family has some respect for a life sorrow. Whenever Pearlie asked that
inevitable question of the fat woman: "Am I as fat as she is?" her
mother always answered: "You! Well, I should hope not! You're looking
real peaked lately, Pearlie. And your blue skirt just ripples in the
back, it's getting so big for you."
Of such blessed stuff are mothers made.
But if the gods had denied Pearlie all charms of face or form, they had
been decent enough to bestow on her one gift. Pearlie could cook like an
angel; no, better than an angel, for no angel could be a really clever
cook and wear those flowing kimono-like sleeves. They'd get into the
soup. Pearlie could take a piece of rump and some suet and an onion and
a cup or so of water, and evolve a pot roast that you could cut with a
fork. She could turn out a surprisingly good cake with surprisingly few
eggs, all covered with white icing, and bearing cunning little jelly
figures on its snowy bosom. She could beat up biscuits that fell apart
at the lightest pressure, revealing little pools of golden butter within.
Oh, Pearlie could cook!
On week days Pearlie rattled the typewriter keys, but on Sundays she
shooed her mother out of the kitchen. Her mother went, protesting
faintly:
"Now, Pearlie, don't fuss so for dinner. You ought to get your rest on
Sunday instead of stewing over a hot stove all morning."
"Hot fiddlesticks, ma," Pearlie would say, cheerily. "It ain't hot,
because it's a gas stove. And I'll only get fat if I sit around. You
put on your black-and-white and go to church. Call me when you've got as
far as your corsets, and I'll puff your hair for you in the back."
In her capacity of public stenographer at the Burke Hotel, it was
Pearlie's duty to take letters dictated by traveling men and beginning:
"Yours of the 10th at hand. In reply would say. . . ." or: "Enclosed
please find, etc." As clinching proof of her plainness it may be stated
that none of the traveling men, not even Max Baum, who was so fresh that
the girl at the cigar counter actually had to squelch him, ever called
Pearlie "baby doll," or tried to make a date with her. Not that Pearlie
would ever have allowed them to. But she never had had to reprove them.
During pauses in dictation she had a way of peering near-sightedly, over
her glasses at the dapper, well-dressed traveling salesman who was
rolling off the items on his sale bill. That is a trick which would make
the prettiest kind of a girl look owlish.
On the night that Sam Miller strolled up to talk to her, Pearlie was
working late. She had promised to get out a long and intricate bill for
Max Baum, who travels for Kuhn and Klingman, so that he might take the
nine o'clock evening train. The irrepressible Max had departed with much
eclat and clatter, and Pearlie was preparing to go home when Sam
approached her.
Sam had just come in from the Gayety Theater across the street, whither
he had gone in a vain search for amusement after supper. He had come
away in disgust. A soiled soubrette with orange-colored hair and baby
socks had swept her practiced eye over the audience, and, attracted by
Sam's good-looking blond head in the second row, had selected him as the
target of her song. She had run up to the extreme edge of the footlights
at the risk of teetering over, and had informed Sam through the medium of
song--to the huge delight of the audience, and to Sam's red-faced
discomfiture--that she liked his smile, and he was just her style, and
just as cute as he could be, and just the boy for her. On reaching the
chorus she had whipped out a small, round mirror and, assisted by the
calcium-light man in the rear, had thrown a wretched little spotlight on
Sam's head.
Ordinarily, Sam would not have minded it. But that evening, in the vest
pocket just over the place where he supposed his heart to be reposed his
girl's daily letter. They were to be married on Sam's return to New York
from his first long trip. In the letter near his heart she had written
prettily and seriously about traveling men, and traveling men's wives,
and her little code for both. The fragrant, girlish, grave little letter
had caused Sam to sour on the efforts of the soiled soubrette.
As soon as possible he had fled up the aisle and across the street to the
hotel writing-room. There he had spied Pearlie's good-humored, homely
face, and its contrast with the silly, red and-white countenance of the
unlaundered soubrette had attracted his homesick heart.
Pearlie had taken some letters from him earlier in the day. Now, in his
hunger for companionship, he, strolled up to her desk, just as she was
putting her typewriter to bed.
"Gee I This is a lonesome town!" said Sam, smiling down at her.
Pearlie glanced up at him, over her glasses. "I guess you must be from
New York," she said. "I've heard a real New Yorker can get bored in
Paris. In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the
girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are
higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or
the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in
the world. Ain't they?"
"Oh, now," protested Sam, "quit kiddin' me! You'd be lonesome for the
little old town, too, if you'd been born and dragged up in it, and hadn't
seen it for four months."
"New to the road, aren't you?" asked Pearlie.
Sam blushed a little. "How did you know?"
"Well, you generally can tell. They don't know what to do with
themselves evenings, and they look rebellious when they go into the
dining-room. The old-timers just look resigned."
"You've picked up a thing or two around here, haven't you? I wonder if
the time will ever come when I'll look resigned to a hotel dinner, after
four months of 'em. Why, girl, I've got so I just eat the things that
are covered up--like baked potatoes in the shell, and soft boiled eggs,
and baked apples, and oranges that I can peel, and nuts."
"Why, you poor kid," breathed Pearlie, her pale eyes fixed on him in
motherly pity. "You oughtn't to do that. You'll get so thin your girl
won't know you."
Sam looked up quickly. "How in thunderation did you know----?"
Pearlie was pinning on her hat, and she spoke succinctly, her hatpins
between her teeth: "You've been here two days now, and I notice you
dictate all your letters except the longest one, and you write that one
off in a corner of the writing-room all by yourself, with your cigar just
glowing like a live coal, and you squint up through the smoke, and grin
to yourself."
"Say, would you mind if I walked home with you?" asked Sam.
If Pearlie was surprised, she was woman enough not to show it. She
picked up her gloves and hand bag, locked her drawer with a click, and
smiled her acquiescence. And when Pearlie smiled she was awful.
It was a glorious evening in the early summer, moonless, velvety, and
warm. As they strolled homeward, Sam told her all about the Girl, as is
the way of traveling men the world over. He told her about the tiny
apartment they had taken, and how he would be on the road only a couple
of years more, as this was just a try-out that the firm always insisted
on. And they stopped under an arc light while Sam showed her the picture
in his watch, as is also the way of traveling men since time immemorial.
Pearlie made an excellent listener. He was so boyish, and so much in
love, and so pathetically eager to make good with the firm, and so happy
to have some one in whom to confide.
"But it's a dog's life, after all," reflected Sam, again after the
fashion of all traveling men. "Any fellow on the road earns his salary
these days, you bet. I used to think it was all getting up when you felt
like it, and sitting in the big front window of the hotel, smoking a
cigar and watching the pretty girls go by. I wasn't wise to the packing,
and the unpacking, and the rotten train service, and the grouchy
customers, and the canceled bills, and the grub."
Pearlie nodded understandingly. "A man told me once that twice a week
regularly he dreamed of the way his wife cooked noodle-soup."
"My folks are German," explained Sam. "And my mother--can she cook!
Well, I just don't seem able to get her potato pancakes out of my mind.
And her roast beef tasted and looked like roast beef, and not like a wet
red flannel rag."
At this moment Pearlie was seized with a brilliant idea. "To-morrow's
Sunday. You're going to Sunday here, aren't you? Come over and eat your
dinner with us. If you have forgotten the taste of real food, I can give
you a dinner that'll jog your memory."
"Oh, really," protested Sam. "You're awfully good, but I couldn't think
of it. I----"
"You needn't be afraid. I'm not letting you in for anything. I may be
homelier than an English suffragette, and I know my lines are all bumps,
but there's one thing you can't take away from me, and that's my cooking
hand. I can cook, boy, in a way to make your mother's Sunday dinner,
with company expected, look like Mrs. Newlywed's first attempt at 'riz'
biscuits. And I don't mean any disrespect to your mother when I say it.
I'm going to have noodle-soup, and fried chicken, and hot biscuits, and
creamed beans from our own garden, and strawberry shortcake with real----"
"Hush!" shouted Sam. "If I ain't there, you'll know that I passed away
during the night, and you can telephone the clerk to break in my door."
The Grim Reaper spared him, and Sam came, and was introduced to the
family, and ate. He put himself in a class with Dr. Johnson, and Ben
Brust, and Gargantua, only that his table manners were better. He almost
forgot to talk during the soup, and he came back three times for chicken,
and by the time the strawberry shortcake was half consumed he was looking
at Pearlie with a sort of awe in his eyes.
That night he came over to say good-bye before taking his train out for
Ishpeming. He and Pearlie strolled down as far as the park and back
again.
"I didn't eat any supper," said Sam. "It would have been sacrilege,
after that dinner of yours. Honestly, I don't know how to thank you,
being so good to a stranger like me. When I come back next trip, I
expect to have the Kid with me, and I want her to meet you, by George!
She's a winner and a pippin, but she wouldn't know whether a porterhouse
was stewed or frapped. I'll tell her about you, you bet. In the
meantime, if there's anything I can do for you, I'm yours to command."
Pearlie turned to him suddenly. "You see that clump of thick shadows
ahead of us, where those big trees stand in front of our house?"
"Sure," replied Sam.
"Well, when we step into that deepest, blackest shadow, right in front of
our porch, I want you to reach up, and put your arm around me and kiss me
on the mouth, just once. And when you get back to New York you can tell
your girl I asked you to."
There broke from him a little involuntary exclamation. It might have
been of pity, and it might have been of surprise. It had in it something
of both, but nothing of mirth. And as they stepped into the depths of
the soft black shadows he took off his smart straw sailor, which was so
different from the sailors that the boys in our town wear. And there was
in the gesture something of reverence.
Millie Whitcomb didn't like the story of the homely heroine, after all.
She says that a steady diet of such literary fare would give her blue
indigestion. Also she objects on the ground that no one got
married--that is, the heroine didn't. And she says that a heroine who
does not get married isn't a heroine at all. She thinks she prefers the
pink-cheeked, goddess kind, in the end.
XI
SUN DRIED
There come those times in the life of every woman when she feels that she
must wash her hair at once. And then she does it. The feeling may come
upon her suddenly, without warning, at any hour of the day or night; or
its approach may be slow and insidious, so that the victim does not at
first realize what it is that fills her with that sensation of unrest.
But once in the clutches of the idea she knows no happiness, no peace,
until she has donned a kimono, gathered up two bath towels, a spray, and
the green soap, and she breathes again only when, head dripping, she
makes for the back yard, the sitting-room radiator, or the side porch
(depending on her place of residence, and the time of year).
Mary Louise was seized with the feeling at ten o'clock on a joyous June
morning. She tried to fight it off because she had got to that stage in
the construction of her story where her hero was beginning to talk and
act a little more like a real live man, and a little less like a clothing
store dummy. (By the way, they don't seem to be using those
pink-and-white, black-mustachioed figures any more. Another good simile
gone.)
Mary Louise had been battling with that hero for a week. He wouldn't
make love to the heroine. In vain had Mary Louise striven to instill red
blood into his watery veins. He and the beauteous heroine were as far
apart as they had been on Page One of the typewritten manuscript. Mary
Louise was developing nerves over him. She had bitten her finger nails,
and twisted her hair into corkscrews over him. She had risen every
morning at the chaste hour of seven, breakfasted hurriedly, tidied the
tiny two-room apartment, and sat down in the unromantic morning light to
wrestle with her stick of a hero. She had made her heroine a creature of
grace, wit, and loveliness, but thus far the hero had not once clasped
her to him fiercely, or pressed his lips to her hair, her eyes, her
cheeks. Nay (as the story-writers would put it), he hadn't even devoured
her with his gaze.
This morning, however, he had begun to show some signs of life. He was
developing possibilities. Whereupon, at this critical stage in the
story-writing game, the hair-washing mania seized Mary Louise. She tried
to dismiss the idea. She pushed it out of her mind, and slammed the
door. It only popped in again. Her fingers wandered to her hair. Her
eyes wandered to the June sunshine outside. The hero was left poised,
arms outstretched, and unquenchable love-light burning in his eyes, while
Mary Louise mused, thus:
"It certainly feels sticky. It's been six weeks, at least. And I could
sit here-by the window--in the sun--and dry it----"
With a jerk she brought her straying fingers away from her hair, and her
wandering eyes away from the sunshine, and her runaway thoughts back to
the typewritten page. For three minutes the snap of the little disks
crackled through the stillness of the tiny apartment. Then, suddenly, as
though succumbing to an irresistible force, Mary Louise rose, walked
across the room (a matter of six steps), removing hairpins as she went,
and shoved aside the screen which hid the stationary wash-bowl by day.
Mary Louise turned on a faucet and held her finger under it, while an
agonized expression of doubt and suspense overspread her features.
Slowly the look of suspense gave way to a smile of beatific content. A
sigh--deep, soul-filling, satisfied--welled up from Mary Louise's breast.
The water was hot.
Half an hour later, head swathed turban fashion in a towel, Mary Louise
strolled over to the window. Then she stopped, aghast. In that half
hour the sun had slipped just around the corner, and was now beating
brightly and uselessly against the brick wall a few inches away. Slowly
Mary Louise unwound the towel, bent double in the contortionistic
attitude that women assume on such occasions, and watched with melancholy
eyes while the drops trickled down to the ends of her hair, and fell,
unsunned, to the floor.
"If only," thought Mary Louise, bitterly, "there was such a thing as a
back yard in this city--a back yard where I could squat on the grass, in
the sunshine and the breeze---- Maybe there is. I'll ask the janitor."
She bound her hair in the turban again, and opened the door. At the far
end of the long, dim hallway Charlie, the janitor, was doing something to
the floor with a mop and a great deal of sloppy water, whistling the
while with a shrill abandon that had announced his presence to Mary
Louise.
"Oh, Charlie!" called Mary Louise. "Charlee! Can you come here just a
minute?"
"You bet!" answered Charlie, with the accent on the you; and came.
"Charlie, is there a back yard, or something, where the sun is, you
know--some nice, grassy place where I can sit, and dry my hair, and let
the breezes blow it?"
"Back yard!" grinned Charlie. "I guess you're new to N' York, all right,
with ground costin' a million or so a foot. Not much they ain't no back
yard, unless you'd give that name to an ash-barrel, and a dump heap or
so, and a crop of tin cans. I wouldn't invite a goat to set in it."
Disappointment curved Mary Louise's mouth. It was a lovely enough mouth
at any time, but when it curved in disappointment--ell, janitors are but
human, after all.
"Tell you what, though," said Charlie. "I'll let you up on the roof. It
ain't long on grassy spots up there, but say, breeze! Like a summer
resort. On a clear day you can see way over 's far 's Eight' Avenoo.
Only for the love of Mike don't blab it to the other women folks in the
buildin', or I'll have the whole works of 'em usin' the roof for a
general sun, massage, an' beauty parlor. Come on."
"I'll never breathe it to a soul," promised Mary Louise, solemnly. "Oh,
wait a minute."
She turned back into her room, appearing again in a moment with something
green in her hand.
"What's that?" asked Charlie, suspiciously.
Mary Louise, speeding down the narrow hallway after Charlie, blushed a
little. "It--it's parsley," she faltered.
"Parsley!" exploded Charlie. "Well, what the----"
"Well, you see. I'm from the country," explained Mary Louise, "and in
the country, at this time of year, when you dry your hair in the back
yard, you get the most wonderful scent of green and growing things--not
only of flowers, you know, but of the new things just coming up in the
vegetable garden, and--and--well, this parsley happens to be the only
really gardeny thing I have, so I thought I'd bring it along and sniff it
once in a while, and make believe it's the country, up there on the roof."
Half-way up the perilous little flight of stairs that led to the roof,
Charlie, the janitor, turned to gaze down at Mary Louise, who was just
behind, and keeping fearfully out of the way of Charlie's heels.
"Wimmin," observed Charlie, the janitor, "is nothin' but little girls in
long skirts, and their hair done up."
"I know it," giggled Mary Louise, and sprang up on the roof, looking,
with her towel-swathed head, like a lady Aladdin leaping from her
underground grotto.
The two stood there a moment, looking up at the blue sky, and all about
at the June sunshine.
"If you go up high enough," observed Mary Louise, "the sunshine is almost
the same as it is in the country, isn't it?"
"I shouldn't wonder," said Charlie, "though Calvary cemetery is about as
near's I'll ever get to the country. Say, you can set here on this soap
box and let your feet hang down. The last janitor's wife used to hang
her washin' up here, I guess. I'll leave this door open, see?"
"You're so kind," smiled Mary Louise.
"Kin you blame me?" retorted the gallant Charles. And vanished.
Mary Louise, perched on the soap box, unwound her turban, draped the damp
towel over her shoulders, and shook out the wet masses of her hair. Now
the average girl shaking out the wet masses of her hair looks like a
drowned rat. But Nature had been kind to Mary Louise. She had given her
hair that curled in little ringlets when wet, and that waved in all the
right places when dry.
Just now it hung in damp, shining strands on either side of her face, so
that she looked most remarkably like one of those oval-faced, great-eyed,
red-lipped women that the old Italian artists were so fond of painting.
Below her, blazing in the sun, lay the great stone and iron city. Mary
Louise shook out her hair idly, with one hand, sniffed her parsley, shut
her eyes, threw back her head, and began to sing, beating time with her
heel against the soap box, and forgetting all about the letter that had
come that morning, stating that it was not from any lack of merit, etc.
She sang, and sniffed her parsley, and waggled her hair in the breeze,
and beat time, idly, with the heel of her little boot, when----
"Holy Cats!" exclaimed a man's voice. "What is this, anyway? A Coney
Island concession gone wrong?"
Mary Louise's eyes unclosed in a flash, and Mary Louise gazed upon an
irate-looking, youngish man, who wore shabby slippers, and no collar with
a full dress air.
"I presume that you are the janitor's beautiful daughter," growled the
collarless man.
"Well, not precisely," answered Mary Louise, sweetly. "Are you the
scrub-lady's stalwart son?"
"Ha!" exploded the man. "But then, all women look alike with their hair
down. I ask your pardon, though."
"Not at all," replied Mary Louise. "For that matter, all men look like
picked chickens with their collars off."
At that the collarless man, who until now had been standing on the top
step that led up to the roof, came slowly forward, stepped languidly over
a skylight or two, draped his handkerchief over a convenient chimney and
sat down, hugging his long, lean legs to him.
"Nice up here, isn't it?" he remarked.
"It was," said Mary Louise.
"Ha!" exploded he, again. Then, "Where's your mirror?" he demanded.
"Mirror?" echoed Mary Louise.
"Certainly. You have the hair, the comb, the attitude, and the general
Lorelei effect. Also your singing lured me to your shores."
"You didn't look lured," retorted Mary Louise. "You looked lurid."
"What's that stuff in your hand?" next demanded he. He really was a most
astonishingly rude young man.
"Parsley."
"Parsley!" shouted he, much as Charlie had done. "Well, what the----"
"Back home," elucidated Mary Louise once more, patiently, "after you've
washed your hair you dry it in the back yard, sitting on the grass, in
the sunshine and the breeze. And the garden smells come to you--the
nasturtiums, and the pansies, and the geraniums, you know, and even that
clean grass smell, and the pungent vegetable odor, and there are ants,
and bees, and butterflies----"
"Go on," urged the young man, eagerly.
"And Mrs. Next Door comes out to hang up a few stockings, and a jabot or
so, and a couple of baby dresses that she has just rubbed through, and
she calls out to you:
"'Washed your hair?'
"'Yes,' you say. 'It was something awful, and I wanted it nice for
Tuesday night. But I suppose I won't be able to do a thing with it.'
"And then Mrs. Next Door stands there a minute on the clothes-reel
platform, with the wind whipping her skirts about her, and the fresh
smell of the growing things coming to her. And suddenly she says: 'I
guess I'll wash mine too, while the baby's asleep.'"
The collarless young man rose from his chimney, picked up his
handkerchief, and moved to the chimney just next to Mary Louise's soap
box.
"Live here?" he asked, in his impolite way.
"If I did not, do you think that I would choose this as the one spot in
all New York in which to dry my hair?"
"When I said, 'Live here,' I didn't mean just that. I meant who are you,
and why are you here, and where do you come from, and do you sign your
real name to your stuff, or use a nom de plume?"
"Why--how did you know?" gasped Mary Louise.
"Give me five minutes more," grinned the keen-eyed young man, "and I'll
tell you what make your typewriter is, and where the last rejection slip
came from."
"Oh!" said Mary Louise again. "Then you are the scrub-lady's stalwart
son, and you've been ransacking my waste-basket."
Quite unheeding, the collarless man went on, "And so you thought you
could write, and you came on to New York (you know one doesn't just
travel to New York, or ride to it, or come to it; one 'comes on' to New
York), and now you're not so sure about the writing, h'm? And back home
what did you do?"
"Back home I taught school--and hated it. But I kept on teaching until
I'd saved five hundred dollars. Every other school ma'am in the world
teaches until she has saved five hundred dollars, and then she packs two
suit-cases, and goes to Europe from June until September. But I saved my
five hundred for New York. I've been here six months now, and the five
hundred has shrunk to almost nothing, and if I don't break into the
magazines pretty soon----"
"Then?"