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The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, a novel by Sinclair Lewis |
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Chapter 11 |
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_ CHAPTER XI The day before Christmas--an anxious day in Regalberg's department store, where the "extra help" were wondering which of them would be kept on. Most of them were given dismissals with their pay-envelopes. Mother's fate was not decided. She was told to report on the following Monday; the toy-department would be reduced, but possibly they would find a place for her in the children's dresses department, for the January white sale.... At the very least, they would be glad to give her an excellent recommendation, the buyer told her. More distraught than one stunned by utter hopelessness and ruin, she came home and, as Father had once been wont to do for her, she made her face bright to deceive him. Under her arm she carried a wonderful surprise, a very large bundle. Father was agitated about it when she plumped gaily into their housekeeping room. At last she let him open it. He found an overcoat, a great, warm, high-collared overcoat. He had an overcoat--an overcoat! He could put it on, any time, and go about the streets without the pinned coat-collar which is the sign of the hobo. He could walk all day, looking for a job--warm and prosperous. He could find work and support Mother. He had an overcoat! He was a gentleman again! With tears, he kissed her, lingeringly, then produced his own present, which he had meant to keep till Christmas Day itself. It was seven dollars, which he had earned as waiter at the piggery. "And we're going out and have dinner on it, too," he insisted. "Yes, yes; we will. We've been economizing--so much!" But before they went they carefully cached in the window-box the cabbage he had cooked for dinner. With a slow luxurious joy in every movement he put on the overcoat. Even in the pocket in which he stuck the seven Christmas dollars he had a distinct pleasure, for his undercoat pockets were too torn, too holey, to carry anything in them. They went prancing to the Hungarian restaurant. They laughed so much that Father forgot to probe her about the overcoat, and did not learn that she had bought it second-hand, for three dollars, and had saved the three dollars by omitting lunch for nearly four weeks. They had a table at the front of the restaurant, near the violin. They glowed over soup and real meat and coffee. There were funny people at the next table--a man who made jokes. Something about the "Yiddisher gavotte," and saying, "We been going to dances a lot, but last night the wife and I wanted to be quiet, so I bought me two front seats for Grant's Tomb!" It was tremendous. Father and Mother couldn't make many jokes, these days, but they listened and laughed. The waiter remembered them; they had always tipped him ten cents; he kept coming back to see if there was anything they wanted, as though they were important people. Father thanked her for the overcoat in what he blithely declared to be Cape Cod dialect, and toasted her in coffee. They were crammed with good cheer when Mother paid the check from a dollar she had left over, and they rose from the table. Father stood perplexedly gazing at the hat-rack behind them. He gasped, "Why, where--Why, I hung it----" He took down his old hat with a pathetic, bewildered hesitancy, and he whispered to Mother, "My overcoat is gone--it's been stolen--my new overcoat. Now I can't go out and get a job--" They cried out, and demanded restitution of the waiter, the head-waiter, the manager. None of these officials could do more than listen and ask heavy questions in bad English and ejaculate, "Somebody stole it from right behind you there when you weren't looking." One of the guests dramatically said that he had seen a man who looked suspicious, and for a moment every one paid attention to him, but that was all the information he had. The other guests gazed with apathetic interest, stirring their coffee and grunting one to another, "He ought to watched it." The manager pointed at one of the signs, "This restaurant is not responsible for the loss of hats, coats, or packages," and he shouted, "I am very sorry, but we can do nuttin'. Somebody stole it from right behind you there--no one was looking. If you leaf your name and address--" Father didn't even hear him. He was muttering to himself, "And the seven dollars that I saved for Sarah was in it." He took Mother's arm; he tried to walk straight as he turned his back on the storm of windy words from the manager. Once they were away from spectators, on dark Fifteenth Street, Father threw up his hands and in a voice of utter agony he mourned, "I can't do anything more. I'm clean beaten. I've tried, and I've looked for work, but now-- Be better if I went and jumped in the river." She took his arm and led him along, as though he were a child and helpless. She comforted him as well as she could, but there was nothing very convincing to say. As she grew silent her thoughts grew noisy. They shouted separate, hard, brutal sentences, so loudly that she could not hear even the scraping feet of the stooped man beside her. They clamored: "I can't do anything more, either. "I don't believe I will be kept on at the store, after all. Only through January, anyway. "All the money we've got now is the nine dollars they gave me to-day. "Suppose that's been stolen, too, from our room. "Suppose I died. "What would happen to Father if I died? He'd have to go--some dreadful place--poor-house or some place-- "What would happen to me if he died? I'd be so lonely I couldn't stand it. He's always been so dear to me. "That clerk in the book-department that died from asphyxiation--I wonder if it was accident, after all. They said so, but she was so unhappy and all when she talked to me at lunch. "'Better jump in the river.' That would be cold and he hasn't got an overcoat. No, of course, that wouldn't make any difference-- "I wonder if gas suicide hurts much? "If we could only die together and neither of us be left-- "God wouldn't call that suicide--oh, He couldn't, not when there's two people that nobody wants and they don't ask anything but just to be together. That nobody really wants--my daughter don't--except maybe the Tubbses. And they are so poor, too. Nobody needs us and we just want to find a happy way to go off together where we can sleep! Oh, I wouldn't think that would be wrong, would it?" They were at home. She hastened to burrow among the pile of stewpans for the nine dollars, her week's salary, which she had hidden there. When she found that it was safe, she didn't care so much, after all. What difference would it have made if the money had been gone? Father staggered like a drunkard to one of the flimsy, straight, uncomfortable chairs. But he got himself up and tried to play on the mouth-organ a careless tune of grassy hills and a summer breeze. While he played he ridiculed himself for such agony over the loss of an overcoat, but his philosophizing didn't mean anything. He had lost the chance of finding work when he had lost the overcoat. He couldn't really think, and the feeble trickle of music had a tragic absurdity. He petulantly threw the mouth-organ on the bed, then himself slumped on the coverlet. His face was grayly hopeless, like ashes or dust or the snow of great cities. Mother had been brooding. She was only distantly conscious of his final collapse. She said, suddenly, bluntly: "Let's go away together. If we could only die while we are still together and have some nice things to remember--" Hers was the less conventional mind of the two. He protested--but it was a feeble mumble. The world had come to seem unreal; the question of leaving it rather unimportant. Much they talked, possibly for hours, but the talk was as confused as the spatter of furniture in that ill-lighted room--lighted by a gas-jet. All that they said was but repetition of her first demand. While he lay on the bed, flat, his arms out, like a prisoner on a rack, wondering why all his thoughts had become a void in which he could find no words with which to answer her, she slowly stood up, turned out the gas, then again opened the gas-cock. She hastily stripped off her overcoat and fitted it over the crack at the bottom of the door, where showed a strip of light from the slimy hall without. She caught up the red cotton table-cloth and stuffed it along the window, moving clumsily through the room, in which the darkness was broken only by pallid light that seeped through the window from cold walls without. She staggered over and lay down beside him. Her work was done, and in the darkness her worried frown changed to a smile of divine and mothering kindliness which did not lessen as a thin, stinging, acid vapor of illuminating gas bit at her throat and made her cough. Father raised his head in stupefied alarm. She drew him down, put his head on her shoulder. She took his hand, to lead him, her little boy, into a land of summer dreams where they would always be together. The Innocents were going their way, asking no one's permission, yet harming no one.... His hand was twitching a little; he coughed with a sound of hurt bewilderment; but she held his hand firmly, and over this first rough part of the road the mother of tenderness led him pityingly on. _ |
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