She said, in a mincing, artificial voice: “I kin recommend the roast beef. It’s kinda good here. And the creamed peas, and the mashed potatoes. And they got razberry short-cake, too, tonight, with whip cream. Coffee’s good, too. Best in town.”
The gaslights spit and hissed; the heat seemed to increase. There was a swinging door at the rear, which, upon opening, emitted the bass roar of a Greek cook, and the overpowering effluvium of frying grease. Frank could see Myrtle more clearly in this glare of steaming light. Her fair hair had black roots; her lips were as purple as plums, and the homemade black velvet hat faced with rose-colored velveteen was obviously put together over a frame of uncertain cardboard. The brim had a wavy effect. The gray suit was spotted. There were many “Woolworth” bangles of greening yellow metal clattering about her wrists. The skin of her face was so overlaid with rice powder and thick red paint that it had a canvas-like appearance, through which sweat had made seams and cracks. Her features were small, even delicate, but so cunning, so stupid, that their delicacy was lost, and had become degradation.
It was impossible. He must leave this horror at once, this filthly little corruption! And then he saw her neck.
What a thin, young, vulnerable and pathetic neck, so childlike, so tender, so unbearable in its appeal. Frank could not look away. The painful stir which he had felt before now became intolerable in its immensity. Why, that was the neck of a little girl, a little hungry waif, an innocent and defenseless child! There was a rope of ten-cent pearls about it, twisted with black velvet, but this only enhanced its touching pathos. Frank wanted to stroke that neck, to cry out something, to turn away. The emotion in himself was new, or, rather, it was renewed. He had felt this way so often when he was younger, and he had hoped, and believed, that he was done with it. It had no crippling and softening place in his life any longer. It was a chasm in the road he had set out to walk. He must pass over it, no matter how difficult that might be. He set his teeth. He said: “I’ll have what you have, Myrt.” And he would not look at her neck again. His hands knotted into fists under the oilcoth.
CHAPTER 34
The meat had a hot and acrid taste; the gravy was rancid. The mashed potatoes were soap-suds, solidified. The “creamed peas” tasted of soda and sour milk. The coffee was pure chicory, black and bitter, in which the alleged cream floated in semi-solid little wafers. Frank ate a mouthful or two, gagged, sat back to watch Myrtle devour the horrid mess with gusto and an almost ravenous appetite. When she saw him watching her, she assumed great daintiness, but let him glance away and she fell upon the mess like a starving wolf. She drank milk, three or four glasses of it, not with appetite and pleasure but with a kind of grim determination. “If you don’t like it, why drink it?” he asked. Her eyes sidled away. “Gotta,” she muttered.
Had she tuberculosis? She was scrawny, and her skin, where it was not caked with powder, had a bluish look. But there was no hectic tinge to it. Anaemic, then. But milk was not the thing for anaemia. Frank heard his mother’s firm, dogmatic voice: “Iron! Blaud’s pills. Iron.” He wondered, with dry amusement, if he ought to buy a bottle of Blaud’s pills for Myrtle.
While she ate, he studied the restaurant and its diners. This, then, was poverty. He had been surrounded by poor people all his life, laborers, mechanics, miserable artisans, washerwomen and teamsters. But never before had the poor so impinged upon him, and with such acute and stinging disgust. Had he been blinded by childish unawareness, or that sickening compassion of which he had once been a victim? He did not know. He only knew that when he looked upon these animal-like faces, these dirty shirts stained with sweat, these empty eyes and thick dull mouths, these cracked, soiled hands and black nails, he was filled with loathing and hatred. He heard the loud, empty guffaws all about him. He caught snatches of hoarse conversation. They sounded like the grunts, squeals, bellows, of animals. Could one honestly believe that these creatures belonged to the heroic human race, these women with flat, piggish features and frizzed hair, these men whose every glance was ox-like and blunted? Look at that man there, whose thick wet hair of an ugly tan shade grew far down on his forehead so that the peak almost met his scraggy eyebrows. The back of his head was as flat as though it had been pressed with a board. His neck was bull-like. His mouth was flabby, half-open, his nose was wide and bulging, and his eyes, tiny, porcine and lightless, kept staring at his fat companion’s breast. Was this a man? Had this monster a soul? A soul!
“An’ I said to him, I says, ‘Why, you bastard, I coulda beat you ten to one at that bowlin’ match if I hadn’ta had eight glasses of beer just afore!’” His female companion growled an affectionate affirmative. “Even if he was the foreman, I said it to him, right out, and the—hadda shut his trap.”
“They gotta, these days,” a short and enormously fat man at another table joined in. “We gottem on the run, these days. Gotta kiss our behinds, or out we walk. And where’ll they git more hands? That’s what I’d like to know. Yep, we gottem on the run. They gotta raise us ten cents more an hour, and cut down the work-week. That’s what our union’s gonna tell ’em next week. You guys oughta git yoursel’s a union. Nothin’ like it. The war’s gonna last three years more, at least; that’s what they tell us, and they gotta have us workin’ for ’em, all the rich bastards.”
His lady companion shook her head dolefully. “I heard different. The war’ll soon be over,” she said.
She was greeted by a chorus of angry hoots. “Shut yer trap!” “You’re a damn fool, Maisie!” “Whadaya know, anyway? I got it straight it’s gonna last three years! Hope so, anyways. Why, the Huns’re stronger than ever!”
The others bellowed and squealed emphatically, nodding their heads. “War’s gonna last! Maybe five years, if we’re lucky.”
Frank stared at them grimly, these creatures who dared believe they were his fellows. These men voted. They were the masses. They formed seventy-five percent of the population in all nations. These were the enemies of civilization.
Again, from out of his subconsciousness rose Miss Bendy’s voice: “The world is full of lightless, dull and hidden souls, like moles, Frank. When you are older, and you travel, you’ll find them everywhere, in every village and town and city, on every farm. You’ll find these blind eyes and these clay-covered hearts, these thick grunting tongues and these paw-like hands. They are the Terror, Frank, and we must do something about them. But what?”
Frank stood up abruptly. “Are you finished, Myrtle?” he asked.
Myrtle started, hastily wiped her mouth on her soiled handkerchief, and rose.
Frank hurried ahead of her, his flesh crawling at the proximity of these beasts, these depravities. He stood on the gritty sidewalk outside, and looked at the dirty, noisy street clattering under its lamplight. Myrtle reached him, smiled brightly. “Well, guess we oughta go to my place, huh?” She looked up at him coyly, and simpered.
He said involuntarily, out of his disgust: “Myrtle, did you hear them, in there? They want the war to go on forever, just so they can make big wages in the war plants.”
Her face changed, and now it was old and withdrawn, and her eyes shifted. “Yeh. I heard ’em. You’d wanta hate ’em, maybe? Maybe that’s what you think, thinkin’ about all the boys that’re dyin’. But then you think, too: ‘This is the first time they ever ate regular, and the first time they ever had a little cash in their pockets, and they could feel that they wasn’t—wasn’t—just horses. And they gotta place to live, for once, that they wouldn’t be thrown out of, the first of the month.’ That’s what you gotta think. If you said to Johnny, back there: ‘Say, you want the boys to die so that you can make forty dollars a week?’ Johnny’d say no, damn fast, and maybe punch you in the jaw. They don’t want the boys to die. They only want to eat.”
She sighed. “It’s kinda terrible, ain’t it, that the only time they kin eat is when kids die?” She waited for him to speak, and then when he did not, she added: “I heard Lloyd shootin’ off his mouth about tellin�
�� his foreman off. It makes him feel kinda good that for once he’s got the upper hand, and that he’s a man, too.”
Lloyd! Another one of the horrible names which the illiterates affect! Frank’s first reaction was to the name, his second, to Myrtle’s words. “A man!” Why did not some public benefactor rise up and teach these creatures that manhood was not implicit in telling one’s foreman “off,” but in self-respect and dignity, in an inner pride that set a human being on the high road to self-improvement? Instead, the newspapers pretended to find pathos in the American workingman’s new and passionate penchant for silk shirts, and spoke with maudlin sentimentality of his delusion that “big” words, arrogant behavior and lavish spending meant that he had acquired importance. “They do not know,” said one columnist with a sigh, “that wealthy and important men do not wear silk shirts or throw their money away recklessly.” But there was no one to tell them this. Their monkey-like antics provoked tender smiles and foolish defenses from those who ought to have known better.
The glaring lamplight shone on dull passing faces, on little shifting eyes, on brutal, ape-like features, and Frank’s disgust rose to hot rage. He had forgotten Myrtle; when she touched his arm, he shied from her as though struck.
“I live here,” she simpered, pointing to a couple of dirty windows above a closed shop. Frank glanced up automatically. He saw filthy whitish curtains bellying out into the breezy night. There was a faint glimmer of lamplight behind them.
“I gotta ask you to wait a coupla minutes,” said Myrtle. “Gotta straighten up things a little first. Then I’ll yell down the stairs and you kin come up. O.K.?”
Frank was relieved. Once let the little horror out of his sight, and he would take to his heels. He hesitated. He looked down at her small painted face, and something was squeezed in him. He put his hand in his pocket. Then he withdrew it. He watched her as she opened the door on a black staircase, saw her flash him a provocative smile, and disappear. He heard her heels clacking on the wood, heard an upper door open. Somewhere an infant wailed, was hushed.
He stood on the street. A trolley crashed by, faces pressed against the lighted windows. A gusty wind blew up the street, filled with dust and chaff. A gramophone shrieked that a long, long trail was winding into a land of dreams. There was a distant thunder, a splintering noise, a clicking and a clacking. A bowling alley near-by. Next door, a saloon, through its swinging doors, emitted the stench of stale beer and a snatch of hoarse song. Two young soldiers, putteed and giggling, swaggered down the street, struck matches, lit cigarettes. One began to sing:
“Over there, over there,
Say a prayer, for the boys
Over there—!”
The other said something obscene, and they both giggled like schoolgirls leaving the classroom. Frank watched them until they disappeared under the dusty trees. Now all the disgust and hatred slowly sank away from him, leaving a hollow emptiness behind, a kind of sickness. They were hardly older than himself, those boys. Surely he did not pity them for the threat of death that hung over them. He did not pity them for their youth, for he was young himself. The pity had no name.
“Say a prayer, for the boys, over there—” No, say a prayer for all the boys “over here,” everywhere in the world. Say a prayer for youth eternally and inevitably betrayed, not by the world, but by its own dreams, by time, by mere living. If one could only die while one still believed—Believed what? He could not remember. What had he ever believed? There was a golden fog hanging between his present self and the child he had been, and he could not see through it.
Why was he standing here, aching like a fool from what cause he did not know? He had believed he was all finished with aching, with longing, with yearning. He looked at the black stairs up which Myrtle had disappeared. If he did not hurry, she would return, and he would be embarrassed, for he had no desire to accompany her to her room. He began to walk away. Then, impelled by what could only have been curiosity, he returned and crept silently up the stairway. He did not know why he did this. Was it to discover whether Myrtle had a previous customer, to sink himself in another scene of degradation? There was a dim light showing under the door at the head of the stairs. The door was not quite closed. He pushed it open slowly, and looked within.
In one swift glance he saw the wretched room, the tumbled bed, the littered dresser, the two wooden rocking-chairs. He saw the yellow gaslight hanging from a calcimined ceiling. There was another door opposite, near which stood a gross fat old woman, reminiscent of Mrs. Watson. She stood there, half-turned from Frank, her arms folded across an immense bosom. She began to speak sourly: “Well, you better get some money, that’s all. I let you run a week. He’d better have some money, that’s all. Hurry up. You can’t keep a feller waitin’ too long, and I got to get my sleep. I’ll only keep the kid to twelve o’clock. Got to visit a frien’ tonight.”
Then Frank saw Myrtle near one of the windows. She was sitting on a stool, her back to him. She was nursing an infant. Her frail body was bent over the child in an arch of tenderness. Frank saw the full profile of her breast, against which the baby had pressed its eager, sucking lips. Myrtle still wore her hat. In her haste, she had not even removed her gray jacket. Her legs were bowed, to accommodate the weight of the child on her thighs. She crooned wordlessly.
The old woman snorted: “Don’t see why you don’t give the kid to an orphanage, or sumpin’. Get better raisin’ than you can give it. An’ you won’t be tied down. You can git a job that pays regular wages.”
Myrtle lifted her head sharply. Frank could see her profile, stark, terrified, full of rage. “I won’t give my baby up! They’ll adopt him out, and I won’t never see him ag’in! This way I kin take care of him days, and support him nights! I won’t give him up!”
The old woman shrugged. She chewed on a wad of gum indifferently. “Well, you do what you want. No use givin’ advice to fools. That damn bastard shoulda married you before he went overseas and got himself kilt. You oughta had more sense.”
Myrtle began to cry. “They sent him away too soon. We was goin’ to git married. And then they sent him away.” Suddenly she hugged the baby to her frantically, fiercely. “But I got Floyd! I got my baby, and his! And I’m gonna hang on to him!”
Again the harridan snorted. “Fine life you’ll be givin’ him. His mother a common whore.”
“I ain’t! I ain’t!” cried Myrtle vehemently. “When I’m done nursin’ him I’ll git someone to take care of him regular, and I’ll work. I don’t do this for money for my own self. I do it for Floyd! And I ain’t a whore.”
Tears ran down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, and sniffled like a child. The baby continued to suck contentedly. Myrtle sobbed.
“I had a good job in a rest’runt. I kin get it back, when I’m done nursin’ him. But he needs me for another coupla months. Then I kin get help.”
Frank closed the door which he had opened. He stood in the darkness. He felt sweat on his forehead, felt it trickling down his back, for the stairway was very warm. He heard the dull sick beating of his heart. He put his hand in his pocket He knew to the last bill what he had there. Fifteen dollars. He had intended to take the money to the bank tomorrow. He bent down cautiously and slipped the bills under the door. Then, holding his breath, he went down the stairway and into the street.
He had gone three blocks before he cursed himself for a fool. What had betrayed him once again into that weakening, that shameful, compassion? Fifteen dollars! Ten minutes ago he had been fifteen dollars nearer freedom, a strong full step. But he had stepped backward. For what? He berated himself the rest of the way home. Less than half an hour ago he had seen clearly and honestly. Now his sight had become murky, if only for a few moments, and he had joined the sentimental jackasses who encouraged the inferior in their bestial state.
What had he thought in his folly, there on the staircase? That Myrtle might stay in peace with her baby for one night, for two nights! But the thi
rd night? God damn it, he said to himself. What does it matter about the Myrtles and their horrible little “Floyds”! They were the weaklings, the rejected of life, the offal of humanity.
Engaged with furious thoughts, he was surprised to see that he had reached his home on Albany Street. Every window glowed with gaslight, and the shades, contrary to Maybelle’s usual custom, were not drawn. In less stressful moments he would have paused to consider this extraordinary phenomenon. But now he felt only a revulsion against entering that hot, neat little house, there to be greeted by his mother’s angry nagging about his absence.
The evening wind was dusty, and it carried with it the scent of drying horse manure and heated asphalt and cabbage. Somewhere, too, a housewife was making her winter supply of catsup, and now all the other odors were suddenly swamped in the fine rich scent of spices and stewing tomatoes. Frank was conscious that he was still hungry then. He heard the tall heavy elms near the sidewalk muttering to themselves. He hesitated.
Then he walked carefully to the rear of his home and entered the yard. Here it was dark and cooler. Francis had worked for many hard years in his garden of an evening and on his days off. He had borders of red and white roses along the wooden fence, a bed of mint and parsley and thyme, and another bed of his favorite flower, pansies. The grass, too, had been carefully tended, until it was thick plush under Frank’s feet. In the very center of the yard stood the catalpa tree he had planted. When had he planted it? The golden fog between himself and his boyhood thinned, and through its wavering bright mist he saw himself as a child of—eight? Nine? Ten? He could not remember, but he did remember that it was Arbor Day, and each child at the school had been given a whip of a young tree for planting. He saw himself in full and splendid sunlight, his father beside him, the early spring wind in their faces, the sky above the color of a brilliant amethyst. Francis plunged the spade deep into the brown earth, in the very center of the yard. Frank saw earth thrown aside, full of writhing worms, their bodies red and wriggling. Now water was poured into the deep hole, and then Frank was allowed to set his tree in it. Francis carefully spread the roots. Frank took up the spade and tenderly threw the earth back onto those roots, and gently tamped it down. It was such a small tree. Planted, it was no higher than the little boy, just a whip, barren-branched, vulnerable and very young, bending in the wind.
There Was a Time Page 28
