The Vertical City Part 32

"Hattie--" he said, and started to touch her.

"Don't!" she sort of cried under her whisper, but not without noting that his hand was ready enough to withdraw. "Please--go--now--"

"To-morrow at the station, then. Eleven. There's a train every hour for Greenwich."

He was all tan to her now, standing there like a blur.

"Yes, Morton, I'll be there. If--please--you'll go now."

"Of course," he said. "Late. Only I--Well, paying the taxi--strapped me--temporarily. A ten spot--old Hat--would help."

She gave him her purse, a tiny leather one with a patent clasp. Somehow her fingers were not flexible enough to open it.

His were.

There were a few hours of darkness left, and she sat them out, exactly as he had left her, on the piano stool, looking at the silence.

Toward morning quite an equinoctial storm swept the city, banging shutters and signs, and a steeple on 122d Street was struck by lightning.

And so it was that Hattie's wedding day came up like thunder.

GUILTY

To the swift hiss of rain down soot-greasy window panes and through a medley of the smells of steam off wet overcoats and a pale stench of fish, a judge turned rather tired Friday-afternoon eyes upon the prisoner at the bar, a smallish man in a decent-enough salt-and-pepper suit and more salt than pepper in his hair and mustache.

"You have heard the charge against you," intoned the judge in the holy and righteous key of justice about to be administered. "Do you plead guilty or not guilty?"

"I--I plead guilty of not having told her facts that would have helped her to struggle against the--the thing--her inheritance."

"You must answer the Court directly. Do you--"

"You see, Your Honor--my little girl--so little--my promise. Yes, yes, I--I plead guilty of keeping her in ignorance of what she should have known, but you see, Your Honor, my little gi--"

"Order! Answer to the point. Do you," began the judge again, "plead guilty or not guilty?" his tongue chiming the repet.i.tion into the waiting silence like a clapper into a bell.

The prisoner at the bar thumbed his derby hat after the immemorial dry-fingered fas.h.i.+on of the hunted meek, his mouth like an open wound puckering to close.

"Guilty or not guilty, my man? Out with it."

Actually it was not more than a minute or two before the prisoner found reply, but it was long enough for his tortured eye to flash inward and backward with terrible focus....

On its long cross-town block, Mrs. Plush's boarding house repeated itself no less than thirty-odd times. Every front hall of them smelled like cold boiled potato, and the gilt chair in the parlor like banana.

At dinner hour thirty-odd bas.e.m.e.nt dining rooms reverberated, not uncheerfully, to the ironstone clatter of the canary-bird bathtub of succotash, the three stewed prunes, or the redolent boiled potato, and on Sat.u.r.day mornings, almost to the thirty-odd of them, wasp-waisted, oiled-haired young negro girls in white-cotton stockings and cut-down high shoes enormously and rather horribly run down of heel, tilted pints of water over steep stone stoops and scratched at the trickle with old broom runts.

If Mrs. Plush's house broke rank at all, it did so by praiseworthy omission. In that row of the fly-by-night and the van-by-day, the moving or the express wagon seldom backed up before No. 28, except immediately preceding a wedding or following a funeral. And never, in twenty-two years of respectable tenancy, had the furtive lodger oozed, under darkness, through the Plush front door by night, or a huddle of sidewalk trunks and trappings staged the drab domestic tragedy of the dispossessed.

The Kellers (second-story back) had eaten their satisfied way through fourteen years of the breakfasts of apple sauce or cereal; choice of ham and eggs any style or country sausage and buckwheat cakes.

Jeanette Peopping, born in the back parlor, was married out of the front.

On the night that marked the seventeenth anniversary of the Dangs into the third-floor alcove room there was frozen pudding with hot fudge sauce for dessert, and a red-paper bell ringing silently from the dining-room chandelier.

For the eight years of their placid connubiality Mr. and Mrs. Henry Jett had occupied the second-story front.

Stability, that was the word. Why, Mrs. Plush had dealt with her corner butcher for so long that on crowded Sat.u.r.day mornings it was her custom to step without challenge into the icy zone of the huge refrigerator, herself pinching and tearing back the cold-storage-bitten wings of fowls, weighing them with a fidelity to the ounce, except for a few extra giblets (Mr. Keller loved them), hers, anyhow, most of the time, for the asking.

Even the nearest drug store, wary of that row of the transient hat-on-the-peg, off-the-peg, would deliver to No. 28 a mustard plaster or a deck of cards and charge without question.

To the Jett Fish Company, "Steamers, Hotels, and Restaurants Supplied--If It Swims We Have It," Mrs. Plush paid her bill quarterly only, then Mr. Jett deducting the sum delicately from his board.

So it may be seen that Mrs. Plush's boarding house offered scanty palate to the dauber in local color.

On each of the three floors was a bathroom, spotlessly clean, with a neat hand-lettered sign over each tin tub:

DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU

PLEASE WASH OUT THE TUB AFTER YOU

Upon the outstanding occasion of the fly in the soup and Mr. Keller's subsequent deathly illness, the regrettable immersion had been directly traceable, not to the kitchen, but to the dining-room ceiling. It was November, a season of heavy dipterous mortality. Besides, Mrs. Peopping had seen it fall.

Nor entered here the dirge of the soggy towel; Mrs. Plush placed fluffy stacks of them outside each door each morning. Nor groggy coffee; Mrs.

Plush was famous for hers. Drip coffee, boiled up to an angry sea and half an eggsh.e.l.l dropped in like a fairy barque, to settle it.

The Jetts, with whom we have really to do, drank two cups apiece at breakfast. Mrs. Jett, to the slight aid and abetment of one of her two rolls, stopped right there; Mr. Jett plunging on into choice-of--

The second roll Mrs. Jett usually carried away with her from the table.

Along about ten o'clock she was apt to feel faint rather than hungry.

"Gone," she called it. "Feeling a little gone."

Not that there was a suggestion of frailty about Mrs. Jett. Anything but that. On the contrary, in all the eight years in the boarding house, she held the clean record of not a day in bed, and although her history previous to that time showed as many as fifteen hours a day on duty in the little fancy-goods store of her own proprietors.h.i.+p, those years showed her guilty of only two incapacitated days, and then because she ran an embroidery needle under her finger nail and suffered a slight infection.

Yet there was something about Emma Jett--eight years of married life had not dissipated it--that was not eupeptic; something of the sear and yellow leaf of perpetual spinsterhood. She was a wintry little body whose wide marriage band always hung loosely on her finger with an air of not belonging; wore an invariable knitted shawl iced with beads across her round shoulders, and frizzed her graying bangs, which, although fruit of her scalp, had a set-on look. Even the softness to her kind gray eyes was cozy rather than warm.

She could look out tabbily from above a lap of handiwork, but in her boudoir wrapper of gray flannelette scalloped in black she was scrawny, almost rangy, like a horse whose ribs show.

"I can no more imagine those two courting," Mrs. Keller, a proud twin herself and proud mother of twins, remarked one afternoon to a euchre group. "They must have sat company by correspondence. Why, they won't even kiss when he comes home if there's anybody in the room!"

"They kiss, all right," volunteered Mrs. Dang of the bay-window alcove room, "and she waves him good-by every morning clear down the block."

"You can't tell about anybody nowadays," vouchsafed some one, tremendously.

But in the end the consensus of opinion, unanimous to the vote, was: Lovely woman, Mrs. Jett.