Gaslight Sonatas Part 50

"Rest! O my G.o.d! rest!"

"Yes, yes, mama; lean on me."

"My--bed."

"Yes, yes, darling."

"Bed."

Her voice had died now to a whimper that lay on the room after she had pa.s.sed out of it.

When Selene Coblenz, with a gust that swept the room, sucking the lace curtains back against the panes, flung open the door upon that chromatic scene, the two jets of gas were singing softly into its silence, and within the nickel-trimmed baseburner the pink mica had cooled to gray. Sweeping open that door, she closed it softly, standing for the moment against it, her hand crossed in back and on the k.n.o.b. It was as if--standing there with her head c.o.c.ked and beneath a shadowy blue sailor-hat, a smile coming out--something within her was playing, sweetly insistent to be heard.

Philomela, at the first sound of her nightingale self, must have stood thus, trembling with melody. Opposite her, above the crowded mantelpiece and surmounted by a raffia wreath, the enlarged-crayon gaze of her deceased maternal grandfather, abetted by a horrible device of photography, followed her, his eyes focusing the entire room at a glance. Impervious to that scrutiny, Miss Coblenz moved a tiptoe step or two farther into the room, lifting off her hat, staring and smiling through a three-shelved cabinet of knickknacks at what she saw far and beyond. Beneath the two jets, high lights in her hair came out, bronze showing through the brown waves and the patches of curls brought out over her cheeks.

In her dark-blue dress, with the row of silver b.u.t.tons down what was hip before the hipless age, the chest sufficiently concave and the silhouette a mere stroke of a hard pencil, Miss Selene Coblenz measured up and down to America's Venus de Milo, whose chief curvature is of the spine.

Slim-etched, and that slimness enhanced by a conscious kind of collapse beneath the blue-silk girdle that reached up half-way to her throat, hers were those proportions which strong women, eschewing the sweet-meat, would earn by the sweat of the Turkish bath.

When Miss Coblenz caught her eye in the square of mirror above the mantelpiece, her hands flew to her cheeks to feel of their redness. They were soft cheeks, smooth with the pollen of youth, and hands still casing them, she moved another step toward the portiered door.

"Mama!"

Mrs. Coblenz emerged immediately, finger up for silence, kissing her daughter on the little spray of cheek-curls.

"'Shh-h-h! Gramaw just had a terrible spell."

She dropped down into the upholstered chair beside the base-burner, the pink and moisture of exertion out in her face, took to fanning herself with the end of a face-towel flung across her arm.

"Poor gramaw!" she said. "Poor gramaw!"

Miss Coblenz sat down on the edge of a slim, home-gilded chair, and took to gathering the blue-silk dress into little plaits at her knee.

"Of course, if you don't want to know where I've been--or anything--"

Mrs. Coblenz jerked herself to the moment.

"Did mama's girl have a good time? Look at your dress, all dusty! You oughtn't to wear your best in that little flivver."

Suddenly Miss Coblenz raised her glance, her red mouth bunched, her eyes all iris.

"Of course--if you don't want to know--anything."

At that large, brilliant gaze, Mrs. Coblenz leaned forward, quickened.

"Why, Selene!"

"Well, why--why don't you ask me something?"

"Why, I--I dunno, honey. Did--did you and Lester have a nice ride?"

There hung a slight pause, and then a swift moving and crumpling-up of Miss Coblenz on the floor beside her mother's knee.

"You know--only, you won't ask."

With her hand light upon her daughter's hair, Mrs. Coblenz leaned forward, her bosom rising to faster breathing.

"Why--Selene--I--Why--"

"We--we were speeding along, and--all of a sudden, out of a clear sky, he--he popped. He wants it in June, so we can make it our honeymoon to his new territory out in Oklahoma. He knew he was going to pop, he said, ever since that first night he saw me at the Y.M.H.A. He says to his uncle Mark, the very next day in the store, he says to him, 'Uncle Mark,' he says, 'I've met _the_ little girl.' He says he thinks more of my little finger than all of his regular crowd of girls in town put together. He wants to live in one of the built-in-bed flats on Wa.s.serman Avenue, like all the swell young marrieds. He's making twenty-six hundred now, mama, and if he makes good in the new Oklahoma territory, his Uncle Mark is--is going to take care of him better. Ain't it like a dream, mama--your little Selene all of a sudden in with--the somebodies?"

Immediate tears were already finding staggering procession down Mrs.

Coblenz's face, her hovering arms completely encircling the slight figure at her feet.

"My little girl! My little Selene! My all!"

"I'll be marrying into one of the best families in town, ma. A girl who marries a nephew of Mark Haas can hold up her head with the best of them.

There's not a boy in town with a better future than Lester. Like Lester says, everything his Uncle Mark touches turns to gold, and he's already touched Lester. One of the best known men on Washington Avenue for his blood-uncle, and on his poor dead father's side related to the Katz & Harberger Harbergers. Was I right, mama, when I said if you'd only let me stop school I'd show you? Was I right, momsie?"

"My baby! It's like I can't realize it. So young!"

"He took the measure of my finger, mama, with a piece of string. A diamond, he says, not too flashy, but neat."

"We have 'em, and we suffer for 'em, and we lose 'em."

"He's going to trade in the flivver for a chummy roadster, and--"

"Oh, darling, it's like I can't bear it!"

At that Miss Coblenz sat back on her tall wooden heels, mauve spats crinkling.

"Well, you're a merry little future mother-in-law, momsie!"

"It ain't that, baby. I'm happy that my girl has got herself up in the world with a fine upright boy like Lester; only--you can't understand, babe, till you've got something of your own flesh and blood that belongs to you, that I--I couldn't feel anything except that a piece of my heart was going if--if it was a king you was marrying."

"Now, momsie, it's not like I was moving a thousand miles away. You can be glad I don't have to go far, to New York or to Cleveland, like Alma Yawitz."

"I am! I am!"

"Uncle--Uncle Mark, I guess, will furnish us up like he did Leon and Irma--only, I don't want mahogany; I want Circa.s.sian walnut. He gave them their flat-silver, too, Puritan design, for an engagement present. Think of it, mama, me having that stuck-up Irma Sinsheimer for a relation! It always made her sore when I got chums with Amy at school and got my nose in it with the Acme crowd, and--and she'll change her tune now, I guess, me marrying her husband's second cousin."

"Didn't Lester want to--to come in for a while, Selene, to--to see--me?"

Sitting there on her heels, Miss Coblenz looked away, answering with her face in profile.

"Yes; only--I--well, if you want to know it, mama, it's no fun for a girl to bring a boy like Lester up here in--in this crazy room, all hung up with gramaw's wreaths and half the time her sitting out there in the dark, looking in at us through the door and talking to herself."

"Gramaw's an old--"

"Is it any wonder I'm down at Amy's half the time? How do you think a girl feels to have gramaw keep hanging onto that old black wig of hers and not letting me take the crayons or wreaths down off the wall? In Lester's crowd they don't know nothing about revolutionary stuff and persecutions. Amy's grandmother don't even talk with an accent, and Lester says his grandmother came from Alsace-Lorraine. That's French. They think only tailors and old-clothes men and--."