'We're dancing this together,' I said.
He grinned all across his face.
I found Mrs Charlie looking as if she had never shed a tear in her
life. She certainly had pluck, that kid.
'Come on,' I said. 'Stick to your ticket like wax and watch your step.'
I guess you've seen these sporting contests at Geisenheimer's. Or, if
you haven't seen them at Geisenheimer's, you've seen them somewhere
else. They're all the same.
When we began, the floor was so crowded that there was hardly
elbow-room. Don't tell me there aren't any optimists nowadays. Everyone
was looking as if they were wondering whether to have the Love-r-ly Cup
in the sitting-room or the bedroom. You never saw such a hopeful gang
in your life.
Presently Izzy gave tongue. The management expects him to be humorous
on these occasions, so he did his best.
'Num-bahs, seven, eleven, and twenty-one will kindly rejoin their
sorrowing friends.'
This gave us a little more elbow-room, and the band started again.
A few minutes later, Izzy once more: 'Num-bahs thirteen, sixteen, and
seventeen--good-bye.'
Off we went again.
'Num-bah twelve, we hate to part with you, but--back to your table!'
A plump girl in a red hat, who had been dancing with a kind smile, as
if she were doing it to amuse the children, left the floor.
'Num-bahs six, fifteen, and twenty, thumbs down!'
And pretty soon the only couples left were Charlie and me, Mrs Charlie
and the fellow I'd introduced her to, and a bald-headed man and a girl
in a white hat. He was one of your stick-at-it performers. He had been
dancing all the evening. I had noticed him from the balcony. He looked
like a hard-boiled egg from up there.
He was a trier all right, that fellow, and had things been otherwise,
so to speak, I'd have been glad to see him win. But it was not to be.
Ah, no!
'Num-bah nineteen, you're getting all flushed. Take a rest.'
So there it was, a straight contest between me and Charlie and Mrs
Charlie and her man. Every nerve in my system was tingling with
suspense and excitement, was it not? It was not.
Charlie, as I've already hinted, was not a dancer who took much of his
attention off his feet while in action. He was there to do his
durnedest, not to inspect objects of interest by the wayside. The
correspondence college he'd attended doesn't guarantee to teach you to
do two things at once. It won't bind itself to teach you to look round
the room while you're dancing. So Charlie hadn't the least suspicion of
the state of the drama. He was breathing heavily down my neck in a
determined sort of way, with his eyes glued to the floor. All he knew
was that the competition had thinned out a bit, and the honour of
Ashley, Maine, was in his hands.
You know how the public begins to sit up and take notice when these
dance-contests have been narrowed down to two couples. There are
evenings when I quite forget myself, when I'm one of the last two left
in, and get all excited. There's a sort of hum in the air, and, as you
go round the room, people at the tables start applauding. Why, if you
didn't know about the inner workings of the thing, you'd be all of a
twitter.
It didn't take my practised ear long to discover that it wasn't me and
Charlie that the great public was cheering for. We would go round the
floor without getting a hand, and every time Mrs Charlie and her guy
got to a corner there was a noise like election night. She sure had
made a hit.
I took a look at her across the floor, and I didn't wonder. She was a
different kid from what she'd been upstairs. I never saw anybody look
so happy and pleased with herself. Her eyes were like lamps, and her
cheeks all pink, and she was going at it like a champion. I knew what
had made a hit with the people. It was the look of her. She made you
think of fresh milk and new-laid eggs and birds singing. To see her was
like getting away to the country in August. It's funny about people who
live in the city. They chuck out their chests, and talk about little
old New York being good enough for them, and there's a street in heaven
they call Broadway, and all the rest of it; but it seems to me that
what they really live for is that three weeks in the summer when they
get away into the country. I knew exactly why they were cheering so
hard for Mrs Charlie. She made them think of their holidays which were
coming along, when they would go and board at the farm and drink out of
the old oaken bucket, and call the cows by their first names.
Gee! I felt just like that myself. All day the country had been tugging
at me, and now it tugged worse than ever.
I could have smelled the new-mown hay if it wasn't that when you're in
Geisenheimer's you have to smell Geisenheimer's, because it leaves no
chance for competition.
'Keep working,' I said to Charlie. 'It looks to me as if we are going
back in the betting.'
'Uh, huh!' he says, too busy to blink.
'Do some of those fancy steps of yours. We need them in our business.'
And the way that boy worked--it was astonishing!
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Izzy Baermann, and he wasn't
looking happy. He was nerving himself for one of those quick referee's
decisions--the sort you make and then duck under the ropes, and run
five miles, to avoid the incensed populace. It was this kind of thing
happening every now and then that prevented his job being perfect.
Mabel Francis told me that one night when Izzy declared her the winner
of the great sporting contest, it was such raw work that she thought
there'd have been a riot. It looked pretty much as if he was afraid the
same thing was going to happen now. There wasn't a doubt which of us
two couples was the one that the customers wanted to see win that
Love-r-ly Silver Cup. It was a walk-over for Mrs Charlie, and Charlie
and I were simply among those present.
But Izzy had his duty to do, and drew a salary for doing it, so he
moistened his lips, looked round to see that his strategic railways
weren't blocked, swallowed twice, and said in a husky voice:
'Num-bah ten, please re-tiah!'