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Humoresque

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Humoresque




For the second that it took her presence to be felt, Miss Schump stood
there trembling, all of a sudden more deeply and more rapidly. Then,
Mrs. O'Connor leaned out, bare arms folded atop her broom.

"So!" she said, a highly imperfect row of lower teeth seeming to jut
out, and her voice wavy with brogue and vibrant to express all its
scorn. "So!"

"Mrs. O'Connor--"

"So! Ye've come back in time for the buryin'! Faith, an' it's a foine
toime for the showin'-up of the chief mourner! Faith now it is!"

"Mrs. O'Connor--"

"Ain't ye ashamed? Ain't ye ashamed before the Lord to face your Maker?"

"Please--please--Mrs. O'Connor--what--what--"

"The pasty-faced lyin' ways of ye! I can see now how ye look what ye
are! I'd have believed it as soon of my own. It's the still water that
run deep in ye, is the way your girl friend put it. The hussy under that
white complexion of yours! Your sainted mither! Oh, ain't ye ashamed in
the name of the Lord to face your Maker?"

"O God--please what--"

"Your sainted mither! Niver, after that letter from ye the next night
after her scourin' the city, a whimper more out of her--"

"I wrote--I wrote--they gimme a stamp--I wrote--how--Where is she?"

"A cousin had called ye sudden-like for sickness was how she put it.
Faith and me niver once a-smellin' the mice, the way she lay there,
waitin', waitin' day after day, doubled up in the joints and waitin' for
thim ten days to pass--"

"O God!"

"I found her in bed yisterday, a-clutchin' the letter, or niver to my
own dyin' would I have known the shameful truth of it. It's screw open
her poor hands I had to, for the readin' of the letter that had been
eatin' 'er for all them days of waitin'. Ye hussy! Ye jailbird--and me
niver thinkin' but what it was the sick cousin! Me niver smellin' the
mice! Your own girl friend, neither. Ye hussy! Jailbird!"

"Oh! Oh! Oh!"

"It's only because she was sainted I'm lettin' ye up in on her. She
layin' up there, waitin'. Strangers that crossed her poor hands on her
poor breast and strangers that laid her out. Niver even a priest called
in on her. She a-layin' up there, waitin'--the Lord have mercy on your
soul! If ye ain't afraid before the Lord to look on her, come up. It's
thankin' God I am she can't open her eyes to see ye."

Hands clutching her throat, Miss Schump remained standing there on the
sun-drenched steps, gazing after the figure receding into the musty
gloom of the hallway. She wanted to follow, but instead could only stand
there, repeating and repeating:

"O my God! O my God! God! God! What have I done? What have I done?
Mamma--mamma--mamma! O my God! What? What--"

* * * * *

In the pyramidal plot-structure of this story the line of descent is by
far the sheerer. Short-story correspondence-schools would call it the
brief downward action leading to dénouement.

With Stella Schump it was almost a straight declivity. There were days
of the black kind of inertia when to lift the head from its sullen
inclination to rest chin on chest was not to be endured. There was
actually something sick in the eyes, little cataracts of gray cloud
seeming to float across. She would sit hunched and looking out of them
so long and so unseeingly that her very stare seemed to sleep.

She had removed the stick or two that remained unsold to a little rear
room high up in a large, damp-smelling lodging-house on West Twentieth
Street, within view of a shipping-pier. There was a sign inserted in the
lower front window:

ROOMS. LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING.

INQUIRE WITHIN.

She would sit in that room, so heavy with its odor of mildew, her window
closed against the long, sweetly warm days, hunched dumbly on the
cot-edge and staring into the stripe and vine, stripe and vine of the
wall-paper design, or lie back when the ache along her spine began to
set in. There were occasional ventures to a corner bake-shop for raisin
rolls and to the delicatessen next door for a quarter-pound of Bologna
sausage sliced into slivers while she waited. She would sit on the
cot-edge munching alternately from sliver to roll, gulping through a
throat that was continually tight with wanting to cry, yet would not
relax for that relief.

There was little attempt for employment except when the twenty dollars
left from the sale of effects and funeral expenses began to dwindle. She
would wake up nights, sweaty with the nightmare that her room was some
far-off ward for incorrigibles and that one of the strange, veiny-nosed
inmates was filching her small leather bag from beneath her pillow.

When her little roll had flattened finally down to five one-dollar bills
she took to daily and conscientiously buying morning papers and scanning
want-advertisements as she stood at the news-stand, answering first
those that were within walking-distance.

She would make a five-block détour of the Criterion rather than pass
the nearer to it.

Once, returning after a fruitless tour of the smaller department stores,
and borne along by the six-o'clock tide of Sixth Avenue, her heart
leaped up at sight of Miss Cora Kinealy, homeward bound on her smart
tall heels that clicked, arm in arm with Mabel Runyan of the notions.
Standing there with her folded newspaper hugged to her and the small
hand-bag dangling, Stella Schump gazed after.

It was not only the lack of references or even of experience that
conspired against her every effort at employment. It was the lack
of luster to the eye, an absolutely new tendency to tiptoe, a
furtive lookout over her shoulder, a halting tongue, that, upon
the slightest questioning, would stutter for words. Where there were
application-blanks to be filled in she would pore inkily over them and,
after a while, slyly crunch hers up in her hand and steal out. She was
still pinkly and prettily clean, and her hair with its shining mat of
plaits, high of gloss, but one Saturday half-holiday, rather than break
into her last bill, she ate a three-cent frankfurter-sausage sandwich
from off a not quite immaculate push-cart, leaning forward as she bit
into it to save herself from the ooze of mustard. Again she had the
sense of Cora Kinealy hurrying along the opposite side of the street on
the tall heels that clicked. She let fall the bun into the gutter and
stood there trembling.

She obtained, one later afternoon, at the instance of a window-card, the
swabbing of the tiled floor of an automobile show-room. She left before
her first hour was completed, crying, her finger-tips stinging, two
nails broken.

Finally came that chimera of an hour when she laid down her last coin
for the raisin rolls. She ate them on the cot-edge. And then, because
her weekly dollar-and-twenty-five-cent room rent fell due that evening,
she wrapped two fresh and self-laundered waists, some white but unlacy
underwear, a mound of window-dried handkerchiefs, a little knitted
shoulder-shawl so long worn by her mother, her tooth-brush and tube of
paste, and all her sundry little articles no less indispensable, into a
white-paper package. There were left a short woolen petticoat, too
cumbersome to include, the small wooden rocker and lamp with the china
shade which she had rather unexplainably held out from the dealer's
inventory. She closed the door softly on them one evening and, parcel in
hand, tiptoed down the stonily cold halls and out into a street of long,
thin, high-stooped houses. Outside in the May evening it was as black,
as softly deep, as plushy as a pansy. She walked swiftly into it as if
with destination. But after five or six of the long cross-town blocks
her feet began to lag. She stood for a protracted moment outside a
drug-store window, watching the mechanical process of a pasteboard man
stropping his razor; loitered to read the violent three-sheet outside a
Third Avenue cinematograph. In the aura of white light a figure in a
sweater and cap nudged up to her.

"Lonesome?"

She moved on.

In Stuyvesant Square were a first few harbingers of summer scattered
here and there--couples forcing the gladsome season of the dim park
bench; solitary brooders who can sit so long, so droop-shouldered, and
so deeply in silence. On one of these benches, beside a slim,
scant-skirted, light-spatted silhouette, Stella Schump sat finally down.
It was ten o'clock. There was a sense of panic, which she felt mostly at
her throat, rising in her. Then she would force herself into a state of
quiet, hand on bundle, nictitating, as it were--eyes opening, eyes
closing. The figure beside her slid over a bit, spreading the tiny width
of skirt as if to reserve the space between them.

"Workin'?"

"Huh?"

"Lord!" she said, indicating Second Avenue with a nod. "The lane's like
a morgue to-night."

"Cold, ain't it?" said Stella Schump, shivering with night damp.

A figure with a tilted derby came sauntering toward them.

"Lay off my territory. I seen him first."

"Oh--sure--yes--all right."

The place in between them was filled then, the tilted derby well forward
and revealing a rear bulge of head. There was an indeterminate moment of
silence broken by the slim-skirted silhouette.

"Where you goin'?"

Straightening, Miss Schump could hear more.

"No place. Where you goin'?"

"I'm cold."

"Buy you a drink?"

In the shaft of arc-light Miss Schump could see the little face framed
in the wan curls lift and crinkle the nose to smile.

"Come on."

She watched them recede down the narrow asphalt of the parkway. At
eleven o'clock, to lessen her stiffening of joints, she walked twice the
circumference of the fenced-in inclosure, finally sitting again, this
time beneath a gaunt oleander that was heavy with bud.

"O God!" she kept repeating, her stress growing. "O God! God! God!"

With the lateness, footfalls were growing more and more audible, the
gong of a street-car sounding out three blocks down.

"O my God!" And then in rapid succession, closing her eyes and digging
her finger-nails into her palms: "Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!"

She wanted and wanted to cry, but her throat would not let her, and so
she sat and sat.

There were still occasional figures moving through the little lanes and
a couple or two deep in the obscurity of benches. After another while,
at the remote end of her own bench, a figure sat down, lighting a pipe.
She watched him pu-pu-pup. At half after eleven she slid along
the bench.

"Where you goin'?"

He turned to look down.

"Eh?"

"Where you goin'?"

"No place."

"I'm cold."

"Pu-pu-pup."

"I am."

"Pu-pu-pup."

She leaned around, trying to bring her face to front his and to lift her
nose to a little wrinkly smile.

"Aw, you!"

"Go home and go to bed," he said. "A nice-appearin' girl like you ought
to be ashamed."

"I--ain't."

"Run along."

"Where?"

"You're barkin' up the wrong tree."

She fell silent. A chill raced through her.

"O God!" she began, under her breath. "O God! God!" Then: "Mamma! Mamma!
Mamma!"

"You _are_ cold," he said, reaching out to pinch her jacket sleeve.
"That's a warm coat. Where do you live?"

"Lemme alone," she said, staring out before her as if she were seeing
the stripe and vine, stripe and vine.

"You got the shivers," he said. "Better go home."

"Lemme alone."

"Ain't there no way you girls can learn to behave yourselves?
Here"--digging down into his pocket--"here."

"No."

"Where you live?"

"I dunno. I dunno."

"You surely know where you live."

She looked up at him in one of the rare moments of opening wide her
eyes.

"I tell you I dunno."

"What's in there?"

"My--my clothes."

"Let's see."

She plucked at the knot, drawing back for him to lean to see the top
layer of neatly folded waist.

"Don't," she said, withdrawing it quickly from his touch.

"Why," he said, "you poor little kid! What's got you into this mess?"

At that in his voice, such a quick, a thick, a hot layer of tears sprang
to her eyes that she could not relax her throat for words.

"What got you in?"

"I--I--I dunno."

"Aw, now, yes, you do know. Try to think--take your time--what got you
in?"

"I--I--can't--"

"Yes, you can. Go on; I ain't lookin' at you."

He turned off to an angle.

Her first sob burst from her, tearing her throat and ending in a tremolo
of moans in her throat.

"Now, now," he said, still in profile; "that won't do. Not for a
sensible little girl like you. Easy--easy--take your time--"

"You see, mister--you see, it was my--my mamma--my beautiful, darling
mamma--O God!--"

"Yes, yes; it was your mamma--and then what?"

"It was my mamma, my beautiful, darling mamma! What'll I do, mister? I
can't make it up to her. No way--nohow. She's gone--she's gone--"

"Easy--easy--try to keep easy."

"I used to kiss her hands when they was embroiderin'. I used to grease
'em for her all night when she screamed with the pain of 'em. I used to
scream at night, too, when I was doin' my time--her there waitin'--she
died alone--there waitin'--the letter they gave me the stamp for--I--I
was crazy with scare when I wrote it--O God!--mamma--mamma--mamma!"

"'Sh-h-h! 'Sh-h-h! Try to keep easy."

"It was this way--O God, how was it?--it was this way--you see, me and
my mamma and sometimes a friend--Cora Jones--no--no--no--Cora
Kinealy--we used to sit in the lamplight--no--no--first, I was in the
shoes--the children's shoes--they used to come in, little kiddies with
their toes all kicked out wantin' new shoes--cute little baby-shoes that
I loved to try on 'em. My friend--Cora--my friend--O God!--"

"Now, now, like a good girl--go on."

"My friend Cora--my darling little mamma--I never knew nothing about
anything except me and my mamma, we--it worried her that I didn't have
it like--like other girls--I--you see--you see, mister?"

"Yes, yes, I see."

Her voice, so jerked up with sobs, quieted down to a drone finally, to a
low drone that talked on and on through an hour, through two. There were
large, shining beads of tears flowing constantly from her cheeks, but
she wiped at them unceasingly with her handkerchief and talked evenly
through a new ease in her throat.

"She died, mister," she ended up finally, turning her salt-bitten eyes
full upon him; "she died of that letter written when I was so full of a
scared craziness from bein' in--in that place--that terrible, terrible
place--but she didn't die believin' me bad. I never seen her alive again
to hear it from her, but there in her--her little coffin I--I seen it in
her little face, all sunk, she didn't believe it--she didn't die
thinkin' me bad. Mister, did she? Did she?"

He did not answer, sitting there, drooped forward for so long that
finally she put out her hand to touch his.

"Did she?"

He did not turn his face, but reached around, inclosing her wrist,
pressing it, gripping it.

"Did she, mister?"

"No, no," he said, finally, "no, Stella; she didn't die thinkin' you
bad."

She sighed out, eyes closing, and her quivering lips falling quiet.

"Do you think I'm bad, mister?"

"No, Stella! No! No! No! My God, no!"

"I'm cold."

"Come."

"Where?"

"I'm goin' to take you across the street there to the Young Women's
Shelter Home for to-night. Just across there. See the sign? Don't be
afraid, Stella. Please don't be afraid."

"I ain't."

He retied the white-paper package, tucking it up under one arm.

"Come, Stella."

She rose, swaying for the merest second. His arm shot out.

"I'm all right," she said, steadying herself, smilingly, shamefacedly,
but relaxing gratefully enough to the flung support.

"Don't be afraid, Stella," he said. "I'm here. I'm here."

His forearm where the cuff had ridden up bore a scar, as if molten lead
had run a fiery, a dagger-shaped, an excoriating course.




WHITE GOODS

On a slope a white sprinkling of wood anemones lay spread like a patch
of linen bleaching in the sun. From a valley a lark cut a swift diagonal
upward with a coloratura burst of song. A stream slipped its ice and
took up its murmur where it had left off. A truant squelched his toes in
the warm mud and let it ooze luxuriantly over and between them.

A mole stirred in its hole, and because spring will find a way, even
down in the bargain basement of the Titanic Store, which is far below
the level of the mole, Sadie Barnet, who had never seen a wood anemone
and never sniffed of thaw or the wet wild smell of violets, felt the
blood rise in her veins like sap, and across the aisle behind the
white-goods counter Max Meltzer writhed in his woolens, and Sadie
Barnet, presiding over a bin of specially priced mill-ends out mid-aisle
between the white goods and the muslin underwear, leaned toward him, and
her smile was as vivid as her lips.

"Say, Max, guess why I think you're like a rubber band."

Classic Delphi was never more ready with ambiguous retort.

Behind a stack of Joy-of-the-Loom bed-sheets, Max Meltzer groped for
oracular divination, and his heart-beats fluttered in his voice.

"Like a rubber band?"

"Yeh."

"Give up."

"Aw, give a guess."

"Well, I don't know, Miss Sadie, unless--unless it's because I'm stuck
on you."

Do not, ascetic reader, gag at the unsocratic plane. True, Max Meltzer
had neither the grain nor the leisure of a sophist, a capacity for
tenses or an appreciation of Kant. He had never built a bridge, led a
Bible class, or attempted the first inch of the five-foot bookshelf. But
on a two-figure salary he subscribed an annual donation to a
skin-and-cancer hospital, wore non-reversible collars, and maintained a
smile that turned upward like the corners of a cycle moon. Remember,
then, ascetic reader, that a rich man once kicked a leper; Kant's own
heart, that it might turn the world's heart outward, burst of pain; and
in the granite cañon of Wall Street, one smile in every three-score and
ten turns upward.

Sadie Barnet met Max Meltzer's cycle-moon smile with the blazing eyes of
scorn, and her lips, quivering to a smile, met in a straight line that
almost ironed out the curves.

"'Cause you're stuck on me! That's a swell guess. Gee! you're as funny
as a sob, you are."

The words scuttered from her lips like sharp hailstones and she glanced
at him sidewise over a hump of uplifted shoulder and down the length of
one akimbo arm.

"'Cause you're stuck on me! Huh!"

Max Meltzer leaned across a counter display of fringed breakfast
napkins.

"Ain't that a good reason, Miss Sadie? It's a true one."

"You're one swell little guesser, you are _not_. You couldn't get inside
a riddle with a can-opener. 'Cause you're stuck on me! Gee!"

"Well, I am."

"I didn't ask you why you was like a bottle of glue. I asked you why you
was like a rubber band."

"Aw, I give up, Miss Sadie."

"'Cause you're so stretchy, see? 'Cause you're so stretchy you'll yawn
your arm off if you don't watch it."

Max Meltzer collapsed in an attitude of mock prostration against a
stock-shelf.

"Gee! that must have been cracked before the first nut."

"Smarty!"

Across the specially priced mill-ends she flashed the full line of her
teeth, and with an intensity his features ill concealed he noted how
sweet her throat as it arched.

"It's the spring fever gets inside of me and makes me so stretchy, Miss
Sadie. It's a good thing trade is slow down here in the basement to-day,
because it's the same with me every year; the Saturday before
spring-opening week I just get to feeling like all outdoors."

"Wait till you see me with a new red-satin bow stuck on my last
summer's shape. Dee Dee's got to lend me the price for two yards of
three-inch red-satin ribbon for my spring opening."

His breath rose in his throat.

"I bet you look swell in red, Miss Sadie. But a girl like you looks
swell in anything."

"Red's my color. Dee Dee says my mamma was a gay one, too, when it came
to color. Had to have a red bow pinned somewheres around all the months
she was in bed and--and up to the very night she died. Gimme red every
time. Dee Dee's the one that's always kicking against red; she says I
got too flashy taste."

"Say, if she keeps bossing and bossing at you, what do you keep on
living with her for?"

"Wouldn't you live with your own mother's sister if she raised you from
a kid? What am I going to do, put her in cold storage, now that her eyes
are going back on her? Up in the ribbons she can't hardly keep her
colors graduated no more, that's how blind she's getting. Only yesterday
a dame brought back some lavender ribbon and wiped up the whole
department with Dee Dee for putting it over on her as blue. What am I
going to do?"

"Honest, Miss Sadie, I didn't know that she was your aunt and that her
eyes was bad. I've seen you two together a lot and noticed her thick
lenses, but I just didn't think."

"Well, now I'm telling you."

"I just thought she was some old girl up in the ribbons you was living
with for company. Honest, I didn't know she had bad eyes. Gee!"

"No, they ain't bad. Only she's so blind she reads her paper upside down
and gets sore if you tell her about it."

"And me thinking she was nothing but a near-sighted old grouch with a
name like a sparrow."

Miss Barnet laughed with an upward trill.

"Dee Dee ain't her real name. When I was a kid and she took me to raise,
that's the way I used to pronounce Aunt Edith. Gee! you don't think Dee
Dee was the name they sprinkled on her when they christened her,
did you?"

Max Meltzer leaned to the breath of her laughter as if he would fill his
lungs with it.

"Gee! but you're a cute little lady when you laugh like that."

"Say, and ain't you the freshie! Just because you're going to be
promoted to buyer for your department won't get your picture in the
Sunday supplement. No white-goods buyer I know of ever had to build
white marble libraries or present a bread-line to the city to get rid of
his pin-money."

"I bet you was a cute little black-eyed, red-cheeked little youngster,
alrighty."

"I wasn't so worse. Like I tell Dee Dee, the way she's held me down and
indoors evenings, it's a wonder a kid like me grew up with any pep
at all."

"Poor little lady!"

"It's like Dee Dee says, though. I never was cut out for life behind the
counter. Gee! I'd soak my pillow in gasolene every night in the week if
it would make me dream I'm automobiling."

"Poor little lady!"

"Say, ain't it hot? With the Opening on Monday, they better get the fans
working. Last year three girls keeled. Honest, sometimes I think I'd
rather spend the summer under the daisies out on the hill than down here
in this basement."

"Don't I wish I had an auto to take you spinning in to-night."

"You ought to see the flier a friend of mine has got. A Mercury Six with
a limousine top like a grand-opera box."

"Your--your--friend?"

"Yes. He's that slick-looking, little fat fellow that's a cousin to
Mamie Grant up in the ready-to-wears. He was down here talking to me the
other day."

"I seen him."

"Gee! you ought to feel yourself in his Mercury Six. 'Lemme die,' I says
to him the last time I was in it. 'Just lemme close my eyes right in
here and die happy,' I says, cuddled up in the red-leather seat with a
cornucopia of daffodils tickling my nose and a street-car full of
strap-hangers riding along-side of us."

"I--I guess if you got swell friends like that, a boat excursion down
the river 'ain't got much of a sound for you."

"He says he's got a launch in summer--"

"Honest, Miss Sadie, I--I just been trying for the better part of two
weeks to ask permission if I could come and call on you some evening,
Miss Sadie, but--"

"Whoops! ain't he the daredevil!"

"The first boat of the season, Miss Sadie, a swell new one they call the
_White Gull_, goes down to Coney to-night, and, it being real
springtime, and you feeling kind of full of it, I thought maybe, it
being the first boat of the season, maybe you would take a river ride
this grand April night, Miss Sadie."

Her glance slanted toward him, full of quirks.

"My aunt Dee Dee, Mr. Meltzer, she's right strict with me. She don't
think I ought to keep company with any boys that don't come to see me
first at my house."

"I know it, Miss Sadie; that's the right way to do it, but I think I can
get around her all right. Wasn't she down here in the basement the day I
first heard about my promotion, and didn't she give me the glad hand and
seem right friendly to me? I can get around her all right, Miss Sadie. I
can always tell if a person likes me or not."

"Anyways, if her eyes ain't too bad, Mr. Meltzer, I got a date with my
friend if his car is out of the shop from having the limousine top taken
off. We--we're going for a little spin."

A quick red belied her insouciance and she made a little foray into the
bin of mill-ends.

"Gee! if I've made three sales this livelong day I don't know nothing
about two of them."

Max Meltzer met her dancing gaze, pinioning it with his own quiet eyes.

"You're right to pick out the lucky fellows who can buy a good time. A
little girl like you ought to have every enjoyment there is. If I could
give it to you, do you think I would let the other fellows beat me to
it? The best ain't none too good for a little lady like you."

"Aw, Mr. Meltzer!" Her bosom filled and waned. "Aw, Mr. Meltzer!"

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