Humoresque
by
Fannie Hurst
Part 4 out of 6
spotted--what you call--leopard-skin."
"To me that has a sound, Roody, not to be proud of--"
"A living picture, with such neck and arms and--"
"That's enough, Roody! That's enough! I'm ashamed even for your daughter
here!"
"Such a machine, maybe some day two or three, set up in a place like
Coney Island or, for a beginning, in Pleasure Arcade, is an immense
idea, Rosie. Until an invention like this, nine-tenths of the people
couldn't afford the theyater. The drop-picture machine takes care of
them nine-tenths."
"Theyaters are no place for the poor."
"That's where you're wrong--they need it the most. I don't want to get
you worked up, Rosie, while you ain't strong, but every day that we wait
we're letting a great idea slip through our fingers. If I don't buy that
machine off Emil Hahn, somebody else will see in it what I see. Then
all our lives we will have something to reproach ourselves with."
Mrs. Pelz let slide her hand beneath the pillow, eyes closing and her
face seeming to whiten.
"Ninety dollars! Twenty dollars less than every cent we got saved in the
world. It ain't right we should gamble with it, Roody. Not now."
"Why not now, Rosie? It's all the more reason. Is it worth maybe a
little gamble our Bleema should grow up like the best? I got bigger
plans for her and her little mammela than such a back room all their
lives. In a few years, maybe three rooms for ourselves in one of them
newfangled apartment-houses up on Second Avenue with turn-on
hot water--"
"That's right--you'll have her riding in a horseless carriage next!"
"I tell you, it's a big idea!"
"I wish we had ten cents for every big idea you've been struck with."
"That's just why, Rosie, I'm going to hit one right."
Mrs. Pelz withdrew then the slow hand from beneath the pillow and a
small handkerchief with a small wad knotted into it.
"Nearly every--cent--in--the world, Roody, that we've got. Saved nearly
penny by penny. Our Bleema--it's a sin--our--our--"
"Sin nothing!"
"Our week-old little girl--it--"
"Nothing ventured in life, Rosie, nothing squeezed out of it. Don't put
it back! Look, the baby herself wants it! Papa's little Bleema! Look!
She's trying to lift herself. Ain't that remarkable, Rosie--look at
that child lifting for that handkerchief!"
"Our little baby girl! If it was for ourselves alone, all right, maybe,
take a chance--but for--"
Suddenly Mr. Pelz clapped his thigh. "I got it! I got it! Well let the
little Bleema decide it for us. How's that? She should decide it for us
if we take a gamble on her daddy's big idea! Here--I put a five-cents
piece in her little hand and see which way she drops it. The little
mammela will say which way it is to be--heads or tails. How's that,
Rosie--the baby should decide it for us?"
"Roody--we mustn't!"
"Heads or tails, Rosie?"
"I--I--"
"Quick!"
"H-heads!"
"Quick now, papa's baby, open up little fist!"
"Roody, not so rough! She can't hold that big nickel."
"That's just what I want--she should let it fall."
"Roody, Roody, I hope it's tails."
The coin rolled to the bed-edge, bounced off to the floor, rolled to the
zinc edge.
Immediately after, on all-fours, his face screwed up for scrutiny and
the back of his neck hotly ridden with crimson, Mr. Pelz leaned after.
"Roody--what?"
"Heads!"
Where Riverside Drive reaches its rococo climax of the
twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year and twelve-story-high apartment-house de
luxe and duplex, and six baths divided by fourteen rooms is equal to
solid-marble comfort, Elsinore Court, the neurotic Prince of Denmark and
Controversy done in gilt mosaics all over the foyer, juts above the
sky-line, and from the convex, rather pop-eyed windows of its top story,
bulges high and wide of view over the city.
From one of these windows, looking north, Rudolph Pelz, by the
holding-aside of a dead weight of pink brocade and filet lace, could
gaze upon a sweep of Hudson River that flowed majestically between the
great flank of the city and the brobdingnagian Palisades.
After a day when he had unerringly directed the great swinging crane of
this or that gigantic transaction it had a laving effect upon him--this
view of sure and fluent tide that ran so perpetually into infinitude.
Yet for Mr. Pelz to attempt to articulate into words this porcelain-thin
pillar of emotions was to shatter it into brittle bits.
"Say, Rosie, ain't that a view for you? That's how it is with life--a
river that rises with getting born and flows into death, and the
in-between is life and--and--"
"Roody, will you please hurry for sup--dinner? Do you want Feist to
arrive with you not yet dressed?"
Mr. Pelz turned then into an interior that was as pink and as silk as
the inside of a bud--satin walls with side brackets softly simulating
candles; a Canet bed, piled with a careful riot of sheerest and roundest
of pillows; that long suit of the interior decorator, the
_chaise-longue_; the four French engravings in their gilt frames; the
latest original Josephine's _secrétaire_; the shine of a white adjoining
bathroom. Before a door-impaneled mirror, Mrs. Pelz, in a black-lace
gown that was gracious to her rotundity.
"Just look! I'm all dressed already."
Mr. Pelz advanced to her, his clasp closing over each of her bare arms,
smile and gaze lifting.
"Rosie, you've got them all beat! Guess why I wish I was your diamond
necklace."
"Roody, it's nearly seven. Don't make me ashamed for Feist."
"Guess!"
"All right, then, I guess."
"So I could always be round your neck."
His hand flew immediately to the lay of gems at her throat, a small
flush rising.
"Roody, you hear me--hurry! Stop it, I tell you! You pinch." But she was
warmly pink now, the shake of her head setting the heavy-carat gems in
her ears waggling.
Time, probably emulating destiny, had worked kindly here; had brought to
Mrs. Pelz the soft, dove-like maturity of her little swell of bosom; the
white, even creamy shoulders ever so slightly too plump between the
blades; the still black hair polished and waved into expensive
permanence. Out of years that had first veered and finally taken course
under his unquestionable captaincy, Rudolph Pelz, with some of their
storm and stress written in deep brackets round his mouth, the red hair
just beginning to pale and thin, and a certain roundness of back
enhancing his squattiness, had come snugly and simply into harbor. Only
the high cheek-bones and bony jaw-line and the rather inconveniently low
voice, which, however, had the timbre of an ormolu clock in the chiming,
indicating his peculiar and covert power to dominate as dynamically as
ungrammatically a board of directors reckoning in millions across
the mahogany.
"Shall I call in Sato to help you dress, Roody?"
"Please--no! Just to have him in the room with his yellowness and
tiptoes makes me nervous like a cat."
"I got your shirt and studs laid out myself."
He pinched her cheek again. "Rosie Posy!"
"You had a hard day, Roody? You look tired."
"I don't like the battle of Waterloo in the 'Saint Elba' picture."
"Roody, that scene it took such a fortune to build into the shape of the
letter A?"
"It looks like what is it. Fake! The way it reads in that _French
Revolution_ by that fellow Carlyle they gave me to read and the way it
looks in the picture is the difference of black from white. For fifty
thousand dollars more or less on a four-hundred-thousand-dollar picture
I don't have a fake Waterloo."
"I should say not, Roody, when you're famous for your water scenes in
all your big pictures! In 'The Lure of Silk' it's the scenes on the
water they went craziest over."
"I've already got the passage engaged for next week to shoot the
company over to France. That windmill scene on Long Island looks as much
like the windmill north of Fleuris, where Napoleon could see the Blucher
troops from, as I look like a windmill scene. 'Sol,' I says, 'it looks
just like what it is--a piece of pasteboard out of the storehouse set up
on a rock. Eat those feet of film, Sol,' I says to him, 'plant 'em,
drown 'em--anything you like with 'em. That kind of fake stuff won't
make 'Saint Elba' the greatest picture ever released, and every picture
turned out from these studios has got to be just that.' I wish you could
have heard, Rosie, in the projection-room, quiet like a pin after I came
out with it."
"Fifty thousand dollars, Roody?"
"Yes. 'Fifty thousand dollars,' begins Sol with me, too. 'Fifty
thousand--one hundred thousand--two!' I said. 'It would make no
difference. If we can't fake the kind of battle-plain that wouldn't make
Napoleon turn over in his grave, we cross the ocean for the real thing.'
'Fifty thousand dollars,' Sol keeps saying--you know how he cries with
his voice. 'Fifty thousand dollars your grandmother!' I hollered. 'For a
few dollars more or less I should make a Rudolph Pelz picture something
I'm ashamed of.' Am I right, Rosie? Am I right?"
"I should say so, Roody, for a few dollars you should not belittle
yourself."
"Not if your old man knows it, by golly! and I think he does."
"Hurry now, Roody; you know how Bleema likes it you should be dressed."
"Believe me, if Feist had his choice he wouldn't be dressed, neither.
Full dress for grandma and all of us to look at each other in! When
there's company, it's bad enough, but for Feist and a few servants,
hanged if I see it!"
"Does it hurt, Roody, to give the child a little pleasure? Anyway, she's
right--people like us should get dressed up for sup--dinner. I wouldn't
be surprised if she didn't bring Lester Spencer back for dinner from
automobiling."
"He leaves to-night at ten with the company for Pennsylvania and the
Horseshoe Bend picture. Anyways, I don't see where it comes in that for
a fellow who draws his salary off of me I have to dress. I got to say it
for him, though, give the devil his due, he does a good piece of work
where Sol succeeds in getting him off center-stage in his scene with
Wellington."
"Lester is a good actor. Madame Coutilly, to-day, when I had my
manicure, just raved over him and Norma Beautiful in 'The Lure
of Silk.'"
"He'll be a screen proposition some day if we can chain down some of his
conceit. Only, where such friendships with him and Bleema comes in, I
don't see. I don't like it."
"Say, the child likes to run around with celebrities. Why shouldn't it
give her pleasure over the other girls from Miss Samuels's school to be
seen out once in a while with Lester Spencer, their favorite, or Norma
Beautiful? 'America's Darlings,' I see this week's _Screen Magazine_
calls 'em. It's natural the child should enjoy it."'
"Let her enjoy; only, where it comes in I should have to sit across
from him at supper three times this week, I don't see. Out of the
studio, me and Spencer don't talk the same language. To-night, him and
Feist would mix like oil and water."
"Does Feist know yet, Roody, you closed the deal on the Grismer estate?"
"Sure! I says to him to-day: 'Feist, with us for next-door neighbors of
your country estate, together we own nearly half of Long Island.' Am
I right?"
"Like I says last night in mamma's room to Etta and Sol, 'I was used to
thirty-four rooms and nineteen baths from home yet!' Poor mamma--how she
laughed! Just like before her stroke."
"Nothing, Rosie, not one hundred rooms and fifty baths--nothing I can
ever do for you is one-tenth that you deserve."
"And nothing, Roody, that I can do for you is one-hundredth what you
deserve."
"I sometimes wonder, Rosie, if, with all we got, there isn't maybe some
little happiness I've overlooked for you."
She lifted herself by his coat lapels, kissing him. "Such a question!"
"So many times it comes up in the scenarios and the picture-plots,
Rosie, how money don't always bring happiness."
"It wouldn't, Roody--not a penny's worth to me without you and Bleema.
But with you, Roody, no matter how happy I feel, it seems to me I can't
ever feel happy enough for what we have got. Why, a woman just
couldn't--why, I--I always say about you, Roody, only yesterday to my
own sister-in-law, 'Etta,' I says, 'it's hard for me to think of
anything new to wish for.' Just take last week, for instance, I wished
it that, right after the big check you gave for the Armenian sufferers,
you should give that extra ten thousand in mamma's name to the Belgian
sufferers. Done! Thursday, when I seen that gray roadster I liked so
much for Bleema, this afternoon she's out riding in it. It is a wonder I
got a wish for anything left in me."
"To have you talk like this, Rosie, is the highest of all my successes."
"If--if there's one real wish I got now, Roody, it is only for our
Bleema. We got a young lady, honey; we got to put on our thinking-cap."
"'Young lady'--all of a sudden she decides we've got! Young baby, you
better say."
"A graduate this month from Miss Samuels's Central Park School he calls
a baby!"
"Let me see--how old is--"
"He don't know his own child's age! Well, how many years back is it
since we were in rainy-day skirts?"
"My God! Ten--fourteen--eighteen! Eighteen years! Our little Bleema! It
seems yesterday, Rosie, I was learning her to walk along Grand Street."
"You haven't noticed, Roody, David Feist?"
"'Noticed'?"
"Say, you may be a smart man, Rudolph Pelz--everybody tells me you
are--but they should know once on the Picture Rialto how dumb as a
father you are. 'Noticed?' he asks. All right then--if you need a brick
house--noticed that David Feist hates your daughter and 'ain't got eyes
for her and don't try every excuse to get invited here for sup--dinner."
"You mean, Rosie--"
"Of course I mean! It's pitiful how he follows her everywhere with his
eyes. In the box last night at the opera you was too asleep to see it,
but all evening Etta was nudging me how he nearly ate up our Bleema just
with looks."
"You women with your nonsense!"
"I guess, Rudolph, it would be a bad thing. Our daughter and a young man
smart enough to make himself from a celluloid collar-cutter to a
millionaire five times over on a little thing like inventing a
newfangled film-substance should tie up with the only child of Rudolph
Pelz, the picture king."
"I give you my word, Rosie, such talk makes me sick."
"You'd hate it, wouldn't you? A prince like David Feist."
"People don't talk such things till they happen. If our daughter could
have the King of England and didn't want him, I'd say she should not
marry the King of England. I want my girl home by me yet, anyway, for
many a long day. She should be playing with her dolls instead of her
mother and aunt Etta filling her up with ideas. Don't think I'm so
stuck, neither, on how she runs around with my film stars."
"Honest, Roody, the way you're so strict with that child it's a shame!
The girl has got to have her pleasure."
"Well, if she's got to have her pleasure, she should have it with young
men like Feist and not with--"
"There! Didn't I tell you so? Didn't I?"
"Say, I don't deny if I got some day to have a son-in-law, my first
choice for him would be Feist."
"Roody, the two estates together in one!"
"I'm surprised at you, Rosie--honest, I'm surprised. Such talk!"
Mrs. Pelz took a pinch of his each cheek, tiptoeing to kiss him squarely
on the lips.
"Go get dressed," she said, "and I'll wait for you."
"Rosie Posy," he said, clucking into his cheek with his tongue and
moving away through the pink-shaded twilight.
At the door to the whitely glittering bathroom she called to him again,
softly; he turning.
"What'll you bet, Roody, that I get my biggest wish as soon as I got the
gray roadster and the Belgian check?"
"Women's nonsense!" said Mr. Pelz, his voice suddenly lost in the
violent plunge of water into porcelain.
In a drawing-room faithful to Dunlap Brothers' exorbitant interpretation
of the Italian Renaissance, a veritable forest of wrought-iron
candle-trees burned dimly into a scene of Pinturicchio table,
tapestry-surmounted wedding-chest, brave and hideous with _pastiglia_
work, the inevitable camp-chair of Savonarola, an Umbrian-walnut chair
with lyre-shaped front, bust of Dante Alighieri in Florentine cap and
ear-muffs, a Sienese mirror of the soul, sixteenth-century suit of
cap-à-pie armor on gold-and-black plinth, Venetian credence with
wrought-iron locks. The voiceless and invoiced immobility of the museum
here, as if only the red-plush railing, the cords from across chairs,
and the "Do Not Sit" warnings to the footsore had been removed.
Against a chair cruel to the back with a carved coat of arms of the
Lombardi family Mr. David Feist leaned lightly and wisely. If his
correct-enough patent pumps ever so slightly escaped the floor, his span
of shoulders left hardly an inch to be desired. There was a peninsula of
rather too closely shaved but thick black hair jutted well down Mr.
Feist's brow, forming what might have been bald but were merely hairless
inlets on either side. Behind _pince-nez_ his eyes sparkled in points
not unlike the lenses themselves. Honed to a swift, aquiline boniness of
profile which cut into the shadows, there was something swiftly vigorous
about even his repose.
Incongruous enough on the Pinturicchio table, and as if she had dared to
walk where mere moderns feared to tread, a polychrome framed picture of
Miss Bleema Pelz, tulle-clouded, piquant profile flung charmingly to the
northwest, and one bare shoulder prettily defiled with a long
screw-curl, lit, as it were, into the careful gloom.
Deliberately in range of that photograph, and so beatific of gaze that
it was as if his sense were soaked in its loveliness, Mr. Feist smiled,
and, smiling, reddened. Enter then Mrs. Pelz, hitting softly into white
taffetas beneath the black lace; Mr. Pelz, wide, white and boiled of
shirt-front.
"Good evening, Mr. Feist! It's a shame the way we kept you waiting."
"Not at all, Mrs. Pelz--a pleasure. Hello! how's my friend, the picture
king?"
"Rotten," said Mr. Pelz, amiably, shaking hands with a great riding-up
of cuff, and seating himself astride a Florentine bench and the
leather-embossed arms of the Strozzi family.
"Roody, what a way to sit!"
"'What a way to sit,' she tells me. I'd like to see a fellow sit any way
in this room without making a monkey of himself. Am I right, Feist? The
Eyetalians maybe didn't know no better, but I should have to suffer,
too, when for four-seventy-nine I can buy myself at Tracy's the finest
kind of a rocking-chair that fits me."
"Roody!"
"Say, Feist agrees with me; only, he don't know you well enough yet to
let on. I notice that with all his Louis-this and Louis-that rooms in
his own house, up in his own room it is a good old Uncle Sam's cot and a
patent rocker."
"You've got a gorgeous room here just the same, Pelz."
"Gorgeous for a funeral."
"Every collector in the country knows that table. I had my eye on it for
my music-room once myself when it was shown at Dunlap's."
"Dunlap's are a grand firm of decorators, Mr. Feist. I'm having them do
Grismer, too."
"Well, Feist, how does it feel to have us for neighbors?"
"Immense, Pelz!"
"Like I said to my husband, between us the way the estates adjoin, we
got a monopoly on Long Island--ain't it so?"
"And believe me, Mrs. Pelz, you'll never regret the buy. The finest
pleasure my money brought me yet is that view of my little bedroom I
took you up to, Pelz."
"Wonderful!"
"I've got an outlook there, Mrs. Pelz, is a paradise to see. You can
have all my forty-two rooms and two garages if you'll leave me my little
top room with its miles of beautiful greenness, and--and so--so much
beauty that--that it gets you by the throat. I--don't express it the way
I see it, but--"
"I should say so, Mr. Feist! Out of every one of our thirty-four rooms
and eighteen baths you can see a regular oil-painting."
Mr. Pelz leaned over, tongue in cheek and, at the screwing noise again,
poking Mr. Feist in the region of the fifth rib.
"She said to me up-stairs just now, Feist, 'Like we was used to it from
home?' Eh? C-c-c-cluck! Eighteen baths a day! I know the time when one
every Saturday night was stuck up."
"Roody, honest, you're awful!"
"Say, me and Feist speak the same language. We ain't entertaining a lot
of motion-picture stars to-night."
"I want Mr. Feist to come over some night to sup--dinner when we have a
few of them over. We're great friends, Mr. Feist, with Norma Beautiful
and Allan Hunt and Lester Spencer and all that crowd. We entertain them
a good deal. My daughter is quite chums with them all. Elsie Love sleeps
here some nights. Honest, Mr. Feist, you never saw a more unassuming
girl for her salary."
"Yes, especially is she unassuming when she spoils ninety feet of film
yesterday in a row with Spencer over who should have one-half inch
nearer to the center of the picture."
"My husband, Mr. Feist, has got no patience with temperament."
"Honey, a little supper wouldn't hurt."
"I'll send and see if Bleema is ready yet. She's been out, taking Lester
Spencer in her new runabout her papa bought her. I wish you could see,
Mr. Feist, the way the traffic policemen smile after that girl the way
she handles a car. If I do say it, she's a picture."
"If you ask me, Mrs. Pelz, the finest of the objects in this room of
fine things, it won't take me long to tell you," said Mr. Feist, leaning
forward to lift for closer gaze the framed photograph.
"Now you're shouting, Feist!"
"That picture don't half do her justice. If I do say it, Mr. Feist--if
that child had to make her living, she'd be a fortune in pictures. 'No,
mamma,' she always says; 'God forbid if I have to make my living some
day, I want to be a famous writer.' I want you to read sometime, Mr.
Feist, some of that girl's poetry. I cry like a baby over the sad ones.
And stories! There's one about a poor little girl who could look out of
her window into the house of a rich girl and--"
"Feist, her mother just hates that child!"
"Say, old man, I don't see any medals on you for hating her."
"He's worse than I am, Mr. Feist; only, he hides it behind making fun of
me. I always say if Bleema Pelz wanted the moon, her father would see to
it that his property-man got the real one for her."
"You--you've got a beautiful, sweet little girl there, Pelz. I don't
blame you."
"Feist, if I didn't know it, I'd be an ungrateful dog."
"Her papa can't realize, Mr. Feist, we haven't got a baby any more."
"I--realize it, Mrs. Pelz."
"You--you see, Roody?"
"I--I--guess I'm the old-fashioned kind of a fellow, Pelz, when it comes
to girls. I--I guess I do it the way they used to do it--the parents
first--but--but--now that we--we're on the subject--I--I like your
daughter, Pelz--my God! Pelz, but--but I like your little daughter!"
An Augsburg clock ticked into a suddenly shaped silence, Mr. Pelz
rising, Mr. Feist already risen.
"I haven't got much besides a clean record and all that love or money
can buy her, Pelz, but--well--you know me for what I am, and--"
"Indeed we do, Mr. Feist! I always say to my husband my favorite of all
the young men who come here is--"
"You know what my standing--well, with men and in business is, Pelz, and
as far as taking care of her goes, I can make her from a little princess
into a little queen--"
"The young man that is lucky enough to get Bleema, Mr. Feist--"
"Not that the money part is everything, but if what I am suits you and
Mrs. Pelz, I want to enter the ring for her. I might as well come out
with it. I wouldn't for anything on earth have her know that I've spoken
to you--yet--not till after I've spoken with her--but--well, there's my
cards on the table, Pelz."
Mr. Pelz held out a slow and rigid arm, one hand gripping, the other
cupping Mr. Feist at the elbow.
"It's the finest compliment I could pay to any man on God's earth to say
it, Feist, but if it's got to be that my little baby girl has grown up
to an age where she--"
"She's already a year older than me when I married you, Roody."
"If it's got to be, then there's one man on earth I can give her up to
with happiness. That man is you, Feist."
Into this atmosphere so surcharged that it had almost the singing
quality of a current through it entered Miss Bleema Pelz, on slim silver
heels that twinkled, the same diaphanous tulle of the photograph
enveloping her like summer, her hair richer, but blending with the
peach-bloom of her frock, the odor of youth her perfume.
"Bleema darling, you're just in time!"
"Hello, moms!"--in the little lifted voice trained to modulation, and
kissing Mrs. Pelz in light consideration of powdered areas. "Hello,
dads!"--tiptoeing and pursing her mouth into a bud. "Good evening,
Mr. Feist."
"Looks like I'm the left-over in this party," said Mr. Feist, slow to
release her hand and wanting not to redden.
"Naughty-naughty!" said Miss Pelz, with a flash of eyes to their
corners, a flouncing of tulle, and then landing ever so lightly on her
father's knee and at the immediate business of jerking open his tie.
"Bad, bad dad! Didn't let Sato dress him to-night."
"You little red head, you!"
"Stop it! Hold up your chin."
"Honey, we're all starvationed."
"Lester'll be here any minute now."
"Lester Spencer coming for dinner, Bleema?"
"Surely. I dropped him just now at the Lions' Club to change his
clothes. Now, don't get excited, dads; he's leaving right after dinner
to catch his train for Horseshoe Bend."
"I must tell Williams to lay another--"
"I've already told him, mamma. Here he is now! Come on in, Lester;
you're holding up the family. You've never met Mr. Feist, have you, the
film king? You two ought to get acquainted--one makes the films and the
other makes them famous."
There was a round of greetings, Mr. Spencer passing a hand that had
emerged white and slim through the ordeal of thousands of feet
of heroics.
"How do you do, Mrs. Pelz? Boss! Mr. Feist, glad to know you!"
What hundreds of thousands of men, seeming to despise, had secretly, in
the organ-reverberating darkness of the motion-picture theater, yearned
over Mr. Lester Spencer's chest expansion, hair pomade, and bulgeless
front and shirt-front! When Lester Spencer, in a very slow fade-out,
drew the exceedingly large-of-eye and heaving-of-bosom one unto his own
immaculate bosom, whole rows of ladies, with the slightly open-mouthed,
adenoidal expression of vicarious romance, sat forward in their chairs.
Men appraised silently the pliant lay of shirt, the uncrawling
coat-back, and the absence of that fatal divorce of trousers and
waistcoat.
"I was telling my husband, Lester, my manicurist just raved to-day about
you and Norma Beautiful in 'The Lure of Silk.'"
"Isn't that just the sweetest picture, moms?"
"It certainly is! Mr. Pelz took me down to the projection-room to see
its first showing, and I give you my word I said to him and Sol--didn't
I, Roody?--'That picture is a fortune.' And never in my life did I fail
to pick a winner--did I, Roody? I got a knack for it. Mr. Feist, have
you seen 'The Lure of Silk'?"
"Sorry to say I have not."
"If you think that is a riot, Mrs. Pelz, you wait until you see the way
they're going to eat me up in the court scene in 'Saint Elba.' I had the
whole studio crying down there to-day--didn't I, Mr. Pelz? Crying like
babies over the scene where I stand like this--so--overlooking--"
"Say, Rosie, that's twice already Williams announced dinner is served."
"Overlooking the--"
"I hear Friedman & Kaplan made an assignment, Feist."
"Come, Lester; you take me in to dinner. Rudolph, you go and get mamma.
Bleema, you and Mr. Feist be escorts."
In a dining-room so unswervingly Jacobean that its high-back chairs
formed an actual enclosure about the glittering, not to say noble, oval
of table, the dinner-hour moved through the stately procession of its
courses. At its head, Mrs. Miriam Sopinsky, dim with years and the kind
of weariness of the flesh that Rembrandt knew so well, her face even
yellower beneath the black wig with the bold row of machine-stitching
down its center, the hands veiny and often uncertain among the dishes.
"Roody, cut up mamma's chicken for her. She trembles so."
"Moms, let Williams."
"No; she likes it when your father does it."
Mr. Pelz leaned over, transferring his own knife and fork. In Yiddish:
"Grandmother, I hear you've been flirting with Doctor Isadore Aarons.
Now, don't you let me hear any more such nonsense. The young girls in
this house got to walk the straight line."
The old face broke still more furiously into wrinkle, the hand reaching
out to top his.
"Don't tease her, Roody; she likes to be let alone in public."
MR. FEIST: The old lady certainly holds her own, don't she? Honest, I'd
give anything if I knew how to talk to her a little.
"No, Mr. Feist, mamma's breaking. Every day since her stroke I can see
it more. It nearly kills me, too. It's pretty lonesome for her, up here
away from all her old friends. Outside of my husband and Bleema, not a
soul in the house talks her language except Sol and Etta when they
come over."
"She's my nice darling grandma," said Miss Pelz, suddenly pirouetting up
from her chair around the table, kissing the old lips lightly and then
back again, all in a butterfly jiffy.
MRS. PELZ (_sotto to Mr. Feist_). Ain't she the sweetest thing with her
grandmother?
"Umh!" said Mr. Spencer, draining his wine-glass to the depth of its
stem. "Mr. Pelz, believe me if the Atlantic Ocean was made out of this
stuff, you wouldn't have to engage passage for me; I'd swim across."
"You better learn how first," said Mr. Pelz. "You've cost me a fortune
already in dummies for the water scenes."
"It's a riot, Mr. Pelz, the way they go mad over me in that Pelham Bay
scene in 'The Marines Are Coming.' I dropped into the Buckingham to see
it last night, and before I knew it the house had it that I was present
and was going wild over me. They had to throw the spotlight on the box."
"I love that scene, too, Lester! Honest, I just squeeze up with
excitement where you stand there at the edge of the deck and take the
plunge into the water to rescue Norma Beautiful."
"You mean a super for five a day takes the plunge."
"Tell you another scene where I simply raise the roof off the house
in--"
MR. PELZ: Williams, pass Mr. Feist some more of them little cabbages.
"Brussels sprouts, dad."
MRS. PELZ: I guess you miss Norma Beautiful not playing with you in
"Saint Elba," don't you, Lester? You and her are so used to playing with
each other.
"I was the one first suggested she wouldn't be the type to play
Josephine, Mrs. Pelz. Too thin. I've got to be contrasted right or it
kills me--"
"Williams, a little more of that chicken stuffing. It's almost good
enough to remind me how you and grandma used to make it, Rosie."
"Speaking of 'Saint Elba,' Mr. Pelz, somebody must speak to Mabel Lovely
about the way she keeps hogging center-stage in that scene with me on--"
"There's no center-stage left to hog with you in the picture, Spencer."
"She crowds me to profile. They want me full-face. If you'd put in a
word to Sol to direct it that way! Other night, at the Buckingham, it
was a riot every time I turned full-face. Just because a fellow happens
to have a good profile is no reason why--"
"Well, Feist, how does the war look to-day?"
"Ugly, Pelz, ugly. Every hour this country lets pass with Belgium
unavenged she is going to pay up for later."
"It's not our fight, Mr. Feist."
"Maybe it's not our fight, Mr. Spencer, but if ever there was a cause
that is all humanity's fight, it is those bleeding and murdered women
and children of Belgium. You're sailing over there yourself next week,
Mr. Spencer, and I hope to God you will see for yourself how much of our
fight it is."
"Ain't things just simply terrible? Honest, I said to Roody, when I
picked up the paper this morning, it gives me the blues before I
open it."
"Nobody can tell me that this country is going to sit back much longer
and see autocracy grind its heel into the face of the world."
"You're right, Feist! I think if there is one thing worse than being too
proud to fight, it is not being proud enough to fight."
"Lester Spencer, if you don't stop making eyes!"
"Mr. Pelz, every time I drink to your daughter only with my eyes she
slaps me on the wrist. You put in a good word for me."
"Little more of that ice-cream, Feist?"
"Thanks, Pelz; no."
"You, Lester?"
"Don't care if I do, Miss Bleema Butterfly."
Mr. Pelz flashed out a watch. "Don't want to hurry you, Spencer, but if
you have to catch that ten-o'clock train, by the time you get back and
change clothes--"
"You're right, Mr. Pelz; I'd better be getting on."
Miss Pelz danced to her feet. "Mamma and papa will excuse us, Lester, if
we leave before coffee. Come; I'll shoot you to the club."
"Why, Bleema! George will bring the limousine around and--"
"I promised! Didn't I promise you, Lester, that if you came up to dinner
I'd drive you back to the club myself?"
"She sure did, Mrs. Pelz."
"Bleema, you stay right here and finish your supper. There's two
chauffeurs on the place to drive Spencer around to his club."
"But, dad, I promised."
"Why, Bleema, ain't you ashamed? Mr. Feist here for dinner and you to
run off like that. Shame on you!"
"Oh, that's all right, Mrs. Pelz. I'll stay around and be entertained by
you and Mr.--"
"I'll be back in twenty minutes, moms. Surely you'll excuse me that
long! I want to drive him down in my new runabout. I promised. Please,
moms! Dad?"
"Ask your papa, Bleema; I--I don't know--"
"Dad?"
"You heard what I said, Bleema. No!"
A quick film of tears formed over Miss Pelz's eyes, her lips quivering.
"Oh, well--if--if you're going to be that mean--oh, you make me so
mad--. Come on, Lester--I--I guess I can take you as far as the front
door without the whole world jumping on me. Oh--oh--you make me so mad!"
And pranced out on slim feet of high dudgeon.
"Poor child!" said Mrs. Pelz, stirring into her coffee. "She's so high
strung."
"She's got to quit wasting her time on that conceited jackass," said Mr.
Pelz, swallowing off his demi-tasse at a gulp. "Won't have it!"
"It makes her papa mad the way the boys just kill themselves over that
girl," said Mrs. Pelz, arch of glance toward Mr. Feist, who was stirring
also, his eyes lowered.
"Me, too," he said, softly.
"Jealous!" flashed Mrs. Pelz.
After an interval, and only upon despatching a servant, Miss Pelz
returned, the tears frank streaks now down her cheeks.
"Sit down, baby, and drink your coffee."
"Don't want any."
"Williams, bring Miss Bleema some hot coffee."
"I'm finished, mother--please!"
"I was telling Mr. Feist a while ago, Bleema, about your ambition to be
a writer, not for money, but just for the pleasure in it. What is it you
call such writing in your French, honey? Dilytanty?"
"Please, mamma, Mr. Feist isn't interested."
"Indeed I am, Miss Bleema! More interested than in anything I know of."
"She's mad at her papa, Feist, and when my little girl gets mad at her
papa there's nothing for him to do but apologize with a big kiss."
Suddenly Miss Pelz burst into tears, a hot cascade of them that flowed
down over her prettiness.
"Why, Bleema!"
"Now, now, papa's girl--"
The grandmother made a quick gesture of uplifted hands, leaning over
toward her, and Miss Pelz hiding her face against that haven of shrunken
old bosom.
"Oh, grandma, make 'em let me alone!"
"Why, Bleema darling, I'm surprised! Ain't you ashamed to act this way
in front of Mr. Feist? What'll he think?"
"Please, Mrs. Pelz, don't mind me; she's a little upset--that's all."
"You--you made me look like--like thirty cents before Lester
Spencer--that--that's what you did."
"Why, Bleema, do you think that if papa thought that Lester Spencer was
worth bothering that pretty red head of yours about that he would--"
"There you go again! Always picking on Lester. If you want to know it,
next to Norma Beautiful and Allan Hunt he's the biggest money-maker your
old corporation has got."
"What's that got to do with you?"
"And he'll be passing them all in a year or two, you see if he
don't--if--if--if only you'd stop picking on him and letting Uncle Sol
crowd him out of the pictures and everybody in the company take
advantage of him--he--he's grand--he--"
"He's a grand conceited fool. If not for the silly matinée women in the
world he couldn't make salt."
"That shows all you know about him, papa! He's got big ideals, Lester
has. He got plans up his sleeve for making over the moving-picture
business from the silly films they show nowadays to--"
"Yes--to something where no one gets a look-in except Lester Spencer.
They're looking for his kind to run the picture business!"
"Roody--Bleema--please! Just look at poor grandma! Mr. Feist, I must
apologize."
"He's a nix, an empty-headed--"
"He is--is he? Well, then--well, then--since you force me to it--right
here in front of Mr. Feist--Lester Spencer and I got engaged to-day!
He's the only man in my life. We're going to be married right off, in
time for me to sail for France with the company. He's going to talk to
you when he gets back from Horseshoe Bend. We're engaged! That's how
much I think of Lester Spencer. That's how much I know he's the finest
man in the world. Now then! Now then!"
There was a note in Miss Pelz's voice that, in the ensuing silence,
seemed actually to ring against the frail crystal. She was on her feet,
head up, tears drying.
"Blee-Bleema!"
"Moms darling, aren't you happy? Isn't it wonderful--moms?"
"Roody! For God's sake, Bleema, you're choking your father to death!
Roody, for God's sake, don't get so red! Williams--some
water--quick! Roody!"
"I'm all right. All right, I tell you. She got me excited. Sit down,
Bleema--sit down, I said."
"Pelz, if you don't mind, I think maybe I'd better be going."
"You stay right here, Feist. I want you to hear every word that I'm
going to say. If my daughter has no shame, I haven't, either. Williams,
call Mrs. Sopinsky's maid, and see that she gets to her room
comfortable. Sit down, Bleema!"
"My God!--I can't believe my ears--Bleema and such a _goy_ play-actor--"
"Please, Rosie!"
"A _goy_ that--"
"Rosie, I said, 'Please!' Bleema, did you hear me? Sit down!"
Miss Pelz sat then, gingerly on the chair-edge, her young lips straight.
"Well?"
Her father crunched into his stiff damask napkin, holding a fistful of
it tense against bringing it down in a china-shivering bang. Then, with
carefully spaced words, "If I didn't think, Bleema, that you are crazy
for the moment, infatuated with--"
"I'm not infatuated!"
"Bleema, Bleema, don't talk to your father so ugly!"
"Well, I guess I know my own mind. I guess I know when I'm in love with
the finest, darlingest fellow that ever--"
"You hush that, Bleema! Hush that, while I can hold myself in. That I
should live to hear my child make herself common over a loafer--"
"Papa, if you call him another name, I--I--"
"You'll sit right here and hear me out. If you think you're going to let
this loafer ruin your own life and the lives of your parents and poor
grandmother--"
"Papa, papa, you don't know him! The company are all down on him because
they're jealous. Lester Spencer comes from one of the finest old
Southern families--"
"Roody, Roody, a _goy_ play-actor--"
"'A _goy_ play-actor'! I notice, mamma, you are the one always likes to
brag when the girls and fellows like Norma Beautiful and Allan Hunt and
Lester and--and all come up to the house. It's the biggest feather in
your cap the way on account of papa the big names got to come running
when you invite them."
"Your mother's little nonsenses have got nothing to do with it."
"She reproaches me with having brought about this _goy_ mix-up! Me that
has planned each hour of that girl's life like each one was a flower in
a garden, A young man, a grand young man like Mr. Feist, crazy in lo--"
"Mrs. Pelz, for God's sake! Mrs. Pelz, please!"
"Rosie, we'll leave Feist out of this."
"Lester Spencer, papa, is one of the finest characters, if only you--"
"I ask you again, Bleema, to cut out such talk while I got the strength
left to hold in. It's a nail in my coffin I should live to talk such
talk to my little daughter, but it's got to where I've got to say it.
Lester Spencer and the fine character you talk about--it's free gossip
in all the studios--is one of the biggest low-lifes in the
picture-world. He has a reputation with the women that I'm ashamed to
mention even before your mother, much less her daughter--"
"Oh, I know what you mean! Oh, you're like all the rest--down on him.
You mean that silly talk about him and Norma Beautiful--"
"Oh my God, Roody, listen to her!"
"I can clear that up in a minute. He never cared a thing for her. It was
just their always playing in the same pictures, and that silly matinée
public, first thing he knew, got to linking their names together."
"Bleema--for God's sake--baby--what do you know about such?"
"Bleema, you're killing your mother! Your mother that used to rock you
in your cradle while she stitched on the machine to buy you more
comforts--a mother that--"
"Oh, if you're going to begin that!"
"Your poor old grandmother--don't she mean nothing? You saw how she
looked just now when they took her out, even before she knows what it's
all about--"
"I hope she never has a worse trouble than for me to marry the best--"
Then Mr. Pelz came down with crashing fist that shattered an opalescent
wine-glass and sent a great stain sprawling over the cloth.
"By God, I'll kill him first! The dirty hou--"
"Pelz, for God's sake, control yourself!"
'I'll kill him, I tell you, Feist!"
"Roody!"
"You can't scare me that way, dad. I'm no baby to be hollered at like
that. I love Lester Spencer, and I'm going to marry him!"
"I'll kill him; I'll--"
"Roody, Roody, for God's sake! 'Sh-h-h, the servants! Williams, close
quick all the doors. Roody, for my sake, if not your child's! Mr. Feist,
please--please make him, Mr. Feist!"
"Pelz, for God's sake, man, get yourself together! Excitement won't get
you anywheres. Calm down. Be human."
Then Mr. Pelz sat down again, but trembling and swallowing back with
difficulty. "She got me wild, Feist. You must excuse me. She got me wild
--my little girl--my little flower--"
"Papa--dad darling! Don't you think it kills me, too, to see you like
this? My own darling papa that's so terribly good. My own darling sweet
mamma. Can't you see, darlings, a girl can't help it when--when--life
just takes hold of her? I swear to you--I promise you that, when you
come to know Lester as I know him you'll think him as fine and--and
gorgeous as I do. Mamma, do you think your little Bleema would marry a
man who doesn't just love you, and dad, too? It isn't like Lester is a
nobody--a high-salaried fellow like him with a future. Why, the best
will be none too good! He loves you both--told me so to-day. The one aim
in his life is to do big things, to make you both proud, to make his
name the biggest--"
"Feist--Feist--can't you talk to her? Tell her it's madness--tell her
she's ruining herself."
"Why, Miss Bleema, there's nothing much a--a stranger like me can say at
a time like this. It's only unfortunate that I happened to be here. If I
were you, though, I think I'd take a little time to think this over.
Sometimes a young girl--."
"I have thought it over, Mr. Feist. For weeks and weeks I've thought of
nothing else. That's how sure I am--so terribly sure."
"I won't have it, I tell you! I'll wring his--"
"'Sh-h-h, Pelz. If you'll take my advice, you'll handle this thing
without threats. Why not, Miss Bleema, even if you do feel so sure, give
yourself a little more time to--"
"No! No! No!"
"Just a minute now. If you feel this way so strongly to-night, isn't it
just possible that to-morrow, when you wake up, you may see things
differently?"
"I tell you I'm going to France with him--on our honeymoon. It's all
fixed if--moms--dad--won't you please--darlings--can't you see--my
happiness--"
"O God, Roody, were ever parents in such a fix?"
"Listen to me, Miss Bleema, now: I'm an old friend of the family, and
you don't need to take exception to what I'm going to suggest. If your
heart is so set on this thing, all right then, make up your mind it's an
engagement and--"
"By God, Feist, no!"
"Wait, Pelz, I tell you you're making a mistake with your state of
excitement."
"Let Mr. Feist talk, Roody."
"Make up your mind as I was saying, Miss Bleema, that this engagement
exists between you and--and this young man. Then, instead of doing the
hasty thing and marrying next week, you remain here a happy, engaged
girl until the company returns in three weeks, and meanwhile you will
have time to know your own mind and--"
"No! No! No! I do know it! It's all fixed we're--"
"That's a fine idea of Mr. Feist's, Bleema darling. For mamma's sake,
baby. For grandma's. If it's got to be an engagement, hold it until
after he gets back. Don't go rushing in. Take time to think a little.
France is no place for a honeymoon now--submarines and all."
"Oh, I know! You hope he'll get sunk with a submarine."
"Shame, Miss Bleema; shame!"
"All mamma means, darling, is take a little time and get a--a trousseau
like a girl like you has to have. If your heart is so set on it, can't
you do that much to please mamma? That much?"
"There's a trick. You want me to wait and then--"
"Miss Bleema, is my promise to you enough that there's no trick? On my
respect for your parents and grandmother, there's no trick. If it is
only to please them, wait those few weeks and do it more dignified. If
it's got to be, then it's got to be. Am I right, Pelz?"
Mr. Pelz turned away, nodding his head, but with lips too wry to speak.
"O my God, yes! Mr. Feist, you're right. Bleema, promise us! Promise!"
"Just a matter of a few weeks more or less, Miss Bleema. Just so your
parents are satisfied you know your own mind."
"I do!"
"Then, I say, if you still feel as you do, not even they have the right
to interfere."
"Promise us, Bleema; promise us that!"
"I--I'll be engaged on your word of honor--without any fussing about
it?"
"An engaged girl, Miss Bleema, like any other engaged girl."
"But dad--look at him--he won't--p-promise," trembling into tears.
"Of course he will--won't you, Pelz? And you know the reputation your
father has for a man of his word."
"Will--will he promise?"
"You do; don't you, Pelz?"
Again the nod from the bitter inverted features.
"Now, Miss Bleema?"
"Well then, I--I--p-promise."
On a May-day morning that was a kiss to the cheek and even ingratiated
itself into the bale-smelling, truck-rumbling pier-shed, Mr. Lester
Spencer, caparisoned for high seas by Fifth Avenue's highest
haberdasher, stood off in a little cove of bags and baggage,
yachting-cap well down over his eyes, the nattiest thing in nautical
ulsters buttoned to the chin. Beside him, Miss Norma Beautiful, her
small-featured pink-and-whiteness even smaller and pinker from the
depths of a great cart-wheel of rose-colored hat, completely swathed in
rose-colored veiling.
"For a snap of my finger I'd spill the beans--that's how stuck on this
situation I am!"
Mr. Spencer plunged emphatic arms into large patch-pockets, his chin
projecting beyond the muffle of collar.
"Just you try it and see where it lands you!"
Then Miss Beautiful from the rosy depths of hat began to quiver of
voice, jerky little sobs catching her up.
"I can't stand it! I b-bit off a b-bigger piece than I can swallow."
"Now, Darling Beautiful, I ask you would your own Lester do anything
that wasn't just going to be the making of his girl as well as himself?
Is it anything, Angel Beautiful, he is asking you to do except
wait until--"
"I can't bear it, I tell you! A little red-haired kike like her! How do
I know what I'm letting myself in for? There's only one ground for
divorce in this state. What guarantee have I you'll get free on it?"
"My guarantee, Pussy. You're letting yourself in for a pink limousine to
match that pink sweetness of yours and a jumping-rope of pearls to match
those sweet teeth of yours and--"
"I want black pearls, Lester, like Lucille Du Pont's."
"Black, then. Why, Angel Beautiful, you just know that there's not a
hair on any head in the world, much less a red one, I'd change for one
of my girl's golden ones. You think I'd ever have known the little
Reddie was on earth if she hadn't just flung herself at my head! She
could have been six Rudolph Pelz's daughters, and I wouldn't have had
eyes for her."
"But, Lester--she--she's right cute. What guarantee have I got?"
"Cross my heart and swear to die, Angel! Haven't I already sworn it to
you a thousand thousand times? You wouldn't want me to close my eyes to
the chance of a lifetime--you know you wouldn't, Beautiful, when it's
your chance as much as mine. Both ours!"
"I--if only it was--over, Lester--all--over!"
"What's three weeks, Angel Beautiful? The very day I'm back I'll pull
the trick with the little red head, and then I'm for letting things
happen quick."
"And me, what'll I--"
"I'm going to move you into the solid-goldest hotel suite in this here
town, Pussy. I'm going to form the Norma Beautiful Film Corporation in
my own girl's name, the first pop out of the box. Why, there's just
nowhere Rudolph Pelz's son-in-law can't get his girl in the little while
I'm going to stick."
"How do I know? How do I know they won't find a way to hold you?"
"Why, Darling Beautiful, when they're through with me, they'll pay me
off in my weight in gold. Haven't you said things often enough about
your boy's temper when he lets it fly? You think they're going to let
me cut up nonsense with that little Reddie of theirs? Why, that old man
would pay with his right eye to protect her!"
"O God, it's rotten--a nice fellow like Pelz--a--"
"It's done every day, Gorgeous Beautiful. Anyway, there's no way to
really hurt the rich. Look at Warren Norton--the Talcott family paid
Warren two hundred cool thousand to give her back quietly. It's done
every day, Gorgeousness. Many a fellow like me has gotten himself roped
into a thing he wanted to get out of quietly. That little girl lassoed
me. I should have eyes for a little Reddie like her with the Deep-Sea
Pearl of the world my very own. I'm going to marry you, too,
Gorgeousness. I'm going to see you right through, this time. Jump right
out of the frying-pan into the hottest, sweetest fire!"
"I tell you I can't stand it! Promising to marry me with another one to
see through before you get to me. It--it's terrible! I--"
"There you go again! The Norma Beautiful Film Corporation doesn't tickle
my pink rose on the eardrums! She doesn't want it! Wouldn't have it!"
"I do, Lester; I do--only--only--I--the little Reddie--it's not right.
She's a sweet little thing. I'm afraid, Lester--I think I must be going
crazy! I wish to God I could hate you the way you ought to be hated. I
tell you I can't stand it. You sailing off like this. The coming
back--her--I'll kill myself during the ceremony. I--"
"You create a scene down here and you'll be sorry!"
"Lester--please!"
"They'll be here any minute now. They're late as it is. Look--
everybody's on board already! One more blast, and I'll have to go, too.
You just kick up nasty at the last minute and watch me!"
"I won't, Lester; I won't! I swear to God! Only, be good to me; be sweet
to me, darling! Say good-by before they--she comes. I'm all right,
darling. Please--please--"
He caught her to him then, and back in the sheltering cove of baggage
thrust back her head, kissing deep into the veiling.
"Beautiful! Angel Beautiful!"
"Swear to me, Lester, you'll see me through."
"I swear, Beautiful."
"Swear to me, or hope to die and lose your luck!"
He kissed her again so that her hat tilted backward, straining at its
pins.
"Hope to die and lose my luck."
"My own preciousness!" she said, her eyes tear-glazed and yearning up
into his.
"'Sh-h, Pussy; here comes Sol Sopinsky to hurry me on board. Funny the
Pelz crowd don't show up. Quit it! Here they come! That's their car. Cut
it--quick!"
With noiselessly thrown clutch, the Pelz limousine drew up between an
aisle of bales, its door immediately flung open. First, Mr. Pelz
emerging, with an immediate arm held back for Mrs. Pelz. Last, Miss
Pelz, a delightful paradox of sheer summer silk and white-fox furs, her
small face flushed and carefully powdered up about the eyes.
"There he is, dad! Over there with Norma and Uncle Sol!"
"Don't run so, Bleema; he'll come over to you."
But she was around and through the archipelago of baggage.
"Lester darling! There was a tie-up at Thirty-third Street. I thought
I'd die! Here's a little package of letters, love, one for each day on
the steamer. Lester, have you got everything--are you all ready to leave
your girlie--Hello, Norma--Uncle Sol! Lester are you--you sorry to leave
you--your--"
"Now, now--no water-works!"
"My all! My own boy!" She drew him, to hide the quickening trembling of
her lips, back behind the shelter of piled baggage.
"Lester darling--I--I didn't sleep a wink all night! I--I'm so nervous,
dear. What if a submarine should catch you? What if you meet a French
girl and fall in--"
"Now, now, Reddie! Is that what you think of your boy?"
"I don't, dearest; I don't! I keep telling myself I'm a silly--What's
three weeks? But when it means separation from the sweetest, dearest--"
"'Sh-h-h, Angel darling! There's the last blast, and your father's
angry. See him beckoning! The company's been on board twenty minutes
already. Look--there's the sailors lined up at the gangplank--Bleema--"
"Promise me, Lester--"
"I do! I do promise! Anything! Look, girlie: Miss Beautiful will feel
hurt the way we left her standing. It isn't nice--our hiding this way."
"I can't bear, dearest, to see you go--"
"Look! See--there's David Feist come down, too. You don't want him to
see my girl make a cry baby of herself over a three weeks' trip--"
"You'll write, Lester, and cable every day?"
"You just know I will!"
"You won't go near the war?"
"You just know I won't!"
"You--"
"Your father, Bleema--let's not get him sore, hiding back here. Come;
they'll draw up the plank on me."
"I'll be waving out from the edge of the pier, darling. I've got a
special permit to go out there. I just couldn't stand not seeing my boy
up to the last second. It's terrible for you to sneak off on a boat like
this, darling, without flags and music the way it was before the war. I
want music and flags when my boy goes off. Oh, Lester, I'll be working
so hard on the sweetest little trousseau and the sweetest little--"
"Bleema, please! There's Miss Beautiful overhearing every word. Please!"
"Well, good-by, Miss Beautiful; don't walk off with the studio while
we're gone--take care of yourself--"
"Good-by--Mr. Spencer--_b-bon voyage_!"
"Hi, Mr. Feist, mighty handsome of you to come down to see me off!"
"Safe journey, Spencer! Remember you've got a precious piece of anxiety
waiting back here for you."
"Oh, Mr. Feist--isn't--isn't--it awful--submarine-time and all? I--I
just can't bear it!"
"Now! Now! Is that the way for a brave little girl to talk?"
"Bleema, if you can't control yourself, you had better go sit in the
car. I'm ashamed before the company."
"Roody, the poor child!"
"He--that's the only way papa talks to me these days--fault-finding!"
"Now, now, Miss Bleema! Here--take mine; yours is all wet."
Another blast then, reverberating into the din.
"All aboard!"
"Good-by, Lester--good-by, darling--cable every day--by--good-by--boy!"
"Good-by, little Reddie! Thanks for the beautiful fruits and letters.
Good-by, Mr. Pelz!"
"Play fair in the picture, Spencer. Don't hog the scenes. Help instead
of hinder Sopinsky."
"Indeed I will, sir! Good-by, Mrs. Pelz!"
"Good-by, Lester! God bless you, my boy! Take care of yourself, and
remember my little girl is--"
"Lester--Lester, a cable every day!"
"Bleema, will you please let the man catch his boat? It's an
embarrassment to even watch you."
"Lester--Lester--"
"Yes, yes; good-by, everybody!"
"I'll be out at the pier-edge--wave back, darling!"
"Yes, yes! Good-by, Miss Beautiful! By, all!" And then, from an upper
deck, more and more shouted farewells.
"They're moving! Come, Mr. Feist--please--with me--I've got the
permit--don't let papa see us--come--the pier-edge!"
"Sure! This way, Miss Bleema--here--under--quick!"
Out in the open, May lay with Italian warmth over a harbor that kicked
up the tiniest of frills. A gull cut through the blueness, winging it
in festoons.
"Over this way, Miss Bleema; we can see her steaming out."
"Lester--good-by--Lester--a cable every day! I'll be waiting. Good-by!"
All this unavailingly flung to the great hulk of boat moving so proud of
bow and so grandly out to sea, decks of faces and waving kerchiefs
receding quickly.
"Good-by--darling--oh--oh--"
"'Sh-h--'sh-h-h, Miss Bleema. Here--take another of mine. Yours is all
wet again. My--what a rainy day! Here--let me dry them for you.
Hold still!"
"Oh--oh--cable every day, darling--write--oh, Mr. Feist--he
don't see us--he's out of sight--don't wipe 'em so hard, Mr.
Feist--you--you h-hurt!"
Out toward the blue, the billowing fields sailed away the gray steamer,
cutting a path that sprayed and sang after. Sunlight danced and lay
whitely as far as the eye could reach. It prolonged for those on shore
the contour of the line of faces above each deck; it picked points of
light from off everywhere--off smokestacks and polished railings, off
plate-glass and brass-bound port-holes and even down the ship's flank,
to where gilt letters spelled out shiningly:
"_LUSITANIA._"
A BOOB SPELLED BACKWARD
How difficult it is to think of great lives in terms of the small
mosaics that go to make up the pattern of every man's day-by-day--the
too tepid shaving-water; the badly laundered shirt-front; the
three-minute egg; the too-short fourth leg of the table; the draught on
the neck; the bad pen; the neighboring rooster; the misplaced key; the
slipping chest-protector.
Richelieu, who walked with kings, presided always at the stitching of
his red robes. Boswell says somewhere that a badly starched stock could
kill his Johnson's morning. It was the hanging of his own chintzes that
first swayed William Morris from epic mood to household utensils.
Seneca, first in Latin in the whole Silver Age, prepared his own
vegetables. There is no outgrowing the small moments of life, and to
those lesser ones of us how often they become the large ones!
To Samuel Lipkind, who, in a span of thirty years, had created and
carried probably more than his share of this world's responsibilities,
there was no more predominant moment in all his day, even to the signing
of checks and the six-o'clock making of cash, than that matinal instant,
just fifteen minutes before the stroke of seven, when Mrs. Lipkind, in
a fuzzy gray wrapper the color of her eyes and hair, kissed him awake,
and, from across the hall, he could hear the harsh sing of his bath in
the drawing.
There are moments like that which never grow old. For the fifteen years
that Samuel Lipkind had reached the Two Dollar Hat Store before his two
clerks, he had awakened to that same kiss on his slightly open mouth,
the gray hair and the ever-graying eyes close enough to be stroked, the
pungency of coffee seeming to wind like wreaths of mundane aroma above
the bed, and always across the aisle of hallway that tepid cataract
leaping in glory into porcelain.
Take the particular morning which ushers in our story, although it might
have been any of twelve times three hundred others.
"Sammy!" This upon opening his door, then crossing to close the
conservative five inches of open window and over to the bedside for the
kissing him awake. "Sammy, get up!"
The snuggle away into the crotch of his elbow.
"Sammy! _Thu, thu_! I can't get him up! Sammy, a quarter to seven! You
want to be late? I can't get him up!"
"M-m-m-m-m-m!"
"You want your own clerks to beat you to business so they can say they
got a lazy boss?"
"I'm awake, ma." Reaching up to stroke her hair, thin and gray now, and
drawn back into an early-morning knob.
"Don't splash in the bath-room so this morning, Sammy; it's a shame for
the wall-paper."
"I won't"--drawing the cord of his robe about his waist, and as if they
did not both of them know just how faithfully disregarded would be that
daily admonition.
Then Mrs. Lipkind flung back the snowy sheets and bed-coverings, baring
the striped ticking of the mattress.
"Hurry, Sammy! I'm up so long I'm ready for my second cup of coffee."
"Two minutes." And off across the hall, whistling, towel across arm.
It was that little early moment sublimated by nothing more than the
fusty beginnings of a workaday, the mere recollecting of which was one
day to bring a wash of tears behind his eyes and a twist of anguish into
his heart.
Next breakfast, and to dine within reach of the coal-range which brews
it is so homely a fashion that even Mr. Lipkind, upon whom such matters
of bad form lay as a matter of course, was wont to remonstrate.
"What's the matter with the dining-room, ma? Since when have
dining-rooms gone out of style?"
Pouring his coffee from the speckled granite pot, Mrs. Lipkind would
smile up and over it.
"All I ask is my son should never have it worse than to eat all his
lifetime in just such a kitchen like mine. Off my kitchen floor I would
rather eat than off some people's fine polished mahogany."
The mahogany was almost not far-fetched. There was a blue-and-white
spick-and-spanness about Mrs. Lipkind's kitchen which must lie within
the soul of the housewife who achieves it--the lace-edged shelves, the
scoured armament of dishpan, soup-pot, and what not; the white Swiss
window-curtains, so starchy, and the two regimental geraniums on the
sill; the roller-towel too snowy for mortal hand to smudge; the white
sink, hand-polished; the bland row of blue-and-white china jars spicily
inscribed to nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves. That such a kitchen could be
within the tall and brick confines of an upper-Manhattan apartment-house
was only another of the thousand thousand paradoxes over which the city
spreads her glittering skirts. The street within roaring distance, the
highway of Lenox Avenue flowing dizzily constantly past her windows, the
interior of Mrs. Lipkind's apartment, from the chromos of the dear dead
upon its walls to the upholstery of another decade against those walls,
was as little of the day as if the sweep of the city were a gale across
a mid-Victorian plain and the flow past the windows a broad river
ruffled by wind.
"You're right, ma; there's not a kitchen in New York I'd trade it for.
But what's the idea of paying rent on a dining-room?"
"Sa-y, if not for when Clara comes and how in America all young people
got extravagant ideas, we was just as well off without one in our three
rooms in Simpson Street."
"A little more of that mackerel, please."
You to whom the chilled grapefruit and the eggshell cup of morning
coffee are a gastronomic feat not always easy to hurdle, raise not your
digestive eyebrows. At precisely fifteen minutes past seven six mornings
in the week, seven-thirty, Sundays, Mrs. Lipkind and her son sat down to
a breakfast that was steamingly fit for those only who dwell in the
headacheless kingdom of long, sleepful nights and fur-coatless tongues.
"A few more fried potatoes with it, Sammy?"
"Whoa! You want to feed me up for the fat boys' regiment!"
Mrs. Lipkind glanced quickly away, her profile seeming to quiver. "Don't
use that word, Sam--even in fun--it's a knife in me."
"What word?"
"'Regiment.'"
He reached across to pat the vein-corduroyed back of her hand.
"My little sweetheart mamma," he said.
She, in turn, put out her hand over his, her old sagging throat visibly
constricting in a gulp, and her eyes as if they could never be finished
with yearning over him. "You're a good boy, Sammy."
"Sure!"
"I always say no matter what it is bad my life has had for me with my
twenty-five years a widow, my only daughter to marry out six hundred
miles away from me, my business troubles when I had to lose the little
store what your papa left me, nothing ain't nothing, Sammy, when a
mother can raise for herself a boy like mine."
"You mean when a fellow can pick out for himself a little sweetheart
mamma like mine."
"Sammy, stop it with your pinching-me nonsense like I was your best
girl!"
"Well, ain't you?"
She paused, her cup of coffee half-way to her lips, the lines of her
face seeming to want to lift into what would be a smile. "No, Sammy;
your mother knows she ain't, and if she was anything but a selfish old
woman, she would be glad that she ain't."
"'Sh! 'Sh!" said Mr. Lipkind, reaching this time half across the table
for a still steaming muffin and opening it so that its hot fragrance
came out. '"Sh! No April showers! Uh! Uh! Don't you dare!"
"I ain't," said Mrs. Lipkind, smiling through her tear and dashing at it
with the back of her hand. "For why should I when I got only everything
to be thankful for?"
"Now you're shouting!"
"How you think, Sammy, Clara likes a cheese pie for supper to-night?
Last week I could see she didn't care much for the noodle pudding I
baked her."
Mr. Lipkind, who was ever so slightly and prematurely bald and still
more slightly and prematurely rotund, suffered a rush of color then, his
ears suddenly and redly conspicuous.
"That's--that's what I started to tell you last night, ma. Clara
telephoned over to the store in the afternoon she--she thought she
wouldn't come to supper this Wednesday night, ma."
"Sammy--you--you and Clara 'ain't got nothing wrong together, the way
you don't see each other so much these two months?"
"Of course not, ma; it's just happened a few times that way. The
trade's in town; that's all."
"How is it all of a sudden a girl in the wholesale ribbon
business should have the trade to entertain like she was in the
cloak-and-suit chorus?"
"It's not that Clara's busy to-night, ma. She--she only thought she--for
a change--there's a little side table for two--for three--where she
boards--she thought maybe if--if you didn't mind, I'd go over to her
place for Wednesday-night supper for a change. You know how a girl like
Clara gets to feeling obligated."
"Obligated from eating once a week supper in her own future house!"
"She asked I should bring you, too, ma, but I know how bashful you are
to go in places like that."
"In such a place where it's all style and no food--yes."
"That's it; so we--I thought, ma, that is, if you don't mind, instead of
Clara here to-night for supper, I--I'd go over to her place. If you
don't mind, ma."
There was a silence, so light, so slight that it would not have even
held the dropping of a pin, but yet had a depth and a quality that set
them both to breathing faster.
"Why, of course, Sammy, you should go!"
"I--we thought for a change."
"You should have told me yesterday, Sammy, before I marketed poultry."
"I know, ma; I--just didn't. Clara only 'phoned at four."
"A few more fried potatoes?"
"No more."
"Sit up straight, Sam, from out your round shoulders."
"You ain't--mad, ma?"
"For why, Sammy, should I be mad that you go to Clara for a change to
supper. I'm glad if you get a change."
"It's not that, ma. It's just that she asked it. You know how a person
feels, her taking her Wednesday-night suppers here for more than five
years and never once have I--we--set foot in any of her boarding-houses.
She imagines she's obligated. You know how Clara is, so independent."
"You should go. I hear, too, how Mrs. Schulem sets a good table."
"I'll be home by nine, ma--you sure you don't mind?"
"I wouldn't mind, Sammy, if it was twelve. Since when is it that a
grown-up son has to apologize to his mother if he takes a step
without her?"
"You can believe me, ma, but I've got so it don't seem like theater or
nothing seems like going out without my little sweetheart mamma on one
arm and Clara on the other."
"It's not right, Sammy, you should spoil me so. Don't think that even if
you don't let me talk about it, I don't know in my heart how I'm in
yours and Clara's way."
"Ma, now just you start that talk and you know what I'll do--I'll get up
and leave the table."
"Sammy, if only you would let me talk about it!"
"You heard what I said."
"To think my son should have to wait with his engagement for five years
and never once let his mother ask him why it is he waits. It ain't
because of to-night I want to talk about it, Sam, but if I thought it
was me that had stood between you and Clara all these five years, if--if
I thought it was because of me you don't see each other so much here
lately, I--"
"Ma!"
"I couldn't stand it, son. If ever a boy deserved happiness, that boy is
you. A boy that scraped his fingers to the bone to marry his sister off
well. A boy that took the few dollars left from my notion-store and made
such a success in retail men's hats and has given it to his mother like
a queen. If I thought I was standing in such a boy's way, who ain't only
a grand business man and a grand son and brother, but would make any
girl the grandest husband that only his father before him could equal, I
couldn't live, Sammy, I couldn't live."
"You should know how sick such talk makes me!"
"I haven't got hard feelings, Sammy, because Clara don't like it here."
"She does."
"For why should an up-to-date American girl like Clara like such an
old-fashioned place as I keep? Nowadays, girls got different ideas. They
don't think nothing of seventy-five-dollar suits and twelve-dollar
shoes. I can't help it that it goes against my grain no matter how fine
a money-maker a girl is. In the old country my sister Carrie and me
never even had shoes on our feet until we were twelve, much less--"
"But, ma--"
"Oh, I don't blame her, Sam. I don't blame her that she don't like it
the way I dish up everything on the table so we can serve ourselves. She
likes it passed the way they did that night at Mrs. Goldfinger's new
daughter-in-law's, where everything is carried from one to the next one,
and you got to help yourself quick over your shoulders."
"Clara's like me, ma; she wants you to keep a servant to do the waiting
on you."
"It ain't in me, Sam, to be bossed to by a servant, just like I can't
take down off the walls pictures of your papa _selig_ and your grandma,
because it ain't stylish they should be there. It's a feeling in me for
my own flesh and blood that nothing can change."
"Clara don't want you to change that, ma."
"She's a fine, up-to-date girl, Sam. A girl that can work herself up to
head floor-lady in wholesale ribbons and forty dollars a week has got in
her the kind of smartness my boy should have in his wife. I'm an old
woman standing in the way of my boy. If I wasn't, I could go out to
Marietta, Ohio, by Ruby, and I wouldn't keep having inside of me such
terrible fears for my boy and--and how things are now on the other side
and--and--"
"Now, now, ma; no April showers!"
"An old woman that can't even be happy with a good daughter like Ruby,
but hangs always on her son like a stone around his neck!"
"You mean like a diamond."
"A stone, holding him down."
"Ma!" Mr. Lipkind pushed back, napkin awry at his throat and his eyes
snapping points of light. "Now if you want to spoil my breakfast, just
say so and I--I'll quit. Why should you be living with Ruby out in
Marietta if you're happier here with me where you belong? If you knew
how sore these here fits of yours make me, you'd cut them out--that's
what you would. I'm not going over to Clara's at all now for supper, if
that's how you feel about it."
Mrs. Lipkind rose then, crossed, leaning over the back of his chair and
inclosing his face in the quivering hold of her two hands. "Sammy,
Sammy, I didn't mean it! I know I ain't in your way. How can I be when
there ain't a day passes I don't invite you to get married and come here
to live and fix the flat any way what Clara wants or even move down-town
in a finer one where she likes it? I know I ain't in your way, son. I
take it back."
"Well, that's more like it."
"You mustn't be mad at mamma when she gets old-fashioned ideas in her
head."
He stroked her hand at his cheek, pressing it closer.
"Sit down and finish your breakfast, little sweetheart mamma."
"Is it all right now, Sammy?"
"Of course it is!" he said, his eyes squeezed tightly shut.
"Promise mamma you'll go over by Clara's to-night."
"But--"
"Promise me, Sammy; I can't stand it if you don't."
"Alright, I'll go, ma."
The Declaration of Economic Independence is not always a subtle one.
There was that about Clara Bloom, even to the rather Hellenic swing of
her very tailor-made back and the firm, neat clack of her not too high
heels, which proclaimed that a new century had filed her fetter-free
from the nine-teen-centuries-long chain of women whose pin-money had too
often been blood-money or the filched shekels from trousers pocket or
what in the toga corresponded thereto.
And yet, when Miss Bloom smiled, which upon occasion she did
spontaneously enough to show a gold molar, there were not only Hypatia
and Portia in the straight line of her lips, but lurked in the little
tip-tilt at the corners a quirk from Psyche, who loved and was so loved,
and in the dimple in her chin a manhole, as it were, for Mr.
Samuel Lipkind.
At six o'clock, where the wintry workaday flows into dusk and Fifth
Avenue flows across Broadway, they met, these two, finding each other
out in the gaseous shelter of a Subway kiosk. She from the tall, thin,
skylightless skyscraper dedicated to the wholesale supply of woman's
insatiable demand for the ribbon gewgaw; he from a plate-glass shop with
his name inscribed across its front and more humbly given over to the
more satiable demand of the male for the two-dollar hat. There was a
gold-and-black sign which ran across the not inconsiderable width of
Mr. Lipkind's store-front and which invariably captioned his four inches
of Sunday-news-paper advertisement:
SAMMY LIPKIND WANTS YOUR HEAD
As near as it is possible for the eye to simulate the heart, there was
exactly that sentiment in his glance now as he found out Miss Bloom, she
in a purple-felt hat and the black scallops of escaping hair, blacker
because the red was out in her cheeks.
He broke into the kind of smile that lifted his every feature,
screw-lines at his eyes coming out, head bared, and his greeting
beginning to come even before she was within hearing distance of it.
There was in Mr. Lipkind precious little of Lothario, Launcelot,
Galahad, or any of that blankety-blank-verse coterie. There remains yet
unsung the lay of the five-foot-five, slightly bald, and ever so
slightly rotund lover. Falstaff and Romeo are the extremes of what Mr.
Lipkind was the not unhappy medium. Offhand in public places, men would
swap crop conditions and city politics with him. Twice, tired mothers in
railway stations had volunteered him their babies to dandle. Young
women, however, were not all impervious to him, and uncrossed their feet
and became consciously unconscious of him across street-car aisles. In
his very Two Dollar Hat Store, Sara Minniesinger, hooked of profile, but
who had impeccably kept his debits and credits for twelve years back
under the stock-balcony and a green eye-shade, was wont to cry of
evenings over and for him into her dingy pillow. He was so unconscious
of this that, on the twelfth anniversary of her incarceration beneath
the stock-balcony, he commissioned his mother to shop her a crown of
thorns in the form of a gold-handled umbrella with a bachelor-girl
flash-light attachment.
There are men like that, to whom life is not only a theosophy of one
God, but of one women who is sufficient thereof. When Samuel Lipkind
greeted Clara Bloom there was just that in his ardently
appraising glance.
"Didn't mean to keep you waiting, Clara--a last-minute customer. _You_
know."
"I've been counting red heads and wishing the Subway was pulled by white
horses."
"Say, Clara, but you look a picture! Believe me, Bettina, that is some
lid!"
Miss Bloom tucked up a rear strand of curl, turning her head to extreme
profile for his more complete approval.
"Is it an elegant trifle, Sam? I ask you is it an elegant trifle?"
"Clara, it's--immense! The best yet! What did it set you back?"
"Don't ask me! I'm afraid just saying it would give your mother
heart-failure by mental telepathy."
He linked her arm. "Whatever you paid, it's worth the money. It sets you
off like a gipsy queen."
"None of that, Sam! Mush is fattening."
"Mush nothing! It's the truth."
"Hurry. Schulem's got a new rule--no reserving the guest-table."
They let themselves be swept into the great surge of the underground
river with all of the rather thick-skinned unsensitiveness to
shoulder-to-shoulder contact which the Subway engenders. Swaying from
straps in a locked train, which tore like a shriek through a tube whose
sides sweated dampness, they talked in voices trained to compete
with the roar.
"What's the idea, Clara? When you telephoned yesterday I was afraid
maybe it was--Eddie Leonard cutting in on my night again."
"Eddie nothing. Is it a law, Sam, that I have to eat off your mother
every Wednesday night of my life?"
"No--only--you know how it is when you get used to things one way."
"I told you I had something to talk over, didn't I?"
They were rounding a curve now, so that they swayed face to face, nose
to nose.
A few crinkles, frequent with him of late, came out in rays from his
eyes.
"Is it anything you--you couldn't say in front of ma?"
"Yes."
He inserted two fingers into his collar, rearing back his head.
"Anything wrong, Clara?"
"You mean is anything right."
They rode in silence after that, both of them reading in three colors
the border effulgencies of frenzied advertising.
But when they emerged to a quieter up-town night that was already
pointed with a first star, he took her arm as they turned off into a
side-street that was architecturally a barracks to the eye, brownstone
front after brownstone front after brownstone front. Block after block
of New York's side-streets are sunk thus in brown study.
"You mustn't be so ready to be put out over every little thing I say,
Clara. Is it anything wrong to want you up at the house just as often as
we can get you?"
"No, Sam; it ain't that."
"Well then, what is it?"
"Oh, what's the use beginning all that again? I want to begin to-night
where we usually leave off."
"Is it--is it something we've talked about before, Clara?"
"Yes--and no. We've talked so much and so long without ever getting
anywheres--what's the difference whether we've ever talked it before
or not?"
"You just wait, Clara; everything is going to come out fine for us."
Her upper lip lifted slightly. "Yes," she said; "I've heard that
before."
"We're going to be mighty happy some day, just the same, and don't you
let yourself forget it. We've got good times ahead."
"Oh dear!" she sighed out.
"What?"
"Nothing."
He patted her arm. "You'll never know, Clara, the torture it's been for
me even your going out those few times with Eddie Leonard has put me
through. You're mine, Clara; a hundred Eddies couldn't change that."
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