“I’m no jazz baby,” Madeline declared indignantly.
“Well, I never said you were, did I?” demanded Mr. Ritchie.
“Well, you think so,” she replied.
“Well, if you can read my mind, it’s no use me trying to talk,” said he.
“I never asked you to talk!”
They were both aware that their badinage had lost its fine edge.
“Well, I never asked you to listen,” Mr. Ritchie said valiantly, but he
knew very well that this was not a clever retort.
At that moment he was greatly dissatisfied both with his wit and his
person. He thought it brutal on the part of fate that a young man as
passionate and resolute as himself should have so frail a form, and that
after having taken a correspondence course in rhetoric and oratory he
should still be so tongue-tied--especially with Madeline.
He could see himself in the mirror opposite. He sat so straight that he
leaned over backward a little, but this did not disguise the fact that
his shoulders were narrow and not quite even, and his chest somewhat
hollow. Neither had his studies or his burning thoughts left any visible
impress on his sallow, rather ratlike face; and all this hurt his
terribly sensitive soul.
“I never said you were a jazz baby,” he insisted. “I only said lots of
girls were--and that’s a fact. Why, a lot of those girls wouldn’t spend
a cent to get a decent, well balanced meal! All they care about is
clothes and--”
“I don’t guess you know such a lot about girls,” Madeline interrupted.
Her tone was scornful, and the outrageously sensitive Mr. Ritchie at
once saw all sorts of implications. She meant that girls wouldn’t bother
with him. She meant that he was nothing but a mechanic. She meant that
his clothes were shabby, and that he was small and slight. She meant
everything that could affront his manly pride.
His face grew crimson.
“All right!” he said loftily. “Have it your own way!”
He turned away his head, though he was a little alarmed as he did so. He
had always felt that chivalry required him to keep his head turned
rigidly toward Madeline, to atone for the fact that she stood while he
sat. Of course, that was not his fault. Madeline being a waitress, and
he a customer, anything more gallant was impossible.
He certainly did not enjoy being waited on by this splendid girl. In
fact, he so bitterly disliked it that he would have ceased coming to
Compson’s Chophouse, if he had not realized that in his absence she
would very likely be waiting on some other man, possibly not so
chivalrous.
It was altogether a sacrifice on his part, because the food did not
conform to his standards. He could not get here the well balanced
rations necessary for building up his physique. Of what use to work
night and morning with a patent exerciser, if he did not get the proper
muscle-building foods? This worried him very much, for he desired a fine
physique as greatly as he desired a master mind.
Then, too, he often had to wait a long while for Madeline to be free to
attend to him, and he fretted at the waste of time. He couldn’t light a
cigarette to beguile his tedium, for he knew that the smoker cannot have
a fine physique. If he saw a smoker who looked as if he had one, Ritchie
knew him to be a whited sepulcher, with a failing heart, exhausted
lungs, and no will power.
To be sure, he might have passed the time with some improving book. He
always carried in his pocket a volume of a set he had bought--a set
guaranteed to broaden his mind, and to contain all that he ought to
read; but he couldn’t keep his mind on a book when Madeline was about.
“Have it your own way,” he repeated.
This time he said it with a new significance. He meant that, as far as
he was concerned, Madeline might have everything her own way forever.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t there to hear him. She was waiting on a man at
another table. She never so much as glanced at Ritchie. He knew she
wouldn’t look at him, and he took a gloomy pleasure in staring at her.
She was worth looking at, was Madeline. Tall, spare, straight, in an
austere white uniform and a sleek coiffure, she was a miracle to
irradiate any chophouse. Her features were subtle--a delicate nose, a
rounded chin, a mouth very red in her pale face. Her black brows made an
incomparable line above her dark, steady eyes.
In spite of her thinness and her pallor, in spite of twenty years of bad
air and wretched food, she was strong and tireless, with muscles like
steel--a heritage from ancestors of Slavic peasant stock. She had a
cool, careless manner, inclined to sudden hauteur when she thought it
necessary, but she could also chat with the greatest affability--as she
was doing now.
“Trying to make me jealous!” thought Ritchie. “What do I care?”
He had merely invited her, very politely, to a dance to be given by the
Coyote Club that evening. He worked very hard all day as a mechanic in a
garage. In addition to building up a fine physique and broadening his
mind by reading, he was taking a correspondence course in mechanical
draftsmanship; and the Coyote Club, of which he was treasurer, was his
one frivolity.
Every week they engaged a pianist, a saxophonist, and a drummer, and had
a dance in a hall over a restaurant on Eighth Avenue. There was no
“rough stuff.” It was a seemly and refined entertainment--Madeline ought
to have known that. Ritchie only meant that some of the girls brought by
some of the Coyotes were jazz babies. The remark was not intended as
personal, and she shouldn’t have taken it as such.
“Don’t know much about girls, don’t I?” he reflected angrily.
Nothing could have been more galling, especially as it was true. Ritchie
had noble ideas about girls, though. He was not exactly in a position to
marry at the present moment; but later on, when his heroic efforts began
to show results, he intended to have a home, a garden, and a wife whom
he would venerate and take to lectures and concerts.
He did not care to admit that that wife must be Madeline or no one. He
was far too proud to acknowledge how much he cared for a girl with her
silly ideas; but unhappily he was not clever enough to conceal it, and
Madeline knew only too well.
These were her silly ideas. Knowing herself to be rare and seductive,
she intended to marry a millionaire. She was weary and disgusted with
her present condition. She wanted a life of exquisite refinement and
languor. She hated the restaurant, she hated her home, her uniform. She
turned up her delicate nose at everything about her, including Ritchie.
Not that he wasn’t “refined,” for he surely was, and she secretly
admired him; but it was not the right, the princely, sort of
“refinement,” and she would have none of him.
Still, she felt a pang of regret when he went out. A girl as attractive
as she, alone in the world, could not well help learning to appreciate
the chivalry and restraint of Mr. Ritchie. He never “said anything,” and
never would, until encouraged. He came every night to Compson’s for his
dinner, and of late he had fallen into the habit of being on the corner
when she came out, at ten o’clock. He never said that he was waiting for
her, and she had manners enough to be surprised every time. He walked
home with her, both of them conversing with the utmost formality.
He had never invited her anywhere, except to this dance at the Coyote
Club. He had never so much as shaken hands with her. She knew very well
that the reason for this was his severe sense of respect for her. While
she admired this, she would have been better pleased with a little more
impetuosity.
Still, it was no use denying that he left a gap. Madeline missed him.
Even when she was busy, she had found comfort in the sight of his head
bent over one of his little books.
“Now he’s mad,” she reflected. “He won’t come back. All right! I don’t
care! Let him go to his old dance and have a good time with the jazz
babies!”
She consoled herself by imagining the balls she would go to in the
future, when the millionaire arrived--balls like those she saw in the
movies. She herself would wear a long, swathed dress and carry a
feathered fan. She would be languid and scornful, and would flirt in a
refined manner impossible to one who was at present a waitress in
Compson’s Chophouse.