Part 7 (1/2)

Let's see, you've had it two--three years this spring? My land! Let me show you our new taupes.”

Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two--perhaps two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York.

”I guess you ain't a New Yorker, huh?” Mike said.

”Me? No.”

”Th' most of the folks in th' buildin' ain't.”

”Ain't!” Hosea Brewster was startled into it. ”They're artists, aren't they? Most of 'em?”

”No! Out-of-town folks, mostly, like you. West--Iowa an' Californy an'

around there. Livin' here, though. Seem t' like it better'n where they come from. I dunno.”

Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women.

He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath, b.u.t.toned so snugly into their s.h.i.+ning shoes and their tailored clothes, with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white linen collars. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn't his square-toed shoes that made the difference, or his gray hat, or his baggy trousers. It was something inside him--something he lacked, he thought. It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed that they did not.

”Enjoying yourself, Milly?”

”I should say I am, father.”

”That's good. No housework and responsibility to this, is there?”

”It's play.”

She hated the toy gas stove, and the tiny ice chest, and the screen pantry. All her married life she had kept house in a big, bounteous way: apples in barrels; b.u.t.ter in firkins; flour in sacks; eggs in boxes; sugar in bins; cream in crocks. Sometimes she told herself, bitterly, that it was easier to keep twelve rooms tidy and habitable than one combination kitchen-dining-and-living room.

”Chops taste good, Hosey?”

”Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show.”

”You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?”

”It's the life, mother! It's the life!”

His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some sc.r.a.p of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lively. The price of b.u.t.ter, eggs, milk, cream, and the like horrified his Wisconsin cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.

Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady b.u.t.ter-and-egg acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous Wisconsin farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out on the porch early, very early summer mornings.

You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.

”I don't know what ailed him,” his widow had said, weeping. ”He just seemed to kind of pine away.”

It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market.

Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of eggs, the b.u.t.ter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.