Part 46 (2/2)
”Just for five minutes you should have felt that pain!”
”Honest, Julius, to be a coward like you for dying it ain't nice--honest, it ain't.”
”Always, Becky, when I think I ain't always going to be with you and the children such a feeling comes over me.”
”_Ach_, Julius, be quiet! Without you I might just as well be dead, too.”
”I'm getting old, Becky; sixty-six ain't no spring chicken no more.”
”That's right, Julius; stick knives in me.”
”Life is short, Becky; we must be happy while we got each other.”
”Life _is_ short, Julius, and for our children we should do all what we can. We can't always be with them, Julius. We--we must do the right thing by 'em. Like you say we--we're getting old--together, Julius. We don't want nothing to reproach ourselves with.”
”Ya, ya, Becky.”
Darkness fell thickly, like blue velvet portieres swinging together, and stars sprang out in a clear sky.
They rocked in silence, their heads touching. The gray cat, with eyes like opals, sprang into the hollow of Mr. Binsw.a.n.ger's arm.
”Billy, you come to sit by mamma and me? Ni-ce Bil-ly!”
”We go in now, papa; in the damp you get rheumatism.”
”Ya, ya, Becky--hear how he purrs, like an engine.”
”Come on, papa; damper every minute it gets.”
He rose with his rheumatic jerkiness, placed the cat gently on all fours on the floor, and closed his fingers around the curve of his wife's outstretched arm.
”When--when we go--go to the city, Becky, we don't sublet Billy; we--we take him with us, not, Becky?”
”Yes, papa.”
”Ya, ya, Becky.”
The chief sponsors for the family hotel are neurasthenia and bridge whist, the inability of the homemaker and the debility of the housekeeper.
Under these invasions Hestia turns out the gas-logs, pastes a To Let sign on the windows, locks the front door behind her, and gives the key to the auctioneer.
The family holds out the dining-room clock and a pair of silver candlesticks that came over on the stupendously huge cargo which time and curio dealers have piled upon the good s.h.i.+p _Mayflower_; engages a three-room suite on the ninth floor of a European-plan hotel, and inaugurates upon the sly American paradox of housekeeping in non-housekeeping apartments.
The Wellington Hotel was a rococo haven for such refugees from the modern social choler, and its doors flew open and offered them a family rate, excellent cuisine, quarantine.
Excellent cuisine, however, is a clever but spiceless parody on home cookery.
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