Part 6

She sat beside her cold meal, tears scratching her eyes like blown grit. "It's like I told you this morning, Phonzie; when you get tired, all you got to do is remember I got the new trunk standing right behind the cretonne curtains, and I can pack my duds any day in the week and find a welcome over at--at Ida May's."

"Mil, ain't you ashamed!"

"Why, I could pack up and--and find a welcome there right to-night, if the kid wasn't too little for the night air."

"Mil, honest, I--I just don't know what to make of you. I--I've just lost my nerve about going now."

"I'm not going to be the one to say stay."

With his coat unhooked from the antlers and flung across his arm, he stood contemplating, a furrow of perplexity between his eyes.

"If I--I hadn't promised--"

"You go. I guess it won't be the last evening I spend alone."

"Yes it will, hon."

"I know, I know."

He buttoned his coat and stooped over her, the smell of damp exuding from his clothes.

"Just you lay down in the front room till I get back, Mil. Here, look at some of these new fashion books I brought home. I'll be back early, hon, and maybe wake you and the kid up with--with a surprise."

"Quit!"

"Just a French kiss, hon."

She raised a cold face. He tilted her head backward and pressed his lips to hers, then went out, closing the door lightly behind him.

For a breathing space she remained where he had left her, with her lips held in between her teeth and the sobbing breath fluttering in her throat. The pink rose lay on the table, its beautiful silk-velvet leaves concealing its cotton heart. She regarded it through a hot blur of tears that stung her eyeballs. Her throat grew tighter. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and to the hallway. A full-length coat hung from the antlers and a filmy scarf, carelessly flung. She slid into the coat, cramming the sleeves of her negligée in at the shoulders, wrapping the scarf about her head and knotting it at the throat in a hysteria of sudden decision. Then down the flight of stairs, her knees trembling as she ran. When she reached the bubbly sidewalk, cool rain slanted in her face. She gathered her strength and plunged against it.

At the corner, in the white flare of an arc-light, chin sunk on his chest against the onslaught of rain, and head leading, Alphonse Michelson stepped across the shining sea of asphalt. She broke into a run, the uneven careen of the weak, keeping to the shadow of the buildings; doubling her pace.

When he reached the hooded descent to the Subway, she was almost in his shadow; then cautiously after him down the iron stairs, and when he paused to buy his ticket, he might have touched her as she held herself taut against the wall and out of his vision. A passer-by glanced back at her twice. From the last landing of the stairway and leaning across the balustrade, she could follow him now with her eyes, through the iron gateway and on to the station platform.

From behind a pillar, a hen pheasant's tail in her hat raising her above the crowd, her shoulders rain-spotted and a dripping umbrella held well away from her, emerged Gertie Dobriner, a reproach in her expression, but meeting him with a pantomime of laughs and sallies. A tangle of passengers closed them in. A train wild with speed tore into the station, grinding to a stop on shrieking wheels. A second later it tore out again, leaving the platform empty.

Then Madam Moores turned her face to the rainswept street and retraced her steps, except that a vertigo fuddled her progress and twice she swayed. When she climbed the staircase to her apartment she was obliged to rest midway, sitting huddled against the banister, her soaked scarf fallen backward across her shoulders. She unlatched her door carefully, to save the squeak and to avoid the small maid who sang over and above the clatter of her dishes. The yellow lamp diffused its quiet light the length of the hallway, and she tottered down and into the bedroom at the far end.

A night lamp burned beside a basinette that might have been lined with the breast feathers of a dove, so downy was it. An imitation-ivory clock ticked among a litter of imitation-ivory dresser fittings. On the edge of the bed, and with no thought for its lacy coverlet, she sat down heavily, her wet coat dragging it awry. An hour ticked past. The maid completed her tasks, announced her departure, and tiptoed out to meet an appointment with a gas-fitter's assistant in the lower rear hall.

After a while Madam Moores fell to crying, but in long wheezes that came from her throat dry. The child in the crib uncurled a small, pink fist and opened his eyes, but with the gloss of sleep still across them and not forfeiting his dream. Still another hour and she rose, groping her way behind a chintz curtain at the far end of the room; fell to scattering and reassembling the contents of a trunk, stacking together her own garments and the tiny garments of a tiny white layette.

Toward midnight she fell to crying again beside the crib, and in audible jerks and moans that racked her. The child stirred. Cramming her handkerchief against her lips, she faltered down the hallway. In the front room and on the pillowed couch she collapsed weakly, eyes closed and her grief-crumpled face turned toward the door.

On the ground floor of a dim house in a dim street, which by the contrivance of its occupants had been converted from its original role of dark and sinister dining-room to wareroom for a dozen or more perambulators on high, rubber-tired wheels, Alphonse Michelson and Gertie Dobriner stood in conference with a dark-wrappered figure, her blue-checked apron wound muff fashion about her hands.

Miss Dobriner tapped a finger against her too red lips. "Seventy dollars net for a baby-carriage!"

"Yes'm, and a bargain at that. If he was home he'd show you the books hisself and the prices we get."

"Seventy dollars for a baby-carriage! For that, Phonzie, you can buy the kid a taxi."

In a sotto voice and with a flow of red suffusing his face, Alphonse Michelson turned to Gertie Dobriner, his hand curved blinker fashion to inclose his words.

"For Gawd's sake, cut the haggling, Gert. If this here white enamel is the carriage we want, let's take it and hike. I got to get home."

Miss Dobriner drew up her back to a feline arch. "The gentleman says we'll take it for sixty-five, spot cash."

"My husband's great for one price, madam. We don't cater to none but private trade and--"

"Sure you don't. If we could have got one of these glass-top carriages in a department store, we wouldn't be swimming over here to Brooklyn just to try out our stroke."

"Mrs. Nan Ness, who sent you here, knows the kind of goods we turn out. She says she's going to give us an order for a twin buggy yet, some of these days. If the Four Hundred believed in babies like the Four Million, we'd have a plant all over Brooklyn. Only my husband won't spread, he--he--"

Mr. Michelson waved aside the impending recitation with a sweep of his hand. "Is this the one you like, Gert?"

"Yes, with the folding top. Say, don't I want to see madam's face when she sees it. And say, won't the kid be a scream, Phonzie, all nestled up in there like a honey bunch?"

He slid his hand into his pocket, withdrawing a leather folder. "Here, we'll take this one with the folding top, but get us a fresh one out of stock."

"We'll make you this carriage up, sir, just as you see it now."

"Make it up! We've got to have it now. To-night!"

"But, sir, we only got these samples made up to show."

"Then we got to buy the sample."

"No, no. My husband ain't home and I--I can't sell the sample. We--"

"But I tell you we got to have it to-night. To-morrow's Sunday and the lady who--"

"No, no. With my husband not here, I can't let go no sample. As a special favor, sir, we'll make you one up in a week."

Miss Dobriner stooped forward, her eyes narrow as slits. "Seventy-five, spot down."

Indecision vanished as rags before Abracadabra.

"We make it a rule not to sell our samples, but--"

"That carriage has got to be delivered at my house to-night before ten."

"Sir, that can't go out to-night. It's got to be packed special and sent over on a flat-top dray. These carriages got to be packed like they was babies themselves."

"Can you beat that for luck?" He inserted two fingers in his tall collar as if it choked him. "Can you beat that?"

"The first thing Monday morning, sir, as a special favor, but that carriage can't go out to-night. We got one man does nothing but pack them for delivery."

He plunged his hands into his pockets and paced the narrow aisle down the center of the room. "We got to get that carriage over there to-night if--if we have to wheel it over!"

Miss Dobriner clapped her hands in an ecstasy of inspiration. "Good! We'll wheel it home. We can make it by midnight. What you bet?"

He turned upon her, but with a ray in his eyes. "Say, Gert, that ain't such a worse idea, but--"

"No buts. The night is young, and I know a fellow used to walk from the Bronx to Brooklyn with his girl every Sunday."

"Sure! What's an eight-mile walk on a spring night like this? It's all cleared up and stopped raining. Only, gee! I--I hate to be getting home all hours again."

She flipped him a gesture. "Say, it's not my surprise party you're giving."

"It's not that, Gert, only I don't want to keep her waiting until she gets sore enough to have the edge taken off the surprise when it does come."

"Say, suit yourself. It's not my kid I'm going to wheel out to-morrow. I should worry."

"I'll do it."

"You're not doing me a favor. With my cold and my marcel, a three-hour walk ain't the one thing in life I'm craving."

"I'll roll it over the bridge and be home by twelve, easy. You take the Subway, Gert; it's too big a trot for you."

"Nix! I don't start anything I can't finish."

She cocked her hat to a forward angle, so that the hen pheasant's tail swung rakishly over her face, took an Hellenic stride through the aisle of perambulators, flung her arms across her bosom in an attitude of extravaganza, then tossed off a military salute.

"Ready, march!"

"You're a peach, Gert."

"I've tried pretty near everything in my life. Why not wheel another fellow's baby-carriage for another fellow's wife's baby across Brooklyn Bridge at midnight? Whoops! why not!"

"We're off, then, Gert."

"Forward, march!"

"Keep your eye on the steering-wheel, Phonzie, and remember, ten miles is speed limit on the Bridge. One, two, three! Gawd! if my friend from Carson City could only see me now!"

Out on the drying sidewalk they leaned to each other, and the duet of their merriment ran ahead of them down the meager street and found out its dark corners.

"Honest, Phonzie, won't the girls just bust when they hear this!"

"And Mil, poor old girl, she's right weak and full of nerves now, but she'll laugh loudest of all when she knows why I went with Slews."

"Yes. She-can-laugh-loudest-of-all."

"What?"

"Come on, or we won't get home until morning."

And on the crest of her insouciance she thrust out her arm, giving the shining white perambulator a running push from the rear, so that it went rolling lightly from her and with a perfect gear action down the slight incline of sidewalk. They were after it at a bound, light-heeled and full of laughter.

"Whoops, my dear!"

"Whoa!"

* * * * *

At a turn in the dark street the lights of the Bridge flashed suddenly upon them, swung in high festoons across an infinitude of night. Above, a few majestic stars, new coined, gleamed in a clear sky.

"What do you bet that with me at the wheel we can clear the Bridge in thirty minutes, Phonzie?"

"Sure we can; but here, let me shove."

She elbowed him aside, the banter gone suddenly from her voice.

"No, let me."

She fell to pushing it silently along. Stars came out in her eyes. He advanced to her pace, matching his stride to hers, fancies like colored beads slipping along the slender thread of his thoughts.

"Swell sight, ain't it, Gert, the harbor lights so bright and the sky so deep?"

Silence.

"Seeing so much sky all at once reminds me, Gert. You know about that midnight--blue satin Hertz had the brass to dump back on us because the skirt was too tight. Huh?"

Her eyes were far and away.

"Huh, whatta you know about that, Gert?"

Her hands, gripped around the handle-bars, were full of nerves; she could feel them jumping in her palm.

"Huh, Gert?"

"What you say, Phonzie?"

"All right, don't answer. Moon all you like, for my part." And he fell to whistling as he strode beside her, his eyes on the light-spangled outline of the city.

* * * * *

At twelve o'clock the lights in the lower hall of the up-town apartment-house had been extinguished. All but one, which burned like a tired eye beneath the ornate staircase. The misty quiet of midnight, which is as heavy as a veil, hung in the corridors. Miss Gertie Dobriner entered first and, holding wide the door between them, Alphonse Michelson at the front wheels, they tilted the white carriage up the narrow staircase, their whispers floating through the gloom.

"Easy there, Phonzie!"

"There!"

"Watch out!"

"Whew! that was a close shave!"

"Here, let me unlock the door. 'Sh-h-h!"

"Don't go, Gert. Come on in, and after the big show I'll send you home in a cab."

"Nix! After a three-hour walk, a street-car will look good enough to me."

"Well, then, come on in, just a minute, Gert. I want you to see the fun. What you bet she's asleep in the front room, sore as thunder, too? We'll sneak back and dump the kid in and wheel him in on her."

"Aw no! I--I got to go now, Phonzie."

"Come on, Gert, don't be a quitter. Don't you want to see her face when she knows that Slews has been all a fluke? Come on, Gert, I'll wake up the kid if I try to dump him in alone."

"Well, for just a minute. I--I don't want to butt in on your and--and her fun."

They entered with the stealthy espionage of thieves, and in the narrow hallway she waited while he tiptoed to the bedroom and back again, his lips pursed outward in a "'Sh-h-h."

"She must be in the front room. The kid's in his crib. Come on, Gert. 'Sh-h-h!"

He was pink-faced and full of caution, raising each foot in exaggerated stealth. Between them they manoeuvered the carriage down the hallway.

"'Sh-h-h. If she's awake, she can hear every word in the front room."

From her wakeful couch Madam Moores raised herself on her elbow, cupping her ear in her palm, and straining her glance down the long hallway. The tears had dried on her cheeks.

"Here, Gert, you dump in these things and let me lift the kid."

"No, no; let me! Go 'way, Phonzie. You'll wake him! I just want her to be too surprised to open her mouth when she sees him sleeping in it like a top."

She threw back the net drapery and leaned to the heart of the crib, and the blood ran in a flash across her face.

"Little darling--little Phonzie darling!"

"Don't wake him, Gert."

She was reluctant to withdraw herself. "His little darling fists, so pink and curled up! Little Phonzie darling!"

He hung over each process, proud and awkward.

"Little darling--little darling--here, Phonzie help."

They transferred the burden, the child not moving on his pillow. In the shallow heart of the perambulator, the high froth of pillows about him, he lay like a bud, his soft profile against the lace, and his skin like the innermost petal of a rose.

"Phonzie, ain't he--ain't he the softest little darling! Gawd! how--how she'll love to--to be wheeling him!"

His fingers fumbled with excitement and fell to strapping and buckling with a great show and a great ineffectually.

"Here, help me let down the glass top."

"'Sh-h-h-h! Every word carries in this flat."

"Now!"

"Now!"

"You wheel him down and in on her, Gert."

She stiffened with a new diffidence. "No, no. It's your surprise."

"You done all the work on the job as much as me, and it's half your present, anyways. You roll him down the hall and stand next to her till she wakes up. She's a tight little sleeper, but if she don't wake soon I'll drop a book or something. Go on, Gert, roll it in."

"No, no, Phonzie. You and her have your fun out alone. It's your fun, anyways, not mine. This piece of rolling-stock will roll herself along home now."

"Aw, now--"

"Anyways, I'm dead. Look what a rag I am! Look at the hem of this skirt! The next time I do a crazy thing like walk from Brooklyn, I want to be burned in oil."

"Now, Gert, stick around and I'll send you home in a cab."

But she was out and past him craning her neck backward through the aperture of the open door. "Go to it, Phonzie! It's your fun, anyways. Yours and hers. S'long!"

He had already begun his triumphant passage down the hallway, and on her couch among her pillows Madam Moores closed her eyes in a simulation of sleep and against the tears that scalded her lids.

In a south-bound car Gertie Dobriner found a seat well toward the front. Across the aisle a day laborer on a night debauch threw her a watery stare and a thick-tongued, thick-brogued remark. A char-woman with a newspaper bundle hugged under one arm dozed in the seat alongside, her head lolling from shoulder to shoulder. Raindrops had long since dried on the window-pane. Gertie Dobriner cupped her chin in her palm and gazed out at the quiet street and the shuttered shops hurtling past.

Twice the conductor touched her shoulder, his hand outstretched for fare. She sprang about, fumbling in her purse for a coin, but with difficulty, because through the hot blur of her tears she could only grope ineffectually. When she finally found a five-cent piece, a tear had wiggle-waggled down her cheek and fell, splotching the back of her glove.

Across the aisle the day laborer leaned to her batting at the hen pheasant's tail in her hat, and a cold, alcoholic tear dripping from the corner of his own eye.

"Cheer up, my gir-rl," he said, through a beard like old moss--"cheer up and be a spor-r-rt!"

HOCHENHEIMER OF CINCINNATI

When Mound City began to experience the growing-pains of a Million Club, a Louisiana Exposition, and a block-long Public Library, she spread Westward Ho!--like a giant stretching and flinging out his great legs.

When rooming-houses and shoe-factories began to shove and push into richly curtained brown-stone-front Pine Street, reluctant papas, with urgent wives and still more urgent daughters, sold at a loss and bought white-stone fronts in restricted West End districts.

Subdivisions sprang up overnight. Two-story, two-doored flat-buildings, whole ranks and files of them, with square patches of front porch cut in two by dividing railings, marched westward and skirted the restricted districts with the formality of an army flanking. Grand Avenue, once the city's limit, now girded its middle like a loin-cloth. The middle-aged inhabitant who could remember it when it was a corn-field now beheld full-blasted breweries, cinematograph theaters, ten-story office-buildings, old mansions converted into piano-salesrooms and millinery emporiums, business colleges, and more full-blasted breweries up and down its length.

At Cook Street, which runs into Grand Avenue like a small tributary, a pall of smoke descended thick as a veil; and every morning, from off her second-story window-sills, Mrs. Shongut swept tiny dancing balls of soot; and one day Miss Rena Shongut's neat rim of tenderly tended geraniums died of suffocation.

Shortly after, the Adolph Shongut Produce Company signed a heavy note and bought out the Mound City Fancy Sausage and Poultry Company at a low figure. The spring following, large "To Let" signs appeared in the second-story windows of the modest house on Cook Street. And, hard pressed by the approaching first payment of the note and the great iron voice of the Middle West Shoe Company, which backed up against the woodshed; goaded by the no-less-insistent voice of Mrs. Shongut, whose soot balls increased, and by Rena, who developed large pores; shamed by the scorn of a son who had the finger-nails and trousers creases of a bank clerk--Adolph Shongut joined the great pantechnicon procession Westward Ho! and moved to a flat out on Wasserman Avenue--a six-room-and-bath, sleeping-porch, hot-and-cold-water, built-in-plate-rack, steam-heat, hardwood-floor, decorated-to-suit-tenant flat neatly mounted behind a conservative incline of a front terrace, with a square patch of rear lawn that backed imminently into the white-stone garages of Kingston Place.

Friedrichstrasse, Rue de la Paix, Fifth Avenue, Piccadilly, Princess Street and Via Nazionale are the highways of the world. Trod in literature, asterisked in guide-books, and pictured on postal cards, their habits are celebrated. Who does not know that Fifth Avenue is the most rococo boulevard in the world, and that it drinks its afternoon tea from etched, thin-stemmed glasses? Who does not know that Rue de la Paix runs through more novels than any other paved thoroughfare, and that Piccadilly bobbies have wider chest expansion than the Swiss Guards?

Wasserman Avenue has no such renown; but it has its routine, like the history-hoary Via Nazionale, which daily closes its souvenir-shops to seek siesta from two until four, the hours when American tourists are rattling in sight-seeing automobiles along the Appian Way.

At half past seven, six mornings in the week, a well-breakfasted procession, morning papers protruding from sack-coat pockets and toothpicks assiduous, hastens down the well-scrubbed front steps of Wasserman Avenue and turns its face toward the sun and the two-blocks-distant street-car. At half past seven, six days in the week, the wives of Wasserman Avenue hold their wrappers close up about their throats and poke uncoifed heads out of doors to Godspeed their well-breakfasted spouses.

Wasserman Avenue flutters farewell handkerchiefs to its husbands until they turn the corner at Rindley's West End Meat and Vegetable Market. At eventide Wasserman Avenue greets its husbands with kisses, frankly delivered on its rows of front porches.

Do not smile. Gautier wrote about the consolation of the arts; but, after all, he has little enough to say of that cold moment when art leaves off and heart turns to heart.

Most of Wasserman Avenue had never read much of Gautier, but it knew the greater truth of the consolation of the hearth. When Mrs. Shongut waved farewell to her husband that greater truth lay mirrored in her eyes, which followed him until Rindley's West End Meat and Vegetable Market shunted him from view.

"Mamma, come in and close the screen door--you look a sight in that wrapper."

Mrs. Shongut withdrew herself from the aperture and turned to the sunshine-flooded, mahogany-and-green-velours sitting-room.