a great distance and stopped just before his eyes. He wondered where
they had been all this time. He stared past them into the light disk
of his propeller, and again the rain lashed into his face and stung
him. He caught at the kicking joy stick and held on to it with both
hands--but one hand fell away from it and wouldn’t come back. With an
effort, he pulled back his stick to climb up under the clouds again.
Must be up under the clouds. Must wait and get more Huns. Funny things,
Huns. Clumsy, stupid gray things you shot at and sent down. Go home
soon, rest a bit and get some more. He laughed softly to himself. Joke.
Funniest thing in the world.
The centre section wires clouded up before his eyes and started to
race away from him. Here! That’s bad! Can’t fly without centre section
wires. He chuckled a bit over that. Absurd to think of flying without
centre section wires! Come back here! You come back!
Just as his eyes closed, he saw a streak of roadway flicker through the
struts of his left wing. There were faces on it quite close to him;
faces that were white and staring; faces with arms raised above them.
Funny. He whipped back his joy stick with a convulsive jerk, and then
his head crashed forward and he threw up his arm to keep his teeth from
being bashed out against the compass.
* * * * *
It was very dark--dark except for a dancing blue light far away. He
moved slightly. Something cool touched his forehead.
“All right,” he muttered; “that’s all right now. You just follow me.”
Someone whispered. He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness.
“No,” he said quite plainly. “I mean it! Hoyt’s dead. I saw him go
down.”
He felt something sharp prick his arm. “You’ve got the new airdrome
pinpointed, haven’t you?” he asked.
A soft voice said, “Yes. Sh-h-h!”
“No,” he said, “I can’t. Darlington’s alone now, and I’ve got to go
back. They’re green, but they’re good boys.” He moved his legs to get
up. “There’s a bottle of Dewar’s----”
“No,” said the voice beside him.
“Oh, yes,” he said quietly. “Really, this is imperative. I know I
crashed.”
A stealthy languor crept across his chest and flowed down toward his
legs. He thought about it for a moment. “I ought to go,” he said
pettishly. “But I’m so tired.”
“Yes,” said the voice. “Go to sleep now.”
“Right-o,” he said. “You call a tender and wake--me--half--an--hour.”
He was quiet for a moment more and then he chuckled softly. “Tell ’em
it’s poobah,” he said sharply.
“All right,” said the voice. “It’s poobah.”
His breathing became quiet and regular and footsteps tiptoed softly
down the ward away from his bed.
NIGHT CLUB
BY KATHARINE BRUSH
From _Harper’s_
Promptly at quarter of ten P. M. Mrs. Brady descended the steps of the
Elevated. She purchased from the newsdealer in the cubbyhole beneath
them a next month’s magazine and a to-morrow morning’s paper and, with
these tucked under one plump arm, she walked. She walked two blocks
north on Sixth Avenue; turned and went west. But not far west. Westward
half a block only, to the place where the gay green awning marked Club
Français paints a stripe of shade across the glimmering sidewalk.
Under this awning Mrs. Brady halted briefly, to remark to the six-foot
doorman that it looked like rain and to await his performance of his
professional duty. When the small green door yawned open, she sighed
deeply and plodded in.
The foyer was a blackness, an airless velvet blackness like the inside
of a jeweller’s box. Four drum-shaped lamps of golden silk suspended
from the ceiling gave it light (a very little) and formed the jewels:
gold signets, those, or cuff-links for a giant. At the far end of the
foyer there were black stairs, faintly dusty, rippling upward toward
an amber radiance. Mrs. Brady approached and ponderously mounted the
stairs, clinging with one fist to the mangy velvet rope that railed
their edge.
From the top, Miss Lena Levin observed the ascent. Miss Levin was the
checkroom girl. She had dark-at-the-roots blonde hair and slender hips
upon which, in moments of leisure, she wore her hands, like buckles of
ivory loosely attached. This was a moment of leisure. Miss Levin waited
behind her counter. Row upon row of hooks, empty as yet, and seeming to
beckon--wee curved fingers of iron--waited behind her.
“Late,” said Miss Levin, “again.”
“Go wan!” said Mrs. Brady. “It’s only ten to ten. _Whew!_ Them
_stairs_!”
She leaned heavily, sideways, against Miss Levin’s counter, and,
applying one palm to the region of her heart, appeared at once to
listen and to count. “Feel!” she cried then in a pleased voice.
Miss Levin obediently felt.
“Them stairs,” continued Mrs. Brady darkly, “with my bad heart, will be
the death of me. Whew! Well, dearie? What’s the news?”
“You got a paper,” Miss Levin languidly reminded her.
“Yeah!” agreed Mrs. Brady with sudden vehemence. “I got a paper!” She
slapped it upon the counter. “An’ a lot of time I’ll get to _read_ my
paper, won’t I now? On a Saturday night!” She moaned. “Other nights is
bad enough, dear knows--but _Saturday_ nights! How I dread ’em! Every
Saturday night I say to my daughter, I say, ‘Geraldine, I can’t,’ I
say, ‘I can’t go through it again, an’ that’s all there is to it,’ I
say. ‘I’ll _quit_!’ I say. An’ I _will_, too!” added Mrs. Brady firmly,
if indefinitely.
Miss Levin, in defense of Saturday nights, mumbled some vague something
about tips.
“Tips!” Mrs. Brady hissed it. She almost spat it. Plainly money was
nothing, nothing at all, to this lady. “I just wish,” said Mrs. Brady,
and glared at Miss Levin, “I just wish _you_ had to spend one Saturday
night, just one, in that dressing room! Bein’ pushed an’ stepped on
and near knocked down by that gang of hussies, an’ them orderin’ an’
bossin’ you ’round like you was _black_, an’ usin’ your things an’ then
sayin’ they’re sorry, they got no change, they’ll be back. Yah! They
_never_ come back!”
“There’s Mr. Costello,” whispered Miss Levin through lips that, like a
ventriloquist’s, scarcely stirred.
“An’ as I was sayin’,” Mrs. Brady said at once brightly, “I got to
leave you. Ten to ten, time I was on the job.”
She smirked at Miss Levin, nodded, and right-about-faced. There,
indeed, Mr. Costello was. Mr. Billy Costello, manager, proprietor,
monarch of all he surveyed. From the doorway of the big room, where the
little tables herded in a ring around the waxen floor, he surveyed Mrs.
Brady, and in such a way that Mrs. Brady, momentarily forgetting her
bad heart, walked fast, scurried faster, almost ran.
The door of her domain was set politely in an alcove, beyond silken
curtains looped up at the sides. Mrs. Brady reached it breathless,
shouldered it open, and groped for the electric switch. Lights sprang
up, a bright white blaze, intolerable for an instant to the eyes, like
sun on snow. Blinking, Mrs. Brady shut the door.
The room was a spotless, white-tiled place, half beauty shop, half
dressing room. Along one wall stood washstands, sturdy triplets in a
row, with pale-green liquid soap in glass balloons afloat above them.
Against the opposite wall there was a couch. A third wall backed an
elongated glass-topped dressing table; and over the dressing table and
over the washstands long rectangular sheets of mirror reflected lights,
doors, glossy tiles, lights multiplied....
Mrs. Brady moved across this glitter like a thick dark cloud in a
hurry. At the dressing table she came to a halt, and upon it she laid
her newspaper, her magazine, and her purse--a black purse worn gray
with much clutching. She divested herself of a rusty black coat and a
hat of the mushroom persuasion, and hung both up in a corner cupboard
which she opened by means of one of a quite preposterous bunch of keys.
From a nook in the cupboard she took down a lace-edged handkerchief
with long streamers. She untied the streamers and tied them again
around her chunky black alpaca waist. The handkerchief became an
apron’s baby cousin.
Mrs. Brady relocked the cupboard door, fumbled her keyring over, and
unlocked a capacious drawer of the dressing table. She spread a fresh
towel on the plate-glass top, in the geometrical centre, and upon the
towel she arranged with care a procession of things fished from the
drawer. Things for the hair. Things for the complexion. Things for the
eyes, the lashes, the brows, the lips, and the finger nails. Things in
boxes and things in jars and things in tubes and tins. Also, an ash
tray, matches, pins, a tiny sewing kit, a pair of scissors. Last of
all, a hand-printed sign, a nudging sort of sign:
NOTICE!
These articles, placed here for your convenience, are the property of
the _maid_.
And directly beneath the sign, propping it up against the
looking-glass, a china saucer, in which Mrs. Brady now slyly laid decoy
money: two quarters and two dimes, in four-leaf-clover formation.
Another drawer of the dressing table yielded a bottle of bromo seltzer,
a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia, a tin of sodium bicarbonate,
and a teaspoon. These were lined up on a shelf above the couch.
Mrs. Brady was now ready for anything. And (from the grim, thin pucker
of her mouth) expecting it.
Music came to her ears. Rather, the beat of music, muffled, rhythmic,
remote. _Umpa-um, umpa-um, umpa-um-umm_--Mr. “Fiddle” Baer and his
band, hard at work on the first foxtrot of the night. It was teasing,
foot-tapping music; but the large solemn feet of Mrs. Brady were still.
She sat on the couch and opened her newspaper; and for some moments
she read uninterruptedly, with special attention to the murders, the
divorces, the breaches of promise, the funnies.
Then the door swung inward, admitting a blast of Mr. “Fiddle” Baer’s
best, a whiff of perfume, and a girl.
Mrs. Brady put her paper away.
The girl was _petite_ and darkly beautiful; wrapped in fur and mounted
on tall jewelled heels. She entered humming the ragtime song the
orchestra was playing, and while she stood near the dressing table,
stripping off her gloves, she continued to hum it softly to herself:
“Oh, I know my baby loves me,
I can tell my baby loves me.”
Here the dark little girl got the left glove off, and Mrs. Brady
glimpsed a platinum wedding ring.
“’Cause there ain’t no maybe
In my baby’s
Eyes.”
The right glove came off. The dark little girl sat down in one of the
chairs that faced the dressing table. She doffed her wrap, casting it
carelessly over the chair back. It had a cloth-of-gold lining, and
“Paris” was embroidered in curlicues on the label. Mrs. Brady hovered
solicitously near.
The dark little girl, still humming, looked over the articles “placed
here for your convenience,” and picked up the scissors. Having cut off
a very small hangnail with the air of one performing a perilous major
operation, she seized and used the manicure buffer, and after that
the eyebrow pencil. Mrs. Brady’s mind, hopefully calculating the tip,
jumped and jumped again like a taximeter.
“Oh, I know my baby loves me----”
The dark little girl applied powder and lipstick belonging to herself.
She examined the result searchingly in the mirror and sat back,
satisfied. She cast some silver _Klink! Klink!_ into Mrs. Brady’s
saucer, and half rose. Then, remembering something, she settled down
again.
The ensuing thirty seconds were spent by her in pulling off her
platinum wedding ring, tying it in a corner of a lace handkerchief, and
tucking the handkerchief down the bodice of her tight white velvet gown.
“There!” she said.
She swooped up her wrap and trotted toward the door, jewelled heels
merrily twinkling.
“’Cause there ain’t no maybe----”
The door fell shut.
Almost instantly it opened again, and another girl came in. A blonde,
this. She was pretty in a round-eyed, babyish way; but Mrs. Brady,
regarding her, mentally grabbed the spirits of ammonia bottle. For she
looked terribly ill. The round eyes were dull, the pretty, silly little
face was drawn. The thin hands, picking at the fastenings of a specious
beaded bag, trembled and twitched.
Mrs. Brady cleared her throat. “Can I do something for you, miss?”
Evidently the blonde girl had believed herself alone in the dressing
room. She started violently and glanced up, panic in her eyes. Panic,
and something else. Something very like murderous hate--but for an
instant only, so that Mrs. Brady, whose perceptions were never quick,
missed it altogether.
“A glass of water?” suggested Mrs. Brady.
“No,” said the girl, “no.” She had one hand in the beaded bag now.
Mrs. Brady could see it moving, causing the bag to squirm like a live
thing, and the fringe to shiver. “Yes!” she cried abruptly. “A glass of
water--please--you get it for me.”
She dropped on to the couch. Mrs. Brady scurried to the water cooler in
the corner, pressed the spigot with a determined thumb. Water trickled
out thinly. Mrs. Brady pressed harder, and scowled, and thought,
“Something’s wrong with this thing. I mustn’t forget, next time I see
Mr. Costello----”
When again she faced her patient, the patient was sitting erect. She
was thrusting her clenched hand back into the beaded bag again.
She took only a sip of the water, but it seemed to help her quite
miraculously. Almost at once colour came to her cheeks, life to her
eyes. She grew young again--as young as she was. She smiled up at Mrs.
Brady.
“Well!” she exclaimed. “What do you know about that!” She shook her
honey-coloured head. “I can’t imagine what came over me.”
“Are you better now?” inquired Mrs. Brady.
“Yes. Oh, yes. I’m better now. You see,” said the blonde girl
confidentially, “we were at the theatre, my boy friend and I, and it
was hot and stuffy--I guess that must have been the trouble.” She
paused, and the ghost of her recent distress crossed her face. “God! I
thought that last act _never_ would end!” she said.
While she attended to her hair and complexion, she chattered gaily to
Mrs. Brady, chattered on with scarcely a stop for breath, and laughed
much. She said, among other things, that she and her “boy friend” had
not known one another very long, but that she was “ga-ga” about him.
“He is about me, too,” she confessed. “He thinks I’m grand.”
She fell silent then, and in the looking-glass her eyes were shadowed,
haunted. But Mrs. Brady, from where she stood, could not see the
looking-glass; and half a minute later the blonde girl laughed and
began again. When she went out she seemed to dance out on little winged
feet; and Mrs. Brady, sighing, thought it must be nice to be young ...
and happy like that.
The next arrivals were two. A tall, extremely smart young woman in
black chiffon entered first, and held the door open for her companion;
and the instant the door was shut, she said, as though it had been on
the tip of her tongue for hours, “Amy, what under the sun _happened_?”
Amy, who was brown-eyed, brown-bobbed-haired, and patently annoyed
about something, crossed to the dressing table and flopped into a chair
before she made reply.
“Nothing,” she said wearily then.
“That’s nonsense!” snorted the other. “Tell me. Was it something she
said? She’s a tactless ass, of course. Always was.”
“No, not anything she said. It was----” Amy bit her lip. “All right!
I’ll tell you. Before we left your apartment I just happened to notice
that Tom had disappeared. So I went to look for him--I wanted to ask
him if he’d remembered to tell the maid where we were going--Skippy’s
subject to croup, you know, and we always leave word. Well, so I went
into the kitchen, thinking Tom might be there mixing cocktails--and
there he was--and there _she_ was!”
The full red mouth of the other young woman pursed itself slightly. Her
arched brows lifted. “Well?”
Her matter-of-factness appeared to infuriate Amy. “He was _kissing_
her!” she flung out.
“Well?” said the other again. She chuckled softly and patted Amy’s
shoulder, as if it were the shoulder of a child. “You’re surely not
going to let _that_ spoil your whole evening? Amy _dear_! Kissing
may once have been serious and significant--but it isn’t nowadays.
Nowadays, it’s like shaking hands. It means nothing.”
But Amy was not consoled. “I hate her!” she cried desperately.
“Red-headed _thing_! Calling me ‘darling’ and ‘honey,’ and s-sending
me handkerchiefs for C-Christmas--and then sneaking off behind closed
doors and k-kissing my h-h-husband....”
At this point Amy quite broke down, but she recovered herself
sufficiently to add with venom, “I’d like to slap her!”
“Oh, oh, oh,” smiled the tall young woman, “I wouldn’t do that!”
Amy wiped her eyes with what might well have been one of the Christmas
handkerchiefs, and confronted her friend. “Well, what _would_ you do,
Claire? If you were I?”
“I’d forget it,” said Claire, “and have a good time. I’d kiss somebody
myself. You’ve no idea how much better you’d feel!”
“I don’t do----” Amy began indignantly; but as the door behind
her opened and a third young woman--red-headed, earringed,
exquisite--lilted in, she changed her tone. “Oh, hello!” she called
sweetly, beaming at the newcomer via the mirror. “We were wondering
what had become of you!”
The red-headed girl, smiling easily back, dropped her cigarette on
the floor and crushed it out with a silver-shod toe. “Tom and I were
talking to ‘Fiddle’ Baer,” she explained. “He’s going to play ‘Clap
Yo’ Hands’ next, because it’s my favourite. Lend me a comb, will you,
somebody?”
“There’s a comb there,” said Claire, indicating Mrs. Brady’s business
comb.
“But imagine using it!” murmured the red-headed girl. “Amy, darling,
haven’t you one?”
Amy produced a tiny comb from her rhinestone purse. “Don’t forget to
bring it when you come,” she said, and stood up. “I’m going on out, I
want to tell Tom something.”
She went.
The red-headed young woman and the tall black-chiffon one were alone,
except for Mrs. Brady. The red-headed one beaded her incredible lashes.
The tall one, the one called Claire, sat watching her. Presently she
said, “Sylvia, look here.” And Sylvia looked. Anybody, addressed in
that tone, would have.
“There is one thing,” Claire went on quietly, holding the other’s eyes,
“that I want understood. And that is, ‘_Hands off!_’ Do you hear me?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You do know what I mean!”
The red-headed girl shrugged her shoulders. “Amy told you she saw us, I
suppose.”
“Precisely. And,” went on Claire, gathering up her possessions and
rising, “as I said before, you’re to keep away.” Her eyes blazed sudden
white-hot rage. “Because, as you very well know, he belongs to _me_,”
she said, and departed, slamming the door.
* * * * *
Between eleven o’clock and one Mrs. Brady was very busy indeed. Never
for more than a moment during those two hours was the dressing room
empty. Often it was jammed, full to overflowing with curled cropped
heads, with ivory arms and shoulders, with silk and lace and chiffon,
with legs. The door flapped in and back, in and back. The mirrors
caught and held--and lost--a hundred different faces. Powder veiled
the dressing table with a thin white dust; cigarette stubs, scarlet at
the tips, choked the ash-receiver. Dimes and quarters clattered into
Mrs. Brady’s saucer--and were transferred to Mrs. Brady’s purse. The
original seventy cents remained. That much, and no more, would Mrs.
Brady gamble on the integrity of womankind.
She earned her money. She threaded needles and took stitches. She
powdered the backs of necks. She supplied towels for soapy, dripping
hands. She removed a speck from a teary blue eye and pounded the heel
on a slipper. She curled the straggling ends of a black bob and a
gray bob, pinned a velvet flower on a lithe round waist, mixed three
doses of bicarbonate of soda, took charge of a shed pink-satin girdle,
collected, on hands and knees, several dozen fake pearls that had wept
from a broken string.
She served chorus girls and schoolgirls, gay young matrons and gayer
young mistresses, a lady who had divorced four husbands, and a lady
who had poisoned one, the secret (more or less) sweetheart of a Most
Distinguished Name, and the Brains of a bootleg gang.... She saw
things. She saw a yellow check, with the ink hardly dry. She saw four
tiny bruises, such as fingers might make, on an arm. She saw a girl
strike another girl, not playfully. She saw a bundle of letters some
man wished he had not written, safe and deep in a brocaded handbag.
* * * * *
About midnight the door flew open and at once was pushed shut, and a
gray-eyed, lovely child stood backed against it, her palms flattened
on the panels at her sides, the draperies of her white chiffon gown
settling lightly to rest around her.
There were already five damsels of varying ages in the dressing room.
The latest arrival marked their presence with a flick of her eyes and,
standing just where she was, she called peremptorily, “Maid!”
Mrs. Brady, standing just where _she_ was, said, “Yes, miss?”
“Please come here,” said the girl.
Mrs. Brady, as slowly as she dared, did so.
The girl lowered her voice to a tense half-whisper. “Listen! Is there
any way I can get out of here except through this door I came in?”
Mrs. Brady stared at her stupidly.
“Any window?” persisted the girl. “Or anything?”
Here they were interrupted by the exodus of two of the
damsels-of-varying ages. Mrs. Brady opened the door for them--and in
so doing caught a glimpse of a man who waited in the hall outside, a
debonair, old-young man with a girl’s furry wrap hung over his arm, and
his hat in his hand.
The door clicked. The gray-eyed girl moved out from the wall, against
which she had flattened herself--for all the world like one eluding
pursuit in a cinema.
“What about that window?” she demanded, pointing.
“That’s all the farther it opens,” said Mrs. Brady.
“Oh! And it’s the only one--isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“Damn,” said the girl. “Then there’s _no_ way out?”
“No way but the door,” said Mrs. Brady testily.
The girl looked at the door. She seemed to look _through_ the door, and
to despise and to fear what she saw. Then she looked at Mrs. Brady.
“Well,” she said, “then I s’pose the only thing to do is to stay in
here.”
She stayed. Minutes ticked by. Jazz crooned distantly, stopped, struck
up again. Other girls came and went. Still the gray-eyed girl sat on
the couch, with her back to the wall and her shapely legs crossed,
smoking cigarettes, one from the stub of another.
After a long while she said, “Maid!”
“Yes, miss?”
“Peek out that door, will you, and see if there’s anyone standing
there.”
Mrs. Brady peeked, and reported that there was. There was a gentleman
with a little bit of a black moustache standing there. The same
gentleman, in fact, who was standing there “just after you come in.”
“Oh, Lord,” sighed the gray-eyed girl. “Well ... I can’t stay here all
_night_, that’s one sure thing.”
She slid off the couch, and went listlessly to the dressing table.
There she occupied herself for a minute or two. Suddenly, without a
word, she darted out.
Thirty seconds later Mrs. Brady was elated to find two crumpled
one-dollar bills lying in her saucer. Her joy, however, died a
premature death. For she made an almost simultaneous second discovery.
A saddening one. Above all, a puzzling one.
“Now what for,” marvelled Mrs. Brady, “did she want to walk off with
them _scissors_?”
This at twelve-twenty-five.
At twelve-thirty a quartette of excited young things burst in, babbling
madly. All of them had their evening wraps with them; all talked at
once. One of them, a Dresden china girl with a heart-shaped face, was
the centre of attention. Around her the rest fluttered like monstrous
butterflies; to her they addressed their shrill exclamatory cries.
“Babe,” they called her.
Mrs. Brady heard snatches: “Not in this state unless....” “Well, you
can in Maryland, Jimmy says.” “Oh, there must be some place nearer
than....” “Isn’t this _marvellous_?” “When did it happen, Babe? When
did you decide?”
“Just now,” the girl with the heart-shaped face sang softly, “when we
were dancing.”
The babble resumed, “But listen, Babe, what’ll your mother and
father...?” “Oh, never mind, let’s hurry.” “Shall we be warm enough
with just these thin wraps, do you think? Babe, will you be warm
enough? Sure?”
Powder flew and little pocket combs marched through bright marcels.
Flushed cheeks were painted pinker still.