Part 13

Sleep did not come to Henriette until nearly daybreak. It began to rain about midnight, a steady rain, long and full of the secrets of autumn. And Henriette lay in her bed and thought about death and dying. She thought about her grandchildren, how good they were. Somehow she always felt sorriest for young people when anyone died. Not for little children, or the very old; but the ones in between. The ones between eighteen and forty, say. They took it hardest. How terrible death was to them, how _everlasting_! If only they could know what _she_ knew, she and the little children.... Of course, she wailed and carried on; that was her business, her calling. But how often, right in the midst of a funeral, even as she stood and gazed in the grave, she had longed to go and whisper to youth’s white, impassioned grief, “There, there, _chère_ ... don’t sorrow so hard. Me, I know. I tell you, I _know_.” But what she knew she could not have said.... Henriette stirred in her bed, sought a new place for her pillow. How often she had longed to say to some bereft mother, she who had buried six, “Do not grieve overmuch, little Mammy. He is not here. See! He is dragging a little tin can for a train, across the white courts of Heaven.”

Henriette slept, and after a time a bell tolled in her dreaming. It awakened her. A gray light had come into the room, and the rain was gone. Well, and who could be dead? Somebody old and rich was dead, the bell had been tolling so long. The light about her bed grew brighter, and the ceiling shone with rose. She dozed again; but when she again awakened the bell was still tolling.... It must be an old person dead.

Suddenly Henriette became aware of a flow, a movement in the house. The windows rattled; a door was opened somewhere and shut. And then there was a swishing of skirts, a running of feet. Her grandchildren! They crowded about her bed, three-deep, tense and excited. The cheeks of the littlest ones glowed, the way they did when there was bad news to be broken; when the sugar was out, or the cat had fallen down in the cistern. “Granny, what you think is happen? Old lady Josephine’s gone!” ... They crowded closer, to see how Henriette “took it.” “Poor Josephine, she got sick in the night and she passed away early this morning.”

Henriette sat up against her pillow, blinking. She looked like the kind of old woman children make out of their knuckles, with black-headed pins for eyes. And now the older ones, her daughters, stole into the room on their tiptoes. They took her hands. “How you feel, Gran’mammy? Is your throat all right? Well, they’ve done sent for you, honey. They said Josephine asked for you in the night, to come and sing for her funeral.... Well, _le bon Dieu_ is love you, sho’, Mammy.”

All day her children were busy, getting Henriette ready: her best alpaca cleaned and pressed; her mourning veil laid out, her gloves and her shoes. Shiny and speckless they must be, to follow the honoured dead. “Mammy,” her daughters said, “you stay in bed and rest, so your voice will be good to-morrow.” They were nice daughters; they were trying to make her feel prideful again.... All day long Henriette lay and gazed out at the white gravelled road, stretching away, on past Josephine’s house. Looked like she could see Josephine, sitting there on her gallery, the fat running over!

Well, she would miss Josephine, her old crony. Toni and Josie both gone. It would be queer, a sort of joke, wailing for Josephine’s funeral. It would be like singing beside her own grave.

* * * * *

The next morning, at the first peep of day, her children came in to help her. “How you feel, Gran’mammy?” They looked at her and shook their heads. She was so thin and so old. With her friends all gone she seemed like something from some other life.... “Well, we won’t have Mammy much longer,” they said. They crowded about her, solicitous.

Old Henriette sat up in bed. “Fetch me my specs,” she grumbled.

They brought her specs, her false teeth, her rosary, and her snake-oil. They washed her feet and rubbed them, and helped her to dress. With her mourning veil on she looked like a little black bride. And when she was dressed and ready they brought her the funeral book. “Now, Mammy, look! Mark it down--one hundred funerals. You’ve sung for more buryings than anyone else in the parish.”

But Henriette stared at the funeral book; she seemed mad about something, offended. “Don’t meddle so much,” she cackled. “You wait till I come home from Josephine’s funeral.”

She set out in the ditch, holding tight to her little black bag and her glasses. The grandchildren, who were to go on in the car, stood and watched her sorrowfully. Once she turned back and waved.... She was so little, so little and thin, so _perverse_! She hobbled along in the ditch. Her funeral shoes felt stiff and heavy, and caught in the Queen Anne’s lace; and whenever an automobile thundered by on the highway, Henriette, terrified, put her hands to her ears.... Once, half fainting, she stopped and clutched at the branch of a cottonwood tree. And a loneliness passed over her, a loneliness and a heartache.... “Josie,” she called, hopelessly, “Josie.... I’m a-coming....”

But when she got to the turn of the road where the willows grew, she faltered, distressed and alarmed. She could get no farther down in the ditch. A freshet poured from a hole in the side of the road, and the ditch in front of her was flooded with water. The black water boiled and licked at her feet, treacherous and angry; and Henriette shrank and backed away. For a moment she stood, trembling, uncertain; and she stared at the road above her that stretched away in the sunlight, on past Josephine’s house. Then, tottering and dizzy and sick with fright, she pulled herself up the embankment, and with her face turned toward Josephine’s house, began to hobble along on the highway.

“Josie--” she whispered, and a numbness, a darkness took hold of her--“Josie.... I mind as how, after all, my friend, you and me ull quit even....”

WITH GLORY AND HONOUR

BY ELISABETH COBB CHAPMAN

From _Century_

In a cross street of the riant fifties stands the Club Levering, an old brownstone building in a brave new coat of tan plaster, with wrought-iron lamps by its doors and an imposing uniformed figure to bow you out politely, or with the force of a strong arm, in nice accordance to the decorum or lack of it that you preserve within the precincts which he guards.

The Club Levering is not a club; it is a cabaret, a dance hall, and a theatre, with a strong attraction for Broadway luminaries. They drop in after the theatre to hear Hal Levering sing his new songs and to watch the swells, strayed from up town East, dance and enjoy themselves. And they love Hal. “He’s a great boy,” they say. “An artist. Some kid. Listen to that now. Boy, how he can put it over!”

Levering, born Lipwitz, had been driven to this place by a dim dream. There was struggle behind him, years of the unbelievable struggle of the poor man, of the immigrant Jew, against a relentless city. He could remember dimly a night in southern Russia, the pogrom, flames and the sounds of shots in the dark, driving out the Jew. He had been held up by his mother, crying, on the deck of an immigrant ship to see the Promised City blazing tall and splendid in the sunlight. They had all been held up to see it, he and Lena and Roziska and Leo and little Moses, even though Moses was too young to know what it was all about--and the Promised Land, as it materialized, a tenement in the crowded ghetto, too hard on the little Moses, who died in a few months.

Behind Hal were the years as a singing waiter in cheap cabarets, as a “song plugger,” small-time vaudeville, and then a revue; and now marvellously he was Hal Levering, star and part owner of the Club Levering, and packing them in at higher prices than any other night club dared charge.

He had done that single-handed. And he had carried the Lipwitz family with him. Lena was now a dancer, a good one; Isaac, a partner in a clothing store. Rosie had married a doctor. Mama kept house for Lena, and if Papa had been alive, Hal would undoubtedly have found something lucrative for him.

Always his dream had driven him. The dream of the artist, inarticulate, clumsy, hunting for the ultimate beauty. He sang jazz now and he wore fine clothes, while around him were the flash of jewels and the white faces of gaudy women and the throb of Bennie Bernstein’s music. Everybody paid him homage, bowing, pounding on the table for Hal Levering, the artist, singing “Abie’s an Irisher Now,” a song whose words were a cry of pain, written by a Jew in contempt of his race. He sang it gorgeously, with exaggerated gestures, flexible hands, and when he did the part where Abie pretends to be the Irish plug-ugly, one saw the cringe of the homeless race that was ingrained in Abie in spite of the defiant throw of an Irish jaw. It was a beautiful bit of mimicking, and even though he was a Jew he did not mind the ugly words at all.

He had one song, “When My Little Baby Boy Says His Prayers to Me,” that never failed to make his hearers cry. And there were tears in his own eyes, when he came off, not because of the song--he knew hokum even when he sang it himself--but because he could “get them” with it. Hal Levering, the artist, his triumph ringing in his ears clapped out by enthusiastic hands.

The grinding afternoon before his new summer show went on; he was in his element. About him were excited waiters arranging their tables, decorators at work on the flowers, Bennie Bernstein in his shirt sleeves, sweating over the new songs, Lilian Laine begging help with the duet they were to sing. And then, as Hal went over his new numbers alone, the waiters and the decorators, Lilian and song-wise Bennie himself, stopped to listen to him.

He had worked that day until his face was gray with fatigue, but when at last he went out for his dinner, he walked bravely, with his head up, a conqueror, Hal Levering of the Club Levering, a king on Broadway.

The opening of the summer show had been an enormous success. The entrance was choked with disappointed people who could not get in, and at the door the page boys battled with the crowd clamouring for tables, among which the lucky ones who had reservations battled their way. And Hal moved from table to table to welcome his guests and receive homage. This was his big night, his triumph, the end, he thought with a choke in his throat, of his struggle toward the ultimate beauty.

* * * * *

Constance Corthwaite came to the Club Levering that night. She had never been there before, but Hal Levering recognized her at once. She was as much a celebrity to Broadway as she was to Fifth Avenue. One saw her everywhere, a pirate of a woman with a face moulded firm in lines of complete and terrible ennui, hunting for amusement, scattering her millions with a disdainful hand. She had been Constance Corthwaite for thirty-five years now, for she had never found a man to hold her interest long enough to marry him.

Levering had gone at once to her table, had been introduced, had accepted a glass of excellent champagne, had bragged, had strutted, had told jokes.

“Your place is quite amusing,” Constance Corthwaite said. “I hear you sing very well.”

Hal Levering laughed. “That’s what they say. Have you ever heard me?”

She shook her head.

“Well, the stuff I do here is--well, no artist can put anything over in a restaurant, but I’m opening in a new act, just a side line, you know, at the Palace next week, and that’s where I knock ’em right out of their seats. We’ve tried it out, and it’s great. Next week--come and see me.” Then in a magnificent burst of cordiality: “Come around during the show and see it from behind. How’d you like that, huh? See, I do a skit, new songs, new patter--it’s a wow!”

She had favoured him with a glance from her long eyes. “Thank you.”

“What would you like to have me sing for you now?” he asked.

“Try something good--I should like to see how it went here.”

He sang “Sweet Siren” and “Pretty Little Mama” for her. She did not applaud. He was disappointed. He had realized that she wasn’t demonstrative, but he had hoped to win her.

Her friends seemed to enjoy themselves, and he took no more trouble with them. He noticed that they laughed, drank, and danced. Later there was an animated discussion; he could see that from the floor as he sang. Constance Corthwaite’s friends were arguing with her. They leaned toward her, protesting. The attitudes were unmistakable. Apparently unmoved, she blew smoke from her nostrils and with a wave of her cigarette turned their attention back to him. They watched him, shrewdly, for a few seconds, and then went off into quiet laughter. Laughter at some joke which that long-eyed woman had designed. From the floor, singing, he saw all this, for his early training had made him observant.

As Constance was leaving she beckoned to him. She stood at the door, wrapped in her dark cloak. He went out at her nod, with alacrity. As he went he wondered what she wanted and decided definitely that he did not like her. “Too damned ritzy,” and he thought her ugly and badly dressed, too, but after all she was Constance Corthwaite. Probably she had fallen for him. Most of ’em did.

She recognized his approach with the smallest possible nod.

“Thank you for the songs. We enjoyed them. As I can’t watch you ‘knock ’em off their seats’ at the Palace, I suggest that you come down to my place in the country next week-end and knock us off our seats down there.”

She was asking him to visit her. So she _had_ fallen for him. They all did. He was inundated with female attentions. But a visit to the Corthwaite place! Well, he had arrived! He accepted blandly.

* * * * *

Mommer and Lena helped him pack. They came from their apartment across the hall to his and favoured him with their advice and assistance. It was a lengthy business. Before he got off, the plush splendour of his rooms was strewn with discarded clothing.

“Take your dress suit, Hermie,” advised his mother. “Your new suit for those swells is none too good.”

“Wear your lavender sport suit for the golfing.”

“A bathing suit.”

“Your silk socks, Hermie. Hermie, you have forgot your silk socks, Hermie.”

“The lavender suit, Hermie.”

* * * * *

He got off at last. His big car seemed to eat the miles, exaltation keeping time to the healthy song of his motor. He went swiftly through the mean towns squatting on the island’s edge out to the rolling hills of the North Shore. He dreamed dreams. Now a new billing suggested itself. “Hal Levering--Society’s Favourite”--or better, “Hal Levering, Society’s Favoured Comedian.” In his mind’s eye he could see an article in _Vanity Fair_--perhaps--“Hal Levering, the erstwhile mammy songster a belated society discovery.”

He turned the nose of the car into the Corthwaite gates and at a reduced speed moved up the driveway. In spite of the explicit directions given him by the policeman in Jonestown, he wasn’t at all sure that this was the place.

He had passed, on his drive from New York, many great stone gates, so high and so formidable that they gave only a niggard glimpse of blue stone road, perhaps the outline of proud roofs upheld above the trees, and he had expected the Corthwaite driveway to be at least as fine as the finest of these.

But this was just a comfortable country road, distinguished from its kind only by a pair of lowly stone pillars and a squat frame cottage doing duty as a gatekeeper’s lodge.

He drove through a small woodland, not pruned or landscaped at all, turned a corner, and found himself facing an expanse of lawn and a rambling frame house, painted a soft faded yellow and adorned with plain white shutters. The Corthwaite house laid claim to no other beauty than that which is inherent in old colonial houses and in ancient Greek vases, the unadorned beauty of line. Hal Levering was disappointed in it. A butler, not in livery, met him at the door. He was an old man and grumpy.

“Mr. Levering?” he asked. Levering had an uncomfortable feeling that his clothes, his car, and his abilities were all being evaluated, but he dismissed the suspicion as absurd, for the old man’s eyes had not moved. He was at the moment holding open the door.

“Miss Corthwaite left word that if she had not returned at the time of your arrival you were to make yourself at home and ask me for anything you might require--sir.”

Levering entered.

“The Car?” he asked, and one had, as always, a feeling that he was thinking of it with at least a capital “C.” “The Car will be all right there?”

“The chauffeur will take it around if you will give me the keys--sir,” said the old man.

“Oh!” There was an appreciative pause from Levering. This place was like one of those English places he had heard of--all service--no show.

The old man led him upstairs, and down a long hall to a bedroom, which like the rest of the house gave the impression of luxury, although the chintz was faded and the old furniture austerely simple.

The windows gave one a view of a garden, a box hedge, and, looming friendly in the rear, fruit trees not bowed as yet with the crop, but holding the green fruit as sturdily as a street lamp its light. That was no drawing room of a garden. The fruit trees were welcome to come in if they liked. “I don’t call that much,” Levering remarked to the air at large. He compared unfavourably the gay simple little flower beds before him to the marble swimming pool and formal terraces of his friend, Isaac Lowenstein, the moving-picture magnate. He carefully dusted his gray tweeds, straightened his tie an infinitesimal fraction, and from his bag searched out a bottle of brilliantine, and, anointing a comb, smoothed his hair.

Downstairs again, Levering found himself in the great room he had first entered, and through which he had passed too quickly for an impression. Now he frankly took its measure. It did not impress him. It was big, to be sure, but the hangings were not velvet, the upholstery was not rich. He decided that the early-American maple was cool looking but plain, and the dim rosy riot of the chintz, comfortable but cheap. He wondered at the house because he was sure that here, if any place in the world, things would be correct, and he had expected to find a glorified Club Levering with more crystal and more plush and more grandeur.

The old butler found him there and offered liquid refreshment, which was accepted gratefully.

“Did Miss Corthwaite say when she’d be home?” asked Levering. It made him lonely to be left to himself. The din of his days had beaten upon his nerves until solitude was a thing abhorred.

“She did not--sir,” said the butler. Hal was offended with his welcome. He was doing Constance Corthwaite a favour in coming all the way down here to the country, and she had made no effort to receive him. Left alone, he looked about him for some source of amusement. Tentatively he opened two small cabinets, hoping vainly that they might contain phonograph or radio. He found only riding gloves, golf balls, a pair of garden shears, and some sheet music. The music offered possibilities, and in that room the big piano was the only piece of furniture that looked like any furniture he had ever seen, but the music was queer stuff. He did not know any of it, nor did he want to.

There were magazines piled on the long centre table, and he looked through them hopefully. Here was the bland impudence of the young intellectuals with their opinions supported by the dignity of a Duncan Phyfe table. If Hal Levering had possessed a subtle mind, he would have fathomed Constance Corthwaite at that instance. Eccentricity upheld by Duncan Phyfe.

Half buried in the pile of papers and magazines he found an old book, _The Book of the Corthwaites_, and in idle curiosity he turned the leaves. There were long lists of names in it, explained by short sentences.

In 1732, Colonel Abednego Corthwaite married Eliza Pepperidge. He settled in the city of Boston and became one of its most prominent citizens. His children were Abednego, Elisha, John, Eliza, Aaron, and Piety. Abednego died in infancy. Elisha married Patience Cabot. Their children were----

“Good-night!” Levering’s surprise was jolted out of him. “What does anybody care who those dead ones married?” But Constance Corthwaite and her kind must care, or the book would not be here. He carried it out on to the porch that gave a view of the garden and the apple trees.

When Constance Corthwaite and the rest of her house party returned from the golf links, they found Hal Levering reading....

“In 1802 Solomon Corthwaite married Sarah Emerson,” and in his eyes a dazed, bored, yet questioning expression.

“How d’ye do?” said Miss Corthwaite. She did not offer to shake hands. “Sorry to be so late. Golf, you know. Did Lake make you comfortable?” With a little wave of a hand she indicated her other guests, who, apparently without seeing him at all, were settling themselves in the low wicker chairs. “Miss Bromley, Mr.--er--Levering.” Miss Bromley, whose sunburned face and quite frankly dirty hands gave evidence that she had played a hard game, indeed, acknowledged the introduction by not the faintest flicker of an eye. She was seemingly impervious to introductions. Her bow was not to be considered as directed at him at all. She merely happened to be bowing at that moment. Miss Paine and Mrs. Douglass and an Englishwoman, Lady Greville, to whom he was in turn presented, acknowledged his presence with equal enthusiasm. The men were more cordial, “My cousin, Mr. Herton, Lord Greville, Mr. Paine, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Valentine.”

Levering instantly assumed the genial air of the club. That air, half ingratiating, half bold, wholly impudent. From his smiling lips to the bob of the little blue tassels that held up his blue golf stockings, he radiated cordiality.