IV
Into a brilliantly lighted, well-filled saloon on the corner of Seventh avenue and Thirty-fourth street, strolled Joe Kaplan. He was wearing an overcoat of English tweed; a white Angora muffler around his neck; and a fashionable soft hat. Evening dress was suggested beneath. Accustomed to being stared at, his expression was bland; but could not altogether conceal the quality of electric alertness which attracted people’s eyes, without their knowing why. Making his way to the bar, he ordered a drink of whiskey. He looked at nobody, but was visibly holding himself in readiness to be hailed. Like a royal prince, he had to be prepared for encounters in the unlikeliest places. He cultivated the note of bonhomie in public, which encouraged hails. This was sometimes inconvenient; but Joe argued that it was better to be hailed than to be watched unknown to yourself.
He was not hailed. Leaning his elbows on the mahogany rail, and embracing the little whiskey glass within one hand, preparatory to kissing it, he gazed with pleasure at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. A thoughtless pleasure, and cumulative; for it made him exult the more, to see himself exulting. Likeness of a fellow with a dandy appetite! The fine creases on either side of his mouth deepened. He observed that the snowy muffler set off his pink skin and jetty black hair with striking effectiveness.
Swallowing his whiskey, he went out again, and turned west in Thirty-fourth street. This neighborhood had lately taken on a nondescript character. The building of the Pennsylvania terminal had brought business among the sedate old dwelling-houses, and some of them were now let out in rooms to all comers. The landlords collected their rents in advance, and shrugged their shoulders: the tenants looked after themselves. Joe had considered all this before hiring a room there.
With a final glance around, to assure himself he had not been recognized, Joe turned into one of the old houses, and mounting to a hall room on an upper floor, let himself in. It had been a family bedroom once; the old-fashioned wall-paper was rubbed and discolored; the grate was full of litter; the floor smelled of dust. There was nothing in the room now but some old clothes hanging from a row of hooks on the back of the door, and a new kitchen chair. Without troubling to make a light, Joe, whistling between his teeth, commenced to take off his fine clothes replacing them with the shabby garments from the back of the door. The chair was to enable him to change his shoes in comfort. He spread a newspaper to protect his stockinged feet from the dusty floor.
In due course he issued out of the house, metamorphosed. He was now wearing a greasy mackintosh with the collar turned up around his neck, and a shapeless cap pulled down over his eyes. He had sloughed off more than the fine clothes; somehow he looked ten years younger, and fifteen pounds lighter. His glance seemed to have become narrower and more penetrating, his nose longer, his cheeks hollower, his mouth more cruel. His gait had become a loose-limbed slouch, full of a latent spring. He gave the effect of a young wolf at his ease, with his tongue lolling. He padded noiselessly along the pavement at an uneven rate, like an idle wolf; sometimes a lighted shop window drew him to stand and gaze with vacant, brilliant eyes.
In another saloon he bought a bottle of whiskey, and carried it away under the mackintosh. At Herald Square he hailed a taxicab, and had himself driven down-town to the corner of Rivington street and the Bowery. He walked east in Rivington street, his steps unconsciously quickening, and becoming purposeful. He loitered no more. Turning into one of the older tenement houses, the springs in his body seemed suddenly to be released. Running up the stairs two at a time, he rapped at a door on the first landing.
There was no answer; and with a black face, he rapped again.
From within, a woman’s voice answered coolly: “You can’t come in.”
Joe looked like a balked wolf then. “It’s me,” he muttered.
“I can’t help it. You’ll have to come back in ten minutes.”
He slunk back and forth before the door, showing his teeth, and impotently glaring at the panels. Then he went noisily down the stairs. Outside, he kept shifting uneasily around the low stoop with his wolflike tread, keeping his glance fixed on the entrance with a snarl fixed in his face; yet half afraid; for suddenly he veered off across the roadway, with his head over his shoulder. He entered a lunch-room opposite, and ordering a cup of coffee, brought it back to the window where he could still watch the entrance to the tenement house. Presently a man came out. Joe had never seen the man, but by his furtive air he knew it was the man he was waiting for. Joe, drawing behind the window frame, watched him, snarling, and profoundly indifferent. Leaving the coffee, he went back across the street.
In the comfortable, clean, ugly room, with a double bed across the front, and a gas-cooker, sink and icebox at the back, Jewel was waiting for him, wrapped in a pink, quilted silk coat, which was beginning to reveal its cotton stuffing. She stood motionless in the center of the floor, dusky, solid, significantly shapeless, like a piece of sculpture beginning to emerge from the stone.
“What the hell . . . !” began Joe angrily. “A nice thing . . . !”
“Aah!” she said, moving slightly. “You don’t own me!”
“You don’t have to have them now!” he cried.
“Sure, I don’t have to have them. But I can have them, if I want.”
Joe, cursing, flung his mackintosh on the sofa. Like a wolf, he snarled obliquely.
“If you’d let me know when you were coming . . .” she suggested.
“Aah!” he snarled. “That would spoil it. I like to come on the impulse. . . . And you like me to.”
“Sure, I do,” she said with a slow smile. “But you can’t blame me, if you find me engaged.”
“Damnation!” cried Joe, flinging back and forth across the room with his soft tread. “Oh, damnation! I might as well go, now!”
Jewel shrugged. She moved portentously to the foot of the bed, where she could look out of the second window. She knew quite well he had no intention of going. Looking out of the window, she waited calmly for him to work off the burden of his ill-temper.
“I don’t see why you wont let me hire you a decent place up-town,” he cried.
“Yer on’y tahkin’,” she said. “You ought to know by this time I’ll never take anything off you. Why, you fool, it’s on’y because you got no strings on me that you’re still wild about coming here!”
“How about you?”
She gave him her slow creased smile over a shoulder. “Well, if I ever git enough of you, I’ll let you give me a hundred thousand.”
“But this room!” he grumbled. “On the level . . . !”
“Suits me!” she said. “I wouldn’t change it for the Waldorf Astoria. I fixed my bed so’s I could lie in it all day if I wanted, and look into the street.”
“That’s why you’re so fat,” said Joe. “Gee! you’re fat!”
“Well, they tell me you can’t get too much of a good thing,” she said good-humoredly.
Joe dropped on the sofa, all of a piece. His legs and arms jerked restlessly. There was no guard on his sharp face, and the successive emotions flickered there, and gave place to each other, as inconsistently as in the face of a wild being. He looked at her savagely and cravenly. He snarled; and his whole face became suffused with a dark delight.
“You——!” said Joe thickly. “I’ll pay you out for this!”
Jewel turned around. Her broad face creased into wrinkles. She laughed richly in her throat.
“You come here!” said Joe.
“You come here!” she said coolly. “You don’t own me!”
“I’ll show you!”
She awaited him massively. He did not go to her in a straight line, but veered; and his shoulders writhed. His darting eyes could not meet her steady, laughing ones. His eyes were perfectly irresponsible. Deep, fixed lines of pain and bliss were etched about his grinning lips.
“By God! One of these days I’ll kill you!” he muttered, enraptured.
She laughed from her capacious breast. “You talk so big!”
Raising himself on his elbow, Joe felt around on the bed for the cigarettes. “Just the same,” he said in an aggrieved voice, “I don’t see why you’ve got to have anybody but me.”
“Yeah,” she said, “sit here twiddling my thumbs, eh? till you happen to feel like coming round.”
“I haven’t got anybody but you.”
“So you say. How do I know whether you have or not? It’s nothing to me either way. . . . You’ve got a wife.”
“Aah! I don’t trouble her no more. It’s better that way. As long as I did, we used to scrap. . . . She never meant anything in particular to me. Too high-toned.”
“You got plenty other interests,” said Jewel. “Men are my amusement. They come here, and talk about their wives. I listen, and thank my God I’m no man’s wife. I’m a luxury to them, see? And you bet they have to mind themselves around me.”
“Just the same . . .” grumbled Joe.
“What’s the matter with you? You never bothered about it before. Only to-night you happened to. . . .”
“Who was he?”
“I shan’t tell you. He don’t cut no ice, anyhow.”
“Well, I admit I don’t like to have my bed warmed for me.”
“Find another bed, then. There’s no use grousing about it, and you know it. I mean to live as I please.”
“Aah!” he grumbled, “a person would think it was nothing at all to have Joe Kaplan in your bed.”
“Aah!” she retorted, “your money’s no good to you there!”
She chuckled at her own joke, and the bed shook. Joe, laughing too, tumbled her roughly.
“Your wife must be a funny one,” she said presently.
“She’s all right!” said Joe, carelessly. “I did a damn good day’s work when I copped her. Year by year she gets handsomer. There ain’t a woman in New York can wear diamonds like her. She gives my house the style of a King’s palace.”
“But never to quarrel with you?”
“She’s too proud to quarrel with me. She’d go a hundred miles out of her way to avoid a quarrel. Suits me all right. I don’t want to be bothered around the house. It’s the same about other men. Too proud to look at them. It’s a cinch for me.”
“Well, pride is a cold bedfellow,” said Jewel. “I’m glad I’m not her.”
“God! your breast is so broad and firm!” murmured Joe, pillowing his head there.
“You’re my kid,” she murmured, running her fingers through his thick hair. “For me, you have never got any bigger.”
“On’y a kid?” demanded Joe, raising his head, and grinning close in her face.
“Oh well, a man, too. Crazy about yourself, ain’t yeh?”
“When I come here,” he said, dropping back on the pillow, “a weight rolls off me, sort of. I can let myself go. I been with lots of women, but it wasn’t the same. I was always tryin’ to make them crazy about me. With you, you old slob! I don’t think of nothing. What ud be the use? You know me!”
Rolling over, he flung his arms around her body. “You’re so damn solid, so damn solid!” he muttered. “Gee! it’s great. I don’t know why. You’re so slow and hard to change. It’s funny, but whatever you say seems to come right out of the middle of you. You’re never any different, only more so. Like a tree, damn you! Rooted in the same spot!”
He sat up on the bed, nursing his knees. “Well, here’s me, if you know what I mean. Look at the way I’ve worked and schemed, and gone up like a skyrocket. It’s been a hell of a lot of fun, but it don’t seem quite real. All sparks, like the tail of the rocket. It’s been too easy, maybe. Men are such simps. I never had no setbacks to speak of. All I was concerned with was keepin’ out of jail. The same with women. They fell for me so easy, there was no zip to it. I’ve cut out women. . . .
“Here I am at the top, and I don’t find it no different. At heart I’m the same kid that used to swipe apples offen t’ pushcarts out there. Gee! I never found a street I liked as well as Rivington. . . . In them days I thought it would be different to be rich. A kind of dream, like. But everything stays just the same. Not but what I enjoy all the big stuff at that; conferring with prominent men, and making them do what I want; being God to thousands of little men; and living in a God-damn palace and all. But not so much as I did. I’m used to it now. And there’s always that feeling somehow that it ain’t quite real. I’ve got a child, and I swear I can’t feel that he’s mine at all. . . . Funny! . . .
“When I was a kid, once in a while I’d wake up in my bed all in a sweat. I don’t know . . . I can’t exactly name it. A sort of where-am-I feeling, and not a damn thing to grab hold of. God! for a minute, it makes you fair sick at your stomach. Well . . . that’s what I mean. Up there on the Avenue in my fancy bed—it was Louis the something or other’s bed, or one of those guys; I swear I have the same dream every once in a while, and wake up sweating just the same old way. So what have I got out of it all? Me, myself, inside, I’m just the same. I’ve got you; but I had you when I was a kid, and hadn’t nothing else. . . .
“It’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. I don’t mean to be complaining. I’ve had a hell of a good time, and still do. I have everything a man could have. I travel light. I don’t worry about nothing. It’s wonderful what a lot of things I don’t worry about! They call me heartless. Well, —— them! A pack of coyotes. They used to yelp at me in their newspapers. Well, I bought their newspapers. I’m one of the most powerful men in New York they say. I suppose I am. But . . . somehow it don’t seem quite real . . . !”
He dropped down, and put his hands around her thick throat. “Only this . . . ! By God! this is real . . . !”
“I thought you was gonna tahk all night,” murmured Jewel sleepily. “Such foolishness . . . !”
Joe chuckled.