two-story, flat-roofed buildings, stares, window for window, stoop for
stoop, at its opposite side, and, in summer, the strip of asphalt street,
unshaded and lying naked to the sun, gives off such an effluvium of heat
and hot tar that the windows are closed to it and night descends like a
gas-mask to the face.
Opening the door upon the Hassiebrock front room, convertible from bed- to
sitting-room by the mere erect-position-stand of the folding-bed, a wave
of this tarry heat came flowing out, gaseous, sickening. Miss Hassiebrock
entered with her face wry, made a diagonal cut of the room, side-stepping a
patent rocker and a table laid out with knickknacks on a lace mat, slammed
closed two windows, and, turning inward, lifted off her hat, which left a
brand across her forehead and had plastered down her hair in damp scallops.
"Whew!"
"Lo-o, that you?"
"Yes, ma."
"Come out to your supper. I'll warm up the kohlrabi."
Miss Hassiebrock strode through a pair of chromatic portières, with them
swinging after her, and into an unlit kitchen, gray with dusk. A table
drawn out center and within range of the gas-range was a blotch in the
gloom, three figures surrounding it with arms that moved vaguely among a
litter of dishes.
"I wish to Heaven somebody in this joint would remember to keep those front
windows shut!"
Miss Ida Bell Hassiebrock, at the right of the table, turned her head so
that, against the window, her profile, somewhat thin, cut into the gloom.
"There's a lot of things I wish around here," she said, without a ripple to
her lips.
"Hello, ma!"
"I'll warm up the kohlrabi, Loo."
Mrs. Hassiebrock, in the green black of a cotton umbrella and as sparse of
frame, moved around to the gas-range, scraping a match and dragging a pot
over the blue flame.
"Never mind, ma; I ain't hungry."
At the left of the table Genevieve Hassiebrock, with thirteen's crab-like
silhouette of elbow, rigid plaits, and nose still hitched to the star of
her nativity, wound an exceedingly long arm about Miss Hassiebrock's trim
waist-line.
"I got B in de-portment to-day, Loo. You owe me the wear of your spats
Sunday."
Miss Hassiebrock squeezed the hand at her waist.
"All right, honey. Cut Loo a piece of bread."
"Gussie Flint's mother scalded her leg with the wash-boiler."
"Did she? Aw!"
Mrs. Hassiebrock came then, limping around, tilting the contents of the
steaming pot to a plate.
"Sit down, ma; don't bother."
Miss Hassiebrock drew up, pinning a fringed napkin that stuck slightly in
the unfolding across her shining expanse of shirtwaist. Broke a piece of
bread. Dipped.
Silence.
"Paula Krausnick only got C in de-portment. When the monitor passed the
basin, she dipped her sponge soppin'-wet."
"Anything new, ma?"
Mrs. Hassiebrock, now at the sink, swabbed a dish with gray water.
"My feet's killin' me," she said.
Miss Ida Bell, who wore her hair in a coronet wound twice round her small
head, crossed her knife and fork on her plate, folded her napkin, and tied
it with a bit of blue ribbon.
"I think it's a shame, ma, the way you keep thumping around in your
stocking feet like this was backwoods."
"I can't get my feet in shoes--the joints--"
"You thump around as much as you darn please, ma. If Ida Bell don't like
the looks of you, let her go home with some of her swell stenog friends.
You let your feet hurt you any old way you want 'em to. I'm going to buy
you some arnica. Pass the kohlrabi."
"Well, my swell 'stenog friends,' as you call them, keep themselves
self-respecting girls without getting themselves talked about, and that's
more than I can say of my sister. If ma had the right kind of gumption with
you, she'd put a stop to it, all right."
Mrs. Hassiebrock leaned her tired head sidewise into the moist palm of her
hand.
"She's beyond me and the days when a slipper could make her mind. I wisht
to God there was a father to rule youse!"
"I tell you, ma--mark my word for it--if old man Brookes ever finds out I'm
sister to any of the crowd that runs with Charley Cox and Willie Waxter and
those boys whose fathers he's lawyer for, it'll queer me for life in
that office--that's what it will. A girl that's been made confidential
stenographer after only one year in an office to have to be afraid, like I
am, to pick up the morning's paper."
"Paula Krausnick's lunch was wrapped in the paper where Charley Cox got
pinched for speedin'--speedin'--speedin'--"
"Shut up, Genevieve! Just don't you let my business interfere with
yours, Ida Bell. Brookes don't know you're on earth outside of your
dictation-book. Take it from me, I bet he wouldn't know you if he met you
on the street."
"That's about all you know about it! If you found yourself confidential
stenographer to the biggest lawyer in town, he'd know you, all right--by
your loud dressing. A blind man could see you coming."
"Ma, are you going to stand there and let her talk to me thataway? I notice
she's willing to borrow my loud shirtwaists and my loud gloves and my loud
collars."
"If ma had more gumption with you, maybe things would be different."
Mrs. Hassiebrock limped to the door, dangling a pail.
"I 'ain't got no more strength against her. My ears won't hold no more. I'm
taking this hot oil down to Mrs. Flint's scalds. She's, beyond my control,
and the days when a slipper could make her mind. I wisht to God there was a
father! I wisht to God!"
Her voice trailed off and down a rear flight of stairs.
"Yes _sir_," resumed Miss Hassiebrock, her voice twanging in her effort at
suppression, "I notice you're pretty willing to borrow some of my loud
dressing when you get a bid once in a blue moon to take a boat-ride up to
Alton with that sad-faced Roy Brownell. If Charley didn't have a cent to
his name and a harelip, he'd make Roy Brownell look like thirty cents."
"If Roy Brownell was Charley Cox, I'd hate to leave him laying around loose
where you could get your hands on him."
"Genevieve, you run out and play."
"If--if you keep running around till all hours of the night, with me and ma
waiting up for you, kicking up rows and getting your name insinuated in the
newspapers as 'the tall, handsome blonde,' I--I'm going to throw up my job,
I am, and you can pay double your share for the running of this flat. Next
thing we know, with that crowd that don't mean any good to you, this family
is going to find itself with a girl in trouble on its hands."
"You--"
"And if you want to know it, and if I wasn't somebody's confidential
stenographer, I could tell you that you're on the wrong scent. Boys like
Charley Cox don't mean good by your kind of a girl. If you're not speedy,
you look it, and that's almost the same as inviting those kind of boys
to--"
Miss Lola Hassiebrock sprang up then, her hand coming down in a small crash
to the table.
"You cut out that talk in front of that child!"
Thus drawn into the picture, Genevieve, at thirteen, crinkled her face for
not uncalculating tears.
"In this house it's fuss and fuss and fuss. Other children can go to the
'movies' after supper, only me-e-e--"
"Here, honey; Loo's got a dime for you."
"Sending that child out along your own loose ways, instead of seeing to it
she stays home to help ma do the dishes!"
"I'll do the dishes for ma."
"It's bad enough for one to have the name of being gay without starting
that child running around nights with--"
"Ida Bell!"
"You dry up, Ida Bell! I'll do what I pl--ease with my di--uhm--di--uhm."
"If you say another word about such stuff in front of that child, I'll--"
"Well, if you don't want her to hear what she sees with her eyes all around
her, come into the bedroom, then, and I can tell you something that'll
bring you to your senses."
"What you can tell me I don't want to hear."
"You're afraid."
"I am, am I?"
"Yes."
With a wrench of her entire body, Miss Lola Hassiebrock was across the room
at three capacity strides, swung open a door there, and stood, head flung
up and pressing back tears, her lips turned inward.
"All right, then--tell--"
After them, the immediately locked door resisting, Genevieve fell to
batting the panels.
"Let me in! Let me in! You're fussin' about your beaux. Ray Brownell has a
long face, and Charley Cox has a red face--red face--red face! Let me in!
In!"
After a while the ten-cent piece rolled from her clenched and knocking
fist, scuttling and settling beneath the sink. She rescued it and went out,
lickety-clapping down the flight of rear stairs.
Silence descended over that kitchen, and a sooty dusk that almost
obliterated the table, drawn out and cluttered after the manner of those
who dine frowsily; the cold stove, its pots cloying, and a sink piled high
with a task whose only ending is from meal to meal.
Finally that door swung open again; the wide-shouldered, slim-hipped
silhouette of Miss Hassiebrock moved swiftly and surely through the kind
of early darkness, finding out for itself a wall telephone hung in a small
patch of hallway separating kitchen and front room. Her voice came tight,
as if it were a tense coil in her throat that she held back from bursting
into hysteria.
"Give me Olive, two-one-o." The toe of her boot beat a quick tattoo.
"Stag?... Say, get me Charley Cox. He's out in front or down in the grill
or somewhere around. Page him quick! Important!" She grasped the nozzle of
the instrument as she waited, breathing into it with her head thrown back.
"Hello--Charley? That you? It's me. Loo ... _Loo_! Are you deaf, honey?
What you doing?... Oh, I got the blues, boy; honest I have. Blue as a
cat.... I don't know--just the indigoes. Nothing much. Ain't lit up, are
you, honey?... Sure I will. Don't bring a crowd. Just you and me. I'll walk
down to Gessler's drug-store and you can pick me up there.... Quit your
kidding.... Ten minutes. Yeh. Good-by."
* * * * *
Claxton Inn, slightly outside the city limits and certain of its decorums,
stands back in a grove off a macadamized highway that is so pliant to tire
that of summer nights, with tops thrown back and stars sown like lavish
grain over a close sky and to a rushing breeze that presses the ears like
an eager whisper, motor-cars, wild to catch up with the horizon, tear out
that road--a lightning-streak of them--fearing neither penal law nor Dead
Man's Curve.
Slacking only to be slacked, cars dart off the road and up a gravel
driveway that encircles Claxton Inn like a lariat swung, then park
themselves among the trees, lights dimmed. Placid as a manse without, what
was once a private and now a public house maintains through lowered
lids its discreet white-frame exterior, shades drawn, and only slightly
revealing the parting of lace curtains. It is rearward where what was
formerly a dining-room that a huge, screened-in veranda, very whitely
lighted, juts suddenly out, and a showy hallway, bordered in potted palms,
leads off that. Here Discretion dares lift her lids to rove the gravel
drive for who comes there.
In a car shaped like a motor-boat and as low to the ground Mr. Charley Cox
turned in and with a great throttling and choking of engine drew up among
the dim-eyed monsters of the grove and directly alongside an eight-cylinder
roadster with a snout like a greyhound.
"Aw, Charley, I thought you promised you wasn't going to stop!"
"Honey, sweetness, I just never was so dry."
Miss Hassiebrock laid out a hand along his arm, sitting there in the quiet
car, the trees closing over them.
"There's Yiddles Farm a little farther out, Charley; let's stop there for
some spring water."
He was peeling out of his gauntlets, and cramming them into spacious side
pockets.
"Water, honey, can wash me, but it can't quench me."
"No high jinks to-night, though, Charley?"
"Sure--no."
They high-stepped through the gloom, and finally, with firmer step, up the
gravel walk and into the white-lighted, screened-in porch.
Three waiters ran toward their entrance. A woman with a bare V of back
facing them, and three plumes that dipped to her shoulders, turned square
in her chair.
"Hi, Charley. Hi, Loo!"
"H'lo, Jess!"
They walked, thus guided by two waiters, through a light _confetti_ of
tossed greetings, sat finally at a table half concealed by an artificial
palm.
"You don't feel like sitting with Jess and the crowd, Loo?"
"Charley, hasn't that gang got you into enough mix-ups?"
"All right, honey; anything your little heart desires."
She leaned on her elbows across the table from him, smiling and twirling a
great ring of black onyx round her small finger.
"Love me?"
"Br-r-r--to death!"
"Sure?"
"Sure. What'll you have, hon?"
"I don't care."
"Got any my special Gold Top on ice for me, George? Good. Shoot me a bottle
and a special layout of _hors-d'oeuvre_. How's that, sweetness?"
"Yep."
"Poor little girl," he said, patting the black onyx, "with the bad old
blues! I know what they are, honey; sometimes I get crazy with 'em myself."
Her lips trembled.
"It's you makes me blue, Charley."
"Now, now; just don't worry that big, nifty head of yours about me."
"The--the morning papers and all. I--I just hate to see you going so to--to
the dogs, Charley--a--fellow like you--with brains."
"I'm a bad egg, girl, and what you going to do about it? I was raised like
one, and I'll die like one."
"You ain't a bad egg. You just never had a chance. You been killed with
coin."
"Killed with coin! Why, Loo, do you know, I haven't had to ask my old man
for a cent since my poor old granny died five years ago and left me a world
of money? While he's been piling it up like the Rocky Mountains I've been
getting down to rock-bottom. What would you say, sweetness, if I told you I
was down to my last few thousands? Time to touch my old man, eh?"
He drank off his first glass with a quaff, laughing and waving it empty
before her face to give off its perfume.
"My old man is going to wake up in a minute and find me on his
checking-account again. Charley boy better be making connections with
headquarters or he won't find himself such a hit with the niftiest doll in
town, eh?"
"Charley, you--you haven't run through those thousands and thousands and
thousands the papers said you got from your granny that time?"
"It was slippery, hon; somebody buttered it."
"Charley, Charley, ain't there just no limit to your wildness?"
"You're right, girl; I've been killed with coin. My old man's been too busy
all these years sitting out there in that marble tomb in Kingsmoreland
biting the rims off pennies to hold me back from the devil. Honey, that old
man, even if he is my father, didn't know no more how to raise a boy like
me than that there salt-cellar. Every time I got in a scrape he bought me
out of it, filled up the house with rough talk, and let it go at that. It's
only this last year, since he's short on health, that he's kicking up the
way he should have before it got too late. My old man never used to talk it
out with me, honey. He used to lash it out. I got a twelve-year-old welt on
my back now, high as your finger. Maybe it'll surprise you, girl, but now,
since he can't welt me up any more, me and him don't exchange ten words a
month."
"Did--did he hear about last night, Charley? You know what came out in
the paper about making a new will if--if you ever got pulled in again for
rough-housing?"
"Don't you worry that nifty head of yours about my old man ever making a
new will. He's been pulling that ever since they fired me from the academy
for lighting a cigarette with a twenty-dollar bill."
"Charley!"
"Next to taking it with him, he'll leave it to me before he'll see a penny
go out of the family. I've seen his will, hon."
"Charley, you--you got so much good in you. The way you sent that wooden
leg out to poor old lady Guthrie. The way you made Jimmy Ball go home, and
the blind-school boys and all. Why can't you get yourself on the right
track where you belong, Charley? Why don't you clear--out--West where it's
clean?"
"I used to have that idea, Loo. West, where a fellow's got to stand on his
own. Why, if I'd have met a girl like you ten years ago, I'd have made you
the baby doll of the Pacific Coast. I like you, Loo. I like your style and
the way you look like a million dollars. When a fellow walks into a café
with you he feels like he's wearing the Hope diamond. Maybe the society in
this town has given me the cold shoulder, but I'd like to see any of the
safety-first boys walk in with one that's got you beat. That's what I think
of you, girl."
"Aw, now, you're lighting up. Charley. That's four glasses you've taken."
"Thought I was kidding you last night--didn't you--about wedding-bells?"
"You were lit up."
"I know. You're going to watch your step, little girl, and I don't know as
I blame you. You can get plenty of boys my carat, and a lot of other things
thrown in I haven't got to offer you."
"As if I wouldn't like you, Charley, if you were dead broke!"
"Of course you would! There, there, girl, I don't blame any of you for
feathering your nest." He was flushed now and above the soft collar, his
face had relaxed into a not easily controllable smile. "Feather your nest,
girl; you got the looks to do it. It's a far cry from Flamm Avenue to where
a classy girl like you can land herself if she steers right. And I wish it
to you, girl; the best isn't good enough."
"I--I dare you to ask me again, Charley!"
"Ask what?"
"You know. Throw your head up the way you do when you mean what you say
and--ask."
He was wagging his head now insistently, but pinioning his gaze with the
slightly glassy stare of those who think none too clearly.
"Honest, I don't know, beauty. What's the idea?"
"Didn't you say yourself--Gerber, out here in Claxton that--magistrate that
marries you in verse--"
"By gad, I did!"
"Well--I--I--dare you to ask me again, Charley."
He leaned forward.
"You game, girl?"
"Sure."
"No kidding?"
"Try me."
"I'm serious, girl."
"So'm I."
"There's Jess over there can get us a special license from his
brother-in-law. Married in verse in Claxton sounds good to me, honey."
"But not--the crowd, Charley; just you--and--"
"How're we going to get the license, honey, this time of night without
Jess? Let's make it a million-dollar wedding. We're not ashamed of nobody
or nothing."
"Of course not, Charley."
"Now, you're sure, honey? You're drawing a fellow that went to the dogs
before he cut his canines."
"You're not all to the canines yet, Charley."
"I may be a black sheep, honey, but, thank God, I got my golden fleece to
offer you!"
"You're not--black."
"You should worry, girl! I'm going to make you the million-dollar baby doll
of this town, I am. If they turn their backs, we'll dazzle 'em from behind.
I'm going to buy you every gewgaw this side of the Mississippi. I'm going
to show them a baby doll that can make the high-society bunch in this town
look like Subway sports. Are you game, girl? Now! Think well! Here goes.
Jess!"
"Charley--I--You--"
"Jess--over here! Quick!"
"Charley--honey--"
* * * * *
At eleven o'clock a small, watery moon cut through a sky that was fleecily
clouded--a swift moon that rode fast as a ship. It rode over but did
not light Squire Gerber's one-and-a-half-storied, weathered-gray, and
set-slightly-in-a-hollow house on Claxton countryside.
Three motor-cars, their engines chugging out into wide areas of stillness,
stood processional at the curb. A red hall light showed against the
door-pane and two lower-story windows were widely illuminated.
Within that room of chromos and the cold horsehair smell of unaired years,
silence, except for the singing of three gas-jets, had momentarily fallen,
a dozen or so flushed faces, grotesquely sobered, staring through the
gaseous fog, the fluttering lids of a magistrate whose lips habitually
fluttered, just lifting from his book.
A hysterical catch of breath from Miss Vera de Long broke the ear-splitting
silence. She reached out, the three plumes dipping down the bare V of her
back, for the limp hand of the bride.
"Gawd bless you, dearie; it's a big night's work!"
* * * * *
In the tallest part of St. Louis, its busiest thoroughfares inclosing it
in a rectangle, the Hotel Sherman, where traveling salesmen with real
alligator bags and third-finger diamonds habitually shake their first
Pullman dust, rears eighteen stories up through and above an aeriality of
soft-coal smoke, which fits over the rim of the city like a skull-cap.
In the Louis Quinze, gilt-bedded, gilt-framed, gilt-edged bridal-suite _de
luxe_ on the seventeenth floor, Mrs. Charley Cox sat rigid enough and in
shirt-waisted incongruity on the lower curl of a gilt divan that squirmed
to represent the letter S.
"Charley--are you--sorry?"
He wriggled out of his dust-coat, tossing it on the gilt-canopied bed and
crossed to her, lifting off her red sailor.
"Now that's a fine question for a ten-hours' wifey to ask her hubby, ain't
it? Am I sorry, she asks me before the wedding crowd has turned the corner.
Lord, honey, I never expected anything like you to happen to me!"
She stroked his coat-sleeve, mouthing back tears.
"Now everybody'll say--you're a goner--for sure--marrying a--Popular Store
girl."
"If anybody got the worst of this bargain, it's my girl."
"My own boy," she said, still battling with tears.
"You drew a black sheep, honey, but I say again and again, 'Thank God, you
drew one with golden fleece!'"
"That--that's the trouble, Charley--there's just no way to make a boy with
money know you married him for any other reason."
"I'm not blaming you, honey. Lord! what have I got besides money to talk
for me?"
"Lots. Why--like Jess says, Charley, when you get to squaring your lips and
jerking up your head, there's nothing in the world you can't do that you
set out to do."
"Well, I'm going to set out to make the stiff-necks of this town turn
to look at my girl, all right. I'm going to buy you a chain of diamonds
that'll dazzle their eyes out; I'm--"
"Charley, Charley, that's not what I want, boy. Now that I've got you,
there ain't a chain of diamonds on earth I'd turn my wrist for."
"Yes, there is, girl; there's a string of pear-shaped ones in--"
"I want you to buck up, honey; that's the finest present you can give me. I
want you to buck up like you didn't have a cent to your name. I want you
to throw up your head the way you do when you mean business, and show that
Charley Cox, without a cent to his name, would be--"
"Would be what, honey?"
"A winner. You got brains, Charley--if only you'd have gone through school
and shown them. If you'd only have taken education, Charley, and not got
fired out of all the academies, my boy would beat 'em all. Lord! boy,
there's not a day passes over my head I don't wish for education. That's
why I'm so crazy my little sister Genevieve should get it. I'd have took to
education like a fish to water if I'd have had the chance, and there you
were, Charley, with every private school in town and passed 'em up."
"I know, girl, just looks like every steer I gave myself was the wrong
steer till it was too late to get in right again. Bad egg, I tell you,
honey."
"Too late! Why, Charley--and you not even thirty-one yet? With your brains
and all--too late! You make me laugh. If only you will--why, I'm game to go
out West, Charley, on a ranch, where you can find your feet and learn to
stand on them. You got stuff in you, you have. Jess Turner says you was
always first in school, and when you set your jaw there wasn't nothing you
couldn't get on top of. If you'd have had a mother and--and a father that
wasn't the meanest old man in town, dear, and had known how to raise a
hot-headed boy like you, you'd be famous now instead of notorious--that's
what you'd be."
He patted her yellow hair, tilting her head back against his arm, pinching
her cheeks together and kissing her puckered mouth.
"Dream on, honey. I like you crazy, too."
"But, honey, I--"
"You married this millionaire kid, and, bless your heart, he's going to
make good by showing you the color of his coin!"
"Charley!"
She sprang back from the curve of his embrace, unshed tears immediately
distilled.
"Why, honey--I didn't mean it that way! I didn't mean to hurt your
feelings. What I meant was--'sh-h-h-h, Loo--all I meant was, it's coming to
you. Where'd the fun be if I couldn't make this town point up its ears at
my girl? Nobody knows any better than your hubby what his Loo was cut out
for. She was cut out for queening it, and I'm going to see that she gets
what's her due. Wouldn't be surprised if the papers have us already. Let's
see what we'll give them with their coffee this morning."
He unfolded his fresh sheet, shaking it open with one hand and still
holding her in the cove of his arm.