Part 21

"Now, now, Mae! You knew this had to come sooner or later, I 'ain't never lied, have I? Right here in this room 'ain't you told me a dozen times you'd let me go quietly when the time came? 'Ain't you?"

"I never thought you meant it, Max. You don't mean it now. Don't let your old woman upset you, dear. What she don't know won't hurt her. Stick around her a little more if you think she's got a hunch about me and the flat. But she 'ain't, dearie; there ain't a chance in the world she's got a hunch about me. Don't let her make a mollycoddle out of you, Max. That old woman don't know enough about life and things to--"

"You cut that and cut it quick! I'm a decent fellow, I am. For six years I been tipping you off to leave my mother's name out--out of your mouth. There's a place for everything and, by gad! your mouth ain't the place for her name! By gad! I ain't no saint, but I won't stand for that! By gad! I--I won't!"

"Oh-h-h-h-h! Oh-h-h-h! Oh-h-h!"

She struck her breast twice with the flat of her hand, her voice so tight and high that it carried with it the quality of strangulation.

"Ain't fit to mention her name, ain't I? Ain't fit to mention her name? My kind ain't fit to mention her name, eh?"

"No, if you got to know it. Not--like that! My old mother's name. Not like that!"

"Not fit, eh? What are we fit for, then, us that only get the husks of you men and nothing else?"

"I--"

"What am I fit for? Fit to run to when your decent friends won't stand for you? Fit to run to when you get mixed up in rotten customs deals? Fit to stand between you and hell when you got the law snapping at your heels for--for smuggling? Who was fit to run to then? Her whose name I ain't fit to mention? Her? Naw, you was afraid she'd turn on you. Naw, not her! Me! Me! I'm the one whose mouth is too dirty to mention your old lady's name--"

"By gad! you got to cut that or--"

"Just the same, who was it you hollered for when you woke up in the hospital with your back like raw meat? Who was it you hollered for then? Her whose name I ain't fit to mention? Naw, it wasn't! Me! Me! I was good enough then. I was good enough to smuggle you out of town overnight when you was dodging the law, and to sleep in my clothes for two weeks, ready to give the signal."

"That's right, dig up! Dig up! You might forget something."

"I been good enough to give you free all these years what you wasn't man enough to pay for. That's what we women are; we're the free lunch that you men get with a glass of beer, and what the hell do you care which garbage-pail what's left of us lands in after you're done with us!"

"Cut that barroom talk around here if--"

"Good enough for six years, wasn't I, to lay down like a door-mat for you to walk on, eh? Good enough. Good enough when it came to giving up chunks of my own flesh and blood when your burns was like hell's fire on your back and all your old woman could do to help was throw a swoon every time she looked at you. Good enough to--"

"Gad! I knew it! I knew it! Knew you'd show your yellow streak."

She fell to moaning in her hands. "No, no, Max, I--"

"Bah! you can't throw that up to me, though. I never wanted it! I could have bought it off any one of them poor devils that hang around hospitals, as many inches off any one of 'em as I wanted. I never wanted them to graft it on me off you. I told the doctor I didn't. I knew you'd be throwing it up to me some day. If I'd bought it off a stranger I--I wouldn't have that limp in front of me always to--to rub things in. I knew you'd throw it up to me. I--Gad! I knew it! I knew it!"

"No, no, Max, I didn't mean it. You--you just got me so crazy I don't know what I'm saying. Sure, I--I made you take it off me. I wanted 'em to cut it off me to graft on your burns because it--it was like finding a new way of saying how--how I love you, Max. Every drop of blood was like--like I could see for myself how--how I loved you, Max. I--"

"Oh, my God!" he said, folded his arms atop the piano, and let his head fall into them. "Oh, my God!"

"That's how I love you, Max. That's how you--you're all in the world I got, Max. That's why I--can't, just can't let you go, dear. Don't throw me over, Max. Cut the comedy and come down to earth. You 'ain't had a holy spell for two years now since the old woman sniffed me and wanted to marry you off to that cloak-and-suit buyer with ten thou in the bank and a rush of teeth to the front. You remember how we laffed, dearie, that night we seen her at the show? Don't let your old lady--"

"Cut that, I tell you!"

"You'd be a swell gink hitting the altar trail with a bunch of white satin, wouldn't you? At your time of life, forty and set in your ways, you'd have a swell time landing a young frisky one and trying to learn one of them mother's darlings how to rub in your hair-tonic and how to rub your salad-plate with garlic? Gosh-golly! I bust right out laffing when I even think about it! Come down to earth, Max! You'd be a swell hit welded for life with a gold band, now, wouldn't you?"

She was suddenly seized with immoderate laughter not untinctured with hysteria, loud and full of emptiness, as if she were shouting for echoes in a cave.

"Like hell you would! _You_ tied to a bunch of satin and tending the kids with the whooping-cough! Whoops la, la!" She fell to rocking herself backward and forward, her rollicking laughter staining her face dark red.

"Whoops la, la! Whoops la, la!"

Suddenly Max Zincas rose to his height, regarding her sprawling uncontrolled pose with writhing lips of distaste, straightened his waistcoat, cleared his throat twice, and, standing, drank the last of his wine. But a pallor crept up, riding down the flush.

"Funny, ain't it? Laff! Laff! But I'd wait till you hear something funnier I got to tell you. Funny, ain't it? Laff! Laff!"

She looked up with her lips still sagging from merriment, but the dark red in her face darker.

"Huh?"

His bravado suddenly oozed and the clock ticked roundly into the silence between them.

"Huh?" she repeated, cocking her head.

"You got to know it, Mae, and the sooner I get it out of me the better. But, remember, if you wanna drive me out before I'm finished, if you wanna get rid of me a damn sight quicker than any other way, throw me some sob stuff and watch. You--Well--I--The sooner I get it out of me the better, Mae."

"Huh?"

"She's a--a nice little thing, Mae. Her mother's a crony with my old lady. Lives in a brownstone out on Lenox Avenue. Met her first at--at a tennis-match she was winning at--at Forest Park Club."

"Huh?"

"Not a high-stepper or a looker like you in your day, Mae, none of--that chorus pep you used to have. Neat, though. Great little kid for outdoors. Nice little shape, too. Not in your class, but--but neat. Eyes like yours, Mae, only not--not in your class. A--a little cast in one of them, but all to the good, Mae. Nice clean little--girl, fifteen thou with her, and her old man half owner in the Weeko Woolen Mills. I--I need the money, Mae. The customs is digging up dirt again. It ain't like I 'ain't been on the level with you, girl. You knew it had to come sooner or later. Now, didn't you, Mae? Now there's the girl. Didn't you?"

Reassured, he crossed to where she sat silent, and placed a large, heavy hand on her shoulder.

"There's nothing needs to worry you, old girl. Thirty-five hundred in your jeans and a couple of thou and the flat from me on top. Gad! it's a cinch for you, old girl. I've seen 'em ready for the dump at your age, and you--you're on the boom yet. Gad! you're the only one I ever knew kept her looks and took on weight at the same time. You're all right, Mae, and--and, gad! if I don't wish sometimes the world was different! Gad! if--if I don't!"

And, rather reassured, he tilted her chin and pinched her cold cheek and touched the corner of his eyes with the back of his wrist."

"Gad, if--if I don't!"

It was as if the flood of her emotion had risen to a wave and at his words frozen on its crest. She opened her lips to speak, but could only regard him with eyes as hard as ice-fields.

"Now, now, Mae, don't look thataway. You're a sensible woman and know the world's just built thataway. I always told you it don't cost us men nothing but loose change to show ourselves a good time. You girls gotta pay up in different coin. If I hadn't come along some other fellow would, so what's the use a fellow not showing himself a good time? You girls know where you get off. Come, be a sport, old girl! With thirty-five hundred in your jeans and me wanting to do the square thing--the piano and all, lemme say to you that you 'ain't got a kick coming. Just lemme say that to you--piano and all, Mae!"

Sobs trembled up, thawing the edge of ice that incased her. A thin blur of tears rose to her eyes like a premonitory ripple before the coming of the wind.

"You can't! You can't! You--you can't ditch me like that, I tell you. You--"

"By God! if you're going to begin to holler I'll get out of here so quick it'll make your head swim!"

"Oh no, you don't! Aw, no, you don't! You ain't going to quit so easy for a squint-eyed little hank that--that your old woman found for you. Max, you ain't! You wouldn't! Tell me you wouldn't, dear. Tell me! Tell me!"

"Get off your knees there and behave yourself, Mae! Looka your dress there, all torn. This ain't no barroom. Get up and behave yourself! Ain't you ashamed! Ain't you ashamed!"

She was trembling so that her knees sent little ripples down the tight white silk drop-skirt.

"You can't ditch me like this and get away with it. You and me can't--can't part peaceful. You can't throw me over after all these years for a little squint-eyed hank and get away with it! By Heaven! you can't!"

He drew tight fists to his sides, his lower jaw shot forward. "You start a row here and, by gad! if I don't--"

"I ain't! I ain't! But don't throw me over, Max, after all these years! Don't, Max! You need me. There ain't a woman on God's earth will do for you what I will. I--I 'ain't got nobody but you, Max, to do for. I tell you, Max, you--you need me. Think, dear, all them months when the customs was after you. Them hot days when you couldn't show your face, and I used to put you to bed and fan and fan you eight hours straight till you forgot to be scared and fell asleep like a baby."

"Now, now, Mae, I--"

"Them nights we used to mix a few drinks when we came home from a show or something and sit right here in this room and swill 'em off, laffing and laffing till we got a little lit up. That time when we sneaked down to Sheepshead and you lost your wad at the wheel and I won it back for you. All them times, Max! That--that Christmas Eve you sneaked away from your old woman! Remember? I tell you, Max, you can't throw me over after what we been through together, and get away with it. You can't, not by a damn sight! You can't!"

In spite of herself her voice would slip up, raucous sobs tore through her words, tears rained down her frankly distorted face, carrying their bitter taste of salt to her lips.

"You can't! You can't! I 'ain't got the strength! I 'ain't got a thing in life that ain't wrapped around you. I can't go back to hit or miss like--like I could ten years ago. I 'ain't got nothing saved out of it all but you. Don't try to ditch me, Max! Don't! I--I'll walk on my knees for you. I--"

"For God's sake, Mae, I--"

"If there's a way to raise two times fifteen thou for you, Max, I--I'll raise it. I'll find a way, Max. I tell you I will! I'm lucky at the wheel, Max. You watch and see. You just watch and see. I can work. Max, I--"

"Get up, Mae, get up. There's a good girl. Get up and--"

"I'll work my fingers down, Max, only don't try to ditch me, don't try to ditch me! I'll go out to the country where your old woman can't ever sniff me. I--I'll fix it, Max, so you--so you just can't lose. Don't ditch me, dear; take your Maizie back. Take me in your arms and call me Maizie. Take me!"

"Girl, 'ain't you--'ain't you got no shame!"

"Just try me back for a month, Max. For a month, Max, and see if--if I don't fix things so they come out right. Gimme a month, Max! Gimme, Max! Gimme! Gimme!"

And with her last remnant of restraint gone, she lay downright at his feet, abandoned to virulent grief, and in her naked agony a shapeless mass of frill and flounce, a horrible and not dramatic spectacle of abandonment; decencies gone down before desire, the heart ruptured and broken through its walls. In such a moment of soul dishabille and her own dishabille of bosom bulging above the tight lacing of her corset-line as she lay prone, her mouth sagging and wet with tears, her lips blowing outward in bubbles, a picture, in fact, to gloss over, Mae Munroe dragged herself closer, flinging her arms about the knees of Mr. Zincas, sobbing through her raw throat.

"Just a month, Max! Don't ditch me! Don't! Don't! Don't!"

He looked away from the sorry spectacle of her bubbling lips and great, swollen eyelids.

"Leggo! Leggo my knees!"

"Just a month, Max, just--"

"Leggo! Leggo my knees! Leggo, girl! Ain't you ashamed!"

"Just a month, Max, I--"

"Gad! 'ain't you got no shame, girl! Get up! Leggo! I can't stand this, I tell you. Be a sport and leggo me quiet, Mae. I--I'll send you everything, a--a check that'll surprise you, old girl! Lemme go quiet! Nothing can't change things. Quit your blubbering. It makes me sick, I tell you. Quit your blubbering, old girl, and leggo. Leggo! Leg-go! Leg-go, I say!"

Suddenly he stooped and with a backward turn of her wrist unloosed himself and, while the pain still staggered her, side-stepped the huddle of her body, grasped his hat from the divan and lunged to the door, tugging for a frantic moment with the lock.

On her knees beside the piano, in quite the attitude he had flung her, leaning forward on one palm and amid the lacy whirl of her train, Mae Munroe listened to his retreating steps; heard the slam of a lower door.

You who recede before the sight of raw emotions with every delicacy shamed, do not turn from the spectacle of Mae Munroe prone there on the floor, her bosom upheaved and her mouth too loose. When the heart is torn the heart bleeds, whether under cover of culture and a boiled shirt-front or without shame and the wound laid bare. And Mae Munroe, who lay there, simple soul, only knew or cared that her heart lay quivering like a hurt thing, and for the sobs that bubbled too frankly to her lips had no concern.

But after a while they ceased of exhaustion, and she rose to her feet, her train threatening to throw her; walked toward the cold, cloyed dinner, half-eaten and unappetizing on the table; and fell to scooping some of the cold gravy up from its dish, letting it dripple from the spoon back again. The powder had long since washed off her cheeks and her face was cold as dough. The tears had dried around her mouth.

Presently she pinned up the lacy train about her, opened a cupboard door and slid into a dark, full-length coat, pinned on a hat with a feather that dropped over one side as if limp with wet, dabbed at her face with a pink powder-chamois and, wheezing ever so slightly, went out, tweaking off two of the three electric lights after her--down two flights of stairs through a quiet foyer and out into the fluid warmth of late October. Stars were out, myriads of them.

An hour she walked--down the cross-town street and a bit along the wide, bright, lighted driveway, its traffic long since died down to an occasional night-prowling cab, a skimming motor-car; then down a flight of curving stone steps with her slightly perceptible limp, and into the ledge of parkway where shadows took her into their velvet silence; down a second flight, across a railroad track, and to the water's edge, where a great coal-station ran a jut of pier out into the river. She could walk its length, feeling it sway to the heavy tug of current.

Out at the very edge the water washed up against the piles with a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be understood from the under side.

THE NAME AND THE GAME

At Christmas-tide men and women with soiled lives breathe alcoholic sighs and dare to glance back into the dim corridors of their long agos.

Cronies, snug in an age of steam heat, turn their warm backs upon to-day, swap white-Christmas stories, and hanker with forefinger laid alongside of nose for the base-burners and cold backs of the good old days.

Not least upon the busy magnate's table is his shopping-list.

Evenings, six-dollar-a-week salesgirls sit in their five-dollar-a-week hall-bedrooms, with their aching feet in a tub of hot water and their aching fingers busy with baby-ribboned coat-hangers and silk needle-book tokens of Yuletide affection.

Even as it flowered in a manger the Christmas spirit, a perennial lily upon the sooty face of the world, blooms out of the slack heap of men's rife and strife.

In the hearts of children it is a pod filled with their first happiness.

Down from a sky the color of cold dish-water a cloak of swift snow fell upon the city, muffling its voice like a hand held against its mouth. Children who had never before beheld a white Christmas leaped with the joy of it. A sudden army of men with blue faces and no overcoats sprang full-grown and armed with shovels, from out the storm. City parks lay etched in sudden finery. Men coming up out of the cañon of Wall Street remembered that it was Christmas and felt for bauble money.

At early dusk and through the white dance of the white storm the city slid its four million packs off its four million backs and turned homeward. Pedestrians with the shopper's light in their eyes bent into the flurry and darted for surface cars and subways. Commuters, laden with bundles and with tickets between their teeth, rushed for early trains.

Women with bearing-down bundles and babies wedged through the crowd, fighting for trains and place. Boys in cadet uniforms and boarding-school girls, homeward bound, thrust forward their shining faces as if into the to-morrow. A tight tangle of business men passed single file through a trellised gateway and on down to a lower level. A messenger with a tipsy spray of holly stuck upright in his cap whacked with a folded newspaper at a fellow-messenger's swift legs and darted in and around the knees of the crowd. A prodigal hesitated, then bought a second-class ticket for home. Two nuns hurried softly on missions of Christmas.

The low thunder of a thousand feet: tired feet, eager feet; flat feet; shabby feet; young feet; callous feet; arched and archless feet. Voices that rose like wind to a gale. A child dragged by the arm and whimpering. A group of shawled strangers interchanging sharp jargon.

Within the marble mausoleum of a waiting-room, its benches lined with the kaleidoscopic faces of the traveling public, a train-announcer bellowed a paean of tracks and stations.

At the onyx-and-nickel-plated periodical stand men in passing snatched their evening paper from off the stack of the counter, flopping down their pennies as they ran. In the glow of a spray of red and white electric bulbs, in a bower of the instant's pretty-girl periodical covers, and herself the most vivid of them all, Miss Marjorie Clark caught a hastily flung copper coin on the fly, her laughter mounting with it.

"Whoops, la-la!"

"Good catch, kiddo."

"Oh, you Charley-boy, who was you pitching for last season?"

"The Reds, because that's your color."

"Say, if you're going to catch that four-eighteen you've got to break somebody's speed limit between here and track ten. Run along, Charley-boy, and Merry Christmas."

But Mr. Charles Scully swung to a halt, poured his armful of packages into a wire basket of six-city-postcard-views for ten cents, swung open his overcoat with a sprinkling of snow on its slick-napped velvet collar, lifted his small black mustache in a smile.

"Black-eyes, I'd miss three trains for you."

"There's not another until the four-forty."

"I should worry. Anyway, for all I know you've changed your mind and are coming out with me to-night, little one."

The quick blood ran up into her small face, dyeing it, and she withdrew from his nearing features.

"I have not! Gee! you're about as square as a doughnut, you are."

"Jumping Juniper, can't a fellow miss his train just to wish a little beauty like you a Merry Christmas? But on the level, I want to take you out home with me to-night; honest I do, little spitfire."

"Crank up there, Charley-boy; you got about thirty seconds to make that train in."

"Gets you sore every time I ask you out, don't it, black-eyes? Talk about your little tin saints!"

"Say, if you was any slicker you'd slide."

"You can't scare me with those black eyes."

"Can't I, my brave boy! Say, you'd want to quarantine the dictionary if you found smallpox in it, that's how hard you are to scare."

"Well, of all the lines of talk, if you 'ain't got the greatest. Cute is no name for you."

"And say, the place where you clerk must be a classy clothes-parlor, Charley-boy."

"Right-o, little one. If you ever pass by the Brown Haberdashery, on Twenty-third Street, drop in, and I'll buy you a lunch."

"Tra-la! Where did you get that checked suit? And I'll bet you flag the train out at Glendale, where you live, with that tie. Oh, you Checkers!"

"Some class to me, eh, kiddo?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that."