Every Soul Hath Its Song Part 39

"No, no, Izzy. When I ride too much in the cold right away up in my ribs comes the sciatica again."

Miss Meyerburg bent radiant over her parent. "Mother," she whispered, her throat lined with the fur of tenderness, "it's reception-day out at that club, and all the cliques will be there, and I want--"

"Sure, Becky, you and the marquis should drive out. Take the big car, but tell James he shouldn't be so careless driving by them curves out there by the golf-links."

"But, ma dear, you come, too, and--"

"No, no, Becky; to-day I got not time."

"But, ma--ma, you ain't mad at me, dear? You can see now for yourself, can't you, dear, what a big thing it is for the family and how you--"

"Yes, yes, Becky. Look, go over by your young man. See how he stands there and not one word what Ben is hollering so at him can he understand."

Across the room, alongside a buffet wrought out of the powerful Jacobean period, Mr. Ben Meyerburg threw a violent contortion.

"Want to go up in the Turkish room and smoke?" he shouted, the apoplectic purple of exertion rus.h.i.+ng into his face and round to the roll of flesh overhanging the rear of his collar.

_"Pardon?"_

"Smoke? Do you smoke? Smokez-vous? Cigarez-vous? See, like this. Fume.

Blow. Do you smoke? Smokez-vous?"

_"Pardon?"_ said the marquis, bowing low.

In the heavy solitude of Mrs. Meyerburg's bedchamber, the buzz of departures over, silence lay resumed, but with a singing quality to it as if an echo or so still lingered.

Before the plain deal table, and at her side two files bulging their contents, Mrs. Meyerburg sat with her spatulate finger conning in among a page of figures. After a while the finger ceased to move across the page, but lay pa.s.sive midway down a column. After another while she slapped shut the book and took to roaming up and down the large room as if she there found respite from the spirit of her which nagged and carped. Peering out between the heavy curtains, she could see the tide of the Avenue mincing, prancing, chugging past. Resuming her beat up and down the vistas of the room, she could still hear its voice m.u.f.fled and not unlike the tune of quinine singing in the head.

The ormolu clock struck, and from various parts of the house musical repet.i.tions. A French tinkle from her daughter's suite across the hall; from somewhere more remote the deep, leisurely tones of a Nuremberg floor clock. Finally Mrs. Meyerburg dropped into the overstuffed chair beside her window, relaxing into the att.i.tude her late years had brought her, head back, hands stretched out along the chair sides, and full of rest. An hour she sat half dozing, and half emerging every so often with a start, then lay quietly looking into s.p.a.ce, her eyes quiet and the erstwhile brilliancy in them gone out like a light.

Presently she sat forward suddenly, and with the quick light of perception flooding up into her face; slid from her chair and padded across the carpet. From the carved chest alongside the wall she withdrew the short jacket with the beaver collar, worked her shoulders into it.

From the adjoining boudoir she emerged after a time in a small bonnet grayish with age and the bow not perky. Her movements were brief and full of decision. When she opened her door it was slyly and with a quick, vulpine glance up and down the grave quiet of the halls. After a c.o.c.ked att.i.tude of listening and with an incredible springiness almost of youth, Mrs. Meyerburg was down a rear staircase, through a rear hallway, and, unseen and unheard, out into the sudden splendor of a winter's day, the side street quiet before her.

"Gott!" said Mrs. Meyerburg, audibly, breathing deep and swinging into a smart lope eastward. Two blocks along, with her head lifted and no effort at concealment, she pa.s.sed her pantry-boy walking out with a Swedish girl whose cheeks were bursting with red. He eyed his mistress casually and without recognition.

At Third Avenue she boarded a down-town street-car, a bit winded from the dive across cobbles, but smiling. Within, and after a preliminary method of paying fare new and confusing to her, she sat back against the rattly sides, her feet just lifted off the floor. She could hardly keep back the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns as old streets and old memories swam into view.

"Look at the old lay-dee talking to her-sel-uph," sang an urchin across the aisle.

"Shut up," said the mother, slapping him sidewise.

At one of the most terrific of these down-town streets Mrs. Meyerburg descended. Beneath the clang and bang of the Elevated she stood confused for the moment and then, with her sure stride regained, swung farther eastward.

Slitlike streets flowed with holiday copiousness, whole families abroad on foot--mothers swayback with babies, and older children who ran ahead shouting and jostling. Houses lean and evil-looking marched shoulder to shoulder for blocks, no gaps except intersecting streets. Fire-escapes ran zigzag down the meanest of them. Women shouted their neighborhood jargon from windows flung momentarily open. Poverty scuttled along close to the scant shelter of these houses. An old man, with a beard to his chest, paused in a doorway to cough, and it was like the gripe-gripe of a saw with its teeth in hard wood. A woman sold apples from a stoop, the form of a child showing through her shawl. Yet Mrs. Meyerburg smiled as she hurried.

Midway in one of these blocks and without a pretense of hesitancy she turned into a black mouth of an entrance and up two flights. On each landing she paused more for tears than for breath. At a rear door leading off the second landing she knocked softly, but with insistence.

It opened to a slight crack, then immediately swung back full span.

"_Gott in Himmel_, Mrs. Meyerburg! Mrs. Meyerburg! _Kommen Sie herein_.

Mrs. Meyerburg, for why you didn't let me know? To think not one of my children home and to-day a holiday, my place not in order--"

"Now, now, Mrs. Fischlowitz, just so soon you go to one little bit of trouble, right away I got no more pleasure. Please, Mrs. Fischlowitz.

Ach, if you 'ain't got on your pantry shelfs just the same paper edge like my Roody used to cut out for me."

"Come, come, Mrs. Meyerburg, in parlor where--"

"Go way mit you. Ain't the kitchen where I spent seventeen years, the best years in my life, good enough yet? Parlor yet she wants to take me."

An immediate negligee of manner enveloped her like an old wrapper.

A certain tulle of bewilderment had fallen. She was bold, even dictatorial.

"Don't fuss round me so much, Mrs. Fischlowitz. Just like old times I want it should seem. Like maybe I just dropped in on you a lump of b.u.t.ter to borrow. No, no, don't I know where to hang mine own bonnet in mine own house? Ach, the same coat nails what he drove in himself!"

"To think, Mrs. Meyerburg, all my children gone out for a good time this afternoon, my Tillie with Morris Rinabauer, who can't keep his eyes off her--"

"How polished she keeps her stove, just like I used to."

"Right when you knocked I was thinking, well, I clean up a bit. Please, Mrs. Meyerburg, let me fix you right away a cup coffee--"

"Right away, Mrs. Fischlowitz, just so soon you begin to make fuss over me, I don't enjoy it no more. Please, Mrs. Fischlowitz, right here in this old rocker-chair by the range let me, please, sit quiet a minute."

In the wooden rocker beside the warm stove she sat down quietly, lapping her hands over her waist-line.

_"Gott in Himmel,"_ sitting well away from the chair-back and letting her eyes travel slowly about the room, "just like it was yesterday; just like yesterday." And fell to reciting the phrase softly.

"Ja, ja," said Mrs. Fischlowitz, concealing an unwashed litter of dishes beneath a hastily flung cloth. "I can tell you, Mrs. Meyerburg, my house ain't always this dirty; only to-day not--"

"Just like it was yesterday," said Mrs. Meyerburg, musing through a tangle of memories. She fell to rocking. A narrow band of suns.h.i.+ne lay across the bare floor, even glinted off a pan or two hung along the wall over the sink. Along that same wall hung a festoon of red and green peppers and a necklace of garlic. Toward the back of the range a pan of hot water let off a lazy vapor. Beside the scuttle a cat purred and fought off sleep.

"Already I got the hot water, Mrs. Meyerburg, to make you a cup coffee if--"

"Please, Mrs. Fischlowitz, let me rest like this. In a minute I want you should take me all through in the children's room and--"

"If I had only known it how I could have cleaned for you."

"Ach, my noodle-board over there! How grand and white you keep it."

"Ja, I--"

"Mrs. Fischlowitz!"

"Yes, Mrs. Meyerburg?"

"Mrs. Fischlowitz, if you want to--to give me a real treat I tell you what. I tell you what!"

"Ja, ja, Mrs. Meyerburg; anything what I can do I--"