"And him dated for Stella! Honest, it's a rotten shame!" Suddenly Miss
Kinealy flashed to her feet, her glance running quick. "Where is she?
Well, Stella Schump, sitting over there playing chums with yourself!
Honest, your name ought to be Chump! Whatta you think that is--the amen
corner? You're a fine bunch of social entertainers, you fellows are!
Bring her up a chair. Gee! you are! Honest, Gertie Cobb, I wouldn't want
my cat to be company to you! Bring 'er up a chair, Ed. Here, next to me!
Honest, it's a rotten shame! Give 'er a sandwich. Open 'er up a bottle.
Gee! you're a fine crowd of fish, you are!"
There was a general readjustment of circle and scraping of chairs. Miss
Schump, scarlet, drew up and in, Mr. Kinealy prying off a fluted
top for her.
"Have this one on me, Stella!" he cried. "Your guy bolted of stage
fright; but I'm here, and don't you forget it!"
"Aw--tee-hee!" she said, wiping at her upper lip.
"Here!"
She regarded the foam sing down into amber quiet.
"I'm on the water-wagon," she said, essaying to be light of vein,
crossing her hands and feet and tilting her glance at him.
"Say, here's a girl won't blow the foam off a fellow's glass for fear
she'll get soapsuds in her eyes!"
"Wash her face with 'em!"
MISS KINEALY: Aw, now, Stella; can't you be a good fellow for once? Do
it, if it hurts you. Honest, I hate to say it, but you're the limit, you
are! My God! limber up a little--limber up!
"Here, now--open your mouth and shut your eyes."
"Open it for her, Ed."
"Aw, no; don't force her if she don't want it."
"Gowann, Stella; be human, if it hurts you."
Redly and somewhat painfully, the observed of all observers, Miss Schump
tilted her head and drank, manfully and shudderingly, to the bitter end
of the glass.
"Attaboy! Say, tell it to the poodles and the great Danes! That Jane's
no amachure!"
Eyes stung to tears, pink tip of her tongue quickly circling her lips,
Miss Schump held out to Mr. Kinealy the empty tumbler.
"Now, there!"
"More?"
"I'm game."
"Don't give 'er a whole glass, Ed."
She drank, again at one whiff.
"That's more like it! Didn't kill you, did it? Now eat that Swiss-cheese
sandwich and come over next to me and Arch while he tells fortunes."
Miss Schump rose, rather high of head, the moment hers.
Miss Kinealy stretched her hand out into the center of the closing-in
circle of heads.
"I said palm-reading, Arch, not hand-holding. Leave that part to Ed and
Gert over there. Now quit squeezing--"
Mr. Sensenbrenner bent low, almost nose to her palm.
"I see," he began, his voice widening to a drawl--"I se-e a fellow about
my size and complexion entering your life--"
To Miss Schump, her hand on Miss Kinealy's shoulder and her head peering
over, the voice seemed to trail off somewhere out into infinitudes of
space, off into bogs of eternity, away and behind some beyond.
"Gee! it's hot in here!" she muttered, no one heeding or hearing. "Sure
hot. Whew!"
"Going on a long journey, and a fellow about my size and complexion is
going along with you, and there's money coming--"
"Sure hot!" It was then Miss Schump, with fear of a rather growing and
sickening sense of dizziness and of the wavy and unstable outline of
things, slipped quietly and unobtrusively out into the hallway, her
craving for air not to be gainsaid. The door to the little bedroom stood
open, her pink scarf uppermost on the cot-edge. She stood for an instant
in the doorway, regarding and wanting it, but quite as suddenly turned,
and down the three flights gained the dewy quiet of out-of-doors,
fighting muzziness.
The street had long since fallen tranquil, the Greek church casting
immense shadow. The air had immediate and sedative effect upon Miss
Schump's rather distressing symptoms of unrest, but not quite allaying a
certain state of mental upheaval. She had the distinct sensation of the
top of her head lifted off from the eyebrows up. Her state of
light-headedness took voice.
"Gimme," she said, lifting the pink-mull, ankle-length skirt as if it
trailed a train and marching off down-street; "now you gimme!"
An entirely new lack of self-consciousness enhanced her state of
giddiness. A titter seemed to run just a scratch beneath the surface
of her.
The passing figure of a woman in a black cape and a bulge of bundle
elicited a burst of laughter which her hand clapped to her mouth
promptly subdued. Awaiting the passing of a street-car, she was again
prone to easy laughter.
"Oh, you!" she said, quirking an eye to the motorman, who quirked back.
Crossing the street, she came down rather splashily in a pool of water,
wetting and staining the light slippers.
"Aw!" she repeated, scolding and stamping down at them. "Aw! Aw! You!"
Across from the gloomy pile of old Jefferson Market, she stood, reading
up at an illuminated tower-clock, softly, her lips moving.
"Nine--ten--e-lev-hun--"
A dark figure slowed behind her elbow; she turned with a sense of that
nearness and peered up under the lowering brim of a soft-felt hat.
"Hoddado?"
"Hello!" she answered, slyly.
"Hello!"
She peered closer.
"Got a girl?"
"Nope."
"Blow suds?"
"Where?"
"Cora's."
He flung back his coat, revealing a star.
"You're under arrest," he said, laconically. "Solicitin'. Come on; no
fuss."
Her comprehension was unplumbed.
"O Lord!" she said, pressing inward at her waistline to abet laughter,
following him voluntarily enough, and her voice rising. "You make me
laugh. You make me laugh."
"That'll do," he said.
"Whoop la-la!"
"Now, you get noisy and watch me."
He turned in rather abruptly at a side door of the dark-red pile of
building which boasted the illuminated tower-clock and a jutting ell
with barred windows.
She drew back.
"No, you don't! Aw, no, you don't! Whatta you think I yam? Cora's! Tell
it to the poodles and the great Danes!"
He shoved her with scant ceremony beyond the heavy door. She entered in
one of the uncontrollable gales of laughter, the indoor heat immediately
inducing the dizziness.
"Whatta you think I yam? Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"
Thirty minutes later, in a court-room as smeared of atmosphere as a
dirty window, a bridge officer, reading from a slip of paper, singsonged
to the sergeant-at-arms:
"Stella Schump. Officer Charles Costello."
How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of
a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend
for Stella Schump the vague boundaries of the probable.
The milky-fleshed, not highly sensitized, pinkly clean creature of an
innocence born mostly of ignorance and slow perceptions, who that
morning had risen sweet from eleven hours of unrestless sleep beside a
mother whose bed she had never missed to share, suddenly here in
slatternliness! A draggled night bird caught in the aviary of night
court, lips a deep vermilion scar of rouge, hair out of scallop and
dragging at the pins, the too ready laugh dashing itself against what
must be owned a hiccough.
Something congenital and sleeping subcutaneously beneath the surface of
her had scratched through. She was herself, strangely italicized.
A judge regarded her not unkindly. There were two of him, she would keep
thinking, one merging slightly into his prototype.
She stood, gazing up. Around her swam the court-room--rows of faces;
comings and goings within her railed area. And heat--the dizzying, the
exciting heat--and the desire to shake off the some one at her elbow.
That some one was up before her now, in a chair beside the judge, and
his voice was as far away as Archie Sensenbrenner's.
"And she says to me, she says, your Honor, 'Got a girl?'"
"Were those her exact words to you?"
"Yes, your Honor."
"Proceed."
"And I says to her, I says, 'No,' and then she comes up close and says
to me, she says, 'Buy me a drink?'"
"Were those her exact words?"
"Yes, your Honor, as near as I can remember."
"Go on."
"And I says to her, 'Where do you want to go?' and she says to me,
giving me a wink, 'Cora's.'"
"Cora's?"
"Yes, your Honor; the Cora Jones mulatto woman that was cleaned out last
week."
"She suggested that you accompany her to the house of the Jones woman?"
"Beg pardon, your Honor?"
"She suggested this resort?"
"Yes, your Honor. 'Cora Jones,' she said."
Through the smoke of her bewilderment something irate stirred within
Miss Schump, a smouldering sense of anger that burst out into a brief
tongue of flame.
"You! You! You're no amachure! Cora Jones! Cora Kinealy! Go tell it to
the great Danes! Say it again! Gimme leave! Gimme leave!" The immediate
peremptoriness of the gavel set her to blinking, but did not silence.
"'Gimme leave,' was what I said--"
"Come to order in the court!"
"Aw!"
A new presence at her elbow grasped her sharply. She subsided, but still
muttering.
"Proceed, officer."
"And then, when she starts off with me, I says to her, I says, 'You're
under arrest,' and brought her over."
"That'll do."
"Does the defendant wish to take the chair?"