Elkan Lubliner, American Part 46

At length the happy couples dragged themselves apart and crowded into the automobile 'bus of the New Salisbury, sweeping Elkan and Yetta before them, so that when the 'bus arrived at the hotel Elkan and Yetta were the last to descend.

A burly yellow-faced porter seized the baggage with the contemptuous manner that Ham nowadays evinces toward Shem, and Elkan and Yetta followed him through the luxurious social hall to the desk. There the room clerk immediately shot out a three-carat diamond ring, and when Elkan's eyes became accustomed to the glare he saw that beneath it was a fat white hand extended in cordial greeting.

"Why, how do you do, Mr. Williams," Elkan cried, as he shook hands fervently. "Ain't you in the Pitt House, Sarahcuse, no more?"

"I'm taking a short vacation in a sensible manner, Mr. Lubliner," Mr.

Williams replied in the rounded tones that only truly great actors, clergymen, and room clerks possess. "Which means that I am interested in a real-estate development near here, and I'm combining business with pleasure for a couple of months."

Elkan nodded admiringly.

"You got the right idee, Mr. Williams," he said. "This is my wife, Mr.

Williams."

The room clerk acknowledged the introduction with a bow that combined the grace of Paderewski and the dignity of Prince Florizel in just the right proportions.

"Delighted to know you, Madame," he declared. "Have you made reservations, Mr. Lubliner?"

Elkan shook his head and after an exchange of confidential murmurs Mr.

Williams a.s.signed them a room with an ocean view, from which they emerged less than half an hour later to await on the veranda the welcome sound of the dinner gong. A buzz of animated conversation filled the air, above which rose a little shriek of welcome as Mrs. Gans rushed toward Yetta with outstretched hands.

"Why, h.e.l.lo, Yetta!" she cried. "I didn't know you was coming down here."

They exchanged the kiss of utter peace that persists between the kin of highgrade and popular-priced manufacturers.

"I read about you in the newspapers," Yetta said, as they seated themselves in adjoining rockers, and Mrs. Gans flashed all the gems of her right hand in a gesture of deprecation.

"I tell you," she said, "it makes me sick here the way people carries on. Honestly, Yetta, I don't see Barney only at meals and when he's getting dressed. Everything is Mister _Scharley_, Mister _Scharley_. You would think he was H. P. Morgan _oder_ the Czar of _Russland_ from the fuss everybody makes over him."

Yetta nodded in sympathy and suddenly Mrs. Gans clutched the arm of her chair.

"There he is now," she hissed.

"Where?" Yetta asked, and Mrs. Gans nodded toward a doorway at the end of the veranda, on which in electric bulbs was outlined the legend, "Hanging Gardens." Yetta descried a short, stout personage between fifty and sixty years of age, arrayed in a white flannel suit of which the coat and waistcoat were cut in imitation of an informal evening costume.

On his arm there drooped a lady no longer in her twenties, and from the V-shaped opening in the rear of her dinner gown a medical student could have distinguished with more or less certainty the bones of the cervical vertebrae, the right and left scapula and the articulation of each with the humerus and clavicle.

"That's Miss Feldman," Mrs. Gans whispered. "She's refined like anything, Yetta, and she talks French better as a waiter already."

At this juncture the dinner gong sounded and Yetta rejoined Elkan in the social hall.

"What is the trouble you are looking so _rachmonos_, Elkan?" she asked as she pressed his arm consolingly.

"To-night it's Sol Klinger," Elkan replied. "He's got a dinner on in the Hanging Gardens for Scharley, Yetta, and I guess I wouldn't get a look-in even."

"You've got six weeks before you," Yetta a.s.sured him, "and you shouldn't worry. Something is bound to turn up, ain't it?"

She gave his arm another little caress and they proceeded immediately to the dining room, where the string orchestra and the small talk of two hundred and fifty guests strove vainly for the ascendency in one maddening cacophony. It was nearly eight o'clock before Elkan and Yetta arose from the table and repaired to the veranda whose rockers were filled with a chattering throng.

"Let's get out of this," Elkan said, and they descended the veranda steps to the sidewalk. Five minutes later they were seated on a remote bench of the boardwalk, and until nine o'clock they watched the beauty of the moon and sea, which is constant even at Egremont Beach. When they rose to go Yetta noticed for the first time a shawl-clad figure on the adjacent bench, and immediately a pair of keen eyes flashed from a face whose plump contentment was framed in a jet black wig of an early Victorian design.

"Why, if it ain't Mrs. Lesengeld," Yetta exclaimed and the next moment she enfolded the little woman in a cordial embrace.

"You grown a _bisschen_ fat, Yetta," Mrs. Lesengeld said. "I wouldn't knew you at all, if you ain't speaking to me first."

"This is my husband, Mrs. Lesengeld--Mr. Lubliner," Yetta went on. "He heard me talk often from you, Mrs. Lesengeld, and what a time you got it learning me I should speak English yet."

Elkan beamed at Mrs. Lesengeld.

"And not only _that_," he said, "but also how good to her you was when she was sick already. There ain't many boarding-house ladies like you, Mrs. Lesengeld."

"And there ain't so many boarders like Yetta, neither," Mrs. Lesengeld retorted.

"And do you got a boarding-house down here, Mrs. Lesengeld?" Yetta asked.

"I've gone out of the boarding-house business," Mrs. Lesengeld replied, "which you know what a trouble I got it _mit_ that lowlife Lesengeld, _olav hasholom_, after he failed in the pants business, how I am working my fingers to the bones already keeping up his insurings in the I. O. M.

A. and a couple thousand dollars in a company already."

Yetta nodded.

"Which I got my reward at last," Mrs. Lesengeld concluded. "Quick diabetes, Yetta, and so I bought for ten thousand dollars a mortgage, understand me, and my son-in-law allows me also four dollars a week which I got it a whole lot easier nowadays."

"And are you staying down here?" Elkan asked.

"Me, I got for twenty dollars a month a little house _mit_ two rooms only, right on the sea, which they call it there Bognor Park. You must come over and see us, Yetta. Such a _gemutlich_ little house we got it you wouldn't believe at all, and every Sunday my daughter Fannie and my son-in-law comes down and stays with us."

"And are you going all the way home alone?" Elkan asked anxiously.

"Fannie is staying down with me to-night. She meets me on the corner of the Boulevard, where the car stops, at ten o'clock already," Mrs.

Lesengeld replied.

"Then you must got to come right along with us," Elkan said, "and we'll see you would get there on time."

"Where are you going?" Mrs. Lesengeld asked.

"Over to the Salisbury," Elkan answered, and Mrs. Lesengeld sank back on to the bench.

"_Geh weg_, Mr. Lubliner," she cried. "I am now fifty years old and I was never in such a place in my life, especially which under this shawl I got only a plain cotton dress yet."

Elkan flapped his hand rea.s.suringly.

"A fine-looking lady like you, Mrs. Lesengeld," he said, as he seized her hands and drew her gently to her feet, "looks well in anything."

"And you'll have a water ice in the Hanging Gardens with us," Yetta persisted as she slipped a hand under Mrs. Lesengeld's shawl and pressed her arm affectionately. Ten minutes later they arrived at the stoop of the New Salisbury, to the scandalization and horror of the three score A to F first credit manufacturers and their wives. Moreover, approximately a hundred and fifty karats of blue white diamonds rose and fell indignantly on the bosoms of twenty or thirty credit-high retailers' wives, when the little, toilworn woman with her shawl and ritualistic wig entered the Hanging Gardens chatting pleasantly with Elkan and Yetta; and as they seated themselves at a table the buzz of conversation hushed into silence and then roared out anew with an accompaniment of t.i.tters.

At the next table Sol Klinger plied with liquors and cigars the surviving guests of his dinner, and when Elkan nodded to him, he ignored the salutation with a blank stare. He raged inwardly, not so much at Elkan's invasion of that fas.h.i.+onable precinct as at the circ.u.mstance that his guest of honour had departed with Miss Feldman for a stroll on the boardwalk some ten minutes previously, and he was therefore unable to profit by Elkan's _faux pas_.

"The feller ain't got no manners at all," he said to Max Koblin, who nodded gloomily.