hear you in the next room? 'Sh-h-h-h! Please, you must excuse her, Max."

"Pearlie"--he placed his hand lightly on her shoulder--"Pearlie--Mrs. Binswanger, you must excuse me, too, but I got to say it--while--while I got the courage. Can't you guess it, little Pearlie? I'm in love with you. I'm in love with you, Pearlie, since the first month you came to this hotel to live."

"Max!"

"_Ach, Gott!_"

"I only got this to say to you: I love you, little Pearlie. To-day, when I heard the news, I was sorry, Pearlie, and--and glad, too. It made things look easier for me. Right away I invited Izzy to lunch so like a school-boy I could hint. I--two years I been wanting to get out of the store, Pearlie, where there ain't a chance for me to build up nothing. Like I told Izzy to-day, I want to find a run-down business that needs building up where I can accomplish things."

"Max!"

"I wanted him to know what I meant, but like--like a school-boy so mixed up I got. Eight thousand dollars I got laying for a opening. This failure--this failure don't need to happen, Pearlie. With new capital and new blood we don't need to be afraid of tractions and competitions--with me and Izzy, and my eight thousand dollars put in out there, we--we--but this ain't no time to talk business. I--you must excuse me, Mrs. Binswanger, but--but--"

"Poil, my baby! Max!"

"I love you, Pearlie girlie. Ever since we been in the same hotel together, when I seen you every day fresh like a flower and so fine, I--I been heels over head in love with you, Pearlie. You should know how my father and my married brothers tease me. I--I love you, Pearlie--"

She relaxed to his approaching arms, and let her head fall back to his shoulder so that her face, upturned to his, was like a dark flower, and he kissed her where the tears lay wet on her petal-smooth cheeks and on her lips that trembled.

"Max!"

"My little girlie!"

Mrs. Binswanger groped through tear-blinded eyes.

"This--this--ain't no place for a--old woman, children--this--this--_ach_, what I'm sayin' I don't know! Like in a dream I feel."

"Me, too, mamma; me, too. Like a dream. Ah, Max!"

"I tiptoe in and surprise papa, children. I surprise papa. _Ach_, my children, my children, like in a dream I feel."

She smiled at them with the tears streaming from her face like rain down a window-pane, opened the door to the room adjoining gently, and closed it more gently behind her. Her face was bathed in a peace that swam deep in her eyes like reflected moonlight trailing down on a lagoon, her lips trembled in the hysteria of too many emotions. She held the silence for a moment, and remained with her wide back to the door, peering across the dim-lit room at the curve-backed outline of her husband's figure, hunched in a sitting posture on the side of the bed.

Beside him on the white coverlet a green tin box with a convex top like a miniature trunk lay on one end, its contents, bits of old-fashioned jewelry, and a folded blue document with a splashy red seal, scattered about the bed.

She could hear him wheeze out the moany, long-drawn breaths that characterized his sleepless nights, his face the color of old ivory, wry and etched in the agony of carrying his trembling palm closer, closer to his mouth.

Suddenly Mrs. Binswanger cried out, a cry that was born in the unexplored regions of her heart, wild, primordial, full of terror.

It was as if fear had churned her blood too thick to flow, and through her paralysis tore the spasm of a half-articulate shriek.

"Jule--Jule-ius--Jule-ius!"

His hand jerked from his lips reflexly, so that the six small pink tablets in the trembling palm rolled to the corners of the room. His blood-driven face fell backward against the pillow, and he relaxed frankly into short, dry sobs, hollow and hacking like the coughing of a cat. His feet lay in the little heap of jewelry and across the crumpled insurance policy.

"Becky--it--it's all what I--I could do--it's--it--"

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

She dragged her trembling limbs across the room to his side. She held him to her so close that the showy lace yoke transformed its imprint from her bosom to the flesh of his cheek. She could feel his sobs of hysteria beating against her breast, and her own tears flowed.

They racked her like a storm tearing on the mad wings of a gale; they scalded down her cheeks into the furrows of her neck. She held him tight in the madness of panic and exultation, and his arm crept around her wide waist, and his tired head relaxed to her breast, and her hands were locked tight about him and would not let him go.

"We--we're going _home_, Julius--we--we're going home."

"Ya, ya, Becky, it's--it's all right. Ya, ya, Becky."

SUPERMAN

The canker of the city is loneliness. It flourishes--an insidious paradox--where men meet nose to nose in Subway rushes and live layer on layer in thousand-tenant tenement houses. It thrives in three-dollars-a-week fourth-floor back rooms, so thinly partitioned that the crumple of the rejection-slip and the sobs of the class poetess from Molino, Missouri, percolate to the four-dollars-a-week fourth-floor front and fuddle the piano salesman's evening game of solitaire. It is a malignant parasite, which eats through the thin walls of hall bedrooms and the thick walls of gold bedrooms, and eats out the hearts it finds there, leaving them black and empty, like untenanted houses.

Sometimes love sees the To Let sign, hangs white Swiss curtains at the window, paints the shutters green, plants a bed of red geraniums in the front yard, and moves in. Again, no tenant applies; the house mildews with the damp of its own emptiness; children run when they pass it after dark; and the threshold decays. The heart must be tenanted or it falls out of repair and rots. Doctors called in the watches of the night to resuscitate such hearts climb out of bed reluctantly. It is a malady beyond the ken of the stethoscope.

One such heart beat in a woman's breast so rapidly that it crowded out her breath; and she pushed the cotton coverlet back from her bosom, rose to her elbow, and leaned out beyond her bed into the darkness of the room.

"Jimmie? Essie? That you, Jimmie?"

The thumping of her heart answered her, and the loud ticking of a clock that was inaudible during the day suddenly filled the third-floor rear room of the third-floor rear apartment. The continual din of the street slumped to the intermittent din of late evening; the last graphophone in the building observed the nine-o'clock silence clause of the lease at something after ten, and scratched its last syncopated dance theme into the tired recording disk of the last tired brain. An upholstered chair, sunk in the room's pool of darkness, trembled on its own tautened springs, and the woman trembled of that same tautness and leaned farther out.

"Who's there? That you, Jimmie?"

Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock!

She huddled the coverlet up under her chin and lay back on her pillow, but with her body so rigid that only half her weight relaxed to the mattress; and behind her tight-closed eyes flaming wheels revolved against the lids. Tears ran backward toward her ears like spectacle-frames and soaked into the pillow, a mouse with a thousand feet scurried between the walls.

"Essie? Jimmie, that you?"

Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock!

More tears leaked out from her closed eyes and found their way to her mouth, so that she could taste their salt. Then for a slight moment she dozed, with her body at full stretch and hardly raising the coverlet, and her thin cheek cupped in the palm of her thin hand. The mouse scurried in a light rain of falling plaster, and she woke with her pulse pounding in her ears.

"Jimmie? Jimmie? Who's there?"

Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock!

Sobs trembled through her and set the bed-springs vibrating, and she buried her head under her flat pillow and fell to counting the immemorial procession of phantom sheep that graze the black grasses of the Land of Wakeful Hours and lead their sleepless shepherds through the long, long, long pastures of the night.

"Three hundred 'n' five; three hundred 'n' six; three hundred 'n' seven; three hundred 'n'--Jimmie?"

A key scratched at the outer lock, and she sprang two-thirds from the bed, dragging the coverlet from its moorings.

"Jimmie, that you?"

"Sure, ma! 'Smatter?"

She relaxed as though her muscles had suddenly snapped, her tense toes and fingers uncurled, and the blood flowed back.

"I--Nothin', Jimmie; I was just wondering if that was you."

"No, ma; it ain't me--it's my valet coming home from a dance at his Pressing Club. You ain't sick, are you, ma?"

"No. What time is it, Jimmie? It's so dark."

"You been havin' one of your spells again, ma?"

"No, no, Jimmie."

"Didn't you promise to keep a light going?"

"I'm all right."

"Ouch! Geewhillikins, ma, if you'd burn half a dime's worth of gas till me and Essie get home from work nights we'd save it in wear and tear on our shins. I ain't got no more hips left than a snake."

"It's a waste, Jimmie boy; gas comes so high."

"You should worry, ma! Watch me light 'er up!"

"Be careful in there, Jimmie! Stand on a chair. I got a little supper spread out on the table for Essie and her friend. You take a sandwich yourself--"

"Forty cents in tips to-day, ma."

"Forty cents!"

"Yeh; and a dame in Seventieth Street gimme a quarter and hugged the daylights out of me till my brass buttons made holes in me and cried brineys all over the telegram, and made me read it out loud twice, once for each ear: 'Unhurt, Sweetheart, and homeward bound--Bill.' Can you beat it? Five cents a word!"

"Jimmie, wasn't you glad to carry her a message like that?"

"It's a paying business, ma, if you're lucky enough to deal only in good news."

A chair squealed on its castors, a patch of light sprang through the transom, and the chocolate-ocher bedroom and its chocolate-ocher furniture emerged into a chocolate-ocher half-light.

"Jimmie?"

"Huh?"

"I'm--I wish--Oh, nothin'!"

"Ain't you feelin' right, in there, ma?"

"Yes, Jimmie; but--but come in and talk to your old mother awhile, my boy."

"Surest thing you know! Say, these are some sandwiches! You must 'a' struck pay-dirt in your sardine-mine, ma."

"They're for her gen'l'man friend, Jimmie."

The door flung open and threw an island of light pat on the bed. In the gauzy stream the face on the pillow, with the skin drawn over the cheeks tight as a vellum on a snare-drum, was vague as a head by Carriere after he had begun to paint through the sad film of his growing blindness.

"Jimmie, my boy!"

"Hello, ma!"