another picture had invaded, even superseded the old. A stamp-photograph
likeness of Mr. James P. Batch in the corner of Miss Slayback's mirror,
and thereafter No Man's slippers became number eight-and-a-half C, and
the hearth a gilded radiator in a dining-living-room somewhere between
the Fourteenth Street Subway and the land of the Bronx.
How Miss Slayback, by habit not gregarious, met Mr. Batch is of no
consequence, except to those snug ones of us to whom an introduction is
the only means to such an end.
At a six o'clock that invaded even Union Square with heliotrope dusk,
Mr. James Batch mistook, who shall say otherwise, Miss Gertie Slayback,
as she stepped down into the wintry shade of a Subway kiosk, for Miss
Whodoesitmatter. At seven o'clock, over a dish of lamb stew _a la_ White
Kitchen, he confessed, and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise
and too little indignation, try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and
week-out days of hairpins and darning-balls, and then, at a heliotrope
dusk, James P. Batch, in invitational mood, stepping in between it and
the papered walls of a dun-colored evening. To further enlist your
tolerance, Gertie Slayback's eyes were as blue as the noon of June, and
James P. Batch, in a belted-in coat and five kid finger-points
protruding ever so slightly and rightly from a breast pocket, was hewn
and honed in the image of youth. His the smile of one for whom life's
cup holds a heady wine, a wrinkle or two at the eye only serving to
enhance that smile; a one-inch feather stuck upright in his derby
hatband.
It was a forelock once stamped a Corsican with the look of emperor. It
was this hat feather, a cock's feather at that and worn without sense of
humor, to which Miss Slayback was fond of attributing the consequences
of that heliotrope dusk.
"It was the feather in your cap did it, Jimmie. I can see you yet,
stepping up with that innocent grin of yours. You think I didn't know
you were flirting? Cousin from Long Island City! 'Say,' I says to
myself, I says, 'I look as much like his cousin from Long Island City,
if he's got one, as my cousin from Hoboken (and I haven't got any) would
look like my sister if I had one.' It was that sassy little feather in
your hat!"
They would laugh over this ever-green reminiscence on Sunday park
benches and at intermission at moving pictures when they remained
through it to see the show twice. Be the landlady's front parlor ever so
permanently rented out, the motion-picture theater has brought to
thousands of young city starvelings, if not the quietude of the home,
then at least the warmth and a juxtaposition and a deep darkness that
can lave the sub-basement throb of temples and is filled with music with
a hum in it.
For two years and eight months of Saturday nights, each one of them a
semaphore dropping out across the gray road of the week, Gertie Slayback
and Jimmie Batch dined for one hour and sixty cents at the White
Kitchen. Then arm and arm up the million-candle-power flare of Broadway,
content, these two who had never seen a lake reflect a moon, or a slim
fir pointing to a star, that life could be so manifold. And always, too,
on Saturday, the tenth from the last row of the De Luxe Cinematograph,
Broadway's Best, Orchestra Chairs, fifty cents; Last Ten Rows,
thirty-five. The give of velvet-upholstered chairs, perfumed darkness,
and any old love story moving across it to the ecstatic ache of Gertie
Slayback's high young heart.
On a Saturday evening that was already pointed with stars at the
six-o'clock closing of Hoffheimer's Fourteenth Street Emporium, Miss
Slayback, whose blondness under fatigue could become ashy, emerged from
the Bargain Basement almost the first of its frantic exodus, taking the
place of her weekly appointment in the entrance of the Popular Drug
Store adjoining, her gaze, something even frantic in it, sifting the
passing crowd.
At six o'clock Fourteenth Street pours up from its basements, down from
its lofts, and out from its five-and-ten-cent stores, shows, and
arcades, in a great homeward torrent--a sweeping torrent that flows full
flush to the Subway, the Elevated, and the surface car, and then spreads
thinly into the least pretentious of the city's homes--the five flights
up, the two rooms rear, and the third floor back.
Standing there, this eager tide of the Fourteenth Street Emporium, thus
released by the six-o'clock flood-gates, flowed past Miss Slayback.
White-nosed, low-chested girls in short-vamp shoes and no-carat gold
vanity-cases. Older men resigned that ambition could be flayed by a
yard-stick; young men still impatient of their clerkship.
It was into the trickle of these last that Miss Slayback bored her
glance, the darting, eager glance of hot eyeballs and inner trembling.
She was not so pathetically young as she was pathetically blond, a
treacherous, ready-to-fade kind of blondness that one day, now that she
had found that very morning her first gray hair, would leave her ashy.
Suddenly, with a small catch of breath that was audible in her throat,
Miss Slayback stepped out of that doorway, squirming her way across the
tight congestion of the sidewalk to its curb, then in and out, brushing
this elbow and that shoulder, worming her way in an absolutely supreme
anxiety to keep in view a brown derby hat bobbing right briskly along
with the crowd, a greenish-black bit of feather upright in its band.
At Broadway, Fourteenth Street cuts quite a caper, deploying out into
Union Square, an island of park, beginning to be succulent at the first
false feint of spring, rising as it were from a sea of asphalt. Across
this park Miss Slayback worked her rather frenzied way, breaking into a
run when the derby threatened to sink into the confusion of a hundred
others, and finally learning to keep its course by the faint but
distinguishing fact of a slight dent in the crown. At Broadway, some
blocks before that highway bursts into its famous flare, Mr. Batch, than
whom it was no other, turned off suddenly at right angles down into a
dim pocket of side-street and into the illuminated entrance of Ceiner's
Cafe Hungarian. Meals at all hours. Lunch, thirty cents. Dinner, fifty
cents. Our Goulash is Famous.
New York, which expresses itself in more languages to the square block
than any other area in the world, Babylon included, loves thus to dine
linguistically, so to speak. To the Crescent Turkish Restaurant for its
Business Men's Lunch comes Fourth Avenue, whose antique-shop patois
reads across the page from right to left. Sight-seeing automobiles on
mission and commission bent allow Altoona, Iowa City, and Quincy,
Illinois, fifteen minutes' stop-in at Ching Ling-Foo's Chinatown
Delmonico's. Spaghetti and red wine have set New York racing to reserve
its table d'hotes. All except the Latin race.
Jimmie Batch, who had first seen light, and that gaslight, in a block in
lower Manhattan which has since been given over to a milk-station for a
highly congested district, had the palate, if not the purse, of the
cosmopolite. His digestive range included _borsch_ and _chow main_;
_risotta_ and "ham and."
To-night, as he turned into Cafe Hungarian, Miss Slayback slowed and
drew back into the overshadowing protection of an adjoining
office-building. She was breathing hard, and her little face, somehow
smaller from chill, was nevertheless a high pink at the cheek-bones.
The wind swept around the corner, jerking her hat, and her hand flew up
to it. There was a fair stream of passers-by even here, and occasionally
one turned for a backward glance at her standing there so frankly
indeterminate.
Suddenly Miss Slayback adjusted her tam-o'-shanter to its flop over her
right ear, and, drawing off a pair of dark-blue silk gloves from over
immaculately new white ones, entered Ceiner's Cafe Hungarian. In its
light she was not so obviously blonder than young, the pink spots in her
cheeks had a deepening value to the blue of her eyes, and a black velvet
tam-o'-shanter revealing just the right fringe of yellow curls is no
mean aid.
First of all, Ceiner's is an eating-place. There is no music except at
five cents in the slot, and its tables for four are perpetually set each
with a dish of sliced radishes, a bouquet of celery, and a mound of
bread, half the stack rye. Its menus are well thumbed and badly
mimeographed. Who enters Ceiner's is prepared to dine from barley soup
to apple strudel. At something after six begins the rising sound of
cutlery, and already the new-comer fears to find no table.
Off at the side, Mr. Jimmie Batch had already disposed of his hat and
gray overcoat, and tilting the chair opposite him to indicate its
reservation, shook open his evening paper, the waiter withholding the
menu at this sign of rendezvous.
Straight toward that table Miss Slayback worked quick, swift way,
through this and that aisle, jerking back and seating herself on the
chair opposite almost before Mr. Batch could raise his eyes from off the
sporting page.
There was an instant of silence between them--the kind of silence that
can shape itself into a commentary upon the inefficacy of mere speech--a
widening silence which, as they sat there facing, deepened until, when
she finally spoke, it was as if her words were pebbles dropping down
into a well.
"Don't look so surprised, Jimmie," she said, propping her face calmly,
even boldly, into the white-kid palms. "You might fall off the Christmas
tree."
Above the snug, four-inch collar and bow tie Mr. Batch's face was taking
on a dull ox-blood tinge that spread back, even reddening his ears. Mr.
Batch had the frontal bone of a clerk, the horn-rimmed glasses of the
literarily astigmatic, and the sartorial perfection that only the rich
can afford not to attain.
He was staring now quite frankly, and his mouth had fallen open. "Gert!"
he said.
"Yes," said Miss Slayback, her insouciance gaining with his
discomposure, her eyes widening and then a dolly kind of glassiness
seeming to set in. "You wasn't expecting me, Jimmie?"
He jerked up his hand, not meeting her glance. "What's the idea of the
comedy?"
"You don't look glad to see me, Jimmie."
"If you--think you're funny."
She was working out of and then back into the freshly white gloves in a
betraying kind of nervousness that belied the toss of her voice. "Well,
of all things! Mad-cat! Mad, just because you didn't seem to be
expecting me."
"I--There's some things that are just the limit, that's what they are.
Some things that are just the limit, that no fellow would stand from any
girl, and this--this is one of them."
Her lips were trembling now. "You--you bet your life there's some things
that are just the limit."
He slid out his watch, pushing back. "Well, I guess this place is too
small for a fellow and a girl that can follow him around the town like
a--like----"
She sat forward, grasping the table-sides, her chair tilting with her.
"Don't you dare to get up and leave me sitting here! Jimmie Batch, don't
you dare!"
The waiter intervened, card extended.
"We--we're waiting for another party," said Miss Slayback, her hands
still rigidly over the table-sides and her glance like a steady drill
into Mr. Batch's own.
There was a second of this silence while the waiter withdrew, and then
Mr. Batch whipped out his watch again, a gun-metal one with an open
face.
"Now look here. I got a date here in ten minutes, and one or the other
of us has got to clear. You--you're one too many, if you got to know
it."
"Oh, I do know it, Jimmie! I been one too many for the last four
Saturday nights. I been one too many ever since May Scully came into
five hundred dollars' inheritance and quit the Ladies' Neckwear. I been
one too many ever since May Scully became a lady."
"If I was a girl and didn't have more shame!"
"Shame! Now you're shouting, Jimmie Batch. I haven't got shame, and I
don't care who knows it. A girl don't stop to have shame when she's
fighting for her rights."
He was leaning on his elbow, profile to her. "That movie talk can't
scare me. You can't tell me what to do and what not to do. I've given
you a square deal all right. There's not a word ever passed between us
that ties me to your apron-strings. I don't say I'm not without my
obligations to you, but that's not one of them. No, siree--no
apron-strings."
"I know it isn't, Jimmie. You're the kind of a fellow wouldn't even talk
to himself for fear of committing himself."
"I got a date here now any minute, Gert, and the sooner you----"
"You're the guy who passed up the Sixty-first for the Safety First
regiment."
"I'll show you my regiment some day."
"I--I know you're not tied to my apron-strings, Jimmie. I--I wouldn't
have you there for anything. Don't you think I know you too well for
that? That's just it. Nobody on God's earth knows you the way I do. I
know you better than you know yourself."
"You better beat it, Gertie. I tell you I'm getting sore."
Her face flashed from him to the door and back again, her anxiety almost
edged with hysteria. "Come on, Jimmie--out the side entrance before she
gets here. May Scully ain't the company for you. You think if she was,
honey, I'd--I'd see myself come butting in between you this way,
like--like a--common girl? She's not the girl to keep you straight.
Honest to God she's not, honey."
"My business is my business, let me tell you that."
"She's speedy, Jimmie. She was the speediest girl on the main floor, and
now that she's come into those five hundred, instead of planting it for
a rainy day, she's quit work and gone plumb crazy with it."
"When I want advice about my friends I ask for it."
"It's not the good name that worries me, Jimmie, because she ain't got
any. It's you. She's got you crazy with that five hundred, too--that's
what's got me scared."
"Gee! you ought to let the Salvation Army tie a bonnet under your
chin."
"She's always had her eyes on you, Jimmie. Ain't you men got no sense
for seein' things? Since the day they moved the Gents' Furnishings
across from the Ladies' Neckwear she's had you spotted. Her goings-on
used to leak down to the basement, alrighty. She's not a good girl, May
ain't, Jimmie. She ain't, and you know it. Is she? Is she?"
"Aw!" said Jimmie Batch.
"You see! See! Ain't got the nerve to answer, have you?"
"Aw--maybe I know, too that she's not the kind of a girl that would turn
up where she's not----"
"If you wasn't a classy-looking kind of boy, Jimmie, that a fly girl
like May likes to be seen out with, she couldn't find you with
magnifying glasses, not if you was born with the golden rule in your
mouth and had swallowed it. She's not the kind of girl, Jimmie, a fellow
like you needs behind him. If--if you was ever to marry her and get your
hands on them five hundred dollars----"
"It would be my business."
"It'll be your ruination. You're not strong enough to stand up under
nothing like that. With a few hundred unearned dollars in your pocket
you--you'd go up in spontaneous combustion, you would."
"It would be my own spontaneous combustion."
"You got to be drove, Jimmie, like a kid. With them few dollars you
wouldn't start up a little cigar-store like you think you would. You and
her would blow yourselves to the dogs in two months. Cigar-stores ain't
the place for you, Jimmie. You seen how only clerking in them was nearly
your ruination--the little gambling-room-in-the-back kind that you pick
out. They ain't cigar-stores; they're only false faces for gambling."
"You know it all, don't you?"
"Oh, I'm dealing it to you straight! There's too many sporty crowds
loafing around those joints for a fellow like you to stand up under. I
found you in one, and as yellow-fingered and as loafing as they come, a
new job a week, a----"
"Yeh, and there was some pep to variety, too."
"Don't throw over, Jimmie, what my getting you out of it to a decent job
in a department store has begun to do for you. And you're making good,
too. Higgins teld me to-day, if you don't let your head swell, there
won't be a fellow in the department can stack up his sales-book any
higher."
"Aw!"
"Don't throw it all over, Jimmie--and me--for a crop of dyed red hair
and a few dollars to ruin yourself with."
He shot her a look of constantly growing nervousness, his mouth pulled
to an oblique, his glance constantly toward the door.
"Don't keep no date with her to-night, Jimmie. You haven't got the
constitution to stand her pace. It's telling on you. Look at those
fingers yellowing again--looka----"
"They're my fingers, ain't they?"
"You see, Jimmie, I--I'm the only person in the world that likes you
just for what--you ain't--and hasn't got any pipe dreams about you.
That's what counts, Jimmie, the folks that like you in spite, and not
because of."
"We will now sing psalm number two hundred and twenty-three."
"I know there's not a better fellow in the world if he's kept nailed to
the right job, and I know, too, there's not another fellow can go to the
dogs any easier."
"To hear you talk, you'd think I was about six."
"I'm the only girl that'll ever be willing to make a whip out of herself
that'll keep you going and won't sting, honey. I know you're soft and
lazy and selfish and----"
"Don't forget any."
"And I know you're my good-looking good-for-nothing, and I know, too,
that you--you don't care as much--as much for me from head to toe as I
do for your little finger. But I--like you just the same, Jimmie.
That--that's what I mean about having no shame. I--do like you so--so
terribly, Jimmie."
"Aw now--Gert!"
"I know it, Jimmie--that I ought to be ashamed. Don't think I haven't
cried myself to sleep with it whole nights in succession."
"Aw now--Gert!"
"Don't think I don't know it, that I'm laying myself before you pretty
common. I know it's common for a girl to--to come to a fellow like this,
but--but I haven't got any shame about it--I haven't got anything,
Jimmie, except fight for--for what's eating me. And the way things are
between us now is eating me."
"I---- Why, I got a mighty high regard for you, Gert."
"There's a time in a girl's life, Jimmie, when she's been starved like I
have for something of her own all her days; there's times, no matter how
she's held in, that all of a sudden comes a minute when she busts out."
"I understand, Gert, but----"
"For two years and eight months, Jimmie, life has got to be worth while
living to me because I could see the day, even if we--you--never talked
about it, when you would be made over from a flip kid to--to the kind of
a fellow would want to settle down to making a little two-by-four home
for us. A little two-by-four all our own, with you steady on the job and
advanced maybe to forty or fifty a week and----"
"For God's sake, Gertie, this ain't the time or the place to----"
"Oh yes, it is! It's got to be, because it's the first time in four
weeks that you didn't see me coming first."
"But not now, Gert. I----"
"I'm not ashamed to tell you, Jimmie Batch, that I've been the making
of you since that night you threw the wink at me. And--and it hurts,
this does. God! how it hurts!"
He was pleating the table-cloth, swallowing as if his throat had
constricted, and still rearing his head this way and that in the tight
collar.
"I--never claimed not to be a bad egg. This ain't the time and the place
for rehashing, that's all. Sure you been a friend to me. I don't say you
haven't. Only I can't be bossed by a girl like you. I don't say May
Scully's any better than she ought to be. Only that's my business. You
hear? my business. I got to have life and see a darn sight more future
for myself than selling shirts in a Fourteenth Street department store."
"May Scully can't give it to you--her and her fast crowd."
"Maybe she can and maybe she can't."
"Them few dollars won't make you; they'll break you."
"That's for her to decide, not you."
"I'll tell her myself. I'll face her right here and----"
"Now, look here, if you think I'm going to be let in for a holy show
between you two girls, you got another think coming. One of us has got
to clear out of here, and quick, too. You been talking about the side
door; there it is. In five minutes I got a date in this place that I
thought I could keep like any law-abiding citizen. One of us has got to
clear, and quick, too. Gad! you wimmin make me sick, the whole lot of
you!"
"If anything makes you sick, I know what it is. It's dodging me to fly
around all hours of the night with May Scully, the girl who put the tang
in tango. It's eating around in swell sixty-cent restaurants like this
and----"
"Gad! your middle name ought to be Nagalene."
"Aw, now, Jimmie, maybe it does sound like nagging, but it ain't, honey.
It--it's only my--my fear that I'm losing you, and--and my hate for the
every-day grind of things, and----"
"I can't help that, can I?"
"Why, there--there's nothing on God's earth I hate, Jimmie, like I hate
that Bargain-Basement. When I think it's down there in that manhole I've
spent the best years of my life, I--I wanna die. The day I get out of
it, the day I don't have to punch that old time-clock down there next to
the Complaints and Adjustment Desk, I--I'll never put my foot below
sidewalk level again to the hour I die. Not even if it was to take a
walk in my own gold-mine."
"It ain't exactly a garden of roses down there."
"Why, I hate it so terrible, Jimmie, that sometimes I wake up nights
gritting my teeth with the smell of steam-pipes and the tramp of feet on
the glass sidewalk up over me. Oh, God! you dunno--you dunno!"
"When it comes to that, the main floor ain't exactly a maiden's dream,
or a fellow's, for that matter."
"With a man it's different. It's his job in life, earning, and--and the
woman making the two ends of it meet. That's why, Jimmie, these last two
years and eight months, if not for what I was hoping for us,
why--why--I--why, on your twenty a week, Jimmie, there's nobody could
run a flat like I could. Why, the days wouldn't be long enough to putter
in. I--Don't throw away what I been building up for us, Jimmie, step by
step! Don't, Jimmie!'
"Good Lord, girl! You deserve better'n me."
"I know I got a big job, Jimmie, but I want to make a man out of you,
temper, laziness, gambling, and all. You got it in you to be something
more than a tango lizard or a cigar-store bum, honey. It's only you
ain't got the stuff in you to stand up under a five-hundred-dollar
windfall and--a--and a sporty girl. If--if two glasses of beer make you
as silly as they do, Jimmie, why, five hundred dollars would land you
under the table for life."
"Aw--there you go again!"
"I can't help it, Jimmie. It's because I never knew a fellow had what's
he's cut out for written all over him so. You're a born clerk, Jimmie."
"Sure, I'm a slick clerk, but----"
"You're born to be a clerk, a good clerk, even a two-hundred-a-month
clerk, the way you can win the trade, but never your own boss. I know
what I'm talking about. I know your measure better than any human on
earth can ever know your measure. I know things about you that you don't
even know yourself."
"I never set myself up to nobody for anything I wasn't."
"Maybe not, Jimmie, but I know about you and--and that Central Street
gang that time, and----"
"You!"
"Yes, honey, and there's not another human living but me knows how
little it was your fault. Just bad company, that was all. That's how
much I--I love you, Jimmie, enough to understand that. Why, if I thought
May Scully and a set-up in business was the thing for you, Jimmie, I'd
say to her, I'd say, if it was like taking my own heart out in my hand
and squashing it, I'd say to her, I'd say, 'Take him, May.' That's how
I--I love you, Jimmie. Oh, ain't it nothing, honey, a girl can come here
and lay herself this low to you----"
"Well, haven't I just said you--you deserve better."
"I don't want better, Jimmie. I want you. I want to take hold of your
life and finish the job of making it the kind we can both be proud of.
Us two, Jimmie, in--in our own decent two-by-four. Shopping on Saturday
nights. Frying in our own frying-pan in our own kitchen. Listening to
our own phonograph in our own parlor. Geraniums and--and kids--and--and
things. Gas-logs. Stationary washtubs. Jimmie! Jimmie!"
Mr. James P. Batch reached up for his hat and overcoat, cramming the
newspaper into a rear pocket.
"Come on," he said, stalking toward the side door and not waiting to see
her to her feet.
Outside, a banner of stars was over the narrow street. For a chain of
five blocks he walked, with a silence and speed that Miss Slayback could
only match with a running quickstep. But she was not out of breath. Her
head was up, and her hand where it hooked into Mr. Batch's elbow, was in
a vise that tightened with each block.