"Do you like it, Charley? It's that checked jacket I bought at Hamlin's sale last year made over."
"Say, it's classy! You look like all the money in the world, honey."
"Huh, two yards of coat-lining, forty-four cents, and Ida Bell's last year's office-hat reblocked, sixty-five."
"You're the show-piece of the town, all right. Come on; let's pick up a crowd and muss-up Claxton Road a little."
"I meant what I said, Charley. After the cuttings-up of last night and the night before I'm quits. Maybe Charley Cox can afford to get himself talked about because he's Charley Cox, but a girl like me with a job to hold down, and the way ma and Ida Bell were sitting up in their nightgowns, green around the gills, when I got home last night—nix! I'm getting myself talked about, if you want to know it, running with—your gang, Charley."
"I'd like to see anybody let out so much as a grunt about you in front of me. A fellow can't do any more, honey, to show a girl where she stands with him than ask her to marry him—now can he? If I'd have had my way last night, I'd—"
"You was drunk when you asked me, Charley."
"You mean you got cold feet?"
"Thank God, I did!"
"I don't blame you, girl. You might do worse—but not much."
"That's what you'd need for your finishing-touch, a girl like me dragging you down."
"You mean pulling me up."
"Yes, maybe, if you didn't have a cent."
"I'd have enough sense then to know better than to ask you, honey. You 'ain't got that fourteen-carat look in your eye for nothing. You're the kind that's going to bring in a big fish, and I wish it to you."
"Lots you know."
"Come on; let me ride you around the block, then."
"If—if you like my company so much, can't you just take a walk with me or come out and sit on our steps awhile?"
"Lord, girl, Flamm Avenue is hot enough to fry my soul to-night!"
"We can't all have fathers that live in thirty-room houses out inKingsmoreland Place."
"Thank God for that! I sneaked home this morning to change my clothes, and thought maybe I'd got into somebody's mausoleum by mistake."
"Was—was your papa around, Charley?"
"In the library, shut up with old man Brookes."
"Did he—did he see the morning papers? You know what he said last time,Charley, when the motor-cycle cop chased you down an embankment."
"Honey, if my old man was to carry out every threat he utters, I'd be disinherited, murdered, hong-konged, shanghaied, and cremated every day in the year."
"I got to go now, Charley."
"Not let a fellow even spin you home?"
"You know I want to, Charley, but—but it don't do you any good, boy, being seen with me in that joy-wagon of yours. It—it don't do you any good, Charley, ever—ever being seen with me."
"There's nothing or nobody in this town can hurt my reputation, honey, and certainly not my ace-spot girl. Turn your mind over, and telephone down for me to come out and pick you up about eight."
"Don't hit it up to-night, Charley. Can't you go home one evening?"
He juggled her arm.
"You're a nice little girl, all righty."
"There's my car."
He elevated her by the elbow to the step, swinging up half-way after her to drop a coin into the box.
"Take care of this little lady there, conductor, and don't let your car skid."
"Oh, Charley—silly!"
She forced her way into the jammed rear platform, the sharp brim of the red sailor creating an area for her.
"S'long, Charley!"
"S'long, girl!"
Wedged there in the moist-faced crowd, she looked after him, at his broad back receding. An inclination to cry pressed at her eyeballs.
Flamm Avenue, which is treeless and built up for its entire length with two-story, flat-roofed buildings, stares, window for window, stoop for stoop, at its opposite side, and, in summer, the strip of asphalt street, unshaded and lying naked to the sun, gives off such an effluvium of heat and hot tar that the windows are closed to it and night descends like a gas-mask to the face.
Opening the door upon the Hassiebrock front room, convertible from bed- to sitting-room by the mere erect-position-stand of the folding-bed, a wave of this tarry heat came flowing out, gaseous, sickening. Miss Hassiebrock entered with her face wry, made a diagonal cut of the room, side-stepping a patent rocker and a table laid out with knickknacks on a lace mat, slammed closed two windows, and, turning inward, lifted off her hat, which left a brand across her forehead and had plastered down her hair in damp scallops.
"Whew!"
"Lo-o, that you?"
"Yes, ma."
"Come out to your supper. I'll warm up the kohlrabi."
Miss Hassiebrock strode through a pair of chromatic portières, with them swinging after her, and into an unlit kitchen, gray with dusk. A table drawn out center and within range of the gas-range was a blotch in the gloom, three figures surrounding it with arms that moved vaguely among a litter of dishes.
"I wish to Heaven somebody in this joint would remember to keep those front windows shut!"
Miss Ida Bell Hassiebrock, at the right of the table, turned her head so that, against the window, her profile, somewhat thin, cut into the gloom.
"There's a lot of things I wish around here," she said, without a ripple to her lips.
"Hello, ma!"
"I'll warm up the kohlrabi, Loo."
Mrs. Hassiebrock, in the green black of a cotton umbrella and as sparse of frame, moved around to the gas-range, scraping a match and dragging a pot over the blue flame.
"Never mind, ma; I ain't hungry."
At the left of the table Genevieve Hassiebrock, with thirteen's crab-like silhouette of elbow, rigid plaits, and nose still hitched to the star of her nativity, wound an exceedingly long arm about Miss Hassiebrock's trim waist-line.
"I got B in de-portment to-day, Loo. You owe me the wear of your spatsSunday."
Miss Hassiebrock squeezed the hand at her waist.
"All right, honey. Cut Loo a piece of bread."
"Gussie Flint's mother scalded her leg with the wash-boiler."
"Did she? Aw!"
Mrs. Hassiebrock came then, limping around, tilting the contents of the steaming pot to a plate.
"Sit down, ma; don't bother."
Miss Hassiebrock drew up, pinning a fringed napkin that stuck slightly in the unfolding across her shining expanse of shirtwaist. Broke a piece of bread. Dipped.
Silence.
"Paula Krausnick only got C in de-portment. When the monitor passed the basin, she dipped her sponge soppin'-wet."
"Anything new, ma?"
Mrs. Hassiebrock, now at the sink, swabbed a dish with gray water.
"My feet's killin' me," she said.
Miss Ida Bell, who wore her hair in a coronet wound twice round her small head, crossed her knife and fork on her plate, folded her napkin, and tied it with a bit of blue ribbon.
"I think it's a shame, ma, the way you keep thumping around in your stocking feet like this was backwoods."
"I can't get my feet in shoes—the joints—"
"You thump around as much as you darn please, ma. If Ida Bell don't like the looks of you, let her go home with some of her swell stenog friends. You let your feet hurt you any old way you want 'em to. I'm going to buy you some arnica. Pass the kohlrabi."
"Well, my swell 'stenog friends,' as you call them, keep themselves self-respecting girls without getting themselves talked about, and that's more than I can say of my sister. If ma had the right kind of gumption with you, she'd put a stop to it, all right."
Mrs. Hassiebrock leaned her tired head sidewise into the moist palm of her hand.
"She's beyond me and the days when a slipper could make her mind. I wisht to God there was a father to rule youse!"
"I tell you, ma—mark my word for it—if old man Brookes ever finds out I'm sister to any of the crowd that runs with Charley Cox and Willie Waxter and those boys whose fathers he's lawyer for, it'll queer me for life in that office—that's what it will. A girl that's been made confidential stenographer after only one year in an office to have to be afraid, like I am, to pick up the morning's paper."
"Paula Krausnick's lunch was wrapped in the paper where Charley Cox got pinched for speedin'—speedin'—speedin'—"
"Shut up, Genevieve! Just don't you let my business interfere with yours, Ida Bell. Brookes don't know you're on earth outside of your dictation-book. Take it from me, I bet he wouldn't know you if he met you on the street."
"That's about all you know about it! If you found yourself confidential stenographer to the biggest lawyer in town, he'd know you, all right—by your loud dressing. A blind man could see you coming."
"Ma, are you going to stand there and let her talk to me thataway? I notice she's willing to borrow my loud shirtwaists and my loud gloves and my loud collars."
"If ma had more gumption with you, maybe things would be different."
Mrs. Hassiebrock limped to the door, dangling a pail.
"I 'ain't got no more strength against her. My ears won't hold no more. I'm taking this hot oil down to Mrs. Flint's scalds. She's, beyond my control, and the days when a slipper could make her mind. I wisht to God there was a father! I wisht to God!"
Her voice trailed off and down a rear flight of stairs.
"Yessir," resumed Miss Hassiebrock, her voice twanging in her effort at suppression, "I notice you're pretty willing to borrow some of my loud dressing when you get a bid once in a blue moon to take a boat-ride up to Alton with that sad-faced Roy Brownell. If Charley didn't have a cent to his name and a harelip, he'd make Roy Brownell look like thirty cents."
"If Roy Brownell was Charley Cox, I'd hate to leave him laying around loose where you could get your hands on him."
"Genevieve, you run out and play."
"If—if you keep running around till all hours of the night, with me and ma waiting up for you, kicking up rows and getting your name insinuated in the newspapers as 'the tall, handsome blonde,' I—I'm going to throw up my job, I am, and you can pay double your share for the running of this flat. Next thing we know, with that crowd that don't mean any good to you, this family is going to find itself with a girl in trouble on its hands."
"You—"
"And if you want to know it, and if I wasn't somebody's confidential stenographer, I could tell you that you're on the wrong scent. Boys like Charley Cox don't mean good by your kind of a girl. If you're not speedy, you look it, and that's almost the same as inviting those kind of boys to—"
Miss Lola Hassiebrock sprang up then, her hand coming down in a small crash to the table.
"You cut out that talk in front of that child!"
Thus drawn into the picture, Genevieve, at thirteen, crinkled her face for not uncalculating tears.
"In this house it's fuss and fuss and fuss. Other children can go to the 'movies' after supper, only me-e-e—"
"Here, honey; Loo's got a dime for you."
"Sending that child out along your own loose ways, instead of seeing to it she stays home to help ma do the dishes!"
"I'll do the dishes for ma."
"It's bad enough for one to have the name of being gay without starting that child running around nights with—"
"Ida Bell!"
"You dry up, Ida Bell! I'll do what I pl—ease with my di—uhm—di—uhm."
"If you say another word about such stuff in front of that child, I'll—"
"Well, if you don't want her to hear what she sees with her eyes all around her, come into the bedroom, then, and I can tell you something that'll bring you to your senses."
"What you can tell me I don't want to hear."
"You're afraid."
"I am, am I?"
"Yes."
With a wrench of her entire body, Miss Lola Hassiebrock was across the room at three capacity strides, swung open a door there, and stood, head flung up and pressing back tears, her lips turned inward.
"All right, then—tell—"
After them, the immediately locked door resisting, Genevieve fell to batting the panels.
"Let me in! Let me in! You're fussin' about your beaux. Ray Brownell has a long face, and Charley Cox has a red face—red face—red face! Let me in! In!"
After a while the ten-cent piece rolled from her clenched and knocking fist, scuttling and settling beneath the sink. She rescued it and went out, lickety-clapping down the flight of rear stairs.
Silence descended over that kitchen, and a sooty dusk that almost obliterated the table, drawn out and cluttered after the manner of those who dine frowsily; the cold stove, its pots cloying, and a sink piled high with a task whose only ending is from meal to meal.
Finally that door swung open again; the wide-shouldered, slim-hipped silhouette of Miss Hassiebrock moved swiftly and surely through the kind of early darkness, finding out for itself a wall telephone hung in a small patch of hallway separating kitchen and front room. Her voice came tight, as if it were a tense coil in her throat that she held back from bursting into hysteria.
"Give me Olive, two-one-o." The toe of her boot beat a quick tattoo. "Stag?… Say, get me Charley Cox. He's out in front or down in the grill or somewhere around. Page him quick! Important!" She grasped the nozzle of the instrument as she waited, breathing into it with her head thrown back. "Hello—Charley? That you? It's me. Loo …Loo! Are you deaf, honey? What you doing?… Oh, I got the blues, boy; honest I have. Blue as a cat…. I don't know—just the indigoes. Nothing much. Ain't lit up, are you, honey?… Sure I will. Don't bring a crowd. Just you and me. I'll walk down to Gessler's drug-store and you can pick me up there…. Quit your kidding…. Ten minutes. Yeh. Good-by."
* * * * *
Claxton Inn, slightly outside the city limits and certain of its decorums, stands back in a grove off a macadamized highway that is so pliant to tire that of summer nights, with tops thrown back and stars sown like lavish grain over a close sky and to a rushing breeze that presses the ears like an eager whisper, motor-cars, wild to catch up with the horizon, tear out that road—a lightning-streak of them—fearing neither penal law nor Dead Man's Curve.
Slacking only to be slacked, cars dart off the road and up a gravel driveway that encircles Claxton Inn like a lariat swung, then park themselves among the trees, lights dimmed. Placid as a manse without, what was once a private and now a public house maintains through lowered lids its discreet white-frame exterior, shades drawn, and only slightly revealing the parting of lace curtains. It is rearward where what was formerly a dining-room that a huge, screened-in veranda, very whitely lighted, juts suddenly out, and a showy hallway, bordered in potted palms, leads off that. Here Discretion dares lift her lids to rove the gravel drive for who comes there.
In a car shaped like a motor-boat and as low to the ground Mr. Charley Cox turned in and with a great throttling and choking of engine drew up among the dim-eyed monsters of the grove and directly alongside an eight-cylinder roadster with a snout like a greyhound.
"Aw, Charley, I thought you promised you wasn't going to stop!"
"Honey, sweetness, I just never was so dry."
Miss Hassiebrock laid out a hand along his arm, sitting there in the quiet car, the trees closing over them.
"There's Yiddles Farm a little farther out, Charley; let's stop there for some spring water."
He was peeling out of his gauntlets, and cramming them into spacious side pockets.
"Water, honey, can wash me, but it can't quench me."
"No high jinks to-night, though, Charley?"
"Sure—no."
They high-stepped through the gloom, and finally, with firmer step, up the gravel walk and into the white-lighted, screened-in porch.
Three waiters ran toward their entrance. A woman with a bare V of back facing them, and three plumes that dipped to her shoulders, turned square in her chair.
"Hi, Charley. Hi, Loo!"
"H'lo, Jess!"
They walked, thus guided by two waiters, through a lightconfettiof tossed greetings, sat finally at a table half concealed by an artificial palm.
"You don't feel like sitting with Jess and the crowd, Loo?"
"Charley, hasn't that gang got you into enough mix-ups?"
"All right, honey; anything your little heart desires."
She leaned on her elbows across the table from him, smiling and twirling a great ring of black onyx round her small finger.
"Love me?"
"Br-r-r—to death!"
"Sure?"
"Sure. What'll you have, hon?"
"I don't care."
"Got any my special Gold Top on ice for me, George? Good. Shoot me a bottle and a special layout ofhors-d'oeuvre. How's that, sweetness?"
"Yep."
"Poor little girl," he said, patting the black onyx, "with the bad old blues! I know what they are, honey; sometimes I get crazy with 'em myself."
Her lips trembled.
"It's you makes me blue, Charley."
"Now, now; just don't worry that big, nifty head of yours about me."
"The—the morning papers and all. I—I just hate to see you going so to—to the dogs, Charley—a—fellow like you—with brains."
"I'm a bad egg, girl, and what you going to do about it? I was raised like one, and I'll die like one."
"You ain't a bad egg. You just never had a chance. You been killed with coin."
"Killed with coin! Why, Loo, do you know, I haven't had to ask my old man for a cent since my poor old granny died five years ago and left me a world of money? While he's been piling it up like the Rocky Mountains I've been getting down to rock-bottom. What would you say, sweetness, if I told you I was down to my last few thousands? Time to touch my old man, eh?"
He drank off his first glass with a quaff, laughing and waving it empty before her face to give off its perfume.
"My old man is going to wake up in a minute and find me on his checking-account again. Charley boy better be making connections with headquarters or he won't find himself such a hit with the niftiest doll in town, eh?"
"Charley, you—you haven't run through those thousands and thousands and thousands the papers said you got from your granny that time?"
"It was slippery, hon; somebody buttered it."
"Charley, Charley, ain't there just no limit to your wildness?"
"You're right, girl; I've been killed with coin. My old man's been too busy all these years sitting out there in that marble tomb in Kingsmoreland biting the rims off pennies to hold me back from the devil. Honey, that old man, even if he is my father, didn't know no more how to raise a boy like me than that there salt-cellar. Every time I got in a scrape he bought me out of it, filled up the house with rough talk, and let it go at that. It's only this last year, since he's short on health, that he's kicking up the way he should have before it got too late. My old man never used to talk it out with me, honey. He used to lash it out. I got a twelve-year-old welt on my back now, high as your finger. Maybe it'll surprise you, girl, but now, since he can't welt me up any more, me and him don't exchange ten words a month."
"Did—did he hear about last night, Charley? You know what came out in the paper about making a new will if—if you ever got pulled in again for rough-housing?"
"Don't you worry that nifty head of yours about my old man ever making a new will. He's been pulling that ever since they fired me from the academy for lighting a cigarette with a twenty-dollar bill."
"Charley!"
"Next to taking it with him, he'll leave it to me before he'll see a penny go out of the family. I've seen his will, hon."
"Charley, you—you got so much good in you. The way you sent that wooden leg out to poor old lady Guthrie. The way you made Jimmy Ball go home, and the blind-school boys and all. Why can't you get yourself on the right track where you belong, Charley? Why don't you clear—out—West where it's clean?"
"I used to have that idea, Loo. West, where a fellow's got to stand on his own. Why, if I'd have met a girl like you ten years ago, I'd have made you the baby doll of the Pacific Coast. I like you, Loo. I like your style and the way you look like a million dollars. When a fellow walks into a café with you he feels like he's wearing the Hope diamond. Maybe the society in this town has given me the cold shoulder, but I'd like to see any of the safety-first boys walk in with one that's got you beat. That's what I think of you, girl."
"Aw, now, you're lighting up. Charley. That's four glasses you've taken."
"Thought I was kidding you last night—didn't you—about wedding-bells?"
"You were lit up."
"I know. You're going to watch your step, little girl, and I don't know as I blame you. You can get plenty of boys my carat, and a lot of other things thrown in I haven't got to offer you."
"As if I wouldn't like you, Charley, if you were dead broke!"
"Of course you would! There, there, girl, I don't blame any of you for feathering your nest." He was flushed now and above the soft collar, his face had relaxed into a not easily controllable smile. "Feather your nest, girl; you got the looks to do it. It's a far cry from Flamm Avenue to where a classy girl like you can land herself if she steers right. And I wish it to you, girl; the best isn't good enough."
"I—I dare you to ask me again, Charley!"
"Ask what?"
"You know. Throw your head up the way you do when you mean what you say and—ask."
He was wagging his head now insistently, but pinioning his gaze with the slightly glassy stare of those who think none too clearly.
"Honest, I don't know, beauty. What's the idea?"
"Didn't you say yourself—Gerber, out here in Claxton that—magistrate that marries you in verse—"
"By gad, I did!"
"Well—I—I—dare you to ask me again, Charley."
He leaned forward.
"You game, girl?"
"Sure."
"No kidding?"
"Try me."
"I'm serious, girl."
"So'm I."
"There's Jess over there can get us a special license from his brother-in-law. Married in verse in Claxton sounds good to me, honey."
"But not—the crowd, Charley; just you—and—"
"How're we going to get the license, honey, this time of night without Jess? Let's make it a million-dollar wedding. We're not ashamed of nobody or nothing."
"Of course not, Charley."
"Now, you're sure, honey? You're drawing a fellow that went to the dogs before he cut his canines."
"You're not all to the canines yet, Charley."
"I may be a black sheep, honey, but, thank God, I got my golden fleece to offer you!"
"You're not—black."
"You should worry, girl! I'm going to make you the million-dollar baby doll of this town, I am. If they turn their backs, we'll dazzle 'em from behind. I'm going to buy you every gewgaw this side of the Mississippi. I'm going to show them a baby doll that can make the high-society bunch in this town look like Subway sports. Are you game, girl? Now! Think well! Here goes. Jess!"
"Charley—I—You—"
"Jess—over here! Quick!"
"Charley—honey—"
* * * * *
At eleven o'clock a small, watery moon cut through a sky that was fleecily clouded—a swift moon that rode fast as a ship. It rode over but did not light Squire Gerber's one-and-a-half-storied, weathered-gray, and set-slightly-in-a-hollow house on Claxton countryside.
Three motor-cars, their engines chugging out into wide areas of stillness, stood processional at the curb. A red hall light showed against the door-pane and two lower-story windows were widely illuminated.
Within that room of chromos and the cold horsehair smell of unaired years, silence, except for the singing of three gas-jets, had momentarily fallen, a dozen or so flushed faces, grotesquely sobered, staring through the gaseous fog, the fluttering lids of a magistrate whose lips habitually fluttered, just lifting from his book.
A hysterical catch of breath from Miss Vera de Long broke the ear-splitting silence. She reached out, the three plumes dipping down the bare V of her back, for the limp hand of the bride.
"Gawd bless you, dearie; it's a big night's work!"
* * * * *
In the tallest part of St. Louis, its busiest thoroughfares inclosing it in a rectangle, the Hotel Sherman, where traveling salesmen with real alligator bags and third-finger diamonds habitually shake their first Pullman dust, rears eighteen stories up through and above an aeriality of soft-coal smoke, which fits over the rim of the city like a skull-cap.
In the Louis Quinze, gilt-bedded, gilt-framed, gilt-edged bridal-suitede luxeon the seventeenth floor, Mrs. Charley Cox sat rigid enough and in shirt-waisted incongruity on the lower curl of a gilt divan that squirmed to represent the letter S.
"Charley—are you—sorry?"
He wriggled out of his dust-coat, tossing it on the gilt-canopied bed and crossed to her, lifting off her red sailor.
"Now that's a fine question for a ten-hours' wifey to ask her hubby, ain't it? Am I sorry, she asks me before the wedding crowd has turned the corner. Lord, honey, I never expected anything like you to happen to me!"
She stroked his coat-sleeve, mouthing back tears.
"Now everybody'll say—you're a goner—for sure—marrying a—Popular Store girl."
"If anybody got the worst of this bargain, it's my girl."
"My own boy," she said, still battling with tears.
"You drew a black sheep, honey, but I say again and again, 'Thank God, you drew one with golden fleece!'"
"That—that's the trouble, Charley—there's just no way to make a boy with money know you married him for any other reason."
"I'm not blaming you, honey. Lord! what have I got besides money to talk for me?"
"Lots. Why—like Jess says, Charley, when you get to squaring your lips and jerking up your head, there's nothing in the world you can't do that you set out to do."
"Well, I'm going to set out to make the stiff-necks of this town turn to look at my girl, all right. I'm going to buy you a chain of diamonds that'll dazzle their eyes out; I'm—"
"Charley, Charley, that's not what I want, boy. Now that I've got you, there ain't a chain of diamonds on earth I'd turn my wrist for."
"Yes, there is, girl; there's a string of pear-shaped ones in—"
"I want you to buck up, honey; that's the finest present you can give me. I want you to buck up like you didn't have a cent to your name. I want you to throw up your head the way you do when you mean business, and show that Charley Cox, without a cent to his name, would be—"
"Would be what, honey?"
"A winner. You got brains, Charley—if only you'd have gone through school and shown them. If you'd only have taken education, Charley, and not got fired out of all the academies, my boy would beat 'em all. Lord! boy, there's not a day passes over my head I don't wish for education. That's why I'm so crazy my little sister Genevieve should get it. I'd have took to education like a fish to water if I'd have had the chance, and there you were, Charley, with every private school in town and passed 'em up."
"I know, girl, just looks like every steer I gave myself was the wrong steer till it was too late to get in right again. Bad egg, I tell you, honey."
"Too late! Why, Charley—and you not even thirty-one yet? With your brains and all—too late! You make me laugh. If only you will—why, I'm game to go out West, Charley, on a ranch, where you can find your feet and learn to stand on them. You got stuff in you, you have. Jess Turner says you was always first in school, and when you set your jaw there wasn't nothing you couldn't get on top of. If you'd have had a mother and—and a father that wasn't the meanest old man in town, dear, and had known how to raise a hot-headed boy like you, you'd be famous now instead of notorious—that's what you'd be."
He patted her yellow hair, tilting her head back against his arm, pinching her cheeks together and kissing her puckered mouth.
"Dream on, honey. I like you crazy, too."
"But, honey, I—"
"You married this millionaire kid, and, bless your heart, he's going to make good by showing you the color of his coin!"
"Charley!"
She sprang back from the curve of his embrace, unshed tears immediately distilled.
"Why, honey—I didn't mean it that way! I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. What I meant was—'sh-h-h-h, Loo—all I meant was, it's coming to you. Where'd the fun be if I couldn't make this town point up its ears at my girl? Nobody knows any better than your hubby what his Loo was cut out for. She was cut out for queening it, and I'm going to see that she gets what's her due. Wouldn't be surprised if the papers have us already. Let's see what we'll give them with their coffee this morning."
He unfolded his fresh sheet, shaking it open with one hand and still holding her in the cove of his arm.
"Guess we missed the first edition, but they'll get us sure."
She peered at the sheet over his shoulder, her cheek against his and still sobbing a bit in her throat. The jerking of her breath stopped then; in fact, it was as if both their breathing had let down with the oneness of a clock stopped.
It was she who moved first, falling back from him, her mouth dropping open slightly.
He let the paper fall between his wide-spread knees, the blood flowing down from his face and seeming to leave him leaner.
"Charley—Charley—darling!"
"My—poor old man!" he said in a voice that might have been his echo in a cave.
"He—his heart must have give out on him, Charley, while he slept in the night."
"My—poor—old—man!"
She stretched out her hand timidly to his shoulder.
"Charley—boy—my poor boy!"
He reached up to cover her timid touch, still staring ahead, as if a mental apathy had clutched him.
"He died like—he—lived. Gad—it's—tough!"
"It—it wasn't your fault, darling. God forgive me for speaking against the dead, but—everybody knows he was a hard man, Charley—the way he used to beat you up instead of showing you the right way. Poor old man, I guess he didn't know—"
"My old man—dead!"
She crept closer, encircling his neck, and her wet cheek close to his dry one.
"He's at peace now, darling—and all your sins are forgiven—like you forgive—his."
His lips were twisting.
"There was no love lost there, girl. God knows there wasn't. There was once nine months we didn't speak. Never could have been less between a father and son. You see he—he hated me from the start, because my mother died hating him—but—dead—that's another matter. Ain't it, girl—ain't it?"
She held her cheek to his so that her tears veered out of their course, zigzagging down to his waistcoat, stroked his hair, placing her rich, moist lips to his eyelids.
"My darling! My darling boy! My own poor darling!"
Sobs rumbled up through him, the terrific sobs that men weep.
"You—married a rotter, Loo—that couldn't even live decent with his—old man. He—died like a dog—alone."
"'Sh-h-h, Charley! Just because he's dead don't mean he was any better while he lived."
"I'll make it up to you, girl, for the rotter I am. I'm a rich man now,Loo."
"'Sh-h-h!"
"I'll show you, girl. I can make somebody's life worth living. I'm going to do something for somebody to prove I'm worth the room I occupy, and that somebody's going to be you, Loo. I'm going to build you a house that'll go down in the history of this town. I'm going to wind you around with pearls to match that skin of yours. I'm going to put the kind of clothes on you that you read of queens wearing. I've seen enough of the kind of meanness money can breed. I'm going to make those Romans back there look like pikers. I'm—"
She reached out, placing her hand pat across his mouth, and, in the languid air of the room, shuddering so that her lips trembled.
"Charley—for God's sake—it—it's a sin to talk that way!"
"O God, I know it, girl! I'm all muddled—muddled."
He let his forehead drop against her arm, and in the long silence that ensued she sat there, her hand on his hair.
The roar of traffic, seventeen stories below, came up through the open windows like the sound of high seas, and from where she sat, staring out between the pink-brocade curtains, it was as if the close July sky dipped down to meet that sea, and space swam around them.
"O God!" he said, finally. "What does it all mean—this living and dying—"
"Right living, Charley, makes dying take care of itself."
"God! how he must have died, then! Like a dog—alone."
"'Sh-h-h, Charley; don't get to thinking."
Without raising his head, he reached up to stroke her arm.
"Honey, you're shivering."
"No-o."
"Everything's all right, girl. What's the use me trying to sham it's not. I—I'm bowled over for the minute, that's all. If it had to come, after all, it—it came right for my girl. With that poor old man out there, honey, living alone like a dog all these years, it's just like putting him from one marble mausoleum out there on Kingsmoreland Place into one where maybe he'll rest easier. He's better off, Loo, and—we—are too. Hand me the paper, honey; I—want to see—just how my—poor old man—breathed out."
Then Mrs. Cox rose, her face distorted with holding back tears, her small high heels digging into and breaking the newspaper at his feet.
"Charley—Charley—"
"Why, girl, what?"
"You don't know it, but my sister, Charley—Ida Bell!"
"Why, Loo, I sent off the message to your mama. They know it by now."
"Charley—Charley—"
"Why, honey, you're full of nerves! You mustn't go to pieces like this.Your sister's all right. I sent them a—"
"You—you don't know, Charley. My sister—I swore her an oath on my mother's prayer-book. I wouldn't tell, but, now that he's dead, that—lets me out. The will—Charley, he made it yesterday, like he always swore he would the next time you got your name on the front page."
"Made what, honey? Who?"
"Charley, can't you understand? My sister Ida Bell and Brookes—your father's lawyer. She's his private stenographer—Brookes's, honey. You know that. But she told me last night, honey, when I went home. You're cut off, Charley! Your old man sent for Brookes yesterday at noon. I swear to God, Charley! My sister Ida Bell she broke her confidence to tell me. He's give a million alone to the new college hospital. Half a million apiece to four or five old people's homes. He's give his house to the city with the art-gallery. He's even looked up relations to give to. He kept his word, honey, that all those years he kept threatening. He—he kept it the day before he died. He must have had a hunch—your poor old man. Charley darling, don't look like that! If your wife ain't the one to break it to you you're broke, who is? You're not 'Million Dollar Charley' no more, honey. You're just my own Charley, with his chance come to him—you hear,myCharley, with the best thing that ever happened to him in his life happening right now."
He regarded her as if trying to peer through something opaque, his hands spread rather stupidly on his wide knees.
"Huh?"
"Charley, Charley, can't you understand? A dollar, that puts him within the law, is all he left you."
"He never did. He never did. He wouldn't. He couldn't. He never did. I saw—his will. I'm the only survivor. I saw his will."
"Charley, I swear to God! I swear as I'm standing here you're cut off. My sister copied the new will on her typewriter three times and seen the sealed and stamped one. He kept his word. He wrote it with his faculties and witnesses. We're broke, Charley—thank God, we're flat broke!"
"He did it? He did it? My old man did it?"
"As sure as I'm standing here, Charley."
He fell to blinking rapidly, his face puckering to comprehend.
"I never thought it could happen. But I—I guess it could happen. I think you got me doped, honey."
"Charley, Charley!" she cried, falling down on her knees beside him, holding his face in the tight vise of her hands and reading with such closeness into his eyes that they seemed to merge into one. "Haven't you got your Loo? Haven't you got her?"
He sprang up at that, jerking her backward, and all the purple-red gushed up into his face again.
"Yes, by God, I've got you! I'll break the will. I'll—"
"Charley, no—no! He'd rise out of his grave at you. It's never been known where a will was broke where they didn't rise out of the grave to haunt."
He took her squarely by the shoulders, the tears running in furrows down his face.
"I'll get you out of this, Loo. No girl in God's world will have to find herself tied up to me without I can show her a million dollars every time she remembers that she's married to a rotter. I'll get you out of this, girl, so you won't even show a scratch. I'll—"
"Charley," she said, lifting herself by his coat lapels, and her eyes again so closely level with his, "you're crazy with the heat—stark, raving crazy! You got your chance, boy, to show what you're made of—can't you see that? We're going West, where men get swept out with clean air and clean living. We'll break ground in this here life for the kind of pay-dirt that'll make a man of you. You hear? A man of you!"
He lifted her arms, and because they were pressing insistently down, squirmed out from beneath them.
"You're a good sport, girl; nobody can take that from you. But just the same, I'm going to let you off without a scratch."
"'Good sport'! I'd like to know, anyways, where I come in with all your solid-gold talk. Me that's stood behind somebody-or-other's counter ever since I had my working-papers."
"I'll get you out of—"
"Have I ever lived anywheres except in a dirty little North St. Louis flat with us three girls in a bed? Haven't I got my name all over town for speed, just because I've always had to rustle out and try to learn how to flatten out a dime to the size of a dollar? Where do I come in on the solid-gold talk, I'd like to know. I'm the penny-splitter of the world, the girl that made the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store millinery department famous. I can look tailor-made on a five-dollar bill and a tissue-paper pattern. Why, honey, with me scheming for you, starting out on your own is going to make a man of you. You got stuff in you. I knew it, Charley, the first night you spied me at the Highlands dance. Somewhere out West Charley Cox is now going to begin to show 'em the stuff in Charley Cox—that's what Charley Cox & Co. are going to do!"
He shook his head, turning away his eyes to hide their tears.
"You been stung, Loo. Nothing on earth can change that."
She turned his face back to her, smiling through her own tears.
"You're not adding up good this morning, Mr. Cox. When do you think I called you up last night? When could it have been if not after my sister broke her confidence to tell me? Why do you think all of a sudden last night I seen your bluff through about Gerber? It was because I knew I had you where you needed me, Charley—I never would have dragged you down the other way in a million years, but when I knew I had you where you needed me—why, from that minute, honey, you didn't have a chance to dodge me!"
She wound her arms round him, trembling between the suppressed hysteria of tears and laughter.
"Not a chance, Charley!"
He jerked her so that her face fell back from him, foreshortened.
"Loo—oh, girl! Oh, girl!"
Her throat was tight and would not give her voice for coherence.
"Charley—we—we'll show 'em—you—me!"
Looking out above her head at the vapory sky showing through the parting of the pink-brocade curtains, rigidity raced over Mr. Cox, stiffening his hold of her.
The lean look had come out in his face; the flanges of his nose quivered; his head went up.
Over the silent places of the world flies the vulture of madness, pausing to wheel above isolated farm-houses, where a wife, already dizzy with the pressure of rarefied silence, looks up, magnetized. Then across the flat stretches, his shadow under him moving across moor and the sand of desert, slowing at the perpetually eastern edge of a mirage, brushing his actual wings against the brick of city walls; the garret of a dreamer, brain-sick with reality. Flopping, until she comes to gaze, outside the window of one so alone in a crowd that her four hall-bedroom walls are closing in upon her. Lowering over a childless house on the edge of a village.
Were times when Mrs. Hanna Burkhardt, who lived on the edge of a village in one such childless house, could in her fancy hear the flutter of wings, too. There had once been a visit to a doctor in High Street because of those head-noises and the sudden terror of not being able to swallow. He had stethoscoped and prescribed her change of scene. Had followed two weeks with cousins fifty miles away near Lida, Ohio, and a day's stop-over in Cincinnati allowed by her railroad ticket. But six months after, in the circle of glow from a tablelamp that left the corners of the room in a chiaroscuro kind of gloom, there were again noises of wings rustling and of water lapping and the old stricture of the throat. Across the table, a Paisley cover between them, Mr. John Burkhardt, his short spade of beard already down over his shirt-front, arm hanging lax over his chair-side and newspaper fallen, sat forward in a hunched attitude of sleep, whistling noises coming occasionally through his breathing. A china clock, the centerpiece of the mantel, ticked spang into the silence, enhancing it.
Hands in lap, head back against the mat of her chair, Mrs. Burkhardt looked straight ahead of her into this silence—at a closed door hung with a newspaper rack, at a black-walnut horsehair divan, a great sea-shell on the carpet beside it. A nickelplated warrior gleamed from the top of a baseburner that showed pink through its mica doors. He stood out against the chocolate-ocher wallpaper and a framed Declaration of Independence, hanging left. A coal fell. Mr. Burkhardt sat up, shook himself of sleep.
"Little chilly," he said, and in carpet slippers and unbuttoned waistcoat moved over to the base-burner, his feet, to avoid sloughing, not leaving the floor. He was slightly stooped, the sateen back to his waistcoat hiking to the curve of him. But he swung up the scuttle with a swoop, rattling coal freely down into the red-jowled orifice.
"Ugh, don't!" she said. "I'm burnin' up."
He jerked back the scuttle, returning to his chair, and, picking up the fallen newspaper, drew down his spectacles from off his brow and fell immediately back into close, puckered scrutiny of the printed page.
"What time is it, Burkhardt? That old thing on the mantel's crazy."
He drew out a great silver watch.
"Seven-forty."
"O God!" she said. "I thought it was about ten."
The clock ticked in roundly again except when he rustled his paper in the turning. The fire was crackling now, too, in sharp explosions. Beyond the arc of lamp the room was deeper than ever in shadow. Finally John Burkhardt's head relaxed again to his shirt-front, the paper falling gently away to the floor. She regarded his lips puffing out as he breathed. Hands clasped, arms full length on the table, it was as if the flood of words pressing against the walls of her, to be shrieked rather than spoken, was flowing over to him. He jerked erect again, regarding her through blinks.
"Must 'a' dozed off," he said, reaching down for his newspaper.
She was winding her fingers now in and out among themselves.
"Burkhardt?"
"Eh?"
"What—does a person do that's smotherin'?"
"Eh?"
"I know. That's what I'm doing. Smotherin'!"
"A touch of the old trouble, Hanna?"
She sat erect, with her rather large white hands at the heavy base to her long throat. They rose and fell to her breathing. Like Heine, who said so potently, "I am a tragedy," so she, too, in the sulky light of her eyes and the pulled lips and the ripple of shivers over her, proclaimed it of herself.
"Seven-forty! God! what'll I do, Burkhardt? What'll I do?"
"Go lay down on the sofa a bit, Hanna. I'll cover you with a plaid. It's the head-noises again bothering you."
"Seven-forty! What'll I do? Seven-forty and nothing left but bed."
"I must 'a' dozed off, Hanna."
"Yes; you must 'a' dozed off," she laughed, her voice eaten into with the acid of her own scorn. "Yes; you must 'a' dozed off. The same way as you dozed off last night and last month and last year and the last eight years. The best years of my life—that's what you've dozed off, John Burkhardt. He 'must 'a' dozed off,'" she repeated, her lips quivering and lifting to reveal the white line of her large teeth. "Yes; I think you must 'a' dozed off!"
He was reading again in stolid profile.
She fell to tapping the broad toe of her shoe, her light, dilated eyes staring above his head. She was spare, and yet withal a roundness left to the cheek and forearm. Long-waisted and with a certain swing where it flowed down into straight hips, there was a bony, Olympian kind of bigness about her. Beneath the washed-out blue shirtwaist dress her chest was high, as if vocal. She was not without youth. Her head went up like a stag's to the passing of a band in the street, or a glance thrown after her, or the contemplation of her own freshly washed yellow hair in the sunlight. She wore a seven glove, but her nails had great depth and pinkness, and each a clear half-moon. They were dug down now into her palms.
"For God's sake, talk! Say something, or I'll go mad!"
He laid his paper across his knee, pushing up his glasses.
"Sing a little something, Hanna. You're right restless this evening."
"'Restless'!" she said, her face wry. "If I got to sit and listen to that white-faced clock ticking for many more evenings of this winter, you'll find yourself with a raving maniac on your hands. That's how restless I am!" He rustled his paper again. "Don't read!" she cried. "Don't you dare read!"
He sat staring ahead, in a heavy kind of silence, breathing outward and passing his hand across his brow.
Her breathing, too, was distinctly audible.
"Lay down a bit, Hanna. I'll cover you—"
"If they land me in the bug-house, they can write on your tombstone when you die, 'Hanna Long Burkhardt went stark raving mad crazy with hucking at home because I let her life get to be a machine from six-o'clock breakfast to eight-o'clock bed, and she went crazy from it.' If that's any satisfaction to you, they can write that on your tombstone."
He mopped his brow this time, clearing his throat.
"You knew when we married, Hanna, they called me 'Silent' Burkhardt. I never was a great one for talking unless there was something I wanted to say."
"I knew nothin' when I married you. Nothin' except that along a certain time every girl that can gets married. I knew nothin' except—except—"
"Except what?"
"Nothin'."
"I've never stood in your light, Hanna, of having a good time. Go ahead. I'm always glad when you go up-town with the neighbor women of a Saturday evening. I'd be glad if you'd have 'em in here now and then for a little sociability. Have 'em. Play the graphophone for 'em. Sing. You 'ain't done nothin' with your singin' since you give up choir."
"Neighbor women! Old maids' choir! That's fine excitement for a girl not yet twenty-seven!"
"Come; let's go to a moving picture, Hanna. Go wrap yourself up warm."
"Movie! Oh no; no movie for me with you snorin' through the picture till I'm ashamed for the whole place. If I was the kind of girl had it in me to run around with other fellows, that's what I'd be drove to do, the deal you've given me. Movie! That's a fine enjoyment to try to foist off on a woman to make up for eight years of being so fed up on stillness that she's half-batty!"
"Maybe there's something showin' in the op'ry-house to-night."
"Oh, you got a record to be proud of, John Burkhardt: Not a foot in that opera-house since we're married. I wouldn't want to have your feelin's!"
His quietude was like a great, impregnable, invisible wall inclosing him.
"I'm not the man can change his ways, Hanna. I married at forty, too late for that."
"I notice you liked my pep, all righty, when I was workin' in the feed-yard office. I hadn't been in it ten days before you were hangin' on my laughs from morning till night."
"I do yet, Hanna—only you don't laugh no more. There's nothin' so fine in a woman as sunshine."
"Provided you don't have to furnish any of it."
"Because a man 'ain't got it in him to be light in his ways don't mean he don't enjoy it in others. Why, there just ain't nothin' to equal a happy woman in the house! Them first months, Hanna, showed me what I'd been missin'. It was just the way I figured it—somebody around like you, singin' and putterin'. It was that laugh in the office made me bring it here, where I could have it always by me."
"It's been knocked out of me, every bit of laugh I ever had in me; lemme tell you that."
"I can remember the first time I ever heard you, Hanna. You was standin" at the office window lookin' out in the yards at Jerry Sims unloadin' a shipment of oats; and little Old Cocker was standin' on top of one of the sacks barkin' his head off. I—"
"Yeh; I met Clara Sims on the street yesterday, back here for a visit, and she says to me, she says: 'Hanna Burkhardt, you mean to tell me you never done nothing with your voice! You oughta be ashamed. If I was your husband, I'd spend my last cent trainin' that contralto of yours. You oughtn't to let yourself go like this. Women don't do it no more.' That, from the tackiest girl that ever walked this town. I wished High Street had opened up and swallowed me."
"Now, Hanna, you mustn't—"
"In all these years never so much as a dance or a car-ride as far asMiddletown. Church! Church! Church! Till I could scream at the sight ofit. Not a year of my married life that 'ain't been a lodestone on my neck!Eight of' 'em! Eight!"
"I'm not sayin' I'm not to blame, Hanna. A woman like you naturally likes life. I never wanted to hold you back. If I'm tired nights and dead on my feet from twelve hours on 'em, I never wanted you to change your ways."
"Yes; with a husband at home in bed, I'd be a fine one chasin' around this town alone, wouldn't I? That's the thanks a woman gets for bein' self-respectin'."
"I always kept hopin', Hanna, I could get you to take more to the home."
"The home—you mean the tomb!"
"Why, with the right attention, we got as fine an old place here as there is in this part of town, Hanna. If only you felt like giving it a few more touches that kinda would make a woman-place out of it! It 'ain't changed a whit from the way me and my old father run it together. A little touch here and there, Hanna, would help to keep you occupied and happier if—"
"I know. I know what's comin'."
"The pergola I had built. I used to think maybe you'd get to putter out there in the side-yard with it, trailin' vines; the china-paintin' outfit I had sent down from Cincinnati when I seen it advertised in theUp-State Gazette; a spaniel or two from Old Cocker's new litter, barkin' around; all them things, I used to think, would give our little place here a feelin' that would change both of us for the better. With a more home-like feelin' things might have been different between us, Hanna."
"Keepin" a menagerie of mangy spaniels ain't my idea of livin'."
"Aw, now, Hanna, what's the use puttin' it that way? Take, for instance, it's been a plan of mine to paint the house, with the shutters green and a band of green shingles runnin' up under the eaves. A little encouragement from you and we could perk the place up right smart. All these years it's kinda gone down—even more than when I was a bachelor in it. Sunk in, kinda, like them iron jardinières I had put in the front yard for you to keep evergreen in. It's them little things, Hanna. Then that—that old idea of mine to take a little one from the orphanage—a young 'un around the—"
"O Lord!"
"I ain't goin' to mention it if it aggravates you, but—but makin' a home out of this gray old place would help us both, Hanna. There's no denyin' that. It's what I hoped for when I brought you home a bride here. Just had it kinda planned. You putterin' around the place in some kind of a pink apron like you women can rig yourselves up in and—"
"There ain't a girl in Adalia has dropped out of things the way I have, I had a singin' voice that everybody in this town said—"
"There's the piano, Hanna, bought special for it."
"I got a contralto that—"
"There never was anything give me more pleasure than them first years you used it. I ain't much to express myself, but it was mighty fine, Hanna, to hear you."
"Yes, I know; you snored into my singin' with enjoyment, all right."
"It's the twelve hours on my feet that just seem to make me dead to the world, come evening."
"A girl that had the whole town wavin' flags at her when she sung 'The Holy City' at the nineteen hundred street-carnival! Kittie Scogin Bevins, one of the biggest singers in New York to-day, nothing but my chorus! Where's it got me these eight years? Nowheres! She had enough sense to cut loose from Ed Bevins, who was a lodestone, too, and beat it. She's singing now in New York for forty a week with a voice that wasn't strong enough to be more than chorus to mine."
"Kittie Scogin, Hanna, is a poor comparison for any woman to make with herself."
"It is, is it? Well, I don't see it thataway. When she stepped off the train last week, comin' back to visit her old mother, I wished the whole depot would open up and swallow me—that's what I wished. Me and her that used to be took for sisters. I'm eight months younger, and I look eight years older. When she stepped off that train in them white furs and a purple face-veil, I just wished to God the whole depot would open and swallow me. That girl had sense. O God! didn't she have sense!"
"They say her sense is what killed Ed Bevins of shame and heartbreak."
"Say, don't tell me! It was town talk the way he made her toady to his folks, even after he'd been cut off without a cent. Kittie told me herself the very sight of the old Bevins place over on Orchard Street gives her the creeps down her back. If not for old lady Scogin, 'way up in the seventies, she'd never put her foot back in this dump. That girl had sense."
"There's not a time she comes back here it don't have an upsettin' influence on you, Hanna."
"I know what's upsettin' me, all right. I know!"
He sighed heavily.
"I'm just the way I am, Hanna, and there's no teachin' an old dog new tricks. It's a fact I ain't much good after eight o'clock evenin's. It's a fact—a fact!"
They sat then in a further silence that engulfed them like fog. A shift of wind blew a gust of dry snow against the window-pane with a little sleety noise. And as another evidence of rising wind, a jerk of it came down the flue, rattling the fender of a disused grate.
"We'd better keep the water in the kitchen runnin' to-night. The pipes'll freeze."
Tick-tock. Tick. Tock. She had not moved, still sitting staring above the top of his head. He slid out his watch, yawning.
"Well, if you think it's too raw for the movin' pictures, Hanna, I guess I'll be movin' up to bed. I got to be down to meet a five-o'clock shipment of fifty bales to-morrow. I'll be movin' along unless there's anything you want?"
"No—nothing."
"If—if you ain't sleepy awhile yet, Hanna, why not run over to WidowDinninger's to pass the time of evenin'? I'll keep the door on the latch."
She sprang up, snatching a heavy black shawl, throwing it over her and clutching it closed at the throat.
"Where you goin', Hanna?"
"Walkin'," she said, slamming the door after her.
In Adalia, chiefly remarkable for the Indestructo Safe Works and a river which annually overflows its banks, with casualties, the houses sit well back from tree-bordered streets, most of them frame, shingle-roofed veterans that have lived through the cycle-like years of the bearing, the marrying, the burying of two, even three, generations of the same surname.
A three-year-old, fifteen-mile traction connects the court-house with the Indestructo Safe Works. High Street, its entire length, is paved. During a previous mayoralty the town offered to the Lida Tool Works a handsome bonus to construct branch foundries along its river-banks, and, except for the annual flood conditions, would have succeeded.
In spring Adalia is like a dear old lady's garden of marigold and bleeding-heart. Flushes of sweetpeas ripple along its picket fences and off toward the backyards are long grape-arbors, in autumn their great fruit-clusters ripening to purple frost. Come winter there is almost an instant shriveling to naked stalk, and the trellis-work behind vines comes through. Even the houses seem immediately to darken of last spring's paint, and, with windows closed, the shades are drawn. Oftener than not Adalia spends its evening snugly behind these drawn shades in great scoured kitchens or dining-rooms, the house-fronts dark.
When Mrs. Burkhardt stepped out into an evening left thus to its stilly depth, shades drawn against it, a light dust of snow, just fallen, was scurrying up-street before the wind, like something phantom with its skirts blowing forward. Little drifts of it, dry as powder, had blown up against the porch. She sidestepped them, hurrying down a wind-swept brick walk and out a picket gate that did not swing entirely after. Behind her, the house with its wimple of shingle roof and unlighted front windows seemed to recede somewhere darkly. She stood an undecided moment, her face into the wind. Half down the block an arc-light swayed and gave out a moving circle of light. Finally she turned her back and went off down a side-street, past a lighted corner grocer, crossed a street to avoid the black mouth of an alley, then off at another right angle. The houses here were smaller, shoulder to shoulder and directly on the sidewalk.
Before one of these, for no particular reason distinguishable from the others, Mrs. Burkhardt stepped up two shallow steps and turned a key in the center of the door, which set up a buzz on its reverse side. Her hand, where it clutched the shawl at her throat, was reddening and roughening, the knuckles pushing up high and white. Waiting, she turned her back to the wind, her body hunched up against it.
There was a moving about within, the scrape of a match, and finally the door opening slightly, a figure peering out.