The Vertical City | Page 4

was almost something of the nudity of arm and leg he must have presented to eighteen's tender sensibilities in Mr. Latz's expression now as he sat well forward on the overstuffed chair, his overstuffed knees strained apart, his face nude of all pretense and creased with anxiety.
"That's about the way of it, isn't it?" he said again into the growing silence.
Suddenly Mrs. Samstag's fingers were rigid at their task of lace making, the scraping of the orchestral violin tearing the roaring noises in her ears into ribbons of alternate sound and vacuum, as if she were closing her ears and opening them, so roaringly the blood pounded.
"I--When a woman cares for--a man like--I did--Mr. Latz, she'll never be happy until--she cares again--like that. I always say, once an affectionate nature, always an affectionate nature."
"You mean," he said, leaning forward the imperceptible half inch that was left of chair--"you mean--me--?"
The smell of bay rum came out greenly then as the moisture sprang out on his scalp.
"I--I'm a home woman, Mr. Latz. You can put a fish in water, but you cannot make him swim. That's me and hotel life."
At this somewhat cryptic apothegm Mr. Latz's knee touched Mrs. Samstag's, so that he sprang back full of nerves at what he had not intended.
"Marry me, Carrie," he said, more abruptly than he might have, without the act of that knee to immediately justify.
She spread the lace out on her lap.
Ostensibly to the hotel lobby they were as casual as, "My mulligatawny soup was cold to-night," or, "Have you heard the new one that Al Jolson pulls at the Winter Garden?" But actually the roar was higher than ever in Mrs. Samstag's ears and he could feel the plethoric red rushing in flashes over his body.
"Marry me, Carrie," he said, as if to prove that his stiff lips could repeat their incredible feat.
With a woman's talent for them, her tears sprang.
"Mr. Latz--"
"Louis," he interpolated, widely eloquent of eyebrow and posture.
"You're proposing, Louis!" She explained rather than asked, and placed her hand to her heart so prettily that he wanted to crush it there with his kisses.
"God bless you for knowing it so easy, Carrie. A young girl would make it so hard. It's just what has kept me from asking you weeks ago, this getting it said. Carrie, will you?"
"I'm a widow, Mr. Latz--Louis--"
"Loo--"
"L--loo. With a grown daughter. Not one of those merry-widows you read about."
"That's me! A bachelor on top, but a home man underneath. Why, up to five years ago, Carrie, while the best little mother a man ever had was alive, I never had eyes for a woman or--"
"It's common talk what a grand son you were to her, Mr. La--Louis--"
"Loo."
"Loo."
"I don't want to seem to brag, Carrie, but you saw the coat that just walked out on Mrs. Gronauer? My little mother she was a humpback, Carrie, not a real one, but all stooped from the heavy years when she was helping my father to get his start. Well, anyway, that little stooped back was one of the reasons why I was so anxious to make it up to her. Y'understand?"
"Yes--Loo."
"But you saw that mink coat. Well, my little mother, three years before she died, was wearing one like that in sable. Real Russian. Set me back eighteen thousand, wholesale, and she never knew different than that it cost eighteen hundred. Proudest moment of my life when I helped my little old mother into her own automobile in that sable coat.
"I had some friends lived in the Grenoble Apartments when you did--the Adelbergs. They used to tell me how it hung right down to her heels and she never got into the auto that she didn't pick it up so as not to sit on it.
"That there coat is packed away in cold storage now, Carrie, waiting, without me exactly knowing why, I guess, for--the one little woman in the world besides her I would let so much as touch its hem."
Mrs. Samstag's lips parted, her teeth showing through like light.
"Oh," she said, "sable! That's my fur, Loo. I've never owned any, but ask Alma if I don't stop to look at it in every show window. Sable!"
"Carrie--would you--could you--I'm not what you would call a youngster in years, I guess, but forty-four isn't--"
"I'm--forty-one, Louis. A man like you could have younger."
"No. That's what I don't want. In my lonesomeness, after my mother's death, I thought once that maybe a young girl from the West, nice girl with her mother from Ohio--but I--funny thing, now I come to think about it--I never once mentioned my little mother's sable coat to her. I couldn't have satisfied a young girl like that, or her me, Carrie, any more than I could satisfy Alma. It was one of those mamma-made matches that