Page 5 of The Vertical City

  GUILTY

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

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

  "I--I plead guilty of not having told her facts that would have helpedher 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 haveknown, but you see, Your Honor, my little gi--"

  "Order! Answer to the point. Do you," began the judge again, "pleadguilty or not guilty?" his tongue chiming the repetition into thewaiting silence like a clapper into a bell.

  The prisoner at the bar thumbed his derby hat after the immemorialdry-fingered fashion of the hunted meek, his mouth like an open woundpuckering to close.

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

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

  * * * * *

  On its long cross-town block, Mrs. Plush's boarding house repeateditself no less than thirty-odd times. Every front hall of them smelledlike cold boiled potato, and the gilt chair in the parlor like banana.At dinner hour thirty-odd basement dining rooms reverberated, notuncheerfully, to the ironstone clatter of the canary-bird bathtub ofsuccotash, the three stewed prunes, or the redolent boiled potato, andon Saturday mornings, almost to the thirty-odd of them, wasp-waisted,oiled-haired young negro girls in white-cotton stockings and cut-downhigh shoes enormously and rather horribly run down of heel, tilted pintsof water over steep stone stoops and scratched at the trickle with oldbroom runts.

  If Mrs. Plush's house broke rank at all, it did so by praiseworthyomission. In that row of the fly-by-night and the van-by-day, the movingor the express wagon seldom backed up before No. 28, except immediatelypreceding a wedding or following a funeral. And never, in twenty-twoyears of respectable tenancy, had the furtive lodger oozed, underdarkness, through the Plush front door by night, or a huddle ofsidewalk trunks and trappings staged the drab domestic tragedy of thedispossessed.

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

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

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

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

  Stability, that was the word. Why, Mrs. Plush had dealt with her cornerbutcher for so long that on crowded Saturday mornings it was her customto step without challenge into the icy zone of the huge refrigerator,herself pinching and tearing back the cold-storage-bitten wings offowls, weighing them with a fidelity to the ounce, except for a fewextra 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 transienthat-on-the-peg, off-the-peg, would deliver to No. 28 a mustard plasteror a deck of cards and charge without question.

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

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

  On each of the three floors was a bathroom, spotlessly clean, with aneat 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'ssubsequent deathly illness, the regrettable immersion had been directlytraceable, not to the kitchen, but to the dining-room ceiling. It wasNovember, a season of heavy dipterous mortality. Besides, Mrs. Peoppinghad seen it fall.

  Nor entered here the dirge of the soggy towel; Mrs. Plush placed fluffystacks of them outside each door each morning. Nor groggy coffee; Mrs.Plush was famous for hers. Drip coffee, boiled up to an angry sea andhalf an eggshell dropped in like a fairy barque, to settle it.

  The Jetts, with whom we have really to do, drank two cups apiece atbreakfast. Mrs. Jett, to the slight aid and abetment of one of her tworolls, 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 butthat. 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 historyprevious to that time showed as many as fifteen hours a day on duty inthe little fancy-goods store of her own proprietorship, those yearsshowed her guilty of only two incapacitated days, and then because sheran an embroidery needle under her finger nail and suffered a slightinfection.

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

  She could look out tabbily from above a lap of handiwork, but in herboudoir 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 twinherself and proud mother of twins, remarked one afternoon to a euchregroup. "They must have sat company by correspondence. Why, they won'teven kiss when he comes home if there's anybody in the room!"

  "They kiss, all right," volunteered Mrs. Dang of the bay-window alcoveroom, "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.

  Nice couple; so unassuming. The goodness looks out of her face; and soreserved!

  But it was this aura of reserve that kept Mrs. Jett, not without a bitof secret heartache about it, as remote from the little world about heras the yolk of an egg is remote from the white. Surrounded, yet no partof those surroundings. No osmosis took place.

  Almost daily, in some one or another's room, over Honiton lace or themaking of steel-bead chatelaine bags, then so much in vogue, thoseimmediate, plushy-voiced gatherings of the members of the plain goldcircle took place. Delicious hours of confidence, confab, and theexchanges of the connubially loquacious.

  The supreme _lese majeste_ of the married woman who wears her state ofwedlock like a crown of blessed thorns; bleeds ecstatically and swapsafternoon-long intimacies, made nasty by the plush in her voice, withher sisters of the matrimonial dynasty.

  Mrs. Jett was also bidden, by her divine right, to those conclaves ofthe wives, and faithfully she attended, but on the rim, as it were.Bitterly silent she sat to the swap of:

  "That's nothing. After Jeanette was b
orn my hair began to fall out justas if I had had typhoid"; or, "Both of mine, I am proud to say, werebottle babies"; and once, as she listened, her heart might have been apersimmon, puckering: "The idea for a woman of forty-five to have herfirst! It's not fair to the child."

  They could not, of course, articulate it, but the fact of the matter wasnot alone that Mrs. Jett was childless (so was Mrs. Dang, who somehowbelonged), it was that they sensed, with all the antennae of their busylittle intuitions, the ascetic odor of spinsterhood which clung to Mrs.Jett. She was a little "too nice." Would flush at some of the innuendoesof the _contes intimes_, tales of no luster and dulled by soot, but inspite of an inner shrinkage would loop up her mouth to smile, becausenot to do so was to linger even more remotely outside the privileged rimof the wedding band.

  Evenings, after these gatherings, Mrs. Jett was invariably even a bitgentler than her wont in her greetings to Mr. Jett.

  Of course, they kissed upon his arrival home, comment to the contrarynotwithstanding, in a taken-for-granted fashion, perhaps, but there wassomething sweet about their utter unexcitement; and had the afternoonsession twisted her heart more than usual, Mrs. Jett was apt to place asecond kiss lightly upon the black and ever so slightly white mustache,or lay her cheek momentarily to his, as if to atone by thus yearningover him for the one aching and silent void between them.

  But in the main Henry Jett was a contented and happy man.

  His wife, whom he had met at a church social and wooed in the front ofthe embroidery and fancy-goods store, fitted him like the proverbialglove--a suede one. In the eight years since, his fish business hadalmost doubled, and his expenses, if anything, decreased, because moreand more it became pleasanter to join in the evening game of no-stakeseuchre down in the front parlor or to remain quietly upstairs, agas lamp on the table between them, Mr. Jett in a dressing gown ofhand-embroidered Persian design and a newspaper which he read from firstto last; Mrs. Jett at her tranquil process of fine needlework.

  Their room abounded in specimens of it. Centerpieces of rose design.Mounds of cushions stamped in bulldog's head and pipe and appropriatelyetched in colored floss. A poker hand, upheld by realistic five fingersembroidered to the life, and the cuff button denoted by a blue-glassjewel. Across their bed, making it a dais of incongruous splendor, wasflung a great counterpane of embroidered linen, in design as narrativeas a battle-surging tapestry and every thread in it woven out of theselong, quiet evenings by the lamp side.

  He was exceedingly proud of her cunning with a needle, so fine that itsstab through the cloth was too slight to be seen, and would lose nooccasion to show off the many evidences of her delicate workmanship thatwere everywhere about the room.

  "It's like being able to create a book or a piece of music, Em, to sayall that on a piece of cloth with nothing but a needle."

  "It's a good thing I am able to create something, Henry," placing herthimbled hand on his shoulder and smiling down. She was slightly thetaller.

  It was remarkable how quick and how tender his intuitions could be.An innuendo from her, faint as the brush of a wing, and he wouldimmediately cluck with his tongue and throw out quite a bravado ofchest.

  "You're all right, Em. You suit me."

  "And you suit me, Henry," stroking his hand.

  This he withdrew. It was apt to smell of fish and he thought that onceor twice he had noticed her draw back from it, and, anyway, he wasexceedingly delicate about the cling of the rottenly pungent fish odorof his workadays.

  Not that he minded personally. He had long ago ceased to have anyconsciousness of the vapors that poured from the bins and the incomingcatches into his little partitioned-off office. But occasionally henoticed that in street cars noses would begin to crinkle around him,and every once in a while, even in a crowded conveyance he would findhimself the center of a little oasis of vacant seats which he hadcreated around himself.

  Immediately upon his arrival home, although his hands seldom touched thefish, he would wash them in a solution of warm water and carbolicacid, and most of the time he changed his suit before dinner, from asalt-and-pepper to a pepper-and-salt, the only sartorial variety inwhich he ever indulged.

  His wife was invariably touched by this little nicety of his, andsometimes bravely forced his hand to her cheek to prove her lack ofrepugnance.

  Boarding-house lore had it correctly. They were an exceedingly nicecouple, the Jetts.

  One day in autumn, with the sky the color and heaviness of a Lynnhavenoyster, Mrs. Jett sat quite unusually forward on her chair at one ofthe afternoon congresses of the wives, convened in Mrs. Peopping's backparlor, Jeanette Peopping, aged four, sweet and blond, whom the Jettsloved to borrow Sunday mornings, while she was still in her littlenightdress, playing paper dolls in the background.

  Her embroidery hoop, with a large shaded pink rose in the working, had,contrary to her custom, fallen from idle hands, and instead of followingthe dart of the infinitesimal needle, Mrs. Jett's eyes were burninglyupon Mrs. Peopping, following, with almost lip-reading intensity, thatworthy lady's somewhat voluptuous mouthings.

  She was a large, light person with protuberant blue eyes that looked asif at some time they had been two-thirds choked from their sockets anda characteristic of opening every sentence with her mouth shaped to anexplosive O, which she filled with as much breath as it would hold.

  It had been a long tale of obstetrical fact and fancy, told plushily,of course, against the dangerous little ears of Jeanette, and at itsconclusion Mrs. Peopping's steel-bead bag, half finished, lay in ahuddle at her feet, her pink and flabby face turned reminiscently towardthe fire.

  "--and for three days six doctors gave me up. Why, I didn't see Jeanetteuntil the fourteenth day, when most women are up and out. The crisis,you know. My night nurse, an awful sweet girl--I send her a Christmaspresent to this day--said if I had been six years younger it wouldn'thave gone so hard with me. I always say if the men knew what we women gothrough--Maybe if some of them had to endure the real pain themselvesthey would have something to do besides walk up and down the hall andturn pale at the smell of ether coming through the keyhole. Ah me! I'vebeen a great sufferer in my day."

  "Thu, thu, thu," and, "I could tell tales," and, "I've been through myshare"--from various points of vantage around the speaker.

  It was then that Mrs. Jett sat forward on the edge of the straightchair, and put her question.

  There was a pause after it had fallen into the silence, as if anintruder had poked her head in through the door, and it brought only themost negligible answer from Mrs. Peopping.

  "Forty-three."

  Almost immediately Mrs. Dang caught at the pause for a case in pointthat had been trembling on her lips all during Mrs. Peopping's recital.

  "A doctor once told a second cousin of my sister-in-law's--" and so on_ad infinitum, ad lib._, and _ad nauseaum_.

  That night Mrs. Jett did an unprecedented thing. She crept into thecrevice of her husband's arm from behind as he stood in his waistcoat,washing his hands in the carbolic solution at the bowl and washstand.He turned, surprised, unconsciously placing himself between her and thereeky water.

  "Henry," she said, rubbing up against the alpaca back to his vest likean ingratiating Maltese tabby, "Hen-ery."

  "In a minute, Em," he said, rather puzzled and wishing she would wait.

  Suddenly, swinging herself back from him by his waistcoat lapel, easily,because of his tenseness to keep her clear of the bowl of water, shedirected her eyes straight into his.

  "Hen-ery--Hen-ery," each pronouncement of his name surging higher in herthroat.

  "Why, Em?"

  "Hen-ery, I haven't words sweet enough to tell you."

  "Em, tell what?" And stopped. He could see suddenly that her eyes werefull of new pins of light and his lightening intuition performed amiracle of understanding.

  "Emmy!" he cried, jerking her so that her breath jumped, and at thesudden drench of tears down her face sat her down, supporting herroundish back with his
wet hands, although he himself felt weak.

  "I--can't say--what I feel, Henry--only--God is good and--I'm notafraid."

  He held her to his shoulder and let her tears rain down into his watchpocket, so shaken that he found himself mouthing silent words.

  "God is good, Henry, isn't He?"

  "Yes, Emmy, yes. Oh, my Emmy!"

  "It must have been our prayers, Henry."

  "Well," sheepishly, "not exactly mine, Emmy; you're the saint of thisfamily. But I--I've wished."

  "Henry. I'm so happy--Mrs. Peopping had Jeanette at forty-three. Threeyears older than me. I'm not afraid."

  It was then he looked down at her graying head there, prone against hischest, and a dart of fear smote him.

  "Emmy," he cried, dragging her tear-happy face up to his, "if you'reafraid--not for anything in the world! You're _first_, Em."

  She looked at him with her eyes two lamps.

  "Afraid? That's the beautiful _part_, Henry. I'm not. Only happy. Whyafraid, Henry--if others dare it at--forty-three--You mean because itwas her second?"

  He faced her with a scorch of embarrassment in his face.

  "You--We--Well, we're not spring chickens any more, Em. If you are sureit's not too--"

  She hugged him, laughing her tears.

  "I'm all right, Henry--we've been too happy not to--to--perpetuate--it."

  This time he did not answer. His cheek was against the crochet of heryoke and she could hear his sobs with her heart.

  * * * * *

  Miraculously, like an amoeba reaching out to inclose unto itself, thecircle opened with a gasp of astonishment that filled Mrs. Peopping's Oto its final stretch and took unto its innermost Emma Jett.

  Nor did she wear her initiation lightly. There was a new tint out in herlong cheeks, and now her chair, a rocker, was but one removed from Mrs.Peopping's.

  Oh, the long, sweet afternoons over garments that made needleworksublime. No longer the padded rose on the centerpiece or the futiledoily, but absurd little dresses with sleeves that she measured to thelength of her hand, and yokes cut out to the pattern of a playing card,and all fretted over with feather-stitching that was frailer thanmaidenhair fern and must have cost many an eye-ache, which, because ofits source, was easy to bear.

  And there happened to Mrs. Jett that queer juvenescence that sometimescomes to men and women in middle life. She who had enjoyed no particularyouth (her father had died in a ferryboat crash two weeks before herbirth, and her mother three years after) came suddenly to acquirecomeliness which her youth had never boasted.

  The round-shouldered, long-cheeked girl had matured gingerly to rathersparse womanhood that now at forty relented back to a fulsome thirty.

  Perhaps it was the tint of light out in her face, perhaps the splendorof the vision; but at any rate, in those precious months to come, Mrs.Jett came to look herself as she should have looked ten years back.

  They were timid and really very beautiful together, she and Henry Jett.He came to regard her as a vase of porcelain, and, in his ignorance,regarded the doctor's mandates harsh; would not permit her to walk, butordered a hansom cab every day from three to four, Mrs. Jett alternatingpunctiliously with each of the boarding-house ladies for drivingcompanion.

  Every noon, for her delectation at luncheon, he sent a boy from thestore with a carton of her special favorites--Blue Point oysters. Shesuddenly liked them small because, as she put it, they went down easier,and he thought that charming. Lynnhavens for mortals of tougher growth.

  Long evenings they spent at names, exercising their pre-determinationas to sex. "Ann" was her choice, and he was all for canceling hispreference for "Elizabeth," until one morning she awakened to the whitelight of inspiration.

  "I have it! Why not Ann Elizabeth?"

  "Great!" And whistled so through his shaving that his mouth was rayedwith a dark sunburst of beard where the razor had not found surface.

  They talked of housekeeping, reluctantly, it is true, because Mrs. Plushherself was fitting up, of hard-to-spare evenings, a basinette of pinkand white. They even talked of schools.

  Then came the inevitable time when Mrs. Jett lost interest. Quite out ofa clear sky even the Blue Points were taboo, and instead of joining thisor that card or sewing circle, there were long afternoons of stitchingaway alone, sometimes the smile out on her face, sometimes not.

  "Em, is it all right with you?" Henry asked her once or twice,anxiously.

  "Of course it is! If I weren't this way--now--it wouldn't be natural.You don't understand."

  He didn't, so could only be vaguely and futilely sorry.

  Then one day something quite horrible, in a small way, happened to Mrs.Jett. Sitting sewing, suddenly it seemed to her that through the veryfluid of her eyeballs, as it were, floated a school of fish. Smallones--young smelts, perhaps--with oval lips, fillips to their tails, andsides that glisted.

  She laid down her bit of linen lawn, fingers to her lids as if tosqueeze out their tiredness. She was trembling from the unpleasantness,and for a frightened moment could not swallow. Then she rose, shook outher skirts, and to be rid of the moment carried her sewing up toMrs. Dang's, where a euchre game was in session, and by a few adroitquestions in between deals gained the reassurance that a nervous statein her "condition" was highly normal.

  She felt easier, but there was the same horrid recurrence three timesthat week. Once during an evening of lotto down in the front parlor shepushed back from the table suddenly, hand flashing up to her throat.

  "Em!" said Mr. Jett, who was calling the numbers.

  "It's nothing," she faltered, and then, regaining herself more fully,"nothing," she repeated, the roundness out in her voice this time.

  The women exchanged knowing glances.

  "She's all right," said Mrs. Peopping, omnipotently. "Those thingspass."

  Going upstairs that evening, alone in the hallway, they flung an armeach across the other's shoulder, crowding playfully up the narrowflight.

  "Emmy," he said, "poor Em, everything will be all right."

  She restrained an impulse to cry. "Poor nothing," she said.

  But neither the next evening, which was Friday, nor for Fridaysthereafter, would she venture down for fish dinner, dining cozily upin her room off milk toast and a fluffy meringue dessert preparedespecially by Mrs. Plush. It was floating-island night downstairs.

  Henry puzzled a bit over the Fridays. It was his heaviest day at thebusiness, and it was upsetting to come home tired and feel her placebeside him at the basement dinner table vacant.

  But the women's nods were more knowing than ever, the reassuringinsinuations more and more delicate.

  But one night, out of one of those stilly cisterns of darkness thatbetween two and four are deepest with sleep, Henry was awakened on thecrest of such a blow and yell that he swam up to consciousness in aready-made armor of high-napped gooseflesh.

  A regrettable thing had happened. Awakened, too, on the high tide ofwhat must have been a disturbing dream, Mrs. Jett flung out her arm asif to ward off something. That arm encountered Henry, snoring lightly inhis sleep at her side. But, unfortunately, to that frightened fling ofher arm Henry did not translate himself to her as Henry.

  That was a fish lying there beside her! A man-sized fish with its mouthjerked open to the shape of a gasp and the fillip still through itsenormous body, as if its flanks were uncomfortably dry. A fish!

  With a shriek that tore a jagged rent through the darkness Mrs. Jettbegan pounding at the slippery flanks, her hands sliding off itsshininess.

  "Out! Out! Henry, where are you? Help me! O God, don't let him get me.Take him away, Henry! Where are you? My hands--slippery! Where areyou--"

  Stunned, feeling for her in the darkness, he wanted to take hershuddering form into his arms and waken her out of this horror, but witheach groping move of his her hurtling shrieks came faster, and finally,dragging the bedclothing with her, she was down on the floor at thebedside, blobbering. T
hat is the only word for it--blobbering.

  He found a light, and by this time there were already other lightsflashing up in the startled household. When he saw her there in the agueof a huddle on the floor beside the bed, a cold sweat broke out over himso that he could almost feel each little explosion from the pores.

  "Why, Emmy--Emmy--my Emmy--my Emmy--"

  She saw him now and knew him, and tried in her poor and alreadyburningly ashamed way to force her chattering jaws together.

  "Hen-ery--dream--bad--fish--Hen-ery--"

  He drew her up to the side of the bed, covering her shivering knees asshe sat there, and throwing a blanket across her shoulders. Fortunatelyhe was aware that the soothing note in his voice helped, and so he satdown beside her, stroking her hand, stroking, almost as if to hypnotizeher into quiet.

  "Henry," she said, closing her fingers into his wrists, "I must havedreamed--a horrible dream. Get back to bed, dear. I--I don't know whatails me, waking up like that. That--fish! O God! Henry, hold me, holdme."

  He did, lulling her with a thousand repetitions of his limited store ofendearments, and he could feel the jerk of sobs in her breathing subsideand she seemed almost to doze, sitting there with her far hand acrossher body and up against his cheek.

  Then came knocks at the door, and hurried explanations through the slitthat he opened, and Mrs. Peopping's eye close to the crack.

  "Everything is all right.... Just a little bad dream the missus had....All right now.... To be expected, of course.... No, nothing anyone cando.... Good night. Sorry.... No, thank you. Everything is all right."

  The remainder of the night the Jetts kept a small light burning, after awhile Henry dropping off into exhausted and heavy sleep. For hours Mrs.Jett lay staring at the small bud of light, no larger than a human eye.It seemed to stare back at her, warning, Now don't you go dropping offto sleep and misbehave again.

  And holding herself tense against a growing drowsiness, she didn't--forfear--

  * * * * *

  The morning broke clear, and for Mrs. Jett full of small reassurances.It was good to hear the clatter of milk deliveries, and the first barof sunshine came in through the hand-embroidered window curtains like asmile, and she could smile back. Later she ventured down shamefacedlyfor the two cups of coffee, which she drank bravely, facing theinevitable potpourri of comment from this one and that one.

  "That was a fine scare you gave us last night, Mrs. Jett."

  "I woke up stiff with fright. Didn't I, Will? Gracious! That first yellwas a curdler!"

  "Just before Jeanette was born I used to have bad dreams, too, butnothing like that. My!"

  "My mother had a friend whose sister-in-law walked in her sleep rightout of a third-story window and was dashed to--"

  "Shh-h-h!"

  "It's natural, Mrs. Jett. Don't you worry."

  She really tried not to, and after some subsequent and privatereassurance from Mrs. Peopping and Mrs. Keller, went for her hansom ridewith a pleasant anticipation of the Park in red leaf, Mrs. Plush, in abrocade cape with ball fringe, sitting erect beside her.

  One day, in the presence of Mrs. Peopping, Mrs. Jett jumped to her feetwith a violent shaking of her right hand, as if to dash off somethingthat had crawled across its back.

  "Ugh!" she cried. "It flopped right on my hand. A minnow! Ugh!"

  "A what?" cried Mrs. Peopping, jumping to her feet and her flesh seemingto crawl up.

  "A minnow. I mean a bug--a June bug. It was a bug, Mrs. Peopping."

  There ensued a mock search for the thing, the two women, on all-fours,peering beneath the chairs. In that position they met levelly, eye toeye. Then without more ado rose, brushing their knees and reseatingthemselves.

  "Maybe if you would read books you would feel better," said Mrs.Peopping, scooping up a needleful of steel beads. "I know a woman whomade it her business to read all the poetry books she could lay handson, and went to all the bandstand concerts in the Park the whole time,and now her daughter sings in the choir out in Saginaw, Michigan."

  "I know some believe in that," said Mrs. Jett, trying to force a smilethrough her pallor. "I must try it."

  But the infinitesimal stitching kept her so busy.

  * * * * *

  It was inevitable, though, that in time Henry should begin to shouldermore than a normal share of unease.

  One evening she leaned across the little lamplit table between them ashe sat reading in the Persian-design dressing gown and said, as rapidlyas her lips could form the dreadful repetition, "The fish, the fish, thefish, the fish." And then, almost impudently for her, disclaimed havingsaid it.

  He urged her to visit her doctor and she would not, and so, secretly, hedid, and came away better satisfied, and with directions for keeping herdiverted, which punctiliously he tried to observe.

  He began by committing sly acts of discretion on his own accord. Wascareful not to handle the fish. Changed his suit now before cominghome, behind a screen in his office, and, feeling foolish, went out andpurchased a bottle of violet eau de Cologne, which he rubbed into hispalms and for some inexplicable reason on his half-bald spot.

  Of course that was futile, because the indescribably and faintly rottensmell of the sea came through, none the less, and to Henry he washimself heinous with scent.

  One Sunday morning, as was his wont, Mr. Jett climbed into his dressinggown and padded downstairs for the loan of little Jeanette Peopping,with whom he returned, the delicious nub of her goldilocks head showingjust above the blanket which enveloped her, eyes and all.

  He deposited her in bed beside Mrs. Jett, the little pink feet peepingout from her nightdress and her baby teeth showing in a smile that Mr.Jett loved to pinch together with thumb and forefinger.

  "Cover her up quick, Em, it's chilly this morning."

  Quite without precedent, Jeanette puckered up to cry, holding herselfrigidly to Mr. Jett's dressing gown.

  "Why, Jeanette baby, don't you want to go to Aunty Em?"

  "No! No! No!" Trying to ingratiate herself back into Mr. Jett's arms.

  "Baby, you'll take cold. Come under covers with Aunty Em?"

  "No! No! No! Take me back."

  "Oh, Jeanette, that isn't nice! What ails the child? She's always soeager to come to me. Shame on Jeanette! Come, baby, to Aunty Em?"

  "No! No! No! My mamma says you're crazy. Take me back--take me."

  For a frozen moment Henry regarded his wife above the glittering fluffof little-girl curls. It seemed to him he could almost see her facebecome smaller, like a bit of ice under sun.

  "Naughty little Jeanette," he said, shouldering her and carrying herdown the stairs; "naughty little girl."

  When he returned his wife was sitting locked in the attitude in which hehad left her.

  "Henry!" she whispered, reaching out and closing her hand over his sothat the nails bit in. "Not that, Henry! Tell me not that!"

  "Why, Em," he said, sitting down and trembling, "I'm surprised at you,listening to baby talk! Why, Em, I'm surprised at you!"

  She leaned over, shaking him by the shoulder.

  "I know. They're saying it about me. I'm not that, Henry. I swear I'mnot that! Always protect me against their saying that, Henry. Notcrazy--not that! It's natural for me to feel queer at times--now.Every woman in this house who says--that--about me has had her nervousfeelings. It's not quite so easy for me, as if I were a bit younger.That's all. The doctor said that. But nothing to worry about. Mrs.Peopping had Jeanette--Oh, Henry promise me you'll always protect meagainst their saying that! I'm not that--I swear to you, Henry--notthat!"

  "I know you're not, Emmy. It's too horrible and too ridiculous to talkabout. Pshaw--pshaw!"

  "You do know I'm not, don't you? Tell me again you do know."

  "I do. Do."

  "And you'll always protect me against anyone saying it? They'll believeyou, Henry, not me. Promise me to protect me against them, Henry.Promise to protect me against our li
ttle Ann Elizabeth ever thinkingthat of--of her mother."

  "Why, Emmy!" he said. "Why, Emmy! I just promise a thousand times--" andcould not go on, working his mouth rather foolishly as if he had notteeth and were rubbing empty gums together.

  But through her hot gaze of tears she saw and understood and, satisfied,rubbed her cheek against his arm.

  The rest is cataclysmic.

  Returning home one evening in a nice glow from a January out-of-doors,his mustache glistening with little frozen drops and his hands (he neverwore gloves) unbending of cold, Mrs. Jett rose at her husband's entrancefrom her low chair beside the lamp.

  "Well, well!" he said, exhaling heartily, the scent of violet denyingthe pungency of fish and the pungency of fish denying the scent ofviolet. "How's the busy bee this evening?"

  For answer Mrs. Jett met him with the crescendo yell of a gale sweepingaround a chimney.

  "Ya-a-ah! Keep out--you! Fish! Fish!" she cried, springing toward him;and in the struggle that ensued the tubing wrenched off the gas lamp andplunged them into darkness. "Fish! I'll fix you! Ya-a-ah!"

  "Emmy! For God's sake, it's Henry! Em!"

  "Ya-a-ah! I'll fix you! Fish! Fish!"

  * * * * *

  Two days later Ann Elizabeth was born, beautiful, but premature by twoweeks.

  Emma Jett died holding her tight against her newly rich breasts, for afew of the most precious and most fleeting moments of her life.

  All her absurd fears washed away, her free hand could lie without spasmin Henry's, and it was as if she found in her last words a secreteuphony that delighted her.

  "Ann-Elizabeth. Sweet-beautiful. Ann-Elizabeth. Sweet-beautiful."

  Later in his bewildered and almost ludicrous widowerhood tears wouldsometimes galumph down on his daughter's face as Henry rocked her ofevenings and Sunday mornings.

  "Sweet-beautiful," came so absurdly from under his swiftly grayingmustache, but often, when sure he was quite alone, he would say it overand over again.

  "Sweet-beautiful. Ann-Elizabeth. Sweet-beautiful. Ann-Elizabeth."

  * * * * *

  Of course the years puttied in and healed and softened, until for Henryalmost a Turner haze hung between him and some of the stark facts ofEmma Jett's death, turping out horror, which is always the first to fadefrom memory, and leaving a dear sepia outline of the woman who had beenhis.

  At seventeen, Ann Elizabeth was the sun, the sky, the west wind, and theshimmer of spring--all gone into the making of her a rosebud off thestock of his being.

  His way of putting it was, "You're my all, Annie, closer to me than I amto myself."

  She hated the voweling of her name, and because she was so nimble withyouth could dance away from these moods of his rather than plumb them.

  "I won't be 'Annie.' Please, daddy, I'm your Ann Elizabeth."

  "Ann Elizabeth, then. My Ann Elizabeth," an inner rhythm in him echoing:Sweet-Beautiful. Sweet-Beautiful.

  There was actually something of the lark about her. She awoke with asong, sometimes kneeling up in bed, with her pretty brown hair touslingdown over her shoulders and chirruping softly to herself into the littlebird's-eye-maple dressing-table mirror, before she flung her feet overthe side of the bed.

  And then, innate little housekeeper that she was, it was to thepreparing of breakfast with a song, her early morning full of antics.Tiptoeing in to awaken her father to the tickle of a broom straw.Spreading his breakfast piping hot, and then concealing herself behind ascreen, that he might marvel at the magic of it. And once she put saltin his coffee, a fresh cup concealed behind the toast rack, and knee toknee they rocked in merriment at his grimace.

  She loved thus to tease him, probably because he was so stolid that eachnew adventure came to him with something of a shock. He was foreverbeing taken unawares, as if he could never become entirely accustomed tothe wonder of her, and that delighted her. Even the obviousness of hisslippers stuffed out with carrots could catch him napping. To her danceof glee behind him, he kept poking and poking to get into them, onlythe peck of her kiss upon his neck finally initiating him into theabsurdity.

  There was a little apartment of five rooms, twenty minutes removed bySubway from the fish store; her bedroom, all pink and yellow maple; his;a kitchen, parlor, and dining room worked out happily in white-muslincurtains, spindle-legged parlor chairs, Henry's newfangled chifferobeand bed with a fine depth of mattress, and a kitchen with eight shiningpots above the sink and a border of geese, cut out to the snip of Ann'sown scissors, waddling across the wall.

  It was two and a half years since Mrs. Plush had died, and the boarders,as if spilled from an ark on rough seas, had struck out for diverseshores. The marvel to them now was that they had delayed so long.

  "A home of our own, Ann. Pretty sweet, isn't it?"

  "Oh, daddy, it is!"

  "You mustn't overdo, though, baby. Sometimes we're not so strong as wethink we are. A little hired girl would be best." The fish business hadmore than held its own.

  "But I love doing it alone, dad. It--it's the next best thing to a homeof--my own."

  He looked startled into her dreaming eyes.

  "Your own? Why, Annie, isn't this--your own?"

  She laid fingers against his eyes so that he could not see the pinkinessof her.

  "You know what I mean, daddy--my--very--own."

  At that timid phrasing of hers Henry felt that his heart was actuallystrangling, as if some one were holding it back on its systolic swing,like a caught pendulum.

  "Why, Annie," he said, "I never thought--"

  But inevitably and of course it had happened.

  The young man's name was Willis--Fred E. Willis--already credit man ina large wholesale grocery firm and two feet well on the road toadvancement. A square-faced, clean-faced fellow, with a clean love oflife and of Ann Elizabeth in his heart.

  Henry liked him.

  Ann Elizabeth loved him.

  And yet, what must have been a long-smoldering flame of fear shot upthrough the very core of Henry's being, excoriating.

  "Why, Ann Elizabeth," he kept repeating, in his slow and alwaysinarticulate manner, "I--You--Mine--I just never thought."

  She wound the softest of arms about his neck.

  "I know, daddy-darlums, and I'll never leave you. Never. Fred haspromised we will always be together. We'll live right here with you, oryou with us."

  "Annie," he cried, "you mustn't ever--marry. I mean, leave daddy--thatway--anyway. You hear me? You're daddy's own. Just his by himself.Nobody is good enough for my girl."

  "But, daddy," clouding up for tears, "I thought you liked Fred so much!"

  "I do, but it's you I'm talking about. Nobody can have you."

  "But I love him, daddy. This is terrible. I love him."

  "Oh, Ann, Ann! daddy hasn't done right, perhaps, but he meant well.There are _reasons_ why he wants to keep his little girl with himalways--alone--his."

  "But, daddy dear, I promise you we'll never let you be lonely. Why, Icouldn't stand leaving you any more than you could--"

  "Not those reasons alone, Ann."

  "Then what?"

  "You're so young," he tried to procrastinate.

  "I'll be eighteen. A woman."

  All his faculties were cornered.

  "You're--so--Oh, I don't know--I--"

  "You haven't any reasons, dad, except dear silly ones. You can't keep mea little girl all the time, dear. I love Fred. It's all planned. Don'truin my life, daddy--don't ruin my life."

  She was lovely in her tears and surprisingly resolute in her mind, andhe was more helpless than ever with her.

  "Ann--you're not strong."

  "Strong!" she cried, flinging back her curls and out her chest. "That isa fine excuse. I'm stronger than most. All youngsters have measles andscarlet fever and Fred says his sister Lucile out in Des Moines had St.Vitus' dance when she was eleven, just like I did. I'm stronger than youare, dad. I didn't get the
flu and you did."

  "You're nervous, Annie. That's why I want always to keep you athome--quiet--with me."

  She sat back, her pretty eyes troubled-up lakes.

  "You mean the dreams and the scared feeling, once in a while, that Ican't swallow. That's nothing. I know now why I was so frightened in mysleep the other night. I told Fred, and he said it was the peach sundaeon top of the crazy old movie we saw that evening. Why, JeanettePeopping had to take a rest cure the year before she was married. Girlsare always more nervous than fellows. Daddy--you--you frighten me whenyou look at me like that! I don't know what you mean! What-do-you-mean?"

  He was helpless and at bay and took her in his arms and kissed her hair.

  "I guess your old daddy is a jealous pig and can't bear to share hisgirl with anyone. Can't bear to--to give her up."

  "You won't be giving up, daddums. I couldn't stand that, either. Itwill be three of us then. You'll see. Look up and smile at your AnnElizabeth. Smile, now, smile."

  And of course he did.

  It was typical of her that she should be the busiest of brides-to-be,her complete little trousseau, every piece down to the dishcloths,monogrammed by her--A.E.W.

  Skillful with her needle and thrifty in her purchases, the outfit whencompleted might have represented twice the outlay that Henry expendedon it. Then there were "showers,"--linen, stocking, and even a tin one;gifts from her girl friends--cup, face, bath and guest towels; all thetremendous trifles and addenda that go to gladden the chattel-lovingheart of a woman. A little secret society of her erstwhile schoolfriends presented her with a luncheon set; the Keller twins with asilver gravy boat; and Jeanette Peopping Truman, who occupied anapartment in the same building, spent as many as three afternoons a weekwith her, helping to piece out a really lovely tulip-design quilt ofpink and white sateen.

  "Jeanette," said Ann Elizabeth, one afternoon as the two of them sat ina frothy litter of the pink and white scraps, "how did you feel thattime when you had the nerv--the breakdown?"

  Jeanette, pretty after a high-cheek-boned fashion and her still brighthair worn coronet fashion about her head, bit off a thread with sharpwhite teeth, only too eager to reminisce her ills.

  "I was just about gone, that's what I was. Let anybody so much as lookat me twice and, pop! I'd want to cry about it."

  "And?"

  "For six weeks I didn't even have enough interest to ask after Truman,who was courting me then. Oh, it was no fun, I can tell you, thatnervous breakdown of mine!"

  "What--else?"

  "Isn't that enough?"

  "Did it--was it--was it ever hard to swallow, Jeanette?"

  "To swallow?"

  "Yes. I mean--did you ever dream or--think--or feel so frightened youcouldn't swallow?"

  "I felt lots of ways, but that wasn't one of them. Swallow! Who everheard of not swallowing?"

  "But didn't you ever dream, Jeanette--terrible things--such terriblethings--and get to thinking and couldn't stop yourself? Silly,ghostly--things."

  Jeanette put down her sewing.

  "Ann, are you quizzing me about--your mother?"

  "My mother? Why my mother? Jeanette, what do you mean? Why do you ask mea thing like that? What has my mother got to do with it? Jeanette!"

  Conscious that she had erred, Jeanette veered carefully back.

  "Why, nothing, only I remember mamma telling me when I was just a kiddiehow your mamma used to--to imagine all sorts of things just to pass thetime away while she embroidered the loveliest pieces. You're like her,mamma used to say--a handy little body. Poor mamma, to think she had tobe taken before Truman, junior, was born! Ah me!"

  That evening, before Fred came for his two hours with her in the littleparlor, Ann, rid of her checked apron and her crisp pink frock savedfrom the grease of frying sparks, flew in from a ring at the doorbellwith a good-sized special-delivery box from a silversmith, untying itwith eager, fumbling fingers, her father laying aside his newspaper toventure three guesses as to its contents.

  "Another one of those syrup pitchers."

  "Oh dear!"--plucking the twine--"I hope not!"

  "Some more nut picks."

  "Daddy, stop calamity howling. Here's the card. Des Moines, Iowa. 'FromLucile Willis, with love to her new sister.' Isn't that the sweetest!It's something with a pearl handle."

  "I know. Another one of those pie-spade things."

  "Wrong! Wrong! It's two pieces. Oh!"

  It was a fish set of silver and mother-of-pearl. A large-bowled spoonand a sort of Neptune's fork, set up in a white-sateen bed.

  "Say now, that _is_ neat," said Henry, appraising each piece with a showof critical appreciation not really his. All this spread of the gewgawsof approaching nuptials seemed meaningless to him; bored him. Butterknives. Berry spoons. An embarrassment of nut picks and silver pitchers.A sliver of silver paper cutter with a hilt and a dog's-head handle. Andnow, for Fred's delectation this evening, the newly added fish set, soappropriately inscribed from his sister.

  Tilting it against the lamp in the place of honor, Ann Elizabeth turnedaway suddenly, looking up at her father in a sudden dumb panic of whichhe knew nothing, her two hands at her fair, bare throat. It was so hardagain to swallow. Impossible.

  But finally, as was always the case, she did swallow, with a great surgeof relief. A little later, seated on her father's knee and plucking athis tie in a futile fashion that he loved, she asked him:

  "Daddy--about mother--"

  They seldom talked of her, but always during these rare moments abeautiful mood shaped itself between them. It was as if the mere breathof his daughter's sweetly lipped use of "mother" swayed the bitter-sweetmemory of the woman he carried so faithfully in the cradle of his heart.

  "Yes, baby--about mother?"

  "Daddy"--still fingering at the tie--"was mother--was everything allright with her up--to the very--end? I mean--no nerv--no pain? Just allof a sudden the end--quietly. Or have you told me that just to--spareme?"

  She could feel him stiffen, but when his voice came it was even.

  "Why, Ann, what a--question! Haven't I told you so often how mother justpeacefully passed on, holding a little pink you."

  Sweet-Beautiful--his heart was tolling through a sense ofpanic--Sweet-Beautiful.

  "I know, daddy, but before--wasn't there any nerv--any sickness?"

  "No," he said, rather harshly for him. "No. No. What put such ideas intoyour head?"

  You see, he was shielding Emma way back there, and a typhoon of herwords was raging through his head:

  "Oh, Henry, protect me against anyone ever saying--that. Promise me."

  And now, with no sense of his terrible ruthlessness, he was protectingher with her own daughter.

  "Then, daddy, just one more thing," and her underlip caught while shewaited for answer. "There is no other reason except your own dear sillyone of loneliness--why you keep wanting me to put off my marriage?"

  "No, baby," he said, finally, his words with no more depth than if hisbody were a hollow gourd. "What else could there be?"

  Immediately, and with all the resilience of youth, she was her happyself again, kissing him through his mustache and on his now frankly baldhead, which gave off the incongruous odor of violet eau de Cologne.

  "Old dude daddy!" she cried, and wanted to kiss his hands, which he heldsuddenly very still and far from her reach.

  Then the bell rang again and Fred Willis arrived. All the evening,long after Henry lay on his deep-mattressed bed, staring, the littleapartment trilled to her laughter and the basso of Fred's.

  * * * * *

  A few weeks later there occurred a strike of the delivery men and truckdrivers of the city, and Henry, especially hard hit because of theperishable nature of his product, worked early and late, oftentimesloading the wagons himself and riding alongside of the precariouslydriving "scab."

  Frequently he was as much as an hour or two late to dinner, and upon oneor two occasions had tiptoed out of the
house before the usual hourwhen Ann opened her eyes to the consciousness of his breakfast to beprepared.

  They were trying days, the scheme of his universe broken into, and Henrythrived on routine.

  The third week of the strike there were street riots, some of themdirectly in front of the fish store, and Henry came home after a day ofthe unaccustomed labor of loading and unloading hampers of fish, reallyquite shaken.

  When he arrived Ann Elizabeth was cutting around the scalloped edge ofa doily with embroidery scissors, the litter of cut glass and silverthings out on the table and throwing up quite a brilliance under theelectric lamp, and from the kitchen the slow sizzle of waiting chops.

  "Whew!" he said, as he entered, both from the whiff he emanated as heshook out of his overcoat, and from a great sense of his weariness.Loading the hampers, you understand. "Whew!"

  Ann Elizabeth started violently, first at the whiff which preceded himand at his approach into the room; then sat forward, her hand closinginto the arm of the chair, body thrust forward and her eyes wideninglike two flowers opening.

  Then she rose slowly and slyly, and edged behind the table, her twohands up about her throat.

  "Don't you come in here," she said, lowly and evenly. "I know you, butI'm not afraid. I'm only afraid of you at night, but not by light. Youlet me swallow, you hear! Get out! Get out!"

  Rooted, Henry stood.

  "Why, Annie!" he said in the soothing voice from out of his long ago,"Annie--it's daddy!"

  "No, you don't," she cried, springing back as he took the step forward."My daddy'll kill you if he finds you here. He'll slit you up from yourtail right up to your gill. He knows how. I'm going to tell him and Fredon you. You won't let me swallow. You're slippery. I can't stand it.Don't you come near me! Don't!"

  "Annie!" he cried. "Good God! Annie, it's daddy who loves you!" PoorHenry, her voice was still under a whisper and in his agony he committedthe error of rushing at her. "Annie, it's daddy! See, your own deardaddy!"

  But she was too quick. Her head thrown back so that the neck musclesstrained out like an outraged deer's cornered in the hunt and hereyes rolled up, Ann felt for and grasped the paper knife off thetrinket-littered table.

  "Don't you touch me--slit you up from tail to your gills."

  "Annie, it's daddy! Papa! For God's sake look at daddy--Ann! God!" Andcaught her wrist in the very act of its plumb-line rush for his heart.

  He was sweating in his struggle with her, and most of all her strengthappalled him, she was so little for her terrible unaccountable power.

  "Don't touch me! You can't! You haven't any arms! Horrible gills!"

  She was talking as she struggled, still under the hoarse and franticwhisper, but her breath coming in long soughs. "Slit-you-up-from-tail.Slit--you--up--from--tail--to--gills."

  "Annie! Annie!" still obsessed by his anguished desire to reassureher with the normality of his touch. "See, Annie, it's daddy. AnnElizabeth's daddy." With a flash her arm and the glint of the papercutter eluded him again and again, but finally he caught her by thewaist, struggling, in his dreadful mistake, to calm her down into thechair again.

  "Now I've got you, darling. Now--sit--down--"

  "No, you haven't," she said, a sort of wild joy coming out in herwhisper, and cunningly twisting the upper half of her body back fromhis, the hand still held high. "You'll never get me--you fish!"

  And plunged with her high hand in a straight line down into her throat.

  It was only when the coroner withdrew the sliver of paper knife from itswhiteness, that, coagulated, the dead and waiting blood began to ooze.

  * * * * *

  "Do you," intoned the judge for the third and slightly more impatienttime, "plead guilty or not guilty to the charge of murder against you?"

  This time the lips of the prisoner's wound of a mouth moved stifflytogether:

  "Guilty."

  ROULETTE

  I

  Snow in the village of Vodna can have the quality of hot white plushof enormous nap, so dryly thick it packs into the angles where fencescross, sealing up the windward sides of houses, rippling in great seasacross open places, flaming in brilliancy against the boles of ever sooccasional trees, and tucking in the houses up to the sills and downover the eaves.

  Out in the wide places it is like a smile on a dead face, this snowhush, grateful that peace can be so utter. It is the silence of a broodyGod, and out of that frozen pause, in a house tucked up to the sills anddown to the eaves, Sara Turkletaub was prematurely taken with the pangsof childbirth, and in the thin dawn, without even benefit of midwife,twin sons were born.

  Sturdy sons, with something even in their first crescendo wails thatbespoke the good heritage of a father's love-of-life and a mother'slife-of-love.

  No Sicilian sunrise was ever more glossy with the patina of hopethan the iced one that crept in for a look at the wide-faced,high-cheek-boned beauty of Sara Turkletaub as she lay with her sons tothe miracle of her full breasts, her hair still rumpled with the agonyof deliverance. So sweetly moist her eyes that Mosher Turkletaub, hisown brow damp from sweat of her writhings, was full of heartbeat, evento his temples.

  Long before moontime, as if by magic of the brittle air, the tidings hadspread through the village, and that night, until the hand-hewn raftersrang, the house of Turkletaub heralded with twofold and world-old fervorthe advent of the man-child. And through it all--the steaming warmth,the laughter through bushy beards, the ministering of women wise andfoolish with the memory of their own pangs, the shouts of vodka-stirredmen, sheepish that they, too, were part custodians of the miracle oflife--through it all Sara Turkletaub lay back against her coarse bed, sorich--so rich that the coves of her arms trembled each of its burden andheld tighter for fear somehow God might repent of his prodigality.

  That year the soil came out from under the snow rich and malmy to theplow, and Mosher started heavy with his peddler's pack and returnedlight. It was no trick now for Sara to tie her sons to an iron ring inthe door jamb and, her strong legs straining and her sweat willing,undertake household chores of water lugging, furniture heaving,marketing with baskets that strained her arms from the sockets as shecarted them from the open square to their house on the outskirts, hermassive silhouette moving as solemnly as a caravan against the sky line.

  Rich months these were and easy to bear because they were backed by adream that each day, however relentless in its toil, brought closer toreality.

  "America!"

  The long evenings full of the smell of tallow; maps that curled underthe fingers; the well-thumbed letters from Aaron Turkletaub, olderbrother to Mosher and already a successful pieceworker on skirts inBrooklyn. The picture postcards from him of the Statue of Liberty! Ofthe three of them, Aaron, Gussie, his wife, and little Leo, with donkeybodies sporting down a beach labeled "Coney." A horrific tintype oflittle Leo in tiny velveteen knickerbockers that fastened with large,ruble-sized, mother-of-pearl buttons up to an embroidered sailor blouse.

  It was those mother-of-pearl buttons that captured Sara's imaginationso that she loved and wept over the tintype until little Leo quitedisappeared under the rust of her tears. Long after young Mosher, wholoved his Talmud, had retired to sway over it, Sara could yearn at thistintype.

  Her sons in little knickerbockers that fastened to the waistband withlarge pearl buttons!

  Her black-eyed Nikolai with the strong black hair and the virile littleprofile that hooked against the pillow as he slept.

  Her red-headed Schmulka with the tight curls, golden eyes, and evenmore thrusting profile. So different of feature her twins and yet sotemperamentally of a key. Flaming to the same childish passions, oftentoo bitter, she thought, and, trembling with an unnamed fear, would tearthem apart.

  Pull of the cruelties and the horrible torture complex of the youngmale, they had once burned a cat alive, and the passion of their fatherand their cries under flaying had beat about in her brain for weeksafter. Jealousies, each of the o
ther, burned fiercely, and, aged three,they scratched blood from one another over the favor of the shoemaker'stot of a girl. And once, to her soul-sickness, Nikolai, the black one,had found out the vodka and drunk of it until she discovered him in alittle stupor beside the cupboard.

  Yet--and Sara would recount with her eyes full of more tears than theycould hold the often-told tale of how Schmulka, who could bear noinjustice, championed the cause of little Mottke, the butcher's son,against the onslaught of his drunken father, beating back the lumberingattack with small fists tight with rage; of little Nikolai, who felldown the jagged wall of a quarry and endured a broken arm for the sixhours until his father came home rather than burden his mother with whathe knew would be the agony of his pain.

  Red and black were Sara's sons in pigment. But by the time they werefour, almost identical in passion, inflammable both to the same angers,the impulsive and the judiciary cunningly distributed in them.

  And so, to the solemn and Talmud teachings of Mosher and thewide-bosomed love of this mother who lavishly nurtured them, these sons,so identically pitched, grew steady of limb, with all the thigh-pullingpower of their parents, the calves of their little legs already tightas fists. And from the bookkeeping one snow-smelling night, to thedrip-drip of tallow, there came the decisive moment when America lookedexactly four months off!

  Then one starlit hour before dawn the pogrom broke. Redly, from the verystart, because from the first bang of a bayonet upon a door blood beganto flow and smell.

  There had been rumors. For days old Genendel, the ragpicker, hadprophetically been showing about the village the rising knobs of hisknotting rheumatic knuckles, ill omen of storm or havoc. A star had shotdown one night, as white and sardonic as a Cossack's grin and almostwith a hiss behind it. Mosher, returning from a peddling tour to aneighboring village, had worn a furrow between his eyes. Headache, hecalled it. Somehow Sara vaguely sensed it to be the ache of a fear.

  One night there was a furious pink tint on the distant horizon, andborne on miles of the stiffly thin air came the pungency of burningwood and flesh across the snowlight. Flesh! The red sky lay off in thedirection of Kishinef. What was it? The straw roof of a burning barn?The precious flesh of an ox? What? Reb Baruch, with a married daughterand eleven children in Kishinef, sat up all night and prayed and swayedand trembled.

  Packed in airtight against the bite of the steely out-of-doors, most ofthe village of Vodna--except the children and the half-witted Shimsha,the _ganef_--huddled under its none-too-plentiful coverings that nightand prayed and trembled.

  At five o'clock that red dawn, almost as if a bayonet had crashed intoher dream, Sara, her face smeared with pallor, awoke to the smell ofher own hair singeing. A bayonet _had_ crashed, but through the door,terribly!

  The rest is an anguished war frieze of fleeing figures; of runninghither and thither in the wildness of fear; of mothers running withbabes at breasts; of men, their twisted faces steaming sweat, locked inthe Laocooen embrace of death. Banners of flame. The exultant belch ofiridescent smoke. Cries the shape of steel rapiers. A mouth torn back toan ear. Prayers being moaned. The sticky stench of coagulating blood.Pillage. Outrage. Old men dragging household chattels. Figures crumplingup in the outlandish attitudes of death. The enormous braying offrightened cattle. A spurred heel over a face in that horrible momentwhen nothing can stay its descent. The shriek of a round-bosomed girlto the smear of wet lips across hers. The superb daring of her lover tokill her. A babe in arms. Two. The black billowing of fireless smoke.

  A child in the horse trough, knocked there from its mother's arms by thebutt end of a bayonet, its red curls quite sticky in a circle of itslittle blood. A half-crazed mother with a singed eyebrow, blatting overit and groveling on her breasts toward the stiffening figure for thewarmth they could not give; the father, a black-haired child in hisarms, tearing her by force out of the zone of buckshot, plunging backinto it himself to cover up decently, with his coat, what the horsetrough held.

  Dawn. A huddle of fugitives. Footsteps of blood across the wide openplaces of snow. A mother, whose eyes are terrible with what she has leftin the horse trough, fighting to turn back. A husband who literallycarries her, screaming, farther and farther across the cruel openplaces. A town. A ship. The crucified eyes of the mother always lookingback. Back.

  And so it was that Sara and Mosher Turkletaub sailed for America withonly one twin--Nikolai, the black.

  * * * * *

  The Turkletaubs prospered. Turkletaub Brothers, Skirts, the year afterthe war, paying a six-figure excess-profit tax.

  Aaron dwelt in a three-story, American-basement house in West 120thStreet, near Lenox Avenue, with his son Leo, office manager of theTurkletaub Skirt Company, and who had recently married the eldestdaughter of an exceedingly well-to-do Maiden Lane jewelry merchant.

  The Mosher Turkletaubs occupied an eight-room-and-two-baths apartmentnear by. Sara, with much of the fleetness gone from her face and a smiletempered by a look of unshed tears, marketing now by white-enameled desktelephone or, on days when the limp from an old burn down her thigh wasnot too troublesome, walked up to a plate-glass butcher shop on 125thStreet, where there was not so much as a drop of blood on the marblecounter and the fowl hung in white, plucked window display withgarnitures of pink tissue paper about the ankles and even the danglingheads wrapped so that the dead eyes might not give offense.

  It was a widely different Sara from the water lugger of those sweatyRussian days. Such commonplaces of environment as elevator service,water at the turning of a tap, potatoes dug and delivered to herdumbwaiter, had softened Sara and, it is true, vanquished, along withthe years, some of the wing flash of vitality from across her face. Sowas the tough fiber of her skin vanquished to almost a creaminess, andher hair, due perhaps to the warm water always on tap, had taken ona sheen, and even through its grayness grew out hardily and was welltrained to fall in soft scallops over the singed place.

  Yes, all in all, life had sweetened Sara, and, except for the occasionallook of crucifixion somewhere back in her eyes, had roly-polied herinto new rotundities of hip and shelf of bosom, and even to whatmischievously promised to be a scallop of second chin.

  Sara Turkletaub, daughter of a ne'er-do-well who had died before herbirth with the shadow of an unproved murder on him; Sara, who had runswiftly barefoot for the first dozen summers of her life, and married,without dower or approval, the reckless son of old Turkletaub, thepeddler; Sara, who once back in the dim years, when a bull had got loosein the public square, had jerked him to a halt by swinging herself fromhis horns, and later, standing by, had helped hold him for the emergencyof an un-kosher slaughter, not even paling at the slitting noises of theknife.

  Mosher Turkletaub, who had peddled new feet for stockings and calico forthe sacques the peasant women wore in the fields, reckoning no longer indozens of rubles but in dozens of thousands! Indeed, Turkletaub Brotherscould now afford to owe the bank one hundred thousand dollars! Mosherdwelling thus, thighs gone flabby, in a seven-story apartment house witha liveried lackey to swing open the front door and another to shoot himupward in a gilded elevator.

  It was to laugh!

  And Sara and Mosher with their son, their turbulent Nikolai, now anaccredited Doctor of Law and practicing before the bar of the city ofNew York!

  It was upon that realization, most of all, that Sara could surge tears,quickly and hotly, and her heart seem to hurt of fullness.

  Of Nikolai, the black. Nicholas, now:

  It was not without reason that Sara had cried terrible tears over him,and that much, but not all, of the struggle was gone from her face.Her boy could be as wayward as the fling to his fierce black head, andsickeningly often Mosher, with a nausea at the very pit of him, hadwielded the lash.

  Once even Nicholas in his adolescent youth, handsomely dark, had stoodin Juvenile Court, ringleader of a neighborhood gang of children on aforay into the strange world of some packets of cocaine purloined fromthe rear
of a vacated Chinese laundry.

  Bitterly had Mosher stood in the fore of that court room, thumbing hishat, his heart gangrening, and trying in a dumbly miserable sort of wayto press down, with his hand on her shoulder, some of the heaving ofSara's enormous tears.

  There had followed a long, bitter evening of staying the father's lashfrom descending, and finally, after five hours with his mother in hislittle room, her wide bosom the sea wall against which the boilingwaywardness of him surged, his high head came down like a black swan'sand apparently, at least so far as Mosher knew, Sara had won again.

  And so it was that with the bulwark of this mother and a father whospared not the wise rod even at the price of the sickness it costhim, Nicholas came cleanly through these difficult years of the longmidchannel of his waywardness.

  At twenty-one he was admitted to the bar of the city of New York,although an event so perilous followed it by a year or two that thescallops of strong hair that came down over the singed place of Sara'sbrow whitened that year; although Mosher, who was beginning to curveslightly of the years as he walked, as if a blow had been struck himfrom behind, never more than heard the wind before the storm.

  Listen in on the following:

  The third year that Nicholas practiced law, junior member in the BroadStreet firm of Leavitt & Dilsheimer, he took to absenting himself fromdinner so frequently, that across the sturdy oak dining table, laid outin a red-and-white cloth, gold-band china not too thick of lip, and acut-glass fern dish with cunningly contrived cotton carnations stuck inamong the growing green, Sara, over rich and native foods, came more andmore to regard her husband through a clutch of fear.

  "I tell you, Mosher, something has come over the boy. It ain't like himto miss _gefuelte_-fish supper three Fridays in succession."

  "All right, then, because he has a few more or less _gefuelte_-fishsuppers in his life, let it worry you! If that ain't a woman everytime."

  "_Gefuelte_ fish! If that was my greatest worry. But it's not so easy toprepare, that you should take it so much for granted. _Gefuelte_ fish, hesays, just like it grew on trees and didn't mean two hours' chopping onmy feet."

  "Now, Sara, was that anything to fly off at? Do I ever so much as eattwo helpings of it in Gussie's house? That's how I like yours better!"

  "Gussie don't chop up her onions fine enough. A hundred times I tell herand a hundred times she does them coarse. Her own daughter-in-law, agirl that was raised in luxury, can cook better as Gussie. I tell you,Mosher, I take off my hat to those Berkowitz girls. And if you shouldask me, Ada is a finer one even than Leo's Irma."

  The sly look of wiseacre wizened up Mosher's face.

  "Ada!" she says. "The way you pronounce that girl's name, Sara, it'slike every tooth in your mouth was diamond filled out of Berkowitz'sjewelry firm."

  Quite without precedent Sara's lips began to quiver at this pleasantry.

  "I'm worried, Mosher," she said, putting down a forkful of untasted foodthat had journeyed twice toward her lips. "I don't say he--Nicky--Idon't say he should always stay home evenings when Ada comes oversometimes with Leo and Irma, but night after night--three times wholenights--I--Mosher, I'm afraid."

  In his utter well-being from her warming food, Mosher drank deeply and,if it must be admitted, swishingly, through his mustache, inhalingcopiously the draughts of Sara's coffee.

  Do not judge from the mustache cup with the gilt "Papa" inscribed, thatSara's home did not meticulously reflect the newer McKinley period, soto speak, of the cut-glass-china closet, curio cabinet, brass bedstead,velour upholstery, and the marbelette Psyche.

  They had furnished newly three years before, the year the businessalmost doubled, Sara and Gussie simultaneously, the two of them poringwith bibliophiles' fervor over Grand Rapids catalogic literature.

  Bravely had Sara, even more so than Gussie, sacrificed her old regime tothe dealer. Only a samovar remained. A red-and-white pressed-glass punchbowl, purchased out of Nicholas's--aged fourteen--pig-bank savings. Anenlarged crayon of her twins from a baby picture. A patent rocker whichshe kept in the kitchen. (It fitted her so for the attitude of peeling.)Two bisque plaques, with embossed angels. Another chair capable ofmetamorphosis into a ladder. And Mosher's cup.

  From this Mosher drank with gusto. His mustache, to Sara so thrillinglyAmerican, without its complement of beard, could flare so above therelishing sounds of drinking. It flared now and Mosher would share noneof her concern.

  "You got two talents, Sara. First, for being my wife; and second, forwasting worry like it don't cost you nothing in health or trips toCold Springs in the Catskills for the baths. Like it says in Nicky'sShakespeare, a boy who don't sow his wild oats when he's young will someday do 'em under another name that don't smell so sweet."

  "I--It ain't like I can talk over Nicky with you, Mosher, like anotherwoman could with her husband. Either you give him right or right awayyou get so mad you make it worse with him than better."

  "Now, Sara--"

  "But only this morning that Mrs. Lessauer I meet sometimes at Epstein'sfish store--you know the rich sausage-casings Lessauers--she says to methis morning, she says with her sweetness full of such a meanness, likeit was knives in me--'Me and my son and daughter-in-law was coming outof a movie last night and we saw your son getting into a taxicab withsuch a blonde in a red hat!' The way she said it, Mosher, like a catlicking its whiskers--'such a blonde in a red hat'!"

  "I wish I had one dollar in my pocket for every blond hat with red hairher Felix had before he married."

  "But it's the second time this week I hear it, Mosher. The samedescription of such a--a nix in a red hat. Once in a cabaret show Gussiesays she heard it from a neighbor, and now in and out from taxicabs withher. Four times this week he's not been home, Mosher. I can't help it,I--I get crazy with worry."

  A sudden, almost a simian old-age seemed to roll, like a cloud that canthunder, across Sara's face. She was suddenly very small and no littleold. Veins came out on her brow and upon the backs of her hands, andMosher, depressed with an unconscious awareness, was looking into thetired, cold, watery eyes of the fleet woman who had been his.

  "Why, Sara!" he said, and came around the table to let her head wilt inunwonted fashion against his coat. "Mamma!"

  "I'm tired, Mosher." She said her words almost like a gush of warm bloodfrom the wound of her mouth. "I'm tired from keeping up and holding in.I have felt so sure for these last four years that we have saved himfrom his--his wildness--and now, to begin all over again, I--I 'ain'tgot the fight left in me, Mosher."

  "You don't have to have any fight in you, Mamma. 'Ain't you got ahusband and a son to fight for you?"

  "Sometimes I think, except for the piece of my heart I left lying backthere, that there are worse agonies than even massacres. I've struggledso that he should be good and great, Mosher, and now, after four yearsalready thinking I've won--maybe, after all, I haven't."

  "Why, Sara! Why, Mamma! Shame! I never saw you like this before. Youain't getting sick for another trip to the Catskills, are you? Maybe youneed some baths--"

  "Sulphur water don't cure heart sickness."

  "Heart sickness, nonsense! You know I don't always take sides withNicky, Mamma. I don't say he hasn't been a hard boy to raise. But a man,Mamma, is a man! I wouldn't think much of him if he wasn't. You 'ain'tgot him to your apron string in short pants any more. Whatever troubleswe've had with him, women haven't been one of them. Shame, Mamma, thefirst time your grown-up son of a man cuts up maybe a little nonsensewith the girls! Shame!"

  "Girls! No one would want more than me he should settle himself down toa fine, self-respecting citizen with a fine, sweet girl like Ad--"

  "Believe me, and I ain't ashamed to say it, I wasn't an angel, neither,every minute before I was married."

  "My husband brags to me about his indiscretioncies."

  "_Na, na_, Mamma, right away when I open my mouth you make out acase against me. I only say it to show you how a mother maybe don'tunderstand as well as
a father how natural a few wild oats can be."

  "L-Leo didn't have 'em."

  "Leo ain't a genius. He's just a good boy."

  "I--I worry so!"

  "Sara, I ask you, wouldn't I worry, too, if there was a reason? Godforbid if his nonsense should lead to really something serious, thenit's time to worry."

  Sara Turkletaub dried her eyes, but it was as if the shadow ofcrucifixion had moved forward in them.

  "If just once, Mosher, Nicky would make it easy for me, like Leo did forGussie. When Leo's time comes he marries a fine girl like Irma Berkowitzfrom a fine family, and has fine children, without Gussie has to cry hereyes out first maybe he's in company that--that--"

  "I don't say, Sara, we didn't have our hard times with your boy. But wegot results enough that we shouldn't complain. Maybe you're right. Witha boy like Leo, a regular good business head who comes into the firmwith us, it ain't been such a strain for Gussie and Aaron as for us witha genius. But neither have they got the smart son, the lawyer of thefamily, for theirs. _We_ got a temperament in ours, Sara. Ain't thatsomething to be proud of?"

  She laid her cheek to his lapel, the freshet of her tears past staying.

  "I--I know it, Mosher. It ain't--often I give way like this."

  "We got such results as we can be proud of, Sara. A genius of a lawyerson on his way to the bench. Mark my word if I ain't right, on his wayto the bench!"

  "Yes, yes, Mosher."

  "Well then, Sara, I ask you, is it nice to--"

  "I know it, Papa. I ought to be ashamed. Instead of me fighting you togo easy with the boy, this time it's you fighting me. If only he--he wasthe kind of boy I could talk this out with, it wouldn't worry me so.When it comes to--to a girl--it's so different. It's just that I'mtired, Mosher. If anything was to go wrong after all these years ofstruggling for him--alone--"

  "Alone! Alone! Why, Sara! Shame! Time after time for punishing him I wasa sick man!"

  "That's it! That's why so much of it was alone. I don't know why Ishould say it all to-night after--after so many years of holding in."

  "Say what?"

  "You meant well, God knows a father never meant better, but it wasn'tthe way to handle our boy's nature with punishments, and a quick temperlike yours. Your way was wrong, Mosher, and I knew it. That's why somuch of it was--alone--so much that I had to contend with I was afraidto tell you, for fear--for fear--"

  "Now, now, Mamma, is that the way to cry your eyes out about nothing? Idon't say I'm not sometimes hasty--"

  "Time and time again--keeping it in from you--after the Chinese laundrythat night after you--you whipped him so--you never knew the months ofnights with him afterward--when I found out he liked that--stuff! Mealone with him--"

  "Sara, is now time to rake up such ten-year-old nonsense!"

  "It's all coming out in me now, Mosher. The strain. You never knew. Thattime you had to send me to the Catskills for the baths. You thoughtit was rheumatism. I knew what was the matter with me. Worry. Thenights--Mosher. He liked it. I found it hid away in the toes of hisgymnasium shoes and in the mouth to his bugle. He--liked that stuff,Mosher. You didn't know that, did you?"

  "Liked what?"

  "It. The--the stuff from the Chinese laundry. Even after the JuvenileCourt, when you thought it was all over after the whipping that night.He'd snuff it up. I found him twice on his bed after school. Alldruggy-like--half sleeping and half laughing. The gang at school he wasin with--learned him--"

  "You mean--?"

  "It ain't so easy to undo with a day in Juvenile Court such a habit likethat. You thought the court was the finish. My fight just began then!"

  "Why, Sara!"

  "You remember the time he broke his kneecap and how I fighted thedoctors against the hypodermic and you got so mad because I wouldn't lethim have it to ease the pain. I knew why it was better he should sufferthan have it. _I knew!_ It was a long fight I had with him alone,Mosher. He liked that--stuff."

  "That--don't--seem possible."

  "And that wasn't the only lead-pipe case that time, neither, Mosher.Twice I had to lay out of my own pocket so you wouldn't know, and talkto him 'til sometimes I thought I didn't have any more tears leftinside of me. Between you and your business worries that year of thegarment-workers' strike--and our boy--I--after all that I haven't gotthe strength left. Now that he's come out of it big, I can't begin overagain. I haven't got what he would call the second wind for it. Ifanything should keep him now from going straight ahead to make him countas a citizen, I wouldn't have the strength left to fight it, Mosher.Wouldn't!"

  And so Sara Turkletaub lay back with the ripple writing of stormy hightides crawling out in wrinkles all over her face and her head, that hehad never seen low, wilting there against his breast.

  He could not be done with soothing her, his own face suddenly aspuckered as an old shoe, his chin like the toe curling up.

  "Mamma, Mamma, I didn't know! God knows I never dreamt--"

  "I know you didn't, Mosher. I ain't mad. I'm only tired. I 'ain't gotthe struggle left in me. This feeling won't last in me, I'll be allright, but I'm tired, Mosher--so tired."

  "My poor Sara!"

  "And frightened. Such a blonde in a red hat. Cabarets. Taxicabs. Nightafter night. Mosher, hold me. I'm frightened."

  Cheek to cheek in their dining room of too-carved oak, twin shadow-boxedpaintings of Fruit and Fish, the cut-glass punch bowl with the hooked-oncups, the cotton palm, casually rigid velour drapes, the elusive floorbell, they huddled, these two, whose eyes were branded with the scarsof what they had looked upon, and a slow, a vast anger began to rise inMosher, as if the blood in his throat were choking him, and a surge ofit, almost purple, rose out of his collar and stained his face.

  "Loafer! Low-life! No-'count! His whole body ain't worth so much as yourlittle finger. I'll learn him to be a worry to you with this all-nightbusiness. By God! I'll learn my loafer of a son to--"

  On the pistol shot of that, Sara's body jumped out of its rigidity, allher faculties coiled to spring.

  "He isn't! You know he isn't! 'Loafer'! Shame on you! Whatever else heis, he's not a loafer. Boys will be boys--you say so yourself. 'Loafer'!You should know once what some parents go through with real _loafers_for sons--"

  "No child what brings you such worry is anything else than a loafer!"

  "And I say 'no'! The minute I so much as give you a finger in findingfault with that boy, right away you take a hand!"

  "I'll break his--"

  "You don't know yet a joke when you hear one. I wanted to get you mad! Iget a little tired and I try to make myself funny."

  "There wasn't no funniness in the way your eyes looked when you--"

  "I tell you I didn't mean one word. No matter what uneasiness that childhas brought me, always he has given me more in happiness. Twice more.That's what he's been. Twice of everything to make up for--for onlybeing half of my twins."

  "Then what the devil is--"

  "I don't envy Gussie her Leo and his steady ways. Didn't you sayyourself for a boy like ours you got to pay with a little uneasiness?"

  "Not when that little uneasiness is enough to make his mother sick."

  "Sick! If I felt any better I'd be ashamed of having so much health! Ifyou get mad with him and try to ask him where he stays every night isall that can cause me worry. It's natural a handsome boy like oursshould sow what they call his wild oat. With such a matzos face likepoor Leo, from where he broke his nose, I guess it ain't so easy for himto have his wild oat. Promise me, Mosher, you won't ask one question orget mad at him. His mother knows how to handle her boy so he don't evenknow he's handled."

  "I'll handle him--"

  "See now, just look at yourself once in the glass with your eyes full ofred. That's why I can't tell you nothing. Right away you fly to pieces.I say again, you don't know how to handle your son. Promise me you won'tsay nothing to him or let on, Mosher. Promise me."

  "That's the way with you women. You get a man crazy and then--"


  "I tell you it's just my nonsense."

  "If I get mad you're mad, and if I don't get mad you're mad! Go do mesomething to help me solve such a riddle like you."

  "It's because me and his aunt Gussie are a pair of matchmaking oldwomen. That the two cousins should marry the two sisters, Irma and Ada,we got it fixed between us! Just as if because we want it that way it'sgot to happen that way!"

  "A pair of geeses, the two of you!"

  "I wouldn't let on to Gussie, but Ada, the single one, has got Leo'sIrma beat for looks. Such a complexion! And the way she comes over tosew with me afternoons! A young girl like that! An old woman like me!You see, Mosher? See?"

  "See, she asks me. What good does it do me if I see or I don't see whenhis mother gets her mind made up?"

  "But does Nicky so much as look at her? That night at Leo's birthday Iwas ashamed the way he right away had an engagement after supper, whenshe sat next to him and all through the meal gave him the white meat offher own plate. Why, the flowered chiffon dress that girl had on cost tendollars a yard if it cost a cent. Did Nicky so much as look at her? No."

  "Too many birthdays in this family."

  "I notice you eat them when they are set down in front of you!"

  "Eat what?"

  "The birthdays."

  "Ha! That's fine! A new dish. Boiled birthdays with horseradish sauce."

  "All right, then, the birthday _parties_. Don't be so exactly with me.Many a turn in his grave you yourself have given the man who made thedictionary. I got other worries than language. If I knew where heis--to-night--"

  Rather contentedly, while Sara cleared and tidied, Mosher snapped openhis evening paper, drawing his spectacles down from the perch of hisforehead.

  "You women," he said, breathing out with the male's easy surcease fromresponsibility--"you women and your worries. If you 'ain't got 'em, youmake 'em."

  "Heigh-ho!" sighed out Sara, presently, having finished, and divinginto her open workbasket for the placidity her flying needle could socunningly simulate. "Heigh-ho!"

  But inside her heart was beating over and over again to itself, rapidly:

  "If--only-I--knew--where--he--is--to--night--if--only--I--knew--where--he--is--to--night."

  II

  This is where he was:

  In the Forty-fifth-Street flat of Miss Josie Drew, known at varioustimes and places as Hattie Moore, Hazel Derland, Mrs. Hazel, and--Butwhat does it matter.

  At this writing it was Josie Drew of whom more is to be said of thanfor.

  Yet pause to consider the curve of her clay. Josie had not molded hernose. Its upward fling was like the brush of a perfumed feather dusterto the senses. Nor her mouth. It had bloomed seductively, long beforeher lip stick rushed to its aid and abetment, into a cherry at thebottom of a glass for which men quaffed deeply. There was somethingrather terrifyingly inevitable about her. Just as the tide is playthingof the stars, so must the naughty turn to Josie's ankle have beencomplement to the naughty turn of her mind.

  It is not easy for the woman with a snub nose and lips molded with ahard pencil to bleed the milk of human kindness over the frailties ofthe fruity chalice that contained Miss Drew. She could not know, forinstance, if her own gaze was merely owlish and thin-lashed, thechallenge of eyes that are slightly too long. Miss Drew did. Simplydrooping hers must have stirred her with a none-too-nice sense ofherself, like the swell of his biceps can bare the teeth of a gladiator.

  That had been the Josie Drew of eighteen.

  At thirty she penciled the droop to her eyebrows a bit and had a notalways successful trick of powdering out the lurking caves under hereyes. There was even a scar, a peculiar pocking of little shotted spotsas if glass had ground in, souvenir of one out of dozens of such nightsof orgies, this particular one the result of some unmentionable jealousyshe must have coaxed to the surface.

  She wore it plastered over with curls. It was said that in rage itturned green. But who knows? It was also said that Josie Drew's correctname was Josie Rosalsky. But again who knows? Her past was vivid withthe heat lightning of the sharp storms of men's lives. At nineteen shehad worn in public restaurants a star-sapphire necklace, originallydesigned by a soap magnate for his wife, of these her birthstones.

  At twenty her fourteen-room apartment faced the Park, but was on theground floor because a vice-president of a bank, a black-broadclothlittle pelican of a man, who stumped on a cane and had a pink tin roofto his mouth, disliked elevators.

  At twenty-three and unmentionably enough, a son of a Brazilian coffeeking, inflamed with the deviltry of debauch, had ground a wine tumbleragainst her forehead, inducing the pock marks. At twenty-seven it wasthe fourth vice-president of a Harlem bank. At twenty-nine an interim.Startling to Josie Drew. Terrifying. Lean. For the first time in eightyears her gasoline expenditures amounted to ninety cents a month insteadof from forty to ninety dollars. And then not at the garage, but at thecorner drug store. Cleaning fluid for kicked-out glove and slipper tips.

  The little jangle of chatelaine absurdities which she invariablyaffected--mesh bag, lip stick, memorandum (for the traffic in telephonenumbers), vanity, and cigarette case were gold--filled. There remaineda sapphire necklace, but this one faithfully copied to the wink of thestars and the pearl clasp by the Chemic Jewel Company. Much of theindoor appeal of Miss Drew was still the pink silkiness of her, alittle stiffened from washing and ironing, it is true, but there was aflesh-colored arrangement of intricate drape that was rosily kind toher. Also a vivid yellow one of a later and less expensive period, allheavily slashed in Valenciennes lace. This brought out a bit of viragothrough her induced blondness, but all the same it italicized her, justas the crescent of black court plaster exclaimed at the whiteness of herback.

  She could spend an entire morning fluffing at these things, pressingout, with a baby electric iron and a sleeve board, a crumple of chiffonto new sheerness, getting at spots with cleaning fluid. Under alcoholicduress Josie dropped things. There was a furious stain down theyellow, from a home brew of canned lobster a la Newburg. The stainshe eliminated entirely by cutting out the front panel and wearing itskimpier.

  In these first slanting years, in her furnished flat of upright,mandolin-attachment piano, nude plaster-of-Paris Bacchante holdinga cluster of pink-glass incandescent grapes, divan mountainous withscented pillows, she was about as obvious as a gilt slipper that hasstarted to rub, or a woman's kiss that is beery and leaves a redimprint.

  To Nicholas Turkletaub, whose adolescence had been languid and who hadnever known a woman with a fling, a perfume, or a moue (there had beenonly a common-sense-heeled co-ed of his law-school days and the ratherplump little sister-in-law of Leo's), the dawn of Josie cleft opensomething in his consciousness, releasing maddened perceptions thatstung his eyeballs. He sat in the imitation cheap frailty of herapartment like a young bull with threads of red in his eyeballs, hishead, not unpoetic with its shag of black hair, lowered as if to bash atthe impotence of the thing she aroused in him.

  Also, a curious thing had happened to Josie. Something so jaded inher that she thought it long dead, was stirring sappily, as if withspringtime.

  Maybe it was a resurgence of sense of power after months of terror thatthe years had done for her.

  At any rate, it was something strangely and deeply sweet.

  "Nicky-boy," she said, sitting on the couch with her back against thewall, her legs out horizontally and clapping her rubbed gilt slipperstogether--"Nicky-boy must go home ten o'clock to-night. Josie-girltired."

  Her mouth, like a red paper rose that had been crushed there, was alwaysbunched to baby talk.

  "Come here," he said, and jerked her so that the breath jumped.

  "Won't," she said, and came.

  His male prowess was enormous to him. He could bend her back almostdouble with a kiss, and did. His first kisses that he spent wildly. Hecould have carried her off like Persephone's bull, and wanted to, soswift his mood. His flare for life and for her leaped out like a flame,an
d something precious that had hardly survived sixteen seemed to stirin the early grave of her heart.

  "Oh, Nicky-boy! Nicky-boy!" she said, and he caught that she wasyearning over him.

  "Don't say it in down curves like that. Say it up. Up."

  She didn't get this, but, with the half-fearful tail of her eye forthe clock, let him hold her quiescent, while the relentlessly slidingmoments ticked against her unease.

  "I'm jealous of every hour you lived before I met you."

  "Big-bad-eat-Josie-up-boy!"

  "I want to kiss your eyes until they go in deep--through you--I don'tknow--until they hurt--deep--I--want--to hurt you--"

  "Oh! Oh! Josie scared!"

  "You're like one of those orange Angora kittens. Yellow. Soft. Deep."

  "I Nicky's pussy."

  "I can see myself in your eyes. Shut me up in them."

  "Josie so tired."

  "Of me?"

  "Nicky so--so strong."

  "My poor pussy! I didn't mean--"

  "Nicky-boy, go home like good Nicky."

  "I don't want ever to go home."

  "Go now, Josie says."

  "You mean never."

  "Now!"

  He kissed his "No, No," down against each of her eyelids.

  "You must," she said this time, and pushed him off.

  For a second he sat quite still, the black shine in his eyes seeming togive off diamond points.

  "You're nervous," he said, and jerked her back so that the breath jumpedagain.

  The tail of her glance curved to the gilt clock half hidden behind alitter of used highball glasses, and then, seeing that his quicklysuspicious eye followed hers:

  "No," she said, "not nervous. Just tired--and thirsty."

  He poured her a high drink from a decanter, and held it so that, whileshe sipped, her teeth were magnified through the tumbler, and he thoughtthat adorable and tilted the glass higher against her lips, and when shechoked soothed her with a crush of kisses.

  "You devil," he said, "everything you do maddens me."

  There was a step outside and a scraping noise at the lock. It was onlya vaudeville youth, slender as a girl, who lived on the floor above,feeling unsteadily, and a bit the worse for wear, for the lock that musteventually fit his key.

  But on that scratch into the keyhole, Josie leaped up in terror, so thatNicholas went staggering back against the Bacchante, shattering to afine ring of crystal some of the pink grapes, and on that instant sheclicked out the remaining lights, shoving him, with an unsuspected andcatamount strength, into an adjoining box of a kitchenette.

  There an uncovered bulb burned greasily over a small refrigerator, thatstood on a table and left only the merest slit of walking space. It wasthe none too fastidious kitchen of a none too fastidious woman. A pairof dress shields hung on the improvised clothesline of a bit of twine.A clump of sardines, one end still shaped to the tin, cloyed in its ownoil, crumbily, as if bread had been sopped in, the emptied tin itself,with the top rolled back with a patent key, filled now with old beer.Obviously the remaining contents of a tumbler had been flung in.Cigarette stubs floated. A pasteboard cylindrical box, labeled "SodiumBi-carbonate," had a spoon stuck in it. A rubber glove drooped deadlyover the sink edge.

  On the second that he stood in that smelling fog, probably for no longerthan it took the swinging door to settle, something of sickness rushedover Nicholas. The unaired odors of old foods. Those horrific things onthe line. The oil that had so obviously been sopped up with bread. Theold beer, edged in grease. Something of sickness and a panoramic flashof things absurdly, almost unreasonably irrelevant.

  Snow, somewhere back in his memory. A frozen silence of it that wasclean and thin to the smell. The ridges in the rattan with which hisfather had whipped him the night after the Chinese laundry. The finewhite head of the dean of the law school. His mother baking for Fridaynight in a blue-and-white gingham apron that enveloped her. Redcurls--some one's--somewhere. The string of tiny Oriental pearls thatrose and fell with the little pouter-pigeon swell of a bosom. Prettyperturbation. His cousin's sister-in-law, Ada. A small hole in apink-silk stocking, peeping like a little rising sun above the heel of arubbed gilt slipper. Josie's slipper.

  Something seemed suddenly to rise in Nicholas, with the quickcapillarity of water boiling over.

  The old familiar star-spangled red over which Sara had time after timelaid sedative hand against his seeing, sprang out. The pit of hispassion was bottomless, into which he was tumbling with the icy laughterof breaking glass.

  Then he struck out against the swinging door so that it ripped outwardwith a sough of stale air, striking Josie Drew, as she approached itfrom the room side, so violently that her teeth bit down into her lipsand the tattling blood began to flow.

  "Nicky! It's a mistake. I thought--my sister--It got so late--youwouldn't go. Go now! The key--turning--Nervous--silly--mistake. Go--"

  He laughed, something exhilarant in his boiling over, and even in hersudden terror of him she looked at his bare teeth and felt the unnicebeauty of the storm.

  "Nicky," she half cried, "don't be--foolish! I--"

  And then he struck her across the lip so that her teeth cut in again.

  "There is some one coming here to-night," he said, with his smile stillvery white.

  She sat on the couch, trying to bravado down her trembling.

  "And what if there is? He'll beat you up for this! You fool! I've triedto explain a dozen times. You know, or if you don't you ought to, thatthere's a--friend. A traveling salesman. Automobile accessories. Longtrips, but good money. Good money. And here you walk in a few weeks agoand expect to find the way clear! Good boy, you like some one to goahead of you with a snow cleaner, don't you? Yes, there's some one duein here off his trip to-night. What's the use trying to tell Nicky-boywith his hot head. He's got a hot head, too. Go, and let me clear theway for you, Nicky. For good if you say the word. But I have to knowwhere I'm at. Every girl does if she wants to keep her body and soultogether. You don't let me know where I stand. You know you've got mearound your little finger for the saying, but you don't say. Only gonow, Nicky-boy. For God's sake, it's five minutes to eleven and he's duein on that ten-forty-five. Nicky-boy, go, and come back to me at sixto-morrow night. I'll have the way clear then, for good. Quit blinkingat me like that, Nicky. You scare me! Quit! When you come back to-morrowevening there won't be any more going home for Josie's Nicky-boy.Nicky, go now. He's hotheaded, too. Quit blinking, Nicky--for God'ssake--Nicky--"

  It was then Nicholas bent back her head as he did when he kissed herthere on the swan's arch to her neck, only this time his palm wasagainst her forehead and his other between her shoulder blades.

  "I could kill you," he said, and laughed with his teeth. "I could bendback your neck until it breaks."

  "Ni--i--Nic--ky--"

  "And I want to," he said through the star-spangled red. "I want you tocrack when I twist. I'm going to twist--twist--"

  And he did, shoving back her hair with his palm, and suddenly bared,almost like a grimace, up at him, was the glass-shotted spot wherethe wine tumbler had ground in, greenish now, like the flanges of hernostrils.

  Somewhere--down a dear brow was a singed spot like that--singed with theflame of pain--

  "Nicky, for God's sake--you're--you're spraining my neck! Let go! Nicky.God! if you hadn't let go just when you did. You had me croaking.Nicky-boy--kiss me now and go! Go! To-morrow at six--clear foryou--always--only go--please, boy--my terrible--my wonderful. To-morrowat six."

  Somehow he was walking home, the burn of her lips still against his,loathsome and gorgeous to his desires. He wanted to tear her out by theroots from his consciousness. To be rollickingly, cleanly free of her.His teeth shone against the darkness as he walked, drenched to the skinof his perspiration and one side of his collar loose, the buttonholeslit.

  Rollickingly free of her and yet how devilishly his shoes could clat onthe sidewalk.

  To-morrow at six. To-morrow at s
ix. To-morrow at six.

  * * * * *

  It was some time after midnight when he let himself into the uptownapartment. He thought he heard his mother, trying to be swift, paddingdown the hallway as if she had been waiting near the door. That wouldhave angered him.

  The first of these nights, only four weeks before (it seemed years),he had come in hotly about four o'clock and gone to bed. About five hethought he heard sounds, almost like the scratch of a little dog athis door. He sprang up and flung it open. The flash of his mother'sgray-flannelette wrapper turned a corner of the hall. She must havebeen crying out there and wanting him to need her. None the less it hadangered him. These were men's affairs.

  But in his room to-night the light burned placidly on the little tablenext to the bed, a glass of milk on a plate beside it. The bed wasturned back, snowy sheets forming a cool envelope for him to slipin between. The room lay sedatively in shadow. A man's room. Books,uncurving furniture, photographs of his parents taken on theirtwenty-fifth anniversary standing on the chiffonier in a double leatherframe that opened like a book. Face down on the reading table beside theglass of milk, quite as he must have left it the night before, exceptwhere Sara had lifted it to dust under, a copy of Bishop's _New CriminalLaw_, already a prognosis, as it were, of that branch of the law he wasultimately and brilliantly to bend to fuller justice.

  Finally, toward morning Nicholas slept, and at ten o'clock of arain-swept Sunday forenoon awoke, as he knew he must, to the grip of ablinding headache, so called for want of a better noun to interpret thekind of agony which, starting somewhere around his eyes, could prickeach nerve of his body into a little flame, as if countless matches hadbeen struck.

  As a youngster these attacks had not been infrequent, usually after afit of crying. The first, in fact, had followed the burning of the cat;a duet of twin spasms then, howled into Sara's apron, And once after hehad fished an exhausted comrade out of an ice hole in Bronx Park. Theyhad followed the lead-pipe affairs and the Chinese-laundry episode withdreadful inevitability. But it had been five years since the last--thenight his mother had fainted with terror at what she had found concealedin the toes of his gymnasium shoes.

  Incredible that into his manhood should come the waving specter of thoseearly passions.

  At eleven o'clock, after she heard him up and moving about, his mothercarried him his kiss and his coffee, steaming black, the way he likedit. She had wanted to bring him an egg--in fact, had prepared one, tojust his liking of two minutes and thirty seconds--but had thoughtbetter of it, and wisely, because he drank the coffee at a quick gulpand set down the cup with his mouth wry and his eyes squeezed tight.From the taste of it he remembered horridly the litter of tall glassesbeside the gilt clock.

  With all her senses taut not to fuss around him with little jerks andpullings, Sara jerked and pulled. Too well she knew that furrow betweenhis eyes and wanted unspeakably to tuck him back into bed, lower theshades, and prepare him a vile mixture good for exactly everything thatdid not ail him. But Sara could be wise even with her son. So insteadshe flung up the shade, letting him wince at the clatter, dragged offthe bedclothes into a tremendous heap on the chair, beat up the pillows,and turned the mattress with a single-handed flop.

  "The Sunday-morning papers are in the dining room, son."

  "Uhm!"

  He was standing in his dressing gown at the rain-lashed window,strumming. Lean, long, and, to Sara, godlike, with the thick shock ofhis straight hair still wet from the shower.

  "Mrs. Berkowitz telephoned already this morning with such a grandcompliment for you, son. Her brother-in-law, Judge Rosen, says you'rethe brains of your firm even if you are only the junior partner yet, andyour way looks straight ahead for big things."

  "Uhm! Who's talking out there so incessantly, mother?"

  "That's your uncle Aaron. He came over for Sunday-morning breakfast withyour father. You should see the way he tracked up my hall with his wetshoes. I'm sending him right back home with your father. They shouldclutter up your aunt Gussie's house with their pinochle and ashes. I had'em last Sunday. She don't need to let herself off so easy every week.It's enough if I ask them all over here for supper to-night. Not?"

  "Don't count on me, dear. I won't be home for supper."

  There was a tom-tom to the silence against her beating ear drums.

  "All right, son," she said, pulling her lips until they smiled at him,"with Leo and Irma that'll only make six of us, then."

  He kissed her, but so tiredly that again it was almost her irresistiblewoman's impulse to drag down that fiercely black head to the beatingwidth of her bosom and plead from him drop by drop some of the bitterwelling of pain she could see in his eyes.

  "Nicky," she started to cry, and then, at his straightening back fromher, "come out in the dining room after I pack off the men. I got mywork to do. That nix of a house girl left last night. Such sass, too!I'm better off doing my work alone."

  Sara, poor dear, could not keep a servant, and, except for theinstigation of her husband and son, preferred not to. Cooks rebelledat the exactitude of her household and her disputative reign of thekitchen.

  "I'll be out presently, mother," he said, and flung himself down in theleather Morris chair, lighting his pipe and ostensibly settling down tothe open-faced volume of _Criminal Law_.

  Sara straightened a straight chair. She knew, almost as horridly asif she had looked in on it, the mucky thing that was happening; theintuitive sixth sense of her hovered over him with great wings thatwanted to spread. Josie Drew was no surmise with her. The blond head andthe red hat were tatooed in pain on her heart and she trembled in a bathof fear, and, trembling, smiled and went out.

  Sitting there while the morning ticked on, head thrown back, eyesclosed, and all the little darting nerves at him, the dawn of NicholasTurkletaub's repugnance was all for self. The unfrowsy room, and himselffresh from his own fresh sheets. His mother's eyes with that clean-skyquality in them. The affectionate wrangling of those two decent voicesfrom the dining room. Books! His books, that he loved. His tastiestdream of mother, with immensity and grandeur in her eyes, listeningfrom a privileged first-row bench to the supreme quality of his mercy._Judge_--Turkletaub!

  But tastily, too, and undeniably against his lips, throughout theseconjurings, lay the last crushy kiss of Josie Drew. That swany arch toher neck as he bent it back. He had kissed her there. Countlessly.

  He tried to dwell on his aversions for her. She had once used anexpletive in his presence that had sickened him, and, noting its effect,she had not reiterated. The unfastidious brunette roots to her lighthair. That sink with the grease-rimmed old beer! But then: her eyeswhere the brows slid down to make them heavy-lidded. That bit of bluevein in the crotch of her elbow. That swany arch.

  Back somewhere, as the tidy morning wore in, the tranced, the maddeningrepetition began to tick itself through:

  "Six o'clock. Six o'clock."

  He rushed out into the hallway and across to the parlor pinkly lit withvelours, even through the rainy day, and so inflexibly calm. Sara mighthave measured the distance between the chairs, so regimental theystood. The pink-velour curlicue divan with the two pink, gold-tasseledcushions, carelessly exact. The onyx-topped table with the pink-velourdrape, also gold-tasseled. The pair of equidistant and immaculate chinacuspidors, rose-wreathed. The smell of Sunday.

  "Nicky, that you?"

  It was his mother, from the dining room.

  "Yes, mother," and sauntered in.

  There were two women sitting at the round table, shelling nuts. One ofthem his mother, the other Miss Ada Berkowitz, who jumped up, spillinghulls.

  Nicholas, in the velveteen dressing gown with the collar turned up,started to back out, Mrs. Turkletaub spoiling that.

  "You can come in, Nicky. Ada'll excuse you. I guess she's seen a man inhis dressing gown before; the magazine advertisements are full withthem in worse and in less. And on Sunday with a headache from all weekworking so hard,
a girl can forgive. He shouldn't think with his head somuch, I always tell him, Ada."

  "I didn't know he was here," said Miss Berkowitz, already thinking interms of what she might have worn.

  "I telephoned over for Ada, Nicky. They got an automobile and she don'tneed to get her feet wet to come over to a lonesome old woman on arainy Sunday, to spend the day and learn me how to make those deliciousstuffed dates like she fixed for her mother's card party last week. Drawup a chair, Nicky, and help."

  She was casual, she was matter-of-fact, she was bent on the businessof nut cracking. They crashed softly, never so much as bruised by hercarefully even pressure.

  "Thanks," said Nicholas, and sat down, not caring to, but with goodenough grace. He wanted his coat, somehow, and fell to strumming thetable top.

  "Don't, Nicky; you make me nervous."

  "Here," said Miss Berkowitz, and gave him a cracker and a handful ofnuts. The little crashings resumed.

  Ada had very fair skin against dark hair, slightly too inclined to curl.There was quite a creamy depth to her--a wee pinch could raise a bruise.The kind of whiteness hers that challenged the string of tiny Orientalpearls she wore at her throat. Her healthily pink cheeks and her littleround bosom were plump, and across the back of each of her hands werefour dimples that flashed in and out as she bore down on the cracker.She was as clear as a mountain stream.

  "A trifle too plumpy," he thought, but just the same wished he had wethis military brushes.

  "Ada has just been telling me, Nicky, about her ambition to be aninterior decorator for the insides of houses. I think it is grandthe way some girls that are used to the best of everything preparethemselves for, God forbid, they should ever have to make their ownlivings. I give them credit for it. Tell Nicky, Ada, about the drawingyou did last week that your teacher showed to the class."

  "Oh," said Ada, blushing softly, "Mr. Turkletaub isn't interested inthat."

  "Yes, I am," said Nicholas, politely, eating one of the meats.

  "You mean the Tudor dining room--"

  No, no! You know, the blue-and-white one you said you liked best ofall."

  "It was a nursery," began Ada, softly. "Just one of those blue-and-whitedarlingnesses for somebody's little darling."

  "For somebody's little darling," repeated Mrs. Turkletaub, silently. Shehad the habit, when moved, of mouthing people's words after them.

  "My idea was--Oh, it's so silly to be telling it again, Mrs.Turkletaub!"

  "Silly! I think it's grand that a girl brought up to the best shouldwant to make something of herself. Don't you, Nick?"

  "H-m-m!"

  "Well, my little idea was white walls with little Delft-blue bordersof waddling duckies; white dotted Swiss curtains in the brace of sunnysouthern-exposure windows, with little Delft-blue borders of morewaddling duckies; and dear little nursery rhymes painted in blue on theheadboard to keep baby's dreams sweet."

  "--baby's dreams sweet! I ask you, is that cute, Nick? Baby's dreams sheeven interior decorates."

  "My--instructor liked that idea, too. He gave me 'A' on the drawing."

  "He should have given you the whole alphabet. And tell him about thechairs, Ada. Such originality."

  "Oh, Mrs. Turkletaub, that was just a--a little--idea--"

  "The modesty of her! Believe me, if it was mine, I'd call it a big one.Tell him."

  "Mummie and daddie chairs I call them."

  Sara (mouthing): "Mummie and daddie--"

  "Two white-enamel chairs to stand on either side of the crib so whenmummie and daddie run up in their evening clothes to kiss baby goodnight--Oh, I just mean two pretty white chairs, one for mummie and onefor daddie." Little crash.

  "I ask you, Nicky, is that poetical? 'So when mummie and daddie run upto kiss baby good night.' I remember once in Russia, Nicky, all theevening clothes we had was our nightgowns, but when you and your littletwin brother were two and a half years old, one night I--"

  "Mrs. Turkletaub, did you have twins?"

  "Did I have twins, Nicky, she asks me. She didn't know you were twins.A red one I had, as red as my black one is black. You see my Nicky howblack and mad-looking he is even when he's glad; well, just so--"

  "Now, mother!"

  "Just so beautiful and fierce and red was my other beautiful baby. Youdidn't know, Ada, that a piece of my heart, the red of my blood, I leftlying out there. Nicky--she didn't know--"

  She could be so blanched and so stricken when the saga of her motherhoodcame out in her eyes, the pallor of her face jutting out her featureslike lonely landmarks on waste land, that her husband and her son hadlearned how to dread for her and spare her.

  "Now, mother!" said Nicholas, and rose to stand behind her chair,holding her poor, quavering chin in the cup of his hand. "Come, onerainy Sunday is enough. Let's not have an indoor as well as an outdoorstorm. Come along. Didn't I hear Miss Ada play the piano one eveningover at Leo's? Up-see-la! Who said you weren't my favorite dancingpartner?" and waltzed her, half dragging back, toward the parlor. "Come,some music!"

  There were the usual demurrings from Ada, rather prettily pink, and Mrs.Turkletaub, with the threat of sobs swallowed, opening the upright pianoto dust the dustless keyboard with her apron, and Nicholas, his saggingpipe quickly supplied with one of the rose-twined cuspidors forash receiver, hunched down in the pink-velour armchair of enormousupholstered hips.

  The "Turkish Patrol" was what Ada played, and then, "Who Is Sylvia?" andsang it, as frailly as a bird.

  At one o'clock there was dinner, that immemorial Sunday meal of roastchicken with its supplicating legs up off the platter; dressing to begouged out; sweet potatoes in amber icing; a master stroke of Mrs.Turkletaub's called "_matzos klose_," balls of unleavened bread,sizzling, even as she served them, in a hot butter bath and light-brownonions; a stuffed goose neck, bursting of flavor; cheese pie twice thedepth of the fork that cut in; coffee in large cups. More crackingof nuts, interspersed with raisins. Ada, cunningly enveloped in amuch-too-large apron, helping Mrs. Turkletaub to clear it all away.

  Smoking there in his chair beside the dining-room window, rain theunrelenting threnody of the day, Nicholas, fed, closed his eyes to therhythm of their comings and goings through the swinging door that led tothe kitchen. Comings--and--goings--his mother who rustled so cleanly ofstarch--Ada--clear--yes, that was it--clear as a mountain stream. Theirsmall laughters--comings--goings--

  It was almost dusk when he awoke, the pink-shaded piano lamp alreadylighted in the parlor beyond, the window shade at his side drawn and anAfghan across his knees. It was snug there in the rosied dusk. The womenwere in the kitchen yet, or was it again? Again, he supposed, lookingat his watch. He had slept three hours. Presently he rose and saunteredout. There was coffee fragrance on the air of the large white kitchen,his mother hunched to the attitude of wielding a can opener, and at thesnowy oilclothed table, Ada, slicing creamy slabs off the end of a cubeof Swiss cheese.

  "Sleepyhead," she greeted, holding up a sliver for him to nibble.

  And his mother: "That was a good rest for you, son? You feel better?"

  "Immense," he said, hunching his shoulders and stretching his hands downinto his pockets in a yawny well-being.

  "I wish, then, you would put another leaf in the table for me. There'sfour besides your father coming over from Aunt Gussie's. I just wish youwould look at Ada. For a girl that don't have to turn her hand at home,with two servants, and a laundress every other week, just look how handyshe is with everything she touches."

  The litter of Sunday-night supper, awaiting its transfer to thedining-room table, lay spread in the faithful geometry of the cold,hebdomadal repast. A platter of ruddy sliced tongue; one of noondayremnants of cold chicken; ovals of liverwurst; a mound of potato saladcrisscrossed with strips of pimento; a china basket of the stuffeddates, all kissed with sugar; half of an enormously thick cheese cake;two uncovered apple pies; a stack of delicious raisin-stuffed curlicues,known as _"schneken,"_ pickles with a fern of dill across them
(Ada'stouch, the dill); a dish of stuffed eggs with a toothpick stuck in eachhalf (also Ada's touch, the toothpicks).

  She moved rather pussily, he thought, sometimes her fair cheeksquivering slightly to the vibration of her walk, as if they had jelled.And, too, there was something rather snug and plump in the way herlittle hands with the eight dimples moved about things, laying the slabsof Swiss cheese, unstacking cups.

  "No, only seven cups, Ada. Nicky--ain't going to be home to supper."

  "Oh," she said, "excuse me! I--I--thought--silly--" and looked up at himto deny that it mattered.

  "Isn't that what you said this morning, Nicky?" Poor Sara, she almostfailed herself then because her voice ended in quite a dry click in herthroat.

  He stood watching the resumed unstacking of the cups, each with itscrisp little grate against its neighbor.

  "One," said Ada, "two-three-four-five-six--seven!"

  He looked very long and lean and his darkly nervous self, except that hedilly-dallied on his heels like a much-too-tall boy not wanting to lookfoolish.

  "If Miss Ada will provide another cup and saucer, I think I'll stayhome."

  "As you will," said Sara, disappearing into the dining room with themound of salad and the basket of sugar-kissed dates.

  She put them down rather hastily when she got there, because, sillilyenough, she thought, for the merest instant, she was going to faint.

  * * * * *

  The week that Judge Turkletaub tried his first case in Court of GeneralSessions--a murder case, toward which his criminal-law predilectionseemed so inevitably to lead him, his third child, a little daughterwith lovely creamy skin against slightly too curly hair, was lying, justtwo days old, in a blue-and-white nursery with an absurd border of blueducks waddling across the wallpaper.

  Ada, therefore, was not present at this inaugural occasion of his firsttrial. But each of the two weeks of its duration, in a first-row benchof the privileged, so that her gaze was almost on a dotted line with herson's, sat Sara Turkletaub, her hands crossed over her waistline, herbosom filling and waning and the little jet folderols on her bonnetblinking. Tears had their way with her, prideful, joyful at her son'snew estate, sometimes bitterly salt at the life in the naked his eyesmust look upon.

  Once, during the recital of the defendant, Sara almost seemed to bleedher tears, so poignantly terrible they came, scorching her eyes of apain too exquisite to be analyzed, yet too excruciating to be endured.

  III

  Venture back, will you, to the ice and red of that Russian dawn when onthe snow the footsteps that led toward the horizon were the color ofblood, and one woman, who could not keep her eyes ahead, moaned asshe fled, prayed, and even screamed to return to her dead in thebullet-riddled horse trough.

  Toward the noon of that day, a gray one that smelled charred, a fugitivegroup from a distant village that was still burning faltered, as it toofled toward the horizon, in the blackened village of Vodna, because alitter had to be fashioned for an old man whose feet were frozen, and amother, whose baby had perished at her breast, would bury her dead.

  Huddled beside the horse trough, over a poor fire she had kindled ofcharred wood, Hanscha, the midwife (Hanscha, the drunk, they called her,fascinatedly, in the Pale of generations of sober women), spied Mosher'sflung coat and reached for it eagerly, with an eye to tearing it intostrips to wrap her tortured feet.

  A child stirred as she snatched it, wailing lightly, and the instinct ofher calling, the predominant motive, Hanscha with her fumy breath warmedit closer to life and trod the one hundred and eight miles to the portwith it strapped to her back like a pack.

  Thus it was that Schmulka, the red twin, came to America and for thefirst fourteen years of his life slept on a sour pallet in a sourtenement he shared with Hanscha, who with filthy hands brought childreninto the filthy slums.

  Jason, she called him, because that was the name of the ship thatcarried them over. A rolling tub that had been horrible with the criesof cattle and seasickness.

  At fourteen he was fierce and rebellious and down on the Juvenile Courtrecords for truancy, petty trafficking in burned-out opium, vandalism,and gang vagrancy.

  In Hanscha's sober hours he was her despair, and she could be horriblein her anger, once the court reprimanding her and threatening to takeJason from her because of welts found on his back.

  It was in her cups that she was proud of him, and so it behooved Jasonto drink her down to her pallet, which he could, easily.

  He was handsome. His red hair had darkened to the same bronze of thesamovar and he was straight as the drop of an apple from the branch. Hewas reckless. Could turn a pretty penny easily, even dangerously, andspend it with a flip for a pushcart bauble.

  Once he brought home a plaster-of-Paris Venus--the Melos one with thebeautiful arch to her torso of a bow that instant after the arrow hasflown. Hanscha cuffed him for the expenditure, but secretly her oldheart, which since childhood had subjected her to strange, ratherepileptical, sinking spells, and had induced the drinking, warmed herwith pride in his choice.

  Hanscha, with her veiny nose and the dreadful single hair growing out ofa mole on her chin, was not without her erudition. She had read for themidwifery, and back in the old days could recite the bones in the body.

  She let the boy read nights, sometimes even to dropping another coininto the gas meter. Some of the books were the lewd penny ones of theBowery bookstands, old medical treatises, too, purchased three for aquarter and none too nice reading for the growing boy. But there he hadalso found a _Les Miserables_ and _The Confessions of St. Augustine_,which last, if he had known it, was a rare edition, but destined for theash pit.

  Once he read Hanscha a bit of poetry out of a furiously stained oldvolume of verse, so fragrantly beautiful, to him, this bit, that itwound around him like incense, the perfume of it going deeply andstinging his eyes to tears:

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting! The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy. Shades of the prison house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows He sees it in his joy; The youth who daily farther, from the East Must travel, still is Nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

  But Hanscha was drunk and threw some coffee-sopped bread at him, and sohis foray into poetry ended in the slops of disgust.

  A Miss Manners, a society social worker who taught povertysweet forbearance every Tuesday from four until six, wore aforty-eight-diamond bar pin on her under bodice (on Tuesday fromfour until six), and whose gray-suede slippers were ever so slightlyblackened from the tripping trip from front door to motor and back, tookhim up, as the saying is, and for two weeks Jason disported himself onthe shorn lawns of the Manners summer place at Great Neck, where thesurf creamed at the edge of the terrace and the smell of the sea setsomething beating against his spirit as if it had a thousand imprisonedwings.

  There he developed quite a flair for the law books in Judge Manners'sladdered library. Miss Manners found him there, reading, on stomach andelbows, his heels waving in the air.

  Judge Manners talked with him and discovered a legal turn of mind, andthere followed some veranda talk of educating and removing him from hisenvironment. But that very afternoon Jason did a horrid thing. It was nomore than he had seen about him all his life. Not as much. He kissed thelittle pig-tailed daughter of the laundress and pursued her as she ranshrieking to her mother's apron. That was all, but his defiant head andthe laundress's chance knowledge of his Juvenile Court record did forhim.

  At six o'clock that evening, with a five-dollar bill of which he made aspitball for the judge's departing figure down the station platform, hewas shipped back to
Hanscha. Secretly he was relieved. Life was easierin the tenement under the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge. The piece of itsarch which he could see from his window was even beautiful, a curve of astone into some beyond.

  That night he fitted down into the mold his body had worn on the pallet,sighing out satisfaction.

  Environment had won him back.

  On the other hand, in one of those red star-spangled passions ofrebellion against his fetid days, he blindly cut Hanscha with the edgeof a book which struck against her brow as he hurled it. She had beendrunk and had asked of him, at sixteen, because of the handsomenessthat women would easily love in him, to cadet the neighborhood of GrandStreet, using her tenement as his refuge of vice and herself as sharerof spoils.

  The corner of the book cut deeply and pride in her terror of him cameout redly in her bloodshot eyes.

  In the short half term of his high-school training he had already forgedahead of his class when he attained the maturity of working papers. Hewas plunging eagerly--brilliantly, in fact--into a rapid translationof the _Iliad_, fired from the very first line by the epic of thehexametered anger of Achilles, and stubbornly he held out against theworking papers.

  But to Hanscha they came with the inevitability of a summons ratherthan an alternative, and so for a year or two he brought home ratherprecocious wages from his speed in a canning factory. Then he stoked hisway to Sydney and back, returning fiery with new and terrible oaths.

  One night Hanscha died. He found her crumpled up in the huddle of herskirts as if she had dropped in her tracks, which she had, in one of theepileptic heart strictures.

  It was hardly a grief to him. He had seen red with passion at heratrociousness too often, and, somehow, everything that she stood for hadbeen part of the ache in him.

  Yet it is doubtful if, released of her, he found better pasture. Biggerpastures, it is true, in what might be called an upper stratum of thelower East Side, although at no time was he ever to become party to anyof its underground system of crime.

  Inevitably, the challenge of his personality cleared the way for him. Atnineteen he had won and lost the small fortune of thirty-three hundreddollars at a third-class gambling resort where he came in time to becroupier.

  He dressed flashily, wore soft collars, was constantly swapping sportyscarfpins for sportier ones, and was inevitably the center, seldom part,of a group.

  Then one evening at Cooper Union, which stands at the head of theBowery, he enrolled for an evening course in law, but never entered theplace again.

  Because the next night, in a Fourteenth Street cabaret with adjacentgambling rooms, he met one who called herself Winnie Ross, the beginningof a heart-sickening end.

  There is so little about her to relate. She was the color of cloyedhoney when the sugar granules begin to show through. Pale, pimply in afashion the powder could cover up, the sag of her facial muscles showedplainly through, as if weary of doling out to the years their hushmoney, and she was quite obviously down at the heels. Literally so,because when she took them off, her shoes lopped to the sides and couldnot stand for tipsiness.

  She was Jason's first woman. She exhaled a perfume, cheap, tickling,chewed some advertised tablets that scented her kisses, and her throat,when she threw up her head, had an arch and flex to it that weremysteriously graceful.

  Life had been swift and sheer with Winnie. She was very tired and,paradoxically enough, it gave her one of her last remaining charms. Hereyelids were freighted with weariness, were waxy white of it, and theycould flutter to her cheeks, like white butterflies against white, andlay shadows there that maddened Jason.

  She called him Red, although all that remained now were the lightsthrough his browning hair, almost like the flashings of a lantern down arailroad track.

  She pronounced it with a slight trilling of the R, and if it was left inher of half a hundred loves to stir on this swift descent of her lifeline, she did over Jason. Partly because he was his winged-Hermes self,and partly because--because--it was difficult for her rather faggedbrain to rummage back.

  Thus the rest may be told:

  Entering her rooms one morning, a pair of furiously garish ones over amusical-instrument store on the Bowery, he threw himself full length onthe red-cotton divan, arms locked under his always angry-looking head,and watching her, through low lids, trail about the room at the businessof preparing him a surlily demanded cup of coffee. Her none tooimmaculate pink robe trailed a cotton-lace tail irritatingly about herheels, which slip-slopped as she walked, her stockings, without benefitof support, twisting about her ankles.

  She was barometer for his moods, which were elemental, and had learnedto tremble with a queer exaltation of fear before them.

  "My Red-boy blue to-day," she said, stooping as she passed and wantingto kiss him.

  He let his lids drop and would have none of her. They were curiouslyblue, she thought, as if of unutterable fatigue, and then quicklyappraised that his luck was still letting him in for the walloping nowof two weeks' duration. His diamond-and-opal scarfpin was gone, and thegold cuff links replaced with mother-of-pearl.

  She could be violently bitter about money, and when the flame of hispersonality was not there to be reckoned with, ten times a day sheejected him, with a venom that was a psychosis, out of her furthertoleration. Not so far gone was Winnie but that she could count on thetwist of her body and the arch of her throat as revenue getters.

  At first Jason had been lavish, almost with a smack of some of the olddays she had known, spending with the easy prodigality of the gambler inluck. There was a near-seal coat from him in her cupboard of near-silks,and the flimsy wooden walls of her rooms had been freshly papered inroses.

  Then his luck had turned, and to top his sparseness with her this newsullenness which she feared and yet which could be so delicious toher--reminiscently delicious.

  She gave him coffee, and he drank it like medicine out of a thick-lippedcup painted in roses.

  "My Red-boy blue," she reiterated, trying to ingratiate her arms abouthis neck. "Red-boy tells Winnie he won't be back for two whole days andthen brings her surprise party very next day. Red-boy can't stay awayfrom Winnie."

  "Let go."

  "Red-boy bring Winnie nothing? Not little weeny, weeny nothing?" drawinga design down his coat sleeve, her mouth bunched.

  Suddenly he jerked her so that the breath jumped in a warm fan of itagainst her face.

  "You're the only thing I've got in the world, Win. My luck's gone, butI've got you. Tell me I've got you."

  He could be equally intense over which street car to take, and she knewit, but somehow it lessened for her none of the lure of his nervosity,and with her mind recoiling from his pennilessness her body inclined.

  "Tell me, Winnie, that I have you."

  "You know you have," she said, and smiled, with her head back so thather face foreshortened.

  "I'm going far for you Winnie. Gambling is too rotten--and too easy. Iwant to build bridges for you. Practice law. Corner Wall Street."

  This last clicked.

  "Once," she said, lying back, with her pupils enlarging with thefleeting memories she was not always alert enough to clutch--"once--oncewhen I lived around Central Park--a friend of mine--vice-president hewas--Well, never mind, he was my friend--it was nothing for him to turnover a thousand or two a week for me in Wall Street."

  This exaggeration was gross, but it could feed the flame of his passionfor her like oil.

  "I'll work us up and out of this! I've got better stuff in me. I want towind you in pearls--diamonds--sapphires."

  "I had a five-thousand-dollar string once--of star sapphires."

  "Trust me, Winnie. Help me by having confidence in me. I'm glad my luckis welching. It will be lean at first, until I get on my legs. Butit's not too late yet. Win, if only I have some one to stand by me. Tobelieve--to fight with and for me! Get me, girl? Believe in me."

  "Sure. Always play strong with the cops, Red. It's the short cut toready money. Ready money, Re
d. That's what gets you there. Don't askany girl to hang on if it's shy. That's where I spun myself dirt many atime, hanging on after it got shy. Ugh! That's what did for me--hangingon--after it got shy."

  "No. No. You don't understand. For God's sake try to get me, Winnie.Fight up with me. It'll be lean, starting, but I'll finish strong foryou."

  "Don't lean on me. I'm no wailing wall. What's it to me all yourhighfaluting talk. You've been as slab-sided in the pockets as a cat allmonth. Don't have to stand it. I've got friends--spenders--"

  There had been atrocious scenes, based on his jealousies of her, whichsome imp in her would lead her to provoke, notwithstanding that even asshe spoke she regretted, and reached back for the words,

  "I mean--"

  "I know what you mean," he said, quietly, permitting her to lie backagainst him and baring his teeth down at her.

  She actually thought he was smiling.

  "I'm not a dead one by a long shot," she said, kindling with what wasprobably her desire to excite him.

  "No?"

  "No. I can still have the best. The very best. If you want to know it,a political Indian with a car as long as this room, not mentioning anynames, is after me--"

  She still harbored the unfortunate delusion that he was smiling.

  "You thought I was up at Ossining this morning, didn't you?" he asked,lazily for him. He went there occasionally to visit a friend in thestate prison who had once served him well in a gambling raid and was nowdoing a short larceny term there.

  "You said you were--"

  "I _said_ I was. Yes. But I came back unexpectedly, didn't I?"

  "Y-yes, Red?"

  "Look at me!"

  She raised round and ready-to-be-terrified eyes.

  "Murphy was here last night!" he cracked at her,bang-bang-bang-bang-bang, like so many pistol shots.

  "Why, Red--I--You--"

  "Don't lie. Murphy was here last night! I saw him leave this morning asI came in."

  It was hazard, pure and simple. Not even a wild one, because alltoo easily he could kiss down what would be sure to be only herhalf-flattered resentment.

  But there was a cigar stub on the table edge, and certain of heradjustments of the room when he entered had been rather quick. He couldbe like that with her, crazily the slave of who knows what beauty hefound in her; jealous of even an unaccountable inflection in her voice.There had been unmentionable frenzies of elemental anger between themand she feared and exulted in these strange poles of his nature.

  "Murphy was here last night!"

  It had happened, in spite of a caution worthy of a finer finesse thanhers, and suddenly she seemed to realize the quality of her fear for himto whom she was everything and who to her was not all.

  "Don't, Red," she said, all the bars of her pretense down and dodgingfrom his eyes rather than from any move he made toward her. "Don't, Red.Don't!" And began to whimper in the unbeautifulness of fear, becomingstrangely smaller as her pallor mounted.

  He was as terrible and as swarthy and as melodramatic as Othello.

  "Don't, Red," she called still again, and it was as if her voice came tohim from across a bog.

  He was standing with one knee dug into the couch, straining her headback against the wall, his hand on her forehead and the beautifulflexing arch of her neck rising ... swanlike.

  "Watch out!" There was a raw nail in the wall where a picture had hung.Murphy had kept knocking it awry and she had removed it. "Watch out,Red! No-o--no--"

  Through the star-spangled red he glimpsed her once where the hair sweptoff her brow, and for the moment, to his blurred craziness, it was as ifthrough the red her brow was shotted with little scars and pock marksfrom glass, and a hot surge of unaccountable sickness fanned theenormous silence of his rage.

  With or without his knowing it, that raw nail drove slowly home to therear of Winnie's left ear, upward toward the cerebellum as he tilted andtilted, and the convex curve of her neck mounted like a bow stretchedoutward.

  * * * * *

  There was little about Jason's trial to entitle it to more than aback-page paragraph in the dailies. He sat through those days, thatwere crisscrossed with prison bars, much like those drowned figuresencountered by deep-sea divers, which, seated upright in death, arepressed down by the waters of unreality.

  It is doubtful if he spoke a hundred words during the lean, celled weeksof his waiting, and then with a vacuous sort of apathy and solely uponadvice of counsel. Even when he took the stand, undramatically, hisvoice, without even a plating of zest for life, was like some old drumwith the parchment too tired to vibrate.

  Women, however, cried over him and the storm in his eyes and thecuriously downy back of his neck where the last of his youth stillmarked him.

  To Sara, from her place in the first row, on those not infrequentoccasions when his eyes fumbled for hers, he seemed to drown in hergaze--back--somewhere--

  On a Friday at high noon the jury adjourned, the judge charging it witha solemnity that rang up to wise old rafters and down into one woman'sthirsty soul like life-giving waters.

  In part he told the twelve men about to file out, "If there has beenanything in my attitude during the recital of the defendant's story,which has appeared to you to be in the slightest manner prejudiced oneway or another, I charge you to strike such mistaken impressions fromyour minds.

  "I have tried honestly to wash the slate of my mind clean to take downfaithfully the aspects of this case which for two weeks has occupiedthis jury.

  "If you believe the defendant guilty of the heinous crime in question,do not falter in your use of the power with which the law has vestedyou.

  "If, on the other hand and to the best of your judgment, there has beenin the defendant's life extenuating circumstances, er--a limitationof environment, home influence, close not the avenues of your fairjudgment.

  "Did this man in the kind of er--a--frenzy he describes and to whichwitnesses agree he was subject, deliberately strain back the Rosswoman's head until the nail penetrated?

  "If so, remember the law takes knowledge only of self-defense.

  "On the other hand, ask of yourselves well, did the defendant, in thefrenzy which he claims had hold of him when he committed this unusualcrime, know that the nail was there?

  "_Would Winnie Ross have met her death if the nail had not been there?_

  "Gentlemen, in the name of the law, solemnly and with a fear of God inyour hearts, I charge you."

  It was a quick verdict. Three hours and forty minutes.

  "Not guilty."

  In the front row there, with the titillating folderols on her bonnet andher hand at her throat as if she would tear it open for the mystery ofthe pain of the heartbeat in it, Sara Turkletaub heard, and, hearing,swooned into the pit of her pain and her joy.

  Her son, with brackets of fatigue out about his mouth, was standing overher when she opened her eyes, the look of crucifixion close to the frontof them.

  "Mother," he said, pressing her head close to his robes of state andholding a throat-straining quiver under his voice, "I--I shouldn't havelet you stay. It was too--much for you."

  It took her a moment for the mist to clear.

  "I--Son--did somebody strike? Hit? Strange. I--I must have been hurt.Son, am I bleeding?" And looked down, clasping her hand to the bosom ofher decent black-silk basque.

  "Son, I--It was a good verdict, not? I--couldn't have stood it--if--ifit wasn't. I--Something--It was good, not?"

  "Yes, mother, yes."

  "Don't--don't let that boy get away, son. I think--those tempers--I canhelp--him. You see, I know--how to handle--Somehow I--"

  "Yes, mother, only now you must sit quietly--"

  "Promise me, son, you won't let him get away without I see him?"

  "Yes, dear, only please now--a moment--quiet--"

  You see, the judge was very tired, and, looking down at the spot whereher hand still lay at her bosom as if to press down a hurt, the red ofher same obse
ssion shook and shook him.

  Somehow it seemed to him, too, that her dear heart was bleeding.

  THE END

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