“Yes, I know,” he now added almost sadly. So they had not raised the rent in all this time, although the city had grown so. Evidently this region had become worse, not better. “I’ll look at them, if you please, just the same,” he went on, feeling that the dull face before him was wondering why he should be looking at them at all.
“Vait; I getcha der key. You can go up py yerself.”
He might have known that she would never climb any four flights save under compulsion.
She returned presently, and he made his way upward, remembering how the fat husband of the former janitress had climbed up promptly every night at ten, if you please, putting out the wee lights of gas on the return trip (all but a thin flame on the second floor: orders from the landlord, of course), and exclaiming as he did so, at each landing, “Ach Gott, I go me up py der secon’ floor ant make me der lights out. Ach Gott, I go me py der t’ird floor ant make me der lights out. Ach Gott, I go me py der fourt’ floor ant make me der lights out,” and so on until he reached the fifth, where they lived. How often he had listened to him, puffing and moaning as he came!
Yes, the yellowish-brown paper that they had abhorred then, or one nearly as bad, covered all these hall walls to-day. The stairs squeaked, just as they had then. The hall gas jets were just as small and surmounted by shabby little pink imitation glass candles—to give the place an air, no doubt! He and Marie would never have taken this place at all if it had depended on the hall, or if the views from its little windows had not been so fine. In the old days he had trudged up these steps many a night, winter and summer, listening, as he came, for sounds of Marie in the kitchen, for the prattle of the two children after they were with them, for the glow of a friendly light (always shining at six in winter) under the door and through the keyhole. His light! His door! In those early dark winter days, when he was working so far downtown and coming home this way regularly, Marie, at the sound of his key in the lock, would always come running, her heavy black hair done in a neat braid about her brow, her trim little figure buttoned gracefully into a house-dress of her own making. And she always had a smile and a “Hello, dearie; back again?” no matter how bad things were with them, how lean the little larder or the family purse. Poor little Marie!
It all came back to him now as he trudged up the stairs and neared the door. God!
And here was the very door, unchanged—yellow, painted to imitate the natural grain of oak, but the job having turned out a dismal failure as he had noted years before. And the very lock the same! Could he believe? Scarcely any doubt of it. For here was that other old hole, stuffed with putty and painted over, which he and Marie had noted as being the scar of some other kind of a lock or knob that had preceded this one. And still stuffed with paper! Marie had thought burglars (!) might make their way in via that, and he had laughed to think what they would steal if they should. Poor little Marie!
But now, now—well, here he was all alone, twenty-four years later, Marie and Peter and Frank gone this long time, and he the master of so many men and so much power and so much important property. What was life, anyhow? What was it?
Ghosts! Ghosts!
Were there ghosts?