Storytelling. The adventure of the creeping man and other stories. Сборник
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grunted Mr. Fink.
After supper he gathered his newspapers to read. He sat in his stocking feet.
Arise, some new Dante, and sing me the befitting corner of perdition for the man who sitteth in the house in his stockinged feet. Sisters of Patience who by reason of ties or duty have endured it in silk, yarn, cotton, lisle thread or woollen – does not the new canto belong?
The next day was Labor Day. The occupations of Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Fink ceased for one passage of the sun. Labor, triumphant, would parade and otherwise disport itself.
Mrs. Fink took Mrs. Cassidy’s pattern down early. Mame had on her new silk waist. Even her damaged eye managed to emit a holiday gleam. Jack was fruitfully penitent, and there was a hilarious scheme for the day afoot, with parks and picnics and Pilsener in it.
A rising, indignant jealousy seized Mrs. Fink as she returned to her flat above. Oh, happy Mame, with her bruises and her quick-following balm! But was Mame to have a monopoly of happiness? Surely Martin Fink was as good a man as Jack Cassidy. Was his wife to go always unbelabored and uncaressed? A sudden, brilliant, breathless idea came to Mrs. Fink. She would show Mame that there were husbands as able to use their fists and perhaps to be as tender afterward as any Jack.
The holiday promised to be a nominal one with the Finks. Mrs. Fink had the stationary washtubs in the kitchen filled with a two weeks’ wash that had been soaking overnight. Mr. Fink sat in his stockinged feet reading a newspaper. Thus Labor Day presaged to speed.
Jealousy surged high in Mrs. Fink’s heart, and higher still surged an audacious resolve. If her man would not strike her – if he would not so far prove his manhood, his prerogative and his interest in conjugal affairs, he must be prompted to his duty.
Mr. Fink lit his pipe and peacefully rubbed an ankle with a stockinged toe. He reposed in the state of matrimony like a lump of unblended suet in a pudding. This was his level Elysium – to sit at ease vicariously girdling the world in print amid the wifely splashing of suds and the agreeable smells of breakfast dishes departed and dinner ones to come. Many ideas were far from his mind; but the furthest one was the thought of beating his wife.
Mrs. Fink turned on the hot water and set the washboards in the suds. Up from the flat below came the gay laugh of Mrs. Cassidy. It sounded like a taunt, a flaunting of her own happiness in the face of the unslugged bride above. Now was Mrs. Fink’s time.
Suddenly she turned like a fury upon the man reading.
“You lazy loafer!” she cried, “must I work my arms off washing and toiling for the ugly likes of you? Are you a man or are you a kitchen hound?”
Mr. Fink dropped his paper, motionless from surprise. She feared that he would not strike – that the provocation had been insufficient. She leaped at him and struck him fiercely in the face with her clenched hand. In that instant she felt a thrill of love for him such as she had not felt for many a day. Rise up, Martin Fink, and come into your kingdom! Oh, she must feel the weight of his hand now – just to show that he cared – just to show that he cared!
Mr. Fink sprang to his feet – Maggie caught him again on the jaw with a wide swing of her other hand. She closed her eyes in that fearful, blissful moment before his blow should come – she whispered his name to herself – she leaned to the expected shock, hungry for it.
In the flat below Mr. Cassidy, with a shamed and contrite face was powdering Mame’s eye in preparation for their junket. From the flat above came the sound of a woman’s voice, high-raised, a bumping, a stumbling and a shuffling, a chair overturned – unmistakable sounds of domestic conflict.
“Mart and Mag scrapping?” postulated Mr. Cassidy. “Didn’t know they ever indulged. Shall I trot up and see if they need a sponge holder?”
One of Mrs. Cassidy’s eyes sparkled like a diamond. The other twinkled at least like paste.
“Oh, oh,” she said, softly and without apparent meaning, in the feminine ejaculatory manner. “I wonder if – wonder if! Wait, Jack, till I go up and see.”
Up the stairs she sped. As her foot struck the hallway above out from the kitchen door of her flat wildly flounced Mrs. Fink.
“Oh, Maggie,” cried Mrs. Cassidy, in a delighted whisper; “did he? Oh, did he?”
Mrs. Fink ran and laid her face upon her chum’s shoulder and sobbed hopelessly.
Mrs. Cassidy took Maggie’s face between her hands and lifted it gently. Tear-stained it was, flushing and paling, but its velvety, pink-and-white, becomingly freckled surface was unscratched, unbruised, unmarred by the recreant fist of Mr. Fink.
“Tell me, Maggie,” pleaded Mame, “or I’ll go in there and find out. What was it? Did he hurt you – what did he do?”
Mrs. Fink’s face went down again despairingly on the bosom of her friend.
“For God’s sake don’t open that door, Mame,” she sobbed. “And don’t ever tell nobody – keep it under your hat. He – he never touched me, and – he’s – oh, Gawd – he’s washin’ the clothes – he’s washin’ the clothes!”
Dusk
Norman Gortsby sat on a bench in the Park, with his back to a strip of bush-planted sward, fenced by the park railings, and the Row fronting him across a wide stretch of carriage drive. Hyde Park Corner, with its rattle and hoot of traffic, lay immediately to his right. It was some thirty minutes past six on an early March evening, and dusk had fallen heavily over the scene, dusk mitigated by some faint moonlight and many street lamps.
There was a wide emptiness over road and sidewalk, and yet there were many unconsidered figures moving silently through the half-light, or dotted unobtrusively on bench and chair, scarcely to be distinguished from the shadowed gloom in which they sat.
The scene pleased Gortsby and harmonised with his present mood. Dusk, to his mind, was the hour of the defeated. Men and women, who had fought and lost, who hid their fallen fortunes and dead hopes as far as possible from the scrutiny of the curious, came forth in this hour of gloaming, when their shabby clothes and bowed shoulders and unhappy eyes might pass unnoticed, or, at any rate, unrecognised.
A king that is conquered must see strange looks,
So bitter a thing is the heart of man.
The wanderers in the dusk did not choose to have strange looks fasten on them, therefore they came out in this bat-fashion, taking their pleasure sadly in a pleasure-ground that had emptied of its rightful occupants. Beyond the sheltering screen of bushes and palings came a realm of brilliant lights and noisy, rushing traffic. A blazing, many-tiered stretch of windows shone through the dusk and almost dispersed it, marking the haunts of those other people, who held their own in life’s struggle, or at any rate had not had to admit failure. So Gortsby’s imagination pictured things as he sat on his bench in the almost deserted walk. He was in the mood to count himself among the defeated. Money troubles did not press on him; had he so wished he could have strolled into the thoroughfares of light and noise, and taken his place among the jostling ranks of those who enjoyed prosperity or struggled for it. He had failed in a more subtle ambition, and for the moment he was heartsore and disillusionised, and not disinclined to take a certain cynical pleasure in observing and labelling his fellow wanderers as they went their ways in the dark stretches between the lamp-lights.
On the bench by his side sat an elderly gentleman with a drooping air of defiance that was probably the remaining vestige of self-respect in an individual who had ceased to defy successfully anybody or anything. His clothes could scarcely be called shabby, at least they passed muster in the half-light, but one’s imagination could not have pictured the wearer embarking on the purchase of a half-crown box of chocolates or laying out ninepence on a carnation buttonhole. He belonged unmistakably to that forlorn orchestra to whose piping no one dances; he was one of the world’s lamenters who induce no responsive weeping. As he rose to go Gortsby imagined him returning to a home circle where he was snubbed and of no account, or to some bleak lodging where his ability to pay a weekly bill was the beginning and end of the interest