"Mud in your eye," she said.
They drank. He put down his gla.s.s and took up the heavy suitcases.
"Got to get a train around six," he said.
She followed him down the hall. There was a song, a song that Mrs. Martin played doggedly on the phonograph, running loudly through her mind. She had never liked the thing.
"Night and daytime.
Always playtime.
Ain"t we got fun?"
At the door he put down the bags and faced her.
"Well," he said. "Well, take care of yourself. You"ll be all right, will you?"
"Oh, sure," she said.
He opened the door, then came back to her, holding out his hand.
" "By, Haze," he said. "Good luck to you."
She took his hand and shook it.
"Pardon my wet glove," she said.
When the door had closed behind him, she went back to the pantry.
She was flushed and lively when she went in to Mrs. Martin"s that evening. The Boys were there, Ed among them. He was glad to be in town, frisky and loud and full of jokes. But she spoke quietly to him for a minute.
"Herbie blew today," she said. "Going to live out west."
"That so?" he said. He looked at her and played with the fountain pen clipped to his waistcoat pocket.
"Think he"s gone for good, do you?" he asked.
"Yeah," she said. "I know he is. I know. Yeah."
"You going to live on across the hall just the same?" he said. "Know what you"re going to do?"
"Gee, I don"t know," she said. "I don"t give much of a d.a.m.n."
"Oh, come on, that"s no way to talk," he told her. "What you need-you need a little snifter. How about it?"
"Yeah," she said. "Just straight."
She won forty-three dollars at poker. When the game broke up, Ed took her back to her apartment.
"Got a little kiss for me?" he asked.
He wrapped her in his big arms and kissed her violently. She was entirely pa.s.sive. He held her away and looked at her.
"Little tight, honey?" he asked, anxiously. "Not going to be sick, are you?"
"Me?" she said. "I"m swell."
II.
When Ed left in the morning, he took her photograph with him. He said he wanted her picture to look at, up in Utica. "You can have that one on the bureau," she said.
She put Herbie"s picture in a drawer, out of her sight. When she could look at it, she meant to tear it up. She was fairly successful in keeping her mind from racing around him. Whisky slowed it for her. She was almost peaceful, in her mist.
She accepted her relationship with Ed without question or enthusiasm. When he was away, she seldom thought definitely of him. He was good to her; he gave her frequent presents and a regular allowance. She was even able to save. She did not plan ahead of any day, but her wants were few, and you might as well put money in the bank as have it lying around.
When the lease of her apartment neared its end, it was Ed who suggested moving. His friendship with Mrs. Martin and Joe had become strained over a dispute at poker; a feud was impending.
"Let"s get the h.e.l.l out of here," Ed said. "What I want you to have is a place near the Grand Central. Make it easier for me."
So she took a little flat in the Forties. A colored maid came in every day to clean and to make coffee for her-she was "through with that housekeeping stuff," she said, and Ed, twenty years married to a pa.s.sionately domestic woman, admired this romantic uselessness and felt doubly a man of the world in abetting it.
The coffee was all she had until she went out to dinner, but alcohol kept her fat. Prohibition she regarded only as a basis for jokes. You could always get all you wanted. She was never noticeably drunk and seldom nearly sober. It required a larger daily allowance to keep her misty-minded. Too little, and she was achingly melancholy.
Ed brought her to Jimmy"s. He was proud, with the pride of the transient who would be mistaken for a native, in his knowledge of small, recent restaurants occupying the lower floors of shabby brownstone houses; places where, upon mentioning the name of an habitue friend, might be obtained strange whisky and fresh gin in many of their ramifications. Jimmy"s place was the favorite of his acquaintances.
There, through Ed, Mrs. Morse met many men and women, formed quick friendships. The men often took her out when Ed was in Utica. He was proud of her popularity.
She fell into the habit of going to Jimmy"s alone when she had no engagement. She was certain to meet some people she knew, and join them. It was a club for her friends, both men and women.
The women at Jimmy"s looked remarkably alike, and this was curious, for, through feuds, removals, and opportunities of more profitable contacts, the personnel of the group changed constantly. Yet always the newcomers resembled those whom they replaced. They were all big women and stout, broad of shoulder and abundantly breasted, with faces thickly clothed in soft, high-colored flesh. They laughed loud and often, showing opaque and l.u.s.terless teeth like squares of crockery. There was about them the health of the big, yet a slight, unwholesome suggestion of stubborn preservation. They might have been thirty-six or forty-five or anywhere between.
They composed their t.i.tles of their own first names with their husbands" surnames-Mrs. Florence Miller, Mrs. Vera Riley, Mrs. Lilian Block. This gave at the same time the solidity of marriage and the glamour of freedom. Yet only one or two were actually divorced. Most of them never referred to their dimmed spouses; some, a shorter time separated, described them in terms of great biological interest. Several were mothers, each of an only child-a boy at school somewhere, or a girl being cared for by a grandmother. Often, well on towards morning, there would be displays of kodak portraits and of tears.
They were comfortable women, cordial and friendly and irrepressibly matronly. Theirs was the quality of ease. Become fatalistic, especially about money matters, they were unworried. Whenever their funds dropped alarmingly, a new donor appeared; this had always happened. The aim of each was to have one man, permanently, to pay all her bills, in return for which she would have immediately given up other admirers and probably would have become exceedingly fond of him; for the affections of all of them were, by now, unexacting, tranquil, and easily arranged. This end, however, grew increasingly difficult yearly. Mrs. Morse was regarded as fortunate.
Ed had a good year, increased her allowance and gave her a sealskin coat. But she had to be careful of her moods with him. He insisted upon gaiety. He would not listen to admissions of aches or weariness.
"Hey, listen," he would say, "I got worries of my own, and plenty. n.o.body wants to hear other people"s troubles, sweetie. What you got to do, you got to be a sport and forget it. See? Well, slip us a little smile, then. That"s my girl."
She never had enough interest to quarrel with him as she had with Herbie, but she wanted the privilege of occasional admitted sadness. It was strange. The other women she saw did not have to fight their moods. There was Mrs. Florence Miller who got regular crying jags, and the men sought only to cheer and comfort her. The others spent whole evenings in grieved recitals of worries and ills; their escorts paid them deep sympathy. But she was instantly undesirable when she was low in spirits. Once, at Jimmy"s, when she could not make herself lively, Ed had walked out and left her.
"Why the h.e.l.l don"t you stay home and not go spoiling everybody"s evening?" he had roared.
Even her slightest acquaintances seemed irritated if she were not conspicuously light-hearted.
"What"s the matter with you, anyway?" they would say. "Be your age, why don"t you? Have a little drink and snap out of it."
When her relationship with Ed had continued nearly three years, he moved to Florida to live. He hated leaving her; he gave her a large check and some shares of a sound stock, and his pale eyes were wet when he said good-by. She did not miss him. He came to New York infrequently, perhaps two or three times a year, and hurried directly from the train to see her. She was always pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go.
Charley, an acquaintance of Ed"s that she had met at Jimmy"s, had long admired her. He had always made opportunities of touching her and leaning close to talk to her. He asked repeatedly of all their friends if they had ever heard such a fine laugh as she had. After Ed left, Charley became the main figure in her life. She cla.s.sified him and spoke of him as "not so bad." There was nearly a year of Charley; then she divided her time between him and Sydney, another frequenter of Jimmy"s; then Charley slipped away altogether.
Sydney was a little, brightly dressed, clever Jew. She was perhaps nearest contentment with him. He amused her always; her laughter was not forced.
He admired her completely. Her softness and size delighted him. And he thought she was great, he often told her, because she kept gay and lively when she was drunk.
"Once I had a gal," he said, "used to try and throw herself out of the window every time she got a can on. Jee-zuss," he added, feelingly.
Then Sydney married a rich and watchful bride, and then there was Billy. No-after Sydney came Ferd, then Billy. In her haze, she never recalled how men entered her life and left it. There were no surprises. She had no thrill at their advent, nor woe at their departure. She seemed to be always able to attract men. There was never another as rich as Ed, but they were all generous to her, in their means.
Once she had news of Herbie. She met Mrs. Martin dining at Jimmy"s, and the old friendship was vigorously renewed. The still admiring Joe, while on a business trip, had seen Herbie. He had settled in Chicago, he looked fine, he was living with some woman-seemed to be crazy about her. Mrs. Morse had been drinking vastly that day. She took the news with mild interest, as one hearing of the s.e.x peccadilloes of somebody whose name is, after a moment"s groping, familiar.
"Must be d.a.m.n near seven years since I saw him," she commented. "Gee. Seven years."
More and more, her days lost their individuality. She never knew dates, nor was sure of the day of the week.
"My G.o.d, was that a year ago!" she would exclaim, when an event was recalled in conversation.
She was tired so much of the time. Tired and blue. Almost everything could give her the blues. Those old horses she saw on Sixth Avenue-struggling and slipping along the car-tracks, or standing at the curb, their heads dropped level with their worn knees. The tightly stored tears would squeeze from her eyes as she teetered past on her aching feet in the stubby, champagne-colored slippers.
The thought of death came and stayed with her and lent her a sort of drowsy cheer. It would be nice, nice and restful, to be dead.
There was no settled, shocked moment when she first thought of killing herself; it seemed to her as if the idea had always been with her. She pounced upon all the accounts of suicides in the newspapers. There was an epidemic of self-killings-or maybe it was just that she searched for the stories of them so eagerly that she found many. To read of them roused rea.s.surance in her; she felt a cozy solidarity with the big company of the voluntary dead.
She slept, aided by whisky, till deep into the afternoons, then lay abed, a bottle and gla.s.s at her hand, until it was time to dress to go out for dinner. She was beginning to feel towards alcohol a little puzzled distrust, as toward an old friend who has refused a simple favor. Whisky could still soothe her for most of the time, but there were sudden, inexplicable moments when the cloud fell treacherously away from her, and she was sawed by the sorrow and bewilderment and nuisance of all living. She played voluptuously with the thought of cool, sleepy retreat. She had never been troubled by religious belief and no vision of an after-life intimidated her. She dreamed by day of never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen and admire, of never more being a good sport. Never.
But how would you do it? It made her sick to think of jumping from heights. She could not stand a gun. At the theater, if one of the actors drew a revolver, she crammed her fingers into her ears and could not even look at the stage until after the shot had been fired. There was no gas in her flat. She looked long at the bright blue veins in her slim wrists-a cut with a razor blade, and there you"d be. But it would hurt, hurt like h.e.l.l, and there would be blood to see. Poison-something tasteless and quick and painless-was the thing. But they wouldn"t sell it to you in drugstores, because of the law.
She had few other thoughts.
There was a new man now-Art. He was short and fat and exacting and hard on her patience when he was drunk. But there had been only occasionals for some time before him, and she was glad of a little stability. Too, Art must be away for weeks at a stretch, selling silks, and that was restful. She was convincingly gay with him, though the effort shook her.
"The best sport in the world," he would murmur, deep in her neck. "The best sport in the world."
One night, when he had taken her to Jimmy"s, she went into the dressing-room with Mrs. Florence Miller. There, while designing curly mouths on their faces with lip-rouge, they compared experiences of insomnia.
"Honestly," Mrs. Morse said, "I wouldn"t close an eye if I didn"t go to bed full of Scotch. I lie there and toss and turn and toss and turn. Blue! Does a person get blue lying awake that way!"
"Say, listen Hazel," Mrs. Miller said, impressively, "I"m telling you I"d be awake for a year if I didn"t take veronal. That stuff makes you sleep like a fool."
"Isn"t it poison, or something?" Mrs. Morse asked.
"Oh, you take too much and you"re out for the count," said Mrs. Miller. "I just take five grains-they come in tablets. I"d be scared to fool around with it. But five grains, and you cork off pretty."
"Can you get it anywhere?" Mrs. Morse felt superbly Machiavellian.
"Get all you want in Jersey," said Mrs. Miller. "They won"t give it to you here without you have a doctor"s prescription. Finished? We"d better go back and see what the boys are doing."
That night, Art left Mrs. Morse at the door of her apartment; his mother was in town. Mrs. Morse was still sober, and it happened that there was no whisky left in her cupboard. She lay in bed, looking up at the black ceiling.
She rose early, for her, and went to New Jersey. She had never taken the tube, and did not understand it. So she went to the Pennsylvania Station and bought a railroad ticket to Newark. She thought of nothing in particular on the trip out. She looked at the uninspired hats of the women about her and gazed through the smeared window at the flat, gritty scene.
In Newark, in the first drug-store she came to, she asked for a tin of talc.u.m powder, a nailbrush, and a box of veronal tablets. The powder and the brush were to make the hypnotic seem also a casual need. The clerk was entirely unconcerned. "We only keep them in bottles," he said, and wrapped up for her a little gla.s.s vial containing ten white tablets, stacked one on another.
She went to another drug-store and bought a face-cloth, an orange-wood stick, and a bottle of veronal tablets. The clerk was also uninterested.
"Well, I guess I got enough to kill an ox," she thought, and went back to the station.
At home, she put the little vials in the drawer of her dressing-table and stood looking at them with a dreamy tenderness.
"There they are, G.o.d bless them," she said, and she kissed her fingertip and touched each bottle.
The colored maid was busy in the living-room.
"Hey, Nettie," Mrs. Morse called. "Be an angel, will you? Run around to Jimmy"s and get me a quart of Scotch."
She hummed while she awaited the girl"s return.
During the next few days, whisky ministered to her as tenderly as it had done when she first turned to its aid. Alone, she was soothed and vague, at Jimmy"s she was the gayest of the groups. Art was delighted with her.
Then, one night, she had an appointment to meet Art at Jimmy"s for an early dinner. He was to leave afterward on a business excursion, to be away for a week. Mrs. Morse had been drinking all the afternoon; while she dressed to go out, she felt herself rising pleasurably from drowsiness to high spirits. But as she came out into the street the effects of the whisky deserted her completely, and she was filled with a slow, grinding wretchedness so horrible that she stood swaying on the pavement, unable for a moment to move forward. It was a gray night with spurts of mean, thin snow, and the streets shone with dark ice. As she slowly crossed Sixth Avenue, consciously dragging one foot past the other, a big, scarred horse pulling a rickety express-wagon crashed to his knees before her. The driver swore and screamed and lashed the beast insanely, bringing the whip back over his shoulder for every blow, while the horse struggled to get a footing on the slippery asphalt. A group gathered and watched with interest.
Art was waiting, when Mrs. Morse reached Jimmy"s.
"What"s the matter with you, for G.o.d"s sake?" was his greeting to her.
"I saw a horse," she said. "Gee, I-a person feels sorry for horses. I-it isn"t just horses. Everything"s kind of terrible, isn"t it? I can"t help getting sunk."
"Ah, sunk, me eye," he said. "What"s the idea of all the bellyaching? What have you got to be sunk about?"
"I can"t help it," she said.
"Ah, help it, me eye," he said. "Pull yourself together, will you? Come on and sit down, and take that face off you."
She drank industriously and she tried hard, but she could not overcome her melancholy. Others joined them and commented on her gloom, and she could do no more for them than smile weakly. She made little dabs at her eyes with her handkerchief, trying to time her movements so they would be unnoticed, but several times Art caught her and scowled and shifted impatiently in his chair.
When it was time for him to go to his train, she said she would leave, too, and go home.
"And not a bad idea, either," he said. "See if you can"t sleep yourself out of it. I"ll see you Thursday. For G.o.d"s sake, try and cheer up by then, will you?"
"Yeah," she said. "I will."
In her bedroom, she undressed with a tense speed wholly unlike her usual slow uncertainty. She put on her nightgown, took off her hair-net and pa.s.sed the comb quickly through her dry, vari-colored hair. Then she took the two little vials from the drawer and carried them into the bathroom. The splintering misery had gone from her, and she felt the quick excitement of one who is about to receive an antic.i.p.ated gift.