“Breakfast ready, pet?” he asked.
“It will be by the time you’re dressed,” his wife called attention to his departure from the accepted code.
And so this morning honors were about even.
Louis read the sports pages while he ate. with occasional glances at his cerise-striped sleeves. He was stimulated by the clash between the stripe and his crimson sleeve-garters. He had a passion for red, and it testified to the strength of the taboos of his ilk that he did not wear red neckties.
“How do you feel this morning, pet?” he asked after he had read what a reporter had to say about the champion’s next fight, and before he started on the account of the previous day’s ball games.
“All right.”
Pearl knew that to mention the headache would be to invite a display of superiority masked as sympathy, and perhaps an admonition to eat more beef, and certainly one to take more exercise; for Louis, never having experienced any of the ills to which the flesh is heir. was, naturally enough, of the opinion that even where such disorders were really as painful as their possessors’ manners would indicate, they could have been avoided by proper care.
Breakfast consumed, Louis lighted a cigar and addressed himself to another cup of coffee. With the lighting of the cigar Pearl brightened a little. Louis, out of consideration for his lungs, smoked without inhaling; and to Pearl this taking of smoke into the mouth and blowing it forth seemed silly and childish. Without putting it into words she had made this opinion known to her husband, and whenever he smoked at home she watched him with a quiet interest which, of all her contrivances, was the most annoying to him. But that it would have been so signal an admission of defeat, he would have given up smoking at home.
The sports sheets read — with the exceptions of the columns devoted to golf and tennis — Louis left the table, put on his vest, coat, and hat, kissed his wife, and. with his consciously buoyant step, set out for his shop. He always walked downtown in the morning, covering the twenty blocks in twenty minutes — a feat to which he would allude whenever the opportunity arose.
Louis entered his shop with a feeling of pride in no wise lessened by six years of familiarity, To him the shop was as wonderful, as beautiful, as it had been when first opened. The row of green and white automatic chairs, with white-coated barbers bending over the shrouded occupants; the curtained alcoves in the rear with white-gowned manicurists in attendance; the table laden with magazines and newspapers; the clothes-trees; the row of white enameled chairs, at this hour holding no waiting customers; the two Negro boot-blacks in their white jackets; the clusters of colored bottles; the smell of tonics and soaps and steam; and around all, the sheen of spotless tiling, porcelain and paint and polished mirrors. Louis stood just within the door and basked in all this while he acknowledged his employees’ greetings. All had been with him for more than a year now. and they called him “Lou” in just the correct tone of respectful familiarity — a tribute both to his position in their world and his geniality.
He walked the length of the shop, trading jests with his barbers — pausing for a moment to speak to George Fielding, real estate, who was having his pink face steamed preparatory to his bi-weekly massage — and then gave his coat and hat to Percy, one of the bootblacks, and dropped into Fred’s chair for his shave. Around him the odor of lotions and the hum of mechanical devices rose soothingly. Health and this... where did those pessimists get their stuff?
The telephone in the front of the shop rang, and Emil, the head-barber, called out, “Your brother wants to talk to you, Lou.”
“Tell him I’m shaving. What does he want?”
Emil spoke into the instrument; then, “He wants to know if you can come over to his office some time this morning.”
“Tell him all right!”
“Another shipment of bootleg?” Fielding asked.
“You’d be surprised,” Louis replied, in accordance with the traditional wit of barbers.
Fred gave a final pat to Louis’s face with a talcumed towel. Percy a final pat to his glowing shoes, and the proprietor stepped from the chair to hide the cerise stripes within his coat again.
“I’m going over to see Ben,” he told Emil. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
Ben Stemler, the eldest of four brothers, of which Louis was the third, was a round, pallid man, always out of breath — as if he had just climbed a long flight of steps. He was district sales-manager for a New York manufacturer, and attributed his moderate success, after years of struggling, to his doggedness in refusing to accept defeat. Chronic nephritis, with which he had been afflicted of late years, was more truly responsible for his increased prosperity, however. It had puffed out his face around his protuberant, fishy eyes, subduing their prominence, throwing kindly shadows over their fishiness, and so giving to him a more trustworthy appearance.
Ben was dictating pantingly to his stenographer when Louis entered the office. “Your favor of the... would say... regret our inability to comply... your earliest convenience.” He nodded to his brother and went on gasping. “Letter to Schneider... are at a loss to understand... our Mr. Rose... thirteenth instant... if consistent with your policy... would say... in view of the shortage of materials.”
The dictation brought to a wheezing end, he sent the stenographer on an errand, and turned to Louis.
“Hows everything?” Louis asked.
“Could be worse, Lou, but I don’t feel so good.”
“Trouble is you don’t get enough exercise. Get out and walk; let me take you down to the gym; take cold baths.”
“I know, I know,” Ben said wearily. “Maybe you’re right. But I got something to tell you — something you ought to know — but I don’t know how to go about telling you. I... that is—”
“Spit it out!” Louis was smiling. Ben probably had got into trouble of some sort.
“It’s about Pearl!” Ben was gasping now, as if he had come from an unusually steep flight of steps.
“Well?” Louis had stiffened in his chair, but the smile was still on his face. He wasn’t a man to be knocked over In the first blow he met. He had never thought of Pearl’s being unfaithful before, but as soon as Ben mentioned her name he knew that that was it. He knew it without another word from Ben; it seemed so much the inevitable thing that he wondered at his never having suspected it.
“Well?” he asked again.
Unable to hit upon a way of breaking the news gently. Ben panted it out hurriedly, anxious to have the job off his hands. “I saw her night before last! At the movies! With a man! Norman Becker! Sells for Litz & Aulitz! They left together! In his ear! Bertha was with me! She saw ’em too!”
He closed with a gasp of relief and relapsed into wheezes.
“Night before last,” Louis mused. “I was down to the fights — Kid Breen knocked out O’Toole in the second round — and I didn’t get home until after one.”
From Ben’s office to Louis’s home was a distance of twenty-four blocks. Mechanically timing himself, he found it had taken him thirty-one minutes — much of the way lay uphill — pretty good time at that. Louis had elected to walk home, he told himself, because he had plenty of time, not because he needed time to think the situation over, or anything of that sort. There was nothing to think over. This was a crystal-clear, tangible condition. He had a wife. Another man had encroached, or perhaps only attempted to, on his proprietorship. To a red-blooded he-man the solution was obvious. For these situations men had fists and muscles and courage. For these emergencies men ate beef, breathed at open windows, held memberships in athletic clubs, and kept tobacco smoke out of their lungs. The extent of the encroachment determined, the rest would be simple.