But she went to bed very early, to be absolutely certain of being on time at Regalberg"s Monday morning.
So began for Seth Appleby the haunted days when, drifting through the gray and ghostly city of winter, he scarce knew whether he was a real man or a ghost. Down prison corridors that the city calls streets, among Jewish and Italian firms of which he had never heard, he wandered aimlessly, asking with more and more diffidence for work, any kind of work. His shoes were ground down at the heel, now, and cracked open on one side. In such footgear he dared not enter a shoe-store, his own realm, to ask for work that he really could do. As his December drifted toward Christmas like a rudderless steamer in a fog, the cold permitted him to seek for work only an hour or two a day, for he had no overcoat and his coat was very thin. Seth Appleby didn"t think of himself as one of the rank of paupers, but rather as a man who didn"t have an overcoat.
He had the grippe, and for a week he never left the house. While Mother proudly carried on the money-earning he tried to do the house-work. With unskilled hands he swept--leaving snags of dirt in the corners; he washed--breaking a dish now and then; he even got down on protesting sore knees and sloshed around in an attempt at scrubbing the knotty, splintery floor. He tried to cook dinner and breakfast, but his repertoire consisted of frying--fried eggs, fried bacon, fried bread, fried pork chops, which Mother pretended to like, though they gave her spasms of indigestion. In the richest city in the world he haggled with abusive push-cart peddlers over five cents" worth of cabbage. He was patient, but wrinkled with hopelessness.
With two warm days in succession, and the grippe gone, Father found work as a noontime waiter in a piggery on Third Avenue, where contractors"
workmen devoured stew and sour coffee, and the waiters rushed gaspingly about in filthy white ap.r.o.ns. After the lunch hour he washed dishes in soapy water that quickly changed from white to grease-filmed black. For this he received fifty cents a day and his lunch. He hid the depressing fact of such employment from Mother, but religiously saved the daily fifty cents to give to her at Christmas. He even walked for an hour after each lunch, to get the smell of grease out of his clothes, lest she suspect.... A patient, quiet, anxious, courteous, little aging man, in a lunch-room that was noisy as a subway, nasty as a sewer excavation.
Without admitting it to himself, he had practically given up the search for work. After Christmas--something would happen, he didn"t know what.
Anyway, they wouldn"t go back to their daughter"s prison-place unless Mother became ill.
He discovered the life of idle men in New York--not the clubmen, but those others. Shabby, shuffling, his coat-collar turned up and secured with a safety-pin, he poked through Tompkins Square, on sunny days, or talked for hours to hoboes who scorned him as a man without experience of brake-beam and rods, of hoboes" hangouts and the Munic.i.p.al Lodging House.
When it was too cold to sit in the park, he tried to make himself respectable of aspect, by turning down his coat-collar and straightening his streaky tie, before he stalked into the Tompkins Square branch of the public library, where for hours he turned over the pages of magazines on whose text he could concentrate less each day that he was an outcast accepting his fate. When he came out, the cold took him like the pain of neuralgia, and through streets that were a smear of snow and dust and blackened remains of small boys" bonfires he shuffled off with timorous rapidity, eying shop windows full of cheap bread, cheap cakes, cheap overcoats, cheap novels on the joy of being poor, all too expensive for him.
Clean and upright and longing to be merry in a dour world, he sank down among the spotted, the shiftless, the worthless. But perhaps when he struck bottom--
He was not quite beaten. He never varied in the wistful welcome he gave to Mother when she dragged herself home from work. But with an increasing humbleness he accepted her as the master of the house, and she unconsciously took the role. She petted him and comforted him and worked for him. She announced, with the gaiety that one uses with a dependent small boy, that they would have a wonderful party on Christmas Eve, and with the animation of a dependent child he begged her to tell him about it.
CHAPTER XI
The day before Christmas--an anxious day in Regalberg"s department store, where the "extra help" were wondering which of them would be kept on. Most of them were given dismissals with their pay-envelopes.
Mother"s fate was not decided. She was told to report on the following Monday; the toy-department would be reduced, but possibly they would find a place for her in the children"s dresses department, for the January white sale.... At the very least, they would be glad to give her an excellent recommendation, the buyer told her. More distraught than one stunned by utter hopelessness and ruin, she came home and, as Father had once been wont to do for her, she made her face bright to deceive him.
Under her arm she carried a wonderful surprise, a very large bundle.
Father was agitated about it when she plumped gaily into their housekeeping room. At last she let him open it. He found an overcoat, a great, warm, high-collared overcoat.
He had an overcoat--an overcoat! He could put it on, any time, and go about the streets without the pinned coat-collar which is the sign of the hobo. He could walk all day, looking for a job--warm and prosperous.
He could find work and support Mother. He had an overcoat! He was a gentleman again!
With tears, he kissed her, lingeringly, then produced his own present, which he had meant to keep till Christmas Day itself. It was seven dollars, which he had earned as waiter at the piggery.
"And we"re going out and have dinner on it, too," he insisted.
"Yes, yes; we will. We"ve been economizing--so much!"
But before they went they carefully cached in the window-box the cabbage he had cooked for dinner.
With a slow luxurious joy in every movement he put on the overcoat. Even in the pocket in which he stuck the seven Christmas dollars he had a distinct pleasure, for his undercoat pockets were too torn, too holey, to carry anything in them. They went prancing to the Hungarian restaurant. They laughed so much that Father forgot to probe her about the overcoat, and did not learn that she had bought it second-hand, for three dollars, and had saved the three dollars by omitting lunch for nearly four weeks.
They had a table at the front of the restaurant, near the violin. They glowed over soup and real meat and coffee. There were funny people at the next table--a man who made jokes. Something about the "Yiddisher gavotte," and saying, "We been going to dances a lot, but last night the wife and I wanted to be quiet, so I bought me two front seats for Grant"s Tomb!" It was tremendous. Father and Mother couldn"t make many jokes, these days, but they listened and laughed. The waiter remembered them; they had always tipped him ten cents; he kept coming back to see if there was anything they wanted, as though they were important people.
Father thanked her for the overcoat in what he blithely declared to be Cape Cod dialect, and toasted her in coffee. They were crammed with good cheer when Mother paid the check from a dollar she had left over, and they rose from the table.
Father stood perplexedly gazing at the hat-rack behind them. He gasped, "Why, where--Why, I hung it----"
He took down his old hat with a pathetic, bewildered hesitancy, and he whispered to Mother, "My overcoat is gone--it"s been stolen--my new overcoat. Now I can"t go out and get a job--"
They cried out, and demanded rest.i.tution of the waiter, the head-waiter, the manager. None of these officials could do more than listen and ask heavy questions in bad English and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e, "Somebody stole it from right behind you there when you weren"t looking."
One of the guests dramatically said that he had seen a man who looked suspicious, and for a moment every one paid attention to him, but that was all the information he had. The other guests gazed with apathetic interest, stirring their coffee and grunting one to another, "He ought to watched it."
The manager pointed at one of the signs, "This restaurant is not responsible for the loss of hats, coats, or packages," and he shouted, "I am very sorry, but we can do nuttin". Somebody stole it from right behind you there--no one was looking. If you leaf your name and address--"
Father didn"t even hear him. He was muttering to himself, "And the seven dollars that I saved for Sarah was in it."
He took Mother"s arm; he tried to walk straight as he turned his back on the storm of windy words from the manager.
Once they were away from spectators, on dark Fifteenth Street, Father threw up his hands and in a voice of utter agony he mourned, "I can"t do anything more. I"m clean beaten. I"ve tried, and I"ve looked for work, but now-- Be better if I went and jumped in the river."
She took his arm and led him along, as though he were a child and helpless. She comforted him as well as she could, but there was nothing very convincing to say. As she grew silent her thoughts grew noisy. They shouted separate, hard, brutal sentences, so loudly that she could not hear even the sc.r.a.ping feet of the stooped man beside her. They clamored:
"I can"t do anything more, either.
"I don"t believe I will be kept on at the store, after all. Only through January, anyway.
"All the money we"ve got now is the nine dollars they gave me to-day.
"Suppose that"s been stolen, too, from our room.
"Suppose I died.
"What would happen to Father if I died? He"d have to go--some dreadful place--poor-house or some place--
"What would happen to me if he died? I"d be so lonely I couldn"t stand it. He"s always been so dear to me.
"That clerk in the book-department that died from asphyxiation--I wonder if it was accident, after all. They said so, but she was so unhappy and all when she talked to me at lunch.
""Better jump in the river." That would be cold and he hasn"t got an overcoat. No, of course, that wouldn"t make any difference--
"I wonder if gas suicide hurts much?
"If we could only die together and neither of us be left--
"G.o.d wouldn"t call that suicide--oh, He couldn"t, not when there"s two people that n.o.body wants and they don"t ask anything but just to be together. That n.o.body really wants--my daughter don"t--except maybe the Tubbses. And they are so poor, too. n.o.body needs us and we just want to find a happy way to go off together where we can sleep! Oh, I wouldn"t think that would be wrong, would it?"
They were at home. She hastened to burrow among the pile of stewpans for the nine dollars, her week"s salary, which she had hidden there. When she found that it was safe, she didn"t care so much, after all. What difference would it have made if the money had been gone?
Father staggered like a drunkard to one of the flimsy, straight, uncomfortable chairs. But he got himself up and tried to play on the mouth-organ a careless tune of gra.s.sy hills and a summer breeze. While he played he ridiculed himself for such agony over the loss of an overcoat, but his philosophizing didn"t mean anything. He had lost the chance of finding work when he had lost the overcoat. He couldn"t really think, and the feeble trickle of music had a tragic absurdity. He petulantly threw the mouth-organ on the bed, then himself slumped on the coverlet. His face was grayly hopeless, like ashes or dust or the snow of great cities.
Mother had been brooding. She was only distantly conscious of his final collapse. She said, suddenly, bluntly: "Let"s go away together. If we could only die while we are still together and have some nice things to remember--"
Hers was the less conventional mind of the two. He protested--but it was a feeble mumble. The world had come to seem unreal; the question of leaving it rather unimportant.