Gaslight Sonatas Part 11

"And a gold-colored bird-of-paradise for a black-velvet hat, all my life, Harry--"

"With Alma Zitelle in the part--"

"Is it her picture I found in your drawer the other day, Harry, cut out from a Sunday newspaper?"

"One and the same. I been watching her. There's a world of money in that woman, whoever she is. She's eccentric and they make her play straight, but if I could get hold of her--My G.o.d! Millie, I--I can't believe things!"

She rose, coming round to lay her arms across his shoulders.

"We'll be rich, maybe, Harry--"

"I've picked the winners for the other fellows every time, Mil."

"Anyhow, it's worth the gamble, Harry."

"I got a nose for what the people want. I've never been able to prove it from a high stool, but I'll show 'em now--by G.o.d! I'll show 'em now!" He sprang up, pulling the white table-cloth awry and folding her into his embrace. "I'll show 'em."

She leaned from him, her two hands against his chest, head thrown back and eyes up to him.

"We--can educate our boy, then, Harry, like--like a rich man's son."

"We ain't rich yet."

"Promise me, Harry, if we are--promise me that, Harry. It's the only promise I ask out of it. Whatever comes, if we win or lose, our boy can have college if he wants."

He held her close, his head up and gazing beyond her.

"With a rich daddy my boy can go to college like the best of 'em."

"Promise me that, Harry."

"I promise, Millie."

He released her then, feeling for an envelope in an inner pocket, and, standing there above the disarrayed dinner-table, executed some rapid figures across the back of it.

She stood for a moment regarding him, hands pressed against the sting of her cheeks, tears flowing down over her smile. Then she took up the plate of cloying fritters and tiptoed out, opening softly the door to a slit of a room across the hall. In the patch of light let in by that opened door, drawn up before a small table, face toward her ravaged with recent tears, and lips almost quivering, her son lay in the ready kind of slumber youth can bring to any woe. She tiptoed up beside him, placing the plate of fritters back on a pile of books, let her hands run lightly over his hair, kissed him on each swollen lid.

"My son! My little boy! My little boy!"

Where Broadway leaves off its roof-follies and its water-dancing, its eighty-odd theaters and its very odd Hawaiian cabarets, upper Broadway, widening slightly, takes up its macadamized rush through the city in block-square apartment-houses, which rise off plate-gla.s.s foundations of the de-luxe greengrocer shops, the not-so-green beauty-parlors, and the dyeing-and-cleaning, automobile-supplies, and confectionery establishments of middle New York.

In a no-children-allowed, swimming-pool, electric-laundry, roof-garden, dogs'-playground, cold-storage apartment most recently erected on a block-square tract of upper Broadway, belonging to and named after the youngest scion of an ancestor whose cow-patches had turned to kingdoms, the fifteenth layer of this gigantic honeycomb overlooked from its seventeen outside windows the great Babylonian valley of the city, the wide blade of the river s.h.i.+ning and curving slightly like an Arabian dagger, and the embankment of New Jersey's Palisades piled against the sky with the effect of angry horizon.

Nights, viewed from one of the seventeen windows, it was as if the river flowed under a sullen sheath which undulated to its curves. On clear days it threw off light like parrying steel in suns.h.i.+ne.

Were days when, gazing out toward it, Mrs. Ross, whose heart was like a slow ache of ever-widening area, could almost feel its laving quality and, after the pa.s.sage of a tug- or pleasure-boat, the soothing folding of the water down over and upon itself. Often, with the sun setting pink and whole above the Palisades, the very copper glow which was struck off the water would beat against her own west windows, and, as if smarting under the brilliance, tears would come, sometimes staggering and staggering down, long after the glow was cold. With such a sunset already waned, and the valley of unrest fifteen stories below popping out into electric signs and the red danger-lanterns of streets constantly in the remaking, Mrs. Harry Ross, from the corner window of her seventeen, looked down on it from under lids that were rimmed in red.

Beneath the swirl of a gown that lay in an iridescent avalanche of sequins about her feet, her foot, tilted to an unbelievable hypothenuse off a cloth-of-silver heel, beat a small and twinkling tattoo, her fingers tattooing, too, along the chair-sides.

How insidiously do the years nibble in! how p.u.s.s.y-footed and how c.o.c.ksure the crow's-feet! One morning, and the first gray hair, which has been turning from the cradle, arrives. Another, the mirror shows back a sag beneath the eyes. That sag had come now to Mrs. Ross, giving her eye-sockets a look of unconquerable weariness. The streak of quicksilver had come, too, but more successfully combated. The head lying back against the brocade chair was guilty of new gleams. Bra.s.s, with a greenish alloy.

Sitting there with the look of unshed tears seeming to form a film over her gaze, it was as if the dusk, flowing into a silence that was solemnly shaped to receive it, folded her in, more and more obscuring her.

A door opened at the far end of the room, letting in a patch of hall light and a dark figure coming into silhouette against it.

"You there?"

She sprang up.

"Yes, Harry--yes."

"Good Lord! sitting in the dark again!" He turned a wall key, three pink-shaded lamps, a cl.u.s.ter of pink-gla.s.s grapes, and a center bowl of alabaster flas.h.i.+ng up the familiar spectacle of Louis Fourteenth and the interior decorator's turpitude; a deep-pink brocade divan backed up by a Circa.s.sian-walnut table with curly legs; a maze of smaller tables; a marble Psyche holding out the cl.u.s.ter of pink grapes; a gilt grand piano, festooned in rosebuds. Around through these Mr. Ross walked quickly, winding his hands, rubbing them.

"Well, here I am!"

"Had your supper--dinner, Harry?"

"No. What's the idea calling me off when I got a business dinner on hand?

What's the hurry call this time? I have to get back to it."

She clasped her hands to her bare throat, swallowing with effort.

"I--Harry--I--"

"You've got to stop this kind of thing, Millie, getting nervous spells like all the other women do the minute they get ten cents in their pocket. I ain't got the time for it--that's all there is to it."

"I can't help it, Harry. I think I must be going crazy. I can't stop myself. All of a sudden everything comes over me. I think I must be going crazy."

Her voice jerked up to an off pitch, and he flung himself down on the deep-cus.h.i.+oned couch, his stiff expanse of dress s.h.i.+rt bulging and straining at the studs. A bit redder and stouter, too, he was constantly rearing his chin away from the chafing edge of his collar.

"O Lord!" he said. "I guess I'm let in for some cutting-up again! Well, fire away and have it over with! What's eating you this time?"

She was quivering so against sobs that her lips were drawn in against her teeth by the great draught of her breathing.

"I can't stand it, Harry. I'm going crazy. I got to get relief. It's killing me--the lonesomeness--the waiting. I can't stand no more."

He sat looking at a wreath of roses in the light carpet, lips compressed, beating with fist into palm.

"Gad! I dunno! I give up. You're too much for me, woman."

"I can't go on this way--the suspense--can't--can't."

"I don't know what you want. G.o.d knows I give up!

Thirty-eight-hundred-dollar-a-year apartment--more spending-money in a week than you can spend in a month. Clothes. Jewelry. Your son one of the high-fliers at college--his automobile--your automobile. Pa.s.ses to every show in town. Gad! I can't help it if you turn it all down and sit up here moping and making it hot for me every time I put my foot in the place. I don't know what you want; you're one too many for me."

"I can't stand--"

"All of a sudden, out of a clear sky, she sends for me to come home. Second time in two weeks. No wonder, with your long face, your son lives mostly up at the college. I 'ain't got enough on my mind yet with the 'Manhattan Revue' opening to-morrow night. You got it too good, if you want to know it. That's what ails women when they get to cutting up like this."