"F-f-f----" The bewilderment in Orville Platt's face gave way to
anger. "Do you mean to tell me that you screeched like that because
my--because I moved my elbow?"
"Yes."
His anger deepened and reddened to fury. He choked. He had started
from his chair with his napkin in his hand. He still clutched it. Now
he crumpled it into a wad and hurled it to the center of the table,
where it struck a sugar bowl, dropped back, and uncrumpled slowly,
reprovingly. "You--you----" Then bewilderment closed down again like a
fog over his countenance. "But why? I can't see----"
"Because it--because I can't stand it any longer. Flapping. This is
what you do. Like this."
And she did it. Did it with insulting fidelity, being a clever mimic.
"Well, all I can say is you're crazy, yelling like that, for nothing."
"It isn't nothing."
"Isn't, huh? If that isn't nothing, what is?" They were growing
incoherent. "What d'you mean, screeching like a maniac? Like a wild
woman? The neighbors'll think I've killed you. What d'you mean,
anyway!"
"I mean I'm tired of watching it, that's what. Sick and tired."
"Y'are, huh? Well, young lady, just let me tell YOU something----"
He told her. There followed one of those incredible quarrels, as
sickening as they are human, which can take place only between two
people who love each other; who love each other so well that each knows
with cruel certainty the surest way to wound the other; and who stab,
and tear, and claw at these vulnerable spots in exact proportion to
their love.
Ugly words. Bitter words. Words that neither knew they knew flew
between them like sparks between steel striking steel.
From him: "Trouble with you is you haven't got enough to do. That's
the trouble with half you women. Just lay around the house, rotting.
I'm a fool, slaving on the road to keep a good-for-nothing----"
"I suppose you call sitting around hotel lobbies slaving! I suppose
the house runs itself! How about my evenings? Sitting here alone,
night after night, when you're on the road."
Finally, "Well, if you don't like it," he snarled, and lifted his chair
by the back and slammed it down, savagely, "if you don't like it, why
don't you get out, hm? Why don't you get out?"
And from her, her eyes narrowed to two slits, her cheeks scarlet:
"Why, thanks. I guess I will."
Ten minutes later he had flung out of the house to catch the 8:19 for
Manitowoc. He marched down the street, his shoulders swinging
rhythmically to the weight of the burden he carried--his black leather
handbag and the shiny tan sample case, battle-scarred, both, from many
encounters with ruthless porters and busmen and bellboys. For four
years, as he left for his semi-monthly trip, he and Terry had observed
a certain little ceremony (as had the neighbors). She would stand in
the doorway, watching him down the street, the heavier sample case
banging occasionally at his shin. The depot was only three blocks
away. Terry watched him with fond but unillusioned eyes, which proves
that she really loved him. He was a dapper, well-dressed fat man, with
a weakness for pronounced patterns in suitings, and addicted to
derbies. One week on the road, one week at home. That was his routine.
The wholesale grocery trade liked Platt, and he had for his customers
the fondness that a traveling salesman has who is successful in his
territory. Before his marriage to Terry Sheehan his little red address
book had been overwhelming proof against the theory that nobody loves a
fat man.
Terry, standing in the doorway, always knew that when he reached the
corner just where Schroeder's house threatened to hide him from view,
he would stop, drop the sample case, wave his hand just once, pick up
the sample case and go on, proceeding backward for a step or two until
Schroeder's house made good its threat. It was a comic scene in the
eyes of the onlooker, perhaps because a chubby Romeo offends the sense
of fitness. The neighbors, lurking behind their parlor curtains, had
laughed at first. But after a while they learned to look for that
little scene, and to take it unto themselves, as if it were a personal
thing. Fifteen-year wives whose husbands had long since abandoned
flowery farewells used to get a vicarious thrill out of it, and to eye
Terry with a sort of envy.
This morning Orville Platt did not even falter when he reached
Schroeder's corner. He marched straight on, looking steadily ahead,
the heavy bags swinging from either hand. Even if he had
stopped--though she knew he wouldn't--Terry Platt would not have seen
him. She remained seated at the disordered breakfast table, a
dreadfully still figure, and sinister; a figure of stone and fire, of
ice and flame. Over and over in her mind she was milling the things
she might have said to him, and had not. She brewed a hundred
vitriolic cruelties that she might have flung in his face. She would
concoct one biting brutality, and dismiss it for a second, and abandon
that for a third. She was too angry to cry--a dangerous state in a
woman. She was what is known as cold mad, so that her mind was working
clearly and with amazing swiftness, and yet as though it were a thing
detached; a thing that was no part of her.
She sat thus for the better part of an hour, motionless except for one
forefinger that was, quite unconsciously, tapping out a popular and
cheap little air that she had been strumming at the piano the evening
before, having bought it downtown that same afternoon. It had struck
Orville's fancy, and she had played it over and over for him. Her
right forefinger was playing the entire tune, and something in the back
of her head was following it accurately, though the separate thinking
process was going on just the same. Her eyes were bright, and wide,
and hot. Suddenly she became conscious of the musical antics of her
finger. She folded it in with its mates, so that her hand became a
fist. She stood up and stared down at the clutter of the breakfast
table. The egg--that fateful second egg--had congealed to a mottled
mess of yellow and white. The spoon lay on the cloth. His coffee, only
half consumed, showed tan with a cold gray film over it. A slice of
toast at the left of his plate seemed to grin at her with the
semi-circular wedge that he had bitten out of it.
Terry stared down at these congealing remnants. Then she laughed, a
hard high little laugh, pushed a plate away contemptuously with her
hand, and walked into the sitting room. On the piano was the piece of
music (Bennie Gottschalk's great song hit, "Hicky Boola") which she had
been playing the night before. She picked it up, tore it straight
across, once, placed the pieces back to back, and tore it across again.
Then she dropped the pieces to the floor.
"You bet I'm going," she said, as though concluding a train of thought.
"You just bet I'm going. Right now!" And Terry went. She went for
much the same reason as that given by the ladye of high degree in the
old English song--she who had left her lord and bed and board to go
with the raggle-taggle gipsies-O! The thing that was sending Terry
Platt away was much more than a conjugal quarrel precipitated by a
soft-boiled egg and a flap of the arm. It went so deep that it is
necessary to delve back to the days when Theresa Platt was Terry
Sheehan to get the real significance of it, and of the things she did
after she went.
When Mrs. Orville Platt had been Terry Sheehan, she had played the
piano, afternoons and evenings, in the orchestra of the Bijou Theater,
on Cass Street, Wetona, Wisconsin. Anyone with a name like Terry
Sheehan would, perforce, do well anything she might set out to do.
There was nothing of genius in Terry, but there was something of fire,
and much that was Irish. Which meant that the Watson Team, Eccentric
Song and Dance Artists, never needed a rehearsal when they played the
Bijou. Ruby Watson used merely to approach Terry before the Monday
performance, sheet music in hand, and say, "Listen, dearie. We've got
some new business I want to wise you to. Right here it goes 'TUM
dee-dee DUM dee-dee TUM DUM DUM.' See? Like that. And then Jim
vamps. Get me?"
Terry, at the piano, would pucker her pretty brow a moment. Then, "Like
this, you mean?"
"That's it! You've got it."
"All right. I'll tell the drum."
She could play any tune by ear, once heard. She got the spirit of a
thing, and transmitted it. When Terry played a martial number you
tapped the floor with your foot, and unconsciously straightened your
shoulders. When she played a home-and-mother song you hoped that the
man next to you didn't know you were crying (which he probably didn't,
because he was weeping, too).
At that time motion pictures had not attained their present virulence.
Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been crowded out by the
ubiquitous film. The Bijou offered entertainment of the
cigar-box-tramp variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettes
in slightly soiled pink, trained seals, and Family Fours with lumpy
legs who tossed each other about and struck Goldbergian attitudes.
Contact with these gave Terry Sheehan a semiprofessional tone. The more
conservative of her townspeople looked at her askance. There never had
been an evil thing about Terry, but Wetona considered her rather fly.
Terry's hair was very black, and she had a fondness for those little,
close-fitting scarlet turbans. Terry's mother had died when the girl
was eight, and Terry's father had been what is known as easygoing. A
good-natured, lovable, shiftless chap in the contracting business. He
drove around Wetona in a sagging, one-seated cart and never made any
money because he did honest work and charged as little for it as men
who did not. His mortar stuck, and his bricks did not crumble, and his
lumber did not crack. Riches are not acquired in the contracting
business in that way. Ed Sheehan and his daughter were great friends.
When he died (she was nineteen) they say she screamed once, like a
banshee, and dropped to the floor.
After they had straightened out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan's
gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to
practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou,
and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of
sophistication which comes from daily contact with the artificial world
of the footlights.
There are, in a small Midwest town like Wetona, just two kinds of
girls. Those who go downtown Saturday nights, and those who don't.
Terry, if she had not been busy with her job at the Bijou, would have
come in the first group. She craved excitement. There was little
chance to satisfy such craving in Wetona, but she managed to find
certain means. The traveling men from the Burke House just across the
street used to drop in at the Bijou for an evening's entertainment.
They usually sat well toward the front, and Terry's expert playing, and
the gloss of her black hair, and her piquant profile as she sometimes
looked up toward the stage for a signal from one of the performers
caught their fancy, and held it.
She found herself, at the end of a year or two, with a rather large
acquaintance among these peripatetic gentlemen. You occasionally saw
one of them strolling home with her. Sometimes she went driving with
one of them of a Sunday afternoon. And she rather enjoyed taking
Sunday dinner at the Burke Hotel with a favored friend. She thought
those small-town hotel Sunday dinners the last word in elegance. The
roast course was always accompanied by an aqueous, semifrozen
concoction which the bill of fare revealed as Roman Punch. It added a
royal touch to the repast, even when served with roast pork.
Terry was twenty-two when Orville Platt, making his initial Wisconsin
trip for the wholesale grocery house he represented, first beheld her
piquant Irish profile, and heard her deft manipulation of the keys.
Orville had the fat man's sense of rhythm and love of music. He had a
buttery tenor voice, too, of which he was rather proud.
He spent three days in Wetona that first trip, and every evening saw
him at the Bijou, first row, center. He stayed through two shows each
time, and before he had been there fifteen minutes Terry was conscious
of him through the back of her head. Orville Platt paid no more heed
to the stage, and what was occurring thereon, than if it had not been.
He sat looking at Terry, and waggling his head in time to the music.
Not that Terry was a beauty. But she was one of those immaculately
clean types. That look of fragrant cleanliness was her chief charm.
Her clear, smooth skin contributed to it, and the natural penciling of
her eyebrows. But the thing that accented it, and gave it a last
touch, was the way in which her black hair came down in a little point
just in the center of her forehead, where hair meets brow. It grew to
form what is known as a cowlick. (A prettier name for it is widow's
peak.) Your eye lighted on it, pleased, and from it traveled its
gratified way down her white temples, past her little ears, to the
smooth black coil at the nape of her neck. It was a trip that rested
you.
At the end of the last performance on the night of his second visit to
the Bijou, Orville waited until the audience had begun to file out.
Then he leaned forward over the rail that separated orchestra from
audience.
"Could you," he said, his tones dulcet, "could you oblige me with the
name of that last piece you played?"
Terry was stacking her music. "George!" she called to the drum.
"Gentleman wants to know the name of that last piece." And prepared to
leave.
"'My Georgia Crackerjack,'" said the laconic drum.
Orville Platt took a hasty side step in the direction of the door
toward which Terry was headed. "It's a pretty thing," he said
fervently. "An awful pretty thing. Thanks. It's beautiful."
Terry flung a last insult at him over her shoulder: "Don't thank ME
for it. I didn't write it."
Orville Platt did not go across the street to the hotel. He wandered
up Cass Street, and into the ten-o'clock quiet of Main Street, and down
as far as the park and back. "Pretty as a pink! And play! ... And
good, too. Good."
A fat man in love.
At the end of six months they were married. Terry was surprised into
it. Not that she was not fond of him. She was; and grateful to him,
as well. For, pretty as she was, no man had ever before asked Terry to
be his wife. They had made love to her. They had paid court to her.
They had sent her large boxes of stale drugstore chocolates, and called
her endearing names as they made cautious declarations such as:
"I've known a lot of girls, but you've got something different. I don't
know. You've got so much sense. A fellow can chum around with you.
Little pal."
Wetona would be their home. They rented a comfortable, seven-room
house in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood, and Terry dropped
the red velvet turbans and went in for picture hats. Orville bought
her a piano whose tone was so good that to her ear, accustomed to the
metallic discords of the Bijou instrument, it sounded out of tune. She
played a great deal at first, but unconsciously she missed the sharp
spat of applause that used to follow her public performance. She would
play a piece, brilliantly, and then her hands would drop to her lap.
And the silence of her own sitting room would fall flat on her ears.
It was better on the evenings when Orville was home. He sang, in his
throaty, fat man's tenor, to Terry's expert accompaniment.
"This is better than playing for those ham actors, isn't it, hon?" And
he would pinch her ear.
"Sure"--listlessly.
But after the first year she became accustomed to what she termed
private life. She joined an afternoon sewing club, and was active in
the ladies' branch of the U.C.T. She developed a knack at cooking,
too, and Orville, after a week or ten days of hotel fare in small
Wisconsin towns, would come home to sea-foam biscuits, and real soup,
and honest pies and cake. Sometimes, in the midst of an appetizing
meal he would lay down his knife and fork and lean back in his chair,
and regard the cool and unruffled Terry with a sort of reverence in his
eyes. Then he would get up, and come around to the other side of the
table, and tip her pretty face up to his.
"I'll bet I'll wake up, someday, and find out it's all a dream. You
know this kind of thing doesn't really happen--not to a dub like me."
One year; two; three; four. Routine. A little boredom. Some
impatience. She began to find fault with the very things she had liked
in him: his superneatness; his fondness for dashing suit patterns; his
throaty tenor; his worship of her. And the flap. Oh, above all, that
flap! That little, innocent, meaningless mannerism that made her
tremble with nervousness. She hated it so that she could not trust
herself to speak of it to him. That was the trouble. Had she spoken
of it, laughingly or in earnest, before it became an obsession with
her, that hideous breakfast quarrel, with its taunts, and revilings,
and open hate, might never have come to pass.
Terry Platt herself didn't know what was the matter with her. She would
have denied that anything was wrong. She didn't even throw her hands
above her head and shriek: "I want to live! I want to live! I want
to live!" like a lady in a play. She only knew she was sick of sewing
at the Wetona West End Red Cross shop; sick of marketing, of home
comforts, of Orville, of the flap.
Orville, you may remember, left at 8:19. The 11:23 bore Terry
Chicago-ward. She had left the house as it was--beds unmade, rooms
unswept, breakfast table uncleared. She intended never to come back.
Now and then a picture of the chaos she had left behind would flash
across her order-loving mind. The spoon on the tablecloth.
Orville's pajamas dangling over the bathroom chair. The coffeepot on
the gas stove.
"Pooh! What do I care?"
In her pocketbook she had a tidy sum saved out of the housekeeping
money. She was naturally thrifty, and Orville had never been
niggardly. Her meals when Orville was on the road had been those
sketchy, haphazard affairs with which women content themselves when
their household is manless. At noon she went into the dining car and
ordered a flaunting little repast of chicken salad and asparagus and
Neapolitan ice cream. The men in the dining car eyed her speculatively
and with appreciation. Then their glance dropped to the third finger of
her left hand, and wandered away. She had meant to remove it. In
fact, she had taken it off and dropped it into her bag. But her hand
felt so queer, so unaccustomed, so naked, that she had found herself
slipping the narrow band on again, and her thumb groped for it,
gratefully.
It was almost five o'clock when she reached Chicago. She felt no
uncertainty or bewilderment. She had been in Chicago three or four
times since her marriage. She went to a downtown hotel. It was too
late, she told herself, to look for a less expensive room that night.
When she had tidied herself she went out. The things she did were the
childish, aimless things that one does who finds herself in possession
of sudden liberty. She walked up State Street, and stared in the
windows; came back, turned into Madison, passed a bright little shop in
the window of which taffy-white and gold--was being wound endlessly and
fascinatingly about a double-jointed machine. She went in and bought a
sackful, and wandered on down the street, munching.
She had supper at one of those white-tiled sarcophagi that emblazon
Chicago's downtown side streets. It had been her original intention to
dine in state in the rose-and-gold dining room of her hotel. She had
even thought daringly of lobster. But at the last moment she recoiled
from the idea of dining alone in that wilderness of tables so obviously
meant for two.
After her supper she went to a picture show. She was amazed to find
there, instead of the accustomed orchestra, a pipe organ that panted
and throbbed and rumbled over lugubrious classics. The picture was
about a faithless wife. Terry left in the middle of it.
She awoke next morning at seven, as usual, started up wildly, looked
around, and dropped back. Nothing to get up for. The knowledge did
not fill her with a rush of relief. She would have her breakfast in
bed. She telephoned for it, languidly. But when it came she got up
and ate it from the table, after all.
That morning she found a fairly comfortable room, more within her
means, on the North Side in the boardinghouse district. She unpacked
and hung up her clothes and drifted downtown again, idly. It was noon
when she came to the corner of State and Madison Streets. It was a
maelstrom that caught her up, and buffeted her about, and tossed her
helplessly this way and that.
The thousands jostled Terry, and knocked her hat awry, and dug her with
unheeding elbows, and stepped on her feet.
"Say, look here!" she said once futilely. They did not stop to listen.
State and Madison has no time for Terrys from Wetona. It goes its way,
pell-mell. If it saw Terry at all it saw her only as a prettyish
person, in the wrong kind of suit and hat, with a bewildered, resentful
look on her face.
Terry drifted on down the west side of State Street, with the hurrying
crowd. State and Monroe. A sound came to Terry's ears.
A sound familiar, beloved. To her ear, harassed with the roar and
crash, with the shrill scream of the whistle of the policeman at the
crossing, with the hiss of feet shuffling on cement, it was a celestial
strain. She looked up, toward the sound. A great second-story window
opened wide to the street. In it a girl at a piano, and a man,
red-faced, singing through a megaphone. And on a flaring red and green
sign: