des toutes petites rrides. Mais ils dispareaitront. Forgive me,
dear.” The thick arm round her waist squeezed her. Ellen edged off a
little.... “Vous la femme la plus belle de New Yorrk.... Angelica Mrs.
Herf’s evening dress,” she shouted in a shrill grating voice like a
guineahen’s.
A hollowcheeked washedout blond girl came in with the dress on a
hanger. Ellen slipped off her gray tailored walkingsuit. Madame
Soubrine circled round her, purring. “Angelica look at those shoulders,
the color of the hair.... Ah c’est le rêve,” edging a little too near
like a cat that wants its back rubbed. The dress was pale green with a
slash of scarlet and dark blue.
“This is the last time I have a dress like this, I’m sick of always
wearing blue and green....” Madame Soubrine, her mouth full of pins,
was at her feet, fussing with the hem.
“Perfect Greek simplicity, wellgirdled like Diana.... Spiritual with
Spring ... the ultimate restraint of an Annette Kellermann, holding up
the lamp of liberty, the wise virgin,” she was muttering through her
pins.
She’s right, Ellen was thinking, I am getting a hard look. She was
looking at herself in the tall pierglass. Then my figure’ll go, the
menopause haunting beauty parlors, packed in boncilla, having your face
raised.
“Regardez-moi ça, cherrie;” said the dressmaker getting to her feet and
taking the pins out of her mouth “C’est le chef-dœuvre de la maison
Soubrine.”
Ellen suddenly felt hot, tangled in some prickly web, a horrible
stuffiness of dyed silks and crêpes and muslins was making her head
ache; she was anxious to be out on the street again.
“I smell smoke, there’s something the matter,” the blond girl suddenly
cried out. “Sh-sh-sh,” hissed Madame Soubrine. They both disappeared
through a mirrorcovered door.
Under a skylight in the back room of Soubrine’s Anna Cohen sits sewing
the trimming on a dress with swift tiny stitches. On the table in front
of her a great pile of tulle rises full of light like beaten white
of egg. _Charley my boy, Oh Charley my boy_, she hums, stitching the
future with swift tiny stitches. If Elmer wants to marry me we might
as well; poor Elmer, he’s a nice boy but so dreamy. Funny he’d fall
for a girl like me. He’ll grow out of it, or maybe in the Revolution,
he’ll be a great man.... Have to cut out parties when I’m Elmer’s wife.
But maybe we can save up money and open a little store on Avenue A in
a good location, make better money there than uptown. La Parisienne,
Modes.
I bet I could do as good as that old bitch. If you was your own boss
there wouldn’t be this fightin about strikers and scabs.... Equal
Opportunity for All. Elmer says that’s all applesauce. No hope for
the workers but in the Revolution. _Oh I’m juss wild about Harree,
And Harry’s juss wild about me._... Elmer in a telephone central in
a dinnercoat, with eartabs, tall as Valentino, strong as Doug. The
Revolution is declared. The Red Guard is marching up Fifth Avenue.
Anna in golden curls with a little kitten under her arm leans with
him out of the tallest window. White tumbler pigeons flutter against
the city below them. Fifth Avenue bleeding red flags, glittering with
marching bands, hoarse voices singing Die Rote Fahne in Yiddish; far
away, from the Woolworth a banner shakes into the wind. ‘Look Elmer
darling’ ELMER DUSKIN FOR MAYOR. And they’re dancing the Charleston in
all the officebuildings.... _Thump. Thump. That Charleston dance....
Thump. Thump._... Perhaps I do love him. Elmer take me. Elmer, loving
as Valentino, crushing me to him with Doug-strong arms, hot as flame,
Elmer.
Through the dream she is stitching white fingers beckon. The white
tulle shines too bright. Red hands clutch suddenly out of the tulle,
she cant fight off the red tulle all round her biting into her, coiled
about her head. The skylight’s blackened with swirling smoke. The
room’s full of smoke and screaming. Anna is on her feet whirling round
fighting with her hands the burning tulle all round her.
Ellen stands looking at herself in the pierglass in the fitting room.
The smell of singed fabrics gets stronger. After walking to and fro
nervously a little while she goes through the glass door, down a
passage hung with dresses, ducks under a cloud of smoke, and sees
through streaming eyes the big workroom, screaming girls huddling
behind Madame Soubrine, who is pointing a chemical extinguisher at
charred piles of goods about a table. They are picking something
moaning out of the charred goods. Out of the corner of her eye she sees
an arm in shreds, a seared black red face, a horrible naked head.
“Oh Mrs. Herf, please tell them in front it’s nothing, absolutely
nothing.... I’ll be there at once,” Madame Soubrine shrieks
breathlessly at her. Ellen runs with closed eyes through the
smokefilled corridor into the clean air of the fitting room, then, when
her eyes have stopped running, she goes through the curtains to the
agitated women in the waiting room.
“Madame Soubrine asked me to tell everybody it was nothing, absolutely
nothing. Just a little blaze in a pile of rubbish.... She put it out
herself with an extinguisher.”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing,” the women say one to another settling
back onto the Empress Josephine sofas.
Ellen goes out to the street. The fireengines are arriving. Policemen
are beating back the crowds. She wants to go away but she cant,
she’s waiting for something. At last she hears it tinkling down the
street. As the fireengines go clanging away, the ambulance drives up.
Attendants carry in the folded stretcher. Ellen can hardly breathe.
She stands beside the ambulance behind a broad blue policeman. She
tries to puzzle out why she is so moved; it is as if some part of her
were going to be wrapped in bandages, carried away on a stretcher. Too
soon it comes out, between the routine faces, the dark uniforms of the
attendants.
“Was she terribly burned?” somehow she manages to ask under the
policeman’s arm.
“She wont die ... but it’s tough on a girl.” Ellen elbows her way
through the crowd and hurries towards Fifth Avenue. It’s almost dark.
Lights swim brightly in night clear blue like the deep sea.
Why should I be so excited? she keeps asking herself. Just somebody’s
bad luck, the sort of thing that happens every day. The moaning turmoil
and the clanging of the fireengines wont seem to fade away inside
her. She stands irresolutely on a corner while cars, faces, flicker
clatteringly past her. A young man in a new straw hat is looking at her
out of the corners of his eyes, trying to pick her up. She stares him
blankly in the face. He has on a red, green, and blue striped necktie.
She walks past him fast, crosses to the other side of the avenue, and
turns uptown. Seven thirty. She’s got to meet some one somewhere, she
cant think where. There’s a horrible tired blankness inside her. O dear
what shall I do? she whimpers to herself. At the next corner she hails
a taxi. “Go to the Algonquin please.”
She remembers it all now, at eight o’clock she’s going to have dinner
with Judge Shammeyer and his wife. Ought to have gone home to dress.
George’ll be mad when he sees me come breezing in like this. Likes to
show me off all dressed up like a Christmas tree, like an Effenbee
walking talking doll, damn him.
She sits back in the corner of the taxi with her eyes closed. Relax,
she must let herself relax more. Ridiculous to go round always keyed up
so that everything is like chalk shrieking on a blackboard. Suppose I’d
been horribly burned, like that girl, disfigured for life. Probably she
can get a lot of money out of old Soubrine, the beginning of a career.
Suppose I’d gone with that young man with the ugly necktie who tried to
pick me up.... Kidding over a banana split in a soda fountain, riding
uptown and then down again on the bus, with his knee pressing my knee
and his arm round my waist, a little heavy petting in a doorway....
There are lives to be lived if only you didn’t care. Care for what, for
what; the opinion of mankind, money, success, hotel lobbies, health,
umbrellas, Uneeda biscuits...? It’s like a busted mechanical toy the
way my mind goes brrr all the time. I hope they havent ordered dinner.
I’ll make them go somewhere else if they havent. She opens her vanity
case and begins to powder her nose.
When the taxi stops and the tall doorman opens the door, she steps
out with dancing pointed girlish steps, pays, and turns, her cheeks a
little flushed, her eyes sparkling with the glinting seablue night of
deep streets, into the revolving doors.
As she goes through the shining soundless revolving doors, that spin
before her gloved hand touches the glass, there shoots through her
a sudden pang of something forgotten. Gloves, purse, vanity case,
handkerchief, I have them all. Didn’t have an umbrella. What did I
forget in the taxicab? But already she is advancing smiling towards
two gray men in black with white shirtfronts getting to their feet,
smiling, holding out their hands.
* * * * *
Bob Hildebrand in dressing gown and pyjamas walked up and down in
front of the long windows smoking a pipe. Through the sliding doors
into the front came a sound of glasses tinkling and shuffling feet and
laughing and _Running Wild_ grating hazily out of a blunt needle on the
phonograph.
“Why dont you park here for the night?” Hildebrand was saying in his
deep serious voice. “Those people’ll fade out gradually.... We can put
you up on the couch.”
“No thanks,” said Jimmy. “They’ll start talking psychoanalysis in a
minute and they’ll be here till dawn.”
“But you’d much better take a morning train.”
“I’m not going to take any kind of a train.”
“Say Herf did you read about the man in Philadelphia who was killed
because he wore his straw hat on the fourteenth of May?”
“By God if I was starting a new religion he’d be made a saint.”
“Didnt you read about it? It was funny as a crutch.... This man had the
temerity to defend his straw hat. Somebody had busted it and he started
to fight, and in the middle of it one of these streetcorner heroes came
up behind him and brained him with a piece of lead pipe. They picked
him up with a cracked skull and he died in the hospital.”
“Bob what was his name?”
“I didnt notice.”
“Talk about the Unknown Soldier.... That’s a real hero for you; the
golden legend of the man who would wear a straw hat out of season.”
A head was stuck between the double doors. A flushfaced man with his
hair over his eyes looked in. “Cant I bring you fellers a shot of
gin.... Whose funeral is being celebrated anyway?”
“I’m going to bed, no gin for me,” said Hildebrand grouchily.
“It’s the funeral of Saint Aloysius of Philadelphia, virgin and martyr,
the man who would wear a straw hat out of season,” said Herf. “I might
sniff a little gin. I’ve got to run in a minute.... So long Bob.”
“So long you mysterious traveler.... Let us have your address, do you
hear?”
The long front room was full of ginbottles, gingerale bottles, ashtrays
crowded with half smoked cigarettes, couples dancing, people sprawled
on sofas. Endlessly the phonograph played _Lady ... lady be good_. A
glass of gin was pushed into Herf’s hand. A girl came up to him.
“We’ve been talking about you.... Did you know you were a man of
mystery?”
“Jimmy,” came a shrill drunken voice, “you’re suspected of being the
bobhaired bandit.”
“Why dont you take up a career of crime, Jimmy?” said the girl putting
her arm round his waist. “I’ll come to your trial, honest I will.”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“You see,” said Frances Hildebrand, who was bringing a bowl of cracked
ice in from the kitchenette, “there is something mysterious going on.”
Herf took the hand of the girl beside him and made her dance with
him. She kept stumbling over his feet. He danced her round until he
was opposite to the halldoor; he opened the door and foxtrotted her
out into the hall. Mechanically she put up her mouth to be kissed. He
kissed her quickly and reached for his hat. “Good night,” he said. The
girl started to cry.
Out in the street he took a deep breath. He felt happy, much more happy
than Greenwich Village kisses. He was reaching for his watch when he
remembered he had pawned it.
The golden legend of the man who would wear a straw hat out of season.
Jimmy Herf is walking west along Twentythird Street, laughing to
himself. Give me liberty, said Patrick Henry, putting on his straw hat
on the first of May, or give me death. And he got it. There are no
trollycars, occasionally a milkwagon clatters by, the heartbroken brick
houses of Chelsea are dark.... A taxi passes trailing a confused noise
of singing. At the corner of Ninth Avenue he notices two eyes like
holes in a trianglewhite of paper, a woman in a raincoat beckons to him
from a doorway. Further on two English sailors are arguing in drunken
cockney. The air becomes milky with fog as he nears the river. He can
hear the great soft distant lowing of steamboats.
He sits a long time waiting for a ferry in the seedy ruddy-lighted
waiting room. He sits smoking happily. He cant seem to remember
anything, there is no future but the foggy river and the ferry looming
big with its lights in a row like a darky’s smile. He stands with his
hat off at the rail and feels the riverwind in his hair. Perhaps he’s
gone crazy, perhaps this is amnesia, some disease with a long Greek
name, perhaps they’ll find him picking dewberries in the Hoboken Tube.
He laughs aloud so that the old man who came to open the gates gave
him a sudden sidelong look. Cookoo, bats in the belfry, that’s what
he’s saying to himself. Maybe he’s right. By gum if I were a painter,
maybe they’ll let me paint in the nuthouse, I’d do Saint Aloysius of
Philadelphia with a straw hat on his head instead of a halo and in
his hand the lead pipe, instrument of his martyrdom, and a little me
praying at his feet. The only passenger on the ferry, he roams round as
if he owned it. My temporary yacht. By Jove these are the doldrums of
the night all right, he mutters. He keeps trying to explain his gayety
to himself. It’s not that I’m drunk. I may be crazy, but I dont think
so....
Before the ferry leaves a horse and wagon comes aboard, a brokendown
springwagon loaded with flowers, driven by a little brown man with high
cheekbones. Jimmy Herf walks round it; behind the drooping horse with
haunches like a hatrack the little warped wagon is unexpectedly merry,
stacked with pots of scarlet and pink geraniums, carnations, alyssum,
forced roses, blue lobelia. A rich smell of maytime earth comes from
it, of wet flowerpots and greenhouses. The driver sits hunched with his
hat over his eyes. Jimmy has an impulse to ask him where he is going
with all those flowers, but he stifles it and walks to the front of the
ferry.
Out of the empty dark fog of the river, the ferryslip yawns all of a
sudden, a black mouth with a throat of light. Herf hurries through
cavernous gloom and out to a fog-blurred street. Then he is walking
up an incline. There are tracks below him and the slow clatter of
a freight, the hiss of an engine. At the top of a hill he stops to
look back. He can see nothing but fog spaced with a file of blurred
arclights. Then he walks on, taking pleasure in breathing, in the
beat of his blood, in the tread of his feet on the pavement, between
rows of otherworldly frame houses. Gradually the fog thins, a morning
pearliness is seeping in from somewhere.
Sunrise finds him walking along a cement road between dumping grounds
full of smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines redly through the mist on
rusty donkeyengines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of Fords, shapeless
masses of corroding metal. Jimmy walks fast to get out of the smell. He
is hungry; his shoes are beginning to raise blisters on his big toes.
At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and winks, is a
gasoline station, opposite it the Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully
he spends his last quarter on breakfast. That leaves him three cents
for good luck, or bad for that matter. A huge furniture truck, shiny
and yellow, has drawn up outside.
“Say will you give me a lift?” he asks the redhaired man at the wheel.
“How fur ye goin?”
“I dunno.... Pretty far.”
THE END