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twg_000000048400 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048401 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048402 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048403 | 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. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048404 | VI NIGHTSHADE 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, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048405 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048406 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048407 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048408 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048409 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048410 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048411 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048412 | 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, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048413 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048414 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048415 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048416 | 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," | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048417 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048418 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048419 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048420 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048421 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048422 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048423 | 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' | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048424 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048425 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048426 | 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, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048427 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048428 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048429 | 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. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048430 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048431 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048432 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048433 | 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 as Middletown. Church! Church! Church! Till I could | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048434 | scream at the sight of it. 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048435 | '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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048436 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048437 | 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 the _Up-State Gazette_; a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048438 | 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, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048439 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048440 | I was a bachelor in it. Sunk in, kinda, like them iron jardinires 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048441 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048442 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048443 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048444 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048445 | 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. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048446 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048447 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048448 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048449 | 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, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048450 | 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' | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048451 | 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 Widow Dinninger's to pass the time of evenin'? I'll keep the door on the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048452 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048453 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048454 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048455 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048456 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048457 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048458 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048459 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048460 | a match, and finally the door opening slightly, a figure peering out. "It's me, Mrs. Scogin--Hanna Burkhardt!" The door swung back then, revealing a just-lighted parlor, opening, without introduction of hall, from the sidewalk. "Well, if it ain't Hanna Burkhardt! What you doin' out this kind of a night? Come in. Kittie's dryin' her hair in the kitchen. Used to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048461 | be she could sit on it, and it's ruint from the scorchin' curlin'-iron. I'll call her. Sit down, Hanna. How's Burkhardt? I'll call her. Oh, Kittie! Kit-tie, Hanna Burkhardt's here to see you." In the wide flare of the swinging lamp, revealing Mrs. Scogin's parlor of chromo, china plaque, and crayon enlargement, sofa, whatnot, and wax bouquet embalmed under glass, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048462 | Mrs. Burkhardt stood for a moment, blowing into her cupped hands, unwinding herself of shawl, something Niobian in her gesture. "Yoo-hoo--it's only me, Kit! Shall I come out?" "Naw--just a minute; I'll be in." Mrs. Scogin seated herself on the edge of the sofa, well forward, after the manner of those who relax but ill to the give of upholstery. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048463 | She was like a study of what might have been the grandmother of one of Rembrandt's studies of a grandmother. There were lines crawling over her face too manifold for even the etcher's stroke, and over her little shriveling hands that were too bird-like for warmth. There is actually something avian comes with the years. In the frontal bone pushing | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048464 | itself forward, the cheeks receding, and the eyes still bright. There was yet that trenchant quality in Mrs. Scogin, in the voice and gaze of her. "Sit down, Hanna." "Don't care if I do." "You can lean back against that chair-bow." "Hate to muss it." "How's Burkhardt?" "All right." "He's been made deacon--not?" "Yeh." "If mine had lived, he'd the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048465 | makin' of a pillar. Once label a man with hard drinkin', and it's hard to get justice for him. There never was a man had more the makin' of a pillar than mine, dead now these sixteen years and molderin' in his grave for justice." "Yes, Mrs. Scogin." "You can lean back against that bow." "Thanks." "So Burkhardt's been made | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048466 | deacon." "Three years already--you was at the church." "A deacon. Mine went to his grave too soon." "They said down at market to-day, Mrs. Scogin, that Addie Fitton knocked herself against the woodbin and has water on the knee." "Let the town once label a man with drinkin', and it's hard to get justice for him." "It took Martha and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048467 | Eda and Gessler's hired girl to hold her in bed with the pain." "Yes, yes," said Mrs. Scogin, sucking in her words and her eyes seeming to strain through the present; "once label a man with drinkin'." Kittie Scogin Bevins entered then through a rain of bead portires. Insistently blond, her loosed-out hair newly dry and flowing down over a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048468 | very spotted and very baby-blue kimono, there was something soft-fleshed about her, a not unappealing saddle of freckles across her nose, the eyes too light but set in with a certain feline arch to them. "Hello, Han!" "Hello, Kittie!" "Snowing?" "No." "Been washing my hair to show it a good time. One month in this dump and they'd have to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048469 | hire a hearse to roll me back to Forty-second Street in." "This ain't nothing. Wait till we begin to get snowed in!" "I know. Say, you c'n tell me nothing about this tank I dunno already. I was buried twenty-two years in it. Move over, ma." She fitted herself into the lower curl of the couch, crossing her hands at | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048470 | the back of her head, drawing up her feet so that, for lack of space, her knees rose to a hump. "What's new in Deadtown, Han?" "'New'! This dump don't know we got a new war. They think it's the old Civil one left over." "Burkhardt's been made a deacon, Kittie." "O Lord! ma, forget it!" Mrs. Scogin Bevins threw | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048471 | out her hands to Mrs. Burkhardt in a wide gesture, indicating her mother with a forefinger, then with it tapping her own brow. "Crazy as a loon! Bats!" "If your father had--" "Ma, for Gossakes--" "You talk to Kittie, Hanna. My girls won't none of 'em listen to me no more. I tell 'em they're fightin' over my body before | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048472 | it's dead for this house and the one on Ludlow Street. It's precious little for 'em to be fightin' for before I'm dead, but if not for it, I'd never be gettin' these visits from a one of 'em." "Ma!" "I keep tellin' her, Kittie, to stay home. New York ain't no place for a divorced woman to set herself | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048473 | right with the Lord." "Ma, if you don't quit raving and clear on up to bed, I'll pack myself out to-night yet, and then you'll have a few things to set right with the Lord. Go on up, now." "I--" "Go on--you hear?" Mrs. Scogin went then, tiredly and quite bent forward, toward a flight of stairs that rose directly | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048474 | from the parlor, opened a door leading up into them, the frozen breath of unheated regions coming down. "Quick--close that door, ma!" "Come to see a body, Hanna, when she ain't here. She won't stay at home, like a God-fearin' woman ought to." "Light the gas-heater up there, if you expect me to come to bed. I'm used to steam-heated | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048475 | flats, not barns." "She's a sassy girl, Hanna. Your John a deacon and hers lies molderin' in his grave, a sui--" Mrs. Scogin Bevins flung herself up, then, a wave of red riding up her face. "If you don't go up--if you--don't! Go--now! Honest, you're gettin' so luny you need a keeper. Go--you hear?" The door shut slowly, inclosing the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048476 | old figure. She relaxed to the couch, trying to laugh. "Luny!" she said. "Bats! Nobody home!" "I like your hair like that, Kittie. It looks swell." "It's easy. I'll fix it for you some time. It's the vampire swirl. All the girls are wearing it." "Remember the night, Kit, we was singin' duets for the Second Street Presbyterian out at | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048477 | Grody's Grove and we got to hair-pullin' over whose curls was the longest?" "Yeh. I had on a blue dress with white polka-dots." "That was fifteen years ago. Remember Joe Claiborne promised us a real stage-job, and we opened a lemonade-stand on our front gate to pay his commission in advance?" They laughed back into the years. "O Lord! them | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048478 | was days! Seems to me like fifty years ago." "Not to me, Kittie. You've done things with your life since then. I 'ain't." "You know what I've always told you about yourself, Hanna. If ever there was a fool girl, that was Hanna Long. Lord! if I'm where I am on my voice, where would you be?" "I was a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048479 | fool." "I could have told you that the night you came running over to tell me." "There was no future in this town for me, Kit. Stenoggin' around from one office to another. He was the only real provider ever came my way." "I always say if John Burkhardt had shown you the color of real money! But what's a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048480 | man to-day on just a fair living? Not worth burying yourself in a dump like this for. No, sirree. When I married Ed, anyways I thought I smelled big money. I couldn't see ahead that his father'd carry out his bluff and cut him off. But what did you have to smell--a feed-yard in a hole of a town! What's | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048481 | the difference whether you live in ten rooms like yours or in four like this as long as you're buried alive? A girl can always do that well for herself after she's took big chances. You could be Lord knows where now if you'd 'a' took my advice four years ago and lit out when I did." "I know it, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048482 | Kit. God knows I've eat out my heart with knowin' it! Only--only it was so hard--a man givin' me no more grounds than he does. What court would listen to his stillness for grounds? I 'ain't got grounds." "Say, you could 'a' left that to me. My little lawyer's got a factory where he manufactures them. He could 'a' found | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048483 | a case of incompatibility between the original turtle-doves." "God! His stillness, Kittie--like--" "John Burkhardt would give me the razzle-dazzle jimjams overnight, he would. That face reminds me of my favorite funeral." "I told him to-night, Kittie, he's killin' me with his deadness. I ran out of the house from it. It's killin' me." "Why, you poor simp, standing for it!" | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048484 | "That's what I come over for, Kit. I can't stand no more. If I don't talk to some one, I'll bust. There's no one in this town I can open up to. Him so sober--and deacon. They don't know what it is to sit night after night dyin' from his stillness. Whole meals, Kit, when he don't open his mouth | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048485 | except, 'Hand me this; hand me that'--and his beard movin' up and down so when he chews. Because a man don't hit you and gives you spending-money enough for the little things don't mean he can't abuse you with--with just gettin' on your nerves so terrible. I'm feelin' myself slip--crazy--ever since I got back from Cincinnati and seen what's goin' | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048486 | on in the big towns and me buried here; I been feelin' myself slip--slip, Kittie." "Cincinnati! Good Lord! if you call that life! Any Monday morning on Forty-second Street makes Cincinnati look like New-Year's Eve. If you call Cincinnati life!" "He's small, Kittie. He's a small potato of a man in his way of livin'. He can live and die | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048487 | without doin' anything except the same things over and over again, year out and year in." "I know. I know. Ed was off the same pattern. It's the Adalia brand. Lord! Hanna Long, if you could see some of the fellows I got this minute paying attentions to me in New York, you'd lose your mind. Spenders! Them New York | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048488 | guys make big and spend big, and they're willing to part with the spondoolaks. That's the life!" "I--You look it, Kit. I never seen a girl get back her looks and keep 'em like you. I says to him to-night, I says, 'When I look at myself in the glass, I wanna die.'" "You're all there yet, Hanna. Your voice | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048489 | over here the other night was something immense. Big enough to cut into any restaurant crowd, and that's what counts in cabaret. I don't tell anybody how to run his life, but if I had your looks and your contralto, I'd turn 'em into money, I would. There's forty dollars a week in you this minute." Mrs. Burkhardt's head went | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048490 | up. Her mouth had fallen open, her eyes brightening as they widened. "Kit--when you goin' back?" "To-morrow a week, honey--if I live through it." "Could--you help me--your little lawyer--your--" "Remember, I ain't advising--" "Could you, Kit, and to--to get a start?" "They say it of me there ain't a string in the Bijou Cafe that I can't pull my way." | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048491 | "Could you, Kit? Would you?" "I don't tell nobody how to run his life, Hanna. It's mighty hard to advise the other fellow about his own business. I don't want it said in this town, that's down on me, anyways, that Kit Scogin put ideas in Hanna Long's head." "You didn't, Kit. They been there. Once I answered an ad. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048492 | to join a county fair. I even sent money to a vaudeville agent in Cincinnati. I--" "Nothing doing in vaudeville for our kind of talent. It's cabaret where the money and easy hours is these days. Just a plain little solo act--contralto is what you can put over. A couple of 'Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night' sob-solos is all | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048493 | you need. I'll let you meet Billy Howe of the Bijou. Billy's a great one for running in a chaser act or two." "I--How much would it cost, Kittie, to--to--" "Hundred and fifty done it for me, wardrobe and all." "Kittie, I--Would you--" "Sure I would! Only, remember, I ain't responsible. I don't tell anybody how to run his life. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048494 | That's something everybody's got to decide for herself." "I--have--decided, Kittie." At something after that stilly one-o'clock hour when all the sleeping noises of lath and wainscoting creak out, John Burkhardt lifted his head to the moving light of a lamp held like a torch over him, even the ridge of his body completely submerged beneath the great feather billow of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048495 | an oceanic walnut bedstead. "Yes, Hanna?" "Wake up!" "I been awake--" She set the lamp down on the brown-marble top of a wash-stand, pushed back her hair with both hands, and sat down on the bed-edge, heavily breathing from a run through deserted night's streets. "I gotta talk to you, Burkhardt--now--to-night." "Now's no time, Hanna. Come to bed." "Things can't | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048496 | go on like this, John." He lay back slowly. "Maybe you're right, Hanna. I been layin' up here and thinkin' the same myself. What's to be done?" "I've got to the end of my rope." "With so much that God has given us, Hanna--health and prosperity--it's a sin before Him that unhappiness should take root in this home." "If you're | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048497 | smart, you won't try to feed me up on gospel to-night!" "I'm willin' to meet you, Hanna, on any proposition you say. How'd it be to move down to Schaefer's boardin'-house for the winter, where it'll be a little recreation for you evenings, or say we take a trip down to Cincinnati for a week. I--" "Oh no," she said, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048498 | looking away from him and her throat throbbing. "Oh no, you don't! Them things might have meant something to me once, but you've come too late with 'em. For eight years I been eatin' out my heart with 'em. Now you couldn't pay me to live at Schaefer's. I had to beg too long for it. Cincinnati! Why, its New-Year's | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000048499 | Eve is about as lively as a real town's Monday morning. Oh no, you don't! Oh no!" "Come on to bed, Hanna. You'll catch cold. Your breath's freezin'." "I'm goin'--away, for good--that's where--I'm goin'!" Her words threatened to come out on a sob, but she stayed it, the back of her hand to her mouth. Her gaze was riveted, and | 60 | gutenberg |
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