Were I only swifter and more potent of pen, I could convey to you all in
the stroke of a pestle the H2O, the pigment of the red-cheeked apple,
the blue of long summer days, and the magnesia of the earth for which
Stella Schump was the mortal and mortar receptacle.
She was about as exotic as a flowering weed which can spring so strongly
and so fibrously from slack. And yet such a weed can bleed milk. If
Stella Schump was about fourteen pounds too plump, too red of cheek, and
too blandly blue of eye, there was the very milk of human kindness in
her morning punching up of her mother's pillows and her smoothing down
of the gray and poorly hair. She could make a bed freshly, whitely, her
strong young arms manoeuvering under but not even jarring the poor old
form so often prone there.
There was a fine kind of virile peasantry in the willing hands, white
enough, but occasionally broken at the nails from eight hours of this
box in and that box out in a children's shoe department.
Differing by the fourteen pounds, Watteau would have scorned and Rubens
have adored to paint her.
She was not unconscious of the rather flaxen ripple of her hair, which
she wore slickly parted and drawn back, scallop by scallop, to a round
and shining mat of plaits against the back of her head. But neither was
she unconscious that she thereby enhanced the too high pitch of her
cheek-bones and the already too generous width between them. It was when
Stella Schump opened wide her eyes that she transcended the milky
fleshliness and the fact that, when she walked rapidly, her cheeks
quivered in slight but gelatinous fashion. Her eyes--they were the color
of perfect June at that high-noon moment when the spinning of the
humming-bird can be distilled to sound. Laura and Marguerite and Stella
Schump had eyes as blue as Cleopatra's, and Sappho's and Medea's must
have been green.
For reading and occasional headaches, she wore a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles prescribed but not specially ground by the optical
department, cater-corner from the children's shoes. Upon the occasion of
their first adjustment, Romance, for the first time, had leaned briefly
into the smooth monotony of Miss Schump's day-by-day, to waft a scented,
a lace-edged, an elusive kerchief.
"You ought to heard, mamma, that fellow over in the specs, when he gimme
the test for the glasses."
"What?"
"Tee-hee!--it sounds silly to repeat it."
"You got the Schump eyes, Stella. I always used to say, with his big
blue ones, your poor father ought to been a girl, too."
"'Say,' he said to me, he said, just like that, 'I know a society who
will pay you a big fat sum if you'll sign over them eyes for
post-mortem laboratory work. Believe me, Bettina,' he said, just like
that, 'those are some goo-goos!'"
"'Goo-goos'?"
"Yes, ma--the way I look out of them."
"See, Stella, if you'd only mix with the young men and not be so
stiff-like with them. See! Is he the sober, genteel kind who could sit
out an evening in a self-respectin' girl's front parlor?"
"I--I can't ask a fellow if he didn't ask me, can I? I can't make a
pusher out of myself."
"A girl don't have to make a pusher out of herself to have beaus; it's
natural for her to have them in moderation. I don't want my girl shut
out of her natural pleasures."
"'Believe me, Bettina,' he said, 'those are some goo-goos'--just like
that, he said it."
"Before I'd let a girl like Cora Kinealy have all the beaus! I bet
_she'd_ ask him."
"It--it just ain't in me, ma. The other girls do, I know--you ought to
heard the way Mabel Runyan was kiddin' a fellow in the silks to-day--it
just ain't in me to."
"Nowadays, young men got to be made to feel welcome."
"I just don't seem to take."
"'I'll be pleased to have you call of a Saturday night, Mr. So-and-so.'
No one could say there's anything but the genteel in that. Those are
just the words I used to say to your poor father when he was courtin'."
"If only I--I wouldn't turn all red!"
"I bet Cora Kinealy would have asked him." "I--I'll ask him, ma."
When Stella Schump was adjusting her black sleevelets next morning,
somewhat obviously oblivious of the optical department across the aisle,
a blond, oiled head leaned out at her.
"Mornin'. Goo-goo!"
A flush that she could feel rush up and that would not be controlled
threw her into a state of agitation that was almost abashing to behold.
"Tee-hee!"
"Believe me, Bettina, those are some goo-goos!"
"I'd be pleased to have you--come--to--"
"I told the little wifey last night, 'Angel Face, I've found a pair of
goo-goos that are a close runner-up to yours.'"
Miss Schump turned to her first customer of the day, the flush receding
as suddenly as it had come to scorch.
"Copper toes for the little boy? Just be seated, please."
Thus did the odor of romance lay for the merest moment upon the stale
air of Miss Schump's routine.
Evenings, in the high-ceilinged, long-windowed, and inside-shuttered
little flat in very West Thirteenth Street, tucked up in the top story
of one of a row of made-over-into-apartments residences that boasted
each a little frill of iron balcony and railed-in patch of front lawn,
they would sit beside an oil-lamp with a flowered china shade, Mrs.
Schump, gnarled of limb and knotted of joint, ever busy, except on the
most excruciatingly rheumatic of her days, at a needlework so cruel, so
fine that for fifteen years of her widowhood it had found instant market
at a philanthropic Woman's Exchange.
Very often Miss Cora Kinealy, also of the children's shoes, would rock
away an evening in that halo of lamplight, her hair illuminated to
copper and her hands shuttling in and out at the business of knitting.
There were frank personal discussions, no wider in diameter than the
little circle of light itself.
MISS KINEALY (_slumped in her chair so that her knee rose higher than
her waist-line_): I always say of Stella, she's one nut too hard for me
to crack, and I've cracked a good many in my life. Why that girl 'ain't
got beaus galore--well, I give up!
MRS. SCHUMP (_stooped for an infinitesimal stab of needle_): She don't
give 'em a chance, Cora. You can't tell me there is not many a nice,
sober young man wouldn't be glad to sit out a Saturday evening with her.
She's that bashful she don't give 'em a chance. I tell her it's almost
as much ruination to a girl to be too retiring as to be too forward. She
don't seem to have a way with the boys.
MISS SCHUMP (_in a pink, warm-looking flannelette kimono and brushing
out into fine fluff her flaxen-looking hair, and then, in the name of
to-morrow's kink, plaiting it into a multitude of small, tight-looking
braids_): You can talk, mamma. You, too, Cora, with a boy like Archie
Sensenbrenner and your wedding-day in sight. But what's a girl goin' to
do if she don't take; if she ain't got an Archie?
Mrs. Schump (_riding her glasses down toward the end of her nose to
look up sharply over them_): Get one.
"There you go again! Honest, you two make me mad. I can't go out and
lasso 'em, can I?"
"She doesn't give 'em a chance, Cora; mark my word! The trouble is,
she's too good for most she sees. They ain't up to her."
"I can't understand it, Mrs. Schump. I always say there ain't a finer
girl on the floor than Stella. When I see other girls, most of 'em fresh
little rag-timers that ain't worth powder and shot, bringing down the
finest kind of fellows, and Stella never asked out or nothing, I always
say to myself, 'I can't understand it.' Take me--what Arch Sensenbrenner
ever seen in me, with Stella and her complexion working in the same
department--"
"You got a way, Cora. There's just something about me don't take with
the boys. Honest, if I could only see one of you girls alone with a
fellow once, to see how you do it!"
"Just listen to her, Mrs. Schump, with her eyes and complexion and all!"
"There's not a reason my girl shouldn't have it as good and better than
the best of them. She's a good girl, Cora. Stella's a good girl to me."
"Aw, mamma--"
"Don't I know it, Mrs. Schump! I always say if ever a girl would make
some nice-earning, steady fellow a good wife, it's--"
'"Good wife'! That ain't the name! Why, Cora, for ten years that child
has lifted me on my bad days and carried me and babied me like I was a
queen. It's nothing for her to rub me two hours straight. Not a day
before she leaves for work that she don't come to me and--"
"Fellows don't care about that kind of thing. A girl's got to have pep
and something besides complexion and elbow-grease. I'm too fat."
"She's always sayin' she's too fat. With one pound off, would she
look as good, Cora? If I hadn't been as plump as a partridge in my
girl-days--and if I do say it myself, I was as fine a lookin' girl
as my Stella--do you think Dave Schump would have had eyes for me?
Not if I was ten times the woman I was for him."
"Sure she ain't too fat, Mrs. Schump. I always tell her it's her
imagination. I know a girl bigger than she is that's keeping company
with an expert piano-tuner. Why, I know girls twice her size. Stella's
got a right good figure, she has."
"Lots of good it does me! I--It's just like my brains to go right to my
hands, once you put me with a fellow. That time your brother Ed called
for me for that party at your house--honest, I couldn't open my mouth
to him."
"Can't understand it! 'Honest,' I says to Ed that time after the party,
I says to him, 'Ed, why don't you go over and call on Stella Schump and
take her to a movie or something? She's my idea of a girl, Stella is.'
Think I could budge him? 'Naw,' was all I could get out of him. Just,
'Naw.' Honest, I could have shook him. But did he run down to that
little flirt of a Gert Cobb's the very same night? He did. Honest, like
I said to Arch, it makes me sick. Is it any wonder the world is filled
with little flips like Gert Cobb, the way the fellows fall for 'em?"
"I never could be fresh with a boy. Take that time at your party. I bet
your brother Ed would have liked me better if I'd have got out in the
middle of the floor with him, like he wanted me to and like Gert did, to
see who could blow the biggest bunch of suds off his stein. I never
could be fresh with a fellow."
"That's just the trouble, Mrs. Schump. Stella don't see the difference
between what's fresh and what's just fun. Is there anything wrong about
one stein of beer in a jolly crowd? A girl can be nice without being
goody-good. If there's anything a fellow hates, it's a goody-good. Take
a fellow like Arch--you think he'd have any time for me if I wasn't a
good-enough sport to take a glass of beer with him maybe once a week
when he gets to feeling thirsty? Nothing rough. Everything in
moderation, I always say. But there's a difference, Mrs. Schump, between
being rough and being a goody-good."
"There's something in what you say, Cora. I've had her by me so much,
maybe I've tried to raise her a little over-genteel. There ain't one
single bad appetite she's got to be afraid of. It's not in her. I used
to tell her poor father, one glass of beer could make him so crazy loony
he never had to try how two tasted."
"I'm bashful, and what you goin' to do about it?"
"Say, you and Ed's foreman ought to meet together! Honest, you'd be a
pair! Ed brought him to the house one night. Finest boy you ever seen.
Thirty-five a week, steady as you make 'em; and when they put in girls
to work down at the munitions-plant where him and Ed works, Ed said it
was all they could do to keep him from throwing up his job from fright.
Whatta you know? A dandy fellow like him, with a dagger-shaped scar
clear down his arm from standing by his job that time when the whole
south end of the plant exploded. A fellow that could save a whole plant
and two hundred lives afraid to face a few skirts! Crazy to get married.
Told Ed so. Always harping on his idea of blue eyes and yellow hair, and
then, when he gets the chance, afraid of a few skirts!"
"That's me every time with fellows. I get to feelin' down inside of me
something terrible--scary--and all."
"Say, I'll tell you what! I'll get Ed to bring him down to Gert Cobb's
party next Saturday night, and you come, too."
"I?"
"There's two of a kind for you, Mrs. Schump. A fellow that's more afraid
of girls than explosions, and a girl that's afraid to blow a little foam
off a glass of beer! Them two ought to meet. Me and Arch and Ed'll fix
it up. How's that for a scheme? Now say I ain't your friend! Are
you game?"
"I don't go out tryin' to meet fellows that way."
"You see, Mrs. Schump, the way she puts a gold fence around herself?"
"Cora's puttin' herself out for you, Stella. There's no harm in a
Saturday night's party in the company of Cora and some genteel friends."
"Gert Cobb don't know I'm on earth."
"You hear, Mrs. Schump? Is it any wonder she don't get out? All I got to
do is say the word, and any friend of mine is welcome in Gert
Cobb's house."
"I'll make you up them five yards of pink mull for it, Stella. It's a
shame that pretty dress-pattern from your two birthdays ago has never
had the occasion to be made up. It's nice of Cora to be puttin'
herself out."
"Look at 'er, like I was asking her to a funeral!"
"There's such a pretty sash I been savin' to make up with that mull,
Cora. A handsome black-moiré length of ribbon off a beaded basque her
father gimme our first Christmas married."
"I'll lend her my pink pearls to wear. Honest, I never knew a girl could
wear pink like Stella."
Miss Schump leaned forward in the lamplight, the myriad of tight little
braids at angles, but her eyes widening to their astounding blueness.
"Not your--pink beads, Cora?"
"You heard me the first time, didn't you? 'Pink' was what I said."
"Ma!"
"Now ain't that nice of Cora?"
"Quick--are you game?"
"Why, yes--Cora."
* * * * *
There is a section of New York which rays out rather crazily from old
Jefferson Market and Night Court in spokes of small streets that seem
to run at haphazard angles each to the other--that less sooty part of
Greenwich not yet invaded by the Middle West in search of bohemia. An
indescribable smack of Soho here, tired old rows of tired old houses
going down year by year before the wrecker's ax, the model tenement
rising insolently before the scar is cold.
It is that part of the Latin Quarter which is literally just that, lying
slightly to the south and slightly to the west of that odd-fellow's land
of short-haired women and long-haired men. Free love, free verse, free
thought, free speech, and freed I.W.W.'s have no place here. For three
blocks a little Italy runs riot in terms of pastry, spaghetti, and
plaster-of-Paris shops, and quite as abruptly sobers and becomes Soho
again. A Greek church squats rather broadly at the intersection of three
of these streets.
There intervened between Stella Schump's and the six-story model
tenement adjoining the Greek church which Miss Gertrude Cobb called
home, a rhomboid of park, municipally fitted with playground apparatus,
the three-block riot of little Italy, the gloomy barracks of old
Jefferson Market and Night Court, and a few more blocks of still intact,
tired old rows of tired old houses.
On a spring night that was as insinuatingly sweet as the crush of a rose
to the cheek there walked through these lowly streets of lower Manhattan
Mr. Archie Sensenbrenner, bounded on the north by a checked,
deep-visored cap; on the south by a very bulldogged and very tan pair of
number nines; on the east by Miss Cora Kinealy, very much of the
occasion in a peaked hood faced in eider-down and a gay silk bag of
slippers dangling; on the west by Miss Stella Schump, a pink scarf
entwining her head like a Tanagra.
"Honest, Cora, I feel just like I'm intruding."
"'Intrudin'! Would I have invited her if we didn't want her, Arch?"
"Naw."
"'There's always room for one more,' is my motto. I believe it always
comes home to the girl that don't share her good times. If me and Arch
couldn't call by for a girl on our way to a party, I'd feel sorry for
us. Give her your arm, Arch."
"Here! I tried once to, and she wouldn't take it."
Miss Schump hooked a highly diffident hand into Mr. Sensenbrenner's
sharply jutted elbow.
"You two go on and talk together. I've chewed Arch's right ear off
already."
"It's a grand evenin'--ain't it, Mr. Sensenbrenner?"
At that from Miss Schump, Miss Kinealy executed a very soprano squeal
that petered out in a titter of remonstrances.
"Arch Sensenbrenner, if you don't stop pinching me! Honest, my arm's
black and blue! Honest! What'll Stella think we are? Now cut it out!"
They walked a block in silence, but, beside her, Miss Schump could feel
them shaking to a duet of suppressed laughter, and the red in her face
rose higher and a little mustache of the tiniest of perspiration beads
came out over her lip. The desire to turn back, the sudden ache for the
quietude of the little halo of lamplight and the swollen finger-joints
of her mother in and out at work, were almost not to be withstood.
"I--You--you and Mr. Sensenbrenner go on, Cora. I--me not knowin' Gertie
Cobb and all--I--I--feel I'm intruding. You and him go on. Please!"
Miss Kinealy crossed to her, kindly at once and sobered.
"Now, Stella Schump, you're coming right to this party with me and Arch.
We can't do more than tell her she's welcome, can we, Arch?"
"Sure."
"I promised your mother I'm going to see to it that you get away from
her apron-strings and out among young folks more, and you're coming
right to this party with me and Arch. Ain't I right, Arch?"
"Sure."
"You mustn't feel bad, honey, that Ed couldn't get John Gilly to come
around and call after you. Ed says he'd never get him to steam up his
nerve enough to call at a girl's house after her; but ain't it enough
he's coming to Gert's to-night just to meet you? You ought to heard him
when Ed got to telling him what kind of a girl you was. 'Gee!' Ed says
he says. 'Big blue eyes like saucers sounds good to me! Well,' he says,
Ed says he says, 'if my nerve don't lay down on me, I'll show up there
with you.' That's something, ain't it, for a fellow like John Gilly to
do just to meet a girl? Ain't it, Arch, for that fine, big fellow, Ed's
foreman, you seen up at our house that night? You know the one I mean,
the one with his arm scalded up from the explosion."
"Sure."
"Honest, if I wasn't already tagged and spoken for, I'd set my cap for
him myself."
"'Mother, mother, mother, pin a rose on me!'" cried Mr. Sensenbrenner,
with no great pertinence.
Miss Kinealy threw him a northwest glance. "Ain't he the cut-up,
Stella?"
"He sure is."
"Br-a-a-y!" said Mr. Sensenbrenner, again none too relevantly.
"Oh, show her the way the zebra in the Park goes on Sunday morning,
Arch!"
He inserted two fingers, splaying his mouth. "Heigh-ho!
He-e-e-e-e-e-e-e!"
"Ain't that lifelike, Stella?"
"It sure is."
"Oh, look! Up there--the third story--see--those are the Cobbs'
windows, all lit up! Oh, gee! I just can't make my feet behave. Waltz me
around again, Archie! No; you got to take the first dance with Stella."
"Oh no, Cora; he wants--"
"You hear, Arch?"
"Sure; only, I can't force her if she don't want to."
"Sure she wants to! Hurry! I hear Skinnay Flint's ukulele. Gee! I just
can't make my feet be-have!"
They entered an institutional, sanitary, and legislation-smelling box of
foyer and up three flights of fire-proof stairs. At each landing were
four fire-proof doors, lettered. The Cobbs' door, "H," stood open, an
epicene medley of voices and laughter floating down the long neck of
hallway on the syncopated whine of a ukulele.
There was an immediate parting of ways, Mr. Sensenbrenner hanging his
cap on an already well-filled rack of pegs and making straight for the
sound of revelry by night.
The girls made foray into a little side pocket of bedroom for the
changing of shoes, whitening of noses, and various curlicue preambles.
"Stella, your hair looks swell!"
"Ma plaited it up last night with sugar-water."
"Here, just this speck on your lips, just a little to match your
cheeks!--See--all the girls use it."
"Ugh--no--"
"There, just a stroke. Fine! Say, wasn't Arch killing to-night when he
called my cheeks naturally curly?"
"You look grand, Cora. Sure you don't want your pink beads?"
"I'll throw 'em down and step on 'em if you take 'em off."
"I just love that changeable silk on you."
"Does the split under the arm show?"
"Notta bit."
"Come on, then!"
"Oh, Cora--"
"Come on!"
In the Cobb front room a frightened exodus of furniture had taken place.
A leather-and-oak "davenbed" had obviously and literally been dragged to
the least conspicuous corner. An unpainted center of floor space showed
that there had been a rug. Camp-chairs had been introduced against all
available wall space. Only a fan-shaped, three-shelved cabinet of
knickknacks had been allowed its corner. Diagonal from it, the horn of a
talking-machine, in shape a large, a violent, a tin morning-glory, was
directed full against the company.
Not a brilliant scene, except by grace or gracelessness of state of
mind. But to Stella Schump, neither elected nor electing to walk in
greater glory, there was that about the Cobb front room thus lighted,
thus animated, that gave her a sense of function--a crowding around the
heart. The neck of hallway might have been a strip of purple, awninged.
There were greetings that rose in crescendo and falsetto.
"Cora Kinealy! Hello, Cora! How's every little thing?"
"Baby-shoes--tra-la-la!" "Oh, you changeable-silk kiddo! Turn green for
the ladies." "Come on over here, Cora, and make Arch tell fortunes!"
"Gertie, this is my girl friend, Stella, from the shoes, I brought.
Y'know? I told you about her. Ed's bringing down a gentleman friend
for her."
Miss Gertie Cobb, so blond, so small, so titillating that she resembled
nothing so much as one of those Dresden table-candelabra under a pink
glass-fringed shade with the fringe always atinkle, laughed upward in a
voice eons too old.
"Make yourself right at home. At our house, it's what you don't see ask
for. Skin-nay Flint, if you don't stop! Make him quit, Cora; he's been
ticklin' me something awful with that little old feather duster he
brought along. Whatta you think this is--Coney Island? E-e-e-e-e-e!"
There ensued a scramble down the length of the room, Miss Cobb with her
thin, bare little arms flung up over her head, Miss Kinealy tugging and
then riding in high buffoonery over the bare floor, firmly secured to
Mr. Flint's coattails.
"Leggo!"
"Quit--ouch--e-e-e-e-e! That's right; give it to him! Cora--go to
it--e-e-e-e-e--"
Lips lifted to belie a sinkage of heart, Miss Schump, left standing,
backed finally, sinking down to one of the camp-chairs against the wall.
The little glittering mustache had come out again, and, sitting there,
her smile so insistently lifted, the pink pearls at her throat rose and
fell. The ukulele was whanging again, and a couple or two, locked cheek
to cheek, were undulating in a low-lidded kind of ecstasy. Finally, Cora
Kinealy and Archie Sensenbrenner, rather uglily oblivious.
A youth, frantic to outdistance a rival for the dancing-hand of Miss
Gertie Cobb, stumbled across Miss Schump's carefully crossed ankles.
"'Scuse," he said, without glancing back.
"Certainly," said Miss Schump, through aching tonsils.
There was an encore, the raucous-throated morning-glory taking up where
the ukulele had left off. Miss Schump sat on, the smile drawn more and
more resolutely across her face. Occasionally, to indicate a state of
social ease, she caught an enforced yawn with her hand.
After a while Mrs. Cobb entered, quietly, almost furtively, hands
wrapped muff fashion in a checked apron, sitting down softly on the
first of the camp-chairs near the door. She had the dough look of the
comfortable and the uncorseted fat, her chin adding a scallop as,
watching, her smile grew.
"It's great to watch the young ones," she said, finally.
Miss Schump moved gratefully, oh, so gratefully, two chairs over.
"It sure is," she said, assuming an attitude of conversation.
"Like I tell Gert, it makes me young again myself."
"It sure does."
"Give it to 'em in the house, I say, and it keeps 'em in off the
street."
"Your daughter is sure one pretty girl."
"Gert's a good-enough girl, if I could keep her in. I tell 'er of all my
young ones she's the prettiest and the sassiest. Law, how that girl
can sass!"
"Like my mother always says to me about sass, sass never gets a girl
nowheres."
"Indeed it don't! It's lost her more places than my other two, married
now, ever lost put together. You work in the Criterion?"
"Yes'm. Children's shoes."
"I bet you're not the kind of a girl to change places every week."
"No'm. Criterion is the only place I ever worked at. I started there as
Cash."
"I bet you give up at home out of your envelop."
"Yes'm."
"Father?"
"No'm. He was a night watchman and got shot on duty."
"Mother?"
"Yes'm."
"Brother?"
"No'm."
"Sister?"
"No'm."
"Only child, huh?"
"Yes'm."
Then Miss Cobb blew up in a state of breathless haste and bobbing of
curls.
"Eats, maw--eats! The crowd's thirsty--spittin' cotton. What's the idea?
My tongue's out. Eats! Quick, for Gawsakes--eats!"
Mrs. Cobb, wide and quivery of hip, retreated precipitately into the
slit of hallway. Almost immediately there were refreshments, carried in
on portentous black tin trays by a younger Cobb in pigtails and by Mrs.
Cobb, swayback from a great outheld array of tumblers and bottles.
A shout went up.
The tray of sandwiches, piled to an apex, scarcely endured one round of
passing. The fluted tin tops of bottles were pried off. Tumblers
clicked. There were the sing of suds and foamy overflowings.
Enter Mr. Ed Kinealy, very brown and tight of suit, very black and
pomaded of hair.
"Oh, Ed!" This from Miss Kinealy between large mouthfuls of sandwich
and somewhat jerkily from being dandled on Mr. Sensenbrenner's knee,
"Where's your friend--where's John Gilly?"
"Oh, Ed!" "Naouw, Eh-ud!" "I'll give you a slap on the wrist." "Naouw,
Ed!" Delivered by those present in a chorus of catcalls and falsetto
impersonations of Miss Kinealy in plaintive vein.
"Now tell me--where is he, Ed? Shut up every body! Where is he, Ed?"
Mr. Kinealy shot a pair of very striped cuffs.
"That guy had sense. One whiff of this roughhouse and he bolted down
again, six steps at a jump. He slipped me so easy I was talking to
myself all the way up-stairs. That guy had sense. Petticoat shush-shush
can't put nothing over on him."
"Aw, Ed!"