THE ROYAL EUROPEAN HAIR-DRESSING PARLORS
MARCEL-WAVING TAUGHT IN TEN LESSONS
Besides this, there were offices for a dozen patent medicine cures;
a notary public and public stenographers; while banjo lessons,
instruction in illustration, commercial advertising and fancy
dancing were offered on every floor.
Higher up, on the fifth and particularly on the sixth floor,
where the lofts had been transformed into dwelling-rooms and
studios, a queer collection had settled and clung tenaciously. For
years, oppressed by the vastness and gloom of the reverberating
corridors, they had gone on living solitary lives, barely nodding
to each other, as though each had a secret to bury (which indeed
was often true), and they might have continued thus indefinitely,
had it not been for two events--the accident of King O’Leary’s
meeting Tootles, and the mystery of Dangerfield’s coming to the
corner studio--two unifying events that brought the little group
of human stragglers on the sixth floor into a curious fraternity
that persisted for several years, and was fated to affect several
destinies profoundly.
I
It was Christmas Eve in Lincoln Square. A fine snow was sifting
out of the leaden night, coating the passers-by with silver but
dissolving on the warm asphalt stretches in long, gleaming lakes
where a thousand reflections quivered. From the glowing subway
entrances, the holiday crowds surged up, laden with mysterious
packages, scurrying home for the decking out of tinseled trees
and the plotting of Christmas surprises. The shop windows flared
through the crowds so brightly that they seemed to have brought
up electric reinforcements. The restaurants were crowded with
brilliant garlands gay with red berries and festal ribbons,
while amid the turbulent traffic of the avenues, impudent little
taxi-cabs went scooting merrily, with rich glimpses of heaped-up
boxes inside.
At Healy’s, under the strident elevated station, a few guests
were entering the blazing dining-rooms, laughing and expectant.
The tension of the city’s nerves seemed everywhere relaxed.
For one merry hour in the long, grinding year, united in the
unselfish spirit of revelry, with the zest of secrets to be guarded
and secrets to be discovered, the metropolitan crowd bumped
good-humoredly on its way, gay with the democracy of good cheer.
King O’Leary left the throng at the bar at Healy’s, whistling
loudly to himself, flung a half-dollar to the blind news-dealer
under the elevated steps, calling with gruff gusto, “Merry
Christmas!” and, resuming his whistling, crossed the square to
where Teagan’s Arcade rose in shanty splendor, six stories above
Broadway, filling the block with its flashing electric signs which
hung against the night like so much cheap jewelry.
If King O’Leary continued to whistle with exaggerated gaiety,
tricking himself into a set smile, it was because deep in his
heart he felt the irresistible closing-in of his black hour.
As he neared the glass descent into the rumbling underground,
a flurried eruption of parcel-laden crowds whirled momentarily
about him, wrapping him around with youth, laughter, and the aroma
of friendship and affection. Home! He felt it so keenly; he saw
so clearly rising before him a hundred visions of family groups
gathered in the warmth of cozy houses, he felt so out of it, so
socially excommunicated, that his pretense at gaiety flattened out.
He shifted the soft-brimmed hat over his eyes, as though to shut
out memories, turned up the collar of his coat, and, digging his
great hands into capacious pockets, swung doggedly on. The world
for this one night had run away from him. In the whole city he
could think of no door where he could leave a present or imagine
from what direction one might descend upon him. With the exception
of the half-dollar flung to the blind news-dealer, and a few tips
jingling in his pockets, his Christmas giving was over. Twice a
year, in his happy-go-lucky existence, rolling down incredible
avenues of life from Singapore to Nome, Alaska, meeting each day
with unfailing zest, leader and boon companion through whatever
crowds he passed--twice a year, at Christmas and on a certain day
in mid-April, the secret of which lay buried in his memory, King
O’Leary went down into the dark alleys of remembrance.
He entered the Arcade, which was like a warm, friendly furnace
after the wet, shivering snow flurries, transparent shops on either
side, and ahead the gleam of brass railings barring the entrance to
the vaudeville theater, whose evening program shrieked at him from
colored sheets of mystery and guaranteed thrills.
“Lord, but this is awful!” he said solemnly, gazing
absent-mindedly into the glowing tonsorial parlors inscribed “Joey
Shine.” “Wish to the deuce I could think of some one to give a
present to!”
All at once he perceived the manicurist, a tall, Amazonian
young lady, with reddish hair coiled in amazing tangles, who
was examining him with friendly curiosity. He came out of his
abstraction, wondered where he had seen her, half smiled, and went
slowly on his way to the elevator, an old-fashioned vehicle, which
came settling down like an ancient barge.
“Merry Christmas, Mistah O’Leary!”
“Back to you, Sam!” he said, dropping a dollar in the box which was
conspicuously advertised. And he added, “Up six.”
“Thank you, sah; _thank you_!” said Sam, whose eyeballs rolled
whitely at the magnificence of the tip.
The twin elevators in the Arcade were sleepy affairs, unoppressed
by a sense of time, while the voyage upward was never guaranteed.
They were large, open, cage-like affairs, littered with
announcements: rooms to be sublet or to be shared; trousers pressed
and old clothes bought; washing cheaply offered; instruction in
typewriting and stenography; dental parlors; the future foretold
and confidential advice given at reasonable rates by Madame
Probasco on the fifth floor; while only temporarily reversed, a
large sign announced:
OUT OF ORDER
TAKE OTHER ELEVATOR
Sam lingered a moment, humming sleepily, as though to coax forth
another passenger from the shadows. This failing, he shuffled out
for a languid survey of the Arcade.
“No hurry here,” said O’Leary, yawning indifferently and settling
into the cushioned chair which soothed the attendant in his weary
hours.
Thus encouraged, Sam lounged away for a final reconnoitering,
slouched back, vacillated a moment on one foot, and had his hand
on the sliding gate, when out of the dusk came a hallo in a high,
nasal English accent.
“I say there, Sassafras, my man, hold him in!”
Sam began laughing immediately, in a thin, treble, body-shaking
laugh,
“He-he-he, Mr. Kidder; I sartainly knew you was coming--yassah!”
A young fellow, barely five feet six, with the figure of a jockey,
hopped into the car, and, seizing the regulator, rattled off:
“Cast away there! Smartly now, my man, smartly! Take in your
spinnaker! Ship the maintop-gallant sheets! Douse the poop-deck!
Stand by the battens!”
In response to this rapid salvo, the elevator began to budge,
creaking and protesting, rising at about the rate of six inches a
second.
“Do you think we can make it?” said Kidder, with assumed alarm.
“How’s the old scow to-night, mate?”
“Why, most surprisin’ well--yassah, most surprisin’.”
“It’s a stormy night, and there’s a bad reef above the fourth.
Well, mate, we’re in the hands of Providence. It’s will be done!”
All at once, seeming to perceive King O’Leary for the first time,
he inquired anxiously:
“Excuse me, sir, does my presence at the helm cause you any
anxiety?”
“Not here,” said King O’Leary, who, in his amusement, had been
tricked out of his glumness.
“What floor can I serve you, sir?”
“The sixth will be about right for me.”
“Then we sink or swim, survive or perish, together!”
He was dapperly dressed, and though his yellowish checks were
evidently ready-made, they were squeezed in at the waist and
hoisted over the ankles in the latest style. He had the hatchet
face of the clever Yankee, alert, sharply defined, with a
high-bridged and rather bold English nose.
“Youngster looks like a pocket edition of the Duke of Wellington,”
thought King O’Leary, registering his favorable impressions, and,
before the other’s infectious spirits, he began to recover his
natural zest.
Tootles--to give Mr. St. George Kidder at once his workaday
name--meanwhile had been examining his companion with the
impressionable eye of the artist. He saw the bulky body of a man
approaching middle age, yet full of rough, brawny substance and
weather-tried endurance. The great half-moon of a mouth was now
turning up in its usual indomitable attitude toward life under the
broad-spaced, jovial nose set between full cheeks breaking into
dimples. Underneath wisps of tawny hair, rather Mephistophelian,
were clear-blue eyes, brilliant and sharp as a brigand’s. The
whole had a combination of companionable good humor, and instant
aggression when necessary.
“Rather a rough nun in case of a scrap, I should fancy,” thought
Tootles, who had his own way of expressing things. “However, he has
a sense of humor--of _my_ humor--which is distinctly in his favor.”
Suddenly he exclaimed aloud:
“Whoa there! All hands on deck stand by the lifeboats!”
The elevator, having drifted gradually past one dark floor after
the other, had now come to a jolting stop between the third and
the fourth, and began to churn up and down in a manner distinctly
alarming.
“Sassafras, you’re feeding Tessie too much red meat,” said
Tootles, shifting his metaphors as Sam came to the rescue.
Another moment of joggling and bucking, and the elevator, as though
too weary to continue its exertions, suddenly glided up and to a
rest at the sixth floor.
“Whew! My eyes and whiskers!” exclaimed Tootles, springing out.
He turned with an air of grave solicitude.
“Sassafras, I do believe I forgot to pay the chauffeur. Small
change, you know, is such a nuisance. I’m going to let you be my
banker for a couple of days. Give him a liberal tip. And I say,
when the florist comes in the morning with my _boutonnière_, attend
to that, too, will you? Oh, yes, if Mrs. Van Astorbilt calls again
this evening, tell her I have gone to the country--but discreetly,
Sassafras, discreetly, in your best manner. Remember--she is a
woman, like your mother.”
The sparkling elevator sagged out of sight, burying in the
cavernous shaft the body-shaking peals of laughter, leaving O’Leary
and Tootles moving down the spacious, murky corridor of the sixth
floor back. There was a moment of silence, each rather watching
the other out of the corner of his eye, and then Tootles heaved a
prodigious sigh.
“Say, this is a hell of a place on Christmas eve, isn’t it?”
“Why, boy, I didn’t know it hit you that way,” said King O’Leary,
surprised.
“It sure does. ‘Christmas comes but once a year, when it comes it
brings good cheer!’ Yes, it does! Wish I could sleep it over. Ugh!
Well, anyhow!”
He stopped at the door which bore the inscription: