Part 17

"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!"

"Ain't your cheeks cold, though, Jimmie? It's right sharp out, ain't it? And Essie in her thin coat! You—you're a little late to-night, ain't you, Jimmie?"

He drew his loose-jointed figure up from over the bedside; and his features, half-formed as a sculptor's head just emerging from the marble, took on the easy petulance of youth, and he wiped the moist lips' print off his downy cheek with the back of his hand.

"Ah, there you go again! You been layin' here frettin' and countin' the minutes again, ain't you? Gee, it makes a fellow sore when he just can't get home no sooner!"

"No, no, Jimmie; I been layin' here sleepin' sound ever since I went to bed. I woke up for the first time just now. I'm all right, Jimmie, only—only—"

"Honest, ma, you ought to ask the company to put me in short-pants uniform, day duty, carrying telegrams of the day's catechism to Sunday-school classes."

"I—Don't fuss at me, Jimmie! I—I guess I must 'a' had one of them smothering spells, and I didn't wait up for Essie and Joe to-night. I'm all right now, Jimmie—all right."

He placed his heavy hand on her brow in half-understanding sympathy.

"Geewhillikins, why don't you tell a fellow? You want some of that black medicine, ma. You—gee!—you ain't lookin' kinda blue-like round the gills, are you? Old man Gibbs said we should send for him right away if—"

"No, no, Jimmie; I'm all right now."

"Look! I brought you a carnation one of the operators gimme—one swell little queen, too. You want some of that black medicine, ma?"

"I'm all right now, Jimmie. It was just earlier in the evening I kinda had a spell. Ain't that pink pretty, though! Here, put it in the glass, and gimme a French kiss. Always ashamed like a big baby when it comes to kissin', ain't you? Ashamed to even kiss your old ma!"

"Aw!" He shuffled his feet and bent over her, with the red mounting above the gold collar of his uniform.

"And such a mamma-boy you used to be before you had to get out and hustle—such a mamma-boy, and now ashamed to give your old ma a kiss!"

"Ashamed nothin'! Here, ma, I'll smooth your hair for you the wrong way like Essie used to do when you came home from the store dead after the semiannual clearings."

"No, no, Jimmie; these days I ain't got no more hair left to smooth."

"You look good to me."

"Aw, Jimmie, quit stringing your old ma. How can a stack o' bones look good to anybody?"

"You do."

"Your papa used to say so, too, Jimmie; but in them days my hair was natural curly—little cute, springy curls like Essie's. The first day he seen me he fell for 'em; and the night before he died, Jimmie, with you and Essie asleep in your folding-cribs and me little thinkin' that the next week I'd be back in the department clerking again, he took me in his arms and—"

"Yes, yes; I know, ma—but didn't old man Gibbs say not to get excited? Lay back and don't talk, ma. I can feel your heart beatin' way down in your hands."

"You're all tired out, ain't you, Jimmie?—too tired to listen to my talk; but you're going to wait up for your sister's young man to-night, ain't you, my boy? Go wet your hair and smooth it down. You'll wanna see him, Jimmie."

"Fine chance."

"Sure he's coming to-night, Jimmie. I got their supper all waitin'; and, see, there's my flowered wrapper at the foot of the bed, so I can get up and go in when—"

"Aw, cut out the comedy, ma! She ain't comin' straight home after the show any more'n a crooked road; and if she does he ain't coming with her."

"Jimmie, she promised sure to-night."

"Didn't she promise last night and the night before and the night before that?"

"But this afternoon when she left for the matinee, Jimmie, I wasn't feelin' so well, and she promised so sure."

"Them girl ushers down there is too lively a bunch for her, ma. Ushin' in a theayter is next to bein' in the chorus—only—"