THE HOME FRONT
157
"I tell
you,
Doctor," she would say, "on the grass, okay when they
lose their hair. Outside, all right. Inside, on the cushions, hell's bells!"
Sometimes she would simply ask him, in the derisive voice of a bad
schoolboy, "How you find Milenka last night, Doctor? Plenty good
fleas on him, eh?" And once, reaching, the limit of her insolence, she
followed him out the door and paced up the driveway, calling shrilly,
"Milenka! Milenka!"
When he was not in school, the manageress was accompanied
by her thirteen year old son, a large boy with a malicious face which
forever grinned under a sailor hat. Occasionally
it
was. he who came
for the rent and Dr. Pakheiser, fumbling in
his
wallet, felt that the
boy with
his
obscene leer had expected to find dirty French pictures
on the wall or a light woman in the bed. "Hey, Doc," he said once,
"You like that cat?" And the doctor, laughing violently, replied,
"Ach, yes! Very much." Freddie continued. Pretty soon now "that
cat" had better watch its step for he was going
to
trap and tame some
birds and
if
that dope of an old grey dumbbell got one of them, it
would be "goodbye, cat." Dr. Pakheiser, baffled by the assurance of
the outsized youth, cried, "Ach, so!" louder and more amiably than
ever.
So far, no birds had been caught, but Freddie, on Saturday and
Sunday, worked all day long making his traps out of wooden crates,
and in time the back yard was so full of them that it appeared he
intended to catch entire flocks. And the doctor had no doubt either
that Milenka would chase the birds or that Freddie would cruelly
punish him.
2.
On this damp April evening, Dr. Pakheiser wa.s about to draw
his
windowblinds and prepare his supper when he saw Mr. Horvath
come out of the cottage bringing a step-ladder which he set up under–
neath an apple tree. At his approach, the blackbirds all flew off,
twittering irritably. Some time before, he had built a bonfire at the
water's edge which now was burning brightly, sending up bits of
charred paper, like smaller blackbirds. The man called out, "Hey,
Freddie, come here a minute." And Freddie came charging through
the door, wearing a baseball mitt on one hand. There was a colloquy
which the doctor could not hear and then the boy, rushing to the
bonfire, hurling his mitt to the ground, cried, "Oh, boy!" He lighted
a torch and came back to the step-ladder, sedately so that the flame
would not go out, handed it
to
his
father and then climbed up. At the
