Tuesday morning Miss Willett’s intermittent little alarm-clock did its
third violent song and dance by the side of her bed before she mustered
enough energy to reach down and switch the silencing lever. Turning her
feet out on the floor, she sat drooping on the side of the bed, holding
her face in her hands. After a while, standing up, she yawned and
stretched with large listlessness, and walked to the one window in her
second-floor rear room.
It looked out on a double row of dingy back yards belonging to the
old-style, brown-stone houses that had fallen from the high estate of
private residences to the low estate of converted “light-housekeeping”
apartments. Directly opposite her window, in the back yard of the house
fronting northward on East Thirty-sixth Street, was a small brick
building. Originally, she judged, it had been used as a stable. She
wondered what it was used for now; herself a “light housekeeper,” she
knew that they did not often keep carriages and automobiles in their
back yards.
It occurred to her that she was still in her nightgown, and that her
pale-yellow hair, which she had unpinned and shaken out, was falling
about her shoulders and that people might see her. What if they did? Who
cared?
All at once there leaped upon the threshold of her consciousness the
suspicion that some one _was_ peering at her from behind the one small
window in the south end of the old stable, hardly twenty feet away. The
window was partly hidden by a green blind now closed but the slats were
tilted open, and there was a dimly silhouetting light behind the peering
figure, probably from a window or door on one of the unseen sides of the
building. Miss Willett could not discern the eyes clearly, but she knew
now that they were there. Well, let him rubber. She did not trouble to
ask why she had said to herself “him.” Shifting her eyes from the stable
window, she began smoothing, as if absent-mindedly, at the wrinkles in
the gown about her neck.
Miss Willett was waiting anxiously and planning. Down on Third Avenue a
house was being torn down to make room for a taller building. Through
the irregular gap the summer sun was raking the double line of grimy
back yards with a shallow, narrow shaft of warm white light rising
higher every minute. Already it rested on the east side and rear of the
old stable, its upper edge cutting just under the window-sill.
“If the blackguard waits, I’ll catch him with the sun,” Miss Willett
said savagely, straining to keep her eyes away from the window until the
light should rise and enter the slats of the blind.
Over in the east a cloud slid darkly across the accomplice sun. Miss
Willett shook her hair forward and began running her hands back through
it, to hold the leering peeper until the revelation and the punishment.
A little gray kitten came around the far corner of the stable, stepping
with great daintiness through the tin cans and glass and broken
furniture in the dirty yard. The big woman welcomed the little kitten;
he would be a useful object upon which to attach her eyes until the
proper time, and while she gathered her utmost resources to curdle her
plump, kindly face in the disgusted grimace she used upon this kind of
man. She had not been in department-store toilet articles ten years for
nothing. And this morning she felt that it would ease her powerfully to
squelch a man.
There was no need of gaps in the serried old buildings for the young
summer season to get down into these back yards. It came in through the
open window, touching Miss Willett. The wind was soft, like silk, and
fiery sweet, like an alcoholic toilet water. There was in it the faint
fragrance of millions of flowers, like the perfume she used to sell at
Pfefferbaum’s for five dollars an ounce.
“I’ve got him!” she almost shouted to herself as the cloud slipped
suddenly from across the sun. But the corners of her mouth did not draw
down, and her upper lip and snub nose did not lift as if she were making
desperate, but futile, efforts to avoid smelling something unspeakably
evil. The brown-bearded face behind the blind, lit up for a moment,
was--not what she had expected. No man’s eyes had ever before looked
like that at her. They were not staring; they did not leer. They had in
them something akin to timidity, a fearful wistfulness, a yearning
tenderness; and Miss Willett was sorry that the sun’s shaft had now been
blotted out by a cloud and no longer disclosed the face.
Sighing, she turned away. Pulling aside a huge-figured dust-curtain
hanging across a corner of the room, she surveyed her wardrobe.
“An’ not a decent dress in the lot,” she summarized gloomily. “Gee! an’
I ain’t got no job, neither, to buy another one with.”
Miss Willett had received notice the day before. For five weeks she had
been earning the highest salary that had come to her in her life--twenty
dollars a week as a demonstrator of Bimber’s Patent Baby Bed. For five
weeks, clothed in the handsome costume of a nurse (supplied by Mr.
Bimber), she had stood in a show-window at Broadway and Twenty-third
Street illustrating the marvelous and manifold uses of the patent baby
bed, the other actor in the pantomime being a dummy baby with a
celluloid head whom she called the Princess Bimberino.
According to her employer, she had not fulfilled his expectations;
having learned the mechanism of the bed, she had not acted with any
“ginger,” she had not exhibited the hoped-for “pep.” In her hands, Mr.
Bimber had said the day before, when giving her notice, the Princess
Bimberino was only a dummy and the patent bed only a wearisome piece of
machinery out of which she had been making twenty dollars a week and
through which the company had been losing two hundred dollars.
When Miss Willett reported for work at 8:45 o’clock a mob of twenty or
thirty prospective demonstrators who had answered Mr. Bimber’s
advertisement in the morning papers were waiting out in the hall in
front of the office.
“Get on your nurse’s rig, Miss Willett,” he said briskly, “an’ do the
job while I weed out that bunch. I guess you’ll be free by noon all
right--to look around for another job. But I’m payin’ you for this week,
an’ your time is mine if I want it.”
At nine o’clock Miss Willett stepped up on the show-window stage, ran up
the curtains hiding Twenty-third Street on the one side and Madison
Square Park on the other, and set herself to do the last sad lap of her
twenty-dollar job. Lifting the Princess Bimberino in her arms, she
noticed that the long white dress of the royal infant had lost its
freshness and that some of the lace at the bottom was torn and hanging.
She had not noticed the princess’s dress before.
“Bless her heart!” the big woman whispered contritely, squeezing the
princess hard against her breast. “Bless her heart! nobody looks after
_her_. Your muzzer’s goin’ to make you a brand-new dress even if she is
losin’ her job. God knows, honey, I reckon I’ll have plenty of spare
time in the next few days. It’s toilet articles again for mine, I
reckon, at ten per; an’, stars above! how I hate the things now!”
In the shifting hundreds that stopped and gazed in at Bimber’s Patent
Baby Bed exhibit during the morning there were more than the usual
number of women. At almost any moment an Italian or Jewish mother with a
baby in her arms joined the inlooking crowd. At the conclusion of every
part of the didactic pantomime, and while she was putting on the stand
the black-lettered card telling the use she had just demonstrated, Miss
Willett’s round, gray eyes were searching hungrily through the
spectators until she found one of these mothers, and then they smiled
across the silent chasm of the plate-glass window in the eager, instant
intimacy of common motherhood.
During a five-minute rest in the middle of the morning, holding the
royal infant close up in her arms, Miss Willett turned her chair to face
the Broadway side, and sat staring out at the park, just across the
street. The old trees waved their young green branches at her, beckoning
her to look. The multitude of flowers, banked row on row around the
leaping fountain, lifted their hot faces to the kisses of the sun. The
big woman leaned over suddenly and kissed the Princess Bimberino.
At 12:30 o’clock Mr. Bimber stepped up on the stage. His large,
fat-padded, black eyes were shining. His stubby hands rubbed themselves
together as if they were feeling already luxury within them. His little
legs were strutting.
“Do you know it’s a half an hour past your lunch-time, Miss Willett?” he
asked, looking closely at her.
“No, sir; I never paid no ’tention to the clock to-day.”
“Well, it is, Miss Willett. I’ll do this here three-ring circus while
you’re gone.”
“Must I come back?” she asked, moving slowly toward the steps. “I guess
you got somebody outa that bunch, didn’t you?”
“What’s happened to you, Miss Willett, that’s what I want to know?”
“Nothin’ ’s happened to me; only I’ve lost my job.”
“Lost nothing! I sent that bunch away after fifteen minutes. I got so
busy writin’ orders I couldn’t talk to ’em. I ain’t even had time to go
outside there to see what you been doin’ up here. What’s happened,
that’s what I want to know? What you been doin’ up here while my back
was turned, hey, Miss Willett? You got ’em comin’ in droves. Where’d you
get all this here new ginger at, Miss Willett? Yesterday you had
nothin’; to-day you got everything. I ain’t had time to see it, but you
must have it. What’s happened to you overnight?”
“Stop your kiddin’, Mr. Bimber. I ain’t up to it to-day. I reckon I got
to go back to toilet articles, an’ I hate them things now. I done ’em
ten years. An’ it ain’t no cinch that I can get even that job again, for
it’s the good old summer-time now. I’ll go back to Pfefferbaum’s and
make a try, anyhow. I reckon you won’t need me no more this afternoon?”
“Need you? You make me laugh, Miss Willett. I tell you, you’ve got ’em
comin’ in droves. I took more orders this mornin’ than I’ve took ever
since I’ve been here. If this here keeps up, I’ll have to hire a
secretary to write ’em down.”
“Need you, Miss Willett! Miss Willett, your salary is raised--a dollar
and a quarter a week. You see that there place acrost the street over
yonder? They say it’s a swell restaurant. Myself, I ain’t been in it;
presidents of baby-bed companies eats in dairy lunches. But you--you
take this here an’ have lunch on _me_ to-day, Miss Willett.”
“O Mr. Bimber!”
“Gimme the princess an’ get out!”
As the big, bewildered, tremulous woman started out of the door, Mr.
Bimber committed the terrible dramatic solecism of halting the pantomime
in the middle of an act.
“Miss Willett!” he called.
“Yes, sir?”
“You take plenty of time to eat, Miss Willett. An hour for yours to-day.
I guess you ain’t kind o’ tired, hey? Take an hour, anyhow, Miss
Willett, an’ if it runs over, who cares? Not me. I’ll do this here
three-ring circus in some kind o’ way while you’re gone. Don’t you come
back before one-thirty, Miss Willett. Y’ un’erstan’ me, Miss
Willett--one-thirty?”
“Yes, sir; thank you.”
She ate in a dairy lunch, bought a pair of clocked silk stockings with
the rest of the two-dollar bill, and sat out the last three fourths of
the hour in Madison Square Park.
Quitting work at six o’clock, Miss Willett took off the Princess
Bimberino’s long white outer dress and tucked her carefully in the bed
for the static, electrically lighted night exhibition, and came down the
steps of the show-window stage holding the soiled, frazzled garment in
her hands.
“What you gonna do with that thing, Miss Willett?” asked Mr. Bimber,
looking up from the order-book.
“I ’m goin’ to patch it up some an’ wash it to-night. The pore little
thing looks like a tramp in this. Ain’t you got but _one_ dress for the
princess, Mr. Bimber? She ought to have a clean dress every day, bless
her heart! An’ she _will_ have, too, if I have to do this one up every
night.”
“Dozen new dresses for the Princess Bimberino to-morrow, Miss Willett.
You buy ’em; I ’ll give you the money at lunch-time. Anything you say
about the princess goes, Miss Willett; y’ un’erstan’ me--anything! Will
you buy ’em for me, Miss Willett?”
“Sure; I’d like to.”
“Good night, Miss Willett. Pleasant dreams.”
Then Mr. Bimber went back inside to gloat over the day’s orders.
Arrived at home, Miss Willett rushed up the one flight of stairs and
burst into her room. She took off her hat, dabbed a powder rag about her
nose, slicked her eyebrows straight with a moistened finger, “duded up”
her hair a bit, and then straining to hold herself to casual leisurely
gestures, walked to the rear window and slid up the shade slowly. She
looked out, not at the stable first; and when at last she did permit her
eyes to rest hungrily on the little window, it was blinded on the inside
with a dingy, blue shade.
“Gee! I knew it,” sighed Miss Willett, and went back to the bed and sank
down. “Nobody lives or works in that little old thing, anyhow. He just
happened to be in there this mawnin’ for a minute or two. I reckon it’s
just a lumber-room, or somethin’, now. But maybe again sometime--.” The
big woman stirred herself energetically, and stood up, to hurry her
delicatessen and gas-stove dinner. “Because I got to do the princess’s
dress to-night,” she said to herself, as if in explanation of her haste.
Miss Willett was awake Wednesday morning before the alarm-clock on the
floor by her bed had done even one violent thing. She heard it give the
premonitory click to signal all its forces to make ready for the first
fiendish charge upon the quiet peace and comfort of the occupant of the
bed. Reaching down, she turned the lever back to the word “Silent.”
“Don’t, dear,” she said, patting it tenderly. “It ain’t needed this
mawnin’.”
Getting quickly out on the floor, Miss Willett stood up without
stretching or yawning. Having attended carefully to her face and hair,
she raised her arms above her head to make sure that the sleeves of her
nightgown would slip down over them; she knew that her arms were good to
look at. Maybe they were a shade too plump, but they were straight,
without a loose-jointed bend-in at the elbow, and they were round and
smooth and firm and long and white.
Assured that the sleeves were in perfect working order, she walked to
the window, ran up the shade, and looked straight at the green blind on
the rear of the old stable. The morning was gray with clouds, but she
easily made out, behind the open slats, the brown-bearded face of the
day before.
“Again--all right!” she said to herself, triumphantly.
Shifting her eyes from the window, she slowly raised her arms above her
head as if in a waking yawn, and shook the loosened sleeves down to her
shoulders. With tremendous effort she kept her eyes drifting about the
back yards in the pretense of lazy, early morning indifference. When she
looked back, a hand was shoving out on the window-sill a tin can
containing a geranium with one red flower open. Miss Willett smiled
vaguely in the direction of the window, shifted her eyes once more, and
pulled down the shade.
“I wonder what them things cost?” she said to herself. “Anyhow, I got to
have one.”
On the way down to Twenty-third Street it occurred to Miss Willett that
he might be following her. She rather wished he would trail her to the
baby-bed window; Mr. Bimber’s nurse’s white outfit was the handsomest
costume she wore. She dawdled in front of several windows, looking
furtively, anxiously, back.
“Shuckin’s!” she said after the third attempt, “he wouldn’t do a thing
like that--follow a lady.” And she hurried on to work.
That night, though the stable window was once more dark and dead with
the drawn shade, Miss Willett placed on her window-sill a small potted
geranium with two open red flowers, flushing as red as they because she
felt that already she was whispering to him in tones that no one else
could hear. Well, anyhow, he had spoken first.
The week wore on. Mr. Bimber’s enthusiasm increased as the orders kept
coming in. The forelady of Pfefferbaum’s “Ladies’ and Misses’ Dresses,”
an old friend of Miss Willett’s, was personally supervising the
alterations of “somethin’ swell,” for her whom the Pfefferbaum girls
called “Old Toilet Articles.” Every day, across the dingy back yards,
the two geraniums sent secret messages to each other; and though not
again that week did the sun come out from behind the clouds in time to
light the little window in the stable, yet every morning the big,
blushing woman kept her tryst there with the brown beard and the tender
wistful eyes. Only once, and then for but a few seconds, had the sun
lighted the gloom behind the open-slatted blind; yet her imagination,
given merely a glimpse of the now familiar head, always supplied the
appealing attributes that had impressed her that first morning of
acquaintance.
Rising as early as usual Sunday morning, Miss Willett hurried to the
window. She did not know if he would be there on Sundays. Still, if he
wasn’t a twenty-carat simp, he should have gathered that she, too, was a
worker, and that therefore she would probably be free all day Sunday.
And even if he wasn’t of the masher kind, surely he would have “pep”
enough to seize her first free day. Miss Willett did not raise the
shade; she merely peeped around the side of it. He was there all right,
all right.
During the week, in the early morning pantomimes, Miss Willett had
featured first her vague sweet smile, then her pale-yellow hair, her
splendid arms, and her white neck with the dimpled depression at the
base of it; and yet all so diplomatically that if for any reason she
should want to draw back, she felt she could say severely and
convincingly: “Who are you? I never seen you before. I don’t know you.
On your way; don’t get fresh with _me_!”
This morning she would feature the new dress; hence the window-shade
would not be raised until late, maybe nine o’clock, when she would be
all ready. But she desired him to know that she was up and alert.
Sticking her head around the side of the shade, she smiled across the
two tiny yards, and shook her hand gaily.
At 9:15 Miss Willett still stood before the dresser-glass. The shade
being down, the gas was turned on. She got out in the middle of the
room, making large contortions in the endeavor to see herself from all
sides. Front, back, and sides, she was the best that she could achieve.
The big, gracefully drooping hat was of a tint which would, in the open,
she knew, emphasize the color of her wholesome complexion. The filmy
sleeves revealed her opulent arms alluringly, and the dark-blue taffeta
skirt rustled richly at her slightest movement. The low shoes, though
topped with buckles set with brilliants, did not dim, but enhanced, the
glory of the clocked silk stockings.
Taking a final supercritical view of her face within three inches of the
mirror, Miss Willett turned off the gas, drew a chair against the
window, ran the shade up briskly, and sat down, holding in her hand a
book that seemed, from the manner in which she handled it, already to
bore her considerably. Miss Willett’s date was with Circumstance. She
was ready; she was waiting.
From time to time she smiled incitingly across at the wistful, yearning,
tender eyes she knew were behind the blind. Down on Third Avenue the
elevated trains thundered, and in her mind she traced, a little
regretfully, the glad course of the four old Pfefferbaum girls who had
invited her to a Sunday in Bronx Park. If he made a move, she would
suggest the park, provided he wasn’t dressed altogether like a rube. She
was instantly ashamed of thinking of that proviso; somehow she knew he
would not be tacky, no matter what he wore.
It _was_ a swell day. Though the elevated trains roared on north and
south as usual, though the trolley-cars rattled their loose and
loosening steel bones along the steel tracks, yet the harsh, clattering,
shrieking week-day noises of innumerable trucks and machines and
whistles were withdrawn from the general volume of sound, and the city’s
mighty voice was lowered and softened to its gentler Sabbath key. The
west wind, coming from across how many millions of passionate fields and
forests, shook out over New York the whispering ghosts of their soft
summer sighs. Up in the park Minnie and the others were already rioting
with the city and June and the sun. Miss Willett, gorgeous, eager,
tremulous in the strain of suspense, sat by the window, holding a book,
waiting.
At noon she dropped the book on the floor peevishly. “Gee! I wisht the
simp would make _some_ kind of a move. I cain’t set here _all_ day. My
God! on week-days I’m fed up good an’ plenty on show-window
exhibitions.”
As usual on Sundays, Miss Willett went down to a restaurant on Third
Avenue for dinner. Coming out, she stopped to consider. What next? She
thought she might be able to find Minnie and the others in the park, and
it would be fun trying, anyhow. But already she was arguing for him.
“Yes, you knock the mashers,” she said accusingly to herself, “an’ then
you throw a fit because he don’t rush things like they do. Give him a
little time, won’t you? He’p him out. Them’s the best kind--the kind you
have to he’p some. It’s a sign they ain’t fresh.”
So she went back to her room, sat by the window, and took up her book
and waited, while the marvelous June day marched on without her.
At two o’clock Miss Willett’s eyes were lounging about over the dirty
back yards, as if to rest themselves after the fatigue of reading. They
fell upon the little gray kitten. He came stealing around the far corner
of the old stable, searching for whatever dainty adventures might come
his way.
Determined to fight something and at once, he humped his back at a poor,
defenseless tin can lying prostrate on the ground, sidled over to it,
lashing his triple-sized tail ferociously, struck one mighty blow at the
can, and ran to the fence separating the two back yards. He hesitated a
moment in indecision whether to come over into foreign and fascinating,
but possibly dangerous, territory; then he jumped, and so did Miss
Willett. She was standing up when he reached the fence. Her plan was
made.
Rushing down-stairs and through the basement apartment of the janitress,
she got out in the yard. Five minutes later she was back in her room
with the captive kitten. Setting him in the middle of her bed, she threw
herself feverishly into the completion of her preparations for her
tremendous adventure. It seemed to her that the kitten was a miraculous
gift dropped straight down from heaven for a special purpose.
Tucking the strategic kitten under her left arm, Miss Willett walked out
of the room, tiptoeing for some vague reason, locked the door, and went
noiselessly down the stairs.
Every piece of jewelry that she owned was stuck on her somewhere. The
fingers of her left hand were gnarled with rings. She loathed toilet
articles, having had too much to do with selling them; but now she
called herself a fool for not possessing any more complicated cosmetic
aids than talcum powder. Still, the touch of the rings and the other
jewelry, the swish of the taffeta skirt, the soft, snug feel of the silk
stockings, the clinging caress of the filmy sleeves,--all these somewhat
reassured her.
At 3:30 o’clock Miss Willett was around in East Thirty-sixth Street,
standing fearfully in front of the leaning, dilapidated wooden gate that
must open upon the passage leading back to the primitive little stable.
She didn’t want to ring up the janitress of his house unless she had to.
She pushed the gate, and it creaked open. Slipping inside, she closed
it, and walked back along the rough, irregularly paved roadway, at the
end of which she saw the dull red stable, its sliding-door slightly
ajar.
It was not easy to walk down the old roadway now. She wanted to drop the
kitten and flee. After a moment she did stop and drop him. But he did
not run away and thus deprive her of her innocent excuse for entering
the stable of the red geranium. He humped his back and snuggled purring
about her ankles. So she picked him up again.
And now she had either to go on or run back at once. She could not
stand there in the yard. The houses on both sides of her were filled
with windows--monstrous eyes that leered and grinned at her, eyes that
seemed to know every secret thought that had passed through her mind in
the last five days about this man she had come to see--thoughts some of
which even she herself was not definitely aware of until now. But they
did not seem new; she was certain she had had them before. The door
ahead of her was ajar. She went on slowly.
At the door the big, gorgeous, tremulous, flaming woman halted again,
panting, crying “Shame” at herself within her heart. And yet she knew,
knew absolutely, that he would not even _think_ “Shame” about her. She
recollected his eyes; no eyes had ever looked like that at her before.
_He_ would understand at the very first. Nothing else mattered.
High up in the house to her left a yearning beginner on the violin
struggled in ecstatic pain with some vast, ancient, overpowering
love-song. The softly moving wind from the west, slipping through the
crevices of the crowding city, came stealing along the passage and waved
the pale-yellow hair about her hot temples. Apparently unrelated
thoughts, dimly noted, went swirling through her head: that the shouting
of the children back there in Thirty-sixth Street sounded sweet in her
ears; that she was thirty years old already; that the kitten lay warmly
curled under her heart; that somehow the Princess Bimberino was very far
away from her now.
Then she knocked, and, without waiting for an answer, stepped inside the
door. Her eyes leaped to the little rear window that looked up at hers.
But she was acutely aware of other things in the small house. There was
a pungent odor of lime in the air. An old gray-bearded Italian lay
asleep, snoring, on a bench against the wall. On shelves, on benches, on
boxes, sitting around everywhere, were plaster figures of all sizes and
shapes and colors. On the sill of the rear window sat the can with the
one red geranium bloom. In front of it stood the plaster figure whose
face the young summer sun had lifted up to hers. Some queer feminine
impulse, in the midst of her catastrophe, demanded that she notice how
he was dressed--in a sheet-like garment, with a blue border, and wearing
sandals. She broke into a hysterical giggle, instantly smothered with a
sob.
Miss Willett’s left arm relaxed, and the kitten slipped down upon the
hard floor, scratching ragged furrows in her new dress as he went. The
big woman, whimpering as if she were being beaten, leaned back against
the door, patting at her mouth with her ring-gnarled fingers.
“O Jesus!” she whispered, pleading, holding out her arms to the plaster
figure by the window--“Jesus! I didn’t know! I didn’t--”
And she backed out of the door, and closed it softly, and went home.
But somehow after that, Miss Willett’s love for the Princess Bimberino
seemed even to deepen and intensify, and there was in her handling of
the veteran infant an immaculate, an almost agonized wistful tenderness
which, as Mr. Bimber said, “kept ’em comin’ in droves, an’ with their
eyes shinin’.”