Part 2

At parting he pressed her hand. "I have been happy," he murmured in a tone which said, "Mine is a sorrow-shadowed soul that has rarely tasted happiness."

She glanced up at him with ingenuous feeling in her eyes and managed to stammer: "I hope we'll meet again."

"Couldn't I come down to see you Sunday evening?"

"There's a concert in the Square. If you're there I might see you."

"Until Sunday night," he said, and made her feel that the three intervening days would be for him three eternities.

She thought of him all the way home in the car, and until she fell asleep. His sonorous name was in her mind when she awoke in the morning; and, as she stood in the store that day, waiting on the customers, she looked often at the door, and, with the childhood-surviving faith of youth in the improbable and impossible, hoped that he would appear. For the first time she was definitely discontented with her lot, was definitely fascinated by the idea that there might be something higher and finer than the simple occupations and simple enjoyments which had filled her life thus far.

In the evening after supper her father and mother left her and her brother August in charge, and took their usual stroll for exercise and for the profound delight of a look at their flat-houses--those reminders of many years of toil and thrift. They had spent their youth, she as cook, he as helper, in one of New York's earliest delicatessen shops. When they had saved three thousand dollars they married and put into effect the plan which had been their chief subject of conversation every day and every evening for ten years--they opened the "delicatessen" in Avenue A, near Second Street. They lived in two back rooms; they toiled early and late for twenty-three contented, cheerful years--she in the shop when she was not doing the housework or caring for the babies, he in the great clean cellar, where the cooking and cabbage-cutting and pickling and spicing were done. And now, owners of three houses that brought in eleven thousand a year clear, they were about to retire. They had fixed on a place in the Bronx, in the East Side, of course, with a big garden, where every kind of gay flower and good vegetable could be grown, and an arbor where there could be pinochle, beer and coffee on Sunday afternoons. In a sentence, they were honorable and exemplary members of that great mass of humanity which has the custody of the present and the future of the race--those who live by the sweat of their own brows or their own brains, and train their children to do likewise, those who maintain the true ideals of happiness and progress, those from whom spring all the workers and all the leaders of thought and action.

They walked slowly up the Avenue, speaking to their neighbors, pausing now and then for a joke or to pat a baby on the head, until they were within two blocks of Tompkins Square. They stopped before a five-story tenement, evidently the dwelling-place of substantial, intelligent, self-respecting artisans and their families, leading the natural life of busy usefulness. In its first floor was a delicatessen--the sign read "Schwartz and Heilig." Paul Brauner pointed with his long-stemmed pipe at the one show-window.

"Fine, isn't it? Beautiful!" he exclaimed in Low-German--they and almost all their friends spoke Low-German, and used English only when they could not avoid it.

The window certainly was well arranged. Only a merchant who knew his business thoroughly--both his wares and his customers--could have thus displayed cooked chickens, hams and tongues, the imported sausages and fish, the jelly-inclosed paste of chicken livers, the bottles and jars of pickled or spiced meats and vegetables and fruits. The spectacle was adroitly arranged to move the hungry to yearning, the filled to regret, and the dyspeptic to rage and remorse. And behind the show-window lay a shop whose shelves, counters and floor were clean as toil could make and keep them, and whose air was saturated with the most delicious odors.

Mrs. Brauner nodded. "Heilig was up at half-past four this morning," she said. "He cleans out every morning and he moves everything twice a week." She had a round, honest face that was an inspiring study in simplicity, sense and sentiment.

"What a worker!" was her husband's comment. "So unlike most of the young men nowadays. If August were only like him!"

"You'd think Heilig was a drone if he were your son," replied Mrs. Brauner. She knew that if any one else had dared thus to attack their boy, his father would have been growling and snapping like an angry bear.

"That's right!" he retorted with mock scorn. "Defend your children! You'll be excusing Hilda for putting off Heilig next."

"She'll marry him--give her time," said Mrs. Brauner. "She's romantic, but she's sensible, too--why, she was born to make a good wife to a hard-working man. Where's there another woman that knows the business as she does? You admit on her birthdays that she's the only real helper you ever had."

"Except you," said her husband.

"Never mind me." Mrs. Brauner pretended to disdain the compliment.

Brauner understood, however. "We have had the best, you and I," said he.

"Arbeit und Liebe und Heim. Nicht wahr?" Otto Heilig appeared in his doorway and greeted them awkwardly. Nor did their cordiality lessen his embarrassment. His pink and white skin was rosy red and his frank blue-gray eyes shifted uneasily. But he was smiling with eager friendliness, showing even, sound, white teeth.

"You are coming to see us to-morrow?" asked Mrs. Brauner--he always called on Sunday afternoons and stayed until five, when he had to open shop for the Sunday supper rush.

"Why--that is--not exactly--no," he stammered. Hilda had told him not to come, but he knew that if he admitted it to her parents they would be severe with her. He didn't like anybody to be severe with Hilda, and he felt that their way of helping his courtship was not suited to the modern ideas. "They make her hate me," he often muttered. But if he resented it he would offend them and Hilda too; if he acquiesced he encouraged them and added to Hilda's exasperation.

Mrs. Brauner knew at once that Hilda was in some way the cause of the break in the custom. "Oh, you must come," she said. "We'd feel strange all week if we didn't see you on Sunday."

"Yes--I must have my cards," insisted Brauner. He and Otto always played pinochle; Otto's eyes most of the time and his thoughts all the time were on Hilda, in the corner, at the zither, playing the maddest, most romantic music; her father therefore usually won, poor at the game though he was. It made him cross to lose, and Otto sometimes defeated his own luck deliberately when love refused to do it for him.

"Very well, then--that is--if I can--I'll try to come."

Several customers pushed past him into his shop and he had to rejoin his partner, Schwartz, behind the counters. Brauner and his wife walked slowly home--it was late and there would be more business than Hilda and August could attend to. As they crossed Third Street Brauner said: "Hilda must go and tell him to come. This is her doing."

"But she can't do that," objected Mrs. Brauner. "She'd say it was throwing herself at his head."

"Not if I send her?" Brauner frowned with a seeming of severity. "Not if I, her father, send her--for two chickens, as we're out?" Then he laughed. His fierceness was the family joke when Hilda was small she used to say, "Now, get mad, father, and make little Hilda laugh!"

Hilda was behind the counter, a customer watching with fascinated eyes the graceful, swift movements of her arms and hands as she tied up a bundle. Her sleeves were rolled to her dimpled elbows, and her arms were round and strong and white, and her skin was fine and smooth. Her shoulders were wide, but not square; her hips were narrow, her wrists, her hands, her head, small. She looked healthy and vigorous and useful as well as beautiful.