Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

Suddenly Marcia's eyes, almost with the perpendicular slits of her kitten's in them, seemed to swish together like portières, shutting Hattie behind them with her.

"Oh--my Marcy!" said Hattie, dimly, after a while, as if from their depths. "Marcy, dearest!"

"At--at Harperly's, momie, almost all the popular upper-class girls wear--a--a boy's fraternity pin."

"Fraternity pin?"

"It's the--the beginning of being engaged."

"But, Marcy--"

"Archie's a Pi Phi!"

"A--what?"

"A Pi Phi."

"Phi--pie--Marcy--dear--"

* * * * *

On October 17th "Love Me Long" celebrated its two-hundredth performance. Souvenir programs. A few appropriate words by the management. A flashlight of the cast. A round of wine passed in the after-the-performance gloom of the wings. Aqueous figures fading off in the orderly back-stage fashion of a well-established success.

Hattie kissed the star. They liked each other with the unenvy of their divergent roles. Miss Robinson even humored some of Hattie's laughs. She liked to feel the flame of her own fairness as she stood there waiting for the audience to guffaw its fill of Hattie's drolleries; a narcissus swaying reedily beside a black crocodile.

She was a new star and her beauty the color of cloth of gold, and Hattie in her lowly comedian way not an undistinguished veteran. So they could kiss in the key of a cat cannot unseat a king.

But, just the same, Miss Robinson's hand flew up automatically against the dark of Hattie's lips.

"I don't fade off, dearie. Your own natural skin is no more color-fast. I handled Elaine Doremus in 'The Snowdrop' for three seasons. Never so much as a speck or a spot on her. My cream don't fade."

"Of course not, dear! How silly of me! Kiss me again."

That was kind enough of her. Oh yes, they got on. But sometimes Hattie, seated among her sagging headstones, would ache with the dry sob of the black crocodile who yearned toward the narcissus....

Quite without precedent, there was a man waiting for her in the wings.

The gloom of back-stage was as high as trees and Hattie had not seen him in sixteen years. But she knew. With the stunned consciousness of a stabbed person that glinting instant before the blood begins to flow.

It was Morton Sebree--Marcia's father.

"Morton!"

"Hattie."

"Come up to my dressing room," she said, as matter-of-factly as if her brain were a clock ticking off the words.

They walked up an iron staircase of unreality. Fantastic stairs. Wisps of gloom. Singing pains in her climbing legs like a piano key hit very hard and held down with a pressing forefinger. She could listen to her pain. That was her thought as she climbed. How the irrelevant little ideas would slide about in her sudden chaos. She must concentrate now. Terribly. Morton was back.

His hand, a smooth glabrous one full of clutch, riding up the banister. It could have been picked off, finger by finger. It was that kind of a hand. But after each lift, another finger would have curled back again. Morton's hand, ascending the dark like a soul on a string in a burlesque show.

Face to face. The electric bulb in her dressing room was incased in a wire like a baseball mask. A burning prison of light. Fat sticks of grease paint with the grain of Hattie's flesh printed on the daub end. Furiously brown cheesecloth. An open jar of cream (chocolate) with the gesture of the gouge in it. A woolly black wig on a shelf, its kinks seeming to crawl. There was a rim of Hattie _au natural_ left around her lips. It made of her mouth a comedy blubber, her own rather firm lips sliding about somewhere in the lightish swamp. That was all of Hattie that looked out. Except her eyes. They were good gray eyes with popping whites now, because of a trick of blackening the lids. But the irises were in their pools, inviolate.

"Well, Hattie, I reckon I'd have known you even under black."

"I thought you were in Rio."

"Got to hankering after the States, Hattie."

"I read of a Morris Sebree died in Brazil. Sometimes I used to think maybe it might have been a misprint--and--that--you--were--the--one."

"No, no. 'Live and kickin'. Been up around here a good while."

"Where?"

"Home. N'Orleans. M' mother died, Hattie, God rest her bones. Know it?"

"No."

"Cancer."

It was a peculiar silence. A terrible word like that was almost slowly soluble in it. Gurgling down.

"O-oh!"

"Sort of gives a fellow the shivers, Hattie, seeing you kinda hidin' behind yourself like this. But I saw you come in the theater to-night. You looked right natural. Little heavier."

"What do you want?"

"Why, I guess a good many things in general and nothing in particular, as the sayin' goes. You don't seem right glad to see me, honey."

"Glad!" said Hattie, and laughed as if her mirth were a dice shaking in a box of echoes.

"Your hair's right red yet. Looked mighty natural walkin' into the theater to-night. Take off those kinks, honey."

She reached for her cleansing cream, then stopped, her eyes full of the foment of torture.

"What's my looks to you?"

"You've filled out."

"You haven't," she said, putting down the cold-cream jar. "You haven't aged an hour. Your kind lies on life like it was a wall in the sun. A wall that somebody else has built for you stone by stone."

"I reckon you're right in some ways, Hattie. There's been a meanderin' streak in me somewheres. You and m' mother, God rest her bones, had a different way of scoldin' me for the same thing. Lot o' Huck Finn in me."

"Don't use bad-boy words for vicious, bad-man deeds!"

"But you liked me. Both of you liked me, honey. Only two women I ever really cared for, too. You and m' mother."

Her face might have been burning paper, curling her scorn for him.

"Don't try that, Morton. It won't work any more. What used to infatuate me only disgusts me now. The things I thought I--loved--in you, I loathe now. The kind of cancer that killed your mother is the kind that eats out the heart. I never knew her, never even saw her except from a distance, but I know, just as well as if I'd lived in that fine big house with her all those years in New Orleans, that you were the sickness that ailed her--lying, squandering, gambling, no-'count son! If she and I are the only women you ever cared for, thank God that there aren't any more of us to suffer from you. Morton, when I read that a Morris Sebree had died in Brazil, I hoped it was you! You're no good! You're no good!"

She was thumping now with the sobs she kept under her voice.

"Why, Hattie," he said, his drawl not quickened, "you don't mean that!"

"I do! You're a ruiner of lives! Her life! Mine! You're a rotten apple that can speck every one it touches."

"That's hard, Hattie, but I reckon you're not all wrong."

"Oh, that softy Southern talk won't get us anywhere, Morton. The very sound of it sickens me now. You're like a terrible sickness I once had. I'm cured now. I don't know what you want here, but whatever it is you might as well go. I'm cured!"

He sat forward in his chair, still twirling the soft brown hat. He was dressed like that. Softly. Good-quality loosely woven stuffs. There was still a tan down of persistent youth on the back of his neck. But his hands were old, the veins twisted wiring, and his third finger yellowly stained, like meerschaum darkening.

"Grantin' everything you say, Hattie--and I'm holdin' no brief for myself--_I've_ been the sick one, not you. Twenty years I've been down sick with hookworm."

"With devilishness."

"No, Hattie. It's the government's diagnosis. Hookworm. Been a sick man all my life with it. Funny thing, though, all those years in Rio knocked it out of me."

"Faugh!"

"I'm a new man since I'm well of it."

"Hookworm! That's an easy word for ingrained no-'countness, deviltry, and deceit. It wasn't hookworm came into the New Orleans stock company where I was understudying leads and getting my chance to play big things. It wasn't hookworm put me in a position where I had to take anything I could get! So that instead of finding me playing leads you find me here--black-face! It was a devil! A liar! A spendthrift, no-'count son out of a family that deserved better. I've cried more tears over you than I ever thought any woman ever had it in her to cry. Those months in that boarding house in Peach Tree Street down in New Orleans! Peach Tree Street! I remember how beautiful even the name of it was when you took me there--lying--and how horrible it became to me. Those months when I used to see your mother's carriage drive by the house twice a day and me crying my eyes out behind the curtains. That's what I've never forgiven myself for. She was a woman who stood for fine things in New Orleans. A good woman whom the whole town pitied! A no-'count son squandering her fortune and dragging down the family name. If only I had known all that then! She would have helped me if I had appealed to her. She wouldn't have let things turn out secretly--the way they did. She would have helped me. I--You--Why have you come here to jerk knives out of my heart after it's got healed with the points sticking in? You're nothing to me. You're skulking for a reason. You've been hanging around, getting pointers about me. My life is my own! You get out!"

"The girl. She well?"

It was a quiet question, spoken in the key of being casual, and Hattie, whose heart skipped a beat, tried to corral the fear in her eyes to take it casually, except that her eyelids seemed to grow old even as they drooped. Squeezed grape skins.

"You get out, Morton," she said. "You've got to get out."

He made a cigarette in an old, indolent way he had of wetting it with his smile. He was handsome enough after his fashion, for those who like the rather tropical combination of dark-ivory skin, and hair a lighter shade of tan. It did a curious thing to his eyes. Behind their allotment of tan lashes they became neutralized. Straw colored.

"She's about sixteen now. Little over, I reckon."

"What's that to you?"

"Blood, Hattie. Thick."

"What thickened it, Morton--after sixteen years?"

"Used to be an artist chap down in Rio. On his uppers. One night, according to my description of what I imagined she looked like, he drew her. Yellow hair, I reckoned, and sure enough--"

"You're not worthy of the resemblance. It wouldn't be there if I had the saying."

"You haven't," he said, suddenly, his teeth snapping together as if biting off a thread.

"Nor you!" something that was the whiteness of fear lightening behind her mask. She rose then, lifting her chair out of the path toward the door and flinging her arm out toward it, very much after the manner of Miss Robinson in Act II.

"You get out, Morton," she said, "before I have you put out. They're closing the theater now. Get out!"

"Hattie," his calm enormous, "don't be hasty. A man that has come to his senses has come back to you humble and sincere. A man that's been sick. Take me back, Hattie, and see if--"

"Back!" she said, lifting her lips scornfully away from touching the word. "You remember that night in that little room on Peach Tree Street when I prayed on my knees and kissed--your--shoes and crawled for your mercy to stay for Marcia to be born? Well, if you were to lie on this floor and kiss my shoes and crawl for my mercy I'd walk out on you the way you walked out on me. If you don't go, I'll call a stage hand and make you go. There's one coming down the corridor now and locking the house. You go--or I'll call!"

His eyes, with their peculiar trick of solubility in his color scheme, seemed all tan.

"I'll go," he said, looking slim and Southern, his imperturbability ever so slightly unfrocked--"I'll go, but you're making a mistake, Hattie."

Fear kept clanging in her. Fire bells of it.

"Oh, but that's like you, Morton! Threats! But, thank God, nothing you can do can harm me any more."

"I reckon she's considerable over sixteen now. Let's see--"

Fire bells. Fire bells.

"Come out with what you want, Morton, like a man! You're feeling for something. Money? Now that your mother is dead and her fortune squandered, you've come to harass me? That's it! I know you, like a person who has been disfigured for life by burns knows fire. Well, I won't pay!"

"Pay? Why, Hattie--I want you--back--"

She could have cried because, as she sat there blackly, she was sick with his lie.

"I'd save a dog from you."

"Then save--her--from me."

The terrible had happened so quietly. Morton had not raised his voice; scarcely his lips.

She closed the door then and sat down once more, but that which had crouched out of their talk was unleashed now.

"That's just exactly what I intend to do."

"How?"

"By saving her sight or sound of you."

"You can't, Hattie."

"Why?"

"I've come back." There was a curve to his words that hooked into her heart like forceps about a block of ice. But she outstared him, holding her lips in the center of the comedy rim so that he could see how firm their bite.

"Not to me."

"To her, then."

"Even you wouldn't be low enough to let her know--"

"Know what?"

"Facts."

"You mean she doesn't know?"

"Know! Know you for what you are and for what you made of me? I've kept it something decent for her. Just the separation of husband and wife--who couldn't agree. Incompatibility. I have not told her--" And suddenly could have rammed her teeth into the tongue that had betrayed her. Simultaneously with the leap of light into his eyes came the leap of her error into her consciousness.

"Oh," he said, and smiled, a slow smile that widened as leisurely as sorghum in the pouring.

"You made me tell you that! You came here for that. To find out!"

"Nothin' the sort, Hattie. You only verified what I kinda suspected. Naturally, you've kept it from her. Admire you for it."

"But I lied! See! I know your tricks. She does know you for what you are and what you made of me. She knows everything. Now what are you going to do? She knows! I lied! I--" then stopped, at the curve his lips were taking and at consciousness of the pitiableness of her device.

"Morton," she said, her hands opening into her lap into pads of great pink helplessness, "you wouldn't tell her--on me! You're not that low!"

"Wouldn't tell what?"

He was rattling her, and so she fought him with her gaze, trying to fasten and fathom under the flicker of his lids. But there were no eyes there. Only the neutral, tricky tan.

"You see, Morton, she's just sixteen. The age when it's more important than anything else in the world to a young girl that's been reared like her to--to have her life _regular_! Like all her other little school friends. She's like that, Morton. Sensitive! Don't touch her, Morton. For God's sake, don't! Some day when she's past having to care so terribly--when she's older--you can rake it up if you must torture. I'll tell her then. But for God's sake, Morton, let us live--now!"

"Hattie, you meet me to-morrow morning and take a little journey to one of these little towns around here in Jersey or Connecticut, and your lie to her won't be a lie any more."

"Morton--I--I don't understand. Why?"

"I'll marry you."

"You fool!" she said, almost meditatively. "So you've heard we've gotten on a bit. You must even have heard of this"--placing her hand over the jar of the Brown Cold Cream. "You want to be in at the feast. You're so easy to read that I can tell you what you're after before you can get the coward words out. Marry you! You fool!"

It was as if she could not flip the word off scornfully enough, sucking back her lower lip, then hurling.

"Well, Hattie," he said, unbunching his soft hat, "I reckon that's pretty plain."

"I reckon it is, Morton."

"All right. Everybody to his own notion of carryin' a grudge to the grave. But it's all right, honey. No hard feelin's. It's something to know I was willin' to do the right thing. There's a fruit steamer out of here for N'Orleans in the mawnin'. Reckon I'll catch it."

"I'd advise you to."

"No objection to me droppin' around to see the girl first? Entitled to a little natural curiosity. Come, I'll take you up home this evenin'. The girl. No harm."

"You're not serious, Morton. You wouldn't upset things. You wouldn't tell--that--child!"

"Why, not in a thousand years, honey, unless you forced me to it. Well, you've forced me. Come, Hattie, I'm seein' you home this evenin'."

"You can't put your foot--"

"Come now. You're too clever a woman to try to prevent me. Course there's a way to keep me from goin' up home with you this evenin'. I wouldn't use it, if I were you. You know I'll get to see her. I even know where she goes to school. Mighty nice selection you made, Hattie, Miss Harperly's."

"You can't frighten me," she said, trying to moisten her lips with her tongue. But it was dry as a parrot's. It was hard to close her lips. They were oval and suddenly immobile as a picture frame. What if she could not swallow. There was nothing to swallow! Dry tongue. O God! Marcia!

That was the fleeting form her panic took, but almost immediately she could manage her lips again. Her lips, you see, they counted so! She must keep them firm in the slippery shine of the comedy black.

"Come," he said, "get your make-up off. I'll take you up in a cab."

"How do you know it's--up?"

"Why, I don't know as I do know exactly. Just came kind of natural to put it that way. Morningside Heights is about right, I calculate."

"So--you _have_--been watching."

"Well, I don't know as I'd put it thataway. Naturally, when I got to town--first thing I did--most natural thing in the world. That's a mighty fine car with a mighty fine-looking boy and a girl brings your--our girl home every afternoon about four. We used to have a family of Grosbeaks down home. Another branch, I reckon."

"O--God!" A malaprop of a tear, too heavy to wink in, came rolling suddenly down Hattie's cheek. "Morton--let--us--live--for God's sake! Please!"

He regarded the clean descent of the tear down Hattie's color-fast cheek and its clear drop into the bosom of her black-taffeta housemaid's dress.

"By Jove! The stuff _is_ color-fast! You've a fortune in that cream if you handle it right, honey."

"My way is the right way for me."

"But it's a woman's way. Incorporate. Manufacture it. Get a man on the job. Promote it!"

"Ah, that sounds familiar. The way you promoted away every cent of your mother's fortune until the bed she died in was mortgaged. One of your wildcat schemes again! Oh, I watched you before I lost track of you in South America--just the way you're watching--us--now! I know the way you squandered your mother's fortune. The rice plantation in Georgia. The alfalfa ranch. The solid-rubber-tire venture in Atlanta. You don't get your hands on my affairs. My way suits me!"

The tumult in her was so high and her panic so like a squirrel in the circular frenzy of its cage that she scarcely noted the bang on the door and the hairy voice that came through.

"All out!"

"Yes," she said, without knowing it.

"You're losing a fortune, Hattie. Shame on a fine, strapping woman like you, black-facing herself up like this when you've hit on something with a fortune in it if you work it properly. You ought to have more regard for the girl. Black-face!"

"What has her--father's regard done for her? It's my black-face has kept her like a lily!"

"Admitting all that you say about me is right. Well, I'm here eating humble pie now. If that little girl doesn't know, bless my heart, I'm willin' she shouldn't ever know. I'll take you out to Greenwich to-morrow and marry you. Then what you've told her all these years is the truth. I've just come back, that's all. We've patched up. It's done every day. Right promoting and a few hundred dollars in that there cream will--"

She laughed. November rain running off a broken spout. Yellow leaves scuttling ahead of wind.

"The picture puzzle is now complete, Morton. Your whole scheme, piece by piece. You're about as subtle as corn bread. Well, my answer to you again is, 'Get out!'"

"All right. All right. But we'll both get out, Hattie. Come, I'm a-goin' to call on you-all up home a little while this evenin'!"

"No. It's late. She's--"

"Come, Hattie, you know I'm a-goin' to see that girl one way or another. If you want me to catch that fruit steamer to-morrow, if I were you I'd let me see her my way. You know I'm not much on raisin' my voice, but if I were you, Hattie, I wouldn't fight me."

"Morton--Morton, listen! If you'll take that fruit steamer without trying to see her--would you? You're on your uppers. I understand. Would a hundred--two hundred--"

"I used to light my cigarette with that much down on my rice swamps--"

"You see, Morton, she's such a little thing. A little thing with big eyes. All her life those eyes have looked right down into me, believing everything I ever told her. About you too, Morton. Good things. Not that I'm ashamed of anything I ever told her. My only wrong was ignorance. And innocence. Innocence of the kind of lesson I was to learn from you."

"Nothin' was ever righted by harping on it, Hattie."

"But I want you to understand--O God, make him understand--she's such a sensitive little thing. And as things stand now--glad I'm her mother. Yes, glad--black-face and all! Why, many's the time I've gone home from the theater, too tired to take off my make-up until I got into my own rocker with my ankles soaking in warm water. They swell so terribly sometimes. Rheumatism, I guess. Well, many a time when I kissed her in her sleep she's opened her eyes on me--black-face and all. Her arms up and around me. I was there underneath the black! She knows that! And that's what she'll always know about me, no matter what you tell her. I'm there--her mother--underneath the black! You hear, Morton! That's why you must let us--live--"

"My proposition is the mighty decent one of a gentleman."

"She's only a little baby, Morton. And just at that age where being like all the other boys and girls is the whole of her little life. It's killing--all her airiness and fads and fancies. Such a proper little young lady. You know, the way they clip and trim them at finishing school. Sweet-sixteen nonsense that she'll outgrow. To-night, Morton, she's at a party. A boy's. Her first. That fine-looking yellow-haired young fellow and his sister that bring her home every afternoon. At their house. Gramercy Park. A fine young fellow--Phi Pi--"

"Looka here, Hattie, are you talking against time?"

"She's home asleep by now. I told her she had to be in bed by eleven. She minds me, Morton. I wouldn't--couldn't--wake her. Morton, Morton, she's yours as much as mine. That's God's law, no matter how much man's law may have let you shirk your responsibility. Don't hurt your own flesh and blood by coming back to us--now. I remember once when you cut your hand it made you ill. Blood! Blood is warm. Red. Sacred stuff. She's your blood, Morton. You let us alone when we needed you. Leave us alone, now that we don't!"

"But you do, Hattie girl. That's just it. You're running things a woman's way. Why, a man with the right promoting ideas--"

There was a fusillade of bangs on the door now, and a shout as if the hair on the voice were rising in anger.

"All out or the doors 'll be locked on yuh! Fine doings!"

She grasped her light wrap from its hook, and her hat with its whirl of dark veil, fitting it down with difficulty over the fizz of wig.

"Come, Morton," she said, suddenly. "I'm ready. You're right, now or never."

"Your face!"

"No time now. Later--at home! She'll know that I'm there--under the black!"

"So do I, Hattie. That's why I--"

"I'm not one of the ready-made heroines you read about. That's not my idea of sacrifice! I'd let my child hang her head of my shame sooner than stand up and marry you to save her from it. Marcia wouldn't want me to! She's got your face--but my character! She'll fight! She'll glory that I had the courage to let you tell her the--truth! Yes, she will," she cried, her voice pleading for the truth of what her words exclaimed. "She'll glory in having saved me--from you! You can come! Now, too, while I have the strength that loathing you can give me. I don't want you skulking about. I don't want you hanging over my head--or hers! You can tell her to-night--but in my presence! Come!"

"Yes, sir," he repeated, doggedly and still more doggedly. "Yes, siree!" Following her, trying to be grim, but his lips too soft to click. "Yes--sir!"

They drove up silently through a lusterless midnight with a threat of rain in it, hitting loosely against each other in a shiver-my-timbers taxicab. Her pallor showing through the brown of her face did something horrid to her.

It was as if the skull of her, set in torment, were looking through a transparent black mask, but, because there were not lips, forced to grin.

And yet, do you know that while she rode with him Hattie's heart was high? So high that when she left him finally, seated in her little lamplit living room, it was he whose unease began to develop.

"I--If she's asleep, Hattie--"

Her head looked so sure. Thrust back and sunk a little between the shoulders.

"If she's asleep, I'll wake her. It's better this way. I'm glad, now. I want her to see me save myself. She would want me to. You banked on mock heroics from me, Morton. You lost."

Marcia was asleep, in her narrow, pretty bed with little bowknots painted on the pale wood. About the room all the tired and happy muss of after-the-party. A white-taffeta dress with a whisper of real lace at the neck, almost stiffishly seated, as if with Marcia's trimness, on a chair. A steam of white tulle on the dressing table. A buttonhole gardenia in a tumbler of water. One long white-kid glove on the table beside the night light. A naked cherub in a high hat, holding a pink umbrella for the lamp shade.

"Dear me! Dear me!" screamed Hattie to herself, fighting to keep her mind on the plane of casual things. "She's lost a glove again. Dear me! Dear me! I hope it's a left one to match up with the right one she saved from the last pair. Dear me!"

She picked up a white film of stocking, turning and exploring with spread fingers in the foot part for holes. There was one! Marcia's big toe had danced right through. "Dear me!"

Marcia sleeping. Very quietly and very deeply. She slept like that. Whitely and straightly and with the covers scarcely raised for the ridge of her slim body.

Sometimes Marcia asleep could frighten Hattie. There was something about her white stilliness. Lilies are too fair and so must live briefly. That thought could clutch so that she would kiss Marcia awake. Kiss her soundly because Marcia's sleep could be so terrifyingly deep.

"Marcia," said Hattie, and stood over her bed. Then again, "Mar-cia!" On more voice than she thought her dry throat could yield her.

There was the merest flip of black on the lacy bosom of Marcia's nightgown, and Hattie leaned down to fleck it. No. It was a pin--a small black-enameled pin edged in pearls. Automatically Hattie knew.

"Pi Phi!"

"Marcia," cried Hattie, and shook her a little. She hated so to waken her. Always had. Especially for school on rainy days. Sometimes didn't. Couldn't. Marcia came up out of sleep so reluctantly. A little dazed. A little secretive. As if a white bull in a dream had galloped off with her like Persephone's.

Only Hattie did not know of Persephone. She only knew that Marcia slept beautifully and almost breathlessly. Sweet and low. It seemed silly, sleeping beautifully. But just the same, Marcia did.

Then Hattie, not faltering, mind you, waited. It was better that Marcia should know. Now, too, while her heart was so high.

Sometimes it took as many as three kisses to awaken Marcia. Hattie bent for the first one, a sound one on the tip of her lip.

"Marcia!" she cried. "Marcy, wake up!" and drew back.

Something had happened! Darkly. A smudge the size of a quarter and the color of Hattie's guaranteed-not-to-fade cheek, lay incredibly on Marcia's whiteness.

Hattie had smudged Marcia! _Hattie Had Smudged Marcia!_

There it lay on her beautiful, helpless whiteness. Hattie's smudge.

* * * * *

It is doubtful, from the way he waited with his soft hat dangling from soft fingers, if Morton had ever really expected anything else. Momentary unease gone, he was quiet and Southern and even indolent about it.

"We'll go to Greenwich first thing in the morning and be married," he said.

"Sh-h-h!" she whispered to his quietness. "Don't wake Marcia."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His were.

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

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

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

GUILTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

On its long cross-town block, Mrs. Plush's boarding house repeated itself no less than thirty-odd times. Every front hall of them smelled like cold boiled potato, and the gilt chair in the parlor like banana. At dinner hour thirty-odd basement dining rooms reverberated, not uncheerfully, to the ironstone clatter of the canary-bird bathtub of succotash, the three stewed prunes, or the redolent boiled potato, and on Saturday mornings, almost to the thirty-odd of them, wasp-waisted, oiled-haired young negro girls in white-cotton stockings and cut-down high shoes enormously and rather horribly run down of heel, tilted pints of water over steep stone stoops and scratched at the trickle with old broom runts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU

PLEASE WASH OUT THE TUB AFTER YOU

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

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

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

The second roll Mrs. Jett usually carried away with her from the table. Along about ten o'clock she was apt to feel faint rather than hungry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The supreme _lèse majesté_ of the married woman who wears her state of wedlock like a crown of blessed thorns; bleeds ecstatically and swaps afternoon-long intimacies, made nasty by the plush in her voice, with her sisters of the matrimonial dynasty.

Mrs. Jett was also bidden, by her divine right, to those conclaves of the 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 born my hair began to fall out just as if I had had typhoid"; or, "Both of mine, I am proud to say, were bottle babies"; and once, as she listened, her heart might have been a persimmon, puckering: "The idea for a woman of forty-five to have her first! It's not fair to the child."

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

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

Of course, they kissed upon his arrival home, comment to the contrary notwithstanding, in a taken-for-granted fashion, perhaps, but there was something sweet about their utter unexcitement; and had the afternoon session twisted her heart more than usual, Mrs. Jett was apt to place a second kiss lightly upon the black and ever so slightly white mustache, or lay her cheek momentarily to his, as if to atone by thus yearning over 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 of the embroidery and fancy-goods store, fitted him like the proverbial glove--a suede one. In the eight years since, his fish business had almost doubled, and his expenses, if anything, decreased, because more and more it became pleasanter to join in the evening game of no-stakes euchre down in the front parlor or to remain quietly upstairs, a gas lamp on the table between them, Mr. Jett in a dressing gown of hand-embroidered Persian design and a newspaper which he read from first to 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 appropriately etched in colored floss. A poker hand, upheld by realistic five fingers embroidered to the life, and the cuff button denoted by a blue-glass jewel. Across their bed, making it a dais of incongruous splendor, was flung a great counterpane of embroidered linen, in design as narrative as a battle-surging tapestry and every thread in it woven out of these long, quiet evenings by the lamp side.

He was exceedingly proud of her cunning with a needle, so fine that its stab through the cloth was too slight to be seen, and would lose no occasion to show off the many evidences of her delicate workmanship that were everywhere about the room.

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

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

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 would immediately cluck with his tongue and throw out quite a bravado of chest.

"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 once or twice he had noticed her draw back from it, and, anyway, he was exceedingly delicate about the cling of the rottenly pungent fish odor of his workadays.

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

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

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

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

One day in autumn, with the sky the color and heaviness of a Lynnhaven oyster, Mrs. Jett sat quite unusually forward on her chair at one of the afternoon congresses of the wives, convened in Mrs. Peopping's back parlor, Jeanette Peopping, aged four, sweet and blond, whom the Jetts loved to borrow Sunday mornings, while she was still in her little nightdress, 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 following the dart of the infinitesimal needle, Mrs. Jett's eyes were burningly upon Mrs. Peopping, following, with almost lip-reading intensity, that worthy lady's somewhat voluptuous mouthings.

She was a large, light person with protuberant blue eyes that looked as if at some time they had been two-thirds choked from their sockets and a characteristic of opening every sentence with her mouth shaped to an explosive 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 its conclusion Mrs. Peopping's steel-bead bag, half finished, lay in a huddle at her feet, her pink and flabby face turned reminiscently toward the fire.

"--and for three days six doctors gave me up. Why, I didn't see Jeanette until 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 Christmas present to this day--said if I had been six years younger it wouldn't have gone so hard with me. I always say if the men knew what we women go through--Maybe if some of them had to endure the real pain themselves they would have something to do besides walk up and down the hall and turn pale at the smell of ether coming through the keyhole. Ah me! I've been a great sufferer in my day."

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

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

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

"Forty-three."

Almost immediately Mrs. Dang caught at the pause for a case in point that 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 the crevice 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 the reeky water.

"Henry," she said, rubbing up against the alpaca back to his vest like an 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, she directed her eyes straight into his.

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

"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 were full of new pins of light and his lightening intuition performed a miracle of understanding.

"Emmy!" he cried, jerking her so that her breath jumped, and at the sudden drench of tears down her face sat her down, supporting her roundish 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 not afraid."

He held her to his shoulder and let her tears rain down into his watch pocket, 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 this family. But I--I've wished."

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

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

"Emmy," he cried, dragging her tear-happy face up to his, "if you're afraid--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. Why afraid, Henry--if others dare it at--forty-three--You mean because it was 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 sure it'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 her yoke and she could hear his sobs with her heart.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps it was the tint of light out in her face, perhaps the splendor of 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, but ordered a hansom cab every day from three to four, Mrs. Jett alternating punctiliously with each of the boarding-house ladies for driving companion.

Every noon, for her delectation at luncheon, he sent a boy from the store with a carton of her special favorites--Blue Point oysters. She suddenly 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-determination as to sex. "Ann" was her choice, and he was all for canceling his preference for "Elizabeth," until one morning she awakened to the white light of inspiration.

"I have it! Why not Ann Elizabeth?"

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

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

Then came the inevitable time when Mrs. Jett lost interest. Quite out of a clear sky even the Blue Points were taboo, and instead of joining this or that card or sewing circle, there were long afternoons of stitching away 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 very fluid of her eyeballs, as it were, floated a school of fish. Small ones--young smelts, perhaps--with oval lips, fillips to their tails, and sides that glisted.