Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole

"I guess you're right, Rudolph; but how I had plans for that girl, papa can tell you, Marcus! You're a good boy, Marcus, and she's got her heart set on you; but I--I hate it how everybody can talk now--something to talk about for them all!" "They should talk!" said Mr. Katzenstein, lighting a cigar. "And talk and talk!" "What I ordered embroidered linens enough for five rooms now I don't know, Birdie! If you want him I say you should have him--but how I had plans for that girl!" "I'll work for her, all right, Mrs. Katzenstein. It will be five rooms before you know it--this don't mean, Mrs. Katzenstein--maw!--that I won't ever get up." "Kiss me, Marcus," said Mrs. Katzenstein. "That she should be happy is all I care." "Now, Marcus, we'll go up and see Mamma Gump." "Get ready, little Birdie," he said. "Good night, Marcus! You're a good boy, and you'll be good to our baby. Even if she ain't got it so grand, she's got a good husband--that's more than Meena Ginsburg's got." "Run along, you children," said Mr. Katzenstein. "Here, Marcus, put a cigar in your pocket--one of Goldstein's ten-cent specials." "I don't smoke, paw," said Marcus. He went out, his arm linked in Birdie's. Their laughter drifted backward. Mrs. Katzenstein resumed her chair in the warm glow of the logs--her full face, with the scallop of double chin, was suddenly old and lined; her husband drew up his curved-back rocker beside her. "Mamma, you shouldn't take on so. Everything comes for the best." "You can talk, papa! Now I had even told Mrs. Ginsburg for sure she should have one of those Ninety-sixth Street apartments." "You women folks make me sick! You should be glad we got our health, mamma, and good men for our girls." "I guess you're right, papa. He's a grand young man!" "A good boy--_ach_, how tired I am!" "Stretch out your feet, papa. It's warm by the fire." The light flickered over their faces and sent long shadows wavering and dancing back of them. Mr. Katzenstein settled deeper in his chair; his head, bald on top and with a fringe of bristles over the ears, was hunched down between his shoulders. "You've been a good mother, Salcha." "Not such a mother as you've been a father--me and them girls never wanted for one thing, even when you couldn't afford it as now." "Ah--ho!" sighed Mr. Katzenstein. "You're tired, papa, and it's late. Here, I'll unlace your shoes for you." "No; in a minute I go to bed--such a back-ache!" "She's got a good man; and, like you say, that's the main thing," repeated Mrs. Katzenstein, intent on self-conviction. "It ain't always the money." "_Ya, ya!_" said Mr. Katzenstein. "Look at us when we was down on Grand Street! We was happy--You remember that green-plush dress I had, papa?" "Yes, Salcha." "Don't go to sleep sitting there, papa; you'll take cold." Mr. Katzenstein's fingers, that were never straight, closed over the veined back of his wife's hand. "In a minute I go to bed." "If she had known what was coming when he asked her last night it might be different; but now it's too late, and everything is for the best." "Yes, mamma." "She's happy--and that's the main thing." "Time flies," he said, with his eyes on the flames. "Only yesterday she was a baby!" "Ain't it so, papa? We had 'em, and we suffered for 'em, and now we give 'em up; that's what it means to raise a family." "Salcha," he said, his fingers stroking hers gently, "we're getting old--ain't it, old lady?" "Yes," she said, rocking rhythmically; "twenty-eight years now! We've had good times, and we've had bad times." "Good--and--bad--times," he repeated. They watched the flames. After a while Mr. Katzenstein's head fell forward on his chest and he dozed lightly. The clock ticked somberly and with increasing loudness; twice it traveled its circle, and twice it tonged the hour. The gas-logs burned steadily and kept the shadows dancing. Off somewhere a dog bayed; a creak, which is one of the noises that belong solely to after midnight, came from the direction of one of the windows. Mr. Katzenstein woke with a start and jerked his head up. "Mamma!" he cried, dazed with sleep. "Mamma! Birdie! Mamma!" "Yes, papa," she replied, smiling at him and with her hand still beneath his; "I'm here." BREAKERS AHEAD In the ink-blue shrieking trail of the twenty-two-hour Imperial flyer, Slateville lay stark alongside the singing tracks as if hurtled there like a spark off a speed-hot emery wheel. The Imperial flyer swooped through the dun-colored village like the glance of a lovely coquette shoots through her victim's heart and leaves it bare. At eight-one the far-off Imperial voice hallooed through the darkness like a conquering hero whose vanguard is a waving sword which flashes in the sunlight before he and his steed come up out of the horizon. At eight-four a steam yodel shook the panes and lamp-chimneys of Slateville, a semaphore studded with a ruby stiffened out against the sky, and a white eye--the size of a bicycle-wheel--flashed down the tracks. Then the howl of a fiend, and a mile-long checkerboard of lighted car-windows, and cinders rattling against them like hail. A fire-boweled engine with a grimy-faced demon leaning out of his red-hot cab, and, on every alternate night, a green eye with a black pupil which winked a signal from that same heat-roaring cab and from a dirt-colored frame shanty in a dirt-brown yard, where a naked tree stretched its thin arms against the sky, an answering eye which gleamed through a bandana-bound lantern and outlined the Hebe-like silhouette of a woman in the window. Then the flash of a mahogany-lined dining-car with nodding _vis-a-vis_, pink-shaded candles and white-coated, black-faded genii of the bowl and weal; an occasional vague figure peering through cupped hands out from an electric-lighted berth; a plate-glass observation-car with figures lounging in shallow leather chairs like oil-kings and merchant princes and only sons in a Fifth Avenue club, and a great trailing plume of smoke that lingered for a moment and died in the still tingling air. For a full half-hour, even an hour, after the Imperial flyer had gouged through the village the yellow lights of Slateville burned on behind its unwashed windows, which were half opaque with train-dust and the grimy finger-prints of children. Then they began to flick out, here, there--here, there. In a slate-roofed shanty beside the quarry, in an out-of-balance bookkeeper's office in the Slateville Varnish Factory, in the Red Trunk general store and post-office, the parson's study, a maiden's bedroom, in the dirt-colored frame house, another slate-roofed shanty beside the quarry, another, and yet another. Here, there--here, there. The clerk in the signal-tower slumped in his chair, the doctor's tin-tired buggy rattled up a hilly street that was shaped like a crooked finger, and away beyond the melancholy stretches of close-bitten grazing-land and runty corn-fields the flyer shrieked upward, and the miles scuttled the echoes back to Slateville. On an alternate night that was as singingly still as the inside of a cup the flyer tore through the village with the cinders tattooing against its panes and the white eye searching like a near-sighted cylcopean monster. But from the red fireman's cab the green lantern with the black bull's-eye painted on the outward side dangled unlit, and in the dirt-colored house, behind drawn shades, the Hebe-like figure was crouched in another woman's arms, and, in the room adjoining, John Blaney lay dead with a dent in his head. Who-o-o-p! Who-o-o-p! "Listen, Cottie, listen!" "'Sh-h-h-h, darlin'." The crouching women crouched closer together, a dove-note in the crooning voice of one like the coo of a mate. "'Sh-h-h, darlin'." "There it goes, Cottie. Gawd, just like nothing had happened." "'Sh-h-h, dearie; lay still!" "Listen. The engine's playin' a different tune on the tracks; it's lighter and smoother." "Yes--yes--'sh-h-h." "Just hear, Cottie; they got the old diner on. I know her screech." "I hear, dearie." "And the Cleveland sleeper wasn't touched, neither. Hear her. They say she didn't even leave the tracks. He used to say she had a rattle like a dice-box. Just the same, it was the smooth-runnin' Washington sleeper lit on the engine. Listen, Cottie, oh, listen! Just like nothin' had happened." "Don't tremble so, darlin'. That's life every time--it just rides over its dead." "He hated the flyer, oh--oh--" "Don't take on so, Della darlin'. He died on his job." "He hated the flyer; he--" "He could have jumped like Jim Dirkey did, and lived to face the shame of it, but he died on his job. You can always say your man died on his job, Della darlin'." Della raised her crouching head and brushed the hair back from her eyes. Helen's face that launched a thousand ships was no more fair. "That he did--didn't he, Cottie? He died on his job." "Sure he did, darlin'--sure he did." "You remember--you remember, Cottie, the first night they put him on the flyer?" "Try to forget it, Della, and don't go gettin' all excited--there--there." "I was over home that night with you and maw, and--and he came in for supper with the news and--and he was like a funeral about bein' promoted." "Yes, I remember." "Even with the extra pay he was for stickin' to the accommodation, because he loved her insides." "And because it was a chance to spite you." "But I--I was all for the flyer. I told him he was afraid of her speed, and he hauled off and nearly hit me for callin' him a coward before you and maw, and you up and--" "He was rough with you, Della, but he wouldn't 'a' dared do it with me there. I had him bluffed, all righty; he wouldn't 'a' done it with me and maw there." "Lots maw would 'a' cared. Poor maw! She never knew nothing else but abuse, herself." "Paw wasn't so bad, Della--he always brought home the envelope." "John--he made me eat the words when we got home that night; but, just the samey, he--he wouldn't 'a' took the Imperial, Cottie, if I hadn't nagged him to it--he wouldn't have!" "Well, what if he wouldn't? You wouldn't 'a' married him, neither, if he hadn't nagged you to it when paw died, and he knew you had a stepmother that was devilin' and abusin' the life out of us--you." "He used to say, when he came home with a face as black as a crazy devil's, that coaling the flyer was just like stoking hell. She ate and ate and bellowed for more. He hated the flyer, he did. He stoked her with more hate than coal, and I drove him to it, Cottie. I put the hole in his head." "Aw, no, dearie! Nobody ever made John Blaney do nothing he didn't want to do. He's dead now and can't take up for hisself, but he was hard as nails--even if he was my brother-in-law." "'Sh-h-h, Cottie, little sister." "I always say, Della, Gawd knows I ain't got a cinch! I hate the factory like I hate a green devil, and you know what it is to live around maw's doggin' and abuse, but it's like I tole Joe the other night: I wouldn't marry the finest man livin' before I'd had my chance to try out what I had my heart set on. I told him he could save his breath. I'm goin' to take a chance on gettin' out of this dump--not on tyin' up to it." "Joe's a good boy, Cottie. He's a saint alongside of what John was. Steady fellows and foremen ain't layin' around loose, dearie. He's a good boy, Cottie--none finer." "Della! You ain't--" "No; I ain't urgin' you, Cottie. I ain't sayin' you're not right to hold off, but Joe's the finest boy in these parts, ain't he?" "That ain't sayin' much. You wasn't a big-enough gambler, Della. You