machine, reached out a dim arm that was noisy with bracelets, and
clicked on the lights. The two figures at the typewriters, the
stationary wash-stand in the corner, a roll-top desk, and the
heat-lightning tints in Miss Flint's hair sprang out in the jaundiced
low candle-power.
"I'm done the second act, Miss Gregory. May I go now?"
Miss Flint's eyes were shining with the love-of-life lamps, the mica
powder of romance, and a brilliant anticipation of Harry Trimp. Miss
Gregory's were twenty years older and dulled like glass when you
breathed on it.
"Yes; if you got to go I guess you can."
"Ain't it a swell play, Miss Gregory? Ain't it grand where he pushes her
to the edge of the bridge and she throws herself down and hugs his
knees?"
"Did you red ink your stage directions in, with the margin wide, like he
wants? He was fussy about the first act."
"Yes'm; and say, ain't it a swell name for a show--'The Last of the
Dee-Moolans'? Give me a show to do every time, and you can have all your
contracts and statements and multigraph letters. Those love stories that
long, narrow fellow brings in are swell to do, too, if he wa'n't such an
old grouch about punctuation. Give me stuff that has some reading in it
every time!"
Miss Gregory sniffed--the realistic, acidulated sniff of unloved forty
and a thin nose.
"The sooner you quit curlin' your side-hair and begin to learn that
life's made up of statements and multigraphs, instead of love scenes on
papier-mache bridges and flashy fellows in checked suits and
get-rich-quick schemes, the better off you're going to be."
The light in Goldie's face died out as suddenly as a Jack-o'-lantern
when you blow on the taper.
"Aw, Miss Greg-or-ee!" Her voice was the downscale wail of an oboe.
"Whatta you always picking on Harry Trimp for? He ain't ever done
anything to you--and you said yourself when he brought them circular
letters in that he was one handsome kid."
"Just the same, I knew when he came in here the second time hanging
round you with them blue eyes and black lashes, and that batch of
get-rich-quick letters, he was as phony as his scarf-pin."
"I glory in a fellow's spunk that can give up a clerking job and strike
out for hisself--that's what I do!"
"He was fired--that's how he started out for himself. Ask Mae Pope; she
knows a thing or two about him."
"Aw, Miss--"
"Wait until you have been dealing with them as long as I have! Once get
a line on a man's correspondence, and you can see through him as easy as
through a looking-glass with the mercury rubbed off."
The walls of Jericho fell at the blast of a ram's horn. Not so Miss
Flint's frailer fortifications.
"The minute a fellow that doesn't belong to the society of pikers and
gets a three-figure salary comes along, and can take a girl to a
restaurant where they begin with horse-doovries instead of wiping your
cutlery on the table-cloth and deciding whether you want the 'and' with
your ham fried or scrambled--the minute a fellow like that comes along
and learns one of us girls that taxi-cabs was made for something besides
dodging, and pink roses for something besides florist windows--that
minute they put on another white-slave play, and your friends begin to
recite the doxology to music. Gee! It's fierce!"
"Gimme that second act, Goldie. Thank Gawd I can say that in all my
years of experience I've never been made a fool of: and, if I do say it,
I had chances in my time!"
"You--you're the safest girl I know, Miss Gregory."
"What?"
"You're safe if you know the ropes, Miss Gregory."
"What did you do with the Rheinhardt statement, Goldie? He'll be in for
it any minute."
"It's in your left-hand drawer, along with those contracts, Miss
Gregory. I made two carbons."
Miss Flint slid into her pressed-plush fourteen-dollar-and-a-half copy
of a fourteen-hundred-fifty-dollar unborn-lamb coat, pulled her curls
out from under the brim of her tight hat, and clasped a dyed-rat tippet
about her neck so that her face flowered above it like a small rose out
of its calyx.
The Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, the Fifth Dimension, and the American
Shopgirl and How She Does Not Look It on Six Dollars a Week, and
Milk-Chocolate Lunches are still the subjects that are flung like
serpentine confetti across the pink candle-shades of four-fork dinners,
and are wound like red tape round Uplift Societies and Ladies' Culture
Clubs.
Yet Goldie flourished on milk-chocolate lunches like the baby-food
infants on the backs of magazines flourish on an add-hot-water-and-serve,
twenty-five-cents-a-can substitute for motherhood.
"Good night, Miss Gregory."
"Night!"
Goldie closed the door softly behind her as though tiptoeing away from
the buzzing gnats of an eight-hour day. Simultaneously across the hall
the ground-glass door of the Underwriters' Realty Company swung open
with a gust, and Mr. Eddie Bopp, clerk, celibate, and aspirant for the
beyond of each state, bowed himself directly in Goldie's path.
"Ed-die! Ain't you early to-night, though! Since when are you keeping
board-of-directors hours?"
"I been watching for you, Goldie."
Eddie needs no introduction. He solicits coffee orders at your door. The
shipping-clerks and dustless-broom agents and lottery-ticket buyers of
the world are made of his stuff. Bronx apartment houses, with
perambulators and imitation marble columns in the down-stairs foyer, are
built for his destiny. He sells you a yard of silk; he travels to Coney
Island on hot Sunday afternoons; he bleaches on the bleachers; he
bookkeeps; he belongs to a building association and wears polka-dot
neckties. He is not above the pink evening edition. Ibsen and eugenics
and post impressionism have never darkened the door of his
consciousness. He is the safe-and-sane strata in the social mountain;
not of the base or of the rarefied heights that carry dizziness.
Yet when Eddie regarded Goldie there was that in his eyes which
transported him far above the safe-and-sane strata to the only communal
ground that men and socialists admit--the Arcadia of lovers.
"I wasn't going to let you get by me to-night, Goldie. I ain't walked
home with you for so long I haven't a rag of an excuse left to give
Addie."
Miss Flint colored the faint pink of dawn's first moment.
"I--I got to do some shopping to-night, Eddie. That's why I quit early.
Believe me, Gregory'll make me pay up to-morrow."
"It won't be the first time I shopped with you, Goldie."
"No."
"Remember the time we went down in Tracy's basement for a little
alcohol-stove you wanted for your breakfasts? The girl at the counter
thought we--we were spliced."
"Yeh!" Miss Flint's voice was faint as the thud of a nut to the ground.
They shot down fifteen fireproof stories in a breath-taking elevator,
and then out on the whitest, brightest Broadway in the world, where the
dreary trilogy of Wine, Woman, and Song is played from noon to dawn,
with woman the cheapest of the three.
"How's Addie?"
"She don't complain, but she gets whiter and whiter--poor kid! I got her
some new crutches, Goldie--swell mahogany ones with silver tips. You
ought to see her get round on them!"
"I--I been so busy--night-work and--and--"
"She's been asking about you every night, Goldie. It ain't like you to
stay away like this."
Their breaths clouded before them in the stinging air, and down the
length of the enchanted highway lights sprang out of the gloom and
winked at them like naughty eyes.
"What's the matter, Goldie? You ain't mad at me--us--are you?"
Eddie took her pressed-plush elbow in the cup of his hand and looked
down at her, trying in vain to capture the bright flame of her glance.
"Nothing's the matter, Eddie. Why should I be mad? I been busy--that's
all."
The tide of home-going New York caught them in its six-o'clock vortex.
Shops emptied and street-cars filled. A newsboy fell beneath a car, and
Broadway parted like a Red Sea for an overworked ambulance, the mission
of which was futile. A lady in a fourteen-hundred-fifty-dollar
unborn-lamb coat and a notorious dog-collar of pearls stepped out of a
wine-colored limousine into the gold-leaf foyer of a hotel. A ten-story
emporium ran an iron grating across its entrance, and ten watchmen
reported for night duty.
"Aw, gee! They're closed! Ain't that the limit now! Ain't that the
limit! I wanted some pink tulle."
"Poor kid! Don't you care! You can get it tomorrow--you can work
Gregory."
"I--I wanted it for tonight."
"What?"
"I wanted it for my yoke."
They turned into the dark aisle of a side street; the wind lurked around
the corner to leap at them.
"Oh-h-h-h!"
He held tight to her arm.
"It's some night--ain't it, girlie?"
"I should say so!"
"Poor little kid!"
Eddie's voice was suddenly the lover's, full of that quality which is
like unto the ting of a silver bell after the clapper is quiet.
"You're coming home to a good hot supper with me, Goldie--ain't you,
Goldie? Addie'll like it."
She withdrew her hand from the curve of his elbow.
"I can't, Eddie--not tonight. I--tell her I'm coming over real soon."
"Oh!"
"It's sure cold, ain't it?"
"Goldie, can't you tell a fellow what's the matter? Can't you tell me
why you been dodging me--us--for two weeks? Can't you tell a
fellow--huh, Goldie?"
"Geewhillikins, Eddie! Ain't I told you it's nothing? There ain't a girl
could be a better friend to Addie than me."
"I know that, Goldie; but--"
"Didn't we work in the same office thick as peas for two whole years
before her--accident--even before I knew she had a brother? Ain't I
stuck to her right through--ain't I?"
"You know that ain't what I mean, Goldie. You been a swell friend
to poor Addie, stayin' with her Sundays when you could be havin'
a swell time and all; but it's me I'm talking about, Goldie.
Sometimes--sometimes I--"
"Aw!"
"I've never talked straight out about it before, Goldie; but you--you
remember the night--the night I rigged up like a Christmas tree, and you
said I was all the ice-cream in my white pants--the night Addie was run
over and they sent for me?"
"Will I ever forget it!"
"I was tuning up that evening to tell you, Goldie--while we were sitting
there on your stoop, with the street-light in our eyes, and you
screechin' every time a June-bug bumbled in your face!"
"Gawd, how I hate bugs! There was one in Miss Gregory's--"
"I was going to tell you that night, Goldie, that there was only one
girl--one girl for me--and--"
"Yeh; and while we were sittin' there gigglin' and screechin' at
June-bugs poor Addie was provin' that a street-car fender has got it all
over a mangling-machine."
"Yes; it's like she says about herself--she was payin' her initiation
fee for life membership into the Society of Cripples with a perfectly
good hip and a bit of spine."
"Poor Addie! Gawd, how she loved to dance! She used to spend every
noon-hour eatin' marshmallows and learning me new steps."
The wind soughed in their ears, and Goldie's skirts blew backward like
sails.
"You haven't got a better friend than Addie right now, girlie! She
always says our little flat is yours. The three of us, Goldie--the three
of us could--"
"It's swell for a girl that ain't got none of her own blood to have a
friend like that. Swell, lemme tell you!"
"Goldie!"
"Yes."
"It's like I said--I've never talked right out before, but I got a
feelin' you're slippin' away from me like a eel, girlie. You know--aw,
you know I ain't much on the elocution stuff; but if it wasn't for Addie
and her accident right now--I'd ask you outright--I would. You know what
I mean!"
"I don't know anything, Eddie; I'm no mind-reader!"
"Aw, cut it out, Goldie! You know I'm tied up right now and can't say
some of the things I was going to say that night on the stoop. You know
what I mean--with Addie's doctor's bills and chair and crutches, and
all."
"Sure I do, Eddie. You've got no right to think of anything."
She turned from him so that her profile was like a white cameo mounted
on black velvet.
"You just give me a little time, Goldie, and I'll be on my feet, all
righty. I just want some kind of understanding between us--that's all."
"Oh--you--I--"
"I got Joe's job cinched if he goes over to the other firm in March; and
by that time, Goldie, you and me and Addie, on eighty per, could--why,
we--"
She swayed back from his close glance and ran up the first three steps
of her rooming-house. Her face was struck with fear suddenly, as with a
white flame out of the sky.
"'Sh-h-h-h-h-h!" she said. "You mustn't!"
He reached for her hand, caught it and held it--but like a man who feels
the rope sliding through his fingers and sees his schooner slipping out
to sea--slipping out to sea.
"Lemme go, Eddie! I gotta go--it's late!"
"I _know_, Goldie. They been guyin' me at the office about you passin'
me up; and it's right--ain't it? It's--It's him--" She shook her head
and tugged for the freedom of her hand. Tears crowded into her eyes like
water to the surface of a tumbler just before the overflow. "It's
_him_--ain't it, Goldie?"
"Well, you won't give--give a girl a chance to say anything. If you'd
have given me time I was comin' over and tell you, and--and tell--"
"Goldie!"
"I was--I was--"
"It's none of my business, girlie; but--but he ain't fit for you. He--"
"There you go! The whole crowd of you make me--"
"He ain't fit for no girl, Goldie! Listen to me, girlie! He's just a
regular ladykiller! He can't keep a job no more'n a week for the life of
him! I used to know him when I worked at Delaney's. Listen to me,
Goldie! This here new minin' scheme he's in ain't even on the level! It
ain't none of my business; but, good God, Goldie, just because a guy's
good-lookin' and a swell dresser and--"
She sprang from his grasp and up the three remaining steps. In the sooty
flare of the street lamp she was like Jeanne d'Arc heeding the vision or
a suffragette declaiming on a soap-box and equal rights.
"You--the whole crowd of you make me sick! The minute a fellow graduates
out of the sixty-dollar-clerk class, and can afford a twenty-dollar
suit, without an extra pair of pants thrown in, the whole pack of you
begin to yowl and yap at his heels like--"
"Goldie! Goldie, listen--"
"Yes, you do! But I ain't caring. I know him, and I know what I want.
We're goin' to get married when we're good and ready, and we ain't
apologizing to no one! I don't care what the whole pack of you have to
say, except Addie and you; and--and--I--oh--"
Goldie turned and fled into the house, slamming the front door after her
so that the stained-glass panels rattled--then up four flights, with the
breath soughing in her throat and the fever of agitation racing through
her veins.
Her oblong box of a room at the top of the long flights was cold with a
cavern damp and musty with the must that is as indigenous to
rooming-houses as chorus-girls to the English peerage or insomnia to
black coffee.
Even before she lighted her short-armed gas-jet, however, a sweet,
insidious, hothouse fragrance greeted her faintly through the must, as
the memory of mignonette clings to old lace. Goldie's face softened as
if a choir invisible was singing her ragtime from above her skylight.
She lighted her fan of gas with fingers that trembled in a pleasant
frenzy of anticipation, and the tears dried on her face and left little
paths down her cheeks.
A fan of pink roses, fretted with maidenhair fern and caught with a sash
of pink tulle, lay on her coarse cot coverlet, as though one of her
dreams had ventured out of its long night.
What a witch is love!
Pink leaped into Goldie's cheeks, and into her eyes the light that
passeth understanding. Life dropped its dun-colored cloak and stood
suddenly garlanded in pink, wire-stemmed roses.
She buried her face in their fragrance. She kissed a cool bud, the heart
of which was closed. She unwrapped the pink tulle sash with fingers that
were addled--like a child's at the gold cord of a candy-box--and held
the filmy streamer against her bosom in the outline of a yoke.
* * * * *
In Mrs. McCasky's boarding-house the onward march of night was as
regular as a Swiss watch with an American movement.
At nine o'clock Mr. McCasky's tin bucket grated along the hall wall,
down two flights of banisters, across the street, and through the
knee-high swinging-doors of Joe's place.
At ten o'clock the Polinis, on the third-floor back, let down their
folding-bed and shivered the chandelier in Major Florida's second-floor
back.
At eleven o'clock Mr. McCasky's tin bucket grated unevenly along the
hall wall, down two flights of banisters, across the street, and through
the knee-high swinging-doors of Joe's place.
At twelve o'clock the electric piano in Joe's place ceased to clatter
through the night like coal pouring into an empty steel bin, and Mrs.
McCasky lowered the hall light from a blob the size of a cranberry to a
French pea.
At one o'clock the next to the youngest Polini infant lifted its voice
to the skylight, and Mr. Trimp's night-key waltzed round the front-door
lock, scratch-scratching for its hole.
In the dim-lit first-floor front Mrs. Trimp started from her light doze
like a deer in a park, which vibrates to the fall of a lady's feather
fan. The criss-cross from the cane chair-back was imprinted on one
sleep-flushed cheek, and her eyes, dim with the weariness of the
night-watch, flew to the white-china door-knob.
Reader, rest undismayed. Mr. Trimp entered on the banking-hour legs of a
scholar and a gentleman. With a white carnation in his buttonhole, his
hat unbattered in the curve of his arm, and his blue eyes behind their
curtain of black lashes, but slightly watery, like a thawing ice-pond
with a film atop.
"Hello, my little Goldie-eyes!"
Mr. Trimp flashed his double deck of girlish-pearlish teeth. When Mr.
Trimp smiled Greuze might have wanted to paint his lips for a
child-study. Women tightened up about the throat and dared to wonder
whether he wore a chest-protector and asafetida bag. Old ladies in
street-cars regarded him through the mist of memories, and as if their
motherly fingers itched to run through the heavy yellow hemp of his
hair. There was that in his smile which seemed to provoke hand-painted
sofa-pillows and baby-ribboned coat-hangers, knitted neckties, and
cross-stitch slippers. Once he had posed for an Adonis underwear
advertisement.
"Hello, baby! Did you wait up for your old man?"
Goldie regarded her husband with eyes that ten months of marriage had
dimmed slightly. Her lips were thinner and tighter and silent.
"I think we landed a sucker to-night for fifty shares, kiddo. Ain't so
bad, is it? And so you waited up for your tired old man, baby?"
"No!" she said, the words sparking from her lips like the hiss of a hot
iron when you test it with a moist forefinger. "No; I didn't wait up. I
been out with you--painting the town."
"I couldn't get home for supper, hon. Me and Cutty--"
"You and Cutty! I wasn't born yesterday!"
"Me and Cutty had a sucker out, baby. He'll bite for fifty shares sure!"
"Gee!" she flamed at him, backing round the rocker from his amorous
advances. "Gee! If I was low enough to be a crook--if I was low enough
to try and make a livin' sellin' dead dirt for pay dirt--I'd be a
successful crook, anyway; I'd--"
"Now, Goldie, hon! Don't--"
"I wouldn't leave my wife havin' heart failure every time McCasky passes
the door--I wouldn't!"
"Now, don't fuss at me, Goldie. I'm tired--dog-tired. I got some money
comin' in to-morrow that'll--"
"That don't go with me any more!"
"Sure I have."
"I been set out on the street too many times before on promises like
that; and it was always after a week of one of these here slow jags. I
know them and how they begin. I know them!"
"'Tain't so this time, honey. I been--"
"I know them and how they begin, with your sweet, silky ways. I'd rather
have you come staggering home than like this--with your claws hid.
I--I'm afraid of you, I tell you. I ain't forgot the night up at
Hinkey's. You haven't been out with Cutty no more than I have. You been
up to the Crescent, where the Red Slipper is dancing this week, you--"
Mr. Trimp swayed ever so slightly--slightly as a silver reed in the
lightest breeze that blows--and regained his balance immediately. His
breath, redolent as a garden of spice and cloves, was close to his
wife's neck.
"Baby," he said, "you better believe your old man. I been out with
Cutty, Goldie. We had a sucker out!"
She sprang back from his touch, hot tears in her eyes.
"Believe you! I did till I learnt better. I believed you for four
months, sittin' round waiting for you and your goings-on. You ain't been
out with Cutty--you ain't been out with him one night this week. You
been--you--"
Mrs. Trimp's voice rose to a hysterical crescendo. Her hair, yellow as
corn-silk, and caught in a low chignon at her back, escaped its
restraint of pins and fell in a whorl down her shirt-waist. She was
like a young immortal eaten by the corroding acids of earlier
experiences--raw with the vitriol of her deathless destiny.
"You ain't been out with Cutty. You been--"
The piano-salesman in the first-floor back knocked against the closed
folding-door for the stilly night that should have been his by right. A
distant night-stick struck the asphalt, and across Harry Trimp's
features, like filmy clouds across the moon, floated a composite
death-mask of Henry the Eighth and Othello, and all their alimony-paying
kith. His mouth curved into an expression that did not coincide with
pale hair and light eyes.
He slid from his greatcoat, a black one with an astrakan collar and
bought in three payments, and inclined closer to his wife, a
contumelious quirk on his lips.
"Well, whatta you going to do about it, kiddo--huh?"
"I--I'm going to--quit!"
He laughed and let her squirm from his hold, strolled over to the
dresser mirror, pulled his red four-in-hand upward from its knot and
tugged his collar open.
"You're not going to quit, kiddo! You ain't got the nerve!"
He leaned to the mirror and examined the even rows of teeth, and grinned
at himself like a Hallowe'en pumpkin to flash whiter their whiteness.
"Ain't I! Which takes the most nerve, I'd like to know, stickin' to you
and your devilishness or strikin' out for myself like I been raised to
do? I was born a worm, and I ain't never found the cocoon that would
change me into a butterfly. I--I had as swell a job up at Gregory's as a
girl ever had. I'm an expert stenographer, I am! I got a diploma from--"
"Why don't you get your job back, baby? You been up there twice to my
knowin'; maybe the third time'll be a charm. Don't let me keep you,
kiddo."
The sluice-gates of her fear and anger opened suddenly, and tears rained
down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her bare palm.
"It's because you took the life and soul out of me! They don't want me
back because I ain't nothin' but a rag any more. I guess they're ashamed
to take me back cause I'm in--in your class. Ten months of standing for
your funny business and dodging landladies, and waitin' up nights, and
watchin' you and your crooked starvation game would take the life out of
any girl. It would! It would!"
"Don't fuss at me any more, Goldie-eyes. It's gettin' hard for me to
keep down; and I don't want--want to begin gettin' ugly."
Mr. Trimp advanced toward his wife gently--gently.
"Don't come near me! I know what's coming; but you ain't going to get me
this time with your oily ways. You're the kind that, walks on a girl
with spiked heels and tries to kiss the sores away. I'm going to quit!"
Mr. Trimp plucked at the faint hirsute adornment of his upper lip and
folded his black-and-white waistcoat over the back of a chair. He
fumbled it a bit.
"Stay where you're put, you--you bloomin' vest, you!"
"I--I got friends that'll help me, I have--even if I ain't ever laid
eyes on 'em since the day I married you. I got friends--_real_ friends!
Addie'll take me in any minute, day or night. Eddie Bopp could get me a
job in his firm to-morrow if--if I ask him. I got friends! You've kept
me from 'em; but I ain't afraid to look 'em up. I'm not!"
He advanced to where she stood beneath the waving gas-flame, a pet
phrase clung to his lips, and he stumbled over it.
"My--my little--pussy-cat!"
"You're drunk!"
"No, I ain't, baby--only dog-tired. Dog-tired! Don't fuss at me! You
just don't know how much I love you, baby!"
"Who wouldn't fuss, I'd like to know?"
Her voice was like ice crackling with thaw. He took her lax waist in his
embrace and kissed her on the brow.
"Don't, honey--don't! Me and Cutty had a sucker out, I tell you."