"Waitin' for the rain to let up?"
"No, foolish; I'm posing for a statue of Patience by a sculptor who's
going to be born tomorrow."
This answer was brilliantly in accord with the humour of the day. Austin
chuckled appreciatively.
"I thought maybe you was waitin' for Jeems to bring around your
limousine, Miss Thursby."
"I was, but he won't be here till day before yesterday."
The strain of such repartee proved too much for Austin; he felt himself
outclassed and, shuffling to cover his discomfiture, sought another
subject.
"Whacha doing tonight, Joan? Anythin' special?"
"I've got an engagement to pass remarks on the weather with the Dook de
Bonehead," the girl returned with asperity. "He ain't late, either."
"I guess that was one off the griddle, all right," said Austin
pensively. "Excuse me for livin'."
There fell a pause, Joan contemptuously staring away through the
glimmering rain-drops, Austin desperately casting about for a
conversational opening less calculated than its predecessors to educe
rebuffs.
"Say, Joan, lis'en--"
"Move on," the girl interrupted: "you're blocking the traffic."
"Nah--serious': howja like to go to a show tonight?"
She turned incredulous eyes to him. "What show?" she drawled.
"I gotta pass for Ziegfield's Follies--N'Yawk Roof. Wanta go?"
"Quit your kidding," she replied after a brief pause devoted to analysis
of his sincerity. "Y' know you've got to work."
"Nothin' like that!" he insisted. "The Hip closed last Sat'dy and I got
a coupla weeks lay-off while they're gettin' ready to rehearse the new
show. On the level, now: will you go with me?"
"_Will_ I!" The girl drew a long, ecstatic breath. Then her face
darkened as she glanced again at the street: "But we'll get all wet!"
"No, we won't: I'll get an umbrella. Besides, it's lettin' up."
With this Austin vanished, to return in a few minutes with a fairly
presentable umbrella. The shower was, in fact, fast passing on over Long
Island, leaving in its wake a slackening drizzle amid deep-throated
growls at constantly lengthening intervals.
Half-clothed children were seeping in swelling streams from the
tenements as the two--Austin holding the umbrella, Joan with a hand on
her escort's arm, her skirts gathered high about her trim
ankles--splashed through lukewarm puddles toward Third Avenue. A faint
and odorous vapour steamed up from wet and darkly lustrous asphalt.
They hurried on in silence: Austin dumbly content with his conquest of
the aloof tolerance which the girl had theretofore shown him, and
planning bolder and more masterful steps; Joan all ecstatic with the
prospect of seeing for the first time a "Broadway show"....
A few minutes before nine they left the cross-town car at Broadway and
Forty-second Street.
Though she had lived all her young years within the boundaries of New
York, never before had Joan experienced the sensation of being a unit of
that roaring flood of life which nightly scours Longacre Square, with
scarce a perceptible change in volume, winter or summer. Yet she
accepted it with apparently implacable calm. She felt as if she
had been born to this, as if she were coming tardily into her
birthright--something of which each least detail would in time become
most intimate to her.
They were already late, and Austin hurried her. A brief, hasty walk
brought them to the theatre, where Austin left her in a corner of the
lobby with the promise that he would return in a very few minutes: he
had to see a friend "round back," he explained in an undertone. But Joan
remained a target for boldly enquiring glances for full ten minutes
before he reappeared. Even then, with a nod to her to wait, Austin went
to the box-office window. She was not deceived as to the general tenor
of his fortunes there--saw him place a card on the ledge and confer
inaudibly with the ticket-seller, and then reluctantly remove the card
and substitute for it two one-dollar bills, for which he received two
slips of pasteboard.
"House 'most sold out," he muttered uncomfortably in her ear as an
elevator carried them to the roof. "Best I could get was table seats."
"They're just as good as any," she whispered, with a look of gratitude
that temporarily turned his head.
The elevator discharged them into a vast hall with walls and a roof of
glass. Artificial wistaria festooned its beams and pillars of steel,
palms and potted plants lined the walls. A myriad electric bulbs
glimmered dimly throughout the auditorium, brilliantly upon the small
stage. Deep banks of chairs radiated back from the footlights, to each
its tenant staring greedily in one common direction.
An usher waved the newcomers to the left. Ultimately they found seats at
a small table in a far corner of the enclosure.
Austin was disappointed, and made his disappointment known in a public
grumble: the table was too far away; they couldn't see nothin'--might's
well not've come. Joan smiled his ill-humour away, insisting that the
seats were fine. Mollified, he summoned a waiter and ordered beer for
himself, for Joan a glass of lemonade--a weirdly decorated and insipid
concoction which, nevertheless, Joan absorbed with the keenest relish.
In point of fact, the distance from their seats to the stage offered
little obstacle to her complete enjoyment: her senses were all youthful
and unimpaired; she saw and heard what many another missed of those in
their neighbourhood. Furthermore, Joan brought to an entertainment of
this character a point of view fresh, virginal, and innocent of the very
meaning of ennui. She sat forward on the extreme edge of her chair,
imperceptibly a-quiver with excitement, avid of every sight and sound.
All that was tawdry, vulgar, and contemptible escaped her: she was
sensitive only to the illusion of splendour and magnificence, and lived
enraptured by dream-like music, exquisite wit, and the poetic beauty of
femininity but half-clothed, or less, and viewed through a kaleidoscopic
play of coloured light.
During the intermission she bent an elbow on the sloppy table-top and
chattered at Austin with a vivacity new in his knowledge of her, and for
which he had no match....
At one time during the second part of the performance, the auditorium
was suddenly darkened, while attention was held to the stage by the
antics of a pair of German comedians. But in the shadows that now
surrounded them (quite unconscious that Austin had seized this
opportunity to capture her warm young hand) Joan became aware of a
number of figures issuing from a side-door to the stage. She saw them
marshalled in ranks of two--a long double file, vaguely glimmering
through the obscurity. And then the comedians darted into the wings, the
lights blazed out at full strength all over the enclosure, and a roll of
drums crescendo roused the audience to a tremendous and exhilarating
novelty: a procession of chorus girls in hip-tights and hussar tunics
who, each with a snare-drum at waist, had stolen down the aisle, into
the heart of the auditorium.
For a long moment they marked time, drumming skilfully, their leader
with her polished baton standing beside Joan. Then the orchestra blared
out an accompaniment, and they strode away, turning left and marching up
the centre aisle to the stage.... Joan marked, with pulses that seemed
to beat in tune to the drumming, the wistful beauty of many of the
painted faces with their aloof eyes and fixed smiles of conscious
self-possession, the richness of their uniforms, their bare powdered
arms, the pretty legs in their silken casings. Oblivious to the
libidinous glances of the goggling men they passed, she envied them one
and all--the meanest and homeliest of them even as the most proud and
beautiful--this chance of theirs _to act_, to be admired, to win the
homage of the herd....
She awoke as from idyllic dreams to find herself again in a Third Avenue
car, homeward bound. But still her brain was drowsy with memories of the
splendour and the glory; fragments of haunting melody ran through her
thoughts; and visions haunted her, of herself commanding a similar meed
of adoration....
Austin's arm lay along the top of the seat behind her; his fingers
rested lightly against the sleeve of her shirtwaist. She did not notice
them. To his clumsily playful advances she returned indefinite,
monosyllabic answers, accompanied by her charming smile of a grateful
child....
On the third landing of their tenement they paused to say good night,
visible to one another only in a faint light reflected up from the
gas-jet burning low in the hall below. The smell of humanity and its
food hung in the clammy air they breathed. A hum of voices from the many
cells of the hive buzzed in their ears. But Joan forgot them all.
She hesitated, embarrassed with the difficulty of finding words adequate
to express her thanks.
Austin tried awkwardly to help her out: "Well, I guess it's good night,
kid."