Fannie Hurst is one of the bcst-lovedand most widely read writers of our time. To date she has written twenty-seven books. Her novels have topped innumerable best-seller lists, Her short pieces have commanded the highest prices from the most popular magazines. Motion picture compariies have vied furiously for her wonderful stories, .Why? Perhaps the best answer is that Fannie Hurst's special gift has always been her ability to see beyond the disappointments of daily existence and to write inspirmgly of the excitement and drama in every person’s life, # * IMITATION OF LIFE is a wonderful example of this gift, Originally made into an immensely popular film in 193d, it has now been reseripted and cast with Lana Turner, John Gavin and Sandra Dee in the starring roles. The book upon which both these films are based was originally published by Harper & Brothers, ft Other hooks by Fannie Hurst ANATOMY OF ME ANITBAS DANCE BACK STREET FIVE AND TEN HUMORESQUE AND OTHER STORIES Are there paper-bound books you want but cannot find at your retail stores? You can get any title in print in these famous series, POCKET BOOKS, CARDINAL EDITIONS, POCKET LIBRARY and PERMABOOKS, by ordering from Mail Service Depart- ment, Pocket Books, Inc., 630 Fifth Ave,, New York 20, N.Y. Enclose retail price plus 6c per book for mailing costs.' FREE CATALOGUE SENT ON REQUEST CHAPTER 1 This Permabook includes every word contained in the orig¬ inal, higher-priced edition. It is printed from brand-new plates made from completely reset, clear, easy-to-read type. IMITATION OF LIFE Harper edition published February, 1933 Permabook edition published April, 1959 4th printing.April, 1959 Imitation of Life appeared serial¬ ly under the title Sugar House. Copyng/it 7933, by Fannie Hurst. Copyright, 1932, 1933, by the Rem "> This Permabook edition is tmlMod h arrangement with Harper & Brothers. Printed in the V.S.A. Srr K p dit i°, nS , ar ? ublL i hd in tbe United Statcs b V P«oket Books, - C *“ da *«** Booh of Canada, Ltd,-the world’s It struck Bea, and for the moment diverted her from grief, that quite the most physical thing she had ever connected with her mother was the fact of her having died. She found herself, crying there beside the bier, thinking of her mother’s legs. Such willing ones. They were locked now, as they lay stretched horizontally down the center of the parlor, in the rigidity of death. The beiigaline dress, for which only four dreamlike weeks ago they had shopped together on Atlantic Avenue, now lay decently over those dear legs. Dreadful counterpane to the' physical fact that Adelaide Chipleys breasts and loins and femurs lay dead. There had been so little evidence, during her lifetime, of any aspect of her physical life, other than just the automatic processes of locomotion and eating and sleeping. Mother had never been the one to profess hunger, or fatigue, or warmth, or cold, but how those estates of being in others could con¬ cern her! Her legs had just carried her about through being wife to Evans Ohiplcy, and mother to Beatrice Fay Chiplcy, and all tilings to the monotonous mosaic of little days in the little household. True, it had repeatedly occurred to Rea to ask herself, fol¬ lowing that day shortly after her fourteenth birthday when the physical fact of her becoming of menstrual age had fright¬ ened her so terribly that she had sobbed all through her mothers clumsy attempt at explanation, how on earth it was possible to even imagine two such people as her parents ever coming together in a way to conceive her, their child. Why, it was even difficult to visualize Mother us st young girl (how pretty she was on the old tintype) sitting in the parlor of her little home in Burlington, New Jersey, past which the railroad train thundered,- awaiting Father on his Saturday night visits from Philadelphia. They had always seemed too little acquainted even for i IMITATION OF LIFE 3 2 IMITATION OF LIFE that. Too-too remote, for the suggestion of passion. How could those two have begot child! They never even touched except for the peck of the lips when Father departed and arrived, and Bea came in for that too, of precisely the same quality. How then . . . ? , Following her mother’s shockingly inadequate explanation , shortly after her fourteenth year, she had fleetingly dared j to ask herself that question over and over again. How...? , ,, What secret and mysterious transformation could come ,■ over two such unintimate-appearing people as her father and mother, after they had closed the door of their bedroom . nights? How account for their matter-of-fact exit from the quite inexorable matter-of-factness of life as it was lived on Arctic Avenue, between Georgia and Mississippi Avenues, into realms which begot progeny. It was all immensely reasonable in the stuff of which the books she borrowed from the public library were made. Janice i Meredith When Knighthood Was in Flower. Hichard Car- | vel. Mill on the Floss. But Mother and Father-how? Nei¬ ther could it have been a matter between them that had solely to do with the first night, or the first months, of mar¬ riage. After her fourteenth year, Bea came to recognize, with her logic, that her mother’s illness, the year before, had been due to miscarriage, Almost equally strange was a high-school mate, Fcrdic •, Leigh, getting a baby sister. The Leighs lived on Mississippi Avenue, and Mr. Leigh, who had a bathing-suit concession on the Boardwalk, was m an elder in the Presbyterian Church. The Leigh children I were not allowed, to ride in street cars on Sunday... . Mrs. I Leigh was quite old and ugly and narrow. . . . How . . . ? j: How in the world did two people like Mr. and Mrs. 1 Leigh, and more especially like her mother and father, ever j become sufficiently well acquainted with one anollier. . . . Life in the Chipley household was so crammed with just the daylight facts. Setting yeast. Stretching lace curtains. Fancy-work, Pickling. Carpet-beating. Ironing. Nice meals .p planned by Mother, around everyone’s likes and dislikes, except her dear own. “The chicken liver at the end of the platter is for you, Mr. Pullman, knowing you don’t eat rabbit.” “Take plenty of floating island, Bea; it’s your favor¬ ite dessert.” “Mr. Chipley, that is your kind of sweet but¬ ter.” Life all cluttered like that, with littlenesses. Coming. Going. Sleeping, too, of course, but Mother and Father straight beside one another in bed, like her, Bea, in her own little room. And Mr. Pullman in his. For a while, after she was fourteen, it had been difficult to keep her mind from sliding around to this mystifying riddle of the intimacies, that must, by very virtue of her own existence, have transpired between her father and mother. Jeanette Clubby, another schoolmate, and who was a Cath¬ olic, would undoubtedly carry such thoughts to confession. If they possessed her. Did they? Nice girls would no more have discussed such things! But the riddle of her parents would persist, privately. Goodness! if she so much as entered the bedroom where, her mother was dressing, she hastily threw a towel or y wrapper across her breasts. Her father, even in the yea|l before they had moved to Atlantic City, from Philadelphia,’! and when the asthma was thick upon him, had not liked to' appear before the small girl, Bea, in his undershirt. What: mysterious transformation was it could come over two such unihtimute people . , , ? And now in death, there was at last something physical;; about her mother. The awfolness of thinking that thought smote her with something that hurt even more than her grief. How con¬ fusing to find ideas that bordered on the forbidden, mingling wilh the aroma of Cod which seemed to emanate from a face dead and dear. How private she had been about her illness, delicate and secretive as she had been about everything else pertaining to what touched her most closely. And what a frightening, hurling illness! , . . And now Cod had folded those mys¬ terious limbs into the sanctuary and still further privacy ofi death. I 4 IMITATION OF LIFE And to think that out of those dead loins had sprung-life, hers-Beatrice Chipley’s! They had been warm, yielding loins, and that crumpled figure over there in the corner of the darkened parlor, his back retching as he cried, had actually committed the act of sex. It made mother’s deadness somehow seem so young and inexpressibly heartbreaking. All mixed up with this death of a mother from whom she had never been separated one full day of her life, was a kind of splendid grief she had experienced once, fleetingly, while reading from a high-school platform: "I weep for Adonais, he is dead.” The words, as she recited them, had felt like wine, fizzing dovra into, and exciting and hurting her. “I weep for Adonais, he is dead. . . I weep for mamma, she is dead . . , her arms and logs and breasts and her loins there, under the bengaliue dross, are stiff and dead- CHAPTEB 2 _ It WAS STRANGE THAT IN ALL THE YEARS of living in that small gray board house on Arctic Avenue, with the exterior staircase running down its flank like a lad¬ der, in fact ever since she was six and they had moved from Philadelphia the year of the climax of her father's asthma, tile things she, Bea, had taken for granted. Things such as an always replenished stack of fresh hand¬ kerchiefs in her dresser drawer; clam chowder on Fridays; clean top sheets every Monday; face towels when you reached for them; and a winter’s supply of coal in the cellar without anyone mentioning or reminding. Management of even so modest a household as the one on Arctic Avenue was packed with a minutiae of detail, of which, during the lifetime of her mother, she had scarcely been conscious. Then, icepans had never overflowed nor laundry accumulated, nor windows grown thick with grime. There had been tape hangers always on towels, and unfrayed cuffs on her father’s shirts, and new all-over-embroidery IMITATION OF LIFE 5 corset-covers in her dresser, without anyone seeming to give any apparent thought to them. They were just there, the product of Mother, sitting evening after evening, sometimes on a bench on the Boardwalk, or beside the Wclsbach lamp in the sitting-room, at work with her indefatigable fingers. Less than a month following her death, myriads of these hitherto unrecorded little items were to begin to stand out immensely against the nil too brief span of each day. Housekeeping for Father and Mr. Pullman, now that eveiy detail of it rested suddenly upon her, was filled with tre¬ mendous trifles of which heretofore she had not even been aware. To housekeep, one had to plan ahead and carry items of motley nature around in the mind and at the same time preside, as Mother had, at table, just as if everything, from the liver and bacon, to the succotash, to the French toast and strawberry jam, had not been matters of forethought and speculation. Since her passing, Evans Chipley was somehow, to his daughter, looking so dwarfed. Almost as if he had shriveled into his clothes and hung in the middle of them like a spider close to the center of his web. Poor Father. Life for him g must be made to proceed as closely as possible to the pattern , - she had woven about his fastidious little needs. There must % never he any coffee lop over into his saucer, and his corn must always be cut from the cob for him, and socks must be folded away wrong side out, with the toe indented so he could slide easily into them, and on wet days when Father walked to his headquarters on the Boardwalk Pier, there must he newspaper in his rubbers against possible leak. If Mother could carry these things around in her head without over seeming to have them there, surely she, Bea, with her diploma from the Atlantic City High School fresh in its ribboned roll, must he capable of carrying on with at least equal efficiency. True, during Mother's lifetime, it lntd been her pride that Bea did not often set: her nicely shod young feet into the kitchen. “Those tilings will come naturally enough when you get 6 IMITATION OF LIFE to them. I’d rather you spent the time practicing, or at your painting or burnt wood.” Darling Mother. How spared she, Bea, had been all those years, what with even Mr. Pullman’s board money being chiefly diverted to provide all sorts of additional little luxu¬ ries for Bea and her father. And now poor Father, deprived of those blessed first-hand administerings, was looking so dwarfed. This unintimate man, the mystery of whose intimacy with her mother still snagged her shameful curiosity, seemed to have touched life precisely in the manner he now inhabited his neat little dandified clothes; rather suspended in the middle, without contacts. She must see to it that the taken-for-granted creature com¬ forts of his life went on without the interruption to which hers had been so violently subjected. He had seemed so be¬ wildered, not to say fastidiously offended, that night the little bubbles had appeared along her mother’s lips when, without their realizing it, she lay dying. Mother’s impulse, as she begged him to leave the room and let her suffer alone, must have been to spare him ugliness. The other evening when the icepan had overflowed and its contents had come creeping into the dining-room to their feet beneath the sup- . per table! The mess of it was easily cleared, but to have had i Father see and suffer, was the rub. His voice had actually | cried, the morning he had come to her with a rent across his I freshly opened pocket handkerchief. Mother had always ; tended that crying voice as you would a child’s. And now, just one month after she had taken up the reins that had been laid down in death by her mother, came the suggestion from Father as he offendedly, after one spoonful, pushed away his dish of ever-so-slightly scorched com pud¬ ding: “Bea, better see if we can’t get Selene to come by the week.” She had been in the act of helping Mr. Pullman to some of the corn pudding, and now her hand hung with the spoon¬ ful over his saucer and made a little trembling motion as if it had been hurt. And in front of Mr, Pullman, too, She began to press out- IMITATION OF LIFE 7 ward with her tonsils, with her whole body, in fact, in an effort not to cry. “I’m sorry about the scorch, Father. The butcher boy came just as I was about to take it out of the oven.” “It’s all right, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Bah! Bitterl” Oh, oh, how that ground ini Rome wasn’t built in a day, How subtly, and yet with what cruel benignancy, that ejacu¬ lation from Father summed up her inadequacies. “Mr. Pullman and I can walk across the tracks to Selene’s house after supper. This kind of thing won’t do.” Now Father simply mustn’t act like that. To begin with, he knew perfectly well that the black woman, Selene, who had helped Mother twice a week toward the end, had moved to Baltimore. If only he had come right out with, “Bea, child, you’ve scorched the pudding again.” He had no intention of taking on the additional expense of Selene or anyone like her. Except for the grace of Mr, Pullman’s financial contribution, over and above Father’s sal¬ ary', there could never have been a Selene, even those last months of Mother’s life. Mother had once said that as a lad in Leeds, England, Father had seen better days. Perhaps, but certainly Aunt Chipley, the sole relative, who had lived with them in the Philadelphia days until her death, had given little evidence. Aunt Chipley, whose husband had been an ironmonger in Leeds and who, after his death, had followed her brother Evans to America, had drunk coffee from her saucer in great soughing movements and gone stocking-footed about the house. In fact, these constituted Bea’s sole memories of her, , except the tuberose smell of her parlor funeral, and the time she had yelled at Father that he was born a little dark, was a little dark at heart, and a dark would live and die. It had worried her at the time because, first of all, you r said “clerk,” not “dark,” and then besides, Father was not j a clerk or dark. Even back in those days before the asthma, f he had been city salesman for the great pickle-and-relish I concern whose interests he now represented in Atlantic City. I Clerks stood behind counters. Father drove a buggy around [ town to the trade. Father wore spats. True, he drank out ’ of bis saucer, too, but without the soughing noise, and with I t ■ J 8 IMITATION OF LIFE his small white mustache lifted as if it were first fastidiously smelling of what it partook. How small and neat and right he was. She fell now, with the entire pressing outward of her body, as it seemed to swell to resist all that was unspoken about the scorched corn pudding, the look she had so often seen in her mother’s gray eyes. He was quite a relentless pattern of precisions. Father was. Such a little gentleman, that the rebukes lay lotded into the custard of his manner. There was something utterly be¬ wildering about the way his capacity for rebukes was whipped into his suavity, No getting at it any more than you could separate the flavor of the vanilla from the custaui itself. ; . Strange that in all those years of seeing her mother’s neck drop forward like a tired swan’s, to the something fh.it: lurked , behind the neat privet hedge of her father’s^ mustache, that; ‘ /)• only now, when it was too late, she should find herself aeh- : ing to hold her mother understandingly away from his small, jf scarcely perceptible cruelties. Af| ' Did Mr. Pullman, who had resided in the small bosom of || that family ever since the move from Philadelphia, fifteen ■ F years before, realize any of this? He must know Father so ]: well by now. It was through his business acquaintanceship with him that he had come to board at the house. To he sure, Mr. Pullman’s work confined him to the Amusement Pier on the Boardwalk, where he demonstrated the varied uses of the varied relishes and gave out pickle literature and little stone pickles on stickpins. Father’s connections, as city salesman, had chiefly to do with the Philadelphia office. Still, the Amusement Pier, jutting from the Boardwalk out into the vast curve of hissing surf which dances in against the flunk of Atlantic City as it stretches quite beautifully between lgk Absecon and Great Egg Harbor Inlets, was informal head- {§| quarters for every local employee connected with the pickle- Brand-relish concern. |p Lucky for the Ghipleys that it was, since it drew to them F" Mr, Pullman. But how much better, this all-year-around “guest” ar¬ rangement, than every blessed year, come summer, having to move out, like the Leightons or the Doc Hansons, in an effort to catch up on the chronic national dilemma of living 9 IMITATION OF LIFE beyond their means, and then, nine times out of ten, renting the house to summer folks who had no respect for one’s things. Take the year the Hansons had rented to those four bache¬ lor boys from Philadelphia who had dried their bathing-suits on the mahogany furniture and burned cigarette holes in every piece of bedding in the house. Or the summer the Leightons had rented to a Wilmington family who had ruined a davenport worth more than the entire season’s rental. Really, with Mr. Pullman, you scarcely knew he was in the house. One of those conservative New Englanders, So quiet, so considerate, so steady and church-going. Except for the cans of maple syrup, which he handled as a side line, arriving in consignments which he kept stacked in his room, you would hardly have known it was occupied. Why, you could almost read the time of day by his orderly comings and goings, and really, in his frock-coat (lecturing, you see, at the .Pier on the history and development of the tomato from the field to the jar), there was that about him that was as high-class as a clergyman. Take your average unmarried man in a town like Atlantic City, where you only needed to walk three blocks from the house to the easily accessible gaieties of the Boardwalk, Wouldn't he just, though! Not so Mr. Pullman. Why, it was a pleasure, instead of a fear, to have a young girl growing up in the house with him. And goodness knows not many ' mothers in. Atlantic City who rented out could say that. Per¬ haps it was 'the combination of his day-long work of demon¬ strating and lecturing at the Pier, and his noon-hour side line of soliciting orders from the big hotels for his maple syrup, kept him such a home-body, nights, That fact, coupled with such nice house habits, such as reading or checkers, or one or two evenings a week a Sousa or Creators band concert on the Boardwalk, or a Saturday- night meeting of a local literary organization known as the Pleiades Club. A gentleman, if there ever was one. How often Rea had heard her mother sing this poan of Mr. Pullman to a guest whose visiting-card, freshly released 10 IMITATION OF LIFE from a case of mother-of-pearl, lay newly uppermost on the ; hall tray. Yet withal, even in his instance, the passing of her mother had revealed more and more her silent capacity for doing so many of the chores of life, too slight to be noticed while they were being accomplished, but suddenly, after her death, each one standing revealed as finite and exacting, It was simply horrid, for instance, to have to go into Mr. Pullman's room, after his departure each Monday morning, and collect his laundry. To be sure, as Mother had so often remarked, it was the income the renting of that room afforded made possible a laundress in the house half a day a week. . But just the same, to step into that room of Mr. Pullman s, Monday mornings after he had left the house, and assemble : his seven handkerchiefs, two shirts, four pairs of cuffs, three : collars, one nightshirt, one suit of underwear, one hath and two face towels, to be all tied into a wad for the washer¬ woman to carry down into the basement, was just terrible. It was one of the things she had seen Mother do, almost A, without its registering, during the fifteen years of Mr, Pull- |fe J man’s tenancy of that room. One of those taken-for-granled,. «y,v# •-moving-about-the-house tilings. But picking up all these male personal objects of apparel herself, was quite another matter, Then too, quite unreasonably perhaps, there was something exasperating about the immutable precision of the listing, The two shirts into which he apparently must dive because the stiff white fronts offered neither entrance nor egress. The balbriggan socks, which it was now her chore to mend on those rare occasions when fine holes fell into them. The seven large muslin squares with the little tape insert in the corner on which was printed an indelible B. P. The precision, more than the chore itself, with which there were the two shirts, the four pairs of cuffs, the nightshirt with the red-taped border, was dull and exasperating business, Apparently, when Mr. Pullman lectured to the visitors 1 It was infinitely nice just to walk arm in arm with Mother | -or Father. Or Mr. Pullman. 'VVjjA'T HAPPENED THE DAY SHI! WAS EIGIIT- een and Father’s arm had already had the dead look to it for weeks came not precisely as a bolt out of the blue, but out of skies soggy with her secret tears. It was her first birthday since the death, and Father had not remembered. This fact, watered with tears brought her no resentment, only heartbreak. Father would have been the first, had she reminded him, to bend down his neat white pate, as he did when guilty of small omissions and say, Cut off mv head, It’s empty," and would have hurried to see to it that a box of Fruitage* salt-water taffy or a ball of Board¬ walk popcorn was beside her supper plate. _ The omission had not been a sin. Only part of the ineffable loneliness that washed over her like a lusterless tide. Mother had always poked this day as full of little nonsenses • as a pudding with currants. New hair ribbons; broad pink or white moire bows, ready-made, which she wore anchored ; with a hatpin to the braided loop at the nape of her nee . ; Last year, on her seventeenth, just when Mother was begin¬ ning to grit her teeth through pain about which she had been so long silent, so that once Bea had exclaimed, “Mother, don t do that horrid scratching thing with your teeth” (oh, darling, forgive!), there had been the cutest little silver placket-pin, so your placket could never gape, and an Irish-lace jabot in a Wanamaken box, and a band-painted autograph album into which John Philip Sousa had subsequently inscribed. Such a pretty glove box too, of conch shells, made by a neighbor who sold them to a Boardwalk dealer for five dollars apiece (one dollar and forty cents to Mother), a copy of that darling book, David Hcirum, and a pair of sterling-silver hatpins, also in a Wanamaker box. For a while it had seemed to her (unworthily, she was to realize later) that Father was remembering and pretending not to, All through supper, a little crackle of artificial gaiety had flickered, in too frequent laughter, along his white mus- 22 IMITATION OF LIFE 23 tache. Father was not naturally gay. Usually he crackled with the dry fire of this kind of forced levity when he was about ! to say something oblique or in the inverted fashion that for J years had caused the back of Mother’s neck to hang forward ? Sometimes, too, this expression flickered when a little excite- 'f ment, like the surprise years back, announcing the family’s r trip to Pittsburgh, upon the occasion of the employees’ con- j> vention in the home-office city of the Pickle and Relish Com- 4 pany, was impending. ■ ;§ At that time, Bea remembered, he had been quite horribly * gay, propounding riddle after riddle to his wife, to whom ^ these moods were as embarrassing as their reverse could be i; painful. .. Thc evening of Bea’s eighteenth birthday, after propound- i tag several, he leaned forward to pinch her cheek, taking the l cool young flesh between his fingers. "What’s the difference between an elephant and an egg J ehr “Why—why, Father, that’s a queer one,” l “Mean to say you don’t know the difference?” Thank Heaven, Mr. Pullman did not either lend or with- Jx draw himself from these moods, eating calmly ahead, his k temples working beneath the smoothly parted wig-like hair. “No, Father.” Then on a little flash of forced hilarity his glance darting to Mr. Pullman: j “Don’t know! Well, well, you’d be a good one to send out to buy eggsl” It was here that he pinched her cheek. She could have Cried of a curious embarrassment. Even then, when immediately after the meal Father had disappeared alone on the rather surprising mission of a late business appointment, no portent of what was to come struck her. Tears were aching in her throat that day. That they would flow later when her head struck its pillow was some¬ thing to which she could almost look forward. Suddenly, as she drew back her chair with that imme¬ morial gesture of a woman about to clear table, the figure of Mr. Pullman, risen, was at her elbow, breathing, It was the breathing which shot her through with a strange premonition 24 IMITATION OF LIFE of she knew not what. It was a man breathing under a kind of excitement that was immediately transmitted to her. There was something about that breathing that caused her flesh to ri^ and shudder a little, as Mr. Pullman was risen and shuddering. , , . , «Bea ” he said, and laid his hand right down on the risen nap of hers, “your father and I had a long talk, just before SU For the first time in her life a rushing consciousness of the contour of her body flowed over her. It seemed to her, in that startled listening instant, that her flesh was being pricked into awareness, pore by pore. Not exactly unpleasant. The sensation was related somehow to the appeal.nice of a tall building, lighting up, window after window The soft rush of his breathing pouring over her was what did it. She let gasp an inner shame. “Bea, your father and I have had a long talk, She felt as if she had just had a silly and unaccountable scare over she knew not what. Long talk, of counsel Father and Mr. Pullman were for¬ ever having long talks. Right in the middle of the sidewalk . before the house. After supper. Polities. Business. Sometimes ! they sent her, since she was the quicker at reference volumes, f: to the Book of Facts to settle small disputes; President Har¬ rison’s years of office. Date of first ocean pier at .Atlantic City, Date of opening of Philadelphia Bank of North America, Population of Mays Landing. That hand on hers! It dawned upon her, with recrudes¬ cence of excitement, that no man, except her father for his morning and evening peeks, had ever touched her. Oh yes, and old Dr, Mcrribel, once, feeling her. bare back with his ear, when a cold had settled on her lungs. "Sit down, Bea, I want to talk to you,” said Mv. Pullman and pushed her so that she sank softly onto a chair, and began clearing bis throat the way he had, during the vocal solo, the evening of his reading of the paper on Abraham Lincoln. Gaslight from two Welsbaeh lamps, the kind that crumbled to the touch, spilled down on them, making prunes of their eyes and smearing their faces with pallor and their lips a IMITATION OF LIFE 25 faint purple. She had always noticed about him that his moist lips stuck slightly after each word, as a silence cloth.under a too hot dish leaves an imprint on a polished mahogany table top, Under the bright brown mustache, it was a very curving and very full mouth. "Don’t you want to know, Bea, what we were talking about?” "Yes, Mr. Pullman,” she said oil her own cool lips. She had a way of blowing up her hair out of her eyes when it escaped her pompadour. It was pretty tan hair, with a deep natural wave that showed in each single strand. He liked it. She could toll, because he breathed faster, and watched her lips and the flying strands. It. was the queerest experience, Ibis coming suddenly aware of her teasing bodily self. The "ape of her neck felt nice and long as she turned her head slowly on it. Under her shirtwaist, lovely white breasts, which, as they had developed, had filled her with secret shame, causing her to bind them down to flatness under towels and tight corset covers, seemed part, now, of that strangely exciting sense of her contour. It was not pleasant, but at the same time it was strangely exciting to behold his eyes seeming to want to undress something that she coveted, with a sudden exaltation, for her modest secret self. “Now what have you and Father been talking about?” To her amazement, for the first time in her unaware life, she felt her voice taking on the curving sex quality she had no¬ ticed in girls at school when they talked with hoys. “About you,” he said, the pupils of his eyes focusing and becoming smaller as she had observed them in poll parrots. "Your father and I have been talking-” “What on earth ...” “Bea, the thing for this house—now that your mother is gone-is for you and me to get married.” It was curious not to feel completely surprised, or. could one be too stunned for surprise? “If we marricd-lhings would look better, Besides, you are wlmt I want, Bea.” So this Was it. These were the things those bodies on the beaches, twining toward each other like vines toward the 2 6 IMITATION OF LIFE light, must be saying to, and wanting of. mAi other. This was the answer to the mysterious ballleinent which had pressed against her curiosity. How had Father asked Mother to marry him? What had he said, when he proposed? A mam- spring, so long concealed by the blank, eloek-bke law of her world of externals, was suddenly being revealed. She was being a woman. . . , “We figure it this way, Bea. Its not «‘>od around here, now. Your father don't feel it’s good this way any more than I do. Never mind why. You’re too innoee.it lu understand. A man likes that. Innocence. A man likes innocence. A man likes innocence a lot. Anyway, a man ike me, who wants a home with a wife in it. I’ll make a good man to you, Bea. She believed that. “It will mean a lot to your father, lies not getting any younger, It will mean a lot to me. You see, we ligurnl it out like this. You’re alone now, Bea, except lor your hither, and him not getting any younger. • • • As if part of her secret fear about the arm were not bound up with just that frightening thought! She half moved to put out her hand to touch the security of his presence, but because of that something which thickened his gaze each time she moved, she continued to hold herself bully away from his .nearness. : “I don’t pretend to be any better or worse than the run tit us. Not good enough for you, but then, wlmt one of us is good enough for a good woman? I. can stand up straight in triy church, and in my business, and look my conscience :in the eye. There’s not only my salary, five dollars larger .than your father’s, hut you would he surprised what my little side line in maple syrup is beginning to yield. Cover three or lour hotels in a noon hour and come away with an order or two every time. I’ve got a living to offer and I ligu re on promo¬ tion ahead. Only held two positions in mv life. Bruttleboro, and now here. Looks like I’m pretty steady, don’t it? Same now. No changes around here, your lather and I figure. Everything going on as usual, except us married.” Married! She would be married to this lean, rather uu- romantic New Englander, with his Adam’s apple and brown wig-like hair, long lean body, and strangely contradictory, IMITATION OF LIFE 27 : moist-looking lips carved heavily into his lantern-shaped face j There was no youth to him, even to his feet, which he wore 1 incased in Bluchers with rubber gores, or the furry way he 1 had of completing each word as if it tasted. All his little l habits, such as standing in stockinged feet polishing his shoes \ in the kitchen every night before retiring, unwrapping the l consignments of maple syrup and saving the paper and twines i in neat stacks on his closet shelf, keeping his copies of the ! Bnittkhora News piled unopened on his table until Sunday !; morning, when he read them in rotation in the hour before ji leaving for church, were not young habits. Something told I one that Mr. Pullman had never been young, | Marriage. Most girls, except spinsters, Heaven forbid! like f the Miss Burl who made the conch-shell boxes, came to it. 1 Mother had made no bones about saying; “Some day you f will marry, but there is time enough to begin to think about { that. Well, the time had come. With Mother gone, life was \ much as if some one had lclt open a door to a warm room f and strange bitter and alien winds were suddenly rushing I into security. | With Mr. Pullman, life would once more have to it that f darling aspect of being safe. There would be that indefinable f security which comes with a home of one’s own. Not ideal, l of course, the house on Arctic Avenue. But even that, tem¬ porarily, was pleasant to contemplate as one’s own and then •§:' perhaps some day a bungalow in Ventnor, with a brace of how windows that overlooked the ocean. Security! Her 1 own curtains to select and hem. Her own place in the ’ life of a man, Her own ability to provide Father’s old age with 1 a home, There would be babies—the part one understood so feebly- Tims in tin 1 year when men were debating whether a col¬ lege professor was of sufficient stamina for Presidency of the United Stales, Bea lifted her face, which intimated yes, for the betrothal kiss of Mr. Pullman. IMITATION OF LIFE CHAPTER 0 The marriage was to task i-i.aok unukii a white silk bell with a small stuffed dove bead for a dapper. The class eves of the dove and the little beak hunt; downward on a strip of white satin ribbon. One of the stewards ol the Hotel Dennis had loaned it to Father for the ivemnm. Not that it was to he so much of an occasion. 1 he odor of the tuberoses of Mother's death had lain too recently in the room which was to be the scene of her child’s marriage to her boarder. ' . . ,, ,, .• The sensing of this was unanimous between the Unco ot Unfortunately, though, the day, a hard bright 3rd of November, turned out to be one which pressed external ex- : citements against the small clapboard walls of the little house on Arctic Avenue. . No one had remembered to reckon that tins choice of date verged, with disturbing closeness, upon the mounting ex¬ citement of impending national elections, For the two days preceding Woodrow Wilson s first elec¬ tion to the Presidency of the United States, the Boardwalk, to say nothing of the city itself, shook to one demonstration after' another, “We want Teddy,” "Down with the Steam Roller.” “It’s a Dem-it’s a Dem-it’s a Dem-o-crutic yoarl Wilson!” ; : Already, during the forenoon of the day of trie wedding, the pouring of crowds, banner-carriers, and panniers toward the Boardwalk;, the disgorging of the Heading excursion trains from Philadelphia which rushed along Mississippi Ave¬ nue up to the Boardwalk, emptying coaches as far back as Arctic Avenue, to say, nothing of loaded incoming Pennsyl- vania trains as they came rushing.in along Georgia Avenue, contributed tension and din, It was one of those days when the all-year residents of the town whose incomes were not immediately derived from the i t; U demonstration, kept close to home and prepared to rent out I spare bedrooms to the “overflow.” jj Was there ever such a town in which to live? thought Bea j that day of her wedding, as the outdoor tensions began to f invade her own. Ft was like dwelling in a hurdy-gurdy. Even | on its comparatively quiet days, Atlantic City reverberated | to brassy out-of-door music. Every time you peeped out of | your window, there was a monkeyshine of one sort or another, | pretty sure to be somewhere in view, and no telling when the j! next blare of mechanical music would burst forth. Mother 1 used to say she got so she could stir up a cake or carpet-sweep | to the rhythm of any old German band. Of all days, her wed- $ ding day, for the last big demonstration before elections! j Mr. Pullman had been right cute, though, pasting a picture I of Teddy” in the parlor window and climbing out along the $ ridge of the porch in order to tack up a small American flag, f “Just to show them we appreciate their celebrating our f wedding with a big parade and a brass band!” § Anything, of course, to cover up his nervousness. | As Mrs, Hanson, who was being such a help in the arrange- I ments, remarked: . | “Wouldn’t it just blast you to see a big strong man like j! Mr. Pullman turn nervous as a cat over his wedding,” | It was really quite pathetic. Hoisted up on his cheek bones, / like red balls announcing skating on the lake, were two 5 rounds of unwonted color, and lie could not sit still. Mr. A Pullman just could not sit still, although he had decided to I remain in his room the morning of that day of the wedding, 1 and to appear down in the parlor at noon just before the I arrival of his friend the curate, Dr. Aspern, of Second Rock | Clmrch. I it was certainly better so. Much more delicate. It occurred 1 to Bea, alter it was too late to do anything about it, that 1 perhaps Mr. Pullman should have taken a room in the neigh- I borhuod, those twenty-four hours before the ceremony, Of | course, Mrs. Hanson had practically taken possession and, with I Mrs. Vizitolli from next door, in and out, it was all right™ j still— It was impossible not to be aware, even though lie tip- ; toed on his journeys through the hull to the bathroom, of the [ 30 imitation of life unprecedented sounds of midn.or.ang kth-w.-l.T planging into the tin tub, and the little snipping no.se* u ins .seasons room sl« sped thr.,., K h the « ft, feverish missions of that feverish (lay. X were to be efflnos mi mtf sideboard in the dining-room. Just a smuk. i u. a nu > teste had baked the cake and loaned her m.t-glass punch¬ bowl with die little glasses that hung on m»b fm..^.ts brim. There would only he Mrs. Hanson..me • N • * • > a friend of Mr. Pullman’s, who passed busk,, u; . m at Second Church on Sunday mornings who would staml u and Father who would give away the hi de, and Mm. \ telli who had loved to dandle Boa as a child when tin mo iu had taken her into the grocery store and who had .e ., < vowed she would see Bea as a bride. Poor de;„, she. not hear of coming into the parlor, but insisted upon viewing the ceremony from the pantry. A mere wisp of a wedding. Not even a veil, soar Moth, so recently had lain down the center of the morn m which the ceremony was to take place, Only yesterday, it seemed, Dr. Aspcrn, with Ins spectacles far down on his nose and their lenses horizontally bisect,■(!, had stood in this same room intoning the funeral oration over Mother’s darling clay, ... To think that life had sped on so rapidly just these tew weeks after her going, into channels that must have been undreamed of by her. Or had they been? Always, she had said, placing her hand with the almost chronic thimble on the third finger, into tlm warmth of Boa’s hair, Some day, of course, you will marry,” but invariably with a sort: of promissory note in her voice, as if against that some day arriving no sooner than necessary. Now suddenly it had lie- come necessary. The, loneliness and -the sense of that door loft: open, admitting chill, had made it necessary, The brass bands were quite terrible. “Hiawatha,” “Mos¬ quito Parade.” “Jack Johnson Came Home.’’ "Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” “Hackensack.” “Bedelia.” "John Brown’s Body.” “Where Was Moses.” , . . They boat up around the house so and made her feel quite crazy with all sorts of excitements, IMITATION OF LIFE 31 | Mrs. Doc Hanson, herself harassed with overwork, kept f admonishing her not to “run her legs off” and to lie down and t| rest while she and Mrs. Vizitelli and a fourteen-year-old black f girl, Angie, in for the occasion, did the arranging. f But there were last-minute things galore to be done! That S swap of bedrooms, for instance. Father was to be moved out S of the double bedroom he had shared with Mother, into \ Mr. Pullman s, and her own litile room left temporarily empty, ; put to the use of sewing-room, spare room, or whatever disposition such excess space in the house of newly-wed folk I was temporarily put. $ If only Father would make haste about swapping rooms \ with Mr. Pullman. Pie moved so casually, emptying his $ dresser drawers and carting his ties and shirts across the hall, I sorting and resorting his belongings on the wide double bed I of the room lie was vacating, just as if, in the brief remaining | : time before the ceremony, it did not have to be remade, and jf certain last-minute touches, preparatory to the invasion of a bride and groom, achieved. i Mr. Pullman, for instance, liked the north side of the I room for his shaving light. She knew that, from the way he $ had dragged over the waslistand in his old room. If only if Father would hurry. She wanted to move the chiffonier to | a position similar to where Mr, Pullman’s waslistand stood || in the old room. She had some lovely new pillow-slips with n B. P. embroidered on them which Claire Leighton, who had | moved away to Oklahoma (lily, had sent, and which she |f wanted to have fresh in their places, and a box of flowers | wrapped in col I on had come from Mr. Pullman’s aunt in | Bangor, Maine, which she wanted to arrange in the pair of |* vases on the mantel. The B. P. on the pillow-slips was done | in French knots on a hemstitched border. Pleasant that in | marriage she was not going In have to change her initial. But $? in a way she loll cheated of a thrill. | They were playing “Stars and Stripes Forever,” as a Read- £ jug train, just disgorged of excursionists, was backing its way jjj along Mississippi Avenue, coughing steam. !; What a crazy town in which to plan a quiet wedding to | follow softly oil the bereavement of a dearly beloved. One evening, according to what had been a favorite story i 32 IMITATION OF LIFE of Mother’s, about a year after they had moved to Atlantic City, a giraffe, being led to a Boardwalk exhibition, had actu¬ ally poked his head in through tire lace curtains of the second- story front window, as she had sat there rocking the child, Bea, to sleep. What a town! What a wedding day. The-arra-ee-and- na-vee-for-evuh-three-cheers-for-the-red-white-aitd-bl-oool The shaving soap smelled so. Mr. Pullman, with all his fixings, was making the house smell like a barber shop. It was nice, though. Bay Rum. Her own blue silk wedding dress was being pressed by Mrs. Doc Hanson over at her house. There was a picture-hat of blue panne velvet to match. A wedding veil would have made her cry, terribly. It would somehow have suggested Mother, misty and remote in death. Besides, the parlor was so small.. .. Her long white kid gloves, stretched and powdered, were laid out on the bed. Mr. Pullman had gloves, too. Heavy new white kid ones, She had glimpsed him, sitting on the edge of his bed in his undershirt, trying them on. It had startled her so that she forgot the mission which was sending her speeding along the hall. Oh yes, her lovely new white dimity nightgown had conic back from the seamstress with one row of heading acci¬ dentally left empty of satin baby-ribbon. She needed privacy for running that baby-ribbon, Suppose some one should stumble upon her, sewing on that particular nightgown. She found her bodkin and a secluded place on the stairs leading to the attic trunk-room, Weaving the ribbon through the embroidery, her legs began to tremble, Here she crouched, quite alone, on the edge of her journey into mystery. ' Mother. . . ? The silence of her mother, loaded and unrevealing, seemed to wind against her ears. CHAPTER 7 The outdoor demonstrations made Dr. Aspern fifty minutes late for the ceremony. It was all but impossible to get through the paraders as they clogged Atlan¬ tic Avenue, and while the bands blared, and the gold-fringed banners rode past the windows, the little party sat distributed through the house and waited; Father, in his Ascot tic, spats and small creased trousers, strumming his fingers on the table and drinking from the punch-bowl, until Mrs. Vizitelli carried it out into the kitchen, ostensibly to keep it on ice. Mrs. Doe Hanson, in and out between her home duties and the arraying of Bea and the house; Mr. Pullman, inside his room where you could hear him pacing and every so often opening the door to hold his ear to the crack for the sound of the arrival of Dr. Aspern. It was quite dreadful, that little house, set there in the midst of din, waiting. It was dreadful, because, now that the double room had been cleared and made ready, the chiffonier moved, Beil’s new fineries and underthings laid out cm the fresh paper in the dresser drawers, leaving free drawers for his, the new pillow-slips with B. P. embroidered in, fresh and snowy on the snowy bed, the pressure of a certain kind of silence, loaded and unrevealing, had time to settle in a sort of heavi¬ ness against her chest. It gave time to think arid shiver a little; shiver with one knew not what; shiver with the desire to be happy; shiver with dread and anticipation and ignorance. Mr, Pullman in congress gaiters, moistening his rather moist lips, was not quite the dream of all the suppressed silent years. But perhaps marriage was. Ever since she had played dolls, Bea had wanted, secretly, of course, in the little house of little secrets, to he married. To live in the security of one’s very own home, To ho Mrs. To sit opposite a man with whom one had lmrne a child. To 33 34 IMITATION OF LIFE fuss over and rear and dress that child as Mother had fussed over her. Sitting there in brand-new kid slippers with their white soles, blue silk dress with its yolk of Irish lace and balloon sleeves, large blue velvet hat with willow plumes rising away from her gray-eyed, pleasantly wide-mouthed face, little, if any, of ridiculous innocence was apparent. On the contrary, although there was something tremulous and eighteen about her, there was at the same time something markedly mature. The rounded breasts lifted by whaleboned corsets were full fledged; so was the dimpled hand that occasionally she pressed against them, as if to still their tumult. But her tendency to premature development which had caused her to bind her quite lovely bosom, as it matured, with tightly wrapped towels, and suffer secret humiliation over her tallness, was no longer to he worried about. Mar¬ riage freed you from the nervous concerns of girlhood, eased your sense of being an outsider to life, even where your very dear parents were concerned, once they closed the door of .-their room behind them. Marriage established you. Gave you a sense of security and being eared for in a special private way that meant everything. That is, if the dear close snug things mattered a lot. They did to Bea. The inside of a married woman’s pretty house, The sight of a baby under a coverlet with a pink bow, in a perambulator. A husband unlocking the front door to his home. The silhouette of a housewife moving about her very own kitchen. Husbands and wives pairing off and going home together after a prayer¬ meeting: or a concert or a euehcr, or gazing together into a shop window, were something over which to feel wistful and somehow a little chilled. From now on, in a very few moments, a husband would be caring if she got her feet wet or if other men ogled her. Or in that curious and possessive way that men minded cer¬ tain things in their own women that were matter of indiffer¬ ence when they observed them in others, Mr. Pullman would be saying: “It’s all right for other women to let their hare skin show through those thin net yokes, but I don't want my wife to do it.” That must give a woman a darling, cared-about feeling. IMITATION OF LIFE 35 i “You talk so much more of marriage than you do of Mr. Pullman,” Mrs. Doc Hanson had blurted out on one of those 1 few hurried days between the betrothal and the wedding, j “Are you marrying marriage, or Mr. Pullman?” ii Mr. Pullman, of course. Marriage was the symbol of Mr. f Pullman. That must be Mr. Pullman now, leaning over the top of fl the stairs, That was he, greeting Dr. Aspeml Ready now! I Marriage hud come. j$ CHAPTER 8 Everything had gone very well, even III with all the commotion out-of-doors arid a section of the I Reading train panting and coughing right through the cere- I mony and the strains of brass bands rattling the very window I panes of the parlor as Bea and Mr. Pullman dropped softly d to the floor cushion for the ritual of the marriage service. I The ring, balking ever so slightly at the knuckle, had slid |j on. There was something protective in the soft creaking noises |} and breathing of Mr. Pullman as lie knelt. She tried to mar- jf shai her mind during the ceremony. Here she was in the jf midst oi this must important moment, perhaps in her entire p life, Love. Did her gown, as she knelt, properly cover up the |f new while solos of her shoes? Honor. Some one had left the ft! kitchen faucet running! And obey. There was an imperfoc- || tion in the weave of Dr. Aspem's striped left trousers leg, | And now a kiss, the taste and smell and temperature of bav -d rum, , . . ’ j : ;f And there wasn’t even a young girl present to catch the § bride’s bouquet. Pink roses and baby’s breath. Later, Mrs. Hanson (in transparent navy blue voile over. if oxblood tallela), Doe Hanson (dentist over Cuskadeti’s Drug fi| Store), Mr. Farley, who operated a burnt-leather and shell- it goods concession on the Boardwalk, Father, and the bridal If; pair had taken a hack for table d'hfila dinner at the Hotel :| Rudolph, " . ' While this showy Boardwalk hostelry, catering as it did S'. 36 IMITATION OF LIFE to a wealthy Semitic clientele, would not ordinarily have been first choice, it was all quite special, both Father and Mr. Pullman knowing the chief steward. And as Father had put it, Hebrews are so good to their own stomachs they will be good to ours. And indeed so it happened. Black waiters in white coats and white eyeballs and white teeth, hoisted their trays and wound among the family-sized round tables of the vast dining-room. An orchestra played behind a trellis of artificial autumn leaves. Prosperous-looking families, surrounded by wide as¬ sortments of foods, dined to the clatter of dishes, music, and surf. The slap of bare brown palms against pantry swinging doors was part of the constant din, and even with the season well turned toward its decline, the aggregate of holiday diners was not inconsiderable. Heavy-busted, Oriental-eyed girls in heavy authentic jew¬ elry, dark men with blue jowls, stout children with chins rising barely above enormously piled plates, plump, pretty, clucking mothers, young love, still slim, seated tfite-i-tete at the smaller tables for two, and din, din, din. The table was in an alcove, and the chef had baked a small bridal cake with a pair of dolls in the center, and a bottle of Moselle wine was in a wicker cradle at Mr. Pullman’s left, Everybody stared when the wedding party walked through the dining-room, the slightly greasy lips of the stout and pretty young Hebrew mothers of unmarried daughters, part¬ ing, Bea, in her light feather boa, her hand on Mr. Pullman’s arm, who carried her cloak, felt the rising tide of color rise ami prick her face. Hebrews were such artists about life, often bad artists, it is true, but walking in among the spice of those dark, lit, sometimes greedy, but strangely alive faces, it struck her that they must regard this groom of hers as so much oatmeal ... unctuous oatmeal. . . . Took, there’s rice on your beard, Mr. Pullman,” cried Doc Hanson. Of course there wasn’t, and Mr. Pullman had no beard, but it made them all laugh as two Negro waiters drew back chairs and ice-water began to tinkle in them glasses. Mrs, Pullman,” cried Mrs. Hanson, elaborately, “pass your IMITATION OF LIFE 37 husband the olives.” That broke the ice of the occasion at the very start and Mr. Pullman pressed her knee under the table and Father, whose waning tipsiness, induced by the home-brew punch, revived with the second glass of Moselle began to relate little childhood escapades of Bea’s in the manner of one wanting to climb over his own mustache to get it said. b “... and everything is as all right as rain, until her mother, Oort rest her memory, gets to rockin’ her to sleep and believe it or not, believe it ladies and gentlemen, as you prefer, right as ram until her mother gets to rocking her to sleep and all ot a sudden, as I’m sitting here, I’ve her sainted mother’s word for it, right through the lace curtain, big as life, bigger comes the giraffe. ...” hb ’ Oh it was merry enough, with everybody complimenting everybody and touching glasses at each sally, and sometimes there were naughty ones from Doc Hanson, such as “May all your troubles be little ones,” and Mr. Pullman's knee nudging hers. ... 1 hat was being married, Mr. Pullman’s knee presuming to touch hers! She let her eyes stray to him when she dared. T here was something forthright and handsome about him, say what you would. His vigorous brown mustache and vigorous parted hair might have been painted on, and his legs, not slender and puny like a boy’s, but thick toward the top, carried him firmly. He would have made two of Father, and even Doc Hanson, who was thick-set, looked quite pudgy before the tall squarish figure in 'the frock-coat with the black binding, striped trou¬ sers, and white carnation in his buttonhole. If anybody in that party looked the doctor, it, was Mr. Pullman, As a matter of fact, there was a striking resem¬ blance between Mr. Pullman and “Mahatma” on the Board¬ walk, wlio dispensed Indian herbs and pamphlets on Vigorous Manhood. ■ Others had also remarked it, although it was not the sort of thing you would dream of observing to Mr. Pullman him¬ self. Mahatma had greasy coat lapels and his parted-m-the- center thatch of too brown hair really was a wig. Suddenly, with his air of rivaling Mahatma, Mr, Pullman 38 IMITATION OF LIFE pushed back his chair, cleared his throat terribly, and in .precisely the voice of tracing the history of the tomato from • the vine to the ketchup bottle, commanded a hush that in- ,1 stantly straightened the faces of the company, “Friends,” he said, and lifted his glass of Moselle, “to the | memory of one who has departed us in the flesh, but is our |v loved guest here tonight in the spirit.” jfr She felt as if.she were going to faint, as if the evening wore ?§:v a drain-pipe through which she was slipping. Father was looking at her with his eyes dragged down like a St. Ber¬ nard’s and his lower lip wagging; her husband, seating him- !fjtv, self, placed his hand over hers. fflfe'-' Mother, , ,, \ "And now," said Mr, Pullman, again changing the tenor of ■ the occasion with his voice, “and now?” M j “Say, Chipley,” began the Doc, “You like riddles, Here’s If: A one, How long is a Chinaman?” That broke the ice again, and it seemed to Rea that she I !' ; came up from under it where she must have been fainting- Now, how long was-a-Chinaman.,,,. Everybody was lovely at the dinner, just as if nesting in the backs of their beads was not the consciousness that these ^ two were beginning being married this night, Doc Hanson was great fun, and dear Mrs, Hanson, to f whom he was untrue, had rigged herself up in great state for the occasion. The poll parrot nesting in the voluminous velvet folds of her hat gave her an exciting and really quite crazy look. It dipped over one side, its black gums seeming ready to sink into her eyeball and somehow causing her very expression to match its own. Mother had liked this good- natured dear, Her third marriage-she had buried two, and not one of them any better than he should have been-bad l not violated that impeccable good-nature. Mr. Pullman was being delicate as one could wish, With all the right in the world now, he had only kissed her once. ? following the one at the altar. That was when she had run upstairs to get her feather boa and they had met on the landing, It had been all right. Not a bit frightening. Only now-it was pitch dark outside and they were already at the ice-cream and coffee. IMITATION OF LIFE 39 The next move, since they were postponing what was to be their honeymoon trip until Mr. Pullman’s annual week’s vacation . , . the next thing would be home, Suddenly the ice-cream, as it slid from her spoon across her lips, simply would not go down. It lay melting for a I long and uncomfortable while in her mouth, before she could | swallow. | i , ;j CHAPTER 9 : :l ■j This gas was burning m the hall, and the scent of the roses and carnations, already going limp in their vases, crowded to the door, almost like a presence to meet them. Mrs. Vizitclli and the little black girl had tidied nicely, (Had Mis, Vizitclli seen to it: that she had carted nothing away? Tin's one was a great one for stealing laundry soap, and now, what with so much angel-food left over, and an unusually full ice-box-no tolling.) The chairs were all back in plant*. Tim wedding bell wrapped and on a pantry shelf waiting foi Father to return it, I he little parlor table, before which Dr. Aspem had read the ceremony, in position once more between the windows, the shells, the small white moir<5 : Bible, the china plate with the signatures burned into it of the east of the Alleghenies salesmen and their wives who had attended the Pittsburgh home-office week of the Pickle and Relish Company, back once more in their usual neat geometry, Except lor (lie scent, which hud also hung around like a last: reluctant guest following the funeral, it might have been any evening on Arctic Avenue, alter church or Pleiades or baud concert. The Hansons going their way; five houses down on the other side ol the ,street; the magnified sound of late pedestrians’ (outsteps and laughter; the little pale patch of light which the corner street lamp throw across the lower half ol the lace ol the house, making llm keyhole discernible. Father was miwoutcdly tired. The side of him on which she fancied the arm looked muni), hung half an inch lower. The lipsiness had left him quite limp, and his left eyelid 40 IMITATION OF LIFE drooped like a crocodile’s, low and full of wrinkles. He always tired like that, exhausted^ and without the least re¬ serve, Mother used to relate how he could undress with his eyes closed, asleep almost before he touched the bed. He went upstairs like that, his feet striking heavily, and his head directed toward the door of the old room he had shared with his wife, Diverting his blind steps toward the room he had swapped with her, made Bea want to cry a little. But i Father was too tired to notice. The moment she lighted his gas, kissed him and closed his door, nothing was left of his ! little elegances but the desire to get rid of them as he sat on his bed edge, peeling off garment after garment with his eyes closed. He let her go like that, on this of all nights . . . alone, pecking her on the cheek in his half-consciousness and actu¬ ally suffering so with the weight of sleep that eventually he slid into bed with his shoes on, She stood in the upper hall. Downstairs, Mr. Pullman, about to take his usual long glass of cold water on a single draught, was hacking ice. _ j She lit the gas in their room. It was immaculate. Matting freshly scrubbed, crisp lace curtains, long enough to be laid out on the floor like the train to a miss’s graduating frock. Once the wedding party was out of the house, Mrs. Vizitelli j and the black girl had moved Mr. Pullman, even to the stacks of undistributed cans of maple syrup, which now stood j neatly on the floor beside his chiffonier. His razor strop hung over the washstand in a position relative to the one it had occupied in the old room. His slippers, too, brown felt, stood ! beside the coal-scuttle on the white-marble hearth, precisely as he had kept them in the other room, and on the mantel, between the two brown pottery pug dogs, was a small array , of his personal objects. Framed photographs of an exceed¬ ingly narrow-faced pah of parents, deceased. One of quite an aged aunt, deceased. A framed program of the Pleiades Club, ! the one on which Mr, Pullman was announced to read his | paper on Abraham Lincoln. And of all things! Dear knows from where, the black girl had unearthed a picture which ; must, in some way, have got mixed up with his other belong- j- ings. A horrid cabinet-sized thing of a woman, which Bea 41 IMITATION OF LIFE turned face down, in stockings and no clothes, trying on a man’s high hat before a mirror. With what seemed actual malice, that Picture had been propped up against one of the china pugs. Those darkies. ... The bed had been turned down, and on the side near the window on which her mother had slept, was the dimity white gown with the beading. Another pair of lives was about to begin moving through the secret places of experience, there in that room. But how? Now that the curtain veiling the unmentionable was about to be withdrawn, what was going to happen? To her? To happiness? The hacking of the ice had ceased. She must hasten down- stairs for fear he might think it was she who was waiting for him to come up, when suddenly, more than anything in the world, that was precisely what least she wanted.' As a child, when fear of dark hallways had sent her feet speeding, she now began to run downstairs, to where there was the lighted parlor and Mr. Pullman seated in a rocker with the water-glass, which he had just drained, in his hand. He rose to take her in his arms, and began to place a series of large, slow, sucking kisses against her face and down along the Irish-crochet yoke. “You’re my wife now,” he said into her flesh. ' She wanted him not to smear against the lace which had been made by her mother and was of beautiful raised rose design, but would not have withdrawn for worlds. This was being married. He was very nice, too, and smelled of bay rum and those little scented black things he chewed. More than that, was the cold male aroma of his flesh as he held and desired her. “You’re not afraid, are you?” She sat on his knee and played with his cravat. “No.” “I won’t frighten you.” She didn t want to push his hands away from her face and neck, but she wished-she wished he wouldn’t. ‘You belong to me, now,” he said, and it was fascinating to watch the pupils of his eyes become quite small when he said it. Fascinating and, in spite of her firm resolve to sit relaxed against his knee, a little frightening. She drew an outline of his lip with her forefinger. 42 IMITATION OF LIFE “And you belong to me.” At that be jerked her to him, his breath pouring clown through the lacework of her yoke. “Go upstairs,” he said. “To bed. I’ll come.” All the breathing and the beating and the commotion of her being seemed to stop at that. She felt more motionless than she had ever dreamed she could be, and still live. “Why, yes,” she said, finally, and, more to withdraw from the torrential avalanche of his breathing than anything else she could think of, began obediently to walk upstairs. The gas, contrary to custom in a house where it was usual to turn it out after ever so brief an exit from a room, was still going, and there was her gown on the side of the bed near the window. Well, one didn’t stand and gape that way, at a gown. She began to unhook the placket of the blue silk skirt and then to climb with both her arms down toward the center of tho back, at unhooking the basque. When she knew him better, her husband would do that. Her petticoats were so pretty, She took them off, the three, ; one by one, trying to concentrate on the sweet little hand- | made details she knew about each of them. Unhooking her corsets, the wardrobe gave one of its habitual groans of creaking wood, and throwing her arms across her breasts, she leapt, shivering and appalled, to the I corner of the room. It made her cry of anger. Anger at herself. There was no j harry. There was no fear. She slid into her gown, closing it at the neck and at each wrist with a bow of white satin j, baby-ribbon, arid, the color of maple syrup pouring from b one of Mr. Pullman’s pails, her hair came down below her j: waist and hung like a photograph of a waterfall. It was won- derfully alive hair that sometimes snapped and bit with elec- > tricity if you so much as touched it, and separate strands f seemed to raise themselves up, each with a glow of life. It was syrup brown mixed and lightened by some of the ash color of her eyes. Beautiful hair, which, when twisted into its “horse’s tail” at the nape of her neck and plastered over f: with a ribbon bow, suggested little of its wealth. Standing in front of the mirror which she tilted to reveal ;■ IMITATION OF LIFE 43 her full length, it enveloped her like a domino. A face cov¬ ered with a pallor, smooth as cream which, flowing around her features, seemed to obliterate everything except gray eyes plunged into by enormous black pupils. Perhaps since Mr. Pullman was a gentleman-Mother had always said it of him—ho would not come up tonight, Would give her time-privacy- Standing trembling, grateful for the security of the cloak ot tier hair, the overwhelming ridiculousness of her nlirrlit felling UP ° n hef ' If onIy Mother llad n °t left her without The Welsbach burner sang its whiteness down over her £Tti‘ T e, ' e W T, thi "f *? ck Biased' Me active things. The placing of her blue kid slippers in tissue wrap¬ pings -m their box. Getting all her paraphernalia, corsets, underclothing, hair-rats, garters, out of sight. Hanging the blue silk dress wrong side out in the closet. In it now dan- ghnj? m rows, were the suits of Mr. Pullman. Two of them and his brown velveteen morning jacket and some odd pairs of trousers hanging upside down by clips. There were his shoos, too, strong Bliichers into which his strong feet on their heavy mature legs rested roomily. As alarinodly as a bare takes fright, suddenly she banged shut he door turned the gas jet, and was in bed, deep, trembling, and her skin dry as powder. Mr. Pullman was a gentleman. But his breathing had poured so. Boasts in jungles were supposed to breathe that way.. Long and deep and hot. He had been kind. He would bn kind'. His lips and the way they drew unto him. . .. That eabinet-sized picture, face down now, on die mantel. Mother, it you had only told. . . . Tomorrow things would be lovely. Rios's him, alter all, Mr. Pullman was not coining. Bless him. . . . The door opened then, and precisely as the panther is supposed to. do in tho jungle, some one was breathing in the dark. CHAPTER 10 On Fridays Mr. Pullman had got into the habit of liking his Absecon oysters. A Mr. Wilson, with a fish store on North Carolina Avenue, saved her twelve beau¬ ties every Friday morning. It was pleasant in the crisp R months to take the longer route of walking over to the Board- . walk, as far down as Haddon Hall or Steeple Chase Pier, turn off into North Carolina Avenue for the oysters, and then home by way of Arctic Avenue, doing incidental shopping on the way, Mighty pleasant when the ocean was just mild and curly and sails bobbed against a deep blue sheet of sky and the air was sharp enough to keep the white beach clear of shouters and bathers. That was the ideal time, after the guest-ridden, excursion¬ ist-invaded summer season was over, to venture onto the Boardwalk, if you wanted to enjoy a sense of the vast beauty of a sea that remained so impersonal to the strutting parade of bathers, hotels, strollers, lovers, roller chairs, venders, brass bands, banners, popcorn balls, horseback-riders, sand artists, fakers, youngsters, oldsters. In July and August, when the excursion trains thundered in at the rate of dozens a day, disgorging holiday-makers iu a thick stream that reached backward from the walk as far as Arctic Avenue, the ocean somehow became just part of the bedlam into which merrymakers plunged with no sense of ;~ its gorgeous miracle, beyond the last two or three breakers that came plunging in to tickle their none too ticklish sensi- | bilities. They screeched when riding the waves, much as they j : screeched when the cave of the winds on the Steel Pier blew the girls’ dresses up over their heads. All five Fridays of April had been fine. Along the thinly peopled Boardwalk, wind and sun and salt seemed to pour in off the ocean, painting and coating the body with one sensation of'exhilaration after another. 44 IMITATION OF LIFE 45 ;; It must he good for me in my condition, thought Bea, breathing in with every inch of her capacity during these ? Friday-morning walks after the Absecon oysters. I Ever since February, the “condition” had been almost as j concrete as a presence, around which revolved every act and * consideration. Even during the period of those dreadful | mornings of facing each day wrung with nausea, when she I had perspired of chill and rattled into chill through perspira- I tion, it had seemed nice and right to be in the condition. A ij justification, in some way, for that sense of the passivity of tilings. The fears, the hopes, the ecstasies behind the veil had J simply not been there. And neither, mind you, was she un- ! happy. Not a bit of it. On the contrary, it was all right being J married to Mr. Pullman. Nice. Only marriage, the marriage ill part, was nothing mysterious at all. A clinical sort of some- | tiling, apparently, that a girl had to give a man. It was a f little terrible at first. Quite terrible, in fact, to have to feel so passive, so unstirred in the face of all the strange delights | it was within her power to awaken in Mr. Pullman. After a while one s chief solace lay in just that, It was wonderful, it j was beautiful, it was being a goddess, to be able to bestow, J even though within yourself no fires were lighted, only the : willingness to endure. J " The condition was her compensation. It made the quite |. shocking sense of let-down merge readily into the not un- 1 pleasant routine of her marriage to Mr. Pullman. And do 1 not for a moment think that quite a few of the compensations fl| she had foreseen were not there. They were. 1 Marriage with Mr. Pullman had its problems, of course, ffl But then, to quote Mrs. Doc Hanson, • “Dear God, what 1 marriage hasn’t?” He wasn’t a man you could handle so as I he could notice it. Just a bit set in his ways about the little if things (how he could pound a bolster to get the feathers distributed his way before retiring), but when it came to the if big, always ready to give in at the end. The time she had <| wanted to order their new parlor set from Wanamaker’s in ; | Philadelphia, and he had believed in giving Braunstein’s, a : j|j home concern, precedence. That was as it should have been, ; except that Wanamaker had such a lovely three-piece, rose i f velvet suite, not a bit more expensive than the green-and-gold 1 46 IMITATION OF LIFE velours set, really more practical, which they ultimately pur¬ chased. Of course, they had bought it at Braunstein’s, because after he had given in about Wanamaker’s, not for worlds would she have had it any but his way. And really the green- and-gold velveteen, splashed in flowers, turned out quite handsome in the end. But it just went to show what being married to Mr. Pullman meant. Knowing how to handle him in the big things and letting him have his way in the little. Take the time he had wanted to throw over the maple- syrup side line because Prynne & Company, the Brattleboro concern, had wanted to hold him to accept a shipment that had arrived in bad condition. She had won out by taking a secret trip to the local claim agent in an attempt to force the railway company to do the adjusting, a solution which Mr. Pullman had claimed would be impossible, owing to faulty packing at tbe Brattleboro end having had so plainly to do with the leakage. Just one of his stubborn fits which you had to learn how to handle, or there he would have gone and thrown over the tidy little side income that was precisely to her what Mr. Pullman’s board money must have been to Mother. Nr. It meant a lot of little addenda, that extra twenty dollars or so a month that Mr, Pullman earned by the compara¬ tively. slight additional effort of carrying a few gallons of f the syrup around to certain of the Boardwalk stewards who took it regularly. Everything in knowing how to handle a man, Take this little matter of the Absecon oysters. Why, to hear him brag about it, one would think the Friday walk to Wilson’s fish shop on North Carolina Avenue was miles instead of just this pleasant early stroll along the Boardwalk. Mr. Pullman appreciated little things like that. Loved for her to cream and sugar his cereal; insert the large gold monogrammed buttons into his stiff detachable, cuffs. Pinched her cheeks over favors, and in the case of the Absecon oysters, inhaled each one, as if its flavor had a double meaning. Oh, there were compensations being married to Mr. Pull¬ man, and plenty of them, and life, especially now that those perfectly terrible spells of morning nausea were over, was good. IMITATION OF LIFE 47 it was amazing what feeling secure did to the front one put up to the world. Striding along the Boardwalk in the nippy morning air; wife of a local man of impeccable stand¬ ing; mother-about-to-be; motivating force of tbe small, well- kept home whose very existence depended upon her return from the fishmonger’s into its sweet-smelling security-made a difference in the way you faced the world, the day, and the fishmonger. The Bea Chipley of six short months ago had been a mouse, wanting in, as it were, and scratching feebly at the walls of life, She was in now. One soon learned to tune one- seJt to the more tempered actualities of marriage. The actu¬ alities, iri fact, the darling little secure rows of days of tink¬ ering and building more and more stably into the home were what made the secret aspects of it endurable. It was they, these secret.aspect^could' not be quite terrible. . “J , the °fter hand there Was this to consider. He was so nice. At! considerate as you could expect! Mixed up in it all was not even disappointment, , since hpr expectations-had been as inchoate as her knowledge. The mystifying part of her relationship with Mr. Pullman was, .the sense of feeling ex- ternaT and non-participant to the spectacle of the supreme t emotion flashing its strange, and she supposed sublime, im-l| pulse through so malter-oFfacfT conductor as Mr. Pullman, 1 It seemed u lot to be able, through just the volition of being herself, to bring to him what seemed to be almost intolerable ecstasies of the flesh which, through the calm unruffled curtain of her own unawakened flesh, she could regard with almost clinical detachment. Mrs Doe Hanson, by way of immediate metamorphosis after the wedding day, which had transformed her from Mother's neighborhood friend into eager and intimate old- wife, had frankly out-and-out questioned her. ‘‘Well, don’t answer if you don’t want to, but if you are inclined to be one of the frigid ones, don’t let him know it. I would bo u lot better off today if I had learned sooner how little to let-my husbands know about mo.” Did Mr. Pullman suspect she wus-that? Profiting by the suggestion, she tried to'make him believe she shared. . . . IMITATION OF LIFE 49 That was why the coming of the baby, so rightly, so promptly, made it all comfortably all right and normal. As right and normal as trotting along the Boardwalk this cerulean morning, her home standing solidly behind her, spick and span, after its morning cleaning, her purpose Ab- secon oysters for Mr, Pullman’s supper and the purchase of Omega Oil for Father, who was complaining of pains under his shoulder blades. A hack drew up at the curb simultaneously with her re- turn to the house, laden with the carton' of oysters and the package of Omega Oil. Stepping out of it were two attaches of the Seaside Hotel, where he happened to have been stricken, bringing Father home. He had had his stroke in earnest this time, from which he seemed to recover later in the day, but which left his \'. '. TALS^aO'' ' ' C H A P T E R 11 ©ffiS'tfes A&C Ho. iwm0 Hi®© ©f Damir.. In some RESPECfM-tert'e):t easier to handle than she would"fe^fe!M was just no pleasing him. He took to his wheel-chair with almost immediate docility, seeming to experience an actual pleasure in the fastidious selection from the three which had been sent from Phila¬ delphia on approval, as well as in his place in the side yard in the sun, where, after a while, there was usually some one pausing to pass the time of day with him. Elegance of a sort descended upon the chair-ridden old gentleman whose baby-fine white hair was always fresh and damp with the mark of the comb through it, and whose small immaculate clothing seemed never rumpled by his predicament of paralysis. It was surprising how well he came to make himself un¬ derstood out of the unimpaired corner of his mouth through which he had to crowd articulation. At least to Bea it seemed so. After the first two or three weeks, translation became a IMITATION OF LIFE relatively simple matter for her: “Reem Sasheesho”-Read : me the Saturday Evening Tost. “Pay Mewsh”-Play the music-box. “Iwa Cough”~I want coffee. On the other hand, Mr. Pullman never learned the knack of it so that, no matter from what part of the house she heard Fathers voice addressing him, down the stairs she new in her ‘ condition,” to thrust herself between Mr, Pull- ^ Calamfty WhiCh had descended u P on their It_ was as if she felt responsible. Apologetic. Needful of sparing him. Which, in justice to Mr. Pullman, was not the case, at least not until by her manner of apology she invoked it into being, He must, of course, have foreseen the coming of the day when the Company could or would no . longer continue to carry Clnpley on its salary list. As a matter of fact it was after the sixteenth week that, with a note of regret, the weekly remittance ceased. But even then, except for a dis¬ cussion as to the wisdom of renting out Bea’s old loom in¬ stead of fitting it up as a nursery, Mr, Pullman, with deli¬ cacy, seldom alluded to the additional burden. Here again, in the matter of the contemplated nursery - the small revenues from the maple-syrup side line helped I meet the situation. Seaside Hotel, Hotel Traymore, anil Pierrepont had all recently been entered into the little black book in which Mr. Pullman noted these accounts. The ag-1 gregate from these sources made it possible, even with what 8 had befallen Father, to forge ahead with the adorable plans for that nursery. Baby-hunting wall paper. Dotted Swiss shirred around the ■clothes-basket bassinet. New matting and a gate for the head of the stairs. The gate somehow was the most exciting detail of all to contemplate. Protection against a child’s adorable but perilous instincts to explore, it hung in her mind, “We’ll make out all right,” Mr. Pullman had said into the stub of pencil point held against his lips the evening the letter, from the Company regretting discontinuance of Mr, I Chipley’s weekly remittance lay before them. “Those little 1 rascals of maple-syrup accounts will d'o the trick.” 1 He was right nice about money affairs, Mr. Pullman was. ; g 0 IMITATION OF LIFE Generous and ready, just so you took pains to let him know you knew who, after all, was holding the purse strings, and dear knows, now with Father incapacitated, she was certainly doing that, and letting him know it was not only a duty but a pleasure, , . No, .it was little short of admirable the way m which Mr Pullman had stood up under the entire situation, except, and she felt base in letting the thought flicker against hot¬ brain, the change in Mr. Pullman’s altitude toward Father, after that stoppage of salary, had been so lightning quick. Nothing much on the surface, mind you, but- far from the old attitude of cronyship that had existed between them, Father, almost from the day, almost from the hour in which be became financially dependent, became some one not to bo answered. That hurt, that almost killed her. Far from even trying to interpret, or have Boa interpret for him, the mis¬ shapen words as they mushed thickly off bathers lips, Mi. Pullman not only no longer addressed Father, but no longer wanted him at table. “This won’t do. Bib him and feed him off to himself, had been Mr. Pullman's illy concealed dictum of disgust one night at dinner when spoonful after spoonful of bread soaked , in chicken gravy (so nourishing) held coaxingly against her ? father’s stiff lips by Bea, had drooled away from its desti- ■ nation. Oh, that had not been fair of Mr, Pullman! To be sure, a man coming home tired, had a right to expect release from the exactions of a busy day, and the crowds which milled the pickle-and-relish pier could be exasperating, what with ■ their sampling, sampling, and crowding about for the pickle stickpins without regard for Mr. Pullman’s oratory. But stored up in almost every mind, she had observed, was ;a grudge against some one individual which it found hard to forgive. Mother’s grudge against: Father had been his never consenting to take out life insurance. Father’s against Mother, in spite of the fact that the enterprise had died a total loss, was her one-time refusal to lend him two hundred dollars, her savings, for an investment in a Boardwalk concession called The Battle of San Diego, : To her dying day, with his admirable qualities to the con« imitation OF LIFE 5X trary m’tvvithstanding, Bea told herself she could never for¬ give Mi. Pullman his defection where Father was concerned a f0 , Sure ’ as an “wM, Father did immediately develop a querulous, exacting side that kept her really quite cruelly on the jump. Not that by sigh or word of mouth she would ever have let on to Mr. Pullman! hi^r 1 " i™ have C0nceived t0 what exteht the nithtito moii, or less. innocuous fastidiousness of the little d0 "u ! eVe ° l ? ed int ° f f uenilmis ^anny that some- unes brought Bea exhausted to the task of getting him to hoft/lont f S ' tie m ° re She , Wed the more there ^eloped All! f ,ni ! g,n ® out a Intent cussedness in Father. 1 lifedoinu mim r an ' ying t00k his chances 011 f d0,n « lhn f ! lb that to him. Why, just look at Doc r |M FOfeSS t0 , be m the raan Mr. Pullman vvasl Halft 1 Could,, t even speak of them in the same breath, ever body knowing Doc Hanson wasn’t any better than he needed to be But the way that fellow toted around blind old penniless Mrs. Hassiebrock, his mother-in-law, just as if she were a queen, and her, as Father had once laughingly put it, lie. a bullion on wheels” if ever there was one. No what with her “condition” and all, Mr. Pullman should not have made it necessary, along about the time for lum to come home, for her to whisk Father out of sight as U 00 were some old kitchen apron. Father, for all his naughtiness, was so terribly meek about that, urging lus invalid’s chair out of the front room by manipulating his good hand along the wheel and doing all m lus power to have himself disposed of before the entrance of his son-in-law. There was something heartbreaking about it; something heartbreaking and infinitely puzzling. Father would actually hurl a dishful of his gruel or purged pota- toes down the front of her dress if she displeased him by its preparation or manner of tilting the spoon, But to Mr. Pullman, who ignored him as if he were so much meal in a sack, Father presented an obsequious, almost fawning front, eager to be out of the way if that was what pleased most, pathetic in his desire to mumble forth to him the doctors dictum that his speech seemed less thick, im¬ peccable in his table .manners if by any chance Mr. Pullman 52 IMITATION OF LIFE i: : waited through the kitchen, where, likely as not, two rain- utes before, Bea had been having a bad time with him. His deference to Mr. Pullman, even while they lightened certain of her trials with him, broke her head. On one occasion Mr. Pullman had entered the kitchen right in the midst of one of her father’s most shocking in¬ stances of insubordination to her administenugs. In trying to adjust his spats, which, along with every accouterment of his late dandyisms, he still insisted upon wearing, one ot the straps had come loose. The ready beast of rage which seemed to crouch just beneath the surface of his dealings with Bea leaped at her then, and with his good arm (.hipluy lifted a rolling-pin, which lay on the adjacent table and struck, It landed whack across her jawbone, horrifying him and causing her to cry out so that Mr. Pullman, reading Ins Philadelphia Inquirer in the dining-room, came hurrying out in his congress gaiters that clicked. The scene that followed tattooed itself for life into her consciousness. She was to cry against it, as two months later she writhed in childbirth, mistaking it, in her semi-conscious¬ ness, for the immediate source of her agony. “God damn you,’’ Mr. Pullman had shouted, kicking the Step of the invalid chair with the side of his huge Bliicher ! shoe so that it spun halfway around on its rubber-tired wheels. "You house-devil, touch her again and 1II break every bone in your persnikkety body.” It was the first and last oath she was ever to hear come off those piously shaped lips. It was grand to have him sweep his arm about her in the protective manner she craved, and yet, upon seeing her lather cower into mute acquiescence, the kick and the oath were at that moment translated into secret and lasting unfmgiveness for. his brutality to a mealsack in a wheel-chair. CHAPTER 12 Mu, Pullman was not onk who nkkoep to be prodded about this matter of life insurance. He had doubtless heard years of the dickerings on this subject be- IMITATION OF LIFE 53 tween Mother and Father. You could scarcely lie abed in one room in the house on Arctic Avenue and not overhear a con¬ versation going on in an adjoining. A man can save without shelling out in premiums to insurance companies, had been Father’s life-long contention. “I know, but we don’t seem able to get ahead of our¬ selves.” “We will.” Of course, they never did. Bea knew lor a fact that her father had even been hard pressed to meet the sudden exigency of her mother’s under¬ taking and funeral expenses. She had used the circumstance to try arid take the edge off' her pain. After all, it: was better, Mothers going first. Being left unprovided had been a chrome dread with her. Just had not ever been able to get ahead with savings for that rainy day. Being left: “unpro¬ vided had been a life-long dread with Mother. The fact that two or lima; of the girls in Boa’s graduation class had gone into stenography, and that one, Ella Stanhope, had got her name in I he papers as the first woman bank cashier in Atlantic City, had accelerated Mother’s amazingly stubborn demands lor life insurance. If, Cod lorbidl the unexpected happens, a man must leave his women folk provided for, Mr. Chipley must see to that:: Her one demand. Oh, it: was belter so, her going first. . . . Yes, Mr. Pullman must have been well initiated into this ancient eoulroversy between her parents, because, always now, he took care to see to i|: llial discussions pertaining to that subject took place in Father’s presence, invariably causing him to wince a lilllc with Iris good eyelid and them .imme¬ diately simulate sleep. Mr. Pullman intended to lake out a two-tliousand-dollar life policy, and “when baby came” just for the cute fun of it, start a little building association account: in baby's name. Surprising law those tilings growl Surprising too, how Mr. Pullman, who had formerly seemed such a detached person, his interest in the household so casual, bad suddenly developed a whole string of the most intimate domestic interests. A little too much so. Why, lie g4 IMITATION OF FIFE could tell, when he walked into the house .'it night, if a bisque figurine had' so much as been moved from the mantel to the whatnot, And how pleasant it was, during the day, to arrange and rearrange. Nice, of course to have a man in¬ terested that wav. But really, Mr, Pullman took tlm cake. Didn’t he just have to have his way about where tlm enb should stand in baby’s room and about looping hack the Swiss curtains instead of letting them lull straight, the pretty way she had planned? And as for her appearance, well sir, Mr Pullman was certainly particular about: tlm way her shirt¬ waists sat in the back, and concerned that her heels were properly low and broad and never run over! Who would have thought he would ever turn out that wqv] It was nice, of course, having him so interested. Didn't he rehang the lace curtain on the bout hull dooi one morn¬ ing on his way out, because the design was upside down? Only sometimes there were things a woman should decide. Those long infant’s dresses, for instance, What dillernme should it have made to him whether she ran the tucks side- wise or lengthwise. It did, though, and sidewise they had to go. Well, it was better than some men who thought womens cares beneath them. He was sweet about baby corning, not above speculative playfulness about its sex. Jessie was a good name to plan in advance. It had been his mothers. Also, and many a laugh they had, unless twins, it was a name to fit either sex. He humored her in these laughing bouts, cau¬ tioning her, though, against over-strain. All well and good for some smart-alec women of fresh ways to ride horseback and go in the surf when they were in that ‘'condition.’' Nothing like that around herd Once every so often she went to her doctor’s, nor was she allowed by her husband to do any heavy lifting, which must wait to be done by him evenings when he came home. Then, too, there was this inestimable boon to these un¬ comfortable months, which she was reluctant to admit even to herself. Mr, Pullman was such a gentleman. He offered, which proved him one every inch, to have a cot put tip in the nursery and transform it into his temporary quarters. IMITATION OF LIFE 55 It would have been-well, it would have meant a lot; but that she refused to sanction. Meanwhile the clays, full of not unpleasant realities and of: dreams as well, moved on. The plan afoot for the new borne, a year, or at the most two years, hence, was the dear¬ est of all the dreams. The idea was to purchase one of those darling bungalow cottages they were beginning to put up around Ventnor, where there could be a sun porch for Father am Hie baby, and a view of the sea from the west windows. Imre was a payment-down, rent-toward-purchase, arrange¬ ment which Mr. Pullman considered very fine, It gave the prospective lmyer his chance both ways. If, God forbid! ill- ness or unforeseen circumstance interrupted the gradual acquisition of the home, nothing but the initial deposit of something like two hundred and fifty dollars need be for¬ feited. it would be lovely, living down Ventnor way, re¬ moved from the growing din of the town and the proximity of Boardwalk activities, to say nothing of the inpouring ex¬ cursion trains which intersected Arctic Avenue at two adja¬ cent corners. Mr, Pullman, who was not demonstrative outside the privacy of their own room, had kissed her right in front of Father the night they had planned this all out. It made her blush, his doing that to her in her unsightly stale. Honestly, it was a wonder be would even look at her. it filled her with a sense of shame to go about even in front of Father, who, so far as one could judge, continued ignorant of what by now had become such a conspicuous fact, causing her embarrassment even when she wrapped herself in her "maternity” cape and went out toward evening for market¬ ing and shopping. Father could not have known. He would never have dared, for instance, even in his poor old state, to have lifted the rolling-pin that time, or to grimace and make talons of the fingers of his good hand when she displeased him in the matter of food or dress. He was sly, all right. Knew how to confine these parox¬ ysms of rage to the periods when Mr. Pullman was not about, ami then he could be mighty naughty. His exactness about his clothing made the laundry such an item, to say 56 IMITATION OF LIFE nothing of meals. He would calmly let food, not to his lik¬ ing, flow away from his lips as she tilted spoonful after spoonful of carefully pnreed vegetables or meats against them. Sometimes it would be necessary to prepare three or four varieties before the welcome feel of suction against the spoon would convey the glad tiding that his fancy had at last been reached, Of course, nothing of this was ever allowed to get to Mr. Pullman, It was one of those lonely struggles in which women somehow have the courage to engage. “If he was my father,” Mrs. Doc Hanson exploded to her once, “I’d fold him over my knee and spank him or let him go to the house on the hill.” This was coarse of Mrs. Hanson, and Bea let her see that she thought so. It wasn’t that simple with one’s own. Besides, chances were that if Mrs. Hanson’s old mother by some miracle should turn querulous, she would be the first to bare her back for the burden, Bitterly, though, Bea thought to herself, if just an ordi¬ nary fellow like Doc Hanson could make the sacrifice, Mr. Pullman might be nicer to Father, for her sake. Well, you can’t have everything. Dear knows she? was a lucky girl to find herself with a husband and home and coming child instead of having to brave that strange cold world out there into which girls were actually voluntarily ven¬ turing nowadays for such positions as stenographer, teacher, saleslady, or, as in the outstanding case of Miss Ella Stan¬ hope, cashier. A girl had to be cut out for that sort of thing. Yes, in- deedy, there were worse fates than being married to Mr. Pullman. Worse fates! What a way to put itl There wasn’t any bad fate at all in being married to him. Better say, very good fate, It was a lush June evening that she prepared him his dinner with these thoughts running through her brain. A particularly good dinner (a New England one,/for which he had great relish), because in the morning he was going on one of his rare visits to Philadelphia, to confer with the office, there regarding a scheme he entertained for enlarging display space on the Pier, Also, from certain correspondence IMITATION OF LIFE 57 she had seen indicated on letterheads when he emptied his waistcoat pockets on Saturday night for Sunday church, she ielt sure that Mr. Pullman was conferring with the life in¬ surance company there. f elI r h , er when time came to go through with the ordeal of his physical examination, but from something he had once said, she feared he might spare her this A man had a right to want his wife by at appre¬ hensive times like that although, dear knows, Mr. Pullman was the picture of health. H was on the trip to Philadelphia the following morning ftat here occurred the tram wreck, remembered by many Atlantic City veterans, when four coaches and an engine went over an embankment into the Delaware River, kiting outright eleven people, one of whom was Mr. Pullman. CHAPTER 13 Si® WAS HAVING A PREMATURE BABY. Fhey could not keep her far enough beneath the ether for her not to realize that. She was having a premature baby in a hospital room which every so often came down over the face like a mask and Mr Pullman was kicking and spinning Father’s wheel-chair, and when they started to try and amputate her legs by pulling them out from the sockets, she screamed, and there was the upper half of her separating from the something going from her. . . . Mother, or somebody with a white headache-they all wore white linen headaches about their brows, no, not headaches. Of course notl-Mother or somebody was t elli ng her to press and relax, and a classmate named Freda Uhl, whom she had not seen or heard of for at least ten years, was shoveling coals into a furnace-the furnace of an over¬ turned steam-engine which had spilled out onto Mr. Pullman, who was lying in the midst of it, the shape of a crazy old wooden cross. . . . Stop that! Relax, God or somebody was putting her together again. 58 IMITATION OF LIFE Flaming terrible legs which were being hooked onto the slashing knives of her pain. . . . Mr. Pullman was spinning that chair. ... No, no, no! Stop thatl Jessie was bom. CHAPTER 14 An idea which must have been float- ing about her troubled subconsciousness suddenly awoke Ben, hitting against her brain, It had happened like that frequently of late, an alarm of hope, usually false, routing her out of sleep. But this! Curious, now, that she hadn’t thought of this before. It seemed so obvious, It would have saved so much running about until the soles of her feet made the Board¬ walk and the sidewalks feel like red-hot stoves, There must be a box of the cards still in Mr. Pullman’s upper chiffonier drawer! In all the weeks she had not yet found.the impulse to go about emptying those drawers of the minutiae of personal content. If only she had, the sight alone of those business cards might have saved her so much of what had been the almost vain travail of trying to persuade busy men around town to pause in order to see a woman hunting a job. There they were! In their neat box. B. Pullman Atlantic City, N. J, | The accident of the initials made it all right.’Beatrice or i Benjamin Pullman could use those cards, If only she had thought to employ this device as a talking-point to the Pickle and Relish Company, on the trip she had made to Philadelphia to try and induce the office there to take her on in lier father's place. Of course she had gone about it all wrong, Naturally IMITATION OF LIFE 59 there was something strange and irreconcilable to a business loadJ°l ^ woman, her hands always loaded between hiking her skirts off the ground, her pocket- book and her gloves, rushing about as salesman. CThose ramy-day skirts had sense to them!) » t t t r:r!' u,uIied - dol ! ar g * fr ° m ^ w b M a touching boon, considering the tact that so shortly before ta cakmty „f t ,, e d th of M , ^ “« wh the7, * B “‘ Wkl ™ **■ compared wi what the secmity of being permitted to carry along Father’s position would have meant? b of to, aim,? r iti0n ’ ° f C0urse ’ would have been out 11 ,! , Demonstrating required the quite special talent of voice and presence. He had always said ofhiLelf that people first tasted the command in his voice and then came nibbling at his products. That was true. Sensing the tt'T ] ? mnity 0f hira ’ to listen, then the tin, nf tmn n tUSte the chilIi sauce an d picca-lilli off n fV !i M, ‘ a P T r spoo,ls pi ' ovided for Ibe purpose. But labors work was another matter, particularly since he had not been replaced and his territory was being handled, n adequately, no doubt, by two of the Philadelphia salesmen alternating on weekly visits to Atlantic City. Father’s cus¬ tomer would be more than willing to carry on with his daughter Of that she felt sure. But just try and convince a business firm of thatl If Father’s own concern could not see a woman in the strenuous rflle of city salesman, what could you expect of the firms to whom she was not the wife and daughter of erstwhile trusted employees. Regarding it from that angle the two-hundred-dollar gift had been little short of good-riddance money. . . . Why, even the men in Atlantic City, to say nothing of the canvassing tour she had made that day in Philadelphia when Mrs. Hanson had come over to mind her child and Father; some of the men, who knew who she was, would scarcely lend civil ear to her application, “Don’t let them get fresh with you,” Mrs. Hanson had admonished. "In the nasty eyes of a lot of men a woman who is out to earn her own living a man’s way is either a freak or don’t mean any good.” IMITATION OF LIFE Except in one instance (a deacon, mind you, right in her own Atlantic City) where she had been crowded tip against the door and a pair of insinuating knees pressed, against hers, from which she sped out into the corridors, nothing of that sort had even approached happening. In most cases it was simply a matter of no precedent for women in the concern. If only, thought Bea, on occasion after occasion after de¬ feat, I had more gumption! They feel in me how worried I am! That’s no good, I look a fright. Perhaps I’m dressed wrong. The shirtwaist and skirt are all right, but it might be a good thing to leave off the taffeta petticoat which rustles so. Felt right silly, talking to old Mr. Massingham of the East Jersey Title and Guarantee Company, seeing in the looking-glass behind him the way those blue plumes kept shaking so on my hat when I talked. One of those plain, short-back sailors, like the girls in the big offices in Philadel¬ phia wear to work, would be more business-like. And if only there were a greater variety of alternative positions. Not that there was any sense of emergency; even with the hospital and doctor’s bills paid, there still remained, what with the Pickle and Relish gift and the railroad settle¬ ment, a seven-hundred-dollar residuum. But it just did seem as if one could not find rest on that slender timo-ledgo of security. Salesladying and teaching and stenography seemed to he about the beginning and the end. But positions as saleslady on and off the Boardwalk were at a premium. Braun,stein’s department store would have been an ideal berth, close enough to the center of town to he M within easy walking distance to wherever she would tilti- f . mately have to install Father and her baby. The general J> manager there had known Mr. Pullman slightly, Ho would » keep her in mind. I' Besides the notorious case of Miss Stanhope, there was a f white-haired spinster, a Miss Bogarthy, employed as buok- ‘ keeper in one of the hotels just off the Boardwalk. But: in¬ quiry revealed that she had virtually inherited the position t f rom h er father, whom she had helped out in his cage, back 1 in the days when his eyesight and health began to fail’ IMITATION OF LIFE 81 The daughter of an invalided father and mother of ail infant child herself, she could not very well contemplate the ' nursing of other people’s children. Not but what, if some ' sort of arrangement presented itself, she would not grasp at the opportunity. If only I had taken a Normal course or studied stenog¬ raphy! If only— 0 j Standing beside the chiffonier in her long-sleeved high- necked nightgown, die small box of cards in her hand, the thought which had awakened her spread, warming her brain into the wakefulness which was corning more and more to eat into her nights. A Icihaps il she could establish a mail contact with some firm under the name, “B. Pullman.” Men often worked for * firms, handling their products, without: necessarily having I personal contact with the homo office. Take Mr. Pullman and the maple-syrup side line! (Ah, the pity! They had planned the honeymoon trip to Brattle- ‘ horn, Vermont, that summer.) Mr. Pullman had never so I much as laid eyes on anyone connected with the little maple- | syrup firm with which he did business. fj, rhere had come two letters from Prynne & Company Sugar Mart, still apparently ignorant of his death, reminding Mr. Pullman it was ".some time since they had been favored with an order." She had not found the opportunity or heart to reply or even to inform a remote cousin of his in Rutland, who had sent them a quite horrible hand-painted piano-scarf for a wedding gift. She had delivered the six or eight cans of post-mortem syrup according to the careful data found in Mr. Pullman’s black notebook, lugging the .heavy cans herself, after dark, ill the immediate weeks before the premature birth of her child. The idea, spreading by now in her brain, like the ink spot from an overturned bottle onto a blotter, took pattern. Why not! The name B. Pullman, to the firm in Vermont, was just that, nothing more or less. It was fair to assume that the holds Id whom the account was an old one would continue. New ones could be approached by mail. However 62 IMITATION OF LIFE small the beginning, it would relieve the strain of whal were threatening to be these tormenting nights. Well and good to regard with equanimity, up to a certain point, the cash of over seven hundred dollars which she kept wrapped in the thickness of two handkerchiefs in the bottom of a locked trunk. The fact which remained however, to be constantly borne in mind, was that between her, her father, and her child, and the peculiar exigency of no funds, were not more than six or seven months’ security. The five-hundred-dollar check from the railroad company had been a godsend, but at tire same time had branded her guilty of serious tactical error. If only she had not accepted the settlement money from the agent who had appeared one of those horrible days im¬ mediately following the plunge of that fateful train! Proper lawyers, she had subsequently learned, might have helped her to recover many thousands, That would have been re¬ pugnant to her, bartering for payment in return for the life of Mr. Pullman, but no question about the validity of such a claim. Defective steel in the shaft of a speeding engine had sent the sole support of two adults and a coining child to his death. Small doubt but what families of some of the other victims of this wreck were recovering at least the solace of financial restitution for the tragedy of human loss. “It is one of those tilings,” the irreconcilable Mrs. Hanson would reiterate until, listening to her, the senses tottered, “makes me want to jump out of my skin! To think Doc and I had to be in Philadelphia the day you settled for a measly five hundred!” , i But little use to cry over the spilled milk of that, now. I She had accepted the check, gratefully, from an agent: who carried his penpoint wet and ready. I Surprising how high Mr. Pullman’s funeral expenses had ■ managed to pile themselves. Far beyond , what she had an¬ ticipated when, only half hcedingly, she had agreed to the various bland suggestions of the undertaker, As revealed by the still mounting minutia* of the various bills as they continued to come in, the coffin, it seems, had been tufted, camp chairs had been brought into the parlor, IMITATION OF LIFE 63 where there wore far too few present to occupy them and I the carriages, according to the surprising detaftfof the'vari- ons statements, had been double and mbher-tired I llut large spray of carnations “With deepest sympathy” I hmu the Iron Pier Associates must have covered^ the I tuftmE. or perhaps it had been concealed because Mr Mb I man, m violent death, had not been in » 1 I after tin: tinkering* of the undertakers to ho « 10 j’ CTen I through the small window "To looked beautiful in her last sleep, had bei. ’ ^ jl The condition jof Ins “remains" had been carefully con- [I tuh,d horn her condition. Sometimes, in spite of herself ' I quite a cold sweat would break out all over her beca“r I mmd .skidded onto that forbidden thought. How must Mr I lulliimn have looked to the embalmers? Perhaps he had •$ a no face left. To think that anything so orderiy as d fif like Mr I all man s could instigate God to tear it out of ex- I istence that way, | It was blessedly better, awakening as she did to the spur ‘j of an idea, flam to he tern out of sleep shuddering with the ’! ,rfwktwrcnwinfid \ 1 ,i;i:,;r,5 lto, '" cr - **** w w* '*«. * j To tlie small distributing firm known as Prynne & Com¬ pany, ilvaltleboro, the demise of B. Pullman could be a ' mailer ol hllle note. \ It was a common tbing for businesses to go on functioning' under the original trade name, after the death of the founder « or after it had passed into other hands. Business went on as H usual. In all probability Prynne & Company would never » bother to question one way or another, particularly if she 11 were careful (o form a habit of. signature not dissimilar to 1 the late 15. Pullman. 1 15. Pullman, for some reason with the “B” bisected, had 1 been his habit. m The value ol B, Pullman lay in its entrance wedge. You 1 sent in your card. B. Pullman. You got at your man. You signed letters to customers who need never lay eyes 1 on you. 15. Pullman. They made cards on the Boardwalk 1 64 IMITATION OF LIFE while you waited One hundred for ten cents. B. Pullman. It was as B. Pullman that she sold that week, 'by the device of leaving stamped, addressed envelopes and samples from a quart tin which she had on hand, at several hotels not entered in the black book, eleven gallons of maple syrup. Further, the black book revealed this to be one gallon over and above the best week achieved by Mr. Pullman. But, as opposed to the period of his noon hour given over three times a week, she practically tramped, or rode street cars, the day through, a schedule complicated by the need to report back, every hour or less, to the house on Arctic Avenue that contained her father and child. CHAPTER 15 Years later, she was to mu, ate to a national group of business and professional women convening at Hotel Commodore, New York, that the tide of those days turned for her on a pail of syrup and a flight of stairs, the latter enabling her to let the three upper rooms of the house on Arctic Avenue for a sum that to the penny paid her monthly rent. This flight of stairs, which was an exterior one, led up the flank of the house into what had once been Mr. Pullman’s room. Theoretically, because it gave entrance in a private and detached manner that did not necessitate passage through the lower floor, it was ideal for the lodger. | That Mr, Pullman had never availed himself of it had •been, in Mother’s eyes, another commentary upon the im¬ peccability of his virtues, Just fancy what getting the wrong : person into such a room plight have meant in vagrant com¬ ings and goings, to say nothing of possible goings-on! But the turning of his key in the lower front hall, almost: to the daily second, was something that belonged to the stability of : Mr, Pullman. He and those stairs would have made one another ridicu¬ lous. So much so^ that during the lifetime of Mrs. Chiplev it. had been Mother’s contention with a landlord who protested, IMITATION OF LIFE 65 that he remove the stairs, which required weekly scrubbings, trom their position of undue conspicuousness against the flank of the house, • It was the advantage of these very stairs, however, which now caught the fancy of the first applicants, a Mr. and Mrs. lanue ulh who responded to the small advertisement in the Atlantic City Tress: For Rent, furnished: Three neatly furnished rooms. Miare kitchen and bath. Twenty dollars a month. tn iSf eX ! eri0r stai ™ appealed at once 1 «r M 1 i'" 1 !- 11 ’ W1 °’ a!t,nff with JlLs wife, conducted a pho¬ tograph .studio on the Boardwalk, near Georgia Avenue, arid who, as evidence of good faith, paid an immediate deposit of one week s rent and left an umbrella. . ^ cnm j etl «P rt ;'»8s Pretty badly. Father on the divan m the parlor, herself and child i„ what had once been the wortif it° 0W1, M thC prop,!lti(male Peace of mind was Forfunately, Mrs. Tannehill and her husband alternated ?, : was a fair amount of certainty that one oi the other of them would he usually in the house a circumstance which helped the quite terrible unease oc¬ casioned by being obliged to leave a semi-helpless old man and a helpless infant alone there even for the intermittent periods of absence she allowed herself. Also, the sense of : her lodgers presence there at night helped. . The Tannehills were a pair, it later developed, who had never been married at all, but had rented her second floor m order to live in a domestic brand of sin the like of which stunned her more than the fact itself. It was not: only a domestic brand, it was of an orderly and mundane routine, which even during the period of her innocence of the actual relationship, or lack of it, between Hus pair had caused her sometimes to wonder if its reim- larity did not irk Mrs. Tannehill, who was a large blond woman of exactly the consistency of the crab-apple ’jelly for which Mis. Hanson was quite.famous locally, : In her liiother-hubburd, with a yoke that struck her just 66 IMITATION OF LIFE above her large breasts, her yellow-and-gray hair in a leaning psyche on the top of her head, her fleshy hands mushing up softly around an array of turquoise rings, she flopped about those upstairs rooms, doling out the most menial serv¬ ices to Mr, Tannehill, himself of soft, rather sybaritic flesh to which he applied scents that clung to upholstery and stairs: Sunday mornings you could hear the clip of her scissors trim¬ ming his nails. Late evenings she washed out his light-blue underwear and hung it on a line she had improvised in the bathroom she shared with the lower half of the house. It was revolting to need to dodge the soft dangling legs and shirt tails of Mr. Tannehill's drying garments, but the blessed boon of the solution of her immediate rent problem offset even the many disadvantages of this bizarre couple, who permeated the house with a strangely assorted odor of drying underwear, sen-sen, eau de lilac, and the smell of banana which seemed to emanate from a gilt wicker chair which Mrs. Tannehill apparently carted with her for the purpose of removing the sting from the impersonal cold shoulder of the furnished quarters through which they wan¬ dered as the seasons shifted from Atlantic City to Miami. It was reassuring to come home and find the odor of stale sen-sen hovering over the garments of the child. It meant that Mrs. Tannehill had been in and out during Boa’s ab¬ sence, Her love of children took a form of fine, if niimslhelic, frenzy which had the unfortunate tendency to frighten. "I love it; to death. I could bite a piece right out of it! If only I could chew that darling pink toe.” All this through Mrs. Tannehill’s gold and gritted teeth as she snatched up the infant, burying her scented face into its face and hair. I Invariably the child set up fast and frightening crying, struggling away from the deluge of pleated cheek and sound of Mrs. Tannehill’s gritting teeth, but. her violently n> . strained pinches traveled along tile tender flesh, stiffening the tiny body against the imminence of the occasional stinging pinches which escaped her control. Father, too, shuddered fastidiously away from the well- meant ministrations of Mrs. Tannehill, Her breath blew his hair when she talked, and to avoid the warm sen-sen -.gale of it he would operate his wheel-chair rapidly as possible . IMITATION of life “ ‘! U(1 -n Vay ‘ Hy [ easy sympathy made her garrulous V L!’Ir 1 1 ® Way ' SiMe * he could understand no more o lathers Hack utterances than she could of baby’s gur¬ glings her next best was to resort to babbling through lips spiead to achieve some sort of perverted vernacular which she fancied equal to the occasion: Does bad ole sun shine in him poor ole eyes? Here kTwithb tab Tl kitCl r ’ m / my Miss Beebee co ™ i . b g t °* IuI goodie-goodies for her daddy.” In heis sack of a body, in its dandified suit, could not withdraw all the way from her touch, but bis eyes old as a moeodiies and somehow, since his second stroke,’as evil- looking, would roost, with a sort of hate, upon her. cu rr^ f a ? iiity , pather kd Been ^le to c. tnat.. in hat part of Ins side which the second stroke had grandchild out of £ de 1 in- at a T ™ angle beside hira ’ IfmKf, ° 1,e for the prepared bottle 1,1 ' lidl «!*• stood at a certain angle in its pail of i" 1 W!l , il ! ld Inform the service of change, with minimum of infant discomfort. .Sometimes m the midst of her intermittent but practically day-long traipsing in and out of the trade entrances of hotels and boarding-houses, the flashing vision of that small house oil Aidie Avenue and its helpless inmates would fill her will, premonition that would send her scuttling home, even lhough her last look-in might have been but a half-hour 5 previous, 5 Her impotent father operating himself on the wheels o us invalid chair, trying to administer to her impotent child, whose Iwdve-wecks-old back was still too soft to sustain ilsell wjtlioi.it I bo brace of a palm field against it! {'ire! It was as if hourly she knew by heart what must lie by n.nv the precise positions of the smoldering coals so Ciivelmly placed within the range. Stroke! When doctors said it might mean a matter of hours or a matter of years before the second or third, usu¬ ally it. meant, the former. Her dead father might be sitting there now beside her alone child! Once, alter she. bad sent in her card to the manager of a IMITATION OF LIFE large new restaurant which was opening on Atlantic Avenue, this clap of thunderous apprehension boomed so across her peace of mind that, without waiting for a long-coveted inter¬ view, which was just about to be granted her, she started running the ten blocks back to the house on Arctic Avenue, which twenty minutes before she had quitted. It made nervous apprehension her running-mate, l.l made the slamming of a door strike terror, and the sound of the sea ran through her constant unease like foreboding rhythm. What if! What if the carefully banked coals in the kitchen range should suddenly collapse onto wooden flooring? What il. she had weaned her child too soon? What if! What if paralysis should suddenly race into the unimpaired arm of her father, causing her child to roll like so much logwood to the floor? What if croup or convulsion or any of the catastrophes' of infancy were to swoop upon the bundle of helplessness that lay committed to the feeble care of another bundle of almost equal helplessness? What if she, hurrying along with the twine of a can of maple syrup cutting so into her fingers, were suddenly to be run clown by a horse and buggy or stricken .suddenly by one of those unfathomable acts of God which, one after an¬ other, had so recently descended upon her house? Ads of Gocl Why were only calamities referred to as acts of God? “What if,” and “if only!” If only, of all possible days, Mr, Pullman bad not chosen that one! If only, due to a suddenly detected flaw in the doc¬ tor’s license to practice dentistry in the state of New Jersey, the dear Hansons had not, overnight, as it were, up and de¬ parted for Montreal. If only Mrs. Vfeitclli were not so tied down by the demands of a large family and the grocery store. If only Father—if only destiny—if only life. ... Now, now, life was making out nicely. The first six months of her back-door assault upon every hotel and boarding¬ house within the broad pleasure belt had yielded her an aveiage of ten to twelve dollars a week, although it was the last six weeks of those six months which succeeded in jerkinf her average up to its level. IMITATION OF LIFE 69 The tins of syrup were arriving at the house on Arctic Ave¬ nue m considerable assignments, and evenings after dark wliensliecovild get Mrs. Vizitelli or her daughter Nettie,’ 01 is. anno n , in the event that it was her evening home delivery 0 * ^^ Kmin h the rooms > she set about their Fortunately, (lie summer, approaching its peak, was the It l Ii W " H f r Sal “ of '** Mr - Pullman had 1, W dually « the basis of its being a winter produet. veranfts now, a solid (rent of illuminated hotel., going full blast, termed a dating » wall of movement, energy, and carnival, behind which the city streets, shops, smaller hotels, ami lioaidiiig-liiiiifies achieved something similar to that move,net, a reflected, if somewhat shoddy, glory. imiolas, peanut-stands, billiard-halls, dance-pavilions, penny arcades, wienie-stands, photograph and shooting gal¬ leries, claiii-cuimlers, salt-water-talfy emporiums, saloons, shore-,Imner resorts, ice-cream parlors, fortune-telling con¬ cuss,,ms, astrologers, tamale-hawkers, operated not only along the Boardwalk, but corroded a brassy trail into the side streets and along the main arteries of midtown, creating a sort of small summer madness along streets that in winter with a stif wind howling in off the ocean, were those of a vilmffr willi its IigikI lucked under its wing, '& Boarding houses with laming verandas'spilled their com! motions I mm lighted windows and crowded stoops. The knee-high swinging doors of saloons slapped inward and outward and family entrances were the scene of constant com¬ ings and goings. Greek restaurants poured greasy odors, kosher hotels buzzed with the activities of stout matrons in uiacliine-.slitelied wigs. Nationalisms flared along these side streets, each country to its odor, complexion, and often as not, its hoisted flags. Hiore were certain streets along. which Mr. Pullman would no more have walked with her, much less have per- ruifted her to walk alone! Still more streets along which she had never ventured, even in Sunday-aftcmoon walks with her ■ parents, am!, for that matter, streets whose existence she had never before realized. They were the streets she traversed frequently now, the 70 IMITATION OF LIFE narrow ones honeycombed with lodging and boarding houses; also the wide boulevard of Pennsylvania Avenue with its line-up of pretentious “guest homes” and 'small hotels, and then, of course, those side streets which led up to the trade entrance of the Boardwalk hostelries, “Lead me blindfolded through Atlantic City," she would tell her father, hopeful that some of her tidbits of conver¬ sation reached him, “and I can tell the streets by the smells. I can tell Jewish garlic from Italian.” Had it ever occurred to her to question why, in these mul¬ tifarious lanes, she remained unmolested, a glance at her reflection in the mirror might have answered. It was at that period in her life when, the youth of her seemed to have passed behind the dark cloud of a dowdiness induced by frantic haste. It was as if she could scarcely wait for each day to begin in order to do something about it. To relieve a fright. To cram what had seemed such a well- behaved, well-meaning destiny back into the groove from which it had slipped. The haste, the frenzied sense of needing to do many things at once, the weight of the syrup tins pulling at her arm sockets and cutting into her fingers, the anxiety of doubts that always existed between the taking and the de¬ livery of an order, were out in a tense grimace over her face. Hurrying along on her nocturnal errands of delivery (she could never bear to sleep between an order and its execution), her gray-eyed, wide-featured face, with its somewhat Maltese jfeline quality, was drawn in at the lips until they stretched lacross her dry teeth in a grim harassed line, Her sailor hat, Moo, had a habit of riding back on her pompadour, enhancing her air of almost painful concentration upon her destination of back doors. Loitering men in lighted doorways or on street comers looked after her, but did not follow up with more than the occasional half-hearted accostings which they subconsciously expected of themselves at the passing of an unaccompanied woman. It is doubtful if Bea, her face twisted with purpose, ever even heard. Maple syrup and delivery mattered so terribly. It actually IMITATION OF LIFE 71 gave one little time, beyond an obsessing concern for its crea¬ ture well-being, to realize one had a baby. Countless little buckling impulses seemed to have been nipped in the frozen garden ot her expectations. Babies must live, and so the P'lrunc)unt )r ' Ia ^ ei ^ an l: ^ e ^ act * ts existence became I t was at the end of about the fifth month that it occurred . 0 .?’ 111 h S ht of the increasing orders, to write and ob- tam r°m Huron T. Prynne, of the Sugar Mart, an additional inn Hr t C T f T casl l- 14 was also at end of these months that her hypothetical forebodings of, “what if,” re- solved themselves into a happening that potentially, at least, was fraught with tragedy. ’ ?l ie n ;! urne<1 llome (me afternoon to find her father seated ngM and unseeing in his chair, her child, as it had rolled fmni his uiiretentive lap, dangling and howling head down over the side wheel, where it hung precariously suspended uy the tace hem of its dress, which had providentially caught k on the lever by which Mr. Chipley propelled his chair, Ex- 1 eept tor her return, either the child would ultimately have if? tumbled to the floor or hung there head downward until its ' ones attracted the possible attention of Mrs. Tannehill, or : ultimately ceased in suffocation. 1 Kie state of unconsciousness from which her father then emerged, 'without having been aware of his lapse, was the foremnnex of a series to which he was to become subject. But the first was sufficient to stun Bea into the realization that never again could these two be left there alone in this slate of their mutual impotence. '! bo much-mooted problem of a servant became no longer controversial, The crime had been in daring to makeshift so long. The boon of the additional discounts in her dealings with ; Hiram Prynne would go a little way toward meeting the additional eight or ten dollars a month the hiring of a'serv¬ ant would. entail, and besides, she was about to be initiated Into the technique of raising money by way of the pawnshop. There was one on Atlantic Avenue with the three balls over tlm doorway. Unbeknown to Mr. Tannehill, Mrs. Tan- nehill carried on quite a constant series of negotiations there. 72 IMITATION OF LIFE The solid silver nut-bowl on the sideboard was reassuring reminder. Her mother’s dozen sterling-silver knives and forks and spoons. Her own pathetically new bridal outfit of prettily engraved silver fish set, dessert spoons, ramekin- holders, and bonbon dish. Her graduating gift of a blue enamel watch with its fleur-de-lis pin to match. If need be, her mother’s gold watch with its chased gold case and long gold chain. If need be, too, yes, if need be, the gold horse- head with a tiny diamond eye which her father wore daily even now in his cravat. She would substitute an imitation one, slyly. What Father did not know would not hurt him. He knew so little. Sometimes she wondered if he knew of the death of Mr, Pullman. But in any event, life must go on. . . , A visit across the railroad tracks to the shanty district where Selene had dwelt, revealed no one else in that par¬ ticular house who was available for a position at general housework, “sleeping in,” There was the difficulty. Sleeping in. Most of the female domestic help, wives, sweethearts, or what nots of tire thou¬ sands of Negro waiters, chair-pushers, and miscellaneous helpers about town and the Boardwalk, demanded the free¬ dom to return home evenings. “No, ma’am. I cain’t take no job at sleepin’ in. I got a husband waitin’ table at de Seaside Hotel, and three chillun needs me to put ’em to bed.” “No’m, I got to sleep home. I’s married.” “Sleepin’ in? No, ma’am!” < It was on her disgruntled and discouraged way homeward Jacross the railroad tracks, as she was mentally framing an pdvertisement to insert in the Tress, that suddenly she emu¬ lated something she had seen her mother do. In fact, it had > been the method by which she had secured the services of Selene. “Do you know of anyone who wants a position for gen¬ eral housework, sleeping in?” she inquired of the enormously buxom figure of a woman with a round black moon face that shone above an Alps of bosom, privately hoping that the scrubbed, starchy-Iooking Negress would offer herself. “I sho does, miss, and dat’s me. But I’s got a three-month- 73 IMITATION OF LIFE old chile, honey. You white folk, ain’t got no track with a Uackwo^ w. d a chfle, r, learaed dat, walking my & You mean you would want to bring your baby, too?* Honey dub. HI work for anything you is willin '?‘ and not tale more’n mah share of your time for my J™ un, ef f hn get her and me a good roof over our heads* Didn your maw always tell you a ni^er L ; reliable when she had chillun taggin’ at her aprun strips? IT td iT y wrte dl^oT ? 10 T ow ask Mrs. Osper Glasgow, wife of Cunnel Glasgow^whaTl worked since I was married ...” b 1 “You have a husband?” "Died six mouths ago in the Atlantic City Hospital of a lung misery that brought us here from Richmon’, A white mggen mm that you'd never think would've had truck S f i f T !t tis ml ' !t 'til after de Lawd took km dat I learned it was a bigamist's soul. Ef you doan believe I ldn housekeep, miss, wid a baby unde my arms, try me. Why notl The child would insure this woman’s perma¬ nence, In a town with nine thousand colored population, re- hable houseworkers were nevertheless difficult to obtain With the wives of waiters themselves veering from general housework and angling for the less confining duties of waitress or chambermaid, domestic help was what it had always been in Atlantic City—a nomadic procession of women with home ties of their own, or of slim young blackbirds with no stability whatsoever. “Is your little one healthy?” “The purfectest white nigger baby dat God ever dropped down in de lap of a black woman from Virginie, Her pap didn leave her nothin’ but some blue-white blood a-flowin’ in her little veins. ’Twas de ruination of her pap, dat blue-, white blood. ’Tain't gonna be hern. We’s black, me and mail baby, and we’d lak mighty much to come work for you.” So, Delilah and Peola. CHAPTER 16 Sometimes it seemed to Be a that, operating her business on no capital, and paying back into her small enterprise most of her profits, she was running her house on a minus sign. A hospital and two clubs now enriched her list, and there was still the unexplored area of private homes to be can¬ vassed, but the expensive sunlight treatments for Father bail seemed one of the tilings she would never have forgiven her¬ self for not trying, and if you believe that five can live as cheaply as three, try bringing into the house, even at the driblet wages that satisfied Delilah, a buxom Negro woman who, with the best intentions in the world, swelled the food budget so considerably. There was a time, there the first months after the advent of Delilah and Peola, when the nights, what with the four of them, Father, Jessie, Delilah and her, breathing peacefully in the small area of crowded first floor, practically amounted to a session in mathematics. Either lying in hod or crawling out of it to work on the kitchen table, there was figuring to be done, on the backs of used envelopes, on scraps of old paper, which could not be accomplished with the hard bright day full upon her, when the phenomenon of living tm a ) ’ minus sign seemed less fraught with danger than it did at i night. Worries that kept themselves at half-mast during the Bp busy days seemed, at night, to. creep out of the corners of If her restlessness and with enlarged heads, grotesque torsos, I and frightening grimaces press the seriousness of her pro- • ' dicament full upon her. ?!» The electric baths for her father, .which he seemed to f: enjoy, were now a matter of one a day and of heavy cash drain, The Tannehills were not . all that could be hoped lor in the matter of promptness at paying:rent, frequently, full¬ ing one, two, even four weeks in arrears, and then meeting her timid pressures with installments. The amazingly pale- 74 & IMITATION OF LIFE 75 W? , of .l*ck hdian-lookmg eyes and straight glossy hatr, developed a rash which re- q„„c< four visits Iron, Dr. Mcrribol. Much of I,cr worry there had been fear of possible contagion „ r in(ertion nothing beyond a small skin irritation developed, and tucked mto the end of the wicker perambulator, which against a deeply noted prep,dice planted by a mother to whom the system had been anathema, she U purchased on install- meats rode the small n„b of Delilah's rather astonishing anomaly, a 1, ick-and-hn, little masthead to the ship of state which earned the blne-and-ycllow porcelain of Ben’s child Daily in line weather, you could behold Delilah, the vast moon ot her face shining a |„ve the alp of her bosom, ma- nip,dating her three helpless charges, the two infants in their perambulator and Father In the wheel-chair, toward the neach, three long blocks to the west. All to the good, for the growing peace of mind that per¬ mitted Ben to work now in two long lndf-day periods, with¬ out that Haying sense of the need to rush home. Delilah might he said to have risen like a vast black sun over the troubled waters of the domestic scene, laying them and the hordes of fears, large and small, that had dogged her heels all day. Delibih, with a radiance that emanated off the polished disk of her face and off the impeccable fortification of her huge gingham aprons, had placed something as horny as the hand of a crocodile upon this uneasy household and brought it somewhere akin to a going concern, But it cost to feed Delilah, who not only had the palate and the capacity of the gourmet, but the grand old Southern skill to prepare dishes fit for a daily company of them. Her breakfast bacon, fried to its cunning turn, tickled the senses awake. There just never were griddle cakes like Delilah's.' Ilcr crullers doused into boiling baths of specially rendered fat that cost so, swelled to a perfection which she sprinkled with powdered sugar and served piping hot. In fact, everything cost to such an extent, that one night, sealed in her nightgown, barefoot, figuring on the backs of envelopes while Delilah’s breathing blew through the rooms in a small gale, she wrote out the following for the printer: 70 IMITATION OF LIFE B, Pullman is forced'regretfully to announce the fol¬ lowing slight increase in price schedule, to become effective after October first: Ten cents per gallon on every purchase amounting to five gallons or less. On purchases over that amount, five cents per gallon. Orders received before the above date, accompanied by check or money order, will be filled at present prices. It worked! Not only were there no lost accounts, but quite a few stewards of the larger hotels took the opportunity to accomplish the slight saving by ordering well in advance. Checks came in covering not only immediate orders, but future deliveries. For the first time since Delilah’s initial month of service, Bea was able to pay her a portion of the arrears. This she refused with such loud ejaculations, stretchings of the orifice of her mouth into a very red and very white cave of long- drawn winds, that meekly she was forced to restore the money to her purse. “We’s partners in clis heahl shebang, Miss Bea. Nevah did have no truck wid money-suckin’. We got our chilhm to think about before.we go squanderin’ do fust spare money dat comes in on no-’count suvvant’s wages,” The major dispensation of this experimental period would have summed up into one single noun-Delilnh. Into every cranny and crevice of the strangely placed household there poured the red, black, and white personality of this immense woman, The red of her easily-hinged large : mouth, packed with the white laughter of her stunning al¬ lotment of hound-clean teeth; the jug color of Her skin with the gold highlights on cheekbones; the terrific unassailable quality of her high spirits, Baptist fervor, and amplitude reached arid encompassed two infants and an infantile old man, who turned his cold old bones toward her warmth. The household, sleeping in what segregation the cramped quarters allowed, Bea and her child in what had been the dining-room, Delilah and hers on an improvised cot in the little “reception” hall, the old gentleman upright .in his chair or on the leather sofa in the parlor, awoke nowadays IMITATION OF LIFE 77 to the tone of staling bacon, steaming mountains of griddle cate of Huff and no weight, which presently, with her enor mous prodigality, Delilah would smother under some of the honseWd .supply of maple syrup. Coffee that Mm. Tan- richrll declared wound upstate to her, causing her to yearn hb a dnmkard and a porridge for the old gentleman which child* Uim, ' gh " S “ SS t0k ‘' WWl lk STOdy !uct ™ of > There was no suppressing the enormity that was Delilah nor was there the desire to suppress it. Her table might ap' pear fnghtemngly lavish (how she loved the boaid that groans), hut she had skill immense as it was consistent, in utilizing breakfast s left-over bacon into luncheon's coleslaw served with sizzled bacon cubes, and there was no such thing as too many griddle cakes, because once Delilah herself sur- rounded them, the golden syrup began to pour down their diminishing flanks to form engulfing pools into which she dove with an exaltation not dissimilar to the white-eyed ecstasy with which she soared into her frequent outbursts of ■Baptist fervor. . ; So if , VVils from a household of Delilah and three babies that Bea plunged every morning, into the territory roi the day, and the special calls for solicitation and reorders which she had jotted onto the small silver pad she wore on a chatelaine at her waist: Call Hotel Fassio (ask for Elkus). Hotel Lurray. Hotel Traymore. Albrecht’s Hotel (Jones). Rhode Island Avenue. C. I. Mistrial, Caspain Avenue. (Recommended by Stahl.) She used to insist that, according to actual measurement by one of the Boardwalk penny devices, she had become taller during this period. Be that as it may, or whether the 1 ; amount of walking, as it hardened and slenderized, might have been accountable for the undeniable look of stature and added length of face, the look of new height was there. And it was a leaner face, an obsessed face, that strode ahead of herself those days of the first years of her bird’s-eye can¬ vassing of Atlantic City, a quality of straight-lipped concen¬ tration out in it that must have immunized her not only from street loiterers of a carnival city, but from the men IMITATION OF LIFE upon whom she thrust'herself, once she had cleaved hear, way | through to them by the little device of the business card [ After that it was simple enough, so simple that sometimes, secretly and half ashamed, she was moved to contemplate her reflection in the mirror. Even with her vigorously honed- j down contours, marriage or maternity or disaster, or all three, | had brushed her with the light and quite lovely pollen of . slight maturity. !] Withal, the alleged perils, so vividly anticipated by Mrs. !j Hanson, who had always worn an extra enforcement of pet- j ticoats against an ever-potential Jack the Ripper, of a woman if venturing into the ice-fields of business, had not dawned upon ii her experience. Men registered surprise at the sight of a j woman as follow-up to that card, some a passing annoyance, If." a passing facetiousness, others a rather disgruntled refusal I to permit her to even recite the virtues of her product, but | few seemed to find in the unusual spectacle of a woman ;| salesman, a purposefulness that was enticing, or more than | casually to he rioted. | To be sure, a steward of a hospital, himself a staff physi- | dan,-had asked for a kiss in return for a filled-in order | blank, but at her refusal had gone through none of the al¬ ii: leged rigmarole of withholding the order, or, for that matter, had scarcely bothered to register disappointment at her re¬ fusal. “As you will, sister ” The resident buyer for a local firm of wholesale grocers had pointed a more or less immediate way out of the un¬ toward predicament of a woman engaged in this strange traffic in maple syrup, but had seemed content with her airi¬ ness for his pains, After the rather mild and easily rebuffed advance, men occasionally were men, but in the main they had merely been friendly and in some eases where her sex entered at all, it was to the extent of influencing some male to give her an order, where, except for her being a woman, none would have gone. \! But the women! The woman superintendent of a hospital ! brought her to the verge of what was to her, at the time, a ;; ! most serious money involvement, by throwing back on her I ; hands a very special consignment of maple, sugar , in the loaf, |, 1 after the Brattleboro people, who did not handle the product IMITATION OF LIFE 79 in this form, had gone to considerable pains to obtain it for her. Time after time, her defeats, her snubs, her humiliations, her failures, were to descend upon her from the women executives of-hospital diet kitchens, hotels, and from the women along the Boardwalk who conducted eating estab¬ lishments, who would have thrown their patronage to the male had the alternative presented itself. . “Miss Boa, honey, you ain’t got enough flirtatious ways wid de men and enough onery ways wid de wimmin. Make up your mind you kin fool a man and he’ll like it, and you cam t fool your own kind and dey doan like it. Treat ’em both de way de Lawd fashioned ’em, and He sho did allow more fool to a man and more foolin’ to a woman-” How tins vast monument of a woman stood behind the flat, prairie-like quality of those days! To open the door to the boom and the roar of her was to stumble into a household warmed by the furnace of Delilah. Her huge smile was the glowing heart of that furnace into which, sore and weary, Bea nightly dragged herself, wanting to be enveloped into the limitless reaches of its warmth. “Gawd bless mail soul if it ain’t mail honey-chile!. Clean dead-beat to de bone. Off wid dem dar stockin’s. Let De¬ lilah rub up dem white little dead-beat feet, Look what Delilah’s got heatin’ for her dead-beat honey-chile. Hominy what I found in de market and clat you heah don’t know nothin’ ’bout. Doan’ you wake up mah babies. All three of ’em sleepin* after de very ole debbil in each and every one of ’em sense you left dis house dis mawnin’. Miss Honey- Bea, what you think that pap of yourn et for supper? Crack¬ lin’, honey, may de Lawd strike me dead if he didn’t, Crackliu clat I fed dat little Englishman, between de lips laic he was a little chippie, an’ he smaked ’em lak I had fed him an-gel food.” The untold relief of those warm pale-palmed fingers knead¬ ing and soothing and cooling the tortured soles of her feet. “Miss IIoney-Bea, jes’ ask me if dem two little bratses didn’t get up out of deir washbaskets dis mawnin on de wrongest side you ever heard of. Crainky ain’t jest savin’ it. Did mah white chile quit bawlin’ ’til I tote her, mah 4 80 IMITATION OF LIFE wash a-boilin’, every inch of dis mawnin’ in mah arms? Did mail black chile make her maw so spankin’ mad she spanked Her liT backside?” How cooling to burning shoulder blades, Delilah’s fingers kneading as if into dough that under her fingers became fluff. “Honey-chile, what you think?” “I can’t think, Delilah. It’s too delicious just lying here getting rested by you.” “Honey-chile, your young un gonna sprout a tooth! Two weeks younger dan mah.’onery one, and sproutin’ fust!” The naughty, kindly, and limitless capacity of this Delilah for rubbing in the salve of unctuousness. For weeks, while Bea had been vainly running finger along the stubbornly sterile gums of her child, the offspring of Delilah had been fretting away at two tiny white specks forcing their way like crocuses through the flesh of her little gums, What a woman! Even her insincerities were so palpably sincere! “Mah chile doin’ all de squallin’, and youm walkin’ away wid de teeth. Ain’t dat de cussedest, Miss Honey-Beal Like her pap, all big noise and no big cloin’s. ...” In every matter of precedence, including teeth, was the priority of Bea’s child most punctiliously observed. The duet of their howling might bring her running intuitively to her own, but the switch was without hesitancy to the white child, every labor of service adhering rigidly to that order. But her; emulation of everything pertaining to the bit of pale porcelain which contrasted so'oddly with her own, was as slavish as her adherence to the rule of precedence. Within two months after her arrival, drawing upon who knows what mysterious source of scraps, Peola’s colorful and, fantastic little wardrobe of checks and. bright calicos had. been replaced by a •coarse replica of the sheer and dainty one which had been concocted during the lifetime of Mr. Pull¬ man, by Bea’s waiting fingers, Even in the matter of feeding, Delilah’s child,; who the first weeks of her life had thrived on a.hit-or-miss system of. nobody’s formulating, now conformed meticulously to Dr. Members carefully devised scheme for the white cliild. IMITATION OF LIFE 81 Over this precedence m teething, Delilah had gone so far as to «retly attempt to ward off Peola's threat of triumph, by borhng up a concoction of frog,’ leg, », fa o£ moWe P e , and standing over its bodmg fumes, secretly adapt an incan¬ tation she remembered hearing her mother cfat against wakeful pickaninnies; “Doan’ talk-go ter sleep! Eyes shet an’ doan’ you peep! Keep still, or he jes’ moans, ‘Raw Head an’ Bloody Bones!’ Miss Honey-Bea, if yon dean' believe me, come right on over to wbar your baby chile i, sleepin' an' fame show v•'" white horses, voodoo, which could determine or prohibit her M slightest action. “Never bathe a baby wid your back to de window. Hop- J toads 11 jump in de water and wart up your chile something terrible.” “Step on de forepaw of a northbound black cat, and /W misery’ll git you sho as heaven,” ’ jT “Sweep de baby’s feet wid broom sedge every mawnin’, or he jes’ won’t grow.” “Pulled teeth should be put away in a stockin’, If a dog should walk on one, de chile will have a dog’s tooth in its ' place, sho as heaven.” From her cot in the reception-hall, where she lay beside a festooned washbasket containing Peola, came the heavy f sleeping noises of Delilah, roaring through the silence. . No use, out of her consuming impatience'to .get started on this project, to try and awaken her, Once her head struck pillow, nothing short of the cry of one of three babies could tear Delilah from the thicket of sleep which closed around her, Besides, why? There was nothing about the idea of the forty-eight boxes of candy hearts, flavored so slyly, to be done up in white glazed boxes, splashed with a photograph of Delilah, and tied with gold cord, that would not keep until morning. But just the same, until then, with an en¬ velope propped against the Welsbach to shield the light from possibly scratching against the lids of her sleeping 84 IMITATION OF LIFE child, she virtually waited through the night for Delilah to awaken, sitting beside the window, scribbling on the backs of envelopes, adding, subtracting, looking out and looking out upon a backyard scene of jet-black woodshed, jet-black plane tree and the miracle of a full moon not succeeding m whitewashing them. The matter of the photograph was managed, after all. Mr. TannehiE took it one Sunday morning in the side yard, with Delilah as fluted and as irate as a duchess. “This heah ain’t no rig for to have your picture taken m. Maybe you doan believe it, Miss Honey-Bea, but Is forgot mob about style dan de niggahs in dis heah jay-walkin' town ever knowed, Please, Miss Bea, honey, ain’t you gonna let me wear mah hat dat ole Mrs. Wynkoop down in Richmon give me for to git mahself married in? I want to keep rccoid for mah chile of how her mammy looked-” The photograph of Delilah, however, turned out to be one of those rare accomplishments of a face choosing the mo¬ ment of the clicking of the camera to illuminate and reveal. : Breaking through a white background, as through a paper- covered hoop, there burst the chocolate-and-cream effulgence ' that was Delilah. The heavy cheeks, shellacked eyes, bright, round, and crammed with vitality, huge upholstery of lips that caught you like a pair of divans into the luxury of laugh¬ ter, Delilah to the life beamed out of that photograph with sun power! ' It took three weeks to succeed in placing, on commission basis, the first forty-eight boxes. Twelve at Connie’s Candy Counter. Twelve in the lobby of tbe Pierreponl Hotel, Twelve in Cuskaden’s Drug Store. Twelve in the Atlantic City Novelty .Shop. : Four weeks after that, to the day, came the first two re¬ orders, One for five boxes from the Gandy Corner, The other for twelve, from the Pierrepont. Reorders which became the occasion of the first trip to Philadelphia in two years. There was not a copper kettle adequate for candy-making, on even a semi-professional scale, to be found in all Atlantic .City, Besides, it began to seem desirable to set about ordering ithe white one- and two-pound boxes, with the effulgence of IMITATION OF LIFE 85 Delilah bursting through the cover, in considerably larger numbers. Neighbors began to complain benignly that the smells emanating from the small dun-colored frame house made their months water, Bill Vizitelli, after school hours, covered die dirt floor of the woodshed with pine boards upon which were mounted two new copper kettles. The larger new con¬ signment of candy-boxes, of outlandish bulk and no weight, crowded up the space under the stairs in the reception-hall. The business of sorting lace-paper mats began to be some¬ thing which Father could manage from his wheel-chair. A little timorously, to the impetus of the first two or three reorders, then a couple more, and still a couple more, and Delilah's Hearts were on the market. -fi CHAPTER 18 After the Tannehjlls went, walked , out, virtually, owing the last six weeks and leaving behind a trail of solicitors and collectors who dogged the house for months after, it seemed logical to once more attempt to rent that upper floor, Except for Delilah. “Miss Bca, honey, I oain’t have mah cnokin’-floor all clut¬ tered up wid mah three babies. Me and'mah hearts need privacy, Do Lawd needed privacy dem days befoh creation or Me couldn't have thought it all out de way He did, Jes’ look how He reckoned Sunday following Monday and all, My hearts’ll make up dat dar rent money, honey, if you . give me peace and quiet to make ’em in. Jj| Up to date, the reorders had been real enough, coniitnh* hig and increasing. Thanks to the genial offices or a Mr. * Marks, one of the late Mr. Pullman’s colleagues at the pickle* arid-relish pier, the Belvedere Hotel In Philadelphia had taken a dozen one-pound boxes on consignment and re¬ ordered, but the margin of profit continued to bailie and elude. Somewhere in that strange interlude between each finished pound there occurred the discrepancy between profits 86 IMITATION OF LIFE on paper and actual results. Discounts spoilage exig<«, : sue]) as the two dozen boxes which she herself, aul«l by htlh. Bill Vizitelli, had delivered to the Royal lalaee Hotel only to have them topple over, as they were being earned by a bellhop, into a vat of boiling water. Not her fault, but o save the terrified lad dismissal, a loss which managed to keep her calculations on the debit side. Each evening, after a usual session of attempted enter¬ tainment of her Father, who could be so irate with her, and after moments with her child, whose bedtime usually over¬ lapped her return, the figuring, once her household was m bed, began, The profit, gross, of each pound box of candy, multiplied by the number of boxes sold. From tins total, deduction of daily expenses. Result, almost invariably, a ; minus quality that sent her to restless bed, tortured with the ; need and yet the inability to provide the necessities ol that household. , , There were three babies, two of them beginning to crawl, and one of them practically having ceased to move, for whom | nourishing food had to be provided with militaristic regime. f Herself and Delilah might make gratefully out, for four or .J five consecutive meals, on one of the stuffed .Hank-steak If roasts that Delilah could maneuver out of almost any old P ' cut of beef, and wonders could be accomplished by that black I' crocodile-like hand in providing dishes that were not only tasty, but toothsome, out of anything from barley to tapioca. But milk and cream and white meat of chicken and dainties for the exacting palate of a paralytic who could not feel a pin stuck into his flesh, hut whose palate could recoil from the slightest flavor not felicitous to it, were imperative. The creature-lives, for which incredibly she was suddenly and solely responsible, of five human beings had to go on; had to proceed and thrive on profits squeezed from her manipulations of a not-highly important food product known as maple sugar. It was strange that so casual a commodity to human needs fe as the sugar could suddenly have become the central ■kforce of her universe. Bv It mattered to her with an intensity which, while it was Jr privately embarrassing to herself, must in some measure have IMITATION OF LIFE 87 helped produce the ultimate results, just what decision took place m a stewards or housewife’s mind concerning maple sugar. Often waiting for that decision, her finger nails sank deeply into her palms to the rhythm of a quickly reiterated prayer which ran under her silence: “Please, God, make him. Make him order. Make him. Make him.” There had once been a girl in high school, quite a beauty named Emu .Ponscarme, who had been able to desire the im¬ mediate thing in that passionate sort of way. Almost invari¬ ably unprepared when called upon in class, she had the habit of clutching violently at the aim of her nearest classmate and hissing under her hot breath: “Tell me. What is the answer? Tell me. Pleusel Please!” Almost immediately following gradu¬ ation, lima, daughter of a chef in one of the larger Board¬ walk hotels, had married the proprietor and now occupied a suite in the same hostelry where her parent, once of the kitchen, was now maitro d’bdtel, Apparently, there was something to wanting as passion¬ ately as did Erna. It had kept: her a sort of laughing-stock with her classmates, but in the end it had got her there. Graduation with honorable mention and subsequently the most spectacular marriage of any girl in the class. Perhaps the laugh was now on the girls who had lacked Enin’s impolite gumption, Digging her nails into her palms, prayerful under her silence, time and time again, something about the spectacle of herself reminded her of the terribly eager Erna, pinching her'classmates as she hissed: “Tell me. Please! Pleasel Martin k Luther’s dates.” Wanting passionately had got Erna there, all right. On . the other hand, Rea’s was not a matter so much of wanting passionately as needing passionately. Mouths to be fed. There was something that got at her emotions about the spectacle of her child, pulling with remarkably strong lips at the nipple of a bottle which contained the good and proper nourishment of her own providing. Different emotions, per¬ haps, than she had stored up in her anticipation. Motherhood had turned out not to be a matter of nursery pruttiuess, adorable pastimes over a layette, hours beside a 88 IMITATION OF LIFE perambulator on a sunlit beach, or retailing baby anecdotes to Mr. Pullman. There had been so little time for anything more than a hurried realization that here was a mouth whose first: quiver and howl had shaken the world with imperious demand to be fed. The fact that it had mattered, that call, more than any¬ thing else had ever mattered before, must, in some ways, she felt sure, be part of the compensations of motherhood which she had been taught to expect would be hers. But up to now there had been so little time for self- analysis. It was unceasingly wonderful that the little creature was beautiful and whole. All there. Proper assortment of twenty fingers and toes, Pink ones! Yellow down for luiir. Small pink zero of a mouth that had to be kept wiped. Oh, one had moments, of course. Such as when the doll-like ■ creature, , starched and white, was placed in her arms by Delilah, Or when she found she could hush small cries emanating from the enlarging zero, by pressing these cries, that seemed strangely hers, into her breast, or when she be¬ held her own, riding in the huge crotch of Delilah’s elbow, opposite the pale and black bit of fierceness that was Peola. But more usually, tire twenty-six inches of life for which she was so suddenly responsible was something, along with a myriad of other concerns, about which to dash through the days, engaged in what was becoming the more and more engrossing occupation of livelihood. Some day, she told herself upon these occasions when the pangs of the; not realized sense of her maternity were upon her, there will be time for the old dreams of hours in a nursery; beside a child on a beach; or on the veranda of a yet-to-be-realized, cottage in Ventnor; doing the fine ..head-' luckings and engaging in the lovely pastimes of sewing for her young, Hours that were not to come. But the quaint dream of them, from a girlhood that was already taking on some of the contours of having itself been quaint, was what impelled her, finally, to risk not attempting to once more rent the second story of the house on Arctic Avenue. Thus the little nursery up there would come into its own, IMITATION OF LIFE 89 to be shared, during this period of sublime democracy of childhood, with the dark child, who, except for the contrast of the whiteness of Jessie, might have passed for white her¬ self. Father could be comfortably manipulated upstairs to a room of his own, there to sleep with his open door facing her own open one, leaving Delilah a free hand on her kitchen floor. In spite of the stubborn persistence of the minus results■ on the hacks of envelopes, the list of maple syrup reorders 1 was half again its original length and Delilah’s Hearts were moving. It was worth taking the risk, at any rate for a month or two. It required her nerve, all of it. But sleeping upstairs again in what had once been her marriage bed, with the remainder of her household normally quartered and grouped around her, was a blessed reinstatement which must somehow be made permanent. That was the summer, one of flaying heat and unprece¬ dented prosperity for the resort town, that the pattern ran something like this; eight hours of day-by-day, door-to-door canvassing that covered three out of Atlantic City’s four wards as well as Ventnor and Longport. Weekly and often bi-weekly tours of the Boardwalk hotels, Evenings devoted to delivering, sometimes with the aid of Bill Vizitelli, the heavy bulk of candies and syrups which had been assembled, ticketed, and wrapped by Delilah, The twine-bites from these loggings were to remain across the insides of her fingers, irradicablc evidence to months and miles of carting through the streets of a city that, even in its byways, put up the hold, raucous, penny-whistle front of carnival. .Scarcely a lodging-house or cheap hotel but poured its kitchen odors upon her as she passed or sought out trade entrances. Stench from fish-frys, shore dinners, liumbut'ger- wagons, of bathing-suits as they dried over porch railings, ■wasting peanuts, sour alleys and streets where the poor, in a dreadful kind of finery, aped the Boardwalk, seeped into her clothing on those days when her route carried her away from the translucent, spangled air of the ocean front, into hack streets, to such an extent that Delilah, waiting to peel the 90 IMITATION OF LIFE shoes and stockings off her tingling feet and the wilted cloth¬ ing off her shoulders, would sniff with her great flaring nostrils. "Fish in dis jacket. Wienies in dis waist. Clam chowder in your hair, Been baek-streetin’ today. I kin tell de smell of a white-trash fish-fry wid mail both eyes shut. Better not go near mail ole gemmeman wid chowder on your hair. Dat ole man’s got fas-tidousness.” But even if much of that summer stank of fetid back doors and the glare of the long tramping days was like sheet tin before her eyes, and her corsets at night, when she removed them, were streaked with rust from her constantly perspiring body, there were compensations. Except for a temporarily disastrous tendency of Delilah’s Hearts to melt and glue together under mounting tempera¬ ture, a difficulty quickly overcome by waxed paper cups, the candy, there for a time during the peak of the, summer sea¬ son, did nip and tuck with the syrup orders, multiplying until Delilah took it upon herself to engage, at twenty-five cents a week, the services of small black Jake, aged nine, who came in after school hours to assist in everything from scraping copper pots to wheeling an irate old gentleman who, to the youngsters strange delight, struck out angrily with his cane at whatever did not please him. And how much did not please him! The slant of sun, the angle of his chair, his rug, the sweetness or lack of it of his i lemonade, the falsetto howling of Peola, the temporary ab¬ sence of Delilah in the kitchen at; her ironing, tile lateness of Boa, the earliness of his bath, the warmth of his coffee, the chill of his milk. “Ole gemmeman, dar’s a debbil sitting down dar inside yom fas-tidousness, dat de Lawd has got to plunk out wid a pair of ^tweezers if He’s gwine to let you into heaven, (f you dnan’ quit dat bangin’ round wid dat doggone cane of yours sho as black cats has stick-up tails, ’Lila’s gonna spank.” And m just the proportion that her day-long mouthings, etriisions, invocations, incantations, and threats mounted, did her indulgences mount with them. ;v lm ®P an k mah bad ole , gemmeman if he drain’ quit his pcstenn, sho as dar’s wool on mah head,” was her kind of acquiescence to heating his milk, cooling his coffee, cluing- ju . yj mg his coverlets, to his slightest whim, “Ain’t dat de cussed iak ^ bu ^ hoiioy; maybe data what voll ' re L‘ . 6 E“« of ice in it, Mali will it dar J„g~ c m „ F* l0Uch De - it spankin' you. 'On,™ A ,,',.1 y “" rs ' sl “' s S°nna break big baby." h * >" «. P°» ole Delilah's On and on, hours of it rl.-,,,,. f ,r -l , . to rnim. Miss Honey Boa wJerTf ; ain’t (Iruvo ,m, clean * * W *»» Noi was that anything near the wnnrW o • whose laughter shook the <1,1, “ I ° l l B by the corner o Georgia Avenue shook the house. V ‘i”T; “" C be lylaugh and three meals of belly-warmin' Villa Is and one lie y-prayer a dw on’ T u, 1 • side mall like i, <*/,*$ “ 1 k “‘ k “P ■** »“*- res, even In that glaring circus of a summer, when Bea r mm «*» " f '« i« "'ill. adhesive to keep ,, i l v ™ 1 """‘iwratrons of Delilah and ef late S f T'."l i’" fi "*,"*"!•**• *" « ; P* «f crowds, *Y. bending like the I , '' ”™«l to samp ocean landward in lovely soil hisses at her feet, 3 Dining such walks the mind cleared, revived, and bristled, tomorrow became something more than just a blur across eyes that smarted even behind dark-blue sun glasses. Tomor- mw became a deck, cleared for plans which came tumbling across it like spirited acrobats, Hurting twine-bitten hands and adhesive-bound led: look flight from the body which dragged I hem all day. J ho dome of heaven, salted with - stars, seemed anything but its hard, duylit self. Tomorrow, during such walks as these late homeward ones, became a theater of the kind of success that lay most immediately in her vision. Leisure to be with her child. A modest lit lie rubber- t ired trap or solicitor’s buggy, in which she could drive about town on her canvassing toms. A cot¬ tage in Veutuor. Life insurance, A nest egg against her child’s education, Helpers for Delilah, Larger wage for Delilah. Gadgets for her Father. Fine linen for her child. More income and more leisure. 92 IMITATION OF LIFE They would mean hours in the nursery. Afternoons on the beach or on a Ventnor veranda, sewing for a child who romped as she stitched. Father in the very last word in wheel-chairs, sunning himself. Evenings of sewing tucks into the prettiest little-girl dresses in Atlantic City. . . . For the moment life might be a matter of maple sugar, but it must not remain that. It needn’t, It wouldn’t. Maple sugar must be made to yield the belated reality of a home worthy of Mr. Pullman’s widow and child, A more or less assured market, say fifty pounds a week of Delilah’s Hearts and as many gallons of syrup, might, if contemplated during a leg-hurting day of high mileage and low sales, seem dishearteningly remote, but dreams came out brightly during nocturnal walks, especially at that shank of the evening when there was still plenty of evidence of human life about. As tire big hotels began to appear and the shops and the lights and the crowds and the magic of Sousa’s brass band, or Creators, came crashing through the throng of visitors, such success as she craved seemed not only real, but within easy grasp. In a world wanting so passionately to play, there was place for Delilah’s Hearts. These big, good-humored salesmen with black cigars and Panama hats and stout wives; the rows of roller-chairs filled with self-indulgent-looking women and ;! indulgent men; the brilliantly lit fagades of shops, piers, and hotels, candy-anckmusement emporiums; the streamers of music flung like colored moiiA ribbons across the scene; the sea applauding and booming; the smell of popcorn, taffy, masting coffee, sea salt, festive women-gave sense of de¬ mand and supply, It appeared so simple, trotting along invigorated, in her big hat, wide sleeves, and Spanish-flounced skirt whose brush- braid just cleared the walk. . The dream of twenty dollars a week seemed, God willing to spare her health, something actually within easy attainability. It was at times like these that the widow of B. Pullman deske 1Cr t6Ct 1 in tlle Srimaco of intense CHAPTER 19 I Mr, Chipley had become wizened and incased in a tough skin that fitted him like a suit, several times too large, of loose old crocodile leather, Clare to goodness if de biggest baby in dis house ain’t tmmu into his Lilahs ole alligator. Put dat arm into dis i lieah coat > ,,r s h° as mah name is Jack Robinson, Delilah’s gonna spank. Lawd A’mighty! did I ever see anything like mail ole gemmeman, turnin’ jes’ as fast as he can into hide .j for somebody’s valise.” : j ^c day, even the children, fascinated by the roomy old domino of skin, were discovered in the covert act of sticking pins into the loose wattles about the wrists, Mr, Chipley par tuer to their hilarity at his irnperviousness, -i Morbid silence, with the splashed fury of a hurled j tomato, there hurst the descent of Delilah. “Who’s dat makin all dis lieah stillness? What you three young nils (loin ? For do love of Gawd Almighty! sticldn' pins in mah chair-baby! De Lawd bear witness. De Lawd shine down, It’s u ntiiude de like of walkin do Red Sea or may mah eyes bug out. Mali clmir-babys above feeliu’ de stick of pins! Angel skin is on him, But angel skin or no angel skin, Delilah’s J, gwine to lam down on dese braises for a-stiekm him. Gimme dat white ear, Jessie, for to twist. Gimme dat yaller ear, I cola, for to twist, Stop pushin’, Peek You cain’t git your I car twisted befoh white chile has had hern. Jcs^ you two bad ones wait’ll somebody comes home dis eveiiiu dead-beat and needin’ rest, and two labile good angels, YVhats she gonna get? Two labile debbils what stick pins in folks. 1 wo liddle mean emeses to make her suffer mob when sites so dead-beat from earnin’ ’em bread and milk and salt-water-taffy dat her bugs won’t carry her no moll. Gawds going to put it all down in His pcarl-and-luce book, I every single one of your meannesses.” Extraordinary the consistency of reaction to this thread- 93 94 IMITATION OF LIFE bare threat,' The stoic little mouth of Peola hardening against tears; the fluted ripple of Jessie’s lips wanting to widen into the orifice of a howl, but settling, with what grimness it could muster, into something resembling the hard little heart¬ break of Peola’s. The proportion of occasions upon which Delilah carried out these threats to retail to the pale-faced tired young woman who came hurrying home, almost invariably after dark, bundle laden, was shrewdly sufficiently large to occa¬ sion apprehension and despair, “My mamma won’t caret My mamma likes for me to stick pins in Grampa,” “My missy won’t care. My missy likes for me to stick pins in Jessie’s grampa.” From her very infancy, Peola, quick as any child to ape, was nevertheless careful to avoid replica of her parent s dic¬ tion. Where it did make way into her speech, it crept there from Jessie, whose drawling idiosyncrasies were to play im¬ portant role in her mother’s ultimate decision in favor of boarding-school. “Your missy likes for you to stick pins in Jessie’s grump,” mimicked Delilah, "If I couldn’t smack dut chile, Peola, right dis minute befoh her missy comes home. If dat ain’t de low-do widest. I’m a-tellin’ you do Lawd will come right down here on Arctic Avenue after you two if He finds a single pin in de old gemmeman when He gits up to heaven. ‘Mamma likes for me to stick pins in Cramp!’ Jes’ you wait and see when your blessed mammy, her feet biirnin’ her like bell’s asphalt, comes home tonight:, Peola, come here and git your¬ self smacked I” This was one of the occasions when Delilah saw fit to make good her threat,, standing foursquare against the appalled retreat of the two young miscreants, who measured, respec¬ tively, the identical heights of two feet and four inches. , , Sure as Moses writ de laws on marble stationery, Miss Beal Me out in de kitchen in a big batch of Hearts and what does I hear? Nothin’ is what I hears so loud it. would craelc your ears. I say to mahself I says, dis here house is too filled wid de sound of nothin’ to mean any good. I tip¬ toes, an’ what does dis pair of eyes give me by de Lawd see? I j 1 ! i i I I IMITATION OF LIFE 95 ; Something He never ameant me to see wid ’em. Two of God’s : chillun, Miss Boa, wid faces laic angels and souls lak tar, a- f ! : slickin’ pins into mah old gemmeman lak he was a mule’s T tail.” : There they stood, the two of them, before the enormous tower of Delilah, to whom they measured knee-high and less, as they drooped with chastisement. The small brightly gold Jessie, the small straight-mouthed Peola, whose pallor, the color of a peeled banana, lay over slim Caucasian fea¬ tures, coined out of heredity knows where, ■ * £ There was a deep damp rim across Bea’s brow, due to her J|L hat pressing down all day. The sockets of her arms, from :1 last night’s lugging after dark, felt exactly their shapes.. The Moses Frank Hospital in Ventnor had a new dietitian i who had struck maple-sugar products off its list. Her erst- j while schoolmate, Erna Ponscarme Sperwick, who had mar- | ried the proprietor of the Boardwalk Hotel, who in turn 1 was one of her best customers, had made a request which, corning from her, amounted actually to command, for a : maple-sugar booth at an impending church fair. Oh, how one needed to arrive home to that grateful mo- ■ ij merit of slumping into bed, drawing covers up around a body i j singing and stinging of fatigue, and drift off into the all too brief hours of immunity from the sense of peril to herself . and hers, at every turn of the day. \ And now here, as if to add to her sense of alienation from q a household into which she longed to remain riveted like a i| fungus to its walls, were two children standing huddled away 1 j from her and into the very shadow that was betraying them. Jealousy of Delilah smote her, dying instantly, as it always did, of self-loathing. The lightning intuition of Delilah, who was a lyre re¬ sponding to the lightest breath of an emotion in Beal , . doan stun’ heah, you two, hanging on to ’Lilah, tt-pretendm’ yuu.se don’t want to fly those arms aroun’ Miss Honey-Bea’s neck. Declare to. de Lawd you won’t believe me, Miss Honey-Boa. Dose two liddle house-debbils been slickin’ pins in mah old gemmeman for to see him not hurt. I Lawd strike me dead, Miss Bea, if dey wasn’t.” , ;]' Dr, Merribel repeatedly had run a needle along the sur- j. : 96 IMITATION OF LIFE lace of Father’s flesh, pricking into it now then for symptoms of response or lack of it. The children, playing about, had doubtless observed that. In spite of herself, a grim kind of laughter shook her inwardly. “No, no, Delilah. You don’t mean our Jessie and our Peola. You must have them mixed up with some other dread¬ ful little girls.” “I means oum. Look at ’eml Steeped in sin before their Lawd who has give ’em nothin’ but love. Dat BddJe yaller- headed one of youm is no innocenter than rnah black one, only mine might as well begin leamin’ herself now, that what’s jes’ naughty for a white chile, can be downright ag’in de law if a black one does it. ’Tain’t no use mah chile tryin’ to get herself raised on de idea all men is equal. Maybe dey ■IS in de eyes of de Lawd, but it’s de eyes of man TV talkin’ ’bout. Law! jes’ to look at my Peola. Makes mab palm itch for to give it to her standin’ up, whar de Lawd made it for her to sit down.” “Jessie, come here to Mother.” “No, no, no-no-no.” “Go to your maw, white chile!” “Come here, Jessie,” “Go ’long, honey. Your maw won’t lambast. Her’II jes' be sorry. Go ’long. Dat ain’t no way for mah white liT pear blossom to treat her maw when her comes home dead-beat from work.” it wasn’t, and Bea could feel the tears press against her tonsils and pangs of something bitter and hurting at the sight of the small tight fingers of her child curling around the homy ones of Delilah. "Come to me, Jessie. Why did you stick pins into Grand¬ father? Don’t you and Peola know that is a cruel sin? Come to me and tell me about it,” What a darling, straight, defiant little stick she was, to stand off there in the shadow of the bulwark of Delilah, her fluty mouth held straight and cold. Tm sorry, Miss Bea, even if Jessie won’t be.” “Peola, will you stop bein’ sorry before Jessie is sorry? Ain’t you got no way of keepin’ yourself in your place?” “I know you’re sorry, Peola, only I don’t want you to be 97 IMITATION OF LIFE sorry before Jessie is sorry, because she probably put you up Put her up nothin’. Nobody can put mah chile up to a meanness she ain’t thought of fust.” I did put her up to it.” “Well, you don’t need to go cuttin’ off your own haid before your own maw.” “You cruel little girl!” “Oh, no’m, now, Miss Bea, her ain’t cr-” “Delilah, keep out of this. Jessie, come here,” “I won't.” “Jessie.” “I sticked pins, Miss Missy.” “Peola, hush, Jessie, come here.” “Won't.” Here was the decisive stuff, in this tiny crisis, winch was to establish the basis of her relationship with the small gilt spar of a twenty-eight-inch girl standing so defiantly before her. Mothers with their wits about them realized that on such moments as this could pivot the delicate mechanism of status between themselves and their children. Jessie, a wild, elusive little bird where her mother was concerned, who flew out from under her caresses, who danced lightly away from her advances, must be captured, held, disciplined. “Did you hear what I said?” There now, that tone would jerk this bit of porcelain, so strangely, so beautifully hers, to discipline. “Yes.” “Then come.” “Won’t.” “You cruel little girl, must I force you?” How could she have said that? She was her dear darling of a straight little jonquil, so sunlit, far too incredibly covered with sheen and the strange frivolity of beauty ever to have sprung from so staid a union as her own with Mr. Pullman. She was some¬ thing bright and elusive as a hummingbird, that had to be captured in a tender gesture too quick for it. Bea had never succeeded iu that gesture. The spectacle of her child lingering away from her in the vast shade of Delilah was the cruel result of the necessity of too often leaving the 98 IMITATION OF LIFE house early mornings before the lids flew back from those very blue eyes and returning to it long after the child slept. Jessie, holding shyly away from her. Jessie, bright and wary- eyed as a robin, peering at her from behind the starchy barri¬ cade of Delilah’s apron. Jessie standing stiff, as now, her fluty mouth held straight. Oh, you could not be hard on a child so placed that Mother was more of a boarder than even the average father who left his home daily, returning late. What could she know?—Still, regardless, here was one of those situations that had to be gone through with. “Why did you hurt Grandpa?” “It never hurted.” “It might have.” “But it didn’t.” “Well, if it didn’t hurt Grandpa, it’s hurting me. Hurting me just terribly. Just as you standing there disobeying me is—hurting me-” To her own amazement, with every word she felt her voice slipping upward into tears. A small explosion of them came down, wetting her tiredness. She, who so seldom cried, was standing there quite foolishly, hat toward the back of her head as she was accustomed to wearing it from too weary a sense of it clamping her brow all day, bundles slipping un¬ heeded from her hands and the taste of dust along her lips. “Gawd Almighty, muh Honey-Boa missy’s cryin’i” She was, Just standing there as she put. it.to herself, bawling, through misery of the sudden impact of sense of iin- potency that was overtaking her before the stiff spar of tight-lipped, blond aloofness, facing her from the background of Delilah’s apron. What was the use? The struggling to keep together body and soul and the small institution "of this home, in which, except for the blessed expansiveness of Delilah, she mattered little, if at all, Why, it was not even unusual, when she came home, to have Father crouch sullenly in his chair away from her kiss, or bestowal of small gifts of lolly pops, spats, violet-colored liquor, or tiny bottle of a drug-store perfume. It didn’t mean a thing, this turning away from those best beloved. In fact, _ it was often characteristic of atrophying IMITATION OF LIFE 99 minds, Dr. Merribel had again and again assured her, Father, quick to the extent of unrestrained anger if she erred in her calculations respecting his wishes by so much as the fraction of an inch regarding the position of his chair, his cravat, his medicine-dropper, and who could really he quite nightmarish With her, must not be held responsible. Impotence in this household seemed to reside chiefly in its reigning spirit, who left it each morning before father or child was awake, and returned evenings to find a pair of sleepy hostile strangers who needed to be wheedled. It was terrible to stand there crying, like a child before the calamity of broken dishes, and the ridiculous part of it was that she could not stop either distorting her face or tasting the salted dust, or keep her hat from sliding back¬ ward, dangling ridiculously by the pin and hurting, But even before Delilah, to whom life was largely a wail to which she must fly in order to administer, could roach her side, this bright miracle happened-straight as a dart to her there flew Jessie, wanting and needing to be held. CHAPTER 20 Mingling with a okhtain constehna- tion at the prospect of the maple-sugar booth which the former Emu Ponscnrme had asked her to contribute to the First Church Fair, to be held on the Steel Pier, was some- tiling akin to gratification. Aside from her business obligation to conform with this request, coming as it did from the wife of one of her first and staunchest customers, something of a first awareness of herself as enough of a local entity to be reckoned with in the community stirred within her. Participation in this event, under the auspices of this particular church and this particu¬ lar occasion, stamped her growing repute, The implication moved her pleasantly. A gesture of civic cooperation was expected of B. Pull¬ man, business man. ; The way to whet Delilah into a’ lather of enthusiasm was 10 0 IMITATION OF LIFE by way of the tried and true device of simulating opposition. “I am simply going to explain to Mrs. Sperwiek, Delilah, that much as I would like to have a booth, I cannot afford either the time or the money, although, of course, the church will pay the expenses of the carpentry and buntings. Besides, it is too much work for you.” “Lissen to dat chile talkl Jes’ Ink folks was invited every day to show off on de Steel Pier, Why cain’t you afford it? You talk lak you ain’t got no ’Lilah to help you manage.” “Yes, but-” “Dar ain’t gonna be no boldin’ back from dis here cor¬ poration. Servin’ de Lawd on high and advertisin’ your wares on de Boardwalk is killin’ two birds at one shot. May de Lawd Almighty, who I love, forgive me for what I jes’ said, not a-meanin’ thataway. De Lawd is no bird except a great white heavenly host bigger’n any white horse you ever seed, but de Lawd don’t wear His wings stowin' lak de angels does,” “It is well and good for you to insist, hut how will we manage, Delilah? Somebody will have to preside at the booth and I can’t take two days off.” “Somebody’s a-goin’ to preside at dat booth if 1 has to do de presidin’ myself, an’ de Lawd is going to be praised and i our business is goin’ to git itself advertised and like it.” “But, Delilah—” “Ought to see, honey, how de kids call after me when I rolls out mah baby. Dar goes 'Lilah, I’s a walkin' trade-mark. Candy-box ’Lilah. Dem kids know me already from the candy-box—-if it ain’t a shame de way you made me get mah picture took for it, widput a-dressuT me up.” It was stuff out of that remark which sent Bea out of bed to her feet at three o’clock of the morning following this encounter, with the full-grown conception of a plan seeming to spring: from, her sleep. Why not Delilah, in her shining fluted cap, which no amount of indoor drudgery could seem to wilt, presiding over waffles and maple syrup at the booth? The ladies would enjoy her fluffy, delicately turned waffles, as only Delilah could turn them. The ladies, and their hus¬ bands, tool IMITATION OF LIFE 10.1 To the tune of this rag-and-bone of a phrase, “If I has to do the presiding myself. . . . I’s a walkin’ trade-mark was bom of papier ituiche, bcuver boards, fifteen yards or yel- low crilpe tissue paper, four small square tables, a waffle iron, and a glass counter for containing candy-boxes, the first: B. Pullman, . ■ B, Pullman’s waffle-booth, Or just B. Pullman. Waffles. Why not a Pullman ear? That would be cute! A little booth rigged up like a Pullman to match the accident of name. Not exactly a Pullman. You didn’t eat in Pullmans, Rig it up like a dining-carl There were always brilliantly polished dining-car windows revealing snowy napery, shining silver¬ ware, and white-coated, white-eye-balled rows of dark-skinned waiters, Hashing by the corner of Mississippi and Arctic Ave¬ nues as the Philadelphia and Reading trains sped their noses up to the very Hank of the Boardwalk. She had eaten in one once, when her father had managed to get them free scats on a special delegation train to Phila¬ delphia. “They certainly don’t know how to fry ham, lie lmd complained, making a finicky mouth as ho turned his over with his fork. But to Bea, with the scenery flying past and the white napery so heavy and glossy, it had seemed the best food she had ever tasted. And that trip to Pittsburgh when the sales staff arid families had attended the conven¬ tion of employees of the pickle-aud-relish firm, lo find your¬ self seated beside the wide Hashing window of a dining-car, unfolding stiffly white napery, jotting down, because your eyes were better than Mother’s or Father’s, the order for food that by virtue of the movement, sense of journeying, smell of leather luggage, train smoke and propinquity of kitchen, seemed flavored with romance! Delilah in her fluted cap, cooking waffles at one end of a little booth designed after the interior of one of those dining- cars that you associated with Pullman service! Why not! Would Delilah? How soundly she slept, her huge body shaped like a cave around the form of Pcola. Alert to the faintest cry of a child or sound from Mr. Cliipley, a dining- ear itself might have thundered through her bedroom without awakening her. How soundly the entire household slept, just 102 IMITATION OF LIFE as if, full-grown, into the night, had not spiung this B. 1 nil- man idea, wanting to be set into motion. Who is this B. Pullman? she would start them asking. Mighty clever little idea of his. B, Pullman. Any relation to the railroad Pullman? Well, anyway, mighty clever idea. Snappiest booth in the place. That mammy certainly can juggle waffles. Guess Ill take some of those Hearts bade home to the wife. Put your card in there, Mammy, so we can reorder on them, if they are as good as your waffles and syrup. Oh, and why not darling little souvenir paper tans, like they gave away at the Steel Pier, with Delilah s picture! If Delilah would only stir out of the deep draught of sleep which caused her breathing to whistle against her teeth and periodic groans of her complete abandonment to ema¬ nate. Perhaps painted panels of some sort could be trumped up to be hung against the windows to simulate scenery-and copies of the little lighted lamps on each table that made the dining-cars glow so as they rushed along Georgia and Mis¬ sissippi Avenues. Impossible to return to sleep in a night that had thus been punctured with an impulse which had brought her awake tingling. Outside, an evening the color of watered milk flowed over and seemed to immerse Arctic Avenue in bluish pallor. A wavy moon lit , the car tracks along which the last “Owl” had passed. That strange pungent Atlantic City smell, from off a scene still hard at roasting its popcorn, chewing its taffy, pressing its sea-damp lips together, relaxing body-deep in sands, frying its fish, lying full stretched on white beach under the watery moon, undressing in hotel rooms, scuttling down side streets to brothels, lolling on spacious ocean-front verandas, under enchantment, sweating in mean rooms over saloons, rolled down the side streets and against the nostrils. Standing at her open window, with the cool June air lash¬ ing her nightgown softly against her body, Bea could sniff it, taste it, feel it. Even tied up in. the cheap tinsel of beach love-making and Atlantic City brand of romance, the something that she had IMITATION OF LIFE 103 missed was going on out there. She knew that now, with the orderly memory of Mr. Pullman stored away in her mind in an orderly kind of grief. Contact with the business world, in which, strangely enough, her sex seemed to have played no part, had taught her that. Something had passed her by, all right, without leaving her the leisure to more than iieetingly comprehend it. There had been a girl, late one evening, as, she was re¬ turning from deliveries, standing on the corner of Georgia Avenue and the Boardwalk, crying, and looking up at a youth in a checked cap who had slapped her face and walked off. The stream of that girl’s tears rose in wild, mountainous, grand places of the heart of which she, Bea, knew little, if ; anything! Something stale in the flavor of her entire life, and J|;, hitherto unsuspected, became for the moment suddenly upper- most, almost immediately passing out again into the limbo K of her uuawareness, ' ;|| A man in the office of a fancy-grocery concern, where she -1 had been soliciting a maple-syrup order, had picked up the I receiver of a ringing telephone and said, “Hello, sweetheart, * | in a manner that gave her the strangest nostalgia for some- || thing she had never known. “ Atlantic City, smelling of carnival and free-for-all love, did that, too, but so iieetingly that scarcely the wing of her ' desire brushed her consciousness. Activity was the lid to the jack-in-the-box of a heart that ; r hurt: of some sort of deficiency; activities that flowed across the surface of her days, making maple sugar matter. Even now, remaining inert within four walls, after she had been awakened by a plan that: pressed to be put into execution, irked too much for endurance. A cape she had worn during the days of the coining of Jessie, thrown hastily on over a skirt adjusted on top of her nightgown, was scarcely attire to make a midnight stroll on the sands seem invitational or indecorous. It would be easier waiting for the break of day, out there along the sand front of a carnival city that did not want to go to bed, The mind worried so at the little idea of the booth. The napery must be the snow white of Delilah s 104 IMITATION OF LIFE inimitable laundry-work. Her own Delft blue-and-white salad plates—there were eleven-coukl be used for the waffles, and coffee-cups to match. Four tables seating four each. About three gallons of syrup. Twenty boxes of Hearts. . . . B. Pullman. Dining service. Out along the white sands, the sense of the night a big frosted grape was even stronger, because the piers hacl dark¬ ened and only the hotel lights hung like cats eyes. Along the sands, beneath the piers, within black shadows, were crouched the immemorial lovers, as if carved out of the substance of the night itself. They belonged to it, as figures emerging to bas-relief are only half torn out of the marble At streak of dawn their passion, bom of this night, would (.flow back into it. , , , , Cheek to cheek, lips to lips, and youth to youth,, they lay. To walk through them was literally to walk through love. r Bea, who was nineteen and had missed its meaning, strode through the familiar spectacle, her cape flying backward and her eyes trying to keep ahead. ... . , , , What in all this prone youth was there mat she had never captured-the languor in the whispers of these giris- the fuzzy male voices that vibrated? Pier love had worn congress gaiters and had been unyoung- Just the same, life was a full and going affair-four tables seating four-about three gallons of syrup. . • • CHAPTER 21 The thick of mind which made it habitual for Bea to trace back a chain of circumstances to its first link, fastened on the deluge of dull cold rain which poured uninterruptedly throughout the two days of the l'irst Church Faff. ... Had it not been for the unseasonable and niarrow-chilliug , weather, the B. Pullman might not have been the success that it was. : There was something downright soothing, to people blown in off the wind-swept ocean front, about piping-hot waffles IMITATION OF LIFE 105 j on which the butter melted into little diamond-shaped pools, If and coffee that lifted its aroma from a boiling, nickel-plated | pot. ' -1 “Folks jus* nachally goes hot-waffle in a storm,” proclaimed | Delilah, twirling her irons and the whites of her eyes. “Some- | thing cozy as a Minkin* cat about a pipin'-hot waffle, wid de I right blend of drip coffee to wash it: down." | She might have added that there was something cozy as a ill cat about the enormous Delilah, fluted and starched to per- f fection, dominating the narrow confines of the rickety cross J section of dining-car. It was not much of a cross section. Except for the two wide windows flunked by small tables which looked out upon J a painted drop of landscape, the dining-car idea had not quite jj managed to emerge. It was upon a trumped-up rear plat¬ form, railed in with a brass gate recruited from the railroad yards and personally lugged by Bea after dark, upon which | most of the illusion rested. A small rod signal lantern, a brake- man’s red flag, and a screen door were contributing proper¬ ties to Hie effect. “A porter walkin’ in here would jes’ nachally swing a laig on board,’’ hud been Delilah’s elated comment the morning | she arrived, paraphernalia laden, for her first day. J That was scarcely true, but there were those who, sniffing j through the golden aroma which filled the booth, not only perceived, but applauded. f “Fixed up like a little dining-car, isn’t it? Right cute idea. . Say, Mammv, don’t care if I do have another .order of those- I waffles.. Loriclv! they tickle the spot.” QUART-PAIL-OF- DELlLAirS-MAPLE-SYRUP-MAILED-TO-ANy-PART-OF- THE-UNITED-STATES-AND-CANADA. POSTAGE PRE¬ PAID. “Let’s send some down home, Texas being a pretty I large part of these United States. Couple of boxes of those | Hearts, too, Mammy, while you’re at it” j So, despite the conspiracy of two days which blew tatters j of wind and rain at high velocity along a Boardwalk con- | stantly bombarded by a swollen sea that sprang in angry spurts up through the cracks, the little fair, netting the J church three hundred and eleven dollars, ninety-six of which /j was credited to tiro B. Pullman, topping the next runner-up m 106 IMITATION OF LIFE the grab-bag booth, by fifty cents, was a pronounced success. The secretary and treasurer of the Ladies Auxiliary wrote a letter expressing appreciation of the splendid effort of Mrs. Pullman in behalf of First Church. The pastor called and made a bid for Jessie when she matured to Sunday-school age, although Boa’s lapsed membership in Second Church was the one she intended to resume. Erna Spenvick, whose gnnvingly important role in the social columns was never to cease to excite the wonderment, not to say risibilities, of her erstwhile classmates, sent her a rubber plant in a jardiniere. A Mrs. Alex Grenoble, president of the First Church Ladies Aid Society and wife of a retired Philadelphia banker whoso Atlantic City all-year home was a show place, called and left a card, which Delilah kept dusted and conspicuous on the hall table for months. This call, after worry and speculation, Bea returned, choos¬ ing a time when she figured Mrs. Grenoble would be out and leaving a visiting-card, especially engraved for the occa¬ sion, with the first butler in uniform she had ever seen in the flesh, Nothing more came of it at the time, but it all gave to Bea a sense of somehow being part of the citizenry of a community in which she had hitherto moved without, contact. Besides, where there were children! You owed it to your little daughter to screw up courage to return this visit of the wife of one of the wealthy and socially secure men of the town. You could never tell when such a connection would prove valuable. Later, years later, one faint repercussion of this incident was to prove just that. . • ■ The boon of the small circumstance asserted itself in.her canvassing manner, impelling her to scratch down into new territories which she had hitherto discarded as barren of pos¬ sibilities, Why not the drug store? The railway station? Or, for that matter, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia? To that firm she wrote a letter, sending along with it a sample box -of Delilah’s Hearts. Her proposition to place a : consignment was rejected, but it brought her a courteously considered refusal. IMITATION OF LIFE 107 B. Pullman, Esq. Dear Sir: Replying to your favor, with sample, of June 29th, beg to inform you that we are not at this time open to your proposition, but trust that future opportunity will enable us to handle your attractively presented product. Into the shoe-box which she used for a letter file she in¬ serted a new folder -Wmiamaker. If, in the end, as she reckoned the cost of carpentry and cartage,, for which she had never found courage to present a bill, the First Church fair had netted a personal loss of thir¬ teen dollars and eighty-five cents, it had also netted a strange profit. Even while confronted by one of the periodic and always frightening crises in her budget affairs, she hurried with her pearl-and-diamond engagement ring to one of its temporary lay-ups at the pawnshop on Atlantic Avenue, the tiny nucleus of a perfect resolve had already formed in her mind. A one-hundred-dollar capital and an advance payment of one month’s rent would make it possible to establish a small B. Pullman on the precious frontage of the Boardwalk. B. Pullman. Delilah’s Hot Waffles with Genuine Golden Glory Maple Syrup. Delilah’s Famous Egg-shell Drip Coffee. Delilah’s Maple Sugar Hearts. Mail a pound box, postage prepaid, to the folks back home. You do not know the real Boardwalk until you have eaten Delilah’s hot waffles in the ' famous B. Pullman. Such a concession, properly conceived, properly managed, might he a way out of the grilling routine of canvassing the hack doors of the hotels, boarding-houses, private residences, hospitals, and dmg stores of the city, The stench of the days became not so much that of the kitchens, unsavory approaches to rear entrances to shore- dinner restaurants, stale popcorn, sweating Negro bodies, as the odor of nostalgia which permeated her long tramping hours; nostalgia for that small kennel of home where her daughter was already racing on vigorous legs; where the sun lay cozily in the front rooms of forenoons and in the pleasant kitchen for the remainder of the day. Even in such a rickety 108 IMITATION OF LIFE sort of house, one who loved the security of walls could sit at the doing of secure indoor things. As a wife she had known briefly and sweetly of that security, Each morning now, that she left the house, was a matter of bracing herself for a plunge into cold alien streams that were perpetual shock to her, The hanker in her was lor the doing of little and tidy things. To stack spired cookies into a painted jar for the cupboard. To hem the dotted-swiss bathroom curtains, was nostalgia indeed, that set in no more than she had left the house with its domestic doings for which she yearned. It pressed on the idea of the B. Pullman like a hurting shoe. With Delilah presiding at the walHe-imn, and a black boy in a white duck coat combining waiting table with dish¬ washing, how easily conceivable that the miniature idea of a miniature dining-car might amuse the general public as it had the special public of the fair. Just see what had been accomplished in that little ten-by¬ twelve church boothl Twenty-five dollars a day, and ninety per cent of it profit. Excellent point to develop in the attempt to raise the two hundred dollars capital toward a Boardwalk B. Pullman. That attempt, had she foreseen it, was to cover a period of eight months, during which time, as Delilah ejaculated over trash-baskets, more figures had gone onto the backs of en¬ velopes than chicken feathers into a nigger’s sack. Eugene McVickers, president of the town’s second largest bank, whom she finally reached through the device of ap¬ pealing to the Pittsburgh head of the pickle-and-rdish firm, listened, at the point of her fanatically focused eyes, and advised her gently that her plan was not practical. How well, even rushing in to anticipate them, she knew the vulnerable points to her plan. No, Mr. McVickers was wrong, a larger capital than the two hundred would not be required. No, the waffles and maple syrup were not too wintry and seasonal for a summer resort. Hot waffles and maple syrup were a national dish. Delilah’s hots would know no season. Besides, even assuming such to be the ease, they were al¬ ready experimenting with a delicious frozen-custard summer combination with the waffles. Yes, of course the rents were IMITATION OP LIFE 109 prohibitive along the Boardwalk, hut not when you had a popular novelty. Just see how the souvenir concession, which trafficked in sea shells and burnt leather, and the salt-water- taffy stands were multiplying in numbers! Yes, to be sure, seasons were short, but wasn’t there an emphatic movement afoot to make Atlantic City a year-around resort. Like clockwork the local business minds tick-toclced to her project. No, no, you can’t swing it, sister, so spare your energy. I’ve seen too many of them come and go. No business man will risk even a couple of hundred on a winter concession for summer-resorters. What you want is some Eskimo to back you for a North Pole enterprise. The president of a large paint concern, who had known her mother as a girl in Burlington, made short work of their interview. “The place for a woman who has got to earn her living is behind the typewriter or the counter or the school- ma’am’s desk. I wouldn’t turn a finger to help put the best woman on earth into pants. What’s the world coming to, with women wielding hatchets like Carrie Nation and crying out loud for the vote?” Spenvick, the husband of Erna, had gone, most shockingly of all, to the point. She had never dreamed she could feel so smeared by mere words, every one of them usual ones , from her everyday vocabulary yet suddenly arranged in a,'^ juxtaposition that made them shock her. g|p Nothing so brutally frank had she ever heard put into wj phrase before. Spenvick, a little black-eyed, dandified Italian l with a turtle-like neck, had darted it at her, declining the plan in terms that made that fact seem secondary. “Only C customer for crazy idea Ink that is some fella who lak to sleep with you. Fine woman Ink you-fine-strong-gooda busts—high. Bemioss- no place. Jeez Christ He makka woman for love. ...” All her outraged senses of chastity rose like a row of good little girls, as if to form a ring-around-of-rosy against the sullied phrases. What a vile man! At what price must Erna have achieved her suite in the Boardwalk Hotel! What kind of a person dared he think she was? A nice, decent school¬ mate of his very own wife’s, she’d have him know, and a 110 IMITATION OF LIFE hundred times less fresh than Erna, who had been known as a “boy-kisser.” Just went to show, the flyer a girl was, the better the men liked her. Nerve. Men didn’t breathe the mention of such parts of human anatomy as busts in the pres¬ ence of a good woman, to say nothing of his allusion, in words of no evasion, to the act of sleep. Italians were that way, about love and sex and nature. Her mother had always said, “Never have anything to do with Eyetalian boys” (clear darling, her sole and apparently insur¬ mountable error of pronunciation). “They aren’t nice in their ideas about little girls.” Nice? They were loathsome! Why, there were certain aspects about love that were never men¬ tioned, because all decent-thinking people pretended they never existed. Imagine Mr. l’ullman ever letting on! It seemed to her that the incident must somehow be a reflection upon her own innate niceness. How dared lit; as¬ sume that she was the sort of a woman to whom such talk was not shameful. “You’re too nice a woman,” the head of a realty firm told her, “to be out after fish of this fry. Go get yourself a hus¬ band or a lover. Or at least a job behind somebody else’s desk.” For over a period of months these incidents actually proved ;i:a deterrent that kept her to the narrow routine of adhering I strictly to her accustomed rounds. Apparently, to the men if she approached, it had seemed either freakish or female of her to entertain the idea of a small business that would require even the small capital she sought, Try and make the rather curiously focusing eyes of the men believe that her major idea was to achieve the. security of life at home with her child, To the male mind, snooting about ns if among the garbage of her motives, there was something neither savory nor. welcome in the idea of a woman getting creative about this matter of business. Has been done, was being done, would be done, of course. There were enough of them already talking their women’s rights, and God knows the spectacled kind of females that wanted them were welcome to them. But a woman with a pair of busts and a curve to her—get a man, is our solution. Or if you won’t . do that, be a man, then, and stand on your own. IMITATION OF LIFE 111 After the incident of Spenvick, at least a percentage of them seemed to say just that with their manner or unminced words. It was almost Christmas, following an ebb tide in her order- book that was without precedent even for off season, that she awoke one chilled December morning as much stunned that the thought had not come to her sooner, as with the impact of the idea itself, and still in her nightgown began composing a letter to Mr. Hiram Prynne, Maple Sugar Mart, Brattle- boro, Vermont, submitting her proposition for opening a B. Pullman on the Atlantic City Boardwalk under the auspices and benign beneficence of that company. Two weeks later, a reply from H, Prynne, Esq,, stated that B. Pullman’s favor of such and such a date having been under advisement, Prynne & Company Maple Sugar Mart, given proper assurances, would advance the sum of two hundred and fifty dollars for enterprise described in letter of such and such a date, provided B, Pullman would agree to certain spe¬ cific considerations of Prynne & Company Sugar Mart, as follows. . . . On an Easter Sunday that poured sunshine and broke a ten-year Atlantic City record for crowds, a B. Pullman, lo¬ cated just two blocks below the Chalfontc Hotel and rather shyly placed in the fifteen feet of width between an astron¬ omer’s booth and an Irish-linen shop, opened its new door to reveal the enormous face of Delilah, under its sunrise of headdress, presiding at the altar of the waffle-iron. CHAPTER 22 Mbs. Vizitelli, who foh twenty yeans had conducted the grocery store at the comer of Arctic and Mississippi, used, to say of her second boy, Vincenzo, that out of her turbulent brood of five, lie was one who, by both nature and circumstance, had never given her an hour’s trouble from the day he was born. In a measure, Boa felt that same to be true of her first 112 IMITATION OF LIFE Pullman. Come what subsequently might, there was some¬ thing of the determined normalcy of Vincenzo set in the brood of difficult Vizitelli children, about this Boardwalk enterprise which opened its brightly-polished, crisply-cur¬ tained eyes to the perfect beatitude of that thronged Easter morning. , ■ , , If an almost too propitious beginning was destined tor a sharp aftermath of decline, the average performance of this first-born was to continue to strike pride in its owner, similar to Mrs. Vizitelli’s in her second-born. No measles, no paroxysms of naughtiness, no retarded growth, no rickets or bad reports of juvenile delinquencies. Links in the chain, of which the Boardwalk B. Pullman was to be the first, were some of them to be strong, some of them weaker, but virtually from the start this pioneer B. Pullman showed a sustained and seldom faltering margin of profit. i “It’s mah fust baby-chile,” Delilah was wont to declare, in the sequence of years that took her to the inaugural pio- cedure of launching new B. Pullmans in so many of the sizable cities and resorts of the country. “Ah’ ain't a mother livin’, dat doan jes’ nachally dote on her fust-born. You kin have all your Michigan Boulevard, Fifth Avenue, and Palm Beach Pullmans, but I’ll take mah fust little Boardwalk waffle baby ovah and above even de new one dats goin into de skyscrapin’ building that’s givin dis heah New York crick in de neck.” But despite, or perhaps because of, a beginning so propi¬ tious, immediate and attendant complications piled fast and high. With all the good intentions in the world, it remained im¬ possible for Delilah to solve the corporeal problem of being two places simultaneously. Even on the anti-climactic Monday following Easter Sun¬ day, the Pullman tossed its waffles practically without inter¬ ruption from morning until late midnight. It meant the pres¬ ence of two climbing children and a wheel-chair in the small kitchen and back porch of the B. Pullman, where dishwashing and coffee-percolating were taking place, or the presence of Bea in the house on Arctic Avenue, in frenzied relief IMITATION OF LIFE 113 spurts between her canvassing rounds and presence at the Boardwalk scene of Delilah’s activities. P or the first: day or two it was well and good enough that two highly excited children and the old gentleman be carted along m a general morning exodus to the B. Pullman, After all there was the little rim of back porch, which, while it: did not overlook the sea and was cluttered with the sound of carrousel music and the back-door smells of neighboring con- cessions nevertheless was drenched in strong S alt-lnden sun¬ light and strongly inclosed against the truant impulses of two small girls. But even on the first day, the nervous, over¬ wrought cries of the children had percolated into the diner causing Deli ahs eyes above the waffle-iron to roll in anxiety’ while the old gentleman found the beach noisy and bewilder¬ ing, and the constant scraps of adjoining music irritating. Any way you looked at it, the arrangement at best could only be a temporary one. What happened eventually was a shift system between Bea and Delilah in the house on Arctic Avenue, aided and abetted by the after-school services of the small sister of the helper at the B. Pullman, who for fifty cents a week tended two small girls and the chair. lhat tended to alleviate, but did not solve, the rather curious dilemma already presented by the child Peola in-her propinquity to the child Jessie. Sooner or later, Bea kept telling herself, this situation was going to develop itself into a concrete problem. But why anticipate? ’ Delilah did. Some day dat chile of youm is gonna wake up an’ find my Peola black, Don what?” ' Jf® crossing (hat bridge until we come to it.” (j ’ Tain ’ 1 our bridge to cross, honey. It’s youru.” leoplo are broader-minded about such things than they used to-be.” "Yns’m, Broad-minded as mail thumb nail.” “I don’t believe in making an issue of it." ^‘Neither did de good Lawd when he made us black and while, an’ look what’s been issuin’ ever since. Do glory in bein black, honey, is dat 1 de Lawd willed it so. Mali man 114 IMITATION OF LIFE grieved his heart out wantin’ to pass. Dar ain I no passin. When de time conies for mall Peola to stay on her Mack side of de world and yourn on her white side, wo won’t have to decide it, Miss Boa. Some day, jes’ a little word lak nigger’ll creep in, an' everything will bo all right except mwah de same as befoh. Won’t be your fault, won’t be Jessies, wont: be oum. Maybe it’ll be de Lawd’s, but only for bein’ so holy an’ good hisself, ho couldn’t figure out de meanness and misery was goto’ to come from makin’ dis a two-tone world. Glory be to Gawd, Is glad I’s one of his black chillmi, ’cause, sho as heaven, his heart will bleed fust wid pity an’ wid mercy for his low-down ones. , . “Delilah, Northern Negroes don’t feel that way any more. . . .” “Northern niggersl Scratch one of dose heah North nig¬ gers an’ dey’ll bleed Alabamy blood. It may he mixed up wid plenty of white blood, lak mah man was, but thin out chicken gravy wid water an’ it remains chicken gravy, only not so good. Every day of mah life I’s gonna rear mah young un to know de glory of bein’ bom one of de Lawd’s low- down ones. I seen her pap suffer tryin' to pass. Lord’ll gimme strength for sparin’ his chile dat sufferin’ an’ pain. De Lawd never made no bones about makin’ me . . . he certainly kincla done lost his nerve makin Peola and her pap. Ain’t dat de way, though? All dose pale Northern niggers spendin’ their las’ pennies to git Gawd’s kink out of dat hair, and all de white ladies spendin' dars to git Gawd’s kink into thars. I’s seen too much white-nigger heartache in mah time. I wants mah chile full of nigger-love and lovjn’-to-be-niggcr." Certainly in the narrow, tan little girl of level, soot-colored eyes and straight-banged, soot-colored hair, resided none of her maternal parent’s rambunctious capacity for devotion, one way or another. You needed to earn your way into her carefully dispensed graces, and at the slightest intrusion of Jessie into the world of her rights, to watch, not without apprehension, for the danger signals of the flanges of her small straight nose beginning to quiver and turn faintly green, ; “ ’Clare, if" it wasn’t for dat chile’s talcin' so after her pap, I d swear she’d done been changed in de cradle on me. Dar # , IMITATION OF LIFE 115 don’t seem to be no pickaninny in dat young un. Pier’s a little squaw.” “Are you sure, Delilah, there wasn’t some Indian blood in your husband?” “G’wan, honey. Not but what he wasn’t Indian-giver- biggest you ever seen for givin’ an’ talcin’ back again, but dar was mostly nigger in mah nigger, no matter how high-toned he tried to be ovah the black wife he took hisself. Me that done the slavin’ tor him ought to know.” * She’s so~why, almost dignified, Delilah, in a strange Indi- an manner.” Indians. Dar wasn’t nothin’ any more Indian than a cigar-store Indian anywhars near fifty miles whar her pap was born of two Virginie darkies, which ain’t saym dar mayn t have been plenty of white blood in him, down dar whar white blood in nigger veins comes cheaper’n moonshine whisky.” “But your Peola is so exceptionally light, Delilah.” Accident, honey. And style. Her pap jes’ had style mixed in, I guess, wid a teaspoonful of white blood back some- whores, an’ it got him through life an’ three wives widout ever turnin’ them lily-pink palms of his. Style, but not a half-moon to his finger nails, and doan’ you forgit it. Give a nigger style an’ his blood stream is filled wid gold nuggets. Peola s got style, an you jes’ wait and see if her mammy aiiit gonna work her hands to de bone for her and lak it, jes lak some man is gonna do after dose hands of mine have gone to join de Almighty who dey loves.” Peola darling, why aren't you a little sweeter to Jessie? I Just see how she wants to love you and you won’t have any- : tiling to clo with her,” “Black chile, go over dar as fast as dem laigs will walk j you, and make up wid dat yaller-haired angel-chile.” "Don’t force her, Delilah. They play nicely together, It’s f only that Peola seems almost resentful of Jessie.” M “Shall I tell you what’s eatin’ out her little heart? Sure as , f her pap’s in de arms of a forgivin’ Lawd, It’s a curse on her already, lak it: was on him. Mah baby hates to be black. Ain’t that terrible, Miss Bea-ain’t that heart-breakin? , Shamed to be what de Lawd made her. Oh, mah baby-chile, 116 IMITATION OF LIFE come heah lo yoh mammy, an let her kiss some of dc ache out of dat sweetheart face. Dar ain’t nothin’ hut glory in bein’ black, baby mine, it you can look at it: as bein tie will of de Lawd.” "Delilah, as if that child realizes!” "She do, Miss Honey-Bea. Her little heart’s scarred wid it, lak her paw’s before her. De Lawd help her an’ her mammy help her! An’ dats what 1m put on dis eailh for to do. Help mah baby find de will of de Lawd and glory in bein’ what she is. Go make a fuss over dat white chile dis minute, if you don’t want me to spank your little bottom- round.” To Bea there was something that seemed actually to hurt her physically around the heart, to behold the cagei recep¬ tivity with which her blond Jessie welcomed the slightest show of advance from Peola, And more than that, a twinge of jealousy. “Mother had better take lessons from Peola, darling. My love comes too cheap.” Repeatedly she found herself realizing her mistake in mauling and kissing at the small face of her daughtei, which i , was to her so flower-like, The child almost dodged these '!_ fierce caresses, or cried out under a kiss that ground too deeply against the tender flesh, or wriggled out of an em¬ brace that confined too closely. But, somehow, it remained quite beyond her not to snatch the yellow loveliness of this youngster greedily to her during the all too brief periods she spent with her at home during her waking hours. “Mother loves you so, Jessie, She sees you so seldom. She knows she is rough, but it is because she loves you so,” The old gentleman, who no longer spoke, or even at- y tempted it, had invented a game which at first had repelled even the children, but upon his pantomime insistence had come to be a favorite. Across the dead wood of his lower limbs a small plank afforded seesaw. This the little girls had learned to use at a lickety-split pace, their shouts rising with the old gentleman’s apparent zest for the play. Then usually it petered out into a curious and stilly game IMITATION OF LIFE 117 carried on between Peola and Mr. Ghipley, which Delilah declared gave her the “shimmy-shivers.” These two, across the chasm of years and color, could go into the trance, without the trembling of a lash, of staring at one another for periods that gathered silence and usually ended by the small and overstrained little Jessie, as she viewed the contest from the side lines, bursting into tears. Delilah was intuitive about these endurance tests, darting into the room if the sound of silence irked her. “It’s deni two holding deir breath ag’in wid deir eyes! Peola, stop pasting your look onto de ole gemmeman’s dat way. Taint nice. What does mah chair-baby mean by letting his ole eyes get reviled on mah young un’s datavvay? Stop it, both of you, or ’Lilah’U paste dem eyes bang up against one another for keeps,” “I declare, Miss Honey-Bea, it’s like mah young un was tryin' to read in dc ole gemmeman’s eyes de reason for why de Lawd sent some into de world wid light and some wicl dark skin, seem’ He wanted ’em to be born equal.” “Delilah, you’re fanatical on that subject.” “Maybe 1 is grammatical on dat subject, but you see, honey, I knowed her daddy.” CHAPTER 23 The beginnings op the idea fou the Philadelphia B. Pullman grew out of the waning of the At¬ lantic City season, in those days before the idea of its winter- resort possibilities seemed fully to have dawned upon the spangled brain of this playland by the sea. With the autumnal thinning of the crowds, the passing of the excursion months, the boarding up of most of the gaudy faces of the Boardwalk plcasance, and with tire hibernating activities of the majority of the major hostelries, the death rattle to the summer season was something a little ominous in its finality. During the lifetime of Mr. Pullman the closing of the Pier for the winter months had made little impression into routine, US IMITATION OF LIFE because the duties of the staff were transferred to offices which the company kept operating inside the Tier building. But now, come November, cold, salt-bitten winds whirled under the thin wooden floors of the concession structures, ballooning Delilah’s wide skirts as she stood at the waffle- iron and rattling the little edifice on its high stilts, until the dishes teetered on their shelves and the wooden edifice rocked like a frail bark at sea. It was when the need for boarding up the bright dining- car windows and unhinging the striped awning became im¬ minent, that the picture of a smartly equipped little B, Pull¬ man in or near the busy, snateh-a-bite atmosphere of a great city’s railway station began to etch itself sharply against her ■ brain, To be sure, the seasonal slump would release Delilah to the growing requirements of the kitchen in the house on Arctic Avenue, now that the demand for Hearts quite sud¬ denly seemed to attain a new high level and hold it. But as Bea wrote oriec more to Hiram Frynnc of Sugar Mart, this time secure in the precedent of having successfully met the demands of the previous obligation: ... my little project has proved itself. Are you dis¬ posed now to advance me a loan double yours of last year, terms identical, based on the following? . . . judging from the public’s warm response to my Atlantic City enterprise, 1 am now of a mind to attempt to pro¬ cure a lease on a desirable Philadelphia location, prefer¬ ably near the Broad Street Station, or adjacent to the heart of the shopping district— A trip to Philadelphia, taken nervously while she awaited reply to this letter, revealed, in the day’s shopping among realty offices, that twenty feet of frontage in proper propin¬ quity to Wanarnaker’s, or the Broad Street Station, was a matter of larger monthly rental than she had counted on for tire year. But stubbornly, the newly generated enthusiasm for the scheme kept raging like wildfire up and down her brain. Set into one of these flanks of gray stone that lined Market IMITATION OF LIFE 119 or Chestnut Street, the warm bright look of a B. Pullman, glowing into the drab fog of a typical downtown winter day, was something to bring, in the way of inexpensive comfort: and cheer, to all this gray hurrying humanity, with its gray face tucked into collars and its shoulders hunched against chill. On one hand, the restaurants with palms in the windows and-ornamental balconies with orchestras, and on the other the bedlams of the quick-lunch room, met the creature de¬ mands of all the anonymous figures, but in an impersonal way that had little in common with the certain kind of achieve¬ ment she had in mind for her new B. Pullman. To some extent, the Boardwalk diner had smacked of it. Patrons had told her so. You relaxed in the B. Pullman. None of that lettuce-leaf, muffin-and-too-trimmed-lamb-chop, reduced-gentlewomen-from-Virginia, tearoom feeling to it. Delilah, starched, fluted, immaculate, at her iron, was some¬ thing to set the juices of anticipation running, as the soft warm smells rose off her griddle. The dishes, the thin china blue-and-whito ones from the house on Arctic Avenue, had given off no clatter. Toward evening, a candle with a bow around its neck like a kitten’s, burned on each table. This last to Delilah’s ill-concealed scorn. “Caindles! What for caindles, when you got de electricity going anyway. Caindles! We stuck ’em in bottles on soap¬ boxes where I was raised. My ole one-eyed granny would have give her right eye to have electric light for to do her ironin’ an’ eat by. An’ dat’s jes’ what she had to do, give her right eye dat went blind from tryin’ to work by caindles. Caindles! I ’dare, ’tain’t no wonder de Lawd gits scared and shimmies with earthquake when He looks clown and sees some of the nonsense goto’ on down on dis heah earth,” . But the candles proved themselves to he part of the amber coziness at dusk, combined with the amber smells of waffles off the iron going faintly and just rightly soggy under inun¬ dation of melting butter and Vermont maple syrup. You could do something mellow as that right into the hard metallic bang of these bat-colored city streets and these hat- colored city people, You could soften a moment, warm a chilled hour. 12 () IMITATION OF LIFE For a little pocket change, a dolicato-lipped cup from which to drink good coffee; soft light, amber atmosphere of indoor security, which, however fleeting, was respite from theduress of that strife and stone and s eel out here; th something she yearned to create was akin to the kennel warmth and brightness she so passionately wanted to pour around herself and little family in the house on Arctic Ave¬ nue, Here was opportunity for the eqmva cut of what life had started out to be with Mr. Pullman. Warm, amber mcbm security. Candle-light flickering on cozy inclosing walls. Cu¬ linary smells of indoor women, to whom homely climes weie homey. She would shirr yellow curtains at the wmdow« o this B. Pullman. Daily papers and a few of the bctla-gade magazines mounted on holders the way they arrange tkm in clubs. Menus the shape of dining-car MIk -fmt v h Delilah having her laugh on the cover. A dish of De • s Hearts to be passed gratis with the coflee. Some day, perhaps, there would be a way to work out a scheme or an open lue- place . . . now that would be a pretty monkey wrench into tire dining-car idea, wouldn’t it! But no use adhering too rigidly to that. Once let the public got the general feel ol a B Pullman-all there was to it. Lonely young fellows away from home might feel impelled to forgather where there was I inexpensive cheer. ... . . n ... I I There were troops of boys marching through cold city streets these days, on their strange embarkations for war. Something as remote and outside the pale of interest as ol understanding, as a war was happening. For months, like a monster from afar, the situation had been breathing, as it were, on the neck of American business, creating an unrest and an unsureness all along her territory. And now the American glove, a gauntlet of mail and steel, had been flung into the fracas, Something that had hitherto belonged fo the pages of textbooks and school orations was going on all around. Boys with packs on their backs were marching. The calamity of this half-understood spectacle seemed less real than the not unecstatic hysteria of departure. Herself only negligibly older than the majority of these hoys, younger than some, she had come unconsciously into an air of mater- nalism with them. As college students, week-end vacationists, 121 IMITATION OF LIFE playboys, they had frequently stormed the Boardwalk B. Pullman until it teetered on its stilts, She knew and liked their outrageousness, so exuberant and yet so easily held in check. Once, to Delilah’s immense remonstrance and good humor, they had formed a hand-basket and pranced her, in violent pantomime against the outrage, up and down a bit of Boardwalk. “Good old Delilah! Hurrah for Delilah! Hip, hip, hurray! Good old Delilah!” These same nice boys were marching now, Logical to as¬ sume that the war-bound youngsters who were beginning to be so terribly in evidence around city streets and stations would likewise assail the toothsome and inexpensive products of Delilah’s magic irons, k That was precisely what did happen, although not irnme-f dialely in Philadelphia, because it was five years before the: brightly caparisoned and by then standardized dining-cart was to flash its polished brass railing along that section of Broad Street she had so tirelessly explored pending the reply to her letter from the Sugar Mart, Brattleboro, When that letter did come, it was curiously not what she wanted, non-committal up to a point, and yet in no way to be regarded as an out-and-out refusal. Sugar Mart regarded Philadelphia as too conservative to respond readily to the small novelty, but suggested the larger field of New York, where Hiram Prynne had a brother-in-law, an executive in a midtown realty firm. “In the event that through the offices of Mr. Field you find premises there which you consider suitable to your purpose, as outlined in your recent favor, our firm will then take up the suggestions contained therein,” New York! The thought flooded her with a certain dismay. If Philadelphia offered almost insurmountable rent difficul¬ ties, what was to he hoped for in the most notoriously expen¬ sive and overcrowded city in the world. She had often heard her father and Mr. Pullman discuss how in some of the New York restaurants you paid extra for a portion of the piekle-and-relish firm’s famous condiments, which in other cities throughout the country were served gratis with the meal. “Those fellows down there can got away with anything. New Yorkers love to be bilked.” 122 IMITATION OF LIFE Well perhaps by that very token her venture might he ventured there. You paid more-you charged more-you earned more. But there again, that need in itself threatened to defeat the impulse so strangely growing behind all this. Business was business, of course, but there was something about the idea of the fragrant, amber-colored interior, lin'd faces getting ironed out as they relaxed to well-being which she had provided for them at fair prices, that had the same quality ol satisfaction to it she hud found in lining tin in st of the house on Arctic Avenue to meet the crealure-sat is! ac¬ tion of the man who for so brief a while had cornu home to it at night. , People sank gratefully into a B. Pullman because ol the genius'of a certain quality that had got itself horn into d. On week-end days they had sat too long over their refresh¬ ment, while little pools of standees waited. Young fellows, for whom many of Atlantic City’s far dillerent resorts were primarily planned, found pause here. Sons brought mothers. Mothers brought sons. Post: cards addressed Delilah, At¬ lantic City, from vacationists, mostly young ones, who re¬ membered, wore already quite an array, in a wire rack in Delilah’s room. "Hello, Delilah, from the Akron Boys who won’t ever forget Delilah’s Bed Hols!" "Dear Delilah, wish ffwe had some of your Hearts and Hots down here in Chalta- inooga. I’m the little red-haired girl you called Honey an Mlasses.” “Dear Aunt Delilah, I voted to hold the Wood¬ man’s convention at Atlantic City again next year, just so we can sit in B, Pullman and gather round the finest hot waffles I ever seen flapped on land or sea. George Ryan of Bangor, Maine.” “Best regards to my seat in the little B. Pullman. P.S. Remember the little cock-eyed fellow who ate you out of five orders of waffles!” The major need was to succeed in duplicating the genius of that certain quality which had got itself horn into the first B. Pullman: Delilah’s savory coffee, Delilah’s hot waffles, Delilah’s Hearts, Delilah’s smile, Golden Maple Syrup, can¬ dle-light at dusk, thin china dishes, odors, the little pamper¬ ing something that came so readily from Delilah. Prices within almost any tired shopper’s range. I Some people have talent for writing poetry or building IMITATION OF LIFE 123 towers or singing arias. Mine must be to surround people for a few moments out of a tired day, with a little unsubtle but cozy happiness of body and perhaps of mind. Well, why not? We can’t all build empires and sonnets. How fortunate to have discovered talent for anything at all, even if for nothing more than the ability to provide people with a few moments of creature enjoyment. The B. Pullman did that. A feat not so simple as it seemed, witness the high mortality among Boardwalk concessions which, for one rea¬ son or another, were not able to keep head above water. It was wonderful, having found a talent. Yes, it was that! Why, a woman patron from Oak Park, Chicago, had taken the trouble to come right out into the kitchen to proclaim it. “My dear, this little place is a real stroke of geniusl Such atmosphere! That adorable mammyl Such coffee! My dear, you’ve got something here, Wish there were something like it out in my town.” Philadelphia, yes, Even Chicago, remote as it seemed. But New York! That was u different and a terrifying matter. A day spent there as a child, with her mother, on one of those dollar-round-trip excursions from Philadelphia, re¬ mained stuck in the memory. Her fingers had been glued to¬ gether must: of the time, from clinging so to the tight clutch of her mother’s hand as they darted across streets, between street cars, and beneath the hooves of horses. ■ Such irrelevant bits of recollection of that trip clungl The din as they stepped off the ferry. New kid gloves at Lord & Taylor’s fine emporium. A ride on the elevated rail¬ road, and a visit to the strange wax morgue of Madame Tus- saud. Curb venders selling polly seed to dirty-faced street children who gobbled them, A horse-car ride to the humble room of a wliite-lmired trained nurse who kept imparting to Bea the strange information that she had helped bring her mother into the world. A trip across Brooklyn Bridge to Visit a friend of her mother’s who dwelt in a row of identical houses, as in their own Philadelphia, except that, instead of the two-story boxes that lined their street were lean, narrow, brown-stone buildings with hallways that smellecl of cold boiled potatoes. The furniture had been slippery horsehaii, and poised on it, she had been given a pretty pink pastry, the IMITATION OF LIFE 124 inside of which proved to be eocoanut, which she loathed, lTO d which Mother with the tail of her eye had forced her to eat, Then brown button shoes, with tassels, at Stewarts. Some balbriggan socks, at a counter where the stools whirled, for Father. Finally, while waiting for the ferry to carry them tlm first homeward lap of the trip, fried-egg sandwiches and a little pyramid of ice-cream in a thick-lipped dish, her mother, already sickening of headache from the violent day, sipping hot water from a glass. New York. To even so much as put foot into that cold swirling maelstrom would strike chill to her courage. If the business men of a community tire size of Atlantic City bad kept turned consistently cold shoulder to her business enter¬ prise, what could Ire hoped of the steeknd-iron anatomy that was New York. New Yorkers, as they poured into the beach resort, well- dressed, easy-spending holiday crowds, seemed cocksure, shellacked with sophistication, free enough with money, but fastidious in demands. You could spot them. The women almost invariably with something in the way of a skirt or a feather which you were . seeing for the first time; the men shaved until that bluish cast came out along the jowl, more curt in their demands and paying a bit more generously and ostentatiously for services received. It was surprising, though, how superficial the badge. Take them, for instance, as they eaine into the B. Pullman. They all boiled down into “general public.” Underneath the sldn, pathetically close to the .sophisticated surface of a blue shave or a rouged cheek they were merely Albuquerque, Altoona, Atchison, Arlington, Amityville, or Astoria. New York itself might prove to he like that. Delilah was doubtless right. “Scratch any one of 'em all tie way from New York to Alabam’ an’ watch ’em bleed God’s red.” CHAPTER 24 “If any one,” Bea used to say after a habit of looking back over years that kept their quality of remaining perpetually amazing to her—“if any one had told me that at twenty-six I would be running two businesses and carrying my syrup and candy lines on the side, I would sim¬ ply have said they were crazy.” She had an oracular way of stating this, as if no one had ever said this sort of thing before, It clouded up her eyes with a fierce sort of gray mud. It flashed across a face which had matured too young and which now looked actually younger than it had five years previous, A face upon which had set¬ tled the subtle mask, woven of the stuff of incipient self- confidence. Not that the second B. Pullman had made anything re¬ sembling the propitious start of its Atlantic City predecessor. Her initial ideal of a sliver of precious space within the corridors of the new Grand Central Station itself; corridors with sleek marble sides and tiled runways that were kept pol¬ ished by the commercially precious tread of hundreds of thousands of daily feet-had almost immediately to be aban¬ doned. Every inch bordering the priceless thunder of those pass¬ ing feet was worth its width in gold. There was one tiny frontage, its cement scarcely dry, that seemed almost diaboli¬ cally designed to meet the requirements of a B. Pullman. Long, narrow, shaped like a car, it stood waiting to be caparisoned. Twenty-eight hundred a year. Thereupon ceas¬ ing to be a possibility, it became a defeat, that made addi¬ tionally bitter her ultimate compromise on premises across the street; premises which were to prove so disastrously on the wrong side of the street. She was long to remain a little mystical about the decision which prompted her to sign lease on that twenty-foot front¬ age of East Forty-second Street space. Some inner driving 125 128 IMITATION OF LIFE force the always iffliM that was strwfier even than l« interior and the shabby old building which contained r, had determined her. Every judgment sltrank fruni® Even with paint and caparisons, there was nail) 111. to hope from those moldy old walls, although much could bo done to dissipate their gloom. At any rate, once the die was cast and her pen had made its trance-like motions in placing her signature to ease t ho strangest kind of buoyancy rode high. Aided and by what turned out to be the professional optimism >1 holds, the brother-in-law of Hiram Prymie, the new ventuie man¬ aged to get itself conceived in a whirlwind ot acreleuilcd """my not! The Sugar Mart had confidence in their man, Fields. To return to Atlantic City without, having closed with him on some plan or other would be to admit detent. Hue was backing. Here were premises, if not by any means ideal, at least they lurked across the street from the ideal. A miss, alas, that was to be as good as a mile. „ To begin with, even regardless of the wrongness ol its side of street, no more the lease was signed than the_sht o space wedged into the shadow of the now Crand (.mitral railway station began to develop undroamod-ol, and uu* dreaded disadvantages. No sooner was the small gas stove behind its partition set going, than ventilation in the little one-window aisle ol space became such a pressing problem that, two days after farmr. opening, the promises were obliged to undergo installation of an air-cooling system that not only dosed the newly opened doors for three days, but swept away, at one stroke, a tiny reserve budget of eighty-three dollars. That initial calamity and the all-ton quick realization that manifold, if not on the surface readily apparent, were the reasons for what had appeared surprisingly low rental. It was fair to assume that even Fields, whose high-power I sense of salesman technique obliterated his sense of brother- F in-law-ship to Prymie of Bruttlcboro, was unaware of the strange circumstance of a subway rattle, which, due to the rushing of trains underneath the building, swept the little IMITATION OF LIFE 127 interior every few seconds with a chill of rattling dishes and jittering, of everything movable, that was finally subdued, but never conquered, by application of heavy felt to all flat surfaces. It became, too, quite immediately apparent that not only was the handicap of that particular side of the street even greater than had been anticipated, but, by virtue of a small platform of safety erected at the street-crossing, the actual week the B. Pullman took possession of its new quarters, at least two-thirds of the pedestrians hitherto calculated to pass the B. Pullman were suddenly enabled, just twenty yards before reaching it, to make a comfortable short cut to the opposite side of the street. All of which meant that, literally facing the grand facade of one of the busiest junctions in the world, the small B. Pullman, tucked into an ancient brick edifice in a city where old buildings, like old people, are quickly scrapped for new faces and new facades, began, from the very day of its in¬ ception, its fight against anonymity. So near and yet so far, she was to think in moans to her¬ self as she stood watching the tide slip her by, while empty moments and hours in the busiest heart of die busiest city in the world ticked themselves cruelly and expensively away. Even though so large a proportion of the renting op¬ timism had been Fields’, it had all seemed quite different to her as well, during the period of the decision regarding that lease. The scene past the door had been one of such thunder¬ ing activity. The plan of the long, narrow little premises had seemed to lend themselves to requirements. After all, even with the disadvantages of the wrong side of street, frontage at its worst, on so terrific an artery as this, was not to be winked at. Wiiy, if any one had told her, a twelvemonth before, that she would even be daring to consider any sort of New York frontage! And now. For the first four weeks of the Forty-second Street B. Pullman the backs of envelopes, covered over with inexorable subtractions and additions, showed the kind of deficit that struck almost an insanity of terror into her already appalled and regretting heart. U8 IMITATION OF LIFE t this continued, she could actually wipe herself out in “"why'had she dared it? How had she dared it? To think that onlv a few short weeks ago she had Ireeil m the un- “ iv“,l position to let well enough alone, yet, spurred by Tit of forcing her small success to succeed mom grandly, had not quite dared. Tucked away in that Atlantic City house on Arctic Aw, nue were, at the moment, responsibilities which, from the very beginning, should have dictated against, rather than in behalf of, this hazardous and by now almost calamitous step. What mad housing impulse, hers! lo house husel and hers in a cottage in Ventnor. To house the impersonal har¬ assed faces that would not even glance her way, in he golden glow of a Pullman of her providing, lo house he future of her child in a sort of security to be had at the purchase price of this harried and harassed pressing forwiud. The well enough to have let alone was buck there m that house on Arctic Avenue. False as that security might seem, at least there was freedom from this kind of harassment, with which so little in her make-up seemed adequate to cope. To some, all this might seem part and joy of the battle. But to one who so passionately longed for the sweet if small fruits of security, the waves of conflict beat cold and high and bone-breaking. The pleasant little sounds of little success, like a cheeping of a new bom chicken from its egg, of the Boardwalk B. Pullman had been one thing. This matter of cheeping away through the incredible din and clatter of this vast city, another. , How-how had she ever dared? As a matter of fact, she had not. The idea, top heavy, had been superimposed upon her originally modest one of a small Philadelphia adjunct to be operated as complement to the closed season of the Boardwalk. Actually, come to analyze it, the entire folly, the whole madness, had had its beginnings in little more than the idea of a warm and appetizing smell, a glow of amber cheer against the stone flank of a city, a bit of warmth for those IMITATION OF LIFE 129 young troops marching toward a war about which she knew so little and comprehended less. To be sure, mixed up in the small immediate reality were die needs and dreams for a growing child. On every hand, now, girls were going to college. Bea, it so happened, had. never personally known one who did, but hers should. To one of the large high-sounding girls’ colleges or to finishing- school in Switzerland, and there would be pennants of Smith or Vassar on her walls, and crossed tennis racquets and shelves of hooks and all the happy paraphernalia of happy girlhood. A home to which she could be proud to bring her friends. Bea had never been able to feel exactly proud of the house on Arctic. A bungalow at Ventnor, with the sea less than a block away and those handsome-shaped hedges en¬ closing Jessie’s lawn and a side yard swing under a striped awning . . . and now . . , For three weeks following the departure of Delilah, who had journeyed to New York to show her fluted sunrise of a face over the waffle-iron the opening day of the New York B. Pullman, leaving, to carry on in her place, a large hand¬ some Negress, trained in the Arctic Avenue kitchfen, a thor¬ oughly appalled young woman returned evenings to lodgings in a Lexington Avenue brownstone front, there to •contem¬ plate, half the night through, the brown wall paper of her hull bedroom, as if to wrench from its chromatic pattern oracular way out. Back in Atlantic City, a little household was day by day, hour by hour, eating its way into the slender funds deposited into the homy palms of Delilah. Any day now might come the dreaded demand for more. Even with Delilah’s magic in stretching the dollar beyond its conceivable ductility, her continued silence regarding Bea’s questionings about funds was almost more worrisome than would have been the dreaded announcement of depleted exchequer. Daily her postal cards, previously addressed by Bea, ar¬ rived, announcing in chirography fearful and wonderful the well-being of the little group on Arctic Avenue, But there were mouths: to he fed there, the kind of nourishment that could bear no retrenchment; an old gentleman whose fastidi¬ ousness Delilah would be the last to deny; rent; osteopathy ]30 IMITATION OF LIFE S3 S3 »' ca " ,te wM h d,,ri ” g w " tile tempoitivy -M. rf Miliih seeming to walk the seas of their dilemma, what next. “Tit miss of not more tta two hundred imd fifty yads, 0 ( that site felt so sore, the B. Ml", « i <)*; c eetly aside to let its «KfflS P® >' ft was htemlly dying fa b new tracks. To close it and nml A don. tunes a day ”d night the impulse swept over her Ihere seemed so 1. tie C. A child had been stiD-bom. To somehow barge her % behind the granite which inclosed New t«k. m« V cowers for the additional loan which she dart.d not ask of Sugar Mart, would make it possMs for her to get tenancy m that narrow mocking diver of space across to street. Ol local hanking contacts she had not one, a corner branch ol a Corn Exchange refusing her a chcckmg account buesrnse of the inadequacy of her initial deposit. But one cold November evening and be it admitted to her own actual self-embarrass- menUrt the futility of her act .ho walke throe or four times around the block containing the vast ochlico of the Madison Avenue residence of J. P. Morgan. By the lifting of a huger, he could! No, unless you were as insane as she suspected m i prowling around this residence to be, you did not go up and ring a doorbell and ask a butler to be admitted to a man richer than kings, in order to accost him for a loan of what was to him loss than pin money and to her ransom enough to buy her a universe. No, you didn’t do that. It was as 0 she was in some sort of tranced race, sweat running, the muscles of her legs pulling, and yet, with all the hallucination of running, actually she was not making a m The heart strained, the eyeballs bulged. Two hundred and fifty yards, There were veins in her neck she could fed rise) and throb. Hot prickles flashed over her body. Each tiiuo she swallowed, a contraction of fear seemed to sink into the strange vacuum of her body. . . . All day the wale batter, taking on the sickly odor of IMITATION OF LIFE 131 stagnation, stood cloying in its bowl, while the face of the imitation Delilah nodded over its lack of task, and the black boy in the white Pullman-porter coat dozed among the un- aceumulating dishes and, scenting disaster, ran his finger up and down the Help Wanted columns. Mamina—Mr. Pullman-why did you leave me¬ lt was on the thirty-first day, when the day’s business had dropped to the new low of exactly one dollar and twenty cents, that a man named J. S. Squibb, whom Bea had never seen before, and was never to see again, walked into the B. Pullman and, in the name of a corporation that was nego¬ tiating to purchase the building that contained her premises in order to make way for the invasion of a skyscraper, offered her a three-thousand-dolkr cash bonus for her lease. CHAPTER 25 Since the armistice, rent had gone soaring to unheard-of heights. It was something, indeed it was a great deal, to be in a position to sign a lease on Central Park West near One Hun¬ dred and Third Street for the six rooms and two'baths, at one-third more than the sum for which they could have been procured during the early days of the war. They were such infinitely superior rooms to the four stuffy little ones on West One Hundred and Thirteenth Street and Amsterdam Avenue which she had rented when the move from the house on Arctic Avenue had finally been decided upon. So superior in fact, that there was no reality at all about the whole business of this move, just as there was none too much reality about the quick sequence of the years. Two of the rooms, the square living-room with its bright- yellow hardwood floors and white woodwork, and the old gentleman’s bedroom, actually overlooked Central Park, From only the, second floor of a ten-story apartment building, it is true, but just the same, there, spread before the gaze, was the vista of reservoir, equestrian paths, driveways, traffic- polished roadways, and at dusk, pop-pop-pop, as the children 132 IMITATION OF LIFE lovecl shrilly to shout with their palms spread against the window panes, out came the lights, festooning the scene as you might festoon diamonds across Delilah's black and shin¬ ing bosom, The remainder of the rooms, Sea’s and Jessie’s, the dining¬ room, kitchen, and offshoot of a tiny chamber occupied by Delilah and Peola, looked down onto the tops of delivery wagons, parked automobiles and the light pedestrian traffic of One Hundred and Third Street. Previous to this move there had been weeks of literal house-hunting. That ultimate house, with its upstairs and downstairs and surrounding green, standing foursquare, was still passionately the dream and still stubbornly the elusive. But in New York City, where apartment-dwelling was gen¬ erally the rule, the private house was fraught with compli¬ cations. Present scheme of life and routine and requirements of practicable living made the small suburban home out of question. Scraps of mornings and evenings, fleeting moments in the heart of the household, were too precious and too 1 transitory to be spent on trains. Meanwhile, the cottage in ? Ventnor, the castle in Spain, the house with a garden, re¬ mained the compromise of six square rooms set into brick, bordered in asphalt, but within precious view of a Park that performed quite lovely seasonal antics in color, under the square eyes of the living-room window. Next to having a house, with its upstairs and downstairs and surrounding green of its own, it was pleasant and easy to rig up this apartment with certain very dear accouter¬ ments of home. Nothing of the “McKinley era,” thank you, in the new furnishings of these new quarters. Of all the terri¬ ble effects to which for so many years she had been immune in the house on Arctic Avenuel That velours set, all splotched, which she had purchased and, if not actually liked, at least v had not minded. The brass bedstead which, be it said for Mr. I Pullman, he had tried to talk her out of. Those hideous lace curtains which with such pride she had purchased, starched, hung, and laid out on the floor like a girl’s train. Live and learn. Even back in those days, allowing for styles, the right kind of houses had not been done in the key of the one on Arctic Avenue. IMITATION OF LIFE 133 _ Although practically devoid of the experience of a social life which would carry her into homes of others, glimpses of apartments through open doorways, window and floor 1 displays of the shops, hotel-foyers, offices done in the better manner, womens magazines, created their slow revolution against the van-loads of household furnishings that had been transported from the house on Arctic Avenue. A comic strip of her early environment should not be plastered against the mind of her growing child, as the memory, for instance of the golden-oak sideboard, with all the little fretwork bal¬ conies containing the pressed-glass vinegar cruet, bisque shepherd, and beer-stein shaped like a fat monk, was riveted into Bea’s. With one stroke, preceding this last move, over loud: lamentations from Delilah, the major pieces of the Arctic Avenue period had been carted away to a neighborhood dealer, who had a basement store and exhibited most of his wares on the sidewalk. “Jes’ breaks mah heart to go marketin’ over on Amster¬ dam, Miss Bea, an’ pass by dat furniture cellar and have to see mah ole gemmeman’s little old carpet hassock, an’ dat dar taboret of oum what used to have the knick-knacks on, standin’ out dere on de sidewalk, waitin’ for to be sold like any ole nigger slave. I loved dat ole hassock, and you done gone and pulled it right from under mah feet.” “I’ll get you a new one, Delilah.” “New onel Ain’t a hassock made lak dey used to make dem ole ones. Call dat new little ole footstool a hassock? Dat’s nothin’ on God’s earth but a floor pimple, An dat dar dining-room buffet. Gimme a sideboard every time. Maybe the drawers of our ole sideboard wasn’t lined in velvet, but dar was a place on top whar to stand de fixin’s dat was made for God’s own dining-rooms, You kin have your buffets . . . jes’ lak you kin have your dive-in-ports instead of de good ole slippery leather sofa you might have give me for mah room.” "But, Delilah, it would have ruined the effect of your nice new bedroom set.” "Nothin’ cain’t ruin no effect for me, jes’ ’cause somebody tells me a fashion. I loved dat ole slippery sofa. . . m IMITATION OF LIFE r:!i;" 3""«fx;; 1 01 i], it hill even to the untrained, m mil- fStigi not fatigue. Thu delight (if feethering the mat m tlw W '' r w h the lovely and symmetrtal ^ kitchen ones, unless you knew their correelues n da k u *•? u ,Mns r*:;t£ itblno velvet (oh, the splotched kom* "I J she had once been content!) with » overst.il! J d “> ; “ moni/e foot mutch). End-tables for the couch, with cadi a aZ& h» «* »“»= "X?til 3 alone had cost one hnodred and seven y-fc ; ” which, fan the point of view ol MlH .x».h.ul needed to hesitate. There was )»t no «4M " n idea. A beautiful octaffm-stoH mahogany thkrf . W purchase. It wanned the dining-room beautifully, Uk 1 ■ | L hanging in all its rich oranges and browns above tin. ibuffet and against the tan wall paper, Good inuscuhn«-hi- f irm oak furniture for Father’s room, ' There bed really been no nod for the bed. I.* more A tt „ n vear, now, Father had been finding It easier to sleep IMITATION OF LIFE 135 upright in his chair. But it was wonderful to be able to pro¬ vide him that set, complete, with a chifforobe of smoothly planed drawers that catered to every whim of his personal fastidiousness. The bedroom which she shared with her young daughter was really quite frivolous in its furnishings of a lovely new kind of wood called curly birch, with its twin beds, balcony-front dresser and dressing-table, blue silk scarves, curtains, and upholstery for the low boudoir chair and window seat. The master bathroom delighted too. Its frosted-glass window set high in the wall. White mosaic floor. A fine white medicine-chest over the washstand that went right with the apartment; and then all the amusing nickel accessories that she stole tire time to purchase, rushing in be¬ tween appointments to shop the soap-dishes, cute sponge- rack to hook on over the bathtub, and a little white-enamel stool for Jessie, who by now could stand on it and reach the spigot of the stationary washstand for her own adorable little ablutions. You just couldnt believe, the joy, between business ne¬ gotiations of proportions that never ceased to bowl her over by their growing scope and importance, of this shopping for gadgets. The day of one of the important lease negotiations of her career, she stopped between lawyers’ offices, to dart into Stem’s for the purchase of a shower spray small enough for a child to manipulate in the bath. She was boastful of the fact that she believed she had started the craze of color kitch¬ ens in New York, inaugurating into her own all sorts of red- enamel pots and pans and red-checked oilcloth and a bright linoleum. It was a complete enough little household of a pathetic kind of conservatism mixed in with a small quality of daring such as the bright kitchen and a gay piece of India print which she bought for its color and nailed up against the wall to brighten a dark bit of hallway. All her very own, as, warmed to the core, she looked about it, yet so little hers. Rather, Delilah’s, upon whose terrific and willing-to-sweat shoulders rested so much of her success. Indeed, if you looked at it in a certain way, much of this well-being, this warm, good nest, was the gift of those boys, or rather what was left of them, who had packed the returning transports from Brest, 136 IMITATION OF LIFE J: as they swung up the harbor to be greeted by Mayor Hylan’s Committee of Welcome. These same doughboys, with body scars and deeper, more subtle scars deep down in the wells of their eyes, had, during those strange days of the strange orgy of going off to war, } literally rioted her B. Pullman into prominence. Overnight, v, as it were, they had transported it to the priceless vantage of the front page of every metropolitan newspaper: TROOPS STORM DOORS OF WAFFLESHOP ! Small Riot in Grand Central Station as Dough- boys, Led by Allen Matterhorn of Seattle, Vie : for Southern Mammy’s Old-Fashioned Waffles \ ■ and Maple Syrup. ■ j Doughboys with lusty voices and still lustier appe¬ tites, passed up the buck and lure of the Great White Way last night and chose to bombard the portals of a newly opened refreshment novelty in the esplanade of ! Grand Central Station, known as B. Pullman, where, for fifteen cents, hot waffles, such as mother used to I: make, steaming coffee, all presided over by a grand old black woman in starched white. . , . % Actually, the boy, Allen Matterhorn, of Seattle, the young- m est of them all, and with a sprinkling of freckles in a milky ; way across his nose and cheekbones, had eaten seven portions that gay mad night, his tan-colored curly hair standing up in shock from its constant tousling from the others. "Dat boy shore did know how to git on dc outside of a waffle better’ll anybody I ever seen. Dar’s a boy after raah own heart. Lawd help de mother dal’s havin’ to give him up -dar’s a boy wid a grin into his face after mail own heart.” He had sent Delilah a pair of post cards through twelve months of days that shook tire world, the first, a flamboyant word of greeting from Nantes in a bold boyish hand; the sec- ond, months later, in a strange small scrawl from Paris. Then /' silence- "Mali boy’s done hurt his ann-dis is lef-handed writin’,” Delilah had wailed, inserting the card in the wire rack of IMITATION OF LIFE 137 them she was accumulating. “Mali sweetest boy from all de war done hurt his arm an’ dar ain’t no good ahead when he gets home, God help his mammy’s soul.” Perhaps. Perhaps not. But whether or no, there persisted the feeling of clairvoyance which she applied to the desti¬ nation of so many of the boys who passed through her experience, never to be seen again or even hoard from again, except by a vagrant postal card, perhaps, falling like a star out of the night of her crowded memories. Some of those boys were not returning on the transport from Brest, nor would they ever. Delilah, with her boastful, aggressive, not-to-be-duunted clairvoyance, practiced a vol¬ uble omniscience: Dat little red-headed boy from what’s dat town, dat we let sleep at de house de night he was feverin’ up for his sciatica—what was dat town—Ipepcac—IthicuP—dat chile nevei coined home from de war, Miss Boa, Mark mah word, flat boy s been took to Jesus. De big, long, red-haired one dat de boys called Shank, dat et me out of house and home in powder’ sugar on his waflies-he’s got back to dat dar horse- like-lookin maw out in Kansas lie showed us in de picture. Mali chile, Allen, is back wid his maw. He didn’t have no time to stop by an’ see us on his way out dar-but mark mah word, Miss Bea, dat boy Allen Matterhorn has got hisself home-” Be that as it may, coining and going, those boys, eager to be off, and on the return, desperately anxious and eager to forget, had contributed by their patronage to all this well¬ being of an apartment on Central Park West, with gadgets and trimmings, that actually, if the truth were known, rep¬ resented less than she could really afford. . Bhose boys, including who knows how many of them left in Plunders fields, had helped bring it all about; those boys, Delilah, and, to be sure, her own fanatical capacity for riding an idea to its conclusion. This last had helped enormously, but at ironical cost to one who had been forced to learn to tear herself reluctantly from four walls she coveted. By now, the equivalent of any high-power business man, the order of her day was to rush’.' out mornings before her pretty child opened eyes that were 138 IMITATION OF LIFE accustomed to finding her gone, back again evenings, in time for the fag end, or part of the last hour, of her daughter’s day. And the greater part of the time, scarcely that. It was not unusual for her to return long after the apartment was quiet of every living thing save the ponderous lumbering about of Delilah, for an evening meal which she ate from a tray at one end of the living-room table. Things had shaped themselves into that crowded kind of pattern. Three B. Pullmans in New York, one in Atlantic City, Baltimore, and Washington, with Cleveland and Chi¬ cago in the offing, to say nothing of a candy-and-syrup mer¬ chandising enterprise, which, it is true, had become merely complementary to the B. Pullmans, but which was rapidly taking on proportions that meant immediate extension of the two-room office suite and candy-kitchen in an old ramshackle office building in Front Street. There were four salesmen out of that office and a mail-order experiment with Delilah’s Hearts that had become, within two years, a department of detail and growing profit, | It was beginning to be said of Bea, rather privately at .first and within the sanctum of her business offices, where her clerks and salesmen were her devotees, that everything she touched turned to gold. Even the candy-kitchen, in the hands of a small, corps of girls trained by Delilah, who herself had become too heavy on her feet for long hours over the kettles, started to out¬ grow its quarters. With the exception of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a B. Pullman designed to undergraduate appeal had mysteri¬ ously failed and been withdrawn, the little flock of the re¬ mainder of them was moving ahead at self-generated and generally exciting momentum. Already the idea and equipment were sufficiently stand¬ ardized to make rapid duplication a comparatively simple matter, Floor space, approximately eighteen by forty, al¬ though variations would answer, with show window and entrance giving onto important corridor or thoroughfare, fere to be found in the arcades, shopping districts, or rail¬ way stations of the average large city. With Delilah on hand for the' initial period, and young IMITATION OF LIFE 139 Flake, who was rapidly taking over the road management of the business and who had the hound’s quick faculty for nosing out desirable localities, the results, with a facility that she found actually a little embarrassing, had come to be almost automatically to the good. To he sure, there had been the quick demise at Cambridge, a failure so difficult to understand that' it served to keep the precariousness also well to the fore of both her mind and young Flake’s, but on the other hand, take what Bea called her stepchild B. Pullman. Located in New York, within a stone’s throw of a large new hotel which invited the exclusive patronage of men, nothing of what she and Flake had antic¬ ipated happened. The men who had prompted the choice of location remained conspicuously away, apparently not at¬ tracted by the rather playful idea of the diner. It was after three summer months of desuetude that the select girls’ schools in a neighborhood characterized by them, literally fell upon and swooped the B. Pullman unto themselves, storming it into sudden and lasting success. The year that Jessie began to lisp to the small playmates she encountered in Central Park that her mother was B. Pullman and that the Delilah on the candy-boxes was her Delilah, that strange sporadic creature known as her parent, who hud so little part in her day and was perceived evenings mostly through the heavy-lidded mists of sleep, was con¬ fronting the phenomenon of a twelve months’ net profit amounting to fourteen thousand seven hundred and forty-six dollars and eighty-eight cents. “Delilah, were rich!” “Go ’long, Miss Honey-Beal If we was rich you wouldn’t he workin’ your laigs off thisaway. We’re rich in the luv of the Heavenly Host, if that’s what you mean." This conversation had taken place in the narrow confines of the little apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, where the bulk of Delilah had actually repeatedly been known to get itself wedged into the narrow railroad hallway and where the children and the old gentleman had been placed, in shifts, upon the fire escape, for airing. “What would you like best, Delilah, if we could afford to IMITATION OF LIFE 141 her child had begun and ended, too bone-tired for more than her nightly round of inspection to the sleeping forms of her father and child, to even give alert attention to De¬ lilah’s detailed recountings of her child-ridden, old-man- ridden day. The years in the narrow coop on Amsterdam Avenue had sped, like monotonous scenery past a train, leaving few defi¬ nite impressions except those of mileage toward destination. Home was a halfway house in which to steam up for the new day, the new quest, the new decision. Catch up on sleep, Snatch at die luxury of a warm bath, to soak the ache out of bones. Plan tomorrow. Wrestle with the problem of getting in Mrs. Wexler, practical nurse, who, just when most needed, was so dangerously likely to be occupied with another case, to come in and take over the household, while she and De¬ lilah bustled out to Cleveland or to Baltimore, to inaugurate a new B. Pullman, Long evenings of credit and debit on the backs of envelopes. Credit. Debit. Months, even years of those evenings, seated beside a small table in the front room she shared with her child, a bit of old black shawl draped between the electric light and the crib. The years marched on that way. Insidiously. There was the event of her first credit from the bank. There was the event of young Flake. There was the event of an invitation to confer with the Department of Home Economics at Cor¬ nell. There was the event of a voluntary loan of three thou¬ sand dollars from Hiram Prynnc, Senior, who was to die two months later without her ever having clapped eyes on him, Events marched, all right! Before she was seven, Jessie, snatching a hoop away from Peola one day, had shouted in a small shrill voice a word she had picked up that morning in Central Park, “Nigger, you!" Following that incident with rather frightening closeness, Peola had undergone severe scalp operation, the result of a hot iron simultaneously cutting and burning her as she was secretly trying to iron out an imaginary kink in her straight black hair. A campaign of newspaper advertising, dreamed by Bea, planned by young Flake, was about to make Delilah’s face, Delilah’s name, Delilah’s smile, one that reached from coast to coast. Months of boiling down advertising copy into IMITATION OF LIFE the phrase that was to prove succinct and magic. Delilah Delights. And strangely enough of developing within herself so marked an aptitude, that when the B. Pullman advertise¬ ment became a full-page feature in metropolitan newspapers throughout the country, she was still writing her own copy, in a sort of rhythm that started a fashion. Your neighborhood B. Pullman is a rest cured Bead why Delilah delights. One of her favorite and most successful feature pages was a catalogic summary of those reasons. _ 1. Delilah is the most indulgent hostess in the world. 2. Delilah loves to spoil you. 3. Delilah has a mother-complex. 4. Delilah cares, Sometimes there were thirty of these notations. Alter a while, at her suggestion, the public began to cooperate. One h thousand dollars to be given away in prizes for best: state¬ ment not to exceed ten words, why Delilah delights. | “You’ve an ear for hokum; you mix it almost as well as t Delilah does her batter,” spoke young Flake, whose amaze¬ ment at the fecundity of her copy continued to mount. Perhaps. It was that, of course. Hokum. American raucous hokum. High-speed advertising. 'Well, they like it! Except that deep down in the reaches of her, from where she sur¬ veyed with a seriousness she was not to outgrow, everything pertaining to this strange incubus of business which had ob¬ tained strangle hold upon her life and time, she believed her ballyhoo, Felt it, dreamed it, lived it. A B. Pullman represented achievement, the best of its kind. Under the superlative tutelage of Delilah, its corps of ample, immaculate Negro women graduating into the Pull¬ mans of various large cities was not to be outdone for those qualities which made the enterprise immaculate, popular, and outstanding. If, as young Flake put it, site wrote gor* ■ geous ballyhoo, it was because her copy was weighted with the quality of conviction uncoated by even the priceless veneer of sense of humor. It was rumored at one time, considerably later, that she "had been offered: fifty thousand dollars a year to handle the 143 IMITATION OF LIFE advertising account of a national baking concern. The rumor was true, but it came at a time when, on the basis of relative values, it was to provide her office force amusement not un¬ mixed with a certain amount of subdued hilarity. Oh, events marched all right. The World War, which straddled that period, had sometimes, quite horribly to her contemplation, seemed to bend a persistent rainbow over her enterprises. It was as if a harassed world found just the pause she had planned for it within the warmth of her amber-lit, fragrant booths. You stepped off a milling thoroughfare of war- burdened faces into a tiny recess in the day’s turmoil. It was not: so simple to analyze the growing momentum of tin; maple sugar and Delilah’s Hearts, except in terms of this same phenomenon of a riddled world eking for itself small gratifications. In any event, hero was the evidence in fourteen thousand dollars not profit: for that Armistice year, when the renting of the eightecn-luindred-dollar-a-year' apartment on Central Park West was to be the last conservative move out of the mood of a lifetime of conservatism which up to this point had enveloped her. Overnight', as it were, unloosing what must have been latent dogs of war within her, she seemed to have tasted the blood of big business. I he secret of her success, said the wiseacres of no wisdom, lies in the fact that she does things on a large and daring scale. Large and daring scale! She knew better. Flake knew bet¬ ter. Up to this point, every knot of the progress from harbor to open sea had been nosed by inches, not ells. It was as concrete as this; I’ve got to get over being penny wise, she told herself one August noonday of a humidity that was felling horses in the streets, while she stood in the center of the sea of asphalt of Columbus Circle; stood in the relent¬ less heat, debating whether to take a languid crosstown car or a taxicab, to the place of a business meeting which was to involve a transaction in her affairs mounting into six figures. Yes, events were marching, and through it all, as if symbol 144 IMITATION OF LIFE of littleness from which she needed emancipation, her little father, clapped into his body like a druid into a tree, regarded her constantly with his silent eyes. CHAPTER 26 The more on less quiescent problem of Peola lifted its head the daythat Jessie caused to explode off her lovely lips the “nigger. It was a Sunday morning, one of the rare ones that aid not find Bea indulging in the boon of the hebdomadal quiet of her office, usually with Weems, her head bookkeeper, or with young Flake during his intervals in town, going over odds and ends of affairs that had found no place during the weeks hurly-burly. Windows were open to an April sun of drenching warmth that flooded the front of the apartment. In one of them, | wrapped in blankets, leathery as a crocodile, his small eyes all for his daughter, sat the olcl gentleman, ready to lift his threatening cane, in the only gesture left to him, at prac¬ tically every expression of her solicitude for his comfort. On the floor beside him, in, about, and around his wheel¬ chair, reckoning with him only as a fixture of environment, there romped the children when the epithet came, From her chair beside the window, her drying hair, al¬ ready long and reactionary-looking in a world of women who were beginning to dock theirs, lifted itself, as if indi¬ vidually, from each follicle, of its electric vitality. It was pleasant to alternately open and close eyes upon the scene of the bright frail lacework of new greens in the Park across the street; shouts of children on roller skates, soft new smells, splashes of light on a powder-blue Chinese rug, her flushed and agile Jessie at play with Peola, who was more agile. And then it came, bursting across the quiet like shrapnel, because immediately from the kitchen, as if part of it had struck out there, was Delilah on the scene, standing stunned and stockstill in the middle of a strange new silence. “Nigger! No fairl You pushed! You’re a little nigger and IMITATION OF LIFE 145 you’ve got no half-moons on your finger nails. Nig-nig-nig- ger!” Nigger! How, how, had the word dawned into the tiny horizon of this household. Nigger. “Jessie, how could you? Come here, my poor little Peola, to Miss Bea. ...” My poor little Peola, not at all! Something as agile and ready to leap as a leopard was out in Peola. Backed almost immediately by the enormous bulk of her mother, her hands flew together and clasped behind her back, so that her thin arms twisted like pulled twine, the small face settling into lines of a fury ridiculously too old for it. Actually, standing there in an anger ready to spring, she made a hissing sound. “Honey-chile, your mammy’s here. Take it standin'. You •; gotta learn to take it all your life that way. Nigger is a tame-cat word when we uses it ourselves ag’m ourselves, : and a wild-cat word when it comes jumpin' at us from the outside. Doan’ let it git you.” “Jessie, apologize!” No, no, Miss Bea. ’Tain t no use inakin’ either one of deni make too much of dis. Peola’s got to learn. What’s happened is as nacheral as de tides. Dey been creepin’ up on her since de day she was bom, and now de first little wave is here, wettin’ her feet. Jessie ain’t to blame, God ain’t, ’cause He had some good reason for makin’ us black and white , . . and de sooner mah chile learns to agree wid Him the better. Oh, Miss Bea, doan’ you remember ’way back when she was a baby, mah tellin’ you de itch in her heart mah poor chile was bom wid?” Suddenly there turned upon her mother the small gripped fury of Peola. “You! You!” she screamed, the flanges of her nose whitening and spreading like wings as she beat small fists against the checkered apron frontage of Delilah. “You’re so black! That’s what makes me nigger.” “Peola, my child, how can you talk to your-” “Hole a minute, Miss Bea. She doan’ mean it no more’n her whitish pap used to mean it. Nobody can tell me dat white nigger married me ’cause he knew I’d slave for him. He could ’a’ got plenty. He married me ’cause he knowed I jes’ cain’t help a-lovin’. Ain’t nothin’ gonna make me quit 146 IMITATION OF LIFE lovin’ dis chile. She’s got her pap’s curse. Hating what he was. And it’s a heap easier to he black when you’re black lak I am, Miss Bea, dan it is to be white when you’re black lak mah poor baby. Folks said I worked dese hands to de bone supportin’ her pap ’cause I was proud he was white. Proud? De biggest curse what ever hit him or me was his white¬ ness. Oh, mah honey, cain’t you sec de Lord done had good reason for makin’ you black? Oh, mah honey, cain’t you see de glory in de Lawd’s every move? Into the checkered fold of apron flowed the heat and bitter salt of her child, and finally into the thawing warmth of vasty bosom. “Sh-h-h, mah baby-chile. Jessie didn’ call you nigger wid her meanness. She called you dat wid her blood. Forgive dem ’cause dey know not what dey do is de Lawd’s way for malcin’ it easy for us to bear our cross, as he bore hisn. Doan’ cry, mah baby. If you let go of tears for every time you’re gonna be called nigger, your tears will make a Red Sea big enough to drown us all in.” “Jessie, sweet, you don't know what a dreadful unkind word you just used to Peola.” “Peola is a nigger, Mother, isn’t she? But I never meant it to be bad,” “She is a Negro, just as you are a white. Go over to her and tell her how naughty you have been to pick up a horrid street word without even knowing its meaning.” “No white chile cain’t be cornin’ apologizin’ to a black and puttin’ ideas into her head, Stop dat tremblin’, Peola, and walk over dar, and tell Jessie you’re proud of bein’ a nigger, ’cause it was de Lawd’s work makin’ you a nigger. . . .” “I won’t be a nigger! I won’t be a nigger!” “Got to, mah baby. The further 'long you go apin’ whites and pleasurin’ wid dem, de more you’re letting yourself in for de misery. ...” “Won't! Won’t!” “Then brace your heart, mah baby, ’cause breakin’s ahead for it. Brace your heart for de misery of tryin to dye black blood white. Ain’t no way to dye black white. God never even give a way to dye a black dress white, much less black- blood. Never you mind, mah chile. Some day, on the white IMITATION OF LIFE 147 wings of a white hearse, wid white plumes and the tr um pets of a heavenly host Mowin' black and white welcome alike, we’ll ride to glory to a land whar dar ain’t no such heart- breukiii colors as black and white. Quit: cryin’ out your little heart, Sh-h-h-h. . , Delilah, stop her. She'll have a convulsion. Oh, Jessie, how could you!” ^ didn’t mean nigger to he a mean word, Mother.” i hen don t dare to use it again! See now what you’ve done. Peola, you mustn’t hold your breath!” “I won’t he nigger!” “Yes, you will, baby, long as de Lavvd is stronger dan you are.” “I won’t! I won’t!” Got to, rnali baby. ’Tain’t no tragedy unless you make it one. Dar is good black happiness in bein’black. Your maw’s done found glory in de Lawd’s way. She’s gonna learn it to her baby. Remember, honey, some, day on de wings of a whito hearse-sb-li-h-li, mall little black baby will be carried to her heavenly host,” “She’ll have a convulsion, Delilah, if you don’t stop her.” Better nmv dati when sites old enough to have grown-up ones, Jt aint do lieiu black, honey—it’s bein’ black in a white world you got to get your little hurtbum quiet about... 1 won t be black! I won’t he nig™” Of! the small lips, which shuddered the word like a defec¬ tive coupon out of a machine, spun foam. “Delilah—the little thing-,she’s fainted ... I” She had. Quite stiffly and into a pallor that made her whiter than chalk. CHAPTER 27 OnK DAY A GLIB YOUNG BEPOMHn FROM ihe New York Mail, still in the coat to the khaki uniform she had worn ambulance-driving in France, shot a question at her, out of a mental kit-bag of them she was using in a 148 IMITATION OF LIFE "CAREERS OF SUCCESSFUL WOMEN” series, which left Bea flabbergasted. “And now, Mrs. Pullman, at the close of your busy execu¬ tive day, what are your recreations? They were seated in the new B. Pullman offices situated in the prow of the twentieth story of the Flatiron Building, the city laying itself out from its triple exposure, its gigantic pattern weaving across the frame of another day. They had been much in the public print, these offices, keyed to the pitch of the flamboyant success story. FEW KNOW THAT B. PULLMAN, KNOWN. BY NAME THE COUNTRY OVER, IS A WOMAN. WOMAN EXECUTIVE, SEATED AT DESK IN HER EXTENSIVE OFFICES IN FLATIRON BUILDING. SPECTACULAR RISE FROM TINY WAFFLE SHOP TO AN INSTITUTION. “It is difficult to realize that the comely, mild-mannered woman who rises from her desk to greet the visitor, is the B. Pullman whose name has become , . .” At first, as the identity of B. Pullman began to take on ballyhoo and feature-story value, this sort of thing had struck her with the usual shock with which publicity assails the hitherto obscure. Delilah, who by now could scarcely appear on the streets without recognition following and pedestrians frequently stepping up to confirm their suspicion of her identity, was one matter, Her face glowing above the alliterated euphe¬ mism, “Delilah Delights,” had stamped itself against the public mind, but as for Bea herself, having one’s picture in the paper was somehow not the thing. Mother had even not liked it when on one occasion their figures had stood out quite boldly, if anonymously, in a view of the Boardwalk which a photographer had snapped on them unawares, and which subsequently appeared in the Sunday section of a local news¬ paper. You left that sort of thing to the actresses and women who achieved the front pages through actions which invited notoriety. You never saw the women members of the really exclusive Atlantic City families in the papers, unless for social events of a high and distinguished order. IMITATION OF LIFE 149 _ Otherwise you got into the newspapers if you were missing like Dorothy Arnold, or divorcing, or kissing Hobson, or wore your hair short, or chopped with a hatchet like Carrie Nation. It was young Flake who was to hold out for the advertising value of dramatizing the personal equation behind the rise of the B. Pullman from a waffle to an institution, Hie ten-year almost general misapprehension of the sex of B. Pullman, the Atlantic City girl who started out on a can of maple syrup; the place of Delilah Who Delighted in the hearts of thousands of doughboys; the University of De¬ lilah, where nearly as possible replicas of herself were trained foi B. Pullman service; all a gold mine of free advertising, which, according to Flake, money could not even buy. ' ’ Already there were three or four handsomely-bound scrap¬ books of dippings on a table in the waiting-room outside the private offices of B. Pullman. Yet, withal, here was this young squirt of an ex-ambulance- di iver putting in her cocksure manner a disquieting question to B. Pullman, that for the moment staggered her. “. . . What are your recreations?” “Recreations? Why-er-of course.” What did one do after business hours? Sundays? Week-ends? During those vacation periods she was constantly planning for herself and the per¬ sonnel of her staff, but to which, she herself never quite got around. Recreations? Now, what? Curious. Most curious. Come to think about it, she had none. In all the years since the death of Mr. Pullman, her father’s growing impotencies, the birth of her child, the birth and development of her business, recreation had played no part in her scheme. Recreations? For years the majority of her evenings had been commandeered for the quiet intervals they afforded for going over her affairs, particularly of late, with Flake, on the occasions when he was in off the road, or in clearing up odds and ends of long accumulation with willing members of her growing staff, Miss Weems, Miss Lejaron, or any of a score of the competent ones with whom she seemed to have de¬ veloped a talent for surrounding herself. : Boa’s jerry-flappers, Jessie was to dub them, several years later on the occasion of the joint celebration of the tenth ISO IMITATION OF LIFE anniversary of the service of three such invaluable women- Miss Weems, Miss I^jaron, and Mrs. Van dor Lippo. Of course there was llu; aspect of recreation to all this, especially the periods spent with Hate, whose road to ulti¬ mate general managership was paved with his bestowal upon the affairs of B. Pullman of practically all his spare time. The all too few hours with her child were recreation, hut now, with Jessie about to be entered into a boarding-school, which but a few years ago it would have seemed fantastic to ever he in a position to afford for her, even those lew spare Hours at home would dwindle to the sole performing of offices for the old gentleman. Recreations? The question off the fresh young lips of her interrogator left her flabbergasted. Recreations, zero, However, it gave her pause. Magazines and the feature sections of the Sunday newspapers were constantly serving up the success formula.' of the great and near-great, ehieliy as they existed in the minds of press agents bent on celebrat¬ ing their clients into celebrity. Knowing all this, having swing hack often enough re¬ volted from the printed palaver of herself and her enter¬ prises, there persisted, however, just enough nl the conviction of inexact journalism to set going within her a sense of the need to do something about this recreations, zero. According to the inexhaustible folk-biologv of Delilah, you shed your skin, like a snake, every seven years. “Yes, ma’am! New skin creeps up on you and shoves off do old widnut anybody but de Lawd knowin’ it. Yon’s shed vnurn all right, Miss .Rea, Mali same Miss Honey-Bca underneath, but a shiny new one on top.” That was true. It was impossible to live and move in an ever-enlarging world of business women and not both con¬ sciously and unconsciously ape their accouterments of dress and good grooming, It was as if, too, she could feel the ac¬ couterments of her success, You buckled into them as part of the business clay’s armor. The hells, the straps, the nickel plating. The large de luxe offices, which had grown out of the insistence of Weems and Flake rather than her own voli- 151 IMITATION OF LIFE tion for the symbols of achievement, The rigmarole of inner and outer, private and public, offices, conference-rooms and secret sanctums, The dramaturgy of Weems, who in her early days had studied for the stage, was responsible for most of these outer trappings. They constituted a success technique to which Bea, resistant at first, was gradually to conform, No doubt about it, they, that hydra-headed public, wanted it that way. They expected it, They demanded it, Nothing short of it smelled of success, and making your success suc¬ ceed was by no means a negligible aspect of the strange tribute it exacted. Business appointments staged by Weems or Flake to take place around the lunch tables of expensive hotels. Largess in what you did and how you did it. To the manner born in transactions of growing vastness and im¬ portance by one who most of her life had reckoned conserv¬ atively and without sense of irk, in her parents and then Mr. Pullman’s world of nickels and dimes. A Weems-and- Flake generated talent for the apparently large and easy spending of the executive who will not stint in the tremendous trifles of keeping up appearances. You drove your bargain to the last penny amid settings and gestures that seemed to toss them far and wide, Penny-foolishness and pound-wisdoms developed with overwhelming suddenness in one who still practiced secret: and almost appalling personal economies. The debate with self over the cross-town street ear or thirty-writ taxi fare to keep the rendezvous of a one-hundred- thousand-dollar-lease transaction she was to consummate with a group of men she had invited to lunch with her in a private room at the Plaza, Bargain-bin stockings and expensive mod¬ ish-looking slioes which she bought in Thirty-fourth Street basement shops that specialized in “slightly imperfects”, and in which she trod the expensive Chinese rugs of her elaborate offices. On those days when there were not business appoint¬ ments over the Waldorf or Holland House or Plaza or Gotham lunch tables, she snatched her bite in a lunchroom on Twenty- third Street called Sweet’s Inn, or often as not took it stand¬ ing up in the form of a chocolate milk-shake and vanilla wafers before a drug-store counter. There was a Tiffany glass- 152 IMITATION OF LIFE set on her broad-topped walnut desk, but a sack of jelly beans in her beautifully planed right-hand drawer. Yes, something should be done about it. Constantly you were reading the recreations of John D. Rockefeller, Mary Pickford, Virginia Eden, Anna Held, President Wilson, Valen¬ tino, Caruso, Gaby Pelys. No modern woman, up and doing, celebrated after a fash¬ ion, could afford to let herself feel thus flabbergasted before the question of a chit. Recreations? That was the small situation that sowed seed for the elabo¬ rate white-tile gymnasium, sunken pool, handball-court, elec¬ tric riding-horse, rowing-machine, punching-bag, to be in¬ stalled in the B. Pullman offices, considered quite an inno¬ vation at the time and which was to be flashed as a news story from coast to coast. Incidentally, too, it laid the beginning of the friendship with Virginia Eden, author of one of the most alluring and remunerative phrases of modern industry, ‘Beauty culture, who, unsolicited, asked permission to install, gratis, into the B. Pullman office gymnasium, one of her beauty grottos, a cabinet of mirrors so cunningly devised that you beheld the back of your neck as casually as you ran eye down the length of your nose and elaborately fitted out with shelf after shelf of the famous creams, lotions, powders, astringents, perfumes, and manicure paraphernalia that bore the famous Eden im¬ print, . • “The gymnasium is yours,” Bea told the women members of her office force, who at the time numbered only forty-six. “Use it. Feel at home in it. Get yourself trim in it and keep there in it.” They adored her, these women employees, for a time with a dangerous kind of intensity which took the form of anony¬ mous gifts and letters which ultimately had to be ruled and ridiculed out of practice by Flake. A situation which could easily have become obnoxious and of which Bea herself had remained almost absurdly unaware. At twenty-seven, despite pores that had been bared to years of city soot, body that had never known massage or periods of rest or respite, and which was never to avail itself of the gymnasium which Weems declared was tire source of a fad IMITATION OF LIFE 153 that was to spread rapidly among men executives, who on all sides were installing punching-bags and electric horses in conjunction with then- high-power offices, the B. Pullman who had looked twenty-three at seventeen, looked precisely that twenty-three now. Through little if any, effort „f hcr own _ s , le h , |d m d to linger behind her years, her growing symptoms of inner tiredness, her buffeting about the marts of men, her combat with a world which she had dared before she comprehended, to the contrary notwithstanding. The year that she appended to her offices the elaborately explanatory recreation," she looked easily, in the lay of her flesh without shadow or crinkles along her bones, in the way her strong {{lossy hair, when she brushed it a few hurried strokes, continued to stand out strand by strand, and in the stride of her strong firm legs, not a day older than the twenty- Except that imbedded in her bones, packed into their mar¬ row, there nested the growing fatigue that, mysteriously, seemed not to be of her body, yet hung in the very center ot her being, like a clapper to a bell. CHAPTER 28 , , , The first even incipient friendship of these militaristic years of expansion and growth was Virginia Eden. Characteristically, in the events leading up to the installa¬ tion of the Eden Grotto, an invitation to lunch had arrived, m the last word of the prevailing mode of a large mauve liorists box, containing a corsage of Parma violets with a red- rose center. It struck Rea with a sense of the growing inner dreariness which sometimes now seemed to dangle down the center of her that it was the first corsage she had ever received. Its cold fragrance filled her office, and later the sitting-room at home, when she unloosed it in a bowl and managed to keep it alive a week by storing it in the ice-box, nights. 154 IMITATION OF LIFE They met for lunch in big hats and cloth-topped shoes amid the plush, carved wood, gilding and heavy mahogany of the Waldorf-Astoria on Fifth Avenue. There was some¬ thing exciting to Bea about this occasion. It was the first time she was experiencing personal and semi-social encounter with that then comparatively rare bird, woman in big business. To be sure she knew women general managers, departmental heads, tearoom and candy-shop owners galore, but years pre¬ vious, before the word “beautician” bad arrived, she had read somewhere that only one person in the beauty-culture busi¬ ness had paid income tax. that one was Virginia Eden, a fact Which her appearance delightfully belied. “Wily, I thought you were much older!" “I thought the same of you.” “I would have recognized you anywhere,” “Your pictures don’t do you justice.” They might have been any two of the throng of women meeting in Peacock Alley, with husband's allowances in their pocketbooks, for. lunch and matinee. They Hushed, they fum¬ bled among gloves and handbags, fluttered over choice of table, fought, with two waiters standing attention, for the privilege of granting the other the chair with the most desir¬ able view of dining-room, spilled excess emotion, motion, and vitality over trifles. Within the next few years, by way of one of the major financial interests of the world, was to come to the small ash-blond woman facing Bea, whose face so frail bad the look of a sheet of fine-grained writing-paper with careful erasures almost marking out what had been written on it, a cash oiler of eight million dollars for her imprint Virginia Eden, which had become a household word. VC years ^ enco ’ t * 1(! combination of Virginia Eden and B. Pullman would have created a stir in any smart public dining-room of New York, and even then, rather unprece¬ dented figures were these two who with their teeth into the wind, were riding farther and farther into the uncharted seas of big business for women. _ My, but here was some one in this- Me trick of a Virginia Eta. A dancing slob on a string, her arms, her logs' her tongue, and the whites of her eyes all seeming to synchronize IMITATION OF LIFE into an ecstasy of vitality. The way she called, “Waiterl” and, adding first, dashed off her name on the check. The manner in which, relative to a business proposition they were discuss¬ ing, she flashed a gold pencil out of her bag and did addi¬ tions right on the heavy damask tablecloth. The circumstance of her being paged by a row of gilt buttons, who bowed her toward a telephone booth. There were rings on her fingers, fine ones of large carat, animated sparkling tips to her nails, and two circles of color on her cheeks that seemed run up there by the high pressure of her bounding heartbeat instead of having been achieved by her already world-advertised cosmetics. There were no halfway measures with Virginia Eden. Even then, her sureness was quite terrible. “My dear, you are the one person in New York I have wanted to meet. Not just because I want you to have one of my grottos, and you can take my word for it that I come bearing you some gift-of which, I may add, I expect magnifi¬ cent free publicity. I’m that way, m’dearl To the point!” She wasl Like a streak. Five years from now we won’t be quite so special as we are now. From now on, women in big business are going to be common everyday, as they should be. But just the same, we re a nose ahead of the gold rush and that’s why we’ve a right to be in on the ground floor. See?” You bet B. Pullman wanted to be in on the ground floor. It gave meaning to years where all too often meaning had been obscured. All these years of blind pulling at the* load must have been beading her toward this. Toward something other than just the blind ploddings. . . . Sitting here in this rod-and-gold dining-room that over¬ looked Fifth Avenue, lunching with one of the few impor¬ tant business women in Aineriea-in the world, come to think about it—brought homo a sense of significance. Who would think it of them, that in all that vast dining- room, so festively agog with millinery and music and fresh flowers, tlie two youngish women cutting into mushroom omelettes were in a peculiar and exciting class to themselves, uni bet B. Pullman wanted to he in on the ground Hour. You know, Pullman, they’ll tell you that women cannot 156 IMITATION OF LIFE work well together, and God knows most of them can’t. Yet. But we can. I know it by the way you do things. By the way you handle your employees and your fork and your pub¬ licity, By the way you swing a real estate deal and sign leases where angels fear to tread. Single-track mind. Want what you want when you want it. That’s you. That’s me. I want love. I want money. I want success. I don’t know you well enough yet to know what you want, but whatever it is, you’re after it. How much ready cash can you tap?” This amazing woman! How did one know so patly what one wanted. How dared one demand so patly. Love? Of course one wanted it. Down underneath the recurring sense of the futility which one kept jammed down so tightly into the recesses of the mind, that want somehow would not be jammed and stilled. One would no more admit to Virginia Eden, who had it, the extent to which her days and endeavors and even her successes were devoid of love in the sense of the word that had lain so apparent in the Eden eyes when she pronounced the word. Cash on tap, now, was another matter-cash on tap-well-er- “All right. Don’t commit yourself. We won’t talk any more about it until I have put the grandest array of facts before you that one business man ever placed before another. I’ve a scheme, Pullman, that will lift you off your chair. Are you a home-wench?” “A what?” “Are you crazy about houses-homes-dig-ins?” Was she! Was she! “My car is outside. You’re going with me to look at a certain parcel of property in this town that is going to put you with me in on the ground floor. You and me ought to work together, Pullman. You make women fat and comfort¬ able. My job is to undo all that and make them beautiful. You’re grist to my mill. I want to be grist to yours. Look, I brought you a present. A little Aladdin’s lamp. Rub it when you feel blue. It’s solid gold. Wear it on a bracelet. When I was seventeen I rubbed mine for the first time and fell into my first love affair, and have been falling in and out of them ever since. Most of them have ended badly, but they’ve been Worth it. See, it’s my business trade-mark. Cute, ain’t it? I IMITATION OF LIFE 157 have them made up in gold to give away to my friends. You’re my friend, now. Look me in the eye, Pullman, and tell me. Isn t success ridiculously easy, once it begins to succeed?” She bad thought so a thousand times, Yes, after the strain and sweat and pushing until the very groins of your being shrieked protest, something like momentum happened. It took yom wits and your concentration and your continued willing sweat, of course, to keep it going, but the success of success had ball bearings. You steered, but in time your energy was strung with nerves along which flowed the mysterious gen¬ erating currents you had somehow got started back in days when success had not yet been bom, What a smart, shrewd, on-to-herself girl was this one scooping up peach molba with the quick dips of a bird. Life was a matter of definition for her. She took frequent inven¬ tory not only of her business, but of her days, her emotions her gratifications, her fulfillment, her destination. Catch her using up the days, the weeks, the months in just the dogged procession of time. Part of life’s yield of riches must he love-pus times- What are your recreations? How shrewdly, quickly, and to the point Eden could have answered that! She not only had them, but chose them each with purpose. My bridge unci golf are equally bad, but playing them at all enlarges the scope for meeting men that matter. Life owes me a living worth living. Yes, Eden regarded life as her debtor, she its relentless paymaster. By contrast:, she made B. Pullman to herself, seem its slave. Learn from a woman like Virginia Eden, no older, no wisei than herself, but who seemed to have so many more responding surfaces to her mind, All in a breath she talked of life, happiness, and love as if they were the rightful facets to the diamond she called life, Life, Happiness, Love, Not just: living along, although there was plenty of homely family pattern in Virginia’s life, too, Children by two different: fathers whom she adored. Retainers. Ilangcrs-on. A step¬ father with a silver tube lor a larynx, whom she housed in a special suite especially built on the top of her house on Lexington Avenue. let even more than those kinds of loves were demanded by 158 IMITATION OF LIFE the imperiousness in Virginia Eden’s eyes. Neither was she content to give or receive solely in the coinage of these. Greed for the transcendent of all loves, which begot life and which begot more love, was in the imperiousness of Virginia Eden’s demands. Love and happiness, as she said them, made what had been going on through years of a petty and mun¬ dane routine seem imitation of life. Except, there was Flake! Dickery, dickery dock; the mouse ran up the clock. Just so, the name ran up Bea s spine. It was at this time, with scarcely more than the shiver, that she first began to permit thought of him, eight years her junior, to penetrate die tremendous inhibition she erected against it. My, though, what a lot to be learned from a woman who put under appraisal, demanding value received, pretty nearly everydiing connected with love and happiness. How typical Vir ginia Eden’s remark: “Life is a feast for those who insist upon forcing their way to the banquet-hall. Think of all the centuries women like you and me have had to sit back and wait for men to manufacture their destinies for them. I’m going to help you manufacture some of your own destiny this afternoon. And you’re going to help me. Ever heard of Fishback Row?” Fishback Row proved to be a city block composed of a regiment of twelve narrow tenement houses with homely, pock-marked faces and unsightly reai-s that sloped in unkept grass plots down into the East River which washed and lopped against their clayey flanks. At first sight a dreary line-up of impersonal-looking filing cabinets for city dwellers, washlines flopping their uniforms of poverty, and dirty chil¬ dren with shaved heads playing about the sagging stoops. High above the heads of these houses, a suspension bridge, jerking Long Island to the acquisitive flank of Manhattan, stalked across the skyline in quite a magnificent geometry of steel and arch. A dramatic effect of high-flung, girdered webbing, bending above these narrow-faced houses as they bathed their dirty feet in the hurrying river. “Now,” cried Miss Eden, bumping her smart sedan along • the cobbled, unpretty, and soot-blown street, “what do you see?” Where, previous to the descriptive eloquence she had just IMITATION OF LIFE 159 heard from Virginia Eden as they drove along, she might have seen precisely the literal picture that blew so coldly against the naked eye that raw November day, there slid now a vision that transformed the pock-marked tenements into a row of Colonial houses along what Miss Eden de¬ scribed as “the London Embankment all over again, what with Blackwells Island across the river bed, giving a House of Commonsy effect.” What an idea! The new houses to be built hind-side around, with kitchens facing the drab slit of street and the clayey back yards becoming inclosed gardens which marched in well-graded terraces down to the river and which would then face the lovely fronts of these lovely homes. To one with that perpetual hurting nostalgia for a house and a bit of green, and that sense of security within four dear walls that were meant to inclose happiness, here in the heart of this city of granite bosom, was a bit of small intimate soil, washed by and smelling damp from a friendly river. Not the impersonal grandeur of the Hudson, but just a stream that cut through back-yard dirt. In. such a bit of yard Father could sit and sun himself, the children shout at play, The children! It was becoming constantly necessary to jerk the mind to the new reality that Jessie only returned home nowadays at long and stated intervals from Miss Winch’s Tarrytown School for Girls, and that a surprisingly long- legged Peola marched off for public school these mornings from a household long since empty of either of their day¬ long needs. The children did not shout any more at play. Up to the time the encroaching problem concerning them had made necessary the choice of separate ways, the hitherto insepara¬ ble youngsters, destined so suddenly and so irrevocably to fly apart, had already reached the stage of conversing in quiet, little-girl tones. But in any event, it was easy to visualize Jessie, arriving with her school-girl luggage and her bright hair that would never bear restraint, flying, to a home into which she could be proud to bring a chum. Here, off the central lanes of a city forever in the throes of building and rebuilding, in these 160 IMITATION OF LIFE old-women houses literally standing in their foot-bath of river water, was somebody’s chance to create a colony of new homes. Her own. Virginia Eden's. At least a dozen of homes. As Eden said: “somebody’s chance to reap the easy rewards of starting a bright new fad in a city that loved to succumb to them.” What a chancel Simultaneously, as on a thunderclap, their eyes, hers and Virginia’s, met. “I knew you’d see it! Anybody with imagination would! That’s what makes it such a dangerous idea, though. It is a miracle nobody has seen it before. This block, darling, can be purchased for under two hundred thousand dollarsl We can start something this town will remember, All we need is one bell-sheep to come in on it and watch the rest follow. I know a woman now-client of mine, you’ll know her name right ofF-who is ripe to sell her Fifth Avenue house and start a colony somewhere that looks as if it’s for fad and for fun, instead of for thrift. Can’t you just see the layout? Homes and gardens and the right ten or twelve people to make it the smart thing to up and move away from the beaten old trails, and us in on the ground floor of it all, with our own homes costing us not a cent!” Bea couldl "It isn’t really my idea! Except it took me to pounce on it. A girl in my cosmetic department-poor dear, she died last month-got the pneumonia and I came here to see her. She lived in the fourth house, there to the right. Had a hack room-can’t see it from here, but one facing the river and the Island. She saw me looking out of the dirty window to¬ ward the river, with the boats moving up and down it and the bridge arching it all. ‘Somebody ought to buy up these tenements, Miss Eden,’ she said, ‘build homes with gardens, and start a fad. Its like the Thames in London, where I was born, That put the idea in my head. I’ve been back every day since. Poor Claire, I didn’t speak any more about it to her before she died, not knowing how sick she was. Figured there would be time to give her a share of credit. Meant to give her a room of her own in my new house overlooking tire IMITATION OF LIFE 161 New York Thames. She’s gone now. But you’re here. Are you interested?” Was she! The thought of this real estate venture, whetted by her own previous forays into rentals and leases of her various B. Pullman sites, came rolling at her like a tide. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar proposition! Two hun¬ dred ... Never, never be overwhelmed. Things need not be what habit made them seem. There was a time when even con¬ templation of the scale on which she now did business would have floored her. Never be overwhelmed. Stretch the mind. The imagination. The will. Find a way. Here was a project into which the imagination flowed like wine into its carafe. Here was Jessie’s home, about to be born. Here, then, in this row of frowning witch-like houses, was the meaning of every¬ thing that had gone before. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. Well, venture everything! CHAPTER 29 TllliUE WERE TO COME PERIODS, DURING the three years of the labored and reluctant fruition of this project, when, laid low of what she was to call her chronic Fishrow headache, she was to wish herself well out of it. At least so it seemed to her when time and time again circum¬ stances attendant to Fishrow were to take on what seemed a spirit of vengeful design to obstruct. Actually, however, dur¬ ing their darkest density, she was to refuse two offers to buy her out. One from the firm of architects at work on the plans for reconstruction; the other from the very building loan association that was helping float the enterprise. Now indeed wore money worries, what with her business up for collateral during fifteen long months of uncertainty, and staggering and unforeseen impedimenta to teach her the terror of the squatting of sleepless nights upon her. Yet even these were subordinate to the devilishness of certain realtor- IMITATION OF LIFE 162 tions of the human equation, that were to come in a terrible sort of dawning. The single-fisted years had been one matter. One schemed, fretted, maneuvered into action on the one-man plan. But suddenly now, in this partnership, with all the new and vast corollary interests, so vast that they threatened, there for a time, to engulf her own original enterprises, there began her grim education of how men sharpened their teeth for throat- to-throat contest in business. Virginia Eden’s teeth were as pointed and polished and incisive as a terrier’s, and with them, when she sank, she drew blood. They were to sink, during those nervous, harried, and yet withal adventurous months, into B. Pullman, drawing from her blood of disillusionment and almost defeat. ‘‘I feel,” she told Flake during this period of critical in¬ tensity in her affairs, and when it seemed to her she had reason to regret the hour she had ever laid eyes on Fishrow, “as if I am doing business by ear. I hire expensive lawyers, I listen here, I listen there, but in the end I go ahead on my own judgment. Such as it is. Such as it is. Such as it isl” “I’ve faith in it,” he said. They were seated at lunch at Sweet’s Inn, and she felt herself flood with color and the world jump. “I couldn’t go on if you didn’t.” It was the most emotionally freighted remark she had ever made to him. They served at Sweet’s little canary-bud bath¬ tubs of pickled beets before the arrival of the meal proper. She began to jab into hers, spattering little crimson (hops on the tablecloth. “Look what I’ve done,” she said, feeling the same crimson mounting to her eyes, “Technically,” he said, resuming, in a voice smooth as glass, where they had left off, “Eden is within her rights. The contract provides, corporation shall not be responsible for unsuspected fissures, rock formations,, underlying ob¬ structions.'. In the end, and at risk of financial jeopardy that for a period of five months threatened to dash her onto the rocks IMITATION OF LIFE 163 1 of bankruptcy, it was B. Pullman who swung loans and terms to enable her to buy out the Virginia Eden share of Fishrow, Inc,, at a top price which was handsome justification for all the beautician’s prophecies, that windswept November day when the two of them had viewed the properties from her sedan, It was a close and to-the-swiftest race, with two sets of expensive lawyers chuckling over the spectacle of Virginia Eden and B. Pullman waging a fierce, amiable bargain with apparent satisfaction to both sides concerned: Apparent satis¬ faction to both sides concerned, because even with knowl¬ edge that the final terms were mulcting ones, and that the Eden profit on the investment was netting her eighty-two per cent, there was elation and relief in feeling herself out from under a partnership that had become something worse than irksome, free now to swing this project with the single- handed precision of one who has always walked alone, The stand taken by Virginia Eden with regard to the need to suppress the fact of an immense rock stratification running under part of the property where important excavations were planned, was what had thrown the pall of incompati¬ bility over the partnership. Division of legal opinion inclined toward the Eden attitude. The Fishrow block had been pur¬ chased under what might or might not have been the knowl¬ edge of the former owners concerning the presence of rock. Legally, it seemed fair enough to pass on that suppositional ignorance, even though these disclosures threatened to dou¬ ble, if not triple, the cost of building to those who had bought lots. All within their rights, and, as Virginia Eden had not been slow to reiterate, shrewd and legitimate busi¬ ness. In fact, the gamble, the zest, the quick-wittedness of big business lay in just such sleight-of-hand. Besides, the type of person who had been induced, mainly by Eden, to buy m on the novel project, could afford to take the additional financial punishment. Perhaps. But stubbornly, doggedly, threateningly, B. Pull¬ man opposed the suppression of the fact of the rock stratum, “There is a difference between integrity and just out-and- out dumb business,” an equally resistant Eden fought back. “If anybody asks me if there is a rock stratum below the 164 IMITATION OF LIFE point of present excavation, I’ll say yes. But I won’t go out of my way to advertise the fact, and neither would one single shrewd business man of my acquaintance.” “I’m not saying you aren’t within your rights, Virginia. It’s just that we don’t feel the same about it. I’ve never done things quite that way.” “Babe-in-the-wood luck may desert you at any moment, . you know.” “I realize that. But just the same, there is something in me won’t let me see that corner lot going to your Mrs. Kan Casamajor, I don’t care how many millions she has, without letting her know the foundation for a house the size she plans is going to cost her about four times more than we originally estimated for her. “Darling Exhibit-A, chances are she’ll never even know j the difference! Do you think she stews over her account- books the way you and I do?" "Perhaps not, but that doesn’t change my role in the trans¬ action,” ■ ? “Starting Fishrow is just a fad for her. She’ll live in her house a few years and then pass it on to one of her children. But to us it means everything.” ; “Neither would I do it to Hedda Owen. At least she has had to earn her fortune.” “Preaching thrift to an actress! What does she know ex¬ cept that as long as it’s there it’s there to be spent! Why do you think I, who haven’t personally given a facial in years, made Owen the talk of the town in twenty treatments, if it wasn’t to knead into her flesh and bones the idea of Fish- row?” “Then why, if it makes no difference-” “Because where you and I might not hack out for tho sake of the extra money that rock strata will cost, these women, once they learn about it, even though ordinarily they wouldn’t ever miss the difference, arc rich enough and famous enough to make themselves cheap for the sake of a few thousand dollars. And without Casamajor and Owen, where do we stand for making Fishrow the fad of the town. Oh no, you don’t do this to inel” IMITATION OF LIFE 165 They won’t renege on us, Virginia, even if they know the truth. Neither will the Baileys nor a single lot-holder.” ‘Maybe. But we don’t take that chance!” “I do.” Their eyes met. “You do it alone, then,” How calmly and irrefutably that decision settled itself, How outside herself. There was a sureness, and underneath all, as she and this small-faced, determined little nugget of a Virginia Eden faced one another across a directors’ table a_ sense brightness, that had dictated so many of her pre¬ vious and lesser decisions. Something stubborn and sure held out in her, even in the " face of what seemed irrefutable evidence. Eden was right enough. No use pretending, even to her¬ self that years in the conflict of the business world had not taught her that. Caveat mptor -let the buyer beware-was phraseology she had picked up among the marts of men. What was not specifically guaranteed was not guaranteed at all. Unless ethically, and the great ethics of business, as you approached its upper reaches, was to be legally protected. Mrs. Kan Casamajor, oil magnate’s widow, whose initial purchase of the large corner lot and the adjoining one was to start off the Fishrow project as one of the smart new residential fads of the town, might undoubtedly be the sort to raise hue and cry should certain facts of the rocky lay of her land reveal themselves to her. But in the end, legally helpless, she would take her punishment. So would they all. Pullman, facing Virginia Eden across the long table of a private room their bank had thrown open to them for this hurried discussion, realized this. Realized this ns well as she had known, live years before, that a certain interpretation or a clause in a contract with a firm of candy-box manufac¬ turers would, had she availed herself of the loophole, have saved her eleven thousand dollars, Here it was again, the curious, rather frightening rigidity of her adherence to certain mysterious and unplotted tenets of her behavior. “We’ve come to a deadlock, Virginia,” “Well, what are you going to do about it?” 166 IMITATION OF LIFE “Buy you out.” “Good. Pay me the percentage of profit I’ve figured has got to pay for my initial genius in this affair, and the Fishrow baby is yours, hook, bait, and sinker. I’m never interested in anything that looks sure-fire, anyway. And besides, my darling, oh, my darling, I’m in lovel He doesn’t know it yet. In fact, he doesn’t even know I exist. But you can see for yourself—how can I let my business interfere with my life . . . ?” If only, if only, if only, she thought, smiling back at her brilliantly—if only, if only, if only mine were the kind of life with which my business could interfere—if only— “Make me an offer, Pullman, remembering that I come high, but within reason to friends-” “As one business man to another, name your price, first and last.” “Two hundred thousand buys me out, first price, last price, so help me God.” “Piracy. But said. Done.” CHAPTER 30 Christmases, Easters, and Tuankkc.iv* ings, except the last two of them, when she had visited her roommate in Baltimore, Jessie came home. The summer vacations of her tenth, eleventh, and twelfth years, however, were spent in the Switzerland summer branch of Miss Winch’s school, along with about twelve of the boarding girls, who wore escorted by Miss Winch herself and a Miss Askenasi, junior member of the highly successful firm known as Miss Winch’s Hudson School for Girls. Admission into Miss Winch’s school had been something of an achievement. With no prestige other than a'business one, which in the nature of the case might have been a de¬ terrent, the by no means simple circumstance of entrance to Winch’s was achieved in a manner that mattered with in¬ tensity to Bea, because it seemed to place her under the first tribunal of her young daughter’s judgment, IMITATION OF LIFE 167 It had long since become evident to everyone concerned thaHhe problem of the day-by-day propinquity of Peola and Jessie was one that would no longer keep laid. One of us has got to get t’other away from t’other, Miss Bea. Dein two chillun is turnin’ black an’ white on us now. m earnest. Your chile cain’t go startin’ in the same public school, tagged on to by mah nigger child-’tuin’t no good for No argument to that. The time had come for the parting of two tiny ways which had converged successfully enough up to that point. b "You doan’ want no public school for youm, nohow, Miss Bea. Amt you affordin’ one of them fancy boardin’-schools for her? A small neighborhood girl who walked with her nurse in the park and sometimes invited Jessie to tea parties off minia¬ ture hne china in her own elaborate nursery, had already inculcated into a pair of laid-back and listening little-girl ears the magic of the name Miss Winch’s School. It was during those days of need of decision and action regarding boarding-school for Jessie, that Bea, rather than risk direct application at Winch’s, keyed herself up to a piece of aggressive letter writing not easy for her, Mv dear Mns, Grenoble: I read of your activities with much pleasure in the Atlantic City papers, I wonder if you remember me and my first B. Pullman booth for the First Church Fair of which you were patron many years ago. You recall, we left cards at one another’s home. My little daughter is quite a young lady by now, and I desire to enter her in Miss Winch’s Hudson School for Girls. Excellent references are necessary and, knowing yours would be that, I am, for old times’ sake, request¬ ing that you indorse my application. Thanking you in advance, my clear Mrs. Grenoble, for any assistance you may give me in obtaining entrance for my daughter into a school of such fine rating as Miss Winch’s, I remain 168 IMITATION OF LIFE The reply, which immediately she began to await as some¬ thing which was to determine so much of her status with her child, came with alacrity and enthusiasm. So, when she was seven, a rather lanky, knob-kneed little girl, whose first blondness had dimmed into a freckled sort of eclipse from which it was to emerge again, was entered as boarding student in a school that was practically to mo¬ nopolize her, body and spirit, for the next decade of her life. At the period when the circumstance that Jessie was almost the identical height of her mother was still a shock and a surprise to them both, there was not yet much to indicate die Jessie to come. Gone was that quality of golden childishness which had once made it a delight for Delilah to appear with her showy charge among the nursemaids in the park, leaving only a low glow of pallor over a child almost conspicuously a gawk. For the several years of this transition, Jessie, as Flake once put it, teasing her, lmng from the joints, knees and elbows dominating her young weediness. There was not so much length, as looseness, of limb; a predisposition, too, not unlike her mother’s, had been toward premature growth, except that there was something slab-like and boyish to her kind of slimness. Tender and tiny were these early maturities of Jessie, only half awake, reluctant there in the lathe-like flatness of her pallid body, with its budding breasts slow to emerge from the dream of sleeping flesh. Even at fourteen, in her manner was something of the startled unease of a boy in a roomful of strangers—half shy, half rebellious, wholly inarticulate. Her blue eyes with their extraordinarily large black pupils darted, her breathing came short, and always her head was half thrown back as if to give ready momentum to imminent flight. A startled-looking little girl, as if her ears were laid back to sound as slight as the falling of a leaf, her eyes wide apart and unquiet, her expression listening, her attention cocked, like a squirrels. Time and time again the thought rolled over her mother: The child looks surprised about something. Perhaps she was born with some of my surprise that anything so different— so-so like a bird, could be her father’s daughter. Or, for that matter, mine. We never imagined things together. We didn’t know how. IJs-to have begot her! IMITATION OF LIFE 169 Strange were the feelings she engendered in a mother whose imagination had been unprepared for her, It was like holding a bright foreign bird captive in the hand and feeling it breathe fast of all sorts of fears and uncertainties, and then loving to release it and watch it hop exploring^ around the house and sometimes actually come perch upon the shoulder, And as she grew older, and her visits home from school more and more intermittent, especially when the summers in Switzerland became almost part of her school routine, that quality seemed out over her more and more. She talked so little; so little that her mother came to have secret awe of her silence. I am one of those mothers who isn’t supposed to under¬ stand. There are probably teachers, that Miss Askenasi or Miss Winch, in whom she confides. She is more at ease, no doubt, in the homes of her school chums, She never brings them here. She will some day, though, when I give her the proper background. I wonder if I am educating her away from me. That will be a terrible thing, and yet I will go right on doing it. I wonder what she thinks of me, Or if she thinks of me. After all, in my world I stand for something. Wonder just how she feels about that. She never wants things like other children. Almost as if it embarrasses her to be be¬ holden to me. I want to give her. Those are the things that draw parents and children together. Giving. If only there were something she terribly wanted, The right kind of home to which to bring her chums? She never complains, Only doesn’t bring them. If only she were of a temperament to come to me, wanting things. We’re so formal. It would even be darling if she would nag. Perhaps I am just one of those tired business men to her, wanting to buy my way into her affections. I’m away from home so much. Must seem terribly preoccupied by outside worries, Why, Delilah is a better mother to. her Peola than I am to mine! Next year T am going to start a regular campaign to spend more time with her. Next year- It was just about this time, though, when Jessie was her stand-offish fourteen, that she did something that amounted to a darling and tremendous trifle. Home for the Easter holidays, a little strange about the 170 IMITATION OF LIFE house, non-communicative, except with Delilah, whom she followed from room to room; or with her grandfather, who, VI even while a babe herself, she had babied, she suddenly, out of a clear sky, began what to Bea turned out to be the de- y\ lightful inauguration of addressing her as “B. Pullman.” “Hello, B. Pullman!” she had cried, kissing and greeting i Bea the’evening that, appalled, overwhelmed, and almost ! unbearably excited, she had entered the apartment after catching Virginia Eden’s proposition on the ily. A dozen methods of procedure for raising the initial down¬ payment of good-will moneys, mental muneuverings for col¬ lateral for loans, were pressing against the hot and troubled inner surface of her forehead as she turned her latchkey that night, conscious that what she needed was to forage, face down, into a bed Delilah would turn back for her, and con¬ front,’ in a spangled darkness and concentration created by tightly squeezed eyes, the gorgeous dilemma into which a stubbornness of purpose, over which she scorned to have no particular control, had crowded her. j Fishrow in her lap! Wanting it with all her intensity, she : < nevertheless felt pinioned, appalled, frightened by it. This ■ dazzling project of Fishrow! As if already the arrival of her child for the Easter holidays had not been relegated to a . i corner of her mind by circumstances that kept nudging and crowding at her for attention. On top of her latest determination to open a Pullman in j the Wall Street district, with a lease ponding for precious - footage in the financial district, with Flake in Detroit: fol¬ lowing up an important location lead there, and the final payment of a twenty-eight-thousand-dollar note to Frazier v Bank to be met that week, hero an additional something had : developed, of her own stubborn volition, it is true, that stag- | gered her. Partnership acquisition of a good parcel of land, its sub¬ sequent subdivision and resale under highly restricted and profitable conditions, was one thing; lone-band operation an¬ other. No two ways about it, whatever of considerable and canny acumen she, Bea, had been able to bring to the im¬ mensely difficult task of the purchase of a block of individu¬ ally owned lots, with prices mounting as suspicion of a pro- IMITATION OF LIFE 171 moting project developed, Eden’s indispensable contribution had been the important list of the right names she had been able to commandeer as purchasers of building lots in Fishrow. Twelve lots in all, eight of them, including the double one to Mrs. Kan Casamajor, had been sold according to Eden’s insatiable lust for names. Due to certain perceptions in Eden, perceptions entirely lacking in Bea, the quite remarkable balance of at least two of the town’s foremost social and professional signatures had been appended to Fishrow deeds. To swing so growingly important a project alone from this point on! , You play a lone hand best,” Flake had repeatedly told her, after her involvement with Eden had started to show up fissures in their common ground. “It is sex o’clock in the garden of Eden. It is just plain six o’clock in yours. One of you will have to get out.” Well, it had been Eden. Walking into her home that evening, weighted with this new aspect of an old fear of that perpetual bugaboo, her aloneness, it seemed little short of blessed dispensation to be met by the lovely phenomenon of her young daughter, thawed, of her own sweet will, into the sweet nonsense of: Hello, B. Pullman I What’s the use of having a national insti¬ tution for a mother unless you cry it out loud!” Jessie’s favors, when they came, could be quite lovely. Her over-consideration for her grandfather was one of them. '" During what was to amount, from this time on, to a practi¬ cally sustained period of absences at schools in and out of America, not a week was to pass without some token, from a postcard to a package, finding its way to the old gentleman. “It’s so pitiful to me that some poor quirk in Grandfather’s brain denies him the happiness of loving you,” she told her mother once, a remark which Bea was to keep polished by constantly turning it over in her memory, It is doubtful if he was ever to place quite definitely in his brain the-identity of his granddaughter, except that his eye loved to rove after her, much in the fashion it would follow a mote of sunlight dancing along a wall. Her brightness moved and laughed and danced, like light. There was a male 172 imitation of life nurse, now, for the old gentleman. John, a taciturn middle- aged Soot who was to remain with him until Mr. Chipley’s demise some sixteen years later in Helsingfors, Finland, of all places, at the age of ninety-two. Jessie’s holidays meant long hours of relief tor John, while she wheeled the sack-likc figure of her grandlatl.er in the sunny lanes of Central Park, or, with the serious ui.anmscd face of a preoccupied adult, cut rows of paper dolls for him. Alas they meant these holidays, the most curious exhibition of class consciousness between her and her erstwhile play¬ mate of all hours, Peola, which Jessie now tried to meet with too much show of affability and the dark child with loo much sullen reticence. It was for Delilah, however that she re¬ served an almost demonstrative adoration; Delilah, who in turn paid her the perfect tribute of reciprocal devotion by emulating in Peola, as far as her sense of propriety dared, Jessie’s clothes, hair-dress, and color schemes. Demonstrativeness toward her mothei was snflieu oily late to make the episode of the "hello 13. Pullman" memorable. Extraordinary the quality of formal restraint between these two. Always had been, To the mother, who in all her life¬ time had almost literally refused her nothing, her requests came timidly, if at all, and then usually by way of Delilah. “Delilah, you ask the B. Pullman for me, when slm comes home tonight, if I may spend Christmas holidays with my roommate, Madelaine Stanhope, at their camp up in the Adirondack.” “Delilah, you ask the ft. Pullman for me if I mayn’t have one of those fur skating-jackets the girls aie wearing.” “Delilah, it would help a lot if you would talk up with the B. Pullman the idea of another Switzerland summer for me.” “Law’, chile-honey, why (loan you up and warm your mammy’s heart by askin’ yourself. She never did. Or rather, she never could. The inhibiting something between these two kept them timid one of the other. Sometimes it seemed to the mother, thwarted and yet adoring, adored and yet thwarting, that if literally she could hold the yellow head of this girl close to her for as long as she wanted-and that would be days, weeks; hold it as long IMITATION OF LIFE 173 as she wanted-that something inside her, the something that- hungered, would reach out and draw this child of her being back again into the warmth of a body that yearned for it. “You and your chile is too polite to each other, Miss Bea. What you need to git acquainted is some good old hollering Pests, lak me and mine. We yells our lovin’. You two just hurts yourn.” True, i It hurt terribly, to be shy of the child you loved. It made seem doubly precious any indication of thaw in her. “Now is that nice? To address your decrepit old mother that way? What put it into your head, Puss? Where is your respect for the aged? Hello, Bea Pullman! The idea!” “Well, you are, aren’t you, everybody’s Bea Pullman, Why not mine? Every time one of the girls or a teacher learns for the first time you’re my mother, their eyes turn cartwheels!” The thought smote her for the moment that their eyes might perform the phenomenon referred to, because of the indefinable snobbery that exists in all school worlds. In her own time, even back in the Atlantic City public school, chil¬ dren of mothers who “worked” were in a subtly relegated class. But none of that here. There was pride in Jessie’s voice. Jessie was admiring her. “I. wonder, child, if you wouldn’t like to come down one day, while you’re home on this vacation, and see our new offices?” “You bet!” Actually the child seemed to want it! If only there were time tomorrow. She would walk her through the offiees-not exactly to show off, but for the girls and boys to have a look at her in her natty little velveteen suit, long black-silk legs, blond hair escaping her velveteen cap and flowing over her shoulders. Tomorrow! Dread of it came surging over her like an engulfing wave. The very dawn of it would be tangled with problems almost too staggering to be faced. Too staggering -yet exciting—yet alluring. “Hurry, Delilah, my dinner, I’ve heavy going tomorrow.” "Here it is, Miss Honey-Boa, pipin’ hot, and I’ll turn your bed down.” How well Delilah knew! Hours ahead face down into her 174 IMITATION OF LIFE pillow, lying there fully dressed, concentration pinioned, the darkness soaring in Catherine wheels befoie her squeezed eyes, until, finally, exhausted, she rose only in order to go to Her child had been sweet tonight. Something seemed to have pushed up through the fresh young earth of her. A bud¬ ding of something that seemed to make her shyly but surely aware of Bea. One must follow up this something so sweetly and newly begun between them. But at the moment, so much more so even than usual, there was heavy going ahead. Meanwhile, Jessie must wait. CHAPTER 31 Ultimately, it became noised about that B. Pullman Company, Inc., had gained exclusive control of the Fishrow enterprise. What actually happened was the reverse, because for a period of over three years B. Pullman, Inc., became literally a mortgage, held as collateral by Fishrow, a complicated deal ' which was to harness that period in financial exactions that {took heavy toll of peace of mind. ■ It was not that subsequent developments were not to more than justify this strange leap into the dark of Virginia Eden’s proposition and the subsequent mortgaging of the B. Pullman enterprises. They were, and with brilliance. But it was that sense of the suspended private ownership of her short string of standardized B. Pullmans that had grown, as it were, from the intimate flesh of the palm of her own hand, which kept unease her running-mate. There were urge and hurry, presence of fear and dread of disaster, over these years, due chiefly to the involvements which complicated her state of mind as well as her stale, of affairs. There simply could be no peace to the period of the sus¬ pended ownership of her business. Fear hung like a dagger IMITATION OF LIFE 175 ; into the mortgaged days. Immature business instinct inoti- | vated these fears. Her experience in a fluctuating commercial world dominated by loan and notes, mortgage and collateral, | did little to come to the rescue of these amateurish anxieties. If With the passing of her sense of complete ownership of her I Pullmans, persistent unease was born. It lay on her heart, it motivated her days, it drove her strength; captured for its own purpose every ounce of her vitality. Needlessly to the extent that it did, because from jj the very first, events practiced conformity to her pattern for jj them. jj Mrs. Kan Casamajor, social dowager whose fancy at sev- 1 enty-six had been captured by Virginia Eden’s carefully I massaged-in idea of a new residential center removed from the usual restricted area of the socially mighty, took the news of the serious rock strata impediment across the most 'k important excavating section of her property, so casually that she did not even trouble to reply to tile report of the sur¬ veyors’ findings. It is doubtful if she did more than toss it haif-rcad along with other matter pertaining to her enter¬ taining new pastime. Already, with the new venture in its incipiency, the dow- J ager Mrs. Kan Casamajor had become the subject of pub¬ licity and speculation. Let it cost. The new venture was proving amusing. Miss Owen, influenced chiefly by a turn in her own do¬ mestic affairs, which was ultimately to result in divorce, de- ■ manded, upon learning of the additional expenditure of A. * thousands to he occasioned by the difficulties of excavation, k release from the transaction, a junior member of the architec- tural Ann which designed the external layout of the block, I buying in immediately. I Within three weeks after the announcement of the Kan 9 Casamajor purchase, what amounted to two city blocks of I lots had been sold to persons likely to keep to the mood of 1 Virginia Eden’s original project, and on a basis calculated to 1 yield B, Pullman her property free. Making up the carefully I planned motley of Fishrow were a Wall Street broker, in- I tematiormily known as a turfman; a spinster, with a lower 9 New York. Street named after her forebears; the grand- 1 176 IMITATION OF LIFE daughter of the dowager and her artist husband; a song¬ writer who had married the daughter of a bishop; Ned and Lyne Esty, a brother and sister of local social and athletic fame; the junior architect; and to B. Pullman's amused de¬ light,' the remaining plot to Virginia Eden, at a price none other than the one she herself had originally determined it must yield. Incidentally, long after the blue-print version of Fishvow was to become brick and mortar reality in the finest Colonial tradition, one lot only, Number Nine, Boa’s own, was to re¬ main empty, filled in, fenced in, and waiting, for the first- spadeful of dirt to be turned toward the erection of her house. Almost, it seemed, before her senses were prepared to re¬ ceive the full impact of the phenomenon of Fishrow, it had begun to be a moving concern of clearance of tenements, wreckage, blasting, excavation, blue prints, brick and stone. Fishrow, with the exception of her own well-dreamed house, which must now await the easing of the great financial pressure of these mortgaged years, was almost too easily becoming reality. Every growing aspect of it never ceased to amaze and stun her. The meeting of the stockholders to agree to the last detail upon the architectural stipulations of Fishrow. ’Hie dowager’s handsome gift of a pair of Vermont marble and |limestone gates, as portals to Fishrow Gardens. The negotia¬ tion with the city of New York for certain riparian rights concerned with boat-landing at the base of Fishrow Gardens. The decision of the stockholders to inaugurate their own steam-launch service between Fishrow, Wall Street, and points intermediate. Promptly this enterprise, which B. Pullman found herself swinging single-handed, became a publicized, not to say spec¬ tacular, project; residential land values along a hitherto ig¬ nored edge of the city started rapid response to inflation. Almost immediately promoters began buying up adjacent rows of tenements, none of which, however, could claim the peculiar river-front advantages of Fishrow. Here was a ground-floor achievement. A Wall Street jour¬ nal carried this quip: IMITATION OF LIFE 177 It is not generally known that the B. Pullman of Waffle and Fishrow fame is a woman. The name B. Pullman, of course, is generally known, with every indication of be¬ coming more so. Have you seen the latest B. Pullman on Broadway near Trinity Church? The last word of its kind. There are now twelve distributed between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlantic City, Detroit, Buffalo, New Haven, Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City, and Tulsa. Watch this. Also watch Fishrow. And most of all, watch B. Pullman. Here it was, happening all right, all about her. The suc¬ cess of her success. She, who had scarcely been aware of the woman-suffrage movement as it came to fruition, impor¬ tuned now on all sides to address business and professional groups of her sex, eager to take cue from her; she to whom everything outside the home was interference with the or¬ dered rightness of the dear private things that mattered, Achievement, built upon the shoestring of those days when the dimension of her dream was no larger than an ultimate bungalow at Ventnor on an income which was to be wheedled from the back doors of Atlantic City! The piling of those days into weeks, into months, into years until now ... Miss Bea, said Delilah, after John, the male nurse, had read her the item in the Wall Street journal, “dot’s grand, but dar’s something powerful lonesome-soundin’ about it.” “What do you mean?” Outta all dem men down dar in Wall Street, supportin’ and lovin’ deir wimrnin, you ain’t one of ’em.” “What under the sun kind of an idea is that?” “I want some lovin’ for you, honey-some man-lovin’.” “Delilah!” *Yes, wasnt no slipperance of de tongue. Man-lovin’ was what I said. All dis here giftin’ us upper and upper is all right, but ’taint gittin’ mah child nawthin’ for herself.” “Why, Delilah] Hush!” She felt hit. As if suddenly she had walked into the edge of a door standing open in the dark. As if there had been an accident and this was her first moment after the crash. 178 IMITATION OF LIFE “Ain’t nothin’ wrong in what I done said, Miss Bea! After all dese years, I want some man-lovin’ for mah chile. . ^ •” “Delilah, I’ve never heard you talk like this before. It’s not nice. It’s vulgar. . . _ ■ “Right kind of man-lovin’ aint vulgar, honey. Its de Lawd’s patent for makin enough babies to keep de world goin’, wid enough left over for wars and cyclones and drown¬ in’ and failin’ off de tops of buildin’s. . . .” “I’ve had my share of that sort of thing. “Man-lovin’? No, you ain’t, honey. You jes’ know you ain’t. I doan’ know nothin’ about Mr. Pullman, honey. You ain’t never mentioned him much. I ain’t nevah asked, knowin’ mah place. But I’ve seen his picture, honey. You ain’t nevah had your share. Nothin’ lak your ^ share. You doan’ know nothin’. It ain’t in your eyes, honey.” The thought flashed through her that sometimes her eyes felt like the carved ones that kept sculpture such a dead art t0 “IV jes’ an ole nigger woman, honey, but I’s had it and I’s done wid it, but I’s had it while it lasted. I’s laid wid a no-’count nigger, knowin’ I was no moh to him dan a washin- macbine and a ironin’-board dat he married to save ever havin’ to shuffle a bone again. But in lovin’ dat no-’count, Is had de t’ing dat ain’t come up in your eyes yet. And knowin dat, I wants mah Miss Honey-Bea to have it. No matter what ('you got to pay, it’s worth it. Doan’ wait too long, honey. . Cotcli it!” , , _ . ' , ' Cotch it! Her relentless pursuit did seem to imply the overtaking of something. Of what? Cotch it! Cotch security, home, opportunity for her child, Cotch itl Cotch life. Suc¬ cess.' Fishrow. B. Pullmans. More B. Pullmans. Detroit. Philadelphia. Chicago. New Haven. New York. Kansas City. Springfield, Massachusetts. With still more Springfields in the offing to conquer, what with Flake already casting his location eye over the Springfield of Illinois. Cotch it! Round black faces as nearly as possible in the image of Delilah shin¬ ing over the waffle irons of the cities of a nation. Maple-sugar hearts. Mail-order shipments of more and more gross of them. Gray-squirrel coat for Jessie. Fishrow for Jessie. Switzerland for Jessie. Success. Cotch itl More, bigger, and better Pull¬ IMITATION OF LIFE 179 mans. Man-lovin’. Cotch ill Dickery, dickery dock, there was that little fugitive thought that, like the mouse, ran up t ie clock. Only the clock was her spine, stinging to the scut¬ tling thrill. Man-lovin’. That dream had been dreamed du¬ biously and lay for what it was worth in the small sealed casket of her dimming yesterdays. Within it, the image of Mr. Pullman was dust. Sometimes, on those rare occasions when she attempted to try and piece together her memories ot ms features, his precisions, his habits of speech, his heavy- breathing habits of passion, his gaitered heaviness of tread the bits of love’s young dream, lay squashed into that dust’ nor would they revive into pattern. Cotch it? Gone! Tlie act of teaching Jessie the final clause of her nightly : prayer had been little more than a mental gesture. “God bless my mama and my gramp and Delilah and Peola and dear gramma and papa in heaven.” The mere thought of the dear dust of Adelaide Chipley lying in the small plot of Atlantic City cemetery, beside the decorous remains of Mr, Pullman, was tender to tears, But somehow, his memory could not seem more than a small pebble pressing the memory but faintly, the heart not at all. In just such proportion as he disintegrated into featureless, then faceless dust in the memory, the need to resurrect his image for the growing Jessie sporadically presented itself, The child had remained uncurious but politely attentive to the cabinet-size photograph which her mother took occa¬ sion to hold before her from time to time. “Jessie, I am going to have a copy of this photograph of your father made and framed for your room at school.” Or, “Jessie, it is twelve years ago today that God called your dear father to rest.” Once when she was six, her reply indicated no relevance of idea to the theme. “Did you shave my pap?” "Pap? Who is he?” “Pap is my papa, Delilah calls papas pap.” “Never mind what Delilah calls him. You are to say papa, or better still, father-dear,” “Did you shave my papa-dear, the way you shave Gramp?” 130 IMITATION OF LIFE "No, dear. Your father was not ill and helpless. He shaved himself.” “Did my pap spit, like Mr. Vr/itelW “No, Jessie. Your father was not the sort of man to chew tobacco,” “Did my pap-” _ . . ... “Father-dear! Now say it after Mother, Fath-cf-dear! "Faw-ther de-ar!” , u n n It had not been easy to keep mental image of Mi. 1 oilman hung in either the child’s or her own gallery of portraits From the very beginning "Grandma had tripped lightly from the fastidious sills of Jessie’s little lips. Not so, Fath-er dC "Man-lovin’. That chapter is closed, Delilah.” CHAPTER 32 Without anyone knowing it, except the strange little crypt herself, Pcola, at eight, had "passed.” By one of those feats of circumstance that seem to cere¬ brate and conspire, one Pcola Cilia Johnston, entered into a neighborhood public school one morning by B. Pullman, as she paused long enough in her morning rush to enro l the child, was actually to pursue two years of daily attendance, unsuspected of what she chose not to reveal. In a public-school system where the northern practice of non-segregation was common, it must have been a simple, if coolly calculated, little procedure, for the eight-year-old Pcola to take her place without question among the children, never by word or deed associating herself with the handful of Negro pupils in the class. , Only in a city whose density of population could make possible so fanciful an anonymity could this child’s small ruse have been possible. Be that as it may, for over a period of twenty-eight months, living within a three-block radius of a public school made up of district children, the fact of Pcola Cilia Johnston’s race remained unbeknown to schoolmates' and teachers alike. IMITATION OF LIFE 181 As Delilah, with her face fallen into the pleats of a trou¬ bled mastiff, reiterated over and over again: “If I’d V only known all dem months dat my chile was a-cheatin’ on color! Swear to de good Lawd who is mah Saviour, Miss Bea I’d a turned in mah grave if I was dead. Cheatin’ on color befoh all dem teachers and chillun. Cheatin’ on color jes’ because de Lawd eft out a little drop of black dye in de skin dat covers up her black blood. How kin I git mah baby out of cruefyin herself over de color of de blood de Lawd seen fit m His wisdom to give her. Lawd, have mercy on mah chiles soul Miss Bea! She cain’t pass. Nobody cain’t pass. Cods watcliin. God’s watchin’ for to cotch her” The manner of the upset of Peola’s little apple-cart came ultimately by way of an incident treacherously outside cal¬ culation. . A su dden freak rainstorm, little short of cloudburst, pre¬ cipitating itself into the midafterrioon of a day that had begun in sunshine, played such havoc in parts of the city that ; streets were flooded, cellars and subways inundated, and at certain intersections traffic, paralyzed, stood hub-high in water. Alarmed as she viewed a wind-swept, tree-ravaged section of Central Park, Delilah, in a cape that gave her-the appear¬ ance of a slightly asthmatic rubber tent, set out for the school- house with galoshes and mackintosh for Peola. I starts out for her, hurryin’ to git dar before school closin’. Her pap died from bronchitis he cotched in jes’ such a storm. When I seen dem trees twistin’ and beared water roarin’ down de streets like Noah’s flood, I started footin’ it fast as mah laigs would carry me for mah chile, knowin’ her pap’s weakness in de lungs. ... “Miss Bea, all of a sudden, standin’ dar in de door of her schoolroom, askin’ for mah chile, sweat began to pour on me Ink it was rain outdoors. Dat Peola’s little face, sittin’ down dar in de middle of all dem Chilian's faces, was a-stickin’ up at me when I asked teacher for mah little gal, lak a little dead Chinaman’s. Mali baby turned seventy years old in dat schoolroom. . . . Lawd help her and Lawd help me to save her sinning little soul. ...” This was strangely and really quite terribly true. The 182 IMITATION OF LIFE straight-featured face of this child, Peola, had the look to it of hard opaque wax that might have stiffened in the mo¬ ment of trance and astonishment following the appearance of Delilah in that schoolroom, into something analogous to a Chinese masque with fear molded into it. Bea Pullman, walking into the typhoon of hysteria that followed the arrival home after the thunderbolt which had smashed a small universe to smithereens, heard the first commotion while riding up in the elevator. Facing Delilah in the center of the kitchen, her dark lips edged in a pale little lightening of jade green, was fury let loose sufficient to blast the small body that contained it. Low-pitched fury, grating along on a voice that was not a child’s voice. ... , “Bad mean old thing. Bad mean old devil. They didnt know. They treated me like white. I won’t ever go back. Bad mean old devil. I hate youl “0 Lawd! Oh LawdI saw a brown spider webbin ^down¬ ward this mornin’ and know’d mah chile was a-comin home brOwn-Q Lawd! ...” “Go away— youl Yoo-yoo—yooooool The words out of Peola’s fury became shrill intonations of the impotence of her rage, and finally with her two small frenzied fists she was beating against the bulwark of the body in the rain-glossed rubber cape, beating and beating, until her breath gave out and she fell shuddering and shivering to the kitchen floor, “May de Lawd,” said Delilah, stooping to pick her up as you would a plank, and standing there with her stiff burden outstretched like an offering, the black chinies of her eyes sliding up until they disappeared under her lids, something strangely supplicating in the blind and milk-white balls- “nmy de Lawd Jehovah, who loves us black and white alike, show mah baby de light, an’ help me forgit datjnah heart at clis minute lies inside me laic a ole broke teacup.” “Oil, my poor Delilah!-” “Poor Delilah ain’t no matter, Miss Honey-Bea. It’s poor Peola.” They wrapped her in warm cloths, with memory of meth¬ ods used in a previous attack similar to this, and chafed her IMITATION OF LIFE 183 long, slim carved-looking hands, and, despite, dissuading from Bea, there was a smelling muslin bag, with a rabbit foot attached, that Delilah kept waving before the small quiver¬ ing nostrils. “Dar’s shameweed in dat bag, and asfidity. Shame, mala baby. Lift de curse from off mah baby. Lawd, git de white horses drove out of her bood. Kill de curse-shame de curse her light-colored pap lef for his baby. Chase it, rabbit’s foot. Chase de wild white horses trampin’ on mah chile’s happi¬ ness. Chase em, shameweed. Chase ’em, rabbit’s foot “Delilah, that’s terrible! That’s wild!” “It's de white horses dot’s wild, a-swimmin’ in de blood of mah chile. Drive’em out Lawd. Drive ’em out, shameweed. it only I had a bit of snail water-” “Delilah, take away that horrid-smelling bag. Try this brandy-force the spoon between her lips-” But in the end the services of the physician, with offices on the ground floor of the apartment building, were hastily enlisted. “This child is in a state of nervous collapse. Has she had a shock?” “Yes, Doctor. A little upset at school.” "Look at that eye,” he said, rolling back the lid. “Rigid.” Poor Peola! “You have a highly nervous little organism here to deal with, madam. You know that?” “We do, Doctor.” “Public school?” “Yes”' “Remove her. Let her have instruction at home or at least where she will receive individual instruction. Get me a bowl of good hot water; Mammy, so I can immerse her feet and get some circulation started.” “Get the one from my room, Delilah.” “Is this your only child, madam?” “Why, Doctor, this is the daughter of the woman you just sent for the hot water! Peola is colored.” He screwed die top onto his thermometer, slid it into his waistcoat pocket, and reached for his bag. “I see. My error. Sometimes difficult to detect die light 184 IMITATION OF LIFE types. Keep her in bed overnight. She’ll be all right for school in the morning.” ■ .. , . . „ In the doorway he encountered Delilah with the bowl of steaming water. , , , “Innything else I kin do, Doctor, for to make her free of de spasms?” , . “Spank her out of them when you see them coming. Gently, of course. Then dose her with castor oil. She may not be so inclined then to go oil into them. “Ain’t you gonna put her into dis heah footbath I brung you, Doctor?” „ , ' . „ “A night’s rest will fix her up. j"Jood evening. “Miss Honey-Bea—what—how? “Dear, dear Delilah! • • . , But it was out of the wretchedness of this was bom one of the few desires Delilah could ever be inveigled into ex- Pr "Miss' Bea, I’d love it, when mail chile gits well, for to send her away to school like Miss Jessie. Not no boarding- school of course, but dar’s a colored school teacher m Wash¬ ington I used to work for could tell me whar I could find a private learnin’-school for mah baby. . . • _ Two weeks later, as boarder and pupil, Peola was installed in the home of Miss Abbie Deacon, daughter of a colored professor of mathematics at Howard University and herself a teacher in the public schools. CHAPTER 33 One aspect of the B. Pullmans was most pleasurable of all. Personal contacts, practically the only ones for which there had been time during the straining years, had grown out of the Eastern Seaboard Pullmans, chiefly New York and Atlan¬ tic City. • , ,, . , It started during the war. Tired doughboys, homesick troopers, regiments coming and going, formed the habit, IMITATION OF LIFE 185 ' dear to her, of making the Station B. Pullman and the one on Madison Avenue tiny and informal headquarters. Fen and ink and writing-paper were on hand; B. Pullman engraved stationery with the imprint of Delilah delighting m the upper right-hand corner. Mail was received and held for the soldier boy who chose to give B. Pullman as his address. It had not been unusual for a few of these boys to accompany Bea to the tiny apartment she had occupied at One Hundred and Thirteenth Street and later to the larger one on Central Park West, there to sit for an additional hour or two around the tiny open fire to more good coffee and more of Delilah s waffles. It struck her with a sense of inner . disquiet, one day after a large newspaper story of her largess to these boys had appeared, how much selfish gratification ' was mixed up in these contacts. Crowding them into the confines of her narrow little home puffed her up like a mother hen. It was good having them there. Their nonsense and cubbishness subtracted from her loneliness. Sometimes they brought ukuleles and banjos. Sometimes Delilah, not to be coaxed out of the rear end of the apartment, would consent to sit in her dark kitchen, fire¬ light on her eyeballs, cheek bones, and surf of white teeth, and sing through the open doorway her version of “When Jesus wuz totin’ de cross up de hill to Calvary”: “Mus’ Jesus bear de cross alone, An’ all de wori’ go free? No, dere’s a cross for ebbyone An’ dere’s a cross for me.” Or, how these youngsters did love to succeed in getting her started on her John Henry legends. Sitting out there, in the semi-darkness of her kitchen, huge body rocking and wind¬ ing to the rhythm of the on-and-on of it, was their delight— "John Henry said to his captain, Well, a man ain’t nothin’ but a man, An’ belo’ I’d be beaten by dat ole steam drill I’ll die wid de hammer in my han’, Lawd, I’ll die wid de hammer in my han’.” 186 IMITATION OF LIFE “More, Delilah! — "Some said he came from England, Some said he came from Spain, But it’s no such thing, he was an East Virginia man, And he died wid de hammer in his Iran , He died wid de hammer in his han.” “Go on, ’Lilah!”— “John Henry was killed on de railroad, A mile an’ a half from town;. His head cut off in de drivin’-wheel And his body ain’t never been found.” “Tell us, 'Lilah, about Polly Ann!” “John Henry had a little girl, Her name was Polly Ann. John was on his bed so low She drove him wid his hammer like a man, Drove him wid his hammer-” “’Lilah, come on in here and give us ‘Whistlin’ Sam’.” “Go on, you boys; I got mall sleep to git.” With the increasing of her great bulk, as the years settled themselves more and more in terms of ilesh over along her vast body, her major activity, except for the trips she was obliged to make for the proper inaugural of each new 13. Pullman, had chiefly to do with training new recruits to preside picturesquely and efficiently above the waffle-irons. It was no small task to find types of black women who com- bined sufficient of waffle-iron technique with the something benign and effulgent which must approximately, at least, correspond with the nation-wide trade-mark of Delilah m her fluted crown. , It was after the almost enforced retirement of the great hulk of her back once more into the hinterland of her own kitchen, that more and more, after the war, there drifted into the household, not only the doughboys themselves, but IMITATION OF LIFE 187 a growingly miscellaneous company of unattached and more or less lonely city souls to whom a B. Pullman offered friendly and sociable refuge. “Some day there will be a B. Pullman alumni, or a B. Pullman American Legion,” Bea was fond of prophesying when taking stock of the myriads of letters from her boys, from their mothers, from lonely city figures who during the years had passed through and passed on. Passed on. Some to anonymity, some as from the cloud of a temporary and stranded loneliness into such assorted ulti¬ mate destinations as the navy, the farm, marriage and the home, and in the case of one young fellow with a Southern accent and a poetic shyness, who had found the adventure of New York rooming-house by night and a haberdashery shop by day not to his liking, a trading-post north of the Yukon, from where he wrote enthusiastic post cards. Regina Elmp, invaluable emissary of her supplies depart¬ ment, had come out of the ranks of solitary women who had learned to regard the neighborhood B. Pullman as a sort of club from which she was reluctant to be ousted at closing- time for the narrow confines of a rooming-house. Several of the traveling salesmen were recruits from the ranks of boys who had returned from war unshot, but with scars in the depths of their eyes. There was a stack of letters and telegrams from the mothers and sisters of these hoys, and all the miscellany from the boys themselves, alphabetically arranged in the jewelry- drawer of Bea’s dressing-table. Delilah owned a stack of them, too. One, postmarked Seattle, written on lined paper, was framed and mounted in a little silk portfolio she had made for it. Darling Mammy Delilah, My boy Allen has told me all about you. He is not ashamed to say that without your kind substitution for his old mother, he. could not easily have found the courage to face the dreadful days following life sailing from New York, Bless you and the dear lady who employs you. The inclosed little gift I knitted myself from my invalid’s bed and it goes to you with the love of Allen, who is at work in the fields but 188 IMITATION OF LIFE whom I am proud to add is also studying , civil engineer¬ ing at night. Your friend, Addie Matterhorn. P. S. To think of your dear lady letting him sleep in her own bed and tending him like a baby the night he was taken with chill. I remember you both in my prayers. The memory of that boy—his name was Allen Matterhorn -blond and slim and nineteen, frightened and influenza- bitten, remained a favorite image in a mind that was filled with dimming pictures of the secretly suffering youth who had passed in transient troops through those days. “De Lawd chastised dat boy wid homesickness and fear and body misery more dan enny I seed sail away, an^it is in mah tea leaves, de Lawd ain’t done chastisin’ him yet" “Delilah, you read his mother’s letter. He’s not only safely back on the farm, but preparing to become an en- gineer.” “Dar ain’t no safely back anywhares for dat boy. It was writ in his eyes de night he lay shakin’ here wid chill. He got himself out of de war, but dar is more chastisin’ ahead for dat boy in de battle of dis life. I know it, and when I knows a thing wid my knowin, I knows it. No use to try to dissuade Delilah from one of her oracular and prophetic convictions. She lay back in them as into a " warm bath and let the waters of portent wash over and 1 immerse her. "Dat boy Allen had doomnation in his eyes. May de Lawd relent and save him the sufferin’ ahead. May de Lawd spare his maw, layin’ out dar on her death-bed, knowin' it.” “Death-bed, Delilah? Invalid’s bed doesn’t necessarily mean that,” “Her is on her last bed. I knows it wid mah knowin’. No use. Doomnation for Allen.” But for others in her gallery of memories of doughboys, which memories she kept as brightly scrubbed as the alumi¬ nums in her kitchen, was sprightliness in her heart. “Wonder why dat euttin'-up Micky boy from Altoona dat used to pester me life and soul to sing him 'Whistlin’ Sam’ has quit writin’ us postuls every Armistice Day? Sure as fate 189 IMITATION OF LIFE dat boy’s too busy giftin' hisself rich and happy f or h ™ tae for postals cards. Or: "Bless mah son] V it ' tany valentine from dat red-headed Kentucky m „“tain Larry who could cat one waffle in esactly two fe <>! f dar W * care of hisself in 13 a •* m —* »* s ** Frank Flake came later. It was considerably after the Arausboe that the sqttare-shouldered, lean-hipped yens fel- ow w, I, a spare square face that in profile was as sharp as a Made, began to repeat evenings, at a comer table of the Madison Avenue Pullman, crouching there over what might have been medical or law books and making annotations into a loose-leaf notebook. So many of the unattached and ap- parently detached young frequenters were like that some of them medical or law students or from the dental’school around the corner, but more, usually, men just beyond the student age, often following business vocations and studying evenings toward some profession. . b Flake fell into the latter category, by day an expert ac- countant for a wholesale glass-and-china firm on Seventeenth Street, a medical student by night to the extent that he spent Ins evenings either at libraries or beside the B. Pullman cor¬ ner table, hunched over books on his chosen subjects This came out slowly in the first few casual passings of the time of day which Bea took pains to exchange with her repeaters, during those years when she made it a rule to alternate her evenings between one or the other of the local B. Pullmans. It pleased her when young Flake took finally to leaving overnight some of his books on a small shelf at the rear of the Pullman, and to talking less reservedly as she drew up opposite. It meant that once more someone was burrowing gratefully into the kennel warmth she had achieved in these retreats. Flake, back from the war, reluctant to return to East St. Louis, where an uncle and sole relative had died during his absence, diffident, inarticulate in the rather terrible way char¬ acteristic of so many of the returned boys, was another lone hand being played against a vast impersonal background. 190 IMITATION OF LIFE Not that it appeared that way to him. To one through whose head still roared cannon noises and whose eyes were not clean of horror, feeling tucked into the anonymity of new life in a city he had never seen before, embarking from it for war, was like one of those incredibly quiet French dawns, too unreal to hold portent of the reality of the days’ impending cannonading. He often said of these first years in New York, that with all their external din he was sitting in the midst of a world that was quiet as a graveyard with the memories of the dead buddies that were stacked higher in his eyes than reality. Higher even than the memory of all the days of his life in East St, Louis; in the home; in the public schools; and finally in the hotel-supply business of an uncle’s who had died during his absence at war and left the entirety of a not inconsiderable fortune to the Christian Science Church. Higher even than a strangely thwarted and secret passion for the fifteen-year-old daughter of an East St. Louis clergy¬ man, who two years before Flake’s return from overseas was to become wife of her father’s assistant curate and mother of twins. A mountain of dead bodies, to dwindle slowly, rose be- l tween him and such realities as loneliness and detachment. He was too deeply in the trance of his peace. Uncannon- ’ aded days led to these uncannonaded evenings in candle-lit, amber-colored warmth. There was no February chill sufficiently icy those first two years, for him not to feel himself thawing of the war horror and war terror and war dread that had ridden him like ; witches. Just to move along the hurly-burly days of a hurly-burly city, even at tasks not congenial to him, on into quiet eve¬ nings where for the price of good strong coffee served in decorated pottery cups lie could sit in a sense of warmth and : security, was to feel dread lifting. “I must have been even more of a coward throughout : that mess than I realized, because I can’t seem to get over ’ my relief at being out of it,” he once confided to Bea, as the L shy regalia of his constraint began to wear ofF. She had seen them come home shell-shocked and dazed :■ IMITATION OF LIFE 191 Jit”;!, W0 ° dc '! "“I 3 over their careless I iS m d d f? t af thc looIt Of relief on Frank Flake revealed what must have been his quite ter- ! nbletaror throughout the period ot his too year’ and ten j ,,h ? ^ “* “ ** * tab***,' ! rlS “ "" ll6 taoiy 0{ attive 1 jtert k ,hat way ' Ceita ” —°f ^ MM ft doggedness which a quality of frailty in his looks j five rlnll SUr ^ USe , e j t( ? earn was then earning sixty- I five dollars a week with the china-and-glassware firm, in the I hotel-supply department. You hesitated before you took pity on a youth who could \ afford to do so many of the tilings for which lie apparently-, lacked only the inclination. It He .seemed older than his toenty-eight years, was another Ij reason why she had to curb the impulse to invite him home * for an hour before her fireplace one evening at ten-o’clock closing, along with a Miss Elmp who nightly shunted off as long as possible the return to her hall bedroom. Much older, with quite a tracery of blue veins showing beneath the pallor of his angular blond face and bright blue eyes the color of the carbon flame that comes spluttering off good coal. It occurred to her, exchanging the pleasantries of weather with him one evening as she hesitated beside his table, that he was quite beautiful, and then felt a shock that somehow the thought was not sufficiently shocking to her. A beautiful man! And yet in a way, quite strange and surprising to her, she kept admitting the beauty of Flake. Nothing effeminate about him. A bridge or a ship or a storm or a foundry at night might be beautiful. Young Flake had beauty in a hand¬ some way. That putting of it satisfied something disturbed in her. It was about along in here that she caught herself in¬ creasing the number of her evening visits to the Madison Avenue Pullman, and in an ashamed orgy of self-discipline remained away almost a Week. At the prospect of Flake sit¬ ting there in his comer, his spare figure hunched in a way Sfe 192 IMITATION OF LIFE that had become familiar to her, something rose like a tide, carrying a small rush of excitement right through her. Well, why not? There was something about a well-cut young fellow like this Frank Flake to just naturally point up the anticipations. Pleasant to have about. Interesting to have about. Still— It was during one of her subsequent chats with him, that something he said in regard to a plan he had under way for working out a line of reproductions of early American glass for his firm, put an idea into her head. Why not have Flake devise something new and novel in the way of china equipment for her Pullmansl The soft, imitation-Spanish potteries she was using were not only being imitated by a rapid influx of tearooms, but their easy chip¬ ping and high breakage was a growing problem. Something he had said about white glass recalled a quaint and early chrorno of an American plate that had belonged on a shelf in her mother’s dining-room. A white glass plate with scalloped edges, through which was run a strip of pink satin ribbon. Why not install a new scheme entirely, harkening back to Colonial wares. White glassl Heavy, du¬ rable, quaint. White table service. Napery, The heavy white glass plates with the design raised. White goblets. White cream-jugs. Tiny individual butter-dishes in the design of a setting hen. Americana. Even now, with the Central Park apartment still fresh as paint, was beginning to be borne upon her a sense of the stereotyped. By a process of observation and assimilation, she had outgrown, almost before entering into it, the home so lovingly furnished in blanket department-store fashion. Fishrow, the beautiful general design of the architects, restricting each plot-holder to conform to a certain unanimity of Colonial scheme; conferences with the architects, decora¬ tors, builders, had awakened something new and exciting in her. Visits to the Metropolitan Museum and private access to handsomely bound reproductions of famous interiors of homes and palaces, began by now to clearly define her dream of her ultimate house in Fishrow. At present it stood there a yawning vacant lot, between the already realized homes of the Wall Street turfman’s and IMITATION OF LIFE 193 V,rpm Edens, except that forming and growing in her mmd, m terms of American Colonial for which h® mind’s eye a^te d tack by bnck was the ultimate lovable and beautiful reality of Number Nine Fishrow Now take a young fellow like this Flake, just sort of tel 7 h nt n n 'd ? f WatCh ? g hk niGe sensitive face flash into understanding, made it doubly exciting to pl&n. , * « No wonder one looked forward to the evenings. . . . Natural . . Why shouldnt one? . . . Now, why? Take the matter of white glass which was ultimately to lead to her famous all-white table service-except for those evening chats, there just wouldn’t ever have been white glass. ... It was out of white glass grew not only the largest order of young Flake s career, but some time later, with his china- and-glassware firm trying to retain him at a price that topped Bea s offer he was to accept the position of general manager for the B. Pullman, Inc., interests. CHAPTER 34 Virginia Eden’s house at Number Eleven Fishrow had been completed three years, while Bea’s empty lot continued to give to the handsome compact block the effect of a missing tooth, # In some respects, Number Eleven was the most outstand¬ ing of all, not even excepting the Casamajor home on the double corner lot, with its fine Georgian faqadc and heavy marble pillars that bore out handsomely its Greek lineage, Virginia's home, of less than half the Casamajor frontage, gave to the street a rather pinkish pressed-brick face, fine convex windows of carefully collected Tudor panes with lavender fires in them, a white door with a fanlight that had been considered one of Charleston’s finest, and from what had once been the littered rear of a row of tenement houses, an awninged terrace with silver balls that flashed in sun¬ light. Bird baths, flagstones, that wound under trellises, led 1 194 IMITATION OF LIFE from the French windows of Virginia’s drawing-room, down marble steps especially imported by Mrs. Casamajor from the neighborhood of Villa d’Este, to a gaily painted com¬ munity boathouse. , , c . ,. r Thus had Virginia Eden, who had been bom Sadie Kress In Jersey City, succeeded in making this sunny, terraced, pretentiously simple home along its imitation l hames Em¬ bankment her own. . . . She occupied it with a second husband whom she had twice divorced and twice remarried; a mother-in-law who through¬ out those fluctuating episodes had taken sides with her sons wife- the stepfather of the silver larynx, two daughters, a sixteen-year-old son by this husband’s former marriage; a Miss Twcedie, secretary, cousin, and inseparable companion to Virginia Eden; six cocker spaniels and a corps «»J servants who overran the house as informally ns u brood of children home for the holidays. . In demanding of those about her more of everything than might be considered the just lot of one person, Virginia gave with even a higher and freer band than the one with which she commanded. . , Her servants quailed before her tantrums and reaped the harvest: of her quick spasms of self-reproach which she ex¬ pressed in the form of showered affection and gifts. She enjoyed neither their deference nor what might bo termed their respect, because the sense of their familiarity mixed with contempt and affection, saturated, and in a sense made ridiculous, her household. But predominantly they adored her, and in that one it** \. spect, like her husband, left in frequent hufls, only to return j on a more intimate and more firmly intrenched basis. ■ “If I can’t have people around me whom 1 love and who love me, then I prefer to wash out my own shimmies,” was , the Virginia Eden succinct summation of the curiously tropi- • cal and storm-infested atmosphere that surrounded her. The :J same applied to her business. Her hairdressers, manicurists, masseuses, and saleswomen clamored for her favor, fawned, ; won it, went down before her siroccos of rage, departed from . her service, protesting at her tyrannies and returned to it chastened. Z IMITATION OF LIFE T95 It was said that her stepson, vowing he would rather break 1 rock than endure the hierarchy of her roof an hour longer, 1 did literally that, fracturing his leg in an upstate quarry the very first day of his drastic alternative. Chartering a plane, she flew to his side, returning him to her hearthstone by way of a twelve-thousand-dollar motor- launch which she purchased for him in fierce mood of restitution. | There hung over Number Eleven the surcharged atmos- S phere of a woman who demanded on every side assorted loves, from the effusive canonization of her employees to the ' mute, inglorious adoration of her lean and lame stepson to 1 the sporadic fidelities of a handsome and somewhat wastrel husband whose major virtue was his frank realization of his merely ornamental role in the history of her success. k . It was rumored, and rightly, that certain capitalistic in-® terests had already offered Virginia Eden five million dollars 11 for Virginia Eden Beauty Products, Incorporated. W A wag in a New York tattling weekly had it: Certain 1 capitalistic interests are reported to have offered Virginia 9 Eden five million dollars outright for world rights to her 1 business. Pocket money for Virginia. It costs that to keep her I vassals in tin spears and her court in Fishrow going. 1 Be that as it may, the household of Virginia, crowded with i hothouse flowers, sunlight, sycophants, objects, objets d’art, I jangling telephones; a household of excitements, waste, easy § intake, easy outgo, it was one to never cease to amaze Bea, on her infrequent, always diplomatic, visits to it. Diplomatic because between these two, shunted by circum¬ stance into the curious sister,ship of pioneer r61es, was deep and intuitive realization of the importance of at least surface amity between them. "Where two men might be able to afford to publicly agree to disagree without further comment, let us so much as yea the other’s nay, and they’ll have our hairpins flying. You and I have to be friends, Pullman, and like it.” Grimly they conceded that, with laughter. “I won't be treated by them like a Pekingese who has learned to walk on his hind legs,” Virginia was fond of reciting. “I won’t be patted on the back by a man’s world. j 196 IMITATION OF LIFE Let them pat me on the bean. Here, around the brain-pan.” Despite, however, sueh perilous incompatibilities as had sent thorn' sky wise in the project of Fishrow, there did exist between these two a quality of mutual attraction not unlike that between parent and the offspring which most markedly reproduces his own characteristics. Every move of Virginia Edens was of vital interest to Bea, and vice versa. Boa knew of herself that it she. so much as picked up the morning Times, a reference to Virginia, even though incorporated in fine print in the body of a long column, would spring at her with the velocity of a headline. What this woman did, how she lived, loved, achieved, were matters of transcendent interest, with all this equally true of Virginia Eden, who had been watching Bea steam into the scene even before Virginia had begun to dawn with such potency upon the latter. The racy ingredient of competition lay folded into the j psychology of all this, tempered, however, by the fact of the two fields of separate commercial endeavor. If anything, it was rather easy for Virginia Eden, who hy now was imbued with her mission of high priestess of beauty, to take on a magnanimity toward an enterprise which had flowed to its fruition from the sugar buckets of Vermont. The Virginia Eden School of Massage; the Virginia Eden Mask for Facial Rejuvenation; the Virginia Eden Delphic Studios; the Virginia Eden Electro Gymnasium; the Vir¬ ginia Eden Institute of Beauty; the Virginia Eden Aesthetic Preparations, showed plainly the trend of the mind behind , these vast commercial interests. f When Virginia Eden addressed her assembled employees, disciples of her cult of beauty, then; was high priestess in her hearing, and mind you, in her heart. The fact that her cult grow out of the aggressively eager effort of one Sadie Kress of Jersey City to earn a living lor a family consisting of one pair of shiftless parents, one para¬ lyzed sister, one gang-running brother, all of whom broke her heart hy dying an assorted array of deaths within a year or two before she began to come into her own, seemed in no way to impede her growing sense of sclf-ordaiiiment to the cause of beauty. * * x /x i x yj im v x Jj U' l 4. V t Her mission m clearing up the acne from the faces of women cleansing them of the ravages of living in a world oo much with them; her dedication of self to hours in her laboratories experimenting, along with highly paid chemists, foi piepaia ions warranted to bring new sheen to old bodies, vinD ( Fden lailSe ° f llmiticism in the quick eyes of Interested as she was in every aspect of the straneelv analogous career of B Pullman, so like hers, so strangely alien to it, she could nevertheless afford to be widely charitable. y “ThTO is a woman hard to fool in delta and cents, but 1* has short-changed her every inch of the way and she can quite locate the deficit. She doesn't know she is on earth, chiefly because she isn't. She doesn't ask for what she doesn t sec, but she wants it mighty bad without knowing it. Ive got to he cheated, I’ll take my licking in dollars and cents. Shes taking hers in love and life. No wonder she’s gol such lmmed-looking eyes. She’s got love and life coming to her and none too much time to collect!” On the basis of sex solidarity, one could afford a public and conspicuous intimacy with one of the outstanding busi¬ ness women of her day, even though, where the intimate aspects of life were concerned, she was a wooden Indian. There were hidden, intimate subjects to he shared and dis¬ cussed with the sort of girl-friend confidantes with Z> Eden surrounded herself. With Bea, now, you didn’t know where you stood, or rather where she stood. Was her, life merely what it seemed to be? Probably not. The stilly kind usually had it “behind their ears." But at any rate, her gesture of affiliation with B. Pullman in the Fishrow enterprise had been a dramatic amalgama¬ tion. Withdrawal, as circumstances developed, had seemed the canny part of discretion, Let Bea hold the hag, if bag there was to be held. Nor had the subsequent success of the enterprise soured or embittered anything of the external atti¬ tude of Virginia toward her friend. More and more, even to the extent of trailing them about her own drawing-room and posing in them with groups of 198 IMITATION OF LIFE instructors in her plastic classes, the painted velvet robes of the high priestess, instead of the tailored suits of the business woman, were enveloping Virginia. Yes, even with what might be regarded as Reas coup m this matter of Fishrow, it was something to be well out of it sitting pretty in a house that, if you counted just one of her recent successful forays into Wall Street, had cost her from its cellar to its mansard roof not a penny. Also, there was something about the outstanding friendship of two out- standing women that should be regarded as touching, splen¬ did generous, as-it-should-be. A brilliant rebuttal to the popular theory that women did not get on well with rival members of their own sex. Less complicated were the reactions of Bea Pullman to the tenacity with which Virginia Eden held out for the friend- First to grant Virginia precedence in both her public and private achievement was Bea. There was something willful in the manner m which, by availing herself of every opportunity to look in on Virginias, she exposed her own life to contrast. There was a woman for youl Virginia Eden! A woman toward whom life flowed like sunshine over the fields and meadows it was fructifying. Light, gnyety, easy friends, easy laughter, easy adoration, flooded that household. A husband who was naughty but whom she adored with a kind of in¬ termittent and adolescent infatuation, kept her boudoir a , bower of flowers; a stepson who followed her movements I' w ith the tragic worshipping eyes of one who found her splendor heartbreaking to endure. Her servants called her undignified, diminutive, endearing names, and worried over her diet, her fatigue, her moods. The out-and-out admiration of young men and young girls, oldish men and ageing women, kept further patino on a life that apparently had never lost its luster even with Virginia within view by now, of her menacing forties. There she goes! was the applause-laden atmosphere through which daily, at home and in business, Eden walked in adoration. IMITATION OF LIFE 199 More and more, by contrast, it was beginning to be borne in upon Bea, that for her, life was like a furnace that had not worked very well. She was cold. CHAPTER 35 When Jessie was sixteen she wrote to her mother from Zermatt in Switzerland, “All that I am I owe to you.” To be sure, it was embodied in the common¬ place comment of a usual fortnightly letter of running in¬ consequential patter concerning the pleasant routine of life in a Swiss school for girls, and came hard upon an urgent plea to be permitted to remain abroad over another summer vacation. But to Bea it seemed a pair of arms flung out of the girlish scrawl of that letter, firm and true and tight about her neck. This was the year that the Fifth Avenue B. Pullman, on a lease negotiation that over the interim of years would amount to three quarters of a million rental, opened heavy, copper-trimmed doors that were designed to simulate the entrance to a de luxe observation car, Half a year of the concentrated efforts of herself and Flake had conspired toward the creation of this four de force in B. Pullmans. Its equipment, not the standardized, had been especially designed, redesigned, built, rejected, rebuilt; its minutest details, color, walls, ventilation, plumbing, gadgets, supervised by them both, during clays of standing by the debris of plaster, paint, lumber, and scaffolding that achieved the transformation of the premises from eighteen- by-forty feet of space to an observation dining-car of ele¬ gancies not exactly adapted to the rigors of the road-bed, but delightfully and poetically licensed for the boulevard. A tour de forced Ideal for its purpose, it had entrances at both ends, its lighting, its simulated scenery, its novelties in upholstery, china, menu, and atmosphere, luxuriously dis¬ tinguished from the pattern of B. Pullman construction in use by now the country across. 200 IMITATION OF LIFE “It’s too grand,” had been Boa’s private indictment to Flake the day of the much-publicized opening. “It it doesn’t pay, we’ll tear out the elegance and just go plain diner again.” But it did pay. , ,, During the first month, for the few hours a day that her limbs would support, without becoming nnl.caralde stabs of pain, the heavy bulk of her, Delilah herself household trade¬ mark come to life, presided at the shrine of her waffle-iron. It was at the end of the first month, when by chance Bea found her hidden and shuddering in the locker-room, where it was revealed she retired at close intervals for the rebel of letting the shooting pains have their way, that the popular innovation of the personal appearance oi Delilah was dis¬ continued and a trained disciple installed m her place. The Fifth Avenue B. Pullman, with its varied innovations, including full-fledged menus, higher price list, rather aims- ing display of Americana along the walls, cloudy and dear reproductions, quickly Mowed l.y m tat Forty-ninth Street and an even more sumptuous one in the arcade of the new Father Knickerbocker, became quickly and remuneratively the popular rendezvous of the surprisingly large class of upper middle-class women who still shop, fore¬ gather, attend matinees, hotel bridge parties and while away hours out of the heart of the city’s congested workaday. It seemed to Bea that Jessie’s letter, with what or her amounted to effusion, coming as it did on top of a school of ; successes such as these, to say nothing of two-lumdred-thou- i sand-dollar net Fishrow profit, plus her own building lot which had cost her exactly the price of registering the deed, was the crowning touch to a series of circumstances almost frighteningly benign. . ,, She even talked it over with Flake, with whom she dis¬ cussed everything except such private affairs as these, and let him read the letter. . , ., , V “Thought you might he interested in seeing the Kind Of letter my girl puts up,” she said, tossing it, with over-elab¬ orate carelessness, across her desk. “Of course l know what those summers over there mean to her. Hiking trips, sight¬ seeing, and visits to her roommate’s home on the. Italian IMITATION OF LIFE 201 Kivim but it's the third successive year abroad. She's , dar- kg aud mil come home at the drop of a hat if I say so, only .Tr/ e T'J™" 1 W011 ’ t say “• J Mt nought you’d he m crested m he, description of the trip she took with Miss Winch and Miss Askenasi to Lausanne ” What secretly and ingloriowdy she desired wa, the mo- ment wlien, seated opposite him, she could see his eyes trail the third to the last line ", . . mfe if, my m bve summer but nest year I'm finished end home for good Of course Ill do as you say, dear , dU tlut I m m lupeto be 1 owe to you. . , . 1 m time young Frank Flake knew where she stood with It, "?T' ‘ W ” ot be “ eaSy ' carrying arou " leapt and flickered in the newly lighted tapers 1 of her consciousness as she forced her eyes against the menu.'l I love Flake, Outwaidly and with lips that moved coolly and evenly and sti .lightly, she asked him about a Pullman on Olive Street in ot. Louis, which, for reasons Flake had especially gone there to analyze, was continuing stubbornly to stand in the red of die debit side of its monthly statement. For the better part of an hour she listened to his recital of the generic and minute matters which made up his chrono¬ logical report of the ground covered before her wire had curtailed the last three weeks of his trip. $ In the beginning, her judgments had seemed to him to i! come snap, hit or miss, so quickly they followed upon the 1 heels of a report. He had come to learn differently. What ? actually happened was that the wealth of detail which he < recited or read from closely documented reports sprang into immediate pattern, enabling her to see the whole. Facts and statistics which he shoveled before her eyes were the dots composing the lithograph. With the curious talent of die block-reader, salient points marched out, disassociating them¬ selves from contributory lesser ones, Long since, Flake had learned to defer to the tuning-fork of her intuition, which, responding almost immediately, pitched her for quick action. What a curious conglomerate, this B. Pullman. But not of difficult stripe, once you learned to reckon with the fact that 220 IMITATION OF LIFE only Pullman the business woman was the phenomenon. Her¬ self apart from the strange acumen, ability to meet im¬ mense issues with what seemed no realization of their immensity, her almost instantaneous perceptions, curious quality of throwing out casual dictums involving enormous transactions, Iter baffling tricks of largess and « economies; apart from all these, she was, as Flake put i him¬ self, nothing more than a girl with her skates. A Mttor Wowy girl hi her thirties, who wore her new grooming like a shtllac Lm which her fluffing of hair and figure and nervous manner would escape, but withal, a delayed kind of pretti- ne r:^r^ w -•* this prettiness, and trying to behave, deep down o W as if the realizations, sweeping over her, were not floming her I am in love. For the first time in my life. Why not? It was as if she needed to feel at the inner arlm.ss.ons, the flood of her shame. But instead, slicing dowinnto_st.uk, forking up peas sautd, and permitting the secret uUoxicatum to mill through and through her, she sat aiofiy hstemug ) his perfectly submitted territorial report of maple-syiup and maple-candy distribution west of the Rockies. I love Flake and I am glad of it, and not even mv child shall deny me! And nothing smote her, not even shame, ex¬ cept the quite incomparable sensation of sitting there m Her beige velvet, her hair soft, brown, and with electricity in it, curving out from beneath the gold turban, and more beige, fluffed in tulle over the bare white bosom revealed by Her decolletage, blocked squarely into bis vision, As a matter of fact, he had taken on the habit, these last months, or was it years, of slipping, without change of tone, and certainly without change of manner, from the intimacies of business into a strange, paradoxical, kind of impersonal intimacy that had to do with her appearance, “Is that hat hurting you or is it supposed to be worn on the back of your head that way? Looks like the devil. Ho had bolted at her one day following immediately upon the heels of a discussion they were holding in her office over the idea of simultaneously invading Los Angeles, with Wilshire IMITATION OF LIFE 221 Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, and Seventh Street B. Pull¬ mans. She had felt slapped and her hand had flown to her head. Devil! Teasel He knew it was not hurting, but that she had pushed it so, as she invariably did when the rim felt hot and bothersome. A paragraph in one of the gossip weeklies had recently referred to her as a “big business dame” and disciple of the Queen Mary School of Millinery, “who, it is rumored, is considering a seven-figure offer for the Paddy Cake Business,” He must have read that wise-cracking nonsense! Her hand which had flown to her hat began tucking away the strands of her hair, which she still wore, except for flattened pompa¬ dour, precisely as she had worn it all of her adult life, and then down to her bodice, along the diaphragm, which for" some time she had been noticing rolled in a little ridge of flesh above the corset line, “Why? What do you mean?” “I mean just that. Talk it out with Virginia Eden. She's high priestess of that sort of thing. They tell me she actually uses her own preparations. It pays to advertise, if you can sell your products to yourself," That had been more than sufficient. She could scarcely wait, that day back there when his first comment had fallen, to hasten, in her sense of humiliation, from her office and from his sight. What a figure she must cut, for him to have ventured that much! Even her child, in a recent letter, had affectionately i admonished her not to forget to “squneh” her hat down. Probably that same copy of the gossip weekly had fallen into her hands. For months Virginia Eden’s urgings, “Come in and let us do you over. You need to be taken in hand,” had failed to penetrate. Now suddenly, now immediately, noth¬ ing mattered quite so much as to somehow, some way, con¬ vert those aspects of herself, such as the bulgy diaphragm, and tire blowy hair of which hitherto she had been half, but not sufficiently, aware. It needed no more than this word of terribly embarrassing suggestion from Flake to whip awake the half perception 222 IMITATION OF LIFE that, prettier than ever though she might be at this period of her life, she was nevertheless letting herself go blowy. The defensive impulse of the thirties had apparently had no chilly dawning. Up to the time of the veiled inventory that lay beneath the remark of Flake, there had been only the private pangs of plucking out the first gray hairs which had not multiplied, and that latent sense of the thickening which was manifesting itself in the bulge above her corset line. Just the same, I am a prettier woman than I was a girl, she said back to her reflection one day as she stood noting herself in the full-length mirror mounted onto her bedroom door, and self-embarrassed, snatched up her handbag and ■ gloves and made her rush for the subway. : Then Flakes remark, of the some months previous. And now: The security of sitting there opposite him at dinner, and feeling with eveiy inch of her the grooming and creaming and waving and slimming she had endured at tire hands of the corps Virginia Eden had loosed upon her! Flake’s penetrating appraising eyes, as they swung, as im¬ personally as he swung his voice, into the channels that more and more, of late, he was permitting himself: “That’s a handsome outfit.” (He means I am handsome!) “Those browns and golds are clever. Whatever it is you have been doing, is all to the-good.” For him, to whom words came sparingly, where she was ■ concerned at least, here was fulsome praise. The sense of being admired lifted itself from the dusty places within her. The gift of blushing lit across her face and for a painful instant she was conscious that she had giggled upward like the girls who had crowded about her the week before, after she had delivered a talk at die Advertising Show, on Women in Business. Women in business! What did they matter! Women in love! Ah, women in love! Brilliantly, blindingly one thing mattered. I am in love with Flakel CHAPTER 38 The head of one of Geeat Britain’s largest corporations had stated in an interview that women make erratic executives, and two or three of the news serv¬ ices were hard after what reply B. Pullman would make to this. Quonta Club, national business women’s organization, was wanting B. Pullman as guest speaker for the Philadelphia^ Convention. National Weekly invites article: What Price Business Career to a Woman, Weekly Wall Street journal requests interview: Do Women Really Want Business Careers? For the first time in its' history, Advertisers Monthly had departed from its standardized green cover, for one in'three colors that blazoned “The Face That Has Become a Na¬ tional Institution” (Delilah’s). At the expiration of the period between the lugging of the tins of maple syrup through the back streets of Atlantic City, to this culmination of shipping-rooms, mail-order depart¬ ments, luxurious B. Pullmans that were idealizations of even the most de luxe dining-car, a wave of business-woman con¬ sciousness seemed to have struck the press. Considerably after the event, the achievements were sud- J denly being heralded of women who for a decade dr more had deployed their activities well over the commercial scene. ‘Dey didn’t pay no attention to us in de years when a little of dis here free advertisin’ we’re girtin' now, and that we can afford to buy, would have saved us corns on our hands and souls.” Right enough, but the year that B. Pullman, Virginia Eden, and such women; as Hanna Gronauer, reputed to have conceived and promoted an aggregate of thirteen miles of model tenement buildings in the larger American cities; Faith McDonald, founder and president of eighty-eight Cutie 224 IMITATION OF LIFE Dress Shops; Fanny Mason of the Mason Savings Bank Sys- tem-came in for flare after flare of publicity, the B. Pullman enterprises almost doubled profits. “It pays better to be advertised than to advertise,” she remarked to Flake the evening they dined, in celebration of the results of inventory, across lighted candles in the dining¬ room of the apartment on Central Park West, a dining-room long since gone ehrorno in her estimation, but which pending Fishrow, she refused to refurnish. It was months now since the strange rhythm of being in love with Flake had swung itself to her consciousness. Months of constant procrastinations, with herself and with him, of one trumped-up alibi after another for maneuvering to keep him from important territorial surveys and the rou¬ tine of inspections which were part of his indispensability to the firm. Time after time be had turned restive, while she parried for time and subterfuge. “There is something brewing in my mind that I am not quite ready to discuss, but I don’t want you off on territory until I have settled it one way or another,” Again; “No need to start south yeti Reports are good and the Atlanta situation can be handled from this end. With all the rumors flying that Usa is about to make us an offer, it might be just as well for you to remain here for a while. ...” And then suddenly, as if to legitimatize her procrastina¬ tions, ..there came, not the rumored move by Universal Sales t Association, but a proposition from Imperial Chain, the Brit- fish corporation that had recently flung its indictment that women make erratic executives, to simultaneously spread the B. Pullman novelty through six European countries, with further expansion in immediate view. Six European coun¬ tries, and Orient, enterprise to be launched by Imperial Chain in cooperation with B. Pullman, Inc., with minimum three-years agreement, the president herself to personally inaugurate the overseas chain. Rome to Singaporel Three years of city-to-city, dotting the world with B. Pullmans. Rome. Monte Carlo. Budapest. Vienna. Munich. Berlin. Deauville. Paris. London. Sydney, Singapore! IMITATION OF LIFE 225 Terms, the flattering perfection of terms. The world lit¬ erally this time, an oyster to be pried open from Rome to Monte Carlo. From Budapest to Vienna, To Munich. To Paris. To Pekingl An oyster to any woman except the one with her eyes on a kennel with a small brass plate beside the door, and a sitting-room with a private door through which a put-upon surgeon could escape from his office. . . . But suddenly, here into her lap, with a time clause allow¬ ing four months for decision, was sufficient controversial ma¬ terial to justify her procrastinations with Flake. Big decisions pended here. Deep down inside her tiredness, imbedded into her fatigue, her every impulse turned its head away. New worlds, but old life stretching ahead in them. Sugar-sugar-sugar. Sites. De- lilahs. j Boats, trains, hotels, conferences with strange men divided from her by strange languages, Boats, trains, hotels. Planes because time would be priceless, instead of long and sweet and slow and utterly, darlingly worthless, except for purposes of private and personal happiness; lazily her own', in a home agog with such unroutinized delights as the comings and goings of a young daughter, With the comings and goings of a-of a young husband. Flakel She dared now, in the innermost recesses of her, specula¬ tion that set nostalgia for what she had never known, fizzing along her veins. The business sold outright to the home cor¬ poration, Universal Sales Association! Fine ample revenues from six-figure investments, Life to be lived now, perhaps tardily, but fully, dearly, rightly, More and more her mind began to fasten itself upon the possibility of Usa, For months, filling the air like missiles, had persisted the rumors of this impending offer from a cor¬ poration backed by the second largest money interests in America. Where a year or hvo before she would have given only the slightest credence to any one of the insect army of such rumors that in one form or another buzz into a busy day, now suddenly, it was difficult not to concentrate hopefully upon them. Was Usa actually about to swing open its monopolistic 226 IMITATION OF LIFE jaws in the direction of H. Pullman, toe.? Theoretically, the idea had for years been anathema to her. All about hot was the spectacle of business after business, built up out of lives arid brawn, slipping down impersonally in the gigantic maw of a now industrial monster that seemed to have appetite only for what somebody else had created. Virginia Eden, with her eyes on unridden seas, had al¬ ready refused. according to what Bea knew to be more than rumor, a four-million-dollar outright sab of her interests to Usa. ’ It was fair enough to assume that at this period of their ripe maturity the B. Pullman enterprises might also fall with¬ in the gargantuan appetite of monopoly. In the years before this impulse to be re«> of the vast incubus of business laid ridden her the dream d Ming, herself in a position to refuse an offer mounting into the terrific millions had dramatized itself across her imagination. B. Pullman refuses Usa offer of ten million. ... Jessie abroad, her teachers, her colleagues, would read it as a news dispatch. . . . Her entire organization would know it one morning as she strode through its outer offices to her private one where piled messages of applause and congratulation would await her. Only eighteen months previous the entire run of her con¬ i' sciousness had been something like this: Usa? Sell now? In¬ deed! If B. Pullman is a household word, wait! 1'ive years I hence will see a B. Pullman in every town of a population of twenty-five thousand and more, that intervenes between coast and coast. Nothing, it is true, so daring as the British Imperial Umm idea, had entered her reckoning. But there was Canada yet to be invaded. Ottawa. Toronto. Montreal. Then, too, the dream that lurked back of all this. An ultimate negotiation of national scope, ’whereby a B. Pullman buffet ear would be part of short-run train service the country across. . ■ j If Jessie seemed to marvel now at the large accomplish¬ ment which lay behind every advantage she so lavishly en¬ joyed, the next five years would reveal bow comparatively IMITATION OF LIFE 227 What with annual business bulking into millions, B. Pull¬ man negotiable shares not only bolding their own, but bril¬ liantly rising in a fluctuating market, the rumored Usa offer had been one to covet chiefly in order to reject. And now, all that was changed! _ Instead, the rumored offer from Universal Sales Associa¬ tion, continuing to linger in the limbo of mere hearsay, was becoming a matter of acute anxiety; part of the general frenzy of mind that mingled so confusingly with the elab¬ orate mental tissue of maneuvering to keep Flake at home. The time had come to ‘botch.” Cotch life! She intended to. Yes sirree! Cotch it on the rebound and for all it was worth, and it was worth a very, very great deal. Particularly these days since their relationship had swung from the office, the Gotham lunch-table, to these small candle-lit evenings in the dining-room of her own home. Evenings like this one, following inventory or preceding one of the long territorial trips, had hitherto been matters of late conference at office with sandwiches and coffee brought in, or across the impersonal rectangle of a hotel table. Now suddenly, across the highly personal one of her own, a right gay table with twisted blue candles in a pair of crystal girandoles which Flake had picked up for her at a New Orleans auction and which were ultimately to adorn a high¬ boy at Fishrow, the something in her that had leaned shyly out of her manner was about faintly to capture his attention. “What’s all this,” ho seemed to say, scenting, but by no means aware. “What’s up?” A sense of revulsion against something old and predatory within herself swept her as she saw this happening. An older woman was spreading her not for bright youth. The sort of woman that sometimes, in fear of the precariousness of her position, she visualized might ensnare him on the road. You could tell, from tile invariable flurry he created among the women of the organization, he was not the man to pass un¬ noticed, even though his apparent imperviousness seemed almost too perfect not to be simulated. The voices of the 228 imitation of life 1 older women, Weems and Lejaron, and even Mrs. Van der '■'I Tjnoe no less than the youngsters, whose manners were : coated with sex when they had occasion to address him, curved, where Flake was concerned. The older women. She was one of them not so old as ' Weems or Mrs. Van der lip*, but sufficiently older to fee 1 this boys youth flaming between. At that though only eigh vears! She had worried so at the. thought of those eight P. that finally reduced and distorted in her mmd they ; existed there soluble and shrinking under the constant self- : 3U eight years? Between a woman hvenly-five and ; a youth eighteen, yes! But the span narrowed as they grtv i older, Now both she and Flake were m their thirties! And a . woman with a sublime reason for needing to keep young, can, Does! In mind, in body, m spirit! Oh, Flake, will yo think I am crazy, when you know? . , 1 And something of knowing was flickering i Within a fortnight his manner which seemedto all this?” had been scenting. Flake was no fool. He musi. be seeing for himself what at first may have seemed unbeheva- ; hie . . .what’s all this? . . . whats up?. . . « Rome to Singapore! Enormously flattering, but there" isn’t money enough to tempt me!” She was saying to ! h im explaining over and over again, under pretext of need- §|. injt his advice on a matter definitely settled m ber mmd, the 5 Kte Sails of the Imperial Chain offer. "There ar J things in life besides bigger and better business. Bigger and b2 living counts for something. I’m beginning to realize th ‘1 don’t suppose it would make much of an impression on Imperial Chaifi if you were to explain to them that while you are disinclined to devote the next several years to knock tag about the cities of the world, you’ve an extremely efficient young fellow to offer as substitute. A genius blushing —Why Flake,” she said on a rapid gush of words too quick for her “I had hoped you might have the same reason for not wanting it that I have. Surely there is nothing to years ahead of traipsing around the cities of the world doing die IMITATION OF LIFE 229 things over and over again that we have already succeeded in doing. We-I see such different things ahead-don’t you?" Well! There it was said. Anyway, so much of it that she sat back in the sudden rush of silence, breathing as if she had been running. Well? well? well? her alarmed kind of waiting seemed to say. Well, I ve said it, now what are you going to do about it? You can’t kill me for being ridiculous. Loving you is not a criminal offense. I do love you. Flake! I want to stay back here, for happiness, with you. Of course what he said out of a silence which seemed to gather around him as if to clothe him in the decent shadows of reticence, was along lines that steered them back into the unembarrassment of casualness. But from this point some- : thing in Flake had been reached. Even after, it was to spread its essence over his manner. She had been casting pebbles against his consciousness, and suddenly a shade had been raised and a man was looking out at a woman. ... “Mighty fine of you to feel that way about it,” he said. Under his skin appeared a tinge of pallor that made it hard and smooth as marble. Under her own, it seemed to her she could feel the entire stream of her blood coagulate and red¬ den her. Well? Well? Well? “I’ll take up this matter with Jones of Syracuse by long¬ distance telephone, since you think it best for me not to start; off on schedule,” he said, folding a sheet of figures that had lain in a space cleared of dishes, and over which they had been poring. Well? well? well? her silence seemed crying, and as if irked by it, put upon by it, ill at ease almost beyond endur¬ ance, he lifted the embroidered chiffon edge of her sleeve, fingering it. “New?” New! Within the past three weeks, she had not only spent more on clothes than within any similar given period in her life, but had actually tripled any annual budget she had hith¬ erto allowed herself. New? Every garment! The very new-fangled boneless corset which lay to her body like a coating of tallow was being worn for the first time. It had cost eighty dollars, and 230 IMITATION OF LIFE accustomed as she was by now to similar items that had come to seem just casual on the mounting bills that came m from Jessie, the price for her own had conic as a shock to one who never in her life had paid more than three dollars for contraptions that seemed adequately enough to fill their 'TSmiturihre who had literally outfitted her from tip to toe had exclaimed in shrill French at the stillly boned corsets in which she had stood revealed the first day ol her fittings, jerking them off and holding them up gingerly to marvel at their antiquated architecture. The new foundation felt sleazy and light under the lin¬ gerie and gown built so snugly to conform to the new flowing lines of the figure it created, Were those new things? The apricot-colored chiflon, set off with jade bolt and jade shoulder ornaments and jade satin slippers, in which she sat opposite him m the soft light of table candles, had cost five hundred dollars not including the whispers of the fine umlerthmgs which lay so ingrati¬ atingly to her body. She knew now, that really, regardless of what had gone before, for the first time in her life, along in her dilficult thirties, she was feeling herself delectable lor a man. All the more so because in these difficult thirties, more and more, she was realizing the barrenness of every moment that h a d led up to them; more and more was being borne in upon jher the travesty of herself, in a marriage that now stood '■revealed as a pallid mating with a man who had not even faintly roused her from a somnolence of senses destined to stretch over the first thirty-five years of her lile. I am entitled to this! My child, who is forever Iterating me for getting too little out of life, will be the first to entitle me to it. I have been half-dead in a hall-dead world, Hake likes me. He can be made to love me. fu books -and of course in life, too, it happens that way. We arc both in our thirties! The few years’ difference this way or that do not matter, He is not the sort to run after fledglings. Never has been, l am tired. My bones are tired. My marrow is tired, and he is bringing me to life. 1 want to be free of all this. IMITATION OF LIFE 231 Sell out. I want my home in Fishrow, I want my child in it. i| My husband. Delilah. Flake. | All along, under their talk, as she handed fresh fruit out j of a silver bowl inscribed, “With the affection and admira¬ tion of the office. Christmas 1924,” the runnel of her droughts beat and flushed her face. "Flake, has it ever occurred to you that if the Imperial Chain offer were even double what it is, I’ve had enough?” I “You mean?” 6 j I mean that if the proper offer to buy outright, comes I from Usa, or any similar source, for that matter, I’m ready! "f I know when I’ve enough, Flake.” He crushed his napkin on the table, half pushing back his chair, and rather too elaborate in his gesture of surprise. “But I’ve heard you say repeatedly that you could imagine no reasonable offer large enough for you to accept.” Dial is true, Make, of the years gone by. But people change.” “Yes, yes, of course.” “I’ve changed, Flake.” She fastened her eyes on him then, as clearly and un- blinkingly as she could manage, amazed at the implication her gaze seemed able to muster, because as she held it she could see his face, where it started to quiver slightly in little jumping nerves along the jaw line, set itself against it. Why shouldn I: you get out from under? You’ve worked long and hard, Too hard. You’ve built up your monument, f You’re a rich woman,” She sat there leaning slightly forward, conscious that Delilah had shut the door to the kitchen, and absolutely breathless with desiring something different from what he said. He had not followed up the challenge of her retort. On the contrary. She had not, somehow, the womanish talent to make him too the mark of her passionate desire to keep him personal. I’m tired, Fluke, she wanted to say with the sob in her heart making itself felt in her voice so that he must, must, see all the way into the meaning of her maneuvering!!. I’m tired. You are the meaning of rest to me and happiness, and every- 232 IMITATION OF UFE thing that life hitherto has not meant lor me. Don't yon see? j W wlr"he“i»lly said was a string of worfc little shriU • words dint clattered like walls olf the chute of her lips. “I want to live;, Flake. I h:ivt*u t ever. Either the lines that fliekeral in and on o Ins f»oo were the almost too terrible ones to l.e endured, those of a man . retreating before the advances of an older wonun, or they ; • * the worried ones of a man concerned chieflywrath tlnnlo What of me in all this? % ,l Slv you step out, 1 do, too, no mailer what. ; Withyou gone there will he nothing loll of it a 1 ">1 its h| ; ness and profit Imagine 15. Pullmans without the B. lull- m '“Frank, you don't need to imagine anything without the \ B '“of Ini for vour decision. You’re right. Dead right What does business amount to, if not as a means to an end. “The end is our—” , . T “I’m in a position to take my medicine, I ve saved, may , seem a little too old to branch into new worlds. I crimps, but not much. I’ve never let myself dwell on stepping out while » you . . « “While I, Frank?” ,, » r “Not that I’ve entertained the idea that 1 m indispensable. : “You have been! You arcl" . . ' 1 “Nonsense! You’re too shrewd a business woman not to understand the big-business principle that no one man is ever r indispensable. But let me tell you that these years m asso- ; ciation with you have been indispensable to me. ( “Fluke, Frank, they’ve been more than that to wje. “Stuff and nonsensel Part of your success has been your :) : talent for employees. I don’t know how you do it. I doubt it b you quite do. But practically everybody who works for yw, ;; now that the girls have got the nonsense kmk brushed out ot , their minds, becomes your Delilah. ' \ IMITATION OF LIFE 233 “Not you, Frank_” He reached over and patted the back of her hand, “Yes, me. And I ve liked it, As a matter of fact I’ve liked it so much that your decision to sell may turn out to be the blessing in disguise for me that will start me on the road do¬ ing the only thing for which I have any real talent or desire. The fact that I feel sure I could pass my state medical exam¬ ination right now isn’t going to help me much, if I don’t hustle out and get a diploma to prove it, The day you get out from under, I enroll for that diploma.” She had a desperate and overwhelming feeling that some¬ how she must push back the strange tides she had so unwit¬ tingly released. “But, Frank, what I mean is . . .” “I know what you mean. You’re dead right. From now on, you want to begin to use your success, instead of going on creating more. You’ve already more than you want for your needs. Get yourself the things now that your money and leisure can buy. Get that girl of yours home. Enjoy her, En¬ joy yourself. God knows you’ve managed life well enough for everyone around you. It’s time you remembered you’re living a life, too.” “But, Frank, without the lives of those about me, Jessie, you-I need-” “You’ve it coining to you. If she’s anything near the gal she ought to be . . “And you, Frank-you’re built too solidly into my life by now for me to . , .” “Never fear. You’ll have a hard time to shake off this old relic of your business life, even if Weems and Lejaron and Van der Lippe aro to be sold up the river with Universal Sales Association.” “How can youl” “You know what I mean-passed on to the new ownership, you’ll have them and plenty more of us, who owe you too much to quite know what to do about it, yapping around your ankles, long after you would have done with us. And mark my word, with your interests in the condition they are, you’ll unload to Usa or some corporation as big, for some¬ where around six million, and it is coming to you every cent.” 234 imitation of life “That’s the least ...” , .. “Funny part, I know it is. You clout begin to realise any¬ thing about yourself.” “That’s not quite accurate. 1 m just beginning to. “You’ve kept your nose so close to the grindstone that you actually haven't taken time oil to realize whats liapjiniBl to von. Or have you any kind of ii.kliiitf that what has hap¬ pened to yon and the handful like you, prohaldy hasot hap- Led to women in the history of the world. Name m a woman, with the exception of lire few '» V™ 1 '» J today, who have built op husmesses anywhm a,jo, elt the magnitude of yours. How many women a, ho wh e history of them, have ever pnwed I o to fl. business man you are. lhe stage husii xui ^ set for it when you steamed m. for llwt matt i. and si. it for yourself, ft. as far back as you like and ml me he equivalent of a woman about to be fcd ' ' business slto built up out of u coa of maple )ou need is time off in order to get on to youtseU. Oh, how wrong, how cruelly, how ever, iudierously wrong had been her took. Here lw was ialtos ” *' ™ manner of a toastmaster introducing her at u Womans ness League dinner. . Here she was, calling to him from the and drsolauim,. into which none of these things he recited had leached. Frank, I love you. All the reward and all the itmanmg ohny success lie centered in yon and there you sit talking to hr my achievement. You and my child are my achievement. l am ready for you both now. Can’t you see what 1 m driving at? Won’t you see? . , , Suddenly, as if the stimulant of what was happening ha I only just reached him to the core, he reached over across the table and closed his hand over her wrist until the bracelet bit in. , .. . r "If you sell the business, you're releasing me for some¬ thing I should have had the courage to do live years ago on my own. I didn’t. The job here interested me ami the salary Isolved a lot. Besides, working for you was one of those priv¬ ileges a fellow doesn’t easily throw over. The day you step out, though, I step into medicine. In my way, this Usa otter, IMITATION OF LIFE 235 when it comes, will mean as much to me as it will to you!” There was something of the compensation of self-flagella¬ tion in continuing to sit there in the candlelight, twirling tire jade bracelet that his clutch had made dig into the flesh and planning with him, far into the midnight, the sale of a busi¬ ness that would release them both. CHAPTER 39 The night that, unannounced, Peola § walked in, Bea, who had come into the apartment about ten | o’clock after a monthly round-table dinner with her staff . managers, was standing before her mirror in one of tire new ■■§ fluffy peignoirs that had lately replaced her cotton crepe kimonos, braiding her hair into the two identical plaits she had worn to bed all of her adult life. Through the open door of her fathers room, she could hear his rumbling breathing, which was as definitely part of | her night as the ticking of a clock. Once indeed, the night of i his second stroke, both she and Delilah had darted from bed, on no more alarm than the unwonted silence of his having ;, skipped some of the breathings. , L Whe-e-eze, it was going through the apartment the night|': ; that Peola turned unexpectedly up, as Bea stood in the im¬ memorial attitude of a woman making a braid over one shoulder and binding it with a wisp of combing. It was three and a half years since Peola had passed through New York for a two-day visit on her way from | Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Washington, to accept the new - | position as librarian. Her appearance, following a late ring at the door, an- jjj swerecl by Delilah who had been moving about the kitchen at her nightly rite of washing a cold red apple for Bea before she retired, had been the occasion of an instantaneous outcry and clatter of an apple bumping its way along the hallway. “Praise be do Lawd Gawd Almighty for bein’ in His heaven! It’s mall chile come home to her waitin’ and prayin mammy! Lawd, you answered mail prayer. I knowed you 236 IMITATION OF LIFE would. Come out here, Miss Beal Didn't I tell yon »h chile W t d ar2Tl«t"»t told W. Bursting throu^ Are immense stress of this mooen^™ ^ wekh^, what must have lain crouclmg tew* the « “ ** silence concertos to Stmas visits, procrastinations, postponements except jPP J most indifferent justification, difficult to ever have qum lieved, yet so puzzlingly convincing. ali . “Mali chile ain’t cornin’ home dis heah Chnstaas, art Sent her de money, but ah tole her to keep| a 8^ ftU something for to wear, her a-hav . , jj ome neither, of ’em, includin’ Miss Jessie, who Is’re-cat-a- It’s re-cat-a-log-hT time out dar whar * de log-in' somctog .as fine as.: wto M^ on de mind dan re-cat-a-log-in. . t _ Not an intimation of tot chrome „L«ly man’s footfall; of the long and ^crvals betwe_ ^ ^ typed envelopes bearing the Seattle pos • crampe d ten or fifteen of Delilah’s, as immature scrawl, bearing, in spi pinned to her to a checking system, inclosures of bank notes pi 4 “t was Peola, straight . • tag; colored pallor stands out be—to ta- to mod^ hat walking into the routine of DelUan P re P‘ l ™ *■ to nightly ^polished apple on ^'^Lwn to Delilah, the secto inner guishes concerning this offsprmg of hers, along “'""ah bah, would-e home * -' »g IMITATION OF LIFE 237 mah chile. Gawd Almighty, praise be de Lawd, mah chile’s come home. . . The wide expanse of her face slashingly wet, the whites of her eyes seeming to pour rivulets down her face like rain against a window pane, her splayed lips dripping eaves of more tears, her throat even rained against, there was ap¬ parently no way that Delilah could capture the face of her child in an embrace. Rigid-eyed, it swung, the banana-colored mask, this way and that, away from the wetness. It eluded, it dipped, it came up dry and powdered with pallor, fastidi¬ ously untouched in die perfection of its maneuvers to escape the great wet crying surface that was after it. Mah baby. I knowed she’d come if I waited arid prayed and prayed and waited, Mah baby, come home to her mam¬ my, and nobody askin’ it of her.” The dry inscrutable face, wrung and silent, stared across the vast shoulder of her modier; stared arid stared at the figure of B. Pullman standing on the edge of that scene of the revelation of the pouring forth of this sole, this vast reti¬ cence of Delilah. Here was the silence of a late evening suddenly strewn with the secret debris of all the released torments that dur¬ ing the years must have pressed against the infallible out¬ ward exuberance of Delilah. A crucifying kind of pity for it looked out from the face regarding Bea above the enormous mound of her mother’s shoulder. Pity and a veritable nausea of revulsion. Peola was suffering that embrace, a demonstra¬ tion against which her flesh and her staring eyes seemed to curl. “Miss Jessie’s letters corned oftener, but mah baby brunged herself instead of any letters. Look heah at mah honeychile, Miss Bea. Miss Jessie never come home in no more stylel Look at dat fur tibbet, will youl White wid black tails lak kings wear. Ain’t she de fashionest-plate! Uli-uh, gimme dat valise! Doan’ you spoil your pretty hands luggin’ dat lug¬ gage. Gawd Almighty, mah chile’s come home-an will you look at dat tail to her walk. Strutting I calls it, an’ struttin’ ain’t none too good for her-Gawd Almighty, mah chile’s come home!” It was obvious enough that what happened with such im- 238 IMITATION OF LIFE mediate sequence had not been planned by Feola at all, as :die opened stiff lips to try and make manifest m the ws few lines of her dreadful little preamble. But somewhere her intentions, as revealed by her luggage and the late hour of her arrival, were failing her. The vast wet surface of a face that threatened to suck hers to it, the arms loaded with flesh that crowded and pressed her, _ e pronouncement that the small spare room off Delilah s which she had occupied on the rare occasions of visits to her mother was now preempted by the male nurse. Her intention o remain even overnight was failing her, failing her,, as she stood. , ... , “Gome right into your mammy’s room, honey-chile and take off your things and let your mammy feed and rest you. Ain’t no place, wid mah chair-baby’s nurse cluttering up de little room, for you to sleep tonight, exceptin where you belongs, in your mammy’s arms in your mammy s bed . . . > something I wouldn’t take ten million dollars for . . . mah baby wid her mammy in her bed, . . . r “No. No. No, I mean, I couldn’t. I can’t. I mean, you see, it’s better this way. Quickly. Let me talk it all, right here. In the hall. Standing. It will be better then for me to go. Please, Mrs, Pullman, you stay too. Please. You must. Ive traveled three days and three nights to see you both this way together!” “But, baby-chile—ain’t you gonna let your mammy git you fixed and comfortable fust? You looks dead-beat, baby. Missy Boa and me will wait-not Mrs, Pullman, honey; dat aint no way for to call—your best friend.” M “Please! The sooner this is over tire better for-everyone. “Baby, you ain’t in trouble?” “Not unless you decide that I am.” “Lawdagawd-” “Please! You-Mrs. Pullman-Missy Bea, tell her we must talk quietly and at once,” “But, Peola, your mother is happy and excited-” “Jos’ so happy, baby, I don’t know where to turn fust.” “I know you are, dear, But I need so much to talk to you, now—at once-quietly-” “I’ll leave you and your mother alone, Peola.” IMITATION'.OF LIFE 2 39 “Oh no, nol No, no, please! Won't you please stay? Yon have to he here. Thai, why I've come. To see you both' Then come mto my room. Don’t bother with (hose haw bags now, Delilah. Come. y "If it's because you got to sleep wid your ole mammy dat you dont want to stay tonight now dat you got your baus here, I kin roll mahself up on de floor.” 1 gS “Delilah, you’ll do nothing of the sort! Come into mv room. y No sooner in behind closed doors, than the daughter of Delilah, facing them, jerked off the small hat that revealed suddenly with startling distinctness the straight black hair and straight contrasting pallor of straight brow. “Help me, you two!” “Lordagawd! ...” “There is nobody but you two who can. Help me to passl” ‘Lordagawd!” “I’ve been in Seattle four years now. I’m liked there. I’ve made good there. I’ve passed. You must have known that all along, Missy Bea.” “I’ve suspected it.” “There’s nothing wrong in passing. The wrong is the world that makes it necessary.” Suddenly Delilah began to sway, throwing her apron up over her face and talking softly into it as her body rocked. Lordagawd, it s come! Give me strength. De white horses have cotched her. Lordagawd, give me strength.” “You’ll never know,” said Peola to Bea, as if trying to make herself heard above the noise of a crying child, “how I’ve dreaded all this. The wailing. The dreadful sounds- the awfulness. . . .” “Lordagawd, forgive me for wailin’, hut after all dese years of mah prayin’, you’ve seen fit, in your wisdom, for it to come tlusaway-” “There is nothing wrong about this way. What the world does not know, will not hurt it. I’m not ungrateful. Please try and understand that. I know how good you are. Twenty thousand times too good for me. Twenty? Fifty! Fifty times fifty times! Everything you’ve given me has been more than 240 IMITATION OF LIFE I deserve, and you’ve given and given and given me since the day 1 was bom. ...” , “Oh, mah baby, a-givin’ you has been the meanm ot livin. A-givin’ you, seein’ you git fine and educated an into what you are now, even if in do end it crucify me, is God s nicanin for puttin’ breath of life into dis black hulk- “Then you do want me to be happy-?' “I does, baby. . . . It hurts lak dis ole heart was a tooth¬ ache, wantin’ it.” “You do, you do, of course you do. And yet you know as well as I know, that with all you've given me over and above what I deserve, since the day I was horn, i vo been the most wretched • » • “Doan say it, baby. It’s do knife back in mail heart." “I must say it in order to make you understand. “Doan’, ...” “You at least can cry. I can’t. You’ve got tears left, I haven’t. I’ve cried myself dry. Cried myself out with self- loathing and self-pity and self-consciousness. I tell you I’ve .prayed same as you, for the strength to be pioiid of being t black under my white. I’ve tried to glory in mv people. I’ve : drenched myself in the life of Tonssaint LOnverture, Hooker Washington, and Frederick Douglass. 1 vo tried to catch some of their spark. But I'm not that stuff. I haven’t pride of race, or love of race. There’s nothing grand or obthe-stuil- martyrs-are-made about me. I can’t learn to endure being black in a white world. It might he easier if I was out-and-out black like you. Then there wouldn't he any question. But I’m not. I’m light. No way of knowing how much while flows somewhere in my veins. I'm as white under my skin as 1 am on top. Sometimes I think if my pap were living he'd have things to tell me-” “Pedal” “Lord Gawd Almighty, it ain’t mah chile talkin’-it's do horse in her neighin’ out through her blood. . . .” "Listen. You scarcely know me, I’ve gone my way, able to do so because you have been good and indulgent and generous. 1 haven’t been a good (laughter. 1 know that. I haven’t been anything you deserved to have me lie--” “You’re mail-” IMITATION OF LIFE 241 “But as things go in this world, I have been a good girl, morally or whatever you want to call it. I’ve worked. I’ve studied. I’ve tried to make the best of myself. And all the time with the terrible odds against me knowing I could never get anywhere I wanted to getl” j “Oh no, Pedal” j “Yes, Missy Beal What do you know about the blight of j not having the courage to face life in a black world? You’ve j succeeded in a world that matters to youl Give me that same chance.” : ;v. “What do you mean?” '! “I’ve got on out there in Seattle. Librarian in the city’s finest branch. I’ve been careful. I’ve watched my every step, made no false ones. I’m not black out there in Seattle. No¬ body knows anything, except that I’m an orphaned girl out from the East earning a decent living. And now, and now- the test has come. Sooner or later it had to come. I’ve got to go on forever that way, or be thrown back into something I haven’t the courage to face. You can help me. You two. Only you two and Jessie, who will, if you will. For GodVsake make her stop those moaning sounds. I can’t stand it. I wouldn’t hurt a dog that way. Make her stop it. ...” j? “Delilah, you must give Peola the right to state her case. ...” ■ “Lord Gawd Almighty, I’m breakin’ in twol I cain’t hear it no more. Lovin’ de Lawd dat made me black, I bring mah baby-chile into a race dat I’m proud to be one of. A low- down, good-for-nothin’ race of loafers, lots of ’em, but no worser dan loafers of any other color. Lovers of de Lawd and willin’ servers is mah race, filled wid de blessin’s of humility—a singin’, happy, God-lovin’, servin’ race dat I loves an’ is proud of, an’ wants mah chile to love--” “I can’t! I’ve nothing against them, but I-I can’t be what you want. I’m not the stuff. Not in a white world. If your skin is white like mine and your soul is white-like mine, there is no point to the needless suffering. I’ve got to be helped. You two can do it. And I need to terribly-now- nowl-to pass completely.” "Lawd have-” 242 IMITATION 01 LIFE ;it do you menu "Delilah, you must hear Peola out! the ordinary inevitable crisis. ■ • ■ "Marriage?" “Yes,” "White?” “No' no, no! Gawd don’t want His rivers to mis! .^SB&Ssass wi-y, <«a « SjJ? But wlml shu uttuuiptBl was W™* ydtid Ptol'i, tat* stood between them, she hall m-M.nl h , that was stronger than she was. “Won’t you please-wont yon-release me- ' L my way?” , . , “Let go what. I. ain t never hail- *t „eod so tcrrilily «W it * h V;*' I sm rfc os«pt for >™. Ilu ,«*.. W » 1 Lite how Hindi, II,smites ol how no,, , I W" tins « V. and I do, I do, I dan, not risk lotting him on mo V l '®"- lug,: Neither dare 1 risk it for myself. I ojmldu live. . - “Black winnnin who pass, pass into dainnalion. . • • “() my God! What chance have 1, Missy Bea, against hei swamp and voodoo nonsense? • • • , . “Dal ain't swamp talk. Dat ainl voodoo. Dais blondlalk. Dal’s de law-of-de-Lawd talk. You caiut go ag in do tallm of do rain and do crackin’ of de flmndcr. 'I heyrc there. v„,iVo iIipi-p Black! You aint lovm uohody but y tun soli m IMITATION OF LIFE 243 : dis here passin*. Your man will live to curse de day when your lie comes out in your ehillun. ...” “I’ve taken care of thatl” “Peolal” • | “I’m not ashamed. There are millions to populate tire world besides me. There is no shame in being sterilized in the name of the happiness of another. He knows, without knowing why, that I can’t have children. I want my happi¬ ness. I want my man. I want my life. I love him, I’ll follow j him to tire ends of the earth. Which is practically what I { propose to do.” j! “What end of the earth, Peola?” i| “He’s an engineer. We’re going to Bolivia. I’ll see to it that we stay there. His happiness will be the meaning of my , life. I love him. He loves me. Knowing would blast his life A and destroy mine. Nothing can happen to destroy us except if you . . . won’t . . . help-” “Lordagawd give me strength. . . .” “Try, dear Miss Bea, to stop her. It's like a horror in a jungle—it’s I ike—everything I’m trying to run away from. For God’s,sake-don’t do that—stop swaying-stop praying-” “Doan’ leave me, baby. Doan’ pass from me, baby, Even if I ain’t never had you, doan’ leave me. . . “You’re good. All my life I’ll carry the memory of it locked up in my silence. But let me pass-Mammy-” “Mammy! She called me Mammy-I’s in her blood—she cain’t help it-Honey-chile, come to your mammy-” “Don’t you dare! You can’t hold me. Blood can’t, because there isn’t enough of it between us. I don’t care what you say. If my father had lived he might have had something to tell me that not even you know. Let me passl” “You cain’t pass! You cain’t! You cain’t! God’ll know it, even if nobody el,so does, and what you gonna do when you face him on bis pearly throne. ...” “Let me take care of God! All that I want is your pledge. Both of yours. To let ine pass, in silence. Give me your sol¬ emn oaths that so far as you are concerned, so far as ever en¬ tering my life with my husband is concerned, you do not know me, have never seen me, have never heard of me. It is that, for me, or nothing. It is life for me, or death. Promise 244 imitation of life mc never to know me If yon **M »«> “ *££ years to come. I'll see that yon dm I. W I®' lu the arm of coincidence, promise mo y „„r power to rf» “ TWr^ Wro,™ Ian my happiness in your \ ^ oonven- Thev made a strange center, these uuu , tional bedroom of taffeta, Ctosshm li-tt".** a r;;,S'" • ‘tSSSSiTSi. Co for you.” ( i t0 mail “Lordagawd, you re a-oskin mme ol - * „ chile in her grave, hot if dots ywn • • . , l rm not worth yo.tr tears, lm not>*>, ' * i :fcm. I’.n as vile in my own tnmd « I . » But somehow I’ll make it np. HI make " ? 1 , mate it op in trying to bring cm** ^ one human bring. I’ll make up lor the rotten tilth - b, making A, M. the best wile Clod over mi* a man. just a darling, clean young boy, Mammy, » J” 1 *J“ SZ it «> »i.h his free ** got library evenings, after bis mother died last Mo di, h a H; him without a tie in the world. Lonely kid. Dailmf, - ■ fellow. Wonder if you know what A means U > g- lonely careful life I had to. All of a sudden-all of a sucUU-n he whole world bursting open, like a flower. 1 never dmm u -I never tried for him. It was just a ease of a loneso, e U coming to the library evenings and the lonosomest yil m in the world-” , . >. “De makin’s of misery-tie makms ot misery- “I tell you no! He’s gassed, to say nothing of ha « “ he lost in Flanders. He's never yet shaken the hell ol w.u lout of his eyes. He needs change. Were gun,g to mate a Ifeesh start. He’s got this engineering chance m Mma. IMITATION OF LIFE 245 Thousands of miles from anyone who knows us. We’ll get our roots down, there. What he doesn’t know about me cannot ever hurt him. What lie does know will bring him all the happiness there is. It’s not a sin, Mammy, where there won’t be children. It’s all or nothing for me. You two have my life or my death in your hands.” “Oh, Peola, it isn’t fair to put it that way to your mother.” “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I’ve sweated agony before I took the train to come here?'But it’s all there is left. Life doesn’t mean much to me, Missy Bea. Never has, until now. I couldn’t go back to having it mean little again— and live on. Mammy’s got you, You’ve got Jessie. I’ve found A. M. He loves me. I love him, I’ve done the—the right things—about the possibility of children. Never mind how. You couldn’t believe how! It hasn’t been easy. It’s been ter¬ rible that—well, without him, I couldn’t face a life that would be as sterile as I am.” “How have you dared!” “One dares everything when there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. His mother died and he began studying on his evening engineering course at the library. He couldn’t find the right lodgings. I got him a room where I was board¬ ing. We got to sitting together on the stoop evenings, after library. Walking. Talking. He needed to be nursed out of a state of mind he’d gotten into about that half of hand, He’s been so terribly gassed too. To show you the kind of boy he is, his mother never knew that, up to the day she died. Not a hoy to go gadding around. Lonely. Me too. Self-conscious about his hand. I cured him of that. Mining engineers don’t read much outside their work. I got him into the habit. We began to go rowing Sundays. With a book. A.-M. is such a kid. Used to his mother-” “Mali chile dat’s gonna throw away her own mammy is a-lovin’ him now for a-lovin’ his mammy!” “It’s life, I tell you. Me clutching at life! You’ve got to let me pass into a new world. I haven’t told him anything different than Tve told everyone out there. Practically noth¬ ing except that I-I’m alone, too. They like me out there. Ho—loves me. He depends on me. He’s out there now- waiting for me to come back before we set sail. He’s got this 246 IMITATION OF LIFE «-**-*» lt-muSc“«l «« know. Tliimsamls km Am*. H 1 n«r know anything m* 1— Hw 1 him And will. Oh, don't look at mo like that, tho Inn of yon. What * yon know of what I've l» j -"hf , k ““ ^ I’,n doing. It’s all or nothing for me. l‘<>» tw <>~ P 'Tortowd, help me-do for mah elnlo what dm wants-" •I °l? yon to let me pas. 1 want yonr oath. Nem m lone as yon live, if vou meet me here or lime- m tin imnjc, I, ™ he hick seas, to noogoi- or own m. 1 leave y». ** w,ul t,H ‘ uf ..* K ’ Whifwoultl lmvo thnntdil I'Tdai mmld imiM'iiiI I''' 11 1^"* I' 1 such nonsense? Go on! Go on! U out Once or twice on the drive home she g.»w !utk J ' EsSkBSSS laughter into the darkness. CHAPTER 46 Following that first noncommittal but significant lunch at the Sky Top Club, where the major issues in the minds of all concerned were skirted but never skated upon, flumes of rumors began to fly and thicken, Negotiations for the out-and-out sale of the B. Pullman interests, while carefully guarded from the press, became “Street” rather than general conjecture, There was anxiety on the part of Universal Sales Associa¬ tion not to have leak out beyond the inevitable confines of ,< Wall Street and interests vitally concerned, the passing into | new hands of a concern so intimately associated in the minds j of the public with the name and personality of its founder, if Both on the part of Universal Sales and B. Pullman, Inc., statements, interviews, or comment was denied, and for ten days, while two sets of corporation lawyers sat in preliminary conferences, B. Pullman, target for skulking reporters, re¬ mained virtually a prisoner within the walls of her apartment. ; They were ten days laid over with a simulated enchant¬ ment of what amounted to a game she played with herself. Suppose, just suppose the deal were through and that she ... was awakening, this string of quiet secluded mornings, to days that were absolutely freed of her labor and consecration. Days devoid of reports and conferences, telegrams, cable¬ grams, adjustments, maladjustments, long-distance and local problems, chronic and emergency complications, quick de¬ cisions, locked committee meetings, personnel and staff con¬ siderations, moneys, notes, stocks, loans, mortgages, leases, releases, insurances, breakage, overhead, claims, shipments, accidents, prices, wear and tear, innovations, renovations, Cleveland, Toronto, Hollywood, Denver, Chicago! . This brief and enforced seclusion in order to escape the press the immunity from the usual office telephone calls ot widely assorted inquirers, promoters, cranks, interrogators, made possible for her a little oasis of days the like of which 277 278 IMITATION OF LIFK ; *w-*sts it ii;r!; •f* 1 ' lW . P '!'“ P Avomil: limminfl window c-iirlains that ,5;-S2S£;K-:;t mj*‘at < a*’«'r°« H> & i “ I »*'"“IT ,'"7"''7 54„,rations and your inquiring press tamld t»dy !»•“ 5 P”t”„ , oltrtum-iionirmT at tart. A l*» ■'[ *««« «•'« P car,,I slippers (or Uni wta I® “'»« " """J* I T L| (Oh darling, aren't you over pwiR «** I> '« F i it said? I can't hold him "If much Imtfiw. 1>"I I need m ' terribly to have yotir sanction brat baby.) "Ben, were you ever in love with my ratlin r “O^dimf prtaoml. You’re modem enough to stand up under a question like that. _ “1 don’t know what you meam "You do. Only the Arctic Avenue in you wmt b-t you k ; simple and frank about it. ™ ««wr l<* P"- ^ Y uU WW (Now 1 nowl Now, was the time! Jessie, ymm’ right, My ■ marriage to your father was the marriage of a sleeping sp»it Z\ a sleeping flesh whieh he never sucm-derl u awakening That had to wait eighteen years, kr Make. I hut u why ; weedv. 1’m thirty-eifilit. Let mi? have what is eft. hn not sure that Flake is any morn awake than l was twenty yea s ago, but I fool » sore "f wkl I bvo lo « j|k Jessie, lor just thu lowering of ll* Wta wta* ' W fBidowu to him. Let me have him, Sweet.} , 9|flp. |£ en « t jf over, was opportunity to tear these winds out, ot IMITATION OF LIFE 279 her silence. Here, if ever! The two of them hunched in their soft tilings on the chaise longue in Jessie’s room. These com¬ paratively peaceful shut-in days of security against intrusion. The growth of this something so right and . normal between them, after the delayed and frustrated years of intimacy. The need to talk to Jessie. Opportunity was at hand. Next: week this time, steam-shovels would already be biting into the waiting dirt of Fishrow. New life, as if waiting for the signal to raise the curtain, was about to begin. . . , ‘‘Jessie, you and I, because of the strangeness of our lives, the immense thing that happened to me when I thought that all I was doing was trying to keep a roof over our heads, haven’t had the opportunity, up to this perfect and precious i present, to get really acquainted, ...” “Don’t I know it! It’s been long-distance awe for me and ft, being impressed by the grandeur of a parent who turned out II to be a swell exhibit A of my idea of a regular mater, No a two ways about it, Bea, something just perfectly grand has 1 happened to you this time. Up to now I’ve always sort of f shared the idea of the girls and teachers at school and of everybody who ever heard I was my mother’s daughter. Thrilling and all that to be the daughter of a famous mother, ; but rather too grand for comfort. But it’s this selling the | business or-something, or perhaps my discovering for my- 7 self how dnrlingly human you are, has thawed all the awe ; and still kept you the darlingest person in the world,” “Ob, my dear! ...” _ i ‘Tin crazy about you, Bea. Not just admiration and being \a impressed. I think you’re such a darling. Remember how | Delilah used to say to Peola-it’s so hard to remember not to mention her-remember how she used to say, ‘Chile, amt you ashamed to be so naughty when you got a missus is sech 1 “Oh Jessie, now that we are this way, so blessedly elose- things that would have been so terribly difficult to discuss have suddenly become so-” , v . . “Don’t I know! Easier to say. Easier to confide. Easier to just crawl, old darling, into each other. Bea darhng, Im so ridiculously happy this very moment. Oh, Ma, 280 IMITATION OF LIFE don't look at ...0, I'm silly and fall of giffiK »»d * V»“ look at me twice, I’ll cry." “Jessie, what do you meant “Nothing; that's the ridiculous part. 1 only know that In, happy, Ilea. Happier than I've ever ten u> my Me. “Silly! Has it to do with being hmucr “Yes, Yes-yes!” “With me?” “Yes." “Is it-Fishrow-” , , . ., » “No. Yes-yes-yes, in a way. Oh, Bca, dent you see? . . . Strangely enough, to what was to he her subsequent and almost insane despair, she did not see. CHAPTER 47 That shk uh> not skh was almost im- mediately to he home in upon her humiliation in hot and The growing and grim tautness of Hake, whieh at first she attributed to the importunings of Universal Sales Associa¬ tion that, in the event of sale, he remain on with the new combine for a minimum period of three years, was obviously of stranger and deeper source. There was something that seemed startled and apprehen¬ sive in the manner lie carried about. He entered the house that way evenings, during the retreat of Rea following tho all-too-heralded rumor of sale. He paled under it, grew ret¬ icent under it. And then came the occasion, as she entered the room one evening where ho sat poring over blue-prints with Jessie, that Rea, placing her hand lightly on his shoulder, had felt his body spurt to its feet, as if to throw it olf. And still in the enormity of her lack of realizations, the dear thought struck her that the time was at hand when every taut suppressed nerve in his body, instead of retreating, would relax against hers. The suspicion of a desiring Hake repressed actually smote her body like fingers across a lyre. IMITATION OF LIFE 281 Here was every indication that under the strain she was j imposing upon him, the weeks of procrastination, her failure j| to see him alone, the holding off rigidly for the sake of a sanction she could not bring herself to proceed without, ; Flake was breaking. Jessie or no Jessie, the time was at hand, j the time had come! j But there was Jessie. i. From her position on the other side of what had been the j| concealing figure of Flake as he rose at that touch, it was J, almost as if-why, it was almost as if Jessie, who now sat spread like a flower on a cushion at his feet, must have slid • there from his knees. k The thought smote her, the thought stopped her heart,® and then, too ephemeral to endure beyond the batting of an a eye, died back into the recesses of her consciousness. Why, I these two were giggling! they were feet apart and apparently 1 had been hard at the blue-prints for Number Nine, because | the curled sheets lay between them, and as for the lovely .4 brightness that lay on the face of Jessie, that was constantly there these days, like a flood light, Like a flood of brightness; but still she did not see. Over years of strange dark foreign nights filled with the most tormenting musings, she was never to cease to marvel ( over that. Over years of letters from them, of regularity, of affection, “ of deepest nostalgia for her return, and later, over the first precariously scrawled letters of their children, all three born in Fishrow, she was never to cease to marvel at what had been the paralysis of her perceptions. . . . The seeing, when it did come, had to happen so literally as A-B-C. A for apple. B for biscuit. C for Cat. It had, so she cried out to herself from the fastnesses of hotel suites at Deauville, the Griffon in Paris, tire Savoy in London, the Australia in Sydney, to be ground into her con¬ sciousness as concretely as gravel under a heel. For years, to the constant peregrinations of her affairs, while, as it were, her enterprises joined hands to almost literally encircle the world, Madrid to Rome, to Vienna, to Berlin, to Paris, London, Sydney, Shanghai, that thought, 282 IMITATION OF LIFE Hke a hangnail against peace, was to continue to prick and t0, Sl»e U practieallv needed to be told, in words of one syllable, when an ounce more of blessed intuition would have spared her son-in-law a future of uncase and abjectness in her pres¬ ence As a matter of fact, would have Spared them both that harness of insurmountable self-consciousness winch was for¬ ever to caparison their mutual manner and which was ulti¬ mately to condemn her more and more rigidly to the pro- Wed absences from the home in Fishrow where her grand¬ children were growing up to regard her as a magnificent ttpt happening and happening that night, the feeble¬ ness of her perceptions, when she should have been able, not only to «4 tat t. hold tin; revolali™ that J«* nf « ootenw into tin' mom, l«d slid 1mm llm ™ta« « I' Not only as she walked in upon them, did the Hash of her initial impression of these two in the propinquity of im m- limce streak across her mind and then out, but immediate contrition for the snide thought flooded her. Plain to see all that had happened was this: Her touch Upon Flake’s shoulder, spurting him to his feet, had been something goading, something more, than he could hear, Jessie or no Jessie, the time had come! “Jessie, I need to talk to Frank. Will you leave us alone? “Of course," said the yellow spread of skirts from her cushion, with the brightness out over her face in its flood light, and also, too, as if glad to he released from a moment that had caught and captured her into discomfort. “Frank," she said, in their sudden alrmeness, and went toward him. Since her return, Jessie had rearranged the lights ot Hie living-room so that they were dimmer and pinker, and sud¬ denly, and because of what she was about to say, she felt grateful to them for wrapping her in a protective kind of tulle. “Frank!” , ■ . There was that pallor again against his face hko a steel light, and the stiffening she had noticed of late, which was IMITATION OF LIFE 283 his manner, these days, of meeting her protracted technique of evasions. “Frank, I know you’re hurt with me. I know you’re baffled with me. But it’s nothing, except that I’ve been stuck in the mud of a psychological hole. Frank, the reason I haven’t let this thing happen as-as it started to before Jessie came, is because I’ve been playing for time. Too silly! She’ll be the first to think so. I’ve wanted to tell her-prepare her—silly nonsense somewhere in me of thinking I owed it to her. Frank, am I being awful-or mistaken about everything-or just humanly honest about what won’t stay pent up in me any .•; longer? Shall we both tell Jessie-now-together? Frank, my dear, am I being terrible? . . yjjg: To stand there was to feel, as nearly as the human body ::s * capable of feeling, that the heart was a pump forcing hlood;|i up tight against the roof of the head, rushing it down tight, ; | close, pressing, into the legs, making them want to hurst. Up. Down. Up. 1 ! “Frank!" Surely and terribly there lay that steel light ■ against his face! ; ; A7 “If I’ve been insane, crazy, dreaming, tell me, boy. One ; can no more than be incinerated of humiliation. Only I thought—you see, all, everything between us—all the more. , so because it has never quite been spoken out—has been there , —as surely as your hand is there on that table. Fiank, are you about to tell me that the thing that has been between you and me has existed only-only in my craziness? . . . ■ “Good Godl a man like me-one-tenth your caliber-to ; have to tell a woman like you-the lay of land between us. You’re right. After the first realizations began to crack in upon me that things could actually be what they weie seenr ing to be, I did come to understand that matters could come to their head almost any day. Of course I came to know what was brewing in that blessed head and heart of yours. 1 was biding my time-glad that you were hiding yours, m order to make sure that what was happening to me was not some quirk in my brain, making me see tilings. A man, 1 kept telling myself, would he insane not to want it, A woman like you Me, actually having the power to interest a woman like vou. I don’t know, Bea, being as honest with you as you | deserve I should he-I don't honestly know how it all would i i vm , come out. Only now-now 1 know what a terrible, mis I take has possibly been averted-for you as much as tor me, :i Boa. God what a messl _ . She tried to draw his palms away - from .grinding against his tightly closed eyes. i “Why Frank, are you misunderstanding? 1 here is no moss. Everything is what it has been, only infinitely more, h pent you see, I’m through now, playing for tune. I havent , mV «ride where you are concerned. Only humility, Frank, •uid the passionate desire to try to return to you some measure n S the i credible happiness you have given me. Age is not | necessarily a matter of years, Frank. The eight years between | - us need not be eight. My capacity for hying and bvmg- ‘ “F or God’s sake,” lie almost screamed, his teeth bared beneath the grinding of his palms against his eyes and this time no mistaking the tense turning of the pillar ot his body away from hor-for Cod’s sake- don t make me have to be 1,1 0,riiis ’turning, the door swung open to Jessie in her ' 1 “DiV^von call? Of course 1 know you didn’t. But I’ve been so afraid he might be the fat to tell you, or that he won dn t E' tell you at all, or if things got into a jam them would 0 sweetheart to guide him, Darling, has he? 0 emuse he •H hasn’t! As a matter of fact, he hasn’t quite told himself, ve I.; done all the folding. He’s a terrible lover, Ma. Doesn t know his own mind. Blows hot. Blows cold. In Cods moitdawe I : of yon. Temperamental as a barber. Would escape i lie could, l]i Couldn’t if lie would. Wouldn't if he could But I love him -I! a nd he loves me, Relieve his terror, parent; gwo ns lb, maternal blessing with caution or I may pass out of the pit* sure of too much happiness.” ; Here was the scene which was to be preserved so peitecliy k in the retina of her mind’s eye, that looking back, looking ! “ hack at it across the years, the living picture of it, even to the yellow of a frock and the smear of anguish aeioss a wu„ was never to dim, _ . . They were so young, standing there... so ngnt,... GOA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY TALE ,AO GOA ©©nation AGO No..D.bB.. Name of Dsaour L-' B' " ... ftgo