pressed out against his chest.
"I 'ain't got nothing in life but you, honey. There ain't nobody else under
the sun makes any difference. That's why I want you to get out of it,
Blutch. It's a dirty game--the gambling game. You ain't fit for it. You're
too good. They've nearly got you now, Blutch. Let's get out, honey,
while the goin's good. Let's take them seventy-five bucks and buy us a
peanut-stand or a line of goods. Let's be regular folks, darlin'! I'm
willin' to begin low down. Don't stake them last seventy-five, Blutch.
Break while we're broke. It ain't human nature to break while your luck's
with you."
He was for folding her in his arms, but she still withheld him.
"Blutch darlin', it's the first thing I ever asked of you."
He grew grave, looking long into her blue eyes with the tears forming over
them.
"Why, Ann 'Lisbeth, danged if I know what to say! You sure you're feelin'
well, Babe? 'Ain't took cold, have you, with your fur coat in hock?"
"No, no, no!"
"Well, I--I guess, honey, if the truth was told, your old man ain't cut out
for nothing much besides the gamin'-table--a fellow that's knocked around
the world the way I have."
"You are, Blutch; you are! You're an expert accountant. Didn't you run the
Two Dollar Hat Store that time in Syracuse and get away with it?"
"I know, Babe; but when a fellow's once used to makin' it easy and spendin'
it easy, he can't be satisfied lopin' along in a little business. Why, just
take to-night, honey! I only brought home my girl a peach this evening,
but that ain't sayin' that before morning breaks I can't be bringin' her a
couple of two-carat stones."
"No, no, Blutch; I don't want 'em. I swear to God I don't want 'em!"
"Why, Babe, I just can't figure out what's got into you. I never heard you
break out like this. Are you scared, honey, because we happen to be lower
than--"
"No, no, darlin'; I ain't scared because we're low. I'm scared to get high
again. It's the first run of real luck you've had in three years, Blutch.
There was no hope of gettin' you out while things was breakin' good for
you; but now--"
"I ain't sayin' it's the best game in the world. I'd see a son of mine laid
out before I'd let him get into it. But it's what I'm cut out for, and what
are you goin' to do about it? 'Ain't you got everything your little heart
desires? Ain't we going down to Sheepshead when the first thaw sets in?
Ain't we just a pair of love-birds that's as happy as if we had our right
senses? Come, Babe; get into your jacket. Joe'll be here any minute, and I
got that porterhouse at Jack's on the brain. Come kiss your hubby."
She held up her face with the tears rolling down it, and he kissed a dry
spot and her yellow frizzed bangs.
"My girl! My cry-baby girl!"
"You're all I got in the world, Blutch! Thinkin' of what's best for you has
eat into me."
"I know! I know!"
"We'll never get nowheres in this game, hon. We ain't even sure enough of
ourselves to have a home like--like regular folks."
"Never you mind, Babe. Startin' first of the year, I'm going to begin to
look to a little nest-egg."
"We ought to have it, Blutch. Just think of lettin' ourselves get down to
the last seventy-five! What if a rainy day should come--where would we be
at? If you--or me should get sick or something."
"You ain't all wrong, girl."
"You'd give the shirt off your back, Blutch; that's why we can't ever have
a nest-egg as long as you're playin' stakes. There's too many hard-luck
stories lying around loose in the gamblin' game."
"The next big haul I make I'm going to get out, girl, so help me!"
"Blutch!"
"I mean it. We'll buy a chicken-farm."
"Why not a little business, Blutch, in a small town with--"
"There's a great future in chicken-farmin'. I set Boy Higgins up with a
five-hundred spot the year his lung went back on him, and he paid me back
the second year."
"Blutch darlin', you mean it?"
"Why not, Babe--seein' you want it? There ain't no string tied to me and
the green-felt table. I can go through with anything I make up my mind to."
"Oh, honey baby, you promise! Darling little fuzzy chickens!"
"Why, girl, I wouldn't have you eatin' yourself thisaway. The first
ten-thou' high-water mark we hit I'm quits. How's that?"
"Ten thousand! Oh, Blutch, we--"
"What's ten thou', girl! I made the Hot Springs haul with a twenty-dollar
start. If you ain't careful, we'll be buyin' that chicken-farm next week.
That's what can happen to my girl if she starts something with her hubby."
Suddenly Mrs. Connors crumpled in a heap upon the lacy pillows, pink
sequins heaving.
"Why, Babe--Babe, what is it? You're sick or something to-night, honey." He
lifted her to his arms, bent almost double over her.
"Nothin', Blutch, only--only I just never was so happy."
"Lord!" said Blutch Connors. "All these years, and I never knew anything
was eatin' her."
"I--I never was, Blutch."
"Was what?"
"So--happy."
"Lord bless my soul! The poor little thing was afraid to say it was a
chicken-farm she wanted!"
He patted her constantly, his eyes somewhat glazy.
"Us two, Blutch, livin' regular."
"You ain't all wrong, girl."
"You home evenings, Blutch, regular like."
"You poor little thing!"
"You'll play safe, Blutch? Play safe to win!"
"I wish I'd have went into the farmin' three years ago, Babe, the week I
hauled down eleven thou'."
"You was too fed up with luck then, Blutch. I knew better 'n to ask."
"Lord bless my soul! and the poor little thing was afraid to say it was a
chicken-farm she wanted!"
"Promise me, Blutch, you'll play 'em close--to win!"
"Al's openin' up his new rooms to-night. Me and Joe are goin' to play 'em
fifty-fifty. It looks to me like a haul, Babe."
"He's crooked, Blutch, I tell you."
"No more 'n all of 'em are, Babe. Your eyes open and your pockets closed is
my motto. What you got special against Joe? You mustn't dig up on a fellow,
Babe."
"I--. Why ain't he livin' in White Plains, where his wife and kids are?"
"What I don't know about the private life of my card friends don't hurt
me."
"It's town talk the way he keeps them rooms over at the Liberty. 'Way back
when I was a kid, Blutch, I remember how he used to--"
"I know there ain't no medals on Joe, Babe, but if you don't stop listenin'
to town talk, you're going to get them pretty little ears of yours all
sooty."
"I know, Blutch; but I could tell you things about him back in the days
when my mother--"
"Me and him are goin' over to Al's to-night and try to win my babe the
first chicken for her farm. Whatta you bet? Us two ain't much on the
sociability end, but we've played many a lucky card fifty-fifty. Saturday
is our mascot night, too. Come, Babe; get on your jacket, and--"
"Honeybunch, you and Joe go. I ain't hungry."
"But--"
"I'll have 'em send me up a bite from the grill."
"You ain't sore because I asked Joe? It's business, Babe."
"Of course I ain't, honey; only, with you and him goin' right over to Al's
afterward, what's the sense of me goin'? I wanna stay home and think. It's
just like beginnin' to-night I could sit here and look right into the time
when there ain't goin' to be no more waitin' up nights for my boy. I--They
got all little white chickens out at Denny's roadhouse, Blutch--white with
red combs. Can we have some like them?"
"You betcher life we can! I'm going to win the beginnings of that farm
before I'm a night older. Lordy! Lordy! and to think I never knew anything
was eatin' her!"
"Blutch, I--I don't know what to say. I keep cryin' when I wanna laugh. I
never was so happy, Blutch, I never was."
"My little kitty-puss!"
* * * * *
At seven o'clock came Mr. Joe Kirby, dark, corpulent, and black of cigar.
"Come right in, Joe! I'm here and waitin' for you."
"Ain't the missis in on this killin'?"
"She--Not this--"
"No, Joe; not--to-night."
"Sorry to hear it," said Mr. Kirby, flecking an inch of cigar-ash to the
table-top. "Fine rig-up, with due respect to the lady, your missis is
wearing to-night."
"The wife ain't so short on looks, is she?"
"Blutch!"
"You know my sentiments about her. They don't come no ace-higher."
She colored, even quivered, standing there beside the bronze Nydia.
"I tell her we're out for big business to-night, Joe."
"Sky's the limit. Picked up a pin pointin' toward me and sat with my back
to a red-headed woman. Can't lose."
"Well, good-night, Babe. Take care o' yourself."
"Good night, Blutch. You'll play 'em close, honey?"
"You just know I will, Babe."
An hour she sat there, alone on the _chaise-longue_, staring into space and
smiling at what she saw there. Finally she dropped back into the lacy mound
of pillows, almost instantly asleep, but still smiling.
* * * * *
At four o'clock, that hour before dawn cracks, even the West Forties, where
night is too often cacophonous with the sound of revelry, drop into long
narrow aisles of gloom. Thin, high-stooped houses with drawn shades recede
into the mouse-colored mist of morning, and, as through quagmire, this mist
hovering close to ground, figures skulk--that nameless, shapeless race of
many bloods and one complexion, the underground complexion of paste long
sour from standing.
At somewhat after that hour Mr. Blutch Connors made exit from one of these
houses, noiseless, with scarcely a click after him, and then, without
pause, passed down the brownstone steps and eastward. A taxicab slid by,
its honk as sorrowful as the cry of a plover in a bog. Another--this one
drawing up alongside, in quest of fare. He moved on, his breath clouding
the early air, and his hands plunged deep in his pockets as if to plumb
their depth. There was a great sag to the silhouette of him moving thus
through the gloom, the chest in and the shoulders rounding and lessening
their front span. Once he paused to remove the brown derby and wipe at his
brow. A policeman struck his stick. He moved on.
An all-night drug-store, the modern sort of emporium where the capsule
and the herb have become side line to the ivoritus toilet-set and the
pocket-dictionary, threw a white veil of light across the sidewalk. Well
past that window, but as if its image had only just caught up with him,
Mr. Connors turned back, retracing ten steps. A display-window, denuded of
frippery but strewn with straw and crisscrossed with two large strips of
poster, proclaimed Chicklet Face Powder to the cosmetically concerned. With
an eye to fidelity, a small brood of small chickens, half dead with bad
air and not larger than fists, huddled rearward and out of the grilling
light--puny victims to an indorsed method of correspondence-school
advertising.
Mr. Connors entered, scouting out a dozy clerk.
"Say, bo, what's one of them chicks worth?"
"Ain't fer sale."
Mr. Connors lowered his voice, nudging.
"I gotta sick wife, bo. Couldn't you slip me one in a 'mergency?"
"What's the idea--chicken broth? You better go in the park and catch her a
chippie."
"On the level, friend, one of them little yellow things would cheer her up.
She's great one for pets."
"Can't you see they're half-dead now? What you wanna cheer her up with--a
corpse? If I had my way, I'd wring the whole display's neck, anyhow."
"What'll you take for one, bo?"
"It'll freeze to death."
"Look! This side pocket is lined with velvet."
"Dollar."
"Aw, I said one, friend, not the whole brood."
"Leave or take."
Mr. Connors dug deep.
"Make it sixty cents and a poker-chip, bo. It's every cent I got in my
pocket."
"Keep the poker-chip for pin-money."
When Mr. Connors emerged, a small, chirruping bunch of fuzz, cupped in his
hand, lay snug in the velvet-lined pocket.
At Sixth Avenue, where the great skeleton of the Elevated stalks
mid-street, like a prehistoric _pithecanthropus erectus_, he paused for an
instant in the shadow of a gigantic black pillar, readjusting the fragile
burden to his pocket.
Stepping out to cross the street, simultaneously a great silent motor-car,
noiseless but wild with speed, tore down the surface-car tracks, blacker in
the hulking shadow of the Elevated trellis.
A quick doubling up of the sagging silhouette, and the groan of a clutch
violently thrown. A woman's shriek flying thin and high like a javelin of
horror. A crowd sprung full grown out of the bog of the morning. White,
peering faces showing up in the brilliant paths of the acetylene lamps. A
uniform pushing through. A crowbar and the hard breathing of men straining
to lift. A sob in the dark. Stand back! Stand back!
* * * * *
Dawn--then a blue, wintry sky, the color and hardness of enamel; and
sunshine, bright, yet so far off the eye could stare up to it unsquinting.
It lay against the pink-brocaded window-hangings of the suite in the Hotel
Metropolis; it even crept in like a timid hand reaching toward, yet not
quite touching, the full-flung figure of Mrs. Blutch Connors, lying, her
cheek dug into the harshness of the carpet, there at the closed door to the
bedroom--prone as if washed there, and her yellow hair streaming back like
seaweed. Sobs came, but only the dry kind that beat in the throat and then
come shrilly, like a sheet of silk swiftly torn.
How frail are human ties, have said the _beaux esprits_ of every age in one
epigrammatic fashion or another. But frailty can bleed; in fact, it's first
to bleed.
Lying there, with her face swollen and stamped with the carpet-nap,
squirming in a grief that was actually abashing before it was
heartbreaking, Ann 'Lisbeth Connors, whose only epiphany of life was love,
and shut out from so much else that helps make life sweet, was now shut out
from none of its pain.
Once she scratched at the door, a faint, dog-like scratch for admission,
and then sat back on her heels, staring at the uncompromising panel,
holding back the audibility of her sobs with her hand.
Heart-constricting silence, and only the breath of ether seeping out to
her, sweet, insidious. She took to hugging herself violently against a
sudden chill that rushed over her, rattling her frame.
The bedroom door swung noiselessly back, fanning out the etheric fumes, and
closed again upon an emerging figure.
"Doctor--quick--God!--What?"
He looked down upon her with the kind of glaze over his eyes that Bellini
loved to paint, compassion for the pain of the world almost distilled to
tears.
"Doctor--he ain't--"
"My poor little lady!"
"O God--no--no--no! No, Doctor, no! You wouldn't! Please! Please! You
wouldn't let him leave me here all alone, Doctor! O God! you wouldn't! I'm
all alone, Doctor! You see, I'm all alone. Please don't take him from me.
He's mine! You can't! Promise me, Doctor! My darlin' in there--why are you
hurtin' him so? Why has he stopped hollerin'? Cut me to pieces to give him
what he needs to make him live. Don't take him from me, Doctor. He's all I
got! O God--God--please!" And fell back swooning, with an old man's tear
splashing down as if to revivify her.
* * * * *
The heart has a resiliency. Strained to breaking, it can contract again.
Even the waiting women, Iseult and Penelope, learned, as they sat sorrowing
and watching, to sing to the swing of the sea.
When, out of the slough of dark weeks, Mrs. Connors took up life again,
she was only beaten, not broken--a reed lashed down by storm and then
resilient, daring to lift its head again. A wan little head, but the eyes
unwashed of their blue and the irises grown large. The same hard sunshine
lay in its path between the brocade curtains of a room strangely denuded.
It was as if spring had died there, when it was only the _chaise-longue_,
barren of its lacy pillows, a glass vase and silver-framed picture gone
from the mantel, a Mexican afghan removed from a divan and showing its
bulges.
It was any hotel suite now--uncompromising; leave me or take me.
In taking leave of it, Mrs. Connors looked about her even coldly, as if
this barren room were too denuded of its memories.
"You--you been mighty good to me, Joe. It's good to
know--everything's--paid up."
Mr. Joe Kirby sat well forward on a straight chair, knees well apart in the
rather puffy attitude of the uncomfortably corpulent.
"Now, cut that! Whatever I done for you, Annie, I done because I wanted to.
If you'd 'a' listened to me, you wouldn't 'a' gone and sold out your last
dud to raise money. Whatcha got friends for?"
"The way you dug down for--for the funeral, Joe. He--he couldn't have had
the silver handles or the gray velvet if--if not for you, Joe. He--he
always loved everything the best. I can't never forget that of you,
Joe--just never."
She was pinning on her little crêpe-edged veil over her decently black hat,
and paused now to dab up under it at a tear.
"I'd 'a' expected poor old Blutch to do as much for me."
"He would! He would! Many's the pal he buried."
"I hate, Annie, like anything to see you actin' up like this. You ain't
fit to walk out of this hotel on your own hook. Where'd you get that
hand-me-down?"
She looked down at herself, quickly reddening.
"It's a warm suit, Joe."
"Why, you 'ain't got a chance! A little thing like you ain't cut out for
but one or two things. Coddlin'--that's your line. The minute you're
nobody's doll you're goin' to get stepped on and get busted."
"Whatta you know about--"
"What kind of a job you think you're gonna get? Adviser to a corporation
lawyer? You're too soft, girl. What chance you think you got buckin' up
against a town that wants value received from a woman. Aw, you know what I
mean, Annie. You can't pull that baby stuff all the time."
"You," she cried, beating her small hands together, "oh, you--you--" and
then sat down, crying weakly. "Them days back there! Why, I--I was such a
kid it's just like they hadn't been! With her and my grandmother dead and
gone these twelve years, if it wasn't for you it's--it's like they'd never
been."
"Nobody was gladder 'n me, girl, to see how you made a bed for yourself.
I'm commendin' you, I am. That's just what I'm tryin' to tell you now,
girl. You was cut out to be somebody's kitten, and--"
"O God!" she sobbed into her handkerchief, "why didn't you take me when you
took him?"
"Now, now, Annie, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. A good-lookin' woman
like you 'ain't got nothing to worry about. Lemme order you up a drink.
You're gettin' weak again."
"No, no; I'm taking 'em too often. But they warm me. They warm me, and I'm
cold, Joe--cold."
"Then lemme--"
"No! No!"
He put out a short, broad hand toward her.
"Poor little--"
"I gotta go now, Joe. These rooms ain't mine no more."
He barred her path.
"Go where?"
'"Ain't I told you? I'm going out. Anybody that's willin' to work can get
it in this town. I ain't the softy you think I am."
He took her small black purse up from the table.
"What's your capital?"
"You--quit!"
"Ten--'leven--fourteen dollars and seventy-four cents."
"You gimme!"
"You can't cut no capers on that, girl."
"I--can work."
He dropped something in against the coins.
It clinked.
She sprang at him.
"No, no; not a cent from you--for myself. I--I didn't know you in them
days for nothing. I was only a kid, but I--I know you! I know. You gimme!
Gimme!"
He withheld it from her.
"Hold your horses, beauty! What I was then I am now, and I ain't ashamed of
it. Human, that's all. The best of us is only human before a pretty woman."
"You gimme!"
She had snatched up her small hand-satchel from the divan and stood
flashing now beside him, her small, blazing face only level with his
cravat.
"What you spittin' fire for? That wa'n't nothin' I slipped in but my
address, girl. When you need me call on me. 'The Liberty, 96.' Go right up
in the elevator, no questions asked. Get me?" he said, poking the small
purse into the V of her jacket. "Get me?"
"Oh, you--Woh--woh--woh!"
With her face flung back and twisted, and dodging his outflung arm, she was
down four flights of narrow, unused stairs and out. Once in the streets,
she walked with her face still thrust up and a frenzy of haste in her
stride. Red had popped out in her cheeks. There was voice in each
breath--moans that her throat would not hold.
That night she slept in the kind of fifty-cent room the city offers its
decent poor. A slit of a room with a black-iron bed and a damp mattress.
A wash-stand gaunt with its gaunt mission. A slop-jar on a zinc mat. A
caneless-bottom chair. The chair she propped against the door, the top slat
of it beneath the knob. Through a night of musty blackness she lay in a
rigid line along the bed-edge.
You who love the city for its million pulses, the beat of its great heart,
and the terrific symphony of its soul, have you ever picked out from its
orchestra the plaintive rune of the deserving poor?
It is like the note of a wind instrument--an oboe adding its slow note to
the boom of the kettle-drum, the clang of gold-colored cymbals, and the
singing ecstasy of violins.
One such small voice Ann 'Lisbeth Connors added to the great threnody of
industry. Department stores that turned from her services almost before
they were offered. Offices gleaned from penny papers, miles of them, and
hours of waiting on hard-bottom chairs in draughty waiting-rooms. Faces,
pasty as her own, lined up alongside, greedy of the morsel about to fall.
When the pinch of poverty threatens men and wolves, they grow long-faced.
In these first lean days, a week of them, Ann 'Lisbeth's face lengthened a
bit, too, and with the fuzz of yellow bangs tucked well up under her not so
decent black hat, crinkles came out about her eyes.
Nights she supped in a family-entrance café beneath her room--veal stew and
a glass of beer.
She would sit over it, not unpleasantly muzzy. She slept of nights now, and
not so rigidly.
Then followed a week of lesser department stores as she worked her way
down-town, of offices tucked dingily behind lithograph and small-ware
shops, and even an ostrich-feather loft, with a "Curlers Wanted" sign hung
out.
In what school does the great army of industry earn its first experience?
Who first employs the untaught hand? Upon Ann 'Lisbeth, untrained in any
craft, it was as if the workaday world turned its back, nettled at a
philistine.
Once she sat resting on a stoop beneath the sign of a woman's-aid bureau.
She read it, but, somehow, her mind would not register. The calves of her
legs and the line where her shoe cut into her heel were hurting.
She supped in the family-entrance café again--the bowl of veal stew and two
glasses of beer. Some days following, her very first venture out into the
morning, she found employment--a small printing-shop off Sixth Avenue just
below Twenty-third Street. A mere pocket in the wall, a machine champing in
its plate-glass front.
VISITING-CARDS WHILE YOU WAIT
THIRTY-FIVE CENTS A HUNDRED
She entered.
"The sign says--'girl wanted.'"
A face peered down at her from a high chair behind the champing machine.
"'Goil wanted,' is what it says. Goil!"
"I--I ain't old," she faltered.
"Cut cards?"
"I--Try me."
"Five a week."
"Why--yes."
"Hang your coat and hat behind the sink."
Before noon, a waste of miscut cards about her, she cut her hand slightly,
fumbling at the machine, and cried out.
"For the love of Mike--you want somebody to kiss it and make it well?
Here's a quarter for your time. With them butter-fingers, you better get a
job greasin' popcorn."
Out in the sun-washed streets the wind had hauled a bit. It cut as she bent
into it. With her additional quarter, she still had two dollars and twenty
cents, and that afternoon, in lower Sixth Avenue, at the instance of
another small card fluttering out in the wind, she applied as dishwasher
in a lunch-room and again obtained--this time at six dollars a week and
suppers.
The Jefferson Market Lunch Room, thick with kicked-up sawdust and the fumes
of hissing grease, was sunk slightly below the level of the sidewalk, a
fitting retreat for the mole-like humanity that dined furtively at its
counter. Men with too short coat-sleeves and collars turned up; women with
beery eyes and uneven skirt-hems dank with the bilge-water of life's lower
decks.
Lower Sixth Avenue is the abode of these shadows. Where are they from, and
whither going--these women without beauty, who walk the streets without
handkerchiefs, but blubbering with too much or too little drink? What is
the terrible riddle? Why, even as they blubber, are there women whose
bodies have the quality of cream, slipping in between scented sheets?