cheese had been like a drop of human blood to a man-eating tiger. It
made her bold, cunning, even while it maddened. She stopped at this
counter and demanded a slice of summer sausage. It was paper-thin, but
delicious beyond belief. At the next counter there was corned beef,
streaked fat and lean. Jennie longed to bury her teeth in the succulent
meat and get one great, soul-satisfying mouthful. She had to be content
with her judicious nibbling. To pass the golden-brown, breaded pig's
feet was torture. To look at the codfish balls was agony. And so Jennie
went on, sampling, tasting, the scraps of food acting only as an
aggravation. Up one aisle, and down the next she went. And then, just
around the corner, she brought up before the grocery department's pride
and boast, the Scotch bakery. It is the store's star vaudeville feature.
All day long the gaping crowd stands before it, watching David the Scone
Man, as with sleeves rolled high above his big arms, he kneads, and
slaps, and molds, and thumps and shapes the dough into toothsome Scotch
confections. There was a crowd around the white counters now, and the
flat baking surface of the gas stove was just hot enough, and David the
Scone Man (he called them Scuns) was whipping about here and there,
turning the baking oat cakes, filling the shelf above the stove when they
were done to a turn, rolling out fresh ones, waiting on customers. His
nut-cracker face almost allowed itself a pleased expression--but not
quite. David, the Scone Man, was Scotch (I was going to add, d'ye ken,
but I will not).
Jennie wondered if she really saw those things. Mutton pies! Scones!
Scotch short bread! Oat cakes! She edged closer, wriggling her way
through the little crowd until she stood at the counter's edge. David,
the Scone Man, his back to the crowd, was turning the last batch of oat
cakes. Jennie felt strangely light-headed, and unsteady, and airy. She
stared straight ahead, a half-smile on her lips, while a hand that she
knew was her own, and that yet seemed no part of her, stole out, very,
very slowly, and cunningly, and extracted a hot scone from the pile that
lay in the tray on the counter. That hand began to steal back, more
quickly now. But not quickly enough. Another hand grasped her wrist. A
woman's high, shrill voice (why will women do these things to each
other?) said, excitedly:
"Say, Scone Man! Scone Man! This girl is stealing something!"
A buzz of exclamations from the crowd--a closing in upon her--a whirl of
faces, and counter, and trays, and gas stove. Jennie dropped with a
crash, the warm scone still grasped in her fingers.
Just before the ambulance came it was the blonde lady of the impossible
gelatines who caught the murmur that came from Jennie's white lips. The
blonde lady bent her head closer. Closer still. When she raised her
face to those other faces crowded near, her eyes were round with surprise.
"'S far's I can make out, she says her name's Mamie, and she's from Cuba.
Well, wouldn't that eat you! I always thought they was dark complected."
VIII
THE LEADING LADY
The leading lady lay on her bed and wept. Not as you have seen leading
ladies weep, becomingly, with eyebrows pathetically V-shaped, mouth
quivering, sequined bosom heaving. The leading lady lay on her bed in a
red-and-blue-striped kimono and wept as a woman weeps, her head burrowing
into the depths of the lumpy hotel pillow, her teeth biting the
pillow-case to choke back the sounds so that the grouch in the next room
might not hear.
Presently the leading lady's right hand began to grope about on the
bedspread for her handkerchief. Failing to find it, she sat up wearily,
raising herself on one elbow and pushing her hair back from her
forehead--not as you have seen a leading lady pass a lily hand across her
alabaster brow, but as a heart-sick woman does it. Her tears and
sniffles had formed a little oasis of moisture on the pillow's white
bosom so that the ugly stripe of the ticking showed through. She gazed
down at the damp circle with smarting, swollen eyes, and another lump
came up into her throat.
Then she sat up resolutely, and looked about her. The leading lady had a
large and saving sense of humor. But there is nothing that blunts the
sense of humor more quickly than a few months of one-night stands. Even
O. Henry could have seen nothing funny about that room.
The bed was of green enamel, with fly-specked gold trimmings. It looked
like a huge frog. The wall-paper was a crime. It represented an army of
tan mustard plasters climbing up a chocolate-fudge wall. The leading
lady was conscious of a feeling of nausea as she gazed at it. So she got
up and walked to the window. The room faced west, and the hot afternoon
sun smote full on her poor swollen eyes. Across the street the red brick
walls of the engine-house caught the glare and sent it back. The
firemen, in their blue shirt-sleeves, were seated in the shade before the
door, their chairs tipped at an angle of sixty. The leading lady stared
down into the sun-baked street, turned abruptly and made as though to
fall upon the bed again, with a view to forming another little damp oasis
on the pillow. But when she reached the center of the stifling little
bedroom her eye chanced on the electric call-button near the door. Above
the electric bell was tacked a printed placard giving information on the
subjects of laundry, ice-water, bell-boys and dining-room hours.
The leading lady stood staring at it a moment thoughtfully. Then with a
sudden swift movement she applied her forefinger to the button and held
it there for a long half-minute. Then she sat down on the edge of the
bed, her kimono folded about her, and waited.
She waited until a lank bell-boy, in a brown uniform that was some sizes
too small for him, had ceased to take any interest in the game of chess
which Bauer and Merkle, the champion firemen chess-players, were
contesting on the walk before the open doorway of the engine-house. The
proprietor of the Burke House had originally intended that the brown
uniform be worn by a diminutive bell-boy, such as one sees in musical
comedies. But the available supply of stage size bell-boys in our town
is somewhat limited and was soon exhausted. There followed a succession
of lank bell-boys, with arms and legs sticking ungracefully out of
sleeves and trousers.
"Come!" called the leading lady quickly, in answer to the lank youth's
footsteps, and before he had had time to knock.
"Ring?" asked the boy, stepping into the torrid little room.
The leading lady did not reply immediately. She swallowed something in
her throat and pushed back the hair from her moist forehead again. The
brown uniform repeated his question, a trifle irritably. Whereupon the
leading lady spoke, desperately:
"Is there a woman around this place? I don't mean dining-room girls, or
the person behind the cigar-counter."
Since falling heir to the brown uniform the lank youth had heard some
strange requests. He had been interviewed by various ladies in
varicolored kimonos relative to liquid refreshment, laundry and the cost
of hiring a horse and rig for a couple of hours. One had even summoned
him to ask if there was a Bible in the house. But this latest question
was a new one. He stared, leaning against the door and thrusting one
hand into the depths of his very tight breeches pocket.
"Why, there's Pearlie Schultz," he said at last, with a grin.
"Who's she?" The leading lady sat up expectantly.
"Steno."
The expectant figure drooped. "Blonde? And Irish crochet collar with a
black velvet bow on her chest?"
"Who? Pearlie? Naw. You mustn't get Pearlie mixed with the common or
garden variety of stenos. Pearlie is fat, and she wears specs and she's
got a double chin. Her hair is skimpy and she don't wear no rat. W'y no
traveling man has ever tried to flirt with Pearlie yet. Pearlie's what
you'd call a woman, all right. You wouldn't never make a mistake and
think she'd escaped from the first row in the chorus."
The leading lady rose from the bed, reached out for her pocket-book,
extracted a dime, and held it out to the bell-boy.
"Here. Will you ask her to come up here to me? Tell her I said please."
After he had gone she seated herself on the edge of the bed again, with a
look in her eyes like that which you have seen in the eyes of a dog that
is waiting for a door to be opened.
Fifteen minutes passed. The look in the eyes of the leading lady began
to fade. Then a footstep sounded down the hall. The leading lady cocked
her head to catch it, and smiled blissfully. It was a heavy, comfortable
footstep, under which a board or two creaked. There came a big, sensible
thump-thump-thump at the door, with stout knuckles. The leading lady
flew to answer it. She flung the door wide and stood there, clutching
her kimono at the throat and looking up into a red, good-natured face.
Pearlie Schultz looked down at the leading lady kindly and benignantly,
as a mastiff might look at a terrier.
"Lonesome for a bosom to cry on?" asked she, and stepped into the room,
walked to the west windows, and jerked down the shades with a zip-zip,
shutting off the yellow glare. She came back to where the leading lady
was standing and patted her on the cheek, lightly.
"You tell me all about it," said she, smiling.
The leading lady opened her lips, gulped, tried again, gulped
again--Pearlie Schultz shook a sympathetic head.
"Ain't had a decent, close-to-nature powwow with a woman for weeks and
weeks, have you?"
"How did you know?" cried the leading lady.
"You've got that hungry look. There was a lady drummer here last winter,
and she had the same expression. She was so dead sick of eating her
supper and then going up to her ugly room and reading and sewing all
evening that it was a wonder she'd stayed good. She said it was easy
enough for the men. They could smoke, and play pool, and go to a show,
and talk to any one that looked good to 'em. But if she tried to amuse
herself everybody'd say she was tough. She cottoned to me like a burr to
a wool skirt. She traveled for a perfumery house, and she said she
hadn't talked to a woman, except the dry-goods clerks who were nice to
her trying to work her for her perfume samples, for weeks an' weeks.
Why, that woman made crochet by the bolt, and mended her clothes evenings
whether they needed it or not, and read till her eyes come near going
back on her."
The leading lady seized Pearlie's hand and squeezed it.
"That's it! Why, I haven't talked--really talked--to a real woman since
the company went out on the road. I'm leading lady of the 'Second Wife'
company, you know. It's one of those small cast plays, with only five
people in it. I play the wife, and I'm the only woman in the cast. It's
terrible. I ought to be thankful to get the part these days. And I was,
too. But I didn't know it would be like this. I'm going crazy. The men
in the company are good kids, but I can't go trailing around after them
all day. Besides, it wouldn't be right. They're all married, except
Billy, who plays the kid, and he's busy writing a vawdeville skit that he
thinks the New York managers are going to fight for when he gets back
home. We were to play Athens, Wisconsin, to-night, but the house burned
down night before last, and that left us with an open date. When I heard
the news you'd have thought I had lost my mother. It's bad enough having
a whole day to kill but when I think of to-night," the leading lady's
voice took on a note of hysteria, "it seems as though I'd----"
"Say," Pearlie interrupted, abruptly, "you ain't got a real good
corset-cover pattern, have you? One that fits smooth over the bust and
don't slip off the shoulders? I don't seem able to get my hands on the
kind I want."
"Have I!" yelled the leading lady. And made a flying leap from the bed
to the floor.
She flapped back the cover of a big suit-case and began burrowing into
its depths, strewing the floor with lingerie, newspaper clippings,
blouses, photographs and Dutch collars. Pearlie came over and sat down
on the floor in the midst of the litter. The leading lady dived once
more, fished about in the bottom of the suit-case and brought a crumpled
piece of paper triumphantly to the surface.
"This is it. It only takes a yard and five-eighths. And fits! Like
Anna Held's skirts. Comes down in a V front and back--like this. See?
And no fulness. Wait a minute. I'll show you my princess slip. I made
it all by hand, too. I'll bet you couldn't buy it under fifteen dollars,
and it cost me four dollars and eighty cents, with the lace and all."
Before an hour had passed, the leading lady had displayed all her
treasures, from the photograph of her baby that died to her new Blanche
Ring curl cluster, and was calling Pearlie by her first name. When a
bell somewhere boomed six o'clock Pearlie was being instructed in a new
exercise calculated to reduce the hips an inch a month.
"My land!" cried Pearlie, aghast, and scrambled to her feet as nimbly as
any woman can who weighs two hundred pounds. "Supper-time, and I've got
a bunch of letters an inch thick to get out! I'd better reduce that some
before I begin on my hips. But say, I've had a lovely time."
The leading lady clung to her. "You've saved my life. Why, I forgot all
about being hot and lonely and a couple of thousand miles from New York.
Must you go?"
"Got to. But if you'll promise you won't laugh, I'll make a date for
this evening that'll give you a new sensation anyway. There's going to
be a strawberry social on the lawn of the parsonage of our church. I've
got a booth. You shed that kimono, and put on a thin dress and those
curls and some powder, and I'll introduce you as my friend, Miss Evans.
You don't look Evans, but this is a Methodist church strawberry festival,
and if I was to tell them that you are leading lady of the 'Second Wife'
company they'd excommunicate my booth."
"A strawberry social!" gasped the leading lady. "Do they still have
them?" She did not laugh. "Why, I used to go to strawberry festivals
when I was a little girl in----"
"Careful! You'll be giving away your age, and, anyway, you don't look
it. Fashions in strawberry socials ain't changed much. Better bathe
your eyes in eau de cologne or whatever it is they're always dabbing on
'em in books. See you at eight."
At eight o'clock Pearlie's thump-thump sounded again, and the leading
lady sprang to the door as before. Pearlie stared. This was no
tear-stained, heat-bedraggled creature in an unbecoming red-striped
kimono. It was a remarkably pretty woman in a white lingerie gown over a
pink slip. The leading lady knew a thing or two about the gentle art of
making-up!
"That just goes to show," remarked Pearlie, "that you must never judge a
woman in a kimono or a bathing suit. You look nineteen. Say, I forgot
something down-stairs. Just get your handkerchief and chamois together
and meet in my cubbyhole next to the lobby, will you? I'll be ready for
you."
Down-stairs she summoned the lank bell-boy. "You go outside and tell Sid
Strang I want to see him, will you? He's on the bench with the baseball
bunch."
Pearlie had not seen Sid Strang outside. She did not need to. She knew
he was there. In our town all the young men dress up in their pale gray
suits and lavender-striped shirts after supper on summer evenings. Then
they stroll down to the Burke House, buy a cigar and sit down on the
benches in front of the hotel to talk baseball and watch the girls go by.
It is astonishing to note the number of our girls who have letters to
mail after supper. One would think that they must drive their pens
fiercely all the afternoon in order to get out such a mass of
correspondence.
The obedient Sid reached the door of Pearlie's little office just off the
lobby as the leading lady came down the stairs with a spangled scarf
trailing over her arm. It was an effective entrance.
"Why, hello!" said Pearlie, looking up from her typewriter as though Sid
Strang were the last person in the world she expected to see. "What do
you want here? Ethel, this is my friend, Mr. Sid Strang, one of our
rising young lawyers. His neckties always match his socks. Sid, this is
my friend, Miss Ethel Evans, of New York. We're going over to the
strawberry social at the M. E. parsonage. I don't suppose you'd care
about going?"
Mr. Sid Strang gazed at the leading lady in the white lingerie dress with
the pink slip, and the V-shaped neck, and the spangled scarf, and turned
to Pearlie.
"Why, Pearlie Schultz!" he said reproachfully. "How can you ask? You
know what a strawberry social means to me! I haven't missed one in
years!"
"I know it," replied Pearlie, with a grin. "You feel the same way about
Thursday evening prayer-meeting too, don't you? You can walk over with
us if you want to. We're going now. Miss Evans and I have got a booth."
Sid walked. Pearlie led them determinedly past the rows of gray suits
and lavender and pink shirts on the benches in front of the hotel. And
as the leading lady came into view the gray suits stopped talking
baseball and sat up and took notice. Pearlie had known all those young
men inside of the swagger suits in the days when their summer costume
consisted of a pair of dad's pants cut down to a doubtful fit, and a
nondescript shirt damp from the swimming-hole. So she called out,
cheerily:
"We're going over to the strawberry festival. I expect to see all you
boys there to contribute your mite to the church carpet."
The leading lady turned to look at them, and smiled. They were such a
dapper, pink-cheeked, clean-looking lot of boys, she thought. At that
the benches rose to a man and announced that they might as well stroll
over right now. Whenever a new girl comes to visit in our town our boys
make a concerted rush at her, and develop a "case" immediately, and the
girl goes home when her visit is over with her head swimming, and forever
after bores the girls of her home town with tales of her conquests.
The ladies of the First M. E. Church still talk of the money they
garnered at the strawberry festival. Pearlie's out-of-town friend was
garnerer-in-chief. You take a cross-eyed, pock-marked girl and put her
in a white dress, with a pink slip, on a green lawn under a string of
rose-colored Japanese lanterns, and she'll develop an almost Oriental
beauty. It is an ideal setting. The leading lady was not cross-eyed or
pock-marked. She stood at the lantern-illumined booth, with Pearlie in
the background, and dispensed an unbelievable amount of strawberries.
Sid Strang and the hotel bench brigade assisted. They made engagements
to take Pearlie and her friend down river next day, and to the ball game,
and planned innumerable picnics, gazing meanwhile into the leading lady's
eyes. There grew in the cheeks of the leading lady a flush that was not
brought about by the pink slip, or the Japanese lanterns, or the skillful
application of rouge.
By nine o'clock the strawberry supply was exhausted, and the president of
the Foreign Missionary Society was sending wildly down-town for more
ice-cream.
"I call it an outrage," puffed Pearlie happily, ladling ice-cream like
mad. "Making a poor working girl like me slave all evening! How many
was that last order? Four? My land! that's the third dish of ice-cream
Ed White's had! You'll have something to tell the villagers about when
you get back to New York."
The leading lady turned a flushed face toward Pearlie. "This is more fun
than the Actors' Fair. I had the photograph booth last year, and I took
in nearly as much as Lil Russell; and goodness knows, all she needs to do
at a fair is to wear her diamond-and-pearl stomacher and her set-piece
smile, and the men just swarm around her like the pictures of a crowd in
a McCutcheon cartoon."
When the last Japanese lantern had guttered out, Pearlie Schultz and the
leading lady prepared to go home. Before they left, the M. E. ladies
came over to Pearlie's booth and personally congratulated the leading
lady, and thanked her for the interest she had taken in the cause, and
the secretary of the Epworth League asked her to come to the tea that was
to be held at her home the following Tuesday. The leading lady thanked
her and said she'd come if she could.
Escorted by a bodyguard of gray suits and lavender-striped shirts Pearlie
and her friend, Miss Evans, walked toward the hotel. The attentive
bodyguard confessed itself puzzled.
"Aren't you staying at Pearlie's house?" asked Sid tenderly, when they
reached the Burke House. The leading lady glanced up at the windows of
the stifling little room that faced west.
"No," answered she, and paused at the foot of the steps to the ladies'
entrance. The light from the electric globe over the doorway shone on
her hair and sparkled in the folds of her spangled scarf.
"I'm not staying at Pearlie's because my name isn't Ethel Evans. It's
Aimee Fox, with a little French accent mark over the double E. I'm
leading lady of the 'Second Wife' company and old enough to be--well,
your aunty, anyway. We go out at one-thirty to-morrow morning."
IX
THAT HOME-TOWN FEELING
We all have our ambitions. Mine is to sit in a rocking-chair on the
sidewalk at the corner of Clark and Randolph Streets, and watch the
crowds go by. South Clark Street is one of the most interesting and
cosmopolitan thoroughfares in the world (New Yorkers please sniff). If
you are from Paris, France, or Paris, Illinois, and should chance to be
in that neighborhood, you will stop at Tony's news stand to buy your
home-town paper. Don't mistake the nature of this story. There is
nothing of the shivering-newsboy-waif about Tony. He has the voice of a
fog-horn, the purple-striped shirt of a sport, the diamond scarf-pin of a
racetrack tout, and the savoir faire of the gutter-bred. You'd never
pick him for a newsboy if it weren't for his chapped hands and the
eternal cold-sore on the upper left corner of his mouth.
It is a fascinating thing, Tony's stand. A high wooden structure rising
tier on tier, containing papers from every corner of the world. I'll
defy you to name a paper that Tony doesn't handle, from Timbuctoo to
Tarrytown, from South Bend to South Africa. A paper marked Christiania,
Norway, nestles next to a sheet from Kalamazoo, Michigan. You can get
the War Cry, or Le Figaro. With one hand, Tony will give you the Berlin
Tageblatt, and with the other the Times from Neenah, Wisconsin. Take
your choice between the Bulletin from Sydney, Australia, or the Bee from
Omaha.
But perhaps you know South Clark Street. It is honeycombed with good
copy--man-size stuff. South Clark Street reminds one of a slatternly
woman, brave in silks and velvets on the surface, but ragged, and rumpled
and none too clean as to nether garments. It begins with a tenement so
vile, so filthy, so repulsive, that the municipal authorities deny its
very existence. It ends with a brand-new hotel, all red brick, and white
tiling, and Louise Quinze furniture, and sour-cream colored marble lobby,
and oriental rugs lavishly scattered under the feet of the unappreciative
guest from Kansas City. It is a street of signs, is South Clark. They
vary all the way from "Banca Italiana" done in fat, fly-specked letters
of gold, to "Sang Yuen" scrawled in Chinese red and black. Spaghetti and
chop suey and dairy lunches nestle side by side. Here an electric sign
blazons forth the tempting announcement of lunch. Just across the way,
delicately suggesting a means of availing one's self of the invitation,
is another which announces "Loans." South Clark Street can transform a
winter overcoat into hamburger and onions so quickly that the eye can't
follow the hand.
Do you gather from this that you are being taken slumming? Not at all.
For the passer-by on Clark Street varies as to color, nationality,
raiment, finger-nails, and hair-cut according to the locality in which
you find him.
At the tenement end the feminine passer-by is apt to be shawled, swarthy,
down-at-the-heel, and dragging a dark-eyed, fretting baby in her wake.
At the hotel end you will find her blonde of hair, velvet of boot, plumed
of head-gear, and prone to have at her heels a white, woolly, pink-eyed
dog.
The masculine Clark Streeter? I throw up my hands. Pray remember that
South Clark Street embraces the dime lodging house, pawnshop, hotel,
theater, chop-suey and railway office district, all within a few blocks.
From the sidewalk in front of his groggery, "Bath House John" can see the
City Hall. The trim, khaki-garbed enlistment officer rubs elbows with
the lodging house bum. The masculine Clark Streeter may be of the kind
that begs a dime for a bed, or he may loll in manicured luxury at the
marble-lined hotel. South Clark Street is so splendidly indifferent.
Copy-hunting, I approached Tony with hope in my heart, a smile on my
lips, and a nickel in my hand.
"Philadelphia--er--Inquirer?" I asked, those being the city and paper
which fire my imagination least.
Tony whipped it out, dexterously.