Part 16

She finally resolved, “It’s not such a terrible! He won’t die from it and we can’t live from it. He’ll learn a lesson and I’ll earn a living.”

And the experiment continued.

It was very hard on Mendel. It was harder on Sarah and hardest on Zelde. But time subdued Mendel’s protests and improved his work.

Zelde was surprised at his altered attitude of gradual submission. It almost alarmed her. She had never really intended this radical change to last. She had expected Mendel to rebel more and more violently as time went on and finally to make a break for his freedom and exclaim, “I’m sick and tired of this slavery. I’m going to work!”

Instead he was getting actually to like it. By degrees Zelde found less to do in the house after her return from the shop. True, his work was crude and slovenly to her practiced eye. She never would have cleaned dishes as he did, with a whisk-broom, or swept dirt under the table, or boiled soup in a coffee-pot, or wiped the floor with a perfectly good skirt.

But withal, Mendel was doing things, and as his domestic craftsmanship improved, Zelde grew more disappointed and depressed. She felt that he was planning to displace her permanently. She pictured him bending over the wash-tub as she used to do; or arranging the dishes in the closet, which was once her favorite diversion; or scouring the pots and pans as only she knew how, and a genuine feeling of envy and longing seized her.

“Thief!” she was tempted to cry. “Go out from my kitchen! Give me back my apron and let alone my housework!”

For she had become nothing more than a boarder in that home, to be tolerated merely because she earned the rent. She saw the children only at supper-time, and they looked curiously at her as if they hardly recognized her.

At table all eyes were turned to pa.

“Papa, Sammy took my spoon!”

“Take his,” Mendel decreed.

“Pa, I want some more meat!”

“Take mine.”

“Pop, Lena stealed my bread!”

“Take hers.”

“Pa-ah! The thoup ith too hot. I tan’t eat it!” Jakie complained, and turned a bruised tongue to his father.

“Take some water from the sink,” was Mendel’s motherly advice.

Zelde felt like a stranger. They did not seem to know that she was present. She tried to interfere.

“Don’t put water in soup, Jakie! Better blow on it.”

But the little boy slipped down from the chair without noticing her, wriggled out from under the table, and soon returned, gaily carrying a cup of sink-water.

Her maternal instinct rebelled.

“No!” she said warningly, as Jakie tilted the cup over the plate of bean-soup.

But the child, with his eyes fixed on Mendel, poured the contents bravely.

Zelde slapped his hand, and the cup fell with a clatter. It was not a hard blow, but an impulsive one. It created a strained and awkward silence. Jakie burst into tears. He ran to Mendel and buried his little face in daddy’s lap. Lena began to whimper in sympathy.

Something snapped in Zelde. Her appetite was gone. She rose and went into the bedroom and shut the door behind her.

She did not want them to hear her sobs.

It had all turned out so different!

Instead of driving Mendel to work she had driven herself into exile. Mendel the housewife was now further from ever getting a man’s job than Mendel the idler had ever been. Zelde felt she had made a grave mistake. Rather should she have permitted him to idle and mope--he would have tired of it eventually--than that he should be wrongly occupied and contented.

If only she could undo what she had done, she’d be satisfied.

“After all, a house to manage is for a woman,” she began, bent upon re-establishing the old order. “A man should do housework? It can make him crazy yet!”

“I believe you,” Mendel conceded.

“It don’t look like housework should agree with you,” she observed.

“Looks is deceiving.”

There was a pause. A good deal of understanding passed between them.

“Mendel, hard work will kill you yet,” she insisted.

“So will idleness--in the long run. What is death? An appointment. You got to keep it some time.”

“But you don’t look good.”

“I don’t feel bad.”

Zelde became a little dizzy. Did he mean to say that he intended to stick to housework? She tried to tempt him.

“Wouldn’t you like, like you used to, to have nothing to do, and sit and cross your legs, and, without you should move, somebody should bring you hot tea?”

Mendel blew rings of smoke at the ceiling.

Zelde continued, scarcely breathing.

“And wouldn’t you like to lie on the couch with your hands together behind your head and look on the sky from the window and dream what a great inventor you are?”

An impressive silence followed. On Mendel’s face were fleeting traces of an inner struggle.

“And--I’ll clean the house,” she added softly to clear any doubts that he might still have.

Mendel shook his head.

“It’ll be too hard for you,” he said gallantly.

“It’s not such a terrible!”

“I haven’t the heart to let you,” he complained feebly.

“You’ll get over it.”

His tone became firmer.

“No! Housework is not for a woman. Like the Masora says, ‘Be good to your wife and give your children to eat.’ That means a man should clean the house and cook for his children. What is a wife? A soldier. Her place is on the field. What is a husband? A general. His place is at home!”

Zelde was chagrined.

“So this is the future what you aimed for?” she chided. “To be a washerwoman and a porter! Pooh! You ought to be ashamed to look on my face! Think what people say! They don’t know which is what! If I am the husband or if you are the wife or how!”

Mendel carefully rolled a new cigarette. There was a plaintive note in her anger. He could afford to be defiant.

“Didn’t you make me to stay home and work? So! I’m working! What is work? Pleasure!--If you know how!”

And he struck a match.

Zelde sat down to avoid falling down.

“Work is pleasure,” echoed through her mind like an explosion. Maybe solitary confinement at home every day had gone to his head. Or maybe--maybe--! She slowly repeated to herself his sally. “What is work? Pleasure!” and “What is pleasure?” she wondered. The shock of the answer almost made her scream.

So that was it! She had suspected something, but _that_ would never have occurred to her in a million years. Those floor-brushes that she found the other day under the bed, and the mop and the tin pail. They did not belong to the house. To whom _did_ they belong? She had certainly seen them somewhere before. Now she knew! At the janitor’s!

“No wonder he likes to stay home,” she muttered to herself. “I should have knew; it’s a bad sign if Mendel likes work all of a sudden!”

Her suspicions were still hypothetical, but fragments of evidence were fast falling in to shape an ominous and accusing picture.

One day, upon her return from work, Zelde found Mendel sitting near the window, restfully smoking a cigarette. His legs were crossed under his apron and his arms were folded over his lap. He gazed wistfully out upon the city.

Zelde looked about her in astonishment. The house was tidy, the kitchen spick and span, the wash dried and ironed, the floor freshly scrubbed. A model housewife would have envied the immaculate perfection of the work.

Zelde gasped. So early in the day and already through with all his work! And what work!

“Sarah, I wonder who did it,” she finally said to her daughter when she had somewhat regained her composure.

Her groping suspicions now became a startling conviction. Evidence fairly shrieked at her from every corner.

“Only a woman could do this,” she thought, overcome by the shock of the revelation.

“Who do you think?” Sarah asked innocently.

“Did you see the way she looks at me?” Zelde exclaimed with mounting fury. “No wonder she laughs in my face. No wonder she tells all the neighbors, ‘Such a fool! She works and he plays!’ No wonder!”

“What are you talking about?” Sarah inquired, bewildered.

“Never mind! Your father knows what I mean! _She_ did it! Rifke! The janitor’s wife! I know her, all right. She made eyes to Mister Mendel Marantz lots of times! She’s older from me by four years, but she paints up like a sign and makes her hair Buster Brown and thinks the men die for her. Ask your father. He knows!”

Mendel sat dumbfounded. His eyes opened like mouths.

“Don’t make believe you’re innocent. I know you men too good,” Zelde broke out violently. “I slave like a dog and that dirty old--” Tears of rage stifled her. But with a swift change of tone she added, her finger shaking under Mendel’s nose, “Mister Marantz, remember, you’ll be sorry for this.” And she walked out of the room.

Mendel was sorry for her. He turned a puzzled face to Sarah. “When the house was upside down she said I made her crazy. Now when it’s fixed up she tries to make me crazy! What’s a wife? An epidemic. If it don’t break out here, it breaks out there!”

The next day Zelde fidgeted at her work. She was prompted to fling it aside, rush home, and catch them together--Mendel and Rifke--and pull out the old vixen’s hair and scratch out her eyes. But she bided her time. Mendel was, no doubt, expecting a surprise attack and perhaps had warned his paramour to stay away.

Zelde decided to be wily. She would make believe that she had forgotten and forgiven. But how could she?

That night, on the landing of the fourth floor, she met Rifke coming down from the fifth. There were only two tenants on the fifth floor--Mrs. Peril Tzvack, a widow who hated Rifke and would never let her into her house, and Mendel Marantz. From which of the two was Rifke coming?

As Zelde entered her home the same neatness, the same cleanliness and smartness stung her sight. In fact, she herself could not have done better. To be honest--not even as good. The house was a mirror of spotlessness. It was so obviously the accomplishment of the wicked woman she had met on the stairs that Zelde spent a tortured and sleepless night.

She went to work the next morning with a splitting headache, and mists swam before her eyes as she tried to sew. Weird thoughts revolved in her mind. If it were only a question of Mendel, she would not hesitate a moment to leave him forever. But the children! A daughter of marriageable age and the tiny ones! What would people say? And even Mendel. True, there was no excuse--absolutely none--for his abominable treachery. She would never forgive him! Still, Rifke, that superannuated flirt, was the kind of woman that could turn any man’s head! With that double chin of hers and the shaved neck and a dimple like a funnel in her cheek! That’s what the men liked!

After all, Mendel was a helpless male, all alone in a house. He probably did not know the first thing about housekeeping and would have starved or been buried in dirt if he had not appealed to somebody to help him. And Rifke was just the type to take advantage of a defenceless man in such a predicament. She doubtless opened her eyes at him like two coal-scuttles, and pursed her lips--she had a way of doing it which gave the women of the neighborhood heart failure. And Mendel must have been grateful and kind to her for her assistance, and she must have mistaken his attitude for something else. She always misunderstood kindness from men.

So that’s how Mendel managed to clean the house so well! And that’s why work was pleasure to him! Judging by the amount and quality of the work Rifke was doing for him, their affection for each other must have developed to an alarming degree.

Zelde visualized the hateful scenes of faithlessness in which Mendel probably danced fawningly about Rifke, the fifty-three-year-old “vamp,” who cleaned dishes and washed clothes for him as a reward. She must have nudged him with her elbow while she boiled the wash and said invitingly, “Mendel, dear, why are you blind to beauty?”

And Mendel, edging closer, must have answered, “What is beauty? Wine! The older it gets, the rarer it is!” Then pressing his cheek against hers, he undoubtedly added, with tenderness, “You’re so fat! It’s a pleasure to hold you around! What is a man? Dynamite. What is a woman? A burning match. What is passion? The explosion!”

“Stop it! Your whiskers tickle me,” she probably replied with a coquettish laugh, and slapped him playfully over the hands with a rinsed shirt.

But she was only jesting, and was perhaps ecstatic with joy when Mendel courageously kissed her on the cheek despite her protests, and exclaimed, “What is a kiss? A smack for which you turn the other cheek!” And she probably turned it.

Then Rifke amorously rested her head on his chest and looked up with those devilish eyes of hers, and, linking her plump arms about his neck, she whispered, “Love me, Mendel, love me! I am yours!”

And Mendel, planting his feet more solidly to bear her weight, and carried away by the flames of desire, must have gripped her in his passionate embrace and murmured in a throaty voice, “What is love? A broom. It sweeps you away!”

“What’s the matter with you, Zelde?” cried Marcus, the tailor, biting the thread from a seam. “You stitched the skirt to a sleeve and you’re sewing up the neck of the waist!

“You look white like a ghost!”

Zelde drew herself up, as out of a lethargy.

“Eh! W--where am I? Oh!”

And her face sank into her palms.

Instantly there was a tumult in the shop.

A startled group of frightened men and women gathered about her.

But Zelde regained her self-control without aid, and pale and faint though she was, she smiled weakly to reassure them all.

“It’s nothing. A dizziness. I’m better,” she said. But Sarah insisted upon taking her home at once.

“That’s right,” Marcus advised. “Go home and take a hot tea with lemon. It’ll sweat you out.”

He added in an undertone to his neighbor, “It’s a shame! Such a fine woman! She’s got a husband who’s a nix!”

Zelde refused to have Sarah accompany her home.

“We can’t afford you shall lose a half day,” she argued. But the real reason was that she did not wish her daughter to behold her father’s infamy.

At eleven o’clock Zelde left. As she neared the house her breath became short and rapid. She stumbled several times going up the stairs. She stopped at the door.

Was it voices or was it her imagination?

No. Yes. It was. A man’s voice, then a woman’s laughter, then some--oh! She could stand it no longer. She broke wildly into the room and dislodged a bulky person who had been leaning against the door. Zelde stood electrified.

It was Rifke. And she was laughing in her face! And there was Mendel. And the janitor, too--Rifke’s husband. And two men! With stovepipe hats and cutaways and spats! Detectives, no doubt! Brought by the janitor to catch his wife and arrest Mendel! Oh, heavens! And there was Morton, Mendel’s nephew, a lawyer!

“Oi! A lawyer in the case!” she moaned to herself. “Then everything is lost!”

Zelde was ready to drop, but Mendel took her by the hand, and she heard him say, “This is my wife. It’s all her fault. She drove me to it.”

“We want you to come with us now,” one of the strangers said to Mendel.

“What’s the matter here, anyhow?” Zelde exclaimed at last.

“I got to go with these people,” Mendel replied. “But you can ask--Rifke,” he added significantly. “She knows all about it.”

Mendel, his nephew and the two gentlemen departed before Zelde had time to protest. She turned with burning eyes to Rifke--the hussy!

“I wish they could take my husband where they take yours,” Rifke began by way of explanation. “You don’t know what kind of a husband you got. It’s gonna be in all the papers. He did something. Those men what was here watched him, and when they seen it they jumped up like crazy.”

“What did he do?” Zelde asked in great alarm. “I betcha you made him to do it.”

“I? He says you made him. I only brought up the people. They knock by me in the door. They say, ‘Do Mendel Marantz live here? Where is it?’ So I bring them up.”

“What for did you bring them up--what for? A blind one could see it’s detectives!” Zelde muttered angrily.

“How shall I know it who they are? When they came in your husband turned white like milk. ‘Are you the man which done it?’ they ask him, and he says, shivering, ‘Yes.’”

Zelde wrung her hands.

“What for did he say ‘Yes’--what for?”

“Because it’s true,” Rifke explained.

“What’s true?”

“That he done it.”

“What did he done--what? You’ll make me crazy yet. Why don’t you tell me?”

“But I told you already!”

“When did you told me--when? You’re talkin’ and talkin’ and it don’t come out nothing! What happened here? What did they want here? Why is your husband here? Why are you here? Why were they here? What’s the matter here, altogether, anyway?”

“It’s a whole lot the matter--with you!” Rifke exclaimed impatiently. “Come over here and look and maybe it’ll open your eyes!”

She led the dazed Zelde into the kitchen.

“You see it?” Rifke asked triumphantly, pointing out a mass of wrinkled canvas in the middle of the room.

“What shall I see?” Zelde answered skeptically. “Rags, I see!”

“But under the rags!” Rifke insisted. She lifted the canvas. Zelde stood completely bewildered. Her eyes opened wide, then her face reddened. A feeling of indignation welled up in her.

“You can’t make a fool from me!” she began at last with rising momentum. “What do you show me--what? An ash-can on wheels! What’s that got to do with you and my husband? Don’t think I don’t know! You show me this, I should forget _that_!”

Rifke began to perspire. She mopped her face with her apron as she struggled to keep calm.

“You don’t know what I’m talkin’ about and I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. It’s mixed up, everything! Where do you see a ash-can? This ain’t a ash-can! It looks, maybe, like it. But it ain’t. All my friends should have such ash-cans! It’s a wonder in the world!”

Zelde’s head was reeling.

“So what is it, I’m asking you?” she gasped helplessly.

“It’s a whole business!” Rifke replied. “We seen it, my husband Shmeril and me and the people which was here. Your husband showed us. He winds up the can like a phonograph and it begins to play. The dishes go in dirty and they come out clean like after a bath. You see it? On these straps the dishes take a ride. They go in from the back and come out on the front. When it’s finished the dishes, your husband opens the box--I thought a man will jump out from it--but it’s only wheels and straps and wires and pipes inside! Did you ever?

“Then he pulls off the feet and the box sits down on the floor, and he takes out the straps from the back door and puts in such a board with bumps and brushes, and he turns the handle and the box rides around like a automobile and washes up the floor till it shines! I tell you the people was standing and looking--I thought their eyes would fall out!

“Then your husband stands up the box and puts back the feet and takes out the bumpy board and sticks in a whole machinery with pipes and wheels and winds up the machine and pumps in fresh water and throws in all the old clothes, and you hear inside such a noises, and then the clothes come out like frankfurters, clean and washed and ready to hang! Such a business! You don’t have to work no more! It works itself! I wouldn’t mind to have such a box by me!”

Zelde, dumb with amazement, gazed at the mute, ugly monster before her. She recognized the wheels from the old baby-carriage; the legs were from her kitchen chair; the handle from the stove. And now she remembered the can, the brushes, and the mops that Rifke had probably discarded, and that Mendel had used in the creation of this freak.

So this was the rival she had been jealous of, the usurper of her rights!

“It makes in five minutes what I do a whole day,” Rifke rambled along. “They call it such a fancy name--Combination House-Cleaner. It cleans everything. The strangers is from a company which goes to make millions cans like this.

“You’re gonna be rich, Mrs. Marantz!

“Who would think from house-cleaning you could get rich! Here I’m cleaning houses for twenty-nine years and I never thought from such a scheme! You gotta have luck, I tell you!”

“And I thought all the time it was Rifke! Oi, Mendel, you must think I’m such a fool!”

“Forget it. If not for you I never would have did what I done. You made me to do it.”

“I didn’t, Mendel.”

She added in a caressing tone:

“Your laziness did it, Mendel. You invented that machine because you were too lazy to work.”

“What’s a wife? An X-Ray. She knows you through and through!”

[12] Copyright, 1922, by The Pictorial Review Company. Copyright, 1923, by David Freedman.

BELSHAZZAR’S LETTER[13]

By KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

(From _The Metropolitan_)

“Belshazzar had a letter, He never had but one,” murmured Fenwick.

I should never have suspected Fenwick of having read, much less having memorized, the works of Emily Dickinson. Fenwick does not read--much; and how should he have got hold of Emily, anyhow? It appeared presently--for of course he was questioned--that he had picked up her poems in the home of a New England foreign missionary, where he had once perforce been marooned during a cholera epidemic. Fenwick himself is, I fancy, outside all creeds; but he can’t help--given his life--running into missionaries, and he usually speaks well of them. He takes them, at all events, as all in the day’s work, as he reports, from very strange places, to the “interests” that employ him. They have an eye out, those “interests,” for a good many different commodities, though I incline to believe that rubber is the chief. Adventure has never seemed to pry Fenwick loose from his very American moorings, though he told me on a certain occasion, with a dropped jaw (in a kind of wry whisper) that he had lost his religion once--just like that--in a typhoon.

I mention these facts concerning Fenwick for reasons that will appear later. He was leaving for San Francisco and the East the next week, by the way, and this was a scratch gathering of friends and acquaintances more or less to do Fenwick honor. Ben Allis and Mrs. Allis were giving the “party.” Nora Pate, Mrs. Allis’s niece, was spending with them an enforced holiday from school. She was at the dinner-table on sufferance merely. It was Nora, with her giggling flapperish reference to a ouija-board occurrence at school that had elicited Fenwick’s humorous quotation.