Behind the lunch-room, a sink of unwashed dishes rose to a mound. She
plunged her hands into tepid water that clung to her like fuzz.
"Ugh!"
"Go to it!" said the proprietor, who wore a black flap over one eye. "Dey
won't bite. If de grease won't cut, souse 'em wit' lye. Don't try to muzzle
no breakage on me, neither, like the slut before you. I kin hear a cup
crack."
"I won't," said Ann 'Lisbeth, a wave of the furry water slopping out and
down her dress-front.
Followed four days spent in the grease-laden heat of the kitchen, the smell
of strong foods, raw meat, and fish stews thick above the sink. She had
moved farther down-town, against car fare; but because she talked now
constantly in her sleep and often cried out, there were knockings from the
opposite side of the partitions and oaths. For two evenings she sat until
midnight in a small rear café, again pleasantly muzzy over three glasses
of beer and the thick warmth of the room. Another night she carried home a
small bottle, tucking it beneath her coat as she emerged to the street. She
was grease-stained now, in spite of precautions, and her hat, with her hair
uncurled to sustain it, had settled down over her ears, grotesquely large.
The week raced with her funds. On the sixth day she paid out her last fifty
cents for room-rent, and, without breakfast, filched her lunch from a
half-eaten order of codfish balls returned to the kitchen.
Yes, reader; but who are you to turn away sickened and know no more of
this? You who love to bask in life's smile, but shudder at its drool! A
Carpenter did not sicken at a leper. He held out a hand.
That night, upon leaving, she asked for a small advance on her week's wage,
retreating before the furiously stained apron-front and the one eye of the
proprietor cast down upon her.
"Lay off! Lay off! Who done your bankin' last year? To-morrow's your day,
less four bits for breakage. Speakin' o' breakage, if you drop your jacket,
it'll bust. Watch out! That pint won't last you overnight. Layoff!"
She reddened immediately, clapping her hand over the small protruding
bottle in her pocket. She dared not return to her room, but sat out the
night in a dark foyer behind a half-closed storm-door. No one found her
out, and the wind could not reach her. Toward morning she even slept
sitting. But the day following, weak and too soft for the lift, straining
to remove the great dish-pan high with crockery from sink to table, she let
slip, grasping for a new hold.
There was a crash and a splintered debris--plates that rolled like hoops
to the four corners of the room, shivering as they landed; a great ringing
explosion of heavy stoneware, and herself drenched with the webby water.
"O God!" she cried in immediate hysteria. "O God! O God!" and fell to her
knees in a frenzy of clearing-up.
A raw-boned Minerva, a waitress with whom she had had no previous word,
sprang to her succor, a big, red hand of mercy jerking her up from the
debris.
"Clear out! He's across the bar. Beat it while the going's good. Your
week's gone in breakage, anyways, and he'll split up the place when he
comes. Clear out, girl, and here--for car fare."
Out in the street, her jacket not quite on and her hat clapped askew, Ann
'Lisbeth found herself quite suddenly scuttling down a side-street.
In her hand a dime burnt up into the palm.
For the first time in these weeks, except when her pint or the evening beer
had vivified her, a warmth seemed to flow through Ann 'Lisbeth. Chilled,
and her wet clothing clinging in at the knees, a fever
nevertheless quickened her. She was crying as she walked, but not
blubbering--spontaneous hot tears born of acute consciousness of pain.
A great shame at her smelling, grease-caked dress-front smote her, too, and
she stood back in a doorway, scraping at it with a futile forefinger.
February had turned soft and soggy, the city streets running mud, and the
damp insidious enough to creep through the warmth of human flesh. A day
threatened with fog from East River had slipped, without the interim of
dusk, into a heavy evening. Her clothing dried, but sitting in a small
triangle of park in Grove Street, chill seized her again, and, faint for
food, but with nausea for it, she tucked her now empty pint bottle beneath
the bench. She was crying incessantly, but her mind still seeming to
revive. Her small black purse she drew out from her pocket. It had a
collapsed look. Yet within were a sample of baby-blue cotton crêpe, a
receipt from a dyeing-and-cleaning establishment, and a bit of pink
chamois; in another compartment a small assortment of keys.
She fumbled among them, blind with tears. Once she drew out, peering
forward toward a street-lamp to inspect it. It clinked as she touched it, a
small metal tag ringing.
HOTEL LIBERTY 96
An hour Ann 'Lisbeth sat there, with the key in her lax hand. Finally she
rubbed the pink chamois across her features and adjusted her hat, pausing
to scrape again with forefinger at the front of her, and moved on through
the gloom, the wind blowing her skirt forward.
She boarded a Seventh Avenue street-car, extracting the ten-cent piece
from her purse with a great show of well-being, sat back against the
carpet-covered, lengthwise seat, her red hands, with the cut forefinger
bound in rag, folded over her waist.
At Fiftieth Street she alighted, the white lights of the whitest street in
the world forcing down through the murk, and a theater crowd swarming to be
turned from reality.
The incandescent sign of the Hotel Liberty jutted out ahead.
She did not pause. She was in and into an elevator even before a lackey
turned to stare.
She found "Ninety-six" easily enough, inserting the key and opening the
door upon darkness--a warm darkness that came flowing out scented. She
found the switch, pressed it.
A lamp with a red shade sprang up and a center chandelier. A warm-toned,
well-tufted room, hotel chromos well in evidence, but a turkey-red air of
solid comfort.
Beyond, a white-tiled bathroom shining through the open door, and another
room hinted at beyond that.
She dropped, even in her hat and jacket, against the divan piled with
fat-looking satin cushions. Tears coursed out from her closed eyes, and she
relaxed as if she would swoon to the luxury of the pillows, burrowing and
letting them bulge up softly about her.
A half-hour she lay so in the warm bath of light, her little body so
quickly fallen into vagrancy not without litheness beneath the moldy skirt.
* * * * *
Some time after eight she rose, letting the warm water in the bathroom lave
over her hands, limbering them, and from a bottle of eau de Cologne in a
small medicine-chest sprinkled herself freely and touched up the corners of
her eyes with it. A thick robe of Turkish toweling hung from the bathroom
door. She unhooked it, looping it over one arm.
A key scraped in the lock. From where she stood a rigidity raced over Ann
'Lisbeth, locking her every limb in paralysis. Her mouth moved to open and
would not.
The handle turned, and, with a sudden release of faculties, darting this
way and that, as if at bay, she tore the white-enameled medicine-chest from
its moorings, and, with a yell sprung somewhere from the primordial depths
of her, stood with it swung to hurl.
The door opened and she lunged, then let it fall weakly and with a small
crash.
The chambermaid, white with shock at that cry, dropped her burden of towels
in the open doorway and fled. Ann 'Lisbeth fled, too, down the two flights
of stairs her frenzy found out for her, and across the flare of Broadway.
The fog from East River was blowing in grandly as she ran into its tulle.
It closed around and around her.
V
GOLDEN FLEECE
How saving a dispensation it is that men do not carry in their hearts
perpetual ache at the pain of the world, that the body-thuds of the
drink-crazed, beating out frantic strength against cell doors, cannot
penetrate the beatitude of a mother bending, at that moment, above a crib.
Men can sit in club windows while, even as they sit, are battle-fields
strewn with youth dying, their faces in mud. While men are dining where
there are mahogany and silver and the gloss of women's shoulders, are men
with kick-marks on their shins, ice gluing shut their eyes, and lashed with
gale to some ship-or-other's crow's-nest. Women at the opera, so fragrant
that the senses swim, sit with consciousness partitioned against a
sweating, shuddering woman in some forbidding, forbidden room, hacking open
a wall to conceal something red-stained. One-half of the world does not
know or care how the other half lives or dies.
When, one summer, July came in like desert wind, West Cabanne Terrace and
that part of residential St. Louis that is set back in carefully conserved,
grove-like lawns did not sip its iced limeades with any the less
refreshment because, down-town at the intersection of Broadway and West
Street, a woman trundling a bundle of washing in an old perambulator
suddenly keeled of heat, saliva running from her mouth-corners.
At three o'clock, that hour when so often a summer's day reaches its stilly
climax and the heat-dance becomes a thing visible, West Cabanne Terrace and
its kind slip into sheerest and crêpiest de Chine, click electric fans to
third speed, draw green shades, and retire for siesta.
At that same hour, in the Popular Store, where Broadway and West Street
intersect, one hundred and fifty salesgirls--jaded sentinels for a
public that dares not venture down, loll at their counters and after the
occasional shopper, relax deeper to limpidity.
At the jewelry counter, a crystal rectangle facing broadside the main
entrance and the bleached and sun-grilled street without, Miss Lola
Hassiebrock, salient among many and with Olympian certainty of self, lifted
two Junoesque arms like unto the handles of a vase, held them there in the
kind of rigidity that accompanies a yawn, and then let them flop.
"Oh-h-h-h, God bless my soul!" she said.
Miss Josie Beemis, narrowly constricted between shoulders that barely
sloped off from her neck, with arms folded flat to her flat bosom and her
back a hypothenuse against the counter, looked up.
"Watch out, Loo! I read in the paper where a man up in Alton got caught in
the middle of one of those gaps and couldn't ungap."
Miss Hassiebrock batted at her lips and shuddered.
"It's my nerves, dearie. All the doctors say that nine gaps out of ten are
nerves."
Miss Beemis hugged herself a bit flatter, looking out straight ahead into a
parasol sale across the aisle.
"Enough sleep ain't such a bad cure for gaps," she said.
"I'll catch up in time, dearie; my foot's been asleep all day."
"Huh!"--sniffling so that her thin nose quirked sidewise. "I will now
indulge in hollow laughter--"
"You can't, dearie," said Miss Hassiebrock, driven to vaudevillian
extremities, "you're cracked."
"Well, I may be cracked, but my good name ain't."
A stiffening of Miss Hassiebrock took place, as if mere verbiage had
suddenly flung a fang. From beneath the sternly and too starched white
shirtwaist and the unwilted linen cravat wound high about her throat and
sustained there with a rhinestone horseshoe, it was as if a wave of color
had started deep down, rushing up under milky flesh into her hair.
"Is that meant to be an in-sinuating remark, Josie?"
"'Tain't how it's meant; it's how it's took."
"There's some poor simps in this world, maybe right here in this store,
ought to be excused from what they say because they don't know any better."
"I know this much: To catch the North End street-car from here, I don't
have to walk every night down past the Stag Hotel to do it."
At that Miss Hassiebrock's ears, with the large pearl blobs in them,
tingled where they peeped out from the scallops of yellow hair, and she
swallowed with a forward movement as if her throat had constricted.
"I--take the street-car where I darn please, and it's nobody's darn
business."
"Sure it ain't! Only, if a poor working-girl don't want to make it
everybody's darn business, she can't run around with the fast rich boys of
this town and then get invited to help hem the altar-cloth."
"Anything I do in this town I'm not ashamed to do in broad daylight."
"Maybe; but just the samey, I notice the joy rides out to Claxton don't
take place in broad daylight. I notice that 'tall, striking blonde' and
Charley Cox's speed-party in the morning paper wasn't exactly what you'd
call a 'daylight' affair."
"No, it wasn't; it was--my affair."
"Say, if you think a girl like you can run with the black sheep of every
rich family in town and make a noise like a million dollars with the horsy
way she dresses, it ain't my grave you're digging."
"Maybe if some of the girls in this store didn't have time to nose so much,
they'd know why I can make them all look like they was caught out in the
rain and not pressed the next morning. While they're snooping in what
don't concern them I'm snipping. Snipping over my last year's
black-and-white-checked jacket into this year's cutaway. If you girls had
as much talent in your needle as you've got in your conversation, you might
find yourselves somewheres."
"Maybe what you call 'somewheres' is what lots of us would call
'nowheres.'"
Miss Hassiebrock drew herself up and, from the suzerainty of sheer height,
looked down upon Miss Beemis there, so brown and narrow beside the
friendship-bracelet rack.
"I'll have you know, Josie Beemis, that if every girl in this store watched
her step like me, there'd be a darn sight less trouble in the world."
"I know you don't go beyond the life-line, Loo, but, gee! you--you do swim
out some!"
"Little Loo knows her own depth, all righty."
"Not the way you're cuttin' up with Charley Cox."
Miss Hassiebrock lowered her flaming face to scrutinize a tray of
rhinestone bar pins.
"I'd like to see any girl in this store turn down a bid with Charley Cox. I
notice there are plenty of you go out to the Highland dances hoping to meet
even his imitation."
"The rich boys that hang around the Stag and out to the Highlands don't get
girls like us anywheres."
"I don't need them to get me anywhere. It's enough when a fellow takes
me out that he can tuck me up in a six-cylinder and make me forget my
stone-bruise. Give me a fellow that smells of gasolene instead of bay rum
every time. Trolley-car Johnnies don't mean nothing in my life."
"You let John Simeon out of this conversation!"
"You let Charley Cox out!"
"Maybe he don't smell like a cleaned white glove, but John means something
by me that's good."
"Well, since you're so darn smart, Josie Beemis, and since you got so much
of the English language to spare, I'm going to tell you something. Three
nights in succession, and I can prove it by the crowd, Charley Cox has
asked me to marry him. Begged me last night out at Claxton Inn, with Jess
Turner and all that bunch along, to let them roust out old man Gerber there
in Claxton and get married in poetry. Put that in your pipe and smoke it
awhile, Josie; it may soothe your nerve."
"Y-aw," said Miss Beemis.
The day dwindled. Died.
At West Street, where Broadway intersects, the red sun at its far end
settled redly and cleanly to sink like a huge coin into the horizon. The
Popular Store emptied itself into this hot pink glow, scurried for the open
street-car and, oftener than not, the overstuffed rear platform, nose to
nose, breath to breath.
Fortunately the Popular Store took its semi-annual inventory of yards and
not of souls. Such a stock-taking, that of the human hearts which beat from
half after eight to six behind six floors of counters, would have revealed
empty crannies, worn thin in places with the grind of routine. The
eight-thirty-to-six business of muslin underwear, crash toweling, and
skirt-binding. The great middle class of shoppers who come querulous with
bunions and babies. The strap-hanging homeward ride. Supper, but usually
within range of the range that boils it. The same smells of the same foods.
The, cinematograph or front-stoop hour before bed. Or, if Love comes,
and he will not be gainsaid, a bit of wooing at the fountain--the
soda-fountain. But even he, oftener than not, comes moist-handed, and in a
ready-tied tie. As if that matters, and yet somehow, it does. Leander wore
none, or had he, would have worn it flowing. Then bed, and the routine
of its unfolding and coaxing the pillow from beneath the iron clamp. An
alarm-clock crashing through the stuff of dreams. Coffee within reach of
the range. Another eight-thirty-to-six reality of muslin underwearing,
crash toweling, and skirt-binding.
But, not given to self-inventory, the Popular Store emptied itself
with that blessed elasticity of spirit which, unappalled, stretches to
to-morrows as they come.
At Ninth Street Miss Lola Hassiebrock loosed her arm where Miss Beemis
had linked into it. Wide-shouldered and flat-hipped, her checked suit so
pressed that the lapels lay entirely flat to the swell of her bosom, her
red sailor-hat well down over her brow, and the high, swathing cravat
rising to inclose her face like a wimple, she was Fashion's apotheosis in
tailor-made mood. When Miss Hassiebrock walked, her skirt, concealing yet
revealing an inch glimmer of gray-silk stocking above gray-suede spats,
allowed her ten inches of stride. She turned now, sidestepping within those
ten inches.
"See you to-morrow, Josie."
"Ain't you taking the car?"
"No, dearie," said Miss Hassiebrock, stepping down to cross the street;
"you take it, but not for keeps."
And so, walking southward on Ninth Street in a sartorial glory that was of
her own making-over from last season, even St. Louis, which at the stroke
of six rushes so for the breeze of its side yards, leaving darkness to
creep into down-town streets that are as deserted as cañons, turned its
feminine head to bear in mind the box-plaited cutaway, the male eye
appraising its approval with bold, even quirking eye.
Through this, and like Diana, who, so aloof from desire, walked in the path
of her own splendor, strode Miss Hassiebrock, straight and forward of eye.
Past the Stag Hotel, in an aisle formed by lounging young bloods and a curb
lined with low, long-snouted motor-cars, the gaze beneath the red sailor
and above the high, horsy stock a bit too rigidly conserved.
Slightly by, the spoken word and the whistled innuendo followed her like
a trail of bubbles in the wake of a flying-fish. A youth still wearing a
fraternity pin pretended to lick his downy chops. The son of the president
of the Mound City Oil Company emitted a long, amorous whistle. Willie
Waxter--youngest scion, scalawag, and scorcher of one of the oldest
families--jammed down his motorgoggles from the visor of his cap, making
the feint of pursuing. Mr. Charley Cox, of half a hundred first-page
exploits, did pursue, catching up slightly breathless.
"What's your hurry, honey?"
She spun about, too startled.
"Charley Cox! Well, of all the nerve! Why didn't you scare me to death and
be done with it?"
"Did I scare you, sweetness? Cross my heart, I didn't mean to."
"Well, I should say you did!"
He linked his arm into hers.
"Come on; I'll buy you a drink."
She unlinked.
"Honest, can't a girl go home from work in this town without one of you
fellows getting fresh with her?"
"All right, then; I'll buy you a supper. The car is back there, and we'll
shoot out to the inn. What do you say? I feel like a house afire this
evening, kiddo. What does your speedometer register?"
"Charley, aren't you tired painting this old town yet? Ain't there just
nothing will bring you to your senses? Honest, this morning's papers are a
disgrace. You--you won't catch me along again."
He slid his arm, all for ingratiating, back into hers.
"Come now, honey; you know you like me for my speed."
She would not smile.
"Honest, Charley, you're the limit."
"But you like me just the same. Now don't you, Loo?"
She looked at him sidewise.
"You've been drinking, Charley."
He felt of his face.
"Not a drop, Loo. I need a shave, that's all."
"Look at your stud--loose."
He jammed a diamond whip curling back upon itself into his maroon scarf. He
was slightly heavy, so that his hands dimpled at the knuckle, and above
the soft collar, joined beneath the scarf with a goldbar pin, his chin
threatened but did not repeat itself.
"I got to go now, Charley; there's a North End car coming."
"Aw, now, sweetness, what's the idea? Didn't you walk down here to pick me
up?"
An immediate flush stung her face.
"Well, of all the darn conceit! Can't a girl walk down to the loop to catch
her car and stretch her legs after she's been cooped up all day, without a
few of you boys throwing a bouquet or two at yourselves?"
"I got to hand it you, Loo; when you walk down this street, you make every
girl in town look warmed over."
"Do you like it, Charley? It's that checked jacket I bought at Hamlin's
sale last year made over."
"Say, it's classy! You look like all the money in the world, honey."
"Huh, two yards of coat-lining, forty-four cents, and Ida Bell's last
year's office-hat reblocked, sixty-five."
"You're the show-piece of the town, all right. Come on; let's pick up a
crowd and muss-up Claxton Road a little."
"I meant what I said, Charley. After the cuttings-up of last night and the
night before I'm quits. Maybe Charley Cox can afford to get himself talked
about because he's Charley Cox, but a girl like me with a job to hold down,
and the way ma and Ida Bell were sitting up in their nightgowns, green
around the gills, when I got home last night--nix! I'm getting myself
talked about, if you want to know it, running with--your gang, Charley."
"I'd like to see anybody let out so much as a grunt about you in front of
me. A fellow can't do any more, honey, to show a girl where she stands with
him than ask her to marry him--now can he? If I'd have had my way last
night, I'd--"
"You was drunk when you asked me, Charley."
"You mean you got cold feet?"
"Thank God, I did!"
"I don't blame you, girl. You might do worse--but not much."
"That's what you'd need for your finishing-touch, a girl like me dragging
you down."
"You mean pulling me up."
"Yes, maybe, if you didn't have a cent."
"I'd have enough sense then to know better than to ask you, honey. You
'ain't got that fourteen-carat look in your eye for nothing. You're the
kind that's going to bring in a big fish, and I wish it to you."
"Lots you know."
"Come on; let me ride you around the block, then."
"If--if you like my company so much, can't you just take a walk with me or
come out and sit on our steps awhile?"
"Lord, girl, Flamm Avenue is hot enough to fry my soul to-night!"
"We can't all have fathers that live in thirty-room houses out in
Kingsmoreland Place."
"Thank God for that! I sneaked home this morning to change my clothes, and
thought maybe I'd got into somebody's mausoleum by mistake."
"Was--was your papa around, Charley?"
"In the library, shut up with old man Brookes."
"Did he--did he see the morning papers? You know what he said last time,
Charley, when the motor-cycle cop chased you down an embankment."
"Honey, if my old man was to carry out every threat he utters, I'd be
disinherited, murdered, hong-konged, shanghaied, and cremated every day in
the year."
"I got to go now, Charley."
"Not let a fellow even spin you home?"
"You know I want to, Charley, but--but it don't do you any good, boy, being
seen with me in that joy-wagon of yours. It--it don't do you any good,
Charley, ever--ever being seen with me."
"There's nothing or nobody in this town can hurt my reputation, honey, and
certainly not my ace-spot girl. Turn your mind over, and telephone down for
me to come out and pick you up about eight."
"Don't hit it up to-night, Charley. Can't you go home one evening?"
He juggled her arm.
"You're a nice little girl, all righty."
"There's my car."
He elevated her by the elbow to the step, swinging up half-way after her to
drop a coin into the box.
"Take care of this little lady there, conductor, and don't let your car
skid."
"Oh, Charley--silly!"
She forced her way into the jammed rear platform, the sharp brim of the red
sailor creating an area for her.
"S'long, Charley!"
"S'long, girl!"
Wedged there in the moist-faced crowd, she looked after him, at his broad
back receding. An inclination to cry pressed at her eyeballs.