Gaslight Sonatas Part 15

Watching it, and quickened by the fife and drum to an erect sitting posture, Mrs. Ross slid forward on her bench, lips opening. The policeman standing off, rapped twice, and when she rose, almost running toward the lights of the Elevated station, followed.

Within her apartment on upper Broadway, not even a hall light burned when she let herself in with her key. At the remote end of the aisle of blackness a slit of yellow showed beneath the door, behind it the babble of servants' voices.

She entered with a stealth that was well under cover of those voices, groping into the first door at her right, feeling round for the wall key, switching the old rose-and-gold room into immediate light. Stood for a moment, her plumage drooping damply to her shoulders, blue foulard dress snagged in two places, her gold mesh bag with the sapphire-and-diamond top hanging low from the crook of her little finger. A clock ticked with almost an echo into the rather vast silence.

She entered finally, sidling in among the chairs.

A great mound of gray yarn, uncut skein after uncut skein of it, rose off the brocade divan, more of them piled in systematic pyramids on three chairs. She dropped at sight of it to the floor beside the couch, burying her face in its fluff, grasping it in handfuls, writhing into it. Surges of merciful sobs came sweeping through and through her.

After a while, with a pair of long amber-colored needles, she fell to knitting with a fast, even furious ambidexterity, her mouth pursing up with a driving intensity, her boring gaze so concentrated on the thing in hand that her eyes seemed to cross.

Dawn broke upon her there, her hat still c.o.c.kily awry, tears dried in a vitrified gleaming down her cheeks. Beneath her flying fingers, a sleeveless waistcoat was taking shape, a soldier's inner jacket against the dam of trenches. At sunup it lay completed, spread out as if the first of a pile. The first noises of the city began to rise remotely. A bell pealed off somewhere. Day began to raise its conglomerate voice. On her knees beside the couch there, the second waistcoat was already taking shape beneath the c.o.c.ksure needles.

The old pinkly moist look had come out in her face.

One million boys "out there" were needing chest-protectors!

III

ICE-WATER, PL--!

When the two sides of every story are told, Henry VIII. may establish an alibi or two, Shylock and the public-school system meet over and melt that too, too solid pound of flesh, and Xantippe, herself the st.u.r.dier man than Socrates, give ready, lie to what is called the shrew in her. Landladies, whole black-bombazine generations of them--oh, so long unheard!--may rise in one Indictment of the Boarder: The scarred bureau-front and match-scratched wall-paper; the empty trunk nailed to the floor in security for the unpaid bill; cigarette-burnt sheets and the terror of sudden fire; the silent newcomer in the third floor back hustled out one night in handcuffs; the day-long sobs of the blond girl so suddenly terrified of life-about-to-be and wringing her ringless hands in the fourth-floor hall-room; the smell of escaping gas and the tightly packed keyhole; the unsuspected flutes that lurk in boarders' trunks; towels, that querulous and endless paean of the lodger; the high cost of liver and dried peaches, of canned corn and round steak!

Tired bombazine procession, wrapped in the greasy odors of years of carpet-sweeping and emptying slops, airing the ga.s.sy slit of room after the coroner; and padding from floor to floor on a mission of towels and towels and towels!

Sometimes climbing from floor to floor, a still warm supply of them looped over one arm, Mrs. Kaufman, who wore bombazine, but unspotted and with crisp net frills at the throat, and upon whose soft-looking face the years had written their chirography in invisible ink, would sit suddenly, there in the narrow gloom of her halls, head against the bal.u.s.trade. Oftener than not the Katz boy from the third floor front would come lickety-clapping down the stairs and past her, jumping the last four steps of each flight.

"Irving, quit your noise in the hall."

"Aw!"

"Ain't you ashamed, a big boy like you, and Mrs. Suss with her neuralgia?"

"Aw!"--the slam of a door clipping off this insolence.

After a while she would resume her climb.

And yet in Mrs. Kaufman's private boarding-house in West Eighty-ninth Street, one of a breastwork of brownstone fronts, lined up stoop for stoop, story for story, and ash-can for ash-can, there were few enough greasy odors except upon the weekly occasion of Monday's boiled dinner; and, whatever the status of liver and dried peaches, canned corn and round steak, her menus remained static--so static that in the gas-lighted bas.e.m.e.nt dining-room and at a remote end of the long, well-surrounded table Mrs. Katz, with her napkin tucked well under her third chin, turned _sotto_ from the protruding husband at her right to her left neighbor, s.h.i.+elding her remark with her hand.

"Am I right, Mrs. Finshriber? I just said to my husband in the five years we been here she should just give us once a change from Friday-night lamb and noodles."

"Say, you should complain yet! With me it's six and a half years day after to-morrow, Easter Day, since I asked myself that question first."

"Even my Irving says to me to-night up in the room; jumping up and down on the hearth like he had four legs--"

"I heard him, Mrs. Katz, on my ceiling like he had eight legs."

"'Mamma,' he says, 'guess why I feel like saying "Baa."'"

"Saying what?"

"Sheep talk, Mrs. Finshriber. B-a-a, like a sheep goes."

"Oh!"

"'Cause I got so many Friday nights' lamb in me, mamma,' he said. Quick like a flash that child is."

Mrs. Finshriber dipped her head and her glance, all her drooping features pulled even farther down at their corners. "I ain't the one to complain, Mrs. Katz, and I always say, when you come right down to it maybe Mrs.

Kaufman's house is as good as the next one, but--"

"I wish, though, Mrs. Finshriber, you would hear what Mrs. Spritz says at her boarding-house they get for breakfast: fried--"

"You can imagine, Mrs. Katz, since my poor husband's death, how much appet.i.te I got left; but I say, Mrs. Katz, just for the principle of the thing, it would not hurt once if Mrs. Kaufman could give somebody else besides her own daughter and Vetsburg the white meat from everything, wouldn't it?"

"It's a shame before the boarders! She knows, Mrs. Pinshriber, how my husband likes breast from the chicken. You think once he gets it? No. I always tell him, not 'til chickens come doublebreasted like overcoats can he get it in this house, with Vetsburg such a star boarder."

"Last night's chicken, let me tell you, I don't wish it to a dog! Such a piece of dark meat with gizzard I had to swallow."

Mrs. Katz adjusted with greater security the expanse of white napkin across her ample bosom. Gold rings and a quarter-inch marriage band flashed in and out among the litter of small tub-shaped dishes surrounding her, and a pouncing fork of short, sure stab. "Right away my husband gets mad when I say the same thing. 'When we don't like it we should move,' he says."

"Like moving is so easy, if you got two chairs and a hair mattress to take with you. But I always say, Mrs. Katz, I don't blame Mrs. Kaufman herself for what goes on; there's _one_ good woman if there ever was one!"

"They don't come any better or any better looking, my husband always says.

'S-ay,' I tell him, 'she can stand her good looks.'"

"It's that big-ideaed daughter who's to blame. Did you see her new white spats to-night?" Right away the minute they come out she has to have 'em.

I'm only surprised she 'ain't got one of them red hats from Gimp's what is all the fad. Believe me, if not for such ideas, her mother could afford something better as succotash for us for supper."

"It's a shame, let me tell you, that a woman like Mrs. Kaufman can't see for herself such things. G.o.d forbid I should ever be so blind to my Irving. I tell you that Ruby has got it more like a queen than a boarding-housekeeper's daughter. Spats, yet!"

"Rich girls could be glad to have it always so good."

"I don't say nothing how her mother treats Vetsburg, her oldest boarder, and for what he pays for that second floor front and no lunches she can afford to cater a little; but that such a girl shouldn't be made to take up a little stenography or help with the housework!"

"S-ay, when that girl even turns a hand, pale like a ghost her mother gets."

"How girls are raised nowadays, even the poor ones!"

"I ain't the one to complain, Mrs. Katz, but just look down there, that red stuff."

"Where?"

"Ain't it cranberry between Ruby and Vetsburg?"

"Yes, yes, and look such a dish of it!"