and wristlets and a great shaking of curls, execute the poodle-prance to
half the encores of other days. May Deland, whose ripple of hip and droop
of eyelid are too subtle for censorship, walks through her hula-hula dance,
much of her abandon abandoned. A pair of _apaches_ whirl for one hundred
and twenty consecutive seconds to a great bang of cymbals and seventy-five
dollars a week. At shortly before one Miss Hanna de Long, who renders
ballads at one-hour intervals, rose from her table and companion in
the obscure rear of the room, to finish the evening and her cycle with
"Darling, Keep the Grate-Fire Burning," sung in a contralto calculated to
file into no matter what din of midnight dining.
In something pink, silk, and conservatively V, she was a careful
management's last bland ingredient to an evening that might leave too
Cayenne a sting to the tongue.
At still something before one she had finished, and, without encore,
returned to her table.
"Gawd!" she said, and leaned her head on her hand. "I better get me a job
hollerin' down a well!"
Her companion drained his stemless glass with a sharp jerking back of the
head. His was the short, stocky kind of assurance which seemed to say,
"Greater securities hath no man than mine, which are gilt-edged."
Obviously, Mr. Lew Kaminer clipped his coupons.
"Not so bad," he said. "The song ain't dead; the crowd is."
"Say, they can't hurt my feelin's. I been a chaser-act ever since I hit the
town."
"Well, if I can sit and listen to a song in long skirts twelve runnin'
weeks, three or four nights every one of 'em, take it from me, there's a
whistle in it somewhere."
"Just the same," she said, pushing away her glass, "my future in this
business is behind me."
He regarded her, slumped slightly in his chair, celluloid toothpick
dangling. There was something square about his face, abetted by a
parted-in-the-middle toupee of great craftsmanship, which revealed itself
only in the jointure over the ears of its slightly lighter hair with the
brown of his own. There was a monogram of silk on his shirt-sleeve, of gold
on his bill-folder, and of diamonds on the black band across the slight
rotundity of his waistcoat.
"Never you mind, I'm for you, girl," he said.
There was an undeniable taking-off of years in Miss de Long. Even the very
texture of her seemed younger and the skin massaged to a new creaminess,
the high coiffure blonder, the eyes quicker to dart.
"Lay off, candy kid," she said. "You're going to sugar."
"Have another fizz," he said, clicking his fingers for a waiter.
"Anything to please the bold, bad man," she said.
"You're a great un," he said. "Fellow never knows how to take you from one
minute to the next."
"You mean a girl never knows how to take you."
"Say," he said, "any time anybody puts anything over on you!"
"And you?"
"There you are!" he cried, eying her fizz. "Drink it down; it's good for
what ails you."
"Gawd!" she said. "I wish I knew what it was is ailin' me!"
"Drink 'er down!"
"You think because you had me goin' on these things last night that
to-night little sister ain't goin' to watch her step. Well, watch her watch
her step," Nevertheless, she drank rather thirstily half the contents of
the glass. "I knew what I was doin' every minute of the time last night,
all righty. I was just showin' us a good time."
"Sure!"
"It's all right for us girls to take what we want, but the management don't
want nothing rough around--not in war-time."
"Right idea!"
"There's nothing rough about me, Lew. None of you fellows can't say that
about me. I believe in a girl havin' a good time, but I believe in her
always keepin' her self-respect. I always say it never hurt no girl to keep
her self-respect."
"Right!"
"When a girl friend of mine loses that, I'm done with her. That don't get a
girl nowheres. That's why I keep to myself as much as I can and don't mix
in with the girls on the bill with me, if--"
"What's become of the big blond-looker used to run around with you when you
was over at the Bijou?"
"Me and Kit ain't friends no more."
"She was some looker."
"The minute I find out a girl ain't what a self-respectin' girl ought to be
then that lets me out. There's nothin' would keep me friends with her. If
ever I was surprised in a human, Lew, it was in Kittie Scogin. She got me
my first job here in New York. I give her credit for it, but she done it
because she didn't have the right kind of a pull with Billy Howe. She done
a lot of favors for me in her way, but the minute I find out a girl ain't
self-respectin' I'm done with that girl every time."
"That baby had some pair of shoulders!"
"I ain't the girl to run a friend down, anyway, when she comes from my home
town; but I could tell tales--Gawd! I could tell tales!" There was new
loquacity and a flush to Miss de Long. She sipped again, this time almost
to the depth of the glass. "The way to find out about a person, Lew, is to
room with 'em in the same boardin'-house. Beware of the baby stare is all I
can tell you. Beware of that."
"That's what _you_ got," he said, leaning across to top her hand with his,
"two big baby stares."
"Well, Lew Kaminer," she said, "you'd kid your own shadow. Callin' me a
baby-stare. Of all things! Lew Kaminer!" She looked away to smile.
"Drink it all down, baby-stare," he said, lifting the glass to her lips.
They were well concealed and back away from the thinning patter of the
crowd, so that, as he neared her, he let his face almost graze--indeed
touch, hers.
She made a great pretense of choking.
"O-oh! burns!"
"Drink it down-like a major."
She bubbled into the glass, her eyes laughing at him above its rim.
"Aw gone!"
He clicked again with his fingers.
"Once more, Charlie!" he said, shoving their pair of glasses to the
table-edge.
"You ain't the only money-bag around the place!" she cried, flopping down
on the table-cloth a bulky wad tied in one corner of her handkerchief.
"Well, whatta you know about that? Pay-day?"
"Yeh-while it lasts. I hear there ain't goin' to be no more cabarets or
Camembert cheese till after the war."
"What you going to do with it--buy us a round of fizz?"
She bit open the knot, a folded bill dropping to the table, uncurling.
"Lord!" she said, contemplating and flipping it with her finger-tip. "Where
I come from that twenty-dollar bill every week would keep me like a queen.
Here it ain't even chicken feed."
"You know where there's more chicken feed waitin' when you get hard up,
sister. You're slower to gobble than most. You know what I told you last
night, kiddo--you need lessons."
"What makes me sore, Lew, is there ain't an act on this bill shows under
seventy-five. It goes to show the higher skirts the higher the salary in
this business."
"You oughta be singin' in grand op'ra."
"Yeh--sure! The diamond horseshoe is waitin' for the chance to land me one
swift kick. It only took me twelve weeks and one meal a day to land this
after Kittie seen to it that they let me out over at the Bijou. Say, I know
where I get off in this town, Lew. If there's one thing I know, it's where
I get off. I ain't a squab with a pair of high-priced ankles. I'm down on
the agencies' books as a chaser-act, and I'm down with myself for that. If
there's one thing I ain't got left, it's illusions. Get me? Illusions."
She hitched sidewise in her chair, dipped her forefinger into her fresh
glass, snapped it at him so that he blinked under the tiny spray.
"That for you!" she said, giggling. She was now repeatedly catching herself
up from a too constant impulse to repeat that giggle.
"You little devil!" he said, reaching back for his handkerchief.
She dipped again, this time deeper, and aimed straighter.
"Quit!" he said, catching her wrist and bending over it. "Quit it, or I'll
bite!"
"Ow! Ouch!"
Her mouth still resolute not to loosen, she jerked back from him. There
was only the high flush which she could not control, and the gaze, heavy
lidded, was not so sure as it might have been. She was quietly, rather
pleasantly, dizzy.
"I wish--" she said. "I--wi-ish--"
"What do you wi-ish?"
"Oh, I--I dunno what I wish!"
"If you ain't a card!"
He had lighted a cigar, and, leaning toward her, blew out a fragrant puff
to her.
"M-m-m!" she said; "it's a Cleopatra."
"Nop."
"A El Dorado."
"Guess again."
"A what, then?"
"It's a Habana Queen. Habana because it reminds me of Hanna."
"Aw--you!"
At this crowning puerility Mr. Kaminer paused suddenly, as if he had
detected in his laughter a bray.
"Is Habana in the war, Lew?"
"Darned if I know exactly."
"Ain't this war just terrible, Lew?"
"Don't let it worry you, girl. If it puts you out of business, remember,
it's boosted my stocks fifty per cent. You know what I told you about
chicken feed."
She buried her nose in her handkerchief, turning her head. Her eyes had
begun to crinkle.
"It--it's just awful! All them sweet boys!"
"Now, cryin' ain't goin' to help. You 'ain't got no one marchin' off."
"That's just it. I 'ain't got no one. Everything is something awful, ain't
it?" Her sympathies and her risibilities would bubble to the surface to
confuse her. "Awful!"
He scraped one forefinger against the other.
"Cry-baby! Cry-baby, stick your little finger in your little eye!"
She regarded him wryly, her eyes crinkled now quite to slits.
"You can laugh!"
"Look at the cry-baby!"
"I get so darn blue."
"Now--now--"
"Honest to Gawd, Lew, I get so darn blue I could die."
"You're a nice girl, and I'd like to see anybody try to get fresh with
you!"
"Do you--honest, Lew--like me?"
"There's something about you, girl, gets me every time. Cat-eyes!
Kitty-eyes!"
"Sometimes I get so blue--get to thinkin' of home and the way it all
happened. You know the way a person will. Home and the--divorce and the
way it all happened with--him--and how I come here and--where it's got me,
and--and I just say to myself, 'What's the use?' You know, Lew, the way a
person will. Back there, anyways, I had a home. There's something in just
havin' a home, lemme tell you. Bein' a somebody in your own home."
"You're a somebody any place they put you."
"You never seen the like the way it all happened, Lew. So quick! The day I
took the train was like I was walkin' for good out of a dream. Not so much
as a post-card from there since--"
"Uh--uh--now--cry-baby!"
"I--ain't exactly sorry, Lew; only God knows, more'n once in those twelve
weeks out of work I was for goin' back and patchin' it up with him. I ain't
exactly sorry, Lew, but--but there's only one thing on God's earth that
keeps me from being sorry."
"What?"
"You."
He flecked his cigar, hitching his arm up along the chair-back, laughed,
reddened slightly.
"That's the way to talk! These last two nights you been lightin' up with a
man so he can get within ten feet of you. Now you're shoutin'!"
She drained her glass, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes.
She was sitting loosely forward now, her hand out on his.
"You're the only thing on God's earth that's kept me from--sneakin" back
there--honest. Lew, I'd have gone back long ago and eat dirt to make it
up with him--if not for you. I--ain't built like Kittie Scogin and those
girls. I got to be self-respectin' with the fellows or nothing. They think
more of you in the end--that's my theory."
"Sure!"
"A girl's fly or--she just naturally ain't that way. That's where all my
misunderstanding began with Kittie--when she wanted me to move over in them
rooms on Forty-ninth Street with her--a girl's that way or she just ain't
that way!"
"Sure!"
"Lew--will you--are you--you ain't kiddin' me all these weeks? Taxicabbin'
me all night in the Park and--drinkin' around this way all the time
together. You 'ain't been kiddin' me, Lew?"
He shot up his cigar to an oblique.
"Now you're shoutin'!" he repeated. "It took three months to get you down
off your high horse, but now we're talkin' the same language."
"Lew!"
"It ain't every girl I take up with; just let that sink in. I like 'em
frisky, but I like 'em cautious. That's where you made a hit with me.
Little of both. Them that nibble too easy ain't worth the catch."
She reached out the other hand, covering his with her both.
"You're--talkin' weddin'-bells, Lew?"
He regarded her, the ash of his cigar falling and scattering down his
waistcoat.
"What bells?"
"Weddin', Lew." Her voice was as thin as a reed.
"O Lord!" he said, pushing back slightly from the table. "Have another
fizz, girl, and by that time we'll be ready for a trip in my underground
balloon. Waiter!"
She drew down his arm, quickly restraining it. She was not so sure now of
controlling the muscles of her mouth.
"Lew!"
"Now--now--"
"Please, Lew! It's what kept me alive. Thinkin' you meant that. Please,
Lew! You ain't goin' to turn out like all the rest in this town? You--the
first fellow I ever went as far as--last night with. I'll stand by you,
Lew, through thick and thin. You stand by me. You make it right with me,
Lew, and--"
He cast a quick glance about, grasped at the sides of the table, and leaned
toward her, _sotto_.
"For God's sake, hush! Are you crazy?"
"No," she said, letting the tears roll down over the too frank gyrations of
her face--"no, I ain't crazy. I only want you to do the right thing by me,
Lew. I'm--blue. I'm crazy afraid of the bigness of this town. There ain't a
week I don't expect my notice here. It's got me. If you been stringin' me
along like the rest of 'em, and I can't see nothing ahead of me but the
struggle for a new job--and the tryin' to buck up against what a decent
girl has got to--"
"Why, you're crazy with the heat, girl! I thought you and me was talking
the same language. I want to do the right thing by you. Sure I do! Anything
in reason is yours for the askin'. That's what I been comin' to."
"Then, Lew, I want you to do by me like you'd want your sister done by."
"I tell you you're crazy. You been hitting up too many fizzes lately."
"I--"
"You ain't fool enough to think I'm what you'd call a free man? I don't
bring my family matters down here to air 'em over with you girls. You're
darn lucky that I like you well enough to--well, that I like you as much as
I do. Come, now; tell you what I'm goin' to do for you: You name your idea
of what you want in the way of--"
"O God! Why don't I die? I ain't fit for nothing else!"
He cast a glance around their deserted edge of the room. A waiter,
painstakingly oblivious, stood two tables back.
"Wouldn't I be better off out of it? Why don't I die?"
He was trembling down with a suppression of rage and concern for the rising
gale in her voice.
"You can't make a scene in public with me and get away with it. If that's
your game, it won't land you anywhere. Stop it! Stop it now and talk sense,
or I'll get up. By God! if you get noisy, I'll get up and leave you here
with the whole place givin' you the laugh. You can't throw a scare in me."
But Miss de Long's voice and tears had burst the dam of control. There was
an outburst that rose and broke on a wave of hysteria.
"Lemme die--that's all I ask! What's there in it for me? What has there
ever been? Don't do it, Lew! Don't--don't!"
It was then Mr. Kaminer pushed back his chair, flopped down his napkin, and
rose, breathing heavily enough, but his face set in an exaggerated kind of
quietude as he moved through the maze of tables, exchanged a check for his
hat, and walked out.
For a stunned five minutes her tears, as it were, seared, she sat after
him.
The waiter had withdrawn to the extreme left of the deserted edge of the
room, talking behind his hand to two colleagues in servility, their faces
listening and breaking into smiles.
Finally Miss de Long rose, moving through the zigzag paths of empty tables
toward a deserted dressing-room. In there she slid into black-velvet
slippers and a dark-blue walking-skirt, pulled on over the pink silk,
tucking it up around the waist so that it did not sag from beneath the hem,
squirmed into a black-velvet jacket with a false dicky made to emulate
a blouse-front, and a blue-velvet hat hung with a curtain-like purple
face-veil.
As she went out the side, Keeley's was closing its front doors.
Outside, not even to be gainsaid by Sixth Avenue, the night was like a
moist flower held to the face. A spring shower, hardly fallen, was already
drying on the sidewalks, and from the patch of Bryant Park across the maze
of car-tracks there stole the immemorial scent of rain-water and black
earth, a just-set-out crescent of hyacinths giving off their light steam of
fragrance. How insidious is an old scent! It can creep into the heart like
an ache. Who has not loved beside thyme or at the sweetness of dusk? Dear,
silenced laughs can come back on a whiff from a florist's shop. Oh, there
is a nostalgia lurks in old scents!
Even to Hanna de Long, hurrying eastward on Forty-second Street, huggingly
against the shadow of darkened shop-windows, there was a new sting of tears
at the smell of earth, daring, in the lull of a city night, to steal out.
There are always these dark figures that scuttle thus through the first
hours of the morning.
Whither?
Twice remarks were flung after her from passing figures in
slouch-hats--furtive remarks through closed lips.
At five minutes past one she was at the ticket-office grating of a
train-terminal that was more ornate than a rajah's dream.
"Adalia--please. Huh? Ohio. Next train."
"Seven-seven. Track nine. Round trip?"
"N-no."
"Eighteen-fifty."
She again bit open the corner knot of her handkerchief.
* * * * *
When Hanna de Long, freshly train-washed of train dust, walked down Third
Street away from the station, old man Rentzenauer, for forty-odd springs
coaxing over the same garden, was spraying a hose over a side-yard of
petunias, shirt-sleeved, his waistcoat hanging open, and in the purpling
light his old head merging back against a story-and-a-half house the color
of gray weather and half a century of service.
At sight of him who had shambled so taken-for-granted through all of her
girlhood, such a trembling seized hold of Hanna de Long that she turned
off down Amboy Street, making another wide detour to avoid a group on the
Koerner porch, finally approaching Second Street from the somewhat straggly
end of it farthest from the station.
She was trembling so that occasionally she stopped against a vertigo that
went with it, wiped up under the curtain of purple veil at the beads of
perspiration which would spring out along her upper lip. She was quite
washed of rouge, except just a swift finger-stroke of it over the
cheek-bones.
She had taken out the dicky, too, and for some reason filled in there with
a flounce of pink net ripped off from the little ruffles that had flowed
out from her sleeves. She was without baggage.
At Ludlow Street she could suddenly see the house, the trees meeting before
it in a lace of green, the two iron jardinières empty. They had been
painted, and were drying now of a clay-brown coat.
When she finally went up the brick walk, she thought once that she could
not reach the bell with the strength left to pull it. She did, though,
pressing with her two hands to her left side as she waited. The house was
in the process of painting, too, still wet under a first wash of gray. The
pergola, also.
The door swung back, and then a figure emerged full from a background of
familiarly dim hallway and curve of banister. She was stout enough to be
panting slightly, and above the pink-and-white-checked apron her face was
ruddy, forty, and ever so inclined to smile.
"Yes?"
"Is--is--"
Out from the hallway shot a cocker spaniel, loose-eared, yapping.
"Queenie, Queenie--come back. She won't bite--Queenie--bad girl!--come back
from that nasturtium-bed--bad girl!--all washed and combed so pretty for a
romp with her favver when him come home so tired. Queenie!"
She caught her by a rear leg as she leaped back, wild to rollick, tucking
her under one arm, administering three diminutive punishments on the shaggy
ears.
"Bad! Bad!"
"Is Mr.--Burkhardt--home?"
"Aw, now, he ain't! I sent him down by Gredel's nurseries on his way home
to-night, for some tulip-bulbs for my iron jardinières. He ought to be
back any minute if he 'ain't stopped to brag with old man Gredel that our
arbutus beats his." Then, smiling and rubbing with the back of her free
hand at a flour-streak across her cheek: "If--if it's the lady from the
orphan asylum come to see about the--the little kid we want--is there
anything I can do for you? I'm his wife. Won't you come in?"
"Oh no!" said Miss de Long, now already down two of the steps. "I--I--Oh
no, no!--thank you! Oh no--no!--thank you!"
She walked swiftly, the purple veil blown back and her face seeming to look
out of it whitely, so whitely that she became terrible.
Night was at hand, and Adalia was drawing down its front shades.
VII
GET READY THE WREATHS
Where St. Louis begins to peter out into brick- and limestone-kilns and
great scars of unworked and overworked quarries, the first and more
unpretentious of its suburbs take up--Benson, Maplehurst, and Ridgeway
Heights intervening with one-story brick cottages and two-story
packing-cases--between the smoke of the city and the carefully parked Queen
Anne quietude of Glenwood and Croton Grove.
Over Benson hangs a white haze of limestone, gritty with train and foundry
smoke. At night the lime-kilns, spotted with white deposits, burn redly,
showing through their open doors like great, inflamed diphtheretic throats,
tongues of flame bursting and licking out.
Winchester Road, which runs out from the heart of the city to string these
towns together, is paved with brick, and its traffic, for the most part,
is the great, tin-tired dump-carts of the quarries and steel interurban
electric cars which hum so heavily that even the windows of outlying
cottages titillate.
For blocks, from Benson to Maplehurst and from Maplehurst to Ridgeway
Heights, Winchester Road repeats itself in terms of the butcher, the
baker, the corner saloon. A feed-store. A monument- and stone-cutter. A
confectioner. A general-merchandise store, with a glass case of men's
collars outside the entrance. The butcher, the baker, the corner saloon.
At Benson, where this highway cuts through, the city, wreathed in smoke,
and a great oceanic stretch of roofs are in easy view, and at closer
range, an outlying section of public asylums for the city's discard of its
debility and its senility.
Jutting a story above the one-storied march of Winchester Road, The
Convenience Merchandise Corner, Benson, overlooks, from the southeast
up-stairs window, a remote view of the City Hospital, the Ferris-wheel of
an amusement park, and on clear days the oceanic waves of roof. Below,
within the store, that view is entirely obliterated by a brace of shelves
built across the corresponding window and brilliantly stacked with ribbons
of a score of colors and as many widths. A considerable flow of daylight
thus diverted, The Convenience Merchandise Corner, even of early afternoon,
fades out into half-discernible corners; a rear-wall display of overalls
and striped denim coats crowded back into indefinitude, the haberdashery
counter, with a giant gilt shirt-stud suspended above, hardly more
outstanding.
Even the notions and dry-goods, flanking the right wall in stacks and
bolts, merge into blur, the outline of a white-sateen and corseted woman's
torso surmounting the topmost of the shelves with bold curvature.
With spring sunshine even hot against the steel rails of Winchester Road,
and awnings drawn against its inroads into the window display, Mrs. Shila
Coblenz, routing gloom, reached up tiptoe across the haberdashery counter
for the suspended chain of a cluster of bulbs, the red of exertion rising
up the taut line of throat and lifted chin.
"A little light on the subject, Milt."
"Let me, Mrs. C."
Facing her from the outer side of the counter, Mr. Milton Bauer stretched
also, his well-pressed, pin-checked coat crawling up.
All things swam out into the glow. The great suspended stud; the background
of shelves and boxes; the scissors-like overalls against the wall; a
clothesline of children's factory-made print frocks; a center-bin of
women's untrimmed hats; a headless dummy beside the door, enveloped in a
long-sleeved gingham apron.
Beneath the dome of the wooden stud, Mrs. Shila Coblenz, of not too fulsome
but the hour-glass proportions of two decades ago, smiled, her black eyes,
ever so quick to dart, receding slightly as the cheeks lifted.
"Two twenty-five, Milt, for those ribbed assorted sizes and reinforced
heels. Leave or take. Bergdorff & Sloan will quote me the whole mill at
that price."
With his chest across the counter and legs out violently behind, Mr. Bauer
flung up a glance from his order-pad.
"Have a heart, Mrs. C. I'm getting two-forty for that stocking from every
house in town. The factory can't turn out the orders fast enough at that
price. An up-to-date woman like you mustn't make a noise like before the
war."
"Leave or take."
"You could shave an egg," he said.