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Humoresque

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Humoresque




"Mamma Hat! Honey, you didn't wait up for me?"

Mr. Kessler came forward, goggles pushed up above his cap-visor.

"Well, I'm hanged! What did you think--that I was kidnapping the kid?"

"How--how dared you! It's after two, and--"

Miss Goldstone began then to jump again upon her toes, linking her arm
in his.

"Tell her, Leon! Tell her! Oh, Mamma Hat! Mamma Hat!"

She was suddenly in Mrs. Goldstone's arms, her ardent face burning
through the white wrapper.

Mr. Kessler removed his cap, flinging it upward again and catching it.

"Tell her, Leon!"

"Well, what would you say, Becker, what would you say if I was to come
out here and swipe that little darling there?"

"Oh, Leon--kidder!"

"If--what?"

"I said it!"

"Tell her, Kess; tell it out! Oh, mommie, mommie!"

He leaned forward with his hand on the back of the turbulent head of
curls.

"You little darling, I'm going to put you on my back and carry you off
to New York."

"Oh, mommie," cried Miss Goldstone, flinging back her head so that her
face shone up, "he asked me in Delmar Garden! We're going to live in New
York, darling, and Rockaway in summer. He don't care a rap about the
New York girls compared to me. We're going to Cuba on our honeymoon. I'm
engaged, darling! I got engaged to-night!"

"That's the idea, Twinkle-pinkle. I'd carry you off to-night if I
could!"

"Mommie Hat, ain't you glad?"

"Effie--Effie--"

"Mommie, what is it? What's the matter, darling? What?"

"I--it's just that I got cold, honey, sitting here waiting--the surprise
and all. Run, honey, and get me a drink. Crack some ice, dearie, and
then run up-stairs in the third floor back and see if there's some
brandy up there. Be sure to look for--the brandy. I--I'll be all right."

"My poor, darling, cold mommie!"

She was off on the slim, quick feet, the screen door slamming and
vibrating.

Then Mrs. Goldstone sprang up.

"You wouldn't dare! Such a baby--you wouldn't dare!"

"Dare what?"

"You can't have the child! You can't!"

"What do you mean?"

"What do I mean?"

He advanced a step, his voice and expression lifted in incredulity.

"Say, look here, Becker, are you stark, raving crazy? Is it possible you
don't know that, in your place, nobody but a crazy woman would open
her mouth?"

"Maybe; but I don't care. Just leave her alone, Kess, please! That
little baby can stand nothing but happiness."

"Why, woman, you're crazy with the heat. If you want to know it, I'm
nuts over that little kid. Gad! never ran across anything so full of zip
in my life! I'm going to make life one joy ride after another for that
joy baby. That kid's the showpiece of the world. She's got me so hipped
I'm crazy, and the worst of it is I like it. You don't need to worry. As
the boys say, when I settle down, I'm going to settle hard."

"You ain't fit to have her!"

"Say, the kind of life I've lived I ain't ashamed to tell her own
father. He's a man, and I'm a man, and life's life."

"You--"

"Now look here, Becker. That'll be about all. If you're in your right
senses, you're going to ring the joy bells louder than any one around
here. What you got on your chest you can just as well cut your throat as
tell; so we'll both live happy ever after. There's not one thing in my
life that any jury wouldn't pass, and--"

"I've seen you drunk."

"Well, what of it? It took three of us to yank old I.W. out from under
the table at my sister's wedding."

"You--What about you and Cissie and--"

The light run of feet, and almost instantly Miss Goldstone was
pirouetting in between them.

"Here, dearie! There wasn't anything like brandy up in the third floor.
I found some cordial in the pantry. Drink it down, dearie; it'll
warm you."

They hovered together, Miss Goldstone trembling between solicitude and
her state of intensity.

"Kessie darling, you've got to go now. I want to get mommie up-stairs to
bed. You got to go, darling, until to-morrow. Oh, why isn't it tomorrow?
I want everybody to know. Don't let on, Mamma Hat. I'll pop it on popsie
at breakfast while I'm opening his eggs for him. You come for breakfast,
Leon. You're in the family now." He lifted her bodily from her feet,
pressing a necklace of kisses round her throat.

"Good night, Twinkle-pinkle, till to-morrow."

"Good night, darling. I won't sleep a wink, waiting for you."

"Me, neither."

"One more, darling--a French one."

"Two for good measure."

"Sleep tight, beautiful! Good night!"

"Good night, beautifulest!"

She stood poised forward on the topmost step, watching him between
backward waves of the hand crank, throw his clutch, and steer off. Then
she turned inward, a sigh trembling between her lips.

"Oh, Mamma Hat, I--"

But Mrs. Goldstone's chair was empty. Into it with a second and more
tremulous sigh sank Miss Goldstone, her lips lifted in the smile that
had been kissed.

When Mr. Goldstone slept, every alternate breath started with a rumble
somewhere down in the depths of him and, drawn up like a chain from a
well, petered out into a thin whistle before the next descent. Beside
him, now, on her knees, Mrs. Goldstone shook at his shoulder.

"I.W.! I.W.! Quick! Wake up!"

He let out a shuddering, abysmal breath.

"I.W.! Please!"

He moaned, turning his face from her.

She tugged him around again, now raising his face between her hands from
the pillow.

"I.W.! Try to wake up! For God's sake, I.W.!" He sprang up in a
terrified daze, sitting upright in bed.

"My God! Who? What's wrong? Effie! Hattie."

"No, no; don't get excited, I.W. It's me--Hattie!"

"What?"

"Nothing, I.W. Nothing to get excited about. Only I got to tell you
something."

"Where's Effie?"

"She's home."

"What time is it?"

"Three."

"Come back to bed, then; you got the nightmare."

"No, no!"

"You ain't well, Hattie? Let me light up."

"No, no; only, I got to tell you something! I 'ain't been to bed; I been
waiting up, and--"

"And what?"

"She just came home--engaged!"

"My God! Effie?"

He blinked in the darkness, drawing up his knees to a hump under the
sheet.

"Engaged--how?"

"I.W., don't you remember? Wake up, honey. To Kess, to Leon Kessler that
she went automobiling with."

"Our Effie engaged--to Leon Kessler?"

"Yes, I.W.--our little Effie!"

A smile spread over his face slowly, and he clasped his hands in an
embrace about his knees.

"You don't tell me!"

"Oh, I.W., please--"

"Our little girl. S-ay, how poor Lenie would have loved this happiness!
Our little girl engaged to get married!"

"I.W., she--"

"We do the right thing by them--eh, Hattie? Furnish them up as many
rooms as they want. But, s-ay, they don't need help from us. He's a
lucky boy who gets her, I don't care who he is. Her papa's little Effie,
a baby--old enough to get engaged!"

"I.W., she's too--young. Don't give him our little Effie; she's too
young!"

"I married her mother, Hattie, when she wasn't yet eighteen."

"I know, I.W., but not to Leon Kessler. She's such a baby, I.W.
He--didn't I work for him nine years, I.W.--don't I know what he is!"

"I'm surprised, Hattie, you should hold so against a man his wild oats."

"Then why ain't oats for the man oats for the woman? It's the men that
sow the wild oats and the women--us women that's got to reap them!"

"S-ay, life is life. Do you want to put your head up against a brick
wall?"

"A wall that men built!"

"It's always hard, Hattie, for good women like you and like poor Lenie
was to understand. It's better you don't. You shouldn't even think
about it."

"But, I.W.--"

"If I didn't know Leon Kessler was no worse than ninety-nine good
husbands in a hundred, you think I would let him lay a finger on the
apple of my eye? I don't understand, Hattie; all of a sudden this
evening, you're so worked up. Instead of happiness, you come like with a
funeral. Is that why you wake me up out of a sleep? To cry about it?
Don't think, Hattie, that just as much as you I haven't got the good of
my child at heart. Out of a sound sleep she wakes me to cry because a
happiness has come to us. Leon Kessler can have any girl in this town he
wants. Maybe he wasn't a Sunday-school boy in his day--but say, show me
one that was."

She drew herself up, grasping him at the shoulders.

"I.W., don't let him have our little Effie!"

"Nonsense!" he said, in some distaste for her voice choked with tears.
"Cut out this woman foolishness now and come to bed. Is this something
new you're springing on me? I got no patience with women who indulge
themselves with nervous breakdowns. I never thought, Hattie, you had
nothing like that in you."

Her voice was rising now in hysteria, slipping up frequently beyond her
control.

"If you do, I can't stand it! I can't stand it, I.W.!"

He peered at her in the starlight that came down through the screened-in
top of the sleeping-porch.

"Why?" he said, suddenly awake, and shortly.

"I worked for him nine years, I.W. I--I know him."

"How?"

"I know him, I.W. She's too good for him."

"How do you know him?"

"I--the girls, I.W. One little girl now, Cissie--I--I hear it all from
my friend Delehanty--sometimes she--she writes to me. I--the models
and--the girls and--and the lady buyers--they--they used to gossip in
the factory and--I--I used to hear about it. I.W., don't! Let go! You
hurt!" His teeth and his hands were very tight, and he hung now over the
side of the bed and toward her.

"He--I.W.--he--"

"He what? He what?"

"He--ain't good enough."

"I say he is!"

"But he--I.W.--she--she's such a baby and he--he--. You hurt!"

"Then tell me, he what?"

"I.W., you're hurting me!"

"He what--do you hear?--he what?"

"Don't make me say it! Don't! It--it just happened--with him meaning one
thing all the time and--me another. I was thrown with that kind of a
crowd, I.W., all my life. All the girls, they--It don't make me worse
than it makes him. With me it was once; with him it's--it's--I didn't
know, I.W. My mother she died that year before, and--I needed the job,
and I swear to God, I.W., I--kept hoping even if he never put it in
words he'd fix it. Kill me, if you want to, I.W., but don't throw our
Effie to him! Don't! Don't! Don't!"

She was pounding the floor with her bare palms, her face so distorted
that the mouth drawn tight over the teeth was as wide and empty as a
mask's, and sobs caught and hiccoughed in her throat.

"I didn't know, I.W.! Don't kill me for what I didn't know!"

She crouched back from his knotted face, and he sprang then out of bed,
nightshirt flapping about his knees, and his fists and his bulging eyes
raised to the quiet stars.

"God," he cried, "help me to keep hold of myself! Help me! You--you--"

His voice was so high and so tight in his throat that it stuck, leaving
him in inarticulate invocation.

"I.W.!"

"My child engaged to--to her mother's--you--you--"

"I.W.! Do you see now? You wouldn't let him have her! You wouldn't,
I.W.! Tell me you wouldn't!"

"I want him if he touches her to be struck dead! I want him to be struck
dead!"

"Thank God!" said Mrs. Goldstone, weeping now tears that eased her
breathing.

Suddenly he leaned toward her, his voice rather quieter, but his
forefinger waggling out toward the open door.

"You go!" he said, and then in a gathering hurricane of fury, "go!"

"I.W., don't yell! Don't! Don't!"

"Go--while I'm quiet. Go--you hear?"

She edged around him where he stood, in fear of his white, crouched
attitude.

"I.W.!"

He made a step toward her, and, at the sound in his throat, she ran out
into the hallway and down the stairs to the porch. In the deep shade of
the veranda's elbow a small figure lay deep in sleep in the wicker
rocker, one bare arm up over her head and lips parted.

In a straight chair beside her Mrs. Goldstone sat down. She was
shuddering with chill and repeating to herself, quite aloud and over and
over again:

"What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?"

She was suddenly silent then, staring out ahead, her hands clutching the
chair-arms.

To her inflamed fancy, it was as if, beyond the hedge, the old disused
hitching-post had become incarnate and, in the form of her naive and
horned conception, was coming toward her with the whites of his eyes
bloodshot.




A PETAL ON THE CURRENT

Were I only swifter and more potent of pen, I could convey to you all in
the stroke of a pestle the H2O, the pigment of the red-cheeked apple,
the blue of long summer days, and the magnesia of the earth for which
Stella Schump was the mortal and mortar receptacle.

She was about as exotic as a flowering weed which can spring so strongly
and so fibrously from slack. And yet such a weed can bleed milk. If
Stella Schump was about fourteen pounds too plump, too red of cheek, and
too blandly blue of eye, there was the very milk of human kindness in
her morning punching up of her mother's pillows and her smoothing down
of the gray and poorly hair. She could make a bed freshly, whitely, her
strong young arms manoeuvering under but not even jarring the poor old
form so often prone there.

There was a fine kind of virile peasantry in the willing hands, white
enough, but occasionally broken at the nails from eight hours of this
box in and that box out in a children's shoe department.

Differing by the fourteen pounds, Watteau would have scorned and Rubens
have adored to paint her.

She was not unconscious of the rather flaxen ripple of her hair, which
she wore slickly parted and drawn back, scallop by scallop, to a round
and shining mat of plaits against the back of her head. But neither was
she unconscious that she thereby enhanced the too high pitch of her
cheek-bones and the already too generous width between them. It was when
Stella Schump opened wide her eyes that she transcended the milky
fleshliness and the fact that, when she walked rapidly, her cheeks
quivered in slight but gelatinous fashion. Her eyes--they were the color
of perfect June at that high-noon moment when the spinning of the
humming-bird can be distilled to sound. Laura and Marguerite and Stella
Schump had eyes as blue as Cleopatra's, and Sappho's and Medea's must
have been green.

For reading and occasional headaches, she wore a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles prescribed but not specially ground by the optical
department, cater-corner from the children's shoes. Upon the occasion of
their first adjustment, Romance, for the first time, had leaned briefly
into the smooth monotony of Miss Schump's day-by-day, to waft a scented,
a lace-edged, an elusive kerchief.

"You ought to heard, mamma, that fellow over in the specs, when he gimme
the test for the glasses."

"What?"

"Tee-hee!--it sounds silly to repeat it."

"You got the Schump eyes, Stella. I always used to say, with his big
blue ones, your poor father ought to been a girl, too."

"'Say,' he said to me, he said, just like that, 'I know a society who
will pay you a big fat sum if you'll sign over them eyes for
post-mortem laboratory work. Believe me, Bettina,' he said, just like
that, 'those are some goo-goos!'"

"'Goo-goos'?"

"Yes, ma--the way I look out of them."

"See, Stella, if you'd only mix with the young men and not be so
stiff-like with them. See! Is he the sober, genteel kind who could sit
out an evening in a self-respectin' girl's front parlor?"

"I--I can't ask a fellow if he didn't ask me, can I? I can't make a
pusher out of myself."

"A girl don't have to make a pusher out of herself to have beaus; it's
natural for her to have them in moderation. I don't want my girl shut
out of her natural pleasures."

"'Believe me, Bettina,' he said, 'those are some goo-goos'--just like
that, he said it."

"Before I'd let a girl like Cora Kinealy have all the beaus! I bet
_she'd_ ask him."

"It--it just ain't in me, ma. The other girls do, I know--you ought to
heard the way Mabel Runyan was kiddin' a fellow in the silks to-day--it
just ain't in me to."

"Nowadays, young men got to be made to feel welcome."

"I just don't seem to take."

"'I'll be pleased to have you call of a Saturday night, Mr. So-and-so.'
No one could say there's anything but the genteel in that. Those are
just the words I used to say to your poor father when he was courtin'."

"If only I--I wouldn't turn all red!"

"I bet Cora Kinealy would have asked him." "I--I'll ask him, ma."

When Stella Schump was adjusting her black sleevelets next morning,
somewhat obviously oblivious of the optical department across the aisle,
a blond, oiled head leaned out at her.

"Mornin'. Goo-goo!"

A flush that she could feel rush up and that would not be controlled
threw her into a state of agitation that was almost abashing to behold.

"Tee-hee!"

"Believe me, Bettina, those are some goo-goos!"

"I'd be pleased to have you--come--to--"

"I told the little wifey last night, 'Angel Face, I've found a pair of
goo-goos that are a close runner-up to yours.'"

Miss Schump turned to her first customer of the day, the flush receding
as suddenly as it had come to scorch.

"Copper toes for the little boy? Just be seated, please."

Thus did the odor of romance lay for the merest moment upon the stale
air of Miss Schump's routine.

Evenings, in the high-ceilinged, long-windowed, and inside-shuttered
little flat in very West Thirteenth Street, tucked up in the top story
of one of a row of made-over-into-apartments residences that boasted
each a little frill of iron balcony and railed-in patch of front lawn,
they would sit beside an oil-lamp with a flowered china shade, Mrs.
Schump, gnarled of limb and knotted of joint, ever busy, except on the
most excruciatingly rheumatic of her days, at a needlework so cruel, so
fine that for fifteen years of her widowhood it had found instant market
at a philanthropic Woman's Exchange.

Very often Miss Cora Kinealy, also of the children's shoes, would rock
away an evening in that halo of lamplight, her hair illuminated to
copper and her hands shuttling in and out at the business of knitting.
There were frank personal discussions, no wider in diameter than the
little circle of light itself.

MISS KINEALY (_slumped in her chair so that her knee rose higher than
her waist-line_): I always say of Stella, she's one nut too hard for me
to crack, and I've cracked a good many in my life. Why that girl 'ain't
got beaus galore--well, I give up!

MRS. SCHUMP (_stooped for an infinitesimal stab of needle_): She don't
give 'em a chance, Cora. You can't tell me there is not many a nice,
sober young man wouldn't be glad to sit out a Saturday evening with her.
She's that bashful she don't give 'em a chance. I tell her it's almost
as much ruination to a girl to be too retiring as to be too forward. She
don't seem to have a way with the boys.

MISS SCHUMP (_in a pink, warm-looking flannelette kimono and brushing
out into fine fluff her flaxen-looking hair, and then, in the name of
to-morrow's kink, plaiting it into a multitude of small, tight-looking
braids_): You can talk, mamma. You, too, Cora, with a boy like Archie
Sensenbrenner and your wedding-day in sight. But what's a girl goin' to
do if she don't take; if she ain't got an Archie?

Mrs. Schump (_riding her glasses down toward the end of her nose to
look up sharply over them_): Get one.

"There you go again! Honest, you two make me mad. I can't go out and
lasso 'em, can I?"

"She doesn't give 'em a chance, Cora; mark my word! The trouble is,
she's too good for most she sees. They ain't up to her."

"I can't understand it, Mrs. Schump. I always say there ain't a finer
girl on the floor than Stella. When I see other girls, most of 'em fresh
little rag-timers that ain't worth powder and shot, bringing down the
finest kind of fellows, and Stella never asked out or nothing, I always
say to myself, 'I can't understand it.' Take me--what Arch Sensenbrenner
ever seen in me, with Stella and her complexion working in the same
department--"

"You got a way, Cora. There's just something about me don't take with
the boys. Honest, if I could only see one of you girls alone with a
fellow once, to see how you do it!"

"Just listen to her, Mrs. Schump, with her eyes and complexion and all!"

"There's not a reason my girl shouldn't have it as good and better than
the best of them. She's a good girl, Cora. Stella's a good girl to me."

"Aw, mamma--"

"Don't I know it, Mrs. Schump! I always say if ever a girl would make
some nice-earning, steady fellow a good wife, it's--"

'"Good wife'! That ain't the name! Why, Cora, for ten years that child
has lifted me on my bad days and carried me and babied me like I was a
queen. It's nothing for her to rub me two hours straight. Not a day
before she leaves for work that she don't come to me and--"

"Fellows don't care about that kind of thing. A girl's got to have pep
and something besides complexion and elbow-grease. I'm too fat."

"She's always sayin' she's too fat. With one pound off, would she
look as good, Cora? If I hadn't been as plump as a partridge in my
girl-days--and if I do say it myself, I was as fine a lookin' girl
as my Stella--do you think Dave Schump would have had eyes for me?
Not if I was ten times the woman I was for him."

"Sure she ain't too fat, Mrs. Schump. I always tell her it's her
imagination. I know a girl bigger than she is that's keeping company
with an expert piano-tuner. Why, I know girls twice her size. Stella's
got a right good figure, she has."

"Lots of good it does me! I--It's just like my brains to go right to my
hands, once you put me with a fellow. That time your brother Ed called
for me for that party at your house--honest, I couldn't open my mouth
to him."

"Can't understand it! 'Honest,' I says to Ed that time after the party,
I says to him, 'Ed, why don't you go over and call on Stella Schump and
take her to a movie or something? She's my idea of a girl, Stella is.'
Think I could budge him? 'Naw,' was all I could get out of him. Just,
'Naw.' Honest, I could have shook him. But did he run down to that
little flirt of a Gert Cobb's the very same night? He did. Honest, like
I said to Arch, it makes me sick. Is it any wonder the world is filled
with little flips like Gert Cobb, the way the fellows fall for 'em?"

"I never could be fresh with a boy. Take that time at your party. I bet
your brother Ed would have liked me better if I'd have got out in the
middle of the floor with him, like he wanted me to and like Gert did, to
see who could blow the biggest bunch of suds off his stein. I never
could be fresh with a fellow."

"That's just the trouble, Mrs. Schump. Stella don't see the difference
between what's fresh and what's just fun. Is there anything wrong about
one stein of beer in a jolly crowd? A girl can be nice without being
goody-good. If there's anything a fellow hates, it's a goody-good. Take
a fellow like Arch--you think he'd have any time for me if I wasn't a
good-enough sport to take a glass of beer with him maybe once a week
when he gets to feeling thirsty? Nothing rough. Everything in
moderation, I always say. But there's a difference, Mrs. Schump, between
being rough and being a goody-good."

"There's something in what you say, Cora. I've had her by me so much,
maybe I've tried to raise her a little over-genteel. There ain't one
single bad appetite she's got to be afraid of. It's not in her. I used
to tell her poor father, one glass of beer could make him so crazy loony
he never had to try how two tasted."

"I'm bashful, and what you goin' to do about it?"

"Say, you and Ed's foreman ought to meet together! Honest, you'd be a
pair! Ed brought him to the house one night. Finest boy you ever seen.
Thirty-five a week, steady as you make 'em; and when they put in girls
to work down at the munitions-plant where him and Ed works, Ed said it
was all they could do to keep him from throwing up his job from fright.
Whatta you know? A dandy fellow like him, with a dagger-shaped scar
clear down his arm from standing by his job that time when the whole
south end of the plant exploded. A fellow that could save a whole plant
and two hundred lives afraid to face a few skirts! Crazy to get married.
Told Ed so. Always harping on his idea of blue eyes and yellow hair, and
then, when he gets the chance, afraid of a few skirts!"

"That's me every time with fellows. I get to feelin' down inside of me
something terrible--scary--and all."

"Say, I'll tell you what! I'll get Ed to bring him down to Gert Cobb's
party next Saturday night, and you come, too."

"I?"

"There's two of a kind for you, Mrs. Schump. A fellow that's more afraid
of girls than explosions, and a girl that's afraid to blow a little foam
off a glass of beer! Them two ought to meet. Me and Arch and Ed'll fix
it up. How's that for a scheme? Now say I ain't your friend! Are
you game?"

"I don't go out tryin' to meet fellows that way."

"You see, Mrs. Schump, the way she puts a gold fence around herself?"

"Cora's puttin' herself out for you, Stella. There's no harm in a
Saturday night's party in the company of Cora and some genteel friends."

"Gert Cobb don't know I'm on earth."

"You hear, Mrs. Schump? Is it any wonder she don't get out? All I got to
do is say the word, and any friend of mine is welcome in Gert
Cobb's house."

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