bar to help Miss Sweeney check the drinks. They're coming too swift for
her. The eating will be light from now on; just a little something salty
now and then."
So Miss Fink dabbed covertly at her eyes and betook herself out of the
atmosphere of roasting, and broiling, and frying, and stewing; away from
the sight of great copper kettles, and glowing coals and hissing pans,
into a little world fragrant with mint, breathing of orange and lemon
peel, perfumed with pineapple, redolent of cinnamon and clove, reeking
with things spirituous. Here the splutter of the broiler was replaced by
the hiss of the siphon, and the pop-pop of corks, and the tinkle and
clink of ice against glass.
"Hello, dearie!" cooed Miss Sweeney, in greeting, staring hard at the
suspicious redness around Miss Fink's eyelids. "Ain't you sweet to come
over here in the headache department and help me out! Here's the wine
list. You'll prob'ly need it. Say, who do you suppose invented New
Year's Eve? They must of had a imagination like a Greek 'bus boy. I'm
limp as a rag now, and it's only two-thirty. I've got a regular cramp in
my wrist from checkin' quarts. Say, did you hear about Heiny's crowd?"
"No," said Miss Fink, evenly, and began to study the first page of the
wine list under the heading "Champagnes of Noted Vintages."
"Well," went on Miss Sweeney's little thin, malicious voice, "he's fell
in soft. There's a table of three, and they're drinkin' 1874 Imperial
Crown at twelve dollars per, like it was Waukesha ale. And every time
they finish a bottle one of the guys pays for it with a brand new ten and
a brand new five and tells Heiny to keep the change. Can you beat it?"
"I hope," said Miss Fink, pleasantly, "that the supply of 1874 will hold
out till morning. I'd hate to see them have to come down to ten dollar
wine. Here you, Tony! Come back here! I may be a new hand in this
department but I'm not so green that you can put a gold label over on me
as a yellow label. Notice that I'm checking you another fifty cents."
"Ain't he the grafter!" laughed Miss Sweeney. She leaned toward Miss
Fink and lowered her voice discreetly. "Though I'll say this for'm. If
you let him get away with it now an' then, he'll split even with you.
H'm? O, well, now, don't get so high and mighty. The management expects
it in this department. That's why they pay starvation wages."
An unusual note of color crept into Miss Gussie Fink's smooth cheek. It
deepened and glowed as Heiny darted around the corner and up to the bar.
There was about him an air of suppressed excitement--suppressed, because
Heiny was too perfect a waiter to display emotion.
"Not another!" chanted the bartenders, in chorus.
"Yes," answered Henri, solemnly, and waited while the wine cellar was
made to relinquish another rare jewel.
"O, you Heiny!" called Miss Sweeney, "tell us what she looks like. If I
had time I'd take a peek myself. From what Tony says she must look
something like Maxine Elliot, only brighter."
Henri turned. He saw Miss Fink. A curious little expression came into
his eyes--a Heiny look, it might have been called, as he regarded his
erstwhile sweetheart's unruffled attire, and clear skin, and steady eye
and glossy hair. She was looking past him in that baffling, maddening
way that angry women have. Some of Henri's poise seemed to desert him in
that moment. He appeared a shade less debonair as he received the
precious bottle from the wine man's hands. He made for Miss Fink's desk
and stood watching her while she checked his order. At the door he
turned and looked over his shoulder at Miss Sweeney.
"Some time," he said, deliberately, "when there's no ladies around, I'll
tell you what I think she looks like."
And the little glow of color in Miss Gussic Fink's smooth cheek became a
crimson flood that swept from brow to throat.
"Oh, well," snickered Miss Sweeney, to hide her own discomfiture, "this
is little Heiny's first New Year's Eve in the dining-room. Honest, I
b'lieve he's shocked. He don't realize that celebratin' New Year's Eve
is like eatin' oranges. You got to let go your dignity t' really enjoy
'em."
Three times more did Henri enter and demand a bottle of the famous
vintage, and each time he seemed a shade less buoyant. His elation
diminished as his tips grew greater until, as he drew up at the bar at
six o'clock, he seemed wrapped in impenetrable gloom.
"Them hawgs sousin' yet?" shrilled Miss Sweeney. She and Miss Fink had
climbed down from their high stools, and were preparing to leave. Henri
nodded, drearily, and disappeared in the direction of the Pink Fountain
Room.
Miss Fink walked back to her own desk in the corner near the dining-room
door. She took her hat off the hook, and stood regarding it,
thoughtfully. Then, with a little air of decision, she turned and walked
swiftly down the passageway that separated dining-room from kitchen.
Tillie, the scrub-woman, was down on her hands and knees in one corner of
the passage. She was one of a small army of cleaners that had begun the
work of clearing away the debris of the long night's revel. Miss Fink
lifted her neat skirts high as she tip-toed through the little soapy pool
that followed in the wake of Tillie, the scrub-woman. She opened the
swinging doors a cautious little crack and peered in. What she saw was
not pretty. If the words sordid and bacchanalian had been part of Miss
Fink's vocabulary they would have risen to her lips then. The crowd had
gone. The great room contained not more than half a dozen people.
Confetti littered the floor. Here and there a napkin, crushed and
bedraggled into an unrecognizable ball, lay under a table. From an
overturned bottle the dregs were dripping drearily. The air was stale,
stifling, poisonous.
At a little table in the center of the room Henri's three were still
drinking. They were doing it in a dreadful and businesslike way. There
were two men and one woman. The faces of all three were mahogany colored
and expressionless. There was about them an awful sort of stillness.
Something in the sight seemed to sicken Gussie Fink. It came to her that
the wintry air outdoors must be gloriously sweet, and cool, and clean in
contrast to this. She was about to turn away, with a last look at Heiny
yawning behind his hand, when suddenly the woman rose unsteadily to her
feet, balancing herself with her finger tips on the table. She raised
her head and stared across the room with dull, unseeing eyes, and licked
her lips with her tongue. Then she turned and walked half a dozen paces,
screamed once with horrible shrillness, and crashed to the floor. She
lay there in a still, crumpled heap, the folds of her exquisite gown
rippling to meet a little stale pool of wine that had splashed from some
broken glass. Then this happened. Three people ran toward the woman on
the floor, and two people ran past her and out of the room. The two who
ran away were the men with whom she had been drinking, and they were not
seen again. The three who ran toward her were Henri, the waiter, Miss
Gussie Fink, checker, and Tillie, the scrub-woman. Henri and Miss Fink
reached her first. Tillie, the scrub-woman, was a close third. Miss
Gussie Fink made as though to slip her arm under the poor bruised head,
but Henri caught her wrist fiercely (for a waiter) and pulled her to her
feet almost roughly.
"You leave her alone, Kid," he commanded.
Miss Gussie Fink stared, indignation choking her utterance. And as she
stared the fierce light in Henri's eyes was replaced by the light of
tenderness.
"We'll tend to her," said Henri; "she ain't fit for you to touch. I
wouldn't let you soil your hands on such truck." And while Gussie still
stared he grasped the unconscious woman by the shoulders, while another
waiter grasped her ankles, with Tillie, the scrub-woman, arranging her
draperies pityingly around her, and together they carried her out of the
dining-room to a room beyond.
Back in the kitchen Miss Gussie Fink was preparing to don her hat, but
she was experiencing some difficulty because of the way in which her
fingers persisted in trembling. Her face was turned away from the
swinging doors, but she knew when Henri came in. He stood just behind
her, in silence. When she turned to face him she found Henri looking at
her, and as he looked all the Heiny in him came to the surface and shone
in his eyes. He looked long and silently at Miss Gussie Fink--at the
sane, simple, wholesomeness of her, at her clear brown eyes, at her white
forehead from which the shining hair sprang away in such a delicate line,
at her immaculately white shirtwaist, and her smooth, snug-fitting collar
that came up to the lobes of her little pink ears, at her creamy skin, at
her trim belt. He looked as one who would rest his eyes--eyes weary of
gazing upon satins, and jewels, and rouge, and carmine, and white arms,
and bosoms.
"Gee, Kid! You look good to me," he said.
"Do I--Heiny?" whispered Miss Fink.
"Believe me!" replied Heiny, fervently. "It was just a case of swelled
head. Forget it, will you? Say, that gang in there to-night--why, say,
that gang----"
"I know," interrupted Miss Fink.
"Going home?" asked Heiny.
"Yes."
"Suppose we have a bite of something to eat first," suggested Heiny.
Miss Fink glanced round the great, deserted kitchen. As she gazed a
little expression of disgust wrinkled her pretty nose--the nose that
perforce had sniffed the scent of so many rare and exquisite dishes.
"Sure," she assented, joyously, "but not here. Let's go around the
corner to Joey's. I could get real chummy with a cup of good hot coffee
and a ham on rye."
He helped her on with her coat, and if his hands rested a moment on her
shoulders who was there to see it? A few sleepy, wan-eyed waiters and
Tillie, the scrub-woman. Together they started toward the door. Tillie,
the scrubwoman, had worked her wet way out of the passage and into the
kitchen proper. She and her pail blocked their way. She was sopping up
a soapy pool with an all-encompassing gray scrub-rag. Heiny and Gussie
stopped a moment perforce to watch her. It was rather fascinating to see
how that artful scrub-rag craftily closed in upon the soapy pool until it
engulfed it. Tillie sat back on her knees to wring out the water-soaked
rag. There was something pleasing in the sight. Tillie's blue calico
was faded white in patches and at the knees it was dark with soapy water.
Her shoes were turned up ludicrously at the toes, as scrub-women's shoes
always are. Tillie's thin hair was wadded back into a moist knob at the
back and skewered with a gray-black hairpin. From her parboiled,
shriveled fingers to her ruddy, perspiring face there was nothing of
grace or beauty about Tillie. And yet Heiny found something pleasing
there. He could not have told you why, so how can I, unless to say that
it was, perhaps, for much the same reason that we rejoice in the
wholesome, safe, reassuring feel of the gray woolen blanket on our bed
when we wake from a horrid dream.
"A Happy New Year to you," said Heiny gravely, and took his hand out of
his pocket.
Tillie's moist right hand closed over something. She smiled so that one
saw all her broken black teeth.
"The same t' you," said Tillie. "The same t' you."
VI
ONE OF THE OLD GIRLS
All of those ladies who end their conversation with you by wearily
suggesting that you go down to the basement to find what you seek, do not
receive a meager seven dollars a week as a reward for their efforts.
Neither are they all obliged to climb five weary flights of stairs to
reach the dismal little court room which is their home, and there are
several who need not walk thirty-three blocks to save carfare, only to
spend wretched evenings washing out handkerchiefs and stockings in the
cracked little washbowl, while one ear is cocked for the stealthy tread
of the Lady Who Objects.
The earnest compiler of working girls' budgets would pass Effie Bauer
hurriedly by. Effie's budget bulged here and there with such pathetic
items as hand-embroidered blouses, thick club steaks, and parquet tickets
for Maude Adams. That you may visualize her at once I may say that Effie
looked twenty-four--from the rear (all women do in these days of girlish
simplicity in hats and tailor-mades); her skirts never sagged, her
shirtwaists were marvels of plainness and fit, and her switch had cost
her sixteen dollars, wholesale (a lady friend in the business). Oh,
there was nothing tragic about Effie. She had a plump, assured style, a
keen blue eye, a gift of repartee, and a way of doing her hair so that
the gray at the sides scarcely showed at all. Also a knowledge of
corsets that had placed her at the buying end of that important
department at Spiegel's. Effie knew to the minute when coral beads went
out and pearl beads came in, and just by looking at her blouses you could
tell when Cluny died and Irish was born. Meeting Effie on the street,
you would have put her down as one of the many well-dressed,
prosperous-looking women shoppers--if you hadn't looked at her feet.
Veteran clerks and policemen cannot disguise their feet.
Effie Bauer's reason for not marrying when a girl was the same as that of
most of the capable, wise-eyed, good-looking women one finds at the head
of departments. She had not had a chance. If Effie had been as
attractive at twenty as she was at--there, we won't betray confidences.
Still, it is certain that if Effie had been as attractive when a young
girl as she was when an old girl, she never would have been an old girl
and head of Spiegel's corset department at a salary of something very
comfortably over one hundred and twenty-five a month (and commissions).
Effie had improved with the years, and ripened with experience. She knew
her value. At twenty she had been pale, anaemic and bony, with a
startled-faun manner and bad teeth. Years of saleswomanship had
broadened her, mentally and physically, until she possessed a wide and
varied knowledge of that great and diversified subject known as human
nature. She knew human nature all the way from the fifty-nine-cent
girdles to the twenty-five-dollar made-to-orders. And if the years had
brought, among other things, a certain hardness about the jaw and a line
or two at the corners of the eyes, it was not surprising. You can't rub
up against the sharp edges of this world and expect to come out without a
scratch or so.
So much for Effie. Enter the hero. Webster defines a hero in romance as
the person who has the principal share in the transactions related. He
says nothing which would debar a gentleman just because he may be a
trifle bald and in the habit of combing his hair over the thin spot, and
he raises no objections to a matter of thickness and color in the region
of the back of the neck. Therefore Gabe I. Marks qualifies. Gabe was
the gentleman about whom Effie permitted herself to be guyed. He came to
Chicago on business four times a year, and he always took Effie to the
theater, and to supper afterward. On those occasions, Effie's gown, wrap
and hat were as correct in texture, lines, and paradise aigrettes as
those of any of her non-working sisters about her. On the morning
following these excursions into Lobsterdom, Effie would confide to her
friend, Miss Weinstein, of the lingeries and negligees:
"I was out with my friend, Mr. Marks, last evening. We went to Rector's
after the show. Oh, well, it takes a New Yorker to know how. Honestly,
I feel like a queen when I go out with him. H'm? Oh, nothing like that,
girlie. I never could see that marriage thing. Just good friends."
Gabe had been coming to Chicago four times a year for six years. Six
times four are twenty-four. And one is twenty-five. Gabe's last visit
made the twenty-fifth.
"Well, Effie," Gabe said when the evening's entertainment had reached the
restaurant stage, "this is our twenty-fifth anniversary. It's our silver
wedding, without the silver and the wedding. We'll have a bottle of
champagne. That makes it almost legal. And then suppose we finish up by
having the wedding. The silver can be omitted."
Effie had been humming with the orchestra, holding a lobster claw in one
hand and wielding the little two-pronged fork with the other. She
dropped claw, fork, and popular air to stare open-mouthed at Gabe. Then
a slow, uncertain smile crept about her lips, although her eyes were
still unsmiling.
"Stop your joking, Gabie," she said. "Some day you'll say those things
to the wrong lady, and then you'll have a breach-of-promise suit on your
hands."
"This ain't no joke, Effie," Gabe had replied. "Not with me it ain't. As
long as my mother selig lived I wouldn't ever marry a Goy. It would have
broken her heart. I was a good son to her, and good sons make good
husbands, they say. Well, Effie, you want to try it out?"
There was something almost solemn in Effie's tone and expression.
"Gabie," she said slowly, "you're the first man that's ever asked me to
marry him."
"That goes double," answered Gabe.
"Thanks," said Effie. "That makes it all the nicer."
"Then----" Gabe's face was radiant. But Effie shook her head quickly.
"You're just twenty years late," she said.
"Late!" expostulated Gabe. "I ain't no dead one yet."
Effie pushed her plate away with a little air of decision, folded her
plump arms on the table, and, leaning forward, looked Gabe I. Marks
squarely in the eyes.
"Gabie," she said gently, "I'll bet you haven't got a hundred dollars in
the bank----"
"But----" interrupted Gabe.
"Wait a minute. I know you boys on the road. Besides your diamond scarf
pin and your ring and watch, have you got a cent over your salary? Nix.
You carry just about enough insurance to bury you, don't you? You're
fifty years old if you're a minute, Gabie, and if I ain't mistaken you'd
have a pretty hard time of it getting ten thousand dollars' insurance
after the doctors got through with you. Twenty-five years of pinochle
and poker and the fat of the land haven't added up any bumps in the old
stocking under the mattress."
"Say, looka here," objected Gabe, more red-faced than usual, "I didn't
know was proposing to no Senatorial investigating committee. Say, you
talk about them foreign noblemen being mercenary! Why, they ain't in it
with you girls to-day. A feller is got to propose to you with his bank
book in one hand and a bunch of life-insurance policies in the other.
You're right; I ain't saved much. But Ma selig always had everything she
wanted. Say, when a man marries it's different. He begins to save."
"There!" said Effie quickly. "That's just it. Twenty years ago I'd have
been glad and willing to start like that, saving and scrimping and loving
a man, and looking forward to the time when four figures showed up in the
bank account where but three bloomed before. I've got what they call the
home instinct. Give me a yard or so of cretonne, and a photo of my
married sister down in Iowa, and I can make even a boarding-house inside
bedroom look like a place where a human being could live. If I had been
as wise at twenty as I am now, Gabie, I could have married any man I
pleased. But I was what they call capable. And men aren't marrying
capable girls. They pick little yellow-headed, blue-eyed idiots that
don't know a lamb stew from a soup bone when they see it. Well, Mr. Man
didn't show up, and I started in to clerk at six per. I'm earning as
much as you are now. More. Now, don't misunderstand me, Gabe. I'm not
throwing bouquets at myself. I'm not that kind of a girl. But I could
sell a style 743 Slimshape to the Venus de Milo herself. The Lord knows
she needed one, with those hips of hers. I worked my way up, alone. I'm
used to it. I like the excitement down at the store. I'm used to
luxuries. I guess if I was a man I'd be the kind thy call a good
provider--the kind that opens wine every time there's half an excuse for
it, and when he dies his widow has to take in boarders. And, Gabe, after
you've worn tailored suits every year for a dozen years, you can't go
back to twenty-five-dollar ready-mades and be happy."
"You could if you loved a man," said Gabe stubbornly.
The hard lines around the jaw and the experienced lines about the eyes
seemed suddenly to stand out on Effie's face.
"Love's young dream is all right. But you've reached the age when you
let your cigar ash dribble down onto your vest. Now me, I've got a
kimono nature but a straight-front job, and it's kept me young. Young!
I've got to be. That's my stock in trade. You see, Gabie, we're just
twenty years late, both of us. They're not going to boost your salary.
These days they're looking for kids on the road--live wires, with a lot
of nerve and a quick come-back. They don't want old-timers. Why, say,
Gabie, if I was to tell you what I spend in face powder and toilette
water and hairpins alone, you'd think I'd made a mistake and given you
the butcher bill instead. And I'm no professional beauty, either. Only
it takes money to look cleaned and pressed in this town."
In the seclusion of the cafe corner, Gabe laid one plump, highly
manicured hand on Effie's smooth arm. "You wouldn't need to stay young
for me, Effie. I like you just as you are, with out the powder, or the
toilette water, or the hair-pins."
His red, good-natured face had an expression upon it that was touchingly
near patient resignation as he looked up into Effie's sparkling
countenance. "You never looked so good to me as you do this minute, old
girl. And if the day comes when you get lonesome--or change your
mind--or----"
Effie shook her head, and started to draw on her long white gloves. "I
guess I haven't refused you the way the dames in the novels do it. Maybe
it's because I've had so little practice. But I want to say this, Gabe.
Thank God I don't have to die knowing that no man ever wanted me to be
his wife. Honestly, I'm that grateful that I'd marry you in a minute if
I didn't like you so well."
"I'll be back in three months, like always," was all that Gabe said. "I
ain't going to write. When I get here we'll just take in a show, and the
younger you look the better I'll like it."
But on the occasion of Gabe's spring trip he encountered a statuesque
blonde person where Effie had been wont to reign.
"Miss--er Bauer out of town?"
The statue melted a trifle in the sunshine of Gabe's ingratiating smile.
"Miss Bauer's ill," the statue informed him, using a heavy Eastern
accent. "Anything I can do for you? I'm taking her place."
"Why--ah--not exactly; no," said Gabe. "Just a temporary indisposition,
I suppose?"
"Well, you wouldn't hardly call it that, seeing that she's been sick with
typhoid for seven weeks."
"Typhoid!" shouted Gabe.
"While I'm not in the habit of asking gentlemen their names, I'd like to
inquire if yours happens to be Marks--Gabe I. Marks?"
"Sure," said Gabe. "That's me."
"Miss Bauer's nurse telephones down last week that if a gentleman named
Marks--Gabe I. Marks--drops in and inquires for Miss Bauer, I'm to tell
him that she's changed her mind."
On the way from Spiegel's corset department to the car, Gabe stopped only
for a bunch of violets. Effie's apartment house reached, he sent up his
card, the violets, and a message that the gentleman was waiting. There
came back a reply that sent Gabie up before the violets were relieved of
their first layer of tissue paper.
Effie was sitting in a deep chair by the window, a flowered quilt bunched
about her shoulders, her feet in gray knitted bedroom slippers. She
looked every minute of her age, and she knew it, and didn't care. The
hand that she held out to Gabe was a limp, white, fleshless thing that
seemed to bear no relation to the plump, firm member that Gabe had
pressed on so many previous occasions.
Gabe stared at this pale wraith in a moment of alarm and dismay. Then:
"You're looking--great!" he stammered. "Great! Nobody'd believe you'd
been sick a minute. Guess you've just been stalling for a beauty rest,
what?"
Effie smiled a tired little smile, and shook her head slowly.
"You're a good kid, Gabie, to lie like that just to make me feel good.
But my nurse left yesterday and I had my first real squint at myself in
the mirror. She wouldn't let me look while she was here. After what I
saw staring back at me from that glass a whole ballroom full of French
courtiers whispering sweet nothings in my ear couldn't make me believe
that I look like anything but a hunk of Roquefort, green spots included.
When I think of how my clothes won't fit it makes me shiver."